Story Note: Wang Zengqi's "Buddhist Initiation"

Wang Zengqi, folk culture expert, writer, editor of a volume on food writing I'd like to see. He also illustrated a reference work on the potato, which has me dreaming of a volume of food writing. (From Fang's introductory biography). Thanks to this blog for the picture.

Chinese Short Stories of the Twentieth Century: An Anthology in English by Zhihua Fang

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I picked this up so I could read Fang's translation of "Buddhist Initiation" by Wang Zengqi. It's a ridiculously poor translation of a story that already lacks conflict and tension.



The introduction to the book has some real howlers, e.g. Fang on the 1980s in China: "It was a magic, romantic and wondrous time that will never be again." Astoundingly, Fang's bumbling historical introduction does not even mention "Buddhist Initiation."



I can see no reason to look at this volume, unless you need to read stories by Gao Xiaosheng, Tie Ning and/or Wang Zengqi quickly, in poor English that will leave you suspecting that Chinese literature really is inferior.



(Apparently the "Garland Reference Library of the Humanities" is another one of those near-vanity publishers that will publish practically anything, with no attempt to vet or consult with peers in the field.)



Finally, a response to the story "Buddhist Initiation," at least in this English translation:



Wang Zengqi’s “Buddhist Initiation” is about a town where a Buddhist monastery and an earthy citizenry exist in harmony. People love and respect the monks, even though the monks don't obey the vinaya codes that prohibit eating meat and having sex. The story drifts from scene to scene with lyrical writing about land, as well as detailed portraits of the various monks, children, old ladies, street merchants, etc. etc. that fill the town. There is a sort of a protagonist, a child named Mingzi who wants to be a monk, but also likes this one girl Yingzi. Will he be able to have both? Yes.



Like so much of Mark Twain's writing, place and language are bound so tightly together, this piece is probably not a good choice for translation. As Carolyn FitzGerald has suggested in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, we can apply David Wang's term "imaginary nostalgia" to describe the idealized network of landscape and portrait that comprises these compositions. Note that I say "compositions" and not "stories" because landscape and portrait do not a story make.







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Beijing Doll: Beijing Bomb, More Like

Beijing Doll by Chun Sue

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"I knew that this novel, which records my youth and that of others of my generation, would only reveal its true meaning and value with the passage of time."

OK stop right there. I'm wary of the contemporary 'book' (I'm not going to call it a novel, because I demand a story structure for that) that thinks it can simply photograph in writing the way the author and her friends live, day to day, and call that a novel. I'm wary and weary of writing that calls attention to the author in the first few sentences -- if you can't give us some 'why' other than 'It's me!' in those first few sentences, well, increasingly I will put the book down. Lastly, I am now officially suspicious of any claims to represent "a generation." Clearly, what Chun Sue really means is not a "generation" but a group of middle- and upper-class urban kids, and not even most of those, but the ones who get into sex and rock'n'roll. And not even most of those -- just the real losers who can't even practice, and don't even seem to enjoy fucking. No doubt this is still a large portion of Beijing teenagers, but it hardly counts as a 'generation.'

Chun Sue's protagonist, Chun Sue, is mildly interested in writing. She is ever curious about boys. She is bold enough to speak rudely to her parents. She finds high school to be alienating, constricting, and unfair. She's doing her best to figure herself out, and the occasional boy.

Other than that, she seems have little curiosity for the outside world. And this story reflects that: it has little crisis, only one monotonous conflict (teenage girl self vs. teenage girl self, dontcha know), and, oddly, no climax that I can see. Was it her relationship with Mint, or G.? Was it that decision to quit school again after quitting before and going back? Was it deliberate not to have a final moment of growth, to leave her in this late teenager state of being?

What worries me the most is, why did Howard Goldblatt do this piffle? What was he thinking as he plodded through all this stuff? The only thing I can think is that the 70-year-old dean of Chinese-to-English novel translations wants to expand his range to cover it all, and leaped at a work that seemed to 'speak for the new generation.' I hope he wasn't one of those aggravating readers who take Chun Sue's alienation as further evidence of the distinctive changes taking place in China. Bull. shit. If that's the case, then my kid sister's life in San Antonio is evidence of the distinctive changes taking place in China.

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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.

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Story: "I Bought a Little City"

A young Barthelme. Thanks to the Guardian books blog - this entry is part of a long series surveying the short story.

I have listened to all of the New Yorker fiction podcasts, and I am now filled with complex feelings about the short story. It seems to me the form that privileges the craft of story first, entertainment value second, and lastly social and political commentary. For comparison's sake, most television and genre fiction seems to go for entertainment value first, followed closely with social commentary; craft recedes into the background, even in the most highly-crafted works. In poetry, craft is probably everything, and poems with social content or entertainment value per se are now an endangered species.

That is preliminary bullshit, but it matters to the young critical thinker still too afraid or too plagued by petty anxieties and self-inflicted handicaps to write. I don't write, precisely, but I do comment. To comment seems the biggest procrastination of all.

