Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction 900417978X, 9789004179783

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reading and Writing the Courtesan
1 Paradise Lost: The Fantastic Childhood of a Courtesan to be
2 Lost and Found: The Socialization of the Prostituted Body
3 Family Matters: Patterns of Solidarity and Discord in the Brothel
4 Nobody’s Son: Prostitution and the Disintegration of the Family Romance
5 Taking Flight: Poverty, Sickness and Death
Epilogue: Back to the Future: Nostalgia and Prostitution
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction

Women and Gender in China Studies Edited by

Grace S. Fong McGill University

Editorial Board

Louise Edwards Gail Hershatter Robin D.S. Yates Harriet T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 3

Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction By

Paola Zamperini

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

On the cover: Jade Lady, FINE ART, Painting by Hung Liu, 2006, Mixed media American, born 1948 (Changchun, China) Overall: 64" x 48" x "2 1/8" Mead Art Museum, Amherst College This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zamperini, Paola. Lost bodies : prostitution and masculinity in Chinese fiction / by Paola Zamperini. p. cm. — (Women and gender in China studies ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17978-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Prostitution—China—History. 2. Prostitutes—China—History. 3. Prostitutes in literature—History. I. Title. II. Series. HQ250.A5.Z33 2010 306.740951—dc22 2009047746

ISSN 1877-5772 ISBN 978 90 04 17978 3 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For Anna and Paolo

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................

ix

Introduction: Reading and Writing the Courtesan .....................

1

Chapter One Paradise Lost: The Fantastic Childhood of a Courtesan to be ....

21

Chapter Two Lost and Found: The Socialization of the Prostituted Body ......

53

Chapter Three Family Matters: Patterns of Solidarity and Discord in the Brothel .............................................................................................

77

Chapter Four Nobody’s Son: Prostitution and the Disintegration of the Family Romance ............................................................................

107

Chapter Five Taking Flight: Poverty, Sickness and Death .................................

149

Epilogue: Back to the Future: Nostalgia and Prostitution ..........

185

Bibliography Chinese Sources ............................................................................. Western Sources ............................................................................

211 214

Index ....................................................................................................

229

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When a book is born, the habit is to congratulate (or curse) its maker. In my view, it ‘takes a whole village’ to create any piece of scholarly work. Of course, any shortcoming, as far as this particular effort is concerned, must fall upon my shoulders and mine alone. However, all the merit, if any is to be found here, has to be shared with all the wonderful people who, throughout the many years it took me to feel confident enough to make this work public, have supported me and encouraged me. In this spirit, I would like to thank my teachers at University of California at Berkeley, Samuel H. Cheung, Gail Hershatter, Lydia H. Liu and Yeh Wenhsin, who, with infinite patience, humor, and generosity, read and substantially improved my writing and scholarship with their feedback. A special acknowledgement goes to Wilt Idema: it was his scholarship that led me, as an undergraduate in Italy years ago, to choose to study Chinese literature. His generosity, wisdom, knowledge and quirky sense of humor over the years have allowed me to keep growing as a student, a scholar and as a human being. I count myself incredibly fortunate to have met him, both on the page and in person. Furthermore, I have benefited from the research of so many other scholars in my field, that I could write a whole another book just to express my gratitude. So here are a few of those who, directly and indirectly, have never failed to inspire me with their wisdom, intelligence and unfailing enthusiasm for all things Chinese: Robert Ashmore, James Cahill, Katherine Carlitz, Maram Epstein, Grace Fong, Joshua Fogel, Patrick Hanan, James Hevia, Ted Huters, Joan Judge, Regina Llamas, Susan Mann, Keith McMahon, Melissa Macauley, Barbara Mittler, Paul Ropp, Patricia Sieber, Janet Theiss, Tian Xiaofei Owen, Giovanni Vitiello, the late Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Stephen West and Harriet Zurndorfer. To my extremely patient editor at Brill, Patricia Radder, goes my endless gratitude, especially for her trust and inexhaustible humor. To Grace Fong, for the care, patience and time she put in giving me invaluable feedback, I owe more than words can convey. As I worked on this book, I was lucky enough to be able to publish my work in progress as articles and to also present it at various conferences. Portions and previous incarnations of the following chapters,

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albeit in quite different contexts and with drastically different conclusions, have appeared as articles and essays that could almost constitute another book on their own. “Wanmei tuxiang: Wanqing xiaoshuozhongde yinying, yuwang yu dushixiandaixing,” “On Their Dress They Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai,” “In and Out: Love’s Marketplace in Late Qing Fiction” and “But I Never Learned To Waltz: The ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’ Education of a Courtesan in the Late Qing” all pick up specific themes of the courtesan’s progress (photography, fashion, space and voice) as it appears in late Qing fiction and expand it as the main lens to deconstruct and analyze this fictional figure.1 However, this book stands on its own in terms of its argument, in a way that would not have been possible if I had not had the possibility of revisiting my work and my understanding of Ming, Qing and modern Chinese literature in the realm of academic journals, as well as scholarly presentations. In this sense, I am very thankful to the all the audiences on the receiving end of my efforts and in particular to the anonymous reviewers that, through their feedback to the various incarnations of this manuscript, have given me invaluable help. I am also thankful to those who took the time to reject and harshly criticize my scholarship: I believe that, by testing my belief in my own work, these people have actually spurred me on to becoming a better scholar and writer. I am beholden to all my students, past and present, at Arizona State University, UC Berkeley, Universidade de Aveiro and Amherst College. I also want to express my gratitude to the faculty with whom I have worked at all these institutions, as well as to the scholars at the Institute of Literature and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taipei. At Amherst College, Alan Babb, Maria Heim, Nasser Hussain, Martha Saxton and Wako Tawa have been irreplaceable beacons of intellectual companionship, delight and inspiration.

1 See Paola Zamperini, “Wanmei tuxiang. Wanqing xiaoshuozhongde yinying, yuwang yu dushixiandaixing” (Picture Perfect. Photography, Urban Modernity and Desire in Late Qing Fiction), in Li Hsiao-t’i, ed., Zhongguode chengshi shenghuo (Chinese Urban Life) (Taipei: Lien-ching, 2005); Paola Zamperini, “On Their Dress They Wore a Body. Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai,” in Tina Mai Chen and Paola Zamperini, eds, “Fabrications,” Positions 11.2 (2003); Paola Zamperini, “In and Out. Love’s Marketplace in Late Qing Fiction,” in Yuyan Mizhang (Concealing to Reveal. The Private and Sentiment in Chinese History and Culture) (Taiwan: Center for Chinese Studies, 2003), Vol. I; Paola Zamperini, “But I Never Learned To Waltz: The ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’ Education of a Courtesan in the Late Qing,” Nannü 1.1 (1999).

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I am very thankful to Hong Liu for her generosity in allowing me to use one of her amazing paintings for the cover of this book, and to Dr. Raymond Lum and the Harvard-Yenching Library for the permission to reproduce the 1909 illustration that had originally inspired me to structure the present effort along the lifecycle of a Chinese woman. I would also like to thank my ‘families’, my friends and accomplices, and those people who have helped me navigate the turbulent waters of academia. While, again, it would prove impossible to name every single one of them, the ‘short list’ must celebrate: Barbara, Benjamin and Thomas Jr., Mittler and Thomas ‘Der Grosse’ Schmitz, who, individually and as a family, nourished me in more ways they will ever realize; my ‘pod’ at Procchio, especially Lisa (Alice) Ardita, Riccardo (Azzurro) Buralli, Alessandro (Ciccio) Corcella, Sandro (Patacca) Riccio, Fabio (Balu) Salucci, Claudia (Shamu) Scali, Claudia (Pua) Starnini, and Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche and everyone in the Dzogchen Community, from Khandroling to Merigar. Last but not least, I could have not wished for better parents or greater friends than Anna Maria Pratesi and the late Paolo Zamperini. None of the wonders my academic journey has brought me would have been possible without their setting such a shining example of what it means to live a life of heart and mind together, always.

INTRODUCTION: READING AND WRITING THE COURTESAN The prostitute’s body is by definition a storied body, itself enacting and also creating narratives of passion, lust and greed as it passes through the social economy.1 真是饮食男女, 人之大欲了。我何妨去考察考察, 这是嫖家的侦探学问了。2

I. Of Time and Narrative It would be hard to dispute the literary supremacy of courtesans in world literature, compared to other female fictional characters, even in this day and age. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a general Google search for the term ‘courtesan’ yielded at least 42,200 web pages, spanning a vast cultural and temporal spectrum that included websites such as “Dating for Adults,” “Local Hotties” and so on. Therefore I cannot claim any originality as a graduate student who found herself drawn by courtesans as subjects of representation in Ming and Qing fiction; I soon became aware of the fact that many scholars before me had fallen victim to the charming inhabitants of the fictional pleasure quarters of late imperial China. Still, my desire to understand the ‘aura’ of these characters by mapping out its genealogy and that of the discourses generated around them in late imperial Chinese vernacular fiction immediately became a sort of imperative in my research and overrode any fears I may have had about lack of originality. So many courtesans crowd the pages of countless fictional works at almost any given time in Chinese literary history that one would be quite tempted to simply enjoy these characters from a hedonistic perspective, one so comfortably occupied by so many authors and readers who had come before me. Yet these

1

Peter Brooks, Body Work. Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1993), 70. Brooks’ analysis helped me frame and think critically through the issue of the body and its representation in late imperial Chinese fiction. 2 Li Boyuan, Haitian hongxueji, (Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1997 [ca. 1899]), 79.

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heroines beg a reading that is not just narcissistic and private or, as it is often the case, romanticized and public; rather, they ask for one that is lucid and aimed at going against the grain of most recent attempts to freeze forever these protean characters in their mould. This book was consequently born from the pleasure that these women have given me as a passionate reader of late imperial Chinese literature, as well as from the critical questions they have simultaneously posed to me as a scholar interested in literary history, narrative and gender. Its goal is to engage the multi-layered literary icon of the courtesan, in order to flesh out a coherent narrative about prostitution, desire and sexuality in late imperial fictional sources, with a special focus on the late Qing period and constructions of masculinity. So, who is this courtesan? Terminology is the first challenge in the path to answering this question and this book accordingly begins with an exploration of the Chinese used in the original sources. In terms of the English language, ‘prostitute’ here is the more general term and refers to any woman who engages in sex work; a ‘courtesan’ is a prostitute who associates with men of wealth and prestige, is often kept by one or more of these men, and is a public figure.3 Both terms refer to a ‘public’ figure, though in different social contexts. Etymologically, a prostitute is somebody who stands or is set (statuta, from statuere) in public ( pro). To prostitute is to set something, oneself, perhaps, before someone else to offer it for sale.4 Visibility is then strictly connected to the social role of this category of women, be they courtesans or prostitutes; however, as Hershatter points out, given the strong hierarchy in Chinese prostitution and in the working conditions of women who sold sexual services in a high-class brothel or in the street, hierarchy that we find clearly reflected in fictional sources, it is highly problematic to talk about ‘prostitution’ as a unitary occupation.5 One may ask at this juncture: what is the most beneficial angle from which to study these representations of courtesans and prostitutes? What are the forces that are involved in the creation and perpetuation of these

3 See C. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute. Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth Century France (Harvard University Press, 1989), 6. 4 C. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story. The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670−1820 (University of California Press, 1995). 5 G. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures. Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (University of California Press, 1997), 19.

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images? And what is the best way to connect all these different texts in order to flesh out a coherent narrative? Reading and writing the courtesan in this fashion forces one to reflect first of all on writing and history, both in a textual and metatextual sense. This is because, in Chinese literature, narrating the courtesan involves almost invariably narrating the times in which she lives and moves. Her appearance dates the text: whether she figures as a marker of nostalgia for late Ming splendor in early Qing memoirs, or a symbol of the Shanghai fast life in late Qing novels, her story becomes meaningful because it is chronologically relevant to the reader. In other words, understanding the literary figure of the courtesan and how her representation changes over time implies understanding how the men who wrote about her saw the times in which they lived. In this sense, even more importantly, it equates with a fascinating journey into the Chinese male mind and erotic imagery. From this perspective, it is important to emphasize that the novels under study here do not necessarily constitute reliable sources of information about daily life in late imperial brothels, though often their authors claimed the contrary. It is more correct to say that they represent moments in which men expressed their ideas, dreams and anxieties about their own masculine roles and the construction of fictional masculinities. They also expressed here prescriptive ideals of femininity that could be, by default, extended from prostitutes and courtesans to women of other social categories. Even if social historians find in these works intriguing reflections of the actual sexual and social practices in which men and women engaged in the space of pleasure-quarters, these texts cannot be taken at face value. Accordingly, the main gender angle in this book is on how masculinity (of authors, male characters and male readers) is defined and created against the polysemic figure of the literary courtesan. Writing about courtesans cannot be read as immediately conveying the voices and the experiences of real women. The literary heroines moving across the pages of centuries’ worth of Chinese fiction, just like Athena, were born straight out of their fathers’ brains. Reading these representations against the foil of gender is thus imperative. Since most of the agents involved in creating and perpetuating these representations were men, it is essential to first approach these texts as speaking the voice of homosocial/ heterosexual male desire. Male writers represent prostitution as a powerful and protean symbol, of social injustice, of national identity or of racial superiority,

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and yet also as a well-established and familiar site of pleasure and entertainment tailored to male needs and desires. At the same time, male authors often portray these women as complex sex symbols to at once enhance the desirability of transgressive female characters and to express their anxiety about erotically powerful women. We do not yet know enough of the readership of these late imperial novels.6 Very likely most of the readers and writers were male, yet it is undeniable that women were exposed to and their consciousness influenced and shaped by the same set of literary representations through different media, such as plays, storytelling and so on. In Chinese fiction, the discourse about prostitution can be envisioned as a relational and fragmented discourse, which could give its authors enunciative positionalities from which to reproduce, challenge and resist power relations. In other words, when Chinese men wrote about courtesans, they tried to reproduce their perception of reality and also to detach themselves and their readers from it to entertain, to admonish and to explore new meanings that could be attached to their literary creations. When women, and in the case at hand, courtesans and prostitutes, spoke, they used and altered the set of images that these writers had conjured to present themselves to the different audiences they chose (or were forced to by external influences) to address. However, even in those sources, such as newspaper interviews carried out in the Republican period, where we hear the voices of the women who waltzed their ways through the pages of late imperial novels, the dominant narratives of falling into disgrace and redemption (or the failure to achieve it) are unavoidable.7 This is why it is important not to succumb to the temptation to read in the portrayals of the often strong-willed, sexualized, active courtesans depicted in late imperial fiction, a ‘proto-feminist’ attempt to liberate women. The romanticized reading of these heroines as harbingers of progress and modernization does not do justice to the complexity of fears and expectations that conjured these representations in the first place.8 As we shall see in the pages that follow, there is indeed poten6 From this perspective Ellen Widmer’s work is both groundbreaking and illuminating. See her The Beauty and The Book. Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-century China (Harvard University Press, 2006). 7 For an analysis of how real life courtesans addressed these fictional representations, see Zamperini, 1999. 8 See Hu Ying, Tales of Translation. Composing the New Woman in China, 1899−1918 (Stanford University Press, 2000).

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tial for destabilization of established gender and social norms, but no actual liberation in the fixed paper image of a ‘liberated’ woman. Yet another obstacle could come from taking an excessively rigid stance in relation to gender. The importance of tools such as gender theory and the deconstruction of masculinity and femininity in approaching these novels is undeniable but one must always bear in mind that most Ming and Qing vernacular novels were more often than not meant as frivolous, mind-diverting, recreational sources. Their authors managed to temporarily escape the hardships of their historical period by ‘homeopathically’ writing themselves, their characters and their readers precisely into that reality that was threatening them.9 As Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty aptly puts it, “Though we may read certain kinds of narratives—and not merely escapist or fantasy literature—in order to escape from reality, we also read in order to find reality and to bring it from the page back into our active lives.”10 In terms of literary history and from a meta-textual perspective, the fictional courtesan’s identity also gets progressively constituted against a series of well-established sets of literary tropes and genres, a whole range of spatial and social backgrounds, a set of behaviors, and a heterogeneous cast of male characters. This fact immediately discloses how representations of prostitution that appear in late imperial Chinese writings are connected to each other, through a history of ruptures and breaks, across texts. We are indeed a far cry from the essentialized, atemporal Chinese courtesan to which Western audiences have grown accustomed to through a hybrid accretion of nineteenth-century missionary accounts, Orientalist fantasies and popular culture representations, such as Suzie Wong. Keeping these caveats in mind, these texts can be used as windows on a literary and fictional arena that had tremendous importance in the shaping of Chinese literary representations as we experience them today, in all its multi-faceted and contradictory legacies, an arena in which History and Time, Gender and Writing met and coalesced in the body of the Courtesan.11 9 This does not mean that late Qing fiction was all frivolous: one has only to think of Liang Qichao and his advocacy of popular fiction as a vehicle of radical reform and social change. 10 W. Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 302. 11 For other approaches to the figure of the courtesan in Chinese literature and history in English, see C. Henriot, “Chinese Courtesans in Late Qing and Early Republican

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introduction II. Fin-de-siécle Blues: The Flow of Qinglou wenxue and Late Qing Fiction

In China, stories about courtesans and prostitutes have been told, retold, recited, performed, recollected, anthologized, sung, read, printed, circulated, sold and bought for at least some thirteen hundred years. They have, in other words, been part of an active reading and writing of many different strata of the Chinese population. Furthermore, ever since the Tang dynasty, writing about courtesans has been weaving in and out of genres and literary languages. If we take the word ‘pornography’ in its original sense to indicate writing about prostitutes, then Chinese writers across the centuries have veritably constituted—and no offense is meant here—a nation of pornographers. However, is it necessary to apply a Western phrase, no matter how appropriate, to the Chinese context, when there is a Chinese expression that seems to include all the different genres of writing by and about courtesans, namely qinglou wenxue 青樓文學, literature of the blue pavilions? Qinglou 青樓 is a term that was originally applied to women’s inner quarters and it began to be used to refer exclusively to the brothels in the Liang dynasty (502−556 C.E.). According to Tao Muning, qinglou wenxue officially started during the Tang dynasty, when writings by literati about courtesans, as well as by the women themselves, were produced in great numbers.12 Ever since then, qinglou wenxue has

Shanghai (1849–1925),” East Asian History 8 (1994): 33−52; C. Henriot, “From a Throne of Glory to a Seat of Ignominy: Shanghai Prostitution Revisited (1849−1949),” Modern China 22.2 (1996): 132−163; C. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai (Cambridge University Press, 2001); G. Hershatter, 1997; G. Hershatter, “The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution, 1870−1949,” Modern China 15.4 (1989): 463−498; D. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers. Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 1994), 251; S. Mann, Precious Records. Women’s in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 1997), 121; David Der-Wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor. Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849−1911 (Stanford University Press, 1997), 53; E. Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 1997 (in particular P. Ropp, “Ambiguous Images of Courtesan Culture in Late imperial China,” 17; Li Wai-yee, “The Late Ming Courtesan: Invention of a Cultural Ideal,” 46; D. Ko, “The Written Word and the Bound Foot: A History of the Courtesan’s Aura,” 74); Ye Xiaoqing, “Commercialisation and Prostitution in 19th Century Shanghai”, in Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren, eds., Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture (1999), 37−57; C. V. Yeh, Shanghai Love. Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850−1910 (University of Washington Press, 2006). 12 Tao Muning, Qinglou wenxue yu Zhongguo wenhua (Beijing: Dong fang chu ban she, 1993), 2−6. For a fascinating study of gender dynamics in male-authored Tang

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steadily expanded to include memoirs of life in the pleasure quarters in different dynasties, for instance, Beilizhi 北里志 (“Account of the Northern Quarter”),13 Qinglou ji 青樓記 (“Memoirs from the Blue Bowers”)14 and Banqiao zaji 板橋雜記 (“Miscellaneous Records from the Wooden Bridge”);15 chuanqi 傳奇 or tales composed in classical Chinese, such as Huo Xiaoyu zhuan 霍小玉傳 and Li Wa zhuan 李娃傳;16 plays written and performed during the Yuan (1271−1368) and Ming (1368−1644) dynasties, such as Zhao Pan’er jiu fengchen 趙盼兒救風塵 (“The Demirep Rescues the Demimonde”);17 countless Ming short stories; and, last but not least, ballads and poems of different dynasties composed by courtesans or about them by literati.18 In short, we could define qinglou wenxue as a hybrid, multi-genre body of fictional, non-fictional and fictionalized accounts of anything written, either in wenyan 文言 or in baihua 白話, about courtesans and their patrons. Many Ming and Qing novels are included in this huge literary corpus, though the scholars who research qinglou wenxue usually focus largely on non-fictional sources, in an effort to reconstruct actual practices related to prostitution. Historically, novels that deal with courtesans and their exploits can be seen as the late imperial offspring of a sort of sub-genre of Chinese fiction, stemming from the established caizi jiaren 才子佳人 (talent and beauty) genre that dealt with the romances between young scholars and beautiful maidens. One could argue that since the trope of

literature, see Paul Rouzer, Articulated Ladies. Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts (Harvard University Press, 2001). 13 Sun Qi, “Beilizhi,” in Cui Lingjin, Jiaofang ji (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1957). 14 Xia Tingzhi, “Qinglou ji,” in Cui Lingjin, Jiaofang ji (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1957). 15 Yu Huai, “Banqiao zaji,” in Xiangyan congshu (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1914), Vol. 13. The Banqiao zaji, written immediately after the collapse of the Ming dynasty, is a work that describes the entertainment quarter of Nanking before the Manchu’s victory and the establishment of the Qing dynasty: the tone is very nostalgic and the representation of the courtesans highly idealized. See also H. S. Levy, tr., A Feast of Mist and Flowers: The Gay Quarters of Nanking at the End of the Ming (translation of Yu Huai’s Diverse Records of Wooden Bridge) (Yokohama, 1966). 16 Anon, “Huo Xiaoyu zhuan,” in Tangren xiaoshuo (Xianggang: Zhonghua shuju, 1973); Li Wa zhuan, ibidem. 17 Zhao Pan’er jiu fengchen, in Wang Xueqi et al., eds., Guan Hanqing quanji jiaozhu (Hebei jiaoyu, 1988), 635. 18 For anthologies of poetry by courtesans, see Zhang Mengwei, Qinglou yunyu (Shanghai: Zhongyin shudian, 1935); Tao Muning, Qinglou wenxue yu Zhongguo wenhua, 2-6.

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what we could call the ‘talented scholar and the beautiful courtesan’ was born in the Tang dynasty side-by-side with that of the caizi jiaren, it should perhaps be acknowledged as a main genre in and by itself. Especially since, beginning with the late 1840s, the authors who wanted to write about the demimonde seem to privilege the medium of the vernacular novel over the other genres (autobiography, poetry, drama, memoirs, etc.) that had until then existed side-by-side within qinglou wenxue. This fact appears to be a part of a larger trend in Chinese literature, namely the process of disintegration of the barriers existing between different literary genres and various stylistic and linguistic registers that took place in the second part of the nineteenth century. This process had been initiated in the seventeenth century by the late Ming huaben 話本, which merged poetry and fictional prose writing. In the eighteenth century, Shitouji 石頭記, “The Story of the Stone”, also known as Honglou meng 紅樓夢, “Dream of the Red Chamber”, bringing to new literary heights the ‘low-brow’ form of the novel, further accelerated this evolution.19 By the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks also to technological innovations, an incredible quantity of novels was being published in Shanghai and sold and circulated all over China, many of them in serialized format in various literary journals and magazines. Almost invariably, each of these novels included at least one or two fictional courtesans and many of them were exclusively dedicated to the sex workers of all classes and ranks. Thus, we

19 See A Ying, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980); Chen Pingyuan, Ershiji Zhongguo xiaoshuoshi (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1989); P. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies. Popular Fiction in Early 20th Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The entropy generated by this process can also be witnessed at the turn of the century in the birth of the mandarin and butterfly fiction. For the main characteristics of late Qing novels, see also S. H. L. Cheng, “ ‘Flowers of Shanghai’ and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan Novel,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1980; Des Forges’ work on the Shanghai novel: A. T. Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai. The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), and also his “Opium/Leisure/Shanghai. Urban Economies of Consumption,” in Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes. China, Britain and Japan, 1839−1952 (University of California Press, 2000), 167−185; M. Dolezoleva-Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (University of Toronto Press, 1980); P. Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Essays (Columbia University Press, 2004); Lu Xun, “Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe,” in Lu Xun Quanji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), Vol. 9; Der-Wei Wang, 1997; Henry Y. H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator. Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford University Press, 1995).

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could argue that though qinglou wenxue has been an important part of Chinese literary production and, at the end of the Qing dynasty, its subject matter acquires an unprecedented visibility, in the form of the novel; this is one of the main reasons why this book deals extensively with many late Qing texts. In recognition of the growing popularity of nineteenth-century novels that had prostitution as their main subject matter, in 1923, Lu Xun, in his canonical study of Chinese fiction, grouped them together under the heading of xiaxie xiaoshuo 狹邪小說, usually translated as ‘courtesan novels’.20 Xiaxie, crooked alleys, was traditionally used to indicate the courtesans’ houses, which were mostly located in back streets and side alleys. In this sense, there is a similarity between qinglou wenxue and xiaxie xiaoshuo, as they both reveal the semantic area of their contents by referring to the physical location where courtesans plied their trade. But while qinglou wenxue refers to a whole body of heterogeneous writings, xiaxie xiaoshuo points only to the novel. Perhaps more importantly, qinglou in itself implies no moral judgment. Xiaxie, on the contrary, does, and very much so. Thus, Lu Xun’s definition appears problematic, since it immediately connects the novels with despicable locales and practices. Furthermore, Lu Xun puts the few novels he had selected as representative of the genre in a quite tight chronological frame: he saw them as a sub-genre of the sentimental novels, renqing xiaoshuo 人情小說, and traced their development in three phases, a first phase of idealization, characterized by works like Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑑 (“The Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers”), Hua yue hen 花月痕 (“Traces of Flowers and Moon”), and Qinglou meng 青樓夢 (“Dream of the Blue Mansions”); a second phase of realism, epitomized by novels like Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (“Chronicle of the Flowers of Shanghai”); and a third phase of excessive condemnation, represented by Jiuweigui 九尾龜 (“The Nine-tailed Turtle”), and other texts.21 Recently, Chinese and Western scholars have pointed out that Lu Xun’s chronological reconstruction is not chronologically accurate. Patrick Hanan, in particular, has shown how “. . . to judge from the pattern of intertextual references found among the courtesan novels,

20 21

Lu Xun, 1989, 256. Der-Wei Wang, 1997, 339.

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the first two types must have formed two separate streams during the nineteenth century.”22 If one were to look at these novels strictly from the point of view of literary history, one would be then tempted to subscribe to Hanan’s periodization, which broadens and completes the developmental path of the xiaxie xiaoshuo. The trouble with this approach is that it still leaves unquestioned the reading of Lu Xun, who, like other May Fourth intellectuals, tailored his readings to fit his own ideological needs and agendas.23 From this perspective, the term ‘courtesan novels’ seems a convenient catchphrase that helps literary critics and scholars to elude the challenges presented by late Qing texts dealing with prostitution. Destabilizing the way both the courtesan and the role she plays in late Qing fiction have been read so far by most sinologists, who have usually either adopted Lu Xun’s models or chosen to expand his categories while preserving their fundamental nature, becomes then a more challenging but necessary enterprise. Lu Xun’s classification of genres for late Qing fiction is based on themes (adventure, erotic and so on). Such airtight divisions work only up to a certain extent because a late Qing novel, though identified as belonging to one particular thematic group, often includes all, or at least many, of the themes and tropes typical of other genres. Late Qing novels are assemblages of ideas and images in progress, a complex mixture of very unstable elements always on the brink of a collapse or an explosion. Just as the courtesans, prostitutes, pimps, go-betweens and clients are not at all intimidated or restricted in their appearances in all nineteenth-century fiction by genre limitations, the scholar interested in exploring the gendered representations of prostitution in fiction should not be either. Furthermore, in order to retrace the genealogy of the fictional representations of prostitution in late imperial China, we also need to study many novels that are not listed within the Lu Xun’s ‘canon’ of xiaxie xiaoshuo. Interestingly enough, it is Lu Xun’s own work that can help us to break away from the canon and to think beyond his paradigmatic reading of Chinese literature.

22 Hanan, 2004, 33. Patrick Hanan also argues that Fengyue meng’s contents and structure influenced these later texts, for example, in the use of Suzhou dialect to represent the speech of the courtesans, a trend picked up by the more famous Haishanghua liezhuan and found also in Jiuweigui. 23 Der-Wei Wang, 1997, 1−53.

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Lu Xun, talking about the evolution of xiaxie xiaoshuo, used the word liu 流 (‘to flow’).24 This word expresses in a brilliant and useful way the nature of the Chinese fictional representations under study here. The idea of liu as ‘flowing’ can be theoretically developed to explain the porous junctions between texts that allow the courtesan to travel across centuries and to emerge as the main heroine of the nineteenth-century Chinese novel.. On a second and more specific level of analysis, we can picture qinglou wenxue as part of a literary flux, which is, in turn, part of the larger flux of wenxue. If we assign the color qing (‘blue’) from qinglou to the liu (‘flux’) of wenxue of writings about courtesans and prostitutes, then we can navigate the river of Chinese literature from the source upstream, looking for this ‘blue stream’ and seeing where it widens, where it becomes narrow, where it goes underground and where it resurfaces. From this perspective, we see how in the late Qing period the thematic streams that had been centuries in the making resurface in amazingly complex configurations. We can also move forward in time, to trace how the flow moves on, all the way to the present day, as we shall see in the Conclusion. Focusing on novels written between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century requires including material that, though published in the Republican era and nowadays, is still deeply connected to representations that surfaced during the late Qing period. Deploying the idea of flux in the case of late Qing fiction is not dissimilar to what Dudbridge decides to do in his work on Tang dynasty religious practices, adopting in a way Braudel’s three levels of historical change (slow and imperceptible change; slow but with rhythms; history of events, brief, rapid fluctuations) and the metaphor of a moving body of water to explain his conception of la longue durée. Historians sometimes use geological metaphors (‘layers’, ‘substrata’) to describe traditional society and occasionally put signs or markers at single points in time to separate out historical periods. I avoid both practices, because they suggest static, frozen structures and deny the complex, dynamic movement going on in all societies as they pass through time. Instead we shall look at the Chinese world, in particular its religious culture, as evolving simultaneously at many different speeds. The governing metaphor should really be the movement of a

24

Lu Xun, 1989, 339.

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mass of water, with slow-moving depths, fast-flowing surfaces, irregular currents and localized eddies.25 Neither my own nor Dudbridge’s (as far as I understand it) approach should be taken as an argument against historiographical approaches to literature. To ignore the historical context that grounds these novels in historic specificity would be a serious mistake. The fact that scholars in the field of Chinese literary studies have chosen to focus on one century or one dynasty at a time is often justified by the extreme richness of the late imperial Chinese literary scene. However, the serious limit of this kind of approach, which relies on the time unit of the dynasty and the century as the main criterion to assess the worth of literary production, is that it unfortunately does not reflect the fact that Chinese writers, from century to century, were profoundly intertextual in their creative efforts. Many scholars have indeed shown that intertextuality is one of the main characteristics of traditional Chinese literature.26 Across the centuries, writers have come to Tang stories and retold them, choosing the angles, the characters, the parts of the plot they wanted to develop, creating new stories in the process. From Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 (“The Water Margins”) to Jinpingmei 金瓶梅 (“The Plum in the Golden Vase”), from Honglou meng to Xin Shitouji 新石頭記 (“The New Story of the Stone”), from Li Wa zhuan to the whole array of Li Wa plays composed in the Yuan and the Ming dynasty, we see how a strong literary flux carried plots and characters across dynasties, as well as across genres and registers of language. As Dudbridge states, We might regard each story as a single image taken from the flux of the past-like a photograph or a frame of film. If several distinct histories are moving together at different speeds through time, then each image, photograph or still frame should show signs of them all caught in suspension together.27

From this perspective, the late Qing is the era in which all sorts of literary flows come together in interesting and often quite bizarre ways. In particular, as mentioned above, stories about courtesans invaded the

25 G. Dudbridge, Religious Experience and Lay Society in Tang China. A Reading of Tai Fu’s Kuang-i chi (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65. 26 Jing Wang, The Story of Stone. Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and the Journey to the West (Duke University Press, 1992). 27 Dudbridge, 2002, 65−66.

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realm of all levels of texts from wenyan to baihua, from performance texts to texts meant for private entertainment and consumption, from personal recit to national narrative, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. “You can’t keep a good story down,” the Chinese case seems to tell us, and why should we by using dams and barriers? Dates and dynastic changes are important as watersheds, as reference points, but once this point is made, we can try to reconstruct a different history, that of a flux that journeyed through time. Consequently, the novels most extensively discussed here to map out this genealogical discourse include Yuguihong 玉閨紅 (“Rouge in the Jade Boudoir”), a heartbreaking (and extremely pornographic) tale of a young noble girl forced to become a low-class streetwalker;28 the eighteenth-century novel Jin Yun Qiao zhuan 金雲翹傳 (“The Story of Jin, Yun, and Qiao”), which retells the misfortunes of a girl from a good family who becomes a prostitute to save her father from prison;29 Pinhua baojian (first published in 1849), mentioned above, about the realities of male prostitution in the second half of the nineteenth century, by Chen Sen (1791−ca. 1848);30 Fengyue meng 風月夢 (“Illusion of Romance;” preface 1848, published in 1883), a didactic novel about the dangers of whoring and opium-smoking;31 Yu Da’s Qinglou meng (preface 1878, published in 1888), a romantic male fantasy of empowerment;32 Han Ziyun’s Haishanghua liezhuan (1894), which describes the lives of prostitutes in Shanghai at the turn of the century;33

28

Dong Lu Luoluo pingsheng, Yuguihong (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1995). This novel was hailed as a late Ming text but there are some doubts to its authenticity and it could also be a late Qing hoax. Of thirty chapters, for which we have the titles, only twenty still exist. These are, in some cases, damaged (see, for example, the last chapter) and all the racy passages in this reprint of the only known edition have been censored, so that there are no pornographic passages but simply long rows of bubbles. The missing parts, however, emphasize all the more the violence and the vulgarity of the situation, since it is often clear enough from the context what is going on. 29 Qingxin cairen, Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1983). This well-written but relatively obscure novel inspired Vietnam’s most famous ballad. See Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu. A Bilingual Edition Translated by Huynh Sanh Thong (Yale University Press, 1983). See also C. H. Benoit, Jr., “The Evolution of the Wang Cuiqiao Tale: From Historical Event in China to Masterpiece in Vietnam,” Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University (1981). 30 Chen Sen, Pinhua baojian (Xi’an: Xibei daxue chubanshe, 1993). 31 Hanshang mengren, Fengyue meng (Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1989). 32 Yu Da, Qinglou meng (Taipei: Baihua Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo daxi, 1980). 33 Haishanghua was written in Wu dialect by Han Banqing and published in installments between 1892 and 1894. See Han Ziyun, Haishanghua (Taipei: Huanggua zazhishe, 1983).

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Haishang fanhuameng 海上花繁華夢 (“The Luxurious Dream of the Flowers of Shanghai”), written by Sun Jiazhen, (1862−1937), serialized between 1903 and 1906, as well as his Shi weigui 十尾龜 (“The Ten-tailed Turtle), first published in 1911, and Xin Shanghai 新上海 (“New Shanghai”), first published in 1909, three novels that deal with life and death in Shanghai;34 Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu 海上名妓四大金剛奇書 (“The Marvelous Book of the Four Guardian Gods of the Famous Courtesans of Shanghai;” 1898), an entertaining ‘biography’ of four of the most famous late Qing Shanghai courtesans;35 Zeng Pu’s Niehaihua 孽海花 (serialized, 1903−1907; “Flowers in an Ocean of Sin”), a historical novel that narrates the life of the historical courtesan Sai Jinhua 賽金花;36 Li Boyuan’s Wenming xiaoshi 文明小史 (serialized, 1903−1905; “A Brief History of Enlightement”);37 and Zhang Chunfan’s Jiuweigui (serialized, 1906−1910), also mentioned by Lu Xun, an exposé of Shanghai’s brothel life.38 The common thread for all these sources is that they deal, in different degrees, with courtesans and prostitutes, especially in the urban settings of fin-de-siécle Shanghai and Beijing. Many of these texts were the first to represent a specific set of issues pertaining to the world of prostitution. For example, Yuguihong is the first—and, to my knowledge, the only—late imperial Chinese vernacular novel to deal with low-class brothels, Fengyue meng is the first Qing novel to deal in a realistic way with the life of courtesans, and Pinhua baojian to represent in detail the world of male actors. They are homogeneous in format, that of zhanghui xiaoshuo 章回小 說, the linked-chapter narrative, and are all written in the late imperial vernacular language.39 Many of these novels were serialized in liter-

34 Sun Jiazhen, Haishang fanhuameng (Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 1991); Sun Jiazhen, Shi wei gui (Shenyang: Chunfen wenyi chubanshe, 1994); Sun Jiazhen, Xin Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997). 35 Chousi zhuren, pseud. for Wu Jianren, Huitu Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe, 1996 [1898]. Henceforth, for brevity, Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu. 36 Zeng Pu, Niehaihua (Taipei: Wenhua tushu gongsi, 1990). 37 Li Boyuan, Wenming xiaoshi (Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1989). 38 Zhang Chunfan, Jiuweigui (Beijing: Renmin Zhongguo chubanshe, 1993). 39 By vernacular, I mean novels written in late imperial baihua, a mixture of guanhua 官話, the written language of legal documents and officials, and northern Chinese written vernacular, not immediately connected to a spoken language (which is the modern meaning of the term baihua). Fengyue meng and Haishang hua are exceptions, since they include long passages written in Suzhou and Wu dialect respectively.

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ary journals and most of them, with the exception perhaps of Qinglou meng, became best sellers: Niehaihua enjoyed incredible success from 1906 all through the Republican period, and still is widely read today. Literary quality was not necessarily a factor in the choice of the novels: most of them were written in haste or in a repetitive manner, a fact that may be imputed to their serialized publication. They were all composed by professional or semi-professional writers who dealt, in different ways and with different degrees of success, with the same overwhelming historical conditions and cataclysmic changes. At the same time, it is important to read these texts against the foil of the larger literary context, so my discussion will refer to and rely on many other novels not listed here, such as Ming huaben, and novels like Jin Ping Mei and Honglou meng.40 For all the weight of Lu Xun’s legacy, it is quite possible to move beyond the above-mentioned literary histories that group late imperial Chinese novels together according to dynastic division and also beyond the schema of the monograph of an individual writer’s production.41 In order to weave a coherent narrative and analysis out of the various plots found in these different texts, the chapters of this book have been arranged in a sequence that traces the different stages in the fictional life of the courtesan, in order to resemble a sort of ‘Chinese Harlot’s Progress’, namely childhood, youth, maturity and old age/death (see Figure 1). This narrative strategy, though quite innovative in contemporary sinological studies, is by no means original and is derived directly from classical Chinese writings about women. The earliest stories told in China about women were biographies, such as those we find in Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記, as well as in Lienü zhuan 烈女傳 by Liu Xiang (77−6 B.C.).42 These biographies seldom

40 Yet, one has to keep in mind that there were about two thousand new fictional works published between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, so it is almost impossible to claim to have looked at all of them exhaustively. See A Ying, 1980. 41 See, for example, Peter Li, Tseng P’u (Chicago: Twayne Publishers, 1980); C. Yeh, “Zeng Pu’s ‘Niehai Hua’ as a Political Novel: A World Genre in a Chinese Form,” Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University (1990). 42 Sima Qian, Shiji (Changsha: Xinhua Shudian, 1988); Liu Xiang, Lienü zhuan (Taibei: Guangwen shuchu, 1978). The literature on this topic is huge. As basic reference works, one can refer to Richard W. Guisso, “Thunder over the lake: The Five Classics and the Perception of Woman in Early China,” in Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen, eds, Women in China. Current Directions in Historical Scholarship (Philo Press, 1981); L. A. Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women

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Figure 1. Bao Tianxiao 包天笑, ed. Xiaoshuo shibao 小說時報 No. 5. Shanghai, 1909. Reproduced with permission of the Harvard-Yenching Library

gave a complete account of the woman’s life, and usually told her story from the point of view of the woman’s relationship to the men in her life. In other words, the reason behind telling the woman’s life-story was in the first place a meritorious or an infamous deed perpetrated against a man. This feature was absorbed by fictional texts: in Six Dynasties zhiguai 志怪 and Tang chuanqi, where women often figure as the main protagonists, the narrative begins when the woman is a young adult; of her origins, we are usually only told her father’s name. She reveals herself and her moral, social and sexual alignment through her interactions with the male characters. This characteristic remained a stable

and Virtue in Early China (State University of New York Press, 1998); Marina H. Sung, The Chinese Lieh-nü tradition, ibid.; Albert Richard O’Hara, The Position of Woman in Early China (Taipei, 1971).

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fixture in later texts, though Yuan drama and Ming fiction progressively included more and more details in retelling women’s lives and character development became more elaborate. Given this general picture, it is interesting to notice that very early on in Chinese literary tradition courtesans’ lives would be told in detail. The above-mentioned Beilizhi, Qinglou ji and Banqiao zaji are the most famous titles in a huge literary corpus: since men of letters spent a great deal of time in the entertainment quarters and in the company of courtesans, it was not uncommon for them to compose, in their old age, memoirs where they remembered the women they loved and their own lost youth, and bemoaned their lost youth as well as changed historical circumstances (as we see in Banqiao zaji). Retelling courtesans’ life-stories became for these nostalgic literati once more a way of narrating their social and historical self and, yet, their texts are still precious repertoires of representations and interesting testimonies of pre-modern Chinese culture. At times, the character’s tale would begin with her birth, but more often it was told beginning with her teenage years, as she started entertaining clients (which makes sense, since the authors of this retelling, who were often her patrons, seldom got to know her as a child).43 Late imperial and late Qing novels absorbed the tendency to use the frame of courtesans’ lives to convey socio-political messages and to entertain their readers. Han Ziyun’s novel includes the word liezhuan 列傳 (‘exemplary biography’) in its title; Haishang mingji sida jingang qishu follows the life-story of four courtesans, from their supernatural origin to their childhood, and from adulthood to their demise. Sai Jinhua benshi 賽金花本事 (“The Interview of Sai Jinhua”) by Liu Bannong, inherits this convention by structuring Sai Jinhua’s own retelling of her life along the chronological lines of this well-established literary convention.44 Thus, the formal structure of this book is modeled after, with the due changes, the biographical model found in these sources. Clearly, using a very traditional format to tell a known tale with a different spin is meant as a sign of respect for such a long-standing tradition but also as a way to trace the courtesan’s life-story as we find it in fictional sources without, however, reproducing the positioning 43

See also Ropp, 1997, for ways in which courtesans’ stories were told and circulated in late imperial China. 44 Liu Bannong and Shang Hongkui, Sai Jinhua benshi (Beiping: Xingyuntang shudian, 1934).

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of the male authors who composed these texts. The intent here is not to propose these narrative trajectories as the ahistorical products of sexual fantasies. Rather, I want to show how the sexual and romantic fantasies centered around the courtesan turn from dream to nightmare in a way that shows the dissolution, at least within the novels written within the late Qing period, of a solid core of subjectivity, especially in terms of masculinity, that is the result of growing disillusion with the family romance circulating in Ming and Qing fiction. In Chapter One, we will look at the social, sexual and (super-)human identity of the courtesan, both before and after her incarnation as a human being. Her body is immediately unveiled as the main site where this identity is progressively constructed. Thus, we see that reading the courtesan means to read her as the nexus of desire, the body, the drive to know and the narrative. Her story falls within the category of “. . . those stories we tell about the body in the effort to know and to have it, which result in making the body a site of signification—the place for the inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning.”45 The body is what determines the fate of the child-prostitute and the vehicle that leads her to shi shen 失身 (‘to lose her body’), meaning here the loss of her virginity, the ultimate bodily transformation that sanctions officially her social identity as a sex worker and that allows her body to acquire a stable narrative meaning. These protean transformations, analyzed in Chapter Two, were a staple of Ming and Qing sources but acquire new semantic power as they are re-imagined in the new urban landscape of late Qing Shanghai. Thus, most of the chapter is devoted to map out the space, at once oneiric and immanent, fantastic and nightmarish, that Shanghai constitutes for fictional writers of the period, against the foil of the traditional landscape of courtesans’ stories. Chapter Three shifts to how courtesans behave with each other and with women from other social classes. The two major modes of behavior that appear in these late Qing novels between women, namely rivalry and solidarity, and the reasons behind them, both within and outside the brothel, are here explored to unveil the power struggles between courtesans and wives, madams and lovers. Once again, the body of the courtesan gains center stage. It is the locale of discipline and training

45

Brooks, 1993, 5−6.

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of the madam, who, in an attempt to protect her volatile investment, can torture the courtesan, force her to miscarry, and sell her. It is the threat posed to the conjugal stability of women of good family, as well as the site of pleasure that the courtesan’s male customers so recklessly pursue. The end of the chapter, in light of these explorations, questions the feasibility of invoking the female gender as the ruling one within the brothel in the context of these representations. Chapter Four follows the courtesan, after the ‘loss of her body’, into adulthood. In order to understand the significance and novelty of late Qing representations of adult courtesans, we briefly retrace the genealogy of the Chinese discourse on the courtesan as the man of letters’ perfect match, a vital part of traditional China’s rhetoric of the beloved, via the zhiyin 知音 (‘bond’). Here we analyze the myth of this talented scholar and beautiful courtesan relationship, based on the affinity between men of letters and courtesans, and explain the reasons behind what I call the ‘savior syndrome’, that throughout Ming and the Qing novels plagues most of the male companions of the courtesan. The complex relationships the courtesan has with the men in her life reveal the actual limits of the agency assigned to her in the pages of novels. By fleshing out the changes that take place in late Qing texts in the ways in which the courtesan fashions her bodily and social self, and on what it is called here the ‘disintegration of the family romance’, it becomes clear how this transition mimics and reflects the progressive disempowerment of the man of letters in other fields than his erotic and romantic life. The courtesan’s enhanced agency reveals the troubled masculinity of late Qing characters and their schizophrenic approach to social, racial and national identity. Chapter Five concludes this fictional journey. Marriage, poverty, disease and old age prompt courtesans to leave, either temporarily or permanently, their professional arena. In the economy of the courtesan’s world, “sexual expenditure is consistently a loss of energy, and of life itself, and fully consonant with the spending of money.”46 The depletion of the courtesan’s economic capital closely matches her physical decay and, in this chapter, we unearth the discourses that get enmeshed with male anxieties and fears about female sexuality, physicality and death. Accordingly, in the final part of this book, we see how the female body becomes a site of deadly pollution and how

46

Brooks, 1993, 69.

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even love can become pathological if it is experienced excessively or in a socially transgressive manner. The Conclusion analyzes the relationships that these novels institute among the multitude of individualized and turbulent bodies of the courtesan and her partners both in Ming and Qing fiction, as well as in the new urban landscape that displaces and seduces them at the end of the nineteenth century. It is at this very problematic juncture that the courtesan’s body gives in to all sorts of uncontrolled and uncontrollable behaviors, behaviors that are mirrored in the bodies of her lovers and companions. Theirs is a body that is trying very hard to forget the bodily disciplines imposed on it by centuries of tradition. Thus, both male and female bodies in late Qing fiction consume drugs, sex, fashion, and food and are, in turn, consumed by them. This excursus through the world of late Qing courtesans illuminates the well-established relationship between male perceptions of the female body and the construction of the female body as a site of desire but also of deadly danger for the male. It also sheds light on the new, alienating and contradictory landscapes of desire engendered by historical changes that took place between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The journey comes full circle with the resurfacing of the late Qing courtesan in twenty-first-century mainland Chinese, as well as transnational publishing discourses and scholarly work, and to engage them fully, we will utilize nostalgia as the main analytical tool to deconstruct these latter-day representations. Let us then begin, without further delay, our exploration of the Chinese Courtesan’s Progress, by tracing its dramatic point of departure, namely the ‘dreamscapes’ of late Qing fiction.

CHAPTER ONE

PARADISE LOST: THE FANTASTIC CHILDHOOD OF A COURTESAN TO BE I. Dreamscapes: The Vertical Horizons of Late Qing Fiction . . . we, who think of happiness Ascending, would then experience The feeling which almost startles When what is happy falls. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

Many scholars of Chinese literature and culture have commented on the fact that dream narrative is a common feature in Chinese texts.1 This is particularly true of late Qing novels and their deployment of dream space to construct new narratives of desire, identity and nostalgia. The oneiric landscapes that become the background of many novels of this period are essential to understanding how late Qing authors depict the disintegration, profound deformation and metamorphoses of space and time that take place at the turn of the twentieth century. As cities and the people who inhabit them dramatically change face, the writers force characters and readers alike to constantly strive to reach a vertical point of view from which to be able to re-orient themselves, as well as to reorganize the plot. New bodies and new vehicles appear, and a new tempo and speed propel them across the pages of the novels. Thus, dream narratives, though a long-standing tradition in Chinese literature, become a fundamental narrative component of these texts, as the most appropriate fictional device to mirror the often surreal explosive emergence of powerful new desires and consumerism against the urban landscapes of a new China, especially as it is outlined against Shanghai’s protean skyline. It is indeed impossible to think through the narrative of the courtesan’s progress in late Qing fictional sources without first

1 The bibliography related to the topic is immense, both in Chinese and in Western languages. See, to begin with, the essays contained in Carolyn T. Brown, Psycho-sinology. The Universe of Dreams in Chinese Culture (University Press of America, 1988).

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exploring this ‘architectural’ component, namely, the relationship between real and imagined spaces, new bodies of consumption and new fantasies of empowerment. Particularly relevant to understanding this issue is the opening dream in Haishang hua.2 Han Ziyun’s text begins, like many late Qing novels, with a dream that sets the stage for the hero’s delusional journey into the follies of the mortal world.3 After stating that his book comes from his dreams, the author goes on to say that he spent his life day-dreaming, mistaking it for reality, and, thus, started to write a dream book of sorts.4 It was only upon completing it that he was able to wake from the dreams that he wrote about. The novel, in other words, opens an oneiric space that at first confines and deludes the narrator/protagonist but eventually enables the dreamer/writer to awake, very much like what we see happen in many late imperial fictions of enlightenment rooted in Mahayana Buddhist discourse. What was the dream in this particular instance? The narrator falls asleep unaware and immediately his dream equates with spatial dislocation. He gets lost and cannot find his way. All of a sudden he finds himself in front of a huahai 花海 (‘a sea of flowers’) that, the author hastens to explain, is not meant here as a flowery expression but quite literally. The flowers are rootless, floating and at the mercy of bees and butterflies. At once moved by the beauty of the flowers and shocked by the brutal attacks of the insects, the author swoons and falls into the sea of flowers. He screams in horror and keeps falling for about one thousand feet, all the way to earth: when he opens his eyes he sees he has landed on the Luji Stone Bridge in Shanghai. There he bumps into Zhao Puzhai, a young lad who just got to Shanghai himself—albeit by more conventional means of transportation—and is hurrying to see his maternal uncle to get help in finding a job in the city. It is at this precise moment that the novel takes off. The author passes the torch on to one of the characters and transfers his dreamtime to him, who goes on to become entangled in a web of desire and ruin with one of Shanghai’s most desirable courtesans.5 2 Han Ziyun, 1983. See also Chen Sen, 1993; Chousi zhuren, 1996; Hanshang mengren, 1989; Li Boyuan, 1997; Luyixuan zhuren, Hualiu shenqing zhuan (Taipei: Hanyuan wenhuashiye gongsi, 1993); Sun Jiazhen, 1991; Zhang Chunfan, 1993. 3 See also Qiancheng Li, Fictions of Enlightenment. Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). 4 Han Ziyun, 1983, 27. 5 See also Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories,” especially 145−149.

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No matter how tempted we may be to turn immediately to Freudian analysis, the socio-cultural context that produced these texts contains already the key to understanding this as well other dreams we shall discuss later on.6 Clearly, the narrator’s fall through the sea of flowers is an important part of the narrative, as the incipit to a novel that itself is constructed as a dream. This oneiric structure comes from illustrious antecedents, such as the Tang chuanqi Huang Liang Meng 黃粱夢 (“The Yellow Millet Dream”) and the Qing novel Honglou meng. Setting up the dream sequence, the author at once locates his work under the shadow of existing literary tradition, frames his text as a didactic one (albeit in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion), and lessens the political impact of the social critique that his novel carries. Similarly, it could be argued that the relationship between desire for beautiful women (here represented by the flowers, which often specifically refers to courtesans), its fulfillment, and dreams, is nothing new. Traditionally love was experienced in dreamtime and dream space, as we see, for instance, in the Ming play Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (“The Peony Pavilion”). Passion in fiction was often consumed at the borders of socially acceptable spaces where established modes of control and policing weakened, and what better place for love then than the dream? A close second came temples, brothels, entertainment quarters, cemeteries, strange cities, and/or various open, public and semipublic areas, that would be accessible only in certain times of the year and, thus, were ideal sites to consume fleeting passions. In particular, the brothel, which had well defined spatial boundaries, served an important function in providing and framing the locale for passion, while containing its subversive and overflowing (or yin 淫) lascivious potential. Furthermore, the season of love was meant to be so brief to feel unreal, just like a dream. In other words, the dream had been constructed as a typical ‘chronotope’ for the traditional Chinese romance from very early on in the context of both classical and vernacular fiction.7

6 See Chapter 4 and, more specifically, the discussion of Zhao Erbao’s dream in this book. 7 M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. For Shanghai as a chronotope, that is time and space made visible artistically and narrative-wise, in late Qing and modern Shanghai novels, see Des Forges, 2007.

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This reflects very well the relationship that developed throughout the centuries between the space assigned to romance within traditional Chinese literature and the social category of women under study here. Fictional works mirrored and enhanced, often in a distorted fashion, actual practices and consequently, in novels, the home, the family and the people who occupied the family house, were not meant to be on the giving or receiving end of passion: filial piety and respect were supposed to be the norms regulating the emotional world of wives and husbands, parents and children. Wives were chosen by parents, husbands were imposed on young women. Election and selection of sexual and romantic partners were represented as a privilege limited to men of upper classes who had the economic and social power to fulfill their needs.8 However, men were also restricted in the choice of places where they could enact feelings and emotions towards the opposite sex not aimed at perpetuating the family line. The marginality of the sites of desire for men and women thus ensured that it would be short-lived and thus its disruptive force less devastating: the disastrous consequences of bringing sexual and romantic passion to one’s own household are epitomized, for example, in Jin Ping Mei, and are usually envisioned as part of larger process of decay of national mores.9 The stereotypical dreamer was the young scholar, a subject whose identity was highly unstable, not just emotionally, but also socially. His naïveté and his lack of human, romantic and sexual experience made him the perfect fictional character of a tale of romantic and sexual initiation. On the road, he was vulnerable to all sorts of seductions and dangers. Likewise, as an inexperienced sojourner in the capital, presented since the Tang dynasty as the primary site of unknown and dangerous pleasures, he was the perfect protagonist of romantic intrigues. By the same token, the female romantic protagonists who inhabited the liminal dreamscapes were characterized by their unstable social and sexual identities: they were virgins ready for motherhood, as well

8 For a very powerful historical and theoretical illustration of the dynamics described here in late imperial fictional discourse, see Keith McMahon, Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction (E. J. Brill, 1988); Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists. Sexuality and Male-female Relations in Eighteenth-century Chinese Fiction (Duke University Press, 1995). 9 Lanling xiaoxiaoshen, Jinpingmei cihua, (Xianggang Taiping shuju, 1982), 3 vols.

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as courtesans, foxes, ghosts and disembodied souls.10 These bewitching sexual and erotic partners were dangerous because they blurred the boundaries between social classes, fantasy and reality, and different worlds and realms of existence. By assigning romance a feminine and supernatural character, the need to convey a warning often clashed with the desire for exoticism and wish fulfillment. The election of the courtesan as the romantic, dreamy and supernatural heroine par excellence is thus closely intertwined with the initiation journey of the young male hero. Of course, there are historical resonances to this plot. With the creation of the jinshi 進士 examination during the Tang dynasty, more and more scholars converged on the capital, Chang’an. This brought forth the development of the entertainment business and to the production and circulation of narratives that mirrored the developing ties among scholars, courtesans, and romance.11 In Tang chuanqi, such as Li Wa zhuan and Huo Xiaoyu zhuan, the courtesan is cast as the favorite partner of the young scholars.12 This prompted the emergence of the ‘talented scholar and the beautiful courtesan’ motif side-by-side with the officially recognized talent and beauty stories mentioned in the Introduction that dealt with the romances between young scholars and beautiful maidens from more respected social backgrounds (Yuan Zhen’s Yingying zhuan 鶯鶯傳 is perhaps the most famous example of this latter genre).13 In these prose texts written in classical Chinese, a beautiful courtesan is often called

10 See A. Levy, “Le renard, la morte et la courtisane dans la Chine classique,” Études Mongoles 15 (1984): 111−139. In this article, Levy aims to show, in a very intriguing but not completely convincing manner, that the images of the dead woman in love, the vixen and the courtesan belong to the same paradigm and are but three different ways of imagining an alternative—perceived as illusory—to the traditional system of matrimonial alliance. 11 S. Owen, “Romance,” and “Conflicting interpretations,” in S. Owen, The End of the Chinese ‘Middle Ages’: Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture (Stanford University Press, 1996). 12 See G. Dudbridge, The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983); Anon., 1973. 13 See Richard C. Hessney, “Beyond Beauty and Talent: The Moral and Chivalric Self in the ‘Fortunate Union’,” in R. E. Hegel and R. C. Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature (Columbia University Press, 1985), 214. For the emergence of the beauty and scholar vernacular novel during the seventeenth century, see K. McMahon, “The Classic ‘Beauty-Scholar’ Romance and the Superiority of the Talented Woman,” in A. Zito, and T. E. Barlow, Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 227.

