Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature

Studies in Oriental Culture, Number 19

Columbia University
 Expressions of Self
in Chinese Literature

Edited by ROBERT E. HEGEL

AND R I C H A R D C . HESSNEY

Columbia University Press

New York 1985
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance
of the Pacific Cultural Foundation in the publication of this
book.

Columbia University Press

New York Guildford, Surrey
Copyright © 1985 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Expressions of self in Chinese literature.

(Studies in Oriental culture; no. 19)

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Chinese literature—History and criticism—
Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Self in literature—
Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Hegel, Robert E.
II. Hessney, Richard C. III. Series.
PL2275.S44E96 1985 895.1'09'353 84-29270
ISBN 0-231-05828-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-231-05829-2 (pbk.)

Clothbound editions of Columbia University Press Books are

Smyth-sewn and printed on permanent and durable acid-free
paper.
 To C T. HSIA
Scholar, Mentor, and Friend
These Essays are Affectionately Dedicated
 Studies in Oriental Culture
Edited at Columbia University

Board of Editors:
Pierre Cachia, Professor of Arabic Language and Literature
Wm. Theodore de Bary, John Mitchell Mason Professor
of the University
Ainslie T. Embree, Professor of History
Donald Keene, Professor of Japanese
Barbara Stoler Miller, Professor of Oriental Studies
 Contents

Preface ix
Contributors xiii
Introduction
An Exploration of the Chinese Literary Self
ROBERT E. HEGEL 3

Part I. Self in Poetry and Criticism

The Dusty Mirror: Courtly Portraits of Woman in Southern
Dynasties Love Poetry
ANNE M . B I R R E L L 33

Structuring a Second Creation: Evolution of the Self in

Imaginary Landscapes
FRANCES LAFLEUR MOCHIDA 70
The Expression of Self in the Kung-an School:
Non-Romantic Individualism
JONATHAN CHAVES 123

Part II. Self in Drama and Fiction

The Self in Conflict: Paradigms of Change in a T'ang Legend
C A T H E R I N E SWATEK 153
The Fiction of Moral Duty: The Vernacular Story
in the 1640s
PATRICK H A N A N 189
Beyond Beauty and Talent: The Moral and Chivalric Self
in The Fortunate Union
R I C H A R D C. HESSNEY 214
Vlll Contents

Maids and Servants in Dream of the Red Chamber: Individuality

and the Social Order
M A R S H A L. WAGNER 251
The Solitary Traveler: Images of the Self in Modern
Chinese Literature
LEO OU-FAN LEE 282
Perceptions of Self and Values in Recent Chinese Literature
E D W A R D M . GUNN, J R . 308
The Search for Identity in Fiction from Taiwan
R O B E R T E. HEGEL 342

An Overview
Duty, Reputation, and Selfhood in Traditional Chinese
Narratives
J O S E P H S. M . LAU 363

Notes 385

Glossary 433

Index 449
 Preface

O ne of the more interesting panels at the

twenty-ninth annual meeting of the Associa-
tion for Asian Studies, held in New York that year, was enti-
tled "Expression of Selfhood in Chinese Literature." It was
chaired by Joseph S. M. Lau of the University of Wisconsin;
its other contributors were Anthony C. Yu of the University
of Chicago, Leo O. Lee, then teaching at Indiana University,
and Frances LaFleur, a Princeton graduate student. The panel's
discussant was C. T. Hsia, Professor of Chinese at Columbia
University.
Professor Hsia was the best possible choice for this
function. His contribution to the study of Chinese literature in
the West is unexcelled. His A History of Modern Chinese Fiction,
1917-1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961; rev. ed.
1971) was the first critical survey of this exciting field to be
written in English; his The Classic Chinese Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1968) quickly became the standard
introduction to the great novels of China's past. He has also
written numerous essays in Chinese and English on literary
works and figures. But among these essays, none has at-
tracted more attention than his own first English-language es-
say, " 'To What Fyn Lyve I Thus?'—Society and Self in the
Chinese Short Story" (Kenyon Review [1962], vol. 24, no. 3; re-
vised as an appendix to The Classic Chinese Novel). This seminal
essay had opened a new window on Chinese fiction, and the
Preface X

conference panel furthered its illumination by investigating

selfhood as expressed in poetry and travel diaries. The year
was 1977.
While this panel was still in its planning stages, Jo-
seph Lau and Anthony Yu discussed a book of essays on this
theme with Robert E. Hegel of Washington University, Hsia's
first Ph.D. student who had specialized in precisely the same
fields as his mentor. The panel papers could form a core of
material, they suggested, and the book could be dedicated to
Professor Hsia for his contributions in this area. Hegel can-
vassed other interested scholars and before long many had
promised papers on this theme. Another of Hsia's former
graduate students, Richard C. Hessney, then teaching com-
parative literature at Brooklyn College, offered to share the work
of editing.
The collection evolved over a number of years as
drafts were revised, some potential contributors withdrew, and
others substantially rewrote their papers in response to a
number of critical readings. And so the present collection came
to be. These essays are yet another beginning; they constitute
the first volume of work devoted to this crucial area of Chinese
literature. They do not exhaust any one form, period, or genre.
Instead they are meant to reveal the richness that exists in this
field and to dispel misconceptions about the Chinese literary
self. To that end, these essays do not presuppose a knowl-
edge of Chinese language: for the specialist there is a glossary
of names and terms in Chinese ideographs and an appendix
with the texts of certain poerru, but the essays themselves
should be stimulating for comparatists and other readers in-
terested in the self in literature.
The number of persons who have helped with this
project extends far beyond the list of contributors. Many pro-
vided valuable advice and support during the volume's ex-
tended incubation period. Among them are Cyril Birch, Ste-
phen Cheng, Kenneth DeWoskin, Shuen-fu Lin, Liu Ts'un-yan,
Irving Lo, Conrad Lung, Y. W. Ma, and Anthony Yu. Special
thanks should go to William F. Bernhardt, Associate Executive
Editor at Columbia University Press, for his unflagging pa-
PREFACE xi

tience and assistance, to Karen Mitchell at the Press for her

thoughtful editing, and to Marc Wilson, Director of the Nel-
son-Adkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, for permission to
publish the dust jacket illustration. The entire project lan-
guished for a time due to financial uncertainty. Then the Pa-
cific Cultural Foundation in Taipei came to our rescue with a
generous grant that made publication possible. We are partic-
ularly grateful to the foundation and to its president, Dr. Jeanne
Tchong-Koei Li, for their support. The Department of Chinese
and Japanese at Washington University in St. Louis also con-
tributed significantly to the success of this project, especially
the time, energy, and good will of Margery Bystrom and De-
bra Jones. At last, with the humility and self-awareness akin
to that learned by Su Shih at the Red Cliff, we present these
essays to C. T. Hsia with gratitude for his inspiration, insight,
and enthusiasm.
ROBERT E. H E G E L AND RICHARD C . HESSNEY
March 2, 1985, the eleventh day of the
first lunar month
 Contributors

ANNE M. B I R R E L L , B.A. in Russian and French (thesis on Pushkin),

M.A. University of Michigan, 1970 (thesis on the prose-poems of
Ts'ao Chih), M. Phil, and Ph.D. Columbia University, 1978 (dis-
sertation on the love imagery of the Yii-t'ai hsin-yung). Now teach-
ing at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, the University of Cam-
bridge, England. Her translation of the Yu-t'ai hsin-yung was
published as New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Allen and Unwin, 1982).
Her interpretative study of early medieval Chinese love poetry will
also appear soon. Dr. Birrell is completing a book on early anon-
ymous Chinese folk-songs for publication this year.

JONATHAN CHAVES teaches Chinese language and literature at the

George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He has pub-
lished three books on Chinese poetry: Heaven My Blanket, Earth My
Pillow: Poems from Sung Dynasty China by Yang Wan-li (Weatherhill,
1975); Mei Yao-ch'en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry (Co-
lumbia University Press, 1976); and Pilgrim of the Clouds: Poems and
Essays from Ming Dynasty China by Yuan Hung-tao and his Brothers
(Weatherhill, 1978). The most recent of these was nominated for
the National Book Award in Translation in 1979. Dr. Chaves has
also written articles on Chinese poetry and literary criticism and
on the relationship of poetry to painting and calligraphy in China.
He has participated in workshops on literary translation and on
the influence of Chinese poetry on American poetry.

EDWARD GUNN received his doctorate from Columbia University in

1978 and is now associate professor of Chinese literature at Cor-
nell University. He has published Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Litera-
Contributors xiv

ture in Shanghai and Peking, 1937-1945 (Columbia University Press,

1980) and Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology (Indiana
University Press, 1983).

PATRICK HANAN is Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard Uni-

versity. His writings include two books published by Harvard
University Press, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Author-
ship, and Composition (Harvard University Press, 1973) and The
Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard University Press, 1981). In addi-
tion, his essays on traditional and modern vernacular fiction have
appeared in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Asia Major, and else-
where.

ROBERT E. H E G E L completed his doctorate at Columbia University in

1973 with a dissertation on Sui Tang yen-i. His publications include
The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1981) and several essays in English and Chinese on
traditional and modern vernacular fiction. He is presently com-
pleting a translation of Forgotten Tales of the Sui (Sui shih i-wen, 1633),
a novel by the dramatist Yüan Yü-ling. He teaches Chinese litera-
ture and thought and chairs the Department of Chinese and Jap-
anese at Washington University in St. Louis.

RICHARD C. H E S S N E Y received his Ph.D. in Chinese literature from

Columbia University in 1979. From 1977 to 1980, he was an assist-
ant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Brook-
lyn College of the City University of New York. His research has
focused on seventeenth-century romances. He is currently an ed-
itor at Reader's Digest.

JOSEPH S. M . LAU, born in Hong Kong, received the B . A . degree in

English from National Taiwan University (1960) and the Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature from Indiana University (1966). He has
taught comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin and
English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Univer-
sity of Singapore. Currently he is Professor of Chinese at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, Madison. He is editor of Chinese Stories from
Taiwan, 1960-1970 (1976) as well as coeditor of Traditional Chinese
Stories: Themes and Variations (1978) and Modern Chinese Stories and
Novellas, 1919-1949 (1981), all of which were published by Colum-
bia University Press. His latest contribution to the study of recent
CONTRIBUTORS XV

literature is The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction Since

1926 (Indiana University Press, 1983) of which he is the editor.

LEO OU-FAN LEE is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University

of Chicago. A graduate of National Taiwan University, he com-
pleted the Ph.D. at Harvard University and has taught at Dart-
mouth College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Princeton,
and Indiana University. His publications include The Romantic
Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Harvard University Press, 1973)
and essays in both Chinese and English on modern Chinese liter-
ature and history. His monograph on Lu Hsün, entitled Voices from
the Iron House, will be published by Indiana University Press.

FRANCES LAFLEUR MOCHIDA was born in Cape May Point, New Jer-
sey. After studying at Oberlin College and Fu-jen University (Tai-
wan), she transferred to Princeton University, where she received
a B.A. in 1973. She is presently a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton in
Chinese literature, has been a full-time lecturer at Rutgers Univer-
sity, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and is now teaching at Suzhou
University, Jiangsu, China.

CATHERINE SWATEK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of East

Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She is
writing a dissertation on the drama of Feng Meng-lung.

MARSHA L. W A G N E R attended Bryn Mawr College, and received her

B.A. in Oriental Languages from the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1969. After a year of study at the Inter-University Pro-
gram at National Taiwan University in Taipei, she returned to
Berkeley and there completed her Ph.D. in comparative literature
in 1975, specializing in Chinese, English, and French literature. She
is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at
Columbia University and Vice President for Programs at China In-
stitute in America. Her critical study of Wang Wei was published
by Twayne in 1981, and The Lotus Boat: The Origins of Chinese Tz'u
Poetry in T'ang Popular Culture was published by Columbia Univer-
sity Press Ln 1984.
Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature
Introduction
 An Exploration of
the Chinese Literary Self
Robert E. Hegel

S elf as expressed in literature is an elusive en-

tity; the self in literature is necessarily at some
remove from living reality. Mao Tse-tung was apparently la-
boring under the misconception that writers could capture so-
cial phenomena in objective terms when he advised them to
create fictional characters "more typical, nearer the ideal" than
ordinary mortals. While no product of the human imagination
can be other than "human material" (in the words of Welleck
and Warren), no literary self is completely like any one person
who ever lived.1 After all, self in literature is a function of the
mind reflected in a product of the mind. Literary art is thus a
distorting mirror if naked reality is all that one hopes to per-
ceive there. But the study of self in literature can reveal in ex-
treme detail two variants on that primary entity, created selves
and revealed selves. The first are those fabricated individuals
who people narratives and other literary forms; they embody
what their creators considered essential to particular selves.
Their study readily reveals, through common features, what
writers understood about the self as it should appear in writ-
ing. Revealed selves are those features of individual writers'
Robert E. Hegel 4

psyches unwittingly or deliberately manifested as self-expres-

sion in their work.
The essays that constitute this volume address the
question of self from a wide variety of individual works of all
major literary forms from the earliest to the present. None of
the articles is an exhaustive survey of literary manifestations
of Chinese personal identity. Generalizations of that sort are
premature; they must of necessity be based on a much greater
number of narrow investigations than could be assembled in
a single book. These essays, then, are a contribution toward a
better understanding of the self in Chinese literature, the first
such collection on this topic. This introduction will explore the
question from nonliterary perspectives as well, to provide a
background against which to understand the other studies.
Readers interested in more detailed historical, philosophical,
or sociological elucidations of the Chinese self may wish to
consult works cited below.
Some six decades ago modern China's best-known
writer, Lu Hsiin (Chou Shu-jen, 1881-1936), began his serial-
ized biography of an Everyman for his age by commenting:
And yet no sooner had I taken up my pen that I be-
came conscious of the huge difficulties in writing this far-from-
immortal work. The first was the question of what to call it.
Confucius said, "If the name is not correct, the words will not
ring true"; and this axiom should be most scrupulously ob-
served. There are many types of biographies . . . but unfortu-
nately none of these suited my purpose. . . . The second dif-
ficulty confronting me was that a biography of this type should
start off something like this: "So-and-so, whose other name was
so-and-so, was a native of such-and-such a place"; but I don't
really know what Ah Q's surname was. . . . The third diffi-
culty I encountered in writing this work was that I don't know
how Ah Q's personal name should be written either. . . . My
fourth difficulty was with Ah Q's place of origin. 2

Lu Hsiin's purpose here was caricature, a parody of age-old

conventions of historical writing in China—a branch of litera-
ture in many respects—that identified the relationship of au-
THE C H I N E S E LITERARY S E L F 5

thor to subject, format of the work, its intended purpose, and

the like through choice of conventional nomenclature in its ti-
tle, such as lieh-chuan (official biography), izu-chuati (autobiog-
raphy), or wai-chuan (unofficial biography). But even within the
various formats in which biography could properly be written
in China, past or present, there was little latitude in the types
of information expected, particularly the subject7s various names
and native place, as Lu Hsiin observes. What he does not
specify is normally the very first element by which a person is
identified, the name of the dynasty under which he lived. That
Lu Hsiin omitted it is no surprise. Clearly he was referring to
his own time, when no dynasty reigned; the Manchus had
fallen and China did not have a unified government. Nor could
he particularize native place, formal name, or even surname
and still universalize his protagonist: both writer and intended
reader would have shared the traditional wisdom that the
Chinese self, one's personal identity, is inextricably bound up
in just such facts of family and geographic origins. 3
It was not only through a few details of birth that
a Chinese historically was identified, however; biographical
accounts in Western society demand this same information. The
traditional Chinese accounts also provide data to clarify the in-
dividual's social and cultural context: his male relatives for
several generations in both directions, his status as indicated
by amount of formally recognized education attained and of-
ficial positions held, his legacy as identified by his writings and
his disciples, his affiliations demonstrated by his literary ties
and personal friendships, his personal strengths evinced by
anecdotes concerning his youth, and his moral stature exem-
plified by his success in functioning as a son, as a subject, and
as a friend. (I use the masculine pronoun deliberately. Women
were infrequently the subject of biographical writing in old
China; even then they are most commonly referred to only by
surname and by the names of their spouses.) In the People's
Republic today, individuals are still identified by reference to
social function—by type of occupation, workplace, and politi-
cal experience—in addition to the bare-bones data of personal
Robert E. Hegel 6

appellation, home province, and time of birth. It is no exag-

geration to say that to a considerably greater extent than in the
modern West, the real Chinese individual has been, and still
is, identified by reference to the greater human context of his
time.
While to a Western perspective human society seems
to consist of an infinite number of identifiably different indi-
viduals, all peoples agree that many attributes, values, and as-
pirations are shared by everyone. To the Chinese it has been
the common features and not the uniqueness of an individual
that draws attention. The period of time during which a per-
son lived reveals something about him; regionally distin-
guished habits, propensities, and even tastes further clarify the
image. In China there have always been a relatively small
number of surnames. The family name and the economic, po-
litical, and social relationships it entails in a given locality and
time can tell a great deal about an individual. Furthermore,
historians wrote (and people thought) in terms of widely
known, fixed reference points in order to identify individuals,
specifically the traditional behavioral models. That is, a person
may not have been merely a minister, a father, a son, but in-
stead an upright minister, an exemplary father, a filial son—or
their converse. Histories were intended as manuals of prece-
dents for Confucian administrators; this explains the tendency
to group subjects in terms of their moral function in a partic-
ular social role, both roles and functions described in terms
congruent with Confucian conceptions of social order in-
tended to facilitate governing. 4
Given the holistic cosmological views of traditional
China, and their modern analogue in the universalism as-
cribed to Chinese Marxism, it is only logical to concentrate on
roles in society and the proper functioning of the individual
therein as a means of identifying the self. Since the cosmic
balance, or at least social harmony, depends on the smooth
interaction of individuals, social data about a person logically
define him, both descriptively and prescriptively, for the reader.
In the same way that the cosmos (human society, to the Marx-
ists) is in a state of constant flux, an individual too is hardly a
THE C H I N E S E LITERARY SELF 7

static entity: he changes, must change, as the changes inherent

in aging thrust him into one social role after another, whether
the roles are in sequence or simultaneous. Complexity in an
individual naturally results from playing several roles simul-
taneously or from shifting from role to role. Deprived of social
function, the individual becomes an unknown, perhaps even
meaningless, entity. In this regard, China's present demon-
strates a high degree of continuity with China's past. 5
In a fascinating study Tu Wei-ming contrasts the
Western notion of adulthood as completion of growth with the
Chinese concept ch'eng-jen, literally "becoming a person." China
has viewed the self as imbued with virtually unlimited poten-
tial for development; maturation is a lifelong process, the
product of the continuous effort needed if genuine humanity
is to be attained. To Confucians and Taoists alike, the Tao—
whether conceived -as the overarching moral structure of the
universe or as Ultimate Reality itself—is not separate from one
who pursues it. Consequently, there is no absolute but only
relative attainment of all that humanity can be; 6 self-perfection
is the development of that which is both universal and inher-
ent in all individuals. Definitions of the learning process differ
among China's philosophical schools, but they agree on one
central point: self-cultivation involves the development of self-
lessness, and therein lies the perfection of the self.
A superficial example is Confucius' statement, "A
man of humanity [i.e., highest virtue], wishing to establish his
own character, also establishes the character of others, and
wishing to be prominent himself, also helps others to be
prominent." 7 However, this same principle informs the Con-
fucian emphasis on conventionally regulated behavior, ritual,
decorum, and the like.

To return to the observance of the rites through overcoming the

self constitutes benevolence [e.g., jen, humanity's highest moral
quality] . . . the practice of benevolence depends on oneself
alone, and not on others. 8

Ritual behavior serves several purposes for the Confucian: it

regulates the expression of human feelings, it integrates the
Robert E. Hegel 8

individual into the social context, and it provides a continuous

link between the present and the past, from which all "proper"
ritual was thought to have been transmitted. In each of these
functions, ritual served to make human behavior predictable
and uniform, more expressive of common social role than of
the temperament and values of any one individual. Ultimately
its observance creates in human society a structure parallel to
the hierarchical order of the cosmos. As we have seen, study-
ing the histories of old China involves constant rehearsal of
normative behavioral categories; Tu Wei-ming has aptly re-
marked that for the Confucian, the study of history thereby
presents an "uninterrupted affirmation of the authentic pos-
sibility of humanness in the w o r l d . " 9 Especially to later Con-
fucians, study and moral self-cultivation could lead to the ul-
timate degree of self-realization, self-transcendence to a realm
of sympathetic identification with the processes of nature it-
self. 10
Early Taoist writings are even more straightfor-
ward in identifying the universality of what is fundamental to
the self. In the Tao-te chitig egotism is repeatedly condemned
as "having desires." The Taoist must exert conscious effort to
rid himself of these impediments to attune to the ultimate Tao,
that which is tzu-jan, " o f itself s o . " Because the Tao underlies
both nature and man, human society too can be "natural"; the
Tao-te ching offers a Utopian vision of simple human life in self-
contained agricultural communities having neither individual
nor collective goals beyond calm subsistence. 11 The Taoist classic
Chuang Tzu rejects political activity, confounds logic and nor-
mal mental processes, and makes heroes of those who become
self-contained in the Tao of their own minds. And yet the pri-
macy of basic human relationships is never questioned.
In a brief narrative that has relevance on several
levels to this discussion of self, Chuang Tzu's wife dies, and
Chuang bangs on a pot and sings. A friend, the logician Hui
Shih, questions his apparent lack of feeling for this person with
whom he had shared his life and had raised children. The
character Chuang Tzu replies: " W h e n she first died, do you
think that I didn't grieve like anyone e l s e ? " 1 2 Even in a Taoist
THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF 9

parable, the protagonist's first response is to identify himself

with conventional behavior relevant to an established social role.
However, his rationale only begins here. He continues with
an antidote for bereavement that clarifies the Taoist notion of
individual identity: he traces his wife's existence backward
through time.

In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took

place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body.
Another change and she was born. Now there's been another
change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four
seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter. 1 3

To the Taoist perspective, an individual is a transient creature

whose nature it is to change, to develop from the Ultimate
Source and to return thereto at death. Chuang Tzu's irrever-
ent singing reflects his acceptance of the inevitable, of what
transcends man and is "of itself so."
Buddhism brought to China a yet more highly re-
fined conception of the conditional existence of the individual.
According to the wisdom scriptures (the Prajna-paramita su-
tras) of the Mahayana tradition, the self, like all other condi-
tional entities, is comprised of a transitory aggregate of ele-
ments. These elements, the five skandhas (form and matter,
sensations, perceptions, emotional states, and consciousness),
are in a constant state of flux; hence the individual is not to be
considered a permanent entity in any regard. A person should
face this reality by extinguishing all sense of self to become one
with the Unconditioned, the ultimate reality that is Void of all
particular characteristics. This sublime selflessness puts one on
the path to becoming a bodhisattva, the embodiment of wis-
dom whose function is to bring all other living creatures to this
realization. However, to the enlightened person or even to one
who grasps this truth in purely rational terms, the uncompro-
mising ontological nondualism in the more intellectual sects of
Mahayana Buddhism offers a poignant paradox. That is, the
Unconditioned is ultimately no different from conditioned ex-
istence; enlightenment is indistinguishable from immersion in
the delusions of the real world. The self is no different from
Robert E. Hegel 10

what the individual perceives it to be from moment to mo-

ment. Buddhist-influenced writers could celebrate their mo-
mentary hopes, fears, and insights in the bittersweet knowl-
edge that such is the only existence that self can possibly have.
Other, less philosophical Mahayana sects saw some reality in
material existence which might even lead to salvation, rebirth
in the Western Paradise. The negation of Confucian social ties
as a basis for self-conception here echoed the more intellectual
Buddhist conception of self as conditional and transient. 1 4
Time has been of central concern in all three of these
philosophical approaches to the self. James J. Y. Liu has iden-
tified several typical attitudes toward time in Chinese verse.
Poets "confront" time as they face events streaming toward
them from the past; they "concur" with time when they face
the same direction as the flow of events, into the future. Liu
also comments, perceptively if parenthetically, "I assume that
in the case of circular time one would be at the circumference;
if one were at the center, one would no longer be in time." 1 5
To the extent that self is based on the past in the Confucian
view, Confucian poets must "confront" time to establish a self.
Taoists who would follow Chuang Tzu's example would focus
on the forward flow of time; they would "concur" with it. Both
indigenous schools of thought posit cyclical time; only philo-
sophical Buddhism does not. Instead, the emancipated self is
beyond, or " n o longer in" time.
Here Liu has touched upon another facet of the self:
its necessary separability from temporal process, often visual-
ized as a stream of water. (Not surprisingly, a conventional
metonymy for the poet during the T'ang period was ku-chou,
or "solitary boat," a symbol of "man's aloneness in an enlarg-
ing world.") 16 The historiographical demand for designation of
dynasty during which a person lived, the dating of poems, even
the arrangement of items in an anthology by chronological or-
der presupposes a cosmic, continuing process of change to
which the separate (whether real or perceived) self must re-
spond for validation. One might face the past or face the fu-
ture, in Liu's terms, but the Chinese self was allowed no free-
dom to ignore time while asserting its individuality. On the
T H E C H I N E S E LITERARY SELF 21

one hand, this view could—and did, in Six Dynasties poets—

produce both a morbid fear of death and spiritual and alchem-
ical attempts to transcend or to slow time's movement. 17 On
the other, even a poet having the individual personality and
Taoist leanings of T'ao Ch'ien (365-427) expressed his deeply
felt concern for the destructive effects of time in his famous
"Hsing, ying, shen" (Substance, Shadow, and Spirit):
Earth and heaven endure forever,
Streams and mountains never change.
Plants observe a constant rhythm
Withered by frost, by dew restored.
But man, most sentient being of all,
In this is not their equal.
He is present here in the world today,
Then leaves abruptly, to return no more.

The body goes; that fame should also end

Is a thought that makes me burn inside.

Give yourself to the waves of the Great Change

Neither happy nor yet afraid
And when it is time to go, then simply go
Without any unnecessary fuss. 18

The loss of self the poet here laments is clearly an individual

self, defined in part as the object of time's destructive effects.
T'ao Ch'ien's reaction to mortality, like that of Chuang Tzu
immediately after his wife died, sees the self as an animate
physical being, pathetically helpless to forestall time's depre-
dations. A similar view must have inspired certain Taoists of
the Six Dynasties period to foil time with only successful means
at their disposal: they committed suicide to achieve immortal-
ity, freedom from time's control. 19
One remedy proposed by a T'ao Ch'ien persona in
the poem cited above is to achieve a measure of immortality
through one's writings. This was a pressing concern for writ-
ers in all ages of China's history; writers' hopes were gener-
ally vindicated by the tremendous bulk of literature preserved
in China. Yet some of China's best-known poems refer to no
Robert E. Hegel 12

explicit self; there is no " I , " nor even an individualized per-

sona, to be found. Wang Wei (701-761) has often been cited
as an extreme example of this sort of literary selflessness, a
product of his Buddhist inclinations.

Empty hills, no one in sight,

only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again. 2 0

In this brief poem, the poet's mind is like a mirror— to use the
Buddhist image—reflecting reality without comment or other
intellectual interference. Wang Wei's literary self stands at the
center of time, unchanging with it and unchanged by it. The
poet here becomes, in Yip Wai-lim's apt phrase, "Nature
[Phenomenon] as it is: no trace of conceptualization." 2 1 The
influence of Buddhism on Wang Wei's conception of self is
clear. But its manifestation is two-sided. First, the poet be-
comes one with the scene, denying separate existence. But on
the other hand, the conception of the five skandhas of condi-
tional existence seems to be invoked here. That is, these fleet-
ing perceptions constitute the totality of the poet's existence,
his self at one moment. (After all, the poem only reflects
physical reality; regardless of the poet's mental state at the time
of composition, the poem, a literary artifact, exists separate from
other elements of external—-and internal—reality.) Other poems
in this sequence by himself and his friend P'ei Ti refer to time
and place explicitly. 22 By creating a seemingly eternal mo-
ment, the poem overcomes time. Wang Wei's immortality is
doubly ensured thereby: no self to lose to time, and a poem
celebrating this no-self that has been preserved for more than
a millennium.
Self-denial plays a significant role in the ideology
of the modern age as reflected in contemporary Chinese liter-
ature. However, the purpose is quite different: instead of los-
ing the self in the Eternal, the writer denies the individual self
for the specific—and transitory—needs of the mass. China's
Marxist leaders in recent decades have often repeated the slo-
gan, " T h e masses are the makers of history." Yet instead of
THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF 13

the collective resilience this approach would imply, recent cre-

ative writing and events reveal instead a faith in the ability of
man to change with events. Mao Tse-tung interpreted the so-
cial function of literature narrowly, seeing it as a necessary
means of meeting political needs. As he so clearly revealed in
the phrase "more typical, nearer the ideal," Mao saw litera-
ture as didactic by definition. Writing has the power to mold
the values of those who read it; writers must therefore embue
their work with only the correct values. The malleability at-
tributed to the individual is to be found at all social levels:
China's working masses should become literate in order that
they may be reached collectively by new values, while intel-
lectuals should live and work together with peasants and la-
borers in order to develop the values of that class and be able
to write specifically to meet their needs. These ideas, the mo-
tive force behind social movements of totally unprecedented
scope (including the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"
that began in 1966 and lasted, in important respects, until the
death of Mao a decade later), hinge on the premises that a
person consists essentially of a set of values and that personal
values, hence one's identity, can change through time. That
one's identity is ostensibly related to socioeconomic class does
not negate this conception. 2 3 A Marxist writer must take part
in the process of revolutionary social change Bodhisattva-fash-
ion by bringing all others to a higher stage of political con-
sciousness, and hence, in certain regards, to a higher level of
being. At this higher level values are less egotistical and more
collectivist in orientation. The conscientious writer, then, has
two choices: either to present himself as an exemplary char-
acter in his writing (one that is "close to the ideal") or to erase
any trace of individuality from his writings, replacing his par-
ticular consciousness with the desired ideology of the com-
munity, expecially during periods of progressive change. 24 The
goal of self-development in Chinese Marxism is self-tran-
scendence no less than it was in Confucianism. This remark-
able parallel reveals a fundamental continuity in the Chinese
notion of the self as a fluid entity of not merely material pro-
portions.
Robert E. Hegel 14

China's social history confirms the continuity of this

conception of the self through time. The ancestral cults of the
Shang kings 3,500 years ago and the religious practices of Tai-
wan's modern-day peasants share with billions of Chinese
throughout the millennia one essential premise. That is, the
unseen world is at most an extension of the visible; the two
realms of existence are fundamentally interconnected. The de-
ities of Chinese religions have never originated from some
transcendent or otherworldly source; for the most part they are
simply deceased human beings. Thus Chinese deities past and
present have been conceived as needing concern and suste-
nance from their descendants or followers. In turn, their di-
vine powers can be invoked to meet the needs of the living—
which the gods know so well from having experienced mortal
existence themselves. Myths are therefore rare in China by
Western standards; instead, biographies of gods exist to par-
allel—or to extend—those of normal human beings. 2 5
While explanations vary with time and social stra-
tum, traditional Chinese religion consistently presents a view
of the self as constituted of matter and energy. The former is
subject to the depredations of time; the latter is further sepa-
rable into positive or benevolent elements and others that are
negative or malevolent. In its purest form, the first of these
spiritual essences is the stuff of divinity; concentrated malev-
olence forms the ghosts or demons that occasion popular fears
and folk rituals.26 To a degree, then, these beliefs and the
practices they require parallel the Buddhist idea that the self
lacks integrity; the constituent elements differ, to be sure, but
religion as practiced for thousands of years in China presup-
poses the conception of a self that is voluntarily (in the case of
spirit mediums) or involuntarily divisible, may have partial
continued existence after death, and is certainly spiritual rather
than material at base. This belief accords well with the
Chuangtzian account of the plight of the dead woman—she
returned to the realm of spiritual energy whence she c a m e —
and with the flight of the disembodied mind through medita-
tive trance in certain Taoist schools. It also serves to explain
T H E C H I N E S E LITERARY SELF 15

certain peculiarly Chinese treatments of the individual in lit-

erature.
First, the divisible nature of the self allows mind and
body to separate in narratives of late imperial China. The theater
utilizes this idea to allow young female characters apparently
to accompany their lovers while their own real bodies lie cold
in death or in coma. 27 Second, it allows for characters to func-
tion on two planes of existence simultaneously, most promi-
nently in the greatest of all Chinese novels, Hung-lou meng (A
Dream of Red Mansions, more commonly referred to as Dream
of the Red Chamber), also known as Shih-t'ou chi (The Story of
the Stone). The protagonists Pao-yii and Tai-yii are both ma-
terial and spiritual beings, fated in their attraction for each other
and yet free to work out the details of their lives. One is never
really certain which level of existence is meant to be more valid
in the work; clearly they cannot be separated. 28 Finally, the
spiritual nature of the self permits the exploration of dreams
in Chinese literature to have an extended range of signifi-
cance. On the one hand, dream exploits constitute transparent
allegories for the reader; they are no less real for the character
than are his waking adventures. On the other, dreams in fic-
tion allow the enactment of fantasies that would be impossible
in daylight reality—and yet they have as much physical effect
on characters as do everyday events. 29
The perspective of Chinese religion and some of its
literary manifestations reveal a conception of the self varying
only in degree from those visions presented in its major phil-
osophical schools. Here again the self is a transient entity,
conditional rather than absolute in its existence (although the
nature of this conditional existence is not explored fully in
Chinese religion), fluid in its composition, and changeable—
in addition to being primarily spiritual in nature. Clearly, the
Chinese self is a self-conscious conception, a product of mind
with all the characteristics that definition implies.
Thus far I have discussed a few elements of literary
identity in the perennial Chinese scheme primarily as pre-
sented from nonliterary perspectives. Literature itself differs
Robert E. Hegel 16

from history, philosophy, and religion because no matter how

a work may generalize on the human self—as do these other
disciplines—it also reveals the self as expressed by an individ-
ual self, whether consciously or inadvertently. The studies that
follow examine a variety of Chinese literary works, poetry, fic-
tion, and drama, from a 2,400-year span of time. These writ-
ings express—and elicit—differing views of self and differing
degrees of individual particularity balanced by social custom
and literary convention. Implicit in most of the works here
discussed is a pragmatic theory of literature, an approach that
stresses the social effect of writing (which effect, as Edward
Gunn discovers, may actually be minimal). To this end, many
of these works present behavioral models explicitly, as type
characters in narrative, 30 or implicitly, through conventional
modes of expression in verse.
The aspect of self that appears most frequently in
these essays is the recognition of the necessary role of duty
and its fulfillment in building an individual identity. As soci-
ety presents many role models to maturing individuals, so too
do duties multiply and, in the more interesting Chinese nar-
ratives, bring conflicting obligations. Duty to the state is per-
haps most obvious, but duty to one's class, one's locality, one's
family, and one's beloved all appear as strong motivation for
Chinese heroes and heroines. Likewise, the duty to oneself as
separable from the other causes—largely a function of self-
preservation, usually in a quite literal sense—makes its de-
mands and must be answered.
Patrick Hanan's topic is a body of stories compiled
during one of China's most chaotic periods, the Manchu con-
quest of the 1640s. These stories were written in a version of
the vernacular even though designed for the authors' own class
of educated and privileged males; they address directly the
duties incumbent upon this class. To such readers, the indi-
vidual is fully capable of moral choice; the self is to be not only
evaluated but defined on the basis of these choices. Moral or-
der being fundamentally indistinguishable from political and
social order in the Confucian world view, patriotism presents
the challenge to devote oneself heroically and selflessly to the
T H E C H I N E S E LITERARY S E L F 17

needs of society. Thus the writers Hanan investigates dismiss

the possibility of Taoist eremitism, so appealing in other eras,
to endorse self-fulfillment through Confucian puritanism and
public service. 31 To them, writing is a weak second choice as
a means of establishing oneself.
Moral conservatism in the Confucian vein and the
establishment of self were interlocked issues among mid-sev-
enteenth-century novelists as well. Chin Sheng-t'an (?1610-
1661), for example, was a nonconformist who did not sit for
the higher-level civil service examinations, preferring instead
to read voraciously in a wide variety of areas. He was con-
vinced that he was intellectually superior to his contemporar-
ies and arrogantly flaunted his knowledge at every opportu-
nity. Yet he is best known for his work in editing and writing
critical commentary for the novel Shui-hu chuan (Water Mar-
gin), a military romance that reached the final stage of its tex-
tual evolution in his hands. 32 To Chin, the successes of its
bandit-turned-rebel heroes might promote civil disorder and
warfare. As a consequence he truncated the novel at the reb-
els' triumphant banquet celebrating a final victory over impe-
rial forces—to substitute an ending in which all of them are
executed through direct divine intervention. To clarify further
his own views on political loyalty, Chin also modified the text
to cast doubt on the intentions of the leader of the gang; thus
Sung Chiang ostensibly maintains his loyalty to the emperor
while rebelling only against his evil ministers. Clearly Chin
Sheng-t'an used this novel to establish himself through his
moral stance. This was not enough, however; Chin later was
a leader of a widespread demonstration in Soochow against a
rapacious tax collector. He himself was executed for seeking a
higher degree of self-fulfillment: he physically demonstrated
his moral standards and his courage to criticize others for not
meeting those same traditional behavioral norms. 33 Chin, like
Hanan's authors, perceived self-worth as hinging on fulfill-
ment of his responsibility to the body politic.
Joseph Lau discusses several versions of selfhood,
all of which are related to self-justification or even self-esteem
by virtue of adherence to duty. Orphan Chao may collapse
Robert E. Hegel 18

w h e n finally told the truth about the gruesome fate of his clan
and the role of his "adopted father" in their demise, but his
chagrin is only momentary. At once he resolves to destroy the
man w h o raised him in order to avenge the deaths of his rel-
atives by birth. His collapse serves in the play to mark his shift
of allegiances and of social roles, from obedient adopted son
to his clan's avenger. The widow in "Shih-wu-kuan hsi-yen
ch'eng ch'iao-huo" (The Jest That Leads to Disaster) w h o has
been, unwittingly, the faithful wife of her first h u s b a n d ' s mur-
derer, also shifts her loyalties—even without obvious physical
trauma. The protagonist of the first tale acts for the most
straightforward reasons, Lau argues; the O r p h a n can compre-
hend no moral complexity in his situation. However, the widow
is a different case. She may well be moved to betray her "hus-
band"-captor in part by a guilty conscience; after all, she had
insisted on the execution of two innocent people wrongly ac-
cused of murdering her first h u s b a n d .
Lau's example of the young w o m a n w h o sacrifices
all marital happiness for the sake of reputation is extreme but
still within the same category of character as these two. She
and others in traditional literature, such as Chu Kuei-erh in
the novel Sui Yang-ti yen-shih (The Merry A d v e n t u r e s of Em-
peror Yang, anon., 1631), embody the paradoxical situation that
total self-denial can in fact be an extremely effective m e a n s of
self-assertion. These characters function quite simply as mar-
tyrs for their chosen cause, self-appointed victims on the sec-
ular pyre of Confucian morality, confident that their bold ac-
tions will be recorded and told to generation after generation
of less intrepid souls. Like Christian martyrs in medieval Eu-
rope, they ensure themselves everlasting fame by apotheosis
to the sublime level of behavioral model for all posterity. Many
stories and plays resort to divine intervention to rescue such
characters, as in the story discussed by Joseph Lau. Other more
realistic narratives simply leave them their fame, a cold re-
ward but one sought by various real-life heroes of Chinese tra-
dition. 34
However, as Lau observes, there is an unmistaka-
ble element of egotism involved in such choices. Chinese tra-
THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF 19

dition with its "golden mean" tends to see all acts as falling
on continua between polar opposites of behavior, for exam-
ple, that of self-denial. Extremes are to be avoided, according
to popular Confucian teachings. Such perverse rejection of this
principle not only earns reputation; it is a selfish blow against
social convention. A figure who puts this aspect of self in clear
perspective is the hilariously ornery protagonist of the early
vernacular story "K'uai-tsui Li Ts'ui-lien chi" (Loquacious Li
Ts'ui-lien, or "The Shrew" in H. C. Chang's wonderful trans-
lation). Ts'ui-lien balks at every suggestion made by her par-
ents: their efforts to marry her off meet with a torrent of abuse
from the young lady, whose interests apparently are confined
to joining a Buddhist convent. Philosophically her insistence
might be rationalized as motivated by her realization of the il-
lusory nature of this world and the need to retreat to the other.
But in the context of the story, she refuses to cooperate with
others because that is what they want her to do. She simply
will do what she wants to do; the prospect of a reputation for
chastity pales before her obstinacy. 35
The selfish side of an apparently selfless self can be
seen even in the romantic exemplars discussed by Richard C.
Hessney. He observes their struggles to satisfy both love and
morality, but for most this dilemma causes none of the emo-
tional turmoil visited upon such Western heroines as Clarissa
Harlowe. They are secure in their resolve: the "beauty" in Hao-
ch'iu chuati (The Fortunate Union) handily tricks her vile uncle
with never a palpitation for herself; the "genius" T'ieh Chung-
yü may raise his voice in self-righteous anger but he does not
spend nights sleepless with longing. Sentimental platitudes
serve to calm the blaze that we expect to rage in his chest. But
in fact his passion does not blaze. In this T'ieh differs pro-
foundly from the feckless Chang Sheng in "Ying-ying chuan"
(The Story of Ying-ying) as revealed by Joseph Lau. One might
argue that the "comic rise" from disharmony to harmony in
these "genius-beauty romances" takes place on the moral
foundation of these youths. Appropriately they are gratified
by this process, for example when Ping-hsin is vindicated by
proof of her virginity in The Fortunate Union and when her in-
Robert E. Hegel 20

dividualistic disregard for the rules binding normal society

brings the proper results. Hessney is surely justified in de-
scribing their ability to discern talent in others as a sign of their
self-assurance. (Appropriately Ping-hsin, like her predecessor
Ying-ying, urges her lover-to-be to cultivate his moral self, i.e.,
self-control, even though T'ieh remains so much cooler than
Chang.)
Joseph Lau has demonstrated the quickness and
apparent ease with which Orphan Chao shifts roles; to Lau the
widow of "The Jest That Leads to Disaster" changes position
less smoothly, and she reveals a certain self-interest in the
process. Often Western readers find characters of the latter
propensity in Chinese literature more engaging. They appear
to us as more complex in their motivations, hence more real-
istic. These complexities of motivation, of morality, and of in-
terest, are accomplished in several major ways. Hessney com-
ments that the interplay of types in old vernacular fiction
parallels a similar phenomenon in Chinese theater. The shift
from role to role can occasion a noteworthy shift in identity.
See, for example, the curious humanity Catherine Swatek dis-
covers attributed to Yang Su in the play Hung-fu chi (Red
Whisk). At first he is the self-satisfied minister, aloof from the
concerns of his underlings; then he becomes the indulgent and
paternalistic patron who reunites a serving maid with her hus-
band. The play demonstrates its characters' capacity for self-
transformation, often through inner crisis. Curly Beard in
"Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" (The Man with the Curly Beard) must
shift from being a contender for the throne to patron of those
who would help his erstwhile rival Li Shih-min. In the T'ang
period ch'uan-ch'i tale this transformation occurs without stress;
in the play written centuries later, and with an eye toward
revealing inner feelings, the change occasions great tension for
him. The self may be presented as dynamic, but substantial
role change takes its toll. Aspects of self defined by social
function can be crucial to the ego in a Chinese narrative.
Marsha Wagner focuses specifically on social rela-
tions as they define the self. Even minor characters, maids and
THE C H I N E S E LITERARY SELF 21

servants, in the immortal Dream of the Red Chamber have inner

feelings and complex motivations, in marked contrast to the
conventional use of stereotypes for minor roles. 36 Each is in-
dividualized, often revealed in the need for self-justification by
gaining or recovering face. Li Ma-ma, the wet nurse, follows
a pattern similar to that of the maid Ssu-ch'i; the latter hallu-
cinates a reason for her suicide, thus absolving herself of re-
sponsibility for moral stain. But it is change in social position
that generates intense anxiety in Dream. Self-esteem is never
at a more precarious ebb than when a servant is demoted, for
example. Mere fear of change may be a factor as well in the
young mistresses' apprehension about marriage away from the
Chia household. Indeed, Wagner explains, a character bereft
of a supportive social context suffers; self here is in part a
psychic state that needs the security of a stable hierarchical
structure to survive intact. And as a social entity, each indi-
vidual self is involved in the stability of all. When social order
declines in the Chia household, when individuals step out of
their proper roles—whether to carry on illicit amours, to ac-
complish private business dealings, or to snatch a tidbit fit for
a master—the entire edifice is threatened through inevitable
chains of causation.
Given the general Chinese preoccupation with so-
cial nexus as a means of establishing the self, it is not surpris-
ing that this Dream element has a substantial history in Chinese
literature. Vernacular narratives in particular put their protag-
onists on the road, away from ties of family and village, when
trouble strikes. This event often occasions a crisis in identity.
In the late Ming short story "Wu Pao-an ch'i-chia tu-yu" (Wu
Pao-an Ransoms His Friend), the faithful Wu devotes all his
energies to saving the money needed to ransom a man he has
never met who is a captive of border tribal peoples. His rea-
son is that he vowed to aid him in a military campaign; having
so vowed, his self-concept as well as his reputation seem to
hinge on fulfilling his commitment. For years he lives apart from
his family, depriving himself of all comforts in his self-ap-
pointed quest; when finally he dies in obscurity, his son re-
Robert E. Hegel 22

ceives high honors in his stead and a shrine is established in

his honor. 3 7 His self-worth is established in relation to another
person, but it does not hinge on any familiar social setting.
Of the earliest preserved vernacular stories, two
bring ego-destructive calamity on heroes who are out of their
context. In "Yang Wen Lan-lu-hu chuan" (Yang Wen and the
White Tiger Star) 3 8 Yang, scion of a line of generals, finds
himself shamed by being caught off guard, having his wife ab-
ducted, and being deprived of his weapons while away from
home. In the more famous story version of the White Snake
legend, the hapless young man falls under the spell of the ser-
pent while enjoying the scenery on the Ch'ing-ming festival.
Appropriately, he is an orphan; he has only weak relation-
ships with a brother-in-law and his employer. Consequently,
he has no resources with which to meet the unprecedented
challenge of the lady's advances. The legal trouble into which
he falls requires him to move away from even these ties. In-
deed, the monk who saves him constitutes the hero's only other
personal tie. 39
Two seventeenth-century novels present this prob-
lem in its ultimate form. Sui shih i-wen (Forgotten Tales of the
Sui, 1633) leaves its hero, a would-be knight errant, far away
from home, friendless, penniless, and with nothing to do. De-
prived of all social supports, Ch'in Shu-pao gives up the
weapons handed down from his grandfather, symbolizing his
family, and even takes on an assumed name. His concept of
self has flown away with his social (and financial) resources,
leaving only confusion, despair, and emotional depression. 4 0
In Hsi-yu pu (Tower of Myriad Mirrors, 1641), on the other hand,
the magical Monkey is still able, sporadically, to see and hear
his erstwhile companions. But he is alone, unable to touch
them. They have become mere figments of his imagination. He
too hides his identity in an effort to recover his original rela-
tionships, although when events lose all predictability, Mon-
key loses his self-control, to become a mindless embodiment
of frustration and rage. 41 Indeed, in fiction loss of a familiar
social matrix, even temporarily, puts the self in a precarious
position.
T H E C H I N E S E LITERARY SELF 23

The Buddhist notion of self also appears in Dream

of the Red Chamber: the fundamentally empty product of mind
from which each person must be liberated. Several characters
do achieve release from their worldly attachments in the novel;
to most, loss of ego is a traumatic transition, if it is genuine.
However, once this ultimate freedom is achieved, identity be-
comes a function of self-denial. The Buddhist arhat as a liter-
ary device then differs only superficially from the Confucian
moral paragon. Again paradoxically, no-self becomes license
for self-indulgence for the eccentric Buddhist (and Taoist)
characters that appear in much of China's fiction and drama.
The snobbish Buddhist "nun" (actually still a laywoman) Miao-
yu in Dream is a case in point. Compare also the sublime self-
confidence of the Confucian "genius" T'ieh Chung-yii with
more serious portraits, Ni Heng and various Taoist hermits.
Ni is an ostensibly Confucian eccentric in the classic historical
romance, San-kuo chih yen-i (Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
c. 1400, attributed to Lo Kuan-chung). Unwilling to compro-
mise his integrity, he berates the would-be usurper Ts'ao Ts'ao
for his worldly aims while revealing no fear for himself. Later
he removes his clothing in Ts'ao Ts'ao's court, declaring, "To
hoodwink and deceive the emperor, that's insolence! I expose
the body my parents gave me—that's showing my purity." 4 2
The idea of nakedness as symbolizing purity also appears in
the following well-known anecdote about the drunken Taoist
poet Liu Ling (fl. 250):

On many occasions Liu Ling, under the influence of wine, would

be completely free and uninhibited, sometimes taking off his
clothes and sitting naked in his room. Once when some per-
sons saw him and chided him for it, Ling retorted, "I take heaven
and earth for my pillars and roof, and the rooms of my house
for my pants and coat. What are you gentlemen doing in my
pants?" 4 3

Perhaps the legendary Buddhist poet Han-shan (fl.

800) is a clearer example. Unconventional in every way, the
unkempt layman would work occasionally in a temple kitchen
only to flee with peals of laughter when approached by any-
Robert E. Hegel 24

one in a position of authority. He even refused such mundane

items as food and shelter. When a suit of clothing was finally
brought to him as he wandered in the mountains, he cursed
the bearer for being a thief and then disappeared into a cave. 44
While this account may not be an accurate account of a partic-
ular hermit, it does reveal the truth of this image: the most
selfless character has a good deal of ego invested in proving
how different he is from the common herd. In fact, part of the
initial irony in the heroic Monkey Sun Wu-k'ung in the alle-
gorical novel Hsi-yu chi (Journey to the West, ca. 1580, at-
tributed to Wu Ch'eng-en) lies in his repeated attempts to es-
tablish longevity, a kingdom, and proper status for himself after
he has achieved Buddhist emancipation. 45
Jonathan Chaves discerns just this sort of "individ-
ualism" ultimately based in philosophical mysticism in the
Kung-an school of poetry criticism. A poet, he rightly ob-
serves, may be utterly free to express self in a Chinese context
that sees total identity between the essential self and the Ul-
timate Reality of the universe. From this perspective, no "self"
differs in the slightest from any other, or even from nature in
its totality. In marked contrast to the romantic notion of the
individual self in Western literature, which stressed the senti-
mentality and authenticity of personal feelings, Neo-Confu-
cian poets often saw ego as properly transparent and its per-
ceptions of nature uncolored by any shred of individuality.
Chaves demonstrates that the Kung-an school claimed for the
poet the freedom to roam (the Taoist metaphor) between so-
cial and literary roles. While philosophical selflessness does
dominate the poetry of these and earlier poets, such as Wang
Wei, the literary counterpart is a self defined, in a self-con-
gratulatory way, by its selflessness. Type characters and the
high individuality of poetic personas are thereby congruent
manifestations of complementary visions of the self.
Specifically Buddhist or Taoist poets were not the
only writers of old China to abandon ego and assume the
function of mirror for the universe. As Leo O. Lee remarks,
the great travel diarists recorded much more of landscape than
of self. His characterization of the late Ch'ing novel Lao Ts'an
T H E CHINESE LITERARY SELF 25

yu-chi (The Travels of Lao Ts'an, by Liu E) as a "spiritual"

journey to self-discovery and self-revelation identifies one phase
of the accommodation of Chinese literature to Western influ-
ences. The romantic traveler created by Yii Ta-fu (1896-1945)
contrasts deliberately and sharply with Lao Ts'an; Yii's self seeks
to assert the individual personality against chaotic external
reality. Liu E had sought to bolster the Confucian world view
against Western intellectual incursions; by 1920 Confucianism
clearly had been defeated. Yii's May Fourth generation was left
with an unprecedented degree of iconoclasm, perhaps in self-
defence. It was only appropriate that at the age of forty the
patriotic Yii Ta-fu turned to writing traditional travel diaries as
a source of cultural security. On the other hand, one of Liu E's
contemporaries, Tseng P'u (1872-1935) progressed less dra-
matically, but more consistently, from defender of traditional
values to a writer in the mode of French Romanticism. 46
The solitary self was a phenomenon of Western-
oriented May Fourth writers, Lee observes. The rise of the
Communist Party and the Japanese invasion were two factors
in the burgeoning nationalism that tempered their iconoclasm
significantly. Later travelers, much like their Confucian fore-
bears, again see themselves as part of a social context, an or-
dered context with hope for stability in which both individual
and group are secure. The formal declaration of a "new" China
in 1949 typified what was to become the dominant tendency
in literary self-expression, a self fulfilled through duty. Ed-
ward Gunn developed a questionnaire designed to test the ef-
fectiveness of literature in modifying the self-concept of its
readers. His literary selections present normative characters in
situations that embody dominant values of socialist China. In
this there are fundamental continuities with the past. But the
ability to discern which values are being presented seems to be
a function of experience: readers could identify the relevant
values more easily if they had been in the same situation as
the protagonist. This observation may suggest a number of
conclusions about didacticism in contemporary revolutionary
literature; it may suggest too a reason for typical and stereo-
typed characters in traditional narratives. Like Lu Hstin's Ah
Robert E. Hegel 26

Q, who has been deprived of identifying data, by appealing

to a few basic values shared by all traditional character types
are more readily comprehensible to their readers. Limited as
it often has been to worker, peasant, and soldier heroes, con-
temporary Chinese fiction has had to embody constant shifts
of political line; it may well have lost the empathy and self-
projection of many of its readers in the process. 4 7 The conti-
nuity of roles and values that identify personal security with
the harmonious organization and functioning of the group may
have made traditional narratives, particularly drama and other
mass forms, popular through time—their audience could readily
identify with the messages inherent in these works.
The nationalism that grew in China over the last
century has been in part a reaction to alternative ideologies from
abroad. The iconoclasm of the May Fourth era was accompa-
nied, in the field of literary scholarship, by an investigation of
China's vernacular fiction and drama that was totally unprec-
edented in scope. Ostensibly this research was to serve the
needs of China's modern writers, as a clear basis upon which
to build a new literature comparable to that of advanced West-
ern cultures. The Chineseness of their material served to bol-
ster the collective ego of this generation of intellectuals against
the apparent onslaught of Western threats to identity. Signif-
icantly, the Japanese-trained Lu Hsun turned to writing West-
ern-style short stories only after a period of intense study of
Buddhist texts and old Chinese fiction; Yii Ta-fu, Leo Lee ob-
serves, ultimately retreated to traditional literary forms. Some
of the best known reaffirmations of Chinese culture among
writers occurred during the war years, when Japan occupied
most of China's major cities. Lu Hsiin's brother Chou Tso-jen
(1885-1968?) found a new literary self through study of late
Ming writers and thinkers; Eileen Chang (Chang Ai-ling, b.
1921) began her writing career after careful study of Dream of
the Red Chamber.48 Selfhood for these figures was based firmly
on their identity as Chinese despite antitraditionalist elements
in their public statements.
A concern for China as a whole is thus an obvious
characteristic of the Chinese writer's self-definition in twen-
tieth-century writing. The narrowly defined social responsibil-
T H E C H I N E S E LITERARY S E L F 27

ity dictated by Marxist theoreticians had its roots in the patri-

otism of the May Fourth era, which in turn reflected the
Confucian sense of social responsibility. However, even non-
and strongly anti-Communist writers who live or publish in
Taiwan reveal similar sentiments. Taiwan's writers regularly
address the needs of society through the needs of the self; in
fact, the self is as much a social entity in the best of Taiwan
fiction as it was in the best Confucian fiction of the past. A
function of place and of time as well, the most rootless of Tai-
wan's fictional selves characteristically seek to establish an
identity through traditional social relationships and through
affirmation of elements of Chinese culture. This is despite a
nominal romance with Western literature and values that be-
gan at the end of the nineteenth century and, unlike on the
mainland, has only grown in intensity in Taiwan over recent
decades.
Thus far I have addressed only those articles that
deal with created visions of self, fictional or fictionalized char-
acters. In poetry, however, the self is projected, or reflected,
more directly in the persona of the poet. Frances LaFleur
Mochida traces the development of the poet's presentation of
self in nature poetry, from the selfless communality of reli-
gious ritual through the subjective landscape of Li Ho in the
ninth century. Ch'ii Yuan, often called China's first poet, was
certainly innovative in presenting a unique and well-devel-
oped persona in his poem; his journey is a deliberately per-
sonal pilgrimage having exoneration and glorification of self
(albeit in terms of his dedication to his lord) as its dual goal.
In this, his "Li sao" (Encountering Sorrow) contrasts sharply
with the religious quest for a kind of self-transcendence in the
poetry that inspired him. The Ts'aos of the third century, father
and son, Mochida observes, put their personal stamp on their
verse within the confines of received tradition. The great poets
of the middle T'ang created personal worlds in verse by con-
founding tradition. The dimensions of their worlds aside, this
trend clearly demonstrates the conventional use of poetry for
self-expression, including the expression of unique experi-
ence, insights, and sentiments.
But poetry, like prose narratives, can readily pre-
Robert E. Hegel 28

sent a fictional self. Anne Birrell explores the amazing com-

plexity of the conventionalized view of woman in the courtly
poetry of the southern courts of the Six Dynasties period. These
women nominally differ in status, ranging from entertainers
to officials' wives and palace ladies, but all are alike in roman-
tic sensibilities and passionate longing for an absent lover. In
the poems of this genre woman is a victim with whom, pre-
sumably, the reader is to sympathize. But can a reader be
moved by well-worn sentiments made fashionable?
The self-indulgence in sentiment gave vigor to the
trend, Birrell argues; most likely this character type may serve
as a model for understanding the parameters of self as viewed
in Chinese literature. That is, one need not hypothesize that
this image of woman was necessarily an accurate description
of woman's position in society, nor even that it fulfills men's
wish that woman should be helpless, languid, and passionate.
It may constitute no more than a convenient means, conven-
tionalized in its dimensions, of representing an emotion com-
monly felt by the male poets. Thus the fashion may have used
rather incongruous personas (of the opposite sex, etc.), but the
expression of frustration through it may be a perfect parallel
for the earlier fashion of expressing a morbid fear of death in
verse, in the "coffin-puller's songs," for example. 49
If verse was a vehicle for self-expression in Chinese
literature, then narrative provided ample opportunity for
identification on the part of the reader with various charac-
ters. Gunn shows how experience shaped moral comprehen-
sion of fiction in his q u e s t i o n n a i r e . Traditionally literary ster-
eotypes were defined largely by social role, but role shifts do
appear, with corresponding moral complexity, in characters
from old Chinese narratives. Consider, however, the function
of multiple and divisible identities in this material. Some years
ago, C. T. Hsia perceptively identified pairs of relatively sim-
ple characters in several of the classic Chinese novels that con-
stitute a single personality. That is, each "half character" has
attributes lacking in the other; neither is complete alone. Li K'uei
and Sung Chiang from Water Margin constitute one such pair:
Sung Chiang is the nominal idealist mouthing platitudes about
THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF 29

loyalty to the throne, while Li K'uei is a pure sensualist who

delights in the act of killing, often while stark naked. Nor will
the latter countenance capitulation until Sung forces him to do
so on threat of execution—which Sung Chiang cannot bear to
carry out. 50 The various sides of an individual self represented
by the pilgrims of Journey to the West have been widely ob-
served; the oaths of brotherhood that bind the trio of heroes
in Romance of the Three Kingdoms likewise denote a composite
personality. The complementary way in which such characters
work together can be seen in the interaction between Chu-ko
Liang and the brothers of Three Kingdoms: Liu Pei goes three
times to enlist the aid of the strategist Chu-ko; while the trio
has a full complement of bravery, military skill, and charisma,
none has the insight needed to plan a campaign either on the
battlefield or at court. Chu-ko Liang fulfills them to make a
single, fully rounded entity, composite in nature.
One might argue that these characters merely rep-
resent different types, but the novelist gives a different impres-
sion when he has his characters switch functions. Late in the
novel, Liu Pei's sworn brothers Kuan Yii and Chang Fei are
killed. Lacking the strategic vision of Chu-ko Liang, the first
dies needlessly in battle and the second is killed by his own
men. Liu Pei is consumed with a desire for revenge and dis-
regards all words of caution, even though it costs him his state.
Yet when blinded by passion this man can still discern the
weakness in his adviser. Thus he tempts Chu-ko Liang with
his throne. He also foresees Chu-ko's only (and fatal) error of
judgment in a total reversal of the characters' usual roles.51
Catherine Swatek demonstrates the shared identity of Li Shih-
min and Curly Beard in the T'ang tale and in its later dramatic
version; Leo Lee notes the complementary function of Lao Ts'an
and Yellow Dragon in The Travels of Lao Ts'an. The "genius"
and the "beauty" fit together perfectly; they even look alike,
as Richard Hessney observes. Elsewhere Andrew Plaks has
explored the significance of the haunting identification of the
two major heroines Tai-yii and Pao-ch'ai in Dream of the Red
Chamber; he comments on the relative rarity with which a sin-
gle character dominates a Chinese narrative work.52 In the short
Robert E. Hegel 30

novel Tower of Myriad Mirrors, Tung Yueh divides the person-

ality of Monkey Sun Wu-k'ung into its component parts for an
astonishingly detailed view of his psyche. 53
The convention of dividing a single identity into
constituent elements has its origins in Chinese philosophy and
religion. The primeval yin-yang dualism later appears as two
"souls," the hurt and the po, that divide at death; it even finds
expression as male and female aspects of a personality. 54 But
the appearance of characters that exemplify these theories has
a significance that transcends expression of conventional per-
spectives in literature. They represent a deeper level of under-
standing about the nature of the self, that it is visible in, even
created by, one's social function, that it is no-self and yet
everything, that it is in constant flux, and that it encompasses
mutually contrastive or even contradictory elements. The
Chinese self may be expressed in less direct ways than in the
West; the mirror of literature does, after all, distort. But the
self expressed in Chinese literature is no simple entity. It has
been of central importance in writing past and present; stu-
dents of Chinese literature have heretofore only begun to ex-
plore its depth and complexity.
 Part I

Self in Poetry and Criticism

 The Dusty Mirror:
Courtly Portraits of Woman in
Southern Dynasties Love Poetry
Anne M. Birrell

7 n the middle of the sixth century a remarkable,

pioneering anthology of poetry appeared enti-
tled Yti-t'ai hsin-yung, New Songs from a Jade Terrace. It was
compiled by Hsu Ling (507-583) at the request of Hsiao Kang
(503-551), then the crown prince of the Liang Dynasty, known
to history as Emperor Chien-wen. 1 The innovative aspect of
this literary venture lay partly in the fact that it was the first
anthology in the Chinese poetic tradition devoted exclusively
to poems on the theme of love. Its novelty also lay partly in
the fact that the majority of the poets represented lived during
the Southern Dynasties era of the fifth and sixth centuries. 2
Although the point of the anthology was to com-
pile poems with a similar theme from a long period stretching
back several centuries, it was particularly in the Southern Dy-
nasties that a distinct, well-developed pattern of presenting a
love poem emerged and crystallized.3 During this period poets
focused on woman in their love poetry in a highly original way.
Their mode of presentation, while containing certain elements
Anne M. Birrell 34

borrowed from the earlier poetic tradition, was sufficiently in-

fused with new components to be characterized as "Southern
Dynasties" in content, attitude, and style.
From the Southern Dynasties love poems in this
anthology it is possible to infer a typical picture of a woman
in love because the poets were generally working within a well-
defined system of poetic convention. By "convention" I mean
an implicit agreement between poet and audience to impose
certain restrictions upon, and to take certain liberties with, the
poet's treatment of both theme and style. 4 There are a number
of reasons why love poetry acquired a markedly conventional
character at this particular point in the history of Chinese lit-
erature. The first is royal patronage. The Hsiao family of the
Liang royal house were poets, literary critics, and patrons of
the arts. 5 When Hsiao Kang commissioned Hsu Ling to com-
pile New Songs from a Jade Terrace, he did so in his capacity as
crown prince and as royal head of his own literary salon. 6 Hsu
Ling, a poet in his own right, and most of the poets in the
Southern Dynasties era, held official positions at court.
The second involves the occasions for the poems.
The Hsiao princes of Liang would commission poems from
courtier-poets who were their social inferiors, albeit artistic
peers. Thus the phrases, ying-ling, "at His Majesty's request,"
and ying-chiao, "commissioned by His Majesty," proliferate in
the titles of poems in the Southern Dynasties sections of the
anthology. Moreover, at such formal functions as court ban-
quets, topics for poetic composition were assigned to court poets
by their royal patrons. Thus the phrase fu-te, "assigned such-
and-such a topic for poetic composition," is also frequently to
be found in the anthology's titles.
Finally, poets formally imitated each other's poems,
and assiduously imitated those of their royal patrons in terms
of theme, structure, and style. A great many court poems have
in their titles the phrase feng-ho, "respectfully submitted to His
Majesty, matching the rhymes of his poem," or the word ni,
meaning "to imitate the style" of someone's poem. 7
Since topic, theme, structure, and style were mat-
ters either officially decided by royal patrons or heavily influ-
THE DUSTY MIRROR 35

enced by them, especially in the Liang era of the Southern Dy-

nasties, literary taste became pronouncedly more courtly and
more conventional. Thus love poems essentially adhere to a
regular set of rules of presentation. Generally the rules are as
follows. When a Southern Dynasties court poet composed a
love poem, he would usually select a woman as his subject,
rather than a man. She would conform to a noble ideal of fem-
ininity: she would appear to be well born and living in luxu-
rious surroundings, preferably palatial. Her pampered exis-
tence would be conveyed in her physical appearance: slender,
graceful, elegantly dressed, and heavily made up. The poet
would be obliged to depict her as pining for her absent lover;
a profound sense of melancholy should pervade his poem. She
should seem depressed but submissive in her acceptance of her
amorous fate. And because of this resigned frustration, the
woman he portrays would strike a pose of appealing physical
weakness and emotional vulnerability. Her time must be spent
in the palatial ambience of her boudoir. She must be seen to
be waiting there interminably for her absent lover. The poet
must describe certain items in her boudoir with sensuous de-
tail. Her portrait should be framed in a setting where nature
is not too far off; for nature is to be used to contrast with her
beauty and her situation, to pinpoint the passage of time, and
to underscore poetic statements on the meaning of love and,
by extension, of life. The general tenor of this portrait of a
woman in love should be one of touchingly pretty pathos.
In sum, the typical features of this new poetic style
are: the courtly love poem has as its theme frustrated love; its
subject is a palace lady, or a wealthy woman; its ambience is
palatial and luxurious; its setting is a woman's solitary bou-
doir; its mood is one of pessimism arising from the male lov-
er's absence; and its style is expressive and decoratively de-
scriptive, at once evoking the pathos of a woman unhappily
in love and the opulence of a fashionable woman's boudoir
decor.
This then was the new style of love poem upon
which Hsiao Kang, as royal patron of the arts, had set his seal
of approval. In his day it was dubbed kung-t'i shih, or "Palace-
Anne M. Birrell 36

style poetry." 8 In modern parlance it is better termed courtly

love poetry of the late Southern Dynasties era.
As the degree of conventionality in presentation
suggests, women are depicted in the love poetry of this period
as a type, a highly idealized and stylized type, rather than as
realistically observed individuals. Concepts of feminine attrac-
tiveness, of women's romantic attitudes, of the situations in
which women find themselves, of women's response to emo-
tional dilemmas all conform to a set repertoire of poetic idiom.
In other words, the image of woman here is conventional. The
poet does not so much seek to probe psychological depths as
to display technical virtuosity in his handling of a set literary
theme. What we have here is not a portrait of a female self,
nor of woman as an individual, nor of a feminine identity. For
terms such as "self" presuppose the poet's willingness to in-
ject into the fictionalized image of a woman in love some sem-
blance of his own personal experience. Those terms also imply
a sense of uniqueness about a person, which is the opposite
of a conventional type. In short, the imaginative system of
Southern Dynasties love poetry is geared to depicting a ste-
reotype.
What I propose to do first of all, therefore, is to de-
fine the typical features of the woman in love as she is por-
trayed by court poets in the Southern Dynasties. In order to
arrive at an understanding of the basic concept of this courtly
stereotype, I will begin by delineating four main conventional
aspects of woman as image, through (1) physical and personal
attributes, (2) social standing, (3) environment, and (4) her at-
titude to her male lover. Second, since these poems also sug-
gest tensions inherent in this literary portrait of woman, I will
enumerate the sources of conflict pertaining to such a presen-
tation of women in love. Third, I will seek to demonstrate how
the very conventional nature of these court poems prohibits
such poetic female types from reconciling their conflicts, or
adapting their behavior according to experience, or transform-
ing themselves from victims to active participants in love and
in life. Finally, I will attempt to evaluate the literary signifi-
cance of such elements as sentiment, convention, and deco-
ration in this stylized concept.
THE DUSTY MIRROR 37

As a corpus of literature, New Songs from a Jade Ter-

race covers a wide spectrum of time—seven and a half centu-
ries from the late third century B.C. to the middle of the sixth
century A.D. It constitutes a large body of poetry, 656 poems
in all, mostly pentasyllabic shih of varying lengths. 9 For the
purposes of this essay I have studied the 502 love poems in
the anthology which belong to the Southern Dynasties period,
76.5 percent of the total. My generalizations are based on these,
and I quote 28 representative poems, either in full or in part,
by 18 different poets. The translations are my own. 10

Four Conventional Aspects

of a Woman in Love

Aspects of the female portrayed in courtly love

poems of the Southern Dynasties are explicitly or implicitly
conveyed either through the female persona's statements about
her condition or through the poets' evocative descriptions. In
this section I will examine various facets that make up the idea
of woman, both as she sees herself and as the poet sees her.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE
One way of defining the female type as it is pre-
sented in these love poems is through descriptions of personal
appearance. I will consider the general image of woman as she
is idealized by the poets, leaving aside for the moment the
question of how this image alters under the pressure of emo-
tional conflict.
New Songs from a Jade Terrace contains numerous vi-
gnettes describing women, and nearly every poem contains
some reference to their personal appearance. These descrip-
tive passages evoke images of a woman's physique, her per-
sonality, her dress, and her ornaments. My survey of all the
poems in the anthology indicates that the poets tend to draw
on a common repertoire of epithets to convey a woman's
Anne M. Birrell 38

physical features and personality traits. The same vocabulary

occurs repeatedly in descriptive passages. Much of the ideal of
femininity derives from earlier poems which celebrate a god-
dess. The most influential of these was "Prose-poem on a
Goddess" attributed to Sung Yii (third century B.C.), and closer
to the time of Hsu Ling's anthology, Ts'ao Chih's third-cen-
tury "Prose-poem on the Goddess of Lo River." 1 1 The divine
qualities with which the two poets imbued their goddesses are
directly transposed to a more mundane woman, mostly a pal-
ace lady, in the Southern Dynasties. A typical example of this
conventionally idealized presentation of feminine beauty oc-
curs in a third-century ballad by Lu Chi, which, although
somewhat earlier than the Southern Dynasties, nevertheless
conveniently brings together the various elements that the later
poets used variously in their evocations of womankind. His
poem, which appears in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, is enti-
tled "Love Song." It describes a group of palace ladies leaving
their rooms to go on an excursion to Lo River:
The dawning sun rises from Fu-sang
To shine on this side of the high terrace.
On the high terrace are many enchanting beauties,
Their bright faces peeping from hidden rooms.
Lovely faces glisten in the white sun.
So tender of heart, so pure and modest.
Brilliant eyes suffused with lustrous jade,
Moth eyebrows like kingfisher wings,
Smooth skin with a bloom so fresh,
A complexion you could nibble.
Meek and mild in every way,
Flirting the charm of their laughing words. 1 2

This is not a precise portrayal; various conventional epithets,

such as "enchanting," "pure and modest," and "brilliant,"
suggest rather an idealized concept of the female. Moreover,
nearly every woman in the anthology has "moth eyebrows"
or brows like "kingfisher wings." The stereotype is reinforced
by the very fact that Lu Chi's passage describes not one per-
son but a group of women.
Apart from this image derived from earlier evoca-
THE DUSTY MIRROR 39

tions of goddesses, Southern Dynasties poets sought to con-

vey impressions of a woman's nobility and fragility. A wom-
an's skin has a pallor which suggests her pampered, high-born,
leisurely existence indoors. Her hands are slender and grace-
ful, indicating soft cultural activities rather than hard labor in
the fields or kitchen. Her body is light and slim, scarcely able
to bear the weight of her clothes, which connotes feminine
weakness and vulnerability. A couplet by the sixth-century poet
Ho Sun, illustrates this physical frailty:
A singer's kohl contracts as if in pain;
A dancer's waist threatens to snap.13

These lines express the extreme passion of two female per-

formers, as imagined by the male poet: the power of their
emotions overwhelms their weak, feminine bodies and seems
almost to destroy them. The destructive force of love's passion
is a recurring theme, usually elaborated in the context of a
woman's physical delicacy.
Again at the idealized and generalized level,
Southern Dynasties poets tend to include personality features
together with physical characteristics. Turning back to Lu Chi's
description, it is noticeable that the epithets he uses to denote
personality, such as "tender" or "modest," define femininity
in its submissive, subordinate aspect. These traditional epi-
thets recur in hundreds of love poems in the anthology. The
motive of the poets appears to be not so much a quest for psy-
chological veracity as a conscious conformity to established
standards for depicting the ideal.
Another important element is the ideal woman's
attractiveness as a creature of luxury. Adorned with jewels,
costly silks, and elaborate cosmetics, she reveals her beauty and
worth in a highly material way through the sheer opulence of
her personal decoration. So closely and persistently is a wom-
an's rich attire associated with her personal allure that it seems
that her desirability depends to a great extent on the financial
and social worth of her costume. What this amounts to is a
convention that woman is adored when adorned. This is nicely
illustrated in a poem by Shen Yiieh, entitled "Poem for a Young
Anne M. Birrell 40

Man Newly Wed," in which the images progress from a wom-

an's physical charms to the details of her rich clothing and
brilliant cosmetics. Note the close similarity between the epi-
thets Shen Yiieh uses and those used by Lu Chi in the pas-
sage cited earlier:
The daughter of the Shan-yin Liu family—
Don't say she's from the country!
Lovely and pretty her face and figure,
Courteous and clever is the way she talks.
Her waist and limbs are graceful,
Her clothes so sweet and fresh.
Her round red cape reflects the early dawn chill;
Her painted fan welcomes the first spell of heat.
On brocaded slippers is a pattern of identical flowers,
On embroidered sash a design of twin lettuce hearts.
Large gold leaf brooches fasten her bodice edge;
Decorative flower pins hold up her cloudy hair.
My feelings now sadly tangled,
How will I express my confusion?
I offer my love to kohl on her eyebrows,
Whisper my passion to lipstick on her mouth. 1 4

Of the 16 lines quoted here from the total of 34 in Shen Yiieh's

poem, only one line refers to the bride's behavior and two lines
to her physique, while 9 lines are devoted to her dress and
cosmetics. Of the remaining 18 lines which I have not quoted
here, 6 more refer conventionally to the young girl's physical
attractiveness. No further mention is made of her as an indi-
vidual person. The disproportionate amount of space given to
material rather than personal qualities is typical. The effect of
such an emphasis is that human values are less important than
material values. Woman is featured as deluxe object. The fe-
male figure is redolent with sensuous luxury and with an erotic
but impersonal ornamentation. This tendency on the part of
the poets toward depersonalization of the female in the con-
text of the love poem is a crucial factor in understanding some
of the ramifications of the female type, expecially when woman
is presented in situations of romantic conflict.
THE DUSTY MIRROR 41

SOCIAL GROUPING
Another means of defining the image of woman in
these love poems is by social grouping. It is difficult to deter-
mine from the poems themselves any information about a
woman's actual position in the household, her family ties, her
kinship roles, her religion, her political persuasion, or any de-
tails of her daily life beyond the sphere of love and romance.
This limited poetic perspective is due in part to a woman's
historical exclusion from the public realm of life in traditional
China, and in part to poetic convention. The poems do tell us
a good deal, however, about a woman's social status from her
clothes, her milieu, and her level of culture. Although the
poems describe either a historical or a fictional figure, they do
in fact portray a fairly recognizable social stereotype. On the
surface, a survey of women's social status in Southern Dynas-
ties love poems would seem to indicate a wide variation in
background: there are palace ladies, royal consorts, enter-
tainers, divorced or deserted women, wives of circuit officials,
country girls, and the wives of soldiers. Yet, despite this ap-
parent variation, the poets' presentation of women is stylized
in this respect. For example, the palace ladies described in the
next poem, by Hsiao Yen, Hsiao Kang's father (known to his-
tory as Emperor Wu of the Liang), are lavishly dressed in the
clothes of the well-born, despite the fact that they are per-
forming the manual task of fulling cloth. This type of ward-
robe is repeated throughout Southern Dynasties portraits of
women:

Night pounder blows sound uneven,

Autumn fulling-block thuds ring forlorn.
Light silk billows round jade arms,
Wispy hair-plumes curve across rosy cheeks.
A scarlet flush rises to pink faces,
Sidelong glances sparkle even brighter,
As we pound the cloth with all our "not a stone,"
Its pattern of two lovebirds. 15

Regardless of their actual social status, the women described

in Southern Dynasties love poetry belong, at least in terms of
Anne M. Birrell 42

appearance, to the socioeconomic class of the wealthy and the

noble. The interest of the poet is always to make woman de-
sirable by investing her with appurtenances of wealth, even at
the risk of a certain lack of verisimilitude.
It is also clear from these court poems that the con-
cept of the ideal woman includes talent in the performing arts.
Nearly every poem from this era contains some reference to a
woman either playing a musical instrument or dancing, or doing
both. 16 She does not merely interpret the classical and popular
repertoire; she also composes her own music and creates her
own choreography as the mood inspires her. Her high level of
culture, linked to the leisure she enjoys, reflects the opulent
ambience and the courtly background of Hsiao Kang's salon.
The following poem by Hsiao Kang himself, entitled "Playing
My Zither," describes a woman in love playing her instru-
ment to express her passion. As she plays, she breaks a string,
symbolic of her broken heart:

I play my zither by the north window,

Echoes of night charged with clear, sad tones.
I raise the key, a string soon snaps,
My heart mourns the melody lost.17

Another social grouping by which a woman may be

defined in these poems is her age group. The Southern Dy-
nasties poets prefer to portray girls in love who are either very
young (between 10 and 16 years old), or reaching that indefin-
able age of fading physical charms (perhaps as early as 25 or
30 years old). In other words, the women are of an age to ex-
perience love and marriage, with all their accompanying joys
and sorrows. Indeed, love, beauty, and aging interact with one
another in a perpetual pattern of the poetic themes of change
and decay.

ENVIRONMENT
In order to approach the feminine environment, it
will be useful at the outset to examine briefly what Hsu Ling
has to say about the context of his anthology in his own pref-
T H E DUSTY M I R R O R 43

ace. There he clearly establishes a woman's boudoir in a pal-

ace harem as the typical setting of the contemporary love poem.
His preface opens with a fanciful list of women in history who
have graced the palace seraglio, and later these historical fig-
ures are linked with contemporary palace ladies:

On King Mu of Chou's jade-disc terrace,

In Emperor Wu of Han's golden house,
Are jade trees with coral boughs,
Pearl blinds on tortoise-shell frames,
Where beautiful women live.
These beauties
Are aristocrats of Wu-ling,
Chosen for the imperial harem
From the best families of the Four Clans—
Celebrities of the seraglio.18

As an environment the harem boudoir is a closed erotic world.

The women Southern Dynasties poets depict are hardly ever
placed in other settings, such as a kitchen, a lounge, a library,
or an office, though they do move into a garden which is di-
rectly attached to their boudoir. No differentiation of a wom-
an's role is possible in such a narrow setting.
The focus on the boudoir as a court lady's typical
domain in these love poems has important implications. For
in composing a love poem, the Southern Dynasties poet con-
centrated his attention on the private world of a woman's feel-
ings for her lover, while pruning away such normal elements
of her daily life as her servants, children, friends, family, and,
most important, her husband or lover. Indeed, a primary con-
vention of the Southern Dynasties love poem is that the hus-
band or lover must be absent. A woman's longing and frustra-
tion in palatial solitude function as the emotional underpinning
of the love poem qua love poem. In the full flower of love po-
etry in this era woman becomes confined to symbolic isolation
in her boudoir. This desolate, claustrophobic environment is
an essential aspect of the courtly concept of a woman in love.
The lover's absence and the lady's vigil are ex-
pressed poetically in two standard metaphors: he is traveling
Anne M. Birrell 44

along a road into the distance; she is pining in her secluded

boudoir. This pair of metaphors crystalizes their mutually an-
tagonistic, yet complementary, sex roles in traditional society,
of which Southern Dynasties love poetry is to some degree a
literary reflection. The following poem by Wang Yiin illus-
trates the disparate roles of a man and a woman in the love
relationship. Its title is "Autumn Night."

Florets of dew get thicker, thicker,

Cassia boughs go rustling, rustling.
The spirit of death falls from serried eaves,
Pale shadows flood my room's four sides.
Estranged favor makes long nights longer,
Distant campaigns sadden my solitary sleep.
Despair wreathes my kingfisher-plume eyebrows,
Tears flood my slanting-wave eyes.
At Ch'ang-men Palace an end to visits.
Burning desire. Shuttle and spindle lie useless.19

The setting here is a boudoir in which a woman idles away

the time in the absence of her lover (or husband) who is on
campaign. The season is autumn, when in nature life visibly
ebbs. The reference to Ch'ang-men Palace toward the end of
the poem is pointed: it was here that Empress Ch'en lived in
retirement when she lost favor with Emperor Wu of the Han
(r. 141-87 B . C . ) . The inference the reader is left to draw is that
the woman in this poem is not likely to see her man again.
Thus the environment in which women usually find
themselves, namely, the boudoir, and the area where their men
are vaguely said to be, namely, the road or the battlefield, have
symbolic meaning in these poems. For the male lover is seen
to be free to follow his own destiny, floating down the high-
ways and byways of life, while a woman, in diametrical op-
position, remains confined and unfree in her home. Poets use
this symbiotic imagery of the road (or campaign) and the bou-
doir as a metonymy for the discordant relationship between a
man and a woman as they perceive it.
Thus, by convention a woman's boudoir is the cen-
ter of her existence. This interior setting is full of the intimate
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 45

objects with which a woman of the noble class would sur-

round herself: her ivory bed, her silken curtains, her bronze
lamps, her jade mirror stand and bronze mirror, and her ex-
otic cosmetics and perfumes. The poets invest their boudoir
images, such as the bed, with agreeable pictorial detail which
affects the senses and gives aesthetic in addition to erotic plea-
sure. Yet the artifacts they describe are rarely purely func-
tional, in the sense of useful objects which also happen to give
aesthetic pleasure. A particular object in the boudoir is se-
lected to make it convey in metaphorical terms some aspect of
love. Thus a finely carved ivory bed is pleasing to the eye of
the reader; but at the same time, when it is shown lying empty
and covered with dust under rays of moonlight, it also serves
to denote the idea of frustrated love. Also, it suggests sen-
suality—were it to be occupied. It is an emotive image charged
with aesthetic nuance. Similarly, an elaborately decorated cen-
ser is attractive to look at with its glowing ash, coiling smoke,
and metallic sheen; but it is also made to serve as an analogy
for the wanton destructiveness of passion's consuming fire and
for the volatile nature of love. In other words, the poets fur-
nish the boudoir of a woman in love with concrete particulars
which create in pictorial and sensuous terms the emotional
impressions of the state of love.
Immured as she is in this sensuous environment,
the typical woman in this love poetry responds to the stimuli
of the luxurious objects and erotic emblems surrounding her
with amorous yearnings for her departed lover. The following
poem by Hsiao Kang, entitled "A Singer's Frustrated Pas-
sion," shows the extent to which the boudoir as an erotic en-
vironment serves to reinforce a woman's role in emotional re-
lationships. That is, she is seen to respond to her absent lover
with touching displays of fidelity and devotion, reenacting the
ritual of past love:
She slips on her softly rustling red shawl,
Dabs fresh, chic yellow on her brow.
Shading the lamp, she enters brocade curtains;
Faint smoke comes from the jade bed.
The six corners of their twin tortoise-shell pillows,
Anne M. Birrell 46

Their wide quilt adorned with two lovebirds—

These things still since they parted
Comfort love's grief, mementoes of him.
In tears she passes tedious days
So soon transformed from hot to cold.20

The persona here is a singer whose lover is away on military

duty. In her frustrated longing for him she looks around at the
erotic objects in her boudoir and weeps for his return. Her
boudoir and its objects, being of an erotic nature, restrict her
to the role of a lonely, forsaken mistress, from which she can-
not escape. This sense of being caged in, of being imprisoned
within brocade curtains, is characteristic of the way Southern
Dynasties poets present a woman in love.
The reinforcement of a woman's amorous role by
her boudoir environment is also apparent in the activities with
which she occupies herself there. What she does is specifically
related to her lover—singing love songs, playing romantic tunes,
writing love letters, or applying cosmetics to make herself
beautiful for him. Indeed, when performing more routine tasks,
such as lighting a candle, drawing curtains, or having some
wine, the woman typically is stimulated to thoughts of love.
The most typical boudoir activity is the personal one
of dressing and putting on cosmetics. Most of the love poems
of this era contain portraits of women seated before their pol-
ished bronze mirrors, applying makeup and appraising their
beauty. Confined as they are for long periods waiting for a lover
who is far away, yet might return in the night, the women di-
vide their time between such matters as personal adornment
and vain musings, both occupations oriented toward their male
lover. This poem by Fei Ch'ang, for example, entirely devoted
to a woman's self-appraisal, is entitled " O n Her Reflection in
a Mirror."

The dawn sun shines on apricot rafters,

A Chao Fei-yen beauty rises to put on morning makeup.
Carefully she spreads a wide line of kohl,
Deft fingers dot her brow with a yellow bud.
She fixes her hairpin, studies her reflection,
T H E DUSTY M I R R O R 47

Pats her face with powder, admires its scent.

Then she takes a dislike to her worn kingfisher plume,
Starts grumbling at her lackluster jewels.
In the city they all wear half-forehead eyebrows,
Not like mine, which just aren't long enough! 2 1

In this portrait, as in many other Southern Dynasties love

poems, there is more than a hint of vanity. The woman's
preoccupation with such trivia as the length of her eyebrows
and the state of her jewelry reveals the extent of her superfi-
ciality. But the portrait is not simply an exercise in self-grati-
fication and self-pity on the part of the female persona. It serves
to highlight that essential feminine weakness—vanity, empti-
ness—which manifests itself in recurring images in Southern
Dynasties love poetry.
A natural consequence of a woman's seclusion in
her boudoir for long periods is that the boudoir generates an
atmosphere of silence, desolation, and boredom. In his pref-
ace Hsu Ling anticipates these preoccupations. He writes of
sequestered palace ladies in this vein:

And so,
Through labyrinthine spirals of pepper palaces,
Up mysterious elevations of mulberry tree halls,
Scarlet Crane keys impose privacy at dawn,
Bronze Clam knockers fall silent at noon.
Before the Three Stars' twilight hour
The ladies are not summoned to bring their quilt.
Even five days seem too long.
For whom will they comb their untidy hair?
Languidly idle, with few distractions,
In quiet tranquillity, with hours of leisure,
They loathe Ch'ang-lo Palace's delayed bell,
Are weary of Central Hall's slow arrow of time. 22

Hsu Ling's lines emphasize the ennui of a leisured class of

women whose sole, undifferentiated role is to provide sexual
pleasure for a man at his whim: man proposes, man disposes.
This tedium is a key convention. It is given its fullest expres-
sion in poems featuring the water-clock in a boudoir as a sym-
Anne M. Birrell 48

bol of time passing. The following poem by Hsiao Kang, en-

titled "The Sighs of the Lady of Ch'u," provides a fine example:

In her still room the water-clock endlessly drips,

Time's infinity, silence of night.
Grass insects flit through the door of night.
Spinning spiders entwine autumn walls.
She faintly smiles, but not a happy smile.
She softly sighs, a sigh that turns to sorrow.
Her golden hairpins droop in her hair.
Jade chopsticks trickle onto her dress. 23

Nothing interrupts this world of watching, waiting, pining for

a lover. The boudoir depicted here is an environment which
should function as an enchanted amorous locale, but becomes
a scene of romantic disenchantment.
In most of Southern Dynasties' love poetry the at-
mosphere in the boudoir is claustrophobic. The woman im-
mured inside is not permitted to break out of this setting, to
interrupt the mood of inevitable despair. The poets only allow
their female personas to act out a subordinate, submissive role
which is entirely oriented toward the male lover. Isolated from
all other human contact, the typical woman described in the
poems is stimulated only by sensory perception of the erotic
objects furnishing her boudoir, which in turn stir up fancies
and memories of a past love there. Her recurring experience
is one of being the center of an enclosed world, her world, one
which is designed for love's fulfillment, but one which is iron-
ically shown to be a travesty of amorous happiness.

ATTITUDE TOWARD THE MALE LOVER

Now I would like to turn to the presentation of a
typical woman in love in relation to her male lover. One of the
basic tenets is that she must play a subordinate role. The lit-
erary concept of woman's inferior role derives from a tradi-
tional attitude toward the sexual relationship which finds its
socioethical expression in such early Confucian texts as the Li
chi (Record of Ritual), and Pan Chao's Nil chieh (Precepts for
Women) of the Later Han era (A.D. 25-220). 2 4
THE DUSTY MIRROR 49

This social and sexual inferiority embedded in the

traditional mores of ancient Chinese society is given a new di-
mension in Southern Dynasties love poetry. In its application
to love relationships, the attitude is interpreted to mean that
man is elevated in a woman's eyes: she perceives that he con-
fers the gift of love upon her, or withholds it, according to his
opinion of her worth. Since her own self-esteem stems in large
part from her lover's opinion of her, his conferral or with-
drawal of favors has a profound effect on her. This is an as-
pect to be examined later.
Court love poetry in this period is replete with im-
agery which reinforces the relationship of the inferior female
to the superior male. Woman is likened to duckweed clinging
to water; the latter is an image for the male. Or she is com-
pared to shadow following form; again the latter is a mascu-
line image. She may also be likened to a plant leaning toward
the (male) sunlight. The following poem by Wen-jen Ch'ien,
entitled "Spring Sun," uses various images drawn from na-
ture to suggest the elemental energy of sunny spring. In par-
ticular, the image of "green mallows," which "twist toward the
sun," anticipates the longing of the woman in the poem for
her husband from whom she is separated:

Spring colors stir on the high terrace,

Clear pools reflect sunlit splendor.
Green mallows twist toward the sun,
Kingfisher willows sway in the wind.
In the woods a bird excites my heart,
In the garden massed flowers captivate my eye.
Like me, all nature knows the season,
Sighs that you alone are away from home.
Wanderer, you will not return today—
Why do I trouble to pick vain love-flax? 25

Wen-jen Ch'ien's imagery, drawn as it is from nature, implies

that a woman's emotional dependence on a man is biological,
as well as psychological: she is seen to crave the warmth of a
man's love as if her very life depended upon it, in the same
way as a plant reaches out for the sun.
Again, a woman in love is compared to an insect
Anne M. Birreil 50

smitten by autumnal frost, trying to move indoors to the

warmth. This image appears in a poem by Hsiao Kang, enti-
tled "Night Longings in an Autumn Bedroom":
The distant moon peeps through my window,
Humming insects pine around the steps.
Early frosts dislodge frail leaves,
Autumn winds drive confused fireflies.
Stale makeup stays on for several days,
A new dress, unpleated, is still to be finished.
Do you know why I don't sleep well?
It's the sound of fulling beyond the city wall.26

Or, as in Chi Shao-yii's poem also entitled "Spring Sun," a

woman is compared to spring blossoms torn from a tree by
the wind:
A sad woman timidly leans from her window,
Spring beauty still for eternity.
Fitful, the sun draws near the netting,
Trembling, the wind creeps under the blind.
Fallen blossoms whirl back to their trees,
Gently flutter away to vanish in the skies,
Making a vain trace of chopstick tears
Hang double in her bright mirror.27

Such images convey the idea of a weak, dependent, pathetic,

and lovely woman hurt or even destroyed by the power of the
love she feels for her absent man. What emerges from these
poems is the notion that a man's love is a life-giving force, and
that if a woman is denied this love, her will to live weakens.
This morbid strain recurs throughout Southern Dynasties love
poetry.
Linked to a woman's emotional dependency is the
obsessiveness of her attachment to her lover. This aspect of
love is particularly underscored by her immobility. In her bou-
doir, ironic memories of past love reign supreme. Love's de-
mands are absolute. Woman is consumed with passion, dec-
orous though its poetic expression may be. This obsession is
expressed through a variety of metaphors, the most successful
of which are those having to do with burning. The following
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 51

poem by Wang Yung, entitled "Imitation of Hsu Kan's Poem,"

illustrates the force of obsessive desire with the metaphors of
a censer and a candle:
Ever since you went away,
My gold censer has not burned with perfume.
I love you like the candle bright
Consumed in idle flames by midnight. 28

Two combustible items are contrasted here. First, the incense

is not burned, the implication being that the woman sees no
reason to perfume herself in her lover's absence. Second, the
candle burns while the woman in the poem waits up for the
man who will not be coming to visit her. Both metaphors rein-
force the negative tone of the poem, and, interacting, empha-
size the destructiveness and futility of love.
Psychologically akin to this idea of the power of
desire is the concept expressed in these love poems that lovers
should become identified with each other, one and the same
person, twins in a love relationship. This attitude toward love
is expressed through the female persona, and through numer-
ous images. Lovers are likened to twin flower-hearts, to two
mandarin ducks, or to boughs intertwined to become one. A
clear example is the following poem by Hsiao Yen entitled "You
Must Believe unto Death My Promise":

You must believe unto death my promise at the bridge.

Don't listen to whirlwind rumor!
Look in the mirror—two heads of hair.
Clearly I am not of two hearts! 29

The first line refers to the romantic legend of Wei Sheng, who
waited in vain by a bridge for his mistress to keep her tryst.
Though the river's tide rose higher, he refused to desert their
trysting-place, and was eventually drowned. The wit of this
small poem lies in the repetition of the word "two" in the last
couplet: "two heads of hair" is an affirmative image—her lover
is with her, so that the boudoir mirror does reflect two lovers'
heads; "not of two hearts" is an ironically negative image—
the lover insists that he is single-hearted, his love for his mis-
Anne M. Birrell 52

tress is undivided; at the same time, he does literally have only

one heart!
Another aspect of a woman's attitude to her lover
is that she expects absolute standards of constancy, affection,
and attentiveness from him. Her own account of herself as it
is typically expressed in Southern Dynasties love poetry is
idealistic: she imposes upon herself a rigid code of sexual mo-
rality. Her ideal of chastity is conveyed in many poems through
the metaphor of severe frost, and her ideal of fidelity through
conventional metaphors like the fixed pole star, the evergreen
pine, or the unchangingly green cypress. A poem by Ho Sun
entitled "Boudoir Regrets" exemplifies this idealism through a
woman's protestation of unswerving love during her lover's
absence:
At dawn the River of Heaven fades on tall roofbeams,
A slanting moon half lights the deserted garden.
Fallen leaves cross the windowsill,
Beyond the blind fireflies are shut out.
Full of longing, I let down kingfisher curtains,
Hide my tears behind a gilt screen.
My former love today has not returned.
Spring grass, though chill, is green again.
In my love for you I cannot change—
Am I different from the pole star? 3 0

The setting is a boudoir at daybreak where a woman has waited

in vain for her lover to return one spring night. The move-
ment of the poem proceeds from outdoor images of night which
"fades" on the roof, to her "deserted garden"; then it shifts to
a closeup of "fallen leaves" by her window, and finally moves
to indoor images of her boudoir's elegant furnishings to the
desolate woman herself. The cumulative impact of this series
of melancholy images drawn from nature and from the hu-
man world, charged as they are with loss and decay, antici-
pates the woman's despair and colors the next series of more
intimate boudoir images expressing emotional withdrawal: the
woman conceals herself behind her blind, her curtains, and her
screen. Only in the last quatrain does the lady reveal why she
is so sad. In her explanation that her husband has failed to
THE DUSTY MIRROR 53

return in spring, the conventional season of love, she also re-

veals the wistfulness of her patient longing. With nature's re-
turn to color and renewed growth come the rekindled stir-
rings of the lady's passion. Thus "green again" denotes the
season of spring, the time of nature's renewal, and the rebirth
of human hopes. The lady's undying hope and love are rein-
forced by the poem's last image: the immovable, changeless
pole star, with which the lady so proudly and idealistically
identifies. Yet the seeming finality of this last image is called
into question by the ambiguous expression of faint hope in the
phrase, "green again." For the more forceful images of death
and decay in the first quatrain impose themselves and ironi-
cally negate the lady's small, weak response to life beyond the
boudoir. She insists on her constancy in an atmosphere heavy
with pessimism. Given the conventions of the Southern Dy-
nasties love poem, a woman so portrayed is not free to seek
any emotional alternative.
By the same set of conventions a man is free to
choose an alternative to absolute fidelity. Indeed, to judge from
the torrent of female accusations in these love poems, he ac-
tually does exploit his greater sexual freedom. And in this
connection the image of lovers as identical twins becomes an
impossible female ideal held in the face of a more plural male
reality. Two recurring themes appear: first, a woman views her
lover as a philanderer who has broken his sacred vow of con-
stant love; second, she views herself as an "old" love when
she is deserted, compared with her lover's " n e w " sweetheart.
A fine example of the way in which a woman takes on a cen-
sorious moral attitude toward a wayward husband occurs in a
poem by Wang Yung. Here the woman typifies the tendency
to go to extremes in romantic expectation of a man's perpet-
ual, unflagging attention:

Birds of the air know dusk is the hour of return.

Only the wanderer fails to come home.
In my loneliness I waste flowers' fragrant breath,
Futilely pass time gazing at the moon's splendor.
A frowning face appears in my morning mirror,
Lovesick tears stain my spring dress.
Anne M. Birrell 54

On Mount W u sunrise mists are fading,

Along River Ch'i green boughs grow bare.
I waited for you. You didn't come.
A u t u m n geese fly double, double. 3 1

Creatures of nature, "birds of the air" and "autumn geese,"

establish the pattern of normal behavior, which, it is implied,
humans should also follow. When the lover, referred to as "the
wanderer," fails to return to his lonely wife, he is, the poem
suggests, offending against some unwritten code of morality.
In many poems of the period this sort of moral wrong is ex-
plicitly expressed through the word meaning "to violate," or
"to wrong" (wei). The crucial factor in the depiction of wom-
en's attitude toward love is that they refuse to evaluate reality
objectively, preferring to conclude subjectively that they suffer
some cruel moral injustice when their lover deserts them. This
sense of injustice stems in most cases directly from their atti-
tude toward their own virtue and correct moral behavior, con-
trasting with their attitude toward their lover's wrong behav-
ior. It is not so much their view of themselves or their lover
that is so important here, as the very intensity of the rigid at-
titude they hold toward the love relationship.
In the second case, " n e w " love versus " o l d " love,
there occurs in these poems the repeated refrain that once a
man has enjoyed a woman, he loses interest in her and seeks
a new love. By itself, this is not an entirely novel concept of
sexual relationships at any time or place. What makes it sig-
nificant in the Southern Dynasties projection of a woman in
love is that the man's behavior in rejecting an old love and
taking on a new woman is promulgated as a natural law of
human relationships, an inexorable fact of life. Nowhere is this
refrain more forcefully stated in these poems than in the fol-
lowing poem by Hsiao Kang:

Spiders spin silk full within the curtains.

Spring grass forms blades choking the path.
Pink cheeks, flushed, flushed, weep her life away.
Orioles now and then flutter, flutter by in flight.
Old love, though old, once was new.
New love, though new, must grow old too. 3 2
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 55

The last couplet is a witty paradox: the wronged woman turns

the tables on her rival by anticipating her inevitable downfall.
What Hsiao Kang suggests here is that the male lover goes
through a cyclical enactment of courting, loving, and rejecting
women throughout his life, and nothing the women can do
will be able to halt this predetermined pattern. Hsiao Kang
perceives the injustice of this feminine dilemma.
All these attitudes of a woman toward the man are
stated from the detached, male observer-poet's point of view.
What they reveal is that in terms of roles, values, interests, be-
havior patterns, and so forth, female perceptions of the world,
as stated in the poems, are basically incompatible with male
perceptions of it. Women's assumptions about life and the part
they play in it are radically different from men's. There is no
common ground between the two. In some respects, such as
chastity and intensity of passion, the women tend to express
a moral superiority over the concupiscent male. In other re-
spects, such as a man's freedom, the women tend to express
the idea that feminine vitality is diminished and jeopardized
because the male fails to respond to women's romantic needs.
It is this type of basic conflict in the romantic expectations of
the female that I will now summarize.

Sources of Conflict

There are five main sources of conflict in the way

Southern Dynasties poets typically present a woman in love.
First, there is a dissonance between what a woman ideally ex-
pects from love and what she in fact experiences. Usually, the
happiness she seeks is a renewal of a past love. Her love,
however, is only fulfilled briefly, before the time of the poem.
Happy love is referred to as a past experience that can never
be recaptured. This generates a tone of nostalgia throughout
these poems. By the same token, love that is hoped for in the
future is tinged with a sense of inevitable failure. Thus the
Anne M. Birrell 56

sexual aspirations of the women portrayed here are expressed

in terms of despair.
Arising from this kind of doomed romantic aspira-
tion is the women's predilection for voicing moral complaints
about their lover's conduct. When a woman's lover does not
conform to her ideal concept of behavior, she feels that he has
wronged her, that her situation is unjust, and that she is the
victim of inequity. She does not ask herself if her ideals are
too absolute, or if her romantic attitudes are too extreme. She
demands, on the contrary, that reality dovetail with her ide-
alism. The typical woman presented in these poems is ill-pre-
pared to accept real experience. She prefers to modify reality
to meet some abstract code.
A third source of conflict in this portrayal of woman
is the obsessiveness of her love. Her physical appearance, her
environment, her activities are all romantically directed to-
ward her lover. Hers is a one-dimensional world, symbolized
by her boudoir, from which she has no escape.
Another source of tension lies in woman's depen-
dence on man for emotional reassurance. Her sense of her own
worth stems from his good or bad opinion of her. If he confers
his love on her, she thrives. If he withholds it, she declines
both physically and psychologically.
Linked to this sense of emotional dependency is the
theme of the aging process. The women in the poems are pro-
foundly disturbed by thoughts of losing their beauty. Their
troubled state of mind ensues from a logical train of ideas: since
a woman conceives of herself as someone whose role is to
please a man, if physical allure is her chief means of doing so,
it follows that once her beauty fades, she will no longer be able
to please her lover. She changes from an object of desire to an
object of rejection.
These five areas of conflict spring directly from the
conventions of Southern Dynasties love poetry. The manda-
tory absence of the male, the obligatory mood of pessimism,
and the stereotyped image of woman as a decoratively vulner-
able love object all contribute to the major conflicts as I have
summarized them. I will now turn to these questions: how do
THE DUSTY MIRROR 57

the women portrayed in these poems respond to such con-

flicts? Are they capable of resolving them?

Response to Conflict

The discussion thus far suggests that women do not

manage to rise above their problems in life. Rather they suc-
cumb, either willing or reluctant victims to life's vicissitudes.
In fact, of the 500 or so Southern Dynasties poems in New Songs
from a jade Terrace scarcely 1 percent expresses a constructive
response to difficulties. Many early poems do manifest a greater
resilience to stress and crisis than is evident in the love poetry
of the Southern Dynasties. For example, in the first poem of
the "Nineteen Old Poems" cycle, dating from the Later Han,
there is a readiness to resume life's daily round with dignified
resignation, despite the sorrow occasioned by a long separa-
tion of two friends or lovers ("On, On, Ever Journeying On"):
Longing for you makes one grow older.
Years and months suddenly slip by.
I'm cast off—but no more talk of that!
Just try to eat and stay alive. 33

The persona in this earlier poem implicitly senses that inces-

sant wailing at the loss of a dearly beloved companion is
counterproductive to the business of living, nor does it solve
any problems. There is a sturdy stoicism here which fails to
find an echo in the Southern Dynasties love poem.
One or two poems of the Southern Dynasties era
do, however, voice a woman's defiance in the face of romantic
misfortune. The following poem by Wang Seng-ju is a good
example. It is entitled "For a Singer Who Feels Hurt."
I know deep in my heart I hate you,
Yet I'm ashamed to look in my mirror.
I used to feel sad when our love went wrong,
But now I've changed, feel nothing for you.
Anne M. Birrell 58

Take back the earrings you gave me!

Give back the fox-fur I sent you!
A lute-string snaps—it can be mended.
Once love departs, it will not be detained. 34

This female persona does not prevaricate. She knows her love
affair is over, and implies it was not her fault. She accepts reality
with self-confidence, and responds with spirit, even if some-
what sulkily.
Another small group of poems from this era indi-
cates a degree of self-awareness on the part of the female per-
sona. Some of the most interesting among them use the image
of a mirror to contrast with a woman's reflection and her own
sense of self. This surface comparison between reality and ap-
pearance is further developed by certain poets into what we
would term psychological investigation of the nature of cog-
nitive and perceived truth. In the following poem Hsiao Kang
explores the relation between a woman's awareness of what
has happened to her and other people's mistaken appraisal of
her state of mind. Its title is "In Her Sad Boudoir She Looks
in Her Mirror":
Long since you left I've looked haggard.
Other people are amazed at my appearance.
Except there's my mirror in its case—
I pick it up, recognize myself there. 35

The female persona has so changed in appearance because of

her lover's absence that she seems unreal to those who know
her. In fact, as she admits, she recognizes in her ravaged face
the true mark of her wounded psyche. When this woman says
"recognize myself" in the last line (tzu hsiang shih), she means
her inner self, not simply her outer appearance. She knows
how her romantic experience has affected her, and she achieves
some measure of self-understanding.
These instances of a positive response to an emo-
tional crisis are, however, the exceptions in Southern Dynas-
ties love poetry; the rule is that women fall victim to their ro-
mantic upsets. It is generally true that the poets of this era
depict women as weak, restricted beings: weak because they
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 59

have no self-mastery, restricted because they tend to relate to

life through a man, and because they perceive the boudoir as
the focus of the larger world. Condemned to living in the closed
world of their boudoir, where milieu and imagination rein-
force their view of themselves and of reality, they are con-
stantly shown to be indulging in memories which confirm the
happy emotions of the past. The following poem by Hsieh T'iao
illustrates this tendency toward self-gratification through ro-
mantic nostalgia. Its title is " A Former Palace Lady Singer of
Han-tan Marries a Supplies Sergeant."

Long had this lady lived in galleried halls,

Constantly attending at cinnabar court.
In opened wardrobes her sheer dresses outshone all;
Her face in the mirror rivaled all moth eyebrows.
When first she went away, her feelings lay suppressed.
Years later her sorrow deepened with each day.
Unrecognizably gaunt and pale,
Still a trace of flirting beauty remained.
Faint images of the past flickered in her dreams
Murmuring yet, At royal feasts I won high favor!36

This poem tells of a palace entertainer, a high-born lady, who

suffers the ignominy of a déclassé marriage. In her shame she
prefers to reject the present, clinging to visions of her glorious
days in the palace. Her withdrawal from present reality is re-
flected in the fact that her life is slowly ebbing away. Such re-
membrance gives the dreamer biased views of reality, obscur-
ing the path to emotional awareness.
This withdrawal of the female into a world of
memories, into a passive, interior emotional life, is a major
theme in Southern Dynasties love poetry. Unable to move be-
yond the mental concept of the boudoir and their role within
it, women are shown trying to alleviate their anxieties by re-
pressing them. The characteristics of activity, independence,
self-confidence, and so forth, cannot but surface in the crisis
of conflict, only to be interiorized and suppressed. The poetic
expression of this may be termed "the neglect syndrome."
When a woman's lover neglects her, she invariably reacts by
Anne M. Birrell 60

neglecting her own environment and person in turn. Her bou-

doir, garden, material possessions, and appearance are de-
scribed through images redolent with sensuous dereliction: dust
palls her bed, weeds tangle her garden, grime and verdigris
tarnish her precious objects, and stale makeup mixed with tears
ruins her beautiful face. Similar elements of this "neglect" im-
agery are used to such an extent that it develops into a styl-
ized presentation of frustrated love by the Southern Dynasties
poets.

SECLUSION
The first instinct of a woman featured in a love poem
of this era is to withdraw deep into seclusion inside her bou-
doir when confronted with a crisis in love. Many poems ac-
centuate the voluntary nature of this seclusion—bearing in mind
that boudoir life is restricted anyway—by fixing the time of
withdrawal at noon, usually the busiest social hour. The fol-
lowing poem by Wang Yun illustrates this emphasis on a
woman's negative response:
The cockleburr's heart has not yet opened,
Herbal leaves are ready to unfurl.
Spring silkworms start spinning threads,
First swallows carry mud in busy beaks.
Pheasants of the fields call softly to their hens,
Garden birds protect their nesting young.
After you left for Liang,
I shut myself in my spring boudoir at noon.
The road to you is blocked by hill and river,
Scented flowers bloom in idle luxury. 37

The theme of happy mating is reiterated from the third to the

sixth lines. From the female persona's point of view, it is as if
the busy signs of spring, when nature's creatures instinctively
court, mate, and breed, overwhelm her as she suffers in her
lover's absence. She seeks refuge in the total eclipse of life be-
hind the shut door of her boudoir, not wishing to confront the
painful contrast between nature's happy fulfillment and her
own loneliness.
T H E DUSTY M I R R O R 61

INACTIVITY
A second typical reaction to emotional conflict as it
is explored in these love poems is the woman's suspension of
all activity. Even communication ceases, as this poem by Liu
Hsiao-wei indicates. Its title is "Submitted to Hsiao I, Prince
of Hsiang-tung, Harmonizing with his 'Winter Dawn' Poem."

From my home near Loyang city

I can often hear bells toll at dawn.
Tolling bells had not ended
When a Chinese envoy announced your campaign.
The sky grew colder, water in my inkwell froze.
So sad was my heart, your letter lay unwritten. 38

The auditory image of the bells in the second and third lines
at once evokes court ceremony, civilian or religious authority,
perhaps even national crisis. It also conveys the idea of time.
These two themes of national crisis and the passage of time
foreshadow the news in line four that the lover or husband
has gone to war. Perhaps, it might be inferred, he may never
come back. It is also suggested that he was already absent, for
she was writing to him when the envoy came. The auditory
image of bells is augmented by the tactile image of coldness in
line five, which metaphorically conveys the sense of love's de-
mise. The action at the end of the poem freezes into an eternal
attitude of despair.

WEEPING
Another important aspect of woman's response to
crisis is her propensity for shedding tears. Of the 656 poems
in the anthology, 114 contain direct reference to frowns and
tears, while in many more poems they are implicitly present.
Tears are shed by all in Southern Dynasties love poems, by
humans and nonhumans alike. Smiles, when they do appear,
turn to frowns, frowns turn to tears. When tears are wiped
away, they fall again. In short, the love poems of this era are
awash with the fruits of sorrow. It is even suggested in some
poems that women in the Southern Dynasties applied cosmet-
Anne M. Birrell 62

ics to suggest a tear-stained look, to make themselves attrac-

tive to men. For example, a line by the sixth-century poet Wang
Shu describes a woman applying such a cosmetic: "Her 'Chao
Fei-yen in tears' makeup is finished."39 Tears were in vogue.
Lachrymose sentiment is clearly a convention. It is the stock
emotional response of women when struck by events beyond
their control. As the following poem indicates, the female per-
sona dons a dismal mask when she parts with her lover; she
will only remove it on his return. The poem is by Wang T'ai-
ch'ing. Its title is "Saying Goodbye to a Beauty on South Bank."
My frowning face says goodbye to you,
Once in frowns, it won't relax again.
All I can do is wait to see y o u —
And then will a smile melt my frowns away. 4 0

This poem reveals that obsessiveness of a woman's emotions

which I discussed earlier. Rarely is there any middle ground
between smiles and frowns, laughter and tears. Neither scorn,
nor humor, nor anger is allowed to obtrude as an alternative
feeling which might mitigate some of the lovers' conflict and
vary the emotional monotony. A woman fluctuates between
extremes of feeling under the pen of the Southern Dynasties
poet.
Many poets in this era even take a morbid interest
in developing tears imagery to denote the despair of the fe-
male. For example, the next poem by Wu Chun presents a
grotesque picture of feminine desolation with the visual image
of pearl tears turning to "drops of blood":
Spring grass gathered can be bound,
But my heart is utterly broken.
From grief my green-glinting hair turns white,
Pink cheeks from tears have paled.
My tears not only form beads of pearl,
But I watch pearls change to drops of blood. 41

The "blood" image is ambiguous. Either this really does mean

blood—tears have been exhausted, making the eyes drip blood;
or the tears may be colored red by the woman's rouge—a con-
ceit. The latter interpretation is supported by line four, which
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 63

suggests that rouged cheeks have been washed pale by con-

stant tears. As this elaborate example shows, tears are a major
image in these love poems.

FUTILITY
A further element in the "neglect syndrome" is the
notion of impossibility which reverberates throughout the
poems. Words such as "vain," "futile," "can't," "can't bear
to," and the like punctuate the poems with great frequency.
For the woman depicted in them life becomes meaningless once
her lover has departed: when love ends, with it fades the de-
sire to live. A poem by Liu Shuo entitled "Imitation of 'On,
On, Ever Journeying On,' " is a typical example of this styl-
ized way of depicting a woman suffering pangs of love amid
a scene of dereliction. Liu Shuo presents his poem from the
point of view of the woman's husband, who is fondly imag-
ining her sense of loss without him as he leaves her in the
capital city:
Far, far I struggle down the long road.
On, on, journeying further into the distance.
I turn my back on the capital city,
Wave my hand, say goodbye to all that.
In the hall drifting dust will spread.
In my garden green weeds will grow rank.
A cold bird flies up from the river bend,
Autumn hares hug the foothills.
Spring is a lovely season, and yet
My sweet lady knows not the hour of my return.
Toward evening, when cool winds stir,
She'll stare into her drink, lost in thought,
Sing songs of the south, give way to sorrow,
Chant "Your collar is blue," yield to despair.
Going up to bed she sees her bright lamp dimming.
Sitting up, she notices her sheer gown looks dingy.
Her tear-stained face will be without fresh makeup,
Her dull mirror she cannot bear to polish.
"Oh! may he cast pale twilight flickers
To brighten my 'Mulberry-Elm' hour!" 4 2
Anne M. Birrell 64

It is instructive to compare this poem with the original, the last

lines of which I discussed earlier. Whereas the Han poem voiced
stoicism in the face of adversity, this typical Southern Dynas-
ties poem gives in to deep pessimism and resolute melan-
choly. The woman's futility is seen as "Her dull mirror she
cannot bear to polish." This somber note is one of the most
mandatory conventions of Southern Dynasties love poetry.

PHYSICAL DETERIORATION
It is as inconceivable for the typical woman por-
trayed in Southern Dynasties love poetry to stop the cycle of
material neglect by constructive action, such as dusting or pol-
ishing, as it is for her to break the deadlock of her obsessive
despair. A poem by Liu Chun, known to history as Emperor
Hsiao-wu of the Liu-Sung Dynasty, illustrates the emotional
decline of the female through prolonged, monotonous pining.
It is entitled "Imitation of Hsu Kan's Poem."
Ever since you went away,
Gold tarnished, kingfisher faded, lost their sheen.
My thoughts of you, like sun and moon,
Go round and round, as day grows into night. 43

As the last couplet shows, obsession with loss of love in-

creases in proportion to the time the persona spends pining.
Some poets explore the changes in sensory percep-
tion arising from a woman's depressed state. One represen-
tative poem of this type expresses a woman's optical illusion.
It is by Wang Seng-ju, and is entitled "Despair in the Night."
Dew on the eaves hardens into pearls,
Ice on the pool freezes to smooth jade.
Dawn tears flow in ten thousand streams,
Grief at a thousand-league parting deepens by night.
Forsaken curtains hang drawn, never to open.
Cold perfumed tallow lamps gutter, flare once more.
How can I tell my heart and eyes are confused?
I see scarlet suddenly change to green! 4 4

Familiar features are present in Wang Seng-ju's poem: tactile

images (frozen dew and ice) denote absence of passion; a vi-
T H E DUSTY M I R R O R 65

sual image (curtains drawn closed) suggests withdrawal from

life; and an olfactory image (scented lamp gutters) conveys the
idea of love's waning ardor. The final image of one color blur-
ring with another acts as a metaphor for emotional confusion:
the boundary between reality and imagination is no longer clear.
The physical decline that ensues from psychologi-
cal malaise is described in a great number of the poems of this
period. Many portray the female elaborately beautifying her face
with cosmetics, only to depict her at the poem's end ruining
her mask of beauty with tears of frustration. The title of the
following poem (its first line) typifies the way a woman sur-
renders her will to romantic torpor. It is by Chiang Hung and
is the first of a set of two poems entitled "Green Water Mel-
ody."

My grimy face I cannot bear to beautify.

I lean over a pool, dream of my wanderer's return.
Who can take green water in her hand
To wash silk robes in a tedium of ennui? 4 5

Neglected by her lover, she in turn neglects her physical ap-

pearance. Stated more abstractly, when a woman experiences
neglect in love, she will direct her negative feelings of anxiety
and aggression inward, reverting to infantile levels of behav-
ior and becoming absorbed in masochistic actions. The next
poem shows how wraithlike a woman in Southern Dynasties
love poetry often becomes when she takes self-neglect to ex-
tremes. It is by Liu Huan, and is entitled "Cold Boudoir."

