Reading: A Conference Article

Mary Lyon, educator. Founder of Mount Holyoke in Massachussetts. AKA 梨痕女士. Since Mary remained single her whole life, I wonder if queer history buffs claim her. But in China, she was once promulgated as a mother figure.

Judge, Joan. "Mediated Imaginings: Biographies of Western Women and their Japanese Sources in Late Qing China." In Qian, Nanxiu, Fong, Grace and Richard J. Smith, editors. Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008.

I suppose that its characteristic of conference volume articles that they have the flavor of simple lab reports, with a structure something like this: Topic A is of interest. Set S of texts is related to topic A. Set S, described. Conclusion.

In this short paper, Prof. Judge states very simply that biographies of Western women such as Joan of Arc and Mary Lyon were popular in very early 20th-century China, and not coincidentally these biographies were mostly translated and adapted from Japanese accounts. There is a simplicity and elegance to the report that makes it a joy to read, footnotes and all. But the young and unsure scholar sits back in the end and says to herself at once two opinions: 1. "So, that's enough for an article. Yay! I can write tons of articles." and 2. "That's enough for an article? Isn't it a bit thin? And why is any of this information important? How does it inform the larger story of China? Why would anyone give anyone a grant to study something like this?"

I suppose it is another characteristic of conference reports that the questions attitude no. 2 brings up are not addressed -- Judge was fashioning a report to other professionals, and simply stuck to the story. Stating what's at stake is the job of the volume's editors in their introduction to the whole volume. On p. 17 of their introduction, the editors here re-use Judge's term "mediation" to describe the fact that biographies of Western women were written up in Japan and taken over to China afterward, changing along the way. This shows us "complex processes of mediation and accommodation." Reading as if I were a grant-giver, though, I'm still not satisfied as to what the point of all this is. Note that I'm not saying there is no point: I'm saying no point is being overtly and clearly made. A.'s requirement of "clear and present relevance" is not being met.

I suppose that I am reading too harshly. For a conference volume, one must read as a fellow professional, with a strong sense of the states involved already established. Still, it strikes me as dangerous to assume this of the reader. Isn't it all too easy to become disengaged with the basic motives for doing historical research? To spend your grant counting names, matching kanji with hiregana, and identifying some text's source in another, earlier text? I get a kind of Borges-ian sense of joy, but also malaise, at the thought of publication histories, translation analysis, pinpointing of influence, and other stories that can go on forever and ever without ever asking, "why"?

So let's make something up. Let's conjecture that the fact that Joan of Arc and Mary Lyon had cultural currency in 1900s China was important? How so? Well, younger men and women read these biographies and were changed by them -- Judge mentions Qiu Jin at one point, who obviously saw herself as a Joan of Arc figure at times. So the importance seems to be in the fact that the image, once there in the cultural politics, propogates along and causes changes to the identity formation of readers. But this part of the story is entirely neglected in this particular report. I suspect, further, that it is a part of the story that is much more difficult to tell. Easier to just consider that one text is a translation of another text, with some differences.

A few additional notes, in bibliographic form:

Judge, Joan. "Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." in Fong, Grace S., Qian, Nanxiu and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, editors. Beyond Tradition & Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004. On female exemplars. Perhaps this is the larger, more expansive article that I wanted the one I just read to be.

Judge, Print and Politics. biographies of Western men don't change Chinese men's identities as much as women's biographies do.

Davis, p. 148. "women worthies" in the West. In Scott, Joan, ed. Feminism and History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hu, Ying. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
, pp. 6-8. Why do they always criticize potential late Imperial exemplars?

Qian Nanxiu, 2001 (Chinese article.) and Qian Nianxiu in 2004, pp. 60-101. 外國烈女傳. This one didn't come from Japan, but also didn't have as much influence.

Pollard 1994. Chinese of those days mainly translated from Japanese, sometimes English and rarely French.

Judge in Fogel, 2001. Translating Japanese textbooks.

Songwei Yang'er. Mme Roland, from Japanese journal to Liang Qichao's biography.

女子新讀本, 1904,1905. Yang definitely uses Zhao's translation of Japanese sources. notes 21, 23 gives transliterations of many women's names. Also a song and two articles in 女學報. [What's at stake in a publication history?]