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‘a fairy princess who has been banished to this lower world’: thus we see that the rhetoric of assigning a supernatural origin to beautiful women in general, and to those who make a living by selling their beauty and their talents to men of letters in particular, is a well-established one in Chinese literary tradition.14 Most late Qing novels about courtesans are faithful to this standardized discourse, and set out the narrative with a prologue connecting either the author of the book or its characters (and in some cases both) to a supernatural environment. Aside from, or together with, the dream sequence illustrated in the earlier section, usually the author sets the action in motion in a fairyland where gods and supernatural creatures of different religious background come together. For example, in the first chapter of Qinglou meng, the narrator meets a Daoist, who gives him a mirror. His spirit goes through the looking glass and, on the other side of the mirror, he becomes Jin Yixiang, a scion of a wealthy family, who is actually Jin Tongzi, the Golden Boy, a page at the court of the Old Man in the Moon, the Celestial Matchmaker.15 In the case of Fengyue meng, the author is depicted as an eccentric immortal whom has become enlightened thanks to his carousing in brothels and, thus, has been prompted to write a book to enlighten other men: the narrator meets him one day, at the end of the book, in a forest, playing chess with another immortal.16 In Niehaihua, the narrator is in Shanghai in a setting that, though not imaginary, had many magic connotations for late nineteenth-century Chinese readers: there he meets a mysterious woman who gives him a magic book that he reads and later narrates to his friend Dongya Bingfu, The Sick Man of Asia. The book’s origin is, thus, presented as the supernatural gift of a beautiful goddess.17 So dream space, supernatural settings and the urban space of Shanghai mix and become enmeshed almost seamlessly. It is on the streets of this bustling metropolis that many characters from many late Qing and modern novels meet with love, passion and their doom. In this sense, then, the spatial assignment and the new erotic and romantic geographies of late Qing fiction are closely connected to many centuries of romantic literature. And yet, it is precisely in late 14 15 16 17

Anon., 1973, 77. Yu Da, 1980, 2. Hanshang mengren, 1989, 188. Zeng Pu, 1990, 1.

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Qing fiction that everything changes, even love and dreams, because time and the spaces (meaning here the physical horizons) in which the characters of these novels socialize and are socialized change drastically. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that Han Ziyun’s narrator lands in Shanghai, a place where dreams can be bought at any time of the day and night by anyone who has money to buy them. Shanghai is the perfect dreamscape in so many ways. The treaty port where East met West on a daily basis, fictional Shanghai is depicted as a veritable modern metropolis, with its fast vehicles, its electric lights, its foreign crowds and its theaters and cinemas. As such, it is depicted as the Mecca of China’s leisure culture, where ‘all that is solid melts into air’ and where money can buy anything, be it love, sex, drugs, fancy horses or exotic pleasures.18 The opening dream of Haishang hua, like many other novels of the time, posits Shanghai as a dreamland, a world that, at the time, was for many Chinese just an alluring dream or a metropolitan nightmare.19 Once the insatiable Zhao Puzhai starts dreaming the Shanghai dream, he cannot, à la Jia Baoyu, wake up in the land of Disenchantment, and it is in this sense that the whole novel is a dream book, as the author states at the beginning, as there is no metaphysical or spiritual awakening.20 In other words, their dreams do more than just frame the narrative or to serve as metaphors for Daoist and/or Buddhist soteriology. As Foucault said, “Dream analysis does not stop at the level of a hermeneutic of symbols.”21

18 For the role played by Shanghai as a fundamental ‘chronotope’ in late Qing fiction, see, in addition to the secondary sources mentioned in the introduction, Cheng, 1980; Zamperini, 2003a, and 2003b; Zhang Yingjin, The City in Modern Chinese Literature & Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford University Press, 1996), especially 180–181. For a brilliant discussion of Shanghai as a literary trope and as a modern metropolis, see A. Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from ‘Lives of Shanghai Flowers’ (1892) to ‘Midnight’ (1933)”, Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998, especially 8−70, and Mediascape Shanghai. For historical background, see Hershatter, 1997; F. E. Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927−1937 (University of California Press, 1995); F. E. Wakeman and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992). 19 Zhang Yingjin, The City in Modern Chinese Literature & Film, especially 180−181. 20 There is, however, as we shall see in Chapter 4, a different type of awakening. 21 M. Foucault, “Dream, Imagination and Existence”, originally published in 1954, as an introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence,” in M. Foucault, Dream and Existence. Michael Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993 [1930]), 33.

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However, there is more. Fictional Shanghai exists in Haishang hua as “. . . a space of relations which is just as real as a geographical space, in which movements have to be paid for by labor, by effort and especially by time (to move upwards is to raise oneself, to climb and bear the traces of the stigmata of that effort.”22 This space of relations, for all its dreamlike quality, is not a level playing field. In this dream the vertical fall of the dreamer is propelled by his unfulfilled desire. The pursuit of its satisfaction, in late Qing novels, is always organized along a vertical axis, which is the very axis of the subject’s existence. And the author’s fall clearly precipitates the narrative, along with the reader’s attention, in this direction. As Binswanger writes, When we are in a state of deeply felt hope or expectation and what we have hoped for proves illusory, then the world—in one stroke—becomes radically ‘different’. We are completely uprooted and we lose our footing in the world. When this happens, we say later—after we have regained our equilibrium—that it was ‘as though we had fallen from the clouds’.23

The endless fall of the author through the sea of flowers clearly echoes Zhao Puzhai’s descent down the social ladder throughout the novel because of his unbridled lust. The latter’s narrative path is inevitably catastrophic, as he falls “. . . from purity into corruption and from eternity to time.”24 His existence against the dreamscape of Shanghai is no longer mapped out along the horizontal trajectory of Confucian propriety. From this perspective, Shanghai can be read as the vertical ‘heterotopia’ in which writers constructed romantic architectures of desire.25 Just as it is the case with the oneiric dimension, it is a space that is completely ‘Other’. It is also clearly marked as an eroticized, sexual space, a ‘sextopia’ of sorts, where characters can act out their fantasies, just like children in a game that escapes adult supervision; how accurate this metaphor turns out to be we shall discuss in the following chapters. In spite of this, there is nothing unreal about the destruction brought in by Zhao Puzhai’s socio-economic fall into a circuit of exchange and

22

P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard University Press, 1991), 232. Binswanger, 1993 [1930], 81. 24 S. Herbold, “Woman and Modernity in Lolita,” n.p., 4. 25 For an explanation of ‘heterotopia’, see M. Foucalt, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22−27. Also, David Wang has talked about the confused horizons of late Qing ‘science fantasy’, as well as the attraction late Qing authors felt for balloons and ascensions. Wang, 1997, 252, and especially 262. 23

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consumption where money replaces qing 情 (‘passion’) as the currency that is at the base of narrative exchanges. In this sense, Shanghai is a dream world that “. . . is not the inner garden of fantasy. If the dreamer meets there a world of his own, this is because he can recognize there the fact of his own destiny; he finds there the original movement of his existence and his freedom, in its achievement or in its alienation.”26 This tragic fate, this final alienation is alluded to by the brutality of the attacks of bees and flowers at the beginning of the novel and by the precipitous fall of the author from heaven to earth. Furthermore, one should not forget an important point when looking at dreams and the disintegration of space in Haishang hua and other novels of this period. These characters are often dazed and confused not only by the great changes going on around them, but also by the great quantities of drugs and intoxicants they consume. For late Qing heroes and heroines, late nineteenth-century Shanghai was a space-time (Zeittraum) and a dreamtime (Zeit-traum), also because many of them experience it in an altered state of mind: many of them often are, simply put, incredibly high, which is a very apt term to keep the vertical aspect of these fictional horizons in the picture.27 Be it whiskey or opium, this helps to explain why, for likes of Zhao Puzhai, Shanghai streets are dreamlike and precipitous.28 Shanghai is at once the opium couch on which the character dreams his/her dream, as well as the dreamscape in which the dream is enacted. Shanghai, as an opium-induced dream space, is a perilous labyrinth with many ways in but very few ways out. Unlike the classical labyrinth, Shanghai does not have one center where one monster lurks and expands both horizontally and vertically. Dangers lurk everywhere in Shanghai because it is a space dominated by consumption dynamics for goods that look real but are not, giving pleasures that feel real but are not. It is true that the streets of Shanghai may be portrayed, here and elsewhere, in a very realistic fashion; what matters here though is that they become the arena in which the male self wages (and clearly loses) his battle to fulfill the pursuit of pleasure that will help him to become a subject, while retaining his masculinity. The new riddle posed to

26

M. Foucault, “Dream, Imagination and Existence,” in Foucault, 1993, 54. For the relationship between fiction, modernity, dream, and verticality, see also W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 389. 28 Benjamin, 1999, 416. 27

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Chinese masculinity by Shanghai’s modernity is dissolved in dreams because the male subject does not possess the necessary complex balance of bodily and mental knowledge. The erotic component of his pursuit is embodied and simultaneously challenged by the prostitute and the courtesan, among the most deceptive dream figures one can encounter in Shanghai, a city that by the late nineteenth century, due to historical and economic reasons, had become China’s entertainment center and attracted all kinds of profligates and sex workers.29 They, as we will see clearly in the pages to come, are an integral part of the metropolitan landscape, a landscape marked through their movements, of which they are an extension and which extends into them. These women, just like the city, are offered as objects of desire and knowledge that, not unlike Eve’s apple, can and should be bitten into, but at one’s own risk. It is undeniable that the legacy of centuries of literary writing, most prominently that of the Honglou meng, loomed large on these late Qing novels.30 The fantastic settings; the dreams; the main characters presented as earth-bound supernatural beings because of karmic debts they have contracted in Heaven, as a sort of earthly malaise; the presence of Daoist immortals with magic mirrors and of Buddhist monks with tricks up their sleeves; all these ancient themes and tropes had been sanctioned and organized as mainstream in vernacular fiction by Cao Xueqin’s novel. After all, it is a well-established fact that the Honglou meng constituted the literary milestone against which all later vernacular novels written about love and sexuality had to measure themselves. Particularly influential was the initial dream sequence of Honglou meng, in which Jia Baoyu travels to the land of the immortals and reads the stories of the twelve beauties. This story is mimicked almost verbatim in Qinglou meng, except that in the latter we find Lin Daiyu herself to welcome the hero Jin Yixiang.31 The challenge and the charm of late Qing fiction lies in its using and employing a repository of images and plots developed through the centuries both in vernacular and classical Chinese, across different genres of literary production and within different cultural contexts.

29 Hershatter, 1997; Wakeman, 1995; Wakeman and Wen-hsin Yeh, 1992; Zhang Yingjin, The City in Modern Chinese Literature & Film, especially 180−181. 30 Cao Xueqin, Honglou meng (Renmin chubanshe, 1984). 31 P. Zamperini, “Elective Affinities: Spiritual Resonance and Book-marketing in Late Qing Novels,” Late Imperial China (June 2007).

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Thus, drama also plays an important role in this thematic universe, especially from the point of view of the canonization of the origins of the courtesan, herself, and not just of the male hero who conjures her in his dreams. This is a very important point that connects goddesses and sex work, a relatively natural development of the idea of beautiful women as supernatural creatures. For example, in the Yuan play Ming Yue Heshang Du Liu Cui 明月和尚度柳翠 (“The Monk Bright Moon Carries Across Liu Cui”), the willow branch that Guanyin is often depicted as holding in her hand is sent back to earth because it has become dusty and needs to be cleansed. In its human incarnation, the willow branch becomes a prostitute, Liu Cui, until her exile to earth is up, by which time the monk Yue Ming takes her back to Guanyin.32 The image of Guanyin, herself, can offer interesting insights: in one of her thirty-two incarnations, the Bodhisattva of Compassion appears as an attractive woman with a fish basket, to draw with her beauty men onto the path of enlightenment (and to refer to a beautiful young woman as a ‘Guanyin’ was a common practice in late imperial China). A modification of this story deals with a prostitute who engaged in sexual activities to carry out the mission of salvation.33 In traditional Buddhist lore, we often meet bodhisattvas who “. . . voluntarily manifest themselves as courtesans to attract men, but having seduced them with the hook of desire, they establish them in the knowledge of the Buddhas.”34 As Yu Chun-fang writes, “Sexuality, either offered outright or first promised and then later withheld, can serve as a powerful tool of spiritual transformation.”35 Accordingly Guanyin is also, in one of her many incarnations, a prostitute who “. . . gives herself to men as a way to lead them to the ultimate bliss of awakening.”36 The influence of Buddhism and the idea of karma had by the late Qing become a necessary staple of vernacular fiction, especially in connection with the experience of sexuality and desire: one only has to think of the Buddhist rhetoric of enlightenment through sexual

32 Anon., “Mingyue heshang du Liu Cui,” in Wang Xueqi, ed., Yuanqu xuan jiaozhu (Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), 4A: 3369−3416. 33 See Faure, B., The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, Princeton University Press, 1998, 118 and ff.; Yu Chun-fang, “Images of Kuan-yin in Chinese Folk Literature,” Han Hsueh Yen chiu 8 (1990): 1, 239 and ff. 34 Faure, 1998, 43. 35 Yu Chun-fang, 1990, 242. 36 Faure, 1998, 120.

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excesses found in most of late Ming pornography, for example, in Li Yu’s Rouputuan 肉蒲團 (“The Carnal Prayer Mat”).37 In many nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, sexuality is presented as a very powerful tool of—positive and negative—transformation, both for earthly and heavenly creatures. In sum, one can see that the authors of these novels established a multi-layered set of movements at the inception of their works. Prefiguring the arrival of the courtesan on earth as the fall of a disgraced heavenly creature from a celestial plane of existence, they trace a downward trajectory, from supernatural to human. This brings as a consequence the direct transformation of the embodied courtesan from pure and chaste celestial being to filthy and sexual yin creature, in its two graphemes, 淫 (‘lustful’) and 陰 (‘female’), and thus as (twice over) inferior. However, it is also a movement towards an inferior social status. The body of the courtesan, the experience of love and sex, social class, and the world of immortals, or a fantastic plane of existence, all become enmeshed in these texts. In Chinese lore and literature, the physical and tangible dimension of love, inclusive of sex and passion, is presented as belonging to the realm of human beings: that the desire to experience them is strong enough to pull gods down from heaven and ghosts back to life (like Du Liniang, for example) or drive them to consort with humans can be read as a sort of reassuring message for the living.38 More importantly for our present concern, there seems to be a sort of continuity between the here-and-now and the afterlife through the medium of the sexual experience through the body of women who engage in sex work. After all, sexual pleasure is often the closest to heaven that many human beings will ever get and, since courtesans in late imperial China were represented as the women who were, physically and culturally, the very gate of access to the paradise of the flesh, it is logical that they should be seen as some sort of supernatural creatures. There is more: in Chinese sexology, and especially in pornographic novels, the experience of orgasm is presented as a small death, a

37 Rou putuan, The Carnal Prayer Mat, perhaps Li Yu’s most famous novel, was first published in 1657. Li Yu, Rouputuan (Taibei: Taiwan da Ying bai ge gu fen yu xian gong si, 1994). 38 Du Liniang is the heroine of Tang Xianzu’s play Mudan ting. See Tang Xianzu, “Mudan ting,” in Xu Shuofang, ed., Tang Xianzu xiqu ji (Shanghai, 1982).

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moment in which the boundaries between life and death are blurred.39 Perhaps then, to have sex workers who by virtue of their profession were the tools of this ‘small death’, as intermediaries between these two realms of existence, could be read as a way to represent death as a less powerful transformation: if sex is a precursor of death and a way to experience it, pleasurably, during one’s lifetime, this category of women could play a very important role as conveyor both of death and of life, both of reassurance and threat. This dual role, we shall see, is one of the main ones that the adult courtesan plays and capitalizes on in late Qing novels. For now, however, we are still concerned with the initial steps that a courtesan must take to initiate her journey. The ideal text to begin to reconstruct the vertical, downward fall of the heavenly-creaturecum-sex-worker in all its complexity and phases is Haishang mingji sida jingang qishu, written by Wu Jianren (1867−1910) under the pseudonym of Chousi Zhuren.40 This novel is not considered a literary 39 For Chinese understandings of orgasm, in medicine and fiction, and its relationship to death, see Douglas Wile, ed., Art of the Bedchamber. The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics including Women’s Solo Meditation Texts (State University of New York Press, 1992); McMahon, 1988; McMahon, 1995; R. H. Van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Brill, 2004); R. H. Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China. A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1664 A.D. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961); R. H. Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China. A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1664 A.D. (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 40 Published in the middle of 1898, just before the crackdown on the Reformers, it consists of two parts of fifty chapters each: there was a gap in time between the composition of the two halves, which were published separately, but not too far apart. The authorship is still somewhat debated. See Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898]. The page numbers I will use refers to the 1996 reprint, and not to the 1898 original. For the controversy over the attribution to Wu Jianren, see Wei Shaochang, Wanqing si da xiaoshuojia (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwuyin shuguan, 1993), 65−70; Guo Changhai, “Wu Jianren xieguo shenme changpian xiaoshuo,” Shinmatsu shosetsu 17 (1994): 25. In Chapter 99, the author gives us some biographical information that fits Wu’s biographical background well, except that he shifts his native place from Guangdong to Guangxi. Wu Jianren, in his 1906 wenyan work devoted to late Qing courtesans, Hu Baoyu (the famous late Qing courtesan), had a section devoted to Sai Jinhua: this shows that he had both interest in and knowledge of the main events of the life of Sai Jinhua, which in the 1906 text he recounts exactly in the same way as they are recounted in the 1898 novel; see Wu Jianren, “Hu Baoyu”, in Wofo shanren wenji (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1989), 7. The section about Sai Jinhua is also reprinted in Zeng Pu, 1990, 459. Wu Jianren edited a tabloid newspaper in Shanghai in 1898−1899 called Caifeng bao, “Colorful Wind Journal.” Beginning with 7.12 of 1898, it carries an advertisement for this novel prominently on its front page. The same advert is reprinted on 7.13, 7.17, 7.22, 7.79, and 8.8, beginning with: “For some years (or during the past year) visitors to Shanghai have referred to the four prostitutes Lin Daiyu, Lu Lanfan, Jin Xiaobao, and Zhang Shuyu as the sida jingang. Later

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masterpiece, nor can it be considered among Wu Jianren’s best works.41 For all its qualitative shortcomings, however, it is a wonderful tool to reconstruct the journeys that fictional courtesans undertook to cross the Niehai 孽海 (‘the sea of evil karma’). To explain why, let’s turn to the text: [Shen Xiaoqing] was quite calm: she went back to her room and wrote the three characters Jin Hongjun on her hand. Then she took out many leaves of gold, rolled them up in the necessary fashion, and swallowed them. She finally changed into a bright red and green new dress and climbed into bed for a restful sleep.42

Shen Xiaoqing, a blind fortuneteller’s daughter, has become a prostitute after her father’s death. She is abandoned by the unfaithful Jin Hongjun, after she has helped him with funding to get to the capital to take the metropolitan exams and in which he is selected zhuangyuan, the highest rank attainable through the examination system. Devastated by his rejection, Shen Xiaoqing kills herself, only to be reborn as a Suzhou courtesan.43 In her second incarnation, she loses her virginity to Jin Buhuan, the rascally son of Jin Hongjun, whom she then proceeds to marry, to cuckold with many different men, and to eventually poison. From this perspective, her suicide is an act of defiance, rather than of defeat. Shen Xiaoqing’s act of writing the name Jin Hongjun on her hand points out that much: her vengeance spans over two lifetimes and crosses the boundaries between life and death. It is a gesture addressed to two different audiences: to those who will find the girl’s body in the morning, it will give a very precise explanation of why

(or recently), because Jin Xiaobao did not (or does not) qualify as a jingang, they have replaced her with Fu Yulian.” Because this is so prominent in the advert, it is possible that Wu Jianren, himself, had done the replacing. I owe this precious piece of information to Patrick Hanan. See also Guo Changhai, 1994, 32, for another advert for this novel published in Shenbao (3 April 1898). 41 The author states in Chapter 51 that Shanghai culture has declined, a fact that could explain the somewhat sudden stylistic and narrative shift that takes place from Chapter 50 onwards. 42 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], 420. 43 It was commonly believed that in real life Sai Jinhua was the reincarnation of a courtesan Hong Jun had abandoned; we can see that here Wu Jianren too subscribed to this view, which Zeng Pu later also deployed in his first edition of Niehaihua. After May Fourth intellectuals criticized him for this ‘superstitious’ old-style device, Zeng Pu revised the novel and eliminated the plot of evil karmic retribution from the relationship between Fu Caiyun and Hong Jun.

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she decided to take her own life. To Shen Xiaoqing, herself, and to those in the underworld, it will be a reminder of the karmic debt that Jin Hongjun owes Shen Xiaoqing.44 More than one century later, this dramatic act of self-assertion is still quite meaningful for the present audience, embarked as we are on an exploration of the representations of courtesans in late Qing fiction: Shen Xiaoqing is none other than the very first fictional persona of the protean Sai Jinhua, whom we shall encounter on many occasions and under different disguises. However, Shen Xiaoqing, just as her Tang predecessors, also has quite an impressive celestial pedigree: she is the human incarnation of Mo Liqing, a very manly and fierce jingang 金剛, or Guardian god. In Chapter 1 of the novel, we are told that at the time of the fall of the Shang dynasty, Jiang Ziya, the marshal who helped King Wu of Zhou to defeat the evil King Zhou of Shang, invested Mo Liqing (originally a demon) as the heavenly king in control of wind; along with his three brothers, Mo Lihong, Mo Lishou and Mo Lihai (also invested as heavenly kings), Mo Liqing then began his career as a Dharma protector.45 For a while, the four brothers worked as guardian gods in a Buddhist temple but, by looking at the people going in and out of the temple, they were stirred by the desire to go to earth and explore carnality. The Daoist divinity Yuan Shi Tian Zun, Primal Celestial Excellency, decides to grant the brothers their wish: he is worried, however, that their original demonic nature could create a great deal of trouble on earth and so decides that they will have to experience humanity through a woman’s body. There is no doubt that the author of Haishang mingji sida jingang qishu had in mind Fengshen yanyi 封神演義 (“The Investiture of the Gods”), a Ming novel that tells the story of how the first king of the

44 For a more detailed analysis of female suicide in late imperial Chinese fiction, see P. Zamperini, “Untamed Hearts. Eros and Suicide in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction,” in Paul Ropp, Harriet Zurndorfer, and Paola Zamperini, eds., Passionate Women. Female Suicide in Late Imperial China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001). 45 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], 393 and ff. Originally the jingang are ‘just’ vajra pani balin, or strong heroes, who become the guardian gods who stand at the entrance of temples (W. E. Soothill and L. Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms. With Sanskrit and English equivalents and a Sanskrit—Pali Index, [Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 1937], 347). It was Amogha who began the conflation between the jingang and temple guardians, by introducing into China the sida tian wang, four heavenly kings, as the four giant temple-guardians (ibid., 173). Amogha, a Singhalese of northern brahmanic descent who lived in the eighth century AD, was the head of the Yogacara school in China (ibid., 108).

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Zhou dynasty defeated the last king of the Shang dynasty and how he and his generals were invested with heavenly ranks and deified.46 The names, the titles, the blood relationship, the appearance, the magic weapons of the four jingang are taken quite literally from the earlier novel, with the only exception of Mo Lishou, who has lost his two whips but not his familiar striped marten. This is an important point, not only to clarify the identity of the gods who are the main protagonists, in their female personae, of the late Qing novel, but also to point out the comic aspect of taking four fierce martial gods, who appear in a well-known text devoted to fighting and martial pursuits and making them heroines of the demimonde. Wu Jianren chose the four guardian gods as his soon-to-be transgenderal protagonists with the explicit intent to poke fun at four real people, who were among the most famous courtesans of the Shanghai

46 Anon., Fengshen yanyi (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1988). Usually attributed to Lu Xixing (1520−1601?), a Daoist priest interested in Tantric Buddhism; as a matter of fact, we see an amalgamation of Buddhist and Daoist gods in this work: we find the above mentioned Yuan shi tian zun, who, together with Laozi, was one of the highest divinities of the Daoist pantheon, as well as our four jinggang. Here is how they are described in Chapter 40 of the Fengshen yanyi: “The eldest brother Mo Liqing is twenty-four-feet tall, with a face resembling that of a crab, and the hair of his beard is like copper-wire. He fights on foot with a long spear, and he has an infallible sword called ‘Blue Cloud’, on which there are charms and a seal saying ‘earth, wind, fire and wind’. This wind is a black wind in which there are hundreds of thousands of spears: should somebody happen upon it, his limbs would be hacked to pieces. As to the fire, [it is like] golden serpents stirring and coiling, sending everywhere black smoke that covers people’s eyes, a roaring blaze that burns people, and there is no way to escape it. The weapon of Mo Lihong is a parasol called ‘Parasol of Chaos Primordial’, studded with emeralds, other green precious stones, and ‘shine-in-the-night’ pearls, green dust pearls, green fire pearls, green water pearls, ‘eliminate-the-cold’ pearls, ‘establish-complexion’ pearls, ‘stop-the-wind’ pearls, and also pearls which are threaded together to form the words: ‘loading the universe’. One does not dare to open this parasol, because when it is opened heaven and earth are covered in darkness, the sun and the moon lose their light; when one rotates it, the world shakes. Mo Lihai carries a spear and on his back there is a four-stringed pipa that produces the same effect as the ‘Blue Cloud Sword’ when played and the four strings correspond to ‘earth, water, fire and wind’. Mo Lishou carries two whips and a bag in which is concealed a peculiar creature resembling a rat, Huahudiao (the striped marten). When hurled into air this creature will assume the shape of an elephant with wings on its sides and will devour every one” (Anon., 1988, 356−357). See also Liu Ts’un Yan, Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Novels: The Authorship of the Feng Shen Yen I (Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz, 1962), Vol. I, 217−219. Wu Jianren’s novel picks up where Fengshen yanyi ends, namely with the four gods being invested with their heavenly titles: the connection between the two fictional works must have been an intentional choice on the part of the author. The illustrations that accompany the late Qing novel match perfectly the descriptions found in the Fengshen yanyi.

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he knew so well: the four fictional demons-cum-gods are reborn as Sai Jinhua, Lin Daiyu, Lu Lanfen and Zhang Shuyu, four of Shanghai’s most famous late nineteenth-century courtesans, known as the sida jingang 四大金剛, a sort of Gang of Four ante litteram. This appellation had been created by the Shanghai press and writers for a group of courtesans who commanded a prominent presence in the Shanghai social scene: while it is true that the four courtesans who bore this title changed from one source to the next, the four most frequently mentioned were Zhang Shuyu, Jin Xiaobao, Lu Lanfen and Lin Daiyu.47 It is, thus, interesting that Wu Jianren decided to include Sai Jinhua in the picture, becoming the first fictional writer to produce an exhaustive account of her life in the xiaoshuo format.48 To be accurate in his reconstruction of the actual background of the four women’s lives does not seem to have been one of Wu Jianren’s concerns: he states in Chapter 1 that his book deals with tall tales, castles in the air, and, as we shall see, his depiction of Sai Jinhua’s life is very different from the more canonical and accurate versions circulating in late Qing and Republican China. His aim is satirical, not historical: what better way to give the reader a good laugh than to satirize the most four famous courtesans of Shanghai, whose popular appellation was indeed the ‘four guardian gods’, by making them the earthly incarnations of four demonic brothers? This strong element of

47 See Hershatter, 1997, 169−171, for more detailed information about the historical characters who constituted this group. 48 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapters 79−81. To explain how the four (supposedly real) jingang came to be known with this appellation, Wu presents the following story: Jin Xiaobao is actually a false jingang. One day a beggar (originally a man of letters, who loses everything because of his dream of becoming a stand-up comedian, and who is none other than the reincarnation of a celestial dog, sent down to earth as a punishment for his excessive barking) sees Jin Xiaobao coming in his direction and kneels down in front of her. True to his original nature of dog who barks when it is not appropriate, he calls her “jingang pusa,” Guardian God and Bodhisattva! Pleased and flattered, Jin Xiaobao gives him money: of course, from that moment on, every time the beggar sees her, he calls her a jingang, in order to keep her money flowing into his bowl. He also does the same every time he sees Lin Daiyu, Lu Lanfen and Zhang Shuyu (who also pay him quite generously), and that is how their fame as the ‘Four Guardian Gods of Shanghai’ spread through Shanghai, thanks to a muddled celestial-dog-cum-failed-comedian-turned-beggar who speaks out inappropriately and is interested in making a living by flattering others. Sai Jinhua replaces Jin Xiaobao after she hears that Jin does not want to be called jingang anymore: by showing herself off in the streets, Sai Jinhua makes the gullible brothel-goers think she is really ‘hot’ material and, thus, becomes essential part of the ‘gang of four’ of Shanghai’s courtesans.

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comic relief, which runs throughout the novel, though not the focus of the present analysis, should neither be forgotten, nor ignored, especially because it is enhanced by the sense that the novel as a whole seems highly influenced by theater: to have four awesome-looking males transformed in four petite but just as fierce women, is actually reminiscent of the common practice of cross-dressing male actors, as well as that of having the actor playing the clown role dress in drag.49 In other words, the prostituted body and its socialization appear inextricably related to drama, performance and staging. II. One is not Born a Woman: Gender, Performativity and the Sexed Body Bodily ambiguity was translated into social gender according to patterns that identified the female with sexual deficiency and the male with androgynous erotic capabilities. These patterns show that although social gender overshadowed sexuality, this dominance was not total. Gender also involved sexual criteria ordering the male and female around the oppositions of active/passive, presence/absence. Moreover, gender accommodated the sexual in asymmetrical ways. Where individuals were socially powerful and/or had the capacity to act upon the world, sexual organs and sexual acts could be genderized as male. Female gender, on the other hand, was identified with those powerless persons whose bodies were read as defective and whose sexuality was passive or absent.50

The Daoist divinity Yuan Shi Tian Zun worries about the four brothers’ impending incarnation and its consequences: raw sexuality can be experienced only through a human body and even heavenly gods cannot alter this fact, no matter what consequences they may fear or foresee. Yuan Shi Tian Zun’s idea that a woman’s body would be less powerful and dangerous than a man’s (since a woman supposedly cannot engage in combat and kill enemies) is steeped in irony, as the whole novel then proceeds to illustrate the dangers the four brothers, once turned prostitutes, come to embody for the world at large. However, clearly, at this early stage, there is a lot at stake for Mo Liqing in becoming human: not only he has to literally fall from heaven, he must also change sex. So how does Mo Liqing, one of our four Chinese

49

I am indebted to Andrea Goldman for this reference. C. Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 9. 2: 24−25. 50

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Orlandos ante litteram, go from a heavenly and male creature to an earthly and female courtesan?51 As the author points out, sex change: . . . is a very difficult matter indeed: . . . to change a man into a woman, first you have to castrate him, then you have to cut a way into [his genitals] to provide him with a vagina: only then can he become physically a woman.52

Mercifully, the author spares his readers gruesome operations: the castration happens through the magic means of the guyang qiyin jiu 沽陽起陰酒 (“the wine to confuse the Yang and to stir the Yin”) served to the four guardian gods during a banquet held by the King of the Wheel of Rebirth, the one in charge of their incarnation. Fooled by the festive settings and totally oblivious to what is about to happen, they drink the magic potion: All of a sudden they felt an odd ticklish sensation between their legs. When they stretched out their hand to touch [themselves], they realized that there was no trace of their jade stalks and that the Peach Spring had already burst forth. They were stunned. Mo Liqing then got up with the pretext of relieving himself. Once in the privy, he took a good look [down there], and could not help gnashing his teeth in anger.53

Incensed at and possibly deranged by the loss of his manhood, Mo Liqing decides to flee the premises. After having traveled for a while on a beam of multi-colored light, he falls off it: it is then that he is reborn as Shen Xiaoqing, the daughter of a blind fortuneteller. Of course, his anger is explainable with the fact that Mo Liqing, like his brothers, thought that he was in for a farewell banquet before going down to earth to carouse for a while. He had no idea that he would have to give up his most treasured ‘jade stalk’. The fool should have known better. Already he and his brothers, though they had been granted their wish to go down to earth to live out their worldly longings, had to relinquish the magic objects that were emblematic of their stature of Guardian gods and Heavenly kings: he had to leave behind his magic sword, Mo Lihong his parasol, Mo Lishou his white rat-like pet, and 51 This is where the lore of Guanyin could also be relevant to this novel more so than drama, chuanqi and Honglou meng put together, because she is the most illustrious example of transgenderal divinity in the Chinese pantheon. She, like Shen Xiaoqing, underwent a sex change, from the manly Avalokitesvara to the feminine and motherly Bodhisattva of Compassion. 52 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], 395. 53 Ibid., 396.

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Mo Lihai his pipa. Their castration is presented as a further disempowerment, which should not surprise: they have officially become members of the ‘weaker sex’. Mo Liqing’s fall to earth is then preceded by another very significant fall from male to female, from a penetrating body into a penetrable one. As he is fleeing from the scene of his emasculation, leaving his three younger brothers captives of the King of the Wheel of Rebirth until his return, he ponders his fate, his duoluo nüshen 墮落女身, his fall (in the sense of decadence) into a woman’s body. His astute conclusion is that, since he has already sunk so low as to become a woman, he might as well become one of some prospect, which means a beautiful woman, and a beautiful woman with a career can only turn out to be a prostitute. This first transformation has very interesting repercussions for a gender-conscious reader. One cannot help noticing that, just as it is the case with human births, the determination of the sex happens via the genitals. Since these are adult bodies, one could have expected mention of breasts growing or of beards falling off, for example. We find nothing of this kind, however: the transformation is limited to the genital area. This genital sex change has to happen in the world of gods, before birth: this seems to imply that the soul/spirit is sexed and that the physical body of these heavenly creatures has a clear correspondent in the physical body of their earthly incarnations. The body and its sex are presented as the faithful materialization of the spirit: sexual karma is literally written and carved on the body before birth. This consideration brings up the idea of porosity between different realms of existence, as well as the magic role of writing on the skin within this context of sexing gods and souls in view of their earthly incarnation. This role is emphasized again shortly after Mo Liqing’s flight. Once Yuan Shi Tian Zun is informed that Mo Liqing has escaped from the custody of the King of the Wheel of Rebirth and has been reborn as Shen Xiaoqing, he dispatches Da Tongzi, the Fairy Boy, to retrieve him and bring him back to heaven, so that Mo Liqing can be sent back to earth together with his brothers to meet the destiny originally planned for him. When Da Tongzi asks how he will be able to recognize Mo Liqing in his earthly form, Yuan Shi Tian Zun opens up the boy’s shirt and writes a charm on his chest, namely the four characters fuxin beiyue 負心背約 (‘ungrateful and unfaithful’). The fairy boy is then sent to carry out his mission, written out on his body. And, indeed, he becomes the Jin Hongjun who breaks not only his promise to Xiaoqing, but her heart as well.

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The confusion of gender and sex, and of human and superhuman relationships, increases as the narrative unfolds. In Chapter 17, when the King of the Wheel of Rebirth brings Mo Liqing, who, after his first incarnation has been finally brought back to the place he had escaped from without permission, to the Niejingtai 孽鏡臺 (‘Terrace of the Karma Mirror’). Mo Liqing, who has retained Shen Xiaoqing’s outer appearance, dazed and unable to remember his actual background, looks in the mirror and recognizes his true self, as the blue-faced guardian god: “Yuanlai shi wo 原來是我,” (“It was me all along!”), s/he exclaims.54 His body has become a set of Chinese boxes and, since the outer appearance does not match his inner essence, the magic mirror is necessary to reveal his inner core. His sex change and his feminine appearance take place on the surface of his skin. Gender and gendered behaviors, visible displays of internalized norms, come into play as well, as becomes clear when he is reunited with his three brothers, who waste no time in making fun of him. When they saw Xiaoqing’s appearance, they all burst out laughing. “Long time no see, older brother. Poor us kept prisoners here, waiting for you to come back so that we could be dispatched down to earth together! We had no idea you had already become a woman. If it hadn’t been for the small ghost who came in to inform us, why, we would have mistaken you for the bodhisattva Guanyin!” Xiaoqing had no rebuttal, so she just greeted them with folded hands and said: “It’s been a long time.” Mo Lihong asked: “Older brother, how can you, a woman, greet us in a manly fashion?” And Mo Lihai joined in: “If we are to go by his looks, we cannot call him older brother anymore: we will have to call her little sister!” He turned his head to laugh and called Xiaoqing twice ‘little sister’. Xiaoqing said: “You three, stop picking on me. We will all be alike in a short while.”55

The first problem we encounter is a linguistic one. In the late imperial Chinese original, the personal pronoun ta 他 could be used for either feminine or masculine, and thus is so much appropriate for this gender-bending situation. This passage illuminates how sex change determines the ritual and social behavior Xiaoqing has to engage in, a predicament she had also with the King on the terrace of the Karma

54 55

Ibid., 425. Ibid., 426.

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Mirror. S/he knows, after s/he has looked in the magic looking glass, that s/he is actually a man, but still looks like a woman: that is why her greeting her younger brothers like a man, with both hands folded in front of her chest, has an undeniably comic effect. For all its comic impact, this scene further helps us to detect the strategies that make up the gender behavior of late imperial Chinese culture. It is fascinating, along this line of thought, to see how Mo Liqing/Xiaoqing shares his/her wisdom about being a human being and a woman. Mo Lishou said: “You two, my older brothers, stop picking on him. For my part, I want to ask our older brother’s instruction about one matter. Now that you are a person of experience, how about this incarnation business: is it painful?” Xiaoqing replied: “Not really painful, it is like a spell of hot and muggy darkness. I(t) felt a little uncomfortable, then my body all of a sudden felt cold and I was born. The painful thing is that you have this sensation of piercing cold from your forehead to your stomach.”56

Shen Xiaoqing seems to have retained his higher status, both as the oldest brother and as the one with more experience. However, along with this experience, s/he has picked clearly gender-marked womanly habits, such as sighing while talking, so he is again teased by his brothers: “Look at our older brother, just few years as a woman, and he’s gotten rid of all his virility.” The god-in-drag, whose transgenderal body moves back and forth between different realms of existence, that of demons, heavenly creatures, and human beings, is read as a woman because he looks and acts (most of the time) like one. The sex change alone would not be enough, as we see in the case of Mo Liqing’s brothers. Why transgenderal, as an adjective, and not a past participle, such as transgendered? Because the adjective, unlike the past participle, expresses well the element of protean fluidity for the body that remains a constant characteristic of our queer gods: when Mo Liqing loses his penis, he finds himself physically a woman, but has to go through a series of deeper transformations to learn how to be a woman. His gender identity is learned and reinforced constantly: the action of gender is a ritual social drama, which requires a repeated performance. Gender is presented here as performative, i.e., as constituted through the

56

Ibid.

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repetitions of certain acts that come to represent gender in the eyes of society and, therefore, constitute the identity gender purports to be.57 As Judith Butler points out in her book “Gender Trouble” while discussing drag and gender performance, Mo Liqing’s corporeality, and his brothers’ reactions to it, are created by three contingent dimensions: anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance.58 Gender should not be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. Bodily gestures, such as sighing or clasping one’s hands in greeting, are stylized, and they require an audience that assigns them value and recognizes them as gendered. The trouble for Mo Liqing, prompted by his sex change, is to learn how to constitute his new gender identity through gender performance once he is reminded of the original self lurking underneath his mutated body, especially given that, as the readers learn once he reaches the end of his journey through the world of the red dust, there will yet be another layer to peel away to reveal the true self of the four gods. Gender stands as a threshold to cross (trans), so Mo Liqing performs a crossing that is not permanent, but situates him in a hiatus where his sexual and gender identity become confused. The pains and troubles of the crossing from male to female are pointed out in the text, as we have seen. Mo Liqing’s brothers complain about the fact that being sexed as female can bring up desires hard to satisfy: After we drank the wine of that confounded king, we were kept prisoners here. Often we felt an odd itching, hard to bear, and when the itch started, all our body felt numb and weak, we couldn’t move. We did not know that being human came with this handicap.59

The handicap being, of course, having sexual desires that cannot be fulfilled. The sexing of the guardian gods’ bodies has made them become sexual creatures with a strong sexual drive. The consequences of this passage are manifold. It would seem, first of all, that before their sex

57 For this definition of gender performativity, see J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), especially 140−141. 58 Ibid., 137. 59 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], 395.

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change, they had no sexual desires. Or did they? They became aroused by looking at the worshippers of the temple under their protection. As a result of this arousal, which they could not pursue with their male heavenly bodies, they lost their penises and became prisoners, first of all of the King of the Wheel of Rebirth, and secondly of their now female bodies. They are still spirits but their bodies are becoming more confining and demanding with each passing moment. Their sex change from male to female makes them sexual and sex becomes a defining part of their identity. Before, as male gods, they did not have to deal with sexual desires, or with a passive, confining role in which their bodies were overcome by a numbing itch that they could not, as it were, scratch. This is another point where Butler’s analysis acquires striking resonances with the gender-bending taking place in the late Qing novel. While discussing Monique Wittig’s “One is not Born a Woman,”60 Butler writes that, according to Wittig, . . . [t]o be male is not to be ‘sexed’, to be ‘sexed’ is always a way of becoming particular and relative, and males within this system participate in the form of the universal person. For Wittig, then, the ‘female sex’ does not imply some other sex, as in ‘male sex’; the ‘female sex’ implies only itself, enmeshed, as it were, in sex, trapped in what Beauvoir called the circle of immanence. Because ‘sex’ is a political and cultural interpretation of the body, there is no gender distinction along conventional lines; gender is built into sex, and sex proves to have been gender from the start. Wittig argues that within this set of compulsory social relations, women become ontologically suffused with sex; they are their sex, and conversely, sex is necessarily feminine.61

Indeed, the four Mos seem to be the living proof that, in late imperial Chinese fiction, sex was represented as necessarily feminine and that to be woman meant ‘to be sex’. Better yet, as it will become clearer in the course of this book, ‘to be sex’ was represented in these novels as a prerogative of the specific category of women under study here. While they are still spirits, the brothers enter the realm of sexuality, but only after they have gone from male to female, and they have become entrapped in a circle of unfulfilled desire that only intercourse with human men will satisfy. In other words, they are incomplete because they cannot reach jouissance by themselves and because they are in the wrong setting to achieve such jouissance. 60 61

M. Wittig, “One is not Born a Woman,” Feminist Issues 1.2 (1981): 53. Butler, 1990, 113.

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Their transgenderal bodies, weighed down by inscriptions and encodings of desire, sex and gender, have to be carried through a lower realm of existence, the human world, where these women go from powerless and passive, as the women depicted by Wittig and reconstructed by Butler, to extremely powerful and dangerous sexual predators. What is clear, at the end of the first leg of the downward journey of the courtesan, is that it is through reading her body, its construction and/or deconstruction, and the meanings attached, erased and re-inscribed onto it, that we will be able to discover the complexities of gender and sexual politics at stake in late imperial Chinese representations of prostitution. III. The City of Lost Children: The Childhood of a Courtesan What happens after the fall from heaven to earth, when the male god, via his sex change, finally hits the ground? All we know about Mo Liqing/Shen Xiaoqing’s entrance in prostitution is that she becomes a sex worker only after her father’s death. Her childhood and her socialization are not presented in detail: the emphasis in her first life is to construct the karmic relationship between her and the unfaithful Jin Hongjun. In order to better understand the complexities of the childhood of a sex worker and the means through which her social status is acquired, we have to consider also her second incarnation and those of her three brothers, because their childhoods help to illustrate the different venues through which little girls came to be sex workers of different ranks, training and backgrounds.62 In Shen Xiaoqing’s second incarnation, she is born to Madam Shi, a rare beauty in her thirties who manages the Autumn Barge, a renowned and refined brothel on the water in Suzhou.63 Though Madam Shi does not entertain clients, she dallies with actors and, thus, becomes pregnant: she does not know who the father is, but this does not concern her in the least. The brothel world is a world where Confucian values are reversed: it is women who count, both as breadwinners and as decision-makers. Pregnancy out of wedlock for women like Madam Shi is not a source of shame and distress. On the contrary, the author

62 Where necessary, I will draw examples from other late Qing novels that deal with this particular phase of a courtesan’s life. 63 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 19.

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points out that while, in good families, the birth of a son was cause of rejoicing (since male heirs were more important for their dominant role in lineage and ancestral worship), “. . . in the case of those who work in the prostitution business things are different: when they give birth to a daughter, for them is like getting a money-shaking tree.”64 This is due to the fact that a daughter can be trained as a sex worker herself: her economic potential in a brothel is definitely higher than that of a son. The reversal of values is shown in the festivities held for the xiao wawa 小娃娃 (‘the little doll’) that match those held for a male heir in the world of respectable folks: Madam Shi’s ‘colleagues’ all visit her to extend their congratulations on the happy event and, at the one hundred days celebration, her clients come to visit and it is one of her patrons who chooses the name Chunfei for Mo Liqing/Shen Xiaoqing. The crossing of gender boundaries continues then also in this ritual entrance in the world of human beings: the little girl is valued and treated as a little boy would have been, because she exists in a space where canonical social standards cannot be applied. The journey from innocent (?) child to sex worker is not fraught with immense obstacles and ordeals for Shi Chunfei. She enters the changjia 娼家 (’family of whores’) through the main gate, as it were, by virtue of being born into a high-class establishment. However, if we look at what happens to her three brothers, we see that their transformation from children into sex workers is less direct and much more traumatizing. Mo Lishou, for instance, is reborn as the daughter of a Jiangbei woman beggar and begins her journey with the lowest social rank possible.65 As Emily Honig shows, at the turn of the century and in the Republican period, the Jiangbei category was used among Shanghai people to individuate a despised and segregated minority who, because of the progressive impoverishment of their native area due to floods and famine, had to leave northern Jiangsu and migrated to the richer, more industrialized southern Jiangsu, where they came to dominate the ranks of unskilled laborers.66 64

Ibid. Ibid., Chapters 19, 25, 26, 27. 66 Jiangbei, also known as Subei, was a region that included all of Jiangsu north of the Yangzi River. The two terms were used as synonyms in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Shanghai to indicate the geographical and social origins of a vast group of non-native dwellers who lived at the bottom of the city’s social ladder. See E. Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity. Subei People in Shanghai, 1850−1980 (Yale Uni65

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The little girl, who has no name and no father, fits the stereotype of the Jiangbei identity to perfection: after a severe famine, when she is only a few days old, her mother takes her away from their native region, and they beg their way through life by singing Jiangbei opera. It is details like this that make the narrative of this late Qing novel contemporary and realistic, and at times blur the boundaries between fictional storytelling and accurate portrayal of actual practices. Yet, they should not mislead the scholar of Chinese fiction. It is precisely in these moments of realistic details that the pre-modern convention of telling the story of the courtesan begins to crack to reveal modern anxieties, as we shall see presently. Even more importantly, for each realistic detail he adds, the author is mindful not to forget the supernatural and imaginary dimension of the characters. Therefore, the main characteristic of the little beggar girl is that she has a pet snake, the reincarnation of her celestial familiar Huahudiao. Mother and daughter eventually end up in Shanghai, attracted by its lore as a place of wealth and riches, but they immediately get arrested for begging in the foreign concession. After experiencing police brutality and spending the night in the beggars’ jail, they are released and manage to find shelter with other Jiangbei beggars, who live as a community on dilapidated boats by the riverside.67 The beggars are forced to leave all of a sudden when one official starts demanding dock money: the mother and the little girl happen to be out begging when this happens, and are left behind. The frailty and the helplessness of this stratum of Shanghai’s population is dramatized in this episode and hints at the main motif of this and other contemporary fictional works, namely deracination and deterritorialization. Literally stranded in a city that they cannot orientate themselves in, deprived of the shelter of their Jiangbei community, mother and daughter have to spend the night on the street, where the little beggar girl is kidnapped by another beggar who sells her, for eight thousand cash, to a water peddler, who deals in children as a side business. He is the first man who takes an active role in the girl’s life, by giving her

versity Press, 1992) and E. Honig, “Migrant Culture in Shanghai: In Search of a Subei Identity,” in F. Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992), 239. 67 For real life conditions of beggars in China and how they differ from the representations discussed here, see Hanchao Lu, Street Criers. A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars (Stanford University Press, 2005).

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new clothes and, at long last, a name. Nevertheless, the new clothes are just to trick others into believing she is his daughter, and he renames her Zhuzi (‘Pig’), which reveals the status of disposable merchandise she has in the eyes of the water peddler. Through her separation from her only true relative, the child’s biological identity is lost forever and she is ushered into a cycle of name and social changes that take her further away from her family roots. Due to new edicts aimed at containing and eradicating traffic in children, the kidnapper has to leave Shanghai and to travel all over Jiangsu in order to find somebody willing to buy the little girl.68 After he has secured a deal to sell her as a maid in Yangzhou, he has to flee helter-skelter back to Shanghai when somebody recognizes him. For two months he finds no way to get rid of Pig: upper class madams do not want the girl because she has a Jiangbei accent and big, unattractive eyes, while lower class brothels are unwilling to take in a girl too young to receive customers.69 Eventually he manages to sell her to Madam Li, who runs a flower-smoke room (the lowest of all brothels in the hierarchy of prostitution) and agrees to buy the little girl for seventy yuan because she, herself, is from Jiangbei.70 Madam Li, just like the water peddler before her, renames Pig Li Wenxian and gives her a new set of clothes, assigning her the job of going out in the street to literally grab customers for the older girls of her establishment. Mo Lihai is, in turn, born in Suzhou, into the Zhu household, where there are no men.71 Her mother, who works as a caterer, names her A Qiao. At the age of six, she meets, as she is playing on the street, the little beggar girl and her green snake who have made their way to Suzhou in their wanderings. Moved by unconscious recollections of her previous existence, A Qiao starts spending her days at the door, gazing in the distance, in the hope of seeing the beggar girl again. A child trafficker spots her and, pleased by her good looks, kidnaps her using a stupefying drug. The market in small towns is saturated in such human goods, however, so he brings her to Shanghai. The

68 About the kidnapping of children in Shanghai, see Yuan Bo, Jiu Shanghai heimu (Yuanfang chubanshe, 1998). 69 As Emily Honig points out, speech—and at times, dress—was the only marker of Jiangbei identity. See Honig, 1992b, 241. 70 Hershatter, 1997, 49−50. 71 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapters 19−21.

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city immediately mesmerizes the captive little girl with all the different sorts of entertainment it offers. There she is sold for three hundred foreign yuan to one of the city’s most famous courtesans, Hu Baoyu.72 Having real historical figures appear as characters in fictional texts was a very common trait in late Qing novels. The Shanghai courtesan, here portrayed as a physically unattractive but socially skilled and sexually insatiable woman, renames her Hu Yue’e. Hu Baoyu binds her feet and has musicians come in to train her: Yue’e, who still retains some of her supernatural skills (she is the incarnation of the guardian god who had a pipa as a magic weapon), does not need that much training after all and gets on her way to become an upper-class sex worker without any major trauma. The least developed childhood plot is that of Mo Lihong, who is born to a servant in the mansion of a Shanghai gentleman. Her first human name is A Bao: she becomes totally fascinated with the courtesans’ lifestyle and eventually manages to join a brothel through the help of another maidservant, who works for a courtesan. Greed for all the beautiful objects the courtesans she meets possess is the main drive behind her desire to become a courtesan herself: unlike her brothers, she is neither born into the prostitution world, nor forced into it. In an act of homage towards the real life Hu Baoyu, the first courtesan to select the name of Honglou meng’s melancholic heroine as her ‘working name’, A Bao chooses Lin Daiyu as her professional name. So, what are the differences that the author of the novel maps between these paths into professional prostitution? Economic factors appear crucial in how the girls’ careers develop. A Bao/Lin Daiyu and Li Wenxian start off from a very economically disadvantaged position, while Hu Yue’e and Shi Chunfei begin at the highest level possible within the brothel’s hierarchy. Even if in the case of Hu Yue’e, her adoptive mother seems to genuinely care for her, it is mostly because of the little girl’s moneymaking potential; these differences are erased when it comes to the economic value attached to the children’s bodies. They are all assets and their worth, at this early stage, when they are still passively manipulated by adults, is based first of all on their looks

72

For more data about Hu Baoyu, a real historical character, see Hershatter, 1997, 176. Wu Jianren later wrote a whole book of memoirs dedicated to this courtesan. See Wu Jianren, “Hu Baoyu,” Wofo shanren wenji 7 (1989): 309−356.

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(that, though not permanently modifiable, can be altered through make-up, clothing, and foot-binding), then on their training. The children are exposed, sold, apprised, exchanged, washed up, dressed up and dolled up. Along with their original identity as gods, they all also lose their original social identity, as beggar, as maid servant, as girl from a good family (with the exception of Shi Chunfei): regardless of their different economic backgrounds, they all end up in the same social category. This shifting status and identity is reflected in their constant name changing. The names they acquire are all aimed at making them even more valuable assets. They take their mothers’ last names, unlike girls from good families and, then, once they have become adults, they use their name-changing skills for pure self-promotion. As they are manipulated, altered, renamed, their value is susceptible to fluctuation: for example, the beggar girl’s economic worth increases with each exchange of hands, the more she gets removed from her original social milieu. She goes from being a nameless entity to a veritable immortal (how much irony in her first human name, Wenxian, or Refined Immortal!), and her price on the market keeps rising. The children also share an incredible vulnerability at this stage in their life. Hu Yue’e and Shi Chunfei are vulnerable because of their beauty, Pig and A Bao because of their marginal social status that exposes them to dangers. We do not want to romanticize excessively the little girls. The rhetoric of the victimized female child can be quite disturbing for a feminist scholar because it tends to reproduce stereotypes of female weakness one would rather steer away from. However, it is the text itself, and more precisely the author, himself, who represents these four girls as innocent victims and, to a certain extent, turns them into martyrs. It is undeniable that the author must have had some intention to expose the evils of late Qing society, especially of the society he had known in Shanghai. In this, his novel could be seen also as an example of what Lu Xun called qianze xiaoshuo 譴責小說 (‘novels of social exposure’), a genre that was quite popular in this period. By narrating the childhoods of the four girls and the adventures that force them in the realm of adult sexuality, the author exposes the cruelty and the callousness of the men and women, of all ages and walks of life, involved with the prostitution business. The author, again, could be seen as using fiction to dramatize the dramatic circumstances of the renshi 人市 (‘the people’s market’) where, in real life, little girls were sold every day and provided a constant flux of

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‘fresh meat’ to sex work establishments.73 In late Ming narratives about courtesans, it was commonplace to bemoan poverty and an unjust fate as the reasons behind a young girl’s fall from social grace. In contrast, here the writer involves society in a very large and detailed fashion in the defilement of not just one, but many children, at the hands of multiple perpetrators. Social critique and satire are achieved by the author’s deployment of these four children in an unprecedented scale (and this is a characteristic we encounter also in the second section of the novel, which deals with the adult life of the courtesans). Nevertheless, this stage of the narrative is not just about exposing the corruption of Shanghai’s kidnappers and the miseries of the children’s market in the Jiangnan area: it is also about the sexing of these children’s bodies. Already we have witnessed the sexing of the divine male body in the upper realm of existence, when the four gods have been first sexed as biological females. As human children, born female as a consequence of this first sexing, they have to become sexual and sexualized. Here lies the nexus between sex, gender and gender performance: and this is why their entrance into the prostitution world culminates with their first sexual experience. In this sense, it is impossible to ignore the fact that most of the men who read these novels were turned on by reading about the misfortunes of young hapless girls: as Justine, Lolita and other sadomasochistic novels show, the innocent charm of a prepubescent girl has a powerful sexual pull. Indeed, it is almost exclusively in Ming and Qing pornography that we encounter virgins, as discussed in Chapter 2. In most late imperial novels, female characters who engage in prostitution are usually shown in their sexual adulthood, after they have lost their virginity. Usually we are not told much about their childhood, unless it is pertinent to the main plot; even then, it is usually told in a summarized form, full of formulaic expressions, about the unjust fate reserved to beautiful women. The novel presents us with a view that individuates quite clearly both the agents and the space for sexual activity aimed at pleasure: they are courtesans, whores and prostitutes, and those one would find in the semi-private, semi-public spaces created by brothels and streets.

73 According to Wei, Lu and Lu, during the Qing dynasty these were markets for human beings, where children and adults would be put on sale (Wei Qingyuan, Lu Qiyan, Lu Su, Qingdai nubi zhidu [Zhongguo renmin daxue, 1982], 49). For the traffic in girls and women during the late Qing period, see also C. Henriot, Belles de Shanghai. Prostitution et sexualité in Chine aux XIXe−XXe siècles (CNRS Editions, 1997), 187.

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This becomes the world of these lost children. The fall from grace into the realm of humans is not only a fall from one realm of existence into another: it is also a fall from a safe haven, where the characters are powerful, to a dangerous one in which the characters have no power whatsoever (until, that is, they get control of their bodies and start managing themselves). It is in this unsafe realm that sexuality is first experienced. It is either prompted by lust, by the body’s desires and the lack of self control of the characters involved, or by greed. The little girls have to acquire then the attributes that will make them independent, self-sufficient, money-making individuals in the urban space where they have ended up: another kind of fall is required, one that will mark both their body and their social destiny. Training in music, foot-binding, and learning social skills are meant to bring these fictional heroines to another, more important threshold that will mark their passage from childhood to adulthood.

CHAPTER TWO

LOST AND FOUND: THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE PROSTITUTED BODY THESE MEN HOLD RESPONSIBLE POSITIONS OF ALL KINDS IN THE BUSINESS WORLD and do not seem to regard it as anything out of the way to spend their money for this purpose. Such men are regular customers. THEY DO NOT LOSE THEIR SOCIAL STANDING BY THESE VISITS TO THE UNDERWORLD.1 La défloration d’une jeune fille, sauf exception, confirme les processus de la vierge: dans le mariage, elle suture définitivement le sexe, et hors mariage, elle le prostitute . . . C’est cette defloration qui fragmente la fémininité en ses deux constituants élementaires dont la vierge est porteuse: la maternité et la putainerie.2

Haishang mingji sida jingang qishu offers a very colorful representation of the process whereby one becomes a prostitute. Beyond the laughter evoked by the incarnations of the four late Qing transgenderal gods, the question they also raise remains quite serious: how does the socialization of the prostituted body happen and on what different linguistic and representational levels? What are the implications and the consequences that the loss of virginity, the very incipit of this process, engenders? These are fundamental questions, as the body is the measure of all things for a sex worker. Late imperial vernacular fiction defines this rite of passage as shi shen 失身 (’loss of the body’), expanding to include defloration as the most patent among the different forms of (violent and nonviolent) socialization of female

1 J. Washburn, The Underworld Sewer. A Prostitute Reflects on Life in the Trade, 1871−1909 (Bison Books, 1997), 212. 2 Dominique Grisoni, “Les Preuves du corps,” in Jean-Pierre Bardet et al., La Premiere Fois, ou, Le roman de la virginite perdue atravers les siecles et les continents (Editions Ramsay, 1981), 71.

