When True Love Came to China 9888208802, 9789888208807

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Love’s Entrée
2. Confucius and Freud
3. Love in the Western World
4. Keywords
5. Two Great Works on Love
6. The Camellia Lady
7. Joan Haste and Romantic Fiction
8. The Clump
9. Two Ways of Escape
10. Faust, Werther, Salome
11. Ellen Key
12. One and Only
13. Looking for Love: Yu Dafu
14. Exalting Love: Xu Zhimo
15. Love Betrayed: Eileen Chang
16. Love’s Decline and Fall
17. Afterthoughts
Notes
References
Index

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When True Love Came to China

‘Nobody writes about China quite as brilliantly as Lynn Pan, who in this new, illuminating work on love showcases her trademark erudition entwined with a novelist’s sensibility. Pan’s rare skill makes the book a treat from start to finish; a sumptuous, deft and moving analysis of China’s relationship with love.’ —Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang and The Other Side of Light

When True Love Came to China

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Most people suppose that the whole world knows what it is to love; that romantic love is universal, quintessentially human. Such a supposition has to be able to meet three challenges. It has to justify its underlying assumption that all cultures mean the same thing by the word ‘love’ regardless of language. It has to engage with the scholarly debate on whether or not romantic love was invented in Europe and is uniquely Western. And it must be able to explain why early twentieth-century Chinese writers claimed that they had never known true love, or love by modern Western standards. By addressing these three challenges through a literary, historical, philosophical, biographical and above all comparative approach, this highly original work shows how love’s profile in China shifted with the rejection of arranged marriages and concubinage in favour of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love.

When True Love Came to China

‘This book, Lynn Pan’s best to date, adds a wonderful new angle by encouraging us, via comparison, to better appreciate how unusual, even in some ways exotic, a part of the Western past we take for granted, as though it were natural, actually is. While the reader will learn a great deal about Chinese literary and cultural traditions from this book, if read with an open mind the Western reader may end up rethinking things about his or her tradition just as deeply.’ —Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California at Irvine

Lynn Pan

Lynn Pan was born in Shanghai and educated in London and Cambridge, England. She is the author of more than a dozen books on China and the Chinese diaspora, including Shanghai Style; Tracing It Home; and Sons of the Yellow Emperor, the winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize.

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

Lynn Pan

Literary History / China

Front cover image: Cover of Zhongguo xuesheng, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1931.

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When True Love Came to China

When True Love Came to China

Lynn Pan

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2015 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-80-7 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Hang Tai Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

1.

Love’s Entrée

2

2.

Confucius and Freud

14

3.

Love in the Western World

26

4.

Keywords

50

5.

Two Great Works on Love

74

6.

The Camellia Lady

88

7.

Joan Haste and Romantic Fiction

98

8.

The Clump

108

9.

Two Ways of Escape

120

10. Faust, Werther, Salome

138

11. Ellen Key

154

12. One and Only

170

13. Looking for Love: Yu Dafu

190

14. Exalting Love: Xu Zhimo

208

15. Love Betrayed: Eileen Chang

230

16. Love’s Decline and Fall

254

17. Afterthoughts

278

Notes References Index

285 309 319

Acknowledgements

For their interest, suggestions and other kindnesses, I am grateful to Kazuko Asakura, Mary Boyd, Shelly Bryant, Hanno Hessmer and Anja Thomson, Linda Johnson, Li  Suk Woon, Richard Lim, Ni Yibin and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. For generous help with securing materials, I am deeply indebted to Stefan Al, Catherine Stenzl and Zhu Chunxiang. For providing a choice of images for the cover, I am immensely grateful to Michelle Morkel and Karolina Pawlik. Cao Mengqin’s research assistance has been invaluable and it is a pleasure to thank him. To Miho Kinnas, who helped not only to locate Japanese sources for me but to read them, I owe more than I can say.

A student rallies support for May Fourth protests in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. An illustration by Wen Yiduo, 1919.

1 Love’s Entrée

With love being in an embryonic state in the China of today, pure love is hard to find. Chen Guangding, in The Ladies’ Journal, 1926

‘We don’t put much store by love,’ you hear the Chinese say of themselves, not in any tone of self-depreciation but matter-of-factly. In one sense it is true: except among a small minority, romantic love is not felt to be of overriding importance in the choice of whom the Chinese marry. Small as that minority is, it is still considerably larger than it was in the early years of the twentieth century, when all marriages were arranged by parents through appointed go-betweens, and no one chose their own spouses on the basis of romantic love. At the urging of the intellectual vanguard of the time, this millennia-old custom began to change in the years leading up to the communist revolution in 1949. It was to the start of this change that the person quoted in the epigraph to this chapter traced the ‘embryonic state’ of love in 1926. Of course, not to marry for love is not necessarily to be innocent of love: lovelessly married Chinese men had immemorially looked to courtesans and concubines for romance. But that was not true love, according to those intellectuals, for it could only be that with the exercise of free will and the attainment of man-woman equality; love was only true if it was a relationship freely entered into on the basis of man-woman equality. And since relations were neither free nor equal in China, the Chinese ‘have no love to speak of,’ some said of themselves, ‘Chinese don’t understand what love is, so you can’t talk about love to Chinese.’ A commentator who heard these words thought them a little exaggerated: ‘It isn’t that the Chinese don’t understand love,’ he wrote, ‘it’s that we don’t get a chance at true love; and we don’t because Chinese society won’t allow it . . . and therein lies the Chinese tragedy.’ Chinese society would not allow it because it was shackled still by such age-old Confucian ritual practices as sequestering maidens, so the liberty to love was simply not there. How, he asked, are we to improve and evolve? He himself came to the conclusion that a ‘love revolution’ was needed.1

Love’s Entrée

3

Calls for such a revolution were hard to ignore in one place in particular. This was Shanghai, the most Westernized of China’s cities by virtue of its being a treaty port harbouring British, American and French concessions. China’s chief publishing centre, Shanghai was where all the books, magazines and especially translations of foreign works introducing new ways of love saw the light of day. There was a flood of these in the 1920s, a period exceptionally preoccupied with love. A periodical named The Ladies’ Journal, for example, dedicated whole issues to the subjects of love, divorce and mate selection, while special columns were started so that readers could write in and air their views on questions such as, ‘What is my ideal match?’ and ‘What do I expect of men (or women)?’2 It was a time that promised crucial breakthroughs in Chinese attitudes to love, sex and marriage. Contrasting notions of these were on offer, with those from the West threatening to upstage native ones among the educated young. That those Western ideas did transplant, but not all that well and not wholly, was what the Shanghai-born writer Eileen Chang (1920–95) had in mind when she wrote her short story ‘Stale Mates’ (1956).3 She subtitled it ‘A Short Story Set in the Time When Love Came to China.’ The title of my book, When True Love Came to China, consciously echoes the subtitle. The time in which her story is set is 1924, when the fashion is to address a young unmarried woman as misi (Miss), wear spectacles with round black rims even when there is no call for them, clip a fountain pen on your lapel and read Shelley. Boating on the West Lake, the story’s hero Mr Luo reads the English poet aloud to the twenty-year-old Miss Fan, who, whenever she feels moved, would tightly grasp the hand of her girl companion. He is sweet on her and she him. Inevitably, he is married—no Chinese man his age would still be single. A ‘universal predicament,’ Eileen Chang calls it, and observes wryly of the time that ‘practically everybody was married and had children before ever hearing of love.’ That Luo and his men friends have heard of it can be deduced from the pleasure they take in talking endlessly about their beloved among themselves, showing each other the girls’ letters and analyzing their personalities from their handwriting. You might think that none of this amounts to much, but for these young men it is rapture enough, love being such a new experience in China ‘that a little of it goes a long way.’ Luo declares himself to Miss Fan, who is asked to wait for him while he extricates himself from his marriage. Divorce, once raised with his wife back home in the country, causes rage and consternation to the two mothers, his and hers, Chinese matrimony being more a matter of family than of the couples themselves. Alas, the six years it takes to come to an agreement prove too long for Miss Fan, who at twenty-six is fast becoming an old maid. Indeed, if she does not hurry she would be too old to qualify even for what is called a ‘room-filler,’ one who marries a widower. A matchmaker is engaged, and while a pawnbroker is the best that this go-between could do, Miss Fan

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does receive a big diamond engagement ring from him and gets taken out to dine on European food. In a fit of pique, the by-now divorced Luo turns (through the agency of a matchmaker) to a Wang family, whose eldest daughter accepts his suit after the usual exchange of photographs and due investigations. But while he is married within three months, Miss Fan’s match falls apart. Is it because the man turns out to be older than first thought, or is it she who has lied about her age? Malicious gossip is not altogether clear on this. Luo’s and Miss Fan’s friends see to it that the two run into each other, in all likelihood because they think it would be ‘sad and beautiful—and therefore a good thing—’ if the two were to meet again on the West Lake under the moon. Under the moon, Luo is smitten once again. For the second time he starts divorce proceedings, a struggle no less prolonged than the previous one, made all the worse perhaps by his being seen now as ‘a scoundrel where he has once been a pioneer.’ She stands by him through thick and thin and, without being ‘monotonously pliant,’ falls in with his moods, reads all the books that he gives her and remains devoted to Shelley. Once married, however, she forsakes Shelley for mah-jong, revealing a side to her that Luo has not suspected. She lets herself go, lounging about at home in unwashed old gowns when not out playing mah-jong, and cracking watermelon seeds in bed and spitting out the shells onto the bedclothes and floor. Word of their squabbles reaches his relatives, who suggest a simple solution: why not get Miss Wang to come back? Luo wavers, but is then persuaded. As expected, his wife throws a tantrum, then rises to her new role by appearing to be magnanimity itself when Miss Wang is brought home—not, it is understood by her family, as a secondary wife or concubine but as ranking equally with the former Miss Fan. And if two, why not three? There is his first ex-wife, whom a clan elder says it would only be fair for Luo to take back. Luo agrees, and goes down to the country to fetch her from her family. Yet he does not feel blessed though onlookers say so. Not that his having all these wives is matter for congratulation these days, since it is already 1936, an age ‘at least nominally monogamous.’ But none of his friends take him seriously when he confesses his unhappiness. Never mind, one of them guffaws, ‘There are four of you—just right for a nice game of mah-jong.’

It might seem as though, for Luo, the pieces have fallen into place against the odds. Yet in a way it is not against the odds that he should end up polygamous—the satirist in Eileen Chang mocks his all too inevitable reversion to ancestral practice. What is more, the reversion seems to be more duty than pleasure; he does what his clan elders, or hoary Chinese tradition, expect of him. It is true that he is a trailblazer—and not once but twice over—marrying for love, a new thing under the Chinese sun; and

Love’s Entrée

5

divorcing his wife in the teeth of opposition. But that is his new self, one fired in part by Shelley and the new banner of progress. His old self is another matter. There is no eradicating it root and branch, and it is bound to break out sooner or later. Selves are after all not created in a day; such selves, on so colossal a scale as China’s, have millennia-long roots, not easily pulled up. Yet pulled up they ought to be, urged the champions of the love revolution, pulled up and discarded. The self must be reshaped, and any inadequacy in cultural make-up and character made good by foreign borrowing. The inadequacy was gloomily felt to be general, love being just one of many spheres of Chinese life, from the scientific to the artistic and philosophical, that cried out for Western input. An across-the-board Westernization was seen by many to be the way forward. Eileen Chang, who wrote ‘Stale Mates’ in two versions, English then Chinese, tells us when it was that the Chinese looked so enthusiastically to the West: she does so by including the date ‘May Fourth’ in the title of the Chinese (which translates very roughly as ‘It Happened in the May Fourth Period’).4 A date resonant in the Chinese revolutionary memory, this is a shorthand for the May Fourth movement of 1919, a sweeping literary and intellectual renewal that has been called the ‘Chinese Renaissance’ and is said to be the Chinese answer to the Enlightenment in Europe. Its ignition was a patriotic student demonstration, staged in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, to protest the humiliating decision of the Paris Peace Conference to transfer Germany’s rights in Shandong province, in northern China, to  Japan rather than return them to Chinese sovereignty. The thousands that took to the streets saw it as a stinging betrayal of China by the allied powers. Galling it was too, to find their country counting for so little in the world. As they saw it, it was China’s backwardness that made it weak, and weak, it invited the depredations visited upon it by Western and Japanese imperialists. At this rate, the protestors asked, how was the nation to survive the twentieth century? Campus rallies, street processions, impassioned speechifying, an upsurge of nationalism and anti-imperialism—these were the May Fourth movement in its strict sense. In its broader sense, it coalesced with two sweeping changes that had preceded it. One cleared the decks for the emergence of the Republic of China by toppling the Qing dynasty, the Manchu ruling house, from its throne in 1911. The second was a clearing of the decks of another sort: the New Culture movement of 1915 was exactly as its name suggests, a move to renew Chinese culture. Age-old ways of thinking, of saying things, of ordering personal relationships—all these had to be swept away. Thus thought hamstrung and conventionalized by the Classical language was to be freed and made new by the modern vernacular; top-down relations of father to son, and husband to wife, were to be ditched in favour of equality, and so on. Renewing Chinese culture meant a cathartic casting out of demons, and of no demon was exorcism more needed than Confucius. It had to be done for China to be

6

When True Love Came to China

saved. Only then might Chinese culture emerge from its political, moral and intellectual darkness into the light of ‘science’ and ‘democracy.’ Once Confucianism had been jettisoned, the web of ideas that went with it, ideas relating to morality, family and of course women, might be discarded as well. As the protests grew, so did the force of ideas voiced in a spate of new periodicals—with names like New Youth, The Renaissance (Xinchao in Chinese) and The New Woman—that appeared to call for a new page to be turned. The writers, intellectuals and radicals who contributed to these journals or read them make up what I call the May Fourth generation. In the passage from oldness to newness, May 4, 1919 was a milestone. But to say that that date marks a change from old-style love to new-style love is rather like Virginia Woolf announcing that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’ Of  course, she is not saying that ‘one went out, and there saw a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless, and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.’5

Apart from supposing romantic love to be terra incognita to the Chinese, what did those May Fourth intellectuals think about when they thought about love? What were they talking about when they talked about love? They were thinking and talking about a liberation from the dark tyranny of ‘feudal’ matchmaking, about free will and individualism and self-determination. They were condemning inequality and sexual double standards, how unfair it was to demand chastity and constancy of women while tolerating male philandering and polygamy. They were talking about the New Woman and clamouring for a release from Confucian prudery. They were rejecting sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy and calling for a new and superior morality based on love. On ‘love’ itself, however, they were less clear. Some thought it a euphemism and mask for animal appetite; some an ideal unattainable in real life. Others decried it as merely a modish word, with nothing of substance behind it. All were agreed that its meaning was not to be found in the Chinese cultural script, for there was always to the old Chinese idioms for amorous relations a tinge of unseriousness, of dalliance even; in their view such relations were either sensualized and sentimentalized as ‘wind, flowers, snow, moon,’ or regarded with tongue firmly in cheek.6 It became a cliché to suppose that historically there had only ever been two attitudes to love in China: to prohibit it as immorality; or to play it like a game of refined taste and elegance.7 The refinement and elegance came of the fact that in the long tradition of connoisseurship created and shaped by elite men of letters, women were an object of erotic appreciation, on a par with, say, collecting art; feminine beauty was there for the delectation of men of taste, for whom the ability to take pleasure in it was a mark of elegant sensibility.

Love’s Entrée

7

As for what those men wrote in the way of fiction, it was no better than what they practised. The love stories of old were harshly judged by progressive May Fourth critics, as being either pornographic or formulaic. The first kind has lovers giving in readily to consuming passion and clandestine sex; while the second, the so-called ‘scholarbeauty’ romance, pairs a talented scholar with a chaste and clever maiden, and all’s well that ends well in matrimony. Love is often at first sight and unmarried lovers frequently fall ill from unassuaged longing. In fact it is love by any measure, but the progressive critic’s view was anything but dispassionate, and he found love wanting in the pages of Chinese fiction not only because it was not free but because it was somehow less sentiment than sex. It was time to throw that sort of love over. Surveying the scene in 1926, a commentator remarked, ‘Frankly speaking, Western authors of sentimental novels have more insight into individual character, so their portrayals make more sense. Besides, in the West love is sacred and it is free. There men and women mix socially in more varied ways than in China; here it is always just more of the same. In times past we worked at vivid phraseology; today we’re only inclined to sad endings and melancholy. Really, you’re better off looking to translations if you want works of a higher and purer calibre. The care that their authors take in writing about love is of the closest, finest and most meticulous quality.’8 Love was neither ‘sacred’ nor ‘free’ in China. To trace how it became so under Western influence is one of the aims of this book. The conduits of this influence were Western works of literature, social theory and psychology. From these, new foreign ideas on the nature of love not only entered the Chinese conception but became constitutive of it. What are those ideas about the nature of love and how are they different from the homegrown variety?—that, too, is a question this book tries to address. Different, the homegrown variety was counted deficient. From this it was but a short step to the conclusion that the Chinese were a people little given to love. The conclusion is of course unwarranted, since not exalting or privileging love does not necessarily imply a want of natural amorous feeling in a people. It could mean that such feelings were denied or disdained, or simply that other things were considered more important. Or that the feelings were there, only little expressed. Yet it has been a marked tendency among both Chinese and Western commentators to suppose the Chinese less captive to love than Europeans (see Chapter 3). Compared to Europeans they are indeed little given to general theorizing on love, but what is one to make of Eileen Chang’s astonishing remark (in a letter to her closest friends dated June 16, 1969), ‘To this day we Chinese don’t much love, and even our love stories don’t often tell of love’?9 Surely not, you think, unless she means by ‘love’ something different from how that word is understood by the general run of Chinese? Does she mean by ‘love’ something more than what is professed by characters in Chinese love stories? And if so what is

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that something more? The notion having been advanced that the Chinese thought only of lust when they thought of love, that ‘something more’ could only be not-lust. But ‘not-lust’ is not a good enough definition of love, and since there had been no Chinese attempt to define it before, guidance was sought again in Western writing. The closest thing to a Chinese classification of love was a seventeenth-century (or late Ming) anthology of tales, legends and historical anecdotes compiled by a man of letters called Feng Menglong. Because these materials are grouped under various headings, Western scholars have named the compilation An Anatomy of Love, but in many cases the categorization is not so much of kinds of love as of kinds of person— ‘homosexual,’ for example, and ‘knight errant’ (more of whom in Chapter 4). Even less was it a case of defining love when early twentieth-century publishers of a school of popular fiction named ‘Mandarin Duck and Butterfly’ (mandarin ducks and butterflies being the very image of lovers in the Chinese tradition) brought novels out under subgeneric labels like Triste Love, Bitter Love, Strange Love, Voluptuous Love and so on. These tags give the book-buying public some indication of what to expect but they hardly describe the nature and meaning of love.10 By contrast, Westerners are quick to say what love is and what it is not, when it is ‘true’ and when it is not; they are quick to define it as x and not y, what is at stake in love and what are the proofs of love. They are quick to analyze it too; there is hardly a book on the subject that does not speak of kinds of love. Such concerns became a new frame in which the Chinese learned to place their feelings. Today the Chinese who try to make sense of their feelings in terms of it do so with little grasp that it is a cultural construct, not objective reality but merely one way, perhaps uniquely Western, of carving up the semantic domain of ‘love.’ One of the first thoughts to emerge in the course of researching this book was how much better it would be for this study if it were to pay attention to the carving of the semantic domain of love, especially as it has to tell the Chinese story alongside the West’s. Of the different ways of slicing the semantic melon of love, the one that makes the most sense to me is the one that marks off the state of ‘falling’ or ‘being in love’ from ‘love.’ The former is a distinctly definable emotional condition, the only reliably identifiable state under the ‘love’ rubric, its onset frequently allegorized as being pierced by Cupid’s arrow or struck by a thunderbolt. In his book Love (De l’Amour) the French writer Stendhal describes this moment: ‘The most surprising thing of all about love is the first step, the violence of the change that takes place in a man’s mind.’11 More recently, John Armstrong describes it in his book Conditions of Love as ‘an amazing explosion of feeling’: ‘All our desires become focused upon that person and we look, dazzled, into those beloved eyes and see—if only for a while—the summation of our own existence and a new world of happiness.’12 One brave American psychologist, Dorothy Tennov, thought the condition deserved a name all to itself and coined one, limerence; then published a whole study

Love’s Entrée

9

of it in 1979 using interviews and a questionnaire. Her book is dedicated to Stendhal, from whom she quotes a description of the ‘intrusive thinking’ that is so typical of the limerent experience: ‘A person in love is unremittingly and uninterruptedly occupied with the image of [the] beloved.’ It was a state, Tennov finds, that ‘some people were in much of the time, others in some of the time, but still others never in . . .’13 This last surprised her, but she hastened to reassure those who had never fallen in love that they were not on that score not loving, if loving were defined as caring. You could be caring, affectionate, even tender without being limerent. At its most full-blown limerence carries all before it, eclipsing other human relationships. It is not mere sexual attraction, but nor is it limerence if the potential for physical consummation was not there. Returned feelings might be what the limerent yearns for above all, yet there is no rapture equal to that of having those feelings expressed in sexual union. Limerence blooms and fades, and by its nature it is transitory. In duration it could be as brief as a few weeks or as long as a few years. Intimacies initiated by limerence might well outlast it, by years or by even a lifetime, but then it is no longer limerence that sustains these relationships but some other kind of attachment. That it is involuntary, not subject to reason or the will is one reason it has been disparaged, given such pejorative labels as ‘infatuation,’ ‘puppy love,’ ‘obsession,’ ‘addiction,’ ‘destructive passion,’ ‘selfish love,’ and even ‘pseudo-love’ by people who, one guesses (as Tennov does), had never been in love themselves. Tennov’s book was coolly received by the academic community when it came out, and resistance to her theory persists to this day, with psychologists and other experts looking to see if limerence might not be clinically classed as an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and others wondering how it might be distinguished from true love! Still, was it necessary to coin a new term for it? No, says the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher: it is your classic, standard romantic love.14 Fisher, who has been named the world’s leading expert on the biology of love, has also called it infatuation, obsessive love, passionate love and romantic attraction.15 Fisher believes that, call it what you will, it is one of three interrelated yet distinct emotion systems in the brain involved in mating, reproduction and the rearing of the young, the other two being the sex drive (or lust, as she has also called it) and attachment (or companionate love). Neuro-scientific research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has led her to the theory that each of the three emotions systems is correlated with a specific neurobiology in the brain (feelings of romantic attraction being associated with high levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine and with low levels of serotonin, lust with testosterone and attachment with oxytocin and vasopressin). The three systems are linked but they can operate independently, so lust and romantic attachment need not go together, and deep attachment to a long-term mate need not

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When True Love Came to China

stop one from falling in love with another or being sexually stimulated by a third. You can ‘love’ more than one person at the same time, in other words, feeling companionate love for one, say, and romantic love for another.16 The trouble with using the term ‘romantic love’ for limerence is that not everyone means the same thing by it. Also, while limerence denotes a distinct state or lived experience, ‘romantic love’ has been understood not only in the experiential sense but as a cluster of ideas with a history. Hardly had I started reading up on the subject than I ran across the debate, a lively and still unresolved one among literary scholars and social scientists, as to whether romantic love is universal, or whether, far from being quintessentially human, it is a cultural construct specific to Western culture. Indeed, it has long been held by literary scholars that romantic love was an invention of the West, one whose medieval version was the fin’amors (or courtly love) of the Middle Ages (see Chapter 3). Poets and novelists created it, they say; they are the ones who have made romantic love so central to the lives of individuals in the West.17 So you would not expect answers to the question, ‘What does it mean to love someone romantically?’ to be the same across time and space. By contrast, you would expect the answers to be much more similar if the question were, ‘How does it feel to be in love (or limerent?)’ But while Tennov differentiates ‘being in love’ from ‘love,’ ‘romantic love’ has not been so isolated. John Armstrong, whose description of falling in love I earlier quoted, calls it the ‘opening stages of love,’ implying it goes on. Tennov, on the other hand, would say that Armstrong’s ‘explosion of feeling’ comes to an end sooner or later. People call it love, but if they do, they will also have to take on board the fact that it is not, by its very nature, destined to endure. Yet the idea that love is a short-lived thing is widely resisted. ‘Real love,’ writes Armstrong, is ‘love that lasts.’18 It is no wonder that Tennov’s work was coolly received. Also, it runs counter to an age-old vision of love in the West and the way thinkers and writers have habitually characterized it. The old way, too ingrained in the Western tradition to be ever questioned, is to carve it up into love and lust (or, as we shall see, sacred and profane love, or the spiritual versus the physical). But here she is, identifying a distinct emotional state that is not just sexual attraction but is nonetheless sexual and, what is more, so intense and overwhelming in feeling and sensation that to those who experience it, it can’t not be the real thing. For the Chinese, as we shall see, there was no distinction between love and lust comparable in significance to that drawn in the West, and it was not until they modelled their love on that of the West that they began to share in the metaphysical dualism of ‘flesh’ and ‘soul’ characteristic of Western thinking. The story which this book tells reaches its climax with the adoption, by members of the Chinese intelligentsia if not by the population at large, of the Western notion of true love as the ‘oneness of spirit and flesh’ (see Chapter 11).

Love’s Entrée

11

My story is mainly of the early twentieth century, but as I have to return to the origins to make any sense of it, I go as far back as antiquity. There is love and ‘love.’ The former is what people actually experience (which it is impossible for another person to know), while the latter is what they say they experience. The people who say it best, and at length, are poets, novelists and essayists; and as this account is historical, the only way it could get at the experience of love is by studying what these authors have left behind in the way of diaries, letters, autobiographical writings, stories, articles, tracts and translations. These, then, are its main sources. Its focus is on China, but love belongs to all humanity and it is my hope that, from seeing its place and meaning in the minds of another people, those not of that culture will learn something about themselves.

Natural feet shod in large round-toed shoes are urged upon girls with bound feet encased in tiny pointy ones (bottom right-hand corner) in an anti-foot-binding campaign. Illustrated News (Tuhua xinwen), January 1908.

2 Confucius and Freud

There are three things which the gentleman must guard against. In youth, when the energy in his blood is still not settled, he should guard against lust. When he is strongly grown and in full vigour, he should guard against quarrelsomeness. In old age, when his energy is on the wane, he should guard against covetousness. The Analects of Confucius

For true love to come to China and take root, it had at some point to wrestle with Confucius, or rather with the brand of Confucianism that governed conjugal and family relationships in the early decades of the twentieth century. Luo, the young man in the short story recounted in the previous chapter, dutifully did as he was told by his clan elders. Now that is Confucianism, the unquestioned authority of the father and the male members of your extended family. By marrying Miss Fan, he subscribed to the romantic love ideal, the belief that one should marry for love, but in doing so he was not only going out on a limb but violating the standards set by that framework of fixed convention that is the proper Confucian way of conducting oneself. Any pursuit of love had also to contend with the sexual prudery that the Chinese say—much as the English say of the Victorians or of Western missionaries—had come of Confucian moralizing. Not that sex as such interested the Sage, since politics—that is, a proper state of affairs between the ruler and the ruled—was what really concerned him. But it is a measure of his influence that a couple of gnomic statements on sex he made well over two thousand years ago should still be matter for literary and historical criticism in the twentieth century. These statements were made on a set of airs in the Book of Songs (Shi jing), a collection purportedly compiled by Confucius in 600 BC. It was the very first anthology of poetry in China but it would not be too much to say that it, along with the other books in the Confucian canon, formed the very bedrock of Chinese tradition. It was scripture, no less, a classic pored over by Confucian scholars through the ages, accreting so many layers of exegesis and interpretation in the process that it is now impossible to free it from its carapace of commentary. Nor were these the province only of crusty old bookworms, for such was the nature of the bureaucratic empire that was China that no man could hold office unless he competed successfully in the civil service examinations that were open to everyone—unless, in other words,

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he was a scholar with years of Confucian learning behind him. And he was no scholar if he could not quote from the Book of Songs. Confucian learning meant knowing not just the classics but what the classics imparted in the way of appropriate norms and practices, in other words, ritual propriety. Only men with that sort of cultivation, moral no less than intellectual, were deemed fit to govern. No vision of hellfire torments was necessary to keep such a person on the straight and narrow, only his internalization, through all that classical book learning, of Confucian moral conventions. Nor did formal law hold him in check so much as ethical code. And Confucius would call a man educated if he valued virtue more than physical beauty, if he exerted himself to the utmost in serving his father and mother, if he was prepared to give his life for his sovereign, and if in intercourse with friends he was true to his word.1 Confucius prized self-control—it seldom led men astray, he said—and if he comes across as rather proper, more intellectual than appetitive, that does seem to be how he really was.2 Anyone who heard him say, ‘Hard is it to deal with him, who will stuff himself with food the whole day, without applying his mind to anything’3 and put him down for a sobersides would not, one imagines, be too far wrong. His legacy has a lot to answer for, his twentieth-century debunkers claim, not least the squeamishness with regard to sex that he and his followers had handed on. Did Confucius not famously say of certain airs in the Book of Songs that he disliked their music and their lyrics for their licentiousness? And did this pronouncement not invite centuries of anti-sex annotations and commentaries? One commentator even doubted the truth of the tradition that it was Confucius who selected and edited the Book of Songs, for if it had been the Sage himself who anthologized them, how could the lewd ones not have been weeded out? Confucius has famously said, ‘The three hundred Songs are summed up in one single phrase: “Having no depraved thoughts.”’4 It would be hard to square that with those errant verses. For example, surely these lines have no business in a canonized work? Out in the bushlands a creeper grows, The falling dew lies thick upon it. There was a man so lovely, Well rounded his clear brow. By chance I came upon him: ‘Oh, Sir, to be with you is good.’5

The poem from which these lines are drawn is in the voice of a woman who fancies a handsome man she sees in a chance encounter. Just desire is enough to raise moralistic hackles in a Confucian scholar, let alone female desire. And there are plenty of other poems like it in the anthology. For example, sleeplessness is seen to join with amorous longing against an evocation of stormy weather in the song ‘Wild and Windy’:

16

When True Love Came to China A great wind and darkness; Day after day it is dark. I lie awake, cannot sleep, And gasp with longing. Dreary, dreary the gloom: The thunder growls, I lie awake, cannot sleep, And am destroyed with longing.6

Though not part of the set singled out for condemnation by Confucius, this and many other songs speak of young lovers. A fair number would seem to be connected to a spring festival where boy met girl—perhaps lined up with others of their sex on opposite sides of a stream—for courtship and mating. It was an occasion when male and female could proposition and unabashedly sport and flirt with each other. Ever since then phrases such as ‘spring thoughts,’ ‘spring heart,’ and ‘spring feeling’ have denoted love and sexual awakening. In another poem, a girl yearning for spring in the third line is seduced by the fourth: In the field there is a dead roe. With white grass we wrap it. There is a girl who longs for spring. A fine fellow seduces her. In the forest there is a pusu tree. In the field there is a dead deer. With white grass we bind it. There is a girl like jade. Oh, undress me slowly. Oh, do not touch my kerchief. Do not make the shaggy dog bark.7

A barking dog would wake the parents, who are too close at hand for comfort. The kerchief, worn at the belt like an apron, is symbolically torn on the wedding night, as a girl’s maidenhead was. Metaphorically too, the dead roe wrapped is the lovers’ coupling ‘covered up,’ this perhaps accomplished by the boy making an honest woman of the girl. Sex has always been hemmed in by taboo, regardless of culture. Nowhere in the world could sexual expression break loose into the open unbridled by ritual code. In ancient China sex seemed to have been even more of a matter of state than in other civilizations. There sexual promiscuity seemed to have been political licentiousness by another name. It was almost as if you could only be a libertine if you were a conspirator or fomenter of rebellion. It was a Chinese historian’s reflex to blame disorder in the country on the emperor’s excessive attachment to his harem. Confucians were for

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correct political comportment by being against improper sex. As has been observed by Paul Rakita Goldin, the author of The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (2002), ‘order and disorder of a political nature are frequently associated with order and disorder of a sexual nature.’8 Old habits die hard, none more so than when they are Chinese and ideological. Twenty-five centuries separate the time of Confucius from that of Chris Patten, but when that radical last governor of Hong Kong instituted electoral reforms to make the local legislative system of the then British colony more democratic before handing it over to China, an outraged Chinese government reviled him by calling him names, famously ‘whore’ and ‘perpetrator of a 1,000-year crime’.9 Patten had threatened the unity of centralized power and offended against political propriety: was this not licentious of him? It is hard to imagine any other of the world’s governments thinking in this way. Communist as this one might be, Chinese it still is. Sex was read as politics in another way, by understanding sexual intercourse allegorically, as the relationship between a ruler and his subjects, or between a deity and his human worshippers. Allegorical readings of this kind are of course not confined to the Chinese: the Bible’s Song of Songs comes immediately to mind as another example. Exegetes of that book have pressed lines like ‘Oh give me the kisses of your mouth / For your love is more delightful than wine,’ into service as an allegory of God’s relationship with Israel (or the love between Christ and the Church).10 We know from the Book of Songs as well as other ancient texts that during propitiatory ritual observances, worshippers sometimes invoked the spirits in songs employing sexual imagery, with the relationship of earthling to deity represented in the metaphor of hierogamous union. Goldin chooses to read the anthology’s very first song in this metaphoric way. The song’s imagery famously opens with the cry of ospreys on an islet, then ends with the lines, ‘The reclusive, modest girl— / as a bell to a drum, he delights in her.’ In between it describes a keyed-up lover: Long and short is the duckweed To the left and to the right we look for it. The reclusive, modest girl— waking and sleeping he seeks her. He seeks her and does not obtain her. Waking and sleeping he pines and yearns for her. Oh, anxious! Oh, anxious! He tosses and twists and turns onto his side.11

Goldin thinks the sexual imagery a metaphor for the yearning of a worshipper for his goddess, the bells and drums in the last line echoing those sounded in rituals in which supplicants invoked the spirits of their dead ancestors. She is ‘reclusive’ and so aloof, but still the worshipper will try to entice her to mate with him on earth.12

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Goldin’s interpretation is a far cry from orthodox commentary. With Confucius in mind, generations of Chinese commentators have been at pains to give the whole poem a moral spin. Every literate Chinese knows by heart what the Sage has said of the poem: ‘There is joy without licentiousness, grief without injury.’ As the orthodox version has it then, the girl is the royal consort, beyond the reach of any admirer’s ardour because she observes the ‘separation of the sexes’ decreed by propriety—‘her seclusion is deep’ is how the commentary puts it—just like the crying ospreys which keep clear of each other instead of being promiscuously hugger-mugger. Morally and politically, the consequences of sex segregation are seen to be immense, indeed nothing short of world-shaking: ‘When husband and wife have separation,’ the commentary continues, ‘father and son are intimate; when father and son are intimate, lord and vassal are respectful; when lord and vassal are respectful, the court is upright; when the court is upright, the royal transformation is complete’13—‘royal transformation’ being the King’s perfect and complete moral make-over of all the world. Readings of this kind might now seem forced to us, even ridiculous, with too much of a ‘she doth protest too much’ air to it. Yet in the ancient frame of mind a reckless love affair is not just a reckless love affair but an indication of how far the government of the day had gone off course. A deserted woman is not just a deserted woman but a metaphor for the misunderstood and unappreciated courtier or official. Her plaint is not just a plaint about her husband’s or lover’s neglect but a government official’s plea for a return to good government. Indeed, read a relationship between the sexes as anything but a relationship between the sexes and you would be thought to be doing right by Confucius. Politics being the Sage’s true calling, it was political meaning and metaphor that Confucian scholars found under every bed: sex needn’t be sex if it could be symbol.

‘But it is just sex,’ protests Wen Yiduo, who set out to prove this point in essays he wrote on the Book of Songs in the 1930s. Readers create anew each classic they read. They may misunderstand it, then pass on that misunderstanding to those who come after them. So long as it is read, the text will continue to develop, or to undergo disfigurement, in the minds of its readers. Far from being a problem though, the different readings of the Book of Songs are as much grist to my mill as the songs themselves, since it cannot be stressed enough that my concern is with what people understood love to be and how that understanding changes. Wen’s reading tells me something about how the modern conceptions of it relate to the traditional ones, and my interest is not in whether their readings were correct but how they came to think the way they did. Wen Yiduo (1899–1946) was a poet, illustrator, scholar of classical Chinese literature and political activist who posed a challenge to tradition in more ways than

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one. Such challenges were the main item of business on the agenda of the May Fourth movement, for whose rebels Confucian morality was a particular bête noire. Wen was a twenty-year-old student in the prestigious, American-founded Tsinghua University in Beijing the year the movement erupted. He was a rebel in the mind as well as on the street, penning and handing out agitprop pamphlets in Beijing. A fine artist, he has left us, in the form of an illustration published in the Tsinghua University yearbook, a drawing of a student protestor speaking to an audience of passers-by in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in Beijing.14 When Wen left for the United States on a scholarship in 1922, it was to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. The school thought well of him, as a report there for 1923 indicates: ‘He is one of the strongest members of his class and has maintained a uniformly high standing through the year.’15 The next year he transferred to Colorado College, enticed there by his friend Liang Shiqiu, whom he had known at Tsinghua University and of whom we will hear more in the next chapter. By the time Wen returned to China, in 1925, his interest in painting had already been overtaken by his interest in poetry—and new-style poetry at that. The May Fourth movement saw the breakthrough out of the Classical Chinese written style into that of the vernacular, or Modern Chinese, and Wen won a name for himself as a pioneering practitioner of the new form. However, the old was not jettisoned, and before long he was delving into the oldest Chinese poetry of all, namely the Book of Songs. Here he broke with tradition yet again by offering his readers an entirely new reading, one informed by his acquaintance with Western thinking, not least that of Sigmund Freud. Look at this classic with an unoccluded eye, he advises, and you will see that it is ‘licentious,’ indeed utterly licentious! Of course this is not at all to decry the book. What age are we living in? What age did the compilers live in? We’re twentieth-century Chinese; they lived in antiquity, a primitive stage in the evolution of society. If we cannot imagine how frankly and baldly they must have talked about sex in those days, then there is something wrong with us. As primitive people they could not possibly have repressed sexual instincts to the extent of not expressing them. Yet that is what all those commentaries would have us believe, when in fact we ought to be surprised that the book is not more ‘licentious.’16 Wen then analyzes the five ways in which the book refers to sexual intercourse: outright, metaphorically, by hints, by association, and by symbolization. This last is where Freud comes in: following the Viennese doctor’s interpretation of dreams, in which apparently innocent content is seen to be symbolic of wishful, unmistakably sexual impulses, Wen unlocks the sexual meaning of words, phrases, and even whole poems in the Book of Songs. The best known of his interpretations is that of the symbolic meaning of fish. He decodes it as symbolizing sexual relations, citing linguistic usages in ancient texts as well as in folk songs and sayings; and thanks also to his interest in

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ethnography, he is able to find support for his assertion in the occurrence of fish as symbols of fertility in other cultures.17 Not all Wen’s Chinese contemporaries were persuaded by his Freudian reading— Liang Shiqiu thought it too slanted towards sex. Yet his decoding of fish and fishing, and also of hunger as signifying sexual desire, is widely accepted today. There is one poem, ‘Banks of the Ru,’ which would be hard to understand unless read in his way. This starts with images of the female narrator collecting kindling or cutting firewood by the riverbank and thinking of ‘her lord,’ then breaks for no apparent reason into a new stanza with the line, ‘The bream has a reddened tail . . .’ The academic Edward L. Shaughnessy is surely not alone in taking this to signify ‘an engorged phallus,’ following Wen’s interpretation.18 It might be thought that Wen’s enthusiasm for psycho-literary history was idiosyncratic, whereas in fact he was quite characteristic of his generation. A friend of his, the sociologist and eugenicist Pan Guangdan (1899–1967), did what Freud did in his classic Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (1910)—he probed the psyche and sexuality of a historical figure. Pan, who converted to Christianity when he was about seventeen, was first a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, then at Dartmouth College and Columbia University in America. Upon his return to China in 1926 from the United States, he taught at universities in Shanghai but from 1934 onwards he was back in Beijing, and it was there that students heard him lecture on sex, one of a host of subjects on which he brought his reading of American, English and German authors to bear.19 There they all are—Freud of course; Havelock Ellis, of whom he wrote a potted biography and whose writings he translated; Aldous Huxley, whom he also translated; the Bible; Arthur Schopenhauer; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and numerous others. While still a student in Beijing, Pan decided to revisit the story of the seventeenth-century Feng Xiaoqing, a girl who died from an excess of emotion on an island in the West Lake in Hangzhou, leaving a portrait and eleven of her poems. She had beauty and she had talent—and by her time beauty-and-talent twinned had become the stock characteristic of a literary or fictional heroine. What is more, she was touched by tragedy, sold as a concubine at the tender age of fifteen and then banished to the island by her husband’s jealous principal wife, only to die alone of consumption two years later. As tragedy spoke to the self-styled ‘men of feeling’ of her time, the age of sensibility (see Chapter 4), her story inspired biographies and a flood of poetry and drama right up to the twentieth century; and, if Pan Guangdan had anything to do with it, she would also become the subject of Freudian analysis. After perusing the literary sources for evidence of obsessive self-absorption, he had her down for a case of narcissism, a condition first identified by Havelock Ellis, the Victorian English pioneer of sexology. How Pan explains Feng’s case smacks of Freud’s theory, which posits narcissism as a disorder of the libido; this has been withdrawn

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from the outside world and turned in and back upon the ego, and it is the turning back that causes the illness. The inhibition of the libido makes emotional life all but impossible. From undergraduate paper, Pan’s essay grew into a serialized article published in a popular woman’s magazine in Shanghai in 1924, then was brought out as a book in 1927.20 This enjoyed several reprints in succeeding years, one as recent as 1990. The first edition has an illustration by his friend Wen Yiduo, a watercolour in which the poetess is seen with her back to the viewer, her left shoulder sensually exposed by the loose folds of her robe. Framed by uncombed hair, her face, reflected in the mirror before which she sits, has a look of strain and neediness about it, as well as an anxiety that is emphasized by her two long nervous fingers touching the lower lip.21 Like his friend Wen, Pan was ready to find in the Book of Songs sexual content capable of being explained by newly available European terminology, only in his case it was for the purpose of advancing a study of homosexuality. By his day homosexuality had been given a new, modern Chinese name, one that translates as ‘same-sex love.’22 Pan combed the literature from the Book of Songs onwards and down to the last dynasty (Qing) for accounts of male-male love, and found that the list of recorded homosexuals, including emperors, is a long one in Chinese history. Pan carefully and eruditely tabulates it with the literary source for each of the names and, wherever possible, the names of their catamites, favourites or lovers spelt out in an adjoining column.23 He found the evidence to be particularly marked for the period known in Chinese history as the Six Dynasties (AD 220–589), when there emerged an extraordinary sensibility to a person’s looks and manners. A famous dandy of the time, Pan Yue, had only to step out into the streets to be mobbed by admiring ladies. Outward beauty counted as never before, and perfumes, cosmetics, and hair and body ornaments were widely employed to enhance it. Pan Guangdan told his students and readers that the period was China’s closest parallel to Classical Greece, where homoerotic relationships—usually between an upper-class older man and a boy—were widely tolerated (see Chapter 3). More than tolerated, said Pan—male-male love was regarded as purer and loftier than man-woman love. He was not sure whether it was so regarded in Six Dynasties China but he did not doubt that it was met with far less prejudice and moral censure then than in later times.24 Pan wrote about homosexuality without moralizing and with almost a sense of discovery. In translating the catalogue of sexual conduct in Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex (a condensation of his multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex), Pan’s enthusiasm for pressing home parallels found in Chinese literary sources turned his footnotes into a commentary so extended that it eclipsed the body text. Though rarely stumped for a Chinese equivalent, two English words, ‘prudery’ and ‘frigidity,’ made him hesitate for a moment or two. In the end, there being no conceivable situation in life for which the Chinese cannot furnish some apt proverb or set phrase, he explained

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the first in his footnotes by citing an idiom of the lower Yangtze region: ‘to love plums yet pretend to fear sourness.’ For the second he borrowed the Chinese word for ‘cold,’ ‘gloomy,’ and ‘glum’—yinleng—the first syllable of which, yin, denotes the feminine force in the feminine-masculine (or negative-positive) yin-yang polarity in Chinese cosmology. It is obvious why new words had to be coined: heirs to Confucius could only think of a prude as a paragon of rectitude and sexual discipline, and of frigidity as praiseworthy feminine modesty and chastity.25 This mining of the native vein with the pickaxes of foreign concepts was an exercise which writers of the time other than Pan and Wen relished. My next and last example concerns bound feet, those three-inch ‘golden lotuses’ on which Havelock Ellis could write a whole book were he Chinese. If ever an object of desire were of man’s making— culturally constructed rather than biologically given—those lily feet were it. What a sophisticated form of female subjugation it was too: no woman could be a gadabout with maimed feet, and what better guarantee of a wife’s fidelity to her husband than to bind her physically to the home. Until the twentieth century few mothers dared to leave their daughters’ feet unbound, since big feet were the butt of ridicule and scorn and, what is worse, robbed a girl of her chances of catching a good husband. A woman who stumped about on her heels would be an unattractive spectacle today, but so much and for so long had ‘golden lotuses’ been eroticized by Chinese men of letters that a girl was not desired by any man unless her feet were tiny. Never mind her lips or breasts or eyes, you could imagine the man thinking, let us just take a look at her feet. The hero of Romance of the West Wing, a famous thirteen-century play I shall discuss more fully in another chapter, says something to that effect when he first catches sight of the heroine and falls head over heels in love with her: Such a girl in this world! Isn’t she a heavenly beauty, a real ‘state-toppler’? Needn’t mention her figure—why, that pair of feet alone are worth a hundred talents of gold.

And again: It is not necessary to say, ‘The corners of her eyes, there she lets passion linger,’ Because this single footprint relays all the feelings of her heart.26

But while men of earlier times waxed lyrical about feet, those of Wen’s and Pan’s generation did not. Decidedly not: the writer Guo Moruo (1892–1978), who will make much more than a cameo appearance later, writes that what the hero as well as the author had was foot fetishism. Earlier men of letters had aestheticized their fixation, passing judgements on small feet rather as today’s connoisseurs would on wine or art. But not Guo: Pan Guangdan credits him with being the first in China to point out that a fetish is what it is.27 In Freudian theory, if the developing sexual aim is frustrated short of fulfilment at a crucial stage of infancy, it settles for a symbolic substitute. Feet

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are such a substitute, Guo writes, and Confucian sexual repression is what fixates the libido on the fetish symbol. Guo as good as calls China, or at least its upper-class male population, a nation of sick perverts. As for the women, it is clear to him that they embrace subjection and sexual exploitation out of masochism. Not that Guo thinks any the less of Wang Shifu, the play’s extremely fine author, for having a foot fetish; with all that ‘twisting’ of the libido by Confucian morality, how could Wang’s sexual aim not be deflected to an abnormal sexual object? Romance of the West Wing is a great creative work, and on reflection Guo is not at all sure that Wang would have produced it had his dammed-back libido not have to seek another path for expression.28 Here Guo is really talking about sublimation, the Freudian means of converting libidinal energy displaced from normal sexual fulfilment to higher, artistic use. Still, it has been ‘volcanic,’ the way education in recent years has awakened young men and women to their ‘individual consciousness.’ The perversion is now ‘withered,’ Guo says, ‘turned to ashes.’ Though he strikes a brighter note when he observes this, he is deeply disturbed at how many older men and women are still stuck with it. The movement against foot-binding started in the 1890s. Its extreme cruelty apart, educated Chinese came to see it as a mark of backwardness that shamed China in the eyes of the world, and they viewed it with total aversion. Their campaign against it must be counted a success because so firmly entrenched a custom is seldom brought to an end in so little time. The change vividly indexes the speed and scope of the movement for women’s rights in China. Nevertheless, it came too late for the twenty-nineyear-old Guo Moruo. Though there was nothing he and his generation found more repugnant than bound feet, he himself was married to a small-footed woman. His mother had chosen her for him in total disregard of his desire or pleasure, let alone of romance or love. It was against such marital unions—of which those golden lilies were a detested symbol—that his cohort fought. The next milestone of progress they aimed for was the abolition of the system of arranged marriage. Since that exercise involved a freeing-up of the choice of mate, love was thrust to the fore.

Chinese article on love illustrated by The Ravishment of Psyche by the French painter WilliamAdolphe Bouguereau. The Ladies’ Journal (vol. 12, no. 7, 1926).

3 Love in the Western World

Emotional arousal is sensual arousal; sensual arousal is sexual arousal. The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan culture. Agape, spiritual love, belongs to eros but has run away from home. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

Arthur Waley, the great orientalist and Bloomsbury figure, has said, ‘To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese, it is something commonplace, obvious—a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions.’1 While other sinologists and translators think Waley jaundiced and mistaken,2 I propose to take him seriously and consider his remark alongside Eileen Chang’s view (quoted in Chapter 1) that the Chinese do not much love and that even their love stories do not often tell of love. Waley is speaking of poetry, but is what he observes true also of real life? It has frequently been questioned whether literature can be considered reliable sources for the historian. Justifiably so: fiction is not fact. Yet it must, by its very nature, reflect the imaginative life of the society which produced it. It reacts to and gives voice to what is in the air around it, and it in turn provides models for people imaginatively to follow. Eileen Chang’s remark is one of many to relate love stories to real life. And, as we shall see, Waley himself smudged the distinction between poet and person. No writer has expressed the inextricable link of life to letters more clearly than C. S. Lewis, who observes in his landmark book The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, ‘If  the feeling came first a literary convention would soon arise to express it: if the convention came first it would soon teach those who practised it a new feeling.’3 Waley, whose translations enraptured his English readers, had taught himself Chinese while working as assistant keeper of oriental prints and manuscripts at the British Library. Yet he failed ever to visit China. When his close friend Harold Acton, the writer and dilettante, was asked to explain why, he answered, ‘Ooh yes. Arthur had a recurrent stoppage.’4 Suppose access to medical care had been certain enough in those days for Waley to travel to China, might he have gone there after he had quit his

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job at the British Library in 1929? If he had, he might well have found that while some Chinese would take issue with his remark, many would agree with him. Some would tell him that what he thought true of Chinese poetry was true in fact—love was not of supreme importance to the Chinese—while others would say that it would be if they had anything to do with it. The latter would be the writers and progressives who made up the May Fourth generation. I will relate that generation’s preoccupation with the question of love in other chapters but for the moment I will stay with Waley’s line of thinking. For the Chinese poet, Waley thinks, the man-woman relation is a matter of coupling or satisfying bodily need, not emotions. In other words, it is a matter of sex, and there is certainly nothing mysterious about that. From there he goes on to say that the Chinese poet reserves such emotions entirely for friendship; in Waley’s view it is as a friend, not lover, that the Chinese poet recommends himself. By contrast, the European poet’s preoccupation with love is apparent not only in the actual love poems but in all poetry where the poet’s personality is ‘in any way obtruded,’ with the poet showing himself in a romantic light. Another who disagrees with Waley is Anne Birrell, whose translation of the medieval Chinese anthology of love poems named New Songs from a Jade Terrace is a Penguin Classic. She contends that the supposed preference of Chinese poets for writing about their friends rather than their lovers is a myth.5 Though Waley knew he was being criticized, he stuck to his guns. How tiny a proportion of the whole mass of classical Chinese poetry from the seventh to the fourteenth century is devoted to romantic love is proof, he claims, that he is right. In any case, he was the sort to prefer the ‘neat and tranquil’ figure of Chinese classical poets, with their ‘gentle and reflective’ poems, to their ‘bare-headed and wild-eyed’ European counterparts, with ‘shirts unbuttoned at the neck as though they feared that a seizure of emotion might at any minute suffocate them.’6 So the comment quoted at the start of this chapter sounds like a denigration but turns out not to be. Or not much of a one, as might be inferred from another of his remarks: It has been the habit of Europe to idealize love at the expense of friendship and so to place too heavy a burden on the relation of man and woman. The Chinese erred in the opposite direction, regarding their wives and concubines simply as instruments of procreation. For sympathy and intellectual companionship they looked only to their friends.7

Here he sounds extraordinarily like those May Fourth progressives who decried loveless arranged marriages, which to them were unions for reproduction only. Teased out, Waley’s characterization of the Chinese conception of the man-woman relation is that it has no mystery to it, it is appetitive not emotional, and it is not idealized. Why not, you might ask? Better still, you might turn the question on its head and ask why it should be thought a thing of mystery in the West, instead of something

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obviously natural? You might ask why sex is distinguished from emotion? And why is love so idealized? Turned around, the question is no longer ‘why love in China is not like love in the West’ but ‘why love is the way it is in the West.’

The mystery was not there to begin with but was acquired over several centuries. The Roman poet Ovid (born 43 BC), with whose poems—The Art of Love (Ars Amatoria), Cures for Love (Remedia Amoris) and the Amours (Amores)—a history of love in the West might begin, thought of it in frankly sensual terms, with none of the romance of later times. It was love as sexual opportunism and conquest, without any sense of mystery. Furthermore, to Ovid’s audience not only was love extramarital (since husbands and wives could not love each other), it was also warfare, and one way lovers waged it was by playing a game of mutual deceit.8 The Art of Love appeared in a Chinese translation in 1929. The translator was the twenty-four-year-old poet Dai Wangshu, who had been a student of French at Aurora, a university founded by Jesuits in Shanghai, and who went on to study in France. Ai jing (‘love classic’), as the book is called in Chinese, came out in a second edition in 1932, and in the short preface to that Dai praises the book, his admiration turning on Ovid’s success in titillating his readers without descending into lewdness.9 The book was well timed, for, following a deluge of Chinese translations of Western fiction, Chinese interest in love had grown to a height by the late 1920s and early 1930s. But Ovidian love was not ‘true love.’ ‘True love’ was fin’amors, the courtly love that the troubadours of southern France and the Minnesingers of Germany sang of from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, and which coloured such medieval romances as Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot and Perceval, and The Story of the Grail (figures in these stories, Sir Lancelot, Queen Guinevere, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, remain household names to this day). In the fin’amors convention the courtlychivalrous knight served his lady love rather as he would his liege lord. It was within its idiom too that Gottfried von Strassburg sanctified adulterous love in his adaptation of the legend of Tristan and Isolde. It has been called ‘love of a highly specialized sort’ by C. S. Lewis.10 What made it special, in fact extraordinary, was the ideal it evolved of the spiritual love of man for woman. While the Ovidian lover aimed mainly at the satisfaction of physical desire, the courtly lover, for all his display of the same outward signs of love—sighing, trembling, growing pale and thin and sleepless—adored his lady without wishing to possess her sexually. It was not only that the lady was invariably married; it was that the knight’s yearning for her was supposed to make him a finer being, for love was thought to have the power to ennoble man, and man was man and not beast because of his ability to mould his desire in this idealized form. The female idealized in courtly love was a love

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object less to be enjoyed than worshipped. She was worthy of the love of its poets and practitioners precisely because she was too pure, too untouchable, to reciprocate it. Purity was not an ideal until the Church asserted its authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the Christian ascetic ideal—to not experience desire at all— infiltrated courtly poetry. The idea that true love is pure would have been nonsense to the earlier troubadours.11 Neither Lancelot and Guinevere nor Tristan and Isolde were pure, indeed far from it. But theologians and Church reformers, for whom sexual desire was sinful, even within marriage, moved to purify the clergy as well as to change the sexual practices of lay society. In the clerical view, desire was somehow more than the natural claims of physical being but the urges of a body which, as ‘flesh,’ was ever shadowed by the risk of temptation to concupiscence and sin. It was in that context that fin’amors developed, initially among aristocrats, for whom it was not just a literary fashion or allegorical style but a way also of counteracting the Church’s condemnation of all sexual pleasure. Redolent of refinement, selfless purity, and the emergent aristocratic code of conduct known as chivalry, fin’amors inverted the Church’s hostility to sex by sharply distinguishing itself from concupiscence, becoming a spiritually transforming longing that was ‘so holy’ that any sexual pleasure ‘that furthered love’s aims was good and innocent.’12 Courtly love was thus a counter-doctrine to and inversion of the Church reformers’ view of desire as dangerous appetitive lust. It was an ‘early version of the typical Western configuration of “romantic love,” which today is still seen, in certain Western and Western-influenced areas (and nowhere else), as standing in sharp contrast to sexual desire and yet mastering and purifying desire.’13 The rules of this love were codified in The Art of Courtly Love, an immensely popular and influential handbook written by Andreas Capellanus (Andreas the Chaplain) in the twelfth century. Just as man must be educated from animal to civilized being, Andreas instructs his audience, so must carnality be refined into love: Who doubts that the man who chooses the solaces of the upper part should be preferred to the one who seeks the lower? For so far as the solaces of the lower part go, we are in no wise differentiated from brute beasts . . . But the solaces of the upper part are, so to speak, attributes peculiar to the nature of man and are by this same nature denied to all the other animals. Therefore the unworthy man who chose the lower part should be driven out from love just as though he were a dog.14

Andreas maintains that love must be freely chosen, by ‘two persons who are bound together by a mutual trust and an identity of desires.’ What love is not, he insists, is marital affection. One reason conjugal affection cannot fit under the definition of true love is that it is not hidden or furtive enough to drive passion. Nor can love possibly flourish in a marriage because jealousy, which Andreas deems ‘the very substance of love, without which true love cannot exist,’ has no place in it, whereas jealousy should

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always be welcomed by lovers as a preservative of love, its ‘mother’ and ‘nurse.’ One aspect of jealousy is the lover’s fear that his beloved may not love him as he loves her. Andreas the Chaplain is also enlightening on the subject of ‘pure love.’ There are two kinds of love, he explains, one ‘pure’ and the other ‘mixed.’ The first ‘consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace, for that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely.’ It is this love that he recommends, for it endures and grows, and gives rise ‘to all excellence’ and ‘God sees very little offence in it.’ Mixed love, on the other hand, ‘gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus.’15 However, Andreas hastens to assure his readers that ‘mixed love, too, is real love’ and is praiseworthy enough; only it does not last, it offends God, and it carries grave dangers. He approves of both but prefers, he claims, to practise pure love: by this he presumably means he does not ‘go all the way.’ Andreas seems to be able to have his cake and eat it, to be ‘pure’ yet not strictly chaste. He can even square it with God, who is little offended by erotic intimacies provided they stopped short of copulation. Andreas later recanted, however, and advanced reasons for why love of woman should be avoided: he who serves love cannot serve God, so you had best maintain the purity of your body and ‘keep your vessel unspotted for the Lord.’16 Courtly love was paralleled and absorbed by a separate cult in medieval Catholicism, that of the Virgin Mary, adoration of whom was at a height at the time. The two cults became confused in the popular mind—a French translation of Andreas’s book in the thirteenth century, for example, besides giving religious colouring to passages originally without it, even identifies the lady whose love is being sought as the immaculately pure Virgin Mary. All this, the deification of woman and the Madonna-worship, the Chinese were to learn. One of their sources was a book called The Evolution of Love (1913, and published in Berlin in 1920). The author, an Austrian bank clerk turned poet, novelist and philosopher named Emil Lucka (1877–1941), was a Jewish convert to Catholicism whose writing was to be banned by the Nazis. His book had come out in a full Japanese translation, or rather a re-translation from an English edition, in 1917. The following year Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of the thousands of Chinese students to have studied in Japan and of whom we will hear more in another chapter, recommended it to his fellow Chinese in an essay he published in New Youth, the mouthpiece of the May Fourth progressives.17 Many more Chinese were introduced to Lucka and to courtly love by Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923), a Japanese professor of English literature who had furthered his studies in America and who was killed in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Kuriyagawa’s 1921 love treatise, Modern Views of Love, was a runaway bestseller in Japan, and in

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this way its contents, which are chock-a-block of the names of European works and authors, were disseminated far and wide. In China a précis of it appeared in 1922 in the pages of the Shanghai magazine The Ladies’ Journal.18 Then Ren Baitao (1890–1952), a journalist educated in Japan, undertook the first Chinese translation in 1923—by which time Modern Views of Love had already gone through no fewer than sixty editions in Japan. Ren’s was an excellently edited, abridged translation—he was right to find the original repetitive, verbose, disorganized and self-contradictory. It enjoyed many reprints and a long shelf-life, with a new, revised edition coming out in 1964, more than forty years after its first appearance.19 Separately, a full translation of this and successive writings of Kuriyagawa on love was published by the teacher and translator Xia Mianzun (1886–1946) in 1928. All around him, Kuriyagawa has said, sex was being talked about to the neglect of love’s aesthetic and spiritual meaning, and it was his dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, made worse by the hold that materialism and utilitarianism had on people’s values, that had spurred him to write his treatise. Xia Mianzun thought the treatise a prophylactic for similar ills in China: the tendency to ‘rattle on and on about carnal desire, and either to besmirch love or to play it like a game.’20 In his first chapter Kuriyagawa summarizes Lucka’s account of the three stages in the evolution of love. In the first of the three stages, unbridled sexual instinct and casual promiscuity reigned; our remote ancestors knew only sexual urges undifferentiated from other powerful impulses. The sexual impulse was general and impersonal, not directed towards a particular individual, and one female was as good as another. In an aside, Kuriyagawa observes that Confucian moralists are still stuck at this stage. As civilization developed, such indiscriminate sexuality gave way to more individualized unions. In the Middle Ages, something unprecedented appeared, a new personalized emotion that the lyrics of the early troubadours idealized as ‘chaste love.’ For this, the second stage of the erotic life, to emerge, there had first to occur the invention of ‘metaphysical love,’ and this Christianity effected, with its projection of a spiritual love on God and its emphasis on the divine nature of the soul of man. In the Middle Ages, this spiritual love was projected on to a woman, she who was the object of adoration in courtly love. Woman was deified, Kuriyagawa explains, becoming in one leap ‘a queen and a goddess.’ She became a purifying influence, and Kuriyagawa ends his paragraph by quoting Dante, specifically the latter’s description of his beloved Beatrice in his work of love the Vita Nuova (1292–94), as the ‘scourge of vice and queen of virtue.’21 Noting that Provence was the place of origin of this new feeling, Kuriyagawa refers to troubadours (interposing the English word) as the people who spread it about, and to Minnesingers (the word given in the original German) as those with a ‘romantic conception of love.’ The medieval period was also a time of asceticism, he reports, when sensuality was suppressed by the Church even as men worshipped sensuality’s vehicle,

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woman. The Church could live with the woman-worship as long as it was turned into the Madonna-worship of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Of course, he continues, professing chaste love for his beloved courtly lady did not stop the troubadour from pursuing sensual gratification with others. The new, spiritualized love fought the older sexual impulse, and to resolve that tension through a fusion of the two was well-nigh impossible. Woman was both sacred and profane, a divine being who spiritualized a man’s desire at the same time as she was a snare and a devil jeopardizing his soul’s salvation. A man of the Middle Ages, Lucka says (and Kuriyagawa paraphrases), would recognize this tragedy of his soul in a ‘magnificent’ portrayal of the dualism in Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser (see Chapter 13). After these two stages in which the body and the soul are separated, the third phase finally enables the body and the soul to merge, in a ‘psycho-physical’ unity so complete that the line between them disappears. From first the bestial and then the divine, love finally returns to the human and personal. ‘The unity of sexual impulse and love’ is what Lucka has for a sub-heading in his chapter on the final stage in the evolution of love.22 It was the stage that the Chinese thought they must aim for, evolve towards, if they were to arrive at modern love. As will be seen later, the ‘oneness of soul and flesh’ was the idea that the Chinese seized upon above all others as the definition of true love. A mania for things Western apart, forward progress was very much part of the ethos of the May Fourth period, so the notion of passing from one stage to the next in an upward evolutionary sequence, in love as in other areas of life, was a potent one. Just as, in looking to the West for models, practitioners of the new literature squeezed whole European literary epochs, from Realism and Romanticism to Modernism, into one decade, so love’s champions eagerly sought to propel themselves from Confucian barbarism (in which men coupled with women for the purpose of procreation) to the synthesis of spirit and flesh in a single leap. A second conduit of the idea of courtly love was Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), which came out in a complete Chinese translation in 1929 (portions of it began appearing from as early as 1907).23 Engels’s famous tract is not where you’d expect to find mentions of fin’amors because though he also adopts an evolutionary scheme—as he is bound to, as a Marxist—it is an economic one in which courtly love does not quite fit. Yet it is there. His theory historicizes the family, the economic forces underlying its changing forms, and the worsening (less and less equal) position of women. He posits primitive society’s promiscuous group marriage as the first stage, matriarchal pairing marriage as the next, the patriarchal extended family as the one after that, and bourgeois monogamy as the last of all forms to emerge. Until it came in with the rise of bourgeois monogamy, Engels claims, love was sought outside matrimony, with hetaerae. ‘Sex love,’ as he dubs it, was brought into fashion by chivalry. He traces its germ to the Middle Ages, when there appeared the