Enough. Now I procrastinate even comment.

"I Bought a Little City" by Donald Barthelme is "absurdist" in the sense that a man cannot, in fact, purchase Galveston, Texas, to rule over as absolute monarch. Perhaps even more absurd is just how much the protagonist debates with himself before selfishly inflicting injustice (he shoots another man's dog -- not quite a beating offense). But the story's truth is that if we were to give high office to any of the whining social commentators of the land, from our finest poets to the most unimaginative dolts, they would very likely fail to uphold fairness and decency in the realm. The best they would be able to do is hand the land back, and move away from the center.

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First Encounter With Can Xue's Grotesque Fiction

Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas by Xue Can

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Truth is often a tiny, dim star enveloped in thick layers of cloud and fog, quite beyond recognition by ordinary eyes. Only sophisticated yet simple and sincere creatures can "discover" it in meditation. - Can Xue, "Yellow Mud Street"

Readers need only set their imaginations free. Even if they do not always understand Can Xue, they will invariably be challenged, fascinated, and provoked. - Charlotte Innes

What is there to say about the art of the grotesque? One must taste it. Taste it:

Old Hu San was asleep under the eaves.It was particularly hot that day. Early in the morning Hu San had a dream in which a red spider with a huge belly and long, hairy legs kept crawling onto the tip of his nose. He whisked it off five times, but it crawled back a sixth time. He was about to whisk it off again when a loud tap woke him up. Opening his eyes, he found a big water drop hanging from the tip of his nose.***Lying still, Old Hu San listened to the rain. It beat on the tarred street like popping beans. Streams of black water poured from the eaves. The rain soaked his clothes, then flooded on to the step where he lay. His whole back was immersed. "The rain this year is a little sticky, and a little salty, too," he thought. "Very similar to human sweat." He recalled the year when there was a rain of dead fish. The rainwater then was also salty. He had even salted two big fish.

From out of death, comes life again, but if the trauma of death is massive, the returning life will be grotesque. There is something like a cathartic juissance, a vomiting up of the bile of soul which feels so cleansing and refreshing, that makes Can Xue's descriptive writing a sickeningly addictive performance:

Lying there, they heard the autumn wind skim over the roof. A child shot stones onto the tiles with a slingshot. When they heard the last tiny cricket groaning in the tile jar, they hugged each other in terror, then separated in disgust."Your T-shirt smells sweaty around your armpits.""I changed it this morning.""Maybe, but I smell it. You told me it was a sweet odor, but you were wrong. It's a sour smell. There can't be a mountain so tall that you could catch the sun even if you were at the peak. Can you be wrong about everything?""But I just want to tell about these things. I have to find something to say.""True. I love talking, too. Maybe we're both wrong. Maybe we're doing it on purpose, so we have something to talk about. For instance, you came just now smelling of sunflowers. Then we talked about sunflowers which do not exist in reality. You know that.""My father-in-law incites his daughter to steal things for his home. They think I don't know it. They just like to put on a show.""But you don't care at all?""I pretend not to have seen through their tricks and act greatly annoyed. And sometimes the funny way the old man eggs my daughter on, too, makes me feel like holing up and having a good laugh. Yesterday my daughter came and said she hates her mother bitterly and could no longer tolerate her. She claimed her mother constantly put pressure on her, hid rats under her pillow, stole and burned her letters to her friends, and forced her to dress like a beggar. When she leaves the house, she said, her mother follows her, spying to see if she flirts with anybody. While my daughter feels so humiliated, the mother boasts to her colleagues that her daughter is striving for perfection and will have a bright future. My daughter also told me that all the things that disappeared from my home were stolen by her mother and her grandpa in collaboration.""What did you say then?""Me? Definitely I won't be taken in! I gave her an angry stare and yelled, 'Beat it!' I scared the wits out of her. Only after a long time did she state her grievance: 'I've come to inform against others only to get shouted at.' 'Who asked you to inform against others?' I said fiercely. 'Spying on people! Learning such tricks at your young age!' She looked at me with terror, and ran away. As I expected, my wife flew into a rage that night, saying I suspected her of being a thief! I dashed into my daughter's roomand searched her bed. I found a paper box containing half of the cat's tail. I threw the tail at my daughter, and she started to twitch immediately. These people are crazy.""You make such a great show of being in earnest. Did you tell me you were standing at the other end of the forest at the same time? And you saw something?""When I was standing there, I saw long columns of smoke. The whole city was trembling in the red light. The sky was crackling. Something was crawling haltingly in the mud. Its back was cracked. Dark red bloodstains crimsoned the long path.""The sky full of red light?""It made me dizzy. I regretted that the thing could never crawl to its destination. The smallest stones tipped it over. Where did it intend to go?""Where did it intend to go?" she echoed.