After we parted, the spring pool looked different:

Lotus died, ice seemed to form.
In my sewing-box the shears felt cold,
My face-cream froze on the mirror-stand.
Grown frail, my slender waist
Can hardly bear the coldness of my clothes. 46

There is an obsession with tactile images here (cold, congeal-

ing, freezing), all denoting change from love's warmth. Psy-
chological distress causes changes in sensory perception: for
the woman in this poem the world "looks different," and things
feel to her touch as chill as the coldness of her lover's heart.
Anne M. Birrell 66

Conclusion

To summarize then, this survey of a woman's re-

sponse to emotional conflict indicates that the female por-
trayed in Southern Dynasties love poetry fails to react posi-
tively and creatively to life's adversities. The women presented
here are usually unable to adapt to reality. In their subjective
view of life they tend to personalize experience, blurring the
boundary line between what they feel and what is actually
happening. Instead of trying to solve conflict arising from their
situation, they direct negative feelings inward against them-
selves. They regress into a state of infantilism and become
preoccupied with moribund phenomena. The different stages
of this mental and physical decline are voluntary seclusion,
suspension of activity, nostalgic pining, obsessive despair, ne-
glect of the boudoir, self-neglect and physical deterioration, and
morbidity of life-view. These stages are presented in the poems
by means of a common repertoire of neglect imagery, filtered
through poetic conventions of theme, subject, setting, and
mood. As such, a woman in love presented by the Southern
Dynasties poet is a symbol of disintegration caused by the in-
completeness of her relationship with her male lover. Love is
expressed through the female persona as a malaise, a disease.
Southern Dynasties poets are concerned to show in
their love lyrics the debilitating effects of love on a woman.
They present a gallery of pathetic portraits: hundreds of women
are described as lost, abandoned, neglected, suffering,
wounded, and so forth. To the predominantly male poets the
image of woman is one of weakness. She is ungoverned by
reason or discipline or moderation. She is subjugated by her
desire for her lover, lacking any destiny or purpose in life out-
side love. She is idle, vain, and self-absorbed. By contrast the
image of the male that emerges from these poems is positive
and successful in the sphere of love. Although literary atten-
tion in these love poems focuses on women, men are present,
even if as mere shadowy figures on the distant horizon. There
are very few concrete descriptions of men. They exist rather
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 67

as a potent figment of the female imagination in the poets'

portrayal of her. This projection of the male through the eyes
of the female is as follows: he is master of his own destiny; he
is the superior partner in love relations; he is free; he is a man
of the world; he is strong-willed, desirable, capricious, fickle;
he is the controller of a woman's life, the active force in love's
progress. He is, in other words, woman's reverse image: he is
what she is not; she is what he is not. He is a success. She is
a failure.
The reason why male poets chose the female per-
sona to explore the nature and meaning of love are many and
complex. The major reason may perhaps be discerned in the
clear dichotomy they projected between masculinity and fem-
ininity. While fascinated by the concept of vulnerability in hu-
man love with its attendant aspects of weakness and failure,
male poets avoided directly identifying themselves with fail-
ure. Instead, they preferred to project their own weakness in
the experience of love through a more distant feminine per-
sona, anticipating Shakespeare's, "Frailty, thy name is woman."
This conscious choice of a female persona thus allowed male
poets covertly to probe, under the guise of objectivity and dis-
tance, their own human foibles. It also permitted them overtly
to suggest the idea of male dominance and power in the sphere
of love, as in other spheres of human activity. Another reason
lies in the exoticism of the palace lady herself. By choosing such
a persona, male poets titillated themselves, their male readers,
and also, through the workings of vanity, their female read-
ers. In society, people enjoy seeing themselves mirrored,
however negative the portrait might prove to be, in fashiona-
ble literature, and especially enjoy savoring the thrill of rec-
ognition. A third reason is the erotic allure of the palace lady.
The Southern Dynasties poets' interest in her appearance often
borders on fetishism, risqué sexuality, and voyeurism. Male
poets provided a peephole into the closed world of the bou-
doir, especially when their setting was a palace harem.
The lyric is by definition expressive of strong emo-
tion. The love lyric is even more so. Southern Dynasties poets
equate love with suffering, destruction, and obsessive pas-
Anne M. Birrell 68

sion. They present love as a passion which claims woman as

its victim. Women as innocent victims of love's wound make
appealing poetic subjects. The poets of this period intend that
the reader will overlook or forgive these innocent female vic-
tims, condone their weakness and folly as they struggle un-
successfully against the problems of love. Women do not de-
serve the pain they endure in love's name, the poets seek to
persuade. They weep, and the reader is prompted to sympa-
thize. This is the poetry of sentiment, of inured emotion. The
reader is asked to wallow for a while in the misfortune pre-
sented to him in the persona of a woman, to endorse her self-
pity. There is nothing inherently wrong with such sentiment,
whether it is in literary vogue or not, except in the matter of
degree.
One cause of this cult of lachrymose sentiment is
the conventional nature of the Southern Dynasties love poem.
Woman suffering in solitude from her lover's neglect is a ste-
reotyped character in the poems. Despair in a deserted, ne-
glected boudoir is a stock situation. The subject of the love poem
responds with a single-minded passion to her absent lover,
another major poetic convention. The assumption the modern
reader has to make is that Southern Dynasties poets sympa-
thized with the concept of woman as a victim of circumstance
and her own nature. Self-indulgence in an excess of sentiment
appealed to their poetic sensibility.
Yet if the Southern Dynasties love lyric evinces lim-
itations in emotional response and a lack of verisimilitude, both
characteristics stemming from the cult of sentiment and the
observance of convention, they are markedly freer in provid-
ing decorative background. It is as if in writing a love lyric the
Southern Dynasties poet obediently followed the conventions
of the form in terms of subject, situation, and mood, while de-
voting all his originality and ingenuity to the descriptive set-
ting of the poem. What he lost in emotional spontaneity he
gained in descriptive élan. The poems often have a pictorial
quality which creates striking effects of light and shade, of color,
and of movement. In this decorative aspect one notices the re-
alism with which details of concrete objects are described. The
T H E DUSTY MIRROR 69

contemporary reader would have instantly recognized the

scenes evoked with such loving care by the painterly poets with
their objets d'art and objets de luxe. At a more superficial level
the luxurious settings portrayed in the poems are posh trim-
mings designed to captivate the reader's eye, affecting his sense
of beauty. This is essentially a courtly setting, described by those
best equipped artistically to do so—the court poets. Thus the
pathos of a woman in love and the beauty of her person and
belongings combine to create in these love poems of the
Southern Dynasties a cult of sensibility, awakening in the reader
sensations of erotic familiarity and an appreciation of beautiful
decor.
 Structuring a Second Creation:
Evolution of tne Self in Imaginary
Landscapes
Frances LaFleur Mochida

Z n the middle of the eighteenth century, the Swiss

critics Johann Bodmer (1701-1776) and Johann
Breitinger (1698-1783) defended poetry of the supernatural by
asserting that it represented not a reflection of this world, but
a second creation, subject to its own laws and its own reason
for being. 1 Arguing against the narrowly rationalist view of
poetry held by many at the time, they proposed that a critic
should seek internal coherence and congruence, on the p o e m ' s
own terms, rather than judge it on its correspondence to real-
ity. 2
Today we would find it unnecessary to defend fan-
tastic imagery against Hobbes' dictum that a poet "should not
go beyond the conceived possibility of nature," 3 since we tend
to view all poetic statements as hypothetical utterances rather
than reflections of philosophical truth. But still the idea ex-
pressed by these early advocates of imagination is suggestive
for its characterization of supernatural poetry as a " s e c o n d
creation"; it implies that in order for a poet to lend coherence
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 71

to a fantastic work he must articulate the structure of his world

fully enough to allow us to see its own internal laws and pur-
pose. 4
Although notable exceptions do exist, it might be
fair to say that practitioners and apologists for fantastic poetry
in China have been fewer than in the West, and that in China
the techniques of fantastic creation have been less often held
up to critical scrutiny. Generally, classical Chinese poetry has
preferred realism to fancy, and suggestion to exposition, tend-
encies initiated in the venerable Book of Songs (Shih ching), where
images from the natural world are juxtaposed with the poet's
unadorned emotions. Lyrics formed this way tend to portray
the poet as an experiencing individual responding to some-
thing in the environment with his personal sentiment, or chih.
This poetic technique, termed hsing by traditional critics, pro-
duced many short stanzas of discrete, timeless lyric moments
bound to momentary sense impressions. 5 The poet writing in
this mode apparently felt no need for an elaborate expository
structure. The reality of his perceptions of the world and his
place in it were simply assumed.
But less matter-of-fact worlds did exist in China. The
world of the anthology of ancient songs from Ch'u, Songs of
the South (Ch'u tz'u) was not one which the senses could im-
mediately perceive; its inspiration arose from myths con-
nected with rites of shamanistic worship. 6 As we would ex-
pect, following our Swiss critics' line of thought, this poetry
of a "second creation" required more expository framework than
did the short verses in the Book of Songs. In this southern tra-
dition we find a poet incorporating elements of nature into his
subjective and imaginative system of belief; he is a concep-
tualizer rather than a perceiver. Traditional critics recognized
his elaborated poetic structure as predominantly fu or ex-
tended description, discourse, or narrative. This technique is
not absent from the Book of Songs, but its use is not so perva-
sive or so central to the poet's artistic purpose.
The Songs of the South collection is the inexhaustible
source for imaginary landscapes in Chinese poetry. Although
later embellished with mystic parables of Chuang Tzu and Lieh
Frances LaFleur Mochida 72

Tzu and Taoist anecdotes of immortals, adepts, and alche-

mists, the imagery from this hallowed source never lost its
special magic. 7 The Songs also furnished two recurrent themes
for supernatural poetry: the quest of the goddess and the spir-
itual journey. 8
Although diverse in conception, mood and detail,
all the poems we will examine—the "Nine Songs" ("Chiu ko"),
Ch'ii Yiian's "Encountering Sorrow" ("Li sao"), the wander-
ing immortal poems (yu-hsien shih), and the "ghostly" poems
of Li Ho (A.D. 791-817)—share these two essential themes. And
these themes, as we will see, may illuminate key aspects of
the dilemma of the human condition at critical stages in the
realization of the self in Chinese poetry. In the "Nine Songs"
we glimpse a primitive world where man has the power to in-
tegrate himself with nature through an act of ritual. With Ch'ii
Yuan we hear the first alarms of an individual's alienation from
society and imprisonment in time. By the time of the "Wan-
dering Immortals," when poets are seeking a spiritual solu-
tion to their terror of eternal repose under pine and cypress,
the old religion offers no comfort. It is left for Li Ho to work
out aesthetically the mortal dilemma which the "immortals"
left unsolved. Subjective and imaginative projections such as
these lead us to vistas rarely encountered in the mainstream
of the lyric tradition. They provide a tantalizing further di-
mension to our understanding of the evolving poetic self, for
in the intricate webs of fantasy the poets weave, they end by
revealing themselves.

The "Nine Songs": Within the Mythic Embrace

Within the collection Songs of the South we discover

a variety of genres, all of which draw heavily on the rites of
the shamanistic religion of the Yangtze Basin area. While we
cannot fit these pieces neatly into Western categories, it does
seem that the "Nine Songs" are related to actual ritual perfor-
STRUCTURING A S E C O N D CREATION 73

mances, with their sequences of mythic narrative, descriptions

of the performance itself, and emotional responses to the pag-
eant. Other works in the collection, such as the "Summons of
the Soul" ("Chao hun") are probably derivatives of magical
incantations recited by individual shamans. "Encountering
Sorrow," though obviously concerned more with poetic intent
than with adherence to ritual, has still borrowed liberally from
the themes and images of the "Nine Songs" and probably also
from the more extended forms of religious recitation. All the
extant pieces are greatly conditioned by the mythic orientation
of their distinctive religious practice, and the lyric narrative form
to which they gave birth had a lasting impact on later secular
literature.
Many would concur with David Hawkes that the
"Nine Songs" are very close in spirit to genuinely religious
verses. 9 Nor is this a peculiarly modern view. Wang I, the ear-
liest compiler and annotator of the Ch'u songs, made the first
recorded statement to that effect, claiming that these were songs
of worship refined by the poet Ch'u Yuan during his exile
among the people of the south. 10
A number of modern scholars have sought to re-
construct the dramatic setting of the "Nine Songs" on the ba-
sis of textual clues and ethnological parallels. Although they
differ on details, most envision one shaman impersonating the
god, another impersonating the human being desiring union
with the god, and perhaps a third acting as a narrator, with a
background complement of musicians and participants in the
ceremony.11
The shamans' actions on stage are clearly condi-
tioned by the actions and attributes of the gods contained in
the myth, and it is this mythic basis which gives the "Nine
Songs" their distinctive emotive power. We are understand-
ing myth in this context as "a story or a complex of story ele-
ments taken as expressing, and therefore implicitly symboliz-
ing, certain deep-lying aspects of natural, human, and
transhuman existence." 12 It is important to differentiate be-
tween the "mythic" basis of these songs and the "mythical"
basis of much of the later literature. 13 In the "Nine Songs" no
Frances LaFleur Mochida 74

consciousness of myth per se is evident; the world is simply

articulated in anthropomorphic terms. In the extraordinary at-
tributes and actions of the gods, the forces of nature are made
manifest. The poems are utterly lacking in a concern for the
true or false, the figurative or literal. Perhaps partly for this
reason many lines in the poems fail to distinguish clearly be-
tween description and address, adjective and noun. The god
behaves as he is.
To a modern reader the ambiguity is also apparent
on another level: the shaman, by impersonating a god, gives
the god an element of human subjectivity, and conversely, the
questing shaman, by participating in the rite, is infused with
the divine. In the terse language of the poems, these religious
phenomena, along with the absence of stage directions, often
contribute to a confusion about the speaker's identity. Is the
man responding to the god, or is the god moved by the man's
performance?14 The difficulty is more acute in some poems than
in others. The opening and closing hymns, "The Great One,
Lord of the Eastern World" ("Tung-huang T'ai-i") and "The
Ritual Cycle" ("Li hun"), are simple objective descriptions of
the performance of the rite. The second and third songs, 15 "The
Lord of the East" ("Tung chun") and "The Lord Within the
Gouds" ("Yiin-chung chun"), are essentially the expression of
the man's feelings about the gods as they descend. "The Spir-
its of the Fallen" ("Kuo shang"), the penultimate song, is a
straight narrative account of the "deification" of dead war-
riors. It is in the middle of the cycle, where the gods are most
humanly portrayed, and most often disappointing to their
mortal lovers, that we sense the participants acting out parts
of the myths themselves. Here the lyric persona is most diffi-
cult to determine. 16
Although we may puzzle over the speaker at times,
we can detect shifts in the focus of the action by means of the
changes in rhymes and changes in verbal patterns. The subtle
shifting of rhythms and the marking off of segments with rhyme
are only two examples of the songs' linguistic artistry. An-
other interesting feature, noted by Hawkes and by A. C. Gra-
ham, is the use of the particle hsi in the middle of each line. 17
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 75

This caesura allows for a very flexible verbal structure with

numerous relational possibilities between line segments. Be-
cause the language and structure of the "Nine Songs" form
the prototypes for later poetry of fantasy, we will look closely
at several examples in the cycle to see how poetic effects are
achieved. The techniques are employed similarly in all the
poems, so I will simplify by choosing examples in which the
lyrical persona is less often controversial.
"The Great One, Lord of the Eastern World," ad-
dressed to the most exalted deity in the hierarchy, describes
the preparation for and initiation of the rite itself. The god does
not play an active role in the dramatic presentation, unlike the
gods in the remainder of the poems. As the highest divinity,
he functions rather as the overlord and beneficiary of the en-
tire song cycle. Lacking concrete form or specific attributes, his
august power is revealed obliquely through the structure and
imagery of the poem:

Auspicious the day the timing fine,

Reverently let us please our lord divine.
Clasp the long sword with jaded hilt.
Jingle-jangle the sounds our girdle stones chime.
Fragrant reed mats with weights of jade,
Now let us take up the perfumes refined.
Basil-steamed meats with orchid wrappings,
Offer up cinnamon drink peppered wine.

Brandish the drumsticks strike the drums,

[Line missing]
Set the slow rhythm calmly chant,
Add pipes and zithers passionately sing.
The shaman flitter-flutters his filmy robes,
Incense puffs-puffs to fill the shrine.
The five tones blend in rich harmony,
Our Lord very merry in joy sublime. 18

The song has only one rhyme and is apparently sung

by one voice or a chorus. The rhyme scheme, a a x a x a etc.,
is typical of the "Nine Songs." The first two lines form a sin-
gle rhyming couplet, which establishes a religious identity be-
Frances LaFleur Mochida 76

tween time and purpose, and sets those two lines off from the
x a x a rhythm of the rest of the poem. The adverbial expres-
sion chiang, "let u s " or "about t o , " is a frequent one in the
poems and poises us for the onset of action.
In lines 3 - 5 the ritual objects are presented—the long
sword with jade hilt, the tinkling stone girdle gems, the mats
weighted with pieces of jade. The minerals are cold, hard, and
translucent. The reed mats signal the next series of images, the
fragrant offerings, and the rest of the stanza is essentially an
enumeration of items presented by the worshipers. Since these
lines are neither linked by verbal parallelism nor lengthened
by enjambment, the result is a stanza of mosaic texture; many
brightly colored elements of similar size and weight gradually
accumulate to form a symbolic and ritual complex. The quali-
ties of these two groups of images become metaphors—not the
rhetorical metaphors of sophisticated poetry, where names are
transferred from the things they properly denote to other things,
but primary mythic metaphors. Certain raw materials of ex-
perience—embodying a shared sensuous quality, a divine ef-
ficacy, and a relationship to the entire religious complex—are
fused into a symbolic unity.
Therefore, these symbolic offerings, unlike articles
embellished with rhetorical metaphors, have an inexplicit rich-
ness and mystery which hark back to almost subconscious ar-
chetypes. The mineral group suggests immortality and time-
lessness, incorruptibility. Stone and metal objects can be used
time and again in the celebrations, thereby storing up a potent
magic. The aromatic group, on the other hand, exhales onto
its surroundings an intoxicating scent which can pervade an
entire space, envelop the whole stage in a cloak of the sacred.
Yet the fragility of the flowers and the volatility of the wines
also attune us to their impermanence. Throughout the "Nine
Songs" we sense an implicit juxtaposition of divine purity and
permanence, worldly sensuality and transience.
The slow, dignified pace of the poem is altered
abruptly in the first line of the second stanza. Here we en-
counter a verbal pattern which is interspersed throughout the
collection and seems adapted to presenting actions involved
S T R U C T U R I N G A SECOND C R E A T I O N 77

with the mechanics of the production of the pageant rather than

with the divine mystery being acted out on center stage. The
simplicity of such lines as "Brandish the drumsticks, strike the
drums," which contain no qualifying adjectives to particular-
ize the actors or the objects acted upon, are like cues or stage
directions, which, once initiated, seem to continue for the
duration and serve as a backdrop to the pageant. The action
is open-ended; the drums continue to beat while we shift fo-
cus to other things.
The next two extant lines are almost perfectly par-
allel and sequential. 19 Each line's two segments are causally
related: the slow, measured rhythm induces solemn chanting,
then the pipes and zithers join in and the singing becomes
passionate. This type of sequence is also frequent. Whereas the
free-standing lines of the first stanza gave us the static impres-
sion of a mozaic of glittering fragments, these tightly related
lines seem to build up volume and energy.
The climax is reached in the passionate singing, and
the action remains at a feverish pitch throughout the last four
lines. The dramatic fervor is reinforced by the descriptive bi-
nomes lacing this section—"flitter-flutter" (yen-chien), "puff-
puff" (fei-fei), "very merry" (hsin-hsin)—all of which embody
movement, agitation, inner momentum, an almost animate
energy. 2 0 The shaman with clothes fluttering, the incense with
fragrance wafting, and the god with pleasure stirred by the
spectacle, when taken together recapitulate the important ele-
ments of the celebration and show how each has reached a
point of intoxication, an ideal active state. Although no god is
described arriving or departing, the glory of the deity is effec-
tively rendered; when in the last line we read " O u r Lord very
merry, in joy sublime," we suddenly realize that the ecstatic
buildup in the last stanza was "divinely inspired." The god's
ineffable greatness has infused the elements of the human
realm.
Viewing the poem as a whole, we see that it is
clearly structured to achieve the explicit goal: to welcome and
delight the Great One, the highest god. First, the slow actions
of the ritual help us to focus on the symbolic essence of divin-
Frances LaFleur Mochida 78

ity, and then the bombardment with intense sensual stimuli

lifts us from the mundane to the sacred.
Unlike the majority of the odes in the Book of Songs,
this poem does not remain grounded in the natural world.
Rather than reacting to some stimulus external to him in na-
ture, the poet is manipulating a series of objects, grouping them
according to their significant abstract qualities, and presenting
them as symbols of religious efficacy. While describing the
preparation and placement of ritual properties on the stage,
he is actually creating an imaginary world wherein he can re-
alize a union with the divine through his actions. Therefore
these objects and events take on a sacred meaning only through
the staging power of his carefully structured expression.
The skillful manipulation of images in meaningful
sequence evokes in the reader the dual sensations of the poet
having been lifted into the spiritual realm by the power of the
god, and of the divine having been conjured up through his
own act. The shaman-poet's ability to achieve this imaginative
identity of sacred and mundane through language is a key part
of the magic which has always entranced readers of the "Nine
Songs."
In the second poem, "Lord of the East," the sun
god takes an active role, and his arrival is enhanced through
the artful use of language:

A glow's just appearing in the eastern sky,

It shines on my balcony o'er Fu-sang's height.
I pat my horse slowly ride,
The night how it glistens now is bright.

In the first four lines, the rays shining on the bal-

cony rouse the worshiper, and he rides out to greet the god. 21
Without his being described or referred to in his anthropo-
morphized form, his approach is conveyed through his ever
stronger radiance. In the first line "glow" (t'un) is a noun which
represents a luminosity still potential; it sets the sequence in
motion. In line 2 the action of the god is depicted in the verb
"shines o n " (chao)—a progressively more active and therefore
stronger manifestation. Most interesting is the descriptive bi-
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 79

nome (chiao-chiao), which I have translated "glistens" to try to

bring out its dynamic element. Here again, we have an ex-
ample of the use of binomes in passages conveying emotional
intensity in people, gods, or objects transformed into an ani-
mated state. These are moments when the god's power and
presence are displayed. The poet conjures up his brilliant
qualities before confronting him.
A change of rhyme and an upgrading of the im-
agery to the marvelous shift the focus away from the human
worshiper to the descending god:

He drives his dragon chariot on thunder it sails,

His cloudy banner winding trails.
With a long great sigh he starts to climb,
His heart hesitates his desire prevails.22

Again we find two descriptive binomes relating to his godly

movements, "winding trails" (wei-tui) and "hesitates" (ti-hnai).
In the next section the scene again shifts to the
spectacle enacted on the ground, with shamans using images
of birds and flight to parallel the god's celestial attributes and
activities. Within the confines of the stage and within the ver-
bal structure of the poem, mortals are invested with spiritual
power. After the shaman's ecstatic dances are performed, with
descriptions of music and dance like those in the last part of
the first hymn, the poem concludes with the god's resump-
tion of his divine journey toward the west. The clock of nat-
ural time, which the god controls with his ride across the sky,
begins to tick again. The last segment shifts to a new rhythm,
with three beats before and after the caesura. This meter is ef-
fective for narrating godly actions because it produces a sol-
emn monotony in tune with the unchanging nature of the god's
daily ritual. The tendency toward parallelism in the syntax of
the lines enhances this effect:

In blue cloud coat white rainbow gown,

He holds his bow soars high around.
He raises a long arrow shoots the Heavenly Wolf,
Draws forth the Dipper and pours cinnamon wine.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 80

He gathers his reins toward the abyss he plunges,

Into darkness distant he eastward journeys down.23

In lines like these we feel closer to the narration of

the underlying myth itself than to the human dramatic pre-
sentation on the stage. The references to the two stellar con-
stellations, the Wolf and the Dipper, call to mind a number of
similar myths. 24
Progressing through the cycle, the gods seem more
and more human and the stage settings richer in detail. This
reflects the nature of the gods being worshiped. The first three
gods, the Great One, the sun god, and the god of the clouds,
rule impersonally over all things. The Greater and Lesser Mas-
ters of Fate (Ta ssu-ming, Hsiao ssu-ming), while still celestial
deities, are more intimately connected with specifically human
existence, controlling as they do the length of man's life and
the birth of his progeny, respectively.25
Even closer are the gods in the latter part of the cy-
cle who actually inhabit the earthly domain, e.g., the Hsiang
River deities (Hsiang-chiin, Hsiang fu-jen) the Yellow River god
(Ho-po), and the mountain spirit (Shan-kuei). They have real
personalities, reflecting the sometimes calm, sometimes stormy,
active, and capricious elements of the natural features they in-
habit and which the celebrants know well from direct experi-
ence.
The more human the god, the more intensely emo-
tional the interaction with the shaman. In the "Princess of the
Hsiang" and "The Lady of the Hsiang" the entire poems are
within the context of the dramatic search, with no asides per-
taining to the rite itself.26 But even here, our attempt to visu-
alize a natural scene is foiled. As Hawkes has pointed out, many
of the lines in these poems are in fact dramatic clues and con-
ventional references: "Now I halt my pace at such-and-such,"
or "Now I bend my course to so-and-so." 27 Impossible dis-
tances are covered and time is greatly compressed. These scenes
are not enacted in mundane landscapes but molded through
religious imagination.
Perhaps the lyrical culmination of the song cycle is
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 81

the hymn the "Mountain Goddess" or, as others have ren-

dered it, the "Mountain Spirit." 28 Unlike most of the hymns,
this poem is sung entirely in a three-beat, pause, three-beat
meter, like the final section of the "Lord of the East." While it
contains formulaic lines describing the symbolic gathering of
certain flowers similar to those in other poems, it seems to
present a more unified scene and mood than the poems pre-
ceding it.
Kuo Mo-jo may be correct in suggesting that this
mountain spirit is the same one who appears in the legend of
the noble daughter who died on Wu Mountain and enter-
tained the King of Ch'u. 29 Certainly the dense, forested hills
with howling apes, the divinely induced clouds and rain, and
the eroticism coupled with intense loneliness are strikingly
similar:
There seems to be someone in the mountain fold,
Draped in fig leaves tied with mistletoe.
Since you coyly glance easily smiling,
You desire me artfully inviting.
Riding a red leopard a striped lynx leading,
With magnolia chariot cassia banner flying.

My place is a remote grove and has never seen the sky,

The road is hard and dangerous alone I'm last in coming.

The thunder deeply rumbles gloomy is the rain,

Monkeys are chattering apes at evening cry.
The wind is whistling the trees whine and sigh,
I long for you but my sorrow is vain.

The "Mountain Spirit" movingly conveys the un-

derlying theme of all the foregoing poems—the desire for union
between god and man. Through divine sexual encounter, the
physical and spiritual regeneration of the human community
can be ensured, and man can feel more at one with awesome
natural forces.
The shaman-poet can bridge the two worlds by
conjuring up the divine Other through a structured succession
of images. In each of these dramatic narratives there is an ini-
Frances LaFleur Mochida 82

tial equilibrium where man and nature are separated; it is the

imaginative incarnation of the god, the intervention of the
supernatural, which allows the poet to carry out his quest and
the narrative to progress to a rapid modification, producing
another equilibrium where a harmony, albeit fragile, is re-
stored.
But the poet does not always reach the god. Of the
seven pieces that mention love trysts, consummation is achieved
in only three or four. 30 These early gods have personalities much
like their counterparts in later Chinese popular religion—
granting and withholding favors, acting generously and self-
ishly, just like the men who create them. Perhaps because of
their fickle natures, the attempt at union by the shaman, indi-
cating as it does his acknowledgment of and regard for the god,
is sufficient to confer benefit on the participants of the cere-
mony.
But on a deeper level, these uncertain courtships
with the gods reveal a fundamental attitude held by the sha-
man-poet. At best, the union he seeks will be a brief one. While
there is a desire to contact the god, there also must be a fear
of being obliged to become his pliant instrument. 31 The sha-
man is not simply a man possessed, but a man who exercises
a measure of control over the gods through his ability to reach
them and communicate with them. 3 2 But at the same time, re-
alization of his power does not let him forget who he is. Even
in this early stage in the poetic expression of the self, before
the poet reveals even his name to us, his occasional failures
remind us of his attachment to the earthly realm and proclaim
his allegiance to humanity. 3 3 The alienation of the self from
nature cannot be completely surmounted even by the power
of his imagination, as long as he remains a man.

Ch'ii Yuan: "Encountering Sorrow"

Turning to the most famous poem in Songs of the

South, "Encountering Sorrow," we no longer hear the voice of
an anonymous celebrant representing the community, but an
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 83

individual whose uniqueness is felt from the first lines. He be-

gins with a genealogy and a description of himself, confirming
a consciousness of his place in a historical continuity and an
existence extending through time.
Whatever the origins of the genre to which this
poem belongs, "Encountering Sorrow" seems at least one step
removed from a religious purpose. 34 If we accept the tradi-
tional view that at least some of the intent is allegorical, we
should characterize Ch'ii Yiian's work as mythical rather than
mythic, since he consciously selects, regroups, and rewrites bits
of the old stories or patterns to conform to his own design.
But one feels that the poem still embodies some degree of be-
lief, and this allows him to integrate the elements without too
much apparent artifice. Many formulaic phrases reminiscent of
the "Nine Songs" seem prompted by ritual rather than logical
requirements. 35 Hawkes describes the poet not as "an ordi-
nary neurotic" but a magician who can "summon gods and
immortal spirits to do his bidding, and can roam at will to the
uttermost ends of the universe." 3 6
The remaining element of belief in myth is what
gives power to the poem's poetic vision. The "magical" effects
are produced in much the same ways they were in the "Nine
Songs," that is, through ingenious narrative structuring and
through the use of special effects of language.
The ritualistic presentation of objects, particularly
flowers, in the first stanzas of the poem cause us to sense the
sacred dimensions of the poef s actions. As in the "Nine Songs,"
the flowers accrue meaning through repetition in the narra-
tive, until they come collectively to embody abstract qualities.
The plants are never presented as if observed in their natural
state. Always, the poet is manipulating them within his inten-
tional framework:
Ah, since I had this inner beauty,
I further added a cultivated mien.
I dressed in selinea and shady angelica,
I twined autumn orchids as a belt.

I then nourished nine fields of orchids,

Also planted a hundred rods of melilotus.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 84

I raised sweet lichen and cart-halt flower,

And mixed in asarum and angelica.
I hoped for the branches' and leaves' flourishing,
I wanted at the proper time to harvest them. 3 7

Many commentators, attempting to pinpoint polit-

ical allegory in the poem, have tried to match historical figures
to the various flowers and herbs. Occasionally, in such phrases
as "the pepper who specialized in flattery" (chiao chuati tiing i
man-Kan) we may suppose a specific referent was intended, but
for the most part, the flowers seem to be invoked for their rit-
ual appropriateness to the poet's character and actions, rather
than for their correspondence on a one-to-one basis with ab-
stract behavioral qualities or human beings. Taken as a total-
ity, they seem to indicate instances where sacredness and pu-
rity are either present or absent.
As in "The Great One, Lord of the Eastern World,"
where the human celebrants made the divine manifest by
creating a sacred atmosphere, in this poem we have a similar
transformation from the mundane to the extraordinary through
ritual actions. In the first eight lines, Ch'ii Yuan identifies
himself and proclaims his purity. This opening is followed by
a long section (lines 9-120) 3 8 declaring his inability to lead the
ruler along the correct path, and describing the many ritual
actions he has performed in vain. Finally, a quarter of the way
through the poem, he decides on his course of action:

Suddenly I turn to look and my eyes rove,

I am about to go and see the four quarters.
My girdle is a confusion of numerous ornaments,
Their fragrance wafts far and wide.
Each man's life has its pleasure,
I only love beauty as a constant.
Though I be dismembered I would not change,
How could my heart be punished?

The narrative is interrupted here while his hand-

maidens try to dissuade him, but his resolve is firm, and he
travels to the site of Emperor Shun's grave to make his plaint.
Having done this, he is infused with the power to make his
journey:
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 85

I knelt on spread robes to state my plaint,

Dazzled I then obtained this inner truth.
I yoked jade dragons to a phoenix chariot,
On a dusty wind I suddenly soared up.

It is only at this point that the poem moves to the supernat-

ural realm. Despite many innovations, the "Nine Songs"
structure can still be delineated. Once again, the supernatural
signals a rapid transition from one equilibrium to another.
Much of the imagery of the celestial journey is ap-
parently from the same source as the god descriptions in the
"Nine Songs." Again, the striking use of descriptive binomes
infuses this portion of the narrative with divine overtones. In
the terrestrial part of the poem (up to line 185), such binomes
are rare, and those that do occur depict objects in the natural
state, for example, grass and trees withering and dying (ts'ao
mu chih litig-lo) or ivy trailing (hu-sheng chih hsi-hsi). These usages
are no different from those in the Book of Songs, except that
they function more explicitly in the narrative as symbolic of
his mental state. But in the "inspired" part of the poem, the
descriptive binomes are multiplied. Most of them suggest
forceful, rhythmic movement, such as in the phrases "high soar
the phoenixes, wings beating" (kao-ao chih i-i) or "I gallop my
eight dragons, writhing" (chia pa lung chih wan-wan). Here, the
elements of the poet's universe are in an excited state like that
in the climactic portions of the "Nine Songs." Compare the
following two couplets. The first occurs near the beginning of
the poem, and the second near the end:

Days and months are rapid and don't wait,

Spring and autumn alternate.

The sun rushes on about to set,

I command the Sun Goddess to slow her pace.

The poet in the first lines was a helpless mortal observing an

abstract natural phenomenon, whereas in the second lines he
was one with the gods, and animated nature responded to him.
During the poet's celestial journey, except for the
brief interludes where he quests for enchanting women and
seeks a divination, the narrative covers great distances at high
Frances LaFleur Mochida 86

speed. Ch'ii Yuan seems to be traveling ever westward, as if

trying to catch the sun before it sets. It is the imaginative power
which the poet is able to generate in these lines which makes
the ending so abrupt and poignant:

Ascending to Heaven's splendid vastness,

Suddenly I catch a glimpse of my old home.
My groom is grieved and my horses are yearning,
Arching their backs they will not go on.

Ultimately his magic is not sufficient for him to

sustain his fabulous journey. Like the "Nine Songs" poet he
ultimately does not really wish to abandon the earthly realm
to become one with the gods, despite his attraction to their
celestial abode and their power over time and decay. But be-
cause of his greatly heightened self-consciousness, the reali-
zation is more dramatic and more painful. He cannot sever
himself emotionally from his earthly identity, his human ties,
and all else that his old home represents.
We are brought home to the earthly dilemma which
prompted him to set out in the first place. Ostensibly, his an-
guish was caused by his ruler's losing faith in him. And ac-
cording to the allegorical interpretation, the goal of his quest
is reconciliation with his prince. This theme seems to be a nat-
ural extension of the religious preoccupation of the "Nine
S o n g s . " From the earlier desire of man for a sexual union with
a god, the theme has been modified to a desire to serve a
powerful Other, a human ruler, who will bring back the world
of harmony known under the sage kings of antiquity.
But there is a dimension in this poem which goes
beyond the intellectual and structural framework of the "Nine
Songs." Throughout the poem, we have only one voice; the
experiencing protagonist is a painfully self-aware individual.
He expropriates the imagery, the grandeur, and the power of
the gods, but his fixation on self distinguishes him from an
anonymous celebrant of religious rite.
It would be tempting to call "Encountering Sor-
row" an epic poem, because then we could perhaps take the
"Nine Songs" as ballads and the "Summons of the Soul" as
STRUCTURING A S E C O N D CREATION 87

an incantation, which eventually evolved into an epic narra-

tive form in "Encountering Sorrow." This would tend to fit the
hypothesized Western literary model, with narrative arising
from forms pertaining to religious rite.39 The length of Ch'ii
Yiian's poem, its longer lines (as compared with the "Nine
Songs") which tend toward couplet formation suited more to
chant than song, and its lively incidents linking men and gods,
do lend it epic qualities. But the beginnings of lyricism, which
we detected in passages where the shaman acted out his search
for the gods, are carried much further in this poem. In fact, it
is so completely egocentric that it cannot be considered an epic
in the Western sense at all.40
In epic narrative we expect the materials of experi-
ence received by the poet to be arranged into plots condi-
tioned by circumstances which proceed, generally somewhat
chronologically, through cause-and-effect relations. In the pre-
sent poem, however, the poet experiences a series of situa-
tions which have only a vague plot framework. If we try to
rationalize his behavior, or even outline the time sequence
within a given scene, we quickly realize that the progression
is not causally determined at all, but formulaic and perhaps
unconsciously based on religious rite.41
Ch'ii Yuan, as lyric protagonist, refashions the world
through his own perceptions and renders it in a highly sym-
bolic and distinctive imaginary form. Natural elements are re-
duced to their symbolic aspects. He describes his entourage at
some length, with dragons pulling jade-hubbed chariots and
phoenixes bearing pendants, but these picturesque images too
are devices for expressing his divine power and ability to ani-
mate the universe. When we try to visualize the lands he passes
over or the route he follows, the scenes evaporate. The place
names are evocative—Flowing Sands, Red Waters—but aside
from what the words conjure up in themselves or what we
know from mythological sources, we have no details. 42
The I-dominated universe is enhanced by the ver-
bal patterns of the sao-style poem. The flexibility of the "Nine
Songs" structure, created by the caesura in the middle of each
line which allowed manifold relations between line segments
Frances LaFleur Mochida 88

and adjacent lines, has been diminished by the substitution in

"Encountering Sorrow" of a "key word" 4 3 for the mid-line
caesura and the addition of an end-of-line caesura placed be-
tween two adjacent lines:

"Nine Songs": 3 hsi 2, 3 hsi 2.

3 hsi 2, 3 hsi 2.
"Encountering Sorrow": 3 key word 2 hsi 3 key word 2,
3 key word 2 hsi 3 key word 2.

This produces a much stronger formal relation between the

adjacent lines, and contributes to the tendency toward couplet
formation with parallel syntax. 44 These extended lines, double
the "Songs" lines in length, coupled with a great increase in
emotive verbs like "fear" and "wish" and personal pronouns,
produce extended transitive sequences (subject-verb-object). The
result is a poetic monologue which sublimates all elements to
a subjective purpose or vision.
Ch'ii Yiian's reveries are haunted by memories of
his own past and his country's glorious history. He agonizes
that the times are out of joint and that his own lifespan is lim-
ited. He has stepped out of the integrated and unquestioning
world of the "Nine Songs" to face alone the ultimate ques-
tions of human existence:

I flow like a fast torrent, as if never to catch up,

Afraid that the years will go without me.

I think of the decay and fall of the trees and plants,

And fear my beloved Beauty will fade in twilight. 45

Here is an individual separated from a community

of shared values, a man at odds with the world. He desires,
through liaisons with goddesses, to effect a union which will
reintegrate him with this world, but each time his quest ends
in failure.
Finally, in disillusionment, he receives the oracle
from Ling Fen, who advises him to seek beauty and forsake
women; and after a long lament listing his travails he sets off
on his final and most impressive journey, which spans seem-
STRUCTURING A S E C O N D CREATION 89

ingly limitless space. The ecstasy of the flight reaches its cli-
max and his movement is briefly suspended while he hears
the "Nine Songs" and Shao dances. Then he glimpses his old
home below.
In the "Nine Songs," the height of the poefs power
and lyricism was elicited by his desire. In the beautiful songs
to the Hsiang River goddesses and the mountain spirit, all na-
ture seemed to exist in order to evoke the longings and prom-
ise of union with the Enchanting Other. Ch'ü Yüan also seeks
the Other, but his quests are subsumed in a framework which
is, from beginning to end, a process of personal exploration—
through history, through his past, through his life in time. His
personal alienation from the world precludes his finding sol-
ace in an intermediary. He confronts the totality of the world
directly, and the metaphor for his attempt to conquer it is the
journey. The height of his lyricism is reached in those pas-
sages where his soul soars above the earth. For a short time
he can control the elements, marshal the gods to do his bid-
ding. And as he rushes through space, keeping pace with the
sun, he is metaphorically conquering time.
Chen Shih-hsiang has written about the new
awareness of the affective aspect of time in this poem. 46 Ch'ü
Yüan makes numerous references to its interminable onward
flow. But in the ecstatic moments of his final journey, he is
temporarily released from its nagging pull, and from his limi-
tations as a human being bound to a spot on earth and out of
princely favor. Until, that is, he glimpses his old home and
remembers who he is.
Suggestive in illuminating the themes in the "Nine
Songs" and "Encountering Sorrow" is Tzvetan Todorov's ge-
neric study of fantastic literature. Todorov distinguishes two
thematic complexes which, although found in all types of lit-
erature, are especially articulated in works of fantasy, where
the imagination is free to transcend physical or social limita-
tions. He defines these themes as self in relation to other, and
self in direct confrontation with the world. 47 In the former
complex, the self is defined from its external projection; the
center of interest is in the object of desire. The theme of "other"
Frances LaFleur Mochida 90

gives vent to the poet's wish to act upon and relate to an ex-
ternal one, and is expressed through sexual love. This is a dy-
namic mode, a "theme of discourse." Through the language
of an imaginary encounter, a poet reveals his desire to struc-
ture his relations with other human beings. In supernatural
literature this encounter is enacted beyond the physical and
social boundaries of more realistic and conventional modes. The
intensity of this desire is often revealed in a joining of the love
theme to death or cruelty.
Todorov was speaking of nineteenth-century fic-
tion when he defined this genre, but even within the religious
context of the "Nine Songs" the impulse to exercise human
desires over the gods exhibits similar elements. Since the gods
in the cycle were conceived to have human attributes, the re-
lations between them and their worshipers are essentially
analogous to those in the secular literature Todorov examined.
In the imaginative quests of the "Nine S o n g s " we see a fore-
shadowing of the link between intense desire and death and
cruelty. This is particularly noticeable in the "Mountain Spirit"
poem, where the goddess is portrayed driving leopards and
lynxes (fearsome predators—symbolic of her nature?) and
dwelling in a place remote and dark (suggesting the peril of
union with her, or of a union between a living shaman and a
departed spirit?).
The other complex, the self in direct confrontation
with the world, is a "theme of vision." This theme is a passive
one—the interest is in the self's perception of the world and
its conquest of matter by the mind rather than in the self's in-
teraction with an other. Literature with this orientation, there-
fore, does not focus on others; others are interesting only in
their relation to the self as he perceives and fashions them.
Rather, the self molds the world to fit his conceptual idea. He
can transform his personality (as Ch'u Yuan did, from exiled
courtier to rider of the skies), he can produce his own causes
and effects (command the gods), and he can become a master
over space and time (traveling to the ends of the universe).
Of course, in both the "Nine S o n g s " and "Encoun-
tering Sorrow," as he structures a second creation based on
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 92

imagination above and beyond sense perception, the poet has

exercised a great deal of subjective power over his material in
order to clarify his world's laws and its purpose. But we see
Todorov's thematic complexes operating on the level of the goal
of the artistic persona within the work rather than on the level
of artist in relation to his literary creation. Ch'ii Yuan is not a
sophisticated modern playing with the real and the imaginary
for philosophical effects. In Todorov's fantastic literature, the
manipulations of these themes are based on deliberate
transgressions of natural laws. In the shamanistic literature, at
least some of the impulse was genuine belief. At any rate, a
careful discrimination between real and fantastic was not elab-
orated upon or exploited. And, as Todorov has pointed out,
in intentional fantastic literary creations, the two thematic
complexes do not overlap, whereas they do in folktales.48 If
this is a valid principle, it may further corroborate my conten-
tion that "Encountering Sorrow" is partially conditioned by
ritual requirements of the shamanistic tradition, since it con-
tains elements of both themes. But certainly, individual inspi-
ration is paramount, and the journey ultimately prevails over
the quest.
The quest and the journey proved to be enduring
motifs in secular Chinese poetry. 49 Even prior to the Ch'u ma-
terial we can find many poems in the Book of Songs which tend
toward one or the other of the two thematic orientations—either
the self confronting the world or the self seeking a lover. But
there is little sense in these realistic poems of a self molding
his own universe, seeking to escape his mortal limitations, or
carrying desire to extreme limits. We have no deep, almost
morbid longing, and no soul soaring to the ends of the earth.
These themes could be amplified only by the elaborate aes-
thetic framework of the imagination which the poetry of the
supernatural produced.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 92

From Magic to Alchemy: Ts'ao Ts'ao and Ts'ao Chih

"Li sao" imitation was a completely exhausted genre

well before the end of the Han. The new innovations in po-
etry during the period were largely inspired by the so-called
Music Bureau songs (yiieh-fu), initially collected among the
common people and later composed by literati. 50 The great lit-
erary experimenters of the Chien-an period, Ts'ao Ts'ao (A.D.
155-220) and his sons Ts'ao P i (187-226) and Ts'ao Chih (192-
232), were leading poetry in new directions arising out of this
ballad tradition. Ts'ao Ts'ao was a pioneer in incorporating
fantastic themes into the fashionable genre.
Ts'ao Ts'ao was also perhaps the first poet in the
ballad tradition to put a personal stamp on his creations. By
the Chien-an period, literati were beginning to view poetic
creation as a legitimate means of preserving their reputations
for later ages, although poetic achievement still took a decid-
edly second place to active civil service. 51
As the rebel who delivered the coup de grace to the
Han and established his own regime, Ts'ao Ts'ao is a fascinat-
ing figure in Chinese history. While still bound up in realizing
his ambition of subduing the empire along traditional lines, he
also reflects the growing philosophical tendency toward per-
sonal introspectiveness and self-cultivation which was to
dominate intellectual discussion and behavior in the succeed-
ing reigns of the Six Dynasties (A.D. 280-589).
Both of Ts'ao Ts'ao's concerns are evident in the
large percentage of his extant poetry with themes or images of
immortality. He was the first to apply the imaginative ma-
trixes of Ch'u poetry to the ballad genre. The following poem,
the second to the "Song of Ch'iu Hu" ("Ch'iu Hu hsing"), is
one of his most successful:

I want to climb the great Hua Mountain,

and with divine men distant roam,
I want to climb the great Hua Mountain,
and with divine men distant roam.
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION

Passing K'un-lun Mountain I arrive at P'eng-lai,

Swirling to the eight extremes,
I will with immortals fly,
I wish to get divine herbs,
ten thousand years to abide.
I will sing of my resolve,
I want to climb the great Hua Mountain.

Heaven and earth how long endure,

man's span is so brief,
Heaven and earth how long endure,
man's span is so brief,
The world talks of Po-yang who truly never knew old age,
Ch'ih Sung and Wang Ch'iao,
say that they have found the way,
That they did I've never heard,
but they lived long lives anyway.
I will sing of my resolve,
Heaven and earth how long endure.

Bright, bright the sun and moon's light,

where is not their radiance displayed?
Bright, bright the sun and moon's light,
where is not their radiance displayed?
Together blend the sacred forces, is not only man held dear?
Leader of ten thousand nations,
the king's power reaches everywhere,
Kindness and virtue make his name,
rites and music give him fame.
I will sing of my resolve,
Bright, bright the sun and moon's light.

Four seasons in succession pass,

days and nights make up a year,
Four seasons in succession pass,
days and nights make up a year.
The Great Man goes ahead of Heaven and Heaven does not
interfere.
Don't begrudge the passing years,
Instead lament the world's misrule,
Life and death lie with fate,
He who worries is a fool.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 94

I will sing of my resolve,

Four seasons in succession pass,

Sad, sad, why be brooding?

Joy and mirth should be our will.
Sad, sad, why be brooding?
Joy and mirth should be our will.
Prime of life and perfect wisdom truly never do return,
Seize the moment to press forward,
Who shall all the favor earn?
Drifting, drifting with abandon,
What can you perform?
I will sing of my resolve,
Sad, sad, why be brooding? 52

The balladic origins of this poem are very evident

not only from the title, which designates the poem as having
been written to the older melody, but also in the structure of
the poem itself. Refrains at the end of each verse break the
poem into five short and regular stanzas. The irregular num-
ber of words per line is also apparently conditioned by the tune;
it is consistent throughout. The diction is simple, employing
frequent repetition of complete phrases. It is quite evident that
this poem was meant to be a song rather than a written piece
only. The repeated use of the formulaic phrase " I will sing of
my resolve" (ko i yen chih) at the end of each stanza also gives
the poem a folksy ballad feeling.
The ballad form imposes its will on the content of
the song. Unlike "Encountering Sorrow" or even the "Nine
Songs," we have here a structure based on recapitulation rather
than progression. The long chains of couplets are lacking and
the lines are subordinate to the stanza blocks in logical orga-
nization.
The first stanza expresses the poet's desire to take
a spiritual journey which transcends space and time. Each of
the next four takes up one aspect of the initial vision—long
life, the nobility of man's place in the universe, the futility of
sorrowing over death, and the happiness in fulfilling one's
ambition. Point by point he negates the Taoist ideal com-
pletely with his arguments in favor of seizing the moment rather
than drifting in abandon.
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 95

Ts'ao Ts'ao is a pragmatist. In many of his poems

he begins with a wish to escape mortality, but even within the
context of his poem he never leaves the ground. He begins with
a verb of longing, yiian, and we realize that the whole opening
sequence is a meditation rather than an imaginary journey. His
vision and energies are directed outward, and the only solu-
tion to his dilemma is to return to empire building.
If we look closely at the images he employs, we re-
alize that very few are actually from the Songs of the South.53
Instead the names and phrases are culled from the Lao Tzu,
the Records of the Grand Historian (Shih chi), the Book of Songs,
and the Book of Changes (I ching). This should indicate to us that
the poem has a social meaning as much as a personal one. The
use of the last three above-named works in Chinese poetry
generally goes hand-in-hand with "orthodox," or political and
didactic, purposes. The simple, hypotactic phraseology, the
repetition of ideas, and the didactic references to kindness and
virtue all function as a persuasion to accept his activism and,
in fact, his intent to rule. This is a far cry from the Han type
of ballad which uses a stock dramatic situation to express a
generalized statement on human life. Nor is it an attempt to
explore an imaginary interior landscape. It is fantasy used as
a metaphor for a worldly ambition that is distinctively Ts'ao
Ts'ao's.
Some of Ts'ao Ts'ao's yu-hsien, or wandering im-
mortal poems, are slightly more subtle than "Song of Ch'iu
Hu," but they are not personal, dramatic encounters with di-
vine beings or extraordinary experiences. True to the ballad
genre in which they are cast, they are composed for a social
function and have a layer of public meaning. Although rather
plain and mechanical in diction compared with the rich natu-
ral descriptions in some of his other works, for example,
"Marching Out of Hsia-men," the metaphorical presentation
of his buoyant spirit and daring ambition apparently awak-
ened an interest in the wandering immortal theme in his sons
and other Six Dynasties poets.
Slightly later, Ts'ao Ts'ao's talented son Ts'ao Chih
takes us closer to the realm of the immortals. While still class-
ified as a ballad by its title and certain thematic elements bor-
Frances LaFleur Mochida 96

rowed from the original, 54 his "Roaming Far" ("Yuan yu") lacks
the ballad formulas of "Song of Ch'iu H u , " and does succeed
in creating a magical world before our eyes:

Distantly I roam nearing the four seas,

Look up and down regarding the vast waves.
Great fish like humped mounds,
Ride the breakers and pass me by.
The divine tortoise supports the Blissful Isle,
Its holy peak is dangerously steep.
Immortals hover round its crags,
Jade maidens play amid its slopes.
The jasper buds can banish hunger,
Raising my head I inhale the morning dew.
The K'un-lun Mountains were once my lodging,
The Central Land is not my home.
I'll soon be off to visit the Eastern Father,
Once aloft I'll leap the shifting sands.
Beating my wings I'll dance in the seasonal wind,
I'll whistle and sing a rousing melody.
Gold and stone are so easily worn away,
But I'll be radiant as the sun and moon.
I'll match the heaven and earth in years,
What more is there, even for an emperor? 5 5

The first four couplets offer us a skillfully con-

structed ideal landscape. We begin not in the sad human world
but already high above the four seas, looking down on the
waves. Descending, the giant fishes' forms take shape and the
divine mountain appears in its awesome, rugged detail. The
descriptive continuity of these lines, focusing more and more
closely on the sea and mountain as the poet draws near, have
a sophistication which surpasses the descriptions in the origi-
nal poem "Roaming Far" from the Songs of the South. The use
of syntactically parallel lines to freeze the actions of the inhab-
itants of the craggy peak is reminiscent of the action carved on
Keats's Grecian urn.
The poet entered this magical world unobtrusively,
partaking of immortal buds and dew, but his assertion about
his home being in the K'un-lun Mountains seems to jar him
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 97

back to self-awareness—he uses personal pronouns in both

phrases. This couplet marks the division between the two halves
of the poem: the second half is logical discourse, the only sug-
gested action being a hypothetical visit he is about to make.
What we have is a truncated version of "Encoun-
tering Sorrow." Had the last action sequence not been en-
closed by two propositional statements, it might have sus-
tained the sensations of the initial journey. But the mention of
the Central Land belies the poet's attachment to earth. In his
vociferous denial, he in a sense asserts it. The references to
metal and stone and the lot of an emperor poignantly under-
line the two compelling anxieties expressed over and over again
in Ts'ao Chih's poems—his fear of death and inability to serve
the empire. Metal and stone are constant symbols in Han po-
etry of incorruptibility as contrasted with human decay. In the
negative rhetoric of this half of the poem, even they can be
easily worn away. And the mention of the emperor reminds
us of Ts'ao Chih's precarious existence as the ili-fated victim
in the power struggle between the heirs to the Wei throne.
This poem nearly transcends the ballad genre, es-
pecially in the masterful realization of the fairy landscape in
the first half. But the imaginative setting once again is applied
to a worldly dilemma which is finally worked out discursively,
with his boastings of cosmological longevity, rather than
through a purely supernatural framework.
Ts'ao Chih did write several other poems which
sustained a fantastic vision throughout. "Roaming the Five
Directions" ("Wu yu") is structured much like its prototypes
"Encountering Sorrow" and "Roaming Far" in Songs of the South:

The Nine Provinces are not worth treading,

I wish I could ascend the clouds and soar.
Wandering far beyond the great expanses,
My roving eyes pass over distant wilds.
Draped in my red cloud cloak,
Wearing my white rainbow skirt.
My flower-topped carriage is perfumed and luxuriant,
Its six dragons look to Heaven and prance.
The dazzling divinity hasn't moved its brightness,
Frances LaFleur Mochida 98

Hastily I reach the bright azure sky.

The vermilion doors of the Heavenly Gate are opened,
Twin towers of dazzling crimson shine.
I loiter at the palace of the Wen-chang Star,
I ascend the hall of the T'ai-wei Star.
The Lord on High rests in his western quarters,
A group of harem ladies gathers in the eastern chamber.
I wear my jasper girdle,
I rinse with pure dew nectar.
I linger to toy with the divine fungus,
I dally to play with the fragrant flowers.
Wang Tzu offers immortal herbs,
Hsien Men presents a rare formula.
I take and eat them to enjoy great age,
And prolong my life, preserving the limitless. 56

Although much simplified, the poem presents the

ritual act in all its stages. We learn of the poet's worldly dis-
content and desire to escape. We learn of the garments with
which he adorns himself and the vehicle which will carry him.
Briefly we experience the vast distance covered at great speed
which brings him to the Heavenly City.
One of the most outstanding features of this poem
is the verbal structure. In the second half, commencing after
he arrives at his marvelous destination, the couplets are all
perfectly parallel. Unlike the rudimentary verb-object parallel-
isms in Ts'ao Ts'ao's Music Bureau songs, these lines derive
much of their effect from the pairing of numerous adjectives—
jasper girdle, pure dew nectar, divine fungus, etc. The careful
crafting of these lines is rather more in the Nineteen Old Poems
of the Han than the ballad tradition. 57 The active movement in
the opening section gives way to a static one. The enjoyment
of the poem derives not so much from a space- and time-de-
fying journey through the universe as from a sustained im-
mersion in sensual delights and elixirs.
Some of Ts'ao Chih's poems may contain more ac-
tual flight passages than this one, but all share some tendency
toward lyric stasis, unless they resort to propositional argu-
ment. Why do even the heavenly precincts seem so earth-
S T R U C T U R I N G A SECOND C R E A T I O N 99

bound? Ultimately it is not artistry but conviction that is lack-

ing.
The Chien-an period was one of political instabil-
ity, treachery, and intrigue. Poets of that period like Ts'ao Ts'ao
and Ts'ao Chih were not Taoist adepts but philosophical skep-
tics seeking an escape from an oppressive, stark reality. 58 In
such an era, with politics so perilous, it is not surprising that
intense introspection revived that old symbol of mind's con-
quest over matter—the aerial journey. Again it expressed the
self's desire. But the sophistication of the era, and the result-
ant lack of faith in any religious panacea, meant that the sources
of flight imagery were found in earlier literary texts rather than
in personal vision.
The ancient shaman-poet had been powerful be-
cause he could do in his song what mortals ordinarily could
not: he could structure his songs so as to animate the forces
operating in his world, and, by making them humanly under-
standable, he could exert power over them. For him, language
and reality were one. His songs retain much of the undiffer-
entiated wholeness with which Ernest Cassirer has character-
ized the primitive world view. 59 In the "Nine Songs" we wit-
nessed the lack of distinction between the literal and figurative,
and we saw metaphor used only in its radical sense, as a unity
of reference fused from raw elements of experience and em-
bodied in a symbol.
By the time of the Chien-an poems, man had long
since stepped back from the world to view it as an entity dis-
tinct from himself, which he could imitate or improve upon in
his poetry but never rejoin completely. As the world came to
be perceived as parts and causal relations, language too grad-
ually became dissociated from Being and an entity in itself to
be analyzed and manipulated. By Ts'ao Chih's time, the pre-
vailing poetic devices were rhetorical metaphor and textual al-
lusion. The poets gathered together pieces of the ancient sys-
tem of belief but lacked the faith to reconstruct it.
Though a humble genre taken on its own merit, this
wandering immortal poetry marks an important shift in the use
of myth in Chinese poetry, and reflects indirectly the chang-
Frances LaFleur Mochida 100

ing attitude of poets toward language and reality during the

Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties. In Gerald Bruns's terms,
these later poets are alchemists, producing "fragments tossed
up by the historical dismemberment of Orpheus," the sha-
man-poet. The alchemist is a preserver of magic and a trans-
mitter, but he is not endowed with the power to call the orig-
inal elements of the world into being. 60
Divine power is never really manifest in these
poems. The supernatural element, to be artistically effective,
must be able to break through the impasse of everyday con-
straints and a stagnant equilibrium to bring about a changed
state. Alchemists like Ts'ao Chih lacked the power of faith and
the imaginative structure necessary to effect such a change.
The injection of the supernatural, as Todorov has
shown, usually goes hand in hand with the narrative impulse,
because narrative even in its crudest form must be "a move-
ment between two equilibriums which are similar but not
identical." 61 And the supernatural is often the most dramatic
catalyst in that movement. It is no coincidence that the wan-
dering immortal poems in the ballad genre tend toward lyric
stasis. If the poems "progress" at all, it is generally through
rhetorical argument rather than through a sequence of ac-
tions.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the metaphor of the
aerial journey came to be replaced by the mountain top before
very long. Lacking a conviction in a God or gods, these post-
Han Chinese literati turned to nature for a transcendent struc-
turing principle, and the inexhaustible manifestations of na-
ture provided a poetic vocabulary at once immediately per-
ceivable and infinitely varied. 62 And as the elements of
landscape became more and more overlaid with emotional and
symbolic meanings in the evolution of T'ang regulated verse,
the practice of reading a poem on one level as a natural de-
scription and on another as a coded personal statement was
just a further institutionalization of what was already implicit
in the works of Ts'ao Ts'ao and his son.
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 101

Li Ho: Conjuring Up a Reluctant Ghost

The advent of landscape poetry did not mean a to-

tal eclipse of fantasy in verse. Throughout the Six Dynasties
and the T'ang (618-907), devotees of the genre remained. 63 The
neatly structured dualistic framework, however, remained in-
tact even in the works of a genius as rich and original as Li
Po's (699-762). In analyzing one of his superb fantasies, " M y
Trip in a Dream to the Lady of Heaven Mountain, A Farewell
to Several Gentlemen of Eastern Lu" ("Meng yu T'ien-lao shan
pieh Tung-lu chu-kung"), Elling Eide writes:
. . . Li Po, from whom we might expect and accept any fan-
tasy is . . . careful to maintain a balance between the real and
unreal. As if he were providing his reader with justifications
for the suspension of disbelief, he often reconciles poetic li-
cense with rationality—as he does here by setting his fantasy
within a dream. . . . M

For this reason, Eide speculates, Li Po was highly

acclaimed by Tu Fu (712-770) and other "orthodox" poets of
the T'ang, despite his extravagant subject matter. In Li Ho (791-
817), however, we find a poet who often confounded his con-
temporaries, dazzled though they were by his striking use of
language. Tu Mu (803-852), author of the first preface to Li
Ho's works, was moved to write that Li Ho composed in the
tradition of "Encountering Sorrow," although his conception
did not always come up to it, and his language often sur-
passed it. 65 He went on to remark that Li Ho went down path-
ways so strange that no one could really claim to understand
them. 6 6
Ever since Li Ho was dubbed the "ghostly genius"
in Sung times, there has been a continual debate over just what
lends the demonic or ghostly quality to his poems. Certainly
not all of his poems have it—he wrote many kinds of occa-
sional poems, social and political satires, and even praises of
beauties of the capital. But certain verses do stand apart, and
critics like Wada Toshio have effectively argued that it is not
Frances LaFleur Mochida 102

simply diction which distinguishes these demonic poems but

underlying theme as well. 67
If we look through the 300-odd poems which have
been preserved, we find that his poems with fantastic themes
divide into two groups. One takes place entirely within the
ethereal realm of Heaven, and the other takes place on earth.
It is this latter group for which Li Ho earned his reputation.
One such poem, justly famous, is the "Grave of Little Su" ("Su
Hsiao-hsiao mu"). It appears to be a meditation on a grave, a
theme not uncommonly chosen by literati in T'ang times. The
vogue for this type of poem is mentioned in a T'ang tale:
Chen-niang was a famous beauty of Wu. She was compared to
Little Su of Ch'ien-t'ang. When she died, she was buried be-
side the Wu palace. Passersby lamented her [lost] beauty. They
competed in writing verse on the trees of the grave. [The verses]
were as dense as teeth on a comb. 6 8

In fact, one of Li Ho's closest associates, Shen Ya-chih, wrote

a poem on the beautiful courtesan Chen-niang. His poem is
typical of the genre, couched in images of delicate beauty with
an air of sentimental melancholy:
Her golden hairpin is lost in Sword Ravine,
This ground remains a flowered mound.
Who will meet her lacquered carriage?
The Ch'ien-t'ang [River] keeps her song's sad time.
Her kingfisher [gown] leaves color on the willows,
Her lingering scent beclouds the winter plum.
Though they say she's gone with the clouds,
I'll greet her wandering soul come in a dream. 69

Compare Li Ho's poem on the grave of the Six Dynasties cour-

tesan Little Su:
Dew on the hidden orchid,
Like a weeping eye.
There's nothing to join our hearts,
Since mist flowers cannot bear cutting.
Grass like a cushion,
Pines like a parasol.
The wind is her dress,
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 203

The water her sash [tinkling.]

A lacquered carriage,
In the evening waits.
Cold kingfisher tapers,
Lend weary light.
Beneath West Mound,
Wind blows the rain. 7 0

While Shen's poem seems to be set in the mellow light of an

early spring day, Li Ho's takes place on a cold, rainy night.
Whereas the more conventional poems like Shen's stress life
and sensual pleasure, Li Ho's broods on death and depriva-
tion. Both poets imagine the dead ladies in the elements of the
landscape, but Shen's wandering spirit appears only in a dream,
while Li Ho's apparition may actually be part of a waking hal-
lucination.
The diction of "The Grave of Little Su" is decep-
tively simple: many of the nouns are unadorned by adjectives,
and the phrases are short. Yet each image is laden with many
overtones of meaning. The poem begins with a "hidden or-
chid" (actually a species of Eupatorium, or thoroughwort), an
image with a long heritage in the poetic tradition. In "Encoun-
tering Sorrow" Ch'ii Yuan wrote: "The day was dark and
drawing to its close; / Knotting orchids I waited in indeci-
sion." In Ts'ao Chih's "Rhapsody on the Lo River Goddess"
("Lo-shen fu") the orchid described the goddess's seductive
beauty. 71
The orchid before Su's grave is covered with dew,
as if weeping. This could be taken as pathetic fallacy if we feel
that the grief is the poet's, but considering the traditional as-
sociation of the orchid with the Lo goddess, probably the flower
is a metaphor for the dead maiden. The next line, "There's
nothing to join our hearts," is an almost word-for-word bor-
rowing from the short folk song associated with Little Su in
which she tells of pledging her heart to her lover under the
trees on her grave:

I ride a lacquered carriage,

The gentleman a piebald horse.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 104

Where shall we join our hearts?

Beneath pine and cypress on West Mound.72

The joining of the two hearts also resonates with

the orchid in the first line, since Ch'ii Yuan was twining, or
joining (chieh) orchids as the dark descended. Perhaps on seeing
the orchid, the poet is reminded of her pledge.
The next line is ambiguous, since it can mean either
"I can't bear to cut the mist-covered flowers," or "The flowers
of mist are too insubstantial to be cut." This dual possibility
nicely rounds out the first section by explaining why there is
nothing with which to pledge, and it also reminds us of an old
story about unrequited love: Han Chung loved a maid named
Purple Jade (Tzu Yii) but was unable to marry her. When he
returned from a journey he found out that she had died, and
so he visited her grave. She appeared and offered him a jade
token of her love, but when he embraced her, she turned to
mist. 73
Although the only images in the first part of the
poem are the orchid and the mist, we already feel an eeriness
in the scene—we sense the gloom of the setting, the sadness
of the flowers, the suggestion of love yearning beyond the
grave. Nothing is explicit, yet the following lines, "Grass like
a cushion, pines like a parasol," do not come as a surprise.
Already her presence is vaguely felt, and that the trees and
grass should seem like her accoutrements does not require much
stretch of the imagination. But the vision is becoming more
distinct—"the wind is her dress, the rain is her s a s h . " Al-
though the syntactical structure of the four phrases is parallel,
we have dynamic movement toward the concrete as the verb
changes from "is like" (ju) to " i s " (wei). Amidst the move-
ment and sound of the wind and rain it becomes difficult to
tell the real from the unreal. Is an apparition before us?
In the next two lines, we continue to wonder. A
lacquered carriage waits for someone in the darkness. This again
harks back to the folksong. Is she waiting there, or is the car-
riage simply buried with her and remembered by the musing
poet? Green flickering candles are burning. Are they only will-
o'-the-wisps or are they her candles burning low as she waits?
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 105

The last two lines seem to leave us squarely in the

natural scene again, where the wind blows the rain under the
West Mound grave. But the mention of the wind and rain at
her grave recalls the legend recounted by Li Shen that on
windy, rainy nights some have heard the echo of a song. 74 We
glance back at the penultimate line and wonder whether "un-
der" (hsia) means "under the trees" as it did in her folk song,
or "under the mound" where she may be singing a song for
her lover. The poem is disturbing because we sense some-
thing beyond the ordinary and yet we cannot be sure. The poet
offers us no dream or other rational mechanism with which to
naturalize the images. The dark, wet, windy atmosphere re-
verberates through all the images, haunting us with sadness
and the desire for a tangible image of the girl.
"The Grave of Little S u " has been compared with
the "Mountain Spirit" poem in the "Nine Songs." 7 5 The se-
quence of images is quite similar—a dark, secret place on a
lonely mountain, wind and rain, a beauty adorned in flowers,
and an aura of unfulfilled desire. But in the "Mountain Spirit"
the poet saw her and could not reach her, or reached her and
could not stay with her. Although an elusive and awesome
spirit, she was less unsettling than this phantom of Little Su.
Two of Li Ho's elaborate and mythological poems
are even more clearly based on the "Nine Songs" tradition.
They deal with the two wives of the legendary Emperor Shun
who drowned themselves in the waters of the Hsiang River
on learning of his death. These two ladies, who by T'ang times
had become inextricably connected with the more ancient water
goddesses of the Hsiang River and Wu Mountain, were a pop-
ular literary topic. 76 However, a brief reading of one of these,
"The Hsiang Consort" 7 7 ("Hsiang fei"), will show that Li Ho
did not limit himself to a conventional treatment of the theme:

Spotted bamboos a thousand years old but yet alive,

Long accompany Ch'in O shading the River Hsiang.
A southern maiden sings and plays filling the winter sky,
In the Nine Mountains' silent green, red flower tears.
Parted simurgh and deserted phoenix in paulownia mist,
Wu clouds and Shu rain far off meet.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 106

In secret sadness autumn air ascends the green maples,

This cool night amid the waves, an ancient dragon moans. 7 8

The poem begins with a reference to the bamboos

famous in the Hsiang River region. Their being aged but not
dead reminds us that the legend is an old one but that it
somehow lingers on. This bamboo has long been associated
with the two wives, since their tears of mourning for Emperor
Shun supposedly gave rise to reddish spots on its stalks. In
the second line, we are introduced to the bamboos' age-old
companion, Ch'in O. Why Li Ho uses Ch'in O (the Ch'in fairy)
is puzzling. She is mentioned in another of his poems, "Ballad
of Heaven" ("T'ien-shang yao"), where she rolls up her blinds
at dawn in her palace on the moon. According to legend, she
fell in love with a young man who played the flute. One day
she and her husband mounted a dragon and a phoenix and
ascended to heaven. 7 9 Probably Li chooses her because of her
susceptibility to music. As we can see in an earlier poem by
Lu Chi (261-303), she was often associated with sad songs:

The Ch'i youth sings the Liang-fu dirge,

Ch'in O performs the Chang-nu tune.
The mournful music circles the rafters,
The lingering notes enter the Milky Way. 8 0

There is also the song lyric attributed to Li Po, "Remembering

Ch'in O " ("I Ch'in O " ) , which begins:

The flute sound sobs,

Ch'in O's dream is broken by the Ch'in tower moon,
The Ch'in tower moon,
Year after year the willow's hue,
Parting in grief at Pa-ling. 81

But probably Li Ho is attempting a composite image with con-

notations of several figures. Since we know from Edward
Schafer that the moon and river goddesses had become blended
by Li Ho's time, 82 the name may also carry overtones of the
goddess Ch'ang O who fled to the moon with the elixir of life.
Furthermore, another epithet of the Hsiang consort was O
Huang, or Fairy Empress. There seems little doubt that the
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 107

figure in this line is the moon goddess, or more likely the god-
dess's abode, the moon.
Into this silent landscape, the playing and singing
of a southern maiden intrude. Already the moon above has
been linked with lovers of music, so the music of the maiden
may summon the goddess. We can take the southern maiden
literally as an earthly inhabitant playing an instrument, or even,
perhaps, as J. D. Frodsham suggests, as a personified descrip-
tion of the "music" of the wind in the bamboo. 83 Probably she
is less a personality than a typical element of the exotic south-
ern landscape. 84 The first half of the poem is rounded out with
a reference to the green stillness of the Mountain of Nine Un-
certainties, the area sacred to Shun (his burial site), where red
tear-flowers are visible. 85 This might also be taken as referring
to the red-spotted bamboo covering the mountainside.
Despite the emptiness of the landscape, the allu-
sive language seems to render all things sentient. And while
the scene is still and sad, it is not static—the music fills the
stillness and tear-flowers fall.
The second half of the poem is more active, as if
the landscape is now becoming aroused as the music travels
on the air. The "parted simurgh and deserted phoenix" of the
next line act not only as symbols of the eternally separated
Emperor Shun and his consort, but also suggest the names of
famous tunes for the lute, 86 and hark back to the music loved
by the Ch'in king's daughter in the second line. It is as if the
souls of lovers were rising in the mist, moved by the plaintive
songs.
The theme of love is strengthened by the mention
of Wu clouds and Shu rain in the next line. Clouds and rain
have been associated with the act of love ever since the spirit
of Wu Mountain appeared to the King of Ch'u in his dream. 87
The ephemeral nature of the image makes it only suggestive,
however. The mist could merely be that rising over the river
and lake in the evening. The next line, combining "secret sad-
ness" and "autumn air" would seem to hint at both meanings
simultaneously. The sadness of the scene and the coolness of
the atmosphere have tinged the maples red. This recalls the
bamboos speckled with red tears.
Frances LaFleur Mochida 108

A dragon moans in the concluding line. Once again,

we are left hesitating between a naturalistic and a fanciful
interpretation. The Chinese believed that a moaning dragon
signaled rain, and perhaps the build-up of clouds over the water
has been the prelude to a storm. If so, there is no need to see
the dragon as fanciful—the southern waters abounded with
alligators whose bellowing the Chinese took for dragons' calls.88
On the other hand, the ancient dragon could be the Dragon
King in his underwater palace. In many T'ang tales, water
maidens with goddess-like attributes are found to be daugh-
ters or sisters of the king. One last possibility is that the
moaning dragon also represents a lute song title. One famous
lute player of the Northern Ch'i wrote ten songs entitled
"Dragon's Moans"-("Lung yin") after being instructed to play
them in a dream. 89
Many of the ambiguities caused by multiple refer-
ences may well be intentional. We can see the basic outline of
the poem, however. The Hsiang consort is sought for but does
not appear. The landscape, far from impassive, is affected by
the grief of Shun's longing for her, or the poet's longing for
her. The agent which produces nature's response to human
grief is music—either human, if a southern maiden is actually
playing on a deserted riverbank, or natural, if the sound is the
wind in the trees and rippling of the water before the coming
of the storm.
Though many of these points call to mind the "Nine
Songs" poems on the same subject, 90 there are important dif-
ferences. No concrete Other is present, nor is there any assur-
ance that she can, or ever will, return. If the bamboos have
been waiting for a thousand years and have grown old, what
of the goddess? Is she eternal as the moon, or is she aged with
grief and time? Such questions seem to have disturbed sensi-
tive poets in the T'ang. A contemporary of Li Ho's, the poet
Pao Jung, expressed such a sentiment outright in his poem
entitled "Mournful Hsiang Spirit" ("Pei Hsiang ling"):

How could her face after ten thousand years,

Be again that of a seductive beauty? 9 1
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 109

In a poem closely related in theme and treatment

to "The Hsiang Consort" called "The Emperor's Child" ("Ti-
tzu ko"), presumably written about the younger of the two di-
vine wives of Shun, 92 Li Ho hints at this idea further:

From Tung-t'ing Lake the Emperor's Child [can roam] a thousand

miles,
In the cool wind a goose cries, the sky is on the water.
Nine-jointed sweet flag dies on the rocks,
While the Hsiang Spirit plays the lute inviting the Emperor's Child,
On the hill's crest old cinnamons exhale their ancient fragrance,
A female dragon plaintively moans, the cold water glows.
On the sandy bank fish run with the Gentleman of White Rock,
Who lazily takes a true pearl and casts it into the dragon's hall. 93

Here the younger goddess is anticipated by the

Hsiang Spirit, probably her husband Shun. Though other
creatures and gods appear, there is no concrete mention of the
goddess herself—just an ancient fragrance wafting down from
the mountains as the spirit plays his songs, which seems like
the aging essence of the goddess.
The second couplet contains a bizarre image, con-
sidering that sweet flag is an herb conferring longevity. It sug-
gests an allusion to an old folksong in which an immortal begs
the singer to eat sweet flag to keep himself beautiful to be-
hold. 94 It also suggests the story in the Chronicle of Gods and
Immortals (Shen-hsien chuan) where the Han emperor Wu-ti met
an immortal on Sung Mountain who identified himself as the
Man of the Mountain of Nine Uncertainties (Emperor Shun),
and explained to Wu-ti that he sought the herb to gain im-
mortal life.95 So the herb is associated with both long life and
physical beauty. But in this poem, the sweet flag is dying.
Has the goddess's beauty also died? Has she been
metamorphasized into an ugly bellowing female dragon? These
may seem strange sentiments to suggest in poems about god-
desses, but it is characteristic of Li Ho to give ironic twists to
cliched phrases. The importance of this technique of his will
be discussed further below.
In both "The Hsiang Consort" and "The Emperor's
Frances LaFleur Mochida no
Child" we find images with multiple meanings drawn from
eclectic sources, popular as well as classical. 96 If we could be
sure we had tracked down all the possibilities for each one, it
is conceivable that we could produce a tissue of allusions
forming a coherent allegorical reading, but thus far only ten-
tative suggestions have been offered by commentators, tying
in "The Emperor's Child" with the death of Emperor Hsien-
tsung's mother, the Empress Dowager, in 816, or else with
Hsien-tsung's futile search for an elixir of eternal life. In recent
years Michael Fish has pursued these and historical readings
in other of Li Ho's poems with mythological themes, but has
concluded that no discernible formula exists for a consistent
reading on a second level. 97 Speculation will no doubt con-
tinue.
The poetic images seem rich and inexplicit. This may
be one reason why readers have always been reminded of the
Songs of the South collection when reading Li Ho. In the "Nine
Songs" and "Encountering Sorrow" we found primary mythic
metaphors with multiple qualities and almost subconscious ar-
chetypes behind them. The similarity of the two poetic styles
is reinforced on other levels. The unfolding of images in se-
quence in the two poems by Li Ho is quite reminiscent of the
narrative progression in the ancient ones. This is especially
obvious in "The Emperor's Child," which imitates almost ex-
actly the "Lady of the Hsiang": the autumn wind whines, the
waves of Tung-t'ing Lake lap the shores under the trees, the
spirit arrives in a cloud of mist, and the shaman leaves a love
token in the water.
But is Li Ho really re-creating old myths, infusing
them with new life? It is true, as Schafer remarks, that their
very vividness makes them seem to be the product of genuine
belief. 98 But if we look carefully at Li Ho's techniques of com-
position, we soon discover that rather than arising out of a body
of transmitted myth, or even out of a body of religious im-
agery within a conventional framework of interpretation, Li Ho's
poems are a pastiche of elements plundered from many con-
texts and recombined. He delights in shocking our expecta-
tions, as with the sweet flag dying on the rocks. The sweet
STRUCTURING A S E C O N D CREATION 111

flag, no longer representing simply longevity and beauty, be-

comes Li Ho's personal symbol for beauty ravaged by time. In
the wandering immortal poems we find the same stock of im-
ages appearing time after time in poet after poet. But Li Ho's
images derive their meaning only in a unique context.
As he builds up lines from his images, sensuous
qualities prevail over allusive sense. He strives to create a lyric
mood which unifies disparate elements and gives new mean-
ings to old metaphors. Far from being a product of myth, Li
Ho's artistry is aesthetic and self-consciously based on a wealth
of inherited texts. His sophistication is as far removed from the
mythic consciousness as the Ch'ii Yiian of legend was from
the barbarous southerners whose pagan rituals he supposedly
polished into the "Nine Songs."
If Li Ho was not holding a séance, what infuses his
poems with an atmosphere seemingly as numinous as any in
the "Nine Songs"? His scenes are unearthly even without any
assurance, as in the shaman's songs, that the goddesses do in-
habit the landscape. Somehow in Li Ho we sense the god-
desses without really seeing them. Do they exist? We hesitate
between the tangible and intangible. What we perceive could
be the sound of the rain or the singing of a ghost. It could be
the wind blowing in the cassia or the perfume of the goddess.
It is not the presence of ghosts per se that disturbs
us. Despite her wild beast entourage, the Mountain Spirit was
more bewitching than terrifying. Nor is imagining of ghosts or
goddesses in landscape unique to Li Ho. We've already seen
another example of this T'ang conceit in Shen Ya-chih's poem.
But the mood of Li Ho's poems, coupled with the lack of nat-
uralizing techniques such as references to dreams or the use
of obvious conventional metaphors, gives them an unfamiliar
and unsettling quality. The night should be sad and deserted,
but is it?
Surely these poems are structured on the old quest
narratives, but the Enchanting Other is no longer the central
focus. What is Li Ho seeking, and to what purpose? We must
look at his corpus as a whole to untangle the private symbols.
Perhaps nowhere are his intentions clearer than in his paean
Frances LaFleur Mochida 112

to a harp player: "Song of Li Ping's Vertical Harp" ("Li P'ing

k'ung-hou yin"). Since this poem has been brilliantly analyzed
elsewhere by Chou Ch'eng-chen," we need not go into detail
here, except to summarize the poem as a very clear statement
on the tremendous power of art. Chou shows how, by violat-
ing the traditional modes of thought associated with myth-
ological elements, Li Ho can highlight art's destructive and re-
creative potential:

. . . The goddess Nii Kua smelts her stones

To weld the sky.
Stones split asunder, the sky startles,
Autumn rains gush forth.
He goes in dreams to the Magic Mountain
To teach the Weird Crone.
Old fishes leap above the waves,
Gaunt dragons dance.
Even Wu Kang, unsleeping still,
Leans on his cassia tree,
While wing-foot dew drifts wetly
Over the shivering hare.100

Li Ping's music can reach Heaven, can cause the

clouds to freeze in their tracks, and can cause rain to gush forth.
Even Wu Kang, doomed like Sisyphus to toil forever, cutting
the cassia tree on the moon, can pause for a moment from his
labor. 101
Normally Heaven for Li Ho is a realm of infinite
impassivity. Its power and its immortality derive from its in-
vulnerability to the ravages of mortal passions. Probably the
most famous line in Li Ho's entire collection is: "If Heaven had
feelings, it too would grow old." 102 Throughout his poems, we
find a dichotomy between the exquisite creatures of the celes-
tial or eternal realm, almost frightening in their icy perfection,
and the anguished inhabitants of the earth, who haunt us with
their doomed emotions. But music, which throughout Li Ho's
works represents the expressive power of art, can move
Heaven. In the goddess poems it was music which stirred the
STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 113

fragrance in the cassias, causing the dragon to moan, bringing

rain, and causing the bamboos to weep red tears.
What the poet is questing for in his melancholy
landscapes infused with mortal longings is power over Heaven
through artistic imagination. The whole subjective world he
creates is a metaphor for his passionate attachment to life, the
same passion which makes even the goddesses old because they
are moved by longing for a reunion with Emperor Shun. Only
art can bridge the chasm between mortality and immortality,
and only art is worthy of being Li Ho's divine intermediary,
his Enchanting Other. Because if art can make Heaven weep,
it can conversely make the artist powerful within his universe
of words.
Why does Li Ho choose to write "ghostly" poems
which hesitate between the real and the unreal to express his
desire? In the first part of this article we looked at narrative
poems where the supernatural provided the impetus to change
one equilibrium to another. The supernatural formed a believ-
able part of the mythic structure as the shaman-poet created it
and therefore was a viable artistic means of effecting change.
In the wandering immortal poems, we saw supernatural themes
used to set up an entirely separate and marvelous universe
which was read via a conventional code as allegory. Since the
supernatural could be in this way "naturalized" by the reader,
the dual structure of the real and unreal was never threat-
ened. Unlike the shamanistic poems, these tended more to-
ward lyric stasis. The supernatural no longer provided a needed
suspension of natural law, because it appeared within a fan-
tasy where all was supernatural but at the same time natural-
ized. As a narrative catalyst its effect was minimal.
The function of the supernatural in Li Ho's poetry
stands poised between the other two. An equilibrium operat-
ing by natural forces is initially set up, but the remainder of
the poem hesitates between the supernatural (which would
effect a change to a second equilibrium) and the natural, where
we would tend toward lyric stasis. Poised between the two, a
"naturalized" reading is impossible. This may well be why Tu
Frances LaFleur Mochida 114

Mu and others accused Li Ho of lacking in conception: he was

violating the tacit poetic code whereby verse could be read si-
multaneously on both the immediate sensory level and on an
allegorical level.
Todorov, in his study of the structure of the fantas-
tic genre, claims that the fantastic cannot be attained in po-
etry, since poetry by its very nature is hypothetical; it should
be read as a text rejecting all representation, considering each
sentence as a purely semantic combination. 103 It is true that we
now tend to read poetry this way, but the Chinese poetic con-
vention was much more akin to the classical Western ap-
proach, as evidenced in Voltaire: " A metaphor, to be a good
one, must always be an image; it must be such as a painter
could make with brush." 1 0 4 Furthermore, for the Chinese
writing conventional regulated verse, these painted images
should not only embody elements of the natural universe but
carry a moral significance as well, built up step by step from
the encoded allusions.
Within such a convention, could not Li Ho produce
fantastic poetry? The fantastic, as Todorov defines it, is pro-
duced when an event in the natural world cannot be natural-
ized by the reader according to the laws of this same world as
determined by the reading convention. The fantastic occupies
the duration of the uncertainty which ensues while we vacil-
late between taking the event as an illusion (hence still within
natural norms), or as a fact explained in a world operating on
different laws. 105
This would seem to be precisely what Li Ho was
trying to effect in his ghostly poems. But why did he choose
this technique? The pleasure derived from the use of the fan-
tastic is in breaking laws—all the better to make us aware of
them. As Todorov has argued, the fantastic appears as the "bad
conscience" in a positivist era when literature is taken as "real"
and a mirror of the universe. 106
During Li Ho's era poets were beginning to exper-
iment with and question the classical formula for poetry. Tu
Fu's later poems some years before had pointed out the way
toward an opposition between the aesthetic universe of the
STRUCTURING A S E C O N D C R E A T I O N 115

poem and the external natural universe. Internal relationships

between images in his later poems evolved more complexity,
while their correspondence to outside referents became less
clear. 107 Departing from the classical regulated verse formula
of masters like Wang Wei, who rounded off his poems with
propositions integrating himself serenely into his poetic land-
scape, Tu Fu began jarring readers with endings of striking
contrast to the natural scene he had created.
By constructing poems with a fantastic framework
Li Ho went one step further, artistically questioning the func-
tion of the real and the unreal in literature. Although the fan-
tastic could not answer the dilemma of the relationship of lan-
guage to reality (since it still had to assume certain elements
depicted in literature as "real" representations in order to pro-
duce hesitation in the reader), 108 it did, in China as it would
also do in Europe, open the door to a more "aesthetic" or
"modern" approach to literature in which words could have a
life of their own, apart from and even surpassing external
reality.
Li Ho's fantastic visions give us the sense that the
focus was shifting back again from the poem itself, as a "real"
embodiment of the universe, to the poet and his unique ex-
pressive power, which could mediate between the world of
man's intellect and nature. By no means a hysterical shaman
himself, he succeeded in doing on a formalized aesthetic basis
what the wandering immortals had been unable to do: he built
up a world through his expressive power. In doing so, Li Ho
also had to rely on an elaborate framework for his "second
creation." But instead of building a sequence of actions with
ritual logic and efficacy, he built up a personal landscape of
images divorced from the natural world and from the conven-
tion, clustered and regrouped to conform to his emotional re-
quirements.
It has ever been man's desire to escape from time
and an imperfect world, but the artistic means that he chooses
to free himself depend very much on the symbolic world at
his disposal. In ancient Ch'u men sought to raise themselves
up temporarily to the level of the gods, and in early medieval
Frances LaFleur Mochida 116

times they sought instead to create a separate world, better than

earth, peopled with beings who remained forever young. But
by Li Ho's sophisticated era man was beginning to see himself
as the most important element in his consciousness despite his
limitations. So instead of raising himself up to a higher level
or renouncing the world in favor of paradise, he tried to bring
the gods down, to make Heaven weep with him.
 Appendix

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 The Expression of Self
in the Kung-an School:
Non-Romantic Individualism
Jonathan Chaves

T he emergence of the idea that self-expression

is a major goal of literature is usually associ-
ated in the West with the so-called Romantic Movement. Ro-
manticism is contrasted with Classicism in a dichotomy which
is frequently confusing and even misleading. Students of Ro-
manticism have demonstrated that the term is given so many
different meanings, and is applied to such varied styles of
writing (the various English, German, and French Romantics)
that a satisfactory definition is virtually impossible to formu-
late. 1 Even if we accept the standard formulations, however,
it seems clear that the Romantic-Classic dichotomy is inade-
quate even within the world of Western literature. For exam-
ple, it utterly fails to account for the Middle Ages, one of the
major periods of European cultural history. This being the case,
one is not surprised to find that these terms mean next to
nothing in a non-Western context, such as that of China. And
yet efforts to characterize certain Chinese writers as "roman-
tic" continue unabated.
Jonathan Chaves 124

Recently, in a thorough and well-documented study

of the Kung-an school of the late Ming, Hung Ming-shui has
asserted that there was " a kind of romantic movement going
on in late M i n g , " and he further specifies that " t h e term 'ro-
manticism' is used . . . referring to . . . identity with nature,
emphasis on originality and spontaneity, [the] plea for cre-
ative sensibility, and the concept of the urgency and overflow
of feeling." 2 These are indeed qualities which are convention-
ally labeled " r o m a n t i c , " but at least two questions are begged
here. First, what do these phrases actually mean? Words-
worth and Wang Wei (701-761) can both be said to express
"identity with nature," but any close analysis of their poetry
will reveal differences greater than the similarities. Second, are
these qualities truly characteristic of the Kung-an writers? Al-
most any Chinese poet can be said to express "identity with
nature." On the other hand, a true emphasis on "overflow of
feeling" (from Wordsworth's famous phrase, " t h e sponta-
neous overflow of powerful feelings") would indeed be un-
usual in Chinese poetry, but the Kung-an writers, in practice
at least, never attain (if indeed they even strive for) the emo-
tional outpouring of a Shelley, let alone the veritable flood tide
of emotion in Novalis or Lamartine.
I believe there are two basic qualities in traditional
Chinese culture which prevented the emergence of true "ro-
manticism." While the Romantic movement was characterized
by a sense of the individual's (the artist's) alienation from So-
ciety, there existed in China the persistent conception of the
individual as essentially integrated with the rest of society in
some fashion. Even such figures as Han Shan and Shih Te (early
ninth century) should be interpreted as eccentrics within a tra-
dition of accepted eccentricity that can be traced back at least
as far as the Chuang Tzu. This in turn prevents true alienation.
If one does not like the present state of society, one can with-
draw (indeed, as Frederick Mote has shown in his superb study
of "Confucian eremitism," one is sometimes expected to with-
draw) 3 from the " w o r l d " in the assurance that things will
change for the better eventually, and that meanwhile one's ac-
tion will not only not be frowned upon but will be praised by
those of true discernment.
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 125

The second quality in Chinese culture militating

against the rise of true romanticism I find to be the deeply
rooted feeling that the world (the universe) is innately numi-
nous (sacred, imbued with a spiritual quality). This conception
underlies Taoism (in all senses of the word), Buddhism ("Nir-
vana is Samsara"), and Confucianism as well (Mencius' hao-
jan chih ch'i, "overflowing spirit," echoed in the li, "innate
principle," of Neo-Confucianism). It is in fact a key element in
the Chinese world view at a level more basic than that of doc-
trinal distinction. One might think at first that this would make
China the romantic environment par excellence: after all, don't
the Romantics talk constantly of "A motion and a spirit, that
impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And
rolls through all things" (Wordsworth, "Lines Composed A Few
Miles Above Tin tern Abbey . . .")? Here, I believe, we come
to a point of crucial importance. First of all, the Tao is "that
which is so of itself" (tzu-jan); Nirvana is Samsara: there is here
a true acceptance of the world, before which the perceiving ego
becomes, as it were, transparent, allowing the mystery of ex-
istence to be itself, without interference. The result is true
meditation, in the technical, religious sense, an experience of
spiritual penetration. The Romantic, on the contrary, is so
amazed to find himself moved at all by the external world-—
after centuries of being told that the only real truth was in the
realm of Platonic ideals, or in Heaven, and that the "creation"
was either ephemeral and morally contemptible, or a mere
machine (the Rationalist view)—that he cannot stop boasting
of his discovery, and interposing himself between experience
and reader. In addition, as a highly self-conscious artist, he
becomes the God of this newly discovered world, and his ego,
if anything, looms larger than ever before. For this reason, with
most of the Romantics, we always suspect that the artist be-
lieves himself actually to be the creator of this wonderful realm
through the power of his "imagination," something the Chinese
poets would find absurd, if they could even comprehend it.
In a word, then, the Romantic conception of nature
never really goes beyond the old notion of Platonic ideals, su-
perimposed in this case on concrete reality (this is particularly
obvious among the Germans). Furthermore, when the Ro-
Jonathan Chaves 126

mantic poets praise nature, the sentimentality which is so ap-

parent in their work is essentially solipsistic emotion, self-gen-
erated rather than truly inspired by the world of nature. No
wonder, then, that the first real Chinese Romantics only ap-
pear in modern Chinese literature, as the result of Western in-
fluence, and that they are embarrassingly adolescent in their
emulation of Romantic modes of perception and expression
(Hsu Chih-mo, 1895-1931; Yu Ta-fu, 1895-1945)—they had no
relevant native tradition to draw upon.
Although the Kung-an school is frequently de-
picted as wild and bizarre, I believe it can be shown that Yuan
Hung-tao (1568-1610) and the other Kung-an writers were well
within the mainstream of Chinese poetry and poetic theory.
In fact, they were simply restoring sanity to a literary scene in
which it was being seriously argued that one should write only
in the manner of the poets of the High T'ang period, some eight
or nine centuries in the past. In calling for the expression of
feeling, these poets were only harking back to the "Great Pref-
ace" ("Ta-hsu") to the Book of Songs (Shih ching). In calling for
a return to the world of actual nature, they were only attempt-
ing to restore the age-old relationship between art and nature
in Chinese culture. In calling for a more lively, colloquial dic-
tion, and the depiction of everyday experience, they were ap-
pealing to one of the venerable traditions of Chinese poetic
style, that which reached from Po Chii-i (772-846) in the T'ang
dynasty, to Mei Yao-ch'en (1002-60) and Su Shih (1037-1101)
in the Northern Sung, and to Yang Wan-li (1127-1206) in the
Southern Sung.
In contrast to this, the Romantic movement re-
flected a true dislocation in European history (in the words of
David Wright): "The Industrial Revolution destroyed the fam-
ily as an economic unit and converted the working individual
into an impersonal labour force. . . . Our mass society was
being born. . . . It was the spiritual and metaphysical impli-
cations of the scientific and technological revolution which be-
gan in the seventeenth century . . . together with the changed
and changing view of man's place in the universe, that sparked
off the Romantic movement." 4 In the absence of an Industrial
S E L F IN THE KUNG-AN SCHOOL 127

Revolution, China did not experience anything even remotely

resembling the wild, egocentric individualism of the Roman-
tics, which was a form of reaction to the frightening "mass so-
ciety" already taking form. The late Ming was certainly a dif-
ficult, troubled time, and such figures as Li Chih (1527-1602),
who was a friend of Yuan Hung-tao, do represent a call for
individualism, 5 but Chinese society was able to absorb these
shockwaves and return more or less to normal after the new
Ch'ing dynasty became stabilized. For this reason, Hung Ming-
shui is wrong when he blames the Ch'ing for nipping Chinese
"romanticism" in the bud. The equally interesting "individu-
alist" tendency in late Ming painting continued unabated into
the early Ch'ing (painting, perhaps, is harder to censor than
literature, which presents ideas in an explicit form), but lost
its force before too long anyway and died a natural death. 6
On the other hand, Lilian Furst is certainly correct
in seeing Romanticism as the true watershed for the West, the
source of virtually the entire modern movement in Western
culture. 7 This is because, again, it corresponded to a social
change (the Industrial Revolution) which was simply of greater
magnitude than anything China was to experience until the
coming of Westernization late in the nineteenth century.
From these general considerations, let us now pro-
ceed to a detailed query of each "romantic" trait which might
be purported to characterize the Kung-an writers, and in this
process, perhaps, define with more precision where they really
stand (most of these traits are implied in Hung Ming-shui's
discussion, but not all of them; there is also some inevitable
overlap among them).

Attitude Toward Nature

No one can deny the significant role played by na-

ture imagery in Romantic poetry, and in theory as well. Fried-
rich von Schlegel (1772-1829), the German Romantic poet and
Jonathan Chaves 128

theoretician whose turgid writings comprise undoubtedly the

largest body of theoretical musings on Romanticism, even de-
fined art as "the hieroglyphic expression of outer nature trans-
figured by the imagination." 8 But the cat is let out of the bag
by the key role assigned here to the artisfs "imagination." One
never escapes the feeling that for all their effusive praise of
nature, the Romantics were not truly interested in "that which
is so of itself." Nature was significant to them only as a kind
of base from which to take off on their flights of imagination.
Their true concern was with certain aspects of their own egos.
Now, it has been claimed that John Clare (1793-1864) "was a
nature-poet in a sense to which none of the other Romantics
can lay claim: for in his work Clare displays the knowledge
and observation of a naturalist as well as a poet." 9 We are asked
to consider his poem "The Nightingale's Nest" from this point
of view. Let us do so:

Up this green woodland-ride let's softly rove,

And list the nightingale—she dwells just here.
Hush! let the wood-gate softly clap, for fear
The noise might drive her from her home of love;
For here I've heard her many a merry year—
At morn, at eve, nay, all the livelong day,
As though she lived on song. This very spot,
Just where that old man's beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o'er the road and stops the way—
And where that child its bluebell flowers hath got,
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails—
There have I hunted like a very boy,
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn
To find her nest and see her feed her young.
And vainly did I many hours employ:
All seemed as hidden as a thought unborn.
And where those crimping fern-leaves ramp among
The hazel's under-boughs, I've nestled down
And watch'd her while she sung; and her renown
Hath made me marvel that so famed a bird
Should have no better dress than russet brown.
Her wings would tremble in her ecstasy,
And feathers stand on end, as 'twere with joy,
S E L F IN THE KUNG-AN SCHOOL

And mouth wide open to release her heart

Of its out-sobbing songs. The happiest part
Of summer's fame she shared, for so to me
Did happy fancies shapen her employ;
But if I touched a bush or scarcely stirred,
All in a moment stopt. I watched in vain:
The timid bird had left the hazel bush,
And at a distance hid to sing again.
Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves,
Rich ecstasy would pour its luscious strain,
Till envy spurred the emulating thrush
To start less wild and scarce inferior songs;
For while of half the year care him bereaves,
To damp the ardour of his speckled breast,
The nightingale to summer's life belongs,
And naked trees and winter's nipping wrongs
Are strangers to her music and her rest.
Her joys are evergreen, her world is wide—
Hark! there she is as usual—let's be hush—
For in this blackthorn-clump, if rightly guessed,
Her curious house is hidden. Part aside
These hazel branches in a gentle way
And stoop right cautious 'neath the rustling boughs,
For we will have another search to-day
And hunt this fern-strewn thorn clump round and round;
And where this reeded wood-grass idly bows,
We'll wade right through, it is a likely nook:
In such like spots and often on the ground,
They'll build, where rude boys never think to look.
Ay, as I live! her secret nest is here,
Upon this whitethorn stump! I've searched about
For hours in vain. There! put that bramble by—
Nay, trample on its branches and get near.
How subtle is the bird! she started out.
And raised a plaintive note of danger nigh,
Ere we were past the brambles; and now, near
Her nest, she sudden stops—as choking fear
That might betray her home. So even now
We'll leave it as we found it: safety's guard
Of pathless solitudes shall keep it still.
See there! she's sitting on the old oak bough,
Jonathan Chaves 130

Mute in her fears; our presence doth retard

Her joys, and doubt turns every rapture chill.
Sing on, sweet bird! may no worse hap befall
Thy visions than the fear that now deceives.
We will not plunder music of its dower,
Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall;
For melody seems hid in every flower
That blossoms near thy home. These harebells all
Seem bowing with the beautiful in song;
And gaping cuckoo, with its spotted leaves,
Seems blushing with the singing it has heard.
How curious is the nest! no other bird
Uses such loose materials, or weaves
Its dwelling in such spots: dead oaken leaves
Are placed without and velvet moss within,
And little scraps of grass, and—scant and spare,
Of what seem scarce materials—down and hair;
For from men's haunts she nothing seems to win.
Yet nature is the builder, and contrives
Homes for her children's comfort even here,
Where solitude's disciples spend their lives
Unseen, save when a wanderer passes near
Who loves such pleasant places. Deep adown
The nest is made, a hermit's mossy cell.
Snug lie her curious eggs in number five,
Of deadened green, or rather olive-brown;
And the old prickly thorn-bush guards them well.
So here we'll leave them, still unknown to wrong,
As the old woodland's legacy of song. 10

How true that everything is relative! It may well be

that "compared with Clare's, the poetry of Shelley and Keats
. . . is self-conscious," 1 1 but from the point of view of the
Chinese poet, it is immediately apparent that in " T h e Night-
ingale's N e s t , " the poet himself is the true subject. "I've
searched about / For hours in vain." When the search ends
successfully, the poet is full of self-congratulation for his de-
cision to leave the nest unharmed: " W e will not plunder mu-
sic of its dower, / Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall . . .";
"So here we'll leave them [the eggs], still unknown to wrong."
SELF IN THE KUNG-AN SCHOOL 131

It is within man's power to manipulate nature, and only the

self-conscious restraint of the poet saves the nest. In the wake
of the Industrial Revolution, examples of man's "plunder" of
nature were legion, and Clare was well aware of them. But,
alas, much as he might have loved nature, Clare cannot help—
as indeed none of the Romantics could help—personifying
"her" out of existence: the nightingale's nest is "home of love"
(do birds actually love in the human sense?); her feathers are
a "dress" of "russet brown"; she feels "ecstasy," "fear," "joy."
Clare might not have realized it, but he is manipulating na-
ture, refusing to allow nature to be itself.
Let us now consider a poem by Yuan Hung-tao, one
of his masterpieces, "In the Cave of the Jade City":

Deep as a valley
high as a hall
penetrating to the heart of clouds
tunneling to the earth's core.
The way is blocked
by stalactites and stalagmites
rocks that look sick
under a crazy sky—
yellow ones of pus
white ones of marrow.
Clouds in floating threads
rise from our boots.
White bats
big as chickens
startled by the torches
flap against our faces.
Suddenly: a peak surges up
then: open and level again.
Dragons want to speak
they hear us and stay quiet
their spittle flows
giving off strange odors.
Ghosts? Immortals?
Mist? Fog?
Our torches give no light
where do we go now?
Jonathan Chaves 132

The ocean can be crossed

the Yangtze traversed
but the Immortal of Spiritual Power
will be hard to find again.12

Like Clare, Yuan is engaged in a journey of explo-

ration. We know from his prose account of his trip, 13 and from
one left by his friend T'ao Wang-ling (1562-1609, another ma-
jor figure in the Kung-an school), 14 that the journey to this
cave—located some ninety li from Chu-chi subprefecture, south
of Shao-hsing in Chekiang province—actually took place. Where
Clare is in virtually complete command throughout his trip
(despite some minor frustration), and his trip ends success-
fully, Yuan tells us that he "remembered hearing an old story
about people suffocating because of torch smoke in caves; I
became frightened and retreated. . . . " This trepidation is re-
flected in the poem by the poet's question, "Where do we go
now?"
Are we therefore to conclude that Yuan has failed
to have a real "nature experience," while Clare managed to
find the nest and appreciate its beauty? On the contrary! Clare's
egocentric stance, his insistence on seeing nature as if it were
quasi-human, acts as an obstacle between the poet (or the
reader) and nature per se. Yuan, on the other hand, has in-
deed encountered the Mystery which men have sensed in caves
since they painted bison on the ceiling of Altamira, or since
Orpheus entered the underworld through the mouth of a cave.
This mystery cannot be sentimentalized. As the Tao-te ching puts
it (in Arthur Waley's translation):

Heaven and Earth are ruthless;

To them the Ten Thousand Things are but as straw dogs. 1 5

In other words, nature should not be conceived of

as possessing " h u m a n e " values (jeti). It is the process of ex-
istence, which can only be seen for what it is when value
judgments are dropped. Yuan truly feels the power of na-
ture's transformations, and leads the reader directly into the
cave at the outset of his poem. Nothing could be further from
the Romantics than the lean, abrupt, unsentimental power of
S E L F IN T H E K U N G - A N S C H O O L 133

these lines—written in the highly unusual three-character me-

ter. Yuan ends with questions, and with a statement that im-
plies that it will be difficult to encounter the mystery again.
We are left in true awe of nature's power, with a proper sense
of the gulf between the human realm and the realm beyond.
It is not within the poet's power to manipulate this environ-
ment. Also, the rocks may seem "sick" and the " s k y , "
"crazy"—but this is merely how they feel to the pilgrim as he
moves deeper into the cave. He does not mean to imply that
perhaps they actually are sick or crazy.
Paradoxically, it is only when nature's otherness is
realized (i.e., when the veil of sentimentalizing is removed) that
the way is open to a true mystic experience of unity with na-
ture.
Awe before nature's transformational power can be
traced in Chinese literature to the Chuang Tzu. The notion that
paradises inhabited by immortals exist deep within certain caves
is a popular way of expressing the theme that caves are seats
of this power. It is significant that Yuan Hung-tao was a great
traveler, exploring the hidden reaches of caves and moun-
tains, and describing his experiences in superb yu-chi, or travel
essays. In this he foreshadowed and influenced the famous
explorer Hsu Hsia-k'o (1586-1641).
Not all of Yiian's nature poems are as remarkable
as this one. In Chinese poetry, when a poet develops a style
that is new, he will nevertheless continue to write poems in
the traditional styles side by side with those in his new style.
For this reason. Yuan Hung-tao has a great many poems which
are virtually indistinguishable from those written by certain
poets in the past. For example, "A Record of My Trip to Mount
She":
Yellow leaves spiral down through the air;
waterfall spray flies into raindrops.
Patches of moss darken Buddha's face;
the stones here have been brushed by the robes of a god.
The monks are tranquil, though their kitchen has few vegetables;
the mountain, cold—not many sparrows in the flock.
Of themselves, my worries all disappear;
I do not have to try to forget the world. 1 6
Jonathan Chaves 134

This is the quintessential T'ang-style nature poem,

with the proper balance of ching ("scene") and ch'ing ("feel-
ing"), albeit a masterful example of the genre. Such a poem is
even easier to contrast with Romantic "nature poetry" than the
previous one. The poet's ego is brought into the picture only
in the last two lines, with great subtlety (and even here there
is no first person pronoun in the original Chinese text). We
are left with a feeling of great tranquillity, which we sense de-
rives from the innate tranquillity of nature, and the Buddhist
community which exists in harmony with nature. Like the
mystery and power of nature evoked in the previous poem,
this calmness is allowed to exist without interpretation. By
contrast, we must agree that the Romantic poet, in the percep-
tive words of Lilian Furst, "invariably apprehends the outer
world through the mirror of his ego as against the objective
approach of the Realist. What matters to the Romantic is not
what is but how it seems to h i m . " 1 7 It is interesting, however,
that Furst finds it necessary to contrast the obviously egocen-
tric Romantic approach with objective realism. She is appar-
ently unaware, as indeed are most Western intellectuals, of a
third possibility, which is in fact embodied in such Chinese
poems as the two by Yiian discussed above: the poet is indeed
interested in what is (i.e., the Tao, tzu-jan), but he regards it
not as some cold, objective fact, but rather as being which is
numinous (sacred) in itself, and hence capable of inspiring au-
thentically spiritual experience. Yiian Hung-tao would have
understood, as the Romantic poet could not, that "sensual
perceptions do not reveal the essence of things . . . only be-
neath the visible surface are the veins and sinews in which the
living substance of the form flows and pulsates." These words,
written by the Yugoslavian archeologist Dragoslav Srejovic,
describe the monumental stone sculptures discovered at Le-
penski Vir in the Iron Gates gorge of the Danube, and carved
around 5000 B.C.18 They could just as well be taken as a de-
scription of nature as it was understood by the Chinese, whose
basic cosmology is seen to form a continuum with the peren-
nial world view of prehistoric man. The realist would look at
the "visible surface." The Romantic imagines some ideal form
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 135

in his mind, loosely based on the visible surface. The third ap-
proach, known in the West only to the mystics, is to penetrate
the surface and to sense the "living substance" beneath. This
is the Tao.

Individualism and the Expression of Personal Emotion

There can be no question that Yuan Hung-tao and

his circle, including his personal friend Li Chih, are calling for
individualism in life and art. Even here, though, I believe a
distinction must be made. For the Romantics, individualism
implies almost complete difference between one person and
another. The result might be, say, obsessive fascination with
the nighttime (Novalis), total insanity (Clare), heroism and
death in a war with the Turks (Byron)—the list is endless. When
Li Chih calls for a return to the "childlike mind," however,
while he is asking that the individual rely on his own
heart/mind as opposed to external authority—and is certainly
an individualist in this sense—we feel that this innately good
mind will ultimately turn out to be more or less the same for
everyone. The basic human emotions, after all, are the same.
This is essentially Mencius, via Wang Yang-ming (1472-1528).
Translated into a conception of individualism (or
originality) in artistic style, this comes out something like a
passage from the Chin and Yuan thinker Ho Ching (1233-1275),
to which I have called attention elsewhere. I will quote this
passage and my brief commentary on it here:
"The writers of past and present have not necessar-
ily sought to make the style (fa) of another person their own
style. They have only comprehended the basic patterns. When
one has fully comprehended the basic patterns of Heaven and
Earth, then creativity will inhere in the Self (wo)." The idea ap-
pears to be that mere imitation of others is not creativity—in-
tense personal experience must precede any form of artistic
creation. But the stuff of that experience will ultimately consist
Jonathan Chaves 136

of the essential truths which the great artists of the past have
also discovered. Thus the poet and the painter will reach a point
where the expression of an individual perception and the
expression of the Absolute are one and the s a m e . 1 9

This is related in turn to what Brower and Miner, speaking of

Japanese poetry, call the "paradox of original conventional-
ity," 2 0 and is far from the almost complete break with tradi-
tion or indeed with each other (Blake's dislike for Words-
worth, the estrangement of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron's
disdain for nearly everyone, etc.) that characterizes the Ro-
mantics. More will be said about the idea of originality later
on.
On a less spectacular scale, Yuan Hung-tao defi-
nitely calls for each historical period to create its own litera-
ture. In a letter to one of his closest friends, Chiang Ying-k'o
(tzu, Chin-chih, 1556-1605), he says, " A s the ways of society
undergo change, literature must follow suit. So it is natural that
the present need not imitate the past," 2 1 a view echoed by yet
another important Kung-an writer, Huang Hui (1554-1612):
"Isn't it true that literature follows the vicissitudes of the
times?" 2 2 Chiang Ying-k'o, who deserves recognition as one
of the most forceful theorists of the Kung-an school, takes the
next logical step and claims that "Poetry is based on the na-
ture and the emotions (hsing-ch'ing). If a poem is a real poem,
then a single reading will suffice to bring the poet's nature and
emotions [i.e., personality] before one's eyes." Chiang goes on,
in a remarkable passage, to establish connections between
eleven stylistic types and the respective personality types (if
we may use this phrase) of the poets who would write in these
various ways. The phrases he uses are drawn from the reper-
toire of notoriously difficult two-character expressions which
plague those who attempt to understand Chinese literary crit-
icism, but here are some tentative translations:

W h e n the poetry is unrestricted,

the poet must be a free spirit (feng-liu) . . .
W h e n the poetry is withered and gaunt,
the poet must be cold and repressed.
S E L F IN T H E K U N G - A N SCHOOL 137

When the poetry is rich and full,

the poet must be expansive and giving.
When the poetry is mournful,
the poet must be depressed. . . .

Chiang continues:

This is comparable to the flowering peach tree, plum

tree, and apricot tree. By looking at the blossoms one can know
the tree they come from. As for plagiarists, they are "deer who
cover themselves with tiger skins" and have no discrimination.
For example, a poet who speaks of himself as old when he is
not actually old, poor when he is not actually poor, or sick when
he is not actually sick, is a robber of Tu Fu's house! A poet who
never drinks a single cup of wine, but says, "Three hundred
cups a day!" who never spends a cent, but says, 'Tens of thou-
sands of cash with a sweep of the hand!" is a pickpocket steal-
ing from Li Po! From these examples, others can be figured out.
When such poets say their work is based on their nature and
emotions, they miss the mark by over a thousand miles!23

How close are we to Romanticism here? Going back

to Yuan's idea that literature follows changes in society, we
might call to mind this statement by the French Romantic
theoretician, Émile Deschamps (1791-1871): " W h a t constitutes
Romanticism is not so much the times . . . as the tendency of
certain writers to liberate themselves from rules of art" ( " C e
qui constitue le romantisme cf est bien moins l'époque . . . que
la tendance de quelques auteurs à s'affranchir des règles de
l'art"). 2 4 This is a very different idea, namely that the new
movement is created by a few remarkable individuals rather than
as a natural response to the changes of the times, as believed
by Yiian.
What, then, of Chiang Ying-K'o's correlation of po-
etic style and the personality of the poet? Here too a surface
resemblance should not blind us to a more deep-rooted differ-
ence. Chiang is speaking about types: the two-character
expressions he uses to characterize personality and stylistic type
are all traditional and had been in use for centuries. What
Chiang does do, however—and this is the real significance of
Jonathan Chaves 138

Kung-an theory in this respect—is to go further than anyone

in the Chinese past in correlating specific stylistic traits with
specific personality traits. He stops short, though, of the Ro-
mantic implication that each individual artist will create a style
sui generis to his own particular genius, an implication that
eventually led, in the twentieth century, to its natural reductio
ad absurdum, with artists doing almost anything to create their
own style: Josef Albers (at one point in his career, at any rate)
painting nothing but squares superimposed upon one an-
other. Chiang Ying-k'o, on the other hand, is arguing that a
"cold and repressed" poet, for example, will inevitably write
"withered and gaunt" poetry, as naturally as a flowering plum
tree will bear plum blossoms and not apricot blossoms. There
may be any number of cold and repressed poets.
Within these limitations, however, it cannot be de-
nied that individualism and the expression of feeling are both
being called for by the Kung-an writers. Yuan Hung-tao ex-
presses this most dramatically in his letters. For example, "There
is no fixed pattern for the expression of newness in literature.
You must only put forth something which others could not put
forth. The lines, the individual words, the music: each of these
must flow out (liu-ch'u) from your own heart. This, truly is
'newness.' ' , 2 5 Similarly, in the magnificent letter to Li Tzu-jan
he writes, "Human feelings demand some medium of expres-
sions—only then can we be happy. So some people do it
through chess, some through sex, others through hobbies, and
still others through writing." 26

Imagination and the Cult of the Artist

Recent students of Romanticism have come to see

the emphasis on the artist's imagination as the single most
characteristic aspect of Romanticism.27 It is also the point of
least similarity with China's Kung-an school. Coleridge's fa-
mous term "esemplastic" implies that the imagination is, in his
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 139

words, "an instrument to achieve unity within the universe,

to bring disparate elements together in a coherent shape." 2 8
Similarly, Wordsworth tells us that poetry's "appropriate em-
ployment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat things not as
they are, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the pas-
sions."29 In other words the universe as it is (which is precisely
what interests the Chinese poets) is merely raw material for
the artist's imagination, which creates order where previously
there was chaos. This is the so-called "modifying power" of
the imagination. Nothing could be further from the main-
stream Chinese conception of creativity.
The only extended discussion in Chinese literary
criticism of something like the "imagination" is Liu Hsieh's (c.
465-522) opaque chapter on shen-ssu in the Wen-hsin tiao-lung
(The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons), and to the
extent (which is not very great) that one can determine what
he has in mind, the differences are more striking than the sim-
ilarities. The term shen-ssu (literally, "spirit-thought," "god-like
thought") seems to mean by turns the ability to conjure up
previously experienced images before the mind (the power of
recall, or even memory), and, more prosaically, the ability to
arrange the components of a literary work in one's mind be-
fore actually writing them down. At no point is it suggested
that the artist manipulates the universe in any way. On the
contrary, in the most significant passage in this chapter, Liu
Hsieh uses Buddho-Taoist terminology to suggest that the art-
ist must attain a state of tranquillity before contemplating the
phenomena of the universe: only then will things appear as
they really are. This is the transparency of ego, or even tran-
scendence of ego (in the technical, religious sense, egoless-
ness) of which I have already spoken. It is also the precise op-
posite of the Romantic conception. In the translation of Vincent
Shih, "When the key works smoothly, there is nothing which
will not appear in its true form. . . . For this reason, vacancy
and tranquility are important in the development of literary
thinking: the achievement of this state of vacancy and tran-
quility entails the cleansing of the five viscera and the purifi-
cation of the spirit." 3 0 It is precisely things as they are rather
Jonathan Chaves 140

than as they appear that interest Liu Hsieh's poet. To perceive

them as they are, he strives for inner "vacancy and tranquil-
ity" in the Buddho-Taoist sense.
On the other hand, when the Romantics speak of
the so-called "mediating power" of the imagination, they
sometimes do sound vaguely Buddho-Taoist. Shelley, for ex-
ample, says, "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of
the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not
familiar." Thus, poets are "hierophants of an unapprehended
inspiration." 31 But if we consider these statements for a mo-
ment, we will realize that (1) Shelley speaks of hidden beauty,
not a deeper level of reality (which in Buddho-Taoism would
be beyond the dualism of "beauty" and "ugliness"). His con-
cern is therefore aesthetic, not existential or experiential. (2)
Shelley has poetry making the familiar seem as if it were not fa-
miliar. Again, the manipulative imagination is accorded much
more power than any Chinese poet would grant it, and we
suspect that Shelley's true concern is to create a world of beauty
using materials from the familiar world, and then eventually
turning his back on the familiar world once he has made use
of it, rather than to penetrate to the underlying truth of the
familiar world. He basically distrusts the reality he perceives,
and wishes to reject it in favor of a fantastic, purely aesthetic
realm brought into being by his imagination. For him, as for
Keats, "Truth is Beauty." What would the Ch'an master Ma-
tsu (709-788) say to Shelley? "Do not choose what is good, nor
reject what is evil. . . . The mind does not exist by itself, its
existence is manifested through forms." 32 What would Chuang
Tzu (?369-286 B.C.) say to him? When asked where the Way
exists, Chuang Tzu replied, "There's no place it doesn't ex-
ist." 3 3 The Romantics, even when they speak of the mediating
power of the imagination, are thoroughgoing dualists. When
one looks at the actual poetry of the German Romantics (Nov-
alis comes to mind), one sees the logical extreme to which this
stance leads. This is an unreal world of pure fantasy, with no
relationship to actual experience.
Where, then, does the Kung-an school stand on this
matter? Chiang Ying-k'o has an essay entitled "Ch'iu chen"
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 141

(Seeking the Real), which is worth translating in full, as it pro-

vides a characteristically lucid answer:

Someone has asked me, "The theory that poetry

should be like the poetry of the Han, Wei, and High T'ang has
been around since Yen Ts'ang-lang [Yen Yu, c. 1200] first artic-
ulated it. These days even three-foot-tall children can state this
idea. So why do you maintain that one must become thor-
oughly familiar with Mid and Late [T'ang poetry] as well before
one can exhaust all the possible transformations available to
poets?"
I answer that one who is good at discussing poetry
only asks whether it is real or not. He does not ask whether it
is T'ang or not, whether it is High T'ang or not. When you can
write real poetry, then you do not strive to make it T'ang in
style, and you do not strive to make it High T'ang in style, and
yet you will find that your poetry will naturally follow in the
High T'ang tradition! But if it is not real poetry, then even if
you take actual phrases and lines from the High T'ang poets
and inlay or ornament your own poems with them, you will
merely be a pickpocket who steals from poets.
For in any poetry—whether it be based on narration
of an event or on lyrical emotion, whether it be about some
particular object or scene—there will naturally be an immedi-
ately present "world" (chitig-chieh, from Sanskrit vishaya] which
must be depicted and represented, and this should be revealed
with the greatest clarity, so that the sight and hearing of any-
one who reads it will feel a renewed freshness.
It is comparable to a painter of portraits, who—be
his subject's face beautiful or ugly, dark or light, fat or thin,
slanty or straight, smooth or pockmarked—wishes one thing
only: to paint a portrait which is totally like, so that when the
son sees it, he says, "This is really my father!" and when the
younger brother sees it, he says, "This is really my elder
brother!" With such an artist, how is it that he can depict such
things as cap, robes, sash, and shoes according to their ap-
pearance at the time and under the actual circumstances with-
out losing his reputation as a master? It is because in his por-
trait of a real person he comes as close as possible to the real
appearance of that person. If such things as the facial features,
eyes, cheekbones, chin, and so forth are not like, and the artist
Jonathan Chaves 142

merely does a mechanical depiction based on the clothes and

appurtenances—capping the figure with Lin-tsung's headcloth,
dressing him in Wang Kung's crane-down robe, giving him
Cheng Tz'u's sandals to shuffle his feet in and Juan Hsiian's
cane to hold 34 —imitating the ancients in every detail, but miss-
ing the appearance of his actual form, then the son will not rec-
ognize this as his father, and the younger brother will not rec-
ognize it as his elder brother! Such a work could not be
considered a likeness, nor could it even be considered a paint-
ing! It would merely be an imitation of the ancients that would
make its artist a laughingstock!
Now as far as words and lines of poetry are con-
cerned, if you emulate the High T'ang poets while missing the
scene that is right before your eyes, you are doing more or less
the same thing as the painter. To work in this way and hope
for your poetry to be handed down to posterity might be com-
pared to hoping that an unlike portrait will be venerated and
worshiped forever by the subject's descendants. Of course no
such thing would happen!
Therefore I say, in writing poetry, first seek the real;
don't start by seeking a T'ang style. And if this can be said, the
implication for those who would emulate Han and Wei should
be clear. 35

Chiang is not calling for mere realism. Elsewhere,

he ridicules the "skillful worker or capable artisan w h o molds
some clay, carves some wood, and produces an exact image
of a man which nevertheless totally lacks the vital spirit of a
real m a n . " 3 6 T h e key passage is the one in which he discusses
the " w o r l d " (ching-chieh) which is "depicted and represented"
in poetry. This is the term made famous by Wang Kuo-wei and
discussed by James J. Y. Liu in The Art of Chinese Poetry. Liu
says Wang was the "first to use this term systematically," 3 7
but already in this essay, Chiang strikes a considered balance
in his precise description of what it is that poetry deals with.
The " w o r l d " in question arises "naturally" from the " e v e n t "
or " e m o t i o n , " " o b j e c t " or " s c e n e . " The poet's task is then to
" r e v e a l " this world. Note the fine balance of self and external
environment in this conception, as opposed to the Romantics'
impatient, even childish insistence on creating their own, in-
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 143

dependent, aesthetic realm. It follows also that the Kung-an

school could not idealize and even worship the Artist, as did
the Romantics, because their vision of poetry gives at least equal
weight to the external world in all its multiplicity. When Yuan
Hung-tao went on his travels, he was acting as a pilgrim in
search of the mysteries of nature, the "ultimate in mysterious
transformation." 38 With such trust in the wonder of things as
they are, he did not have to retreat into his "imagination."