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‘first historical form of sexual love as passion  .  .  .  as the highest form of the sexual impulse—and that is what constitutes its specific character.’ This was ‘chivalrous love’ or, as he also calls it, ‘knightly love.’ But this love was not conjugal; on the contrary, ‘in its classic form among the Provençals, it heads straight for adultery.’24 It is not clear how courtly love fits into his evolutionary scheme but Engels does try to relate one to the other by saying that in its bourgeois form, it was no longer adulterous love but the love of husband and wife. Of all the known forms of the family, he holds, the only one through which love could develop was bourgeois monogamy. The bourgeoisie wanted romance and rapture and all the rest of it, but since bourgeois marriage was at bottom a money relationship, love remained a matter merely of theory and poetry. Only with the abolition of capitalism, and with it the patriarchal domination of women, could ‘our sex love’ come fully into its own. Sex love is by nature exclusive, says Engels, who sounds almost romantic when he writes about it, describing it as intense, durable, and founded on man-woman equality. But he does not see it faring well in a bourgeois union, since the husband’s ‘ownership’ of the wife made it easy for him to be unfaithful to her, so it was only in women that this exclusiveness was fully realized. For men, the double standard prevailed and bourgeois monogamy was routinely supplemented by adultery and prostitution. It is doubtful whether anyone in the West swallows Engels’s theories on faith today, but Chinese communists have taken them altogether seriously. Indeed, they stayed true to his scheme long after they came to power in 1949. Visitors to the National Museum of Chinese History in Beijing, for instance, found the story of neolithic China narrated as though it really were a matriarchal society to begin with, one that evolved over time, in parallel with the development of productivity, into a patriarchal system.25 Engels was not an exponent of courtly love and was not seen as such by the Chinese, but then what kindled Chinese interest was not courtly love as such but those aspects of it that spoke to them. This is evident in the way The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, which came out in a Chinese translation in 1928, was read and interpreted.26 These impassioned and eloquent letters unfold the celebrated relationship of ‘the earliest passionate lovers whose story has reached us,’ says the thinker Denis de  Rougemont, whose classic work Love in the Western World is invoked whenever the subject of courtly love is discussed. Noting that the brilliant French philosopher Peter Abelard and his exceptionally gifted pupil Heloise met for the first time in 1118, de Rougemont writes, And it is in the middle of this same century that love was first recognized and encouraged as a passion worth cultivating. Passionate love was then given a name which since became familiar. It was called courtly love.27

Heloise, who was considerably younger than Abelard, was the niece of Fulbert, a canon who encouraged her in her remarkable intellectual grasp and interests. When Fulbert

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discovered the love affair, he was incensed and tried to separate her from Abelard, but he succeeded only in fanning the flames of the lovers’ passion and one day found them in bed together. When Heloise discovered she was pregnant, Abelard arranged for her to go to his people in Brittany, where a son was born. Back in Paris, he appeased Fulbert by proposing to marry Heloise provided that the marriage was kept a secret, this to protect his reputation for celibacy as well as the good name of the school where he taught and where rigorous religious standards were upheld. Fulbert went back on his word, however, and divulged the marriage. Abelard secretly removed Heloise from her uncle’s house and left her in a convent, profanely disguising her in a nun’s habit. But he could not keep away, and the two committed the sacrilege of making love in a corner of the convent refectory. Fulbert exacted a terrible revenge by getting some hirelings to set upon Abelard one night, when he was asleep, and castrate him. At Abelard’s bidding, Heloise took the veil despite being still in her twenties. Though she felt no vocation for the monastic life, she presently became abbess of a flourishing community of nuns to which Abelard, who took holy orders after she did, served as spiritual adviser. Outliving him by some twenty-odd years, she was buried alongside him when she died in 1163 or 1164. Moved several times, their remains came to a final rest in a sarcophagus at the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, where the odd local or tourist would occasionally lay flowers. A powerful sexuality had driven the two lovers. So intense were the lusts that fired him that Abelard ‘set those wretched, obscene pleasures, which we blush even to name, above God as above myself,’ and ‘no reverence for decency or for God even during the days of Our Lord’s Passion, or of the greater sacraments could keep me from wallowing in this mire.’ (Intercourse between even married couples was forbidden by the Church during Lent.)28 Castration dampened those fires in Abelard but they continued to rage in Heloise. Men called her chaste, but little did they know, she told Abelard, what a hypocrite she was. Even during the celebration of the Mass, ‘when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers.’29 She could find no penitence either, for she blamed God for what had befallen them; and anyway, how could it be called repentance for her sins if she was still minded to sin and was still on fire with desire? Later, believing herself to be neglected and forgotten by Abelard, she complained that it was ‘the flame of lust rather than love’ that had bound him to her.30 Not wishing perhaps to be drawn on this, Abelard agreed, though not necessarily with the way she saw it: choosing to understand lust from the Christian monastic point of view, he wrote, ‘My love, which brought us both to sin, should be called lust, not love’—all the more reason she should turn her mind to Jesus Christ instead, for ‘it was he who truly loved you, not I.’31

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Their story, then, is not one you’d call ‘pure,’ ‘sublime,’ and ‘transcendental,’ yet those were the words the Chinese translator used of it in his advertisement in the literary magazine Crescent Moon Monthly, where he first published it. This seems a little puzzling, until perusal of the English version he used—an edition in the Temple Classics series reprinted by J. M. Dent in London—reveals it to be a romantic rewriting, indeed a travesty, of the original text.32 There is a letter from Heloise, wholly made up, in which she announces, ‘At last, Abelard, you have lost Heloise for ever . . . I confess my inconstancy, Abelard, without a blush.’33 And who is the rival whom she now loves? It is God. In the Temple Classics version she is overtaken by God’s grace, whereas we are never to know from the historic Heloise’s letters whether she succeeded in achieving a change of heart and in devoting herself entirely to God, as everyone who has written about her has wanted to think. This version also faces Abelard with a tricky conundrum not presented in real life: ‘not cured’ of his love for Heloise, he wonders ‘How can I separate from the person I love the passion I detest?’34 The Chinese translator was Liang Shiqiu (1903–87), who is best known today for single-handedly translating the complete works of William Shakespeare into Chinese. When his The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise came out in 1928, he had been back in China for no more than two years from America. There he had studied at the universities of Columbia and Harvard and had come deeply under the influence, at Harvard, of the conservative cultural critic Irving Babbitt. Babbitt was a champion of classical standards (to him a thing was classical when it belonged to a high class or to the best class), and an unremitting critic of the Romantic imagination, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s. To Babbitt, the classical spirit is universal and human; it is moderate, sensible and decent, whereas the Romantic hunger for the thrilling and marvellous undermines timeless beliefs and traditions. It was Babbitt’s belief that humankind possesses an internal ethical will, what he called an ‘inner check.’ But with Rousseau defining humans as naturally good, only marred by society, man is relieved of his old obligation to discipline himself. To Babbitt, problems are not outside the individual, so the solution to them is not revolution, which is a forced change in the economic and political conditions external to the individual. Hardly surprisingly, Babbitt was hated by the intellectual Left, and seen in a China avid for revolutionary change to be fuddy-duddy at best and reactionary at worst. To know and restrain one’s self—that was what Babbitt taught his fiercely loyal students. Babbitt, who drew widely from the wisdom of the East, held the Buddha and Confucius in high regard, and one reason was no doubt the stress that their messages placed on restraint and moderation. One thing the ‘real Buddha’ was not, Babbitt has remarked, was ‘an emotionalist.’35 It has been said that if Babbitt had a religion, it was closer to Buddhism than to any other. By all accounts, his translation of the

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Buddhist scripture the Dhammapada was a great labour of love that took many years of his life. In all likelihood it was the Dhammapada that Babbitt’s Chinese disciple drew upon when, looking back on The Love Letters years later, Liang found a Buddhist analogy for the medieval Christian association, so pronounced in the story of Abelard and Heloise, of sex and sin. He compared it to the Buddhist concept of ‘thirst’ (tanha), or craving, the principal and most immediate cause of suffering because it is never satisfied but is ever-shifting from one unbidden impulse to another. To desire is to suffer, Buddhists say, because it is to crave something we do not and can never fully have. Just as, in its chapter on ‘Thirst,’ the Dhammapada enjoins the Buddhist to ‘dig up the root of thirst,’36 so Liang holds that the practice of the spiritual life presupposes the rooting out of craving. But he also notes that overcoming craving is a far-from-easy task. This goes for even a monk and a nun. Though Abelard and Heloise are exceptional people, still they are human, and humans are saddled with the physical body, and from the body arise love and sexual desire. Actually the Buddhist crushing of passion for the sake of ending suffering is not quite the same as the Christian’s war against sexual temptation to escape the penalty of sin. For the Buddhist, the source of suffering is ignorance rather than sin. The deepest ignorance is to fail to see things as they really are—that is, impermanent and ever changing—so that to desire and to cling is actually to grasp at nothing. Sexual desire is not singled out for particular opprobrium. In the Christian theology bequeathed by Saint Augustine—he who, in his Confessions, famously prayed for ‘chastity and continence . . . but not quite yet’—the stress falls quite differently.37 Augustine defined the doctrine that each individual is born with the taint of Original Sin. That unbidden sexual urges and pleasures notoriously escaped the control of the conscious will was seen as a symptom of an enduring frailty, ‘a fatal deposit of concupiscence’ inherited by mankind from Adam’s Fall.38 In so seeing it, Augustine ‘placed sexuality irremovably at the centre of the human person,’ giving it a far greater weight than it might otherwise have borne.39 It is little wonder that sex is one of ‘Western love’s greatest obsessions.’40 ‘Restraining the flesh’s incontinence,’ says the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, ‘is a way of leaving a bonfire at the heart of humanity, the better to be consumed by it.’ It is a paradox that ‘the better to free himself from the flesh, the Christian who renounces it has to think about it all the time.’41 The removal of sin’s cause, as I have said, is not what the Buddhist aims for when he renounces sex. Still less does he abjure sexual love the better to love God. The passage where Heloise tells Abelard of her inconstancy in now loving his rival, God, instead of him reads very strangely, indeed incomprehensibly, in Chinese, as does her ex-lover’s injunction, ‘Remember that the least thought for any other than God is an adultery.’42 He himself despairs that the love of God could not at the beginning ‘wholly annihilate’ his love of Heloise.43 Their love he calls ‘profane,’ ‘guilty,’ even ‘evil,’44 so it is just as

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well that he is castrated, for the mutilation furthers his soul’s salvation. In one of his real letters, he spoke of men as truly blessed who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.45 The eunuch he had in mind was the theologian Origen, whom Abelard regarded as the greatest Christian philosopher, and who, as a twentyyear-old in about AD 206, had himself castrated because only the body untouched by sexual experience could be made holy for God. Abelard himself thanked ‘divine grace’ for cleansing him of a ‘foul imperfection in order to preserve perfect purity.’46 Such horror of sexuality is matchless, certainly unparalleled in Chinese history, ventured a contributor to the Shanghai magazine The New Woman. He pointed to the example of Origen’s self-mutilation in an essay he wrote on ‘Asceticism and Freedom of Love’ in 1926.47 The distrust of sexual pleasure that had coursed through the Christian West for centuries was unknown in China, where sexual arousal had, to the Chinese commentator’s knowledge, never been viewed as sin. He wondered if readers knew why European Christian clergy in times past took nightly cold baths and whipped themselves? It was, he told them, to still their sexual urges and quieten their impure thoughts. The commentator had learned something else about Christian ascetics—their misogyny. Christian churchmen blamed sin on women, seen to be a source of temptation and sexual peril. They made women the scapegoat for their own ensnarement by flesh. For an example of the Christian demonization of women the commentator pointed to their being charged with diabolical witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was by the ‘sick imagination’ of their persecutors, he said, that women were accused of having sexual intercourse with Satan. And he described the tortures the women suffered, hysterical burnings and killings that he said were depicted in some paintings. Of course all this lay in the past, he reassured his readers, and Christianity was far more tolerant nowadays, but still there was no doubting the thorough infusion of the Western marriage system by religious thinking. In fact what lay at the back of his mind was the still uncertain place of love in the Chinese marriage system. He had his own agenda for raising the subject of asceticism and misogyny: it heightened the impression he wished to give his readers that there were anti-love and anti-women tendencies in Chinese culture too. Chinese tended to regard love between the sexes as not quite above board, he said, and Chinese women too had had the power to harm ascribed to them. Indeed, there were Chinese who, half-old and half-new in their thinking, believed (following Europeans) that romantic love qua sexual desire was a sin and that they should dispense with it in matrimony lest it tempted them to the pleasures of sex. Resistance should be put up against this and other anti-love attitudes, the writer declared, and cudgels taken up on behalf of the ‘freedom of love’ and the ‘sanctity of love.’ The two were complementary catchphrases in China during the 1920s, a double thrust against all who would do romantic love down, old-school morality-mongers

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no less than left-leaning revolutionaries (see Chapter 16). The struggle for ‘freedom of love’ was a mutinous bid for the right to choose one’s own mate in a marriage freely consented to and founded on mutual love. And was the fight not vindicated by love’s sanctity? The notion of love’s sacredness is pregnant with Christian associations, but not necessarily for the Chinese who harped on about it. The sheer difficulty of understanding what the Western world takes to be ‘Christian love’ was the problem. The best that the Chinese could do was to liken it to Confucius’ concept of ‘humanity,’ the virtue that has also been translated as ‘goodness’ or ‘benevolence.’48 The comparison is useful as far as it goes, but while the conceptual complexes in which Christian love and Confucian humanity are embedded do indeed overlap, they do not exactly coincide. In fact they fly apart in one particular, and that is the total absence in Confucian ‘humanity’ of anything like the distinctly Christian polarization of eros and agape. The relationship is so hard to understand for non-Christians that it is as well to try and make sense of it here. Of the idea of ‘Christian love,’ Saint Augustine was one of the great founders; it was he who really established Christianity as ‘the religion of love.’49 Augustine used the Latin word caritas for the highest form of love. This implies far more than its English cognate of ‘charity’ because Augustine included in it eros and agape, in what Christian scholars have termed ‘the caritas synthesis’—a synthesis that is itself forged from two traditions, Platonism (of which more later) and Christianity. One of the ways these two faces of love have been characterized has been to see eros (in the philosophical Platonic sense) as an ascending love that proceeds from man to God, and agape as a descending love that proceeds from God, or the incarnated God Jesus Christ, to man. Central to the Christian myth is the Crucifixion of God Incarnate. The Crucifixion is customarily interpreted sacrificially, as Christ dying on the cross in expiation for the sins of the world. It is a redemptive death, one that saves mankind once and for all. In the Christian narrative of sin and redemption, ideas of atonement and salvation are bound in a tight nexus with a descending love—for it is God’s love for man that has sent Christ into the world. (‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’). Indeed, as the Gospel of St John has famously pronounced, ‘God is love.’50 Synonymous with love, God is simply called ‘Love Himself, the inventor of all loves’ by the writer and lay theologian C. S. Lewis in his classic The Four Loves (the four being affection, friendship, eros and charity, each with a number of strands or subdivisions).51 Elevated to the rank of the sacred, love simply could not rise any higher; it has become ‘the source and origin of all being and all value.’52 With Christ’s coming, love edges closer to centre stage. Men are now enjoined to love one another as God loves them, expressing their love for God not directly but indirectly, by loving one another. God’s love is the model which Jesus would have us emulate when we love our enemies, do good to those who hate us and so on.

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What hubris, says Simon May in his book Love: A History, how tremendous a misunderstanding, to believe that human beings could model their own loving on how they believe God to love them, and thereby to regard their love for another as eternal and redemptive and unconditional, when in fact our love, says May, is always conditioned. May’s conclusion is, ‘In short: love is being overloaded.’53 Proof of this can be culled from literature, film and opera, in which we do not have to look far for visions of love clothed about with divinity. We may put these down to the literary conventions to which their authors are subject, and suppose them too overblown or histrionic (too operatic) to be taken seriously. Yet no rhetorical inflation is intended, nor read, in C. S. Lewis’s remark, ‘The human loves can be glorious images of Divine love.’54 One of Lewis’s four human loves is, as I have said, eros. So is eros’ image divine too? Yes, Lewis says, ‘This love is really and truly like Love Himself.’ Of itself, he adds, it is, ‘at its height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship.’ To one who is in love it could certainly seem that way, ‘a sort of religion.’55 Lewis reports that at the time of writing his book on courtly love, The Allegory of Love, he mistakenly believed ‘religion of love’ to be a purely literary convention, too ‘blind’ to realize that eros by its very nature deifies itself. To those not in love, however, agape is commonly prioritized over eros. Though in the New Testament agape is not yet absolutely distinguished from ‘eros-love,’ a distinction that is in fact read back into the New Testament many centuries later,56 the two have long been thought of as a dichotomy, with eroticism serving as a shorthand for sensual desire or sexuality. Besides, who in the West has not heard of Cupid, who is but Eros, the god of love in Greek mythology, by a Roman name? Art, literature and popular belief have diffused the modern form of Cupid, a pudgy winged boy with bow and arrow, throughout Western consciousness. In his grown-up form he is erotically allegorized in a familiar and, during some periods of European history, fashionable fable where he is united with Psyche, the Greek goddess who personifies the human soul. In China Eros as both the chubby infant and the lover of Psyche began appearing in text and image in the 1920s, when love was in the air and curiosity about the West at an unprecedented height.57 To move from the unions of gods and goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology to those in Chinese legend required no great imaginative leap. Legends about the couplings of goddesses and kings are an old Chinese heritage. One that will reappear in these pages is of a scene that brought into the Chinese literary vocabulary the term yunyu, ‘cloud and rain,’ as a metaphor for sexual intercourse. This is the ‘Rhapsody on Gaotang’ (the High Terrace), a poem that dates from the first or second century BC and is attributed to a court poet named Song Yu. According to the story, it was at the Wu Mountain at Gaotang that the King of Chu made love in a dream to a mysterious woman who, on parting, told him, ‘At dawn I am the morning cloud, at evening I am

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the driving rain.’ After he heard her say, ‘I offer you pillow and mat,’ the king took his pleasure with her, then honoured her as the Goddess of Wu Mountain by dedicating a shrine to her. The goddess’s legend lives on to this day in the recognition by educated Chinese of the words ‘Gaotang,’ ‘Wu Mountain,’ and ‘cloud-and-rain’ as literary synonyms for lovers’ rendezvous and for lovemaking. As the numerous sexualized immortals in Greek, Indian and Chinese mythology show, the appeal of erotic encounters with deities is universal. Sex was a path to divinity in ancient Chinese shamanism, and quests for union with a deity, typically a beautiful river goddess in ancient China, are frequently allegorized in early Chinese poetry. In the Daoist tradition, it was hierogamy—the marriage of the Queen Mother of the West and her heavenly mate—that brought the world into being and kept it in balance. In early art, this goddess, who is the yin to her consort’s yang, is shown in scenes juxtaposing her image with such symbols of yin and yang as the moon and the sun, and the tiger and the dragon.58 Love is linked to the stars in a charming folktale that tells of the marriage of the Cowherd (symbolizing the Altair) and the Spinning Maid (symbolizing Vega). In one of several variations of the story, they were married on a visit to earth but were forced to separate upon returning to Heaven; the King and Queen of Heaven had thought it best to keep them apart, as otherwise they would moon about all day. So a line was drawn across the heavens, and from that day on the Heavenly River, actually the Milky Way, has flowed between the lovers. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, when all the magpies in the air would assemble to form a bridge for them, they were allowed to cross the river to be reunited with each other. They wept copious tears when the time came for them to part once again, and these tears are the cause of the rains which fall during that season. But to return to eros, there are two more senses to it that cannot be as easily grasped. The first is C. S. Lewis’s use of it in The Four Loves, where it is ‘that state which we call “being in love”’ or ‘that kind of love which lovers are “in”.’ What makes it hard to grasp is that it is contrasted with Venus, which Lewis defines as ‘the carnal or animally sexual element within Eros.’ He gives the latter a name rather than simply calling it ‘sexuality’ because whereas sexuality may operate without love, Venus is a part of Eros or being in love. At the same time, it is the need for sexual gratification that man shares with the animals.59 Such a distinction would have been lost on every Chinese before the twentieth century, as well it might, and it escapes them even now, to judge from the way it is dealt with in a Chinese translation of The Four Loves published in 2007 in Shanghai. The translator Wang Yongmei (whose PhD in philosophy was on Lewis) simply ignores ‘Venus’ altogether and renders it throughout as ‘sexual love’ (xing’ai) rather than as its ‘carnal ingredient.’ Clearly Wang is not one to insist, as a Western intellectual might, on the discrete identity of things. He manages to get Lewis’ points across for the most

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part, but falters when Lewis tells the reader at one point that he will now broaden his discussion from the ingredient to the wider whole—for the Chinese translator to render this as a turn from ‘sexual love’ to ‘love’ can only confuse.60 The second sense of eros relates to the ‘ascending love’ glancingly referred to earlier. The key text of this is The Symposium, which, together with Plato’s other great work on love, Phaedrus, has exerted unrivalled influence on thinking about love from antiquity to the present-day, especially upon the Neoplatonists of the Italian Renaissance.61 The dialogues of The Symposium climax in a speech by Socrates in which eros is presented as the means of ascent to an ideal of Beauty (beauty in itself, in contrast to the beauty of, say, a particular body). From recognition of another person’s beauty, one moves on up a ‘ladder of love’ to an appreciation of beauty as it exists beyond any individual, then farther still to the love or desire of the essence of Beauty itself. The ultimate goal of eros is immortality, not through giving birth to offspring with a beautiful person but in a more spiritual form, through the mental reproduction and development of ideas (by the lover in his boyfriend), the highest form of love being the philosophical pursuit of truth and the possession of the good. Plato requires embodied beauty, in other words physical allure, to trigger the move to philosophical understanding. Ascending to the essence of Beauty would seem to require one to transcend interpersonal erotic relationships. In the 1920s (as now) the Chinese knew it as ‘Platonic love,’ taking this to mean a sexless love between men and women. Those who had it explained to them, however, understood that Plato meant something different when he spoke about eros in The Symposium and Phaedrus.62 It is male-male love that is being talked about in these works, and far from being asexual, it is physical—eros is itself the Greek word for ‘a longing capable of satisfaction,’ one that primarily means ‘sexual desire’ or even ‘lust.’63 Love might inspire or debase, depending on whether the lover apprehends ultimate Beauty in a single beautiful form, or whether he stalls at his desire for Beauty’s single physical exemplar and so is captured by base lust. Just now I mentioned the Italian Renaissance: it was in the Neoplatonist movement of that period that the phrase ‘Platonic love’ was introduced. The phrase and doctrine were spelled out by the Italian philosopher, priest and physician Marsilio Ficino, he who translated all of Plato’s dialogues into Latin, thereby diffusing them throughout Europe, and who synthesized Plato’s thought with other philosophical systems, in particular Christianity. Without spurning earthly love, Ficino tried to reconcile it with a heavenly one founded upon a love for God. In sophisticated arguments he tried to blur the distinction between eros and caritas, going to ridiculous lengths to devise tripartite formulae that could summarize this reconciliation—in contemporary language the process can be likened to seeing a beautiful girl in the street, and then trying to rationalize one’s sexual desires in terms of spiritual ecstasy . . . The analogy is a crude one, but a certain degree of common sense is required to come to terms with the complexity of language often used.64

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In Ficino’s theory love exists in two forms which are symbolized by Twin Venuses: the heavenly Venus, who mediates between the human mind and God and may be compared to caritas; and the earthly Venus, whose beauty is realized in the physical world. Each form of beauty begets a corresponding form of love—divine love in the one case, human love in the other. There is a third kind of love, called ‘bestial love,’ which Ficino characterizes as a sort of insanity; as such, it requires no emblem, so that he could handle three kinds of love without having to resort to an extra Venus.65 Ficino considers both loves, both Venuses, to be worthy—in Neoplatonist theory love reaches the divine without forsaking the human and becomes spiritual while remaining also carnal. It is in the Ficinian sense, says the art historian Erwin Panofsky, that Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane Love (circa 1514), showing Twin Venuses, is to be interpreted. One of the two Venuses is a nude figure who, as an unadorned beauty, is the image of the heavenly Venus (a flame in her right hand symbolizes the love of God), while a gorgeously draped figure, a worldly beauty, embodies earthly Venus. The painting is an allegory of the two kinds of love posited by Ficino, with the third kind possibly depicted in the scenes of lust being punished on the sarcophagus near the middle of the composition. The placing of Cupid between the two beauties points up the Neoplatonic idea of love as an intermediary between heaven and earth.66 Though this contrasts sharply with Christianity’s requirement for love to be directed to proper procreative ends and with the Christian abhorrence of sensual pleasure, it is still to put desire in its proper place, namely near the bottom of the ladder of love, and to emphasize the supra-physical dimensions of love. In being taken up and adapted by Ficino’s followers, the term ‘Platonic love’ went the way of all popularizations, which is to say it was diluted and distorted; and now it is commonly seen to be chaste and asexual, and Platonic teaching standardly represented as a tradition that spiritualizes love. In sum, there is a straining after a higher, idealized love, as well as an antithesis between the spiritual and the physical, or the sacred and the profane, that has been historically constituted by fin’amors as well as by Platonism and Christianity. Some Chinese had a shorthand for it: ‘Dante-type love.’67 The Beatrice of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a woman pushed to the absolute limit of idealization. Seen primarily in physical, worldly and fin’amors terms in the earlier Vita Nuova, Beatrice is turned into an abstract, spiritualized figure of divine grace in the Divine Comedy. European ideas of love came all at once to China, those of the Middle Ages along with those of a much later period, so that ‘Dante-type love’ had to be grappled with at the same time as ‘Werther-type love.’68 The latter refers to the hero of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). I shall have much more to say about the enormous impact of this novel on the Chinese in Chapter 10; here I shall merely note that the young Goethe is commonly accounted a champion of the Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) cult, a proto-Romantic movement of the 1770s in Germany. To the

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Chinese translator of Werther, the ideals of the Storm and Stress cause were the ideals of the May Fourth movement.69 The character of Werther, who was driven above all by the promptings of his inner being, was deeply indebted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the fathers of Romanticism. To be yourself to the fullest possible extent—to be authentic, or to achieve self-realization, as people are wont to say nowadays—came to be seen by the Romantics as the greatest of all virtues.70 The new ideal of being true to yourself emerged with Rousseau, the philosopher who gloried in being himself and whose longest writing is his tell-all autobiography. This, his Confessions, was repeatedly published in Chinese in the 1920s.71 Romanticism paved the way for love to be seen as one’s highest duty to oneself and not God; and this is what is meant by that oft-quoted remark, ‘Where once God was love, now love is God.’72 With Romanticism sexual desire is seen to support, not undermine, one’s claim to love and to be fully human. In Plato’s philosophy it is necessary to pass by way of the body to attain the true, the beautiful and the good. In sharp contrast to that view, Rousseau would have you believe that spiritual oneness will intensify physical satisfaction. As Simon May puts it, in Rousseau’s ‘picture of fulfilled love—which has become part of our contemporary picture—sexual intercourse and its culmination in orgasm have special delight and value because achieved with the one person in whom we see embodied the true, the beautiful and the good.’73 In other words, May adds, ‘to seek a spiritual union with our lover is not only to turn physical desire for her into love. It is also to intensify that physical desire.’ The desire to fuse the two souls into one turns lust into love at the same time as it enhances lust. From this one is led to the Romantic’s definition of love: ‘sexual love between two people directed at their spiritual union.’74

Arthur Waley was living in these traditions, and conditioned by them, when he worked on his Chinese translations. This goes some way towards explaining the difference he noted between Chinese and European approaches to man-woman relations. To explain his remarks further, it helps to place them in a larger frame, one formed by an ongoing debate between two contending schools of thought in the academic community. The first sees romantic love as being uniquely Western, an ‘invention’ of European culture. This is challenged by a second school of mostly anthropologists who see it as a universal experience, something that is quintessentially human. Waley, whose view aligns with the first school, is echoed by Denis de Rougemont, who has observed in his book Love in the Western World that the problem of love did not arise for the Chinese because they and other people in the East regarded love ‘as mere pleasure and physical enjoyment,’ whereas in the West it was glorified and mystified. He illustrates his point by quoting an Italian author, Leo Ferrero, who has said of his fellow Europeans that they founded their whole life upon passion, unlike the Chinese:

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When True Love Came to China The attitude of a European, who wonders all his life: ‘Is it love or not? Do I really love this woman, or is it affection that I feel for her? Do I love God or do I merely want to love God? Am I in love with her or am I in love with love?’—to a Chinese psychiatrist that attitude might well appear as symptomatic of insanity.75

A favourite position among historians is that fin’amors was a cultural construction. Their main authority is C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, in particular his oft-quoted remark: French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth century. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution, the Renaissance is a mere ripple in the surface of literature.76

In his book Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (1991), not only does Howard Bloch hold that position, he further claims that ‘love as we know it’ is not a universal natural phenomenon: If the expression ‘invention of Western romantic love’ seems like a contradiction, it is because we so often assume love as we know it to be natural, to exist in some essential sense, that is, always to have existed. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth . . . The terms that serve to define, or mediate, what we consider to this day to constitute romantic involvement were put into place definitively—at least for the time being—sometime between the beginning and the middle of the twelfth century, first in southern and then in northern France.77

The trouble with the arguments for or against the idea that romantic love is uniquely Western is that those who make them do not mean the same thing by ‘romantic love.’ Surely Charles Lindholm is not using the same definition as Bloch when he says, in his much-cited paper ‘Romantic Love and Anthropology’ (2006), that ‘Western civilization did not discover love,’ and that ‘a great body of literary evidence clearly demonstrates that the ideology and practice of romantic love was well developed, at least among the elite, in many pre-modern non-Western complex societies, such as Japan, China, India, and the Middle East, as well as among our own cultural ancestors in ancient Greece, Rome and elsewhere’?78 Whatever he means by romantic love, it is clearly not how Bloch understands it. What further muddies the waters is that when some scholars speak of romantic love, what they really mean is romantic-love-in-marriage, or love as realized by matrimony, and it is this that makes the European unique among the world’s societies. On this point there are two academic traditions, one ethnographic, the other historical. Representative of the first is Margaret Mead, who writes in her famous book Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 that ‘romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity

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does not occur in Samoa.’79 Ethnographers have traditionally taken the presence of arranged marriages to be evidence for the absence of love. As for love, it only qualifies as ‘romantic love’ if it is a formula for monogamous marriage; any other kind is not love but sensuality or passion. Scholars belonging to the historical tradition argue that romantic-love-in-marriage is not only Western but modern. They locate it not only in space but in time, positing a ‘sentimental revolution’ in much of Europe in the eighteenth century, when there is said to have occurred a fundamental change in matrimonial habits and attitudes, with personal choices based on love replacing arranged marriages.80 As the change, if there was one, involved an act of free choice, it is said to be linked to rising individualism and, since Engels’s thinking was behind this type of argument, to individual property and capitalism. This is another way of saying that the free-choice marriage emerged with the birth of the modern world of individualism and capitalism. Since the premise is that love is intrinsic to consensual matrimony, romantic love, certain scholars argue, was a direct response to the rise of capitalism. And if it was that, then romantic love is uniquely modern. The ‘sentimental revolution’ school has been challenged by writers such as Ferdinand Mount (1982) and Jack Goody (1983), who in their different ways have taken issue with the view of the eighteenth century as the tipping point for love-based marriage. Mount used literary texts (including those of Shakespeare and Chaucer), diaries, letters and village records to show that matches involving consent and love had existed long before. Goody traced it all the way back to the early Middle Ages, when the medieval Catholic Church’s doctrine of marriage based on mutual consent encouraged the love match against the arranged marriage. Urging celibacy, monogamy and the marriage partners’ freedom to choose and refuse, as well as severely prohibiting sexual relations before and outside marriage, Christianity laid the ground for not only a distinctive pattern of marriage, one which made sex and marriage synonymous, but also for love-in-marriage. In sum, what academic tradition regards as uniquely Western (if not modern) is courtly love on the one hand, and the love-based marriage on the other. When the two are combined, with each other as well as with other elements, a cluster of beliefs and ideals results that the British sociologist Anthony Giddens has called ‘the romantic love complex,’ and this too is posited as being uniquely Western and modern. Giddens links the cluster to the moral values of Christianity, the late eighteenth-century emergence of the European novel (or romantic literature), and to ‘the emergent ties between freedom and self-realization.’81 Conceptualized in this way, there is no question that what Giddens means by romantic love is characteristically European. What makes it even more so is that he distinguishes ‘romantic love’ from ‘amour passion,’ a term he borrows from Stendhal’s Love without, however, following the French writer’s meaning (for an example of ‘amour passion,’ Stendhal names Heloise’s

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love for Abelard). In romantic love attachments, Giddens argues, ‘the element of sublime love tends to predominate over that of sexual ardour. The importance of this point can hardly be overstressed.’ Romantic love, he further writes is incompatible with lust, and with earthy sexuality, not so much because the loved one is idealized—although this is part of the story—but because it presumes a psychic communication, a meeting of souls . . .

While amour passion ‘is a more or less universal phenomenon,’ romantic love is ‘much more culturally specific,’ to be sharply separated from the former’s ‘sexual/erotic compulsions.’ It is, Giddens says, ‘geared to transcendence,’ sounding to my ears a decidedly Platonic note. At the same time he strikes a Romantic chord when he writes, ‘Love breaks with sexuality while embracing it.’ It is with the likes of Giddens, C. S. Lewis and Margaret Mead that the second school of thought contends when it argues in favour of love’s universality. Thus Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist whose research into the underlying brain mechanisms of love was discussed in Chapter 1, dismisses as ‘preposterous’ the notion of romantic love as an invention of the troubadours of Provence. Romantic love ‘is far more widespread,’ she writes, and goes on to find it in India, China, Japan, Polynesia and so on.82 For added support, she (and virtually every piece of anthropological research on love) cites the 1992 study of William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer. Aimed at demonstrating the universality of love, this work was judged a success because love was found to be present in 166—or 88.5 per cent—of the world’s societies based on such criteria as accounts of personal anguish and longing, the existence of love songs or folklore, incidents of elopement, and accounts of love by natives and foreign ethnographers. The definition of love Jankowiak and Fischer adopted was ‘any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future.’83 There is nothing there of love as a basis for monogamy, nor of the fin’amors notion of a love that ennobles and purifies desire; much less is there any suggestion of sublimity or transcendence, or of a distinction from lust. So though the researchers may have proved that love as they have defined it was a universal phenomenon, they have not disproved those who, characterizing it in terms of courtly love or the romantic love complex, believe it to be specific to Western culture. Clearly, how investigators characterize romantic love, and how broadly or narrowly they define it, will make a huge difference to how many cultures they will find it in. That Jankowiak and Fischer found romantic love to exist the world over is hardly surprising given their definition of it. And Helen Fisher was wrong to pronounce the idea of romantic love as a Western invention ‘preposterous’—China was one of the places she has found it to exist, but were she to look for anything like fin’amors there, she would draw a blank.

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Jankowiak and Fischer’s definition of love was not what the Chinese had in mind when they declared it to be absent from China. What they missed was the love match, and when they enquired into how that love might be recognized when it came their way, seeking their answers in Western texts, it was something like the ideals of the romantic love complex that they discovered. How Chinese love was recast in terms of these ideals will be considered in succeeding chapters. What concerns us next is what the Chinese love tradition was to begin with; what ways of conceptualizing the manwoman relationship were inherited by all those young Chinese who, at the time Arthur Waley might have come to China had he made the journey, were eagerly waiting for Western romantic love to disclose its manifold mysteries.

Love-struck Zhang longs for Oriole in a seventeenth-century woodblock printed illustration of Romance of the West Wing.

4 Keywords

As the truly wise see it, all love is daft. Feng Menglong, early seventeenth century

When airplanes, corporations, high-rise buildings and other modern things were introduced to China from the West, Chinese names had to be coined for them. The same goes for peculiarly Western notions. The new coinages went hand in hand with innovations in the writing style of Chinese, a sweeping shift from an archaic prose intelligible only to classically educated scholars to a modern written vernacular accessible to ordinary people. Engaged intellectuals of the New Culture and May Fourth movements were the pioneers of this new style. They and other educated Chinese of their generation believed the old-style literary language to be inadequate not only to the task of absorbing foreign scientific knowledge but to the full expression and communication of modern thoughts, emotions and experiences. Throwing it over was tantamount to unfettering oneself from the chains which cribbed and yoked one to Confucianism. But ‘love’ was not a new thing under the sun, not like an airplane or a corporation. Or was it? In Japan, love as the West understood it was thought to be something Japanese people had not known before it entered their country with Christianity, so a new term had to be coined for it; this was rabu, a neologism actually transcribing the English word ‘love’ as the Japanese would pronounce it (pronouncing ‘l,’ and telling the difference between ‘v’ and ‘b,’ are difficult for the Japanese). In China there came to be, if not exactly an entirely new coinage, certainly new ways of talking about it. The May Fourth intellectuals’ push for the renewal of language and writing was in some senses a bid to offset the persistence, right up to the twentieth century, of timeworn conventions of expressing thoughts and emotions, and by doing so to counteract the conventionalizing of thinking and feeling. They were up against a great deal. Just the look of the written word, or rather character, posed a problem. Words and their meanings and resonances remain recognizable for no more than centuries in alphabetic languages that are phonetically written, but in Chinese—whose ideographic written forms are not essentially phonetic—they stay

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preserved for millennia by virtue of the relative independence of script from speech. Speech could change but not writing, certainly not in tandem. We know what we feel is ‘love’ because our language has given us a label to affix to our feelings. That label is not wholly our own: we have been given it by our linguistic ancestors and millions of others have used it before us. It has not been used in the same sense throughout the ages either, with the same content, meaning and pattern of association. Nor, in China, has it been the same label that predominated in every era of history, from ancient and medieval times to the modern period. I will leave the modern terms for later, when I enquire into the influence of Western ideas, but it is as well to look at the vocabulary antecedent to that influence before going any further. The first of the central usages of the Chinese tradition that this chapter considers is si, ‘longing.’1 Used in countless classical poems, including a large number in the Book of Songs, si is understood as a synonym for ‘love’ by modern-day Chinese anthologists, as well as by Western translators and scholars. In the eight lines of a poem by Li Ye, a  woman poet of the eighth century, the word ‘longing’ appears no less than three times, but on two of those occasions it is rendered as ‘love’ and on the third as ‘longing love’ in a sensitive translation by the scholar Stephen Owen: People say the sea is deep – it’s not as deep by half as love. The sea at least still has its coasts, love’s farthest reaches have no shore. Take your harp and climb the tower, where moonlight fills the empty rooms. Then play the song of longing love – heart and strings will break together.2

In the early Chinese poetry of love, such ‘longing love’ is usually voiced by a woman. A stock figure is a woman forsaken by her husband or lover. There is even a name for this genre of poetry: boudoir lament. The trouble with trying to discover what it is like for these women to yearn for their lovers is that we are told it by mostly men. The literary stock is a predominantly male discourse, from whose folds female figures emerge in the shape in which men have wrapped them. That a man could discourse from outside his gender remains a possibility, but neither a large nor evident one. At however many removes, something in his writing has sprung from his self. It is but illusion to think that the sexual frustration and self-pity of the women portrayed in this poetry came of any male poet’s grasp of feminine psychology. In the boudoir lament the longed-for lover is by definition absent. What he is like can only be imagined. He need not always be of a roving disposition, but is on the move only to go about his business—fighting, travelling, or discharging official duties. But often he is the sort to wish himself elsewhere, never to return, once he has taken

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his pleasure with a woman. Whatever the reason, his absence is but one facet of the partings whose recurrence as a literary motif mirrors harsh Chinese reality—Chinese history is unthinkable without war and migration, or that ever-present occupational hazard of public life, exile or banishment by a displeased court to a faraway corner of the empire. On top of this, we must not forget that for long spans of Chinese history sex segregation prevailed. Maidens were sequestered in inner female quarters, safely secluded from masculine company. Yearning rather than any active pursuit could not but be all that they would ever know of love. In a beguiling body of imagery that has come down to us from early medieval China, amorous longing is enfleshed in either a nameless palace lady out of favour with the emperor or a discarded courtesan or female entertainer, whether singing-girl or dancer. We meet her over and over again in the pages of New Songs from a Jade Terrace, an anthology of poems compiled in the sixth century, the first to be devoted exclusively to love. The book anthologizes poetry going as far back as the late third century BC, but the palace lady is a figure of the fifth and sixth centuries (the Southern Dynasties), the time Chinese love poetry came into full flower. The ladies are largely cut-outs, composite copies of each other. Their looks and bearing, clothing and mood are stylized, and in describing them the cultivated court poets demonstrated not only their mastery of sophisticated language but also their connoisseurship of beautiful women. We never lose sight of the place where our lady awaits her departed lover. It is a boudoir in a palace harem, sensuously depicted by the poet with an interior decorator’s eye. Silk curtains unfurl, bronze censer smokes, ivory bed registers moonlight . . . she more than takes colouring from the scene’s worldly, upper-class refinement, she completes it. For that matter, her solitude is answered by the emptiness of her quarters, seen to be opulent, yes, but also desolate. The glamour and loneliness of her sumptuous surroundings are annexed to her alluring but ultimately pathetic persona. Just as longing and luxury are fused, so sentiment and sensuality are inseparable from seclusion. He is nowhere to be seen but objects in the room and furniture speak of him. The bed with its twin pillows recalls sexual bliss, all the more so for being cold and deserted now. The quilt conjures up the intimacies it once covered, the mandarin ducks (‘lovebirds’) embroidered on it retaining their power to evoke wedded love and fidelity. The place is full of him, yet empty of him: She slips on her softly rustling red shawl, Dabs fresh, chic yellow on her brow. Shading the lamp, she enters brocade curtains; Faint smoke comes from the jade bed, The six corners of their twin tortoiseshell pillows, Their wide quilt adorned with two lovebirds –

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These things still since they parted Comfort love’s grief, mementoes of him. In tears she passes tedious days So soon transformed from hot to cold.3

Dejection and the sufferings of a denied heart are offered as a source of aesthetic pleasure, one enhanced by the satisfaction to be had from regarding, with a connoisseur’s eye, the woman’s beauty as well as her fear of advancing age and fading looks. The shelf life of beauty being limited, there is a sense of time running out; her make-up crumbles, the incense turns to ashes. Simply calling such poems ‘love poetry,’ thinks the scholar Paul Rouzer, belies their emphasis on ‘physicality,’ and he suggests calling them ‘sensual’ poetry instead.4 He has argued elsewhere that since it is the poet’s ‘voyeuristic gaze’ that gives certain of the poems their interest, and that it is the way things look, their sensuous surfaces, that matters rather than the act of sexual coupling, such poems may be termed ‘erotic’ rather than love poetry.5 This is to slice the melon of love in yet another way. The erotic is not exactly love, nor is it sex, but something in-between. To sort out how the three relate to each other, I could do no better than to consult Octavio Paz’s The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism (1996). Sex, Paz says, ‘is the primordial source,’ eroticism is ‘sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings,’ while love is ‘attraction towards a unique person: a body and a soul.’ The image of the ‘double flame’ of his book’s title is that of the red flame of eroticism rising from the primordial flame of sexuality and then turning into the blue flame of love. The erotic act is ‘sex and it is something else besides.’ But the line that divides one from the other is a ‘sinuous’ one that is ‘fairly often trespassed.’6 It helps to keep Paz’s definitions in mind when we look at my next two usages. The first of these is haose, which translates literally as ‘to be fond of sex’ and which is frequently used of sexual desire or lust. It is a word made up of two syllables: hao, ‘to be fond of,’ and se, ‘sex.’ Confucius has famously been reported in the Analects as saying, twice, ‘The fact remains that I have never seen a man who loves virtue as much as he loves sex’—in this repeated remark haose is the word used for ‘loves sex.’7 For an example of se used singly, there is the equally famous line from Mencius: ‘Appetite for food and sex (se) is inborn nature.’8 But because another of its meanings is ‘colour,’ se connotes an appeal to the visual sense, which in turn implies that the answer to the question, ‘What does one desire when one desires another person?’ is sensuous appearance or physical beauty. So ‘to be fond of se’ is to be susceptible to the sexual pleasure aroused by beauty. The measure of a man’s lust is how readily he succumbs to a woman’s beauty: the more resistant he is, the less haose.

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More often he is dazzled, held in thrall; and enthralled, he experiences sexual bliss with her. In a standard Chinese tale she is often revealed to be a goddess or a were-creature, the latter a mythical being who changes from a beast, usually a fox, to a person. The fox-spirit or the goddess cannot stay with the man for long, and after their lovemaking she leaves him to his sense of elegiac loss. The most famous of all such sexual encounters is the one that readers may recall from Chapter 3, the dream rendezvous that gave to the Chinese language that highly allusive synonym for ‘sexual intercourse,’ namely ‘cloud and rain.’ Now for the next term: yin, Chinese for ‘lust,’ ‘lubricity,’ or ‘licentiousness.’ Confucius is said to dislike a set of airs in the Book of Songs for being ‘licentious’ ( yin).9 An yin woman is a fast, indeed wanton, woman; while an yin book or picture is pornographic or obscene. The word also spells excessiveness, the ‘flooding waters’ (a primary meaning of yin) which social control in the form of Confucian rules of propriety must dam back if we are not to be storm-tossed on a sea of disorderly and ungovernable lust. Probably all societies raise defence mechanisms against the unruliness of indiscriminate sex. The rules of Confucian propriety, such as the strictly observed regulations against the social mixing of the sexes, were the means China found to guard against it. It was only the West that discovered a defence against sex in ‘true love.’ As we saw in the previous chapter, true love, or fin’amors by another name, was an innovation that inverted the asceticism of twelfth-century Christianity by assigning a spiritual dimension to sexual relationships. What the Church branded as lust was transformed into ‘a love that reaches the divine without abandoning the human and becomes spiritual while remaining also carnal.’10 From such idealization emerged the notion that sex with love is good sex and without love is promiscuity. That rationalization was not available to the Chinese, for whom there was sexual desire (haose), and there was lewdness ( yin), and both had the potential to corrupt and attract social stigma. Chinese tradition never did envision a ‘higher’ love that was spiritual and carnal at the same time. There was no escape clause, no provision for a special condition, namely a love that was not just about sex, under which one was relieved of liability for failure to meet the terms of sexual morality. This is in stark contrast to the West, as a comparison of two cases, both involving a defence against the charge of obscenity, may show. One is the obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (the Crown versus Penguin Books) in 1960. That the publisher was acquitted of breaking the Obscene Publications Act made headlines internationally. At home in Britain, it ushered in so profound a change to the degree of state regulation of private morality that the poet Philip Larkin was famously to write that sexual intercourse began ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban/and the Beatles’ first LP.’

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The novel’s protagonists are well-known: Lady Chatterley is the wife of a minor aristocrat Sir Clifford, and her lover is the gamekeeper, Mellors, on her husband’s estate. Sir Clifford is impotent, paralyzed from the waist down by a war injury and, wheelchair-bound, is looked after by the widowed carer Mrs Bolton, who comes to treat him like a child and with whom he becomes infantile and physical. Of the dozens of distinguished witnesses lined up by the defence to attest to the novel’s literary merit, one was a respected literary critic and Lawrence specialist named Graham Hough. Hough was asked by the counsel for the prosecution if he agreed that sex was dragged in at every opportunity and the plot was little more than padding. When Hough disagreed, the counsel asked Hough if there was any point in Lawrence dragging in Mrs Bolton so that Sir Clifford could feel her breasts, and if this wasn’t because the whole book was about sex. Hough replied that there was very much point: Clifford was shown to have become an unpleasant child. This prompted the prosecution to ask, ‘Is there any particular literary or sociological advantage in having this described?’ To which Hough said yes; these were ‘representations of false and wrong sexual attitudes,’ and this was an important part of the book. The prosecution then asked where the good attitudes came in, and Hough answered that they were in the relationship between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover, ‘who really loved each other’ (italics mine).11 I imagine a contemporary Chinese furrowing his brow at this and wondering, as well he might, why really loving each other should make all that copulation all right. What was this ‘love’ that turned wrong into right? That trumped all propriety? And if someone were to ask him if he did not think ‘love redeems all,’ he would probably answer that he could not say: he had no clear idea of how one kind of adulterous sexual desire might be distinguished from another kind. Nor indeed could he have: he was no heir to the cult of courtly love, Platonism, Christianity and Romanticism. How to turn a sexual wrong into a right greatly exercised Jin Shengtan (1608–61), a man of letters who, among other things, edited and wrote commentaries on the marvellously written thirteenth-century sung comedy, Romance of the West Wing (readers may recall the lines on bound feet which Chapter 2 quotes from that play). No drama was more popular or influential, yet Romance was judged obscene and became forbidden reading for much of its history. Jin takes it upon himself to refute the charge of obscenity ( yin). Like Hough, he is an expert of literature, but unlike Hough, he has not been primed by his culture to distinguish between love and lust. This makes his task all the harder. The story revolves around a young couple modelled on the stock figures of ‘scholarbeauty’ fiction and drama; as such, they are fated to meet, fall in love and finally marry. Jin is particularly anxious to prove the heroine spotless, unfallen from the moral ideals of her upbringing—not an easy task, one would have thought, when neither her good

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breeding nor her developed sense of propriety stops her from giving herself to her suitor without being married to him. The heroine is the beautiful, gifted, chaste and high-born Oriole (or Yingying in romanized Chinese). A young, handsome and ardent student, Zhang Gong, catches a glimpse of her as he is going through a Buddhist monastery where he stops on his journey to the capital to distinguish himself in the state examinations. In the ordinary course of events she would have been kept well out of sight of any man, but it so happens that she is at the monastery with her mother to conduct mourning rites for her recently deceased father, a chancellor. The student is smitten: those tiny feet, alone worth a hundred talents of gold! He tingles at her every step and, better still, she casts a backward glance, showing him what he takes to be a tenderness lingering in the corner of her eye. A poem that the love-struck Zhang recites at night in the garden behind the walls of her courtyard is heard, and not only heard but answered by one of hers. It is springtime, and she too suffers pangs of yearning. Indeed, she cannot stop thinking of him, and as time passes she grows pensive, listless, sad and lonely. But before courtship could advance rebel troops surround the monastery, causing panic all around. Their chief has it in mind to abduct Oriole, of whose beauty he has heard rumoured. Appealed to for help by Oriole’s mother, who promises to give her daughter’s hand in marriage to whoever subdues the rebels, Zhang saves the day by despatching a letter to a childhood friend, a garrison commander who presently arrives and raises the siege. Once the rebels are dispersed, the mother goes back on her word with the excuse that Oriole is already promised to another suitor, a high court official. ‘Brother,’ she enjoins her daughter to call the poor student, not ‘bridegroom,’ plunging the inflamed lover into confusion and hopeless longing and finally into lovesickness. The starcrossed lover is tormented by thoughts of her day and night and when Oriole rebuffs his overtures as propriety demands, he falls seriously ill. All might have been lost had Oriole’s maid Crimson not stepped forward to play go-between. A secret assignation is arranged, and one night Crimson enters his room to deliver Oriole’s coverlet and pillow in advance of the arrival of the lady herself. Oriole, all bashful, hangs her head and speaks not a word as he unbuttons her robe and unties her silk girdle. He clasps her to his breast and makes love to her, while she yields with the show of reluctance maidenly modesty requires. He is in paradise, all lovesickness fled. ‘I have sullied your pure whiteness,’12 he says baldly at one point, but otherwise sings of Oriole’s deflowering in metaphors—of the splitting of ‘the flower’s heart,’ of the dew dripping and the peony opening; of the butterfly collecting at will ‘the lovely fragrance of the tender pistil,’ and of the spots of red on her sparkling white handkerchief. Many more nights of bliss follow until, one day, the suspicions of Oriole’s mother are aroused. Once she has forced Crimson to tell all, Oriole’s mother has no choice but

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to consent to the lovers’ marriage, but on condition that the young man establish his credentials by passing the state examinations that qualify him for office. This he does, and the play ends with the couple overcoming further setbacks to be happily united at last. Parts of the script are by turns bawdy and erotic, with puns on and symbols of the sexual act and organs, as well as literary allusions to myths and classical tales involving lovemaking. Since little is explicit, a reader needs to crack the Chinese code of erotic language and imagery to understand the script fully. I use the word ‘erotic’ in keeping with Octavio Paz’s definition of eroticism as ‘sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings.’ The erotic is not a category in Jin Shengtan’s thinking though, and the bee in his bonnet is that the count on which the play is judged obscene is its inclusion of the matter of the sex act. At any rate, it is against this that he hurls himself. His defence comprises a couple of rhetorical questions. Is there ever a time or place on earth where ‘this matter,’ as he calls the act, is absent? Isn’t doing away with ‘this matter’ tantamount to doing away with the natural world (‘heaven and earth’) itself ?13 He makes this point again in another passage, additionally pitting subject matter against literary merit. Sex is something that takes place in every household, he says; it is universal, everyday. By contrast, what is unique and exceptional is the writing. The mind should dwell, as the playwright’s assuredly does, on what is singular, namely the writing; not on what is commonplace, namely the subject matter. If some people dwell on the book’s indecency, is it not because they are unable to grasp the writing but understand the subject matter only too well? Smut, he means, is in the mind of the hypocritical beholder. Inevitably, and as a creature of his culture, Jin’s mind moves back to the airs in the Book of Songs. Two famous sayings in the critical tradition are now cited to further his argument. The first of these commends a particular set of airs for giving voice to ‘sexual desire but not licentiousness.’ The second, that the airs ‘give vent to the feelings but stop at the bounds of propriety,’ Jin takes to be drawing more or less the same distinction.14 As a child he was taught these by his village schoolteacher, he recalls, but he cannot say that they make much sense to him, for where does sexual desire (haose) end and licentiousness ( yin) begin? Do you call ‘sexual desire’ that which would have fallen into ‘licentiousness’ were it not pulled back from the brink by propriety? If you desire yet disavow licentiousness, Jin argues, then you do not really desire. And if you hold propriety in awe but dare to desire yet dare not be licentious, then you do not know what licentiousness is. There has never been a person who does not desire, he continues, and there has never been a person who desires without being licentious. What cries out for an answer is how much difference there really is between desire and licentiousness. Yet the sex act, while natural enough in itself, is committed by a girl flouting the rules of propriety and, perhaps even worse in the Chinese scheme of things, in defiance

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of parental authority. How is Jin, who shows himself to be something of a prude in the way he edits and bowdlerizes the play, to defend Oriole, who he insists is innocent and virtuous? Born to so prominent a family, Oriole could not, to his mind, know anything at all of the opposite sex, nor is she given in the slightest degree to flirting or making eyes at boys the way girls of a lower class might improperly do. Indeed, he tries to make out at one point that she is oblivious of Zhang’s attentions, let alone sexually aroused. But then how is he to reconcile Oriole’s supposed chastity, which in Jin’s time was practically synonymous with moral perfection, with her amorousness and longing and, worse still, her willingness to be deflowered by Zhang? One answer that Jin offers to the question of why she gives herself to Zhang is that she is not heartless enough to let him die of lovesickness. Another is that she is simply making good her mother’s promise, one subsequently reneged upon, to betroth her, Oriole, to Zhang—that they could have been husband and wife were it not for the mother’s duplicity somehow legitimizes their illicit lovemaking. The trouble for Jin is that he cannot put up a defence that is not internally contradictory: he is adamant that the play is not immoral, that Oriole does not offend against propriety, yet the age and tradition in which he lived took it as read that chastity and morality were one. And for a girl of Oriole’s time and class, just to desire sex (haose) is to be unchaste, indeed even lewd ( yin). What might have helped him to reconcile them is not conceptually available to him. This is the love which Graham Hough invoked in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and which I have earlier termed an escape clause; subject to it, illicit sex might be exonerated. The conceptual frameworks that Platonism, Christianity and fin’amors have fed into the way Hough and the Western world understood love have distinguished the carnal from the spiritual, opposed lust to love, made the latter an overriding virtue and bounded it up with redemption. By contrast, what is to the fore in Jin’s cultural inheritance is the notion of haose versus yin—in other words, desire versus unbridled desire, two hardly antithetical categories. He does well enough with those, showing the two to be indivisible. But since he sees Octavio Paz’s flame not as double but as one—and an all-red one at that, not yet broken through to blue—he could do no better. His is not the dualistic framework that offers the possibility of redeeming Oriole’s illicit sexuality by reformulating it as love. Jin, ever anxious to present Oriole as innocent and morally proper, tries at one point to deny that she is in love with Zhang. But he is nothing if not self-contradictory, and in other sections of his commentary he describes her as an ‘amorous type’ much given to love and speaks of her ‘limitless feelings of love-longing.’ By and large, he is on the side of love, but at the same time he is constantly looking over his shoulder at those who call it licentious. The way he sees it is that, to be in character and to act out the roles prescribed for them by the ‘scholar-beauty’ story, Oriole and Zhang have to fall in love. In this way theirs is a natural and ‘inevitable love,’ he says. But to be

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equally in character they have to be respectful of prescribed practices handed down by ancient moral exemplars, and these practices, as they related to marriage, were ironclad. No one from a respectable family could possibly contemplate a marriage where partners of the opposite sex were not chosen by the parents, usually through the offices of a marriage broker. To Jin and his contemporaries, indeed to Chinese right up to the early decades of the twentieth century, a clash between this moral code and ‘inevitable love’ was matter for regret but no occasion for transgression or even negotiation.

The word Jin uses for ‘love’ is qing. It is a word whose meanings have been widely probed by scholars writing in English, no doubt because it is seen to be the closest thing the Chinese have had to ‘romantic love.’ There is a whole book in English—Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature edited by the academic Halvor Eifring— devoted to this one word. This aims to elucidate the meaning of qing across different historical periods and different literary genres. Historically, the word’s semantic range is very wide; apart from ‘love’ and ‘romantic love,’ it has been variously translated by ‘feeling,’ ‘emotion,’ ‘sentiment,’ ‘passion,’ ‘affection,’ ‘attraction,’ ‘ardour’ and ‘affect’ (this last in the sense used in psychology). And that is to confine it to one part of the semantic range only. I have left out other meanings, those that seem to have nothing in common with the ones just now listed, qing in the sense of ‘the basic facts of a matter,’ for example. With every awareness that ‘love’ and qing are not exactly equivalent, many scholars of China writing in English have taken to leaving it romanized but untranslated. I propose to translate it as Feeling, with an upper case ‘f,’ as that seems to me to serve best as a generic, one-size-fits-all rendition, though I make an exception of those instances where ‘love’ seems apter. In a familiar classical usage, qing is the generic word for ‘emotion’ in the list of ‘seven emotions’ formulated by the Confucian canon, namely joy, anger, sorrow, fear, affection, hate and desire. These emotions are said to be inborn, requiring no learning for any person to experience them. That ‘the seven emotions’ became a stock expression in Chinese speech and writing, with nothing added to it in a thousand years, is indicative of how little interest the subject of emotion has held for classical writers. I have earlier noted the overriding interest of Confucius in state and government. Good character and the virtues that make up good character also preoccupied him and his ideological heirs, but not the passions. When the seventeenth century threw an emphasis on Feeling to a degree not seen before in Chinese history, a challenge was posed to the rigid system of values spawned by the philosophy known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. This had jelled into shape in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries and had been instituted as the state ideology in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It was a full flowering of Confucianism which—and this was one of the things that was new about it—drew upon Buddhist ideas that had been influential in earlier centuries, even as

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it returned Chinese thinking to the typically Confucian concern with this-worldly ethical matters. One of the things Neo-Confucians went in for was self-cultivation through ‘quiet-sitting,’ a practice originating in Buddhist meditation; they followed Buddhism in trying to free their selves from desires. They were suspicious of human emotions, and liked them to be held in check or kept at equilibrium. Moral danger lurks whenever emotions are aroused, for selfish desire, all too prone to excessiveness, is never far behind, so any Feeling is best held in abeyance, in that state of mind which Neo-Confucianism conceptualized as ‘yet unstirred.’ ‘Stirred’ and ‘yet unstirred’ are Neo-Confucian formulations we shall encounter again in the next chapter.15 They are traceable to the words of Confucius, specifically those enunciated in the Doctrine of the Mean: When pleasure, anger, sorrow or joy are yet unstirred, the mind may be said to be in a state of equilibrium. When these feelings are stirred and all are expressed in their due degree, there ensues what may be called the state of harmony . . . Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.16

The words were enough, more than a millennium later, to furnish mainstream NeoConfucianism with an image that pictures the mind as water, inborn nature as the stillness of an unruffled lake, emotion as the flow of the water and desire as the waves.17 If  emotions undulated the still lake of inborn nature, desire swelled it still further, causing a flood. The educated class was thoroughly imbued with these notions. Nor could they not be, when a man’s career advancement depended on his knowing the Confucian classics and the commentaries on them well enough to pass those all-important examinations that selected aspirant scholars from all corners of the empire for government office, and nobody could study those texts year after year without internalizing their messages. Put through that system as through a cultural mill, these scholars all ended up thinking alike, shaped from one end of China to another by the same norms and values. Until modernity dealt it a blow in the twentieth century, Neo-Confucianism remained the default setting, as it were, of Chinese attitudes towards authority, proper behaviour and, importantly for this book, relationships. When it came to relationships the family was everything, and an unfilial son or daughter was unthinkable. The chief purpose of marriage being to continue the family line, the wife’s fidelity to her husband—or, more accurately, to her husband’s family line—had to be total; in fact, so much was sexual purity expected of her that were she widowed young or threatened with rape, she would commit suicide to safeguard it. Such acts of sexual heroism earned their supposedly unflinching perpetrators public admiration and government awards and recognition (see Chapter 12). Would the suicides be extolled if they were committed, not for any Confucian virtue such as loyalty or righteousness, but out of Feeling? Moralists bred to the

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Neo-Confucian suspicion of emotionality would certainly have said no, but for someone like the anthologist, publisher and man of letters Feng Menglong (1574– 1645), the distinctions are blurred. In his opinion, ‘she who is not possessed of Feeling would not make a faithful wife’ anyway.18 Moreover, whether the act be one of loyalty or filial piety, chastity or heroism, to carry it out as a matter of principle is to force it, while to do so out of ardour is to be genuine and sincere. Feng was a seventeenth-century, or late Ming, man, and this period stands out in the literary and social history of China for its hospitality to Feeling, which appeared to many China specialists writing in English today to have achieved a high enough profile during that time to justify calling it a cult. To describe it as the rise of ‘romantic emotionalism’19 might be stretching it but a belief that the various forms of human emotion should be brought into focus as a valuable kind of experience and given direct expression did show through the writings of the time, and this belief did get more of a sympathetic hearing then than at any time before or after. Feng expresses his views in a compilation of tales, legends and hearsay in which facets of Feeling—largely between man and woman but also between man and man— are seen to play a part. In a preface to the compilation, Feng declares himself to be a man of Feeling—in fact, so much so that when he comes upon another man of Feeling, he wants to prostrate himself before him. And not to be able to help relieve another’s suffering, whether or not this person is known to him, would so distress him that he would sigh for days and be kept awake tossing and turning at night.20 To urge Feeling upon people, he would go so far as to found a religion to teach it to them. Once it is imparted, a son would feel it towards his father and a vassal towards his lord. The result would be like seeing spring flowers blossom, spreading joy and delight to all creatures. Likening Feeling to a string that threads dispersed coins together, Feng sets his sights upon a time when, tied together at last by Feeling, all the world becomes one family. ‘Only connect!’ might be his motto—‘connect without bitterness,’ as E. M. Forster has it, ‘until all men are brothers.’ The title of Feng’s collection is The History of Qing—actually a misnomer, since little of its contents has any basis in historical fact. In English, the title has most frequently appeared as The Anatomy of Love. Translating qing as ‘love’ is well enough in its way—many strands of meaning are entangled in the word ‘love’ too. Yet it nags at me that ‘love’ cannot be what Feng says keeps him tossing and turning at night when he sees suffering but is unable to help; what he feels is surely more like sympathy or a capacity for entering into another’s emotions, so that when he goes on to say ‘people who prey upon or harm others are actually hurting their own qing,’ what he must mean is that to injure others is to do damage to your own fellow feeling.21 At another point in his preface, he suggests that you might as well see off the Buddha’s compassion and Confucius’ benevolence and righteousness because qing could replace them all.