Oh well, life goes on! It will crawl, crippled. It will drink its own pee and eat insects at the bottom of the vat, with the black water. But what might be irreparable are the attachments of human beings to each other, as of parent to child, with the accompanying sense of what these human beings owe to each other. The state of nature is ammoral, non-ethical. Human attachments degrade, are reduced, and may ultimately be lost, disconnected. Then each person is the same as the fungi growing under the floorboards, the spider waiting for the fly. Can Xue's early fiction as represented in this collection closes the gap between life and the mud, food and shit, the man and the rat. She makes one hope like hell that the human experience can recover the injuries dealt it, injuries in the past, ongoing now, and to come. Sometimes hope lies in imagining the worst.

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Thoughts on the Grotesque

Gummo (1997) a film by Harmony Korine

I happened to watch the movie Gummo just after I had finished the novella Yellow Mud Street 黄泥街 by Can Xue, and I was really struck by how both advance a portrait of grotesque communities. Both have horror elements that are buried deeply in the scenery -- trash, mess, odd growths like black mushrooms, fat albinos with no toes, maggots that appear everywhere, pots of dried up spaghetti, stands of fruit that immediately rot and drip into the drains. Both focus on how misdirected and now anarchic communities aim to live, but are only able to do so in a limited way -- blistering in heat, prey to insects and larger predators.



There is a strong element of black comedy to both stories as well, without which the pieces would be unambiguously negative overall. Little boys curse each other, but they are still clearly little boys. An old man learns to eat black spiders, but hey, he's eating, right? There is an ambiguous idea that life is beautiful in all its forms, even if it is grotesque after experiencing a great disturbance.

This disturbance is also clearly evident in both works. In Can Xue, it was Maoism, including state industry, collectivization, and the use of mass communication to make every speak a common, if empty, rhetoric. For Korine's Xenia, Ohio, the trauma is a tornado that had passed through 20 years before -- the audience is left to wonder just how metaphorical to take that 'tornado.'

Since I had also recently watched a TED Talk on coral reef devastation and the tremendous crisis facing world oceans, I have begun to think of both Yellow Mud Street and Gummo as having an ecological element. The grotesque element that stands out the most in both stories is nothing more or less than the force of life to continue along even after tremendous trauma. After a devastating tornado or pollution event, the life that first returns is always the most grotesque possible, because it must feed off of the waste that is left behind. And this is ambiguously beautiful -- it is beautiful that life will always go on, and it is terrible that the healthiest path of life is so seldom offered.
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Half of Man is Writing

Cover of Zhang Xianliang's first major work in its English edition.

Below I paste in code from a review I wrote over at Goodreads.com, which seems both a nice tool to send off reviews to Twitter and a community of intelligent readers. See the site for a well-written negative review of this book and several other interesting comments.

Once again I feel the need to press some internal "reset" button and strategize once again for a method of work that will give me real results on my dissertation. I feel what I'm lacking now is a firm system for managing time. Time is constraining, but also liberating. There is the bare fact that the entire project is on a deadline, and then there is the problem of how to use a single free day. This is essentially a problem of management, of making action and timing both deliberate.

So. To manage myself, I will say that I must have the first fully-drafted chapter of my diss by June 1. That leaves about 37 days to get the draft done. Plenty of time, I think, as long as I give it a concentrated effort. The draft I will have on June 1st will simply be a crafted summary of what I have read by then. Thus, the key method will be to read and write reciprocally.

This blog will remain a hybrid document that contains small reviews and comments from my research, as well as self-reflective comments on the larger project at hand.

Half of Man Is Woman by Zhang Xianliang


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Zhang, Xianliang. Half of Man Is Woman. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.

Casablanca in the Gulag

Zhang Yonglin is a Chinese Rick -- they probably would have fought on the same side during the Spanish Revolution in 1936, if Zhang had been there. But Zhang wasn't -- he was probably only born around then. By the time he had grown up, this sort of meritocratic freedom fighting was under attack in the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Zhang had been condemned, politically, socially and every other way, and sent to the first labor camps of those days, where he remained till 1966, when our story opens.



The inciting incident of "Half of Man is Woman" is boy sees girl, "Woman needs man/And man must have his mate./ That no one can deny." Zhang Yonglin, a virgin at 39 (picture a virgin Bogart! Sheesh!) is working in the fields one day when he sees -- a naked woman! He's so unbalanced he enters an amazing crisis punched into us via Zhang Xianliang's blockish prose. It is almost a coincidence that the very same year, a new political movement known as the Great Cultural Revolution is beginning. But after all, right, "It's still the same old story/ A fight for love and glory/A case of do or die."

The conceit of the story is that Zhang is working out his ideas about what life is all about in both his relationship with the woman and with his observations on the political events in the following years, 1968-1979. Like Rick, Zhang knows in the end that it's "a case of do or die," and makes the decision that determines his marriage and his very life.

Any reader who understands this work first and foremost as a documentary of life in China is a tremendous fool. First and foremost it is a great work of fiction, a crafted expression of a life, with turning points full of the interior thoughts of a man, including doubts, fears, desires and weaknesses. It probes just what would make a thinking man live through a dark night of turmoil that might last for decades, leaving a deep, national version of Stockholm's syndrome on the psyche. China here is the setting, no more.