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(and male, as we shall see presently) bodies in the brothels.3 From this angle, focusing on this particular stage of the courtesan’s development in the context of the sources under discussion should reveal the intricacies of the physical and erotic imaginary of Chinese men, while at the same time giving us insights into the cultural horizons of China. Ming and Qing novels depict a woman’s entrance into adult sexuality as heavily marked in terms of class and space. When a liangjia 良家 woman, from a respectable background, gets married and sleeps for the first time with her husband, her deflowering is described as po shen 破身 (‘breaking the body’), po gua 破瓜 (‘splitting the melon’), and other related expressions that, not surprisingly, position the man as the (grammatically and physically) active subject. Terms that mark the woman as (relatively speaking) the active subject, such as luo hong 落紅 (‘dropping red [blood]’) are rarer, and tend to mark the female body as the site which displays at the once the consummation of the marriage and the virtue of the bride. Clearly, this first group of idioms, though at times metaphorical, stems from the actual sexual penetration: at the same time, it also translates this very act in a more culturally specific arena of meanings. The act of yan hong 驗紅 (‘checking the red’; i.e., the blood traces on the bedding) is often depicted in vernacular fiction as collective moment of enjoyment of the triumph of normative heterosexual chastity norms.4 It is true that these same terms can be applied to someone deflowered in a brothel but, in this latter case, shi shen is by far the most common definition; it is also used a propos of a girl who loses her virginity outside of marriage, as a result of rape. It is then imperative to try and understand how loss of virginity could result in the loss

3 See Liu Dalin, Zhongguo gudai xingwenhua (Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1993), especially 592−603, 730−752; Shi Fang, Zhongguo xing wenhua shi (Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1993), especially 277−281, 392−396. It is interesting to note that most scholars engaged in exploring the construction of gendered body in traditional China, especially through the lens of traditional Chinese medicine, have hardly approached the topic of defloration: while consistent attention has been given to the construction and representation of the female body in relationship to menstruation, motherhood and childbearing, only two Chinese texts, to my knowledge, have superficially explored the rituals and the implications of deflowering both on a physical and a social level in traditional Chinese society. My conclusions are consequently based mostly on my understanding of the fictional representations and are not to be understood as historical reconstructions of actual practices. 4 Anon., Ge lian hua ying / Xu Jin Ping Mei (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1985), 634−635.

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of the body, whatever this may mean and, in order to do so, a short philological excursion may be in order. The first meaning of shi shen, beginning with pre-Qin and Han sources, is to lose one’s life, to die.5 Shen is usually understood as the social body, as opposed to ti 體 (‘the physical body’) or other more decidedly anatomical terms. In classical Chinese philosophy, although it can certainly be used to denote one’s physical being, shen is also taken to mean ‘person’ with the connotation of ‘self ’, in contrast with ren 人 (‘person’) with the connotation of ‘other’.6 As such, it could be translated also as ‘personhood’. At the same time, since it is a personhood, i.e., social identity, that comes to be defined through changes and modifications that take place on and can be displayed within and on one’s physical body (such as the change in hairstyle upon marriage), I would rather translate it with ‘body’, to stay close to this meaning of identity originating from the social abstraction of one’s physical form.7 The first known example of the use of the shi shen as applied to the context of male-to-female sexual relationship is found in Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (ca. 145−ca. 86 B.C.) retelling of the story of Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179−117 B.C.), perhaps the best-known and most celebrated fu 賦 writer in the history of Chinese literature. He supposedly seduced the young widow Zhuo Wenjun 卓文君: as the story has it, it was because of his zither playing that she, totally smitten, yishishen yu Sima 已失身於司馬 (‘lost her body to Sima’).8 Thus, this definition was applied to women who engaged in unchaste behavior, like cheating on their husbands, be they alive or dead (as in the case of Zhuo Wenzhun).9 That these social dynamics are indicative of a disempowerment that happens on many more levels than just the physical, is

5 Hanyu da cidian (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1986), vol. 2, 1481; Zhongwen da ci dian (Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo, 1962), 3445. 6 R. Ames, “The meaning of body in classical Chinese philosophy,” in T. P. Kasulis, with R. T. Ames and W. Dissanayake, Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice (State University of New York Press, 1993), 165. 7 See also F. Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1997), 297, for a discussion of the body in late imperial China. 8 Sima Qian, Quan zhu quan yi Shi ji (Tianjin: Tianjin gu ji chu ban she, 1995), 3 vol.; Sima Qian, “Shi ji 117: Biography of Sima Xiangru,” in Records of the Grand Historian. Han Dynasty, translated by Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 1993), Vol. 2, 259−306. 9 For the legal definition of shi shen in late imperial China, see M. H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2000), 80.

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also emphasized by the construction shi shen yuren 失身於人, or losing one’s self to somebody, as illustrated in the quote above.10 Now, in the context of the actual practice of prostitution in late imperial China, a society whose members were “. . . acutely sensitive to the ways in which bodily actions shaped identity,” the ‘problem’ with a courtesan was that she would become sexually active outside the framework of reproduction aimed at perpetuating family lineage and ancestors’ worship.11 Not that the courtesan would or could not be a biological mother, though in the novels examined here, she is seldom presented as one. The question is, rather, one of spatial dislocation and of its consequences. The traditional term for ‘virgin’, chunü 處女, originally indicated the womenfolk of a household, who reside inside the house, and only in a second moment was it used to designate an unmarried woman in general, and, more specifically, a young woman who has not yet lost her maidenhood.12 That a stationary physical location, combined with age, is synonymous of a proper woman’s journey through life, in terms of her reproductive status, as well as of her social persona, is reinforced by its opposite, the expression younü 遊女. It literally means ‘female traveler’, and we find it in Tang poetry, for instance, to indicate women who are sightseeing; but by Ming times it defines loose women and courtesans; in other words, those women who, because of their profession, do not remain, physically, socially and morally firmly within the boundaries of the patriarchal household. The profound ‘topo-ethical’ dimensions of a woman’s attributes, bodily and otherwise, are thus clearly revealed in this terminology, which deploys space (‘topos’) as a meta-physical manifestation of virtue (or lack thereof ).13 This is also connected to the very powerful gendering of space in most of traditional Chinese culture where the spaces assigned to the sexes are heavily defined and segregated. From this perspective, the courtesan’s deflowering marks her body as a site of (purchasable) sexual pleasure for the men, her clients, well

10 I am very thankful to the anonymous reader for emphasizing this very important aspect in his/her report. 11 Bray, 1997, 41. 12 See, for instance, usages of the terms chunü, chuzi 處子 and chushizi 處室子 as synonyms in Mengzi, Guanzi, Zhuangzi and Xunzi: Sun Yi-Rang, 墨子閒詁—Mozi Jiangu” 1893 http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=3925&if=en&searchu=%E8% 99%95%E5%A5%B3# [accessed on: 10 May 2009]. 13 See Ko, 1994, especially 115 onwards; Mann, 1997; S. Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (University of California Press, 2007).

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outside the appropriate boundaries for conjugal and reproductive sex. This is one way to understand shi shen, in the sense that a female body not engaged in biological reproduction is a body lost in a society that prizes most highly fertility in women. By engaging in sexuality for pleasure’s sake, these women’s bodies do not enter the conventional circle of childbearing, heirs and ancestral worship. From the studies of scholars, such as Charlotte Furth, Judith Farquar and Francesca Bray, we see that among men and women in late imperial China, “. . . procreative preoccupations played a central role in shaping their everyday sensibilities, and that these inchoate feelings fed into medical or social discourses.”14 This does not mean that, in real life, infertility was necessarily a drawback. As Francesca Bray points out, elite women could actually turn infertility into an advantage and that orthodox gynecology provided them with a technology of reproductive control that offered them a certain amount of freedom in choosing not to get pregnant, also because in elite families the role of progenetrix, or biological mother, often did not immediately translate into the more prestigious role of mater, or social mother, since “. . . the marriage system allowed senior women to benefit from the fruits of junior women’s wombs: bearing a child did not necessarily make one a mother.”15 What is at stake in this context is that if a woman (and a man)’s body acquired meaning by virtue of participating in the reproduction of the family line, then a courtesan, by not becoming part of this discourse, immediately lost value vis-à-vis posterity, because she would not be honored after death or signified by an ancestral tablet honored on the family altar. She would become then a purely present body, without a past and a future in, or beyond, this world. In traditional Chinese fiction, we see incredibly few courtesans redeemed, through marriage, and even fewer were allowed by author and narrative trajectories to become mothers (Li Wa, for example). Loss of the body, then, could be perceived as the acknowledgment of the loss for society of the procreative potential of young, able-bodied women and their subsequent virtual and social sterility, a meaning reinforced by the fact that even if sex workers of all different ranks went on to have children, these children could not participate in the rituals of good

14

Bray, 1997, 302. Bray, 1997, 334 and 281. For these definitions of biological and social motherhood, see Bray, 1997, especially 318−334 and 358−368. 15

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families. They, too, would become social outcasts and, in the end, their social weight amounted to naught. In this sense, the courtesan and her offspring could be read, socially, legally and politically in a way that resonates interestingly with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, who by virtue of being located in a juridical category of ‘bare life’, finds himself submitted to the sovereign’s state of exception. His biological life, then, just like the late imperial fictional courtesan’s, has no political significance.16 And yet, in both cases, this reduction to pure simple, animal life (or zoé), hides a different kind of productivity.17 While it is true that a young girl’s body is lost to the cause of perpetuating family lineage as soon as she is deflowered within a brothel, it is also true that by virtue of losing her social status and her biological destiny, she is entering a different world of exchange and production. Through her one-time loss of the body, she collects all her clientele’s capital that she then circulates back into the economy of exchange. The client invests his jouissance in/on her, which is also lost, because it does not enter the circuit of heir-making, as it were, but which is also immediately recuperated and converted into money.18 The male body is an active part of this loss, which actually becomes a gain for the woman on the level of the economy of pleasure and sexuality. Language, through the expression shi shen, registers only the first layer of discourse, then, where the lost body is the woman’s, and hides

16

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1988). 17 Jean-Francois Lyotard has a very interesting point to make about the necessary sterility of the body of the prostitute: “[F]or the prostitute transforms the client’s jouissance into money and therefore phlegmatically converts the perverse libido or simply its use, the surplus of pulsional energy scattered in society, and dangerous to it, deadly because it is capable of setting it off in every sense without any regard for its organic unity—it converts therefore these perversions or diversions or energy into money, and then into commodities (into capital indeed), thereby taking care to safeguard the social whole, assuming the sacred malediction of genital sterility, but simultaneously bringing about the return of these ‘lost’ expenditures into the circuit of social exchanges. The prostitute therefore redeems perversion (the diversion of the pulsions) by replacing its product, not semen exactly, but its equivalent, money, not in the entry to her uterus which is necessarily closed off while the penile clientele frequent her, but in the entry to the goods market, and therefore to society” (J. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993 (1974)], 157). 18 “The turning back, the return to the ‘community’ of the social body cannot take place in the form of children (since it is this which the client, the pervert, fears and which goes to her arms in order to avoid), it must therefore take place in the form of an equivalent to children: money.” (Ibid., 167).

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the economy of pleasure, where the male patron actually is the one who suffers the loss. Physical sterility veils the economic fertility of the sex worker’s vagina, transposed onto her purse and her treasure chest: The prostitute, in particular, that is to say the modern business ‘woman’, who is just as much as a ‘man’—and the same goes for him—has not had and must no longer have any relation with fertility. Should she occasionally produce children from the jouissances she procures, then it would signify that she had received impregnating semen into her womb; but she must be able to receive only money, and this in her purse.19

It is undeniable that the fictionalized practice of prostitution does bring forth the body in an unquestionable way, no matter how much language concurs to erase it. From this perspective the prostituted body is socialized first and foremost when is deflowered, because this is the moment in which it enters the circuit where (male) expenditure of jouissance equates (female) gain of money. The whole notion of shi shen illuminates how this socialization happens simultaneously on the closely interrelated physical, social and economic levels. First of all, the sex worker’s personhood is defined, via her body, against different foils: the first is the foil offered by the male body. The male body penetrates the hymen and creates the rupture in her body that generates the movement of money. The male and the female body interlock to generate not heirs, as we have seen, but a series of bodily fluids and economic flows. Furth and Bray tell us that, in traditional Chinese medicine, men and women’s bodies are identical, they just differ in degree. Although the language that we find used in late imperial novels a propos of deflowering seems to undercut this conclusion, or, at least, to problematize it. The male body does stand as the Golden Rule(r) against which the female body is measured. Immediately connected to this, we have the second foil formed by the bodies of those women who engage in reproduction. Between these two, the courtesan’s body stands out as waiflike and ethereal. She represents the lightness of sexuality aimed at pleasure, as opposed to the weight of sexuality aimed at reproduction. She, like liangjia women, loses her hymen: but whereas the uterus of women from good family is opened up, through their first sexual experience, and made (to?) matter in the reproductive cycle, her uterus is immediately closed off. It is as if her

19

Ibid., 178.

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hymen were displaced onto her cervix, to prevent sperm to actually force it into the reproductive cycle. Class comes immediately into play as well. Even in novels, upperclass women could engage in both social and biological motherhood but they could not be marked as active producers and consumers of economic capital without running the risk of falling from grace and of forfeiting their very existences, as in the case, for instance, of Wang Xifeng in Honglou meng. This is not to say that in real life women from good families did not engage in money-making activities. On the contrary, the work of women, from all classes, was essential to the welfare of Chinese household in late imperial China. Yet, the fact remains that the notion of shi shen illustrates how a woman cannot participate in the productive cycle of economic and social production without the loss of her body. At the same time, the disappearance of a courtesan’s body from the cycle of social and biological exchange outlined above is the necessary condition for her money-producing potential to manifest and, thus, this disappearing act proves illusory because it immediately transposes her body on another plateau of signification. Most fictional narratives reverse economic roles: the courtesan becomes the moneymaker and her male partner, if attached to her through marriage, is the kept spouse; if he is her client, he becomes the source of income but the connotations of the financial exchange are passive on the male side since he is often represented as the victim. This victimization, as we shall see below, is indicative of a high degree of male anxiety that frames the courtesan as a dangerous seductress and her patrons as the vulnerable objects (albeit willing) of her sexual vampirism. Now that we have mapped the semantic and linguistic boundaries of the dynamics we are trying to deconstruct, it is important to look closely to the texts that inform these different discourses on the (female and male) body. This brings us to a few centuries before our gods-turned-courtesans were conceived, to two seventeenth-century texts: the first is Qingqi 情奇 (“Love Marvels”) in Bian er chai 弁而釵 (“Cap and Hairpin”), and the second is in Maiyoulang du zhan huakui 賣油郎獨占花魁 (“The Oil-Peddler Wins the Queen of Flowers”).20 It 20

See Zui Xihu Xinyue Zhuren, pseud., Bian er chai (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1990) and Feng Menglong, ed., Xingshi hengyan (Beijing: Renminwenxue chubanshe, 1987), 35. For the latter, I have used also another uncensored edition, as found in Zhongguo Huaben Daxi (Shanghai: Jiangsu Guji chubanshe, 1991), since the passage

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is in these late Ming sources that we find the basis for later discourses about loss of virginity and, without them, it would be impossible to understand the concepts found in later fiction. These two stories have very different plots but they both include the sexual initiation in a brothel of Meiniang 美娘, a young girl (Maiyoulang), and Zhaifan 摘凡, a boy (Qingqi), respectively. In both stories the scene involves rape, in the sense of sexual intercourse by a person with another person without the latter’s consent and chiefly by force or deception.21 They are relevant to our present focus because they show the social, sexual and emotional implications of shi shen as a metamorphic rite of passage sanctioned by violence. The importance of this moment as a crucial rite of passage for the young person is emphasized in both texts and this is consistent with what we find in many other fictional representations that frame

that I will use is not present in the 1987 edition. See also Zui Xihu Xinyue Zhuren, pseud., Yichun xiangzhi (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1990) and Zuizhu Jushi, Longyang yishi (Taipei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1990). For a study of all these little-known collections, see G. Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites: Male Homosexuality in Late Ming Fiction,” Ph. D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley (1994). See also Giovanni Vitiello, “Exemplary Sodomites: Chivalry and Love in Late Ming Culture,” Nannü 2.2 (2000): 207–258; Giovanni Vitiello, “The Forgotten Tears of the Lord of Longyang: Late Ming Stories of Male Prostitution and Connoisseurship,” in Peter Engelfriet and Ian de Meyer, eds., Linked Faiths: Essays on Chinese Religion and Traditional Culture in Honour of Kristopher Schipper (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 227−247; Giovanni Vitiello, “The Fantastic Journey of an Ugly Boy: Homosexuality and Salvation in Late Ming Pornography,” positions 4.2 (1996): 291–320; Giovanni Vitiello, “The Dragon’s Whim: Ming and Qing Homoerotic Tales from the Cut Sleeve,” T’oung Pao 78 (1992): 341−372; S. Volpp, “Classifying Lust: The Seventeenth-Century Vogue for Male Love,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (June 2001); S. Volpp, “A Male Mencius’s Mother: Li Yu’s Virtuous Woman,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 2.1 (Summer 1994). 21 It is very interesting to notice that, according to the Webster’s Collegiate dictionary, the word ‘rape’ defines an action perpetrated by a man onto a woman. A brief summary of the stories from which the passages are taken is as follows: In Bian er chai, no. 4, we find the story of the sentimental journey of a young boy from a wealthy family, Li Youxian, zi Zhai Fan, who sells himself to a male brothel to save his father from financial ruin. There he meets Kuang Shi, who ransoms him and takes him inside his household as a concubine. The boy maintains his transgenderal persona of devoted and chaste secondary wife for many years and through many misfortunes: in the end, he discovers that he is an immortal who had wanted to experience the life of a woman, but in the more comfortable male body (for a more detailed synopsis of the Bian er chai, story, see Vitiello, 1994, 119). In Maiyoulang du zhan huakui, Meiniang is a girl from a good family who gets separated from her family as a little girl during the Jurchen invasion of the twelfth century C.E. and is sold into a brothel by a scheming family friend. She is ransomed from the brothel, after a long and convoluted courtship, by a humble oil-peddler, who is a paragon of devotion and wins her over simply by showing her the strength of his love for her.

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deflowering as connected with shulong 梳攏, nuptial proceedings of sorts that mark the entrance of the prostitute in the world of active sex work.22 Unlike in the case of Yuan zaju 雜居 plays, where the physical and emotional violence of the brothel is portrayed in a very vivid manner, generally speaking the mainstream fictional accounts of courtesans and prostitutes (mostly female) in Ming and Qing China tend to present a strikingly idealized portrait of their life. Whatever pain or difficulties that such a position entailed are usually referred to by using stereotyped expressions, such as hongyan boming 紅顏薄命 (‘ill-fated beauties’) and so on.23 This is the reason why the fictional representations of violence on the body of the prostitute, both male and female, become a new and important path of investigation to uncover the process of socialization of the prostituted body. The argument that the body, both in Chinese art and fiction, is invisible and that we have to wait for literary modernity and westernization to encounter representations of the body, reveals more the blindness (voluntary and/or cultural) of sinologists up to present times than an actual absence.24 It is undeniable, as we shall see in Chapter 4, that during the late Qing and the early Republican period alienated, problematic and westernized bodies rise from the pages of Chinese novels. That does not mean that the body was not quite visible and legible up until then Chinese culture, visual and otherwise.25 Meiniang’s story undeniably proves this point, as her body stands out as the naked surface on which the entire shi shen process outlined above, with all of its consequences, is clearly mapped out and traced. To call her body invisible would be just as violent an act as the one she is subjected to by the author: 22 Shulong can be translated with ‘combing’, or even ‘making a hairdo’, because after losing her virginity the prostitute would arrange her hair in a different style, usually pulling it up in the back, in a fashion that resembled the practice for newly wedded women. See Bian er chai, 225b. 23 See, for instance, Guan Hanqing’s Zhao Pan’er jiu fenchen. For more information on Yuan representations of prostitutes’ life in the entertainment quarters, see W. L. Idema and S. H. West, Chinese Theater. 1100−1450. A Source Book (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982). 24 See, for example, Mark Elvin, “Tales of shen and xin: Body-person and heartmind in China during the last 150 years,” in M. Feher, ed., with R. Naddafi and N. Tazi, Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989), Part 2, 267, or François Jullien, The Impossible Nude. Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2007). 25 J. Hay, “The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?,” in A. Zito and T. E. Barlow, Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 42.

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[Jin and his accomplices] drove Meiniang into a state of complete drunkenness, then they helped her back to the establishment of Ninth Mother Wang and put her, unconscious, in bed. In that season the weather was warm so the girl was not wearing many clothes: the madam stripped her stark naked with her own hands to help the magnate Jin the Second in his ‘business’. He, on his part, did not have an extraordinary ‘tool’, so he lightly parted her thighs and, using a little bit of saliva, penetrated her with a thrust. By the time that Meiniang, feeling the pain in her slumber, came back to her senses, she had already been ‘hooked’ by Jin the Second. She wanted to fight him off, but how could she with her weakened limbs, and so she was “put down” by him once. Only when the green had faded and the red flew away, was the rain collected and the clouds scattered. Truly: amidst the rain the stamen of the flower has opened and withered, and the beautiful woman in the mirror is not like of old. When, at fifth watch, Meiniang woke from her drunken sleep, she knew that she had “broken her body” because of the madam’s machinations. She pitied the ill fate that befalls beautiful women for incurring this violence. She got up to go to the bathroom and got dressed. Then she dozed by herself on a rattan divan by the bed, facing the wall, tears secretly falling. When Jin came over to kiss her, she hit him in the face and on the head, and scratched him leaving some bloody marks.26

Similarly, we see Zhaifan refuse to comply with the desires of Mister Hung, his patron, who, deeply enraged, calls the pimp, old Yan. He first threatens the boy to beat him if he does not hop into bed with his client. Then, when Zhaifan does not satisfy his request, he acts upon his threat: Such a pitiful jade-like, flower-like youth, how could he stand this brutality? [The pimp] beat him until his hair was all disheveled and then sent him rolling on the ground. Heavens, did it hurt! After having thrashed him, the pimp asked him: “And now are you willing to sleep with Mister Hong?” Zhaifan, in tears, begged him: “For anything else, I will respect your orders as soon as I hear them, but spare me from this thing!” Yan the Pimp told that man: “His hole has never been opened, and this is why he is acting up. If you wait a while, I will make him sleep with you. If you do not want the trouble, I will send you somebody else.” That man replied: “I will wait for this one.” “He will be with you presently,” said the pimp and took Zhaifan to his room, where already there were three or four male prostitutes. He ordered them to take off Zhaifan’s clothes: they obliged him and stripped the boy completely. Then Yan called for

26 Feng Menglong, 1991, 36. There is a translation of this story in Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau, tr., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 177, but I prefer to use my own translation.

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The pimp beats Zhaifan again and then proceeds to rape him. Zhaifan’s tears are of no use with such a wicked person as the pimp, who penetrates him brutally. Eventually Zhaifan does not oppose resistance anymore and Old Yan, after dispensing him with some coaxing words intermingled with new threats, takes him back to the client: [The boy], bashful and holding back his tears, simply did not speak. Hong, the client, took off his clothes for him and had a go at it with him. Since [Zhaifan] had been beaten by the pimp he did not dare to put up a fight. But shedding secret tears he said: “Heavens, what horror did I commit that I have to incur this evil retribution?” And swallowing any sound and drinking his tears he endured this ordeal till the end of the night, without uttering a word.28

This last quote makes clear that Zhaifan, after losing his virginity in such a traumatic fashion, quite literally swallows his tears and accepts his destiny as a sex worker. Similarly, the ‘breaking’ of her body works very effectively to break Meiniang’s resistance to receiving clients. She may scratch her first client’s face but once she is threatened with being sold to an unknown man, she chooses the lesser of two evils, that is, to sleep her way to redemption, in the hope of finding the ideal mate who will rescue her from the huokeng 火坑 (‘the living hell’) of the brothel. The violent act they suffer alters the two young persons’ identities in two ways: first of all, on the physical level, marked by almost total passivity and, consequently, on the social one. During the entire deflowering scene, for instance, Meiniang is presented as totally passive. She is not only drunk, but also asleep and she becomes a doll in the hands of her madam and her patron. Her defenselessness makes her endearing to the reader, obviously, but also invites him to read her predicament as spectacle. In this sense, the violation happens within and outside the text. While there is only a very indirect mention of her virginal bleeding as a result of the rape, through the elliptic expression lü’an hongfei 綠暗紅飛 (“green fading and red flying away,” a poetic reference to her shattered youth), the blood appears, transposed on the face of her customer, Jin, as some sort of retaliation for his raping her. Meiniang’s

27 28

Bian er chai, 222a and ff. Ibidem, 225a.

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suffering is enhanced in the story by the fact that up until that night, she had been able to use her virginity as a shield to stay away from sex work. When that thin and penetrable protection is taken away from her, the girl loses her foothold and falls straight into social disgrace. The obvious passivity that marks the body of Meiniang is at once a consequence and a function of her femininity. What stands between the male organ of the client and her genitals is simply a series of manufactured and biological veils that are very easy to remove and/or penetrate: light summer clothes, two thighs that can be easily parted, and a hymen that is never mentioned but can easily be penetrated even by a poorly endowed man as Jin. However, her physical vulnerability is also closely connected to her problematic social status. Although she hails originally from a decent family, she is now property of the brothel owner. This makes her a public woman: she is ostensibly visible and accessible where other females, who may share with her the same biological characteristics of vulnerability and penetrability, cannot be (or should not be, according to the tenets of neo-Confucian behavior). If we turn to Zhaifan with these assumptions in mind, we have to deal instantly with his biological and gendered masculinity. Given that he is a man, does rape socialize his body in the same way as we have seen happen for Meiniang? At first, he appears more empowered than Meiniang in all sorts of manners. He is the one who has sold himself to Old Yan, the vicious pimp, to help out financially his family. Unlike Meiniang, who was driven from her home by the war and is given away as a piece of ware, Zhaifan is actively responding to a crisis, as it befits the son in the family. It is not his mother who goes out and puts a placard around her neck to declare her intent to sell her body in exchange for cash. Yet, people are puzzled when they see Zhaifan advertising his own sale and they ask: “How can a male-bodied person sell [himself] for one hundred liang?”29 Their bewilderment is not due to the fact that a person may be sold, but that the person, actually the body, to be true to the original version, on sale may be male. His expected gender/sexual role is active and act he does in the sense that he is the one who puts the merchandise on the market and disposes of the capital derived from the sale. Therefore, his gender role immediately complicates the dynamic relationship existing between the pimp and the client. The ‘taming’ of the male prostitute happens

29

Bian er chai, 214a.

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at a physical and a social level too, but with a violence that is proportioned to the level of agency determined by his biological and gender/ social identity. The denial of his virility is sanctioned when the other boys grab him and turn him around, exposing his back. This first violent act is enough to erase his identity as a biological male. His male organ disappears: his white buttocks that can be parted and his anus that can be penetrated assimilate him also physically with the female virgin about to lose her body. The rump of the boy turns into the ‘melon’ that can be split open by the penis. The gesture of the pimp of putting saliva on his anus is identical to Jin’s gesture with Meiniang: the two holes serve the same sexual function.30 Once his resistance is broken, his body quickly follows: he too shi shen le 失身了, has lost his body. ‘Losing his body’ means for Zhaifan to lose the capability to speak out and act out his thoughts. He has become a body that anyone who is willing to pay the price can purchase. The violability of the male body is not to be taken for granted in Ming and Qing sources, since the male body is usually considered impenetrable, the tool of penetration being integral part of it. Nevertheless, it too could become part of the system of exchange in the context of the economy of pleasure. It is clear that in the historical context of the literary sources here employed, sexual commodification was a practice that could be applied to both men and women, regardless of their social origins. At the same time, the commodification of the body for sexual services appears to have originated from a discourse centered on the female body and its vulnerability. Consequently, when it is a man that is the object of this process, he has to assume a female persona to manifest to the rest of society his changed status. As Matthew Sommer writes, the penetrated becomes socially female.31 The same idea can be applied to loss of virginity outside of marriage. ‘Losing one’s body’ is also a corporeal/incorporeal transformation: it is predicated upon the physical laceration of the hymen but, as soon as

30 I am not arguing that in any given context anal sex and vaginal intercourse have the same symbolic and semantic value. In this context, however, it would seem that they come to serve the same function, especially as far as the patron is concerned, and especially in the view of the widespread bisexual practices of late imperial China. See also Sommer, 2000, 114−165. 31 Ibid., 148−162.

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the body loses this membrane, it also immediately loses a strong social position and acquires a marginal, liminal state.32 Thus, we decode a pattern whereby violence is the necessary action that propels female/male and feminized bodies, like that of Meiniang and Zhaifan, into prostitution. Furthermore, this passage is represented as a corporeal act affecting permanently the social body of the girl, while only temporarily the body of the man who has sex with her; yet, this very act is also an incorporeal act, since it brings about the loss of her status, by which she becomes a fallen woman.33 Shi shen, from this perspective, is a moment in time but also a process of social degradation: this idea is exemplified quite well in Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (“The story of Jin, Yun and Qiao”). In this mid-Qing novel, the chapter in which Qiao (a young woman whose fate retraces Meiniang’s) loses her virginity is entitled ‘the beginning of the loss of the body’, or shi shen zhi shi 失身之始.34 In other words, shi shen, or the loss of the body, happens in language to mark the violence of a physically concrete transformation that gives rise to a whole set of abstract transformations. Just like, for example, a passenger on a plane becomes a ‘hostage’ and the plane becomes a jail, a raped woman’s body becomes a ‘lost body’. This triangulation is quite well illustrated in Yuguihong 玉閨紅, a late Ming pornographic novel ‘rediscovered’ in the early Republican period.35 Here, class is a fundamental key to read and understand the

32

See also G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 80−81: “The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect that the transformation produces. The order-words or assemblages of enunciation in a given society (in short, the illocutionary) designate this instantaneous relationship between statements and the incorporeal transformations or noncorporeal attributes they express.” 33 Ibid.: “Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies. “You are no longer a child”: this statement concerns an incorporeal transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their actions and passions.” 34 Qingxin cairen, Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1983), 58. 35 Dong Lu Luoluo pingsheng, 1995. The novel stops at Chapter 10 (thus, leaving us without the remaining ten chapters) but the first chapter mentions evil retribution for the eunuch and all the evil characters. Judging from the chapters’ headings, retribution does take place in the ten missing chapters, when Jin Yuwen, a noble wenren, comes to the rescue of the girl and succeeds in ending Wei Zhongxian’s reign of terror as well.

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relationship between violence and the loss of virginity. A young girl, Liu Guniang, the only survivor of a respectable family fallen on hard times, is brought, very much against her will, to a yaozi 窯子 (‘a kiln’), the worst kind of brothel in Ming dynasty Beijing. There prostitutes are stripped naked and made to have sex with their customers in decrepit slums, with big holes in the walls, so that others outside can watch and get turned on by the peep-show. As she is a virgin, the beastly Madam Zhang Small Feet, deflowers her with a broomstick handle, so that she will be able to immediately start receiving clients. Liu Guniang, like any other respectable maiden, bleeds profusely, and the author elaborates quite extensively not only on the physical, but also on the psychological laceration that she suffers, thus introducing another dimension to the treatment of sexual violence, namely the emotional sphere of the object of violence, that in this novel becomes, as we shall see below, part and parcel of the narrative of epistemological violence the girls suffer through. However, neither her pain, nor her bleeding stop Zhang’s lover and a friend of his from immediately having sex with Liu Guniang. From this angle, Liu Guniang’s defloration can be compared to Pan Jinlian’s in Jin Ping Mei, in the sense that the latter is also a victim of rape, which introduces her immediately into the circuit of sexual consumption (though Pan Jinlian quickly moves from victim to rapacious sexual predator).36 This very fast and mechanical way of opening the female body to the productive activity of prostitution, commonplace as it may have been in the late imperial narrative, stands in great contrast with the long, painstakingly detailed process that another female character undergoes in the same ‘kiln’ as Liu Guniang. The heroine Guizhen, Boudoir’s Chastity, is an upper-class maiden who should not be anywhere but in her rooms, safely hidden away from view. Unfortunately for her, she lives during the Tianqi era (1621−1628), under the infamous eunuch Wei Zhongxian’s empire of terror. Her father, the high official Li Shinian, decides to denounce Wei Zhongxian to the emperor and pays with his life for his heroic act. His wife commits suicide when she hears of her husband’s death and Guizhen escapes together with her maid Hongyu, Red Jade, when officials come to arrest her. Guizhen and Hongyu get separated on the street where Guizhen is tricked by one of her father’s ex-servants into following

36

I am thankful to Xiaofei Tian Owen for this very insightful remark.

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him to the yaozi where Liu Guniang is kept. An official’s daughter falling into a brothel has been an old trope in classical literature from the Tang onwards and it is also the theme, for example, of the Ming huaben 話本 Shan Fulang Quanzhou jiaou 單符郎全州佳偶 (“Shan Fulang Finds His Perfect Mate in Quanzhou”).37 However, as already mentioned, in this type of narrative, the brothel was almost always a high-class establishment, a fact that allowed the fallen girl to ‘land’ on a relatively comfortable life. In fact, the heroine of Yuguihong thinks to herself at one point that she had heard brothels were places of fanhua 繁華 (‘luxury and splendor’), nothing like the kind of squalor she has fallen into. One revealing detail in this sense is that, when forced to sing a song, she intones a highly refined song about feeling ‘spring sorrows’. Her client complains that he does not understand her and does not like the song at all, so another girl consequently sings a more folksy song with explicitly sexual language, which pleases the men immensely. In this sense, Yuguihong is not only a self-conscious subversion of the vernacular fiction and wenyan 文言 romance tradition, but it may be taken as a reverse mirror image of the high romantic courtesan culture of the late Ming in which courtesans were always exchanging poetry with their elite literati lovers.38 For sure, Guizhen’s social class makes her virginity and its loss all the more desirable. As mentioned earlier, both Zhaifan and Meininang belong to the liangjia social category, and Guizhen’s predicament reinforces the notion that, in vernacular fiction, class is eroticized. Given the very high status to which Guizhen belongs, it takes at least four chapters for the actual deflowering to take place. As the moment of her defloration approaches, Guizhen is beaten, harassed and humiliated in all sorts of ways to break her spirit and to ensure that she will not fight or resist when the time comes. Unlike it was in the case of Liu Guniang, whose hymen was indeed a trifle, even worse, an obstacle for the madam, Guizhen’s virginity is a valuable asset that needs to be disposed of wisely and to the best economic use. This works to the advantage of the voyeuristic reader. Guizhen is literally stripped naked and made visible completely, in all the splendor of her one-thousand-liang-of-silver-body, to the eyes both of the lowlives, who crowd the low-class brothel to sleep with her, and to those

37 38

Feng Menglong, Yushi mingyan (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1989), 263. I am thankful to Xiaofei Tian Owen for this suggestion.

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of the reader, who can distance himself from such cruel and disgusting creatures by virtue of his very likely higher social status. This novel, like many other pornographic works, offers its readers the pleasure of scopophilia because it allows them to enjoy, untainted, the sight of the young girl raped, attacked and penetrated in every single orifice she has available for penetration. Indeed the long narrative that leads the reader to Chapter 8 of the novel, when Guizhen’s first patron, a merchant of human waste, ‘finally’ rapes her, marks only the beginning of a spiral of sexual brutality.39 After that, it is the turn of the ex-servant who brought her to the brothel and of a friend of his. The next day she has to receive twenty-six clients. Then she is forced to give oral sex to the ex-servant, who then proceeds to urinate in her mouth.40 Eventually she loses her second, i.e., anal, virginity, and this event marks yet again the breaking of another boundary, both physical and emotional, and it is appropriately again marked by loss of blood. The physical consequences of these successive deflowerings are devastating for Guizhen. The broken, inflamed and swollen genitals of the girl are described in detail in the novel, as well as her hesitant gesture to touch them in an effort to make sense of the devastation that has taken place over, inside and outside her body. Perhaps we are dealing with a sort of eroticization of the pain of the young girl here and, for sure, this long, drawn-out narrative of sexual violence finds in her high social status one of its propelling narrative reasons. That said, this novel can also help us deepen our understanding of the shi shen process because, as a result of all the sexual violence done unto her, Guizhen has literally ‘lost her body’, also in the sense that she has lost bodily perception through the pain of forced sexual intercourse. Her gesture of touching her private parts to get a sense of what has happened to her ‘down there’, points to the alienation inflicted onto the female body by predatory male sexuality. The virgin, who narcissistically identifies herself also through her being physically whole and closed, has been impossibly and irretrievably wounded. For Guizhen—as in the case of Meiniang and Zhaifan—, loss of virginity, which could also be summarized as a bodily alteration at the genital level hard—if not impossible—to detect from the outside, proves quite

39 40

Dong Lu Luoluo pingsheng, 1995, 388 and ff. Ibid.

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powerful in determining her social, emotional and karmic future, a fate that cannot be escaped. The raped virgin has no control over her life any longer, just as she has no control over her body and, therefore, over her destiny and her life. In this sense, Guizhen’s fate appears to be a very apt metaphor for the suffering and abuse the Chinese intellectual and political elite suffered at the hands of Wei Zhongxian and his corrupt acolytes, a point that is reinforced by the fact that the whole novel is crowded with lower class villains who, just like Wei Zhongxian’s persona in late Ming and Qing vernacular fiction, only care for sex, food and violence.41 This is clearly seen in the fact that, even if Guizhen tries to commit suicide every single time she is raped or abused, she is always prevented from leaving the source of her sufferings. Guizhen and the other women in the story are always sexually passive and as the very opposite of aggressive female sexuality, with the one notable exception of Small-feet Zhang who is portrayed as a lustful and uncouth woman, more of a sow than an actual human being. These brutalized, bruised and beaten up girls could then be read as the very antithesis of Pan Jinlian, to return for a moment to this central Ming icon of female sexual identity. As Xiaofei Tian Owen states, “The brutalized heroine of Yuguihong never possesses the subject position of actively desiring sexual fulfillment. We may suppose that the male readers of Yuguihong might have felt a pleasure of complicity in seeing the female body reduced to a state of passivity and so ceasing being threatening in any way.”42 As she rightly points out, there may have even been a self-conscious inversion of Jin Ping Mei’s model on the Yuguihong author’s part, for there is no doubt that he had read and loved the earlier text. Not only the title Yuguihong is made up of the names of the three major characters in the novel, just like Jin Ping Mei, but the preface to the novel claims that the author also wrote a Jin Ping Mei tanci 彈詞. In other words, just as Pan Jinlian’s narrative function focuses on her insatiable sexual desire and its consequences, including what we could read as the final and deadly ‘rape’ of Ximen Qing, so do these

41 For a concise presentation of the literati’s behavior and attitudes towards Wei Zhongxian in late Ming times, see John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China. The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (University Press of Hawai’i, 2002). 42 Xiaofei Tian Owen, in her discussion of an earlier version of this chapter, Fairbanks Center, November 2003.

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female characters become specialized ‘victims’. No matter how many times they are sexually violated, they remain virginal in their incapability to preserve in their body an area that can withstand continuous narrative violence and to resist both physical and narrative penetration on the part of both the male characters in the novel and the male readers outside of it. These ‘narrative virgins’, at least in the pages of Yuguihong, may be penetrated thousand of times and they will never occupy the position of a female subject capable of threatening masculinity through its desire. They remain vulnerable, open, the blank sheet on which the pen of male desire can obsessively inscribe its fears and its anxieties over and over again. A character like Guizhen is trapped in a narrative that eroticizes her virginality and, at the same time, makes it an object of abjection and destruction. One could also argue that men want her because she is a virgin and, yet, because she possesses such a great power over them, they cannot but rape her, humiliate her and destroy her. Virginity is such a potent object of desire that it can be handled only by completely eliminating it, over and over again. So Guizhen’s (as well as the other female and feminized characters) loss of virginity can and should be read as the effort to inflict a narcissistic blessure, a wound that bleeds onto the text its violent origin and its devastating consequences for the female Self.43 Right after her broom-induced defloration, the madam asks Liu Guniang if she dares to refuse still to entertain clients. But as “her female body had already been broken,” she can only cry, her voice completely silenced by violence and pain.44 Once she has lost virginity outside of marriage, she has lost her pride, language and claims to respectability. Not surprisingly, most eighteenth and early nineteenth-century representations reproduce and perpetuate these late Ming and mid-Qing representations and Haishang mingji sida jingang qishu inherits all the themes analyzed above. Changes, however, start occurring as well. Loss of virginity is presented in this later text as a violent socialization that damages irreparably the physical body of innocent girls, as the veritable beginning of a fatal sickness. The first to lose her virginity, in Chapter 35, is Li Wenxian, which makes sense, given her very visible

43 See Jean-Pierre Bardet et al., La Premiere Fois, ou, Le roman de la virginite perdue atravers les siecles et les continents, 415. 44 Dong Lu Luoluo pingsheng, 1995, 345.

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function of hustling clients right off the street. She starts getting along well with a sailor who is in the cangue for gambling, the thirty-year old Wang Liu. He takes a liking to her and buys her virginity for ten yuan. Madam Li, who knows the girl is very young to become sexually active, loses her fears at the sight of the money and sends Li Wenxian to the man.45 The author uses strong sympathetic words in this instance: Pity Li Wenxian, a child of just thirteen sui: when Madam Li got her ten dollars, she could not have cared less whether Wenxian lived or died. That night her body was broken by Wang Liu: though he was not exceptionally endowed, how could this tiny child bear it? After this night, in short, she took to her bed.46

We learn later on in the text that Li Wenxian’s sickness lasts for one whole year. To present loss of virginity as a sickness is not unusual. What is unprecedented, however, is the strong condemnation of this act on the part of the writer. Unlike the case with the authors of the sources previously quoted, who were using the predicaments of the girls to eroticize their sexual vulnerability, the late Qing writer criticizes the practice of having very young girls engage in sexual activities. As for the novel’s main heroine, Shi Chunfei, she loses her virginity when she is sixteen sui old. Like Meiniang, she is drugged by a rascally patron, none other than Jin Buhuan, who turns out to be the son of her original nemesis, Gong Jun, whom she will eventually marry in this second life. She too is given away willingly by her mother, who loses her wits (but not her business sense) at the sight of the money offered, two hundred liang of silver. Shi Chunfei has been raised in an upper courtesan establishment, not just in a smoke-shop, so her virginity is worth more than Li Wenxian’s. Thanks to the drug, Shi Chunfei is spared the initial pain but she still receives a substantial wound and is sick for more than ten days.47 Also in this case, the author points out the fact that though a qinglouren 青樓人 (‘a prostitute’), Shi Chunfei was still a virgin and, thus, vulnerable to sexual suffering. We do not have any description of the loss of the body for the other two, A Bao and Hu Yue’e, an absence that can be explained by the fact that in this

45

Thirteen sui, twelve years old in Western counting. The legal age for consent to sex during the Qing dynasty was twelve sui. See Sommer, 2000, 85. 46 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 35. 47 Ibid., Chapters 40 and 41.

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novel the rhetoric of sexual violence is not as explicit and descriptive as in Ming pornographic and erotic narratives. As a matter of fact, it is important to mention that there are a few exceptions to the narrative of loss of virginity as a violent, bloody and self-annihilating event. One of them is to be found in the Ming huaben Jiang Xingge chong hui zhenzhu shan 蔣興哥重會珍珠衫 (“Jiang Xingge Re-encounters the Pearl-sawn Shirt”), where we are treated to a very comic scene where an older woman retells a younger woman how she lost her virginity way before her marriage and was able to restore it thanks to a concoction of alum and pomegranate.48 The idea that men can be fooled into believing they are sleeping with a virgin is often deploy to introduce comic relief in this type of narratives and is indeed quite common also in Qing fiction. It is also used to illustrate a man’s lack of sexual skills, as it were, as well as his uncouthness, as an expert lover would be able to tell a virgin from a whore. Thus, sexual prowess for a man is predicated on recognizing a woman’s level of sexual maturity and expertise. In the sequel to the Jin Ping Mei, for example, a young courtesan’s virginity is sold for a very high price to a rich but quite uncouth patron. Though technically no longer a virgin, the courtesan Ying Ping has had a very sensitive lover up to this moment, who never dared to penetrate her forcefully and, thus, inflicted upon her neither bleeding, nor pain. Her new patron, however, is by no means a match for her delicate lover, and proceeds to literally rip her body apart, mistaking her screams of pain and anguish for moans of pleasure. Thus, she too bleeds profusely, to the satisfaction of the madam and the many onlookers who swarm in the morning to yanhong.49 We could push our reading of this episode to show that in this circumstance the young woman’s suffering also becomes a comic episode as she is presented as just as foolish as the patron she is trying to deceive with her pretense of virginity. It could also be read as her just dessert for her tricky behavior, which is framed here as typical of courtesans and prostitutes, the most deceitful group of women in late imperial society. Actually, it is interesting to notice how this type of representation, in which women and especially prostitutes capitalizing on the unintelligibility of their bodies and the condition of their hymens to

48

Feng Menglong, Jingshi tongyan (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1989), 1. Ciyang daoren, Xu Jin Ping Mei, in Anon., Ge lian hua ying / Xu Jin Ping Mei, Tianyi chubanshe, Taipei, 1985, 634−635. 49

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men, increase as we move towards the end of the Qing dynasty. For instance, in the late Qing novel Fengyue meng, just like in the sequel to the Jin Ping Mei mentioned above, loss of virginity is faked for the benefit of a gullible client.50 Thus, we see that the prostitute’s body could be repackaged to reproduce its loss over and over again, to keep replicating the immense money-making potential that virginity represented in brothels. This is connected to the patent decay in the quality and stature of brothels that becomes apparent in sources written after the second half of the nineteenth century, a point to which we will return below. Whereas rape and sexual violence are used in the context of late Ming vernacular sources as part of a larger discourse on the corruption spreading at court and in the capital as a result of the toxic effects of one corrupt eunuch, in late Qing novels they drive home an even more morally compelling point. In Jiuweigui, which is a novel that deals with women who have already become prostitutes, the only violated virgin is a girl from a good family. The sexual violence takes place neither in a ‘kiln’, nor in an upper class brothel: rather it is staged in the girl’s very bedroom.51 When the novel’s hero, Zhang Qiugu, sees this young teenager, he falls for her and, thanks to his concubine and other women with whom he makes sure to sleep so as to ensure their loyal support, he traps the girl in her home and rapes her. The girl seems to be the only one who knows what she is facing and the moral standards by which people should abide. Not only Zhang Qiugu, but also her step-mother and her father, the adults who should protect her, fail her and become accomplices in the violence she endures. Here, then, we could say that the author is showing the reader that it is no longer the young girl who loses her body and her chastity through violence. Everyone else has lost their bodies, their chastity and their sense of propriety and the main currency of bodily exchange is violence, that at this point stops being closely identified with the brothel, but also with male gender and with male sexuality. In Jiuweihu 九尾狐 (“The Nine-tailed Fox”), we even find the novel’s heroine, the nymphomaniac Hu Baoyu, the fox of the title, intent on deflowering a young boy. We have encountered already a fictional rendering

50 Hanshang mengren, 1989. We also know from historical sources that this happened quite often in real life to careless patrons: see Laofu, Zhongguo huang du du shi lu (Beijing: Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe, 1999), 227. 51 Zhang Chunfan, 1993, Chapter 110.

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of this real life courtesan in Haishang mingji sida jingang, as she is the madam who purchases Mo Lihai’s reincarnation. In Jiuweihu, Hu Baoyu is depicted as a ruthless man-eater who goes so far as to po le yige tongnande shenti 破了一個童男的身體 (‘have broken the body of a male-child’).52 In the world of late Qing fiction, sexuality is portrayed as totally and definitively disengaged from the circuit of biologically meaningful activity and is strongly situated in the narcissistic circuit of pleasure related to prostitution and sex work. It is also ‘freed’ from a narrative that associates predatory sexuality with lower-class hooligans, as in Yuguihong, or with the merchant class, as we see in Jin Ping Mei. In the late nineteenth-century literary landscapes, bodies multiply endlessly, as do the possibilities to break and rape them. A girl is one moment a victim of rape, as we have witnessed, and the next, the very legitimate heiress to Pan Jinlian’s voracious and exuberant sexuality, as we will see in the following chapter. Virginity becomes just one of the many commodities on sale in the leisure economy that becomes one of the main themes of late nineteenth-century novels and, thus, its narrative sex appeal appears to wane, except when it is counterfeited and re-constructed for the benefit of gullible clients who cannot even tell when the woman underneath them is as ‘fresh’ as she purports to be. Thus, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors move from narrating the violated virgin and her traumatized identity to narrating the trauma of post-Opium Wars’ China and of its inhabitants. In conclusion, we can see that sexuality, childhood, violence, history and urban life go hand-in-hand when it comes to sex trade. The ruthless rituals performed on the bodies of these children inscribe and map the drama of adult sexuality in particular and adult life in general, in terms of power, agency and economics. These representations show us that, once lost, a body could be found time and again, in all manners, to produce pleasure, pain, social mobility (and immobility) and, last but not least, money. Paradoxically, once they have lost their bodies, the girls we are studying are no longer lost children. They find themselves with a new physical and social identity, namely that of adult women in a city full of traps and dangers, at the time when China is emerging on the global stage as a wounded but meaningful presence. And this is where we will follow them.

52 Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu (Taipei: Guanya chuban, 1984), Wanqingxiaoshuo daxi, vol. 9, 164.

CHAPTER THREE

FAMILY MATTERS: PATTERNS OF SOLIDARITY AND DISCORD IN THE BROTHEL No Ming and Qing courtesan’s progress is complete without her baomu 鴇母, the mother-cum-madam.1 She is rarely the explicit protagonist of such narratives but, as we have seen in the previous chapters, she is responsible for ushering the young girls into the business of sex work. She may be the biological parent of the courtesan-in-training; however, she may also simply buy the child off the street and only nominally become her ‘mother’. In any event, regardless of blood ties, she is responsible for educating and training her daughter to entertain men, and, most importantly, it is this woman who decides when the girl is ready to start sex work. Consequently, before exploring the relationships that our fictional heroines develop with their patrons, customers and paramours, it is essential to retrace the relationships existing between them and the brothel-keepers. Late imperial novels also focus a great deal on the bond (or animosity) between the prostitute and her fellow workers, as well as on her interactions with women of other social classes. Given that we are dealing with male-authored texts meant for a mostly male audience, deconstructing the ways in which male imaginings envision female bonding and rapports becomes a very important task. Masculinity is clearly displayed in its fears, anxieties and wishful thinking in the arena created by the connections between and among women. Thus, in this chapter, we will begin to probe and measure the ‘gender’ borders and boundaries of the courtesans’ world. What rules regulate and complicate female interaction? Is theirs a woman’s world, where women rule over a band of subjugated men? Are they benevolent queens in a proto-feminist utopian reign where all women are sisters and all men are enemies? What happens when a respectable woman ‘trespasses’,

1 This term, which originally means female bustard, finds its rationale in the perceived behavior of this bird, thought to be lewd and sexually promiscuous by Chinese observers.

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as it were, into it? Why would male authors want to evoke such representations? These are the questions that we will address here and, at the end, in light of these explorations, we will discuss the feasibility of invoking the female gender as the ruling power and voice within the context of these late Qing narrative trajectories. I. Tough Love: Mothers, Daughters and the Economics of Violence In the Chinese demimonde, kinship terms reflect the hierarchy existing among the different people who live in and patronize the ‘green bowers’.2 Even fictional works of various genres and different periods seem to reflect the fact that in late imperial China unorthodox household patterns mimicked the orthodox ones.3 After all, in these novels the brothel does constitute a household of sorts, albeit extremely temporary and unstable, for all the people that dwell within it. So it does not seem to out of place for both the prostitute and her client to refer to and to address the madam of the brothel (independently of actual blood ties) as mama 媽媽 (‘mom’), muqin 母親 (‘mother’) or, more commonly, the above-mentioned baomu. The fictionalization of kinship includes other prostitutes, who are called zimei 姊妹 (‘sisters’). According to age differences, courtesans call each other respectively jiejie 姐姐 (‘older sister’) and meimei 妹妹 or meizi 妹子 (‘younger sister’). The plethora of terms referring to female kin and the relatively scarcity of male ones show how, in most fictional texts, men are portrayed as temporary inhabitants, sojourners, as it were, of the brothel, a point to which we will return in Chapter Four. If they have the right connections and social prestige (in the case of upper-class establishments), and money, patrons can stake a claim to entering the brothel. However, short of resorting to violence, that privilege is temporary and connected to constant expenditure. They never become the courtesan’s brother or the baomu’s son, not even in appellation. Money buys time and space in the qinglou, just like it buys access to the talents, if any,

2 For the usage of kinship terms in brothels, see Hershatter, 1989, 463−498., and G. Hershatter, “Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity: Prostitution in Early TwentiethCentury Shanghai,” in C. Gilmartin et al., Engendering China. Women, Culture and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 3 Sommer, 2000.

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and to the sexual favors of the courtesan: in the end, however, the customer is always seen as a passer-by, as attested, for instance, by the very famous proverb used to illustrate the fundamental nature of sex work that invariably appears in any narrative connected to the world of prostitution in late imperial fiction, qianmen yingxin, houmen songjiu 前門迎新, 後門送舊 (‘welcoming the new guest at the front door, and seeing off the last one out the back’). Men are essential as they convey the currency necessary for the brothel to function but they have to keep moving for this system to be effective. As Mrs. Liu, a sworn sister of Meiniang’s madam, tells Meiniang to get her out of her room and back to work after she has been deflowered, Zhanglang song mi, Lilang song chai, wanglairenao, cai shige chumingde ziwei hangjia 張郎 送米, 李郎送柴, 往來熱鬧, 才是個出名的姊妹行家 (“It is only when master Zhang sends you rice and Master Li firewood, and there is a constant hustle and bustle of activity, that you have a famous house.”)4 In other words, it is the combined movement of men and goods that keep the courtesan-house afloat in a competitive business. And that does not a stable household or family make, as it were. A very interesting parallel develops consequently between the qinglou and the body of the courtesan in a way that resonates powerfully with our previous discussion of the topo-ethical dimensions of virginity and shi shen: both are framed as semi-public spaces of economic, social and sexual interaction, with points of access that are often heavily regulated and policed but that must remain at all times potentially open and available in order to remain lucrative. The blue pavilions, however, are clearly defined not only as yin 陰 sites, ruled by femininity and female presence, which would simply define them as belonging to the nei 內 feminine sphere (as opposed to the wai 外, or gendered male): they are also marginalized and problematized by the fact that they are zones run entirely by families of women, headed by the baomu, where indecent actions were extremely likely to happen. As Stephen West and Wilt Idema write, “A world dominated by women is, of course, a world turned upside-down, one in which the other evils appropriately run rampant.”5 In accordance with this view, we find that the Chinese character for ‘adultery/debauchery/licentiousness’ ( jian 姦) is written by repeating three times the character

4 5

Feng Menglong, 1991, 43. Idema and West, 1982, 168.

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nü 女 (‘woman’). The image of a group of women gathered together, with no man involved, appears immediately connected with morally dubious and socially dangerous behavior. Of course, the threat, at the linguistic and ethical level, seems to be greater for the male patrons. Yet, as we have already seen in our discussion of the beginning of the socialization of the prostituted body, the first to be at risk within the bordello is the young courtesan. The main source of danger within the brothel would indeed appear to be other women and not so much customers and clients. The foremost ‘ogre’ in many of the stories relating to sex workers is actually the ‘matriarch’ who runs the brothel and polices its space and inhabitants. The main stream of the qinglou wenxue, ever since its beginning, tells the reader that the madam is wicked and cruel and out to exploit the innocent victim that falls into her hands. Once the hapless child is trained properly and she starts receiving clients, as we have seen, often very much against her will, the brothel-keepers are fed, clothed and pampered by their ‘daughters’. For the madam the young girl is first and foremost a qianshu 錢樹 (‘money tree’) to be shaken until the last penny falls down. Furthermore, in most narratives, the baomu is loath to part from her ‘money tree’ not out of motherly love, but because the price offered from the potential buyer is not high enough. The few times in which a madam goes soft with tenderness towards a girl are usually related to the latter’s skill in bringing in the money. In short, greed, wickedness and brutality are the stereotypical attributes of the mother/madam in almost all vernacular and classical sources of different dynasties, beginning with Li Wa zhuan in the Tang dynasty, and no motherly or kinship appellation can hide this. I would like to argue here that a true marker of the problematic quality of the qinglou as a space of destabilized social norms and destabilizing social practices is the pervasive presence of violence, and its solid positioning in an almost completely female sphere of control. We have already seen how, in Yuguihong, the merciless Madam Zhang Small Feet deflowers Liu Guniang with a broomstick so that the girl can start entertaining customers right away.6 In Jin Yun Qiao zhuan, the madam hangs Cui Qiao from a beam, strips her naked and then beats her into a bloody pulp as a punishment for trying to escape.7

6 7

Dong Lu Luoluo pingsheng, 1995, 344. Qingxin cairen, 1983, 80.

