Romancing the Internet : Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance [1 ed.] 9789004259720, 9789004222052

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Romancing the Internet

Women and Gender in China Studies Edited by

Grace S. Fong

McGill University Editorial Board

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

VOLUME 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/wgcs

Romancing the Internet Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance

By

Jin Feng

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feng, Jin, 1971Romancing the internet : producing and consuming Chinese web romance / by Jin Feng. pages cm. -- (Women and gender in China studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-22205-2 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-25972-0 (e-book) 1. Literature and the Internet--China. 2. Chinese literature--21st century--History and criticism. 3. Romanticism--China. 4. Hypertext literature, Chinese--History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.I64F46 2013 895.1’30850906--dc23 2013026462

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1877-5772 ISBN 978-90-04-22205-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25972-0 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. 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. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To all fans of Chinese Web romance

CONTENTS Acknowledgments������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ix Introduction: This is Not Your Mother’s Qiong Yao��������������������������������������������1  Fan Production��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������4  Interdisciplinary Improvisation��������������������������������������������������������������������������9  Organization of Chapters���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 15 1 A Short Genealogy����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 17  The Politics and Economics of Web Publishing������������������������������������������ 21  The Popular Mind������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 28  Stud, Farming, and Magic-Space Fiction: Characteristics  and Trends�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 35  The Pleasure of Repetition�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 41  Romantic Love with Chinese Characteristics���������������������������������������������� 47 2 Addicted to Beauty���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 53  Three Players and the Text�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 59  Textual Poaching�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 68  Time Travel in Danmei Fiction������������������������������������������������������������������������� 70  The Androgynous Reader���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 72  Conclusion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 80 3 “Men Conquer the World and Women Save Mankind”����������������������������� 85  Clues from Interviews����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 87  The Supreme Heroine����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 91  Three Princesses��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 94  Conclusion�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������105 4 Rewriting Classics, Righting Wrongs������������������������������������������������������������109  Tricks of the Trade���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������110  Rewriting Classics����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������116  Danmei Fanfic�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������123  Anti–Qiong Yao Fanfic�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������126  Conclusion�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������136

viii contents 5 How to Make Mr. Right�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������139  Seeking Mr. Right?���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������140  The Ideal Hero����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������142  Who Is More “Economical and Serviceable”?��������������������������������������������150  Reading Zhifou: Strategies and Negotiations����������������������������������������������156  Making Mr. Right������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������160  Conclusion�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������164 Coda: What Does Chinese Web Romance Do?�����������������������������������������������167  Remaking Popular Romance��������������������������������������������������������������������������168  Creating the Self in a Crowd���������������������������������������������������������������������������170  A New Woman Born of the E-Age?���������������������������������������������������������������172 Appendix: Glossary of Chinese and Japanese Characters���������������������������177 Bibliography�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������181 Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������191

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea for this book first came to me in fall 2007, when I presented a paper on Web-based Chinese time-travel romances at the international conference “Beyond the Text,” held at Birmingham University in England. I had started to read Chinese-language Web romances only half a year before, but somehow got up the nerve to submit a proposal to the conference organizers. From that point on, many people helped to shape this project. Anouk Lang, one of the organizers for the Birmingham conference and later editor of a volume of the conference proceedings, encouraged my research of Web literature. Maria Tapias, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Grinnell College, revealed to me the methodological and ethical issues involved in ethnography in her course, “Ethnographic Research Methods in Complex Societies.” Liyan Chen, Grinnell College alumna, alerted me to sources on state control of the Chinese Internet. Kirk Denton, editor of the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, arranged for the evaluation and publication of my article, “Addicted to Beauty.” Eric Selinger and Sarah Franz, former presidents of the International Association for Popular Romance Studies, published my article “Men Conquer the World, Women Save Mankind” in the online Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and warmly welcomed me to this new academic field. Colleagues and commentators, whose names are too numerous to list fully here, gave me valuable feedback at academic conferences where I presented my findings. I especially thank Carolyn FitzGerald, who has patiently read through various versions of the chapters in this book, and supported me faithfully over the years. I thank Brill for showing interest in this potentially risky scholarly project. I also appreciate the anonymous reviewers’ and the editorial board’s thoughtful comments on my manuscript. Anthony Cheung carefully copyedited my manuscript initially. Gene McGarry proved himself an exemplary copyeditor: talented, meticulous, and highly efficient. Grinnell College awarded me a mid-cycle study leave to complete the revisions of my manuscript in the academic year 2012–13, along with a Furbush Scholarship to cover research expenses. Various Web publishers, Web

x acknowledgments forum administrators, and Internet users generously allowed me to interview them about their online experiences. Last but not least, fans of Chinese Web romance have inspired me with their enthusiasm, creativity, and sense of fun on the Chinese Internet. Without them, this book would not have come into being in the first place.

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS NOT YOUR MOTHER’S QIONG YAO Yaya Bay (Yaya wan 丫丫湾) is a U.S.-based Chinese-language website that circulates novels, especially popular romances, that were originally published on other websites. The site also hosts a lively discussion forum where romance fans converse about the novels as well as other topics. A transcript of a sequence of comments posted by four different users on Sunday, March 6, 2011, between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m., Beijing time, illustrates how a typical exchange may develop: This novel is full of dog blood [gouxue 狗血, clichés] and thunderclaps [tianlei 天雷, ridiculously bad plots]! Only idiots would like reading such a stupid novel. We read idiotic novels precisely because we don’t want to exhaust our brain. Real life is hard enough as it is, so why shouldn’t we find some painless pleasure through reading? It is misguided to hope to realize your ideals through others’ writings. Well, I am just taking a breather here myself. I saw many policemen and some foreign journalists at X, but no protesters in sight. The foreign journalists claimed that they got pushed around, but who wants them there anyways? Oh, I shouldn’t have mentioned this. We are only discussing novels here, not politics.1

Within the space of half an hour, a series of female readers from across the globe converged to critique the plot of a popular romance, debate the purpose of romance reading in general, and report on the day’s events. In the last comment, a reader residing in mainland China alluded to Chinese people’s responses to the “Jasmine Revolution” in the Arab world, venting her nationalist feelings against perceived foreign interference while displaying conscious self-censorship by withholding her location. Throughout the discussion the readers used a Web patois made up of elements lifted from both official discourses and popular culture and adapted to suit their various discursive needs, creating a campy humor in the process. 1 Users’ comments on Yi Qianchong’s Xi ying men (Happiness filled a home), accessed March 10, 2011, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=105440&extra =&page=251.

2 introduction The online exchanges at Yaya Bay reveal the varied sociopolitical environments and personal experiences that shape Chinese women’s consump­ tion of Web romances. They also raise crucial questions regarding reader’s experiences on the Internet: How is the Web influencing their views about good literature? How do they deal with social norms and current political issues on the Web? The enthusiasm demonstrated by their commentaries raises one further question: What personal, social, cultural, and political benefits do they hope to reap through reading, interpreting, and discussing  popular romances in the company of their anonymous fellow users? Although privileging literary and discourse analysis, this audience-focused study of Chinese Web romance also integrates relevant sociological data to distill these and other critical questions down to three basic issues: How is the Internet transforming contemporary reading and writing practices? How is it facilitating the production of new forms of popular romance? And, ultimately, how does women’s writing and reading of online literature help them to reinvent their gender and cultural identities? Chinese women frequently appropriate from and reinvent existing cultural products on and through the Internet, displaying a common trend among authors and readers of Chinese Web literature. I show through this book how Chinese women create cultural capital for themselves by employing various strategies of online rewriting, such as producing fan fiction (fanfic), to reconfigure popular romances. Web romance thus serves as a window for me to examine both the narrative patterns and ideologies of Chinese popular literature and the social power that the Internet engenders in contemporary China. Chinese women’s production and consumption of Web-based popular romance yields valuable sociological documents whose contents provide revealing glimpses into the popular mind and cultural landscape of contemporary China. I look at the unique linguistic and narrative forms of both the fictional works and the exchanges surrounding them, as well as those of cartoons, audio files, and video clips created by authors and readers to accompany specific works. Drawing on my research as a participantobserver, I situate romances, commentaries, and discussions in their multimedia environs while using oral interviews of Web users to examine the significance of these artifacts of popular culture. I thus explore how larger sociocultural forces, such as the economics of romance publishing and state control of the Internet, shape the content and audience of Chinese Web romance. Web users’ lasting influence on Chinese fiction awaits long-term investigation, but current trends in Chinese Web literature have yielded

introduction

3

illuminating insights. Web romance, in particular, reflects a host of new phenomena in contemporary reading and writing practices in the age of the Internet. As the fourth user’s remarks about protesters and journalists show, commentators often put their own spin on the news they deliver by quoting and reframing current affairs, even though the focus of their discussion is ostensibly fiction. Second, users engage in a flow of active and immediate exchanges of feelings and ideas, whether they are the readers or authors of the work under discussion. This frequently leads to a more egalitarian relationship between authors and readers (and among readers themselves) than print media allows, at times effecting a reversal of roles of authority and subordination, a change in conventional definitions of reader and author, and, eventually, a transformation of traditional gender norms. As I have mentioned in a study of Jinjiang 晋江 Literature City, China’s largest website devoted to contemporary women’s Web fiction, readers start to write fanfic, spinoffs, or parodies of the original work and become authors themselves.2 Moreover, because of this lively circulation of thoughts and feelings, the text remains in a continual state of flux as authors respond to feedback from readers by changing, revising, or even deleting their works. Rather than a sealed and self-sufficient universe, Web fiction becomes an open forum for the negotiation of meaning between various agents. Further, users’ online production has shaped and in turn been influenced by the multimedia environment it inhabits. Not only are users recipients of texts, images, and sounds on the Internet, they also use their own imagination and creativity to contribute to its vibrancy. Their production and dissemination of a “Web language,” made up of heterogeneous elements lifted from their daily life as well as from foreign languages, indicates both irreverence toward official discourses and a sense of community. Moreover, even when reading linear (as most Chinese Web romances are) rather than hypertext novels, they create images, music clips, and short movies to annotate and enhance their reading experiences. These artifacts make it possible for them to depict their ideal heroes and heroines, illustrate their interpretations, parody the original work, satirize related social phenomena, and, by sharing with their fellow readers, generate a community whose members are bound by their enjoyment of both the romance and their own responses to it. Indeed, their creative reshaping of the original work often comes to overshadow the presumably primary goal

2 Jin Feng, “Addicted to Beauty: Web-based Danmei Popular Romance,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 1–41.

4 introduction of reading the romance itself. Interestingly, in most cases these women recycle textual and visual elements from popular culture to imagine an ideal masculinity and construct their own gender identity vis-à-vis this “other,” both defying and embracing patriarchal ideologies and societal norms at the same time. Their acts of “poaching” not only change the shape of popular romance but also display shifting trends in Chinese women’s gender and sociopolitical consciousness.3 Consequently, I seek to bring the content, form, and context of Chinese Web romance into productive dialogues with one another through this book. Fan Production In August 2007, a campaign flourished on the Chinese World Wide Web to rewrite the titles of canonical works of Chinese literature. Classics such as the Five Masterpieces, vernacular Chinese novels produced in the Ming 明 (1368–1644) and Qing 清 (1644–1911) dynasties, acquired outlandish new names.4 Mimicking what they call the style of Zhiyin 知音 (Kindred soul), a popular Chinese magazine known for the sensational titles it bestows on tales of family drama, Chinese Web users produced several gems of parody. “Arranged Marriage: A Human Tragedy That Broke Families and Killed People” (Baoban hunyin, yichang jiapo renwang de renjian canju 包办婚 姻：一场家破人亡的惨剧) was proposed as a new title for Honglou meng 红楼梦 (Dream of the red chamber, 18th century). For Sanguo yanyi 三国演 义 (Romance of the three kingdoms, 14th century), someone suggested “From Humble to Self-Made: Unprecedented Perverted Love between Three Brothers” (Cong beijian dao ziqiang, san xiongdi de kuangshi jilian 从卑贱到自强：三兄弟的旷世畸恋). Chinese scholars of media studies dismissed this fad as the activity of teenagers venting repressed desires and alleviating boredom.5 But it is better understood as just one example of Chinese Web users’ creative and complex consumption of literature: the impulse that drove the campaign to retitle the classics also 3 For the term “poaching,” see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 147. 4 The Five Masterpieces are Shuihu zhuan (Water margin, earliest extant complete edition 1589), Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the three kingdoms, 14th century), Xiyou ji (Journey to the west, earliest extant edition 1590), Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber; also known as Shitou ji, Story of the stone, 18th century), and Jin Ping Mei (Plum in a golden vase, earliest extant edition 1618). 5 “ ‘Zhiyin ti biaoti’ egao mingzhu” [Using the style of titles in Zhiyin to parody famous masterpieces], Yangzi wanbao, September 4, 2007.

introduction

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generates various types of fan productions, such as fanfic, fan music, and fan video. Fan fiction, one of the main topics of this study, is creative work based on a literary or media source text (a “canon,” in the jargon of fanfic), produced by people other than the original author for noncommercial purposes. It is written mostly by women and for women’s consumption.6 While detractors dismiss fanfic as “derivative,” supporters call it “archontic”7— that is, an expanding archive that is never closed—and an ever-growing body of “work in progress.”8 Fans regard it as a community-based product, a collective effort that draws on their shared knowledge of the canon universe for its production and consumption. They believe that its “literary” character is defined by a rich intertextuality and dense symbolism.9 Other supporters also remark on fanfic’s ethical dimension, noting that it supports resistance to patriarchy and heteronormativity insofar as it provides a space for alternative, queer readings of the source text.10 The field of fan studies encompasses fans and fandom, as well as fan productions such as fanfic. English-language scholarship in this field has gained even more momentum in the age of the Internet. Although fan studies began in the 1980s, mainly as an investigation of the motivations of women who wrote fanfic—especially slash fiction, a genre of fanfic focused on same-sex relationships that are usually invented by the fanfic author on the basis of perceived homoerotic subtexts in the source text—the 1990s saw three influential studies that established the central theoretical approaches to fan production: Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers (1992), Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992), and Constance Penley’s “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture” (1998). These three works represented the three main approaches in the field at the time—media studies, ethnography, and psychoanalysis. Drawing from 6 Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 2005). 7 Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 71. 8 Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, introduction to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 6–7. 9 Mafalda Stasi, “The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 115. 10 Ika Willis, “Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 153.

6 introduction audience studies, Jenkins interpreted fanfic and other fan practices such as television viewing in light of Michel de Certeau’s notion of “poaching,” a strategy adopted by subordinate and marginalized social groups to produce meaning outside dominant ideologies and officially sanctioned interpretive practices by appropriating from existing cultural artifacts.11 In contrast to Jenkins’s self-positioning as both a fan and an academic, BaconSmith adopted more traditional ethnographic research methodologies in her work, carefully delineating herself as an outsider and observer even as she emphasized the community of female fans and the ties that they forge among themselves.12 Penley, examining fan production from yet another angle, used a psychoanalytic approach to argue that slash fiction allows female readers multiple entry points into the original work and multiple modes of identification with characters in the canon.13 Most scholarly works published in the 1990s regarded fanfic as fans’ attempts at reinventing the source text, and focused on their compliance with or challenge to patriarchal norms. But the new millennium has brought a paradigm shift: studies of media-based (rather than text-based) fandoms assert that a compliance-resistance paradigm should be replaced by a spectacle-performance one. Researchers have begun to complicate and even invert the power relationship between media producer and media audience, and also to shift their attention from fan communities to individual fans.14 However, the role of the Internet in fan production only began to receive the attention it deserved in Karen Helleckson and Kristina Busse’s edited volume, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006). In this anthology, contributors who are both fans and academics examined the definition, context, generic features, and literary value of fan production since the introduction of the World Wide Web. Several of the essays also explored the emerging subfield of virtual ethnography, which studies online cultures and communities; although the field is still seeking to establish widely accepted protocols, it holds great promise for the investigation of fandom on the Internet. In contrast to the explosion of interest and enthusiasm in Englishlanguage fan studies, and despite the potentially rich rewards for scholars 11 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 12 Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 13 Constance Penley, “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” in Techno­ culture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 135–61. 14 Hellekson and Busse, introduction, 17–24.

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of contemporary China, fan production on the Chinese Internet has rarely attracted academic attention. Sequels to premodern vernacular classics such as Honglou meng, arguably an earlier version of Chinese fanfic, had appeared in the nineteenth century,15 but they have mainly been studied as part of premodern Chinese fiction rather than examples of fan activity. Further, little attention has been paid to the proliferation of Web-based fan production inspired by popular literary or media texts, such as the romances authored by Qiong Yao 琼瑶 (1938–), the acclaimed “Queen of [Chinese] Romance” who reigned in Chinese popular romance circles for more than thirty years, and whose works continue to be adapted for television series and movies.16 The reason for this lack of academic interest in online Chinese fanfic, as Michel Hockx sees it, is that English-language scholarship on the Chinese Web focuses on issues of state censorship and civil liberties while ignoring “cultural production.”17 Given the overwhelming volume and uneven quality of online writing, it could also be the case that scholars have not found researching Chinese Web literature to be all that fruitful in proportion to the time and effort it demands, even though its very abundance and volatility highlight its importance as a topic of cultural studies. On the other hand, mainland Chinese scholars usually engage in theoretical discussions of the ontology, aesthetics, and sociology of Web literature rather than investigating concrete user experiences.18 Some scholars extol the liberating and democratizing efficacy of the Internet while others lament the fate of serious literature and the downfall of traditional values. Experts such as Ouyang Youquan 欧阳友权, one of the premier Chinese scholars in Web studies, have produced seminal articles and monographs. But Chinese scholars have not yet employed the categories of class and gender in their analyses, nor have they produced in-depth analyses of the unique 15 For example, see Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2006. 16 English translations of works by Qiong Yao are unfortunately hard to find in print. It seems that fan translations on the Internet are more common, which, to a great extent, illustrates the space that popular romance occupies in Chinese Studies. For examples, see the translations of Tingyuan shenshen (A trip back to the old courtyard), accessed November 14, 2012, http://www.spcnet.tv/qiongyao/tingyuan01.shtml, and Yanyu mengmeng (Love in the rain), accessed November 14, 2012, http://www.spcnet.tv/qiongyao/yanyumengmeng03 .shtml. 17 Michel Hockx, “Virtual Chinese Literature: A Comparative Case Study of Online Poetry Communities,” in Culture in the Contemporary PRC, ed. Michel Hockx and Julia C. Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 150. 18 A search for the keywords wangluo wenxue (Web literature) in CNKI, a database of full-text Chinese academic sources, yields more than a thousand entries, most of them theory-driven analyses.

8 introduction structural and discursive features of Chinese Web romance, let alone the dynamic process of its production and consumption as demonstrated in female readers’ experiences. Additionally, controversial topics such as male-male homoerotic tales or matriarchal narratives, or the impact of state censorship on Web literature, usually remain off their scholarly radars. The dearth of academic interest in Web romance is further exacerbated by a deep-seated belief that popular romance is only a women’s genre, a corpus of banal entertainment produced for female consumers. This stereotype dismisses popular romance for failing to support literature’s state-promoted mission of nation-building and civic education, and for its perceived lack of revolutionary, anticapitalist consciousness.19 Web-based popular romance thus occupies a marginal space, if any, in scholarship on China due to biases against popular, “feminine,” and politically suspect Web productions. Yet, regardless of what one thinks of genre fiction and fanfic on the Web, the Internet has the potential to attract and influence wider Chinese society in profound ways. China is currently the world’s largest broadband Internet market,20 and as a site of dynamic cultural production the Chinese Web rivals or surpasses printed channels. By 2000, Web literature, consisting mainly of unedited items, had surpassed the volume of print matter published in China.21 A query addressed to the Chinese search engine Baidu 百度 in March 2012 yielded more than 73,700,000 websites that identified themselves as literature websites. Whereas 162 million people maintained blogs on the Chinese Web in 2009, microblog (weibo 微博, the Chinese version of Twitter) users have tripled within half a year, from 63.1 million by the end of 2010 to 195 million in July 2011, and are still growing exponentially.22 19 For example, see Miriam Lang, “San Mao and Qiong Yao: A Popular Pair,” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 76–120. 20 David Barboza, “China Surpasses U.S. in Number of Internet Users,” New York Times, July 26, 2008. 21 Birgit Linder, “Web literature,” in Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, ed. Edward L. Davis (London: Routledge, 2005), 896. 22 The former statistic is from the China Internet Network Information Center’s (CNNIC) report “Di ershisan ci Zhongguo hulianwangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao (2009 nian yiyue)” [The 23rd statistical survey report on Internet development, January 2009], accessed July 8, 2009, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/tjbg/200906/t20090615_18388 .html; the latter is from the CNNIC’s “Di ershiba ci Zhongguo hulianwangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao (2011 qiyue)” [The 28th statistical survey report on Internet development, July 2011], accessed September 4, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/tjbg/ 201107/t20110719_22120.html.

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The field of Chinese studies awaits in-depth research on the effects of technology and new media on literature and culture. My book attempts to explore these effects by taking stock of the creative energy and enthusiasm demonstrated in Chinese women’s production and consumption of Chinese-language Web romances. I examine not only how they appropriate existing cultural products and officially sanctioned interpretive practices for their own purposes, but also the ways that economic forces and political control shape their behavior. The study also sheds light on the relationship between popular culture and dominant ideologies in China, and the role that the Internet plays in Chinese women’s cultural production, sociopolitical consciousness, and gender identity. My book addresses both academic and general audiences. The general reader interested in issues of globalization and popular culture can gain insight into the vicissitudes of the new media in twenty-first-century China. For scholars of contemporary China, it provides a slice of the country’s vibrant, complex, and at times subversive popular cultural scene. And for scholars of gender and women’s studies, it presents several case studies showing how Chinese women negotiate their own representation in a market economy by redefining and reimagining romantic love and gender relationships through writing and reading Web romances. Interdisciplinary Improvisation While the emerging fields of popular romance studies and Web studies have attracted much scholarly interest, standard methodologies for addressing these subjects have not yet been formulated. This book experiments with an interdisciplinary approach that takes into account the particular challenges of studying Internet activity in China. Web materials appear in high volume every day on the Chinese Internet, but due to censorship and other reasons many disappear as quickly as they are published. Moreover, it has proven extremely difficult to conduct comprehensive user studies under state censorship in contemporary China. Not only do such large-scale undertakings require resources and efforts that are prohibitive for the individual researcher, they also entail ethical issues due to the sensitive and controversial nature of many Web materials. Given these challenges, I attempt to strike a balance between innovation and experimentation on the one hand, and solid data and clear descriptions of Chinese Web culture on the other. I have grounded this book in literary and media analysis while incorporating sociological data as a supplement for the study of Chinese Web

10 introduction romance. When performing textual analysis, I examine not merely the plot, characterization, and setting of specific Web romances, but also their shared narrative gestures, discursive patterns, and generic genealogy. Additionally, I investigate readers’ productions, both textual and visual, to illustrate the field of energy that Web romances generate. I primarily employ discourse and literary analysis to trace the cultural forces and systemic mechanisms underlying specific romance works. In order to get a better sense of the communities that produce and consume Web romances, I also conducted virtual and actual fieldwork to flesh out Web users’ experiences, bringing sociological findings to bear on the meaning and significance of Web works and the comments that readers produce. By incorporating findings from my online observations and offline interviews, I seek to present a wide canvas of Chinese Web romance and also explore the offline habitat that shape users’ online behavior. This integrative approach has proven both fruitful and necessary given the dynamic nature of Chinese Web literature. Unlike print literature, Web romance constantly shifts its shape, not only in response to the immediate needs and interests of its producers and consumers, but also under the influence of the larger sociocultural context. Chinese women’s production and consumption of a particular type of Web romance, fanfic based on Qiong Yao’s works, provides a perfect case in point. A mainland-born Taiwan romance writer, Qiong Yao garnered many mainland followers in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet she is currently ridiculed and condemned on the Chinese Web. Chinese women parody her melodramatic narrative style, change her characterizations and plots, criticize her “glorification” of extramarital affairs, and allege that her “authorial misguidance” has bred social ills and destroyed “traditional Chinese values.” However, while engaging in such moralistic discourses, these women also disparage blatant male fantasies in male-authored, Web-based time-travel novels, unflatteringly calling them “stud (zhongma 种马) fiction” and seeking ways to appropriate from and subvert them. In online exchanges, these women claim that they denounce the “immoral” heroines in Qiong Yao’s works because they reject “inauthentic” femininity, which they characterize as feigning vulnerability and naïveté in order to curry favor with patriarchal power and monopolize resources. Readers and writers of Qiong Yao fanfic not only construct distinct identities for themselves in place of the “proper” femininity prescribed by patriarchal Chinese traditions, they also engage with each other to generate a participatory fan culture. They actively borrow from existing texts to produce meaning for themselves, to meet their own needs, and to explain and

introduction

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validate their own life experiences. Ultimately, as will be shown later in this book, users’ exchanges not only establish an alternative community responsive to more democratic values, creative urges, and Chinese women’s unique concerns, but also provide a new platform that allows them to cross barriers of genre and culture that would have been otherwise impenetrable. Chinese Web romance fans employ what de Certeau calls “textual poaching,” a kind of guerrilla-warfare tactic that involves borrowing from heterogeneous sources to elude or escape institutional control, and to resist, negotiate, or transform the system and products of the relatively powerful. Yet fans also adopt multiple and contradictory positions vis-à-vis dominant ideologies and social norms. Their ostensible focus and particular take on romantic relationships signal larger sociocultural forces at work. It is therefore helpful to supplement literary with sociological analysis, so that users’ daily practices and experiences might shed light on “native” meanings and narrative patterns in their online productions, such as those embodied in Chinese women’s Web argot. Ethnography offers useful methodological tips in this regard. Ethnog­ raphers by definition commit themselves to “uncovering and depicting indigenous meanings.”23 Participant observation, the key ethnographic method, requires ethnographers to perform a split self-positioning: They must interact with those they study as a cultural insider and participant, while also transcribing details and sensory impressions as an outside observer. They should also recognize that they produce “inscriptions of social life and social discourse” rather than value-neutral descriptions, required as they are to reduce the confusion of the social world to written words that can be reviewed, studied, and thought about repeatedly later.24 Although this book is more a literary and media study than an ethnography, participant observation has helped me to gather sociological as well as literary data, and thereby to accomplish a more nuanced and complex understanding of Web romance than otherwise possible. I have chosen to focus on two Chinese literature websites in this study, Jinjiang Literature City and Yaya Bay. These two websites have served my project especially well for several reasons. Both Jinjiang and Yaya publish popular romances extensively and almost exclusively. They attract many female Chinese users, generate numerous 23 Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, eds., Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12. 24 Ibid., 9, emphasis in original.

12 introduction fan productions, and provide representative literary examples and ample accounts of user experiences. However, these two websites also display two different modes of operation corresponding to their locations—Jinjiang is based in China, while Yaya is hosted by servers in the United States. With respect to their format, Jinjiang and Yaya represent the two main types of Chinese literature websites: text-centered websites, whether the works are original or pirated from elsewhere, and commentator-oriented discussion forums using a bulletin board system (BBS). Additionally, they manifest divergent configurations of the sociopolitical factors that shape users’ offline habitat. While Jinjiang bills itself as the largest Chinese-language women’s literature website in the world, Yaya grew from an unassuming beginning as an amateur’s hobby—a not-for-profit discussion forum initially created by a group of Chinese-born young scientists for exchanging tips on the stock market. Further, whereas Jinjiang has provoked controversy through its increasingly impersonal and profit-seeking practices, thanks to both its ever-increasing scale and a checkered career under market economy and state censorship, Yaya has attracted users precisely because of its individuated, friendly service and its apparent freedom from political control and commercial considerations. I was thus able to collect diverse materials from these two sites to explore how the following factors affect Chinese women’s online production: the location of each site’s Web servers, the economic forces surrounding Web publishing, and, if such data were available, users’ personal details such as age, occupation, and place of residence. When researching online, I interacted with fellow users while noting down their terms of address and greetings, questions and answers, descriptions, stories, explanations, theories, processes, and categories, taking care not to project my own typology onto them. But I inevitably read online exchanges as a manuscript and try to construct a reading of what happens.25 My virtual fieldwork always involved interpreting social discourses, extracting elements from particular occasions, and fixing them in perusable form. This semiotic interpretive approach suited my project. It allowed me to avoid becoming mired down in details and taking a user’s utterances at face value, and to produce a “thick description” of diverse and dynamic interactions on the Chinese cyberspace.26

25 Cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 18. 26 Ibid.

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I complemented my online observations and interactions with offline interviews of Web publishers and users. I identified Shanghai Shengda 上海盛大 Internet Development Company as the most important Web publisher in contemporary China (see Chapter 1) and interviewed their staff members over the course of several years. I interviewed Chinese Web users in Beijing 北京, Shanghai, and Nanjing 南京 and at a small liberal arts college in the United States, and also conducted participant observation of their daily habitat and experiences. All the interviews were one-on-one, and with a single exception, all lasted between forty-five minutes and one hour. The interviewees were all native Chinese speakers. Although their age, gender, and occupation varied, most of them ranged in age from late teens to early forties, and their current or former places of residence in China were usually large urban centers and economically developed areas with Internet coverage, such as Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou 广州. Despite its small size, this sample of users reflects several common characteristics of readers and writers of Chinese Web literature. Consumers of Web literature in China tend to be young, urban, and well educated; the majority are students. Overseas Chinese who study and work in foreign countries also constitute a significant portion of Web writers and readers. Especially at individuated websites such as Yaya, where users may choose to reveal personal information including their gender and location, interviews can shed light on users’ participation and production when compared and contrasted with their online personae. My interview findings dovetailed with my previous observation that young people consume Web-based literature as a way to explore and construct their identities, but they also yielded certain surprises. Given the social atmosphere I witnessed online, I had assumed that Web readers would be equally open to sharing reading experiences with people they know and come into contact with in real life. This did not seem to be the case. Especially for those who read online literature frequently, they seemed very protective and even secretive about their reading habits and tastes, and preferred to discuss certain works online with anonymous fellow readers in the virtual world rather than with people they knew in real life. At times, a potential interviewee’s concern about being regarded as “other” (tazhe 他者) by researchers ruled out a face-to-face engagement.27 My interviews of Web romance fans have helped me to develop 27 Author’s e-mail interview, November 24, 2010.

14 introduction relationships, entertain open-ended questions, and encourage interviewees’ self-expression as well as gather data. But I have also found it neces­ sary to be mindful of their concerns about privacy and confidentiality. I have consequently emphasized an integrative, flexible, and self-reflective approach in my fieldwork in order to fulfill my ethical obligations to those I study while gathering data. Web romance constitutes only one part of Chinese Internet culture. Performing in-depth case studies of Chinese Web romance could limit the generalizability of my findings, but the advantages of this approach far outweigh its disadvantages. Case studies that focus on a particular group of people in extensive detail—the “thick description” advocated by Clifford Geertz—have much to offer because they provide a kind of familiarity that goes beyond summary and reflects the nuances of human experience.28 Further, the gendered focus of my study enables me to explore the as yet understudied topic of Chinese women’s experiences of the Internet. Definitive conclusions on the Internet’s broader cultural influence and power in China call for further scholarly engagements and efforts. My book represents one of the first ventures into this area of inquiry. By employing a multi-sited, integrative methodology, I seek to distill the web of textual and extratextual forces into a lucid account without reducing the complexity of cultural transactions on or off the Web in contemporary China. Since Chinese Web literature is fraught with inconsistencies, contradictions, and dispersions symptomatic of postsocialist China, I consider this integrative and interdisciplinary approach not only justified, but also highly useful. As a final note on methodology, although it is not my intention to provide an “autoethnography,” an exercise in which “the tastes, values, attachments, and investments of the fan and the academic-fan [i.e., the author] are placed under the microscope of cultural analysis,”29 I undertake this project fully aware of my own subject position as fan-scholar and scholar-fan. Challenging the artificial dichotomy between the scholarly and fannish community, I experiment with a connective, mobile, and self-reflective approach instead,30 and incorporate my personal experi­ ence as both insider and outsider into this study as well. By scrutinizing Chinese women’s conceptions, enunciations, reiterations, or denunciations 28 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 18. 29 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 72. 30 For the terms “connective” and “mobile,” see Christine Hine, “Internet Research as Emergent Practice,” in Handbook of Emergent Methods, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy (New York: Guilford, 2008), 533–37.

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of romantic love through their Web productions, my book addresses issues of gender formation, clashes between tradition and modernity, and Chinese women’s strategies to deal with the dilemmas facing them in a rapidly changing contemporary society. Organization of Chapters In this study I explore not only the transmutation of narrative patterns and ideologies manifest in different subgenres of Chinese Web romance, but also to what extent the sociocultural environments that users inhabit shape their reception and interpretation of Web literature. Therefore, before examining specific works and the fan productions that they have sparked, I provide in Chapter 1 a brief survey of Web romance in contemporary Chinese society. This entails both a short genealogy of Chinese popular romance and a sketch of the birth and development of Chinese Web literature. I then devote the next four chapters respectively to the four most innovative and visible subgenres of Web romance, which serve as the foci of my textual analysis: danmei (耽美 male-male homoerotic fiction), nüzun (女尊 matriarchal fiction that features women’s dominance in a matriarchal society), tongren (同人 fanfic), and chuanyue (穿越 time-travel) heterosexual popular romance. As will become apparent, however, this division is somewhat artificial, as these subgenres frequently overlap with and cross-fertilize each other. I have chosen my examples from the two major websites introduced above: Jinjiang Literature City, published in mainland China, and U.S.based Yaya Bay. In each chapter I examine the narrative structures, discursive gestures, and ideological enunciations in particular romances, as well as the rich exchanges that the texts provoke among users. I also bring to literary and discursive analysis the sociological data I have gathered in the last five years. Additionally, I incorporate popular media texts, such as televised soap operas circulated in contemporary Chinese society, to shed further light on the context of Chinese Web romance. I thus look at a variety of primary sources including both digital materials (such as Web-based texts, images, and video clips) and oral interviews. Guobing Yang sees Chinese online activism as a “generalized response to the consequences of Chinese modernity,” and “a countermovement rooted in material grievances and an identity movement born out of the identity crisis associated with dramatic change.” Further, he argues that the Internet has brought a revolution to contemporary China in three ways:

16 introduction communicational, cultural, and social, since it has significantly expanded “the horizons of learning and communication of ordinary people” and “citizens’ unofficial democracy.”31 While focusing more on Web literature than Chinese citizens’ political activism, my book ultimately reveals how much of a revolution the Chinese Web has meant for authors and readers of Chinese Web romance. The findings, as readers will see, can stir up utopian optimism and dystopian despair, and occasionally both at the same time.

31 Guobing Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 209–13.

CHAPTER ONE

A SHORT GENEALOGY 同样是穿越剧,美国都是往前穿,中国都是往后穿 。 一个想不出历史,一 个想不出未来。

American time-travel TV dramas always feature travels forward in time while Chinese ones tell stories of travels backward. The former cannot imagine a history, while the latter cannot imagine a future. –A Web reader’s online signature at Yaya Bay

Although romantic plots abounded in the “scholar and beauty” genre of premodern vernacular fiction1 and the “mandarin duck and butterfly” tales of Republican-era popular fiction,2 contemporary popular romance did not make its debut in mainland China until the 1980s. Since 1949, official discourses in China had always emphasized the utilitarian function of literature, regarding it as a tool of civic education and social engineering that should mobilize the people under the banner of socialist construction and national salvation. Under such severe strictures, works of popular literature such as butterfly fiction were denounced as relics of a feudal society and banned, and any description of a romantic relationship, not to mention sex, immediately made a work suspect in official eyes.3 As late as 1979, a short story entitled “Ai shi buneng wangji de” 爱是不能忘记的 (Love must not be forgotten), written by the female writer Zhang Jie 张洁 and today a canonized piece of post-Mao “scar literature” (shanghen wenxue 1 So called because it portrays love relationships between scholars and beautiful and talented women. 2 These tales belong to a type of sentimental fiction popular in the early Republican era (ca. 1911–1940s) that catered to the need for entertainment among urban residents in China. It was often disparaged by radical nationalists of the era for its lack of “revolutionary” content. For a more detailed discussion, see Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 3 This is amply proved by the criticism that Xiao Yemu’s “Women fufu zhijian” (Between us, the couple) faced. Although upholding the call for self-reformation on the part of bourgeois intellectuals, the story was severely criticized because the author described the tender relationship between husband and wife and details of their conjugal life rather than class struggles. See Hong Zicheng, Zhongguo dangdai wenxue shi [History of contemporary Chinese literature) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1999), 138.

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chapter one

伤痕文学), caused considerable controversy. Although the author portrays

a self-sacrificing female protagonist who never acts on her secret love for a married communist cadre, this work roused criticism of its “bourgeois sentiments” just because it holds that individuals have a right to romantic love, separate from and beyond the revolutionary cause and ethical code of Communist China.4 During the 1950s–60s, it was virtually unheard of to view literature as entertainment, even though this may have been desired by readers. But state control of literature and ideology relaxed somewhat following the economic reform and opening of China in the late 1970s. Subsequently, numerous volumes of popular literature such as romance and martial arts novels, many of them pirated, were published and sold in China. In the 1980s came Qiong Yao, a female mainland-born romance writer from Taiwan, followed by her peers from Taiwan and Hong Kong, such as Yi Shu 亦舒 (1946–). Chinese popular romance in print form deserves a separate and more complete study.5 Suffice it to state here that in light of the long years of state censorship of popular literature, works penned by Qiong Yao and her peers provided female readers with a sense of liberation as well as novelty and entertainment, since their emotional lives were acknowledged, validated, and made the focus of literary works for the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The commercial success of these romance novels was never in doubt. They not only attracted numerous female readers in China, ranging in age from the teens to the sixties, but also made their way into various popular TV series and movies. Romance has thus been associated with the rise of popular culture and with a female consumer base in mainland China ever since its debut. Romance novels such as those authored by Qiong Yao and Yi Shu typically describe the romantic entanglements of a young, urban, middle-class Chinese woman. The setting is predominantly modern China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, but futurist settings sometimes appear in Yi Shu’s works while Qiong Yao’s later works such as Huanzhu gege 还珠格格 (The pearl-returning princess) adopt a pseudo-historical setting in the Qing dynasty. Heterosexuality and monogamy, especially on the part of the heroine, are the norm for romantic relationships in these novels. Both Qiong 4 Ibid., 259. 5 For example, Fang-mei Lin, “Social Change and Romantic Ideology: The Impact of the Public Industry, Family Organization, and Gender Roles on the Reception and Interpretation of Romance Fiction in Taiwan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), treats Qiong Yao’s novels from a sociological perspective, but focuses mostly on the context of Taiwan.



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Yao and Yi Shu wrote very tame love stories by today’s standards, since they were devoid of explicit sex scenes. Instead, the heroine in Qiong Yao’s works was extolled for her sexual innocence, spirit of self-sacrifice, capacity for suffering, and faith in the ultimate triumph of romantic love. While this image harkens back to the gender code in premodern China, for it promotes women’s self-effacement and chastity, the idea of love reigning paramount signals the influence of Western notions of romantic love. Meanwhile, Chinese popular literature also catered to the desires of male consumers, as revealed by the proliferation of male-centered timetravel fantasies starting in the 1990s. Some have ascribed the popularity of time-travel fiction to Xun Qin ji 寻秦记 (Tale of seeking Qin, ca. 1991), a fantasy written by a male Hong Kong writer named Huang Yi 黄易 (1952–), and adapted into a popular TV series in 2001. This novel tells the story of a special-forces soldier who travels back to the Warring States period (475–221 b.c.e.), and helps the duke of Qin 秦 to unify China and establish the first Chinese imperial dynasty. The hero’s sexual exploits as well as his miraculous deployment of modern knowledge and technology have spurred widespread imitations on the Chinese Web. Women also utilized the trope of time travel to write romances. Xi Juan 席娟 (1972–), a female author from Taiwan, described the romantic adventures of a young woman who travels back to the Song 宋 dynasty (961–1279 c.e.) in her novel, Jiaocuo shiguang de ailian 交错时光的爱恋 (Love that crosses time, 1993), published to wide commercial success and reader acclaim. Chinese-language Web romance took off thanks to the development of a market economy, the rise of consumerism, and especially the introduction and fast assimilation of the World Wide Web into Chinese life in the last twenty years. In 1989, only a few scientists at prestigious research and academic institutions in China had e-mail accounts. It was not until 1994 that China acquired full-function Internet connectivity, and only after 1996 did the Internet become available to the average urban consumer, while the first BBS forum was set up at Tsinghua (Qinghua 清华) University in Beijing in 1995.6 In the ensuing years, the number of Web users has increased by leaps and bounds (and is continuing to grow rapidly in mainland China), paving the way for the birth of Chinese-language literature websites. It was Chinese students studying in the United States who first launched Chinese Web literature. As early as 1989, a group of students founded News Digest (Xinwen wenzhai 新闻文摘), later known as China Digest (Huaxia 6 Yang, The Power of the Internet in China, 29.

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chapter one

wenzhai 华夏文摘), a listserv that accepted submissions of creative writing and was distributed to overseas Chinese students; the venue was closely linked to the student demonstrations at Tian’an men 天安门 at the time.7 In 1991, Wang Xiaofei 王笑飞, another overseas Chinese student, established Chinese Poem Net 中文诗歌网 ([email protected] .edu) at the University of Buffalo.8 In February 1994 Fangzhou zi 方舟子 and others founded the first literature website based in China, New Threads 新语丝 (www.xys.org), to be followed by others such as Olive Tree 橄榄树 (www.wenxue.com) in March 1995; Hua Zhao 花招 (www.huazhao.com), the first Chinese women’s literature website, at the end of the same year; and Rongshuxia 榕树下 (www.rongshu.com) in 1997. In 1999, Taiwan writer Pizi Cai’s (痞子蔡, a.k.a. Cai Zhiheng, or Tsai Chih-Heng 蔡智恒) Web novel entitled First Close Touch (Diyi ci de qinmi jiechu 第一次的亲密接触) constituted a landmark in Chinese-language Web literature, for this irreverent yet quintessentially idealistic work on youthful romance and experience attracted an unprecedented large following in the Chinese-speaking world on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.9 Cai’s Web fiction exerted a strong influence on the development of Chinese Web literature; many of its characteristics are typical of productions and exchanges in Chinese cyberspace today, in particular a playful yet also deliberately prosaic style characterized by a “matter-of-fact approach and a self-conscious avoidance of heroic grandeur.”10 Whether Chinese Web literature indeed embraces a new moral sentiment, a utopian impulse such as Guobing Yang has found in Web-based Chinese activism,11 is open to discussion, but it does manifest a new “structure of feelings,” that is, “a common set of perceptions and values shared by a particular generation and most clearly articulated in artistic forms and conventions” at a particular historical moment,12 fostered by the Internet. 7 Li Dajiu, “Wangluo wenxue qiyuan de jizhong butong shuofa (yi)” [Several theories on the origin of Web literature, part 1], published January 5, 2010, in “Li Dajiu de boke” [Li Dajiu’s Blog], accessed February 22, 2012, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5223ef410100hiid .html. 8 Li Dajiu, “Zuizao de chunwenxue wangluo meiti shiliao” [Sources on the earliest pure literature websites], published June 13, 2010, in “Li Dajiu de boke” [Li Dajiu’s Blog], accessed February 22, 2012, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5223ef410100k7nj.html. 9 Pumin Yin, “Web writing,” Beijing Review, August 25, 2005, 31. 10 Yang, Power of the Internet in China, 29. 11 Ibid., 182. 12 This concept was first used by Raymond Williams in his A Preface to Film (with Michael Orrom, 1954), developed in The Long Revolution (1961), and elaborated throughout his work, in particular Marxism and Literature (1977). Williams used it to characterize the lived experience or the quality of life at a particular time and place. See Jenny Bourne Taylor, “Structure



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The Politics and Economics of Web Publishing No discussion of the production and consumption of Web romance in China can overlook the role of the state, which sees the Internet both as a forum in need of censorship and regulation and as an opportunity for economic development. As the rise of new media in contemporary China has led to both the unprecedentedly wide circulation of Web novels and their increasing commercialization, the state and populace are battling over the control of the Internet. State censorship of the Internet and its promotion of e-commerce play a significant, though not always clearly visible, role in Web literature. As of February 2013, at least fourteen government units, from the culture and information technology ministries to offices that oversee films and books, each exerted some control over China’s Internet.13 The Ministry of Infor­ mation Industry (MII), China’s major telecom regulator since 1949, was absorbed into the new Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in 2008. Along with the MIIT, four other agencies—the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), the Ministry of Culture, and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT)—operated collectively as the most important Internet regulation agencies. The 12th Chinese People’s National Congress, which ended its first session on March 17, 2013, passed measures to restructure government ministries and agencies in order to cut red tape. It has unveiled plans to integrate the two existing media regulators, the GAPP and the SARFT, into a ministerial-level State General Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film, and Television to oversee those five sectors.14 What this proposed merge will bring to Internet censorship remains to be seen, but the powerful Chinese Internet surveillance regime already comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control, ranging from various selfcensoring practices to the state-sponsored Golden Shield Project (a.k.a. the

of Feelings,” in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne (Blackwell, 1997), accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id =g9780631207535_chunk_g978063120753522_ss1-37#citation. 13 Michael Wines, “China Creates New Agency for Patrolling the Internet,” New York Times, May 5, 2011, accessed November 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/ world/asia/05china.html. 14 “China unveils cabinet reshuffle plans,” accessed March 17, 2013, http://www.china .org.cn/china/NPC_CPPCC_2013/2013-03/10/content_28191188.htm.