Originality and Opposition to Imitation

In a work published in 1817, August Wilhelm von

Schlegel, the brother of Friedrich, defined Romanticism as "the
particular spirit of modern art, in contrast to ancient or classi-
cal art." 3 9 The Romantics threw off all past styles (they create
an idealized vision of "medieval" or "primitive" poetry, how-
ever; see below) and disdained the "Daughters of Memory"
(Blake's term). 40 Similarly, the Kung-an school vehemently re-
jected the orthodox school of the Former Seven Masters and
Latter Seven Masters, primarily Li Meng-yang (1473-1579), Ho
Ching-ming (1483-1521), Li P'an-lung (1514-1570), and Wang
Shih-chen (1526-1590). These men called for total imitation of
the High T'ang poets Tu Fu, Li Po, Wang Wei, etc.—a view
ridiculed by Yuan Hung-tao. Indeed, opposition to slavish im-
itation of past poets is the single most common theme in his
critical writings, and in those of the other Kung-an theoreti-
cians. This was a theme of Chiang Ying-k'o's essay "Seeking
the Real" (translated above), and recurs endlessly, as the Kung-
an poets felt the oppressive weight of the orthodox masters'
influence on their contemporaries. Here is part of a letter from
Yuan Hung-tao to his friend Ch'iu T'an:

The gentlemen of today wish to 'T'ang-ify" the whole

world, and they fault the Sung for not having been T'ang in
style. Well, if we are to fault the Sung for not having been the
T'ang, why not fault the T'ang for not having been like the Wen
Jonathan Chaves 144

hsiian [Anthology of Literature]? And fault the Wen hsiian for

not having been like the Han and Wei dynasties? And fault the
Han Dynasty for not having been like the "three hundred
poems" [the Shih ching]? And fault the "three hundred poems"
for not having been like the time of "knots in ropes and bird
tracks?" Indeed, wouldn't it be best to make a clean sweep of
each and every school of poetry and be left with just a blank
sheet of paper!41

The weight of past literature itself also had to be cast

off if contemporary writers were to achieve anything of their
own. Yiian's elder brother, Tsung-tao (1560-1600), describes a
trip to the mountains during which he suggested to the friends
who were accompanying him that "each person should tell a
story about ghosts or tigers. These must be recent events that
took place in the last year or two—no quoting anything from
old books! Anyone unable to do this must drink a huge goblet
of w i n e . " 4 2 And Chung-tao (1570-1624), the youngest of the
three Yuan brothers, boldly implies in one of his poems that
Li Po was wrong to refuse to write a poem at Yellow Crane
Tower just because Ts'ui Hao's (7704-754) famous poem was
so magnificent:

When later men of talent climb Yellow Crane Tower

they should wield their brushes
to express their poetic thoughts.
Who says that after Ts'ui Hao
there will be no more poems written at this tower?43

On the other hand, it is Chung-tao, in many re-

spects (as theoretician and as practicing poet) the most con-
servative of the Kung-an writers, who makes us realize that
these men were not calling for complete rejection of the liter-
ature of the past. It is, quite specifically, the excessive narrow-
ness of the orthodox masters that they are opposed to. Chung-
tao (and the other Yuan brothers) praise the T'ang poets time
and time again. In a preface to his own collected works writ-
ten in 1623, he says, "Poetry never reached a greater height
than in the T'ang dynasty. . . . The weighty seriousness of
Tu Fu and the brilliance of Li Po are almost diametrically op-
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 145

posed, but this is because each of them was approaching po-

etry from his own a n g l e . " 4 4 Chung-tao goes on to praise the
T'ang for being able to encompass the varying styles of such
poets as Lu T'ung (d. 835), Li Ho (791-817), and Meng Chiao
(751-814).
Elsewhere, Chung-tao reveals that he arid Hung-tao
in their youth did imitate works of the past, "from Han and
Wei down to the three periods of the T'ang [sati T'ang, a term
used frequently by Chung-tao referring to High, Mid, and Late
T'ang]. We would imitate every style and in no case did we
fail to achieve its likeness. But we told ourselves that this was
not the ultimate, and we were not profoundly pleased with
what we had d o n e . " 4 5 Finally, writing after Hung-tao's death,
at a time when certain followers of the Kung-an school were
apparently going much too far for him, Chung-tao stresses that
the orthodox masters were wrong only in imitating just " o n e
or two High-T'ang p o e t s . " This led to their being too re-
stricted both in ching ("scene") and ch'ing ("feeling"). One should
learn from poets of all three major T'ang periods (signifi-
cantly, early T'ang is left out). Chung-tao continues:

Members of your generation [i.e., those younger

poets who wish to emulate Yuan Hung-tao] should read thor-
oughly the poetry of the Han, the Wei, and the three periods
of the T'ang, and only then start to write. Definitely do not freely
spill out your own feelings, saying you are beyond limits [lit-
erally, "pathways"] and thus will achieve fame in the world.
For, while it is true that there are no emotions which cannot be
described in poetry, there are certain emotions which one should
refrain from describing, and while there are no scenes which
cannot be absorbed into poetry, there are certain scenes which
one should refrain from depicting. When you understand this,
you can begin to talk about poetry. 46

In a different essay, however, he praises another

poet because his works are "neither T'ang nor Sung in style—
he directly expresses what he wants to s a y . " 4 7 The picture that
emerges is one of balance and control. Expression of emotion
is a desired goal, but it can only come after mastery of the tra-
dition and the achievement of maturity as a poet. Thus learn-
Jonathan Chaves 146

ing t h o u g h imitation d o e s play a role. O n e is strongly re-

m i n d e d of O u - y a n g H s i u ' s ( 1 0 0 7 - 1 0 7 2 ) v i e w of the H s i - k ' u n
school of poetry which was popular early in the Northern S u n g
Dynasty. Far from rejecting it entirely, he w a s able to praise
s o m e of its main poets, particularly Y a n g I ( 9 7 4 - 1 0 2 0 ) . But h e
did regard the H s i - k ' u n style as too restrictive to b e u s e d a s a
viable m o d e l for the revitalized poetry h e a n d his friend M e i
Y a o - c h ' e n w i s h e d to create for the S u n g . 4 8 A n d both in this
case a n d in the case of the K u n g - a n poets, later critical tradi-
tion in C h i n a distorted the facts by portraying the poets in question
as flaming revolutionaries who xoanted to make a total break with the
past. This in turn is s y m p t o m a t i c of a strange t e n d e n c y in tra-
ditional C h i n e s e literary criticism to overstate polemical posi-
tions without conscientiously balancing t h e actual facts, a ten-
d e n c y which is largely responsible for the misleading
characterization of the K u n g - a n poets as w e i r d a n d e x t r e m e .

Interest in the "Primitive"

It might be argued that there exists yet another point

of similarity b e t w e e n the R o m a n t i c s a n d t h e K u n g - a n s c h o o l ,
an impatience with t h e pedantic style of m o s t c o n t e m p o r a r y
writers and a concomitant interest in the literature of the masses:
folk, or oral poetry (song) a n d stories. H u n g M i n g - s h u i d o c u -
m e n t s Y ü a n H u n g - t a o ' s position, particularly his appreciation
for the vernacular novels (only relatively " f o l k " ) , but d o e s n o t
stress the possible parallel with the R o m a n t i c s .
At o n e point in his important preface to the col-
lected works of his y o u n g e r brother C h u n g - t a o , Y ü a n H u n g -
tao says of the s o n g s sung by village w o m e n a n d children,
" T h e s e are c o m p o s e d by real people, so t h e y h a v e real reso-
nance! T h e y are not slavish imitations of t h e H a n and W e i dy-
nasties, they do not follow in the footsteps of the High T ' a n g
period. T h e y are p r o d u c e d naturally, from the i n n e r nature,
and they express h u m a n happiness, anger, grief, joy, love, and
desire. This is w h a t m a k e s t h e m worth s a v o r i n g . " 4 9
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 147

Compare this statement by Johann Gottfried von

Herder (1744-1803), one of the Sturm-und-Drang poets: "He
who would still find in our midst traces of . . soundness
should certainly not seek it among scholars: artless children,
women, people with common sense, they are the ones who
are the only and the best orators of our age." 5 0 But as Lilian
Furst points out, we have in Herder a "Rousseauistic worship
of the primitive, as exemplified by Ossian; its latent motive was
a rejection of present reality in favor of the distant." 51 It is for
this reason that many of the Romantics and their immediate
predecessors, dissatisfied with—or even uninterested in—real
oral (or medieval) poetry, simply forged their own: James
Macpherson's "Ossian" and Chatterton's "Rowley" (also the
Grimm brothers, who collected stories but "improved" upon
them in various ways.) Again the tendency toward idealism
led these writers in the opposite direction from Yuan Hung-
tao et al. The first untampered-with collection of folk songs in
China was published between 1610 and 1619 by Feng Meng-
lung (his Shan-ko, Mountain Songs), who was certainly influ-
enced by the Kung-an interest in this kind of material.52 (Feng's
reworking of certain vernacular stories derives, I believe, from
separate and quite complex causes unrelated to Romantic ide-
alism.)

Form

One might also wonder about the question of form.

It is common knowledge that the Romantics revolutionized lit-
erary form completely. Hung Ming-shui expresses a certain
disappointment about the fact that Yuan Hung-tao came up
with "no new literary forms." 5 3 He does refer to a series of
ten poems of parting from T'ao Wang-ling in which Yuan ap-
parently experiments with unusual line lengths,54 and we might
point out that Yiian's masterpiece, "In the Cave of the Jade
City" (translated above), with its extremely bizarre meter of
sixteen three-character lines, two six-character lines, ten three-
Jonathan Chaves 148

character lines, one seven-character line, succeeds beautifully

in creating an appropriate atmosphere of tension and excite-
ment. But an important point should be kept in mind here:
some degree of experimentation with form seems to have been
in the air in the Ming Dynasty, and was not limited to the Kung-
an school. To give just one example from the orthodox camp,
Pien Kung (1476-1532), one of the Former Seven Masters, has
an interesting poem called "Song of the Transport Workers,"
which exists in at least three metrically different versions: the
one in Pien's personal collection, and versions in Ming shih tsung
(A Compendium of Ming Poems) and Ming shih pieh-ts'ai (An
Additional Selection of Ming Poetry).55 This hardly qualifies Pien
Kung as a Romantic! It is simply indicative of an interest shared
by many Ming poets in carrying the yueh-fu ("folk song") tra-
dition a bit further. The fact of the matter is that no Chinese
poet, without exception, ever questioned the legitimacy of the
metrical traditions of Chinese poetry—until the emergence of
the modern pai-hua poets, who can thus be seen, in this re-
spect as in others, as China's true Romantics.
We can now finally ask the question, what is the
Kung-an conception of self? The question will almost answer
itself when we read another of Yiian's very best poems,
"Making Fun of Myself on People Day":
This official wears no official sash,
this farmer pushes no plow,
this Confucian does not read books,
this recluse does not live in the wilds.
In society, he wears lotus leaves for clothes,
among commoners, he is decked out in cap and jade.
His serenity is achieved without closing the door,
his teaching is done without instruction.
This Buddhist monk has long hair and whiskers,
this Taoist immortal makes love to beautiful w o m e n .
One moment, withering away in a silent forest,
the next, bustling through crowds on city streets.
When he sees flowers, he calls for singing girls:
when he has wine to drink, he calls for a pair of dice.
His body is as light as a cloud
floating above the Great Clod.
S E L F IN THE K U N G - A N S C H O O L 149

Try asking the bird, flying in the air:

"What clear pond reflects your image?"
How free! the dragon, curling, leaping,
liberated! beyond this world, or in it.
The official, Liu-hsia Hui, firm, yet harmonious;
or Hermit Yi, pure in his retirement. 56

In this triumphant poem, Yuan considers every

available role in contemporary Chinese society—official, peas-
ant, literatus, hermit, Buddhist monk, Taoist monk—as an as-
pect of his own self, or rather he claims for himself the free-
dom to move at will among these roles, without being limited
by their ordinary restrictions. This makes him the liberated
dragon of the / ching (Book of Changes, Ch'ieti, line 5: fei lung
tsai t'ien). Whether we consider the changing positions of the
dragon in the I ching, or the "free and easy wandering" (Wat-
son's rendition) of the sage in Chuang Tzu, or the detachment
from ego in Ch'an Buddhism, we are led to a conception of
flexibility and freedom within the world as we know it. This
conception Yuan embodies in his poem—showing himself again
to be solidly within his tradition, but going just a bit further
with it than anyone else.
By contrast—and the contrast here is really tell-
ing—the Romantic poet is locked into a single role, that of the
Great Artist. His own ego is, in fact, his real concern. Rather
than flowing naturally from role to role as called for by cir-
cumstance, he must continually hold the same pose on stage,
dramatizing himself to the point where he may even die par-
ticipating in a war in distant lands (Byron at Missolonghi). The
self-destructiveness of the Romantic is well known, in fact, and
contrasts clearly with Yiian's gentle humor. The grim humor-
lessness of the Romantics (Byron's humor in Don Juan is lim-
ited to the wit of the cynic) leads to the conclusion that their
lack of a sense of humor is an essential point of difference be-
tween the Romantics and the Kung-an writers, whose humor
is one of their most characteristic qualities. Chiang Ying-k'o even
compiled a collection of jokes and anecdotes entitled Humor-
ous Histories (Hsieh shih).57
Hung Ming-shui discusses Yiian's half tongue-in-
Jonathan Chaves 150

cheek analysis of four personality types. One of these is the

"carefree m a n " (shih-shih), described thus (in Hung's transla-
tion):
The carefree man is the strangest kind of all. He can
also be very annoying. As a Ch'an Buddhist, he does not ob-
serve the monastery disciplines; as a Confucianist, he does not
speak of the ancient sages, Yao, Shun, the Duke of Chou and
Confucius, and he does not practice shameful and obsequious
acts; as a businessman, he has no skill; and in society, he can-
not bear any responsibility. He is the most unimportant man in
the world. Although he is also the most harmless person, he is
the one always despised by the "worthy men" of our society.
Nevertheless, I am very fond of this type of person. I admire
him secretly for his self-contentment.58

The admiration of the Kung-an writers for truly "carefree" types

led them to write "biographies" of various eccentrics. I have
translated elsewhere two of these (Yuan Hung-tao's A Biogra-
phy of the Old Drunkard and Chung-tao's A Biography of the Taoist
of the Single Gourd).59 Yuan Chung-tao's Taoist, in the course
of his life, becomes by turn a student, a soldier battling Japa-
nese pirates, a robber, a restaurateur, a beggar, and a combi-
nation fortune-teller, doctor, painter, and poet. Like the poet
of "Making Fun of Myself on People Day" he flows from life-
role to life-role in complete freedom, but in response to circum-
stance, not as an act of self-dramatization. ' T o him there is no north
or south—in utter freedom he dissolves himself in the four di-
rections." 6 0 This was said of Chuang Tzu two thousand years
before Yuan Hung-tao. Yuan must have felt that there was a
need again in his own time for this kind of freedom.
Part II

Self in Drama
and Fiction
 The Self in Conflict:
Paradigms of Change
in a T'ang Legend
Catherine Swatek

C hang Feng-i's (1527-1613) most enduring and

popular play, Hung-fu chi (Red Whisk) was,
we are told, written on the occasion of his marriage. 1 The play
pays tribute to the wifely virtues of chastity and fidelity, and
Chang's choice of stories to convey these sentiments is an in-
triguing one. The source for the play is the well-known T'ang
tale "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" (The Stranger with the Curly Beard).
Both the tale and the play can be described as heroic stories
with dynasty building themes (so-called fa-chi pien-t'ai stories
"of the eminently successful"), but in conceiving his play Chang
incorporated scenes from other sources that romanticize the tale
without betraying its central concerns—concerns which go well
beyond the sentimental celebration of marital harmony.
The tale is set in the waning years of the Sui Dy-
nasty (A.D. 581-618) and describes the careers of several of the
heroes ambitious to take part in the "great enterprise" whose
outcome will be the founding of a new dynasty, the T'ang (618-
907). As the narrative begins, the outcome of that enterprise
is still in doubt, and each of the heroes is eager and hopeful
of success. All share a sense, an intuition, that the time is ripe
for change; indeed, this power of foresight is what draws them
Catherine Swatek 154

to one another and defines them as a heroic group. But only

one man is destined to become the next emperor, to be the
chosen instrument of Heaven's will, and in the course of the
story this man will emerge, while the other contenders must
find their proper role with respect to him or risk alienation from
the new order.
In essence the fa-chi story is about change. It de-
scribes those epochal moments in history when the normal flow
of events is interrupted, when the curve of historical time be-
comes discontinuous, and the context for action becomes tan-
talizingly fluid. As the familiar order disintegrates, a unique
kind of individual emerges—an individual w h o is spurred to
action by a sense of sudden opportunity and a notion of his
(or her) uniqueness that prompts him to promote his own cause
rather than that of his sovereign.
From a Confucian perspective, then, the fa-chi story
deals with sensitive issues, since its authors touch upon vital
questions of loyalty and legitimacy and celebrate the deeds of
men who in normal times are rebels and upstarts. Curly Beard,
the hero of our tale, not only rebels against the Sui but also
refuses to participate in the T a n g order, preferring exile to
service under Li Shih-min (his rival in the tale and eventual
emperor of the new dynasty). In this respect he remains stub-
bornly faithful to his own cause, in spite of unmistakable omens
portending Li Shih-min's elevation. Yet most readers would
agree that he, not Li, is the hero of the story. 2 To judge by this
example, the dynasty building story is more sympathetic to the
failed hero than it is to the future emperor, or at least more
concerned with narrating his experiences. And although an
attempt is made by some nameless redactor to discredit Curly
Beard at the end of the tale (which will be discussed later), this
attempt does little to alienate our sympathy from the character
who has made the most powerful impression on us.
Hence in interpreting the tale we are confronted with
a paradox of sorts, since we are led first to sympathize with
the failed hero and then to applaud his rival's success. It is the
mysterious stranger who captures our interest and from whose
perspective we perceive events, but in the end we are ex-
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 155

pected to transfer our sympathies to a cardboard character who

is little more than an icon—a symbol of order and legitimacy.
In my discussion below I account for these para-
doxical qualities of the tale by recourse to ideological concerns
of the tale's authors, concerns which compelled them to rec-
oncile popular legends concerning the coming of an ideal ruler
with the ideology of the imperial cult. In doing so the redac-
tors show themselves to be preoccupied with the problem of
loyalty. Under what circumstances are acts of disloyalty against
the reigning dynasty justified? How does the man who has
himself been disloyal to his sovereign command loyalty among
his followers? How is his authority legitimated? Or, with re-
spect to the failed hero, how does he reconcile his own hopes
with reality, redirecting his self-loyalty into service to another?
A concern with ideological questions—in particular
the issue of dynastic legitimacy—is crucial to my reading of
"Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" and distinguishes the tale from Chang's
play. This is not to say that the influence of Confucian ortho-
doxy is not apparent in the play, but such influence is differ-
ently expressed. Chang Feng-i wrote in a different genre, with
a different sense of occasion and purpose, and at a great tem-
poral remove from his source. 3 In his reinterpretation of the
tale he remains remarkably faithful to its central concerns, but
his perspective is different. He is neither a mythmaker nor a
propagandist, as I feel is the case with the shapers of the tale.
Rather, he is a dramatist who approaches his subject by
anatomizing the emotions, inner conflicts, and states of mind
of his characters.
If "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" explores the problem of
loyalty, it does so exclusively within the public domain. Al-
though each of the heroes of the tale must confront the prob-
lem of allegiance to self or to some other man, their decisions
are made in the light of their foreknowledge of historical events,
their ability to receive and interpret Heaven's signs. Since their
actions are portrayed as prompted by a divinely inspired sense
of mission, they appear less self-interested; their compulsions
lack a private, selfish dimension. The conviction of their
uniqueness permits the heroes of the tale to identify self-inter-
Catherine Swatek 156

est with society's interests (the preservation of order and of

the civilization), even though by the conventional standards
of that society their actions are self-aggrandizing and subver-
sive.
Chang approaches the problem of loyalty differ-
ently. With its dialectical form and its romantic (lyrical) ele-
ment, the southern drama invites a more intimate and subjec-
tive treatment of its subject. The inevitable result of the tale's
translation into this genre is that the focus turns inward.
Questions of loyalty are never simply a matter of historical
destiny or necessity as revealed in the public theater of action.
They are inextricably bound up in private concerns and inti-
mate relationships (in particular those between lovers and be-
tween spouses), so that this private sphere of feelings and ob-
ligations affects the hero's (or heroine's) perception of his public
role, and vice versa.
Perhaps for these reasons Chang has chosen to em-
phasize feminine elements in his play. As its title suggests,
Hung-fu, who in the tale plays a vital but subsidiary role,
emerges as the play's central character, overshadowing even
Curly Beard. Not only does she energize and motivate the other
heroes (her function in the tale), but she also confronts most
directly the dilemmas posed by heroic action. As both female
hero and romantic heroine, Hung-fu must refrain from allow-
ing sentiment (her desire for fulfillment in love) to interfere with
her destiny (her ambition to change the course of history). But
she must also learn that the single-minded pursuit of power
and fortune, unmitigated by private feelings and loyalties, is
both hazardous and fraught with insecurity. While the same
can be said of the play's male protagonists, Chang Feng-i me-
diates this conflict through the experience of his heroine (or,
more accurately, his heroines, since he has written a second
major feminine role into his play). While he refrains from sen-
timentalizing the story, he articulates a different heroic ideal
from that of the tale by making this realm of private senti-
ments his point of departure. And since in both tale and play
the actions of the heroes directly affect the fate of society, of
civilization, it is fair to say that in both the authors articulate
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 257

an idea about society and the individual's relationship to it.

But they construct their paradigms in very different ways. I
will explore these differences separately below before conclud-
ing with a discussion of the ideological dimensions of the por-
trayal of the heroic self in the respective works.

"Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan"

Although "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" 4 depicts the rise of

Li Shih-min (T'ang T'ai-tsung) to power, his presence in the
tale is a fugitive one. Its protagonists are the singing girl Hung-
fu (Red Whisk), Li Ching, her lover and fellow conspirator, and
the curly bearded stranger—the man who, as the tale's title
suggests, is the real hero of the story. His presence gives it its
power and its grip on our imagination. His most distinctive
trait—his curly red beard—marks him as an outsider, and al-
though his identity is never made clear, his attributes and be-
havior, and the aura of the supernatural that clings to him,
suggest a figure out of a popular religious tradition.
Given Li Shih-min's prominent historical role in the
Li family's rise to power, it follows that stories would have
arisen concerning the supernatural assistance given him and
his supporters during his rise to power. In one fragment of
that tradition preserved in a Sung anthology, Li Ching en-
counters a mysterious being referred to as "an old man with a
yellow beard" (huang-hsu lao-wetig) who shares with him his
knowledge of the future. "Old Yellow Beard" has clear affini-
ties with "Master Yellow Stone" (Huang-shih kung), an im-
mortal who renders invaluable assistance to the heroes who
founded the Han dynasty. Like Master Yellow Stone, the
bearded stranger of this anecdote has no ambition to become
emperor himself; his role is that of a donor figure who assists
the hero in his rise to prominence but does not participate in
his success. 5
In the much fuller account of Li Shih-min's rise
Catherine Swatek 158

preserved in the ch'uan-ch'i tale, we find a more complex treat-

ment of Curly Beard's character and of his relationship to the
other heroes. Two versions of the tale are extant: a simpler and
cruder version preserved in the Tao-tsang and a more elaborate
version found in the T'ai-p'ing kuatig-chi.6 The two versions are
closely related. In both we glimpse traces of the legend pre-
served in the anecdote, but in the two versions of the tale we
can observe the influence of Taoist beliefs (in particular Taoist
sectarian ideology) and the infiltration of more orthodox con-
cerns in the depiction of Li Shih-min's career. In the most
elaborate form of the tale orthodox and sectarian beliefs are
conflated and coexist in an uneasy but provocative tension.
In the simpler version of the tale found in the Tao-
tsang Curly Beard combines in his person the character of a
public-spirited knight errant (hsia) and a Taoist immortal pos-
sessed of mysterious sources of wealth and knowledge. 7 Both
qualities set him apart from the other heroes, who are firmly
rooted in the mundane world, and this otherworldliness in-
creases as the narrative unfolds. At least as interesting as the
question of Curly Beard's identity is the depiction of his rela-
tionship to the other protagonists. The tale's author or authors
are concerned with working out a pattern of relationships
among the heroes and with exploring their underlying dy-
namic. In this respect their tale is a sophisticated treatment of
the process of change accompanying the transfer of power in
times of dynastic upheaval. Such change entails disintegra-
tion, dislocation, and the threat of conflict, but is shown
nevertheless to be possessed of an underlying logic.
"Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" begins with the disintegra-
tion of order as Yang Su, a powerful minister charged with
guarding the capital, abandons his responsibilities for a life of
ease. Hung-fu, his serving maid, senses that his days are
numbered (and so the dynasty's). 8 She seizes the first oppor-
tunity to flee the capital with Li Ching, a hero who has come
offering counsel to Yang Su in the dynasty's hour of need. Her
actions are symptomatic of the crisis of affairs; no longer will-
ing to serve an enfeebled master, she is quick to attach herself
to a hero whose star is rising. Li Ching's own ambitions are
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 159

thus intimated through the actions of the woman who flees to

him—by their flight the couple turn their backs on the familiar
order of the Sui capital and openly defy their sovereign.
The central episodes of the tale take place outside
the capital, where the various heroes must work out their vital
but uncertain stake in the coming conflagration. 9 Each episode
or "move" of the tale depicts an encounter between two or more
of these ostensible rivals for power, and each serves to clarify
the relationship that should properly exist between them. In
the first of these encounters—at an inn outside the capital—
the fleeing couple meet the curly bearded stranger in a scene
initially fraught with tension that concludes amicably as the
three become sworn brothers and sisters and, seated in a cir-
cle, share a meal.
This pattern of opposition-reconciliation is re-
peated in two subsequent meetings between Curly Beard and
Li Shih-min, as the two men meet face to face and take each
other's measure. In the first of these, no sooner does Curly
Beard catch sight of the future emperor than he takes the last
seat in the company, a gesture of humility that acknowledges
the other man's superiority. At a second meeting—the famous
go-playing scene—Curly Beard's nameless Taoist companion,
by forfeiting the game, confirms his friend's suspicion that Li
Shih-min is indeed the "True Lord" (cheti yitig-chu) who is des-
tined to become emperor. 10
Even as these encounters serve to convince Curly
Beard that his fortunes are not of this world,11 his relationship
with Li Ching and Hung-fu, who will eventually serve the T'ang
cause, becomes more intimate. Further meetings between the
three, marked by communal feasting and drinking, 12 follow
closely upon the two meetings described above, as Curly Beard
takes stock of his situation and ponders his next move. Each
meeting takes place in the capital, drawing the exiles back from
the hinterland to the center of political authority. In the last of
these meetings Curly Beard undergoes a dramatic transfor-
mation from rude wanderer to elegant host, greeting his star-
tled friends dressed in silk and furs. Amid the opulence of his
villa he regales them with food and wine fit for an immortal. 13
Catherine Swatek 160

Having announced his decision to abandon all hope of becom-

ing emperor, he entrusts his wealth to the couple, charging
them to use it in Li Shih-min's behalf. He then vanishes with-
out a trace until—true to his prediction—word reaches the T'ang
court ten years later of his successful conquest of a remote is-
land kingdom.
Interpreters of "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" usually dwell
upon its promotion of Li Shih-min as the "man of the Man-
date" and view it as an attempt to refurbish the luster of im-
perial rule by ridiculing the ambitions of its enemies—rebels
and upstarts deluded enough to challenge imperial author-
ity. 14 Such interpretations are not so much wrong as inade-
quate, since by interpreting the tale satirically they fail to do
credit to its author's more subtle aims. These aims are, in my
opinion, the depiction of dynastic change not simply as
foreordained fact but as a process fraught with tension and
uncertainty but ultimately comprehensible.
The agents of such change are precisely those fig-
ures in the tale who must yield to Li Shih-min—Li Ching (and
Hung-fu, who has thrown in her lot with him) and, in a dif-
ferent way, Curly Beard. In the course of his rise to power Li
Shih-min does not so much purchase success at his rivals' ex-
pense as relegate them to their proper sphere in relation to him.
By tale's end Li Ching has joined Li Shih-min, electing to play
the role of "coadjutor" by serving as a general in the T'ang
armies. 15 Curly Beard, on the other hand, refuses to contend
openly with Li Shih-min for power. But his refusal is not so
much a failure as a discreet withdrawal, a return to his proper
sphere upon the completion of his mission. That sphere and
that mission are never made explicit. But as the narrative pro-
gresses, his identity is adumbrated through a series of strate-
gically placed clues.
The most superficial clues to Curly Beard's identity
are his surname (Chang) and his manner of entry into the tale
in the tattered garb of a wanderer. These indications of a Taoist
identity are counterbalanced by rude behavior and habits that
suggest knight errantry (including the feeding of meat to his
mule). As the story progresses, Curly Beard's Taoist attributes
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 261

become more pronounced. He is said to possess an ability to

interpret omens (wang ch'i)—a skill he shares with his Taoist
companion (Tao-hsiung)—and our final glimpse of him is amid
surroundings so opulent that they are compared to an immor-
tal's paradise. At this point in the story, ostensibly a moment
of resignation and defeat for him, we are left instead with the
impression of a fabulous being possessed of a knowledge of
the future that is instrumental to the successful outcome of the
T'ang cause.
As Curly Beard's Taoist attributes emerge, his
identity undergoes a change, from that of disappointed aspi-
rant for worldly power to otherworldly being who intervenes
to influence the course of human affairs. His function, then,
is to underscore the lightness and inevitability of Li Shih-min's
rise to power—not as an unsuccessful rival for that power but
as a divine being who by his intervention confers legitimacy
on that power. 1 6
There are other reasons for associating Curly Beard
with Li Shih-min in a positive way. The most striking of these
is the fact that Curly Beard's most distinctive physical trait, his
curly beard, is the trait which in official and unofficial histori-
cal sources is singled out in Li Shih-min. 1 7 Granted that Curly
Beard's beard is one of his attributes as a hsia while Li Shih-
min's reflects his ancestry, 1 8 the fact that the two men share
this unusual physical trait in this narrative context suggests a
deliberate conflation of the two persons. In the tale, then, Curly
Beard can be perceived as an otherworldly avatar of the future
emperor, whose status in the other world parallels and thus
legitimates Li Shih-min's status in this one.
Curly Beard's identification with Li Shih-min is
hinted at through their shared physical traits, 19 but his partic-
ipation in Li's campaign for power is effected indirectly, through
his ties to Li Ching and Hung-fu. In the tale the lovers func-
tion as intermediaries—servants of the Sui who become loyal
subjects of the T'ang—and it is around them that the new or-
der crystallizes. This new order is delineated through one of
the tale's more striking structural devices—its doubling of sur-
names and their pairing in ways that establish affinity (through
Catherine Swatek 162

fictitious ties of kinship) and relation (where none in fact ex-

ists). Hung-fu, possessed of an ability to "know the times" (shih
shih), is the agent of change, since her flight with Li Ching sets
in motion the train of events which culminates in Li Shih-min's
victory. In this respect she is especially akin to Curly Beard,
with whom she shares a surname. It is around their pseudo-
relationship (i.e., of older brother and younger sister) that the
fellowship of heroes so basic to empire building materializes.
In the case of Li Ching, a close relationship with Li Shih-min
is implied by their sharing of a surname (and other reasons,
discussed below), and as a military man Li Ching is destined
to distinguish himself in Li Shih-min's service. Through these
manufactured relationships claims of loyalty are established
which compete with those sanctioned in the society the he-
roes have left behind. 2 0 In time this heroic fellowship, which
begins to take shape from the first encounter at the inn, emerges
to successfully challenge the old order represented in the per-
son of Yang Su, a man who functions as a surrogate for the
Sui emperor, with whom he shares a surname. 21
The importance of the heroic fellowship as a kind
of microcosm of the emerging new order is underscored at
several points in the tale by the recurrent motif of feasting—
an act which draws the heroes into a communal circle and, by
its associations with harmony and reconcilation, prefigures the
return of order and peace (t'ai-p'ing). But the sharing of ritual
food and wine serves another purpose, underscoring the gravity
of the oaths sworn and binding the parties together in their
common enterprise. In the last of these communal scenes, Curly
Beard instructs Li Ching and Hung-fu to pour a libation in his
honor should they receive word ten years hence that he has
won for himself the throne of an overseas kingdom. In the
simpler, Tao-tsang, version of the tale, his admonition im-
presses us as simply another gesture of goodwill, a recogni-
tion of the enduring ties that bind them. It is therefore inter-
esting to turn to the elaborated version of the tale preserved
in the T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi, where Curly Beard's final instruc-
tions take on an added and quite pointed significance.
In this elaborate variant of the tale, the author (or
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 163

redactor) has done more than embellish and polish, since his
changes subtly alter the tale's character and direct the reader's
attention along new lines. For example, in the simpler version
of the tale preserved in the Tao-tsang, Vang Su is described as
proud, lax, and increasingly enfeebled. The author of the Tai-
ling kuang-chi version elaborates on these laconic observa-
tions, making Yang not only proud but rebellious, fond of pomp
and careless of ritual. His behavior so offends Li Ching on the
occasion of their first interview that he is forced to remon-
strate with the man he had hoped to serve. By depicting Vang
according to the stereotype of the "bad last ruler," the author
lends greater legitimacy to Hung-fu and Li Ching's desertion
of the Sui cause, an act which in the simpler version of the
tale smacks of disloyalty and opportunism. At this stage of the
tale's evolution, we see concern evinced for the negative im-
plications of the couple's actions, a concern very much present
in Chang Feng-i's dramatization of the tale.
A more striking and significant addition to the story,
aside from additional indications of the fabulous nature of the
action, 22 is the matter of Curly Beard's vendetta against a
"faithless man" (T'ien-hsia fu-hsin che) and his grisly act of re-
venge. This dimension of his character is introduced at the time
of his first meeting with Li Ching and Hung-fu at an inn, just
after they have sworn fellowship and shared a meal. When he
hears of Li Ching's plan to go to Li Shih-min's camp, Curly
Beard calls for wine and produces from a blood-soaked bag the
heart and liver of a man, which he proceeds to chop up and
serve his friends. The victim, he explains, is a man against
whom he has plotted revenge for ten years.
The significance of this gesture is far from clear, but
its introduction into the narrative is a striking feature of the
T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi version of the tale (it is not found in the
Tao-tsang version). It recalls Yellow Beard's act of cannibalism
in Fan Kung-ch'eng's anecdote, and here as there Curly Beard's
actions have a vaguely demonic power. But in the more elab-
orate context of the tale they assume further significance.23 The
ritual, in which Li Ching and Hung-fu participate, dramatizes
the gravity of their situation and adds grim force to the pledges
Catherine Swatek 164

of fellowship into which the three have just entered. Having

fled the capital and their sovereign, the couple have ex-
changed old ties for new ones and have abandoned a familiar
existence for one fraught with danger and devoid of familiar
rules.
At first encounter Curly Beard is portrayed as a
crude barbarian (by the standards of the court). Even before
we witness his feast he is portrayed as a man insensitive to
the elementary requirements of ritual, when he insolently in-
trudes upon Hung-fu, lies down, and stares at her. One senses
that the author intends his reader to associate this action with
Yang Su's failure to stand when receiving Li Ching at court—
a lapse of etiquette that convinces Hung-fu that he is unwor-
thy of her loyalty and respect. Curly Beard's rudeness, how-
ever, seems calculated, designed as a kind of test, and al-
though his actions anger Li Ching, Hung-fu responds as though
she senses in their guest a man worthy of their trust. She
quickly discovers a bond with him (they share the same sur-
name, Chang) and they become sworn brother and sister. In
this way the first step is taken in defining the set of relation-
ships out of which a new order will emerge. And although, as
here, some elements of this new order appear alien and
threatening, that impression changes as the narrative pro-
gresses and the heroes are revealed to be the instruments of a
divine purpose and thus worthy successors to the imperial in-
stitution.
If we recall Curly Beard's parting instructions in both
prose versions of the tale—his request that Li Ching and Hung-
fu keep faith with him by offering a libation of wine when they
hear of his success—the introduction of his vendetta into the
T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi version assumes the character of a warn-
ing, a revelation of the consequences of bad faith and the as-
surance of eventual retribution. By being loyal to their friend,
Li Ching and Hung-fu demonstrate their fitness to serve in Li
Shih-min's new order. In this light Curly Beard takes on yet
another role in the expanded version of the legend—that of
enforcer of loyalty to Li Shih-min's new order. 24
That a future emperor should have an other-
T H E SELF IN CONFLICT 165

worldly avatar is not surprising. The belief that the ruler was
chosen by Heaven, hence semidivine, was an ancient one, and
since Han times if not earlier imperial propagandists had drawn
on other beliefs, in particular those current among Taoist sects,
in their efforts to endow dynasties and their rulers with char-
isma. 25 Such efforts are in evidence in the different accounts
of Curly Beard's role in the founding of the T'ang Dynasty,
and as we trace that role from the brief anecdote to the elab-
orated tale, we find a growing sophistication in the treatment
of the tale's ideological meaning.
Most critics recognize the importance of ideology in
interpreting the tale's meaning, but by emphasizing its "Con-
fucian" elements—its attack upon corrupt officialdom, its rid-
icule of rebels and military upstarts, and its portrayal of Li Shih-
min as the recipient of Heaven's Mandate (T'ien-ming)—they
distort that importance. Consider the view that the tale ridi-
cules the ambitions of rebels and military strongmen (repre-
sented by Curly Beard and Li Ching). It is true that comments
appended to both versions of the tale represent an effort to
discredit the story's heroes, but these comments are superflu-
ous and could easily have been added at a later time. Since
everything that has gone before inclines us to empathize with
the upstarts (especially Curly Beard), such last-minute at-
tempts at ridicule seem clumsy and out of place, nothing more
than crude propaganda.
By contrast, the treatment of Curly Beard's rela-
tionship to Li Shih-min in the narrative proper is a very skill-
ful bit of mythmaking, as I have tried to suggest. In shaping
their myth about the founding of the T'ang, the authors and/or
redactors show themselves to be influenced by Taoist sectar-
ian ideology. We know that the T'ang ruling family came from
an area in which such beliefs (for example, in the coming of a
messiah—a "True Lord"—and the vital role of a family sur-
named Li in that enterprise) were deeply rooted. 26 And we
know that the T'ang ruling family manipulated such beliefs to
their advantage in the course of their rise to power and after
that power had been secured. While we cannot be certain who
the authors of the tale were or what their relation to the ruling
Catherine Swatek 166

family was, we can suggest that their story should be viewed

as a piece of unofficial propaganda for the T'ang house. 27
A detailed discussion of the Taoist influences upon
the tale must await another occasion, but some can be men-
tioned briefly here. For example, both Chang and Li surnames
have particular importance in sectarian Taoism; their promi-
nence in the tale is no coincidence. And much of the tale's
language has Taoist connotations—for example the portrayal
of Li Shih-min as a 'True Lord" whose coming will bring about
an era of "great peace" (t'ai-p'ing), and the prediction by Curly
Beard that Li Ching and Hung-fu will assist (pu) the future
emperor in his rise to power. 28 Li Ching's role in the tale re-
calls that of Chang Liang, a hero who, with the assistance of
the mysterious Master Yellow Stone, became Liu Pang's coad-
jutor in founding the Han Dynasty. 29 Even the element of
knight errantry in this tale has a Taoist, as opposed to a Con-
fucian, cast. Curly Beard's status as an outsider and his sud-
den apotheosis at the end of the story are redolent with Taoist
lore about immortals. On the other hand, his role as public-
spirited defender of dynastic integrity in a corrupt age—a more
Confucian view of knight errantry—only begins to emerge in
the more elaborate version of the tale with the heavy-handed
indictment of Yang Su and the portrayal of Curly Beard as an
enforcer of loyalty.
In the elaborate version, we find an effort to con-
flate the more purely Taoist account of Li Shih-min's career
found in the simpler tale with a Confucian concern for legiti-
mizing power and securing loyalty. If the Tao-tsang version in-
vests the emperor-to-be with an aura of mystery and char-
isma, the version found in T'ai-p'ing kmng-chi makes arguments
on his behalf in the language of morality and duty. Hence the
more explicit denunciation of Yang Su and the pains taken to
portray Li Shih-min as the man chosen by Heaven. Even the
demonic motif of cannibalism, which may have vague associ-
ations with sectarian Taoist ritual in the popular imagina-
tion, 30 serves to underscore the issue of enforcing loyalty—a
Confucian concern.
But perhaps the most interesting achievement of the
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 167

shapers of this tale is their depiction of dynasty building in

terms other than the neat, after-the-fact rationalizations of the
Mandate concept or, for that matter, the naive lore of Taoist
messianism. In this tale they have depicted change in dy-
namic terms, as a process that entails the dissolution of a fa-
miliar order and the gradual emergence of a new order. As this
order emerges, alien and potentially anarchic forces must be
tapped, incorporated, then either transformed or expelled. But
even when banished they continue to be implicated in the new
order, having figured so crucially in its formation.

Hung-fu chi

If dramatic versions of the T'ang tale intervened

before the appearance of Chang Feng-i's play in the sixteenth
century, they are no longer extant. 3 1 In Chang's play Curly
Beard does not have the presence he commands in the tale;
interest has shifted to the lovers, especially to Hung-fu, for
whom the play is named. Like the tale, the play is a story of
dynasty building, and in it heroic action is also celebrated. But
it is also a story of elopement (ssu-pen)32 that explores the con-
sequences of the lovers' flight: its impact upon those whom
they leave behind, the trials and hardships which their actions
cause them (including the test of their faithfulness to each
other), and their reintegration into society. 33
How is this romantic element integrated into the
tale? Although as a rule romantic themes are out of place in a
heroic tale, it is worth noting that the dynasty building story
has affinities with tales of elopement: both contain heroes or
heroines who flee from society, experience hardship, and risk
notoriety because of their impetuosity, and whose first alle-
giance is to those who understand them (be they sworn broth-
ers or lovers); both depict characters whose personal or pri-
vate values bring them into conflict with their superiors and
elders—those to whom they owe obedience and duty—and in
Catherine Swatek 168

both types of story these private values are vindicated with the
hero's reinstatement in society, usually in a position of prom-
inence. In the fa-chi story the problem of the hero's rebellion
against authority is finessed by recourse to rationalizations
provided by the Mandate concept (the regime was corrupt;
hence the actions of the rebel hero are justified). In the elope-
ment story there is either a scene of reconciliation with the un-
sympathetic elders or they are excluded from the final reunion
scene. 3 4
Both types of story have a vaguely subversive cast,
because the defiance of socially powerless individuals leads to
the correction of abuses. However, the author of the fa-chi tale
does not concern himself with romantic entanglements (ro-
mantic interests conflict with the hero's public-spirited im-
pulses). Although the "upstarts" are motivated by ambition,
they typically are portrayed as men of the hour, whose des-
tiny it is to live and act at unique historical watersheds. Their
self-interest is acted out in the public arena, and little atten-
tion is given to their private feelings. By contrast, the author
of the elopement story devotes most of his attention to his
characters' private feelings and motives, exploring how these
sensibilities have alienated the lovers from conventional soci-
ety. In neither type of story, typically, is the storyteller or dra-
matist equally concerned with exploring his characters' private
feelings and his public deeds, but this is what happens in
Chang's play. Hung-fu and Li Ching's elopement is both a
private and a public act: in fleeing Yang Su's camp Hung-fu is
motivated by both love and ambition. By linking her fortunes
to Li Ching's she hopes to rise with him. But from the start
she and Li must confront their private needs as well. 35
In her own mind Hung-fu worries that her flight
with Li will appear wanton and disloyal, and both lovers ex-
ercise constant vigilance against the impulse to dally when af-
fairs of the realm are at stake. In their initial encounters and
flight eroticism is suppressed, but even the hint of it casts sus-
picions on their motives, and the cloud only lifts after Li Ching
has gone off and won merit in the military campaigns that un-
fold in the last half of the play. 3 6 But Chang does choose to
exploit the romantic elements of his play to humanize the ac-
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 169

tions of the otherwise impassive heroes, so that by play's end

the two realms (of heroic endeavor and romantic feeling) are
shown to be mutually interdependent rather than mutually
exclusive.
One of the redactors of the T'ang tale (the variant
preserved in T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi) demonstrated his concern with
justifiying the lovers' flight by depicting Yang Su as not only
weak but also disloyal, since he apes the imperial style and
ignores affairs of state in the dynasty's hour of need. In the
play it is not Yang's arrogance that impresses us but his love
of luxury and beautiful women and his willingness to rest on
his laurels.37 This diminishes him in Hung-fu's eyes, as it alarms
Li Ching. Hung-fu is compelled to confront her intolerable sit-
uation: forced to serve Yang Su as a singing girl, she laments
that she has "by mischance" been reduced to the life of bro-
cade skirts and jeweled hairpins. Throughout the play Chang
exploits the imagery of dress to suggest his character's circum-
stances. In the early scenes the luxurious trappings of her life
symbolize in Hung-fu's mind her confinement and lack of
freedom, since her service to Yang prevents her from realizing
her ambition to be a hero. She frets that she is forced to be at
Yang's beck and call, an unwilling party to his voluptuary life.38
When she slips off her brocades and strips away her makeup,
disguising herself as a courier in order to slip out of Yang's
camp, her feelings of escape into freedom are captured in her
aria:

Row upon row, I have passed heavy gates and vermilion doors;
Secluded chamber's doors are locked in vain.
Now in jade pavilions the dance is over,
By silk mats the song has ended.
Changing old guise for new, I go in search of my mate.

Although from the moment she first sees him Hung-fu is de-
termined to marry Li Ching (acting as her own go-between if
necessary), her arias make clear that her passion for him is not
of the conventionally romantic sort:

I take pride in my wit, my quick intuition,

One glimpse of him and my feelings run deep.
Catherine Swatek 170

Heroic spirit is conveyed by the sword;

Spring thoughts are not stirred by lutesong. 39

Li Ching, equally struck by the waiting maid who has stared

at him so intently during his interview with Vang Su, is quick
to sense an attraction:
I called at his gate, hoping to offer my service,
The beauty glanced my way; her face broke into a smile.
Just as the sun appears in the east in the west there is rain;
You may say her smile lacks feeling but I say it is there. 40

Perhaps because his feelings are aroused, Li seems

inclined to avoid an entanglement with the lady, but he yields
quickly enough to Hung-fu's urgings when she comes to him
in the night. Although overt references to their sexual liaison
are muted, the language occasionally has erotic overtones. This
may simply be the inevitable result of Chang's resort to the
conventional language of romantic encounters in these open-
ing scenes of the play. 41 Certainly, two acts later the couple
(who have fled the capital and are on the road) appear to be
bent on matters other than lovemaking. Hung-fu in particular
is determined to shed the trappings of her former life as a kept
woman, 42 and in the encounter between the couple and Curly
Beard the three are all business, making arrangements for the
meeting with Li Shih-min and planning for the great under-
taking ahead. While both men recognize in Hung-fu an excep-
tional woman (i-jen), the compliment is to her heroic qualities
more than her physical beauty. 43
Thus, after their initial meeting and flight, the lov-
ers abandon the language of love and the heroic mode pre-
vails. Indeed, at one moment in the play both Li Ching and
Hung-fu appear to be harassed by their romantic involve-
ment. The moment comes in scene 22, at a time when the cou-
ple are living in seclusion in Curly Beard's opulent mansion.
Li complains that he feels tied down and Hung-fu retorts that
she can get along fine without him, in fact has been hoping
for months that he would go off to battle and make a name
for himself. Perhaps inadvertently, Chang has captured in this
brief scene the atmosphere of a marriage in which the couple
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 171

have grown restless and bored with each other (one wonders
what life will be like after the wars are over). But the scene no
doubt is intended to demonstrate that the couple are not going
to dissipate their energies by indulgence (as Vang Su has done).
But Hung-fu and Li Ching are not the only roman-
tic couple in the play, and although it is clear that Chang has
taken pains to contain the eroticism of their liaison, he has, by
weaving another subplot into his play, refrained from drama-
tizing the rest of the tale in exclusively heroic terms. By de-
voting several scenes of his play to the "Tale of the Broken
Mirror" in conjunction with the narration of the meetings
among the heroes and their exploits, Chang achieves an inter-
esting interplay between the large sphere of heroic action and
the intimacy of a domestic drama. The question remains
whether the effect of this interplay is jarring or enhancing to
the play's thematic development as a whole.
The story of Princess Lo-ch'ang and her husband
Hsu Te-yen, their separation at the time of the destruction of
their kingdom by the Sui, their fidelity to each other during
the long years of exile, and their eventual reunion, was a fa-
miliar one to Chang's audience. 44 He exploits the coincidence
that Yang Su appears in both stories to weave it into his play.
While this serves nicely to supply Chang with additional ma-
terial, his subplot appears to have no relevance to the main
story. 45 It can be argued, in fact, that the introduction of this
subplot, with its themes of loyalty and self-sacrifice, only con-
fuses our appreciation of the main story, where we are asked
to identify with assertive, forceful characters who are quick to
abandon old relationships for new ones and who are very am-
bitious. We are left with the question of whether there is a dis-
continuity or even a contradiction between the main story and
the subplot, or whether they have some relevance to each other.
The subplot provides a different perspective from
which to view the heroes' actions and their consequences. As
the play begins, both Hung-fu and the princess sing of the
sorrows and frustrations of their life in Yang Su's camp. Hung-
fu cannot achieve her heroic ambition; the princess, a political
refugee who has been taken into Yang Su's household, is pre-
Catherine Swatek 172

vented from seeking out Hsu Te-yen by her sense of obliga-

tion to her new master. The two women explain the signifi-
cance of the objects associated with them. Hung-fu's red whisk
suggests her desire to sweep away or destroy the bad things
in the world; the princess's broken mirror reminds her of her
first husband and of her pledges of loyalty to their love. 46
We next see the princess in scene 14, by which time
Hung-fu has fled in secret to Li Ching, unable in her haste to
take leave of her companion. The princess struggles to come
to terms with Hung-fu's departure, which leaves her bereft of
her sole companion. More sadly than bitterly she sings:

In secret I lament that beauty such as mine

Must spend lovely nights by a lonely pillow.
In the morning I rose in search of some diversion;
My companion had vanished; I am left alone.
I remember spring mornings spent gathering flowers;
How, one morning, for love of a youth,
Could she so rashly abandon me?
It must have been hard to suppress her desire,
To resist the song of a lute plucked by night. 47

While this short scene belongs to the princess, add-

ing to the poignancy of her situation, her inclination to see
Hung-fu's actions as motivated by passion are interesting both
for what they suggest about her (she is a more thoroughly ro-
mantic character) and for how Hung-fu's actions are perceived
by other sympathetic characters. Hung-fu and Li Ching have
reason to fret that their motives are misunderstood, and al-
though the princess makes no judgments, in her handling of
her dilemma and in her scenes with Yang Su she appears to
operate by standards different from those of Hung-fu.
In scene 17 of the play, which comes after the fa-
mous go-playing scene, Yang Su learns from the princess of
her separation from her husband, Hsu Te-yen. Touched by her
loyalty to her husband and moved by her plight (in the play
the princess makes no effort to find her husband by sending
a man with her half of the mirror to sell, as was true in the
original story), 48 Yang offers to help her and sends a servant
out with her half of the mirror. Scene 18 finds Hung-fu and Li
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 273

Ching enroute to the capital, where Curly Beard is to entrust

to them his worldly possessions, instructing them to use them
in Li Shih-min's cause.
Scenes 19 and 20 take place in Yang Su's camp, and
describe the reunion of the princess with Hsu Te-yen. Scene
19 opens on the eve of the new year and finds Hsu in the cap-
ital. After years of wandering and exile he is still separated from
his wife by the gates and high walls of Yang's compound. He
feels himself surrounded by "walls of grief and encirclements
of hate"; hidden deep within Yang's walls, she is lost to him,
and his sense of hopelessness is expressed in the imagery of
broken objects which symbolize their ruined marriage. 49 Al-
though a wanderer, Hsu is as much a prisoner as his wife.
Unlike Hung-fu his salvation lies within the high walls and gates
of Yang's camp, but even were he to penetrate these barriers
his situation would be hopeless, since his wife belongs to Yang.
Thus when he is ushered at Yang's order into his
wife's presence, the moment brings as much pain as joy. For
Hsii there is the realization that he can never reclaim his wife;
for the princess there is the awful realization that she is caught
in an impossible dilemma: confronted with her new husband
and her old one, with whom does she belong? Asked by Yang
Su to commemorate the occasion of the reunion in verse, she
expresses these feelings in her poem:

Whom to promote,
The old or the new?
I dare not laugh nor cry;
Now I know what life
can bring.

In her next aria, which is not addressed to Yang Su

but is in the form of an aside, she reflects:
In his presence I force myself to hide my sorrow;
Were I to abandon an old love for a new one,
How could I sink to such disloyalty and ingratitude? 50

The second line of this aria can be understood in two senses.

We can read it as referring to Hsii Te-yen as the old husband;
how can she abandon her former husband for Yang, her new
Catherine Swatek 174

husband, since to do so would entail her failure to repay his

love and loyalty? But the line could plausibly be read as refer-
ring to Yang Su. Since it is Hsu who has just arrived belatedly
on the scene, a penniless exile with no status and presumably
no claims to press, he could represent the new element in the
situation; thus how can the princess forget the duty and loy-
alty she owes Yang Su? 5 1
The essence of the princess's dilemma is conflict. She
owes Hsu Te-yen her love, Yang Su her "gratitude," and to
honor either commitment entails a breach of faith with the
other.
What a contrast she presents in this respect to Hung-
fu who, having met Li Ching, might have confronted a similar
dilemma: by going to her lover she would be disloyal to Yang
Su. Such doubts do not deter Hung-fu—in Li lies her pathway
to the future, and she seizes the moment with scarcely a
thought for the present. Where Hung-fu is oriented to the fu-
ture, the princess is rooted in the present (an exile, she has
lost her ties to the past). Where Hung-fu is active and bold,
the princess is cautious and passive.
Other contrasts can be suggested between the con-
texts associated with the two heroines. In the heroic context
in which Hung-fu operates, change is initiated by individuals
motivated by a desire for freedom. The active search for a new
way of life entails displacement (flight from the capital) and
replacement (the shedding of old clothing and of old roles, the
abandonment of old obligations and old ties). The language of
these scenes is that of turbulence and movement, of instabil-
ity, and the operative symbol is Hung-fu's whisk, expressive
of her desire to sweep the world clear of filth and corrup-
tion. 52
In the capital context the princess surrenders her
choices, placing herself at her master's mercy. Any change in
her circumstances will have to come from a change in him; she
chooses to stay, to wait and see. Nostalgically attached to a
past that she feels is lost forever, she elects to dwell entirely
in the present; even when her husband is brought to her (she
has made no effort to find him) she is incapable of action,
T H E SELF IN CONFLICT 175

fearing the consequences of redirecting her loyalties or chang-

ing her place. Here fixity (remaining in the capital) and recov-
ery are the operative terms, and the symbol of the broken mir-
ror, whose luster must be restored, captures this idea.
How do these different contexts work in Chang's
play? It is possible that they simply destroy what coherence
the play might have as either a heroic story or a romantic one.
In attempting to combine the two stories by exploiting the co-
incidence that Yang Su appears in both of them, Chang has
been accused of forcing into one play thematically incompati-
ble material.53 Of course, the characteristic structural device of
the southern drama is to establish two locales and to shift the
action back and forth between them. The danger of such a for-
mal feature is that the action of the play simply fragments as
the two plots diverge. But in skillful hands the play can ex-
ploit points of tension and contrast as the action of the two
contexts diverges and intersects. Chang attempts to do this,
and although his handling of the form may not be masterful,
he does orchestrate the action in ways intended to invite the
reader to consider how the two actions inform each other.
One strategy he employs to invite the reader to re-
late the two contexts is language—not simply the use of con-
trasting symbols and imagery but also a deliberate use of key
words or phrases that resonate in more than one context, in-
viting, practically demanding, that the reader ponder their dual
implications. We have seen one instance of this already, where
the gates and walls of Yang Su's camp represent for both Hung-
fu and Hsu Te-yen a hateful barrier, but elicit different re-
sponses. Hung-fu is driven to break out; Hsu wishes to pen-
etrate within. The encircling walls delimit the two arenas of
action (or contexts) in the play—the contained, familiar, or-
dered world of the capital and the turbulent and uncivilized
wilderness of the central plain. Hung-fu's trajectory takes her
outward, while Hsii is journeying back to the capital—he longs
to return from his wanderings, to rediscover within the walls
of Yang's camp that part of his past that is worth preserving.
Likewise the words "old" and " n e w " resonate differently in
the two contexts. Hung-fu is eager to strip off her old makeup
Catherine Sxvatek 176

and adopt a new guise along with her new role; she embraces
her new life. The princess feels trapped between old and new
lives. Confronted with her past she experiences a dissonance
between that past and her present circumstances that is para-
lyzing. Both Hung-fu and the princess express the fear that they
will be disloyal or ungrateful, 5 4 but it is clear that these words
have different implications for them. For Hung-fu these val-
ues must be weighed according to the necessities of the times,
the tug of events. For the princess they have an intensely per-
sonal significance that governs her actions. Chang's use of these
key phrases invites us to read his play dialectically—we are
forced to recognize the play's dual perspective. But it remains
to account for these perspectives in a coherent way.
In the first half of the play, then, the contrast is es-
tablished between the heroic context of the countryside and
the romantic context of the capital—Hung-fu being identified
with the former, the princess with the latter. Initially the two
diverge: as Hung-fu actively pursued her destiny, the princess
resigns herself to her lot, pining all the while for her husband.
Hung-fu seeks freedom, the princess security. Hung-fu justi-
fies her actions in terms of public morality (the world is cor-
rupt; she has a mission as a hero to change it); the princess
knows only the language of personal commitments and obli-
gations.
But at mid-play the contexts are revealed to be quite
intimately interrelated. This is revealed in the character of Yang
Su and his transformation from a man who appears to be
physically robust but morally infirm into a man who, although
suddenly aware of his limitations, has recovered his essential
moral soundness.
Yang's change of character can be explained as
simply the requirement that Chang combine the two stories in
one play. In the T'ang tale Yang Su is arrogant and lax, but in
the story of the princess he is a compassionate, kind man. 5 5 In
order to effect the necessary change, Chang ameliorates his
portrait of Yang Su in the early scenes of the play. Yang im-
presses us as a man inclined to enjoy his hard-won privileges,
and as a man who has a fondness for wine, women, and song.
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 277

But nothing like the indictment of him in the tale is found in

the play. By the time of his next appearance (after Hung-fu's
departure), he is more reflective and subdued. Contrary to what
Hung-fu has told Li Ching, 5 6 Yang Su has missed her pres-
ence, and this has made him thoughtful. He regrets having
failed to act to ensure the couple's loyalty to him (by giving
Hung-fu to Li), and he expresses his sadness at Hung-fu's de-
parture:

Atop the dikes, willows contain spring;

Bordering the hall, flowers gleam in the night.
The oriole has flown away—where has she gone?
What could she do but rashly forsake me?

Then in a poem he expresses his sense of loss in words per-

haps tinged with the realization that his own time is passing:

In spring I remember the Chang-t'ai willow,

Are its leaves as green now as they were then?
Even were its branches to trail down as before,
They'd likely be plucked by another man's hand. 5 7

By the time he has united his other favorite with her husband
(in effect doing for her what he failed to do for Hung-fu) his
transformation from overbearing master to benevolent patron
is complete. Hsu Te-yen and the princess take their leave of
him singing his praises at the very moment that word reaches
the capital of rebellion in the countryside.
Yang's change of heart is portrayed as a case of self-
recovery, but the agents of this transformation in him are Li
Ching and Hung-fu: the former by his stern lecture to Yang
(in scene 7), in which he reminds him of his duty to defend
the country from its internal and external enemies, and the latter
by her decision to leave him. It is Hung-fu who brings Yang
to his senses; his regret at her departure leaves him deter-
mined to show that he is not so infatuated with beauty that
he forgets to honor worthiness. 5 8
By depicting Yang Su as a man capable of moral re-
generation, Chang has introduced a dynamic element into the
action, and its immediate effect is to supply the rationale for
Catherine Swatek 178

the princess' decision to remain with Vang and place her trust
in him. She makes Hung-fu's departure an occasion to test
Yang's character. When he shows no inclination to pursue the
lovers and instead is solicitous of her, she elects to remain. Thus
her loyalty to Yang is possible only because of Hung-fu's
flight—in a sense Hung-fu's disloyalty to Yang Su prepares the
way for the princess's gesture of fidelity to him, and this ges-
ture in turn has the happy effect of reuniting her with her
husband, with whom she can redeem her earlier pledge of good
faith.
By mid-play romantic and heroic values have been
reconciled. Hung-fu's "selfish" and "ungrateful" actions—her
assertive, positive approach—have contributed to the amelio-
ration of the situation she left behind. With Yang Su's re-
dedication to benevolent and righteous principles we can ap-
plaud the princess for her scrupulousness in matters of duty
and loyalty, where if Yang had remained the man of the T'ang
tale, we would find her dilemma absurd and her sense of ob-
ligation excessive. Both heroines win our approval, although
they act in such different ways.
Yang Su conveniently passes from the scene, and
with his passing the nature of the play changes. It becomes a
much duller affair, as the action shifts between the field of
battle, where Li Ching and Hsu Te-yen easily dispatch the en-
emy (first invading Turks, later recalcitrant Korean vassals), and
secluded chambers in which Hung-fu and the princess wait for
news of their men and sing limp arias bemoaning their lone-
liness. This is dull stuff, with some of the most diverting mo-
ments surely not intended to be so (as when Li Ching and
Hung-fu converse testily in scene 22—an unheroic private mo-
ment that reveals the couple in a snappish humor as they sit
out their enforced retirement in Curly Beard's opulent man-
sion—or when Curly Beard's wife attempts unsuccessfully to
console her embittered husband as they prepare to leave Chi-
na's shores in scene 21).
Despite an element of anticlimax in the second half
of the play (we know the outcome of the struggles in ad-
vance), the fact remains that by scene 21 the heroes are dis-
T H E SELF IN CONFLICT 179

persed and the motherland is imperiled as civil war rages and

the Turks invade. Although the seeds of the new order have
been sown, the "Great Unity" (Ta-t'ung) is a long way off. He-
roic action can dispatch the enemy with comparative ease, but
as the sworn brothers disperse and husband is separated from
wife, the battle turns inward and, albeit fleetingly, the heroes
must cope with frustration, anxiety, and even doubt. Thus, al-
though the victories accumulate, an air of malaise lingers
through these scenes; at times the mood of the play is pee-
vish, at one moment nasty, at another simply tinged with re-
gret—the heroes, in short, at times seem unheroic. 59 As early
as scene 21, Curly Beard (who in the play is not only proud
but also often ill-tempered) prepares to set sail from China: he
is still bemoaning his ill fortune and blasted hopes, but deter-
mined to serve no other man. Deaf to his wife's attempts to
coax him out of his bad humor, he surveys the sea which in
his mind has become the grave in which his hopes will be bur-
ied: its waves chill his heart; the ocean will swallow him up. 6 0
Scene 22 presents Li Ching and Hung-fu "at home," but in
the unhappy frame of mind described above. However, no
sooner does Li Ching set off for battle than he finds himself,
two scenes later, accused of insubordination and bundled off
to be executed. In scene 25, Hung-fu is hobbling away from
the capital, which has fallen to the Turks, disheveled, in fear
of being captured by the barbarians, and lamenting the day
she sent Li away. Even in the final moment of victory all is not
well. Hung-fu pines and wonders whether Li Ching will re-
turn to her; 61 Curly Beard, now enthroned in his island king-
dom, regrets the day he left his homeland and laments his self-
imposed exile. 62
All these trials are, of course, safely passed. Yet it
is interesting that the only characters who are relatively free
of self-searching are the princess and Hsu. They have already
experienced their ordeal of separation and their test of loyalty
to one another. What is required of them is that they emerge
from their semiretirement and, by recommitting themselves to
heroic action, win recognition and with it a place in the new
order. At Hung-fu's insistence Hsu Te-yen goes off to join Li
Catherine Swatek 180

Ching in the T'ang camp. He is given a command at which he

soon distinguishes himelf and returns to bring news of the fi-
nal victory and (to Hung-fu's relief) Li Ching's imminent re-
turn. 63
For Li Ching, Hung-fu and Curly Beard, the busi-
ness of the last half of the play serves as much to demonstrate
their good faith as it does to show feats of heroism in the T'ang
cause. Although the background is one of action and in the
foreground there is often the bustle of war, the mood of these
scenes is reflective and often somber—until the final scene, that
is, when the heroes are reunited and, newly confident of their
accomplishments and good faith, can bask in their success.
In his dramatization of the T'ang novella, Chang
Feng-i portrays the principal actors as individuals who undergo
change in the course of the play. Virtually every character ex-
periences some inner crisis—of despair, fear, anxiety, regret.
The impetuous and confident heroine of the tale is still in evi-
dence, especially in the first half of Chang's play, but in the
latter scenes she is more vulnerable emotionally and, when
separated from Li Ching, suddenly uncertain. And Li Ching
is caught up in inner turmoil as well: how should he respond
to the beautiful maid attending Yang Su whose glances have
aroused him; how, after settling into Curly Beard's opulent,
otherworldly domains, will he reenergize himself to go forth
and "win merit" (te-kung); how will he survive the ordeal of
his rough treatment by Li Yüan, Li Shih-min's father? The only
exceptions to this fuller portrayal of character are Li Shih-min,
the future emperor whose presence in the play is largely sym-
bolic, and Hsü Hung-k'o, Curly Beard's Taoist companion and
mentor. As the Taoist who is first ambitious for power and then
disdainful of it, he stands apart from the other heroes, who
are anxious to find their place in Li Shih-min's new order. Curly
Beard is portrayed as a prodigal son who, by yielding to Hsü
Hung-k'o's promise of a foreign kingdom, nearly forfeits the
privilege of serving the T'ang. From the otherworldly figure of
the T'ang tale who intervenes in mundane affairs but chooses
not to participate in Li Shih-min's victory, Curly Beard has be-
come by play's end a lapsed Taoist suddenly eager to partid-
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 181

pate in the "Great Unity" of the T'ang. The new order is, in-
deed, all embracing. In Chang's play Curly Beard has lost his
aura of Taoist otherworldliness. Some of the most striking things
about him—for example, his feasting on the heart and liver of
his enemy—are quite flat in the play, as if they were curious
vestiges of the tale. The qualities of the alien, the inexplicable,
and the latently violent in the character of the tale are absent
from the play. It is Hsu Hung-k'o who is the distinctly Taoist
figure, and his role in the play—that of Curly Beard's se-
ducer—is a dubious one. He first lures Curly Beard away from
China on a foreign adventure, appealing to his egotism by
promising him an overseas kingdom. But no sooner does Curly
Beard seize power in the island kingdom than Hsu drowns
himself, leaving behind a poem that expresses in cliched phrases
his disdain for mundane riches and his desire to become an
immortal. Coming as it does when Curly Beard is contemplat-
ing his self-created exile and lamenting his haste in forsaking
his native land, Hsu's abandonment of him, his gesture of
Taoist detachment, strikes a sour note. In Chang's play Taoist
sentiments are not portrayed with sympathy.
In addition to the lyrical treatment of character in
its numerous arias, the southern drama lends itself to a dialec-
tical treatment of plot, which facilitates the generation of con-
flict and its resolution at numerous levels of the action. 6 4 How
different is this narrative context from that of the T'ang tale,
whose extreme economy of expression and sketchy treatment
of events leave the area of motive largely unexplored and in-
vite the reader, by means of a few strategically placed clues,
to interpret the tale's meaning.
Both the tale and the play are about change, but it
follows from what has just been said that their depiction of
the process of change will differ. The shapers of the tale are
mythmakers. Their characters are vivid but rather abstract fig-
ures whose movements and interactions are carefully orches-
trated to suggest a process of disintegration, diffusion, and re-
alignment. With Curly Beard and Li Shih-min representing
opposed but complementary elements of the newly emerging
order (its demonic, anarchic aspect and its divine, ordered one),
Catherine Swatek 182

Li Ching and Hung-fu act as mediators by virtue of their mo-

bility, their unique ties to both men, and their relationship to
one another.
In Chang's play, change may have political, even
metaphysical implications, but its operation is revealed in the
actions of individuals and in their capacity for self-transfor-
mation. By dramatizing conflict in terms of tensions and affin-
ities in primary relationships (of ruler and subject, husband and
wife, friend and friend), Chang reveals his strong Confucian
bias, and his particular emphasis on the romantic relationship
(the ties between husband and wife) may be due to his use of
the southern dramatic form.
Chang composed the play on the occasion of his
marriage, which helps to explain his inclusion of the romantic
subplot, with its celebration of marital fidelity and love. Within
the context of the play, such fidelity can, happily, also be por-
trayed as part of a much more momentous and auspicious
process—the founding of a new dynasty. Inasmuch as it touches
on the vital problem of loyalty, it supplies Chang with a the-
matic context in which to explore the difficult problem of ori-
entation during times of turbulence and change.
In my analysis of the subplot's relationship to the
main plot, I have attempted to show how their themes com-
plement rather than contradict each other. Hung-fu's ambition
and eagerness to "win merit" energizes the princess and Hsu
Te-yen, forcing them out of their hermetic world of sentiment
and nostalgia, just as her bold decision to abandon Yang Su
for Li Ching jolts Yang out of his complacency, forcing him to
reflect on his past actions and resolve to change. Thus Hung-
fu's pivotal role is suggested not only in her bringing Li Ching
and Curly Beard together but also in her influence on Yang
Su, which effects the rectification of the original situation. 65
However, Hung-fu's (and Li Ching's) actions give the appear-
ance of disloyalty and opportunism, and both charcters worry
that their actions will be seen in that light by others. And
however public-spirited they are, their pursuit of merit entails
moments of flagging confidence and ardor which, however
brief, cause them to doubt the wisdom of their choices and,
T H E SELF IN CONFLICT 183

finally, to doubt each other. And at this juncture it is the or-

deal of the other couple in the play, which epitomizes the
triumph of loyalties in a personal context, that serves as an ex-
ample to Hung-fu and Li Ching (or, more accurately, a prec-
edent).
On the basis of the interpretations offered above it
is possible to speculate about the ideological elements present
in the two versions of the story, the tale and the play. The T'ang
tale seems to have evolved out of popular traditions and un-
official historical accounts about the founding of the T'ang dy-
nasty which were influenced by Taoist sectarian beliefs—be-
liefs about the coming of an ideal ruler and the forces at work
(both divine and human) to bring it about. At some time these
traditions were co-opted by writers (at least two, one revising
the work of a predecessor) who were, in effect, propagan-
dists, apologists for the T'ang ruling family. The simple and
the more elaborate versions of the tale reflect their efforts to
make these Taoist traditions an integral part of the state ide-
ology.66 We find the influence of that ideology at various points
in the tale's evolution: in the unflattering portrayal of Yang Su,
in the increasing emphasis on the fatedness of Li Shih-min's
rise, and in the belated attempts at ridiculing the hopes of other
aspirants for power—a ridicule that betrays the redactor's lack
of sympathy with the earlier strata of Taoist beliefs, since his
comments undercut the characters who in fact are most closely
identified with the emperor-to-be. And we find the influence
of such ideology in the effort to reconcile the representation of
change as a violent and anarchic impulse with a Confucian
world view that sees all phenomena as governed by divine law
(or Heavenly principle, T'ien-li). Both extant versions of the tale
reveal the intrusion of state ideology upon naive legend, but
in the simple version one can still glimpse the preexisting leg-
end—in, for example, the amorality of Hung-fu's motives for
leaving Vang Su (she simply senses that his days are num-
bered), in the stark violence that underlies Curly Beard's code,
and in the aura of mystery and otherworldliness that sur-
rounds him. 67
Chang's play, on the other hand, reflects trends
Catherine Swatek 184

within Confucian thought in the late Ming. The Confucian

emphasis is most apparent in Chang's treatment of the virtue
of loyalty (chung), but his play reveals influences from outside
the extremely rigid orthodox ideology of the state. By Ming
times the virtue of loyalty occupied a place of supreme impor-
tance in both public and private morality; orthodox ideology
demanded absolute and inalienable obedience from inferiors,
be they officials serving the ruler or wives serving their hus-
bands. 6 8 But in his play Chang approaches questions of loy-
alty problematically rather than dogmatically, under the influ-
ence of a more liberal system of Confucian thought.
In sixteenth-century China several prominent Con-
fucians articulated a view of society which took positive ac-
count of the individual and his or her capacity for self-regula-
tion. More than had ever before been true, they emphasized
the importance of individual moral effort (the quest for sage-
hood) for the integrity of the sociopolitical order, and in doing
so they stressed the importance of accommodating human
emotional and instinctual needs (epitomized in the relation-
ship between man and wife) in any program of self-cultiva-
tion. 69
Hung-fu chi reflects this late Ming humanism, with
its faith in the individual and its optimistic portrayal of the
questing self. This is true not only for the characters who make
up the heroic group, but for the man who embodies the au-
thority of society in the play—Yang Su. He too shows a ca-
pacity for inner growth and self-renewal. It is dramatized in
scene 17 of the play (its exact mid-point), when Yang experi-
ences a change of heart. He resolves to rededicate himself to
his public responsibilities (a decision that comes too late), and,
significantly, his first act is to let the principle of benevolence
govern his actions toward the long-suffering couple by re-
warding them for their loyalty to him and to each other. What
is more, his decision to let the princess return to Hsu is not
portrayed as being motivated purely by self-interest (i.e., the
desire to promote loyalty to himself by rewarding their loyalty
to each other). He is genuinely concerned for their suffering—
for their physical deprivation during the long years of sepa-
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 185

ration (in fact, his surprise upon learning of Hsu's sexual ab-
stinence while separated from his wife borders on incredul-
ity). His recognition of their need for emotional and sexual
fulfillment shows Yang's essential humanity, a quality which
restores our faith in him as a legitimate figure of authority.
Chang's reticence about the erotic element in his play is nei-
ther puritanical nor prudish but rather a careful recognition of
its place in human affairs—public and private.
Thus the proper relations governing ruler and sub-
ject, husband and wife, are restored at the play's very center.
The Confucian paradigm of social order is presented in micro-
cosm, and the salutatory effects of this restoration are gradu-
ally manifested in the second half of the play. By its end, the
"Great Unity" celebrated may vindicate the operation of
Heavenly principle (embodied in the person of Li Shih-min)
but morally speaking it emerges as the achievement of the two
couples. One of these couples, by acting, sets in motion the
train of events that leads to the fall of the old dynasty, sever-
ing the relationship between present and past; the other cou-
ple, by remaining loyal to the representative of that old order
even as it is passing, reaffirms the principles of loyalty and good
faith that buttress that order. And, by virtue of their subse-
quent participation in the new order, they provide a continu-
ity of old values even within change.
 Appendix

SUMMARY O F SCENES O F HUNG-FU CHI

Scene 1: Prologue: action briefly summarized.
Scene 2: While crossing a river enroute to the capital of Ch'ang-an,
Li Ching meets Liu Wen-ching, an official who has left Vang
Su's camp and is going to seek out Li Shih-min.
Scene 3: Hung-fu and her companion, the Princess Lo-ch'ang of
Ch'en, lament their lot as singing girls in Yang Su's camp.
Scene 4: Li Ching prays at the temple of Hsi-yueh Wang; in a dream
he receives prophecies in the form of a riddle.
Scene 5: In the capital Yang Su summons Hung-fu and the prin-
cess to a moon-viewing feast.
Scene 6: Having arrived in the capital, Li Ching waits anxiously for
an interview with Yang Su.
Scene 7: Li Ching, in an audience with Yang Su, chides him for his
failure to defend the dynasty; Hung-fu decides to flee to
Li Ching without even taking leave of the princess.
Scene 8: Equally struck by his glimpse of Hung-fu, Li Ching strug-
gles to control his emotions and put her out of his mind.
Scene 9: Curly Beard and Hsu Hurig-k'o scan the heavens for omens
and see an auspicious vapor hovering over the central plain
(site of Li Shih-min's camp).
Scene 10: Hung-fu makes good her escape disguised as a courier and
convinces Li that Yang is too enfeebled to pursue them.
Li proposes that they join Liu Wen-ching.
Scene 11: Li Shih-min receives Liu, who tells him of the hero Li Ching;
Li Shih-min expresses his desire to attract heroes and in-
vites Liu to stay.
Scene 12: Li Ching and Hung-fu meet Curly Beard at an inn, ex-
change oaths of fellowship, and share a meal (including
the heart and liver of the "faithless man"). Curly Beard
learns from Li Ching about Li Shih-min and agrees to meet
the couple again at the Fen-yang Bridge.
Scene 13: Curly Beard rejoins Hsu Hung-k'o at the Fen-yang Bridge;
Li Ching and Hung-fu arrive, after which the men set out
to visit Li Shih-min.
T H E S E L F IN C O N F L I C T 187

Scene 14: In the capital, the princess laments Hung-fu's hasty de-
parture, and decides to wait and see what Yang Su does
before taking action.
Scene 15: At Li Shih-min's camp, Li Shih-min challenges Hsu Hung-
k'o to a game of chess and wins. Hsu advises a crestfallen
Curly Beard to pursue his imperial ambitions across the
seas.
Scene 16: After this interview, the heroes take stock: Li Ching will
serve Li Shih-min, but Curly Beard will serve no other man
and tells the couple to rejoin him at his home in the cap-
ital.
Scene 17: Yang Su expresses regret at Hung-fu's departure and lis-
tens sympathetically to the princess' story of her separa-
tion from Hsii Te-yen. He sends out a servant with her
half of the mirror in search of Hsu.
Scene 18: Enroute back to the capital Li Ching and Hung-fu worry
that their actions will be misinterpreted. They are received
by Curly Beard in his opulent residence, and he delivers
his possessions into their hands, announcing his deter-
mination to quit China.
Scene 19: After years of exile, the eve of the new year finds Hsii Te-
yen in the capital. In despair, he meets Yang Su's servant,
who escorts him into Yang Su's camp.
Scene 20: The princess and Hsii Te-yen are reunited and allowed to
leave the capital with Yang Su's blessing.
Scene 21: At the coast Curly Beard bitterly laments his disappoint-
ment and is determined to depart, even though he looks
upon the sea as the graveyard of his hopes.
Scene 22: At Curly Beard's home, Li frets that Hung-fu will tie him
down, while Hung-fu worries at his lack of action and urges
him to leave and go to Li Shih-min. Li departs immedi-
ately.
Scene 23: No sooner does the "wise and courageous" Yang Su die
than the barbarian general Hstieh Jen-kao attacks the cap-
ital.
Scene 24: At Li Shih-min's camp, Li Ching's proposals enrage Li Yuan
(T'ang Kao-tsu) who orders him bound and executed.
Scene 25: Hung-fu mingles with the populace and flees the invading
barbarians. Helpless and lamenting her fate, she enters a
forest.
Scene 26: In the forest Hung-fu unexpectedly comes upon the prin-
Catherine Swatek 188

cess and Hsu in a remote village. Hung-fu presents Hsu

with her whisk and urges him to "win merit" in Li Shih-
min's cause.
Scene 27: Li Ching, restored to favor, wishes to show his loyalty by
winning a victory against the Koreans.
Scene 28: Seized and led before a suspicious Li Ching, a dispirited
Hsu Te-yen produces Hung-fu's whisk. Li offers him a
command.
Scene 29: After a year without word of their men, Hung-fu and the
princess offer prayers to the moon and sing of their lone-
liness.
Scene 30: Li Ching and Hsu Te-yen rout the Koreans.
Scene 31: Enthroned as the ruler of the island kingdom of Fu-yii,
Curly Beard thinks nostalgically of his homeland. He sets
out to ambush the fleeing Korean king in hopes of win-
ning merit for himself.
Scene 32: The fleeing Korean king falls into Curly Beard's trap.
Scene 33: Curly Beard delivers his captive to a delighted Li Ching,
w h o suggests that he return with them to the capital. Li
Ching sends Hsu ahead, bearing Hung-fu's whisk, with
news of the victory.
Scene 34: Hung-fu at first interprets Hsu's return as a sign of Li
Ching's abandonment of her, and is relieved at Li Ching's
arrival. Curly Beard regrets his haste in leaving China. Liu
Wen-ching enters bearing an imperial edict awarding ranks
of nobility to the couples and a frontier command to Curly
Beard.
 The Fiction of Moral Duty:
The Vernacular Story
in the 1640s
Patrick Harían

7 n his preface to the story collection Illusions (Huan-

yitig), the author, who names himself Awak-
ened from a Dream, imagines someone challenging him about
the value of writing fiction. In a world of wars and natural di-
sasters, he is asked, why does he not offer a program to save
the country instead of wasting his time writing stories? He re-
sponds with a sigh: "Not only do you know nothing of me,
you know nothing of the world! Chaos springs from ignobly
clinging to life and lusting after gain, from betraying ruler and
parents, from spurning virtue and honor. . . . " ' His book, he
claims, is just such a program, its aim being to reform peo-
ple's thinking in accordance with basic Confucian ideas of moral
obligation.
There is little of the usual authorial hyperbole about
this claim; it is a fair account of the purpose behind the major
strain of Chinese fiction in the 1640s, a fiction of duty and moral
heroism. What particularly stirred the writers was their con-
cern over the fate of China, a concern which, as good Confu-
cians, they sought to allay by promoting moral regeneration in
every social relationship, not merely by promoting loyalty and
patriotism. They rejected the Taoist course of withdrawal from
Patrick Hanan 190

the world, and rejected also the value of romantic love (ch'itig),
which had deeply influenced their predecessors. 2 Far from ex-
alting the demands of the individual self, their particular brand
of heroism subordinates them to social obligation. (More pre-
cisely, the individual moral self is fulfilled in the performance
of one's social duty.) They deprecate the utilitarian kind of
morality that projects rewards and punishments; the actions
of their heroes spring from conscience, not the social stimuli
of shame or vainglory.
They seem obsessed with the history of the Ming
Dynasty. With strong forebodings about the dynasty's fate, they
present the early Ming, especially the vigorous reigns of the
Hung-wu and Yung-lo emperors, as among the most glorious
periods of Chinese history, regularly finding cases of moral
heroism in the Ming to match those of ancient times. So long
as the Ming lasts, they use the expression "our dynasty," and
often leave a respectful space before references to the em-
peror, in the manner of official documents.
The social locus of their stories is commonly that of
the student or officeholder. Students, as would-be officehold-
ers, were presumably the main public they envisaged.
Seven known collections can be assigned to this
category: Stories of Figures from the Four Books (Ch'i-shih-erh ch'ao
jen-wu yen-i),3 which has a 1640 preface; Illusions, of which the
preface bears a cyclical date that apparently refers to 1643; The
Second Collection of West Lake Stories (Hsi-hu erh-chi),4 which must
have been written at some time before the fall of Peking, i.e.,
before mid-1644; A Pair of Needles (Yiian-yang chen) and The Brush
That Serves as ]udgment Goat (Pi hsieh-chih),5 probably written
during the brief reign of the Prince of Fu in the south in 1644-
45; Alarum Bell on a Still Night (Ch'ing-yeh chung),6 published
during the equally brief reign of the Prince of T'ang in 1645-
46; and The Sobering Stone (Tsui-hsing shih),7 written in the early
years of Manchu rule. They display a series of graded reac-
tions to a catastrophic period of history, ranging from the ur-
gent exhortations of the earlier fiction to the somber reflec-
tions of The Sobering Stone. Thematically, they come closer to
the tradition of fictionalized history than to that of the earlier
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 191

vernacular story. Works like The Records of Pure Loyalty (Tan-

chung lu),8 by the publisher Lu Yün-lung or his brother, a his-
tory that narrates the campaigns against the Manchus down
to 1630, exhibit values very similar to those of the seven col-
lections.
Since the collections reflect their historical circum-
stances, they are best treated in the order of their composi-
tion. Stories of Figures from the Four Books and Illusions have less
literary merit and will be discussed only briefly. The others fall
into three groups, based on their probable dating: The Second
Collection, before the fall of Peking; Needles, Brush, and Alarum
Bell, during the Southern Ming regimes; and The Sobering Stone,
after the Manchu conquest.
Stories of Figures from the Four Books, which is only
implicitly concerned with the current situation, consists of forty
items developed from references in the Four Books with the
aid of anecdotal and legendary material. (It is probably mod-
eled on Hsüeh Ying-ch'i's Ssu-shu jen-wu k'ao of 1558.) 9 The
stories are written in a simple vernacular and in an insipid style.
Their morality is standard classroom Confucianism and they
may well have been intended for schoolboys. They frequently
inveigh against modern mores; they show the moralist's sus-
picion of the mere writer and his talent (an immoral self); they
ridicule Mo Tzu's universal love as a false kind of ch'ing; and
they disapprove strongly of eremitism. 10
Most of the forty Illusions stories are set in the Ming,
their aim being to glorify the dynasty by finding modern ex-
emplars to equal the classical paragons. They extend even into
the recent past; one story, set in 1628, graphically describes a
typhoon of that year, while another warns against the current
strategy toward the Manchus. 11 Their concern is above all with
the life of the student and the officeholder; they are full of in-
formation on schoolrooms and government offices. Their in-
sistent morality is the Confucianism of moral obligation, par-
ticularly the duties of loyalty and filial piety, including the
ultimate case of the virtuous daughter-in-law. For this author,
the usual terms of ridicule for Confucian puritanism become
badges of honor. He derides the calculus of merits and de-
Patrick Harum 192

merits (resulting in quantified rewards and punishments) which

had been popularized by the sixteenth-century moralist Yuan
Huang (Yiian Liao-fan). 12 He specifically excludes love (ch'ing)
as a value, attacking the archetypal romance, the elopement of
Cho Wen-chun with the poet Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju. 13 He simply
appropriates Buddhism, insisting that the way to Buddha-
hood is through filial acts, not religious devotions. 14 Through-
out, he stresses the efficacy of the individual's own efforts in
changing his situation; he has no time for the doctrine of an
immutable fate.
His stories have a uniform shape: a poem, then a
moralizing essay containing classical anecdotes, then the main
story. His characters are illustrative of qualities, often with
names to suit. Plots are relatively simple. Some of the stories
are undeniably tedious, and their main interest for the mod-
ern reader is in the social fact they present.

The Second Collection of West Lake Stories

The Second Collection contains thirty-four stories all

of which are set, to one degree or another, in Hangchow, many
of them at the West Lake. Few facts are known about the au-
thor, Chou Chi, styled Ch'ing-yiian, just that he lived at the
West Lake and wrote two collections of stories, of which the
first has been lost. (His one reference to the first collection in-
dicates that it resembled the second in its interest in the early
Ming.) 1 5 But much can be gleaned about him from a revealing
preface written by the "Scholar of Lakes and Seas" and also
from the book itself.
Was the book really designed to celebrate
Hangchow? There is something to be said for this simple view.
The preface praises Chou for his service to the West Lake, de-
scribing him, in an elaborate metaphor, as an artist putting the
finishing touches to the lake's beauty. The book is also gen-
erous with Hangchow lore. It opens with a story of Ch'ien Liu,
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 193

who at the end of the T'ang founded his own state with
Hangchow as its capital, and it proceeds, in the second story,
to treat the Southern Sung, when Hangchow was the national
capital. In these and in many other stories, there is much de-
scription of local scenery and folkways. But for all the rich
compost of literary and historical lore, The Second Collection
cannot be thought of as a work of either celebration or nostal-
gia. It is something quite different, as the preface implies.
The preface insists on the book's subjective value
for its author. After eulogizing Chou as " a brilliant talent
without equal in his time" and "a generous, noble mind," the
preface writer gives us Chou's response to the praise. Instead
of demurring, he launches into a lament: he is too poor to en-
tertain, his walls are crumbling, he has holes in his roof that
let the moonlight in, snow lies on his desk, etc., a whole lit-
any of classical allusions. But the material hardships he can bear;
it is his harsh treatment at the hands of destiny and his hu-
miliation by "foxes and rats" that he complains of to Heaven.
Sometime after this exchange, the preface writer received from
Chou a work entitled West Lake Talk (Hsi-hu shuo), presumably
the lost first collection. Reading its preface, he felt pity for the
author, a man of talent who had been ignored and who was
now "in such desperate straits that he was prepared to play
the entertainer and pluck the lute in order to get recognition
from the public." Are not the authorities at fault? For to have
Chou writing stories is "like harnessing a noble steed to a salt
cart." 1 6 Three instances are given of unrecognized poets who
made final, despairing, flamboyant gestures to gain recogni-
tion. This book is evidently Chou Chi's gesture toward the same
end.
This is not just friendly hyperbole, it is also how
Chou sees his own work. The prologue to the first story has
little to do with that story; instead, it serves as a preface to the
whole book. It begins with a poem about Ch'ii Yu, the famous
Hangchow poet of the early years of the Ming. A poetic prod-
igy, he nonetheless remained poor, and blamed his poverty
on fate. "And then he wrote a book called New Tales under the
Lamplight (Chien-teng hsin-hua), a playful piece of writing in
Patrick Hanan 194

which he influenced readers by persuasion rather than by rid-

icule, a book he employed to express his feelings." New Tales
is a famous collection of Classical romances of a decidedly pre-
cious character, but in C h o u ' s eyes it was demeaning work for
a genius:

Reader, you would expect a literary genius with a soaring no-

bility of mind and a great amount of remarkable literature to
his credit, a man who could discourse fluently of past and
present, who had only to pick up his brush to write with a rapid
swish, producing work of lively thought and brilliant expres-
sion, a man with the talent for impromptu composition of a Ts'ao
Chih or a Wang Ts'an, such a man you would expect to find
established in a high official post. Were he to live in a stately
residence, his palate served with every delicate flavor, pro-
vided with a seven-jeweled bed, a green jade desk, lapis lazuli
winecups, and amber wine, you would not think it excessive.
But Fortune is an imp and Heaven is blind, and they forced him
through a course of hardship that left him destitute, without
clothes enough for his back or food for his belly, never sure
where the next meal was coming from, endlessly drilling the
classical texts from his few battered books, to a point beyond
the expression of all emotion. Is he not a pitiable case? Hence,
on this rare occasion, he played the entertainer and wrote a work
of fiction, trivial though it was, and scrambled to get it pub-
lished. (p. 3)

He then takes u p the case of Hsu Wei, the brilliant

sixteenth-century artist and playwright, one of w h o s e plays
treats the condemnation of the tyrant Ts'ao Ts'ao by the Con-
fucian scholar and poet Ni H e n g . Hsu Wei wrote the play " t o
pour out his lifelong ideals, to express in writing all the emo-
tions of his heart, the urge to sing, laugh, shout, and dance.
His heart was filled with a sense of injustice that weighed on
him and gave him no relief, and so he used this play as a means
of diversion from i t . " C h o u is implying that his book serves
him as New Tales served Ch'ii Yu and the play about Ni Heng
served Hsu Wei. The reader is meant to combine the two ex-
amples to form the picture C h o u is projecting of himself and
his purpose.
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 195

He sees himself, like Ch'ii Yu, as a great but un-

successful talent forced to turn to fiction and, like Hsii Wei, as
a writer using literature to express his vehement feelings about
society. As Hsii Wei used a famous historical event to express
himself, so Chou draws his examples from the Southern Sung
and the early Ming, identifying himself all the while with Ni
Heng, the righteous Confucian intellectual railing against the
abuse of power. By drawing this picture of himself, Chou means
more than the commonplace assertion that he is using his work
to relieve his personal frustrations. He is pointing to his rela-
tionship to his stories as the primary characteristic of the Sec-
ond Collection.
Once or twice he speaks directly about himself. In
story 14, having described the grandeur of the poet Hsing
Feng's tour of the West Lake, he refers to himself and his like
("we penniless licentiates"). But for the most part we must read
his mind indirectly, through the fiction.
The mind and voice are those of an angry, envious,
impoverished, no longer young, rather conservative, idealistic
patriot, even a nationalist, with a strong sense of his own abil-
ity and of his place in a high literary tradition. He is contemp-
tuous of officials as a class, contemptuous of their lack of
learning and of their failure to accept the obligations that go
with their offices, including the sacrifice of their lives if nec-
essary. His morality is of the absolute kind, requiring moral
heroism. At the same time, he is a literary man, presenting his
favorite poets to us for our admiration, poets with a high de-
gree of amour propre, men with sharp tongues and pens, sat-
irists who did not suffer fools gladly or rogues at all. But al-
though Chou is a master of vigorous, denunciatory prose, he
is not a man of novel ideas or of much wit. With one or two
exceptions—story 25 has an accommodation of Confucianism
and Buddhism and story 11 a list of woman's sexual griev-
ances against man—his prologues are not to be compared with
Ling Meng-ch'u's (1580-1644) or Li Yii's (1610-1680) for their
play of ideas.
The depth of his condescension toward fiction is
remarkable in itself. The preface may praise him for translat-
Patrick Hanan 196

ing the West Lake lore into the vulgar language, but Chou
clearly regrets that he has to turn to fiction, any fiction, to ex-
press himself. Nowhere does he attempt to justify vernacular
fiction in the usual way, in terms of its accessibility and im-
pact. Inevitably, this condescending attitude affected his work,
bringing it close to various nonfictional genres, especially his-
torical narrative.
His use of history was certainly more extensive than
that of any other story writer. It is high-level history too, not
the local history that other writers sometimes include in their
fiction; few heroes in his biographical stories come from any
level below that of the most noted literati. Some of his stories,
dense with details of court intrigue and military strategy, even
go beyond the biography and present us with tracts of topical
history. On the other hand, many stories contain legendary
material, and some biographies take the form of fairy tales.
Much use is made of metempsychosis—all the heroes of the
early Ming are reincarnations of historical figures—and the
course of a career is often explained in karmic terms, with stress
on heavenly retribution.
The Southern Sung was a natural focus for his fic-
tion, since Hangchow was its capital. But the Southern Sung
also supplied writers concerned about the national destiny with
clear symbols of good and evil. Chou's interest in the period
is therefore twofold; he glories in its literary culture, in its civ-
ilized prosperity, in the imperial patronage of its arts, but at
the same time he deplores its complacency and lack of princi-
ple, especially its failure to try to regain the lost half of China.
However, it is the early Ming on which he concen-
trates. The Hung-wu Emperor, who appears, sometimes in a
minor capacity, in a good third of the stories, is accorded
nothing less than idolatry. Yung-lo is also the object of ven-
eration; an interlude in story 2 gives us a eulogy of his suc-
cesses, including a list of China's tributary lands. The T'ien-
shun Emperor is mentioned only once, and no other emperor
is mentioned at all; Hung-wu and Yung-lo were evidently the
only positive models that the Ming royal house could offer. A
fervent nationalist, Chou Chi seldom writes of the Jurchen or
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 197

Mongols without contempt, an attitude that no doubt reflects

his fear and hatred of the Manchus.
Chou's ideals are both literary and political—the self
is established through intellectual (especially literary) effort but
fulfilled only in public service—and he naturally projects them
through literary men who aspired to be statesmen. About ten
main stories are biographies of such figures. Story 3 is about
the Sung poet Chen Lung-yu, able, articulate, witty, but brash,
whose talent for satire deprives him of success until late in life.
Story 15 is about Lo Yin, the most brilliant poetic talent in the
whole southeast; eventually he received a post that "did not
fulfill a tenth of his aspirations." Like Chen, he loved to sa-
tirize others, thus arousing fear and dislike. As a youth he was
so poor that he tried to borrow from his relatives, without suc-
cess. "At this point, he was simply a pauper predicting great
things about himself and trying to raise credit on his future
career. But people place their bets only on those who have al-
ready succeeded; they don't take promissory notes" (p. 278).
A third hero is Yang VVei-chen (story 23), another
famous poet who suffered because of his forthrightness. He
was sustained by a strong sense of his own worth: "He looked
on writers of light verse as if they were slaves, and people be-
came very resentful and envious of him." Other heroes are Sung
Lien (story 8) and Liu Chi (story 17).
Chou's criticism of his society is conveyed as much
by declamation as by historical example. The introduction to
story 17 begins with a poem on cats:

Why does this story of mine begin with a poem on cats? People
keep cats for the sole purpose of catching mice. What is the point
of keeping one of those lazy creatures that just eat their mas-
ter's food and then lie snoring beside the stove while the mice
run riot? That is why Lord Yiieh [Yiieh Fei] said: "Provided the
civil officials are not after money and provided the army offi-
cers are prepared to die, the country will be at peace." This puts
it perfectly. Lavish salaries, high posts, honors for their par-
ents, privileges for their children—all these things are given to
officials only so that they will rid us of disaster, preserve the
state, and put down disorder. If they merely revel in their ranks
Patrick Hartan 198

and privileges, always grasping after greater wealth and higher

status, trying to advance themselves and enrich their families,
or if they turn corrupt, ruining the court's endeavors and
harming the people, and then, the moment some emergency
occurs, scuttle away from the scene, are they not betraying the
court's whole purpose in keeping them? (p. 311)
Officials are condemned for failure to sacrifice themselves, for
arrogance, for peculation. The virtuous maidservant of story
19 w a s "far superior to the phony scholars of the present day,
w h o receive great emoluments from the court but are not pre-
pared to sacrifice their lives." The education of officials is in-
adequate for their responsibilities:
They have been brought up on that vile, putrid literature [i.e.,
examination essays]. They are totally ignorant of the rise and
fall of dynasties, of order and disorder. They have no learning,
no skills. They simply act at random. When trouble hits, they
just pee their pants in fright and run away from their posts, (p.
312)
The civil service examinations are the object of constant scorn,
most notably in story 20, Chou's one venture into ironic sa-
tire, in which a worldly wise prostitute tells her young lover
h o w to succeed in life, giving him a quick rundown of the cul-
tural attainments of the successful candidates, many of w h o m
she has known intimately. A passage of similar import occurs
in story 15:
Many men of great talent had no opportunity for a career. The
people who did were mostly palefaced schoolboys who knew
nothing about writing. Nor had they the slightest idea of what
government means. There was not a single responsible, expe-
rienced person among them. That was what brought the T'ang
into chaos. Literary men seethed with the injustice of it and
Huang Ch'ao, who had failed several times in the examina-
tions, rebelled and marched into Ch'ang-an. (p. 285)
There is no need to give further examples of Chou's diatribes
against officialdom, for they are all to the same tune and often
in roughly the same words. The misery resulting from corrup-
tion is frequently described thus: "Those with money lived,
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 199

those without money died." The causes of rebellion are regu-

larly traced to bad government. The rebel Wang Chih of story
34 sums it up by saying: "Today's world belongs to the silk
hats [i.e., the officials] and to the very rich, not to u s . "
Severe as he is in his criticism of officials, Chou re-
quires self-sacrifice of everyone:

Every part of the world belongs to the royal house. Every per-
son in the nation is a subject of the royal house. Whether he
has a post or not, whether he gets a stipend or not, he should
exert his utmost effort for the royal house and strive to bring it
credit, (p. 490)

Chou's historical stories take the form of the historical episode

or the biography. Stories 2, 7, 9, 17, 25, and 34 are the prin-
cipal examples of the former. They are liberally sprinkled with
documents and a couple of them even carry appendices. In
these stories, the sluggish river of Chou's narration, meander-
ing through lush meadows of fact and description, is some-
times almost lost to view. As an attempt to render historical
subjects in story form, the stories deserve attention, even if they
are ultimately unsuccessful. The biographical stories, the most
notable of which are nos. 1, 3, 15, 16, 18, 19, 31, and 33, are
open to the same criticism, but to a slighter degree. Each story
illustrates a principle (e.g., karmic retribution, capricious fate),
but in form it is little more than a string of anecdotes copied
from other works, no one of which is allowed to dominate.
Most of the other stories also have some historical
background. Story 4, about an invincibly stupid person who
passes the examinations, is ostensibly a biography but really a
comedy of capricious fate seasoned with satire. Story 6 is a fi-
lial son story with a dense historical background. Story 11 is
primarily a jealous wife story, story 13 a court case story. There
are several romantic comedies (12, 14, 21, 22, and 27). No. 19
is the story of the virtuous maidservant and no. 20 that of the
prostitute as political mentor. In no. 28, a house painter is lured
away to a rendezvous with a woman whom he later realizes
to be a nun, at which point the story simply comes to an end.
Such incompleteness is unknown in the earlier fiction, which
Patrick Hatian 200

always exposes, explains, rewards, and punishes. Here, the

material is treated as an exotic experience, in the manner of
the Classical tale.
His writing contains a good deal of comedy and
satire, in addition to the examples I have given. There is the
terrible school in story 3, in which Chen loses his job for
teaching a correct interpretation. Story 11, of the jealous wife,
describes the hero, a libertine in puritan's clothing, as he es-
capes from his wife's eye: "He was like a small boy after school
is out who wants to turn somersaults, do tiger jumps, and pull
faces." But there is comparatively little ribaldry in his work.
The rendezvous in story 28 is aptly described in painting ter-
minology, but the purportedly comic sequence "Ten Scenes in
the Seduction of a Maid" 1 7 in story 19 is an isolated passage
in its story.
The most striking formal feature of the Chou Chi
story is the length and elaborateness of its prologue. 1 8 Ling
Meng-ch'u had developed the prologue into, typically, an in-
troductory essay followed by a prologue story, the two to-
gether sometimes almost matching the main story in length.
Chou Chi goes even further. Characteristically, he begins by
explaining a poem line by line, occasionally even telling the
stories behind the allusions. Then he adds a prologue story or
a series of anecdotes. At this point, he mentions the main story,
but before beginning it, launches into yet another story as its
immediate prologue.
His prologue has the same purpose as Ling's—to
establish the narrator's persona and to weight the story with
commentary. Sometimes it teases the reader with false starts,
but more often it is just an exercise in virtuosity. The topics of
his introductions do not greatly exceed the range established
by earlier writers: heavenly requital, predetermination, the three
doctrines, gambling, the sparing of life, jealousy, filial piety and,
overwhelmingly, loyalty—with the one exception that heav-
enly requital is here applied on a grand scale, to the fate of
dynasties, the focus of Chou Chi's moral concern.
T H E FICTION OF M O R A L D U T Y 201

Wartime Stories

The title A Pair of Needles (Yiian-yang chen) refers to

the needles of embroidery and also to those of acupuncture,
which are, metaphorically, the means of "healing kings and
saving nations," as the preface puts it. The preface was writ-
ten by the Only One Sober (or Awake), another instance of
fiction's image of waking or sobering up. The brush of The Brush
That Serves as judgment Goat (Pi hsieh-chih) is the writer's brush,
while the judgment goat is the legendary animal that instinc-
tively attacks the unjust contestant in a dispute. (Judges' caps
were also known by this term; hence the title could also be
rendered The Brush as judgment Cap.) The editor of The Brush is
given as the Only One Sober; presumably both collections were
by the same author. 19 Needles contains four four-chapter sto-
ries, only the first of which is accessible to me. (Synopses are
available of the other three.) The Brush originally contained three
stories of six chapters each; two survive, neither of them ac-
cessible.
Story 1 of Needles, although formally a comedy of
fortune, is actually a fearful indictment of examination dishon-
esty. The glib villain, succeeding in the examinations at the
hero's expense, eventually finds himself at the latter 7 s mercy.
But the hero, now a judge, decides that the man has suffered
enough and, in an act of remarkable leniency, releases him.
The story is full of satire of the villain's imposture, as well as
of the hero's service as aide to a Hanlin official, his prison ex-
periences, and his attempts to set up a school. Although the
characters are wooden, there are lively scenes of the hero's life
as husband, student, examiner, tutor, aide, and official.
Judging from the synopsis, story 2 resembles it
closely. It is about an impoverished student who loses his post
as tutor, serves as an aide, is sent to jail, and then, like the
hero of story 1, is appointed to the Board of Punishments and
put in charge of reviewing the very case in which he himself
was wronged. The story contains one of those attractive ban-
dit figures often met with in late Ming fiction. (Late Ming au-
Patrick Hanan 202

thors generally had little to say about the disastrous rebellions

of their time, at least before Li Tzu-ch'eng's capture of Peking;
it was left to apologists for the Ch'ing dynasty to condemn the
rebels.)
Story 3 has an out-and-out scoundrel as subject. By
exploiting his connections and persuading friends to sit the
examination in his place, he achieves a great success. Exposed
at last, he flees the capital, takes up with the rebels, is cap-
tured by the Ming troops and brought south. The blocks for
the last page have evidently been mutilated and we do not
know what happens to him next. For all their strong social
criticism, these stories do not indulge in Chou Chi's v e h e m e n t
denunciations.
Alarum Bell on a Still Night (Ch'ing-yeh chung) origi-
nally consisted of sixteen stories; ten survive, three of which
are accessible. Lu Kung, w h o has reprinted the three, says the
author was one Yii Lin who also wrote a novel, now lost, about
Yang Kuei-fei and her rivals at the T'ang court. 2 0 The author
claims in his preface to have " a d o p t e d the rhetoric of humor-
ous discussion in order to be able to toll the bell of loyalty and
filial p i e t y . "
Like The Second Collection, it has contemporary rel-
evance, although it does not project its author's personal frus-
trations as Chou Chi's book does. In his subordination of him-
self to his political ideals, as well as in his call for moral activism
from all elements in society, Yii Lin is much closer to the au-
thor of The Sobering Stone. In fact, the form of the Alarum Bell
story—especially the short prologue, poetic commentary, in-
dependent epilogue, and terse language—strongly suggests The
Sobering Stone.
The stories were written as North China was being
lost; there is mention in story 6 of the cities and towns of the
capital province falling one after the other. The main story is
about a model fifteenth-century general, a civil official skilled
in the art of war, that same Wang Yiieh w h o was the philos-
opher Wang Yang-ming's ideal. An able commander who
heeded advice and rewarded merit, Wang succeeded admira-
bly in his job despite venial faults such as a taste for wine,
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 203

women, and gambling. The story's introduction, while absolv-

ing the emperor from blame, bitterly attacks the army, partic-
ularly for its selection of officers. One of the narrators fre-
quent digressions turns into a denunciation:
But our present-day generals are greedy and lustful. They re-
sent criticism and bury wise men in obscure positions while they
themselves try to abduct people's wives and daughters. Would
any of them ever surrender a beautiful concubine to another
man? They look on imperial decrees and ministerial directions
as matters of no consequence. Would any of them ever heed
advice? Hence their reconnaissance is limited to refugees' re-
ports. Cities that are still holding out are reported to have fallen;
towns already lost are reported to be still in our possession. They
put out the most arrant nonsense, yet they have not a single
person on their staffs who is prepared to risk his life going
through the enemy's lines to get the facts. From senior general
down to junior officer, there they all are, encamped a good three
or four hundred li away from the enemy, (p. 94)

Story 7 is the more unusual of the other two. It is about a thir-

teen-year-old boy who kills his father's concubine in order to
prevent his mother from killing herself. (His mother and the
concubine quarrel constantly, with his father regularly taking
the concubine's side.) After he confesses to the crime, the boy
is actually praised for his filial virtue, even by the emperor
himself. Stories of filial piety generally involve terrible trials,
but rarely this painful choice between greater and lesser evils.
The introduction defends the quality of "childishness" on the
grounds that a child's actions are spontaneous, whereas edu-
cation, experience, and a growing self-interest all tend to in-
hibit bold action. The first part of the story, describing the
father's infatuation with a singing girl, is an excellent piece of
writing, reminiscent of Chin Ping Mei. Here and elsewhere, the
author shows himself a master of vigorous dialogue, sly re-
partee, and the depiction of flaring street and family quarrels.
Story 8 is about a widow whose husband has been
murdered by his two brothers. The widow acquiesces in the
murder's cover-up in order to bring up her children safely and
plan a sure revenge. By severe restraint of word and deed over
Patrick Hanan 204

many years, she lulls the suspicions of the murderers, and then
leaves her children, now grown up, with all the evidence they
need to convict their uncles. Like the other stories, this one is
notable for its cynical view of humanity, especially of the ri-
valry among the households. Like the other stories too, it dis-
penses with all supernatural agencies, even the Principle of
Heaven. The individual self is responsible for its own destiny.

The Sobering Stone

The Sobering Stone (Tsui-hsing shih) consists of fifteen

stories by an author who calls himself Master Ku-k'uang
("Ancient-crazy") of Tung Lu, or eastern Shantung. (Despite
the name, he has no perceptible connection with the flourish-
ing Shantung vernacular literature of the time.) From the sto-
ries' manner of reference to the Ming, it is clear that they were
written during the early Ch'ing and from the viewpoint of a
staunch Ming loyalist. The collection's title refers to the leg-
end of a stone which awakens one from a drunken slumber,
and it is indeed a serious book, largely devoid of humor and
entirely devoid of ribaldry. The author's aim is to celebrate good
and condemn evil according to his Confucian lights. He is
concerned with the five cardinal relationships, particularly that
of ruler and subject, focusing on the local bureaucracy below
the level of the county magistrate.
The first two stories illustrate his conception of the
officeholder's duty. The first tells of a certain Yao I-hsiang who
is not an exemplary figure by conventional standards. An or-
phan, he is sent by his mother to the National University in
Nanking where, instead of enrolling, he spends all his money
on singing girls. But, penitent though he is at disappointing
his mother, he never regrets the waste of money. Contenting
himself with a minor job in charge of the local prison, he dis-
tinguishes himself as hard-working, honest, and kind, thereby
earning the scorn of his colleagues. The newly appointed pre-
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 205

feet happens to owe Yao a debt for past generosity. Yao is per-
mitted to select seven cases in each of which, by recommend-
ing a pardon, he can collect a thousand taels from the prisoner.
He is delighted, for there are many unjust sentences that have
long troubled him, but he quietly refuses to accept any money
from the pardoned men, ignoring the demands of his scan-
dalized relatives. Shortly before his death, he pays a dream visit
to the nether world and learns that his descendants will reap
rewards from his virtue.
The second story, about a humble official who dies
fighting bandits and is avenged by his son, stresses the same
moral. The introduction is on the subject of responsibility. Civil
and military officials define their responsibilities too narrowly,
each putting the onus on the other. "But if we want peace,
then everyone, no matter what his position is, must be pre-
pared to die for it." The epilogue refers specifically to the last
years of the Ming. Each social group thought only of its own
interest, and the people became so impoverished they re-
belled. The basic fault was not that of the rebels: "Even before
the bandits came, things were in chaos." 2 1
The story is set early in the reign of the Hung-wu
Emperor of the Ming, when many bandits were still at large.
Its hero, Liu, is a minor official in Kiangsi, "the sort of man
who wanted to do his bit for his country." Unruffled by ridi-
cule, he selects and trains a band of good and devoted troops.
When an order comes to root out some powerful local bandits,
he is dismayed, however, because he mistrusts his colleagues'
capacity. Liu's bold plan succeeds, but at the crucial moment
his colleagues fail to reinforce him, and he is captured and
killed. His son cannot even get the local officials to mount an
expedition against the bandits. (The colleagues have already
placed the blame on his father for "disobeying orders for the
sake of personal glory.") The son rallies his own men, defeats
the bandits, takes a traditional revenge on his father's mur-
derer, and then simply returns home without even calling on
the governor. "I've merely done what I had to do. Why do I
need to see him?" The local people draw up a report on the
son's victory, but as it goes up through official channels, an
Patrick Hanan 206

increasing share of the credit is claimed by others. The father,

however, still receives posthumous honors and the son a
magistrate's post.
"The Captain and the Concubine," story 5, is Ku-
k'uang's finest example of positive morality. It concerns an-
other Yao, a hereditary army officer, who combines a strong
character with good sense. Most hereditary officers, we are told,
are unworthy and corrupt. With secure positions, they do not
bother to practice arms, let alone study how to read and write.
When their peculation is exposed, they merely receive a few
strokes of the rod and continue to draw their full salaries. Yao,
however, is conscientious in his job and studies hard. Unlike
the type of officer who loves to consort with writers, Yao,
though educated, "did not consider literary discussion the
business of a military m a n . " Unlike the other type of officer,
Yao is abstemious in drink and sex and takes good care of his
men. His wife is "an officer's daughter, but with a mild, kindly
nature, a gentle person who treated her sisters-in-law like her
own sisters and her servants like her own children. She and
her husband were a very loving couple." 2 2
Although what follows will strike the modern reader
as unwitting comedy, the author clearly intends the episode
(in which Yao takes a concubine) to represent ideal behavior
on the part of both husband and wife. Of necessity, it is the
wife who raises the matter. Yao, out of fondness for his wife—
not fear of her, the narrator is careful to explain—can think
only of reasons for not taking a concubine. His first concern is
for his duties; he is worried over the external threat of pirate
aggression and the internal threat of uprisings due to bad har-
vests. And there are personal reasons too. Their marriage is a
good one; how will a third person affect it? Besides, his wife
is only thirty and could still have a son of her own.
His wife argues that he has a duty to his father and
grandfather to have a son. "Surely you would not want your
grandfather's gold belt to go to some relative!" Without wait-
ing for his agreement, she searches for a concubine, taking care
to find one better-looking than herself and of gentle upbring-
ing.
T H E FICTION OF M O R A L D U T Y 207

Although young, Jui-chen was serious and demure, with no trace

of giggly forwardness. A quiet, friendly, gentle person, she was
scrupulous in her attendance on the captain's lady, who took a
great liking to her. When, in the evening, Captain Yao felt un-
der a certain constraint and could not bring himself to go
abruptly off to the concubine's chambers, his wife would take
the lamp and lead him there, just as if she were taking a child
by the hand. And she would let no one wake the master if he
happened to sleep late. For her part, the concubine was careful
not to presume, and would always see that Captain Yao spent
the following night with his wife. But the wife had a purpose
in mind and, on learning that it was the concubine's period,
would absolutely insist on pushing the captain into her room
so as to increase the chances of conception.
Jui-chen was a trifle unsophisticated, and the cap-
tain was a military man, after all, and at the height of their love
for each other, inevitably certain tactless things were done to
which the captain's lady paid practically no attention. . . . She
saw to it that the captain took his fertility pills regularly and
the concubine her pills for menstruation control. Within half a
year, Jui-chen conceived, to the delight of the captain's lady,
who arranged for a wet nurse well ahead of time and saw to
all the preparations for the delivery. Fortunately, when the time
came, it was a boy. "Now the Yaos have an heir!" she ex-
claimed. The captain was also exceedingly pleased, (p. 64)

T h e n , as Yao has foreseen, there is fighting along the coast.

His advice is not taken, and the Japanese pirates succeed in
getting into the city of Hsing-hua, where Yao is killed. The two
w o m e n flee with the baby, only to fall foul of an equal dan-
ger—their own demoralized troops.

The two women struggled along. Before they had

gone very far, they heard shouts, and a group of men, who
proved to be Chinese soldiers, rushed out and barred the way.
They noted that the women were attractive, even though they
had no belongings with them.
"There's nowhere for you to go," they said. "There
are Japanese and bandits up ahead. Why don't you come to our
camp and have a good time with us?" And they began to push
the women and urge them along.
Patrick Hanan 208

"You're soldiers!" exclaimed Jui-chen. "How can you

say such disgraceful things? This is Captain Yao's wife!"
"What do we care about any captain's wife?" said
one. "The women we sleep with are all ladies or girls of good
family. The camp is full of them; there's nothing unusual about
it. Now, if you're going to come, come along, otherwise we'll
tie you up. And if you make any trouble, well, I have a sword
here, and I'll cut you to pieces." He drew his sword.
"Cut me to pieces then!" said the captain's wife. "I
am a lady by court appointment, and my life has already been
destroyed back there in the city." Orders were given to bind
her, when Jui-chen spoke up in a calm, deliberate voice.
"There's no need to get impatient," she said. "She
is a lady and must on no account be disgraced. Why not take
me with you and set her free?"
"It doesn't make any difference to us whether she's
a lady or not. We'll take her anyway."
"My only worry is that she'll have so much fun with
us we'll never be able to get rid of her," said one.
"This one's young and pretty and speaks nicely," said
another. "Let's take her. What do we want with that old bag,
anyway?" (p. 70)

Of course, the concubine does not go. She waits until the
woman and child have had time to get away, then defies the
soldiers and pays with her life.
Each member of the family has behaved admirably.
The captain has given up his life fighting his country's ene-
mies; the concubine, in the most remarkable act, has sacrificed
herself to preserve the son and heir; and the wife, by her model
behavior with regard to the concubine, has enabled the Yaos
to have a successor. The captain and the concubine are hon-
ored posthumously, but, in an ironic final note, the men who
draw up the report on the concubine's martyrdom think it might
embarrass the general if they said she had been killed by
Chinese soldiers and so they substitute the word "Japanese"
instead.
"The Bribe," story 11, is the best negative example
of Ku-k'uang's morality. 23 It tells of a student married to a wife
of some means who longs for the day when her husband will
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 209

obtain an office and make some money himself. When he does

obtain an office, the money comes in much too slowly for her
liking, and she is thus an easy mark for a rich man in trouble
with the law. When her husband returns from a tour of in-
spection, she tells him of the bribe she has accepted.

That evening he and his wife took a little wine together, and
when the cups had been cleared away, she announced with a
radiant smile: "You've been in office for over a year now, but
it wasn't until today that we made our first big m o n e y . "
"You mean the presents I brought back with me from
my tour?"
"You call that big money?" she asked, pulling out the
charge against Ch'en Hu from her sleeve. "This man offered
me six hundred taels, which I have accepted. Now it is up to
you to accommodate h i m . "
"I can't possibly pardon him," said Wei. "In fact, I'm
going to make my name by bringing him d o w n . "
"You'd be far better off making a fortune for your-
self than a name," she said. "You're always saying we are going
to profit from your service, but so far we haven't even made
enough money to pay off the loans we took out in the capital.
Look, we have this money in hand now. Surely you're not
thinking of giving it back?"
"The money will mount up if one serves long
enough. You simply can't do this sort of thing!"
"Mount up indeed! It's been two years since you
graduated chin-shih and one year since you got an assistant
magistracy, and yet we're still forced to live like this. If you don't
grab the money when it's in front of your eyes, you'll never get
anywhere in life. I'm going to keep this money, I don't care what
you say."
" W h o gave it to you?" Wei asked.
"Heaven gave it to me, of course! O h , don't be so
stupid! If you don't go after the money, those robbers and
whores will be after you when it comes time for your promo-
tion. Just answer me this: If we don't scrape together a few taels
and pay them off, how will we ever get another loan in the fu-
ture? What 7 s more, this has already been settled by others. Why
stir up trouble and ruin all of them too?" (pp. 169-70)
Patrick Hanan 210

The story dwells on the stages through which the official goes
in reaching his immoral decision. More than most writers, Ku-
k'uang puts the process of decision before the reader; he is an
excellent analyst of motives. After Wei has acquiesced, he is
shown, in a supernatural scene not uncommon in fiction, the
heights to which he might have risen—the consummate honor
of a ministry. Worry over what his wife may do next combines
with guilt and disappointment to bring on an illness that forces
him to resign. The author, who has made uncharacteristic use
of heavenly requital, half apologizes for it in his epilogue:
"These matters to do with the nether world cannot be entirely
believed or entirely disbelieved."
"The Metamorphosis of Poet into Tiger," story 6,
Ku-k'uang's only venture into fantasy, condemns the individ-
ualism (of the immoral self) that offends against his ideal of
self-fulfillment through social duty. The story is based on the
T'ang Classical tale of the poet Li Cheng, 24 who was trans-
formed into a tiger. It sticks fairly closely to the tale, but elab-
orates on the poet's psychopathic arrogance.
Li Wei (the name is slightly changed) considers
himself the equal of his great contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu.
Because he refuses to conform to the rules, he fails nine times
in the examinations, yet nurses a constant sense of injustice,
blaming his failure on illiterate examiners. Passing on the tenth
try, he behaves so superciliously toward his colleagues in his
first position that he is never offered another. He remains em-
bittered even though his patrons reward him lavishly on his
travels about the country. (The narrator explains that the pa-
trons respect his talent and also fear the power of his pen.)
Brooding alone at home, Li Wei unwittingly prepares the
ground for his metamorphosis.
One day an old friend, Li Yen, is traveling through
the mountains when a tiger addresses him in Li Wei's voice
and tells him of the metamorphosis. Even after turning into a
tiger, Li Wei was still reluctant to eat living creatures.