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These extremely violent representations are usually set in the context of a very brutal background where the main mode of interaction is, indeed, predicated on the physical, social, political and sexual abuse of the weak by the strong. From this perspective, one very simple and effective way to explain this representational mode is to understand the baomu’s cruelty as the necessary foil to extol the virtue, frailty and innocence of her ‘daughter’, especially in the case of a fallen girl from a good family. However, there is more. Of course, there is a clear gender distinction most of the time, in terms of the recipients of the violence and the means employed to inflict pain and suffering. Men usually fight with weapons and instruments of torture, to display might, prestige and legal authority. In Ming and mid-Qing novels, such as Jin Ping Mei, Yuguihong and Jin Yun Qiao zhuan, even good men act violently as a default mode at all levels of social interaction. The exception is constituted by the true romantic hero in the fiction of this period, the wenren 文人 (‘the scholar’), who uses words as his weapons and has substituted the phallic power of sword and fists with the honeyed words he can utter, recite and write. At the other end of the spectrum from the literatus we have a whole plethora of violent men whose ethical make-up is manifested but not always defined by violence: Ximen Qing often behaves like a bully and a tyrant, while Wu Song kills tigers and humans with his bare hands, and Wei Zhongxian poisons the entire country. In addition, what happens in the public arena translates seamlessly in the private space of the home: the male servants of the Ximen household all beat their wives, while his son-in-law Cheng Jingji abuses Ximen’s daughter to death, basically. Interestingly, of all the beatings that a man like Ximen Qing initiates, directly and indirectly, as a private citizen and as an official, those that involve his wives—and there are quite a few—, seem to be the more ‘ordinary’ matters of routine domestic administration. Women’s adoption of violence within the Ming and Qing fictional household then appears imitative of a masculine stance that allows the womenfolk to claim authority and control over rivals in love, weaker members of the family and, especially, other women who are socially subordinated to them. Perhaps the best illustration of this dynamic is Pan Jinlian’s constant physical and verbal abuse of her junior maid Qiuju, which borders on one of the most explicit depictions of sadism in Ming literature. Qiuju is relentlessly beaten, insulted and diminished, very often for no other reason than to allow Pan Jinlian to vent her frustration, sexual

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and otherwise.8 In many instances, Pan Jinlian is transposing on the body of the maid the punishments Ximen Qing had inflicted earlier on her, displacing the physical expression of her anger towards the other wives, with whom she can often only deal at the verbal level, onto the inert body of the maid. Qiuju has absolutely no agency to resist Pan Jinlian: she is under her total control and power because the latter, as one of the favorite concubines in the household, is in the socially superior position. This dynamic is very clearly illustrated in Chapter 41 of Jingpingmei cihua, where Pan Jinlian begins to cane mercilessly Qiuju for being slow in opening the gate to let her back into her quarters.9 When the girl starts “howling like a stuck pig” (shazhu yesi jiao 殺豬也 似叫), Li Ping’er sends her maid to ask Pan Jinlian to stop, using as a pretext her fear that Qiuju’s screams will wake her baby, whom she has just put down to sleep. To this, Pan Jinlian responds by beating Qiuju even more viciously, seizing on this opportunity for loudly berating her archrival Li Ping’er in the process. The words are as painful to hear for Li Ping’er as the blows to bear for the tortured body of Qiuju. It would be hard to downplay the legacy of these representations: just to mention one obvious case, there is no doubt that Zeng Pu had Pan Jinlian in mind as a model for his heroine, Fu Caiyun, and her acts of cruelty against her subordinates, in his novel Niehaihua: There was a young maid who, to please Fu Caiyun, carefully brought a cup of tea to her mistress’ mouth. But because the girl was flurried, she burned Caiyun’s lips. Caiyun slapped the girl and screamed: “Worthless slave, you scorched me!” The maid retreated a few steps but her hand slipped and all the tea got spilled on Caiyun’s new dress. Fu Caiyun did not even shake out the water from her clothes. Instead, sitting up straight, she said laughingly: “Come closer, I am not going to eat you!” As soon as the girl came closer, Caiyun grabbed her with all her strength. With her free hand she pulled down a golden ear-pick from her hair and started to stab wildly the back of the maid’s hand until fresh blood spurted.10

Fu Caiyun is a young courtesan who has left the profession by marrying a very important official and she is also one of the many avatars of Sai Jinhua, the historical courtesan who we have also encountered in

8

See Kong Fanhua, Jinpingmeide nüxing shijie (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1991); Lanling Xiaoxiaoshen, 1982. 9 Lanling Xiaoxiaoshen, 1982, vol. 2, 1092. 10 Zeng Pu, 1990, 144−145.

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Haishang si da mingji jingang qishu. Fu Caiyun in this scene is truly ‘channeling’ Pan Jinlian as she is listless and bored, at home, trapped in a foreign country and in a marriage to an older man who does not pay much heed to her. The main difference, of course, between Fu Caiyun’s behavior and that of the madams mentioned above, apart from the settings, is the fact that her abuse serves no precise pedagogical or economic function: it is pure cruelty. From this angle, Fu Caiyun presents the late Qing reader with a very interesting permutation of the model posited by Pan Jinlian, who uses violence not so much in order to educate and train her maids, but rather to mimic masculine authority and, on occasion, to vent repressed anger, thereby appropriating a mostly male language in a way that is meant to be read as immoral, transgressive and iconoclastic, given that she is a married woman in a very wealthy household. Accordingly, Fu Caiyun is as lascivious, reckless and, in many ways, immoral as Pan Jinlian, cheating, as she does, on her husband and leading him to a faster death with all her lies and deceits, echoing, to a certain degree, Pan Jinlian’s role in Ximen Qing’s demise. Given that Fu Caiyun is a courtesan, however, and that after her short marriage to Jin Hongjun she happily returns where she belongs, i.e., the brothel, her loose moral alignment retains its entertainment value but is less questionable, revealing the dramatic changes that had occurred on the horizons of the romantic narrative in the nineteenth century, a point fully explored in the next chapter. That the use of violence in fiction allows women to trespass into a problematic destabilizing mode of physical, sexual and linguistic behavior, is also clearly illustrated by the figure of the shrew, alternatively called yinfu 淫婦, hanfu 悍婦 and pofu 潑婦.11 As Maram Epstein writes, “[the] figure of the shrew, because of her power to threaten normative Confucian social structures on a number of levels, became emblematic of the breakdown of the sociopolitical order within orthodox discourse.”12 Sexually voracious, power hungry, and physically threatening and destabilizing for the husbands, the shrews of Ming times are most harmful to men and to women only as a sort 11 For a profound and exhaustive discussion of this character in late imperial fiction, see M. Epstein, Competing Discourses. Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2001), especially 120ff. See also Y. Wu, The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Harvard University Press, 1995); Y. Wu, The Lioness Roars: Shrew Stories from Late Imperial China (Cornell University, 1995). 12 Epstein, 2001, 121.

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of after-thought. As demonstrated by the examples taken from the Jin Ping Mei, in the household where a shrew appears, it is usually mostly her spouse and a handful of subordinates who suffer, directly and indirectly, by the breakdown of the sociopolitical order. The shift in late Qing fiction happens then in terms of the increase in the numbers of yinfu and of their spread across various social strata: one could go even further and state that almost all of the problematic female characters in the literature of this period (and there are many of those!) share some yinfu genetic make-up, as it were. As opposed to Ming and mid-Qing fiction, where for each household the reader would, mercifully, only encounter one Pan Jinlian at a time, at most, in the novels under discussion here, almost every prostitute is a yinfu or has the potential to turn into one at a moment’s notice, and her possible victims, consequently, also grow in number. To return to the courtesan and her relationship both to her baomu and to her servants, we see that she inherits the masculine modes of expression of the yinfu and simultaneously transposes them in a new territory, which the urban modernity of Shanghai has made more reproductively dynamic. Thus, violence keeps reproducing itself in the linked-mirror space of the brothel, crowded with too many women, all on the prowl for money, sex, power and pleasure. The only element that appears to maintain a very frail order in the brothel is precisely the uneven balance of power, which assimilates the courtesan’s relationship with her maids to the madam-courtesan bond. This connection becomes even more potent when we discover that in many sources a maid raises from her status as a servant to that of a courtesan to eventually become, in her old age, a madam herself. As the madam is often a former prostitute, herself, there is no real social divide, class-wise, between her and her subordinate and the unequal rapport has more to do with the baomu’s absolute financial, legal and physical control of the body of the younger woman. However, since, as we have seen earlier, the prostitute may be unwilling to subjugate herself at first, or to acknowledge this hierarchy, violence becomes a primary language for the madam to educate her daughter in terms of her proper place within the bordello. The madam instead uses physical abuse pedagogically, as it were, and often only reluctantly, as she does not want to maim or damage the body of the courtesan, which is, after all, her primary investment and source of income.

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Indeed, many sources, especially from the mid- to late Qing period, emphasize in great detail how frequently physical violence became the primary tool to shape the young courtesan into a docile and obedient employee. In Haishang hua, for example, Zhu Jinhua, an apprentice courtesan, runs in tears, after a severe round of beating, to the brothel where her older friend Huang Cuifeng is also working as a courtesan. Zhu Jinhua’s very strict maitresse first beat her because the girl was reluctant to receive clients and then, later, the madam beat Zhu Jinhua again because a client had visited her five times in a row and she had grown afraid that the girl was focusing too much of her efforts on him and not enough in getting as large a clientele as possible. When Zhu Jinhua shows her burned legs and her bruises to Huang Cuifeng, the latter is harsh with her and mocks her by telling her that if she is afraid of pain she should go and become the wife or the daughter of an important man, instead of trying to be a courtesan.13 The older courtesan might appear callous and insensitive but we could read her words as a way to help this ‘rookie’ learn how to deal with the reality of the world she has entered: tears and invectives do not seem to address Zhu Jinhua’s powerlessness vis-à-vis the baomu and the sooner she learns how to avoid punishment and bring in money, the better it will be. It is also important to note that, even with this powerful influence of Ming works, in late Qing sources, the viciousness of the madam is increasingly enhanced and revealed on the violated, tortured body of the courtesan, often to the extent that authors appear to compete with each other to unveil the most sensational and, at times, revolting, cases of abuse. This greater display of violent behavior could be explained as a response to the audience’s increased desire for shocking stories, which in turn could be understood as a symptom of the violent historical changes taking place in Chinese society at the time. The younger the victim and the more violent the plot, the more the pleasure of the readership: the shift in the power of audiences to determine content of literary sources constitutes an interesting lens through which to read and understand the stories about the sale of a girl’s virginity analyzed in Chapter Two, one that we will have the opportunity to delve more

13

Han Ziyun, 1983, 358.

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into later on.14 For now, suffice it to say that the madam’s cruelty and her inhuman obsession about keeping her ‘investment’ always financially profitable is best seen in regard to pregnancy. Novels frame the market of sex work as fiercely competitive and posit childbearing as a serious economic hindrance for the madam, who has to support an expecting prostitute who cannot entertain clients and, thus, cannot earn her keep. Thus, in Haishang fanhuameng, just to mention one example, the madam subverts the whole foundation of traditional Chinese society when she says to a patron who may be the father of the yet unborn child of Xiao Tao, one of her girls, that, “Your becoming a father, sir, is what we who earn a living in the brothel fear most.”15 Pregnancy, a joyous and necessary event in the life of a respectable woman (one only has to remember the vicissitudes Wu Yueniang and Li Ping’er go through to successfully bear a child to Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei), constitutes a disaster for the madam because her courtesan cannot work for many months and, thus, is bound to lose precious clients. Furthermore, the higher the rank of the woman, the greater the financial setback will be for the entire establishment, as there will be more people whose livelihood depends from her being able to entertain, from the maids to the servants to the cooks and all the various employees necessary to keep the house running. The madam in question is actually trying to get this client, whom Xiao Tao is identifying as the father of her unborn child, to pay for her upkeep during the months she will not be able to work. The plot becomes more complicated when the pregnant prostitute realizes that the man she believes to be the father, Pan Shao’an, will not support her financially. A woman who works in the brothel with her then suggests to her to try to convince another client, the one she supposedly lost her virginity to, Wen Shengfu, that he is the father, so that he will pay for her upkeep. However, a more experienced friend of Wen Shengfu unveils the scam and Xiao Tao ends up getting a thorough beating from the madam who then forces her to have an abortion. The madam gets 14 For information about Shanghai s print media explosion and the heavy involvement of reading audiences in the development of serialized novels, see also J. Judge, Print and Politics. Shibao and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, 1996); Link, 1981; B. Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872−1912 (Harvard University Press, 2004); C. A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai. Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876−1937 (UBC Press, 2004). 15 Sun Jiazhen, 1991, 411.

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a vicious and mean old lady to perform the operation that nobody wanted to do and the author’s condemnatory tone reveals his opposition to such procedures and practices—though, unfortunately, it does not stop him from dwelling on the entire procedure. It is the madam, again, who rents a dingy and dirty place for the procedure during which Xiao Tao is first painfully bandaged and then fed some medicine that causes her to abort the fetus with great pain and even greater blood loss. Right after the abortion, the ruthless madam forces Xiao Tao to go out on calls and also to have sex with a customer. This causes her depleted physique to collapse and, after a delirious night, she dies.16 Xiao Tao’s entire person is clearly not her own to manage. She cannot control what is put in her, from semen to miscarriageinducing medicine, or what is taken out, from her fetus to her blood and, eventually, her life. The baomu is in charge of regulating these vital flows and exchanges, just as she in charge of admitting or rejecting customers. From this perspective, this brings us back to the reading of the prostitute’s body as an extension of the brothel, that is, an additional site of consumption, as most customers go to the qinglou to drink, gamble, smoke opium, listen to opera and singing, and meet with and entertain friends, aside from having sex. The courtesan in training, as a human being, often resists this commodification that reduces her to pure space of consumption, hence the violence and the ‘depersonification’ at the hands of the madam. This dehumanization of personal ties, together with the financial nature and the uneven hierarchy of the baomu-courtesan bond are made apparent in the almost absolute absence of an emotional component in this relationship. It is seldom the case that a madam will shed tears for the suffering and death of her girls and, the more we move towards the end of the nineteenth century, the more deaths we encounter in these novels. This could be explained by the fact that the madam is in charge of many girls and who are very seldom her own biological daughters, unlike it was the case in earlier Ming and Qing narratives, where the kinship terminology deployed by the inhabitants of the brothel often reflected actual blood ties. Furthermore, it is also the case that the madam, herself, is in many cases the ‘survivor’ of another madam and, thus, we could choose to read the representation of the violence and ruthlessness inflicted here as due not only to

16

Sun Jiazhen, 1991, 472−482 and 550.

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greed, but also to practice. We could further connect it to a discourse that ethically constructs a complete reversal of values. To be filial in the demimonde, for instance, can mean to entertain as many customers as possible, so that the courtesan will be a good ‘daughter’ and support her ‘mother’; as a result, the prostitute’s virtue, then, becomes prostitution itself. For example, the story of Feng Lin in Fengyue meng illustrates how the family’s economy revolved around her ability to make money: she is the breadwinner and she alone takes care of her mother, her sisters, her brother, her husband, her lover and so on. In the end, the only way Feng Lin has to gain her freedom from this constant financial drain is to sell herself to the highest bidder, so that she will be able to retire from her role as the financial provider and get some rest from her constantly needy family.17 We could even go so far as to postulate resentment and a desire for revenge in trying to reconstruct a genealogy of the profuse violence that permeates the lives of all the women inside the brothel. Maids, as we have seen in the passage from Niehaihua quoted above, often provide the young abused courtesans with a venue to vent their anger and their frustration: vulnerable, powerless, young female servants, who often end up working as sex workers themselves, get beaten savagely by prostitutes and madams alike, in a fashion that frames the language of violence as one of the main modes of communication within the qinglou and not the exclusive mode of communication between baomu and courtesan. In Haishang hua, we find a chilling example of this dynamic in the story of A Qiao, whose life depicts a history of child abuse and exploitation, narrative made all the more chilling by its banality as hers is a story that belongs, in varying degrees, to many of the women who appear in the novel.18 In sum, even as violence respects gender and social hierarchies, it also trumps individuality, in a sort of endless cycle, so the madam will hit the courtesan, the older courtesan will hit the rookie, the rookie will hit the servant, the servant will hit her child, and the patron and other men will hit the child, the courtesan, the wife and the madam. Abuse is perhaps connected to power more than to gender and personhood, in this sense: the economics of violence in the brothel is regulated according to who has more economic and social strength, effectively erasing individuality, 17 18

Hanshang mengren, 1989, 336. Han Ziyun, 1983, 227.

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and along with it, many of the possibilities for tenderness and affection between women, even when these female-to-female relationships are embedded in the exclusive language of kinship and motherhood. This conclusion can help us make sense of the fact that in late Qing novels in general, and in novels about the prostitution world in particular, we find some of the most violent scenes in the history of Chinese literature, from rape to child abuse, and also of the fact that, in most cases, the violence takes place between women. Of course, one must not forget the literary precedents sketched earlier, and also that most late Qing writers seemed very invested in using fiction both to satisfy their readers’ thirst for scandal and sensation, as is illustrated by the fact that many of the fictional characters were modeled on reallife courtesans whose adventures were often already sensationalized in newspapers and magazines of the time. At the same time, the strong tone of social accusation towards the very scenes that they so painstakingly depicted in excruciating detail also shows that these writers wanted to create a comfortable position through which the audience could occupy the moral high ground when viewing and enjoying the brutal landscapes painted for them in these novels. This tension between exposé and exploitation is one of the main characteristics of the vernacular literature of this period and, once more, the lost body of the courtesan is found to be a very valuable canvas onto which to display the contradictory journey of repulsion and desire that informed much of the construction of fictional masculinity in this historical juncture. II. Cat-fight! Regardless of whether she is a high-class girl or a hooker, if she survives the harsh and merciless training inflicted on her by the madam, and her entrance into sex work, the courtesan has to face the first and main obstacle to her success, namely her ‘colleagues’. The rivalry among sex workers of all different categories is portrayed as one of the most brutal relationships in the urban landscape of late Qing fiction and this is in and of itself a very important novelty in comparison with earlier stories, which usually only showcased one courtesan at a time. Her ‘sisters’, if they appeared at all, would usually be an inferior foil of the heroine, either as a hapless younger ‘sister’ in need of help and assistance or as a collective body, devoid of individual characteristics.

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Late Qing courtesans move in a much more commercialized environment and marketplace, to the point that new skills, talents and clothes often are not enough to knock the other competitors out of the race for attracting new clients, while keeping the favors of old ones. Competition among brothels, among courtesans, among hookers, is depicted as fierce and, even among women working within the same brothel, the race is always on. At times, the economic competition drives sex workers in a diaspora of sorts. They move from Shanghai to other cities, such as Tianjin and Beijing, as Shi Chunfei did, in search of a new and less saturated market. Often the pull of Shanghai proves too strong to resist though and most migrant sex workers return to their starting place and to a life of cutthroat antagonism. As the famous saying goes, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere,”19 and the ‘bad girls’ of late Qing novels are incredibly mobile, breaking all sorts of walls and boundaries in their path and, thus, the people who move through them are also everywhere. In Haishang hua, we find a clear example of economic competition between two co-workers.20 Shen Xiaohong has been discarded by her only patron, Wang Liansheng, because he has heard rumors about her running after actors. No self-respecting upper-class man would want to see himself second in his courtesan’s affections and not especially for the sake of the very much despised social class of actors. After he leaves her, Wang Liansheng begins patronizing Zhang Huizhen, another courtesan. Since Wang Liansheng had demanded and obtained a promise that Shen Xiaohong would not entertain any other patron beside himself, after he breaks up with her, she has nowhere to turn for economic support. In her eyes, even if she wanted to start entertaining clients again, she could not make herself look presentable, because her wardrobe is too outdated and worn-out. As her economic situation worsens, she decides to go on the attack: armed with her rightful fury, she storms on the new couple who is out and about town on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and is enjoying a day out at the Bubbling Well Temple, one of the primary sites in Shanghai to see and be seen. Once there, she pummels away at Zhang Huizhen. The fight between the two women is vicious: Shen Xiaohong overpowers her rival, who ends up sprawled on the floor, bloody and bruised, all her ornaments shattered, in front

19 20

Saying attributed to the New York socialite Helen Browning. Han Ziyun, 1983, 102 and ff.

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of an ever-growing crowd of onlookers, none of whom raises a finger to defend her. Wang Liansheng is powerless as well, he is simply pushed aside by one of Shen Xiaohong’s maids and it takes him a long time to even gather the wits to go and call for the police. This desperate act on Shen Xiaohong’s part does not help her keep him as a client, possibly also because Wang Liansheng’s suspicions prove to be accurate, as Shen Xiaohong is indeed seeing the actor Xiaoliu behind his back. However, her violent scene turns out to be the way to earn a small amount of capital that allows her to eventually return to receiving clients, as he finally gives her some parting money as a way to compensate her.21 This story, one of many in the pages of late Qing fiction, illustrates how for an upper-class courtesan, one client lost can mean a great set-back in terms of her career and her value on the marketplace. Clearly (and not just in fiction, but also in real life) the loss of a client is less traumatic for lower-class courtesans and streetwalkers, who entertain many more patrons, have less exclusive relationships with them and, thus, can replace a lost patron more easily. The client-sex-worker dynamics at play here reveal the complexity and the limits of the upper-class courtesan’s agency. She is, in a sense, dependent on the patron since it is within his rights to demand at least a semblance of fidelity, as well as to maintain the freedom to change his mind and to discard a courtesan of whom he has grown tired. At the same time, the courtesan herself is not totally helpless: by creating a scene in a very crowded street, Shen Xiaohong could at least manipulate the situation to her advantage and, in this sense, her higher standing and increased visibility, as opposed to the anonymity of the street-walker, allows her more leverage when it comes to shaming her rivals and lovers. Her heightened visibility is actually what makes her so vulnerable in terms of the gaze of others, which in and of itself constitutes perhaps yet another violation, different in kind if not in degree. The body of the courtesan is written in this text as a site of violent spectacle for the enjoyment of the bystanders—and, by extension, of the readers—, and evokes again the equation of lost body with the brothel, in an even more interesting way, since now the courtesan, as a moveable feast

21 Wang Liansheng, the unfaithful lover, gets his retribution, when his marriage to Zhang Huizhen turns out to be a nightmare (Han Ziyun, 1983, 502).

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of sorts, can carry along with her, in her, also the penetrability of the semi-public spaces she at once inhabits and constitutes. The courtesan’s life is indeed prostituted, in the original sense of ‘making public’, in all sorts of ways in this scene: Zhang Huizhen ends up disheveled, her supine body humiliated for all and sundry to enjoy. That it is another woman who overpowers is also essential to this kind of representations: “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” but there is a very powerful component of scopophilia in this cruel mapping of the prostitute’s body on the street, especially given that we are dealing with the fictional avatars of very famous courtesans. The male authors of late Qing novels, besides satirizing the economic rivalry between courtesans, also enjoyed representing them as lovestruck and lustful, jealously fighting over their lovers. Thus, money is not the only reason for contention between courtesans. Because, in these novels, men do not lose their right to polygamy even when they ‘step out’ on their wives, it is customary for one patron to frequent many different houses and restaurants, with the result that often one courtesan’s current beloved would have already been somebody else’s ‘sugar daddy’. Economic rivalry would then be replaced, or at least complicated, by a romantic one, a fact that could have just as serious consequences for the safety and the wellbeing of the rival in love, as we see, for example, in Chapter 21 of Jiuweigui. In this episode, Zhang Shuyu and Jin Xiaobao, two famous courtesans, have a catfight in broad daylight over Chunshu. Zhang Shuyu, who is bent on obtaining the exclusive romantic attention of Chunshu, has recruited some hooligans to give Jin Xiaobao a sound thrashing. It is only thanks to Zhang Shuyu’s best friend Zhang Qiugu and his timely intervention at the last moment that nothing too tragic happens to either woman. During their confrontation, the two women do not spare each other a series of very heavy insults, such as “Bitch fucked by one thousand men” and “You hooker, pulling clients from the streets.”22 Though both women are supposedly high-class sex workers, they debase each other by each claiming a higher moral and accusing the other of acting as a low-class prostitute. Their insults also revolve around not knowing the proper ritual and etiquette, just like those country bumpkins

22

Zhang Chunfan, 1993, 141 and ff.

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who come to Shanghai full of money and bad manners, often the butt of jokes for both the characters and the readers of late Qing novels. It is possible that the abundance of cat-fights and violent confrontations found in the pages of these novels could reflect practices of violence common in the daily life of most courtesans but, since we are in the realm of fiction, it could also very well be that late Qing writers wanted to satirize this category of glamorized women by revealing their less refined, more beastly side. There could be an undeniable element of comedy for Shanghaiese readers to imagine the beautiful women whom they would daily see parading on the Shanghai Bund all dressed up like heavenly creatures fighting like crazed dogs over a man. One can picture the author, and the reader along with him, standing in the circle of onlookers, always present when a fight takes place, and laughing merrily at the disheveled courtesans and at their bloody noses.23 Now, how does this dynamic of rivalry, competition and satire change when it becomes romantic, economic and social at the same time, namely, when the courtesan faces the wife, whose life is seriously affected, both economically and erotically, by her husband’s philandering? Wives in these novels are usually portrayed as the hapless victims of their spouses: often beaten and abused emotionally and verbally, they starve and struggle to make ends meet while their husbands make merry in the brothel and swear eternal love to young courtesans. If the wives dare to say anything, they get savagely thrashed.24 However, not all women take their husbands’ cheating lying down. Some have the courage to remonstrate, and go and face the competition and their philandering husbands. In Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, a jealous wife descends on the brothel to reclaim her husband just in the nick of time, as he is about to take Hu Yue’e for his concubine. The wife storms in, slaps her husband, insults Hu Yue’e and knocks all the food prepared for the festive occasion off the table. Hu Yue’e is not easily intimidated though. She tells Mrs. Li:

23 This can, in itself, be a clear characteristic of the fact that we are dealing with fictional texts and not historical accounts: all confrontations between courtesans happen in the presence of the public, they are staged so to have the widest audience possible, very likely to allow the reader to squeeze into the crowd, just like he would have done during a theatrical representation. 24 See, for one of the most striking examples, Hanshang mengren, 1989, 327 onwards.

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chapter three Lousy wife, if you want to control your man, do it at home! What business do you have in coming here, in our brothel, to raise a ruckus? If you were looking for your man, fine, what is the point of knocking stuff down? If your husband did not come here, do you think we would go to his home and force him to come?25

Then Hu Yue’e scares the wife away by asking her maids to call the (foreign) police. The wife wins in the end, as she manages to leave with her husband and to keep him away from the brothel. The face-off is between the sex worker and the wife, and the husband, here as elsewhere, always takes the ‘back seat’, as it were, in the confrontation, just like it had been the case for Wang Liansheng during the fight between Shen Xiaohong and Huizhen. It is the women who have to fight for their access to men, to mark their territory and their sphere of action and, in this case, it is the rightful wife who wins. However, it is very dangerous for a respectable woman to come close to the problematic topo-ethical world inhabited and represented by courtesans, and other wives are not so successful in reforming and reclaiming their husbands. Usually, the fight between the wife and the prostitute illustrates at the same time the man’s responsibility and his absence. For instance, in Haishang hua, the rage of the wife, Mrs. Yao, who marches to the brothel in high dudgeon in search of her husband, Second Master, and to confront his lover Xuexian, is at first presented as justified.26 As the scene unfolds, however, the prostitute manages to frame the wife as the one who acts shamelessly and against the norms of respectability. Xuexian scolds Mrs. Yao, reminding her that women from a respectable background should not be running around on the street, even if they are looking for their husbands. The sex worker is virtuous because she knows her place, in the brothel and outside and, thus, can claim higher moral ground than the wife. Xuexian even goes so far as to allude to the possibility that the wife could be raped because a proper woman has no business in a brothel and, just by virtue of her trespassing into this heavily sexualized space, she too begins to shi shen in terms of her social status and to become indistinguishable from any other prostitute. Worse, the wife is provoking sexual assault just by virtue of entering the bordello: consequently, if indeed she were

25 26

Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], 501. Han Ziyun, 1983, 231.

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violated, she could not complain about it to anybody, since her transgression against moral conventions would be worse than that of the rapist. A sex worker cannot be raped, especially not in the brothel. Only a woman whose shen is intact can lose it, in other words. This attitude is exactly the one that the courtesans uphold in the course of their confrontations with the wives of the patrons. The sex workers are the first to cry scandal at the sight of a ‘respectable’ woman on public display. For the proper woman, to be outside, on the street, in the brothel, corresponds to becoming visible and to opening herself to the violence of sexuality: for the courtesan, being visible in public is her business, the street her home turf. Visibility is part of her expected role, as opposed to that of a woman from a good family, whose highest virtue consists in disappearing, in erasing all visible traces of her bodily self, from her breasts, tightly wrapped, to her feet, so tightly constricted that her footsteps became as light and subtle as birds’ steps. True, the courtesan also binds her feet: the female body, in traditional Chinese culture, was meant to be wrapped, miniaturized, contained and made into a surface that could be inscribed with aesthetic, erotic and moral meanings. While the bound feet of a wife are precious because invisible, one that should never be seen, except by her husband, other women and by her husband’s family when she first entered his house, the courtesan’s feet are an important asset that needs to be constantly on display. Make-up and bright-colored robes adorn the courtesan, while the wife is in a way clothed by the walls of her inner quarters. Just as the courtesan’s attributes—her se 色, meaning here color and appearance—are external, superficial and visible, the wife’s are internal, moral and invisible. It is patent here that in comparison with the wife, the courtesan, at least in this instance, is empowered, and her manner of speech enhances her superiority: what is left to lose for a woman who has already lost her body, i.e., her good name and social standing? The marginal position of the sex worker appears, for the entire social stigma attached to it, one of greater independence than the wife’s, at least when it comes to depending upon men. She has nothing left to fear, unlike the wife, who must preserve her chastity. The sex worker can always, at least theoretically, replace her clients but the wife is stuck with the one spouse that her parents have dealt her. Mrs. Yao, as any woman of good family gutsy enough to brave the qinglou, can only go back home, crestfallen and humiliated.

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These two groups of women clearly move in different spaces and live by different moral standards. As Fu Caiyun explains to her husband, after he discovers her long-standing liaison with the page A Fu, a courtesan, even after her marriage, cannot be expected to operate according to the same rules as a respectable woman, who would not have become a concubine in the first place: “Let me ask you this: do you consider me your wife or your concubine?” Wenqing asked: “What if you were my wife?” “If I were your wife” continued Caiyun, “Then today I would have brought shame upon you and ruined the reputation of your household, making it impossible for you to be a respected person. There would be nothing else left to say for me but to ask you to bestow on me a dagger or a piece of rope, to be slaughtered or strangled according to your wishes. I would die without a frown.” “And what if you were my concubine?” again asked Wenqing. “Then it would be a different matter. When you look at us concubines, you consider us as mere toys: when you are taken with us, you hold us to your bosoms, sit us in your lap, you praise us as ‘precious ones’ and ‘darlings’. But as soon as your love is gone, you make haste to kick us out, to send us away to a distant place, to present us to other people: the loopholes to get rid of us are so many! Now take me: I believe you treat me a little better, in comparison, but you must know me and my background by now. When you first married me, you never expected me to abide by the ‘Three Obediences’,27 the ‘Four Virtues’28 and by the principle of chaste behavior!”29

Even if we must assume that in real life, for the many concubines, be they ex-courtesans or not, such freedom of speech and action was not only unheard of, but utterly unthinkable, this speech unveils the hypocrisy of men and women who held prostitutes to the same moral standards of their wives. It also shows that consistently throughout the literature of the time, authors depict this category of women in the act of speaking truth to power, as it were, be it the power of social respectability, as in the case where liang jia women challenge the prostitutes’ holds over their husbands, or the power of the phallus, as in the case of Fu Caiyun quoted above. This, in turn, can be reconnected to the idea of violence as the dominant mode of discourse in the brothel and among prostitutes as, clearly, these women use words as power-

27 28 29

I.e., to one s father, husband, and to one s son, for a widow. I.e., right behavior, modest speech, proper demeanor, proper employment. Zeng Pu, 1990, 212−213.

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fully and dangerously as they have learned to use fists and kicks from their madams and rivals. In addition, they also articulate their reasons and rationale for acting in illicit ways with an incredibly high degree of self-awareness and lucidity, which reveals how their socialization process, so brutally etched onto their very body, has as one of its lasting consequences a very empowering form of knowledge. By knowing her place, which, as we have seen, is virtually everywhere, the bad girl quickly learns how to use her ubiquitousness, and its violent consequences, to her advantage. Though the wife can be a very important and powerful presence in her own household, as soon as she ventures outside, alone, to face the ‘other woman’, she is at a loss for words. As we have seen, late imperial Chinese fiction abounds with eloquent and shrewish wives who boss their husbands around but, in late Qing fiction, even shrews fall silent in confrontations with the courtesan. During these confrontations, the courtesan and the wife stand in from of each other as mirror images, one the opposite of the other. Matthew Sommer, in his study of sex and gender in Qing legal history, writes that, “Legal cases again and again show that women who were pimped or otherwise sexually exploited experienced a demystification, a ‘consciousness-raising’, that could have radically subversive results.”30 In other words, he points to the fact that the moral codes that helped induce women to submit to such abusive arrangements initially were themselves undermined by the disjuncture that sexual exploitation opened between mandated values and lived experience. Similarly, the courtesan in late Qing fiction upholds the moral norms of correct behavior for the wife but with a sarcastic smile: by virtue of the sexual exploitation that has brought her to ‘lose her body’ and her respectability, she has gained—at least a fictional—freedom of speech. In these novels, courtesans are depicted as figures extremely conscious of their status and of its double-edged nature. For example, in Niehaihua, Fu Caiyun is at once completely aware of her socially-tainted position and the freedom to which it entitles her. Fu Caiyun sees herself as a subject at odds with those, men and women, hierarchically superior and restricting to her field of action, and as belonging to a group of women whose behavior and ways are

30

Sommer, 2000, 318−319.

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dictated by their character and cannot be changed.31 Her assertiveness and self-perception, in a scene of self-confession to Madame Zhang, the primary wife, once they have both become widows of their husband, are at once an apology of her fallen status and a claim to freedom: Heaven gave me this rotten disposition: I love mischief and pursue happiness. When the occasion arises I am not able to control myself. When my late husband was alive, even if I did not behave very well at all, he kept in check this heart of mine quite a good deal thanks to his tenderness and sweetness; now that there is nobody who can restrain me, and since I am not able to control myself, if you insist in making me stay here, almost for sure I will cause some embarrassing story to go around with my rowdy behavior. At that point, I will have disgraced my late husband’s memory even more! In the second place, I have grown accustomed to spend all I wish: I did not study the art of thriftiness when I was small and ever since my arrival here, I have been squandering money according to my whims. Now that my husband is dead and the income of his household has decreased, even if you, Madame, are very gracious with me, how can I ask you [for money] with a clear conscience? Yet, since I cannot draw back these rich and liberal hands of mine, I fear that I could squander the whole of my husband’s inheritance. Therefore, after careful consideration, [I decided that] instead of keeping up with this farce, that would end up in a great loss of face for my late husband and could hurt his progeny, it would be much better to deal with the problem head on and to let me go away.32

The courtesan is well aware of her indulgences (in this case her scandalous conduct and her prodigality). Blaming her natural disposition for her misbehavior, explaining her actions as something natural, biological, that cannot be helped, she automatically washes her hands of any responsibility for it. She creates with her confession an image of helplessness that has at the same time an immense power. Eventually she, the ex-prostitute, the ex-concubine, with no family to back her up, is the winner in this confrontation, because she has nothing to lose, no reputation to defend, unlike the widow who is addressed in this speech, who, even after her husband has died, has to ferociously guard her invisibility. Keeping Fu Caiyun inside her invisible kingdom after her husband’s death would cause scandal because it would bring

31 Also in nineteenth-century France, prostitution was often explained as the result of a biological inclination towards sexual promiscuity. See Bernheimer, 1989, and J. Matlock, Scenes of Seduction. Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Differences in Nineteenth Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 32 Zeng Pu, 1990, 275.

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her, Madame Zhang, into the public arena and so Fu Caiyun has to be returned to the street. Lest we should read this positioning as proto-feminist, we have to remind ourselves that the voices with which the courtesans talk are the ventriloquized utterances of their authors. That it is the male voice that creates this parlance is made clear in Jiuweigui, when the male narrator directly tells his readers why a courtesan can never become a ‘good’ woman.33 His argument is that these women cannot give up their lavish lifestyle and their trysts with horse-grooms and actors. While for women of good family adultery constitutes a serious trespass, for the prostitutes cheating is ‘everyday fare’. He then goes on to explain how courtesans cheat their clients into believing that they will marry them, when they are actually only scheming to get their money. His point is that when it comes to women, virtue is acquired, not innate. If these women had been brought up in a proper manner, they would not consider cheating, lying and stealing but because of their upbringing and their habits, they cannot help themselves, and most of all, they cannot be reformed. The shi shen is so deeply formed, almost tattooed, by its violent training and socialization that it can never be re-written into the logic of chastity, virtue and respectability, an issue we will discuss again in Chapter Four. It is hard to sort out the extent to which these men’s expectations, in their roles of scribes or of authors, informed the idea/picture of a woman who belonged to a sexually-exploited category and the extent to which women themselves subscribed to these expectations. Quite possibly, male authors were writing partially to express their expectations and partially from their own experience: still, the messages they convey are often confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, by bringing the prostitute and the wife face-to-face, the writer can engage in powerful social satire and display the hypocritical lunacy of pretending that these two groups of women act according to one moral code when the former is sought after by the patron precisely because she is not what their wives are. Indeed, that marriage can alter the moral and sexual make-up of the prostitute is shown as a delusional heritage of the outdated talented scholar and beautiful courtesan mythology late Qing writers set out to debunk, as Chapter Four fully illustrates. There is more: these confrontations show that the courtesan feels entitled to,

33

Zhang Chunfan, 1993.

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and even expects to, share certain spaces with men, at the expense of the exclusion of the wives. If it is true that “[i]dentifying a wife as an inner person (neiren) constructed her femininity via bodily location rather than biology, a spatial habitus that taught female gender in the idiom of a socially complex family life,”34 then the courtesan, by virtue of her multiple bodily locations, could never become a permanent neiren. Rather, she is always a wairen, who, by virtue of her social class, lives outside the domestic realm of wifehood and motherhood but who, by virtue of her gender, is not entitled to fully occupy the outside world where men of different social classes interact. So she is located at the margins of nei and wai but not in a static fashion. To return to the spatial explanation of the connection between virginity, virtue and space, we see that the courtesan moves in the space in-between, she is in constant transit: transgenderal, transpatial, transgressive. Her being so spatially unstable does not, however, destabilize the spatial order of other women: her instability is the necessary foil to the liangjia wives’ stability. That explains why, while there is seldom a brothel scene in late Qing novels without women, when a liangjia woman dares even to go through the door, all hell breaks loose. The late Qing courtesan’s transnational and global mobility is, then, further legitimated by the wife’s confinement.35 To sum up, the courtesan has rivals within and outside the brothel: her clients are her source of income, but also her woe; her lovers are often unreliable scoundrels who are more interested in her money than in her welfare; her ‘colleagues’ are jealous competitors; and the streets are often crowded with the disgruntled wives of her patrons. We have shown how her madam, other courtesans and respectable women are just as important as her patrons in terms of defining the boundaries of the sex worker’s social identity but all three stand as her declared enemies. They are responsible for etching, through their violent utterances, the subjectivities allowed to this class of women. Who are then, if any, the courtesan’s allies and friends? Deprived of a ‘safe’ positioning within the ranks of the ‘good people’, what kind of

34 C. Furth, A Flourishing Yin. Gender in Chinas Medical History, 960−1665 (University of California Press, 1998), 6. 35 At times, liangjia women, not just their husbands, formed bonds with courtesans, and at other times, romanticized and envied their lifestyle. For the bond between women from good families and courtesans in real life, see Ko, 1994; Shen Fu, Fusheng liuji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1992).

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networks can she rely on? Is she destined to sail through life fending for herself, with no other loyalties than to herself ? III. Une Affaire des Femmes or a Man’s World? Jusqu’en 1949, l’administration de la prostitution est restée une affaire des femmes.36

As shown in the previous section, there is often no love lost between the ‘sisters’ of the Chinese demimonde but not all fictional representations of the interactions between them are marked exclusively by hatred, strife and resentment. We encounter, on occasion, rare examples of solidarity and friendship in this world run by women for the joy (and sorrow) of men, located at the borders of the traditional household which is, in turn, marked by society’s approval but underscored by men’s lack of erotic and sexual sincerity. This marginal realm of courtesans, defined by masks and lies (and blemished by society’s disapproval) is posited as a necessary evil and it is defined as brutal and horrifying. Yet, even the Chinese demimonde can occasionally be ennobled by the presence of women true to their words and feelings, especially towards their sisters-in-trade, precisely because ‘it takes one to know one’. The positive bond between courtesans is framed as sworn sisterhood, while the word you 友, or the more modern pengyou 朋友, both meaning ‘friend’, are never used to define the tie between two or more sex workers. In fiction, we find many examples of sworn brothers but the ones between sworn sisters are very rare, and even rarer are the ones where the sworn sisters are courtesans. Interestingly enough, fictional sisterhoods between female entertainers, actresses and courtesans are often modeled after the most famous sworn brotherhood of Chinese lore, namely the one among Zhang Fei (d. 221), Guan Yu (160−219) and Liu Bei (161−233), who assembled in the Peach Flower garden to swear the oath of brotherhood and offered as sacrifices a white horse to Heaven and a black ox to Earth. The men’s oath reveals the terms of their friendship: We seek only to die in the same day; we do not desire to have been born on the same day. When Elder Brother is in dire straits the brothers will

36

Henriot, 1997, 273.

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chapter three come to his rescue. When the brothers have troubles, Elder Brother will go to their aid. If one of us fails to fulfill this promise, may Heaven not cover him or Earth bear him up, may he be banished to the uttermost reaches of the Netherworld, and may he never be reincarnated in human form.37

This oath privileges the bond between sworn brothers, by assigning it priority over all other kinds of relationship, in a very subversive move that displaces the importance of family ties. Similarly, sworn sisterhood extolled the emotional and psychological bound between ‘two sisters’, downplaying the relationship between women and men.38 This attitude could give rise to ‘mysoandric’ conceptions, in the same way sworn brotherhoods could be totally misogynistic in nature (one has only to think of the misogyny that pervades Shuihu zhuan, one of the most famous novels about sworn brothers).39 One of the most memorable examples of loyalty and solidarity between sex workers at the expense of heterosexual bonds is found in the already mentioned Zhao Pan’er jiu fengchen. Central to the story is the rescue of the courtesan Yinzhang by her sworn sister Zhao Pan’er, who, keeping faith to her oath of sworn sisterhood, conjures a clever stratagem to save her ‘sister’ from certain death at the hand of her abusive husband. The author casts Zhao Pan’er in the mold of the ‘elder brother’ who will go to the aid of the ‘younger brother’, i.e., Yinzhang, in times of need. Zhao Pan’er consistently emphasizes the closeness existing between herself and Yinzhang, even going as far as to call Yinzhang her zhixin 知心 (‘bosom friend’).40 These two women are depicted as sharing a deep bond sanctioned by a ritual and a common plight vis-à-vis men who exploit them and a society that holds them in low esteem. The tie that motivates the intervention of the protagonist has nothing to do with Confucian hier-

37

From The Story of Hua Guan Suo, translated with an introduction by Gail Oman King (Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, 1989), 35. 38 See, for example, the work by J. E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta. Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860−1930 (Stanford University Press, 1989) for a detailed study of sworn sisterhoods among silk spinners in late Imperial China. 39 Shi Nai an, Shui hu zhuan (Taibei: San min shuchu, 1974). Works like Shui hu zhuan can be called misogynistic, because the bond that is most exalted is that between two or more people of the same sex, in a guise that it is detrimental to members of the opposite sex. 40 See, Zhao Pan’er jiu fenchen, in Wang Xueqi, et al., eds, Guan Hanqingquanji jiaozhu, 644.

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archies of sentiment and virtue, debunking them. Zhao Pan’er is not acting to protect the ties existing between father and daughter, nor those between husband and wife, not even the relationship between patron and courtesan. She moves to honor and defend the connection between two sworn sisters who ply the same trade. This Yuan play, however, stands out as a rarity in the overall flow of qinglou wenxue. Ming and Qing literary sources seldom depict instances of solidarity between women of the social class under study here. In Haishang hua, for example, we find three orphan girls, whose way to deal with the pressures of child abuse, loneliness, poverty and of the forced entry into commercial sexuality is to become sworn sisters. The reader witnesses the sisterhood’s birth and understands very well how it is motivated by the fear and anxiety the girls have as they are setting on their journey to lose their bodies. However, we are never told if their bond gets tested.41 In the less realistic Qinglou meng, most of the courtesans are tied to each other by bonds of sworn sisterhood, called in this text shoupa zhi jiao 手帕之交 (‘handkerchief friendships’)—possibly from the ritual of exchanging handkerchiefs as a token of the bond existing between the two women. Here too though, unlike it is the case with the Yuan play, we do not get to witness female solidarity in action. Holding banquets in honor of a sister marrying off or reentering the profession after marriage appears to be the only instances in which the bond of two sworn sisters is evoked.42 The invisibility of female friendship, especially if read against the foil of so much female-to-female violence, could be interpreted as male unease in the face of sworn sisterhood where, for once, the courtesan’s efforts are directed not towards satisfying a man but towards cherishing and honoring her sworn sisters. Their profession becomes a common destiny that violently excludes men, as the bond that defines them together against the whole world as it has been presented above: these ‘rapacious prostitutes’ who are, as we have seen, such liars and rogues as far as the ‘respectable world’ is concerned, are in these instances companions to each other. These rare images of solidarity could then be understood as problematic because they show how the love, generosity, sincerity and loyalty that do not exist in the brothel and do 41

Han Ziyun, 1983, 481 and ff. See Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], for example, when the four heavenly brothers, now sisters-in-trade, have a banquet together when Shi Chunfei goes back to being a prostitute. 42

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not take place between courtesan and client could exist among the women themselves. This rhetoric of solidarity and tenderness between women can be seen as extremely destabilizing for the already destabilized rhetoric of the zhiyin, to be discussed in Chapter Four, because it substitutes the man with another woman. It is not part of the polygamous paradise of late imperial fiction in which one man harmonizes a whole household of women who are sexually devoted to him and totally lacking in jealousy and competition.43 So if the author’s intent was to depict the brothel as a man’s fantasy come true, there would not be any space for the representation of harmonious bonds between women: the spotlight had to be, as we see for example in Qinglou meng, a veritable male wish-fulfilling delirium, on part of the men, and on the feelings of utter devotion and love they caused in the heroines. If on the other hand, the writers wanted to at once denounce the evils of these women’s life and to poke fun at her illusory charms and at her deluded patrons, images of female solidarity would have diminished the impact of their exposés. Indeed, this excursus in the world of the relationship between women in demimonde has shown that, even when we try and artificially isolate the courtesans’ interaction among each other and with other women, it is impossible to erase men. The brothel’s main function is to fulfill men’s needs and in it we can detect a definite male presence (clients, pimps and idlers) that does not seem to be manageable or silent enough to make the whorehouse the absolute domain of matriarchal power. Men make the women cry and laugh, and women are always represented as talking, arguing, pining and, more often than not, fighting over men. Men never leave the picture: they are the lovers, the providers, the readers, the writers. It is men, as authors, who represent the brothel as a carnivalesque universe ruled and regulated by women, where evils appropriately run rampant and all values are reversed. On a more abstract level, the male presence is detected by the silences and the absences the male authors introduced in their texts, by refusing to represent positive bonds between women or by focusing on negative dynamics. So, one could say that these fictional brothels are truly a man’s world. It is quite possible that in the real world, as Christian Henriot writes in his well-researched and thoughtful book

43

See McMahon, 1995.

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on prostitution in Shanghai, “If there is an exception to male domination in the public sphere, it is precisely in the realm of prostitution.”44 Legal documents and historical sources could be used to prove that in the late Qing sex market, men became secondary and background figures, and we may detect an echo of these voices in fictional discourse where women, especially as baomu, become masculine in their assertion of control and their exercise of violence. For every madam, however, there is a pimp, for every whore, a customer. In the final analysis, these stories show that, although the courtesans are not just frail flowers waiting to be snapped in two, their powers are limited and have constantly to be negotiated not only with other women, be they their madams, their colleagues or the jealous wives of their clients, but also with their patrons and lovers, who create a demand, both for sex work and for the fantasies produced around it. It is now high time to learn more about the courtesan’s men, those who inhabit her dreams and those who become her nightmares instead.

44 Henriot, 1997, 273: “S’il est une exception à la domination masculine dans la sphère publique, c’est bien dans le milieu de la prostitution”. The translation is mine.

CHAPTER FOUR

NOBODY’S SON: PROSTITUTION AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE FAMILY ROMANCE He knew of ‘fallen women’ only by hearsay and from books, and never in his life had he been in their ‘houses’. He knew that there are immoral women, forced to sell their honor for money under pressure of dire circumstances-environment, bad upbringing, poverty and so on. They know nothing of pure love, they have no children, no civil rights. Their mothers and sisters mourn them as dead, science treats them as an evil, and men address them slightingly. Yet, despite all this, they have not lost the semblance and image of god. They all acknowledge their sin, hoping to be saved, and means of salvation are lavishly available to them. Society does not forgive people their past, true—and yet St. Mary Magdalene is no lower than the other saints in the sight of God. When Vasilyev chanced to recognize a prostitute on the street by her dress or manner, or to see a picture of one in a comic paper, he always remembered a story he had once read: a pure, selfsacrificing young man loves a fallen woman and offers to make her his wife, but she considers herself unworthy of such happiness and takes poison.1

It would prove hard to fully understand the significance and the novelty of late Qing representations of courtesans, prostitutes and sex workers without bringing affect and sentiment into the picture. The courtesan had traditionally been constructed as the man of letters’ perfect match and had, thus, become a vital figure in the rhetoric of the beloved in both classic and vernacular male-authored sources, which extolled and explored the imagined affinity between these two social outcasts of sorts. It was of course, an uneven relationship, which posited the man as the one who would redeem the prostitute from her fate. In this

1 A. Chechov, “The seizure” (1888), in A Woman’s Kingdom and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, 1989), 1.

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chapter, we will try to explain the reasons for this ‘savior syndrome’ and what happened at the turn of the last century to disrupt these paradigms. In a second moment, we will see how in the dreamscapes of Shanghai, the ‘family romance’ that had propelled fictional trajectories in late imperial times crumble and a crowd of orphans appears to illustrate the predicaments of fictional masculinity. By fleshing out the changes that bring about this reconfiguration of fantasies about love and family, it will become clear how this transition mimics and reflects the progressive disempowerment of the man of letters in fields other than his erotic and romantic life. I. Bonds That Matter: Musical Souls and the Sound of Heartbreak There is always a little bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime ideals.2 When Zhong Ziqi died, Bo Ya never played his qin again. Why was that? A man does acts for the sake of someone who understands him, as a woman adorns herself for someone who is attracted to her.3

Chinese authors, for almost two thousand years, have written volumes to at once express their alienation from their contemporaries and the society they lived in and their urgent longing for an understanding Other, someone who, in hearing/reading their work could trace a path back to the writer’s original intent, and could crack open the code of entry to his xin 心 (‘heart/mind’). In other words, a soul mate or, as the Chinese would say it, a zhiyin, the one who knows (zhi 知) the tone (yin 音). The aural/acoustic/musical dimension, connected to what in the Western context is considered mostly a matter of spiritual resonance, is indeed fundamental in the context of Chinese culture.4 The term zhiyin first appears in the music section of the Li Ji 禮記 (“The Book of Rites”) to indicate somebody who knows the yinlü 音律

2 From Diderot’s letter to a friend, quoted in Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin, eds., Thinking Bodies (Stanford University Press, 1994), 230, no. 12. 3 Sima Qian, “Letter in Reply to Ren An,” in S. Owen, ed., An Anthology of Chinese Literature. Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), 136. 4 For the importance of music in male homosocial bonding in late imperial culture, see Joseph Lam, “Music and Male Bonding in Ming China,” work in progress.

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(‘the temperament’) of music.5 Music was the field where one showed one’s understanding of the harmony existing between Man and the Universe and Confucius, himself, emphasized the importance of ritual music in connection with the art of governing a kingdom. The connection of the term zhiyin to the world of sounds persists even when applied to the realm of human relationships. In the Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 (“The Spring and Autumn Annals of Mister Lü”), it is used to describe the relationship between Zhong Ziqi 鍾子期 and Bo Ya 伯牙.6 We are not told much about these two men, except that they shared a unique bond that found its expression in music: Bo Ya played the qin 琴 and Zhong Ziqi listened. We should not perceive their friendship in terms of an ‘active’ player versus a ‘passive’ recipient, however. By his listening, Zhong Ziqi ‘read’ his friend’s feelings as clearly as if they had been characters written on a page and, thus, he engaged, by listening, in a very powerful act of ‘multimediac’ decoding, recognition and translation. While Bo Ya played, Zhong Ziqi’s main role was to zhi 知 (literally ‘to know’), which “means here to perceive, to recognize, to appreciate, to discern, to grasp, to pierce through disguises.”7 This is no trivial or easy task, as we see in another version of this story, which we find, slightly expanded, in Liezi 列子: Bo Ya excelled at playing the qin (zither), and Zhong Ziqi at listening. When Bo Ya played his qin, if his mind was set on climbing a high mountain, Zhong Ziqi would say, “Masterful! Majestic and towering like Mount Tai.” Or Bo Ya’s mind might be intent upon the flowing water, and Zhong Ziqi would say, “Masterful! Onrushing and roiling like the Yangzi and Yellow River.” Whatever was on Bo Ya’s mind, Zhong Ziqi knew it. Bo Ya wandered to the dark slope of Mount Tai and suddenly encountered a terrible rainstorm. Stopping beneath the cliff, his heart full of

5

See Chapter XIX, Records of Music, in Li Chi, The Book of Rites, translated by James Legge (New York: University Books, 1967), 92 and ff. The Li chi is a Western Han miscellany of largely Confucian texts from the Warring States Period (403−221 B.C.) and Han Period (207 B.C.–220 A.D.). See also E. Henry, “The Motif of Recognition in Early China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.1 (1987): 5−30. I am very thankful to the anonymous reader for Brill for this very useful and interesting reference. 6 Lü Buwei, Lüshi Chunqiu (Taipei: Zhongguo zixue ming zhu ji cheng, 1977), vol. 84, 313. Lüshi Chunqiu (ca. 235 B.C.) was commissioned by Lü Buwei (d. 235 B.C.), a rich Qin merchant who served as prime minister for many years, and is a highly readable compendium of late Zhou thought. 7 Henry, 1987, 8.

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chapter four melancholy, he took up his zither and played it, first a melody of the downpour, then the tone of the mountain itself collapsing. And at every note he played, Zhong Ziqi followed the excitement to the utmost. Then Bo Ya put down his harp and said with a sigh of admiration, “Marvelous, marvelous indeed—the way you listen. The images you see in your mind mirror mine. How can I keep any sound concealed from you?”8

The two men are bound by a non-verbal acoustic/visual vocabulary they share without having had to make the effort to construct it. Theirs is a language mediated by natural images and, just like in the poetic tradition inaugurated by Shijing 詩經 (“The Classic of Poetry”), nature becomes the xing 興, the stimulus that the author deploys to convey his emotions and states of mind to the reader.9 Music, poetry, and zhi 志 (‘intent’) interpenetrate in this parable of perfect friendship and they provide a literary dimension to the very human experience of two soul mates; also joy and happiness: for Zhong Ziqi knows his friend, and in the context “of early Chinese narrative, to be ‘known’, that is, valued at one’s true worth, is the only bliss; to be ‘unknown’—misunderstood, unappreciated, falsely blamed—is the only torture.”10 In the late Ming version, Yu Bo Ya shuai qin xie zhiyin 俞伯牙摔 琴謝知音, Yu Bo Ya smashes his zither to thank his zhiyin,11 the tale of the two soul-mates was rewritten in a much more elaborated way: more particulars were added about the circumstances of their meeting, their social class and their relationship. Zhong Ziqi became a simple woodcutter, while Yu Bo Ya became a nobleman who held high office. They meet by chance, as Yu Bo Ya, returning from an official mission, is forced by bad weather to moor by Zhong Ziqi’s usual path back home. They spend only one night together, each enchanted by the affinity felt for the other, and promise to meet exactly a year later. However, Zhong Ziqi dies of exhaustion before the year is over,12 and Bo Ya learns of the tragedy when, on the due date, he comes back to keep their rendezvous. Upon learning of his soul-mate’s death, Bo Ya,

8

Liezi, Liezi (Taipei: Zhongguo zixueming zhu ji cheng, 1978), vol. 64, 164. For the concept of xing in Chinese poetry, see P. Yu, The Reading of Imagery in the Chinese Poetic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1987). 10 Henry, 1987, 8. 11 Feng Menglong, ed., “Yu Bo Ya shuai qin xie zhiyin ,” in Jingshi tongyan (Beijing; Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), vol. 1, 1. 12 Yu Bo Ya had given Ziqi a generous gift of gold as a parting gift; with it Ziqi had bought himself books that he would study every night after a hard day of work: his zeal proved fatal. See Feng Menglong, “Yu Bo Ya shuai qin xie zhiyin,” 1989. 9

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grief-stricken, destroyed his zither: one does not play if there is not an audience who knows exactly what the player’s music conveys.13 The sorrow felt by Bo Ya reveals a profound tragedy: in Zhong Ziqi he had found a true knower and, as Eric Henry writes, “. . . the debt owed by the known to the knower is incalculable, . . . for to know a person is to bestow upon the one known an awareness of life without which life is worth nothing; no one can live, except in the literal and miserable biological sense, until known by another.”14 All these different versions illustrate how the idea of resonance, applied to the relationship between two men, provides the link between musical ear and deep understanding of another’s soul. Just as the one who is trained in music recognizes the right pitch for each instrument, so the zhiyin, via the music, will recognize the frequency and the messages that his mate’s soul emits. Zhiyin could also be used to define the elective affinities discovered through the mediation of a written text which could serve the same function music had for Bo Ya, namely as a vehicle to convey the author’s zhi (‘intention’). Thus, we see that zhiyin was often used to depict the affinity existing between a poet and his readers, whose souls would resonate with the images conjured by the feelings of the poet, in the same way that Zhong Ziqi’s soul would resonate with the images conveyed by Bo Ya’s music, in a sort of emotional echolocation. The written text mediated the aesthetic relationship between author and reader: the author wrote for this specific understanding reader who, in turn, had, by virtue of this bond, the moral obligation to make the work of the author known to the world. In this relationship between literary mates, often being contemporaries was not even among the main requirements. One of the oldest representations of this paradigm is found in Sima Qian (ca. 145−85 B.C.)’s letter to Ren’an, where the forlorn historian wishes for an unknown person of a future generation to rediscover his writings and to take it upon himself to make such hidden treasures public: When I have actually completed this book, I will have it stored away on some famous mountain, left for someone who will carry it through all

13

This story also illuminates how, by the late Ming, the two soul-mates did not have to be of the same social class: on the contrary, their different social status could enhance the beauty and the nobility of their bond. 14 Henry, 1987, 9.