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Great Firewall of China).15 As early as December 1997, the MPS issued the comprehensive Computer Information Network and Internet Security, Protection, and Management Regulations under State Council Order No. 147.16 Article 4 of the regulations states: “No unit or individual may use the Internet to harm national security, disclose state secrets, harm the interests of the State, of society or of a group, the legal rights of citizens, or to take part in criminal activities.” On May 4, 2011, China’s State Council announced the establishment of the State Internet Information Office (SIIO). Under the jurisdiction of the State Council Information Office, the SIIO is responsible for implementing policies on information dissemination, investigating and punishing websites that violate laws and regu­ lations, and organizing the government’s online publicity through the approval of online news websites. State control has caused China-based literature websites to practice selfcensorship in order to avert government shutdown or other forms of punishment. For instance, Jinjiang uses software that automatically deletes “sensitive words” (minggan zi 敏感字) from their published works, leaving blanks where politically forbidden words, such as terms referring to the student demonstration in Beijing on June 4, 1989 (liusi 六四) or Tibet (Xizang 西藏), or phrases deemed pornographic, once existed. Jinjiang webmasters have also enforced a system of reader reporting. If a reader files a complaint about a certain work, usually alleging “pornographic depiction,” the author will be warned and access to the work temporarily blocked until changes are made and approved by Web administrators. Chinese literature websites do not all face dire consequences for alleged breaches of censorship rules, not least because the sheer speed and volume of participation defies total government surveillance. Individual readers and authors also constantly test the boundaries of censorship. Nevertheless, the issue of state control of the Internet looms over any discussion of the content and audience of Web literature. Indeed, in his 2006 study of the Chinese Internet, including several case studies of intellectual and military websites, Yongming Zhou concluded that there is no “public sphere” in the Chinese cyberspace at all due to tight state control.17 15 See Internet Filtering in China in 2004–2005, a study conducted by the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Technology, accessed March 23, 2012, http://opennet.net/ studies/china. 16 “New PRC Internet Regulation,” accessed November 22, 2011, http://www.fas.org/irp/ world/china/netreg.htm. 17 Yongming Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).



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The other side of this story, however, is that the Chinese state also attempts to utilize the Internet to spur economic development. As Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu point out, China “is trying to create an Internet that is free enough to support and maintain the world’s fastest growing economy, and yet closed enough to tamp down political threats to its monopoly on power.”18 Until China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, state-owned major Internet service providers, such as China Telecom and China Mobile, had monopolized the Chinese Internet market. Since then, both domestic and foreign corporations have been seeking to tap into the exponential growth of the Chinese Internet market, and the industry is forecast to grow to $57.72 billion in 2016.19 China’s biggest Internet search engine, Baidu, alone made a profit of $295 million from July to September in 2011, an 80% jump from the same period in 2010.20 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a state-owned research center founded in 1997, provides services such as the Domain Name Registry Service and publishes reports on Chinese Internet policies and developments.21 The CNNIC’s reports, issued in January and July annually, shed some light on how the state strongly promotes Internet-driven economic development in order to increase its popularity and public satisfaction. The twenty-seventh semiannual report, dated January 2011, summarizes: “The rapid increase of mobile net citizens and more thorough Internet utilization, as well as the rapid development of information technology in China guided by Internet construction, have strongly promoted the reform of economic development, social progress, and people’s living standards.”22 According to the state news agency, Xinhua, the government strives to make the Internet “an impetus in transforming the mode of economic growth and in optimizing industrial structure” by fostering Internet development in four areas: Internet infrastructure, technological progress and application, Internet application in other industries and information, 18 Jack L. Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of A Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 89. 19 “Internet Services in China: China Industry Report,” accessed November 20, 2011, http://www.ibisworld.com.cn/industry/default.aspx?indid=805&partnerid=prweb. 20 “China’s Baidu sees profits surge 80% in third quarter,” accessed November 30, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15488426. 21 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), “A Brief Introduction of CNNIC,” accessed November 22, 2011, http://www1.cnnic.cn/en/index/index.htm. 22 CNNIC, “Di ershiqi ci Zhongguo hulianwangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao (2011 yiyue)” [The 27th statistical survey report on Chinese Internet development, January 2011], accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/tjbg/201101/t20110120 _20302.html.

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and Internet security management.23 In addition to paying attention to rural China’s Internet accessibility, the CNNIC reports also show strong governmental support for aiding small- and medium-sized enterprises to use the Internet effectively. For instance, in June 2012 the CNNIC issued a report analyzing the “E-Commerce of Medium-sized and Small Chinese Enterprises in 2011.”24 It has attributed the relatively generous Internet access enjoyed by medium-sized and small enterprises in China to the promotion of the state, which provides “a guarantee … that these enterprises can share Internet services conveniently.”25 The state’s two-pronged approach to the Internet, combining stringent political control with economic stimulation, has borne fruit in Web publishing. In 2010, the GAPP vowed to “remove unwholesome content from the Web,” such as matter identified as “pornographic, vulgar, and violent.” But the state also defined the “cultural industry” as a “national strategic industry,” and by the end of 2010 had established three “national bases” of digital publishing in Shanghai, Chongqing 重庆, and Hangzhou 杭州, while pouring funds into their further construction and expansion.26 The Shanghai Shengda Internet Development Company, in particular, has built its business around Web literature, taking advantage of both state policies and the development of Chinese market economy. This company started out in the 1990s, specializing in computer games, but in the last five years it has spawned Shengda Literature (Shengda wenxue 盛大文学), the largest publisher of Web literature in contemporary China. In 2008 alone, Shengda invested close to one billion yuan 元 to buy out the five most influential literature websites in China, including long-established powerhouses such as Rongshuxia, Jinjiang, and Hongxiu Tianxiang 红袖添香, and incorporated them into Shengda Literature Ltd.27 Further, Shengda introduced new profit-making models based on the Web, such as their notorious pay-per-view system, in which they require readers to pay for access to certain popular works only made available to “VIP” subscribers, 23 “China to foster Internet development in four areas,” accessed November 23, 2011, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-08/23/c_131069427.htm. 24 “2011 nian Zhongguo zhongxiao qiye dianzi shangwu diaocha baogao” [The report on the e-commerce of medium-sized and small Chinese enterprises in 2011], accessed March 16, 2013, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/bgxz_qybg/201206/t20120614_28883.html. 25 Accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/en/index/0O/02/index.htm, 62. 26 CNNIC, “Zhongguo wangluo yonghu diaoyan baogao” [Survey report of users of literature websites, December 2010], 11, accessed August 16, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/ bgxz/wmbg/201108/P020110819564826236297.pdf. 27 Wang Xiaoming, “Liufen tianxia: Jintian de Zhongguo wenxue” [The world divided into six parts: Today’s Chinese literature], Wenxue pinglun, no. 5 (2011), 76.



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while sharing profits with relevant Web authors on the basis of subscription numbers and the length of their works. In its attempt to corner the market on Chinese Web literature, Shengda not only collaborates with established authors to digitize their entire print oeuvres, but also integrates multimedia elements into Web literature to attract a younger, more technologically savvy and adventurous audience, in the process generating new genres in popular fiction such as wangyou 网游 (Web travel, short for wangluo youxi 网络游戏, Web-based computer games) and xuanhuan 玄幻 (fantasy), both with their roots in the fantasy world of computer games. Hou Xiaoqiang 侯小强, CEO of Shengda Literature, has announced that the company is working with the state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association (Zhongguo zuojia xiehui 中国作家协会), the largest national organization of Chinese writers, to mainstream Web literature, forecasting that “the difference between print and Web-based literature will eventually disappear, and ‘traditional’ and ‘Web’ literature will be reunited on the platform of the Internet.”28 According to my interviews with Wang Jing 王晶, the publicity director of Shengda Literature (which also goes by the name of Cloudary in Englishlanguage contexts), they are benefiting from the Chinese government’s increasing support of Web publishing. Shengda Literature now owns six literature websites and runs one audiobook website, one digital publishing website, and three brick-and-mortar publications that publish print materials. Each literature website operates independently but has to meet a sales quota each year. The overall design of Shengda’s official website highlights a commodity-focused corporate culture. From the home page, users are invited to view pages titled “Introduction to the Company” (gongsi jieshao 公司介绍), “Recent News” (xinwen dongtai 新闻动态), “Company Culture” (qiye wenhua 企业文化), and “Join Us” (jiaru women 加入我们), as well as “Product Introduction” (chanpin jieshao 产品介绍), which lists the six literature websites as the company’s “products” and provides a direct link to each. The “Company Culture” page prominently displays the motto “Rationality” (jiang daoli 讲道理), explaining that it captures the spirit of their enterprise. Elaborating on this core value, the page lists its four components: “Accurate Data” (zhunque de shuju 准确的数据), “Coherent Logic” (yanjin de luoji 严谨的逻辑), “Regulated Democracy” (guifan de 28 Qian Yijiao, “Wenxue, meng kaishi de defang—Shengda wenxue gongsi CEO Hou Xiaoqiang zhuanfang” [Literature, where the dream starts: An interview of Hou Xiaoqiang, the CEO of Shengda Literature], Xinmin zhoukan, no. 2 (2009), accessed December 6, 2012, http://www.sachina.edu.cn/Htmldata/news/2008/10/4047.html.

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minzhu 规范的民主), and, somewhat surprisingly, “Responsible Autocracy” (fuze de ducai 负责的独裁). An additional click directs viewers to a more detailed description of each of the four elements, while also outlining Shengda’s involvement in Web publishing since the start of the new millennium. For instance, under “Coherent Logic,” Shengda reveals how it moved from computer games to the “creative entertainment industry” and bought out Qidian (Starting Point 起点, qidian.com) in 2005. In that same year, as a short paragraph under “Responsible Autocracy” explains, the trustees of Shengda Internet Development permitted their CEO Chen Tianqiao 陈天侨 to take advantage of a dip in the stock market and invest in Sina.com 新浪, nowadays one of the largest Chinese Internet portal sites. The remainder of this page describes what makes a real “Shengda person”— “communication,” “creativity,” and “fun”—while also promising “occasions” for staff to speak up, as well as “rewards” for doing so. It ends with a quotation from Chen Tianqiao, which states that Shengda, as a boat sailing in the challenging waters of the Chinese market economy, will adjust itself to the constantly changing currents and winds. Chen’s lines invoke the famous simile of Emperor Taizong 太宗 of the Tang 唐 dynasty (618–907 c.e.), who compared the ruler to a boat carried by the sea of his subjects, which Chen uses to illustrate Shengda’s motto of rationality.29 Relying on the purportedly rational mechanisms of a market economy, Shengda Literature has launched various publicity campaigns to promote its products. According to Wang Jing, the marketing and publicity department she heads is responsible for “promoting and upgrading our brands” by means such as designing and showing products at large-scale book exhibitions, giving press conferences (especially to foreign media) on those occasions, and also exchanging ideas with colleagues in the field.30 Shengda is currently also attempting to establish contacts with international entities, such as institutions of higher education and publishers, by donating Chinese-language electronic books and other materials to their libraries, and is moving toward an initial public offering of stock in order to become a full-fledged commercial entity. Perhaps more intriguingly, they also assist individual websites, such as Qidian, in training Web writers by hosting­annual conferences and workshops. Qidian authors can participate in workshops led by creative writing professors at prestigious universities

29 Accessed October 27, 2011, http://www.cloudary.com.cn/corporate_culture.html###. 30 Author’s interview, June 15, 2011.



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such as Peking University (Beijing daxue 北京大学) in order to improve the quality of their writing.31 Although the various literature websites under Shengda ideally should collaborate with one another, competition and conflicts still occur. Jinjiang, for example, has built its reputation by attracting high-quality female readers and authors. Yet Qidian, a traditionally male-oriented literature website and Shengda’s first acquisition (bought in 2005), has also been trying to lure female users with the help of Shengda’s publicity department. In 2009, Shengda Literature separated the former “Women’s Channel” from Qidian and transformed it into an independent website, Qidian Women’s Net (Qidian nüsheng wang 起点女生网), in an effort to attract female writers and readers and compete with Jinjiang. Shengda Literature plays a crucial role in the commercialization of Chinese Web literature, as can be seen from both its dominant ethos and operational style. Qidian, for instance, was the first of the literature­ websites in China to charge users for access to certain popular works. It has also established an elaborate system of rewards for authors and readers to encourage their output and participation. Web authors are paid for the number of words they produce every day, every month, and every year. They can also earn bonuses if readers show interest through increased subscription numbers or in the high number of votes (piao 票) they cast for particular works. As a result, works published at Qidian, especially those by well-known authors, tend to stretch out over months and years before they are finally completed, often reaching several million characters in length. Readers complain about the “watery” (shui 水) quality of these novels, but they understand the financial motivation behind authors’ wordiness. This actually provides a perfect excuse for them to read pirated versions of the original works without feeling guilty: why waste good money on unworthy works if you can read them for free? Yet, Shengda also tries hard to crack down on flagrant cases of piracy. Not only do Qidian, Jinjiang, and the other Shengda-owned websites frequently reinforce their firewalls and upgrade their antipiracy software, Shengda also filed a lawsuit against the search engine Baidu in 2009, alleging that Baidu published without permission works that had been pirated from Shengda’s websites. After two years’ litigation, this lawsuit was decided in favor of Shengda, and Baidu has been ordered by the court to pay half a million yuan in damage and also 31 Author’s interview, June 11, 2011.

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more than 40,000 yuan for legal fees.32 Shengda regards winning this lawsuit as a major victory, and has described it as a “landmark” case of intellectual property law in China. Yet readers think differently, with some denouncing Shengda for its “capitalist greed”—eliminating open-source websites in order to reap filthy lucre. Authors and readers of Web literature who live in mainland China can hardly escape the control of big corporations such as Shengda, whose state support, financial resources, profitdriven approaches, and concerted efforts to encourage online participation for commercial purposes can all determine the fates of literature websites. The Popular Mind Reader reception is not only shaped by Web publishers, it also responds to larger sociocultural forces in contemporary society. It is therefore useful to paint, in admittedly broad strokes, a general picture of Web readers’ psychological profile as influenced by the unique milieu of twenty-firstcentury China. Who are Chinese netizens? According to the report issued by the CNNIC in July 2012, China had an Internet coverage rate of 39.9%, with over 538 million Chinese able to access the Internet by the end of June 2012 and 36.2% of them (194,570,000) using literature websites regularly.33 This report confirms several persistent trends in user profiles: 55% male versus 45% female Chinese access the Internet; almost 91% of them possess a middle-school or higher level of education; those who are between 20 and 29 in age form the largest group of Chinese netizens (30.2%), followed by those between 30 and 39 (25.5%) and between 10 and 19 (25.4%); and only around 27% of them live in rural areas. In terms of occupation, students still constitute the largest group (around 28.6%) by far, followed by the self-employed (17.2%) and unemployed (11.1%), and by technical and professional (9.5%) and clerical (8.7%) workers. That is, almost 90% of netizens are gainfully employed or studying. Among Chinese netizens, 73% earn a monthly income of over 500 yuan, and around 53% earn more than 32 “Shengda wenxue qisu Baidu qinquan an chen’ai luoding, Baidu peichang 50 yu wan” [Shengda’s lawsuit against Baidu’s copyright violation was settled, and Baidu must repay over half a million yuan], in “Shengda wenxue” (Shengda literature), accessed October 27, 2011, http://www.cloudary.com.cn/News/1020940. 33 CNNIC, “Di sanshi ci Zhongguo hulianwangluo fazhan zhuangkuang tongji baogao (2012 nian qiyue)” [The 30th statistical survey report on Chinese Internet development, July 2012], accessed August 16, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/tjbg/.



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1,500 yuan.34 Since the Chinese national standard of poverty is an annual income less than 2,300 yuan (averaging less than 200 yuan per month), we can conclude that Chinese netizens are relatively young, urban, well educated, and well off.35 This description is even truer of users of Chinese literature websites. In a report issued by CNNIC in 2011, by the end of 2010, 195 million Chinese had used literature websites. Of this number, 56.9% were 24 or younger, while 35.3% (the largest group) had received a college education or higher; 33.9% earned a monthly income between 1,001 and 3,000 yuan, and 89% lived in urban areas. Male users still outstripped female users (55.7% versus 44.3%). Science fiction was the most popular genre among males (45.3% of men preferred it) while romance was favored by females (46.9% of women preferred it).36 Interestingly, home proved the most common location of reading for both men and women (almost 90%), for they generally regarded Web literature as “leisure, relaxation, and entertainment.” According to the personal data they provide, the readers of Web romances at Jinjing and Yaya fit the national user profile in terms of age, education, and occupation, though they are mostly women and reside all over the world. Although not necessarily possessing the “three highs”—a high level of formal education, a high salary, and high social status—as Hou Xiaoqiang, the CEO of Shengda Literature, has claimed,37 they, like other users of Chinese literature websites, occupy the sociopolitical location of, for lack of a better word, the middle class.38 But education and employment have not brought them the large wealth that upper-class tycoons who dabble in real estate or the stock market have accrued. Rather, they have plenty of issues to feed their anxieties and insecurities: the skyrocketing housing prices in Chinese metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai, the widening gap between the rich and poor, 34 Accessed March 30, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/tjbg/201201/t20120116 _23668.html. 35 Accessed March 30, 2012, http://news.xinhuanet.com/herald/2011-12/12/c_131295645 .htm. 36 CNNIC, “Zhongguo wangluo wenxue yonghu diaoyan baogao,” 37–38, accessed August 16, 2012, http://www.cnnic.cn/research/bgxz/wmbg/201108/P020110819564826236297.pdf. 37 Yang Ou, “Wangluo, gaibian de bujinjin shi yuedu” [Internet, it changes not only reading], Renmin ribao (haiwaiban), June 12, 2009. 38 Karl Gerth estimates that about a third of the population, or 430 million Chinese, belongs to this category, which is defined as households owning at least six appliances or electronic goods, such as TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, telephones, cell phones, DVD players, air conditioners, and microwaves. In Karl Gerth, As China Goes, So Goes the World: How Chinese Consumers Are Transforming Everything (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 14.

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uncertain job prospects after college now that the state no longer automatically assigns jobs, food safety incidents that have killed and injured tens of thousands of people, and, last but not least, a vague yet gnawing sense of the loss of basic morality and decency among their fellow Chinese. For example, in Foshan 佛山, Guangdong 广东, in October 2011, a twoyear-old girl named Little Yueyue (Xiao Yueyue 小悦悦) was hit by two vehicles and left to die. Within seven minutes, eighteen people walked by without paying any attention until a garbage collector called for help and sent her to a hospital, where she died after a week.39 With the assistance of the Internet, this incident ignited a nationwide discussion of the decline of morality in contemporary Chinese society, in which users of the two websites under study also participated. Seen in this light, Perry Link’s analysis of the butterfly fiction popular in early-twentieth-century Chinese cities such as Shanghai prompts an eerie sense of déjà vu.40 Link takes the pulse of turn-of-the-century Chinese culture by looking at authors, readers, and works of a particular type of Chinese romance in his book. He characterizes its readership as middle class, and its function as providing comfort to overstimulated and insecure urban dwellers with rural origins who harbored resentment about gaps between their expectations and realities. Link also highlights the role of new media (printed newspapers, journals, and picture books) in the spread of both popular romance works and a modern Western lifestyle. His observations on literary consumption in China in the early twentieth century could easily apply to Web-based popular Chinese fiction and its audience at the turn of the twenty-first century. The feature that distinguishes these two contexts is the Internet. Its characteristics, such as a high speed of dissemination, widespread connectivity, an unprecedented volume of information, and interactive responsiveness, have effected changes in reader psychology and behavior. The Chinese cyberspace has enabled users to rally rescuers and donors in the wake of horrific natural disasters such as the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, whip up nationalist fervor for the 2008 Olympic Games held in Beijing, and instigate boycotts and rallies for a variety of political causes. It has also made obscure figures into media stars overnight: a middle school teacher who left behind his students in the scramble for safety during the Sichuan earthquake (Fan Paopao, 范跑跑 Runner Fan);41 a young woman 39 Accessed February 17, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/4682882.htm. 40 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies. 41 Accessed February 17, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/1622870.htm#1.



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with meager formal education who nevertheless boasted of her own learning and talent and advertised her high standards for potential mates (Fengjie 凤姐, Sister Phoenix, a.k.a. Luo Yufeng 罗玉凤);42 and even a homeless person touted for his quirky, stylish albeit disheveled look (Xili ge 犀利哥, Brother Sharp).43 On the Internet, a seemingly pointless remark can catch on and go viral immediately, as illustrated by the curious case of Jia Junpeng 贾君鹏. On July 16, 2009, an anonymous user in a Baidu discussion forum posted a message titled “Jia Junpeng, your mother asked you to come home to eat” (Jia Junpeng ni mama han ni huijia chifan 贾君鹏你妈妈喊你回家吃饭). The message consisted simply of the twelve Chinese characters in its title, without any punctuation marks or accompanying content. Yet it received 3,000 responses within five hours. Within one day, it attracted 7 million hits and 300,000 comments. Large portal sites like sina.com, netease.com 网易, and people.com 人人 as well as newspapers like Southern Metropolis (Nanfang dushi bao 南方都市报) began to cover it, adding to its popularity. A cryptic posting was thus turned into a national media event, while Jia Junpeng became a household word in Chinese cyberspace overnight. Nobody knows for sure who the sender was or even whether Jia Junpeng was a real person or not, though Guobing Yang has asserted that this case started out as a form of consumer activism allowing users to vent their frustration over the delayed launch of a computer game.44 Chinese Web users appropriated this particular line to express a variety of social sentiments, from resentment of corrupt officials to loneliness and boredom, and did so with great alacrity and gusto. The birth of the so-called high-speed train genre (gaotie ti 高铁体) provides yet another striking example of Web users parodying official discourses to vent their anger with the state.45 Following the clash of two high-speed trains and the deaths of forty people in Wenzhou 温州, Zhejiang 浙江, in July 2011, Wang Yongping 王勇平, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Railway, attempted to rationalize the accident and the government’s ineffectual rescue effort at an official news conference, uttering the famous line: “Whether you believe it or not, I am convinced [by this 42 Accessed February 17, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/984934.htm#sub5066933. 43 Accessed February 17, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/1465055.htm. 44 “The Curious Case of Jia Junpeng, or The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace,” The China Beat, accessed October 20, 2009, http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p =1010. 45 Accessed February 18, 2012, http://news.sina.com.cn/s/p/2011-07-27/032922881925 .shtml.

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explanation] anyway” (Zhiyu ni xin buxin, fanzheng wo shi xin le 至于你信 不信, 反正我是信了). Finding his remarks leiren 雷人, ridiculous and insensitive, Chinese Web users immediately made an image of Wang at the press conference into a GIF file and incorporated it into an animation clip, which they disseminated online. A T-shirt printed with Wang’s famous line was designed and sold on the Web, and a competition asking users to create variations on Wang’s original sentence structure was announced. Among the more than 7,000 entries submitted within three days, many questioned and criticized the ministry’s position and Wang’s own truthfulness. Some used their sentences to express discontent over other social issues. For instance, “The Chinese Men’s Soccer Team will enter the World Cup Competition in 2014. Whether you believe it or not, I am convinced anyway.” Or, “There is no traffic jam in Beijing today. This is a miracle. Whether you believe it or not, I am convinced anyway.” The unique platform provided by the Internet thus enables Chinese users to express their opinions, likes, and dislikes at an unprecedented volume and with unprecedented candor and speed. Web-based popular romances, whether published on BBS forums or work-centered literature websites, rely on the technological features of the Internet discussed above. They attract reader participation and comments in similar ways, and can provide abundant source material for gauging the popular mind. Even though it is admittedly risky to generalize about social psychology on the basis of the books and stories that people like to read, Web readers’ preferences and their interpretative practices do reveal a lot about how they feel about the world. While acknowledging that individual experiences and practices can vary, I still find it helpful to take stock of the broad trends in Chinese Web readers’ cultural production and consumption before delving into specific websites and romances. China’s “miraculous” economic development in the last thirty years and its resurgence on the new global stage have generated a distinct collective consciousness that differs from that of the butterfly fiction readers a century ago. In addition to a somewhat inflated sense of self-importance as citizens of China that masks an underlying insecurity about China’s international status, the new generation of readers and authors of Web fiction also attempts to cultivate an image of playful detachment and carefree insouciance. In other words, to be cool is all the rage. However, we can still glimpse in readers’ choices an ambivalence about traditional Chinese and Western values, as they are propelled by the dizzying pace of modernization and surrounded by the resulting traumas that inevitably rend the fabric of a society in transition. As one insightful reader remarked, “American



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time-travel TV dramas always feature travels forward in time while Chinese ones tell stories of travels backward. The former cannot imagine a history, while the latter cannot imagine a future.”46 Indeed, with the exception of “doomsday” (moshi 末世) Web fiction that features modern men or women confronting extinction and the end of the world, a sharp contrast to the smug touting of a new Chinese era (shengshi Zhongguo 盛世中国) in some intellectual circles since the start of the new millennium, the overwhelming majority of time-travel romances on the Chinese Web have the protagonist travel backward in history. This backward gaze seems to suggest not only a fondness for Chinese history, but also a self-preserving mechanism that invokes China’s golden traditions to fend off the threats of an unknown future. Hustling for good-paying jobs, benefits such as medical insurance, and affordable housing, people of the middle class deal with challenges in contemporary Chinese society, make do with living standards much lower than those enjoyed by the wealthy class that they seek to emulate, and struggle with their own frustrations and disappointments. For Chinese women especially, along with the rise in their level of formal education, literacy, and salary, there has also come discrimination in education and employment, the commodification of their bodies in the media,47 and the perennial dilemma that women face about the choice between career and family. The apparent increase of public venues for their self-realization contrasts sharply with the reality of sexual harassment on the job,48 “hidden rules” (qian guize 潜规则), and the glass ceiling that hinders women’s advancement. Single women have to bear not only the traditional cultural stigma, but also the brunt of countless Web jokes at their expense; while they are all lumped into the category of shengnü 剩女, or “left-over women,” they are given various homophonic monikers according to their age, names that originated in popular cultural artifacts such as Journey to the West and Japanese manga (comic books).49 Women who choose or are forced to 46 Accessed February 21, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =155847&extra=&page=109, #1635. 47 Even the state-owned Zhongguo funü (Women of China), a journal known as one of the “party organs,” has started featuring sexy and fashionable-looking young urban women on its covers. See Wang Lei, “Xin Zhongguo nüxing meijie xingxiang bianqian yu xingbie pingdeng: Zhongguo funü zazhi (1949–2008)” [Changes in media images of women of new China and gender equality: A study of Zhongguo funü, 1949–2008], paper presented at the International Conference on Chinese Women and Visual Representation, Shanghai, China, December 18, 2011. 48 Accessed February 17, 2012, http://women.sohu.com/20041126/n223190989.shtml. 49 They are called, for example, sheng doushi (saint warriors, for women over 25), or Douzhan sheng fo (the victorious warring Buddha, for women between 25 and 28). Also see

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focus their energies on home and family do not fare any better. Other than the ever-thorny issue of extended family versus nuclear family in Chinese culture, crystalized in the struggle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, the ghost of the “other woman” or xiaosan 小三 always haunts an ostensibly happy marriage. A Web-generated derogatory term, xiaosan, short for disan zhe 第三者 (the third party in a romantic or sexual triangle), usually refers to women who wreck families by instigating and engaging in extramarital affairs. Like the ernai 二奶, a second wife or mistress, a phenomenon that swept China in the early days of the economic reform when wealthy Taiwanese or Hong Kong businessmen kept a second household on the mainland, they do not enjoy any legal status or protection in this relationship. However, they are not necessarily kept women in the conventional sense, as many have a career and enjoy economic independence. They are usually, but not always, younger and more attractive than the wife, and they often cite love as a justification for the affair. In the current sociocultural context of contemporary China, reading and writing Web-based Chinese fiction, especially popular romances, provides Chinese women with comfort as well as entertainment. As Georg Simmel theorizes on the effects of urbanization and modernization, the onslaught of stimuli in modern urban life damages the ability of the individual to relate deeply to others; increased isolation generates a stronger need for a sense of security; this sense can be achieved through greater self-expression;­ and one outlet for self-expression is vicarious involvement through novels.50 Through Web romance, readers can dwell in a world where justice reigns supreme and love conquers all, where they can live the kind of life they aspire to, and where they can imagine taking on numerous superman and superwoman roles that could potentially vindicate their present setbacks and frustrations. In this regard, the function and utility of Web romance overlap with its literary precedents, such as butterfly fiction. Yet Web-based popular romance is also distinctly a product of the twenty-first century. It is composed, published, distributed, and read differently than earlier forms of popular romance. New reading and writing practices, as the remainder of this book will show, are reshaping the generic conventions of Chinese popular romance. Further, its production and Roseann Lake, “All the Shengnu Ladies,” accessed March 22, 2012, http://salon.com/a/ sQ769AA. 50 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Reader in Urban Sociology, ed. Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951), 563–74.



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consumption embody many irresolvable contradictions of postmodern and postsocialist China, even as it embraces playfulness and detachment while ostensibly renouncing seriousness and meaning. In his study of Chinese postmodernism, Xiaobin Yang defines the paradigm of Chinese modernity as a “unified concern for an ultimate, absolute subjectivity” and a belief in technological history.51 If twentieth-century Chinese litera­ ture was driven by the idea of modernization and progress and expressed through the absolute national and historical subject, Web romance in the new millennium displays instead both a retrograde tendency and the splintering of univocal subjectivity into various role-playing games. Stud, Farming, and Magic-Space Fiction: Characteristics and Trends Female-oriented Chinese Web fiction privileges the romance genre. Although the subgenres of workplace intrigues (zhichang 职场) and “motivational” (lizhi 励志) fiction adopt a contemporary setting, Web romances usually incorporate elements of fantasy, especially the trope of time travel. While they mostly feature a female rather than male protagonist, the heroine is often endowed with the traditionally masculine characteristics of intelligence, public prominence, sexual promiscuity, and moral ambiguity. In her groundbreaking Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984), which combined ethnographic investigation of romance readers and romance publishing with literary analysis of the romance text, thus starting the interdisciplinary trend in cultural studies, Janice Radway describes the classical romantic heroine as known for her “sexual innocence, unselfconscious beauty, and desire for love.”52 Although heroines in contemporary English-language romances have evolved from the kind prevalent in romances published in the 1980s and analyzed by Radway, Qiong Yao’s female protagonists typically possess these qualities. Thus it is all the more surprising to see the Chinese heroines of Web romances boldly pursuing sexual gratification and social position given a cultural tradition that censures individualism and promotes women’s chastity, modesty, and selfless devotion to collective interests, not to mention the tight state control of speech in contemporary China.

51 Xiaobin Yang, The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 23. 52 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 131.

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Other than their unique treatment of characterization, female authors have added other surprising twists to the well-established conventions of time travel. The four most popular time-travel plots online are the following: a woman travels back to the past in her own body, sometimes crossdresses, and becomes the object of passion and devotion of multiple powerful masculine figures; a woman’s soul travels back to the past, inhabits the body of another man or woman, and also enjoys ardent romantic interest from powerful male figures; a woman either travels back in her own body or inhabits another female body, becomes a dominant public figure in a matriarchal society, and sets up a seraglio of attractive men; and, most recently, the plot of rebirth (chongsheng 重生), in which a woman travels backward in life, (re)awakens in early childhood, and sets about changing her destiny and that of her family. The plots outlined above, especially the first type, may seem formulaic and redundant at first sight, a mere rehashing of traditional heterosexual romances that play out female readers’ fantasies of finding the perfect combination of power and nurturance in emblems of traditional masculinity. Readers of time-travel novels do seem to expect a degree of homogeneity, and even demand the familiar conventions of popular romance. For example, they express dissatisfaction if the author has not made clear within the first few chapters which male character will join the heroine in the romantic coupling—CP in Web patois—at the heart of the plot, or if the work ends with anything other than a happily-ever-after for the romantic couple. However, time-travel romances all feature some degree of transgression even while focusing on romantic relationships. Female authors do not necessarily appear enthusiastic about the myth that women’s ultimate fulfillment is only possible through marriage and domesticity, or about the role model of Chinese guixiu 闺秀—women who not only possess poetic talent but also hold “higher standards of behavior when it [comes] to piety, chastity, or other forms of self-sacrifice.”53 Authors often celebrate not only the female time traveler’s achievements in traditionally masculine occupations such as commerce, politics, and the military, but also her sexual peccadilloes, including simultaneous (and at times incestuous) relationships with multiple partners. Readers also share this desire for a powerful heroine. In their comments, they tend to criticize female characters who seem to have forsaken notions of gender equality after traveling back to the past, demanding from them a modern or even 53 Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 229.



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feminist consciousness even while acknowledging that such behavior would be anachronistic and improbable under the circumstances.54 Yet these romances generate a more complex pleasure than a complete subversion of patriarchy might provide, as illustrated by the unique way in which they provide compensation for their producers and consumers. Above all they embody the basic plot of redemption. The heroine leaves the present as a result of a variety of traumas, including physical and emotional abuse by others. Her time travel provides her with the opportunity to redress the wrongs of her current world and to put things right, if only at another, fantastical, time and locale. Having traveled back to premodern China, she uses her modern knowledge, skills, and progressive ideas to establish herself in a patriarchal society, gaining fame and wealth, winning adoration from multiple and successful men, and exerting power over history. If granted a second chance through “rebirth” into contemporary Chinese society, she not only has the foresight to invest in the stock market and the IT industry and thus make a fortune, but is also able to identify a good marriage prospect in early childhood and bring him up according to her idea of the ideal man. By identifying with such a morally ambiguous yet powerful female time traveler, female writers and readers can suspend the social and moral constraints placed on their lives imaginatively—albeit temporarily—and claim sexual and political power through acts of reading and writing. These romances all start with the heroine’s yearning to escape from her current dull or miserable circumstances in exchange for a past that promises a more authentic and satisfying emotional life. This backward turn may not yet prove that all Chinese women are disillusioned with social reality, though the current resurgence of Confucian values through the promotion of “Chinese Learning” (Guoxue 国学) suggests a widespread disenchantment with contemporary society. Yet the opportunity for the modern time traveler’s restoration and transformation, especially her change of sex, occurs by accident rather than through individual will or endeavor. She is ultimately at the mercy of fate, even though she has ostensibly traded the unsatisfying reality of modern life for an idealized past. In the end, authors’ and readers’ insistence on the theme of redemption and a happy ending is at odds with their (subconscious) urge to subvert patriarchy and disrupt current patriarchal norms, for they strive for a precarious balance between disturbing the status quo and obtaining happy results by realistic means at the same time. 54 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=25&id=5785.

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This dilemma facing the protagonist is equally, albeit somewhat singularly, revealed in two seemingly innovative plot patterns that Web romances adopt: danmei (tanbi in Japanese), male-male homoerotic fiction; and nüzun, narratives of matriarchy. I discuss danmei and nüzun narratives in more depth in the following chapters. But it is worth mentioning that while these two plot patterns enact gender identities and relations that seem advantageous to women, a deep probing into the mores and modes of their production and consumption reveals certain contradictions that compromise their transgressive features. These characteristics of Web romance, especially their fantastical settings, masculinized heroines, and prevalent use of the trope of time travel, register the unsettled feel of postsocialist China, all the more so because Chinese women consume a huge amount of popular cultural artifacts produced and made widely available on the Chinese Internet. Female Web authors list many popular cultural products in print, on TV, and on the Web as sources for their inspiration.55 Yet they also express a deep dissatisfaction with blatant male fantasies in works unflatteringly called “stud fiction” because they depict male protagonists who, endowed with superhuman prowess, change history and acquire numerous beautiful women at the same time.56 Consequently, in their own works they often showcase selfconscious differences from male-authored novels. Furthermore, because the Internet enables the fast dissemination and ready imitation of any high-ranked Web fiction, female users of literature websites also exhibit the typical Web reader’s fickleness in taste. As popular tropes and plots quickly become passé, users begin to expose and criticize what they consider clichés and absurdities in time-travel romances. At the same time, they continue to seek new ways to reinvent the conventions of popular romance and break free from precedents set by earlier female authors. A good case in point is the rise in popularity of first zhongtian 种田, or farming fiction, and then kongjian 空间, magic-space fiction. The former refers to time-travel romances that depict, in a relatively realistic fashion, a heroine of humble origin who nevertheless overcomes apparently insurmountable obstacles through hard work and discretion, rather than heavenendowed prowess or ostentatious “modern” airs, and accrues wealth and power while also achieving felicitous familial relationships. The latter, in 55 For example, accessed March 6, 2008, http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/4a6d1fd0010009jg. 56 See, for example, accessed July 30, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid =173864&chapterid=63; and accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php ?novelid=228479&chapterid=25.



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contrast, endows the female time traveler with magic powers to ensure her survival and success in an alien world. Some farming romances tend to debunk clichés prevalent in earlier works by juxtaposing and contrasting two female time travelers in the same work. For example, in Luohong ru zhou 落红如皱 (Fallen flowers like wrinkles),57 author Dou Yun 逗云 depicts a female protagonist who possesses a surprising conservative streak despite her secret identity as a modern time traveler. The other female time traveler in the same novel displays all the characteristics typical of earlier heroines, such as boldness in relationships between the sexes, curiosity about brothels, and exhibitionistic behavior such as singing contemporary popular songs and plagiarizing classical poems. In contrast, the protagonist apparently adapts to her upbringing as a modest high-class maiden and conforms to all the gender prescriptions that befit her position. Although the “other woman” succeeds in first seducing her fiancé (also her cousin) and later her husband, a mentally handicapped emperor, the protagonist shows great poise and clearsightedness, and gradually gains power in court after giving birth to a son. While some readers complain that this protagonist does not resemble their idea of a modern time traveler at all, others support the author’s more realistic and authentic portrayal of a complex imperial society.58 Further, even though the female protagonist apparently upholds traditional gender norms in a patriarchal society, she also exploits them to her own advantage. Her freedom from romantic illusions and independence from men provoked one reader to remark: “She does not need a man. She can live very comfortably by herself.”59 Yet, one cannot help wondering whether these less flamboyant heroines subvert the patriarchal norms and conventions of heterosexual romances, or merely uphold patriarchal rule at the expense of other women. In a departure from the realism of farming novels, the magic-space fiction that has recently become popular borrows plot elements from the fantasy world of video and computer games. Authors of these works supply the heroine with a magic space that boasts everything from gold and silver mountains to magic plants, animals, and drugs, magnificent buildings and hot springs, and science labs and computers. This space is only visible and 57 Accessed December 14, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=314891. 58 Accessed December 14, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=314891& chapterid=12. 59 Accessed December 14, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=314891& chapterid=52.

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accessible to the heroine, as it can be collapsed into a piece of jade jewelry that she wears or simply conjured up in her mind’s eye. Female-authored romances that feature magic spaces appropriated them from male-authored works, which in turn had incorporated ele­ ments from popular computer games. The notoriously popular “Happy Farm” (Kaixin nongchang 开心农场), a Web-based game, for instance, allows players to cultivate their own piece of virtual land, plant and harvest crops and flowers, raise livestock and poultry, and build houses, while also rising in the ranks based on the time they spend online and the Web coins they thus accumulate. In Web romances, though, the heroine not only hones and harnesses magic powers through farming, as does the hero in maleauthored works, she also uses her supernatural powers to cheat, defeating with ease all her female rivals for money, power, and the hero’s love. The evolution of time-travel romance from stud fiction to farming literature and magic-space tales follows a trajectory from the public sphere through the family circle and culminates in the individual as its principal focus. The public prominence and success typical of the first generation of female time travelers gives way to more domestic concerns in farming romances, where familial relationships as well as economic production become the focus of the plot. Romances featuring a magic space, a metaphor for the heroine’s “inscape,” mark a further retreat into the sanctity of the interior self. This trend echoes what Shuyu Kong calls the “personal writing” typical of Chinese fiction since the late 1980s, as authors “turn away from social and historical concerns to emphasize personal and domestic life, and do so to such an extent that even descriptions of collective historical experiences are conveyed through the lenses of personal memory and flawed narrators.”60 Web romance’s shift from stud fiction to magic-space fiction shows how Web-based popular literature often engenders its own destruction, correction, or reversal even as it is in the process of being widely disseminated and imitated. The particular case of time-travel romance reveals deep contradictions in its ethos and ideologies as it moves farther and farther away from the grand official narrative of nation building. Kong argues that the inward turn in contemporary Chinese fiction “reflects a collective consciousness that is attempting to reconstruct the self as an individual in a postrevolutionary society.”61 Whether the current inward turn in Web 60 Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 104. 61 Ibid.



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romances similarly reveals shifts in Chinese women’s structure of feelings, and thereby redefines their (post)modern identity, is a question that must be answered by examining both Web-based texts and the reading and writing practices that they inculcate. The Pleasure of Repetition What kinds of pleasure can Web romance generate for Chinese women? We must first look closely at the widespread phenomenon of copycat behavior on the Chinese Internet. Web-based popular Chinese fiction is characterized by its appropriation from existing cultural artifacts and integration of heterogeneous elements. A casual scan of any Chinese-language literature website yields titles similar to and derivative of one another, and male and female authors borrow freely from each other. Fan fiction by definition lifts and reframes elements from the original textual and media sources as its starting point. Moreover, the familiar trope of time travel appears again and again in all genres of popular fiction. The ubiquity of imitation and even plagiarism on the Web to some extent reflects the social acceptability of shanzhai 山寨 culture in contemporary China. The term originally referred to mountain strongholds beyond government reach but was later applied to underground factories that produce counterfeit consumer electronics. As Karl Gerth observes, shanzhai products are not passed off as fakes, but rather as imitations of name-brand commodities at affordable prices and with even more features. Shanzhai therefore sounds more “cute, creative, [and] interesting” to Chinese consumers.62 Similarly, rather than revealing a mere lack of originality and creativity, recycling certain cultural elements accomplishes a variety of legitimate goals for readers and authors of Chinese Web literature. In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro­ duction” (1936),63 Walter Benjamin defines aura as the distance between the audience of the work of art and the work itself. With the advent of mechanical reproduction, he argues, the distance has been closed, aura diminished, and the work of art democratized. For Benjamin, the destruction of aura signals the passage from artwork as a religious object to artwork as exhibit. The mechanical reproduction of artwork, however perfect 62 Gerth, As China Goes, 155. 63 Accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/ works/ge/benjamin.htm.

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the image, thus lacks the presence and the authenticity of the original— similar to the loss of the presence of the actor in the transposition of drama from stage to screen. The elimination of aura also suggests to Benjamin the loss of any sense of an unreachable (divine, mysterious, and transcen­ dent) distance. Yet in the age of limitless digital reproduction, repetition in Chinese Web romance points up not the absence, but the presence of creators of reproduced or reinvented artifacts. Even while rejecting the heroic transcendence promoted by the Chinese state by focusing on domestic tales and romantic love, female Chinese readers define and pursue meaning and pleasure through their unique style of repetitive production and consumption. What appears to be repetition in characterization and plot is actually a fulfillment of the generic expectations of popular romance. Radway compares popular romances to “the myths of oral cultures,” since “they all retell a single tale whose final outcome their readers always already know” and that readers’ repetitive consumption “guarantees that the first recurrence of a familiar phrase, stock description, or stereotypical event in a novel still partially unread will inform the reader that the fate of these ‘new’ lovers is as immutable and irreversible as the already completed and fixed destiny of any mythical deity.”64 Further, popular romance, as a “formulaic” literature, seems to some scholars to perpetuate the status quo by embodying a moral fantasy that is acceptable and even preferred by the cultural groups who enjoy the genre. John Calwati argues: “One basic cultural impetus of formulaic literature is toward the maintenance of conventional patterns of imaginative expression…. Formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary.” However, he acknowledges that literary formulas also help with “assimilating changes in values to traditional imaginative constructs.”65 By focusing on the developing relationship of one man and one woman (homosexual romances are a newer innovation), romance novels rehearse a convention that, as Sally Goade notes, harks back to Greek and Shakespearean comedies: the happy ending defined as marriage or betrothal. Therefore, she remarks, “Cawelti’s 1976 description of a focus on the developing relationship and a ‘moral fantasy’ in which the love between

64 Radway, Reading the Romance, 198. 65 John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 35–36.



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hero and heroine overcomes all obstacles still rests at the core of other definitions [of the romance genre].”66 Despite the elitist and even disdainful undertone of Radway’s and Calwati’s critiques, repetition in popular fiction is far from mere imitation or plagiarism. As Lena Henningsen shows in her discussion of fan fiction, writing Harry Potter fanfic constitutes a form of apprenticeship for young authors in China and around the world; just as people praise the Harry Potter series for encouraging young people to read, in Henningsen’s eyes the series also encourages them to write. For example, she points out that Chinese writers tend to integrate Chinese cultural elements into their fanfic: Harry uses a magic wok, is a tourist in China, works with Chinese students, and so on.67 Thus, she believes that fanfic authors’ imitations can be productive, as they lead to new versions of a popular text or new readings of contested symbols in the cultural landscape. The Internet, further, provides indispensable and irreplaceable tools allowing Chinese users to appropriate from existing artifacts. As mentioned, the clash of high-speed trains can generate a new genre of Web writing that allows users both to express outrage at official callousness and to have fun by adding new twists to existing cultural products. In other cases, writers have utilized the Internet to escape from unpromising occupations and realize their literary dreams, such as the famous Web author and dissident Murong Xuecun 慕容雪村, a former car salesman.68 Like imitative writing, the repetitive reading of variations on the same tale can also lead to creative reconfigurations of popular elements, despite the fact that romance novels are invariably criticized for the sin of producing stock characters and hackneyed plots. It is worthwhile for us to explore further how reading recycled versions of the same story generates pleasure.  Numerous ethnographic accounts, from Radway’s 1984 study up to today’s romance scholarship, come to the same conclusion: “The dominant pleasure of reading romance … was associated with an extended narrative where the reader could empathize with the heroine, while at the same time knowing that there would be a positive resolution to the dilemmas or problems that the heroine faced.”69 But, while Radway criticizes 66 Sally Goade, ed., Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 2–3. 67 Lena Henningsen, Copyright Matters: Imitation, Creativity and Authenticity in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Berlin: Berlinger Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2010), 162. 68 Lara Farrar, “For many Chinese, literary dreams go online,” accessed February 15, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/02/15/china.publishing/index.html. 69 Glen Thomas, “Romance: The Perfect Creative Industry? A Case Study of HarlequinMills and Boon Australia,” in Empowerment versus Oppression, ed. Sally Goade, 24.