Zhang's language throughout the book reminds me that story is about plot and character structure, not language. Zhang Yonglin, his girl, and the supporting cast with a wide range of fascinating subplots is a good story, but it is seldom a well-written. It is crafted, but in a garish, earthy style that is often repugnant. Martha Avery would be sublime translating "Baotown" just after this, but writing in 1986-7 she seems certain of Zhang's importance as a story craftsman but often unable to handle his clunky dialogue, flat jokes, flowery landscape description, all of which feed into an enigmatic (to the English reader) because so darkened, black-humor perspective on life. A debased pessimism pervades the work, and clearly Avery has understood the need to render this in English, but only hints of it were possible. I won't read this whole volume in Chinese, most likely, but you better believe I'm going to turn here when I want to practice my snark.


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Review: Baotown by Wang Anyi

Even a few reviewers of the book back in 1989 couldn't resist commenting on how striking Ms. Wang's back-cover author photo is...

Wang, Anyi. Baotown. Translated by Martha Avery. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989.

This is an extraordinarily thoughtful story of an impoverished but benevolent Chinese village. It begins with slow-moving portraits of various characters -- the boy who wants to be a writer, the strong-willed teenage girl, the old man who wishes he were dead, the young boy who will be his friend -- and on and on.

But just when you think it's nothing more than a Chinese Spoon River Anthology, an exciting sequence of climaxes proves Wang's mettle as story teller of real power and insight. People die! Lovers break up and come back together! Huge natural disasters strike! And throughout, the real value is clearly human goodness in its purest form, a love of life that is willing to sacrifice to help another life continue.

The final chapters drag our little village into the public life of mass media when a good little boy's memorial biography becomes an exemplary life. This resolves the tale and also tells us more than a good deal of scholarship about how biography works in modern China!
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Wandermonkey Podcasting 1: Wilson Comes to Lu

Attempting to channel the dead souls of the warring states

I commence podcasting! Yay! This .mp3 records an original story I wrote for a class in creative literature I took with Allegra Lingo.

Text of story:

For several days, Wilson had awakened each morning to the sounds of the boatmen’s oars, slicing gently through the brackish river water, the gentle chirping of waterfowl nesting near the river bank, and, beyond, in the dark woods that surrounded both banks, the cries of monkeys which occasionally emerged.


This is good, Wilson thought to himself as he rode down river in the hired boat. No talking, no banquets, none of the fake smiles and banal errands that were his usual lot, back in the capitol city, Chang’an.


At peace, on his boat, the calm sounds of pure nature lodged, reflected and then helped to shape Wilson’s own inner calm. He could feel waves of calm – probably they looked like the waves made by the boatman’s oar, cutting gently past the dark wooden prow.


But this morning, that calm began to erode again. They had reached the town of Lu – an ancient capitol in its own right, birthplace of Confucius. Now long-conquered by the mighty Han, Lu was essentially just a market town, a large bazaar. On this morning, Wilson knew he was entering Lu because he could hear the talk of the town, at first distant murmurs, as well as the higher shouts of hawkers. He looked up to see the boat pass under the colorful Chang’an Arch Bridge, and abruptly the voices of the crowds of market-goers and merchants erupted from their former dull roar into a louder polyphony in which he could distinguish individual voices. “Gali! Gaaa-li!” cried one hawker, offering the pungent spice powders of Indu in large sacks displayed beneath a umbrella fashioned ingeniously out of straw, and straw twine.


As the boatman pushed on, the early sun began to burn away the morning mist, and Wilson could make out through the haze the outlines of large buildings at the center of town, their familiar dipped archways announcing their function as Confucian halls of ritual. His father had sent him to patronize these sacred places of learning, part of the grand tour of the empire Wilson was taking before he replaced his dying father as Grand Historian of the Han court.


Hmph. Wilson’s mind always made spurnful noises involuntariliy when he said the words “Grand Historian” to himself. For there was nothing “grand” about the job. Not anymore – not since the new Emperor had turned away from taking dusty star charts and boring annals of battles, marriages and speeches of the past as guides to formulate policy. No, the new guy, a truly fearsome man who now called himself Wudi, “God-king of Martial Strength,” was much more interested in men who built steel foundries, men who could handle horses – barbarous, fantastical creatures! – and in men who traveled on big boats – over oceans, not rivers – men with gold.


Hmph! Well, hadn’t Wilson heard it all before? After all, he knew history. South of the Yangze, a mere three hundred years before, Wilson’s predecessor in Chu had tried to convince his king that a deal with Qin was a deal with death and destruction. That a kingdom seeking after profit must always fail to find it , though death and destruction were always close by.


The old statesman had failed to persuade his king. Chu, the great kingdom of the south, was at once on the brink of destruction, though none of its inhabitants knew of this then, except the elder historian, who promptly threw himself into the river. Before he drowned, or so the legend goes, he recited one last poem, a mournful ballad proclaiming his own wisdom and deploring the greed of certain dark men, as well as the benightedness of certain others. The poem contained the lines,


The Way is long. So long, aiyah!