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chapter four the cities. Then I will have made up for the blame that I earlier incurred by submitting to dishonor.15

The reader then is cast not only as the ‘understanding critic’,16 but also as the mediator between the author and his future audience, by virtue of a tie that has yet to come into existence and that will straddle and encompass the literary, the political and the historical realms. It is important to remember that throughout the centuries, the zhiyin bond first and foremost indicated a sort of aesthetic and spiritual resonance between two men. As time passed, the term zhiyin oscillated between defining an emotional bond between friends and an aesthetic and ethical relationship between author and reader, as we see in the case of Sima Qian’s text. The bond between the pair was based on common beliefs, cultural values, combined with, of course, a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that made two particular souls kindred.17 However, in all these contexts, it was invariably represented as a tie between two males: borrowing Eve Sedgewick’s definition, it could be defined as one of the first representations of ‘homosociality’ within the context of Chinese culture.18 It would be easy then to assume that, as with other male fantasies, produced by and mainly for men’s homosocial bonding, the zhiyin tie promoted exclusively masculine self-assertion. It is true that Sima Qian, echoing Bi Yurang 畢豫讓, a fifth-century B.C. official, institutes a very strict parallel between the man who acts on behalf of an understanding friend and a woman who adorns herself for the ‘one who delights in her’ (yueji 悅己).19 In Sima Qian’s view though, there is a very powerful chronological, intellectual and histori-

15 Sima Qian, 1993, 141. I owe this information to Stephen Owen, who, in the course of a private conversation, made clear to me the historical continuity of the dual role of the zhiyin as reader and as mediator. See also S. Owen, Remembrances. The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Harvard University Press, 1986). 16 The translation of the term zhiyin as ‘understanding critic’ is taken from Vincent Yu-chung Shih’s translation of Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong. See Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. A Study of Thought and Pattern in Chinese Literature (Columbia University Press, 1959), 258. 17 See also Lam, in progress, 6 and ff. 18 In Sedgewick’s own words, “Men’s bonds with women are meant to be in a subordinate, complementary, and instrumental relation to bonds with other men.” See E. K. Sedgewick, Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, 1985), 51. 19 Henry, 1987, 10.

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cal superiority to the man’s actions that a woman’s adorning herself could never compare to. It is in another text also authored by Sima Qian that we find a heterosexual counterpart to the lore of Zhong Ziqi and Bo Ya, and it is his aforementioned biography of the famous Western Han poet Sima Xiangru (179−117 B.C.).20 According to the plot, which inspired veritably one of the most romantic and well-known ones in traditional Chinese literature, Sima Xiangru seduced Zhuo Wenjun, the young daughter, recently widowed, of his host Zhuo Wangsun, by playing the zither: the music caused her, as we saw in Chapter Two, to ‘disgrace herself ’ (shi shen) by running away with the young poet. The musical instrument remains the same as the one played by Bo Ya but the consequences for the listener, when gender changes, are dramatically different. The bond the music creates between two men is a construct that defined a homosocial practice of male bonding, not necessarily connected to homosexual practice.21 Between a man and a woman, however, this connection must be consummated through a sexual union. When the zhiyin relationship is transferred to the heterosexual context, the soul-mates also explore the genital/sexual dimension and their story is framed by the rhetoric of predestination that will eventually—and hopefully—result in proper marriage. Sima Xiangru and Zhuo Wenjun are indeed forgiven by her father and reintegrated into the web of society but we can already detect, behind this one couple’s harmonious and compassionate relationship, a whole set of anxieties a propos of the election of one’s mate (in a society that practiced arranged marriages) and the means through which the affinity between a man and a woman could be displayed and expressed. These anxieties appeared more and more urgently in late imperial Chinese society’s push to prevent women from being brought up to appreciate music and poetry (two art forms closely connected in traditional Chinese culture) for fear that, just as Zhuo Wenjun, they would forget their wifely and filial duties and run away with poets and minstrels.22 Accordingly, most women, throughout the centuries, were not

20

Sima Qian, 1988, 834 and ff. There are, however, few late Ming sources where we find two male zhiyin who bond also on a sexual level. See also the already quoted works by Giovanni Vitiello and Sophie Volpp for male homoerotic and homosexual bonds in late imperial China. 22 Chinese poetry was set to music since the beginning. For an analysis of the connection between music and poetry in the Tang dynasty, see R. Ashmore, “Hearing 21

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often schooled in reading and writing that did not aim to make them better daughters, wives and mothers: in late imperial China, especially during the Ming and Qing periods, it was almost exclusively upperclass women who were highly educated and even they, often prolific poets, accomplished musicians and passionate readers of plays and romances, shared the traditional distrust of and ambiguity towards highly literate females.23 From an economic point of view though, women, especially in upper-class families, were often in charge of managing the household, they were most of the time economically dependent on men, even if in literati families economic transactions were seldom openly displayed and talked about.24 While it is true that some upper-class women were educated in the same curriculum as males, the great majority of women were brought up in a situation of intellectual inferiority in relation to men. As for the emotional and physical relationship that could develop between the two sexes, given the fact that in Chinese society Confucian mores commanded a strong separation of the sexes, love between men and women (father and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister, with the single exception

Things. Performance and Lyric Imagination in Ninth Century Chinese Literature,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (1997). 23 I am talking here about traditional China’s dominant values and discourses, and I do not mean to discount the literary achievements of those Chinese women whose writings were preserved throughout the centuries, or to represent Chinese women as illiterate victims of a merciless patriarchal system. Besides, in late imperial China there were some advocates for women’s education, such as Yuan Mei and Lu Kun, but even they had strong faith in patriarchal society. Writing poetry was not the only way in which Chinese women could assert their personality and their independence: on the contrary, given the fact that it was a mostly male activity, the women who engaged in it often had to modify their voices to fit the paradigms of the genre, confusing and, at times, veritably losing their gendered voice. There are other genres of literature, mostly oral, such as tanci, which were more powerful conveyors of women’s thoughts and feelings. See Grace S. Fong, Herself an Author. Gender, Agency, and Writing in late Imperial China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); B. Grant and W. Idema, eds., The Red Brush. Writing Women of Imperial China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Ko, 1994; Mann, 1997; K. Ono, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution. 1850−1950, edited by Joshua A. Fogel (Stanford University Press, 1989); “Poetry and Women’s Culture in Late Imperial China,” Symposium on Poetry and Women’s Culture in Late Imperial China, Late Imperial China 13.1 (1992); P. Ropp, “The Seeds of Change: Reflections on the Conditions of Women in the Early and mid Ch’ing,” Signs 2.1 (1976): 5−23; Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, 1997; Widmer, 2006. 24 See Mann, 1997, and Bray, 1997. It was usually by far more common and acceptable for women from lower classes, especially in specific regions of China, to be taught a trade in a way that allowed them to contribute actively and openly to the income of the household.

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of mother and son) and its physical expressions were frowned upon, considered improper, in public, and very often also in private.25 In contrast, economically-speaking up until the late Ming period, courtesans, who would depend on their clients for their livelihood could at times accumulate large amounts of wealth which they could dispose of independently if they could redeem themselves or keep their madams at bay. Intellectually, they were trained to relate and satisfy their patrons’ literary tastes and cultural pursuits: they were taught poetry, painting, calligraphy, music and chess. Though they did not learn the classics which the men had to master to succeed in the imperial examinations, these women were widely read and could entertain their clients with refined conversation and literary games. In addition, while love and displays of love were out of the question between a man and his wife, the same was not true of the bond that could develop between a courtesan and her patron. The patron would court and conquer the courtesan of his choice: at times, even a tenacious courtship was not necessarily a guarantee of success. Wives and courtesans were both less than equal to men and imbalance between the genders persisted but courtesans came to be perceived as at least able to aspire to gain an equal standing with their male partners in emotional and intellectual terms. All these factors might help to explain why the zhiyin paradigm was more easily transposed in literary sources onto the what we could call the ‘talented scholar and beautiful courtesan’ bond than onto a husband-and-wife relationship: as we shall see presently, after the Sima Xiangru-Zhuo Wenjun story, we will have to wait till the late Ming period to see this term used in the context of caizi jiaren stories.26 Courtesans were represented since the Tang dynasty as the perfect matches of the men of letters. Texts such as the already-mentioned Beilizhi (“An Account of the Northern Quarters”), written between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century A.D., were essential in introducing the concept that the courtesan’s life mirrored

25

See E. Henry, “The Social Significance of Nudity in Early China,” Fashion Theory 3.4: 481. 26 As already mentioned in Chapter One, the connection between the man of letters and the beautiful courtesan emerged in the Tang dynasty.

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and echoed that of the wenren 文人, a concept that by late imperial times had become a fixed trope.27 These two figures were represented as suffering the same fate: they were both anxiety-ridden as to the fact they were constantly searching for a public approval that, as the dynasties passed by, depended more and more on freak circumstances or on power and wealth, than on their real capabilities. Men of letters found in the courtesan a soulmate and wrote a good deal about their common plight: both were set on display and yet so little of their real souls was laid bare or looked at that the emotional need for acceptance and recognition funneled the ideal of the zhiyin into a veritable obsession. In a society that put a man in a very public environment where his performance was constantly measured by strangers who had power over his future, his destiny, his family, the anxiety to find somebody who could understand and appreciate those hidden talents that under pressure could not be expressed fully must have been overwhelming. It is within this framework that the rhetoric of the sex worker as the only, or the first, person who can detect the hidden or unappreciated talents of a scholar develops.28 It does stand to reason as a result of her career and sexual/ emotional experience with men, this type of woman would be imagined as having a broad knowledge about human nature and would perhaps develop the skill to discern the stuff of the successful men. In the already-mentioned nineteenth century Qinglou meng, we find a consideration that attests to the longevity of this view: “The poor scholar is frustrated, for all his talent. Not one high official recognizes his worth. Only the singsong girls sometimes have the intelligence to recognize a great man before he achieves success.”29 It is interesting to see the future greatness of the man is ‘prophetized’ by the prostitute. This could be read as a way to attack the ruling class and to convey social criticism: if even a woman from a despised social class can recognize the worth of a talented scholar, while ‘respectable’ 27 Quite a few scholars have already noted that, in many cultures, similarities exist between the courtesan and the courtier. See M. F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan. Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-century Venice (University of Chicago Press, 1992). It is important to bear in mind, however, that while European courtiers and courtesans competed with one another for the patronage of noblemen and politicians, the Chinese courtesan served the man of letters; thus, there was no competition to speak of between the caizi and the courtesan. 28 See Sun Qi, 1957; Feng Menglong, 1989; Yu Da, 1980; for examples of these recognitions before the man has become famous. See Henry, 1987, for the literary development of this motif in early Chinese literary sources. 29 Yu Da, 1980, 435.

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people fail to do so, the latter’s corruption and incompetence stand out even more blazingly. It could also be connected with homosocial approval displaced onto the woman’s body. The fact that a beautiful, desirable and talented woman acclaims her sexual partner as the best talent in the world acquired meaning because anything the patron proved in her rooms she would circulate back into the circles of her other patrons, who were also literati. The brothel is constructed, then, as a sort of extension of the examination hall, as a site of social performance for men and their peers, in which the potency of the male is made visible to the other males. Eros, masculinity and literacy become deeply entangled in the demimonde and a strongly (male) homosocial desire for recognition is transposed in a heterosexual context in such a way that eventually the woman is just a vehicle for a message to the other men.30 One could also argue that since every man was potentially a competitor with most of his peers because of the examination system, he could find among this class of women a refined companion (zhiyin) who could match his wits and learning, without having to compete with her, since she, because of her gender, was out of the race. She could not sit in the exams and surpass him, like all other men could, at least in theory, do, but at the same time, unlike his wife (or wives) she had supposedly been groomed especially to appreciate his learning and his talent. And also envy him, as Yu Xuanji, a midninth-century courtesan-turned-Daoist nun, so eloquently shows: “I have bitter regrets that skirts of lace hide the lines of my poems / lifting my head in vain I cover the publicly posted names.”31 That “publicly posted name” was the goal of a lifetime for a man of letters and, just as he depended on his peers and his elders to gain the recognition that would make him famous and rich, the flowerhead needed him as a patron who would shangyin 賞音 (‘appreciate her sound’), in other words, validate her artistic talent. Even more importantly, as Robert Ashmore shows, the literati of the Tang could verify their success, as poets, by listening to which poems the singsong girls would perform during banquets and public events.32 The performers, in their turn, would pursue successful literati, who could

30

Ashmore, 1997, 150. Zhang Zhongjiang, Jinü yu wenxue (Taipei: Kangnaixin chubanshe, 1969), 68. Eventually literati instituted ‘beauty pageants’ and, by Yuan times, the language of the examination system was used to rank courtesans competing in beauty and talent contests. 32 Ashmore, 1997. 31

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immortalize them in their compositions and enhance their fame, thus boosting their income. It is clear now that the man of letters and the courtesan were bound not only by romanticized ties, but by a very real ‘mutual admiration’ economy which tied them and their fortunes closely together. In the context of the textual space created by poetry and fictional sources, ever since the Tang dynasty, the ‘scholar and courtesan’ romance enthrones the male subject as an absolutely autonomous yet ‘co-dependent’ representative of that quintessential ‘men’s club’, the circle of the literati. The myth of the predestined bond between scholar and courtesan becomes even more powerful in Yuan times at a time when the emerging merchant class was threatening in no uncertain terms the social prestige and economic and political power of literati.33 By having the courtesan voice her ambition to congliang 從良 (‘to get married out of prostitution’) with, of course, a man of letters, the male author represents the same predicament that the literati had to live through, i.e., finding a patron, and being recognized as worthy.34 We see that with time, in late imperial sources, the term zhiyin and its variations (zhiji 知己, zhixin 知心) came to include the relationship between a man and his wife (the so-called ‘companionate marriage’), or a patron and his catamite. However, the match between the courtesan and official kept being represented as a predestined and ideal romantic destiny well into the nineteenth century. Another factor that may help explain the birth and the success of the lore that exalted this bond was that most marriages were arranged in early, middle and late Imperial China and, at least for upper- and middle-class men, the process of what could be described as ‘romantic courtship’ was often displaced onto the fictional courtesan-patron relationship. This, of course, brought as a consequence the necessity to hide the economic nature of the intercourse between literati and women for hire to compensate the male desire for romantic conquest and to assuage the male anxiety of being able to conquer a woman by himself, without his family’s intervention. This anxiety, combined with a strong component of narcissism, could be the sources of a very

33

Zheng Zhenduo, “Lun Yuanren suoxie shangren shizi jinü jian de san jiao lian’aiju,” Wenxue jikan 1.4 (1934): 169−170. 34 We find this obsession not only in Yuan plays, but also in texts, such as the fourteenth-century Qinglou ji by Xia Tingshi.

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interesting aspect of the fictional representations of the dynamic existing between the courtesan and the scholar. Let us turn again to Meiniang’s story with this picture in mind. We have seen that, after she has been deflowered, she tries to refuse to entertain clients. Once she is threatened with being sold to an unknown man, however, she decides to choose the lesser of two evils, that is, to sleep her way to redemption, in the hope of finding the ideal mate who will rescue her from the brothel. With her behavior she is living up to the expectations of male agents (be they the male protagonists, the author or the readers) who want her beauty enhanced by her sufferings, her body tainted by her fall, so that they can fictionalize themselves as the saviors, as the one and only zhiyin (‘bosom friend’) whose soul can and will resonate with the one of the tattered beauty. There are endless examples of this pattern in most late imperial stories that involve sex workers of all categories: the man is always portrayed as the savior who comes to the rescue of the frail, pitiful courtesan, fallen in the dust, her body lost. Accordingly, the woman’s goal, no matter what is done to her, as we see for example in Jin Yun Qiao, is to find a zhiyin who will marry her and physically and socially elevate her to his level. It is true that in Yuan plays very world-savvy courtesans, such as Zhao Pan’er, question the success rate of this kind of marriage and the possibility for a happy conjugal ending between them and their patrons. Later writers, however, seem oblivious to the absurdity of forcing women who had been trained to please men as entertainers and sex workers to become good wives and mothers and quite blissfully perpetuated the discourse of the poor girl from a good family as the helpless and reluctant victim of old, crooked and evil people. The rhetoric of the zhiyin in late imperial China applied to the scholar and courtesan relationship almost invariably led to marriage: at times the savior fails to perform his feat of rescue, as in Du Shiniang’s story, but in those cases, there is enough space for the (male) reader to step in and fill the savior’s shoes, if only as a wish-fulfillment move.35 It is interesting to notice at this point

35 Du Shiniang is the heroine of the late Ming story “Du Shiniang nu chen baibaoxiang” in Feng Menglong, 1989, 32. She falls in love with Li Jia, a talented but weakwilled man of letters. He purchases her freedom—with her capital—but as they are making their way south, towards his hometown, he lets a merchant, who has his eyes on getting Du Shiniang for himself, talk him into selling her off for fear of his father’s reaction when he will show up with a woman of such despicable status. Realizing

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that Qing legal texts stress the fact that prostitutes do not behave in the same way as women from good families, but in contemporary fictional sources, the expectation, always disappointed, is that marriage can actually redeem the courtesan and transform her into a ‘proper’ woman.36 The ‘savior syndrome’ is quite pervasive in late imperial fictional representations of the bond between courtesan and man of letters, in a clear nod to the male readership. One of the most successful fictional representations of the courtesanofficial relationship can be found in the late Ming story “In the Spring Breeze a Crowd of Famous Courtesans Mourn Liu the Seventh.” The poet Liu the Seventh fails in his career not because of lack of talents, but because of an unfortunate episode that caused him to fall from grace with a high official.37 The only people to stand by his side are courtesans, whose beauty and talent must be appreciated fully to have an effective value; they are goods that need to be displayed and offered only to somebody who can appreciate them. Writing about Qing courtesans, Paul Ropp explains that, . . . as courtesans, held in bondage, hoped against high odds for redemption in marriage, so Han literati, lowly subjects of exalted Manchu emperors, hoped against high odds, for examination success and political prominence. Courtesans were subjected to the whims and demands of their customers, and literati were subjected to the whims and demands of their sovereign.38

However, there is a fundamental power dynamics that this rhetoric erases: as Ropp writes, the courtesan and the wenren both depended on whimsical patrons but, whereas the wenren served the state and had many economic and social resources at his disposal, his female counterpart served the wenren, that is, until the late Qing period, when she stops being a faithful servant of the literati. Until then, however, the rhetoric of the zhiyin cannot hide the strong bias in favor of the caizi, based on gender and social discrimination. In the same way in which, though yin 陰 and yang 陽 are supposed to be equal but yang is always more positive than yin, throughout most late imperial fictional sources the caizi always retains a stronger power over his companion whom, how wrong she had been in entrusting her love to such a weakling, Du Shiniang commits suicide. 36 Sommer, 2000, 218−220. 37 See Feng Menglong, Yushi mingyan, 1989, 174−186. 38 Ropp, 1997, 17.

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for all her beauty and talent, does not have the same kind of social and economic power her soul-mate has.39 In Du Shiniang’s story, just to mention one famous example, we see how Du Shiniang, who is definitely superior to her lover, emotionally and intellectually, and who is independently wealthy, still cannot aspire to be treated with respect both from him and the rest of the world and can only choose death to state her frustration and defiance. It is at the turn of the nineteenth century that the courtesan starts neglecting men of letters and catering not only to the rich magnates— as she had been criticized for doing during the Yuan dynasty—but also to actors and horse-grooms. Worse yet, perhaps the most unforgivable of all her sins, if we are to judge by the cruelty with which it is represented by late Qing authors, is that she starts serving herself and her own desires: she, in other words, dares to become her own zhiyin. In sum, the rhetoric of the zhiyin, through centuries of literary tradition, had, by the nineteenth century, become an integral part of the literary representations of the bond between the wenren and the courtesan. To understand how deeply this bond was shaken and problematized at the turn of the last century in late Qing fiction, we must now return to the journey of the four gods-turned-courtesans. II. Material Girls and the Drag(s) of Modernity We can say that there is no adolescence for Mo Liqing and his transgenderal brothers: they go directly from childhood to womanhood. Yet, this rite of passage, depicted as brutal and unavoidably painful, actually transforms them into free agents who have tremendous money-making potential. Through the act of the sale of their virginity, conducted by their madams for their own economic advantage, the girls begin moving towards a more prominent position in the economic circuit of sex work, in which, up until now, they have played a passive role

39 See C. Furth, “Blood, body and gender: medical images of the female condition in China 1660–1850,” Chinese Science 7 (1986): 43−66; C. Furth, “Concepts of Pregnancy, childbirth and infancy in Ch’ing dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies 46.1 (1987): 7−35; C. Furth, “Rethinking Van Gulik: sexuality and reproduction in traditional Chinese medicine,” in Gilmartin et al., Engendering China: women, culture, and the state (Harvard University Press, 1994), 125−146; C. Furth, “From birth to birth: The growing body in Chinese medicine,” in A. Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Hawaii University Press, 1995), 157−191.

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as goods and tokens of exchange between child trafficker and madam, madam and client. We have already observed how, once the body is lost, the financial potential of the sex worker starts developing. Her vagina, instead of producing babies, sends forth money, and the close relationship between money and the sex worker is seen in fiction by the fact that she always has a treasure chest, a bag, a satchel, where she keeps her money, her jewels and her accumulated capital. The dowry chest of a woman of good family entered her husband’s home already full of treasures and was always supposed to be close and under lock and key; it could be opened only by the woman, herself, in emergencies, such as divorce and widowhood. However, the ‘treasure box’ of a courtesan is a work in progress, it starts out empty and gets full as time goes by; it also can be opened at will, more often than not, not the woman’s own.40 This move towards increased agency is played out through her selffashioning and willing transformation into a desirable commodity and we will explore this aspect presently. Agency, however, is not the only angle from which to witness her progress. The spaces (meaning here the physical horizons) in which she becomes socialized are, as we have already emphasized, also important categories of analysis. Her space of residence is the brothel, within the metropolitan area of either Shanghai or Beijing, but her range of action is not limited to the brothel: her ‘queendom’ is the social scene, which in these late Qing novels can mean the street, the restaurant, the theater house, the park, the private garden of a rich magnate, the boat and the carriage. In other words, any space in which she can show herself and advertise her wares, as it were, and also conduct trysts, meet potential clients, purchase goods that will increase her attractiveness and her competitiveness. She becomes a permanent fixture and an integral part of the metropolitan landscape, a landscape that she marks through her movements, of which she is an extension and which extends into her. We have already noticed that mobility is one of her main characteristics. This is not a completely new feature: already in late Ming sources we see that “. . . the courtesan’s social mobility, her potential to cross barriers and make contacts up and down the social ladder . . .”

40 For example, Du Shiniang has a treasure box, which can be read as a symbol of her economic and moral worth.

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made her an attractive character for fiction writers.41 In many Ming stories, for example, we find courtesans traveling with their lover or going out to entertain guests on boats and in restaurants, moving in a world that belonged, by definition, to men. Thanks to their social ambiguity, they seem to be able to occupy at once two different spaces, the inside, inherently female, and the outside, prevalently male. Of course, the courtesan’s mobility is often dependent on that of her customers. Moving in the male space of a patriarchal society, even in fiction, did not empower the courtesan enough to make her become totally independent. Yet, move she does, and must, and fast. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the trajectory of the turbulent body of the courtesan is her speed. Increasing acceleration, her ‘livefast-and-die-young’ attitude is very likely are due to the fact that her time is limited as she is constantly decaying, since by using her capital, i.e., her body, to advance in society and to produce money, she also depletes it and cannot regenerate herself.42 The movements of one of our ‘stars’ through the streets of Shanghai provide the best case study for this mobility, speed and tempo issue. After Mo Liqing’s second incarnation, Shi Chunfei, loses her virginity to the scoundrel Jin Buhuan, she starts—unknowingly—to entertain his father Jin Hongjun, the very man who earlier in his youth had caused Shen Xiaoqing to commit suicide because of his callousness and his unfaithful heart. The set-up is that of complex karmic retribution, since the reader knows that Jin Hongjun is the mortal incarnation of the fairy boy who has been dispatched down to earth to bring Mo Liqing back to heaven. Jin Hongjun falls in love with Shi Chunfei and quickly takes her as his concubine: on the surface of things, she seems to leave behind the world of prostitution. Her social status appears to have improved as well, since she gets married to a zhuangyuan 狀元, the candidate who came out first in the special examinations held once every few years among the top-ranking candidates of the metropolitan examinations. As the youngest and preferred concubine, Shi Chunfei gets to go with her husband to the Ryukyu Islands when the emperor sends him there on official business.43 Together they travel first to Shanghai, then on

41 42 43

See Bernheimer, 1989, 34. Herbold, n.d., 4. Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 46.

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to Tianjin and Beijing, where Hong Jun receives imperial instructions; then back to Tianjin, where they board a military vessel that takes them back to the Ryukyu Islands, where the king of that place entertains them as royal guests. The downward trajectory of the god-turned-prostitute becomes a horizontal one after her marriage to Jin. In real life, upper-class women were not supposed to be traveling outside of their homes, let alone outside of China; however, under these particular circumstances, an official expedition under imperial auspices, exceptions would be made. Now that Shi Chunfei, by virtue of her marriage, is respectable (though all the while she is traveling she is carrying on affairs with different paramours of hers), she is eligible to accompany her husband. Shi Chunfei’s trip to the remote Japanese islands gets complicated though as it intersects with two other journeys, one real and one fictional. The former is that of the historical counterpart of Shi Chunfei, Sai Jinhua, who in 1887 became the concubine of the zhuangyuan Hong Jun (1840−1893), a scholar and a diplomat, a native of Wuxian, Suzhou, who in 1887 was appointed minister to Russia, Germany, Austria and Holland and took Sai Jinhua along with him for a threeyear residence in Europe.44 The latter is none other than the cruel Fu Caiyun, perhaps the most popular fictional version of Sai Jinhua. As we already know, Fu Caiyun goes west as well, always as the concubine of the fictional counterpart of Hong Jun.45 How can the resonances and the differences between the two fictional heroines, Shi Chunfei and Fu Caiyun, and their mobility and their characterizations help us understand the construction of the adult courtesan’s social and sexual identity in late Qing fiction and its consequences for her patrons then? Shi Chunfei and Fu Caiyun share an intense mobility, in a sexual, physical and social sense. Shi Chunfei moves from the brothel to inside the family, from China to a foreign land, where she is treated as a queen, but she never leaves behind her lascivious nature. For instance, during their visit to the Islands, one day Jin goes to Shi Chunfei’s quarters only to see Song Zhong, one of his attendants, sneak out of her bedroom. When he confronts Shi Chunfei, she feigns ignorance but the reader and Jin as well are 44

Hummel, A. W., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644−1912) (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 2 vol.; Liu Bannong, Sai Jinhua benshi (Changsha: Xinhua shudian, 1985). 45 See Zeng Pu, 1990, 108.

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hard-pressed not to ‘smell a rat’. Similarly, Fu Caiyun marries out of prostitution to Jin Hongqin and follows him west. However, while abroad, she is more radical in her behavior than Shi Chunfei: while Shi Chunfei on her trip to Japan limits herself to continue the trysts she already had developed in China, Fu Caiyun carries on a full-fledged affair with the young German officer Waldersee, the fictional persona of the historical Count Waldersee (1832−1904), who in 1900 served as the Commander-in-Chief of the allied troops in the aftermath of the Boxers’ uprising. It is slightly puzzling that Shi Chunfei, the first fictional persona of Sai Jinhua, goes east and not west. Perhaps history can help in jumping this first hurdle. By the late nineteenth century, the time in which the novel is set, the Ryukyu Islands, though an officially independent kingdom, had been tributaries of China for about five hundred years.46 By the 1870s, the possession of the Ryukyu Islands was a topic of dispute between Japan and China.47 In the years immediately before and after the Japanese takeover of the Islands (which took place in 1879), “Ryukyuan aristocrats petitioned the Qing government to intercede to prevent a Japanese annexation of the Islands.”48 Though the official biographies of Hong Jun do not recount any official expedition he undertook to the Ryukyu Islands, it is possible that Wu Jianren attributed to him a trip that some other Qing official took to the Islands as part of dealings with the Ryukyuan aristocrats at the time Wu Jianren was writing these chapters. It could also be that Wu Jianren thought that the West was too far from the imagination of his readers at the time of the composition of his work. Jin and Shi Chunfei are welcomed by the king of the Islands, who spends about ten days to prepare the articles of tribute Jin and his retinue will bring back to China, meaning that their visit is set at a time in which the Islands had not yet been annexed by Japan.49 At any rate, no official delegation was sent to the Ryukyus from China after 1867.50 We could, thus, see the difference between Shi Chunfei and Fu Caiyun as one in degree, not in kind, since in the end their outward 46 See G. Kerr, Okinawa. The History of an Island People (Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1972), especially 63 and 130. 47 Alan S. Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” positions 1.3 (1993): 606. 48 Ibid., 615. 49 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 47. 50 Kerr, 1972, 352.

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movements can be directed eastwards or westwards, as long as it is towards an exotic, unknown territory where they can enact their own characteristics in an enhanced and more extravagant—and, thus, more entertaining for the reader—fashion. As many scholars have pointed out, expansion of geographical horizons through travel is one of the main characteristics of late Qing fiction.51 What better candidate for the new transglobal Chinese traveler than a courtesan, whose persona has always included physical mobility since her earliest representations? Late imperial courtesans, both in real life and in fictional sources, could dress up as men, as chaste widows, as alluring harlots: transgressions of gender roles and of proper behavior were expected of them, as marginal agents of society. The lack of permanence that is associated with Shi Chunfei and Fu Caiyun constitutes one of the elements that make them alluring as fictional characters and authors, such as Wu Jianren and Zeng Pu, in employing it, are merely tapping into a previous literary tradition in the representation of courtesans.52 Relevant to the present discussion here is how the physical mobility of the sex worker and the expansion of her workplace, as it were, are connected to a popularized discourse about modernity, a most complex and intricate notion in the fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. David Wang has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of what modernity means in the context of late Qing fiction by stating that this historical juncture engendered not one, but many modernities, that were later repressed by the dominant discourses of

51 I will leave aside, for the present discussion, based almost exclusively on content analysis, the issues of style, language, and authorship: though these aspects are just as important as the ones I will be focusing on, there is just not enough space here to discuss them exhaustively. See Chen Pingyuan, 1989; Dolezolova-Velingerova, 1980; Hu Ying, “Re-configuring Nei/Wai: Writing the Woman Traveler in the Late Qing,” Late Imperial China 18.1 (1997): 72−99; Wang, 1997. 52 See articles in the section Writing the Courtesan in Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, 1997; B. Wolfe, The Daily Life of a Courtesan Climbing Up a Tricky Ladder (Hong Kong: Learner’s Bookstore, 1980); P. Zamperini, “The Harlot’s Progress: Fu Caiyun’s Journey in the Sea of Retribution,” M.A. thesis, UC Berkeley (1994). As Marsha Weidner has shown in her paper “Ladies of the Lake: Three Seventeenth-Century Women Painters of Hangzhou” (delivered at the seminar “Images and Imagination: Perspectives on Chinese and Japanese Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” held in honor of James Cahill, Berkeley, May 1994), travel was a dimension of the daily life of some courtesans in Ming times and it is likely that this characteristic later became a part of the fictional representation of this category of women.

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May Fourth intellectuals.53 Plurality is an essential category to gain a deep understanding of this period: indeed late Qing writers reproduced the plurality of discourses about and against the modern, which they labeled as Western, chaotic, fast, vertical, boundary-breaking, to reflect—and possibly, deflect—the multiplicities that surrounded them in their everyday life. Yet, it could also be argued that the modernities that late Qing writers evoked and rejected are not so much then ‘repressed’, as it is after all clear that the themes and the tropes shaped by these late Qing novels went on to find a very comfortable and fertile ground outside the dominant discourses of a handful of elitist literati. This fact may have rendered them invisible, marginal, but to deploy the rhetoric of repression to (re-)present these works to the late twentieth-century readers does not shed enough light on their contents and dynamics. If we take the word ‘modern’ to mean new, groundbreaking, then what we do find of modern in these novels are not the fictional genres, which remained ‘faithful’ to late imperial fiction in terms of format and structure, but certain characters (the displaced man of letters, the displaced sojourner, the foreigner), exotic objects (foreign clothes, steamers, trains, chariots), and behaviors (travel, education for women, anti-footbinding movements). There had been foreigners in Chinese texts before (one only has to think of the Tang dynasty chuanqi “The Curly-bearded Man” by Du Guangting).54 In late Qing novels they appear in new roles: they are engineers and bankers, generals and translators, missionaries and doctors. They speak Chinese, wear Chinese clothes, own Chinese land, dispose of it, as they dispose of Chinese people and wealth. These new characters, objects and behaviors affect and alter the social, economic, spatial and moral universe of the characters exposed to them and force them to question the traditional ways of life they knew before the entrance of such objects and behaviors into their existence. It is within this larger context that the West emerges in all its facets as a useful foil for Chinese writers, to depict China’s political and economic shortcomings vis-à-vis Western powers but also as a model to emulate and as an object of erotic desire. Chinese women 53

Wang, 1997, Introduction. See W. Idema, “Cannon, Clocks and Clever Monkeys: Europeana, Europeans and Europe in Some Eighteenth Century Chinese Novels,” in M. Schipper, et al., White and Black: Imagination and Cultural Confrontation (Amsterdam, 1990), 55. 54

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take on dashing foreigners as their lovers and Chinese men get married to Western women: interestingly enough, the only category of Chinese women open to intercourse—sexual and social—with foreign men are prostitutes and courtesans, while Chinese men always marry respectable foreign women. It is precisely on the level of material cultural and daily life that an often specifically westernized modernity in many late Qing novels is manifested and circulated as a status symbol among urban residents, a fetish that can be worn and purchased. In other words, here we find an Occidentalism of sorts that at once exoticized and domesticated Western presence for the Chinese readers and consumers.55 This expanded horizon becomes the courtesan’s field of action: like the ‘fast girl’ she veritably is, she moves across it astride her bicycle or aboard a steamer. She is at the forefront of this particular kind of late Qing fictional modernity: women like Shi Chunfei and Fu Caiyun spend their time with urbanite flâneurs and foreigners, travel abroad and engage in many ‘new’ activities. In this sense la cortigiana e’ mobile, the courtesan is mobile, whimsical, to parody Verdi’s line: she is mobile physically but she is also mobile as far as her self-fashioning is concerned. Fashion, especially, gave these women a very powerful way to call attention to and to advertise their bodily wares. This was not an entirely new phenomenon: courtesans had been trendsetters in the urban environments for centuries, especially ever since the Ming dynasty.56 At the end of the Qing dynasty, with the arrival of imported goods and a dramatic increase in the number of women who worked in the prostitution industry in urban areas, as the Shanghai sex worker constitutes her bodily self as desirable fetish on the market, she also unavoidably comes to grips with that of modernity. Indeed, “fashion is essential to the world of modernity,”57 because it replicates in its ever-new trends and in the creation of an ever-large mass of consumers differentiated

55 I have addressed elsewhere the issue of Occidentalism in late Qing fiction (Zamperini, 1999; Zamperini, 2003b). See also Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism. A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford University Press, 1995) for an interesting study of Occidentalism in modern and contemporary China. 56 For clothes in traditional Chinese fiction and as markers of modernity in late Qing fiction, see Zamperini, 2003b; and V. Steele, ed., China Chic. East Meets West (Yale University Press, 1999). 57 E. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, Fashion and Modernity (University of California Press, 1985), 11.

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according to their purchasing power. I have argued elsewhere that due to their connection to the entertainment world and to their charged eroticized role, courtesans and prostitutes were the ideal impersonators of a sort of modernity in drag(s), in other words as conveyors of new ideas and roles whose subversive influence was contained and restricted by their marginal social status.58 In late Qing texts, the courtesan is one of the main stars of metropolitan leisure culture. As such, she has to strive to maintain her visibility at the highest level possible. Unlike other categories of women, such as housewives and mothers, whose work is best kept unseen and invisible, courtesans who appear in late Qing fiction are part of the leisure culture and part of their job description is to be seen at their best. We know that in real life, late Qing courtesans relied on many different tools to enhance their visibility, from photographs to advertisements in the many papers published and circulated within and outside of the metropolitan areas of Shanghai and Beijing, and so on and so forth.59 These devices are also to be found in late Qing novels, where there are many representations of courtesans experimenting with new vehicles of seduction, all for the sake of acquiring visibility in order to sell themselves in the midst of an ever-growing competition. One of the most poignant examples is that given by Zeng Pu, of Fu Caiyun standing in front of the mirror, impersonating the Lady of the Camellias. A less exotic but equally powerful example is found in Wu Jianren’s Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (“Strange Events Witnessed During the Last Twenty Years”), published in serialized form between 1903 and 1910, where one of the characters marvels at one of the new fads of Shanghai’s demimonde, namely wearing sunglasses. He marvels: “Can you tell me what’s so attractive about two pitch black lenses on an almond face and peachy cheeks?!”60 The beautiful courtesan, by hiding her face behind the Western dark lenses, attracts the attention, though in this case negative, of the passerby; however, he, too, cannot resist the spectacle that the courtesan stages as she walks through the streets.

58

See Zamperini, 1999. A propos of the historical realities of prostitution in the late Qing period, see Henriot, 1997; Hershatter, 1997; Wang Shunu, Zhongguo changjishi (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 1988 [1933]). 60 Wu Jianren, Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1988), vol. 1, Ch. 11, 74. 59

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This attraction independent from aesthetic appreciation can be connected to a very important characteristic of the physical construction of the late Qing femme fatale: in none of the novels under study here, is beauty presented as a necessary attribute. None of the four guardian gods are depicted as particularly beautiful, with the exception of Shen Xiaoqing/Shi Chunfei. Lin Daiyu is noted for her ugliness, especially after she gets syphilis and loses all her hair, and so is Jin Xiaobao, one of the original jingang who is later replaced by Shi Chunfei.61 What makes a woman successful in the context of an ever-competitive market in a merciless city like Shanghai? Nothing other than the exploitation of her capital, i.e., her body, which, as we see, once lost, is found again in a very tangible and visible corporeality. Talents, such as poetry-making, calligraphy and beautiful singing, are no longer useful and feasible in this context. By juxtaposing Fu Caiyun with another courtesan who appears earlier on in Niehaihua, Zhu Ailin, we realize that the latter constitutes the stereotype of the literary courtesan as the perfect match for the learned man: “She was a character from the Banqiao zaji.”62 Zhu Ailin lives in an elegant mansion, surrounded by antiques and precious paintings, valuable commodities that are suitable complements to her worth, as well as patent displacements of her value. A skilled singer of opera and a wonderful hostess, she is one of those literary prostitutes modeled on the great courtesans of the past, such as Li Wa and Su Xiaoqing, idealized women whose low status in society made their virtues and talents shine even more.63 Fu Caiyun, for her part, is described as intelligent, bright and lively but her artistic talents do not match Zhu Ailin’s. They are ‘sisters in trade’ and yet they represent two distinct feminine ideals. Zhu Ailin is the perfect companion for the romantic and learned man and, as such, she is obsolete. Fu Caiyun is a cross between a latter-day yinfu and a huli 狐狸 (‘a fox-spirit’), the voracious vixen who seduces men and leads them astray. We have proven that empowered courtesans, such as Fu Caiyun and Shi Chunfei, owe much of their sexual aggressiveness to 61

Wu Jianren, 1988a, Chapter 100. Zeng Pu, 1990, 21 and 19. 63 For a discussion of the Li Wa and Su Xiaoqing stories in drama and fiction, see W. L. Idema, “Shih Chu-pao’s and Chu Yu-tun’s Ch’u-chiang-ch’ih. The Variety of Mode Within Form,” T’oung Pao 166.4−5 (1980): 217−265; W. L. Idema, The Dramatic Ouvre of Chu-Yu-tun 1379−1439 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); Idema and West, 1982; and Dudbridge, 1983. 62

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female characters, such as Pan Jinlian. However, they surpass her: Pan Jinlian was obsessed with Ximen Qing and that brought about her undoing. She used her beauty and her sexual charms to marry well, into wealth, but she lost it all, money, sex, power, because she, unlike a late Qing courtesan, focused exclusively on marriage as a vehicle of social mobility. She exhausted it when she went from being a poor wife to being a wealthy one but her role never changed and, in a way, she never was in control of her life. The late Qing courtesans do not aim to please and capture one man alone: the fin de siècle sex worker instead goes from man-to-man, from purse-to-purse. On the way, her wealth keeps growing and the way she keeps her charms intact is by constantly reinventing herself as the newest, most exotic commodity on the market. Resourcefulness is her main characteristic; she is crafty and always finds a way to get what she wants, at least in her prime. In Chapter 52 of Wu Jianren’s Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, we find, for instance, a very frustrated Wang Yuexian/Li Wenxian (the reincarnation of Mo Lishou) who does not want to be a streetwalker anymore and aspires to become a courtesan; however, nobody wants her in a high-class establishment because of her unappealing Jiangbei accent. Determined to better her situation at any cost, she takes lessons in the Suzhou dialect from Zhou Tongsun, an actor, until she manages to acquire the skill that will make her career move forward. In a similar fashion, as soon as Fu Caiyun steps onto the steamer that is going to take her to Europe, she starts taking German lessons from a Russian nihilist. This linguistic ability should not surprise: already in Yuan drama courtesans are at once chastised and praised for their skill to achieve anything with their ‘flowery’ words.64 In late Qing novels, they have just enhanced their linguistic skill by becoming polyglots. One could say that differentiation is what allows the women presented in these late Qing novels to be successful in their

64 See, for example, the already mentioned Zhao Pan’er jiu fengchen. It is important to note that in this and other Yuan plays, the talents of the courtesans are expressed via games that involved verbal skills, tricks with words, composing poetry and matching couplets: the courtesan would entertain her patron with wine, wits and wiles, not with her cooking and embroidery. See also P. Sieber, “Rhetoric, Romance and Intertextuality: the Making and Remaking of Guan Hanqing in Yuan and Ming China,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley (1994); P. Sieber, “Comic Virtue and Commendable Vice: Guan Hanqing’s JIU FENGCHEN and WANG JIANG TING,” Ming Studies (1994): 32.

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trade. Up until mid-nineteenth-century vernacular literature, fictional sex workers were almost always courtesans who worked in high-class establishments and were beautiful and talented. Courtesans all played an identical role, that of the fallen beauty, often with heroic and selfeffacing traits. Very few lower-class prostitutes appear in the pages of vernacular fiction and often the negative characteristics of sexual and economic greed were assigned to them. Generally speaking, the mainstream fictional accounts of courtesans and prostitutes in late imperial China tend to present a strikingly idealized portrait of these women’s lives or to romanticize their difficulties. In late nineteenthcentury fiction, this homogenous picture disintegrates and becomes multi-layered, fragmented and at times contradictory. Thus, one can encounter Shen Xiaoqing, who reverses her sad fate in her next life, as Shi Chunfei; but one can also find Fu Caiyun, who is at once cruel and helpless, vindictive and generous.65 Though it is true that most late Qing novels are still focused on the most famous figures of upperclass establishments, it is also true that yeji 野雞 and other lowerclass prostitutes can become full-fledged protagonists.66 Qinglou meng is one of the few novels written in the nineteenth century that holds on, stubbornly and nostalgically, to the idealized bond between the scholar and the courtesan: the male hero Jin Yixiang is surrounded by thirty-six beautiful courtesans, totally ecstatic about being nothing but his beautiful, self-effacing, self-sacrificing zhiyin. However, these exceptions were few and far between. One could then say that this increased differentiation, in moral and social terms, as well as in terms of self-presentation and of the terminology employed to categorize different groups of sex workers, is a reflection of actual changes taking place both in the demimonde and in Chinese society at large.67 For example, by the end of the Qing dynasty, the hierarchy of Chinese prostitution becomes even more differentiated, and many terms are very fluid and unstable, both semantically and socially: both in the novels and in real life, a girl could start as a mingji 名妓 and end up her life as a jinü 妓女, as in the case of Sai Jinhua, or vice versa, she could start as a streetwalker and ascend to

65

Zamperini, 1994, for the complexity of Fu Caiyun’s character. Yeji means ‘pheasant’ and was used for common street walkers. 67 By the turn of the century, many terms had been coined to identify different categories of jinü and mingji. See Henriot, 1997; Hershatter, 1997, 34−65. 66

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fame.68 In other words, these representations mirror the fragmentation of previously relatively stable social categories and practices, helping us detect them as symptoms of modernity. Polyglossia, social and moral differentiation, and metamorphosis, are all characteristics that go hand-in-hand with another feature that in late Qing novels is a permanent feature of the adult sex worker’s personality: greed for money, and also for sex. These are ‘material girls’, indeed, they live in the here-and-now and thirst for sex and material possessions. These two desires are so strong in her that they can hardly be separated and distinguished, since in many cases greed for money is what allows her to buy the flashy clothes that she needs to be in business and gives her the means to keep her lovers, who are not one-and-the-same as her patrons, as we shall see below. This double desire is connected to her ability to fool her patrons. She is duplicitous, or better, she is protean: she is a performer, she can speak in tongues, and can change personae; that is why she can adapt so successfully to living on the surface of things and wading through historical events that the rest of Chinese society had so much trouble adapting to. The story of Hu Yue’e (the reincarnation of Mo Lihai) is a wonderful example of this point. Her plot to get a rich lover is as devious as it is successful: she first selects a rich candidate and seduces him. Once they start seeing each other on a regular basis, she administers sleeping pills to him, so that she can impress him with displays of devotion as she nurses him back to health.69 What her patron does not know is that as he lies unconscious in bed, she is in the other room entertaining her lover. Moved by her performance and convinced of her love, Chen marries her; however, Hu Yue’e’s desire for money, once fulfilled, is replaced by her desire for sex, of course with a man who is not her spouse: eventually, her husband Chen catches her with her lover and sends her away. Hu Yue’e goes back to her original profession with the name of Lu Lanfen and is free to chase after young boys without any restraint.70 Another mistress of manipulation aimed at increasing her wealth and satisfying her needs is Lin Daiyu. In Chapter 22 of Jiuweigui, she ‘took a bath’ (a Shanghai expression to indicate that she had gotten

68 69 70

See Zamperini, 1999. Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapters 54−60. Ibid., Chapter 73.

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married to) with Qiu Ba, a very wealthy man. Qiu Ba, unlike many others, has managed to keep a balance between his addiction to whoring and saving his capital: having squandered some money on prostitutes in his youth, in his maturity he has worked out a routine in which he comes to Shanghai four times a year (once for each season), each time with an allotted sum of money, and he spends no more and no less in brothels. Lin Daiyu is severely in debt, so she seduces him and convinces him that she wants to marry him. They marry in lavish style but, once back home, Lin Daiyu cannot get used to married life and wants to go back to Shanghai. Qiu Ba has her imprisoned in her room and it is only thanks to his first wife’s pleadings (who is jealous of Lin Daiyu and anxious to get rid of her), that Lin Daiyu is allowed to go back to Shanghai and resume her trysts with her lovers. The whole story is told well, with irony, first taking the side of Lin Daiyu and then slowly showing who is to be pitied, i.e., Qiu Ba, who really fell in love with her, even if only fools fall in love with courtesans.71 In a way, even if late Qing novels are full of proverbs about the women of the demimonde’s lack of emotions, it is not true that they are portrayed as insensitive to feelings. They do appear capable of feeling se 色 (‘lust’). They go with their patrons exclusively for money, but they fall for beauty and masculine charms, two characteristics their patrons seldom have. Furthermore, these women can afford their vices. This story, with many variations, is to be found in virtually every late Qing novel in which courtesans and prostitutes appear. It is a story told from a misogynistic perspective against women who could find a way to carve a niche of empowerment within a patriarchal society: in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, women did not have many choices when it came to making a living outside of a respectable marriage and motherhood or work in a factory among the growing masses of the urban proletariat. These representations also speak of the threat that men felt vis-à-vis the new roles that the collapse of Qing dynasty seemed to bring about for women. This element of fear helps to explain not only the negativity in which most of these women’s characterizations are steeped, but also the constant tone of mockery and debasement directed against these women. We have seen how the sex change and the transformation into prostitutes of the four guardian gods have strong comic aspects. As grown women, they keep 71

Zhang Chunfan, 1993.

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being made fun of, for their appetites and passions, for their ability to be independent. The courtesan, as a representative of a fashionable and fashioned modernity, as a cunning businesswoman, as a passionate and deranged pedophile, as an opium and sex addict, as the breadwinner: all these roles that the courtesan plays are new and potentially disruptive precisely because they represent her as totally independent in her decisions. As we have seen, during her childhood, she did not have that much of a choice in terms of her entrance into the world of prostitution. In the case of the four guardian spirits and of Fu Caiyun, their destiny had been sealed before their births in the world of men. However, once they have lost their virginity and entered the circuits of the economy of pleasure, these women present a very much empowered example of womanhood. What happens, then, to these women, independent, reckless, bound by their fates and yet unrestrained in their sexual and moral behavior precisely because of their status as untouchables, if we want to look at them from the angle of the ‘rhetoric of the beloved’ that we have explained in the first section of this chapter? Are the si da jingang and their sisters-in-trade destined to find their zhiyin and live happily ever after? Most importantly, what do these male engendered representations of this desirable feminine figure tell us about the male fantasies of the late Qing period? III. The Lovers’ Trap: Consumerism and the End of the Patriarchal Romance Once upon a time lived Li Yaxian, for her sake Zheng Yuanhe squandered his yellow gold and went about singing the beggars’ ballads.72 What was to be done to remove the demand for fallen women? This presupposed that men—their purchasers and murders—must appreciate the immorality of their slave-owning role and recoil from it in horror. The men it was who needed saving [the italics are mine].73

72 Feng Menglong, “Yu Tangchun luonan pengfu,” Yu Tangchun falls on hard times and is reunited with her husband, in Jingshi tongyan, 1989, 361. 73 Chechov, 1989, 16.

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In these new circumstances, against the background of a new urbanized, westernized and international horizon, what happens to the caizi, the man of letters, who was the beloved zhiyin of the courtesan? Zhang Qiugu, a consumed brothel-goer and the male hero of the novel Jiuweigui, explains to his friends that in the ‘good old times’ it was the literati who were the faithless lovers who broke their beloved’s hearts and he quotes the stories of Huo Xiaoyu and Du Shiniang. Alas, he laments, in contemporary (meaning early twentieth century) Shanghai, the scene is quite the opposite, with the clients falling in love and the prostitutes breaking their hearts and ruining them financially.74 The caizi goes from being the savior of the woman to being the one who needs to be rescued from and by her, and she often lets him sink in his heartbreak and in his debts; at times, she also hastens his natural death, as we shall see presently. The power dynamics of the scholar and courtesan bond appear reversed. Wu Jianren, lamenting the general decay of Shanghai’s life at the end of the nineteenth century, observes that, “In the old times literati took joy in courtesans (mingji), but nowadays courtesans take joy in famous actors.”75 In other words, this observation tells us that the zhiyin equation is dramatically changed: as we have seen, up until the mid-nineteenth century, in the caizi-courtesan bond the man took his pleasure in the woman and was in an empowered position over her. She depended on him to obtain a socially-acceptable status and her only desire was to get married to him and to give him self-effacing love in return (and often economic rewards as well—as we see starting with Li Wa, all the way through the Ming dynasty). According to Wu Jianren, in these new times, the subject of the jouissance has shifted: the sex worker appropriates erotic agency and gets to have fun. This shift would not be so dramatic perhaps if the object of the jouissance were still the caizi. Adding humiliation to shame, actors, a socially-despised category of people, replace him in the mingji’s affection, as happened with Wang Liansheng in Haishang hua. In other words, just like in Yuan plays the love relationship between the courtesan and the wenren was complicated and often hindered by the presence of the rich and uncouth merchant, in late Qing vernacu-

74 Feng Menglong, “Lü dalang huanjin wan gurou,” Master Lü loses his life to return gold, in Jingshi tongyan, 1989, 59−60. 75 Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 51.

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lar fiction we see new romantic and erotic geometries, which bring together and apart the modern incarnation of the courtesan, old- and new-school wenren and actors. So, who is loving whom, how much and at what price? The four guardian-spirits-turned-courtesans are all teenagers when they start receiving clients. Their patrons, on the contrary, are older and usually not very attractive men. These men have in their mind the very unrealistic expectations that their money will buy them not only the time and the sexual favors of the courtesan, but also her heart. In a way, one cannot help feeling sorry for the rows of old-style literati who, in the pages of late Qing novels, still buy into the rhetoric of the beloved which matches up the jiaji 佳妓 (‘the beautiful courtesan’) and the caizi. By this time, however, the wenren has gone from being her beloved to being just another customer to exploit, side-by-side with the very despised merchants. The literatus has been replaced by actors, just as in Yuan drama the wenren had been displaced by and had to compete with the merchants. The one remaining attraction he now holds for the young Shanghai courtesan is his purse as she is no longer trained to be the perfect zhiyin of the refined man of letters.76 She is brought up to be a shrewd (and also a bit of a shrewish) businesswoman aware of competition and she goes from being a helpless victim waiting to be rescued to being a very dangerous presence that can actually threaten the very existence of these old-style literati. We can see the strength of this threat in what happens to our MoLiqing-turned-Shen-Xiaoqing-turned-Shi-Chunfei. After her marriage, she starts cheating on her husband with his grooms and quite openly at that. Upon her return from the Ryukyu Islands, she falls in love with a dashing actor, Xiao San’er. However, she loses touch with him because she is so engrossed in her trysts with her husband’s groom. Shi Chunfei eventually decides to do away with her old husband: he is an insomniac, so Shi Chunfei starts putting an aphrodisiac in his medicine every night. Between her ‘poisoning’ and the work of inept doctors, Zhang’s health rapidly declines. In an attempt to recover, Zhang decides to go south but there he receives his coup de grâce from Shi Chunfei, who starts entertaining her lover, Song, right under Zhang’s nose. He dies of anger: Shi Chunfei has succeeded in killing him by

76

See Zamperini, 1999.

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poisoning his body with aphrodisiacs and his soul with jealousy.77 It is true that on his deathbed, Zhang recognizes that his demise is not Shi Chunfei’s fault, but only the result of his bad karma, so that the woman appears absolved of the responsibility of his death. After all, this is the just revenge that Shen Xiaoqing had been looking for when she committed suicide. At the same time, the framework of nie 孽 (‘evil retribution’) is precisely just that, a framework to keep the different narrative threads together and it does not lessen significantly the negative representation of Shen Xiaoqing. Zhang broke Shen Xiaoqing’s heart, thus keeping true to the paradigm of the wenren as the faithless lover. When he tries to enact the zhiyin bond between himself and Shi Chunfei, demanding faithfulness and love from her, he ruins himself; Shi Chunfei is no Li Wa, nor Du Shiniang. As more and more courtesans appear in late Qing novels, the role of the wenren as the heartless lover who does not repay her kindness and does not rescue her from the ‘living hell’ of the brothel becomes marginal and instead we see the old-style wenren more and more in the role of a victim, of an old fool unable to face up to reality. The money of the customer gets spent on the woman’s accessories, such as clothes, opium and young lovers. In many cases, she manages to use her client’s money without even sleeping with him, as happens when Hu Yue’e-Lu Lanfen manages to convince Chen of her devotion without ‘putting out’, as it were, and leaves him alone and drugged in her room, while she is having sex with her lover.78 This should not hide the fact that, in late Qing fiction, the courtesan pays a high price for her lovers. In this particular circumstance, the true karmic retribution for Shi Chunfei comes from the lover Song. After she goes back to Shanghai, she is reunited with Xiao San’er and proposes to both him and Song to be her consorts. Xiao San’er agrees but Song, during the night, goes back to her place and robs her blind, so that she is forced to go back to receiving customers.79 Similarly, Hu Yue’e/Lu Lanfen is severely beaten by a groom, an ex-lover of hers, who is deeply upset over her obsession for young boys and who arranges an ambush for her and her lover.80 In other words, her lovers are attracted to her precisely for the same reasons she is attracted 77 78 79 80

Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapters 80–85. Ibid., Chapter 56. Ibid., Chapter 89. Ibid., Chapters 74−77.