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In these cases, it is hard to resist the conclusion that what Feng means by qing is something like ‘sensibility’ to the feelings of others. Indeed, as I read Feng’s preface, ‘sensibility’ kept tugging at me, the word understood not in its present-day sense but in the sense given it in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, where it became all the rage after 1750, prompting literary scholars to speak of the ‘cult of sensibility’ or the ‘culture of feeling’ to characterize the relationship between writers of sentimental literature and their readers. It was a much stronger word than it is now, referring to a more than ordinary degree of responsiveness to others, or to a quickness of feeling that is both moral and aesthetic, as well as signalling a capacity to feel both for others’ distress and for beauty. The connotation of morality is now often forgotten, but at the time it was a widespread view that, quite apart from acts of benevolence inspired by emotions of what we would now call empathy, a proneness to sympathetic tears was a sign of refined sensibility and moral worth. ‘Sensibility’ was a keyword in the general shift of the foundation of moral life from reason and judgement (‘sense’ in Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility) to feelings. The Chinese cult of qing was not exactly a case of prizing feeling over thinking, passion over reason and personal instincts of pity and benevolence over social duty, but still it gave pride of place to feelings, believing those to be a better guide to conduct than insincere convention. What’s more, it claimed that expressing feeling was essentially moral, and not really at odds with the highest Confucian values of filiality, loyalty, selfless benevolence and chastity. Earlier I used the words ‘man of Feeling’ for what Feng professes himself to be. The reader is right if he or she thinks I had borrowed the phrase from Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), one of a number of literary characters—Laurence Sterne’s sentimental traveller, Goethe’s Werther, to name just two—to embody aspects of sensibility. One thing we certainly cannot accuse Feng of is a want of sensibility; he claims to have it to such an extreme degree that he is fairly raving with it, though I hasten to add that this in no way implies those exaggerated forms of sensibility—swooning, handkerchiefs drenched in tears, effusiveness, narcissism—that English critics have decried as sentimentalism, a term we now use, with disapproval, for much of what in the eighteenth century was called, with approval, ‘sensibility.’ So much for the preface. As for the stories which follow it, they are a motley collection in which those familiar elements of the Chinese cultural imagination—knight errantry, predestination, recompense, dreams, resurrection, ghostly visitation, the supernatural—are repeatedly encountered. I will retell three of the tales, randomly picked from the hundreds in the anthology. A timber merchant surnamed Wang is besotted with Tang Yuzan, a courtesan well versed in singing, dancing and acting.22 Word of her skills presently reaches a prince living near the drum tower of the city, and as he is fond of music, he summons her to

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his mansion to try her out. She so delights him that, in order to keep her, he pays a high price to free her from her madam. Wang is undone, and quite beside himself with grief and longing. He bribes an old servant woman from the mansion to send Yuzan a message: if he could but see her just once, he would not have any regrets even if he were to die. The courtesan broaches this with the prince at the first opportune moment. The prince agrees, but adds in jest, ‘Yes, he may come if he first castrates himself.’ Wang promptly does so, causing himself such grievous harm that he almost dies. It is three months before he is sufficiently recovered to present himself at the prince’s residence. There he is ordered to disrobe so that the prince might examine him. ‘Could there really be people as daft as this on earth?’ the prince laughs, then tells Wang, ‘Never mind, now that you have castrated yourself, why not come and work for me?’ Wang thanks the prince, who then has Yuzan brought to the doorway so that Wang might gaze at her. And that is all that the two could do, just look at each other and weep. Afterwards the prince awards Wang a thousand pieces of gold, and on this sum Wang would receive a bit of interest each year. That’s love (qing) for you, Feng observes in a commentary he appends to the story. To love someone, he goes on to say, is to want to have sexual pleasure with him or her. Emasculation puts paid to that pleasure, but not to love—look at Wang. So Feng could only conclude that while ‘love is akin to lust ( yin), lust is not love (qing).’ Here Feng appears to come close to distinguishing between lust and love, certainly closer than any contemporary writer that I have read, but actually he goes no farther than saying that Wang’s feelings for Yuzan are daft enough to persist beyond any possibility of sexual gratification, and that this is what makes it more of a case of qing than yin. Were Wang one of those men who forsake an old love interest for a new one, Feng continues, then it would be an as-yet-unsated lust that drives him—and where is the love in that? Since Wang is desexualized his cannot be out-and-out lust—the continuance of his feelings is a sign that it is not. Some people, Feng goes on, are prepared to sacrifice their life for love, to say nothing of their manhood. Be that as it may though, he concludes, to call it love is admissible, to say that it is not daft is not. The second story, really no more than an anecdote, is about two traders, who are the best of friends.23 One day, the younger of the two is seized by an unbearable pain in his stomach. The other does his utmost to nurse and heal him. Luckily, the patient does not die and, after ten days or so, is transformed into a girl. So strange is this event that the local authorities make it a point to report it to the court, and since the two friends are still unmarried, imperial permission is granted for them to become man and wife. Feng’s only editorial comment is that since the two men are such good friends, they could marry just as well without the sex change. He states this matter-of-factly, as though same-sex marriages were par for the course, and indeed in the chapter he devotes to homosexual love in his anthology, he treats it no differently from the

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heterosexual kind. What is more, he does not show himself to be at variance with a commentator whom he cites and who has asserted that while sex with a woman is for producing offspring, that with a man is for pleasure, and that the male of the species is invariably more attractive than the female—just look at peacocks, pheasants and the gloss of the horse’s coat compared to that of the mare. This anecdote appears in a chapter devoted to the theme of transformations— a woman turned to stone, a devoted couple changed into paired cranes after death, two lovers becoming butterflies and so on. Reading it, I was put in mind of all those Greek and Roman legends that Ovid retold in his book on magical transformations, Metamorphosis. I was reminded specifically of the story of Iphis, a girl raised as a boy who is changed into a boy when her father, from whom her true sex has been hidden all this time, arranges for her to marry another girl.24 But whereas in Ovid’s book the transformation is wrought by the goddess Isis, no outside agent is involved in the Chinese story—just an emotional bond seems to be enough. The third story tells of a good-looking seventeen-year-old boy by the name of Sun.25 He flirts with a girl next door but cannot get anywhere near her. One night, as her mother is taking the chamber pot out, he mistakes her for the daughter and throws himself at her, only to fall back in shock when he sees who it is and to take to his heels. The mother suspects that some dalliance has been going on behind her back, and confronts the daughter. Overcome with shame, the girl hangs herself. The mother tries to revive her but to no avail, leaving her more set than ever on exacting revenge by having Sun put to death. She goes to him and says, ‘Our two families are equal in status, so if you loved my daughter we could have been properly joined by matrimonial ties. Why this impropriety?’ She then forces the boy to come home with her, and there she leaves him tied to the corpse while she goes off to report him to the local magistrate. Sun has no doubt that he would be sentenced to death. Not even a single night’s pleasure have I had with this girl, he thinks to himself, and now I am going to be caught by the law—it has got to be bad karma that brings me to this pass. But disconsolate as he is, he is not above noticing that the dead girl beside him looks as comely as she did alive. So he takes her clothes off and copulates with her—he would die without regret then. To his amazement, no sooner is he done than she starts to breathe. She is brought back to life, and he hastens to help her up. Presently the mother returns with the police but when they enter the room what they see are the two young people sitting together and talking. The mother does not know what to make of it but insists all the same on having Sun apprehended and brought before the magistrate. Sun tells all, whereupon the magistrate decides that it has all come of a pre-arrangement in the nether world and that the two should become man and wife. Feng means by this and several other tales that he includes in the same chapter to illustrate the miraculous power of qing, its efficacious power beyond even the grave, qing here being clearly sexual desire. Having sex with a dead body may strike the

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modern reader as gross, and necrophilia is nowadays seen to be a sexual perversion that brings the police to the door, but Chinese storytelling delights in blurring the worlds of the living and the dead, and Sun’s act would not have been regarded with any more horror than all those instances, recounted in numerous popular and titillating tales, of a human male making love to a female ghost or fox-spirit. What comes across in this story is a comic effect rather than any ghoulishness. Besides, is it not a fact that the consummation of physical desire is life-giving, leading to reproduction and birth, and if birth, why not rebirth? In any case, Sun and the girl are meant for each other, their union predestined in Hades if not in Heaven. The notion of predestination is good enough for the magistrate at any rate—he leaves well alone when he refrains from interfering with the lovers’ fulfilment of their conjugal destiny. What Sun has imagined to be bad karma turns out to be benign after all. Karmic destiny in the guise of a fortuitous affinity between lovers is a pronounced motif in Feng’s anthology, as it is in countless other Chinese stories, and remains part of the vocabulary and even belief system of ordinary Chinese today. This and the second story fall under a chapter heading in which Feeling is coupled with The Miraculous, while the first story appears in a section entitled Infatuation. Each of Feng’s chapter headings pairs Feeling with one of a wide range of categories, from matchmaking and chastity to ghosts and monsters. A few categories serve to qualify Feeling: for example, ‘other or outsider’ collocates with Feeling to give us ‘same-sex love.’ The collocations show that for Feng and, one guesses, for his fellow men of letters, Feeling is linked to, and surrounded by, a whole web of ideas, personal attributes, values and superstitions. Of these, two in particular deserve to be looked at in more detail: infatuation and chivalry. The category which I have rendered as ‘infatuation’ is made up of two words: qing and chi, the latter a character that dictionaries standardly define as ‘idiotic’ or ‘crazy.’ In  my telling of the story of Wang and Yuzan, I translated it as ‘daft’ because that English word means not only ‘foolish’ and ‘crazy’ but also ‘infatuated with’—and this is indeed what Wang is seen to be. He is daft about Yuzan, and to so extreme a degree that he sacrifices his manhood for just a glimpse of her. If this seems like folly, that, the author suggests, is what infatuation is. When Feng utters the words quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, ‘to the truly wise, all love is daft,’ he is making love synonymous with infatuation. For a Chinese to be ‘infatuated’ is for him or her to dote on someone foolishly and excessively, but the Chinese word does not imply, as does the English, that ‘infatuation’ is a transitory state, not the ‘real thing.’ For what it does imply, two illustrations might be offered. In the first, a woodcut print attributed to a painter of the fifteenth century, a young woman and her maid gaze from behind a screen at a pair of cats mating. A quatrain serving as caption conjures up a mood of dreamy lethargy. The wutong tree is shedding its leaves, but the young woman is in a daze and does not know that it is autumn. The

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caption tells us why, but we could just as easily have read it from the mating cats: she is ‘infatuated,’ and her infatuation is tinged with sexual longing.26 For the second illustration, fast forward three and a half centuries to the novelist Wu Jianren (1866–1910). Wu has exclaimed, ‘Qing, qing . . . how do you write about it, how do you exhaust its meaning?’27 To confine it to rapture between the sexes is to narrow and sully it, he says. It is a sensibility you are born with, he elsewhere declares. As you grow older, it shows up in forms that depend on who it is directed to: if to lord and country, it is loyalty; if to parents, it is filial piety; to children, kindliness; and to friends, steadfastness and solidarity. As for that which pertains to man and woman, why, it is only infatuation; and when it is not reciprocated but splurged anyway, then it is nothing short of bewitchment.28 Wu, one guesses, has in mind someone who is smitten and, especially if feelings are not returned, under a spell. He disparages this state, and says more than once that to call it qing, as people who do not know any better are wont to do, is to take the latter term too lightly or to besmirch it. In his view then, infatuation is all there is to romantic love. Why I pay infatuation so much attention, when it is customary to be dismissive of it, is the contrast it allows me to draw between Chinese and Western conceptions of romantic love. For Wu and Feng to say that all love is infatuation is not so much to hold infatuation cheap as to hold love cheap. They were too accustomed to seeing romantic love as forbidden love to think otherwise—forbidden because it played no part in matrimony, so that to fall in love was necessarily to fly in the face of parental authority and conventional morality, and was therefore illicit. By contrast, infatuation is not ‘true love’ in the English-speaking world. John Armstrong has tried to define it in a chapter he devotes to infatuation in his book Conditions of Love, asking if we can ‘pick up an insight into real love by seeing what is missing in infatuation?’ He observes that we ‘want to say that there is a difference . . . between infatuation and real love,’ between what he calls ‘a kind of shadow form of love’ and ‘the real thing.’29 Yet I am not persuaded that the examples he goes on to give of infatuation cannot equally be seen to encapsulate ‘falling in love.’ One way of slicing the melon of love is to mark off ‘falling in love’ or being ‘in love.’ Helen Fisher’s research has shown that there is a case to be made for this in terms of distinct brain circuits. To a neuro-scientist, the state of being ‘in love’ is infatuation, limerence, passionate love or what is standardly dubbed romantic love by another name. When there has been no wish to say that there is a difference between infatuation and love—and there assuredly has been none in Chinese tradition—you would conclude as Wu and Feng do, that romantic love is infatuation by another name.

The other collocation worth noting is of love and chivalry. Feng was the first to forge a link between the two. Mention chivalry and today’s Chinese mind immediately calls

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up kung fu novels and movies. The hero in these certainly stands in a long line that goes back to the knight errant of antiquity—he who righted wrongs with altruism, honour, generosity, a great sense of justice, an aloofness to money and a readiness to help the weak, the poor and the oppressed. A martial figure familiar from Chinese history, lore, popular drama and fiction, he is depicted by some as a sort of benevolent Robin Hood and by others as a predatory bandit-rebel-brute. Whether he was one or the other, the Chinese knight was the image of manliness—and a mark of that manliness was that he cared but little for women. The sworn brotherhood, or gang, to which he belonged stressed male bonding and absolute fraternal loyalty. Towards the female sex he was indifferent if not positively antagonistic. By Feng’s time, however, machismo had crossed paths with eros, and the model of the knight had been recast in the image of a lover. What’s more, he was a lover who would not be acting with such heroism were he not so rich in Feeling. It is wrong to think that the hero and lover are two different kinds of people, insists a romance published two centuries later, A Tale of Heroic Lovers (1878). People mistakenly think, its author writes, that those who indulge in force and like fighting are heroes, while those who toy with rouge and powder or have a weakness for catamites are lovers . . . What they don’t realize is that only when one has the pure nature of a hero can one fully possess a loving heart, and only when one is a truly filial child can one perform heroic deeds.30

The conflation of heroism with filiality reproduced the Confucian values that dominated society, and these in turn worked upon the reader’s imagination, to be brought into play in relationships in the real world. With love thrown into the mix, a new ideal emerged. Lest the reader thinks this ideal comparable to that of courtly love, I hasten to point out that while the Chinese knight bore some similarities to King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, he did not carry out deeds of chivalry for the sake of a lady, nor did he know any courtly love code. Indeed, to seek a parallel between the love of a Chinese knight and that of a Lancelot for a Queen Guinevere, would be quite fruitless. For a start, far from being a lady of a higher rank, the loved one in the Chinese imagination and in real life was all too often a prostitute. Furthermore, chivalry was not an entirely male preserve, and there was ample room in the Chinese cultural imagination for the female knight errant, a heroine quite the equal of the hero in swordsmanship or altruism. One such heroine model is the woman warrior who dons male garb to avenge her father’s death or to fight battles in his stead. You would no more characterize her type as ‘misty flowers, powder-and-eyebrow paint,’ to use a stock Chinese phrase for women, any more than you would call her English sister a ‘petticoat.’ Female chivalry is seen to interlock with male machismo in a chivalric tale dating to the ninth century, in which the wife of one Cui Shensi goes missing one night, then

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reappears carrying a dagger in one hand and a man’s head in another. She tells her dumbstruck husband that, now that she has avenged her father, who was wrongly killed by a high official, it is time she took off. She thanks him for their two years of marriage and for giving her a child, then bids him goodbye. He watches in astonishment as she leaps over the wall and the roofs of neighbouring houses. But a little while later she pops back to say she has forgotten to feed the child; once she has done that, she would leave for good. This turns out to be a pretext, for when Cui Shensi goes in later to look, he finds the child dead. She has killed him, for she is no nurturer but avenger, and as a knight errant and free agent, she is not about to be unmanned by emotional womanly ties to the past or to family.31 Heroic in an entirely different kind was Liu Rushi (1618–64), a historical figure who was simultaneously an accomplished poet, painter and calligrapher. Of the courtesans of her age, she was the most remarkable, if only because no other prostitute has inspired as magisterial a biography as the one written of her by Chen Yinke, the greatest Chinese historian and classicist of the twentieth century. In spirit she was cut from the same cloth as Veronica Franco, the sixteenth-century Venetian poet and courtesan who consorted with poets, artists, politicians and the best brains of her time. Like her, Liu Rushi has had her life written up, her poems published in her own day, and films made about her in ours. She was an extraordinarily bookish courtesan, and the setting one imagines for her is less a boudoir erotically perfumed with incense from a bronze censer than an ink-stained, book-strewn study. Her own preferred setting was actually her leaf-like boat, one on which she travelled about to consort with celebrated artists and writers.32 It has been suggested that she was at times waterborne because she was a ‘painted boatcourtesan,’ in which case her boat could not have been that leaf-like, since it would have been a vessel serving as a floating house of pleasure. She was quite a traveller at any rate, her tiny bound feet notwithstanding. Her station in life afforded her the freedom denied to gentlewomen—who but courtesans could socialize so immodestly with men not their husbands? It is hard to imagine her not doing so on equal terms either, so greatly admired were her literary compositions by the men of talent she enthralled. It must have been because she thought herself one of them that when she first sought out Qian Qianyi (1582–1664), the prominent poet, litterateur and bibliophile she was to marry, she dressed herself as a man while making sure nonetheless that her disguise stopped short of hiding her small feet. Her camouflage obliterated the sexual difference, but not entirely. It made maleness or femaleness irrelevant in the face of such erudition and accomplishment as hers. Yet I suspect her aim was not so much to defeminize femininity as to enhance it, since cross-dressing can be sexually arousing. At any rate, Qian, a quarter of a century older than she, fell under her potent spell and married her against the opposition of his

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principal wife’s family. What incensed his in-laws even further was that he treated Liu as though she were wife not concubine. It must be such a relief for the men of the time to turn from those chaste and submissive wives their culture spawned and so strongly abetted, to the type at the other end of the spectrum of womanhood, namely that embodied by the sensually untrammelled and independently spirited Liu Rushi. Qian and Liu could be friends as well as lovers. They could exchange poems; hold conversations; even compile and edit books together, rummaging among the volumes, many of them rare editions, that he had lovingly amassed in the Tower of Crimson Clouds, the library he had built specially for her. In 1650, an accidental fire caused the library to burn down, reducing much of its valuable collection to ashes. Worse had happened six years before: Manchu claimants to the throne had broken through from the north to occupy first Beijing and then Nanjing, the Southern Capital. The invaders had presently declared the founding of the Qing, a dynasty which loyalists of the Ming imperial house saw as foreign, and resisted. Had he listened to Liu Rushi, who proposed martyrdom in lieu of acceptance, Qian Qianyi, a minister of rites of the fallen Ming, might perhaps not have surrendered. As it was, he agreed to hold office in the conquerors’ court, and even though he resigned shortly afterwards, pleading illness, and maintained his links to the resistance movement, still he was seen to have failed to uphold the cardinal Confucian principle of loyalty. He was seen to have swerved, however reluctantly, and a whiff of betrayal would always hang disagreeably about his name. As for Liu, she tried to drown herself but was pulled back; she refused compromise even if he did not. If, to her characterization as a talent, lover and helpmeet was added the lauded category of ‘woman knight errant,’ it was thanks to her unwavering loyalty to the Ming and her dedication to the cause of resistance. She later proved her loyalty not only by word but by deed, engaging actively in movements to restore the Ming dynasty. She showed herself to be more than an honorary man, the standards of heroism and patriotism she set being higher than could be met by men of flesh and blood. Deterred from honourable suicide, she chose renunciation, taking Buddhist vows a year before Qian’s death in 1664. His death removed any circumspection that his family might have exercised towards his concubine, whose prominent place in Qian’s heart and life they had doubtless deeply resented. In an unpleasant dispute that broke out over family property, Liu Rushi was left without a penny. Was it out of desperation that she died by her own hand, or did she consider it an act of honour? However one sees her suicide, her leaning towards martyrdom and heroism is not in any doubt. An earlier lover, the poet Chen Zilong (1608–47), died as she would have wished Qian to, namely as a martyr to the loyalist cause of resistance. Her liaison with

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Chen Zilong, revealed by their poems to each other as an intensely passionate one, began when she was fifteen and he twenty-five. Their cohabitation, a time of mutual versifying, was cut short by the vehement objections of his family. He had tried at first to keep their avowed love a secret from his wife, whose extremely jealous nature he feared, and whose attempts to break up his relationship with Liu Rushi had the backing of his grandmother, whom Chen revered.33 One such attempt involved getting him a concubine, this by way of distracting him from Liu, whom his wife knew to be a much greater rival because far better loved. The lovers had only a spring and summer together, until Chen’s wife came to their love nest, the Southern Villa, to force them to part. Liu Rushi’s departure from the Southern Villa before the autumn of 1635 did not stop the flow of poetry, however, and dreamy verses continued to be exchanged between the two soulmates, if anything with even greater frequency. She liked to speak from within the song-lyric, a form specially expressive of love, and though her recapitulation of their time together comes to us from a great distance, we hear her longing and her sadness. Here is just one excerpt from her song series Dream of the South: Thinking of Someone: Where was he? At the jade steps. No fool for love, yet I wanted to stay, Overly sensitive to any sign of indifference, It must be that I feared love would run too deep.34

Ten years after their separation, Chen shaved his head, donned a monk’s habit and, thus disguised, united in himself the world of letters and the world of war by actively engaging in underground resistance activities, even joining an army. It was a doomed cause, however, and the poet and hero met his tragic destiny when he died a martyr in 1647. His and Liu Rushi’s dates put them squarely in that part of the late Ming which I have characterized as an age of sensibility. Hearts were quicker to inflame then, and eyes to weep. Thus the lovers were real lovers, encouraged by the high premium placed on Feeling by their era to harbour heartfelt emotions and, since they were poets, to lyricize them. The poems exchanged between Liu and her lovers have retained their fascination for later generations, and unpeeling their layers of meaning for the hints of sentiment and sensuality underneath has kept literary historians busy to this day. That their love and death were enacted against the backdrop of dynastic collapse makes their story all the more engrossing. Dynastic transitions are never without a measure of trauma for intellectuals, but the writing on the fall of the Ming is exceptional in the degree to which it condenses themes of tragedy, elegy, decadence and nostalgia. This last was for a vanished, or vanishing, world, a compelling part of which was the perfumed world of ‘flowers,’ as courtesans were termed. The image of such a

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one as Liu Rushi, in whom eroticism was irresistibly matched by erudition, is a highly potent one, made all the more so by being filtered through literary male eyes and celebrated in writing. The image’s producers, as well as its first audience, were the classically educated scholar-officials who projected their own plight on to the plight of the courtesans: they saw in the suffering of those forced to sell sex a mirror of their own painful subjection to foreign rule and to the distasteful politics of the day. The place of the courtesan in the lives of that class never died out, of course, but still things were never the same again after the Ming. No second Liu Rushi rose to lend lustre and cachet to the profession. The late nineteenth century would see courtesanship flare and flourish, but this would be in the foreign concessions of Shanghai, where an urbanity born of Western imperialism made it a harder-edged, more commercialized and more foreign-flavoured thing. It would attract to it not poetry but the novel, a modern form. Yet the world of ‘misty flowers’ is simply too deeply embedded in the mind of the Chinese male to be easily given up, and well-heeled men continued right up to the early decades of the twentieth century to look to paid sex for solace, diversion, companionship and, yes, for love.

Liniang’s dream of love illustrated in a seventeenth-century edition of The Peony Pavilion.

5 Two Great Works on Love

True love is typically viewed in the great love stories as spiritual, which puts it beyond the realm of the mundane as well as that which can be bought. The body is unimportant. Robert J. Sternberg, Cupid’s Arrow

Platonizing lust out of love or spiritualizing sexuality involves conceptual contortions of the kind the Chinese never attempted before they read love stories of the sort this chapter’s epigraph describes. In their own greatest love stories there is no evasion of sex, nor any denial of love’s equivalence to carnality. As we have seen, the categories with which Jin Shengtan struggles are sexual desire and licentiousness, and in trying to justify Oriole’s consent to her seduction, he argues against the possibility of prising the two apart. All Chinese today know the two works that this chapter discusses, The Peony Pavilion and The Dream of the Red Chamber, to be classics, the very summit of literary achievement. Yet, even as they love them for their amorous content, they could very well see why people had once thought them salacious.1 The Peony Pavilion (1588) is the best-known and best-loved of its author’s sung dramas. Its author was Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), the great Ming-dynasty playwright whom all critics regard as a champion of love. Tang was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare’s, the two men dying in the same year. For this reason, Chinese scholars have compared The Peony Pavilion with Romeo and Juliet, to my mind unprofitably. For a start, the Chinese play is a comedy in the so-called ‘grand reunion’ mode: boy marries girl with the parents’ blessing and after he has passed the state examinations. To summarize the plot briefly: Du Liniang, the enchanting daughter of a high official, is kept in almost complete seclusion by her parents, but on a spring day she ventures into a garden with her maid, Spring Fragrance. In a dream she has during a nap after the stroll, she is back in the garden, and near the Peony Pavilion there, she is made love to by a stranger, a student named Liu Mengmei (‘willow dreaming of plum’). Their union is witnessed by the Flower God, a minor character in the play. Awake, she dies of lovesickness, not only for the absent man of her dreams but for the transience of her wasted (because loveless) youth.

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Nearly three years pass. Liu, who turns out to be a real person, comes upon a selfportrait she has left behind and falls in love with it. In a scene where she visits him one night as a shade—the Judge of the Underworld having released her upon hearing a plea from the Flower God—their dream liaison becomes a ghostly union. She urges him to dig up her grave, exhume her corpse and resurrect her. He does so, and she is returned to the world of light; but because he has to hurry away to take the state examinations (which of course he passes with flying colours, an augur of the story’s happy ending), they marry, thereby completing their predestined match, before they have received her family’s blessing. She claims she is still a virgin—those other nights of love with her ghostly (rather than fleshly) form do not count. At first her father, who takes some convincing that she is really his daughter brought back to life, has Liu detained as a grave robber. But once the Emperor intercedes and judges Liniang to be real, the whole family is joyously reunited. This play, or rather opera, was an instant success, read or sung everywhere and adored especially by its female audiences, for whom Liniang took on a life beyond the page and stage. If contemporary accounts are to be believed, an actress playing Liniang actually expired on stage, so completely did she identify with her character part. Other women acted out their adoration of Liniang by raising altars to her and consecrating her portrait, hero-worshipping her as the ultimate personification of ardour, something they perhaps aspired to themselves.2 Hearts must have stirred, imagination kindled, by such lines as these from Tang’s celebrated preface to his play: ‘Of all the women of feeling in the world, was there ever one like Du Liniang?’ And again, ‘Such a one as Liniang can truly be called a person of Feeling.’3 A Peony devotee whose early death at eighteen was thought to signify acute sensibility was Feng Xiaoqing, that object of fascination to Ming men of letters and, 300 years later, to Pan Guangdan. Few would take Pan’s psychoanalytic interpretation seriously today. But when it comes to Liniang’s dream in Peony, critics have not resisted the temptation to a Freudian reading—it appears to fit so nicely with Freud’s theory that dreams are disguised fulfilments of wishful impulses. One eminent scholar of Chinese literature, for example, saw Liniang’s dream as freeing her ‘libidinous self ’ from ‘all inhibitions and taboos.’4 It is true that dreams were no more nonsense to Tang than they were to Freud: Tang too believed that dreams were rooted in feeling, and in his oft-quoted preface to Peony, he has asked rhetorically, ‘Need the feelings revealed in dreams be untrue?’ Dreams were a lifelong preoccupation of his, as well as a feature common to his four major plays. Yet we need seek no help from Freud to unlock the meaning of Liniang’s dream, so  frankly is it sexual. The dream is a sexual encounter from start to finish, and an undisguised one at that. Enacted half on-stage and half off, the encounter begins with the sudden appearance of Liu Mengmei. Carrying a branch that he had broken off from a willow tree in the garden, he says to Liniang, smiling, ‘Lady, since you are versed

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in the classics, why not favour me with a poem in praise of this sprig of willow?’ She hesitates, as any girl of her breeding would, but singing of her ‘flower-like beauty’ and youth he pulls at her sleeve and asks her to go over to an enclosed bed of peonies where, he tells her, he will Undo your collar, Loosen your girdle– You hiding behind your sleeve Shall bite it for pain And so submit to love’s brief, sweet embrace.5

The lovemaking takes place in the wings, but audiences have it described for them by a witness, the Flower God, who enters and sings: Touched by the great generative forces, already they are transformed: See how wormlike he writhes, fanning desire’s fire, How her limpid charms freeze, her soul transfixed.6

At the consummation of their love, they are bespattered by a rain of red petals that the Flower God lets fall. ‘A shower freshly rouged by the setting sun’ is how, in a succeeding aria, Liu conjures that image, clearly a metaphor for Liniang’s deflowering—and indeed the line has been translated by one scholar as ‘we broke the virginal seal.’7 Liniang herself reminisces about this moment and her lost maidenhood—‘Plop, falling from air, red shadows, / petals torn from heart of flower!’8—in a subsequent scene where, in her waking state, she goes into the garden to relive her dream. In his aria Liu had implored her not to forget his hands seeking to ‘knead her into flakes’: in hers she remembers his eager tenseness and her own ‘sweet melting.’9 Tang’s use of natural imagery here and throughout the play is of a piece with his early presentation of Liniang’s open susceptibility to spring, a season which in Chinese tradition spells love with an ineluctability greater by far than that suggested by Tennyson in Locksley Hall: ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to love.’ The season of courtship and fertility, spring is sensuously evoked to bring her yearnings into sharper relief. She is sixteen now, she sighs to herself in a soliloquy after a walk through the garden, and she still has not met her future husband. It is painfully clear to her that the poems and songs she has read, about girls of yore being stirred to love by spring and to regret by autumn, are only too true. What a waste of her green springtime youth, and beauty too, if the perfect match were to elude her! The word ‘spring’ appears no fewer than nine times in Du Liniang’s short soliloquy. It can be recognized instantly for what it has been throughout the Chinese ages: the worst time of the year to remain unpaired. As synonyms for ‘love,’ the phrases ‘spring thoughts,’ ‘spring heart’ and ‘spring feeling’ fall from the pen of Chinese poets with

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magnificent unconcern for originality. Tuned up by spring, Liniang’s heartstrings await plucking by a lover, and it could be a charge against her that she is a girl in love with love. Her dreaming up of her future mate certainly suggests that a predisposition to love creates its own objects. There follows the rapturous sexual union, the urge to which is what makes love the vital, instinctual and generative force that it is for Tang. That this is his theme is intimated at the very beginning, by way of a reference to Gaotang in the prologue. As the reader may recall, ‘Gaotang’ is shorthand for an ancient story that has contributed a euphemism for sexual intercourse to the Chinese lexicon, namely ‘cloud and rain.’ This metaphor recurs in Peony; it and countless classical allusions saturate Tang’s text with sensuality. Refined as it is, Tang’s treatment of his subject also accommodates a considerable amount of bawdy light-heartedness and earthy irreverence. For example, audiences would have found the burlesque character Sister Stone a great figure of fun, and would have laughed to hear the old Daoist nun tell (in Scene 17) how she came by her name (from a stony obstruction in her vagina) and of her panting bridegroom’s failure to penetrate her on the night of their wedding, leaving her a reluctant virgin and with no choice but to repair to a nunnery. Clement Crisp, the celebrated dance critic, knew what he was about when he used her as the lead in a review he wrote for the Financial Times ( June 8, 2008) of a performance of The Peony Pavilion at Sadler’s Wells in London. ‘It is not every day,’ his opening sentence reads, ‘that you sit in the theatre and a Daoist nun announces from the stage that (in gynaecological matters) “Heaven deprived me of private parts.”’ Nor did it escape Crisp that ‘the verbal imagery is often horticultural (you could plan a garden from the descriptions of emotions couched in the language of flowers).’ Tang’s penchant for the plant world is certainly marked. Through wordplay or allusion, the to-and-fro of a dialogue in Scene 23 moves one by one from thirty-eight different flowers to each plant’s erotic association. The forms of eroticism are protean, and by peopling his play with high-born characters as well as low, Tang could employ the gamut of style and language for them, all the way from the refined to the coarse, the poetically allusive to the baldly explicit. The whole, though, is a celebration of love and life, or of love as life. For Tang, love is revivifying, a force of nature. It is dream’s fulfilment, but it is fulfilment in the hereand-now rather than in any spiritual realm. He is in the business of making an absolute claim for love against what has been termed ‘nature’ and ‘principle,’ two key concepts of the Neo-Confucianism that was the philosophical frame of his time. I am oversimplifying but not grossly when I say that an antithesis with which Tang wrestled was love and human nature. This may sound absurd to the Western reader, for how could love be opposed to human nature, it is of the very essence of being human; and if love was not in your nature then surely you must be an automaton, not a human being? Yet that is the conceptual contrast you are more or less forced to make

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if, following Confucian thinking, you base your ethics (and all Chinese philosophy is basically ethics) on the premise that man is born good (that is, human nature is good) and that all men are capable of becoming sages unless they somehow allowed emotions to stand in the way of their achieving moral perfection. Furthering one’s moral selfcultivation meant guarding against extravagances of desire. So beware of the passions, is the message passed down the centuries. Just now I characterized the antithesis that Tang was caught up in as love versus human nature, but for ‘love’ I should more accurately have written ‘the emotions,’ for love was never singled out in Chinese philosophical discourse but lumped with joy, anger, grief, fear, dislike and desire as one of the so-called ‘seven emotions’ (see Chapter 4). These are deemed innate, belonging to man without his having to learn them. By Tang’s time, the so-called ‘seven emotions’ had long become a stock phrase, and it is as a cliché in popular speech that it appears in his play. Neo-Confucian suspicions of the emotions were touched upon in my previous chapter; as I have said, keeping them at equilibrium was deemed all-important. Any emotion was best held in check, in that state Confucius had termed ‘yet unstirred.’ Neo-Confucians deemed the ‘yet unstirred’ state the still lake of human nature. Once stirred, turbulent desires come into play—and that, we are told by a passage about love and lust in Chapter 111 of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is not ‘true love.’ True love is an unstirred emotion, ‘a bud’ which, ‘once open, ceases to be true love’ because it gives way all too easily to the agitations of desire.10 This is a thoroughly Neo-Confucian conceptualization, one that must puzzle a Westerner because it seems to make love antecedent to desire, the reverse of the more customary idea of desire as primary, basic to love—Plato’s ladder of love starts from bodily attraction; while in Octavio Paz’s ‘double flame’ sex is the primordial fire, love the blue flame to which it rises. By contrast, the Neo-Confucian imagined desire to be an emanation of emotion. To caricature the strict Neo-Confucian only a little, seldom could he think of emotion without the spectre of swamping desires and seething selfishness being raised in his mind. He would pick up The Peony Pavilion but gingerly, if at all. As the apotheosis of the cult of sensibility, in which emotions are definitely not held back, the play would have greatly disconcerted the Neo-Confucian seeker of moral perfection. And there was something else its author was up against: for the inherent goodness of human nature, Neo-Confucianism had thrown up the concept of ‘principle,’ a cosmic and moral order pre-existent in all things, including human beings, making them what they are and constituting their nature. To achieve an unclouded perception of ideal principle, Neo-Confucian moral self-cultivation followed Buddhism in abjuring emotions. ‘Principle’ was what Tang explicitly set against emotion in his preface to The Peony Pavilion, his celebration of emotion qua love. He judged it to be absolutely incompatible with emotion, wholeheartedly endorsing the words of a respected friend: ‘Where emotion is, there principle is not; where principle is, there emotion is not.’

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I will resist the temptation to take ‘principle’ to mean ‘reason,’ as some scholars have done on occasion. Principle versus emotion does not exactly match the opposition, familiar to Western thinking, between reason and emotion, or sense and sensibility, or the head and the heart. Taking but the smallest of dips into Tang’s papers will show that he was championing spontaneous emotional impulses against a whole range of Neo-Confucian emphases. For instance, one practice enjoined by Neo-Confucian thinkers that he criticized as being too contrived was meditational ‘quiet sitting’ as a method of self-cultivation and avenue to moral perfection. The friend whose words I quoted two paragraphs back was Daguan, a Buddhist monk and intellectual whom Tang greatly admired but with whom he could not help disagreeing: while Buddhists renounced desire, Tang was the last person in the world to do so. Those words of Daguan’s that Tang endorsed were taken from a letter in which the monk had meant them to point up what he saw was a self-contradiction in Neo-Confucian thinking, but Tang chose to read them as the very encapsulation of his own position. Daguan had tried to convert him to the Buddhist ideal of renunciation, but Tang had excused himself from any monastic vocation on the grounds that it was still human feelings that drove him, his art and his aesthetics.11 Yet something happened to make him change his mind. When he was about fifty, there occurred a ‘great awakening,’ and the idea of dream as the revelation of deepest desire, as it is in Peony, gave way to dream as illusion, as echoed in the saying ‘life’s but a dream.’ Perhaps it was Daguan’s influence, perhaps it was personal tragedy (the death of some of his children including his eldest son), or perhaps it was simply the resignation of age, but it seemed not the same impassioned person as the author of Peony who wrote, in the preface to his final play, these words of profound disillusion: ‘Where the dream ends, awakening begins: when passions are spent, enlightenment follows.’12 Though Tang was brought up Confucian, he lived in a climate suffused with Buddhist influence. His receptivity to Buddhist ideas is certainly apparent in Peony. Earlier I quoted the Flower God’s aria on the lovers’ ecstasy, but not in full, leaving out lines steeped in Buddhist vocabulary for now: This is but an affinity of shadows, Brought about in the mind, Revealed in the chain of causes. Ha, my Terrace of Flowers is now defiled by lust.13

What is rendered here as the ‘chain of causes’ but is more accurately known as ‘dependent origination’ lies at the heart of Buddhist teaching. It is a Buddhist insight that all phenomena are interconnected, everything affects everything else, that everything that happens is both the effect of a prior cause and the cause of a future effect. Hardly aware that it is Indian in origin, today’s Chinese (who call it yuan or yinyuan) take it to mean some force of fate that determines whether two individuals

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will or will not cross paths, will or will not have an affinity for each other, fall in love, marry or be connected in some way to each other, becoming friends or partners or, above all, a lifelong married couple. And just as a cause could have an effect in the next incarnation, so an effect could have had its cause in a previous life, which is why Tang has his pair of lovers gaze at each other at the start of their intimacy and wonder, ‘Where in some past time had you and I met?’14 We have seen this fatedness at work in the stories told in the previous chapter, where it was variously termed predestination, karmic destiny or affinity and signified a meant-to-be relationship. You could say that it was the Chinese answer to the question asked by all who fall in love: of the thousands upon thousands in the world, ‘Why him?’ or ‘Why her?’ Only it is also the Chinese explanation for why would-be lovers separate or why pairing founders: the predestined affinity is not there. In this and other ways it differs from the myth of the origin of love which Aristophanes retells in Plato’s Symposium. This is the myth that each human being, perfectly round and whole at the beginning, with two faces, two pairs of eyes, ears, arms and legs, was cloven in two by Zeus, to spend the rest of life searching for his or her lost other half in order to fuse with it. Love, according to Aristophanes, is ‘simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.’ In fusing you with your beloved, love makes ‘one out of two’ and restores to you something that is intrinsic to your very nature, for, according to Aristophanes, love is inborn in mankind.15 It is not hard to see such a view seeding the fantasy that there is someone out there who is uniquely ‘right’ for you, who will be a perfect fit, and that if you could only find this person, your happiness would be complete. By contrast, love does not really come into the Chinese scheme, only interconnection and relationship—action and consequence arising together in a mutually interdependent chain of cause and effect. There is no sense of a search for a lost part of oneself, nor any longing for fusion and wholeness. Nor indeed could there be when at its very heart Buddhist teaching denies any solidity or permanence to the self and to the phenomenal world, and therefore to crave complete and enduring happiness (with so unfixed a self and in so impermanent a world) is to court frustration and suffering. It is when your mind sees through to the illusoriness and essential emptiness of the self and the world that you attain enlightenment and, with it, deliverance from the suffering caused by your attachment to them, attachment that is necessarily delusory because what you are clinging to has no true existence. That insubstantiality must be what the Flower God is suggesting when he relegates the lovers’ union to the realm of ‘shadows.’ And it is to continue in the Buddhist vein that he speaks of it, in the last line quoted above, as a defiling lust. To the ears of any reasonably romantic reader of Peony, the Flower God’s phrase sounds strange, even repellent. Defiling? Lust? How could Tang think it was that? Such a reader was the sinologue Cyril Birch, whose translation of the play into English

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in its entirety is a model of erudition and artistry—a fellow scholar is surely right to commend him for finding, without distortion, in the cast of minor characters ‘a host of echoes of Shakespearean comedy and Shakespearean diction.’16 Birch is bothered by this line about lust defiling the flower terrace, singling it out as being as difficult to understand as any line in the whole play. Not difficult in the sense that the words are particularly hard to translate into English, he hastens to add, but puzzling. Why, Birch asks, ‘this concern about “lust”?’17 Surely, he implies, it is love not lust? After all, Peony is Tang’s ‘most protracted and profound meditation on the nature of love.’ Here is how Birch himself defines love: ‘in its highest development, as true love between man and woman,’ it ‘embraces sexual attraction, physical passion, but also sentiment, empathy, devotion—the virtues of that broader love that exists also outside the sexual relationship.’18 I daresay that if they were real people Liu and Liniang would feel all that for each other, but it is not how they would speak of it. What the Flower God has just witnessed is an illicit sex act—and if that is not ‘lust,’ then what is? Why lust, asks Birch? It is partly a matter of shifting styles: love is aestheticized when clothed in the language of classical poetry (of which there is a great deal in Peony), but made plainer, more sexually explicit, when put into the mouths of the minor or humbler characters. ‘This girl died from yearning for sex,’ is how the Flower God puts it (in Scene 23) when he pleads Liniang’s case before the Judge of the Underworld.19 Tang veers at will between high and low diction, but even when love is all flowers and ‘cloud and rain’ and so on, it remains a matter of sexuality, never transcarnal, much less a higher form that is opposed to something lower, less spiritual. But most of all it is lust because that is what sexual love is in the particular realm of ideas which those lines of the Flower God echo. With those lines Tang is taking us briefly into the Buddhist universe, and there you would find no love conceived that is not sensual. There you no sooner desire than you crave. And craving, for Buddhists, is one of the most grievous of defilements and among the greatest of stumbling blocks on the path to enlightenment.

This brings me to the novel that grapples more deeply with the theme of love and lust, only to find a resolution of sorts in the Buddhist ideal of renunciation, than any ever written in Chinese. This is The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1715?–63), introduced to thousands in the English-speaking world by the wonderfully readable translation published in the Penguin Classics series under the novel’s other title, The Story of the Stone. The stone is a piece of jade which the pubescent hero, Jia Baoyu, is born with, a talisman that stands for Baoyu (the name translates as Precious Jade) at the same time as it serves as a narrative thread linking the otherwise thoroughly realistic (indeed autobiographical) world of the novel to the realms of magic, myth and metaphysics.

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Realistically, Baoyu is the scion of a great aristocratic family and heir to its fortune; mythically, he is the incarnation of a piece of a rock which for one brief lifespan has been transformed into a gifted, precocious and waywardly tender-hearted boy. Realistically, he loves Daiyu, a thin-skinned, self-absorbed, highly strung and none too healthy girl cousin who, upon her mother’s death, is brought to the Jias’ palatial house to be raised with him and other members of his family. Mythically, he is owed ‘a debt of tears’ by the Crimson Pearl Flower that the tearful Daiyu was in a past existence and which he gave life to when, as a sentient stone, he daily sprinkled it with dew. In this-worldly terms he marries another girl cousin, the robuster and more ‘suitable’ Baochai, in the mistaken belief that it is Daiyu he is marrying, tricked into doing so by the adults around him. In otherworldly terms his union with Baochai is predestined, the inscription on his jade talisman mysteriously matching the words on a gold locket that she has been given by a Buddhist monk. In much of the novel Baoyu lives an idyllic life in a magnificent garden in the grounds of the family mansion, the only boy in a paradisal world of girls made up of cousins and maidservants. It suits him down to the ground to live there, for he is never happier than when he is surrounded by girls. To him girls are to boys what water is to mud, or as purity is to filth and fineness is to coarseness. That he should have been born a girl, and a beautiful one at that, is a thought you could scarcely resist as you read about him. There is a telling passage (in Chapter 3) in which, upon speaking to Daiyu for the first time, and being completely enchanted by her, Baoyu throws a tantrum: ‘None of the girls has got one,’ said Baoyu, his face streaming with tears and sobbing hysterically. ‘Only I have got one. It always upsets me. And now this new cousin comes here who is as beautiful as an angel and she hasn’t got one either, so I know it can’t be any good.’

‘I do not think,’ observes David Hawkes, the chief translator of the Penguin Classics edition, ‘the fact that he is actually referring to his jade talisman makes this passage psychologically any the less interesting.’20 Baoyu is girlish enough to like such feminine things as rouge and powder, and to be thoroughly knowledgeable about them—‘This isn’t ceruse, it’s a powder made by crushing the seeds of garden-jalap and mixing them with perfume,’ he tells a girl whose toilette he is watching.21 He does not use cosmetics himself but he does have a habit of licking lipstick on the sly. His sensual susceptibilities repulse his father. In a wince-making moment for the reader, the father beats the son to within an inch of his life, not so much from rage at Baoyu’s lack of application (the boy disdains the bookish study that goes into the making of the Confucian man of letters-cum-public servant) but out of a pained disgust at what he suspects to be his son’s sexual proclivities. How many fathers have

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wanted to say to their sons, ‘be a man,’ yet against this in all its senses Baoyu could not be more doggedly set. There is no doubt that Daiyu comes first with him, and he with her. Yet he is easily and irresistibly attracted to others, being highly susceptible to beauty, both masculine and feminine. A glimpse of Baochai’s snow-white arm, for instance, left him rapt, and he fantasized about touching it. During a visit to the country, he was so taken by the pretty picture a farm girl made as she turned a spinning wheel that, when he later caught sight of her standing beside the road watching for him as his carriage took him away, he could not help feeling a strong emotion and gazing longingly back at her. And no sooner did he set eyes on Qin Zhong, a beautiful boy distantly related to him by marriage, than Baoyu developed a crush on him—it was ‘as though part of his soul had left him’ and, staring blankly, he became ‘oblivious to all around him, while a stream of idle fancies passed through his mind.’22 Such instances, just three of many more, suggest a man of Feeling in the making. But lest the reader supposes a childish pre-sexual innocence to all this, it must be pointed out that Baoyu is not sexually inexperienced: he loses his virginity early on in the book. This is how it happens. One afternoon, he takes a nap in the perfumed bedroom of his nephew’s wife Qin Keqing. He has a dream in which he is led through layers of gates to the palatial halls and gardens of the Land of Illusion, his guide a fairy called Disenchantment. He ends up in a sumptuously furnished bedroom where a fairy girl awaits him. Her loveliness has something of Baochai but also something of Daiyu, and indeed she is named Jianmei, meaning ‘two-in-one beauty.’ Disenchantment closes the door on the two, though not before she has imparted the art of love to Baoyu. Sexual bliss with Jianmei follows, but dream turns to nightmare the next morning when, stopped in his tracks by a dark ravine, the so-called Ford of Error, Baoyu finds himself clutched at by demons and water monsters. He wakes in terror, covered in sweat. His devoted maid Aroma, who is two years older, discovers that he has had a wet dream when helping him to do up his trousers. Coyly, but knowing it to be a foregone conclusion that as his personal maid she is his in every sense, she allows him to have sex with her, practising on her what he had learned in his dream. So Baoyu loves one but marries another, loses his virginity to a third and is at the same time sexually, sentimentally or empathically drawn to several others, male and female. Yet he is no philanderer, and indeed the contrast that he poses to the lechers among his elders and the novel’s other characters is essential to the picture the author means us to have of him. The lechers are people like Qin Keqing’s father-in-law, with whom she is suspected of having committed adultery and incest (incest in the Chinese sense of the term, as the perversion of order in the family); and the luckless Jia Rui, a cousin from a poor branch of the family, who lusts after the wife of another cousin, Wang Xifeng, and literarily masturbates to death yearning for her.

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The author means us to see Baoyu as being different from these, and sets him apart from the world of adult male sexuality not only by making him adolescent but by feminizing him. Feminizing him allows Baoyu’s sexuality to be raised above gross gratification or possession. But this is as we see it, not necessarily how the author has it. For how Cao Xueqin has it, you must turn to the famous passage in which the fairy Disenchantment differentiates Baoyu’s ‘lust’ ( yin) from that of the others: In principle, of course, all lust is the same. But the word has many different meanings. For example, the typically lustful man in the common sense of the word is a man who seeks pleasure in a pretty face, in singing and dancing, and who is inordinately given to flirtation; one who makes love in season and out of season and who, if he could, would like to have every pretty girl in the world at his disposal, to gratify his desires whenever he felt like it. Such a person is a mere brute. His is a shallow, promiscuous kind of lust.

Baoyu’s lust, she continues, is different. That susceptibility to infatuation with which nature has filled his being is what she calls ‘lust of the mind.’ ‘Lust of the mind’ cannot be explained in words, she says, ‘nor, if it could, would you be able to grasp their meaning. Either you know what it means or you don’t.’23 So what does it mean? Is she saying that Baoyu is amorous but not libidinous? That he loves rather than lusts? That that which ‘cannot be explained in words’ is in fact what speakers of the English language know as ‘love’? Yes and no. Yes in that some attempt is being made to carve out of lust an area of experience or state of being other than sex for sex’s sake; some line is being drawn between the physical and the mental. But no in that this line had never been drawn in Chinese tradition and indeed is for all practical purposes impossible to draw. All that the author could do is to point to something that ‘cannot be explained in words,’ stopping well short of pinning it down by, say, carving out a Venus from Eros as per C. S. Lewis—as I have tried to show, the paired love/sex contrast is the default option of the Western conception of love. Yet the notion of ‘lust of the mind’ is also a new departure from inherited tradition, entirely original, and in inventing it Cao appears to be reaching for a cultural construct that had long existed in the West but not in China, namely the dichotomy between flesh and spirit. I think Cao came closer to that construct than any other Chinese writing before the twentieth century, but still not close enough, all the same, for him to think there could be such a thing as sexless love. To look forward for a moment, interestingly the phrase ceased to be inexplicable a century and a half later, when it was used, or rather misused, to mean a sexual desire felt but not acted upon, something like what Jesus condemned, perhaps, when he famously remarked: ‘But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’24 I shall be returning to this in Chapter 12.

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We have seen how the three categories—love (qing), sensual susceptibility to beauty (haose), and lust ( yin)—all bleed into one another in Chinese discourse. Far from going against the Chinese grain, Cao would have abjured any notion that the first or second category could exist without the third. People who claim that all that they feel is the first are simply lying or being hypocritical. Disenchantment says as much. ‘Love, meeting with its like, breeds lust,’ is one of her oft-quoted statements, as is this famous assertion that love was coterminous with desire and lust: To be sensually susceptible to beauty is lust. To know love is all the more lust. Every act of love, every instance of sexual intercourse is brought about precisely because sensual delight in beauty has kindled the feeling of love.25

It would seem impossible to hold a view more distasteful to Western thinking than this: that lust is the greater for being love. It could not be farther removed from all those ideas that had powerfully shaped the history of love in the West—the Platonic one, for instance, that love is the ladder taking the lover from the physical to the divine, to the highest beauty and goodness. Or the Christian one that models human love on God’s love and places it at the very centre of existence, making of it a redeemer of life’s wrongs and sufferings. Yet, strange as it may sound to Western ears, love does make things worse in a sense, a Buddhist sense: it compounds attachment, making it all the harder for you to see through the veil of illusion and awaken to the emptiness of beauty and the vanity of desire. It is what Baoyu, whom Disenchantment says is ‘the most lustful person I have ever known in the whole world,’ finally renounces when he leaves home for good to become a monk. At last he sees through appearances, and attains enlightenment. In the dream Disenchantment had meant him to experience disillusionment by way of passion, offering him the lovely Jianmei, who by fulfilling his carnal desire might deliver him from delusion, rather as a bodhisattva would in a Buddhist story who frees men via sex, appearing to them as a seductive courtesan.26 But it is not until he has suffered every anguish, in particular the death of Daiyu and the destruction of the charmed existence of his boyhood, and realized that pain is inseparable from love and that all satisfaction of desire is but transitory, that Baoyu sees through the mortal world of red dust. Seen in the light of the Buddhist ideal of renunciation, invoking Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in a reading of The Dream of the Red Chamber seems not so bizarre. The literary historian Wang Guowei (1877–1927) does just this in an essay he published in 1904, quoting from Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation and pointing specifically to the chapter ‘The Metaphysics of the Love Between the Sexes.’ Schopenhauer’s theory is that being in love is the conscious manifestation of that unconscious force—what he calls the ‘will to life’—which directs you to the person best suited to be the co-procreator of your offspring. To put it crudely,

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you fall in love with people who better your chances of producing healthy, intelligent and beautiful children. Your future co-parent is what the will to life (or reproductive instinct) unconsciously seeks and what triggers ‘the wholly immediate, instinctive attraction, from which alone springs the condition of being in love.’27 The kernel of the will to life is the sexual impulse, to Schopenhauer the desire of desires. In Wang Guowei’s eyes, the continuing motif in The Dream of the Red Chamber is precisely desire—yu in Chinese, a pun on the yu (jade), he notes, in Baoyu, who represents it. Citing the ancient Chinese saying, ‘In drinking and eating, and man-woman relations, lies the greatest of human desires,’ Wang asserts that Schopenhauer’s is the first philosophical work in 2,000 years to address man-woman desire. Man-woman desire is greater than the desire for drink and food, he says, because while there is a limit to the latter, the former is insatiable, and not only insatiable but metaphysical.28 No Buddhist can read Schopenhauer, who was deeply drawn to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, without a feeling of familiarity. It is of the struggle against suffering that Schopenhauer speaks, not sin, and like a Buddhist he believes that all that willing, striving, yearning and craving could never be fully assuaged and must therefore lead to endless suffering, in a world in which everything is impermanent and doomed to destruction. And that from such futile suffering one can only be delivered by renouncing the life of desire. It is what Baoyu does when he repudiates the world of human ties. To put it in Schopenhauerian terms, Baoyu’s will is abolished and what remains of ‘this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies is—nothing.’ As Simon May observes, on this point Schopenhauer is ‘in total distinction from the Jews, whose Old Testament says that God saw the world and found it very good.’29 ‘Very good’ is certainly not how Buddhists find the world; it is but illusory (a ‘representation,’ to use Schopenhauer’s word), and a wise man, expelling desire, would choose not to be reborn to it. Such a philosophy makes it impossible to entertain a rosy view of love—that love is not a good thing is the only logical conclusion to which it could lead. Love walks hand in hand with a wise detachment based on disenchantment. And it is not as though the detachment were to be from lust only, sparing love. You couldn’t have it both ways, as you could in the West. There, love as divinity, the agape versus eros dichotomy, Platonic love, and chaste or pure love—brilliant inventions by, respectively, Plato, Christianity, Neoplatonism and fin’amors—make it possible to believe that the good could exist without the bad, the spiritual without the physical. What would love be like if such inventions did not exist, as they assuredly did not in China until modern times? It would be like Baoyu’s, perhaps, not out-and-out sexual desire but a ‘lust of the mind’ that is nonetheless desire. And since it is not divided against itself, lust against love, any renunciation of it has to be wholesale, all or none. That there might be a way around this, and that you could have your cake and eat it, were still lessons in store, not learned until the twentieth century.

Shanghai screening of Camille advertised in Shenbao, March 24, 1937.

6 The Camellia Lady

[ Jesus] said to Mary Magdalene: ‘Your sins, which are many, shall be forgiven, because you loved much’—a sublime pardon which was to awaken a sublime faith. Alexandre Dumas fils: La Dame aux Camélias

In 1894, the Sino-Japanese War broke out. China’s crushing defeat in that war opened up a whole range of role models. Of these, there was none in the love department to equal Marguerite Gautier in influence. Here is what happened. China had to be humiliated before it would recognize that the West was superior militarily, technologically, industrially, politically and—worst of all—perhaps even morally. Those Chinese who did not, or would not, concede this had nevertheless to admit that, in arms at least, the West was more advanced. How could it not be? China’s defeat by Japan in the war stared them in the face, a defeat they knew to be caused in no small measure by the fact that Japan’s modern navy was modelled on Britain’s Royal Navy, and its professionally trained Western-style army on the French military. It was humiliating, and a great psychological shock to the Chinese, to find the Japanese, whom they had long looked down upon, defeating them; and it galled them still further when little Asian Japan won its war against big European Russia in 1903–5, a war, moreover, that was fought on Chinese soil, in Manchuria. How did Japan do it? The answer could scarcely be avoided that it was that country’s determined emulation of the West—its modernization, in other words—that turned it so startlingly into an international power. Might China, too, learn from the West? What was it that made the West tick though? Whence this superiority? To find the key to unlock the secrets of Western wealth and power, many Chinese intellectuals looked to Western books and, since they themselves did not know the requisite languages, they relied on translations. Here Japan was way ahead of China, as much as a quarter of a century ahead; so for Chinese students sent to Japan to study, ready-made Japanese translations served as a conduit to European literatures, while a large number of translations of Western works into Chinese were in fact retranslations from the Japanese. In this and other exercises

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Japan became China’s window on the West—Europe at one remove, so to speak. And as we shall see, when love came to China, it too did so partly by way of Japan. All this still lay ahead when Western missionaries started to translate the Bible and Christian literature into Chinese—the first complete translation of the Bible dates to 1821 and a translation of Pilgrim’s Progress into old-style literary Chinese came out in 1853. Improving thought, some missionaries thought, was what the Chinese needed in order to be awakened from their sleep and to be dissuaded from thinking and writing in stale formulaic ways. From among such missionaries, John Fryer (1839–1928), who had come to China from London in 1861 to teach at an Anglican school in Hong Kong and who subsequently found employment in Shanghai, stands out. As head of a translation bureau attached to the new Jiangnan Arsenal there, Fryer did much to diffuse Western scientific knowledge. But he left a greater mark by starting a series of contests for essays written in Chinese and, upon finding the fiction entries ‘merely old literary rubbish,’ by being the first to advocate the novel as a means of popularizing right thinking and feeling. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote in 1895, ‘is more capable of moving people and changing social custom than novels, which circulate quickly and widely.’ He would ‘request Chinese who want their nation to flourish to write novels with a new appeal that would illuminate the harm’ caused by what he thought were the three greatest Chinese evils—opium, the examination system, and foot-binding—‘and present ingenious ways to extirpate them.’ But it had to be the right kind of novel, not tales of the strange and grotesque and not written in language too difficult for women and children.1 Just the sort of view you would hear espoused by the reform-minded intellectual Liang Qichao (1872–1929), who would add to the novel’s power of raising Chinese consciousness of their ‘national humiliation’ the useful knowledge that it could afford the Chinese of ‘the foreign mentality.’2 To renew a people, Liang asserted, you need to create a new fiction—indeed new fiction is essential to the renewal of everything from morality, religion, politics, customs and art to the very mind and character of a people. The specimens that he saw around him were simply not edifying reading. Hardly any novel would prove suitable for his purpose. For example, novelists wishing to write about man-woman relationships looked to The Dream of the Red Chamber for a model, and in so doing they encouraged debauchery, in Liang’s opinion. Yet it is human nature, he conceded, to prefer reading for superficial rather than for serious reasons, so to try and forbid fictional works is not as good as trying to make them better. But if there was none to hand at home, there were plenty abroad. After 1902, the year Liang tried to harness fiction to the task of reforming society by founding the journal New Fiction, there was a veritable explosion in the publication of fiction, native as well as imported, with as many as 1,488 of the latter appearing between 1912 and 1920.3 From 1902 to 1907, more translations of foreign works of literature were

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published than original Chinese ones. As for what was published, fiction was far and away the largest category, and mostly light fiction at that. By no means were titles carefully chosen; many seemed to be whatever happened to come the translator’s way, and at so far a remove from the source (with the Chinese translation based on, say, a Japanese adaptation of a German work that had first been rendered into English), and with so many liberties taken with the content that it is no longer possible to identify what texts the originals were. Remarkably, the most prolific translator of foreign fiction in this early period, Lin  Shu (1852–1924), did not even know any Western language! Far from being deterred though, he brought out no fewer than 180 translations. Perhaps they should be called retellings rather than translations, because he arrived at them by first listening to a collaborator proficient in a European language translate each story orally, and then producing his own written version. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha; Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare—these and dozens of other novels poured from his pen in this way. Unfashionably, instead of the vernacular Lin wrote in the outmoded style of Classical Chinese, which you would not have thought lent itself at all easily to Western fictional prose. Yet he was judged an excellent translator. For one thing, the terseness intrinsic to the Classical style afforded little chance for any prolixity in the original to survive into the Chinese—his Dickens was free of the English author’s ‘uncurbed garrulity,’ observed the sinologue Arthur Waley.4 At any rate, Lin’s renditions were immensely influential, none more so than his La Dame aux Camélias. ‘The Camellia Lady,’ as the Chinese dubbed Alexandre Dumas fils’ 1848 novel, appeared in Lin Shu’s translation in 1899 and was an instant success. Some readers could not put it down, some admitted to being deeply moved by it, while others thought it comparable to The Dream of the Red Chamber. Still others made startling discoveries: so Westerners were capable of fine feelings too, who would have thought it!5 The name of Alexandre Dumas fils in Chinese came to be bandied about, and right up to the 1930s self-styled romantic writers arrogated it to themselves. The story, characters, ideas and narrative method got about and became part of the popular imagination of the generations that came of age in the years from the 1900s to the 1940s, with a number of well-known writers admitting to being influenced by it, influenced to the point in some cases of imitating it. Lin was well aware that he would have failed in his purpose of moving the feelings of his readers if they could not relate to the story he told, or if they found the characters and conventions over-foreign. He knew to elide certain passages or to allow them to appear in only an abbreviated or reworked form. It could also be that omissions or mistranslations resulted from a failure on the part of Lin and his French-speaking collaborator to understand the original properly. Failure in this sense is even more telling

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than success because it reveals the cultural gap between the readership of the French work and that of its Chinese translation. In the story Armand Duval wins the heart of the ravishing Marguerite Gautier when she thought she had no heart to give; for a kept woman and a courtesan (what would be a high-society escort today), love is business, the means to the extravagant and luxurious style of living that she enjoys and craves. But after she falls in love with Armand, Marguerite forsakes the worldliness of Paris’ theatres and gaming tables. She takes to life in the country with Armand and experiences true happiness for the first time. However, Armand’s pursuit of his passion alarms his father, who, unbeknownst to the son, implores Marguerite to give Armand up lest he ruins himself and, what is more, jeopardizes his sister’s marriage into a respectable family by his scandalous liaison and notoriety. Self-sacrificially, Marguerite consents to it in the belief that her renunciation is for Armand’s own good, and for the good of his family’s reputation. She returns to her old life of, now, feverish and reckless frivolity without telling Armand why. And it is only when she has died of tuberculosis, alone and impoverished, that he discovers that her leaving him had been an act of noble and painful self-sacrifice. In one respect, Marguerite could have been a Chinese character: at their most idealized courtesans were glamorously romantic figures in Chinese life and lore, celebrated and adored by men of letters, especially by those who thought themselves men of taste and feeling (see Chapter 4). Liaisons with such women were not only sexual but intellectual, and it is as the other half of some famous pair of lovers well-matched in poetic talent that a courtesan’s name and reputation have most often come down to us. The appeal that Marguerite had for her Chinese readers could well be imagined. Her parting from Armand and her death would have struck a chord too, for though all the world likes a happy ending, the Chinese of the time liked tragic endings even better. They preferred tear-soaked stories to ones that left them dry-eyed. In their own stories, published by the dozen in the years following La Dame’s appearance, there would be no lack of thwarted love and self-sacrifice. So in one respect Marguerite would not have seemed all that alien to the Chinese. In other respects though, she would have appeared unfamiliar. ‘She has lived a sinful life’ but ‘she will die a Christian death,’ the priest who receives her last confession says of her.6 I cannot imagine many of Lin Shu’s readers not finding this exotic unless they were converts to Christianity; nor do I see them fully grasping what it meant to be a fallen woman who would be forgiven in the hereafter and received back into God’s grace. Everyone could relate to a story of passion, sacrifice and expiation, but La Dame’s underlying theme of redemption through love is not one that would speak to many Chinese. Marguerite’s path to deliverance (from her fallen essence) lies through her giving all for love. The passage that points this up is the one where, needing to be reassured that Armand’s father recognizes how great and unconditional a love she is renouncing, she asks him,

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When True Love Came to China ‘Do you believe that I love your son?’ ‘Yes,’ said Monsieur Duval. ‘That money does not come into it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you believe that I had made this love of mine the hope, the dream of my life, and its redemption?’ ‘Absolutely.’7

Love as  .  .  .  the ‘redemption’ of her life. How little sense this would make to the Chinese, or to any people, for that matter, in whose consciousness no notion of redeeming love is embedded, needs to be emphasized. Lin Shu knows better than to render the passage faithfully. It belongs with the Christian myth, Christ as love incarnate, Christ the redeemer who takes away the curse of death and replaces it with the blessing of eternal life. In the Chinese version, once Marguerite is reassured that Armand’s father recognizes the disinterestedness of her love, she simply asks, mentioning neither hope nor dream nor love, ‘Will you, sir, allow that I am good enough in thought and intention for my sins to be remitted?’ If Lin Shu were to make not goodness but romantic love the ground for her absolution, I doubt if he would carry many readers with him. Promiscuity is inherent in Marguerite’s profession; a chaste courtesan is a contradiction in terms. Yet in their different ways both Dumas and Lin Shu contrive to establish Marguerite’s chastity and therefore her virtue, a task easier for the Chinese than for the Frenchman, who has to take care also of her sin (a promiscuous woman being at the same time a sinner). True, her love might be her pardon, but still she has to feel that love like a punishment—for ‘there is no absolution without penance.’8 Seasoned woman that she is, she cannot easily fall in love, but when she does, she falls all the harder for not having loved before, certainly harder than any pure ingénue. That love is so ‘profound, sincere, irresistible’ that she is all but devoured by it. None of these contortions are in the Chinese text. Matters are simpler for Lin Shu, or rather made simpler for the Chinese reader. They come down to a line not found in the original but interposed by the translator: this has Marguerite saying to Armand: ‘You met me only today. I could hardly have preserved my chastity before meeting you, could I?’ All the same, in Lin Shu’s book hers is a chastity above the common run, not capable of being grasped by the shallow-minded. He remarks on this after he has spoken of her ‘supernal’ personal integrity, and of how unspotted she is—‘no dust or dirt stains her.’ These words are his rewrite of Dumas’s much longer description, the most pertinent line of which is the following: ‘one could detect in this girl a virgin who had been turned into a courtesan by the merest accident of chance, and a courtesan whom the merest accident of chance could have turned into the most loving, the most pure of virgins.’9 Lin Shu probably failed to grasp Dumas’s point, and who could blame him? The virgin/whore dichotomy on which it rests, and whose prototype is the Christian

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antithesis of the Virgin Mary’s chastity and Mary Magdalene’s sexuality, could not have had any meaning for him. Dumas actually mentions Mary Magdalene elsewhere in the novel, and quotes Jesus’ famous utterance to her, ‘Your sins, which are many, shall be forgiven, because you loved much.’10 But needless to say, the Chinese translation is missing all that. Marguerite’s falling in love with Armand is what flips her over from the whore to the virgin. Dumas writes that during their idyllic interlude in the country, the courtesan disappears little by little, to yield, Dumas must mean, to the virgin, for he has the sun shining on her ‘as it would have shone on the purest fiancée.’11 Lin Shu has her turning into ‘the chastest and purest’ girl too, and he follows Dumas in having Marguerite dressed in white, but he omits the passage where Armand tells his father what it is that has wrought the change: she ‘has been transformed by the love she has for me and the love I feel for her . . . there has been a spiritual change in her.’12 Love in China had no such fantastic transfiguring effect—yet. This was still the nineteenth century, quite a few years before ‘spiritual love’ was heard of in China. For now, love, having not yet been exalted that far above sex, still lacked the purifying power necessary for tipping the scales from whore to virgin. From not having such a cleansing love in their romance repertoire, Chinese readers were denied the fantasy gratification of Marguerite’s innocence and the victory of love over sexuality. Yet if Lin Shu’s is a Chinese naturalization of the French novel, it is that to a degree only. There is still plenty of foreignness left in it to make the Chinese reader sit up. For a start, no character in any Chinese novel would have avowed love so much. ‘I love you as I never believed I could love anybody,’ for example, are Marguerite’s words to Armand when he tells her, ‘We love each other! What does the rest matter?’ Another exchange between the two goes like this: ‘. . . no man has ever loved you as I do.’ ‘Let’s be clear about this: are you really in love with me?’ ‘As much as anyone could possibly love anybody, I believe.’