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romance readers’ pursuit of this kind of “escapist” pleasure, Ien Ang accuses her of committing feminist moralism and demeaning ordinary women’s reading habits. Ang’s argument can be summarized thus: (a) romance readers insist on the happy ending because they want to focus on how the two lovers get together, not the question of whether they will unite; (b) women repeatedly read romance “because it constitutes a secure space in which an imaginary perpetuation of an emphatically utopian state of affairs (something that is an improbability in ‘real life’ in the first place) is possible”; and (c) they favor a “deliberate fictional bracketing of life after the wedding” to show their “determination to maintain the feeling of romance, or a refusal to give it up, even though it may be temporarily or permanently absent in ‘real life,’ against all odds.”70 In other words, familiarity breeds security rather than contempt, and makes it possible for women to savor the utopian fantasy created by romances even more. Jennifer Crusie argues that romance works can be seen as “feminist fairy tales” because the “combination of resonating theme and liberating recasting” not only draws the reader in but also delivers a powerful message: “she will win love only if she remains true to herself—active and passionate.”71 Reading romances “puts women at the center of their stories, reinforcing their instincts about the meanings of the events in their lives.”72 As Crusie asserts, one of the chief reasons that women read romances lies in the pleasure of recognizing the truth and validity of their own lives. In contrast, feminist scholar Tania Modleski views romance novels as inducing addiction precisely because they enable female fantasy. For instance, she holds that romance authors often stage the heroine’s “disappearing act,” such as a false suicide, in order to make the hero suffer and satisfy female readers’ “revenge fantasy”; this plot pattern actually reflects the sobering reality in a patriarchal society: “only by killing themselves off can women get men’s attention.”73 Yet Modleski also recognizes 70 Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 105–77, emphasis in the original. 71 Jennifer Crusie, “This Is Not Your Mother’s Cinderella: The Romance Novel as Feminist Fairy Tale,” in Romantic Conventions, ed. Anne Kaler and Rosemary Johnson-Kurek (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1998), 51–61, accessed January 3, 2013, http://www .jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/this-is-not-your-mothers-cinderella-the-romance -novel-as-feminist-fairy-tale/. 72 Jennifer Crusie, “Romancing Reality: The Power of Romance Fiction to Reinforce and Re-Vision the Real,” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, nos. 1–2 (1997): 81–93, accessed June 16, 2010, http://www.jennycrusie.com/for-writers/essays/romancing-reality -the-power-of-romance-fiction-to-reinforce-and-re-vision-the-real/. 73 Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1982), 46.



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the doubleness of the female reader’s consciousness; while identifying with the fantasy inherent in popular romance, she is also an impersonal observer: “with intellectual distance, detachment, and knowledge” a reader remains “superior to a heroine … with her necessary ignorance, passivity, and self-forgetfulness.”74 For readers of Web-based Chinese romances, their double consciousness also pairs up with the practice of extrapolating from fiction to life, and vice versa. As Henry Jenkins shows, media fans “seemingly blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, speaking of characters as if they had an existence apart from their textual manifestations, entering into the realm of the fiction as if it were a tangible place they can inhabit and explore.”75 Ang diagnoses this particular intensity as symptomatic of fans’ pursuit of “emotional realism” in media texts, for they regard concrete situations and complication as “symbolic representations of more general living experiences: quarrels, intrigues, problems, happiness, and misery.”76 Some argue that this style of reading—extrapolation that draws the reader well beyond the information explicitly presented in the text, the intermingling of personal experience and narrative events, the focus on a narrative’s world rather than its plot—reflects a gender-specific approach to narrative comprehension. David Bleich, for example, concludes that men tend to read for authorial meaning, perceiving a “strong narrational voice” shaping events, while women see themselves as participating in and actively contributing to a conversation initiated by the narrative.77 But the reading practices that some scholars identify as intrinsically feminine in fact reveal strategies that women have adopted to rewrite male-centered narratives in a way that better serves their interests. As Jenkins points out, such strategies “deflect the focus away from male protagonists and onto the larger sets of social relations constituting the narrative world,” “reclaim from the margins the experiences of female characters,” and show “alienation and discomfort” rather than acceptance of male-oriented narrative priorities.78 More importantly, reading and commenting on Web-based popular Chinese romances alongside like-minded fellow users is a social process by 74 Ibid., 56. 75 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18. 76 Ien Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985), 44–45. 77 David Bleich, “Gender Interests in Reading and Language,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and P.P. Scheweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 239. 78 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 113.

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which individual interpretations are reshaped and reinforced through ongoing discussion with other readers. Such discussions expand the experience of the text beyond its initial consumption. The meanings that emerge from the online community are consequently more fully integrated into the readers’ lives and are fundamentally different from those generated through a casual encounter with an otherwise unremarkable text. Serialized romances on the Chinese Internet also produce a unique rhythm of their own. By skillfully timing the release of new installments, authors can whet appetites, build up suspense, and stimulate reader discussion. However, if a work is stretched out too long, readers may complain of boredom and even reproach the author for profiteering by including superfluous plotting. Further, with the encouragement of fellow users, readers also contest or defy authorial intentions and interpretations, at times disabusing each other of romantic illusions that the author attempts to create and leading to the subversion of conventional reader expectations and hence the definition of the romance genre itself. The participatory nature of online reading, therefore, adds additional layers to the pleasure of reading and also challenges the generic boundaries of popular romance. Readers’ discussions not only excavate and create meanings in the work, they also help them to make sense of their own lives through their acts of extrapolation. They are, in short, engaged in creative play through which they express and manage the fears, desires, and fantasies that they otherwise lack the means and sense of security to explore fully and reveal to the (disapproving) general society. The pleasure of writing and reading Web romance is indeed manifold. Since romance novels often confirm an idealized self-image, reading such tales not only validates female readers’ life experiences, but also provides tools for them to grapple with everyday disappointments and challenges. Web literature makes it possible for readers and authors to form what Matt Hills calls “a community of imagination,” which constitutes itself “through a common affective engagement … and similar imaginative experiences.”79 As will be shown throughout this book, Web-based popular Chinese romance boasts not only familiar settings, plots, and characters, but also twists and changes that add to the piquancy of the reading experience. Further, it generates enthusiastic and interactive discussions online, and thus provides the security and encouragement that allow Chinese women to reimagine their gender identity and life experience together. 79 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York: Routledge), 180.



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Romantic Love with Chinese Characteristics Sociocultural changes in early twentieth-century China, such as the decline of concubinage, the promotion of free choice of marriage partners as well as women’s rights within marriage, and the increasing consumer power of women, all contributed to the birth of romantic love in literature. Most significantly, the “new woman” appeared as an icon of modernity in vernacular Chinese fiction and drama starting in the 1910s. One of her distinctive features is the courage to choose her own sexual and marriage partners while defying the strictures of the traditional Chinese family, which was always portrayed by radical intellectuals as exploiting vulnerable and powerless women and youth for the fortification of patriarchy.80 Numerous literary examples, including the emblematic May Fourth novel Family by Ba Jin 巴金81 and Ibsenian plays authored by Hu Shi 胡适 and Tian Han 田汉,82 portray modern, romantic love. This type of individualistic love not only ignited the imagination and dreams of young people at the time, it also assailed both the multigenerational, age-, gender-, and status-graded Chinese family and its attendant set of cultural values that had been in place for at least two thousand years. Traditional folk tales such as The Butterfly Lovers (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai 梁山伯与祝英台), the so-called tale of the Chinese Romeo and Juliet, mostly arrange tragic fates for young lovers who disregard familial prescriptions and social norms in their headstrong pursuit of love. The Herd Boy and Weaver Girl (Niulang Zhinü 牛郎织女), another immortal love story that inspired the creation of a Chinese Valentine’s Day in contemporary society, celebrates a kind of love that is founded not so much on romance as on the family as the unit of economic production and procreation. Further, although both scholar and beauty fiction and butterfly fiction describe the love relationship between a beautiful young woman and a talented young male scholar or official, those unions typically earn the 80 For a fuller discussion of the representation and deployment of this figure, see Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004). 81 The May Fourth (New Cultural) Movement was named after the student demonstrations and widespread strikes that broke out in Beijing on May 4, 1919, as Chinese people protested against their weak government and the Versailles Treaty, which handed over German concessions in Shandong province to a rising Japan. But the term “May Fourth” also refers more widely to Chinese intellectuals’ attempts at modernizing Chinese culture and strengthening the nation since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 82 For example, Hu Shi’s Zhongshen dashi (Big event for the whole life) and Tian Han’s Pan Jinlian.

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blessings of the couple’s parents, and even of the emperor or another higher authority eventually. Anything less than familial approval would signal filial disloyalty and bring about ruination for the young lovers, especially the transgressive woman in the story. It is a revealing reflection of the social mores and sensibilities of early twentieth-century China that the May Fourth literary works that call for the demolition of the traditional family structure and freedom in love and marriage never rivaled their popular peers in sales figures in that period.83 Libai liu 礼拜六 (Saturday; ed. Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鹃, Shanghai), a representative journal of the school of butterfly fiction, had 20,000 subscriptions at its peak. One of the most popular love stories in this genre, Yuli hun 玉梨 魂 (Jade pear spirit) by Xu Zhenya 许振亚 (ca. 1876–?), was reprinted seven times and sold more than 200,000 copies within a two-year span.84 Some observers of the time lamented that of all the fictional works published in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, “eight or nine out of ten are popular love stories.”85 At a time when the more widely distributed books sold a little over two thousand copies and most fewer than one thousand,86 the popularity of love stories was a well-established fact. In contrast to the politically radical May Fourth literature, popular romances of the Republican era uphold rather than attack family values. Leo Lee has called attention to the way popular journals in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s highlighted “women’s new roles in a modern conjugal  family” in order to promote an urban bourgeois lifestyle rather than liberation and self-realization outside the family.87 Writers of popular fiction advocated even more conservative values regarding Chinese women. Some condemned modern education for its alleged destructive influence on traditional womanhood, such as Ziyou du 自由毒 (The poison of freedom, 1919[?]). Others lamented the tragic fates that befell girl students who received a modern education, such as Nü xuesheng mimi ji 女学生秘密记 83 The only exception was Family, which, some scholars argue, resembles butterfly fiction in more than one way. 84 Chen Pingyuan, “Xiaoshuo de shumianhua qingxiang yu xushi moshi de zhuanbian” [The formalization of fiction and transformation of narrative patterns], in Ershi shiji zhongguo wenxue shilun [Discussion on twentieth-century Chinese literary history], ed. Wang Xiaoming (Shanghai: Dongfang chubanshe, 2007), vol. 1, 226–29. 85 Yuan Jin, “Juexing yu taobi: lun minchu yanqing xiaoshuo” [Awakening and escape: On yanqing fiction of the early Republican era], ibid., vol. 1, 250–76. 86 Zhang Jingluan, Zai baojie ershi nian [Twenty years in journalism] (Shanghai: Shanghai zizhi gongsi, 1938), 127–28. 87 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 229.



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(The secret tales of a girl student, 1931). Still others both lauded those new women who preserved traditional virtues despite their modern education and criticized those who lost their chastity, such as Nü xuesheng zhi bai­ mian guan 女学生之百面观 (The many facets of girl students, 1918). These tales often proclaimed their didactic and cautionary purpose while ensuring their entertainment value through the sensational titles and plots, not to mention the surfeit of women’s portraits accompanying each story. The general picture of Chinese people’s marital life since the Communist revolution in mainland China has not signaled an unmitigated victory for romantic love, either. An extensive sociological survey conducted in 1999– 2000 by the Institute of Sex Studies of Renmin 人民 University in Beijing reveals that from 1949 to 2000, less than half of all Chinese found a marriage partner through “free love”; at the beginning of the new millennium this figure reached a historical high of only 43.2%. As for those who did pick their own marriage partners, more people (ranging from 22.6% to 33.8% annually) met their matches at work rather than in some other social context. Together these figures indicate that during the latter part of the twentieth century, most Chinese marriages were firmly based on economic considerations, and that most people viewed mutual respect, support, and obligations rather than passionate love as the foundation of their marriages. The study concluded that rather than embracing the “Western”88 concept of an all-consuming and process-oriented romance, people did not see the point of romance for romance’s sake if it failed to lead to marriage and family life.89 Given the venerable traditions of familial love and Confucian ethics that long pervaded Chinese life and literature, it might come as a surprise that Qiong Yao reigned as the “Queen of Popular Romance,” since she apparently promotes individualistic romantic love in her urban love stories. However, sociologist Fang-mei Lin reveals that a typical Qiong Yao romance features “the synthesis of romantic love and family cohesion.” Compar­ ing  Qiong Yao’s tales with Western romance novels, Lin finds that they 88 This study’s concluding remarks somewhat reinforce Orientalist stereotypes. For example, Jack Goody reveals that the pervasive Eurocentric biases in much Western historical writing lead to the “theft” by the West of the achievements of other cultures in the invention of democracy, capitalism, individualism, and love. See Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Further, many of the ideas and phenomena of romantic love were new to “the West” during those years as well. 89 Pan Suiming et al., Dangdai Zhongguoren de xing xingwei yu xing guanxi [Sexual behavior and relation in contemporary China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004), 162–67.

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“[display] affective familialism instead of affective individualism”: Western individualism requires a firm ego boundary—a selfhood—so that autonomy can be asserted and an introspective interest in the individual personality can be explored, while in Qiong Yao’s stories, “her characters have a permeable ego boundary: selfhood exists in the form of self-in-relation, anchored in particular in family relations.”90 In fact, Qiong Yao’s unique conceptualization of Chinese romance proved so powerful that not only did her early works survive the attacks of modernist Taiwan scholars who criticized them for their perceived lack of social awareness,91 her later, more tradition-bound historical romances dominated the market for mainland soap operas for a decade and have recently been making a comeback. As Inge Nielsen remarks, the historical works depart from her early novels as the author tries her hand at reproducing “an older literary form” of butterfly fiction: a “traditional, often longwinded form of storytelling … with its flexible composition of a few or all of the following ingredients: endless plot subdivisions, kong-fu [gongfu] intermezzos, confused identities, generational conflicts, emotional confrontations, sentimental love scenes, confrontations of tradition and modernity, appeals for political and social justice and so on.” Precisely because of her enduring attraction, Nielson argues, Qiong Yao “comes close to being young adults’ ambassador for ‘Cultural China,’ ”92 in that with the help of the Internet, her latest books and TV shows have become vehicles for interaction between individuals in the geopolitical centers of China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese immigrant communities in North America, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. Qiong Yao’s works are an important precursor to Chinese Web romance. The love so vividly detailed in her fiction as well as in butterfly fiction represents a contradictory mixture of the traditional Chinese version of love, and the new and “modern” concept of Western romantic love. In light of Qiong Yao’s traditional turn in her more recent output, it is all the more intriguing that contemporary Web authors and readers would denounce her “immoral” glorification of romantic love at the expense of traditional family values. Indeed, whether they enable addictive fantasy or creative consumption, Chinese Web romances all embody numerous unruly and 90 Lin, “Social Change and Romantic Ideology,” 178–82. 91 Lang, “San Mao and Qiong Yao,” 76–120. 92 Inge Nielsen, “Caught in the Web of Love: Intercepting the Young Adult Reception of Qiong Yao’s Romances,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 53, nos. 3–4 (2000): 242–51.



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pervasive cultural contradictions. In most cases, the kind of romantic love valued and advocated by female Web users is not only intricately intertwined with familial love, but also ultimately enables the heroine’s selfrealization, and thus expands romance from its traditional definition as a tale of heterosexual relationship to include a female Bildungsroman. In summary, political, economic, and cultural forces in contemporary China have produced a backward and inward turn in Web romance: the heroine (or hero in danmei works) not only travels backward in history, but also moves from the public to the domestic realm while shifting her (or his) attention from collective to individual concerns. Yet the technological features of the Internet also shape its production and consumption, leading to narrative innovations and subversions of cultural norms. Thanks to collective (re)writing and simultaneous and interactive reading, the genre of popular romance is undergoing striking changes. The text is extended to integrate multimedia elements, current affairs, and contemporary cultural practices flowing online and offline. Ultimately, Web romance not only flourishes across the media, but also helps female readers to reimagine masculinity, femininity, and sexual relationships through new subgenres.

CHAPTER TWO

ADDICTED TO BEAUTY It does not matter whether you are a man, woman, dog, cat, plant, or machine; if I fall in love with you, then so be it. –Words spoken by the hero in Absolute Love, a Japanese danmei manga

Although not the largest Chinese literature website, Jinjiang Literature City (www.jjwxc.net) is one of the earliest and most influential women’s literature websites; it has established an almost exclusively female readership that is famous for its enthusiasm, loyalty, and powers of articulation.1 Launched in Jinjiang, Fujian 福建, in 1998,2 it has since developed into an elaborate organization consisting of an e-bookstore, a discussion forum, and a users’ feedback forum, as well as a website for publishing creative works, Creative Writing Net (Yuanchuang wang 原创网). Judging by their self-introductions, the majority of authors and readers are fairly welleducated women whose ages range from the late teens to early forties.3 Only a few are full-time writers. Most have other occupations such as students, teachers, and accountants. The majority of them reside in mainland China; a significant number appear to be living abroad but are nevertheless eager to participate from their various locations in the Chinese diaspora.4 The age, education, and occupation of Jinjiang users fit the national profile of users of Chinese literature websites. Most are between eighteen and thirty years old and possess the “three highs”: high salary, high level of education, and high social status.5 Jinjiang users are thus perhaps more likely to be highly educated, urban, and politically liberal than the small-town romance readers discussed by Janice Radway.

1 Yin, “Web Writing,” 31. 2 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=3&id=56296. 3 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=18&id=12579; see also Linder, “Web Literature,” 895–96. 4 Xu Wenwu, “Lun Zhongguo wangluo wenxue de qiyuan yu fazhan” [On the origin and developments of Chinese Web literature], Journal of Jianghan Petroleum Institute 4, no. 1 (March 2002): 71–74. 5 Yang, “Wangluo, gaibian de bu jinjin shi yuedu.”

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Jinjiang does not depend on the main Internet portals on the Chinese Web, such as Wangyi or Xinlang, but rather frequently changes and enhances its Web features to make itself more user friendly. Compared with other Chinese literature websites, Jinjiang not only almost exclusively answers to contemporary Chinese women’s interests and concerns, it also boasts interactive features conducive to candid, sophisticated, and indepth discussions among its users (more about this later). It thus emerges as an invaluable source of accounts of how Chinese women experience the Internet because of its user profile and its responsiveness to user needs. However, Jinjiang by no means exists in a vacuum isolated from the rest of Chinese society. Founded mostly on volunteer labor, with limited funding from advertisements, it experienced financial hardships, legal crises, and ownership changes before finally finding an investor in Shanghai Shengda Internet Development Company in November 2007. Shortly afterwards, it followed the example of Starting Point (Qidian), the first of Shengda Literature’s acquisitions, and began charging a fee for VIP access to certain works. This practice reflects not only the increasing importance placed on profit by Jinjiang but also the power of big capital in Web publishing.6 It has also caused controversy and deep disappointment among former readers, who consider this move a sell-out and a betrayal of Jinjiang’s core values of volunteerism and equal sharing.7 So far, Jinjiang works have been published in printed form mostly by newly founded houses known for their lists of popular fiction, rather than the large state-run publishers specializing in serious literature.8 But more and more mainstream Chinese publishers have begun to cash in on the rise of popular fiction, and they have especially targeted female romance readers as a profit-generating consumer base.9 Additionally, by utilizing a printon-demand service, authors can have their Web works published in print by specialized publishers and sold to subscribers who collect hard copies as souvenirs.10 Among the various genres available on Jinjiang’s Creative Writing Net,  romance, especially time-travel romance, is the most popular. Most 6 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=2&id=121844. 7 Accessed March 22, 2012, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=4&id=17774. 8 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=18. 9 Qin Yuchun, “Tushu cehua chong xinren, yifenzhong gaojian ding shengsi” [Book designer favors newcomers, manuscript’s success or failure determined in one instant], Fazhi wanbao, May 28, 2007, accessed July 19, 2009, http://fzwb.ynet.com/article.jsp?oid =20840265. 10 These publishing houses are located in both mainland China and Taiwan.



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recently, the rising popularity of time-travel TV soap operas, some adapted from Web novels published by Jinjiang, has further raised the profile of Web-based time-travel romances. For example, Gong 宫 (Palace, a.k.a. Gong suo xin yu 宫锁心玉, Palace locked heart of jade), first aired by Hunan 湖南 Satellite TV in 2011, describes a modern woman who travels back to the Qing dynasty and engages in a romantic triangle with two princes. It was the most-watched show on broadcast television for sixteen consecutive days and attracted more than 200 million hits through Web TV, making it the “second most popular TV drama after Qiong Yao’s Pearl-Returning Princess.”11 However, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, danmei or “boy’s love” fiction (abbreviated by users as BL), which depicts male homoerotic relationships, is not only becoming an increasingly popular romance genre on its own, it has also generated some of the most popular works of fan fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.12 Before I discuss in detail the attraction that danmei holds, a brief history of its introduction to China is necessary. Originally a term designating an anti-Naturalism literary movement in early twentieth-century Japan that promoted “aesthetic” representations of sensory impressions,13 danmei, or in its Japanese form tanbi, has since the 1970s come to refer to manga and other literature produced for Japanese women. The bimonthly magazine June, inaugurated in 1978 by the Sun Publishing Group in Japan and targeting “girls and young women devoted to this [tanbi] theme,” spawned so many imitators that the word “June” itself has become a synonym for the genre of tanbi.14 In 1991–1992, Japanese tanbi manga series began to spread to mainland China via Taiwan. These imported cultural products generated various websites and fan circles consisting mainly of female students between the

11 Dong Limin, “Chuanyue: yizhong xingbie zhengzhi” [Time travel: A gender politics], paper presented at the International Conference on Chinese Women and Visual Repre­ sentation, Shanghai, December 16–19, 2011. 12 Rank lists at Jinjiang accessed on July 27, 2008 show that of the top 50 all-time favorites of readers, 16 are danmei, including the top and second highest ranked works. This trend can also be seen in the semiannual and quarterly rank lists: 13 out of the top 50 in the former and 17 out of the top 50 in the latter. Accessed July 27, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/topten .php?orderstr=7; http://www.jjwxc.net/topten.php?orderstr=6; http://www.jjwxc.net/ topten.php?orderstr=4. 13 Pi Junjun, “Guqi wenxue de ‘mei yishi’ mengya zhi chutan” [First exploration on the budding of aesthetic consciousness in literature by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro], Tianjin waiguoyu xueyuan xuebao, no. 3 (2002): 64–67. 14 Frederik Scodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), 120–22.

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ages of nineteen and twenty-six.15 Thus, danmei in China has from the start relied on the Internet for its spread and enjoyed a fan base of relatively well-educated young women—the same demographic that comprises danmei fans at Jinjiang. As relatively young women, they appear receptive to depictions of unconventional sexual relationships and the higher proportion of graphic sex in danmei novels, as compared to more strictly censored heterosexual romances.16 Because homosexuality is still stigmatized in Chinese society,17 and also because danmei works often contain explicit sexual content, danmei fans sometimes incur severe public criticism and are accused of selling pornography, promoting incest, and “poisoning” young minds.18 As a result, fans often find it necessary to conceal this guilty pleasure from family and friends.19 Yet, danmei fiction holds a strong and lasting attraction for its fans despite hostile reactions from society, and its Chinese fandom has shown no sign of waning. Indeed, the narrative conventions of danmei fiction prove uniquely suited to helping fans to eschew heteronormative conventions in popular romances without making any public or unreserved commitment to homosexuality. The two Chinese characters used to write danmei suggest that it emphasizes aestheticism and hence romanticization in representation. To fans, the romantic portrayal of homoerotic relationships in danmei can generate a “dream-like beauty.”20 As Mark McLelland points out, in Japan tanbi draws on the long tradition of portraying “beautiful young men” (bishonen 美少年) in comics directed at young women: “By describing the romantic love affairs that take place between beautiful young men, who are pictured as sensitive and refined in both looks and demeanor, female authors are able to sidestep the difficulties inherent in portraying heterosexual encounters in which the female partner is necessarily subordinated to the male.”21 15 Wu Nan, “Xiaoyuan danmei zu” [Danmei group on campus], Daxue shidai, no. 5 (2005): 57–59. 16 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=18&id=5382. 17 Yang Tianhua, “Tongxinglian qunti de meijie xingxiang jiangou” [Media representations of homosexuals as a group], accessed March 7, 2008, http://www.sexstudy.org/article .php?id=3767. 18 Accessed March 7, 2008, http://hi.baidu.com/inland/blog/item/59216b3ecff3b23d71 cf6c55.html. 19 For example, accessed March 15, 2007, http://bbs.readnovel.com/htm_data/139/0801/ 289213.html. 20 Yang Ya, “Tongrennü qunti: Danmei xianxiang beihou” [Female danmei fans: Behind the phenomenon], Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu, July 2006, 65. 21 Mark McLelland, “Gay Men as Women’s Ideal Partners in Japanese Popular Culture: Are Gay Men Really a Girl’s Best Friends?,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal—English Supplement (Saitama, Japan), no. 17 (1999), 84.



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Furthermore, the reception of danmei works differs from that of texts commonly understood to be queer literature in that its (mostly female) fans claim that they produce and consume it for reasons other than the representation of their true sexual identity or orientation. Chinese danmei fans, those at Jinjiang included, mostly claim to be heterosexual women who have little to no experience with real-life homosexuality.22 Some became danmei fans, or so they declared, because they felt bored by clichés in heterosexual popular romances and appreciated the novelty of homoerotic tales.23 Others were attracted to the powerful bonding, despite overwhelming social pressure and obstacles, that takes place between male characters in danmei. As the hero in Minami Ozaki’s 尾崎南 Zetsu’ai 绝爱 (Absolute love), a classic Japanese tanbi manga that also initiated many a Chinese danmei fan, famously asserts: it does not matter whether the object of his affection is a man, woman, dog, cat, plant, or machine; if he falls in love with the other, then so be it.24 Thus, the hero loves a man not because he is gay, but because he simply disregards gender in his pursuit of true love. To fans, this statement might prove that danmei celebrates an “absolute love” to the exclusion of all practical considerations. However, both reader comments posted at Jinjiang and my interviews of fans show that danmei attracts them also because it provides a license to sample BL artifacts without being locked into a specific gender identity or sexual orientation. My interviews reveal that danmei readers do include both men and women, and that some of them identify themselves as gay or lesbian, though this piece of demographic information has rarely been disclosed in online postings or addressed in existing scholarship on Chinese BL fandom. One selfidentified heterosexual woman told me that she started reading danmei fiction after she had been sexually harassed by a man and could not bear to read conventional heterosexual romances at all. Another female interviewee asserted that she had originally objected to the homoerotic content in BL fiction—even though she was simultaneously attracted by both the manga story and the emotional intensity that it invoked—until she discovered her own sexual attraction to another woman. She thus called danmei “enlightening” and considered it a crucial step to her “identity construction” (shenfen jiangou 身份建构), because it exposed her to a different, non-heteronormative way of building relationships and sexual identity. 22 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=9&id=276. 23 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=9&id=174. 24 Accessed July 29, 2008, http://baike.baidu.com/view/57274.htm.

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A gay male reader criticized danmei works published at Jinjiang as “unrealistic,” but he also regarded it a good substitute for “real queer literature,” which, according to him, “does not exist” in China.25 While in this chapter I examine Chinese women’s experiences on the Web rather than the role that danmei plays in the formation of homosexual identity in contemporary China, my interviews suggest that the narrative features of danmei are flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of its Chinese fandom. Before I investigate both the lack and the surplus of meaning invested in danmei narratives by its enthusiastic followers, a word on Jinjiang’s role in disseminating the genre is necessary. Access to printed danmei is somewhat restricted: although pirated copies of Japanese BL manga or Chinese danmei fiction printed “illegally” (i.e., without ISBN numbers) often appear on the market, bona fide publishers in mainland China were prohibited from issuing them in print form until 2009.26 Jinjiang performs an important service by providing a home for danmei works. Furthermore, while use of the Chinese Internet does not guarantee privacy or anonymity, Jinjiang provides a relatively safe haven for consumers and producers of danmei alike. Because of the controversial nature of danmei fiction, its writers are even more elusive than its readers, who refused interview requests out of fear of being studied as an exotic “other.” In 2011, the Zhengzhou 郑州 Bureau of Public Security infiltrated a locally based danmei website and arrested a group of female writers on the charge of “disseminating pornographic materials.”27 Not only does Jinjiang provide a more secure environment for the distribution of danmei fiction, its interactive features also generate vibrant exchanges around the texts despite the hostile offline environment faced by fans. These features of the website shape the reading and writing behavior of Jinjiang users and allow them to detach from their bodies “as material bounded space” and from a fixed location of gender identity.28 In what follows I first discuss Jinjiang’s interactive features in detail. I then examine the narrative conventions and features demonstrated in particular danmei works. Finally, I seek to reveal the motivations and interests of danmei fans at Jinjiang. 25 Author’s interviews of Jinjiang danmei fans in Beijing, June 16–20, 2009. 26 Examples of danmei published legally include Fuguang (Floating light) by Wo Dan (Yunnan renmin, 2009), and most recently Qilu (Wrong path) by Momo (Gansu renmin meishu chubanshe, 2011), the same author using a different pen name. 27 Accessed February 16, 2012, http://www.pcgames.com.cn/cartoon/news/guoneinews/ 1103/2163562.html. 28 Thomas Foster, “‘Trapped by the Body?’ Telepresence Technologies and Transgender Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction,” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 440.



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Three Players and the Text Users of Jinjiang’s Creative Writing Net identify it as a place to find entertainment, satisfy creative impulses, and derive emotional nurturance.29 Since Jinjiang publishes a variety of genres including danmei, it seems to lie under the radar of state censors, who regularly patrol the Web and shut down exclusively danmei literature sites. On the other hand, as a general women’s literature website, Jinjiang also shows more hospitality to users than membership-only pure danmei sites. Male-centered literature sites such as Starting Point do not acknowledge the genre at all. Yet, Luciferclub.com, which houses “the largest BL online fandom in Chinese language,” requires at least two years’ immersion in danmei and a complicated and rigorous process of tests and trials before an interested user can register and access its content.30 Jinjiang’s easy access more effectively disseminates danmei, and thus opens up the boundaries of fandom and helps to mainstream this previously marginal subculture.31 Furthermore, it also facilitates the cross-fertilization and free interchange of narrative features between different subgenres of popular romance, whereby the more hardcore danmei fiction is modified to suit a different generation and group of readers. Danmei readers at Jinjiang display different tastes than early members of the online Lucifer Club, who, according to Wei Wei, founded the website in 1999 because they had nowhere else to post and consume danmei works in which sex scenes “are portrayed in detail, often with [an] exaggerated SM [sadomasochistic] plot.”32 Just as important, Jinjiang grants its users the opportunity not only to produce and consume danmei literature, but also to exchange ideas and comments at little cost. Web versions of Jinjiang works can contain more explicit sex and danmei content, while in print versions authors have to excise potentially offensive content before passing censorship and getting published.33 Moreover, Jinjiang does not require users to register before 29 Accessed March 8, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=25&id=5785. 30 Wei Wei, “Resistance in Dreaming: A Study of Chinese Online Boy’s Love Fandom,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, May 28, 2008, accessed July 1, 2009, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p233592_index .html. 31 Kirsten Pullen, “I-Love-Xena.com: Creating Online Fan Communities,” in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, ed. David Gaunelett (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 56. 32 Wei, “Resistance in Dreaming,” 12. 33 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=50785& chapterid=55.

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they post comments. Although technically IP addresses can be traced, in practice users can assume as many Web identities as they wish. As a result, users not only sport numerous outlandish handles, they also feel free to express their interest in taboo topics more frankly than would otherwise be possible or acceptable. With relatively relaxed rules of censorship and intellectual property at Jinjiang, users find it an ideal space where they can not only escape daily travails and make time for themselves, but also air their feelings and thoughts freely. Jinjiang’s interactive features thus make it possible for users to find entertainment and nurturance regardless of geographical distance and class stratification, to let loose their creative impulses by experimenting with and reinventing existing cultural products, and, ultimately, to constitute an alternative social community. After a series of improvements and upgrades, Jinjiang’s Creative Writing Net arrived at its current layout. Each novel spans several Web pages, one for each chapter. In turn, each of these pages is vertically divided into two large blocks: the upper block is dedicated to the author, while readers add their comments in the lower block. The author’s block is divided into two columns, the left one wider than the right. The text of the current chapter occupies the upper part of the left column and is prominently displayed in a black typeface. At the end of the text, a horizontal black line marks the beginning of another section entitled “Author’s Words,” which displays the author’s comments and responses to readers’ remarks in a smaller green typeface. In the example shown in Figure 1, the author explains that she has been busy at work and thus unable to add new installments to her tale as often as she had planned; she also invites readers to guess what will happen to her characters in the next chapter. The narrower right-hand column is also divided into two parts: the upper portion displays the hyperlinked chapter headings of the entire work, while the bottom section, entitled “Author’s Recommendations,” contains hyperlinks to other works at Jinjiang in a small, gray typeface. The author’s block is divided by a band of advertisements from the lower block, which showcases readers’ activities (see Figure 2). Readers can grade each installment of the novel and leave comments in a wide column positioned at the left-hand side of the bottom block, directly under the column featuring the author’s text and comments. To the right a narrower column, headed “Comments Selected by the Author,” allows authors to highlight the reader comments they have found most appealing and profound. Thus, the structure of each page is largely shaped by the contributions of two groups of players, authors and readers. But a third element of the page, located below the box where readers type in their comments and titled



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Figure 1. Shuangyu Zuo 双鱼座, Tingche Zuo Ai Fenglin Wan 停车坐爱枫林晚 (Stopped the carriage to appreciate the maple grove at dusk). Text of novel, “Author’s Words,” and “Author’s Recommendations.” Jinjiang Literature City, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=148809&chapterid=11 (accessed July 28, 2008).

Figure 2. San Liu 三六, Chuanyue cheng Yin Zhiping穿越成尹志平 (Transported in time to become Yin Zhiping). Commentary space. Readers enter comments and assign points in the upper section, which also contains the “Webmasters’ Rules” below the text box. In the lower section, the left-hand column displays readers’ comments in reverse chronological order, with the most recent comments appearing first; the right-hand column features comments that the author particularly liked. Jinjiang  Literature City, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=299690& chapterid=1 (accessed July 27, 2008).

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“Webmasters’ Rules,” indicates the presence, and power, of a third group of players. The “Omnipotent” Webmaster Webmasters are both the architects and the maintenance crew of the website. They offer users a variety of services as well as tutelage, such as instructing prospective authors on how to create tight-knit plots, display text in a more attractive format, and approach publishers.34 More importantly, they have not only established the interactive devices and rules of the Creative Writing Net, but also continually moderate the roles of author and reader. In this regard, the commentary space set up by them warrants particular attention. The basic function of the commentary space is to record points awarded to works by readers, and thereby to serve as a barometer of the popularity of the work and the author. However, the webmasters encourage readers to make substantive comments, with a few stipulations. Prominently displayed below the space where readers enter their comments are the following rules: (a) open communication with the author is highly encouraged; (b) commentators can post comments as often as they like, but can rate each chapter only once; (c) commentators may not include large amounts of the author’s text in their comments; (d) commentators may not include long quotations from other commentators in their own remarks; and (e, f) commentators may not pile up nontextual symbols in their comments or paste a generic form-letter commentary. The webmasters also discipline reader behavior. They waste no time cracking down on what they see as irregularities in grading and commentary, issuing warnings to violators and adjusting cumulative points accordingly. The commentary space forms the basis of Jinjiang’s well-regulated ranking system. Using a mathematical formula to calculate the points accrued by each work,35 webmasters produce four lists that rank titles according to the number of points they have accumulated in monthly, quarterly, and semiannual periods, as well as the total number of points received since they were first published on the Creative Writing Net. They create lists of 34 For example, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/board.php?board=18&page=1 (accessed March 5, 2008). 35 The formula for calculating cumulative points of each work is: Points = (number of hits/number of chapters × Ln [total number of characters in the text] × average points) + (Ln [total number of characters in commentaries of over one thousand characters] × grades on commentaries) + additional points given to quality commentaries.



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newly joined authors, of the authors who update their texts most frequently, and of works recommended by Jinjiang webmasters and by readers. These lists do not just reflect the tastes of Jinjiang readers, they also help to attract readers to particular themes, genres, and authors, thereby increasing the number of followers of certain authors and works. Thus the ranking system both represents and also forms communities of readers and authors. The commentary space also plays a crucial role in shaping reader and author behavior by facilitating the free exchange of information and opinions. Like users of other Chinese websites, Jinjiang readers and authors share among themselves a unique Web language.36 They often use the initials of pinyin 拼音 romanizations of Chinese characters, Arabic numbers, emoticons, words from other languages, or similarly pronounced Chinese characters to replace the correct words. The circulation of a written patois unintelligible to the uninitiated demarcates the boundary between insiders and outsiders. This is especially useful for danmei fans, among whom certain jargon phrases, many of them lifted from the original Japanese,37 not only produce a sense of unity among fans but also protect them from unwanted attention and censure from society. Danmei fans also take time to educate novices and alert each other to new works worth pursuing. The content of their communications, furthermore, induces feelings of recognition and identification among users even more effectively. Because of the serialized nature of the novels, readers’ comments and authors’ responses often involve negotiations over plot and characterization. But the uses of the commentary space are complex and multifaceted: it combines the functions of a writer’s workshop, an opinion column, and a social space. Here authors and readers discuss novel-writing and rhetorical devices in general. They also express their opinions on a variety of controversial topics such as homosexuality, rape, and polygamy, occasionally branching into political satire with wordplay on current political slogans. Perhaps readers and authors navigate to this space not so much for information and ideas as for the social energy and emotional support that it offers. Authors and readers often exchange holiday greetings and tell each other about changes and problems in their lives, such as unemployment, 36 For a detailed discussion, see Zhou Jianmin, “Wangluo wenxue de yuyan yunyong tedian” [Characteristics of language used on the Web], Journal of Wuhan Institute of Education 19, no. 5 (October 2000): 64–70. 37 For example, accessed July 28, 2008, http://www.lerqu.net/bbs/5000184/html/tree _50020918.html.

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marriage, and pregnancy. In return, they receive not only consolation and congratulations, but also practical help at times.38 For instance, when one author told readers about losing her job, fellow readers responded with numerous comforting comments.39 Users even post calls for Japan to apologize for forcing Asian women into sexual slavery during World War II,40 obviously assuming some degree of homogeneity in ideology among their peers. That Jinjiang provides users with a haven from daily toils and tribulations, such as a tedious job and a draining family situation, rings out as a resonant theme in all these nonliterary exchanges. The Courting Author While the commentary space allows readers to make their voices heard, other interactive tools help authors to seek out an audience and influence readers. Authors often respond directly to reader comments in the commentary space as well as posting in the “Author’s Words” section. Moreover, they tag certain long commentaries as “high quality” and link to them from the “Comments Selected by the Author” section to encourage substantive discussion of their work. Another feature, the author’s wen’an 文案, the summary passage appearing on the first page of each novel above the table of contents, demonstrates this gesture of reaching out to readers especially well (see Figure 3). In addition to providing the gist of the plot, authors often use this space for a variety of other purposes: to describe the inspiration for their text; to state their opinion on sexual matters; to refer readers to other websites that concurrently publish their novels as a backup in case Jinjiang encounters technical problems; to indicate how frequently readers can expect new chapters to appear; and to paste images and links to movie clips or to music that they regard as an appropriate accompaniment to the text. A box to the right of the wen’an contains basic information on the serialized novel itself, such as genre and word count. This summary space not only helps authors create their authorial personae, it also allows them to manipulate reader responses. Authors can make their texts more user-friendly by providing information on content and ideological bent, and they can seek out readers who share their values 38 For example, accessed March 18, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid =141437&chapterid=86. 39 Accessed March 3, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=245091& chapterid=64. 40 Accessed March 9, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/comment.php?novelid=92363& chapterid=27&page=2.



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Figure 3. San Liu 三六, Chuanyue cheng Yin Zhiping 穿越成尹志平. Author’s wen’an. Jinjiang Literature City, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid =299690 (accessed November 14, 2012).

or who are attracted to their work for its setting, plot, or protagonist, or for the related cultural artifacts it invokes. Furthermore, authors also use this space to solicit feedback, thus extending to readers a virtual invitation to participate in the creation of the work. For example, the author of Didi dou shi lang 弟弟都是狼 (Younger brothers are wolves)—a title that may be an ironic twist on the idea of brotherhood that undergirds the narrative economy of male-centered premodern vernacular novels and contemporary fiction—settled on this title after sending out a call to readers and receiving numerous suggestions.41 Oftentimes authors also play the role of webmasters by reiterating the rules of commenting and grading so that they 41 Accessed May 16, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=156436& chapterid=34.

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can receive their proper allotment of points. As with the commentary space, the wen’an allows authors to form supportive cohorts and communities by making the fictional text more reader-oriented, that is to say more responsive to the plethora of readers’ comments. The Productive Reader Despite authors’ attentive courtship, Jinjiang readers show remarkable independence. Although willingly collaborating with authors in the creation of their fiction, they sometimes also defy authorial intentions and authority. Some point out mistakes or inconsistencies in the plot. Others request the author to move the plot in certain directions. Still others even bring in external sources to argue for their own interpretation of the work and make demands on the author. Discussion in the commentary space sometimes leads to the creation of spinoffs or parodies of a work published at Jinjiang, creating a type of fanfic usually self-styled as a “sequel” to the original.42 At times, readers also recommend other Web-based works to their fellow readers. These referrals further strengthen the bonds among readers, for they cultivate shared tastes, promote a measure of homogeneity, and may even lead readers to collectively assert their independence from a specific author or text. Thus, readers have taken on not only the traditional task of the author by producing texts, but also that of the webmasters by regulating user conduct and enforcing communal behavior on the Web. As a result of the lively conversations between webmasters, authors, and readers, romances published on the Creative Writing Net display extraordinary fluidity. This can be seen, first, in the different kinds of border-crossing that Jinjiang makes possible. Specifically in the case of danmei, but also in Web-based popular romance in general, Jinjiang works often describe and even celebrate moral and sexual behavior otherwise not condoned by society. Moreover, the creation and adaptation of these works challenges both the traditional demarcation of media and the boundary between author and reader. Since most works published at Jinjiang incorporate elements of music, cartoon, and cinema, the boundaries between the literary text and other genres and media become increasingly blurred. Furthermore, each 42 For example, the popular time-travel romance Bubu jingxin (Suspense at every step, accessed March 15, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=38029) has generated not only numerous comments and reviews, but also several “sequels” at Jinjiang, including this one, accessed March 15, 2008: http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php? novelid=181060.



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work published at Jinjiang is in a perpetual state of flux, subject to endless editing, modification, and even deletion. Because authors aspire to high ranking and positive reception, they take pains to respond to comments left by webmasters and readers. The reading community of any work is thus able to produce almost concurrent, “interlinear”43 commentary that can change the shape of the text precisely because of the instantaneity of feedback. Given that high-ranked novels at Jinjiang often catch the eye of publishers, this malleability on the author’s part is not just a goodwill gesture to attract a greater following, but also an effective way to adapt to the market, making their manuscripts publishable and profitable.44 Perhaps most interesting for researchers of fiction, Jinjiang authors and readers also experiment with innovative devices that change the form of popular romance. A perfect case in point is their use of fanwai 番外 (bangai in Japanese) to insert a chapter that tells the story from the perspective of a character other than the focal narrative voice or central consciousness, usually represented by the heroine. Fanwai, which in the context of cinema refers to “special features,” denotes scenes that have been shot but edited out of the final version of the film. By using this device, the author creates an interstice in the narrative and invites the reader to identify with another character. Although the flow of the plot seems to be interrupted, fanwai allows readers to see the other side of the story. This device can be used to provide a glimpse into male psychology, thereby correcting a fatal flaw in traditional print romances in which the transformation of the hero from a sadistic antagonist to a gentle and caring lover remains unexplained at the time the transformation occurs.45 But more importantly, in using fanwai, the author can induce affective identification, leading the reader to see the gentler side of the male figure and thus understand, if not endorse, the protagonist’s relationship with him. Oftentimes, fanwai becomes not only a teaser to attract readers but also a delaying tactic for authors facing readers’ insatiable appetite to read the main story as quickly as possible, for in fanwai authors can repeat previous scenes and hint at future developments without actually delivering new chapters of the main story. On the other hand, fanwai also attracts readers to participate in the writing of the novel. Some readers post their own fanwai chapters in their commentaries, while others individually or collaboratively turn their fanwai into a fanfic in a 43 For a detailed discussion, see David L. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing between the Lines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 44 Yin, “Web Writing,” 31–33. 45 Radway, Reading the Romance, 147.