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to her older and boring customers, namely for the wealth that she can procure for him. Thus, we see that economic exchange happens between three agents, the courtesan, her client and her lover. Just as the client pays for the female sex worker’s favors, she pays for her lover. This economy of desire is clearly expressed in economic transactions and is neither hidden, nor disguised in flowery terms. Money is what propels the world these characters move in, poverty means death for the sex worker. Once the client has exhausted his money, he is kicked out of the brothel. Or, if the woman has managed to get married to him, and to squeeze him dry, once she has replenished her funds, she usually runs back to Shanghai where she resumes her old profession with a new name. The delusional equation of the savior syndrome, which posits money only as a tool to buy and hold on to the courtesan’s heart, is shattered. Not only does it become clear that we are in a marketplace economy where money is the currency of feelings: money is feeling, affect. To make matters worse, the courtesan has become another buyer, like her patrons, out to purchase and pursue her pleasure. The wenren now enters into a dangerous relationship when he engages the services of a courtesan, risking at least his purse, at most his life. The economics of soteriology at play in late imperial vernacular sources within the context of the scholar and courtesan dynamics is definitely reversed: this reversal is connected to the discourse of speed and modernity that we have already mentioned. The woman acquires—temporary—control over the superficial attributes of modernity and manages to enter history as a subject. On the contrary, the wenren lags behind and if he tries to gain access to the stream of historical changes, he becomes ‘hysterical’, marked as feminine in terms of his lack of power. As the relationship between Fu Caiyun and her husband Jin Wenqing illustrates, the old-style wenren is unable to face up to the new challenges in the world around him. Old, obsolete, he fails to sexually satisfy the young, westernized sex worker he chooses for his mate: while she moves at the fast tempo of a waltz across the changes, he still moves at the rhythm of ritual music, encumbered by the heavy garb of Chinese tradition. While the courtesan’s world expands to include new countries, new languages, new roles, his world shrinks, his body fails, his mind falters. The feminized, non-productive, obsolete uppermiddle-class male is overpowered by an assertive, money-making, lower-class woman who takes away his money and his honor, leaving

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him standing as an object of ridicule to the woman and to the reader looking on behind her shoulder, the modern reader of entertainment fiction who should know better than fall in love with a fast girl.81 Is there no match for this fast-moving femme fatale? Her lovers are her sex toys, her patrons her ‘money-trees’, to use a Chinese expression usually applied to the courtesans themselves. Behind the old-fashioned man of letters and the emerging urbanite, we encounter Zhang Qiugu, the ultimate piaoke 嫖客, brothel-goer, a sort of a Superman of the bordello and the unquestionable hero of the novel Jiuweigui. He is a noble, martial-looking, talented, handsome young man, who lives among prostitutes and courtesans and is able to dominate these greedy women easily. He enlightens prostitutes and clients alike, acts as a mediator when there is a fight, plays the gallant, never falling in love and, even when he is tricked into some trap, manages to pull himself out of trouble in some nice way. He is a great lover and a great friend, fearing nothing and succeeding in all his endeavors. As he explains to one of his friends, Zhang Qiugu knows that prostitutes have feelings only if money is part of the equation. Deploring the fact that people want to marry prostitutes, he likens it to taking a beautiful flower and planting it into an unfamiliar ground with an unfamiliar climate. Of course the flower will suffer and wither: if it could speak, it would refuse to be taken away.82 The problem lies, in his view, in the fact that the customers are in denial and do not understand that lying and deceit is part of this category of women’s line of work.83 At the same time, Zhang Qiugu explains how one can get ‘working girls’ to have real feelings towards him. One needs beauty, talent and etiquette: in short, one needs to be Zhang Qiugu. He is setting himself up as the perfect patron, who can also still be the courtesan’s lover, thereby mending the split we have presented in the previous section in the zhiyin paradigm. The true successful brothel-goer is one who knows the rules and the proper behavior to keep in the brothel and in the company of courtesans. The rich, ignorant, country bumpkins who have the financial means to frequent these women lack the know-how

81 For the relationship between Fu Caiyun and Jin Wenqing and how it intersects with the idea of modernity and the nation, see Zamperini, 1999, and Zamperini, 1994. 82 Zhang Chunfan, 1993, Chapter 9. I have dealt in more detail with this episode in an earlier version of this analysis in Zamperini, 2003a. 83 Zhang Chunfan, 1993, Chapter 15, 18 and ff.

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to actively become connoisseurs. These ignorami are always laughed at, for not knowing how to compose poetry or how to dress properly and according to their social status. Officials, merchants and wenren do not fare much better in Zhang Qiugu’s eyes.84 Merchants are incredibly greedy and do not like to spend money, while officials are just showoffs who like to brag but have no money: “These officials are really ‘food-buckets’ (i.e., useless people), unable to learn the character piao 嫖 (‘whoring’)!”85 He also says that if the prostitutes were to swap jobs with the officials, they would do a much better job. His approach to late Qing courtesans as sex workers is strikingly realistic, as he refuses to see them only as idealized icons of proper behavior. At times he also appears highly sympathetic towards the courtesans, by showing how these women are often stuck with uncouth, rude, aggressive clients who abuse them sexually and how they also have to live with the stigma of not being true to their customers. His bottom line is that one should not go with whores. However, if one does, and he for one does so often and frequently, one must know the etiquette and also must know what to expect, have fun when in the brothel and leave the courtesans where they belong. To have them love one, one must give them leeway and not push them unnaturally. They do fall for beauty and masculine charms, two characteristics their patrons seldom have but with which Zhang Qiugu just happens to be very well endowed. In truth, there are times in which Zhang Qiugu becomes a compass, as it is written at the end of the book by the curator of the novel, a sort of navigational device to teach the reader how to navigate the world of prostitution. Zhang Qiugu is indeed a traveler, like the courtesan, but he is a sex tourist and his movements map the piaojie 嫖界 (‘the whoring world’). Once in Tianjin and Beijing, and also later in Canton, Zhang Qiugu displays an immense curiosity for discovering new forms of sexual and erotic entertainment. While in Beijing, he flirts with a catamite and then visits a restaurant where men and women supposedly meet with the explicit intent to have sex.86 These women are concubines and consorts from good families incognito. The men pay a certain amount of money to the owner of the restaurant. The women, after the men had taken their meal, come in and look at the

84 85 86

Ibid., 17 and ff. Ibid., 19. Ibid., Chapter 153, and Chapters 154−155, 908 and ff.

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men. If they meet their fancy, then they have intercourse with the men. If not, they simply leave and the men really have no say in the matter. These ‘respectable’ women are just like Zhang, out to shop the world of sex. Zhang appears the only one though, in the whole panorama of late Qing novels that deal with courtesans and their clients, who gets his cake and eats it as well. Indeed ‘the smart shopper in the brothel’, he is the true capitalist consumer, who, unlike the oldfashioned Jin Wenqing, does not lose himself, his cash and his life in his interactions with women in general and courtesans in particular. He, in a way, more than the sexy revamped courtesan, is the ultimate male fantasy, as the hero who can have it all, the hybrid creation of a new literary and libidinal economy, that of the marketplace: How does one think a marketplace? At once a bounded enclosure and a site of open commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection with the network of goods, commodities, markets, sites of commerce and places of production which sustain it. A marketplace is the epitome of local identity (often indeed it is what defined a place as more significant than surrounding communities) and the unsettling of that identity by the trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere. At the market centre of the polis we discover a commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed: centre and periphery, inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low. In the marketplace pure and simple categories of thought find themselves perplexed and one-sided. Only hybrid notions are appropriate to such a hybrid place.87

And hybrid indeed Zhang Qiugu is, as he does lose himself in his own desire to consume sex: he loses sight of boundaries and morality. This abhorrent side of his drive to consume is best seen in his seduction of a young adolescent of a good family mentioned in Chapter 2.88 This episode shows Zhang Qiugu’s topo-ethical philosophy. Just as the courtesan moves about and brings the brothel anywhere she stands, so too the ultimate model of the modern patron of the brothel, the whole world is constructed as a brothel and his main activity is penetration. Zhang Qiugu is modern in a very superficial sense: he too moves across China and expands his range of action from Shanghai to the rest of the metropolitan areas of turn-of-the-century China. He is more realistic

87 P. Stally Brass and Allon White, The Politics and the Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 27. 88 Zhang Chunfan, 1993, Chapter 107, 672 and Chapter 110, 685.

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in his expectations about his interactions with the courtesans but it is because he treats all women, even a teenager who makes the mistake of having a crush on him, as whores at his disposal. Though he does project a successful and clearly glamorized image of masculinity, it is somewhat a relief to say that he stands as a solitary figure against the rather problematic landscape of late Qing manhood. IV. (Pur)Chasing Modernity: The Lost Sons of China Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origins, alongside ruined and adventurous off-shoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knifegrinders, tinkers, beggars, in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thiter, which the French call la bohème.89

There is yet another kind of man who gets entangled with the demimonde in the urban setting of Shanghai. He is not an old-style wenren, nor a dashing young actor addicted to money and expensive clothes, nor can he aspire to the status of sexual Superman played by Zhang Qiugu. He is characterized, among other things, by his association with the courtesans and prostitutes; an idiosyncratic approach to modernity and progress, either in the form of unconditional embrace of anything Western and foreign, or of total refusal of anything not Chinese; a very unstable and volatile socio-economic situation; a constant displacement, manifested in restlessness, travels, in constant change of careers; a tendency to addiction (to drugs, gambling and to self-created delusions in general); a strong sexual drive often without means to carry to its conclusion; a very ambiguous moral status; and a general incapability to cope with the changing world around him. In earlier publications, I have called these figures ‘schizeurs’, a fusion of the words ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘amateurs’, to define their multiple and tentative approach to both sexuality and modernity in the urban

89

K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1951), Vol. 1, 267.

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settings of Shanghai.90 I have now come to believe though that the most appropriate definition for them is liumin 流民, a Chinese term that encompasses movement, geographical and socio-economic dislocation, as well as the problematic social status of both vagrants and migrants against the urban landscapes that separate them from their place of origin. The narrative fates of these sojourners are inseparable from those of their female companions, who are the necessary basis for their existence and their identity. Indeed, to write about women is to write about men, in this case. These liumin are very important ciphers for the disintegration not only of the zhiyin bond, but also of the dissolution of the source of its emotional strength and allure for centuries of Chinese authors and readers, namely that of what I will call here the ‘family romance imperative’. ‘Family Romance’ was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one’s family and joining one of higher social standing.91 Many literary scholars and historians have used the term broadly to describe the images of the familial order underlying Western literary and political narratives.92 In this sense, Freud’s image for describing how children who have grown to doubt the identity of a father and idealize their origins through fantasies of heroic illegitimacy can be useful to illuminate what is truly at stake in the work of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century fiction writers. Let me clarify that I do not intend to simply superimpose Freud or Freudianism on late Qing fiction. I do find, however, that the notion of the Freudian family romance can be a useful metaphor for the male hero’s journey in many late imperial novels. It is often the journey of an orphan or still disempowered young man who, through a series

90 ‘Amateur’ has its root in the Latin amare, to love. In my dissertation and in “On Their Dress They Wore a Body,” I used schizophrenia following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of ‘schizoanalysis’ (see G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari, AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia [University of Minnesota Press, 1977]). For a very interesting definition of multiple personalities in connection to the construction of the identity of the [male] Shanghairen in turn of the century journals and magazines, see Barbara Mittler’s “Multiple Personalities? Image and Voice of the Shanghairen,” in A Newspaper for China? Metamorphosis of the Newspaper in Shanghai 1872−1912 (Harvard University Press, 2004), 272. 91 S. Freud, Family Romances (1908), in Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader (Yale University, 1989), 297. 92 See, for example, M. Robert, The Origins of the Novel (Indiana University Press, 1980); L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (University of California Press, 1992).

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of trials and tribulations, ascends to fortune and is integrated into a powerful family, either by reuniting with his original one, or, via marriage, a new one. Even when the hero, as in the case of Sun Wukong in Xiyouji or Jia Baoyu in Hong lou meng, tries to resist his narrative destiny, the father, in his multifarious incarnations (from Buddha to emperor to strict Confucian parent), unfailingly appears to ensure that at the end the lost child/prince/god will find his proper abode, be that of a mandarin’s yamen or of a heavenly abode. What happens, then, to the sojourners who arrive in Shanghai in search of fortune, like the young Zhao Puzhai in Haishang hua, is that they are the first characters in Chinese fiction to lose their fathers and remain permanent orphans. They are usually not born in Shanghai and end up there in a search for fame and fortune. They are usually actual orphans, whose distant mothers can only fret and worry back home and be harassed for money. Even when a father is alive, he is remote or, in some cases, just as besotted as his son with courtesans, opium and gambling and he cannot provide his dazed son with a successful model of masculinity. Not that the displaced subject realizes his need for guidance. In Haishang ha fanhuameng, when the young Du Shaomu, who is about to lose himself, his fortune and almost his life in the pursuit of a toxic love, encounters an older man and his son, friends of his family, he feels sorry for the son, who looks very scared of and intimidated by his father.93 Du Shaomu sees the son as oppressed by a pompous and obsolete parent but, as the narrative makes clear, it is Du Shaomu one needs pity because he does not have a father to rescue him. The young man who sees himself as a savvy savior turns out to be the one who needs to be rescued. His father is long gone, out chasing young girls or stunned by opium and the fall of his belief system. The young Shanghai sojourner, thus, lacks inspiration and guidance and when he falls in love and tries to reproduce the traditional family unit through marriage, he fails. The women he marries are whores who abandon him as soon as the money is spent. With the disintegration of the family romance trajectory, there is no narrative of upward mobility that can guide the young minds of China through the maze of desire and eroticism, as we saw happen in Xixiang ji and Mudan ting, or even Jin Ping Mei. There is only space for a vertical narrative 93

Sun Jiazhen, 1991, 124.

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of fall, loss and dispersion. We should not think that the urban orphan is alone. Unfair as it may seem, for all late Qing male fictional characters, be they old-style wenren or ‘schizeurs’, modernity is often a losing proposition. By ‘killing’ the father’s, as well as the son’s, possibility to replace him in the context of the family romance, late Qing authors bind these figures inextricably with nostalgia, a point we will return to in the Conclusion. As Francis Barker so compellingly writes, . . . modernity creates two bodies: the first is a dead body, it is the spectacular body of past lore, a residue one can feel nostalgia for, but one that, figured as extraneous shell, appears less dangerous. But “no more could modernity develop without the body’s capacity to reproduce itself than could capitalism flourish without the body’s capacity to work.” In another register, there is a second body, one that is ‘out there’. This second body, still deprived of the glories and terrors of its old semiosis, is nonetheless not quite the wholly morbid flesh of the first modern body whose passions have had to be quelled; but more an object of knowledge. Concealed within the first body, it is the diagrammatic, fibrous, structured, organized object of investigation. And, by implication, the object of the disciplinary interventions, which will thenceforward sanitize it, train it, and prepare it for labor.94

This is why the courtesan and her meteoric journey through the firmament of Shanghai are the necessary symbol and metaphor for the male condition of the turn of the nineteenth century. Because she is pregnant with both death and a new life, containing as she does at once both these two bodies, the phantasm of the past and the modern one awaiting to emerge, to be studied, sanitized through discipline, and sent to the factories. She will survive, but only because she puts her own self at the heart of her life and she no longer needs topo-ethical stability obtained through a man’s redemption to achieve happiness. As she moves from lover to lover, from one new outfit to the next, she embraces narcissism and, simultaneously, becomes the protean looking-glass of the fragmented male subject; in this mirroring lies the key to understanding the fortune and the strength of her lore for writers and readers of this period. Chinese men in these late Qing sources are strangers in their own country. Not unlike the millions of migrant workers that in recent years have rushed to Beijing to help build the Olympic stadiums, they move and help construct a

94 F. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body. Essays on Subjection (The University of Michigan Press, 1997), vii.

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city they will not inhabit for long and that will not belong to them, in the end, even if it is their capital that keeps it moving and growing. In the modern metropolis of Shanghai, a stranger, unlike it happens in the smaller space of a town or of a village, always remains such.95 The liumin arrives in Shanghai to pursue dreams, of wealth, success, sex and modernity. His first move is often to set up a home, and to try and furnish it with Western style furniture and a wife. Often his spouse, like his furniture, is bought on credit, or simply rented. Once the money runs out, the furniture is pawned or returned and the wife goes back to the brothel. The imaginary of Chinese novelists bestow to these temporary urban dwellers in late Qing novels the task of stitching together the old and the new worlds. Zhang Qiugu is the only one whose social, racial and sexual identity is not destroyed or fragmented by his drive to consume. Jin Wenqing, Lao Hangjie and others like them, lose themselves in the context of their interactions with their beloved sex workers. It is almost as if the lost bodies of the courtesans helped the bodies of their patrons to get lost as well. As they disappear, they are immediately replaced by new arrivals. There is no home, no family, no nation, not even its dream, to return to. In the end, both the courtesan and her patrons become homeless when they lose their traditional position within the rhetoric of the beloved and their place in the zhiyin equation: they end up outside of the discourse about love and are put within the circuit of an economy of desire, pleasure and consumption that excludes feelings. Always on the move, they can no longer zhi 知 the other’s yin 音, or their own ji 己. They have become the homo oeconomicus and homo consumens, who, according to Zygmunt Bauman, “are men and women without social bonds. They are the ideal residents of the market economy and the types that make the GNP watchers happy. They are also fictions.”96 In the expanded horizons of the piaojie, the late Qing world has become, love becomes a deadly disease, and the zhiyin bond a nostalgic dream of a long lost era.97

95

Z. Bauman, Liquid Love (Polity Press, 2003), 105. Ibid., 69. 97 There is one beautiful exception to this rather dismal commercialization, an exception that paradoxically exemplifies the impossibility of love between the courtesan and the wenren in the changed circumstances of late Qing society. In the already mentioned Haishang hua, we meet a veritable Romeo and Juliet romance, that of Tao Yufu and Li Shufang, and we will discuss this episode in detail in Chapter 5. Han Ziyun, 1983, 181. 96

CHAPTER FIVE

TAKING FLIGHT: POVERTY, SICKNESS AND DEATH Addio del passato bei sogni ridenti Le rose del volto gia’ sono pallenti. Farewell, happy dreams of bygone days; The roses in my cheeks already are faded.1

In the previous chapters, we reconstructed the itinerary that the late Qing courtesan traces across national and international boundaries, as well as gender and social frontiers. We have retraced her fall from heaven to earth, her evolution from innocent child to skilled seducer, and have witnessed how her sexual independence maps new spatial and cultural boundaries. We have also analyzed the way in which men of various social classes accompany her on this downward trajectory through sexuality and modernity, looking at the different representations of both female and male power and powerlessness vis-à-vis historical forces and political changes, together with how they result in national and emotional homelessness and displacement. Yet, no matter how far she travels, how many languages she speaks, how many clients she has welcomed in her boudoirs, very seldom does the courtesan manage to work her way out of prostitution.2 Christian Henriot writes that at the end of the Qing dynasty the ways out of sex work for courtesans were marriage, passage to a lower-rank house, begging and death.3 Their fictional counterparts depart somewhat from this pattern, as we shall see presently, but more often than not their journey end in a tragic fashion as well. Caught in the transience of things, the courtesans are beaten, contract venereal diseases, waste their money and end up alone, on the brink of poverty, sickness, and, often, death. This chapter takes a close look at the last phase of the courtesan’s journey through the Shanghai marketplace. Whether it is through torture, abuse or disease, the end of the line approaches fast for these 1 2 3

Verdi, G., La traviata [sound recording] (New York: Decca, 2002), Act 3. See Zamperini, 1999. Henriot, 1997, 73.

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courtesans, and is always presented as the pathological destiny of the sexed and oversexed woman. We will first focus on her poverty and the reasons why these novels often stress the impossibility of social and economic redemption for this category of women. Secondly, we will explore various representations of disease, either as a way of salvation or as karmic retribution. Then, we will analyze death within the brothel and its implications. Finally, we will discuss the other and less conventional paths through which the courtesan might leave the world of the ‘fiery keng’ behind her; this will conclude the fictional journey of a courtesan in the world of late Qing vernacular fiction. I. The Awakening [Zhao] Erbao thought Shi the Third was really dead. Just as she was about to ask his servants, under her very eyes they changed into monsters of all kinds, and moved to attack her. She was so scared that she screamed in anguish, and was startled awake, her body covered in cold sweat, her heart beating wildly.4

It seems very appropriate to end this last chapter with another dream, since this is how this exploration began. The dreamer in this instance is not a man, however, but Zhao Erbao, a famous courtesan who once upon a time had been a ‘good girl’. Her entry into prostitution has been brought about by her desire for wealth and riches and, more specifically, for the expensive and fast Shanghai lifestyle. She is also, quite appropriately, the sister of Zhao Puzhai, the youth whom the narrator and main dreamer of Haishang hua bumps into at the beginning of the novel after he has fallen through the sea of flowers. Her case well exemplifies how the courtesan’s consumption of goods—from clothes to men—is very much akin to a devouring disease. Its most immediate consequence, which will eventually bring about her demise, is poverty. It is true that the courtesan, through her sex work, generates a steady cash flow that allows her to maintain her expensive urban lifestyle and to participate in a system of financial and erotic transactions. However, this flow is characterized by irregularity and a tendency to

4

Han Ziyun, 1983, 590.

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run dangerously low: the courtesan, initially in control of the money she earns and the way it is spent, is seemingly incapable of wise investments. Narcissistic excesses and the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure are in her nature. Accordingly, as soon as she becomes addicted to luxury, she starts hemorrhaging, as it were, money. Regularly, at the peak of her fame and because of her expensive lifestyle, her careless pursuit of pleasure and lack of careful economic planning, the courtesan is soon plagued by poverty. The novels do present some objective reasons behind the need for an incessant amount of cash: once she starts entertaining clients, the courtesan has to face an ever-increasing number of expenses—for nice furniture, fashionable gowns, make-up and flowers, food and drink, salaries for servants and maids, and so on. What complicates the issue is the fact that patrons keep tabs running and usually pay at the end of the year. They are, in other words, buying their pleasure on credit, just as their mistresses. In many cases these sojourners often disappear when payments are due, leaving the courtesans unable to pay their bills. Aging can also cause economic decline: as her beauty and her charms fade, her needs and vices increase, and this again reduces dramatically her resources. Zhao Erbao’s progress in the world of prostitution well illustrates the speed with which a courtesan goes from stars to dust. She arrives in Shanghai, a young virgin from a good family, along with her mother, a good-hearted but weak woman, and a female friend, on a ‘rescue mission’, to find her wastrel brother and take him back to their hometown.5 It takes only some merrymaking in Shanghai for the two young women to become ‘corrupted’ by the desire for riches, nice clothes and the fast pace of Shanghai. Tainted by their desire to settle in the city, they lose their home and their bodies. Rather than saving the young scoundrel, they both decide to become courtesans to acquire the money necessary to live the highlife in the city. Right

5 Zhao Erbao’s brother, Zhao Puzhai, had gone to Shanghai after his father’s death to make a living, but once there, he wastes his time and his money in brothels and restaurants. On the edge of poverty, he is rescued reluctantly a couple of times by his uncle Hong Shanqin, a rich merchant, who eventually gives him money to go back to his hometown. After his uncle runs into Zhao Puzhai as he is pulling a rickshaw, he writes to his sister, Zhao Puzhai’s mother, to tell her to come and fetch her son, and this letter prompts the woman’s journey to the metropolis. After Zhao Erbao has become a courtesan, Zhao becomes something between a pimp and an errand-boy for his sister.

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after her debut as a courtesan, Zhao Erbao becomes the favorite of an important nobleman, the young gentleman Shi the Third, who soon promises her to take her as his first wife. Later, he leaves to go back to his family, swearing he will send for her as soon as possible. Zhao Erbao buys clothes and jewels on credit for her trousseau and starts putting on airs, treating her family and patrons alike with aloofness, because she thinks she is going to become the wife of a nobleman. She refuses to entertain other clients and stops earning any money but Shi the Third never shows up. Desperate and heartbroken, on the verge of bankruptcy because of all her extravagant expenditures, Zhao Erbao sends her brother all the way to his hometown, just to find out that Shi the Third has already married somebody else. Deep in debt, she has no choice but return all her expensive purchases. Zhao Erbao’s mistake is her assumption that, given her liangjia background, she is different from the other courtesans. But for all her ignorance, her story well exemplifies the dynamics of sexual pollution that regulate the city-wide brothel of Shanghai. Zhao Erbao’s socioeconomic fall into a circuit of exchange and consumption leaves her no protection or safety. Not only does her beloved Shi the Third turn out to be a regular scoundrel who disappears without paying his tab, her uncle disowns her because she has become a courtesan, her mother falls deathly ill, her brother is forced to marry one of her servants who has become pregnant by him, and Zhao Erbao has to pay the girl’s family a good deal of money to keep quiet about the whole incident. As if this were not enough, her abode is wrecked by an uncouth and vulgar patron, Master Lan, famous for his arrogance, who has come to make fun of her being dumped by Shi the Third and smashes her furniture to smithereens when she fails to oblige him. After Lan has destroyed her quarters, Zhao Erbao falls asleep. She dreams Shi the Third’s servants have come to fetch her but soon they announce his death and turn into hideous monsters. This nightmare shows her delusion of love and happiness, her vain arrogance and, by stark contrast, the actual, overwhelming devastation in her life. Reality kicks in: “a courtesan is a courtesan is a courtesan,” and does not become a first wife, nor marry out of love. Throughout the novels, marriage is presented as a way out of prostitution, at least rhetorically, but at the same time it is also shown over and over again that for many of these fictional heroines marriage is a standard practice to support their lifestyles of sexual promiscuity and luxury. In other words, marriage is not a way out of prostitution. Rather, it is precisely what

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keeps these women within the boundaries of sex work. A brief marriage with a rich, wealthy patron—who could be killed off or dumped once robbed blind as we have mentioned earlier—forms a loop that enables the courtesan to get the capital necessary to pay off the debts (for drugs, clothing, paramours) she has incurred so that she can go back to entertain new clients. Zhao Erbao is one of the few late Qing courtesans still actually invested in the neurosis of the ‘savior syndrome’, and she actually believes that Shi the Third will rescue her through marriage, but this is due to her inexperience. She buys into the rhetoric of marriage as redemption but it is clear from these novels that this male fantasy of empowerment is a losing choice on her part. After the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more novelists are unable to keep the zhiyin paradigm alive. To show its failure, they hasten the decline of the courtesan. She cannot be rescued by the scholar, who, as we have seen in Chapter Four, is unable to even save himself, and so her doom comes swiftly and often very violently. Haishang hua ends with Zhao Erbao’s abrupt awakening and the reader is not told what happens to her afterwards. Haishang mingji sida jingang qishu, however, is quite exhaustive in detailing the four main protagonists’ downward spiral of increasing expenses, purchases and debts. Their brush with poverty, to begin with, is not presented as a deadly pathology. For one thing, their wealth attracts thieves. Fu Yulian, for example, is forced back into prostitution when she is robbed blind by one of her lovers.6 Also, the competition is fierce among courtesans in the city of Shanghai: Fu Yulian, strapped for cash, has no choice but to leave Shanghai for Tianjin, in search of a less crowded marketplace. There, she is able to re-invent herself as Sai Jinhua and to start earning money again.7 The fate of those who stay behind in the over-crowded metropolitan sex market is dismal. Lin Daiyu, because of her lack of sexual discrimination, has been steadily losing clients: her odyssey to get money to pay her creditors illustrates very well these women’s financial plight. Driven by lack of money, Lin Daiyu travels all the way to Hangzhou with the hope of getting financial assistance from an old patron. The client at first refuses to see her and has Lin Daiyu thrown out by his

6 7

Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 89. Ibid., Chapter 98.

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servants. Once back in Shanghai, Lin Daiyu gets arrested because of a fight with a rickshaw driver over the fare. The judge, who wants to teach her a lesson, has her first tortured and beaten, and then sentenced to wear the cangue for three months, punishment that she manages to have changed into a fine. After paying it, Lin Daiyu is absolutely broke. The author underlines the anxiety that Lin Daiyu feels because of her financial situation by having her dream a most horrible nightmare.8 While in Hangzhou, waiting for an assignation with her old client, Lin Daiyu dreams that she arrives mysteriously at a temple located in a deserted area. As she enters, she first encounters some horrifying dogs. Once inside, she sees a Buddha with his attendants, sitting face-to-face with Wenchang, the god of literature, who, upon seeing her, calls her yinchang 淫娼 (‘a lustful slut’) and orders five hundred drops of blood to be drawn from her heart, in order to put an end to a drought that has been plaguing the Shanghai area. Wenchang’s helpers, armed with a very sharp knife, proceed to do so, as Lin Daiyu screams for mercy and wriggles in pain. They make fun of the fact that Lin Daiyu, though very fat, has very little blood in her. Just as they are about to cut her a second time, to get the remaining three hundred drops of blood, Lin Daiyu wakes up in horror. As it turns out, the fine Lin Daiyu has to pay to regain her freedom amounts exactly to 500 dollars and that only after she has been severely beaten. Besides presenting her nightmare as a premonition of her legal troubles, the equation the author makes is that money is directly a product of the courtesan’s body. Furthermore, as she extracts capital from men with her body, she has to pay back what she takes in kind. Her blood will benefit the drought-stricken area, just as her 500 dollars will benefit the municipality of Shanghai. She and women of her kind are seen as a plague for Shanghai, polluting the place so much as to cause a drought. In this sense, it is a narrative necessity for Lin Daiyu to finally face up to her responsibilities and get her just desserts, since she at first squeezed her clients to get the money she craved. Indeed, the sexual, economic and social power of the late Qing courtesan comes at a very high price. She cannot escape from the debts, economic and karmic, engendered by her desire for an independent, amusing life, a life in which she can choose whom to love and what

8

Ibid., Chapter 92.

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to wear, how to eat and where to go for parties and entertainment. Her consumption of material and abstract goods that wealthy men are more entitled to consume, such as independence, self-assertion, pride, sexual partners, dooms her. To be fair, men, when they consume exclusively sex, also stand to lose a good deal but the courtesan loses as well and her awakening from a dream of empowerment is always abrupt. The rhetoric of bao 報 (‘retribution’) in connection to sexual excess and waste is, yet again, a direct legacy of Jin Ping Mei, and, once more, what changes here is the scale of the retribution.9 The nightmares of Lin Daiyu and Zhao Erbao are nothing compared to the harsh reality they wake up to. Many late Qing novels about courtesans, as illustrated here, start with an enchanting dream and end with a bad dream that ushers in their disenchantment. It is all an illusion, they seem to say, but the courtesans’ nightmares show that there is no mistaking the pit into which they have fallen for a bed of roses. The spiritual and moral awakening that can lead out of the prostitution world, to enlightenment and nirvana, seldom happens to these women. For many there is no way out of prostitution, only debt and misery, which, in turn, open the door to disease and death. II. The Sick, the Healed and the Dead: Redemption, Prescriptions and Retribution in the Brothel Pleasure is of the nature of certain medical substances: in order to obtain constantly the same effects the doses must be doubled, and death or degradation is contained in the last.10

Besides the socio-economic illness of poverty, we find other more real pathologies associated with prostitution in late Qing works. We have witnessed the violent socialization that damages irreparably the courtesan’s physical body and is posited as the beginning of a fatal sickness, which is at once visible in socio-economic terms, as we have seen above, and in a moral and physical sense. In a way, the moral sickness

9 See Andy Schonebaum’s work in progress, “Sex, Drugs, and Retribution,” unpublished manuscript. I am very grateful for his generosity in sharing his insightful work with me. 10 H. Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, translated by Ellen Marriage, Available at: http://www.authorama.com/book/girl-with-golden-eyes.html.

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of the courtesan constitutes the logical consequence of the ‘savior syndrome’ analyzed in Chapter 4. In the erotic imagination of Chinese men, all courtesans and prostitutes are represented as diseased women who ought to be ‘saved’ by marriage. Their diseases in these novels are at times real, such as syphilis and consumption, and at others moral, such as their inexhaustible craving for money and sex. Given the close equation, in late imperial Chinese culture, between ‘economic capital’ (benqian 本錢) and ‘semen/penis’ (also benqian), it is no surprise that one of the biggest male fears was the sexual vampirism of these lascivious women, who literally swallowed with their bodies both the men’s money and their penises. As we would expect, the corollary of this paranoid fantasy (the courtesan who sucks away money out of the man) was the dream of reversing the flux of bodily and economic resources, that is, the wish fulfillment fantasy of the courtesan as a sickly woman who needs to be saved from her fate by marrying a ‘real man’ who can bestow upon her social and physical health. What are the malaise and the sicknesses, physical and otherwise, that can then befall the courtesan and what cure, if any, is available for her? In Qinglou meng, Jin Yixiang, the hero of the novel, still young and unmarried, goes and visits Niu Aiqing, a beautiful and extremely talented young courtesan—who will eventually become his first wife:11 One day Yixiang went to Aiqing’s place, who had suddenly contracted an eye-sickness. Both her eyes were so infected that her eyelashes were glued together [by the pus]: it was really a serious disease. Yixiang felt great pity for her. He was even more distressed when she later started to go blind. He invited doctors to cure [her], but their medicines did not have any effect. Yixiang would stay at Aiqing’s from morning till evening, and he had already been taking care of her for almost a month, when her ‘sistersin-trade’ learned that Aiqing had fallen ill, and also that Yixiang was nursing her. So they all came to pay a visit. Wanqing [another courtesan] said: “Eye-sickness is the worst. I have heard that one can cure it by washing the eyes with well-water in the early morning, and that the best remedy is to have somebody who, at the crack of dawn, will lick them with the tip of his tongue, so that they can become clear.”

11

In real life, the only socially-acceptable place within a family that a courtesan or a prostitute could acquire through marriage was that of a concubine. It was extremely unlikely that she could become a first wife, especially in an upper-class family, such as that of Jin Yixiang.

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Yixiang committed her words to memory, and the next day he spent the night at Aiqing’s. In the morning, following Wanqing’s instructions, he licked her eyes. It might seem strange, but after three days of licking, most of the red had disappeared from her eyes, and her eye-lashes were not glued together anymore; within seven days, she could already open her eyes, and after ten days, her pupils had become bright again. Yixiang was very proud of this, while Aiqing was very grateful and told him: “Ever since I became a courtesan, I have met so many people, and quite a few have taken pity on me, but nobody has ever shown me such love as you have, sir! I have never seen such a noble heart.” Then she improvised these verses for Yixiang: Who will pity me, fallen filthy mud Though experienced in wind and dust, I meet a man for the first time.12

A Chinese commentator wrote enthusiastically, in a footnote to the passage where Yixiang licks Aiqing’s eyes for the first time, that, “Their taste must have been delicious!”13 However, this passage is clearly not related to an exotic taste for consumption of unusual bodily fluids. The most obvious reason for this episode’s relevance is related to plot development, since it is in this instance that the predestined bond between Yixiang and Aiqing is first established.14 Up until this moment, in fact, Yixiang has been spending his days going from one brothel to the next, without devoting his attention to any one courtesan in particular. Within the context of this chapter, this scene acquires a particular significance because it is one of the few instances in late Qing fiction in which the courtesan’s disease is presented as a redeeming, cleansing rite of passage. Why is a disease chosen to bring this couple together, and why this particular disease, an eye-infection? Is it important that it is the woman who falls ill and not the man? Is the healing technique, i.e., the usage of the tongue, crucial? What deeper meanings can we extract from this episode about the power-relationships that exist between courtesan and patron? And, last but not least, what can we infer from this episode about the (diseased) body as a site where social boundaries were questioned and resolved?

12

Yu Da, 1980. Yu Da, Huitu Qingloumeng quanchuan (Shanghai guangyi shuju, 1905), 16. 14 Yixiang and Aiqing are both immortals temporarily banished to earth because of their impure thoughts, and they are predestined to marry during their mortal incarnation. 13

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First of all, a few words about the remedy itself. In a manual of traditional Chinese medicine by the late sixteenth-century scholar Li Shizhen, licking the eyes was the cure traditionally prescribed for eyeinfections.15 Besides, in traditional Chinese medicine, the pharmaceutical use of bodily fluids, such as saliva, blood and urine, was quite ordinary.16 The striking aspect in this passage is the fact that the careprovider, the healer, is the man. Within the context of the traditional talented scholar and beautiful courtesan model, the role of healer is usually assigned to the woman. The earliest model for such a prototype is Li Wa, who reveals immense generosity and unfailing affection in rescuing the poor student reduced to begging because he squandered his fortune on her. She feeds him, nurtures him back to health and onto his feet: thanks to her care and nursing, he eventually succeeds in the imperial examinations and takes Li Wa as his first wife with his father’s blessing.17 Since the beginning of her fictional appearance the courtesan has been presented in such a double-faced way: as the sexual and economic vampire who can suck a man’s sexual and financial resources dry, but also as the source of wealth and health that can restore that very man to his original state. From Li Wa to Du Shiniang, readers of traditional Chinese fiction grew accustomed to seeing upper-class sex workers as healers of different kinds of diseases. This holds true also of some late Qing representations. In Qinglou meng, when Jin Yixiang falls sick, Yuesu, another courtesan, nurses him with thoughtfulness and care.18 In Fengyue meng, the courtesan Feng Lin unfailingly nurses her lover Jia Ming without rest or squeamishness: she goes to his home every day, prepares his medicine, washes his boils, acting with more devotion than Jia’s own wife, Madam Li.19 When he later develops an eye-infection and his eyes painfully swell to the size of two ripe peaches, Feng Lin spends three nights in a row licking his eyes till 15 For the use of saliva as a cure for eye-diseases, see Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu (Beijing: Xuefan chubanshe, 1992), 2202. 16 See William C. Cooper and N. Sivin, “Man as medicine: pharmacological and ritual aspects of traditional therapy using drugs derived from the human body,” in Shigeru Nakaya and Nathan Sivin, eds., Chinese Science: Exploration of an Ancient Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 203. For bodily effluvia in Ming and Qing fiction, see M. Epstein, “Inscribing the Essentials. Culture and the Body in Ming-Qing Fiction,” MS 41 (1999): 6−36. 17 For both the Chinese original text and English translation, see Dudbridge, 1983. 18 Yu Da, 1980, 81. 19 Hanshang mengren, 1989, 389.

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his sickness recedes.20 His doctor prescribes ineffective remedies and his wife’s devotion pales in the face of Feng Lin’s constant display of fearless nursing determination—though one could argue that, since Jia Ming spent more time with Feng Lin than Madam Li, the courtesan had many more chances and reasons to lavish her loving care on Jia Ming than his lawful but neglected wife. The courtesan, at least in the realm of fictional sources, has access to healing techniques that surpass those belonging to the realm of male doctors. In both cases of eye-sickness, for example, it is clearly stated that the medicine prescribed by the doctors proves ineffective. In the case of Jin Yixiang, it is Wanqing, another courtesan, who suggests the miraculous cure, while in Jia Ming’s case, Feng Lin knows exactly what she has to do to cure her beloved. Where are they getting this kind of medical knowledge? Francesca Bray writes that by late imperial times, simplified medical knowledge was readily available through medical primers in simple language and sections in household encyclopedias and almanacs.21 Though it is true that often courtesans were literate and could have, thus, had access to these simplified texts, it is more likely that it was part of their formal and informal training to gain a basic knowledge of practical medicine and home remedies. As their trade required constant exchanges of bodily fluids with all its consequences, from sexuallytransmitted diseases to pregnancies and abortions, it is reasonable to assume that these women knew how to take care of their bodies better than women from good households who could always rely on their husbands and their doctors in case of sickness. The flip side of the courtesan’s familiarity with folk remedies and drugs is that just as she can cure, she can become the cause of sickness and death. Though she can be a dispenser of health through medication, in late Qing fictional sources she is more often presented as somebody who infects and conveys sickness and death, not only through her moral and physical contagion, but also by administering poison. This fact clearly bespeaks of the male authors’ perverse fascination with a poisonous beauty and throws some very interesting light on the male fantasies of the time, a point to which we will return.

20 21

Ibid., 393. Bray, 1997, 311.

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That said, it is clear that the courtesan’s charms are enhanced by the dangers that lurk behind them. Her sexuality and her sexual expertise are what make her so proficient in substances that are at once a source of joy and one of death. In Wu Jianren’s novel, Shi Chunfei slowly kills her elderly husband by adding to the medicine he takes against his insomnia powerful aphrodisiacs.22 In the same work, Hu Yue’e gives sleeping pills to Chen, one of her patrons, so that she can display affection in nursing him back to health. Her impersonation is so convincing that he hastens to marry her.23 Zhang Shuyu, in Jiuweigui, uses the same trick, namely, making a rich patron sick to allow the courtesan to prove her devotion to him via gentle and selfless nursing.24 In Fengyue meng, we see how at times a courtesan and a quack could cooperate to swindle a client, when, for example, Yue Xiang pretends to be pregnant to fool the naive and love-struck Lu Shu and squeeze even more money out of him.25 In other instances, the madam and sex worker are in cahoots to fake a pregnancy and swindle a client out of his money, eventually enlisting the help of a doctor to make the ploy of the fake pregnancy more believable.26 The tension between the healing and the ‘toxic’ personae of the courtesan is in accordance with her highly ambiguous and unstable social and moral traits. It is not just a question of ‘Madonna-versus-whore’ dichotomy: it is more a matter of a multi-layered literary figure who, by virtue of centuries of literary representations, offers to late Qing authors a repertoire of often contradictory roles. In the light of this explanation, what is highly unusual in the Qinglou meng episode is not that slightly heterodox and highly effective healing goes on in the brothel, but that the healer is the patron and the healed is the courtesan. Doctors are male literati, though in fiction we find female healers represented at times (but usually in a negative light).27 In the examples mentioned above, the patient is always the man. As we shall see presently, there are some other cases in which it is the woman who falls sick but they are different from Niu Aiqing’s case because she is not only restored to health, she is socially redeemed.

22 23 24 25 26 27

Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapter 83. Ibid., Chapter 60. Zhang Chunfan, 1993, Chapter 44. Hanshang mengren, 1989, 288. Han Ziyun, 1983, Chapter 14, 289 and ff. Furth, 1998, 266.

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We find a prelude to the nursing role of the patron in Maiyoulang du zhan huakui when Mai the oil seller nurses all night a very drunk Meiniang who throws up all over him.28 After all, the ability to transcend the physical and repulsive side of sickness because of an abundance of love should be one of the indispensable attributes of a true zhiyin. It is one thing, however, to indulge in romantic activities and to declare one’s love for a beautiful and talented courtesan; it is a completely different matter to lick her infected eyes. Not that the role of selfless healer was completely ruled out for men in traditional Chinese culture. On the contrary, “traditionally, one of the Confucian duties of a filial son was to give his elderly parents the medicines they might need, and therefore it was also considered proper that a gentleman or scholar should be acquainted with the works of the medical canon.”29 The ‘scandal’ of Yixiang’s action is not that he should be represented as a healer: it is rather that his gesture, which would have been warranted only in the case of a mother’s or father’s illness, was definitely out of the question in the case of the sickness of a courtesan to whom Yixiang had no tie other than his emotions and his intellectual admiration for her talents and beauty.30 When sickness brings about deformity, obliterating the woman’s beauty, even if only temporarily, it gives the male lover the opportunity to display his devotion, strengthening his superiority over her and the rest of the male world. The ugliness of the courtesan going blind reveals at once her social malaise and the beauty of the male soul that, being a true zhiyin, can transcend it. As Niu Aiqing, herself, says in her impromptu verses, she is fallen and filthy. In the mentality of nineteenth-century China, the prostitute is a dirty woman, soiled by the sexual and social intercourse she has had with all her clients. Niu Aiqing, talented and morally pure though she may be, must be cleansed and purified of her filth if she is to become the wife of a dashing youth from a good family who possesses an immaculate body and social status. In this light, the choice of such a revolting illness makes more sense, becoming a physical metaphor for the soiled social status of the

28

Feng Menglong, 1991, 36. Bray, 1997, 308. 30 Filial piety was extremely valued in late imperial China, and it predicated, in a fashion somewhat similar to the charitas romana, the complete self-sacrifice (to the point of self-mutilation) of the children for the sake of the ailing parent. 29

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courtesan and for re-purifying her. Whether her ailment is due to her sexual promiscuity, her emotional state or mere bacteria, the courtesan understands her own emotional and intellectual life in terms of a visual metaphor. Her eyes, then, can become the sites where her social malaise (stemming from her debased status as a sex worker, and which must be eliminated for her to be able to leave behind her soiled social background) can manifest itself and subsequently be cured. It would have been highly improper, utterly unthinkable, for Yu Da, the author, to locate the disease in her genital area; it would not have suited the tone and the genre of the novel. Therefore, he relies on a patent displacement of the implied genital infection onto the eyes, bodily organs shaped like the female genitals. Qinglou meng, though racy at times, is a very conservative romance, where love is seldom displayed in its physical dimension and sexual intercourse, when it happens, is always embedded in the heavy embroidery of literary allusions.31 As far as Yixiang is concerned, we can say, the tip of his tongue, a phallic symbol, becomes the metaphorical penis that breaks open the glued eye-lids, which should be understood as a sort of putrid and infected hymen.32 This renewed and transposed loss of virginity heals Aiqing of her previous taint and at the same time works as an extremely potent sexual fantasy. The weak woman, as we shall see below, was a very powerful sexual icon for the Chinese male erotic imagination. This dream could become especially powerful when the woman, as the object of desire, was a courtesan, that is, a woman who had inevitably known many more men than the average ‘honest’ woman33 and was, therefore, best able to assize, as it were, the virility of her patrons. Yixiang, by penetrating with his tongue and his fluids the body of the woman bound to be his future wife, further reinforces his manhood, which Niu Aiqing hastens to praise in her verses. Her sickness and its cure constitute a veiled metaphor for sexual intercourse, where the

31 Even in pornographic novels, cunnilingus was represented as performed usually by older men onto young women to lick away, as it were, their rich and nourishing bodily fluids. I have not come across a reference to a man licking the infected genitals of a woman. See below for further elaboration on this point. 32 Almost certainly, the only tongues that appear quite regularly in Chinese literature are those of the ghosts of people that hanged themselves or that drowned. 33 Adultery was not uncommon in late imperial China among the upper classes and it could be that sexual intercourse was practiced outside wedlock among lower classes. Unfortunately, for lack of documentation, I am relying here on fragmentary and not completely reliable sources.

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man offers himself, his saliva and his erected tongue as a very concrete tool of salvation.34 In this text, disease becomes a device that is at once individual and social to cleanse the courtesan’s body: by virtue of this sickness, her ‘lost’ body is found again. In Qinglou meng, the man is still the caizi and the sex worker’s lover, her savior and her soul-mate. This episode is one of the last ones to pay tribute to the well-established Chinese male dream of rescuing the lost woman from her fate. As we move towards the end of the nineteenth century, we also move towards the end of this dream. The courtesans that crowd the pages of late Qing novels come down with incurable and horrifying diseases, are haunted by terrifying nightmares and no man can rescue them from falling into ridicule, deformity and, eventually, death. The most obvious form of physical retribution for both the courtesan and her patrons comes, not surprisingly, in the form of venereal diseases.35 Indeed, in traditional Chinese literature there are quite a few representations of the nefarious consequences of sexual excesses and of sexual vampirism.36 Late Qing depictions of venereal diseases are actually rare though. That is why the few we find are so precious in shedding light on common perceptions and misperceptions of this kind of sickness and its connection to the practice of prostitution. Already in Fengyue meng—which, though published in 1884, bears a

34 Given the genre of the novel, a prudish late nineteenth-century romance, the disease is transported to a site—her eyes—that does not push the text into the forbidden realm of the literary obscene. 35 For the spread of venereal diseases among sex workers and their patrons in late imperial and early Republican China, see Henriot, 1997, 66 and 160; Hershatter, 1997, 226. For the spread of syphilis in China, see Leung Ki Che, “Zhongguo mafengbing gainian yanbiandelishi,” Zhongyangyanjiuyuan lishiyusuojikan 70.2 (1999): 422; Ma Boying, Zhongguo yixue wenhuashi (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1994), 707. See also Claude Quetel, History of Syphilis (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Though there is evidence of sexually-transmitted diseases in China as early as the Tang dynasty, syphilis could be traced for sure, both in historical and fictional sources, only in the Ming period. See M. W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2001), 5−7, and Andy Schonebaum’s work in progress for Ming literati’s references to sexual diseases. 36 One has only to think about the tragic death of Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei and of Jia Rui in Honglou meng. See H. Shapiro, “The Puzzle of Spermatorrhea in Republican China,” positions 6.3 (1998): 560 and ff., for a provocative analysis of these two episodes and of sexual vampirism within the context of traditional Chinese culture. The first representation of a sexually-transmitted disease and its connection to a loose lifestyle and a corrupt nature I was able to find was in the late Ming cycle of novels that deal with the life of the infamous Wei Zhongxian.

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preface dated 1848—we find the following passage, meant as a caveat for men who frequent cheap brothels: Wasting money in these places [i.e., brothels] is still a trivial matter. There are many men who, just because they are unwilling to spend lots of money, end up contracting these whores’ crushing contagion while in bed, bringing upon their body the fruits of their philandering. Infected with syphilis, [covered with] venereal ulcers and boils, if they get a mild form of the disease, they lose their mind and get a rotten nose; if they get it in its acute form, they die because of its poison.37

Here the venereal disease par excellence, syphilis, is present as retribution for sexual congress with sex workers ( fengliu guozi 風流果子) but mostly when it is carried out with cheap harlots, who entertain many lower-class clients and, thus, are more exposed to this type of disease than upper-class courtesans. The issue involves more the class of her clients than the courtesan herself. Though in order to infect the client, the courtesan herself must be sick, the one who is warned, whose body the disease ravishes, is the patron. Similarly, venereal diseases in Pinhua baojian befall men and women who engage in sexual activities out of lust, out of wedlock and out of heterosexuality and, thus, are doomed to meet with sickness, physical impotence and mutilation as a consequence of their lust.38 In Pinhua baojian, the ones who come down with such horrifying diseases are mostly men who practice homosexual sex with male prostitutes. At this stage, retribution is here connected to lust-driven homosexual sex, which, in this sense, is quite similar to whoring, as it is perceived as a sterile, wasteful, self-indulgent and self-destructive activity. By the late Qing, however, syphilis is not restricted just to lowerclass prostitutes and their cheap customers. Its devastating effects are portrayed also when they affect the courtesan.39 Given that courtesans, for all their different ranks, were perceived more and more in a homogeneous way as sex workers, it makes sense that, over time, even an upper-class courtesan could contract syphilis. Wu Jianren’s

37

Hanshang mengren, 1989, 186. Chen Sen, Pinhua baojian (Xibei daxue chubanshe, 1993). This happens even if the characters are not necessarily lustful and are sexually passive, as it is in the case of the young monk Deyue, who is sodomized by the abbot. 39 With the exception of Pinhua baojian, where the author depicts bizarre and virulent venereal diseases, syphilis is the only venereal disease represented in these novels. 38

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episode about Lin Daiyu’s syphilis sheds important light on perceptions of disease connected to unabashed sexual practices.40 To satisfy her huge sexual cravings, Lin Daiyu has started to sleep with men from all walks of life—with the result that upper-class patrons have stopped seeing her. One night she comes down with a very high fever, and in a matter of days her whole body is covered in boils. Though her maids are at first puzzled, one old servant, with more experience, recognizes them as luetic ulcers. Lin Daiyu, intentionally or simply out of ignorance, refuses to acknowledge this at first and says that perhaps she has caught the disease because of some evil miasma while on an outing to the Zhang gardens but she only manages to have her servants laugh at her. As soon as the nature of her disease is clear, the old servant urges Lin Daiyu to call a doctor but the latter is afraid that news of her sickness will spread around, thereby ruining her reputation. Following the advice of one of her clients, she calls a doctor who specializes in the treatment of sexually-transmitted diseases but he cannot come to her rescue and so she has to call a regular doctor. After two months the boils disappear, leaving her disfigured: by this time the whole city knows about it and nobody will have her anymore. This episode shows many interesting points: first of all, Lin Daiyu, for all her voracious sexuality, seems unaware of the fact that sexual promiscuity brings about sexual diseases to the point that her servants and maids make her into an object of mockery for her ignorance. But the repulsive physicality of her disease is what stands out most in this passage. At one point, as she is arguing with her servant about the possible ways in which she might have contracted syphilis, she slaps one of her thighs and, thus, breaks one of the boils which oozes blood and pus. The fact that this depiction is meant to provoke disgust and laughter shows that the author thinks that Lin Daiyu deserves to suffer for her reckless sexual behavior, in a way that is also meant as comic. This association between the prostitute, syphilis and laughter is seen often in late Qing fiction. At times the laughter is directed at the prostitute, as with Lin Daiyu. At other times, the humor is more explicitly sarcastic and charged with scorn for the weak and sickly population of China who consort with infected hookers instead of trying to reform their country. For example, in Xin Shanghai, a male character, Yuxiang,

40

Chousi zhuren, 1996 [1898], Chapters 61−63.

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illustrates to a friend how the people who specialize in selling girls to brothels are philanthropists. Prompted by the remonstrations of his astonished friend, he says that since they buy the girls cheaply in disaster areas, they benefit first of all themselves because they make money buying the girls for nothing and selling them for a high price; then, the madams, who can make a better business; then the men who obtain the means to divert themselves by having sex with the prostitutes; and last but not least, they benefit the doctors who cure the venereal diseases spread by this increased sexual activity.41 Here, the transmission of sexual diseases begins to be depicted as a national epidemic, in a fashion that evokes laughter but also fear. Elsewhere in the same novel, this is even more clearly represented. As they are walking down the street, the narrator and his friend walk by a shop that advertises medicines to cure venereal diseases. Though the author is shocked by the blatant advertisement of such a product, his friend Yifan says that given the fact that in Shanghai there are many low-class prostitutes who are infected with syphilis and other venereal diseases, it is important to have medicine to cure their customers. Then, in a virtuoso display of mathematical ingenuity, he gives astonishing numbers to illustrate how rapidly the disease can spread not only in Shanghai, but also all over China. Because of the many people who sleep with infected hookers and thanks to the recent technological innovations that have changed the ways in which people move in China, people who come to Shanghai for business and/or pleasure often leave with syphilis that they will transmit to their wives and children at the speed of light. According to his (conservative) estimates, China, at the rate of at least 760,000 cases of syphilis a year, is facing a true epidemic and needs to have medicines to get rid of sexually-transmitted diseases.42 Clients, of course, get syphilis too and in this novel there is an example of how this disease inspires fear of infection in everybody. We must not forget that it was rumored that even the Emperor Tongzhi had died because of syphilis as a result of his escapades to low-class brothels.43 In this regard, in Haishang fanhuameng, we find an interesting comparison with the Tang dynasty story of Li Wa. Two close friends spend their fortunes on ruthless courtesans and one of them starts

41 42 43

Lu Shi’e, Xin Shanghai (Shanghai gujichubanshe 1997), 23. Ibid., 213. Ma Boying, 1994, 717.

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singing and composing songs to pay for the medicines of his friend who has gotten syphilis. They share the fate of Zhen Yuanhe who fell sick after being robbed blind by Li Wa’s madam and was then reduced to singing funeral dirges to make a living. However, in the changed circumstances of the turn of the nineteenth century, the courtesan offers no redemption to herself and to her customers, just a deadly sexuallytransmitted disease that is quite expensive to cure! Other customers become rickshaw coolies or are reduced to writing letters for others as a consequence of having been bankrupted by the whores they patronize.44 We have traveled far indeed from the idealized courtesan of the late Ming period! In the pages of late Qing novels, she has become a voracious and diseased sex worker, whose reckless behavior can doom not only herself and her patrons, but the whole nation as well. Her body is more clearly marked by the imperatives of her profession and by male sexual desire, but the masculine anxieties connected with a more openly blatant female sexual role are inscribed in her clearer role of carrier of deadly diseases. In this new depiction we can find a very striking parallel with the changes in the social and medical attitudes towards syphilis that Nayan Shah describes in the book, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a study of the changing perception of Chinese male and female immigrants by white people in San Francisco in the early twentieth century: Sickness was no longer seen as an inevitable condition of living but rather as an avoidable flaw. Disease was conceived of as flourishing outside the body and at a distance from those who exhibited proper moral rectitude. The very explanation and diagnosis of disease shifted in professional medicine from the early nineteenth-century focus on interpreting the particular visible symptoms of a patient to a late nineteenth-century practice of objectifying disease and evaluating an individual’s deviation from the universal and normal healthy human. With the formation of contrasting categories of normal and deviant, medical therapy and public health instruction emphasized a repertoire of habits and civilizing norms to ensure health.45

In other words, what we see happen here is the reinforcement, through the intervention of a modern disease, such as syphilis, of venereal disease as a moral sickness that separates the drowned from the saved,

44

Sun Jiazhen, 1991, 722−723. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides. Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001). 45

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as it were. While race is of primary importance in the case of Shah’s study, what appears of primary importance in the case of Chinese sources is gender. In the same novel discussed above, the famous and heartless Yan Ruyu gets syphilis too and clearly it is because she is morally evil and lascivious. Once her whole body is covered in running sores, she is sent to the hospital by competent authorities. The doctor says that her illness is very serious and people who know her all agree that this is the rightful end of an evil prostitute: “This is the way an evil whore ends up: once a flowery branch-like woman, and now an arbutus tree!”46 Yangmei 杨梅 (‘arbutus’) is a tree whose red berries were thought to resemble luetic boils, thus this term (short for yangmeichuang 楊梅瘡) was used to mean syphilis, along with the more common meidu 梅毒. This comment is meant to be funny: in these novels courtesans are accused of selling arbutus-plum/syphilis trees 杨梅树 and not sex and entertainment! Once more we see that images from the botanical world are used to depict and configure the physical decay of the prostitute. Yan Ruyu has syphilis and knows it; yet, this does not prevent her from having clients and lovers, even if she has lost weight, her hair, her complexion has become sallow, and she, a twenty-year old woman, looks forty, like a ‘dried-up stick’. She still finds men who fall for her and this is clearly an attack on the lack of taste and judgment of her customers. Yan Ruyu starts living with a music teacher, who gets the disease from her. She takes him to the hospital but he dies in three months. As a consequence of her emotional distress over his death, her own sickness flares up again too. After a period of more than three months in the hospital, no brothel will have her, because she has what people in brothel fear most, a sexually-transmitted disease. So, she becomes a common hooker and manages to use make-up to hide the fact that she has thin hair and a yellowed complexion. Her demise is particularly tragic as she eventually loses her mind: her last public appearance, as it were, takes place when she streams naked in the crowded streets, followed and jeered on by children.47 Going back once more to Shah’s argument, we can see how the nexus between syphilis, sex work and fear of a nationwide infection is very much connected to the anxiety generated by the emergence

46 47

Sun Jiazhen, 1991, 628−629. Ibid., 1136.

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of the urban space of Shanghai where men and women were seen as living in ways perceived as damningly contrary to centuries-old “ideas and mores of respectable domesticity and thus indeed capable of undermining Chinese morality and family life.”48 In the boulevards, as well as in the narrow streets of Shanghai, new working and living conditions, as well as new related necessities and drives invented new kinds of domesticities, just like the ‘queer domesticities’ evoked by Shah that so troubled politicians, doctors and missionaries in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century San Francisco.49 The deviant sexuality of the prostitute is a source of infection for the whole of society; in other words, because she, along with her patrons, inhabits a space that is perverse, not just because of its sexualized nature, but because it gives a specific geographical and physical location to deviant sexualities and domesticities that are ‘queer’ because they cannot fit within pre-existing molds. Taking this line of analysis a step further, one could say that the greatest threat then comes from Shanghai, the city, itself, becomes not just a huge brothel, but a veritable self-regenerating prostitute in and of itself.50 These depictions of the syphilitic body of the prostitute also clearly reveal a fundamental ambivalence towards the female body, at once feared and despised, fascinating and repulsive, vulnerable and grotesque. As Faure writes a propos of Buddhist representations of sick and dead courtesans, These descriptions of the female body reminds us of Bakhtin’s evocation of the grotesque body of Western popular culture in his work on Rabelais. According to Bakhtin, the Rabelaisian character (Gargantua, Pantagruel) is characterized by his/her open body—in stark contrast with the closed body of ‘classical’ culture. The grotesque body is essentially orifices and excreta. It is “emphasized as a mobile, split, multiple self, a subject of pleasure in processes of exchange; and it is never closed off from either its social or ecosystemic context.”51

A body through which sexual fluids and sexual diseases flow is dangerous and uncontrollable, it has gone beyond discipline. Once it opens up to this set of dangerous social, economic and venereal exchanges, it cannot be closed. Once socialized sexually, the courtesan’s body

48 49 50 51

Shah, 2001, 77. Ibid., 13−14, 79. Zamperini, 2003a. Faure, B., The Red Thread, 57.

