Note: Pu Songling's "Twenty Years a Dream"

“Twenty Years a Dream" adapted for Chinese television

As I was cleaning up a messy file in my desk, yesterday, I came across a copy of the story “Twenty Years a Dream” as translated by John Minford in his recent version of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. This morning, in no hurry to get started on the difficult writing of my dissertation, I took the time to read the story again, and now I just have to put down a few comments, which I will try to do quickly.

The story begins

Yang Yuwei went to live on the banks of the Si River, in a studio out in the wilds. There were numerous old graves just beyond the wall of his property. At night he could hear the wind soughing in the poplars, like the sound of surging waves.

He sat up l ate one evening beside his lamp and was beginning to feel very lonely and forlorn when he heard a voice outside chanting some lines of verse:

In the dark night the cool wind blows where it will;
Fireflies alight on the grass, they settle on my gown...”

Over and over again he heard the same plaintive, melancholy lines chanted by a delicate woman’s voice. The sound intrigued him greatly.

The boy meets the girl; I’m always fascinated to find that the basic desire for the most basic of attachments indeed appears over and over in all cultures, in all times! But already we have here some very important conventions at work that make this story distinctively Chinese. Yang Yuwei is man who has come to live “in the wilds.” What he finds attractive about the lady is that she seems so cultivated, so delicate. Her poem is full of symbols, as is the entire story -- symbols stand-in for whole stories, stories within stories. It is important to realize that this is a real erotic feature for him; “intrigued” is a very physical response. Even after Yang realizes that this girl must be a ghost, “He felt himself strangely drawn to it.”

He listens to her “melancholy dirge,” aroused (er, “intrigued”) and thinks of a great way to establish communication: to reply to her couplet with “Who, alas, can know your heart’s secret sorrow, As you stand at moonrise in your cold torquoise sleeves?” I love that the girl’s image is one of the wilderness, one to remind us perhaps that fireflies mate by flashing their lights at each other, males flying in search of a female to alight on. Yang takes up this role, but gives his girl a new image of herself as a fancy lady, alive and standing?” It was just the right thing to say to her.

Thus begins the relationship. “You are indeed a gentleman of such refinement and cultivation, sir!” She tells him her story, that she is from Gansu province and died on a trip at age 17. “Yang wished to make love to her without further ado, but she would not.” But he can’t, because she’s a ghost and sex with her would kill him. “So Yang held back, merely toying with her breasts, which were as virginal and soft to the touch as freshly peeled lotus kernels.” This last is an image from Chinese poetry that elaborates on the idea that what is so erotic about the girl is the great “refinement” and “delicacy” of her body and her persona -- nothing more delicate than a ghost, I guess you could say.

The two continue to cultivate an attachment that is figured by literature. She notices he is in to Yuan Zhen’s “The Lianchang Palace” and is all, “Oh my god, that is my favorite Yuan Zhen poem too! We have so much in common!” (not a real quote, obviously) Unable to have sex, Yang and Locket are able to become good friends with common interests. She does creates her own poetry compilations with great calligraphy, teaches Yang to play ‘Go,’ and plays him songs on the piba. And he loves to listen, especially to her happy songs.

Their relationship is nearly ruined when Yang’s “boorish,” “nasty” friends learn of his girl and want to become audiences to his attachment, but the most boorish of them all, Wang manages to perform the service of ridding the girl of a bullying demon. She responds by acknowledging her debt to him and recognizing him as a friend also (though of course he must respect her closer position to Yang than his now). The story ends as in dreams come true: the girl can become a real girl with just a little sex, blood and nourishing broth. , helps make poetry collections, That the story is essentially boy meets girl, boy faces major challenges to get girl.

Minford seems quite right to compare the “platonic relationship” here (though I won’t agree to that term) to Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu. I think even that it would be a good idea to assign the story along with the book at the end of the semester, the better to talk about the role “elegance” and “delicacy” play in Chinese life writing.