Yet another of the countless instances in which love is professed or wondered about or accounted for or discoursed upon is Marguerite’s: ‘This love of ours, my dearest Armand, is no ordinary love. You love me as though I’d never belonged to anyone else  .  .  .’ These must have sounded strange to Chinese ears at first, though it would probably take no more than just a few Western novels to familiarize them. At any rate, they crop up again and again in the text, and Lin Shu tries his best to keep up. He draws from the vocabulary of love in the Chinese language in a quite admirable way, though at one point he gives up trying to translate one of the things that Armand professes, namely ‘devotion’ (du dévouement), and simply renders the sound of it by five close Chinese syllables (de-wu-mang-er), appending the meaning of the original French word in a parenthesis.13

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Dumas makes this love noble and self-sacrificing, raising it to a loftier plane than any Chinese would have done before their exposure to Western fiction. It is telling that Armand’s characterization of ‘true love’ as that which ‘always makes a man finer, whatever sort of woman inspires it’14 is left out of the Chinese translation. Marguerite’s self-sacrifice is driven by a desire to do what is good for another, not for her own sake but for theirs. Such altruism has impressed at least two contemporary Chinese novelists. One, the author of a novel named Flowers in a Sea of Karma (1903–7), makes a Chinese character say of his English mistress, who loves him but gives him up at great cost to herself: ‘She does not begrudge coming to grief herself in order to save me, so thoroughly is she influenced by Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias.’15 The other was Xu Zhenya (1889–1937), the author of a runaway bestseller Jade Pear Spirit (1912). Xu, who made no bones about his indebtedness to the French novel, styling himself the ‘Dumas of the Orient,’ took the depiction of self-sacrificing love to a level that no one had attained before in Chinese letters. The story is of a forbidden love between a young widow and her son’s even younger resident tutor—forbidden by no one, strictly speaking, save herself: widows did not remarry in China, remember, if they were not to be stigmatized for failing to abide by the Confucian code of chastity? Passionately poeticized love letters pass to and fro but the two stop well short of any impropriety. Indeed, they hardly meet each other face-to-face, and when they do, just the once, all they do is weep one at the other. Since he wants the widow or none, she is condemning him to bachelorhood and celibacy. And how could he ever be happy unmarried, disparaged by all as a lesser man for producing no progeny, a failing immemorially decried as the height of unfiliality? Enter her beloved seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, recently returned from boarding school with her head full of modern ideas such as personal freedom, free-choice marriage and women’s emancipation. The two women are the best of friends, deeply devoted to each other. Wouldn’t it be best for all concerned, the widow thinks, if the tutor married her, the sister-in-law, little aware that a modern girl would find an arranged marriage repellent? The latter’s avowed aim is to promote the freedom of marriage, this to rescue her countless pitiable sisters from the dark prison of the Chinese family system.16 The widow is now ever more determined to die so as to clear the way for the other two. As she is tubercular, she succeeds. Her sister-in-law is grief-stricken, the more so when she discovers it to have been an act of self-sacrifice. She too chooses to offer up her life. That leaves the tutor, who we presently hear has joined the revolutionary army, though not before a course of study in Japan. He dies a patriotic martyr’s death in the 1911 uprising that ended the rule of the Manchus and turned China into a republic. Dying for love shades ultimately into dying for country.

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Jade Pear Spirit was characteristic of its time not only in its sentimentality but in the way it intermingled the old and the new—chaste widowhood with free-choice marriage, for instance. And no novel of an earlier time could have had the heroine wearing a Western dress in a portrait she gives to the tutor. Nor would she be singing some lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at one point, lines which might or might not have been, ‘O, now be gone, more light and light it grows.’17 And surely it was the example of Marguerite’s last days that the Chinese Dumas followed when he had the sister-in-law’s final moments plaintively recorded in a diary, just as Marguerite’s were. The diary form was one of a whole range of Western literary techniques to be adopted as, with La Dame leading the way, more and more Western works of fiction came to be embraced by the Chinese—and with them, the Western portrayal of romantic love. Later generations of Chinese knew Alexandre Dumas fils’ novel not only by Lin Shu’s translation, but by many other translations and, not least, by its stage and screen adaptations. This last was a 1936 Hollywood tear-jerker, Camille, with Greta Garbo playing the Parisian courtesan and Robert Taylor her ardent lover. Chinese audiences thrilled to the film when it opened in Shanghai, just as an earlier generation had thrilled to Lin’s translation, perhaps weeping at Marguerite’s sad fate and eventual death from consumption, rather as Lin and his French-speaking collaborator had themselves wept as they worked, wailing so loudly, apparently, that neighbours had heard them down the street.18 The advertising copy for Camille in the leading Chinese daily, Shenbao, included a line in English—on one day it was ‘crush me in your arms until the breath is gone from my body’; on another it was ‘let me love you—let me live for you’; while on a third it was, ‘I love you more than the whole world—than myself—than my life!’19 The Chinese themselves made films out of the love story—one named Wild Flower Among Weeds (1930) and the other The Camellia Lady (1938).20 Forty years later, La Dame drew tears from the seventeen-year-old Yu Hua (born 1960) when he read a samizdat copy of it at the close of the Cultural Revolution, a time starved of books. Along with numerous other works, La Dame was banned as a ‘poisonous weed’ for being foreign and for being about love. Yu Hua is now one of the ten most influential writers in today’s China, the first Chinese to win the James Joyce award; but just then he was in high school. In his book China in Ten Words (2011), he recounts how a friend of his came by a manuscript copy of the translation and, because he could borrow it for only one day, the two of them took turns to copy every word into a notebook of their own so that they could have it for longer. It took all night, and their wrists ached, and each had to decipher his handwriting for the other because the Chinese characters got progressively more illegible with tiredness and cramp. ‘Despite all the fits and starts, the story and the characters made my heart ache,’ Yu Hua remembers, ‘and it was with great reluctance that I surrendered the notebook . . . my cheeks wet with tears.’21

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In an extraordinary reversal of fortune, La Dame in Chinese translation is officially deemed required reading today, recommended as a set text in schools by the Ministry of Education. A copy published in 2011 claims to be the full, authoritative translation. It is indeed complete, and it reads fluently, and helpfully it provides footnotes to explain names, words and phrases that might puzzle a Chinese reader. Thus for the context to Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene, a footnote refers the reader to 7:47 of the Gospel According to St Luke.22 Yet, for all the translator’s faithfulness to the original, the idea of a redemptive love is still resisted. The last phrase of Marguerite’s question, ‘Do you believe that I had made this love of mine the hope, the dream of my life, and its redemption?’ is rendered as ‘and my life’s consolation?’23 In giving her love, which is something she normally sells, entirely freely to Armand, Marguerite is being admirably unmercenary—this much everyone understands. But how ‘this saving love’ (cet amour rédempteur) could be ‘a pardon for her sins’ is harder to grasp for one in whose cultural consciousness love and absolution from sin have not established their deeply rutted path of connection. The translator is aware that in Christian theology redemption refers to man’s deliverance from sin and damnation. His awareness of it shows up in his translation of ‘cet amour rédempteur’ by ‘a love that has within it a mind to save mankind’—‘saving mankind’ being the Chinese phrase standardly applied to Christ, Western culture’s great symbol of redemption (see Chapter 3).24 But that is not a sinful courtesan’s redeeming love—which is a love that delivers not mankind, nor even the man she loves, but herself. To a Chinese (especially if he or she were Buddhist), Marguerite might be absolved from blame if she were purged of love, but she could never atone for past loving by loving anew, however unmercenarily. As we shall see, love’s repertoire came to be greatly extended in early twentieth-century China, but the idea of its power to redeem never transplanted. And without it, romantic love could never be quite the same thing in China as it is in the West.

A picture of Joan Haste in an 1895 edition of the eponymous novel is reproduced in an article on the history of love in The Ladies’ Journal (vol. 12, no. 7, 1926).

7 Joan Haste and Romantic Fiction

The novel being what it is, if it doesn’t tell of love between men and women, people would not want to read it. Lin Shu, 1900s

In Chinese experience, nobody had harped on love so much before as Alexandre Dumas fils. Now, as if Lin Shu had opened the floodgates, they were going to be treated to more of the same. They adored the self-sacrificing love of The Camellia Lady, as they called Marguerite Gautier, and would quickly find another to admire in that of Joan Haste, the eponymous heroine of a novel by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, he who wrote King Solomon’s Mines and She, both presently translated into Chinese. Joan Haste would follow The Camellia Lady in becoming a buzz item. The first Chinese translation of Joan Haste came about because Yang Zilin, a student of English, happened to come upon the book at a second-hand book stall in Shanghai, and recommended it to his cousin Bao Tianxiao (1876–1973), who knew no English but was an energetic wordsmith and newspaperman. Serialized in a periodical in 1901, their joint translation came out in book form in 1903. It was an incomplete translation, indeed a bowdlerization. Lin Shu thought that he and his English-speaking collaborator could do better, and brought out an unabridged version four years later, only to find himself lambasted for not doing right by Joan. To know how he had offended, I must first summarize the plot. Joan, like Marguerite, renounces her love, in her case for one Henry Graves. She believes that she is doing so for his own good, for to marry a girl like her would be the ruin of a man like him. He is a baronet, she is low-born and, for all we know, illegitimate. Inconveniently, they fall in love—inconvenient because were he to marry Emma, who is rich and, what is more, in love with him, his family estate, the mortgage on which Emma happens to own, would be saved from bankruptcy. His parents and sister greatly wish it, but Henry would never marry for money; he is upright and honourable, and perhaps, in the eyes of the modern reader at any rate, a bit of a prig. Even so, he would marry Emma but for Joan, and it is her name he invokes when, to everyone’s horror, he refuses his father’s deathbed wish that he marry Emma: he is

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bound to Joan, he declares, by ‘ties that may not be broken.’1 Why he deems them unbreakable is not revealed until Rider Haggard springs a surprise on the reader twothirds of the way through the novel. Joan and Henry had avowed their love: this much the reader knows. But since there has been no mention of any lovemaking, it is only when Joan is found to be with child that we realize that sex had followed avowal in their brief hour together. The child does not live long, and Joan’s life goes from bad to worse. To save Henry from disgrace and to free him for Emma, she agrees to marry a persistent suitor she has long detested and spurned. The story then ends melodramatically. In a fit of jealous rage, Joan’s husband shoots and kills her, mistaking her for Henry—as well he might, Joan having disguised herself in men’s clothes to pass herself off for Henry. Joan Haste was published in Britain in 1895, only six years before its first appearance in China, and the values it reflects are those of Victorian England. How those compare with Chinese ones of more or less the same period may be seen in the frames in which love was regarded in the two cultures. Rider Haggard has somehow to explain what it is that drives Henry and Joan, both blameless characters, to have extramarital sex, committing what the novel repeatedly calls a sin. Sixty-five years later, just love would excuse it—remember the expert witness at the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover who called the sexual relationship between the two a good one because they ‘really loved one another’? But this the Victorian in Rider Haggard stops short of doing, for to absolve sex outside wedlock on grounds of love is surely to conflate love and sin. How he must struggle to reconcile this with those received ideas of love presupposed by his English readers—of love being wholly good or redemptive, something that ‘always makes a man finer,’ as Armand has put it. Luckily for the author, a way comes to hand of so slicing the melon of love that for Henry, it is not so much love as romance, or what Dorothy Tennov has dubbed limerence, that causes him to err. In Rider Haggard’s book ‘romance’ mediates between the inherited dualisms of sex and love, and flesh and spirit. There is a good description of this condition in Joan Haste: Whether or no [Henry] was ‘in love’ with Joan, he did not know, since, never having fallen into that condition, he had no standard by which to measure his feelings. What he had good cause to know, however, was that she had taken possession of his waking thoughts in a way that annoyed and bewildered him–yes, and even of his dreams. The vision of her was all about him; most things recalled her to him, directly or indirectly, and he could scarcely listen to a casual conversation, or mix in the society of other women, without being reminded . . . of something that she had said or done.

Rider Haggard knows that it is in the nature of limerence to be short-lived, for he has Henry thinking that his ‘case was by no means hopeless; for even now he knew that

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time would cure the trouble, or at least draw its sting.’ It is ‘the kind of thing,’ he realizes, ‘that they call romance.’2 It is what he does not feel for Emma, of whom he is merely ‘fond.’ When, finally, he does make her a matrimonial proposal, Emma observes that while a woman looks for love in a marriage, in all that he has said to her he ‘has spoken no word of love.’3 Theirs is not a romantic match, in other words. If romance explains Henry’s fall, in Joan’s case it is ‘infatuation,’ a condition described in a long passage of which this is an extract: In the ordinary sense of the word it was not love that possessed her, nor was it strictly what is understood by passion, but rather, if it can be defined at all, some strange new force, some absorbing influence that included both love and passion, and yet had mysterious qualities of its own. Fortunately, with English women such infatuations are not common, though they are to be found frequently enough among people of the Latin race, where sometimes they result in blind tragedies that seem almost inexplicable to our sober minds.4

That which is ‘understood by passion’ is lust. Haggard has Joan feeling that and love, in a combination that has ‘mysterious qualities of its own.’ Why it is not true love but infatuation—for that turns out to be what it is—is that it stops short of the spiritual. Henry would not have hesitated for a moment to make Joan his own if she had fused both flesh and spirit. Yet what faces Henry is flesh pitted against spirit. Rider Haggard prepares the reader for this by making us see Emma through Henry’s eyes when he catches sight of her one night: she is seated in a white dress in a conservatory, alone in moonlight, and the impression that she gives him of being more spirit than woman is heightened by a life-sized, perfectly nude marble statue of Aphrodite overlooking her from behind. The contrast prompts him to wonder ‘which was the more lovely of these two types of the spirit and the flesh,’ and which he would choose himself. A perfect woman, he then concludes, is she who merges the two. At this the reader’s thoughts wing back to how Joan strikes him the first time he sees her—as someone who might pose as a model of Psyche before Cupid kissed her. When Emma and Henry start speaking, it is to disagree on which of the two has primacy, body or soul. Henry is of the view that ‘we are born of the flesh, we are flesh, and all our affections and instincts partake of it.’ Emma believes the reverse: ‘We are born of the spirit . . . the flesh is only an accident, if a necessary accident. When we allow it to master us, then our troubles begin.’5 But Henry, soon to be in the grip of a bodily urge beyond his control, maintains once again that we cannot defy our nature, we cannot escape it. Lin Shu translated all these notions with as much fidelity as his language allowed— no small feat for a Confucian intellectual with a cast of mind so different from that of an English Victorian. However, it would be left to a younger generation to take these ideas on board if not quite to make them their own. On Lin Shu’s contemporaries,

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inherited Chinese ones still had sole authority, and in the witheringly indignant reviews his translation attracted, the centuries-old slur of ‘licentiousness’ ( yin) was ever ready to stake its claim. In rendering the story into Chinese, Lin Shu did not tread as warily as Yang and Bao, who had made it a point to keep Joan chaste; there is no hint of any sex in their version, let alone of pregnancy. The ground now quickly opened before Lin, revealing his readers’ Confucian squeamishness about sex outside marriage. Critics more than cavilled at Joan’s image in his translation; they tore it to shreds. If only, a critic named Yin Bansheng said in a scattershot of ire, Lin Shu too had elided the pregnancy, so morally repugnant to right-thinking Chinese. Nothing less than an ‘immortal in the realm of sensibility (qing)’ in the earlier translation, the critic continued, Joan is now revealed in Lin’s to be lewd, cheap, despicable and shameless. From being right up there, in the highest heavens, Joan has been brought low to way down here, to the nether regions. Poor Joan, what grudge does Lin Shu bear against her to make him treat her so shabbily?6 As for Henry, he is no better. At their first encounter, he climbs up a tower to get Joan a jackdaw from a bird’s nest, risking a bad fall that breaks his leg. The way he explains his foolhardiness to his mother is: ‘I think it was because she is so pretty, and I wanted to oblige her.’7 Granted that Lin over-translates this a little as ‘I was attracted by her beauty, and I wished to curry favour with her,’ still Henry’s is hardly the naked and unrestrained lust that the critic took it for: ‘What sort of man is this Henry, relinquishing his moral quality at the first sight of beauty, and daily indulging in lubricious pleasures even as he is laid up in bed (from his broken leg): how different is that from beasts?’ And what sort of son is he, to deny his father’s deathbed wish that he marry Emma out of doting love of his mistress Joan, this an unconscionable act to a Chinese? Moral character and virtue are what fiction ought to transmit, the critic continued, and Lin Shu has no business purveying licentiousness, baseness and shamelessness instead.8 Another article, published in 1905 by one Jin Tianhe (1874–1947), expostulated: Men can now justify their whoring by declaring, ‘I am Armand Duval,’ going against their fathers’ orders. Girls awakening to sex could claim, ‘I am Joan Haste,’ making away with their chastity.

Westerners call a spade a spade, the critic said, but you are better off exercising restraint, like in Yang and Bao’s rendering, when catering to Chinese society. So prevalent are Western ways that in less than ten years from now, he feared, men and women would be holding hands and kissing—you just wait and see if that didn’t become a trend.9 For Lin Shu’s critics, the question is not love versus infatuation and spirit versus flesh; it is more cut and dried: is Joan chaste, or is she wanton? That, at any rate, was how the first critic Yin Bansheng put it, pointing to her indulgence in sex—to the

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extent, no less, of conceiving an illegitimate child—as proof that it is lust that drives her, not qing. Qing, or Feeling, is ‘desire’s medium, while desire is Feeling’s vermin.’ The logic of the ethical frame into which Yin is locked is hard to follow, until you take it to be shadowed by Neo-Confucian thinking. As we have seen, in that school’s thinking it is from emotion that desire emanates (so Feeling is indeed ‘desire’s medium’); emotion is the calm flow of water, and desire the waves that roil it. Once you frame it that way, what Yin next says seems to make better sense—that Yang and Bao’s virtuous Joan ‘has Feeling but knows no desire,’ while Lin Shu’s immoral Joan thinks it’s Feeling but is in fact impelled by only desire.10 Actually, as the reader may recall, premarital sex is what Oriole engages in with her lover Zhang in the drama Romance of the West Wing. Indeed, if you count dreams, it is also what Du Liniang consummates with the stranger she meets in the garden in The Peony Pavilion. Neither heroine is punished for it, because the fact that they marry their heroes in the end provides an a posteriori moral alibi for their earlier sexual lapse. Joan Haste makes her Chinese readers sit up because her story is not resolved through the convention of marriage. Instead, it is resolved by her compensatory selfsacrifice. She pays for the sex by dying for selfless love of Henry, indeed by dying in his stead. Ah, so this is love, the Chinese reader realizes: the self-sacrifice, the willingness to die for it, the not-counting-the-cost! To readers other than those carping critics I mentioned, the degree to which she reins in her own heart and her own desire for the good of another makes Joan admirable. Such views as Yin’s and Jin’s would not have a long future ahead of them. Joan Haste was reprinted again and again. One of the imitations it spawned was a 1915 work entitled Sacred Love by a Chinese playwright named Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962). In this play two women—let us call them A and B—love the same man C. C loves not A but B and marries her. Yet this does not lessen A’s love for him. At the same time B is loved by another man D who, in a fit of jealous rage, aims a gun at his rival and tries to shoot him. A throws herself in front of C and dies in his stead. The playwright might be appending a footnote to Joan Haste when he explained, ‘To qualify as “love,” I have to love her even though she doesn’t love me; I have to love her even if she doesn’t know it . . . indeed the greater her unawareness the more I should love her. Only in this way is it true love!’11 Not only did Joan Haste appeal to audiences who wanted nothing so much as a good, sentimental read, it whetted the appetite for stories of love triangles with plots resolved by self-sacrifice and suicidal release. Joan Haste might be the sort of book you would disdain as airport reading today but it was immensely influential in China, so  much so that it and La Dame aux Camélias were said in jest to have led to the Chinese revolution of 1911.12

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With influential romantic novels it cannot be certain whether they offer the readers the chance to experience love vicariously and in fantasy, or whether they are simply the most cogent expression of the spirit of the age. In the Chinese case it was probably an interplay of the two. The love story in popular romance fiction in the West is widely supposed to answer, in fantasy, needs that cannot be met in real life; it is the ‘nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream.’13 In China, the fantasy gratification afforded by translations of Western popular fiction turned on the fact that real life held out no promise of love. Among the physical, emotional, contractual and familial relations underpinning an arranged marriage, the emotional conventionally played no part. As against that, however, the age signalled the emergence of feminism, the significance of which was later linked to ‘the discovery of romantic love.’14 Two years before Lin Shu’s Joan Haste came out, a progressive pamphlet named Women’s Bell was widely circulated and snapped up. The pamphleteer ringing the bell to wake oppressed women was none other than Jin Tianhe, he who feared Chinese would be holding hands and kissing next. For all his disapproval of Western practices, however, he thought such Western ideologies as equal rights for women and liberalism ‘a ray of sun appearing in a dark China.’ He was indeed the ‘Lover of Liberty’ that people called him, one who shook his fist at the Chinese subjugation of women and urged their emancipation, earning himself the nickname, ‘Rousseau for Chinese women.’ His voice was to be joined by others, more and more of them female. Not the least of the rights they championed was the right to choose one’s own spouse. Though it would be many years before ‘freedom of marriage’ amounted to anything more than a mere slogan, the words had begun to be heard, carrying with them incalculable significance for the future of romantic love in China. If free to marry someone of one’s own choosing, then there was nothing to stop one from marrying for romantic love. As for a model and ideal of such love, you could look to La Dame, Joan Haste and all those other novels imported from the West. Newspapers and periodicals were proliferating, giving voice to a reform-minded, even radical, intelligentsia at the same time as they were serializing novels for a popular audience, one to whose appetite for entertainment it was commercially necessary to appeal. Sentimental fiction was enjoying a boom in Shanghai, the print media centre of China. ‘The Dumas of the Orient’ Xu Zhenya is said to have started it all with his bestselling Jade Pear Spirit. This tear-jerking novel is relegated, seldom without snobbish disdain, to the popular genre known as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, paired mandarin ducks and butterflies being the very image of faithful lovers in Chinese tradition. Not all examples of Butterfly fiction, as it is usually called for short, are love stories—others purvey crime detection, knight errantry and scandal— but large numbers of them are. As we have seen, their publishers in Shanghai liked to

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attach sub-generic labels to them: Triste Love, Bitter Love, Strange Love and so on. Stories in the Triste Love category were especially popular. Of stories with unhappy endings there was no exponent more dedicated and prodigious than the Shanghai-born popular writer, editor and translator Zhou Shoujuan (1895–1968). Zhou was not nicknamed Master of Triste Love for nothing. There was nothing he liked better than to portray doomed love, perhaps because he himself suffered from an instance of it; as a young man, he fell in love with a girl whose English name was Violet, then lost her when her parents married her off to a rich family. Ever after, ‘violet’ became his trademark and self-signature: he planted the flower in his garden; he named a popular magazine that he edited after it; he included it in the titles of his collected writings; he used it to represent his aesthetics, even himself. Besides, doomed love, the drenched handkerchief, damp-eyed melancholy—these have more romantic frisson to them, as Zhou well knew. He was a prolific translator and adaptor of Western fiction, introducing a total of nearly 460 foreign works, the bulk of them short stories and novels, to China. The sheer quantity of his translations is indisputable, but not their quality. He was not above adding to, subtracting from, blowing up or playing down parts of the original text to suit his own purpose, which was to raise the profile of romantic love and to exalt it. Certainly, if Zhou could make a scene or a passage more mawkish, erotic or melodramatic, he would seldom resist the temptation to do so. Furthermore, anyone who opens one of Zhou’s collections and finds himself leafing through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s Lorna Doone and so on, and believing them to be translations, would be sadly mistaken, for what Zhou has provided are mere synopses, each boiled down from the original novel or novella to no more than a dozen pages of plot summary. If romantic fiction was all the rage, it was thanks largely to Zhou, whom his young fans looked up to as a sort of love guru. Zhou stirred, or pandered to, curiosity about the nature of love—what is love really?—by inviting readers to discuss such questions as ‘Can one man love two women at the same time?’ His own answer to the question ‘What is love?’ sounds hyperbolic, but only to today’s jaded ears: love is ‘the law,’ he writes, ‘the light that illumines the dark,’ ‘the flower of fantasy,’ ‘the magic power that rules the world,’ and so on.15 And it was no doubt because ‘sex sells’ that one year (1923) he conceived and published a calendar carrying on each of its 365 pages—one a day—an aphorism, quote or disquisition on love. He would have been in total agreement with Lin Shu’s view, cited in the epigraph to this chapter, that if a story was not about love between the sexes, it would not get read; much less would it move people, Lin has also said. Lin Shu’s purpose as a translator of Western fiction was to enlighten his fellow-countrymen; while Zhou was more

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profit-driven, the effect on China in the 1910s and 1920s was the same: romantic love came to be thought about more, and it came to be thought about differently. Those were the years in which the place of love in Chinese life shifted and, as we shall see, also its meaning.

The two characters that make up the modern Chinese word for ‘love,’ lian’ai, appear in a modernist typeface across the cover of a novel named The Great Love, circa 1930. Note the inclusion of the English word ‘LOVE’ in the design.

8 The Clump

He had never yet said Love: the Rubicon word, with its transforming powers. Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

‘I loved you, and I loved you, and I love you,’ Joan Haste declares to Henry in the scene in which, we only discover later, they make love.1 Later, upon reading the letter in which her pregnancy is revealed, Henry utters the same words, ‘I love you! I love you!’ and adds, ‘I would never say it before, but I say it now once and for all.’ The Chinese translator Lin Shu is not aware that ‘I love you’ is a formula—and always a quote, suggests Roland Barthes in his book A Lover’s Discourse, where he writes it as I-love-you—nor that the same Chinese word for ‘love’ ought to be used each time it occurs in his source text. He is not aware that no other word, nor any other construction, would do, the three words being, as Barthes says, a ‘clump’ that ‘is shattered by the slightest syntactical alteration; it has no equivalent among its substitutes, whose combination might nonetheless produce the same meaning.’2 The extent to which the clump has spread across the world is extraordinary, as is the influence it has had on the portrayal of love and courtship in different cultures. The example of the Hindi cinema is especially illuminating: there the dialogues might be in Hindi, but the speaker usually goes into English when he or she declares ‘I love you.’ Whatever the reason for this—one scholar suggests that it is because it is ‘hip, serious and individualistic’—the foreignness of the declaration is not in any doubt.3 In today’s China the clump has become familiar from its frequent employment in Chinese pop song lyrics. It has become naturalized to the extent that those who sing it do so unselfconsciously, with little or no awareness of its foreignness. Yet it has not been so naturalized that I don’t cringe when I hear it uttered in Chinese—in a movie, say—unless the scriptwriter means it ironically, as a spoof of those Chinese who fancy themselves Westernized. Not only does it not ring true when put into a love scene in a Chinese movie, it also smacks too much of Mills and Boon (or Harlequin) romance novels and Hollywood’s so-called romantic comedies for it not to sound phoney. Such is the formulaic convention of these genres that unless this declaration is made by both the hero and the heroine, the romance resolution cannot be accomplished.

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Indeed, unless the two say ‘I love you’ to each other, we cannot take it as true love. It is the saying that matters, the uttering of the three words. Lin Shu would have known had he read such romances, but at this point Joan Haste, which has elements of the romance novel but would not be classified as one by virtue of its unhappy ending, was the closest he got to them. Not familiar with the conventions of the genre, and not grasping the significance of the avowal, Lin Shu was not to know that when Henry tells us that he would ‘never say it before,’ by ‘it’ he means the clump. And why would he never say it? Lin Shu cannot be expected to know the answer, but if you have read enough romance fiction or seen enough films, you would know that a man, or at least the romance hero, is not supposed to be forthcoming about his emotions, and the words ‘I love you’ have typically to be wrung from him—one imagines the man telling the woman, ‘There, I’ve said it—you win.’ Henry withholds the words from Emma even when he proposes to her, causing her to make the remark which I quoted in the previous chapter, ‘a woman looks for love in her marriage; and, Sir Henry, in all that you have said to me you have spoken no word of love.’ That word is what a woman wants, indeed it is all she wants. It is to digress only a little if I illustrated all this with an interview from a BBC Four documentary on opera with Jonas Kaufmann, an exceptionally fine actor as well as expressive tenor. He is talking in the interview about his approach to the soldier Don  José in Georges Bizet’s Carmen, and in particular about how he, Kaufmann, tackles the Flower Song, the aria in which José confesses his love for the gypsy temptress and which ends with him saying, all defences down, ‘Carmen, I love you’ (Carmen, je t’aime). ‘It is not typical for a man to describe so specifically his emotions,’ Kaufmann says. ‘You start very softly, to get used to the fact that you are talking to a woman about your emotions.’ Don José then realizes, Kaufmann continues, ‘that he really has to go for it . . . and he tells her, “I love you”—which is extremely hard for him to say, I’m sure. So obviously what you have to avoid is to be too loud at the end, because that’s what Carmen squeezes out [of him]. That’s all she wanted.’4 Why was it all that Carmen wanted? Because, spoken aloud, it signifies her lover’s complete and utter capitulation? When Kaufmann performed the aria in a production of the opera by the Royal Opera House in London in 2008, he sang those final words on his knees, as might a supplicant, or a victim, and, to deafening applause from the audience, his shoulders shook with sobs. The sting of Don José’s masculinity has been drawn, and female victory is complete. Though in Joan Haste Emma does not get the verbalization, she is promised her victory when, his proposal of marriage accepted, Henry assures her that a time ‘will soon come when you will not doubt me if I tell you that I love you.’ That time not having yet come, when Henry draws her to him and kisses her, he does so not on her lips but on her forehead.5 The suggestion of chasteness escapes Lin Shu, who translates the kiss but omits its location.

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Nor has he grasped that it has to be ‘love’ that Henry promises one day to verbalize; that nothing else would do, neither ‘infatuation’ nor ‘fondness’ (Henry does feel the latter for Emma, as I noted in Chapter 7). Lin Shu translated Henry’s promise as, ‘In the end, you and I will be of one heart—I believe you will have no doubt whatsoever about this eventually.’ He was still too new to Western culture to appreciate that this is a case where ‘of one heart’ does not translate ‘love.’ Stylish writer that he was, he used many synonyms for it, drawing freely from the Chinese love repertoire. If no other word would do, of what, then, is ‘love’ so specific a marker? What emotion, what specific state of being, does Henry promise to have entered when finally he finds it possible to avow ‘I love you’ to Emma? It could only be limerence. In other words, Henry promises to fall in love with Emma at some future date. But as limerence rests on sexual attraction, what he promises Emma is in fact physical desire, even though Rider Haggard has left us in no doubt that Henry has so far not felt any such thing for Emma, whose spirituality, the reader may remember, Henry has contrasted with Aphrodite’s sexuality. Joan, the reader will also remember, is the flesh to Emma’s spirit, ‘Psyche before Cupid kissed her.’ To her Henry does avow love, so the reader could only conclude that for him and Joan, love and sex are one. But this poses a difficulty for those who oppose love to sex, and who are, what is more, reinforced in their belief by the centuries-old Western tendency to mark love off from sex—or spirit from flesh, to put it in another way. To pretend that love is not lust is a Western habit with a long history behind it, as I have indicated in earlier chapters and will elaborate upon later. And it is the peculiarly Western distinction drawn between the two that makes the avowal ‘I love you’ so emotionally satisfying to the heroine when it is ‘squeezed’ out of the hero, for its subtext is that it is not just sex he is after and offering, it’s ‘love.’ As we shall see, the distinction was greatly to exercise the minds of the Chinese, not given to defining ‘love’ as ‘not-sex.’ It is little wonder that no other word would do. Lin Shu should be exonerated from any sin of commission or omission in his rendition—he wrote at a time before a single Chinese equivalent for it had been established, and in any case how was he to know that it had to be the one word? By convention, that word in Chinese today is ai. This is now the word for ‘to love,’ and indeed it is to ai that every Chinese resorts whenever it is required to make the declaration ‘I love you.’ Lin Shu has used it to render the ‘love’ in ‘I love you,’ but because he has done this only some of the time, not all, he cannot be credited with having fixed it as the word. It is so fixed today, as you could see for yourself by reading the Chinese subtitles of American movies, or better still, by checking the Chinese translation of the midnight love scene in Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera (1859), the one where Riccardo asks Amelia for the ‘single word’: Riccardo: My life, the universe for a single word. Amelia: Merciful heaven!

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Riccardo: Say that you love me! Amelia: Go, Riccardo! Riccardo: A single word, a single word! Amelia: Well then, yes, I love you! Riccardo: You love me, Amelia! Amelia: But you, noble as you are, must defend me from my own heart! Riccardo: You love me, Amelia! You love me, you love me! Oh, let remorse and friendship be erased from my heart; let everything be erased but love . . . 

The Chinese version of the libretto renders the verb ‘to love’ throughout as ai. That it would become the word for ‘love’ in modern Chinese could not have been foretold from its history. Ai is an ancient Chinese word, pressed into service here as an old bottle for new wine. New because the old usage never did form the keyword in any declaration historically, let alone bear the weight Riccardo gives it when he calls it that ‘single word’ for which he would sacrifice his ‘life, the universe.’ For example, Confucius used it in a broad sense when he enjoined young men to ‘love [ai] all people, but associate with the virtuous.’6 If you looked for it in classical love poetry, you would not find it all that favoured. Occurrences in classical texts such as New Songs from the Jade Terrace and the next best-known collection of love poetry, Among the Flowers (the tenth century), are comparatively few. Here are three examples where ‘love’ translates it: you ‘love’ a blue silk skirt because it hugs the beloved’s waist, and you ‘love’ a duckshaped incense brazier because it shares her bedroom.7 ‘Love’ fades, withering like fleabane,8 or else it is withheld, like imperial favour, provoking a plaint, I long to enter my lord’s breast . . . Fasten my lord’s jewelled belt. I resent you, hate you, need your love!9

It was also a word you could brush in with a light stroke, as the eleventh-century statesman, essayist and poet Ouyang Xiu did when he used it of his feelings for a place: ‘All my life I have loved it,’ he wrote of the scenic West Lake, the focus of aesthetic appreciation for generations of poets and, as it might be recalled, the setting for the story Eileen Chang subtitled, ‘A Short Story Set in the Time When Love Came to China.’10 Before it became new wine in an old bottle, the word ai had not been clustered about with heavy symbolism or powerful connotations, in sharp contrast to the word qing. This perhaps eased its denaturalization—and denaturalized it needed to be if it was to be used of anything so foreign as, for example, Psyche, the beautiful

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mythological figure to whom Joan Haste is likened. Lin Shu rendered her as ai- or ‘love-’ goddess, and indeed it is hard to think how else he could name her if he was not to make her sound too familiarly local—any of the alternatives, qing for example, would overdomesticate her. It was ai that English missionaries in the nineteenth century adopted to render ‘love’ in such occurrences in the Bible as ‘for God so loved the world’ and ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’11 This is again a case of new wine in an old bottle, altogether new because the Chinese lack a notion of divine love. Another case still of new wine is the idea that what sons and daughters feel for their fathers and mothers is ‘love’ (ai). Before their exposure to the West, the Chinese never characterized it as ‘love’ but as ‘filial piety,’ the first of the Confucian virtues. But ‘filial piety,’ the twenty-eight-year-old poet Xu Zhimo (more of whom in Chapter 14) tells us in 1925, is not full-blown ‘love.’ When he was a child, ‘ai, this word that doesn’t trip off the tongue,’ was not one he had to hand to use of his adored mother. But it is now, he says, because ‘today I know what it is to love.’ And it is God’s will, he realizes, that he should do so with his entire being, body and soul.12 For a noun, Lin Shu used quite a number, but the one that leaped out from the page at me was aiqing. Made up of two syllables, ai and the old qing, the word caught my eye because it is a modern usage, one favoured above all others for love between the sexes today. It did not rear its head in La Dame aux Camélias, but here it was in Joan Haste six years later—so new that it couldn’t not have stood out from a page written, as all Lin Shu’s were, in old-style Classical Chinese.13 I have seen ai and qing appear first as separate, uncompounded syllables, then reappear in the next sentence compounded as the noun aiqing in a seventeenth-century text. This is in a short-story collection entitled Constant Words to Awaken the World (1627) by our Man of Feeling, Feng Menglong. In one of the stories a character tells another, ‘Men have seven emotions [qing]: joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love [ai], hate, and desire. I see that you have overcome six of these, leaving only the love-emotion [aiqing] to be banished.’14 As the text dates from the seventeenth century, it could be said that aiqing pre-existed Lin Shu, but this is not to say that Lin Shu was not using an old form to express a new meaning—or that repurposing the word to represent ‘love’ in the Western sense was not an innovation. Within a few years it began cropping up everywhere. It could only have been all those translations of Western works, Lin Shu’s as well as others,’ which put it so widely into circulation. Aiqing was not only the subject of the sentimental fiction of the Butterfly school but one of its subgeneric labels. A novel translated from the English which Lin Shu published in 1907, for example, displays the title on the cover with the aiqing label in a smaller font above it.15 By 1912, when Xu Zhenya published his novel Jade Pear Spirit, the compound word had become quite established. Although he chose deliberately to write his novel

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in an ornately old style, the repeated occurrence of the word aiqing in the text, as well as his disquisitions on it, left contemporary readers in no doubt that it was an up-todate novel they were reading. Aiqing was what went with ‘freedom,’ another recurrent word in the novel; it was what ‘free marriages,’ as opposed to arranged ones, should be based on, and indeed there is a remark in the novel to the effect that since neither of the two women (the widow and her sister-in-law) were ‘free to choose for themselves, the term aiqing isn’t really applicable.’16 In his disquisitions on it, Xu speaks in a way that must have sounded excitingly new to contemporary ears—of love’s ‘degree of heat’ and of how ‘evil-doing could only harm aiqing on the outside, not on the inside,’ its effect being merely to increase ‘the degree of love’s heat, such as to leave the gain far in excess of any loss.’17 Dear old qing would not have hotted up: on the contrary, as Wu Jianren (last glimpsed dismissing all love between the sexes as either ‘infatuation’ or ‘bewitchment’) has argued just a few years before, at its intensest it comes across as indifference. See those chaste widows lauded by our forefathers; do you suppose them to be utterly unfeeling, with hearts like dead trees or dried up wells? No, Wu cries, it is precisely when they seem most unmoved that their qing is at its height.18 (For ardour to seem like coolness has long been a Chinese conceit—for example, Du Mu, a ninth-century poet known for his sensual delight in wine, woman, birds and flowers, begins a poem addressed to a girl of the pleasure quarters with the line, ‘Passion [qing] too deep yet seems like none.’)19

Lin Shu was living and working at a climactic time—from 1898 to 1917, to be exact— of intense linguistic innovation, one marked by the large-scale adoption of Japanese vocabulary into the Chinese vernacular.20 The Japanese had taken the Western bull by the horns a couple of decades earlier than the Chinese, assimilating European ideas and coining neologisms for them, this the result of sweeping reforms initiated by the government after the start of the Meiji era in 1868. The Japanese writing system is ultimately derived from the Chinese—the script the Japanese call kanji (literally ‘Han characters’) comprises the thousands of graphs, or characters, borrowed from written Chinese. When the influx of foreign knowledge and modern terms into their country required the Japanese to coin new equivalents, it was to classical Chinese literature and works of Confucian and Buddhist literature that they looked for inspiration.21 As their coinages employed Chinese characters, it proved easy for the Chinese themselves to import them back to China as graphic loans and re-nativize them. To help effect such ‘round-trip loans,’ as specialists call them, there were the droves of Chinese going to Japan to study: from a trickle of 13 in 1896, the number had risen to a flood of 12,000 in 1906.22 Classical Chinese works were not the only source of new Japanese coinages; bilingual English-Chinese dictionaries compiled by nineteenth-century missionaries were

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also consulted. One such was the English and Chinese Dictionary brought out in four volumes in 1866–69 by the Reverend Wilhelm Lobscheid, who had been sent to China by the Rhenish Missionary Society but who presently gave up God’s work to enter Hong Kong’s colonial government service. He was a writer and lexicographer who consciously created new compounds out of Classical Chinese words to express modern Western concepts. More to the point, Japanese lexicographers and translators drew heavily on his dictionary.23 And it could very well be there that they found their new word for ‘love.’ Just as neologisms were required for concepts like ‘democracy,’ ‘personality,’ and ‘liberty,’ so they were needed to speak the language of modern love. It struck the Japanese in the late nineteenth century that there was no equivalent term in the Japanese language for ‘love’ (or amour or Liebe and so on). Translating one of Turgenev’s novels, Futabatei Shimei (whose The Drifting Cloud, 1887, is said to be Japan’s first modern novel), had trouble rendering the ‘I love you’ uttered by a woman in the story, until he finally opted for ‘I could die for you.’24 Kuriyagawa Hakuson was witheringly scornful when he remarked, in his 1921 love treatise Modern Views of Love: ‘The Japanese language utterly lacks words comparable to the English word “love,” and as for the statements “I love you,” or “Je t’aime,” there is no way whatsoever of rendering them into Japanese. The Japanese language is entirely incapable of expressing the sort of feeling contained in these statements . . . And the reason the vocabulary is lacking is that the thought which such vocabulary might express is not there.’25 What is not there is ‘the kind of love portrayed by Plato, Dante and Byron.’26 The lack was deplored by the Christian poet and essayist Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–94), who thought that men of letters of the period (the Edo) preceding his own (the Meiji) had no ‘other means to express romantic sentiments than to describe carnal lust.’ Instead of the ‘wonderful power of love’ that a true poet like Byron could describe, Tōkoku found in the history of Japanese literature an ‘abundance of bestiality.’27 Thirty years later, the same conclusion, or fallacy, was arrived at in China. To cite just one instance, the theatre reformist Qi Rushan (1876–1962), who did more than anyone to modernize Chinese sung drama, remarked after seeing many European operas during his visits to Germany, France, England, Austria and Belgium that Western dramas did not portray love salaciously, whereas there was not a single work that was not obscene in the Chinese repertoire!28 It seems that in having no word equivalent to the English ‘love,’ the Japanese language was not alone. In the opinion of Zhang Xichen (1889–1969), a magazine editor widely read in Japanese works on women’s issues, the Chinese language suffered the same lack. He made this point in the course of explaining to his readers why The Ladies’ Journal, the Shanghai pro-feminist publication whose image and content he had considerably revamped and radicalized, devoted so much space to the matter of

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love when there were so many more pressing problems to be tackled. That there had been no word for it in Chinese until recently, he said, was the reason why most readers misunderstood the word ‘love.’ All those pages on love in the journal were needed to put across a correct view of it, one in which love is distinguished from lust—which is merely ‘the satisfaction of possessive desire.’29 It is highly instructive to read of the case of colonial India as it seems analogous and, moreover, roughly contemporary. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a linguistic and conceptual change occurred in which writers felt it necessary to distance themselves from shringara, an explicitly sexual and sensual ideal conventionally translated as ‘erotic love’. They turned instead to prem, an ethical and aesthetic ideal of romantic love. With the emergence of this newer style of love, the older conceptualization suffered demotion to a lower, coarser level.30 There and in Japan a new ideal of romantic love required that the old idea of erotic love be downgraded and discarded. And for the new ideal, old labels would decidedly not serve. For a new term the Japanese initially transcribed the English word ‘love’ phonetically, as rabu. What this love was understood to be is revealed in a letter Tōkoku wrote to a fellow Christian (the girl he was to marry) on September 4, 1887. It is a love that is elevated above sex and one that is all the stronger for it: Our love [rabu] stands outside sexual passion, we love in our hearts, we love in our hopes: in contrast to the sexual love of others, we possess a much stronger love. Even though we are not yet one body, I feel as if we are already together. We will build an impregnable fortress of love where no enemies will frighten us.31

Next, during the late 1880s and 1890s, another new term, ren’ai, was popularized and accepted as the Japanese translation of the English (and European) concept of love.32 In a manifesto that Tōkoku published in 1892, the idealization of this supposedly new species of love was taken to an extreme. Entitled ‘Disillusioned Poets and Women,’ this disquisition on love (ren’ai), marriage, women, society and God had so great an impact upon the author’s literary contemporaries that it was as if they ‘had been blown apart by a cannon.’33 The text was the first in Japan to idealize ren’ai as the most important aspect of human existence, and its startling opening words have remained famous: ‘Love is the key to life’s secrets. Love exists first, then human life. If one takes away love, what is left of the meaning of life?’34 The essay goes on to discourse about love reflecting man’s true self and its relation to society—but more on this in Chapter 11. The term itself is a compound of two Chinese characters, lian and ai, the former a synonym of ai, and the latter the term, as we have seen, for ‘to love’ in modern Chinese. The same compound word became common currency in China, one used more or less synonymously with aiqing. The Chinese, of course, pronounce the two characters in their own way, as lian’ai rather than ren’ai.

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Most scholars believe lian’ai to be a Japanese invention, and that its adoption by the Chinese was another case of a ‘round-trip loan’ from Japan. The particular meaning content that the Japanese had given it, namely Western-style romantic love, was certainly new. But I think it would be wrong to suppose the word itself to be newly minted. Lian’ai, defined as ‘to love tenderly,’ appears, as one of several compounds, under the English headword ‘love’ in Wilhelm Lobscheid’s dictionary. Casting about for a term to signify a foreign idea believed not ever to have been conceptualized in quite the same way at home, could a Japanese translator not have helped himself to that compound in Lobscheid’s dictionary? In China the word had been institutionalized by 1905: a widely consulted Chinese-Chinese dictionary, Ci Yuan, includes it as a headword in that year’s edition. Interestingly enough, it was not until 1931 that the same dictionary included an entry for aiqing—glossed as follows: ‘A kind of sentiment: to be overwhelmed by admiration for another, feeling happy when talking to this person, an agonized longing when parted from this person, a joyfulness at this person’s good fortune, sorrow at any calamity this person suffers—all this comes of love (aiqing). In ordinary speech, it largely denotes the love (lian) between man and woman.’ This definition, which Dorothy Tennov would recognize as limerence, is given not in the edition itself but in its supplement, as though it were an afterthought, or an inadvertent omission made good. This was not because love’s star had dimmed; on the contrary, the 1920s was a watershed period for love’s ascendancy. It was just that in the debates on love in the periodical press during those years, in all the theorizing and sloganeering, it was de rigueur to call it lian’ai, and it had now to be that and not aiqing that sounded in such catchphrases as ‘freedom of love.’ It seemed to have a more modern ring to it, more gravitas even, than aiqing, so beloved of the soppy and sentimental and, worse still, old-fashioned writers of the Butterfly school. ‘What is love?’ one of those writers has asked rhetorically in an essay in 1931—only to answer, ‘She is a delicately beautiful rose, gorgeous rosy clouds . . . a flourishing sapling . . . she is hope, light, happiness, youth.’35 Now that is aiqing. But it was more likely to be lian’ai if you were relating love to psychology or literature or capitalism or Dante, or if you were engaging in polemics. Yet there was no hard and fast rule, and as debate proceeded in the pages of the Shanghai magazine The New Woman, one confused commentator was moved to ask in 1927 if ai and lian could be differentiated. What is ai and what is lian, and are the two the same or different? Different, he decided—there is more sense to the sensibility that is ai than there is to lian, the latter more headlong, more like limerence from the way he explained it.36 Another contributor told his readers that the so-called lian’ai was ‘only sexual love to a deeper and longer-lasting degree.’ And to his mention of ‘this word lian’ai,’ he appended the English term ‘sexual love’ in brackets, adding, ‘I’d say yea, yea’ to any proposal to abolish the word altogether.37 He thought he was cutting through the terminological confusion when in fact he was making it worse.

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People misunderstand the newly minted lian’ai, said Zhang Xichen, to the extent even of taking it to imply lewdness.38 And what of the old qing? It was now decidedly thin on the ground, as a charming little story published in a Butterfly periodical in 1922 reveals.39 This is told in the words of the Goddess of the Moon, who compares herself to Aphrodite and revels in the homage paid to her by the world’s mooning lovelorn. She likes nothing so much as helping to bring about lovers’ reunion. To this end, she periodically sends her assistant down to earth with his red silken cord to tie up one couple here, another there. Her assistant is the Old Man in the Moon, and as the god of predestined marriages, he is usually run off his feet. Little did his boss think that he would not have enough to do. But lately she notices a fall-off in demand for her attention. The change from the old Chinese lunar calendar to the Gregorian one by the new Republic (founded after it had toppled the Qing dynasty in 1911) has not really interfered with the observance of the mid-autumn Moon Festival, when the moon is at its fullest and the matchmaking business is at its busiest. So why has she been receiving fewer and fewer appeals? She decides to send the two other denizens of the moon, Jade Hare and Silver Toad, down to earth to investigate. All becomes crystal clear when they return with their report. Down there on earth today, the report explains, there are people who promote what they call ‘free love ideology’ in the name of some Western goddess of liberty, and young men and women who buy into it are tearing down the fences of Neo-Confucianism. What is more, these people think that unless they chucked out everything that belongs to the qing scenario they wouldn’t be true to their ideology. The Moon Goddess is still puzzled: ‘Demolishing the fences of Neo-Confucianism is as you would expect: the amorous had ever had to meet in secret trysts (since they could not have met openly, let alone flirted, under its moral code). But isn’t everything that belongs to the qing scenario treasured by every boy and girl? How could they throw all that out?’ Jade Hair and Silver Toad explain: ‘But you see, under the new ideology, you can love whoever you like; to get married, with a go-between and all, is far too unspontaneous to be of any use. And even those secret trysts are only for the faint-hearted: all that furtive skulking and fear of being found out, all that lovesickness and melancholy when you don’t get your heart’s desire—none of these familiars of qing have anything to do with love [lian’ai] and in fact are deemed an encumbrance of it. Of course, NeoConfucianism does still get in the way, but even to talk in terms of qing, that qing of the qing scenario, is to make love a lesser thing.’ So that’s what it is, the Moon Goddess exclaims! The Moon Festival used to be a time for hook-ups, but now if people want to hook up, they just hook up. No wonder they don’t venerate her any more. The story, though only a story, is true in its reflection of how great a change attitudes to love underwent in the crucial years before and after the fall of the last dynasty

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in 1911. Many men of that time wished it were even greater, urging that the change from an older set of attitudes to a newer—from qing to lian’ai, as it were—be nothing less than ‘a revolution.’ In their call for Chinese to break free from the chains of custom, conformity and Confucianism, and to take fearless leaps forward into happiness and a higher state of social evolution, marriages by pre-arrangement, or loveless marriages by another name, came in for particular excoriation. It is to that institution we must now turn if we are to better understand how the transition from unfreedom to freedom affected the lives of real men and women.

Hu Shi gave this photograph to Clifford, 1933. Courtesy of the Hu Shih Memorial Hall, Taipei.

9 Two Ways of Escape

When a man is born his parents wish that he may one day find a wife, and when a woman is born they wish that she may find a husband. Every parent feels like this. But those who bore holes in the wall to peep at one another, and climb over it to meet illicitly, waiting for neither the command of parents nor the good offices of a go-between, are despised by parents and fellow-countrymen alike. Mencius

‘What happens to Nora after she leaves home?’ The writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) asked this question in a lecture he delivered in Beijing in 1921, so famously that scarcely an educated Chinese has not heard of it.1 Today, no history of women’s emancipation in China, no history of love, for that matter, could be written without considering how that question came to be asked and why. ‘Nora’ is she who, in Henrik Ibsen’s celebrated play A Doll’s House (1879), shockingly walks out on her husband and her children. She has been treated like a child to be indulged and instructed, first by her father and then by her husband, until a series of events brings her to the realization that a woman cannot be herself in such a relationship and in such a household. In a dramatic ending to the play, she leaves her gilded bourgeois cage, slamming the door behind her, for a life of uncertain independence so that she could find out who she is, what she believes in, and what to do with her ‘wasted’ life. The play has been staged countless times in China since its first appearance in Chinese, and Ibsen himself had a whole special issue of New Youth, the periodical that spearheaded the New Culture movement, devoted to him in 1918. Whatever the play meant to the world, it meant a hundredfold in China, where its impact is hard to exaggerate. No sooner was it taken up by the writers there than two more or less synonymous new words were added to the Chinese lexicon: ‘Noraism’ and ‘Ibsenism.’ No woman in China had ever said, ‘Enough, no more!’ to any husband. What she desperately needed, thought Ibsen’s fans in China, was a bit of Noraism or Ibsenism to make her her own woman. Her role model would be the Nora who, in Act 3, finally stands up to her husband Torvald Helmer:

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Nora: What do you consider my holiest duties? Helmer: Do I need to tell you that? Your duties to your husband and to your children. Nora: I have other duties equally sacred. Helmer: Impossible! What duties do you mean? Nora: My duties towards myself. Helmer: Before all else you are a wife and a mother. Nora: That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being, just as much as you are—or at least that I should try to become one.

Noraism was bound up with a key term in Chinese feminist vocabulary, ‘independence of personality.’ Only a woman strong in personality, or ren’ge in Chinese, had enough character and individuality to know her own mind and to set her own goals. A Chinese woman had no hope of developing such a thing, however, unless she was emancipated. That was the message of Ibsenism read into the play by the May Fourth intellectual, the self-appointed literary and cultural modernizer of the day. But hang on, Lu Xun says in his famous lecture. Nora’s victory is hollow because when she closes the door of her doll’s house, it is not as though she goes on to open a gate of opportunity. How is the Chinese Nora’s sense of self, her sense of belonging to herself rather than to her husband, to survive when, not to put too fine a point upon it, she has no money? Only two outcomes are possible after she leaves home: she either sells her body to live or she returns to her husband. Apart from whore and wife, no role is available to her until there is equal opportunity and equal distribution of wealth. He is saying what the Marxist he would one day become would say, which is that a revolutionary change in the nature of family, marriage, and the relations between man and woman could not happen without concomitant transformations, especially economic ones, in all the other relations surrounding the couple. But just now what preoccupied the May Fourth progressives was the Chinese system of arranged marriage encoded in the phrases (italicized in the epigraph to this chapter) ‘the command of parents’ and ‘the good offices of a go-between.’ For the classically educated—and all May Fourth intellectuals were that—hearing just those two phrases was enough to call up all of the surrounding text, and not just those paragraphs either but large chunks of the book of Mencius, one of the canonical works of the teachings of Confucius, of whom the Second Sage, as Mencius has been named, was the pre-eminent transmitter. As far as those intellectuals were concerned, the Second Sage had if anything even more to answer for than the First, for in developing Confucian ethics he emphasized the impropriety of physical contact between unmarried men and women, and prioritized filiality above all other relations. Those progressives thought the influence on popular habits of such prescriptions positively baleful. When I wrote ‘the Chinese system of arranged marriage,’ I did not mean to suggest that it was somehow unique to China. Far from it: up to the eighteenth century,

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conjugal unions among the European upper classes were pecuniary arrangements in the rational interest of the family. In England, the Marriage Act of 1753 curtailed young people’s freedom to marry against the wishes of their family elders.2 In France, it was not until June 21, 1907 that finally, by reducing the fees and formalities of the ceremony, the law allowed young people to get married without their parents’ consent.3 In colonial India, where marriages were arranged by parents who understood a good marriage for their daughter to be a match rated suitable in purely mercenary terms, the British enacted a Special Marriages Act in 1872 to provide for marriage based on individual choice.4 Thus, there is nothing remarkable about the Chinese arranged marriage, but it lasted longer than most and it was more ironclad. It was also the ‘negation of the individual will,’ wrote the young Mao Zedong in 1919, exactly thirty years before he stepped forward to announce the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China with himself as supreme leader. He was writing about a country girl, Miss Zhao, who slit her own throat as she was being carried in a bridal sedan chair to the family home of the man she had been forced to marry. Mao thought that her parents ought to be clapped in prison. But he was more concerned with ‘the question of Miss Zhao’s personality,’ and indeed those words constituted the title of an essay that he published in the periodical Public Interest on November 18, 1919. As her ‘fresh red blood’ stained ‘the snow-white knife,’ Mao wrote, ‘her personality gushed forth, shining bright and luminous.’5 For Mao her suicide marked the emergence of her ‘personality,’ something that her parents and her upbringing had robbed her of before. From the way Mao—and for that matter other contemporary Chinese—used the term, it is obvious that ‘personality’ did not mean quite the same thing to him as it does to psychologists today: as something inherent to the person, to every person, so that Miss Zhao couldn’t not have had one before her suicide. Still, we can see what Mao was getting at—that Miss Zhao was not her own, self-empowering woman until she took her own life, just as Nora was not herself until she asserted her independence.

In 1903 Lu Xun cut off his pigtail, an act which might be taken as a sign of the sort of defiance that would eventually undermine the institution of arranged marriage, but only in the sense that rejecting the queue, a symbol of Chinese subjection to the Manchus, under whose rule all Han Chinese men were obliged to wear it, was similarly a blow struck against authority. When the revolution of 1911 ended Manchu rule, the queue ceased to be mandatory, so Lu Xun was eight years ahead of his time. In 1903 he was studying in Japan, and his being without a queue would have passed unnoticed there. But it made him stick out like a sore thumb when he went home on holiday to Shaoxing, and neither assuming a false queue nor going without saved him from being jeered at as a phoney foreigner.6

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One thing that he was not was disengaged. On the contrary, he was a writer who might have asked himself, ‘Why write if it’s not to change China for the better?’ Ministering to the sick of China as a physician was a vocation he could have pursued had he not dropped out of medical school to write and, by so doing, to minister to the spirit instead. It was to awaken Chinese from their apathy, to turn them from the unfeeling to the feeling, so to speak, that made him devote himself to literature. He decided early on that the two things missing in the Chinese national character were sincerity and love. Why those two? Perhaps because he was taking a leaf out of Chinese Characteristics, a book by an American-born missionary called Arthur H. Smith that came out in a Japanese translation in 1896, only two years after it had appeared in English. ‘The Absence of Sincerity’ and ‘The Absence of Sympathy’ were chapter headings in that book. Today’s readers would be careful not to be seen endorsing many of Smith’s views, judging them, if not downright racist, at least politically incorrect; but in those days ‘national character’ was not thought a dubious proposition. Indeed Lu Xun, who fastened on it, could hardly let it go, constantly excoriating what he saw as deeply flawed Chinese personality traits.7 Not the least of all that was wrong with the Chinese, in his eyes, was lovelessness. Love (ai), he proposes in his 1919 article, ‘How to Be a Father Today,’ is what fathers should give to sons, not favour. The Chinese go on and on about filial piety, he says, blotting out ‘love’—but love is the natural bond, not any feeling of indebtedness or thought of barter and profit. ‘Love alone is true,’ he adds, sounding a decidedly Romantic note.8 The rest is simply hypocrisy, a false morality. From this sons and daughters should be ‘liberated,’ afforded room to determine their own fates. In this view, Lu Xun was far from alone. The whole of the May Fourth generation wanted to cut loose from the old, oppressive and, as they saw it, thoroughly corrupt and degenerate patriarchal order. It could be said that their movement was a revolution aimed not at toppling any political order but at destroying the moral world of their fathers, and especially he who was the symbolic daddy of them all, namely Confucius. There was a Confucian type, or perhaps I should say ‘stereotype,’ which they all deplored, and this was a hypocrite who gave no quarter to others’ sexual impropriety but every licence to himself to embrace concubines and prostitutes. Yet all was not up with paternal authority, not for a long time yet. In this sense, the May Fourth was a transitional generation, still subject to the old morality even as they attacked it. Resist it as he might, Lu Xun had to bend to parental will and contract a marriage in the old way, through a go-between, without being consulted, and with a woman he had never seen before and whom he disliked at first sight. Espousing love but condemned to conjugal lovelessness, he chose to do without sex altogether—he never consummated his marriage. It came about in this way. He was studying in Japan when his widowed mother decided that it was high time he was hitched. So she set about finding him a suitable

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match; indeed, she would think herself negligent, and be thought so by others, if she did not. A girl cousin whom Lu Xun had known and got on well with since he was thirteen would have been ideal, only her zodiac sign augured ill for her future husband, whoever he might be. If Lu Xun’s mother had married her son to this girl regardless, how badly she would have failed in her parental duty. So another candidate was sought through a go-between. Zhu An, who was twenty-eight (old by Chinese reckoning) to Lu Xun’s twenty-five the year the two married, was from a distantly related family. Away in Japan, Lu Xun was reluctant but not defiant. Two things he insisted upon were that his intended should be educated and unbind her feet. Meanwhile he remained out of reach in Japan, until one day in the summer of 1906 he received an alarming telegram to say that his mother was ill and that he should return post-haste to Shaoxing. Once home, however, he found that his mother was quite well and the telegram was a trick to get him home for his wedding. He went through the rites mechanically, without uttering a word. Whether it was then or a little before, he was appalled to discover that his bride had bound feet and was illiterate. They shared a room that night but never again. He made quite sure of that. Tokyo, Xiamen, Canton and finally Shanghai—he was everywhere but where she was. ‘She isn’t my wife,’ he was later to remark, ‘she’s my mother’s.’ The latter Zhu An did serve dutifully, as a virtuous Chinese daughter-in-law should. But how could she, who could not read or write, be any kind of companion to he who would one day be hailed as the greatest writer in modern China? She was no beauty, but even if she were, she would still be a daily reminder of what he so detested about Chinese tradition, namely its victimization of women. For a time they lived under the same roof in Beijing together with other members of her husband’s extended family, and during that period he could barely bring himself to speak to her. We do not hear her voice at all, save for a few poignant words left to us by a family friend who has recorded them. Those begin with the statement that Lu Xun was not very good to her, then went on: My idea was, if I served him well, and did whatever he wished, in the end he would be nice to me. I was like a snail, crawling up from the foot of the wall bit by bit. Surely one day, I thought, I would get to the top. But now there is no way I can do that. I have run out of strength to climb. No matter how good I am to him, it is of no use. It looks as if in this lifetime I shall have to serve the old lady [her mother-in-law] alone.9

He no doubt suffered, but then so did she. If he was aware of hurting her, he did not show it, and beyond providing for her materially, he behaved throughout as though she did not exist. One entry in his diary (for November 26, 1914) indicated the receipt of a letter from her (penned, of course, by a scribe) that might have suggested he take a concubine. Such a suggestion, if it were that, would have been dismissed out of hand—not he, or else how different would he be from that May Fourth bête noire, the Confucian

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moralist who pretends to rectitude even as he embraces courtesans and concubines? So his own note against the entry, ‘quite absurd,’ is entirely in character. He remained a married celibate until well into his forties. He was a writer before he was a man. When a young man he did not know sent him a poem with the lines, ‘I am a poor Chinese. Love! I don’t know what you are.’ Lu Xun wrote, ‘What is this thing, love? I don’t know either.’10 Nor did he experience it until 1925, when he found himself admired by Xu Guangping (1898–1968), a fairly forward student of his seventeen years younger than he. She sat in the front row of his lectures on the history of Chinese fiction at the Women’s Normal College in Beijing, the place where he had delivered his lecture on Nora. She was the one who made the first move, writing him a letter seeking to unburden herself and to ask for guidance. She was extremely bothered by the female head of her college, who was not proving to be as modern and as progressive as her educational background—Japan, then Columbia University in New York—should have made her. In fact, so much did she seem like a woman in the old mould that Xu Guangping and her fellow activists decided one day to shut her out of the university. It was in the midst of the ruckus that Lu Xun, taking the side of course of the students, grew intimate with Xu. All this took place in the spring of 1925; some time in the summer or early autumn, it has been surmised, they became lovers.11 Xu Guangping was a large girl, taller than Lu Xun, and in her embodiment of youth, vitality and boldness she was the very opposite of his wife Zhu An. As a university student who was to write and publish a little, she was, if not Lu Xun’s intellectual equal, at least educated enough to become his copyist and amanuensis. A stream of letters, one day to be edited by Lu Xun and published, flowed between them. These are not obviously love letters, not all that revealing of emotions, but growing intimacy could be read between the lines. She used a number of forms of address, and although ‘MY DEAR TEACHER’—actually written in English—might not sound like an endearment, it was. Theirs was, not to put too fine a point upon it, an extramarital affair, and if this did not give rise to gossip, the age difference and their being teacher and student did. Lu Xun abhorred any suspicion of impropriety but could no more scotch the rumours than protect Xu from being thought his concubine. Divorce was never on the cards, but then weren’t they both fighters against conventional morality? If their love had failed, Lu Xun might not have found another. To judge by a piece she wrote at the time—in which he is represented by Fengzi, a wind god—it was she who conquered him, not the other way round: ‘He, Fengzi, acknowledges my victory! He is willing to be my captive!’ the narrator rejoices: Even though Fengzi has his greatness, has his stature, still he deigns to clasp ardently the hand of one so humble as myself. Then what matter if I don’t know my place! What matter if we are not equal! What matter if we are alike or not

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As for him, he who many years before had cried, ‘We should shout out the sorrow of our lovelessness. We should shout out the sorrow of having nothing to love,’ could now overcome his inhibitions and declare, ‘I can love!’ ‘I had now and then thought of love,’ he told Xu in a letter, ‘but felt ashamed almost immediately after, feeling I didn’t deserve it and so did not dare to love anyone.’ Now he was confident that he did not have to belittle himself to the extent of thinking himself undeserving of love.13 The two eventually settled in Shanghai, and it was there, in 1929, that Xu gave birth to their son. The news naturally pleased Lu Xun’s mother but it would not have displeased his wife Zhu An either; she would be reassured that the family line was continued, and anyway Chinese tradition considered the first wife to be the mother of any child born to a concubine. Lu Xun and Xu Guangping were now man and wife in all but name. They made their last home in a terraced house at the end of a lane off Scott Road (renamed Shanyin Road after the communist takeover), and it was in that house, now a museum, that Lu Xun died of tuberculosis in 1936, aged fifty-five. To the funeral parlour where his corpse was laid out, thousands came to pay their respects.