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becomes all orifices, from which all sorts of repulsive fluids ooze out. In this sense, it remains a productive body, pregnant with meanings, including the idea that the sickness that maims the courtesans is a direct consequence of their sexual voracity, which produces nothing but waste—disease, pus and urine—and it is described in such a fashion that it derides and berates them.52 Not all prostitutes, though, fall sick as a result of their lascivious behavior and sexual promiscuity. Furthermore, not all of them survive, albeit temporarily, their struggle with sickness. Yet, if representations of sexually-transmitted diseases are relatively rare, the portrayal of death within the brothel is even rarer. Even novels, such as Fengyue meng, which heavily criticizes the practices within the world of sex workers, shrink from dealing with actual representations of dead courtesans. The reason seems to be the fact that death has the power to annihilate more than to cure. The one notable exception is the representation of suicides. Many courtesans find a way out of prostitution into eternity either by swallowing opium or by hanging. The reasons behind the suicides can be manifold; at times they are attempts to escape debtors, at others the result of a broken heart, and in some cases they constitute an attempt at reestablishing a reputation of some sort. When the courtesan dies, it is seldom a natural death. The same applies to her patron, of course, who is often poisoned or dies as a result of the anger and frustration the courtesan, as a faithless lover, cause to fester within him. In Jiuweigui, Lu Lanfen, who up to this point has been represented as an evil and manipulating whore, dies, perhaps as a result of a neglected colic.53 Zhang Qiugu, the main character of the story, goes to her establishment and is totally horrified by the body of the dead woman. Her mouth open, her eyes shut, her corpse dressed in old clothes, she becomes a veritable memento mori for Zhang Qiugu, who immediately forgets Lu Lanfen’s shortcomings and bemoans the fragility of beauty. Interestingly, in her death, Lu Lanfen has shed her seductive charm while retaining her social role. As she was a public woman in life, Lu

52 One could ask how the diseased body of the courtesan is different from other diseased bodies that appear in fiction. Though the matter begs further research, it does not appear to be portrayed differently from those bodies afflicted by the physical decay that results from open and reckless sexuality, such as Chunmei in Jinpingmei cihua. See also Andy Schonebaum’s work in progress. 53 Zhang Chunfan, 1993, Chapter 47, 317 and ff.

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Lanfen remains a public woman in her death, visible, an open body and, in her death, she conveys a very powerful message. Once more her body functions as an object on display but not an object of desire: by displaying her as a grotesque body, the author aims at curing the ‘illness of male passion’ that fixates itself onto the invisibly corrupted body of this category of women.54 Death, then, reveals the folly of this fixation by exposing the horror of women’s corporeality. As Faure writes, this “. . . horrible transformation of the female body serves both to thwart its power of seduction and to reveal its true nature.”55 Of course, Zhang Qiugu, who is on a mission to rescue the whole of Shanghai’s courtesans, points out that Lu Lanfen would never had come to such a tragic ending if she had chosen to get married and leave the world of prostitution for good. Zhang Qiugu depicts mortality as a consequence of prostitution and marriage as the quintessential medicine for the courtesan. Eros, meaning the active participation of woman in an extremely sexualized role as object of male desire as well as a subject of her own desire, destroys both the male and the female body. If the courtesan had chosen the path of motherhood and marriage, on the contrary, she and her patron would be able to escape such destruction, since female fecundity, at least in the cultural universe Zhang Qiugu and his friends move in, can absorb and neutralize ‘the disruptive charges of male desire’ and rid men and women of the taint which sexuality aimed at pleasure, not at reproduction, engenders.56 What happens if the courtesan wants to marry and she cannot precisely because of social conventions? Xiangsi bing 相思病 (‘lovesickness’), a fixed trope in Chinese fiction since the Tang dynasty chuanqi, has always been known to cause very real debilitation and, in the worst cases, death. This kind of consumptive love-sickness, very common among upper-class fictional characters, is very rare among courtesans and prostitutes, who are seldom represented as falling in love. The first of these heartbroken courtesans was the already-mentioned Huo

54

See Bernheimer, 1989, 216. Faure, B., The Red Thread, 57. 56 This does not mean that in traditional Chinese medicine, for example, the female body was not seen as constantly decaying. On the contrary, Charlotte Furth’s work shows that fecundity and reproduction, along with menstruation and pregnancies, contributed to create an image of the motherly, reproductive body as a continually deteriorating one (see Furth, 1998, 74 and ff.). 55

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Xiaoyu: she loses her life over the betrayal of her lover who fails to keep his promise to come back to her after his exams.57 We find echoes of this tragic Tang story in one of the most powerful portrayals of the heartsick courtesans in Haishang hua, a novel that usually exposes the courtesan as either a cruel and manipulative person or as a delusional creature. Set against the dismal commercialization, the exceptional and tragic romance between Li Shufang and Tao Yufu paradoxically exemplifies the impossibility of love between the courtesan and the wenren in the changed circumstances of late Qing society. Tao Yufu is a young scion of a rich family and Li Shufang is his beautiful, sweet and devoted courtesan. The two young ones love each other dearly but, since he cannot take her as his first wife, due to social restrictions and his family’s resistance, she dies of heartbreak. Her love cannot erase social barriers and her incapability to adapt herself to a world that does not allow space for real affections, for feelings that do not aim to consume, exchange or produce any capital, brings about her demise. She does not play by the rules of the market because she believes in the strength of her love and, as a result, she dies. Li Shufang, thus, stands even taller in her status of true lover and beloved and hers is perhaps the only love story of the whole novel. She is truly loyal and in love and is, in turn, genuinely loved by her young patron Tao Yufu. Both are young, beautiful and passionate. As such, they fit perfectly in the old-fashioned zhiyin paradigm and, if this were a late Ming short story, perhaps they would not be helpless in the face of tradition and social norms. But times have changed. Li Shufang knows that she will never become Tao Yufu’s first wife, as he wants her to. She is willing to compromise and have him spend only a limited amount of time with her, after which he can go on with his life and get married with a woman from a respectable background—in this, she is actually mimicking Huo Xiaoyu’s words. Li Shufang is truly the epitome of self-effacing love. She hesitates to ask for medical help because she does not want her sickness to inconvenience her caring boyfriend and her amazingly sweet mother, who, unlike many madams, actually seems to care for her. All throughout the course of her sickness everybody fusses about her in a way she does not want but that she is obliged to accept, especially at the end when she is too weak to put up resistance. Her disease starts as a minor cold,

57

Anon., 1973.

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but because she neglected it and did not treat it properly, it causes a slow depletion of her strength, weight loss, lack of appetite and recurring fevers. When Gao Yabai, a friend of Tao Yufu, visits her, he diagnoses her ailment as laozhai zhi zheng 癆瘵之症 (‘a wasting disease or consumption’). He prescribes medicine and forecasts a slow but sure recovery, stating that there are no incurable diseases: for all his optimism, his cure fails.58 Though he provides a specific diagnosis, the author describes her illness more in psychological and emotional, than in physical terms. Because of her condition, she is left behind when the other girls of the establishments go out on their round of calls and the reader is treated to an accurate depiction of her restlessness and her listlessness as time passes slowly in her lonely quarters.59 The atmosphere in Li Shufang’s quarters is very different from that of merrymaking vivacity usually associated with a courtesan’s boudoir. We see her squatting down to pee and losing her balance when a dark mass that turns out to be a cat scares her out of her wits. Once she regains her bearings, she goes back to bed. The dark and solitary room stirs fear in her heart, as she is anxiously waiting for Tao Yufu’s return from a banquet. Once more, she gets frightened when she sees a dark shape, her cat’s, floating over her make-up table. Still waiting for her lover, shaken by this fright, she looks at herself in the mirror and can only sigh at the sight of her sallow face. Li Shufang is an extremely powerful character because her pain is not expressed or conveyed through words until her very end. All throughout her sickness she does not complain and her biggest fear is to be a hindrance to her mother, her sister and her lover. Her gestures, jumping off a chamber pot frightened by a cat, gazing in a pocket mirror, wandering aimlessly about her room tormented by insomnia, show her as scared, vulnerable victim. She too, like Lin Daiyu and Zhao Erbao, has nightmares: at a certain moment, after Tao Yufu has finally returned from his social engagement and she is able to fall asleep, she dreams that she is being taken away by two foreigners, possibly policemen, and wakes up frantic, screaming that she will not go with them.60 This is perhaps her only attempt to resist her fate. That she sees her 58

Han Ziyun, 1983, 352 and ff. For a description of this kind of disease in traditional Chinese nosology, see Furth, 1998, 79. 59 Han Ziyun, 1983, 200−201. 60 Ibid., 206.

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enemies as foreigners could be read as her feeling of alienation from her destiny, as the fact that she identifies the root of her misfortune as totally outside of her power and her control, just like the foreign policemen who responded to a foreign jurisdiction. Eventually, she dies. While in the case of Lu Lanfan’s death, we encounter the corpse of the courtesan, exposed to public view, we can follow Li Shufang’s road to death. Her fading beauty, her increased physicality, in negative terms, once again bring us to the grotesque, open body of the courtesan. Yet, here the fact that the readers are following the physical decline of the courtesan step-by-step makes it impossible to feel alienated or disgusted by the mortality that emanates from Li Shufang. Her long, gentle death resembles that of Verdi’s Traviata, Violetta, who also dies of consumption and of a broken heart, as well as that of Lin Daiyu in Honglou meng. In a very moving conversation with Tao Yufu, Li Shufang blames herself for the discomfort she is causing everybody and explains that she did not want to call a doctor because he would have prescribed medicine that other people would have had to fix for her. People are too busy in a brothel to take care of a sick person. Besides, she argues that since she knew her illness would be fatal, her taking medicines that could not cure her would have caused too much distress to her mother. After this apology, she has time to say farewell to her lover, and to entrust to him her adoptive sister, Li Wanfang, encouraging him to take her as his concubine.61 At these words, the latter explodes in loud sobs and runs to the room of Li’s mother yelling for help. Li Wanfang is not the only one to break down: tears flow freely from everybody’s eyes around Li Shufang and, as her condition worsens, her sickness seems to spread to all the people who love her. Out of worry over her and heartache over her approaching demise, her mother and her lover both fall sick. There is no separation of body and mind; the afflicted heart can generate deadly diseases and the pain can generate a veritable epidemic of broken hearts. Right before her death, the reader is drawn back into her quarters to witness her death rattle, the confusion around her and the almost deranged incoherence of Tao Yufu, this time through the eyes of his older brother Tao Yunfu. Li Shufang’s room, in sharp contrast with

61

Ibid., 205.

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the solitary and silent space in which she nursed her sickness at the beginning, is now crowded with people, visitors, servants and wellwishers.62 This room that confines her also defines her plight, her immobility and impotency in the face of her fate. It is in this room that she was happy with Tao Yufu, that she spent anguished hours waiting for him and here that she will die. Interestingly, Li Shufang’s death, monitored closely until the very last moment, is not represented and the reader learns of it from a servant who has gone to announce it to Tao Yunfu, who comes immediately after her death to bring Tao Yufu back to where he belongs, not next to the polluting corpse of a prostitute, disgracing himself—at least in his older brother’s opinion—with his excessive outbursts of grief.63 The transient, disposable nature of Li Shufang is conveyed once more by the space she occupies. After the author escorts her to her grave, as it were, devoting a whole chapter to the burial procedures and to the detailed representation of the grief felt by Tao Yufu and Li Wanfang,64 Tao Yufu goes back to her room to gather her belongings. Her room has been emptied, all her things are gone, her chests are locked and there is garbage strewn all over the floor. It is as if she had never been there and very soon somebody else will occupy her space and erase her. Only the cat is still there, to provide some comic relief: Tao Yufu, too, does not recognize it for what it is and mistakes it for the spirit of Li Shufang.65 The root of her disease is just as psychological and social as it is physiological. As Qian Zigang explains to Gao Yabai, who does not understand why Li Shufang has fallen sick, since she is so well-loved by everybody, the problem is that she did not want to be a prostitute and she became one because of her mother’s evil heart. Her only patron has been Tao Yufu and she would be happy to go to him as a concubine, except that he wants her to be his primary wife. His family would never allow such an outrage. Her social identity is seen as pathological, in the sense that it dooms her to death, whether she stays in it (due to beatings, sexually-transmitted diseases or exhaustion) or

62

Ibid., 395. For the idea of pollution in connection to death, see E. Ahern, “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women,” in M. Wolf and R. Witke, ed., Women in Chinese Society (Stanford University Press, 1975), 192. 64 Han Ziyun, 1983, 401. 65 Ibid., 404. 63

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she aspires to leave it. Her awareness of her debased social status and the impossibility of being with her beloved causes her sickness.66 This is in accord with the idea prevalent in traditional Chinese medicine that states that “depletion fatigue in its various manifestations had an especially close association with affective disorder,” and that women, because of their “propensity to emotionality,” were particularly vulnerable to this syndrome.67 The novel had opened with a dream in which the author saw a sea of flowers attacked by merciless bees and butterflies. Li Shufang’s tragic destiny then can be read in the metaphor of the flower floating in the sea at the mercy of the insects and transforms her into the true romantic heroine of the novel. All along this story one witnesses the strength of the prejudices and social conventions that keep the two lovers apart and prevent them from becoming a lawfully-wedded couple. The woman cannot change her identity, which so quickly becomes her doom. Qian Zigang asks rhetorically, “How could she say: ‘I am not a prostitute?’ ” It is here that Li Shufang’s powerlessness is fleshed out and, simultaneously, Tao Yufu’s as well. He, like Jia Baoyu before him, cannot do anything to rescue his beloved.68 It is undeniable that if there is social criticism in this novel, it comes across most strongly in the unspoken narrative of the woman’s disease and in her lover’s paralysis in the face of her slow death. Unlike Huo Xiaoyu’s deceitful lover, Tao Yufu sincerely loves Li Shufang and has no intention of abandoning her. He holds her while she sleeps and soothes her when she has nightmares. Disconsolate, he falls sick over her fate, forgets to sleep and hardly leaves her side all the time, nursing and looking after her. After her death, he forgets all social decorum and bursts into tears in front of his acquaintances, causing his older brother to reproach him and seriously worry about his health. All these displays of devotion notwithstanding, his hands are tied, however. He loves her and yet he cannot save her. Their powerful love is defeated by social conventions. They prove Zhang Qiugu wrong: marriage is no longer the best social cure for a courtesan. She 66 Ibid., 356−357. Qian Ziqian, like Gao Baiya, is a male character, friend of Tao Yufu. Their conversation takes place after they have had dinner with him at Li Shufang’s place. 67 Furth, 1998, 81−87. 68 Jia Baoyu had to marry his cousin Baochai, though he loved Lin Daiyu: for this reason, Lin Daiyu died of heartbreak and Jia Baoyu went insane. See Cao Xueqin, 1984.

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can enter it once more as a marginal figure, as a concubine, playing a smaller role, but not taking up the role of a first wife. Even love, which in Ming times could bring Du Liniang back from the dead,69 cannot save a courtesan from her death. If anything, it dooms her even more than her social status. There is yet another angle that we can bring in this analysis. By narrating the story of Li Shufang, the author is playing with one of the most powerful icons in late imperial China: the ideal beauty was often a weak, sick and consumptive girl. The image of the beautiful weak woman who arouses pity and compassion (and perhaps also something else) is quite common and very erotic in late imperial Chinese stories. If disease and sickness can, as we have seen, reveal the somewhat repulsive corporeality of women and, as we have seen in the case of Niu Aiqing, constitute an effective way out of a tainted moral and social universe, they can also, somewhat counter-intuitively, increase the erotic appeal of the woman, making her weaker and, therefore, more available to the attentions of her partner. The weak woman amplifies the power of the male. Though perhaps it would be too strong of a statement to assert that there was a cult of female invalidism in late imperial China, we could be tempted to apply Gilbert and Gubar’s words to the Chinese context, namely that, In the nineteenth century . . . the complex of social prescription these diseases parody did not merely urge women to act in ways which would cause them to become ill; nineteenth-century culture seems to have actually admonished women to be ill. In other words, the ‘female diseases’ from which Victorian women suffered were not always byproducts of their training in femininity; they were the goals of such training.70

The diseased body of the late Qing courtesan, however, is a far cry from the consumptive beauty of the eighteenth-century Lin Daiyu, who does

69 For an analysis of the cult of love in Ming times, see Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton University Press, 1993); Hua Yuan Li Mowry, Chinese Love Stories from ‘Ch’ing-shih’ (Archon Books, 1983). 70 S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 55. For a very interesting analysis of the image of frail beauty fetish, especially vis-à-vis the May Fourth ‘cultural revolution’ in aesthetic ideals, see You Lanmin, “Meiren bianzhong? Jiandai zhongguo youguan nuzijianmeide yanlun (1920 niandai−1940 niandai),” presented at the Conference on Women’s History, Academia Sinica, Taipei, August 2001, especially 22ff.

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indeed make us think of Victorian ideals of femininity. In late Qing fiction, too few women die of broken hearts. It is the syphilitic body of the prostitute, reeking of pollution and corruption that appears and towers in all its horrors. She may seduce the young men of China but her body is also displayed as a filthy, purulent sack of flesh that can spread epidemics that can weaken a whole nation. We see then how issues such as agency, desire, repulsion and morbidity are written on these fictional bodies. The qing (‘passion’) of these young and dead— and yet not quite dead—women, has many and often contradictory values. It is a passion that is simultaneously pure and erotic, at once life giving and deadly. The late Qing romantic hero has a tormented rapport with his flowery beauties, especially at the turn of the nineteenth century, when we often find the lovers entangled on a narrative trajectory doomed to self-destruction, drugs and evil retribution. The courtesan’s main malaise is the fact that her realm is that of passion and emotions; centuries of xiaoshuo have clearly stated that emotions in fiction are anything but abstract. They are embodied and chaotic. They cause deaths and resurrections, sickness and healing. Clearly, the authors of late Qing novels, just like their predecessors, were more concerned with the messy, undisciplined side of emotions and with their daily enactment in bodies that were not those of sages, but those of men and women whose bodily discipline and emotional control mechanisms failed. When they failed, gender mattered, and that is when stories worth being written were produced. Thus, we could read the courtesans’ sickness as the patent manifestation of fictional representations of such failures and of their consequences. In late Qing fiction, one does not find the perfectly controlled, non-ejaculating male body of the Supernatural Ruler around whom a whole array of women is arranged like so many petals of a lush peony, a ruler that dominates so many erotic and pornographic narratives of earlier times. Instead we find a multitude of individualized, turbulent bodies, with plenty of holes leaking out all sorts of fluids. Bodies given to all sorts of uncontrolled and uncontrollable behaviors and not to mathematically-structured copulation, bodies that are trying very hard to forget the bodily disciplines imposed on them by centuries of tradition. Thus, both male and female bodies consume drugs, sex, fashion, and food and are, in turn, consumed by them. We witness how the female body turns into a contested site of emotion for the male lover and how love can become pathological if it is experienced excessively or in a socially transgressive manner.

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If then we can talk about modernity in connection to the sick prostitute, it is in the sense that she predates the dangerous and seductive (and often afflicted by tuberculosis) Modern Girl of the Republican Era, as a powerful social mirror in which the painful alienation the Chinese experienced between the end of the Opium Wars and the fall of the Qing dynasty in Shanghai is magnified, as ‘everything solid melts into air’. This reading is just as problematic though as it reduces this tangled web of representations to teleological Western modernity as the manifested destiny of China. Perhaps we should see what late Qing writers represent as coming to terms with a new identity, which consists of the impossibility of permanence in terms of subject fabrication and that is shaped by the constantly frustrated desire of a subject position entailing power and control over one’s identity.71 From this perspective, we could then say that all male and female characters in these works, from all sorts of social classes, suffer from various ‘diseases’, from syphilis to greed, from pulmonary disease to lust, in various degrees, as well as from the narcissistic drive to pleasure themselves, regardless of the consequences. At odds with Confucian precepts that entail erasure of the self and its pleasure, the individual, driven by his or her desire to obtain permanent jouissance through the expensive lifestyle of Shanghai, expends all his or her energy in trying to gain a foothold in a new and disorienting space. In this arena, subjects are at once invisible because they are away from their family and land of origin (in Shanghai, everyone is a stranger) and, thus, anonymous and, yet, as visible as never before, because there is no longer one site of belonging for them, such as a family or a home. III. The Bodhisattva of Beijing: From Whore to War-hero Even against this very maddening scenario of schizophrenic loss and disease, some courtesans prove themselves to be more resilient in sickness, poverty, marriage and redemption, than others. While fewer

71 See Leo Oufan Lee, “The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations,” for the relationship between popular press and modernity in Shanghai, and Yeh Wen-hsin, “Introduction: Interpreting Chinese Modernity, 1900–1950,” 1–28, for an interesting discussion of the stakes involved in discussing Chinese modernity, both in Becoming Chinese. Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Yeh Wen-hsin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For further elaboration of this point, see Zamperini, 2003b.

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courtesans are rescued in the pages of late Qing novels, not all of them end up poor, dead or sick. Indeed, some manage to remain in business, at times losing agency and finding work in lower-class establishments or on the street, or, if they are ‘lucky’, as madams running their own house, with their own girls. Of all the possible fictional endings, this last one is perhaps the most believable and realistic. “Women trained to be entertainers and to have a relatively independent lifestyle are ill suited to become loving mothers and wives,” many late Qing authors, from Zeng Pu to Zhang Chunfan, repeat ad nauseam to their readers. Accordingly, there are scores of fictional courtesans who get married only to rob their husbands and run back to Shanghai, where they resume their old profession armed with a new name and a new fortune. Of course, when old age comes, the courtesan has to find new ways to stay in business. Even when she opens her own establishment, it is the reputation she had established as a sex worker that can help her to keep a thriving house, even in her twilight years. A fictional example of a courtesan able to live off the fame she accumulated while young is the protean Shi Chunfei/Fu Yulian/Sai Jinhua.72 In Haishang mingji sida jingang, Niehaihua and Jiuweigui, Fu Yulian/Fu Caiyun, after her failed marriage, goes back to being a sex worker in her own house. At the same time, she manages to embark on another more original path, that of national heroine. She is portrayed as a sex worker who is brought by circumstances to be awakened to her national consciousness, in a way that at once ennobles and eroticizes her (and in this sense she is not unlike fictional and real-life late Ming courtesans who became quite fervent patriots on the eve of the fall of the dynasty at the hands of the Manchus).73 In all the novels in which she appears, she is able to capitalize on her life-story. In her ‘twilight years’, her fading beauty is replaced by the (sex)appeal her body, as a vessel of history, still possesses for male literati. Sai Jinhua’s nationalistic spirit can be detected in Jiuweigui, where Sai puts in, as it were, a guest appearance.74 Though mature, she is still

72 For a more complete analysis of the Sai Jinhua’s legend, see Zamperini, 1999, and The True Story of Sai Jinhua, unpublished work in progress, for a complete bibliography and reference list. 73 See Kang-i Sun Chang, The Late Ming Poet Ch’en Tzu-lung (Yale University Press, 1991). 74 Zhang Chunfan, 1993, 998−1038.

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a consummate seducer and, because of this, she succeeds in spending the night with Zhang Qiugu, the ‘philosopher of the bedroom’ of late Qing fiction whom we have encountered on quite a few occasions already. Zhang Chunfan’s retelling of her story conforms quite closely to the standard version of her life—her liaison with Waldersee, her being sent to jail by the jealous officials, her fragile status as an aging courtesan who has nothing else but a story and the skills of her trade to charm her clients.75 The striking point, however, is that Sai Jinhua, the first courtesan in this long novel who is shown having anything that could slightly resemble a deep thought (given the huge number of courtesans that appear in this novel, this fact alone would be remarkable), is willing to go a long way for China’s sake. During the aftermath of the Boxer uprising, in a Beijing destroyed and brutalized by foreign troops, after spending the night with Waldersee, the German official in charge of the foreign armies, she agrees to help him translate official documents necessary to the peacemaking process between China and the foreign powers. “Even if I am a prostitute,” she thinks, “I am always a Chinese: now that I have the chance to help China, of course I must exert myself.”76 In Jiuweigui, just as in Niehaihua, and unlike in Wu Jianren’s novel, Sai Jinhua does sleep with the enemy: in contrast to Zeng Pu’s novel, however, it is not out of a selfish desire to pursue her own pleasure while sojourning in a foreign land. On the contrary, it is a very strategic choice done on behalf of her country, to help those officials who were so powerless in the face of the Western powers. In other words, thanks to her identity as a prostitute and her language skills, Sai Jinhua can help her nation and somehow use her involvement in sex work as a redeeming act. A very cynical reader cannot but see this role of national heroine as yet another role, one that Sai Jinhua, as a skilled and aging entertainer, could perform without a glitch. She is also shown as somebody who is aware of the charm that history can have for the literati who saw her as a representative of a past lost and, as such, she can successfully sexually exploit the male nostalgia for a dream of power lost vis-à-vis foreign powers.

75 76

See also Wang, 1997, 110−116. Zhang Chunfan, 1993, 1004.

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She achieves the status of an immortal in these novels, in two ways: fictionally, because she, like the generous Guanyin, benefits the population of Beijing and of the whole of China and, thus, becomes a famous figure. Historically, because thanks to these novels, the real Sai Jinhua could exploit her own life-story and become one of the first national and transnational stars of the Chinese entertainment world. So, in a sense, she succeeds where others fail because she is able to keep doing what she knows how to do without appearing to do so. In a way, she is the ultimate whore and possibly that is why she, at least in fiction, survives almost unscathed the ravages of time. IV. Starbound: Paradise Regained? We must not forget, at this point, that we are dealing with fictional texts and though some of the exits from the world of prostitution illustrated in these novels are quite realistic, at times excessively and distressingly so, there are more fantastic and theatrical ways out of prostitution in late Qing novels. A common way out of prostitution, in fictional sources, ever since the Yuan dynasty, is her return to her original supernatural settings. We have seen in Chapter One that in many of these late Qing novels courtesans are assigned divine and heavenly origins. For example, in Qinglou meng, all the characters turn out to be immortals, from Jin Yixiang’s parents to his wives and lovers, and they all ascend to heaven in bright daylight. Once more, Yu Da presents the reader with a very traditional, non-problematic narrative approach to the issues of desire and redemption in connection with the prostitution world.77 A more complex approach is presented in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, when all the characters who have scattered all across China and the celestial heavens, either to escape creditors or to eke out a living, come back as actors and actresses this time. In one of the most amazing and creative moments in late Qing fiction, the text changes in genre, going from xiaoshuo to opera. Wu Jianren perhaps intended to reveal the farcical quality that he felt characterized the Shanghai demimonde, in order to satirize further the four belles de Shanghai who are the heroines of his novel. His stylistic switch generates a very intriguing way to conclude the journey of his transgenderal protagonists.

77

Yu Da, 1980, Chapter 55 onwards.

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Yuan Shi Tian Zun is the first to come on stage, retelling from the beginning how the four generals were sent to the King of the Wheel of Rebirth to be reincarnated as women. He also states that it is time for them to come back because ever since they left their original positions there have been many natural disasters, since, as we have seen, they had originally been in charge of harmonizing wind and rain. He calls Daheng Tongzi, who is by now back from his earthly adventures as Jin Hongjun, after his death caused by Shi Chunfei’s poison and cheating ways. He suggests that Erlang Shen be brought in, to go and escort back the recalcitrant gods and reinstate them in their original position.78 As in other epic journeys, our hero/ines end up where they started from: escorted by Erlang, the shenghun 生魂, the living souls of the jingang, one-by-one, come on stage and sing arias that identify them and their main characteristics. The scene is set up in a very comical way. Lin Daiyu sings of her sexual expertise, Lu Lanfan professes her lust for virgin boys, Fu Yulian/Shi Chunfei/Sai Jinhua retells the story of her life and, last but not least, Zhang Shuyu describes the ugliness of her body. When Yuan Shi Tian Zun orders them to revert to their original form as gods, they are so overpowered by their human thoughts that they cannot retrieve their original godliness and, in a surreal twist that reveals the extent of their obscurations, they limit themselves to applauding Yuan Shi Tian Zun for his nice singing. At this point Yuan Shi Tian Zun has them taken offstage where, unable once more to change back into their original form, they are transformed into the lowest form of existence: Lin Daiyu becomes a fox, Lu Lanfen a monkey, Fu Yulian a dog, and Zhang Shuyu a pig. Yuan Shi Tian Zun, frustrated by their resistance to enlightenment and to shedding their human form, has a celestial dog eat the animals, leaving behind only their soul, so that at least the four brothers’ spirits will be freed and able to be reinstated to their respective posts. Thus, the brothers, albeit in a very disembodied and abstract form, revert to their original gender and status. We can then say that, in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, sexuality, as experienced through the body of the courtesan, is a very

78 Also known as Yang Jian (who, like the other fantastic characters of this novel, also appears in Fengshen yanyi), Erlang is a fierce-looking god, who carries a long spear and has a heavenly dog following him around. See Yuan Ke, ed., Zhongguo shenhua chuanshuo cidian (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1985), 189.

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powerful tool of transformation for the ‘heavenly creatures’ who populate its pages, at least in a moral, physical and spiritual sense. The awakening of their passion brings about their fall to earth, and into prostitution. After having lost their godliness (shi shen 失神), the four gods lose their bodies (shi shen 失身). They develop human emotions and attachments, they experience financial and emotional hardship, the pleasure and the pain that comes from sexual intercourse. They have lovers and customers, they lie and they cheat, they steal and are robbed. In the end, however, their odyssey through gender, sexuality and mortality leaves them, if possible, more unenlightened than they were at its beginning. Their active sexual life does not produce any final salvation or awakening, unlike what usually happens in late imperial Chinese fiction and especially pornography.79 If anything, it makes them all duller and more attached to materiality and physicality. Yet, they are not punished for this, nor deprived of their heavenly privileges. Yuan Shi Tian Zun, acting as a stern heavenly father, or as a demanding employer, wants them back where they belong, to work as male gods. One wonders, given the immense reluctance of the four brothers-turned-courtesans-turned-animals to change back into their male godly form, if the setups they had in Shanghai, as sex workers, were not a paradise in comparison with the boring routine expected of them as gods in charge of meteorological phenomena and of guarding the entrances to temples. For sure, this novel and its conclusion bring some needed comic relief to an otherwise very bleak ending of the courtesan’s progress. For all its comic relief though, the taint of their human gender and of their profession is so strong that they can never fully return to their original status. Homeless on earth, they become displaced also in the heavenly realms that they could once call home. In conclusion, we can say that, since the beginning, the courtesan’s journey has been a fall. At the end of her career she can precipitate even further down, into deeper debt, sickness, till death, or she can move upward, back to a surreal, asexual universe, marked by detachment—albeit a reluctant one at times—from worldly pleasures and hard work. We, in turn, cannot follow further any of these women any longer, except towards the future that awaits them at the hands of late twentieth and twenty-first century artists and scholars.

79

See Faure, B., The Red Thread, 63.

EPILOGUE

BACK TO THE FUTURE: NOSTALGIA AND PROSTITUTION These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.1 Nostalgia is not always about the past . . . Fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present always have a direct impact on the future.2

By retracing the flow of the literature of the blue pavilions through the ‘journey’ that fictional courtesans have been made to travel, starting with the Tang dynasty, all the way across late imperial stories up to the turn of the twentieth century, we have mapped the changes that take place during the late Qing period in the representations of the courtesan and her patrons and, thus, gained insights into the ways in which the depictions of prostitution found in these texts circulated and challenged perceptions regarding gender, sexuality and love. These fascinating sources show us the complexity that went into the ‘make-up’ of courtesans as innocent children, passionate lovers, calculating schemers and helpless victims. While in late imperial Chinese fiction the courtesan’s progress could trace either a trajectory of social disgrace or a vertical ascent of redemption, in late Qing tales these two narratives merge and complicate the plot. As salvation through marriage is no longer possible, the only path they allow the courtesan is downwards: worse still, come the late nineteenth century, bad women are set on a precipitous ‘road to nowhere’. In this sense, these representations tell us a great deal about men and ideas of masculinity. Since we know that all the authors of the novels under study here, which were written in different periods and at different junctures, were men, this means that the courtesan in these sources speaks in a transgenderal voice. Her narrative destiny is

1 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), vol. 1, 45. 2 S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), xvi.

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at once the story, familiar and alien, of the men who dreamed about and longed for her. Thus, the lost bodies of these female protagonists have the complex task of defining a male self against the changing landscapes of late and early twentieth-century China. Reading and writing the courtesan, then, was for late Qing men a very important moment in understanding their gendered identity as the Old and New Men of China. It was a collective and empowering act, one that was indeed predicated in producing and consuming fiction as an escapist past-time of the urbanites, the new and growing class of city dwellers who would leave their hometowns and go to the city in search of fortune, love, a future. In this sense, the courtesan can be framed as the morally and socially hybridized mirror of Chinese men, trapped, then, within the pages of these novels and at times quite pleasantly so, in a struggle between tradition and modernity, pleasure and torment, ecstasy and agony. As we have seen in the last two chapters, this late Qing masculinity was anything but repressed. While many male characters are defeated in their endeavor to become more than displaced orphans, what eventually fails are the fantasies engendered by Ming and Qing masculinity, namely the zhi yin myth and the savior syndrome. However, the strong male identity that writes and enjoys the lost bodies of the courtesans remains the same, and central, to the flow of fictional representations of the courtesan’s progress. From this perspective, then, the readers’ masculinities were enhanced, augmented and increased by these problematic narratives. This conclusion brings us a step closer to our final goal. I. The Secret of the Flowers Thus far we have in a way tried to understand how the seduction of the courtesan story works and how it changes. We have understood how this narrative evolves, grows and moves through different historical and social landscapes and changes. We have also understood how the voice of the courtesan is a male utterance that echoes and alters masculinity and its predicaments. This, in turn, must lead us to question a bit more in depth why would this be the case in the context of fictional discourse, beyond the very important point that has already been made time and again in the present work, namely male authorship and consumption. This forces us to take a botanical detour of sorts that brings us back to Figure 1, the only illustration in this book. The text that accompa-

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nies the images maps the four phases of a woman’s life by linking her various stages to those of a flower that blooms and too quickly withers and fades. This language is hardly surprising, given that the term most frequently used in traditional Chinese fiction to describe a beautiful woman is hua 花 (‘flower’). A flower is beautiful (hua seye 華色也), just like a woman. And a woman, just like a flower, is an object of aesthetic enjoyment, as well as of desire. This equivalence is indeed a very complex one, as we are dealing with much more than simple visual appreciation. Shigehisa Kuriyama has quite convincingly shown how in traditional Chinese thought and medicine “[b]otanical metaphors explain the relationship between the organs and the parts they govern.”3 Even more importantly, “[o]f all the metaphors deployed in imagining the body, none figured as centrally as the metaphor of plant growth and development.”4 Accordingly, the young woman ‘blooms’, but only for a very short period of time before she ‘withers’: the beauty of the flower/woman is subject to unstoppable change and decay. Time is of the essence in engaging with her, as the male lover has only one season, her spring, to both enjoy her beauty and ‘pick her flower’. In doing so, however, he will also spoil her, hastening her decay. Entry into a sexually-active life, as we have observed, depletes the allotted qi 氣 of a woman. To be fair to the less fair of the sexes though, and even more importantly, as we are dealing with patriarchal preoccupations, craving the se of hua can be quite dangerous for men: A passion for se, haose, is a weakness of all flawed rulers; resistance to its seductions, a mark of superior character. From the earliest chronicles, se’s fatal lure looms large in Chinese historiography as the downfall of many a state. Se identified lust as a visual craving.5

And there is indeed a tight relationship between hua, se, hao (hua) se 好華色, si 死, death, and the male gaze. Though the male eye/I— the implied reader and writer of almost the whole corpus of Chinese xiaoshuo 小說—is bedazzled by the colors of the fragrant object of his desire, he also often faces the object of his love burdened by anxieties and fears. What fears? That his flower may wither before he can pick it, but also fear of the body of the Other, which changes, evolves, 3 S. Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 176. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

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grows and produces other bodies, regardless and independently of his desire. How to fully posses and control this protean body? Femininity implies birth and death, as protean phenomena and metamorphic powers. In traditional Chinese culture, the secret of the flowers, the ability to become other and yet to remain the same, is seen as intrinsic to the female body. It is true that Daoism, to a certain extent, appropriated the concept of the female pregnant body and its creative, lifegiving potential, making it an integral part of male longevity exercises.6 Overall though, changelings in traditional Chinese fiction (as well in many other literary genres) are coded as female and feminine. It is indeed not a coincidence that hua (‘flower’) is homophone with hua 化 (‘to change’). Ce que les femmes ont «en plus», c’est ce pouvoir de transformer, de dialectiser la vie en son essence, ce pouvoir d’être elles-mêmes et l’Autre à la fois, de faire naître en soi l’Autre. Et le reflet, au ciel, de ce pouvoir des transformations est un fleur, hua. Et l’ensemble de ces fleurs forme un paysage magique, unique, mouvant où se trouvent toutes les essences mêlees, maîtresses du temps en ses saisons.7

This magical power both seduces and horrifies the male viewer who is driven to at once represent it obsessively and to exorcise it in all his literary expressions that articulate his gaze and his voice.8 The beauty he chases, the desire he feels for her, sexual intercourse, ‘love’, all of these actions are always invisibly tainted with death, hers as well as his own, as she leads him down the dangerous path of sexuality. He who ‘loves color’ and ‘picks flowers’ is an impossible position: on the one hand, if he does not fulfill his romantic and sexual potential, he will fall sick and there are many male heroes who catch very serious—and, at times, fatal—cases of xiangsibing.9 On the other hand, if he does, he risks death at the hands of a mysterious creature he does not fully

6

See K. Schipper, The Taoist Body (University of California Press, 1993). B. Berthier, La dame-du-bord-de-l’eau (Nanterre, Société d’Ethnologie, 1988), 127. A fascinating study of the legend and the worship, still very alive in the present day, of Linshui furen, also known as Chen Jingu, who protects women and children. See also B. Baptandier, “The Lady Linshui: How a Woman Became a Goddess,” in Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller, Unruly Gods. Divinity and Society in China (University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 105. 8 See also the analysis of these and other gender-related issues in Epstein’s Competing Discourses. 9 For the pathology of love sickness in traditional Chinese medicine, see Ma Boying, 1994, 701. 7

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understand, nor comprehend. Engaging in love and passion, Chinese traditional fiction has shown over and over again, can be a deadly matter, as vital essences are wasted in sexual combat and amorous sporting instead of being sparingly used to prolong the family line. (Of course, as Freud has shown us, the interdependence of Eros and Thanatos is not an exclusive Chinese realm!) The fictional female body that best ‘embodies’ all these facets, namely, beauty, sexual attraction, repulsiveness, magical powers of death and life, as well as protean skills is, of course, that of the prostitute. In a society where women were supposed to become invisible, her body was the most visible of all, by virtue of her profession, and female visibility is always dangerously erotic in the context of Chinese literature. Not only these literary representations are part of the late imperial discourse on women’s roles and dangers, so filled with contradictions and anxiety, but courtesans and prostitutes, as ‘flowery heads’, as represented in fiction were part and parcel of the multi-faceted feminine death figure which had played a very important role in the erotic imagery of male Chinese readers and writers. Loving the courtesan can, then, be read as an irresistible death wish of the male erotic Self, as it is she who best embodies “the excessively obvious but often non-read figure that crosses femininity with death.”10 We have emphasized how in the context of Chinese culture, death had occupied ever since the Tang dynasty the realm of the imaginary, sideby-side with love, women and eroticism. It is especially during the Ming dynasty that male and female readers appear mesmerized by the titillating spectacle offered by the death of young, beautiful women.11 By late Qing times, the triangle generated by male gaze, prostitution, sickness and death had become quite complex. To look at these icons of female protean skills, as well as at (venereal) disease and male vulnerability, can help us to understand the significance of gender and the body in mapping emotions, together with the complex relationship between desire, the body and death in the late Qing imaginary. The secret of the flowers is precisely this power perversely attributed by male writers to the female body in general and to the prostituted

10 E. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992), 35. 11 See E. Widmer, “Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China,” LIC 13.1 (1992): 111; J. Zeitlin, “Shared Dreams: The Story of the Three Wives Commentary on ‘The Peony Pavilion’,” HJAS (1994): 127.

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body in particular to at once heal and to poison. Hidden behind the beauty of the flower is the secretion that can cause sickness and death, both of the male who picks it and of the flower herself. Given this rather gloomy scenario, it is legitimate to ask at this point: is there anyone who gets pleasure from these alienating dreamscapes? Authors and readers, who are not fictional characters; together, they can dream up the characters and their stories ad infinitum, without fear. The courtesan’s socio-economic downfall will not affect them but they can re-enact endlessly possessing her and her image.12 Viewing the city and its inhabitants, their stories, their lives, from a bird-eye’s view, from the top, as it were, the reader in particular is the ultimate voyeur.13 In the vertical horizons of late Qing fiction, he never loses his higher and privileged position. Though all these novels are accounts of private lives, the architectural structures in which the lives take place disappear under the greedy eyes of the reader. One of the most exciting sides of reading fiction is, after all, the perverse pleasure that comes from violating private spaces, transgressing, opening doors, peering through windows, like so many late imperial Chinese erotic prints and novels teach and encourage us to do.14 The novel, then, unveils desirable bodies, no matter how lost, and feeds the reader’s desire to possess—through the written medium and the imagination—what cannot and should not (given the high risk of corruption, bankruptcy and venereal disease) be possessed in the flesh. Furthermore, fictional sources often deal with real characters and, thus, reflect the public’s thirst for gossip about the private life of the very public individuals that inhabit a world where romance is sold, purchased, consumed and disposed of quickly. In a way, the text itself echoes this exchange and resembles most of the fetishized figures appearing in it, as it is a public and widely-circulated commodity.15 So the dreamscape of the Shanghai courtesan-land is dreamed up for 12 The question of the gender of the late Qing reader is a fascinating and complex one. In the case of the sources under exam here, the reader was very likely male, but that does not rule out the possibility of female readership. See Hu Ying, 2000. 13 For a more complete elaboration of this point, see Zamperini, 2003a. 14 For a brilliant analysis of the relationship between voyeurism, privacy and the birth of the novel in the West, see Brooks, 1993. 15 As mentioned earlier, by the late Qing period, publishing was a profitable business, novels were items of mass consumption and fiction writers an emerging profession. A thin line, often none at all, separated fiction writers from journalists, who exploited the advances in printing technology to feed and generate at the same time the desire for news, sensationalized stories and fiction.

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the benefit of the reader and are not dreams the fuel that propel the leisure industry? All the characters, male and female, that crowd the pages of late Qing fiction, along with the reader, though on the very brink of temporal-spatial collapse, keenly pursue narcissistic pleasures. At the end of the Qing dynasty, they enact, witness and enjoy the obscene and highly entertaining spectacle offered by new circuits of an economy of desire, pleasure and consumption. II. Writing Bad Girls Redux One cannot resist the temptation to wonder, at this juncture, about what, if anything, happens to the geographies of desire mapped by the pursuit of pleasure in late Qing Shanghai, the subject positions it allows and destroys, the old dreams it crushes and the new dreams it invents after the fall of the Qing dynasty: where do the perverse dreamscapes that the courtesans inhabited and haunted with their lost bodies go? Are there any more contemporary incarnations of qinglou wenxue? Is this veritable river of tropes and motifs to run for centuries, as we have witnessed, still flowing these days? Is the late Qing courtesan still in circulation? And if so, what guises is she sporting? Who is telling her stories? What if, for example, a female author wrote about a courtesan’s life: what tropes would she choose?16 How would she position herself vis-à-vis the ‘army’ of male writers who have monopolized the topic for hundreds of years? Let us begin with the very last question and move forward in time to two novels written one hundred years after Wu Jianren’s work was published to try and illuminate the legacy of the fictional representations of prostitution at the turn of last century in contemporary times. Both novels bear the same title, Sai Jinhua 賽金花. The prolific Taiwanese writer Zhao Shuxia, still living in Switzerland, published her own version of Sai Jinhua’s life in 1990.17 The second text, by Wang Xiaoyu, a female novelist and a university professor in Chinese literature, was published in 1998. Let us turn to a scene from Wang

16 I have addressed elsewhere the issue of what happens when courtesans speak back to these representations. See Zamperini, 1999. I am currently working on a book project entitled The True Story of Sai Jinhua, which includes the translation of the 1934 interview conducted with Sai Jinhua, herself, prefaced by a critical introduction. 17 Zhao Shuxia, Sai Jinhua (Taipei: Jiuge chubanshe, 1990).

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Xiaoyu’s novel which imagines the encounter between Sai Jinhua, the protean courtesan who deeply captured the imagination of countless generations of Chinese readers and writers, and Zeng Pu, the author of the late Qing bestseller Niehaihua so often mentioned in the pages of this book: He had written about her. She had been written about by him. He had relied on writing about her to start his book company, the Xiaoshuo Lin. She had relied on his writing about her to keep her ‘Residence of Sai from the Capital’, in her little garden. In all these years they had been deeply connected. But each had avoided the other. She hated him with all her heart. He hated her with all his heart. As they eyed each other from up close, each immediately thought that the other had changed a good deal. Even Zeng Huizhao, who had just sighed in admiration at the fact that at fifty [she] was still alluring, saw very clearly that the thick layer of powder on Caiyun’s face could not conceal the finely woven web of her wrinkles.18

In a brilliant move, the novelist brings together the late Qing author and his icon, and imagines them as entangled by hatred, mutual exploitation and also compassion. The mirroring between the subject and the object of representation unveils the complex relationship that exists between the author and the character. The gaze of the author and her creation meet in the fictional arena of Sai Jinhua and echo in a fascinating manner with the gazes of generations of authors and readers in pre-modern, late imperial and late Qing China, all male. How does then the gender of the author matter in this latter-day narrative? Could we read the lingering mention of Sai Jinhua’s wrinkles under her make-up as a feminine reimagining of the courtesan’s body and plight? How is Wang Xiaoyu and Zhao Shuxia’s writing different from that of Wu Jianren and Zeng Pu? A century separates these writers, of course, but what else? The first point to notice is the somewhat ironic continuity of the situation in Wang Xiaoyu’s case. One hundred years later, the writer of Sai Jinhua’s story, though a woman, is rooted firmly in the academic world, just like the literati who were so fascinated by Sai Jinhua.

18 Wang Xiaoyu, Sai Jinhua. Fanchen. Hua fei hua (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998), 485.

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We find countless similarities that powerfully establish Zeng Pu and other late Qing authors’ influence on Wang Xiaoyu’s Sai Jinhua. In Wang Xiaoyu’s work, just to mention one of these influences, Fu Caiyun retains all her destructive erotic appeal and her helplessness as the first victim of her own sensual innate character. We find sentences such as: “Simply stated, it was Fu Caiyun who lit Hong’s ‘big candle’.”19 Though the effort seems to be to empower Fu Caiyun, this type of representation simply replicates the power dynamics envisioned by male writers, whereby Fu Caiyun is a sexually-overpowering figure that destroys men on her path, the shrewish and sexually-omnivorous creature who transformed the late urban landscape into a moveable brothel. Furthermore, just as Zeng Pu called his novel a historical novel, deploying Fu Caiyun as the connecting thread between different historical events, so Wang explicitly marks her own work as lishi xiaoshuo 历史小说 (‘an historical novel’).20 Wang Xiaoyu follows Zeng Pu’s lead in the sense that she too frames Fu Caiyun’s life and her actions as indicative and ‘symptomatic’ of a much larger historical picture and discourse. The courtesan remains a cipher, an empty signifier to be filled with meanings, scholarly and otherwise, and does not then appear to acquire any agency. Furthemore, whereas Zeng Pu and Wu Jianren clearly stated, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that their work was purely imaginary, in Wang Xiaoyu’s novel there is a constant deployment of the fictional representations to rectify historical truth, in an effort to bestow upon the narrative created by the novel the aura of truth. For example, the author writes that Fu Caiyun’s father’s death was not due to the fact she had become a prostitute, as it was written in ‘the novels’.21 Another example of this approach is the effort of the author to present Fu Caiyun as a woman just like any other, underneath her glamorous appearance. One could argue that there is something not only historically inaccurate but also intellectually perverse in wanting

19

Ibid., 249. See Zeng Pu, “Xiugai hou yaoshuode ji juhua,” in Zeng Pu, Niehaihua (1928), 1−8; reprinted in Wei Shaochang, Niehaihua ziliao (Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 128−133, which he attached to his revised edition published in 1928. In this brief text, Zeng Pu responds to the reactions that his novel had caused in the Chinese literary world and has this to say about Caiyun: “I wanted to use the protagonist [i.e., Fu Caiyun] as the main thread of the story and to incorporate as much as possible of the history of the last thirty years.” 21 Wang Xiaoyu, Sai Jinhua, 24. 20

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to make Sai Jinhua’s story into that of a commonplace woman. There is nothing ordinary in her story, if for one hundred years, male and female, Chinese and non-Chinese authors and scholars have been writing about her tale. To make a courtesan’s story feminist does not mean to make it banal; rather, it was the anomaly of Fu Caiyun’s story, her visibility, her national and international fame that made it possible for late Qing authors to tie her fate to that of China. Wang Xiaoyu, in this sense, attempts to rectify what she perceives a historically incorrect view of a fact presented within a fictional context but she does so within that very same context and not that of a history book. This is a very problematic move, possibly informed by Marxian notions of literary theory and practices, but one that ultimately fails both as fiction and as historiography. To stake a higher claim to truth, Wang Xiaoyu often weaves into the text pieces of interviews done with Sai Jinhua, especially from the notorious Sai Jinhua benshi 賽金花本事.22 However, she engages in a very dangerous enterprise when she integrates whole passages from Sai Jinhua benshi almost verbatim without explicitly stating it. One could argue that Wang Xiaoyu is empowering herself when she takes a masculine stance and appropriates Sai Jinhua’s voice, just as male authors used Fu Caiyun and other fictional courtesans that appeared in late Qing fiction as mouthpieces for their fears, anxieties, desires. She further also claims authorship over Sai Jinhua’s words without acknowledging the loan and, thus, does end up silencing the female protagonist in a way that appears even more violent than that of the late Qing authors, who were not stealing the real woman’s words and circulating them as their own. This process of bringing history to bear upon the narrative of the late Qing courtesan’s progress becomes slightly more complicated in the case of the rendition penned by Zhao Shuxia, a prominent transnational Chinese writer active in Switzerland. She states in her introduction that she wants her novel to be at once realistic (zhenzhengde xiaoshuo 真正的小說) and an example of feminine writing (nuxingwenxueyilei 女性文學一類).23 Indeed, Zhao Shuxia begins her narrative with journalists going to Sai Jinhua’s home to verify rumors of her

22

See Liu Bannong, 1985. Zhao Shuxia, 1990, 5. For a very interesting English study of Zhao Shuxia’s work, see K. Ensinger, “The Private Archives of Zhao Shuxia,” in Tan Chee-Beng, Colin Storey and Julia Zimmerman, eds, Chinese Overseas. Migration, Research and Documentation (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007). 23

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death. In this very poignant incipit, the author points to the predatory nature of the press and the print world’s relationship with Sai Jinhua. The squalor and dirt of her room is offset by the rapacious desire of one of the two journalists to take pictures of her belongings and even of her corpse, to consume yet once more the narratibility/narrative appeal of Sai Jinhua, with no respect whatsoever. Zhao Shuxia’s novel, thus, posits itself as a redressing of the wrongs that Sai Jinhua suffered at the ends of greedy and voracious male writers. She clearly tries to create a more authentic and legitimate position for herself as a female author who, by virtue of her gender, could better understand and interpret the life of the late Qing woman, in a manner that is at once humane, compassionate and truthful. This is where this very promising and unconventional beginning fails: Zhao Shuxia cannot help but romanticize Sai Jinhua, this time by portraying her as a victim of male writers and journalists in need of being rescued and saved by an understanding friend. In this, her writing is not feminine but quite masculine. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Zhao Shuxia decides to occupy the self-defeating position of the nostalgic man of letters whom we have seen desperately trying to rescue the late Qing courtesan and himself from the dangers of impending modernity. This nostalgic, male-gendered positioning becomes even more apparent as the plot moves back in time, to the late Qing courtesan’s childhood, where we encounter again the narrative of yore, namely that of a girl sold into prostitution once her very respectable family has fallen on hard times. Zhao Shuxia deploys all the stereotypes we have already encountered in the course of our exploration of the courtesan’s life, beginning with the way she loses her virginity and opens up for business. There is no departure from the standardized representations of fear, pain, disgust and humiliation that the young courtesan feels at the hand of the madam and her loathsome deflowerer. As the story moves forward again, Sai Jinhua is truly trapped here by her narrative destiny, as a restless and sexually-voracious woman, a victim of her own natural inclinations. This return to the late Qing mode of storytelling the courtesan is also echoed at the linguistic level, as Zhao Shuxia’s language itself appears to revert to late Qing vernacular Chinese, perhaps in an effort to strive for historical accuracy. Surprisingly, then, even a writer of Zhao Shuxia’s talent cannot but reproduce the same narrative scheme that she, by invoking gender as her weapon, sets out to debunk. How to explain this failure to conjure a new story? What seduces and tricks even a savvy and sophisticated

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author like Zhao Shuxia to reproduce and ventriloquize, yet again, the late Qing discourse? Clearly, we have yet to uncover something very profound about fictional heroines like Fu Caiyun/Sai Jinhua, Lin Daiyu (the courtesan, not Jia Baoyu’s beloved) and Zhang Shuyu. We have noted that speed and movement seem to be dominant traits of their narrative make-up: perhaps, as they dashed about their bicycles, chariots and rickshaws, they provided a meeting place between history and fiction in a way that few other historical characters could. They were the forerunners of the star system which allowed singers and movie-actors of the twenties and thirties of Shanghai to become cult figures and objects of popular adoration: relying on the hundred years of tradition of writing about courtesans, the authors of late Qing fiction took real women and used them as connecting vehicles between history and desire, nostalgia and modernity.24 One has only to read the articles published in 1936, on the occasion of Sai Jinhua’s death, to become aware of the power of this dynamic. The articles often include biographical sketches of Sai Jinhua, and surprisingly enough, these biographical sketches are taken almost verbatim from Niehaihua.25 The description of her character, her career, her tribulations, they are all there, exactly as described by Zeng Pu. The same can be said for all the novels and plays about Sai Jinhua written in this century, both in Chinese and in English.26 Wang Xiaoyu and Zhao Shuxia are then following the lead of a very large group of past and present writers in subscribing to fictional narratives on the turn of the twentieth century. It is fascinating, in a certain sense, to see how, even when the tables are turned, female writers, like Wang Xiaoyu and Zhao Shuxia, reproduce the same kind of discourses and representations. The fact that they cannot, willingly or unwillingly, escape the narrative structure created by late Qing authors in their own retelling of the courtesan’s legend shows how the gender of the author in this case ceases to matter in the face of a powerful cultural construct, in

24 For the rise of the ‘star system’ in music and cinema in 1930 Shanghai, see A. Jones, Yellow Music. Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001); Zhang Jingyin, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922−1943 (Stanford, 1999). 25 For examples, see Sun Zhen, Sai Jinhua qi ren (Zhong Qin chubanshe, 1987). 26 See, for example, Chang Hsin-hai, The Fabulous Concubine (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990); C. Y. Lee, Madam Goldenflower (New York, 1960); Yangu laoren, Xu niehaihua (Zhenmeishan shudian, 1946); Xia Yan, Sai Jinhua (Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1936).