And I have gone so slow.

Near and far, above and below,

I search, and I search, soul in tow.


How often Wilson had recited these to himself on his own travels. On his way, young Wilson had sought his own Way. His heart was torn – history was the family business, a hereditary honor, one he was duty-bound to inherit. But Wilson was a born wanderer, with a fevered mind that ranged over the land, with its winding rivers and jagged mountains. Yet nature was not his own calling, clearly, for of late his concerns more often than not returned to a single image, that of Jessica.


Jessica, the newest addition to Wudi’s harem, first glimpsed by Wilson when she arrived in the retinue of General Fan Cai. The august General had just crushed her beloved kingdom of Yue in the name of world-uniting Han. General Fan’s hordes had shredded the ancient Yue defenses with their bronze-piercing steel crossbows, and then they rode down the pitiful Yue royal guard with a new kind of regiment mounted on horses and known as a “cavalry.” Jessica, daughter of the murdered Yue king, had been set up as the grand trophy of this adventure, delivered to the Han court on a horse herself. Though bound hand and foot, she looked glorious clothed in solid gold thread, astride a jet-black Arabian stallion saddled and armored in solid, brilliant-white jade, which was in turn carved on every square inch in the mottled and grotesque abstract forms of the ancient Han gods. So beautiful and striking was Jessica, with her head held high, auburn hair flowing unbound down her shoulders, and hazel eyes – a mystical rarity in Han women, though more common among the sea-faring Yue – that rumor quickly spread that she was some earthly incarnation of the famed Goddess of the Luo, who legend said once made love with King Hui of Chu, and so caused to the whole Yangzte river valley to be choked with clouds and rain.


Wilson had been attending on his aged father, who was in turn a member of the Emperor’s ceremonial retinue. Gathered on the Dragon Terrace to receive the returning armies of the south, all of the Emperor’s servants had gasped as this beauty emerged through the city gates. Wilson, though, had attempted to resist. Hmph! He forced himself to think. How ridiculous, all this hoopla for a single girl – how could she have been worth the cost? The loss of life? Didn’t the others see that Wudi was out of control, crushing the old order wherever he looked? Wilson intended to scrutinize the girl head to toe merely to provide fuel for his own private expressions of indignance and fear for the future of the Han race. But suddenly, those light brown eyes (or were they green? He must look closer) seemed to lock on to his, plow straight down his eye sockets and into his heart. His jaw first slackened, and then dropped.


Hmph! Suddenly Wilson in a boat entering Lu, the seat of all learning, realized that his jaw was slack again, all because of a wandering mind and the image of a beautiful woman. What was happening to him? His calm utterly destroyed, Wilson worked in vain to settle his mind once again to the business of learning, of history, and duty.



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Pleasure Reading: Memoirs of Hadrian

Antinous, from the statue at Eleusis

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian. Translated by Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar. New York: Farrar Straus and Young, 1954. The Emperor Hadrian is near his death, about 138 AD, and decides to write the story of his life, how he became emperor, and the great (queer, pederastic) love affair of his middle age (which in the ancient world counted old age; Hadrian died at 60).

I just finished this book and was mightily impressed. I can't help but compare it to a couple of volumes of American fantasy genre lit (Sir Apropos of Nothing comes to mind) and this comparison makes the French historicist Yourcenar seem even more powerful -- almost god like in her ability to weave fantasy. To readers and writers like Peter David: here is what I mean when I say I want to read fantasy.



First, Yourcenar's imagination channels the voice and persona of man unlike any a modern reader has ever met, but which must be familiar to any who study the classics: a ruler and egoist of the ancient world. This ruler persona sketches in adventures in a world of battles, political intrigue and affairs of the heart and we gladly travel along so that we can imagine ourselves taking on great power, or accepting the pains and pleasures of great passion. More importantly, we learn something of the layers and masks of any powerful ruler, of the many kinds connections he forms with other people, and we sense that a certain richness immanent in his identity is after all not that different in any modern identity:

Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some external hum of a bee. But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. An gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me.

Here the trappings of fantasy literature -- "the privations of war," for example -- are forged in tandem with a more universal experience of maturing. The vision of a "young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark" brings a wince and a smile to this reader, who sees in the line someone very much like himself, observant and interrogating by mind but nevertheless and after all limited by self-absorption in the end. This is meta-fantasy: the emperor figure in the fantasy is also admittedly a fantast, and points the way for the reader to realize that we are all always already pretenders.

Of course, lurking behind all this is Yourcenar the researcher and reader, a personality one of my teachers described as "creepy." I think the novel is at its weakest when this persona shines through with its eccentric and vaguely elitist tastes, and for me at least this seemed to happen more often in later passages of the novel:

...among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jasno's expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth.