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different space, becoming authors themselves.46 Jinjiang thus inculcates an interactive and reader-oriented style of writing that makes the boundaries between webmasters, authors, and readers increasingly fluid and their identities mutually constitutive. Textual Poaching It would not be wise to exaggerate Jinjiang women’s resistance to the status quo despite their openness to socially marginal behavior, for they are, as Matt Hills argues, “simultaneously inside and outside processes of commodification” and always subject to the pressure of market forces.47 Still, thanks to various Web features mentioned above, consumers of danmei fiction at Jinjiang often change into its producers, employing the tactics of textual poaching to appropriate from, challenge, and alter the system and products of the relatively powerful from their position of relative powerlessness. While defending their rights to female-centered entertainment and to consumption of popular culture, they add new twists to existing tropes, texts, and other cultural elements, thereby producing meanings outside officially sanctioned interpretive practice and generally accepted social norms. Danmei fiction reflects one crucial feature of popular culture: its appropriation and parody of existing mainstream cultural products. But it also reveals gender-inflected fantasies and anxieties of Jinjiang women in the ways that they simultaneously comply with and recast danmei conventions. Like other types of Jinjiang romances, danmei fiction frequently borrows from existing artifacts while reframing and resignifying them at the same time. Jinjiang authors show no patience with the “insipid” heroines of popular Chinese romances in the style of Qiong Yao, and they frequently parody her melodramatic narration. As mentioned in Chapter 1, they also disparage flagrant cases of stud fiction authored by men.48 Consequently, 46 For example, accessed January 28, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid =154277. 47 Hills, Fan Cultures, 44. The increasing commercialization of Web publishing, which can also be seen in Jinjiang’s checkered history, has led to scandals of “click fraud” (namely, faking high numbers of user clicks in order to get certain Web novels published and sold in print form) that have implicated bestsellers including Mingchao naxie shi’er (Stories from the Ming dynasty). For a fuller description of this case, see Qin, “Tushu cehua chong xinren.” 48 For example, accessed July 30, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=173 864&chapterid=63; and, accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?nove lid=228479&chapterid=25.



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romance works at Jinjiang often display self-conscious differences in setting, characterization, and ethos from existing works even as they pay tribute to them through the act of parodying them. Top-ranked heterosexual romances at Jinjiang all share the following characteristics: First of all, they use elements of fantasy to attract readers. While relatively realistic contemporary urban settings still appear in Jinjiang fiction, futuristic imagery, the trope of time travel, and elements of the paranormal and fairy tales are all prevalent themes in these works. Further, the heroine in high-ranked titles differs widely from those in Qiong Yao’s works. The heroine in a Jinjiang work often possesses character traits traditionally associated with masculinity, such as intelligence, detachment, and ruthlessness. Moreover, her single-minded pursuit of the power to control her own life, if she is not simply driven by money and status, at times trumps any consideration for ethics or the collective good and defies any attempts at subjugation. For example, the high-ranked Jinjiang romance Wan qingsi 绾青丝 (Coiling up black hair), later published in multiple volumes in print form (Huashan wenyi, 2007–2008), portrays a modern woman who travels back in time to inhabit the body of another woman, survives abduction and rape, and achieves amazing feats in her checkered career: she becomes, sequentially, a much sought-after courtesan, a successful business owner, the mistress and manager of a prominent family and clan, and a political player in a court conspiracy and coup. At one point in the story she even enters the underworld in pursuit of her dead lover.49 Jinjiang readers also share authors’ penchant for heroines with agency. Following this general trend of female supremacy in romances that depict heterosexual relationships in a patriarchal society, nüzun (matriarchal tales) and danmei narratives seem to further challenge patriarchy and heterosexism. Although I devote the next chapter to nüzun, it is worth mentioning here that matriarchal tales at Jinjiang depict women as wise, strong, successful, and far superior to men in all aspects. Danmei fiction, therefore, seems to be the natural next step on this spectrum of gender bending, since in and through it female authors focus on the erotic relationships of male figures for female readers’ delectation. Like other types of popular romance at Jinjiang, danmei fiction makes use of discrete cultural elements by liberally incorporating characters, settings, devices, and narrative gestures lifted from both canonical and popular Chinese literature. Further, while Jinjiang danmei works, especially danmei fanfic (Chapter 4), 49 Accessed December 28, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=130145; http://www.du8.com/books/oututxt33086/66.shtml.

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pay tribute to popular culture, their unique reconfiguration of danmei conventions in conjunction with the trope of time travel reveals the complexity and even contradictions inherent in their relation to Chinese culture and society. Time Travel in Danmei Fiction Do danmei time-travel novels only use homoeroticism as a gimmick to pique palates long jaded by the proliferation of tales of heterosexual time travelers?50 Or, as some have claimed, do women like danmei only because they selfishly think that in the danmei world there is no female competition for male attention,51 and that they could thus “permanently possess the man [they] love”?52 Works and comments produced by both authors and readers at Jinjiang challenge such simplistic assertions. Quite different from the picture of immoral, delusional, and perverted women that detractors of danmei fans have painted, readers at Jinjiang prove highly self-reflective and frequently criticize the downside they see in danmei works. Echoing Chinese danmei fans elsewhere, who promote “the purest human love” and refrain from speculating and gossiping about homosexual relationships between real people,53 Jinjiang fans condemn voyeuristic curiosity about homosexuals and express concerns about the potential negative effects of explicit sex scenes on underage readers.54 Danmei authors at Jinjiang also generate openness and sympathy toward homosexuality in contemporary China. Through their works they have not only changed readers’ preconception, inculcated by society at large, that homosexuality is pathological and immoral,55 but also, in some cases, are starting a dialogue with gay people in China by drawing on their own reallife experience with gays. For example, the author of Zuihou de lianren 最后 的恋人 (Last lover) reveals that her work is based on the true story of her younger brother, whose experience with a gay lover she witnessed and who actually wrote the story in collaboration with her.56 In response, one male 50 Yang, “Tongrennü qunti,” 66. 51 Accessed July 27, 2008, http://cache.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/funinfo/1/180617 .shtml. 52 Both accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=270152& chapterid=36; http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=270152&chapterid=38. 53 Ji Xiaoshuang, “Danmei: Lixiang yu xianshi” [Danmei: Ideal and reality], Shijie ribao xinzhoukan, no. 17 (May 31, 2008): 14–15. 54 Accessed March 14, 2007, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=173901& chapterid=1. 55 Ibid. 56 For example, accessed August 1, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid =279517.



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reader recalls his own secret love for a male classmate, and concludes with these remarks: “This kind of love (between men) is much purer than the so-called ‘normal’ love that is tainted by greed in this world. They (the characters) are much more moral than those men who marry today and abandon their wives and children tomorrow. Please be happy! Only if you are happy, can those of us who are reading [your story] be happy!”57 More significantly, although disparaged by detractors as “pseudodanmei,” time-travel fiction that enables a woman to change into a man finds favor with a significant number, if not the majority, of Jinjiang danmei fans. For example, of the five danmei works that ranked among the top ten on Jinjiang’s list of all-time favorites in 2008, three featured a modern woman traveling back to the past to inhabit the body of a man.58 A survey at Jinjiang’s discussion forum also drew a considerable number of respondents who would like to change into powerful men in history if they could travel in time.59 This can be partially explained by their belief that the primitive hygienic conditions of ancient times would pose a great danger to women’s reproductive health.60 Another reason for their interest in inhabiting a male body is their disappointment with heterosexual relationships. As an author remarks through the mouth of a time traveler, heterosexual love is too often spoiled by “money, reputation, house, family, children, and parents,” and only love between men can “transcend worldly concerns.”61 But most compelling to Jinjiang women is their shared conviction that only by becoming a strong man can a woman survive and thrive in a male-dominated world. Similarly, the author of Xieyang Ruo Ying 斜阳若影 (Slanting sun like shadows), a high-ranked work that tells the story of a woman changing into a man through time travel, claims that a woman “needs to become strong and independent to survive in a ruthless patriarchal society.”62 The fantasy of sex change enables women to shed their cumbersome female body and disadvantageous gender identity to seize power. In this respect its function is not so dissimilar from that of cross-dressing, another popular trope in Jinjiang works. 57 Accessed December 26, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=279517&c hapterid=66. 58 Accessed December 26, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/topten.php?orderstr=7. 59 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=18&id=15780. 60 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=97910& chapterid=1. 61 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=270152& chapterid=35. 62 Accessed November 20, 2006, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=141437&c hapterid=26.

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Therefore, time travel in danmei works reveals Jinjiang women’s yearning for a romantic love that transcends mundane considerations, as well as their wish for independence and power in a patriarchal society. Further, combined with the unique narrative conventions of danmei fiction, the employment of time travel not only demonstrates female users’ productive reworking of the cultural import that is danmei, but also helps them to explore gender and sexuality under the guise of producing and consuming fantasy. The Androgynous Reader Some scholars have argued that producing slash fiction—recasting popular cultural products such as the Star Trek series by inserting homoerotic content—is a means to “retool masculinity” for contemporary American women.63 In other words, they can imagine what an ideal masculinity would be like by writing about a romantic love between male figures that combines masculine power with feminine nurturance. Yet, examples from Jinjiang show that although this theory captures some aspects of users’ characterization of the ideal hero, it fails to account fully for the complex process of character identification that occurs in reader reception of danmei fiction. Jinjiang users produce and consume danmei not only to fantasize about ideal masculinity, but also to imagine themselves as empowered, or at least as enjoying a greater degree of freedom than their current situation allows. To put it simplistically, danmei enables them to impersonate a version of idealized masculinity, if only temporarily and imaginatively. We can see this especially clearly in danmei works that feature time travel. The trope of time travel—specifically, a situation where the soul of a modern man or woman is refitted into the body of another man—helps to rationalize all kinds of transgressions in danmei works. For example, this trope may not only encourage the interpretation of a homosexual relationship as a heterosexual relationship in disguise, but also justify incest by suggesting that transmigration of the soul changes the essence of an individual. As a result, time travel often makes possible the circumvention of social and cultural taboos ruling sexual relationships. For instance, readers of Xibei 西北 (Northwest), which once topped Jinjiang’s list of the most popular romances of the last six months, root for a match between the male time traveler with either his father or his half-brother in the other 63 Penley, “Brownian Motion,” 135–61. .



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world, even while acknowledging that society would never permit these incestuous relationships in real life.64 In their anxiety to normalize danmei relationships through the invocation of time travel, Jinjiang users clearly do not possess the same degree of insouciance as either their Japanese peers or the more hardcore Chinese danmei fans at the Lucifer Club; they feel a greater pressure to profess their adherence to socio-ethical norms in China. Yet they also unequivocally defend their rights to fantasy and entertainment precisely by characterizing danmei as fantasy, or in Web patois YY, short for yiyin 意淫, a term meaning “lust of the mind” that first appeared in Dream of the Red Chamber. Perhaps danmei attracts readers and authors precisely because its narrative conventions, including an exotic setting, an androgynous protagonist, and stylized erotica, can successfully produce fantasies. Danmei as Beautiful Fantasy The central generic requirement of danmei—a depiction of ideal love between beautiful men—can produce a unique sense of alienation in female readers. Like other types of Jinjiang romance, the most popular danmei works often adopt historical, futuristic, or foreign settings, or in the case of fanfic appropriate one of the “classics,” in order to add an exotic flavor to their narratives. Even works with contemporary settings are usually not portrayed in a realistic fashion. The homoerotic relationship between the central male characters is usually described as being serenely accepted, if not fully embraced, by family and friends. This kind of idealized and idyllic milieu generates a sense of distance between female readers and the romance, even as it attracts them with the novelty of the fictional world. In danmei works male protagonists also invariably possess great physical beauty, to the point of appearing androgynous at times (see Figure 4). Such settings and characterizations mark danmei works as fantasy rather than realistic representations of contemporary Chinese society, thus providing readers with the freedom to engage in make-believe and playacting. Furthermore, top-ranked danmei novels at Jinjiang mostly avoid gratuitous sex or violence, characteristics typical of an earlier, more hardcore type of fiction produced when Chinese authors first tried their hands at danmei by borrowing from Japanese models. Although many (but not all) 64 Accessed March 30, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=291638& chapterid=85.

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Figure 4. The protagonist of Pingsu You Jiu’s 平素有酒 novel Xibei 西北 as imagined by Cucucat, a reader who drew several illustrations for the novel and published them on her blog. The author of the novel reposted the drawing on her page at Jinjiang Literature City, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=291638&c hapterid=115 (accessed April 8, 2010). Illustration originally published at http:// photo.blog.sina.com.cn/u/1376173443/page10 (accessed March 21, 2013).

danmei works contain explicit and copious depictions of sexual encounters, physical acts are often glossed over, while metaphors, euphemisms, and aesthetically rendered details of the setting, costume, and male body carry the narrative. Indeed, sharply diverging from traditional pornography that aims at a predominantly male audience and focuses on specific physical acts, sex scenes in Jinjiang danmei works are often deployed to facilitate characterization and create a mood of intimacy. The description of the first sexual encounter between two star-crossed lovers in Yisheng guzhu zhi wenrou 一生孤注掷温柔 (Throwing away a life recklessly just for tender love) can serve as a good case in point. Changsheng 长生 and Zishi 子释 (a modern time traveler) are the scions of two distinguished families in two warring states. The two of them meet under perilous circumstances. Changsheng, warrior prince of the invading state, has sustained a serious injury in the war of conquest that his father



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launched, while Zishi, after losing his own father, the former prime minister of the fallen state who decided to take his own life, flees the capital with his younger brother and sister. Zishi rescues Changsheng without knowing his true identity, and they move into a “peach blossom spring-like paradise” (taoyuan xianjing 桃源仙境) deep in the mountains. Far from the war and carnage in the outside world, the “ineffable” beauty of this utopia “cannot even be approximated in words.”65 The two young men soon fall in love with each other. One day they meet by a hot spring, set against blue skies, craggy mountain cliffs, and a green bamboo grove. 他一点一点贴上他，严丝合缝。十指牢牢扣住他的脊背，久久没有动静。 子释感到面上炽热的气息几乎要把人烤化，压住自己的身体却像是冰封的 岩石，微觉讶异。默默等了一会儿，睁开眼睛，从他脸上读出刻骨铭心的 隐忍怜惜，心忽地揪起来。抬手抚过他俊朗的眉眼：“长生……” 这一声叹息般的呼唤，霎那间点着了上边的人，每一寸肌肤都变得滚烫。 他抱着他轻轻打颤：“我怕……你疼……” 唉 ， 真是个傻瓜…勾住他的脖子 ， 把那张眉峰紧蹙的脸带了下来：“长 生，别忍着……” 贴到耳边，“来，我教你……” 金刚浴火，烈焰焚心。 长生只觉置身宝鼎洪炉，仿佛共他历尽三昧真火，练就九转仙丹，从此天 地齐寿日月争辉；又仿佛同他化为青烟灰烬，散入缥缈虚空，瞬时魂飞魄 碎神形俱灭…… ——终于，眼前再次看到了绿草青青，耳畔重新听到了碧水摇摇。66

Changsheng moved closer to Zishi little by little, until finally there was no room between the two of them. His ten fingers clasping tightly onto Zishi’s back, he did not move for the longest time. Zishi was surprised that although Changsheng’s breath on his face was hot enough to melt his flesh, his body was like a rock sealed in ice. After waiting a little while in silence, Zishi opened his eyes and read in Changsheng’s face patience and tenderness, as if these feelings were etched onto his heart. His own heart suddenly stirred, Zishi raised his hand to touch Changsheng’s handsome eyebrows and eyes: “Changsheng …” This sigh-like call at once ignited the person on top, making every inch of his  skin burn hotly. Changsheng hugged Zishi and trembled slightly. “I am afraid that you would be hurt.”

65 Accessed December 29, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=299814&c hapterid=23. 66 E.g., accessed August 1, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=299814& chapterid=24.

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chapter two Ah, what a loveable dummy! Hooking his arm around Changsheng’s neck and bringing his face down, Zishi murmured in his ear: “Do not hold back … come on … I will teach you.” Changsheng felt as if he were being placed in the celestial alchemist’s furnace, smelted by the celestial fire together with Zishi, until they were finally transformed into the elixir of life and lived forever with heaven and earth, the sun and the moon. He also felt as if he were turning into smoke and ashes, scattered into the vast universe, his soul splintering into tiny pieces, and his body and spirit both completely gone in one instant … At last, he opened his eyes once again to green grass and his ears to tinkling blue water.

Although the author describes the two lovers’ words and offers details like “his ten fingers clasping tightly onto his back,” she merely hints at the physical act of sex by alluding to their “burning bodies,” instead listing their loving words and employing metaphors: Changsheng feels as if he were inside a furnace, bursting into smoke and ashes and forever scattered into the universe. Rather than graphic physical acts, the author emphasizes the lovers’ intimacy not only by describing their tender words and behavior, but also by revealing their thoughts alternately, and thereby depicting them as reciprocating lovers and kindred souls. She also uses cosmic images—a celestial furnace, heaven and earth, sun and moon—to accentuate the glory and immortality of their love. Revealingly, after a spectacular climax Changsheng’s consciousness returns to the same beautiful natural scene in which they started to make love: “green grasses and blue waters,” a perfect setting and metaphor for their love, for it possesses a beauty as everlasting and untainted by human greed and cruelty as nature itself. Seen against all the bloodshed, death, and family tragedies in the work, this scene gains additional poignancy, drawing readers into a world of intense emotions whether they feel pleasure about the consummation of a beautiful love or despair at its potential loss. This style of depicting homoeroticism finds resonance with many Jinjiang readers, since it eschews graphic details while offering emotional release for its audience through an aesthetically presented fantasy.67 The taste of Jinjiang danmei readers has deviated from that of the self-styled group of “decadent women” (funü 腐女) who joined Lucifer-club.com.68

67 Ibid., readers’ comments. 68 Wei, “Resistance in Dreaming.”



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The Danmei Hero as a Combination of Ideal Masculinity and Ideal Femininity Danmei works at Jinjiang make it possible for fans to identify with the male perspective of the narrative, rather than merely getting a thrill from the novelty of homoerotic love or seeing what ideal men can do to each other, as Constance Penley has suggested.69 Indeed, danmei fans illustrate what the American romance writer Laura Kinsale calls “the androgynous reader” in female audiences.70 American female readers of popular print romance often claim that rather than identifying with a vapid heroine, they often use her as a “placeholder” in order to experience the fictional world in her stead. Further, they come to identify with the hero’s point of view since he is the one who possesses the power to bring everything under control.71 Likewise, danmei readers at Jinjiang can relate to a male figure because he is the orienting force of the narrative. Danmei fans at Jinjiang vary in their ways of identifying with characters and harbor complex motives for producing and consuming danmei. Some female fans show that their sexual desires do not “naturally” fall within the boundaries of their gender identity, as they identify with more powerful, aggressive figures (gong 攻) in danmei relationships. For instance, in response to a male critic’s taunt that women read danmei fiction only because they wish to replace the passive party (shou 受) in the homosexual couple and be overpowered and ravished by the other, a female respondent retorts: “I actually wish to overpower and ravish men.”72 A fan I interviewed also admits that she identifies with the more aggressive party because taking up the role of the more passive party would make her feel “violated and injured” when reading sex scenes.73 Wei Wei finds that in works published at Lucifer, “the time traveler in the new world becomes, no matter how hard ‘he’ tries, Shou [the passive party] in the relationship eventually.”74 In contrast, at Jinjiang a significant number of danmei authors and readers insist that a modern time traveler, whether originally male or female, always ends up becoming the more 69 Penley, “Brownian Motion.” 70 Laura Kinsale, “The Androgynous Reader,” in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance, ed. Jayne Ann Krentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 31–43. 71 Ibid., 32. 72 Accessed March 5, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=9&id=239. 73 Author’s interview in Shanghai, June 27–28, 2009. 74 Wei, “Resistance in Dreaming,” 11.

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aggressive, “masculine” party in the couple after entering the other world.75 For instance, the author of Feng ba tianxia 凤霸天下 (The phoenix that rules the world),76 one of the consistently top-ranked novels on Jinjiang’s list of all-time favorites, reverses the model of male supremacy and promiscuity prevalent both in popular stud fiction such as Tale of Seeking Qin—the prototypical contemporary time-travel fantasy mentioned earlier—and premodern vernacular novels such as Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 (A country codger’s words of exposure) by Xia Jingqu 夏敬渠 (1705–1787),77 even as she freely borrows from them to delineate the time traveler’s amazing feats and sexual prowess. Although sometimes mocked as “conquering the whole world in bed,” this woman-turned-into-man time traveler displays precisely the kind of masculine aggressiveness characteristic of heroes in male-authored works when she sets out to acquire various beautiful and powerful men, and through them to rule the kingdoms that they each have brought as a “dowry.” However, there are also fans at Jinjiang who favor the more passive, androgynous party in the couple. Some find this type of male beauty more attractive than rugged masculinity, while others claim that they could easily imagine “bullying” (qifu 欺负) androgynous characters and asserting their power over them.78 Still others use danmei to escape into a vague reminiscence of their prepubescent years of freedom, before they became disillusioned by the social reality of gender discrimination and sexual violence against women and fettered by female sexuality and responsibility. Some fans claim that they were first drawn to danmei because they felt uncomfortable exploring their sexuality by reading romances of heterosexual relationships during their adolescent years. Danmei works, on the other hand, provide a venue for them to gain sexual knowledge without the potential psychological burden of identifying with a heroine who faces life issues too similar to their own.79 Whatever particular motives and preferences fans reveal, the generic conventions of danmei fiction facilitate the process through which Jinjiang fans can, as Kaja Silverman calls it in another context, “suture” with a ­danmei protagonist.80 Danmei provides a “masculine fictional construct” 75 For example, author’s wen’an, accessed July 28, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook .php?novelid=165485. 76 Accessed July 29, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=59052. 77 Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 152. 78 Author’s interview in Shanghai, June 30, 2009. 79 Yang, “Tongrennü qunti,” 66. 80 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 195.



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through a male impersonator, just like the Japanese Takarazuka theatre, in which women play male roles.81 We can also find this type of androgynous beauty embodied by Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉, the hero of Dream of the Red Chamber, who represents an object of desire by combining the best of masculine and feminine essence in premodern Chinese fiction. Similarly, danmei creates an imagined “beautiful young man” who combines the best of masculinity (externally) with the best of femininity (internally). Even though male protagonists in danmei works are not universally androgynous in appearance, a danmei hero represents a kind of “androgynous intermediary between the sexes, uniting the best of male and female.”82 That is to say, the hero can enact the ideal femininity stipulated by patriarchal gender codes, in that he is beautiful, gentle, and nurturing, but w ­ ithout the jealousy and other negative qualities that women sometimes associate with their female peers. On the other hand, since he is gendered male, he enjoys more opportunities and faces fewer constraints than women, and thereby achieves the traditional masculine ideal of thriving in his career and gaining power in the public realm. Additionally, his sexual orientation guarantees that he would never direct sexual aggression toward women, so much so that his beauty, whether androgynous or not, can offer a nonthreatening version of masculinity for females to savor and identify with. Examining Chinese fiction and drama from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, Zuyan Zhou sees androgyny in these works as a “political/ideological stance of fashioning personal identity” adopted by marginalized male literati of late imperial China. He argues that their “alienation complex” induced them to share the same gender identity as women, but “their subsequent aversion to such imposed feminization is often artistically projected onto literary characters of ambiguous gender, be it transgressive women or feminized men.”83 Danmei similarly enables fans to take on different gender identities, and offers them psychological relief. Yet this genre is also distinctly female-oriented. Chinese women to some extent always serve as the subaltern to men because of their female gender, even while they also suffer from other forms of oppression based on class and race. Rather than the political inferiority felt by elite men, contemporary 81 Karen Nakamura and Matsuo Hisako, “Female Masculinity and Fantasy Spaces: Transcending Genders in the Takarazuka Theatre and Japanese Popular Culture,” in Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa, ed. James Roberson and Nobue Suzuki (London: Routledge, 2003), 59–76. 82 McLelland, “Gay Men as Women’s Ideal Partners,” 92. 83 Zuyan Zhou, Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 3.

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Chinese women feel more keenly about the sexual violence and gender discrimination that they experience in daily life. They counteract alienation in a patriarchal society not only by assuming an imagined position of (masculine) power through reading and writing danmei fiction, but also by identifying with and living through its androgynous heroes. Danmei works often treat rape in a cavalier fashion. Bizarre and improbable as it may sound, danmei stories abound in which a man dismisses his experience of being raped by another man as only “being bitten by a rabid dog” since he will not get pregnant, and blithely goes along with his life as usual.84 Some may argue that the plot of men being raped in danmei fiction constitutes a gesture of “acting out,” as women put male characters through the ordeal of rape out of an unacknowledged, subconscious desire to retaliate against a patriarchal culture that often blames the (female) victim of sexual violence.85 This can be corroborated by frequent outbursts of reader outrage and demands to “punish” (nüe 虐) certain male figures whom they see have wronged the (male or female) protagonist in Jinjiang romances. Some fans also claim that they enjoy imagining themselves bullying danmei protagonists, as mentioned above. However, since it is often the gentle, androgynous protagonist rather than the aggressive one who falls victim to sexual violence, danmei authors include such incidents also for the sake of highlighting his survival of and triumph over rape. Some female fans favor androgynous beauty in male figures because they can not only neutralize the potential threat of aggressive masculinity, but also more easily identify with, and indeed imagine themselves as a beautiful and strong protagonist who will not be derailed by sexual violence but will continue with the normal course of life. The ubiquitous trope of time travel and its universal popularity further testify to the way that danmei facilitates Jinjiang fans’ gender swap through fantasy. Conclusion The kind of transference made possible by danmei, of course, raises an attendant set of issues. As hinted by Jinjiang users’ preference for a male 84 This is a frequently expressed sentiment when the male protagonist has been subjected to sexual violence. For example, accessed July 28, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/­ onebook.php?novelid=148809&chapterid=11. 85 As recent as 2011, heated debates arose over two criminal rape cases: one woman was praised for resisting rape even though it resulted in life-threatening physical injuries, while another woman was criticized for providing the perpetrator with a condom to avoid STDs and pregnancy.



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body when traveling in time, and also reflected in danmei works in which men are saddled with childbirth, these women may have a problematic relationship with their own body. At least for those fans who confess to have used reading danmei as a way to evade or replace the exploration of their own female sexuality, it appears that they have internalized traditional Chinese sexual and gender norms, especially male stigmas against female sexuality, since they only feel comfortable talking about male sexuality. Indeed, in light of the way rape and other types of sexual violence are treated in danmei fiction, we can say that it suggests that a great deal of repression of female sexuality still exists among many danmei fans, even as they ostensibly subvert patriarchal rule by imagining a world in which men take on all the trials and tribulations that currently burden them. Yet, although fans of danmei fiction at Jinjiang display a cultural sensibility similar to what Sharon Kinsella finds in Japanese manga fans, such as uncertainties about their gender identities and frustrations with heterosexual relationships as constituted in contemporary society,86 they are far from being “stubbornly self-absorbed, decadent and anti-social.”87 Rather, consuming and producing danmei romances provides a venue for these women to explore and represent what Carl Jung called the “animus”88—a masculine component of female subjectivity whose expression is often forbidden by conventional gender codes—if only by adopting the strategy of writing and reading about the “other” in order to know oneself. Further, fans can deploy danmei as a “subcultural tactic” to resist the authoritarian control of the establishment.89 Some scholars even argue that danmei fiction featuring father-son incest allows Chinese women to “articulate their desire for democratic changes in both the intimate sphere and the public sphere,” by “eroticizing the generational conflict” and reconfiguring power relationships in the process.90 Although interpretations of its ethos and ideologies vary, Web-based danmei fiction not only changes the shape of popular romance by introducing innovative literary devices such as fanwai and a different type of gender 86 Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 124. 87 Wei, “Resistance in Dreaming,” 4. 88 For a detailed discussion, see John A. Sandford, The Invisible Partners: How the Male and Female in Each of Us Affects Our Relationships (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). 89 Ting Liu, “Conflicting Discourses on Boys’ Love and Subcultural Tactics in Mainland China and Hong Kong,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20 (April 2009), accessed November 14, 2012, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/liu.htm. 90 Yanrui Xu and Ling Yang, “Forbidden Love: Incest, Generational Conflict, and the Erotics of Power in Chinese Boy’s Love Fiction,” unpublished manuscript, 22.

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positioning, it also enables reading and writing practices that are significantly different from the norm established by print media. In facilitating textual poaching, it opens up new possibilities of border crossing for Chinese women. Only time can tell whether these new developments in Chinese Web literature will permanently change fiction writing in general and Chinese society at large. Yet, as Ian Watt claimed in his classic study, The Rise of the Novel, the growth of profit concerns impelled publishers to reach out to a wider “reading public,” while increasing mechanization provided more leisure time for women in the eighteenth century, and thereby made it possible for women to contribute to the psychological and realistic turn of the novel in their capacity as legitimate authors and readers who needed to see their tastes and preferences represented in this genre.91 Ellen Widmer also shows in her analysis of sequels to Dream of the Red Chamber written in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China that targeting an emerging female audience, authors emphasized more the psychological (qing 情) rather than physical (se 色) manifestations of eroticism, and saw to it that good was rewarded and bad punished and that there was always a happy ending in those novels.92 It is thus not inconceivable that extraliterary and extratextual shifts in contemporary Chinese society, such as the proliferation of Internet access and the increasing participation of female users, would also bring about transformations not only in the form of Chinese fiction, but also in the mores and sensibilities of society. Stuart Hall rightly points out that popular culture is neither “wholly corrupt or wholly authentic,” but rather “deeply contradictory,” characterized by “the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.”93 Readers and authors of danmei fiction at Jinjiang are not wholly or always resistant to or complicit with mainstream culture, but rather continuously reevaluating their relationships to the text and reconstructing its meanings according to more immediate interests. After all, Jinjiang women inhabit a contemporary reality where gender discrimination in education and employment is still rampant, and family burdens fall on women’s shoulders whether or not they have a career outside home. Yet Web-based danmei fiction at Jinjiang establishes a new platform for them to explore their subjectivity, challenge dominant cultural norms, and cross gender and generic boundaries. 91 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 52–53. 92 Widmer, The Beauty and the Book, 238–40. 93 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” in Robert Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), 228.



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Websites such as Jinjiang represent an important cultural force in contemporary China, given the sheer volume of participation and response that they generate. The example of Jinjiang shows that they allow users to temporarily overcome geographical distance and class difference to share their conscious or subconscious aspirations, fantasies, and desires with relatively little danger of exposure and penalty. Furthermore, they not only provide texts that satisfy users’ consumption of popular culture; through interactive features, they also effectively create social interactions about and around those texts. Jinjiang provides an alternative community where women can have easy access to a creative outlet as well as emotional nurturance. Perhaps the beauty of producing and consuming Web-based danmei fiction boils down essentially to this: it offers Chinese women an opportunity to recast themselves, to transcend geographical, ideological, gender, and class boundaries, and to imagine themselves roaming the Internet initiating nurturing encounters with fellow users at will.

CHAPTER THREE

“MEN CONQUER THE WORLD AND WOMEN SAVE MANKIND” In history all the wars were launched by men…. Women are naturally more respectful of the preciousness of life, for everyone has been borne by a woman after her ten-month pregnancy. Had Saddam Hussein been a woman, he would have seen to it first that his people had adequate food and clothing. Had George W. Bush been a woman, he would not have launched a war just to acquire oil from half a world away: his military expenses could have been spent on finding clean sources of energy. –Jun Suiyuan, author of a Web-based nüzun romance

The Internet has caused major shifts in the modes and mores of popular Chinese romance, while also changing the reading and writing practices related to the romance genre, as demonstrated by Web-based danmei fiction. To further explore how Chinese women imagine masculinity and femininity through reading and writing Web romances, in this chapter I focus on another subgenre of Web-based popular romance, nüzun: matriarchal fiction, mostly set in a society ruled by women, that describes a woman’s ascent to power in the public arena, or her success at establishing and heading a happy domicile including one or more male sexual partners, or both. Utilizing a strategy of excess and conjuring up a fantastical world, matriarchal narratives delineate ideal femininity, or at least unrestrained superwomanhood, in a more vivid fashion than run-of-the-mill heterosexual romances. In Reading the Romance, Janice Radway produced a taxonomy of the ideal romance based on her ethnographic research of a group of female romance readers in a small town in the United States. According to Radway, the typical narrative structure of the ideal romance traces the heroine’s path of self-realization from her loss of social identity to its full restoration, when she, after a series of misunderstandings and mis­ haps,  eventually earns a love declaration and “unwavering commitment” from a super-masculine, “aristocratic” hero. Furthermore, Radway asserts that readers of these romances can best relate to an ideal heroine who is “spirited” and “passionate,” but never loses her alluring “feminine”

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characteristics: “sexual innocence, unselfconscious beauty, and desire for love.”1 English-language romances have changed shape since Radway’s study came out in 1984, as has romance scholarship. Nowadays it is common in popular romances, if not quite the universal norm, to encounter a sexually experienced and even adventurous heroine who seeks to control her life rather than being controlled.2 Some scholars have also argued that Radway’s theory does not apply to Chinese popular romances in print form,  because they reflect a different set of sociopolitical developments and cultural imperatives, such as the centrality of the multigenerational Chinese family.3 More important for my study, Chinese Web romances have produced many examples of deviation from Radway’s classic model, especially in nüzun. I thus posit Radway’s theory as a point of departure rather than using it to fully explicate the works I examine in this chapter. Radway’s description of the ideal heroine and her self-realization, in which heterosexual romantic love plays a definitive role, does shed light on pre-Internet popular Chinese romances such as those authored by Qiong Yao, whose works flooded the mainland Chinese market in the 1980s and 1990s. Further, not only does Radway’s central argument that women read popular romances in order to deflect the reality of a patriarchal world still remain provocative, her interdisciplinary approach also proves highly ­useful for my investigation of nüzun. Radway examines popular romance within “the circuit of culture,”4 that is, the different economic, sociopolitical, and cultural forces that energize the production and consumption of popular romance. Despite its specific historical and cultural underpinnings, this approach can also illuminate the micropolitics and inherent contradictions in Web-based nüzun works. Rather than dismiss Radway’s biases as “a form of political moralism,”5 I test the relevance of her theory about female romance readers’ motivations and character identification when it comes to nüzun. Combining fieldwork and literary analysis, I also explore whether a different kind of readership has emerged that derives

1 Radway, Reading the Romance, 131–33. 2 See, for example, some of the comments in Jayne Ann Krentz, ed., Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Writers on the Appeal of the Romance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 3 For example, Lin, “Social Change and Romantic Ideology.” 4 Helen Wood, “What Reading the Romance Did for Us,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2004), 149. 5 Ang, Living Room Wars, 104.



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different kinds of pleasure from the act of reading popular Chinese romances in the age of the Internet. Clues from Interviews Between 2007 and 2012, and especially during the 2010–2011 academic year, I conducted a series of semi-structured and in-depth interviews, as well as a focus group study of readers of Chinese Web literature. My interviewees, including the focus group members, were all native Chinese speakers whose ages ranged from late teens to early forties. Most of them were undergraduate students, but a few were either graduate students or mid-career professionals. While most of them were female, I also interviewed a few men. Since people under forty, especially those between their late teens and early thirties, constitute the majority of the online readership of Web fiction on the Chinese cyberspace, in this section I focus my observations mainly on this age group. My findings round out the general account of Web readers provided earlier (Chapter 1), and they include insights that particularly illuminate the popularity of nüzun romances, which often feature a seemingly untrammeled and overblown heroine. Several terms kept coming up in my interviews: “time” (busy/leisure), “generation” (as a marker of identity), “entertainment,” “literary values,” “private” (activity), and so on. These keywords echoed my discovery that Chinese women consume Web-based danmei fiction as a way to explore and construct their gender identities (Chapter 2). But I also encountered surprises. I had imagined that my interviewees, as regular Web readers— who tend to be intensely social online—would be open to sharing reading experiences with people they knew in real life, as did Radway’s readers in “Smithton,” her alias for the setting of her research. Yet they seemed very protective and secretive about their reading habits and tastes in real life. This tendency does not just apply to readers of danmei or other controversial materials either; even fans of traditional heterosexual romances display the same behavior: their boldness and assertiveness online contrast sharply with their hesitancy about disclosing their Web reading practices offline. My interviews yielded clues to this overall reticence. First, some felt insecure about sharing certain “risqué” content that they had read. One interview participant, for example, did not mention that she was a fan of danmei fiction, though one of her friends alerted me to the fact later. Others flatly denied that they read danmei, even calling its content “perverted”

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(biantai 变态), though they were aware of it and one even admitted to having produced danmei-related artifacts, recording her own singing for an online danmei drama. These women’s reservedness about the danmei genre, while reflecting their wariness about the social acceptability of its consumption, also suggests that fans may participate in the production of Web artifacts for reasons other than ideological or ethical allegiance to any particular subgenre. As the singer revealed, she considered the invitation from a reputable online company that produces high-quality danmei drama an acknowledgment of her singing skills and a chance to showcase them, as well as an opportunity to enjoy the sheer pleasure of creation. Second, my interviewees disliked mentioning their online reading because it conflicted with their sense of obligation. As Chinese students indoctrinated with the message “study above all else” by their parents and society, they felt guilty about spending so much time doing something “useless” and just for fun, when their academic studies are quite demanding and rigorous at the same time. Many of them emphasized how busy they were, and mentioned, often apologetically, how much time they “wasted” online, and sometimes chose not to mention certain online activi­ ties they participated in, such as playing computer games and Web chatting. Even if they might be only paying lip service to the dominant ethos of “grades first” in Chinese culture, their frequent self-criticism of “wasting time playing online” in the interviews still reveals their consciousness of deep-seated traditional expectations that persist in the age of the Internet and Westernization. Third, their reluctance to reveal their reading habits has to do with their self-image at a particular life stage. As young people in their late teens, twenties, and thirties, they view their reading habits as particularly revealing of their thoughts, personalities, and identities, and so they feel vulnerable and hesitate to share these with other people. Teenagers or young people are perhaps more concerned than older adults about being perceived in the “wrong” way by others whose opinions they care about, such as classmates, teachers, and fellow Chinese compatriots. Yet their hesitancy to reveal online reading habits to acquaintances in real life contrasts with their openness in the Chinese cyberspace, whose public dimension seems to have eluded their self-conscious and persistent guard of privacy. Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and specialist on the relationship between technology and society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thus bemoans the downfall of modern technologies: relentless connectivity only leads to a new solitude; technology shallows out relationships, depletes our emotional lives, and merely makes us “alone together.” Yet she



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also admits: “The Internet is more than old wine in new bottles; now we can always be elsewhere.”6 To some degree, Chinese Web readers flock to literature websites precisely because through the simulated life online they gain both companionship and control, and hence “the exhilaration of creativity without its pressures, the excitement of exploration without its risks.”7 The majority of my interviewees described experiencing a height­ ened sense of freedom and liberation through the Internet, which can be explained by their life stage, their hitherto intense focus on academics, and their prior supervision by parents and teachers. Some also mentioned that they still found the dynamics among fellow Chinese students a little too tricky to handle, and therefore felt insecure about disclosing the content of their Web reading, viewing it as especially personal, visceral, and revealing of their inner self. This sense of uncertainty reveals psychological scars that they have carried since their highly competitive high school years, as well as their own age and life experience at the time of the interviews. But they also, perhaps subconsciously, view reading Web literature as a way to both express their identity and also construct it, since it allows them to demarcate themselves from both their peers and their younger selves. During the interviews some of them criticized their own youthful reading tastes, calling their earlier self “silly” and “naïve.” Others emphasized how their tastes differed from those of their fellow Chinese students. Those belonging to what is commonly called in China the Post-80s generation (so called because they were born in the 1980s) looked down on the more “naïve” and “inexperienced” Post-90s (so called because they were born in the 1990s). Some distinguished themselves from the unnamed, unspecified “perverts” who read certain genres they do not approve of (such as danmei), or from people who could not relate to the cultural artifacts about which they themselves felt very passionate, including texts (print “classics” or Web literature), music, popular TV talk show programs, and Korean soap operas. Most also claimed that they were more mature, sophisticated, and grown-up now than before, as proven (they hinted) by their shifting reading tastes, their changing online practices (such as spending less time on “bad literature,” computer games, or Web chatting), and their differences from their peers.

6 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 156. 7 Ibid., 224.

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Their online reading practices function as a generation marker for them. Most of the interviewees belong to the Post-80s and Post-90s generations. Their shared life experience, including computer skills, easy access to the Internet, awareness of Western culture, and material abundance, sets them apart from previous generations. Sensing societal disapproval and stereotyping, they have developed self-defense mechanisms. These mechanisms include a certain braggadocio—“Who cares what others think of us?”—in youth culture in China (though it was not so obvious in the interviews I conducted), as well as meticulous self-differentiation from other generations, namely their parents’ generation and the younger generation. Whatever the specific reason for individual reticence, throughout the interviews an interesting tension repeatedly arose. While the interviewees admitted to having used the Internet for leisure and entertainment, they also felt the urgent need to justify their Web behavior by identifying the “value” of their “frivolous distractions.” By describing shifts and changes in their Web activities and tastes, they were eager to show that they had derived many benefits from these leisure activities, including (a) their growth into mature adults who see the world differently after learning about real life through reading Web literature; (b) maintaining the “mental and psychological well-being” crucial to an otherwise hectic and stressful life; (c) accumulating knowledge from sources such as historical fiction, and acquiring wisdom about reality and the human mind; (d) enhancing their reading skills, as they became more adept at interpreting literature, more fastidious and selective about their reading materials, or more appreciative of writings of a high literary quality; (e) acquiring tips for managing their personal life and relationships; and (f) finding viable ways of connecting with other people—family, friends, hometown, homeland, and the Chinese-language community all over the world—through the Internet. This tension between disparaging and defending Internet activity could be partly explained by younger people’s consciousness of my status as a professor and adult who was asking them about their leisure activities. Yet it also arose in my interviews of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues from my own age group and background. This tension thus echoes Radway’s findings concerning the Smithton women’s reading of popular romances. In her ethnography, Radway showed that female romance readers needed to justify their reading tastes in a patriarchal, unsympathetic society that constantly ignores and belittles women’s needs for leisure, entertainment, and emotional nurturance. My Chinese interviewees also felt their marginalization and relative powerlessness in the adult-centered, patriarchal, and alien world they inhabit in daily life, whether they live in China or the



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United States. Their strategies of resistance—to reclaim their own experiences from the margins and construct a stable and coherent identity for themselves—center precisely around their consumption of Web romances, if only in an “insulated” and “secure” virtual world and in a somewhat furtive and interior manner. Interpreted in the context of their way of managing social pressures, women’s online practices when reading nüzun romances become all the more illuminating. Fans of this subgenre of popular romance, which promotes female supremacy in the public as well as domestic spheres, find it entertaining and liberating to fantasize about women’s ascent to power, usually at the expense of men. Like danmei fiction, nüzun romances constitute a kind of gender bending, but they more directly express women’s desires and address their grievances. Matriarchal romances, in short, give us invaluable glimpses into an insulated imaginary that reveal a yearning to overcome the restrictions Chinese women have to wrestle with in real life. The Supreme Heroine Catering mainly to well-educated and articulate Chinese women, Chineselanguage websites such as Jinjiang possess interactive features that inculcate a reader-oriented form of writing; as a result, the text is transformed from a static and univocal entity into a fluid process of becoming. Employing this reader-oriented style of Web writing, users often appropriate from existing works and tropes to access power granted by the production of meaning. They deploy their creative and playful consumption of cultural artifacts to deflect the power of the dominant social order and to contest ideologies they otherwise lack the means to challenge or change. Just as in the case of danmei fiction, the Internet empowers nüzun consumers to carve out new identities for themselves and participate in a communal life in the Chinese cyberspace, where they use matriarchal tales to rewrite patriarchal narratives together with other women who share many of their beliefs and values. Nüzun romances do not necessarily follow the trajectory (described in Chapter 1) that the development of the heroine has taken in Web-based time-travel romances: from a flamboyant, untrammeled modern time ­traveler, to a low-key, hard worker good at camouflage, and eventually to a  “witch” endowed with magic powers. Nüzun fiction has also been less affected by the conservative turn that traditional heterosexual romances

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have taken recently, such as juxtaposing an early prototype of the modern time traveler against a later model drawn from farming tales, or contrasting a time traveler with a reborn “native,” with the purpose of demonstrating the inferiority of the modern figure and promoting a more submissive approach to patriarchal rule. Indeed, matriarchal narratives by definition promote female supremacy and upset the gender relationships and hierarchies that exist under patriarchy. While romantic relationships remain important in nüzun romances, female authors also explore alternative paths to women’s empowerment. In these works, romantic love is by no means the only ingredient of the heroine’s identity; military, political, and business accomplishments are also described as fulfilling and validating. In some cases, the heroine’s romantic activities pale in comparison to her achievements in the public arena. The emergence of nüzun fiction thus signals a major departure from the generic characteristics of popular romance as defined by Radway and the Romance Writers of America (and represented by Qiong Yao’s works): that a romance should have a central love story and an optimistic, emotionally satisfying ending.8 In contrast to American popular romances, in Chinese matriarchal romances the romantic plot plays a significant, but not necessarily central part in the heroine’s Bildungsroman. Nüzun romances not only permit women to claim center stage in public affairs, they also often relegate men to domesticity. If horror movies reveal a society’s most deep-rooted anxieties, nüzun romance’s reconfiguration or inversion of the traditional gender hierarchy in a patriarchal society similarly provides us with insights into Chinese women’s deepest fears of sexual violence, exploitation, and oppression, and their desire for gender equality and power. Thus, even though matriarchal romance lacks danmei’s notoriety or a clearly defined and coherent fan base, it summons up an equal amount, if not more, of enthusiasm and creative energy among contemporary Chinese women, even as it registers their dilemma and ambivalence. The setting of Web-based nüzun romances is typically fantastic, either vaguely historical or futuristic. In terms of plot, classic matriarchal romances portray a modern woman who travels back in time, either remaining in her own body or inhabiting the body of another woman, becomes a dominant public figure in a matriarchal society, and sets up her seraglio of attractive men. However, this subgenre also stretches to include variations on this basic plot, such as a one-on-one romantic relationship 8 Accessed February 23, 2013, http://www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=578.



