Finished the Red Brush; back from the Wilderness

Idema, W. with Beata Grant. The Red Brush : Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center ; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2004.

At long last, I finished this massive anthology of women's writings in so many genres and from so many different periods of time. I feel like I've just been introduced to a whole small town where everybody is related to everybody else and every relative worships each of her or his elders. Either that or they categorically condemn them.

My favorite section by far is on the drama, near the end of the book. We meet Xie Xucai, the Chinese Yentl, who for me brings to life the adventure of journeying past what culture makes you out to be. (The picture below is from a 2006 production put on by Eslite Bookstore in Taiwan.)



Every woman who learned to read and write in Chinese was once already in drag, because these were the things that men did, as much as wearing pants.

Today the spring colors are splendid and I am consumed with longing. And so to amuse myself, I sit here alone, dressed up as a man... -- Xie Xucai, in The Fake Image《喬影》

So then for Xie Xucai to actually wear pants is only a dramatic flourish that emphasizes the transgression, and hence the adventure, of reading and writing. If you think about this long enough, the figure of the Chinese woman writer becomes the figure of any writer or any artist, because art is really at essence the pouring out of the mind into envisioning some new thing that will then inevitably come to stand for its maker.

Writing is always a kind of self-creation. That a artist can produce something completely unlike his own life, making the association between the work and the identity of its creator an arbitrary and uninformative point, is simply an entry point for the larger realization that the self and its products are equally ephemeral, unknowable, "dream-like." This larger truth reduces gender to a trivia, but that's admittedly poor consolation.