In the autumn of 1925, Lu Xun wrote his one love story, ‘Regret for the Past.’14 In it, the young protagonist-narrator Juansheng recounts the beginning, middle and end of an amorous relationship he had with the would-be Chinese Nora whom he halfsucceeded in educating in the ways of modernity. Although Lu Xun wrote it when he was in the middle of his own love affair, the story is not autobiographical. Still, there is something about the female protagonist, Zijun, that suggests a comparison with Xu Guangping—both women slammed the door on their families in pursuit of ‘freedom of love’ (indeed the latter’s family severed relations with her when they heard of her liaison with Lu Xun).15 But there the similarity ends. Zijun does leave the home of her uncle-guardian to go and cohabit with Juansheng; but love dies, and ultimately she goes back to her family. Sometime afterwards, Juansheng hears of her death and is filled with remorse, and the story ends with him facing an uncertain future which he knows he could only negotiate with forgetfulness and self-deception. How and why love dies is what the story traces. Juansheng’s falling out of love is hastened, or made still more inevitable, by external circumstances, the chief of which is economic hardship. After losing his job as a copyist, Juansheng tries his hand at translating books for a living. He does this at home, in the couple’s cramped and dingy lodgings. All too quickly theirs becomes a pinched existence, and the meanness and daily grind send the two downward into a spiritlessness and misery worse even than poverty. At last he tells her, in so many words, he no longer loves her, and it would be better if each were to make a fresh start alone than to be dragged under together. He wants

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his freedom from coupledom; in other words, that very freedom he had imagined the two of them wresting from their family when their romance began. Of course, it would be best if she were to desire freedom too, so he broaches the subject of independence by bringing up ‘foreign works, works such as Nora [sic] and The Lady from the Sea,’ and how courageously resolute Nora has been . . . Juansheng and Zijun had talked of such things before, or rather he had talked and she had listened: at the start of their relationship he had held forth on the tyranny of the family, the necessity of breaking with tradition and the equality of men and women, as well as on ‘Ibsen, Tagore and Shelley.’ Zijun had taken it all in, smiling and nodding her head, a childlike look of wonder in her eyes. And he had felt shaken, and immensely encouraged and hopeful about the future of Chinese womanhood, when she had then declared, echoing Nora, ‘I belong to myself . . . No one else has any rights over me!’ Yet how hard it is to see any trace of the new, emancipated woman left in the Zijun that now slaves over a hot stove. Ibsen’s drama The Lady from the Sea is surely in the story for a reason, as is the title of the magazine Juansheng tries to sell his translations to, Friend of Freedom. In his lecture, ‘What happens to Nora after she leaves home?’ Lu Xun has referred to the play and explained why Ellida, the main female character, chooses her husband over the sailor she was once betrothed to and who unexpectedly turns up to claim her. It is because her husband has told Ellida that out of love for her he has decided that she could ‘choose freedom, and on her own responsibility.’ Responsibility? She repeats the word, then adds, ‘That changes everything.’ Had Nora too been able to exercise free will with responsibility, Lu Xun has remarked, she too might have chosen to stay with her husband rather than walk out. Reading all this, you cannot help but see ‘Regret for the Past’ as the story—the absurdist farce, you might say—of the male May Fourth intellectual who discovers in the magical pages of Western literature models of love and freedom to live up to, only to find reality falling far short of expectations.

A life which escaped conjugal incompatibility in a way quite different from Lu Xun’s is that of Hu Shi (1891–1962), one of the most influential voices of the New Culture movement. Hu Shi had brains, talent, good looks, a great sense of purpose, deserved celebrity and, and with his long sojourn in America—first as a student, then as China’s ambassador to Washington—ample opportunity to involve himself in cross-cultural relationships. Women found him irresistible and pursued him relentlessly.16 Ironically, the Chinese among those women might have demurred at doing so had he not emboldened them by his translation of A Doll’s House. By publishing this and his famous essay on Ibsenism in the special issue on the Norwegian dramatist in New Youth in 1918, he more than anyone initiated the process by which Nora became a household name in China.17

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‘Walking out’ or ‘walking away’ like Nora became a theme in much of the writing of the time, not least in Hu Shi’s own attempt at drama, a one-act play (1919) which he dashed off in only a day and which was a hit when it was published. Life’s Biggest Event, the play’s title, is a stock Chinese phrase for ‘marriage’; too important an event to be left to the young people themselves, the parents in the play fix it all, basing their choices on such farcically superstitious customs that the young couple couldn’t not walk away from it all by eloping.18 What is both curious and ironic is that walking away was precisely what Hu Shi himself did not do. Hu Shi, who went to a modern school in Shanghai and then to Cornell University and Columbia University in the United States, bowed to his mother’s wishes and married a girl of her choice, one he had never seen and who not only had bound feet but was minimally literate. What is more, unlike Lu Xun, he did not remain sexually and emotionally aloof but had children by her. How does that square with his being the pre-eminent leader of the cause of intellectual enlightenment, one who has been described as ‘the father of the Chinese Renaissance’? Hu Shi was born to the third wife of a twice-widowed official of the Qing empire. His mother was eighteen when he was born, his father fifty. No sooner did his father die (at the age of fifty-four, in 1895) than the absurdly young widow got down to raising the barely four-year-old child to become the man that his father was, ‘the only complete man I have ever known,’ as she made it a daily ritual to tell her son before every daybreak, when she woke him up to give him moral instruction and to enjoin him to study hard. She was remarkable, ‘a paragon among women’ in her son’s eyes. A country girl who had not learned to read and write until her husband began to teach her, she nevertheless saw a need and advantage in sending her son away to Shanghai to attend a ‘modern school’ (where mathematics, science and English were taught rather than just the Confucian classics). Yet by her lights she did well, and no more than what had been customary for centuries, to betroth him to a girl of her choice, Jiang Dongxiu, before he was thirteen. He was eighteen when, as a scholarship student, he sailed from Shanghai for America in 1910. It was seven years before he came back from America; this made his a thirteen-year betrothal. So many ‘returned students’ had broken off their engagements while abroad that his mother feared that he would do the same, especially as he tarried longer and longer until he had fulfilled Columbia’s requirements for a doctorate in Philosophy. But no, once he was home the wedding went ahead as planned, down to the letting off of celebratory firecrackers that his mother had laid in at least a decade before.19 His bride would not have thought herself brought as a lamb to the slaughter and neither, for a wonder, did he. ‘Why not?’ is a question that has given rise to a great deal of speculation. The answer is to be found in his first exchange of letters in 1914 with Edith Clifford Williams (1885–1971), an avant-garde artist he got to know when he

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was at Cornell, most likely through her father, who was a professor at the university. An early feminist, Clifford, as she preferred to be called, became Hu Shi’s confidante and, during a visit he made to the United States nineteen years later, briefly his lover. An issue she had wondered about was, ‘If my own views differ from those of my family, should I compromise to keep the peace? Or should I ignore them and do what I feel is right, at the risk of a rupture?’ To this he replied that there were two views, the oriental and occidental, and he spoke for himself when he told her that he subscribed to the former. Then, feeling his answer to be inadequate, he wrote her a letter (November 2, 1914) in which he set out the contrasting views more fully: The oriental view may be characterized as an ‘altruistic toleration,’ that is, toleration based on consideration and regard for somebody else, for those whom a man loves and who love him. It will be a great pain to them, if we suddenly destroy all the sacredness of those ideals which may be dead to us but which are still vital to them. We are young and creative in our ideas. But they have passed their formative period of life, and are no longer capable of accepting our new ideals in place of their old ones. It is out of consideration for them that we tolerate, at our own volition, their beliefs and ideas, to an extent not vitally detrimental to the development of our own individuality and character. It is not cowardice nor hypocrisy, but altruism and love.20

In the occidental point of view, he continued, our duty is to ourselves. ‘We must be true to ourselves. We must do our own thinking and must never hamper our own individuality and character.’ A ‘new light’ has revealed the truth to us and we must take a strong stand on it, ‘for our ideal—Truth—admits no compromise.’ This view, Hu Shi went on to say, ‘is best illustrated by Henrik Ibsen in his play, A Doll’s House.’ Would she care to read the play, he asked Williams, he could lend her his copy? He also offered to lend her John Stuart Mill’s ‘immortal essay On Liberty,’ which had encouraged him in his belief that it is to those who refuse to be satisfied with the status quo, to the ‘radicals and rebels,’ in other words, ‘that we owe progress.’ He declared himself to be a radical, but only in his social and political views. When it came to family relations, however, ‘I have so far been on the oriental side’: This is so largely due to the fact that I have a very, very good mother to whom I owe everything. My long absence from her has already weighed very heavily on my heart and I can never have a hardened heart against her. I may – this is my hope – be able to change her views gradually when I shall live with her.

Williams, who was extremely well-read and quite his intellectual equal, wrote back to suggest that there was nothing peculiarly oriental about his standpoint, and recommend that he read the eighteenth-century French philosopher Condorcet and the British statesman and journalist John Viscount Morley’s On Compromise. ‘Conservative’ and ‘liberal,’ rather than East and West, was how she would characterize the two positions (not knowing that what he had at the back of his mind was his

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betrothal). Perhaps feeling a bit sheepish about having tried to teach a grandmother to suck eggs, Hu Shi copied down in his diary the quotations that she had sent him, greatly cheered to find his position endorsed by Morley: Now however great the pain inflicted by the avowal of unbelief, it seems to the present writer that one relationship in life, and one only, justifies us in being silent where otherwise it would be right to speak. This relationship is that between child and parent.21

Yet, though he evinced filiality himself, Hu Shi would not wish it on his sons. In  fact, as a champion of independent thinking, he condemned filial piety for nurturing dependence, that Chinese ‘slavishness’ which he and others of the May Fourth generation saw as lying at the root of the nation’s downfall. He himself could not be less Confucian when, upon the birth of the first of his two sons, he wrote a doggerel that might be paraphrased as follows: ‘I don’t actually want a son. He came of his own accord . . . But now that you’re here, I can’t not provide for you and teach you . . . And when you’re grown up, I want you to be a man who impresses, not a filial and obedient son.’22 And how does he reconcile his marriage with his espousal of freedom? Well, the way he puts it in an oft-cited poem (1917) is, Who doesn’t love freedom? But what no one understands is, To consent to being unfree Is also freedom!23

So he chose not to repudiate his thirteen-year engagement; in electing unfreedom he typified the generation he called ‘intermediate,’ one ‘sacrificed to both our parents and to our children’—to the latter because it is for them that his generation strives to ‘make society happier and healthier.’24 But he himself was transitional in more ways than one. As a schoolboy in Shanghai, he concluded from reading three separate translations of La Dame aux Camélias that French customs were degenerate, owing no doubt to faulty family upbringing, and that for Armand to abandon his career for the sake of love was inexusable.25 And as late as 1914, he favoured the Chinese arranged marriage over the American practice of dating, which he saw as putting pressure on women to use feminine wiles and allure to trap men into matrimony—he thought this not only demeaning but also inefficient.26 Did he think this because he was trying to reconcile himself to his own betrothal, or was it because he was not then progressive enough to believe otherwise? Whatever the reason, it was a man who had made a big transition that introduced Nora and Ibsenism to China. We know that history does not stand still, but even so he was unprepared for how swiftly change came. Writing in 1934, he observed that the pace of progress in the previous twenty years had outstripped that of any other period in China.27 Hu Shi

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was buoyed by the rapidity with which his crowning achievement, the reform of the written language, gathered force and took off. In a letter to Clifford Williams on March 12, 1923, he observed that when he started it in 1917, everyone reckoned it would take ten, twenty years of hard work. Who would have thought that the battle would be won in as little as five?28 Hu Shi more than anyone ushered in the switch from the Classical style—in which all of Chinese literature with the exception of such despised genres as the novel was hitherto written—to the vernacular. It might not sound much, a mere technical change; but in fact it was momentous: to be able to write in a language that you spoke rather than in a language so difficult that only an elitist few could master it, made for nothing short of a transformation in consciousness, with effects as profound as, if not more than, the replacement of Latin by the national vernaculars in Europe. What is more, doing away with the obscure allusions with which Classical Chinese had to be larded to be thought elegant not only made written communication intelligible to the man in the street but helped to break the Chinese habit of looking constantly back to the past. One of the beneficiaries of the switch to the vernacular was Hu Shi’s own wife. Classical Chinese would have been beyond her, but she learned to write after a fashion, stretching her acquired stock of characters to the transcribing of colloquial everyday Chinese.29 Even so, she could never be any kind of intellectual company for her husband. Nor did he expect her to be—such company, he observed while still at university, was not to be found in one’s domestic life but in one’s friends. Even were they to be given a choice of mate, his friends might not necessarily go in for intellectually compatible women, regarding such ‘PhD types,’ as they called them, a little too learned for comfort. In Hu Shi’s opinion, there is no such thing as an ideal woman, and a compromise is forced on you sooner or later.30 He found his soulmate in Clifford Williams. Separated by geographical distance, they kept up their romance—you couldn’t not call it that—for nearly fifty years, a  stream of more than 300 letters flowing between them from 1914 to the year of his death in 1962. Photographs of her as a pretty bespectacled teenage girl show her features to be refined and her expression serious, her brow ever so slightly furrowed by thought. Thinking was indeed something she did much of, to judge by her reflective and soul-baring letters to Hu Shi, though you wish she had also painted and sculpted as much—Two Rhythms (1916), an abstract oil of hers that hangs in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is such a harmonious, fluent and tasteful address to the eye that it is frustrating to find it virtually all that is left of her art. For a short while she was involved with the avant-garde art movement in New York City, and admitted to the circle around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Yet for all that she was self-depreciating to a fault, saying of herself in a letter to Hu Shi (dated September 26, 1933), ‘I am not proud of breathing, how can I be proud of that?’31 Yet, far from being ‘worthless scratches,’ as she describes them, her letters were a fount of

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ideas and inspiration to him. She was an exceptional woman, and her relationship to Hu Shi a remarkable one. When at last they became physically intimate, in 1933, when she was forty-eight and he forty-two, this was how she wrote to him of her feelings: I love you! . . . I am very humble that you should love me – but at times, your love surrounds my thoughts like sunlit air. In spite of doubts, I must believe but how could there be advertisement of this that is not loathsome? If there is chance for us to be together living fully can you imagine our not merging like two streams seeking the same valley? . . . We are both of us, you in a great world, I in a tiny one, persons who walk apart freely. Whatever comes real friends would look at us no differently (or turn away merely because they saw a light too bright!) . . . It is not possible that the fair slight beauty of this new touch should not radiate! I am a gentler person when I can see your mouth – the look in your half closed eye. The thought of you has checked and strengthened me always! This new you suddenly flowering in my heart how can I speak? It is so fair!32

This and many letters from her, left behind in Beijing when Hu Shi fled communism for America in 1949, were overlooked by Chinese archivists (thanks to their having been written in English) until 1997, when Chih-p’ing Chou, professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University, discovered them. Since then, more and more hidden areas of Hu Shi’s private life have come to light, calling for a drastic revision of his public image as an exemplary, henpecked husband. In fact, so numerous had been the women attracted to him that a Chinese author has entitled a book about them Stars, Moons, Sun, the idea being that Hu Shi, of whose disposition one of these women has once used the word ‘solar’ (the term inserted in English into her otherwise Chinese text),33 had had a whole galaxy of admirers. And it seems that they were the suitors, not Hu Shi, who could not have had any time left from his work to make conquests. The ‘stars’ were lesser admirers, the ‘moons’ more serious love affairs. Of the latter, the most intense was probably with Cao Peisheng, a distant cousin and one of the bridesmaids at his wedding. She fell precipitously in love with him in the summer of 1923, when she was twenty-one and he was not yet thirty-two. He had gone by himself to Hangzhou, the resort city by the West Lake, for a rest cure, and she happened to be at university there. She was something of a Nora-figure, ‘walking out’ on her husband when, at his mother’s instigation, he took a concubine to give him the children that Cao had not after four years of marriage. She and Hu Shi spent a magical three months together near the scenic lake, at a place evocatively called Grotto of Mist and Evening Glow. Watching the sunrise together, reading, versifying, boating on the lake, going on excursions with friends—all these blended into a dream of their love that summer. He thought he might never be as happy again. But the spell broke and the magic evaporated when he went home to Beijing. We learn only from hearsay that he asked for a divorce from his wife, and that she

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responded by taking a pair of scissors (another account says a kitchen knife) and threatening to kill her sons and herself if he left her.34 Whether or not there is any truth to these accounts, Hu Shi stayed married, and presently acquired a reputation for being a henpecked husband who was too timid to stray. He continued to long for Cao, and she even more so for him, but having to meet in secret and to pass letters to each other through an intermediary inevitably spelled an end to the affair. She was shattered, he possibly not. In reply to some verse she sent him in 1926, he wrote her a poem that in prose reads: Thank you for the poetry. My heart aches at mentions of old dreams and the beautiful mountain moon. To the sender of verse I say with solicitude: the sooner we forget each other the better, lest you waste your youth on tattered dreams.35

He presently pulled strings to enable her to go to the United States to study at Cornell. Armed with a degree from there in crop genetics some years later, she embarked on a career as a university teacher and researcher. It seems that she never got over Hu Shi, to whom she has declared in a letter two years after their time together in Hangzhou, ‘I love you, I love you to the very roots of my being.’36 He was to inspire more such avowals, both in America and, now that the language and concept were available to Chinese women (thanks partly to him and his fellow radicals), in China too. Early fame and an assured place in Chinese history had turned him into an idol of his generation. While this no doubt enhanced his personal magnetism, it is more than a guess that what made him even more attractive to women was an impression he gave that his eye was fixed on a higher plane. He had more important things to think about than love: the fate of China, no less! In America, quite apart from the respect due to him as China’s ambassador in Washington, he was in great demand as a public speaker, and universities acknowledged him as one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of his age by showering honorary degrees on him. He trailed a kind of glamour to which certain women responded. Yet he seemed impassive, accepting the wide recognition without self-congratulation. In his politics and philosophy, he maintained a rational, liberal, pragmatic, middle position throughout his life. In that letter about family relations to Clifford, Hu Shi has underlined the words ‘change’ and ‘gradually,’ prefiguring the side that he would take on the issue of reform versus revolution in China. His advocacy of measured graduation earned him the opprobrium of the side that eventually triumphed, that of Marxist revolutionaries who had no time for the softly-softly approach to social and political transformation. When war and history finally forced a practical choice in 1949, Hu Shi fled communism for exile in America. His emotional life had yet to run its course, however, and he resumed his relationship in New York with Virginia Davis Hartman, a nurse he met when he was hospitalized for heart trouble in 1938 and who had become his lover during his stint as

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ambassador. It seems that Hu Shi, whom she called her Casanova in a letter, amply gratified her sexually.37 She made no bones about how much she adored him; but ever careful to cover his tracks in his letters and diaries, he had left us no intimate record of how he felt about her. Until more documents turn up (if they ever do), we can only guess: since he was not given temperamentally to taking his tendencies to an extreme, it would be wrong to suppose the impersonal tone of his jottings to mask a roil of emotions. He did, however, confide some of the stirrings of his heart over the years, more or less veiled, to his occasional verse. In one poem, ‘Longing,’ he resigns himself to the life of lovelessness to which he thinks his marriage consigns him: I gather up my heart, And lock the door on it, So as to starve love to death, And perhaps remove its sting.38

But we know that Cao Peisheng unlocked his heart in 1923, yet that was the year he wrote ‘Parting: A Parable,’ which ends with the lines ‘I am now a free man, / No longer love’s slave!’39 To be released from servitude to love requires putting love in its place. That love was not everything to Hu Shi, who knew from the very beginning that his wife was never going to be everything to him and that perhaps no woman ever would, may be sensed in a conversation that he reported in an entry in his diary for January 1931. The conversation was one he had with a lifelong friend, Sophia Chen Hengzhe, who had studied Western history and literature at Vassar College and Chicago University, and who was, like him, at home in two cultures, Chinese and American. Her biculturalism (and his) is reflected in the fact that when ‘love’ crops up in the reported conversation—and it does so four times—the speakers interpolate the English word (with a capital L) for it into the Chinese. Sophia Chen asserts, ‘Love is the only worthwhile thing in life,’ speaking as one whose thinking had become Westernized. He disagrees, contending that ‘it’s but one thing—just one of the many things there are to life.’ ‘That’s because you’re a man,’ she counters. His report does not tell us if he protests at this or indeed if he makes any sort of reply, but a note that he confides to his diary reveals what he truly thinks: ‘Actually, the young of today all make the mistake of believing Love to be the only worthwhile thing in life.’40 His advice to a student suffering from unrequited love is telling; in a letter he writes: The silliest idea I have heard recently is that love is the most important thing in life. Love is only one part of life, and not a very important part compared to eating, sleeping and learning. Eating is a necessity; love is not, especially not to a person with a strong urge to learn. Comte had love, but it was a burden to him for his entire life. Kant never loved, and it did not matter to him.41

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For the poem that best reveals him though, I turn not to one of his own but a translation he did of Robert Browning’s ‘Parting at Morning.’ A Chinese commentator, noting that Hu Shi composed the translation in March 1925, thinks that it veils a remembrance of the time he and Cao Peisheng romantically watched the sunrise together on the West Lake.42 I read it a little differently. Hu Shi was extremely conversant with Browning’s poetry: he was awarded a coveted prize for an essay on the English poet in 1914, attracting attention from the American press for being the only Chinese student ever to have won first prize in English at Cornell University.43 He would have been well aware that the poem he translated into Chinese is usually read with another, Browning’s ‘Meeting at Night,’ which critics interpret as evoking a forbidden, possibly adulterous, tryst between a man and his lover. The night of love over, the morning sees the man parting from the woman, and it might be Hu Shi himself who now plunges into the world of action (‘a world of men’) to which the man must return: Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun look’d over the mountain’s rim: And straight was the path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, circa 1775. Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries.

10 Faust, Werther, Salome

Was I speaking the truth? Is not the love I bear her The purest as well as the most sacred? Has a guilty desire ever entered my soul? Yes! I was lying! . . . Oh, God! To suffer Without respite, or else always to lie! It is too shameful and too weak! Jules Massenet, Werther

Trapped in loveless marriages, one writer in the May Fourth vanguard coped as we saw by choosing celibacy, another did so by resorting to infidelity. A third, the poet and playwright Guo Moruo (1892–1978), first glimpsed diagnosing foot fetishism in Romance of the West Wing, thought he might go to pieces. A student in Japan with a wife back in China, he fell in love with a Christian Japanese woman and lived with her, then found himself tormented by a psychological state unknown to earlier generations of Chinese, namely guilt and a sense of ‘sin.’ Luckily for a deeply depressed Guo, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came to his aid, providing validation for his behaviour and therefore a salve for his conscience. For Guo, it was like receiving ‘a stay of execution’ to find himself helped and guided by Goethe.1 How he came to terms with his culpability through the German writer is a story that has to be told from the beginning, so a few words will first be said of his family background and childhood. Guo was born to a fairly well-off family in the inland province of Sichuan, in whose provincial capital, Chengdu, he attended secondary school. His mother was from a highly educated family just modern enough for her to grow up with unbound feet. Guo was lucky in the eldest of his brothers, a scholarship candidate at Tokyo Imperial University who paved the way for the scholastically precocious Guo to go to Japan to study in 1914, when he was twenty-one. Before this happened, however, Guo was made to marry a girl sight unseen. The go-between, a distant aunt, had assured his mother that the bride was educated, good-looking, and large-footed. But when she turned up for the wedding, Guo was appalled to find that he and his mother had been

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deceived: not only were there the golden lotuses to disgust him, there was a hideous nose to put him right off.2 In the telling the story of Guo’s wedding sounds comical, but it was a bitter pill for the bridegroom to swallow. His reading of translated Western fiction had filled his head with romance—in his reminiscences he especially remembers how enthralled he was by Joan Haste when he first read Lin Shu’s translation of Rider Haggard’s novel, how copious were the tears she drew from him.3 He knew such heroines to exist only in the realm of fiction but he had imagined himself meeting them, and so it was a painful jolt to find reality falling so far short of romantic fancy. He returned to school in Chengdu within a week of the nuptials and, as if to dull his pain in dissipation, strove for wild excitement in drink, gambling and what he coyly called ‘unhealthy habits,’ only to arrive ultimately at self-disgust. His subsequent departure for Japan was in no small part what it looked like, an escape. He was at medical school there, but as he was more poet than medic, he found his vocation in literature, seeking in the new written style of Chinese a liberating means for expressing the foreign and modern ideas that he was absorbing. Infatuation with all things Western was at a height in Japan, and writers there were attuning themselves to literary and intellectual currents in Europe earlier than their Chinese contemporaries, about twenty years earlier. The first Japanese translation of The Sorrows of Young Werther, for instance, appeared in 1894, eighteen years earlier than the one Guo Moruo would undertake.4 Guo had had to learn German to study medicine, and this opened the door to a fruitful encounter with Goethe. The German writer’s masterwork Faust quickly became part of his imaginative stock (he was to finish translating both parts of this huge two-part poetic drama into Chinese some thirty years later). And it was by invoking aspects of Part I of this work—as well as aspects of Goethe himself—that Guo’s friends tried to help palliate his feelings of guilt. Goethe bases Part I (1808) on the old story of Faust, the man who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for worldly pleasures and power. At the start of the play, Faust yearns for experience and knowledge yet is sick of life. Mephistopheles the Devil takes him to a drinking party and an orgy but Faust remains unsatisfied. What does catch his fancy is a sweet, innocent, entirely uncorrupted girl he sees called Gretchen (the nickname for Margarete by which she is known in the play). Helped by the Devil, Faust seduces, impregnates and later abandons her. Worse still, her love affair with Faust causes her mother and brother to die. Gretchen goes insane, drowns her newborn baby and ends up in prison to await execution. But even as a despairing Faust offers to rescue her, a voice from heaven announces that her soul is saved.5 She features in Guo Moruo’s juvenilia, in a poem he wrote that begins with ‘Gretchen in the dungeon! / Margarete in the dungeon!’ and goes on to ask for the tears she has shed to flow into his eyes so that they might wash away the stain he is

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born with and quench the raging fire that burns his body. ‘Oh tears! . . . tears!’ he cries, and implores them to kill him: ‘Drown me! . . . Drown me!’6 Guo was a self-styled romantic,7 and it is not clear if, like Keats, he was merely ‘half in love with easeful death’ or if he did seriously contemplate suicide, as he has claimed. Still, there is no doubt that 1916 and 1917 were dark years for him, when only death or Buddhist monkhood offered him a way out of his misery. We learn what had gone wrong from a letter he wrote on February 15, 1920 to a friend he had just made, the future playwright Tian Han (1898–1968). ‘My love is called Anna. She is a Japanese. Her father is a pastor,’ is how Guo begins his explanation. Anna was Satō Tomiko, a nurse who had gone to an American Baptist mission school and who had escaped a marriage her mother was arranging for her by leaving home for Tokyo, where she had found work at a St Luke’s Hospital. It so happened that in the summer of 1916 a Chinese friend of Guo’s was hospitalized there for tuberculosis. The friend subsequently died in a sanatorium, and when Guo returned to St Luke’s to ask for a copy of the patient’s X-ray, she was the nurse who undertook to post the negative to him. On seeing her, he was struck by ‘an unfathomable pure light’ she had about her eyes, and when he received the X-ray, he felt a ‘bitterish sweetness’ (he writes the words in English) upon reading a long letter in English she had enclosed that offered words of comfort and solace, as well as much religious counsel about ‘resignation’ (this last he also writes in English). ‘I thought God must have taken pity on me,’ he continues, ‘sending me a beautiful friend to make up for the one I had lost.’8 From then on three or four letters a week passed between them, she in Tokyo, he  in Okayama. They became intimate on paper, as intimate as ‘brother and sister.’ It being her wish to do good, he thought that she should train as a doctor and come to Okayama to prepare for medical school; he could share his stipend with her and two could live more cheaply than one. This she did at the end of 1916, then left for the Tokyo Women’s Medical School the following spring. But she was there only a few months, Guo tells Tian Han, when ‘my sin’ started to be ‘concretely displayed’ and she had to abandon her studies: ‘my son,’ he reveals, ‘is now three years old.’ They had meant to live together chastely, as brother and sister, but he proved overconfident in his weak resolve; ‘we hadn’t lived together for long before my soul suffered a crushing defeat, and my Anna was ruined by me!’9 Were it only a matter of ‘my sin violating the sacredness of love,’ he continues, he  would not blame himself so much. But the unutterably painful truth is that his parents had made him marry, and he had long of his own accord lost his virginity. He had made a clean breast of it to Anna, in the mistaken belief that his married status would keep her safe from himself. How wrong he was, for in the end he violated her, he said. Tian Han had better know the worst about him, Guo, if the two of them were to become close friends.

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Tian Han took it as a compliment that Guo confided in him, and his reply hastened to exculpate the letter-writer from any guilt—for he, Tian, does not regard what Guo has done as a personal sin so much as the sin of all mankind, or at least of those with ‘a deep consciousness of romantic love.’ Besides, it is a sin to which geniuses are particularly prone—look at Goethe. Goethe, a biography of whom Tian has only just finished reading, was a genius who had loved no fewer than nineteen women, Tian says; so if you must call it sin, then it has to be admitted that in his later life Goethe was the ‘very quintessence of sin.’ Guilt is caused largely by love; yet when one loves, one’s aim is not guilt but love itself—one loves for love’s sake. As an example of this, Tian cites Goethe’s liaison with Christiane Vulpius, whom Tian counts as Goethe’s ninth lover and with whom he had a son, August—a ‘concrete display’ of his sin. Tian then mentions Charlotte von Stein, the object of Goethe’s lifelong devotion at the same time as she was another man’s wife and the mother of that man’s children. Now if she were brought into the picture, doesn’t Goethe’s sin appear all the more grievous? Tian is thoroughly convinced that what Guo has done ‘is only natural.’ He would go even further than that: Married you might be—married by parental arrangement, as you say—but once you fall in love with [an]other woman, you will have, if not no love at all, at least less and little love for the woman you had married, and thus the marriage itself is no longer a marriage in the fullest sense. No! It ceases even to count as marriage. And so then you may indeed say, ‘You go your way, we go ours.’ [The two sets of italicized words in this excerpt are written in English.]10

These words would have been comforting to Guo, himself a worshipper of Goethe. Indeed, Guo had extolled his idol as the best of all human beings, and in a letter to his editor in China a month before had quoted the phrases that other Germans had used of Goethe: ‘superman,’ ‘the most human of all men’ and so on.11 To Guo, Goethe is one of only two geniuses ever to have existed in human history (the other being Confucius, whom, atypically for a May Fourth progressive, Guo greatly respected). After Goethe, Tian’s next authority is Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist (1848–1926) whose ideas on love, sex, marriage, and morality—particularly the notion that matrimony was not moral unless grounded on love—were so influential in Japan and China that I will devote more space to her in the next chapter. Here I will stick with Goethe, and quote from yet another letter in which this ‘most human of all men’ is invoked to help Guo see that opposed impulses coexist in everyone. This letter is from Zong Baihua, the editor-in-chief of two Chinese periodicals to which Guo contributed. Zong, whose command of German, initially acquired in Shanghai, was advanced by stints of study at the universities of Frankfurt and Berlin, was working on an essay on Goethe himself, and when Guo sent him a copy of his correspondence with

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Tian, he wrote back to suggest that Guo should see his sin as the ‘Mephistopheles in his mind.’12 Zong is seeing the Devil as many readers do—which is that he is a part of Faust, part of human character. Mephistopheles is the mischief-maker who lures and tempts and corrupts but who is also a spur to ambition and action, and a contributor to the good. This is why Zong goes on to say that the Mephistopheles in Guo’s mind should encourage him to improve his character ever more creatively. Guo understands what Zong means, having earlier observed that Goethe, endowed as he is with a portion of everything human, is himself simultaneously Faust and Mephistopheles. To return to Tian Han, he has summed it all up by declaring that if Guo were to be prosecuted on the Day of Judgement, he, Tian, would smartly step forward to act as his defender. Thanking him, Guo tells Tian in reply that he now feels reprieved. He and Tian speak in Western, indeed Christian, terms because the problem of guilt is crucial to Christianity, derived ultimately from the myth of Adam’s Fall and the doctrine of original sin. Thanks perhaps to Guo’s interest in Christianity, owed at least partly to its being Anna’s religion, he did feel that he fell into error when he gave in to sexual temptation, and was troubled in his mind that he could not lay his guilt to rest. But what he has not made clear to his correspondent is that while the two of them have chosen to talk in these foreign terms, his problem is actually intractably Chinese. It is his parents. As has already been mentioned, he had found his arranged marriage repugnant. His mother had given him a talking-to for behaving badly at his own wedding, making it seem doom-laden instead of celebratory. He should be man enough, she told him, not to care whether or not his bride was good-looking. Her feet could be unbound tomorrow, and if she proved bright and to be of good character, then she, the mother, could instruct her in the ways of propriety while he, the son, could teach her to read books and poetry. Where was his filial piety—it broke his father’s heart to see him looking so miserable, and you did not break your father’s heart if you were a proper son and a proper human being? Her attitude grieved Guo, all the more so when she and his father stopped writing to him. It pained him that they refused to accept Anna as a daughter-in-law, and he squirmed to hear them call her his ‘concubine’—after all, concubinage belonged to perhaps the most loathed of the layers of tradition which his generation was trying to peel away. It was an irresolvable quandary. He did think of asking for a divorce, but he stopped short of broaching the matter because his parents would be so incensed by the idea that they might die to hear of it; his wife would deem it a disgrace that she could only live down by committing suicide, in which case he would be guilty not only of adultery but murder. His deeply troubled mind was only very slightly eased when, on hearing of the birth of his first son, his parents resumed writing to him—but eased only very

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slightly because in their letter they qualified the word ‘son’ with a prefix meaning ‘of or by a concubine.’ He presently shared his troubled mind with the Chinese public when the letters exchanged by him, Tian Han and Zong Baihua were published in 1920.13 The threeway correspondence, collected under the title Cloverleaf, proved enormously popular, enjoying repeated reprintings. This no doubt came of its claim that the collection was an invitation to its young readers to consider the socially important questions of free marriage and freedom of love, and the conflict between those choices and family coercion. Each of the three contributed a short preface, and for his Guo offered a Chinese translation of a verse from Part I, Scene 2 of Faust. Enjoying proverbial status in German, this verse, rendered into English, begins with the lines, ‘Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, / And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.’14 Chinese readers of Cloverleaf could see for themselves how Guo’s feelings of guilt were assuaged, but they became privy also to the cooling of his ardour for Anna when harassed domestic life and motherhood began to wear her out. His disenchantment with unions based on romantic love is revealed in a letter he addressed to Zong on March 3, 1920; in it he reports a conversation with Tian Han in which the question is posed, ‘Can love survive marriage?’ And, by way of an answer, the idea that ‘marriage is love’s tomb’ is aired. One is still more unfree with the birth of children, Guo further observes.15 Guo had five children with Anna, who became for all intents and purposes his common-law wife, but he betrayed her when, after they were physically separated in 1937 by Japan’s invasion of China—with Guo returning to his own country and Anna remaining in hers—he married a Shanghai actress two years later. When, after the war ended, Anna sought to be reunited with him, she was dismayed to find that he had formed a second family with his new wife.

The youthful Tian Han extravagantly characterized Cloverleaf as China’s answer to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.16 The publication of this sensationally successful novel in 1774, says John Armstrong in his book Conditions of Love, marks a decisive moment in the history of thinking about love in Europe.17 In the history of Chinese attitudes to love too, its appearance in a complete translation by Guo Moruo in 1922 was a milestone. To begin with, the translation was a runaway bestseller; it was reprinted four times in the first year of publication, and ten more times after it was revised a few years later. Nor was Guo’s the only Chinese translation to appear; in the first half of the twentieth century, no fewer than sixty editions and re-editions by about a dozen other translators in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan were brought out.18 It was an undoubted hit, and there continues to be a market for it today. A copy dated 2009 has an endorsement at the back that praises it at the same time as it sounds a warning: ‘Everyone who

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feels disconsolate should read this book. They will find it ineffably consoling. The emotions it conveys are true and moving regardless of age or country. But on no account must anyone go and commit suicide.’19 In other words, do not follow the example of Werther, who blew his brains out for unrequited love of Lotte, or any of those people who killed themselves in his name. Such suicides had been reported, though never really authenticated, in the ‘Werther fever’ that had swept Germany and other countries of Europe in the wake of the book’s phenomenal success. The novel had inspired novels and plays and an opera, Massenet’s Werther, and had attracted denouncers and parodists no less than admirers. In China it had no detractors to speak of, only fans. The Chinese paid Werther the compliment of not producing any parodies—they took romantic love, such a hard-won thing in the 1920s, far too seriously for that. The Chinese reading public could not have been more receptive to Guo’s translation of what is now considered the first great tragic novel of European literature. Young Chinese were in the mood for love, so to speak, to judge by the plethora of love stories published to cater to their taste. For example, in the months before the appearance of the Chinese Werther, 98 per cent of the fiction published in the most important literary periodical of the 1920s, Short Story Monthly, was on the theme of love.20 Some Chinese no doubt read Werther for entertainment and escape, but others wanted an outlet through which to release restrained feelings, and looked to the novel’s young romantic hero to act out their own ardent yet undefined yearnings. Reminiscing about the ‘Werther craze’ in Shanghai at the time, Ye Lingfeng (1904– 75), an art student who designed the cover of the revised edition of Guo’s translation, said, ‘I don’t know how other readers reacted.’ He only knew that after reading the translation as a nineteen-year-old, he longed to experience ‘that kind of love’ himself, and if by chance a girl like Lotte had come his way, and if he could have got hold of a pistol, he thought it not unlikely that he would be a ‘Chinese Werther.’21 What was not fantasy, though, was his wish to read everything that he could lay his hands on about Goethe. On the design of the cover he expended much thought, creating decorative graphics whose colours alluded to Werther’s habitual style of dress: the blue frock-coat and yellow waistcoat that had become fashionable in the Werther fever in Europe. The novel, which unfolds in a series of letters in which Werther bares his heart to a friend, fictionalizes a triangular relationship in which Goethe had found himself two years before. He got to know and became friends with the nineteen-year-old Charlotte Buff, as well as with her husband-to-be Christian Kestner. Goethe fell in love with Charlotte during a dreamy summer idyll, and it is that ‘fall’ which the novel makes the reader privy to, as Lotte comes more and more to occupy Werther’s thoughts, hopes and fears. Lotte is promised to someone else, Albert, just as Charlotte Buff was to Kestner, but in real life Charlotte was never as close to Goethe as Lotte is to Werther. And of course, Goethe chose renunciation rather than suicide.

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The Chinese translator certainly took Werther to be a portrait of the young Goethe, with whose thinking he, Guo, claims to be in complete accord. The first of the things about Goethe’s novel that strikes a chord in Guo himself is emotionalism (the others are pantheism; love of nature, the primitive life and children), and in his preface Guo illustrates this by quoting Werther’s remark that ‘humankind is merely human, and that jot of rational sense a man may possess is of little or no avail once passion is raging and the bounds of human nature are hemming him in.’22 ‘We’ve all experienced this,’ Guo says, and ‘no proof is required that this is how it is.’ Following Werther, Guo extols feelings, and his next quote is of the young man saying, ‘my heart . . . is my only source of pride, and indeed of everything, all my strength and happiness and misery. The things I know, anyone can know—but my heart is mine and mine alone.’23 And again, ‘What is the world in our hearts without love . . . ? What is a magic-lantern without light?’24 Werther’s feelings, Guo writes, are the light from this magic-lantern, ‘projecting every kind of image at once upon a white wall, conjuring a universe of feeling at once out of death and destruction.’25 Of Werther’s love for Lotte, Guo exclaims, ‘With what utter spirit does he love her! How utterly does his spirit surrender itself to rapture! How utterly does his spirit grieve and destroy!’ Nothing is held back, all is drained to the last dregs. Far from being blameworthy, Werther’s suicide is to Guo a supremely ethical act. How little would any of those lukewarm types, he says, understand this who cleave to the Golden Mean preached by Confucius.26 Guo obviously does not think of himself as one of those types. Indeed not, for no practitioner of the Golden Mean would exalt romantic passion to the degree he does. Guo’s appeal is to his own generation and those even younger, for whom the poet Xu Zhimo speaks when he describes Goethe’s poetry as being ‘so close to our hearts that they seem to express for us those deep feelings which we fail to put into words ourselves.’ The experience of reading Goethe’s poems, he continues, is like meeting ‘an old friend in the realm of the spirit’—a kindred spirit, in other words.27 John Armstrong is saying something not dissimilar in his book Love, Life, Goethe when he observes, ‘Werther seems to be living through not just his own experience but a universal sequence of emotions.’ Werther’s love, Armstrong says, ‘is our experience of love.’28 Was it the Chinese experience of love? If Armstrong means the extremes of delight and despair experienced by those who have fallen in love, then yes, there are plenty of descriptions of such emotions in Chinese writing, though they were likely to be accounted ‘daft,’ or an ‘infatuation.’ Yet the Chinese would not, did they belong to the generations before Guo Moruo’s, have been receptive to the entire constellation of ideas surrounding such love as Werther’s. For a start, they would have been strangers to the idea that it is love that gives life meaning and value—the view which Werther expresses when he declares, ‘Without doubt, the only thing that makes Man’s life on earth essential and necessary is love.’29 While there were many ideas in the novel that

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fitted it to an older Chinese audience, the notion that love is the only thing that counts in life was not one of them. When love fails, life to Werther becomes pointless. ‘The silliest idea’ was how Hu Shi, for one, would count that (see Chapter 9). Werther writes at one point of Lotte, ‘I have so much, and without her it is all nothing.’30 If Guo’s translation succeeded in persuading any Chinese reader that feeling that way is a good thing, it would have done so against enormous odds. To set so much store by love is an idealism foreign to Chinese tradition. The French philosopher Pascal Bruckner sees it as excessive ambition: all too often in the West people think that ‘nothing remains but love,’ he writes, ‘and this is the whole problem. We overload the ship, we put so many hopes on it that it ends up sinking.’31 Those young Chinese readers who identified with Werther might have experienced his desire, passion, bliss, frustration, jealousy and wretchedness, but ‘love’ was not their key to life’s meaning. They were not in the habit of overloading the ship of love, let alone of seeing it as a choice between everything and nothing. More likely it was because all adolescents at one time or another feel the unhappiness, distress and melancholy suffered by Werther that the novel struck such a chord. That, at any rate, was how one of Guo’s contemporaries (the writer Zhou Zuoren), explained the novel’s success32 and also how a friend of Goethe’s accounted for its popularity in Europe: ‘At all times, there is a great deal of private, unacknowledged misery in the world; all Goethe did was to bring this to the surface in a sympathetic manner.’33 The other exoticism that the Chinese reader had to take on board in order fully to grasp Werther’s love for Lotte revolves around his sense of sin. As it is adulterous to desire another man’s wife, whether consummated in the flesh or not, Werther’s is a forbidden love: ‘in the eyes of the world is it sinful for me to love you?’ he asks in his farewell letter to Lotte. He struggles with his desire for her, then gives in to his passion at last and, taking her in his arms, he holds her to his breast and covers her lips with rapturous kisses. Recalling that rapture the next day, he wonders, ‘Dear God, is it a sin to feel that happiness even now, and to recall those ardent pleasures with the greatest of joy?’34 If it is sin—and he knows it to be that—then so be it. The die is cast. In his farewell letter to Lotte he writes: Albert is your husband—well, what of it? Husband! In the eyes of the world—and in the eyes of the world is it sinful for me to love you, to want to tear you from his embrace into my own? Sin? Very well, and I am punishing myself; I have tasted the whole divine delight of that sin.35

What Werther has to struggle with is love’s history, tendencies (or pretences) bequeathed by fin’amors and all the rest of it. This demands that his love be pure. How to have it both ways? One way is to deceive oneself into de-sexing love—thus Werther asks himself: ‘Is not my love for her the most sacred, purest and most brotherly love? Have I ever harboured reprehensible desires in my soul?’36 Lotte herself comes late to

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the realization that she loves Werther, believing all the while that if she could but turn him into a brother, how happy she would be. If she could but make him marry one of her friends, she thought at first, how glad she would be, until she discovers much to her distress that her ‘secret heart’s desire was to keep him for herself.’37 Werther, however, is not as self-deceptive as all that. He realizes soon enough that he is lying to himself. An aria in Massenet’s opera Werther makes this more explicit than Goethe’s novella. Note that in the aria (quoted in the epigraph to this chapter), Werther first exempts his love from ‘guilty desire,’ then feels compelled to undeceive himself and admit that he is lying. Struggles with Christian-defined sin and guilt were, of course, unknown to the forbears of Werther’s Chinese translator, and indeed it was because they had thought it normal to have several women (or concubines) on the go at once that the older generation had so horrified the May Fourth progressives. In this respect, the guilt-laden Guo Moruo was a Chinese trailblazer: he was a pioneer in accounting his commission of adultery as a sin, and in being so troubled by guilt feelings. Clearly, Anna’s profession of the Christian faith, as well as his own wide reading of Western works, had got to him, and he couldn’t not have felt the relevance to himself of the forbidden aspect of Werther’s love for Lotte. However, he persuaded himself, or was persuaded by Tian Han, that love absolved him. His relationship with Anna was justified on the grounds that it was a love union. Didn’t Ellen Key, whose idea that loveless marriages were immoral would soon make her the love guru of China, say so? A whole century separates Key from Goethe, yet Guo and Tian could dissolve the moral codes of the two into each other because their own exposures to these Europeans (and indeed to the entire gamut of European ideas of love and morality) were simultaneous. As I have earlier indicated, Werther and Dante could coexist in the same mental frame and be spoken of in the same breath because Chinese discovered them at the same time.

Instead of applying himself to his studies in Tokyo, Tian Han was finding it more congenial to watch plays and movies and reading widely, to the detriment inevitably of his formal education. In his later career too, he appeared to spread himself too thin, daring to translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet into vernacular Chinese, penning scores of plays and film scripts as well as refurbishing Chinese operas, and leaving as perhaps his most lasting legacy the lyrics of what became the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.38 At the time of his correspondence with Guo Moruo, he was eagerly sopping up works of Western literature. He was also reading Japanese authors, and it was one of those that introduced him to the thoughts of Ellen Key.39 Key belongs to another chapter, as I have said, and all I will

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note here is that her Japanese translator and transmitter, Honma Hisao (1886–1981), was also Japan’s leading specialist on Oscar Wilde. Japanese enthusiasm for Wilde knew no bounds; he was the only writer other than Shakespeare to have had his complete works come out in Japanese by 1920. The most translated of Wilde’s works in Japan was the play Salome, of which there were no fewer than eighteen separate Japanese renditions between 1909 and 1936, some with German as their source text, others with French (actually the language in which Wilde wrote the play), and still others with English (the language into which Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, translated it from the French). One Japanese translation was based on Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, which was itself derived from Wilde’s drama. Then there were the stagings in Yokohama and Tokyo—by Europeans to begin with, then by the Japanese themselves. The first of the Japanese productions opened at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo in 1913, and this proved so popular that no fewer than 127 performances across the rest of Japan followed. Acclaimed by the reviewers, the glamour of the actress and props was quickly exploited by fashion; by copying the actress’s hairstyle and wearing accessories modelled on hers, girls in the cities affected what came to be called ‘the Salome style.’40 Tian Han watched the productions in Tokyo. No doubt they inspired him, not only to translate the play into Chinese but to stage it in China. His is still considered the best of the six translations made of Salome in Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed it may be his second most lasting legacy, to judge from a reissue of it in 2013, eighty years after its first appearance in book form in Shanghai.41 This is a trilingual edition, with French and English in a red print to one side of a double spread, and the parallel Chinese text in black to the other. It is expensively produced and printed, the more so for the many pictures it includes: not only those black-and-white drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that had illustrated the original but reproductions in full colour of oil canvases of Salome by Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Gustav Moreau and Franz von Stuck, as well as the famous painting by Klimt of the biblical Judith (also always depicted with a severed head) that is commonly taken to be interchangeable with Salome. Of course, these paintings did not accompany Tian Han’s 1923 publication, but Aubrey Beardsley’s cover design and illustrations did. Beardsley’s art promptly inspired a vogue in Shanghai. Even Liang Shiqiu, whom nobody would call a fin de siècle Aesthete, much less a Decadent, was moved to write a series of poems entitled ‘On Beardsley’s Drawings’ in 1925; one of these addressed Salome: ‘Only a head kissed by your lips / will wear a smile without end.’42 In the Chinese fascination with Salome and Beardsley, a taste for eroticism was an essential seam. The enormous public interest in the stage version of Tian’s translation in 1929 focussed chiefly on the actress who played Salome, the twenty-one-year-old Yu  Shan (1908–68), whose considerable physical allure—a magazine described her as a ‘peerless beauty’—had her male fans buzzing about her like bees around a honey

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pot.43 Published photographs of Yu Shan in her costume, a sort of sleeveless, anklelength chiton, show her baring her back and completely exposing her left shoulder. A scarf wound around her head à la Clara Bow leaves her hair free to be piled up on top and tapered into two prominent flapper kiss curls beneath.44 While her sex appeal is undeniable, by all accounts her bold and expressive acting captivated audiences in Nanjing (where the show premiered) and Shanghai just as much as her appearance. She so impressed Tian Han, who directed, that he went on to adapt Carmen for her. In the role of the gypsy seductress of Prosper Mérimée’s novella, her star quality remained undimmed. Shanghai’s magazine editors knew what they were about when they ran a close-up showing her face in profile, her eye made smoky by make-up, inches away from the severed head of Saint John the Baptist ( Jokanaan) on a silver platter. This was a thrillingly gory scene. It preceded that moment which a spectator, Ye Lingfeng, pinpointed as the climax of the drama: Salome declaring love to, and kissing the mouth of, the man she desires and destroys. Afterwards at least twenty Chinese dramatic works, by ten Chinese writers including Guo Moruo, would borrow that shocking image or allude to it. Just as the Salome of Gustav Moreau is not the Salome of Franz von Stuck—though both are representations of the femme fatale—so the Chinese image of Salome was their own. In her reflection in a Chinese mirror, all her personae are subsumed into that of the defiant, fearless and uncompromising woman who gives free rein to her ardour and stakes her all on love. Other critics might see her as a ‘Late Romantic vampire’;45 not the Chinese. Instead, she is seen to possess individuality, a rebellious spirit and an ‘independent personality,’ qualities that Chinese women might emulate if they but pressed her into service as a role model. In the doggedness with which she demands a kiss of John the Baptist and a head of Herod, her male Chinese admirers could see only perseverance and singleness of purpose—the very qualities, in fact, that their own women needed to stand up for their rights. Something else about her makes her distinct and sets her apart from the ‘old society’: the fire and near-frenzy with which she pursues what she wants is the spirit that is writ large in the thrusting modernity of post–Industrial Revolution Western civilization. That was how Liang Shiqiu expressed what he called the ‘Salome spirit’ in an essay he wrote on Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism.46 Liang had counselled Tian Han against putting on the play at first, deeming it a worthless piece of theatre that evoked nothing but ‘the desire of the flesh.’47 Yet if Liang continued to have reservations about it, watching Yu Shan’s performance quickly dispelled them; indeed, he was so swept off his feet by the actress that years later, he was heard to utter her name in his sleep.48 As for Tian Han, he was nailing his colours to the mast when he cried, ‘My fellow lovers of liberty and equality, learn to pursue that which you love with Salome’s spirit of unwavering purpose and fearlessness!’ Never to compromise with society, never to

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submit to power but instead to rebel against authority—that, Tian Han claimed, was the underlying message of the play. If all this had the effect of defusing Salome’s sexuality, it was just as well that it did, for to foreground the drama’s eroticism was to lay yourself open to the charge of purveying licentiousness. As one who was caught up in the tangled threads of art, politics and ideological bickering that made up Shanghai’s left-wing cultural circles, and who would soon become a card-carrying member of the Chinese Communist Party, Tian Han knew better than to be that politically incorrect. Instead, what was to the fore was the female flouting of male authority. In refashioning Salome, Tian Han showed that he liked women to be strong-willed and insubordinate. In an essay he wrote in 1920 entitled ‘After Tasting the Forbidden Fruit,’ one which acknowledges the writings of Ellen Key and other feminists, he portrays Eve as a feminist rebel who is right to break God’s command that she should not eat of the tree of knowledge, for to obey Him is to be denied access to wisdom and power. To Tian Eve is the prototype for Ibsen’s Nora, who strikes a blow against a male-dominated world by slamming the door on her ‘doll’s house.’49 Actually, for all his politically expedient blindness to the eroticized violence of Salome’s story, Tian Han was fascinated by the figure of the dominatrix and femme fatale. He could only have had a vamp in mind when he wrote his 1927 essay ‘Vampires of the Century’ on alluring but threatening women on stage and screen. By ‘vampire,’ he indicated, he meant voluptuous women with a strong self-conscious urge to fulfil themselves sexually and who are intent on gratifying their need for sensual stimulation.50 Yet this was China, where public display of feminine eroticism could not yet be countenanced even when it was play-acting. Yu Shan’s self-censorship during one of her performances was a measure of the distance Chinese womanhood had still to travel. Playing Salome one night, she was about to declare, ‘I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,’ when she espied her mother sitting in the front row of the theatre glaring at her. To truly inhabit the role of Salome as imagined by Tian Han, she ought to have delivered that climactic line with passionate abandon, dramatically and forcefully. Instead, she ‘instantly shrivelled.’ She muttered the words in a manner indicating that all she wanted was to be done with them. It was apparent to Xu Zhimo, who was in the audience, that Yu Shan simply could not overcome her upbringing. Daughters of distinguished families like hers did not go on the stage, so acting alone lay her open to the charge of immodesty. She braved this, only to find her courage failing her upon catching sight of her mother watching her—at which point she was back immediately to being the shrinking violet that wellbred girls were supposed to be. To Xu, who reported this in a published speech entitled ‘About Women,’ she had yielded to custom and allowed it to prevail over her art, and this further indicated that, while Chinese women might have unloosed the bindings of their feet and their breasts, they remained psychologically shackled. He did not mince

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his words: ‘The ghostly shadow of generation upon generation of bound feet lingers unavoidably in your bloodstream and the fibre of your being.’51 How were Chinese women to be free? How were they to become a Nora or a Salome? By daring to love, many feminists argued. To these feminists, mostly male intellectuals who aired their views in magazines like The Ladies’ Journal and The New Woman, liberty to love was the be-all and end-all of the woman question—it is the ‘fundamental, in fact sole, solution to the problem of women.’52 In so arguing, they were taking a leaf out of Ellen Key’s book—she who has deemed love to be ‘at the core of the woman question.’53 We must now turn to this prophet of the so-called ‘new sexual morality’ and to the novel horizons opened to Chinese by her ‘doctrine that love is the moral ground of sexual relations.’54

Ellen Key

11 Ellen Key

I know that he who loves does not have to marry necessarily, he does not have to produce children, but still true love requires the oneness of soul and flesh. The Ladies’ Journal, 1926

Nobody has heard of Ellen Key today, nor of her book Love and Marriage or her tract The Morality of Woman. She and her ‘new morality’ are quite forgotten, so it is extraordinary to discover how immensely influential her ideas were in Shanghai during the 1920s. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the Chinese reception of her ideas marked the apogee of love’s fortunes in China. What were her ideas, or rather those of her ideas that found adherents and sparked debate in China? The first of these has been quoted already—the ‘doctrine that love is the moral ground of sexual relations.’1 Key’s idea that ‘love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love’ quickly became a credo in China. How could it not, when it was just the foil needed to counter loveless arranged marriages? Nor did Key stop at marriage: the credo’s corollary is that a couple freely joined together in love should be allowed freely to part when love fades or shifts to another. In neither case are the two partners being immoral; indeed, in opting for what Key calls ‘free divorce,’ they are being more moral than those who stay unhappily married despite love’s absence. For if you do not love a man but stay married to him, you are no better than a prostitute. Love between the sexes is clearly of supreme importance to Key, so much so that the Chinese understood her to be espousing a ‘religion of love’ and a ‘love-is-sacred doctrine.’ But ‘sacred’ does not mean supra-physical, and what marks Key’s position, and is the reason she pits herself against the Christian distrust of the body, is her insistence that sex is equally important. Or rather, the right kind of sex—that is, sex with soul. And here she implants an idea that the Chinese would instantly turn into a catchphrase: ‘the oneness of soul and flesh.’2 Taken to be a definition of true love, this caught on in a big way in the 1920s. The reason Key thought sex important was her belief in the principle of progressive evolution, the nineteenth-century idea that the life of mankind (Key calls this ‘race’)

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evolved for the better, or towards a higher stage of development. The evolutionist in her saw love as improving the ‘race’ because offspring conceived with love were thought to be superior to those conceived without; she argued again and again that the most perfect race is the one created by a love that unites the soul and the body. Though she did not hold with sex for the sake of sex, she was adamantly opposed to the denial of sex promoted, she said, by ‘Eastern asceticism’ and Christian morality. Love must combine both body and soul if individuals and humankind are to progress towards betterment. The soul-flesh fusion that she urged presupposes a body-spirit split to begin with, and indeed it was in terms of division rather than congruence that the Chinese first saw the pair when they began to deploy European dualism in their thinking. Along with the division model, they also learned to elevate spirit above flesh. This is as you would expect—recall Anthony Giddens’ point about the tendency in what he dubs the romantic love complex for ‘the element of sublime love . . . to predominate over that of sexual ardour.’ Of course, when those early ‘dualists’ put spirit above body, they did so without imagining the one to be divine and the other earthly, nor implicating sex in sin. A Butterfly novelist named Li Dingyi (1890–1963), for example, describes the bodily kind of love as being sizzling to begin with, but fizzing out with time. He contrasts this with the love that starts from the spirit, which he sees as growing from shallow to deep and becoming ever fuller and more steadfast.3 By love of the spiritual sort, another Butterfly writer, Zhou Shoujuan, appears to mean unconsummated love. In the pages of this writer, spiritual love is chaste longing not acted upon, so it is pure and nothing to be ashamed of, and, what is more, unlike sexual attraction in being enduring. In other contemporary pages, it is equated with Platonic love, this understood as an attachment that stops short of sexual gratification, what still others succeeded in bringing into closer Chinese focus by applying to it a phrase they have inherited from The Dream of the Red Chamber, namely ‘lust of the mind.’ Unfulfilled love, or love shorn of the taint of physical desire, struck Zhou as being not only loftier and purer but more loyal and longer-lasting. In addition, to frustrate a love relationship, especially through death, is to heighten it still further. All this is as you would expect of an expert on Triste Love, one who rated tragedy above the happy ending, and who believed the slivered moon, as he liked to tell his young readers, to be more beautiful than the full moon. ‘True love,’ he pronounced in 1922, is love of the spiritual sort, whereas ‘to seek only to gratify desire is bestiality.’4 Victorian works of fiction, which as the reader may recall was translated into Chinese in great number, offered plenty of examples of the body-soul divide. The fallen Joan Haste, for example, was flesh to Emma’s spirit until, by her self-sacrificial death, she proved herself to be no mere sensualist but true in love of a higher plane. We have heard Henry asking himself ‘which was the more lovely of the two types of the spirit and the flesh,’ and which he would choose himself. The evidence of his dazzled senses

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inclined him to the sensual Joan, but the perfect woman, he concluded, was she who united the two. The Romantic movement had come to the rescue of the body and set it on a par with the spirit. To slightly rejig Anthony Giddens’ characterization, romantic love is something that embraces sexuality even as it breaks with it. By the time the Chinese imported the model of love as ‘the oneness of soul and flesh,’ not spiritual bonding alone, nor desire alone, was thought to make for fulfilled romantic love. This typically European treatment of love, as well as the bemused Chinese adoption of it, is mocked in a 1947 Chinese novel named Fortress Besieged. The novel’s author, the literary scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910–98), satirizes what a hapless returned Chinese student has learned of love in Europe: When he was at the University of Berlin, he had heard the lecture on Eros by Ed Spranger, a professor well known in Japan, and so he understood that love and sexual desire are twins which go together but are different. Sexual desire is not the basis for love, and love is not the sublimation of sexual desire. He had also read manuals on love and other such books and knew the difference between physical and spiritual love.5

An ear cocked to the passage’s irony will also pick up the reference to Japan, the country where Professor Ed Spranger is said to be well known. It is Japan and not any other place for a good reason: Spranger’s teaching was just the sort to be a hit with the Japanese; and where the Japanese led, many Chinese in those years followed. Indeed, it was by way of Japan that certain Western ways of framing love came to China. It was Japanese intellectuals, particularly Christian ones, who evolved the modern ideal of love named ren’ai, the neologism which came to be adopted in China as lian’ai. There had emerged in Japan a set of ideas and ideals that historians have termed a ‘love marriage ideology.’ That you marry for love is of course the chief of these ideas, but equally important for the leading light of the woman’s movement in the Taishō period, Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), is the notion that modern love is a merger of spiritual and sexual love.6 In 1911, this graduate of the Japan Women’s University founded the literary magazine Bluestocking, the first to be created and published by women for women. Tellingly, the cover design of its inaugural issue shows a long panel featuring the elongated figure of a European woman. Flanked at the top by the two Chinese characters for ‘bluestocking,’ seitō in Japanese, the panel is decorated, as is the woman’s dress, in a design patently derived from the graphics of the turn-of-the-century Vienna Secession style. It is a design that clearly shows the magazine to move in step with the times in the West, even to be attuned to the iconoclastic spirit of the Viennese movement.7 Raichō stood for the awakened New Woman who pursued the achievement of true selfhood through the experience of love. One of the things which her female readers took away from her writings was the notion of a true self, and of love being an integral

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part of a woman’s discovery and development of that self. She had imbibed her ideas from the works of Ellen Key, coming across whom was tantamount to ‘a revelation from heaven’; it was like finding a light that beamed on a world of love hitherto unknown to her.8 Having found the light, she projected it on to others by translating Key, publishing excerpts from the English edition of the latter’s book Love and Marriage in Bluestocking between 1913 and 1914. Raichō herself, cohabiting with her lover without being married to him, must have felt she was living up to Key’s ‘new morality.’ She echoed her Swedish role model when she wrote to her parents in 1914, ‘There is nothing more natural than for a man and a woman who are in love to live under one roof, and as long as they have an understanding, I think the formality of marriage is of little consequence.’9 The two names, Hiratsuka Raichō and Ellen Key, were linked in the letter which Tian Han wrote to Guo Moruo in 1919 to allay his friend’s guilt over Anna. In the letter, Tian identified the Japanese feminist with the espousal of marrying for love, and Key with the ideal of unifying soul and flesh. Tian Han suggested that Guo did right by the ‘new morality’ of Raichō and Ellen Key, for whom the presence or absence of love, not law, was the only touchstone of morality. Key’s ideas were exerting considerable influence in Japan at the time the two friends were studying there, and as we have seen, another of Tian’s sources for them was Honma Hisao, who had published books on the woman question and Ellen Key and who would become far better known in China for these than for his expertise on Oscar Wilde.10 Key’s name appeared in New Youth, the chief forum of China’s May Fourth pioneers, in 1918,11 and this was followed a year later by a potted biography of her in The Ladies’ Journal.12 Other Chinese were just as quick off the mark—Mao Dun (1896– 1981), one day to become a famous novelist, brought out excerpts of Key’s book Love and Marriage in Chinese in 1920.13 Another fan, Zhang Xichen, propagated Key’s ideas along with his own feminist beliefs in The Ladies Journal, the periodical of which he was the editor until a special issue he ran on sexual liberation and divorce (in 1925) got him demoted and he turned his hand to starting The New Woman instead. He made sure that Ellen Key’s ‘morality of love doctrine,’ as he called it, was kept on the boil in the pages of that new journal. The crux of the doctrine, Zhang Xichen has said from the start, is what she means by love. Love is not a matter of only soul, nor a matter of only flesh. If it were just soul, then it was Platonic love, and if it were just flesh, then it was ‘free love’ rather than ‘love with freedom’ (he gives the two phrases in English in a parenthesis). Neither of these is as love ought to be; what it ought to be is a more complex, loftier ‘oneness of soul and flesh.’ He then touches on Key’s evolutionist belief that the prime condition for the perpetuation of a more perfect race is a happy love that unites body and soul.14 For ‘body,’ Key habitually uses the word ‘senses’ (as a writer of her time would), and this is the term that comes out as ‘flesh’ in Japanese and Chinese. The formulation

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‘oneness of soul and flesh’ is actually not a direct translation of any of her phrases; pithiness is not at all her style. She writes in the kind of prose that we associate with the Victorian novel, and she has a tendency to work herself up to overwrought utterances. But still we know what she is getting at when she tells us that ‘the most painful of the existing distinctions between man and woman’ is that ‘with women love usually proceeds from the soul to the senses and sometimes does not reach that far,’ while ‘with man it usually proceeds from the senses to the soul and sometimes never completes the journey.’15 In other words, love is in the loins for a man and in the mind and heart for a woman. In Japan the formulation ‘oneness of soul and flesh’ harks back to 1908, or earlier— it was used in that year by Futabatei Shimei, he who rendered ‘I love you’ as ‘I could die for you’ when translating the work of Ivan Turgenev, and used so matter-of-factly that it must already have become fairly common.16 Thus it was ready to hand when Key’s ‘unity of soul and senses in love’ called for a Japanese translation. And as the Japanese had used Chinese characters for it, the formulation could be, and was, adopted wholesale in China. It made its first appearances in Chinese print in the published musings and translations of Zhou Zuoren, a returned student from Japan who has already made a cameo appearance in these pages. As a champion of women’s liberation and freer sex, and an unreserved admirer of Havelock Ellis, Zhou argued against the pitting of soul against flesh, a crude dualism which he thought typical of the puritanical attitudes of (unspecified) religious teachings. We now know soul and flesh to be two facets of the same thing rather than antagonistic, he wrote, and in ‘true love and heterosexual life,’ the ‘soul and flesh should be a unity rather than a duality.’17 The phrase caught on and got thoroughly chewed over in debates published in the periodical press in the 1920s, with stand-offs between the opinions of one camp and the rebuttals of another. The debates between the so-called ‘love naysayers’ and the ‘yes-to-love-sayers’ raged on in the form of letters to the editor in page after page of The New Woman from 1926 to 1928. One contributor observes that ever since the notion of love as the oneness of soul and flesh was introduced to China, two approaches to the word ‘love’ have prevailed: one endows it with reverence and mystique, while the other regards it with contempt and ridicule. A difficulty that many Chinese had was with the question of what exactly was soul-love (or spiritual love)? Sublimated or spiritualized sexual desire, is one commentator’s answer. Well, if it is that, another says, then it is still just sex at bottom, however lofty sublimation or spiritualization might make it seem. The soul in soulflesh unity is illusory, merely a self-deceptive gloss put on sex. The effect is to debase sex still further.18 One who dubs himself a ‘love naysayer’ sees no call at all for any concept of souland-flesh fusion. In any case, it is abstruse, far too metaphysical. He is countered by the

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yes-to-love-sayers, chief among them Zhang Xichen. It is not just sex, Zhang argues; we know that there is such a thing as ‘soul.’ All right, it is intangible, insubstantial, not discernible by the senses and, unlike sex, not experienced by the body, but still you can’t do without the concept. Don’t friends feel delight when they meet, feel sad when they part, miss each other when they separate for a long time? None of these feelings are directly perceptible by the senses, yet they could affect us deeply, indeed even physically. And since we have no general word for them, Zhang continues, we have no choice but to use ‘soul.’ Here Zhang seems unable to help being his down-to-earth Chinese self, making soul-love sound like nothing so much as sentiment, what he might have called qing were he not engaged upon a modern discourse of love.19 A long commentary entitled ‘The Soul Aspect and Flesh Aspect of Love’ makes more or less the same point. It is for want of a better term, it says, and for convenience, that we employ words like ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘mind’ in the phrases ‘soul-and-flesh’ and ‘body-and-mind.’ Agreed, the terms are hard to define, but they are not really abstrusely metaphysical. To feel happy, depressed, pained, angry or loving—all such emotions arise in ways science cannot yet explain, though no doubt there is a biological or chemical basis for them, so until such time as science could elucidate them, let us just call them ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘mind,’ and so on.20 Clearly the issue is one of love versus lust, a typically Western antithesis to which the Chinese were until now not accustomed; in their own tradition there had been no marked-off places for the two on the sex-love continuum. All who take part in the debate are agreed that sex could exist without love, but could love exist without sex? Zhang Xichen maintains that it could, and for proof he points to Dante’s abiding love (in fact courtly love) for Beatrice; the poet claims to have loved her secretly all his life despite having met her only three times, the first when both of them were about nine years of age; the second nine years later, when she intoxicated him by greeting him, and the third when she passed along a street and denied Dante her greeting, causing him to weep bitter tears. Zhang means by Dante’s a chaste love that endures with no hope or means of gratifying physical desire, an ideal fashioned, as we have seen, in medieval France.21 The question of what exactly is the relationship between the two, flesh and spirit, exercised many of the contributors. It did not help that so much additional vocabulary came their way through translations of Western writers. One of the most frequently dropped names from the Western worlds of science and literature, invoked as authorities by some Chinese to bolster their own stance, was Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). In his native England Carpenter is regarded as a bit of a crank, just the sort of socialist to attract fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, sandal-wearers, pacifists and feminists (to echo George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier). It could not have been at all easy for the Chinese translator to render this passage, for example, from Carpenter’s book Love’s Coming of Age (1896):

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When True Love Came to China Lust and love–the Aphrodite Pandemos and the Aphrodite Ourania–are subtly interchangeable. Perhaps the corporeal amatory instinct and the ethereal human yearning for personal union are really and in essence one thing with diverse manifestations.