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between an ordinary woman and man in a matriarchal world, or even the achievements of an exceptionally powerful woman in a patriarchal world (sometimes called nüqiang 女强, “female strength or female power,” rather than nüzun). While matriarchal romances attract female readers because they delineate the Bildungsgroman of a powerful heroine, they also reveal the dilemmas facing modern Chinese women. At first sight, nüzun romances promote female power in unprecedented ways. Time travel, a frequently utilized trope in matriarchal fiction, initiates what Radway has called the heroine’s “loss of social identity,” since she is plucked out of her familiar modern milieu and placed in an environment alien to her upbringing. Yet nüzun romances also all depict an empowered heroine who accomplishes not just the “recovery of her social identity” but also the enhancement of her former social status. Further, in matriarchal romances, the heroine does not solely rely on a declaration of love from the “ideal hero,” as Radway claims, to make her life worthwhile.9 But the protagonist’s source of power in a matriarchal world rests mainly on factors beyond her control, not on her own initiative. In early examples of nüzun, which bear some resemblances to stud fiction, she is either the scion of a noble clan with high social status in a matriarchal society, sometimes even a member of the royal family, and thus inherits formal power; or, she is born with exceptional physical strength and martial skills, without any effort required of the time traveler herself. Her success in a matriarchal world has thereby been ensured if not already secured by these hereditary advantages. Even in the case of farming fiction, where a selfmade protagonist uses her modern perspective, knowledge, and skills to change her unsatisfactory life circumstances and rise up in the world, this tale of mighty strife and success inevitably carries caveats. As in other types of time-travel romances, the protagonist in nüzun fiction is often blessed by the author’s “golden finger” (jin shouzhi 金手指), endowed with skills that sound improbable to the average modern reader, such as the ability to make glass, cement, paper, or even penicillin under primitive conditions. Male-oriented time-travel stud fiction is flooded with examples of this plot of the modern time traveler conquering history using modern technologies, and authors of nüzun apparently find it useful for them to borrow the same plot as well. Yet, while the miracle of modern technology invariably grants the protagonist power over history, the trope of time travel indicates 9 Radway, Reading the Romance, 131–34.

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a yearning to flee modern times and take refuge in a past that not only promises a more satisfying emotional life but also a second chance to succeed despite failures and setbacks in the modern world. Sometimes it is not the protagonist’s astounding feats but her modern consciousness alone, such as her ideas of gender equality and social justice, that earns her admiration and adoration from natives of the matriarchal world, men and women alike. But this ostensible promotion of modern, more democratic values also contrasts sharply with the substance of the plot, in which the protagonist reaches the upper echelon of society, and can therefore afford charity and benevolence as long as she remains with the powerful rather than the downtrodden. Despite these inherent contradictions, typical of all Web romances, nüzun romances still provide a unique platform for Chinese women to reimagine ideal femininity. Sometimes they reverse the gender roles in a patriarchal society, and thus spur humorous (re)productions among readers. For example, in response to the design of Nüdi shengya 女帝生涯 (The empress’s career), where a number of male characters hover around the heroine, a reader uses what is known as “the genre of Fanke” (Fanke ti 凡客体) to create a self-introductory blurb for each man, to the acclaim and amusement of her fellow fans.10 The genre of Fanke is derived from the  intentionally droll text of a commercial for Vancel (Fanke chengpin 凡客诚品 in Chinese), a name-brand Chinese clothing company, that starred the popular young writer Han Han 韩寒 and was widely imitated and circulated on the Web.11 In this respect, followers of nüzun fiction share the same penchant for parody or egao 恶搞 manifested by other Web literature fans. But more sophisticated authors and readers choose to explore women’s unique strengths, hoping to find through nüzun stories a viable path for women to gain power without perpetuating a hierarchy and politics based on gender inequality and exploitation. Three Princesses In order to illustrate the complex and contradictory layers of nüzun, I will analyze three representative Web-based matriarchal romances. While the three works fall on different parts of the spectrum of female supremacy in 10 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =123554&extra=&page=454, #6796. 11 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/4055632.htm.



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their portrayal of the power of the heroine vis-à-vis men in a matriarchal world, they share certain similarities as well. The fact that the tales are set in a matriarchal society already identifies them as gender benders to a greater or lesser degree. In producing such tales of female power, authors can fulfill their creative urges and yearnings for female empowerment by simultaneously borrowing from and undermining canonical works and popular tropes. Moreover, reader comments show that by identifying with a morally ambiguous yet powerful female time traveler, they can claim virtual sexual and political power through reading. On the other hand, by exchanging ideas with authors and among themselves, they also enact collectively what Henry Jenkins calls “viewer activism” in another context.12 That is to say, they undertake a social process through ongoing discussions among themselves, in which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced, experiences of any particular text are expanded beyond its initial consumption, and participants gain a sense of belonging and vali­ dation as well. As women living under patriarchy, nüzun readers, just like danmei fans, have also become textual poachers who launch guerrilla-like raids on existing cultural products, and practice bricolage, making do with various heterogeneous elements in order to elude or escape institutional control.13 But compared to danmei, which enables an exercise in displacement and ventriloquism through gender bending, nüzun fiction allows readers a closer look at the sociocultural forces that shape femininity, and hence also an opportunity to explore alternative paths to female empowerment. Sishi huakai 四时花开 (Flowers of Four Seasons) Sishi huakai,14 a classic matriarchal novel and one of the first to be published at Jinjiang, tells the story of a woman who dies in an accident in the modern world and whose soul then inhabits the body of a princess in a matriarchal society, just because the king of the underworld announces that she has “won the lottery” and deems it so. The protagonist seems to possess all the advantages the matriarchal world can offer. Not only is she born into the royal family and protected by her older sister, the queen, she is also physically attractive and strong. In contrast to this omnipo­ tent  female protagonist, “really a man under the name of a woman,” some 12 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 2. 13 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 184. 14 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=91786. It was published in print form by 21shiji chubanshe in 2007.

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readers protest that the men in this novel are just “women in disguise” as they are all physically and psychologically weaker.15 While the protagonist has absolute power over men both in the public world and in her household, the men in her “harem” are disadvantaged in education and social status at birth because of their male gender, and they must compete with each other for her favor. Some of my interviewees noted that the male harem in Flowers of Four Seasons and other matriarchal romances can be traced to a Japanese literary precedent: Yukino Sai’s 雪乃纱衣 Saiunkoku Monogatari 彩云 国物语 (The story of Saiunkoku, 2003–), a series of novels whose later manga adaptation was directed by Shishido Jun 宍户淳.16 The novels fall under the heading of “light fiction” (raito noberu 轻小说), so called because of its casual writing style, manga-style illustrations, and fan base of young people, who find this type of fiction lighthearted and easily consumable.17 Saiunkoku depicts a young woman from an aristocratic family in decline who cross-dresses as a man, ventures into different corners of a fantastical world, meets many beautiful young men, and eventually becomes a successful high official in court. Yet I argue that although Flowers of Four Seasons also portrays the heroine’s picaresque adventures and romantic encounters, its author Gongteng Shenxiu 宫藤深秀 borrowed the setting of the matriarchal society (nü’er guo 女儿国) from a much earlier source that completely inverts the patriarchal hierarchy. The eighteenth-century Chinese novel Jing hua yuan 镜花缘 (Flowers in the mirror), written by Li Ruzhen 李儒珍 (1763–1830 c.e.), describes the overseas travels of a group of men who visit various kingdoms, including a matriarchy where women serve in public roles while men have bound feet, wear cosmetics, remain confined to domestic spaces, and generally have to behave according to the female gender code that rules women in a patriarchy. However, Flowers of Four Seasons takes this setting a step further. As Keith McMahon argues, Flowers in the Mirror in effect paints women in a matriarchal society as only a “grotesque … mirror image of the male tyrant,” for now that they have absolute power they oppress men in the same way that women are oppressed in a patriarchy.18 In contrast, Gongteng Shenxiu depicts a female protagonist who is intelligent, rational, strong, and benevolent to the extent of acting maternally to all of her husbands, 15 Ibid., reader comments. 16 Accessed February 24, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/37335.htm. 17 Accessed February 24, 2012, http://baike.baidu.com/view/91916.htm. 18 McMahon, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 288.



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and she doles out to male characters physiological and psychological traits traditionally seen as feminine and negative. As the author, a seasoned danmei writer, admits, she tends to portray all male characters in the mold of the weaker, more passive shou of the danmei couple.19 In this nüzun novel, she not only describes men as vain and jealous, but also has them experience menses, childbirth, and breast-feeding. Gongteng Shenxiu’s characterization of men in a matriarchy thus not only points up the similar feminization of male characters in danmei and nüzun romances, but also reveals how ideal femininity is reimagined and constructed in matriarchal narratives. Her female protagonist contrasts with both Qiong Yao’s poetic, ethereal heroine fully consumed by romantic love and the feminine yet socially disadvantaged beauty in Radway’s summary. Yet this strong and all-powerful heroine would not have been as striking without her male foils, who appear socially, culturally, intellectually, physically, and psychologically so much weaker. Although more sophisticated readers point out that such narratives of gender bending only reverse the patriarchal gender hierarchy without eliminating gender inequality,20 these tales also attract a faithful following of readers who see them as entertaining and empowering.21 For example, one reader argues that just as the social status of men and women is reversed in the story, the aesthetic standards of masculinity and femininity should be reversed too. She finds it entirely reasonable and plausible that in this matriarchal society, women are admired for their physical strength and intelligence while men have to devote themselves to maintaining their physical beauty and chastity.22 As some readers admit, this kind of gender reversal satisfies female readers’ “unconscious yearnings for social status [in a patriarchy].”23 However, the protagonist’s miraculous transformation from an ordinary modern woman into a powerful matriarch is not explained in the plot. Although in the modern world the female time traveler supposedly has “neither external beauty nor internal beauty [spiritual worthiness],”24 once she wakes up in the body of a princess in the matriarchal world she suddenly demonstrates exceptional intelligence and willpower. Furthermore, the 19 Accessed October 23, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=91786. 20 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=25&id=5706. 21 Accessed March 6, 2008, http://bbs.jjwxc.com/showmsg.php?board=25&id=5960. 22 Accessed October 23, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=91786. 23 Ibid. 24 Accessed October 21, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=91786& chapterid=1.

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protagonist experiences time travel—or, in this case, the transmigration of her soul—only because of the divine will of the king of the underworld, not by her own agency. Flowers of Four Seasons thus leaves some readers dissatisfied even as it fulfills other readers’ fantasy of female empowerment. Wangzhe zhi tong 王者之痛 (Pains of the Queen) Recognizing structural flaws in early works, later authors of Web-based matriarchal novels attempted to address them in various ways. Luzi 炉子 (Stove), author of Wangzhe zhi tong, another popular matriarchal novel at Jinjiang, states that because she was angered by how a peasant woman is treated in Rou Shi’s 柔石 (1902–1931) short story “Wei nuli de muqin” 为奴 隶的母亲 (A slave mother), she wants to tell the story of “how a ‘weak’ woman conquers the world.”25 She portrays a princess warrior who, although not physically stronger than the men in the story, returns from the dead, recruits supporters, rises above incredible setbacks and sufferings, and eventually overthrows the regime that dethroned her earlier, while also acquiring two powerful and devoted men as spouses in the process. While it would be all too easy to dismiss this story as only a female version of stud fiction, we should pay close attention to the way that it rewrites a piece of state-sanctioned canonical work that is often hailed as an indictment of the “old society,” because the author Rou Shi, a Communist and “revolutionary martyr,” relentlessly exposed the oppression of women and peasants in pre-1949 China. Luzi has turned a tale of unrelieved suffering for women into one of female empowerment and triumph. Rou Shi portrayed a peasant woman who was pawned by her husband to an upper-class family as a surrogate mother to produce a male heir for them, but eventually had to give up her child because of class oppression. In contrast, in Pains of the Queen, the heroine marries herself to the peasant who has rescued her from the battlefield as a form of repayment. After the peasant dies and she has recovered from her wounds, she takes her daughter born out of this marriage and leaves the peasant family to seek revenge and retrieve her power. Although she is later found to be infertile due to old injuries sustained in battle, her lovers remain dedicated to her rather than abandoning her for being “lacking” as a woman. She seems to have traded her procreative capacity for military and political power, instead of remaining a passive 25 Accessed October 21, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=231059.



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“baby machine” and a commodity bartered by men, as was the fate of the slave mother in Rou Shi’s story. Luzi’s novel subverts the discourses of national salvation and class struggle produced by radical male intellectuals such as Rou Shi in early twentieth-century China, in that it depicts a woman who uses her own intelligence, resilience, and political talent to attain empowerment, rather than relying on a savior such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for her liberation, a motif that appears in fiction works by male pro-CCP authors such as Zhao Shuli 赵树理 (1906–1970),26 as well as the ballet and film Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun 红色娘子军). The author uses the same strategy of masculinizing the heroine to create “a model of female leadership” that allows her to function freely, “without the hindrance of being regarded primarily in sexual terms,” as Rosemary Roberts has found in Maoist yangban xi 样板戏 (model theatre).27 But in contrast to yangban xi, Luzi does not code good women as masculine and evil men as feminine;28 nor does she completely eschew depictions of heterosexual sexual relationships in her nüzun work. She instead deploys the heroine’s romantic and marital bliss to illustrate her success in both the public and private realms. Readers have expressed their admiration for a heroine who is strong, independent, and highly intelligent, and they root for her when she is faced with enormous obstacles in her fight to regain power.29 Further, because of the portrayal of the protagonist’s long and hard struggle, some of them also remark that they can relate more to this kind of plot and heroine than to matriarchal novels that portray the female protagonist as talented and all-powerful but reduce minor characters to “total idiots,”30 a characterization that fits early matriarchal novels such as Flowers of Four Seasons, which paint a rather lopsided picture of power dynamics between women and men in the matriarchal world. These Web readers seek, even in fantastical stories such as nüzun romances, a kind of “emotional realism” that can better represent their life experiences and beliefs. 26 For example, see Zhao Shuli, “Meng Xiangying Stands Up,” in Modern Chinese Stories, ed. W.J.F. Jenner (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 120–38. 27 Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre, 260, 262. 28 Ibid., 262. 29 For example, accessed October 22, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php? novelid=231059&chapterid=8; http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=231059& chapterid=10. 30 For example, accessed October 22, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php? novelid=231059&chapterid=9.

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Fenghuang jiangjun liezhuan 凤凰将军列传 (Biography of General Phoenix) In comparison to Luzi’s celebration of the heroine’s military and political accomplishments in Pains of the Queen, Jun Suiyuan 君随缘, the author of Fenghuang jiangjun liezhuan, another high-ranked matriarchal novel at Jinjiang, believes that feminine nurturance, rather than masculine aggressiveness, is the only hope for the world. “Men conquer the world, and women save mankind,” she boldly declares. Challenging the old saying “Men conquer the world, and women conquer men” as “chauvinistic,” she asserts: “Men are more extroverted and aggressive, while women tend to be introverted and accommodating. So only a world dominated by women can treat the disadvantaged group of the opposite sex with enough tolerance.” Moreover, she quips, “Had Saddam Hussein been a woman, he would have seen to it first that his people had adequate food and clothing. Had George W. Bush been a woman, he would not have launched a war just to acquire oil from half a world away: his military expenses could have been spent on finding clean sources of energy.”31 In contrast to the many authors of matriarchal novels who portray female protagonists endowed with extraordinary intellectual and martial prowess and excelling in traditionally masculine realms, Jun Suiyuan depicts a modern-day, ordinary Chinese woman who has the misfortune to  travel back in time and wake up in the body of General Phoenix, formerly the avatar of a powerful alien from another planet, Princess Sarah (Sala gongzhu 萨拉公主). Rather than displaying the alien’s political and military power, this new General Phoenix is frequently exposed as ignorant, timid, and muddleheaded. Her only redeeming feature seems to be her sincere love for her twelve husbands, who include, among others, two princes, a prime minister, a powerful businessman, a knight-errant adept at swordplay, a mercenary assassin, and the leader of a powerful religious cult. Each of her husbands overshadows her former self in intellectual capacity, martial prowess, social status, or political clout. In exposing the modern woman’s weakness as compared to the men in her life, the author of General Phoenix appears to indulge in a cyclical movement. The novel inverts typical matriarchal narratives that glorify the heroine’s abilities or unconditionally extol female supremacy, itself an inversion of patriarchal narrative and especially male-centered stud fiction. This recursive development in plot structure arose from the 31 Accessed June 8, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=144848&chapter id=1.



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author’s wish to debunk clichés in existing time-travel romances that feature plots in which “the heroine becomes a superstar [in the other world] just by singing a modern song and performing an erotic dance, a millionaire by opening a  hot-pot restaurant and frying a few pieces of chicken, and a ‘talented woman’ [cainü 才女] by reciting [plagiarizing] a few classical poems,”32 all true of time-travel classics such as Wan qingsi (Chapter 2). Yet like Flowers of Four Seasons, General Phoenix does not lack elements of the fantastical and excessive, particularly the device of having her acquire twelve husbands. What distinguishes this particular work from many other matriarchal romances is the more nuanced and sophisticated way that the author depicts a modern woman’s growth into the ideal heroine. Pairing her with twelve different powerful men does seem excessive, but it also embodies a reversal and parody of the motif of “twelve beauties” (shi’er jinchai 十二金钗) revolving around a male protagonist, made famous by Dream of the Red Chamber and A Country Codger’s Words of Exposure (Chapter 2). Moreover, the modern time traveler has inherited these men from the alien princess rather than winning them herself through sexual conquest. She has to wrestle with the political intrigue and emotional baggage that they each bring, not to mention the tricky household dynamics that this setup inevitably generates. These twelve “headaches” allow the author to explore what is essentially loveable about the heroine and what validates her existence. Princess Sarah had collected these men for political and business partnerships as well as sexual gratification, supremely confident that she could control and overpower them. In contrast, the modern time traveler’s eventual “conquest” of previously condescending and contemptuous men, a distinct echo of heterosexual popular romances that ­feature similar struggles facing the heroine, comes only after she has accomplished the seemingly impossible mission of retooling herself from a weak “earthling” into a powerful military leader. In the story, the modern heroine reveals again and again her own shortcomings with respect to her predecessor, who has since left this world, and the dozen men in her life. Yet after a series of upheavals, including a rebellion and war against the throne, the serious injuries of two of her husbands, and her own near-death experiences, her inner strength starts to shine through. One husband, a wealthy merchant who calculates to the last cent in all his dealings and who loves beautiful women, especially “Princess

32 Accessed October 21, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=144848.

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Sarah,” nonetheless falls for her perseverance and courage to never give up despite “wounds and bloodshed (toupo xueliu 头破血流).”33 Another husband, who leads a powerful cult and whom she rescues from a fall from a cliff, admits to loving her because “through all the political intrigues and infighting, only she treats me with sincerity (chicheng xiangdai 赤诚相待) and is willing to die for me.”34 Her other husbands, such as the prime minister, the two princes, and the mercenary assassin, similarly fall in love with her at critical moments when the couple faces a life-and-death struggle and she declares her love for him. At the crescendo of volume 1 of this novel, the time-traveling heroine finally emerges from the long shadow cast by Princess Sarah and grows into her own woman, an ordinary human being whose loving nature makes her impulsive and vulnerable, but also propels her to stand up for her beliefs and especially her love despite all kinds of dangers. The above plot seems to recycle a cliché of popular heterosexual romances, in which, some scholars argue, it is the declaration of love that marks the climax of the tale and defines the romance genre, because its performativity and repetition reaffirm heterosexual norms.35 Yet the depiction of the heroine’s growth is striking in light of the particular setting of this nüzun romance, which the author describes as “a different version of the historical Tang dynasty, for here several empresses have ruled after Wu Zetian 武则天 [the only widely acknowledged empress in imperial China], and they have implemented a series of policies and measures that greatly raised women’s social status.”36 This is a fantastical world where female gender is no longer a hindrance to advancement, but it is also a starkly Social Darwinist world where overwhelming strength alone brings absolute power, perhaps reflecting the author’s perception of the cutthroat com­petition in postsocialist Chinese society. Thrust into this cruel world, the ­softhearted heroine finally realizes the purpose of her life: to protect those she loves and avenge their humiliations and pains, after undergoing continuous and unrelenting sufferings herself.37 As the action-packed, 33 Accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/books/readnovel.php?tid =41450&page=35. 34 Accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/books/readnovel.php?tid =41450&page=34. 35 Lisa Fletcher, Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 36 Accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/books/readnovel .php?tid=41450&page=1. 37 Accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/books/readnovel.php? tid=41450&page=6.



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albeit convoluted, plot demonstrates, all the life-threatening situations prove to be crucibles that test and temper the heroine, making her into a stronger and more genuine General Phoenix who still adheres to her idealism and loving nature despite the treacherous and vicious acts of others. Her romantic relationships with various men thus function not as the sole basis of her identity and raison d’etre, but rather as gifts that she can actively bestow on the men in her life, and as trophies of her quest for agency and maturation. Jun Suiyuan seems aware of the potential pitfalls of the ménage of NP (a reader acronym referring to romantic or sexual relationships involving multiple or numerous partners) depicted in the story. She frequently has the heroine experience jealousy at the sight of any of her men with another woman, but each apparent betrayal inevitably turns out to be a misunderstanding, a bit of trickery engineered by her enemies, or a ruse to win her heart. The men in General Phoenix’s life, on the other hand, also subtly or not so subtly compete with one another to capture her affection and monopolize her attention. Further, the author divides her novel into sequential segments that allow the heroine to engage in a one-on-one romantic relationship with each and every one of her twelve husbands at any one time. This “serial monogamy,” though perhaps offensive to purists who believe in an exclusive romantic relationship between one man and one woman (as many Web readers of popular romances profess to be), provides an effective device for the author to explore and develop the heroine’s strength: she is frequently pushed to the very brink of collapse, but emerges all the more fit and resilient after surviving various political, military, and emotional avalanches brought about by her romantic entanglements. This plot pattern also suggests that the author’s version of romance in a matriarchal world is still based on the modern concept of a monogamous, conjugal, and companionate relationship, rather than the harem scenes prevalent in male-authored stud fiction. The extravagant display of male beauty, intelligence, and power drives the plot forward by providing similar, though increasingly challenging tasks for the heroine to complete. In turn, these tasks promote shared goals and alliances between the heroine and her husbands, who help her to grow and eventually succeed against all odds—out of their love for her, not due to fear or greed, as Princess Sarah was wont to incite in them. As the author declares in her wen’an on the first page of the novel, “If (a woman) wants to be independent and self-determined, she must become stronger and stronger.” Romantic love, consequently, “will not be the No.1 element of this

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work; ranked the last, romance is retained merely to prevent the novel from becoming too cold and bare (xiaosuo 萧索).”38 Since General Phoenix has not been completed yet, it remains to be seen how the author will describe the protagonist’s eventual triumph. However, the author mentions in her wen’an that the female protagonist will “meet many people, experience a lot of things, eat a lot of bitterness, make a lot of mistakes, and eventually live up to her title ‘General Phoenix’ after many years of trials and tribulations.”39 In the second volume of the novel, currently appearing in serial form, the heroine learns new martial arts skills from aliens disguised as immortals while gaining physical prowess and emotional clarity. Additionally, in both the first and second volumes of her novel, Jun Suiyuan has included several fanwai chapters that foreshadow future events and also appease the earlier protests of readers who either thought that the author had not given them a satisfactory, powerful female protagonist, or expressed concern that this novel would not have a happy ending, given the protagonist’s obvious weakness. For example, in a fanwai chapter entitled “Tuanyuan” 团圆 (Reunion),40 Jun Suiyuan describes how at the Mid-Autumn Festival, a traditional Chinese holiday marked by family gatherings, General Phoenix waits for her twelve husbands at the family banquet, only to drink herself into oblivion when none of them show up because they are all tied up with affairs of the state or other important public duties. However, when she wakes up from her drunken stupor the next morning, she can tell from various traces, such as the hickey on her neck, a coat that someone has wrapped around her, a fan left behind, and so forth, that they had visited her after she fell asleep. This fanwai not only promises readers a reassuring happy ending, but also provides a tantalizing glimpse into the marital life of the female protagonist, without revealing any substantive plot developments regarding the change of dynamics between the heroine and her partners or compromising the author’s own idea of how a modern woman would behave in a matriarchal world. In its portrayal of a modern woman’s miraculous transformation and growth in a matriarchal society, General Phoenix will most likely provide the same kind of entertainment and validation for its female readers that the other novels discussed in this chapter supply. 38 Accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/books/readnovel.php? tid=41450&page=1. 39 Accessed October 21, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=144848. 40 Accessed October 21, 2009, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=144848& chapterid=148.



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In another, more daring series of fanwai chapters set in contemporary society, published near the start of volume 2, the twelve husbands all take up modern professions: mayor, CEO, movie star, mechanical engineer, business tycoon, religious leader, and so forth. The heroine likewise assumes a leadership role in a big company. Yet they remain passionately in love with her, even sneaking away from their overwhelming responsibilities to take her on a romantic trip on Valentine’s Day.41 These fanwai chapters reveal the domestic bliss of the heroine while also emphasizing the gainful employment and public accomplishments of all the characters. Once again, the heroine engages with each of the male characters sequentially, without causing any jealousy or bad blood among them. This is undoubtedly a utopian vision cherished by authors of nüzun romances such as Jun Suiyuan. Apologizing for her tardiness and thanking all the readers who have been encouraging her to complete a work that comprises over one million Chinese characters, the author asserts that she includes depictions of sexual encounters (as well as romantic get-togethers) in this series for the sake of YY (yiyin), fantasy and entertainment. Conclusion Although Radway’s characterization of the ideal heroine applies, more or less, to pre-Internet popular romance works authored by Qiong Yao, Webbased matriarchal romances feature female protagonists whose identities are not determined by tales of women who sacrifice themselves for romantic love, or by the heroic, nation-centered male narratives of the Mao era. In the age of the Internet, the thematic emphasis of the nüzun subgenre seems to have shifted from the heterosexual romantic love typical of Qiong Yao’s works to women’s explorations of and adventures in various (masculine) realms, even as its formal features integrate elements from diverse premodern and contemporary popular genres. Yet nüzun romances also reveal the many contradictions inherent in  postsocialist Chinese life. While all three matriarchal novels under­ mine patriarchal prescriptions of women’s procreative duties—Gongteng Shenxiu relegates gestation and birthing to men while Luzi makes her heroine barren—they also emphasize the female protagonist’s love and protection of her household and her people. Indeed, the protagonist in 41 Accessed February 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =143802&extra=&highlight=%BE%FD%CB%E6%D4%B5&page=2.

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all three matriarchal romances can be seen as a supreme mother figure personifying benevolence and nurturance, even though she does not necessarily play a maternal role in the traditional sense. This kind of characterization poses a sharp contrast to Radway’s ideal heroine, who expects and thrives on the attention and love showered on her by an ideal hero who is hypermasculine yet acts like a loving, pre-Oedipal mother.42 But these matriarchal romances reinforce some gender stereotypes even as they reverse others. Like Maoist yangban xi, Flowers of Four Seasons also enacts “a gender hierarchy in which yanggang [阳刚] masculine personal qualities are superior to yinrou [阴柔] feminine qualities,” though it is the heroine, rather than the hero, who is “dominated by positive yanggang qualities but also incorporates some positive yinrou qualities.”43 General Phoenix, on the other hand, refashions the romantic relationship as a vehicle for women’s growth and self-realization, but ultimately endorses the essential, incomparable value of feminine nurturance rather than proposing another form or expression of femininity. The seemingly excessive plot elements in nüzun fiction, such as the pairing of the heroine with a dozen husbands and the portrayal of her superhuman physical and intellectual prowess, are an essential part of Web readers’ online experience. On the Web these elements constitute a gesture of rebellion, as they are appropriated from both male-centered premodern vernacular fiction and contemporary stud fiction and deliberately changed. These excesses also enable female authors and readers to reconfigure femininity. Thus, nüzun fiction does not just fulfill what Jennifer Crusie, like the subjects of Radway’s and my interviews, regards as the ultimate positive function of popular romance, namely reinforcing women’s “sense of self-worth” by allowing them to “recognize the truth and validity” of their lives.44 Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal life routines, places that are in some way “betwixt and between.” Turner calls these places “liminal,” from the Latin word for threshold—literally on the boundaries of things.45 Web-based nüzun romances provide just such a liminal space, a platform for Chinese women to push against the outermost boundaries of social acceptability, ethical rectitude, and cultural norms.

42 Radway, Reading the Romance, 113. 43 Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre, 254. 44 Crusie, “Romancing Reality.” 45 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).



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Readers’ online commentaries show that the strategy of excess in matriarchal fiction also generates exhilaration, and provides a kind of erotic pleasure as conceptualized in Georges Bataille’s work; that is to say, the awareness of its very limitation, whether by death or social restrictions, heightens its intensity.46 The pleasure of excess also partly explains the proliferation of similar plots and tropes on the Chinese Web. Together with the creative play available through appropriation and parody, it invariably generates high emotional energy among Web readers. However, as my interviews revealed, there is a gap between Web readers’ enthusiastic online reception of nüzun literature and its effects on their offline lives. Female Chinese readers embrace the concept of privacy and “the sanctity of private emotions” by concealing their online reading habits in real life.47 This inward thrust contrasts not only with the typical nüzun plot characterized by an expansionist, even excessive female ambition, but also with the ever-shifting social exchanges flowing around the text itself. Web-based nüzun romance obviously provides a safe haven for Chinese women to explore their secret desires and fears. The anonymity and parity that the Internet offers enable social and intimate exchanges within certain fan circles, and assist them in expressing and shaping their own gender identity among supportive fellow fans. The grand master narrative of the People’s Republic of China accentuates anticolonial national salvation and the search for a monolithic cultural identity. In response, female users not only appropriate elements of “masculine” cultural products, such as the infamous stud fiction, but also expose the insecurity of a patriarchal society that lashes out against them only because, as they claim, men feel profoundly threatened by women’s need for sexual exploration and expression.48 While female Web authors and readers of popular romances do not all rebel against patriarchy out of feminist consciousness, they recognize gender inequality and seek to subvert patriarchal hierarchy through the creation and consumption of matriarchal narratives. Their online exchanges around matriarchal novels show that these Chinese women discover the utopian dimension of popular ­culture by interacting with each other. They wrestle with unsatisfactory

46 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). 47 Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 209. 48 Accessed March 30, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=291638& chapterid=85.

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situations in their real lives and try to establish a world more open to ­creativity and more responsive to women’s needs. Female romance fans’ offline reticence not only exposes patriarchal oppression, it also debunks the politicized emotions of the Mao years and gestures toward a different structure of feelings in real life. The anthropologist Alasdair MacIntyre contrasts the modern “emotive self” with the traditional “heroic self,” pointing out that the modern self takes pride in being an autonomous agent whose moral authority resides within itself rather than in the external authorities of traditional morality.49 Consuming Web romances such as nüzun fiction allows readers to construct their own modern identities, even though the fictional works invoke the more traditional, role-bound setting of premodern China. The case of nüzun, like danmei, again illustrates that the flood of popular cultural products associated with the rise of the Internet provide Chinese women with useful tools to reinvent themselves in the Chinese cyberspace, even as they struggle with the limitations and contradictions of real life. In the next chapter, I discuss how they employ yet another strategy of rewriting, this time that of producing and consuming fan fiction, to further advance their exploration of gender, identity, and cultural capital on and through the Internet.

49 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 33.

CHAPTER FOUR

REWRITING CLASSICS, RIGHTING WRONGS Fandom is a peculiar mix of cultural determinations. On the one hand it is an intensification of popular culture which is formed outside and often against official culture, on the other it expropriates and reworks certain values and characteristics of that official culture to which it is opposed. –John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom”

I joined Yaya Bay in April 2009. Like many other members of Yaya, I had been looking for a Web-based serialized fan fiction, and found it through the Chinese search engine Baidu. However, when I located Yaya, I discovered that the fiction forum requires users to register. I felt a little apprehensive in the beginning, since I had never before subscribed to an online forum. But the registration process was straightforward and speedy: I only needed to create a Web name and provide an e-mail address that the Web administrator could verify. After subscribing, I also found that I needed to post a certain number of times, earn enough credit, and rise to a certain rank before being able to access the fiction I wanted to read. I did post, and eventually was able to read the work that had prompted me to join Yaya. Meanwhile, I also started to write my very first Chineselanguage blog at this site, and later also played online games. On September 30, 2009, the Web administrators at Yaya invited me to act as the administrator of a new sub-forum they were planning to launch: wenshi tianxia 文史天下, or, “world history and literature.” I hesitated at first, since I was extremely busy with work at the time. However, they promised that it would not take up too much of my time, and that I could decide to what extent I wanted to get involved later. I eventually accepted for two reasons. First, I was genuinely interested in this forum, which had been conceived as a place to acquire knowledge and generate discussion on political, economic, and military affairs, as well as on history and literature. Second, I thought that the experience of working as a Web administrator could benefit my research of Chinese cyber culture. On October 1, 2009, I wrote a blog entry to describe my vision of the new forum, and published it both on my blog and as a posting at Yaya’s discussion forum, asking the Web administrators and other users for feedback.

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The initial reception of my ideas and call for participation was overwhelmingly welcoming and positive, though later developments showed that this forum might be a little too highbrow and demanding for ordinary users. I have learned through administering this forum that most users access Yaya for entertainment, and preferably easily consumable entertainment. While they may be interested in certain “profound” topics and ideas, few of them have the time, skills, or perseverance to research and write for a forum on world history and literature. The response to fanfic at Yaya is all the more remarkable for its volume, intensity, and quality in light of my experience administering the literature and history forum. My participant observation at Yaya as well as face-toface interviews conducted over the past years revealed that Yaya’s interactive features play a crucial role in shaping reader reception of romance novels. Before discussing Web-based fanfic in more depth, I first provide a detailed review of the structure of Yaya. I then discuss the production of fanfic on the Chinese Web to provide some context for my analysis, before delving into specific cases of fanfic, such as works rewriting vernacular classics by adding danmei content, and those based on Qiong Yao’s romances. I explore in this chapter not only the complex motivations of fanfic authors but also the equally complicated responses of their readers in postings charged with intense and multifaceted emotional investment. Tricks of the Trade Unlike the China-based Jinjiang, Yaya Bay was founded in August 2008 by a group of young Chinese men working and living in the Washington, DC, area in the United States. They established this online discussion forum, using a software program that they themselves wrote, as a venue for exchanging tips about investment in the stock market. As more people joined, they found that women, including their own wives and friends, liked to read Web-based literature. The Web administrators then added more topics to the discussion forum, including “Fiction Appreciation,” and saw membership grow exponentially. In response to rising user needs and interests, in December 2008 they purchased Discuz, a popular software application that many online Chinese discussion forums have adopted, and upgraded their forum.1 They have since upgraded their server several times, 1 Author’s interview of Yaya Bay’s creators and Web administrators, March 25, 2010. The creators named the forum after a daughter of one of them, whose nickname is Yaya. However, in Northern China, the character ya is also slang for a woman’s genitals, thus



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revising the layout of the forum constantly, and now have over 200,000 registered members around the world.2 The administrators all work as unpaid volunteers, paying out of their own pockets for necessary upgrades. They also claim that they feel no pressure to post online advertisements to fund Yaya.3 Yaya consists of three major parts: the forum, blog space, and computer games. The structure of Yaya’s blog space resembles those of popular social networking websites such as Facebook in the United States, and Renren (People, formerly called Xiaonei 校内, or On Campus, used mostly by students) and Kaixin wang 开心网 (Happy Net, used more often by whitecollar workers) in China. As on other social networking sites, users can play games, write blogs, upload photos and other images, share music and video clips, exchange text messages, and comment on one another’s blog entries and pictures. They can also participate in the discussion forum. In June 2009, Yaya incorporated a variety of popular computer games into its offerings, such as Happy Farm and Happy Kitchen (Xingfu chufang 幸福厨房), which proved to be a major attraction for users. But this newest offering is gradually being phased out. Within this general milieu of interactions among users, the forum at Yaya further adds to the feel of variety and choice. It is currently divided into twenty-seven sub-forums, including “Stocks and Finance,” “Immigra­ tion,” “Campus Life,” “Love and Marriage,” “Medicine and Health,” “Tourism and Travel,” “Humor and Laughter,” and “Delicious Foods of the World,” as well as the sub-forum of “Fiction Appreciation,” the focus of this study. The fiction sub-forum is further split into ten units. In one unit, users can discuss fiction in general, ask questions about forum rules, and conduct surveys. Six of the units feature fiction: creative works authored by Yaya users; newly “transferred” (zhuanzai 转载) works, relayed by users from the websites that originally published them, that are awaiting approval by forum moderators; serialized fiction; completed romance works (further divided into general romance and danmei); TXT downloads (compressed versions of novels that can be read on cell phones as well as computers), and a collection of “limited access” works. These are works that were pirated endowing the site’s name with “sexy,” “womanly” overtones. While the creators may not have been conscious of this double entendre initially, they are most likely aware of it now. 2 One Web administrator constructed a map to summarize demographic information on Yaya users as of May 2011, accessed March 26, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/ viewthread.php?tid=122764. 3 The summary of Yaya’s history in this paragraph is based on an interview of two Web administrators by the author, March 25, 2010.

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by Yaya members, and whose authors have requested that they be removed from the site; consequently they are available only to qualified users (more about this later). The remaining three units are devoted to recommendations, calls for works currently published elsewhere that users want to see at Yaya, and the elimination of redundant or disqualified works. Judging by their self-identifications, users of the fiction forum are mostly women whose ages range from mid-teens to forties and who live all over the world. As of March 2012, of the 5,789 people who had taken an ongoing survey posted at the fiction forum, more than 60% mentioned that they accidentally stumbled across this site while searching for a certain work that had been off-limits to them because of the widespread VIP practice at literature websites such as Starting Point and Jinjiang. Over 23% found a link to Yaya on another online fiction site, and over 13% were introduced to the site by friends.4 The fiction forum seems to attract users, at least initially, because it houses a number of pirated works originally published elsewhere. In order to protect itself from lawsuits and also to encourage participation and interaction among users, Yaya has established a system of hierarchical access. Only those who have accumulated a certain number of points—by posting repeatedly, visiting the site over a certain length of time, or referring other users to the site—can access certain fictional works.5 Yaya has further borrowed from the premodern system of civil service examinations in China, assigning each level of participation a rank. Starting from pupil (tongsheng 童生), progressing through successful candidate at the county level (xiucai 秀才), successful candidate at the provincial level (juren 举人), and successful candidate at the national level (jinshi 进士), up to Hanlin wensheng (翰林文圣), “literati sage of the Hanlin academy.” Members are motivated to post more frequently by the promise of a higher and more glamorous rank. But more importantly, this system has practical implications, for only those of a certain rank can access certain works. Whereas Jinjiang is the publisher of the works it hosts, Yaya has no claim to ownership of most of the works available through the site. All works available at Yaya, with the exception of those published at their “creative writing” forum, have been transferred to the site by users from the sites 4 Accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =8092. 5 Accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =15593.



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where they were originally published, though a link to the original publication site is provided in the very first posting of each work, together with its title and a plot summary. Some of the transferrers request and receive proper authorization before copying fiction works, while others buy VIP novels published elsewhere and then reproduce them at Yaya, but make sure to lag behind a few chapters, either using their own judgment or by agreement between transferrers and authors. Still others reproduce works copied from sites that host pirated literature without permission from either the original authors or the websites on which those works first appeared, though this last practice is discouraged at Yaya. Yaya defends itself against the charge of piracy by claiming that the site simply facilitates the discussion of literature among a network of users, but if an author of a work published elsewhere and transferred to Yaya objects, access to the work is restricted to a limited group of users of a high rank—that is, users who have a long history of participation at the site and are presumably not simply using the site as a channel to access works published elsewhere at no cost. Thus, it seems that VIP status means different things at Jinjiang and Yaya; while users pay cash to read VIP works at Jinjiang, members contribute labor to earn access at Yaya instead. Like other Chinese literature websites, Yaya fosters a participatory culture that feeds on itself through a variety of interactive features. For instance, readers can send “flowers” (two Web coins for one flower) to those whose postings (whether updated fiction or comments) they like. In turn, the more flowers a certain work receives, the more followers it will attract. Postings of fiction recommendations generate enthusiasm and win new fans for certain works, as do comments on serialized fiction. Users closely follow serialized novels because of the fun of guessing what happens next and discussing the plot with fellow readers. But the operation of Yaya also differs from that of most Chinese literature websites, for it is able to evade certain strictures faced by its competitors. Since the server is based in the United States, Web administrators at Yaya have more leeway to post works and comments and do not have to follow rules of censorship to which China-based literature websites are subject, such as the prohibition of sexually explicit content and politically sensitive topics (Chapter 1). While the Chinese government periodically shuts down some websites and blocks access to others, including Yaya, its administrators have found ways of getting around censorship, such as providing an alternative Web address for users in mainland China (www.chineseindc.com and www.chineseonboard.com) or suggesting proxies. Moreover, as is the case with other Chinese BBS forums that

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feature Web fiction, Yaya users find it easy to transfer to the site works published elsewhere with little fear of penalty, since at Yaya fiction is ostensibly the shared hobby of a limited number of registered members rather than a piece of goods for sale, and in any case Yaya’s server is located outside China. Yaya users defend the site by arguing that it neither charges a fee for access nor displays an unreasonable number of advertisements—a common practice of China-based websites that host pirated literature, some of which even have links to pornography sites—and since the site is not capitalizing on the unauthorized use of copyrighted material, they feel justified in their “transferring” of Web fiction. The tripartite structure of Yaya also benefits discussions at the fiction forum, for those reading and commenting on fiction may have made one another’s acquaintance earlier on, whether as “friends” playing the same computer game, as commentators on the same blog entry and picture, or as fellow posters at some other forum at Yaya. Their previous interactions (or simultaneous engagements) elsewhere cultivate a sense of familiarity and intimacy and foster mutual trust, even though their relationships are established and enacted in a virtual space where users do not necessarily reveal their true identity or other personal information. For instance, a reader of a serial novel that I was also following sent me a text message through Yaya to vent frustration about setbacks in her business; she did not expect a response but was writing just so she “could be listened to.” In another case, a fellow member of Yaya and an enthusiastic reader and commentator wrote me to suggest topics for the forum on world literature and history I was moderating; to talk about her family problems, including the suicide of her sister-in-law; and later to introduce me to the new forum that she created when she decided to leave Yaya. Thus, Yaya’s unique structure promotes a sense of community among users of the fiction forum, which in turn creates a friendly atmosphere conducive to open and substantive discussions of romances. One drawback of using a BBS forum as a literature site is the relative instability and disorganization of its “library.” Work-centered Chinese literature websites such as Jinjiang typically provide a separate and stable Web address for each title while also displaying works in ranked lists. In contrast, Yaya users can keep tabs on a particular work by bookmarking its first page, but the fiction forum does not provide a table of contents or index, and works are listed in the order of the most recent postings that they have received. However, since each installment of a work is commented upon by multiple readers, the order of the postings related to a given work, whether they contain texts or comments, does not correspond to the order of the



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chapters of the original work. Consequently, users cannot accurately bookmark any page of a particular work except for the first page, because the constant shift in the number of postings obviates fixed Web addresses. Although Yaya provides a search function and has recently added a fulltext search function, users often complain that they cannot find the work or author they are searching for. They may have to roll down the screen or skim through multiple pages before they can locate a work because its location is determined by varied and ever-shifting reader interests. When users are intent on reading only the original work, but there are too many reader comments, they may get impatient wading through all the “irrelevant” bits. Nevertheless, these inconveniences also lead to more interactions among users. While searching for the latest installments of the works that they are following, users read and respond to commentary postings they encounter along the way. They also browse other titles and may chance on something to their liking while chasing a different work. At Yaya, the authors of romance novels are usually not involved in the posting and commentary process, since their works have often been “transferred” to the site without their knowledge or authorization; the authorial monitoring and manipulation of reader response common at Jinjiang is absent here.6 As a result, when voices critical of a work become dominant and strident, the author is not present to explain his or her intentions and motives and thereby temper reader dissatisfaction. Sometimes authors are put on trial in absentia, a practice that is perhaps unfair to the author but nevertheless further showcases the all-importance of user participation and the egalitarian structure of the fiction forum. Many Web readers admit that they prefer to read and discuss works at Yaya rather than at Jinjiang, because Yaya offers a more lively and readercentered atmosphere that is conducive to airing their own opinions and emotions. They even appreciate postings that provide historical and cultural knowledge and insights but are unrelated to the work at hand, preferring a “skewed” (wailou 歪楼) discussion to the usual fare of “flattery  or smear” at other sites.7 Authors whose works have been pirated from their original publication sites sometimes also drop by Yaya, attracted by the constant flow of substantive and lively commentaries. Lan Yunshu 蓝云舒, the author of Datang mingyue 大唐明月 (Moon of the Tang 6 For example, at Jinjiang, authors constantly participate in discussions of their works and try to persuade readers to see things their way. See Chapter 2 for details. 7 Accessed February 17, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =169883&extra=&page=60, #898.