As the last sentence indicates, this is part of a longer passage describing the progress of Hadrian's mourning, but too often Yourcenar is not able to achieve the pathos either of grief or of true love -- both fold back into artfully fluffed-up reading notes that reveal nothing to me so much as the writing subject ensconced for emotional and social reasons behind the covers of old books. This is also revealed in scene after scene that should be charged with overt eroticism, but ends up a sketch completed with only to broad a brush. The best passage describing Hadrian's lover Antinuous seemed a great start:

If I have said nothing yet of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment ... I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting, so long were the lids, a young face broadly formed, as if for repose. This tender body varied all the time, like a plant, and some of its alterations were those of growth. The boy changed; he grew tall. A week of indolence sufficed to soften him completely; a single afternoon at the hunt made the young athlete firm again, and fleet; an hour's sun would turn him from jasmine to the color of honey. The boyish limbs lengthened out; the face lost its delicate childish round and hollowed slightly under the high cheekbones; the full chest of the young runner took on the smooth, gleaming curves of a Bacchante's breast; the brooding lips bespoke a bitter ardor, a sad satiety. In truth this visage changed as if I had molded it night and day.

Still, we can tell from the opening of the passage that our author does not really want to dabble to much in erotica (that job of examining the scenario with a stronger magnifying glass perhaps falls to another writer!), and this impressionist sketch really is just as much of boy beauty as we ever get to see. More often it comes in tiny fragments weighted with bland words like "beauty."


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Quixote update

In chapter 4 of Don Quixote, a 15-year-old boy is whipped soundly. For some reason, I am inspired by this image (as was Gustav Doré, apparently)

Last night record snow falls in Texas left me stranded on the tarmac with other passengers in a small Midwest jet bound for Minnesota. As we waited out four and half hours of sitting, I got through 3 more chapters of Don Quixote, with what I think is fair comprehension. My notes continue to grow, but as I was telling my classmate HJ this afternoon, I actually don't know what I'm doing with this "chapter" of my dissertation yet.

I think that's why it's so fun.
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Dissertation: Beginning the Quixote

Don Quixote drawing by Picasso -- I guess probably the best illustration of the character, ever. Here we can see our hero, looking especially 瘦俏, along with his trusty horse 驽骍难得.

I just finished reading the first chapter of Don Quixote in Chinese, part of a reading I now intend to make into a chapter of my dissertation, tentatively called something like "Don Quixote in China." (Full on-the-fly reading notes will be located here.)

I think the point of telling this story is to appreciate how Yang Jiang learned something very powerful about herself during the course of her own translation of the Quixote during China's Cultural Revolution, and we can see from her later essays that the figure of the Quixote never goes away -- I wish I had already made a file containing all the references to "Quixote" that she makes, but I will certainly record them from now on. For me, this is excuse enough to tell the story of Yang Jiang's Quixote. But given that must offer up something else as well, something at stake in the larger Chinese literary scene, and something at stake politically and socially, I will also examine how the Quixote has become a much-loved figure in Chinese literature, a major source for learning about parody and the ancient irony of self-deprecation. This is of course an overly-large and ill-defined project. What else would I ever do?

Sigh.

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一本書

沒事之士

我妹妹送我愛人這本書，書裡有她寫的筆記，說說什麼”本書當然是垃圾文學，不過閱讀的時候我會笑出來。希望你也這樣欣賞。“我一開始立刻覺得起來本書不值得讀下去，因為真的是垃圾文學。但是我那一天要到老家去，坐飛機看垃圾文學輕輕松松，我碰到這個舒服的感覺了就決定了看下去。

我閱讀了這個長篇小說三分之一才發現了主角”沒事之士“("Sir Apropos of Nothing")怎麼能夠引起一種年輕人的注意。小說的背景是封建社會，人人都保持“忠”(honor)這一纇得道德，但是主角跟一般得年輕人一樣都不服從傳統的道德。主角不服從而住封建社會的矛盾是諷刺幽默的來由。

等一下讀完就會繼續談我的反應。
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Writing Class

Ridin' in the Snow -- a snapshot from here.

This is the first exercise from a creative writing class I'm taking this month.

Like all the assignments for the class, this is a "short short" -- story less than 1,000 words long. I found an essay by Diedre Fulton on this subject which reviews a volume of such short shorts.

Picture 10: Ridin' in the Snow



Steady...steady...



Wilson wouldn't want to make a fool of himself by falling over just as his picture was being taken. The bike he was riding wasn't likely to be steady on a wet sidewalk, much less a snowy lawn, which was just what he found himself riding on, that bright, cold February day.



Foolish...why do you always do things that are so foolish? Ah, it's such a bright day. At least over there, beyond the shadows. What a solid and crisp line where the shade and the sunshine meet. How much more time in the day? Does this day seem longer than yesterday? Yes, now I think of it, it does indeed...



Wilson had a peculiar habit, which was simply that whenever he found himself -- or rather, his thoughts -- at an unbearably embarrassing crossroads, he could not bear to think through the circumstance and the likely scenarios of its resolution, but instead, rather, some escapist remarks to himself about something quite different. He couldn't handle his own troubles, and so he didn't.