The names Aphrodite Pandemos and Aphrodite Ourania must have defeated the translator, for he simply leaves them in their original English.22 However, he does understand Carpenter to be describing the merger of physical and spiritual love, something akin to Ellen Key’s ‘oneness of soul and flesh.’ In trying to sort out the relationship between love and sex, sooner or later you come up against the requirement to define love; and this a contributor surnamed Mao tackles head-on. To know whether there is such a thing, or relationship, as romantic love (lian’ai), he says, we must ask if there is such a thing as love (ai). ‘What is love?’ he asks. What is its true face, and how many kinds are there—is it that man has simply taken it upon himself to break it down into friendship-love, human love, romantic (or sexual) love, parental or filial love and so on? And what are the differences between these kinds of love? It seems to him that there could be no riposte to the no-to-love camp unless these questions are satisfactorily and convincingly answered.23 Of the various exchanges, the one on which more ink is spilt than any other involves a self-styled anarchist (with the pen-name Qiandi) who declares himself to be against the whole idea of a discrete man-woman love (lian’ai) distinct from love in general. No such thing as romantic love, he argues; the male-female relationship is based only on the sexual urge, so it involves physiology rather than psychology. Beyond that there is simply love in general or, as he calls it, ‘human love,’ the sort you feel for friends, for example, so that what exists between couples is but ‘sexual friendship’ (the italicized words interposed in English in the Chinese text). Those who argue otherwise do so from having swallowed the theories of Ellen Key and Edward Carpenter, theories which to him, Qiandi, are hopelessly out of date. Nor, for him, and those who second him, does romantic love spell mystery, sacredness or purity. Besides, and here Qiandi’s anarchism rears its head, he pits himself against romantic love for another reason— love is possessive, just as capitalism is.24 (The class character of love is a subject to which I will return in Chapter 16, where it more properly belongs.) One definition, Havelock Ellis’s famous formula of love as ‘sex plus friendship,’ invited much hostile discussion. The love naysayers, who denied the existence of romantic or sexual love as a distinct category, demanded that it be expelled from the way one conceived of friendship. Mao, for one, believed Ellis to be wrong on four counts: first, he is mistaken in regarding what is basically sexual attraction between the sexes as romantic love. Second, friendship between the sexes could very well be Platonic (understood here as being free of sexual desire) and Ellis is wrong to deny this. Third, since love does not exist as a distinct category, Ellis could hardly define it as being made up of sex and friendship. Fourth, friendship is not love by another name,

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though if Ellis had reversed the order and said love was friendship by another name, then he, Mao, would not think Ellis’s definition quite so misconceived.25 It is true, another commentator writes, that you could define love as friendship combined with sex, but that is to speak in general terms; strictly speaking, what transpires from the combination is a new product, with a life of its own. Love is neither friendship nor sex, just as—to force an analogy, he says—water is neither hydrogen nor oxygen even though the two chemical elements together make it up. It all still boils down to sex, is what sceptics like Mao and Qiandi are saying, a view akin to how evolutionary biology explains love today. Would love at first sight happen if there was not a sex drive to turn us on, Mao asks? The question is a riposte to Zhang Xichen’s attempt to distinguish love from the actual experience of sex. Zhang has written, ‘From among many friends of the opposite sex, we find someone with whom we hit it off better than we do with any of the others, someone with whom to go through thick and thin together. When this happens, and when we subsequently become sexually intimate with this person, then it is natural enough to take love to have occurred.’26 But is it that easy to ‘hit it off ’ with someone, Mao counters, implying that the sexual impulse has to come into play before this happens. No, far from being real, he maintains, love is but an illusion created by poets and novelists. Theorists of love deceive themselves into thinking it real, then dupe us into believing it too. No one had the last word in this debate, neither the sceptics and doubters nor their opponents. The notion of the oneness of sex and soul and the dualism that it implies was a field of force drawing in all the new idioms for amorous relationships. Readers could not have enough of love discussions, it seems, and Shanghai’s publishers with an eye to the main chance wasted no time in bringing out love treatises. A boom in books, translations, pamphlets and how-to manuals resulted, all too much of it dross. Love had become the great journalistic and fictional staple of the age. Not just words but graphic images like caricatures, cartoons, magazine covers and illustrations reflected the new interest in the battle of the sexes or the trials and tribulations of moony young love.27 Youth is after all the time of love’s lure. Curiosity, or a wish to acquire sexual and psychological knowledge, no doubt turned many young Chinese readers to the plethora of writing on love and sexuality, but it was also the fashion of the time to think and talk about these topics. The various catchphrases rang in young people’s voices and stories, screwed to a high pitch by the swelling flow of print. One of many examples published is the All About Love Series (1929), a cobbling together of translated texts including a short piece, attributed to the famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, entitled ‘Fleshly Love and Spiritual Love.’ In it Bernhardt extols physical love, which she says surpasses all other kinds of love. As for spiritual love, she says, well, we shall have all the time in the world to go in search of that when we are dead! But love is much more than bodily attraction in another piece in the series, a translated summary (by Bernhard Bauer) of the famous discussion of love reported

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by Plato in his Symposium. Entitled ‘Platonic Love,’ this points beyond the physicality of love to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—three words which, joined up in a Chinese triad, gained enough currency to have become an entry in a Chinese dictionary.28 Young minds were abuzz with these ideas, much to the exasperation of Pan Guangdan, the sociologist and eugenicist last glimpsed in Chapter 2. He expressed impatience with ‘all that glib talk about spiritual love, Platonic love, romantic love among literary people and among those scholars of ethics who espouse passive sex.’ Granted, he added, that a fully satisfying love life was not entirely a matter of the flesh, but neither was it a matter solely of the spirit; rather, love was of whole cloth. Pan took it upon himself to argue against the prevailing notions—or ‘fallacies’ as he called them—and in so doing he helpfully revealed what ideas were abroad at the time. In an article published in 1932, he lists, scientist that he was, those ‘fallacies’ one by one like bullet points. The first is the idea that love is of the flesh, or that it is of the soul, or that it is a combination of the two. Second, that heterosexual love is an extension of self-love. Third, that romantic love is eternal, lasting beyond courtship to survive the whole of marriage. Fourth, that love is, and ought to be, unconditional. And fifth, that love alone should be the ground for marriage. As far as Pan was concerned, all five notions were misconceived. Pan seems to have least time for what he calls ‘sexual metaphysics’—the more you hear ‘soul . . . flesh . . . soul . . . flesh and soul . . . first soul then flesh’ bandied about by the young, he says, the more of a wild boast it sounds and the less you understand what they’re on about. He reports a conversation in which a close friend told him after he’d got engaged that his relationship with his future wife would be one of Platonic love. Later Pan heard that the couple had given birth to a child—to which Pan’s ironic comment to himself was, ‘What a pity the child isn’t a Protestant, as otherwise he’d have a predecessor and wouldn’t be thought quite so strange.’ That Pan did not think it necessary to name the predecessor indicates that the story of Christ’s immaculate conception was common knowledge.29

The model of love as the oneness of soul and flesh provided the Chinese with both a new focus and a milestone of progress, the latter because it was thought to represent the ultimate stage of love’s evolution historically. In one Chinese account, love is seen to advance from the physiological to the moral, and onwards from there to the metaphysical.30 Male Chinese theorists believed themselves to have advanced but little along the road to higher civilization when they looked at their marriage system and noted the absence therein of such benchmarks of progress as freedom, sex equality and monogamy. Still more did they deplore Chinese savagery when they looked at their women, who in their view could not love nor be loved owing to their lack of ‘independent personality.’

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One of their sources for the evolutionary account that Westerners have unfolded was Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Modern Views of Love. I keep coming back to this book but then it is hard not to, so much does it obtrude itself in the story of how ideas of love came to China. In it, the Japanese literary theorist takes it upon himself to identify the unity of soul and flesh with the final stage of love’s evolution in historical time. It is of this stage, love at its most evolved and advanced, that Kuriyagawa takes Ellen Key and Edward Carpenter to be expounding. To trace how it got to that stage requires Kuriyagawa to enquire into the distant past of humanity, and he does so with the help of Emil Lucka’s book The Evolution of Love. Readers will recall Lucka’s three stages, the first located in the time of primitive man, the second in the Middle Ages, and the third in the modern period. In the first, carnally indiscriminate, stage, one female body was as good as another for the purpose of sexual gratification. In the second, woman became idealized and spiritualized as the object of chaste adoration. Meanwhile, mankind was getting more and more civilized until, at last, a third stage merges carnality and spirituality to achieve what Lucka calls a ‘psycho-physical unity’ (the kanji used by the 1917 Japanese translation of Lucka’s book to render ‘psycho-physical unity’ consists of the phrase that, in Chinese, reads as lingrou yizhi, viz. ‘oneness of soul and flesh’). For an example of this, Lucka offers Werther, who, Lucka thinks, loved Lotte spiritually at first, until a dream ‘undeceives’ him about the real nature of his feelings and he arrives at the spiritual-physical synthesis that is ‘the goal of modern love.’31 It is with this last stage that Kuriyagawa identifies the position of Ellen Key and Edward Carpenter on sex-soul unions. In an aside, he observes that Eastern moralists, who fail to conceive of heterosexual relationships beyond mating and reproduction, are still stuck at the first stage. What he does not impart to his readers is the gloomy thought that, in Lucka’s opinion, the complete synthesis of the sexual and the spiritual has not yet been finally reached and that its attainment is unlikely to be a universal condition—Lucka himself rates the chances of the Germanic people achieving it above all others. Kuriyigawa is more concerned to argue that the love of one person for another of the opposite sex, a love based on the oneness of flesh and soul, is what confirms and completes the self; only through love that satisfies the self physically and spiritually can you discover, find, complete and liberate your ‘true self.’ He is deeply preoccupied with ‘the self,’ a category commonly linked by historians of the West to the rise of modern individualism. One of a number of things he says as regards the self is that in the synthesis of the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’ lies the meaning of the union of jinkaku—and here he uses a kanji term which in Chinese is romanized as ren’ge, and which is defined by Chinese dictionaries as ‘personality, character or moral integrity.’ Derived from a latenineteenth-century Japanese neologism, ren’ge in Chinese is no less imprecise than the same word in Japanese.32 Kuriyagawa uses the term repeatedly, frequently joined up to

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the word for ‘union.’ It is hard to know what he is rendering by it—is it a matching of character, or a tie based on moral integrity? I certainly was not sure how I was to read it, until I went back to the original and found the concept to be altogether central to Lucka’s notion of the unity of sex and spirit. That concept is ‘personality.’ In the second half of the eighteenth century, Lucka writes, there appeared a growing tendency to blend sexual appetite and spiritual love in a higher synthesis. This synthesis, in which the line between the two is erased, is effected by the victory of personality over the limitations of body and soul. Lucka finds the first signs of this tendency in the writings of Rousseau and in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. It is a trend that leads, by way of the Romantics, to the modern form of love. This is how he describes it: In the third stage, sensuous pleasure and spiritual love no longer exist as separate elements; the personality of the beloved in its individuality is the only essential, regardless as to whether she be the bringer of weal or woe, whether she be good or evil, beautiful or plain, wise or foolish. Personality has–in principle–become the sole, supreme source of eroticism.33

That Kuriyagawa speaks again and again of ‘personality-union’ is a reflection of Lucka’s emphasis on ‘personality,’ but as the Japanese author has left it unexplained, a Chinese could be forgiven if he mistakenly supposes that it is for a person’s moral character that one person loves another, whereas Lucka is really talking about an individualized feeling for someone regardless of whether she is ‘good or evil . . . wise or foolish.’ The personality of the beloved in its individuality is what unites body to soul, ‘individuality’ understood, one guesses, to be what might be termed ‘the real I’ in today’s language, the inner self or the kernel of what was once called the ‘soul.’ Certainly Lucka takes personality to be synonymous with soul. Hence personality is fundamental to Christianity, he maintains, just as the soul is. It was Jesus Christ, he further says, who first revealed the intimate connection between love and personality, who clearly showed that ‘love can only be experienced by a distinct personality, because it is an emanation of the soul and not a natural instinct.’34 This being the case—that is, ‘true love’ being ‘based on personality’—it is impossible for Chinese, Japanese, Indians and even Jews to know love as Europeans understand it.35 Anyone not acculturated to this model of human relating would boggle at all this, and Kuriyagawa’s Chinese readers certainly would if he had spelt it out as per Lucka. As it was, the Chinese, always more comfortable with theories divested of metaphysical baggage, took ‘personality-union’ to be a sort of personal bond, or what’s left of a love relationship after the sex has been taken out of it.36 There was no real engagement with the concept of ‘personality-union,’ nor did Chinese buy into the other Western ideals with which Kuriyagawa surrounds it—the self, self-discovery, self-affirmation, self-completion, and so on. There had not been in China anything like the interest which Japan in the Taishō period had taken in the idea of the self; there, ‘selfhood’ had

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been floated as part of the modern experience along with democracy, personhood and the ‘realization of personality.’37 It was Kitamura Tōkoku who staked out a new role for love when he famously identified it as ‘a clear mirror that, at the same time as it turns the “I” into a victim, reflects the “self ” that is the “I”.’ A person arrives at a consciousness of self in a love relationship, I understand him to say, for only in a relationship that demands your surrender and self-sacrifice do you begin truly to know yourself. How Tōkoku arrived at these ideas is not in any doubt: it was his study of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For this American poet and philosopher, ‘relationships constitute a “not me” against which the “me” can know itself.’ ‘Love for another teaches the subject about the “you and not you,” which in turn teaches him about the “me” and “not me”.’ Emerson has written of love that in giving a man to another, ‘it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society . . . He is a person. He is a soul.’38 Ideas of the human person and the autonomous modern self were floated by May Fourth intellectuals too. It seemed to them all-important, for example, that women be their own independent persons (as we have seen, to develop ‘independent personalities,’ ren’ge, was how they phrased it). To the extent that the Chinese wanted to choose their own marriage partners, and to be freed from an externally given framework of authority, they aspired to be self-determining. But from self-determination to the pursuit of self-realization through love is still a very large step. The sovereignty of the self is one of the hallmarks of Western philosophy and civilization; no other tradition has fastened so intently upon defining the individual ‘I.’ But the message that you must be yourself to the fullest possible extent, and to do so by loving body and soul—that message did not impress the Chinese. While they took on a number of Western ideals to refigure and modernize their thinking on love, this was not one of them. To look forward for a moment, it is remarkable how conspicuously the notion of the self still figures in the way love is conceived of in the West. Simon May relates it to Rousseau and the Romantic movement’s transformation of Western love: This transformation, in which we still live, concerns the lover, who becomes authentic through love. In love he becomes not selfless but a self. He doesn’t lose himself but finds himself. Even when he strives to transcend nature he seeks to be guided by, and in a sense to actualize, his own nature.39

Similarly, John Armstrong speaks of an ‘inner-self,’ ‘private essence of personality,’ and ‘individuality’ in his book Conditions of Love—it is for this that we want to be loved, he says, not for our achievements or knowledge or accomplishments. And love happens, he adds, when we discover some ‘intimate correspondence’ between ‘our own secret self and that of the other.’40 Love as self-affirmation and self-completion was

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championed by an early-twentieth-century Japan enamoured of Western ideals, and it is still so regarded in the West today—Alain de Botton calls it ‘I-confirmation’ (his italics) in his 1993 book Essays in Love. He tells the reader that ‘without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity, within love, there is a constant confirmation of self.’41 Neither this nor Armstrong’s point is all that different from Lucka’s that through his love for a woman the lover ‘discovers his inmost self, of which, until now, he had been practically ignorant.’42 ‘The self ’ is a cultural construct with a long history in European thought—broadly speaking, it replaced the soul—and Armstrong and de Botton are typical rather than exceptional in hitching love to it. Fundamental as it is to Western thinking, however, it had none of the appeal to his Chinese readers that it had to Kuriyagawa. A concept of man’s making, and Western man at that, it is still so unnaturalized in China that the entry for the word ‘self ’ in Chinese (ziwo) in a current Chinese dictionary (Cihai, 1974) begins its definition by first giving the English word ‘self ’ in a parenthesis. Though it was bandied about, the self did not establish its own groove in Chinese consciousness, and it was not seen to be completed or made authentic through love.

Belonging to the same family of concepts as ‘the oneness of soul and flesh’ was the formulation, ‘love is sacred.’ When I first came across this saying, referred to as the ‘love-is-sacred doctrine’ in Tian Han’s article in 1919, I thought at once of its antithesis ‘profane’ and assumed an association with the higher love of Christianity.43 The sacralization of love was indeed Christian to begin with, but this was in Meiji Japan, into which it was imported in a Christian guise; it was first given utterance in print by a Japanese Christian in 1891. However, outside intellectual circles it was not widely understood as the kind of love lived out by Jesus Christ, more as a secularized spotless love in which impetuosities of desire are kept under the thumb. Sixty or so years later, it was seen to have been an unnatural kind of love for the Japanese to have taken on, one alien to Japanese tradition.44 In China, where the saying came to be heard some two decades later than in Japan, it had religious connotations too, but religious in only Ellen Key’s sense: of a faith in personal love as life’s highest value, not only for the individual man or woman but for the new lives—‘the more perfect race’—that their love will bring forth. Influenced by Japanese scholars like Honma Hisao, the Chinese understood love to be a religion for Key; for them, the ‘love-is-sacred doctrine’ was an encapsulation of, and even a shorthand for, Key’s espousal of soul-flesh unions as the true basis of morality.45 Love was sacred in the sense of being inviolate, not to be traduced on any pretext, while the love-based marriage which she urged was a union of such moral superiority that to speak ill of it was somehow to profane it.

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Just like religion, Key’s Chinese followers argued, love has the power to transform lives and enhance happiness.46 Without naming Christianity, they spoke of ‘religion’ sanctifying and empowering the individual but doing so only when he loves; only in love does his soul yearn for ‘religion’ (by which, I suppose, was meant some sort of spirituality).47 Love’s sanctity was another face of love’s freedom: to make every sacrifice for love but to choose never to sacrifice love for anything, is to assert your right to liberty of choice, and seen in that light, love is as free as it is sacrosanct.48 Bobbing about in the 1920s, the saying was asserted in defiance of all who would impugn love’s sovereignty. It provided the rationale for a line of thinking that ran like this: why all the palaver about love-based marriages if love were not ‘sacred’ and if it were not synonymous with the highest morality? The same rationale no doubt underpinned the sway exerted by its companion saying, ‘love is best.’ Kuriyagawa’s text is studded with the words ‘love is best’ (lian’ai zhishang in Chinese). He identifies Ellen Key with the saying, but also uses it to translate the final declaration in the last stanza of Robert Browning’s Love Among the Ruins, a poem published in the English poet’s monumental volume Men and Women in 1855: In one year they sent a million fighters forth South and North, And they built their gods a brazen pillar high As the sky Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force– Gold, of course. O heart oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth’s returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best.

It is with this poem that Kuriyagawa’s Modern Views of Love opens, and indeed he makes the declaration ‘Love is best’ (in the original English) the heading of his first chapter. In the 1928 edition of Xia Mianzun’s Chinese translation, the cover design is dominated by the three English words, set in a striking Art Deco–style typeface and placed in quotation marks above the name ‘R. Browning.’ The Chinese characters for Modern Views of Love are in a much smaller type, and displayed in a strip that is pushed into a corner. Kuriyagawa’s scene setting in the first chapter’s opening paragraphs paraphrases Browning’s. The pastoral landscape where a great city once stood is now deserted save for some sheep. History has run its course, city and civilization are fallen, triumphs and glories are faded, and only love reigns. Love is the ‘eternal city,’ Kuriyagawa declares, not Rome.

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In its Chinese form Browning’s declaration came to lace Chinese writing, which turned it into a motto and slogan. For Kuriyagawa’s reading—that everything passes save love—to strike a chord in Chinese breasts, love had to have had a higher standing in Chinese culture than it did. Yet if there was ever a time his message might have resonated, it was then. Panegyrizing love by uttering Browning’s line raised it to a pinnacle never surpassed in subsequent Chinese history. It fitted with the emergence of the love-marriage ideal, and with the tantalizing, even intoxicating, feeling that the new morality was knocking Confucius off his pedestal. Surely so exalted a love could only be focussed on a single person, from among a larger selection? Ellen Key’s position on fidelity and monogamy, or what she calls ‘single-hearted love,’ is fuzzy. She counsels against ‘free love,’ which to her implies freedom ‘for any sort of love’ rather than love of the right sort,49 as well as against ‘ephemeral, merely sensual love, which enslaves, dissipates and lessens the personality.’50 At the same time, she is not opposed to the wish for ‘erotic renewal’ such as was evinced by Goethe and Key’s heroine, the French novelist George Sand (who had an affair with Chopin, among others), for Key recognizes these two as great artists and, as such, ‘they can love several times without becoming erotically depreciated.’51 Nevertheless her Chinese followers were not wrong when they took her for a champion of monogamy. They were just then preoccupied with the matter of monogamy as never before, and it is to this, and to the related concerns of chastity and fidelity, that I turn next.

Shao Xunmei with wife Sheng Peiyu and son

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People say that it is not true love unless it is faithful . . . Their theory subordinates fidelity to love; it makes fidelity a constituent of love. You can’t not call this an ingenious theory. Zhou Jianren, 1933

Until the early twentieth century, the notion of a one-woman man did not exist among the well-to-do in China, only that of the one-man woman. This sounds like a sweeping remark but it is not. For a start, just look at family law. To call a spade a spade, Chinese men of means had been polygamous all along. A system the Chinese call yifu duoqi, ‘one husband, many wives’, prevailed until as late as the 1930s, when it was deemed too backward to be allowed to persist. Until then, there was no conception in legal or social terms of a one-woman man. The taking of one or more concubines was not deemed to be wrong until, after much agitation by women’s groups for a revision of the Chinese criminal code in 1934–35, it was ruled that concubinage constituted adultery and a husband with multiple wives could be liable to criminal prosecution if a suit were brought against him. As against this, women were in effect allowed only one man per lifetime. The idea that you marry one person and no other, simultaneously or even serially, was applied to Chinese women for centuries. Up to the time of the May Fourth movement, it was to women only that the three terms for chastity or fidelity were ever applied. If a woman was widowed before the age of thirty and remained celibate past the age of fifty, she was recognized as having preserved her chastity ( jie). If, after the death of her fiancé, a betrothed girl remained celibate and unmarried for the same length of time, then she was honoured for keeping her virginity and remaining faithful to her dead affianced (zhen).1 As she would not have had any experience of the wedding bed, she was in effect honoured for lifelong abstinence from sex. In the third case, a young widow was deemed a paragon of female virtue if, pressured by relatives to remarry, she saved herself from having to transfer her sexual availability from one man to another, or her procreative capacity from one man’s family line to the next, by committing suicide. Rape victims also killed themselves, sometimes in advance of the anticipated sexual defilement, as when bandits, pirates or armed invaders

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appeared on the scene. To all these dead women was applied the term lie, ‘chaste martyrdom.’ So it would seem that China had its own version of the sati, the Indian practice in which a recently widowed woman immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre and was counted a chaste woman thereby. It was as if second marriages were but one step away from prostitution. What made the so-called cult of widow chastity and chaste martyrdom so singular was that it was such a state-heavy enterprise. Imperial sponsorship of female virtue took such forms as the erection of monumental arches and the enshrining of memorial tablets to its exemplars, who in being thus remembered might also serve as role models to be emulated by others. Female chastity was praised as much as filiality, and like the latter, the first of the Confucian virtues, it qualified for awards granted by the state. 2 Studying the Chinese cult, one Western scholar was put in mind of canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, while others observed that its like is found nowhere else in the world, not even in the Latin countries. ‘Even the cult of the virgin saints does not come close,’ they noted. 3 Men of letters of particularly the Ming dynasty liked to make a heroine out of the faithful woman, and a heroic death out of her self-sacrifice and suicide. In that age of sensibility, she was deemed a greater heroine if she was faithful out of Feeling. Men wanted to have it both ways, a chaste woman who was simultaneously passionate, giving satisfaction all the more if, on top of dying to preserve her purity, she evinced ardour. Unfeeling, she could not be a faithful wife to her husband anyway—so claims Feng Menglong, who, in his Anatomy of Love, puts fidelity on a par with loyalty, filiality and heroism, recognizably Confucian virtues. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelist Wu Jianren imagined the impassiveness of chaste widows to mask strong emotion—if you picture their hearts as dead trees or dried up wells, he cries, you could not be more wrong, for it is when they appear most unmoved that their Feeling is at its hottest point.4 Scholars of kinship would protest that China’s marriage system was monogamy not polygamy, and it is certainly true that it has been regarded as that by law since around the first years of the Christian era, with concubinage considered as only an adjunct to marriage. Yet, it is only in the sense that the principal wife was distinguished from all the other sexual partners in the household in legal and ritual terms that a man was considered to have just one wife. Popular Chinese parlance makes no such distinction when it dubs it a ‘one husband, many wives’ marriage system, and neither did the May Fourth radicals who called it into question. What these radicals did do was to speak of concubines and prostitutes in the same breath. They had good reason to, since concubines were customarily bought from bordellos, and concubine stood to courtesan on a continuum rather than separately. Also, right up to those radicals’ day, it was quite common for men of means to enjoy concurrent sexual access to both concubines and courtesans, visits to the latter being

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regarded with no particular disapprobation. In fact, the upper-class courtesan houses offered amenities and diversions little different from those of gentlemen’s clubs in the West—one met one’s men friends there, drank tea, passed plates of sweetmeats around, hosted dinner parties, played cards or mah-jong, discussed business deals, listened to opera, the whole topped off with a bit of dalliance. One smoked there, too, after opium became everywhere available following China’s defeat by imperial Britain in the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century, and tons of the stuff were imported from colonial India. The pipe was prepared by one’s favourite courtesan, for opium was to sex what brandy is to a good dinner. From all this it will be seen that, in whichever light you look at it, there was nothing hole-in-corner about patronizing any of the more expensive houses of pleasure; instead, it was quite public, even glamorous. It was the favoured pastime also of men of letters who, by celebrating these women in verse and prose, gave it much added glamour. In fin de siècle Shanghai, nobody turned a hair to see courtesans thrusting themselves forward into the limelight, dining in trendy restaurants dressed in the latest fashions, for all the world like modern women about town. Those at the top of their profession’s pecking order were at home in the entertainment arts, could sing, play the lute, recite poems and tell stories to musical accompaniment. Virgins held out, or were held back by their madam, for the highest bidders. Far from being heartless, some of the prostitutes had their own fancy men, not pimps but opera singers; others formed emotional attachments to their regular patrons, and they with them. Aspirant concubines, they counted it a dream come true when a lover-patron redeemed them from the brothel and plucked them out of the ‘misty flower lanes,’ as the pleasure quarters were called, into respectability by taking them into his household. If lore and literature are to be believed, they were often a man’s first taste of love, none being felt for the wife who had come to him a stranger via a marriage broker. According to Feng Menglong, what made a wife different from a concubine was not only that the first was formally espoused and the second not but that men took on the latter out of desire or love.5 One of the entries in Feng’s compilation considers the question of whether or not Confucius had a concubine. The answer is yes, obliging Feng to observe that though the Sage did not wallow in Feeling, he was not altogether distanced from it either—if Confucius had a concubine, then he could not have been a stranger to desire, in other words.6 Did the wives mind? Far from minding, they positively encouraged their husbands to take concubines, if the published recollections of Shen Fu (1763–1825), Six Records of a Floating Life (1809), are anything to go by. In this beautifully written memoir, Shen Fu comes across as a bit of a drifter who, though fitted for scholar-officialdom by his classical education, did not amount to much, barely making ends meet as now a government clerk, now a painter. Indeed, he was happiest pursuing aesthetic pleasures like pruning miniature potted trees, arranging chrysanthemums in vases and burning

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incense to enjoy its fragrance. This last he would do with his wife Yun, who would take aloes wood, steam it in a rice cauldron, place it in a copper wire net over the stove, then savour its scent in a quiet room. The gifted, well-versed and delicate Yun was a cousin whom Shen wanted to marry from the first moment he saw her, when both he and she were thirteen. He told his mother so, and she was happy enough to arrange the match as Yun was eminently suitable. On their wedding night four years later, he put his hand on his bride’s breast and found her heart to be beating as fast as his, and when he pulled her to him, she looked at him with a smile that made him ‘feel a love so endless it shook my soul.’7 Whenever his studies or work took him away, he would long intensely for her; and greeting each other after their first separation, ‘each held the other’s hand without a word, and it was as if our souls had melted away or evaporated like mist. My ears tingled and I did not know where I was.’8 Theirs was a companionate marriage through and through, and whether it was discussing classical poetry or composing verse, playing literary games or drinking wine under the moonlight, planting flowers or admiring them in gardens, they always contrived to do things together, deeply relishing each other’s company. Once, she even disguised herself as a man by wearing his clothes so that she could go to a temple festival with him. They were to each other as ‘object is to shadow, the love between us no words could describe.’9 It was not to last, however, and after twenty-three years of marriage to a husband she called ‘her best friend,’ Yun died of illness and in poverty in 1803, when she would have been forty. He said he would not marry again, and quoted a couplet to her to suggest that she was matchless: ‘Water is as nothing to one who has seen the ocean / and to the clouded Wu Mountain’s no mists can compare.’10 He loved her to distraction still, and upon her death was inconsolable—of his love for her he used, as did she of her love for him, a word that I have previously translated as ‘infatuated,’ and which might equally be taken to refer to the state that two people are in when they are in love with each other. Theirs was a love match by any standards. You would have thought that this, coupled with his impecuniousness—Shen Fu could barely support himself, let alone his family—and the fact that they had children, a daughter and, far more importantly, a son, made it unthinkable for him to take a concubine. Yet Yun urged one upon him. Indeed, she was quite bent on finding him one, and when she was introduced to a courtesan’s daughter named Hanyuan, Yun was, if anything, even more pleased with her than her husband. Hanyuan was a maiden in her teens, lovely to look at and literate besides. But how could a poor scholar like himself possibly afford to take her as a concubine? Besides, he protested to Yun, he and she were happily married, so why would he want to look elsewhere?

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‘But I love her too,’ Yun said, laughing. ‘You just leave it to me.’ She invited Hanyuan to join her in a little ceremony in which they pledged themselves as sisters, then proposed that Hanyuan come to their household as Shen Fu’s concubine. Yun’s plans came to nought, however, when Hanyuan was taken away by a powerful man. This was a blow from which she never recovered. Shen Fu recounted the whole episode in a chapter entitled ‘Wedded Bliss.’ The account ends ominously, with the words, ‘In fact, it was because of this that Yun died.’ Her failure to win Hanyuan for her husband had so dashed her hopes that her health, far from robust to begin with, suffered still further. If this seems an overreaction, could it be because she was in love with Hanyuan herself ? Was she after a sort of ménage à trois in which she could be together with both the man and the girl she loved? After all, when her husband laughingly asked if she was trying to enact Women in Love, a seventeenth-century comedy by the witty playwright Li Yu about lesbian love, in their home, she replied, yes. This light-hearted play tells the story of two women, one married and the other not, falling in love at their first encounter and contriving to be married to the same scholar in order to live together as lovers.11 We do not know how far Yun’s was a case of same-sex love, but whatever might have been her reasons for choosing Hanyuan, the fact remains that it was she, the wife, who took the initiative to find her husband a concubine. She was certainly not alone among Chinese womankind to abet concubinage, though what makes her case puzzling to modern-day readers is that she should do so with so little concern—in fact, none at all—for the likelihood of a rival for her husband’s affections and a division in his sexual and emotional fidelity to herself. Yet, living as she did in polygamous times, I doubt if the thought of sexual and emotional exclusivity ever entered her head, or if she ever grieved that she could not be the only woman with whom her husband could be happy. In the popular fiction of the time, women who tried to stop their husbands from taking a concubine or who punished them for philandering were invariably portrayed as jealous shrews.12 In real life, and as attested by one particular upper-class woman whose husband was away taking imperial exams at the capital, wifely solicitude extended to the tolerance of extramarital dalliance. In a letter she sent him, she said, ‘If you grow depressed staying alone in your lodgings, by all means get out and enjoy yourself with the beautiful women in the pleasure quarters! My brothers won’t begrudge you the money!’ The brothers in question held office in the capital, and could be appealed to should the husband require financial assistance, even if such assistance were to facilitate philandering. As for herself, she continued, ‘I long ago cast aside any dream of “growing old together,” that old mandarin duck fantasy.’13 For the man to seek the embraces of a prostitute was not felt to be a betrayal of love by either the wife or the husband, however great their devotion to each other. Shen Fu certainly did not feel that he was betraying his wife when, one night during his travels, the face of a courtesan he had by his side reminded him of Yun’s. He was put into a romantic mood by the sights and sounds of a moonlit night scene he saw

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from a boat—‘wine boats’ (floating bars), sampans, lantern-light bobbing about on the water, and the sound of strings and song and the splashing of waves. What a pity, he said to the courtesan, that ‘my wife Yun couldn’t be here with me.’ And when he turned to look at his companion, her face under the moonlight appeared a bit like Yun’s to him. So he helped her down from the deck of their boat, led her back to their cabin, put out the candles there, and went to bed with her. In their introduction to the Penguin edition of Shen Fu’s book, the translators note that, as a love story, Six Records is, from a Western point of view, altogether unique. ‘For though it is indeed a true love story of Shen Fu and his wife Yun, it is a love story set in a traditional Chinese society—and thus their love coexists and intermingles with Shen Fu’s affairs with courtesans, and with his wife’s attempts to find him a concubine. And yet, for all that, it is none the less love.’14 That it must be counted as love cannot be gainsaid—but only if love does not imply sexual exclusivity, or, to put it in another way, if sexual exclusivity is not a necessary condition of love. It is not a necessary condition of love, as we have seen, in Cao Xueqin’s conception of it. Recall the great love between Baoyu and Daiyu that he depicted in Dream of the Red Chamber. It is a love too great not to have been decreed by karma; it is an entirely individualizing love, the love of a single person who, to the lover, is unique, irreplaceable, and not amenable to substitution by another. Yet, even while Daiyu is the one and only girl for him, Baoyu enjoys sexual relations with a number of others and is not, moreover, thought unfaithful for doing so.

Attitudes to concubinage were rapidly changing in the 1920s, a time of extreme flux and transition, when marriages mapped a twilight area in which the new goal of monogamy was always sliding out of sight, tugged one way by a millennia-old tradition and the other by a compelling if shallow modernity. A survey of attitudes published in 1927 by Pan Guangdan, the eugenicist who has been popping in and out of this book, shows concubinage to be in very bad odour among the young. Pan asked a sample of 318 men and women with a modal age of twenty-three for male and twenty for female to vote for or against the following four propositions. First, that on no account must men take concubines: as many as 80 per cent of the respondents agreed. Second, that there is no harm in taking a concubine if producing progeny is difficult (for the first wife); more than 70 per cent disagreed. Third, that, as a transitional measure, a concubine may be taken if an unsatisfactory marriage cannot be easily dissolved and remarriage is not permitted; nearly 81 per cent voted against this. And fourth, that since men are by nature promiscuous, and prostitution may thrive more in a society without concubinage than in one with, it is as well to let nature take its course and allow concubinage to work its regulating effect on society; a whopping 90 per cent opposed this. Pan also noted that, though you might have expected the opposite,

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the proportion of females favouring monogamy and agreeing with the first proposition was a little lower than that of male. However, the difference was not significant, he added, and on the whole there was now more male respect for female ‘personality’ than ever before, as well as a growing convergence in the views of the two sexes; and for this, he said, you have to thank the movement for women’s emancipation.15 As always, the law lagged changes in social attitude. Those who held power between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the inauguration of the People’s Republic in 1949, namely the Guomindang, or Nationalist Party, did want to live up to their promise to deliver national unity and modernity, and they did heed the call by women’s journals to institute the ‘one husband, one wife’ system for real by abolishing concubinage. But they could not very well act on those periodicals’ demand that they prohibit concubinage as bigamy, for concubinage was not legal marriage, and since it was not that, it did not constitute bigamy, the criminal offence of marrying one person while still legally married to another. This was patently a way of dodging the issue, and was seen as such by the women lobbyists, to whom it could not be clearer that, whatever the legal definition, concubinage was de facto marriage. Yet one cannot help sympathizing with the legislator either: so entrenched a custom could not be done away with at a stroke of the pen without causing massive social disruption, not least to himself, who kept concubines and must protect the interests of their kind; at the same time, countenancing a ‘one man, many wives’ system would hardly square with his government’s modern image and aspirations.16 To be held to the same standards as women, and to be required to observe conjugal fidelity, was a strong brew for the Chinese male to have to swallow at once. The best the lawmaker could do, for now, was to ensure that the concubine did not become a non-person under the law. To this end, he defined her newly as, not any sort of kin or appendage, much less a wife, but a permanent ‘household member.’ This was to pretend that concubinage was neither bigamy nor adultery, merely a domestic arrangement. It was an obfuscation of what was really at stake, which was the matter of conjugal fidelity. Conjugal fidelity was required of women but not of men; adultery was a crime if committed by a wife, but not if it was committed by a husband; and it was a ground of divorce for a husband but not for a wife.17 Though so one-sided a notion of sexual fidelity was hardly consistent with the attitudes of a modern society, it was not until 1931 that, under the civil code adopted that year, women finally gained the right to divorce an adulterous husband. But did concubinage constitute adultery? It had to, if the law were to be egalitarian, and if both men and women were to be held to the same standards of sexual fidelity. It did not constitute bigamy because it was not technically and strictly a marriage, but it had to be counted as adultery if the law made it illicit for either a man or a woman to have sexual relations with a third party. In 1935, the revised criminal code made adultery a punishable offence for both men

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and women; for the first time in Chinese history, a man was required to be a onewoman husband if he was not to fall foul of the law. On paper, then, the year 1935 marked the emergence of the one-woman husband in China. In practice, however, he took quite a bit longer to materialize: the inevitable implementation lag apart, there was soon a far more urgent matter to attend to, the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and the rising to arms of the Nationalist government in desperate resistance. Concubinage did fall into disrepute, but it was not to give way completely to monogamy until after the communists came to power in 1949. The first law to be enacted by the People’s Republic of China was to institute what it termed ‘the new democratic marriage system,’ the basis of which is declared to be the free choice of partners, gender equality and monogamy, the latter phrased as ‘the one husband, one wife’ system. This, the 1950 Marriage Law, put an end to concubinage by prohibiting it along with bigamy. Crucially, the legal stipulations were disseminated, promoted and popularized by a stream of mass campaigns until, several years later, the so-called ‘feudal marriage system’ was well and truly broken across the length and breadth of urban as well as rural China.

All this still lay in the future when, two years beyond the Nationalist definition of concubinage as an illegitimate relation with a third party, the poet-publisher Shao Xunmei (1906–68) took the American writer Emily Hahn (1905–97) as his concubine. This is a remarkable story, one worth recounting in some detail for its illustration of several of the themes of this chapter. It unfolded against the backdrop of the war in Shanghai and involved the triangular relationship between Shao, Hahn, and Shao’s wife Sheng Peiyu. Shao Xunmei made his name at the age of twenty-one with the publication of a volume of his poetry called Paradise and May. He won instant acclaim; the fellow poet Xu Zhimo proclaimed, ‘China has a new poet, its very own Verlaine.’18 Shao had returned to Shanghai from Cambridge University, England, where he had been sent to study as an eighteen-year-old. He also spent some time in Paris, where he studied painting at the L’Ecole des Beaux Arts and consorted with artist friends at the Boulevard Montparnasse. From all this, it will be seen that his family was not short of money. He was indeed born to wealth, great wealth. His grandfather was a very high official in the Qing court, an envoy to Tsarist Russia. Of the grandfather’s two sons—that is, Shao Xunmei’s uncle and father, one married the daughter of Viceroy Li Hongzhang, imperial China’s pre-eminent statesman; and the other, Shao’s father, married into the family of Sheng Xuanhuai, an industrialist and, it so happened, the richest man in Shanghai. Now to be related to Li Hongzhang and Sheng Xuanhuai—you could not get more blue-blooded than that in Shanghai. Shanghai was a plebeian place, after all, a commercial port abounding in merchants rather than mandarins. To top it all, Shao was

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betrothed to his rich cousin, the granddaughter of Sheng Xuanhuai, so he married into money as well as inherited it. The family of his pretty cousin, Sheng Peiyu, was modern enough to countenance a face-to-face meeting between her and her intended. The two were pleased with each other, and the match—which she was later to term ‘half-new-style, half-free’19—was sealed on the eve of his departure for England, when he was eighteen and she nineteen. When, upon his return to Shanghai, they married on January 1, 1927, they just had to have a society wedding, such was their pedigree and social standing. Pictured prominently on the pages of Shanghai’s magazines, bride and bridegroom looked the part, he in a morning coat and white tie, and she in a white wedding veil and dress of imported pearl-decorated lace. The wedding was attended by many from Shanghai’s literary set and art circles, writers and graphic artists who contributed to the popular illustrated magazines, including comics and pictorials, that Shao published. Of their kind, they were the best magazines of their day. Shao also published more highbrow stuff, and in this undertaking he collaborated with Emily ‘Mickey’ Hahn, the prolific author and The New Yorker correspondent with whom he had an affair and who became his ‘concubine’ in 1937. Emily Hahn was born in 1905 in St Louis, Missouri, and nicknamed ‘Mickey’ by her mother because of her resemblance to an American comic strip character, Mickey Dooley.20 Her taste for adventure took her to Manhattan, England, the Belgian Congo and, in 1935, to Shanghai, where she raised many an eyebrow in the foreign community by going native to the extent of taking a Chinese lover, namely Sinmay, the name by which ‘Xunmei’ was known in Shanghainese. What attracted Hahn to Shao? He was good-looking—she has referred to him as ‘the beautiful Sinmay.’21 Here is how she has described him: ‘When he was not laughing or talking his ivory-coloured face was perfectly oval, but one did not think of perfection, one looked at his eyes. In their oblique and startling beauty they were full of light and life . . . In repose his face was impossibly pure, but it was rarely in repose.’22 She thought him a ‘considerate and experienced lover’ and even contemplated having his child.23 He was glamorous, urbane and debonair, a beguiling and witty conversationalist who could tell you a story about every brick in every shop front in Shanghai or about every dish that was laid in front of you at a dinner party. Hahn said that he was ‘overwhelmingly curious,’ with ‘a mind like a child’s, or a puppy’s, or an old-fashioned novelist’s, prying into everything and weaving stories around whatever caught his attention.’24 ‘An intellectual,’ she called him, ‘and so funny. I’d never met anyone quite like him.’ Recalling him, she said, ‘I do love that little bastard, but it’s like playing marbles with quicksilver.’25 He was mercurial, unpredictable, never, never dull. And he was exotic—‘I’d never seen anybody in a Chinese gown before,’ she has said.26 He was wearing this when, on a visit they made together to colonial Hong Kong, he drifted into the lobby of their hotel; all the while chatting amiably with her,

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he turned heads and arrested many a cocktail glass in mid-air. She relished the entrée that he gave her to the ‘real China,’ and to his large circle of friends and relatives, as well as the ‘new windows’ through which she was able to see: ‘It was not so much that I found a new world with Sinmay and his family, but I went with them around to the back of the scenes and peered out at the same old world through a glow of strangecoloured footlights. It was fresh and wonderful that way.’ The first time he took her home, she was entranced by the sight of him preparing his bamboo opium pipe and inhaling it, and she quickly acquired the habit herself. In humorous essays that she wrote for The New Yorker, she lightly fictionalized him as a Mr Pan, and made him appear, fondly, ‘like an idiot,’ he complained.27 There was clearly a great deal of affection on both sides, but what made it much more than a casual relationship was their collaboration on his periodicals—the two worked diligently and well together. One of the ways in which he helped her after war broke out was to introduce her to the right people to enable her to write her bestseller, The Soong Sisters (1941), and to translate reams of Chinese material for her. An aunt of his opened the door to the eldest of the Soong sisters, who just then was living in Hong Kong. His wife countenanced the relationship, though by presenting it decades later as a friendship rather than an affair, her memoirs as good as denied its physical aspect. She describes Mickey as an attractive woman (as indeed she was), neither thin nor fat, she said, but with a less than perfect figure because she had a ‘huge bottom.’28 In a studio photograph that the wife and mistress had taken together, for all the world like two intimates, she and Mickey are seen side by side, shoulder to shoulder.29 At the time Hahn met Shao, his wife was heavily pregnant with their sixth child. It became something of a ménage à trois, with Mickey eating with the family in the evenings and playing with the children, who called her ‘Mickeymama.’ She and Shao saw each other ‘almost every day, sooner or later, mostly later. Time meant nothing whatever to him.’30 She recalls, ‘Then at night, a dinner party or an evening talk at Sinmay’s house, or a movie, or reading in bed. I was very happy, even though I began to smell war in the air.’31 War broke out in July 1937, and in November of that year Shanghai fell to the Japanese Army. For Shao, it was a great help that Mickey was an American citizen, for the United States was not yet at war with Japan, and with her neutral status Hahn could recover property—his priceless library of Ming classics and family heirlooms included—from the house in the Japanese-controlled part of town that Shao and his family had fled for the safety of the French Concession. He had acquired a stateof-the-art printing press, the most sophisticated ever imported into China. This got left behind in his escape from Japanese fire, and might have been confiscated by the Japanese Army had Hahn not rescued it. Shanghai’s Chinese zone came under Japanese control but it was not the end for the foreign concessions, yet. Mickey acquired a pet gibbon, whom she named Mr Mills,

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and was feeling old and spinsterish at thirty-three when Sinmay snapped her out of it by proposing marriage. In a short story that she had published in 1935, she had made a character voice her view of Chinese attitudes to matrimony: ‘Now I think it’s one of the most fascinating things about the Chinese the way they look at marriage, almost the same as the French do.’ She had found it ‘so utilitarian, so sensible.’ ‘The Chinese are practical,’ she had observed,32 just as thousands still do today to explain why love is not that important a consideration in the Chinese choice of mate. She had drawn a comparison with French attitudes, but what happened next could not have happened in France: Shao suggested that they become man and wife. Wouldn’t his wife mind, Mickey asked? No, he replied, in fact Peiyu was the one who had come up with the idea because she had heard Mickey say that she would never marry—of course, if she were to marry, he would not have thought it a good idea. Mickey was helping them and protecting them, Shao told her, and In return for this help you have a family. You have us already, of course, but in this way it becomes true in the eyes of our friends, which would be nicer, wouldn’t it? One of our children, any one you like (except my son as I have only him) will be yours, legally. We give her to you  .  .  .  The others will be yours and [Peiyu’s] together. Anyway they already call you ‘Foreign Mother.’ And when you are dead you will be buried in our family graveyard at Yuyao. And when you are old you will come to live in our house, as I am always asking you to do now only you do not like it, I don’t know why. I think it a good idea.33

Though it seemed fantastic at first, the idea appealed to her, and she signed a document before a lawyer, who seemed not to have stayed au courant with the latest revision of the criminal code, while Peiyu presented Mickey with a pair of jade bracelets to signify her recognition of the new concubine. Hahn was to claim in her memoirs that none of the three parties involved took it seriously, yet ‘for some absurd reason,’ she reports, she was comforted by the thought of being vouchsafed a plot in the Shao clan graveyard. To research and conduct interviews for The Soong Sisters, Hahn went to Hong Kong in mid-1939, and though she had every intention of returning to Shanghai, she never did. Charles Boxer, the great historian of the Dutch and Portuguese empires who was then head of British Military Intelligence in Hong Kong, came into her life. Their love affair ended his unhappy marriage to a woman reputed to be the most beautiful in Hong Kong, and a daughter, Carola, was born to him and Hahn just months before the Japanese occupied the British colony.34 He was interned but not she—in a letter to her family in the United States dated August 8, 1941, she explains why: When the Japanese interned enemy civilians I was most unwilling to go, as Carola was still too small and weak and Charles was far from well [he was wounded]. The Japanese were not interning anybody with ‘Asiatic blood’ or women married to Asiatics, and in spite of Charles’ objections I claimed exemption as Sinmay’s

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wife. I got it, and Charles later admitted I was right, as small babies did badly in internment.35

Her claim of being married under Chinese law was recognized by the Japanese but would not, paradoxically, have washed with the Chinese in Shanghai. In any case the marriage, if it was that, had come to an end. She felt she owed Shao a personal explanation and did consider going back to Shanghai to tender it. But she also believed that ‘he won’t really care; he doesn’t mind anything in the end. It’s my loss, not his.’36 She later reported that Sinmay never wrote to me at all. Or perhaps he did, and forgot to mail the letter. He sent an indirect message over time, though, through a girl we both knew; he said that he wasn’t angry with me, that he hoped I was happy, and that I possessed many of the qualities of a good Chinese woman. I think it was a compliment. I even think he meant it to be.37

She was right about this as she was about other facets of his character. ‘It happened to be his pose,’ she has noted, ‘to be an exquisite, to claim indifference to the present government . . . but we all knew that he was only playing.’ He was widely read in English literature, yet she could tell that he secretly loved his Chinese classics, though he would not admit it. In fact, Peiyu’s characterization of her marriage to Shao as ‘half-new-style’ could just as well be a description of her husband. His being happy in his consensual marriage with Peiyu was new-style of him, but his having Hahn as a mistress and concubine was, when all is said and done, a replay of the Chinese past—as indeed was Peiyu’s full acceptance of the arrangement. His already pale face would blanch to an even whiter shade if he were to look into the wretchedness of the years that lay ahead. To the communists who came to power in 1949, he embodied everything that they thought wrong with Shanghai: its hedonism, decadence and debauchery. It would be hard to imagine anyone less likely to thrive in the new People’s Republic than this incorrigible individualist. Imprisoned and humiliated in the late 1950s for no good reason, Shao died a pauper and a broken man at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1968, his name erased from Shanghai’s literary history. He was not posthumously rehabilitated until nearly twenty years later, in 1985. Political rehabilitation of the author was presently followed by the literary resurrection of his writing; allowed to see print again, a collection of his articles, letters and book reviews was brought out in a handsome edition in 2006 to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. The book gives off a strong whiff of the younger Shao’s era; it does so by its inclusion of the key love concepts of the day—‘spiritual love’ versus ‘bodily love,’ ‘the oneness of soul and flesh’ and the ‘separation of soul from flesh.’ Shao reflected his times in his understanding of ‘spiritual love’ as simply unconsummated desire. ‘Whether it’s spiritual love or bodily love,’ he has remarked, ‘each is only a phase in the two sexes’ progress towards

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union.’ There are those who believe ‘spiritual love’ to be enduring, but in Shao’s opinion that is only because it has not advanced as far as consummation, or that it is advancing at a very slow pace; were it to go forward, then sooner or later it will reach its end.38 Interestingly, for the idea of a sexual desire that is felt but not acted upon, owing either to Victorian repression or hypocrisy, Shao used the phrase ‘lust of the mind.’ This, the reader may recall, is identified with Baoyu, the hero of The Dream of the Red Chamber. In that novel the meaning of the phrase is said to be elusive, but we are told that it is what sets Baoyu apart from the depraved older generation. Now, more than a century and a half later, it has taken on negative connotations, with a meaning I earlier found paralleled in Christ’s remark that to look at people with ‘lustful intent’ in your heart is already to commit adultery. Shao Xunmei used it of cases where lust is felt but not given expression—where lustful intent, you might say, is denied or repressed. He used it in this sense in a review that he wrote in 1931 of D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Escaped Cock (1929). In the story, the sight of the pulsing life of a barnyard cock, clearly a symbol of the phallus and of thrusting male energy, awakens a Christ figure from his death-sleep. He is then made whole again by sex with a pagan priestess. Since, in Lawrence’s view, being true to your sexual instincts is good, not acting out ‘the lust of the mind’ is of course bad. To  Lawrence true sexual impulse, said Shao, is of the flesh entirely; it is sex that is sacred, unlike ‘the lust of the mind,’ which is sinful.39

Zhou Zuoren, last glimpsed in Chapter 11 enjoining the unity of soul and flesh, used the phrase ‘lust of the mind’ in a landmark document he published in 1918. To say that the intellectual ground for the emergence of the one-woman man in China was laid that year is as reasonable as such propositions ever are. Zhou’s publication was a translation of an enormously controversial essay on chastity by the Japanese woman poet Yosano Akiko (1878–1942).40 Yosano, who was a contributor to the feminist periodical Bluestocking, argues that it is entirely up to her if she chooses to be faithful to her husband; it is a personal choice, not a matter dictated by morality. The poetess, who knows how to deliver a killer line, goes on to say that it has nothing compulsory about it, just as there is nothing forced about ‘taking up a hobby, or entertaining a belief, or being compulsive about cleanliness.’ She questions the conventional equating of chastity and morality, and contends that several questions will have to be settled before she could accept the equation. First, the question of the double standard that winks at a man’s promiscuity but damns a woman for having sex outside marriage: is chastity a morality required of women only, she asks, or is it required of all (men included)? Some say, she muses, that men are biologically incapable of being faithful to only one woman; if that is so, then fidelity is no morality, since moral codes are made for all, male or female.