"Although I was quite hungry, I thought that if I re-

frained from eating living creatures I might one day be changed
T H E FICTION OF M O R A L DUTY 211

back into human form. So I put up with my hunger and re-

frained from preying on living things. But after a while my
hunger got the better of me and so I caught deer, pigs, and hares
to satisfy it. But it wasn't long before the animals grew afraid
of me and fled, leaving me with nothing to hunt. I was raven-
ous. One day a woman came past the foot of the mountain.
Driven by my hunger I was just about to eat her when I re-
flected that she was a human being, after all, and that, since I
was already afflicted with my present misfortune, it might be
unwise of me to aggravate my crime. Then, having let her go
by, I reflected how hungry I was, and how I had no way of
getting food, and it occurred to me that she was, after all, a gift
from Heaven, and that if I let this opportunity slip away, good-
ness only knew when I might next find something to fill my
belly with. I was in a quandary, torn this way and that, but in
the end I couldn't restrain myself and so I caught and ate her.
The taste was pleasant and sweet, quite unlike that of the ani-
mals I had been hunting. Her jewelry is still down there below
the rocks; it will prove that what I'm telling you is the truth.
Ever since then I've had a craving for human flesh. No matter
what their age or status, or whether they are carrying burdens
or not, I devour all the passersby I can catch, right down to the
last morsel. I now accept it all as quite normal and no longer
suffer any fear of punishment." (p. 86)

Five other stories present negative examples of Ku-

k'uang's ethic. Story 7 takes up the subject of education, which
is effective within a certain range; a cretin cannot be turned
into a sage, but a C (hsia) can at least be raised to a B (chung).
The main story offers the example of a man who neglects his
sons' education and instead uses his money to buy them suc-
cess. Story 8 draws a harsh picture of the pseudo-intellectual.
Story 9 is about a young rake who makes a profession of se-
duction. He is not innately evil—Ku-k'uang does not believe
in innate evil—but merely fails to think through the effects of
his actions; he "drains his bone marrow in the service of death."
Story 14 is on the old theme of the wife who tires of her hus-
band's failure and leaves him—just before he succeeds. The
prologue describes the social destructiveness of poverty and
obscurity; the discontent that results is "an insect gnawing away
Patrick Hanan 212

at the Five Relations." Like other stories of Ku-k'uang's, this

one presents us with a drama of moral choice. Story 15 is about
a man with a passion for gardens. For Ku-k'uang, a garden is
just another example of a treasure one should not try to lay
up. "Far better just to start walking and every place will be-
come your garden." 2 5
Even the more traditional stories show Ku-k'uang's
approach. Story 3 considers the case of a woman who has been
forced to marry someone other than her fiancé. On discover-
ing the truth, her husband simply allows her to marry the for-
mer fiancé. Story 4 presents a contrasting case. A rich land-
owner has forced a family to break their daughter's betrothal
so that she can be married to his oafish son. The wedding day
produces one of the few dramatic climaxes in the book. As the
girl is carried by sedan chair to the groom's house, the bearers
exchange their well-worn jokes on the theme of the suppos-
edly timid bride who is actually eager for sex. But when they
help her out of the chair, they find she has strangled herself
inside it. Story 13 tells of the revenge of a singing girl betrayed
by the man to whom she has entrusted her money and her
love. The story refuses to romanticize the girl. Coming from a
good family, "she had a certain ladylike quality, none of the
usual brothel slickness. Novices to the game thought her pretty
and admired her gentle manners, and even old hands appre-
ciated her refinement. Moreover, once, in a moment of de-
spair, she had concocted a few lines that actually formed a
verse, after which she received some tips from her friends.
Thereafter, everything she uttered passed for poetry, and she
thus acquired a reputation as a poet. From a few louts as her
clients, she progressed to the scions of important families, and
finally even attracted a few literary men." 2 6 Story 12 is the
anatomy of a Ming rebellion, an analysis of how an astute man
can come to think of himself as a potential emperor. The pro-
logue singles out duty to one's country—as a patriot living un-
der alien rule, Ku-k'uang writes "country" rather than "ruler"—
and duty to one's parents as the absolute imperatives among
the five Confucian obligations.
The Ku-k'uang hero is a moral activist driven by a
T H E F I C T I O N OF M O R A L D U T Y 213

sense of duty, an inner-directed man who bears with equa-

nimity the jeers of his colleagues. He is quite without literary
interests or pretensions. (This is the great difference between
Ku-k'uang and Chou Chi; they are diametrically opposed in
their treatment of the arrogant genius.) Unlike some of his
contemporaries, Ku-k'uang was not cynical about the govern-
mental system; it would work, he believed, if everyone shoul-
dered his responsibilities. Goodness, for him, resulted from the
thorough analysis of Confucian principle; hence the didactic
nature of his book.
Insofar as the collections of the 1640s share a com-
mon value, it is a mainstream value of Chinese culture. To some
degree, it permeates the traditional fiction (although several of
the finest works seek to modify or even contradict it). But in
these seven collections, it is dominant, so dominant as to
amount to an organizing principle. Much of their interest for
the literary historian lies in their urgent subjection of the myths
and techniques of traditional fiction to an overriding social
value. 27
 Beyond Beauty and Talent:
The Moral and Chivalric Self
In The Fortunate Union
Richard C. Hessney

T he Fortunate Union (Hao-ch'iu chuan) is a popu-

lar comic romance that has been enjoyed by
Chinese and foreign readers for nearly three centuries. T h e first
full-length work of Chinese fiction to appear in Western trans-
lation, it is an entertaining portrayal of Confucian courtship and
the life of the seventeenth-century scholar-official class. While
The Fortunate Union does not measure up to other outstanding
contemporary novels, such as Li Yii's The Prayer Mat of Flesh
(Jou p'u-t'uan) or Yuan Yii-ling's Forgotten Tales of the Sui (Sui
shih i-wen), it can be ranked not far below those works owing
to its vivid portrayal of the hero and heroine as moral and chi-
valric exemplars drawn in individuating detail. 1 T h e hero and
heroine are a combination of idealistic representation and re-
alistic portrait of the Confucian self caught up in conflicts among
love, personal morality, and the selfish, immoral interests of
others. 2
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 215

Exemplariness, Typicality, and Individuality

Confucianism has always accorded a great author-

ity to exemplars, historical or living, as determinants in the
formation of personality and character. 3 The Confucian curric-
ulum was taught partly by parable and example, making use
of minatory figures from Chinese history that were supple-
mented by literary biographies and popular stories. Thus Yiieh
Fei (1103-1141) is known for choosing in his youth the Three
Kingdoms military hero Kuan Yii (d. 219) as his model, while
Chu Hsi (1130-1200) was attracted to Mencius (c. 372-c. 289
B . C . ) , who like Chu lived in a time of disorder. Living exem-
plars were equally influential, since the submissiveness of the
young to the old, and of the uneducated to the learned, rein-
forced the tendency of a Confucian youth to pattern himself
after an approved exemplar. This custom favored the estab-
lishment of certain roles in life, such as the scholar-official, the
recluse-poet, the military hero, and so on, which the young
were exhorted to play in society. Considering the ideological
purity of The Fortunate Union's Confucian morality, it is no
wonder that the protagonists take Confucians like Vang Hsiung
(53 B . C . - A . D . 18) and Han Yii (786-824) as role models and also
themselves function as exemplars, especially for young read-
ers. 4
The exemplariness of the hero and heroine is re-
lated to the question of individual and typical characters in
Chinese fiction. By their nature exemplars would be expected
to display ideal qualities. The functional roles of exemplars can
often be equated with human types: the chaste woman, the
filial son, the righteous outlaw, the priggish official, etc. In
Chinese fiction, according to Andrew H. Plaks, "the individ-
uality of characters becomes less important than the interplay
and overlapping of types that actually defines the individual's
existence in the first place." 5 The strong influence of Yuan tsa-
chu plays and Ming ch'uan-ch'i drama with their role types on
the development of fiction is another reason for the typicality
of many characters in scholar-beauty romances.6 While the hero
Richard C. Hessney 216

and heroine of The Fortunate Union differ in important ways from

the theatrical scholar and beauty—and thus the influence of
specific dramatic roles is not clear—their personalities are pre-
sented mainly through dialogue and action easily adapted to
the stage.
There are two other reasons why the hero and her-
oine of The Fortunate Union exhibit typical characteristics. The
first is that the work belongs to the high mimetic comic mode
(as formulated by Northrop Frye) 7 in which the protagonists
are superior in degree to others, but not to their natural envi-
ronment. What they do is subject to the social and natural or-
ders. Frye observes that in the comic mode the action pro-
motes the incorporation of the hero and heroine into society. 8
In other words, comedy involves characters who begin in a
position of disharmony with their society and are educated,
initiated, or accommodated into a more harmonious situa-
tion. 9 For such a "comic rise" to occur, the protagonists must
display traits that their society approves of; otherwise, the
harmonious integration of the protagonists with their world is
impossible. The author, Ming-chiao-chung-jen (Man of the
Teaching of Names), probably knew intuitively that elevation
of characters cpuld be the only effective means of achieving
his comic a r d didactic purposes.
The other reason for the typicality of the hero and
heroine has to do with the concept of the individual in Chinese
thought and culture. Although this is a controversial point, I
believe that the Western notion of, and emphasis on, the in-
dividual is different from that of traditional China. The Chinese
have always placed a greater emphasis on communality than
individuality, with perhaps the exception of Taoists, Bud-
dhists, and others who scorned conventional society in favor
of a separate quest for spiritual enlightenment. Particularly since
Han times, when it became entrenched as a state ideology,
Confucianism stressed that a person's foremost obligations are
to a communal entity, whether it be the family, the clan, the
locality, or the state and the emperor. The four cardinal vir-
tues of loyalty (chung), filial piety (hsiao), chastity (chieh), and
selfless friendship (i) are defined in terms of interpersonal re-
B E Y O N D B E A U T Y AND T A L E N T 217

lationships. As Andrew H. Plaks has aptly put it, "The indi-

vidual takes on a sense of integrity as a unit only when set in
the integral context of other individuals." 10 Chung-wen Shih
credits the importance of propriety, etiquette, ritual, and cus-
tom—all subsumed under the Chinese term li—with inhibit-
ing individualism: "Proper behavior in traditional Chinese so-
ciety is so well defined that there is little room for free individual
action. This way of life, mirrored on the stage by characters
who act according to prescribed rules of propriety, tends to re-
sult in type characters—loyal officials, filial sons, chaste wives,
and devoted friends." 11 Moreover, discussing why epistemol-
ogy did not form an important part of Chinese philosophy,
Fung Yu-lan has written, "Chinese philosophy does not de-
marcate clearly the distinction between the individual and the
universe," and, "In Chinese thought . . . there has been no
clear consciousness by the ego of itself, and so there has been
equally little attention paid to the division between the ego and
the non-ego." 1 2 Individualism as an ethical, legal, economic,
or philosophical doctrine never achieved the same promi-
nence in China that it has in the West. Where in European
thought and literature, especially from the Renaissance on-
ward, there was a growing interest in individuality and per-
ceptions of a distinct self, Chinese culture in general contin-
ued to emphasize communal concerns. 13
Finally, Ming-chiao-chung-jen resembles other con-
temporary authors of scholar-beauty romances, like T'ien-hua-
tsang chu-jen (Master of the Heavenly Flower Sutra, fl. 1658-
1672), in that he probably was a commercial writer mainly in-
terested in entertaining and instructing a popular audience. He
felt that his purpose would be best achieved by creating ideal-
ized characters which he intended to be didactic figures em-
bodying the revival of Confucian principles and practices. In
this endeavor he was joining other intellectual voices in the
seventeenth century for a Neo-Confucian revival in opposition
to the excesses and corruption of late-Ming government, so-
ciety, and fiction.14 Thus for all the above reasons—the role of
exemplars in the formation of character, the prominence of
typical characters in fiction and drama, the structure of the
Richard C. Hessney 218

comic fictional mode, the downgrading of individual concerns

in favor of communal ones (as compared to the West), and the
didactic intentions of the author—a large degree of typicality
is inherent in the selves of The Fortunate Union's hero and her-
oine.

The Plot

Because the romance is not so well known as it once

was, and because the discussion of the hero and heroine's selves
draws its context from the action, I will first provide a brief
synopsis of the plot. The story is set in the late Ming period
and unfolds over eighteen chapters. It begins with the twenty-
year-old hero, T'ieh Chung-yii, reflecting at his family's home
in Pei-chih-li that the outspokenness of his father, T'ieh Ying,
an imperial censor, might land the older man in trouble. De-
ciding to go to the capital to visit his parents, T'ieh stops for
a night in a small hamlet. There an old farmer's wife tells him
that the fiancée of a young scholar, Wei P'ei, has been kid-
naped and that Wei has tried to commit suicide. The next day
T'ieh meets Wei and offers to rescue his fiancée from her ab-
ductor, a powerful nobleman named Sha Li, Marquis of Ta-
kuai.
T'ieh arrives in Peking and finds his father's yamen
deserted. He learns from his mother that his father acciden-
tally met Wei's fiancée's parents and memorialized the throne
concerning her abduction. Sha Li had T'ieh Ying jailed for
"falsely" accusing him of the crime. T'ieh visits his father in
jail and together they petition the emperor for a warrant to
search Sha's villa (T'ieh Ying approves the text of a memorial
that his son has drawn up). After breaking down Sha's gate
with a huge bronze mallet, T'ieh rescues Wei's fiancée and ar-
rests the marquis. The emperor judges the case, sentences Sha
to house arrest for three years, orders the marriage of Wei and
his fiancée, and promotes T'ieh Ying. Because his chivalrous
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 219

deed has made him famous, T'ieh is ordered by his father to

return to Pei-chih-li and study for the examinations. His father
also warns him not to "degenerate" to the level of a knight
errant.
The plot shifts to the seventeen-year-old heroine
Shui Ping-hsin, the capable daughter of an exiled official in the
Board of War. Ping-hsin is in charge of managing the house-
hold in Tsinan, Shantung, since her mother is dead. Her un-
cle, Shui Yiin, covets the family property and conspires to marry
her off to Kuo Ch'i-tsu, the playboy son of the heir apparent's
chief secretary. Under heavy pressure, she agrees to the mar-
riage only after Shui Yiin acknowledges her as his "daugh-
ter." When Kuo arrives on the wedding day, Ping-hsin re-
veals that she substituted her cousin Hsiang-ku's name and
horoscope on the marriage documents. The only way out is to
disguise Hsiang-ku and marry her to Kuo. While not good
looking, Hsiang-ku is resourceful: she follows Ping-hsin's in-
structions and conceals her identity until after Kuo has con-
summated the marriage.
Kuo and Shui Yiin plan revenge by inviting Ping-
hsin to a post-wedding banquet, but on arrival she smells a
trap and flees. Next they try to seize her as she sweeps her
mother's grave, but again she evades them, this time by di-
verting their attention with a dummy in her palanquin made
of piled rocks covered with her clothes. Furious, Kuo fabri-
cates a pardon for her father in hopes of nabbing her when
she comes out to accept it. Kuo's men deliver the pardon, take
her into custody, and proceed with her to the prefect. T'ieh
Chung-yii, having arrived in the area on a "study tour" (yu-
hsueh), hears her cries of injustice on the road and comes to
her aid, beating up Kuo's men. T'ieh accompanies them to the
prefect, who releases Ping-hsin after Kuo's men confess to fal-
sifying the pardon.
The prefect entertains T'ieh for a few days at a
Buddhist temple. Meanwhile, Kuo and Shui Yiin arrange for
the monk preparing T'ieh's food to poison him. Ping-hsin,
alerted by her servants that T'ieh is ill, has him brought se-
cretly to her home, despite Confucian injunctions against un-
Richard C. Hessney 220

married m e n and w o m e n sleeping under the s a m e roof. H o w -

ever, within the house propriety rules: Ping-hsin at first
communicates with T'ieh only through her maids, w h o are
nursing him back to health. Feeling that Ping-hsin's efforts on
his behalf are excessive, T'ieh suffers embarrassment that ac-
tually slows his recovery.
Shui Yiin a n d Kuo hire a spy w h o witnesses the
hero and heroine's first meeting since their original encounter.
They hope to catch them in s o m e improper act, but the spy
can only report that they converse very civilly—separated by
a screen. Although this scene is quite formal, their courteous
and allusive speech reveals their growing attraction for one
another. T'ieh praises Ping-hsin as a female knight errant, while
she counsels him not to take any action against Kuo, Shui Yiin,
and the prefect for the time being.
When he hears how proper their relationship is, the
prefect has a c h a n g e of heart a n d resolves to work for the
marriage of T'ieh and Ping-hsin. Shui Yiin has similar plans,
since, if his niece married T'ieh, he could still obtain most of
her property. Ping-hsin, however, refuses on the ground that
the marriage would ruin her reputation. Only if she does not
marry T'ieh will people believe that there were no illicit rela-
tions between them. Likewise, the prefect fails to convince T'ieh
to marry her; his excuse is that according to Confucian custom
only the parents can decide w h o m their children will marry.
After an episode in which T'ieh proves his chastity
w h e n his n a m e is unfairly linked with a promiscuous concu-
bine of a local landlord, he returns to Pei-chih-li. With T'ieh
out of the picture, Kuo persuades the new regional inspector
of Shantung to order Ping-hsin to marry him. At first she re-
fuses, but then consents w h e n the inspector agrees that his
orders constitute a legal substitute for her father's. Later she
visits the inspector and threatens to stab herself if he does not
retract the order. She shows him a copy of a memorial she has
sent to the capital about h o w she w a s wronged and driven to
suicide by the inspector. Fearful of the consequences of her
complaint on his official career, the inspector bars Kuo or any-
one else from marrying Ping-hsin, w h o in turn dispatches a
servant to recall the messenger with her memorial.
B E Y O N D B E A U T Y AND T A L E N T 221

T'ieh is now in the capital studying for the exami-

nations. He accidentally meets this messenger and, learning
of Ping-hsin's plight, travels to Tsinan to assist her. T'ieh knows
only that Ping-hsin has been ordered to marry Kuo; thus he is
confused when he discovers the new order prohibiting her
marriage. This affords Shui Yiin and Kuo another opportunity
to dispose of their rival. Kuo pays a complimentary call on T'ieh,
knowing that T'ieh is obligated to repay the visit. When T'ieh
returns the call, Kuo presses him into a drinking contest. A
brawl erupts when Kuo's men attempt to seize T'ieh, who wins
the fight by picking up one of Kuo's men and swinging him
like a club to knock the others down.
Kuo tries another stratagem in retaliation. His father,
chief secretary to the heir apparent, writes a letter to Ping-hsin's
father, Shui Chii-i, on the frontier (Shui had been banished for
supporting the valiant but unlucky general, Hou Hsiao). Kuo's
father proposes marriage between his son and Ping-hsin, but
Shui refuses on the grounds that he is now a criminal and has
lost his authority as head of the family until his name is cleared.
Shui says that he has given Ping-hsin the unusual privilege of
choosing her own husband. Kuo's father counters by arrang-
ing for Hou Hsiao's execution, and T'ieh Ying is appointed one
of the officials charged with carrying out the sentence. On the
execution day T'ieh visits Hou, recognizes that he is a true hero,
and offers to be his guarantor, if Hou is spared and given an-
other chance. Pardoned on T'ieh's word, Hou resumes his
command and inflicts heavy losses on the enemy. As a re-
ward, the emperor appoints Hou commander-in-chief, Shui
Chii-i prime minister, and T'ieh to the Hanlin Academy. T'ieh,
however, declines the appointment because he wants to prove
himself first in the examinations.
In the capital Shui Chii-i proposes to T'ieh Ying that
their children marry. Shui is unaware of their earlier relation-
ship and is disappointed when Chung-yii declines the offer.
T'ieh's parents are enthusiastic about the match but let the
matter drop after T'ieh insists that to marry Ping-hsin, when
there is a suspicion of an illicit affair between them, would be
wrong. Ping-hsin is surprised to learn when her father comes
home that T'ieh was largely responsible for his promotion.
Richard C. Hessney 222

Sha Li, meanwhile, hears that Ping-hsin still is not

married and, urged on by Kuo, memorializes the emperor for
permission to marry her. At the same time, T'ieh, who has ob-
tained the chiti-shih (doctorate) degree and is employed as an
editor in the Hanlin Academy, is being pursued by Eunuch
Ch'ou as a match for his unattractive adopted daughter. Shui
brings Ping-hsin to the capital and confers again with T'ieh's
parents, who convince their son that marrying Ping-hsin is the
only way to avert disaster. But T'ieh agrees to a marriage in
name only, not to be consummated. Since this is just what Ping-
hsin wants, they are married and on their wedding night en-
gage only in sentimental, moralistic conversations.
Back at court after a leave of absence, T'ieh meets
Eunuch Ch'ou. The eunuch invites T'ieh to his home on the
pretext that he received an imperial order for T'ieh to inscribe
poems on two paintings of plum blossoms. Ch'ou tricks T'ieh
and locks him into his daughter's bedroom with the paintings.
The daughter makes sexual advances toward T'ieh, who is re-
pulsed by her ugliness and rescued in the nick of time by an
order to report to a victory banquet for Hou Hsiao. Eunuch
Ch'ou and Kuo's father next resort to slander. They accuse Ping-
hsin and T'ieh of premarital sexual relations, and the emperor
orders an investigation. By chance the young scholar Wei P'ei,
whose fiancée T'ieh rescued, is the new magistrate of Li-ch'eng
district in Tsinan and he testifies to their innocence. The em-
peror instructs all parties involved to state their case in me-
morials. In the meantime, the eunuchs plant doubts in the
emperor's mind that Ping-hsin is a virgin. The empress and
her maids examine Ping-hsin physically and confirm that she
is indeed still a virgin. The emperor issues an edict in praise
of the couple, blesses their marriage, and punishes Kuo, his
father, and their accomplices. The plot concludes with a de-
scription of their real wedding night, when their happiness is
all the more for having been deferred.
The Fortunate Union's plot is basically an amalgam
of elements from the chivalric and scholar-beauty traditions.
While it is complex and tightly organized compared with much
longer episodic narratives, it is also a little repetitious. 15 The
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 223

plot conforms well to the structure of Western comedy: lovers

meet, are separated, undergo obstacles, and eventually reu-
nite (usually in marriage). In The Fortunate Union the conflicts
stem not only from the villains' continuous schemes but also
from T'ieh's and Ping-hsin's desire to preserve their honor.
Aside from the repetition—mostly present in the too-numer-
ous memorials—the plot is realistic and should be regarded as
one of the romance's strengths.

The Altruistic, Moral Self of T'ieh Chung-yu

T'ieh Chung-yu is both individualized and at the

same time typical of scholars of the early K'ang-hsi period
(1662-c. 1700). He is individualized by his altruism and chiv-
alry, his great physical strength, and his unwavering commit-
ment to Confucian precepts and rules of propriety. In this re-
gard T'ieh represents a departure from the heroes of other
scholar-beauty romances, who are generally less moralistic,
more poetic and romantic, less robust physically, and not nearly
so brave. This difference from the typical ts'ai-tzu perhaps can
be accounted for by "activist" trends among frustrated K'ang-
hsi period scholars. Whether or not Ming-chiao-chung-jen was
directly influenced by these scholars—a possibility that does
not seem at all unlikely—T'ieh's behavior and beliefs are sim-
ilar.
Compared to one-dimensional types like Su Yu-po
of Yii Chiao Li, T'ieh is notably different. Ming-chiao-chung-
jen opens the romance with this account of T'ieh's appearance
and personality:
To begin our tale, there lived in Ta-ming district of
the Northern Metropolitan Area during the former dynasty a
young Bachelor's degree holder by the name of T'ieh Chung-
yu, styled T'ing-sheng. He grew up to be very handsome, and
because he resembled a beautiful woman, people in the village
gave him the nickname of "Iron Beauty" [T'ieh Mei-jen]. From
Richard C. Hessney 224

his handsome appearance one might expect that he had a warm

and compliant personality, but although he was good-looking,
he was as hard and inflexible as iron itself, and had quite a lot
of strength.
If he were displeased, he was apt to become angry
and rough. Ordinarily, he did not talk or smile much. If he
happened to meet a wealthy acquaintance, he assumed an ex-
tremely frosty demeanor. He was habitually cold to them. Oddly
enough, if he met a friend in reduced circumstances or an in-
timate friend, T'ieh would drink wine and discuss literature with
them, spending the whole day in such happy pursuits without
the slightest boredom. He had another strong point: if people
requested his aid in an emergency, he would generously lend
a hand regardless of who they were. However, he took no no-
tice of flatterers and others who hoped for his favor. Thus while
many were grateful to him, no one dared to approach him
without good reason. 1 6

The narrative emphasizes his feminine face, physical strength,

and alternately frosty and warm personality. His beauty of face
and form reflects an inner beauty consisting of goodness and
altruism. His name expresses, in its literal meaning of "jade
within iron," the two most striking characteristics of his self—
purity and hardness. There are also hints in this opening pas-
sage of T'ieh's fiery temper and pride, which later play a ma-
jor role in his interaction with other characters, expecially the
villains. T'ieh puts no stock in the power and wealth (shih-li)
of his high status, but instead prefers the humanistic en-
deavors of literary cultivation and the generous bestowal of aid
to people in trouble. From the start Ming-chiao-chung-jen es-
tablishes T'ieh as a champion of justice and Confucian hu-
manitarianism.
T'ieh's womanly face is typical of many heroes in
scholar-beauty romances (for example, P'ing Ju-heng and Yen
Po-han of P'ing Shan Leng Yen). In terms of facial appearance
alone, it is frequently impossible to distinguish between the
scholars and the beauties. On the one hand, these epicene
characteristics may be explained by an absence of individual-
izing detail and also by the authors' wish to underscore the
B E Y O N D B E A U T Y AND T A L E N T 225

scholar's and the beauty's preciousness and suitability for each

other—after all, a beauty can not be expected to marry a scholar
unless he is handsome in a feminine way, no matter how good
he might be as a poet. 17 On the other hand, in the epicene
characteristics and resulting confusion between the sexes there
seems to be a manifestation, perhaps unconscious, of the
Chinese archetype of dual harmony or complementary bipo-
larity. 18 In terms of modern psychology, Jung's "animus" and
"anima" here fuse into a unified whole.
If T'ieh shares the feminine facial characteristics of
other scholar-poets, his prodigious physical strength puts him
in a class by himself, making him a kind of superman. Of
course, Ming-chiao-chung-jen rightly knows that if T'ieh is to
possess credibility as a chivalric hero, muscle power is re-
quired. Otherwise, T'ieh's altruistic exploits would land him
in situations similar to those of Don Quixote, and we would
be dealing with a very different work, a satiric rather than
idealistic romance.19 T'ieh exhibits his prowess early in the plot
when he wields a huge mallet to smash down the gate of Sha
Li, the nobleman holding Wei P'ei's fiancée. In chapter 5 T'ieh
happens upon Ping-hsin being dragged against her will to the
magistrate and promptly beats up Kuo's men. Thus at this first
meeting, Ping-hsin can not but be impressed by T'ieh's phys-
ical attributes, as well as his Samaritan intentions and bravery.
However, nowhere is his strength more conspicuous and en-
tertaining than in chapter 12, when Kuo Ch'i-tsu and his ac-
complices try to get him drunk. Already feeling intoxicated,
T'ieh declines Master Chang's invitation to drink another toast,
and Chang's antagonistic response precipitates a pitched bat-
tle:

Chang picked up the cup and splashed the contents

all over T'ieh's face. Although T'ieh was inebriated, he could
still think clearly. When Chang cursed him and splashed wine
in his face, he became so angry that sparks seemed to fly, and
this made him sober in a flash. He jumped up quickly and,
grabbing and twisting Chang's arm, said, "You brazen simple-
ton, you have come to the tiger's head looking for death!"
Chang, worried, cried out, "You dare to strike m e ? "
Richard C. Hessney 226

T'ieh smacked him in the mouth, saying, "What are

you going to do about it?"
Wang and Li saw that Chang had been hit and yelled
in unison, "You little beast! What place is this that you would
dare attack someone?"
Kuo spoke up: "It was only my wish to invite you
for a few cups of wine, and now you dare to cause a ruckus
because you are drunk. Gose the door quick and don't let him
get away. When we have beaten him sober, we'll send him to
the censor's yamen for punishment."
Kuo made a sign with his mouth, and seven or eight
ruffians rushed forward. Shui Yiin pretended to beg them, say-
ing, "Don't be violent!"
They were about to bind the hands of T'ieh, who by
this time was sober. T'ieh knew clearly that he had fallen into
a trap. He said, laughing disdainfully, "You bunch of wild dogs,
how dare you try to trick me!"
Then he grabbed Chang tightly with one hand and
turned over the table with the other, spilling the food, cups,
and plates on the floor.
Shui Yiin went over to T'ieh's side and was pushed
by T'ieh as he said, "For Miss Shui's sake, I'll let you off with-
out getting a blow from me." But, as he said this, Shui Yiin
was shoved backwards more than ten feet before falling to the
floor, unable to drag himself up.
Wang and Li, seeing that the situation was not very
promising, were afraid to advance. They only cried, "Outra-
geous, outrageous!"
Kuo directed his men to attack, but just as they drew
near, T'ieh picked up Chang as if he were a big club and knocked
the attackers down with one swing. They could not have pre-
vented it even if they tried, stumbling and crashing into one
another as they did, knocked unconscious by the force of the
blow. They even vomited the wine in their stomachs. Finally
they shouted, "No more fighting, let's talk it over."
T'ieh answered, "There's nothing to talk about. Just
show me the way out right now and it'll be finished. If you try
to keep me here, it'll mean the death of you all."
Chang could only respond repeatedly, "I'll show you
out! I'll show you out!"
T'ieh put Chang down, standing him upright. Then
BEYOND BEAUTY AND TALENT 227

T'ieh strode out of the room, dragging Chang by the arm. Kuo's
men stared at them and were so incensed that they were rooted
to their places. They did not advance and only remained to the
side, saying angrily among themselves, "How could he have
acted so outlandishly on imperial property? Better let him go;
he is probably going to see some high-ranking official."
Master T'ieh just pretended that he did not hear
them. He walked directly out through the main gate, dragging
Chang. Finally he released him and said, "I'll trouble you to
inform the others that if I had a weapon, I could have fought
my way in or out of the midst of a large force. How much more
so with a few profligates and thugs like you. How stupid of
you to think that you could snip a fierce tiger's whiskers! If I
didn't take into consideration that you come from an official
family, I'd have battered you all until your arms and legs were
broken. I've spared your lives, so tell them that you must all
burn incense and perform the ceremony of highest obeisance
to me both morning and night, in order to recompense the great
kindness I've shown. You must not fail to inform the others!"
T'ieh cupped his hands in front of his chest in a sa-
lute and said, "With your permission," then walked in long
strides back to his lodging. 20

This dramatic confrontation is the most vivid demonstration

of T'ieh's strength. Ming-chiao-chung-jen's treatment reveals
a debt both to the Chinese stage in the preponderance of dia-
logue and action and to well-known fight scenes in Water Mar-
gin (Shui-hu chuan). In T'ieh's remark about snipping the ti-
ger's whiskers, few readers of Chinese fiction would fail to be
reminded of the hero Wu Sung, who fought and killed a tiger
singlehandedly in Water Margin. But another quality of T'ieh's
self is revealed by his boastful speech to Chang at the end of
this passage—his pride.
T'ieh's pride stems from several sources. By virtue
of his upbringing, intelligence, and literary ability, he has de-
veloped a sense of his own worth that goes beyond mere self-
respect. His successes against Sha Li, Kuo Ch'i-tsu, and Shui
Yiin contribute to his self-esteem and self-awareness as moral
and chivalric exemplar, and to an extent the transmitter of a
great tradition. Despite his father's injunction not to become a
Richard C. Hessney 228

hsia-Wo and imitate the wandering knights errant of old, T'ieh's

aggressive pride and moral integrity prevent him from avoid-
ing situations that offer the prospect of righting injustices. A
good example of how his pride results in his willingly and un-
necessarily placing himself in a precarious position is his
championing of the condemned general Hou Hsiao in chapter
14. The officials ordered to carry out Hou's execution, includ-
ing T'ieh's father, are amazed at his cocksure stance in offer-
ing himself as Hou's guarantor. How can T'ieh be so sure, they
ask, that Hou will not fail again? The answer is that only the
truly talented can recognize people of like genius, which is a
major theme of the scholar-beauty romance genre. What ap-
pears to be almost .reckless bravado on T'ieh's part is actually
an extreme form of self-confidence that comes from an under-
stood obligation to support others who are outstanding, if less
fortunate, exemplars of greatness—be they in literary, mili-
tary, or civic affairs. T'ieh's pride is not the destructive hubris
of Western tragic heroes but rather the positive fruit of taking
responsibility for preserving a great moral and cultural tradi-
tion. T'ieh goes out on a limb for Hou Hsiao both because Hou
has been wronged and because Hou embodies some of the most
important qualities of that tradition, namely loyalty to the state,
bravery, leadership, and military capability.
Another feature of T'ieh's self is his cultivated sense
of Confucian morality. 21 The four cardinal virtues of loyalty,
filial piety, chastity, and selfless friendship are the pillars of
T'ieh's moral self. These virtues are combined in the teaching
of the Five Relationships (wu-lun) that comprise ethical and
psychological guidelines for the proper interaction between ruler
and subject, parents and children, husband and wife, elder and
younger brother, and friends. T'ieh displays a strict adherence
to the rules of propriety that further govern accepted Confu-
cian behavior between the sexes and among superiors, equals,
and inferiors. Above all, T'ieh most represents the virtue of i,
variously rendered as "selfless friendship," "righteousness,"
and "duty," especially as it is colored with its frequent coun-
terpart hsia or "chivalry."
One might thus expect a puritan rigidity in T'ieh's
BEYOND BEAUTY AND TALENT 229

self as a result of his complete submission to Confucian mo-

rality, but actually there is considerable moral flexibility in-
volved in his thoughts and actions. This is owing to a distinc-
tion between moral norms (chitig) and expedient measures
(ch'uati) which is as old as Confucius and Mencius. Particu-
larly in matters of lesser moral importance, expedient mea-
sures can take precedence over higher principles and rules of
propriety. Ming-chiao-chung-jen several times has T'ieh and
Ping-hsin make the point that the sages never intended the
norms as hard-and-fast rules. When one realizes how relative
many of T'ieh's and Ping-hsin's moral considerations are, the
stuffiness that sometimes surrounds them becomes much
abated and their moral predicaments much more interesting
to the modern reader. It should be remembered that they are
assailed by forces determined to sever their relationship and
marry Ping-hsin against her will. Under such conditions, moral
principles are paramount only to the degree that they enable
T'ieh and Ping-hsin to survive together in a hostile world.
A scene demonstrating the importance of expedi-
ent measures occurs early in the narrative. T'ieh's filial piety
causes him concern about the capacity of his father, a censor,
to adopt expedient measures when unusual circumstances de-
mand it. In the following passage from chapter 1, T'ieh re-
flects on the subtleties of true loyalty:

One day T'ieh was at home drinking wine and read-

ing, when he suddenly came across the story of the minister Pi
Kan who was put to death for his remonstrances. T'ieh thought
to himself, "While it is right for a minister to exemplify utter
loyalty, he must also possess the ability to adapt to circum-
stances. A minister's real worth can only be displayed when the
sovereign can be awakened to the sense of his errors, while the
minister can preserve himself. If one is merely doggedly forth-
right and does not know what to avoid, he will not only fail in
his objective but also often incur his sovereign's wrath and bring
about the sovereign's wrongdoing. As for himself, he will be
killed. Although he is loyal, what advantage is there?"
He drank a few more cups of wine and thought, "My
father occupies the post of a remonstrating official and is by na-
Richard C. Hessney 230

ture an obstinate man. If he does not know how to adapt to the

situation at hand, then he will probably get involved in this kind
of trouble." 2 2

Pi Kan remonstrated with his nephew Chou, the degenerate

last king of the Shang Dynasty. Chou responded cruelly by
ordering Pi's heart cut out; Pi submitted willingly out of loy-
alty and sincerity. However, T'ieh implies that it might have
been more expedient and in the end more loyal for Pi to soften
his remonstrances and stay alive in order to gradually assist
Chou in cultivating righteousness. In T'ieh's view, loyalty is
no good if you are dead. Hence, expediency becomes the norm
in extraordinary circumstances. Not to recognize that fact can
imperil one's life. But it is also T'ieh's filial piety that influ-
ences his judgment, as well as his Neo-Confucian rationalism
that makes survival the highest motivational norm of all.
T'ieh's allegiance to Confucian teachings is further
emphasized in chapter 14 when he refuses Shui Chii-i's invi-
tation to marry Ping-hsin. Shui proposes the match to T'ieh's
parents after their son's guarantee of Hou Hsiao has brought
about Shui's recall to the capital. Here is T'ieh's answer to his
parents' enthusiastic consent:

"Mother and father, I dare not conceal anything from

you. Considering Miss Shui's wisdom and beauty, even if I
'sought her hand in marriage day and night,' I'm afraid I couldn't
win her. 2 3 Now that Heaven seems to have heard my prayers,
why should I pretend how I feel? I only regret that she and I
are not destined to be married. I encountered her in adversity
and our meeting was not in accordance with propriety. She took
me under her care when she was under great suspicion, yet she
was willing to take her own life to preserve her virtue. If we
were to marry now, our earlier feelings of selfless friendship
toward each other will appear to others as having been illicit
love from the beginning. Thus I'd rather lose this lovely match
than commit a crime against Confucian teachings." 2 4

At this point T'ieh is torn between a wish to preserve Ping-

hsin's and his own reputation and a desire to marry her, with
the former prevailing for the time being. Although T'ieh wants
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 231

to marry her, he can not bear to compromise Confucian mo-

rality and their own good names. Shortly afterwards, this con-
flict is partly resolved when his parents order him to marry
Ping-hsin in chapter 15 as the only way to prevent Sha Li from
getting her. Marrying Ping-hsin would be suspect, but not to
do so would constitute an even more serious sin against filial
piety.
While the profoundly moral strain in T'ieh's per-
sonality clashes with his romantic feelings for Ping-hsin, the
tension of that conflict is diffused and held in check by his
sentimentalism. Unlike his active nature in other spheres, Tieh
is given to an excessive amount of emotion at the expense of
deeds in matters of the heart. His feelings are always couched
in refined terms in allusive discussions of moral concerns with
Ping-hsin, whom he regards as a kind of mentor. 25 Tieh and
Ping-hsin employ an allegorical language of sentimental mor-
alisms to communicate deeper feelings. In Freudian terms, one
could say that T'ieh is repressed by his superego's attachment
to Confucian morality and never succumbs to the same ro-
mantic infatuation that Su Yu-po, P'ing Ju-heng, and Yen Po-
han feel toward their beauties in other romances. T'ieh's libi-
dinal desires are so sublimated that they can only find an out-
let in the form of sentimental platitudes or in bold action on
behalf of others. More than anything, China's cultural super-
ego, hypothesized to be a universal characteristic of civiliza-
tion by Sigmund Freud at the end of Civilization and Its Discon-
tents, is to be credited with the creation of T'ieh's moral self.
At the beginning of this discussion of T'ieh, I stated
that his active pursuit of selfless friendship and chivalry (i) is
characteristic of certain K'ang-hsi scholars. Lynn A. Struve,
studying mid-level K'ang-hsi officials and historians such as
Wan Ssu-t'ung (1638-1702), Yen Yuan (1635-1704), and Wen
Jui-lin (fl. 1690-1710), has shown that their writings and lives
display a preference for chivalry and martial heroism.26 Yen
Yuan, for example, although he was a critic of Sung and Ming
Neo-Confucianism, was famous for his filial piety and taught
the six classical arts (ceremony, music, archery, charioteering,
writing, and mathematics) plus applied military science. One
Richard C. Hessney 232

reason for the renewed interest in altruistic behavior during

the K'ang-hsi period, Struve spectulates, is that severe cuts were
made in the examination quotas for Han Chinese. Young
scholars found it increasingly difficult to advance via the ex-
aminations and obtain even minor official posts. Furthermore,
the K'ang-hsi Emperor himself was vigorous, spirited, martial,
and strict. He had a reputation for lifting men out of obscurity
because of special accomplishments. Struve concludes, "Though
more ambivalent than rebellious, many K'ang-hsi scholars
shifted significantly away from traditional elite preoccupations
(with 'important' men, factional and sectarian maneuverings,
philosophical niceties, etc.) toward such conventionally dis-
valued concerns as little-known eccentrics, hero figures, inglo-
rious historical periods, and the physically active, full-spirited,
martial way of life—all especially easy to pursue in those de-
cades of newfound peace and stability." 2 7 Ming-chiao-chung-
jen was probably aware of this intellectual trend and fash-
ioned T'ieh after these frustrated scholar-heroes. It is note-
worthy T'ieh is not anxious to take the examinations until the
magistrate in chapter 9 impresses on him the importance of
kung-ming (passing the examinations and obtaining an official
post). On the road back from Shantung, T'ieh thinks of Ping-
hsin as a combination of China's legendary beauties Hsi Shih
and Cho Wen-chun. He decides that in order to have a chance
at marrying her, he had better pass the examinations.

The Chaste, Clever Self of Shui Ping-hsin

Shui Ping-hsin (Water Pure-Heart, literally "Ice

Heart") is introduced in chapter 3 in the following passage:
Let us now turn away from our account of T'ieh
Chung-yu's study tour to Shantung, and instead relate that in
Li-ch'eng district of Tsinan prefecture in the same province there
lived a scholar by the name of Shui Chii-i, styled T'ien-sheng.
He had held the post of vice-minister of the Board of War and
BEYOND BEAUTY AND TALENT 233

was well known for his spirit and courage in acting on his prin-
ciples and convictions. His only regret was that his wife had
died before he was sixty and he had no male heir. All that was
left to him was a daughter called Ping-hsin, who had eyebrows
like willow leaves in spring and a face like autumn flowers. She
was delicate and slender; it seemed as if even silk dresses would
be too heavy for her to bear. Yet when the occasion demanded,
she could be both talented and brave, competing favorably in
these qualities with men. Consequently, Shui Chu-i loved her
like a jewel. While he was serving in the capital, he treated her
like his son and gave her charge over all household matters.
She still remained unmarried at the age of seventeen. 28

At first glance this narrative introduction presents Ping-hsin

as typical of beauties: an only child, a single parent living, del-
icate and slender, a face as beautiful as autumn flowers, etc.
But on closer inspection one notices details that set her apart
from the beauty stereotype. She is mature and responsible in
managing family affairs and property. But most important, she
is both talented and brave (ts'ai-tan).
Ping-hsin's talent extends beyond the poetic genius
of the beauties Po Hung-yii of Yu Chiao Li and Shan Tai of P'ing
Shan Leng Yen. In fact, Ping-hsin, unlike almost all beauties,
does not compose any poems, although she does write several
memorials. Her talent and wisdom are revealed in her mature
perspective on moral problems and in her cleverness at avoid-
ing the stratagems designed to entrap her. Her moral under-
standing surpasses even T'ieh's. For example, in the following
polite conversation during his convalescence after being poi-
soned he humbly acknowledges her superior wisdom:

"I, T'ieh Chung-yu, am a stranger. The secrets of my

heart I should not presume to tell you. But now that the bright
mirror of your intelligence is suspended high above me, I dare
not miss this opportunity to be reflected in it, and thus shall
not stint from mentioning such trifling matters. It occurs to me
that I, at the age of twenty and thanks to the support and en-
couragement of my parents, have been blessed with many sa-
gacious teachers and good friends. However, no one has ever
been able to produce such keen and subtle arguments, suffi-
Richard C. Hessney 234

cient to make me admit my own inadequacies. And now, not

knowing to what or whom I owe this good fortune, I have un-
expectedly met you, and you have mentioned everything that
is on my mind. It really is a case of 'those who gave me life are
my parents, but Master Pao is the one who knows m e . ' 2 9 It is
my great wish to be able to attend you constantly and hear from
you lessons I have never heard before. But there is a distinction
between men and women, and I dare not make light of it. When
I depart in a few days, it will be the same as abandoning a great
road for a path that leads nowhere, and I have grave doubts
about it. I beg your opinion, but I do not know whether you
are willing to bestow i t . "
Ping-hsin said, ' T o ask a blind person of the Way is
a reproach even you can not avoid when you turn to me for
advice. However, the sages did not neglect to make inquiries
from woodcutters. Moreover, what perplexes you must be a
matter of subtle import. You fortunately do not hesitate to be-
stow your question upon me, thereby enlarging my lowly
knowledge."
Master T'ieh replied, "I originally came here for the
purpose of making a study tour. Then I realized that I had nei-
ther a fixed destination nor a specific teacher to study under. I
have heard that if I plan to go to the south I should take a boat,
and that if I want to go to the north I should ride a horse. But
I have wandered aimlessly through the world and actually have
no idea of where I should go or what I should study. No one
knows me better than you do. I implore you to instruct m e . "
Ping-hsin answered, "There is no wider place to roam
than the world, but the world, in the final analysis, does not
extend beyond the family. There is nothing more worthy of study
than the teachings of the sages, but they do not transcend hu-
man nature. Han Yii said, 'If the world never saw Confucius, I
would not have counted myself his disciple.' It is on this basis
that perfect nature [chih-hsing] can be fulfilled. 30 As to your per-
fect nature, you are courageous and altruistic. If there were no
Confucius, then who could number you among his disciples? I
humbly wish that you will not forsake what is near for what is
far and believe in others at the expense of trusting in yourself.
Instead of rushing around and seeking for something, you would
be better off to return home. Then you will understand. Fur-
thermore, your distinguished father is a censor and he is more
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 235

than enough to serve as a model for you. Peking is the imperial

capital, where literature and the arts flourish. If you continue
your father's calling, it will be an auspicious event in the cor-
ridors and temples of the capital. It will not at all be bad for
you. Why travel your lonely way to the ends of the earth to
pass on a name that no one will know? 31 If you say you wish
to avoid the enmity of others, then I think that if you are not
careful in the cultivation of your self, with enemies all around
you how could you escape them? But I do not know how you
feel about it."
When Master T'ieh heard Ping-hsin's advice, an
expression of joy involuntarily spread across his face. He quickly
rose from his seat, bowed deeply, and said, "Miss Shui, your
marvelous discourse has removed all obstructions to my un-
derstanding and has caused all my doubts to disappear. How
great your wisdom is!" 3 2

The language of this conversation illustrates the polite senti-

ments that pervade the relationship between T'ieh and Ping-
hsin. In this passage T'ieh confesses his lack of self-direction
and his happiness at discovering in Ping-hsin a friend and
confidante, as well as a mentor. Ping-hsin's response is both
moving in its simplicity and startingly wise for a young woman
of seventeen (Chinese age, sixteen by Western reckoning).
Quoting the Neo-Confucian precursor Han Yii, she urges T'ieh
to look to his family, the sages, and above all himself to un-
derstand the really important things in life and how they ap-
ply to him as an individual. By cultivating his moral self and
modeling himself after his father, T'ieh will perfect his nature,
which is to be brave in defense of righteousness and justice
and, at the same time, selfless in offering aid to others. Ping-
hsin is restating, in effect, the idealistic teaching of The Great
Learning (Ta hsueh), one of the Four Books, that self-cultivation
is ultimately the key to regulating the family and, by exten-
sion, governing the state well. Central to self-cultivation is the
investigation of things and the enlargement of knowledge,
which received great emphasis from Neo-Confucians. Ping-hsin
implies that these are best achieved by returning home, study-
ing for the examinations, and following in his father's foot-
Richard C. Hessney 236

steps. There is no point in his continuing his travels, since he

will probably come to no good end as an unappreciated wan-
derer. By Neo-Confucian standards Ping-hsin's counsel is
morally sound and T'ieh is bright enough to accept it as true
for himself.
Ping-hsin has numerous moments of moral triumph
in the romance, but none is more dramatic for its urgency and
revelation of truth about h u m a n character than her rebuttal of
her greedy uncle Shui Yun in chapter 6. Shui confronts her
about harboring a man, T'ieh, in her house during her father's
absence. Accused of a serious violation of propriety, Ping-hsin
answers:

"I have heard that the sages instituted rules of pro-

priety merely on behalf of the common people, and that origi-
nally they were never intended to be binding upon the true
gentleman (chun-tzu). Formerly when the Duke of Lu bestowed
a jade pei upon Yen Ying, he knelt down to receive it; that is
what is called having propriety outside the bounds of propri-
ety. 33 Similarly, when Mencius spoke of the rule that 'in giving
and receiving a man and woman should not touch hands,' he
probably felt that people would stick to this small matter of
propriety and thus quickly added the sentence, 'but overriding
conditions govern the rescue of a sister-in-law from drowning.'
He also explained this by saying, 'Only a wild animal would
refuse to do so.' 3 4 Considering this, we indeed know that the
sages instituted propriety merely because they wanted to rec-
tify people's hearts. And, if their hearts were rectified, there
would be no harm if there were slight discrepancies in lesser
matters of propriety. So the sages also taught the lesson that
'As long as in undertakings of great moral importance a man
does not "cross the barrier," in undertakings of little impor-
tance he may "come in and go out." ' 3 5 [A long section re-
counting how T'ieh rescued Ping-hsin is omitted.]
. . . If I were to avoid the petty criticisms of others
and not save him, and thereby let a red-blooded man like him,
who has been favored by the spirits of Heaven and Earth, die
in a strange place, then my heart would be no different than
that of a jackal or a wolf. For these reasons I have received him
in my home to cure his illness. When he is better I will send
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 237

him home. In this way both kindness and chivalry will be com-
pletely reciprocated. This is called repaying a kindness with a
kindness. Although I may be accused before all the spirits of
Heaven and Earth, I will feel no shame in my heart. What out-
siders dare to discuss the propriety of my actions, so that you
would have to cover up? If you really think of yourself as my
father, you should have done something to investigate and
punish those who falsified the edict and abducted me. You
should have fought for the Shui house. Surely you are not like
the others I know, who are intimidated by might and sit by with
their hands in their robes' sleeves. But since you too lectured
me with words that smack of wisdom but are totally irrelevant,
you are unkind and unreasonable. How can I put up with it?"
After listening to this sermon, Shui Yun was struck
dumb with amazement. Finally he said, "It is not that I did not
try, but I am a small official and enjoy little power. I could do
nothing. Although your words affirm the principles of moral-
ity, you should know that true gentlemen are few and petty
men are many, and that those who understand principles are
few and those who do not are many. They will all be saying
that it does not look good for an unmarried girl to keep a young
man at her house."
Ping-hsin said, "External appearance is nothing but
floating clouds. What day is without them? This is why your
own mind is the root of your person, and you can not lead it
astray even for a moment. As long as I remain pure and un-
stained, I could not care less for the rest of it." 3 6

In this confrontation with her uncle, Ping-hsin displays the same

comprehension of the difference between expediency and the
norm that T'ieh has previously. Barely literate himself, Shui
Yiin is flabbergasted by her references to Yen Ying, Mencius,
and Confucius. More important, his remarks show that he is
equally astonished by her moral condemnation of him. Ming-
chiao-chung-jen has skillfully juxtaposed two profound truths
in this scene: one concerning the Confucian principles of kind-
ness, reciprocity, and chivalry (jen, shu, and i respectively), and
the other the far less noble truth that such principles are
meaningless to the petty men and women who inhabit the real
world. At this crossroads Ming-chiao-chung-jen opts for the
Richard C. Hessttey 238

idealistic route of moral purity, which always eventually

triumphs in works with a comic structure. The reader knows
that Ping-hsin is proclaiming important truths in assailing the
superficiality of external appearances and declaring that the
mind, as the root of one's person, must be constantly held in
check. Yet, h o w m a n y readers, under the pressures of work
and their personal lives, can arbitrarily side with her in prac-
tice as well as in theory? In view of the moral compromises
that have frequently been necessary to get ahead in life (or
merely to maintain one's social position or minimize one's de-
cline), the advantages of Shui's confessed pettiness are not so
easily dismissed, especially in a culture whose moral fiber was
being eroded as in the late Ming Dynasty, when the events of
the romance take place. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, in letting Shui
Yiin have his say, seems to have been fully aware of the com-
plexities of the stringent test to which he was submitting Ping-
hsin's moral mind.
Ping-hsin's unusual insight into her own self and
external moral principles enables her to remain righteous and
chaste. As the romance progresses, she becomes increasingly
concerned with her chastity as the prime symbol of her overall
moral purity. In this regard she leaves a big gap between her-
self and the heroines of other scholar-beauty romances, who
generally are not nearly so obsessed with their moral spotless-
ness. It is useful to observe her again when she finally marries
T'ieh. Although they agree to the marriage only as a last re-
sort to prevent Sha Li from marrying Ping-hsin, part of T'ieh
wants to consummate the marriage because it is what he has
desired all along. Yet T'ieh submits to Ping-hsin's argument
against consummating the marriage while they are still under
suspicion:

"Today our parents have given their command, the

go-betweens have borne witness, and our marriage is a legal
fact. However, the propriety of our private feelings when we
were together earlier has not yet been vindicated publicly. Thus,
although our marriage is a fact, I dare not call it a fact. And
although we are united, I dare not consummate that union with
you. This is because I want to uphold my good name and in-
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 239

tegrity so that I may be totally blameless in your presence. While

this is my own estimate of things, we really are completing the
design of Heaven. And if, after completing Heaven's design,
Heaven, on the contrary, should not follow through on its de-
sign, then would it not mean that Heaven has given birth to us
in vain? That is absolutely impossible. Yet the mind of Heaven
is very subtle and difficult to penetrate. The true gentleman can
only be content to wait for it to manifest itself. When Heaven
clearly reflects its intentions, then our feelings will naturally be
revealed to the world. And even if they are not, we can con-
tinue like this to the end, husband and wife in name, and friends
in reality. Indeed, it would surely make a wonderful tale that
would last for a thousand autumns if we thus could stay to-
gether until the end of our lives, rejoicing in the flowers by day
and the moon by night." 37

The design of Heaven invoked by Ping-hsin is related to

Heavenly principle (T'ien-li), a fundamental deterministic con-
cept of the Ch'eng-Chu school of Neo-Confudariism. In its more
popular form, Heavenly principle manifests itself as provi-
dence or fortune, often expressed in the context of love and
courtship by the terms yuan or yuan-fen ("romantic destiny").
The design of Heaven is that a scholar and a beauty should
marry, and that their life together should constitute an exem-
plary "wonderful tale that will last for a thousand autumns"
(ch'ien-ch'iu chia-hua). Ping-hsin understands the design of
Heaven when she says that it is impossible for Heaven to have
given birth to them in vain, that is, to have made them a scholar
and a beauty and yet not to bring about their union in mar-
riage. Since Heaven's design is often ambiguous and hard to
understand, however, it is the individual's task to fathom what
part of it he can and to be patient until its intentions are made
clear. Until the time when the motivation of selfless friendship
that originally brought them together is vindicated by no longer
being misinterpreted as illicit sexual attraction, Ping-hsin be-
lieves that they must remain virgins in order to preserve their
reputation in both Heaven's and their own eyes. The position
that Ping-hsin takes is also an illustration of what is meant by
not compromising on really important moral issues.
Richard C. Hessney 240

What is going on psychologically in Ping-hsin's

moral self is that her superego, which stems from and is fully
in accord with the puritan Confucian cultural superego, com-
pletely dominates her ego and her id. Her superego has de-
termined that this is the only way that she can survive with
her self intact. The sexual drives and death wishes of the id
are thoroughly sublimated in her personality. This is the ma-
jor difference between her and Clarissa Harlowe, the tragic
heroine of Samuel Richardson's eighteenth-century novel and
with whom she shares many other traits. Both are bent on
preserving their chastity and reputation, because it has been
instilled in them that their virginity is the greatest single asset
that a young woman can possess. But while Ping-hsin takes a
calculated risk and threatens to kill herself before the regional
inspector, knowing that he will probably back down under the
pressure of being accused by her in a memorial, Clarissa takes
no such drastic steps when Lovelace abducts and later rapes
her. She submits without much resistance because of the sub-
conscious force of her id's desire for Lovelace, and then is de-
stroyed by the relentless, castigating, vengeful superego in the
guise of a religious self-martyrdom. Ping-hsin is psychologi-
cally the stronger of the two because her superego is in such
total command that it never falters. She is so morally pure that
her guilty conscience, the superego's greatest weapon, never
even has a chance to assert itself. Ping-hsin's psychological self
is thoroughly under the iron rule of her superego, which, even
more than T'ieh's, has obliterated the pleasure-seeking and
often self-destructive drives of the ego and the id.
Another trait that sets Ping-hsin apart from Clar-
issa and from other Chinese beauties is her cleverness, which
ultimately must be seen as a product of her innate genius. She
is constantly beset with Shui Yiin's, Kuo's, and Sha Li's arti-
fices. If she is not able to anticipate a stratagem against her
and take defensive measures in advance, her presence of mind
enables her to react quickly in the face of unexpected danger
and find an escape. Her most adroit countermeasure occurs in
chapter 3 when she tricks Shui Yiin and Kuo into believing that
she has agreed to marry Kuo. This lengthy episode not only
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 241

demonstrates her cleverness and self-confidence but also de-

serves praise as the most humorous passage in the romance.

After a little more than a month, Master Kuo com-

pleted his preparations and selected an extremely auspicious day
for the wedding. He arrived in a glorious, lively procession,
complete with music provided by windpipes and drums, to fetch
his bride. Nervous and excited, Shui Yiin opened a small gate
in the wall and went to urge Ping-hsin to get ready.
Ping-hsin feigned ignorance and idly replied, "Get
ready for what?"
Hearing her response, Shui said anxiously, "You
must be joking! Kuo is coming today to marry you. The musi-
cians and palanquin are at our gate. Do you mean to say you
are unaware of this? How can you say, 'Get ready for what?' "
Ping-hsin said, "It's your daughter that Kuo is com-
ing to marry. What has it got to do with me?"
Shui was even more worried and said, "The Kuo
family has engaged the good offices of many people especially
to marry you. How can you say that he's coming to marry my
daughter? With her looks do you think Master Kuo would be
willing to give such an expensive betrothal present?"
Ping-hsin said, "My father has been banished to the
frontier and all our property is under my charge. Since I am
not to be married, how can you say that Kuo is coming to marry
me?"
When Shui heard this he became extremely upset,
but managed to smile and say, "What you're saying is very
clever, but what you're doing is stupid!"
Ping-hsin answered, "If I'm not going to be mar-
ried, who can force me? What have I done that is so stupid?"
Shui said, "Since you aren't going to marry, you
shouldn't have written your horoscope for me. Now, that hor-
oscope has been sent to the Kuos', and I fear that it'll be hard
for you to say you won't be married."
"Uncle," said Ping-hsin, "you'd better stop dream-
ing. Since I'm not willing to be married, how could I be willing
to write my horoscope for you?"
Shui smiled again and said, "My dear niece, there's
no need to deny it. You thought that, when I had the eight
characters of your horoscope done in gold, I'd lost what you
Richard C. Hessney 242

wrote down and thus you could deny ever having written down
your horoscope. Who would think that I was more careful than
you! I preserved your calligraphy as proof. Even if you had
mouths all over your body, you couldn't deny it."
Ping-hsin countered, "If I myself wrote down my
horoscope for you, then naturally there is nothing more to be
said. But if I didn't, then you can't blame me. Bring it here and
we'll look at it together."
Shui agreed, "That makes sense." He rushed back
to his house to get the horoscope and told his three sons to ac-
company him as witnesses. Holding the horoscope at a dis-
tance, he glanced at it and said, "Wasn't this written by you?
What more is there to say?"
Ping-hsin said, "Let me ask you something, uncle.
Do you know when I was born?"
Shui answered, "You were born about ten o'clock in
the evening of the fifteenth day of the eighth month. That night
your father and I were drinking wine and enjoying the moon. 38
I'm your own dear uncle. How could I not know?"
Ping-hsin said, "Let me ask when sister Hsiang-ku
was born."
Shui declared, "She was born in the afternoon of the
sixth day of the sixth month."
"Have you looked," asked Ping-hsin, "to see what
time and date was written on this horoscope?"
Shui said, "All that's written on the horoscope are
eight characters. There's no date written down, so what do you
want me to look at?"
"Uncle," said Ping-hsin, "can you read those eight
characters?"
Shui responded, "No, I can't. But because when I
had the eight characters done in gold we had to weigh out the
amounts, and we said how much the character chia weighed and
the character tzu weighed, I remember that the eight characters
were chia-tzu, hsin-wei, jen-wu, and wu-wu. Altogether they
weighed approximately one and a third ounces of gold."
Ping-hsin said, "Since it's these eight characters, it's
actually my cousin Hsiang-ku's horoscope. What does it have
to do with me? Why have you tried to frighten and intimidate
me?"
Shui said, "You clearly wrote it yourself. How could
it be hers?"
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 243

Ping-hsin answered, "Uncle, there's no need to ar-

gue about it. Just call a fortune-teller to determine if these eight
characters mean the fifteenth day of the eighth month or the
sixth of the sixth month. Then everything will be clear."
When Shui heard this he was stunned for a mo-
ment, then said, "Still, you can't falsify the truth. Not to men-
tion that the Kuo family, the prefect, and the magistrate all know
I was arranging this match for you, everyone in the area knows
that Master Kuo wants to marry you. Although the horoscope
was fabricated by you, the go-between and sponsors of this
marriage are all in agreement, so how can you get away with
denying it?"
"I'm not denying anything," Ping-hsin declared.
"Since Kuo wants to marry me, he should've presented the be-
trothal gifts to me. Why did he send them to you and why did
you accept them? Moreover, the thank-you note that you sent
said, 'I acknowledge the receipt of the betrothal gifts on behalf
of my daughter.' Not a single word referred to me, so how can
you say you did this for me?"
Shui said, "I called you 'daughter7 because you
wanted me to be recognized as your father, as we discussed."
Ping-hsin added, "If you had no daughter, it would
have been permissible for you to refer to your niece as your
daughter. But, uncle, you have a daughter. If you wanted to
call me your daughter too, you should have distinguished be-
tween us according to our ages and called me 'second daugh-
ter.' How could you just say 'daughter7? At this point, even if
you were an official, you should feel that your arguments are
wrong in principle."
While listening to her, Shui became so upset that he
beat his chest and stamped his feet, crying, "Enough! Enough!
You have grievously wronged me. This Master Kuo is a bad
person and his father is about to be appointed prime minister.
He's spent a lot of money on your account. Now on this pro-
pitious day he's invited many friends and relatives to his home
for the wedding banquet. The procession and musicians ar-
rived early this morning to fetch you, and before long he'll come
riding on his horse to receive you as his bride. If you aren't
willing, there will be no bride for him. How could he let things
go at that? My life would be ended simply on account of your
deception. Since you've done me this wrong, I'm not going to
care about you at all. I'll take you first to the magistrate, then
Richard C. Hessney 244

to the prefect, and state what happened. They will see that it
was you who deceived me, and not I who cheated Kuo. We'll
let the officials decide this. And 1 fear that when it comes to
such a pass, even though you're a smart talker, you'll appear
in court and publicly expose yourself to ridicule and s h a m e . "
"Uncle," said Ping-hsin, "if you accuse me before the
magistrate, all I need say is that you took the opportunity of
my father's banishment to form a conspiracy to marry me off
so that you could grab our property. I'm afraid that your crime
will be worse."
Shui became more worried when he heard his niece's
retort and said, "It isn't that I'm determined to bring you to
court; it's just that if I don't, how will I escape my responsibil-
ity to K u o ? "
Ping-hsin replied, "If you don't want to implicate me,
but want to extract yourself from this predicament, it's very
easy."
Shui stopped his whining and asked, "This knot of
wrong that I've got myself tied up in could not be undone even
by a god, so how can you say it would be easy?"
Ping-hsin said, "If you're willing to follow my plan,
I guarantee that this misfortune will become a great occasion
for rejoicing."
Shui said, "This is really very strange. At a time like
this, with death hanging over my head, how could I hope for
rejoicing? But so long as you have some plan to save me from
being ruined by Kuo, then everything might turn out all right."
Ping-hsin continued, " M y cousin Hsiang-ku is sev-
enteen this year and should be married. Why not take this op-
portunity to marry her openly and legally? This affair can be
completed and there'll be no need for you to seek any further
trouble."
Shui pondered this for a minute, then said with an
expression of happy relief and surprise, "That is indeed a good
plan, but I fear your cousin is much worse looking than you
are. If I marry her to Kuo, he'll not be very pleased with her
and will surely want to have some words with m e . "
Ping-hsin said, " T h e horoscope you sent him is
clearly Hsiang-ku's; he openly sent the betrothal gifts to your
house; and your card of acknowledgment clearly said 'daugh-
ter.' Today he's obviously coming here to marry Hsiang-ku, and
it's fitting that you marry her to him. What can Kuo say? More-
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 245

over, you'll be in the honorable position of father-in-law. If

there's anything you did wrong before, it'll be overlooked by
Kuo. Wouldn't that change misfortune into happiness?"
Shui, listening to his niece's words, unconsciously
began to smile. "My child, how could a little girl like you put
your mind to such marvelous uses? You deceive me tremen-
dously, almost to the brink of death, and now you restore me
to life."
Ping-hsin said, "My intention wasn't to deceive you,
but because you wanted to make trouble for me, I had to seek
a way out."
Shui responded, "But your cousin is clumsy and
awkward. She doesn't know how to manage her toilet, and all
of a sudden she'll be married today. You must go and help her
get herself ready."
There could be no greater relief for Ping-hsin than
to get rid of Shui Yiin. She took two maids with her and went
next door. It took all afternoon to prepare Hsiang-ku, as Ping-
hsin washed and did her hair, removed unsightly facial hair,
brushed her teeth, and shaped her eyebrows. Ornaments of pearl
adorned her coiffure, and her gown consisted of embroidered
and brocaded silks. Ping-hsin also instructed her to say that she
was bashful when she entered the bridal chamber and that she
should definitely blow out the candles before going to bed with
Kuo. When the wedding toasts were made, Hsiang-ku must tell
the maids to get the groom drunk. Ping-hsin also instructed her
that, if the groom seemed to dislike her after seeing who she
was, she should frighten him by threatening suicide. Although
Hsiang-ku was known for her stupidity, when it came to mat-
ters of vital concern to her, she was able to grasp them.
Just when Hsiang-ku's toilet was complete, the three
auspicious stars of happiness, honor, and longevity appeared
in the sky. Master Kuo arrived on horseback to receive his bride,
along with a great crowd of retainers and servants. Shui Yiin
had no choice but to assist his daughter into the palanquin as
the throng took her away to the wedding amid the sounds of
pipes and drums.
Truly,
Though villains' devices are clever,
They're no match for one of lofty sapience.
Don't say the osprey is good at stealing,
When the magpie has already moved her nest.
Richard C. Hessney 246

Master Kuo had no doubt that it was Ping-hsin whom

he had taken home and was completely overjoyed. He escorted
her to the front of the main gate, where she descended from
her palanquin. A number of maids assisted her into the hall.
She wore a brocade veil over her face and looked very attrac-
tive and slender, as if she were a fairy from Heaven. Everyone
took her for Shui Ping-hsin.
There was no one who did not praise her. After the
exchange of vows in the main hall, everyone rushed into the
bridal chamber. The marriage wine was brought in, and Hsiang-
ku was expected to drink a cup in front of her groom. Because
of what Ping-hsin had told her, though she removed her veil,
she went immediately behind the curtains and adamantly re-
fused to come out. Master Kuo, thinking that she was bashful,
did not press her and instead went into the hall to drink with
his relatives and guests. On the one hand, he was very happy
and, on the other, his guests showered their congratulations
upon him. Thus with toasts coming from all directions, he found
himself dead drunk before he reentered the bridal chamber. He
glanced around and saw only the silhouette of his bride, still
sitting quietly inside the bed curtain, since the candles were
placed far away from the bed.
Master Kuo, emboldened by his drunkenness, walked
up to the curtain and said softly, "It's late. Why don't you go
to sleep?"
Hsiang-ku saw him and quickly turned her face away,
whispering to her maids to blow out the candles. But the maids
looked at Master Kuo and did not dare to blow them out. Kuo,
in good humor, took part in the scheme and said, "Since your
new lady told you to blow out the candles, then go and blow
them o u t . "
The maids hurried to extinguish the candles and
withdrew. Master Kuo was anxious to touch her body, while
Hsiang-ku had taken off her clothes and burrowed under the
blankets. Kuo, unable to contain himself any longer, stripped
off his clothes and got under the blankets, his mind completely
preoccupied with the thought that it was Ping-hsin in bed with
him. Delirious with joy, he felt her body all over and bestowed
countless warm caresses upon her. Hsiang-ku was a girl with a
sense of timeliness and thus could not control herself when
things had reached this point. For a while the curtains and tas-
BEYOND BEAUTY AND TALENT 247

sels swayed in rhythm. Then the blankets were full of red waves.
It did not take long for them to become man and wife.
Truly,
Those who make clouds within the curtains are all good girls;
Those who fight slow battles under the covers are all good boys.
How come when they awoke and saw each other's faces,
The one once held dear was no longer loved?
Master Kuo, having gratified his desires, slept until
noon the next day. He opened his eyes and gave his new bride
a quick look. He saw that she had a square face and a broad
forehead. She was so doltish-looking that it was impossible she
was the girl that he had previously stolen a glimpse of. He got
up, put on some clothes, and inquired, "You aren't Miss Shui!
Why have you impersonated her?"
Hsiang-ku replied, "Who says I'm not Miss Shui?
You'd better take a closer look."
Master Kuo could only look at her again. Then
shaking his head back and forth, he exclaimed, "No! No! The
Miss Shui that I know has a face as pretty as lotuses rising from
the water, or willows enveloped in mist. Ifs impossible she could
look like you! I bet I have been cheated by that old dog Shui
Yiin."
Hsiang-ku said angrily, "Because you have married
me, I'm your wife and have equal status with you. How can
you be so devoid of manners as to actually curse my father in
front of me?"
Master Kuo became even more agitated and said, "All
right, thafs enough! The person that Shui Yiin originally let me
have a peek at was his niece Ping-hsin. If you call him father,
you must be his daughter."
Hsiang-ku also got up and, donning some clothes,
said, "How could you be so mixed up! Ping-hsin is the daugh-
ter of my uncle, the official. If you wanted to marry her, you
should've gone to her house to court her. So why did you come
to my father? Furthermore, the horoscope that my father sent
you was mine. The acknowledgment card clearly said, 'I ac-
knowledge the receipt of the betrothal gifts on behalf of my
daughter.' Do you mean you didn't see them? How can you
say it was supposed to be Ping-hsin? The presentation of the
betrothal gifts and the reception of the bride both occurred at
Richard C. Hessney 248

my home, so how can you say it wasn't me you were marry-

ing? Instead you talk of improper and shameless things like
stealing a look at a girl. How do you expect me to manage the
household for you in the future and raise sons for you? As I
see it I'm actually better off dead!"
Then, in a fit of crying invoking Heaven and Earth,
she found a large towel with which to hang herself. Realizing
that his bride was not Ping-hsin, Master Kuo was utterly stupe-
fied with rage. When he heard Hsiang-ku say that she was going
to kill herself, he received yet another shock. Because of this
scare our story has a further twist:
Just when one is befuddled by a willow,
One is tricked again by a flower.
If you do not know what the outcome was, then lis-
ten to the explanation in the next chapter. 3 9

The device of substitute marriage is a common motif in folk-

tales and comic fictions and dramas. Shakespeare employed it
in Much Ado About Nothing, where Claudio is required to marry
a cousin of the beauty Hero in her place, and this lady, un-
masked, turns out to be Hero herself. Ping-hsin has cleverly
set this trap for her two adversaries by establishing her advan-
tage over her uncle through fabricating the horoscope and a
strict interpretation of the rules of propriety. Then she presses
her advantage, making him aware of the gravity of his action,
before she rescues his dashed hopes by proposing the substi-
tution of Hsiang-ku as Kuo's bride. The description of their
wedding night and morning after is a refreshing contrast to
the mostly dry morality of The Fortunate Union. Sir John Fran-
cis Davis deleted it from his translation on the grounds that it
was "untranslatable." On the contrary, this episode deserves
praise for its humorous unfolding of Ping-hsin's cleverness. Her
adroitness in dealing with Kuo, more than her self-awareness
as an exemplar of virtue, led to her survival as the heroine of
the modern Kwangtung folk drama Shui Ping-hsin Thrice Infu-
riates Kuo Ch'i-tsu (Shui Ping-hsin san ch'i Kuo Ch'i-tsu).*0
BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 249

Conclusion

In this essay I have provided several quotations from

The Fortunate Union in order to present the exemplary yet in-
dividualized hero and heroine directly to the reader. Similarly,
Ming-chiao-chung-jen has used the vivid techniques of drama—
dialogue and action—to develop them as characters, relying little
on the novelistic technique of extended narrative passages of
psychological examination in the voice of a narrator. This is
another reason, in addition to the emphasis on love, ritualized
courtship, journeys, and upper-class life, for The Fortunate Union
to be regarded as a romance. However, it does not mean that
there is no depth of psychological delineation. My comments
on the quoted passages have been intended to explain the
prominent features of the protagonists' selves: their moral pu-
rity, active selflessness, and the dominance of their supere-
gos.
The Fortunate Union has had a wide appeal among
popular audiences in China and Europe over the last three
centuries. This appeal is primarily the result of several factors:
an organized plot, humorous and suggestive situations, a
commitment to Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, and a
readable style with numerous allusions to Confucian texts. But
the most important reason for its success is the characters of
T'ieh Chung-yu and Shui Ping-hsin. Individualized when
compared to other scholars and beauties, they are at the same
time typical of the chivalry and activism of the K'ang-hsi pe-
riod, especially among scholars who found their careers ob-
structed by the Ch'ing examination system. Above all, T'ieh
and Ping-hsin embrace the Confucian ideal of i, a broad ethi-
cal concept including selfless friendship, duty, chivalry, and
righteousness. T'ieh is an outstanding exemplar of the heroic
young scholar that combines literary talent, physical strength,
and a handsome face with an unshakable devotion to Confu-
cian principles and propriety. Ping-hsin, because of her brav-
ery, sagacity, cleverness, and chastity, has a claim to being one
of the most lovable heroines in classic Chinese fiction. The For-
Richard C. Hessney 250

tunate Union presumably had the greatest impact on young

readers who would have been more attracted by the work's
humor, idealism, and comic vision. Fortunately, Ming-chiao-
chung-jen does not allow his occasionally heavyhanded didac-
ticism to spoil his creation of entertaining characters. T'ieh's
and Ping-hsin's moral and chivalric selves captured the hearts
and minds of sentimental readers of all ages with a fondness
for romances. They reflect the dual affirmation of life and self
in the face of adversity that C. T. Hsia has characterized as an
essential quality of classic Chinese fiction.
 Maids and Servants
in Dream of the Red Chamber:
Individuality and the
Social Order
Marsha L. Wagner

"It's true," said Bao-chai. "Whenever we start gossiping about per-

sonalities, we nearly always end up agreeing what exceptional peo-
ple you and the other chief maids are. And all exceptional in your
different ways, too—that's what's so interesting." 1

T he masterpiece of Chinese fiction, Ts'ao Hsiieh-

ch'in's Hung-lou meng (best known as Dream of
the Red Chamber but also identified by its alternative title, Shih-
t'ou chi or The Story of the Stone), has received a vast amount
of critical attention, yet the dozens of maids and servants who
colorfully populate the world of Hung-lou meng have generally
been neglected. Recent critics have emphasized the novel's
complex structure and analyzed connections between the ma-
jor characters and the allegorical framework. 2 Another com-
mon scholarly approach to the novel examines the authentic-
ity of the text and the historical background of the actual Ts'ao
family members who are said to be prototypes of important
fictional personages. 3 Generations of readers of Hung-lou meng
have been particularly impressed with the distinct personali-
Marsha L. Wagner 252

ties of the memorable main characters: Chia Pao-yii (Jia Bao-

yu), Lin Tai-yii (Lin Dai-yu, Black Jade), Wang Hsi-feng (Wang
Xi-feng, Phoenix), their Grandmother (Jia Mu, Princess Ances-
tress, the Matriarch), and many others. 4 However, the prom-
inent members of the Chia family are not the only richly de-
veloped characters in the novel, and the non-family members
of the diverse household which is the focus of the novel have
too often been overlooked. 5
The excellence of Hung-lou meng consists largely in
its rich narrative texture. In recording the particulars of every-
day life in the Chia mansion, Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in dwells lov-
ingly on the furnishings, food, and clothing as well as on cus-
toms, games, and pastimes. Moreover, he expands the scope
of the novel's world by including people of every social rank,
minutely described in terms of appearance, manner, and tem-
perament. Hung-lou meng stands alone in its sensitively par-
ticularized depiction of the daily lives of a wide variety of
characters on lower social levels. Before Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in's
achievement, maids were generally more finely developed
characters in Chinese drama than in fiction because of the need
for interlocutors for the main characters on stage, but the dis-
tinctive personalities of the few outstanding figures such as
Hung-niang in the Yuan play Hsi-hsiang chi (The Western
Chamber) or Ch'un-mei (Plum Blossom) in the sixteenth-cen-
tury novel Chin P'ing Mei do not begin to rival the diversity
and depth of characterization of the large retinue of maids in
Hung-lou meng. And although Ts'ao's work has often been im-
itated by later writers, its quality of psychological insight into
unique characters has never been equaled. Furthermore, the
characters of Hung-lou meng are made more complex because
each individual is portrayed in a social context, functioning as
part of the highly complex network of interrelationships within
the Chia household and within the novelistic structure.6 In this
essay I will explore the maids' and servants' roles not only as
individuals but also as threads in the rich social and literary
fabric of the novel.
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 253

Individuality

When we consider maids and servants in the West-

ern literary tradition, we also tend to think first of drama, es-
pecially the comedies of Plautus or Molière, for example, in
which servants represent stock types. When the eighteenth-
century English novel expanded to include individualized
characters of all classes, the servant as protagonist was ele-
vated from his or her original rank; Pamela, for example, was
delivered from servitude by marrying her master and thus be-
came a culture heroine for the large class of waiting maids who
read Richardson's work. 7 Even colorful servants in nine-
teenth-century fiction played minor roles, overshadowed by
dominant personalities of their masters in works by Tolstoy and
others. Thus, Hung-lou metig is outstanding in world literature
as well in the Chinese tradition for its creation of significant,
consistently developed characters of the servant class who re-
tain their social rank yet are in no way one-dimensional types.
Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in takes pains to distinguish even secondary
characters by showing their inner feelings and motivations.
A typical example of such a complex minor char-
acter is Pao-yii's wet nurse Li Ma-ma (Nannie Li, Mother Li),
who at first appears simply as a meddlesome old woman. We
see her as a nuisance in chapter 8: oversolicitous about Pao-
yii's health, she dampens everyone's party spirits by remind-
ing Pao-yu he must study and by trying to restrain him from
drinking wine. When the others defy her and insist that Pao-
yii continue the party, Li Ma-ma slips away in humiliated de-
feat; her authority is no longer respected, and her only re-
maining means of self-assertion is to return to Pao-yii's room—
where she was formerly the superior authority—and to help
herself to some of the special dumplings and tea which he was
saving for his maid Ch'ing-wen (Skybright, Bright Cloud, Bright
Design). This act is regarded by Pao-yii and the other maids
as unforgivably peevish. In chapter 19, however, we feel more
sympathy for Li Ma-ma. We learn that her aggressive revenge
has been self-destructive as much as destructive to others;
Marsha L. Wagner 254

Ch'ien-hsiieh (Snowpink) has apparently served as scapegoat

in the incident and has been dismissed for allowing Li Ma-ma
to take Pao-yii's food, but at the same time Pao-yii has con-
vinced his Grandmother to retire Li Ma-ma from service. The
social dynamic is further complicated by the portrayal of the
pointed jealousy of Li Ma-ma toward the younger maids who
have replaced her in Pao-yii's esteem. When in chapter 19 she
repeats the same vengeful act—this time eating koumiss Pao-
yii was saving for his maid Hsi-jen (Aroma, Pearl, Pervading
Fragrance)—it sheds light on the former incident. The pattern
not only reveals a continuing power struggle among the maids
but also is presented, appropriately for a wet-nurse, in terms
of oral needs and aggression. To emphasize the point, Li Ma-
ma's own angry speech as she helps herself to the koumiss
articulates her particular rivalry with Hsi-jen, who is now Pao-
yii's intimate companion, and eloquently expresses the plight
of a retired servant still living among her former subordinates
whose disrespect intensifies her feelings of uselessness and
impotence:
"I won't believe he would be so wicked as to grudge
his old Nannie a bowl of milk. Why, he owes it to me. And not
only a bowl of milk, either. Much more precious things than
that. Do you mean to tell me that Aroma [Hsi-jen] counts for
more with him than I do? He ought to stop and ask himself
how he grew up to be the big boy he is today. It's my milk he
sucked, that came from my own heart's blood: that's what he
grew up on. And you mean to tell me that now, if I drink one
little bowlful of his milk—cow's milk—he's going to be angry with
me? Well, I will drink it, so there! He can do what he likes about
it. And as for that Aroma. I don't know what sort of a won-
derful creature you think she is—a little bit of a girl I picked out
myself and trained with my own hand!" (p. 217; Hawkes 1:383—
84)

Finally, when Wang Hsi-feng enters to calm another dispute

between Hsi-jen and the distraught older woman, she adds a
new interpretation of the varied motivations behind Li Ma-ma's
aggression; overhearing the commotion, Hsi-feng thinks to
herself that Li Ma-ma is "taking out on Bao-yu [Pao-yiiJ's un-
MAIDS IN Dream of the Red Chamber 255

fortunate maids some of the spleen occasioned by her recent

gambling losses" (ch. 20, p. 229; Hawkes 1:402). It is typical of
Hsi-feng to emphasize the economic motive, and may be most
revealing as a personal projection. Nevertheless, while Hsi-
feng7s perspective is less sympathetic to Li Ma-ma than the old
woman's own speech, this additional point of view rounds out
the portrait. Li Ma-ma is not an attractive figure, but she is
certainly convincingly realistic. And it should be noted that al-
though she has been scorned and ridiculed, Li Ma-ma still re-
tains a vestige of her authority. For example, in chapter 57,
when Pao-yii goes into shock after hearing from Tzu-chiian
(Nightingale, Cuckoo, Purple Cuckoo) that Tai-yii plans to re-
turn south, the bewildered maids turn to Li Ma-ma for advice
in the emergency. Although Li Ma-ma gives up in despair, she
is regarded as a central figure in the sickbed scene (pp. 722-
23).
Besides useless old women, a large household staff
is almost certain to contain a few ambitious opportunists, an-
other stock literary character. The best example is Hsiao-hung
(Crimson, Hung-yii, Siao Hung), but again her character is in-
dividualized by being described from various points of view.
Hsiao-hung looks for opportunities to be in the right place at
the right time; thus she is able to draw attention to herself by
serving tea to Pao-yii when his personal maids are all out (ch.
24), and by carrying a message for Wang Hsi-feng (ch. 27). Hsi-
feng is favorably impressed with Hsiao-hung's capability and
initiative,8 and Pao-yu and Chia Yiin (Jia Yun, Little Yun) both
find Hsiao-hung hauntingly attractive from the first encoun-
ter. Yet the other maids resent her attempts to rise above her
station: Ch'iu-wen (Ripple, Autumn Wave, Autumn Sky) calls
her a "nasty, shameless little slut" (ch. 24, p. 284; Hawkes
1:485), and later Ch'ing-wen comments:

"You can see why she's so uppity. She's on the climb again.
Look at her—all cock-a-hoop because someone's given her a lit-
tle message to carry! And she probably doesn't even know who
it's about. Well, one little message isn't going to get her very
far." (ch. 27, p. 317; Hawkes 2:30)
Marsha L. Wagner 256

On the other hand, another minor maid, Chia-hui (Melilot), is

concerned that Hsiao-hung is constantly depressed, and re-
veals that her services have indeed not been justly recognized
(ch. 26, p. 301). But it is when the author depicts Hsiao-hung
brooding alone that we see the greatest complexity of her psy-
chological response to the situation: her moods of intense de-
jection and self-pity alternate with eager efficiency and opti-
mism that she will be rewarded. Both emotional extremes are
dramatized in her poignant dream, in which Chia Yiin's over-
tures, at first flattering, become aggressively sexual, and Hsiao-
hung finally falls on her face with shame (ch. 24, p. 285). Fur-
thermore, the multiple attitudes toward Hsiao-hung are even
reflected in the commentary by Chih-yen chai (Red Inkstone)
and Ch'i-hu sou (Odd Tablet), who alternately criticize Hsiao-
hung for her selfish ambition, sympathize with her frustration
at being unrecognized, and praise her loyal service. 9
Yet another servant type we might expect to en-
counter is the faithful maid. Granted, only brief mention is
made of two of the model loyal maids of Ch'in-shih (Qin-shi,
Ch'in K'o-ch'ing, Qin Ke-qing, Mistress Yung): when the mis-
tress dies, Jui-chu (Gem) promptly commits suicide by dash-
ing her head against a pillar and Pao-chu (Jewel) volunteers to
take the place of a daughter for the funeral ceremony (ch. 13,
p. 146). But in this case, again, the situation and the charac-
ters are far from simple. First, the main point is not the de-
votion of the maids nor even Ch'in-shih's popularity among
the servants, but rather the pathos and portentousness of her
death. Indeed, Ch'in-shih's role in the novel is primarily alle-
gorical: she provides a link with the mythological realm by of-
fering the setting for Pao-yii's prophetic dream in chapter 5,
and the name of her dream counterpart symbolizes the ideal
woman; 1 0 Hsi-feng's dream of Ch'in-shih's deathbed speech
foretelling the decline and fall of the Chia family is often al-
luded to later; and Ch'in-shih's spirit returns at significant points
near the end of the novel. Thus it is to be expected that maids
connected to such an allegorically significant character should
be more idealized than individualized. Second, chapter 13 em-
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 257

phasizes the exaggerated response of Chia Chen (Jia Zhen,

Cousin Zhen, Chia Gen) to these as well as all other aspects
of Ch'in-shih's death. The impropriety of his passion for his
daughter-in-law is dramatized by Chia Chen's extravagance in
supervising her funeral, including his giving the status of fam-
ily members to these two loyal maids. Third, it is quite clear
that these two maids were more fully developed characters in
the portion of the chapter which was omitted in the revision;
critics have suggested that Jui-chu and Pao-chu originally
committed suicide and mourned so excessively as atonement
for having been the ones who discovered the illicit liaison be-
tween Ch'in-shih and Chia Chen, which Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in later
made less explicit.11
In cases of other exemplary faithful maids, such as
Lin Tai-yii's Tzu-chiian and Chia Mu's Yiian-yang (Faithful,
Mandarin Duck, Faith), the characterization is remarkably rich
and full. It is shown again and again in this novel that a per-
fectly loyal maid has two strictly proper alternatives to serving
her master, becoming a nun or committing suicide, 12 and in
these two figures we have a vivid illustration of each option.
Tzu-chiian has served as a devoted maid to Tai-yii
ever since she arrived at the Chia mansion, and she looks after
her mistress' welfare even to the extreme extent of thought-
lessly testing Pao-yii's affection by suggesting that Tai-yii plans
to return home (chapter 57). Indeed, her devotion to her mis-
tress is so fervent that she is one of the few young women in
the novel who often feel cold, critical, and distrustful toward
Pao-yii. She insists on attending at Tai-yii's death, escorts the
coffin to the south, and although she later serves Hsiieh Pao-
ch'ai (Xue Bao-chai, Precious Clasp, Precious Virtue), she con-
tinues to mourn her former mistress. Finally, Tzu-chiian de-
cides to become a nun along with Hsi-ch'un (Xi-chun, Grief of
Spring, Compassion Spring). When she asks Wang Fu-jen (Lady
Wang, Madame Cheng) and Hsing Fu-jen (Lady Xing, Prin-
cess Shieh, Madame Hsing) for permission to leave, she indi-
cates that she has been torn by inner conflicts between dying
with her mistress and continuing to serve the family to whom
Marsha L. Wagner 258

she is bound by law and by gratitude. She sees a partial res-

olution in accompanying another mistress into a life of atone-
ment, chastity, and religious dedication:
" A s you both know, during all the time I served Lin Ku-niang
[Tai-yii], she treated me with really abundant kindness, which
there is no way to repay. She died, and I wish I had died with
her. But she was not from this household, and I had also re-
ceived your kind treatment, so it was very difficult to follow
her in death. Now that Ssu Ku-niang [Hsi-ch'un] wants to be-
come a nun, I beg you to send me with her to serve her for the
rest of my life. Will you allow me to go? If you grant this re-
quest, I will be most fortunate." (ch. 118, p. 1481; my trans.) 1 3

Yiian-yang is more resolute about following her

mistress in death, but her character is also far from simple. Her
name symbolizes fidelity, and Yiian-yang certainly represents
the traditional virtues associated with the Matriarch, Chia Mu,
whom she serves: she is modest, efficient, even-tempered, and
trustworthy. She assumes major responsibilities in carrying out
Chia Mu's orders, representing her tastes and opinions, pro-
tecting her from unnecessary concerns. She even tactfully pre-
sides over cards and drinking games as the equal of the young
mistresses (chs. 40, 41, 47). Yet she is not above playfully wip-
ing her smelly crab-covered fingers on Hsi-feng's face (ch. 38),
gleefully plotting with Hsi-feng to make fun of Liu Lao-lao
(Grannie Liu) (ch. 40), fiercely opposing the proposed bond with
Chia She (Jia She, Chia Sheh, Prince Shieh) (ch. 46), covering
up for the clandestine lovers' tryst of Ssu-ch'i (Chess, Chess
Maid) (chs. 71-72), and even aiding Chia Lien (Jia Lian) in a
dubious financial venture (ch. 72). Still, this spirited and intel-
ligent young woman is profoundly devoted to Chia Mu, and
feels that her life is at an end when the Matriarch dies. The
minute detail in which the narrator depicts her thoughts and
actions on the night before Chia Mu's funeral reveals a com-
plicated, self-aware individual:

All this time Yiian-yang had been weeping. She

thought to herself: "I have been with Lao T'ai-t'ai [Chia Mu]
my entire life, and it is not certain what is to become of me.
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 259

Now, although Ta Lao-yeh [Chia She] is not at home, I do not

respect the way Ta T'ai-t'ai [Hsirig Fu-jen] runs things either.
Since Lao-yeh [Chia Cheng (Jia Zheng)] doesn't concern him-
self with household affairs, others will surely take over in this
chaotic situation. Won't we [senior maidservants] be entirely at
their mercy? They will decide who will become concubines
within the family, and who will be married off to the male ser-
vants. I cannot stand this kind of humiliation, so it would be
best to die now. But what means of death—?"
While she was ruminating, she walked into Lao T'ai-
t'ai [Chia Mu]'s suite of rooms. No sooner had she entered than
she saw that the lamplight was pathetically dim, allowing her
to glimpse only indistinctly a woman holding a sash, as if she
were about to hang herself, (ch. I l l , p. 1401)

Yuan-yang identifies with this woman's intention and asks her

name, fearlessly proposing that they might die together. But
the stranger does not reply, and when Yuan-yang approaches
she vanishes. Puzzled, Yuan-yang sits on the k'atig and re-
flects to herself:
"This must be Mrs. Jung [Ch'in-shih] from the East-
ern mansion. But she died long ago; how can she be here? It
must be she's come to take me. But why is she hanging herself
again?" She thought and thought, then said, "Yes, it must be
she's teaching me the way to die." (ch. I l l , p. 1401)

There follows a detailed account of Yiian-yang's careful prep-

arations to strangle herself, as she systematically arranges the
footstool, climbs up and secures the sash, wraps it around her
neck, and kicks the stool out from under herself. As soon as
her spirit leaves her body, it again encounters the spirit of Ch'in-
shih, who has come to take her to the Land of Illusion (T'ai-
hsii huan-ching). 1 4 The narrative thus alternates between the
concrete realism of Yiian-yang's actions and the almost hallu-
cinatory vision of Ch'in-shih's spirit. This blend of mental states
brilliantly portrays the psychological crisis experienced by Yiian-
yang. While her resolute act of suicide exemplifies orthodox
fidelity, her spiritual and emotional preparation defines the
inward, personal uniqueness of her externally conventional
behavior.
Marsha L. Wagner 260

These examples illustrate how even minor charac-

ters in Hutig-lou meng are given a highly complex presentation.
All are seen from multiple points of view, and all have con-
flicting motivations. Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in generally refrains from
presenting characters from the perspective of an omniscient
narrator; even when describing physical appearance he has us
see through the eyes of a member of the Chia household, as
in the introduction of Hsiao-hung, who is first noticed by Chia
Yiin (ch. 24, p. 281) and shortly thereafter by Pao-yu:

Bao-yu sipped his tea and observed her carefully. Her

dress, though not shabby, was far from new. By contrast she
had a magnificent head of raven-black hair which was done up
in a simple bun. -The face was rather long and thin; the build
slender; the overall impression that of a tidy, clean, graceful
person, (ch. 24, p. 284; Hawkes 1:484)

Moreover, evaluations and judgments of personality and mo-

tivations are consistently made by other characters, so that each
interpretation is itself a social interaction, revealing something
about both characters involved. For this reason, eavesdrop-
ping, gossip, rumor, and message-carrying are among Ts'ao
Hsiieh-ch'in's most important narrative techniques.
On the other hand, the lack of a fixed narrative point
of view may leave the reader uncertain. Some maids feel Hsiao-
hung is improperly ambitious, but Chia-hui believes she is
justified in her sense of deserving a better position; Li Ma-ma
is both scorned and respected. In compensation for this nar-
rative fluidity, Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in characteristically creates at
least one scene in which the character's own heart and mind
are expressed. There is, I feel, an implicit sense that when the
character is alone, or is speaking for herself, we get the most
complete view of her own individual self, and in Hung-lou meng
the self is above all a psychological state.
Tzu-chiian's formal speech is made to justify her
unusual request to become a nun, whereas Li Ma-ma speaks
in self-righteous anger, but in both cases these women show
that the changes in their social positions—resulting respec-
tively from the death of Tai-yii and Pao-yii's growing up—have
MAIDS IN Dream of the Red Chamber 261

led to intense anxiety concerning not only their proper social

roles and behavior but also their sense of self-esteem and per-
sonal fulfillment. Yiian-yang may be even more candid in her
private reflections after her mistress' death; again, we see that
the change in her social status leads her to question the sta-
bility of the entire household and the viability of her own per-
sonality in this context. Yiian-yang's vision of Ch'in-shih, of
course, focuses her decision to die, but for complex reasons
which include self-interest as well as moral purity. Finally, Ts'ao
Hsueh-ch'in is a master of the psychological dream: the brief
presentation of Hsiao-hung's character is somewhat enig-
matic, but her otherwise elusive self is defined and illumi-
nated by the dream in which she is humiliated because the trust
she places in an apparent friend and benefactor is betrayed.
Thus, the individuality of servants in Hung-lou meng
tends to become most pronounced in circumstances in which
their social positions are in some way threatened; a shift in the
external social order intensifies inner tensions and self-aware-
ness. However, the relationship between self and society is not
one of antagonistic polarity. The world of Hung-lou meng is
sufficiently rich, complex, and fluid that it can contain a vari-
ety of temperaments, a conflicting sense of motivation, and a
multiplicity of viewpoints.

Literary Functions of Maids and Servants

It is clear that the maids and servants considerably

enliven the ambience of the world of Hung-lou meng with their
distinct and colorful personalities, yet they also contribute to
the texture of the novel in several other important ways. Ts'ao
Hsiieh-ch'in uses these figures masterfully to highlight pat-
terns of psychology, structure, and theme.
First, the servants are a means of enriching the
characterization of their masters or mistresses. During the dis-
cussion of the individuality of each of the chief maids, Li Wan
Marsha L. Wagner 262

(Widow Chu, Li Huan) says, " I f s almost as though Nature had

in each case designed the mistress and the maid to suit each
other" (ch. 39, p. 469; Hawkes 2:261). The point is not that the
personalities are similar but that they are complementary: Yüan-
yang conscientiously tends to details which Chia Mu might
overlook, Ping-erh (Patience, Little Ping) gently smoothes over
Hsi-feng's roughness of manner, Hsi-jen sternly curbs Pao-yü's
excesses. Moreover, each maid carries the identity of her mas-
ter or mistress: when Chou Jui's wife (Zhou Rui's wife) sees
Ssu-ch'i and Shih-shu (Scribe, Painting Maid, Folio, Tai-shu)
walk through a doorway, she at once knows that their respec-
tive mistresses, Ying-ch'un (Greeting of Spring, Welcome
Spring) and T'an-ch'un (Taste of Spring, Quest Spring) must
be inside (ch. 7, p. 83); and more dramatically, it is when Ying-
erh (Oriole) is substituted for Hsüeh-yen (Snowgoose, Snow
Duck) as the bride's attendant that Pao-yü realizes he is to marry
Pao-ch'ai rather than Tai-yü (ch. 97, p. 1256).
In some cases, repeated correspondences weave
additional patterns into the fabric of the narrative. Many crit-
ics have remarked on parallels between two pairs of charac-
ters: Hsi-jen and Pao-ch'ai, and Ch'ing-wen and Tai-yü. 15 These
associations are made in the rosters of young women in Pao-
yü's dream in chapter 5, 16 and maintained throughout the novel.
Ch'ing-wen and Tai-yü are both noted for their passionate
tempers; both are orphans in poor health, and Ch'ing-wen's
death prefigures Tai-yü's. The similarity between Ch'ing-wen
and Tai-yü is reinforced by allusions, for both are compared
to Hsi Shih, the beautiful peasant girl who is said to have dis-
tracted the King of Wu from his duties and thus contributed
to his defeat. 17 Indeed, Ch'ing-wen and Tai-yü are so similar
in their sense of isolation that they are unable to be friends; in
a characteristic confrontation, Ch'ing-wen, still smarting from
her anger over another quarrel, inadvertently insults Tai-yü by
not opening the gate for her, and Tai-yü's reaction is to be-
come so depressed she tearfully enacts her famous flower bur-
ial the next morning (ch. 26, p. 311, and ch. 27).
Hsi-jen and Pao-ch'ai, on the other hand, are both
of rational, pragmatic dispositions, and both are among the few
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 263

survivors at the end of the novel. In an emblematic scene, Hsi-

jen is linked to Pao-ch'ai: Hsi-jen has just been promoted to
the position of Pao-yii's unofficial chamber-wife, and she is
sitting by the bedside of her sleeping master embroidering a
pair of mandarin ducks—the very symbol of marital fidelity—
on a pinafore. When Hsi-jen goes out for a moment, Pao-ch'ai
spontaneously takes her place, thus foreshadowing her future
role as Pao-yii's official wife (ch. 36, p. 433). Moreover, in the
final chapters of the novel Hsi-jen and Pao-ch'ai become inti-
mate friends.
However, the patterns are not simplistic, and over-
lapping correspondences are also found. Specifically, Hsi-jen
and Tai-yii are associated as Pao-yii's two central loves; his
declaration of love, which he intends for Tai-yii, is overheard
by Hsi-jen instead (ch. 32, p. 387). Furthermore, Hsi-jen's jeal-
ousy is similar to Tai-yii's: Pao-yii can send Ch'ing-wen to Tai-
yii with a handkerchief as a love token, but he knows Hsi-jen
would object (ch. 34, p. 408). And in chapter 21 (p. 240), Hsi-
jen is so hurt she tells Pao-yii to leave her alone, just as Tai-
yii had done the day before (ch. 20, p. 235).
But for all his technical subtlety, Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in
does occasionally resort to schematic presentation. In these in-
stances he seems to be deliberately drawing attention to his
narrative purpose, and to the underlying patterns of signifi-
cation. A salient illustration occurs in chapter 29, in a passage
which merits detailed examination. Here, Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in
uses a pair of maids, Hsi-jen and Tzu-chiian, to underscore the
dramatic and psychological confrontation between their two
masters. I find the passage significant for two reasons: first, in
its abrupt departure from the usual narrative style, it calls at-
tention to itself as a self-contained piece of self-reflexive liter-
ary criticism embedded within the larger text. Second, it illu-
minates Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in's own conception of the functional
relationship between masters and servants in the novel. The
extended four-way symmetry is so neat that it appears stylis-
tically strained, but this effect only intensifies the critical and
thematic point: as readers we must distinguish between out-
ward appearances and inner reality.
Marsha L. Wagner 264

At the outset, the omniscient narrator (who rarely

appears elsewhere) explains that since Pao-yii and Tai-yii shared
a "morbid sensibility," "both parties concealed their real emo-
tions and assumed counterfeit ones in an endeavor to find out
what the real feelings of the other part were" (ch. 29, p. 352;
Hawkes 2:85). The narrator goes on to reveal Pao-yii's and Tai-
yii's actual thoughts, showing the reader that he must be aware
that "these two young people were already of one mind, but
that the complicated procedures by which they sought to draw
together were in fact having precisely the opposite effect" (ch.
29, p. 353; Hawkes 2:86). When Pao-yii tries to smash his jade,
Hsi-jen runs to intervene, and entreats Pao-yii to imagine Tai-
yii's feelings; Tai-yii is moved because Hsi-jen seems to un-
derstand her better than Pao-yii does. Meanwhile, in a mirror
reflection, Tzu-chiian asks Tai-yii to imagine how Pao-yii feels;
Pao-yii is likewise moved because Tzu-chiian seems to under-
stand him better than Tai-yii. Tai-yii and Pao-yii both begin to
cry, and to complete the symmetry, Tzu-chiian and Hsi-jen also
burst into tears (ch. 29, pp. 353-54). This might constitute an
appropriate closure to the scene, but Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in is in-
tent on extending the parallelism to another level: when some
old ladies arrive, Hsi-jen is angry because she believes Tzu-
chiian had sent for them, while Tzu-chiian crossly assumes Hsi-
jen had summoned them (ch. 29, p. 354). The next day, we
are told, both Pao-yii and Tai-yii are emotionally united in re-
gret over the quarrel, and the following day, after Hsi-jen urges
Pao-yii to assume the most blame and Tzu-chiian—following
suit—persuades Tai-yii to assume the major responsibility, the
two cousins are eventually reconciled (ch. 29, p. 356-ch. 30,
p. 358).
The sequential events in this quarrel—and, by ex-
tension, almost all the altercations and misunderstandings
which constitute the main dynamic of social interaction in Hung-
lou meng—are shown to have their origins in the concealment
of true feelings. The scene thus serves as a central illustration,
on the social level, of the major theme of the novel:
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes non-real where the unreal's real.
(ch. 1, p. 6 et passim; Hawkes 1:55) 1 8
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 265

A related point emphasized in comments by Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in

and an annotator called Ch'i-yuan is the "two-in-one" theme:
what appears to be two different personas or points of view is
in fact only one. 19 After pointing out that although Pao-yti and
Tai-yii were really united, they were ironically becoming in-
creasingly estranged, Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in goes a step further and
states: "Since it was a consistent habit for these two young
people to conceal their feelings, it is difficult to give a com-
plete account. Thus in this case I will narrate only the outward
appearances" (ch. 29, p. 353). 20 Thus, in this brilliantly cho-
reographed scene, Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in generalizes on his nar-
rative technique and explicitly alerts the readers to beware that
the surface narrative conceals an underlying level of reality, or
truth. In his admission of the frustration he feels when the two
levels diverge, Ts'ao articulates a key principle in his probing,
psychological approach to the novel. At the same time, he
suggests that the allegorical structure serves as another means
of treating this phenomenon of an apparent split between the
real and the unreal. However, for Ts'ao the appearance of
duality is finally only an illusion: Pao-yii's and Tai-yii's seem-
ing differences are eventually reconciled, just as more abstract
apparent contradictions finally create an integrated unity. 21
The passage in chapter 29 also presents a parallel,
implicit critique of the role of maids and servants. In general,
the presence of Hsi-jen and Tzu-chiian, with their verbatim
repetitions of each others' speeches and actions, serves to stress
the schematic quality of the scene and thus set it off from the
rest of the narrative as a diagrammatic comment on the whole.
More precisely, Hsi-jen and Tzu-chiian perform three distinct
roles in this scene—as facilitators, explicators, and mirror re-
flections for their masters—which indicate the three major lit-
erary functions of maids and servants throughout Hutig-lou
meng.
Let us first look at the household employees as fa-
cilitators. Chapter 29 is only one of many instances in which
the maids persuade their masters to make up after a fight,
smooth over hurt feelings, and otherwise achieve reconcilia-
tions. Hsi-jen is particularly adept at such intervention be-
cause of her tactful self-restraint. Yiian-yang also effectively
Marsha L. Wagner 266

negotiates with others on behalf of her mistress, Chia Mu; and

Ping-erh loyally covers u p for Hsi-feng's indiscretions, in-
cluding even her usury (e.g., ch. 16, pp. 175-76). In other cases
the facilitation is less discreet but no less significant: for ex-
ample, Pao-ch'ai is too modest to tell Pao-yii that her inscribed
gold necklace matches his jade stone, but her maid Ying-erh
biurts it out, and adds that the inscription came from a scabby-
headed monk, as did Pao-yii's (ch. 8, pp. 96-97). Ying-erh thus
facilitates the two main characters' mutual awareness of their
parallel destinies, and also makes the fundamental association
between gold and jade blatantly explicit for the readers.
Whereas Ying-erh's comments serve as a means of
advancing the allegorical structure, other servants are em-
ployed as devices for furthering the novel's plot. A crucial
transition occurs w h e n Hsi-feng learns of Chia Lien's marriage
to Yu Erh-chieh, and in response she begins to plan her sad-
istically elaborate revenge. The information is conveyed to Hsi-
feng through the careless gossip of Wang-erh and two other
servants (ch. 67, p. 860). A similar device is used in the
spreading of information concerning two other pivotal events:
the maid Sha Ta-chieh (Numskull, Stupid Sister) naively hands
over to Hsing Fu-jen the pornographic incense bag which is
the catalyst for the search and purge of the garden (ch. 73, pp.
939 ff.); and it is the same maid Sha Ta-chieh w h o thought-
lessly informs Tai-yii of the arrangements for the marriage be-
tween Pao-yii and Pao-ch'ai, an announcement which hurls Tai-
yii into her final relapse (ch. 96, pp. 1238 ff.). Indeed, almost
all major turning points in the novel are announced by ser-
vants, who serve as key figures in transitional incidents. Thus,
a basic role of maids and servants in Hung-lou meng is to facil-
itate reconciliations, negotiations, transitions, and the dissem-
ination of information a m o n g the characters in the novel.
As we have seen, servants' statements in the novel
often serve as a m e a n s of narrative exposition. But in addition
to conveying information, maids and servants also often ex-
plicate, interpret, or comment on the action. In chapter 29, Hsi-
jen and Tzu-chiian explain to Pao-yii and Tai-yii respectively
why each is responsible for the quarrel and h o w each has hurt
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 267

the feelings of the other. Moreover, the very first maid intro-
duced in the novel, Chiao-hsing (Lucky, Apricot) is noted for
her perceptiveness: it is she who recognizes Chia Yii-ts'un (Jia
Yu-cun) first as a talented and ambitious man of inner worth
and then as a new official (ch. 1), and she is rewarded for her
perspicacity by later becoming his wife (ch. 2). 22
Chiao-hsing is followed by a series of servants with
exceptional insight. The most outstanding example is Chiao Ta
(Big Jiao), a figure who represents the novel's theme of con-
cealed truth: his manner is vulgar and unruly, but what he says
is apparently accurate. As the faithful and self-sacrificing for-
mer servant and bodyguard of Chia Tai-hua, the late master
of the Ning-kuo fu (Eastern palace), Chiao Ta speaks for the
values of the older generation. From his drunken abuse of Chia
Chen and Chia Jung (Jia Rong, Chia Yung) and his sugges-
tions of their adulterous liaisons, we are first alerted to their
actual depravity (ch. 7). Chiao Ta presents an alternative per-
spective on the family; his role as truth-teller is reinforced in
chapter 105 when he is the one who—again accomplishing a
literary transition—informs Chia Cheng of the arrests of these
same two philanderers. In the context of the confiscation, Chiao
Ta's statement, "day after day I admonished my incorrigible
masters, but they only considered me an enemy" (ch. 105, p.
1335), epitomizes the novel's emphasis on the Chia family's
blindness and unenlightened reversal of values.
Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in frequently uses servants as per-
ceptive explicators. In some cases they merely provide insight
into other characters, such as Hsi-jen's prediction that Pao-yii
will consistently hurt Tai-yu (ch. 3, p. 39) and her contrast be-
tween the temperaments of Tai-yii and Pao-ch'ai (ch. 32, p. 384),
or Lai Sheng's speech warning his subordinate servants that
Hsi-feng is a strict, quick-tempered, sour-faced, hard-hearted
mistress (ch. 14, p. 153). Elsewhere, servants are used to ex-
plicate background, as when Chia Lien's former wet nurse Chao
Ma-ma (Nannie Zhao) comments on the family's bygone days
of glory and points out that only the emperor's favor enables
a family to be so rich (ch. 16, pp. 179-80), or when Lai Ma-ma
(Old Mrs. Lai) recites the family history of beating sons who
Marsha L. Wagner 268

misbehaved, putting the special treatment of Pao-yii into per-

spective (ch. 45, pp. 549-50). 2 3 Finally, there are instances in
which the servants' comments even illuminate the underlying
allegorical structure of the novel: two old women naively com-
ment on Pao-yii's character in strikingly Taoist terms (ch. 35,
pp. 423-24), revealing his essential otherworldliness, and Chou
Jui's wife agrees with Chin-ch'uan-erh (Golden, Gold Ring,
Golden Bracelet) that Hsiang-ling (Caltrop) resembles Ch'in-shih
(ch. 7, p. 82), thus suggesting an intentional similarity be-
tween these two innocent and allegorically significant victims
of worldly lust. 24
In offering direct commentary on the events and
characters of Hung-lou meng, these servants stand—at least
temporarily—outside the novelistic structure and assume a role
much closer to that of annotators or critics. For Ts'ao Hsiieh-
ch'in they may serve as mouthpieces for his own narrative in-
tentions and interpretations. Simultaneously, however, they
contribute to an integral major pattern within the novel, which
is based on the contrast between a quasi-Taoist naive but en-
lightened simplicity and a more orthodox Confucian refined but
misguided sophistication. The prototype of the spokesman for
unadorned, commonsensical truth in the novel is Liu Lao-lao,
whom C. T. Hsia identifies as a source of "spiritual refresh-
ment" to the Chia family. 25 Lai Ma-ma is also a source of
amusement for Chia Mu and the other ladies, as in the bick-
ering over contributions to Hsi-feng's birthday party (ch. 43,
p. 523), and she is a figure of power and respect, as when she
arbitrates the dispute over the dismissal of Chou Jui's son (ch.
45, p. 551). Although a part of the Chia household, Lai Ma-
ma also resembles Liu Lao-lao in that she stands apart and thus
offers fresh perspectives on the events involving the family.
Similarly, Chiao Ta, Chao Ma-ma, and other old women con-
nected to the Chia estate, though not outsiders, present sim-
ple wisdom in modest terms which we trust, even though—
or precisely because—it challenges the uncritically accepted
customs and assumptions of the closed circle of the Chia fam-
ily. Thus, many of the servants who act as explicators are rel-
atively detached observers whose judgments broaden the
readers' perspective on the narrative.
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 269

Finally, in addition to their roles as direct facilita-

tors and explicators, maids and servants in Hung-lou meng often
serve to reflect indirectly on the major characters and events
of the novel. In chapter 29 Hsi-jen and Tzu-chiian not only
commented on Pao-yu's and Tai-yii's behavior and attitudes,
but they also mirrored them: when the masters cried, the maids
cried, and the masters' mutual misunderstanding was paral-
leled by the maids' reciprocal suspicion. I have already men-
tioned various meaningful parallels between the characters of
maid and mistress, such as the temperamental similarities be-
tween Hsi-jen and Pao-ch'ai, and the shared destinies of Ch'ing-
wen and Tai-yii; likewise, Tzu-chiian follows Hsi-ch'un into the
convent and Yiian-yang dies with her mistress. We will now
examine more complex pairs of events, in which the signifi-
cance of an incident involving family members is illuminated
when it is followed by a similar incident among the servants.
This pattern of echoes recurs frequently in Hung-lou meng, and
of course it is of a piece with the larger "shadow" structure of
the novel (ying-shu).26
In the British Broadcasting Corporation's Master-
piece Theater serial "Upstairs, Downstairs," a marriage in-
volving the wealthy "upstairs" family was paired with a wed-
ding among members of the "downstairs" family servants, and
the rich son's experiences as an officer in the war were con-
trasted with the chauffeur's plight as a foot soldier. The jux-
taposition illuminated class differences and dramatized uni-
versal human commonality. In Hung-lou meng we find similarly
paired events, but the comparison has a more pointed nega-
tive purpose. The view of human life presented in Hung-lou
meng is generally more pessimistic than that in "Upstairs,
Downstairs," and as a result the mirror-image events tend to
reflect more misery, cruelty, or corruption. Since modes of be-
havior among servants are less bound by decorum than cor-
responding actions among the family members, the author may
often present a more intensely dramatic version of a shared
tendency when reflecting an incident in the world of the ser-
vants.
In chapter 4 we learn that although Hsiieh Fan (Xue
Pan) has murdered the kidnaper of Chen Ying-lien and car-
Marsha L. Wagner 270

ried off the girl, he is insulated from the consequences be-

cause of the money and influence of the powerful Chia family.
Buying official leniency becomes reinforced as a pattern by the
incident reported in chapter 7, in which Chou Jui's wife's son-
in-law is protected from punishment and deportation after a
drunken brawl by the unhesitating intervention of Wang Hsi-
feng and Wang Fu-jen. The connection between these two ep-
isodes of commonplace corruption is made more explicit when
Chou Jui's wife's son-in-law is identified as Leng Tzu-hsing
(Leng Zi-xing), a close friend of Chia Yii-ts'un who helped
Hsiieh P'an escape in chapter 4. In these early chapters, this
network of power and immunity seems unshakable, but the
confiscation and downfall of the family at the end of the novel
dramatically reveal both the degree to which their influence has
diminished and the consequences of relying on such under-
handed means of resolving disputes. 27
A nicely condensed illustration of mirroring in
chapters 6 3 - 6 5 also emphasizes the debased morality of the
Chia household. Chia Lien's marriage to Yu Erh-chieh is im-
proper for many reasons: merely in terms of formalities, it is
incorrect to conduct such a ceremony during a period of
mourning, lacking his wife's consent, with a woman who is
already engaged, and without the requisite number of nego-
tiators and witnesses. But also in terms of underlying moti-
vation, this liaison is shown to be fundamentally debauched:
the bride's mother Yu Lao-niang (Grandmother Yu) consents
because of material benefits for herself; Yu Erh-chieh herself
is considered morally loose and easily won over; Chia Lien's
desires are solely lustful; and the deed is abetted by Chia Chen
and Chia Jung, who share Chia Lien's lust for Yu Erh-chieh
and hope to receive her personal favors when she is more ac-
cessibly installed as a second wife (ch. 64). The tightly inter-
woven servants' involvement in this arrangement even more
flagrantly intensifies the tone of corruption. The chief servant
in the bride's new house is Pao Erh (Bao Er, Little Pao), who
is sworn to secrecy and bribed by both hush-money and fa-
vors: his former wife hanged herself after being discovered in
compromising circumstances with Chia Lien himself (ch. 44),
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 271

and his present wife, To Ku-niang (Mattress)—given to him in

compensation by Chia Lien—is a promiscuous widow of a
drunkard and also a former mistress of Chia Lien (ch. 21).
A juxtaposed and mutually reflecting pair of scenes
in chapter 65 brilliantly epitomize the licentious quality of Chia
Lien's and Chia Chen's liaisons with Yu Erh-chieh. One night
Chia Chen takes advantage of Chia Lien's absence and makes
a clandestine visit to Yu Erh-chieh. As Yu Erh-chieh serves
wine, the narrator comments ironically that since they are "all
one happy family, they have no taboos" (ch. 65, p. 838), and
Chia Chen reminds Pao Erh that it is his job to hush up such
wanton encounters. However, Yu Erh-chieh realizes that Chia
Lien is likely to find them in this "indecorous" situation, so
she leaves the room. And when Chia Lien does arrive, al-
though To Ku-niang informs him that Chia Chen is there, he
avoids a confrontation with his cousin and, feigning igno-
rance, goes directly to Yu Erh-chieh's room (p. 839).
However, in the servants' quarters the encounter
which would have embarrassed the masters is welcomed with
lascivious glee. When Chia Lien's servant Lung-erh ties up his
master's horse, he sees Chia Chen's horse and instinctively
understands the situation, which is confirmed by the presence
of Chia Chen's servants drinking in the kitchen (p. 840). Al-
though the masters avoid a direct encounter, their horses are
tied up together: as the horses begin to kick each other be-
cause they cannot tolerate sharing the same stall, we are alerted
to the unnatural rivalry between the two cousins. But unnat-
ural or not, the servants are delighted to share sleeping quar-
ters. Amid boisterous drinking, teasing, and sexual play, To
Ku-niang says, "We've got plenty of beds here! Lefs all sleep!";
and when the others try to squeeze into bed with him, Chia
Chen's servant Hsi-erh responds, "Now we're laid out like buns
in an oven!" (p. 840).
In this illustration, connections between the two
scenes are artfully drawn. By the use of foils, the narrator sug-
gests that the truth concealed by the hypocrisy or superficial
decorum of the family members can be revealed more explic-
itly by actions among the servants. Pao Erh appears as merely
Marsha L. Wagner 272

a weak sycophant when admonished condescendingly by Chia

Chen, but is shown to be a replusively spineless toad w h e n
berated contemptuously by his wife; Yu Erh-chieh is some-
what discreet but To Ku-niang is aggressively forward; Chia
Chen and Chia Lien indirectly allude to the impropriety of their
situation, but the servants drunkenly revel in it. Although the
masters' behavior is more restrained in fact, it is equally de-
graded in intention. Likewise, indications of the masters' de-
pravity are presented subtly—through Yu Erh-chieh's embar-
rassment, Chia Chen's rationalizations, or the narrator's irony,
for example—whereas the servants' statements offer direct
evidence of their lasciviousness. Moreover, the servants' ap-
parently casual remarks are intended, I believe, to serve as a
commentary on the masters. As in many such pairs of inci-
dents, the scene involving maids and servants encourages the
reader to look back and critically reflect on the corresponding
scene of family members.
The foil events in the servants' quarters in chapter
65 may be humorous, but like many of Shakespeare's scenes
of comic relief they simultaneously evoke disquieting under-
tones suggestive of a general moral decline. 28 Later in the novel
the foil scenes indicate depravity even more explicitly, al-
though they are still generally lighter in tone than the parallel
masters' scenes. Another pair of incidents begins with events
surrounding Wang Hsi-feng's hypocritical friendship to Yu Erh-
chieh, after she discovers Chia Lien's secret marriage. Hsi-feng's
apparent kindness only intensifies the profound cruelty of her
torture of the helpless victim (ch. 67-70). Several chapters later
we encounter another despotic wife, Hsia Chin-kuei (Golden
Cinnamon, Cassia), who is jealous of her husband Hsiieh F a n ' s
chamber-wife, Hsiang-ling (ch. 79, p. 1031-ch. 80, p. 1041).29
Although the ostensible reason for Chin-kuei's bitterness to-
ward Hsiang-ling is that the latter once inadvertently intruded
when Chin-kuei was about to consummate an affair with her
husband's cousin Hsiieh K'o (ch. 100, p. 1284), one suspects
from narrative insinuations and from the parallel with Hsi-feng
and Yu Erh-chieh that her motivation was primarily a temper-
amental selfish greed and thirst for power.
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 273