中國新女界雜誌 and other journals exhibit the influence of Nemoto Shō's text. Notes 31 and 32 have more transcriptions of names.

Joan of Arc. Cf. Hua Mulan, fame and use of this character. Seen as nationalist, not a saint. Chinese readers dismiss the "voices" (and one author condemns the gender inversion).

Mary Lyon. Overlook that she is single; make her into a nurturing mother.

Judge, Joan. The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008.

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Forward to the Song Dynasty

Map of the Song, marked with the territory lost in 1279

It's time to end Unit 1 of my class. Historiography-wise, we are done learning about the various points on the traditional dynastic sequence of Warring-States, Han dynasty, and Period of Disunion: that is, we see the textbook example of the rise and fall of a unified Chinese dynasty.

I'm not including any readings from the Tang dynasty, so I will skip right over it with brief mention (sorry, class -- maybe on another iteration we'll do Li Bai). Tomorrow the students are expecting to talk about the autobiography of Li Qingzhao and a one or two of her poems, so I'll need to give them a brief historical background.

A map shows us that the important thing to know about the Song is that half of the kingdom was lost to the Northern Jin in 1179. I mention my favorite image of the Khitan, their funny pots:



Quickly, though, we have to move on to Li Qingzhao. We'll talk about her autobiography, certainly -- that's the central feature of this lecture. We'll also explore a bit of her lyric poetry as well, though:

One poem covered by Theresa Teng.



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Daji the Evil Bitch

Daji, 1964 Shaw Bros. film

I talked about the figure of the evil concubine Daji today as I introduced Ban the Concubine to class, and I wasn't at all surprised to find that they loved her immediately. But unfortunately there is no good solid translation of her life into English; looks like a job for Life Writing Man!


Among several sort of substandard retellings of the story, one that made me smile is a new volume called Liberal Utopianism Is Destroying the United States (2009) by Charles Keitz. I'm not sure what role Daji plays for Mr. Keitz -- maybe she's Hilary Clinton?










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Exemplary Ladies

A decent introduction to exemplary ladies, and thus to writing women's lives in China in turn, is Shane McCausland's First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll (New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2003)

First there is the following early comment from McCausland, which leads me to the central theme of this lecture: the difficulty of writing a true, as opposed to exemplary, female life.

I'll select two exemplary ladies to examine for this first lecture (we'll return to Concubine Ban, a third, on Friday):

Lady Fan (Fan Ji)

I was able to locate the second part of the Chinese text (after she reforms him from hunting by going on hunger strike) in a translation by Patricia Eberly:

Here is the Chinese text (From Chinapage.com)

　 　 楚 莊 樊 姬
　 　 樊 姬 ， 楚 莊 王 之 夫 人 也 。 莊 王 即 位 ， 好 狩 獵 。 樊 姬
諫 不 止 ， 乃 不 食 禽 獸 之 肉 ， 王 改 過 ， 勤 於 政 事 。 王 嘗 聽
朝 罷 晏 ， 姬 下 殿 迎 曰 ： 「 何 罷 晏 也 ， 得 無 飢 倦 乎 ？ 」 王
曰 ： 「 與 賢 者 語 ， 不 知 飢 倦 也 。 」 姬 曰 ： 「 王 之 所 謂 賢
者 何 也 ？ 」 曰 ： 「 虞 丘 子 也 。 」 姬 掩 口 而 笑 ， 王 曰 ：「