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dynasty), enjoyed far less attention at Starting Point, a website notorious for featuring stud fiction, than at Yaya. While not openly endorsing the piracy of her work, she nevertheless read the commentaries on her work frequently and chose to turn a blind eye to Yaya readers’ copyright violations.8 Another author whose work was pirated, Leidewen, even used her official page at Starting Point to reply to comments posted at Yaya.9 Pirated authors’ tolerance of Yaya echoes the sentiments of the famous dissident Web author Murong Xuecun, who insists that copyright abuse is the least of his concerns, for “a relaxed and free environment is more important than royalties.”10 The genial, reader-centered participatory culture at Yaya indeed ensures the free flow of comments and exchanges surrounding any novel, not to mention fanfic works, which foster even more tight-knit fan communities than other types of Web fiction. Dragging the cursor across a user’s touxiang 头像 (the individual icon and Web handle that accompanies each posting) reveals personal data, including gender and location. This makes it possible to explore the relationship between place of residence and differences in cultural knowledge and political orientation. For instance, a Taiwanese reader may not understand some of the terms used by a mainland reader in a comment, and vice versa. The two readers may also express divergent opinions on sensitive political issues, such as the independence of Taiwan, though these comments can be deleted by forum moderators because they are considered irrelevant to the text under discussion. In discussions of popular Web romance, however, I have found no consistent pattern of differences between users residing in and outside of China. Rewriting Classics Originally meaning “colleagues” or “comrades” in Chinese, tongren 同人 now signifies the genre of fanfic in Chinese Web argot; it acquired the additional layer of significance from Japanese works identified by the same characters. As my account of Web users’ parodic rewriting of titles of      8 Accessed October 2, 2011, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =150770&rpid=4090988&ordertype=0&page=90#pid4090988, #1338.      9 Posting #420, accessed March 27, 2013, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/ viewthread.php?tid=212777&extra=&highlight=leidewen&page=28. 10 C.S.-M. [author’s initials], “Chinese online literature: Voices in the wilderness,” Prospero (blog), The Economist, March 24, 2013, accessed March 27, 2013, http://www.economist .com/blogs/prospero/2013/03/chinese-online-literature.



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classical Chinese novels in the introduction to this book suggests, the works that attract most attempts at fanfic writing on the Web include the premodern vernacular Chinese novels known as the Five Masterpieces, as well as xin wuxia 新武侠, martial arts novels set in premodern periods by contemporary authors such as Jin Yong 金庸; contemporary popular TV dramas, such as Chinese and Korean soap operas, including those directed and produced by Qiong Yao; Western bestsellers such as Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter series; and Japanese manga and anime (animation) series. These rewritings all fit the definition of fanfic in that they deliberately borrow from an original work, they are written without the initial creator’s expressed permission, and they are usually not published professionally for profit.11 Perhaps most crucial, each work of fanfic presumes an audience that possesses previous knowledge of the source text and an interest in the canon universe created by the original work. Why do Chinese women—especially young women, as revealed by official statistics on readers of Web literature (Chapter 1)—participate in the creation and consumption of fanfic? These activities can fulfill a variety of goals. As a loose form of adaptation, fanfic provides the combined pleasure of repetition and difference, the comfort of ritual and the piquancy of change at the same time. It also allows fans to appropriate from existing cultural products to hone their own creative skills while steering clear of the legal constraints that bind print media. Moreover, in some cases it also generates cultural capital, as fanfic authors can both benefit from the original work’s cultural cachet and achieve pedagogical goals by disseminating a popularized version of the classic. As Chinese fans’ online practices reveal, further, their consumption of fanfic serves other personal and political ends, allowing them, mostly young women who keenly feel the need for self-expression, to appropriate cultural materials to construct personal meanings. Wang Zheng 王铮, a long-time participant and moderator of online Chinese-language discussion forums that feature fanfic, identifies the unique aesthetic experience of meng 萌 as the inspiration for various fan productions.12 Originating in Japanese video and computer games, meng initially describes male fans’ emotional (and sexual) arousal by images of beautiful young women. Yet within female Chinese fan circles, it has been 11 Accessed October 8, 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction. 12 Wang Zheng, Tongren de shijie [The world of tongren] (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2008), 27.

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extended to mean the intense interest and aesthetic pleasure derived from reading an original work that consequently inspires fans’ creative impulses. Wang also considers CP, or the romantic and sexual coupling of characters, the most important recreated plot element in fanfic, and believes that authors and readers love the characters they lift from the original and take care not to “distort” the original characterization in their fanfic.13 However, Wang’s assessment of the primacy of romantic coupling does not begin to capture the range of motivations and practices that Web users display when they write and read fanfic. Since fanfic is by definition produced within fan circles, it can be exclusionary and resistant to outsiders. For instance, those unfamiliar with or uninterested in a particular Japanese manga would hardly seek out its corresponding fanfic works. However, fanfic based on vernacular masterpieces or popular TV dramas turns out to be much more inclusive and accommodating of various perspectives. The latter kind of fanfic draws on existing print or media texts that boast long traditions, large followings, or numerous adaptations in theatre, film, television, or even computer games in China. The availability of popular reinterpretations has made it easy for a Chinese person with no formal schooling to access the stories of classic works, if not the original texts. Thus, not only can fanfic works reach an audience well beyond the limit suggested by the term “fan circle,” the interactive features that accompany online access to these works offer a freedom vastly different from that which readers and authors of print works experience. In this study I focus my discussion on the latter, more inclusive and generative type of tongren works. Countless rewritings of premodern vernacular Chinese novels and modern martial arts fiction have emerged on the Chinese Web in recent years.14 Premodern vernacular novels appear especially amenable to attempts at rewriting partly because each can lay claim to long-established folk traditions of theatre and storytelling in Chinese culture. Precisely because these classics (with the possible exception of Dream of the Red Chamber) were produced by the collective efforts of multiple authors and subsequently widely adapted and consumed, their fanfic authors can sidestep the thorny issue of intellectual property. Similarly, modern popular fiction (including martial arts novels and romances) and soap operas also attract numerous attempts at rewriting because they, like the premodern vernacular novels, have won large followings through both the original works and their 13 Ibid., 85, 86. 14 For a detailed discussion, see Jiang Yubin, “Wangluo fanxin xiaoshuo shilun” [On Webbased rewritten fiction], Wenyi zhengming 4 (2006): 66–68.



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adaptations in other media. These two types of fanfic can rely on preexisting wide fan bases as potential readers, but the motivations for writing tongren go far beyond a desire to share and bond with likeminded readers and connoisseurs. Fanfic reworkings of premodern vernacular classics invariably reveal a wish to overcome obstacles and adversities that are very much rooted in contemporary Chinese society. Further, repelled by male-authored stud fiction, female authors often cite as their primary creative motive a wish to change the fate of certain original characters.15 For instance, in fanfic that incorporates the trope of time travel, the protagonist of the work, with the justifiable exception of danmei fanfic (similar to what is known as slash fiction in the English-language tradition), frequently changes from male to female. Muddling along in the Three Kingdoms with a Joke Book (Yiben xiaohua hun Sanguo 一本笑话混三国),16 a fanfic of Three Kingdoms, tells the story of a modern woman traveling back to the Three Kingdoms period (221–280 c.e.) and becoming the historical figure Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮, the famous statesman of the kingdom of Shu 蜀. This fanfic not only describes the heroine’s application of modern technology, her success as a statesman, and her love affair with another woman, but also slyly exposes the homoerotic relationship between the three sworn brothers Liu Bei 刘备, Guan Yu 关羽, and Zhang Fei 张飞, all of whom are, like Zhuge Liang, historical figures and cultural heroes featured in the canonical source text. Web fanfic works often add surprising twists to the original plot, and subvert the gender hierarchy in the canonical works. A comparatively serious retake on the Three Kingdoms, Feng chuan can Han 凤穿残汉 (Phoenix travels to the fragmented Han dynasty), another time-travel tongren, still incorporates a level of gender bending by portraying a heroine adept at political machinations who recruits numerous male warriors and statesmen and competes for power and land with major historical figures such as Yuan Shao 袁绍, Cao Cao 曹操, and Liu Bei.17 Moreover, readers echo the author’s daring plot design by equating the power dynamic between the heroine and members of her “think tank” to that between a husband and his wife and concubines.18 For another example, in Water Margin, another 15 For example, see Ningjing de Xiatian, wen’an for Chuanyue Honglou zhi Daiyu [Traveled into Dream of the Red Chamber to become Lin Daiyu], accessed March 18, 2008, http://www .jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=196387. 16 Accessed July 8, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=273350. 17 Accessed January 21, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =123465&extra=&page=1. 18 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =123465&rpid=4223974&ordertype=0&page=126,#1887.

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vernacular classic that describes the adventures of a group of male bandits who are largely indifferent to women, if not downright misogynistic, the female character Pan Jinlian 潘金莲 is denounced and killed by her brotherin-law Wu Song 武松 because of her illicit affair and her murder of Wu Song’s older brother, the husband whom she does not love. However, one fanfic of Water Margin features a modern female time traveler who takes over Pan Jinlian’s body and becomes the first-person narrator of the story. Her narration not only casts the heroine in a much more sympathetic light, but also makes her into a force to be reckoned with as she uses feminine wiles and engages in various sexual relationships, including her affair with Wu Song, the revengeful brother-in-law in the original.19 Rewritings of the Pan Jinlian tale appeared in twentieth-century China, such as plays authored by Ouyang Yuqian 欧阳予倩 and Wei Minglun 魏明伦, but they do not grant her the agency and sheer power that this Web fanfic bestows on the time-traveling heroine.20 Yet female-authored fanfic works do not all endorse a revolutionary overthrow of patriarchy, and even their most radical deviations from the canonical works register ideological and emotional conflicts. This can be seen particularly in examples of fanfic based on Dream of the Red Chamber. After yet another television adaptation of this classic novel appeared in 2010, garnering heated public criticism for its “ridiculous” (lei 雷) casting and costumes, the number of fanfic works devoted to the novel shot up dramatically. At Yaya, for example, one can see works that feature timetraveling modern men or women entering the canonical universe, taking on different roles, changing the fates of characters, and ultimately restoring justice as defined by the fanfic author. In early fanfic works, the modern traveler usually takes on the role of the heroine Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 or any of the other major female characters in the original, such as Wang Xifeng 王熙凤. The heroine’s romantic relationship remains one of the major foci, if not the only focus, of the plot, even as she goes about setting things right and changing for the better her own fate and the fates of those she loves. However, more recent works frequently cast modern time travelers as minor characters, especially hostile male characters in the original such as Xue Pan 薛蟠, a good-for-nothing bully and relative of the Jia 贾 family, and Jia Lian 贾琏, womanizer extraordinaire. The protagonist’s restoration of 19 That is, Tumi Shiliao, Wo shi Pan Jinlian? (I am Pan Jinlian?), accessed March 10, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=256663. 20 For a detailed discussion of adaptations of the story of Pan Jinlian, see Yomi Braester, Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 56–80.



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the family fortune, rather than romance, occupies center stage. In some cases, the modern time traveler becomes the family matriarch Jia Mu 贾母 or patriarch Jia Daishan 贾代善, whose supreme position in the clan expedites the time traveler’s attempts at reversing the family decline described in the original. This shift from romance to family saga in the plot design of Honglou meng fanfic parallels the move from stud fiction to farming fiction in timetravel romances. Yet pushed to the extreme, it also arouses reader protest over the author’s perceived callousness or even moral deficiency. The fanfic Travel in Time to Buy Soy Sauce (Chuanyue shikong da jiangyou 穿越时空打 酱油), by Standing Alone Mourning the Sunset (Duli Xieyang Shang Wanzhao 独立斜阳伤晚照),21 contains a series of short chapters, loosely based on Dream of the Red Chamber, in which the time traveler is only concerned with surviving in a cruel world. The time traveler harbors no fondness for Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu, the original protagonists and central romantic couple, and has no romantic illusions about changing the course of events by using the “superhuman” prowess that modern time travelers appear to possess in many time-travel novels, frequently refusing to help or save any of the unfortunate characters in the original work. Indeed, the author dispenses with the original characters, including the much beloved Lin Daiyu, in such a cavalier and summary fashion—they die of illness, or by the emperor’s order, or at the hands of bandits, while eliciting neither sympathy nor fear from the time traveler—that her readers complained that she had not read the original work at all. The author replied that she had spent the last twenty-odd years reading various versions of Dream of the Red Chamber, and that she was only writing to express her own interpretations of the characters.22 In the title of this fanfic, “buy soy sauce”—a Chinese Web term for adopting the attitude of an unconcerned bystander—suggests that the author creates characters who do not become emotionally involved with the original plot or protagonists. While this overall indifference toward the original work might well represent the low-key, low-profile approach of a farming romance, it also marks a sharp departure from the “loving” attitude toward original characters adopted by the fanfic authors that Wang Zheng has described. The fanfic author judges the original characters using modern 21 Accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php ?tid=183217&from=favorites. 22 Accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php ?tid=183217&extra=&page=30.

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criteria such as egalitarianism and independence without taking into consideration the historical and cultural setting of the original novel, and, for instance, characterizes Lin Daiyu only as spoiled and snobbish. Thus, although the author has been willing to accommodate readers’ requests to write individual stories for a variety of characters, she offends many who have invested passionately in the original work, and appears as the cruel villain in their mind. Standing Alone Mourning the Sunset’s refusal to either bow to popular sensibilities or get too emotionally attached to the original characters, though more drastic than most of her peers, also reflects a general penchant for the display of carefree playfulness among Web authors. Many of them not only unabashedly characterize their works as mere entertainment and escape, but also appear to revel in this self-identification,23 in direct contrast to the officially sanctioned “mainstream” (zhu xuanlü 主旋律): somber ideologies that promote literature as a useful tool to mobilize citizens to build a “harmonious” and powerful Chinese nation. Sherry Turkle regards desensitization as one of the first casualties of modern technologies: “The connected life encourages us to treat those we meet online in something of the same way we treat objects—with dispatch.”24 Yet in the Chinese context, Web users’ conscious or subconscious choice to appear matter-of-fact rather than heroic, nonchalant rather than engaged, also reflects a particular prosaic style of digital contention remarked upon by Guobing Yang.25 While perhaps revealing a postmodern rejection of meaning, this attitude can also represent a new form of online activism: when heroic revolt solicits only brutal oppression, ostensible playfulness and detachment might instead be able to achieve practical, if only partial reparation and amelioration of social wrongs. Despite the authorial pose of nonchalance and detachment, fans still respond passionately to what they perceive as distortion or even destruction of the canonical world in the original. The complex role that emotion plays in the consumption of fanfic can be further seen in specific types of tongren, such as danmei fanfic and “anti–Qiong Yao” fanfic. While the former pokes fun at canonical texts and elicits lighthearted banter from fans, the latter arouses passionate responses because of its crucial contemporary ramifications. 23 For example, accessed July 9, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid =230533. 24 Turkle, Alone Together, 168. 25 Yang, The Power of the Internet in China, 91.



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Danmei Fanfic Danmei tongren, fanfic with danmei content, often lifts characters and settings from existing works but also adds portrayals of homoerotic relationships that do not exist in the canon universe. As I explained in Chapter 2, female Web users attempt to challenge traditional gender norms, create new meanings, and gain power especially by producing and consuming danmei fiction. Through danmei Chinese women can not only imagine what ideal masculinity would be like by writing about romantic love between male figures, but also “impersonate” a form of ideal masculinity that combines masculine power and feminine nurturance. Like other kinds of danmei works, danmei tongren also helps Chinese women to cope with anxieties caused by gender inequality in society and explore their subjectivity in creative ways. Wang Zheng, for instance, argues that female authors of danmei fanfic wish to place male characters that they love in the feminine position in order for them to be cherished and doted upon by the more masculine parties, since in real life women are usually pursued and cared for (hehu 呵护) by men.26 Further, authors of danmei fanfic relish exposing homosocial subtexts in canonical works that exclusively focus on men’s adventures and friendships, a criterion that fits Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Journey to the West perfectly. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick first argued when studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, patriarchal society consistently constructs boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of male friendship by disrupting the “continuum between homosocial and homosexual desires.”27 Premodern Chinese society may have created a different kind of sexual economy than modern China, in that it condoned a powerful man’s male lovers (nanchong 男宠 or luantong 娈童) as long as he produced legitimate male heirs through marriage,28 as exemplified by the case of Ximen Qing 西门庆 in Plum in a Golden Vase. However, as Matthew Sommer shows, since the Qing dynasty male homosexuality has been seen as a threat to the continuation of the family line and to existing social and moral order, “to the point where anyone familiar with the situation of homosexuals in modern China finds evidence [of tolerance of 26 Wang, Tongren de shijie, 109. 27 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1–2. 28 For a detailed discussion, see Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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homosexuality] from earlier centuries almost unbelievable.”29 Danmei fanfic, by unmasking the repressed erotics of male friendships in canonical works, thus delivers a critique of homophobia in contemporary Chinese society.30 Indicting “the fragmented, alienated conceptions of male sexuality advanced by a patriarchal society,”31 danmei fanfic employs egao, or extreme forms of parody, to undermine contemporary mainstream cultural products, phenomena, or icons. A Web-induced subculture, egao originated in the design of computer games in Japan, spread to Web writings in Taiwan and popular movies produced in Hong Kong, such as the classic egao film Dahua Xiyou 大话西游 (Exaggerated tale of Journey to the West) starring Stephen Chow (Zhou Xingchi 周星驰), and finally landed in mainland China.32 Chinese Web users utilize this kind of parody not only to subvert contemporary artifacts such as popular songs and state media coverage, but also, as in the campaign to reinvent canonical titles mentioned earlier, to dislodge literary and artistic works from their privileged positions in the canon. Danmei fanfic works often make use of egao to achieve effects of comic relief and sly subversion. San Liu’s Chuanyue cheng Yin Zhiping (Transported in time to become Yin Zhiping), a Jinjiang-based danmei fanfic of Shediao yingxiong zhuan 射雕英雄传 (Tale of the eagle-shooting hero), a classic “new martial arts” novel authored by Jin Yong, starts with the journey of a hero who dies in a car crash and then wakes up in the body of Yin Zhiping, a young Daoist priest and a minor character in the original work. After describing and mocking various genres that he might have entered, such as socio-ethical drama, detective fiction, martial arts novel, fantasy, and horror, he concludes that he has made his way into the “unmentionable” (bu ruliu 不入流) genre of time-travel fiction. He then anxiously waits to find out whether his time travel was engineered by authors at female-oriented

29 Matthew Sommer, “The Penetrated Male in Late Imperial China,” Modern China 23, no. 2 (April 1997), 162. 30 This trend of seeing homoeroticism in canonical works seems to be starting to catch on. The famous male writer Wang Meng, for instance, recently voiced a similar sentiment when being interviewed by a reporter. See Raymond Zhou, “Relationships among Men Misperceived,” China Daily, July 12, 2008, accessed July 31, 2008, http://www.chinadaily .com.cn/cndy/2008-07/12/content_6839513.htm. 31 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 205. 32 Wang Luan, “Egao guotou zenme ban” [What to do if egao becomes too much], Shijie ribao xin zhoukan, no. 24 (July 19, 2008), 6–7.



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Jinjiang or male-focused Starting Point, while listing hackneyed clichés in popular BG (“boy-girl,” heterosexual romances) or BL (that is, danmei) fiction.33 This long interior monologue, more than four thousand characters in total, constitutes the entire first chapter of this high-ranked danmei fanfic. Rather than advancing the narrative, the author pays a tongue-in-cheek tribute to various existing popular genres while winking at her readers, fellow danmei fans familiar with the narrative conventions of popular fiction. Her audience fully reciprocates her playful spirit. Amid exclamations of “excellent” and “encore,” they demand in their comments on this chapter that she “persevere with egao to the very end”—and she does, with great relish. In a later chapter, San Liu has another time traveler, this time a woman, fantasize about the character whose body and destiny she would choose to inherit: a superwoman who conquers the world while setting up a harem of handsome men who shower her with attention and adulation.34 Here the author delivers yet another jab at tired clichés in popular cultural artifacts, though this time her target proves to be the female-authored nüzun romances popular at Jinjiang. As Rey Chow shows through her analysis of works by Cui Jian 崔健 and others, popular cultural artifacts produce discourses counter to an officially sanctioned “collective national culture” through deliberate gestures of “light-heartedness [and] sarcasm.”35 Web-based fanfic works take this to a new level. They often utilize extreme parody, such as adding danmei content, to undermine the original meaning and signification of canonized works, because this may provide the only way for them to criticize dominant official ideologies. Although not all danmei fanfic works deploy egao to the same extent, they can and often do deliver cultural and political satire with exuberant playfulness. In real life, however, danmei writers are not as sanguine as their online personae, and often become quite defensive, if not belligerent, when pressed for their motives for producing this type of fanfic.36

33 Accessed July 27, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=299690& chapterid=1. 34 Accessed July 20, 2008, http://www.jjwxc.net/onebook.php?novelid=299690&chapter id=59. 35 Rey Chow, “Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 392. 36 Author’s interview, December 16, 2010.

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Since 2011, a particular type of fanfic has claimed the spotlight and been widely circulated at Yaya Bay. These works are based on the corpus of print romances, television shows, and films authored by Qiong Yao, and they often elicit strong responses. In contrast to the spirit of good-humored mockery that prevails among fans of danmei fanfic works, reader responses to fanfic based on Qiong Yao’s romances tend to be intense and passionate. Before discussing specific examples of this fanfic in detail, a few general notes about the author and her works are necessary. Chen Zhe 陈喆, who would adopt the pen name Qiong Yao, was born in mainland China in 1938. Her parents moved the family to Taiwan during the chaotic civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party in 1949. She failed her college entrance examination, but had started to write and publish popular romance works at the age of sixteen, while still in high school. Between 1963 and 2008, she published more than forty-two romance novels, most of which were adapted into movies and TV series. Although Qiong Yao still boasts large followings in Chineselanguage communities all over the world, her works have displayed a remarkable shift in setting and plot beginning in the 1980s. In her earlier works she focused on young, urban women’s pursuit of romantic love using twentieth-century mainland China or Taiwan as background, but since the 1980s she has turned her attention to a premodern, vaguely historical background, and explored the older literary form of butterfly fiction.37 Moreover, whereas her earlier romances appeared in print first and were then adapted into films and soap operas, her romances of the 1990s were initially produced as TV scripts; print versions were published to cash in on the popularity of those soap operas. Just as the trajectory of Qiong Yao’s romance works parallels the development of the backward-looking and mediacentered (rather than print-centered) stream of Chinese Web culture, the audience of Qiong Yao fanfic is also generally more familiar with the media versions of her later romances, rather than the printed texts. Interestingly, mainland readers’ reception of Qiong Yao’s romances has undergone a striking change. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s her works were enthusiastically devoured by Chinese women of all age groups, in more recent years her historical romances have often been disparaged as the “series of the other woman” (xiaosan xilie 小三系列) and severely 37 Nielson, “Caught in the Web of Love,” 242.



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criticized for their perceived “immoral” glorification of extramarital affairs at the expense of traditional family values. Qiong Yao’s romances are more complex than their mainland Chinese detractors have made them out to be. Her urban romances emphasize the importance of the multigenerational Chinese family as well as the centrality of love, and feature “the synthesis of romantic love and family cohesion.”38 Her recent historical romances such as Huanzhu gege have functioned as “young adults’ ambassador for ‘Cultural China’” and “inadvertent vehicles for ‘Culturally Chinese’ interactions among fans in an English-dominated cyber world outside of China.”39 The recent mainland reception of Qiong Yao’s romances demonstrates not only the heterogeneity of her fans, but also the way in which fans’ reinterpretations of source texts constantly shift in response to their own needs and interests. As Henry Jenkins points out, “Fandom is a ‘scavenger’ culture built from poached fragments of many different media products, woven together into a coherent whole through the meanings the fans bring to those fragments and the uses they make of them, rather than by meanings generated from the primary texts.”40 Mainland Chinese users’ production and consumption of Web-based Qiong Yao fanfic displays the typical features of fanfic, such as intense emotional investment in the original characters and the appropriation of discrete, heterogeneous elements from existing cultural products, but it also reveals, through their attempts at selfrepresentation and identity construction, their specific perception and interpretation of the sociocultural milieu of contemporary China. Reflecting the general shift in the reception of Qiong Yao’s later romances, fanfic works written by mainland authors share the following traits: They are typically based on soap operas rather than the printed texts of Qiong Yao’s romances—mostly her recent historical romances such as Huanzhu gege, Xinyue gege 新月格格 (Princess New Moon), and Meihua luo 梅花烙 (Plum blossom tattoo), but also a few soap operas based on her earlier urban romances, including Qing shenshen, yu mengmeng 情深深雨濛濛 (Deep love and misty rain). Moreover, it is not unusual for authors of these works to integrate elements from popular and canonical cultural products besides the source text, such as characters and plots from Qiong Yao’s other 38 Lin, “Social Change and Romantic Ideology.” 39 Nielson, “Caught in the Web of Love,” 251. 40 Henry Jenkins, “ ‘Strangers No More, We Sing’: Filking and the Social Construction of the Science Fiction Community,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 232.

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works, from other Web-based popular romances, and at times even from fanfic works based on other source texts. A good example of this wide-ranging appropriation is Huanzhu zhi huanghou nanwei 还珠之皇后难为 (It is hard to be empress) by Wo Xiang Chi Rou 我想吃肉 (I Want to Eat Meat), one of the most popular and influential Qiong Yao fanfic works. Originally serialized at Jinjiang from February 5, 2010, until its ending in late May, each chapter was “transferred” as it appeared to Yaya.41 The author of this fanfic not only lifted characters and plots from both Huanzhu gege and Meihua luo by Qiong Yao, but also claimed that she had utilized the official history of the Qing dynasty, Qingshi gao 清史稿 (History of Qing), for materials. In this respect, Qiong Yao fanfic works manifest a characteristic common to all fanfic: a dense intertextuality born out of authors’ constant invocation of shared knowledge and passions within the “fanon.”42 This liberal mixing of existing cultural products contrasts, however, with the unusual ideological uniformity of Qiong Yao fanfic: in these works the original heroine is frequently painted as either weak-minded and selfcentered, or as devious and manipulative, a schemer who fakes vulnerability (“weeping and pitiable”) in order to incite protectiveness and love in men. In contrast, a minor female character, often the “wronged” wife or girlfriend in the source text, is portrayed as possessing admirable intelligence and strength of character in the fanfic. These fanfic authors subvert the original plot and characterization by vindicating unfortunate minor characters in the source text while denigrating the original hero and heroine, to the point that these works are referred to by some as “anti–Qiong Yao fanfic” (fan Qiong Yao tongren 反琼瑶同人). They also typically utilize the trope of time travel to legitimate a radical transformation of the canon universe into a startlingly different alternative universe in the fanfic, where the couple indulging in an illicit affair is published and moral justice restored. If we follow Sheenagh Pugh’s categories for fanfic, Web-based Qiong Yao fanfic works seem to fit better under the “what if” rather than the “what next” heading. Rather than wanting “more of” the original romances, fans want “more from” the source text. In order to further gauge the psychology and narrative strategies behind reader reception of this type of Qiong Yao fanfic, I posted a short article entitled “Why Is Qiong Yao Fanfic So Popular?” 41 Original address (accessed October 23, 2010): http://www.jjwxc.net/comment .php?novelid=642861; at Yaya Bay (accessed October 23, 2010): http://www.yayabay.com/ forum/viewthread.php?tid=59641. 42 Stasi, “The Toy Soldiers from Leeds,” 129.



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at Yaya’s fiction forum in January 2010 and provided a few hypotheses about the motivation and interest of its authors and readers, hoping to stir up discussion. I pointed out that many fanfic works based on Qiong Yao’s romances condemn what they consider her endorsement of extramarital affairs, and especially criticize a heroine who values romantic love above all other practical considerations such as the class, marital status, and material possessions of the hero. In contrast to their source texts, the fanfic works that are currently circulating all delineate the original heroine as spoiled and stupid, or calculating and evil, while a minor female character from the source text—often the wronged wife—wakes up, takes charge, eventually vindicates herself, and extracts revenge from her ungrateful husband and the scheming other woman, who have “destroyed marriage and family” out of selfish desires. I then put forth the following hypotheses to explain the popularity of this kind of Qiong Yao fanfic: readers’ anger against the “other woman” and “family wrecker” in real life; their dislike of heroines whom they consider muddleheaded and weak; their dissatisfaction with Qiong Yao’s melodramatic narrative style; and their perhaps subconscious selfcriticism of a previous youthful infatuation with Qiong Yao’s romances.43 So far, over eighty users at Yaya have responded to my posting. While mostly agreeing with my hypotheses, they also expanded on my original thesis and shed some light on their collective self-image. They voiced many similar opinions about Qiong Yao’s romances. They unanimously criticized her heroines as “immature, irresponsible, dreamy, and self-centered idiots,” and even accused Qiong Yao of spreading immoral messages and creating “vampires and parasites” in real life by portraying such heroines in her works. Some posters reflected on the origin and reception of Qiong Yao’s works in a more rational and even sociological way. They noted the sociocultural context of the initial popularity of her works, remarking that in the 1980s Chinese women needed an outlet for their pent-up emotions and desire for romance after long years of repression by official ideologies, and so the slogan of “pursuing true love” disseminated by Qiong Yao would have found a sympathetic audience. However, they added, since there are  so many instances of extramarital affairs in reality nowadays, and the younger, more attractive “other woman” always gets away with everything, readers want to read stories of how these “family wreckers” get their just desserts. But most of them responded in a more emotional way, even using Qiong Yao’s own biography as evidence of her ulterior motives 43 Accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =57029.

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for portraying extramarital affairs; they alleged that she had started out as a home wrecker herself, hence her impulse to rationalize and glamorize illicit affairs. Besides launching a backlash against the xiaosan (“other woman”) phenomenon and the loosening of the ethical code in contemporary Chinese society that has accompanied the rise of a capitalist market economy, most of these posters also regarded their criticism of Qiong Yao as a sign of their own maturity and growth. Some revealed that although they loved her work when they were young, after marrying they saw the light and now hold that the “other woman” should pay for the sin of breaking up a marriage and a family. While they acknowledged that writing and reading this kind of fanfic is a way to vent their anger (faxie 发泄), they also argued that it represents their rational consideration (fansi 反思) of the position of romantic love in real life. In today’s society, they remarked, Qiong Yao’s romances must be exposed as unrealistically exaggerating the importance of romantic love and leading young people astray. Reading and writing anti-Qiong Yao fanfic was characterized as both a generation marker and a personal landmark. One posting asserted: “For those of us born in the 1980s, who would have voluntarily read Qiong Yao if not for the soap opera Huanzhu gege? Only my parents’ generation liked her works. We follow younger romance writers such as Xi Juan.” Another poster joked: “Reading this kind of fanfic reveals to me how stupid we were  when young and how smart we are now!” Clearly, they regarded anti–Qiong Yao fanfic as a generational marker. Given the rapidly rising divorce rate in mainland China since the 1980s, these posters must have witnessed or experienced the effects of single-parent households and “broken families” to a much larger extent than previous generations. Rather than viewing fanfic works as retelling fairy tales of eternal love and executing an empowering “combination of resonating theme and liberating recasting,”44 they characterized the experience of producing and consuming anti–Qiong Yao fanfic as a rite of passage, a self-exorcism of youthful romantic notions. They see their “youthful indiscretions” embodied particularly in the “Mary Sue” heroines typical of Qiong Yao’s works, whom they now consider naïve and idiotic (naocan 脑残). Mary Sue, or Mali Su 玛丽苏, a borrowing from English-language fan lingo, describes a character who is an idealized version of the author. As Pugh explains, in English-language fanfic she is 44 Crusie, “This Is Not Your Mother’s Cinderella,” 51–61.



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“generally young, female and beautiful. This character will go into the fanfic universe, save its characters, sort out all their problems, probably earn their undying love and often die an heroic death at the end.”45 Although a Mali Su figure in Qiong Yao’s works might differ from her Western counterpart in particular features, she is generally held by Chinese readers to be an avatar of the author and equally ridiculed and criticized. Thus, by denouncing such a heroine, these posters do not just demarcate themselves from their mothers, who they claimed were deluded by romantic love when young; they also in effect announce the death of their own youthful self. Anti– Qiong Yao fanfic is used not only to reinterpret characters “both wholly within its own text and in dialogue with extratextual knowledge of the source text and the fanon accessible to the reader,”46 but also to signify and validate personal experience. But reader reception of anti–Qiong Yao fanfic at Yaya displays complex layers of both feminist self-reinforcement and subconscious reversion to earlier, more traditional beliefs. The proliferation of Qiong Yao fanfic breeds its own antithesis and perhaps even demise. Readers have acknowledged a certain degree of “aesthetic ennui” (shenmei pilao 审美疲劳) after seeing so many repetitive Qiong Yao fanfic works with the same plot. Some commentators point out that several works prove even more lei (a Web descriptor for unbearably bad writing) than the original work, even as they admit that they got a rush out of reading about “idiotic” heroines being punished. Others belittle reading Qiong Yao fanfic as an alternative to any kind of mental exertion. “I read fanfic works because I am lazy,” one poster announces. “Since so many fictional worlds are based on authors’ groundless fantasies, I don’t think it worthwhile to consume too much of this kind of fiction. Those good works that ‘are based in reality but transcend reality’ (laiyu shenghuo, gaoyu shenghuo 来于生活 , 高于生活) are just too hard to come by.” But readers still flock to fanfic that ostensibly disdains Qiong Yao’s outlook and devote considerable energy and enthusiasm to discussing it, precisely because it provides a viable site for them to construct coherent identities for themselves. Operating in what Lawrence Grossberg calls the “domain of affect or mood,” these readers invest a great deal of emotions in fanfic texts, which “let them organize their emotional and narrative lives 45 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, 85. 46 Deborah Kaplan, “Construction of Fan Fiction Characters through Narration,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 151.

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and identities.”47 Some readers even write their own sequels or supplements in response to works of fanfic, trying to tell the story from the perspective of another character in the fanfic while integrating tropes such as time travel into their spinoffs.48 Yishi chun 一室春 (A roomful of spring) by Duomu Muduo 多木木多, one of the many works of anti–Qiong Yao fanfic available at Yaya, is a wellcrafted example of the category.49 This work is based on Xinyue gege, one of Qiong Yao’s later works and one that has attracted a lot of rewritings on the Web. Xinyue gege was not published in print until 2008, more than a decade after the Taiwan-produced soap opera with the same title was aired in twenty-four episodes in 1994. The source text tells a story of star-crossed love between a young woman named Xinyue (New Moon), an orphaned princess who has fled rebel soldiers with her younger brother after their parents are killed in the chaos, and Nu Dahai 努达海, a general of the Qing court who has been married for twenty years and has two children with his wife, Yanji 雁姬. In the original TV series, New Moon was depicted as a caring older sister and a brave young woman in pursuit of pure love. However, Web fanfic works based on this soap opera universally portray her as selfish, spoiled, or even devious, and mete out disgrace and ruination to her in the end. Similarly, in Duomu’s work New Moon meets her downfall while Yanji, the “wronged” wife and a minor character in the source text, claims victory on all fronts. This fanfic starts with Yanji’s soul suddenly returning to the day of her wedding with Nu Dahai, when she was eighteen. She remembers what will happen in her other life in the canon universe, where her husband falls in love with New Moon and creates all sorts of strife within her own family and between her family and the imperial court. Yanji thus goes out of her way to protect her own family and herself in her new life by maintaining emotional distance from Nu Dahai, although in this life he is innocent of wrongdoing. New Moon falls for Nu Dahai and devises various 47 Lawrence Grossberg, “Is there a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 59. 48 For instance, while Huanzhu zhi huanghou nanwei (It is hard to be empress), the Jinjiang fanfic mentioned earlier, was being serialized, readers wrote in the commentary space quite a few chapters from the perspective of female characters other than the two central figures, a female modern time traveler and the empress of the title. For example, accessed October 23, 2010, http://www.jjwxc.net/comment.php?novelid=642861& commentid=67085. 49 Accessed October 23, 2010, http://www.yayabay.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =46406.



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schemes to lure him away from Yanji and his family. But she is stripped of her royal title and given to Nu Dahai as a housemaid by the imperial family because her infatuation with him leads her to engage in “improper,” “loose” behavior, including running away from the palace in order to join him on the battlefield. She eventually goes mad in his household, disappointed by his cold disregard. In contrast, Yanji wins her husband’s love, keeps her children safe and happy, and maintains family harmony. This fanfic follows the trajectory of “righting the wrongs committed by the other woman” and restoring the family that is disrupted by an allconsuming romantic passion in Qiong Yao’s source text. But Duomu has succeeded where many other fanfic works failed for a combination of reasons. Her superior writing skills and relatively nuanced depiction of the triangle of Yanji, New Moon, and Nu Dahai should earn her credit. More importantly, she has created a happily-ever-after romance with a twist. Not only has Duomu imposed her sense of justice on the original novel, as so many anti–Qiong Yao fanfic works are wont to, she has also empowered the originally victimized wife by endowing her with foresight and strength of character. In allowing her to “travel” back to her youth with the memories of her other life intact, Duomu makes Yanji the most aware and knowledgeable character in the romance, almost on a par with its omniscient narrator. Further, she portrays a new Yanji in full possession of her own feel­ ings and critical faculties, who can use her emotional detachment to her own advantage. Since her husband can never take her love and support for granted, he falls deeply in love with her and ignores New Moon completely. Whether this is plausible is open to discussion, but the new Yanji is in full control of her life: she takes revenge on the other woman, protects her family, and earns undying love and gratitude from her husband and children, in stark contrast to her fate in the original novel, where she endures a wayward husband, ungrateful children, and a controlling mother-in-law. In Duomo’s retelling, Yanji emerges as the final victor who can and does win all. In its broad outline, Duomu’s way of subverting the source text does not deviate too widely from the pattern followed by other revisionist fanfic works based on Qiong Yao’s romances. It even replicates what Tania Modleski calls the “disappearing act” so crucial to many popular romances,50 for the heroine in this fanfic wins the hero’s attention by making herself emotionally unavailable to him. But Duomu’s skills as a writer give depth to her fanfic. Rather than dwelling on the punishment of the “other woman,” 50 Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1982), 46.

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as so many other fanfic authors do, Duomu makes innovative use of narrative devices to tell the story of Yanji’s growth and redemption. Although she grounds her fiction in the overused time-travel motif, she refreshes the trope by orchestrating a self-awakening of the heroine, rather than injecting a modern soul into a premodern body. This choice not only allows her to create richer characters, but also to dramatize Yanji’s increasing self-awareness and self-realization without the aid of a “modern” consciousness. Another distinctive narrative feature of Yishi chun is Duomo’s use of a fanwai chapter to reveal Nu Dahai’s psyche and tell the story from his perspective. Nu Dahai dreams about his behavior in the other life (in the canon universe), in which he falls in love with New Moon and abandons his wife and family. In the fanfic, however, he wakes up from this nightmare shaken and remorseful, only too happy that it was just a bad dream. This fanwai not only paints Nu in a positive and sympathetic light, but also symbolizes the match of mind and consciousness between Yanji and her husband. Duomo has created a dream sequence for Yanji’s husband that parallels Yanji’s own vision of her other life to show that they share common values about marriage and family. Yanji (and vicariously the reader) claims the ultimate victory, for the man in her life is indeed hers heart and soul. Despite the wiles of the other woman and an unsympathetic imperial court, the heroine overcomes various setbacks and preserves her family against overwhelming odds. Her success is still partially defined by a man’s devotion, but the narrative also showcases her strength as wife, mother, daughter-in-law, and woman. Most strikingly, she bases her actions on reason rather than an emotional infatuation. Reader reception of this fanfic has been overwhelmingly positive and indeed more nuanced than one might have expected, given its reliance on the overused time-travel device and its ostensibly traditional ethos. While some posters still expressed their heartfelt satisfaction at seeing New Moon’s ruination and even opined that this character must possess the soul of a modern-day “home wrecker,” others also commented on its artistic features and unique value as compared with other fanfic works based on the same source text. Most readers’ postings focused on the characters. Some praised the realistic portrayal of Yanji’s psychological development, noting that her coldness toward her husband is entirely plausible after she has suffered so much in the other life. One of them pointed out that in romantic relationships, only by “guarding one’s own heart” (shouzhu ziji de xin 守住自己的心) can a woman win respect and true love from a man: “I for one have never believed that a woman can earn an equal amount of love



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just by devoting herself heart and soul to a man, and do not approve of the traditional promotion of women’s patience and virtue.” This comment earned unanimous approval and applause from other posters.51 The promotion of women’s independence and of rebellion against traditional gender codes can be detected in other postings as well. Some readers displayed critical detachment by exposing the limitations of online romances. One of them commented that Qiong Yao’s New Moon is actually very similar to other Mary Sue heroines in female-authored time-travel Web romances: Like New Moon they are born into a noble family but have a pitiable life story; they believe in the ultimate triumph of romantic love; they play tricks to attract men; they like to show off and are possessive of men; and they always “laugh at the end” because they destroy female competitors for men’s love, and give birth to excellent sons. This poster then commented: After reading some of these novels, I thought I had traveled in time to a place and age where and when modern women’s independence does not exist. The women [in those works] are only interested in competing for men’s attention. Other than their self-centered love and hooking up with hot guys and rich men, they do not care about anything else. These works all basically portray a male-centered world.52

The poster went on to contrast Yishi chun with fanfic works produced by “angry youth” (fenqing 愤青) who are only interested in punishing New Moon, and to praise Duomu’s novel as “transcending those female-authored romances that trample other women in the name of love.”53 A critique of the Mary Sue heroine in fanfic thus leads to a deeper observation about the pernicious effect of male dominance on women’s solidarity. But not all posters share the same ethos and beliefs. Some of them hold fast to a traditional moral code while others attack patriarchal rule, and at times these two ideological thrusts coexist in one person without any sense of conflict or irony. While posters respond enthusiastically to Yanji’s em­po­werment, her redemption still depends very much on her domestic roles as wife and mother, which offer a safer alternative to women’s breaking away from the traditional family structure and striking out on their own, comparable to the backward and inward turn in Web romances mentioned earlier. Further, readers’ detestation of New Moon is based on both her perceived role in breaking up a family, and their own universal dislike 51 Accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.yayabay.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=46406. 52 Ibid., #54. 53 Ibid.

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of scheming, “inauthentic” women who only feign weakness in order to lure men. This dislike reflects the yearning of women living in a patriarchy for strength, self-sufficiency, and emotional authenticity, but it also ignores the structural and systemic factors that set women against each other in the first place. Conclusion Popular texts such as those authored by Qiong Yao attract user participation and reworking precisely because their perceived contradictions, inadequacies, and superficialities “make the text open and provocative rather than completed and satisfying.”54 The works discussed in this chapter provide a perfect example of the “open canon” or “open archive” that fanfic can create, not because the canon is still being added to by the original author, but because they call out for creative consumption and the kind of repetitive reading that makes a difference both in the canon universe and in the participant’s consciousness. As female Chinese fans discuss, interpret, and reimagine the source text with like-minded insiders, their shared knowledge and values make for a far more satisfying experience than reading a text alone. They actively appropriate from both the source and fanfic text to produce meanings for themselves, to meet their own needs, and, ultimately, to use fanfic to explain and validate their own life experiences. John Fiske rightly points out that fandom “is a peculiar mix of cultural determinations,” in that “it is an intensification of popular culture which is formed outside and often against official culture,” but “it expropriates and reworks certain values and characteristics of that official culture to which it is opposed.”55 Compared to either danmei or nüzun, recent fanfic works on the Web perhaps display a more conservative attitude toward ideal femininity and the male-centered multigenerational Confucian family. But Chinese women attempt to construct coherent identities for themselves despite patriarchal Chinese traditions. They devote their energy to expanding or “rectifying” the canon universe because they are moved by strong feelings, both positive and negative, about characters in the original work, even though they pose as detached and blasé when rewriting the canon. If, as Lawrence Grossberg asserts, “without the affective investments of popular culture,” the very possibility of struggles “will be drowned in the 54 Fiske, “Cultural Economy of Fandom,” 47. 55 Ibid., 34.