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And does the moral code require one to be chaste in the spirit, or in the flesh? And here, in a brilliant stroke, her Chinese translator resorts to a term not in the original, namely ‘lust of the mind,’ to mean the ‘lustful intent’ of Jesus’ pronouncement. He who is chaste in the spirit does not ‘lust in the mind’ when a woman takes his fancy. But who in the world, Yosano counters, has not been unchaste in his mind? As for being chaste in the flesh, she understands this to mean virginity, the loss of which condemns a woman to lifelong celibacy even if it has been through rape. Where is the sense in that, Yosano asks, when no blame is attached to a woman who is sexually faithful to one person but in fact holds another in her heart? Yosano then points to couples who continue to have sex but who feel little for each other, or who neither have sex nor feelings but go on living together—surely they ought not to be thought chaste and faithful but should be seen instead to have violated the spirit of fidelity? As she sees it, then, in the chastity of neither the spirit nor the body is the prevailing moral code not riven by illogical contradictions. What about a merger of the two, ‘the so-called oneness of soul and flesh?’ asks Yosano, and observes that fidelity in both bodily and spiritual terms is conceivable in only a love marriage. But how could there be any love-based marriages where there is no freedom of love, and where, besides, people have yet to develop the sort of personality (ren’ge) needed to appreciate and exercise love’s freedom? Marriages today are still a matter of practical calculation rather than unions entered into out of love, so for moralists to expect husbands and wives to be faithful to each other in both spirit and flesh is surely for these moralists ‘to reap what they have not sown.’ Isn’t it to cause couples pain too, as well as to force them into pretence? Though consensual love-based marriages are looked upon as miracles now, Yosano continues, the day might soon dawn for such unions to become reality. Yet there is no certainty that these unions, however amorously entered into, would not break up after a time, so she doubts that even love marriages offer an assurance of fidelity. The point to be made is that chastity is not synonymous with morality, and in Yosano’s view, there remains only to replace the latter with a new morality, one that turns on self-regulation and conduces to freedom and happiness. Her essay was published in New Youth, and it was in the pages of this May Fourth organ that the debate it sparked off was initially conducted. May Fourth pioneers like Hu Shi entered the fray darting their sharp pens first of all at the practices of ‘widow chastity’ and ‘chaste martyrdom.’ 41 Though it is common for people who are championing new ideas to magnify their attack on the status quo, Hu Shi is not exaggerating when he calls the practices barbaric, brutal and inhumane. He characterizes chaste widows and martyrs as victims of what he terms ‘superstition’—by which he means a sort of blind, irrational and misdirected fetishism. Just try asking somebody, Hu Shi writes, ‘What is chastity? And why do you commend it?’ See if he doesn’t answer,

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‘Chastity is chastity, and I praise it because it is chastity.’ ‘The old morality is bankrupt precisely because it is that unthinking.’42 And not only unthinking but also unequal: Chinese double standards require strict sexual fidelity of wives but no one bats an eyelid at husbands’ liaisons with concubines and prostitutes. Isn’t this, asks Hu Shi, the height of inequality? Not that equality means women should also avail themselves of polygamous sexuality. ‘It’s just that the husband who goes whoring is committing the same crime as the wife who takes an extramarital lover.’ Why? Because, he answers his own question, fidelity is what one person owes to another person; it is reciprocal, not one-sided but mutual. ‘Chastity is when a woman loves just one man exclusively and no other’ and when a man loves a woman equally exclusively. ‘This is not some heresy imported from foreign parts,’ Hu  Shi assures his readers, but the Golden Rule of Confucius—‘Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you.’43 To today’s readers, the points that Hu Shi is trying to put across might seem selfevident, too obvious to be worth making, but readers in his time would have been hearing them for the first time. That sexual relations between man and woman have to be reciprocal, that sexual fidelity is related to love, and that love is exclusive—all these ideas would have lain outside the horizons of people who took the ‘one man, many wives’ practice for granted. Hu Shi was following Yosano Akiko in introducing an entirely new way of talking about chastity, of which the most arresting was the view that love engendered fidelity: ‘Unless there is love between a couple, there can be no fidelity to speak of.’ Love was then brought more squarely into the discussion by an exchange between Hu Shi and a Lan Zhixian, a journalist educated in Japan and Germany. Yes, Lan said, love is indeed important in a conjugal relationship, but it is not all-important, since love is blind and highly changeable, could blow hot and cold, so there is no guarantee that a couple who marry for love (that is, for this blind and volatile thing) would continue to be faithful to each other. That guarantee has to be provided by an outer forcible sanction in the form of morality—and ‘chastity is precisely that morality in the area of sexual relations.’44 What Lan kept emphasizing was ren’ge, that extremely imprecise Chinese word for ‘personality’ or ‘moral integrity.’ He spoke of ‘ren’ge-love,’ and privileged this over love based on the satisfaction of the senses and, strangely, love based on emotion. To Lan, if I understand him correctly, love comes of the senses and emotion, and these are volatile, so that ‘only after love-as-emotion has passed through the baptism of morality and has been refined and tempered into ren’ge-love is it true love.’45 He was thoroughly opposed, at any rate, to unions based on love alone. In reply, Hu Shi quite rightly observed of ‘ren’ge-love’ that ‘not everybody understands what it is.’ From what he next said—‘Even so, I doubt if ordinary people mean by love only its carnal element’—he sounded as though he understood Lan to mean

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by ‘ren’ge-love’ a sort of long-lasting conjugal devotion shorn of short-lasting sexual attraction. No, he contended, sexual love has to be there as its main element; indeed, conjugal love differs from other kinds—such as the ties that grow from living together, the ties to children and so on—precisely in its being a sexual, true and exclusively one-to-one relationship. Hu Shi goes on to argue against the external sanction which Lan had thought necessary to keep husband or wife from straying. Sanction smacks too much of unfreedom to be palatable to the American-educated liberal in Hu Shi, and he tells his readers that no outside force is needed because heterosexual love itself implies fidelity. Then he states, with one guesses some emphasis, ‘Fidelity is none other than the trueness and single-focus of heterosexual love.’46 To put what he said into my words: true love is constant and exclusive by its very nature. He rather labours this point, as well he might, because it is an extremely hard idea to put across to even his contemporary intellectuals, let alone ordinary people. To explain why it is so hard, I need to tease out the three separate ideas involved and look at them one at a time: first, that you are required by society to marry (and have sex with) one person and no other; second, that you marry one person for love, and out of love you make a lifelong commitment to love that one person and no other at the same time; and third, that you love one person and are precluded by the very nature of love from loving another. The third idea, that exclusivity is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, love, is the one Hu Shi is trying to put forward, all the while knowing that even the first and second had yet to be taken on board by his countrymen. The third idea, that love is not love unless it is sexually and emotionally exclusive, is controversial, and any airing of it tends to slide into a discussion of what love is or is not to begin with. Small wonder that it is foreign authorities that are usually cited to support it—for example, Rabindranath Tagore, from whose collection of words and thoughts Stray Birds (1916), a writer in The Ladies’ Journal (1926) takes the quote, ‘Chastity is a wealth that comes from the abundance of love’ to introduce his argument that ‘fidelity is produced by emotion and love is preserved by fidelity.’ In trying to elucidate the relationship between love and fidelity, this writer homes in on the one scenario where you could imagine exclusivity to arise spontaneously from love itself, rather than from choice or commitment, and that is when two people are too much in love to be limerent about another, ‘their love burning with so much passion that it simply can’t admit a third party.’47 The Chinese difficulty with the notion could perhaps be illustrated by Octavio Paz’s remarks on exclusivity in The Double Flame. The ‘first element of love,’ as Paz calls exclusivity, marks the boundary between love and eroticism, the first distinguished from the second in being individual, or, more exactly, interpersonal: we want only one person, and we ask that person to love us with the same exclusivity. Exclusivity requires reciprocity,

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While inconstancy is an old theme in classical Chinese poetry, where the cast-off wife and deserted courtesan is a recurring, indeed formulaic, motif, it is hardly ever the male lover who is betrayed. So no woman could utter the words, ‘we want only one person, and we ask that person to love us with the same exclusivity’ with any confidence. As for the ‘free will’ entailed in reciprocity, this was still being grappled with in early twentieth-century China, both independently and in tandem with chastity. Views of it had far from jelled, and indeed some May Fourth intellectuals, in their enthusiasm for freedom, rejected the idea of fidelity because they regarded it as a form of possessiveness and unfreedom. Such a person was Zhou Jianren (1888–1984). A biologist and Zhou Zuoren’s younger brother, Zhou Jianren was an early advocate of women’s emancipation and sexual liberation, and a one-time editor of The Ladies’ Journal. In 1933, he published an essay on ‘Love and Chastity’ in the magazine Life Weekly. He provoked a flurry of letters and articles from readers taking issue with his views, and in answering them one by one, he found himself embroiled in a heated, four-month long debate in which neither side would give way. Afterwards the editor decided to put the fifty-two pieces together between the covers of a book, Love and Chastity, and found it to sell so well that he quickly issued a second edition.49 To Zhou, love’s core is sexual desire, and love happens when the desires of two people coincide. People say, Zhou writes, that love is the oneness of soul and flesh, but while ‘flesh’ connotes sexual satisfaction, is not ‘soul’ merely the longing you feel prior to physical consummation? As for all that is summed up by the concept of ‘personalityunion,’ namely the convergence of thinking, feeling and conduct, this is not the crux of the matter but a side issue. That some unions of divergent personalities last while others break up is an indication that the congruence of personality is of only incidental importance. Fidelity is not a constituent of love and nor is love the foundation for constancy. Chastity is a shackle that a woman wears, he continues. It does not arise from love but from possessiveness, and prohibiting her from having sex with anyone other than the man who possesses her is no different from disallowing a worker, under capitalism, to offer his labour to another employer. The inequality between men and women does indeed lie in the fact that the fidelity is unilateral, Zhou says, but he thinks it no more likely for men to reciprocate women’s fidelity than for capitalists to agree to engage in only one form of business. Some advocates of women’s emancipation, he continues, are clever enough to skirt the matter of reciprocity and to persuade us that love with constancy is true love, while love without it is not, so that constancy cannot exist on its own but is instead one of the conditions of love. The epigraph to this chapter quotes what he next says: ‘Their theory

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subordinates fidelity to love; it makes fidelity a constituent of love. You can’t not call this an ingenious theory.’ He is quite obviously antagonistic to the idea of chastity, and part of the reason is the word itself, so redolent of the ‘feudal’ past and the hated old morality. He was certainly not alone in thinking it better to dispense with it altogether and replace it with the term ‘focussed on a single person’ instead.50 The old categories, ‘widow’s chastity’ and ‘chaste martyrdom,’ referred to women only, and it is no wonder that when the matter came under review in modern times, it was not altogether clear, at least not to everyone, what it meant to be mutually faithful, how one reconciled a vow of conjugal fidelity with free will, what love had to do with chastity and how all this stood to monogamy. What made for unclarity was the doubt cast by some raised voices on the very existence of love—what is love anyway, ask the noisy love naysayers, if it isn’t at bottom sexual attraction? And if there is no such thing as love, how can there be such a thing as love’s fidelity? What made for further confusion was the failure to distinguish between chastity and the nature of love. One of the yes-to-love sayers aims at clarification when he argues that when a person forsakes one love for another, it is love that is lost, not chastity; chastity is a matter of man-made morality; it is not nature, which is inborn; and it is in the nature of love to be felt for only one person at a time.51 Keeping love out of it was one way of making the modern notion of chastity clear to the general public. Readers of Life Weekly had it spelt out to them by the editor-inchief, Zou Taofen (1895–1944), that chastity is not always synonymous with virginity but also means abstention by a married couple from sexual relations outside wedlock, and, as such, it is another name for that which consolidates the ‘one husband, one wife’ system. Thus it is not a violation of chastity to have sex with a third party once conjugal relations are ended by divorce or the death of one of the partners. Edvard Westermarck, the Finnish founder of academic sociology in England and the author of The History of Human Marriage (1891), is invoked to support the view that monogamy is to be recommended. Westermarck turned the tables on the widely held notion that primitive society had existed in a state of promiscuity, arguing instead that the original form of sexual attachment had been monogamy.52 What about ‘free love’? Lan Zhixian, who fears that in the absence of such external curbs on sexuality as the laws of chastity, we would regress to the promiscuity of savages, notes the call in some quarters for ‘free love’ and the abolition of the marriage institution, and he decries it—for that way lies promiscuity. In his rejoinder to Lan, Hu Shi invokes the English couple William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.53 The anarchist in Godwin rejected the straitjacket of matrimony, seeing it as evil and illogical and vastly inferior to a principled form of free love. He and the radical feminist Wollstonecraft were a liberated couple, keeping separate homes but meeting for meals, maintaining their independence the while. Theirs was an example of ‘free love,’ Hu Shi

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remarks, but it was a meeting of minds too—free love is not necessarily a casual liaison based only on sex that dissolves once the two people involved stop desiring each other. In fact it was not so much free love as freedom to love that Hu Shi’s generation clamoured for, but it took some time for the two notions to be prised apart in the public mind. Ellen Key was a source of clarification: introducing her, Zhang Xichen paraphrases what she has said on the subject—that to apply the term ‘free love’ to transitory unions is mistaken. Fanatics of free love are apt to think, she notes, that since ‘lifelong love is an illusion,’ they might as well not begin by expecting it to last but pursue short-lived sexual liaisons instead. But ‘free love,’ Zhang tells his readers, is to be distinguished from ‘love’s freedom,’ and he gives the two terms in English to dispel the ambiguity of the Chinese. Since love is sacred to Key, he adds, she could hardly have meant indulgence in indiscriminate sex when she urges free love.54 On chastity, Key’s position is adamantine: it can only be ‘developed together with complete love.’ For her, as we have seen, only love counts; marriages not based on love are no better than prostitution. So she would not, as the Christian Church does, regard unchastity as being ‘synonymous with every form of sexual relation outside matrimony,’ and chastity as being ‘equivalent to every form of marriage.’ Since marriages entered into without love are to her ‘untrue marriages,’ vows of fidelity or chastity do not necessarily represent real faithfulness or true purity. ‘Real fidelity can only arise when love and marriage become equivalent terms.’55 Most of all, she points out, quoting the words of the French Romantic writer George Sand, it is of the utmost importance to know whether a union is one in which ‘neither the soul betrayed the senses nor the senses the soul’ (italics Key’s). ‘In these words,’ Key repeatedly stresses, ‘George Sand gave the idea of the new chastity.56 Her Chinese followers heard those words and mouthed them; Zhang Xichen, for one, took them on board and spread them about.57 There was a marked fragmentation of opinion. Not many of the men were persuaded that if you but loved, you would want only one woman. Even less did they believe that you would want only one woman for all time. To even love’s champions, an undivided heart was not necessarily a heart that stayed constant forever, for love was changeable and impermanent, and its focus could shift from one object to another. As Mao Dun, for one, has put it, ‘Chastity has to do with whether love is true or not; the two engender and reinforce each other; it has absolutely nothing to do with the number of times one loves.’58 ‘Chastity’ apart, the terms used for the undivided heart were ‘single-focussed’ and, less frequently, ‘exclusive,’ the words marked off by the Chinese equivalent of inverted commas to indicate that their usage had yet to become convention, or that the speaker reserved his position.59 The one point on which all save a tiny minority were agreed was that the norm of chastity was grossly unfair to women, that it had nothing whatsoever to do with love and that the word itself should be jettisoned.

Yu Dafu as a student in Japan

13 Looking for Love: Yu Dafu

I hope I might have a taste of love before I die. Yu Dafu, 1927

‘Lately he has felt pitifully lonely’ is how the story begins. An ever thicker wall separates him from his fellow men—philistines, he thinks them, and he is constantly at odds with them. Nature is a solace, and poetry intermittently so. The poetry is Wordsworth’s, Emerson’s, Thoreau’s, Heine’s, this last quoted in the original German. On occasion he imagines himself to be Nietzsche’s Zaruthustra, but realizes that his ‘megalomania is in exact proportion to his hypochondria.’1 He feels like dried wood, cold ashes—and he is only twenty-one, supposedly in the prime of life. Neither knowledge nor fame is what he craves but a heart that can understand and comfort him, an intensely passionate heart in which is bred first sympathy then love. ‘What I want is love,’ he reveals. ‘If there were one beautiful woman who understood my suffering, I would be willing to die for her. ‘If there were one woman who could sincerely love me, I would also be willing to die for her, be she beautiful or ugly. ‘For what I want is love from the opposite sex.’ ‘Heaven O heaven, I want neither knowledge nor fame nor useless lucre. I shall be perfectly satisfied if you granted me an “Eve” from the Garden of Eden, allowing me to possess her body and soul.’

He has come from the Chinese lake-city of Hangzhou to Japan to study. He wakes each morning to seductive visions of ‘all those descendants of Eve’ coming to seduce him, and of a middle-aged madam by whose figure he is even more tempted than by a virgin’s, and he masturbates. Bitter remorse always follows. He is a little comforted to discover that no less a man than Gogol, the author of Dead Souls, was a ‘fellow sinner.’ But he knows that to be so comforted is no more than self-deception, and he scarcely passes a day without feeling guilty. He now looks downright unhealthy, bluish-grey lines circling eyes that are ‘as expressionless as those of dead fish.’

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All the while he longs for intimacy, his yearning focussed at one point on the Japanese innkeeper’s daughter. Once, while she is bathing, he steals a look into the bathroom. He is instantly transfixed by what he espies: ‘those snow-white breasts! Those voluptuous thighs! And that curvaceous figure!’ To his alarm, ‘the naked Eve’ hears the sound of his forehead accidentally knocking against the windowpane and asks, ‘Who is it?’ In great agitation he rushes away, then passes a sleepless night imagining her telling her father about the Peeping Tom. He retreats to the country and seeks solace in the beauty of Nature. One day, on a walk along a plateau, he sees unfold beneath him a scene such as might have been a ‘pastoral painting by Millet. Faced with this natural magnificence, he feels like an early Christian at the time of Jesus and could not help laughing at his own pettiness.’ ‘Forgive, forgive! I have forgiven you all who have wronged me. Come ye all and make peace with me!’ Suddenly, the whispers of a pair of lovers hidden from him by a clump of tall reeds reach him, and at the sound of the girl’s voice he freezes. As he hears their sucking lips, he throws himself on the ground to eavesdrop, ‘as stealthily as a wild dog with a stolen morsel in its mouth.’ Shame on you, his heart cries, ‘How can you be so depraved!’ All the same he strains to hear what they are doing and saying. Leaves crunch, clothes are shed, the man pants, and as lips suck, the woman pleads with her lover to make haste while no one sees them. His own skin pales to ashen; his eyes redden with fire; his teeth clatter, upper against lower; and, when the lovers leave the scene and he is back at last in his lodgings, he runs up the stairs to his bedroom like ‘a drenched dog’ and covers himself up with his quilt. On the road once more, he finds himself far from town. He is beckoned into a villa, what looks like a restaurant but is also a house of pleasure. He is timid and nervous before the Japanese waitress who shows him to a room and serves him a drink. He avoids her eyes and looks instead at the bit of pink petticoat peeping from under her kimono where it falls open. How often, walking about on the street, has he looked out for a glimpse of plump thighs under those kimonos, and how often has he chided himself for being ‘a beast, a sneaky dog and a despicable coward’ for doing so. He reddens with embarrassment when she asks him where he is from, for the Japanese look down on the Chinese, thinking them no better than pigs and curs. ‘China O China, why aren’t you strong!’ he cries to himself. Having to confess that he is Chinese gives rise to so much fear and trembling, even tears, that the Japanese waitress thinks it best to leave him to pull himself together, saying she will fetch more drink. At the sound of her returning footsteps, he straightens his clothes, only to discover a moment later that they lead not to him but to customers next door. He feels himself betrayed, thrown over, when he hears her flirting with those other men, and cursing

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her for her faithlessness, he vows, ‘No more shall I love women, no more shall I love women. I’ll just love my country; my country shall be my love.’ Quite drunk now, he passes out. When he wakes up, he is lying under a satin, scented quilt belonging to the waitress. Though, to his further embarrassment, he under-tips her, he is still left without any money for his fare home. He walks by the sea, cursing himself the while, his head mingling suicidal thoughts with self-pity. He might as well drown himself, he thinks, since ‘I’d never get the kind of love I want. And what is life without love? Dead ashes. Why go on living such a dreary life?’ He looks west to a star above the farthest reach of the horizon. Beneath it lies China, the homeland he has left. He sighs, then stammers out the cry, ‘Fatherland, O fatherland, you’ll be the death of me! Grow rich soon, grow strong soon! So many of your sons and daughters are suffering still!’

‘Sinking’ is the name of the story of which these are the bare bones. It appeared as the title story of a collection of short stories brought out in Shanghai in 1921. The collection won its author, Yu Dafu (1896–1945), instant literary fame. It was a huge hit with its young Chinese readers, who had never seen anything quite like it before. Clearly it was writing whose moment had come, and it caught on despite the critical brickbats it had also to endure. Sex, or rather sexual timidity and frustration, is the theme of the story, but Yu has made it part of a larger scenario in which a longing for love is intimately interrelated with a sense of Chinese inferiority towards the Japanese. While a modernizing Japan seemed to be charging ahead, China remained moribund. In ‘Sinking,’ it is as if the love the unnamed protagonist longs for might not keep eluding him, and he would not be quite so pathetically prurient were China stronger and less contemptuously regarded by the world’s nations. It is as if a sense of shame at the humiliation the Chinese nation suffers were the protagonist’s sexual humiliation writ large. And his not being able to assert his manhood is China’s emasculation writ small. He is like one who believes love would more readily come his way if he had a rich and respected family to stand behind him. From his other writings we know Yu himself to be deeply ambivalent about his nine-year sojourn in Japan, relishing the intellectual stimulation and widened horizons it afforded him at the same time as he abhorred the condescension of the Japanese.2 Aged seventeen, the young writer-to-be could not have arrived in Tokyo at a better time: 1913, a year into the Taishō period, ‘a new age of sexual emancipation,’ as he was to recall. Though caught up by it as by a great tidal wave, the likes of him— ‘an innocent, aloof, emotionally fragile and ideologically vacillating transient from another land’—could be no more than the foam on the wave, spume ‘sucked into the vortex, then submerged and drowned.’3 Love was in the Taishō air, but his deflowering was by a Japanese prostitute rather than by any of the well-bred girls to whom he was

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attracted: they had only to utter the racial slur ‘Chinaman’ and he would be assailed by humiliation and indignation. Quantities of sake had emboldened him during his visit to the brothel, just as drunkenness and whoring had gone together in ‘Sinking.’ Alcohol was for Yu an antidote to the bouts of depression he was prey to—that plus women, he has said.4 When one of those gloomy ‘black dog’ moments was upon him, he would find relief destroying something he cherished, even his beloved books. On one occasion, catching sight of himself in an Italian looking glass inlaid with ivory that his wife had given him as a present, he felt such self-disgust that he took hold of the mirror and threw it on the floor. It was an ‘exquisite’ regret that he felt on seeing it smashed into smithereens, and this feeling, he reported to his friends, was enough to allay his depression temporarily. He wondered if this recurrent affliction of his was hereditary, and whether it was confined to the Chinese race? Or was it because he was lovelorn? But then, he mused, ‘This love: I’ve never known what it is . . . I’ve been a wanderer, drifting from one place to another. In between I’ve known a few members of the opposite sex but my relationships to them have only been money transactions, nothing whatever to do with love.’5 Many readers thought he might have been talking about himself when, in his preface to the first edition of ‘Sinking,’ he tells his readers that the story describes the ‘psychology of a sick young man; or else you could call it the dissection of the young man’s depression,’ and here he appends the English word ‘hypochondria’ (in the sense of morbid depression without real cause) to the Chinese word for ‘depression,’ the latter still new and unfamiliar enough, presumably, to require a parenthesis. The story, he continues, also deals with modern man’s ‘sense of frustration’ (kumen in Chinese)—that is, with his ‘sexual urges and the clash of soul and flesh.’ This puzzled a fellow student, the writer Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984), who reported that Yu did not really have any soul-flesh conflict in mind when the two of them first talked about the piece. Surely it is about a ‘heart yearning for love,’ writes Cheng; a ‘heart yearning for love’ and not finding it, is what the work is about, Cheng contends. Of course, we need not take Yu’s remark all that seriously, since ‘soul-flesh’ was being bandied about and he could very well have plucked it out of the air without much careful calculation. One imagines him shrugging his shoulders when, in typical selfdepreciation some six years later, he downplayed the writing of it as merely a recreational exercise, neither true to life nor deliberated upon nor polished.6 Yet, what still needs to be explained is why he linked the soul-flesh clash to modern man’s sense of frustration. From what exactly does the feeling of frustration, or unfulfilment, spring? What is being thwarted? It could only be the sexual impulse; it is the repression of that by the superego, to recast ‘soul’ in Freudian terms, which makes for the modern sense of frustration. That the young man feels so much guilt is of a piece with this understanding of the soul, for the superego is that part of the mind that functions as a

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sort of conscience, causing feelings of guilt and anxiety in one who pleasurably gratifies his impulses. In China, as we have seen, what exactly was soul was much debated: was it heart, was it spirit, was it illusion, or was it simply that which made two people ‘hit it off ’? Now, there was an infiltration of psychoanalytic concepts to confuse the issue. Not only could soul and flesh fuse (into a ‘oneness of soul and flesh’), one could repress the other, giving rise to frustration, neurosis and anxiety. Or to a deviation of the normal sexual aim, according to Yu’s short story ‘Boundless Night’ (1922). The hero, to whom the author gave a name very similar to his own, is  a lecturer newly arrived at a provincial Chinese college. Feeling randy one night, he  prowls the streets looking for a woman and, when he fails to get one, laments that he had never experienced love; Yu has him look up to the night sky and sigh in self-pity, ‘Oh love, if you could be had in exchange for knowledge, I’d proffer all the knowledge I have in return for a full-blooded and tear-soaked embrace . . . O love, how I resent you for your aloofness to qualifications, status and reputation.’ His need for a sexual outlet—for which a woman, any woman, is seen to be the necessary apparatus— is insistent, so much so that he resorts in the end to gratifying it himself masochistically. He has acquired a used needle and handkerchief from a shop girl, and back in his room he smells them and, while studying himself in the mirror, he pierces his cheeks with the needle, drawing drops of blood. Seeing the bloodied handkerchief with which he has wiped his face, and bringing it to his nostrils and the shop girl to mind shoot a frisson of pleasure through his entire body. At last his ‘animal desire,’ as he calls it, is satisfied.7 Earlier, back in Shanghai, he has sought physical intimacy with a young man, a pallid and delicate-looking nineteen-year-old with a sweet voice and beautifully soft eyes. Falling for the boy, the protagonist is put in mind of the passionate affair between the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, though not as the violent, tempestuous, drink- and drug-fuelled relationship that it was but as one of ‘pure love.’ However, once the lecturer leaves Shanghai for the provinces and starts teaching, he forgets the boy—a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’—and his desire for him is replaced by, on the one hand, a ‘simple love’ for a girl student that he does not act upon and, on the other, an unfocussed and irrepressible carnal impulse that he likens to a beast. It is the latter that drives him to tramp the streets and eventually to abuse himself. So it would seem that in any weighing of the soul against the flesh in Yu’s writing, flesh tips the scales. Yet, I doubt if by his own lights there is not plenty of soul there as well. Even critics who find the sex distasteful would hesitate to call it gratuitous, for Yu’s treatment of it is an appeal to the psychological as much as to the sensual. His concern is with the effect of sexual desire, gratified or repressed, on the psychology of those alienated and dispirited characters moping about in his stories. Indeed, he gets inside their heads and admits the reader deeper into their psyche than any Chinese

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writer before him. Psyche is ‘soul’ in a new guise. That Yu takes one to mean the other is indicated by his essay, ‘The Distance Travelled by Modern Fiction’ (1932), where he quotes a line from Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction: ‘Modern fiction really began when the “action” of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul.’ In his Chinese paraphrase of the line, he renders Wharton’s ‘soul’ as ‘psyche.’8 Another Freudian concept that knocked about Japan and China was sublimation, the psychic process by which the repressed sexual instinct could find other paths of expression—such channels of diversion as artistic creativity and the religious life. The term, if not the theory, found its way into Chinese writing, where it came to denote not so much the diverting of the power of the sexual instinct (as per Freud) as its softening or purification. A few of Yu’s protagonists follow the inner promptings of inhibition, lifting themselves above their desires by ‘purifying’ them. In what Chinese critics regard as the maturest of Yu’s works, the short story named ‘Late-Flowering Osmanthus’ (1932), ‘purification’ wins over the desire felt by the firstperson narrator for the sister of a friend he comes to see in Hangzhou.9 The ‘aphrodisiac’ scent of osmanthus blossoms hovers over the story, and something of a pastoral idyll is evoked in a scene where the narrator goes on a mountain ramble with the girl and finds his lust confounded by her childlike naturalness, trusting innocence and freshness of feeling. If he had entertained any thought of seducing her, his sexual desire is now ‘purified.’ She is moved to tears when he confesses his thoughts to her; although he has not yielded to temptation, still he has ‘sinned in his heart.’ They embrace chastely, and agree to call each other brother and sister. Desire overcome is love ennobled and purified. This is the ideal of the courtly love spoken of by medieval troubadours. If we look for it in Yu’s fiction, we will find it in the very first short story that he wrote, ‘Silvery Grey Death’ (1921). The vehicle for it is a character, Wolfram von Eschenbach, in Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. Wolfram is a medieval minstrel knight, as is the eponymous hero Tannhäuser. In ‘Silvery Grey Death’ the protagonist, to whom Yu gives the name Y, appeals to Wolfram to show him the way to a ‘noble and unsullied love.’10 The lonely hero is grieving over his dead wife when he meets Jing’er, a Japanese waitress in her widowed mother’s restaurant. He begins to have tender feelings for Jing’er, and the two of them have heart-to-heart talks whenever he goes to the restaurant to drink. One day, he learns that she is to be married—to a bar owner, he later understands. Upon hearing the news, he feels all the lonelier and drinks all the harder—but not at her place, which he now makes a point of avoiding. But he is unable to keep away and is starting to make his way there when he remembers Wolfram von Eschenbach, and exclaims to him: O poet of ages past! How I admire your magnanimity. How I admire your noble and unsullied love for Elisabeth.

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He starts to hum; and here the author quotes three lines from the libretto of the second act of Wagner’s opera. He reproduces them in the original German but in English translation they are: There she is; approach her undisturbed. So flees from me in this life, All semblance of hope!

Typically, Yu explains neither the scene nor how Elisabeth relates to Jing’er. All that the reader learns is that Y repeats the words a number of times and then tells himself, ‘I can go, I can go to Jing’er’—if someone from ages past (Wolfram) could love in that way, then surely he (who lives in modern times and so should be capable of modern love) could love Jing’er in the same way? But what way is that, the reader is bound to ask? The short answer is ‘spiritually, selflessly,’ but to grasp how that model of love is arrived at, a detour through the opera’s plot is necessary. More readily than any of Wagner’s operas, Tannhäuser lends itself to being studied in dualistic terms, as the conflict between spirituality and sexuality, or soul and flesh. Flesh is represented by the goddess Venus, whose lover Tannhäuser becomes and in whose kingdom, the Venusberg, he abandons himself to carnality. The spiritual takes the form of the saintly Elisabeth, whose heart he had won in the past by his music but who, in her innocence, did not know her ‘unnamed raptures’ to be love. In an orgiastic first scene, Tannhäuser’s senses are surfeited and, disentangling himself from the goddess’s embraces, he leaves the Venusberg, breaking Venus’s enchantment by an invocation to the Virgin Mary. In a valley, he is discovered by Elisabeth’s uncle and his companions, chief among them Wolfram von Eschenbach. Tannhäuser hesitates to join them in a song contest until Wolfram informs him that Elisabeth’s heart had been won by his singing. Wolfram himself loves Elisabeth, but back at her uncle’s castle, it is he who—magnanimously, as Yu describes him—leads Tannhäuser to her, intoning the first of the lines quoted by Yu. This line and the two others quoted sandwich a scene in which the two lovers are reunited, dashing Wolfram’s hopes for the fulfilment of his own love for Elisabeth. The theme of the song contest is to be ‘the true essence of love,’ and the hand of Elisabeth the winner’s prize. Wolfram, who is the first to sing, extols an idealized love, likening it to a miraculous spring from which flow only pure and sacred feelings. But Tannhäuser has no time for such prudish pussyfooting and bursts out in a passionate hymn to the pleasures of sexual gratification. Wolfram’s self-effacing love is what Y calls up as he goes to Jing’er, telling himself that he could love Jing’er in as pure and noble a way as the troubadour knight. When Y does see Jing’er, he finds her avoiding his eyes while hers fill with tears. He pawns his books to buy her some wedding presents. He drinks more and more heavily and begins to behave oddly from what appears to be a mental breakdown. His unidentified corpse is later discovered, the cause of death said to be cerebral haemorrhage. Some

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money and a copy of Ernest Dowson’s Poems and Prose are found in the pocket of his worn suit. In a note that he appends to the story, Yu acknowledges Ernest Dowson (1867– 1900), or rather the model of his life, as one of his sources of inspiration. Dowson is the very fine English poet whose lyrics we are quoting (unknowingly for the most part) when we say, ‘days of wine and roses’ or ‘gone with the wind.’ The archetypal Decadent poet, the image of the bohemian artist and friend to Oscar Wilde, Dowson had a taste for absinthe, low life and little girls. He fell in love with the eleven-year-old Adelaide, the daughter of a Polish refugee who ran a humble restaurant in London’s Soho. She eventually married a waiter, deeply wounding the poet, but also inspiring those greatly admired poems of his that express lost love and weariness of life. Dowson died at the age of thirty-two from tuberculosis, and this early death, as well as his unrequited love for the daughter of the restaurant owner, are two strands that Yu works into his story. Yu was to write about Dowson’s life and poetry at length, using Arthur Symons’s memoir of him but making much more of his love for Adelaide than Symons. She is unnamed in Yu’s essay: he calls her Dowson’s Beatrice, identifying her with Dante’s inspiration, the woman in whom courtly love climaxed. And it is in keeping with this identification that Yu describes Dowson’s as a pure love (writing these words in English).11

There is enough correspondence in the life and personal details of Yu Dafu’s heroes and of himself for readers and critics to wonder if his characters are not lightly disguised self-portraits. He leads them on too, giving his characters names like his own. Yet he could also be saying: you may think I’m like that (lecherous, sexually frustrated, masochistic, bisexual, self-pitying, bibulous, mentally unbalanced and so on) but actually I’m not. On the other hand, you’re not necessarily right either if you think I’m selling you a falsehood, because this is what I am like in temperament if not in deed. He has famously declared, ‘All works of literature are autobiographical.’ But what he means by this is that no fiction escapes the stamp of its author’s personality; it is not an invitation to go looking for parallels between his life and his characters’. Art should closely embrace life, he said; the writer of fiction incarnates this life and expresses it in his own singular way, and no work of his should be without that mark of his individuality (and here Yu writes the word in English).12 What he was really like may be gleaned from his explicitly autobiographical writings, as well as his letters and diaries, which, like other writers of his generation, he had no qualms about publishing. When one reads older Chinese texts, how one longs for a baring of the heart. It is the accursed lot of students of China to work the stony soil of a tradition little given to unbuttoned confession. In diaries, so profoundly private a genre, intimate revelations seem often to be secondary to weather reports (look at

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Lu Xun’s). Readers wishing to be voyeurs are continually thwarted. But here comes Yu Dafu, who tells all. Far from hiding his feelings, he fairly emotes in print. He had a precedent and example in the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘the man who created modern autobiography’ and ‘the first to claim what we call a sexual identity.’13 If we search back for the earliest emergence of intimate self-disclosures, of the redefinition of the good as being oneself and realizing oneself, and of the posture of the modern alienated intellectual, we come sooner or later to Rousseau. Yu has spoken admiringly of Rousseau, of whom he has written a pen portrait; and we might say that, like Rousseau, he too is declaring himself: to commend Rousseau for revealing his failings and ‘wrongdoings in all their undisguised ugliness, nakedly,’ is to find support for his, Yu’s, habit of what his appalled critics have said was exposing his own sores and ulcers to public view.14 The allure of unabashed self-exposure was not felt by Yu alone; among his contemporaries in the May Fourth period confessional writing became a trend, even a fad, linked no doubt to that movement’s call for self-emancipation and, in the literary realm, to the expression of the inner self.15 Yu has credited the May Fourth movement with ‘the discovery of the individual.’ Whereas a Chinese in the past was subject to his lord, the Confucian Way and to his parents, now he knew to live for his self.16 This was the general intellectual climate surrounding the Yu who exclaimed, resorting once again to German, ‘“Ego is all; all is ego”—who among us strongly individualist modern youths is without a belief in the expansion of the ego?’17 Insofar as literature was concerned, Yu put the Chinese discovery of the self seventy to eighty years behind Europe’s. Chinese literature was the richer for the discovery, he said, its scope broader for having had northern Europe’s Ibsen, central Europe’s Nietzsche, America’s Walt Whitman, and Russia’s nineteenth-century writers strike roots and bear fruit in China.18 As for the Chinese self, he left it undefined, and talked as if it was part of a universal reality that existed a priori and that was revealed, uncovered, and made knowable by an acquaintance with Western writing, whereas in fact it was a construct that emerged anew out of that engagement, as his own self-definition proved so well. Western works and their authors were new models for Chinese self-fashioning. We all know that fiction is a fertile medium for shaping imaginations, and that its characters could be models for life to those who lose themselves in it or whose fancies are fed by it. Yu was a case in point, modelling himself and his heroes after various European fictional characters and novelists. He as good as told us who the chief of these was when he wrote a piece entitled ‘A Superfluous Man’ (1924). ‘Superfluous men’ were a literary character type in nineteenth-century Russia, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, for instance, being one of a line of such men that would wend its way through Russian literature. The superfluous man was talented and cultivated yet incapable of purposeful action, trying everything, including romantic love, and finding it wanting.

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Yu sees himself as one in his essay. As in the work whose publication popularized the term, namely Ivan Turgenev’s novella The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), Yu feels dejection sink upon his heart as he sees all his life flash before him. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asks himself as he wanders about. Then the thunderbolt strikes and he bursts out in a cry, ‘I am truly a superfluous man!’ ‘I am useless to society,’ he exclaims, then repeats the term in English, ‘Superfluous! Superfluous!’19 The alienated misfit that is the superfluous man struck a resounding chord in Yu Dafu. We discover, though, that his sense of uselessness has a Chinese basis in that he relates it to his inability to provide for his family and to do anything for his country. He had a conception of himself that was not at all to his liking—or was it perhaps to his liking that he was a hypersensitive, alienated bystander out of sync with society, a homeless sort of man, highly intelligent and educated yet incapable of acting with decisiveness and purpose? In portraying himself as a superfluous man, he blurred the line between being his Chinese self and assuming a Western literary part. Love? How would I ever know love? Who could possibly love me?20 The new self on which such questions were based took shape through the introjection and assimilation of Western literary representations. Another persona with which Yu was identified, one equally derived from European literature, was ‘decadent.’ It is a label that critics then and critics now simply cannot resist attaching to him, imputing largely loucheness. He wore it as a sign of his susceptibility to the sentiments of the Decadent and Aesthetic movements in fin de siècle Europe, but even more so as a sort of stigma. Contemporaries of his who called him that, including the great love of his life Wang Yingxia (of whom more below), largely meant his self-indulgence and restless unconventionality rather than any aesthetic tendency. To distinguish between the two, you might call the one decadent and the other Decadent, with a capital ‘d.’ People who decried his decadence (with a small ‘d’) imagined him lurching from one drinking hole to another, stopping at a brothel along the way. A depressive personality to begin with, one all too prone to self-blame, Yu frequently expressed sadness, shame, disgust and anxiety. He did not think that there was such a thing as happiness in this world. But then life is inherently sad, he said, and because it is that, and he saw through it, he escaped into the pleasures of wine and women. For this, others condemn him as a ‘decadent.’ But he would have them know that he is not without emotions and self-recrimination: ‘When I wake from my intoxicated stupor at night and see the sleeping body on my chest that I had bought with money, many, many more times is the anguish and sorrow I feel than any known by those who call themselves moral.’ Mental pain is his self-vindication.21 For Chinese men of letters to seek solace in the arms of a prostitute was nothing new, and in fact they had made rather a speciality of it, as I have shown, raising intimacies with courtesans to the level of literary connoisseurship. But Yu Dafu’s experience was a

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departure from tradition in two ways. He tramped the streets, which his forbears never did, and the brothels he visited were decidedly unglamorous, a world away from the fragrant courtesan houses patronized by earlier generations of litterateurs. He speaks in one journal entry ( January 25, 1927) of searching the streets for a floozy, using crude Shanghai patois, ‘hitting wild chicks,’ for ‘picking up hookers’ at the low-end of the market. Yu sounds quite matter-of-fact about it, as though it were all in a day’s work, and reports that when, after some altercation with the police (presumably for drunken behaviour), he does find a middle-aged prostitute in the dodgy Shiliupu dock area, he goes home with her. Just as casually, his diary entry for the following day reports getting up late and going with the woman for a bowl of congee, and then, after a nap at her place, taking her to a den for a drag or two on an opium pipe.22 The second difference from the experience of earlier men of letters is that he explicitly brings love—or more accurately its lack—into it. In Canton once, so his diary entry for December 3, 1926 tells us, no sooner does he rest from searching the streets for a brothel than he sighs that he has lived half a lifetime without succeeding in love.23 And again, recollection of an encounter with a prostitute in a first-person narrative called ‘Record of a Journey South’ (1925) is followed by a lament, ‘What is love? I’m thirty already, unattractive to look at, lacking in persistence, reputation and money—who’s going to love me?’ It so happens that the prostitute in the story forms an emotional attachment to him, and though he is indifferent, finding little going for her except a sort of prelapsarian innocence, he is not unsympathetic to her. When, after a long absence, he meets her again and she makes known her feelings for him, he spends the night with her without exacting any sexual favours; and when she asks why, he lies that he has been castrated. Thereafter he would pick up her bills and spend nights with her, even when she is having her period (‘unclean,’ he calls it), without engaging in any sex. It is hardly love, he reminisces of the relationship, yet it is not a case of outright flesh for sale either.24

Love ceased to elude Yu Dafu on January 14, 1927. This was the day he met Wang Yingxia, a schoolteacher from Hangzhou who happened to be staying with mutual friends in Shanghai. She was twenty (to his thirty-one) and by all accounts alluring, with fine white skin and features pronounced enough for someone who met her for the first time when she was in her thirties to detect a resemblance to Joan Crawford, the Hollywood movie star.25 Yu was smitten, and started immediately to pursue her with all the headlong passion of an initiate to love. When I say initiate to love I am taking his word for it, since he constantly bemoaned not having ever known what it is to love and to be loved. He was married, and like Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, he had had his wife Sun Quan chosen for him. But unlike them, not only did he live with her and have children by her, he repeatedly and

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poignantly wrote about her and even dedicated a publication to her, the anthology named Chicken Ribs, or Things of Little Value.26 It was of her that he wrote in 1923, ‘Oh woman of mine, woman that I can’t love yet can’t not love!’27 What he felt for her, he told his friends Guo Moruo and Cheng Fangwu in a letter in 1924, was no different from the love that he felt for them, and such love, he added, ‘can’t after all be called lian’ai,’ romantic love.28 Sun Quan was a country girl from a poor family, but she was better educated than you would expect, and her attempts at versifying were creditable enough for Yu to correct but little the poems she posted to him after their betrothal. They were married in the summer of 1920, when he took leave from his studies in Japan to come home for the wedding. It was a niggardly affair, with no matchmaker present, no feasting and no feeling whatsoever of celebration. To his subsequent drinking, moroseness and illtempered tongue-lashings, she responded with the submissiveness of Chinese womankind, weeping and cowering whenever he vented his anger and frustration at her—‘the sacrificial lamb,’ as he calls her, ‘atoning for society’s sins.’29 He knew his behaviour to be cruel, even abusive. Yet even as he felt regret and remorse at the grief he caused her, still he could not at the same time help hating her too. Was there a time when she had put her hands to her face, a moment when she would have given anything, everything, to be gone? There was. Yu’s mood was at a low ebb; he was drunk, jobless (forced by campus politics to give up his teaching job at the school of law and administration in Anqing, a town on the banks of the Yangtze River), and the words he had hurled at her—‘You and your child are shackles and wearing them will kill me one day’—rang in her ears as she bade her firstborn son (who was to die of meningitis five years later) goodbye, telling him to be good and not to irritate Father. She then slipped out of the house and threw herself into the river. Loud knocking woke Yu from his sleep, and he opened the door to her and the men who had saved her and borne her home. Her eyes were closed, her cotton-padded garment soaked. He writes that the fortnight she spent in hospital, feverish, was when his ‘heart was at its purest.’ She bore him no grudge, he knew—her very acceptance and docility were her undoing, he believed—and his heart was wrung with pity for her. ‘Egoist that I am, never had I felt a purer love’ than when he watched her mend in hospital.30 They left Anqing together, stopping in Shanghai, and though they had planned to proceed to his hometown together to settle in the family home, she let go of him, knowing that deep down he would rather be alone. He saw her and their son off at the railway station in Shanghai, and might have broken down had she but looked him in the eye instead of turning away. Knowing this, she resolutely kept her head averted, lest he saw her eyes fill and, out of pity for her, jumped onto the train himself or got them to stay. She had the self-abnegation one should not think less of because he profited by it at the same time as he abhorred it.

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The years from 1923 to 1926 saw Yu teaching at universities in Beijing, Wuchang and Canton, typically holding none of these jobs for long. Canton was where he joined his two friends, Guo Moruo and Cheng Fangwu. Those two were there because they were sympathizers of the leftist cause (Cheng later penned the direct translation from German of Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto into Chinese). At the time Canton was a revolutionary base, the launching pad of Chiang Kai-shek’s expedition north against the warlords, those strongmen who, after the Qing dynasty was toppled, staked their claims to parts of the country and ran them like personal fiefdoms. The Northern Expedition climaxed years of Soviet aid to the Nationalists as well as the latter’s on-off cooperation, under the banner of anti-imperialism and the unification of the country, with the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. But no sooner did Chiang Kai-shek’s forces reach Shanghai than he ceased to be a revolutionary and, in a bloody coup on April 12, 1927, destroyed the Communist Party–led labour movement there. It was at the start of that year, and against the background of the fighting between first the Nationalists and the warlords, and then the Nationalists and the communists, that Yu met and courted Wang Yingxia. Not cut out to be a revolutionary like his Marxist friends, Yu had returned to Shanghai, putting behind him the political intrigues and chicanery of Canton. She is everywhere in his diary entries for those months, but so are mentions of strikes, curfew, soldiers, killings, headless corpses, and the stench of blood on the streets. He met her wearing the sheepskin-lined gown which Sun Quan had sent him from Beijing, where he had left her when he moved from there to Canton. Solicitous as always, his wife reckoned he would need it now that it was winter. Upon receiving it, he wondered how he was ‘ever to repay her, my pitiable female slave.’31 How bewitched he was by Wang Yingxia, how intensely he longed for her, how he contrived to set eyes on her every day, what mad joy he felt on seeing her, what miserable heartsickness on not seeing her—of these symptoms of limerence, many pages of his diary tell. In love, there is the feeling that surpassing happiness is just around the corner, waiting to be sprung by only a word or a smile. He felt this, and daily craved the word and the smile. Did she return his feelings? There would come a day when she would meet him halfway, but until then there was one big obstacle to be overcome, and this was the fact that he was married. Yingxia was of the generation of the New Woman, highly educated, and with her greatly admired looks and good family background, she would have no trouble making a desirable match. She need not be anybody’s concubine, in other words, were concubinage even fashionable. On the other hand, Yu loved her to distraction. Also, there was some glamour attached to his fame as a much-published author and man of letters, and it might have been because they felt her to be susceptible that her friends in Shanghai persuaded her to deflect his attentions by returning to Hangzhou.

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By leaving Shanghai, she as good as shut a door in his face. But he was on fire. Going in hot pursuit of her to Hangzhou to press his suit further, he took what he hoped was the same train as hers (one crawling with soldiers, he noted), and was quite deflated to discover that not only was it not, there was no trace of her that he could find in Hangzhou either. He returned to Shanghai in despair, and as so often happened resorted the next day to drink and ‘wild-chick hitting.’ All was not lost, however, and the passionate love letters he plied her with drew a response—replies to his letters to begin with, then her physical presence when she came back presently to Shanghai. Perhaps he wore her down with his persistence but she avowed her love on March 5 and allowed him to kiss her for the first time on March 7, a day, he tells his diary, in which ‘our two souls melted into each other.’ One night two weeks later they talked and slept in a bed together until morning, but Yu tells us that their intimacies stopped short of sexual intercourse. On June 5, they announced their engagement at a dinner party that they held for forty-odd guests at a restaurant. They set up home in Shanghai, accepted by all save a few as a married couple, and in the winter of 1928 the first of their three surviving sons was born. They were happy, but with Yu things tended to be short-lived and all too soon they were not. Twelve years and five pregnancies later, their ‘marriage’ broke down in bitter mutual recrimination and they separated. One is not to know what really happened even though the two made their private affairs very public; indeed, his journal was published shortly after it was written, and their quarrels were conducted in print and played out in the pages of a widely read magazine like any love scandal. Exactly why the relationship failed could never be known but one clue is what she understood by love when she avowed it at the beginning of their relationship, and how this compares with his ardour. In the account that she was to write and publish decades later, she shows herself a little undecided about which of the two views of herself she wants to present to explain her surrender: the twenty-year-old who was too young and naïve to be certain of her emotions, or the woman of sympathy stirred above all by pity. In a passage that is embarrassing to read now, she quotes an excerpt from Yu’s ‘Sinking,’ the one where the protagonist exclaims that he craves neither knowledge nor fame but only a ‘heart’ that can understand and comfort him, an intensely passionate heart in which is bred first sympathy then love. ‘Only I, it seems, could give him that sympathy,’ she writes.32 He did turn her thoughts to love though, and in her account she does admit to feeling something in return. It was definitely not mere sympathy she felt towards him when, on a stroll in Hangzhou on April 16, they found themselves alone at a temple and fell upon each other with passionate kisses. He felt the preciousness of the moment, and had all the world’s happiness been funnelled into his being, he would not have felt an iota more. He sensed his own power; he was lord of all he surveyed.

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‘I am like the Despot-Emperor of this place,’ he said to her, ‘I am like the Jade Emperor in Heaven. I feel that no creature anywhere in the world is as happy as I . . . And you?’ It was a woman who answered his love that said, ‘I am the Queen, I am the Fairy in Charge of Calligraphy in the court of the Jade Emperor, I sense only my body awakening, everything melting into happiness, and I am bereft of words.’ (The Fairy in Charge of Calligraphy is one who, in a Chinese legend, is expelled from the court of the Jade Emperor for dreaming of love.)33 Yet the loves of two people, even were they in love with each other, are seldom the same. He ‘burns’ with the fire of ‘first love,’ he tells her in one of the few letters to survive the war with Japan.34 Never had he felt for any woman what he felt for her; to him she was perfection: ‘Oh, Yingxia! You are truly my Beatrice. My repellent thoughts, my intemperance and self-indulgence—all are purified by you,’ he exclaims in his journal.35 ‘My love is unconditional,’ he tells her in his letter, and ‘life, family reputation, social status, money, all can be thrown over.’ But hers is not unconditional, he observes, and spells out how it is different: she cares about her reputation; she wants to marry and is bothered that he is not free, so with her, love comes only third, after honour and matrimony. They differ also in the extent to which they could endure being apart. He could not bear to be away from her for even a minute. ‘Mine is the love that lives and grows and is purified by our seeing and talking to each other every single day,’ whereas she seems to prefer to keep him at a distance. He finds this inexplicable, unless it was because ‘the sort of love you feel for me is the sort of love my wife receives from me.’ That he does not see Sun Quan from one year to the next is as nothing to him. To have to see more of his wife would be a burden, just as seeing more of him appears to be burden to her, Yingxia. If only she would ‘burn inside’ like he. If only her love were not just ‘a reflection of my passionate love but something that issues from deep within your heart.’36 There is much more in this vein. Even a brief summary suffices to show how hard it is to hear him without concluding that not only was he hopelessly in love but that his reading of Western literature had got to him. Where but in the pages of that literature did love have a purifying effect? And whence the belief that love could be distinguished from not-love, or one sort of love from another sort? Only now, he writes, ‘do I know the nature, the essence, of love.’ At around the time of their first meeting, he felt something coming to his rescue from outside himself, a sort of succour that ‘saved my soul, my body.’37 So this is love. It is this, then, that has eluded his heroes and alter egos, it is for this that they have suffered ‘hypochondria,’ have perhaps sought in prostitutes a passing assuagement of their yearning. It is what he might have for himself if he repudiated his wife, for only then would Yingxia surrender herself to him. Yet even in the extremity of his passion for Yingxia, he was not able to forget his wife. One day, he and Yingxia were walking towards

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Shanghai’s French Concession. It was windy, and he had his arms around her. At that moment, even as he was savouring in full the ‘perfect sweetness of love,’ an image came to the fore of Sun Quan giving birth, groaning.38 In his mind her pallor, her silent tears, her faraway look of lonely sorrow, are set against the fullness of Yingxia’s body and the limpid loveliness of her eyes.39 He did not divorce his wife as Yingxia had wished, but the latter overcame her scruples and ‘married’ him anyway. The news enraged his brother, a government jurist, who demanded assurance that Yu Dafu would hold no formal wedding banquet.40 Although bigamy was a crime in Shanghai’s French Concession, where he and Yingxia made their home, it was only prosecuted if a complaint was lodged or a lawsuit brought against them, and of course none was. It was this not-quite-legal status that Yu had in mind when, suspecting Yingxia of adultery, he humiliated her by publicly calling her by the nastiest possible name that anyone could think of: not just ‘concubine’ but ‘brushed-aside concubine.’41 Grave heads shook at the washing of dirty linen in public when his accusation and her denial saw print in 1939: one thing Chinese do not do is reveal shameful family secrets for scandalmongers to lap up. Few doubted that she had deceived Yu (the whispered name was that of a Nationalist official), but even so their friends thought this instance of his, perhaps pathological, compulsion to expose the most intimate things to public view a step too far beyond the bounds of decency. She, for her part, complained of his decadence, carelessness, ‘psychological abnormality’ (her words) and oddities of behaviour. Not the least of these oddities was his periodic, unexplained disappearances from home. Tailing him late one night, she discovered it to be a habit of urban wandering—he was a flâneur long before that term came into fashion, or was heard of in China.42 The wandering was a compulsion with him; tracing to it the first fissures in their deteriorating relationship, she put it down to a need to indulge in fantasies and to let off steam. All this was happening in the midst of war. Japan had attacked in 1937, Hangzhou had fallen to the occupying army. Yu’s mother, stranded in the family home, starved to death; and his brother died in the line of duty, murdered by assassins of the puppet government that collaborated with the Japanese Army. The time had come when homes were divided not just by domestic discord but by the partings of war. Yu, who had been engaged upon propaganda work, decamped to the British colony of Singapore in December 1938. There his writing skills were put to patriotic use monitoring Japanese broadcasts and translating them into English for British intelligence, as well as publishing anti-Japanese propaganda and editing a local Chinese daily. Wang Yingxia did join him there, but not for long. After all that rancour there was little chance of a reconciliation, let alone a fresh start, and the two agreed to a formal separation in March 1940. She returned to China, where she eventually married a businessman: she knew better than to do so to a writer.

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In February 1942, the British lost Singapore to the Japanese in muddle and ignominy. It was such a great a loss of face for the British Empire that Asians would never look upon the white man in quite the same way again. As bombs fell, Yu Dafu fled Singapore by boat and, dodging Japanese as he went, eventually found refuge in a small town called Payakumbuh in central Sumatra. There, under an assumed name, Zhao Lian, he made a surprisingly good living running a rice-wine distillery. With friends of his acting as matchmaker, he married a poor 22-year-old Chinese girl settled in Indonesia, not without the hope that a semblance of normal family life would help allay Japanese suspicions. He Liyou, as she was called, originated in the Canton area in China, so she and Yu had no language in common except Indonesian, the rudiments of which Yu, with his linguistic aptitude, managed to acquire in a matter of months. He wrote reams of Chinese poems in the classical style during those years of exile, but she was never to know that he was a writer. One wonders if the reason he married an illiterate girl whom he kept in the dark as to his true identity was that it seemed to simplify. No Beatrice, she, but by then another Wang Yingxia would be thought one too many. His fluency in Japanese served him well, but also ill. He was much sought after as an interpreter by not only the Chinese settled in Indonesia but by the Japanese military. He became privy to much that went on at the Japanese military headquarters, and for this inside information, as well as for using his position to save Chinese and Indonesians from Japanese torture or worse, he was to pay with his life a fortnight after the Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945. In a celebratory mood at the Allied victory, he was talking to his Chinese friends and planning for the future when a young man speaking in Indonesian knocked on his door. Come to fetch Yu for something, it appeared. Saying he’d be back in a jiff y, Yu took leave of his friends to go with the stranger into the night in his pyjamas and slippers, never to return. Only later was it confirmed that the Japanese military police had executed him. The morning after he vanished was when his wife gave birth to their second child, a daughter. Martyrdom turned Yu Dafu from a decadent into a hero. Alive, he would find it hard to imagine his name appearing on any honour roll. Dead, he was to have the badge of Honoured Martyr conferred on him by the People’s Republic of China, a regime given almost as much to pinning rosettes of honour on people as blacklisting them. This honour and its accompanying social advantages redounded to the martyr’s family. And it was to be Sun Quan, her son and two daughters, not Wang Yingxia and her three sons, whom the People’s Government would officially designate as family.

Xu Zhimo

14 Exalting Love: Xu Zhimo

You possess my love, my soul, my flesh, my whole . . . You are my life, my poetry, you are all mine, every one of your cells—let heaven and lightning strike me dead if you said even half a No. Xu Zhimo, 1925

Of all Chinese poets of his time, Xu Zhimo (1897–1931) was by far the most romantic. As his friend Hu Shi has said of him, ‘Love was his religion, his God.’1 Since ‘all his life he was the very symbol of love,’ you would expect him to have had more than three women in his life not counting the journalist Agnes Smedley and the American author Pearl S. Buck, both of whom are supposed to have had a fling with him. One reason he did not have time for more is that he was short-lived, killed in an air crash when he was only thirty-four, instantly becoming even more famous dead than alive. He was attractive to men and women alike, everyone’s idea of the poet to look at. Pearl Buck, who was born to missionary parents and grew up in China, met Xu in 1924, when he was twenty-seven and she four years older. Here is how she remembered him thirty years later: It even became the fashion to ape Western poets in person and one handsome and rather distinguished and certainly much beloved young poet was proud to be called ‘the Chinese Shelley.’ He used to sit in my drawing-room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures . . . He was northern Chinese, tall and classically beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands . . . Our Chinese Shelley died young, I am sad to say, for he had a sort of power of his own, and could he have outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself.2

Pearl Buck was rumoured to have had an affair with him, but her biographer, Hilary Spurling, thinks it highly unlikely: even if Buck might have wished it, she looked far too dowdy and middle-aged for the dashing poet.3 Agnes Smedley, who was to become famous for chronicling the Chinese revolution as a correspondent for the German, British and American press, was five years older but a practitioner of free sex who would like to have counted Xu Zhimo among her conquests. Xu was close to Hu Shi, whom Smedley was bound to meet after she arrived

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in China in May 1929, since back in New York she had participated in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement, while Hu Shi had interpreted for the contraception campaigner and sex educator when she came in 1922 to speak at Peking University. Xu never mentioned Smedley in any of his writings, but Hu Shi did. ‘Zhimo and I know her well,’ he confided to his diary in 1930, but ‘we don’t get on with her’ because she was an apologist for the Soviet Union and the Indian Nationalist movement. Her radical politics apart (she was enamoured of the Chinese Communist Party and was later revealed to have been a spy for the Soviet Union), he also took exception, he said, to her deep prejudices and to some of the ‘laughable’ nonsense she wrote.4 Xu Zhimo was not interested in leftist politics, or in politics in general, for that matter, though it would be strange if he did not harbour patriotic feelings, ever present in the May Fourth generation, at the start of his studies in America. It was 1918, just a year before student protestors took to the streets in Beijing. At Clark University (in Massachusetts) and then at Columbia, where his MA dissertation was on the status of women in China, he believed he could be of use to a new China. As his father had prospered in manufacturing and banking, it had seemed a good idea to study economics and political theory. Crossing the Atlantic to England in the autumn of 1920 and spending two years in Cambridge University changed all that. In America, he wrote, he had remained unenlightened, an ignoramus, but ‘Cambridge opened my eyes. Cambridge stirred my desire for knowledge, hatched my self-consciousness.’5 He had gone there in pursuit of Bertrand Russell, whose writings had galvanized him and with whom he had hoped to study. He had miscalculated, it turned out, for Russell was not back from a visit to China and what’s more he had been expelled from his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, because the Fellows there frowned upon his pacifist views during the First World War and upon his recent divorce. Fortunately, Xu had the great good luck to meet Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson who, as a fellow of King’s College, got Xu admitted as a special student allowed to audit classes and use the libraries. Dickinson had visited China in 1913, seven years before he took Xu Zhimo under his wing. He had rhapsodized about it from Beijing to his future biographer E. M. Forster, who had accompanied him as far as India: ‘China! So gay, friendly, beautiful, sane, Hellenic, choice, human.’6 ‘Hellenic’ was the last word Xu would use of it. Indeed, if only it were Hellenic was the wish that underlay the lecture, entitled ‘Art and Life,’ which he gave, in English, to a bemused audience of university students in Beijing shortly after his return to China. Dickinson idealized Chinese culture in the way many people oppose industrial progress to tradition and materialism to spiritual values. Dickinson was influential not only academically but in public life as well: he was one of the first proponents of the League of Nations. And it was at tea in London with the director of the Chinese League of Nations Association, Lin Changmin (1876–1925), that Xu met him. Lin had brought with him to London his sixteen-year-old daughter,

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Phyllis Lin Huiyin (1904–55), and with this lovely and talented creature Xu fell head over heels in love. Two obstacles stood in his way. First, he was married, and of the three women in his life alluded to earlier, Lin came second, the first being his wife Zhang Youyi (1900– 89). Xu’s parents had chosen her for him, or rather one of her brothers had picked him after an impressively well-written school composition by Xu had caught his eye. Xu’s father had consented quickly, for Zhang Youyi’s family ranked high academically and socially, with a number of distinguished brothers in government and banking. As for Xu’s qualifications, they couldn’t not have seemed more than satisfactory. He appeared destined for a charmed life: family affluence and academic brilliance apart, he was one of those people everyone found lovable, with an irresistible sunniness about him that contrasted sharply with the trademark melancholy of Yu Dafu, with whom, it so happened, he was at the same school in Hangzhou, and in the same class. The wedding duly took place in 1915, when Xu was eighteen and Youyi fifteen, and a son was born to them in 1918, shortly before he sailed for the United States. The couple did not see each other until after Xu had left America for England. In 1921, he was settled in a rented cottage in Sawston, a village situated on the River Cam some seven miles from the university, when his wife joined him. Poor girl, she was not to know what was in store for her. Her husband was secretly exchanging daily letters with Huiyin, using a local grocer’s as a poste restante. Between wife and husband there were words, unkind on his part; and despite being pregnant with their second child, she left Sawston in the autumn of 1921 to seek refuge in Berlin. There she could be near another one of brothers, who was then studying moral philosophy at the university at Jena. Her second son was born in Berlin, but Peter, as he was named, did not survive beyond his third year. In March 1922, she received a letter from her husband asking for a divorce. His argument revolved around love and freedom, on neither of which their marriage was founded. A marriage without love could not be endured, he said. Freedom should be answered by freedom, and ‘real life,’ ‘true happiness’ and ‘true love’ were won by one’s own free self struggling for them. Since both he and she were minded to reform society and to better the lot of mankind, the letter said, they ought first to set an example themselves and, ‘evincing courage and resolution, and honouring each other’s personalities, freely dissolve our marriage, thereby ending pain and ringing in happiness.’7 It seems an extraordinary letter for anyone in Xu’s circumstances to have written; to our ears it sounds at worst self-serving and at best naïvely idealistic. Yet it is not so extraordinary when viewed against the love ideology of the time. Back in China, love had been linked to freedom for ten years now.8 And didn’t Ellen Key’s advocacy of ‘free divorce’ allow one who has ceased to love the moral as well as the legal right to withdraw from his marriage? After all, you cannot make love the basis of marriage without coming to the position that marriage should cease when love ceases, and if the

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marriage was contracted without love to begin with, then there was no point in staying married. That was the May Fourth credo, and Xu Zhimo was making it his when he broke with Youyi. So he was not a pioneer in holding those beliefs, but he was one in daring to act them out: his has rightly been called the first modern divorce in the history of China. He was the romantic prototype for a thousand aspirant love-ideologists. Many in his generation would like to have done the same but were unable to—his classmate Yu Dafu, for example, could not bring himself to divorce his wife, he pitied her so much, and indeed to do so would be to consign her irretrievably to disgrace and destitution. Youyi was of an altogether different class and mettle, however. I doubt if she thought of herself as a trailblazer when she agreed to the divorce, or ever aspired to exemplify May Fourth values, but still the divorce proved to be the making of her. She quickly came into her own. In Berlin she acquired enough competence in the German language to train as a kindergarten teacher. Clearly an extremely able person, she would become distinguished in her own right as the vice-president of the Shanghai Women’s Bank. To Xu’s parents, it was as if there had not been a divorce, for all the difference it made to the way in which they regarded her. Indeed, when the time came to divide up the family property, they formally adopted her so that she could receive the share due to a daughter. Signatures were put to the divorce papers when her husband came to see her and their newborn son in Berlin. Xu was pleased to have ‘untied the knot of vexation,’ as he put it in a poem, and to have done so amicably.9 Back in Cambridge, he savoured for the first time the pleasures of being alone, and solitariness, he writes, ‘is the first of the conditions for any kind of discovery,’ including the discovery of the self. He passed the spring (an ‘absurdly lovely’ season in England) ‘sometimes in reading, sometimes in gazing at the water [of the River Cam, which seemed to him then to be the most beautiful in the world], sometimes lying on my back and looking at the clouds, sometimes lying prone and embracing the soft warm earth.’ An evening by the river was ‘balm for the soul,’ and he was to feel nostalgic for years afterwards for those moments when evening bells tolled and the first stars pricked the sky.10 His spirit has lived on in Cambridge, and today streams of Chinese tourists make the town their destination only because Xu, upon leaving it, bade it goodbye in a famous poem. The Chinese go there to remember and intone the poem, and to have their photographs taken next to the stone that the university has allowed to be set in the rear grounds of King’s College (the ‘Backs’) to commemorate him. That was the one spring—passed in such ‘sweet solitariness,’ ‘in such sweet leisureliness’—in which he was truly free, truly happy. Yet it was simultaneously the time he felt ‘life’s suffering’ the most acutely. Lin Huiyin and her father had left England for China the autumn before. Her father, who was very fond of Xu, had been alarmed by the young man’s attentions to Huiyin, and had said in a letter to him, ‘The

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intensity of your feelings terrifies one, and Huiyin is too frightened to answer you herself. I mean no mockery [the word ‘mockery’ penned in English] and I trust you understand.’11 Xu himself quit England at the end of the summer. He came home a poet. Cambridge and his reading of English Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley played their part in making him one but it was above all his yearning for Huiyin that unstoppered his creativity. Yet, if he had looked forward to resuming his pursuit of Huiyin on home ground, his hopes would be dashed. Divorcing his wife had removed one of the two obstacles mentioned a few pages back. The other that stood in his way proved insurmountable: Huiyin was intended for another. She was promised to the future architect Liang Sicheng (1901–72), the son of no less a personage than Liang Qichao, last glimpsed in these pages arguing for the creation of a new literature as a means of renewing the Chinese people. The elder Liang was a hugely influential reformist figure, a towering thinker of whom Xu was happy to become a favoured disciple, and who, in his turn, recognized Xu’s talent and loved him dearly. Meanwhile, lecturing, writing and visiting friends and family took Xu to Beijing, Nanjing, Tianjin and Hangzhou in the year following his return. Then, in April 1924, the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour and, as two of the Indian poet-philosopher’s minders, he and Huiyin were a good deal thrown together. Xu confided to Tagore, for whom he acted as interpreter, that he was still in love with Huiyin. But as love was not supposed to flower, it was perhaps just as well that when Tagore’s Chinese hosts performed his short verse drama ‘Chitra’ at a party given in his honour in Beijing (this by way of celebrating his sixty-fourth birthday), Xu did not play Arjuna to Huiyin’s Chitra but a bystander to the love between the two, namely the God of Love who binds their hearts together. That June, Huiyin and Liang Sicheng left to study at the University of Pennsylvania, just as their respective fathers had planned. They married in 1928, again as their fathers had intended. By then, back in China, Xu too had remarried. Scandal swirled about the wedding as the bride, Lu Xiaoman, was a socialite still married to her first husband when, at the end of 1924, Xu Zhimo fell in love with her. During their courtship, her husband, who was a graduate of Princeton and West Point (the United States military academy), was out of harm’s way serving as chief of police in Harbin, Manchuria, leaving May, as she was also called, to her social whirl in Beijing. Rumour and stories did the rounds, like the one of her mother confiscating Xu’s presents and letters, obliging May to sneak out in the early hours to post her replies herself. Xu was free, but the fact that she was not made him complicit and both tainted in the eyes of all save his closest friends. Some gesture was needed from him if gossip were to stop; he made it by going on a long journey to Europe. Love letters that he sent her from Paris, Florence, London and so on were the most passionate ever written by a Chinese, bar none. One day to be published, they would be an eye-opener

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to the thousands of young Chinese who thought that one had to be a Westerner to love so violently. May’s was a dramatically pioneering divorce in that it was asked for by a woman, not a man, and not on the grounds of any misbehaviour on the part of the husband either (not even concubines were involved). It was thoroughly modern, a bid for love. To young people, it was a matter of keeping faith with the new love ideology, but an older generation could not see it as anything other than immoral. Scarcely anyone in that generation approved of the wedding that followed on October 3, 1926, neither Xu’s parents nor his mentor and patron, Liang Qichao, who had been prevailed upon by Hu Shi to lend it a show of support by acting as chief witness. Hu Shi’s wife had kicked up a fuss about her husband’s involvement—she would drag him down from the dais if he were to officiate at the wedding, she had said in front of other people, deeply embarrassing him. He had kept a straight face and changed the subject at the time but had later told her off in private: There are issues about which you are very perceptive and others that you simply do not grasp . . . When it comes to matters relating to young men and women, there are certain things that you will never completely understand.12

She would never understand romantic love, in other words. Liang Qichao made his disapproval more than clear when he rose to make the speech expected of him at the wedding and, instead of congratulating the newlyweds and wishing them well, he astonished all those present by roundly telling Xu off. According to the recollections of one of the guests, Liang chastised Xu and May for failing to be ‘single-focussed in their emotions,’ marrying once, divorcing, then marrying again; and he made a wish that this marriage be their last.13 Liang reported all this to his son and Huiyin in America, sending them a long letter in which was enclosed the script of his speech. His letter was one long sigh: Xu Zhimo is really intelligent, and I love him surpassingly; seeing him fall this time to the point of drowning, I have expended no little effort to rescue him . . . I worry that, were he now to be cast out by society, he’d be driven to take his own life. I also see that, with such a companion [as May], his future suffering will be limitless, hence the blow I delivered, it being my hope to make him come to his senses (though I also fear that this would be difficult), and to save him from being worn to a frazzle.

His letter also bemoaned the way young people gave in to their impulses without a care for the protective ‘net of propriety,’ not realizing that to do so was actually to fall into an ensnaring ‘net of misery’ of their own making. ‘How regrettable, how pitiful,’ Liang thought their imprudence.14 Things did go badly for Xu Zhimo after his marriage to May. The world, in which he had not so far interested himself much, was pressing in on him: China was headed

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for revolution (this came in 1927, as we saw in the previous chapter, in the form of Chiang Kai-shek’s expedition against the warlords and his putsch against his erstwhile communist allies), so a refuge from the depredations in the country round about had to be sought in the foreign-shielded parts of Shanghai. Xu likened his feeling of oppression at the political struggle around him to having all his pores stopped up by wax poured over his body.15 What also oppressed him was that for the first time in his life, he was short of money. He was unable, and unwilling too, to count on his father, who was hit by the depression and robbed of his house in Zhejiang by local desperadoes. In any case, Xu Zhimo thought it high time he stood on his own two feet.16 He applied himself to teaching assignments at various universities to keep his wife in funds; to the extent that May was a big spender, with expensive tastes, she did, as Liang Qichao’s wedding speech had portended, wear Xu out. One of these expensive tastes was for opium-smoking, which she claimed she took up to palliate her various maladies, chief of them a heart condition that might have been tachycardia. She was introduced to the habit by her doctor, masseur and, it was whispered, her lover, Weng Ruiwu. Weng was something of a society figure, welcomed in many circles in Shanghai as a healer, art collector and amateur opera singer— a playboy, in other words. She did grow very dependent on Weng, whose ministrations she found she could not do without, and with whom she had interests in painting and singing in common besides. Whether or not they were lovers, she did move in with him upon Xu Zhimo’s death, and after his wife died, the two lived together as man and wife. No one who saw them together in the 1950s could doubt his devotion; one who did in 1949, when May would have been forty-six, has described her as pale, wan, toothless, her hair messy and her gums black from opium.17 Her dependency on Weng was one reason she refused to join her husband in Beiping (as Beijing was then called) when he took up a professorship in English at the university there in early 1931. Xu’s urgings fell on deaf ears, and though he could hardly afford the airfare, he began to commute between Shanghai and Beiping. For this many would blame her, for had she moved to Beiping, would Xu have hazarded the air travel that would kill him? On November 19, 1931, a small chartered plane on which he was glad to have been given a free pass, flew him from Shanghai to Beiping. The plane smashed into the side of a mountain near Jinan, in the northeastern province of Shandong, in a heavy fog and all on board were killed.