姬 之 所 笑 何 也 ？ 」 曰 ： 「 虞 丘 子 賢 則 賢 矣 ， 未 忠 也 。
」 王 曰 ： 「 何 謂 也 ？ 」 對 曰 ： 「 妾 執 巾 櫛 十 一 年 ， 遣 人
之 鄭 衛 ， 求 美 人 進 於 王 。 今 賢 於 妾 者 二 人 ， 同 列 者 七 人
。 妾 豈 不 欲 擅 王 之 愛 寵 哉 ！ 妾 聞 『 堂 上 兼 女 ， 所 以 觀 人
能 也 。 』 妾 不 能 以 私 蔽 公 ， 欲 王 多 見 知 人 能 也 。 今 虞 丘
子 相 楚 十 餘 年 ， 所 薦 非 子 弟 ， 則 族 昆 弟 ， 未 聞 進 賢 退 不
肖 ， 是 蔽 君 而 塞 賢 路 。 知 賢 不 進 ， 是 不 忠 ； 不 知 其 賢 ，
是 不 智 也 。 妾 之 所 笑 ， 不 亦 可 乎 ！ 」 王 悅 。 明 日 ， 王 以
姬 言 告 虞 丘 子 ， 丘 子 避 席 ， 不 知 所 對 。 於 是 避 舍 ， 使 人
迎 孫 叔 敖 而 進 之 ， 王 以 為 令 尹 。 治 楚 三 年 ， 而 莊 王 以 霸
。 楚 史 書 曰 ： 「 莊 王 之 霸 ， 樊 姬 之 力 也 。 」 詩 曰 ： 「 大
夫 夙 退 ， 無 使 君 勞 。 」 其 君 者 ， 謂 女 君 也 。 又 曰 ： 「 溫
恭 朝 夕 ， 執 事 有 恪 。 」 此 之 謂 也 。

　 　 頌 曰 ： 樊 姬 謙 讓 ， 靡 有 嫉 妒 ， 薦 進 美 人 ， 與 己 同
處 ， 非 刺 虞 丘 ， 蔽 賢 之 路 ， 楚 莊 用 焉 ， 功 業 遂 伯 。

Lady Feng

Lady Fu's low character is revealed:

McCausland makes reads the painting very perceptively:

I really like how McCausland includes other paintings with this theme; it displays the staying power, and the unfortunate woodenness of the "exemplary" life, very effectively.

One more:

McCausland translates part of the Chinese text, which is a much longer and not actually in the Biographies of Eminent Ladies:

The Chinese text of the story (from Wikisource)

建昭中，上幸虎圈鬥獸，後宮皆坐。熊佚出圈，攀檻欲上殿。左右貴人傅昭儀等皆驚走，馮婕妤直前當熊而立，左右格殺熊。上問：「人情驚懼，何故前當熊？」婕
妤對曰：「猛獸得人而止，妾恐熊至御坐，故以身當之。」元帝嗟歎，以此倍敬重焉。傅昭儀等皆慚。明年夏，馮婕妤男立為信都王，尊婕妤為昭儀。元帝崩，為信
都太后，與王俱居儲元宮。河平中，隨王之國。後徙中山，是為孝王。

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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.
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Bibliography Addendum: Jiu-jung Lo on Women's Autobiography

Lo, Jiu-jung 羅久蓉. "Jindai Zhongguo nüxing zizhuan shuxie de aiqing, hunyin yu zhengzhi 近代中國女性自傳書寫中的愛情、婚姻與政治" (Love, Marriage and Politics in Modern Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Writings). Jindai Zhongguo funü shiyanjiu《近代中國婦女史研
究》volume 15 (2007.12): 105-117.

Strangely, I cannot find a digital copy online. I'll have to read this at the library later...
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Jumping Through Hoops (2003)

Wang, Jing. Jumping through hoops : autobiographical stories by modern Chinese women writers. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2003.

There are a number of real gems here -- particularly Lin Beili's hyper-distanced account of life in war conditions. "Children, servants, water, rice, and coal occupied my entire mind. By then I already understood very well that my life was being consumed day after day."

But unfortunately, an awkward translation style combines with the sometimes low or maudlin literary qualities of the original writings to produce more than a few howlers. Bai Wei's title story is probably the worst:

Jump! Jump! Jump out of hell! My heart was laughing. I could realize my ambitions. My heart could pursue its goals. Jump! Jump! My happy heart felt like a white lotus in full bloom at dawn. (55)

Preparing for class:

All stories in this book come from the 1945 volume Nü zuojia zizhuan xuanji 女作家自傳選集 edited by Xie Bingying. I'll need to locate the cover of the 1945 edition, for sure:

Highlighting the unconventionality of these narratives, the front cover of Xie's book features the portrait of a Western woman wearing long curly hair, earrings, and a low-neck dress. She looks half submissively and half defiantly to her lower right, with her right hand on her heart, as if full of stories that she hesitates and yet strongly desires to confide in the reader. This portrait gracing the cover of the book embodies the complicated connection between modern Chinese women's autobiographical practice and its Western "model"... (1)