Take this consideration of the demarcating line between the sunny part of the campus lawn and the shady part, said shade created by the building looming behind him. None of this was at all material to the concern at hand, namely, get this rickety bike to the sidewalk at the other end of the lawn without becoming bogged in the snow, or worse, to have that dreadful feeling of rubber tires suddenly detached, sliding, slippery down the ice, and then foom! down, onto the snow. Hopefully not head-first. How bad would it be? Relax, and sigh into it. Welcome the ground. Hello, ground. Nice to see you again. Are you nice?



The ground probably wouldn't be nice. That's why he pushed carefully at the handlebars, hoping to soar right around that little patch of ice there -- oh! there's one there! And another one there! Now he's in motion, feeling the wind around the sides of his baseball cap and through the patches of hair above his ears. The pleasant whoosh of winter air around the bends of each ear and onto his ear drums did make him feel somehow alive, somehow justified in riding this ridiculously skinny bike over a campus lawn covered in snow -- it's worth it just to feel the crunch of the aging snow under the sharp tires, along with whoosh.



Jessica would pull up the camera to snap a photo in that moment. She had a way of catching him just when he had decided to do something possibly silly and stupid, possibly exhilarating. Did she think it was pitiful for him to prove himself a man by picking up that old bicycle that had rested on the rack beside the building just moments ago, inviting him with its lack of lock? They had gone on this walk as equals, but now he felt like her dog, set loose to roam about the yard or other certified safe area. Would she use the photograph, developed, with stamped date, as a certain proof of ownership?



And what if she did? Didn't being the playful dog suit his nature? Besides, he was no mere dog, but a human being, perfectly capable of analyzing the situation.



The goal was simple: take up the bike and ride it, crazy-styles, right over to the snow and onto the sidewalk, where, schweeee! he would bring the bike to a jolting but gentle halt on the flat surface of the concrete. The only possible thing that could go wrong was that he should encounter some point at which the two tires of this bicycle should have a center of gravity above them of a wide enough berth such that the angular moment in the direction of ye olde ground should be greater than the force keeping the tire in place, which, we should remember, was directly related to the coefficient of friction for the surface the tires were coming into contact with. In short, the bike might slip and fall out from under him. If. If the ground was slippery. And that's if he encountered a patch of ice. Not a likely thing -- oh, no sir. Not with these navigational skills! Why, see as the handlebars are adjusted first to the right, and then to the left, just so, and proper evasive measures are observed to be taken. Oh yes. 



And now here comes the punch line. Is Jessica still aiming the camera? Oh wait, don't look around now, we're almost there. What about the line between the sunshine-lawn and shaded lawn? Have we reached that yet? Wait, don't think too far. Remember the pain of foom! Steady, she goes now. Steady....steady...now over the big patch of plowed-up snow like a Tonka truck down piles of rocks set up to film a commercial. Below this pile lies the sidewalk, and victory. Ov-er, and down. Now swerve to the right and stare straight ahead, hopefully generally in Jessica's direction. Do I look noble, dear one? Come, do take a picture. Swerve, swerve. Down, now swing right. Woops! Wait, is that ice on the sidewalk? Sacré blue! No, wait. Hold-on! Oh. Hello, ground. Nice to see you again. Are you nice?



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Lao She Translations

A quick glance reveals these titles; I'll build on this list. My goal is to determine whether Beneath the Red Banner is the best piece to assign.



Lao, She. Beneath the red banner. Beijing: Panda Books (China Publications Centre), 1982.

Lao, She. The Two Mas. Translated by Kenny K. Huang and David Finkelstein, illustrated by Ding Cong. Hongkong: Joint Pub. Co., 1984.

Lao, She. Blades of Grass: The Stories of Lao She. Translated by William A. Lyell and Sarah Wei-ming Chen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999.
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Shen Congwen

Shen Congwen 沈從文 and Zhang Zhaohe 張兆和.




Shen Congwen, ca. 1931?

So I'm reading the Panda books edition Recollections of West Hunan. An interesting question comes up: what Chinese texts are these English translations made from?

You'd think that would be printed somewhere on the book, but it isn't. Clearly, Foreign Languages Press never viewed these books as pathways back to Chinese texts. All the prefatory note says is

This volume of his [Shen Congwen's] early essays comprises eleven chosen from four collections written between 1931 and 1937.

Great. Let's just track those down. Here's the 11 stories' English titles, matched against Chinese titles I've found on the internet in places like here:

I Study a Small Book and at the Same Time a Big Book
While Continuing My Schooling I Stick to That Big Book
A Night at Mallard-Nest Village
An Amorous Boatman and an Amorous Woman
Chest Precipice
Five Army Officers and a Miner
The People of Yuanling
Fenghuang 凤凰
After Snow
Qiaoxiu and Dongsheng
Truth is Stranger than Fiction


Fenghuang, Hunan Province, Shen Congwen's hometown
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The Zhu Family

Interesting family romance connecting the Zhu sisters (the two older girls in the photo above) with Eileen Chang's ex-husband, who she rightfully detested. From the feature article by Peter Lee

After Hu was dismissed from the academy and asked to vacate his housing, a prominent author, Zhu Xining, stepped forward and arranged for Hu to stay in an apartment next to the Zhu household.

