Floating through a Floating Life

I find it difficult to read the work of any teacher I actually know. I both want and don't want to criticize, both want and don't want to learn from their texts. I think this reveals my own insecurities, which simply have to be conquered. With that in mind, I re-read:

Waltner, Ann. "Spatial Decorum, Transgression, and Displacement in Shen Fu's Six Records from a Floating Life," in Empire, Nation, and Beyond: Chinese History in Late Imperial and Modern Times - A Festschrift in Honor of Frederic Wakeman, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Madeleine Zelin. China Research Monograph no. 61, (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2006).

Floating Life: A Brief Intro

Six Chapters from a Floating Life is another book I've decided to really take my time with. A rare example of extended autobiography from late imperial China, Floating Life is the story of Shen Fu 沈復, a hapless painter-designer-writer type of guy. He was born into a Suzhou literati family, but not a particularly rich one. Shen Fu obviously deeply loved his wife, Chen Yun 陳雲, because he embeds her life story into his own, including many details of the things she did and said, and an empathy for her feelings, ambitions and disappointments that is striking and fresh -- especially so considering how rare this kind of writing is in China even today.

A Floating Story for a Floating Life

Professor Waltner first asks, and then answers, the question of "how to read" Six Records from a Floating Life. The piece is valuable social history, writes Waltner, and that social history is deeply embedded in its narrative structure. It's a weird, non-linear set of 'jottings' that tells some parts of the life story multiple times, yet leaves the reader guessing about much else. So the narrative, so the state of so-called 'traditional Chinese society.' We'd like to imagine that most Chinese "literati" lived lives like Shen Fu's parents: stable, professional, honorable, and rigidly adherent to the social mores of the day. But even though many families must have acheived this ideal, more of them may have been like Shen Fu and Chen Yun: married, in love, but "on the move." Alienated from the Shen Fu's parents, yet still in fear of them, they led lives of worry, uncertainty and a good deal of self-deception.

Ways of Being: Shen Fu's Little China Girl

In early 19th-century China, there were strict codes for what a person could do and be; yet, this is only half the story. If you were a woman, you were supposed to take care of the house and take care of your husband. But this might include needlework and embroidery, and if your husband couldn't get a good job then you might have to supplement his income from this kind of labor. In-laws would not approve of this practice, but bill collectors wouldn't care. In elite families, women often learned to read and write; in Shen Fu's family, women seem to have been in charge of correspondence, giving them the power to tell family members what has been happening and why. Marriage was as much a career for a young 19th-century Chinese woman as it was for any of Jane Austen's women. And much like Jane Austen's heroines, Chen Yun is always looking for ways to bend the traditional rules of behavior to help her husband along, to get their little household out of poverty, to give herself more authority, or even just for a bit of escape. Ever the reader, she tried to be the kind of pro-active woman she'd read about in literary works. This leads to a tragedy worthy of a very sophisticated novelist: she falls in love with the woman she pursues to be her husband's concubine, upsets her fearsome in-laws, and dies of a broken heart while her effete husband looks sensitively on, unable to imagine himself as the man who saves her.

Metafloat: From 1809 to 1980, and back again

Yang Jiang titled her 1980 memoir Six Chapters of a Cadre School, an obvious reference to Six Chapters of a Floating Life. Like her predecessor, Yang Jiang paints a moving portrait of a displaced couple who chafe against the social codes of their time. I think that Professor Waltner's insight about the memoir -- that it's structure really says something about the social history of the time -- is a great point from which to begin thinking of the terms in which we can compare these two works. As in Shen Fu's text, in Yang Jiang's we can readily identify "a tension between the world in miniature and the world beyond walls." Just as for Shen Fu and Chen Yun, for Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu "Defiance is a possibility, but criticism seems not to be." The point of both works is to document the lives of an ill-fated pair who defy the system they live in, but not for the same reasons that revolutionaries defy the system. It's not that these couples want to change society completely -- they just want to tweak it. They want a world where they can do what they do best -- where they can live off their own very clever minds. But compared to Chen Yun and Shen Fu, Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu speak for a segment of society who has experienced decades of revolution. Thus, to the degree that Yang Jiang imitates the form of the much older book, she is appealing to readers who have had enough of revolution, and just want something Chinese.