Other zingers:

Teaching was indeed a joy. (164, Xie Bingying)

People in love with literature are like gardeners, eager to spread seeds at all times. (164, Xie Bingying)

A Chinese page describes the book very briefly, yielding up the Chinese forms of all nine authors represented: 子冈、安娥、白薇、林北丽、彭慧、叶仲寅、褚问鹃、赵清阁、谢冰莹.
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When "I" Was Born: conclusion

Wang's conclusion re-affirms her commitment to considering autobiography as a tool for identity formation and not as a form of historical writing. More than once, Wang attempts to take autobiography down from its place among the collections of facts and truths that we normally think of as history. Back in the introduction, we have seen her state categorically that "published facts have little relevance in autobiography, and that the absence of historical exactitude does not hurt autobiography." In the conclusion we have, Autobiography is not about the truth of the lived experience; it is about the retrospection and interpretation of the experience as the writer is situated in her present moment in history and geopolitical location.

This reader would tentatively suggest that the position is too strong, for the simple reason that all historical writing is as contingent as autobiography: all historical writing is the product of the present moment of the author or authors, and all historical writing is the interpretation of the past rather than the past itself. If this contingency separates autobiography from "the truth of the lived experience," then all history is similarly so separated.

Be that as it may, clearly it is not Ms. Wang's point to say that autobiography has no value as historical writing. Several times throughout her book she refers to the concept of a "subjective truth," which accounts for the phenomenon in which an autobiographer may remember an event or a figure as a true one, but their memory and their tools for expressing the memory may yield an account that is not completely accurate. Wang is an apologist for these situations: "the autobiographer...must not be held accountable for 'factual errors.'"

Her point here, then, is not that autobiography is not a form of historical writing at all, even if at many points throughout the book she implies that she thinks this is the case. Rather, she means to emphasize that story of the emergence of this literary form in China has immense value for understanding how human identity is formed, for understanding how ways of being spread, change, and evolve. Quite correctly, she sees that this understanding has in the past been slighted by academic readers who only use autobiographies as historical resources, and nothing more.

The case of the women examined here is so fascinating because it shows that reading, writing, and passing on autobiographies to mass audiences was a crucially important part of the Chinese literary field beginning in the 1920s. Jing Wang's point is that when the new form was presented to Chinese audiences in translation in mass-market books and literary journals, women readers and women writers responded particularly strongly because so many of them were just then taking very active -- indeed, quite courageous -- steps to be something new, something their parents and local communities for the most part did not expect them to be: writers, teachers, and soldiers. They became professionals, working to gain their independence and break free of the all-too-universal conservative notion that women belonged only in the home as mothers and wives. For them and for their readers, the craft of autobiography was a crucial tool to motivate, to negotiate, and to explain how and why they did what they did. The significance of this coincidence of a new literary form and rapid social change goes far beyond the scope of Chinese women's literature; it is a phenomenon worth considering by any students of history.
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When "I" Was Born: intro and chapter 1

Jing M. Wang's new look at Chinese women's autobiography shows us that the genre emerged from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. In her "Introduction," she gives two basic motivations for the study: first, to combat the implicit hegemony of Western male privilege and so expand the sense of what autobiography is. A second, related motivation is Wang's sense that in critical examinations of modern Chinese women's literature, all too often "fiction overshadows autobiography." To Wang, this "shadow" is completely unjustified: "The light of these texts shone out to me from dusty shelves in libraries, urging me to bring them together as one tradition." To do so, Ms. Wang makes a major nod a/b studies, adapting Lejeune's definition of autobiography as a form to be distinguished from both fiction and historical writing and fiction. Unlike the fiction writer, the autobiographer intends to be a kind of true statement, but this should be a "subjective truth," and so "the autobiographer...must not be held accountable for 'factual errors.'"