Chin-kuei, like Hsi-feng, makes a hypocritical dis-

play of friendliness to Hsiang-ling, also inviting her to come
and share her house and also attempting to torture her to death;
for Hsi-feng's more sophisticated means of starvation, legal-
ity, humiliation, and social ostracism, Chin-kuei simply re-
sorts to poison (ch. 103, pp. 1310-18). The similarity between
the two cases of vengeful women indicates the depths of sa-
distic depravity to which members of the family have fallen.
The death of Yu Erh-chieh is shocking in itself, but the story
of Chin-kuei both reveals a more intense degree of gratuitous
cruelty and encourages us to reread the previous episode with
starker understanding of the malice of a powerful woman's re-
venge on another woman who threatens her dominance. The
difference between the two stories—that Hsi-feng is successful
in her diabolical intentions whereas Chin-kuei's plan backfires
and she herself is poisoned to death—in addition to providing
some comic relief indicates the special role of Hsiang-ling in
the narrative. As a figure whose destiny has been watched over
by the Buddhist monk and Taoist priest since chapter 1, Hsiang-
ling has a providential protection which most ordinary maids
are not favored with. Moreover, if we read the Chin-kuei in-
cident as a form of commentary on the earlier mirrored event,
we may feel it suggests that Hsi-feng deserves the same fate
as Chin-kuei. 30
Thus we see that maids and servants often func-
tion in Hung-lou meng as truth-tellers, who directly or indi-
rectly reflect realities of the masters' personalities and circum-
stances which would otherwise be concealed. Through their
perceptiveness, naïveté, or lack of social restraint they reflect
or comment on the action in ways which enrich the readers'
understanding of the novel. They may even be considered
guides to evaluating events involving the family. Moreover,
many readers find the straightforwardness of the non-family
members' commentary so refreshing and so reliable that they
feel the maids and servants are the most appealing characters
in Hung-lou meng.
Marsha L. Wagner 274

The Social Order

The complex hierarchical structure of the Chia

household is one of the most notable features of Hung-lou meng,
and the maids and servants are an integral part of this social
order. Servants' positions are rigidly stratified, as shown by
distinctions among their respective responsibilities, seating as-
signments, and wages. Status distinctions are particularly sa-
lient on ceremonial occasions, such as the carefully arranged
procession of carriages to the purification rites at the Taoist
temple (ch. 29, pp. 343-44) or the new year's eve tradition in
which every member of the household—including maids, ser-
vants, and pages—must kowtow to all of his or her seniors (ch.
53, p. 667). The ranking of servants involves a complex of fac-
tors such as their origins (house-born or purchased), seniority,
abilities, connections, and reputations. Just as minor excep-
tions are made in the hierarchy of the masters—for example,
Chia Cheng is more competent than his elder brother Chia She
and thus his status is higher although he is younger, and Wang
Fu-jen is correspondingly superior to Chia She's wife Hsing
Fu-jen—so also there is some flexibility in the status of maids.
The highest-ranking maid, Yiian-yang, for example, may sit
with the ladies of the family and act as mistress of ceremonies
in their drinking games (ch. 40, p. 492). Similarly, once a maid
has become a "chamber-wife" she may be addressed as ku-tiiang
(miss) and she is considered, in some respects, an equal to the
mistresses. 31
However, these exceptions are strictly controlled, for
when the hierarchical social order is seriously disturbed, acute
stress is experienced by everyone involved. The Chia house-
hold is a complex social organism, and what affects one indi-
vidual necessarily has ramifications for others. Sociologically
speaking, Hung-lou meng is not a series of events but rather a
network of social patterns. The "shadow" reflections lying) of
family scenes in the world of the servants, which we have seen
to be so literarily effective, are possible only because of this
rigid social stratification. As the social order of Hung-lou meng
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 275

is gradually eroded, and as exceptions to ranked status be-

come the rule, the world of the novel begins to disintegrate,
both as a microcosm of society and as a literary structure.
Even slight disruptions in the social order are
broadly disturbing. The maids are threatened by promotions
of one of their number, as we have seen in the case of Hsiao-
hung (ch. 27, p. 317); they are more discreet but also more
jealous and defensive when Hsi-jen is promoted (ch. 37, pp.
448-51). 3 2 After Hsi-jen leaves to attend her mother's funeral,
there is a complicated jockeying for position to replace her as
Pao-yii's chief maid and bed-partner between Ch'ing-wen and
She-yueh (Musk, Musk Moon; ch. 51, pp. 633-37). 3 3
While the household is running relatively smoothly,
disturbances in the status quo are quickly overcome by an ex-
cessive emphasis on social order. An excellent example is Yiian-
yang's refusal of Chia She's proposal that she become his sec-
ond wife. The offer itself and the pressure brought to bear on
Yiian-yang are threatening to all the other maids; her refusal
is insulting to most of the masters; and the entire incident is
experienced as a personal offense by Chia Mu. When Chia Mu
angrily accuses all the ladies in the family of plotting against
her, the precariousness of the social situation requires a firm
reassertion of decorum. Here Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in emphasizes the
complexity of assessing which of the women is best quali-
fied—in terms of familial connections, social rank, and per-
sonality—to respond to Chia Mu's accusations. After realizing
that Wang Fu-jen, Hsiieh I-ma (Aunt Xue, Aunt Hsueh), Li
Wan and the younger children, Pao-ch'ai, Hsi-feng, Pao-yii,
Ying-ch'un, and Hsi-ch'un, are all inappropriate speakers, T'an-
ch'un assumes the responsibility herself. Moreover, her re-
sponse and the conversation it generates all focus on the issue
of who properly deserves the most blame, and whose status
qualifies him or her to defend or apologize to that person. The
intense scrutiny and reaffirmation of status relationships,
playfully lightened by Hsi-feng's wit, finally reestablish a sense
of order, and avert a potential crisis (ch. 46, pp. 570-72).
But later in the novel threats to the hierarchical sta-
tus quo are not so easily resolved, and the security of a shared
Marsha L. Wagner 276

acceptance of social order is less available. Of the five basic

Confucian relationships, four (ruler-minister, father-son, hus-
band-wife, and elder brother-younger brother) are based on
the principle of filial piety, which is in essence a system of rec-
iprocity: the father is kind and respectful in his care and pro-
tection of the son, and the son in turn treats the father with
compassion, honor, loyalty, and obedience. The master-ser-
vant relationship is an extension of this principle. But the sta-
bility of such a relationship is guaranteed only so long as each
participant adheres to traditional values and practices. After the
first quarter of Hutig-lou meng we begin to see an increasing
number of deviations in hierarchical Confucian relationships,
and thus the decline of the Chia household is inseparably re-
lated to the instability of the social order.
The Chia family is well known for its kindness and
generosity in dealing with servants; 3 4 Chia Mu in particular
epitomizes this tradition—for example, she compassionately
makes amends to the acolyte who is brutally mistreated by Hsi-
feng (ch. 29, pp. 344-45). In the design of the novel, incidents
involving maids and servants consistently function as barom-
eters of the degree of Confucian order within the household.
A number of turning points in the progressive decline in the
stability of the family focus on episodes of maltreatment of
servants. Hsi-feng, of course, displays the most ruthless cru-
elty to servants, but as the tradition of kindness is gradually
eroded, other family members participate. Indeed, there is a
formulaic interrelationship within a series of incidents in which
a master loses his or her temper and strikes a maid "for the
first time."
When Wang Fu-jen suspects that Chin-ch'uan-erh
has flirted with Pao-yii, she slaps her across the mouth and
dismisses her. We are informed that Wang Fu-jen "had never
once struck a maid before" (ch. 30, p. 363), and Chin-ch'uan-
erh's resulting suicide is a major turning point in the novel:
her death is the first of a whole succession of deaths of inno-
cent young women. Moreover, Pao-yii's implication in Chin-
ch'uan-erh's death is one of the reasons he receives the trau-
matic beating by his father in chapter 33, and thus the exces-
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 277

siveness of Wang Fu-jen's punishment of Chin-ch'uan-erh

foreshadows (ying) the extreme paternal behavior of Chia
Cheng. A few pages after Wang Fu-jen strikes Chin-ch'uan-
erh, in an obvious reiteration of this pattern, Pao-yii inadver-
tently kicks Hsi-jen; again, he says, "This is the first time in
my entire life I have ever struck anyone in anger" (ch. 30, p.
367). Although the consequences of this event are less tragic,
it certainly indicates a loss of innocence and a careless impro-
priety in Pao-yu's relation to Hsi-jen. Clearly, the social order
is showing signs of stress. Fourteen chapters later, when Hsi-
feng beats P'ing-erh, the context is significantly more de-
graded, yet P'ing-erh generously forgives her mistress, say-
ing, "In all the years I've served you, you've never laid so much
as a finger on me before" (ch. 44, p. 542; Hawkes 2:380). Fi-
nally, although Hsueh P a n is notorious as a pugnacious bully,
when he beats Hsiang-ling for making his bath too hot, we are
told that he had never done such a thing before (ch. 80, p.
1037). It is interesting to note that in these last three incidents
the maids are remarkably forgiving, showing more nobility of
character in their generosity than the impetuous masters seem
to deserve. A major theme of the latter half of the novel is a
master-servant reversal, in which "nobility of worth" is supe-
rior to "nobility of birth," and the servants come to dominate
morally as well as socially.
Beatings are, of course, part of a larger pattern of
the disintegration of the Confucian moral order. At the mid-
point of the novel we see a mirrored reflection of this family
disorder in the world of the servants, when Ch'un-yen (Swal-
low) is recklessly beaten, first by her aunt and then by her own
mother (ch. 59, pp. 751-54). By this point, many indications
of moral bankruptcy in the Chia family involve maids and ser-
vants: P'ing-erh herself says that Ch'un-yen's beating is "only
one among eight or nine such events in the past three or four
days which are even more serious" (ch. 59, p. 755).
Two other major areas of moral degeneracy in the
family involve money and sex. Money problems are associ-
ated with the servants in the disclosure of the maid Chui-erh
(Trinket)'s theft of the bracelet Hsi-feng gave to P'ing-erh (ch.
Marsha L. Wagner 278

52, p. 644), the uncovering of stolen silver in Shih-shu's trunk

(ch. 74, pp. 958-59), and the increase in gambling among ser-
vants in the garden (reported by T'an-ch'un, ch. 73, p. 938).
Juxtaposed with the punishment of the gamblers is the discov-
ery of the lovers' tryst between Ssu-ch'i and P a n Yu-an, which
signals another step in the progressive moral decline of the
household. Pan Yu-an is an outsider whose entry into the park
by climbing over the wall suggests that the physical barriers
surrounding a former garden of innocence are no longer im-
permeable to forces of vice and lust. 35 And as the architectural
structure of the Chia residence is weakened, the social struc-
ture is correspondingly vitiated.
When the orderliness of the hierarchy among ser-
vants begins to break down, the system of loyalties becomes
less imperative. Owing to harsher punishments, more erratic
supervision, and the general atmosphere of fear and loss of
faith in traditional modes of behavior, servants begin to pro-
tect each other and avoid reporting wrongdoings to their mas-
ters. For example, P'ing-erh attempts to cover up for Chui-erh
(ch. 52, p. 644), and Yiian-yang does the same for Ssu-ch'i (ch.
71, p. 921-ch. 72, p. 924). Hsi-feng accurately accuses the ser-
vants gossiping behind her back of being "all tangled and
matted together like creepers" (ch. 67, p. 870; Kuhn-McHugh
trans., p. 369),36 and even Chia Mu joins in a suspicious atti-
tude toward the servants by chapter 73. Finally, in the later
chapters, the social order is overturned to the extent that ser-
vants commonly have more influence than their masters. Ping-
erh, for example, often replaces the ailing Hsi-feng in author-
ity: it is P'ing-erh who interrogates her superior, Chia Huan
(Jia Huan), about Pao-yii's missing stone (ch. 94, pp. 1214-
15), and who announces the confiscation to the women of the
family as Hsi-feng, conversely, falls helplessly to the ground
(ch. 105, p. 1334). Many of the masters are sick, exiled, mar-
ried off, dead, or utterly withdrawn by the end of the novel;
and healthier, more resilient servants fill the empty stage.37
The most extreme illustrations of this role reversal,
however, are the more malign events of servants' revenge.
Various threads are tied together in the consequences of the
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 279

grudges borne against the Chia family by the moneylender and

gambler "The Drunken Vajrapani" Tsui Chin-kang Ni Erh
("Drunken Diamond"), also known simply as Ni Erh. Chia Yun,
whom Ni Erh once helped in the past (ch. 24), is finally un-
able to use family influence to obtain Ni Erh's release from jail
for drunken insubordination to Chia Yii-ts'un, and Ni Erh is
incensed. When he articulates the grievances of an oppressed
social inferior, Ni Erh joins the series of truth-tellers such as
Chiao Ta, Liu Lao-lao and elderly nannies, the Buddhist monk
and the Taoist priest, and such outwardly shabby but in-
wardly enlightened explicators:

"While in jail, I made several gallant and altruistic

friends, who told me that there are numerous members of the
Chia family, not only in this city but in the provinces as well.
Quite a few of the servants of a Chia family were recently put
in jail. I was puzzled because in this Chia family here, although
among the younger generation both the masters and servants
are worthless, the older generation is still good, and how could
they commit crimes?! After inquiring about, I learned that there
is a Chia family connected to this family from another province
and that it is their servants who, after being duly tried, have
been sent to the capital to await punishment. Only then did I
feel reassured.
"Now if that scoundrel Chia Yiin is ungrateful to me,
I will just tell my friends how his family rely on their influence
to oppress others, how they exploit the poor, and how they force
into concubinage women who are already married or be-
trothed. As my friends spread the word, this information will
reach the ears of the authorities in the capital. When this thing
gets big, then you will all know that the Vajrapani Ni Erh is not
someone to trifle with!" (ch. 104, p. 1324) 38

We later learn that Ni Erh's revenge was to conspire with Pao

Erh (the amoral, opportunistic servant of Chia Lien and Yu Erh-
chieh) and Chang Hua (Yu Erh-chieh's betrothed, who was
bribed by Chia Chen and almost murdered on Hsi-feng's or-
ders) to report Chia Lien and Chia Chen to the authorities (ch.
105, pp. 1338-39). Thus the confiscation and arrests are pre-
sented as direct retribution against the masters for their cruel
Marsha L. Wagner 280

mistreatment of subordinates. As Chia Yiin says, "These days

servants are more powerful than masters" (ch. 104, p. 1323);
and indeed the clan is virtually destroyed by the testimony of
Ni Erh, Pao Erh, and Chang Hua. 39 In the novel's final chap-
ters, servants function less as enlightened explicators and more
as malevolent informers. Likewise, the novelist's tone shifts
from one of fond, romantic nostalgia to bitter and cynical ex-
posé.
Finally, in a more hostile reiteration of P'an Yu-an's
clandestine entry into the garden, the estate is plundered and
the nun Miao-yii is subsequently abducted by a group of rob-
bers led by Ho San, a servant who was previously beaten and
expelled by his master Chia Chen for the relatively trivial of-
fense of having a brawl with—significantly—the same Pao Erh
(ch. I l l , pp. 1404-10). The invasion and pillage, instigated by
a former servant, epitomize the almost total breakdown of so-
cial order and Confucian role hierarchy by the end of the novel.
It has often been pointed out that in the traditional
Chinese view, individuality must be defined in terms of rela-
tionships to others within the social context. 40 However, per-
haps since in Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in's own experience the social
order was profoundly insecure, the individual in Hung-lou meng
is often portrayed as out of place or searching for a position,
and this is particularly true of members of the lower ranks. The
novel brilliantly depicts the poignant suffering of characters who
lack a reliable, supportive social community. As a general rule,
the most celebrated characters in Hung-lou meng are those who
suffer most; it is the constellation of orphans (revolving around
Lin Tai-yu and Ch'ing-wen), anti-Confucians (Pao-yu, Miao-
yii, and others), the misunderstood (Yu San-chieh, Hsiao-hung),
and the abused (Chin-ch'uan-erh, Hsiang-ling) who constitute
the novel's salient figures. Furthermore, it is no accident that
the two maids who are best developed as individuals, Hsi-jen
and Ch'ing-wen, are seen in their own family environments,
outside the social context of the Chia household (ch. 19 and
ch. 77). Indeed, most of the servants in the novel act in some
way which implies a questioning of social conventions, whether
through suicide, religiosity, flagrantly immoral behavior, out-
spoken criticism, or direct revenge.
M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 281

C. T. Hsia has demonstrated how characters in

Chinese short stories who show an excess of passion, obses-
sion, or desire for self-fulfillment are implicitly opposed to the
conventional social order. 41 As Hsia points out, the opposition
is particularly acute when the storyteller himself basically en-
dorses conventional morality. However, Hung-lou metig pre-
sents a variation on this principle, in which the narrator indi-
cates again and again the unreliability of the social structure.
As Hsiao-hung prophesies, "Even the longest party must have
an end" (ch. 26, p. 301; Hawkes 1:509). Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in re-
veals a profound skepticism about the viability of traditional
Chinese modes of social organization; consequently, particular
characters are more prominent than the community as a whole.
When the social order of the family—and of the novel—is pro-
gressively destructured, all that remains is a group of isolated
and deracinated individuals. Their sense of self is indeed bet-
ter defined against a background of social disruption and
trauma.
We have seen that a variety of social and literary
textures in Hung-lou metig are particularly effective because of
status differentiation. Servants serve as foils to masters by
providing patterns of repetition, or more dramatic or outspo-
ken clues to the intended interpretation of family events.
However, in Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in's view, as has been repeatedly
observed, apparent duality is essentially a unity; and, corre-
spondingly, social distinctions are finally broken down. Grad-
ually, the role of maids and servants in the novel becomes less
an indirect reflection of concealed reality and more a direct
expression of truth. When they are no longer subordinated to
family members either socially or literarily, they rise to a
prominence of their own. Perhaps it was Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in's
personal experience which allowed him to create dozens of in-
dividual characters with such stark focus. Certainly, his vision
of the pathos of life amid social disorder provides an ideal
context for Chinese literature's most masterful presentation of
individuals, not only the conventional upper-class protago-
nists but also their maids and servants.
 The Solitary Traveler:
Images of the Self
in Modern Chinese Literature
Leo Ou-fan Lee

T he traditional Chinese travel literature (yu-chi)1

is a mixed genre. Closely connected with both
prose and poetry, it is a flexible form which reflects man's
closeness to nature. The tradition of cosmological thinking, in
which man and nature interact in a harmonious universe, pro-
vides rich ground for the yu-chi writers to achieve artistic
blending, in varying degrees, of subjective and objective ele-
ments. Thus we find a wide range of writings from the poetic
depictions of natural beauty, in which a Taoistic impulse of er-
emitism is manifest, to the encyclopedic accounts of environ-
mental and geographical data. In general, it may be said that
in either extreme the role of the traveler, which is the author's
undisguised or vaguely disguised self, does not assume any
kind of romantic prominence. In a typical piece of yu-chi, as in
a landscape painting, descriptive attention is focused above all
on nature—its beauty and its perennial presence—and sec-
ondarily on the journey but least of all on the traveler. Of
course, this does not rule out the expression of personal feel-
ings and thoughts, which are conveyed through natural de-
scription.
T H E SOLITARY TRAVELER 283

Perhaps the most famous "professional traveler" of

traditional China is Hsu Hsia-k'o (1566-1641), who also rep-
resents the most "objective" strain of travel writing. In a spirit
of scientific inquiry, Hsu undertook his many journeys as a
"geographical explorer" which often brought him to unfamil-
iar territories. His voluminous travel diaries give such a wealth
of accurate details that his latter-day admirer, Ting Wen-chiang,
regards him as China's first modern geographer. 2 Given the
purposefulness of his travels, Hsu Hsia-k'o was nevertheless
reticent about himself in his diaries. As Li Chi has pointed out,
it is odd that "a man who spent a lifetime writing many vol-
umes about his travels should be saying virtually nothing about
his family, his friends, and the times in which he lived." 3 En-
grossed with "mountains and rivers," he was generally indif-
ferent to current affairs, and for this he received some veiled
criticism from his friends. Living in a period of social unrest
and intellectual ferment, Hsii was surprisingly unaffected by
his historical environment. His ambition was merely to trav-
erse the geographical landscape of China and to surpass his
predecessors in the detail and accuracy of his findings. Thus
Hsii's dedication contributes further to the insignificance of the
self in the travel literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
At the same time, however, a gradual tendency to-
ward investigations of the self became also perceptible in late
Ming varieties of the personal essay (hsiao-p'in xoeti) and in
Ch'ing fiction. From the eighteenth-century novels—The Dream
of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou metig) and The Scholars (Ju-lin wai-
shih)—to the late Ch'ing masterpiece, The Travels of Lao Ts'ati
(Lao Ts'ati yu-chi), this trend of what Jaroslav PrilSek calls
"subjectivism and individualism" 4 became gradually domi-
nant. Thus the proper place to begin our examination of the
images of the self in modern Chinese literature is The Travels
of Lao Ts'an by Liu E.
Leo Ou-fan Lee 284

The Travels of Lao Ts'att

The Travels of Lao Ts'an, written between 1904 and

1907, is strictly speaking neither a yu-chi nor a novel but a sub-
tle combination of genres. Though divided into twenty chap-
ters, the book is less concerned with plot than most late Ch'ing
novels. Liu E did not consider himself a professional writer of
novels, unlike his contemporaries Li Pao-chia and Wu Wo-yao.
He therefore felt no special need to conform to the conven-
tions of storytelling, though he could easily do so, as the last
chapters of the book clearly demonstrate. Instead of basing his
work on the conventions of the traditional Chinese novel, Liu
E may have been inspired by the tradition of travel writing, as
his title suggests. In its attention to descriptions of natural
landscape the work owes more to yu-chi prose than to popular
fiction, in which the portrayal of nature is often cliché-ridden
and inferior. Moreover, like the writings of Hsü Hsia-k'o, the
travels of Lao Ts'an carry an investigatory purpose. But in-
stead of exploring and recording natural geography, Lao Ts'an
sets out to explore contemporary society and the meaning of
his own life. Liu E shared with Hsü Hsia-k'o a seriousness of
purpose and, to some extent, even a scientific bent. But unlike
Hsü, Liu E was not as interested in providing objective data
as he was in rendering, in the words of C. T. Hsia, "his per-
sonal vision of China" 5 and, I might add, of himself. The Trav-
els of Lao Ts'an was intended not merely to paint a broad can-
vas of Chinese society but also to register the mood and
mentality of the protagonist—Lao Ts'an, the author's alter ego—
as he roamed the natural and sociopolitical landscape of
northern China in the twilight of the Ch'ing empire. Thus in
its conception the work represents a new advance in the tra-
ditions of both fictional and yu-chi writing.
There are three kinds of travel in The Travels of Lao
Ts'an: an aesthetic trip through some memorable natural set-
tings, an investigative tour of segments of late Ch'ing society
and local government, and most intriguing, a spiritual journey
of self-discovery and self-revelation. As one reads through the
THE SOLITARY TRAVELER 285

first half of the book, it gradually becomes clear that Liu E es-
tablishes Lao Ts'an's itinerary in a series of ascending lyrical
tableaux, from the first level of natural scenery through the
second-level world of politics and society to the third plateau
of the Peach Blossom Mountain, where the philosophic wis-
dom Liu E has assimilated from the T'ai-ku school is revealed
with esoteric and atmospheric brilliance. The middle section
of the book (chapters 8-11), which contains the highest level
of the journey, can be seen as the heart of the narrative and
of Liu E's own preoccupations. From chapter 12, the journey
then descends from its supernatural heights and returns to the
natural and human realms: the landscape of the Yellow River
in its bleak, frozen grandeur and Lao Ts'an's human encoun-
ter with Huang Jen-jui and the two prostitutes in what C. T.
Hsia considers "the longest night in traditional Chinese liter-
ature." 6 In comparison with chapters 2 to 7, these middle
chapters are more profoundly meditative and moving. After
listening, with Shen Tzu-p'ing, to the philosophical musings
of Yü-ku and Yellow Dragon (Huang Lung Tzu) on the Peach
Blossom Mountain, the reader is more prepared to share with
Lao Ts'an a mellower and more melancholic mood, as re-
vealed in that most memorable scene of Lao Ts'an's weeping
at the Yellow River—the "frozen pearls" of his tears are lyrical
crystallizations of a saddened and intensely personal vision of
self and society at the end of a turbulent era.
Had it not been for the last six chapters, which Liu
E wrote after a considerable interval, 7 the novel would have
been even more personal in orientation. The detective case
(kung-an) which occupies the last chapters, brilliantly written
as they are, detracts from the flow of subjective sentiment and,
in my judgment, accounts for a deplorable break in the work's
unity of tone and feeling. But in spite of its conventional char-
acter, the kung-an episode does serve an essential function in
Liu E's highly autobiographical portrait of the protagonist Lao
Ts'an. The solution of the case can be accredited not merely to
Lao Ts'an's intelligence but to the influence he still holds on
high officials. The murder case represents Lao Ts'an's last in-
trusion into Ch'ing officialdom, an intrusion necessitated by
Leo Ou-fan Lee 286

his Confucian sense of justice and an ethical imperative to serve

society. The image of Lao Ts'an is that of a scholar-official
manqué, a conscientious intellectual whose talents, though
thwarted by the bureaucratic system, are nevertheless widely
known in official and unofficial society (chiang-hu, a hardly
translatable term from Chinese novels of knight errantry). And
his fame seems to circulate more widely than his "official" po-
sition would warrant.8 The respect and influence he com-
mands among high officials are definitely not commensurate
with the biographical profile of a doctor without a degree,
though they are more in line with Liu E's own background.
This modest fictional self-portrait nevertheless succeeds in
presenting a unique kind of hero: Lao Ts'an can be seen as a
civilian knight errant, a wen-hsia who uses his mind and her-
bal medicines, rather than his sword, to redress social injus-
tice. He therefore stands in contrast to the two harsh officials
he criticizes, Yii Hsien and Kang Pi. Because of this unique
position, Lao Ts'an is able to befriend both the elite and the
masses—a privilege which Liu E did not entirely enjoy in his
own life.
Thus our solitary traveler here is both detached from
and attached to his society, and the ambiguities of this stance
enrich considerably the fictional characterization of Lao Ts'an.
He can afford to roam the natural landscape as a free spirit,
while at the same time he drops in and out of the sociopoliti-
cal world through his wide-ranging connections. Despite the
sad fate of his country, which he bemoans, he does not feel
totally superfluous. The expression of self in the novel is, on
balance, more positive than negative. Through his travels Lao
Ts'an has performed a variety of useful functions. He has cured
several patients, recommended to a magistrate a brave and
upright man for the post of local police chief, helped two
prostitutes and taken one as his concubine, and of course,
solved a murder case. As most students of the novel have
pointed out, Liu E, through Lao Ts'an, has directed the read-
ers' attention to the evil consequences of the actions of the so-
called "pure officials" (ch'ing-kuan), who inflict extreme cruel-
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 287

ties on the people through their narrow sense of moral self-

righteousness.
But the most important contribution of Lao Ts'an,
although it is rendered indirectly, lies in expounding his own
philosophical beliefs. It seems to me obvious that the real self
of Lao Ts'an and of Liu E is revealed in the middle chapters—
truly the heart of the narrative. This is where Liu E lays bare
the inner essence of his being—a religious sense of serenity
and spontaneity derived from the syncretic teaching of the T'ai-
ku school and explained through the personas of Yii-ku and
Yellow Dragon. I fully endorse Professor Hsia's insight that
Yellow Dragon represents the author's ideal self, but I dis-
agree with his thesis that the two portraits of the self—Lao Ts'an
and Yellow Dragon—are in "unreconciled conflict." 9 Yellow
Dragon's prophetic faith in Chinese culture and Lao Ts'an's
despondency over the fate of China are not necessarily in con-
tradiction. On the contrary, one might argue that in an era
fraught with uncertainties it was more imperative for Liu E to
affirm his "spiritual essence" in the face of external adversi-
ties. The more Lao Ts'an ponders the fate of China, the more
he needs Yellow Dragon's spiritual faith. Lao Ts'an and Yel-
low Dragon represent, it seems to me, two complementary sides
of Liu E's fictional self—one "outer" and the other "inner."
In view of the crucial importance of the middle
chapters, we must confront again the rather enigmatic struc-
tural problem: why is it that this spiritual journey of self-dis-
covery is undertaken not by Lao Ts'an but by Shen Tzu-p'ing,
a character of tangential importance? According to Professor
Hsia, this sudden change of the traveler's identity is a device
used deliberately by Liu E in order to state his "contradictory
responses to his times as voiced by Lao Ts'an and the Yellow
Dragon." 10 If, however, the contradiction is more apparent than
real, other considerations and conjectures may be in order. Liu
E may have felt some anxiety about revealing this most cher-
ished and private part of his inner self. Moreover, the T'ai-ku
teaching, which advocated the confluence of Confucianism,
Buddhism, and Taoism, had been deemed a heretical doctrine
Leo Ou-fan Lee 288

ever since the eighteenth century. 11 The imperative to impart

this central component, not readily acceptable to his readers,
may have led Liu E to resort to a rather prevalent device in
classical Chinese fiction—an ascent to an idyllic setting where
immortals reside. 12 The metaphorical world of Peach Blossom
Mountain seems to be a literary echo of, among others, T'ao
Ch'ien's "Peach Blossom Spring." The journey of Shen Tz'u-
p'ing may be read therefore as a metaphorical exploration into
Liu E's own mind.
We cannot go into the details of Liu E's religious
philosophy, nor do we need to expose the fallacy of his eso-
teric political prophecy. 13 Two points, however, must be men-
tioned to substantiate the thesis that the middle chapters rep-
resent not so much a fictional portrait of the T'ai-ku northern
branch as Liu E's own formulation of T'ai-ku teaching, which
constitutes in fact the spiritual substance of his own mind. 14
First, Yü-ku's bitter attack on the Neo-Confucian restraint on
personal emotions (in chapter 9) and her fervent espousal of
the values of spontaneity certainly illustrate that Liu E was a
man of sentiment comparable to his contemporary Lin Shu. 15
This emotional strain receives amplification in the six-chapter
sequel to The Travels of Lao Ts'an, which is written in a more
personal vein. Second, in the discussion of the genesis of evil
(chapter 11), Liu E brings a Taoist and Neo-Confucian concept
of the "Great Ultimate" (t'ai-chi) to bear on a fairly sophisti-
cated Christian view of good and evil—an intellectual feat that
cannot be expected of his more native teachers. He considers
both God and the Devil to be two manifestations of the Great
Ultimate, thus explaining in cyclical terms the interplay of good
and evil. 16 Whether or not one subscribes to Yellow Dragon's
explanations, this cyclical view tinged with Taoism offers a sense
of philosophical consolation to a man who suffered several times
the vicissitudes of fortune. It also speaks directly to Lao Ts'an's
quandaries: China was going through the winter phase of a
cosmic cycle of change in which the forces of evil reigned and
a national calamity seemed inevitable. But Lao Ts'an's sadness
did not verge on flat despair, for he knew with Yellow Dragon
that the spring phase of rebirth would surely come. The night-
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 289

mare of China as a sinking ship in the first chapter might have

been balanced by a more positive and philosophical note, had
Liu E not digressed into a lengthy murder case near the end
of the book. However, the early chapters of scenic lyricism and
poignant social commentary, coupled with an intriguing and
introspective self-portrait in the middle chapters, are enough
to merit C. T. Hsia's high praise for the work: "But for its ad-
herence to the form of a third-person narrative, The Travels of
Lao Ts'ati could have been the first Chinese lyrical novel in the
first person." 1 7

Yii Ta-fu: "A Sentimental Journey"

The expression of self in the form of a personal

journey is more noticeable in May Fourth literature. The theme
of the solitary traveler thrust upon the road of life recurs fre-
quently in the works of a new generation of romantic writers.
Among them Yii Ta-fu stood out as perhaps the most obses-
sive traveler in modern Chinese literature. Titles such as
"Moving South" ("Nan-ch'ien"), "Midway" ("Chung-t'u"),
"Alone on a Journey" ("I-ko-jen tsai t'u-chung"), "Wistaria
Trip" ("Niao-lo hsing"), "Notes From a Southern Trip" ("Nan-
hsing tsa-chi"), and "A Sentimental Journey" ("Kan-shang ti
hsing-lu") are fitting epithets for Yii Ta-fu's self-image as a man
constantly on the move. As I have written elsewhere in greater
detail, Yii Ta-fu in real life did travel a lot, and his journeys
finally brought him to Sumatra during the war, where he died
presumably at the hands of the Japanese military police. 18
Written two decades after The Travels of Lao Ts'ati and
some three centuries after Hsu Hsia-k'o's diaries, Yii Ta-fu's
travel stories are intensely subjective in both form and con-
tent. He has all but dispensed with plot, so much so that the
boundaries of genre—between essay and story—are not easily
distinguished in Yii's works. Moreover, he has eliminated the
distance between protagonist or narrator and author (or im-
Leo Ou-fati Lee 290

plied author). While in Liu E's novel the authorial persona is

divided into two different characters—Lao Ts'an and Yellow
Dragon—Yii Ta-fu substitutes for these "third-person" de-
vices the simple first-person " I " in most of his travel stories.
With the self in the foreground of Yii's fictional canvas, the
landscapes of nature and society become blurred in the back-
ground or merged with the hero's subjective perceptions and
moods. But instead of presenting fully described lyrical ta-
bleaux to bring out the different facets of the journey, as did
Liu E, Yii writes in a kind of spontaneous process: scenes move
in random flux and are interspersed with fragments of mem-
ory. The cumulative effect is more impressionistic than realis-
tic, and in a way akin to the modern lyrical novel in the West. 19
One also finds a certain " m o d e r n " quality in Yii's
journeys, which are often incomplete, aimless, and marked with
uncertainties. If it can be said that for both Hsu Hsia-k'o and
Liu E traveling defines life's meaning, Yii Ta-fu travels in a
haphazard and futile quest for meaning, only to end midway
toward meaninglessness. Yii's solitary traveler is more truly
alone and adrift in a disjointed world beyond his comprehen-
sion. The inspiration for such a self-image may have come from
Rousseau. In his travel stories Yii is fond of quoting a few fa-
vorite sentences from Rousseau's Reveries du promeneur soli-
taire, which he had translated in part into Chinese: "Whatever
I notice in the external world brings to my heart only pain and
affliction; whenever I cast my eyes upon things which sur-
round me and are connected with me I always find in them
some aspect or other which arouses my spite and indignation,
or else gives me pain. Alone for the rest of my life—since I
find only solace, hope, and peace within myself, I must not,
and no longer want to, occupy myself with anything else ex-
cept my own e g o . " 2 0 Yii certainly echoed Rousseau's pain and
affliction, spite and indignation, at the external environment,
but it is doubtful that he could share with Rousseau—or with
Liu E—the sense of solace, hope, and peace within himself.
It would be useful to compare the style and char-
acter of Yii's traveler with Lao Ts'an by using a relevant story
as my example. " A Sentimental Journey," written in 1928, de-
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 291

scribes in about twenty-five pages one of Yii's many jour-

neys—this time, in a typical wandering fashion, from Shang-
hai to Soochow and Wusih. While it definitely does not match
Liu E's masterpiece in either length or artistry, the story offers
an amusing contrast which serves also to illuminate the differ-
ences between two eras in modern Chinese literature and his-
tory.
First, let us go back to the beginning of Lao Ts'an's
trip. He travels by cart, boat, or on foot in an effortless style
appropriate for a lyrical journey:

He said good-bye, got into his cart, and started off.

The road was among autumn hills covered with red leaves and
gardens full of chrysanthemums so that he did not feel at all
lonely. When he reached Tsinanfu. . . . he found an inn called
Promotion Inn on Treasury Street, took his baggage off the cart,
paid the carter his fare and wine money, had a hasty evening
meal, and went to bed.
The next day he got up early, had a light breakfast,
and then took a turn up and down the streets shaking his string
of bells in pursuit of his calling. In the afternoon he walked over
to the Magpie Bridge and hired a small boat. After rowing north
for a short distance, he reached the Lihsia Pavillion, where he
stopped the boat and went in.21

Thus begins Liu E's consummate description of the beauty of

Lake Ming and the singing of Fair Maid. In Yii's story, how-
ever, the beginning of his trip (by train) is by no means ef-
fortless:

But it was easier said than done. Since autumn I had

harbored the desire to leave for a long time, yet as I was about
to depart there were always obstacles. . . .
To begin my trip, I went to Shanghai, where I had
to negotiate at several places until I finally obtained some pay-
ment for my works. As I went downtown to buy miscellaneous
articles for the trip, my soul was already soaring in the sky:
"Over the hills and far away." 22

Yii's journey is far from smooth and pleasant. One finds, amid
the hustle and bustle of these metropolises, a solitary soul ea-
Leo Ou-fan Lee 292

ger to enjoy the Kiangnan scenery but sidetracked at each city

by difficulties, diversions, and inconveniences which all but ruin
the traveler's original purpose. In a Shanghai hotel, he tries to
read a German traveler's diary (Goethe?) while noises of per-
cussive music and smells of "female flesh" emanate from other
rooms. Unable to sleep, he walks out of his room, only to run
into a seductive, long-haired young woman "wearing a golden
silk négligée" in the corridor. Several times during the train
ride, he tries to appreciate the natural beauty of the Yangtze
countryside, but thoughts of warlords upset his peace of mind.
In Soochow, he plans to stay overnight so that he can walk to
hear the bells of the famous Han-shan Temple at night. But
news of worker strikes, peasant riots, and police harassment
causes him to move on. At Wusih station, he miscalculates and
fails to find a rickshaw, and has to wait for a long time before
getting a more expensive one to a bus station where he then
takes the bus to his hotel. He does manage to enjoy himself
briefly at a few scenic places and indulges in idle fantasies of
living there for good. Yet, near the end of the story, just as he
begins to like his solitary walks along the banks of the lake,
he bumps into a man in military uniform, a former student and
now a big name in the Nationalist Party. Apprehensive that
the VIP may arrest him because of rumors of his antigovern-
ment activities, Yiï tells him lies and accompanies him and his
friends on an excursion in fear and dread. Finally, he leaves
them and Wusih "like a jail-breaking criminal." The story ends
with Yii drinking beer in the corner of a compartment in the
return train to Shanghai: "Recalling my trip to Wusih, I find
its taste rather like the bitter taste of this beer."
Yii certainly had no intention of parodying Liu E's
masterpiece. But the two works nevertheless invite compari-
son on several points. The leisurely pace of Lao Ts'an's travels
is in sharp contrast to the tempo of restlessness and commo-
tion in Yii's journey. The tableaux of lyrical beauty in Liu E's
narrative are paralleled in Yii's by a stream of chaos. Yii Ta-
fu's traveler is no longer a free spirit like Lao Ts'an, but a frus-
trated, bitter, and harassed man who is at a loss to cope with
the complexities of modern life. He is unable to attain, as does
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 293

Lao Ts'an, any heights of spirituality, nor can he relate mean-

ingfully to his environment. While Lao Ts'an the roaming doc-
tor still maintains his connections to, and wields his influence
on, government and society, Yii Ta-fu the celebrated writer lives
in paranoia and alienation. And for all his anger at warlords
and politicians in the story, Yii does not do anything against
them: Lao Ts'an's detective work on behalf of social justice
would be utterly out of place in Yii Ta-fu's works. At the end
of this story, Yu's encounter with the party notable provides
merely a cynical note on his sense of political impotence.
The distance which separates Yii Ta-fu from Liu E
is not only sociopolitical but also cultural. Living in an icono-
clastic age, Yii Ta-fu could not inherit Liu E's sense of conti-
nuity with traditional Chinese culture. In The Travels of Lao Ts'an,
much of "the book's unity of feeling produced by the author's
tireless interest in people and things, his moral integrity, and
his pervading sense of humor" 2 3 is ultimately attributable to
Liu E's familiarity and comfort with his cultural milieu. Lao
Ts'an's political disillusionment does not prevent him from
enjoying, without any ambivalence, the pleasures and vices that
such a milieu provides: food, wine, opium, sing-song girls, and
prostitutes. Yii Ta-fu is equally a connoisseur of such people
and things, but his pleasure is invariably accompanied by re-
morse and shame, as evidenced in his numerous accounts. As
a modern Chinese intellectual, Yii Ta-fu's traveler is also de-
nied something more profound—that inner tranquillity and
strength so characteristic of Yellow Dragon. He is deprived of
the kind of spiritual sustenance which Liu E finds in a teach-
ing that combines the three dominant traditions of Chinese
culture. Liu E conveys this inner dimension through tradi-
tional poetry and metaphors. In Yii's story, on the other hand,
the central poem quoted and flaunted is by a Western author.
And instead of listening to the Chinese lute and the zither, the
traveler wishes that he could hear the recorded sound of
Kreisler's violin and Caruso's tenor voice.
The Westernized taste and Bohemian life-style for
which Yii Ta-fu and his romantic contemporaries became so
well known bespeak an intriguing contradiction when com-
Leo Ou-fan Lee 294

pared with predecessors like Liu E. While in their lives and

works the focal point was always on the self, there was a con-
current lack of inner depth in their self-expressions. Rather than
searching within for a definition of selfhood, as Liu E had done
in the middle section of his novel, the May Fourth generation
of writers (with a few exceptions) often asserted their individ-
ual personalities and life-styles externally against an environ-
ment that they found both confusing and alienating. While this
externalization of the self had its romantic appeal, there was a
spiritual void under the veneer of radical antitraditionalism. Yii
Ta-fu's stories of travel have yielded a rather conservative les-
son: without a firm backdrop of culture and tradition, his sen-
timental journeys can only be aimless wandering—the perfect
image of what Yii himself called an "empty" life without any
inner chapter.
It is noteworthy that when, around age forty, Yii
decided to end his wandering life and tried to settle down with
Wang Ying-hsia, he also adopted the traditional life-style of an
established literatus. He published in 1934 a collection of travel
notes which were clearly imitations of traditional yu-chi es-
says. 24 In these later writings, the author's self retreats con-
veniently into descriptions of nature. But unlike Hsu Hsia-k'o's
diaries, Yii's accounts of familiar sights, some of which were
written also in diary form, yield little excitement in either aes-
thetic wonder or geographical knowledge. In these essays, and
most of his later writings, there is hardly a trace of Yii's early
restlessness, and ironically, the sense of serenity thus achieved
is not only shallower than that of Lao Ts'an yu-chi but also hol-
lower than Yii's early stories, whose very rambling and frag-
mentary structure captured most vividly and authentically the
wandering mentality of a truly modern solitary traveler.

Shen Ts'ung-wen and Ai Wu: Journeys to the South

The literary mode of the personal journey as self-

expression, epitomized by Yii Ta-fu's early works, underwent
THE SOLITARY TRAVELER 295

a further transformation in the literature of the 1930s and 1940s.

The May Fourth exaltation of the self gradually gave way to a
conscious effort on the part of the writer to confront social
reality, thereby shifting the fictional focus to figures and land-
scapes beyond the subjective world of the author himself.
Rather than imposing his ego on society as a gesture of pro-
test or a mark of authenticity, the writer in this post-May
Fourth period would rather allow himself to be impressed by
the human and natural environment which he sets out to in-
vestigate. The conscious retreat of the self does not imply,
however, that the self is "lost"; rather, a sense of social crisis
had compelled the writer to confront a broader reality. While
this trend inevitably pointed to the increasing politicization of
literature, the author's subjective vision remained: "objective"
reality continued to be viewed subjectively, through the writ-
er's own eyes and often transfigured by his own emotions.
The theme of the solitary traveler wandering on a
journey in search of the meaning of life and society can be found
in a large number of fictional and nonfictional works of this
period. I would like to examine two collections of travel liter-
ature as illustrative examples: Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan
(Hsiang-hsing san-chi) by Shen Ts'ung-wen and Accounts of a
Southern Journey (Nan-hsing chi) by Ai Wu. 2 5 Neither of these
works can be termed pure fiction; rather, they record the au-
thors' experiences in a kind of semidocumentary prose rein-
forced by fictional techniques. As such, they seem to belong
in the same "mixed genre" of modern Chinese travel litera-
ture traceable to The Travels of Lao Ts'an.
Shen Ts'ung-wen's Random Sketches was the prod-
uct of the author's return visit, after an absence of eighteen
years, to his native region of western Hunan in 1934. He had,
like many of his contemporaries, migrated from the country-
side to the city. But unlike many May Fourth writers, Shen
never perceived himself as a sophisticated urbanite. As his
Autobiography (Ts'ung-wen tzu-chuan) makes clear, the experi-
ence of his youth—as a soldier, police clerk, and revenue clerk
wandering from place to place in the rural hinterland of
southwestern China—had nurtured in him a "rustic" vision
Leo Ou-fan Lee 296

which alienated him from the "narrow and vulgar" life-style

and value system of the city dwellers. 26 Thus, expectedly,
Random Sketches reads in pointed contrast to his Alice's Travels
in China (A-li-ssu Chung-kuo yu-chi). If the latter is a scathing
indictment of foppish Westernism in Chinese urban morals and
manners of the time, the former can be read as a reaffirmation
of the "pastoral nobility" of the Chinese countryside. Thus
Shen's Random Sketches, though likewise fragmented, does not
share the chaotic uncertainty of Yii Ta-fu's early travel ac-
counts. Instead of a harrowed urbanite trying unsuccessfully
to find temporary respite in his excursions, as in Yii's "A Sen-
timental Journey," we find in Shen's Random Sketches the re-
turn of a native son intent upon exploring the familiar land-
scape of his rural past. The sights and sounds of western Hunan
are thus depicted in glowing colors that mirror the traveler's
emotional excitement of rediscovery. "What a beautiful paint-
ing, what poetry!" the author-narrator rhapsodizes at one point.
"And yet, who would marvel at this sight except the aston-
ished urbanite who is for some reason squeezed out of the
city?" 2 7
Shen's glorification of the Hunan countryside in
these sketches (eleven in all) also betrays, however, a certain
degree of alienation from the very environment to which he
was emotionally attached. The traveler's immersion in his fa-
miliar landscape is not so complete as he may have wished,
for after years of absence he has become something of an out-
sider. Thus he is no longer capable, as in the case of Lao Ts'an,
of exerting his personal impact on his environment. On sev-
eral occasions he is tempted to intervene on behalf of his char-
acters (in one episode, he ponders the possibility of bringing
a young boatman and a romantically inclined prostitute to-
gether for a night), but each time he fails to put his thoughts
into practice. He has become an essentially passive, though
em pathetic, observer—a recipient of sentiment and action. It
is interesting that Shen's own ebullient imagination some-
times leads him to "fantasize" about how his characters might
behave, but he invariably refrains from indulging himself fur-
ther in "fiction," as if to reconfirm his observer's role. The re-
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 297

suit is that the author's self is effaced behind a gallery of

memorable characters: boatmen, vendors, prostitutes, ban-
dits, soldiers, opium-smokers, and smugglers. The rural world
as viewed by the sensitive, yet self-restrained, traveler has be-
come an invaluable repository of collective life for him (and the
reader) to assimilate. The journey thus takes on another di-
mension of meaning: it signifies a process of self-education or
reeducation for the traveler as he learns again from the wis-
dom of nature and life in the old rural world. It is also an at-
tempt, perhaps, to lessen the mental gap caused by his own
alienation. Thus at a lyrical scene Shen is moved to render the
following thoughts: "Looking at the flowing water I feel sud-
denly enlightened about life, at the same time I have gained
new wisdom from this river. In fact, this river, which once gave
me 'knowledge,' now gives me wisdom." 2 8
In a way, Shen Ts'ung-wen can still be regarded as
a romantic. Almost every character he encounters in this jour-
ney has the bearings of a "noble savage": a young boatman
who falls in love with a warmhearted prostitute, a "wild child"
who loves to fight, a maverick womanizer who also collects
paintings, and a seventy-year-old boat-puller with a tough-
ness of spirit and physique that remind the author of Tolstoy!
After describing the itinerant life-style of the boatmen as they
frequent brothels at different ports, Shen concludes: "The life
of a boatman, compared to that of a man of culture, seems much
more carefree. . . . I would go so far as to say that even the
boatman's behavior is more moral than that of a man of cul-
ture." 2 9
Yet amid these romantic paeans to rural people and
country life one also finds Shen interjecting warnings of a more
realistic sort. He is pained by the obvious incompatibility be-
tween two life-styles, and he is aware that the carefree ways
of his native people no longer meet the demands of a chang-
ing, modern world. Thus the author sometimes adopts two
voices: that of an adulating narrator intertwined with that of a
sober commentator. In one sketch, for instance, after describ-
ing how marvelously this world of happy rustics—fishermen,
hunters, boatmen, and workers—merges with nature, Shen
Leo Ou-fatt Lee 298

shifts from the lyrical tone in his narration to a weighty phil-

osophical commentary:
After listening to them for a long time, I am a little
worried. These natural people, who have come to terms with
nature and who owe no obligation to history, are living in this
unknown region. Then there is another group of people who
do not come to terms with nature; instead they find various ways
to dominate nature and violate the habits of nature. . . . Yet
the latter group is changing history and creating history. A new
world is about to wipe out all that is old. What can we do to
make these [rural] people feel a kind of "anxiety," to give up
their pacifist attitude toward nature and to gain a new strength,
so that they can strive to live on with the same spirit with which
they applied themselves to the dragon-boat race? Their passion
in life's pleasures is sufficient proof that they deserve a place in
this world where they can live longer and more happily. But is
there any way to channel their passion toward a new strug-
gle? 30

Through interpolations such as this passage we detect

promptings of Shen's social conscience. His pastoral world does
not give him the blissful contentment he expects. Rather, from
time to time it seems to induce a new anxiety in his mind. In-
asmuch as he remains attached to his native land, he already
has "mixed emotions over the changed texture of life there de-
spite the persistence of a certain degree of pastoral nobility,"
as C. T. Hsia has pointed out. 31 This "changed texture" is due
both to the invasion of outside forces and to a slow erosion
from within—a gentle decay through pacifism and inaction.
Thus something must be done if this part of rural China can
survive the onslaught of "modernization." Shen Ts'ung-wen's
futile plea in the above-quoted passage already contains some
intimations of social action. If he no longer feels comfortable
with this familiar environment, the next logical step besides
total resignation would be to implement certain reforms so that
it can be a better place to live in for his beloved people.
A more conspicuous move in this direction can be
found in the works of Ai Wu, a poet and essayist who later
became an avowed leftist as a result of his early experiences
T H E SOLITARY TRAVELER 299

as a vagabond-traveler. At first glance, Ai Wu's Accounts of a

Southern Journey (first published in 1935) is quite similar in form
and content to Shen's Random Sketches. Consisting of eight pieces
(later expanded to twenty-four in a revised edition), the book
focuses on regions south of Shen's Hunanese world. Like Shen's
Autobiography, it also describes the wanderings of the young
author, from place to place and job to job, in search of the real
"life experience." But the young Ai Wu was more embol-
dened. In a typical May Fourth gesture of self-emancipation,
he had left the familiar world of his home town in Szechwan
to plunge himself into new territories: he ventures from the
southern province of Yunnan to the remote regions of north-
ern Burma. The experiences of his "southern journey" were
more challenging and more bitter than Shen Ts'ung-wen's, and
Ai Wu's accounts are also written in an angrier and more ide-
ological tone.
Unlike the traveler in Shen's Random Sketches, Ai Wu
is miserably poor. Thus he cannot afford the luxury of a se-
rene state of mind in which to enjoy the beautiful scenery. Nor
is he so warmly impressed by this unfamiliar world through
which he moves. Rather, he portrays himself as thrust into a
series of human jungles where he has to struggle for survival.
In one episode, he is so driven by hunger as to sell his only
decent pair of sandals in order to buy some food. Having suf-
fered repeated indignities in the marketplace, he returns to the
low-class hotel where he stays only to see his worn-out shoes
stolen by his fellow lodger. Entitled "A Lesson in the Philos-
ophy of Life," Ai Wu's account of this experience carries the
first of a series of lessons he has learned from life's cruelties:
his journey has become, in fact, a test of his powers of sur-
vival:
Hunger was my friend as I wandered alone in the
streets and alleys every day. But there was no sorrow in my
heart, nor tears in my eyes. Burning in every bone, every blood
vein, and every cell of my body was a simple, elemental idea:
I wanted to live on! Even at moments when hunger muddled
my mind and made my body sweat, when through my be-
clouded eyes I saw my own life, like a frail thread of a cobweb,
Leo Ou-fan Lee 300

about to be blown away by the autumn wind at dusk, I still

harbored passionately this thought: At least I would persist un-
til tomorrow so that I could see the bright and sunny skies of
autumn again.

At the end of the episode, Ai Wu exults: "Even if this society

does not allow me a foothold, I want to live on stubbornly,
like iron and steel." 3 2
This kind of raw courage and dogged instinct for
survival invests Ai Wu's narrative with a dynamism which
contrasts with Shen Ts'ung-wen's gentle passivity. The au-
thor's self, therefore, constitutes a defiant presence vis-à-vis an
adverse and (in the case of Burma) alien environment. While
Ai Wu likewise eulogizes some of the rural characters he en-
counters for their native wisdom (such as the opium-smoking,
drunken old man in " O n the Pine Hill") and their persever-
ance, he does not paint them in a romantic, pastoral hue. Most
of the people in Ai Wu's accounts live, like himself, in strin-
gent circumstances, and to this extent he empathizes with them.
But as he looks for work from place to place he is also victim-
ized by the small shopowners, innkeepers, itinerant mer-
chants, and policemen he meets along the way. In addition,
the Burmese people who take advantage of him are them-
selves dominated by their overlords—the British colonial offi-
cials and their Indian henchmen.
In one story, a "foreign official" forcibly orders a
house newly built by one local family dismantled because it
oversteps the boundary of the public road by some ten feet
and hence violates British law. In another vivid account, the
author finds himself witnessing the pathetic spectacle of a
drunken British "gentleman" and his Indian friend on a noc-
turnal rampage for native women. The author is put in the
embarrassing position of a pimp. His plan to mislead the two
sexual predators backfires when he takes them to an inn where
he does not expect to find any women. When the next morn-
ing he sees young and ravaged women come out the door, he
realizes with terrible guilt that he was, in fact, the real insti-
gator of the crime.
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 301

Thus Ai Wu's accounts of his Burmese journey do

not give an aura of romantic exotica; instead, his experience
there is but an extension of his suffering in Yunnan. In some
ways, it is worse to be a "Chinaman" in a foreign land and
exploited by both natives and their European masters. It is clear
that Ai Wu's anticolonial sentiment, aggravated by a sense of
shame for his own cowardice, has preempted any possibility
for a leisurely appreciation of a different culture. Reflecting on
his humiliating experience as a reluctant pimp, he remarks:
"What a cowardly and impressionable man I am! If only I could
have soundly beaten up that sex maniac and run back to China
. . . I would have a clearer conscience now and would not feel
so much pain." 3 3 He was eventually imprisoned in a Burmese
jail and then deported. Thus ended his ignominious "south-
ern journey."
Like Shen Ts'ung-wen, Ai Wu considers his travel
an educational experience. "I always thought that this south-
ern journey was my university: from it I received much edu-
cation about society and philosophy of life." 34 For a young man
who left home at the age of twenty-three, Ai Wu's journey was,
indeed, his initiation into the "real world." The result of this
social schooling was to turn Ai Wu into a committed leftist who
joined the League of Leftwing Writers in 1932, one year after
he was deported back to China. Whereas the "wisdom" Shen
Ts'ung-wen acquired from the Hunanese people and land-
scape is more aesthetic and philosophical than sociopolitical,
Ai Wu's lessons from his southern journey are consistently
ideological. Thus in recalling his travel experiences he never
hesitates to editorialize: the author's ego has taken on roles of
not merely protagonist and narrator but self-righteous com-
mentator. The more enraged he becomes in his confrontations
with cruel circumstances, the more obtrusive are his sermons:
that the social structures around him, in which the strong or
the clever dominate the weak and the ignorant, are exploita-
tive and that he must struggle in order to survive.
As a sample of travel literature, Accounts of a South-
ern Journey is considered "fiction" by its author but reads, in
fact, like essays of social criticism. It conveys neither the warm
Leo Ou-fan Lee 302

pastoralism of Shen Ts'ung-wen's Random Sketches nor the vivid

storytelling flair of Shen's Autobiography. It is reminiscent of the
latter only in its vaguely picaresque form: the author is cast as
a vagabond-traveler experiencing life and society through his
seemingly aimless wanderings and through chance encoun-
ters with a galaxy of good or evil characters. But Ai Wu's im-
position of a didactic perspective has stripped his traveler of
any semblance of a wide-eyed, carefree youth eager to learn
from life. From his first experience in Kunming to his last in a
Burmese prison, he maintains the same struggling, combative
self without emotional or intellectual growth. The self as picaro
has already formed his personality and proved his strength from
the very beginning. He merely registers more anger and re-
peats his will to survive at each successive test. Thus what
might have been an interesting Bildungsroman is turned into a
long documentary treatise. Even before he ends his journey,
Ai Wu the solitary traveler seems to have given himself a rev-
olutionary purpose for future struggle.

Hao Jan: The Road to Socialism

The common feature that unites Yii Ta-fu, Shen

Ts'ung-wen, and Ai Wu as writers of prerevolutionary litera-
ture, despite their obvious differences in political persuasion,
seems to lie in a certain degree of felt tension between the in-
dividual author and his surroundings. Despite their efforts to
extend their artistic vision from an obsession with self to en-
compass social reality, their perceptions of the social environ-
ment reveal varying degrees of alienation and uncertainty. Even
for an apolitical writer like Shen Ts'ung-wen, his desire to merge
totally with his rural world proves unrealizable. Thus in their
journeys, the solitary travelers can never be fully integrated with
their environment, as Lao Ts'an was able to do. On the con-
trary, the outside world is viewed as chaotically fragmented
(Yii Ta-fu), oppressively antagonistic (Ai Wu), or slowly erod-
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 303

ing despite its beauty (Shen Ts'ung-wen). This is due to a

deeply rooted subjectivism among most May Fourth writers,
coupled with a profound anxiety concerning a society which
seemed on the verge of impending catastrophe and a culture
in rapid, precarious transition.
Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of revolu-
tionary literature from its Yenan beginnings through post-1949
manifestations, as Cyril Birch has remarked, lies in "a re-
newed sense of a social order," 3 5 the vision of a new society
upheld by collective faith which governs the individual thought
and behavior of its members. As a result, the general mode of
revolutionary literature—from Socialist Realism to "Revolu-
tionary Romanticism"—is "comic" in the sense that it is char-
acterized by a festive spirit and the panegyric tone; it tells the
story of how joyfully the positive hero or heroine is integrated
into the new society. 36
The journey motif in post-1949 literature has
undergone a parallel transformation. One needs only to read
through Ai Wu's sequel to his Southern Journey (Nan-hsing chi
hsii-p'ien) to realize the differences in perspective. As revealed
in these twelve stories, written upon the author's return visit
to Yunnan in 1961, it is a bright new world he is witnessing:
former slaves have become local officials; all forms of oppres-
sion and exploitation are gone; the laboring masses have be-
come their own masters; production is enjoying a dynamic
growth. "The atmosphere of prosperity is really exciting. This
great transformation, which has turned hell into a human
world—how can it not make us feel how lovely new China is!" 37
In the ebullient panegyric, the author's combative ego is no-
where to be found. As a literary celebrity revisiting his old re-
gion at the invitation of the government, Ai Wu has become a
truly self-effacing recorder of the heroic achievements of the
people. While the collection is not lacking in vivid vignettes of
local color, Ai Wu, unlike his former self, has lost all feelings
of alienation and antagonism toward his environment. His
journey thus becomes another kind of education—of affirming
and celebrating the success of the revolutionary transforma-
tion.
Leo Ou-fan Lee 304

Leaving aside the question of truth or falsehood in

Ai Wu's documentation, we cannot help but conclude that the
subjective mode of traveling has disappeared not only from Ai
Wu's works but from post-1949 literature as a whole. The sol-
itary traveler is no longer seen as the author's pensive self in
quest of meaning. Rather, he has given way to a new hero—
a dedicated Party cadre or peasant leader or both—whose sol-
itary posture reflects only a temporary setback in his pursuit
of the correct path toward socialist construction.
Hao Jan's famous novel The Great Golden Road (Chin-
kuang ta-tao), is but the most exemplary work that glorifies such
a new hero—Kao Ta-ch'iian. In one of the most vivid chapters
of the novel (chapter 46), 38 Kao Ta-ch'iian embarks upon a
journey to the Party headquarters in the county. He is deter-
mined to convince the Party secretary that between the two
"lines" concerning village reconstruction (forming coopera-
tives vs. encouraging the individual profit motive) the former
is the better one. The journey soon takes an adventurous and
allegorical turn when he encounters an old comrade, T'ien Yii,
whom he has not seen for some ten years. This political "deus
ex machina" demonstrates not only superlative physical
prowess (he arrives in time to tame a horse running wild) but
also amazing ideological foresight: he assures Kao Ta-ch'iian
that the path toward which he has been groping is, in fact, the
correct way as laid down by Chairman Mao—the only way to
socialism. Thus Kao Ta-ch'iian's trip suddenly assumes a reli-
gious significance—it enables him to discover the true Way.
His meeting with T'ien Yii (in obvious symbolism, the name
connotes timely "rain in the field") becomes a moment of epi-
phany. Through the mouth of a prophet, the true gospel of
Chairman Mao is manifested! Accordingly, Hao Jan ends this
chapter on a note which belabors the novel's central theme:
T'ien Yii nodded his head: "Absolutely true. When we were
escaping from the Japanese devils in Heaven-Gate village,
Chairman Mao had already pointed out for us the great golden
road. Friend, let's go!"
And the two fellows, facing the sun, shoulder to
shoulder, strode on the road directly toward the east. . . , 3 9
T H E SOLITARY T R A V E L E R 305

The religious symbolism of two pilgrims marching toward the

shining "east" (an obvious reference to Mao Tse-fung's name)
may have been a byproduct of Hao Jan's eagerness to follow
the guidelines of "combining revolutionary realism with rev-
olutionary romanticism." But given his talents as a shrewd
craftsman of revolutionary fiction, it is no wonder that he
should cast aside the May Fourth legacy of the wandering au-
tobiographical antihero in giving due prominence to positive
heroes of almost mythical stature. The epic quality of his novel
has likewise transformed the mimetic levels of "realism" into
the realm of romance and myth (in Northrop Frye's famous
formulation).40 In Hao Jan's "romantic" world, there can be only
one journey—the pilgrimage along the road to socialism. As
the author's self is submerged in this grandiose landscape, there
is consequently no longer any need to perpetuate the image
of the solitary traveler.

Wang Meng: The Journey Back from the Countryside

Hao Jan's "golden" world of socialist myth proved,

however, not long lasting, as history overtook fiction in a dra-
matic turn of events following Mao Tse-tung's death in 1976.
The preferred "way" of collective populism was replaced by
the new policy of "Four Modernizations," which in fact neces-
sitated official encouragement of the individual profit motive.
As Hao Jan's positive heroes recede again into the back-
ground, individualism and subjectivity are making another
appearance, albeit in a much diluted form. The solitary trav-
eler reemerges—a haggard-looking, middle-aged man return-
ing to his city post after years of living in the remote country-
side as a "rightist." The official policy of "rehabilitation" of
wronged cadres and intellectuals thus provides the conve-
nient background for newly emerged writers to reintroduce the
theme of the sentimental journey, now cast in a vaguely ide-
ological frame. The reigning practitioner of this subgenre is
Leo Ou-fan Lee 306

Wang Meng, who was castigated as a rightist in 1957 and spent

nearly twenty years in Sinkiang. Wang Meng's new fiction is
stylistically adventuresome, at least when compared to the
formulaic writing of recent years. He is known to have devel-
oped a stream-of-consciousness technique with which he wishes
to probe the inner feelings and thoughts of his protagonists. 41
In the context of Chinese Communist fiction, the phenome-
non of Wang Meng is utterly unexpected. But does his fiction
hark back to an earlier tradition? Are his pensive, sentimental
travelers reminiscent of Yii Ta-fu's wandering heroes thrust
upon a journey of meaninglessness? In other words, can we
greet it as a return to May Fourth romanticism?
As we examine some of Wang Meng's stories, par-
ticularly his novella "Butterfly" ("Hu-tieh") and the short sto-
ries "Voice of Spring" ("Ch'un chih sheng") and "Dream of
the Sea" ("Hai te meng"), we are struck by a prevailing sense
of ideological conformity despite their technical virtuosity. As
Wang's protagonist rides on a train or a bus, he is invariably
lost in thought, recalling at every relevant moment fragments
of his past in flashback images arranged in a mannered, jolt-
ing rhythm. Interestingly, nowhere in Wang Meng's emotion-
tinged narrative—whether set in the present or in the past—
do we find the self of the traveler pitted against his environ-
ment. Rather, he is enveloped in a seething humanity, sur-
rounded by his fellow countrymen to whom he is hopelessly
attached. It is only when he enters the big city, as in "The Eye
of the Night" ("Yeh te yen"), that he begins to feel somewhat
ill at ease, because he has become rusticated as a result of his
long stay in the countryside. The general impression gained
from reading Wang Meng's recent work is that the effusive
humanism and patriotism exhibited in his prose have, in fact,
overshadowed the individuality of his protagonists, whose ex-
periences presumably mirror his own. In spite of his flaunted
subjectivity, Wang Meng is curiously self-effacing: his semiau-
tobiographical journeys do not lead to any personal doubt or
anguish, as in Yii Ta-fu, or to a kind of self-education, as both
Shen Ts'ung-wen and Ai Wu have experienced in their re-
spective trips, but rather to a reaffirmation of his faith in a
T H E SOLITARY TRAVELER 307

government and a society of which he is a member and to

which he is again eager to contribute his services. Thus Wang
Meng's fictional vision remains that of integration—of a
spawned self rehabilitated into his society. The solitary trav-
eler has become something of a fictional pose, because in a so-
cialist system, for better or worse, he has lost his spiritual sol-
itude forever.
Thus our capsule survey of selected works of travel
across a span of nearly a century—from Liu E to Wang Meng—
has unveiled a kind of thematic journey of the modern Chinese
self—from its initial awareness in late Ch'ing fiction, through
its prominence in the May Fourth era and its confrontations
with social reality in the 1930s and 1940s, to its final integra-
tion in a collective society in which it can no longer assume
much significance. This is, of course, a familiar theme in mod-
ern Chinese literature. But as we ponder the historical dimen-
sions behind such a familiar literary theme, what is so striking
is the distance between Liu E and Wang Meng: the sensibili-
ties of their respective travelers prove to be so different that
they seem to inhabit two mutually alien worlds. To para-
phrase Tu Fu's famous poetic line in a new light, the moun-
tains and rivers of China remain the same, but the sociopolit-
ical turmoils of the past half century have certainly broken the
human landscape of China. It would have been difficult in-
deed for Liu E's Yellow Dragon, in the lyrical serenity of his
nature-abode, to prophesize exactly the vicious "cycles" of
change which would lead to the holocaust of the Cultural Rev-
olution. Against such mammoth scale of historical transfor-
mation, the solitary traveler as the image of the self cuts a very
small figure.
 Perceptions of Self
and Values in Recent
Chinese Literature
Edward M. Gunn, Jr.

H ow the self has been portrayed in Chinese

Communist literature in the People's Repub-
lic of China and how readers have related to such portraits of
the self are fundamental questions which have posed substan-
tial practical and theoretical difficulties in any search for a de-
finitive answer. This study has approached these problems with
an eye toward answers that are suggestive rather than defini-
tive, using a method which suggests reasonable conclusions
but which also has severe limitations.
Chinese Communist literature from the early 1960s
until 1977 primarily portrayed the individual as a rational en-
tity composed of a set of personal and social values. The in-
dividual was seen as a producer who applies these values in
the workplace (be it school, factory, farm, etc.) to make a de-
cision about a work-related (production-related) problem.
The theories behind this literature presumed that by
presenting such a model of the self as a decision-making pro-
ducer, above or to the exclusion of any other feature of the
PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES 309

self, literary works would in a rational as well as emotional

fashion educate readers to behave according to the model pre-
sented. Such a didactic concept of literature may be seen as an
outgrowth of an assumption by social authorities that they are
responsible for controlling the effects of literature on its read-
ership, followed by a conclusion that there is no rationale for
permitting a literature which does not unambiguously pro-
mote what they are charged to uphold in society as appro-
priate behavior. Either they cannot safely assume that there is
no relationship between literature and the behavior of its readers
or they cannot allow the appearance of condoning portrayals
of behavior which are socially inappropriate. What has re-
mained in China is a rationale for literature as an educative
tool to alter perceptions and behavior.
Only limited means have existed to explore the
questions raised by didactic literature in the context of the
People's Republic of China in the years immediately before and
after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969). With the idea that
it was better to explore than not, no matter how limited the
means, I decided to give a questionnaire to a number of young
émigrés from the People's Republic in Hong Kong in May 1978.
Offered in this paper are the format of the questionnaire, which
included a selection of short stories and poems from the Peo-
ple's Republic; the questions of readership and of émigrés as
respondents; an evaluation of their performance on a psycho-
logical test developed in the People's Republic to test capacity
for moral judgment; the literary works which they read, their
competence as readers, and a detailed discussion of results. The
more salient points are noted first below.
It is interesting that the émigré readers in Hong
Kong in 1978 displayed a capacity for moral judgment similar
to that of their contemporaries in Canton (Guangzhou) as
schoolchildren some fifteen years before, prior to the Cultural
Revolution. While neither the Cantonese schoolchildren nor the
Hong Kong émigrés could reasonably be taken to represent any
major group, much less all of Chinese society, they also could
not be readily distinguished in their moral perception of hy-
pothetical, test situations as created by Chinese psychologists.
Edxvard M. Gunn, Jr. 310

Among personal values approved in the People's Republic, the

émigrés favored being "practical and realistic" and having "a
sense of responsibility toward work." Few believed in the pri-
macy of the Party, class consciousness, or socialist revolution
as a means of serving the interests of Chinese society or them-
selves. Despite this, their own choices of personal values and
omissions of other values could not be correlated in any way
with their perceptions of values in the literature of the Peo-
ple's Republic which they read. From this we may conclude
that the values they held personally had a negligible effect on
their percqjtion of (as opposed to attitude toward) the values
portrayed in recent Chinese literature.
Their perception of the values conveyed in the lit-
erature was not uniform. The émigrés varied among them-
selves most substantially in ranking the values they perceived
in order of their importance in each given work. That their
personal values were not correlated with their perception of
values in a literary work and that they further could not agree
on which values in the works were the most important sug-
gest a failure in the literature as a vehicle for the rational con-
veyance of values and a sense of the priority of values relative
to each other in their given, hypothetical situations. It is quite
likely that the literature often reoriented the thoughts of read-
ers, at least temporarily, as a "ruboff" effect. Yet, that the lit-
erature did so without conveying a clear sense of priority for
the readers' attention indicates its chief handicap as an edu-
cational device: if the readers are left in disagreement as to the
principal concern in the literary work, they are left in dis-
agreement about the lessons in problem-solving, decision-
making processes they are supposed to acquire from it. Nat-
urally, in the conditions under which the questionnaire was
given (discussed below) there could not be rigorous control of
"present environmental stimuli" which could affect readers'
responses. But some steps were certainly taken, and in any case,
if the message of a literary work was or is so subject to varia-
tion depending on each individual circumstance in which it is
read, that argues little for its effectiveness in any practical sense.
Moreover, a distinct pattern of response did emerge
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F A N D V A L U E S 311

when the émigré readers were asked whether they themselves

could identify with the personal values conveyed by poets and
story protagonists. Here there was a definite indication that
those readers who could identify with the heroes in any re-
spect were almost exclusively limited to those who had achieved
some demonstrable form of social recognition, either in the
People's Republic or in Hong Kong. This suggests that the lit-
erature has retained an elitist nature despite its goal of becom-
ing more democratic as popular literature, either for "the whole
of the people" or for a given group of social classes.
While these remarks highlight some fundamental
disagreements with literary theory in China prevalent at a given
point in time, there is hardly anything surprising to an analyst
who is outside that theoretical orientation. Certainly the pe-
riod 1963-1976 considered here saw the entrenchment of the
theory of literature as an educative device to convey rationally
the values put forth in Chinese Communist theoretical and
critical writings. 1 There is no need to dwell at length on the
historical and theoretical background of the literature in this
period, amply discussed elsewhere. 2 Nor is there any call for
criticism from the point of view of my literary values. Whether
the literature served its purpose of illuminating for readers
collectively an aspect of their selves and their society and
whether the methodology used here is of practical relevance
in considering this question for a larger portion of Chinese so-
ciety are the questions taken up here in detail.
Specifically, the questionnaire was given to 28 young
émigrés in Hong Kong, youths who had been raised and ed-
ucated in the People's Republic of China, most of whom had
actively participated in society as Red Guards, cadres, etc., and
worked full-time as members of agricultural communes or fac-
tories. The questionnaire consisted primarily of a psychologi-
cal test developed and administered in China before the Cul-
tural Revolution and a selection of literary works from before
and after the Cultural Revolution. The results of the psycho-
logical test were used to compare the émigré readers in Hong
Kong with their counterparts in the People's Republic in their
ability to make moral judgments based on hypothetical situa-
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 312

tions. The results of this test do not necessarily indicate true

capacity for moral judgment, and the test was used only for
comparative purposes. The results of the questionnaire on val-
ues expressed in literary selections were used to determine
whether the stories and poems produced a unified perception
of their values, of values in relation to each other, and of the
values in relation to the readers' perception of themselves.

Questionnaire Format

Several methods were employed in the question-

naire to evaluate the effectiveness of these literary works as
education-propaganda devices, including: whether a respond-
ent selected the same values as other respondents to describe
a given work, whether the respondents ranked the values in
the same hierarchy, whether they identified with the personal
characteristics of protagonists, whether the works had any de-
monstrable effect on their thinking, and whether they could
correctly date the stories as reflections of changes in social or
political conditions.
The major portion of this questionnaire, consisting
of four short stories and two poems (listed later in this essay),
may be described as a reading comprehension test. However,
the purpose is not ultimately to make a judgment of the read-
ers but to make a judgment of the literature. Since the avowed
purpose of Party-approved literature in China is to educate and
reinforce in the readers the orthodox values of the Party, the
literature may be evaluated as an educational tool and exam-
ined as to its effectiveness in conveying orthodox values. In-
deed, just prior to the Cultural Revolution, the new wave of
model-hero stories for schoolchildren was studied by Chinese
psychologists and justified on the basis that the model-hero
stories promoted a desire among children to imitate the he-
roes in the stories. 3 Thus, given such data as the Test of Ca-
pacity for Moral Judgment (included in this study) and the
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F A N D V A L U E S 313

surveys of the effects of model-hero stories, the aim of this study

is valid both in meeting the literature on its own theoretical
terms and in employing techniques which are not radically at
variance with those used in China before the demise of the
discipline of psychology in 1966 and before the announcement
of its revival in 1978.
To administer the questionnaire, the 28 émigrés re-
cruited for this study were advised in a brief written and oral
introduction that the purpose of the questionnaire was to study
recent Chinese literature through their responses to it, and that
the study was not primarily concerned with their attitudes to-
ward the literature. They were further told that the question-
naire was anonymous and did not involve discussion of con-
crete facts in Chinese society or their personal lives, save that
a few facts about their background were requested for the
purpose of studying and comparing answers on their re-
sponses to the literature.
The respondents were first given a brief set of
questions on their background and interests. They were then
given a simple discussion of value concepts and asked to try
to express their own personal values, setting them down in a
rank order on a scale of 1 (most important) to 5 (least impor-
tant). Following the questionnaire on personal values, the re-
spondents were given the Test of Capacity for Moral Judg-
ment, which consisted of six brief stories, each a paragraph in
length, previously used by psychologists in the PRC in testing
the effects of education on the moral outlook of middle school
students in Canton (see appendix A). The answers given by
the refugees to the questions posed at the end of these brief
stories were used for comparison with those given by middle
school students in Canton.
In addition to the information gained from these
questions, they served to introduce the respondents to select-
ing and scaling answers in a rank order (in the case of ques-
tions on interests and personal values) and to orient them to-
ward reading comprehension procedures. These factors featured
prominently in the other two major portions of the question-
naire.
Edward M. Gunn, jr. 314

One of these two portions consisted of the four sto-

ries and two poems published in the PRC. Two stories and one
poem had been written and published before the Cultural
Revolution, and the other two stories and one poem had been
published after the Cultural Revolution. The texts of all works
were presented as published in the form of photocopies, with
the names of the stories, authors, and dates blocked out. At-
tached to each literary piece was a question and answer form,
identical for all the literary pieces. A written and oral discus-
sion explained their use and contents to the respondents. The
forms first presented a closed-ended list of social values (or
"important points"), representing major social institutions in
China and their related slogans and mottoes (see appendix B).
From this list the respondents were asked to select three social
values which they thought the story or poem portrayed and
to rank them from most important to least important. Follow-
ing this, the respondents were asked to identify whether the
work portrayed Mao Tse-tung Thought. Then a second list was
presented, this one consisting of "special characteristics" (or
personal values) collected from Chinese Communist literary
criticism during the period in which these works were written
(see appendix C). Respondents were asked to indicate which
of these characteristics were demonstrated by the central char-
acter in each story or by the poet in each verse selection. Then
they were asked to compare themselves with the central char-
acters or poets, and on a prepared, brief continuum to indi-
cate whether they shared the special characteristics of the
character or poet in equal measure, whether they were supe-
rior or inferior to the character, or whether they or the char-
acter lacked altogether the model characteristics. Finally, in a
fourth question, they were asked to express themselves briefly
but freely as to whether they thought the various social and
personal values they had indicated for each story were ex-
pressed clearly or not. This question gave respondents a chance
to modify or defend their answers to the closed-ended lists of
values, as well as providing a means for evaluating the ade-
quacy of the question-answer format in the eyes of the re-
PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES 315

spondents and a second check on their answers in the closed-

ended format.
The final portion of the written questionnaire con-
sisted of a reproduction of the two closed-ended lists of values
(social values and personal values; see appendixes B and C).
In this case, the respondents were asked to select and rank-
order five values from each list based on their own views, rather
than on their evaluation of a literary work. Half of the re-
spondents were given these two lists before reading the six lit-
erary works, and half of the respondents were given the lists
after reading the works. In this way, the study examined
whether the stories influenced their selection of values from
the two close-ended lists.
The interviewing sessions concluded with two brief
questions for each respondent: (1) whether he or she had pre-
viously read any of the literary works or taken the Test of Ca-
pacity for Moral Judgment, and (2) whether they could iden-
tify when the stories and poems were written.
Each interview was conducted at a single sitting,
allowing the respondent to proceed at his own pace and dis-
cuss questions or problems that arose during the course of the
questionnaire. The portions of the questionnaire discussed
above were administered one at a time, each one being with-
drawn from the respondent upon his completion of it. Re-
spondents were not allowed to review or revise answers to any
portion of the questionnaire once a portion was completed. No
substantial problems were encountered during the administra-
tion of the questionnaire. While three or four respondents re-
marked that they were unused to reading literature in this
fashion and felt uncertain of their answers, no outright criti-
cism of the questionnaire was offered by the respondents.
Subsequently, at the end of the research period, several émigrés
joined in a discussion of the methods and overall aims of the
questionnaire, but this produced no adverse criticism either.
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 316

The Question of Readership

Certainly an important question to be faced in this

study is the question of readership, both from the standpoint
of literary theory in China and from the standpoint of research
methodology.
Theoretically, the question of to whom Party-ap-
proved Communist literature has been addressed has been an
issue of prominence in the decade 1966-1976. In 1966 literary
critics associated with the literary programs under Lin Piao and
what came to be known as the Gang of Four under Chiang
Ch'ing denounced virtually all literature published prior to that
year as under the influence of a cultural elite gratifying its own
supposedly corrupt views (revisionist, capitalist, bureaucratic,
etc.) to the neglect of the outlook of the masses, who sought
portrayals of continuing revolution and antagonistic class
struggle. This was epitomized in Yao Wen-yiian's attack on
Chou Yang for sponsoring a revisionist literature for "the whole
of the People." 4 The overthrow of the cultural elite in the Party,
according to the partisans of Lin Piao and Chiang Ch'ing, re-
stored literature to its proper readership: workers, soldiers, and
peasants, particularly poor and lower-middle peasants. In the
early 1970s, after Lin Piao disappeared, critics under the Gang
of Four denounced his supposed literary policies as emphasiz-
ing again in a revisionist view that literature was for "the whole
of the People." 5 This issue of whether literary creations were
based on class consciousness and properly intended for worker-
soldier-peasant readership continued until the fall of the Gang
of Four in 1976, the last year with which this study is con-
cerned.
In these terms, the respondents in this study were
all students up to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, and
if one were to heed the accusation that literature up to that
time did not properly address only the worker-peasant-soldier
class, then all the respondents may be considered theoretically
among the readership of the period. In fact, 4 of the respond-
ents recalled reading one of the pre-Cultural Revolution sto-
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F AND V A L U E S 317

ries as part of their schoolwork. Following the Cultural Revo-

lution, most of the respondents were sent to join the ranks of
workers and peasants as "sent-down youth," in the capacity
of laborers or low-level cadres. Whether they all might be con-
sidered members of the social class to which literature was then
supposedly addressed is a moot point. By family background,
11 of the 28 respondents were from the worker-peasant classes,
the others coming from families of intellectuals, merchants, and
office staff workers. On the other hand, if the respondents'
occupations are taken to be the criterion of their class standing
(and it is by this method that most sent-down educated youth
were classified if they returned to universities for advanced
education), then all but one respondent may be judged within
the parameters of appropriate readership: 7 were cadres, 11
were peasants (some belonging to Poor Peasants' Associa-
tions), 9 were workers, and 1 was a student. However class is
to be defined (and there has been no systematic explanation
of social class affiliation), this study included members from
the social classes for whom worker-peasant-soldier literature
was theoretically intended. Moreover, it is important to note
that much of post-Cultural Revolution literature was written
by or for educated sent-down youth and describes the expe-
riences (in ideal terms) of young people taking up worker-
peasant tasks. Stories of this nature were included in the
questionnaire.

Description of Respondents

The 28 respondents included 17 males and 11 fe-

males, with ages ranging from 20 to 35, and an average age of
27. All respondents had been raised and educated in the PRC.
They were primarily from the urban areas of Kwangtung
province, and the majority came from families whose parents
on the eve of the liberation were factory workers, office staff
workers, or intellectuals. However, some came from rural areas,
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 318

some had peasant or merchant class backgrounds, and a

handful volunteered the information that they were from re-
gions outside Kwangtung province (although no precise re-
cord of this information was kept as a condition of the ques-
tionnaire). Twelve of the respondents had attended lower-
middle school, 14 had attended upper-middle school, and 2 had
attended universities in the PRC. Most respondents had been
employed after their schooling and before coming to Hong Kong
as factory workers or peasant laborers. A few, however, had
held positions as low-ranking administrative or cultural cadres.
Despite this degree of variety in the backgrounds
of the repondents, no reasonable claim could be made that they
are, in their backgrounds, representative of all émigrés from
China, not to mention the Chinese population as a whole.
Moreover, even if a representative sample could have been re-
cruited, the environment of Hong Kong itself could not be ex-
cluded as a factor influencing responses. An attempt was made
to measure the possible influence of Hong Kong's culture on
the respondents by recruiting 13 émigrés who had been in Hong
Kong for less than one year (several for less than two months),
in addition to 15 émigrés who had been in Hong Kong for two
to four years. It should be noted that length of stay in Hong
Kong did not affect the answers of émigrés in the question-
naire, and thus the division of respondents according to their
length of stay in Hong Kong does not figure as a major factor
in presenting the results and conclusions of this study.
A few other points should be noted about the re-
spondents at the outset. The respondents represented both le-
gal and illegal émigrés. Further, they were recruited through
four separate private sources, and not through social or polit-
ical institutions or organizations. Given this attempt at varia-
tion, there were still no respondents who expressed a strong
commitment to Marxist or Maoist political values, judging from
their open-ended statements of personal values and the two
closed-ended questionnaires on social and personal values
drawn from the rhetoric of Chinese Communist literature.
Certainly the inclusion of respondents professing stronger be-
lief in Communist ideology might have had an effect on the
PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES 319

response-perception pattern. To elaborate on this point briefly,

the question addressed in this study is not whether a substan-
tively correct response is given by the respondents, but whether
a uniform response is given. If we believe that social factors of
these émigrés influence their perceptions (not to say their at-
titudes), then we would expect that their responses on the
questionnaire would correlate with factors in their social back-
ground. This is not to say that within certain social or ideolog-
ical groups in China there might not be a uniform response.
But it is to say that background factors noted here have not led
to uniformity of response.
Nevertheless, some measure of the respondents'
ability to think in terms considered ethically orthodox in China
(at least prior to the Cultural Revolution) was taken in the form
of the Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment.

Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment

The six brief stories comprising the Test of Capac-

ity for Moral Judgment were designed to test a range of skills
(described as "seeing through the superficial to reveal the es-
sence of a story's moral," "taking into account the principle of
comprehensive consideration," "separating the essential from
the inessential," and applying "the principle of concrete analysis
of concrete situations"). The test was given prior to 1964 to
middle school students (lower and upper middle schools) in
several schools in the city of Canton and a neighboring county.
The purpose of the test was to demonstrate that capacity for
moral judgment increased with higher levels of intellectual at-
tainment, that is, that the scores of upper-middle school stu-
dents showed a higher percentage of correct answers than those
of lower-middle school students. A translation of the test ap-
pears in appendix A.
The purpose of giving the test in this present study
was not to confirm or challenge the conclusions published in
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 320

1964. Rather, the purpose here was to find a means of judging

the perceptions of émigré young people in comparison with a
sample of their contemporaries in the PRC. Setting aside the
question of political attitudes and suspending the large ques-
tion of how life in Hong Kong may have influenced actual moral
perceptions, not to speak of the Cultural Revolution, this test
was used to determine whether the perceptions of young
émigrés might be considered comparable to those of other youth
in the PRC, on the basis of this test.
First, the results of the test when given to the
émigrés largely conform to the pattern produced by the test
when given in Canton some fifteen years before (see table 1).
All high scores (respondents with scores of at least 5 out of a
possible 6) had at least a high-school education, and the range

Table 1. Breakdown of Scores on Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment

Canton Test Hong Kong Test

Lower- Upper- Lower- Upper-
middle middle middle middle
Score' school school school school

1 18% 52% Item 25% (3) b 25% (4)

1/2 60 46 1 58 (7) 75 (12)
0 22 2 17 (2) —

1 51 59 Item 33 (4) 50 (8)

V2 18 22 2 33 (4) 31 (5)
0 31 19 33 (4) 19 (3)

1 66 93 Item 75 (9) 88 (14)

0 33 7 3 25 (3) 12 (2)

1 55 87 Item 17 (2) 50 (8)

0 45 13 4 83 (10) 50 (8)

1 52 47 Item 75 (9) 69 (11)

Vi 34 17 5 25 (3) 31 (5)
0 14 36

1 40 85 Item 50 (6) 69 (11)

0 60 15 6 50 (6) 31 (5)

"On the scoring of the original Canton testing, answers were given full credit
(1), partial credit (Vz), or no credit (0). Items 3, 4, and 6 were scored only as full credit
or no credit.
b Numbers in parentheses indicate the actual number of respondents con-

stituting the percentage figure. (No numbers were available for Canton.)
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F AND V A L U E S 321

of scores for those with upper-middle school education is higher

than for those who attended lower-middle school only: 5 re-
spondents scored from 5 to 6 (with 6 as a perfect score).
Upper-middle school scores ranged from 6 to 3 with
an average score just under 4.5.
Lower-middle school scores ranged from 4.5 to 2,
with an average score of just under 3.5.
The overall scores do not appear to vary dramati-
cally from those for Canton, although the scores for Hong Kong
were notably lower than those for Canton in items 4 and 6 and
higher in item 5. However, the respondents were so few in
number for this study that percentage breakdowns for scores
on answers are more suggestive than definitive, and the over-
all impression is that the émigrés compare with, rather than
contrast with, the respondents in Canton. (It should be noted
that most of the respondents in this study were middle-school
students, many of them in Canton, when this test was given
in that area. None recalled having taken it.)

Selection of Literary Works

The primary criterion for selecting samples of liter-

ature was ideological orthodoxy at the time of publication. This
was determined by restricting the selection of works to those
published in major literary periodicals or anthologies with na-
tional and overseas circulation. The works were color-coded
during the questionnaire, then coded alphabetically as ap-
pears below.
The six works chosen were, in order of publication
(coding for report purposes in parentheses):
Wang Hsing-yiian, "T'ieh-pi yu-shih" (The Iron In-
spector), in Hsirt-jen hsin-tso hsuati (New Men, New Works),
(1965), 1:283-92. (Coded " C " . )
Chao Yen-i, "Hsun-ma p'o" (Horse-raising Slope),
Jen-mitt wen-hsiieh (People's Literature), (May 1965), no. 5, pp.
38-43. (Coded " E " . )
Edward M. Gunn, jr. 322

T'an Jih-ch'ao, "Hung-se tang-an shu-ch'ing" (Lyric

on a Red Dossier), Jen-min zveti-hsiieh (People's Literature), (June
1965), no. 6, pp. 37-38. (Coded " A . " )
Li Hsia, "Chin-chung ch'ang-ming" (Keep the
Golden Bell Clanging)," in Shanghai tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo hsiian
(A Selection of Shanghai Short Stories) (Shanghai: Shanghai jen-
min ch'u-pan she, 1974), pp. 331-50. (Coded " B " . )
Chao Yen-i, "San-yiieh feng-hsiieh" (Snowstorm in
March) in Chao hui (Daybreak) (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsiieh ch'u-
pan she, 1974), pp. 122-46. (Coded " F " . )
Ma K'ai-yiian, "Kao-chii hsien-lieh te ch'i-chih,
ch'ien-chin" (Raising High the Banner of National Martyrs,
Advance), Chao hsia (Morning Light) (February 1976), pp. 26-
27. (Coded "D".)
As it was assumed beforehand that most of the re-
spondents would be sent-down youth, the stories were lim-
ited to those with a rural setting, involving peasant labor in
three stories and a cadre at a rural railroad station in the fourth.
An attempt was further made to include works from
Kwangtung province, where most of the respondents had lived.
This is represented in the selection of the story by Wang Hsing-
yiian and the verse by T'an Jih-ch'ao, which was included in
People's Literature magazine as part of a group of verses com-
posed by Kwangtung youth.
Further criteria for selecting the stories may be listed
as follows:
1. Stories are divided between those published be-
fore the Cultural Revolution and those published after it. Wang
Hsing-yiian's story was originally published in 1963, while T'an
Jih-ch'ao's poem and Chao Yen-i's "Hsun-ma p'o" were pub-
lished in 1965. By contrast, Li Hsia's "Chin-chung ch'ang-ming"
first appeared in 1973, followed by the works of Chao Yen-i
("San-yiieh feng-hsiieh") and Ma K'ai-yiian in 1974 and 1976,
respectively.
2. An attempt was made to include two works
which might be considered representative of the periods be-
fore and after the Cultural Revolution. Wang Hsing-yiian's story
was chosen with Li Hsia's as its counterpart. Both were in-
PERCEPTIONS OF S E L F AND VALUES 323

eluded in at least two major anthologies following their initial

publication, and both have been translated into English.6 Wang
Hsing-yiian's story proved to be the best known among the
respondents, several of whom could identify it by name, and
one of whom recalled a stage play adapted from it. Li Hsia is
a name which has remained virtually unknown, but Li's story
had the distinction of being cited by name in the newspaper
Knang-ming jih-pao following the fall of the Gang of Four as a
representative work of fiction written in the prevailing "model
opera" style created by Chiang Ch'ing, and in its content, at-
tempting to foment "all-out civil war." 7
3. It was decided to select two works by the same
author, one from before the Cultural Revolution and one from
afterward. Chao Yen-i's two stories represent this division, have
rural settings, and, by way of contrast, deal with minorities.
Chao was a respected minor writer before the Cultural Revo-
lution with an anthology of short stories to her credit. More-
over, her short story "San-yiieh feng-hsiieh" had the distinc-
tion of appearing in English translation in the magazine Chinese
Literature.8
4. Finally, two poems were chosen, both to relieve
the possible fatigue and tedium of the lengthier stories and to
offer some variation in the material. In selecting the poems,
an attempt was made to have two poems, one from before and
one from after the Cultural Revolution, which dealt with ap-
proximately the same theme. In this case, the poets in both
verses examine symbols of their predecessors' accomplish-
ments (the dossier of a Party member in the verse by T'an Jih-
ch'ao and the Monument to National Heroes at Tienanmen
Square in the verse by Ma K'ai-yiian) and review their visions
of past heroes of socialist construction.

Competence of Respondents as Readers

Beyond the fact that respondents in this study had

at least lower-middle school education, their ability to read and
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 324

analyze the literary works might be discussed according to

various criteria. As a result, respondents could be grouped in
four ways. The first two ways, according to Communist liter-
ary theory, would be to divide respondents on the basis of
family class background or according to their occupations.
However, these two groupings, already discussed above, were
not important; no correlation was found in responses based on
class background or occupation.
Apart from these theoretical considerations, the
questionnaire provided two further ways for grouping re-
spondents in a manner which suggests their competence as
readers. The first is based on scores in the Test of Capacity for
Moral Judgment. Five readers scored 5 points or more out of
a possible 6, and these five readers may be identified as pos-
sessing particular competence as readers by pre-Cultural Rev-
olution standards. The second way is based on the ability of
readers to identify correctly the periods in which the works were
written; 9 of the respondents (including 3 who had high scores
on the Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment) were able to
identify correctly at least 5, or all 6, of the literary pieces as to
whether they were written before or after the Cultural Revo-
lution. (This is in contrast to 17 respondents who identified all
the works as post-Cultural Revolution and 2 respondents who
could identify only Wang Hsing-yiian's story as pre-Cultural
Revolution.) The perceptiveness of this group of 9 respond-
ents may be taken as an indication of their competence as
readers by post-Cultural Revolution standards. This study paid
particular attention to these two subgroups totaling 11 read-
ers, and these analytic groups figure in item 3 of the next sec-
tion.

Results

Thus far the discussion has mainly focused on the

respondents in comparison to residents of China and in rela-
tion to their competence as readers of recent Communist
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F AND V A L U E S 325

Chinese literature. Some assumptions and conclusions regard-

ing these questions having been suggested, the perceptions of
the respondents may now be applied to the main concern of
this study, the evaluation of Chinese Communist literature as
an educational device for conveying Party-approved values. The
results may be discussed as answers to the various questions
which the study has sought to explore.

1. The personal values stated by the respondents do not

correlate with their selection of values from the literary works.
The respondents gave answers to the short story-
verse questionnaire which could not be correlated with their
previous expressions of personal values in the initial open-
ended questionnaire. Thus, it appears that personal values of
these readers did not influence their perceptions of the stories
as defined by their selection of values in the works. (This is
not to say that theoretically personal values do not affect re-
sponses and perceptions.) For example, within the overall group
of respondents, there was a subgroup of 4 persons who wrote
"freedom" as their primary personal value, and another group
of 4 who wrote "service to people" or "service to society." No
one in the "freedom" subgroup wrote "service" as a personal
value of lesser but conscious priority, and no one in the ser-
vice subgroup wrote "freedom" as a lesser priority of theirs.
However, even between such groups with distinctly different
choices, there was no contrastive or distinctive pattern in their
selection of values as they perceived them in the literary works.
The choices of values perceived in literary works made by
members of one subgroup might contrast with the choices made
by other members of the same subgroup and resemble choices
made by members of the other subgroup.
While this sample is small, the lack of systematic
contrast in the answers to the story-verse questionnaire among
respondents with values as distinctly different as personal
freedom and service to society is enough to suggest the over-
all lack of correlation between personal values in an open-ended
selection and the choice of social values perceived in the lit-
erary works.
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 326

2. Readers collectively selected the same values for a given

literary work only to a limited degree.
This may best be given in two parts, one dealing
with the so-called social values (appendix B) and one dealing
with the so-called personal values or special characteristics
(appendix C).
a. In most cases, the respondents listed three so-
cial values for each work, ranked in order of their importance
in the work, while in the occasional case in which a respond-
ent replied that he or she could not select more than one or
two social values important to the work, the shorter answer
was permitted to stand.
A simple count of the number of times a value was
mentioned as present in each work, regardless of the rank or-
der of the value, shows that for each work (save one) there
was one value mentioned by at least 24 of the respondents,
another value mentioned by at least 15 of the respondents, and
then two or more values mentioned by less than half of the
respondents. Hence, beyond the choice of one value for each
story, there was increasingly substantial disagreement as to
what the remaining important points were for a given work.
In no case did even a simple majority of respondents agree on
more than two values, and in each case the respondents agreed
collectively on the selection of only one value out of three, taken
from a total of nine choices of values. Thus, while a distinct
pattern emerges, it is a limited one reflecting limited agree-
ment as to the thematic content, the important points, of any
given work. The results are given in table 2.
b. In the selection of personal values/special char-
acteristics of the protagonists or poets, from an unranked list
of fourteen choices, respondents' answers varied more than for
the list of nine social values. Only one value in one work was
unanimously selected by the respondents. In three other in-
stances values were selected by 20 or more of the respond-
ents, while all other selections were represented by a simple
majority or a mere minority of respondents. Also, while re-
spondents were verbally instructed to choose only the most
important characteristics, they were not restricted in the num-
PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES 327

Table 2. Values Selected by Readers

Work A Values Selected (by total of 28 respondents)

(T'an Jih-ch'ao, 1965) 6 (Class) (24)
1 (Revolution) V///////////////A (19)
4 (Party organization) W/////A (10)
3 (Party Central) \//////A (9)
Work B
(Li Hsia, 1974) 6 (Class) TZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (18)
1 (Revolution) y;////;/////;/* (17)
4 (Party organization) W / / / / / Á (11)
5 (The People) W / / / / / / Á (H)
Work C
(Wang Hsing-yiian, 1965) 7 (Collective) 7ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ1 (24)
8 (Family) W / / / / / / / / / / / / 7 7 A(20)
5 (The People) '//////////A (13)

Work D
(Ma K'ai-yüan, 1976) 1 (Révolution) W / / M / / / / / / / / / / /(26)
/ / / A
3 (Party Central) W / / / / / / / / / / A (16)
2 (Nation) '////////A (H)
6 (Class) V//////A (10)
Work E
(Chao Yen-i, 1965) 7 (Collective) V / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / (25)
/ / / / A
8 (Family) (15)
9 (Self) (10)
6 (Class) (9)
Work F
(Chao Yen-i, 1974) 6 (Class) (25)
7 (Collective) / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / A (21)
1 (Révolution) ::: (10)
5 (The People) '//////à
(8)
NOTE: In this table, literary works are identified by code letter, author's name, and
date of publication (see section on Selection of Literary Works). For each work the
social values selected are indicated by number (see appendix B) and stated in paren-
theses. The actual number of respondents selecting the value is given at right in pa-
rentheses.

ber of selections they could make. As a result, the number of

special characteristics mentioned by at least 10 respondents for
a given work varied from one work to the next.
Hence, while a pattern is again evident and the an-
swers do not suggest a totally chaotic degree of variation, there
is little unanimity of opinion. The results for all respondents
are given in table 3.
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 328

Table 3. Personal Values (Special Characteristics) Selected by Readers

Work:
A B C D E F

7(18) 12 (21) 6(28) 3(15) 2(20) 2 (22)

Class Going against Selfless Firm Responsibility Responsibility
feeling tide stand
14 (19) 14 (18) 13 (19) 14 (14) 3(11) 11 (18)
Class Class Daring to Class Firm Initiative
struggle struggle struggle struggle stand
13 (14) 3(16) 3(18) 7(12) 4(9) 5(17)
Daring to Firm Firm Class Delight in Integrity
struggle stand stand feeling helping
others
3(11) 13 (16) 14 (10) — 6(9) 14 (16)
Firm Daring to Class Selfless Class struggle
stand struggle struggle

NOTE: Each work is identified left to right by code letter. Below in the columns, each
value is indicated by code number (see appendix C) followed in parentheses by the
number of respondents who chose that value. The value is then briefly identified.

3. Respondents do not rank values selected from the lit-

erary works in the same hierarchies.
An even more striking degree of variation in re-
sponses is sedn when the social values are ranked by the re-
spondents. Although a majority of respondents may be in
agreement as to one or perhaps two of the social values in a
given work, in only one case did as many as 20 respondents
agree on which social value had priority in the theme of the
work. In all other cases, not even a simple majority of the re-
spondents could collectively rank values in the same hier-
archy. Given in table 4 are the respondents' choices for the most
important social value. The variation in these responses is not
correlated with any of the four analytic groups included in this
study. While there are rare instances of identical hierarchies,
these too do not correlate with analytic groupings. As evi-
dence of the lack of correlation between responses to the lit-
erary questionnaire and other factors in the personal profiles
of respondents, table 5 compares the answers of respondents
in the two analytic groups considered as having demonstrated
unusual competence in the Test of Capacity for Moral Judg-
PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES 329

Table 4. Ranking of Social Values

Work:
A B C D £ F

6(9) 1 (14) 7(7) 1 (20) 7(13) 7(9)

1 (7) 6(6) 8(7) 3(3) 8(5) 1 (7)
4(4) 2(3) 6(5) 6(2) 5(3) 6(5)
5(3) 3(2) 5(3) 4(1) 4(3)
3(1) 4 (1) 2(2) 5(2)
1 (1)
NOTE: Each work is identified by code letter. Below in the columns are given the
values selected, by code number, with the number of respondents selecting the value
given in parentheses.

Table 5. Test and Dating Scores Compared with Values Selected

Psychological Story dating

Social values selected
test score score
Respondent (score 1-6) (score 1-3) A B C D £ F

NCEF 3 5.5 2 461 619 875 136 768 76

NCEF 6 5.5 3 61 614 784 134 78 764
RCEL 3 6 1 316 246 725 162 789 756
RCEF 1 5.5 0 136 174 879 129 576 679
RCEL 4 5 3 146 465 257 413 278 467
NCEF 5 3.5 3 163 164 875 1 8 675
NCEL 6 4.5 2 613 639 867 136 876 763
RCEF 4 4 3 614 16 678 13 79 179
RCEF 6 4 2 64 642 318 342 782 185
NCEL 7 4 2 126 162 167 126 167 167
NCEL 8 4 2 136 359 874 613 481 163

NOTE: The column headed " R e s p o n d e n t " identifies individual readers according to
their code (NCEF 3 identifies the reader as Number 3 of the subgroup who were not
recent arrivals in Hong Kong, that is, had resided in Hong Kong for a year or more,
and were given the closed-ended questionnaire /irst; RCEL 3 identifies the reader as
Number 3 of the subgroup who were recent arrivals, had lived in Hong Kong for less
than a year, and were given the closed-ended questionnaire /ast).
The column headed "Psychological test score" gives the reader's score on
the Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment.
The column headed "Story dating score" indicates the reader's ability to
date the stories as pre-Cultural Revolution or post-Cultural Revolution, with a score
of three indicating that the reader could correctly identify the three stories which were
published prior to the Cultural Revolution.
The columns A through F stand for each of the literary works read. Under
each work are the numbers standing for the social values selected for the work by the
reader in the order of importance judged by the reader: that is, 461 indicates that the
reader considered "party organization" (4) to be the primary social value, and " c l a s s "
(6) and "revolution" (1) to be next in order of importance.
Edward M. Guntt, Jr. 330

ment and/or in dating the literary works as pre- or post-Cul-

tural Revolution.

4. Readers' responses do not indicate a perception of dif-

ference in values between pre- and post-Cultural Revolution works.
Judging from the responses, the two stories C and
E (pre-Cultural Revolution) do contrast with the other works
in that their social values emphasize the Collective (7) and the
Family (8) rather than Revolution (1), Party (3 and/or 4), or Class
(6). This is unquestionably a significant difference which may
be representative of overall trends in the literature before and
after the Cultural Revolution.
However, this observation requires strict modifica-
tion. The Collective (7), for example, is still seen as a major
theme in story F, written after the Cultural Revolution by the
same author as that of story E (pre-Cultural Revolution). Even
more striking is the response to poem A, a verse written in
1965, which readers classified as primarily about Class and
Revolution (6 and 1), values otherwise seen in post-Cultural
Revolution works. Moreover, 19 readers of poem A and 10
readers of story C (both pre-Cultural Revolution) felt that the
works conveyed the personal value of "sense of class strug-
gle" (14), a concept usually associated only with the Cultural
Revolution and after. (Other respondents denied the existence
of actual class struggle in story C by explaining that the villain
was a peasant who had "forgotten his origins [zvang-pen]" rather
than a class enemy.)
On the basis of these responses, it may be said that
there tends to be a shift in values from pre-Cultural Revolu-
tion to post-Cultural Revolution works, but that this shift is
by no means an absolute break.
Certainly some values are known as issues in liter-
ature only after the Cultural Revolution. Thus, the "spirit of
going against the tide" (12) was, as would be expected, se-
lected as a special characteristic only of the protagonist in the
post-Cultural Revolution story B. Also, splitting the Party into
Party Central (3) and Party organization (4) is a reflection of
issues which arose most prominently with the Cultural Revo-
PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES 331

lution. 9 Indeed, the choice of Party Central as a distinct entity

appears primarily in the responses to the post-Cultural Rev-
olution poem D, and only to a lesser and more ambiguous de-
gree in poem A (1965).

5. Do readers identify with the heroes in the stories?

By far the most significant response to the question
of positive identification with protagonists in the stories oc-
curred in stories E and F, in which respondents selected a
"strong sense of responsibility toward work" (2) as a major
personal value of each protagonist. For each work there were
8 respondents who identified themselves with the strong sense
of responsibility toward work which they indicated was dis-
played by the protagonists. Six respondents identified them-
selves with the protagonists in both stories, while two differ-
ent pairs of respondents agreed in one instance alone. It is not
surprising to find that several of these respondents had held
positions of some responsibility in China as teachers or cadres.
In the case of those who showed nothing particular in their
backgrounds that would immediately suggest a cause for their
high opinion of their own sense of responsibility, it could be
established that at least two had come from positions of no re-
sponsibility in the PRC to white-collar, intellectual jobs in Hong
Kong. Another, while a new arrival in Hong Kong whose
background indicated nothing unusual, was the high scorer in
the Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment. In sum, there was
usually some concrete aspect of the respondents' backgrounds
which could be said to account for their identification with the
two protagonists they felt showed a strong sense of responsi-
bility toward work. (It should be noted that this correlation
applies to those who identified with the personal value and not
the broader range of those respondents who simply selected the
value without necessarily identifying themselves with it. There
is, thus, no contradiction here with the previous statements of
values in literary works cannot be correlated with elements of
the respondents' backgrounds.)
A few other values drew a scattering of positive
identification responses, from one to four respondents. Those
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 332

Table 6. Identification with Personal Values

Sense of Going against Delight in Unyielding

Responsibility the tide helping others integrity Selflessness
(E) (F) (B) (E) (F) (C>
NCEF 1 NCEF 1
NCEF 3 NCEF 3 NCEF 3
NCEF 5 NCEF 5
NCEF 6 NCEF 6
NCEF 7 NCEF 7
NCEL 4
RCEL 1 RCEL 1 RCEL 1
RCEL 2 RCEL 2 RCEL 2
RCEL 3 RCEL 3 RCEL 3
NCEL 7 NCEL 7 NCEL 7 NCEL 7
RCEF 5 RCEF 5 RCEF 5 RCEF 5
NCEL 8

NOTE: The personal values/special characteristics with which 3 or more respondents

identified are listed along the top, and the works in which they appeared are indi-
cated by alphabetical code immediately below in parentheses. Columns beneath in-
dicate the individual readers who identified with the values in the works indicated
according to their individual code markings (see note to table 5).

values drawing more than one or two responses are listed in

table 6.

6. Literature may have an effect on the respondents.

Literature may have a " r u b - o f f " effect on the re-
spondents, judging from the pattern of their responses to the
closed-ended lists of social and personal values from each of
which they were asked to select and rank the five most mean-
ingful to them. The answer may be given in two parts: one for
the social values, and the other for the personal values or spe-
cial characteristics.
a. With only 4 exceptions, respondents all selected
the same grouping of social values, regardless of whether they
had first read the literature or not. The five social values that
comprise this group are primarily those which may be con-
sidered apart from Communist ideology in the PRC. That is,
respondents avoided selecting Class, Party, Revolution, and
Mao Tse-tung Thought, save for three who chose Revolution
and one who chose the Party organization.
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F A N D V A L U E S 333

However, those who completed the questionnaire

on values before reading the literary selections tended to place
Self (self-control, self-criticism) in the position of most impor-
tance (7 respondents). Four others selected the People, and 1
selected Family. Only 2 placed Nation first. This pattern was
reversed in the responses of those who filled out the question-
naire on values after reading the literature. Seven respondents
placed Nation in the position of most importance, while 4 chose
the People, and only 2 ranked Self as of paramount impor-
tance. While, given these limited numbers, this could be a
random difference, the shift is nevertheless pronounced.
Whether the stories actually inject a spirit of altruism in read-
ers or simply focus their attention on the problems of the
country is a moot point. Table 7 provides a more detailed
breakdown of responses.
b. In the selection of personal values (special char-
acteristics) the respondents were virtually unanimous in their
choice of "practical and realistic" and "sense of responsibility"
and ranked them higher than other values, regardless of
whether the questionnaire was answered before or after read-
ing the literary selections. Respondents in both groups also
emphasized "delight in helping others" (chosen by 10 mem-
bers of the group which answered the value questionnaire first
and 8 members of the group which answered the value ques-
tionnaire last) and "self-control" (chosen by 7 members of the
first group and 9 members of the last group).
Whereas in the selection of social values the two
groups contrasted in the rank order in which they placed sim-
ilar values, in the selection of personal values the two groups
contrasted in the selection of different values, apart from the
strong showing of the four same values listed above. Those
taking the questionnaire before reading the stories tended to
select "spirit of initiative," while those taking the question-
naire on values after reading the literature tended to select "dare
to struggle" and "firm stand" rather than "spirit of initiative."
Seven members of the first group chose "spirit of initiative" as
contrasted with 1 member of the second group. Six members
of the second group chose "firm stand" as opposed to only 2
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 334

Table 7. Responses to Closed-Ended Questionnaire

Completed first Completed last

First Place Responses:

Self 7 Nation 7
People 4 People 4
Nation 2 Self 2
Family 1
Second Place Responses:
Family 6 People 6
Nation 4 Family 4
Total Times Mentioned in First Three Places:
Self 10 Nation 10
Family 10 People 9
Nation 7 Collective 8
People 7 Family 6
Collective 5 Self 4
Total Times Mentioned in All Five Places:
Self 14 People 12
Family 14 Nation 11
Nation 13 Collective 11
People 13 Family 11
Collective 10 Self 11
Revolution 2 Revolution 1
Party 1

NOTE: The left-hand column lists responses of those who completed the closed-ended
questionnaire on social values first, before reading the literary works, and the right-
hand column lists the responses of those who completed it last, after reading the lit-
erary works. The number of readers who selected each value is given next to the name
of the social value: that is, 7 persons who took the closed-ended questionnaire before
reading the literary works ranked Self as their primary choice among social values

in the first group. And 8 members of the second group chose

"dare to struggle" as against only 1 member of the first group.
Whatever else this may indicate, it may be correlated with the
responses of the readers in the literary questionnaire, in which
their identifications of "dare to struggle" and "firm stand" were
frequent and prominent, as opposed to "spirit of initiative,"
which was far less commonly ascribed to the protagonists in
the stories. Nevertheless, this correlation cannot be con-
sidered the dominant factor in the selection of personal values
in the closed-ended questionnaire, since the most frequently
chosen values were the same for both the groups and ranked
highest by both groups, and, moreover, the predominant value
PERCEPTIONS OF S E L F AND V A L U E S 335

of "practical and realistic" was virtually never ascribed to the

poets or protagonists of the literary works.

7. Few readers could recognize which works were writ-

ten before and which after the Cultural Revolution.
Only 5 of the 28 respondents could correctly iden-
tify the approximate dates of publication of all six works. Four
more were able to identify two of the three pre-Cultural Rev-
olution works correctly. Most respondents incorrectly identi-
fied all works as post-Cultural Revolution.
The correct identifications were based on issues
within the stories, rather than the values per se, issues such
as antagonistic class struggle and mention of the Cultural Rev-
olution itself. Readers who identified the dates of works cor-
rectly were well aware of literary policies and could cite offi-
cial directives concerning the issues to be dealt with at a certain
point in time. Others identified changes in writing style. For
instance, one respondent claimed that the number of slogans
and clichés increased in the post-Cultural Revolution works.
Others gave an impressionistic response, saying that the char-
acters in post-Cultural Revolution works were like "ma-
chines," as opposed to the more "lifelike" characters in pre-
Cultural Revolution works. No one suggested that any shift in
the number of simplified ideographs present in the text af-
fected their answers (and, indeed, it might be said that the
simplification of written characters was well advanced by mid-
1965, and modifications after that year were fewer and more
subtle.)
Considering the claims made for post-Cultural
Revolution literature as reflecting a new age in society, the
significance of the inability to distinguish between works writ-
ten before and after the Cultural Revolution is not small. And
those able to distinguish the dates of the works were those who
by stated interest (in literature or psychology) or occupation
(teacher) had devoted particular attention to developments in
recent Chinese literature, although not all persons who stated
an interest in literature were actually able to identify the dates
of the works correctly.
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 336

Postscript

This questionnaire was conceived and carried out

on the eve of a flood of literature in the People's Republic of
China which brought a renewal of aesthetic and ideological
variety there. With this came reexaminations of literary theory
which set aside some of the ideas reflected in this paper and
questioned others. Yet whether the state or the Party altered
its fundamental assumptions about its role in shaping and
guiding literary works or the role of these works in society re-
mained unclear. Hence, while the era which produced the lit-
erary works included in this study passed away, the funda-
mental questions raised here were not addressed directly and
systematically, but remained embedded in the dynamic of the
Chinese literary world.
 Appendix A

TEST OF CAPACITY FOR MORAL JUDGMENT

From Hsieh Ch'ien-ch'iu, "Ch'ing-shao-nien tao-te p'ing-chia neng-
li ti i-hsieh yen-chiu [Some Studies on the Capacity of Youth for Moral
Judgment]," Hsin-li hsiieh-pao (Acta Psychologica Sitiica) No. 3 (1964):258-
65.)
Note: Following the translation of each of the six brief stories, the
questions posed regarding each story and the answers considered fully
or partially correct are given.

ITEM ONE: In the Spring and Autumn Annals there is the following story:
During the Spring and Autumn period, Ping Kung, the Prince of
Chin, asked the minister Ch'i Huang-yang, "There is no official for
the Nanyang district. Who do you think could fill the position?" Ch'i
Huang-yang answered, "Chieh Ho can." P'ing Kung thought his
answer rather odd and asked, "Don't you have a personal vendetta
with Chieh Ho?" Ch'i Huang-yang answered, "You asked who would
be good for the post; you didn't ask whether I had a personal ven-
detta with him!" When Ping Kung heard this he felt it was most
proper, and then hired Chieh Ho. Not long afterward, P i n g Kung
again posed a question for Ch'i Huang-yang: "The country lacks an
official to take charge of the army. Who do you think could fill this
position?" Ch'i Huang-yang replied, "Wu can." Ping Kung again
thought this was an odd answer, and asked, "Isn't Wu your son?"
Ch'i Huang-yang replied, "You asked me who would be good for
this position. You didn't ask whether or not he is my son!" When
Ping Kung heard this he said, "You are right," and thereupon em-
ployed the person he had recommended.
QUESTION: Judging from this story, what do you feel is Ch'i Huang-
yang's good characteristic?
CORRECT ANSWERS: Ch'i Huang-yang showed that he was "practical
and realistic" and/or had a "sense of responsibility" and/or was
"principled."
PARTIALLY CORRECT ANSWER: Ch'i Huang-yang showed "selfless-
ness."
Edward M. Gunn, Jr. 338

I T E M TWO: On the way to school a primary school student found two

Jenminpi coins. He thought, when a good student finds something
belonging to another person he ought to return it to that person and
absolutely avoid the temptation to take advantage of it. He made up
his mind that no matter what, he would take these two coins to school
and give them to the Class Master. When he got to the school gate,
he saw many of his little friends buying candy at a small shop and
wanted very much to buy some himself. But as it happened he had
no money with him. After an inner struggle, he spent the two coins
on a small packet of candy. He had finished eating the candy when
he got to class, but he continually felt unhappy, regretting that he
had wrongly bought candy with someone else's money, and for the
whole day did not pay attention in class.
QUESTION: What do you consider this primary school student's fault
to be?
CORRECT A N S W E R S : He lacked "strong will" or determination, or he
lacked "firm self-control."
PARTIALLY CORRECT A N S W E R : He was too greedy.
I T E M THREE: During an election for a People's delegate, after a thor-
ough, organized discussion, everyone agreed on Comrade Chou
Ch'uan as their candidate for People's delegate. (Because he truly
loved the Party and served the People with his whole heart and mind,
he obtained the love and support of the People.) During the ballot-
ing everyone voted for him as delegate, and Comrade Chou Ch'uan
also voted for himself (that is, he voted for himself as People's del-
egate).
Q U E S T I O N : D O you think Comrade Chou Ch'uan acted correctly or
not? Why?
CORRECT A N S W E R : He acted correctly, showing that he was "practical
and realistic" and/or was ready to "shoulder responsibility to Party
and People." (Degree of correctness of the answer was judged by
how many of these factors were mentioned by the respondent.)
ITEM FOUR: Chou Hsiao-ch'un was a student who had just entered
an upper-middle school first-year class. He always enjoyed express-
ing his opinion. Just as long as someone asked for his opinion, he
was never at a loss for words. It was still early in the term, and so,
since the students were from various different [lower-middle] schools,
they did not yet know each other well. Once he and a classmate, Ma
Te-chia, together assumed responsibility for publishing the first is-
sue of the student blackboard news. He saw how thoroughly Ma Te-
chia took care not to make a mistake in his work. From organizing
the materials to copying out the drafts, he evinced great enthusiasm.
P E R C E P T I O N S OF S E L F A N D V A L U E S 339

After the blackboard news was published, he further saw that Ma

Te-chia hoped he had not let down the expectations of students and
teachers, and was thoroughly delighted. When the Class Master asked
about his view of Ma Te-chia, he then said, based on the impression
of a single experience, that Ma Te-chia definitely was a person who
handled tasks with enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility.
QUESTION: D O you think that Chou Hsiao-ch'un should or should not
evaluate his classmate this way? Why?
CORRECT ANSWER: He should not. The student Ma Te-chia should not
be judged on an impression from a single episode.
ITEM FIVE: The third class period, following calesthenics, was chem-
istry lab. The student Chou Ping-hsin was aware that Teacher Ch'en
had prepared for the class until very late the night before, and even
now was still busy preparing instruments for the experiment. On his
own initiative, Chou Ping-hsin proposed to his Class Master that he
himself was ready and willing to help Teacher Ch'en set up the ex-
perimental apparatus. Teacher Ch'en welcomed his assistance.
However, Chou Ping-hsin was not careful enough and broke an in-
strument.
Q U E S T I O N : H O W do you feel about Chou Ping-hsin's conduct? Is it
good or not good?
CORRECT A N S W E R : The important thing is that Chou possessed the
spirit of helping others: his conduct was good, even if he broke an
instrument.
PARTIALLY CORRECT ANSWER: On the one hand, Chou's motivation was
good; on the other hand, he was too careless. (This answer fails to
emphasize that his good point was more important than his failing.)
ITEM six: After dinner, a group of residents held a casual conversa-
tion under the tTees by the door. Someone brought up the incident
in which a person had had a fight with someone else, and this then
sparked a discussion on the question of "whether hitting someone
was or was not a morally defensible thing to do." An older person
in the gTOup said, "No matter what the concrete circumstances are,
striking others is never morally defensible."
Q U E S T I O N : What do you think of the view of the older person? Is he
correct or not? Why?
CORRECT A N S W E R : The older person is not necessarily correct. In
dealing with concrete situations, one should always use concrete
analysis.
PARTIALLY C O R R E C T A N S W E R : He is correct if it is a question of an is-
sue "among the People" (as opposed to an antagonistic issue involv-
ing an enemy of the People).
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 The Search for Identity
in Fiction from Taiwan
Robert E. Hegel

M ore than a decade ago C. T. Hsia drew at-

tention to a theme in modern Chinese writ-
ing that he identified as an "obsession with China." This pa-
triotic tendency clearly appeared in May Fourth era fiction as
an "obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a
spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or
change its set ways of inhumanity." 1 In a later essay Professor
Hsia observed the same phenomenon in the works of certain
writers who publish in Taiwan, particularly three whose
memories of the mainland before the Communist takeover were
strong. 2 The volume of critical studies of these "patriotic"
writings, particularly those of the 1920s and 1930s, is enor-
mous. The personal involvement of many of these writers in
the political, social, and cultural revolutions of their time is well
known; engagé writers of the twentieth century far outnum-
ber those who, like many of their Japanese contemporaries,
explored the inner life of the individual, it would seem. But
despite the volume of studies of these writers, C. T. Hsia is
one of the few students of this literature who addresses the
nationalistic sentiments of its creators in psychological terms.
T H E S E A R C H FOR IDENTITY 343

It is my intention here to use Professor Hsia's "obsession"

theory as a starting point in a search for the self whose iden-
tity relies so heavily on political questions for validation. My
object is to identify the development of conceptions of self
through modern Chinese literature, in particular a few of Tai-
wan's outstanding story writers. From this perspective, polit-
ical and social concerns are at most a vehicle for self-expres-
sion; on this basis, "modernist" and "regionalist" (hsiang-t'u)
writers may be compared despite differences in scope of com-
mitment (to China as a political entity among the family of na-
tions in "modernist" writings, or to the working people of
Taiwan in "regionalist" literature). 3 First, let us review a few
examples of literature that exemplifies the "obsessive" quality
in its concern with China's needs.
With his first story, "Ch'en-lun" (Sinking, 1921), Yii
Ta-fu (1896-1945) established his reputation as an autobio-
graphical writer concerned primarily with the self. "Sinking"
addresses sex and patriotism through the vehicle of a Chinese
student in Japan. Isolated from the comradely happiness of
classmates by their ethnocentrism and his own feelings of in-
feriority, the story's protagonist falls into voyeurism which
brings self-loathing, retreat from all human contact, and even-
tual suicidal tendencies. " O China, my China, you are the cause
of my death!" he cries, at the conclusion of the story. 4 Yii Ta-
fu's story represents clearly the perception, shared as well by
intellectuals of an earlier decade, 5 that China was weak and
powerless to resist either the economic and military pressures
of the West or the influx of Western ideas that threatened to
engulf all traditional values. The establishment of self-concept
by such young intellectuals was closely tied to their assess-
ment of the state of Chinese society, despite the concern with
self presupposed by the autobiographical approach. To them,
self-realization involved service to society through didactic
writing no less than it did to Confucian literati of generations
before them.
To Yii Ta-fu and the May Fourth period writers, the
disappearance of traditional values would have been nothing
to lament. China's customs were cannibalistic, Lu Hsiin (1881-
Robert E. Hegel 344

1936) asserted in his "K'uang-jen jih-chi" (The Diary of a Mad-

man, 1918). Pa Chin (b. 1904) illustrated this contention in his
novel Chia (Family, 1931) with the tragic deaths of many of his
characters, particularly young women. Lao She (1899-1966)
castigated the hedonism, laziness, and self-delusion of the
Chinese people in his satirical novel Mao-ch'eng chi (Cat Coun-
try, 1933), the "most savage indictment of China ever penned
by a Chinese," C. T. Hsia aptly terms it. 6 Self-doubts regularly
parallel this patriotic theme in May Fourth writings. Even when
the self is not identified with the state, the commitment of the
self to serve the needs of society is regularly total. China's po-
litical and social needs thus provide the details for a paradigm
of the ineffectual young intellectual whose idealistic visions are
shattered by the ugliness of reality. Lu Hsiin records the bitter
failure of enthusiastic young intellectuals to remake China
overnight in his "Tsai chiu-lou shang" (In the Wine Shop, 1924)
and other stories; Yeh Shao-chiin (b. 1894) does the same in
his novel Ni Huan-chih (1929). 7 Here as in a host of other May
Fourth writings, the protagonists' self-concept plummets when
they face defeat in their numerous social or political crusades.
Their "obsession" with the problems of China, despite its sin-
cerity, is in many respects merely a modern version of Con-
fucian social responsibility expressed in new literary media, the
Westernized short story and novel, as a means of self-explo-
ration.
Patriotism was unmistakable in the writing pub-
lished in Taiwan in the fifties. Winners of the Republican gov-
ernment's annual prizes for literature regularly express nostal-
gia for the mainland and frustration over the plight of its people
under Communist rule. But in the hands of the more skilled
writers, Taiwan literature came to have, in Hsia's words, "a
poignant appreciation of the historical greatness of their mother
country." 8 These developments came despite a new aware-
ness of Western literature on the part of young intellectuals in
Taiwan. Under the direction of Professor Hsia's elder brother,
the late Tsi-an Hsia, students of literature at National Taiwan
University began publishing literary periodicals filled with
translations from James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka,
T H E S E A R C H FOR IDENTITY 345

D. H. Lawrence, and others. Their goal was to introduce

Modernism from Europe and America. Some writers, such as
Yu Kwang-chung (Yii Kuang-chung, b. 1928), experimented
with Western-style symbolism in poetry intended for the so-
phisticated reader while insisting that modern Chinese litera-
ture must be built on its cultural heritage as well. A visit to he
United States in 1964 inspired Yu's "obsession"; his "Ch'iao-
ta yueh" (Music Percussive, 1966) ends with the poet identi-
fying himself with China and its numerous social and political
disasters of recent decades.