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sea of historical pessimism,”56 we have cause to remain hopeful. Through their cultural production online, fanfic readers reveal their existing habitus—the cultural tastes and ways of thinking and feeling defined by the economic, social, and cultural space that they occupy.57 Their passionate denunciation of the “other woman” suggests a visceral reaction to the traumas brought about by rapid economic development, including challenges to the ethical principles that traditionally guided Chinese society— in particular the collapse of the monogamous family and the erosion of marriage as the only sanctioned context for sexual relationships. Yet, by reworking canonized works to signify their own experiences and assert their own autonomy, they also chafe against and seek to overthrow the restrictions of such habitus. Their extreme parody of the original work not only reflects a postmodern renunciation of seriousness and dismantling of the canon, it also represents a form of online activism inaccessible to them through any official channels. Rewriting the fate of the “wronged woman” victimized by patriarchal rule allows Chinese women to imaginatively reverse dystopic catastrophes from within the system. In contrast, envisioning ideal masculinity in the context of a traditional heterosexual romantic relationship, as we will see in the next chapter, gestures toward a utopic yearning that reaches outside and beyond the boundaries of the romance genre.

56 Grossberg, “Is there a Fan in the House?,” 65. 57 For a detailed discussion, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

CHAPTER FIVE

HOW TO MAKE MR. RIGHT If, to at least some extent, it’s still a man’s world out there, if the name of the game is patriarchy, then a woman is safer from the dangers that game poses to women … to the extent she is in a committed relationship with, and thus protected by, a good man. –Catherine Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy”

Female Chinese readers invest much energy and passion in discussing and detecting who makes the best hero in Web romances.1 As novels written mostly by women and for women, popular romances presumably provide opportunities for readers to empathize with the heroine and experience the fictional world together with, if not in place of her. But another question captures most of their imagination instead: Who is the intended hero? Or, as Chinese Web fans call it, what is the “official coupling” (guanpei 官配, short for guanfang peidui 官方配对) designed by the author? In this chapter, I focus on the specific reader gesture of “seeking Mr. Right”: deciphering the intended hero in Web-based popular romances. Two time-travel heterosexual romances posted at Yaya Bay serve as case studies: Qingchao jingji shiyong nan 清朝经济适用男 (An economical and serviceable man in the Qing dynasty, henceforth Economical Man) by Zou Zou 邹邹, and Zhifou, zhifou, yingshi lüfei hongshou? 知否, 知否, 应是绿肥红瘦? (Do you know it should be many green leaves and few red flowers?, henceforth Zhifou) by Guanxin ze Luan 关心则乱 (Deeply Concerned). In this chapter I continue to analyze Web users’ unique style of reading, commenting on, and discussing romance works alongside one another. But thanks to the multimedia environment that it inhabits and helps to create, Web romance not only displays unique linguistic and narrative patterns that challenge the traditional generic definition of popular romance, it also features cartoons, audio files, and video clips created by both authors and 1 Epigraph from Catherine Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy,” accessed August 4, 2010, http://jprstudies .org/2010/08/getting-a-good-man-to-love-popular-romance-fiction-and-the-problem-of -patriarchy-by-catherine-roach/.

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readers as their contribution to Chinese popular romance. Web users deploy these audiovisual aids to fulfill various goals: to illustrate particular interpretations, parody the original work, satirize related social phenomena, and generate humor to be enjoyed by the whole online reading community. In the following exploration of the role of the ideal hero in Web romances, I investigate how visual images influence readers’ interpretations of the romance text as well as their representations of the ideal hero. Seeking Mr. Right? Traditional wisdom states that women read romance novels for the vicarious pleasure of experiencing and exploring the world of the heroine. Yet not only does the popularity of danmei fiction belie the limits of this preconceived idea, female readers also seem more concerned with figuring out the intended hero rather than identifying with the heroine. One part of my fieldwork, consisting of semi-structured and in-depth interviews with a group of female Chinese students studying at a U.S. college, reveals that they adopt such an attitude for a variety of reasons. The students, all in their late teens or early twenties, had read a variety of genres on the Chinese Internet. Those born in the late 1980s typically favored more traditional heterosexual Web romances set in either modern or premodern periods. In contrast, the students born in the 1990s confessed that they had developed an interest in Japanese manga (including danmei) at an early age, and were not necessarily fans of the time-travel Web romances currently so popular on the Chinese Internet. Yet when pressed to identify their favorite characters, both groups devoted more time to talking about heroes than heroines. Some of them frankly admitted that when reading popular romances, they were most interested in discussing what kind of man would turn out to be the ideal romantic partner (and spouse) for the heroine in the novel and for themselves. Janice Radway has discussed the “ideal romantic hero,” a supermasculine yet nurturing figure that she sees as allowing “the typical romance reader [… to] relax momentarily and permit herself to wallow in the rapture of being the center of a powerful and important individual’s attention.”2 Radway even contends: “Romantic novels function for their reader, on one level at least, as the ritualistic repetition of a single, immutable cultural 2 Radway, Reading the Romance, 113.



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myth [of heterosexual norms].”3 Although steering clear of Radway’s slightly condescending and moralistic tone, more recently Catherine Roach essentially restates the same position when she asserts that romance “serves to engage readers in a ‘reparation fantasy’ of healing in regards to male-female relations. Romance novels help women readers, especially heterosexual women, deal with their essentially paradoxical relationship toward men within a culture still marked by patriarchy and its component threat of violence toward women.” Moreover, in her opinion, a “good man,” namely, the ideal hero, should possess “the unlikely profile of high alpha traits that both guarantee he can protect the heroine, and that render him immune to the predations of patriarchy … in combination with the high sensitivity of the most enlightened pro-feminist lover.”4 Readers’ practices and experiences related to Chinese Web romance, while to some extent confirming these theorizations of the ideal hero in Western romance scholarship, also challenge their static descriptions of what reading romance can and should do for readers. Female Chinese readers’ absorbing interest in the male protagonist testifies to what some call the “place-holding” function of the heroine.5 As Laura Kinsale asserts, a female reader does not necessarily identify with or internalize the characteristics of “either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader thinks about what she would have done in the heroine’s place. The reader measures the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader’s standards, not vice versa.”6 Readers of Chinese Web romances similarly often take the heroine to task harshly. Contemporary popular culture, such as Japanese-originated and female oriented role-playing video games, also shapes fans’ reception of popular romance. For example, as one interviewee has remarked, the otome 乙女 (young women) video games that cater to teenage girls and other unmarried young women often feature the central plot of one woman (the avatar of the player) pursuing several beautiful men. While the appearances of male characters in the game are fully realized, with painstaking attention paid to their facial features, figures, and costumes, the female lead’s face cannot be seen, since it is covered by her long hair. This design is intended to make it easy for female players to take her place and fully immerse themselves in the fantasy world of the game. 3 Ibid., 198. 4 Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love.” 5 Kinsale, “The Androgynous Reader.” 6 Ibid., 32.

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But Chinese women’s identification with the characters of Web romances involves more complex transactions than merely projecting their own emotions and experiences onto the heroine. Sometimes they become “androgynous” readers by identifying with the male perspective in danmei romances (Chapter 2). On other occasions, the male protagonist only plays a supporting role and becomes a foil to the heroine, as happens with nüzun romances (Chapter 3). Readers’ interest in the ideal hero reveals various undercurrents even when they consume garden-variety heterosexual Web romances. They often become impatient when they cannot find clear clues as to who the “official” hero will be, let alone encounter a Web romance that apparently has no male lead. In this regard they ostensibly recognize and conform to the generic conventions of popular romance, which center around an exclusive heterosexual relationship. But a deeper probing reveals that female Chinese readers show equal interest in romances that depict domestic intrigues, aptly called tales of “household fights” (zhaidou 宅斗), which typically occur between a man’s wife and his concubines, or a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, or children born to different wives and concubines of the same man, or some combination of the above. Rather than ending with a marriage or betrothal, the classic happy ending of Western popular romances, this kind of Chinese Web romance devotes far more energy and space to the heroine’s life after marriage, painting her as the indisputable victor after she has weathered an intense and even lethal struggle for power in the domestic space. As some examples of Qiong Yao fan fiction show (Chapter 4), after the nuptials the hero seems to be relegated to the periphery, as a trophy won and put aside, while the heroine claims center stage and shines in her own milieu. To decode these deviations from the established pattern of Western popular romances, in what follows I first briefly outline the evolution of the “ideal hero” in modern Chinese literature, and then examine two representative works that have stirred up heated discussion surrounding the ideal hero at Yaya Bay. The Ideal Hero In his groundbreaking study of Chinese masculinity, Kam Louie showed that although the Confucian tradition defined the masculine ideal as a harmony between wen 文, the literary qualities of the elite Chinese male, and wu 武, his martial, heroic qualities, wen gradually gained primacy over wu in premodern Chinese society while wu became more associated with



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brutal force and nonelite masculinities.7 Chinese literary representations of masculinity have also advanced on these two separate tracks. In works of scholar and beauty fiction, the hero always has poetic talent, Confucian learning, and a kind of good looks that verges on androgyny by contemporary standards. In tragic tales, the young scholar might die of consumption before he can realize his dream of a happy union with his beloved. In a story that ends happily, he would not only find his soul mate in an equally beautiful and talented young maid, but also fulfill his obligations to family and clan by passing the civil service examination and becoming a high official. Eventually, blessed by the emperor and supported by his parents, the scholar would marry the beauty, and the two would ­produce several male heirs with good looks, talents, and fortunes, thereby  securing the family line unequivocally and unambiguously. This typical narrative pattern, replicated in such classics as Ping Shan Leng Yan 平山冷燕 (1658; the title comprises the surnames of the members of two featured romantic couples in the novel) by Di An Shanren 荻岸山人, ­conflates several key components of ideal masculinity as defined by Confucianism in traditional Chinese society: possession of wen, as demonstrated through mastery of the Confucian classics as well as a developed poetic sensibility; success in officialdom; and procreation and preservation of the family name. Occupying the other end of the masculine spectrum, Water Margin and Three Kingdoms, two of the Five Masterpieces from the Ming and Qing dynasties, promote a kind of ultra-wu masculinity exemplified in bandits and political figures. These two novels, as do many other premodern historical or detective fiction works, create an almost entirely male world, occupied by men who value “brotherhood” above all and have little tenderness to spare for women. Liu Bei in Three Kingdoms famously states that women are like clothes while brothers are like limbs; the former are expendable while the latter cannot be replaced. The bandit-heroes of Water Margin, of course, are mostly either indifferent or hostile to women, and killing off a “licentious” seductress is often a rite of passage for those who enter the brotherhood of the Water Margin. In contrast to the privileging of wu in these two works, Dream of the Red Chamber favors Jia Baoyu, a beautiful young man who loves beautiful young women, writes poetry, and scorns Confucian values and officialdom, as the ideal hero. His star-crossed romance with a cousin, Lin Daiyu, as well as his beautiful appearance and 7 Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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gentle temperament, both emblematic of the “scholar” mold, has fascinated and moved generations of sympathetic young Chinese. According to the wen and wu classification of Chinese masculinity, butterfly fiction portrays a traditional scholar-hero despite his modern veneer. Although he may go to a Western-style school, hold a modern job, consume Western luxury goods, and carry on a new-style courtship, he still possesses a delicate figure, boasts lyrical sensibilities, and upholds traditional values. As Link summarizes, he is “supersensitive to the natural (including cos­ mological and ethical) order” and has an impractical duoqing 多情 (possessing superabundant emotions and feeling) temperament that frequently leads to a Jia Baoyu–like fixation, or chi 痴: “a sudden strong attachment— unreasonably sudden and strong as others see it—to a person or ideal.”8 Iconoclastic by definition, May Fourth literature advocates freedom of romance and marriage while seeking to create a generation of “new youths,” who are often revealed to be ineffectual, selfish, and weak when faced with the daunting task of wrestling with thousands of years of Chinese tradition. Lu Xun 鲁迅, Yu Dafu 郁达夫, and Mao Dun 茅盾, bona fide radical intellectuals of the time, have all portrayed in their fiction male intellectuals who fall short of the revolutionary ideal. In their works the would-be modern man often uses his “other,” the new woman, as a foil to highlight his own revolutionary spirit and buttress his fragile ego, but when faced with obstacles in reality he cannot deliver his promise of a golden modern age.9 Rather than depicting male intellectuals whose wen attributes served them ill in modern times, Ba Jin 巴金, a quintessential representative of the May Fourth youth culture, created heroes who devote themselves wholeheartedly to the revolutionary cause while scoffing at their more romantically inclined comrades. Heroes in the literature of Revolution Plus Love (geming jia lian’ai 革命加恋爱) of the 1930s and 1940s, when bourgeois romance became politically incorrect and morally suspect, frequently appear to be ideological abstractions rather than ardent lovers of women.10 With the still narrower definition of ideological rectitude in mainland China from 1949 to the late 1970s, authors were even more wary about portraying romantic love in their fiction works. The yangban xi, or modernized Peking opera   8 Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, 69.   9 For a detailed discussion of their works, see Feng, The New Woman in Early TwentiethCentury Chinese Fiction. 10 For a detailed discussion of this particular subgenre, see Jianmei Liu, Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women’s Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).



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plays that propagated revolutionary messages during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), invariably portray a hero or heroine whose spouse or lover is conveniently out of the picture: he or she is either dead or working elsewhere, and thereby in no position to detract from or tarnish the “glorious image” of the protagonist. At a time when any mention of a personal life, not to say romance and sex, in literature came under intense scrutiny before deletion by censors, the wu quality appears to have been carried to its logical extreme. At first glance, the hero in Web romances embodies many radical deviations from the existing models in the canons of premodern and modern Chinese literature. Fanfic works almost unanimously denounce Jia Baoyu, whom Web authors paint as an ineffectual wastrel, if not an immoral womanizer. The revolutionary heroes of the 1940s through the 1970s are also passé, as political activism, revolutionary zeal, or selfless devotion to the collective is ignored, if not exposed as hypocrisy or a sign of being out of touch with reality. Today’s Web romance authors fashion their ideal  hero from a hybrid of traditional and contemporary, Chinese and Western virtues. He must be successful in the traditional sense, in possession of vast wealth and power and enjoying public prominence. He must also unconditionally love the heroine to the exclusion of (and sometimes to the detriment of) all other people, including his parents, relatives, friends, and especially his former lover(s). He must sport a metrosexual look: handsome, urbane, and sleek to the point of androgyny. Yet he must also possess superior intellectual and physical powers: he should be at once shrewd and wily (fuhei 腹黑 in Web lingo) and good at martial arts, but without the unseemly bulging muscles of a Western bodybuilder. Although never garrulous or weepy, unlike Jia Baoyu or a scholar-lover, he may sometimes appear cold and forbidding at first sight, in the mode of a Mr. Rochester or Mr. Darcy (both heroes of numerous Chinese Web fanfic works), and even misogynist and brutish—in which case the heroine will then enjoy the task of taming him, turning him from a controlling, brusque bully into a committed and communicative spouse. Rather than reviving the old model of a delicate, sensitive, and frequently polygamous or effusive scholar with too much romantic passion to spread around, female Chinese readers demand monogamy, reserve, intellectual power, practical skills, and physical strength in their ideal hero. A question then arises: Why put such a hero in a premodern setting, when he is imbued with so many modern and Western masculine attributes? To some readers, a premodern setting in romance offers easier access to fantasy than a

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modern background, for it allows them to imagine a powerful man who would deploy all his vast resources to please a woman—a far cry from their experiences in real life, where they do not know any powerful men and have not heard of any who would go to such lengths for their beloved. But more importantly, apart from his personal qualities, the sociocultural world of the premodern hero offers more opportunities for Web readers’ roleplaying and playacting. Web readers apparently set great stock by the Confucian ethics, rituals, and precepts that regulated premodern Chinese society. Although they frequently denounce the persecution and oppression of women Confucianism has caused, they often cite particular paragraphs from the Confucian canon, including such works as Ban Zhao’s 班昭 Precepts for Women (Nüjie 女诫), to explain plot developments and justify their own interpretations, and at times even to rationalize the travails and tribulations of women in the novel, such as the degrading treatment of concubines and the children born to them. Some Chinese women criticize this conservative tendency among their fellow Web readers, regarding their fervent promotion of traditional family hierarchy as a blatant sellout to patriarchal rule.11 However, Web readers’ particular reading practices call for a more nuanced interpretive approach. Chinese women’s interest in envisioning and shaping the ideal hero in Web romances stems from very real and concrete issues they have to deal with in their daily life, such as their anxiety about becoming shengnü, women “left on the shelf” at the marriage mart (Chapter 1), the tricky domestic relations within a multigenerational household that marriage may bring, and the haunting specter of the “home wrecker,” xiaosan. Web romances can and do devote ample space and attention to concerns unique to Chinese women. Moreover, in contrast to the male-oriented popular and serious literature that depicts women as objects of men’s delectation or uses them to promote various male-sponsored political agendas in twentieth-century China, female-authored Web romances display male figures for women’s consumption, allowing women to compare, critique, and mold male figures to their hearts’ content. However improbable a perfect integration of traditional, modern, Chinese, and Western attributes may sound, this paragon of the hero in Chinese Web romances sparks enthusiastic discussions on the Web and generates a variety of textual and visual fan productions. These artifacts of 11 Author’s interview, December 16, 2010.



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popular culture reveal that Chinese women’s playful quest for a fictional Mr. Right does not merely provide entertainment and comfort; by purposely focusing on ostensibly domestic and trivial issues, female readers also take a defiant stand against the male-dominated tradition in Chinese literature as well as official discourses that promote nation building, socialist productivity, and women’s self-sacrifice and devotion to the family and the state. The fan productions surrounding the two Web romances discussed below demonstrate that the ideal hero really serves two purposes. Initially, he functions as a prize awarded to the heroine for winning her battle of wits and will with him, and for overcoming all the other obstacles to their marriage. Once the heroine obtains a legitimate and prestigious position as the  main wife of a powerful man in an elite family, however, the hero recedes into the background as a figurehead, leaving her to manage the household, including his concubines and various offspring, successfully. The ideal hero, in short, proves ideal not simply because his love and nurturance validate the existence of the heroine—the classic role of the hero in Western popular romance—but because he provides rare opportunities for self-realization. The plot device of household conflict, a popular element in many recent Web romances, tests the heroine’s mettle and enables her to demonstrate her intelligence, capability, and iron will. By privileging domesticity, an admittedly narrow delimitation of women’s potentials, romances structured around household fights actually advocate a separate-but-equal ­division of authority and power between men and women. Further, the predominantly premodern setting of these works also provides readers with unique psychological comforts. Compared to contemporary Chinese marriage and family life, where the lip service paid to gender equality and monogamy is constantly belied by gender discrimination and extramarital affairs, readers perceive premodern society to have been governed by a clearly drawn and authoritative set of moral and ethical rules. One may rightfully point out the naivety of this idealization of premodern gender conventions, or lament readers’ endorsement of the more conservative and oppressive gender code for women in premodern China. But romance readers debate premodern domestic issues while living in modern nuclear families themselves. They are keenly aware of their own nontraditional, modern living conditions even while praising “traditional” female virtues. Rather than unequivocally embracing premodern gender norms, in offline interviews some of them condemn the oppression of women that they detect both in specific romances and in their fellow

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readers’ comments,12 while others deploy their Web productions to create cultural capital. It is therefore useful to scrutinize their reading strategies yet again not only to contextualize the two Web romances discussed in this chapter, but also to summarize various points touched upon throughout this book. I detect several common trends in Web romance fans’ interpretive practices. First, these Chinese women instantaneously incorporate elements lifted from contemporary, global sociopolitical life into their comments, such as the Jasmine Revolution in the Arab world in early 2011 (Introduction), the Japanese earthquake in March of the same year, and Chinese people’s hoarding of salt in response to the nuclear crisis caused by the Japanese earthquake. This intimate link between fiction and current affairs sometimes causes readers to reflect on controversial historical events, such as the “Tian’an men Incident” of 1989, though the forum monitor might issue warnings and delete postings that are considered irrelevant to the romance under discussion.13 Second, readers tend to adopt a biographical or autobiographical way of reading. Some readers like to trace authors’ biographies and use them as criteria for praising or criticizing fictional works, as demonstrated in their criticism of Qiong Yao—in their eyes a xiaosan, a home wrecker who glorifies extramarital affairs in her romances out of ulterior motives (Chapter 4). They also use their own life stories, such as their relationship with their mother-in-law, to vouch for or question the plausibility of the plot of a romance, and to agree or disagree with their fellow readers.14 Sometimes their discussion can get very heated, supported not by solid evidence but by strong emotions. Fiction and real life exist side by side for these readers. In discussions of literature they frequently cite postings from other Chinese websites devoted to family or romantic issues. Rather than practicing detached aesthetic appreciation, they believe that fiction and life can and should reflect each other. Third, not only do readers often expect Web romance to be a realistic, transparent representation of life, they also exercise their imagination freely, creating the phenomenon of naobu 脑补. This means that readers use their imagination to fill out the plot, often reading into the story things 12 Ibid. 13 Accessed April 2, 2011, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =98496&extra=&page=578, #8669. 14 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php? tid=108368&extra=&page=106.



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that the author has not intended or will not fulfill, and then denounce the author vehemently for failing their expectations. It usually happens with topics of intense interest to them, such as romantic love, marriage, the ideal man, and so on. The structure of BBS sites also provides fertile soil for such behavior. There is no authorial moderation or intervention on a discussion forum, so readers can carry out a trial in absentia, while also cheering for each other and egging each other on. Faced with the sheer volume of ­postings, forum moderators—volunteers who hold down regular jobs ­elsewhere—often get too busy and distracted to curtail readers’ enthusiasm and wild accusations. But the clichéd plots and literary devices in a lot of works and pervasive copycat practices on the Web have also preconditioned readers to such an extent that they assume they know what is going to happen next,15 and thus feel justified about, and indeed enjoy, indulging in wild speculations. Fourth, a lot of cross-fertilization happens in fans’ readings and debates. Readers usually follow several romances at the same time at Yaya, comparing heroes and heroines and visiting different threads to solicit support for their forecast of plot developments from followers of different works.16 They also bring other websites into the discussion in support of their arguments. For example, sometimes they cite an external discussion featuring a similar CP (coupling) in the offline world in order to argue for their ideal hero,17 and thereby further confirm for themselves the perceived link between fiction and reality. The fusion of fiction and life contributes to the rich intertextuality of Web romances. It also shows that Yaya readers rely on the resources of the online community—including the texts circulated on the website as well as reader comments—to make sense of any particular work, or indeed their lives. Readers may occasionally post messages that sound “fluffy” or “spacey” to an outsider because they feature extravagant wishful thinking or self-fulfilling prophecies, as if users survived and thrived in a world detached and insulated from the “real world.” However, these commentators also inevitably bring up issues crucial to their life and identity.

15 Accessed March 26, 2011, http://www.yayabay.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =105440&extra=page%3D1&page=391. 16 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =13649&rpid=2608110&ordertype=0&page=245, #3666. 17 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=20&id=169279& msg=%D5%BD%C9%AB%C4%E6%C0%D6%D4%B0.

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Economical Man tells the story of a modern female Chinese engineer who is murdered because she intends to expose corruption surrounding a bridgebuilding project, and wakes up in the body of a little peasant girl during the latter part of the reign of Kangxi 康熙 (1661–1722), the fourth emperor of the Qing dynasty. Originally serialized at the most commercially successful literature website in China, Starting Point, a pirated version of this novel was transferred chapter by chapter to Yaya. At Yaya the serialization ran from August to December 2009. The author Zou Zou declares in her preface that she intends to portray a female time traveler who “can hide among people of both high and low social status while also maintaining her true inner self,” and to describe “the struggle of a young couple in the Qing dynasty, the story of their love, work, and life.”18 She also offers a set of reading guidelines for her audience. She mentions that she favors “ambiguity” (aimei 暧昧) in writing, and warns readers that they need to look beneath the surface to grasp the deeper meanings of her work. Anticipating readers’ questions and objections, the author also explains what the title means and how the female protagonist is positioned both vis-à-vis the male protagonist and within the larger historical context depicted in the novel. She states that in contrast to the popular definition circulated in contemporary China, her “economical and serviceable man” refers to a man born into a humble family who rises in society through hard work, but still maintains his integrity and does what is right while also caring for his family and trying to make them happy. The female protagonist, she adds, actually functions only as a lens through which readers can see the good qualities of the male protagonist, even though the author apparently devotes most of the novel to the actions and thoughts of the heroine. As for her description of the imperial court, civil society, and underground criminal world in the Qing dynasty, Zou Zou deems the inclusion of this information essential to illustrate her idea that no individual can survive above and beyond the society he or she lives in. This statement of intentions shows that the author conceives of her work on a rather ambitious scale, as she intends to portray all walks of life in imperial China, but she also recognizes the interests and concerns of her contemporary audience. Not only does she feature time travel, a common 18 Accessed March 21, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =36344, #1.



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trope in Web fiction, she also pays tribute to the generic premise of popular romance—namely, the heroine’s search for identity as realized through her heterosexual relationship with the hero—while indulging female fans’ interest in the ideal hero.19 Further, Zou Zou proves her mettle as an expert in Chinese popular culture by using the term “economical and serviceable” in her title. This term, originally coined by the Chinese government to describe a type of modest, affordable housing offered to low-income families, has become a description of the “average” and “safe” marriage prospects available to contemporary Chinese women. The author both invokes a popular cultural milieu familiar to her audience and also addresses one of their central concerns: What makes for an ideal partner in a romantic relationship in a patriarchal society? Despite the fact that, or, perhaps precisely because the author laid out her intentions in such an eloquent and alluring manner, her work produced major controversies in the course of its serialization at Yaya. The debates surrounding this work center around two interrelated themes: the heroine’s relationships with the two men in her life—her husband, the “economical and serviceable man” of the title, and a crime boss who is secretly in love with her and tries to lure her away from her husband; and, ultimately, the heroine’s identity as a female modern time traveler. Readers ask: Who is really the ideal hero, the husband or the crime boss? Is the heroine modern enough? Or, has she assimilated into imperial China too well, completely forsaking modern and individualist values? Readers expressed great enthusiasm about the “uniqueness” of this heroine as the first episodes appeared. They praised her intelligence, talent, and skills in social interactions. They even found her occasional transgressions plausible and endearing: for example, she utilizes her mathematical and engineering background to draw maps of the Yellow River and secretly contacts the crime boss in order to help her husband, an official in charge of controlling floods and other disasters caused by the river. As one reader comments, She was a professional woman with ambitions and skills before she traveled back in time. Now that she is married to a good man and can handle her family affairs easily, it is no wonder that she ventures out of her home and seeks other venues to realize her talents…. I feel that even though her behavior and speech have assimilated to Qing society, her soul is still that of an independent and brave modern woman.20 19 Radway, Reading the Romance, 139. 20 Accessed March 21, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php? tid=36344&extra=&page=23, #336.

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Readers initially identified with this heroine because the author appeared able to strike a balance between her modern background and her acclimatization to imperial China, which had far more stringent prescriptions for appropriate feminine conduct than the modern world. The first major controversy arose over an episode in which the heroine visits the crime boss’s home for his wedding. During the festivities she gets drunk, and the crime boss nearly rapes her in her drunken stupor but gives up at the last minute out of “male pride.” Interestingly, reader comments placed more blame on the heroine’s own carelessness than the crime boss’s lack of moral fiber. It is easy to interpret this judgment as an instance of “blaming the victim,” reflecting Chinese women’s internalization of patriarchal gender norms. In their debates, however, readers also revealed that their dissatisfaction with the heroine was based not so much on moral grounds as on their sense that she lacked intelligence, and failed to understand what it means to live under an oppressive patriarchal rule. Readers appeared equally harsh toward the heroine during later controversies. Whenever the heroine appeared too weak, too dim-witted, or too imprudent about her personal safety, readers almost always responded with sharp criticism. This kind of response may have shown what Michel Foucault calls “the fascism in us all” in that readers were attracted to the very patriarchal power that “dominates and exploits” them,21 and often displayed a lack of sympathy for those women whom they regard as too “weak” or transgressive. Yet in the context of Chinese women’s experiences as both readers of popular romance and as social beings, readers’ disapproval of a weak heroine not only demonstrates what Laura Kinsale sees as their use of the heroine as a placeholder to test their own wits and strength, but also expresses their awareness of and frustration with patriarchal oppression. In the same vein, readers’ discussions of who and what makes the ideal hero also reveal how their self-perception and self-imagination are bounded by patriarchal gender norms. Radway argues that the heroine’s “identity as a woman is always confirmed by the romantic and sexual attentions of an ideal male,” and readers of popular romance seek a vicarious pleasure by stepping into her shoes.22 While she rightly points out that female readers’ imagination of heterosexual romantic relationships reveals their awareness of patriarchal strictures on women, the comments of readers at Yaya 21 Michel Foucault, preface to Anti-Œdipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), xiv. 22 Radway, Reading the Romance, 113.



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challenge Radway’s somewhat simplistic conclusion that women read popular romance only to vicariously experience adoration by an emblem of traditional masculinity. Neither of the two principal male characters fits Radway’s definition of the ideal hero. The “economical and serviceable” husband in the work falls more on the feminine, wen end of the spectrum, while the crime boss occupies the more masculine, wu end. This apparent bifurcation of Radway’s ideal hero represents a common trend in female-authored Web romances, where authors typically present two or more male characters as potential, if not actual, romantic and sexual partners for the heroine. Although not all of these works celebrate the heroine’s sexual relationships with multiple partners, they appear to be more tolerant of women’s sexual transgressions  than the popular English-language romances of the 1980s that Radway studied, which favored monogamy and the heroine’s “sexual innocence.” Unlike romances written by popular authors such as Qiong Yao, who likewise promotes women’s “chastity,” Web romances featured at Yaya and Jinjiang typically privilege a female-centered approach to sexual relationships. Further, readers also changed their minds about the identity of the ideal hero after reading and discussing the work with one another. Some of them initially regarded the crime boss with favor, responding to his portrayal as a full-blooded “bad boy,” while the husband paled in comparison, partly due to his frequent absence caused by official duties. However, this predilection quickly changed after the episode narrating the crime boss’s aborted assault on the heroine appeared. Some readers called the crime boss a “rapist” and “mafia” and expressed their support for the husband, a moral family man, whom they saw as the bona fide hero of the work. Others criticized Zou Zou’s writing style, finding her description of ambiguous (and often illicit) sexual attraction more offensive than tantalizing. While acknowledging that other Web authors often use ambiguous sexual relationships to titillate and attract readers, they nonetheless remarked that ambiguity is all well and good in fantasy, but when it comes to the reality of rape, there is no gray area. Radway has noted the “peculiar treatment of rape in the ideal [Englishlanguage] romance” of the 1970s and 1980s, where it is often rationalized as simply a case of “misunderstanding” by the hero or an example of the heroine’s irresistible charms. Radway argues that this kind of treatment gives the hero the power to “activate [the heroine’s] sexuality” and actually helps to perpetuate “the repression of female sexuality”: “The narrative action demonstrates that in order to secure the nurturance and security that they

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need for themselves, women must confine their sexual desire to the ­marriage bed and avoid threatening men with a too-active or demanding sexuality.”23 The treatment of rape in Chinese Web romances deserves a separate, more in-depth study. Suffice it to state here that at least some readers of Economical Man are clear-sighted enough to debunk the myth that rape is a demonstration of love or that the heroine should surrender her right to control her sexuality entirely to the hero. Although some readers displayed a similar tendency to blame sexual assault on the “loose” behavior of the heroine, as did the subjects of Radway’s ethnographic research, Yaya at least provides a safe space for users to discuss controversial topics while also allowing different interpretations to coexist. Interactions and discussions among readers, furthermore, help them to create a critical distance from the work. Before the episode depicting the aborted rape appeared, some readers had already commented that the crime boss seemed more “economical and serviceable” than the husband, because the former showed more “realistic” human frailty. But after the ­episode appeared, more and more readers began to question and defy authorial intentions. Drawing on the community of vocal readers and commentators at Yaya for support, they challenged not only the author’s definition of the ideal hero, but also her execution of her intentions: the author supposedly used the crime boss as a foil to showcase the good qualities of the hero but, as mentioned above, because of the husband’s minimal presence in the narrative, readers at first found the crime boss more authentic and exciting than the hero. In later chapters of the work, the author shifted to an external narrative perspective, so that readers could only see the dress, accessories, speech, and actions of the heroine and were no longer privy to her thoughts. Although the author successfully evoked the milieu of premodern vernacular fiction through her lavish portrayal of costumes and folk customs, readers found it difficult to relate to a heroine whose psychological developments were not adequately described and explained to them. They questioned the credibility of the heroine, asking how she could be seen as a modern time traveler at all, and why all sorts of men were attracted to her for no obvious reason. They even challenged the very premise of the tale, asking: What is the point of this work? Hasn’t the author overstated her case in her preface, since she is only passing off a romance (yanqing 言情) as a “realistic” exposé (shiqing 世情) while failing to fulfill the conventions of either genre? 23 Ibid, 141–43.



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Consuming and producing time-travel romances enables Chinese women to fantasize about their empowerment in a patriarchal society, explore their gender identities, and find female-centered entertainment and emotional nurturance in cyber communities formed at websites that feature women’s literature. Commentators at Yaya similarly express admiration for and identification with strong and “modern” heroines while criticizing their perceived weakness and lack of intelligence. Rather than evaluating the heroine based on patriarchal approval alone, as Radway suggests, they instead judge male characters based on how they behave toward the heroine.24 To readers of Economical Man, it is the heroine’s possession or lack of independence, intelligence, and strength of character, rather than adoration from an ideal hero, that determines whether they can identify with her, although their judgment of her character and personality is based partly upon how she behaves toward the men in her life. The critical distance from both the heroine and the author’s intentions that these commentators have shown is made possible, to some extent, by the author’s absence from the discussion at Yaya. The commentators’ stance also challenges John Cawelti’s conception of how readers identify with protagonists of popular literature. As he puts it, Because of its escapist thrust, formulaic literature creates a very different sort of identification between audience and protagonists. Its purpose is not to make me confront motives and experiences in myself that I might prefer to ignore but to take me out of myself by confirming an idealized self-image. Thus, the protagonist of formulaic literature is typically better or more fortunate in some ways than ourselves.25

Although Economical Man at first fulfilled the generic formula of romance literature by providing a strong and modern heroine who generated reader identification, later comments reveal that readers’ interactions with one another alerted them to flaws in the plot and characterization and increased their capacity for critical thinking. They not only questioned why men found the heroine so attractive, disapproving of the author’s intention to create a Mary Sue–type femme fatale, but also touched upon real social issues such as rape and women’s status in a patriarchal society. The discussion happening around Economical Man shows that reader’s interest in this work extends far beyond the escapist pleasure it may provide. Many readers remark that it is the dialogue with fellow readers, rather than the text 24 For example, accessed March 21, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/ viewthread.php?tid=36344&extra=&page=44, #656. 25 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 18.

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itself, which they have found dissatisfactory in one way or another, that attracts them to this forum. The interactive features of Yaya clearly produce a surplus of meaning and pleasure beyond the romance text per se. The author also seems to have taken reader feedback to heart. Although Zou Zou did not participate in the discussions at Yaya, some of the comments authored by Yaya members were relayed to Starting Point. Criticism at Yaya contributed to the author’s confession in her postscript that while writing Economical Man she was too much influenced by premodern vernacular masterpieces such as Plum in a Golden Vase, which typically privilege details of dress and manners rather than the psyche. Zou Zou promised that in her next work she would devote more energy to depicting the inner world of her characters. She announced: “For my next book, I will carefully read Dream of the Red Chamber. I have heard that it features great psychological portrayals. I will send you the general outline and beginning of my new book next time. I need your feedback and comments so that I can revise my work.”26 The above discussion reveals that even though Economical Man at times harks back to an older model of vernacular fiction where characters lack psychological depth, exemplified by Plum in a Golden Vase, readers are dissatisfied with this turn of events and demand a more “authentic” and modern heroine. Ultimately, the case of Economical Man reveals the power of the Internet to subvert established authority and the traditional hierarchy of author and reader by providing room for diverse voices that may eventually bring corresponding changes to the genre of popular romance. Reading Zhifou: Strategies and Negotiations The Web romance Zhifou first appeared at Yaya on October 21, 2010, transferred (pirated) by a Yaya member from its original publication site: Jinjiang. It was diligently updated by various people, especially after it became a VIP work at Jinjiang and access was restricted to paying customers, until it ended in February 2013. This novel attracted so many comments that the original poster soon created a link to a “dehydrated” (tuoshui 脱水) version, which would allow readers to see the work but not the commentaries it generates. When installments of the second volume of the romance began to appear in summer 2011, it was given a separate thread, as if it were a 26 Accessed March 21, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php? tid=36344&extra=&page=235, #3515.



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different work, so as not to pile up too many postings under one headline (lou 楼), a phenomenon that also had no precedent at Yaya. The main plot of Zhifou reflects the recent upsurge of romances featuring household intrigues among the main wife, concubines, and their children, and falls into the so-called household fights subgenre. The story goes like this: A twenty-something female legal clerk dies in a mudslide during her volunteer service in rural China, and her soul travels back in time to a vaguely historical setting (called Dazhou 大周) resembling the Ming dynasty. She takes over the body of Minglan 明兰, the mentally handicapped three-year-old daughter born to a now-deceased concubine of an official. She ingratiates herself with her grandmother and gradually earns her affection. With her grandmother’s support, Minglan manages to survive and thrive in the intrigue-filled household, where her father has a main wife and another concubine, each of whom has borne him one daughter and one son and both of whom may well have been involved in the murder of Minglan’s mother. The concubine is portrayed as a devious “little white flower” (xiao baihua 小白花), a stock image of conniving concubines in Web romances, who feigns vulnerability to curry favor with her husband while destroying her competitors in the household. The wife is painted as hot-tempered and stubborn, but not very intelligent. Minglan also has to  cope with her two half-sisters, who look down upon and mistreat her  because of her low status as the daughter of a deceased concubine. The  story revolves around domestic details, such as the three young girls’  lessons of maidenly etiquette, but especially their betrothals and marriages. Minglan’s marriage attracts the most authorial attention, both before and after the wedding, but the part that aroused the most discussion  among readers happened before the identity of her husband-to-be was revealed. Here is a brief summary of the three candidates for her hand. First, He Hongwen 贺弘文, grandson of Minglan’s grandmother’s best friend: a gentle, handsome young doctor whose manipulative mother wants her son to marry the daughter of her own sister. While he does not want his cousin, a Ms. Cao 曹, for a wife or concubine, he feels sympathy for her checkered life. Second, Qi Heng 齐衡, son of a princess and a good friend of Minglan’s older brother: he has known Minglan from childhood and genuinely likes her, but his mother is a snob and wants her son to marry someone of a higher social status. Third, Gu Tingye 顾廷烨, an aristocratic “bad boy” with a complicated family background, whose own mother died when he was very young: mistreated and driven away from home by his stepmother, Gu later earns wealth and fame through his political acumen and valor on the

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battlefield. He used to argue with the heroine and accuse her (wrongly) of mistreating his own concubine, another conniving female character. As one male character after another was paraded before readers and ­dismissed (by author and audience alike), the question of how the author would engineer the official coupling became more of a riddle. Readers became impatient: some criticized the author while others promoted one  of the established candidates, even placing bets on their favorites. Meanwhile, they also produced long, substantive commentaries on the action and posted images lifted from popular culture to illustrate their notion of the ideal hero. Female Chinese romance readers tend to focus their discussion on the ideal hero, even though it is the heroine who provides the narrative perspective and determines the tone of the romance. By bringing contemporary sociocultural norms to bear on their discussion of the ideal romantic partner, these women seek to understand and manage real-life issues by interpreting Web romances. In their comments, they often use contemporary lingo to evaluate male characters’ worth: an “economical and serviceable man” is gentle, reliable, and easygoing; the “phoenix man” (fenghuang nan 凤凰男) rises far above his humble origins but suffers from an inferiority complex and devotes excessive resources to his birth family, at the expense of his girlfriend or wife; and the immoral men who abuse the heroine are simply “trash’” (zha nan 渣男). Readers’ criteria encompass both the hero’s success and his treatment of the heroine: he is judged according to whether he is rich and powerful as well as whether he is a faithful lover or husband. In their commentaries, Web readers also include visual supplements, such as comic strips, movie clips, and photos. The insertion of images and video into their textual comments enlivens the discussion. However, their visual creations also serve particular purposes. A user impatient to read the next installment of Guanxin ze Luan’s novel posted a doctored still of Ma Jingtao 马景涛 from a TV drama, showing an anguished man with the words, “It’s hard for this kid to handle the pain of waiting for updates!!!” (Figure 5).27 Ma, a well-known actor from Taiwan who has appeared in many soap operas, is generally identified as the creator of paoxiao ti 咆哮体, literally “the genre of yelling,” in reference to his overdramatic acting style, and the poster’s image plays on this reputation. Users also put up stills of good-looking male actors to represent the three suitors in this 27 Accessed March 28, 2012, http://www.jjwxc.net/comment.php?novelid=931329& commentid=53280.



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Figure 5. “It’s hard for this kid to handle the pain of waiting for updates!!!” Guanxin ze Luan 关心则乱, Zhifou, zhifou, ying shi lüfei hongshou？知否, 知否, 应是绿肥红 瘦? Reader’s posting. Jinjiang Literature City, http://www.jjwxc.net/comment.php? novelid=931329&commentid=53280 (accessed March 28, 2012).

romance and asked their peers to place bets on which suitor would turn out to be the “official” hero chosen by the author. One reader of Zhifou posted still images of Yan Kuan 严宽, a Chinese actor, from various films and TV dramas in which he starred, casting him in the role of the “bad boy” Gu Tingye (Figure 6).28 Such postings encourage further participation from other readers. Web readers’ preference for visual representation reflects the general reliance on images in the age of the Internet. As many of them claim, “With pictures there is truth; no pictures, no truth” (You tu you zhenxiang, wu tu wu zhenxiang 有图有真相, 无图无真相). This reading habit seemingly downplays the importance of verbal representation and literary imagination, two mainstays of traditional interpretive practices related to literature, as Web users seem to regard the image as the locus of truth and a justification for them to skip the text entirely. Yet readers of Zhifou show that they are still intensely engaged with its plot and characters, even 28 Accessed March 28, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php? tid=143627&extra=&page=195.

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Figure 6. Readers of Guanxin ze Luan’s novel Zhifou, zhifou, ying shi lüfei hongshou imagined actor Yan Kuan 严宽 as the hero. Left: Various images of Yan Kuan in Qinwang Li Shimin 秦王李世民 (Li Shimin, Prince of Qin), televised in 2005. Reader’s posting. Yaya Bay, http://chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =98366&extra=&page=1336 (accessed March 31, 2013). Right: Yan in the role of Meng Qiyou 孟祈佑, in Qingshi huangfei 倾世皇妃 (The princess that toppled the world), a soap opera that aired in 2011. Reader’s posting. Yaya Bay, http:// www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=143627&extra=&page=195 (accessed March 28, 2012).

though it is not a graphic novel or a hypertext work and therefore contains no images itself. A movie clip that Yaya readers created for Zhifou illustrates how their visual production affects their reading and interpretation of the romance text. Making Mr. Right As readers debated which of Zhifou’s three male principals was the ideal hero and which would turn out to be the author’s chosen hero, they used a



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variety of characters from other Web romances published at Yaya to argue their case, sometimes comparing and ranking them according to their behavior toward Minglan. They also cited situations from real life to support their argument.29 Most important for this chapter, they lifted images from popular culture—one of them even created a music video—to depict the three suitors as they visualized them.30 When I sent a text message to the creator of this movie clip to ask about the sources of the images, she replied that they all came from various TV soap operas. Minglan’s image, for example, was supplied by the actress Liu Yifei 刘亦菲, who played the female lead in Xianjian qixia zhuan 仙剑奇侠 传 (Legend of the extraordinary knight-errant with an immortal’s sword)— a fantasy TV series based on a popular computer game that features many idols of contemporary Chinese youth. The especially popular image for Gu, one of Minglan’s suitors and eventually her husband, came from a “very bad” (lan 烂) soap opera, Qinwang Li Shimin 秦王李世民 (Li Shimin, Prince of Qin),31 a historical drama that depicts court intrigues in the early Tang dynasty. The producer of the video admitted to watching the soap opera only because of the handsome actor Yan Kuan, who played Li Shimin’s older brother, whom Li Shimin deposed in a coup d’état to become the second emperor of the Tang dynasty. The theme song for the video, she told me, came from a popular love song entitled “Zhusha lei” 朱砂泪 (Rougetinted tears). The video electrified readers. One of them exclaimed: “Yan Kuan is really handsome! I am totally infatuated!”32 Others confessed that even though the author had not yet revealed the official coupling, the image of Yan Kuan as Gu had swayed them to choose him as the ideal hero. Some readers later claimed that they gave up on this novel when the author married Minglan off to Gu, but most reacted positively to Gu’s representation in the video and ostensibly based their judgment on his handsome looks alone. The creator of the video, then, seems to have shaped public opinion by successfully packaging and selling her own preference to the crowd.