Wang's chapter 1 lays the groundwork for her conception of Chinese women's autobiography as a unique genre emerging first in the 1920s by considering autobiography in the Chinese tradition in an extremely abbreviated fashion. Traditionally, biographical writing in China is a historical genre with strictly didactic functions, as we can see from the foundational biographies of Sima Qian and repeated endorsements of the tradition in critical writings by figures such as the eight-century historiographer Liu Zhiji and Liang Qichao, the great reformer of the early 20th century. Traditional Chinese historical biography crafts heroic lives to be model figures of moral rectitude; this historiography reaches extreme didactic ends in works like the Ming dynasty tradition of Biographies of Women (Lie nü zhuan), which "is filled with gory atrocities women inflicted on themselves to prove their sexual loyalty toward their husbands..." The dramatic forms of self destruction in these biographies figures well the generality that Jing M. Wang wishes to emphasize, which is that "for both women and men, the circle of the so-called self can be compared to a ripple stirred up by the dropping of a pebble into water: it multiplies, magnifies, and gradually extends and disappears into the body of water." This figure helps us understand why autobiographical writing in ancient China was most often considered only a supplement to larger works, was usually very short, and did not dwell on the interior workings of the author's mind.

There is, however, a counter-tradition to this tradition, one that is perhaps not emphasized strongly enough in this chapter. The most influential of all Chinese lyrics, the Encountering Sorrow (Li sao), has also been called China's first autobiography for its extended and allegorical investigations of the poet's state of mind. And as Ms. Wang perceptively outlines, the growth of funerary writing, especially epitaphs, as a independent genre offers a pathway for personal engagement with the self that was used by countless outstanding figures of the tradition, from Cao Pi to Ouyang Xiu. Wang even brings up important but seldom-mentioned members of the critical tradition of personal, private writing, including Liu Xie, Xu Shizheng, and Zhang Xuecheng.

This discussion is perhaps too brief to function as anything more than a first glance at the problem of autobiographical writing in traditional Chinese literature. Interested readers are referred by Wang herself to the still under-celebrated 1990 work Confucian's Progress by the late Professor Wu Pei-yi, for a fuller exposition on the issues. Still, Wang's generalizations about the tendency in traditional writing to focus the imaginative power away from the self-portrait and instead to the service of historical lesson-making are for the most part still accepted understandings of the milieu from which China's first generation of modernists, the generation of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, emerged. Liang's generation promoted fiction to a higher level in Chinese letters than ever before for the express purpose of reforming politics and society, but understood autobiography strictly as a form of biography, which in turn was strictly understood as a form of history. These traditional precepts first broke down under the pens of the May Fourth writers in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Especially significant was Hu Shi, who called for book-length autobiography as a genre which was literary and historical at once, and able to serve in the development of the Chinese sense of the individual. Also there was Yu Dafu, who perhaps more than any other writer of the May Fourth generation strove to answer the call for inwardly-turned exploration of the author's mind and memory in book-length autobiography. Wang identifies a few works from this period that illustrate well the new turn towards self-writing, including Shao Shunmei's introduction to Lu Yin's Autobiography (廬隱自傳),
in which Wang finds a "nudge" toward the concept of the "subjective truth" that effectively makes autobiography a historically-intended genre distinct from fiction. As is well-known, all of these writers were avid readers of Western literature, including Western autobiographies like Augustine's Confessions; Ms. Wang notes this and also finds as well a 1937 anthology from Commercial Press in Shanghai which proves that Chinese autobiographical writing was at the time considered alongside Western autobiography in translation even in the popular sphere.

As Wang argues, writers of the early May Fourth period tended to focus strongly on the growth and development of the individual, believing that individualism was a crucial ingredient of the more powerful and modern Western societies. But as the events of the late 1920s and 1930s brought deterioration of the Republic, the birth of a new collectivist politics in the new Communist Party, and finally a desperately violent war with Japan, individualism quickly declined. Prof. Wang demonstrates a recurring fascination with the fact that, despite the rapid uptake of new nationalist and collectivist themes in Chinese literature of the 1920s to the 1940s, there is a seemingly paradoxical emergence of autobiographical writing by women during this same period. Professor Wang's goal is to explain how this happened. As the reader finishes chapter 1 and prepares to begin chapter 2, he or she is given to understand that the resolution to the apparent paradox lies in the quickly advancing social and political status of women in China. New roles like teaching and writing are available to a small but quickly growing proportion of Chinese women by the 1920s, and these roles call on women to turn away, at least partly, from their old roles as mothers and wives, as agents of private and domestic spaces; these "new women" firmly occupy the new and exciting public sphere. It makes sense, in a general way, that these women will create literary explorations of all these new ways of being, that they will turn to their own experiences for an honest, earnest look at these new identities, and that they will not see these autobiographies as anything less than fully serving the creation of a new, defensible and modern Chinese nation.
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Black Dossier: I heart Reading

Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill and others. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. La Jolla, CA: America's Best Comics, 2008.