China is me I am China.
Her every disgrace leaves a box print on my face I am defaced.
China O China you're a shameful disease that plagues me
thirty-eight years.
Are you my shame or are you my pride, I cannot tell.9

Despite the Western veneer, personal identity and the plight

of the nation are inseparable in Yu's verse. His sense of social
and political responsibility and his sensibilities are to this ex-
tent a continuation of earlier trends in modern Chinese litera-
ture, awakened, probably, by his need to face the reality of a
divided nation from this new vantage point in the United States.
One of the more imaginative writers of Yu Kwang-
chung's generation is Shui Ching (Robert Yi Yang, b. 1935).
His "Hi Lili, Hi Li . . . " (1967), is an attempt "to allegorize
the precarious condition of Chinese abroad," Joseph Lau re-
marks, a shift from earlier mainland social realism to a mod-
ernist psychological realism. Shui Ching here enters the world
of his unnamed protagonist's dream—or perhaps his night-
mare—of being totally alone in a world thrown awry by some
unknown cause. The setting, presumably based on the au-
thor's sojourn in Borneo, is a south Pacific island with a warm
climate where vegetation grows quickly. The protagonist awakes
one day to find apparent traces of a political coup and the om-
inous aura of death and destruction everywhere. The story ends
with a vision of the protagonist dancing madly in the sand with
a foreign woman, his identity confused at best, perhaps even
lost.10 If this is to be taken as an allegory of the plight of China,
Robert E. Hegel 346

then the danse macabre in the arms of an American dream brings

no real solution to the protagonist's search for the meaning of
his own existence.
Let us consider briefly the terms of this character's
dilemma. " Y " awakes to find himself physically ill at ease; the
astrological signs traditionally observed by Chinese have all
been bad recently and an epidemic threatens. Data disturbing
because of their unfamiliarity now assault his senses: a faucet
drips, the water reeks, the radio receives no stations. Not a
single person is visible. The radio station at which he nor-
mally works is deserted. Bloody handprints festoon a white-
washed wall. Y takes refuge from the imagined insurrection in
a lavatory, although only temporarily: it is "hardly a place for
a man to be captured in. He wants to preserve his dignity to
the end." 1 1 The electricity fails, and then the telephone does
likewise. He stumbles into a hospital, only to find a leaking
corpse, presumably a victim of cholera. In his flight he even-
tually arrives at a beach, where he is distracted from a pine
reminiscent of a traditional Chinese painting by the spectral
dancing form of his erstwhile sweetheart. Not even she will
answer his insistent questions ("What have we done to de-
serve a fate like this?"). 12 An approaching storm reminds him
of lines by the classical poet Li Ho (791-817) but in the end he
joins her dance to the refrain from an American movie theme
song.
Clearly Shui Ching's protagonist is searching for
identity in a modernist world, a world gone awry to the point
of absurdity. Shui Ching seemingly has replaced the old Con-
fucian sense of social and cosmic order—and even the hope
for a new order in May Fourth writings—with the modernist
proposition that primal, irrational energies shape human be-
havior.13 However, while "Hi Lili, Hi Li . . ." is modernistic
in narrating Y's stream of consciousness, there remains the
question of whether it is Y's thoughts or his environment that
have fallen into a chaotic state. Several clues suggest that the
theme is, as C. T. Hsia presents it, "the ultimate relapse of
civilization into barbarism" 14 and not the protagonist's irra-
tionalism that creates the confusion.
T H E S E A R C H FOR IDENTITY 347

Y begins to search for rational explanations the mo-

ment he awakens. He notices strange phenomena, both inter-
nal and external, but he does not distrust the validity of his
perceptions. It is his sense of security that falters; he searches
his memory for corroborative evidence for his fears (ominous
signs of a change in government, reports of an epidemic). He
comments on his physical separation from China, both the
"island bastion" and "the land of his ancestors," and chides
himself for leaving. Many of the eerie data he notices as panic
seizes him are not unprecedented; instead, it is the concate-
nation of events (tainted water and failure of electrical power
suggest breakdown of civil authority) that further unnerves him.
His sense of self-worth, his personal dignity, propels him out
of his logically safe hiding place, the lavatory. It was an "an-
tihero" who was captured there in some foreign story; he re-
fuses to see himself in the same category.15 It is common sense
that brings him to the hospital. What he finds there fills him
with nausea, and he flees to the beach (to escape by sea, per-
haps?). Each step he takes is directed by conscious choice: his
mind retains its own sense of ordered rationality despite the
world around him having become unpredictable. He is re-
minded of traditional landscape painting and poetry of the
T'ang period, a reassertion of his Chinese heritage. His prob-
lem is isolation from others, for it is the social nexus that gives
identity to this individual much as it did in traditional litera-
ture. His sense of personal dignity likewise derives from the
anticipated reactions of other people; his references to tradi-
tional arts demonstrate Y's undiminished awareness of his own
role in China's cultural continuity. At the story's conclusion,
Y joins the woman's erratic dance, thereby establishing a tie
with her to complete his identity in the present when all at-
tempts to communicate in more conventional ways fail. Shui
Ching's protagonist indeed finds himself in a modernist's world,
but his implicit faith in the continuity and rationality of indi-
vidual identity betrays the Chinese foundations for the writ-
er's conception of self. All references to politics here are sub-
servient to that conception.
The experimentation with Western form and tech-
Robert E. Hegel 348

nique visible in "Hi Lili, Hi Li . . . " can be found as well in a

work of the later Regionalist (hsiang-t'u) movement. This is
Wang Chen-ho's (b. 1940) masterful "Chia-chuang i-niu-ch'e"
(Oxcart for Dowry, 1967). Although Regionalist writing has been
characterized as nationalistic to the point of xenophobia, it is
more generally considered a movement based on realism in
contrast to the modernist generation represented by Shui
Ching. 1 6 Its writers frequently pit their protagonists, poor
working people from rural Taiwan, against the perils occa-
sioned by the urbanization, industrialization, and moderniza-
tion of the island in recent decades. While certain Chinese critics
express alarm at the social and political tendentiousness of
representative works, I believe far more of the artistry of Re-
gionalist fiction can be seen in its exploration of the problems
of identity faced by individuals caught in the midst of rapid
social change. Some of these writers, Wang Chen-ho among
them, differ far less in this regard from the modernist writers
than their critics often admit. 1 7
"Oxcart for Dowry" narrates how its hero came to
be cuckolded. This man, Wan-fa, is no young intellectual liv-
ing abroad; instead he lives a life of alienation from his peers
by virtue of his near total deafness. In fact, Wan-fa is nearly
as isolated as Y, both of them left to their internal resources
as a basis for their ongoing sense of self-worth and identity.
But these two stories differ radically. Shui Ching's was a seri-
ous experiment in Westernized writing; while Wang Chen-ho
was no less serious in his art, the tone of "Oxcart for Dowry"
is comic. While Y refused to consider himself an antihero, Wan-
fa is clearly a fool, the butt of jokes from all sides. However,
Wan-fa is not wholly pathetic in the mold of Lu Hsiin's K'ung
I-chi; instead, he is a man who, like Y, can make choices ra-
tionally on the basis of available information. His foolishness
consists of his deliberate use of deafness to limit his contact
with the world outside his own mind—particularly his rela-
tionships with other people.
In form "Oxcart" is reminiscent of "Diary of a
Madman," consisting of an introductory scene for which the
rest of the story provides explanatory background. Lu Hsiin
T H E SEARCH FOR IDENTITY 349

meant the recovery of his madman to be read ironically; so too

is the derision Wan-fa receives from the younger villagers in
the restaurant precisely opposite to the attitude the reader is
ultimately intended to form. But in place of Lu Hsiin's casti-
gation of the shortcomings in traditional morality, Wang Chen-
ho uses this parody of the poor but honest man to examine
the economic and personal needs which ultimately inure Wan-
fa to the taunts of others.
The cause of Wan-fa's deafness seems absurd, and
yet it has a painful ring of plausibility. During the war years,
when American armed forces were bombing Japanese-occu-
pied Taiwan, Wan-fa contracted an ear infection from polluted
water. The only doctor he was able to find (a self-styled gyne-
cologist, although in this context he may well have been a
quack) treated him improperly, with the result that Wan-fa
permanently lost most of his hearing. This handicap caused
Wan-fa to be ostracized by those who grew tired of shouting
to him; finally he moved his family to a hovel near a grave-
yard where he hired himself out as a carter.
One of the greatest Chinese novels is Lao She's Lo-
t'o Hsiang-tzu (Camel Hsiang-tzu, 1936), in part an exploration
of the hopelessness of trying to establish oneself solely by means
of individual effort. Its hero, an upright country lad, works in-
defatigably to buy himself the new rickshaw that he hopes will
give him financial security and prominence among the work-
ing masses of prewar Peking. Hsiang-tzu is tall and strong;
initially he succeeds, only to have his dream fade along with
his self-confidence as evil forces in society one after the other
sap his financial, physical, and moral resources. 18 In certain
respects Wan-fa is a parody of Hsiang-tzu. Wan-fa is short and
ugly, and his hope is to own a plodding oxcart instead of the
smooth-riding, sleek rickshaw of the earlier novel. Both men
marry ugly women made even less attractive by advancing
years; while Hsiang-tzu's wife is fat, Wan-fa's Ah-hao is so
skinny that her chest looks like a washboard. Both women have
considerable sexual appetites. Although Hsiang-tzu fears that
his physical strength may be damaged if he indulges his wife
Hu-niu, Wan-fa is already sexually impotent at the start of Wang
Robert E. Hegel 350

Chen-ho's story, and it is his reputation that falls victim to his

wife's needs. 1 9
Yet Wan-fa's self-concept remains intact. He has built
it in a traditional Chinese manner on the basis of his relation-
ships with others. For even though he seems not to hear the
taunts of the drunken youths, Wan-fa rankles at his situation
and relishes being able to disdain someone else in turn. The
affair between his wife and the clothing merchant Chien (whose
name the author would have translated as "Screw") leaves a
bad taste in his mouth. Even though his conception of himself
as husband and father is not altered by being cuckolded, it is
by force of will alone that he suppresses his resistance to this
indignity.
His wife, Ah-hao, lacks all such moral integrity,
however. Despite her name ("Goodness," or as the author
originally translated it, "Nice"), she does not bring prosperity
to her husband: she gambles until she has to sell their three
daughters to pay off her debts, she is an inveterate gossip, and
worse yet, she is unfaithful. By contrast, Wan-fa readily gives
his clothing to his son as an appropriate sacrifice for his chil-
dren's sake. 2 0 When a newcomer, Chien, moves into the area,
out of concern for the other's feelings Wan-fa avoids any overt
reference to the man's horrible body odor. Furthermore, he
initially considers Ah-hao's illicit relationship with the man to
be an insult to his own lost virility. That is, the challenge is
to his sexual relationship with his wife, not to his own propri-
etary rights to her affections. Even when the interloper moves
in with them, Wan-fa acquiesces as long as he is able to main-
tain his nominal role of head of household: by this arrange-
ment he can support himself and his family while maintaining
control of the family finances. Wan-fa suppresses his own ob-
jections by deluding himself, but when a neighbor openly jokes
about the relationship to their son, Wan-fa's sense of personal
pride forces him to throw Chien out of the house. 2 1
When his son falls ill, Wan-fa uses all of his sav-
ings to preserve the boy's life. Then a tragic accident in which
a child is killed lands Wan-fa in jail for negligence. Yet Wan-
fa's foremost concern throughout this series of setbacks is for
THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY 351

his wife and child, not for his personal loss of occupation and
freedom or for any possible shame over being imprisoned. His
immediate reaction when he learns that Chien is again living
with his wife is relief over their security, not jealous outrage.
His personal disgrace over being cuckolded quite simply pales
when compared to the gratitude he feels for Chien's financial
help. 22
While observing, with W. K. Wimsatt, that a reader
can never know a writer's original intention in writing, Cyril
Birch finds cause for a social and political interpretation of the
story. Even without his doing so intentionally, Wang Chen-ho
reflects in his fiction the realities of Taiwan at the time of writ-
ing. Thus Birch sees in these characters an unconscious recon-
struction of China's plight: one contender can only acquiesce
over his loss of face when compensated by economic prosper-
ity; the other contender mutters some outlandish talk and
throws traditional proprieties to the wind; both want the ugly,
aging mother figure, symbolic of China, with her huge mouth
ever open whether to talk or to eat.23 In effect, then, Birch sees
in this story another "obsession with China." However, the
story's primary conflict is not between Wan-fa and Chien, as
I have endeavored to illustrate. Instead it is within Wan-fa's
own mind. He must somehow reconcile the changes in his re-
lationships occasioned by economic necessity with the concep-
tion of himself as father and husband inherited from China's
past. He may delude himself to the extent that he avoids seeing
(or hearing) what he knows will upset his calm façade, but his
sense of security in his identity can only be assured by clutch-
ing tenaciously to received social role. He must provide for the
needs of those dependent on him for support; he will do
whatever he must to accomplish this end. Wan-fa is an unfor-
gettably comic character; his world may smack of absurdity.
However, in the final analysis his concern with identity does
not hinge on a political interpretation of the story for its sig-
nificance. Even though details of his poverty occasion his
identity crisis, they are peripheral to it in the concern of the
narrator.
The realistic tendency in Regionalist writings is best
Robert E. Hegel 352

exemplified by the early works of Hwang Chun-ming (Huang

Ch'un-ming, b. 1939), a native of Taiwan. The characters of
his 1960s stories are poor or working people who seemingly
reflect the real lives of unimportant individuals native to the
island. They are not the "makers of history" through collec-
tive action; they are the isolated byproducts, sometimes the
victims, of social change. In many of these stories a central
theme is the struggle for individual identity in the face of this
upheaval. Some of Hwang's protagonists fail, losing personal
dignity and sometimes even life itself in the process.
One of Hwang's best-loved stories is "Erh-tzu te ta
wan-ou" (His Son's Big Doll), the subject of several Western
studies. Recently it was also made into a movie for screening
in Taiwan. Its central figure is a poor man who effaces himself
for the sake of the child he longs to have. Early in the story
he takes the only job he can find to earn the money needed to
afford a child; he becomes a "sandwich man," a disguised
nonentity trapped between two advertising posters in a rap-
idly commercializing society. Despite his wife's fears for his
health, he braves torrid summer heat, the taunts of children,
even his uncle's outrage and his own humiliation over hiding
his face behind a clown's makeup, to walk the streets of his
town advertising movies. The story concludes with emotion-
ally overpowering irony: the adman's baby son learns to rec-
ognize him only when his face is made up. Even though he
lands a different job, his love for his baby son condemns him
to maintain this false identity. 24
Poverty has forced the adman into his occupation,
to be sure. But this story is not limited to a mere exposure of
the sufferings of the poor. Feeding himself is not K'un-shu's
primary concern, nor is providing for his wife. His desire for
a son spurs him on in this demeaning occupation; his desire
to make the child happy and to develop their relationship oc-
casions his further self-debasement. The depth of the adman
K'un-shu's commitment to progeny in this tale seemingly goes
beyond any thought of companionship and support in old age;
his identity is inextricably bound up in his profound need for
the child. The reader sees his unexpressed love for his wife,
T H E S E A R C H FOR IDENTITY 353

his keen sense of responsibility for their relationship. But his

willingness to sacrifice himself in the present for a future child
exceeds love; it suggests the age-old Chinese hope for a type
of immortality through one's children. His identity can only
be assured by fathering a child. Perhaps in this light even hid-
ing his face behind makeup is a small price to pay for this se-
curity, this new affirmation of his being, so achieved.
Despite his concern with poor and simple people,
Hwang Chun-ming has created stories in which self-tran-
scendence imbues his characters with a kind of heroic stature
that approaches divinity. In "Ni-ssu i-chih lao-mao" (The
Drowning of an Old Cat, 1967) Uncle Ah-sheng becomes the
leader of resistance to the development of a rural spring as a
swimming resort for urban businessmen. Normally subdued
in manner, the threat to the land and the customary relation-
ship of the villagers to their land inspires the old man to ora-
tory and ultimately to action. But the forces supporting eco-
nomic development are much too formidable—they include not
only governmental influence but also the desire of the vil-
lagers to share in the wealth of the city. The old man ulti-
mately drowns himself, an act that goes virtually unnoticed
amid the festivity surrounding the pool's opening. Despite his
religious pretensions, the old man's heroic stature is transi-
tory; his new identity is false, mere self-delusion. 25 The pes-
simistic tenor of this story might be best understood as the im-
plied author's response to Ah-sheng's self-aggrandizement.
Time has brought inevitable change. Instead of coping with it,
Ah-sheng has attempted to hold back the clock and thereby
elevate himself in the eyes of his peers. His "self-transcen-
dence" stands condemned as mere self-indulgence.
Quite the opposite mood prevails in one of Hwang's
longer stories, also the subject of a movie, "K'an-hai te jih-tzu"
(Sea-Watching Days, 1967), known in translation as "A Flower
in the Rainy Night"). 26 Its protagonist, Pai-mei, is a prostitute,
a country girl sold into the profession at the age of fourteen,
who has come to feel self-contempt and anger because she is
isolated from normal social contact. The story traces her self-
transformation. While riding the train on a home leave, she
Robert E. Hegel 354

encounters a former customer. His lewd comments appro-

priate to the whorehouse here fill her with disgust; she longs
to be "an ordinary woman." Then she encounters an old friend,
a somewhat younger former prostitute named Ying-ying who
has married and had a baby. Ying-ying's husband is consid-
erably older than she is; he is one of the thousands of men
who fled or were brought from the mainland as the Commu-
nists advanced. He was a major in the Nationalist army, a man
who smoked and drank heavily until he met Ying-ying. To-
gether they had forged new identities for themselves and for
each other. Their new son symbolized this momentous change
of identity, bringing to both of them an unprecedented feeling
of self-worth. This encounter was to change Pai-mei's life as
well.
Comparing herself with Ying-ying forces Pai-mei to
reflect on the resentment she feels over being used. The money
she has contributed to her foster family has made a college ed-
ucation possible for one of them; others have married well and
have at least completed senior high school—accomplishments
other rural families could hardly afford. Pai-mei hates them all
except her stepmother, who has tried to arrange a marriage
for her. But marriage is not an appealing alternative to pros-
titution. "I'm already twenty-eight; and being in this business,
anybody who wanted me would either be a dullard or a bum,"
Pai-mei remarks. 27 However, she realizes that a child could
change her life. "Only in the eyes of her own child would she
be viewed without cold scorn." 28 To have a child becomes her
only reason for living, her mission, her obsession.
When Pai-mei returns to the brothel, she selects a
strong and gentle young sailor and deliberately lets him im-
pregnate her. These brief events appear amid a wealth of de-
tail concerning the lives of fishermen and prostitutes, partic-
ularly of the boisterous few days each season when the two
intersect. This setting allows a sensitive exploration of these
two characters, Pai-mei and her mate. Initially each plays a
conventional role in relation to the other, but then they step
outside these roles for unprecedentedly intimate emotional
contact. Their honesty, their warmth, and their embarrass-
T H E SEARCH FOR IDENTITY 355

ment raise this scene to a level of beauty that catches the reader
unprepared—the tenderness of the scene contrasts vividly with
the vulgarity around them portrayed so realistically here. Their
moment of innocence brings hope to Pai-mei; its unexpected
emotional depth frightens the sailor.
Pai-mei never takes another customer. She leaves
the brothel and goes directly home to her natal family. There
she again becomes what she has not been for many years, the
daughter of Sung the capon-maker. The identity that had been
taken from her by others she now seizes with determination;
she takes the concerns of her family upon herself with totally
selfless abandon. She reestablishes ties with family friends and
neighbors; with her own money she secures the medical assis-
tance that saves her brother's life. Her unflagging energy and
her optimism win respect for her on all sides. After all, she
rationalizes, having an illegitimate child is no worse than
whoring; consequently she faces the villagers of her home town
totally without shame. When her confinement draws near, the
villagers happily carry her to the maternity clinic in town.
The birth of Pai-mei's baby is narrated with as much
detail as was the scene of her insemination. In both, Pai-mei's
combination of strength and vulnerability is the focus of the
narrator's attention. Despite her determination and her self-
lessness on behalf of others, when isolated from them by her
pain she worries, she grows fatigued, she endures childbirth
only with greatest difficulty. Her passion once concluded, Pai-
mei is transfigured. The story closes with her return to the sea,
to watch the sea with her newborn son as she had with Ying-
ying's infant. She can articulate no rationale for this trip; it alone
can satisfy her profound need: she is no longer a single woman
while traveling on a train; people now make room for her and
her child in the crowded seats. She is a mother; now she pos-
sesses in fullest measure the hope for personal betterment that
she has inspired in her family and fellow villagers. Through
her child she has "ordinary," healthy relationships with peo-
ple wherever she goes.
Pai-mei achieves dignity despite the odds against
her; her faith in her ability to transcend her previous life makes
Robert E. Hegel 356

it possible to redeem herself, to recover the innocence taken

from her by the economic needs of first her natal family and
then her foster family years before. 29 In C. T. Hsia's apt words,
"it is surely heart-warming . . . to read a story where copula-
tion for the purpose of procreation and the agony of childbirth
are described in all their sanctity as indispensable means for a
woman's redemption." 3 0 Pai-mei created new identity for her-
self through force of will; she has wrenched herself free from
the shackles of habit and economic need to assert her femi-
nine strength in its nurturing, child-bearing aspects. Appro-
priately, she lives a sexually chaste life after her new course is
once set. But her previous life is not overtly described as one
of moral degredation; the story refrains from condemning either
those who sold her into prostitution or the men who enjoyed
her service. Likewise, "Sea-Watching Days" does not demon-
strate that other people helped her achieve this redemption.
Thus the story presents a paradox: if Pai-mei's new
identity is not only a function of others' response to her, is the
child fundamentally necessary? Is not a change in self-evalu-
ation sufficient? Has she in fact become a different person? The
answers to all these questions must be negative. Pai-mei has
been morally consistent throughout the story. In one of its first
scenes she distracts a drunken and physically misshapen cus-
tomer away from the terrified Ying-ying, then a novice to the
trade. Her act is spontaneous and utterly selfless, typical of the
"saintly" Pai-mei after she leaves the brothel. But before she
leaves, Pai-mei is in her own eyes precisely what she is in the
estimation of others: a whore with no control over herself, re-
sponsible for—perhaps capable of—only satisfying the more
base of masculine needs. She must labor for her redemption;
she must sacrifice—these are the obstacles she places before
herself. In this regard the pain of childbirth is the final trial in
a self-imposed struggle for a new identity. The child himself
is perhaps not as essential as is the process of having a child,
asserting her right to have a child and to have the new iden-
tity that a child entails—that of mother, to Pai-mei the most
respectable of all social roles.
Pai-mei's new identity is simultaneously as old as
T H E S E A R C H FOR IDENTITY 357

tradition itself and wholly new. Theoretically she might again

happen to meet a former customer; like Wan-fa she would have
to ignore his vulgar comments. Wan-fa retreated into the con-
ventional roles of father and husband, at least to the extent of
guaranteeing economic support, to preserve his own sense of
dignity. The role of mother functions for Pai-mei in much the
same way. Significantly, she prepares for that role in the vil-
lage of her childhood, where other traditional family ties could
be reasserted and strengthened. Yet she remains unabashed
by her lack of a husband and the means by which the life of
her son began. There is no traditional sanction for this atti-
tude; it is a consequence of her individual will, her personal
faith in the lightness of being a mother in and of itself. Thus
she has achieved a kind of liberation to a realm of self-concep-
tion where conventions are irrelevant in the light of pure mo-
tivations. Her will to improve her social standing, her per-
sonal identity, has become in itself an obsession to reassert her
rightful position in the order of things, an order that tran-
scends mere morality. Her quest, like that of the adman K'un-
shu, brings a new hope through the possibility of a degree of
self-transcendence, of immortality that accommodates itself to
time.
Symbols abound in "Sea-Watching Days"; they serve
to indicate Pai-mei's uniqueness rather than the universality
of her plight. She is offspring of the land, a rural villager; the
land's eternality gives her the strength she needs for her self-
transformation. Yet it is the endless motion of the sea that calls
her to return, perhaps to see the biological father of her child,
prompting her to sing again of fish (yu, traditionally a word
play for the homophone meaning sexual desire). By the sea
she had been a prostitute, always sexually active but never
fertile; having conceived there she reverts to an association
with infertility, becoming again the daughter of a man who
sterilizes male chickens. (Appropriately the talk between Pai-
mei and her chosen mate involves another human manipula-
tion of animal sexuality, the collection of hog semen for arti-
ficial insemination.) In the countryside her brother loses a leg
while continuing to sire children; her years of service in the
Robert E. Hegel 358

brothel has left her only slightly bowlegged. Her transforma-

tion is developed through love, her love for her family, even
though it originated in the loveless desire of an anonymous
young fisherman.
The list of such images and the often ironic con-
trasts between them could be continued considerably farther.
What these few might serve to indicate is the concern for lit-
erary artistry on the part of Hwang Chun-ming. Like the mod-
ernist Shui Ching and like Wang Chen-ho, Hwang ensures that
his stories admit no single, simple interpretation. This fact is
itself most significant for understanding the search for identity
in recent fiction from Taiwan.
China is old; the weight of its traditions crush even
the most strenuous conscious efforts to change her, in the view
of many twentieth-century writers. To Lu Hsiin traditional
values consumed all individual initiative; to Yii Ta-fu and oth-
ers of his generation, the hope that Chinese society would
change might be vain but it was the only hope one could have.
For despite their avowed disdain for them, received traditions
dictated the role for educated intellectuals in society: that of
spokesmen for the highest level of morality, the catalyst for
social harmony and political order. This conception required
that all attempts to establish a new identity for the individual
involve the creation of a new social and political identity for
the state as a whole. This concern became the writer's obses-
sion when there seemed to be no alternative for self-expres-
sion in literature that was not indefensibly self-indulgent by
contrast. Thus the historical tendency to address political and
social needs in literature continued in China long after Con-
fucianism was replaced by a variety of new creeds and ideas
from abroad.
Yet China's tradition of reading literary works as
political allegories remains strong still today. It prompts not
only political figures to search creative writing for ideas that
support or question official policy lines; even foreign scholars
cannot resist reading political meaning into stories that make
no ostensible references to political persons or events. The Re-
T H E S E A R C H FOR IDENTITY 359

gionalist stories of Hwang Chun-ming also allow such manip-

ulation. Yti Ta-fu's apparently autobiographical hero suffered
over China's plight, but his personal malaise was the product
of his alienation from fellow students. In a sense this isolation
paralleled that of China itself, externally abused by more pow-
erful nations, weak and trembling within. Taiwan's situation
is not without parallels. Despite official claims on China's cul-
tural heritage, Taiwan was a frontier region, peripheral to the
great events of China's past. The physical monuments of that
past are elsewhere; its inhabitants are either the refugees from
the mainland or the offspring of humble folk forced there
through the centuries by economic necessity. Moreover, for fifty
years Taiwan had been cut off from the mainland provinces
by alien rule, a Japanese colony. When Hwang Chun-ming
writes of poor people who do not embody the Great Tradi-
tion—or any tradition at all in any major degree—who are not
part of any social movement, who have no prominence in so-
ciety, who have no sense of historical mission, he may well be
consciously or unconsciously allegorizing Taiwan's situation:
waiting for a decades-long civil war to be resolved and for the
country to be reunited, filling the time with response to eco-
nomic needs and concern for reputation abroad. The stories
considered here could be seen as examples in a search for
identity. That is, Shui Ching's Y stands for Chineseness, a
memory of past glories and a need for order in a world that
has gone totally awry; Wang Chen-ho reveals the need for cul-
tural conservativism and moral self-righteousness when real-
ity forces concessions; Hwang Chun-ming's stories take the
search for identity away from the past and into the future,
which his tainted but saintly Pai-mei faces with confidence in
the rightness of her stand and hope for better things to come—
whatever they may be.
This search for identity could be considered allegor-
ically, but its validity does not hinge on this interpretation. Why
offer it at all? The Chinese conception of self expressed in lit-
erature has seldom been apolitical or aloof from the social needs
of its time. The perceptive explorations of personal identity in
Robert E. Hegel 360

writing from Taiwan then should have traces of this tendency

if it is to be Chinese. No one would deny that writing from
Taiwan is Chinese; the existence of political significance in
writing about the individual is hardly surprising, even if the
condition of China as a whole is not its "obsession."
An Overview
 Duty, Reputation, and Selfhood
in Traditional
Chinese Narratives
Josqjh S. M. Lau

j ^ n o w thyself," adjures the Delphic oracle;

l \ Western writers have exemplified its spirit re-
peatedly, particularly in recent literature. But no comparable
command appeared in ancient China; lacking this approach,
traditional Chinese literature diverges markedly in its presen-
tation of the self. To illustrate, let us examine briefly two Rus-
sian heroes.
"What sort of man am I?" This startling question is
raised by the diarist-hero Chulkaturin in Turgenev's The Diary
of a Superfluous Man (1850). "The farther I penetrate into my-
self," he continues, "the more closely I examine my past life,
the more I am convinced of the stern truth of that expression.
Superfluous—precisely. To other people that word is not ap-
plicable. People are bad, good, intelligent, stupid, pleasant and
unpleasant; but superfluous . . . no . . . But I—about me it
is not possible to say anything else: I am superfluous, and that
is all there is to it." 1
Joseph S. M. Lau 364

The heart of the matter is this: Chulkaturin has

mistaken a y o u n g girl's civility for affection since his first
meeting with Yeliza vetta Kirillovana (Liza). H e thought his "life
w a s irradiated with l o v e " (p. 355) until the arrival of Prince N.
in the t o w n of 0 . Unable to bear w h a t h e considers to be
a deliberate insult from the prince at a soirée, Chulkaturin vents
his anger a n d jealously call his rival a " v a c u o u s Petersburg
u p s t a r t " (p. 372). Challenged to a pistol duel, the diarist ap-
parently forgets his sense of h o n o r and pulls the trigger ahead
of time. Though w o u n d e d , the prince graciously spares his life
by firing his shot into the air and calling off the duel.
Later, true to Chulkaturin's presentiments, the
prince leaves t o w n without breathing a w o r d of marriage to
Liza's parents. But the departure of the prince offers little as-
sistance to our diarist, for in the end Liza, w h o finds Chulka-
turin " l o a t h s o m e " (p. 386), decides to give her hand to Biz-
mionkov, a petty t o w n official and, w o r s e yet, the prince's
second at the duel. In despair, Chulkaturin asks: "Well, tell
m e n o w , a m I not a superfluous m a n ? . . . The role played by
the P r i n c e — t h e r e is n o n e e d to dilate on it. Bizmionkov's role
also is comprehensible. . . . But I? W h y w a s I mixed u p in it
all? W h a t a stupid fifth wheel to a c a r t ! " (p. 388).
Painful as this experience m u s t have been for
Chulkaturin, it is perhaps a trifle too personal to allow his reader
to gain a m o r e objective view of the m e a n i n g of his suffering
than w h a t he has given us to understand: that he is a frus-
trated lover and a victim of consumption. Thus, in spite of the
fact T u r g e n e v ' s The Diary is replete with emotive apostrophes,
one fails to detect in it that s y m p t o m a t i c note of anxiety pe-
culiar to, say, C h e k h o v ' s Superfluous M a n on the brink of an
identity crisis. Uncle Vania (1897) presents an example of this
further development.

VOYNITSKY (covers his face with his hands). I feel ashamed! If you
only knew how ashamed I am! This feeling of shame is sharp,
so much so it can't compare with physical pain. (In agony and
despair.) I can't take it! (Leans on the table.) What can I do? What
can I do?
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 365

ASTROV Nothing.
VOYNITSKY Give me something, anything! Oh, dear God. . . .
I'm forty-seven years old. Let's say I live to be sixty, that leaves
me thirteen more years. That's a long time. How can I get
through those thirteen years? What will I do, what can I fill them
with? . . . Give me a hint, tell me how to begin . . . what to
begin with. . . . 2

Frederick Hoffman, in his study of Samuel Beckett, describes

the Superfluous Man thus: "The very nature of his romantic
despair, disillusion or melancholy, is shown to come from an
'unproductive' or 'unrealistic,' in any case an 'unprofitable' set
of circumstances. He does no one any good and the scope of
his emotional extravagances is judged as tedious and perhaps
a bit ridiculous."3 Though no definition can be comprehensive
enough to cover all the characteristics of a given normative term,
Hoffman's observation is useful in identifying certain temper-
amental traits peculiar to such "unnecessary men" as Chul-
katurin and Voynitsky. Besides their inability to translate hon-
orable intention into action, their psyche is also plagued by a
mania for self-knowledge, even though in the end such
knowledge only fuels their propensities for self-pity and self-
mortification.

Propriety as Moral Absolute

In examining the physiognomy of the two Rus-

sians, I am reminded of a statement by a noted critic of Chinese
fiction: "Because of their fascination with life, Chinese novel-
ists are almost incapable of noticing the condition of ennui. . . .
With all its rapacious and lecherous characters, Chinese fiction
could not conceive of a monster like the Stranger of Camus,
not to say the Underground Man of Dostoevsky, who have lost
connection with all values." 4 One can certainly add that Chinese
fiction until modern times was just as incapable of conceiving
Joseph S. M. Lau 366

a Superfluous Man. 5 If the Chinese as a people are "inscruta-

ble," the psychological makeup of individual characters in their
literature is often as predictable as the operation of karma in
many short stories from the seventeenth-century San-yen and
Erh-p'o collections.
Let's imagine Chang Sheng in "The Story of Ying-
ying" ("Ying-ying chuan") in Chulkaturin's position. In the first
place, it is unlikely that any Chinese suitor would go to the
extent of fighting a duel for a lady, 6 much less this passive lover.
In the second, Chang always has the lessons of the ancients
to follow whenever driven to an impasse. By dismissing his
passionate mistress, Ying-ying, as a mere yu-wu ("femme fa-
tale"), the hero of this ninth-century tale has proven himself a
resourceful master of self-defense. Chang presents his justifi-
cation for deserting Ying-ying in these words:
It is a general rule that those women endowed by
Heaven with great beauty invariably either destroy themselves
or destroy someone else. If this Ts'ui woman were to meet
someone with wealth and position, she would use the favor her
charms gain her to be cloud and rain or dragon or monster—I
can't imagine what she might turn into. Of old, King Hsin of
the Shang and King Yu of the C h o u were brought low by
women, in spite of the size of their kingdoms and the extent of
their power; their armies were scattered, their persons butch-
ered, and down to the present day their names are objects of
ridicule. I have no inner strength to withstand this evil influ-
ence. That is why I have resolutely suppressed my love. 7

In this masterpiece of casuistry, the heartless lover

combines false Confucian modesty ("no inner strength") with
self-righteous conceit (shih-yung jen-ch'ing, "resolutely sup-
pressed my love"). But in Chang's case, even if it were the
woman who rejected the man, the yu-wu ("femme fatale") or
yao-nieh ("evil influence") theory would prove equally appli-
cable. For, precisely because a beautiful woman is a cause of
trouble, her rejection of a man can be interpreted as Heaven's
intervention to rescue him from fated disaster. Either way,
Chang invariably emerges as the winner. For this reason, one
needs little imagination to visualize how conveniently Chang
D U T Y , REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 367

could have helped poor Chulkaturin resolve his identity crisis.

All he would have to do is to place Liza on the same (low)
plane with Ying-ying and behave according to conventional
standards of behavior. In this way, Chulkaturin's defeat in the
game of love would immediately be converted to a moral vic-
tory, and self would have been well protected without even
any obvious self-assertion.
Chang Sheng is a convenient example of how in-
strumental history can be in helping a Chinese hero to resolve
his problems in a practical manner. Whenever he is in doubt,
a Chinese is bound to look to the ancients for moral support
or spiritual illumination. Indeed, it can be said categorically that
so long as one is mindful of the teachings in any of the Three
Schools, be it Confucianism, Taoism, or Buddhism, no Chinese
should feel at a loss in any given situation as to what to do
with one's life. One's strict adherence to a moral or religious
cause he or she believes in is by itself a form of self-assertion.
This is certainly the conviction of Liu Ta-chieh in his analysis
of the dilemma of the fourth-century B.C. poet-statesmen C h ' I I
Yuan. It is his view that if Ch'ii Yuan, the archetypal slan-
dered minister, were spiritually endowed with "the wisdom
of Taoist detachment, the rigor of Mohist asceticism, and the
spirit of perseverance in face of adversity expounded in the
teachings of Confucius and Mencius," 8 he could have avoided
drowning himself in political frustration.
Indeed, given the ethical imperatives invested in the
Five Relationships and Four Virtues, 9 one wonders if it is at
all possible—at least in a public medium—for a Chinese to ex-
press another form of selfhood than what is deemed proper to
his position in the established hierarchy. Unquestioning ad-
herence to the dictates of morality is easily noticeable in num-
berless traditional Chinese stories and drama. Take the ques-
tion of self addressed in The Revenge of Orphan Chao (Chao-shih
ku-erh ta-pao-ch'ou tsa-chii), for instance. 10 Written during the
fourteenth century, Chi Chiin-hsiang's play concerns the ri-
valry of two ministerial families in the state of Tsin during the
Spring and Autumn period two millennia earlier. In the pro-
logue General T'u-an Ku, in his attempt to usurp the throne,
]oseph S. M. Lau 368

harbors such art unmitigated hatred for Minister Chao Tun that
he has the whole Chao clan, totaling three hundred members,
eliminated. Chao Shuo, Chao Tun's son, is spared only be-
cause he is the Prince Consort. Later, however, T'u-an Ku is-
sues a counterfeit decree demanding his suicide, with which
Chao Shuo can only comply. In the meantime, the princess
gives birth to a son whom T'u-an Ku is understandably deter-
mined to put to death at any cost. Having entrusted the or-
phan to a retainer, Ch'eng Ying, the princess hangs herself.
Now it remains Ch'eng Ying's responsibility to
smuggle the orphan out of the surrounded house. He hides
the baby in a medicine box as he leaves the palace. Searched
by Han Chueh, a general who set up the guard around the
Chao premises at T'u-an Ku's order, Ch'eng Ying begs on his
knees for mercy on the last member of the Chao family.
Touched by Ch'eng's loyalty, and judging that T'u-an Ku is
clearly the wrongdoer, General Han releases Ch'eng and the
orphan. And, to assure Ch'eng that he would be the last one
to divulge the secret, Han commits suicide to vouch for his
sincerity.
Getting word of the orphan's escape, T'u-an Ku
threatens to kill all infants under six months old unless the Chao
orphan is recovered quickly. At wits' end, Ch'eng Ying con-
sults with Kung-sun Ch'u-chiu, a retired minister and a loyal
friend of the Chaos. After a short debate, Ch'eng agrees that
it would take more personal sacrifice and hardship to raise the
orphan to manhood than to offer one's life to T'u-an Ku for
the sake of the orphan. Consequently, Ch'eng Ying places his
own infant son in Kung-sun's hands and then goes to inform
T'u-an Ku that the retired minister is the keeper of the Chao
orphan. T'u-an Ku stabs the imposter-orphan to death with his
own sword, while Kung-sun, seeing that his mission is com-
pleted, dashes his head against a pillar to commit suicide.
From that point on, T'u-an Ku has taken Ch'eng
Ying as a confidante, and, since he has no son, adopts the or-
phan as his heir. When Orphan Chao reaches twenty, Ch'eng
Ying decides that it is time for the whole truth to be known.
Using a scroll on which the tragic history of the Chao family
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 369

is represented, Ch'eng Ying manages to reveal to the orphan

that his real name is neither Ch'eng nor T'u-an, but Chao.
What Orphan Chao has to face immediately is a
crisis of traumatic proportions. Until the scroll is unrolled in
act 4, he is smugly confident of his role in life:

I serve the sage ruler Duke Ling of Tsin,

And assist the able minister T'u-an Ku.
For I excel in the arts of peace and war and have
the strength of ten thousand men.
My father has invested much, much hope in me.
As horses are strong, and the soldiers brave,
The father is loving, and the son filial,
Why should we have any cause for worry!11

But now that his adopted father T'u-an Ku, whom he has just
referred to as a hsien-ch'en ("able minister"), turns out to be a
man who butchered his whole family, what is he supposed to
do? "If a man suffers a sudden and great shock or fright,"
comments James Olney, "then, whether or not he acts 'out of
character,' . . . for that moment he is not his normal self. Ex-
treme pain and extreme anger can also, in the same way, cause
an apparent disjuncture of selfhood." 12 Theoretically, had there
been a convention in Yuan drama by which the internal con-
flicts of the characters could be externalized through solilo-
quy, Orphan Chao's state of mind would have materialized into,
as for Hamlet, " a question." True, T'u-an Ku is now proven
to be the murderer of his father. But in all fairness it should
be pointed out that for twenty years T'u-an Ku has lavished
on his adopted son the kind of protection and affection wor-
thy of a real father. T'u-an's own words serve as testimony:

I adopted Ch'eng Ying's son and gave him the name

T'u Ch'eng. I've taught him all eighteen branches of the martial
arts. He masters whatever he touches. He even surpasses me
in archery and horsemanship. With his help I can make plans
to assassinate Duke Ling and take over the whole State of Tsin.
I can then let the boy fill all my present positions. Only then
can I be really content.13
Joseph S. M. Lau 370

With such unequivocal assertion of fatherhood, one

could not be far wrong to say that genuine affection must have
existed between T'u-an Ku and Orphan Chao. Granted that no
murderer of one's father should go unpunished, what should
be of immediate interest to us is not the way the orphan goes
about taking his revenge, but how in his conscience he would
account for all the good wishes and favors he has received from
T'u-an Ku, his adopted father—now known as murderer.
This takes us back to act 4. As soon as Orphan Chao
has learned all he wants to know about his true identity, he
laments: "So I am the Orphan of Chao! Oh, blast my fate." 1 4
After that he faints and is at once revived by Ch'eng Ying. It
becomes immediately obvious, however, that Orphan Chao's
temporary loss of consciousness is not induced by any shock
of recognition arising from the tragic irony of fate brought about
by this sudden turn of events; it is caused by the opprobrium
that for the past twenty years he has, as the Chinese saying
goes, "mistaken a villain for a father" (jen-tsei tso-fu). Since he
has no conflict of loyalties to reconcile (a point to be elabo-
rated later), he has no difficulty in making up his mind the
moment he awakens in Ch'eng Ying's arms: T'u-an Ku must
be put to a lingering death and his entire clan eliminated.
In an influential essay on the interrelationship be-
tween technique and subject matter, Mark Schorer notes:
"When we speak of technique, then, we speak of nearly
everything. For technique is the means by which the writer's
experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend
to it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, ex-
ploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and
finally, of evaluating it." 1 5 The key terms relevant to our dis-
cussion are "discovering," "exploring," and "evaluating." If
technique is a means for discovering, it follows that no new
experience felt by the writer would be adequately "explored"
and "evaluated" unless it was first "discovered" by a new
technique sensitive enough to exhaust all its possibilities. For
the student of Western literature exposed for the first time to
a Chinese play such as The Revenge of Orphan Chao, what would
strike him as most curious must be the total absence of any
D U T Y , R E P U T A T I O N , AND S E L F H O O D 371

psychological revelation that would allow him to share some

of the hero's private sentiments. Since in Western literature
soliloquy and stream of consciousness have often been em-
ployed as an expression of the hero's uncertainty on the one
hand, and as a subtle division between appearance and reality
on the other, now if no comparable technique is evident in the
Chinese play, does it mean that the orphan is free from any
emotional uncertainties? Can it be that the appearance he puts
up is in fact the true representation of his mental state?
So long as Orphan Chao moves in the context of
traditional Chinese society, that is precisely the case. His ex-
perience needs neither discovery nor evaluation, for his newly
perceived role as son of a murdered father dictates that he serve
as avenger. Appropriately, revenge under these circumstances
will embrace three of the Four Virtues expected of a Chinese
gentleman in his position. He owes it to his sovereign the Duke
(hence loyalty), to his parents (hence filial piety), and to his
father's loyal friends (hence righteousness) to see to it that
justice be meted out to the usurper-murderer. In this situa-
tion, any misgivings on his part would amount to not only an
open challenge to established moral codes but also a flouting
of the will of Heaven which placed him in these circum-
stances. As the only surviving member of the Chao clan, his
part in the play is at once realistic and providential: he is not
only the avenger of human wrongs but actually a deus ex ma-
china engaged in affirmation of the cosmic order. What sort of
man is Orphan Chao indeed if he is not Chao Wu (the name
given to him by ducal decree as the heir to Chao Shuo to in-
herit the Chao family title and property)? In sum, it can be said
that Orphan Chao's life is clearly a Chinese exemplum in sup-
port of the Chinese saying i wu fan-ku, that is, "When doing
what is righteous, there can be no turning back." Beyond this
acknowledged role in society and the duties accruing to it, this
character has no self at all.
Joseph S. M. Lau 372

Self Defined as Duty

Orphan Chao is a male, and he acts in the capacity

of a son to right the wrongs suffered by his elders. The ques-
tion of the self in Chinese womanhood is addressed in "The
Jest That Leads to Disaster" ("Shih-wu-kuan hsi-yen ch'eng
ch'iao-huo"), 16 a hua-pen story about the fearsome conse-
quences of a jest. It begins with Liu Kuei, a luckless scholar-
turned-merchant, on his way with his wife, Wang-shih, to
celebrate his father-in-law's birthday. Taking pity on Liu's in-
solvency, the old man offers to loan him fifteen strings of cash
as capital for some new business venture. Since his wife is kept
by the father to visit for a few days, Liu returns home alone
with the money. He runs into an acquaintance on his way and
drinks a cup too many with him before resuming his journey.
Because Mrs. Liu is childless, Liu Kuei has taken a
concubine named Erh-chieh (Second Sister). Erh-chieh has
dozed off under the lamp by the time he finally manages to
get home, well after midnight; Liu pounds on the door re-
peatedly before she wakes up to let him in. As she is helping
him to relieve the load from his shoulder, she asks: "Where
did you get this money from? What's it for?" 17 Partly under
the influence of drink and partly irritated by her tardiness in
answering the door, Liu decides to scare her by replying that
he has mortgaged her to a merchant for fifteen strings of cash.
What follows is a chain of tragic coincidences that
gives the most terrifying testimony to the gravity of the theme:
that life is not to be trifled with at any place or at any time.18
Taking Liu's words seriously, Erh-chieh feels that she should
talk this matter over with her parents. She stacks up the money
beside Liu, who is now fast asleep, and heads out the door.
As fate seems to have dictated it, the same night Liu's house
is visited by a burglar. Awakened, Liu fights with the tres-
passer and is killed.
Erh-chieh spends the night with one of the neigh-
bors, then leaves for her parents' place early in the morning.
Midway on her journey she meets a young traveling sales-
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 373

man; the latter is attracted by her charms. Feeling lonely, Erh-

chieh asks the young man if he would be so good as to keep
her company for at least part of the way. But no sooner has
the young man given his happy consent than they are stopped
by two of Liu's neighbors. The neighbors inform her that her
husband's house has been burglarized and that Liu Kuei has
been killed. Since she was not at home when the crime took
place, she should return with them to answer questions. And
because the young man happens to be traveling with her, he
too is treated as a suspect and is brought back by force to the
local authorities, despite his protests.
That young man is named Ts'ui Ning. To his un-
doing, the money he is carrying with him amounts to pre-
cisely fifteen strings of cash. On the basis of this circumstan-
tial evidence he is judged to be the accomplice of Erh-chieh
and the two are summarily sentenced to death.
Mrs. Liu acts as the plaintiff during the prosecu-
tion; she remains convinced that Erh-chieh and Ts'ui Ning are
guilty. After the two have been executed, she sets up Liu's
spirit-tablet at home and passes her days as a dutiful widow
in mourning. Later when her father broaches the subject of re-
marriage, she answers that she would not hear of it, at least
not until the first year of mourning is over.
When the mourning is about to end, Mrs. Liu's
father sends an old servant over to fetch her home. But on the
way they are overtaken by a sudden shower which forces them
to take shelter in a nearby wood. There they are waylaid by a
highwayman. The old servant shouts his defiance and instan-
taneously meets his death. Realizing the futility of resistance,
Mrs. Liu cannot but make do with what the situation has to
offer: she accepts the outlaw's proposition that she become his
"Mistress of Ching Mountain."
In less than a year after they are married, the ban-
dit chief has become a rich man. The story further relates that
Mrs. Liu, being a very sensible woman, never fails to remind
her husband regularly that he should mend his ways before it
is too late. Taking her advice, the chief opens a grocery and
even visits the Buddhist temples occasionally. One day, pre-
Joseph S. M. Lau 374

sumably overcome by a sense of guilt, he makes a full confes-

sion of his past wrong doings to her, including the murder he
committed while robbing a man of fifteen strings of cash.
Needless to say, he had never learned that his wife is the widow
of his victim.
Mrs. Liu's shock at this discovery is imaginably as
great as that of Orphan Chao when his past was revealed to
him. For good reasons, however, the storyteller does not al-
low her to faint. She is only allowed to lament bitterly to her-
self: " S o my husband, too, was killed by this brute! And Erh-
chieh and that young man were unjustly executed. I can see
now that I should never have insisted on their paying with their
lives. They will never forgive me in the court of hell." 1 9
Significantly enough, her recognition is more con-
cerned with facts (the discovery of the real criminal) than with
the terrible irony of fate. It does not occur to her that if it had
not been for her influence, the bandit chief would not have
mended his ways. In a sense, therefore, her reforming influ-
ence—her wifely concern for him—is the very cause of his ul-
timate undoing. Furthermore, there is no hint anywhere in the
story that Mrs. Liu's agreeing to marry the chief is only a tem-
porary measure of expediency, that all along she had planned
to escape and inform on her outlaw husband in the name of
justice, if not for the sake of avenging her old servant. On the
contrary, the fact that she is concerned enough for his welfare
to advise the chief to abjure his life of violence attests to her
sense of new selfhood: she is as much the dutiful wife when
an outlaw's spouse as she was while married to the hapless
Liu Kuei. Lacking any textual evidence which could be used
to determine how close she had been to her first husband, we
cannot make any valid comparison in regard to the degree of
affection Mrs. Liu feels for Liu Kuei and the bandit. But even
if it could be proven that she is more fond of the outlaw than
of her first husband, it would make no difference in the end-
ing. For in her present situation, as with the case of Orphan
Chao, the question of personal sentiment matters little once it
is pitted against the balance of ta-i, or public morality. So long
as the chief is guilty of Liu Kuei's murder and is responsible
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 375

for the two innocent deaths, she has no moral election to make
but to bring him to justice. Her knowledge in the Chinese
context forces her inexorably into the role of vengeful in-
former. Her duty in this new role—as one who knows the
murderer's identity—allows her no other course of action.
In this respect, both Mrs. Liu and Orphan Chao can
be regarded as characters affected by what Lionel Trilling has
called the "morality of inertia": "It knows that duties are done
for no other reason than that they are said to be duties; for no
other reason, sometimes, than that the doer has not really been
able to conceive any other course, has perhaps been afraid to
think of any other course." 20
In the pages above we have seen two types of re-
venge stories, with Chao Wu avenging his father and Mrs. Liu
her husband. Though both instances of revenge can be taken
as a fulfillment of ethical obligations on a personal plane, and
as a reparation of justice on a social level, Mrs. Liu's decision
to betray her bandit husband to the courts is essentially self-
serving compared to the decision of Orphan Chao. Her
"thoughts to herself," quoted earlier, demonstrate that she is
actually more afraid of the vengeful ghosts of Erh-chieh and
Ts'ui Ning than she is concerned with social justice. For this
reason, Mrs. Liu must be seen as a more complex character
than the orphan if only because, unlike the latter, the appear-
ance she puts up is not to be mistaken for her reality. While
the method she uses to assert her selfhood is in general agree-
ment with established social rules, the real motive behind her
public action is but a selfish desire to exorcise private fears re-
sulting from an uneasy, if not guilty, conscience.

A Good Name at Any Cost

"When the individual presents himself before oth-

ers," Erving Goffman informs us, "his performance will tend
to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of
]oseph S. M. Lau 376

the society, more so, in fact, than does his behaviour as a

whole." 2 1 What Orphan Chao and Mrs. Liu have opted to do
can thus be seen more as a result of their eagerness to garner
social approbation than as a disinterested concern for fair play.
"It is fitting that we should hold the young in awe," Confu-
cius said, for "how do we know that the generations to come
will not be the equal of the present? Only when a man reaches
the age of forty or fifty without distinguishing himself in any
way can one say, I suppose, that he does not deserve to be
held in awe." 2 2 While the Master is to be applauded for his
indulgent attitude toward the young, his admonition that one
must make a name for oneself before reaching forty or fifty
constitutes formidable psychological pressure on an average
person. This is especially true for women in traditional China.
True, those who are as gifted as Ts'ai Yen (c. A.D. 200) and Li
Ch'ing-chao (?1084-c. 1151) can distinguish themselves by their
literary skills. Or, if one is as ardent and talented as Ch'iu Chin
(1879-1907), one can expect to leave a name behind by being
a revolutionary. But these are extraordinary women who claim
their positions in the annals of history by virtue of their ex-
traordinary accomplishments. For an ordinary female desiring
fame the only path open to her would seem to be taking an
extra step beyond the call of duty.
One such woman is Shao-shih in "The Case of the
Dead Infant" ("K'uang T'ai-shou tuan ssu-hai-erh") in Ching-
shih t'ung-yen. A lady known for her beauty as well as her vir-
tue, Shao-shih becomes a widow at the age of twenty-three.
Concerned about her future, her parents and her husband's
uncle lose no time in urging her to remarry as soon as the three-
year mourning period is over. But Shao-shih resolves to re-
main chaste, vowing: "Now that my late husband rests below
the Nine Springs, if I serve another family and take a second
husband, I shall either perish under a knife or die by the
rope." 2 3
It must be emphasized that Shao-shih's decision to
live a life of widowhood is strictly of her own volition. Her
elders plead with her to change her mind, and more signifi-
cantly, the storyteller, apparently shaken by his ominiscient
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 377

knowledge of the impending tragedy, also warns her paren-

thetically:24 " 'If you can swallow three gallons of vinegar at
one sitting, you can live on as a lone widow.' Widowhood is
not easily maintained. The best long-term course for Shao-shih
would have been to take a husband openly. Although then she
would not have rated in the top category of women, still she
would not have missed being counted in the middle
group. . . Z' 25
But Shao-shih aspires to count in the top category,
to be in the company of illustrious women as recorded in Liu
H s i a n g ' s ( 7 7 - 6 B.C.) Eminent Women (Lieh-nii chuan). She shuts
herself off from the outside world, keeping only a maid as her
companion and a ten-year-old servant boy by the name of Te-
kuei as a doorkeeper. In her husband's presence, she is known
as a dutiful and virtuous wife. In his absence, she wants to be
remembered as a selfless and chaste widow. Perpetual mourn-
ing becomes her duty as much as it is her identity.
By the time Te-kuei reaches seventeen, Chih Chu,
a wastrel newly installed in the neighborhood, has received
word about the fair reputation of Shao-shih as a great beauty.
After taking a peep at the woman on the occasion of her hus-
band's tenth anniversary memorial service, Chih Chu finds
himself totally possessed by her charms. He befriends the ser-
vant boy by giving him food and wine, in hopes of getting his
help to step into Shao-shih's inner apartment. But the boy re-
bukes him: "What are you saying! How can you be so wicked!
My mistress is most proper and guards her place with vigi-
lance. During the day no man is allowed to go through the
middle door. At night, before she goes to bed, she and her
maid carry a lamp and inspect everywhere to make sure that
each door is locked. Even if I wanted to lead you in, where
would you hide?" 2 6
Upon being informed that Shao-shih also checked
Te-kuei's room, Chih Chu suddenly conceives a plan: he wants
to ruin Shao-shih's reputation through the boy so that he can
blackmail her into submitting to himself later. Accordingly, he
tries his best to arouse the boy's sexual passion with wine and
with salacious suggestions. Te-kuei finally becomes excited
Joseph S. M. Lau 378

enough to ask for advice. Chih Chu responds by instructing

him to lie naked on his back at night when Shao-shih is about
to make her security check.
That evening, Te-kuei displays himself in bed as is
told. Though startled by her discovery, Shao-shih takes no ac-
tion except voicing her opinion to the maid: "This dog of a slave!
His door isn't even closed, and he sleeps there stark naked!
What impudence!" 27 At this juncture, the storyteller makes
another digression: "Had Shao-shih acted decisively, called Te-
kuei to her the next morning, told him of his lazy and outra-
geous behavior of the previous evening, and given him a sound
scolding and beating, then Te-kuei would not have dared
more." 28 This digression is noteworthy because it confirms our
impression of the storyteller's skeptical view of Shao-shih as a
woman of self-conceit whose choice of celibacy is prompted by
vainglorious impulse rather than by moral conviction.
Shao-shih goes to Te-kuei's room on the third eve-
ning, unaccompanied by the maid. The sight of "that thing as
hard and firm as a spearhead" sets her heart "pounding wildly
and her whole body afire with lust." 29 Not wanting to startle
the boy, she noiselessly sits astride his body and guides his
entry. Her loneliness, and especially her desperation resulting
from a protracted period of sexual abstinence, are described in
an interpolated poem:

She had been long denied the pleasure of the bed;

He is experimenting for the first time with the joys of love.
She, reclaiming an old plaything, enjoys it with abandon;
He, delighting in the new taste of sweets, craves for more.
She, too hungry to choose her fare, doesn't mind the
serving boy with all his uncouthness;
He, pampered and assured of favor, fears not his mistress's
authority.
It's obvious he is but a noxious creeper;
Yet it intertwines on the trellis with a prized flower. . . -30

Soon to take place in the story is not only Shao-

shih's downfall, but most significantly, the revelation of the
fanatic extreme to which she is about to go to protect her rep-
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 379

utation. As soon as their game of love is over, Shao-shih con-

fides to Te-kuei: "I have endured widowhood for ten years.
That I should now lose myself to you must be repayment for
some wrong I did you in a previous existence. You must keep
your mouth shut and not let this out to anyone. You can ex-
pect special favors from me." 3 1 Regarding her illicit affair with
the boy as a form of "repayment," she throws all caution to
the wind and carries on with Te-kuei as if they were man and
wife. The question of morality or propriety never enters her
mind so long as her good name before the outside world is
not in jeopardy. In order to seal the maid's mouth, she helps
Te-kuei seduce her, setting the pattern for a mock ménage à trois.
But events take a sudden turn when, after a few
months, Shao-shih finds herself pregnant. She instructs Te-kuei
to buy some medicine for abortion. Ignorant of what to get,
the boy turns to Chih Chu, whom he regards as "benefactor,"
for help. The wastrel cheats him by giving him a womb-
strengthening potion. In due course, Shao-shih delivers a male
child which she immediately drowns, and asks Te-kuei to bury
it in a secret place. Because Chih Chu has said earlier that he
needs a dead infant to concoct some kind of drug, Te-kuei turns
the drowned baby over to his "benefactor" instead of burying
it.
Now that he has solid evidence to incriminate Shao-
shih, Chih Chu is emboldened to force his way into her apart-
ment and to blackmail her. Unwilling to yield to the scoun-
drel, Shao-shih temporizes with him by promising to send for
him in the evening. Only after Chih Chu is gone does it occur
to her that she has been in the wrong all along, and that she
has sinned against the memory of her husband. "In the begin-
ning," she muses, "I was against remarrying because I have
wanted to be a person of exemplary virtue. Now that the truth
is about to be exposed, how could I have the face to look upon
my relatives?"32 After some further thought, she decides that
there is no way to show her regret to her late husband except
taking her life. Just when she is about to hang herself with a
sash, Te-kuei barges in. The sight of this guileless person fills
her with anger and indignation, as she reasons that without
Joseph S. M. Lau 380

his tricking her, she would not have lost her honor and chas-
tity. Gripping the dagger with which she had originally in-
tended to cut her own throat, she strikes a blow against his
head with vengeance, splitting his skull in two. Then she places
her head into the noose.
Because the latter part of the narrative takes up the
judicial handling of the infanf s murder by Lord K'uang Chung,
who finally brings Chih Chu to justice, this story has often been
categorized as a kung-an ("legal case") story. From our point
of view, however, what is so engaging about "The Dead In-
fant" is not so much the investigative process through which
the true culprit is tracked down as the relentless tension which
the storyteller brings to bear on Shao-shih to test her human-
ity. Without any. sign of inward resistance, Shao-shih suc-
cumbs to the claims of Te-kuei's manhood. In drowning her
flesh and blood to obliterate evidence of transgression, she has
at once violated the sanctity of motherhood and the unmistak-
able quality of being human. In her self-reproach quoted above,
her only worry is that she won't "have the face to look upon
her relatives." No trace of remorse for having murdered her
own son can be detected. 33 "The Dead Infant," then, is a cau-
tionary tale in the proverbial sense of the term. For its unsen-
timental treatment of a subject so charged with hagiographic
potential, it is a tour de force of a parabolical journey into the
purgatory of megalomania in which we witness the frighten-
ing consequences of self-delusion and blown-up pretensions.
Above everything else, "The Dead Infant" is a passionate plea
for sanity and humility.

Eccentricity as Identity

With the exception of W. L. Idema, most scholars

and critics of Chinese fiction who chose to examine the tradi-
tional Chinese story from a Western perspective have invari-
ably come away with the impression that the Chinese vision
DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 381

of the self is necessarily limited and predictable. 34 John L.

Bishop, for instance, attributes "this limitation of psychologi-
cal analysis" to the "absence of an aristocratic-feminine tradi-
tion in this branch of literature." 3 5 Robert Ruhlmann, on the
other hand, blames the limitation on the Chinese concept of
moral excellence, which "was thought to lie rather in the proper
fulfillment of established social roles in family and community
living than in individual accomplishments (as in Western civ-
ilization)." 36 Of the three examples used in this article, The Re-
venge of Orphan Chao seems to agree very well with Ruhl-
mann's evaluation of traditional Chinese heroes. But how
applicable Ruhlmann's statement is to a character who is at once
public and private, such as Mrs. Liu, is indeed questionable.
Suffice it to say that while many of the heroes or heroines we
find in Chinese fiction and drama truly are stereotypes, it is
equally true that occasionally we encounter a number of char-
acters whose identity we take for granted at our own risk.
I have particularly in mind the egotist Ching K'o in
"Prince Tan of Yen" ("Yen Tan-tzu"). This hero is a typical
example of a self-obsessed man who is not so much interested
in the plight of the prince, nor the issue of political justice, as
he is in his personal worth. He measures the degree of the
prince's friendship for him in terms of the number of gold
nuggets he receives for throwing at frogs, the liver of the su-
perior steeds served at his meals, and the hands of a beautiful
lute-player presented him on a jade plate. Had he been more
concerned with the cause of his entrusted mission, and less
with his own ego, he would have delayed setting forth until
his partner arrived to ensure success in assassinating the
prince's enemy. But instead, when the prince loses patience
after having waited for five months and inquires about his
plans, Ching K'o angrily takes Wu Yang along as a substitute.
True to Ching K'o's judgment, Wu Yang proves to be a "mere
boy" (shu-tzu),37 who even has difficulty moving his feet in the
presence of the King of Ch'in.
The assassination fails, and Ching K'o forfeits his
life, ostensibly for the sake of reciprocating the gestures of
someone who appreciates him. Whether or not Chinese his-
Joseph S. M. Lau 382

tory would have been rewritten had he gone with his partner
as originally planned is a futile speculation. The relevant fact
is that his pattern of behavior is indisputably "individualistic,"
in that he is more interested in indulging his personal whims
and fancies than in fulfilling any social role or even personal
trust. If Ching K'o had any role to play, it would be that of a
knight errant who is driven by the desire for fame rather than
motivated by impulses of altruism and who, as James J. Y. Liu
has remarked, values personal freedom above family solidar-
ity and social security. 38
Having examined the various forms of self-asser-
tion in The Revenge of Orphan Chao, "The Jest That Leads to Di-
saster," "The Dead Infant," and "Prince Tan of Yen," we can
draw the following conclusions regarding the question of self-
hood in traditional Chinese literature. Granted that the self is
very much subjugated to the dictates of established morality
and propriety, and that it is true that Chinese dramatis personae
are seldom found in the process of soul-searching, it does not
follow that all the Chinese fictional characters are stereotypes.
Admittedly, the moral choices for a "positive character" are few,
unless he chooses to become a rebel like Chia Pao-yii in Dream
of the Red Chamber, who decides to leave the "Red Dust" of this
world just when the honor of his family is about to be re-
stored; or an eccentric, like the third-century poet Hsi K'ang,
who would "normally go half a month without washing [his]
face." 3 9 Otherwise, a man in traditional China must remain loyal
to his ruler, filial to his parents, and faithful to his friends.
Observation of these virtues is a duty that defines a self.
But then we have seen Ching K'o, who is a stranger
to all moral assumptions, guiding his life by no other value
than a rather narrow concept of pao (reciprocity).40 And, as has
been exemplified by Shao-shih, there is even room for assert-
ing one's individuality by going one step further than is deemed
necessary in a conformist society. Subjecting herself willingly
and willfully to a life of misery and sexual privation, she elects
an absurd cause to celebrate her womanly self-denial. Simi-
larly, it would seem that Orphan Chao's unreflecting switch
of loyalty cannot be construed as anything else but an act of
D U T Y , R E P U T A T I O N , AND S E L F H O O D 383

blind faith in society's conventions. In his situation, avenging

his father seems to be the only way to honor relevant moral
obligations. Blind faith in received duties is at least better than
the total lack of faith of the superfluous man. The orphan's
self-concept would be thrown into question by any other course
of action. In each case, it is through affirmation of a cause, be
it altruistic, self-serving, or even absurd, that these characters
in traditional narratives define and sustain their concept of self.
"What sort of man am I?"—anticipating a unique answer—is
a question foreign to the bulk of old China's heroes and her-
oines.
 Notes

AN EXPLORATION OF THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF

Robert E. Hegel
1. Mao Tsetung, 'Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature" (May
1942), Selected Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 3:82; Rene
Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (3d ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1956), p. 78.
2. Lu Hsiin, Na-han (1922; Peking: Jen-min wen-hsueh, 1973), pp. 76-79;
trans. Selected Works of Lu Hsun (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 1:76-80.
Compare the translation from Lun-yu 13:3 in Arthur Waley, trans., The Analects of Con-
fucius (New York: Random House, n.d.), p. 171.
3. Note Lu Hsiin's further explanations of his reasons for not identifying
this character in the conventional way: "I thought at the time that if I wrote a story
of exposure and described events happening in a specific place, the people of that
district would hate me with a deadly hatred, while those of other districts would look
on unconcerned at troubles elsewhere, neither group relating the story to themselves. . . . "
Lu Hsiin, Ch'ieh-chieh-t'ing tsa-wen (1936; rpt. Peking: Jen-min wen-hsueh, 1973), p.
116; trans. Selected Works of Lu Hsiin, 4:138; emphasis mine.
4. See Denis Twitchett, "Problems of Chinese Biography," in Confucian
Personalities, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1962), pp. 24-39, esp. p. 34. Andrew Plaks presents an illuminating discussion
of individuality and type in his "Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," in
Chinese Narrative, ed. Plaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 342-
44. By contrast, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 165, note the central role of Christianity in the de-
velopment of the unique self as an element in modern literature. The inner life of the
individual grew because of the focus on the private relationship of the individual to
God. They further note (p. 192) that the autobiographical spirit of modern Western
literature develops from such autobiographies as those of Montaigne and Cellini,
themselves inspired by yet earlier Christian figures including St. Theresa and St. Au-
gustine. Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957)
examines the relationship between Christianity, particularly in its Calvinist or Puritan
form, individualism, capitalism, and the novel; see pp. 60 ff. for his discussion of Ro-
binson Crusoe.
Hegel: The Chinese Literary Seif 386

5. For more extensive discussions of these questions, see Arthur F. Wright,

"Values, Roles, and Personalities," in Confucian Personalities, ed. Wright and Twitch-
ett, pp. 3 - 2 3 ; and Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in Early China (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1969), and Munro's " T h e Shape of Chinese Values in the Eye
of an American Philosopher," in The China Difference, ed. Ross Terrill (New York: Har-
per and Row, 1979), pp. 3 9 - 5 6 . The search for appropriate social roles and attempts
to deny personal responsibilities to fulfill the obligations of social roles were questions
addressed by late Ming and early Ch'ing writers. See Robert E. Hegel, The Novel in
Seventeenth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 105-
39.
6. Wei-ming Tu, " T h e Confucian Perception of Adulthood," in Adulthood,
ed. Erik H. Erikson (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 113-14. See also A. S. Cua, "Con-
fucian Vision and Experience of the World," Philosophy East and West (1975), 25(3):327-
28.
7. Lun-yii 6:28; trans. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 31. Compare Confucius, The Analects,
tTans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 85, here identified as Lun-yii 6.30.
8. Lun-yii 12:1; Lau, tTans., Analects, p. 112.
9. Tu, "Confucian Adulthood," p. 124.
10. See Tu Wei-ming's Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung
(Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), esp. chapter 4.
11. The famous description of a Utopian community is in Tao-te ching 80;
see Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin, 1963), p. 142. For
insightful discussions of Taoist teachings, see Max Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu and Taoism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 19-69; Holmes Welch, Taoism:
The Parting of the Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), esp. pp. 18-87.
12. Chuang Tzu 18; trans. Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 192. On perfect social order (in the
past), see p. 112; logic is confounded on pp. 4 2 - 4 3 , rejection of political activity is the
point of pp. 187-88. See also Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu, pp. 70-106.
13. Watson, trans., Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, p. 192.
14. Wisdom texts include the Diamond and Heart sutras. See Edward Conze,
trans., Buddhist Wisdom Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958). Noteworthy surveys
of Buddhism include Hans Wolfgang Schumann, Buddhism: An Outline of Its Teachings
and Schools, trans. Georg Feuerstein (Wheaton, 111: Quest, 1974), and W. T. deBary, et
al., The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan (New York: Modern Library, 1969);
see also Chang Chung-yuan, tTans., Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism (New York:
Vintage, 1971). A poem by Hui-neng codifies this approach to self; see Philip Yam-
polsky, trans., The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1967), p. 133, text p. 4.
15. James J. Y. Liu, "Time, Space, and Self in Chinese Poetry," CLEAR
(1979), 1(2):138.
16. Eugene Eoyang, " T h e Solitary Boat: Images of Self in Chinese Nature
Poetry," journal of Asian Studies (1973), 32(4):593-621; the felicitous descriptive phrase
is from James I. Crump, "Eadem sed aliter: 'Pastoral Idyl' and Vanitas in Late Chinese
Fiction and Verse," Tamkang Review (1977), 8(2):32, n. 12.
17. For a discussion of thanatophobia, see Burton Watson, Chinese Lyri-
cism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1971), pp. 4 9 - 5 1 . Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu, discusses alchemy on p. 66; on medi-
tation and alchemy, see Michel Strickmann, " O n the Alchemy of T'ao Hung-ching,"
HEGEL: THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF 387

in Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 123-92, and Joseph Needham, ed., Science
and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),
esp. pp. 220 ff. on alchemical theory. For a literary manifestation of meditation tech-
niques, see "Yiian-yu" in Ch'u tz'u, trans, by David Hawkes, "The Far-Off Journey,"
in his Ch'u Tz'u: The Songs of the South (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962) pp. 81-87.
18. T a o Ch'ien, "Hsing, ying, shen," in Ting Fu-pao, ed., Ch'üan Han San-
kuo Chin Nan-pei-ch'ao shih (1962; rpt. Taipei: I-wen, 1970), pp. 603-4, and Td Emmei,
Ikkai Tomoyoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1958), pp. 175-81, trans. James Robert
Hightower, The Poetry of Too Ch'ien (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 42-44.
19. See Strickmann, " O n the Alchemy," pp. 159-92, esp. pp. 189-91, on
the celebrated toxicity of certain Taoist elixirs and their effect on would-be "immor-
tals" (hsien).
20. Fu Tung-hua, ed., Wang Wei shih (Taipei: Shang-wu, 1964), p. 71; tTans.
Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism, p. 173. Eugene Eoyang discusses this poem in "The
Solitary Boat," pp. 601-4.
21. Wai-lim Yip, trans.. Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei (New York:
Grossman, 1972), p. v. The interpolation is Yip's. The mirror as image for the en-
lightened mind can be seen in Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, p. 132.
22. Both sets of texts are included in Tsuru Hämo, Ö Mei (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1958), pp. 39-66, and in Wai-lim Yip, Hiding the Universe, pp. 92-131; these
volumes also present Japanese and English translations, respectively.
23. At the core of these and other policies concerning literature in the
Chinese Communist Party lie two divergent views of the relationship between the
economic base of society, its physical reality, on the one hand, and society's super-
structure on the other. The superstructure in Marxist terms is the values held by peo-
ple, both individually and collectively, and the institutions that reflect those values.
Marxist theoreticians have hypothesized either that values are shaped by social real-
ity, a "deterministic" view, or that if the values of a people are reformed, they will
change their society accordingly, a "voluntaristic" view. Mao Tse-tung most fre-
quently subscribed to the latter view; hence his support for revolutionary activity that
would bring about rapid social change—and his insistence on the political function of
literature. See Donald J. Munro, The Concept of Man in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1977); Munro, "The Malleability of Man in Chinese
Marxism," China Quarterly (1971), 48:609-40; Maurice Meisner, "Marxism and Chinese
Values," in The China Difference, ed. Terrill, pp. 99-116, and Meisner, "Harmony and
Conflict in the Maoist Utopian Vision," Journal of Chinese Philosophy (1977), 4:247-59.
24. See discussions of semiautobiographical writing in Marxist war litera-
ture in Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese
Novel as a Reflection of Life (London: Hurst, 1973), pp. 143 ff., and of the role of the
writer in Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling's Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1982), esp. chapter 3.
25. An intelligent discussion of religious continuities is Sarah Allen, "Shang
Foundations of Modem Chinese Folk Religion," in Legend, Lore, and Religion in China,
ed. Sarah Allen and Alvin P. Cohen (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1979),
pp. 1-21. A lucid and penetrating exploration of popular beliefs is Laurence G.
Thompson, Chinese Religion: An Introduction (3d ed.; Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1979).
26. See Thompson, Chinese Religion, pp. 9 - 1 2 , 26-33, passim.; David Jor-
dan, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
27. I refer to the fourteenth-century tsa<hü play Ch'ien-nü li-hun (The Soul
Hegel: The Chinese Literary Self 388

of Ch'ien-nu Leaves Her Body), Yuan ch'u hsuan 41; the ch'uart-ch'i play Mu-tan t'ing
(The Peony Pavilion) by Tang Hsien-tsu (1550-1616); the hua-pen story 'Ts'ui Tai-chao
sheng-ssu yuan-chia" (Artisan Ts'ui and His Ghost Wife), the eighth in Feng Meng-
lung's 1624 collection Ching-shih t'ung-yen.
28. See C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1968), chapter 7; and Lucien Miller, Masks of Fiction in "Dream of the Red
Chamber": Myth, Mimesis, and Persona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975).
29. Of the first category, the best-known example is the classical T'ang pe-
riod tale "Chen-chung chi" (Within the Pillow) later revised to form the play Huang-
liang meng (The Yellow Millet Dream); the second includes the seventeenth-century
novel Hsi-yu pu (Supplement to journey to the West, known in English as The Tower of
Myriad Mirrors) by Tung Yueh (1620-1686).
30. Noteworthy studies include Plaks, 'Towards a Critical Theory," and
Robert Ruhlmann, 'Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction," in Confucianism
and Chinese Civilization, ed. Arthur F. Wright (New York: Atheneum, 1964), pp. 122-
57; see also Chung-wen Shih, The Golden Age of Chinese Drama: Yuan Tsa-chii (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 48-50.
31. See Mote's "Confucian Eremitism in the Yuan Period," in The Confu-
cian Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp.
202-40. Of course, a number of Confucian literati who remained loyal to the fallen
Ming became recluses in the late 1640s and the 1650s, many of them even taking the
Buddhist tonsure when their cause was finally lost.
32. The first English translations of this classic narrative appeared fifty years
ago: Pearl S. Buck's All Men Are Brothers (London: Methuen, 1933), and J. H. Jackson's
Wafer Margin (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937). A recent and far more satisfactory
translation is by Sidney Shapiro, Outlaws of the Marsh (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1981).
33. For discussions of Chin Sheng-t'an and his work on Water Margin, see
C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, chapter 3; John C. Y. Wang, Chin Sheng-t'an (New
York. Twayne, 1972), chapter 4; Hegel, Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, pp. 68-84.
34. See, for example, Hellmut Wilhelm's "From Myth to Myth: The Case
of Yiieh Fei's Biography," in Confucian Personalities, ed. Wright and Twitchett, pp. 146-
61. Chu Kuei-erh curses the regicides before they cut down the Sui emperor Yang in
Sui Yang-ti yen-shih (Taipei: T'ien-i, 1974), 2:186-87, even though he is utterly unwor-
thy of her devotion. Obviously she acts for the sake of personal fame. See Hegel,
Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, pp. 101-2. Andrew Plaks discusses the importance
of the manner of one's death in establishing a self; see "Towards a Critical Theory,"
p. 343.
35. Hung Pien, Ch'ing-p'ing-shan-t'ang hua-pen (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsiieh,
1957), pp. 52-67; trans. H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), pp. 32-55.
36. See Plaks, "Towards a Critical Theory," pp. 340-41.
37. Feng Meng-lung, Ku-chin hsiao-shuo, ed. T'an Cheng-pi (Peking: Jen-
min wen-hsiieh, 1958), pp. 121-33; a translation by John Kwan-Terry is in Traditional
Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations, ed. Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 4-18.
38. Hung Pien, Ch'ing-p'mg shan-t'ang, pp. 169-86; translated by Peter Li
as "Yang Wen, The Road-Blocking Tiger," in Traditional Stones, ed. Ma and Lau, pp.
8 5 - % . Li's English version makes lan-lu-hu read as if it were only an epithet of Yang
HEGEL: THE CHINESE LITERARY SELF 389

Wen. But "road-blocking tiger" is a slang term for a highwayman, which Yang Wen
decidedly was not. It also refers to the white tiger star, which brings misfortune to
innocent victims, according to age-old folk tradition; hence my translation. See Ching-
lang Hou, "The Chinese Belief in Baleful Stars," in Facets of Taoism, ed. Welch and
Seidel, pp. 193-228, esp. pp. 209-19.
39. "Pai niang-tzu yung-chen Lei-feng-t'a," in Feng Meng-lung, Ching-shih
t'ung-yen (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsüeh, 1958), pp. 420—48; trans. Diana Yu as "Eternal
Prisoner Under the Thunder Peak Pagoda," in Traditional Stories, ed. Ma and Lau, pp.
355-78.
40. Yüan Yü-ling, Sui shih i-wen (Taipei: Yu-shih yüeh-k'an she, 1975),
chapters 5 - 8 . See Robert E. Hegel, "Maturation and Conflicting Values: Two Novel-
ists' Portraits of the Chinese Hero Ch'in Shu-pao," in Critical Essays on Chinese Fiction,
ed. Winston L. Y. Yang and Curtis P. Adkins (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
1980), esp. pp. 115-25.
41. Tung Yiieh, Hsi-yu pu (Peking: Wen-hsüeh ku-chi kan-hsing-she, 1955),
esp. chapters 15-16. See also Hegel, Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, chapter 5, esp.
pp. 158-60, 166.
42. San-kuo chih yen-i (Hong Kong: Shang-wu, 1962), 4.20-21; trans. C. T.
Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, p. 54.
43. Liu I-ch'ing, Shih-shuo hsin-yü (Ssu-pu pei-yao ed., rpt. Taipei: Chung-
hua, 1970), 3A.29a; trans. Richard B. Mather, Shih-shuo hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales
of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), p. 374.
44. Lii-ch'iu Yin, "Tien-t'ai san-sheng shih-chi hsü," Ho-ting Tien-t'ai san-sheng
erh-ho shih-chi, rpt. as Han-shan shih chi (Taipei: Wen-feng, 1970), pp. 53-57; trans. Gary
Snyder in Anthology of Chinese Literature, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Grove, 1965), pp.
1 9 4 - % . The significance of the cave as datum identifying Han-shan with the realm of
the spirit may be seen by Edward H. Schafer's references to caves (specifically tung-
t'ien, "grotto heavens") in his Man Shan in Tang Times (Society for the Study of Chinese
Religions, Monograph no. 1), pp. 1 ff.
45. See the discussion by C. T. Hsia in Classic Chinese Novel, pp. 134-38,
145-52.
46. In 1927, Tseng P u wrote the first portion of what was to become a
multivolume autobiographical novel entitled Lu Nan-tzu. See the recent biography by
Peter Li, Tseng P'u (Boston: Twayne, 1980), and Leo O. Lee, The Romantic Generation
of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), esp. chapter
6. A more general study is Lin Yii-sheng's The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), esp. chapters 2 - 3 . For a fascinating nonliterary
study of modern China's writers, see Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The
Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980 (New York: Viking, 1981).
47. See recent discussions by the Party literary theoretician Chou Yang on
this question. His speeches have appeared in Beijing Review (December 14, 1979), no.
50, pp. 8 - 1 5 , and (April 13, 1981), no. 15, pp. 23-25. Ironically, Mao Tse-tung was
one of the few truly personal writers of contemporary China; his verse is far less
"public" than the work of writers following his literary directives.
48. An exemplary study in this vein is David E. Pollard, A Chinese Look at
Literature: The Literary Values of Chou Tso-jen in Relation to the Tradition (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1973); see also Edward M. Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese
Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1980). Gunn discusses Chang Ai-ling, esp. pp. 200-31, as does C. T. Hsia, in his pi-
Hegel: The Chinese Literary Self 390

oneering A History of Modern Chinese Ficlion, 1917-1957 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1961), pp. 389-431.
49. See Watson, Chinese Lyricism, pp. 49-51.
50. See Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, pp. 107-10.
51. See ibid., pp. 56-62.
52. Plaks, 'Towards a Critical Theory," p. 345; see also Hsia, Classic Chinese
Novel, pp. 262-63.
53. Tung Yüeh, Hsi-yu pu (Peking: Wen-hsüeh ku-chi, 1955, a reprint of
the first edition); trans. Shuen-fu Lin and Larry Schulz, Tower of Myriad Mirrors (Berkeley:
Asian Humanities, 1978). See Frederick P. Brandauer, Tung Yüeh (Boston: Twayne,
1978), esp. chapter 7.
54. See, for example, Max Kaltenmark, Lao Tzu and Taoism, trans. Roger
Greaves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 60, 63 ff.

THE DUSTY MIRROR: COURTLY PORTRAITS OF WOMAN

IN SOUTHERN DYNASTIES LOVE POETRY
Anne M. Birrell
1. Hsü Ling, tzu Hsiao-mu, was the son of Hsü Ch'ih (472-551), who was
tutor to the young prince Hsiao Kang and shaped his development in administrative
and literary matters. Hsü Ch'ih's lifelong service to Hsiao Kang, in which he saw his
young protégé rise from prince to heir apparent and emperor, provided the oppor-
tunity for Hsü Ling to occupy a favored position at court. See John Mamey, Liang
Chien-wen Ti (Boston: Twayne, 1976), pp. 20-33, 75. Hsiao Kang, tzu Shih-tsan, was
heir apparent to Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (464-549) at the time the anthol-
ogy was compiled. He became crown prince in 531 and emperor in 549, and was post-
humously entitled Chien-wen. He was assassinated by Hou Ching. For his biogra-
phy, see ibid, passim; see also Anne Birrell, trans., New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An
Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), pp. 355, 353.
2. When 1 refer to the Southern Dynasties in this article, I mean the Sung,
Ch'i, and Liang dynasties, that is, the literary period from 420 to c. 545 (545 is the
approximate date of the compilation of the YTHY). The Southern Dynasties era proper
extends to 589 and includes the Ch'en Dynasty.
3. The timespan of Hsü Ling's anthology is seven and a half centuries, from
the late third century B.c. to the mid-sixth century A.D. My article is concerned with
the century and a quarter before A.D. 545.
4. My definition is taken, with slight modifications, from Martin Stein-
mann, Jr., "Convention," in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Prem-
inger, et a!. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 152.
5. This custom did not, of course, originate with the Hsiao royal family.
The Ts'aos of the Wei kingdom in the third century, for example, were also royal pa-
trons of literature.
6. See Marney, Liang Chien-wen Ti, pp. 60-75.
7. For these terms, see ibid., pp. 100-2; Anne M. Birrell, "Erotic Decor: A
Study of Love Imagery in the Sixth Century A.D. Anthology, Yü-t'ai hsin-yung, New
Songs from a Jade Terrace," (Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 1978), pp. 11-13; and
Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T'ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977),
p. 8.
BIRJUELL: T H E DUSTY MIRROR 391

8. See Mamey, Liang Chien-wen Ti, pp. 98-117; Owen, Early T'ang, p. 14;
and Birrell, "Erotic Decor," pp. 13-14.
9. Following Burton Watson, I translate shih as 'lyric," although some poems
in the anthology, a minority, are songs or ballads.
10. The texts of the Yu-t'ai hsin-yung (YTHY) I have used are: T'ang frag-
ment, in Lo Chen-yii, ed., Ming-sha-shih-shih ku-chi ts'ung-ts'an, fasc. 6, Shen-yang: Tung-
shan yu-chu, 1917 (constituting part of the end of ch. 2, from the middle of Chang
Hua's 5th poem of "Ch'ing shih wu shou," including his "Tsa shih erh s h o u , " and
P a n Yueh's "Nei ku shih erh s h o u , " and his "Tao wang shih erh s h o u , " ending with
Shih Ch'ung's " W a n g Ming-chun tz'u i shou," of which the last word is defaced, and
the opening word of Tso Ssu's "Chiao nu shih i shou"); Ming ed., printed at Wu-yun
chi-kuan in moveable type, photolithkally reprinted in Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an (SPTK); Ming
ed., printed by Chao Chiin 1633, photolithically reprinted Peking: Wen-hsueh ku-chi,
1955; Ch'ing ed., YTHY chien-chu, Wu Chao-i ed., 1675, revised Ch'eng Yen 1774, re-
printed in SPPY. (Wu has supplemented the 662 poems of the Chao Chun ed., a ver-
sion of the Sung ed., with a further 179 poems, making a total of 841; of the 662 Chao
Chiin ed. poems, 6 by Shen Yueh are unrelated to the amorous theme of the anthol-
ogy, thus making a truer total of 656 poems; since Wu's addenda appear at the end
of the various ch., they may readily be discounted); Ch'ing ed., YTHY k'ao-i, Chi Jung-
shu 1752, originally in Chi-fu ts'ung-shu, reprinted in Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng.
I have also consulted Suzuki Torao, Gyokudai shin'ei shu, 3 vols., Iwanami
bunko series, 32-010, 1953-56 (rpt., Tokyo: Iwanami, 1970); Uchida Sennosuke, Gyo
kudai shin'ei, 2 vols., Shinshaku kambun taikei series, 60—61 (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1974);
Hsu Nai-ch'ang, YTHY (critical notes) (1922), Obi Koichi and Takashi Chikao, eds.,
Gyokudai shin'ei sakuin (Tokyo: Yamamoto, 1976).
11. See Sung Yii, E. Erkes, trans., "Shen-nii-fu, The Song of the Goddess,"
T'oung Poo (1928), 25:387-402. Ts'ao Chih (A.D. 192-232), K.P.K. Whitaker, trans., "Tsaur
Jyr's Luohshern Fuh," Asia Major, n.s. (1954), 4:36-56; and Burton Watson, trans., Chinese
Rhyme-prose: Poems in the Fu Form from the Han and Six Dynasties Periods (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 55-60.
12. Lu Chi (261-303), tzu Shih-heng, from the region of modern Kiangsu
province, was famous for his Wen-fu, "A Prose-poem on Literature," trans. Chen Shih-
hsiang in Cyril Birch, ed., Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Four-
teenth Century (New York: Grove, 1967), pp. 204-14. YTHY, SPPY 3.4a. Citation from
no. 1 of a set of three yueh-fu poems, U. 1 - 1 2 of a five-word, 40-line poem.
13. Ho Sun, tzu Chung-yen, from the region of modern Shantung prov-
ince (d. c. 517). YTHY, SPPY 5.15a. Citation from "Day and Night I Watch the River,
Presented to Marshal Yii," U. 9 - 1 0 of a five-word, 22-line poem.
14. Shen Yiieh (441-512), tzu Hsiu-wen, from the region of modem Che-
kiang province. YTHY, SPPY 5.4a. Citation of 11. 1 - 1 6 of a five-word, 34-line poem.
Shan-yin is in Chekiang province (1. 1).
15. Hsiao Yen (464-549), tzu Shu-ta, from the region of modern Kiangsu
province. A commoner, he founded the Liang Dynasty. For a survey of his reign, see
Mamey, Liang Chien-xven Ti, pp. 11-15. YTHY, SPPY 7.1b. Citation from "Fulling Cloth,"
11. 15-22 of a five-word, 28-line poem. The phrase "not a s t o n e , " meaning " h e a r t , " in
1. 21 is an allusion to song no. 26 of the Book of Songs.
16. This anthology is a treasure-house of song and dance titles popular in
the Southern Dynasties.
17. YTHY, SPPY 10.16a. Cited in full, a five-word, four-line poem.
Birrell: The Dusty Mirror 392

18. YTHY, SPPY (Hsü) la. For annotated translations, see James Robert
Hightower, "Some Characteristics of Parallel Prose: Preface to 'New Songs from the
Tower of Jade/ " in Studies in Chinese Literature, ed. John L. Bishop (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 125-26; and Birrell, New Songs from a jade Terrace,
pp. 339-47.
19. Wang Yün (481-549), tzu Yüan-li and Te-jou, from the region of mod-
e m Shantung province. YTHY, SPPY 8.3a-b. Cited in full, a five-word, 10-line poem,
no. 2 of a set entitled "Six Poems Harmonizing with Grand Secretary W u " (probably
the poet Wu Chün, 469-520; see note 41), and subtitled "Autumn Nights." "The spirit
of death" is autumn, 1. 3. In 1. 8 "slanting-wave eyes" describes eyes glancing side-
ways flirtatiously. "Shuttle and spindle" represent the weaving the woman would be
engaged in for her lover were he still in love with her (1. 10).
20. YTHY, SPPY 7.10b. Citation of U. 9 - 1 8 of a five-word, 24-line poem.
In this period women applied beauty spots of different colors and shapes, such as a
moon, flower, or mountain, to their faces; here it is probably a mountain or the moon
o. 10).
21. Fei Ch'ang (fl. 510), from the region of modem Hupei province. YTHY,
SPPY 6.11b. Cited in full, a five-word, 10-line poem. Chao Fei-yen (1. 2) was the con-
cubine of Emperor Ch'eng of the Han (r. 3 3 - 7 B.c.); she was a beautiful girl and a
skillful dancer. The last couplet contains an allusion to a Han ditty (anon.) mocking
country girls for aping sophisticated city girls' fashion. (This ditty is translated in Bir-
rell, New Songs, p. 44.)
22. YTHY, SPPY (Hsü) l b - 2 a . Birrell, New Songs, p. 341. See also High-
tower, "Some Characteristics," pp. 131-32.
23. YTHY, SPPY 7.7b. Cited in full, a five-word, 8-line poem. The Lady of
Ch'u was probably Lady Fan, concubine of King Chuang of Ch'u. She is immortalized
as a paragon of virtue in Lieh-nü chuan (Biographies of Good Women), attributed to
Liu Hsiang (77-6 B.C.) A typical anecdote about her is that she stopped eating meat
as a form of protest against the king who was excessively fond of hunting. The title
of Hsiao Kang's poem is a yiieh-fu one, and it has several variations. "Jade chopsticks"
in 1. 8 is a common image for tears. Coming in pairs, chopsticks are a metaphor for
a line of tears from each eye (also see Chi Shao-yü's poem, in the text).
24. James Legge, trans., The Li Ki (Li chi), Sacred Books of the East, 27-28
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885). Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao, Foremost Woman Scholar
of China, First Century A.D.: Background, Ancestry, Life, and Writings (New York: Cen-
tury, 1932).
25. Wen-jen Ch'ien, Wen-jen being his surname. Not much is known about
him, but he probably belongs to the early or mid-sixth century A.D. YTHY, SPPY 8.13b.
Cited in full, a five-word, 10-line poem.
26. YTHY, SPPY 7.12a. Citation of 11. 7 - 1 4 of a five-word, 14-line poem.
27. Chi Shao-yü (fl. 535), tzu Yu-ch'ang, from Chien-yeh, the Liang Dy-
nasty capital, near modem Nanking. YTHY, SPPY 8.13b. Cited in full, a five-word, 8-
line poem.
28. Wang Yung (fl. 483—494), tzu Yüan-chang, from the region of modem
Nanking. YTHY, SPPY 10.7b. Cited in full, a five-word, four-line poem. For Hsü Kan's
(171-218) original poem, see Ronald C. Miao's translation in Liu Wu-chi and Irving
Yucheng Lo, eds., Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1975), pp. 40-41.
29. YTHY, SPPY 10.13b/14a. Cited in full, a five-word, four-line poem.
BIRRELL: THE DUSTY MIRROR 393

30. YTHY, SPPY 5.16b. Cited in full, a five-word, 10-line poem. ' T h e River
of Heaven" is the Milky Way.
31. YTHY, SPPY 4.11b. Qted in full, a five-word, 10-line poem. Mount Wu
is associated with the legend of a goddess who appeared to a king of ancient Ch'u in
an erotic dream. The River Ch'i often features in the love poems of the Book of Songs.
32. YTHY, SPPY 9.21a. Cited in full, a seven-word, 6-line poem.
33. YTHY, SPPY 1.9a. Citation of 11. 13-16 of a five-word, 16-line poem.
Hsu Ling wrongly attributes this and other poems of the "Nineteen Old P o e m s " to
Mei Sheng (d. 141 B . C . ) . For a full translation, see Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism:
Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century with Translations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1971), pp. 20-23.
34. Wang Seng-ju, (465-522) tzu Seng-ju, from the region of modem
Shantung province. YTHY, SPPY 6.8b. Cited in full, a five-word, 8-line poem.
35. YTHY, SPPY 10.16b. Cited in full, a five-word, four-line poem.
36. Hsieh Tiao (464—499), tzu Hsuan-hui, from the region of modem Honan
province. YTHY, SPPY 4.14a. Cited in full, a five-word, 10-line poem. Han-tan, in
modem Honan province, was famous for the artistry of its female musicians.
37. YTHY, SPPY 8.3a. Cited in full, a five-word, 10-line poem. No. 2 of a
set of two poems entitled "Spring M o o n . " "Herbal" (1. 2) refers to mi-wu, a plant as-
sociated with love, possibly a fertility drug, though its precise connotation is not dear.
"Pheasants" are an emblem of conjugal fidelity (1. 5). "Liang" (1. 7) is in the modem
district of K'ai-feng, Honan province. In the Wei Dynasty it became the capital city.
38. Liu Hsiao-wei (d. 548), tzu Hsiao-wei. YTHY, SPPY 8.8a. Cited in full,
a five-word, 6-line poem. Loyang was the old capital before China was partitioned
into North and South.
39. Wang Shu seems to have lived around 510, but not much is known
about him. YTHY, SPPY 5.18b. Citation from "At Chancellor Hsu [MienJ's Banquet I
Was Presented with the Topic 'Adorable' for Extempore Composition," 1. 3 of a five-
word, eight-line poem.
40. Wang T'ai-ch'ing (?late fifth to early sixth century), tzu Tai-ch'ing. YTHY,
SPPY 10.18b. Cited in full, a five-word, four-line poem. No. 2 of a set of two poems.
"South Bank" appears in the Ch'u Tz'u in the context of leave-taking.
41. Wu Chun (469-520), tzu Shu-hsiang, from the region of modem Che-
kiang province. YTHY, SPPY 6.1b. Citation of U. 1 - 6 of a five-word, eight-line poem,
no. 3 in a set of six poems harmonizing with Hsiao Tzu-hsien's (489-537) "Memories
of Long Ago."
42. Liu Shuo (431—453), tzu Hsiu-hsuan, from the region of modem Kiangsu
province. Fourth son of the Liu-Sung Emperor Wen (r. 424—454), Liu Shuo became
Prince of Nan-p'ing. YTHY, SPPY 3.14a-b. Cited in full, a five-word, 20-line poem.
No. 1 of a set of five miscellaneous poems. For the original poem, see note 33 above.
"Your collar is blue" (1. 14) is the title of song no. 91 of the Book of Songs, which tells
of a lady waiting for her lover who wore such clothing. "Mulberry-elm hour" is sun-
set (1. 20).
43. Liu Chun (430—462), tzu Hsiu-lung, became Emperor Hsiao-wu of the
Liu-Sung Dynasty in 454. YTHY, SPPY 10.3a. Qted in full, a five-word, four-line poem.
For Hsu Kan's original poem, see note 28 above.
44. YTHY, SPPY 6.6a. Cited in full, a five-word, 8-line poem.
45. Chiang Hung (fl. 502), from the region of modem Honan province.
YTHY, SPPY 10.9b-10a. No. 2 of a set, ' T w o Poems on Lu River." Cited in full, a
Birrell: The Dusty Mirror 394

five-word, four-line poem. The title may mean either " G r e e n Water Melody" or " L u
River M e l o d y . " O n e source of the Lu River rises in Kiangsi, flowing through Hunan
and flowing into the Hsiang River in the south.
46. Liu Huan (?fl. 549), tzu Han-tu, from the region of modern Shantung
province. YTHY, SPPY 8 . 1 0 a - b . Cited in full, a five-word, 6-line poem. No. 1 in a set
of three poems harmonizing with Hsiao I's (507-555) composition. The latter was Hsiao
Kang's brother; he became Prince of Hsiang-tung, and acceded to the Liang throne in
552 as Emperor Yuan.

STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION: EVOLUTION

OF THE SELF IN IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES
Frances LaFleur Mochida
1. Johann J. Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie
(Zurich, 1940; rpt. Stuttgard: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung and Carl Ernst
Poeschel Verlag GmbH, Gutmann). Breitinger and Bodmer were both influential eigh-
teenth-century Swiss critics of German literature who stressed the role of imagination
in poetry.
2. For a discussion of their poetic theories see Alessandro Pelligrini,
Gottsched, Bodmer, Breitinger e la poetica deli Aufklarung (Catania: Università di Catania,
1952), chapters 12-15.
3. Sir William LXAvenant, A Discourse upon Gondibert, An Heroick Poem, With
an Answer by Mr. Hobbes (Paris: C h e z Mattieu, 1650), pp. 119—45.
4. A difficulty arises in using Western concepts and terminology to de-
scribe Chinese poetry of fantasy. T h e traditional Chinese did not divide phenomena
into two distinct realms of "natural law" and "supernatural." It was more a matter of
emphasis. Beginning with the Chou philosophers, a functional distinction was drawn
between the "ordinary" and the "extraordinary." The Analects of Confucius states that
" T h e Master never talked of prodigies, feats of strength, disorders, or spirits" (trans.
Arthur Waley [London: Allen and Unwin, 1938], p. 127). Perhaps the best explana-
tion of the Chinese sense of the two would be Chuang Tzu's two simultaneously op-
erative planes of existence, the realm "within the square" where man operates by de-
fining, analyzing, and expressing verbally, and "outside the square" where one can
be beyond analysis, beyond the confines of worldly limits and value judgments, and
at o n e with the Creator. (See Chuang Tzu, " T h e Great and Venerable Teacher," trans.
Burton Watson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 86-87). In my dis-
cussion of these attitudes I have been aided by "Squares and Circles," an unpub-
lished article by Willard J. Peterson. For a general discussion of Chinese intellectual
attitudes relevant to this issue, see Frederick W. Mote, " T h e Cosmological Gulf be-
tween China and the W e s t , " in Transition and Permanence: Chinese History and Culture,
a Festschrift in Honor of Dr. Hsiao Kung-ch'uan, ed. David C. Buxbaum and Frederick
W. Mote (Hong Kong: Cathay Press, 1972), pp. 3 - 1 7 .

5. For a discussion of the critical term hsmg see Chen Shih-hsiang, " T h e
Shih-ching: Its Generic Significance," in Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, ed. Cyril Birch
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 8 - 4 1 .
6. Wen I-to, Shen-hua yu shih (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chu, 1956).
7. Indeed, much of what later became known as Taoist religion derived
MOCHIDA: STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 395

from the ancient Ch'u religion. For a literary discussion of this issue see David Hawkes,
"The Supernatural in Chinese Poetry," in The Far East: China and Japan (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1961), pp. 316-17.
8. David Hawkes, "In Search of the Goddess," in Studies in Chinese Literary
Genres, ed. Birch, pp. 42-68.
9. On the religious nature of the "Lady of the Hsiang" poem he wrote:
"there is no question but that this poem, even though it may have been subjected to
literary improvement . . . embodies a religious rite whose pattern has been evolved
and hallowed by long tradition; whose very words . . . [were] dictated more by ritual
appropriateness than logical necessity." See Hawkes, "In Search of the Goddess," p.
49. Unless otherwise stated, the titles used for the works in the Ch'u anthology follow
those used by Hawkes in his complete translation Ch'u Tz'u: Songs of the South (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
10. Wang I, quoted from Ch'u tz'u chu pa-chung, ed. Yang Chia-lo (Taipei:
Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1972), p. 33.
11. Wen, Shen-hm yu shth, pp. 305-34; Aoki Masaru, "Soji kyuka no buk-
kyoku-teki kekko" in Shinagaku (1933) 7 (l):l-23; Arthur Waley, The Nine Songs: A Study
of Shamanism in Ancient China (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955); and Chang Shou-
p'ing, Chiu ko yen-chiu (Taipei: Kuang-wen shu-chu, 1975).
12. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 538.
13. Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 539.
14. See Waley, Nine Songs, pp. 15-16.
15. Following the emended order of the songs in the cycle proposed by
Wen I-to and elaborated by Chen Shih-hsiang in " O n Structural Analysis of the Ch'u
Tz'u Nine Songs," Tamkang Review (April 1971), 11(1):3—14.
16. For example, in the "Greater Master of Fate," "Lesser Master of Fate,"
"Princess of the Hsiang," "Lady of the Hsiang," and "Mountain Spirit" poems.
17. Hawkes, Songs of the South, pp. 6 - 7 ; A. C. Graham, ' T h e Prosody of
the Sao Poems in the Ch'u Tz'u," Asia Major (1963), 10:120-23.
18. I have used my own translations for the "Nine Songs" passages in or-
der to bring out certain linguistic features and rhymes where possible although they
are forced in English. Excellent translations of the songs can be found in Hawkes,
Songs of the South, pp. 35—44 and in Waley, Nine Songs. Chinese texts are in an appen-
dix following this article.
19. Since the pattern in the "Nine Songs" is generally regular, with ana a x a
rhyme pattern, a line seems to be missing after line 1. I follow Yu Yu-fei, Ch'u fu cheng-
i (Taipei: Chung-hua shu-chu, 1960), p. 15.
20. Where possible I have tried to translate these binomes using similar
English expressions to make their occurrence clear, but this is sometimes impossible
without producing a humorous or childlike quality absent in the original.
21. Taking this line as the worshiper's rather than the god's would seem
the most likely interpretation, judging from later religious observances connected with
the sun. See E. T. C. Werner, A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (Shanghai: Kelly and
Walsh, 1932), p. 469: "At this time the people greet him [the sun] in the early morn-
ing with incense, in the open courts and in front of their homes."
22. "His desire prevails" could perhaps be more literally rendered as " h e
longs to look."
Mochida: Structuring a Second Creation 396

23. The order of these line segments is disputed. I have emended the se-
quence as has Hawkes, Songs of the South, p. 42.
24. For example, the myth of Chang Hsien shooting the Heavenly Dog,
Tien-kou, with a bow and arrow to avoid its evil influence on couples desiring male
children. See Werner, Chinese Mythology, p. 34.
25. See Chang Shou-p'ing, Chiu ko yen-chiu, pp. 57-63, and Eduard Erkes,
"The God of Death in Ancient China," T'oung Pao (1939), 35:185-210.
26. Some commentators prefer to take these poems as written to a male
deity, the Lord of the Hsiang. See Chang Shou-p'ing, Chiu ko yen-chiu, pp. 52-53.
27. Hawkes, "In Search of the Goddess," p. 49.
28. Hawkes calls her the "Mountain Goddess," but 1 prefer to follow Waley,
Nine Songs, and call her the "Mountain Spirit" since the Chinese title seems to indi-
cate a ghost (kuei) rather than a goddess (shen).
29. Kuo Mo-jo, Ch'ii Yuan fu chin-i (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsueh ch'u-pan
she, 1953), p. 32. The story of the noble daughter's encounter with the King of Ch'u
was made famous in Sung Yu, "Kao-fang fu," included in Wen hsuan, ed. Hsiao T u n g
(rpt. Taipei: Cheng-chung shu-chu, 1971), p. 250; trans. Arthur Waley, The Temple and
Other Poems (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923), pp. 65-72.
30. Trysts are mentioned in "Lord Within the Clouds," the Hsiang god-
dess poems, the Master of Fate poems, "God of the Yellow River," and the "Moun-
tain Spirit." Of all these, commentators only seem to agree upon a consummation
taking place in "Lord Within the Clouds" and the Master of Fate poems. I would add
the "Mountain Spirit" as implying a consummation.
31. This ambivalence toward the sacred is discussed in Mircea Eliade, Pat-
terns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: World, 1963), pp. 459 ff.
32. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 6: "It will easily be seen wherein a shaman dif-
fers from a 'possessed' person, for example; the shaman controls his 'spirits,' in the
sense that he, a human being, is able to communicate with the dead, 'demons,' and
'nature spirits,' without thereby becoming their instrument. To be sure, shamans are
sometimes found to be 'possessed,' but these are exceptional cases for which there is
a particular explanation."
33. Compare the case of the Teleut shaman who journeys to his celestial
wife in the seventh heaven, receives her help, but touches none of her food, for to
do so would make him forget his earthly life and force him to remain with her for-
ever. Eliade, Shamanism, p. 77.
34. The first compiler of Songs of the South, Wang I, asserted the view that
Ch'ii Yuan wrote the work to express his sorrow at having been exiled by King Huai
of Ch'u. See Ch'u tz'u chu pa-chung, p. 1.
35. Hawkes, "In Search of the Goddess," p. 45.
36. Hawkes, Songs of the South, p. 8.
37. In order to emphasize the literal meanings of certain passages, I have
again used my own translations. However, my debt to Hawkes is obvious, particu-
larly for the poetic English flower names. For a discussion of the difficulty of trans-
lating the flowers accurately and poetically, see Waley, Nine Songs, p. 17.
38. I have counted each phrase as a line, whereas in Hawkes' translation,
Songs of the South, two phrases comprise one numbered couplet.
39. For a brief summary of representative modern ideas on the subject, see
MOCHIDA: STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 397

Princeton Encyclopedia, sections on "Narrative Poetry," pp. 542—43 and "Oral Poetry,"
pp. 591-93.
40. Unlike the epic poets of such classic works as the Iliad, the Odyssey,
and Beowulf, who chronicle the deeds of heroes and events of an age with a degeee
of detachment as storytellers, Ch'ii Yuan tells his own story subjectively. See Robert
Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1966), pp. 5 1 - 5 2 .
41. Hawkes, "In Search of the Goddess," pp. 4 9 - 5 3 .
42. Edward Schafer has made a similar statement in his Pacing the Void,
T'ang Approaches to the Stars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 235.
43. For a discussion of the key word, see Graham, ' T h e Prosody of the
Sao Poems," pp. 120—61.
44. Hawkes considers the adjacent phrases as " o n e long double line di-
vided midway by the carrier-sound hsi." See Songs of the South, p. 7.
45. Trans. Chen Shih-hsiang, " T h e Genesis of Poetic Time: the Greatness
of Chu Yuan," Ch'ing-hua hsueh-pao, n.s. (1973) 10 (1):4.
46. Chen Shih-hsiang, "Genesis of Poetic Time," pp. 2 3 - 3 9 .
47. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 91-139.
48. Ibid., pp. 105-6.
49. Hawkes, "In Search of the Goddess," pp. 54-68, outlines the later de-
velopment of the spiritual journey and asserts that the quest theme was less influ-
ential.
50. For an excellent discussion of the Music Bureau songs, see Hans Fran-
kel, "Yueh-fu Poetry," in Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, ed. Birch, pp. 69-107.
51. Donald Holzman, "Literary Criticism in the Early Third Century A.D.,"
Asmtische Studien (1974), 28(2):113-49.
52. My trans. For a fine translation with explanatory notes, see Etienne
Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. H. M. Wright, ed. Arthur Wright
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 182-86.
53. Those that are present are inspired by the Han Dynasty Taoist poem
"Roaming Far" ("Yuan yu"), which is included in Songs of the South and is modeled
in theme and structure on "Encountering Sorrow."
54. This poem is also directly inspired by the Han Poem "Roaming Far"
described in the preceding note.
55. My trans. For an alternate version see George Kent, Worlds of Dust and
Jade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 68.
56. My trans. For another version see Arthur Waley, Chinese Poems (Lon-
don: Allen and Unwin, 1946), pp. 8 0 - 8 1 .
57. The Nineteen Old Poems are classified as "poetry" (shih), as distinct
from the "ballads" (yiteh-fu). In contrast to the ballads, they are characterized by reg-
ular lines of five characters, paratactic rather than hypotactic grammatical structure,
frequent parallelism between adjacent lines, and allusions to earlier literary works. In
general they have a vocabulary and polish which makes them seem more aristocratic
in tone than the popular-sounding ballads.
58. Ts'ao P i , son of Ts'ao Ts'ao and brother of Ts'ao Chih, in his Tien-lun
(Normative Essays) clearly states his disavowal of Taoist immortality or prolongation
of life. See Holzman, "Literary Criticism," p. 127. Ts'ao Chih himself in his " p o e m s "
Mochida: Structuring a Second Creation 398

(shih), which reflect personal situations rather than set literary themes, echoes the same
sentiment: "Futile it is to seek to join the ranks of the immortals, Master Sung has
long deceived m e . " (From ' T o Prince Piao of Pai-ma" ['Tseng Pai-ma-wang Piao"],
Wen hsuati, p. 329.)
59. Ernest Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1953.)
60. Gerald Bruns, Modem Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974), p. 207.
61. Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. 164-65.
62. For a discussion of this turning to landscape for a transcendent prin-
ciple as it applies to the art of painting, see George Rowley, Principles of Chinese Paint-
ing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 20.
63. Edward Schafer, in discussing T'ang poetic images, writes: "Not sur-
prisingly this body of interstellar imagery had a special appeal for poets whose tem-
peraments inclined them toward Taoist belief." See Pacing the Void, p. 244. In poems
by fervent Taoists, my remarks about a structured dualistic framework do not apply.
However, for poets writing with other than religious intentions, I believe my gener-
alization holds in many cases.
64. Elling Eide, "On Li Po," in Perspectives on the T'ang, ed. Denis Twitch-
ett and Arthur Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 374.
65. San-chia p'ing chu Li Ch'ang-chi ko shih, ed. Wang Ch'i (Shanghai: Chung-
hua shu-chii, 1959), p. 12. The word I have translated as "conception" is li in the
Chinese text. Probably in this passage it implies the moral and philosophical intent
behind the poem. Michael Fish translates the term as "moral discipline" in his article
"The Tu Mu and Li Shang-yin Prefaces to the Collected Poems of Li Ho," in Chinese
Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ronald Miao, Asian Library Series no. 8 (San Francisco: Chinese
Materials Center, 1978), p. 247.
66. Michael Fish has suggested that Tu Mu's confusion over the meanings
in Li Ho's poems may have been more a case of political expediency than actual lit-
erary puzzlement. See "Prefaces," pp. 258-59 and pp. 267-68. Whether he under-
stood the poems or not, he is not giving them a total endorsement.
67. Wada Toshio, "Ri Ga no kishi to sono keisei," Gumma daigaku kiyo jim-
bun kagaku hen (1956), 5(8):88-102.
68. From the tale ' T ' a n Chu" recorded in T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi (rpt. Taipei:
Hsin-hsing shu-chii, 1979), p. 1422.
69. My trans. Shen's poem can be found in Ch'uan T'ang shih, compiled
under the direction of the K'ang-hsi Emperor (r. 1661-1722) (rpt. Taipei: Ping-p'ing
ch'u-pan she, 1974), p. 5578.
70. My trans. For other English versions, see J. D. Frodsham, The Poems of
Li Ho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 30, and A. C. Graham, Poems of the
Late T'ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 113. For the last line of this poem,
there are several textual variants. I am following the Ch'uan T'ang shih text, which is
the commonest variant. For a list of all the variants in extant editions, see Ch'en Hung-
chih, Li Ch'ang-chi ko-shih chiao-shih (Master's Essay no. 132, Taiwan Normal Univer-
sity, 1969), p. 38. The question arises in this line because as it reads in the majority
of versions, there is no Final rhyme. Considering the simple diction and irregular lines
of this poem, it is possibly written to fit a musical form. Several Turkish patterns are
known to lack an end rhyme. See Ogawa Tamaki, "The Song of Ch'ih-le: Chinese
Translations of Turkic Folksongs and Their Influence on Chinese Poetry," Acta Asi-
atica (1960), 1:43-55.
MOCHIDA: STRUCTURING A SECOND CREATION 399

71. Ts'ao Chih, "Lo-shen fu," Wen hsuan, p. 256. For a translation see Bur-
ton Watson, Chinese Rhyme-prose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp.
55-60.
72. Sung pen yueh-fu shih chi, ed. Kuo Mao-ch'ien (rpt. Taipei: Shih-chieh
shu-chii, 1967), vol. 3, chuan 85, p. 9b.
73. One version of this story is found in the Sou-shen chi by Kan Pao, and
must have been known to Li Ho. See Yen-i chih-lin (rpt. Shanghai: Commercial Press,
1937), 4:9b-10a.
74. Li Shen, "Chen-niang mu shih h s u , " Ch'rnn Tang shih, p. 5484.
75. Yen Hsiu-ling (1617-1687) wrote: "Emperor Wu of Liang [wrote] 'Song
of Little Su' and this is 'Grave of Little Su.' The title is not the same and the atmo-
sphere is totally different, truly like the difference between the Prince of Ch'en's
'Rhapsody on the Lo River Goddess' and Ch'u Yuan's 'Mountain Spirit.' " Cited in
Ch'en Hung-chih, Li Ch'ang<hi, p. 39.
76. Edward Schafer, The Divine Woman (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973), pp. 38-40.
77. I have translated the word "consort" in the title of this poem as sin-
gular since Li Ho wrote a second similar poem apparently honoring the second of
Emperor Shun's wives. By T a n g times it seems that often the ladies were treated sep-
arately. Li Ho's literary patron Han Yu explained that although Wang I took "Hsiang
c h u n " to be the male god and "Hsiang fu-jen" to be the wives (in the "Nine Songs"),
it was his view that the two poems were to the two wives. Li Ho seems to be follow-
ing Han's line of reasoning. See Han Yu, "Huang-ling miao pei," Han Ch'ang-Ii wen-
chi chiao-chu, ed. Yang Chia-lo (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1972), p. 287.
78. My trans. From Ch'rnn Tang shih, p. 4401.
79. Liu Hsiang, Lieh-hsien chiian. Quoted by Li Shan in his commentary to
Chiang Yen, "Pan Chieh-yii," Wfn hsuan, p. 433.
80. My trans. Lu Chi, "Ni ku chin-jih liang yen hui," Wen hsuan, p. 423.
81. My trans. From Wan Shu, Tz'u-lii (rpt. Taipei: Kuang-wen shu-chu,
1971), chiian 4, p. 15b. For another translation see James J. Y. Liu, " S o m e Literary
Qualities of the Lyric," in Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, ed. Birch, p. 150.
82. Schafer, The Divine Woman, p. 40.
83. Frodsham, The Poems of Li Ho, p. 58.
84. One could perhaps take the southern maiden as a shamaness or a per-
sonification of the goddess, but in many T'ang and later poems, she is very often part
of the beautiful and enticing landscape. See examples of poems in Edward Schafer,
The Vermilion Bird: Tang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), pp. 83-86.
85. For a description of this locale, see Schafer, The Divine Woman, p. 67. I
have made use of his translation of the mountain's name.
86. Liu Hsin, "Hsi-ching tsa-chi," in Kuan<hung ts'ung-shu, ed. Sung
Lien-k'uei (rpt. Taipei: I-wen yin-shu kuan, 1970), vol. 3, chuan 1, p. 9b: " W h e n
Ch'ing An-shih was fifteen he was made a vice president under Ch'eng-ti. He
delighted in strumming the lute and he could play T h e Two Phoenixes Part from the
Simurgh.'"
87. See note 29.
88. Schafer, The Divine Woman, p. 16.
89. See "Cheng Shu-tsu chuan," Pei Ch'i shih (rpt. Taipei: Ting-wen shu-
chii, 1975), p. 398: "Shu-tsu could strum the lute. He created T e n Variations on the
Mochida: Structuring a Second Creation 400

Dragon's Moans.' He had dreamt of someone playing a lute, and obtained instruction
while asleep. At the time [these tunes] were considered truly sublime."
90. The "Princess of the Hsiang" and "Lady of the Hsiang."
91. Ch'uan Tang shih, p. 5525.
92. The term "Emperor's Child" comes from the first line of the "Nine
Songs" poem "Lady of the Hsiang": "The Emperor's child descends on the northern
shore."
93. Ch'uan T'ang shih, p. 4400.
94. For a discussion of possible sources for the sweet flag image, see Mi-
chael Fish, "Mythological Themes in the Poetry of Li Ho (791-817)" (Ph D diss., In-
diana University, 1973), p. 59.
95. Ko Hung, Shen-hsien chuan: "The Han Emperor Wu-ti ascended Hao-
kao. There was an immortal who said, 'I am the Man of Nine Uncertainties. I have
heard this peak has stone calamus. One inch has nine joints. To eat it is to gain long
life.'" Cited in Ch'en, Li Ch'ang-chi ko-shih chiao-shih, p. 67.
% . One popular source was the strange tales (or precursors common to
both) current among the men of his literary circle. This will be the subject of a forth-
coming essay.
97. Fish suggests a number of categories of mythological poems depend-
ing on the function of myth in each. In several, he finds allusions to secondary nar-
ratives, but because of the ambiguities and multiple meanings, he cautions that his
allegorical readings are at best tentative. "Mythological Themes," pp. 26-39.
98. Schafer, The Divine Woman, p. 106.
99. Chou Ch'eng-chen, Li Ho lun (Hong Kong: Culture Book House, 1971),
pp. 28-38.
100. Ch'uan T'ang shih, p. 4392. Translation by Frodsham, The Poems of Li
Ho, p. 11.
101. Chou Ch'eng-chen, Li Ho lun, pp. 32-33. Li Ho actually refers to Wu
Chih in his poem rather than to Wu Kang, but considering the context of the image
it seems to refer to the former, an adept punished with an unending task on the moon,
rather than the latter, a historical figure who served as a retainer of Ts'ao Chih. (Chih
was the courtesy name of Wu Kang as well as the first name of the retainer.)
102. From "Chin-t'ung hsien-jen tz'u Han ko," Ch'uan T'ang shih, p. 4403.
For English translations see Graham, Late T'ang, p. 106 and Frodsham, The Poems of
Li Ho, p. 65.
103. Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. 167-68.
104. ¡bid., p. 60.
105. Ibid., p. 25.
106. Ibid., p. 168.
107. Kao Yu-kung and Mei Tsu-lin, "Tu Fu's 'Autumn Meditations,' An
Exercise in Linguistic Criticism," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1968), 28:44.
108. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 168.