29 Accessed November 14, 2012, http://www.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/funinfo/1/ 2199309.shtml. 30 The music video discussed in this chapter can also be found at http://www.tudou .com/programs/view/-zX2jyfgDXI/ (accessed March 27, 2012). The creator later also produced another video clip for the second half of the novel: http://www.tudou.com/programs/ view/84pjImQ8i6U/ (accessed March 27, 2012). 31 Author’s online interview, March 23, 2011. 32 Accessed March 23, 2011, http://www.yayabay.net/blog/space.php?uid=119878&do =blog&id=13045&cid=74549.

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It may not have been a difficult sell. Most readers of the novel (and also viewers of the video) had followed the computer games, TV operas, movies, and commercials starring the actors Liu Yifei and Yan Kuan, indirectly contributing to Yan’s reputation as the “Most Handsome Actor in Period Drama” (Guzhuang diyi meinan 古装第一美男). Arguably, they liked the portrayal of Gu in the fan video because their criteria for masculine beauty—a sleek metrosexual look rather than rugged and scuffed masculinity—had already been shaped by Chinese popular culture. In light of users’ prior exposure to Yan’s images on TV and in movies, the video served both as a trigger for them to recall and reconnect with their past experiences of consuming popular culture, and as a springboard for them to appreciate the significance of his transposition into a new setting. Moreover, this music video followed the conventions of a title sequence for a TV soap opera, including tantalizing clips from different episodes and a theme song, and thereby fulfilled yet another set of reader expectations shaped by prior exposure to popular culture. The video used a striking natural landscape, touches of fantasy and animation, and a dreamy atmos­ phere to enhance the attraction of the hero and heroine. By using a popular love song as the theme song, it also created an atmosphere of romantic love. It thus created a romantic setting and the sort of aura that is crucial to the success of a soap opera. The cutting and editing are far from adventurous or avant-garde, since they consist mainly of close-ups of the two characters and Hollywood-style shots of the hero and heroine gazing at each other, though in a later video the producer gave the characters lines to speak from the text of the romance. This intrinsic familiarity and conventionality worked on two fronts. The video fulfilled readers’ expectations of TV soap operas by creating a romantic atmosphere and highlighting the central plot: the separation and reunion of the hero and heroine. It also gave readers the impression that they were predicting the official CP by extrapolating the conventions of another medium onto the romance text, making them feel as powerful as the author of the original romance. In short, this music video presents a classic case of textual poaching, whereby female Chinese fans appropriate existing cultural products and create cultural capital for themselves by adding a new twist to the original. In the process, they inevitably change the meaning and sometimes even the ideology of the original artifact. For example, Li Jiancheng 李建成, the role that Yan Kuan played in the TV drama Qinwang Li Shimin, was a minor character, a mere foil to the title hero Li Shimin. Yet female readers of Zhifou praised Li Jiancheng highly while denouncing Li Shimin as idiotic and implausible. Although their judgment was based mainly on their



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evaluation of the two actors’ performances and of the script of Qinwang Li Shimin, they provided a different interpretation of the soap opera that might even reflect a new understanding of its historical setting. Traditional historiography represents the coup launched by Li Shimin as the triumph of good over evil, and as a manifestation of the “Mandate of Heaven” that legitimated his rule. Yet these romance readers, like other Chinese consumers of the soap opera and similar popular cultural products, displayed an  irreverent attitude toward the official account of the coup, and even attempted some parodic rewritings. This music video succeeded at Yaya not just because it invoked a shared popular culture to sell a particular type of masculine beauty. Readers of Zhifou endorsed Gu for reasons other than his appearance. He is a selfmade man who has overcome obstacles in his life and made something of himself. He possesses both martial valor and intelligence, to the extent that he outsmarts Minglan and her grandmother and father and succeeds in securing her hand in marriage. He also adores Minglan, and promises to give her the comfortable and liberated life that she deserves. In a famous scene where he declares his love to Minglan, he announces: “I will never let you live an oppressed (weiqu 委屈) life. Whatever my rank among men, you will enjoy the same among women.” A lot of readers admitted that they were greatly moved by his words. Gu is also a powerful and successful man who, unlike the other two suitors, does not have an overpowering mother for the heroine to deal with. Despite his numerous greedy relatives, the support of the emperor, his former comrade, allows him to have his own mansion and live within his own household, not among his extended family. His former liaisons with several concubines and the children born out of those unions, in comparison, are easy for the heroine to handle, for as Gu’s legitimate wife she has the ear of her husband and holds the purse strings. Gu thus fulfills the requirements of the ideal hero in that he embodies both masculine beauty and power and feminine nurturance. In a typically Chinese twist on the ideal romantic hero, he does not saddle Minglan with a difficult mother-in-law and is free to focus his love and attention on his wife rather than on his own relatives. Gu’s success as the ideal hero depends not just on his good looks, but also on his many material advantages and his avowed love of the heroine. The music video attracted fans for Gu because it served as a projection of readers’ own imagination of an ideal spouse, based on their previous experiences of popular culture and as social beings. The video highlights his physical beauty, but in its costumes and setting it also hints at more practical factors—his wealth, power, and social status—that are nevertheless

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crucial requirements of an ideal suitor. Gu’s capacity for romance, illustrated in the video through his doting on the heroine, completes the list of qualities of an ideal romantic hero. Thus, the creator of the music video used existing images from popular cultural artifacts to meet her fellow readers’ criteria for male beauty, while reframing the original images to reflect Chinese women’s own desires, fantasies, and anxieties. Indeed, readers’ discussions of the ideal hero often sound practical and decidedly unromantic, as they carefully weigh the pros and cons of each candidate, including his social status, family dynamic, and previous relationships. They focus on the essential requirement of monogamy and faithfulness, and often cite the promiscuous behavior of modern men to support their stance.33 The participatory culture online, therefore, apparently dispels rather than induces romantic illusions and fantasy. Conclusion The fan productions discussed above recycle existing popular cultural products and arguably reflect little, if any, feminist consciousness. However, in producing and creating, in imagining and envisioning, these female readers prove that they have moved from being passive receptacles of patriarchal ideologies to active pursuers of their own welfare. They do not all promote women’s liberation or a complete overthrow of patriarchy, partly because they regard reading a time-travel romance as entertainment rather than social engineering. Yet they also bring social issues such as male ­infidelity and domestic conflicts, especially those between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, to the fore. They even propose new models of femininity and masculinity through fan productions. In identifying with the heroine Minglan, Web readers define the “modern” woman as possessing a ­clear-sighted, unsentimental approach to marriage, and the ability to see through and laugh at the manipulative ways of traditional women. Despite their focus on household fights rather than the public achievements of women celebrated in early time-travel romances, novels like Zhifou place themselves at the center of Chinese women’s consciousness of their (post) modern identity by demonstrating a penchant for lighthearted parody of traditional mores and strictures.

33 Accessed March 24, 2012, http://www.chineseindc.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid =143627&rpid=4806036&ordertype=0&page=435.



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Female readers’ vision of ideal masculinity, furthermore, integrates traditional Chinese and modern Western elements and evolves to fit their varying needs. Although Gu’s material, intellectual, and physical attributes have won over many a fan, toward the end of the serialization of Zhifou readers started a heated discussion about whether he could still be regarded as Mr. Right due to his perceived leniency toward an old flame who had betrayed him and was now scheming to get back into his household. Some criticized his wishy-washy behavior toward women, comparing him to other powerful public men who turned out to be utterly blind and inept when it came to household affairs. Others brought up old scores and denounced Gu’s past romantic entanglements, even calling him “used goods,” though their fellow readers argued that the author was depicting a “man with a past” for the sake of plot development. Throughout such discussions, Chinese women demand of their ideal hero not only a balanced combination of wen and wu qualities—and of masculine attributes by both Chinese and Western standards—but also absolute devotion to his wife and steadfast adhesion to traditional ethics concerning marriage and family life. They thus provide revealing social commentaries and criticisms of contemporary Chinese (marital) life while engaging with issues meaningful to them in their pursuit of personal happiness, if only within the parameters of patriarchal rule and in the fantasy world of popular romance. Fan productions, both textual and visual, provide important outlets for Chinese women’s creative energy and allow them to envision a new kind of romantic love in the company of their fellow readers. Rather than the Western prototype of a process-oriented, all-consuming, and individualistic affair, romance turns out to be a family business in Chinese Web fiction. Ostensibly anchored in traditional ethics, it is also refurbished to become female-centered, wife friendly, and strictly monogamous. Instead of hampering her self-actualization, the domestic space provides the heroine with an invaluable opportunity to demonstrate her intelligence and courage and thereby helps readers to imagine a more realistic path to happiness as women living in a patriarchy. Although the typical heterosexual romance does not necessarily challenge ideas about gender to the extent that danmei, nüzun, and tongren fiction do, there are nevertheless surprising depths to its (re)imagination of gender norms and relationships. By reading and commenting on popular romances, Chinese women reflect on and even re-form their daily con­cerns in a patriarchal society where “rape and other physical attacks, dimin­ ished pay rates, employment discrimination, abandonment with children, restricted travel and other life options, general infantilization, misogyny,

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[and] a life-long low-level anxiety over [their] sexual vulnerability” dominate.34 As creative play exercised within the limitations imposed on their lives, rather than a supposed addiction to escapist pleasure, women’s ­production and consumption of romance literature on the Web deserves both scholarly attention and feminist empathy. While fan productions ­discussed in this chapter bespeak the fragmented, media-centered nature of contemporary Chinese realities and the mixing of traditional and modern elements in postsocialist China, the creative energy they release and the intellectual and emotional satisfaction they offer for female Chinese readers must be fully acknowledged and respected. To a great extent, the  Web enables Chinese women to produce a kind of pastiche popular romance that brings together a wide array of different premodern and modern, Western and Chinese cultural artifacts. In so doing, they generate  new and culturally specific works that challenge both Chinese and Western prototypes while constructing new forms to represent masculinity and femininity.

34 Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love.”

CODA

WHAT DOES CHINESE WEB ROMANCE DO? The soap opera Woju 蜗居 (Snail home), broadcast by Shanghai TV Station in July 2009, broke all records for Chinese TV viewership after having been on air for just four days, and stirred up heated discussion among its audience. This series has touched on various hot topics in contemporary Chinese life, such as housing and job hunting, and it especially energized female viewers with its portrayal of an extramarital affair between a married and corrupt Communist official and a new college graduate whose fiancé could not afford to buy an apartment before their anticipated nuptials.1 Examining treatments of marital infidelity in Chinese cinema and TV since the mid-1990s, Jason McGrath found that they portrayed the “mistress as accessory to [male] urban success.” The theme of infidelity, he contends, also “articulates both the new desires awakened in the midst of urbanization and economic restructuring and the new anxieties associated with them, including the individual anxieties aroused by private desires as well as collective anxieties over the very privatization and commodification of desire and fantasy.”2 Web-based popular Chinese romance demonstrates a similar sensitivity to contemporary social and cultural trends, but features female-centered content while enjoying wide circulation. Web romance fans also respond especially strongly to narratives that develop the theme of infidelity. Web writing has helped young, obscure authors to realize literary dreams that would have been unattainable without professional help and financial support in traditional print media. Web reading, further, provides Chinese women with the opportunity to reflect on their own life situations, and to view them in their larger sociopolitical context, in a supportive environment in Chinese cyberspace.

1 For a brief summary of its plot, see http://baike.baidu.com/view/647503.htm#sub 4982877 (accessed April 3, 2012). 2 Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 93, 95–96.

168 coda Remaking Popular Romance My study has addressed some basic questions on Chinese women’s production and consumption of popular Web romance through case studies. As demonstrated, romance fans on the Web are typically female, young, urban, and relatively well educated. They read and write Web romances in search of entertainment and companionship, and in the process they produce social satire and construct personal and literary identities. While their geographical location does not necessarily decide their ideological orientation, they engage with each other at greater length and produce franker commentary on websites based outside of China, thanks to more relaxed censorship rules. Although they share with other Internet-based fandoms a tendency toward emotional intensity and a habit of extrapolating from real life onto Web productions, they also have more literary tools at their disposal. The multimedia environment on the Internet has shaped the content of Web fiction and redefined the genre of Chinese popular romance. Web romances incorporate references to current events and Web-induced lingo and writing styles, such as the high-speed train genre (Chapter 1). They also utilize audiovisual elements such as music and images to complement and enhance the reading experience (Chapter 5). Appropriating from existing cultural artifacts, Web romances feature narrative innovations such as fanwai, supplementary chapters that present scenes from another character’s point of view. New subgenres inspired by computer games, such as the socalled magic-space fiction (Chapter 1), or suffused with gender issues, including matriarchal and homoerotic tales, have also emerged, potentially signaling social as well as literary changes. In terms of narrative patterns and gestures, the Internet has fostered a general culture of imitation and repetition that enables romance readers and writers to appropriate and utilize familiar literary tropes such as time travel to address their life concerns and realize the theme of redemption in narratives. Rewriting leads to reinvention as well, and in some cases even allows Web romance fans to explore their gender and cultural identities in a liminal space that pushes against the very boundaries of ethical and social acceptability (Chapter 3). Web romance has inculcated new writing and reading practices among Chinese women. Chinese fans access Web romances in search of things beyond the text itself, such as nurturance, catharsis, and the validation of their own experiences. Utilizing interactive Web features and supported by a nurturing online community, they are able to redefine popular romance  and subvert the typically more subservient roles allotted to



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women in traditional literature. Since Web writers can get book contracts by virtue of their numbers of followers, they can gain the financial backing needed to publish without going through large state-run publishing houses, which adopt more conservative views on gender and culture and are also subject to more stringent censorship rules. Web romance readers employ a reciprocal reading strategy of extrapolating from life to fiction and vice versa, and they create commentaries and other types of textual and visual productions along with their fellow fans. For instance, even while reading popular romances set in premodern periods with cultural norms and gender expectations different from those of today, readers’ commentaries inevitably invoke critical issues facing them in contemporary China, such as conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, extramarital affairs, and selfish and greedy relatives. In this respect, they display behaviors similar to those of media fans. As Ien Ang has described in her research on fans of the TV soap opera Dallas, they want not just internal consistency but also “emotional realism,” and regard any particular plot element as a window onto more general emotional experiences.3 Chinese fans of Snail Home likewise invest intense emotions in their discussion of its plot, and Web romance fans form what Shuyu Kong calls the “affective alliance” characteristic of Chinese fans of other media—namely movies and television—in their cultural consumption on the Internet.4 Like these media fans, romance fans tend to blur the boundaries between life and fiction, speaking of characters as if they had an existence apart from their textual manifestations and entering into the universe of the fiction as if it were a tangible place they could inhabit and explore. Henry Jenkins has applauded this style of reading. He sees it as a rejection of “the aesthetic distance that Bourdieu suggests as a cornerstone of bourgeois aesthetics.” As Jenkins observes, “Unimpressed by institutional authority and expertise, the fans assert their own right to form interpretations, to offer evaluations, and to construct cultural canons.”5 Yet Chinese women do not interpret Web romances in isolation from the two crucial bases of their existence: the ideological norms by which they make sense of everyday life and the penetrating impact of the Internet. The reading practices related to Web romance also reveal multiple paradoxes 3 Ang, Watching Dallas, 44–45. 4 Shuyu Kong, “The ‘Affective Alliance’: Undercover, Internet Media Fandom, and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption in Postsocialist China,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 1–47. 5 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18.

170 coda and contradictions rooted in contemporary life that shape their particular structure of feelings, such as levity versus gravity, private versus public, individual versus collective, and ultimately, backward versus forward looking. The way they produce and consume Web romances, therefore, has major implications for their identity formation. Creating the Self in a Crowd Chinese women expand their horizons of knowledge and communications with the help of the Internet, as they are exposed to experiences and viewpoints often more abundant and varied than those afforded by their own immediate environs in real life. Web romance fans often incorporate into their commentaries news and cultural artifacts that are disseminated nonstop on the Internet. Reading and commenting along with their comrades online, they also create a social space for themselves that allows for greater freedom than in the pre-Internet age to control the flow of information, knowledge, and emotions to and from their everyday life. Despite state censorship and control of the Internet, the Web provides not only anonymity and immediacy, which protect and expedite discussions of politically sensitive and taboo topics; it also offers an interactive and nurturing community, and deepens the emotional gratification of users. Web-induced and -enhanced literary devices, such as fanwai supplements and the everpresent trope of time travel, seem to have not only provided them with more tools of literary creation than fans of traditional printed literature possessed, but also given them license to fantasize about, replicate, and promulgate their particular utopian vision of the world. Modern Chinese women can thus enter a world more ideal than the one they have to inhabit and endure, explore “best practices” online, and enjoy the freedom to reimagine femininity and masculinity As they read and comment on each chapter of a serialized romance, Chinese women sometimes find themselves demystifying and deromanticizing the very romance work that they are consuming, stimulated and encouraged as they are by their fellow readers. The new generation of readers and authors of Chinese Web fiction attempts to cultivate an online image of playful detachment even as it displays ambivalence about traditional Chinese and Western values. The lighthearted insouciance characteristic of the general Web culture in China (as revealed in users’ parody of official discourses through “copycatting”), not to mention readers’ penchant for poking holes in romantic plots, enables Chinese women to create



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distance between themselves and any romantic fantasy. Rather than escaping into a heterosexual romance structured by patriarchal norms, they deploy their consumption and production of Web romance as a way to manage their life and respond to dominant ideologies of gender and culture. Although different Web romances may display uneven literary qualities and controversial ethics, the exchange surrounding these texts resignifies, reorients, and recharges them with new relevancy and energy, and challenges the stereotype that women only seek escape from reality by reading popular romances. Chinese fans address reality through the particular lens of Web romance, bending rather than completely breaking gender and cultural norms, and creating new identities for themselves in the process. Nevertheless, my interviews also show that Web romance fans paradoxically pursue privacy despite their performance at such a public forum as a literature website. The contrast between their openness and eloquence online and reluctance to reveal reading tastes and practices in real life marks their unique way of constructing meaning and identity through Web reading and writing. Their reticence in real life reflects the cultural stigma attached to the pursuit of female-centered entertainment. The perceived anonymity provided by the Internet allows them to explore female power, affirm individual rights and liberty, and cultivate more democratic values such as tolerance for different ideologies and lifestyles. Web romance thus provides a kind of identity workshop for these women, allowing them to traverse uncharted and potentially dangerous territories by relying on a form of individualism that can only be safely enacted within an anonymous collective. Given the age range of readers of Chinese Web romances, usually between late teens and late thirties, they have a particularly strong need to appropriate existing cultural materials to construct their identities. As Sherry Turkle contends, “Adolescents have always balanced connection and disconnection; we need to acknowledge the familiarity of our needs and novelty of circumstances.”6 This group of younger Chinese women’s way of reading Web romances as a simultaneously individual and collective act provides them with just the right balance of novelty and familiarity, and individuality and collective support. Research has proven that experimenting with behavior in online worlds can help people develop a wider repertoire of behaviors in the real world; for example, a shy person may learn 6 Turkle, Alone Together, 156.

172 coda how to be more assertive in social situations.7 Although we have no complete data on the social effects of reading Web romances as yet,8 Chinese women’s online practices suggest that at least some of them have developed empathy for people with different sexual orientations while increasing their own gender awareness (Chapter 2). A New Woman Born of the E-Age? Historian Lynn Hunt demonstrates that novels published in eighteenthcentury Europe, such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), generated “torrents of emotion,” making readers empathize with the heroine’s moral struggle against the boundaries of gender and class. These texts both served as a foundation for the Enlightenment ideal of individual autonomy— people thinking and feeling for themselves—and opened the floodgates of sympathy and empathy, thus forming the basis of Western concepts of human rights and democracy.9 Johnnella Butler similarly argues that democracy requires engagement with others beyond one’s community and thrives on feelings of connectedness to others. At the least, it requires us to accept respectfully the existence of narratives and experiences different from our own. This acceptance relies on empathy, defined by Butler as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Since an individual cannot know every historical or imagined fact, or perceive experience exactly as another does, the connections between self and others are not inherent to humankind but require nurturing through exposure and experience.10 The arts and humanities arguably instill in us the necessary empathy that guards against misunderstanding, fear, essentialism, and hostility, for they allow us to use poetic imagination to relate to different experiences. In the immortal words of Ronald Takaki, they provide us with “a different mirror” in which we can see ourselves and thus begin to reflect on the 7 Ibid., 223.   8 Sociological surveys of female readers of time-travel romances have been conducted, though their data are far from conclusive. For example, see Hunan shangxueyuan wenxueyuan chuanyuexiaoshuo keti zu [Research group on time-travel fiction, Hunan school of business and literature] “Nü daxuesheng ‘chuanyue xiaoshuo’ yuedu zhuangkuang diaocha ji fenxi baogao” [Survey and analysis of female undergraduates who read time-travel fictions], Wenxue jie, no. 8 (August 2011): 115–57. 9 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 28–69. 10 Johnnella E. Butler, “Ethnic Studies as Matrix for the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Common Good,” in Color-line to Borderlands: The Matrix of Ethnic Studies, ed. Johnnella E. Butler (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 18–41.



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connected histories and shared narratives of human beings, be they conflicting or complementary to one another.11 Furthermore, to appropriate is to practice a unique form of empathy, for it requires imaginative reconstitution and recasting of the source on the part of the borrower. The widespread appropriation on the Chinese Internet reveals that just as Web romance provides Chinese women with a mirror to reflect back on their life experiences, the experience of reading it collectively online can potentially outline a path to growth, as female readers form their identity with the help of others while developing empathetic and democratic values. Web romances do not universally advocate feminist, progressive, or democratic values. They sometimes seem backward, reactionary, and even offensive. Despite the proliferation of various gender-bending genres such as danmei, nüzun, and tongren fiction on the Chinese Web, heterosexual Web romances have moved from depicting a rebellious, unrestrained, and expansive femininity in early time-travel novels to promoting “keeping a low profile” and domesticity as a path for women’s self-realization in farming and magic-space novels. It can be argued that although the Western ideal of romantic love has made an impact in China since the early twentieth century, recent trends in economic, social, and cultural developments have produced a backward gaze and inward turn in Web romances. But this ostensibly retro tendency must also be viewed both within the specific sociocultural context of Chinese Web romance and against Chinese women’s online practices. “Family values,” Confucianism, and respect for authority and the status quo have been increasingly embraced by the populace, despite the fact that, or precisely because most of them are living nontraditional lives in a rapidly changing Chinese society. However, thanks to rapidly increasing access to the World Wide Web, ideas of personal freedom, social justice, and democracy not only stand side by side with the recently revived conservative virtues, but also permeate Chinese life to a much greater degree than before. As fans’ practices illustrate, by reading and commenting, interacting and discussing, they not only object to what they perceive as moral apathy (Chapter 4) in Web novels, but also help each other navigate and negotiate various challenges in daily life. Their particular emphasis on male fidelity and devotion to the nuclear family in an ideal hero reveals both their specific living conditions and their advocacy of an empowering domicile (Chapter 5). Even though the world of female-centered online romances, such as nüzun, might seem cut 11 Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993).

174 coda off from patriarchal society, in which men are generally in power, it is striking how close it also reflects, whether directly or inversely, Chinese women’s everyday realities at home and in society. The community fostered by the Web has given women the freedom to reinvent traditional narrative patterns and themes in their own fashion, rather than replicating the ideal femininity (innocent, loving, self-sacrificing, and so on) constructed by men and the male gaze, and often replicated in Qiong Yao’s works. Web romance, by providing a dynamic and evolving platform of exchange, therefore suggests alternative paths to growth and self-determination for Chinese women. Finally, my study has raised some theoretical questions concerning Chinese modernity, especially what it means to be a modern woman in the context of the unique sociohistorical traditions and politico-cultural landscape of contemporary China. In Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950, Haiyan Lee explores Chinese modernity by presenting a genealogy of qing, which she construes as emotion, sentiment, and feeling, rather than using the term in the narrow sense of romantic love. From the cult of qing flourishing in the late Qing and early Republican era to May Fourth literature and the Revolutionary Literature of the 1930 and 1940s, she detects an evolution from a Confucian to an Enlightenment and then a Revolutionary structure of feelings. The “Enlightenment structure of feelings,” as described in both Hunt’s and Lee’s works, may be conspicuously absent from Web romances, since they are typically plot- rather than affect-driven. The modern emotive self, as Lee has theorized it, is not dominant in the characterization of more recent Chinese Web romances, either. A more “heroic” version of the self—playing many social roles defined by Confucian ethics as well as possessing extraordinary or even superhuman attributes—is promoted, while the sentimental, poetic, Western-inflected self is mocked, if not denounced.12 Rather than the sympathetic, sensitive, but ultimately vulnerable modern individual typical

12 Alasdair MacIntyre contrasts the modern “emotive self” to the traditional “heroic self”: the latter is wholly defined by one’s membership in a variety of social groups such as family, lineage, local community, and political institutions. In the heroic society, a man is what he does; he has no hidden depths. Moral judgments are formed on the basis of the ethics of action, not on a hermeneutics of intention. The emotive self, on the contrary, prides itself on being an autonomous moral agent free from the hierarchy and teleology of traditional society. Its moral authority resides squarely within itself rather than in the external authorities of traditional morality. See After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 33.



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of May Fourth literature, Web readers cheer for resourceful and powerful protagonists. But even while these protagonists seem to uphold traditional ethical values, they are modern in their pursuit of individual freedom, democracy, and wealth. Web romances reflect the many contradictions and dilemmas that both the state and individuals face at a moment when postsocialist China is at a crossroads economically, politically, and culturally. As shown through this book, female Web romance readers have addressed the fundamental predicament of modernity—“How to affirm the value and dignity of ordinary life without abandoning a sense of the heroic, without giving up the quest for a higher life?”—in their inestimable albeit contradictory ways.13 Not only do we find affirmations of empathy and democracy in readers’ comments and their exchanges with one another; Web romance has also created and disseminated a peculiar form of hybrid and refurbished modern identity as it proliferates in postmodern Chinese cyberspace. Commenting on the “turn to the interior and private … fired by a booming commodity and leisure industry” in postsocialist China, Lee criticizes what she sees as the “all-consuming activity of the care of the self” and “world alienation” of Chinese consumers. Lee expresses her concern “whether the post-Mao rush to reconnect with the heart will give rise to a public sphere in which … self-expressions animate the art of civility and the ideal of worldliness.”14 But my study of Web-based popular Chinese romance and the set of new reading and writing practices that it inculcates reveals that Chinese women attempt to “renormalize” and destigmatize “everything feminine” while also guarding femininity against the intrusions of a market economy.15 As Rosemary Roberts has pointed out, these are tasks they also faced in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Since Web romance registers shifts, reorients feelings, and enables creativity and nurturance for Chinese women, it perhaps represents their life in postsocialist China better than other forms of culture. It remains to be seen what role Web romance will continue to play in Chinese women’s self-imagination and self-representation. Yet it is unwise to characterize its ostensibly backward, inward turn as merely a return to traditional and conservative values. Who is to say that the Enlightenment definition of modern personhood is the only legitimate and viable version 13 Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 301. 14 Ibid., 309. 15 Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre, 264.

176 coda for a female Chinese subject? Chinese women have to wrestle with their own daily challenges and carve out a stable and coherent identity for themselves as they negotiate traditional, modern, Western, and Chinese cultural influences. To be is to do.

APPENDIX

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE CHARACTERS Ai shi buneng wangji de 爱是不能忘记的 aimei 暧昧 Ba Jin 巴金 Baidu 百度 Ban Zhao 班昭 Baoban hunyin, yichang jiapo renwang de renjian canju 包办婚姻, 一场家破人亡的人间惨剧 biantai 变态 bishonen 美少年 bu ruliu 不入流 Cai Zhiheng (Chih-Heng Tsai) 蔡智恒 cainü 才女 Cao 曹 Cao Cao 曹操 Changsheng 长生 chanpin jieshao 产品介绍 Chen Tianqiao 陈天侨 Chen Zhe 陈喆 chi 痴 chicheng xiangdai 赤诚相待 Chongqing 重庆 chongsheng 重生 Chuanyue cheng Yin Zhiping 穿越成尹志平 Chuanyue shikong da jiangyou 穿越时空 打酱油 Cong beijian dao ziqiang, san xiongdi de kuangshi jilian 从卑贱到自强, 三兄弟的旷世畸恋 Cui Jian 崔健 Dahua Xiyou 大话西游 danmei 耽美 Datang mingyue 大唐明月 Dazhou 大周 Di An Shanren 荻岸山人 Didi doushi lang 弟弟都是狼 disan zhe 第三者 Diyi ci de qinmi jiechu   第一次的亲密接触 Dou Yun 逗云 Douzhan sheng fo 斗战胜佛 Duli Xieyang Shang Wanzhao  独立斜阳伤晚照 Duomu Muduo 多木木多

duoqing 多情 egao 恶搞 ernai 二奶 Fan Paopao 范跑跑 fan Qiong Yao tongren 反琼瑶同人 Fangzhou zi 方舟子 Fanke chengpin (Vancel) 凡客诚品 Fanke ti 凡客体 fansi 反思 fanwai 番外 faxie 发泄 Feng ba tianxia 凤霸天下 Feng chuan can han 凤穿残汉 Fenghuang jiangjun liezhuan  凤凰将军列传 fenghuang nan 凤凰男 Fengjie 凤姐 fenqing 愤青 Foshan 佛山 Fuguang 浮光 fuhei 腹黑 Fujian 福建 funü 腐女 fuze de ducai 负责的独裁 Ganlan shu 橄榄树 gaotie ti 高铁体 geming jia lian’ai 革命加恋爱 Gong 宫 gong 攻 Gong suo xin yu 宫锁心玉 gongsi jieshao 公司介绍 Gongteng Shenxiu 宫藤深秀 gouxue 狗血 Gu Tingye 顾廷烨 Guan Yu 关羽 guanfang peidui 官方配对 Guangdong 广东 Guangzhou 广州 guanpei 官配 Guanxin ze Luan 关心则乱 guifan de minzhu 规范的民主 Guoxue 国学 Guzhuang diyi meinan 古装第一美男 Han Han 韩寒 Hangzhou 杭州

178 appendix Hanlin wensheng 翰林文圣 He Hongwen 贺弘文 hehu 呵护 Honglou meng 红楼梦 Hongse niangzi jun 红色娘子军 Hongxiu tianxiang 红袖添香 Hou Xiaoqiang 侯小强 Hu Shi 胡适 Hua Zhao 花招 Huang Yi 黃易 Huanzhu gege 还珠格格 Huanzhu zhi huanghou nanwei  还珠之皇后难为 Huaxia wenzhai 华夏文摘 Hunan 湖南 Jia 贾 Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 Jia Daishan 贾代善 Jia Junpeng 贾君鹏 Jia Lian 贾琏 Jia Mu 贾母 jiang daoli 讲道理 Jiaocuo shiguang de ailian  交错时光的爱恋 jiaru women 加入我们 jin shouzhi 金手指 Jin Yong 金庸 Jing hua yuan 镜花缘 jingji shiyong nan 经济适用男 Jinjiang 晋江 jinshi 进士 Jun Suiyuan 君随缘 juren 举人 Kaixin nongchang 开心农场 Kaixin wang 开心网 Kangxi 康熙 kongjian 空间 laiyu shenghuo, gaoyu shenghuo  来于生活, 高于生活 lan 烂 Lan Yunshu 蓝云舒 lei 雷 Li Jiancheng 李建成 Li Ruzhen 李儒珍 Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai  梁山伯与祝英台 Libai liu 礼拜六 Lin Daiyu 林黛玉 Liu Bei 刘备 Liu Yifei 刘亦菲 liusi 六四 lizhi 励志 lou 楼 Lu Xun 鲁迅

luantong 娈童 Luo Yufeng 罗玉凤 Luohong ru zhou 落红如皱 Luzi 炉子 Ma Jingtao 马景涛 Mali Su 玛丽苏 Mao Dun 茅盾 Meihua luo 梅花烙 meng 萌 Meng Qiyou 孟祈佑 Minami Ozaki 尾崎南 Mingchao naxie shi’er 明朝那些事儿 minggan zi 敏感字 Minglan 明兰 Momo 脉脉 moshi 末世 Murong Xuecun 慕容雪村 nanchong 男宠 Nanfang dushi bao 南方都市报 Nanjing 南京 naobu 脑补 naocan 脑残 Ningjing de Xiatian 宁静的夏天 Niulang Zhinü 牛郎织女 Nu Dahai 努达海 Nü xuesheng mimi ji 女学生秘密记 Nü xuesheng zhi baimian guan  女学生之百面观 nü’er guo 女儿国 Nüdi shengya 女帝生涯 nüe 虐 Nüjie 女诫 nüqiang 女强 nüzun 女尊 otome 乙女 Ouyang Youquan 欧阳友权 Ouyang Yuqian 欧阳予倩 Pan Jinlian 潘金莲 paoxiao ti 咆哮体 piao 票 Ping Shan Leng Yan 平山冷燕 Pingsu You Jiu 平素有酒 pinyin 拼音 Pizi Cai 痞子蔡 Qi Heng 齐衡 qian guize 潜规则 Qidian 起点 Qidian nüsheng wang  起点女生网 qifu 欺负 Qilu 歧路 Qin 秦 Qing 清 qing 情

appendix Qing shenshen, yu mengmeng  情深深, 雨濛濛 Qingchao jingji shiyong nan  清朝经济适用男 Qinghua [Tsinghua University] 清华 Qingshi gao 清史稿 Qingshi huangfei 倾世皇妃 Qinwang Li Shimin 秦王李世民 Qiong Yao 琼瑶 qiye wenhua 企业文化 raito noberu 轻小说 Renmin [daxue] 人民 [大学] Renren 人人 Rongshuxia 榕树下 Rou Shi 柔石 Saiunkoku Monogatari 彩云国物语 Sala gongzhu 萨拉公主 San Liu 三六 sangao 三高 Sanguo yanyi 三国演义 se 色 Shanghai 上海 shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学 Shediao yingxiong zhuan 射雕英雄传 shenfen goujian 身份构建 Sheng doushi 圣斗士 Shengda 盛大 Shengda wenxue 盛大文学 shengnü 剩女 shengshi 盛世 shenmei pilao 审美疲劳 shi’er jinchai 十二金钗 Shibing tuji 士兵突击 shiqing 世情 Shishido Jun 宍户淳 shou 受 shouzhu ziji de xin 守住自己的心 Shu 蜀 Shuangyu Zuo 双鱼座 shui 水 Shuihu zhuan 水浒传 Sishi huakai 四时花开 Taizong 太宗 Tang 唐 taoyuan xianjing 桃源仙境 tazhe 他者 Tian Han 田汉 Tian’an men 天安门 tianlei 天雷 Tingche Zuo Ai Fenglin Wan 停车坐爱枫 林晚 Tingyuan shenshen 庭院深深 tongren 同人 tongsheng 童生

toupo xueliu 头破血流 touxiang 头像 Tsinghua (Qinghua [University]) 清华 Tuanyuan 团圆 Tumi Shiliao 荼蘼事了 tuoshui 脱水 wailou 歪楼 Wan qingsi 绾青丝 Wang Jing 王晶 Wang Meng 王蒙 Wang Xiaofei 王笑飞 Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 Wang Yongping 王勇平 Wang Zheng 王铮 wangluo wenxue 网络文学 wangluo youxi 网络游戏 Wangyi 网易 wangyou 网游 Wangzhe zhi tong 王者之痛 Wei Minglun 魏明伦 Wei nuli de muqin 为奴隶的母亲 weibo 微博 weiqu 委屈 wen 文 wen’an 文案 Wenshi tianxia 文史天下 Wenzhou 温州 Wo Dan 渥丹 Wo Xiang Chi Rou 我想吃肉 Woju 蜗居 Women fufu zhijian 我们夫妇之间 wu 武 Wu Song 武松 Wu Zetian 武则天 Xi ying men 喜盈门 Xia Jingqu 夏敬渠 Xianjian qixia zhuan 仙剑奇侠传 xiao baihua 小白花 Xiao Yemu 萧也牧 Xiao Yueyue 小悦悦 Xiaonei 校内 xiaosan 小三 xiaosan xilie 小三系列 xiaosuo 萧索 Xibei 西北 xieshi 写实 Xieyang Ruo Ying 斜阳若影 Xili ge 犀利哥 Ximen Qing 西门庆 xin wuxia 新武侠 Xin yusi 新语丝 Xingfu chufang 幸福厨房 Xinlang 新浪 xinwen dongtai 新闻动态

179

180 appendix Xinwen wenzhai 新闻文摘 Xinyue gege 新月格格 xiucai 秀才 Xizang 西藏 Xu Zhenya 许振亚 xuanhuan 玄幻 Xue Pan 薛蟠 Yan Kuan 严宽 yangban xi 样板戏 yanggang 阳刚 Yanji 雁姬 yanjin de luoji 严谨的逻辑 yanqing 言情 Yanyu mengmeng 烟雨濛濛 Yaya wan 丫丫湾 Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 Yi Qianchong 意千重 Yi Shu 亦舒 Yiben xiaohua hun sanguo  一本笑话混三国 yinrou 阴柔 Yisheng guzhu zhi wenrou  一生孤注掷温柔 Yishi chun 一室春 yiyin 意淫 You tu you zhenxiang, wu tu wu  zhenxiang 有图有真相, 无图无真相 Yu Dafu 郁达夫 yuan 元 Yuan Shao 袁绍 Yuanchuang wang 原创网

Yukino Sai 雪乃纱衣 Yuli hun 玉梨魂 Zetsu’ai 绝爱 zha nan 渣男 zhaidou 宅斗 Zhang Fei 张飞 Zhang Jie 张洁 Zhao Shuli 赵树理 Zhejiang 浙江 Zhengzhou 郑州 zhichang 职场 Zhifou, zhifou, yingshi lüfei hongshou?  知否, 知否, 应是绿肥红瘦? Zhiyin 知音 Zhiyu ni xin buxin, fanzheng wo shi xin  le 至于你信不信, 反正我是信了 Zhongguo zuojia xiehui 中国作家协会 Zhongshen dashi 终身大事 zhongtian 种田 Zhongwen shige wang 中文诗歌网 Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鹃 Zhou Xingchi 周星驰 zhu xuanlü 主旋律 zhuanzai 转载 Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 zhunque de shuju 准确的数据 Zhusha lei 朱砂泪 Zishi 子释 Ziyou du 自由毒 Zou Zou 邹邹 Zuihou de lianren 最后的恋人

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INDEX Absolute Love (Zetsu’ai) 1, 57 androgynous appearance 79, 80 protagonist 73, 78, 80 reader 72, 77, 77n, 141n, 142 see also androgyny androgyny 79, 79n, 143, 145 anti-Qiong Yao fanfic 117, 126–36 Baidu 8, 23, 23n, 27, 28n, 31, 32n, 109 beautiful young men (bishonen) 56, 96 BL (fiction) 55, 57, 58, 59, 125 boy’s love (boys’ love) fiction 55, 59n, 81n, 90n see also BL (fiction) butterfly fiction function 34 hero in 144 love, portrayal of 50 plot 47 Qiong Yao’s borrowing 126 readers 30 sales figure 48 study of 30 Cai Zhiheng (Ts’ai Chih-Heng) 20 Chen Tianqiao 26 chongsheng (rebirth) fiction 56, 57 chuanyue 15, 61, 65, 121, 124, 172n see also time travel Coiling up Black Hair see Wan qingsi Country Codger’s Words of Exposure, A (Yesou puyan) 78, 101 danmei artifacts 88 at Jinjiang 53–83 authors 58, 70, 73, 97, 125 conventions 70n, 73–80 fanfic 110, 119, 123–25 import from Japan 55–56 protagonist 77–80, 97 published in print 58n rape, treatment of 79–80 readers 56–59, 56n15, 56n20, 58n, 63, 72–80, 81–83, 87

relation to homosexuality 57, 58, 70–71, 72 sex, treatment of 59, 73–76 websites 58, 59 see also boy’s love fiction; BL (fiction); Lucifer Club; slash fiction disan zhe 34 see also xiaosan doomsday (moshi) fiction 33 Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) 7, 73, 118, 156 characters 79, 101, 143 fan production 4, 4n, 120–21 sequels 82 TV adaptation 120 egao 94, 124, 124n ernai 34 fan fiction (fanfic, tongren) 109–37 authors 117 danmei 5, 123–25 definition 5, 117 fan production 3–5, 66–67 Five Masterpieces 119–22 Harry Potter 43 Qiong Yao 10, 126–36, 142 study of 6 Western novels 145 see also anti-Qiong Yao fanfic fandom danmei 56–59, 56n15, 56n20, 58n, 63, 72–80, 81–83, 87 study of 5, 6n, 109, 127, 136n, 169n see also fan fiction Fanke ti (genre of Fanke) 94 fanwai (bangai) 168 definition 67 in General Phoenix 104–105 in Yishi chun 134 farming (zhongtian) fiction 38–39, 40, 92, 93, 121, 173 Five Masterpieces 4, 4n, 117, 143 Flowers in the Mirror 96 gaotie ti (high-speed train genre) 31, 168

192 index genre see danmei; Fanke ti; gaotie ti; nüzun; paoxiao ti; tongren Gong (Gong suo xin yu) 55 Han Han 94 Harry Potter 43, 117 Honglou meng see Dream of the Red Chamber Hongse niangzi jun (Red Detachment of Women) 99 Hou Xiaoqiang 25, 25n, 29 household fights 142, 147, 157, 164 Huang Yi 19 Huanzhu gege 18, 127, 128, 130 Jia Baoyu 79, 121, 143, 144, 145 Jia Junpeng 31 Jin Ping Mei 4n see also Plum in A Golden Vase Jin Yong 117, 124 Jing hua yuan 96 kongjian 38 see also magic-space fiction Li Ruzhen 96 light fiction (raito noberu) 96 Lin Daiyu 120, 121, 122, 143 Lucifer Club 59, 73, 76, 77 magic-space fiction 38, 39, 40, 168, 173 Mali Su 130, 131 see also Mary Sue mandarin duck and butterfly fiction 17 see also butterfly fiction manga BL (danmei) 55, 57, 58 Japanese 33, 117, 118, 140 see also light fiction Mary Sue 130, 135, 155 see also Mali Su matriarchal fiction (nüzun) 8, 15, 36, 69, 168 at Jinjiang 85–108 plot 92–93 see also nü’er guo minggan zi (sensitive words) 22 model theatre see yangban xi moshi fiction 33 Murong Xuecun 43, 116

naobu 148 nü’er guo (matriarchal society) 96 see also matriarchal fiction nüzun see matriarchal fiction paoxiao ti (genre of yelling) 158 Pizi Cai 20 Plum in A Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei) 4n, 123, 156 Qidian 26, 27, 54 see also Starting Point Qiong Yao (Chen Zhe) comparison to Western romance 49–50 heroine 68, 86, 129, 153 reception 10, 18, 50, 148 setting of works 18 see also anti-Qiong Yao fanfic Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun) 99 Romance of the Three Kingdoms 4, 4n see also Sanguo yanyi; Three Kingdoms Rou Shi 98, 99 Saiunkoku Monogatari (The story of Saiunkoku) 96 Sanguo yanyi see Romance of the Three Kingdoms scholar and beauty fiction 17, 47, 143 sensitive words (minggan zi) 22 shanzhai 41 Shengda Literature (Shengda wenxue) 24–27, 29 shengnü 33, 146 Shuihu zhuan see Water Margin slash fiction 5, 6, 72, 119 Snail Home (Woju) 166, 169 Starting Point 59, 112, 116, 125, 150, 152 see also Qidian stud (zhongma) fiction 10, 38, 78, 93, relation to nüzun fiction 93, 98, 100, 103, 106 relation to tongren fiction 119, 121 see also zhongma fiction; Huang Yi; Xun Qin ji Three Kingdoms 119, 123, 143 see also Romance of the Three Kingdoms time travel 168, 170 evolution of time-travel romance 35–41

index fictional works 10, 15, 19, 139–66, 173 in danmei fiction 70–72 in nüzun fiction 93–94, 98, 101 in tongren fiction 119, 121, 124, 128, 132 plots 36 transgression 36–37 TV drama 33, 55 see also chuanyue tongren see fan fiction

xuanhuan 25 Xun Qin ji (Tale of seeking Qin) 19

Wan qingsi (Coiling up Black Hair) 69, 101 wangyou 25 Water Margin 4, 119, 120, 123, 143 Woju see Snail Home

Zetsu’ai (Absolute Love) 57 zhaidou see household fights Zhao Shuli 99 Zhiyin, style of 4 zhongma fiction see stud fiction zhongtian fiction see farming fiction

Xi Juan 19, 130 xiaosan 34, 126, 130, 146, 148 Xinyue gege 127, 132

193

yangban xi 99, 106, 144 yanggang 106 Yesou puyan see A Country Codger’s Words of Exposure Yi Shu 18, 19 yinrou 106 yiyin (YY) 73, 105 Yukino Sai 96