Overall, Black Dossier was a disappointment. I like the idea of a syncretic history of the world through fantastic stories and myths, but unfortunately none of the characters are particularly interesting. Lacking a Batman or other properly mysterious and angsty hero or villain, Black Dossier builds a nice house but doesn't rent it out to anyone.

That said, I did sort of enjoy trying to identify all of the references. In this panel, for example, we have a major figure in ancient Chinese mythology having some fantastic same-sex lovin' with Orlando, a popular figure among historically-minded Western gender-wonks.

So that panel's fun. And I must admit, I don't know if Alan Moore combined the Queen Mother myth with the later trope of the sexual-vampire-witch, or if there is some story about that in the tradition that he read somewhere. Either way, he is definitely a genuine lover of art and literature, and if that comes across to readers, he's still earning his keep.

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Women Writers in China: We are all good girls now

Chang, Kang-i Sun and Haun Saussy, eds. Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

I liked the introduction to this anthology, which is broken up into rhetorical questions like "why women writers?" and "why poets?" The editors have really good answers to these and other questions that briefly illustrate the 'play of gender' in society by means of the tradition. A good wife, for example, once consoled her husband's failure on his examination by quoting a poem about how good girls do better than bad girls in the end. There is nothing queer in a wife comparing her husband to a good girl in the Chinese tradition; in fact, she is riffing off a famous poem by Du Fu, who most readers understand to have been comparing the good girl to himself. And Du Fu in turn relied on a long tradition of disappointed men who figured themselves as misunderstood 'good girls,' going back to the ancient apocryphal disappointed civil servant, Qu Yuan.

Given that tropes of female poets like the proverbial 'good girl' (jia nü 佳女) are so important to men and women alike, it is a relatively simple matter to show that actual female poets are also important to men and women alike. The 'real women' seem to become most interesting during the Ming and the Qing, when readers apparently eagerly devoured whole anthologies of poetry by women.

There's a good girl: Concubine Ban

The first poems in the short section of poets from "ancient times" are by 'Favorite Beauty Ban" (Ban jieyu) 班婕妤 (seen here turning down the Emperor's palanquin, lest she look like a hussy, from The Admonitions Scroll). The famous "Song of Resentment" (Yuan ge xing 怨歌行) was just elegant poutiness -- meh, but surely outdone by the longer, more elevated "Rhapsody of Self-Commiseration" (Zi diao fu 自悼賦). My favorite lines included,

Whether awake or asleep, I sighed repeatedly	每寤寐而累息兮
I'd loosen my sash and reflect on myself	申佩離以自思
I spread out paintings of women to serve as guiding mirrors	陳女圖以鏡監兮
Consulting the lady scribe, I asked about the Odes	顧女史而問詩
Saddened by the monition of the hen that crows，	悲晨婦之作戒兮
I lamented the transgressions of Bao and Yan	哀褒閻之為郵
I praised Huang and Ying, wives of the Lord of Yu	美皇、英之女虞兮
Extolled Ren and Si, mothers of Zhou	榮任、姒之母周
Although stupid and uncouth, and unable to emulate them	雖愚陋其靡及兮
Dare I still my thoughts and forget them? (translated by David Knechtges, pp. 19-20)	敢捨心而忘茲？

I love the idea that you need to loosen your clothing a bit to relax and think about yourself as a self. I could see myself turning on the computer after that, or reading a book, or watching some television. Ban the Concubine pulls out some paintings of really great women and some of really awful ones, and thinks hard about what their life stories mean for her own. I'd say the central tension here is over how to best be "good," and especially whether a girl can be too smart for her own good. Ban's mastery of highly elevated Chinese can only mean that she is very smart indeed, but still she tells us she is "stupid and uncouth." Is that what she really thinks? Or had calling yourself stupid already become a trope in self-reflection by Chinese women?
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