THE EXPRESSION OF SELF IN THE KUNG-AN SCHOOL:

NON-ROMANTIC INDIVIDUALISM
Jonathan Chaves
This work was made possible through the assistance of a research grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The findings and conclusions pre-
Chaves: Self in the Kung-an School 401

sented here do not necessarily represent the views of the Endowment. I would also
like to acknowledge the assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies.
1. For a good summation of the situation, see Lilian R. Fürst, Romanticism,
2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 1 ff.
2. Hung Ming-shui, "Yüan Hung-tao and the Late Ming Literary and In-
tellectual Movement," (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1974), p. 2.,
n. 5.
3. Frederick W. Mote, "Confucian Eremitism in the Yüan Period," in Con-
fucianism and Chinese Civilization, ed. Arthur F. Wright (New York: Atheneum, 1964),
pp. 252-90.
4. David Wright, ed., The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. xiii-xiv.
5. See Wm. Theodore de Bary, 'Individualism and Humani ta nanism in Late
Ming Thought," in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 188-225.
6. See James Cahill, The Restless Landscape: Chinese Painting of the Late Ming
Period (Berkeley: University of California Art Museum, 1971); James Cahill, Fantastics
and Eccentrics in Chinese Painting (New York: Asia House Gallery, 1967); and Wan-Ming
pien-hsing chu-i hua-chia tso-p'in chan (catalogue of an exhibition of late Ming painting,
Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1977).
7. Lilian R. Fürst, Romanticism in Perspectiv (London: Macmillan, 1969), p.
289.
8. Fürst, Romanticism in Perspective, pp. 128 and 331 (the trans, of this and
other passages from German is by Fürst).
9. Wright, English Romantic Verse, p. xxiii.
10. Quoted in ibtd., pp. 253-55.
11. Ibtd., p. xxiii.
12. Yüan Hung-tao, Yuan Chung-lang ch'iian-chi (1935; rpt. Taipei: Shih-chieh
shu-chü, 1964), "Shih-chi", p. 6. Trans, and commentary in Jonathan Chaves, Pilgrim
of the Clouds (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1978), pp. 62 63 (hereafter cited as
Pilgrim).
13. See Yüan Hung-tao, "Yu-chi," p. 24 (trans, in Pilgrim, p. 97).
14. T'ao Wang-ling, Hsieh-an chi (1610; rpt. Taipei: Wei-wen, 1976), 1:181
84.
15. Tao-te ching, chap. 5; trans. Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (1934;
rpt. New York: Grove, n.d.), p. 147.
16. Yüan Hung-tao, "Shih-chi," p. 130.
17. Fürst, Romanticism in Perspective, p. 58.
18. Dragoslav Srejovif, Europe's First Monumental Sculpture: New Discoveries
at Lepenski Vir (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 103.
19. Jonathan Chaves, "Some Relationships Between Poetry and Painting
in China," Renditions (1976), no. 6, p. 91.
20. Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1961), p. 17.
21. Yüan Hung-tao, "Ch'ih-tu," pp. 36-37.
22. Huang Hui, Huang T'ai-shih i<h'un fang i-kao (1604; rpt. Taipei: Wei-
Wen, 1976), pp. 163-67.
23. Chiang Ying-k'o (Chiang Chin-chih), Hsüeh-t'ao hsiao-shu (rpt. Shang-
hai: Chung-yang shu-tíen, 1948), pp. 11-12.
24. Quoted in Fürst, Romanticism in Perspective, p. 71.
Chaves: Self in the Kung-an School 402

25. Yuan Hung-tao, "Ch'ih-tu," p. 57.

26. Yuan Hung-tao, "Ch'ih-tu," p. 9 (trans, in Pilgrim, p. 73).
27. See Furst, Romanticism in Perspective, pp. 120 ff.
28. Quoted in ibid., p. 137.
29. Quoted in ibid., p. 161.
30. Vincent Yu-chung Shih, trans., The Literary Mind and the Carving of
Dragons, bilingual ed. (Taipei: Chung Hwa, 1970), p. 216.
31. Quoted in Furst, Romanticism in Perspective, pp. 148—49.
32. Quoted in Chang Chung-yuan, Original Teachings of Ck'an Buddhism (New
York: Vintage, 1971), p. 149.
33. Quoted in Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 18.
34. Lin-tsung is the tzu of Kuo T'ai (128-169) of the Eastern Han Dynasty.
According to his official biography, he was so greatly admired that when one corner
of his headcloth drooped down in a rainstorm, the headcloth with a drooping comer
became fashionable. Wang Kung (d. 398) of the Chin Dynasty used to walk through
the snow wearing a robe of crane down. When an admirer saw him, the admirer sighed
and said "This is truly an immortal among men!" As for Cheng Tz'u, a man of this
name who obtained his chin-shih degree in 1385 is recorded in the Ming shih (Ming
History). But Chiang may have in mind Cheng Ch'ung of the Han Dynasty, whose
official biography says that when he appeared in court he would "always shuffle in
wearing straw sandals. The emperor would smile and say, i hear the sound of Sec-
retary Cheng coming!'" Juan Hsiian is Juan Hsiu (tzu Hsiian-tzu, c. 270-312) of the
Chin Dynasty, who had no provisions at home and yet was content. He would hang
a few coins from the tip of his cane, go to a wine shop, and get completely drunk.
35. Chiang, Hsiieh-t'ao hsiao-shu, pp. 3—4.
36. Ibid., p. 5.
37. James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1962), pp. 84-85.
38. From one of Yiian's travel essays; see Yuan Hung-tao, "Yu-chi," p. 32
(trans, in Pilgrim, pp. 107-8).
39. Quoted in Furst, Romanticism, p. 7.
40. See S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (New York: Dutton, 1971), pp.
267-68.
41. Yuan Hung-tao, "Ch'ih-tu," pp. 19-20 (more extensive trans, in Pil-
grim, pp. 16-17).
42. Yuan Tsung-tao, Yuan Po-hsiu ch'iian-chi, Chung-kuo wen-hsueh chen-pen
ts'ung-shu, ser. 1, no. 14 (Shanghai: Tsa-chih kung-ssu, 1936), p. 104.
43. Yuan Chung-tao, K'o-hsiieh chai shih-chi wen-chi (Shanghai: Chung-yang
shu-tien, 1936), "Shih-chi," p. 242.
44. Yuan Chung-tao, K'o-hsiieh chai, p. 1 after title page.
45. Yuan Chung-tao, "Wen-chi," p. 25.
46. Ibid., p. 31.
47. Ibid., pp. 45—46.
48. For a detailed discussion of this matter, see Jonathan Chaves, Mei Yao-
ch'en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press,
1976), chapter 3, esp. pp. 75-76.
49. Yuan Hung-tao, "Wen-ch'ao," p. 6.
50. Quoted in Furst, Romanticism in Perspective, pp. 245 and 345-46.
SWATEK: THE SELF IN CONFLICT 403

51. Quoted in Furst, Romanticism in Perspective, p. 245.

52. See Pilgrim, pp. 20 and 27.
53. Hung, p. 165.
54. Yuan Hung-tao, "Shih-chi," pp. 6-7.
55. Pien Kung, Pien Hua-ch'uan chi (1538; rpt. Taipei: Wei-wen, 1976), p.
59; Chu 1-tsun, Ming shih tsung (1705; rpt. Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chu, 1962), chuan 31,
pp. 13a-b; and Shen Te-ch'ien and Chou Chun, Ming shih pieh-ts'ai (1738; rpt. Hong
Kong: Commercial Press, 1961), p. 81.
56. Yuan Hung-tao, "Shih-chi," p. 37 (trans, and discussion in Pilgrim, pp.
35 and 23-24 respectively).
57. See Chiang, pp. 69-117.
58. Hung, "Yuan Hung-tao," p. 99.
59. Pilgrim, pp. 110-12 and 132-34 respectively.
60. Watson, Chrnng Tzu, p. 187.

T H E SELF IN C O N F L I C T : P A R A D I G M S
O F C H A N G E IN A T ' A N G L E G E N D
Catherine Swatek
1. For Chang's biography see L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang,
eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University, 1976), 1:63-64.
2. Kondo Haruo, in his analysis of the tale, observes that the value of the
tale consists in its depiction of the fictional characters rather than the historical ones—
an opinion he shares with Hu Shih. See Tddai shOsetsu no kenkyu (Tokyo: Kasama shoin,
1978), p. 314.
3. The events depicted in the T'ang tale were a popular subject for drama,
especially in the Ming. In addition to Chang"s play, there are references to plays about
Red Whisk by Chang T'ai-ho (now lost), Meng Ch'eng-shun (also lost), Ling Meng-
ch'u, and Feng Meng-lung, among others. See Chuang I-fu, Ku-tien hsi-ch'ii ts'un-mu
hui-k'ao (Shanghai: Ku-chi ch'u-pan she, 1982), pp. 901, 975, 492-94, and 969-70, re-
spectively. None of these plays is likely to have influenced Chang's dramatization of
the T'ang tale. See Jao Tsung-i's discussion of this point in his " 'Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan'
k'ao," Ta-lu tsa<hih (January 15, 1959), 18(1):4.
4. For an English translation of the tale, see Wolfgang Bauer and Herbert
Franke, eds., The Golden Casket: Chinese Novellas of Two Millennia (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1965), pp. 126-135. A thoroughly annotated text can be found in Chang Yu-
ho, T'ang Sung ch'uan-ch'i hsuan (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsueh ch'u-pan she, 1979), pp.
124-30.
5. The anecodote is preserved in a Ch'ing anthology, which attributes it to
a lost Sung work, Kuo-t'ing lu, by Fan Kung-ch'eng. It purports to narrate events in
Li Ching's life before he achieved fame serving Li Shih-min's cause. It begins as fol-
lows: "At the time when Li Ching was living in obscurity, he was very poor. He lived
in a wealthy household in the Northern commandery. One day [Li] Ching stole a
maidservant from the house and ran away. He traveled until nightfall, and sought
shelter at an inn. After having finished his meal, he was washing his feet by the gate.
He saw an old man with a yellow beard sitting to one side. He looked at him care-
fully; his expression was out of the ordinary. Ching was afraid that someone from his
patron's household would catch him and wished to avoid the old man. After a while,
Swatek: The Self in Conflict 404

he took a man's head out of a leather sack, cut it in pieces and ate it. [His manner of
eating] was very leisurely. Ching found it strange and asked him about it. The old
man replied, 'Now the empire is greatly disturbed; you should pacify it, but there is
a man above you. If that man dies, then you should become emperor. You can come
with me to look for him'. . . ." The anecdote is reprinted from the Ch'ing collection
by Chiang Jui-tsao in his Hui-yin hsiao-shuo k'ao-cheng (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu
kuan, 1919), p. 71.
6. There is no consensus among scholars as to which version is the earlier.
For two discussions of the tale's evolution and authorship, see Wang Pi-ch'iang, Tang-
jen hsiao-shuo (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-chi ch'u-pan she, 1978), pp. 178-84, and Kondo,
Tddai shosetsu, pp. 310-13. Wang includes the text preserved in the Tao-tsang in his
notes. For reasons having to do with the tale's ideological evolution (discussed later)
I believe that the T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi text represents a reworked version of the text
preserved in the Tao-tsang (or some lost version very close to it).
7. For a discussion of the hsia in T'ang fiction, see Kondo, Tddai shosetsu,
pp. 73-80.
8. "She knew that [Yang] Su was in peril and did not have long to live.
Abandoning Su, she fled to [Li] Ching."
9. The action moves back and forth between countryside and capital, a
movement which suggests that the two apparently distinct spheres (of wild hinter-
land and civilized court) are in fact interrelated. Thus, for example, Curly Beard (the
outsider) is revealed as possessing a villa in the capital, while Yang Su, the acting
ruler, is so rude (i.e., "barbaric") that he is incapable of observing the prescribed rit-
ual. Li Shih-min, whose base is well outside the capital (at Tai-yiian), eventually makes
the Sui capital the seat of his new dynasty.
10. Curly Beard uses this language in referring to Li Shih-min.
11. This point is made explicitly by Curly Beard's companion, when after
seeing Li Shih-min he says to Curly Beard, "This world is not your world; you must
go elsewhere. Be firm, and don't take this too much to heart."
12. On two occasions these meals are marked by the phrase huan-tso ("seated
in a circle"), as if to draw attention to their communal nature.
13. "It was not to be found in the households of kings and nobles, but
was like a feast in an immortal's dwelling."
14. Kondo, Tddai shosetsu, pp. 314-15. The tale's ideological overtones are
also discussed, largely with reference to the Mandate concept, in Liu K'ai-jung, T'ang-
tai hsiao-shuo yen-chiu (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu kuan, 1955), pp. 208-15.
15. See Anna K. Seidel, "The Image of the Perfect Ruler in Early Taoist
Messianism: Lao-tzu and Li Hung," History of Religions (November-February 1969-
70), 9(2-3):216-47 for the Taoist connotations of the word pu, which I feel are relevant
to the tale. I have used her word ("coadjutor") in translating pu.
16. The authors of the tale reveal a concern with prophecy (or prognosti-
cation) and its proper interpretation—a concern important to any ruling dynasty. It is
Curly Beard who bears witness to the coming of the True Lord (Li Shih-min), a role
analogous to that of Master Yellow Stone in the popular accounts of the founding of
the Han dynasty. See note 29.
17. The matter of beards is a complicated one. See discussions in Kondo,
Tddai shosetsu, p. 31; Wang, T'ang-jen hsiao-shuo, pp. 183-84, and Jao Tsung-i, " 'Ch'iu-
jan-k'o chuan' k'ao," pp. 2-3. Numerous commentators have been struck by the fre-
quent mention of Li Shih-min's curly beard (ch'iu-hsii) in the sources and have noted
SWATEK: T H E SELF IN CONFLICT 405

its prominence in this tale, but they have refrained from speculating on the possibility
of an implied link between the two men (or else have denied any such link). Without
rehearsing the arguments, I simply note some reasons for seeing a link: the similarity
in the terms used for each man's beard, curliness (which connotes foreignness—Li
Shih-min was part Turk), and redness, a feature of Curly Beard's beard that is explic-
itly mentioned in the tale. Red beard calls to mind Yellow Beard, who as we have
seen has associations with a well known figure from legends about the founding of
the Han dynasty. These legends came to be associated with Li Shih-min's rise to power.
18. For Li Shih-min's ancestry, see Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank,
eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3, part 1, Sui and Tang China, 589-906, ed.
Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 188.
19. Another physical detail which may be intended to link the two figures
in the reader's mind is their mode of dress. When we first meet Li Shih-min he is
wearing a kind of undergarment consisting of a tunic and fur vest (hsi-ch'iu); Curly
Beard is similarly attired when he receives Li Ching and Hung-fu at his villa in the
capital. These details are preserved in both versions of the tale. Curly Beard's identi-
fication with Li Shih-min is further reinforced because of both men's close ties to Li
Ching and Hung-fu.
20. I.e., the canonical "five relationships" (wu-lun). These are the relation-
ship of ruler to subject, of father to son, of husband to wife, of elder sibling to younger
sibling, and of friend to friend. In the fa-chi story it is the last of these relationships
that is emphasized, the horizontal bond between sworn brothers competing with the
hierarchical relationships sanctioned in orthodox ideology. In the case of this tale I
believe we find an attempt to represent the transformation of horizontal bonds into
hierarchical ones as the rebellion succeeds. Even as the heroic fellowship forms, the
embryonic "orthodox" relationships are indicated by the particular affinities within
the heroic group (i.e., of ruler-subject in the case of Li Shih-min and Li Ching, of
husband-wife in the case of Li Ching and Hung-fu, of older brother and younger sis-
ter in the case of Curly Beard and Hung-fu).
21. Yang Su was in fact a kinsman of the Sui emperor. See Peter A. Bood-
berg, "Marginalia to the Histories of the Northern Dynasties: The Rise and Fall of the
House of Yang," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1939), 4:263 and n. 157.
22. Additional indications of the fabulous are Curly Beard's ability to pro-
duce vast sums of money (on the occasion of the interview between Li Ching, Curly
Beard and his mysterious Taoist companion in the wineshop, and again when the
couple pay a visit to Curly Beard's villa). The manner of describing Curly Beard's villa
resembles that used to describe the dwelling place of immortals. Such descriptions are
conventionally used in Chinese narrative to describe mundane opulence. But the trope
is deliberately enhanced from the simpler to the more elaborate version of the tale, as
if to call attention to Curly Beard's otherworldliness.
23. The motif of cannibalism is found in other tales of knight errantry in-
volving blood vendettas. For blood sacrifices and Taoism, see note 30. The passage
from the anecdote is translated in note 5.
24. In the T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi version of the tale, Curly Beard's final in-
junction to Li Ching and Hung-fu is linked to his earlier vendetta against the faithless
man through the mention, in both contexts, of a ten-year interval of time—as if to
imply the threat of retribution if faith is broken. A concern with how to enforce loy-
alty among erstwhile comrades-in-arms may be reflected in this redaction of the story.
25. For a richly suggestive study of early Taoist sectarian ideology, see Sei-
Sxvatek: The Self in Conflict 406

del, " T h e Perfect Ruler." See pp. 216-21 for a discussion of imperial ideology and
Taoist religion in Han times.
26 See Seidel, ' T h e Perfect Ruler," p. 244.
27. Kondo notes the views of those who feel that the tale was written to
bolster the prestige of the Sung ruling family, but himself feels that the tale dates
from the latter years of the T a n g ; see Todai shosetsu, p. 314. The interpretation of the
tale offered here (that it reflects propagandist aims sympathetic to the T a n g ruling
family) would be consistent with a date of composition early in the dynasty, but since
it is impossible to date the various versions accurately, my point must remain moot.
Clearly a great deal of lore accumulated concerning the rise of Li Shih-min to power
(see, for example the number of entries about Li Ching and Li Shih-min in the T'ai-
p'ing kuang-chi). The challenge is one of determining whether the handling of this lore
is sympathetic or hostile in a given instance.
28. For the importance of both the Chang and Li surnames in Taoist sec-
tarian movements and messianic literature, especially during the founding of the T a n g
dynasty, see Seidel's "The Perfect Ruler." Tu Kuang-t'ing, the man credited with the
version of the tale preserved in the Tao-tsang, also wrote a preface to one of the major
texts of Taoist messianic literature. See Seidel, " T h e Perfect Ruler," p. 238 and n. 72.
29. The Master of the Yellow Stone has been identified with Huang-lao
Taoism, about which see Seidel, " T h e Perfect Ruler," p. 228. The key word here is
"yellow," a word rich with Utopian associations, and which links "Yellow Beard" with
Master Yellow Stone. By the same token, should the yellow-bearded stranger be iden-
tified with the land of "Great C h ' i n " (Ta Ch'in), a Utopian land of flaxen-haired peo-
ple? Whatever the ancient Utopian associations bound up in the Chang Liang legend,
by the sixth century nostalgia for the Han Dynasty was so deep-rooted that it came
to be viewed as an age of perfect virtue, so that legends about its founding came to
have a Utopian cast. See ibid., p. 246.
30. For example, forms of "blood sacrifice" (yin-ssu) discussed in Rolf A.
Stein, "Religious Taoism and Popular Religion from the Second to the Seventh Cen-
turies," in Facets of Taoism, ed. Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979), pp. 57 ff.
31. See note 3. The version of Chang's play which I have used is that found
in Ku-pen hsi-ch'ii ts'ung-k'an (ch'u-chi), which preserves a late Ming edition of the text.
32. Chou I-pai, in his discussion of Ling Meng-ch'u's tsa chu, Shih yitig-hsiung
Hung-fu mang-tse p'ei, classifies it together with the more famous story about Ssu-ma
Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chun as "tales of elopment" (ssu-pen). See his Ming-jen tsa-
chu hsuan (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsiieh ch'u-pan she, 1958), pp. 752-53. The classifi-
cation may be Chou's, reflecting his feeling that plays about elopement have thematic
elements in common.
33. In the play Chang devotes four scenes (14, 17, 19, and 20) to the situ-
ation back in Yang Su's camp after Hung-fu's departure and devotes approximately
the last third of the play (from scene 22 onward) to events passed over in the tale:
notably Li Ching's departure to win glory in the campaigns for the throne, his en-
counter with Li Yuan (T'ang Kao-tsu) and near execution, his rescue by Li Shih-min,
rapid promotion, and his military victories. In the meantime, Hung-fu is forced to flee
the capital and seek refuge from invading Turks. Increasingly lonely and anxious, she
waits for Li Ching's return and wonders if he will forget her in his hour of glory. A
summary of the play can be found in the appendix to the article. Jao Tsung-i dis-
SWATEK: T H E S E L F IN CONFLICT 407

cusses the historical sources which Chang drew upon in his " 'Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan'
k'ao." See also Chiang Jui-tsao, Hui-yin hsiao-shuo. pp. 71, 534-37.
34. For a discussion of reconciliation scenes in ch'uan-ch'i plays see Jean
Mulligan, trans., The Lute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 6 - 7 .
35. In the tale, when Hung-fu flees to Li Ching she tells him that "the
creeping vine does not grow alone, but attaches itself to a tall tree." This language is
preserved in the play. See Chang Yu-ho, T'ang Sung ch'uan-ch'i hsuan, p. 124, n. 18.
36. At one point Li Ching laments that people will compare their actions
with those of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju and Cho Wen-chun, and denies that they are moti-
vated by passion (scene 18.1b). In an aria immediately following Li's Hung-fu com-
ments that people must take her for a faithless and flirtatious woman. The couple
then lament that their motives will be misunderstood.
37. This comes out in scene 5, where Yang invites his two favorites, Hung-
fu and the princess, to sing and dance for him and drink to the autumn moon.
38. Scene 3.8a.
39. Scene 10.3b and 3a, respectively. In her reference to lute song Hung-
fu is pointedly distinguishing herself from Cho Wen-chun, who was attracted to Ssu-
ma Hsiang-ju by his lute playing.
40. Scene 8.23b-24a. In both Hung-fu's aria and Li Ching's poem the lan-
guage has erotic overtones. Hung-fu's reference to her "feelings" (i) can be taken as
referring either to her heroic purpose or her passionate attraction to Li. Li's allusion
in line three of his poem to the sun's appearing contains a pun on the word for "sunny"
(ch'ing), which is a homophone for "feelings" (ch'ing). I am indebted to Mr. Li Yao-
chung for pointing this out to me.
41. The scene of Hung-fu and Li Ching's tryst is quite decorous, but the
scene-concluding poem which they sing together as they prepare to take flight has
erotic overtones, in particular the last couplet: 'This night, after a long drought, sweet
rain / Another day in another place, old friends will meet." See scene 10.5b.
42. At the scene in the inn Hung-fu unwinds her tresses of hair and strips
them of the remaining traces of fragrance, resolving to adopt a more rustic appear-
ance. Her mood is expressed in her aria: "Dark clouds lifted, / half-streaked with dust;
/ The oil's fragrance still lingers. / I knit my brows—no lover now will paint them; /
No flowers of fine gold will trim my hair. / No rouge or powder will I put on. . . .
My rustic garb has a charm of its own; / yet I fear my radiance will arouse men's
passion." Scene 12.8b.
43. Scene 12.10a.
44. The story can be found in Meng Ch'i (fl. 886), Pen-shih shih, pp. l a - l b .
See Ku-shih wen-fang hsiao-shuo (SPTK ed.).
45. This is the opinion of James J. Y. Liu and most Chinese critics. See his
The Chinese Knight-Errant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 184. T a n
Cheng-pi defends Chang's conception in his discussion of the play in his Ch'u-hai li-
ts'e (Che-chiang jen-min ch'u-pan she, 1983). See p. 157.
46. Scene 3.8b-9a.
47. Scene 14.16b.
48. In the story the princess and Hsu make a pact to seek each other out
by having the princess offer to sell her half of the mirror for a fabulous sum. But in
the play, as the princess says to Yang, "I have in the past observed your Excellency's
laws; I dared not secretly sell this mirror." See scene 17.28b.
Swatek: The Self in Conflict 408

49. Scene 19.5a, 6a. Note how Hsu echoes Hung-fu's earlier "escape" aria.
Here the significance of the walls and gates encircling Yang's camp is reversed: they
bar Hsu's entry, frustrating his desire to return from his years of wandering in exile.
50. For the poem, which is from Meng Ch'i's story, see scene 20.11b. The
aria follows on p. 12a.
51. It may be objected that this reading is forced since the princess is not
free to choose between the two men. But given the instability of the political order
and her borderline status in the play, words such as "old" and " n e w " have an am-
bivalence that seems deliberate on the author's part.
52. See scenes 3, 4, 13, and 19, in which Hung-fu, Li Ching, and Curly
Beard sing variously of their desire to sweep away the smoke and dirt that fills the
world, so that once again they can see the heavens.
53. See above, n. 45.
54. The operative phrase is i-fu wang-en. The princess' language echoes that
used by Hung-fu two scenes earlier, when she and Li Ching are returning to the cap-
ital. There Hung-fu bemoans the fact that her reactions have been misunderstood;
"They say . . . I am tolerant of ingratitude and disloyalty; they take me for a wanton
woman." Scene 18.2a. For the princess' speech, see scene 20.11b.
55. In the version of the story given by Meng Ch'i the princess gets news
of Hsu Te-yen's return and, weeping, refuses to eat. "When [Yang] Su knew of her
actions he was mortified; he immediately summoned [Hsu] Te-yen and returned his
wife to him. All who heard of it sighed in admiration." See Pen-shih shih, p. lb.
56. When Hung-fu tries to persuade a hesitant Li to run away with her
she tells him that Yang is "a rustic boor, unable to pick out the unique beauty from
the crowd." Scene 10.5a-5b.
57. Scene 17.25a. Yang Su's poem is lifted from the T'ang tale "Liu-shih
chuan." See Chang Yu-ho, T'ang Sung ch'uan-ch'i hsiian, pp. 16-22. The "Chang-t"ai
willow" refers to the heroine of the story who lives in the T'ang capital, Ch'ang-an,
and in the story the' poem is sent to her by her absent lover, who fears he will never
see her again. The source of this poem was pointed out to me by Mr. Li Yao-chung.
58. Scene 17.25a-b.
59. A glance at the marginal comments in my text of Chang's play sug-
gests that I am not in agreement with the commentator (who, it is claimed, is the
playwright T'ang Hsien-tsu). For example, T'ang finds heroic ardor in arias which I
find despairing or resigned (a case in point is Curly Beard's aria in scene 21.16b,
discussed below). Feng Meng-lung, however, frequently comments on how unheroic
Chang's characters seem in his commentary to his own revision of Hung-fu chi. His
Nu chang-fu can be found in his collected plays, Mo-han chili ting-pen ch'uan<h'i (Pe-
king: Chung-kuo hsi-chii ch'u-pan she, 1960), vol. 1, complete with marginal com-
mentary.
60. Scene 21.16b.
61. Scene 34.24b.
62. Scene 31.13b.
63. See scene 34. Hsu's receipt of Hung-fu's whisk and his later return of
it to her are strikingly symbolic: in the first instance, of his recommitment to action
(exchanging broken mirror for whisk), in the second instance, of Hung-fu's renewed
appreciation of the value of loyalty with Li Ching's return to her. By play's end the
whisk, borne by Hsii, is the tally betokening Li's good faith (much as the broken mir-
ror was for the princess and Hsu Te-yen).
HANAN: THE FICTION OF MORAL DUTY 409

64. Sec Andrew H. Plaks, 'Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narra-

tive," in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Plaks (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1977), p. 339.
65. Her function in the tale is that of a catalyst; she facilitates the meeting
of the potentially hostile heroes, then fades into the background.
66. See Seidel, "The Perfect Ruler," p. 244. I wish to acknowledge my
gratitude to the editors of this volume for pointing out the interest of the T'ang ruling
family in Taoism—especially sectarian Taoism—which I did not examine in an earlier
draft of this paper and which is clearly of great significance.
67. The anecdote preserved in the Kuo-t'ing lu is quite free of moralizing
commentary, as is the version of the tale found in the Tao-tsang.
68. Frederick Mote has discussed a new emphasis on loyalty in the Sung
and Yüan periods, and his observations are relevant for the Ming as well. See "Con-
fucian Eremetism in the Yüan Period," in The Confucian Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp. 206-8 and 229-32.
69. See Wm. Theodore de Bary, "Individualism and Humanitananism in
Late Ming Thought," in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. de Bary (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1970), pp. 145-247.

THE FICTION OF M O R A L DUTY: THE

V E R N A C U L A R S T O R Y IN T H E 1640S
Patrick Hanan
1. See Cheng Chen-to, "Ming Ch'ing erh-tai ti p'ing-hua chi," in his Chung-
kuo wen-hsueh yen-chiu (Peking: Tso-chia, 1957), pp. 438-39. There are three extant edi-
tions of Illusions, none of which is complete. One, formerly in Cheng's possession
and now in the Peking Library, contains stories 1-7. Another, under the title San-k'e
P'ai-an ching-ch'i, is preserved in Peking University Library; it contains twenty-nine
stories. The third is the so-called "variant edition" of the Erh-k'e P'ai-an ching-ch'i that
is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale; it contains twenty-four Illusions stories, to-
gether with ten from the Erh-k'e P'ai-an ching-ch'i proper. See Liu Hsiu-yeh, Ku-tien
hsiao-shuo hsi-ch'ü ts'ung-k'ao (Peking: Tso-chia, 1958), pp. 48-57, for a comparison of
the last two editions. The Bibliothèque Nationale edition carries a commentary by the
publisher Lu Yün-lung and his friends, men whose pseudonyms are found together
with Lu's name on two novels published in 1628 and 1629. (This fact appears to throw
a little doubt on the tentative 1643 dating of Illusions.) Lu's relationship to the author
is unclear; the variant edition lists numerous editors and commentators, but no Meng-
chüeh tao-jen (Awakened from a Dream). Meng-chiieh tao-jen has not been identi-
fied. The pseudonym was used by several people, including a playwright named Wang
Kucwrhu; see Ch'ii-hai tsung-mu t'i-yao (Peking: Jen-min, 1959), 26.1249. References to
Illusions in this essay are to the edition in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the only edition
I have been able to examine at length.
2. See my Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1981), chapters 4 - 7 , for an account of the vernacular story in the 1620s and
1630s. The same morality is found in some previous writers, but not in so focused or
exclusive a form.
3. See the copy preserved in the Naikaku Bunko. It is a handsome edition,
with illustrations by famous Hangchow engravers. (Absurdly, the title-page attributes
Hanan: The Fiction of Moral Duty 410

the work to Li Chih.) Sun K'ai-ti, in his Chung-kuo t'ung-su hsiao-shuo shu-mu (rev. ed.,
Peking: Tso-chia, 1957), p. 113, gives the title as Ch'i-shih-erh ch'ao ssu-shu jen-wu yen-
i. Although I cannot see this title anywhere in the book, it correctly describes the con-
tents.
4. There is a Ming edition in the Naikaku Bunko. References here are to
the m o d e m edition (Shanghai: Shang-hai tsa-chih kung-ssu, 1936).
5. O n their editions, now in the Lu-ta Municipal Library, see Sun K'ai-ti,
jih-pen Tung-ching so-chien Chung-kuo hsiao-shuo shu-mu (rev. ed., Peking: Jen-min, 1958),
pp. 192-94. Sun includes synopses of the Yuan-yang chen stories. The Yiian-yang chen
was reissued in a limited, mimeographed edition by the Tung-pei People's University
in 1957. I have examined only the first story.
6. T w o editions exist, both incomplete. One, formerly in Cheng Chen-to's
possession and now in the Peking Library, contains stories, 1, 2, 7, 8, 13, and 14. The
other, in the Anhui Museum, contains stories 1 - 8 . Lu Kung, comp., Ming Ch'ing p'ing-
hua hsiao-shuo hsuan (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsiieh, 1958), reprints stories 6, 7, and 8
from the Anhui edition, and supplies what information we have about the author,
presumably taken from the preface. Yii Lin was one of Lu Yuri-lung's names, as can
be seen from a seal following his preface (dated 1631) to the Chu-chi sou. In their Ku-
pen p'ing-hua hsiao-shuo chi (Peking: Jen-min wen-hsiieh, 1984), Lu Kung and T'an T i e n
give the author as Lu Yun-lung.
7. T h e original fine edition is preserved in Peking Library. References here
are to the modern edition (Shanghai: Shang-hai ku-tien wen-hsiieh, 1956).
8. A copy of the original edition is preserved in the Naikaku Bunko. The
preface begins: " F o r what cause shall the heart's hot blood be shed, if not for one's
country?" T h e introduction places loyalty above the other Confucian virtues. The
comment on chapter 7 stresses the taking of responsibility, while the comments on
chapters 3 and 26 stress dying for one's country. In his preface, Lu appears to at-
tribute the work to his younger brother. Note that Lu's Trawler's Companion (Hsing-
chi pi-hsi), of which the Naikaku Bunko has a copy, contains an advertisement solic-
iting certain kinds of documents for publication. Materials are to be sent to his
Hangchow address care of his younger brother Jen-lung. Perhaps Jen-lung wrote the
Records.
9. The Harvard-Yenching Library has a 1637 edition.
10. See 21 and 27 on writers, 22 on Mo Tzu, and 29 and 33 on hermits.
No. 15 is an admiring account of the brothers Po I and Shu Ch'i.
11. Stories 25 and 24, respectively.
12. Story 28.
13. Story 11.
14. Story 34.
15. See story 17.
16. The allusion is to the anecdote in the Chan-kuo ts'e about Po Le, the
expert on horses, who wept when he saw a noble horse pulling a salt cart.
17. T h e " S c e n e s " are taken from earlier literature. Chou Chi is heavily de-
pendent on historical and fictional sources, which he sometimes copies almost with-
out change. In this respect, his practice contrasts sharply with that of the authors of
Alarum Bell and Sobering Stone. Despite his condescension toward fiction and drama,
Chou makes frequent allusion to both, to Shui-hu chuan and Hsi-yu chi, as well as to
Hsi-hsiang chi (both the Chin medley and the Yuan play) and Mu-tan t'ing. He as-
sumes a complete familiarity with this last work.
HESSNEY: BEYOND BEAUTY AND TALENT 411

18. For an analysis of the structure of the Chou Chi story, see Charles J.
Wivell, Adaptation and Coherence in Late Ming Short Vernacular Fiction: A Study of the
Second West Lake Collection (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1969).
19. Story 3 of the former is set in the beginning of the Hung-kuang period,
i.e., in 1644; see Sun K'ai-ti, Jih-pen Tung-ching so-chien hsiao-shuo shu-mu, p. 153. At
one point in story 1, the author introduces a personal note, remarking that, like the
hero of the story, he is also a penniless licentiate.
20. See Ming Ch'ing p'ing-hua hsiao-shuo hsüan, p. 84.
21. See pp. 15, 28.
22. P. 61.
23. Translated by Tai-loi Ma as "The Henpecked Judge Who Loses a Gov-
ernorship" in Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., Tradional Chinese Stories, Themes
and Variations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 325-35.
24. Originally from the Hsüan shih chih, it appears as "Jen-hu chuan" in
the Ku-chin shuo-hai and "Li Cheng" in the Tai-p'ing kuang-chi (427). For the historical
bases of stories 4, 8, and 12, see Tu Lien-che, "Ming-jen hsiao-shuo chi tang-tai ch'i-
wen pen-shih chü-li," Ch'ing-hua hsüeh-pao, n.s. (1969), 7(2):156-75.
25. See pp. 141, 213, and 229, respectively.
26. P. 197.
27. The parallels with post-1949 fiction in China, another literature which
defines the moral self in terms of social duty, will readily occur to the reader.

BEYOND BEAUTY A N D TALENT: THE MORAL

A N D C H I V A L R I C S E L F I N THE FORTUNATE UNION
Richard C. Hessney
1. Chinese critics have traditionally discussed The Fortunate Union together
with scholar-beauty romances (ts'ai-tzu chia-jen hsiao-shuo), a genre or subgenre of ap-
proximately fifty romances from the early Ch'ing period (c. 1650-c. 1730). However,
it is more of a chivalric romance because it stresses the themes of Confucian morality
and selfless friendship to a much greater degree than well-known scholar-beauty ro-
mances like Yu Chiao Li and P'ing Shan Leng Yen (titles consisting of the protagonists'
names). This is apparent from the alternate title of the romance, A Tale of Chivalry and
Love (Hsia-i feng yueh chuan).
In my use of the terms "chivalry" and "knight errantry" in this article, I
do not imply an equivalence to their meaning and usage in the West. Similarities be-
tween Chinese and European chivalry are outweighed by important differences, the
chief among them being that Chinese knights errant did not constitute a separate so-
cial class, support a religious institution like the Roman Catholic Church, and adhere
to an elaborate, self-humbling code of courtly love. For a full treatment of chivalry
and knight errantly in China, see James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967), esp. pp. 193-208.
The Confucian orientation of The Fortunate Union is also reflected in its title
and the author's pseudonym. The hao-ch'iu of Hao-ch'iu chuan, meaning a "good match,"
is an allusion to the first poem of the Book of Songs (Shih ching) entitled " 'Fair, Fair'
Cry the Ospreys" ("Kuan-kuan chu-chiu"). The opening stanza ends with the cou-
plet, "Lovely is this noble lady / Fit bride for our lord" ("Yao-fiao shu-nu / Chun-
tzu hao-ch'iu") (trans. Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, 1937; rpt. New York: Grove
Hessney: Beyond Beauty and Talent 412

Press, I960, p. 81). The author's pseudonym is Ming-chiao-chung-jen (Man of the

Teaching of Names), who has not been identified. The Teaching of Names (ming-chiao)
is linked to Confucianism because of Confucius' emphasis on the rectification of names
(cheng-ming). Most scholars date the earliest extant edition of The Fortunate Union to
1683. The romance probably does not antedate the founding of the Ch'ing dynasty in
1645. For more on its dating and authorship, see Richard C. Hessney, "Beautiful, Tal-
ented, and Brave: Seventeenth-Century Chinese Scholar-Beauty Romances" (Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 1979), pp. 24-27.
2. By " s e l f " I mean the totality of elements—physical characteristics, feel-
ings, thoughts, deeds, etc.—that make up the identity and individuality of a person.
This definition includes Freudian notions of the id, the ego, and the superego, which
can be viewed as comprising the psychological, but by no means complete, self.
3. Arthur F. Wright, "Values, Roles, and Personalities," in Confucian Per-
sonalities, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1962), pp. 9-10. The rest of this paragraph restates Wright's observa-
tions.
4. Arthur F.. Wright has extracted a list of Confucian attitudes and behav-
ior patterns from the Analects (Lun-yu). Since the hero and heroine of The Fortunate
Union exhibit most of them, 1 quote them here: "(1) submissiveness to authority—
parents, elders, and superiors; (2) submissiveness to the mores and norms (li); (3)
reverence for the past and respect for history; (4) love of traditional learning; (5) es-
teem for the force of example; (6) primacy of broad moral cultivation over specialized
competence; (7) preference for nonviolent moral reform in state and society; (8) pru-
dence, caution, and preference for a middle course; (9) noncompetitiveness; (10) cour-
age and sense of responsibility for a great tradition; (11) self-respect (with some per-
missible self-pity) in adversity; (12) exclusiveness and fastidiousness on moral and
cultural grounds; and (13) punctiliousness in treatment of others" (Wright, "Values,"
p. 8; also n. 1, p. 327).
5. Andrew H. Plaks, "Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," in
Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Plaks (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1977), p. 344.
6. For a discussion of character types in Yuan tsa-chu, see Chung-wen Shih,
The Golden Age of Chinese Drama: Yuan "Tsa-chii" (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1976), pp. 47-51. In chapter 1 of my dissertation, "The Development of the Scholar-
Beauty Tradition," I treat in detail the interaction of drama and fiction in such works
as Yuan Chen's 'Tale of Ying-ying" ("Ying-ying chuan"), Master Tung's Western Chamber
Romance (Tung Hsi-hsiang chu-kung-tiao), Wang Shih-fu's Romance of the Western Cham-
ber (Hsi-hsiang chi), and Wu Ping's The Green Peonies (Lit mu-tan). Wu Ping (d. 1650)
was a Ming loyalist official and playright who was a follower of T'ang Hsien-tsu (1550—
1616). The plot and characters of Wu's drama The Green Peonies closely resemble that
of the scholar-beauty romance P'mg Shan Leng Yen.
7. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), pp. 33-35 and 43-52.
8. Ibid., p. 44.
9. Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus, and Michael Silverman, Elements of Lit-
erature: Essay, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Film (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p.
106.
10. Plaks, 'Towards a Critical Theory," p. 344.
HESSNEY: BEYOND BEAUTY AND T A L E N T 413

11. Shih, Golden Age, pp. 4 8 - 4 9 .

12. Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. I, The Period of the Phi-
losophers, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 3.
13. The question of the relationship between communality and individu-
ality in traditional Chinese culture is a difficult one. Much more work in the fields of
sociology, psychology, and philosophy needs to be done before a concensus can be
achieved. I certainly to not mean to imply that China's cultural history lacks colorful,
individual personalities, or that certain periods of Chinese history did not display a
stronger interest in individuality than others. Wm. Theodore de Bary has shown that
humanitarianism and individualism were dominant trends in late Ming thought (see
his "Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming T h o u g h t , " in Self and Society in
Ming Thought, W m . Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1970], pp. 145-248). In an introduction to a subse-
quent work, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1975), de Bary singles out the " m a d ardour" (k'uang) exhibited by radical followers of
Wang Yang-ming (Wang Shou-jen, 1472-1529). De Bary writes, "This was the inde-
pendence arvd uncompromising spirit of men totally dedicated to the service of man-
kind, and mad, like Wang Yang-ming, only because the depth of their human con-
cern set them at odds with complacent society. It was a sign of their true humanity,
their genuineness as individuals, their authenticity as Confucians" (Unfolding, p. 28).
In other words, de Bary argues, a person paradoxically can become more individual-
istic in Chinese terms by exhibiting a greater degree of selflessness. But if Neo-
Confucian thinkers like Wang Yang-ming became the models for individuals in real
life, the man of individualistic self-cultivation was not adopted by fiction writers as a
subject of serious interest until Wu Ching-tzu wrote The Scholars (]u-lin wai-shih) in the
mid-eighteenth century. Even then, Wu's humanitarian sympathies do not prevent
him from deploring the extreme individualism and idealism of the late Ming (see
C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction [New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1968), chapter 6, " T h e Scholars," and esp. n. 28, p. 362). Yet it should
also be stated that there are many memorable individual characters in the six classics
of traditional fiction: Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San-kuo chih yen-i>, Water Margin
(Shui-hu chuan), Journey to the West (Hsi-yu chi), The Golden Lotus (Chin P'ing Mei), Dream
of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng), and The Scholars (ju-lin ivai-shih).

14. On the revival of Neo-Confucianism in the seventeenth century, see

Wm. Theodore de Bary, "Neo-Confucian Cultivation and the Seventeenth-Century
Enlightenment,' " in Unfolding, pp. 141-216.
15. James J. Y. Liu also has criticized the plot as repetitious in The Chinese
Knight-Errant, pp. 121-24.
16. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, T ien tso chih ho (A Heaven-Made Match) [Hsia-i
feng-yiieh chuan or The Fortunate UnionJ, annotated by Yeh Yin-min (rpt. Hong Kong:
Ta-hua shu-tien, 1959), p. 1. All further references are to this edition, except that where
the text occasionally differs from that of the earliest extant Tu-ch'u hsiian edition, I
follow the latter. Another modern edition is C h ' e n g Po-ch'iian, ed., Hao-ch'iu chuan
(Shanghai: Wen-hua ch'u-pan-she, 1956). All translations are mine unless indicated
otherwise. In making the translations I have consulted Thomas Percy, ed., Hau Kiou
Choann or the Pleasing History, 4 vols. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), and Sir John
Francis Davis, trans., The Fortunate Union, a Romance, 2 vols. (London: Oriental Trans-
lation Committee of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1829).
Hessney: Beyond Beauty and Talent 414

17. The Western Chin poet P a n Yueh ( P a n An-jen, d . A.D. 300) is alJuded
to in several romances as the historical prototype of the femininely beautiful scholar-
poet.
18. This archetype has been identified and discussed by Andrew H. Plaks
in his Archetype and Allegory in the "Dream of the Red Chamber" (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976), esp. Chap. 3.
19. A weak, gullible, young would-be knight errant is the protagonist of
the modem writer Chang Tien-i's hilarious satiric novel Yang-ching-peng ch'i-hsia (The
Strange Knight of Shanghai, 1936).
20. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, pp. 171-73.
21. The Fortunate Union is perhaps the most ideologically pure work of
popular Neo-Confucian morality in the seventeenth century. My purpose here is not
to provide an account of all the ways that the romance reflects Neo-Confucian con-
cerns. Such a discussion is more appropriate to a separate essay. However, Neo-Con-
fucian principles and actions that are part of T'ieh's and Ping-hsin's makeup will be
noted as they appear.
22. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, pp. 2-3.
23. The phrase "sought her hand in marriage day and night" is quoted
from the first poem of the Book of Songs.
24. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, p. 206.
25. A passage illustrative of T'ieh's sentimentalism is quoted later in the
discussion of Ping-hsin's self because it is more revealing of her wisdom.
26. Lynn A. Struve, "Ambivalence and Action: Some Frustrated Scholars
of the K'ang-hsi Period," in From Ming to Ch'ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in
Seventeenth-Century China, ed. Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr. (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 321-65.
27. Ibid. p. 340.
28. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, pp. 33-34.
29. This is a saying attributed to Kuan Chung, famous minister to the he-
gemon Duke Huan of Ch'i (r. 685-643 B . C . ) . Master Pao is Pao Shu-ya, another min-
ister of Duke Huan who believed in Kuan's ability and recommended him to the duke
after the death of Kung-tzu Chiu, whom Kuan formerly served. Pao was known for
his ability to judge people. Hence, this expression has survived as a reference to per-
spicacity in choosing friends and judging character.
30. In his essay "Yuan hsing" (On the Origin of Human Nature) Han Yii
distinguished three grades of human nature: the perfect, the medium, and the infe-
rior. See Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, The Period of Classical
Learning, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 413.
31. Or, this sentence may mean, "Why travel your lonely way to the ends
of the earth to make a reputation among those who will not appreciate you?"
32. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, pp. 98-99.
33. This is an allusion to Yen-tzu ch'un-ch'iu (The Spring and Autumn of Mas-
ter Yen), "Nei-p'ien tsa chang" (Miscellaneous Inner Writings), part 1, chapter 21 en-
titled "Yen-tzu shih Lu yu shih chi, Chung-ni i-wei chih li" (Master Yen is Dispatched
to Lu on a Private Matter and Confucius Considers that He Knows Propriety). This
chapter relates that Yen-tzu or Yen Ying of Ch'i (d. 500 B.C.) was considered to lack
propriety by Confucius' disciple Tzu-kung because of a minor infraction of etiquette.
Questioned by Confucius, Yen replied, "I have heard that in great matters a man does
not cross the barrier, but in small matters it is permissable for him to go out and come
WAGNER: MAIDS IN Dream of the Red Chamber 415

in." See Chang Chun-i, ed., Yen-tzu ch'un-ch'iu chiao-chu (Shanghai: Shih-chieh shu-
chu, 1935), p. 141. Master Yen's meaning is that a man may not infringe against pro-
priety in matters of great importance (such as loyalty to one's lord or filial piety), but
in lesser matters he is permitted a certain flexibility in his conduct. Virtually the same
statement appears in the Analects 19.11, where it is attributed to Tzu-hsia.
34. These quotations are from Mencius, 4A.18. See W. A. C. H. Dobson,
trans., Mencius (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 122.
35. Here Ping-hsin cites the Analects 19.11 (see n. 33 above).
36. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, pp. 87-88.
37. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, p. 224.
38. Ping-hsin was bom on the evening of the Midautumn festival, when
the moon is believed to shine bigger and brighter than at any other time of the year—
obviously an auspicious time to be bom.
39. Ming-chiao-chung-jen, pp. 41-47.
40. Liu Ts'un-yan, Chinese Popular Fiction in Two London Libraries (Hong Kong:
Lung Men Bookstore, 1967), p. 314.

M A I D S A N D S E R V A N T S I N DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER:

INDIVIDUALITY A N D THE SOCIAL ORDER
Marsha L. Wagner
For helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper, I am grateful to
C. T. Hsia, Donald Keene, and Lucien Miller, as well as the editors.
1. Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in, Hung-lou meng, 4 vols. (Peking: Jeri-min wen-hsueh
ch'u-pan she, 1973), ch. 39, p. 469; trans. David Hawkes, The Story of the Stone, 3 vols.
(New York: Penguin, 1973-80), 2:261. The page numbers in the text and in the follow-
ing notes all refer to this edition of Hung-lou meng (hereafter cited as HLM), unless
otherwise indicated.
2. This scholarly trend is exemplified by works in English such as Andrew
H. Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in the "Dream of the Red Chamber" (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976), and Plaks' article, "Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng,"
in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Plaks (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1977), pp. 163-202; and also a complementary study, Lucien Miller, Masks
of Fiction tn "Dream of the Red Chamber": Myth, Mimesis, and Persona (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1975).
Chinese scholarship actively stressed allegory in HLM until scholars such
as Hu Shih and Yu Ping-po reacted against it in the early twentieth century; for a
review of the history of Chinese HLM criticism see Wu Shih-ch'ang, On the Red Cham-
ber Dream (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 2 - 9 , and Miller, Masks of Fiction, pp.
5-9.
3. Biographical criticism, initiated by Hu Shih's article, "Hung-lou meng k'ao-
cheng," published in 1921, has led to voluminous scholarship, including highly ide-
ological polemic. A comprehensive discussion of various issues concerning the his-
tory and authorship of the novel may be found in Chao Kang and Ch'en Chung-i,
Hung-lou meng hsin-t'an, 2 vols. (Hong Kong: Wen-i shu-wu, 1970). On matters of text
and authorship, see also Wu Shih-ch'ang, Red Chamber Dream, and C. T. Hsia's review
in the journal of Asian Studies (November 1961), 21(l):78-80. On the history of the Ts'ao
Wagner: Maids in Dream of the Red Chamber 416

family see Jonathan D. Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor, Bondservant and
Master (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), and Hawkes, Story of the Stone, 1:15—
46.
4. Hung-lou meng historical scholarship in Chinese is too vast to acknowl-
edge comprehensively. Suffice it to say that a major traditional approach is to contrast
pairs of characters such as Lin Tai-yu and Hsueh Pao-ch'ai (Xue Bao-chai, Precious
Clasp) or Wang Hsi-feng and Chia Cheng (Jia Zheng). For such treatment in English,
see Jeanne Knoerle, The Dream of the Red Chamber: A Critical Study (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1972). A large portion of C. T. Hsia's brilliant chapter on the
Dream of the Red Chamber in The Classic Chinese Novel (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1968), pp. 245-97, is also broadly organized as an examination of the main
characters. (But see note 5.)
There are four major translations of HLM into English, and in many cases
characters' names are translated differently. I will use the Wade-Giles romanization
of the Chinese names, but on first occurrence I will give in parentheses common var-
iations as they are found in the four major translations: (1) Hawkes, Story of the Stone,
cited in note 1; (2) Florence and Isabel McHugh, The Dream of the Red Chamber (1958;
rpt. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968), translated from the German translation
by Franz Kuhn; (3) Chi-chen Wang, Dream of the Red Chamber (1929; rev. ed. New York:
Twayne, 1958); and (4) Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, A Dream of Red Mansions, 3
vols. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978-1980).
5. Certainly Pao-yii's chief maids are frequently mentioned, but other ser-
vants are neglected, and critics generally take the maids less seriously than the family
members. A major exception is C. T. Hsia, who emphasizes the dominant roles played
by Pao-yu's personal maids Hsi-jen and Ch'ing-wen. Indeed, he praises Ts'ao Hsiieh-
ch'in for creating in Ch'ing-wen a character who "is so individualized that she must
be accounted the most astonishing success among the author's diverse female char-
acters" (The Classic Chinese Novel, pp. 285-86).
6. In his introduction to C. C. Wang's translation of Dream of the Red Cham-
ber (1958 ed.), Mark van Doren emphasized this thrust of the novel: "There are hundreds
of people altogether, and each of them manages somehow to be an individual at the
same time for he (or she, for women dominate the plot) maintains relations with the
whole society of which he is a part" (p. v). See also Mason Gentzler's excellent in-
vestigation of the relation of individuals to the larger society of the novel, "The Bud-
dhist Sociology of Dream of the Red Chamber" (unpublished paper presented to the Co-
lumbia University Seminar on Traditional China, November 15, 1977).
7. The rise of the novel in the West is associated with the development of
individualism, and the expansion of both the reading public and literary characters to
include ordinary people of all classes. It has been shown that Pamela was significant
not only as a servant protagonist in one of the earliest English novels, but also as a
culture-heroine of the waiting maids who read Richardson's work. See Ian Watt, The
Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957; rpt. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967), especially pp 47, 1 4 3 ^ 4 , and 148.
8. Hsi-feng generally assumes that all maids are ambitious; obviously—like
her emphasis on economic motivation—this is a projection of her own impulses. Al-
though she suspects that Yuan-yang will not agree to becoming Chia She's concu-
bine, for example, she says "every one of these girls is ambitious" (HLM, ch. 46, p.
560; Hawkes 2:409).
9. Hsiao-hung is a problematic character; she plays a prominent role in four
W A G N E R : M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 417

consecutive chapters (24-27) and then virtually disappears from the narrative. On the
basis of Ch'i-hu sou's comment that "in the chapter on the Prison God Temple, there
is a long chapter of stories about Ch'ien-hsiieh and Hung-yii [Hsiao-hung]," which
has lamentably been lost, Wu Shih-ch'ang speculates that Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in origi-
nally intended to have these two maids reappear to serve and console their master in
prison after the confiscation of the family property (Red Chamber Dream, pp. 153, 178-
81); see Chih-yen chai ch'ung-p'ing Shih-t'ou chi, 4 vols. (Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-
chu) (hereafter Chih-yen chai), p. 586. The particulars of Wu Shih-ch'ang's projected
intended ending may be questioned, and he incorrectly believes that Chih-yen chai
and Ch'i-hu sou are the same person (p. 17), but certainly there is ample evidence
that Ch'i-hu sou's original harsh view of Hsiao-hung was reconsidered and qualified
after he read the later stories about her service in the Prison God Temple (Chih-yen
chai, p. 618; Wu, Red Chamber Dream, p. 180). Contemporary readers and perhaps even
the author himself may have shared Ch'i-hu sou's ambivalence toward Hsiao-hung.
10. In the dream, Ching-huan hsien-ku (Disenchantment, the Fairy of Fearful
Awakening, Goddess of Disillusionment, Goddess of Disenchantment), presents to
Pao-yu her younger sister Chien-mei (Two-in-one), who is also named K'o-ch'ing (HLM,
ch. 5, p. 64; Hawkes 1:146). For a persuasive interpretation of how Chien-mei repre-
sents a twin ideal, see Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, pp. 262-63.
11. Definitive interpretation of the episode of Ch'in-shih's death must be
suspended because this chapter was clearly revised by Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in, apparently
at the insistence of Chih-yen chai, who disapproved of the frank disclosure of an af-
fair between Ch'in-shih and her father-in-law, Chia Chen. Wu Shih-ch'ang believes
that approximately one-third of the original draft of chapter 13 was excised; he sug-
gests this section included the maids' discovery of Ch'in-shih's affair, the cover-up by
Chia Chen's wife Yu-shih (Yu-shi, Princess Chen), and Ch'in-shih's suicide. The sev-
eral excised and emended pages may well have contained significant elaboration of
the characters of the two maids. For the theory that the maids discovered the adul-
tery, see Yu Ping-po, Hung-lou meng yen-chiu (originally Hung-Iou meng pien, 1923; rev.
ed., Shanghai: T'ang-ti ch'u-pan she, 1952), pp. 179-81, 183. For reconstruction of ex-
cised portions, see Wu, Red Chamber Dream, pp. 216-20, also pp. 83-84, 206-10. See
also Chi-chen Wang, pp. xviii-xiv, and Hawkes, 1:42-43.
12. For example, Yiian-yang reiterates, when refusing to become Chia She's
concubine, that she would first become a nun or take her own life (HLM, ch. 46, p.
565). Maids who commit suicide in HLM include Chin-ch'uan-erh (ch. 32), Pao Erh's
wife (Bao Er's wife, ch. 44), Ssu-ch'i and P a n Yu-an (ch. 92), as well as Yu San-chieh
(Third Sister Yu) and Yu Erh-chieh (Second Sister Yu). Wasting away from sickness
and humiliation is virtually a form of suicide, as we see in the case of Ch'ing-wen
(ch. 77). Moreover, three dismissed actresses refuse to eat and threaten to commit
suicide unless they are allowed to become nuns, a demand to which Wang Fu-jen
finally agrees (ch. 77).
13. Hereafter, translation is mine unless otherwise noted.
14. The T'ai-hsii huan-ching is also translated the Phantom Realm of the
Great Void, the Great Void Illusion Land, and the Illusory Land of the Great Void.
Ch'in-shih's appearance here is appropriate for two reasons: first, in chap-
ter 5 she was introduced as the younger sister of Ching-huan hsien-ku (the fairy
Disenchantment; see n. 9 above); and second, in the original version of chapter 13 she
also committed suicide (thus, this passage may constitute further evidence that Ch'in-
shih hung herself with a sash in the excised portion of ch. 13; see n. 10).
Wagner: Maids in Dream of the Red Chamber 418

It is clear that Yüan-yang herself does become a spirit because Pao-yü en-
counters her in his dream return to the T'ai-hsü huan-ching (ch. 116, p. 1457).
15. Chih-yen chai makes this point: " C h ' i n g has the spirit of Lin; Hsi is
Ch'ai's double," Ch'ien-lung chia-hsü Chih-yen chai ch'ung-p'ing Shih-t'ou chi (Taipei: Chung-
yang yin-chih ch'ang, 1961), p. 124, trans. Andrew H. Plaks, Archetype and Allegory,
p. 70. See C. T. Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, p. 268 et passim, esp. n. 41.; and Wong
Kam-ming, "Point of View, Norms, and Structure: Hung-lou meng and Lyrical Fic-
tion," in Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative, p. 214.
Even in the Roster of Lovers, as reconstructed by Wu Shih-ch'ang, the third
row (and perhaps the fourth and fifth rows as well)—an ordered list of maids—hy-
pothetically mirrors rows one and two, which rank girls in the Chia family (Wu, Red
Chamber Dream, pp. 155-60).
16. See Wu, Red Chamber Dream, pp. 156-157. For general references on
pairs of " s h a d o w " characters see Miller, Masks of Fiction, pp. 6 - 7 , esp. n. 9; see also
pp. 156, 177.
17. Tai-yü is associated with Hsi Shih in ch. 30, p. 364; Ch'ing-wen is said
to resemble both Hsi Shih and Tai-yü, ch. 74, p. 952. Both girls share not only phys-
ical features but also a special attraction which distracts Pao-yü from more serious
Confucian pursuits.
18. The overarching thematic concern with mistaking the false for the true,
and vice-versa, is given particular attention by Lucien Miller, who terms it an "arche-
typal polarity"; Masks of Fiction, p. 255 et passim.
19. The annotator Ch'i-yüan (Sumptuous Garden) overlooks the allegori-
cal significance of the " t w o - i n - o n e " theme and merely quotes a poem which confirms
that a lovers' quarrel is a sign of true love (Chih-yen chai, p. 677). In the broader sense,
the merging of two into one occurs frequently and on various levels throughout HLM;
examples include coincidences and synchronicity of events, Chia ["false"] Pao-yü and
Chen ( " t r u e " ] Pao-yü, girls who live in the red dust and their fairy counterparts, and
pairs of " s h a d o w " characters or foils. On "dual unity" see Plaks, Archetype and Alle-
gory, especially pp. 43—83; also on " t h e enlightenment paradigm of 'true' and 'false' "
see Miller, Masks of Fiction, esp. pp. 1 0 8 - 8 0 , and on synchronicity see ibid., Appendix
C, pp. 2 8 7 - 9 2 .
20. Hawkes' translation of this passage cleverly conveys the spirit, but is
quite remote from the literal meaning of the text: "Complacent reader! Permit us to
remind you that your correct understanding of the situation is due solely to the fact
that we have been revealing to you the secret, innermost thoughts of those two young
persons, which neither of them had so far ever felt able to express" (2:86).
21. The resolution of apparent contradictions or paradoxes constitutes, of
course, the essential mode of discourse for Taoism and Buddhism.
22. Chiao-hsing is first noticed by Chia Yü-ts'un when she impulsively turns
back to look at him. On the significance of the glimpse as a narrative and thematic
device in HLM, see Miller, Masks of Fiction, p. 72.
23. During this visit, Lai Ma-ma also puts Pao-yü's situation into perspec-
tive by an implicit contrast with her son, Lai Ta, who—although born a servant—
through special treatment from the Chia family has received an official position. Thus,
her philosophy of strict child rearing yields admirable results and casts the Chias' in-
dulgent inconsistency in an unfavorable light (pp. 548-50).
24. Just as Ch'in-shih's double is the younger sister of Ching-huan hsien-
ku in Pao-yü's dream in chapter 5, so also Hsiang-ling is known in the allegorical
W A G N E R : M A I D S IN Dream of the Red Chamber 419

frame of the novel (chs. 1—4) as Chen Shih-yin (Zhen Shi-yin)'s kidnaped daughter
Ying-lien (Ying-lian, Lotus).
25. Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, p. 279. Jeanne Knoerle also indicates pointed
parallels between Chia Mu and Liu Lao-lao, Critical Study, pp. 73—78.
26. See note 15 above.
27. The pattern is completed in another incident in chapter 104, in which
it is again suggested that Leng Tzu-hsing may influence the Chia family to obtain le-
niency from Chia Yii-ts'un—this time, to release Ni-erh from prison (ch. 104, p. 1323).
However, this may be Kao E's emendation; for speculative reconstruction of Ts'ao
Hsueh-ch'in's intended portrayal of Chia Yu-ts'un in the end of the novel, see Wu,
Red Chamber Dream, pp. 166-167, 281, and 292-93. The issue of the authorship of the
last forty chapters lies beyond the scope of this paper; for present purposes, I assume
a more or less consistent narrative intention throughout all 120 chapters.
28. For example, the ironically comical banter of the porter in Macbeth which
opens the scene in which the murder of the King is discovered (Macbeth, 2.3). One
reason that the servants' scenes are more comic is of course generic: low mimetic
characters lend themselves to comedy rather than to tragedy.
29. Although Hsia Chin-kuei comes from a good family and is not a ser-
vant, the lines between wives and maids are often less than dear, particularly in the
last forty chapters of the novel in which social order disintegrates. Chin-kuei is cer-
tainly not accepted and respected as a family member. Moreover, in spite of her spe-
cial allegorical status, Hsiang-ling is kept by the Hsueh family as a maid, and her po-
sition—coupled with the low mimetic tone of this episode—qualifies it as a reflecting
foil scene involving servants (see also n. 30 below).
30. For an interpretation of Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in's original intentions for the
final humiliation and death of Wang Hsi-feng, see Wu, Red Chamber Dream pp. 171-
78.
Another overly zealous vengeful woman is Wang Shan-pao's wife. It is in-
teresting to note that her scheme for searching and humiliating all residents of the
garden also backfires when her granddaughter Ssu-ch'i is discovered to be the owner
of the incense bag, and the grandmother is herself consequently humiliated. More-
over, the witnesses to this reversal all agree that Wang Shan-pao's wife received ap-
propriate retribution for her harshness (ch. 74, pp. 960-61).
31. A thematic thread running throughout the novel suggests that many
maids—Hsi-jen and Ping-erh in particular—actually serve as secondary wives; and,
conversely, a wife is often virtually sold as a kind of servant. Ch'ing-wen attacks Hsi-
jen for presuming she is a ku-niang before she is actually promoted, although she al-
ready shares Pao-yii's bed (ch. 31, p. 371). Ping-erh is often said to receive more re-
spect than Hsi-feng (e.g., ch. 39, p. 468 and ch. 45, p. 546), and this may be related
to her status as Chia Lien's "chamberwife." Hsiang-ling's position is particularly am-
biguous; she is a maid who has her own maid (ch. 29, p. 343; see n. 28), but in chap-
ter 80 it is clear that she has been Hsueh Pan's "chamber wife" for several years.
Finally, it is emphasized that Ying-ch'un's marriage is primarily a financial arrange-
ment, and since she was purchased for such a high price she is virtually a slave (ch.
80, p. 1044).
32. See Gentzler, "Buddhist Sociology," pp. 19-21.
33. For more examples of status change in Hung-lou meng, see ibid., pp. 21-
26.
34. This tradition is reiterated, for example, from the point of view of Hsi-
Wagner: Maids in Dream of the Red Chamber 420

jen's family (ch. 19, p. 220), and by Chia Cheng himself (ch. 33, p. 395).
35. On the enclosed garden of Hung-lou meng as an emblem of adolescent
innocence, see Hsia, Classic Chinese Novel, pp. 2 7 8 - 8 0 , and Plaks, Archetype and Alle-
gory, pp. 178-211.
36. See note 4 above.
37. There are several other indications of reversal and breakdown in the
social order near the end of the novel. See, for example, the contrast between the fat,
healthy, and well-off Liu Lao-lao and the frail, sickly, poverty-stricken Hsi-feng (ch.
113, pp. 146-27). Although Kao E may not have followed Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's inten-
tions to the letter, this pattern of role reversal is initiated well before the last forty
chapters. Moreover, even Wu Shih-ch'ang's reconstructions indicate the pattern of
humiliated masters at the mercy of more resourceful and powerful former maids and
servants.
38. I have translated this passage from the standard variorum edition, Hung-
lou meng pa-shih hui chiao-pen, ed. Yu-Ping-po and Wang Hsi-shih (Hong Kong: Chung-
hua shu-chu, 1974), 4:244. For my translation of Chin-kang as Vajrapani, see Liu Ts'un-
yan, Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Novels, vol. 1, The Authorship of the "Feng
Shen Yen I" (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1962), pp. 179-82.
39. Wu Shih-ch'ang takes exception to Kao E's use of Ni Erh as a "villain"
and a belatedly exploded "time bomb" to further the plot in chapter 104 (Wu, Red
Chamber Dream, pp. 190-91, 287-93, 336). But I would contend that Ni Erh does play
a positive role in his exposé of the wrongs of the Chia family, and this is sufficient
justification for Chih-yen chai's ranking him with other "chivalric heroes" in the novel
{Chih-yen chai, ch. 26, p. 599).
40. Andrew Plaks articulates this view, with support from Denis Twitch-
ett's comments on historical biographical writing, in 'Towards a Critical Theory of
Chinese Narrative," in Chinese Narrative, p. 344. See also Gentzler's "Buddhist Soci-
ology" in this regard.
41. C. T. Hsia, "Society and Self in the Chinese Short Story," in The Classic
Chinese Novel, pp. 299-321.

THE SOLITARY TRAVELER: IMAGES OF THE SELF

IN MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE
Leo Ou-fan Lee
1. For a typical collection of such essays, see Lao I-an ed., Ku-chin yu-chi
ts'ung-ch'ao (A Collection of Travel Essays, Ancient and Modern), 6 vols. (Taipei: Chung-
hua shu-chü, 1961). See also, Pei Yün-chen and Yeh Yu-ming, eds., Li-tai yu-chi hsiian
(Selection of Travel Essays from Various Dynasties) (Changsha: Hunan Jen-min, 1980).
2. Li Chi, tr., The Travel Diaries of Hsü Hsia-k'o (Hong Kong: Chinese Uni-
versity of Hong Kong Press, 1974), p. 28. For other scholarly studies of Hsü Hsia-k'o,
see Chang Hsiao-ch'ien, ed., Hsü Hsia-k'o chi-nien lun-wen chi (Studies in Memoriam
of Hsü Hsia-k'o) (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1956).
3. Ibid., p. 22.
4. Jaroslav PrüSek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Litera-
ture, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 1-28.
5. C. T. Hsia, "The Travels of Lao Ts'an: An Exploration of Its Art and
Meaning," Tsing-Hua journal of Chinese Studies, n.s. (August 1969), 7(2):40. For a sehe-
LEE: THE SOLITARY TRAVELER 421

matic interpretation, see Donald Holoch, "The Travels of Laocan: Allegorical Narra-
tive," in Milena Doleíelová-Velingerová, éd., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Cen-
tury (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 129-49.
6. C. T. Hsia, "Travels," p. 45.
7. According to Liu Ta-shen, Liu E's son, the first 14 chapters of the novel
were written in 1904 for Hsiu-hsiang hsiao-shuo (Illustrated Fiction) and the last six
chapters, which revolve around the murder case, were written after the quarrel with
the magazine's editors and published in the Jih-jih hsin-wen of Tientsin. See Lao Ts'an
yu<hi ch'u erh chi chi ch'i yen-chiu (The Travels of Lao Ts'an: Text and Sequel and Their
Studies) (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chü, 1958), pp. 180-82.
8. For a similar view, see J. PrûSek, "Liu O et son roman, le pèlerinage de
Lao Ts'an," in his Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970), p. 164.
9. Hsia, "Travels," p. 53.
10. Ibid., p. 41.
11. The Ch'ing government legally proscribed Three Teachings cults in 1744
for their heretical views and potentially subversive threat. In 1866, the northern branch
of the Tai-ku school in Shantung was ransacked by local governmental forces; its leader,
Chang Chi-chung, and thousands of his followers and their families were killed. See
Chiang I-hsiieh, "Lao Ts'an yu-chi chi ch'i k'ao-cheng" (The Travels of Lao Ts'an, and
Its Textual Research) in Ch'u erh chi, p. 247.
12. PrûSek mentions the possible precedent of "Yu hsien-k'u," a T a n g tale
which describes the escapades of a scholar to an exotic cave where he meets two
women. See PrûSek, "Liu O , " p. 166.
13. Hu Shih and others have pointed out Liu E's fallacies in the esoteric
poems. These poems generated a great deal of attention among readers when these
chapters first appeared; chapter 11 was deleted by the editors of Hsiu-hsiang hsiao-shuo
perhaps because of its politically explosive nature. But from an intellectual perspec-
tive, these poems are but a minor expression of Liu E's religious philosophy—the ap-
plication of his cyclical view to politics.
14. This is the view of Chiang I-hsiieh and many others (see Ch'u erh chi,
pp. 246-50). While it may have been possible that Liu E met the remnants of the
northern school in Shantung and described them in Lao Ts'an yu-chi, especially in matters
of religious rituals involving mixed company, Liu E himself studied with the leader
of the southern branch, Li Ping-shan (Ching-feng). Liu Ta-shen identifies Huang Lung
Tzu (Yellow Dragon) with Huang Kuei-ch'un, Liu E's fellow student under Li Ping-
shan (Ch'u erh chi, p. 184). Liu Ta-shen is close to the mark in observing that Liu E
"borrowed the profiles of others in order to describe the intellectual essence in his
own bosom" (p. 185). It may also be added that Liu E himself, like Yellow Dragon
and Yü-ku, was fond of music and often played the lute. The name of Yü-ku, accord-
ing to Liu Ta-shen, is taken from the name of Liu E's old lute (p. 184). All the above
details point to the conclusion that the characters and content of the middle chapters
represent facets of Liu E's own mind.
15. In fact, Liu E was so fond of Lin's translation of Rider Haggard's Joan
Haste that he wanted to write a variation of the story with a different ending (Ch'u erh
chi, p. 182).
16. The philosophic meaning of the middle chapters require further re-
search. The concept of the Great Ultimate is, of course, borrowed from Chou Tun-i
and Taoism via the T'ai-ku school, which itself may have been influenced by the syn-
cretic teachings of the late Ming intellectual Lin Chao-en. For a study of Lin and his
Lee: The Solitary Traveler 422

influence on later times, see Judith Berlin g, The Syncretic Thought of Lin Chao-en (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980). I am grateful to Professor Berling for sharing
with me her extensive knowledge of religious syncretism and for helping me gauge
Liu E's religious originality.
17. Hsia, 'Travels," p. 41. Professor Hsia also considers Lao Ts'an yu-chi
China's first "political novel."
18. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), chap. 5.
19. A comparative example may be found in the stories of Lu Hsiin, which
perhaps come closer to Ralph Freedman's definition of the "lyrical novel" as "a hy-
brid genre that uses the novel to approach the functions of a poem" and in which
"the usual scenery of fiction becomes a texture of imagery, and characters appear as
personae for the self." See Freedman, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André
Gide, and Virginia Woo//(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 1. Yii's stories
are more in the nature of personal essays and "documentaries," though they do seem
to indicate what Freedman calls "lyrical immediacy": "an immediacy of portraiture,
an availability of themes and motifs to the reader's glance without the interposition
of a narrative world" (p. 9).
20. Quoted in Lee, The Romantic Generation, p. 281. Rousseau's self-portrait
of a solitary "promeneur" in this unfinished autobiographical sequel to his Con/essions
may also have contributed to Yii's use of the journey as autobiography. But Yii does
not have Rousseau's conceptual depth to cast the later part of his life in ten "prome-
nades." Yii's autobiographical fragments remained fragments when they were seri-
alized in Lin Yutang's jen-chien shih (The Human World) and his travel stories never
formed an overall autobiographical sequence. While modem Chinese writers used the
journey form metaphorically as satirical commentary on their society, as in Lao She's
Mao-ch'eng chi (City of Cats) and Shen Ts'ung-wen's A-li-ssu Chung-kuo yu-chi (Alice's
Travels in China), a complete autobiographical novel in the form of a metaphorical
journey remains to be written.
21. Trans. Harold Shadick, The Travels of Lao Ts'an (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1966), p. 13.
22. " A Sentimental Journey" is included in several collections. The text I
have used is taken from Ta-fu yu-chi (The Travels of Ta-fu) (Hong Kong, n.d.), pp.
114-39. English translation my own. The last line of the quotation, in English in the
original, may have been taken from an English folk song.
23. Shadick, Travels, p. xxi.
24. Chi-hen ch'u-ch'u (Footprints Here and There) (Shanghai: T'ai-tung shu-
chii, 1934), also in Ta-fu yu-chi.
25. Shen Ts'ung-wen, Hsiang-hsing san-chi (Random Sketches on a Trip to
Hunan) (rpt., Hong Kong: Wen-hsin ch'u-pan she, 1960); Ai Wu, Nan-hsing chi (Ac-
counts of a Southern Journey) (Shanghai, 1935; rev. ed., Peking: Tso-chia ch'u-pan
she, 1963). Page references in this article are to the 1963 edition.
26. Shen Ts'ung-wen, Ts'ung-iven tzu-chuan (Autobiography of Shen Ts'ung-
wen) (Shanghai: K'ai-ming shu-chii, 1943), p. 72.
27. Shen, Hsiang-hsing san-chi, p. 34.
28. Ibid., p. 35.
29. Ibid., p. 20.
30. ¡bid., pp. 73-74.
LEE: T H E SOLITARY TRAVELER 423

31. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modem Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1961; rev. ed., 1971), p. 359.
32. Ai Wu, Nan-hsmg chi, pp. 20 and 31, respectively.
33. Ibid., p. 88.
34. Ibid., p. 321.
35. Cyril Birch, "Change and Continuity in Chinese Fiction," in Modern
Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1977), p. 394.
36. I am indebted to Victoria Cass for her paper, "Comic Structure in Mao
Tun," in which she brilliantly applies the ideas from Northrop Frye (Secular Scripture:
A Study of Romance) and Robert Torrance (The Comic Hero) to Mao Tun's novel Hung
(Rainbow). However, in my view, the framework seems more relevant to post-1949
literature, especially Hao Jan's works, than to Mao Tun's fiction.
37. Ai Wu, Nan-hsing chi hsii-p'ien (Sequel to Accounts of a Southern Jour-
ney) (Peking: Tso-chia, 1964), p. 3.
38. Hao Jan, Chin-kuang ta-tao (The Great Golden Road) (Peking: Jen-min
wen-hsiieh, 1972), pp. 487-98.
39. Ibid., p. 498.
40. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971). It could be argued that Hao Jan's fiction as a whole might fit into Frye's
"high mimetic" mode, in which " t h e central characters are above our own level of
power and authority, though within the order of nature and subject to social criti-
cism" (p. 366). However, in his eagerness to observe the "Three Prominences" Hao
Jan has definitely gone beyond his previous novel, Yen-yang t'ien (Bright Sunny Skies),
in his characterization of the central heroes. I think chapter 46 of Chin-kuang ta-tao is
one of the more mythological chapters in which "some characters are superhuman
beings who do things that 'happen only in stories' " (Frye, Anatomy, p. 336). The
Chinese slogan "combining revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism" tends
to emphasize the latter phrase in order to differentiate itself not merely from pre-1958
works (the term was first publicized in 1958 as part of the "Great Leap Forward" cam-
paign) but also, one suspects, from the Soviet model of "Socialist Realism." Hence,
one of Frye's definitions of " r o m a n c e " and "romantic," derived obviously from a dif-
ferent context from the Chinese, proves nevertheless pertinent: "The mythos of lit-
erature concerned primarily with an idealized world"; "A fictional mode in which the
chief characters live in a world of marvels (naive romance), or in which the mood is
elegiac or idyllic and hence less subject to social criticism than in the mimetic modes"
(p. 367). For a sympathetic analysis of Hao Jan's two novels, see Wong Kam-ming,
"The Dialectics of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism: From Bright
Sunny Skies to The Road of Golden Light" (paper presented before the Modern Language
Association, December 1977); and Wong's " A Study of Hao Ran's Two Novels: Art
and Politics in Bright Sunny Skies and The Road of Golden Light" in Essays in Modern
Chinese Literature and Literary Criticism: Papers of the Berlin Conference 1978, ed. Wolf-
gang Kubin and Rudolph G. Wagner (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1982), pp.
117-49.

41. For a more detailed analysis of Wang Meng's fiction, see Leo Ou-fan
Lee, " T h e Politics of Technique: Perspectives of Literary Dissidence in Contemporary
Chinese Fiction," in After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978-1981, ed. Jeffrey C.
Kinkley (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985).
Gunn: Perceptions of Self and Values 424

PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND VALUES

IN RECENT CHINESE LITERATURE
Edward M. Gunn, ]r.
1. The notion that literature is an educational tool is so accepted among
Communist theoreticians that it is easier to cite instances when this notion was chal-
lenged as a reminder of this belief. For example, D. W. Fokkema has written, in sum-
mary: "The view that all traditional novels were intended to amuse, as Yii Fing-po
reportedly once stated, and the opinion of the Yunnan writer Lan Mang that litera-
ture does not in the first place aim to educate the people but to give some pleasure
were severely attacked. For the Chinese cultural leaders championed the educative func-
tion of literature, its role as a moral stimulus and a political tool." Literary Doctrine in
China and Soviet Influence, 1956-60 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 265. Further, that
this educative role should emphasize rationality has been noted by a critic most re-
cently in citing the remarks of the leading theoretician Yao Wen-yuan in 1963. David
Pollard has written: "Socialist heroes must be shown to be motivated not by blind
courage or dogged determination, but by 'reason' and 'basic knowledge' supplied by
the education of the Party and supported by the revolutionary traditions, otherwise
'their heroic actions will appear to lack an ideological foundation.' " "The Short Story
in the Cultural Revolution," China Quarterly (March 1978), no. 78, pp. 99-121, quoting
Yao Wen-yuan, "Some Problems Concerning the Reflection of the Class Struggle by
Literature and Art Workers during the Period of Socialist Revolution," Shanghai wen-
hsueh (1963), no. 10, trans, in Survey of China Mainland Magazines, no. 418.
2. See Pollard, "The Short Story," pp. 99-121.
3. See Yuan Liang-tso and Li Tuan-wu, "Revolutionary Hero Stories and
the Formation of Pupils' Moral Consciousness (Ko-ming ying-hsiung ku-shih tui hsiao-
hsueh-sheng tao-te i-shih hsing-ch'en te tso-yung te ch'u-pu yen-chiu)," Hsin-li hsueh-
pao <Acta Psychologica Sjnica) (1966), no. 2, pp. 154-62, cited in Ai-li Chin and Robert
Chin, Psychological Research in Communist China, 1949-66 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969),
p. 184.
4. See Yao Wen-yuan, " P i n g fan-ko-ming liang-mien-p'ai Chou Yang,"
Hung<h'i (Red Flag) (1967), no. 1.
5. Lin Piao reportedly once compared Communist Chinese literature to
coffee: both acted as stimulants. After his fall, critics determined that his comparison
was flawed, since anyone could enjoy coffee, but Communist Chinese literature should
be solely for the workers, soldiers, and peasants. Likewise, he was accused of advo-
cating a literature for "the whole of the People." See, for example, Li Hsi-lien, "K'a-
fei yii ya-p'ien" (Coffee and Opium) in Wen-i tuan-lun chi (Short Essays on Arts and
Letters) (Shanghai: Shanghai jen-min ch'u-pan she, 1973), pp. 4-5. Lin Piao was also
castigated for stating that a "special talent" and "inspiration" were needed for writing
literature and other such "reactionary absurdities." See Ts'ui Ya-pin, "Pu-kan-tao i-
tien chiu hsieh" (Writing Blind) in Wen-i tuan-lun chi, pp. 60-61.
6. Wang Hsing-yiian's "T'ieh-pi yii-shih" appeared first in Tso-p'in (1963),
vol. 2, no. 4, was reprinted in the anthologies Hsin-jen hsiao-shuo hsiian (1965) and I ism
jen hsin-tso hsiian (Peking: Chung-kuo tso-chia hsieh-hui, 1965), and was translated in
W.J.F. Jenner, Modern Chinese Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp.
230—42. Li Hsia's "Chin-chung ch'ang-ming" appeared first in Shanghai wen-i ts'ung-
k'an (1973), then as the title story of the anthology Chin-chung ch'ang-ming (Shanghai:
Shanghai jen-min ch'u-pan she, 1973), and again in the anthology Shanghai tuan-p'ien
HEGEL: THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY 425

hsiao-shuo hsiian (Shanghai: Shanghai jen-min ch'u-pan she, 1974). It appeared in

translation in Chinese Literature (1974) no. 1.
7. Chiang Pin, "Lun yin-mo wen-i" (On Insidious Literature), Kuang-ming
jih-pao (September 3, 1976), p. 3.
8. Several other writers also resurfaced after the Cultural Revolution. A good
portion of these were members of the People's Liberation Army, and their work was
considered less desirable for use because it dealt with experiences less familiar to the
respondents. Chao Yen-i was also picked over several other civilian writers who re-
emerged and were well-known (such as Hu Wan-ch'un and Ju Chih-chuan) because
of the translation in Chinese Literature, not to be disregarded in light of the report that
editorial control, including the selection of works for translation, has been maintained
by higher-ranking authorities than the staff of Chinese Literature itself, at least until
quite recently. Hao Jan's stories and novels were studied but not used for several rea-
sons including his fame, the controversies surrounding his work, his use of historical
rather than contemporary settings in much of his work, the inclusion of what appear
to be anachronisms in his historical settings, and a reluctance on my part to abstract
passages from long novels and present them out of context. As regards this last point,
several other novels were read and dismissed for the same reason. Major novels and
the published criticisms of major novels were, however, part of the sources used for
compiling the lists of values.
9. Such a split in invoking the name and authority of Party Central against
local Party organization occurs, for instance, in the novel Chin-kuang ta-tao (1972) by
Hao Jan. However, the theme is as old, at least, as Ting Ling's T'ai-yang chao tsai Sang-
kan ho shang (The Sun Shines Over the Sangkan River, 1947).

THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY

IN F I C T I O N F R O M TAIWAN
Robert E. Hegel
1. C. T. Hsia, "Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modem Chinese
Literature," in Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (2d ed., New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1971), pp. 533-34.
2. C. T. Hsia, "The Continuing Obsession with China: Three Contempo-
rary Writers," Review of National Literatures (Spring 1975), 6(l):76-99.
3. Chang Shi-kuo, "Realism in Taiwan Fiction: Two Directions," in Chinese
Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives, ed. Jeannette Faurot (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 31-35, and numerous essays in the massive com-
pendium Hsiang-t'u wen-hsüeh t'ao-lun chi, ed. Yü Tien-ts'ung (Taipei: Yuan-chin g, 1978),
discuss the political concerns—and importance—of the hsiang-t'u literary movement.
4. Yü Ta-fu, "Sinking," trans. Joseph S. M. Lau and C. T. Hsia, in Modern
Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949, ed. Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-
fan Lee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 141.
5. One example is the first chapter of the novel Lao Ts'an yu-chi (The Trav-
els of Lao Ts'an, 1904-1907) by Liu E (1837-1909), in which China is likened to a ship
adrift at sea, captained by villains having no interest in bringing it to port. See Liu E,
The Travels of Lao Ts'an, trans. Harold Shadick (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952),
pp. 3-11.
Hegel: The Search for Identity 426

6. Hsia, "Obsession," p. 546. The best translation is Lao She, Cat Country:
A Satirical Novel of China in the 1930s, trans. William A. Lyell, Jr. (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1970).
7. "In the Wineshop," in Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, ed. Lau, Hsia,
and Lee, pp. 27-32, exposes the ineffectuality of " m o d e m " intellectuals on a variety
of emotional levels, and concludes with the revelation that in order to secure an in-
come one had to resort to teaching the Confucian classics. "Just think: has any of our
many plans turned out as we hoped in the past?" (p. 32). The protagonist of Yeh's
Ni Huan-chih plans to bring new-style education to China's countryside in order to
rebuild the nation from the ground up. His eventual disillusionment drives him to
the city where he becomes involved in strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts—all to
no avail. He dies there of disease. See Yeh Shao-chün, Ni Huan-chih (Peking: Jen-min
wen-hsüeh, 1953; rpt. 1962, 1978) and Yeh Sheng-tao, Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, trans.
A.C. Barnes (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1958, rpt. 1978).
8. Hsia, "Continuing Obsession," p. 77.
9. See Hsia, "Continuing Obsession," pp. 87-89, and Yu Kuang-chung,
Ch'iao-ta yüeh (Taipei: Ch'un wen-hsüeh, 1969), p. 60. The poet's own translation ap-
pears in Yu Kwang-chung, Acres of Barbed Wire (Taipei: Mei Ya, 1971), pp. 13-19; the
quoted lines appear on p. 19.
10. Shui Ching, Ch'ing-se te cha-meng (Taipei: Wen-hsing, 1969), pp. 125-
43; Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, ed. C. T. Hsia (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1971), pp. 204-17.
11. Shui Ching, p. 130; Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, p. 208.
12. Shui Ching, p. 141; Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, p. 216.
13. See Lionel Trilling, " O n the Modem Element in Modem Literature,"
in Literary Modernism, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Fawcett, 1967), pp. 71-77, cited in
John Beminghausen's carefully documented "Modernism and Modernity in Mao Dun's
Fiction," Thirtieth International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa, 1976:
China 1, ed. Graciela de la Lama (Mexico, D.F.: El Colegio de Mexico, 1982), p. 327.
14. Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, p. 203.
15. See Shui Ching, p. 130; Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, p. 208; Y
wonders: " a story he has read—was it by Sartre or Camus?" The translation elabo-
rates on the original: " h e remembered a story by Sartre . . ."
16. For the first of these two positions, see Joseph S. M. Lau, "The Tropics
Mythopoetized: The Extraterritorial Writing of Li Yung-p'ing in the Context of the
Hsiang-t'u Movement," Tamkang Review (Fall 1981), 12(1 ):3—4; the other is commonly
expressed in secondary writings on the movement such as those included in the col-
lections mentioned in note 3 above.
17. Robert Yi Yang, "Form and Tone in Wang Chen-ho's Satires," in Chinese
Fiction from Tativan, ed. Faurot, esp. 134, concentrates on the satiric mode that sepa-
rates Wang's works from those of Huang Ch'un-ming. See Yü Kuang-chung's attack
on hsiang-t'u writing as tantamount to Maoist "worker-peasant-soldier" writing in "Lang
lai-le," Hsiang-t'u wen-hsüeh t'ao-lun chi, pp. 264-67.
18. See Lao She, Lo-t'o Hsiang-tzu (Shanghai, 1946; rpt. Hong Kong: Nan-
hua shu-tien, n.d.); Rickshaw, trans. Jean M. James (Honolulu: University Press of Ha-
waii, 1979). These are the full, original version of the text and a complete translation.
Lao She later modified the work somewhat, truncating the last chapter to give it a
more optimistic ending; see the Peking Jen-min wen-hsüeh edition of 1978 for exam-
HEGEL: T H E SEARCH FOR IDENTITY 427

pie, and its translation by Shi Xiaoqing entitled Camel Xiangzi (Peking: Foreign Lan-
guages Press, and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981).
19. C. T. Hsia notes certain parallels with Lao She's novel in his foreword
to Joseph S. M. Lau, ed., Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960-1970 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1976), p. xx. His overall interpretation of the story differs consider-
ably from this, however; Hsia sees Evil in the person of the foul-smelling Chien, pit-
ted against the simple Goodness of Wan-fa.
20. See Chinese Stories from Taiwan, p. 74, for Lau's emendations of Wang's
original translation. Cyril Birch notes that "Chien" is a homophone for "Adulterer"
in his "Images of Suffering in Taiwan Fiction," Chinese Fiction from Taiwan, ed. Faurot,
p. 79. Wan-fa's sacrifice: Wang Chen-ho, "Chia-chuang i-niu che," Chung-kuo hsien-
tai hsiao-shuo hsüan, ed. Ho Hsin (Taipei: Hsin-feng, 1972), p. 59; Chinese Stories from
Taiwan, p. 78.
21. See Wang Chen-ho, pp. 61, 76, 77; Chinese Stories from Taiwan, pp. 80,
95, 96-97.
22. Wang Chen-ho, p. 79; Chinese Stories from Taiwan, p. 98.
23. My statement here amplifies Birch's conclusions, but only slightly;
compare Birch, "Images of Suffering," p. 83.
24. Huang Ch'un-ming, "Erh-tzu te ta wan-ou," Chung-kuo hsien-tai hsiao-
shuo hsüan, pp. 133, 148, 158; "His Son's Big Doll," The Drawing of an Old Cat and Other
Stories, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp.
38-39, 53-60. Cyril Birch makes a penetrating analysis of this story in his "Images of
Suffering," pp. 75-78; see also GoldWatt's excellent "The Rural Stories of Hwang Chun-
ming," Chinese Fiction from Taiwan, ed. Faurot, pp. 110-33, esp. pp. 123-25. For a de-
scription of its screen version, see Huang Yu-mei, "A New Trilogy Zooms In on Tai-
wan's 'Native Soil' Literature," Free China Review (October 1983), 33(10):48-53.
25. The text is reprinted in Huang Ch'un-ming, Hsiao kua-fu (Taipei: Yüan-
ching, 1975), pp. 17-39; Goldblatfs translation is in Hwang, Drowning of an Old Cat,
pp. 12-36.
26. "K'an-hai te jih-tzu" is reprinted in Huang Ch'un-ming, Sayonara Tsai-
chien (Taipei: Yüan-ching, 1974), pp. 59-126; see the translation by Earl Wieman in
Chinese Stories from Taiwan, pp. 195-241. Jon-Claire Lee reviews the film adaptation in
"A Straight-On Look at the Oldest Profession: A Flower in the Rainy Night," Free China
Review (November 1983), 33(ll):35-36.
27. "K'an-hai," p. 80; Chinese Stories from Taiwan, p. 209. Coming on the
heels of her reunion with Ying-ying, this remark adds ambiguity to the first few pages
of the story. The name Ying-ying is well known to readers of Chinese fiction as that
of the protagonist in a classical language tale in the ch'uan-ch'i form written by Yuan
Chen (779-831), "Ying-ying chuan." In this semiautobiographical account, the young
woman—ostensibly of an aristocratic family—is ultimately abandoned by a feckless
young scholar named Chang; his given name is not revealed. This Ying-ying's man
is named Lu, again without a given name. Does "Sea-Watching Days" stand all major
elements of the earlier story on their head? That is, is the whore Ying-ying to be trea-
sured while the young lady was not? Will the rough soldier Lu be steadfast where the
scholar was the opposite? By her reference to "dullards" and "bums" does Pai-mei
place Mr. Lu in one of these categories, thus suggesting a less than joyous future for
them? Clearly the significant element in Ying-ying's new family is not the husband; it
is the baby and the change of identity he brings his parents.
Hegel: The Search for Identity 428

28. "K'an-hai," p. 79; compare the translation given in Chinese Stories from
Taiwan, p. 209, which omits this line.
29. For analyses of this story, see Goldblatt, "Rural Stories," p. 121, and
Jing Wang, 'Taiwan Hsiang-t'u Literature: Perspectives on the Evolution of a Literary
Movement," Chinese Fiction from Taiwan, ed. Faurot, pp. 53—4.
30. Hsia, "Foreword," Chinese Stories from Taiwan, p. xxiv.

DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD

IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE NARRATIVES
Joseph S. M. Lau
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the American Council of Learned So-
cieties for a grant (1975-1976) for research on this topic.
1. The Vintage Turgenev, vol. 2, trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York:
Vintage Books, 1960), p. 349. Susequent page references to this work are given par-
enthetically after the quotations.
2. Anton Chekhov's Plays, trans, and ed. Eugene K. Bristow (New York:
Norton, 1977), p. 89.
3. Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uni-
versity Press, 1962), p. 10. In the opinion of Jesse V. Clardy and Betty Clardy, the
most notable superfluous men in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian litera-
ture are Pechorin in Michael Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, Oblomov in Ivan Gon-
charov's novel of the same name, and a host of male characters created by Ivan Tur-
genev. "All endure purposeless lives and are unable to find meaning in human activity
or even in life." See The Superfluous Man in Russian Letters (Washington, D. C.: Uni-
versity Press of America, 1980), p. v. In this connection it is important to note that
the Russian "Superfluous Men" cited here are not to be confused with the self-styled
American "Superfluous Men" such as Albert Jay Nock who treasure "anything that
nourishes the soul, from art to religion to literature." See The Superfluous Men: Con-
servative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945, ed., Robert M. Crunden (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1977), p. xvi.
4. C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 22. In The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western
Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), Reinhard Kuhn identifies some
of the symptoms of ennui such as "the obsession with death, the lack of involvement,
monotony, immobility, and, of course, a total distortion of the sense of time and even
of the sense of space. By reducing these multitudinous characteristics to their essen-
tial common factor, we can tentatively define ennui as the state of emptiness that the
soul feels when it is deprived of interest in action, life, and the world. . . ." (p. 13).
5. The likes of Chulkaturin and Voynitsky are still rare species in modem
Chinese literature. If one example must be given, I think Fang Hung-chien in Ch'ien
Chung-shu's Fortress Besieged (Wei-ch'eng, 1947) could be seen as sharing some of the
features of the "superfluous man" as described by Frederick Hoffman, even though
Fang"s gift for fatuity and self-mockery redeem him from abject despair. Ch'ien's novel
is available in English translation by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, Fortress Be-
sieged (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).
6. About the unheroic qualities of a Chinese hero in traditional Chinese
love stories, E. D. Edwards has written: " O f all the characteristics of Chinese fiction
LAU: DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 429

which are foreign to European ideas none is more striking than the inadequacy of the
hero of love stories. The nominal hero is generally a quite unheroic person who, find-
ing a maiden in distress, sinks into a kind of physical and mental decline under the
strain of trying to evolve a plan of rescue." See Chinese Prose Literature of the T'ang
Period (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1938), 2:22.
7. Tang-jen hsiao-shuo, ed. and comp. Wang Kuo-yuan (Hong Kong: Chung-
hua shu-chu, 1958), p. 139. The translation is by James R. Hightower, originally pub-
lished in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1973), vol. 33, and is reprinted in Traditional
Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (hereafter, Traditional Stories), ed. Y. W. Ma and
Joseph S. M. Lau (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 144.
8. Liu Ta-chieh, Chung-kuo wen-hsueh fa ta shih (rpt. Taipei: Chung-hua shu-
chii, 1972), p. 87. The original title of Liu's book was Chung-kuo wen-hsueh fa<han-shih
(Shanghai, 1935). This observation on Ch'u Yuan's personality, however, has been
deleted from the revised editions issued in China and in Hong Kong. See the Hong
Kong Ku-wen shu-chu edition of 1964, for example.
9. In the words of Mencius, the ideal human relationships should be: "be-
tween father and son, there should be affection; between sovereign and minister,
righteousness; between husband and wife, attention to their separate functions; be-
tween old and young, a proper order; and between friends, fidelity" (Mencius, 3A.4);
trans. James Legge, The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1960), 2:251-52. Indeed, human relationship in traditional China is highly hierarchi-
cal. As Wm. Theodore de Bary observes: "Man defines his 'self' in relation to others
and to the Way which unites them. Thus is constructed the web of reciprocal obliga-
tions or moral relations in which man finds himself, defines himself. Apart from these
he can have no real identity." See "Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming
Thought," in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 149.
Unlike the wu-lun relationships cited above, the Four Virtues listed in this
article—chung, hsiao, chieh, and i—have to my knowledge not been codified in any
Confucian classics. There are the "Four Principles" (ssu-wei) defined by Kuan Tzu:
propriety (li), justice (i), honesty (lien), and sense of honor (ch'ih). However, it is a
fact that chung hsiao chieh i have always been mentioned in one breath whenever tra-
ditional virtues are referred to. Thus Shih Yen in his preface to Chang Yu-ho's T'ang-
Sung ch'uan-ch'i hsiian: "Likewise, the promotion of feudalistic morality and virtues,
such as chung hsiao chieh i, can also be found in the pieces [collected here]" (Peking:
Jen-min wen-hsueh, 1964; 2d ed., 1979), p. xiv. In similar vein, Hu Shih-ying: "In
feudal times, the moral principles promoted by the ruling class were mainly the so-
called san-kang wu-lun relationships, and the virtues of chung hsiao chieh i." See Hua-
pen hsiao-shuo kai-lun (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1980), 2:449. San-kang are the re-
lationships between sovereign and minister, father and son, and husband and wife
as proposed by Tung Chung-shu (197-104 B.C.) of the Han period.
10. A detailed study of the historical background of this play, its departure
from official history, as well as its reception (and distortion) in Europe in the hands
of the Jesuits and Sinophiles, can be found in Wu-chi Liu, "The Original Orphan of
Chao," in Comparative Literature (1953), 3:193-212.
11. Yuan ch'u hsiian, ed. Tsang Mao-hsiin (fl. 1585) (rpt. Peking: Chung-
hua shu-chu, 1958), 4:1491. The translation is by Pi-twan H. Wang, The Revenge of the
Orphan of Chao, in Renditions (1978), 9, p. 122. The orphan is first identified in the play
as Ch'eng Po (after his protector Ch'eng Ying), and later as T'u Ch'eng after he was
Lau: Duty, Reputation, and Selfhood 430

adopted by T'u-an Ku. To avoid confusion of identity, I have consistently referred to

this orphan as Orphan Chao in this article.
12. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972), p. 24.
13. Yuan ch'u hsuan, p. 1490; Wang, p. 122. Wang notes on the same page:
"According to Cheng Ch'iao's Tung-chih [ch. 29], T'u-an is a double surname, but Chi
Chun-hsiang [the playwright] obviously took T u as a single surname."
14. Yuan ch'u hsuan, p. 1495; Wang, p. 127.
15. Mark Schorer, 'Technique as Discovery," in Critiques and Essays on
Modern Fiction: 1920-1951, ed. John W. Aldridge (New York: Ronald Press, 1952), p.
67.
16. Also known as "The Unjust Execution of Ts'ui Ning" ("Ts'o chan Ts'ui
Ning") in the Ching-pen t'ung-su hsiao-shuo, which was represented "at the time of its
'discovery,' as an older collection than the San-yen, but actually based upon the San-
yen." See Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship, and
Composition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 218.
17. Hsing-shih heng-yen (Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-chu, 1958), p. 695;
trans. Jeanne Kelly, in Traditional Stories, p. 470.
18. Yueh Heng-chiin identifies "The Jest" as a tragedy of fate, an illustra-
tion of the cruelty and precariousness of life. "Between the judge (the prefect of Lin-
an) and the defendants; between one person to another, there is no channel for com-
munication. What prevails in the story is an oppressive feeling of muted fear, an-
guish, and injustice." See Sung-tai hua-pen yen-chiu (Taipei: National Taiwan Univer-
sity, 1969), pp. 204-5.
19. Hsing-shih heng-yen, p. 705; Kelly, 478.
20. A Gathering of Fugitives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), p. 38.
21. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Anchor, 1959), p.
35.
22. Lun-yu 9:22. D. C. Lau, whose translation I have used, rearranges the
sections of this book and places the present quotation in 23 instead of 22. See Confu-
cius: The Analects (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 99.
23. Since the text of this story in Chung-hua shu-chu's edition (Ching-shih
t'ung-yen, Hong Kong, 1958) has been bowdlerized, readers interested in reading the
unexpurgated version can find it in Chung-kuo ch'uan-t'ung tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo hsiian-
chi, ed. Ma Yu-yuan [Y. W. Ma] and Liu Shao-ming [Joseph S. M. Lau) (Taipei: Lien-
ching, 1979; hereafter, Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo). Our text for this and other San-yen sto-
ries in this anthology are based on the two-volume photographic edition of the 1624
printing published by Taipei's Shih-chieh shu-chii in 1958. The present quotation is
on p. 174 of Tuan-p'ien hsmo-shuo; trans. C. T. Hsia and Susan Arnold Zonana, in Tra-
ditional Stories, p. 123. For relevant information about the social pressure against a
widow's remarriage, see Ann Waltner, "Widows and Remarriage in Ming and Early
Qing China," in Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship, ed. Rich-
ard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen (Youngstown, N. Y.: Philo Press, 1981), pp.
129-46.
24. This represents a moral anomaly on the part of the San-yen narrator,
who is always eager to endorse conventional values and virtues. One appropriate ex-
ample can be found in T h e Couple Bound in Life and Death" ("Ch en To-shou sheng-
ssu fu-ch'i," Hsing-shih heng-yen). Chu To-fu in this story is betrothed to Ch en To-
shou when they are both nine years old. At fifteen, however, Ch'en is suddenly at-
LAU: DUTY, REPUTATION, AND SELFHOOD 431

tacked by leprosy. With his consent, Ch'en's parents propose to cancel the engage-
ment. To-fu, however, remains adamant in her insistence to marry the leper boy as
planned, so that she can devote herself to caring for him in the capacity as his wife.
Impressed by her spirit of self-sacrifice, the narrator indicates his admiration with a
two-lined encomium: " Truly: T h r e e winters won't change the lone pine's uprigh-
teousness. / Ten thousand hardships won't alter the noble girl's hearf " (Tuan-p'ien
hsiao-shuo, p. 310; trans. Kelly, in Traditional Stories, p. 216). Like Shao-shih of " T h e
Dead Infant," Chu To-fu is also a high-minded woman striving for a lasting reputa-
tion. Her self-sacrifice is simultaneously a vicarious self-assertion and an alarming way
to demonstrate her "holier than thou" superiority over her fellow men. For a discus-
sion of this story at greater length, see Joseph Lau, " T h e Saint as Sinner: Paradoxes
of Love and Virtues in T h e Predestined Couple' " ['Ch'en To-shou sheng-ssu fu-ch'i'],
in Tamkang Review (1970), 1(1):183-91.
25. Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo, p. 174; Hsia and Zonana, p. 123. Since the nar-
rator in this story is morally transparent, he is a good instance of what Patrick Hanan
calls the "cards-on-the-table omniscience; the narrator knows everything that is ger-
mane to the plot and tells everything. . . . Not only does he know everything, he
positively glories in his knowledge and is tempted to predict what will follow." See
"The Early Chinese Short Story: A Critical Theory in Outline," Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies (1967), 27:168-207; rpt. in Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, ed. Cyril Birch
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 324.
26. Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo, pp. 177-78; Hsia and Zonana, p. 125.
27. Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo, p. 179; Hsia and Zonana, p. 126.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.; Hsia and Zonana, pp. 126-27. If a case is to be made to justify
the relevance of "erotic details" in a given context for the sake of heightening a point
of particular significance, " T h e Dead Infant" offers a good example. True, graphic de-
scriptions can be deleted without impairing the main thrust of the narrative. But un-
less we are given some specific information with regard to her conduct in the "game
of rain and clouds," we have no way of telling how much Shao-shih has suffered
from her self-imposed sexual privation. Precisely because she is not a P a n Chin-lien
known for her wantonness, the more abandoned she appears in the company of the
servant boy, the closer we can perceive the degree of her misery.
30. Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo, p. 180; Hsia and Zonana, 127.
31. Ibid.
32. Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo, pp. 183-84; Hsia and Zonana, p. 129. I have placed
Shao-shih's inner thoughts in quotation marks, and for this reason the English trans-
lation has been slightly altered to fit this purpose.
33. Shao-shih's infanticide invites comparison with Abbie Putnam's mur-
der of her own newborn son in order to prove her genuine love for Eben Cabot in
Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. But unlike Shao-shih, Abbie later decides to
submit herself to law, thus demonstrating "in unequivocal terms her respect for the
fundamentals of social order." While she refuses to regard her incestuous relations
with Eben as a sin, she suffers profound guilt for killing her baby. For more com-
ments on Abbie's development as a character, see Joseph Lau, Ts'ao Yu, the Reluctant
Disciple of Chekhov and O'Neill: A Study in Literary Influence (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 1970), pp. 15-27.
34. To my knowledge, Idema is one of the very few Western scholars who
does not seem to be troubled by the stereotypical characters in Chinese fiction. As he
Lau: Duty, Reputation, and Selfhood 432

put it, "The heroes of Chinese fiction, it is generally agreed, are much less individu-
alized, much more 'types'; the author tries to characterize them by one or two essen-
tial traits, displaying also little attention for individual psychology, but rather show-
ing their nature through actions and conversations. . . . But just as Western fiction
managed to create many completely uninteresting individuals, Chinese fiction created
many convincing types." See Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1974), p. 51.
35. "Some Limitations of Chinese Fiction," in Studies in Chinese Literature,
ed. John L. Bishop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 246. In addition
to "this limitation of psychological analysis," it is Bishop's view that the traditional
colloquial fiction of China is limited in two other respects: "the one a limitation of
narrative convention, the other a limitation of purpose" (p. 240). Eugene Eoyang,
however, takes exception to Bishop's "critical assumptions about literature," and de-
votes a whole essay reconsidering the questions of (1) the notion of unity; (2) the value
of originality; and (3) the definition of audience, around which Bishop's "assumptions
about the limitations of Chinese fiction" are centered. See "A Taste for Apricots: Ap-
proaches to Chinese Fiction," in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed.
Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 56.
Apparently Bishop's view on Chinese fiction proves to be equally disturb-
ing to Timothy C. Wong, who argues that while applying Western criteria directly to
the categorization and evaluation of Chinese works "is in no way a purely wasted
exercise . . . it can sometimes cause us to close our eyes both to the artistic features
of a particular work and to new frontiers of literary appreciation to which the work
can take us." See "Self and Society in Tang Dynasty Love Tales," in journal of the
American Oriental Society (January-March 1979), 89(1):95.
36. 'Traditional Heroes in Chinese Popular Fiction," in The Confucian Per-
suasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 148.
37. Tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo, p. 63; trans. Peter Rushton, in Traditional Stories,
p. 48. Shu-tzu is a njoron.
38. James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1967), pp. 8 - 9 .
39. "Letter to Shan T'ao" ("Yii Shan Chii-yuan chueh-chiao shu"), trans.
J. R. Hightower, Anthology of Chinese Literature, ed. Cyril Birch and Donald Keene (New
York: Grove Press, 1965), 1:163. In a recent article considering the importance of role-
playing in traditional as well as contemporary China, Francis L. K. Hsu goes so far as
to say that "the Chinese never had individualism in their past, and the Communists
have certainly not created it." Presumably Hsu's categorical view is derived from the
Western concept and definition of the term "individualism." Whether individualism
existed in old China cannot be settled in the space of a note, but it should be safe to
argue that eccentricity as embodied in Hsi K'ang and the rest of the Bamboo Grove
Sages is at least a form of individualism. See Hsu's 'Traditional Culture in Contem-
porary China: Continuity and Change in Values," in Mouing a Mountain: Cultural Change
in China, ed. Godwin C. Chu and Francis L. K. Hsu (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1979),
p. 269.
40. Lien-sheng Yang's "The Concept of Pao as a Basis for Social Relations
in China" is the most illuminating essay on this subject. This essay is collected in
Yang's Excursions in Sinology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 3-23.
 Glossary

A-hao K ttf c/wo SB

Ah Q F»J Q Chao Chün
Ah-sheng F»J Chao Fei-yen
Chao hsia
A-li-ssu Chung-kuo yu-chi fo] Sf '£1 't1 Wi Chao huí $131
"Chao hun"
Ai Wu Chao Kang ^ ^
Aoki Masaru h :1 'A! Chao Ma-ma (Nannie Zhao)
BWHJM i f t Chao, Orphan
Chan-kuo ts'e sjM^ Chao-shíh ku-erh ta-pao-ch'ou tsa-chü
Chang ig ffiftfllLKA-«»»«
Chang Ch'un-i "Jgftti Chao Shuo
Chang, Eileen (Chang Ai ling) ^ f t ^ i f t Chao Tun í § Ifí
Chang Fei ft Chao Yen-i m&W
Chang Feng-i "Chen-chung chi" tt f f
Chang Hsien jg, {|l| Chen Lung-yu si K
Chang Hua || "Chen-niang mu shih hsü" 8
Chang Liang }£ fttf
Chang Sheng jfc f\\ Chen Pao-yü M I
Chang Shou-p'ing m Chen Shih-hsiang Pil
Chang-t'ai Chen Shih-yin (Zhen Shi-yin) £ K ± K §
Chang T'ai-ho 'jfi Si chen ymg-chu ^ t.
Chang T'ien-i Ch'en M
Chang Yu-ho Jctt Ch'en, Empress (Ch'en Hou) [>$! ffí
Chang Yueh Ch'en Chung-i W M M
Ch ang-men ftf"] Ch'en Hung-chih W & f e
C h a n g O 48
Glossary 434

"Ch'en-lun" jTl im
"Ch'en To-shou sheng-ssu fu-ch'i" Chia Pao-yù (Jia Bao-yu) ^ flf
m> t . ^ s Chia She Qia She, Chia Sheh, Prince
Ch'en Yu-fu fà 5 'x. Shieh) j f
Cheng Chen- to t f t m m Chia Tai-hua g f t i t
Cheng Chung f $ £ ^ Chia Yu-ts'un Già Yu-cun) f f nil t j
cheng-mmg iH £ Chia Yun Oia Yun, Little Yun) M S
"Cheng Shu-tsu chuan" chiang
Cheng Tz'u Chiang Ch'ing ¡X H
ch'eng-jen tìc A chiang-hu ÌLffl
C h e n g Po Chiang Hung
Ch'eng Po-ch'iian S c f t ^ i Chiang I-hsueh
Ch'eng Yen f c Chiang Jui-tsao
Ch'eng Ying g ^ Chiang Pin
Chi Chiin-hsiang Iti Chiang Yen iEi^S
Chi-fu ts'ung-shu £ $ $ $ 1 1 1 1 Chiang Ying-k'o
Chi hen ch'u-ch'u ìJiRIj&I^ chiao-chiao 8}f
Chi Jung-shu fc'&g? chiao chuan ning i man-k'an li
Chi Shao-yu Yu-ch'ang «Ufi
Ch'i-hu sou ("Odd Tablet') B Ch'iao Chung-ch'ang ft 'M'
Ch'i-shih-erh ch'ao jen-wu yen-i {_; f- Chiao-hsing (Lucky, Apricot) ÌsSj fc
®k¥vmìi Chiao Ta (Big Jiao) « A,
Ch'i-shih-erh ch'ao ssu-shu jen-wu yen-i "Ch'iao-ta yùeh"
L: I " . k t o m f t chieh (chastity)
Ch'i shui (River Ch'i) jji chieh (fidelity) fin
Ch'i-yùan chieh (joining)
Chia Ch'ieh-chieh-t'ing tsa-wen fi. fr-V'SH Z
Chia Chen (Jia Zhen, Cousin Zhen, Chien ff|
Chia Gen) Chien-an period ij'^c;
Chia Cheng (Jia Zheng) f( jft Chien-mei $ );
"Chia-chuang i-niu-ch'e" - '('. Chien-teng hsin-hua J'JK? lii
Chia-hui (Melilot) t à S Chien-wen Z
Chia Huan (Jia Huan) ffi ch'ien-ch'iu chia-hua T'f'Xffciii
Chia Jung Già Rong, Chia Yung) '"( Ch'ien Chung-shu f ^ M
Chia Lien (Jia Lian) fH Ch'ien-hsueh (Snow Pink)
Chia Mu (Grandmother, Jia Mu, Ch'ien Liu
Princess Ancestress, the Matriarch) Ch'ien-lung chia-hsu Chih-yen chat
ch'ung-p'ing Shih-t'ou chi '(' 'ic
fi:;
chia pa lung chih wan-wan 8J A ìlti,^. - r u f iiuii ,id
GLOSSARY 435

Ch'ien-nù li-hun fn Ch'mg-p'ing-shan-t'ang hua-pen in '( •

chih ill lit*
Chih Chu £ 8 f j Ch'ing-se te cha-meng pj£i fYj f f tt
chih-hsing (perfect nature) - f c t t " C h ' i n g - s h a o - n i e n t a o - t e p'ing-chia
C h i h - y e n chai ( R e d Inkstone) Ij^i filft neng-li te i-hsieh y e n - c h i u " pf 'J/
Chih-yen chai ch'ung-p'ing Shih-i'ou chi i t « I Ì « m f i f t - ' & m i e .
SBRflFfisf fiflSie C h ' i n g - w e n ( S k y b r i g h t , Bright Cloud,
cfi'i/i (sense o f h o n o r ) lit Bright D e s i g n ) ^ ®
r/i'iTi Ch'ing-yeh chung in fc M
Chin-ch'uan-erh ( G o l d e n , G o l d Ring, chiù i shan t i f i l i
G o l d e n Bracelet) "Chiù k o "
"Chin-chung ch'ang-ming" Chiu-ko yen-chiu tlWtWlZ
Chin-kuang ta-tao ^ jt À" iS ch'iu chen ^c £K
Chin Ping Mei Ch'iu C h i n 91
Chin Sheng-t'an & W M ch'iu-hsu
chin-shih iM "i: "Ch'iu Hu hsing" & $ ff
" C h i n - t ' u n g hsien-jen tz'u Han k o " "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan" Ì L H $ ( ¡ 1
^ « i i l l A » » » " C h ' i u - j a n - k ' o chuan k ' a o " Ì L I f #
Ch'in O " C h ' i u - j a n - k ' o chuan te w e n - h s u e h
Ch'in-shih (Qin-shi, Ch'in K ' o - c h ' i n g c h i a - c h i h " i l f * ' £ ( f fa . 4 W- © W
Q i n Ke-qing, M i s t r e s s Y u n g ) ^ _ Ch'iu T ' a n i r ifl
"im C h ' i u - w e n (Ripple, A u t u m n W a v e ,
Ch'in S h u - p a o ^ S W Autumn Sky) ft**
Ch'in W a n g - n u ( D a u g h t e r of the Ch'in Cho Wen-chiin £ U
King) m i: k C h o u C h ' e n g - c h e n Bî
ching (norm) C h o u Chi it] tff, C h ' i n g - y u a n
ching (scene) « C h o u Chun m
ching-chieh tg fr- C h o u I-pai U Biî â
C h i n g - h u a n hsien-ku £ ] fill to' C h o u Jui's wife ( Z h o u Rui's wife)
C h i n g K ' o $J$i>J m f f i m f ó
Ching-pen I'ung-su hsiao-shuo C h o u S h u - j e n IS] fat
'MB C h o u T s o - j e n Wi if- A
Ching-shih t'ung-yen ^ tit: i l m Chou Yang m %
ch'ing (feeling, l o v e ) tft C h ' o u , Eunuch th. A
ch'ing (sunny) At Chu-chi sou SiSK
C h ' i n g An-shih |H; Chu-chi subprefecture H;
Ch'ing-hua hsueh-pao fn ^ C h u Usi fc M
ch'ing-kmn ÌH'H* C h u I-tsun £ ft t i
C h ' i n g - m i n g (festival) in ÌP " C h û g o k u k o s h o s e t s u n o tenkai
Glossary 436