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which culture and society, the imagined and the real, language and the world, discourse and materiality meet, clash and coalesce. The diachronic ruptures in the sources under study point to the continuing, problematic importance of prostitution in Chinese culture as a fundamental category to define masculinity, femininity, empowerment, consumerism, nationality and modernity, among other things. However, what fuel has propelled in the end this story all the way to the twentyfirst century, where, as we shall see presently, it is enjoying a long and prosperous fortune, albeit with some technological enhancements? III. Back to the Future: Nostalgia and Prostitution Nostalgic manifestations are side-effects of the teleology of progress.27

Nostalgia appears to be the culprit, in the sense that it figures as the main link between pre-modern and contemporary discourses. In other words, the tropes created to narrate and regulate prostitution in the past still hold a strong currency both in modern-day China and beyond. It is in this sense that nostalgia, as a utopian and often dystopian reading of the past, proves very useful to study the sexual politics of contemporary representations of prostitution in China.28 To begin with, it is imperative to define nostalgia in a fashion that can accommodate the vast chronological horizons of the issues under study. Nostalgia, in other words, aching, algia, to return, nostos, is a very powerful concept in the world of literary production, East and West. Though the term itself is actually a seventeenth-century pseudoGreek word coined by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor, to label what at the time was seen as a medical condition, we could say that nostalgia has shaped the narrative landscape of many a story from the moment Ulysses left home. One of its most fascinating incarnations is the Portuguese saudade, a word that includes in the semantic sphere

27

Boym, S., The Future of Nostalgia, 10. A very interesting and new trajectory of research that falls for now outside the perimeter of this project would be to explore contemporary Western depictions of the Chinese prostitute of old and their impact on configurations of race, gender and sexuality. Works, such as “That Chinese Woman,” “Suzie Wong,” “My Geisha,” all the way to the much-debated “Memoirs of a Geisha,” reveal how the Chinese/Oriental prostitute has also been playing a key role in the context of Western and global sexual politics for at least a century. 28

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of nostalgia also the longing for places one does not know and one will not be able to ever go to, much less return to. Similarly, it could be claimed that most of the history of Chinese literature is inscribed with this backward longing to return to the same characters and plots, as well as to imaginary lands they may inhabit, time and time again. This turning towards the past has indeed propelled many Chinese narratives forward: by recuperating the past plot or character, the author invariably inscribes it at once in its future, as well as in the present, since what is gone cannot but become vested, through the work of contemporary writers, in the current anxieties, desires, wishes of writers and readers alike. One only has to think of the many incarnations of Cui Yingying 崔鶯鶯, or of Sun Wukong 孫悟空, the Monkey King, characters whose systematic fictional rebirths attest to the nostalgic mode of much of Chinese literary writing, namely, recuperating the past through writing and by so doing reiterating its absence, its cessation and, in the end, the impossibility of such a return. Jia Baoyu will never be able to return to the Grand Prospect Garden after having traveled on a balloon towards the moon, as he does in the Xin Shitouji 新石頭記 (“The New Story of the Stone;” 1905−1908), written more than two centuries after the original Shitouji 石頭記 (“Story of the Stone”), just as his Lin Daiyu, in her new position as a sex worker in the same novel, will never die of a broken heart again— whether it is better to work as a prostitute in late Qing Shanghai or to pine away for Jia Baoyu in the Jia mansion is a question that we shall have to leave unanswered. The connection between the courtesan and nostalgia is not a new invention but I wish to push it further. We have already illustrated how courtesans, in their literary incarnations, could serve as mirrors and Othering mechanism for frustrated and failed scholars and, thus, can aid us in exploring the evolving definitions of late imperial and fin-du-siécle’s masculinity. Returning to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of chronotope as the time-space continuum by which changing historical conceptions of time and space are realized, I would like to posit nostalgia as the main mode and tense of existence in which both courtesans and their patrons operate, as a restorative progress that emphasizes the past as truth and seeks to restore it.29

29

Bakhtin, 1981, 84.

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Following the example of what Svetlana Boym does in The Future of Nostalgia, we want to postulate nostalgia as a symptom of an age, ‘a historical emotion’, as well as a sentiment not necessarily opposed to modernity, but rather ‘coeval with modernity itself ’.30 By looking at courtesans and their representations through the lens of nostalgia as a sentiment of loss and displacement, but also as a romance with one’s own fantasy of the spatiotemporal coordinates of past, present and future, we can make sense of the multiple incarnations of these protean figures as they move forward in time. Furthermore, as notions of time and space have been changing increasingly fast and dramatically in China at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, we should accordingly deploy a fluid, inclusive and expansive definition of nostalgia. In this sense, the most interesting development, in terms of the nostalgic deployment of the figure of the courtesan, is that, in modern (meaning from early twentieth century up until the forties) and contemporary times, the sources of production of such images and their consumers have increased and diversified dramatically. Nostalgia is no longer ‘just’ restorative: it has become reflective, more expressive of an individual mind. The beautiful courtesan is no longer only the privy of male disenfranchised scholars who stand in front of the mirrors held up to them by this romantic, erotic and somewhat wild category of women. From the beginning of the twentieth century, men and women, from all gender sexual orientations and all walks of life (and, these days, as we shall see, from all over the globe), become increasingly more able—thanks to the technological advances of photography, print, computer and cinema, as well to increased standards of living—, to both reproduce and enjoy these images. This powerful technological enhancement has strengthened the erotic component of these representations and brought it, in some cases, to the boundaries of the fetish, pornography and sexual exploitation. At the same time, this very move has also generated explicit social and political commentaries that include these depictions in a global discourse to fight the very sexual exploitation promoted through them. In other words, with greater visibility comes greater access and, thus, a proliferation of uses and discourses once more generated by the image of the Chinese sex worker.

30

S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvi.

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With this strong move towards the visual mode of storytelling the courtesan complicates the textual representations in fascinating ways and constitutes one of the main points of continuity between past and present. From the late Qing period onwards, taking, selling, buying, collecting and studying pictures of Chinese courtesans and prostitutes maps out a journey that is at once erotic, cultural, intellectual and technological. These pictures clearly attest to the longevity of the visual and photogenic appeal of the woman as sex worker (regardless of her rank) and, as such, are excellent sites of investigation of the norms of desire and of nostalgia as a mode of erotic and sexual discourse that shapes so many representations of this group of women. At the same time they show us how technology and the market economy are central to the existence of these desires and discourses.31 Late Qing novels often used illustrations to offset the beauty of the courtesans that crowded their pages. While this was by no means a late Qing invention, technological advancements that lowered the cost of illustrated publications, combined with the arrival of photography, created new ways of framing fictional narratives of all sorts, but especially those that dealt with the flower women. Literary magazines, such as Xiao Shuo Shi Bao 小說時報, along with many other publications in late Qing Shanghai, displayed, in their opening pages, pictures of contemporary local courtesans. Many novels, such as Wenming xiaoshi 文明小史 (“A Brief History of Enlightenment”), carried illustrations of brothel scenes and sexy courtesans; even within the novels, themselves, photography had quickly been appropriated as one of the main props of the late Qing courtesan.32 Foreign-operated presses, such as

31 For the purpose of my discussion of the visual representations of the late Qing courtesans, I have decided not to include any photographs in the present volume, though I have used them in other publications of mine, especially when dealing with fashion. Part of my choice is motivated by the fact that these photos are now very easily accessible in virtual databases of visual images, thanks to the stellar work of scholars like Christian Henriot and Barbara Mittler. At the same time, I would like to resist the tendency of some contemporary sinologists to use these photos in a voyeuristic manner and as a way to eroticize their scholarship: deploying these images to turn academic publications to the level of glossy fashion magazines appears to me a very problematic move, one with which I do not feel comfortable. In this sense, I find the work of contemporary Chinese artist Hung Liu, whose painting Jade Lady graces the cover of the present book, to exemplify a very empowering way to keep the images of these women circulating in contemporary Chinese and transnational visual culture without violating or abusing the bodies of the women depicted. 32 See Zamperini, 2005. For a brilliant study of visuality in the late Qing and modern period, see Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (University of Hawaii Press, 2007).

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the publishers of Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報 (“The Dianshizhai Pictorial;” 1884−1898), contributed to this flood of pictures by successfully translating the late imperial practice of illustrating fiction with woodblock prints in the journalistic realm, thanks to greater ease in pictorial reproduction at their disposal.33 Of course, a woodblock illustration engages the viewer in ways that do not match completely the photograph. Even when the illustrations dress their characters with the latest fashion in foreign clothes, the power of the courtesan on film is a much more intense and permanent marker of modernity. It is true that the courtesan had posed in countless other late imperial illustrations and paintings to titillate and seduce the viewer; however, these new illustrations and photography presented consumers with a complete repackaging of this familiar icon, whom they could immediately recognize even in a totally new setting. In this sense, she functioned as the passerby in Baudelaire’s “À une passante” in Les Fleurs du Mal, who exemplifies the eternal beauty in her fleeting, modern, and urban transient incarnation.34 Nostalgia defines this movement, inevitably connected with modernity that posits the subject of representation in an ephemeral, ‘off-modern’, stasis caused by the simultaneous pull of past conventions and new technologies.35 Possibly, this schizophrenic pull would have brought about very interesting developments and evolutions in this type of representations, had it not been for the rise of the Communist Party in China. The establishment of The People’s Republic of China in 1949 ushered in totally different and new sets of visual tropes and signifiers, causing a rupture in the flow of exchange, reproduction and consumption of these pictures in mainland China. They virtually disappeared from the public domain (i.e., the world of publishing) in China until the late eighties, even if they began to resurface more systematically only in the mid-nineties and quite visibly at the turn of this last century. The first images to resurface constitute what one could call a semihistorical attempt at cataloguing photographically a lost and somewhat glamorized era of the recent Chinese past. In works, such as Lao Zhaopian 老照片 (“Old Photos;” 2003) we meet our fin-de-siècle glamorous pin-ups in a somewhat de-eroticized realm, as part of the historical 33 Ye Xiaoqing, The Dianshizhai Pictorial. Shanghai Urban Life, 1884−1898 (University of Michigan, 2003). 34 See http://fleursdumal.org/poem/224 for the French original. 35 See also Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York, 1969), 217−252.

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reconstruction of the clothing revolution that swept China between the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic. This historical framework situates late Qing beauties in an arena where they function as embodied manifestations of customs and practices; this, in turn, allows the viewer to occupy the position of a scholar, without (at least theoretically) any trace of titillation. That the audience is meant to gaze nostalgically at the photos is emphasized not only by the sepia-colored tones of this type of publications, but also from the titles that they bear. From lao to jiu 舊 (both meaning ‘old’) it is but a short step to meng 夢 (‘dream’) and, thus, we see how in a slightly earlier publication, Jiu meng chong jing 旧夢重惊, which could be translated as “Awakening from an Old Dream” but also, more perversely, the “Awakening of Old Dreams” (1998), late Qing courtesans and the postcards that contributed to truly make them global stars in the early twentieth century become part of a very nostalgic posturing towards a past that is so long gone it has become unreal.36 This is very much resonant with the late Ming, early Qing scholarly longing for the alluring faces of these long-gone beauties as a displaced site for their lost selves. It is also part of a larger project to market nostalgia itself as a commodity, a point to which I will return later. Now, this process of re-inscription of these late Qing sex symbols onto the canvas of historical reconstruction, a process that we could say maintain the appeal of these figures but somehow diminishes their transgressive potential by putting them alongside pictures of respectable wives and children, as well as of generals, writers and public figures, as happens in the two sources mentioned above, is problematized to say the least by the emergence of another set of texts that uses often the same pictures to achieve a very different goal in works, such as Changjidelishi 娼妓的歷史 (“The History of the Prostitute;” 2004), to follow the Chinese translation that appears on the cover. We find in this type of text a much more explicit emphasis on the sexual features of the late imperial and late Qing courtesans, as we see from contemporary drawings depicting their voluptuous bare breasts to the inclusion of Ming and Qing erotic prints. We have, in other words, entered the erotopia that pre-modern Chinese prostitution constitutes for the contemporary readers. Books, such as Changjidelishi, blatantly

36 See Shou Xiang, Jiu meng chong jing (Guang xi mei shu chu ban she, 1998); Anon., Lao zhao pian (Shandong hua bao chu ban she, 2003).

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conflate the pursuit of scholarly knowledge with erotic titillation and, thus, offer to their readers a remarkably pleasurable position. These books constitute a hybrid genre that offers simultaneously reliable historical data and information, along with a great deal of visual erotic and, at times, sexually-explicit images whose potential transgression or offensiveness is still always mediated by their aura as past images of an era long gone circulated within academic and quasi-scholarly publications. That said, not all texts manage to straddle the blurry area between the scholarly, the erotic and the pornographic so successfully. In the voluminous Zhongguo Xingshi tujian 中国性史图鉴 (“An Illustrated Mirror of Chinese Sexual History;” translated on the cover of the Chinese version as “The Hard Book of Chinese Sex History”), Liu Dalin, a retired professor of sociology at Shanghai University who pioneered the field of sexology in China, transposes the nostalgic erotopia of the late imperial Chinese brothel into the polymorphic sextopia that the Chinese past becomes in his retelling.37 His nostalgia is definitely restorative, in the sense that it does not think of itself as nostalgia but rather as truth and tradition.38 This also answers the question of what to do with the late imperial erotic and pornographic literary tradition that did not deal only with courtesans. While the fascinating facets and implications of Liu Dalin’s rewriting of Chinese sexual culture, past and present, fall outside the scope of this book, it is still important to stress that there are times when Liu Dalin’s systematic cataloguing of sexual mores and practices, especially when he deals with the practice and the representation of prostitution, is so unquestioningly transparent as to lead at least this concerned scholar to wonder at which point exactly writing about prostitution becomes a pornographic act. Perhaps, more importantly, works like Liu Dalin’s exploit the ‘obscene’ face of nostalgia, by contrasting a sexually-oppressive and repressive

37 See Liu Dalin, 1993, and Liu Dalin, Zhonguo xingshi tujian (Ba Fang, 2004). Liu Dalin, also sometimes Dalin Liu or Ta-lin Liu, (born ca. 1932) is a retired professor of sociology at Shanghai University who pioneered the field of sexology in China. From 1989−1990, he helped conduct a nation-wide survey on sexual behavior and attitudes in China, not unlike the Kinsey Report in the United States. A report on the survey’s outcomes was first published in 1992 in Shanghai; in 1997, Liu published the English edition Sexual Behavior in Modern China. Also in 1997, he opened China’s first sex museum in Shanghai; after much controversy, the museum was relocated to Tongli. Liu won the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for his research in sexology in 1994. 38 S. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xviii.

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present with the often liberated past of Chinese sexual mores. In his defense, he does point out that this freedom was available almost exclusively in late imperial times to a handful of polygynists (to use Keith McMahon’s incredibly apt definition for the marital and sexual arrangements in late imperial Chinese households, fictional and otherwise). At the same time, he clearly relishes re-inventing the courtesan as one of the many characters of the sextopia of China’s past. An interesting presence in the visual gallery we are reconstructing, which stands in stark contrast to the pornification of the courtesan at the hands of book publishers and scholars alike, is to be found in the work of contemporary transnational photographers, like Reagan Louie. A Chinese American photographer living in the Bay Area, Louie recently spent six years recording and documenting the Asian sex trade. His Orientalia. Sex in Asia (2003) chronicles photographically the new faces of twenty-first-century sex work in China and, thus, constitutes a very interesting area of comparison for the depictions, fictional and otherwise, we have discussed thus far.39 The dismal atmosphere that pervades many of Louie’s pictures reveal by default the extent of the nostalgic investment in re-presentations of late Qing photographs, as well as all that these earlier images, in their later settings, hide and glamorize. The late Qing courtesan reemerges in Louie’s work as the scantily clad and often naked inhabitant of a sexual dystopia, where a customer’s dream is presented as a sex worker’s nightmare. In short, these pictures illustrate the passage from the sex appeal of modernity (for the late Qing pictures), to the sepia-colored lens of nostalgia in the picture books that aim at preserving the lost world of late Qing China, to the erotopia depicted in the historical works about prostitution, to the blatant and unapologetic sextopia evoked in works (like the Illustrated Hard Book of Chinese Sex History), finally coming to the transnational sexual dystopias presented in the work of a photographer, like Reagan Louie, where the boundary between the pornographic and social exposure is blurred in ways intentionally meant to both celebrate the prostitutes and excruciatingly question the audience’s pleasure, aesthetic and otherwise, in the sex workers bodies. It proves hard to resist the charms of contemporary photographic discourses and representations, especially when they are so power-

39

R. Louie, Orientalia. Sex in Asia (PowerHouse Books, 2003).

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fully present and visible in all sorts of venues, from the bookstores in Beijing to the museums of North America. However, one should not forget the question of what happens to courtesans and prostitutes in the translation (meaning, quite literally, the carrying across) to contemporary writing arenas. Of the many available for the purpose of our final considerations, I will move from photography to journalism because it shows how fluid the boundaries between genres has become with the advance of the technology of duplication and multiplication, just like what happened at the end of the nineteenth century when print technology allowed many genres of literary writing that had existed often quite independently (the classical Chinese journals, poetry, plays, vernacular ballads and fiction, just to mention a few) to merge into the hybrid format of the new novels serialized in journals, newspapers and magazines. In an article published by the Beijing ribao 北京日報 (“Beijing Daily”) on July 29, 2005, and reprinted in English in the Shanghai Daily on August 6, 2005, we find the tragic story of a young girl, whose virginity was sold by her mother to a costumer of her brothel for ten thousand yuan.40 It may be worthwhile to include the whole text here, as it resonates quite powerfully with many of the narrative strains we have already discussed in earlier chapters: Prosecutors in Shanghai have charged the owner of a small beauty parlor in Jiangsu Province with selling her daughter’s virginity and then forcing the 17-year old girl to have sex with the businessman who paid to deflower her. Prosecutors allege a businessman from Shanghai surnamed Chen paid the mother 10,000 yuan (US$1,235) for the right to ravish her daughter. Prosecutors wouldn’t say, however, if they have taken any legal action against the businessman. According to officials, the mother surnamed Kuang ran a hair salon in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, and several months ago she asked her daughter to work for her. The daughter, who Shanghai Daily will only identify as Xiao, worked as a shampoo girl. After her arrival in the salon, a frequent client surnamed Yan noticed the good-looking girl and asked her mother about the possibility of sleeping with her. While many small hair salons engage in prostitution, prosecutors wouldn’t say if the beauty parlor in question routinely offered sexual services. Yan offered 3,500 yuan to sleep with the girl but Kuang rejected the offer claiming her daughter was a virgin and the price was too low, prosecutors said. When Yan later told his friend Chen about

40 http://english.people.com.cn/200507/29/eng20050729_199084.html [accessed: April 2006].

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epilogue the cute teenager, the businessman rushed to the hair salon. Chen took the mother and daughter to a coffee shop in Wujiang on May 30. While Xiao waited elsewhere, Chen and her mother negotiated the price for taking her virginity. The mother wanted 16,000 yuan but Chen talked her down to 10,000 yuan, prosecutors said. Xiao knew nothing of the deal until her mother took her to Chen’s apartment in the Baoling Residential Area in Baoshan District later that night. Xiao’s mother forced the girl into Chen’s bedroom and became violent when Xiao refused to have sex with the businessman, prosecutors said. “Kuang slapped her on the face and even hit the girl with a belt,” said one prosecutor. When Xiao finally gave in and agreed to have sex, her mother waited in the dining room, he added. The next day Xiao was rushed to a local hospital with massive hemorrhaging. After she told doctors what happened, they called the police. Xiao’s mother faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if she is found guilty, according to the Baoshan District Prosecutors’ Office. [The italics are mine]

To anyone familiar with late imperial narratives of a girl’s fall into prostitution, this story is full of familiar images. The greed and callousness of the mother/madam, the wanton lust of the male customers, the innocent helplessness of the girl, the brutal deflowering, the extensive bleeding that follows it and the necessity of medical attention and healing. The new settings of the hair salon do not diminish the sense of recognition of the images and dynamics that so powerfully dominated centuries of writing about the forced entry into sex work of countless of fictional heroines. Money is mentioned over and over again and the squalid bargaining of the mother is matched only by the emphasis on the fact that she was present as her daughter was sold, beaten, abused and eventually violated. The girl, just like countless other fictional heroines had done before her, bleeds profusely but this time the narrative shows how her blood, in the changed landscape of contemporary hospitals and new policing structures, changes dramatically the ending of the story through the intervention of the police and the punishment of the culprits. This, indeed, points to the changed social settings in China, to the increased rights that even an underage girl can have vis-à-vis her mother and the men who want to sexually exploit her. In a sense, we are no longer dealing with the virtual sex slaves that crowded the pages of late Ming to late Qing brothels and whose only hope of escape from the harsh reality of brothel life was an understanding patron who would buy them out of prostitution.

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Yet, if one were to play devil’s advocate, one could still argue that the girl’s salvation comes still through the powerful masculine hand of the police, almost invariably associated with corrupt and exploitative patriarchal power in mainland Chinese media and life. In contemporary China, prostitution is one of the Six Evils (along with pornography, gambling, drugs, abduction and selling of women and children, and profiteering from superstition).41 As Joanna McMillan states in her book, the debate around the Six Evils is focused on the danger they pose “to morality and social control.”42 Pornography, prostitution and the other evils lead to sex crime and disrupt the social order and, thus, have to be eliminated. The rhetoric of this article then revamps the state and the policemen as latter day incarnations of the late imperial wenren savior of prostitutes and fallen beauty, in a role that the late Qing men had been unable to perform.43 With the dramatic political, social and economic changes that have been taking place in China over the past ten years, and with the incredible explosion of various types of sex work, the Chinese media, and especially the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), have produced a multiplicity of discourses and representations of prostitution that actually offer many examples like the one quoted above of the ways in which late imperial and late Qing brothel tropes, like the bleeding virgin, or the young woman who would rather die than become a prostitute, still retain a great deal of their cultural, political and representational power, with, of course, ever-changing resonances and consequences.44 A very important sign of the changed circumstances in which these representations circulate is that they are located in the public domain as news, meant to spread information about real crimes against real persons, true events that took place in real life. The adoption of late imperial literary tropes to retell actual events is not, in this case, as displacing as the fact that the story eventually found its permanent abode on the Asian Sex Gazette website, one of many English language sites that specialize in Chinese

41 H. Evans, Women and Sexuality in China. Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender Since 1949 (Blackwell, 1997), 235. 42 J. McMillan, Sex, Science and Morality in China (Routledge, 2006), 102. 43 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/126 [accessed on: 1 January 2007]. 44 E. Jeffreys, “Over my dead body! Media constructions of forced prostitution in the People’s Republic of China,” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (Women in Asia Special Issue) 3.2 (2006): 1−27.

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and Asian sex. So, we see, even from this very quick journey, how a late imperial story line can comfortably resists the passage of time and finds its niche through the mediation of a newspaper article, in a virtual arena where underage Chinese girls who are victims of rape can become the object of erotic consumption of global web-surfers. To return (perhaps a bit nostalgically?) to the beginning of this book, let me raise again the question of what is truly the best way to connect these tropes and representations, which straddle the fictional realm and lived experience and practice. Does nostalgia as a theoretical category and as representational mode of cultural production suffice? When the words of an article echo the words of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels, as well as those of late Ming short stories, what are we exactly witnessing? Are we ‘just’ dealing with the strength and longevity of an effective literary trope that sells well in a market as always hungry for lewd news (i.e., the raped child prostitute, the corruption of her mother and, thus, the collapse of the entire ethical system, and so on and so forth)? What are, in this sense, the economic forces, real and imagined, that propel these narratives forward in time? We have also mentioned how technology has played a huge part in preserving and expanding these representations and noticed how the visual has become a necessary dimension for any analytical (and not so analytical) work of prostitution in China and of the Chinese sex worker in the global stage. There is no doubt that we need to deploy sophisticated theoretical tools already existing and possibly to develop new ones to embrace the challenges of studying these discourses in their constant permutations. Much more remains to be said about this crucial role played by the advance of means of technological reproduction, especially in terms of the World Wide Web.45 For sure, the flight that Shanghai courtesans began in early twentieth century on the wings of literary and photographic modernity has brought them to land in multiple and, at times, contradicting and problematic spaces that reveal a lot not only about them as long lasting icons of desire, but also about the way producers, readers and consumers clothe these figures with protean meanings.

45 For example, one could include in this research trajectory not only novels by the body writers a la Wei Hui and Mian Mian, but also blogs such as that of Muzi, and Internet websites, such as the above-mentioned http://www.asiansexgazette.com.

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In this sense we can rephrase Walter Benjamin’s pronouncement that “. . . history decays into images, not stories . . .”46 to “history evolves into images AND stories,” in a way that alters the aura of the object of representation without diminishing it. From this angle, then, the courtesan’s progress can transform itself from an icon of “mystifying enchantment into one of metaphysical and political illumination.”47 So, while it is true that each epoch dreams of the one that follows it, it is also undeniable that modernity and that all future nostalgias constantly emerge from this dream of the present that simultaneously revises the past. From this foray into contemporary times, then, we can assuredly state that this book has only scratched the surface of a very rich narrative figure. No matter what means are chosen to keep narrating the courtesan’s tale, be they textual or visual, or what context her story is discussed in, be they academic or related to the entertainment industry, then, as now, courtesans had something more to offer, compared to other female fictional characters. But what exactly? I would like to argue here, as a concluding remark, that it is the kinetic properties of this figure and of her story that transport them forward, and readers and viewers along with them. The courtesan’s story is a vehicle that has moved throughout history from cart to rickshaw, from bicycle to train, from airplane to digital images. The pleasure this tale has allowed its readers has taken them, like only good stories can do, exactly to the same destination but with totally different experiences. Furthermore, it is this story, as retold by late imperial and late Qing authors, that we have tried to reconstruct, analyze and enjoy in this book.

46

Benjamin, 1999, 476. E. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, 1989), 23. 47

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INDEX A Bao (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 49, 73–74 A Qiao: portrayal in Haishanghua liezhuan, 88; portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 48–49 actors, male: courtesans’ affairs with, 136, 137; cross-dressing, 38; in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 182–84 ACWF. See All China Women’s Federation advertising, 129 affairs of courtesans, 96, 124, 125, 134, 136, 137, 138–39 Agamben, Giorgio, 58 agency, 121–22, 136 All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), 207 Ashmore, Robert, 117–18 Asian Sex Gazette website, 207–8 authors, female, 191–97 authors, male: aims, 4; on dangers of courtesans, 159–60; dreams of, 190–91; enjoyment of fights between courtesans, 92, 93; expectations of courtesans, 99; femininity ideal, 3; masculinities, 3; relationships with characters, 192; relationships with readers, 111–12; symbolism of prostitution, 3–4; voices, 99, 185–86 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 169, 198 Banqiao zaji (“Miscellaneous Records from the Wooden Bridge”), 7, 17 Bao Tianxiao, Xiaoshuo shibao, 16 baomu. See madams Barker, Francis, 146 Baudelaire, Charles, 201 Bauman, Zygmunt, 147 beauty: caizi jiaren (talent and beauty) genre, 7–8, 25, 115; of courtesans, 130, 131, 200–201; of flowers, 187; lack of, 130; poisonous, 159; supernatural origins, 31; symbols, 23; weakness and, 177. See also talented scholar and beautiful courtesan trope beggars, 47

Beijing: brothels, 68; migrant workers, 146; restaurants, 141–42. See also urban landscapes Beijing ribao (“Beijing Daily”), 205–7 Beilizhi (“Account of the Northern Quarter”), 7, 17, 115 Benjamin, Walter, 209 Bi Yurang, 112 Bian er chai (“Cap and Hairpin”), 60–61 Binswanger, Ludwig, 28 biographies, 15–16, 17, 196 blue pavilions, literature of the. See qinglou wenxue Bo Ya, 109–11 bodies: of children, 51; losing, 66–67; male, 59, 66–67, 147; of Other, 187–88; socialization of prostituted, 53–57; traditional Chinese view of, 59; transgenderal, 42, 45. See also diseases bodies, of courtesans: ambivalence toward, 169–70; as capital, 130; cleansing, 163; commodification, 87; controlled by madams, 84, 87; dead, 170–71; decay of, 123, 168, 174; diseases carried, 167, 177–79; fluids leaking from, 178; identity and, 18; money-making potential, 60, 75; outside reproductive system, 56–57, 59–60; physical abuse of, 84, 85; power, 189–90; as semi-public spaces, 79, 87; as site of sexual pleasure, 56–57, 59; as site of violent spectacle, 91–92; socialization, 59, 62; sterility, 58, 59; visibility, 189–90; vulnerability, 169–70. See also courtesans bodies, women’s: bound feet, 95; contained, 95; power, 38, 189–90; procreative potential, 56–57; of respectable women, 95; traditional Chinese view of, 59. See also shi shen (loss of the body) botanical metaphors, 186–90 bound feet, 95 Boxer uprising, 181 Boym, Svetlana, 199 Bray, Francesca, 57, 59, 159

230

index

brothels: as feminine spaces, 79–80, 104–5; functions, 23; hierarchy within, 49, 78; high-class, 69, 132; linked-mirror space, 84; lower-class, 14, 180; male roles, 78–79, 104–5; parallels to courtesan’s body, 79; as residences, 122; violence in, 80–83, 84–89; visual representations, 200; women’s power in, 45, 136. See also madams brothers, sworn, 101–2 Buddhism: enlightenment, 22, 31–32; karma, 31–32, 123, 138; representations of sick and dead courtesans, 169 Butler, Judith, 43, 44, 45 caizi jiaren (talent and beauty) genre, 7–8, 25, 115 Cao Xueqin. See Honglou meng capitalism, 142 changelings, 188 Changjidelishi (“The History of the Prostitute”), 202–3 Chen Sen. See Pinhua baojian childhoods, of courtesans, 45–52 children: bodies, 51; economic value, 46, 49–50; faked pregnancies, 160; paths into prostitution, 49–51; of sex workers, 57–58, 59, 86–87; vulnerability, 50. See also mothers Chinese Communist Party, 201 Chinese national heroines, 180–82 Chousi Zhuren. See Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu chronotopes, 23–24, 198 chuanqi (tales), 7, 16, 23, 25, 127 class: within brothels, 84; distinctions among brothels, 14, 69, 132, 180; motherhood and, 60; of prostitutes, 67–71, 132; women’s education, 114 clients. See patrons clothing: changes, 202; fashions, 128–29, 133 comic scenes, 74–75, 134–35, 165, 168, 184 commodification, 66, 76, 87, 202 Communist Party, Chinese, 201 concubines: differences from wives, 96; fictional portrayals, 123–26 Confucian values, 45, 88, 114–15, 161, 179 Confucius, 109 consumerism and consumption, 21, 142, 147, 150, 151, 155

courtesans: affairs with lovers, 96, 124, 125, 134, 136, 137, 138–39; aging, 151, 179–82; allies and friends, 100–101; appearances, 130–31; beauty, 130, 131, 200–201; bonds among, 101, 102–4; as business women, 59, 60; childhoods, 45–52; consumption of material goods, 150, 151, 155; deaths, 87, 170–76; definition, 2; distinction from prostitutes, 2; educations, 115; empowerment, 95, 97–100, 134, 135; end of careers, 149–55, 184; expenses, 151, 154–55; famous, 36–37, 49, 89, 180; fashionable clothing, 128–29, 133; fears of, 156; as healers, 158–59; as heroines, 25; identities, 50, 76, 100; incomes, 60, 91, 150–51; independence, 95, 135, 154–55; instability, 100; jealousy, 92–93; as liberated women, 4–5; life stages, 15–18; linguistic skills, 131, 181; lovesickness, 171–77; marriages, 119–20, 134, 137–38, 152–53, 156, 171, 180; mobility, 100, 122–26, 128, 146, 196, 209; modernity, 128–29, 139; moral standards, 96, 99; name changes, 50; paths into sex work, 33–38, 49–51; paths out of sex work, 149, 152–53, 182; performances, 133; reading, 18; relations among, 89–93; relations with madams, 77, 78, 80, 84–89; relations with patrons, 115–21; relations with wives of patrons, 93–99; resilience, 179–80; resourcefulness, 131; rivalries, 89, 100; sensational stories about, 89; social spaces, 122–23; as spectacles, 89, 129; stories of, 6, 12–13; supernatural origins, 32–43, 49, 52, 182; training, 45–46, 77, 84–85; twentieth-century images, 199; upper-class, 91, 158–59, 164–65; use of language, 96–100; visibility, 2, 91, 95, 129, 189–90; visual representations, 200–204; voices, 4; vulnerability, 65, 72, 91, 173–74; wealth, 115, 122, 131; in world literature, 1. See also bodies, of courtesans; patrons; prostitutes cultural evolution, 11–12 Daoism, 188 deaths: caused by courtesans, 159–60, 189; of courtesans, 170–76, 178; male gaze and, 187, 189–90; as path out of sex work, 170; of patrons, 160, 170;

index suicides, 170; through lovesickness, 171–72 defloration. See shi shen desire: consumerism and, 21; excess, 28–29; male heterosexual, 3–4; marginal sites, 24 Dianshizhai huabao (“The Dianshizhai Pictorial”), 201 differentiation, 131–33 diseases: associated with prostitution, 155–70; Buddhist representations, 169; caused by courtesans, 159–60, 169; of courtesans, 156–59, 161–63, 167, 172–74, 177–79; erotic appeal, 177; eye infections, 156–59, 161–63; healing, 156–59, 161–63; as metaphors, 162–63; modernity and, 179; moral, 155–56, 167–68; perceptions of, 167; psychological and social roots, 175–76; venereal, 162, 163–69, 178, 189. See also medicine Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy, 5 drama. See actors; plays; theater “Dream of the Red Chamber”. See Honglou meng dreams: of authors and readers, 190–91; narratives, 21–23, 24–25, 26, 27, 29, 152, 154, 176; nightmares, 173–74 drugs, 29 Du Shiniang, 119, 121 Dudbridge, G., 12 economic exchanges: in brothels, 88–89, 118; children as economic assets, 46, 49–50; competition among courtesans, 90, 92, 93; consumerism and consumption, 21, 142, 147, 150, 151, 155; of courtesans, 58–59, 60, 91, 121–22, 139, 150–51 education, of women, 113–14, 115 empowerment. See power enlightenment, 22, 31–32 Epstein, Maram, 83 erotic prints, 202–3 Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (“Strange Events Witnessed During the Last Twenty Years”), Wu Jianren, 129 examinations, 25, 117 eyes: licking to heal infections, 156–59, 161–63; metaphors, 162 family romance imperative, 144–45 Farquar, Judith, 57 fashions, 128–29, 133

231

Faure, B., 169, 171 femininity, 3, 100 feminism, 4–5, 194 Feng Lin (Fengyue meng), 88, 158–59 Feng Menglong. See Maiyoulang du zhan huakui Fengshen yanyi (“The Investiture of the Gods”), 35–36 Fengyue meng (“Illusion of Romance”), 13, 170; cheating of client, 160; diseases, 163–64; faking of loss of virginity, 75; healings, 158–59; prostitute as bread-winner, 88; realism, 14; supernatural elements, 26 filial duties, 88, 161 flowers: sea of, in dream, 22, 176; symbolism, 23, 186–90 foreigners, 127–28 Foucault, Michel, 27 Freud, Sigmund, 144, 189 Fu Caiyun (Niehaihua): affairs during marriage, 96, 125; empowerment, 135; historical events and, 193; life story, 180, 181; marriage, 125, 139–40; mobility, 124–26, 128, 139–40; Pan Jinlian and, 82–83; personality, 132; sexual aggressiveness, 130–31; social position, 97–99; visibility, 129 Fu Caiyun (Sai Jinhua, Wang Xiaoyu), 193–94 Fu Yulian (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 153, 180, 183 Furth, Charlotte, 57, 59 gender: behaviors, 42; confusion with sex, 41, 43; identities, 42, 186; performance, 42–43, 51; of space, 56. See also men; women Gilbert, S. M., 177 Guan Yu, 101–2 Guanyin, 31, 182 Guardian gods. See Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu Gubar S., 177 Guizhen (Yuguihong), 68–71, 72 Haishang fanhuameng (“The Luxurious Dream of the Flowers of Shanghai”), Sun Jiazhen, 14, 86–87, 93–94, 145, 166–67, 168 Haishanghua liezhuan/Haishang hua (“Chronicle of the Flowers of Shanghai”), Han Ziyun, 13; courtesans, 17, 90–92, 150, 151–52, 153; dream scenes, 22–23, 27, 152,

232

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176; ending, 153; realism, 9; Shanghai setting, 27–30; sojourners, 145; sworn sisterhood, 103; tragic romance, 172–77; violence in, 85, 88; wives of patrons, 94–95 Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu (“The Marvelous Book of the Four Guardian Gods of the Famous Courtesans of Shanghai”); Wu Jianren, 14; actors and actresses, 182–84; appearances of courtesans, 130–31; changes in courtesans’ relations, 136, 137–39; childhood of courtesan, 45–52; comic scenes, 134–35, 184; courtesans, 131, 132, 133; courtesans’ initial steps, 33–38, 72–74; deaths caused by courtesans, 160; declines of courtesans, 153–54; gender and sex, 38–45, 51; life stories of courtesans, 17, 121–22, 123–26, 180; loss of virginity, 72–74; venereal diseases, 164–65 Han Ziyun. See Haishanghua liezhuan Hanan, Patrick, 9–10 hanfu. See shrews health. See diseases; medicine Henriot, Christian, 104–5, 149 Henry, Eric, 111 hierarchies, 2, 48, 49, 78, 132–33. See also class Hofer, Johannes, 197 homelessness, 147 homosociality, 3–4, 112, 113, 117, 164 Hong Jun, 124, 125 Honglou meng (“Dream of the Red Chamber”), Cao Xueqin, 8, 12, 23, 30, 60, 174, 198 Honig, Emily, 46 Hu Baoyu: portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 49, 76; portrayal in Jiuweihu, 75–76 Hu Yue’e (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 49, 50, 73–74, 93–94, 133, 138–39, 160 hua. See flowers huaben, 8, 69, 74 Huang Liang Meng (“The Yellow Millet Dream”), 23 Idema, W. L., 79–80 identities: of courtesans, 50, 76, 100; gender, 42, 186; new, 76 immortals, 26, 30, 32, 182 intertextuality, 12–13

“In the Spring Breeze a Crowd of Famous Courtesans Mourn Liu the Seventh,” 120 invalidism, 177 Japan, Ryukyu Islands, 123–24, 125 Jia Baoyu, 30, 198 Jia Ming (Fengyue meng), 158–59 Jiang Xingge chong hui zhenzhu shan (“Jiang Xingge Re-encounters the Pearl-sawn Skirt”), 74 Jiangbei opera, 47 Jiangbei region, 46–47 Jin Buhuan (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 34, 73 Jin Hongjun (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 34, 35, 40, 45, 123–26, 183 Jin Xiaobao, 37; portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 130; portrayal in Jiuweigui, 92–93 Jin Yixiang (Qinglou meng), 26, 30, 132, 156–58, 162–63, 182 Jin Ping Mei (“The Plum in the Golden Vase”), 15, 24, 68, 71–72, 74, 81–82, 155 Jin Yun Qiao zhuan (“The Story of Jin, Yun, and Qiao”), 13, 67, 80, 81, 119–20 Jiu meng chong jing (“Awakening of Old Dreams”), 202 Jiuweigui (“The Nine-tailed Turtle”), Zhang Chunfan, 9, 14; courtesans, 133–34, 180–82; death of courtesan, 170–71; fight between courtesans, 92–93; male hero, 136, 140–43; moral standards of courtesans, 99; realism, 141; violent loss of virginity, 75 Jiuweihu (“The Nine-tailed Fox”), 75–76 karma, 31–32, 123, 138 kinship, 78, 87 Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 187 Lao Zhaopian (“Old Photos”), 201–2 Li Boyuan. See Wenming xiaoshi Li Shizhen, 158 Li Shufang (Haishanghua liezhuan), 172–77 Li Wa, 12, 158, 166–67 Li Wenxian (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 72–73, 131 Li Yu, Rouputuan, 32 Lienü zhuan, Liu Xiang, 15

index Liezi, 109–10 Li ji (“The Book of Rites”), 108–9 Lin Daiyu: diseases, 164–65, 177–78; fame, 37; portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 37–38, 49, 130, 153–54, 164–65, 183; portrayal in Honglou meng, 174; portrayal in Jiuweigui, 133–34; portrayal in Qinglou meng, 30; portrayal in Xin Shitouji, 198 literary magazines, 200 literati: economic and political power, 118; patrons of, 118, 120; women in families, 114. See also scholars; talented scholar and beautiful courtesan trope literature of the blue pavilions. See qinglou wenxue Liu Bannong, Sai Jinhua benshi, 17, 194 Liu Bei, 101–2 Liu Dalin, Zhongguo Xingshi tujian, 203–4 Liu Guniang (Yuguihong), 68, 72, 80 Liu Xiang, Lienü zhuan, 15 liumin, 144–47 loss of the body. See shi shen Louie, Reagan, Orientalia, Sex in Asia, 204 love: Confucian values, 114–15; dangers, 188–89; in dreams, 23; of men, 145; pathological, 178 lovesickness, 171–77, 188 loyalty, 102–4 Lu Lanfen: death, 170–71; fame, 37; portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 37–38, 138–39, 183; portrayal in Jiuweigui, 170–71 Lu Xun, 9, 10–11, 14, 50 Lüshi Chunqiu (“The Spring and Autumn Annals of Mister Lü”), 109 madams: cruelty, 80, 81, 105; fictional portrayals, 68, 71, 80; former prostitutes as, 180; mothers of sex workers, 45–46, 77, 87; power, 84, 105; relationships with courtesans, 77, 78, 80, 84–89; stereotypes, 80; terms of address, 78; training courtesans, 45–46, 77, 84–85 magic, 26, 188 maids. See servants Maiyoulang du zhan huakui (“The Oil-Peddler Wins the Queen of

233

Flowers”), 60–61, 62–63, 64–65, 69, 79, 119, 161 male actors. See actors male authors. See authors, male marketplace, 142, 147, 202, 208 marriages: arranged, 118; companionate, 118; of courtesans, 119–20, 134, 137–38, 152–53, 156, 171, 180; polygamy, 204; prevented, 176–77; redemption through, 120, 156; of scholar and courtesan, 119–20; social mobility through, 131. See also concubines; wives masculinity: of authors, 3; modernity and, 29–30, 186; of patrons, 143; of readers, 186; of scholars, 117; violence and, 81, 83; women’s relationships and, 77–78 May Fourth intellectuals, 10, 126–27 McMillan, Joanna, 207 medicine, traditional Chinese, 59, 158, 159, 176. See also diseases Meiniang (Maiyoulang du zhan huakui), 61, 62–63, 64–65, 69, 79, 119, 161 memoirs, 3, 7, 17 men: anxiety, 118–19; bodies, 59, 66–67, 147; friendships among, 108–11; gender identities, 186; as healers, 160–63; homosociality, 3–4, 112, 113, 117, 164; longevity exercises, 188; loss of virginity as boys, 75–76; prostitutes, 65–66, 164; readers, 4, 186; roles in brothels, 78–79, 104–5; schizeurs, 143–44; sworn brothers, 101–2; victimization, 60; violence of, 81, 83. See also authors, male; patrons; scholars merchants, 118, 141 Ming literature: huaben, 8, 69, 74; novels, 35–36; plays, 7, 23; pornography, 32, 67–71; as qinglou wenxue, 7; short stories, 7, 120; stories of courtesans, 51, 123 Ming Yue Heshang Du Liu Cui (“The Monk Bright Moon Carries Across Liu Cui”), 31 mirrors and mirroring, 97, 146, 186, 192 misogyny, 134 Mo Lihai (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 35, 40, 41, 48–49, 133 Mo Lihong (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 35, 39, 41, 49 Mo Liqing (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 35, 38–43, 45, 121, 123

234

index

Mo Lishou (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 46–48, 131 mobility: of courtesans, 100, 122–26, 128, 146, 196, 209; of liumin, 144–47; of migrants, 46–47, 90, 144, 146, 147; of patrons, 141–42; social, 122–23, 131, 145–46; symbolism, 146; travel, 123–24, 125, 126, 131, 143 modernity: alienation and, 179; of courtesans, 128–29, 139; disease and, 179; fashions, 128–29, 133; in late Qing fiction, 126–28; masculinity and, 29–30, 186; material culture, 128; nostalgia and, 201, 209; of patrons, 142–43, 146; of Shanghai, 29–30; westernized, 128. See also urban landscapes mothers: faked pregnancies, 160; selling daughters’ virginity, 205–7; training daughters as sex workers, 45–46, 77, 84–85; upper-class women, 60. See also children; madams Mudan ting (“The Peony Pavilion”), 23 music, 108–11, 113–14, 115 narcissism, 76, 146, 151, 191 nationalism, 180–82 newspapers, 129, 195, 205–7, 208 Niehaihua (“Flowers in an Ocean of Sin”), Zeng Pu, 14; courtesans, 96, 97–99, 124–26, 128, 129, 130–31, 132, 196; as historical novel, 193; magic elements, 26; popularity, 15; scholars as husbands, 139–40; violence in, 82–83 Niu Aiqing (Qinglou meng), 156–58, 160, 161–63 nostalgia: in Chinese literature, 198; courtesans and, 17, 132, 198–209; definition, 197; as historical emotion, 199; marketing, 202, 208; modernity and, 201, 209; obscene face, 203–4; patrons and, 146; saudade, 197–98; for scholar-courtesan bond, 132 novels: genre classifications, 10; hero’s journey, 144–47; historical context, 12; legacy of late Qing, 30–31; male readers, 4; narrative structures, 196–97; popular, 15; as qinglou wenxue, 7; readers, 4, 85, 89, 111–12, 186, 190–91; realism, 9, 14, 24; sentimental, 9; serialized publication, 8, 14–15; talent and beauty (caizi

jiaren) genre, 7–8, 25, 115; themes from earlier periods, 11, 12, 30–31; travel themes, 126; xiaxie xiaoshuo (courtesan novels), 9, 10–11, 37. See also authors opera: actors and actresses, 182–84; Jiangbei, 47 opium, 29, 170 orgasm, as small death, 32–33 Orientalia, Sex in Asia, Louie, 204 orphans, 145–47 Owen, Xiaofei Tian, 71 Pan Jinlian (Jin Ping Mei), 68, 71, 81–82, 83, 131 passion. See qing patriarchy, 56, 123, 134, 187, 207 patrons: bodies, 147; changes in relations with prostitutes, 136–43, 146; cheating of, 160; courtesans’ fights over, 92–93; deaths caused by courtesans, 160, 170; dependence on, 91; expectations of courtesans, 137; fears of courtesans, 156; foreigners, 128; as healers, 160–63; hearts broken by prostitutes, 136; income from, 58–59, 60, 91, 150–51; loss of, 91; modern, 142–43, 146; money spent in brothels, 78–79, 139; power, 136, 140–41; as saviors, 119–20, 139; as temporary inhabitants of brothels, 78–79; victimization, 138; wives, 93–99; as zhiyin (soul mates), 115–21 People’s Republic of China, establishment of, 201 performances: of courtesans, 38, 133; gender, 42–43, 51; of scholars, 117–18. See also theater photography, 129, 199, 200, 201–2, 204–5 Pinhua baojian (“The Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers”), Chen Sen, 9, 13, 14, 164 plays: Ming, 7, 23; supernatural origins of beautiful women, 31; Yuan, 7, 31, 62, 102–3, 119, 131. See also actors; theater plurality, 127 poets: affinity with readers, 111; performances, 117–18 pofu. See shrews poisons, 159, 170 polygamy, 204

index pornography, 6, 51, 199, 203, 207; late Ming, 32 postcards, 202 poverty, 46, 47, 150–55 power: in client-prostitute relationship, 136; empowerment of courtesans, 95, 97–100, 134, 135; of literati, 118; of madams, 84, 105; of patrons, 136, 140–41; violence and, 88–89; of women in brothels, 45, 88–89, 105, 136; of women’s bodies, 38, 189–90 prostitutes: children of, 57–58, 59, 86–87; collection of clients’ capital, 58–59, 60; comic scenes, 165; in contemporary China, 205–7; definition, 2; distinction from courtesans, 2; greed, 133–34; hierarchy, 2, 48, 49, 132–33; lowerclass, 91, 132, 166; male, 65–66, 164; migrants, 90; relations among, 77, 89–93; shrews, 83–84; soiled social status, 161–62; stories of, 6; terms of address, 78; violent initiations, 62, 80; visibility, 2; vulnerability, 65, 72. See also courtesans prostitution: cultural importance, 197; diseases associated with, 155–70; scholarship on, 203; symbolism, 3–4 publishing industry, 8, 199, 200–201. See also newspapers qianzi xiaoshuo (novels of social exposure), 50 qing (passion), 23, 178, 188–89 Qinglou ji (“Memoirs from the Blue Bowers”), 7, 17 Qinglou meng (“Dream of the Blue Mansions”), Yu Da, 13; dream scenes, 30; healing eye disease, 156–58, 160, 161–63; nostalgia, 132; scholars, 116; as sentimental novel, 9; supernatural elements, 26, 182; sworn sisterhood, 103 qinglou wenxue (literature of the blue pavilions), 6–7; differences for xiaxie xiaoshuo, 9; genres, 7–9; legacy, 191–97; literary flux and, 11–12; portrayals of madams, 80 Qingqi (“Love Marvels”), 60–61, 63–64, 65–66, 69 queerness, 169 Rabelais, François, 169 rape, 61–64, 68, 70, 72, 75–76

235

readers: courtesans as, 18; desire for shocking stories, 85, 89; dreams of, 190–91; male, 4; masculinity of, 186; pleasure, 190–91; relationships with authors, 111–12 realism, 9, 14 renqing xiaoshuo (sentimental novels), 9 Republican Era, 62, 179 retribution, 123, 138, 155, 163, 164 romantic literature, 26–27 Ropp, Paul S., 120 Rouputuan (“The Carnal Prayer Mat”), Li Yu, 32 Ryukyu Islands, 123–24, 125 sadism, 81–82 Sai Jinhua: career, 132–33; as concubine, 124; death, 196; fame, 37, 180; as immortal, 182; as national heroine, 180–82; novels by women on, 191–96; portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 35, 37–38, 180, 183; portrayal in Jiuweigui, 180–82; twentieth-century novels and plays on, 196. See also Fu Caiyun; Niehaihua Sai Jinhua, Wang Xiaoyu, 191–94, 196 Sai Jinhua, Zhao Shuxia, 191, 192, 194–96 Sai Jinhua benshi (“The Interview of Sai Jinhua), Liu Bannong, 17, 194 San Francisco, Chinatown, 167, 169 satire, 51, 93, 99, 182 saudade, 197–98 savior syndrome, 107–8, 119–20, 139, 153, 163, 207 schizeurs, 143–44 scholars: dreams of, 24; examinations, 25, 117; fictional characters, 24; initiation journeys, 25, 117; performances, 117–18; talent and beauty (caizi jiaren) genre, 7–8, 25; travel, 124; wenren, 81, 115–16, 138, 139, 207. See also literati; talented scholar and beautiful courtesan trope scopophilia, 70, 92 se (color and appearance), 95 se (lust), 134, 187 Sedgewick, Eve K., 112 sensationalism, 85, 89 servants, 81–83, 84, 86, 88 sex: changes from male to female, 38–42, 43, 44; gender and, 41, 43, 44, 51

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sex tourism, 141–42 sexuality: bodies and, 43–44, 59–60; dangers, 188–89; desire, 3–4, 24, 28–29; disease and, 162–63, 170, 177; illustrated histories, 203–4; orgasm as small death, 32–33; passivity, 71; pleasure as goal, 59–60, 76; reproduction and, 56–57, 59–60; transformative power, 32, 183–84; in twenty-first century, 204–8; weak women, 162 sex workers. See courtesans; prostitutes Shah, Nayan, 167, 168 Shan Fulang Quanzhou jiaou (“Shan Fulang Finds His Perfect Mate in Quanzhou”), 69 Shanghai: dreamspaces and, 26, 27, 29; foreign concession, 47; living conditions, 168–69; migrants, 46–47, 144, 147; modernity, 29–30; novels set in, 27–30; publishing industry, 8; pursuit of pleasure in, 29–30; sex industry, 30; sojourners, 144, 145–47. See also urban landscapes Shanghai Daily, 205 Shen Xiaohong (Haishanghua liezhuan), 90–92 Shen Xiaoqing (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu): appearance, 41, 130; entry into sex work, 34, 45; as incarnation of Mo Liqing, 35, 39, 40, 41–42; reincarnation as Shi Chunfei, 132, 138; suicide, 34–35, 123, 138 Shi Chunfei (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 132; beauty, 130; entry into life of courtesan, 46, 49, 73; fame, 180; loss of virginity, 73; marriage, 123, 137–38, 160, 183; mobility, 123–26, 128; vulnerability, 50 Shiji, Sima Qian, 15, 55, 113 Shijing (“The Classic of Poetry”), 110 shi shen (loss of the body), 53–57; alienation and, 70–71; comic scenes, 74–75; damage to body, 72–73; faking of loss of virginity, 75; fictional portrayals, 54, 69, 72; outside marriage, 66–67; social degradation and, 67; violence of, 61, 69, 70, 72, 75–76, 80; of young prostitutes, 58–60 Shitouji (“The Story of the Stone”). See Honglou meng Shi weigui (“The Ten-tailed Turtle”), Sun Jiazhen, 14 shrews, 83–84, 97

sickness. See diseases Sima Qian: letter to Ren’an, 111–12; Shiji, 15, 55, 113; on zhiyin, 111–13 Sima Xiangru, 55, 113 sisterhood, sworn, 101, 102–4 Six Evils, 207 social changes, 132–33, 134, 206. See also modernity; patriarchy social degradation, 67. See also class solidarity, 102–4 Sommer, Matthew H., 66, 97 soul mates. See zhiyin spaces: feminine, 79–80, 104–5; gendering, 56; rooms of dead courtesans, 175; social, 122–23; topo-ethical dimensions, 56, 79, 142. See also urban landscapes speed, of courtesans, 123, 139, 196 suicides, 170 Sun Jiazhen. See Haishang fanhuameng; Shi weigui supernatural characters, 31, 32–38, 182 supernatural environment, 26 sworn brothers, 101–2 sworn sisters, 101, 102–4 syphilis, 164–69, 178. See also venereal diseases talent and beauty (caizi jiaren) genre, 7–8, 25, 115 talented scholar and beautiful courtesan trope: emergence, 7–8, 25–26; healing by woman, 158–59; in Niehaihua, 130; in novels, 7–8; in Qinglou meng, 132; reversal, 139–40; savior syndrome, 107–8, 119–20, 153, 163, 207; sentiment and, 107–8; tragic romances, 172–77; unequal status, 120–21; zhiyin paradigm, 115–21 Tang literature, 6, 8, 12. See also chuanqi Tao Muning, 6 Tao Yufu (Haishanghua liezhuan), 172–77 technological advances, 199, 200, 205, 208 theater: actors and actresses, 38, 136, 137, 182–84; Jiangbei opera, 47; staging, 38. See also plays topo-ethical dimensions, 56, 79, 142 transgenderal bodies, 42, 45 transgenderal voices, 185–86

index travel: by concubines, 123–24, 125, 131; in late Qing fiction, 126; by men, 124, 143 Traviata (Verdi), 174 tropes: in Chinese literature, 5; courtesan representations, 5; visual, 201. See also talented scholar and beautiful courtesan trope urban landscapes: anxiety associated with, 168–69; consumerism and, 21; courtesans’ social scenes, 122; liumin, 143–47; migrants, 46–47, 144, 146, 147; newspapers, 129. See also Shanghai vampirism, 156, 158, 163 venereal diseases, 163–69, 178, 189 Verdi, Giuseppe, Traviata, 174 violence: in brothels, 80–83, 84–89; fights between courtesans, 90–92; masculinity and, 81, 83; power and, 88–89; of shi shen (loss of the body), 61, 69, 70, 72, 75–76, 80 virgins: readers’ interest in, 51; sold by mothers, 205–7; terminology, 56. See also shi shen (loss of the body) visibility, of courtesans, 2, 91, 95, 129, 189–90 voyeurs, 190–91 vulnerability: of bodies, 169–70; of children, 50; of courtesans, 65, 72, 91, 173–74 Waldersee, Count, 125, 181 Wang, David Der-Wei, 126 Wang Liansheng (Haishanghua liezhuan), 90–91 Wang Xiaoyu, Sai Jinhua, 191–94, 196 water metaphor, 11–12 websites, 207–8 Wei Zhongxian, 68, 71, 81 Wenming xiaoshi (“A Brief History of Enlightenment”), Li Boyuan, 14, 200 wenren (scholar), 81, 115–16, 138, 139, 207. See also scholars wenyan romance tradition, 69 West, S. H., 79–80 Wittig, Monique, 44, 45 wives: differences from concubines, 96; femininity, 100; moral standards, 97; of patrons, 93–99; shrewish, 97. See also marriages

237

women: authors, 191–97; dowry chests, 122; economic dependence, 114; education of, 113–14, 115; femininity, 3, 100; invalidism, 177; life stages, 15–17; power in brothels, 45, 105, 136; reproductive role, 56–57; respectable, 94, 95, 97; sphere of, 79–80; sworn sisters, 101, 102–4; travel, 124; voices, 4; weak, 162, 177; work of, 60. See also bodies, women’s; courtesans; mothers; prostitutes; shi shen (loss of the body); wives woodblock prints, 201 writers. See authors Wu Jianren, Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang, 129. See also Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu xiangsi bing (lovesickness), 171–77, 188 Xiao Tao (Haishang fanhuameng), 86–87 Xiao Shuo Shi Bao, 200 xiaxie xiaoshuo (courtesan novels), 9, 10–11, 37 Xin Shanghai (“New Shanghai”), 14, 165–66 Xin Shitouji (“The New Story of the Stone”), 12, 198 Yan Ruyu (Haishang fanhuameng), 168 yinfu. See shrews Yu Bo Ya shuai qin xie zhiyin, 110–11 Yu Chun-fang, 31 Yu Da. See Qinglou meng Yu Xuanji, 117 Yuan Shi Tian Zun (Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu), 38, 40, 183, 184 Yuan plays: courtesans, 131; as qinglou wenxue, 7; supernatural origins of beautiful women, 31; zaju, 62; Zhao Pan’er jiu fengchen, 7, 102–3, 119 Yuguihong (“Rouge in the Jade Boudoir”), 13, 14, 67–71, 72, 80, 81 zaju plays, 62 Zeng Pu, 192. See also Niehaihua Zhaifan (Qingqi), 61, 63–64, 65–66, 69 Zhang Chunfan. See Jiuweigui Zhang Fei, 101–2 Zhang Huizhen (Haishanghua liezhuan), 90–92 Zhang Qiugu (Jiuweigui), 92, 136, 140–43, 170–71, 181

238

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Zhang Shuyu: fame, 37; portrayal in Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu, 37–38, 183; portrayal in Jiuweigui, 92–93, 160 Zhang Small Feet (Yuguihong), 68, 71, 80 zhanghui xiaoshuo (linked-chapter narrative), 14 Zhao Erbao (Haishanghua liezhuan), 150, 151–52, 153 Zhao Pan’er jiu fengchen (“The Demirep Rescues the Demimonde”), 7, 102–3, 119 Zhao Puzhai (Haishanghua liezhuan), 22, 28–29, 145, 150, 151, 152 Zhao Shuxia, Sai Jinhua, 191, 192, 194–96

Zhen Yuanhe, 167 zhiguai, 16 zhiyin (soul mate): courtesan’s search for, 119–20; disintegration of bond, 144, 147, 153; idealized, 132; men and women, 113, 172; men as, 108–11, 112–13; patrons as, 115–21; rhetoric of, 104, 119–20, 121; tragic romances, 172 Zhong Ziqi, 109–11 Zhongguo Xingshi tujian (“An Illustrated Mirror of Chinese Sexual History”), Liu Dalin, 203–4 Zhuo Wenjun, 113 Zui Xihu Xinyue Zhuren. See Qingqi