Over the next six months, Hu lectured on the Book of Changes and Book of Poetry and created an indelible impression on Zhu and his daughters, Zhu Tianwen and Zhu Tianxin, both of whom became leading literati of their generation.

The Zhu family created a periodical, the Sansan Jikan, as a vehicle for Hu to publish his writings. Young writers clustered around Hu and Sansan Jikan became the intellectual guiding light for a generation of Taiwanese authors, and a direct challenge to Eileen Chang's literary legacy and the widespread veneration she enjoyed inside Taiwan.

Lee goes on to explain how Chang might have served as an iconic figure in Taiwan literature until 1970s because of her association with the KMT, but following the widespread anger against the KMT, her rake of an ex-husband managed make inroads. Fascinating!
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Little Reunion

Zhang Ailing, whose new posthumous work is the subject of an interesting feature article in the Asian Times this week.
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He's My Concubine

One of students in my advisor's course on "the Fantastic" asked if she could write a story in Chinese for the first paper. P. and I both said yes. Later, she asked me in Chinese, "Is it okay if I write a yaoi story? You know, that means two guys..."

And so I got my first glimpse of Chinese gay fantasy romance, called BL xiaoshuo (Boy-love fiction), GL xiao shuo (Girl-love fiction), and also shenmei xiaoshuo. Shenmei 沈美 is from the Japanese, tanbi, apparently meaning highly aestheticized homoerotic fiction. Searching these terms on Google takes you to BLGL.cn, which is a mixture of translated Japanese materials (including videos) and original Chinese stories. Most intrigued by these original stories, I started reading a random one called "He's my Concubine!" (Ta shi wo wangfei 他是我王妃).

"He's my Concubine!" features the love affair of Xiafeng, King of the Qilin (unicorn-type thingies), who lives in Outworld, but quickly comes over to the world of men in search of his favorite concubine, who apparently died and was reborn as a boy. The boy, Changsun Mingde, is a hot 17-year-old kungfu student. Xiafeng dresses up as a beautiful woman and sets out to woo his concubine once again. Various plot shenanigans ensue, in which boy meets "girl," strict Confucian parents force boy and "girl" to marry, and "girl" proceeds to basically bang the crap out of boy every chance she gets. (Boy eventually becomes preggers, which is a bit odd, but apparently has something to do with qilin blood..)

A wee bit o' translation:

一个几乎要让长孙明德窒息的深吻之后，夏峰探头过来，咬住他敏感的耳朵，来回抿舔，身下动作又加大了几分。

After giving Changsun Mingde a kiss that all but throttled him, Xiafeng moved his head up and away so he could nibble furiously at Mingde's ears -- oh such sensitive ears! As he licked and kissed, the rhythmic movement of his lower body also quickened.

Hot! Now I'm finally gaining Chinese vocabulary for teh buttsex. It's about time!
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Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008.

This story of a Chinese village's trials and tribulations under Communism takes a common, even pedestrian set of themes and makes them totally fresh again with humor and healthy dose of the fantastic.

As in so many epic tales of China's age of revolution (think "To Live" or "The Last Emperor"), we see a group of characters doing the best they can in their little corner of Chinese world as they face first a brutal and extended period of war and deprivation, 1937-1949, then the grand experiments in Communism under Mao Zedong during the 1950s and 60s, and finally whole new kinds of transformations from the mid 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s. What Mo Yan brings to this familiar party is a snarky, earthy sense of humor that manages to bring together the roles of a whole village, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province. A single character who witnesses events first as a landlord, then reincarnated as a donkey, then an ox, then a pig, and finally a dog, a monkey and a human being again, is a brilliant device that captures Mo Yan's beloved home village from all its most revealing angles. Yes, it covers the cruelty and waste of these years that have become standard history lessons even to Chinese students, but more importantly it shows us so many colorful characters, from the party secretary of the village to the poorest and weirdest citizens: China's last independent farmer; a former concubine who eventually became and innkeeper; a disturbed and impoverished man who just loves chopping animals' testicles off. We grow to feel something really deep for all of these characters -- not love exactly, though a little bit. Pity, at times, but overall a sense of deep connectedness. We are all governed by brutish little desires most of the time, most days. Only rarely do human beings achieve great good, or great evil, so whenever we do, it's bound to be good fodder for a story. A donkey can be as good as a man; a testicle-eater's needs make as much sense as a party secretary's if you take the right perspective.

I left the library copy lying around my house too long, and consequently had to turn it in before finishing. I only made it up to the end of pig in the wheel of reincarnations illustrated on the cover. But I'll be back to finish, probably with a few more notes.
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