(shinwa, densetsu, bungei)" rf j [ 3 r^T Chung-kuo t'ung-su hsiao-shuo shu-mu

't'^jiiS'K&KH
Chu-ko Liang f | g % Chung-kuo wen-hsiieh fa-ta shih (fa-
Chu Kuei-erh % * ^d
chan s W + l ^ gif i
Ch'u Huai-wang S I S f". (SSi)
Ch'u ]en-huo ^ A S
Ch'u tz'u ft: Si Chung-kuo wen-hsueh ming chu
Ch'u tz'u chu pa-chung *nt ££ A tt
Ch'u wang (King of Ch'u) H Chung-kuo wen-hsiieh yen-chiu
Ch'u fu cheng-i l3a Sft it l£ "Chung t'u" i f
Ch'u-hai li-ts'e ft $IJ Curly Beard (Ch'iu-jan-k'o) £ L f f r £
Ch'u-hai tsung-mu t'i-yao [ttl $9 iI Erh-k'e Fai-an chmg-ch'i '.MWM

Ch'ii-lun [8] jw Erh-p'o (Erh-p'ai) -jti

Ch'u Yu l i , ' "Erh-tzu te ta wan-ou" r/i { tt-J A
Ch u Yuan jg ®
Ch'u Yuan fu chin-i ® ® RS ^ ¿f fa&
ch'uan-ch'i ^ fa-chi pien-t'ai #
ch'uan (expediency) U Fan, Lady ®
Ch'uan Han San-kuo Chin Nan-pei-ch'ao
Fan Kung-ch'eng fu £ fj§
Fang Hung-chien
Ch'uan Tang shih fiJS If Fei Ch'ang ^
Chuang I-fu fei-fei jp jt
Chuang, King of Ch'u (Ch'u Chuang fei lung tsai fien ^ gl it K
wang) j- feng-ho ^
Chuang Tzu ¡f£ f- feng-liu
Chui-erh (Trinket) Bfi ^ Feng M e n g lung W> hI
chun-tzu IT f- fuM.
"Ch'un chih sheng" fu-teM.®
Ch'un-mei (Plum Blossom) Fu Tung-hua f f £ ^
Ch'un-yen (Swallow) Gumma daigaku kiyo jimbun kagaku
chung ("B" grade) hen K-mnVM
chung (loyalty) Gyokudat shin'ei shu fc ¿j;
Chung-kuo ch'uan-t'ung tuan-p'ten hsiao-
"Hai te meng" fatfj™
shuo hsuan-chi'\'mi$titi3.&'i^ii Han Ch'ang-li wen-chi chiao-chu
Sit-
Chung-kuo hsien-tai hsiao-shuo hsitan Han Chiieh
'¡'ffliHR'i-mm Han Chung 'ft
Chung-kuo ku-tien hsi-ch'u lun-chu chi-Han-shan 3 g l l j
Han Yu
 GLOSSARY 437

Hao-ch'iu chuan ttf it® " H s i a n g f e i " jffl fc

H a o Jan tf; " H s i a n g f u - j e n " iffl ^ A
hao-jan chih-ch'i in" Hsiang-hsing san-chi iffl i ; ¿d
"Hi Lili, Hi L i — " f l i f . ••• Hsiang-ku ^
Ho C h i n g # C g H s i a n g - l i n g (Caltrop) §
H o C h i n g - m i n g fpj M BJ] hsiang-t'u
H o Hsin fHIfjft Hsiang-t'u wen-hsueh t'ao-lun chi
H o - p o ynj i ù
H o San fn] H s i a n g - t u n g w a n g (Prince of H s i a n g -
H o Sun f n J â l . C h u n g - y e n ff tung), Y u a n iffl ^ £ Jc
hsiao
Ho-ling Tien-t'ai san-sheng erh-ho shih-
(filial piety) ^
H s i a o - h u n g (Hung-yii, Crimson, S i a o
Hou Ch'ih pi fu fêjfctgM Hung)/J x S I
Hou Ching ( g f ; Hsiao I f g f f
H o u Hsiao H s i a o K a n g f f f f i . Shih-tsan t f e ®
hsi ^ Hsiao kua-fu >\ • 'If M
"Hsi-ching t s a - c h i " hsiao-p'in wen 'h nn iC
hsi-ch'iu " H s i a o - s s u - m i n g " 'J^ a] ^p
Hsi-ch'un (Xi-chun, G r i e f of Spring, Hsiao T'ung
Compassion Spring) t ^ f ^ H s i a o T z u - h s i e n Ift f m
Hsi-erh & H s i a o Y e n l i f t . Shu-ta
Hst-hsiang chi Iffl ¿g Hsieh-an chi § fi ^
Hsi-hu erh-chi N ffl Hsieh Ch'ien-ch'iu SH T'%'A
Hsi-hu shuo M $ Hsieh shih ¿H "t
Hsi-jen (Aroma, Pearl, P e r v a d i n g Hsieh T ' i a o S t t t , Hsuan-hui £ B f
Fragrance) |g A hsien (immortal) fill
Hsi K ' a n g f ë f l ï hsien-ch'en fj[ [£
Hsi-k'un^M hsin-hsin ftkffc
Hsi Shih («j 5Ë Hsin-jen hsiao-shuo hsiian #f A 'h il
Hsi-yu chi jg Hsin-jen hsin-tso hsiian #r A #T fF 8
Hsi-yu puff ig SI Hsin-h hsiieh-pao-kif^ffi
hsia ( " C " grade) ~F hsing PI
hsia (knight errant) ft Hsing-chi pt-hsiijU'&ffi
Hsia, C. T. (Hsia C h i h - t s i n g ) 1 jf hsing-ch'ing fttf
Hsia Chin-kuei ( G o l d e n C i n n a m o n , Hsing Feng I S
Cassia) H s i n g Fu-jen (Lady Xing, Princess
Hsia-i feng-yikh chuanftJt ÉS, /I f!|Shieh, M a d a m e H s i n g ) A
hsia-k'oft% Hsing-shih heng-yen tfrtPi a
Hsia, Tsi-an J fâ ^ "Hsing, ying, shen"
"Hsiang-chun" ft hsii (preface) ff
Glossary 438

Hsu C h i h - m o Huang Lung T z u Ü f-

HsO Ch'ih Huang-shih kung H f j £
Hsu Fu-tso iM ¡ft Huang Tai-shih i-ch'un t ang i-kao
Hsu H s i a - k ' o & U ' £
Hsu H u n g - k o ^ ^ Hui-neng||$=
Hsu K . a n j £ $ £ Hui Shih j g J g
Hsii Ling Hsiao-mu Hui-yin hsiao-shuo k'ao-cheng '(Jc ñi'] > [Jí
Hsii T e - y e n £§> t=?
Hsii W e i hurt, po^^i
Hsiian shih chih /J, Hung tL
Hsiieh I-ma (Aunt Xue, A u n t Hsiieh) Hung ch'i
&&& Hung-fu
Hsiieh ] e n - k a o g? { ' . % Hung-fu chi
Hsiieh K ' o B W Hung-lou meng IT Rf
Hsiieh P a n (Xue Pan) Hung-lou meng hsin-t'an fclfll
Hsiieh Pao-ch'ai (Xue Bao-chai, "Hung-lou meng k'ao-cheng"
Precious Clasp, Precious Virtue)
Hung-lou meng pa-shih hui chiao-pen
Hsiieh-t'ao hsiao-shu '^M'l'-t tHi^A-f-LnlßE*
Hsiieh-yen ( S n o w g o o s e , S n o w Duck) Hung-lou meng pien ft! ^
%m Hung-lou meng yen-chiu ¡¡¡I fS # iff %
Hsiieh Y i n g - c h ' i & R S J i f Hung Ming-shui $ t 7fc
"Hsiin-ma p ' o " Hung-niang | J
Hu-niu (feffi Hung P i e n g t f f ;
hu-sheng chih hsi-hsi Mim,>fflM " H u n g - s e tang-an s h u - c h ' i n g " fe
Hu Shih ¿fl jSj ffiSfflf
Hu Shih-ying H w a n g C h u n - m i n g (Huang Ch'un-
"Hu-tieh"®^ ming) H # Hfl
Hu W a n - c h ' u n i (feeling)
hua-pen ¿J i (selfless friendship, justice)
Hua-pen hsiao-shuo kai-lun n S"
; ^ 'j ^ "I Ch'in 0"tt.«t$
fii liffB l c h i n g ó
huan-tso Jg ^ i-fu wang-en H £
Huan-ymg ¿J %} '-;>« K- A
Huang C h ' a o H " I - k o - j e n tsai t ' u - c h u n g " -(¡ft A 6 :
huang-hsii lao-weng M ^ ^
Huang Hui i wu fan-ku te g jg
Huang Jen-jui S Ikkai T o m o y o s h i -jflíü^
Huang-liang meng jfc. <jj£ Jao T s u n g - i H ^ g g
"Huang-ling miao pei" if« {.'.
GLOSSARY 439

¡en-chien shih [!!] |il;

"len-hu chuan" ffc Ku-pen p'ing-hua hsiao-shuo chi fa T
jert-min wen-hsueh \ K; ^
jen-sheng 'I- Ku-shih wen-fang hsiao-shuo JfiC" -¡C >Tj
jen-tsei tso-fu ¿SWfF X
Jih-pen lung-clung so-chien Chung-kuo Ku-tien hsi-ch'u ts'un-mu hui-k'ao
hsiao-shuo shu-mu [J ill M ^T iff
' t ' H ' J ^ * II
Ku-tien hsiao-shuo hsi-ch'u ts'ung-k'ao
Jou p'u-t'uan
ju (is like) 4(1
Ju Chih-chuan B§ "K'uai-tsui Li Ts'ui-lien
^ 3 1 ad
ju-lin wai-shih f® tt ^ £ Kuan Chung H
Juan Hsiu |ijt fe Kuan-chung ts'ung-shu Btj H flj
Jui-chen fffi Kuan-kuan chu-chiu |tij Bt ^
Jui-chu ( G e m ) i f ô # Kuan Y ù |Jg ft
Jung, Mrs. ( C h ' i n - s h i h ) f ? A W W Kuang-ming jih-pao U
Kan Pao f'-flf k'uang 51;
"Kan-shang ti hsing-lu " K'uang Chung M i §
fjîK "K'uang T'ai-shou tuan ssu-hai-erh"
"K'an-hai te jih-tzu" ftMù'j tl {- Mk-.m*
k'ang Hi "K'uang-jen jih-chi" Jf. J K [1 ¿d
Kang kuei
kao-ao chih 1-1 ¿_ W H K'un-shu h j J ^ i
"Kao-chii hsien-lieh te ch'i-chih, ch'ien- kung-an (fiction) £
chin" Kung-an (school) £
Kao E ,',','j kung-mmg ij] %
Kao Ta-ch'uan À: iji Kung-sun Ch'u-chiu £ ft- f- ]
"Kao-t'ang fu" Ift 9A kung-t'i shih 'fi fg
k'ao-i % ft Kung-tzu Chiù £ f-jjyf
Ko Hung g ^ t "Kung wu ch'u m e n " ¿> te {fi I"]
ko i yen chih IX < ] „¿:, "K'ung-hou yin" i g |
K'o-hsiieh chai shih-chi, wen-chi J»J U K u n g I-chi
Kuo Ch'i-tsu j g ^ f f i
K o n d 5 Haruo ¡¿£ H # Kuo Mao-ch'ien |]5 in
Ku-chin hsiao-shuo ^ ^ 'h Kuo M o - j o
Ku-chin shuo-hcu ^ $ " K u o shang" ffl %
ku-chou ffl /fj- Kuo T'ai %
Ku-k'uang ("Ancient-crazy") ^ " J f i Kuo-t'ing lu:MH£gk
ku-niang ttiil Lai M a - m a (Old Mrs. Lai) igiftilft
Ku-pen hsi-ch'u ts'ung-k'an (ch'u-chi) Lai Sheng & ft
Glossary 440

Lai T a g A Li Y e n ^
"Lang lai-le" i S ^ T Li Yu
Lao She g £ Li Yuan (T'ang Kao-tsu) £ ffl
Lao T'ai-t'ai (Chia M u ) i^XX (fSi^ffi)
Lao Ts'an yu-chi ^ ^ j g l d heh-chuan ?IJ f#
Lao-yeh (Chia Cheng) £ ^ Lieh-hsien chuan f(l| (4
Leng Tzu-hsing (Leng Zi-xing) PJ Lieh-nii chuan fy
li (innate principle, basic patterns, Lieh Tzu f-
conception) lien (honesty)
li (propriety, mores) ( § Lin Ku-niang (Lin Tai-yii)
Li Ch'ang-chi ko-shih chiao-shih ^ ^^
Lin Piao .ft ^
Rti&ff Lin Shu ftijij*
Li Cheng $ jgK Lin Tai-yii (Lin Dai-yu, Black Jade)
Li chi Ȥ id
Li Chih ^ ^ Ling Fen ® %
Li Ching $ iff Ling M e n g - c h ' u % fj]
Li Ch'ing-chao $ jn BB Liu c h i
Li Cho-wu (Li Chih) Liu Chin-ch'ung §IJ f ; jt
Li H o $Q liu-ch'u Hi
Li Ho lun $ R jfc Liu Chun Hsiu-lung ft ||
Li Hsia iL M LiuEglJfg
"Li hun" Liu-hsia Hui ffl T
Li K'uei Liu Hsiang f l j [u]
Li Ma-ma (Nannie Li, M o t h e r Li) Liu Hsiao-wei
Liu Hsieh Sljfig
Li M e n g - y a n g ^-f-j^ Liu Hsin glj gfc
Li P'an-lung $ g ft Liu Hsiu-yeh
Li Pao-chia Liu Huan f l j g , Han-tu ^
"Li P'ing k'ung-hou yin" Liu I-ch'ing
Li Po ^ ^ Liu, James J. Y. f l j
"Li s a o " g g Liu K'ai-jung g l j ^ «
Li Shan f . £ Liu Lao-lao (Grannie Liu) §1] g g
Li Shang-yin ^ iBjISi Liu Ling SI] ft
Li Shen f . ffi Liu Pang g l j f l j
Li Shih-min (T'ang T'ai-tsung) ^ t ^ K : Liu Pei g l j f i
(f£ k'^) Liu Shao-ming (Joseph S. M . Lau)
Li Tzu-ch'eng ^ fl hSc
Li Tzu-jan £ f- f f "Liu-shih chuan"
Li W a n (Widow Chu, Li Huan) $ ft Liu Shuo $ m . Hsiu-hsuan ft A"
Li Wei fft Liu-Sung Emperor W e n (Liu-Sung
GLOSSARY 441

W e n - t i ) S l j ' £ -¿iW Mmg-chiao ü

Liu T a - c h i e h f ] A * Ming-chiao-chung-jen 41 A
Liu W e n - c h i n g £ fp " M i n g Ch'ing erh-tai te p'ing-hua c h i "
Lo-ch'ang, Princess ^ / m n --ft^f ^ *
Lo C h e n - y ü ü t ü Ming Ch'ing p'ing-hua hsiao-shuo hsiian
Lo Kuan-chung l l f t ' f 1 Mrt^lS'Mfta
"Lo-shen
" M i n g - j e n h s i a o - s h u o chi tang-tai ch'i-
Lo-t'o Hsiang-tzu f w e n pen-shih chü-li" W A ' M S ad
Lo Yin mm.
Lu Chi |S$$,Shih-heng Ming-jen tsa-chii hsirnn Ifl A it ®J ¿8
Lu Hsün (Lu Xun) g . ¿ft Ming-sha-shih-shih ku-chi ts'ung-ts'an
Lu Jen-lung A ft
Lu K u n g H Mo-han chat ting-pen ch'uan-ch'x t'; ^
Lu Nan-tzu ¡J} f-
Lu T ' u n g i g ± Mo Tzu f-
Lu Y ü n - l u n g Mu-tan t'ing ft ft V
Lü-ch'iu Y i n f a f i l E Na-han if?®
Lü mu-tanfäftpf "Nan-ch'ien" ifrül
Lü shui (Lii River) $ 7K Nan-hsingchi '<: •.,:':
"Lun y i n - m o w e n - i " $ it £ Nan-hsing chi hsü-p'ien [ft irad^SS
Lun-yu A J\ " N a n - h s i n g tsa-chi" l^'ijJSnd
Lung-erh [if. ft Nan-p'ing w a n g (Prince of N a n - p ' i n g )
lung-yinM^ lis ? i:
M a K'ai-yüan .EE, ^ Nan-tz'u hsii-lu [fälsJiiil
Ma-tsu ¡ S i f l ni }6f
M a Y u - y ü a n (Y. W . M a ) .Efi in Ni Erh ftj
Mao-ch'eng chi ,iii Ni H e n g i f 8 $ j
M a o Tse-tung £ £ Ni Hmn-chih
M e i S h e n g ft jfc " N i ku chin-jih liang y e n hui" S t T4]" ^t"
Mei Yao-ch'en tS^Ef!".
M e n c i u s ¡fa f- " N i - s s u i-chih l a o - m a o " fäW iL P.föi
M e n g Ch'eng-shun "Niao-lo hsing" M S ti
M e n g Ch'i "Nineteen Old Poems" t ' A S
M e n g Chiao '¿15 N i n g - k u o fu iff
M e n g - c h i i e h tao-jen A nü chang-fufrt:k
meng fieri A Nü chieh ii
" M e n g yu T ' i e n - I a o shan pieh T u n g - l u Nü Hsü k £
c h u - k u n g - 9- m A 111 gij ife- & m O Huang
mi-wu fjf £i Ö Me, IM
M i a o - y ü t?p },; O n l y O n e Sober A
Glossary 442

O u - y a n g Hsiu san Tang ~i

Pa Chin E & San-yen ,.
pai-hua Ö ¿í "San-yiieh feng-hsiieh" . Ifi,''^"
Pai-mei fg sao (style) 5 i
"Pai niang-tzu y u n g - c h e n Lei-feng-t'a" Sayonara • Tsai-chien Aft i® Bfi. • tfi H.

f Sha Li j ^ f l j

Pan C h a o H Cß Sha T a - c h i e h (Numskull, Stupid Sister)

"Pan C h i e h - y ü " ffiüíf m Ate

P a n Yu-an f i Shan-ko ll||fc

P a n Yüeh An-jen 1 " S h a n - k u e i " \ \\%.

pao Shan Tai [ I j j g

Pao-chu (Jewel) ff i t Shanghai tuan-p'ien hsiao-shuo hsiian

P a o Erh ( B a o Er, Little Pao) «fe l-M&m'hMM

P a o Jung «fe f{f Shanghai wen-i ts'ung-k'an i. -¿ifi

P a o Shu-ya « f e f ö i f mn
Pei Ch'i sh,h Jit KU Shao wu (Shao dances) nfj

"Pei Hsiang l i n g " ® f t ] ^ S h e - y u e h (Musk, M u s k M o o n ) i]

P e i Ti iÉ shen #

Pen-shih shih k 'K Shen-hsien chuan

Pihsieh-chih %W % Shen-hua yu shih iff ¿f, ifii ffi

Pi Kan It f- " S h e n - n u f u " # ^rjtji;

Pien Hua-ch'iian chi iâ ^ Ä shen-ssu

Pien Kung Shen T e - c h ' i e n ¿¡t fS

P'ing-erh (Patience, Little Ping) f W Shen T s ' u n g - w e n fa £

P'ing Ju-heng TÔHÛ Shen T z u - p ' i n g tfi f-

"P'ing fan-ko-ming liang-mien-p'ai Shen Ya-chih tJ5

C h o u Y a n g " ¿f- Ix # áp PS iffi Wi fä « Shen Y i i e h ¿ t & J , Hsiu-wen i

Fing Shan Leng Yen iMlli"^ shih

Po chü-i ö % Shih chi ,jd
P o H u n g - y ü ft t i fi Shih ching ¡¡!fj?«
Po I and Shu Ch'i f f l ^ , Shih C h ' u n g { i
P o Le shih-li fj
pu $$ shih-shih (carefree man) $ [II;
"Ri Ga n o ki shi to s o n o keisei" - f Vi shih shih (knowing the times) „"¿¡¿ll.'f
t fcotfíÁ Shih-shu (Scribe, Painting Maid, Folio,
San-chía p'ing chu Li Ch'ang-chi ko shih Tai-shu) ft
Shih-shuo hsin-yii t il : M f t tin
San-kang wu-lun ÍH /i- f f à Shih T e f c f i f
San-k'e P'ai-an ching-ch'i glj Jl'j 'jfi S* ¿y Shih-t'ou chi { i y/j
San-kuo chih yen-i ¡»Si. Shih, V i n c e n t IMk't
GLOSSARY 443

'Shih-wu-kuan hsi-yen ch'eng ch'iao- Sung Lien ^ j{ft

huo" a f t ^ m Sung Lien-k'uei '4c
Shih Y e n fifi ¿t Sung pen yiieh-fu shih chi 'M^^fff
Shih ymg-hsiung Hung-fu mang-tse p'et
Sung-tai hua-pen yen-chiu r\l f^ ¿J
shih-yung jen-ch'ing i t ffl ,-S tit
Shitiagaku WJ1 Sung Y u 3E
shu & Suzuki T o r a o ^ ft
shu-tzu g J ' T a h s u " A If
Shuang-hsiung chi I S ft ac! Ta hsiieh A $
Shui Ching ^K BH /«-« A H
Shui Chu-i 7K IJÌJ — T a Lao-yeh (Chia She) A
Shui-hu chuan /K fet (H Ta-lu tsa-chih
Shui Ping-hsin "Ta-ssu-ming" A fl] ntf
Shui Ping-hsin san ch'i Kuo Ch'i-tsu Ta T'ai-t'ai (Hsing Fu-jen) A X A
Ta-t'ung A|HJ
Shui Yun TK i S t'ai-chi Affi
Shun # T'ai-chou hsueh-p'ai Us ffl ^ 3S:
"Soji kyuka n o bukkyoku-teki k e k k ò " T'ai-hsii huan-ching A A& ¿ 1 *ft
m&fi&comtàMfè&i T'ai-ku A ft
Sou-shen chi 8 i f ad t'ai-p'ing A7?
Ssu-ch'i (Chess, Chess Maid) Tai-p'ing kuang-chi A -T"1 ® id
Ssu Ku-niang (Chia Hsi-ch'un) 23 fó t$- Tai-yang chao tsai Sang-kan ho shang
Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju rr] ^
ssu-pen T'ai-yuan A ®
Ssu-pu pei-yao Wjftfà Tan-chung lu ft
Ssu-pu ts'ung-k'an PH Sft jg flj T a n Chu M f t
Ssu-shu jen-wu k'ao R f t A T'an Cheng-pi |f iE f |
ssu-wei Hit T'an-ch'un (Taste of Spring, Q u e s t
"Su Hsiao-hsiao mu" l i ' J WJ fi Spring)
Su Shih H t i (Tung-p'o T'an Jih-ch'ao M • fi
Su Y u - p o j | & É T'an T'ien 15 A
Sui shih ì-wen PS it T ' a n g Hsien-tsu j f i S g f f i
Sui Tang yen-i ffifBfàtjf. Tang-jen hsiao-shuo Jg A ' h M
Sui Yang-ti yen-shih Pf 'Mé '!{{ 5È Ì! Tang Sung ch'uan-ch'i hsiian f^ fH
Sun K'ai-ti
Sun Wu-k'ung T'ang-tai hsiao-shuo yen-chiu J j j f t
Sung, Ch'i ^
Sung Chiang if?if. Tao-hsiung J|J W.
Sung Hsiao-wu 5)5 ^ Tao-ie ching i l fé" ®
Glossary 444

Tao-tsang ifii£ Ts'ao Chih f | fift

T a o Ch'ien ftjjfl, Yuan-ming Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in f
Tao Wang-lingft8l*è fs'flo M U C/II/I ling-lo
Te-jou £ Ts'ao P'i g £
Te-kuei Ts'ao Ts'ao § f ^
te kung fàl)] ' T s e n g Pai-ma-wang Piao" S
Teng Hsiao-p'ing fflS'h-t- \M
ti-huai iS. f@ Tseng P'u g f i
"Ti-tzu ko" -fi J- Tso Ssu S
T'ieh Chung-yù 'f i "Ts'o chan Ts'ui Ning"
T'ieh Mei-jen ¡St A Tsui Chin-kang Ni Erh ("Drunken
"T'ieh-pi yù-shih" Diamond")
T'ieh Ying ££ £ Tsui-hsing shih S? IW. -f i
Tien-lun Ts'ui H a o g ? H
Tien-hsia fu-hsin che ^ ^ "Ts'ui Tai-chao sheng-ssu yiian-chia"
T'ien-hua-tsang chu-jen J i l t M i i A
T'ien-kou fuj Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng ¿ft ^ Ifc f £
T'ien-li ^ if. Ts'ung-wen tzu-chuan (it i H ft
T'ien-ming ^ ni? Tsuru Haruo
"T'ien-shang yao" _h Tu-ch'u hsiian
Tien-shih tao ^ Érti ìM TuFu i t M
"T'ien-t'ai san-sheng shih-chi h s ù " A f t Tu Kuang-t'ing f t £g
--«¡TffcfF Tu Lien-che ff.WSr'i
T'ien tso chih ho R f t ¿ i ì Tu Mu ft ft
T'ien Yù Ftttfc Tu Wei-ming f t » ^
Ting Fu-pao T i È W T'u-an Ku ^ ft
Ting Ling T T'uan-yuan ¡191M1
Ting Wen-chiang T ÌC. ÌX tun ^
T o Ku-niang (Mattress) % fe»; Tung Chieh-yiian (Master Tung)
Todat shosetsu no kenkyù ft't W-Mk.
"Tung-chun" U ft
To Emmei fò $¡1 Hfl Tung Chung-shu tfi ft3 £f
tsa-chu Tung Hsi-hsiang chu-kung-tiao [ftj tfij
"Tsai chiu-lou shang" -f'Eitljfff h ¿is'PUM
ts'ai-tan ^gB. "Tung-huang T'ai-i" £ A -
ts'ai-tzu ^ {• tung-i (eastern barbarians) 'H
ts'ai-tzu chia-jen hsiao-shuo )( f-fé A tung-t'ien fin] A
'b'ét T u n g Yueh if. ^
Ts'ai Yen H tzu-chuan ['] ft
Tsang Mao-hsun Tzu-chuan (Nightingale, Cuckoo,
GLOSSARY 445

Purple Cuckoo) HS W a n g Shu F.HI

Tzu-hsia {- H W a n g T'ai-ch'ing
tzu hsiang shihft$ „1$ W a n g Ts'an F
tzu-jan f'l ££ W a n g Wei F $
Tzu-kung f- fi Wang Wei shih f
Tzu Yu % I Wang Yang-ming F £§
Tz'u-lii W a n g Ying-hsia
Uchida M i c h i y o FA i l ^ WangYueh l:M
Wada T o s h i o ft [H f IJ £ W a n g Yung F l $ , Yiian-ch'ang
wai-chuan j t ft
Wan-fa $ g W a n g Yun F 2 5 , Te-jou jfj, Yuan-
Wan-Ming pien-hsing chu i hua-chia
li JVH.
tso-p'in hsi4an B£ W £ WfcIt ®
^fl-iV,^ wei U (is)
Wan Shu $ $ wei j^f (to violate)
W a n Ssu-t'ung H jp] fff] Wei-ch'eng ffflM,
WangChen-ho iigjft Wei P'ei % fiR
W a n g Ch'i Wei Sheng Ef:
wang ch'i % wei-lui H
W a n g Chih " W e n fu"
W a n g erh J £ ^ wen-hsia >C$E
W a n g Fu-jen (Lady W a n g , M a d a m e Wen-hsm tiao-lung ¿'ll'Stnt
Cheng) IU-A Wen hsuan yi M
W a n g Hsi-feng (Wang Xi-feng, Wenl-tolM]
Phoenix) i-:,®H Wen-jen Ch'ien IS! A M
W a n g Hsi-shih litgll.'f Wen J u i - l i n r S # ^
W a n g Hsing-yiian H $ jt wo
Wang I F.jg wu
W a n g Kung W u Chao-i
W a n g Kuo-chu 1 i ® ££ W u Ch'eng-en ^
W a n g Kuo-wei Wu Ching-tzu g & f t
W a n g Kuo-yiian (see W a n g Pi-ch'iang) WuChiin Shu-hsiang
Wang Meng Wu Kang, W u Chih i^filj,
wang-pen JE* wu-lun
W a n g Pi-ch'iang (Kuo-yuan " W u Pao-an ch'i-chia tu-yu"
mm f f i i
W a n g Seng-ju Cftig Wu Ping ^ IT.
W a n g Shan pao's wife 1; # % ff] Wu-shan (Mount W u ) |l|
W a n g Shih-chen Ft&rt W u Sung ^ fc
WangShih-fu C S S Wu Wo-yao
Glossary 446

W u Yang g pg Welcome Spring) #

" W u yu" Ying-erh (Oriole) £ £
Yang C h i a - l o ^ S g Ying-lien (Ying-lian, Lotus) $£31
Yang-ching-pang ch'i-hsia if- ifi ying-ling ¡g
Yang Hsiung $ gf. ying-shu H
Yangl^tf. Ying-ying
Yang Kuei-fei ^ t f c "Ying-ying chuan"
Yang-shan Ku-shih wen-fang ßH Ul® R. Yip Wai-lim
mm Yu-ch'ang
YangSu^^ yu-chi ìfó „,:
Yang Wan-li Yu Erh-chieh t . fri
Yang Wei chen jg yu-hsien jg M
"Yang Wen Lan-lu-hu chuan" ¿¡m yu-hsien shih jjf f..|
yu-hsiieh j® ^
Y a o I-hsiang tt - Yu Kwang-chung £ i t "I3
yao-nieh Yu Lao niang (Grandmother Yu)
Yao fiflo shu-nii/chiin-tzu hao ch'iu
* Y î c : < > i k / i \ r-w-iâ Yu San-chieh £ ^ ifl
Y a o Wen-yüan tt'ii: Yu-shih
Yeh Shao-chün j U f g g i yW-UN4
Yeh Sheng-t'ao ^ ^ ¡ ¡ S y" &
"Yeh te yen" ^ f t l g Yu C/iiao Li F. ¡É
Yeh Yin-min Yu Hsien f . M
yen-chien (MS Yu-ku « f é
Yen H s i u - l i n g H ^ f t è YQ Lin
Yen-i chih-lin Yu Lo-yang
Yen Po-han « ¡ ¡ Ö S S Yu P'ing-po Ì H M É !
Yen Tan-tzu (Prince Tan of Yen) "Yu Shan Chu-yuan chiieh-chiao shu"
$hn r WllJKjgigi»
Yen-tzu ch'un-ch'iu f- # fx, Vii I d fu fju .t K
Yen-tzu ch'un-ch'iu chiao-chu '¿- {- Yu-t'ai hsm-yung If #r
mt Yu-t'ai hsm-yung k'ao-i EF iff I * #
Yen Ying # Yu T'ien-ts'ung f-j k 58
Yen YÜ Yu Yu fei j y'k
Yen Yuan H tc yuan (longing) ffl
Yen-yang t'ien ^ yuan, yiian-fen (romantic destiny) Hi,
yin-ssu fêïË
ying (shadow) Yiian Chen x f l l
ying-chiao I¡8 Yuan ch'u hsitan /c [ft S
Ying-ch'un (Greeting of Spring, Yiian Chung-Sang ch'uan chi: shih-chi,
GLOSSARY 447

wen-ch'ao, ch'ih-tu, yu-chi ii'l1®F a i t h ) . « { . «

4 J . . -iPy. M S ,
( Yuan-yang chen Mfi'il
Yuan C h u n g - t a o ê ^ i û "Yiian-yu" i f i i g
"Yuan hsing" ft Yuan Yù-ling g -f
Yuan H u a n g a Liao-fan f J 1 Y u e h Fei g ft
yiieh-fu%m
Y u a n H u n g - t a o M ' M ifi
Yuan Po-hsiu ch'uan-chi H fi'lft*
YiiehWi
Heng-chiin l|i
Yuan T s u n g - t a o 0 : ig " Y u n - c h u n g chiin" 3 Ï
Y u a n - y a n g (Faithful, M a n d a r i n Duck,

Accounts of a Southern Journey, see Ai Wu
Ah Q , 2 5 - 2 6
Ai Wu: traveler in Yunnan and Burma,
2 9 8 - 9 9 ; "southern j o u r n e y " of com-
pared with Shen Ts'ung-wen's, 2 9 9 -
300, 301-2; stiuggle for survival of, 2 9 9 -
300; defiant self of, 300, 302; nonro-
mantic account of Burma journey, 3 0 0 -
1; becomes leftist, 301; as self-right-
eous commentator, 301; didactic per-
spective of, 302; self as picaro in fiction
of, 302; celebrates revolutionary trans-
formation, 303; works: Accounts of a
Southern journey (Nan-hsing chi), 295, 299;
" A Lesson in the Philosophy of Life,"
2 9 9 - 3 0 2 ; " O n the Pine Hill," 300; Se-
quel to Southern Journey (Nan-hsing chi
hsii-p'ien), 303
Alarum Bell on a Still Night: date, 190; au-
thor, 202; compared with The Sobering
Stone, 202; description of stories in, 2 0 2 -
4 Brun, Gerald, on poet as alchemist, 100
Albers, Joseph, 138
Allegory: in "Encountering Sorrow," 84;
in wandering immortal poems, 113;
tradition of reading works as political,
358; see also "Hi Lili, Hi Li . . . "
Archetype of dual harmony, 225
Artist, and universe, 139; Romantic poet
in role of, 149
" A u t u m n Night" (by Wang Yun), 44
Awakened from a Dream, 189, 409nl; see
also Illusions
Index
Ballad genre, see Yiieh-fu
"Ballad of H e a v e n , " see Li Ho
Biography: Chinese, 5; of eccentrics by
Kung-an writers, 150
A Biography of the Old Drunkard, see Yuan
Hung-tao
A Biography of the Taoist of the Single Gourd,
see Yuan Chung-tao
Birch, Cyril, on "Oxcart for D o w r y , " 351
Bishop, John L., on "limitation of psy-
chological analysis" in Chinese fiction,
381, 432n35
Blake, William, 136, 143
Bodmer, Johann, 70
Book of Changes, see I chtng
Book of Songs, 71, 78, 85, 91, 95, 144; "Great
Preface" to, 126
"Boudoir Regrets" (by Ho Sun), 5 2 - 5 3
Breitinger, Johann, 70
" T h e Bribe," see The Sobering Stone
Brower, Robert, on Japanese poetry, 136
The Brush That Serves as Judgment Goat, 190,
201
Buddhism, 9 - 1 0 , 125, 367; C h ' a n , 149; in
Illusions, 192; see also Ego; Self
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 135, 136,
149
' T h e Captain and the Concubine," see The
Sobering Stone
"Carefree m a n " (shih-shih), 150
" T h e Case of the Dead Infant," 3 7 6 - 8 0
Index 450

Cassirer, Ernest, on primitive world view, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 275,
99 276, 277, 382
Cat Country (Mao-ch'eng chi), see Lao She Chia She, 258, 259, 274, 275
Caves, as seats of nature's power, 133 Chia Yu-ts'un, 267, 270, 279
Chang, Eileen (Chang Ai ling), 26 Chia Yun, 255, 256, 260, 280
Chang Feng-i, 153, 155, 156; see also Hung- Chiang Ch'ing, 316, 323
fu chi Chiang Hung, 65, 393n45
Chang Hua, 279 Chiang Ying-k'o: on poetry and emo-
C h a n g Liang, 166 tions, 136-37; on personality and style,
Chang Sheng, 19, 366-67; see also "Ying- 137-38; works: " C h ' i u c h e n " (Seeking
ying c h u a n " the Real), 141-42; Humorous Histories
Chang T'ien-i, 414nl9 (Hsieh shih), 149
Ch'ang O, 106 Chiao-hsing, 267
" C h a o h u n , " see " S u m m o n s of the Soul" Chiao Ta, 267, 268, 279
Chao Ma-ma, 267, 268 "Ch'iao-ta y i i e h , " 345
Chao, Orphan, 17-18, 20, 3 6 7 - 7 1 , 375, Chien-an period, 92, 99
376; see also The Rei'enge of Orphan Chao Chien-teng hsin-hua, 193-94
Chao-shih ku-erh ta-pao-ch'ou tsa<hii, see The Ch'ien-nii li-hun, 387n27
Revenge of Orphan Chao Chih-yen chai, 256, 417n9
Chao Yen-i, 321, 322, 323 "Childlike m i n d , " 135
Chatterton, Thomas, 147 Chin-ch'uan-erh, 268, 276, 277
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 364; see also Chin P'mg Met, 203, 252; see also Ch'un-
Uncle Varna mei (Plum Blossom)
" C h e n - c h u n g c h i , " 388^29 Chin Sheng-t'an, 17
Chen Lung-yu, Chou Chi's story on, 197 Ch'in K'o-ch'ing, see Ch'in-shih
Chen-niang, 102 Ch in O, 106
Chen Shih-hsiang, on time in "Encoun- Ch'in-shih, 256, 259, 268, 4 1 7 n l l
tering S o r r o w , " 89 Ch'in Shu-pao, 22
Chen Ying-lien, 269 Chinese Communist literature, see Revo-
"Ch'en To-shou sheng-ssu fu-ch'i," lutionary literature
430n24 Chinese cosmology, 6, 134
Ch'eng-jen (becoming a person), 7 Chinese fiction: investigation of in May
Chi Ch'un-hsiang, 367; see also The Re- Fourth era, 26; contemporary, 26, 303,
venge of Orphan Chao 3 0 5 - 7; in Taiwan, 27; value of writing,
Chi Shao-yu, 50, 392ri27 189; in the 1640s, 189-213; |ustification
Ch'i-hu sou, 256, 417n9 of, 196; bandits in late Ming, 201, 205;
Ch'i-shih-erh ch'ao jen-wu yen-i, 190, 191 and late Ming authors, 2 0 1 - 2 ; influ-
Ch'i-yiian, 265 ence of Yuan tsa-chii and Ming ch'uan-
Chia (Family), 344 ch'i on, 215, 412«6; individual and
Chia Chen, 257, 270, 271, 272, 279, 280 typical characters in, 215-16; Shui Ping-
Chia Cheng, 259, 274, 277 hsin as one of most lovable heroines in,
"Chia-chuang i-niu-ch'e," see "Oxcart for 249; affirmation of life and self in, 250;
Dowry" ascent to idyllic settings in, 288; politi-
Chia Huan, 278 dzation of in post-May Fourth era, 295;
Chia-hui, 256, 260 reemergence of subjectivism and indi-
Chia Jung, 267, 270 vidualism in post-Mao fiction, 305; in-
Chia Lien, 258, 266, 270-71, 272 capable of conceiving a Superfluous
Chia Mu, 257, 258, 262, 268, 275, 276, 278 Man until modem times, 365-66; karma
Chia Pao-yu, 253, 254, 255, 257, 260, 262, in, 366; six classics of, 413nl3; limita-
INDEX
tions of traditional, 432n35; see also May
Fourth era; Revolutionary literature;
Scholar-beauty romances
Chinese literary criticism: tendency of to
overstate polemical positions, 146;
Communist, 314, 316, 424nl; see also
Kung-an school
Chinese Marxism, 6, 12-13, 26-27, 387*23
Chinese poetry, see Poetry
Chinese religion: view of self in, 14; pop-
ular, 82
Chinese Romantics, 126
Chinese travel literature, see yu-chi
Ching (scene), balance of with ching
(feeling), 134
Ching K'o: as self-obsessed hero, 381; ego
of, 381; individualistic behavior of, 382;
guiding himself by pao, 382; see also
"Prince Tan of Yen"
Ching-shih t'ung-yen, 376, 388n27
Ch'ing-wen, 255, 262, 269, 275, 280, 416n5
Ch'ing-yeh chung, see Alarum Bell on a Still
Night
"Ch'iu chen," see Chiang Ying-k'o
Ch'iu Chin, 376
"Ch'iu Hu hsing," see "Song of Ch'iu Hu"
"Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan," 20; as heroic story,
153; failed hero in, 154-55; dynastic le-
gitimacy in, 155; loyalty in, 155-56, 162,
164, 166, protagonists of, 157, 158, 181-
82; two versions of, 158, 183, 404n6;
Taoist ideology in, 158, 165-66, 183,
Confucian orthodoxy in, 158, 165, 166,
183, 405n20; change in, 158, 167, 181;
pattern of opposition-reconciliation in,
159; depiction of dynastic change in,
160; structural devices of, 161-62; he-
roic fellowship in, 162; versions com-
pared, 162-63, 166; cannibalism in, 163-
64, 166; and propaganda, 165, 166;
mythmaking in, 165-66, Taoist influ-
ences on 166-67; knight errantry in, 166;
Mandate concept in, 167; economy of
expression in, 181; date of, 406n27; Sif
also Curly Beard; Hung-fu; Li Ching;
Yang Su
Ch'iu T'an, 143
Ch'iu-wen, 255
Cho Wen-chun, 192
451
Chou Ch'eng-chen, on Li Ho, 112
Chou Chi (Chou Ch'ing-yùan): few facts
known about, 192; on Ch'u Yu, 193-94;
views on own work, 193-95; on Hsu
Wei, 194-95; moral heroism of, 195;
prologues of, 195, 200; condescension
toward fiction, 195-96, 410nl7; use of
history, 196; use of metempsychosis,
1%; on Ming emperors, 196; view of the
self, 197; criticism of society by, 197-99;
on the examinations, 198; biographical
stories of, 199; romantic comedies of,
199; comedy and satire in works of, 200;
topics of prologues of, 200; vehement
denunciations by, 202; difference with
Master Ku-k'uang, 213; see also The Sec-
ond Collection of West Lake Stories
Chou Jui's wife, 262, 268
Chou Tso-jen, 26
Chou Tun-i, 421nl6
Chou Yang, 316
Christianity, and the self, 385n4
Chronicle of Gods and Immortals, 109
Chu Hsi, 215
Chu Kuei-erh, 19, 388«34
Ch'u, king of, 107
Ch'u tz'u, see Songs of the South
Ch'u Yu: Chou Chi on, 193-94
Ch'ii Yiian, 397rt40; unique persona of, 27;
"Nine Songs" refined by, 73; as an in-
dividual, 82-83; David Hawkes on, 83;
fixation on self of, 86; self-conscious-
ness of, 86; quest of, 86, 88; as lyric
protagonist, 87; not a sophisticated
modern, 91; Liu Ta-chieh on, 367; see
also "Encountering Sorrow"
Ch'uan-ch'i: T'ang, 153; Ming, 215
Chuang Tzu, 8, 124, 133, 140, 149, 150,
394n4
Chui-erh, 277-78
Ch'un-mei, 252; see also Chin P'ing Mei
Ch'un-yen, 277
Civilization and Its Discontents, 231
Clare, John, 128, 135; egocentric stance of,
132; see also "The Nightingale's Nest"
Clarissa, see Harlowe, Clarissa
"Cold Boudoir" (by Liu Huan), 65
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 136; on the
imagination, 138-39
Index
Communality in Chinese culture, 216, 217
Complementary bipolarity, 225
Composite personality, 2 8 - 2 9
Confucian behavioral patterns, 412n4
Confucianism, 125, 358, 367; and exem-
plars, 215; foremost obligations of to
communal entity, 216; four cardinal
virtues of, 2 1 6 - 1 7 , 367, 371, 429n9; see
also Neo-Confucianism; Self
Confucian morality: in The Fortunate Union,
215, 220, 2 2 8 - 3 0 , 2 3 7 - 3 8 ; and expe-
diency, 2 2 9 - 3 0 , 237
Confucian social responsibility, see Ob-
session with China
Confucian thought of late Ming, and
Hung-fu chi, 184
Confucius, 229, 234, 414n33; on "over-
coming the self," 7; on not holding
someone " i n a w e , " 376
Cosmology, see Chinese cosmology
Cosmos, hierarchical order of, 8
" T h e Couple Bound in Life and D e a t h , "
430n24
Creativity: and the self, 135; Chinese
conception of, 139
Cultural Revolution, 307, 309, 312, 314,
317, 3 3 0 - 3 1 , 335
Curly Beard, 20; in "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan,"
154, 157-64, 166, 183; Taoist attributes
of, 160-61; identification with Li Shih-
min, 1 6 1 - 6 2 , 4 0 4 n l 7 , 405nl9; vendetta
of vs. "faithless m a n , " 163, 164; as en-
forcer of loyalty, 164, 166; in Hung-fu chi,
167, 178, 179, 1 8 0 - 8 1
"Daughters of M e m o r y , " 143
Davis, Sir John Francis, 248
Death: and Taoist notion of identity, 8 - 9 ;
suicide to achieve immortality, 11; and
the self, 14-15; fear of in "coffin-pull-
er's s o n g s , " 28; and love, 90; in Hung-
lou meng, 276; in "Ni-ssu i-chih lao-
m a o , " 353
De Bary, Wm. Theodore, on Chinese self,
429*9
Deschamps, Emile, on Romanticism, 137
Descriptive binomes, 77, 7 8 - 7 9 , 85
Desire Under the Elms, 431 n33
452
"Despair in the Night" (by Wang Seng-
ju), 6 4 - 6 5
"Diary of a M a d m a n , " see Lu Hsün
The Diary of a Superfluous Man, 3 6 3 - 6 4
" D r a g o n ' s M o a n s " songs, 108, 399n89
Dream of the Red Chamber, see Hung-lou
meng
Dreams, see Self
Duty: fiction of in 1640s, 189; in late Ming
stories, 204; self-fulfillment through,
210; in The Fortunate Union, 228; in The
Revenge of Orphan Chao, 371; in ' T h e Jest
That Leads to Disaster," 3 7 2 - 7 5 ; Lio-
nel Trilling on, 375; in "The Case of the
Dead I n f a n t , " 3 7 6 - 8 0 ; see also Self
Dynasty-building story, compared with
elopement story, 167-68; see also Fa-chi
pien-t'ai story; Hung-fu chi
Ego: and the self, 20; and selflessness, 24;
becomes transparent, 125, 139; of the
Romantics, 125, 128, 149; transcend-
ence of, 139; detachment from in Ch'an
Buddhism, 149; Fung Yu-lan on Chinese
thought, 217; Yü Ta-fu quoting Rous-
seau on, 290; of Ching K'o, 381; see also
Self
Egotism, 8, 18
Eide, Elling, on Li Po, 101
Elopement: Hung-fu chi as story of, 167,
168; tales of compared with dynasty-
building stories, 167-68
Emigré readers, see Hong Kong émigré
readers
Eminent Women, 377; see also Liu Hsiang
Emperor Chien-wen, see Hsiao Kang
" T h e Emperor's Child," see Li Ho
Emperor Shun, two wives of, 105, 109
Emperor Wu of the Han, see Han Wu-ti
Empress Ch en, 44
Empress Dowager (mother of Emperor
Hsien-tsung), 110
"Encountering Sorrow": contrasted with
earlier poetry, 27; mythical not mythic,
83; and " N i n e S o n g s , " 83, 8 5 - 8 9 ; polit-
ical allegory in, 84; ritual in, 84; lyri-
cism in, 87; syntax of, 88; time in, 89;
the journey in, 89, 91; limitation of, 92;
as prototype for "Roaming the Five Di-
INDEX
r e c t i o n s , " 97; " R o a m i n g F a r " as trun-
cated version of, 97; Li Ho and, 101,
1 0 3 - 4 ; see also Ch'ii Yuan
Ennui: Reinhard K u h n on, 428n4; see also
Hsia, C. T.
Eremitism, 17, 282, 388n31
Erh-p'o, 366
Essay, see Personal essay
Examinations: C h o u Chi on, 198; quotas
in K'ang-hsi period, 232; importance of
passing, 232
Exemplars, 215
Expediency versus the n o r m , 2 2 9 - 3 0 , 237
Fa-chi pien-t'ai story, 153, 154, 168; see also
Dynasty-building story
Family, see Chia
Fan K u n g - c h ' e n g , 163, 403fi5
Fei C h ' a n g , 46, 392n21
Feng Meng-lung, 408n59; Shan-ko (Moun-
tain S o n g s ) by, 147
Fiction, see C h i n e s e fiction
Fish, Michael, on Li Ho, 110
Five Relationships, 228, 276, 367, 405n20,
429H9; see also Confucian morality
" A Flower in the Rainy N i g h t , " see Hwang
Chun-ming
" F o r a Singer W h o Feels H u r t , " see Wang
Seng-ju
Forgotten Tales of the Sui, s e e Sui shih i-wen
Form: Romantics' revolution of, 147; ex-
perimentation with in Ming poetry, 148
" A Former Palace Lady Singer of Han-tan
Marries a Supplies Sergeant" (by Hsieh
T'lao), 59
Former Seven Masters, 143
The Fortunate Union, 19; protagonists of as
moral and chivalric exemplars, 214, 215,
249; as popular comic r o m a n c e , 214,
249, Confucian morality in, 215, 248;
and the high mimetic comic mode, 216;
author of, 216; influence of drama on
characterization in, 216; protagonists'
typical selves in, 2 1 7 - 1 8 ; plot of, 2 1 8 -
23; expediency in, 2 2 9 - 3 0 , 237; senti-
mentalism and allegory in, 231; substi-
tute marriage in, 248; reasons w h y a
romance and not a novel, 249; as chi-
valric romance, 4 1 1 n l ; Confucian ori-
453
entation of, 4 1 1 n l ; translations of,
4 1 3 n l 6 ; a n d popular N e o - C o n f u c i a n
morality, 414n21; see also Ming-chiao-
chung-jen; Shui Ping-hsin; T i e h Chung-
yu
" F o u r M o d e r n i z a t i o n s , " 305
Four Virtues, see C o n f u c i a n i s m
F r e e d m a n , Ralph, definition of "lyrical
n o v e l " by, 4 2 2 n l 9
Freud, S i g m u n d , 231
Frye, N o r t h r o p , 216, 305, 423r>40
Fu (rhyme-prose), 71
F u n g Yu-lan: on the e g o in C h i n e s e
thought, 217; on the individual and the
universe, 217
Furst, Lilian: on Romanticism, 127; on the
R o m a n t i c poet, 134; on the primitive in
J. G. von Herder, 147
G a n g of Four, 316, 323
G e r m a n Romantics, 140; see also Novalis
G o d s , 14, 100, 106, 115; in " N i n e S o n g s , "
74, 8 0 - 8 1 , 82; see also Chronicle of Gods
and Immortals; names of individual gods
( C h ' a n g O , Hsiang River dieties, the
M o u n t a i n Spirit, etc.)
G o e t h e , J o h a n n Wolfgang von, 292
G o f f m a n , Erving, on the individual, 3 7 5 -
76
G r a h a m , A. C . , on the particle hsi, 74
" G r a v e of Little S u , " see Li H o
Greater a n d Lesser Masters of Fate, 80
Great Learning, 235
" T h e Great O n e , Lord of the Eastern
W o r l d " (from " N i n e S o n g s " ) , 74, 7 5 -
78, 84
" G r e a t P r e f a c e " to Book of Songs, 126
" G r e a t U l t i m a t e , " 288
" G r e a t U n i t y , " 179, 181, 185
" G r e e n Water M e l o d y " (by C h i a n g
H u n g ) , 65
G r i m m brothers, 147
Hamlet, 369
Han C h u n g , 104
H a n - s h a n , 23, 124, 389n44
H a n Wu-ti, 44, 109, 400n95
Han Yu, 215, 234, 235, 399n77, 414n30
Hao-ch'iu chuan, see The Fortunate Union
Index
Hao Jan: The Great Golden Road (Chm-kuang
ta-tao) by, 3 0 4 - 5 ; eagerness of to follow
guidelines of revolutionary literature,
305; journey in " r o m a n t i c " world of,
305; fiction of fits "high mimetic" mode,
423n40
Harlowe, Clarissa, 19, 240
Hawkes, David; on "Nine S o n g s , " 73, 80;
on Ch'ii Yuan, 83
Heavenly principle, 183, 185, 239
Heaven's Mandate, see Mandate concept
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 147
High mimetic comic mode, 216, 423n40
" H i Lili, Hi Li . . . " : as allegory of Chi-
na's plight, 345; Joseph Lau on, 345;
C. T. Hsia on theme of, 346; modern-
istic narration in, 346, 3 4 7 - 4 8 ; protag-
onists' search for identity in, 346—47; see
also Shui Ching
Ho Ching, on self and creativity, 1 3 5 - 3 6
Ho Ching-ming, 143
Ho-po, sec Yellow River god
Ho San, 280
Ho Sun, 39, 52, 391nl3; see also "Boudoir
Regrets"
Hobbes, Thomas, 70
Hoffman, Frederick, see Superfluous Man
Hong Kong émigré readers: capacity for
moral judgment of, 3 0 9 - 1 0 , 3 1 1 - 1 2 ;
questionnaire given to, 3 1 2 - 1 5 ; re-
cruited for study of perceptions of self
and values, 313; as " s e n t - d o w n y o u t h , "
317; background of, 3 1 7 - 1 8 ; compe-
tence of as readers, 324, personal val-
ues of, 325, 3 2 6 - 2 8 , 333; selection of
values from literary works by, 3 2 6 - 2 8 ;
ranking of values from literary works
by, 3 2 8 - 3 0 ; identification of with he-
roes of stories, 3 3 1 - 3 2 ; " r u b - o f f " effect
of literature on, 3 3 2 - 3 5 ; see also Revo-
lutionary literature; Test of Capacity for
Moral Judgment; Values
Hsi-ch'un, 257, 258, 269
Hsi-hsiang chi, 252
Hsi-hu erh-chi, see The Second Collection of
West Lake Stories
Hsi-hu shuo, see West Lake Talk
Hsi-jen, 254, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 269,
275, 277, 280
454
Hsi K'ang, 382
Hsi-k'un school of poetry, 146
Hsi Shih, 262
Hsi-yu chi, see Journey to the West
Hsi-yu pu, see Tower of Myriad Mirrors
Hsia Chin-kuei, 272, 273
Hsia, C. T.: on pairs of characters in
Chinese fiction as a single personality,
28; on affirmation of life and self in
Chinese fiction, 250; on Liu Lao-lao of
Hung-lou meng, 268; on characters op-
posed to the social order, 281; on Liu
E, 284; on The Travels of Lao Ts'an, 285,
287, 289; on Shen Ts'ung-wen, 298; on
"obsession with C h i n a " in modern
Chinese literature, 342; on Mao-ch'eng
chi, 344; on Taiwan literature, 344; on
the theme of "Hi Lili, Hi U . . . , " 346;
on "K'an-hai te jih-tzu," 365; on
Chinese novelists and ennui, 365; on
Ch'ing-wen of Hung-lou meng, 416n5
Hsia, Tsi-an, 344
Hsiang chün, see Hsiang River deities
" T h e Hsiang C o n s o r t , " see Li Ho
"Hsiang fei," see Li Ho
Hsiang fu-jen, see Hsiang River deities
Hsiang-ling, 268, 272, 273, 277
Hsiang River deities, 80, 105, 399n77
Hsiang-t'u, see Taiwan literature
Hsiao-hung, 260, 275, 281; as example of
stock opportunist in Hung-lou meng, 255;
psychological complexity of, 256, 261;
problematic character of, 4 1 6 - 1 7 n 9
Hsiao Kang, 33, 35, 54, 55, 390nl; works:
"Playing My Zither," 42; " A Singer's
Frustrated P a s s i o n , " 4 5 - 4 6 ; " T h e Sighs
of the Lady of C h ' u , " 48; "Night Long-
ings in an Autumn B e d r o o m , " 50; "In
Her Sad Boudoir She Looks in Her
Mirror," 58
Hsiao ssu-ming, see Greater and Lesser
Masters of Fate
Hsiao Yen (Emperor Wu of the Liang), 41,
51, 3 9 1 n l 5
Hsieh Ch'ien-ch'iu, 337; see also Test of
Capacity for Moral Judgment
Hsieh shih, see Chiang Ying-k'o
Hsieh T'iao, 59, 393n36
Hsing fu-jen, 257, 259, 266, 274
INDEX
"Hsing, ying, s h e n , " see T'ao Ch'ien
Hsu Chih-mo, 126
Hsu Ch'ih, 390nl
Hsii Hsia-k'o, 133, 283, 284, 289, 290, 294;
see also Yu-chi
Hsii Hung-k'o, in Hung-fu chi, 180, 181
Hsii Ling, 33, 34, 42, 47, 390nl
Hsii Te-yen, in Hung-fu chi, 171, 172, 173,
175, 177, 178, 179-80
Hsu Wei, Chou Chi on, 194-95
Hsiieh I-ma, 275
Hsiieh K'o, 272
Hsiieh P a n , 269-70, 272, 277
Hsiieh Pao-ch'ai, 257, 262, 263, 266, 267,
269
Hsueh-yen, 262
Hsueh Ying-ch'i, 191
Huan-ying, see Illusions
Huang Ch'un-ming, see Hwang Chun-
ming
Huang-hsii lao-weng, see "Old Yellow
Beard"
Huang Hui, 136
Huang Lung Tzu, see Yellow Dragon
Huang-shih kung, see "Master Yellow
Stone"
Hui-neng, 386nl4
Hui Shih, 8
Human consciousness in Li Ho's era, 116
Humanism, late Ming, 184
Humorous Histories, see Chiang Ying-k'o
Hung-fu: in Hung-fu chi, 156, 167-80, 182;
in "Ch'iu-jan-k'o chuan," 157-64; de-
sire for freedom of, 174, 176
Hung-fu chi, 20; source of, 153; Hung-fu
as central character of, 156; romantic
elements in, 156, 167, 168-70, 175, 176,
178, 182, 185, 407n40n41; loyalty in, 156,
171, 182, 183, 184, 185; dynasty-build-
ing theme of, 167; dress imagery in, 169;
heroic mode in, 169, 170, 175, 176, 178,
179, 180, subplot of, 171, 182; heroines
of contrasted, 174-75; dual perspective
of and language, 175-76; anticlimax in,
178; unheroic elements of, 179; protag-
onists of as individuals, 180; Taoist
sentiments in, 181; change in, 181, 182,
185; Confucian bias in, 182; reflecting
late Ming Confucian thought; 183-84;
455
optimistic portrayal of questing self in,
184; Confucian paradigm of social or-
der in, 185; continuity of old values
within change in, 185; summary of
scenes of, 186-88; see also Curly Beard;
Elopement; Hung-fu; Hsii Te-yen; Li
Ching; Princess Lo-ch'ang; Yang Su
Hung-lou meng: planes of existence in, 15;
maids and servants in, 2 0 - 2 1 , 251-81;
Buddhist notion of self in, 23; charac-
ters as individuals in a social context,
252, 260-61; opportunists in, 255; com-
mentary to, 256; mythological realm of,
256; dreams in, 256, 261; faithful maids
in, 256-59; minor characters of given
complex presentation, 260; multiple
points of view in, 260; self as a psycho-
logical state in, 260; narrative tech-
niques of, 260, 265; individuality and
change in social position in, 261; liter-
ary functions of maids and servants in,
261-73; paired personalities in, 262-63,
416n4; maids underscore confronta-
tions between masters in, 263; alterca-
tions and misunderstandings in, 264;
major theme of, 264; allegorical struc-
ture of, 265, 268; duality as an illusion
in, 265, 281; servants as facilitators in,
265-66; servants as explicators in, 266-
68, 279; theme of concealed truth in,
267; servants as critics in, 268; pessi-
mistic view of life in, 269; servants as
reflective of masters' personalities in,
269-72; "shadow structure" of, 269-70,
274; depravity in, 272; paired events and
moral decline in, 272-73; network of
social patterns in, 274; social order of,
274-81; deaths of innocent women in,
276; servants as barometers of Confu-
cian order in, 276; beatings in, 277;
master-servant reversal in, 277; moral
degeneracy in, 277-78; the individual
in, 280; servants as informers in, 280;
suffering in, 280; breakdown of social
order in, 280, 281, 420n37; Mark van
Doren on, 416rt6; maids as secondary
wives in, 419n31; see also names of major
and minor characters (Chia Pao-yii,
Ch'ing-wen, Hsiao-hung, Hsi-jen, Lin
Index
Hung-lou meng (Continued)
Tai-yû, etc.)
Hung Ming-shui, 146, 147; on Kung-an
school, 124; on Chinese "Romanti-
c i s m , " 127; on Yuan Hung-tao's per-
sonality types, 1 4 9 - 5 0
Hung-niang, 252
Hwang Chun-ming: struggle for individ-
ual identity in stories of, 352, 359; self-
transcendence in stories of, 353; self-
transformation in stories of, 353, 358;
allegorizing of Taiwan's situation by,
359; works: "Erh-tzu te ta wan-ou" (His
Son's Big Doll), 352-53; "K'an-hai te jih-
tzu" (Sea-Watching Days) or " A Rower
in the Rainy N i g h t , " 3 5 3 - 5 8 ; "Ni-ssu i-
chih lao-mao" (The Drowning of an Old
Cat), 353
/ (selfless friendship, chivalry, righteous-
ness): in The Fortunate Union, 228, 231,
249; and K'ang-hsi scholars, 231
" I Ch'in O , " see Li Po
1 ching, 95, 149
Identity: crisis of, 21, 364; search for in
Taiwan fiction, 3 4 2 - 6 0 ; protagonists'
search for in "Hi Lili, Hi Li . . . , " 346-
47; struggle for in stories of Hwang
Chun-ming, 352, 356-57; for the indi-
vidual and new political identity for the
state, 358
Illusions; author of, 189; date of, 190; de-
scription of, 191-92; Confucian moral
obligation in, 191; Buddhism in, 192;
editions of, 409nl
Imagination: Coleridge on, 138-39; and
cult of the artist, 138-43; "modifying
power" of, 139; in Chinese literary crit-
icism, 139-40; "mediating power" of,
140
Imitation in poetry, 143, 145-46
"Imitation of Hsii Kan's P o e m " (by Liu
Chun), 64
"Imitation of Hsii Kan's Poem" (by Wang
Yung), 51
"Imitation of 'On, On, Ever Journeying
O n ' " (by Liu Shuo), 63
Immortality through writing, 11
Immortals, see Poetry
456
Individual: and social function, 6 - 7 ; Taoist
perspective of the, 9; Buddhist concep-
tion of the, 9 - 1 0 ; traditional Chinese
conception of the, 124; capacity of for
self-regulation, 184; late Ming faith in,
184; Western notion of different from
Chinese, 216; concept of in Chinese
thought and culture and typicality of
literary characters, 216-17; Andrew H.
Plaks on, 217; Fung Yu-lan on, 217; in
Hung-lou meng, 280; in Chinese Com-
munist literature, 3 0 8 - 9 ; and the social
nexus, 347; existence of political signif-
icance in writing about the, 360; Erving
Goffman on the, 375-76; inner life of
the, 385n4
Individualism (Individuality): in the Kung-
an school, 24; Li Shih and Yiian Hung-
tao as proponents of, 127, of the Ro-
mantics, 127; for the Romantics, 135; in
art, 135-36; and emotion, 135-38; of the
immoral self condemned, 210; Chung-
wen Shih on, 217; as philosophical
doctrine in China compared with the
West, 217; of maids and servants in
Hung-lou meng, 253-61; defined in terms
of social relationships, 280; trend of in
Chinese fiction, 283; reemergence of in
post-Mao literature, 305; and Chris-
tianity, 385n4; in late Ming thought,
413nl3; relationship of with commun-
ality in Chinese culture, 413nl3; and rise
of the novel in the West, 416n7; and
eccentricity in China, 432n39
Industrial Revolution, 126-27, 131
" I n n a t e principle," see Neo-Confucian-
ism
" I n the Cave of the Jade City," see Yiian
Hung-tao
"In the Wine S h o p , " see Lu Hsün
Introspection: in the Six Dynasties, 92; in
the Chien-an period, 99
Japanese literature, inner life of the indi-
vidual in, 342
Japanese poetry, 136
]en ( " h u m a n e " values), 132
" T h e Jest That Leads to Disaster," 18, 20,
376; self and duty in, 3 7 2 - 7 5
INDEX
jou p'u-t'uan, see The Prayer Mat of Flesh
J o u m e y : celestial in " E n c o u n t e r i n g Sor-
r o w , " 8 5 - 8 6 ; spiritual, 94, 99; literary
m o d e of as self-expression trans-
formed, 2 9 4 - 9 5 ; motif of in post-1949
literature, 3 0 4 - 7 ; as m e t a p h o r for sat-
ire, 422n20; see a/so Hsii Hsia-k'o; S h e n
Ts'ung-wen; The Travels of Lao Ts'an; Yii
Ta-fu
journey to the West, 24; a n d composite
personalities, 29
Joyce, J a m e s , 344
Ju-lin wai-shih, see The Scholars
Jui-chu, 256, 257
J u n g , Carl Gustav, 225
Kafka, Franz, 344
Kan Pao, 399n73
Kang Pi, 286; see also The Travels of Lao
Ts'an
K'ang-hsi Emperor, 232
Keats, J o h n , 96, 130, 140
King of C h ' u , 107
Knight errantry: in "Ch'iu-jan-k'o c h u a n , "
166; and personal freedom, 382; in
China and the West c o m p a r e d , 411nl
Ku-k'uang, see Master K u - k ' u a n g
"K'uai-tsui Li Ts'ui-lien c h i " (Loquacious
Li Ts'ui-lien), 19
Kuan C h u n g , 414n29
Kuan Yii, 215
" K ' u a n g T'ai-shou tuan s s u - h a i - e r h , " see
" T h e Case of the Dead I n f a n t "
K u h n , Reinhard, on e n n u i , 428n4
K u n g - a n school of poetry: individualism
in, 24; philosophical mysticism in, 24;
and emotion, 124; H u n g Ming-shui on,
124; attitude of toward nature, 126; in
mainstream, 126; view of poetry and the
emotions, 136; theory in, 1 3 7 - 3 8 ; and
the Artist, 143; rejection of orthodox
schools by, 143; distortion of as revo-
lutionaries, 146; interest of in folk songs,
147; conception of self in, 149-50; sense
of h u m o r in, 149; biographies of eccen-
trics in, 150
Kung-t'i shih (Palace-style poetry), 3 5 - 3 6 ;
see also Southern Dynasties Love Po-
etry
457
K'ung 1-chi, 348; see also Lu Hsiin
Kuo Mo-jo, on ' T h e Mountain Spirit," 81
" K u o s h a n g , " see " T h e Spirits of the
Fallen"
Kuo-t'ing lu, 403n5; see also Fan Kung-
ch'eng
" T h e Lady of the H s i a n g " (from " N i n e
Songs"), 80, 110
Lai Ma-ma, 267, 268
Lai S h e n g , 267
Lamarhne, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat
de, 124
Lao She, 344, 349; works: Lo-t'o Hsmng-tzu
(Camel Hsiang-tzu), 3 4 9 - 5 0 ; Mao-ch'eng
chi (Cat City), 344
Lao Ts'an yu-cht, see The Travels of Lao Ts'an
Lao Tzu, 95; see also Tao-te ching
Latter Seven Masters, 143
Lawrence, D. H., 345
Leng Tzu-hsing, 270
Lepenski Vir sculptures, 134
"Letter to Ch'iu T ' a n , " see Yuan Hung-tao
Li ("innate principle"), see N e o - C o n f u -
cianism
Li Cheng, 210
Li chi (Record of Ritual), 48
Li Chi, on Hsii Hsia-k'o, 283
Li Chih, 127, 135; and the "childlike
m i n d , " 135
Li Ching: in " C h ' i u - j a n - k ' o c h u a n , " 157,
158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 182; in
Hung-fu chi, 168, 170, 1 7 2 - 7 3 , 177, 178,
179, 180; in Kuo-t'ing lu, 403n5
Li Ch'ing-chao, 376
Li Ho, 346; confounding his contempor-
aries, 101; demonic quality of, 101;
death in poetry of, 103; influence of
" N i n e S o n g s " on, 105; allegory in, 110;
imagery of, 1 1 0 - 1 1 ; p o e m s of as pas-
tiche of elements, 110; aesthetic art-
istry and sophistication of, 111; and
Heaven, 1 1 2 - 1 3 ; music in poetry of,
1 1 2 - 1 3 ; and art, 113; subjective world
of, 113; function of the supernatural in
poetry of, 1 1 3 - 1 4 , 115; " s e c o n d crea-
t i o n " of, 115; works: " G r a v e of Little
S u " ( " S u Hsiao-hsiao m u " ) , 102-5; " T h e
Hsiang Consort" ("Hsiang fei"), 105-«,
Index
Li Ho (Continued)
109, 110; "Ballad of Heaven" ("T'ien-
shang yao"), 106; " T h e Emperor's
C h i l d " ("Ti-tzu ko"), 109-10, 400n92;
" S o n g of Li P i n g ' s Vertical Harp" ("Li
P"ing k'ung-hou yin"), 112-13
Li Hsia, 322, 323
"Li h u n , " see " T h e Ritual Cycle"
Li Ma-ma, 2 5 3 - 5 5 , 260
Li Meng-yang, 143
Li P a n - l u n g , 143
Li Pao-chia, 284
"Li P i n g k'ung-hou y i n , " see Li Ho
Li Po, 101, 137, 144, works: " M y Trip in
a Dream to the Lady of Heaven Moun-
tain, A Farewell to Several Gentlemen
of Eastern L u " ( " M e n g yu T'ien-lao
shan pieh Tung-lu chu-kung"), 101;
"Remembering Ch'in O " ("I Ch'in O"),
106
"Li s a o , " see "Encountering Sorrow"
Li S h e n , 105
Li Shih-min (T'ang T'ai-tsung): in "Ch'iu-
jan-k'o c h u a n , " 154, 157, 158, 159, 160,
164-65; identification of with Curly
Beard, 161-62; in Hung-fu chi, 180, 185
Li Tzu-jan, 138
Li Wan, 262
Li Yu, 195, 214
Lieh-nii chuan, 392n23
Lin Chao-en, 421nl6
Lin Piao, 316, 424n5
Lin Shu, 288
Lin Tai-yii, 257, 260, 262, 265, 266, 267,
269
" L i n e s Composed a Few Miles Above
T i n t e m Abbey . . . , " 125
Ling Fen, 88
Ling Meng-ch'u, 195, 200
The Literary Mind and the Canting of
Dragons, see Wen-hsm tiao-lung
Literature, and the self, 15-16; pragmatic
theory of, 16
Literature of the fantastic, 8 9 - 9 0 ; see also
Poetry
Little Su (Su Hsiao-hsiao): folk song about,
103-4; see also Li Ho
Liu Chun (Emperor Hsiao-wu of the Liu-
Sung Dynasty), 64, 393n43; "Imitation
of Hsu Kan's P o e m , " 64
458
Liu E, 25, 2 8 4 - 9 3 , 2 % , 307; see also The
Travels of Lao Ts'an
Liu Hsiang, 377, 392n23
Liu Hsiao-wei, 61, 393n38
Liu Hsieh, 1 3 9 - 4 0
Liu Huan, 65, 394n46
Liu, James J. Y.: on " w o r l d " in poetry,
142; on the knight errant, 382
Liu Lao-lao, 258, 268, 279
Liu Ling, 23
Liu Pang, 166
Liu Shuo, 63, 393n42
Liu Ta-chieh, on Ch'ii Yuan, 367
Liu Ta-shen, 421 nl
Lo-ch'ang, see Princess Lo-ch'ang
Lo Kuan-chung, 23
"Lo-shen f u , " see Ts'ao Chih
Lo Yin: Chou Chi's story on, 197
" T h e Lord of the East" (from "Nine
S o n g s " ) , 74, 7 8 - 8 0 , 81
" H i e Lord Within the C l o u d s " (from
" N i n e Songs"), 74
Love: in Southern Dynasties poetry, 46;
and death in supernatural literature, 90;
rejected in fiction of the 1640s, 190; M o
Tzu's universal, 191; "romantic des-
tiny," 239
" L o v e S o n g " (by Lu Chi), 38
Loyalty, 382; Chin Sheng-t'an on, 17; in
Ming times, 184, 409n68; Pi Kan as ex-
emplar of, 230; in The Revenge of Or-
phan Chao, 372, 382-83; see also "Ch'iu-
jan-k'o c h u a n " ; Hung-fu chi
Lu Chi, 38, 106, 391nl2
Lu Hsiin (Chou Shu-jen), 4 - 5 , 26, 3 4 3 -
44, 345, 348, 358, 385n3, 422nl9; works:
"K'uang-jen jih-chi" (Diary of a Mad-
man), 344, 348-49; "Tsai chiu-lou
s h a n g " ("In the Wine S h o p " ) , 344;
" K ' u n g I-chi," 348
Lu Kung, on Alarum Bell on a Still Night,
202
Lu T'ung, 145
Lu Yun-lung, 191, 409nl, 410n6
Ma K'ai-yuan, 322, 323
Ma-tsu (Ch'an master), 140
Macbeth, 419n28; see also Shakespeare,
William
Macpherson, James, 147
INDEX
Mahayana Buddhism, 9-10; see also Bud-
dhism
Maids: more developed in Chinese drama
than fiction, 252; in Western literature,
253; see also Hung-lou meng
"Making Fun of Myself on People Day,"
see Yuan Hung-tao
Mandate concept, 165, 168; see also "Ch'iu-
jan-k'o chuan"
Mann, Thomas, 344
Man of the Teaching of Names, see Ming-
chiao-chung-jen
Mao-ch'eng chi, see Lao She
Mao Tse-tung, 3, 13, 304, 305, 314, 387n23
Mao Tse-tung Thought, 314, 332, 340
"Marching out of Hsia-men," see Ts'ao
Ts'ao
Master of the Heavenly Flower Sutra, see
Tien-hua-tsang chu-jen
Master Ku-k'uang: Confucian morality of,
204, 212; conception of office holder's
duty by, 204-5; as an analyst of mo-
tives, 210; negative examples of his
ethic, 211-12; disbelieves in innate evil,
212; his hero as moral activist, 212-23;
view of goodness of, 213; see also Chou
Chi; The Sobering Stone
"Master Yellow Stone," 157, 166, 406n29;
see also "Old Yellow Beard"
Maturation, 7
May Fourth era: investigation of fiction
and drama in, 26; expression of self in
literature of, 289, 294; subjectivism
among writers of, 303; obsession with
China in fiction of, 342; writers of, 343;
patriotic theme in writings of, 344
Mei Yao-ch'en, 126, 146
Mencius, 135, 215, 229, 236, 429n9
Meng Chiao, 145
Meng-chiieh tao-jen, see Awakened from
a Dream
"Meng yu T'ien-lao shan pieh Tung-lu
chu-kung," see Li Po
Metempsychosis, 196
Miner, Earl, on Japanese poetry, 136
Ming-chiao-chung-jen: author of The For-
tunate Union, 216, 412nl; as a commer-
cial writer, 217; debt of to stage, 227,
249; awareness of intellectual trends by,
232; skillful juxtaposition of truths by,
459
237; didacticism of, 250; see also The
Fortunate Union
Ming shih pieh-ts'ai, 148
Ming shih tsung, 148
Mo Tzu, 191
Modernism, introduced to Taiwan, 345
Monkey Sun Wu-k'ung, 22, 24, 30
Moral heroism in fiction of the 1640s, 189
Mote, Frederick, an eremitism, 124
"The Mountain Spirit," 80, 81-82, 90;
compared with "Grave of Little Su," 105
"Mournful Hsiang Spirit" (by Pao Jung),
108
Mu-tan fing, 388n27
Much Ado About Nothing, 248; see also
Shakespeare, William
Music in ' T h e Hsiang Consort," 108; and
"Dragon's Moans" songs, 108; in po-
etry of Li Ho, 112-13
"Music Percussive," see "Ch'iao-ta yüeh"
Myth, rare in China, 14
Mythic metaphors, see "Nine Songs"
"My Trip in a Dream to the Lady of
Heaven Mountain, A Farewell to Sev-
eral Gentlemen of Eastern Lu," see Li
Po
Nakedness, as symbol of purity, 23
Narrative, Tzvetan Todorov on, 100
Nature: in "Nine Songs," 89; Romantic
conception of, 125-26; transforma-
tional power of, 132; mystic experience
of unity with, 133; power of and caves,
132-133; innate tranquillity of, 134
Neo-Confudanism (Neo-Confucian): and
li ("innate principle"), 125; seven-
teenth-century revival of, 217; rational-
ism of, 230; emphasis on knowledge,
235; Ch'eng-Chu school of, 239; re-
straint of on emotions, 288; see also
"Great Ultimate"
New Songs from a Jade Terrace, 33, 37, 57;
preface to, 43, 47; see also Southern Dy-
nasties love poetry
New Tales Under the Lamplight, 193-94
Ni Erh, 279
Ni Heng: in San-kuo chih yen-i, 23; con-
demnation of Ts'ao Ts'ao by, 194
Ni Huan-chih, 344
Index
"The Nightingale's Nest" (by John d a r e ) ,
128-31
"Night Longings in an Autumn Bed-
r o o m " (by Hsiao Kang), 50
" N i n e S o n g s " : refined by Ch'ii Yuan, 73;
as religious verses, 73; " m y t h i c " basis
of, 7 3 - 7 4 ; confusion about speaker's
identity in, 74; hymns of, 74, 80; lin-
guistic artistry of, 7 4 - 7 5 ; typical rhyme
scheme of, 75; mythic metaphors in, 76,
99; permanence and transcience in, 76;
and "Encountering Sorrow," 83, 85, 86,
87, 88, 89; meter of, 88; nature in, 89;
influence of on Li Ho, 105; see also Gods;
names of individual songs ( " T h e Great
One, Lord of the Eastern World," ' T h e
Mountain Spirit," etc.); Shamans
"Nineteen Old Poems (of the H a n ) , " 57,
98, 397n57
Novalis (Baron Friedrich von Harden-
berg), 124, 135
Nii chieh, 48
Obsession with China: C. T. Hsia on, 3 4 2 -
43; as m o d e m version of Confucian so-
cial responsibility, 344; in "Oxcart for
D o w r y , " 351
Odd Tablet, see Ch'i-hu sou
" O l d Yellow B e a r d , " 157, 163
Olney, James, on "disjuncture of self-
h o o d , " 369
O'Neill, Eugene, 431 n33
" O n Her Reflection in a Mirror" (by Fei
Ch'ang), 4 6 - 4 7
Only O n e Sober, 201; see also A Pair of
Needles
Orphan Chao, see Chao, Orphan
" O s s i a n , " 147
Ou-yang Hsiu, view of Hsi-k'un school of
poetry by, 146
"Oxcart for D o w r y , " 3 4 8 - 5 1 ; compared
with Lo-t'o Hsiang-tzu, 349; self in, 350;
Cyril Birch on, 351; obsession with
China in, 351; see also Wang C h e n - h o
Pa Chin, 344
A Pair of Needles: date of, 190; preface to,
201; description of stories of, 2 0 1 - 2
460
Pamela as cultural heroine, 253; see also
Richardson, Samuel
Pan Chao, 48
F a n Yu-an, 278, 280
P a n Yüeh (An-jen), 414nl7
Pao (reciprocity, revenge), 382
Pao-chu, 256, 257
Pao Erh, 2 7 0 - 7 1 , 272, 279
Pao Jung, 108
Pao Shu-ya, 414n29
Patriotism in Taiwan writing, 344
"Pei Hsiang l i n g , " see "Mournful Hsiang
Spirit"
P e i Ti, 12
The Peony Pavilion, see Mu-tan fing
Perfect nature, 234, 414n30
Personal essay, investigations of self in,
283
Pi hsieh-chih, see The Brush That Serves as
Judgment Goat
Pi Kan, 230
Pien Kung, 148
P i n g - e r h , 262, 266, 277, 278
P'ing Shan Leng Yen, 224, 233, 411nl
Plaks, Andrew H.: on identification of
heroines in Hung-lou meng, 29; on types
in Chinese fiction, 215; on the individ-
ual in China, 217
"Playing My Zither," see Hsiao Kang
Po Chü-i, 126
"Poem for a Young Man Newly W e d " (by
Shen Yüeh), 3 9 ^ 0
Poet: as alchemist, 100; Romantic, 134; pai-
hua poets as China's true Romantics,
148; see also Romantic
Poetry: for self-expression, 27; and the
fictional self, 27-28; Palace-style, 35-36;
supernatural, 70, 72, 91, 113; hsing
technique in, 71; of a "second crea-
tion," 71; fantastic, 71, 394n4; epic, 87,
397n40; sao-style, 87-88; ballad, 9 2 - % ,
97, 98; wandering immortal (yu-hsien
shih), 95, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 113, 115; T'ang, 100,
101; landscape, 101; convention in, 114;
nature imagery in Romantic, 127; Jap-
anese, 136; and emotions (Chiang Ying-
k'o on), 136-37; Shelley on, 140;
" w o r l d " (ching-chieh) in, 141; and
painting, 141-42; and realism, 142; folk
INDEX
or oral, 146; metrical traditions of
Chinese, 148; see also Hsi-k'un school of
poetry; Kung-an school of poetry; Poet;
Southern Dynasties love poetry
The Prayer Mat of Flesh, 214; see also Li Yu
"Primitive" literature, 146-^47
"Princess of the Hsiang" (from "Nine
Songs"), 80
Princess Lo-ch'ang, in Hung-fu chi, 171—
79
"Prince Tan of Yen," 381-82; see also
Ching K'o
Propriety (li), flexibility of, 414n33
"Prose-poem on a Goddess" (by Sung
Yu), 38
"Prose-poem on the Goddess of Lo
River," see Ts'ao Chih
PrûSek, Jaroslav, on "subjectivism and
individualism" 283
Psychology: demise of in China in 1966,
313; revival of in 1978, 313
Purple Jade (Tzu Yu), 104
Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan, see
Shen Ts'ung-wen
Realism: contrasted with Romantic ap-
proach, 134; in poetry, 142
"A Record of My Trip to Mount She," see
Yuan Hung-tao
Records of the Grand Historian, 95
The Records of Pure Loyalty, 191; see also Lu
Yiin-lung
Red Inkstone, see Chih-yen chai
Regionalist movement, see Taiwan litera-
ture
"Remembering Ch'in O , " see Li Po
The Revenge of Orphan Chao, 381; self in,
367-71; absence of psychological reve-
lation in, 370-71; see also Chao, Or-
phan
Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 290; see also
Rousseau, Jean Jacques
Revolutionary literature: Cyril Birch on,
303; "comic" mode of, 303; journey
motif in, 303-4; new hero in, 304-5;
didactic concept of, 309, 312; failure of
as rational conveyance of values, 310;
retained an elitist nature, 311: theory of,
461
311, 324, 336; model-hero stories for
children in, 312; readership of, 316-17;
evaluation of as educational device for
conveying Party-approved values, 325;
effect on readers, 332-35; renewal of
aesthetic and ideological variety in, 336,
see also Chinese fiction; Chinese liter-
ary criticism; Hao Jan; Hong Kong
émigré readers; Wang Meng; Values
"Rhapsody on the Lo River Goddess," see
Ts'ao Chih
Richardson, Samuel, 240, 253; see also
Harlowe, Clarissa
Ritual: behavior and social role, 7-8; in
"Nine Songs," 72-73, 78, 395n9; in
"Encountering Sorrow," 84; in "Roam-
ing the Five Directions," 98
"The Ritual Cycle" (from "Nine Songs"),
74
"Roaming Far" (from Songs of the South),
96, 397nn53,54
"Roaming Far" (by Ts'ao Chih), 96-97
"Roaming the Five Directions," see Ts'ao
Chih
Roles, see Social roles
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 23; heroes
of as composite personality, 29
Romantic(s): as creator through the
"imagination," 125; interposition of
between experience and reader, 125; as
self-conscious artist, 125; ego of, 125,
128; the first Chinese, 126; egocentric
individualism of, 127; personifying na-
ture by, 131; individualism for, 135;
break with tradition by, 136, 143; and
"mediating power" of the imagination,
140; as dualists, 140; forging of oral po-
etry by, 147; revolution of literary form
by, 147; poet as Great Artist, 149; self-
destructiveness of, 149; see also Poet
Romantic-Classic dichotomy, 123
"Romantic destiny," 239
Romanticism: definition of virtually im-
possible, 123; in Chinese culture, 124-
25; conception of nature in, 125-26, 128;
as watershed for the West, 127, Émile
Deschamps on, 137; and the imagina-
tion, 128, 138-39; August Wilhelm von
Schlegel on, 143; tendency of toward
Index
Romanticism (Continued)
idealism, 147; see also Chinese Roman-
tics; R o m a n t i c s )
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 290, 4.22rc20; see
also Yu Ta-fu
" R o w l e y , " 147
Ruhlmann, Robert, on self and social
roles, 381
San-kuo chih yen-i, see Romance of the Three
Kingdoms
San-yen, 366
"San-yiieh f e n g - h s u e h , " 322, 323; see also
C h a o Yen-i
" S a y i n g Goodbye to a Beauty on South
B a n k " (by Wang T'ai-ch'ing), 62
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 143
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1 2 7 - 2 8
Scholar-beauty romances: typicality of
characters in, 215, 223; epicene charac-
ters in, 224; major theme of, 228
Scholar-official class, seventeeth-century,
214
Scholars: "activist" trends a m o n g K'ang-
hsi period, 223, 2 3 1 - 3 2 , 249; Lynn A.
Struve on, 2 3 1 - 3 2
The Scholars, 283, 4 1 3 n l 3
Schorer, Mark, on technique, 371
The Second Collection of West Lake Stones:
date of, 190, author of, 192; preface to,
192, 193; Hangchow lore in, 192-93;
primary characteristic of, 195; see also
Chou Chi
" S e e k i n g the R e a l , " see Chiang Ying-k'o
Self (selfhood): in literature, 3, 30, 359; the
Chinese, 5; and traditional behavioral
models, 6; identification of via roles in
society, 6 - 7 , 20; Confucius on over-
coming the, 7; cultivation of, 7, 92, 235,
413nl3; and Taoism, 8 - 9 ; and Bud-
dhism, 9 - 1 0 , 14; and time, 1 0 - 1 1 ; and
change, 10; Wang Wei's conception of
the, 12; denial of, 1 2 - 1 3 , 18; and
Chinese Communist literary theory, 1 2 -
13, 387n23; transformation of, 13, 20; as
a fluid entity, 13; in Chinese religion,
14-15; divisible nature of the, 15; and
dreams, 15; and literature, 1 5 - 1 6 ; and
moral choice, 16; and patriotism, 16; and
462
duty, 16, 1 7 - 1 8 , 25, 210; fulfillment of
through Confucian puritanism and
public service, 17; and moral conserva-
tism, 17; and reputation, 18; as a psychic
state in Dream of the Red Chamber, 21,
260, and social nexus, 2 1 - 2 2 , 367; no-
self and self-indulgence, 23; poetic per-
sonas as complementary visions of the,
24; discovery of, 25; the solitary, 25; in
Taiwan fiction, 27; and the poet's per-
sona, 2 7 - 2 8 ; poetry and the fictional,
2 7 - 2 8 ; indulgence of in sentiment, 28,
68; the female, 36, 372; awareness of in
Southern Dynasties love poetry, 58;
gratification of through nostalgia, 59;
neglect of in Southern Dynasties love
poetry, 65—66; poetic expression of the,
82; consciousness of in Ch'ü Yuan, 86;
in relation to other, 89, 91; in confron-
tation with the world, 8 9 - 9 0 , 91;
awareness of in Ts'ao Chih's poetry, 97;
and creativity (Ho Ching on), 135-36;
and the environment, 142; Kung-an
concept of the, 148-50; and freedom,
150; optimistic in Hung-fu chi, 184; Chou
Chi on the, 197; in Alarum Bell on a Still
Night, 204; the Confucian, 214; percep-
tions of in European thought and lit-
erature, 217; of the hero and heroine of
The Fortunate Union, 2 2 3 - 5 0 ; affirma-
tion of in Chinese fiction, 250; images
of in modern Chinese literature, 2 8 2 -
307; and the role of traveler in yu-chi,
282; insignificance of in travel litera-
ture, 283; investigations of in late Ming
essays, 283; expression of in The Trav-
els of Lao Ts'an, 286; expression of in
May Fourth literature, 289, 294, 295; in
Yü Ta-fu's stories, 2 9 0 - 9 4 , 343; retreat
of in post-May Fourth literature, 295;
Shen T s ' u n g - w e n ' s self effaced, 297; Ai
Wu's defiant, 300, 302; as picaro in Ai
Wu's fiction, 302; thematic journey of
the modern Chinese, 307; perceptions
of in Chinese Communist literature,
3 0 8 - 4 1 ; conceptions of in m o d e m
Chinese literature, 343, 344; realization
of through service to society, 343, 344;
in "Oxcart for D o w r y , " 350; transcend-
INDEX
ence of in stories of Hwang Chun-ming,
353; Chinese conception of in literature
seldom is apolitical, 359; assertion of
through adherence to moral or reli-
gious cause, 367, 383; in The Revenge of
Orphan Chao, 367-71; James Olney on
"disjuncture of," 369; and duty in "The
Jest That Leads to Disaster," 372-75,
delusion of in " T h e Case of the Dead
Infant," 380; Chinese vision of as lim-
ited and predictable, 381; subjugated to
morality and propriety, 382; role of
Christianity in development of in mod-
ern literature, 385n4; definition of,
412n2; Wm. Theodore de Bary on the
Chinese, 429n9; see also Composite per-
sonality; Duty; Ego; Identity; Intro-
spection; Journey; Perfect nature; Self-
lessness; Selves; Superfluous Man
Selflessness, 7; Buddhist, 9; literary, 12;
and selfishness, 19; and ego, 24; para-
dox of individuality and, 413nl3
Selves, created and revealed, 3—4
Sex: divine sexual encounter, 81; desire
and death, 90; in Hung-Iou meng, TT1-
78; in "The Case of the Dead Infant,"
377-79; see also Southern Dynasties love
poetry
Sha Ta-chieh, 266
Shakespeare, William, 67, 248, 272; see also
Macbeth; Much Ado About Nothing
Shamans, 73, 3%n32; in "Nine S o n g s , "
73-74, 79, 80, 81, 99
Shan-ko, see Feng Meng-lung
Shan-kuei, see "The Mountain Spirit"
Shantung vernacular literature, 204
She-yueh, 275
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 124, 130; on po-
etry and beauty, 140
Shen-hsien chuan, see Chronicle of Gods and
Immortals
Shen-ssu (spirit-thought), 139
Shen Ts'ung-wen: return of to native
Hunan, 295, 2 % ; youthful wandering
of, 2 9 5 - % ; glorification of Hunan
countryside by, 296; alienation of from
environment, 2 % , 297; as passive ob-
server, 2%; self of effaced behind char-
acters, 297; journey's meaning for, 297;
463
as a romantic, 297; two voices of, 2 9 7 -
98; mixed emotions of about pastoral
world, 298; works: Random Sketches cm a
Trip to Hunan (Hsitmg-hsing san-chi), 295-
98, 299; Autobiography (Ts'ung-wen tzu-
chuan), 295, 298; Alice's Travels in China
(A-li-ssu Chung-kuo yu-chi), 296; see also
Ai Wu
Shen Tzu-p'ing, 285, 287; see also The
Travels of Lao Ts'an
Shen Ya-chih, 102
Shen Yueh, 39, 391 n 14
Shih chi, see Records of the Grand Historian
Shih ching, see Book of Songs
Shih, Chung-wen, on individualism and
type characters, 217
Shih-shu, 262
Shih Te, 124
Shih-t'ou chi, see Hung-lou meng
"Shih-wu-kuan hsi-yen ch'eng ch'iao-
h u o , " see "The Jest That Leads to Di-
saster"
Shui Ching (Robert Yi Yang), 345, 348,
359; see also "Hi Lili, Hi Li . . . "
Shui-hu chuan, see Water Margin
Shui Ping-hsin: differences of from beauty
stereotype, 233, 238; moral under-
standing of, 233-38; chastity as symbol
of moral purity of, 238-39, 240; com-
pared with Clarissa Harlowe, 240;
Freudian analysis of, 240; cleverness of,
240—48; self-awareness of as moral ex-
emplar, 248; heroine of Kwangtung folk
drama, 248; as one of the most lovable
heroines in Chinese fiction, 249; see also
The Fortunate Union; T'ieh Chung-yu
Shui Ping-hsin Thrice Infuriates Kuo Ch'i-tsu,
248
"The Sighs of the Lady of Ch'u," see Hsiao
Kang
"A Singer's Frustrated Passion," see Hsiao
Kang
Skandhas (five), 9, 12
The Sobering Stone: date of, 190, author of,
204; Confucian relationships in, 204;
description of stories in, 204-12; " T h e
Captain and the Concubine" as exam-
ple of positive morality, 206-8; " T h e
Bribe" as example of negative moral-
Index
The Sobering Stone (Continued)
ity, 2 0 8 - 1 0 ; " T h e Metamorphosis of
Poet into T i g e r " as fantasy, 2 1 0 - 1 1 ;
drama of moral choice in, 212
Socialist China, values of, 25
Social roles: and ritual behavior, 8; con-
tinuity of, 26; and stereotypes, 28; and
exemplars, 215; in The Revenge of Or-
phan Chao, 371; Robert Ruhlmann on,
381; and late M i n g - e a r l y Ch'ing writ-
ers, 386n5
" S o n g of Ch'iu H u , " see Ts'ao Ts'ao
" S o n g of Li P i n g ' s Vertical H a r p , " see Li
Ho
" S o n g of the Transport W o r k e r s , " 148
Songs of the South, 7 1 - 7 2 , 95, 110; see also
Ch'u Yuan; "Encountering Sorrow";
"Nine Songs"
Sou-shen chi, 399n73
The Soul of Ch'ien-nii Leaves Her Body, see
Ch'ien-nii li-hun
" S o u l s " (hun and po), 30
Southern drama, 156; characteristic struc-
ture of, 175; dialectical treatment of plot
in, 181; lyrical treatment of character in,
181
Southern Dynasties love poetry: conven-
tional character of, 34-35, 68; nature in,
35; woman in, 35, female type and per-
sonal appearance in, 36, 37—40, 6 4 - 6 5 ;
depersonalization of the female in, 40;
erotic ornamentation in, 40; social sta-
tus in, 41^42; artistic talent in, 42; fe-
male type and age in, 42; the boudoir
in, 43, 46-48; disparate roles of man and
woman in, 44; the environment in, 4 4 -
48; boudoir objects as métaphore in, 45;
emotions in, 45, 5 9 - 6 0 ; love in, 46, 4 9 -
50, 66; vanity in, 47; and seclusion, 4 7 -
48, 60; submissivness in, 4 8 - 4 9 ; female
attitude toward male lover in, 48, 49, 50,
51, 67; pessimism in, 53; moralism in,
5 3 - 5 4 ; and sexual relationships, 54; in-
compatibility of male and female per-
ceptions in, 55; sources of conflict in,
5 5 - 5 7 ; responses to conflict in, 5 7 - 6 0 ;
female self-awareness in, 58; self-grati-
fication through nostalgia in, 59; and the
"neglect s y n d r o m e , " 5 9 - 6 0 ; inactivity
464
in, 61; weeping in, 61-63; futility in, 6 3 -
64; poets choosing female persona in,
67; self-indulgence in sentiment in, 68;
cult of sensibility in, 69
" T h e Spirits of the Fallen" (from " N i n e
S o n g s " ) , 74
"Spring S u n " (by Chi Shao-yu), 50
"Spring S u n " (by Wen-jen Ch'ien), 49
Srejovic, Dragoslav, on sculptures at Le-
penski Vir, 134
Ssu-ch'i, 258, 262, 278
Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, 192
Ssu-shu jen-wu k'ao, 191
Stereotypes in Chinese fiction and drama,
381, 382; see also Type characters
Stories of Figures from the Four Books: date
of, 190; Confucian morality in, 191
Story of the Stone, see Hung-lou meng
" T h e Story of Ying-ying," see "Ying-ying
chuan"
Struve, Lynn A., on K'ang-hsi scholars,
231-32
" S u Hsiao-hsiao m u , " see Li Ho
Su Shih, 126
"Submitted to Hsiao I, Prince of Hsiang-
tung, Harmonizing with His 'Winter
Dawn' P o e m " (by Liu Hsiao-wei), 61
Substitute marriage in The Fortunate Union,
248
Sui shih i-iven, 22, 214
Sui Yang-ti yen-shih, 18, 388n34
" S u m m o n s of the Soul" (from Songs of the
South), 73, 86
Sung Yu, 38, 396n29
Superfluous Man: Turgenev's, 363; Che-
khov's 364; Frederick Hoffman on, 365;
Chinese fiction incapable of conceiving
until m o d e m times, 3 6 5 - 6 6 , 383; most
notable, 428n3
" T a - h s u , " see "Great Preface"
Ta-hsiieh, see Great Learning
Ta ssu-ming, see Greater and Lesser Mas-
ters of Fate
Ta-t'ung, see "Great Unity"
T'ai-chi, see "Great Ultimate"
T'ai-ku school, 285, 2 8 7 - 8 8 , 4 2 1 n l l ,
421nl6; see also The Travels of Lao Ts'an
T'ai-p'ing kuang-chi, 158
INDEX
Taiwan, 359; see also H w a n g C h u n - m i n g
Taiwan literature: " m o d e r n i s t " versus
"regionalist" (hsiang-t'u) in, 343; C. T.
Hsia on, 344; patriotism in, 344; Re-
gionalist m o v e m e n t in, 348; realistic
tendency in Regionalist writings, 351
' T a l e of the Broken M i r r o r , " 171
Tan-chung lu, see The Records of Pure Loy-
alty
T ' a n - c h ' u n , 262, 275
T'an Jih-ch'ao, 322, 323
T ' a n g Hsien-tsu, 388n27, 408n59
Tao, 7, 8, 125, 134, 135
Tao-te ching, 8, 132
Tao-tsang, 158
T a o Ch'ien, 11, 288; works: "Hsing, ying,
shen" ("Substance, Shadow and
Spirit"), 11; " P e a c h Blossom S p r i n g , "
288
T ' a o Wang-ling, 132, 147
Taoism, 125, 367; see also "Great Ulti-
mate"
Taoist sectarian beliefs, 183
Test of Capacity for Moral Judgment, 312,
313, 315, 3 1 9 - 2 1 , 331; translated, 3 3 7 -
39; see also H o n g K o n g émigré readers
T h r e e Schools, 367; see also Buddhism;
Confucianism; Taoism
"Ti-tzu k o , " see Li H o
T'ieh Chung-yu, 19; self-confidence of, 23;
altruistic, moral self of, 2 2 3 - 3 2 ; altruis-
tic, moral self of, 2 2 3 - 3 2 ; as c h a m p i o n
of justice and humanitarianism, 224;
physical strength of, 2 2 5 - 2 7 ; pride of,
227; self-awareness as exemplar, 227;
representative of i, 228; and expe-
diency, 229, sentimentalism of, 230,
Freudian analysis of, 231; see also The
Fortunate Union; Shui Ping-hsin
T'ien-hua-tsang c h u - j e n , 217
Tien-li, see Heavenly principle
T'ien-ming, see M a n d a t e concept
" T ' i e n - s h a n g y a o , " see Li H o
Time: and philosophical approaches to the
self, 10-11; passage of, 61, 79;
compression of in " N i n e S o n g s , " 80;
C h e n Shih-hsiang on in " E n c o u n t e r i n g
S o r r o w , " 89
T o Ku-niang, 271, 272
465
Todorov, Tzvetan: study of fantastic lit-
erature by, 8 9 - 9 1 , 114; on narrative, 100
Tolstoy, Leo, 253, 297
Tower of Myriad Mirrors, 22, 30, 388n29
Tranquillity a n d the artist, 139
The Travels of Lao Ts'an: as a " s p i r i t u a l "
j o u r n e y , 2 4 - 2 5 , 284, 287; as a combi-
nation of g e n r e s , 284; debt of to yu-chi
prose, 284; kinds of travel in, 2 8 4 - 8 5 ;
personal vision of self and society in,
285; T'ai-ku philosophy in, 285, 287,
4 2 1 n l 4 ; detective case in, 2 8 5 - 8 6 ;
expression of self in, 286; Lao T s ' a n a s
civilian knight errant in, 286; solitary
traveler in, 286; criticism of " p u r e offi-
c i a l s " in, 2 8 6 - 8 7 ; Lao T s ' a n and Yellow
Dragon as c o m p l e m e n t a r y sides of au-
thor's fictional self in, 287, 290; attack
on N e o - C o n f u c i a n restraint on emo-
tions in, 288; Peach Blossom M o u n t a i n
as e c h o of " P e a c h Blossom S p r i n g " in,
288; sequel to, 288; S h e n T z u - p ' i n g ' s
j o u r n e y as metaphorical explanation of
Liu E ' s mind in, 288; view of good and
evil in, 288; C h i n a ' s fate in, 2 8 8 - 8 9 ; Yu
Ta-fu's " A Sentimental J o u r n e y " com-
pared with, 2 9 0 - 9 3 ; lack of depth in
self-expression in, 294; writing of, 421 n7
Trilling, Lionel, on "morality of inertia"
and duty, 375
Tsa-chii, see Y u a n tsa-chu
Ts'ai Y e n , 376
T s ' a o C h i h : 38, 92, 9 5 - 1 0 0 , 194, 397n58;
works: "Prose Poem on the Goddess of
Lo R i v e r " ( " L o - s h e n f u " ) , 38; " R o a m -
ing F a r " ( " Y u a n y u " ) , 9 6 - 9 7 ; " R o a m -
ing the Five Directions" ( " W u y u " ) , 9 7 -
98; " R h a p s o d y o n the Lo River God-
d e s s " ( " L o - s h e n f u " ) , 103
Ts'ao Hsiieh-ch'in, 251, 252, 253, 257, 260,
261, 267, 268, 275, 280, 281; see also
Hung-lou meng
T s ' a o P i , 92, 397n58
T s ' a o T s ' a o , 23, 9 2 - 9 5 , 99, 194; works:
" S o n g of Ch'iu H u , " 9 2 - 9 5 ; " M a r c h i n g
O u t of H s i a - m e n , " 95
T s e n g P u , 25, 389n46
Tsui-hsing shih, see The Sobering Stone
Ts'ui Hao, 144
Index
Tu Fu, 101, 137, 144-45, 307
Tu Mu, 101, 113-14, 398n66
Tu Wei-ming: on ch'eng-jen, 7; on Confu-
cian study of history, 8
" T u n g c h u n , " see " T h e Lord of the East"
"Tung-huang T a i - i , " see ' T h e Great One,
Lord of the Eastern W o r l d "
T u n g Yiieh, 30, 388n29
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 363
T y p e characters: and individuality of po-
etic personas, 24; traditional, 26; see also
Individual; Stereotypes
Tzu-chuan, 255, 2 5 7 - 5 8 , 260, 264, 265,
2 6 6 - 6 7 , 269
Uncle Vanta, 3 6 4 - 6 5
"Upstairs, Downstairs," 269
Values: perception of in Chinese Com-
munist literature, 308-41; noncorrela-
tion of with those in literature, 310, 325;
collected from Chinese Communist lit-
erary criticism, 314; of Hong Kong
émigré readers, 325; contemporary
Chinese social, 326, 332, 340; ranking
of by émigré readers, 328-30; percep-
tion of in pre- and post-Cultural Revo-
lution works, 3 3 0 - 3 1 ; list of personal,
341; see also Hong Kong émigré read-
ers; Revolutionary literature
Van Doren, Mark, on Hung-lou meng,
416n6
Vernacular stories, 2 1 - 2 2 ; in the 1640s,
189-213; see also Chinese fiction; Shan-
tung vernacular literature
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), on met-
aphor, 114
Wada Toshio, on Li Ho, 101-2
Wan Ssu-t'ung, 231
Wandering immortal poems, see Poetry
W a n g Chen-ho, 348, 359; see also "Oxcart
for D o w r y "
Wang Fu-jen, 257, 270, 274, 2 7 6 - 7 7
Wang Hsi-feng, 254-55, 256, 262, 267, 270,
272, 273, 275, 276, 277, 278
Wang Hsing-yuan, 321, 322, 323, 324
Wang I, 73, 396n34
Wang Kuo-wei, 142
466
Wang Meng: ideological conformity and
technical virtuosity of stories of, 306;
stream-of-consciousness technique of,
306; spawned self rehabilitated in fic-
tion of, 307
Wang Seng-ju, 57, 64, 393n34; works: "For
a Singer W h o Feels H u r t , " 5 7 - 5 8 ; " D e -
spair in the N i g h t , " 6 4 - 6 5
Wang Shih-chen, 143
Wang Shu, 62, 393n39
Wang T'ai-ch'ing, 62, 393n40; see also
"Saying Goodbye to a Beauty on South
Bank"
Wang Ts'an, 194
Wang Wei: as example of literary self-
lessness, 12; conception of self by, 12;
integration of into poetic landscape, 115;
identity of with nature, 124
Wang Yang-ming, 135, 202, 413nl3
Wang Ying-hsia, 294; see also Yu Ta-fu
Wang Yiieh, 202
Wang Yun, 44, 60, 3 9 2 n l 9
Wang Yung, 51, 53, 392n28
Wafer Margin, 17, 227
Wen-hsin tiao-lung, 139
Wen-hsitan, 144
Wen-jen Ch'ien, 49, 392n25
Wen Jui-lin, 231
The Western Chamber, see Hsi-hsiang chi
Western tragic heroes, 228
West Lake Talk, 193
White Snake legend, 22
Wimsatt, W. K., 351
"Within the Pillow," see "Chen-chung chi"
W o m e n in traditional China, 376; see also
Eminent Women; Hung-lou meng; South-
ern Dynasties love poetry
Wordsworth, William, 124, 125, 136, 139
World as innately numinous, 125
"World" (ching-chieh) in poetry, 141; James
J. Y. Liu on, 142
Wright, Arthur F., on Confucian behav-
ior, 412n4
Wright, David, on Industrial Revolution,
126
Wu Chun, 62, 393n41
Wu-lun, see Five Relationships
" W u Pao-an ch'i-chia tu-yu" (Wu Pao-an
Ransoms His Friend), 2 1 - 2 2
INDEX
Wu Ping, 412n6
Wu Sung, 227
Wu W o y a o , 284
"Wu y u , " see Ts'ao Chih
Yang Hsiung, 215
Yang I, 146
Yang, Robert Yi, see Shui Ching
Yang Su: in Hung-fu dti, 20, 169, 172, 173,
175, 176-78, 184-85; in "Ch'iu-jan-k'o
chuan," 158, 163, 164, 169, 176, 178;
transformation of, 176-78; embodying
society in Hung-fu chi, 184; capacity of
for self-renewal, 184-85
Yang Wan-li, 126
Yang Wei-chen: Chou Chi's story on, 197
"Yang Wen Lan-lu-hu chuan" (Yang Wen
and the White Tiger Star), 22
Yao Wen-yüan, attack on Chou Yang, 316
Yeh Shao-chün, 344
Yellow Beard, see "Old Yellow Beard"
Yellow Dragon, 285, 287, 288, 293, 307; see
also The Travels of Lao Ts'an
Yellow River god, 80
"Yen Tan-tzu," see "Prince Tan of Y e n "
Yen Ying, 236
Yen Yü (Yen Ts'ang-lang), 141
Yen Yiian, 231
Yin-yang dualism, 30
Ying-ch'un, 262
Ying-erh, 262, 266
"Ying-ying chuan," 19, 366-67, 412n6,
427n27
Yip, Wai-lim, on Wang Wei, 12
"You Must Believe unto Death My Prom-
ise" (by Hsiao Yen), 51
Yu-chi: focus on nature in, 282; insignifi-
cance of self in traditional, 283; Yü Ta-
fu's imitations of, 294; see also Hsü Hsia-
k'o
Yu Erh-chieh, 266, 270-71, 272, 273
"Yu hsien-k'u," 421«12
Yu-hsiert shih, see Poetry
Yu Kwang-chung, 345
Yu Lao-niang, 270
Yü Chiao Li, 223, 233, 411 nl
Yü Hsien, 286; see also The Travels of Lao
Ts'an
467
Yu-ku, 285, 287, 288; see also The Travels of
Lao Ts'an
Yu Lin, 202
Yu Ta-fu, 25, 26, 126, 289 90; compared
with Liu E, 293-94; hope of for change,
358; alienation of autobiographical hero
of, 359; lyrical quality of stories of,
422nl9; works: "A Sentimental Jour-
n e y , " 290-93; "Ch'en-lun" (Sinking),
343
Yii-t'ai hsin-yung, see New Songs from a jade
Terrace
Yuan Chung-tao: on Li Po, 144; on nar-
rowness of orthodox masters, 144;
praise of T a n g poetry by, 144—45; and
expression of emotion, 145; imitation in
poetry of, 145; A Biography of the Taoist
of the Single Gourd, 150
Yiian Huang (Yuan Liao-fan), 192
Yuan Hung-tao, 126, 131; awe of nature
in poetry of, 133; travel essays of, 133;
call of for individualism in life and art,
135; view of literary evolution by, 136;
on expression of feelings, 138; and
newness in literature, 138; and the
imagination, 143; opposition to imita-
tion, 143; and folk literature, 146-47;
humor of, 149; view of own self, 149;
works: "In the Cave of the Jade City,"
131-33, 147-48; " A Record of My Trip
to Mount She," 133-34; "Letter to Ch'iu
T a n , " 143—44; "Making Fun of Myself
on People Day," 148-49, 150; A Biog-
raphy of the Old Drunkard, 150; see also
Kung-an school of poetry
Yuan tsa-chu, 215
Yuan Tsung-tao, on not quoting old
books, 144
Yuan-yang, 257, 258-59, 260, 262, 265-66,
269, 274, 275, 278
Yuan-yang chen, see A Pair of Needles
"Yuan y u , " see Ts'ao Chih
Yuan Yii-ling, 214; see also Sui shih i-wen
Yueh Fei, 215
Yueh-fu (Music Bureau Songs), 92, 98,
148
"Yun-diung chun," see "The Lord Within
the Clouds"
STUDIES IN ORIENTAL CULTURE
1. The Onin War: History of Its Origins and Background, with 1967
a Selective Translation of the Chronicle of Onin, by H. Paul
Varley
2. Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies, ed. 1969
Charles O. Hucker
3. The Actors' Analects (Yakusha Rongo), ed. and tr. by Charles 1969
J. Dunn and Bungo Torigoe
4. Self and Society in Ming Thought, by Wm. Theodore de 1970
Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought. Also in pa-
perback ed.
5. A History of Islamic Philosophy, by Majid Fakhry, 2d ed. 1983
6. Phantasies of a Love Thief: The Caurapancaiika Atrributed to 1971
Bilhana, by Barbara Stoler Miller
7. Iqbal: Poet-Philosopher of Pakistan, ed. Hafeez Malik 1971
8. The Golden Tradition: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry, by 1973
Ahmed Ali. Also in paperback ed.
9. Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late 1973
Yuan China, by John W. Dardess
10. The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, by Wm. Theodore de 1975
Bary and the Conference on Seventeenth-Century
Chinese Thought. Also in paperback ed.
11. To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming, by Julia 1976
Ching
12. Gods, Priests, and Warriors: The Bhrgus of the Mahabhdrata, 1977
by Robert P. Goldman
13. Mei Yao-ch'en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry, by 1976
Jonathan Chaves
14. The Legend of Semimaru, Blind Musician of Japan, by Susan 1977
Matisoff
15. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim Modernization in India 1980
and Pakistan, by Hafeez Malik
16. The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political 1982
Mobilization in India, by Gail Minault
17. The World of K'ung Shang-jen: A Man of Letters in Early 1983
Ch'ing China, by Richard Strassberg
18. The Lotus Boat: The Origins of Chinese Tz'u Poetry in Tang 1984
Popular Culture, by Marsha L. Wagner
19. Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, ed. Robert E. He- 1985
gel and Richard C. Hessney
20. Songs for the Bride: Women's Voices and Wedding Rites of 1985
Rural India, by W. G. Archer, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller
and Mildred Archer

NEO-CONFUCIAN STUDIES
Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writ- 1963
ings by Wang Yang-ming, tr. Wing-tsit Chan
Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology, 1967
comp. Chu Hsi and Lii Tsu-ch'ien, tr. Wing-tsit Chan
Self and Society in Ming Thought, by Wm. Theodore de Bary 1970
and the Conference on Ming Thought. Also in paperback
ed.
The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, by Wm. Theodore de Bary 1975
and the Conference on Seventeenth-Century Chinese
Tought. Also in paperback ed.
Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Prac- 1979
tical Learning, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom.
Also in paperback ed.
The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en, by Judith A. Berling 1980
The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming 1981
Synthesis, by Chun-fang Yu
Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart, 1981
by Wm. Theodore de Bary
Yuan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion Under the Mon- 1982
gols, ed. Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore de Bary
The Liberal Tradition in China, by Wm. Theodore de Bary 1983
The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology, by John B. 1984
Henderson
MODERN ASIAN LITERATURE SERIES
Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology, ed. and tr. Ted T. 1979
Takaya. Also in paperback ed.
Mask and Sword: Two Plays for the Contemporary Japanese Thea- 1980
ter, Yamazaki Masakazu, tr. J. Thomas Rimer
Yor.omitsu Riichi, Modernist, by Dennis Keene 1980
Nepali Visions, Nepali Dreams: The Poetry of Laxmiprasad Dev- 1980
kota, tr. David Rubin
Literature of the Hundred Flowers, vol. 1: Criticism and Polem- 1981
ies, ed. Hauling Nieh
Literature of the Hundred Flowers, vol. 2: Poetry and Fiction, ed. 1981
Hauling Nieh
Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949, ed. Joseph 1981
S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee. Also in pa-
perback ed.
A View by the Sea, by Yasuoka Shötarö, tr. Kären Wigen Lewis 1984
Other Worlds: Arishima Takeo and the Bounds of Modern Japa- 1984
nese Fiction, by Paul Anderer

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ORIENTAL CLASSICS

Major Plays of Chikamatsu, tr. Donald Keene 1961
Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, tr. Donald Keene. Paperback 1961
text edition
Records of the Grand Historian of China, translated from the Shih 1961
chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, tr. Burton Watson, 2 vols.
Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writ- 1963
ings by Wang Yang-ming, tr. Wing-tsit Chan
Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, tr. Burton Watson, paperback ed. 1964
only
The Mahäbhärata, tr. Chakravarthi V. Narasimhan. Also in 1965
paperback ed.
The Manyöshü, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai edition 1965
Su Tung-p'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet, tr. Burton 1965
Watson. Also in paperback ed.
Bhartrihari: Poems, tr. Barbara Stoler Miller. Also in paper- 1967
back ed.
Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, tr. Bur- 1967
ton Watson. Also in separate paperback eds.
The Awakening of Faith, Attributed to Aévaghosha, tr. Yoshito 1967
S. Hakeda. Also in paperback ed.
Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology, 1967
comp. Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien, tr. Wing-tsit Chan
The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, tr. Philip B. Yampol- 1967
sky. Also in paperback ed.
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkö, tr. Donald Keene. 1967
Also in paperback ed.
The Pillow Book of Sei Shönagon, tr. Ivan Morris, 2 vols. 1967
Two Plays of Ancient India: The Little Clay Cart and the Minis- 1968
ter's Seal, tr. J. A. B. van Buitenen
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, tr. Burton Watson 1968
The Romance of the Western Chamber (Hsi Hsiang chi), tr. S. I. 1968
Hsiung. Also in paperback ed.
The Manyöshü, Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai edition. Paper- 1969
back text edition.
Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma 1969
Ch'ien. Paperback text edition, tr. Burton Watson.
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the Tang Poet Han-shan, tr. Bur- 1970
ton Watson. Also in paperback ed.
Twenty Plays of the Nö Theatre, ed. Donald Keene. Also in 1970
paperback ed.
Chüshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, tr. Donald Keene. 1971
Also in paperback ed.
The Zen Master Hakuin: Selected Writings, tr. Philip B. Yam- 1971
polsky
Chinese Rhyme-Prose: Poems in the Fu Form from the Han and 1971
Six Dynasties Periods, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paper-
back ed.
Kükai: Major Works, tr. Yoshito S. Hakeda. Also in paper- 1972
back ed.
The Old Man Who Does as He Pleases: Selections from the Poetry 1973
and Prose of Lu Yu, tr. Burton Watson
The Lion's Roar of Queen Srimälä, tr. Alex & Hideko Wayman 1974
Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China: Selections from the 1974
History of the Former Han by Pan Ku, tr. Burton Watson.
Also in paperback ed.
Japanese Literature in Chinese, vol. 1: Poetry and Prose in Chinese 1975
by Japanese Writers of the Early Period, tr. Bruton Watson
Japanese Literature in Chinese, vol. 2: Poetry and Prose in Chinese 1976
by Japanese Writers of the Later Period, tr. Burton Watson
Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma, tr. Leon 1976
Hurvitz. Also in paperback ed.
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva's Gitagovinda, tr. Barbara 1977
Stoler Miller. Also in paperback ed. Cloth ed. includes
critical text of the Sanskrit.
Ryökan: Zen Monk-Poet of Japan, tr. Burton Watson 1977
Calming the Mind and Discerning the Real: From the Lam rim 1978
chen mo of Tson-kha-pa, tT. Alex Wayman
The Hermit and the Love-Thief: Sanskrit Poems of Bhartrihari and 1978
Bilhana, tr. Barbara Stoler Miller
The Lute: Kao Ming's P'i-p'a chi, tr. Jean Mulligan. Also in pa- 1980
perback ed.
A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinnö Shötöki of Kitabatake 1980
Chikafusa, tr. H. Paul Varley
Among the Flowers: The Hua-chien chi, tr. Lois Fusek 1982
Grass Hill: Peoms and Prose by the Japanese Monk Gensei, tr. 1983
Burton Watson
Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies 1983
of Fang-shih, tr. Kenneth J. DeWoskin. Also in paperback
ed.
Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kälidäsa, ed. Barbara Stoler 1984
Miller. Also in paperback ed.
The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the 1984
Thirteenth Century, ed. and tr. Burton Watson
Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten 1985
Songs of Classical Tamil, tr. A. K. Ramanujan. Also in pa-
perback ed.

COMPANIONS TO ASIAN STUDIES

Approaches to the Oriental Classics, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary 1959
Early Chinese Literature, by Burton Watson. Also in paper- 1962
back ed.
Approaches to Asian Civilizations, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary 1964
and Ainslie T. Embree
The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction, by C. T. Hsia. 1968
Also in paperback ed.
Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth 1971
Century, tr. Burton Watson. Also in paperback ed.
A Syllabus of Indian Civilization, by Leonard A. Gordon and 1971
Barbara Stoler Miller
Twentieth-Century Chinese Stories, ed. C. T. Hsia and Joseph 1971
S. M. Lau. Also in paperback ed.
A Syllabus of Chinese Civilization, by J. Mason Gentzler, 2d 1972
ed.
A Syllabus of Japanese Civilization, by H. Paul Varley, 2d ed. 1972
An Introduction to Chinese Civilization, ed. John Meskill, with 1973
the assistance of J. Mason Gentzler
An Introduction to Japanese Civilization, ed. Arthur E. Tiede- 1974
mann
A Guide to Oriental Classics, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and 1975
Ainslie T. Embree, 2d ed. Also in paperback ed.
Ukifune: Love in the Tale of Genji, ed. Andrew Pekarik 1982

INTRODUCTION TO ORIENTAL CIVILIZATIONS

Wm. Theodore de Bary, Editor
Sources of Japanese Tradition 1958 Paperback ed., 2 vols., 1964
Sources of Indian Tradition 1958 Paperback ed., 2 vols., 1964
Sources of Chinese Tradition 1960 Paperback ed., 2 vols., 1964