Xu Zhimo has gone down in history as a great lover.18 In what sense he was that can be approached from three angles of enquiry: what do his words and deeds tell us about the love ideology of his time? What was his relationship to the two women he loved? And, since he was a poet, how did his creative life bear on his love life? The three angles

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are ultimately inseparable, but I shall nonetheless adopt them one at a time in what follows, using as my guide Hu Shi’s essay, ‘In Memoriam: Xu Zhimo.’ If one thing explains the last ten years of Xu’s life, Hu Shi has written, it is his simple belief in the possibility of merging three ideals in himself: freedom, love and beauty. If they sum up that core of faith and naïvity in Xu from which his idealism sprang, these three ‘big words,’ as Hu Shi has dubbed them, are also signposts to my three angles of enquiry. Xu Zhimo lived out the freedom, including the freedom of love, striven for by the May Fourth generation; he staked his life on love; and there was no separating his longings from their aesthetic expression in poetry. Seen from the first angle, he seemed at first sight to be little different from others of his generation in his belief in freedom of choice and the love-based marriage. Yet a closer look will reveal that in insisting upon divorce he went further than any of the others in acting out his belief. His friend Hu Shi stayed married and kept his affairs a secret. His classmate Yu Dafu committed bigamy. Lu Xun refused to consummate his marriage to one woman and entered into a common-law marriage with another. Lu Xun and Yu Dafu opened themselves to the charge that, for all their condemnation of the ‘one husband, many wives’ system, their liaisons were concubinage by another name. Xu Zhimo made a cleaner break, ending his arranged marriage by divorce. Love was the spur, though it no doubt helped that Youyi was a modern woman, from a successful, high-achieving family, whom divorce would not automatically consign to the dust heap. She and he remained friends, writing to each other more frequently and if anything more amicably than when they were married.19 When Xu looked back nearly eight, nine years on, he noted that though attitudes were now more enlightened, you could still see mutually discontented married couples wherever you looked. Now that the great big ‘hat’ of Confucian propriety had become ‘ragged enough for heads to peek out from under it to seek the sunlight and air of freedom,’ he wrote, what had ‘not been a problem for thousands of years’ (since people simply did what convention dictated unthinkingly when there was no choice in the matter), ‘has suddenly become a problem, and a big problem at that. In a narrow sense it is a problem of marriage, but in a broad sense it is a question of the relations between men and women.’ Yet people are slow, too much creatures of habit and custom, to put their hard-won wisdom into practice, maintaining the fiction of a happy marriage while knowing full well that it is in fact killing them—that so ‘unnatural an intimate relationship is equivalent to a slow form of murder or suicide.’ The result is that ‘the elements that make up society are largely unnatural, crooked, twisted, hung-up, eccentric and variously abnormal men and women! That is clearly not the road to a brighter, healthier and freer collective life.’ Added up, the human cost and effort wasted is enough to build goodness knows ‘how many more pyramids or Panama Canals.’

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So what we must do to lessen conflicts between men and women, he continued, is first, to disseminate knowledge of psychology, physiology and even sexology. Second, fully use such knowledge to help us build or reform our actual lives. Third, demand more of couples who are headed for marriage, making the steps towards it stricter and harder. And finally, make the way to the dissolution of marriage simpler and easier. Only by doing all this, he said, will those ‘twisted, hung-up, deranged, cranky, awkward couples shrink to a number small enough to become museum exhibits instead of the common run; only then might we hope that grown-up boys and girls will enjoy wholesome, happy and natural lives.’20 His own divorce seems easy enough from the way I have recounted it, but in fact it was not all plain sailing. His parents were displeased, naturally, but they were not the only people to censure his action. There was his mentor Liang Qichao, who was sufficiently upset by the news to have stayed up to 3 a.m. composing a long letter to him. Avuncular in tone, it was just the sort of letter you would expect to receive, and to bristle at, from someone on the other side of the generation gap. Liang knew that ‘the sanctity of love is what today’s youth rave about (and I don’t wish to stand against current attitudes),’ but why single this one thing out from all others? The amorously emotional type is subject to fantasies, he added, and such fantasies rarely come true. ‘Oh Zhimo,’ he sighed, ‘Since when is the world perfect? . . . It is only when you make it your life’s attitude to desist from seeking perfection that you begin to experience the subtler things in life.’21 Liang did not speak as a man who wanted to marry his son to the girl Xu had been in love with, and if he had intended a ‘hands-off ’ message to his son’s rival, this was not conveyed by his letter. He was genuinely concerned to warn Xu off throwing his life away on something so illusory as love. Xu had his name to make, he suggested, and this was the time to make it. But if Xu persisted in chasing dreams and came a cropper over and over again, then he would lose his taste for life. To die in frustration and anonymity is one thing; what is even more frightening is if Xu should fall into a half-alive and half-dead state, helpless to bring himself back from the brink of ruin. ‘Oh Zhimo, don’t not be fearful! Don’t not be fearful!’ But there was no meeting of minds on this, however well-attuned the old realist and the young idealist might be on other matters. The last thing the young man needed was a lesson in elderly resignation to imperfection. He was being told to put up with not always getting what he wanted from life, but the kind of love he had set his heart on was of a different order, as he made it more than clear in his highly emotional reply to his patron. He denied the charge that he was hurting others for the sake of his own happiness. That he braved society’s reproach and pitted his all against it, he wrote, was to accomplish three things: ‘to calm my conscience, to consolidate my personality, and to save my soul.’ He went on:

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Among men, who does not seek conventional virtue? Who would not rather be satisfied with things as they are? Who does not fear difficulty and danger? Yet surely those who break out of that which hems them in are not so inclined?

Then Xu took on all comers with this declaration: I shall search amidst the sea of humanity for the one and only companion of my soul. If I find her, that is my fortune. If not, let that be my fate.

Nor was this all. It is impossible to miss the idealism in the next exclamation, ‘Alas, teacher! I have striven to the very depths of my soul to culture a lustrous pearl out of my ideals; I nourish it with the hot blood brimming my heart, so that its brightness may irradiate my innermost spirit.’22 Liang could only think Xu had gone off the rails, and said as much when he reported Xu’s wedding to his children and future daughter-in-law. They would have smiled at their father’s description of their dear friend. There was nothing much wrong with his disciple, Liang thought, he was pure-hearted enough; the only thing is that ‘he’s lovemad, not quite right psychologically, with a mental aberration to answer for.’23 Xu was indeed singular if not aberrant, as well as temperamentally unfitted for conformity. And yet he was not out of tune with his time. If I were shown his divorce letter to Youyi without any clues whatsoever as to time, I could still date it to the May Fourth period. The pointers are the oft-heard contemporary terms that stand out from the letter like exclamation marks: ‘love’ (lian’ai), ‘free divorce’ and not least ‘personality.’ Elsewhere he has said that, mutual love apart, mutual ‘respect of personality’ is essential to conjugal happiness. Yes, he admits, the notion that husband and wife should respect each other is not unfamiliar to the Chinese; he cites a Classical set phrase used routinely of couples in a cordial marriage—that they ‘respect each other like honoured guests.’ However, to Xu, there is much more to it than that: while the Chinese emphasize etiquette and form, respecting personality involves a regard for the whole of each other’s individual character.24 In its first clear May Fourth feminist airing, ‘personality’ was linked to ‘individualism’ and ‘freedom’ and pointed up by Nora, the role model for emancipated Chinese womanhood. Until she asserts herself and quits her ‘doll’s house,’ Nora is denied the chance to give full play to her personality and individualism (the latter in its dual aspect of free will and the responsibility that goes with it).25 Nora’s example was what Xu Zhimo held up before the still-married May when he urged her to fight her family’s opposition to her leaving her husband for Xu: Soul has to be saved, flesh can’t be trampled on forever because it itself partakes of spirit. In short, the time has come. Assert your personality [this in English] . . . Soul and flesh can’t absolutely be separated. Why else would Nora leave hearth and home and children and venture into the unknown? She does it for the sake of honouring her own personality and natural disposition.26

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Asserting ‘personality’ had become obligatory for May Fourth individualists, but in Xu’s hands it became a vision of what it was to be a human being. Freedom demanded that each must find his own ideals. And these ideals are assuredly not Chinese ones— come to think of it, what are the standard Chinese personality traits these days, Xu wondered? As a Confucian nation, the Chinese used to extol wisdom, virtue and bravery. Here Xu must have had in mind the passage in the Analects of Confucius which goes: ‘The wise are free from perplexity; the virtuous from anxiety; and the brave from fear.’27 But today all you see as you look around you are dullness and stupidity, cruelty and cowardice. ‘No sooner do idealism and personality reveal themselves than they are either beaten down or derided.’28 To him the supremely ideal personality was Rabindranath Tagore, he whose ‘masterpiece is his own personality.’29 ‘Personality is an unmistakable reality,’ Xu said in an essay about the Indian sage, whose own book Personality the Chinese read in a 1921 translation.30 Xu worshipped Tagore, with whom he became fast friends. He visited the latter’s ashram in India in 1928 and Tagore in turn stayed with him and May in their house in Shanghai. In fact, as someone who blamed Chinese tradition for ‘the death of true personality,’ Xu could not have found all that much common ground with Tagore, who stood for the wisdom of the East against the machine civilization of the West. Yet to Xu this was neither here nor there, and while his Chinese contemporaries, who could not wait to catch up with the West, rejected Tagore for much the same reasons they spurned Confucius, Xu did not—it was the sum total of the man, his poetic personality, his compassion and love for fellow human beings, that he revered.

As he watched Tagore bid goodbye to his Chinese hosts at the railway station in Beijing in May 1924, tears sprang to Xu Zhimo’s eyes. Tagore had to cut short his lectures, so much hostility had they provoked among young Chinese audiences there; those progressives could only think of his preaching of oriental spiritualism as a call to return China to barbarity, the very barbarity they were hurling themselves against at that very moment. Xu likened his own sense of defeat to that felt by Napoleon at seeing his once proud but now ragged soldiers devastated by Russia.31 He was heartsick too at having to part from Lin Huiyin, who until now had accompanied Tagore everywhere; the following month she was leaving for America with Liang Sicheng, and she and Xu would not see each other again for four years. He started to scribble a note but his train pulled out before he could give it to her. The unfinished note reads: ‘Parting! How is that to be believed? Just thinking of it unhinges me. So many ties—who could possibly sever them? My eyes once more see black.’32 Huiyin’s marriage to Liang Sicheng can’t not be counted a success. They had a son and a daughter, and they were partners in their life’s work, which was to use the modern

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concepts and methods that they had acquired in America to discover, document and preserve China’s architectural heritage. But she was as much a poet as architect, and she understood the place she occupied in Xu Zhimo’s heart. She was his muse when it most mattered. He himself has said that it was a deep despondency working its way into his being that started him writing, and nobody who knew about his time in Cambridge need be told that he had felt forlorn from Huiyin’s disappearance from England. After he died, Huiyin confided to Hu Shi why she thought it was perhaps no bad thing that Xu loved and lost. I am . . . not ashamed of having had a tortuous history . . . I feel that though it may seem unfortunate, this thing, if looked at from the point of view of the spirit, could have been the reason Zhimo became a poet. At the same time it helped me by putting my personality and knowledge [of life] through the mill. In a way [this and other italicized words in English] Zimo did not regret having had such a painful history . . . Zhimo awakened me; he became a stimulant in my life, and however resentful, happy, sorry, sad or wretched it made me, I feel no regret, but nor am I proud that I was so unbending, or ashamed.33

In 1927, when she was studying in Philadelphia and was feeling low and lonely, she re-read his old love letters, the ones that he wrote to her from Cambridge. To Hu Shi, who came to lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, she confided, Please tell Zhimo how lonely I’ve been these last three years, and how disappointed, but also how I’ve managed to find consolation and satisfaction by myself. Tell him that I don’t blame him at all, that I hope he would forgive me for my failure to understand—misunderstanding is unavoidable really at this great distance. He ought to forgive me too. Yesterday, I read all his old letters to me, and I now truly and thoroughly understand the old Zhimo.34

On December 7, 1931, she mourned him in a memorial essay, and again on the fourth anniversary of his death in 1935. On the earlier occasion she wrote also to Hu Shi: ‘I’ve been missing him dreadfully these past several days, but were he still alive, I doubt if I’d treat him any differently—in practice it’s all too impossible. Maybe it’s because I don’t love him enough, or maybe it’s proof that I love my current family above all else.’ And she added in parenthesis, ‘My upbringing has been an old-fashioned one, and I can’t change into any new type of person. All I want is not to let people down— to be worthy of my parents, husband (someone who loves me and who is extremely good to me), children, family and so on.’35 For Xu, love had entered a young breast, never to be forgotten, but for all the enduring affinity he felt for Huiyin, there was recognition that the sensation of a light brightening could not be more than that of the moment. In a light but favourite poem of his, ‘A Chance Encounter,’ Huiyin is saluted as a cloud whose shadow falls on him as it passes across the sky:

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May could not hope to compete with that ideal love whose nature is that it cannot be realized. She felt herself to be inferior: though she regretted their not meeting earlier, she did not think Xu would look at her twice had they met before she was married, so much was he in love with Huiyin still. ‘I don’t have anything like her allure,’ May thought, ‘I was but a country girl four years before, how could I have hoped to capture his heart?’37 She was disconcerted to learn from a mutual friend that Huiyin and even Xu Zhimo had looked down on her at first. Her pride was hurt, naturally, yet May could not help thinking that in rejecting Xu’s love Huiyin was being unfair to him—for it was usually the man who spurned the woman!38 His friends did not hesitate to tell her, ‘Such love as Zhimo has for Huiyin has never been seen before. He might not marry, because he can’t love another, and even if he does it will not be to the same degree. So it’s hard luck on whoever comes after.’39 May was more than aware of Xu’s love for Huiyin, but she thought he loved her, May, too, though with a different kind of love; in his loneliness and sense of frustration, he was the better comforted, May thought, by the solace she could offer him. But suppose his hopes for a future with Huiyin were revived, wouldn’t she, May, be left high and dry? Those were the anxieties she confided to the diary which she had started writing at his suggestion, and which the two had agreed would be for his eyes only. To get her started on it, he had suggested that she wrote the entries in the form of letters to him. She did do so, but not consistently, and ‘he’ was sometimes the unnamed husband from whom she was trying to hide the affair, and sometimes Xu, whom she would at other moments appeal to in the second person. ‘You,’ she wrote, addressing Xu in the second person, ‘have taught me what love is; only from that do I enjoy a moment’s happiness, a savour of sweetness and sourness, an indescribable solace!’40 Had she not had the luck to meet Xu, she told her diary, she might have never known love; she would have passed all her days in a state of unawareness like girls of earlier times. Society would have buried her natural disposition did she not summon up the courage to defy it. Now, it is as if black clouds have parted to reveal a blue sky, so why not live with vim and vigour instead of apathy? Her mother did not understand her, and why would she, there was an age difference of twenty years between them, a period

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of incalculable change and progress? Her mother’s retort was that she, May, was asking for trouble—‘Why, instead of having a comfortable life, do you imitate the conduct of people in Western novels, going on and on about love and senseless things like the suffering of the spirit?’41 ‘Love’ is not a word she knew, May confided to her diary. ‘I was muddled,’ but now that she knows love, there is no going back to how she used to be.42 Here and there in her diary she would break into ungrammatical English (‘I am longing for you . . . I hold your photo hard against my bosom and slept with it. I kissed it I don’t know how many times,’ are some of her less shaky sentences in English.) As well as the private lessons that she was receiving in painting, the diary registered the ups and downs of her mood. Tears were a regular occurrence, as they perhaps were for delicate girls of the time, but whether her weepiness came of her poor health or self-pity, it is hard to tell. In 1925 Xu was, as mentioned earlier, travelling in Europe, and she sometimes cried at the separation and at the hopelessness of their situation. There appeared to be no escape from her predicament, that of having to sacrifice a true love to her mother’s insistence that she kept her loveless marriage going if she was not to besmirch her family reputation, to say nothing of bringing ruin upon herself. The thought that death might be an escape could not fail to present itself to the overwrought diarist, who sounded as though she would have gone to pieces did she not succumb instead to her palpitations (the abnormal heartbeat for which she would eventually be treated with opium). At a particularly bad attack of those, Xu hurried back from Europe to be by her side. May desperately needed to be respected, but the opinions pronounced on her were not by and large warm, the cold draught of Liang Qichao’s disapproval being a good case in point. Impassioned though Xu’s letters to her were, they too betrayed disdain for her life of dances, dinner parties and superficial pleasures; this was revealed in the way he urged study and self-improvement upon her.43 Perhaps being told she was beautiful was enough to give her self-confidence. Yet if this was the contemporary opinion, it would not be that today; I doubt if a careful study of her photographs would lead many to the conclusion that she was ‘startlingly beautiful,’ as one Western historian has described her.44 Of course, standards of beauty are historically and culturally variable, and she might have had the sort of looks that appealed to her contemporaries; she certainly knew how to care for her skin and to show herself to best advantage with make-up and fashion, but even so it is hard to see how she could have stood out. Unless it was a question of his being in love with love, what Xu saw in her quite eluded me, especially as it was not a case of mind meeting mind. Then I saw her paintings, and at a stroke the rather dull image I had of her brightened. Reproduced in a book that reprints her diary and his love letters to her, they are breathtakingly accomplished.45 They are in the so-called gongbi style of traditional Chinese painting; this demands a meticulous technique and highly detailed

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brushstrokes. May’s mastery of this technique is apparent, but what is equally obvious is that were she a technician purely, she could not have painted with so much taste in regard to colour and composition. There is nothing in these paintings of the littlegirlishness of her diary. Granted, they were executed after Xu’s death and she could have greatly matured as an artist in the meantime, but even so the tastefulness must have been there from the start. His comment on seeing samples of her work was that she had intelligence to spare but insufficient application. Were she to keep at it, he said, she needn’t fear not achieving fame.46 Her diary entries lasted for only just over a year, and for a glimpse of her feelings after she married Xu we have less to go on, in fact only his letters to her. His 1931 letters to her from Beiping make sad reading, for it is obvious that she had gone cold on him. Saddest of all is the one he sent her on July 8, about four months before he died. While his ardour appeared little diminished, her feelings had clearly dulled. After a long parting, he writes, oughtn’t they to show how glad they are to see each other again? Yet no sooner does he enter their house in Shanghai than his hopes of a hug and a kiss are dashed, for she doesn’t even bother to get up from her bed. ‘When I come back this time, how about us going in for Western style and doing a bit of hugging and kissing—it’s only human, after all . . . I don’t expect you to meet me at the station, but can’t you let me see warmth in your face?’ And it is not as though she were an emotionally reserved person, he observes with a remembrance of past rapture. He  does not understand, he continues, why becoming man and wife should make them grow more distant: ‘It’s not right, I’m a person driven by feeling; should I pour cold water over myself because you can’t accept all of my warmth?’47 Love fades, or at least limerence does, but someone like Xu Zhimo would find it hard to accept that that is all there is to it. He was someone who, with ‘hot blood brimming [his] heart,’ would dare all to find ‘the one and only companion of [his] soul.’ He did realize that ‘love is one thing, marriage another,’ and he was one of many Chinese to quote the Western saying, ‘marriage is the tomb of love.’ A first love overwhelms like ‘a hurricane and tempest,’ he said in his essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s collection of forty-four love poems, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese,’ but who save a few could maintain such love after marriage? Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning could and did, Xu said, and extolled the two English poets as an example of a couple who were wife and husband at the same time as they were lovers and soulmates.48 Sadly, his own wife May was not the sort to live up to such an ideal, and indeed she did not even like it when, as was his wont, he waxed poetic.49 Less than five years into their marriage, he wrote to her in English: ‘I may not love you as passionately as before but I love you all the more sincerely and truly . . . And may this brief separation bring about another gush of passionate love from both sides.’50

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In August 1925, he wrote a poem dedicated to his mother, whom he adored (see Chapter 8). For twenty and more years, it says, he had loved her with a true and loyal love, and yet he did not know it: ‘Love, this word that doesn’t trip off the tongue, wasn’t on my lips then . . . only recently have I grasped what love is: not the innocent love of the child, but adult love . . . that inextinguishable blaze at the entrance gates of life.’ Now that he has grasped it and found personal happiness, body and soul, ‘your child can love, yes, can love you with double the strength.’51 It is not the same thing as the filial piety immemorially emphasized by the Chinese; ‘filial piety is incomplete,’ not ‘the whole of love.’ In making this distinction between love and filiality, Xu’s poem calls to mind similar remarks Lu Xun makes in his 1919 essay, ‘How to Be a Father Today.’ ‘Love alone is real’ and part of the natural order, Lu  Xun has said, urging a reconceptualization of the parent-child relationship in instinctual and unconditional terms rather than as something denatured, morally owed by one to the other. Xu Zhimo goes one step further towards a Western mindset not only by bringing the soul into it but by linking a child’s love to romantic love. He went further than his contemporaries not only in foregrounding love but in the extremeness of his belief that Chinese tradition crushed it: Love . . . is the most significant of all things. And yet this simple truth has never been recognized in the sickeningly long history of China and even today my personal experience has only discovered two classes of people in China . . . : namely cynics who despise love and cowards that are afraid of it.52

Philistine Chinese convention, he said in his lecture on ‘Art and Life,’ stood in the way of men becoming themselves to the fullest extent because it had squashed the natural thrust of life and, so crushed, Chinese life could engender neither love nor art. Chinese tradition could do with a Renaissance (though perhaps the change it is undergoing right now is that), and with spiritualization along Platonic lines. We Chinese, he says, are ‘too rational and reasonable for passionate love, as for passionate religious thoughts.’ Love should be as Plato has it, a ‘divine madness,’ and as the Catholic Church has it, a sacrament. It is ‘transcendental and transfiguring,’ but the customary Chinese approach is too matter-of-fact for it to be elevated to the spiritual realm of the ideal. The Chinese love of moderation (the Confucian Golden Mean), of compromise, is to Xu but cowardice, shallowness, flatness and laziness, inimical to an intensified living of life.53 Against ethical standards, which are primary in Chinese life, he pits aesthetic ones, judging it to be of surpassing importance to strive for beauty (the beauty that is crucial, as we saw in Chapter 3, to Plato’s ‘ladder of love’), there being ‘no better way of attaining to the good than through being beautiful.’ This is the Platonist equivalence between the beautiful and the good that was passed down to later generations by followers of Plato in the Italian Renaissance, the Neoplatonists. It was a Neoplatonist

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theory, the reader may recall, that the ultimate goal of love is reaching God—the love that originates with God and is ignited in the soul by beauty. Neoplatonic thought is discernible in the poetry of nineteenth-century Romantics like Shelley and Wordsworth, both heroes of Xu Zhimo. Directly as well as indirectly then, Neoplatonist ideals inspired Xu. He must have first explored them in Cambridge, perhaps in conversation with Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who had written his dissertation on Neoplatonism. Although Xu later winced at the views espoused by his younger self, as writers usually do at their juvenilia, the classic Neoplatonic vision of love and beauty never deserted him, and he remained the most ‘soulful’ of all of his generation, more inclined to a spiritual conception of love than to a sexual one. Soul merging with soul was an image to which he was much given; it represents the apogee of mutual understanding.54 Yet he did not go as far as platonizing physicality out of love. He has written in his diary, ‘The spring of love is not necessarily the body, but when love reaches the body, it arrives at its apogee.’55 And I have earlier quoted him on the indivisibility of flesh and spirit. Xu could not absorb the European heritage to the extent he did without having to have a place for Christianity in his thinking. He did indeed draw from the Bible, not only words and images but names like ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ and ‘Calvary’ (this last, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion in Jerusalem, is the title of one of his poems). And the manifesto he wrote to a literary magazine which he launched in 1928, one that he named the Crescent Moon Monthly, is prefaced, in English, with a quotation from the Book of Genesis, ‘And God said, let there be light: and there was light.’ (A second quotation is from Shelley, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’)56 Though he was not alone among contemporary writers to adopt Christian vocabulary (his classmate Yu Dafu did the same), what made Xu exceptional among his peers was the degree of his temperamental and aesthetic sympathy with Christianity. He was not a Christian, and I doubt if he believed in the existence of the God whom Christians worship, yet he would sometimes appeal to this deity as though his faith were not in question. Urging May to challenge society’s denial of her right to make love the central experience of her life, he told her that she should fight for it—she owed it to herself, to her newly discovered love, and to God.57 ‘No moment on earth is more beautiful,’ he has also said, than when two souls of their own free will merge in the sight of God. And because their hearts have once met, he would have no cause for complaint if they were to be sundered, for ‘God’s purpose is everywhere clear, he is forever just in the way he deals with offenders; we can’t ever criticize, ever blame.’ 58 He gave no indication of ever needing the customary consolation of the religious, namely the possession of an afterlife, though there is a promise of eternity and beauty in the death depicted in the longest of his poems, ‘Love’s Inspiration.’ In it a dying girl makes her confession in the arms of a man whom she has secretly and hopelessly loved for years, and who at last comes to her:

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Death itself I long ago gazed on. On that day when the bond of love Was formed in my heart, that day I saw The realm, splendid, eternal, of death. Gladly would I surrender, for death Is the birth of freedom and glory. From that time forth I scorned my body, Disdained the vanity of this world. I looked only for a more enduring Measure of time to receive my breath, When the glittery stars should be my eyes, My hair, a sheen at the sky’s edge, The disarray of the tinted clouds, And my arms, my breast, borne on the wind’s Whirling, free against my brow, And the waves dashing my legs, from each Surging rising a mystic aura. With these, the lightning for my thought, Flashing its dragon-dance on the horizon, My voice the thunder, suddenly breaking To wake the spring, to wake new life. Ah, beyond thought, beyond compare Is the inspiration, the power of love!59

When her temporal life ends, the girl is released by the power of love from her scorned body and freed, gloriously, into physical union with the cosmos. Death is approached in a mood of anticipation of a time more enduring than the span of temporal life. When scholars of Chinese literature read these lines, no comparison seems so instructive as between them and the stanza in Keats’s ‘Ode to the Nightingale.’ This is the stanza with the famous line, ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death’ and, further on, ‘Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .’ Of the English Romantic poet’s work Xu was an accomplished translator and eloquent commentator.60 In his essay on the ode, Xu writes of the transfiguring moment at which, ‘at the height of ecstasy, [the poet’s] soul reaches out to infinite release and freedom . . . Such a perishing into abstraction would itself be the birth of eternal bliss.’ In contrast with finite life, Xu says of Keats’s vision: Death is limitless, a transcendence, an intimate union with the endless flow of the spirit . . . Ideals in life are realized only in part, only relatively, but in death they are brought to full and absolute harmony. For in the utter freedom of the realm of death, all that was in discord is given accord, all that was incomplete is given completion.61

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That death is not a cause for only sorrow, and that there is a beauty, order and harmony in it, is a Romantic theme which Xu had introjected from not only Keats but such other English Romantic poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom he had also translated (Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy Gray, or Solitude,’ and Coleridge’s ‘Love’).62 And when I said ‘introjected’ I meant he had taken it into himself, not only as part of his aesthetic creed but as part of himself. There is no separating the life of the imagination from real life, the poet from the person, in his confession to May that he contemplates a love-death with her. ‘Don’t let me frighten you,’ he tells her, ‘but I sometimes think of taking you with me to the absolute stillness and extinction of death to realize perfect love, to find the one light in the pervasive dark.’63 True love is to him love worth dying for, the willingness for self-sacrifice a measure of its authenticity. Love is ‘a matter of life and death, a matter that transcends life and death—and when it arrives at the realm of truth, then it is sacred, it is inviolate.’64 A number of the letters that he sent May during his European tour in 1925 bring up the topic of the consummation of their love in death. One does not have to strain to see that he was talking of their being united in a Liebestod, or love-death—not as the literary topos so greatly favoured by Romantics but, extraordinarily, as a proposition to be acted out, for real, with May! His references were, as usual, European ones, and the two love-death exemplars that he cited are the usual suspects: Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Yesterday, he told May in his letter of June 25, 1925 from Paris, he went to hear Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. He reported, ‘The music was excellent, the singing too—I felt a chilled excitement all over me.’ And when, in the third act, Isolde arrives to be with the dying Tristan, ‘wearing a long-sleeved dress of pale blue silk gauze,’ for a moment Xu was beguiled into thinking that it was his own May, ‘come to take me body and soul in her arms—and in that instant I was chilled to the bone, believing myself to be the Tristan of the drama!’ The opera, he went on to explain, was the supreme Liebestod drama, but did not tell May the story except to say that the love of Tristan and Isolde is doomed because they live in a world which cannot allow it and ‘they have to die, to look to realizing an absolute love in death.’ ‘What an earthshattering concept,’ he exclaimed, ‘how magnificent, how wildly passionate, and what soul-stirring music!’ He would like to take May to see the drama one day, and to talk to her about it in greater detail, but for now he is sending her the libretto, which she could take a look at—‘it is not long’—because once ‘you understand the opera’s meaning, you will grasp the plane attained by love when it is at its loftiest, most transcendent and most sacred.’65 Had he told her the story, she would have seen one similarity between herself and Isolde—their love is adulterous. When the drama begins, Tristan is taking Isolde to Cornwall for a political marriage with his uncle King Marke. But after drinking a love

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potion, the two fling themselves into each other’s arms and fall to panting of their longing. Married to Marke, Isolde is one night caught by her husband in the act of making love to Tristan, an act whose climax is given ravishing musical expression by the longest love duet in opera. Marke has been told of Isolde’s adultery by Melot, Tristan’s false friend, and it is by Melot’s sword that, in a fight that follows, Tristan is pierced. It is all but suicide because Tristan has offered no resistance. As the life of the wounded man hangs by a thread, Isolde hurries to his side, not only to be reunited with him but to douse his raging longing for her by joining him in blissful death. This is the climactic scene that had so shaken Xu Zhimo, as it has countless other theatregoers from before his time to ours. It closes with Isolde singing the spine-tingling aria that the world knows as ‘Liebestod’ as she wills herself out of existence. It is one of the most famous moments in opera’s history, so close does the music come to a depiction of orgasm.66 The reasons Xu Zhimo was so affected by the opera revolved around the appeal of first Wagner’s music, second the love-death idea, and third the support that it lends to his own forbidden love for May. How ‘soul-stirring’ he found the music is apparent from ‘Wagner’s Music Dramas,’ a long paean he composed in 1922 in England and published in China the following year. After exalting its effects on the ear, now excitatory, now assuaging, the eighth stanza of the poem extols the music of Wagner’s operas as a bodying forth of ‘metal-melting and piety-destroying sexual love.’67 Second, his interest in the connection between love and death, a commonplace in the Romantic imagination. ‘Liebestod’ was the title he gave to a poem he composed just a little after his paean to Wagner.68 This was three years before he had cause to contemplate extending the idea beyond the written page. The cause, and the reason he identified with Tristan, was that his love of May was being thwarted by society, the external world of codes and conventions that Tristan’s and Isolde’s love transcends. He saw the opera at a time of quandary, with no solution in sight: there was no question as yet of May defying conventional morality to the extent of divorcing her husband. He was racked with longing for her, as Tristan is for Isolde, and in the latter’s dying together his imagination caught a glimpse of his own escape. The single-sided love-death of Goethe’s Werther held no appeal for him. Nor did any kind of release into empty nothingness (or nirvana) through the denial of desire. Since Tristan and Isolde is informed by Wagner’s enthusiasm for the metaphysics of Schopenhauer and, through him, the Buddhist ideas that parallel the German philosopher’s, the extinction of desire should have been the lovers’ path to redemption or nirvana. Yet the Liebestod is frankly an eroticized death, paradoxically the thing most irreconcilable with Schopenhaurian and Buddhist salvation! But then Wagner appropriated whatever ideas suited him, and it suited him to revise Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Buddhism in such a way ‘that it did not make love an impossibility.’69

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And by love, he has made it clear, he did not mean ‘any abstract human love’ but the love that grows from the root of sexual love—that is, ‘the love that emerges from the attraction between man and woman.’70 One of conclusions to which Xu Zhimo was led by his experience of Tristan and Isolde was that ‘the resolve to undergo a great sacrifice is the only path to the realm of love.’71 In his case, the conjunction of love and death seems perplexing at first. The two ought to be opposed, since love creates life while death destroys it, and he was someone who maintained that to love passionately is to live—he was himself a good example of this attitude, evincing dynamism and intensity at the farthest remove from the stasis that death is. It seems not in the nature of such a person to seek death. Yet he was at the same time enough of a believer in the idea of the soul to look forward to the fusing of his and May’s upon death. To reiterate a remark of his quoted earlier, ‘There is no moment more beautiful than when two souls merge of their own accord before the sight of God.’ Be not afraid of death, he has told May, for ‘death is a triumph. Death is victory.’72 The other love-death he admired was that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. He was trying to impress upon May that love has to be, not merely ‘an additional necessity’ (the two words inserted in English) but something absolutely irreplaceable. It is because the love of Romeo and Juliet is absolute, unalterable and unsubstitutable that it is immortal, lofty and beautiful. For love to climax on an ideal note, Xu said, how better than to die upon a kiss? ‘The lovers die without regret, because death completes their love and takes it to the level of the utmost perfection.’73 His own death froze his love, if not at the point of the utmost perfection, at least at an instant before the spell broke. One wonders how it would have borne up, in the course of years. His friends remembered him as ‘a torch which enkindles everyone’s heart,’74 and as ‘a bundle of sympathy, a bundle of love.’75 One does not know how he might flesh out the next stage of his life except to imagine a future in which he would regard, regretfully, ruefully, and with less and less conviction, the romanticism he could no longer entirely live by. Would he consider this a reduction, not a change for the better? Mourning his friend’s death, Hu Shi characteristically went to the centre of things when he compared him to Brand, the starkly uncompromising character of Ibsen’s eponymous drama. Brand’s purity—which is also his mistake—is in thinking that other people are capable of living up to the standards he sets for himself; he demands all or nothing from himself and from others. It is painfully true that like the idealist in Brand, the lover in Xu Zhimo wanted all or none.

Eileen Chang, 1954.

15 Love Betrayed: Eileen Chang

it seemed that love no longer made her happy, from which I deduced that it was the real thing. Anita Brookner, The Rules of Engagement

‘Love is holy’ had been the slogan of her mother’s generation ‘when they first discovered love and the West.’ So observes Eileen Chang in her autobiographical novel, The Book of Change.1 Born in 1896, her mother, named Yvonne Huang Yifan, did indeed grow to womanhood just as the May Fourth movement’s enthusiasm for the West burgeoned. Yvonne was simultaneously a gentlewoman of the ancien regime and a New Woman of May-Fourth China, ‘her pair of three-inch golden lotuses straddling two eras.’2 She was a Chinese Nora who could scarcely wait to walk out on her husband. She did do so twice, the first time when her daughter Eileen was four and her son three; and the second time when, almost as soon as the law allowed it, she divorced her husband. She found her first chance to decamp when her sister-in-law, her husband’s younger and only sibling Zhang Maoyuan (1898–1991), decided to go to England to study and Yvonne could offer to accompany her there as chaperone. The sisters-in-law became bosom friends, travelling all over England together, and even skiing in the French Alps despite Yvonne’s bound feet. These two Chinese New Women travelled far—and not only in space. Such independence was inconceivable without the financial means afforded them by inherited wealth. Her grandfather a baronet, Yvonne Huang was high-born, her sister-in-law even more so. The latter’s mother (Eileen Chang’s paternal grandmother) was the daughter of Li Hongzhang, the general and statesman whom no textbook of nineteenth-century Chinese history fails to mention. This means that Eileen Chang had an aristocratic pedigree; also that she and Shao Xunmei, whose lives only grazed each other, were distantly related, an uncle of Shao’s having married another of Li Hongzhang’s daughters. Illustrious and noble, the two families were judged to be well-matched enough for Eileen’s mother and father to be betrothed to each other when they were still children. Everyone thought they would make a golden couple; as well as being of the same upper

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class, she is said to be lovely and he ‘beautiful in an ethereal way.’3 Yet the marriage turned out to be as unhappy as the bride had feared, and Eileen could not remember ever seeing her parents together except when they were quarrelling. With some gallantry, the mother later told the daughter, ‘I often thought that if he was married to somebody who was good to him he might be a different man.’4 But Yvonne was not such a person, certainly not the sort to put up with his gambling, opium smoking and whoring, the privileges of a man of his class. Actually Timothy Zhang Tingzhong might conceivably have been a different man if he had been gainfully employed. Instead, he was what the Chinese call a ‘young diehard,’ a leftover from imperial times, classically educated for a career in the state bureaucracy but left without a raison d’etre when the Qing dynasty was swept away. So there he was, a hangover from a China that was no more, still young but already well past his sell-by date. One of Eileen’s short stories, ‘A Withered Flower,’ suggests that there is something stunted, arrested, about these ‘leftovers,’ and the metaphor she uses of the one her story portrays is ‘a child’s corpse or dead foetus pickled in formaldehyde.’5 Though Timothy was heir to a great family name and fortune, he faced a future of dwindling wealth and retrenchment; the threat of destitution was ever-present. To see money leaking away and to have nothing coming in must have been frightening as well as humiliating. One of the most memorable of the sentences that Eileen has written of her father is this: ‘In all his life there was not a thing he could do, good or bad, that did not make him poorer.’6 He was that sad figure, ‘a wastrel’ not known to be ‘a big spender.’7 When he took a concubine he set her up in a separate establishment, but later, as part of an economy drive, he gave up the extra house and brought her home. She lived entirely in her bedroom, just as she would have done back in the courtesan house. Two opium cooks attended her and Timothy, fetching and carrying, and it was presently whispered in the servants’ quarters that one of the two gave injections. The news that reached the ears of other members of the Zhang clan, not only that Timothy was now using morphine alongside opium but that such was the concubine’s fiery temper that she once cracked his head open with a spittoon, was so alarming that a plot was hatched by the relatives to get rid of her at once. She did leave, but not before she had filled the carriages that took her away with the Zhangs’ furniture and silver.8 He himself was far from well. The cracked head was the least of it, the morphine wreaking still greater damage. He nearly died from an overdose of the drug, he was injecting enough of it ‘to kill a horse.’9 It was at this point that his wife and sister returned to China. His wife had been away four years, longer if he had not agreed that she could come home on her terms. The terms were that she would run his house, look after their children, but not share his bed. She would put up with his visits to singsong houses but on no account must he bring any courtesan home. She also insisted that he be weaned of morphine, but when it came to it he resisted so hard that to get him

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into a hospital, the chauffeur and bodyguard of his brother-in-law, whose help she had enlisted, as good as kidnapped him. As part of a fresh start, Yvonne moved the family to a stuccoed house of English design in Shanghai. With garden, pet dog, books, piano, flowers everywhere and, at Christmas, a tree with baubles and candles, it was as Westernized a life as she, a returnee from England, could wish for herself and her children. ‘Everything about the house seemed to me to be the epitome of beauty,’ her daughter was to write, and she came to like the very name, Yinggelan, England.10 All came to a stop when husband and wife began quarrelling over money, their raised voices and his table-pounding terrifying Eileen. It was 1930, and times had changed enough for Chinese women to be able to ask for a divorce; any earlier and they would have been denied any right to it. Divorce was ‘a modern thing to have in one’s family, like an automobile or a scientist,’ Eileen tells her readers.11 Indeed, with the adoption of the new modern civil code in 1929–31, China came to have one of the most liberal divorce laws in the world. ‘Why, she had heard China’s divorce laws were more modern than England’s,’ Eileen writes of her young self.12 She had heard right, for the Chinese divorce law surpassed the German and Swiss codes after which it was modelled, as well as the codes of contemporary England, France and the United States, in having a ‘no fault’ mutual consent provision in addition to the usual grounds.13 Yvonne set sail for France, leaving Eileen, ten years old at the time, motherless once more. But Yvonne’s world did not vanish at once, for Eileen was able to savour it every time she visited her aunt in her modern ‘cubist’ apartment.14 Her mother and Zhang Maoyuan had been so close that in her mind the two were one. And just as she had loved everything about her mother’s house, so her aunt’s apartment seemed to her to hold all that she thought was best in life. The contrast that it posed to her father’s house could not be starker. In his room it was ‘eternally afternoon,’ a fug of hazy sunlight and opium fumes. Eileen knew he was lonely, and that it was in his moments of loneliness that he warmed to her. For her part she found him pitiable, at times even laughable. When he remarried, she attended his wedding; he appeared awkward and embarrassed: that he, of all people, should undergo a European-style wedding ‘with bridesmaids and wedding rings, everything but a top hat,’ seemed ridiculous to her.15 Having a co-addict for a wife meant that there was no prospect of Timothy Zhang ever giving up his habit or changing his way of life. A deep pull at the pipe and husband and wife would companionably enter a dreamy state of blank contentment together. As  the days went by and the price of opium climbed, they couldn’t not know that money was going up in smoke too. But their class tabooed talk of money—they left that to the new rich—so they would skirt round and round it, leaving the word unspoken.16 She knew her father to live in terror of being pressed for money, and the seventeenyear-old Eileen was nervous and fearful of rebuff when she broached the subject of

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her going to England to study. Her mother had been set on her reading for a degree at London University, and had even got it written into her divorce contract that he would pay for it when the time came. Asked now to deliver on his promise, her father was affronted. The prospect of the daughter becoming a replica of the foreign-educated mother angered him, the more so in his reluctance to part with the money. His second wife played her part by adding, cattily, ‘Your mother just can’t stay clear of this family, can she, even though she’s divorced? Why doesn’t she come back, if she can’t let go? Only she’d left it just a bit too late; because if she does come back, she’ll have to do so as concubine not wife.’17 It was 1937, the year of the Japanese invasion, and one day, against the background of falling bombs, her father was galled to hatred and savage violence. His hatred was built on increments: the fact that Yvonne had just come back to Shanghai and Eileen’s changed demeanour implied that she would rather be with her mother; that she had gone to stay over at the apartment her mother was sharing with her aunt; that she made to hit back when her stepmother, picking a quarrel with her on the pretext that Eileen had been disrespectful in not asking her permission to stay over at her aunt’s, had slapped her hard. ‘She hit me! She hit me!’ the stepmother squealed as she ran upstairs to her husband. ‘Then I’ll hit her,’ her husband shouted as he lunged to attack his daughter. Eileen’s head spun as he slapped her left and right; she reeled and fell to the floor as a rain of blows, fists and arms descended. When the servants finally succeeded in calming him down, she ran to the bathroom to examine her bruises and to dry her tears. But her father had not finished with her yet and, back in her own room, the door suddenly opened and a vase that he flung at her whizzed past her ear, missing her head by inches, before it broke into pieces on the floor. Nothing now could placate him, certainly not his sister, who arrived the next day to broker peace. He struck her with his opium pipe, breaking her glasses, and she had to be patched up in hospital.18 It would be a blackening of family honour to report the matter to the police, so nobody did. Her father now as good as imprisoned Eileen, who felt in the next days that she had aged several years in a matter of weeks. She thought only of escape—but how, the watchmen doing her father’s bidding knew better than to let her out? Meanwhile, the Japanese gave no quarter. Planes flew overhead, enemy planes, she surmised as she watched out for them from her balcony. If only, she prayed, they would drop a bomb, start a fire, and create enough havoc for her to escape; or if that is too much to ask, then she wished they would just hit the house and everyone in it. Other than the sky, she had only the front yard for a view. A tall magnolia tree bloomed there, the flowers huge: like soiled white crumpled handkerchiefs, she thought, or wastepaper. A pit as deep as her death opened under her when she came down with dysentery and her father denied her medicine. She came perilously close to dying, and in her

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muffled sense of time passing, she could not tell in what age she lived or in which dynasty. Yet, she listened for each and every opening or closing of the front gates, the squeak of the rusty bolt being pulled and the clang of the iron doors as they swung open on their hinges, hearing the sounds in even her dreams. When, after six months had passed and her legs were strong enough to carry her, she made her move. Timing her getaway to coincide with the changing of the guards at the gates, she slipped out of her room and into the night. She took one slow step after another, hugging the wall the while, until she had reached the gates and unbolted them. Outside, in the street, she would run for the tram stop once she had turned the corner. But just then a ricksha appeared, and as it sped her away from her father’s house to her mother’s flat, she ‘gave herself over to joy that came pounding over her like a cattle stampede.’19 Her father having washed his hands of her, her mother would have to support her studies at London University, whose entrance exams she now passed. Eileen’s feeling of indebtedness further complicated her relationship to her mother—this beautiful, glamorous, Westernized woman of whom she saw so little, and whom she seemed only ever to catch in the act of doing up her face in the bathroom mirror, or packing her trunks to go away. One of the reasons her mother would rather not be in Shanghai, Eileen presently realized, was that it separated her from the man she loved. He was clearly not Chinese but someone she had met abroad.20 ‘We Chinese don’t understand love,’ was one of her mother’s remarks that Eileen has repeatedly reported, a remark followed by the comment that once you had loved a foreigner you could never go back to a Chinese.21 As it turned out, the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe put paid to the idea of Eileen travelling to England and instead she attended the University of Hong  Kong, where she proved such a brilliant student that two scholarships were awarded her. Three years there and Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. The British surrender of the Crown colony interrupted Eileen’s studies, and she returned in 1942 to Shanghai where, virtually overnight, the stories she started publishing turned her into a literary star. The mosquito press started to gossip about her, which was perhaps as much a mark of her celebrity as the comparison that a newspaper man drew, based on a photograph of her he saw, between her looks (and especially hairstyle) and those of the Hollywood star Loretta Young. ‘Fortunately,’ he wrote, ‘no one has been crowned the Oriental Loretta Young yet, so Miss Chang could seize that title.’22

Her published fiction, journalism, film scripts, letters, autobiographical and semiautobiographical writings, as well as the movies made of her stories, have been widely and intensely studied by literary critics and historians, so much of a cult has she become to her admirers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. My concern, however, is not so much with literature as with love; it is with the

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author who wrote about love and the woman who loved. The two cannot be disentangled, any more than the real self and the autobiographical self can. I doubt if she herself could tell fiction from fact when she wrote and rewrote her three posthumously published autobiographical novels: in English, The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change; and in Chinese, Little Reunion. Born a year after May Fourth, the twenty-three-year-old Eileen could sum up the movement in 1943 with a measure of historical hindsight, describing it, not altogether fairly, as a period of ‘superficial enlightenment.’ It was, she wrote in an English-language magazine (the XXth Century): a time when Rousseauistic sentiments were taken very seriously. Students of Western culture had very great faith in ‘Every man with a vote,’ ‘Away with Filial Piety,’ ‘Free Love,’ etc. Experiments were also made in purely mental love, without much success.23

By ‘purely mental love’ she meant, of course, the kind which her predecessors had variously described as ‘spiritual,’ ‘Platonic,’ or pertaining to the ‘soul.’ It went with the idea, similarly imported from the West, that love is sacred (or ‘holy,’ which is the word Eileen uses in the quote that begins this chapter). She did not think it transplanted successfully in China, and she had learned from her mother that people had mistakenly taken ‘free love’ to mean sexual licence. Her own remark that, ‘To this day we Chinese don’t much love, and even our love stories don’t often tell of love’ (see Chapter 1), sounds like a morphing of her mother’s that ‘we Chinese don’t understand love.’24 But Eileen is not led from that to her mother’s conclusion that Western men are therefore a better bet than Chinese. Even so, there is little doubt that Eileen was judging love and love stories by Western standards. To stop short of sex, no matter how much in love, was her mother’s repeated advice to her. Her mother was too ‘moral’ herself, Eileen thought, to have slept with any of the men she fell in love with before her divorce, and her father was unlikely to have been cuckolded.25 Her mother had dinned it into her that she, Eileen, should not have sex with men no matter how much in love—‘love is good as long as you don’t cross the line; the minute there is a relation of the flesh it’s all spoiled.’26 Eileen was not to know until much later that her mother ‘crossed the line’ numerous times. The young Eileen claimed not to bothered by the string of affairs her mother conducted in her pursuit of love; after all she, Eileen, had read George Bernard Shaw (who opposed the institution of marriage), as well as H. G. Wells (the prophet of free love).27 No, what she was repelled by was the way her mother behaved with the men who desired her. What ‘horrified her,’ Eileen, was how little it took to make her mother happy. ‘A marked-down dress,’ a phone call from her English or French boyfriend ‘and her voice would become quiet and sweet’ and breathless with ‘girlish titters. Were women so cheap?’28 Yvonne’s coyness too, struck Eileen as being all wrong, either by the new

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standards or by the old: on the one hand, it was not how an emancipated woman responded to male interest, and on the other, it would be judged very low-class by those traditional circles for whom a woman’s mere awareness of another’s attention amounted to vulgar flirtatiousness.29 Her mother enjoined a separation of love and lust but I doubt if Eileen took it to heart when she heard Yvonne tell her again and again: ‘I’ve always believed love and the body are two different things; relations of flesh spoil everything.’30 Even in her fictional writing Eileen avoids the categorical distinction of good from evil and the absolute clash of ‘soul and flesh.’31 Eileen had read all of George Bernard Shaw’s prefaces to his plays by the time she was fifteen or sixteen, and though she later found some of his views to be juvenile and ridiculous, still she was influenced by him to the extent of seeing nothing inviolate— ‘no sacred cows’ was how she put it—in love, sex and marriage.32 Repressing sex, the adult Eileen shows, produces terrible results in a woman, none more so than in the venomous Qiqiao, the female protagonist of her most critically acclaimed novella The Golden Cangue (1943). How it coarsens, warps and even unhinges a woman, to be denied love and sexual satisfaction.33 Lowly herself, Qiqiao is married ‘up’ into the wealthy Jiang family, but only because her husband is crippled by tuberculosis of the bones and a wife is needed to wait on him—why else would his family accept her, she whom the Jiangs disdain for having a sesame oil vendor for a father? She now feels trapped, locked into her ‘golden cangue.’ Her husband could hardly sit up; slid down, he looks no taller than her threeyear-old, so it is a mystery to her, she exclaims to her sisters-in-law, how he managed to sire two children with her. She is a brash and forthright scold, and makes no bones about her abhorrence of her bedridden husband and his ‘lifeless body.’ ‘Have you felt his flesh?’ she asks her husband’s brother Jize; ‘it feels like your feet when they’re numb.’ Jize is a bit of a wastrel and a rake but she has a secret crush on him. The scene where, talking to him, she puts a hand on his leg and he bends down to pinch her foot, saying, ‘Let’s see if they’re numb,’ is transgressively erotic. She wins the power and money she craves when her husband dies and she gets her share of the family property. She moves out of the Jiang house into one of her own. Jize comes to try and wheedle money out of her, but first he plays on the strings of her heart. How he has suffered all these years, he confesses, from not being able to have her. For a moment she is lost to fantasy, deluding herself with the thought that they were meant for each other: ‘Why had she married into the Jiang family? For money? No, to meet Jize, since it is fated that he and she should fall in love.’ A vision of happiness appears and disappears. She decides he is false, gets a grip on herself, then drives him away. Only opium is left to her, that and gratuitous cruelty. Exercising her new-found power to crush others, she drives her son and daughter to opium addiction and ruins

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the latter’s last chance of catching a husband. As the story draws to a close, Qiqiao is seen half asleep on the opium couch musing: for thirty years now she had worn a golden cangue, and she had used its hard edges to chop down a number of people. Eileen was to write decades later, ‘Every man has a knife in him. When he cannot use it on outsiders to fatten his family he uses it on his family.’34 She had her father in mind when she wrote those chilling words, but she could scarcely not have thought at the same time of her stepmother. In her teens Eileen had sworn to be revenged on her stepmother, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that in conjuring up the unsavoury character of Qiqiao, she has.

A fellow student at Hong Kong University once asked her, as girls do, if she thought there was such a thing as love. ‘Yes, I think there is,’ Eileen replied.35 As a teenager, she had wanted the sort of love she saw in the movies. And it was not only Western films that rubbed off on her, it was also fiction. Not only did she read English and American authors—some with a China connection such as John Hersey, Stella Benson, Pearl S. Buck and Somerset Maugham, many without, such as Tolstoy and Aldous Huxley—but whole runs of the New Yorker were a stream that fed the springs of her imagination.36 Her mind was a mass of cross-cultural associations, and I do not think she could have told whether the opinions she expressed about love had their sources in her reading, observation or experience. Of experience she had little before she was twenty-three. Once, coming back to her aunt’s flat from shopping, she felt a momentary hollowness: ‘I’m 22, I write love stories, yet I have never loved; it wouldn’t do to let people know.’37 At twenty-three she experienced her first love, and it was on a true story told her by her lover, Hu Lancheng (1906–81), that she based a one-page vignette she wrote and entitled simply ‘Love.’ The vignette is of the concubine-mother of Hu’s first wife. It tells of a lovely fifteen-, sixteen-year-old country girl standing with her hands resting on a peach tree one spring evening. A young man to whom she had never spoken, though he lives across the way, walks up to her, and says softly, ‘Oh, so you’re here too.’ They stand there, not speaking, and then go their separate ways. Later she is abducted and sold as a concubine to some distant town, then sold again several times over. Through all this the memory of that spring evening, that peach tree, that young man, lingers, vivid to her still when she is old. The lines with which Eileen ends the story have a strain of romantic fatalism to them: ‘That it should be this person that you catch, not a moment too early nor a moment too late, among the millions you meet, across the millions of years down the limitless wastes of time, leaves you with nothing to do except to say, softly, ‘Oh, so you’re here too.’38 The lines point to love’s chance nature, the enormous improbability of the encounter (the millions of people, the millions of years), but they also trail a sense of the inevitability of its happening—and if inevitable, then perhaps fateful.

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How differently events might have unfolded, how much less meaningful that girl’s memories might have been, had that boy not caught up with her just then, neither a moment too early nor a moment too late. Love is like the sudden, brief vista one catches on a meandering mountain road. To Eileen, it is neither neediness nor possessiveness, nor is it—and here she broke with the customary view of her time—conditional upon any assurance of matrimonial or financial support. ‘It seemed to her,’ she has remarked in The Book of Change, ‘that the only real love was the kind that led nowhere, not with marriage and a lifetime’s support in view, asking for nothing, not even companionship.’39 It is a highly idealized view. Hers is also a high-blown view of love. Once, defending herself against the criticism that her writing dealt with men-women relations rather than with weightier subjects like war and revolution, she contended: ‘I think that people become simpler, and let go of themselves more in love than they do in war or revolution.’40 In terms of emotion, she went on to say, war and revolution are comparable to love, and, like love, they should be capable of penetrating into the whole of one’s life, no holds barred. Another time, asked how she would represent it if she were to write a play on a love theme, she answered, ‘It’d have to be passionate love, nothing ordinary, nothing stereotypical.’41 The May Fourth legacy is discernible too. In the best-loved of Eileen Chang’s stories, a man is thought to be the sort to go in for ‘spiritual love’ rather than the physical variety because he seems more interested in talking to the woman he is courting than in seducing her. The man and the woman are characters in ‘Love in a Fallen City’ (1943), a novella that I propose to discuss in some detail because it is a mirror in which love’s reflection appears differently to Chinese and Western eyes. Not the least of the reasons for the popularity of this work, which has been adapted into film, play and television drama, is that the Shanghainese heroine, Bai Liusu, gets her man when women in Eileen’s fiction rarely do, or if they do, it is at a terrible cost. It is against the odds that Liusu gets him, for Fan Liuyuan appears to be the typical non-committal man, and well-heeled enough to have many mothers thrusting their daughters at him. Yet she, who seems to have little to recommend her save looks, and is a divorcée to boot, is the one he finally marries. Why? She herself as good as explains it when, after spending their first night out alone together in which they do nothing but talk, exchange banter, and even spar with each other, she assesses the chances of her future success with him: So this Fan Liuyuan goes in for spiritual love. She’s all for it, because spiritual love always leads to matrimony, while physical love tends to reach a certain stage and then stop, leaving you with no hope that marriage will transpire. There’s only one thing wrong with spiritual love though, and that is, the woman can’t always understand the man’s talk. Still, it doesn’t much matter because in the end you get married, and after that there’s the house-hunting, furniture-installing and servant-hiring—and in all those things the woman is much more adept than the man.42

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She has put her finger on it without knowing that she has. What he wants is a lover who is also a soulmate; in short, what he wants is love, and reciprocated love at that, the sort which an earlier generation had labelled ‘oneness of soul and flesh.’ He is certainly ‘foreign’ enough for that—in fact doubly ‘foreign,’ from having Malayan Chinese for parents and from having grown up in England. If other Chinese think him odd, that is as you would expect: though he thinks he has gradually grown more Chinese since coming back to China, he remains Westernized and therefore a cypher to other Chinese. They know him to have inherited money, and they hear, or assume, that that money pays for his wardrobe and for those diversions Chinese playboys classically indulge in, namely whoring, gambling and gourmandizing. That much they understand, but it escapes them why Fan, who could ‘take women to be so much dirt under his feet,’ should be interested in a divorcée, one who, at twenty-eight to his thirty-two, is surely too old for him. Liusu herself cannot exactly get the measure of him either: why is it that he, whom everyone takes to be a great seducer, never so much as touches her hands when, day after day, he takes her out? She keeps wondering why he is such a perfect gentleman with her and if it is a mask he is wearing, until she decides that it is spiritual love he’s after. Eileen Chang has told readers in a published comment that her story is written from Liusu’s point of view, and since the latter never did understand Fan Liuyuan, she, the author, needn’t understand him all that well either.43 From start to finish, it is matrimony she is after. Her hardly endurable life circumstances demand it. Her father had gambled away the family fortune, and her brothers, with whom she sought shelter after her divorce, had speculated on stocks with her money and lost it all, forcing her to become entirely dependent on family charity. Meanwhile, she has to endure the insinuations, insults, disdain and sheer bitchiness of her sisters-in-law, who never let a day go by without reminding her of the disgrace she had brought upon herself and her family by divorcing. If life is a misery for a divorced woman in Shanghai, it is doubly so for an impecunious divorced woman. Liusu looks to remarriage as much for the promise of better things to come as for rescue. Yet she is not abject, far from it: Eileen Chang meant her to be formidable, without much formal education but with the gift of the gab. A friend of the family, Mrs Xu, offers to act as go-between and invites her to Hong Kong, where she would cross paths with Fan Liuyuan. Liusu, who is very lovely to look at (indeed ‘beautiful beyond reason’), is also, she soon learns, exactly his type. Fan is that cliché, the modern Westernized Chinese who likes his women to be wholly and truly Chinese. Head bowed, dressed only in old-style cheongsam, Liusu does not appear modern enough to be Shanghainese, in fact not even to be of this world, and as far as he is concerned, that is all to the good. Staying at the same hotel in Hong Kong, the two see each other every day. She recognizes it as a courtship, but it is one where, somewhat to her surprise, no sexual overtures are made.

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One night, things come to a head. She is jolted out of her sleep by the phone ringing, and to her astonishment she hears him say when she puts it to her ear, ‘I love you.’ Just that, and he hangs up. His avowal made, he now demands hers: after barely a minute of silence the phone rings again, and this time he says, ‘I forgot to ask—do you love me?’ ‘You’ve long known,’ she answers after a cough. ‘Why else did I come to Hong Kong?’ Withholding, or skirting around, the required declaration. Yes, he did know, not that she loves him but that she wants to marry him. And it is with this in mind that he replies, ‘I knew, but even with the truth staring me in the face, I still don’t want to believe it. Liusu, you don’t love me.’ And he is right, she doesn’t, not in the sense in which he, the all-but Westerner, understands love. ‘Why do you think not?’ she asks, since by her lights she does love him—she wants to marry him, doesn’t she? But it is not marriage he’s talking about, it is love, and in his book the two are not the same thing. Indeed, were he Eileen Chang he might have said, as she did in the words I quoted earlier, that ‘the only real love was the kind that led nowhere, not with marriage and a lifetime’s support in view, asking for nothing, not even companionship.’ But instead of explaining why he thinks she does not love him, he launches into poetry, quoting an ancient poem from the Book of Songs. He thinks the poem is very sad because it says that ‘life and death and parting are enormous things, well beyond human control,’ and yet, small as we are compared to ‘the great forces in the world, we still say, “I will stay with you forever, we will never, in this lifetime, leave each other”— as if we really could decide these things!’44 At this an irritated Liusu bursts out, ‘Why not just go ahead and just say, flat out, that you don’t want to marry me and leave it at that! Why beat around the bush, with all this talk of not being able to decide things?’ If someone as footloose and fancy-free as Fan couldn’t decide for himself, then who could? His riposte to that is: doesn’t the fact that she can’t help it if she doesn’t love him show that things are beyond one’s control? He does not say, but means, that love is something that hits you, not something you can decide to be in. To hear what she says next would appal any subscriber to the view that mutual love is the prerequisite of marriage: ‘If you really love me,’ she asks, ‘why worry if I do?’ Fan is duly appalled. Marry someone who cares not a whit for him only to have her dictate to him? He is not that much of a fool; besides, ‘it’s too unfair.’ Nor is it fair to her, to bind her to a loveless marriage. But then, he adds, ‘Maybe you don’t care. At bottom you think that marriage is long-term prostitution.’ She is outraged at these words, and slams the phone down before he finishes speaking. I am sure she has never thought of marriage in those terms, nor has she heard of Ellen Key, whose view that loveless marriages are no better than prostitution, it will be recalled, had been taken so much to heart by her May Fourth followers. Fan is not really saying that that is how Liusu thinks, only that in seeing nothing wrong in

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marriages entered into without love, she as good as accepts the exchange of sex for mercenary gain. Seen so much together, the two are taken by people in the hotel to be man and wife. ‘Well,’ he says to her jokingly when one of them addresses her as ‘Mrs Fan,’ ‘You mustn’t bear that title in name only, you must live up to it.’ People assume that they have slept together, she thinks to herself, but no, the truth is that he has not got her yet, and since he has not, he might come back to her with better terms. She decides to return to Shanghai, reasoning all the while that she must not show herself to be cheap. Her relatives there naturally think the worst of her: a woman who has sold herself and is therefore a whore, but a whore twice over because she seems not even to have laid her hands on any money. When, at last, Fan sends for her, she goes for a second time to Hong Kong, but not with the sense of hope of her first trip, only of defeat. In the hotel room he kisses her, and though it is for the first time, it does not feel like the first time to either of them—both have imagined it so many times, he desiring it, she worrying that it might happen. The author describes the lovemaking as though she were scripting a scene in a film, in fine, visually sensuous language, using as a prop the mirror in which the kissing couple is reflected, their burning passion melting against its icy cold surface. Reading the author’s cinematic rendering, I am reminded of a passage in her autobiographical novel, Little Reunion. In it Eileen herself is kissed by Hu Lancheng, and when he observes afterwards, ‘You seem very experienced,’ she tells him, laughing, ‘Saw it in the movies.’45 Liusu becomes Fan’s mistress, or perhaps ‘kept woman’ is the better phrase since he sets her up in a flat. The rest of the story unfolds dramatically, in a narration that Eileen Chang has never bettered. History intervened on December 8, 1941, in the form of the Battle of Hong Kong. On the same morning as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops began shelling Hong Kong, the ‘fallen city’ of the story’s title. Eileen herself was there, evacuated from the University of Hong Kong when a bomb fell next to her dormitory, so her account of Fan and Liusu’s struggles amid machine gun fire and ricocheting bullets in the eighteen-day siege rings true. The struggles strip the two down to nothing save each other. No more second-guessing on Liusu’s part, no more flirtation on Fan’s. She becomes dear to him, and he to her. There is a moment when, huddled side by side in fear, he reaches for her hand and grasps it, and for a moment they see each other true, and though it is only a moment, it is enough to bind them together, says the author, for maybe eight, ten years. The poem that Fan recited to Liusu that night turns out to be a foreshadowing— there is no certainty, and human beings are mere specks against the world’s ‘great forces.’ In the calamity of war, people are unmoored, adrift. And in their anxiety to hold on to something solid, Eileen observed while working as a volunteer in an AirRaid Precaution centre during the siege, people got married.46 This is what Fan and

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Liusu now do. His intention had been to make her his mistress, but Hong Kong’s defeat catapults her from kept woman to wife—to victory, in fact, if it had been a battle of the sexes that the two had conducted. But what about love? Eileen Chang calls her story a romance; she bookends it with the wailing sound of a Chinese fiddle being played offstage, as though it were a tale told by a traditional storyteller. In a traditional Chinese story, matrimony is the happy ending, not ‘true love.’ No Chinese hero ever asked the heroine if she loved him. But ‘Love in a Fallen City’ is a modern romance, and as such it has an obligation to end on a note of love fulfilled, just like the Hollywood movies which its author and readers saw by the dozen in Shanghai. So here is Fan saying after he has proposed marriage, ‘Goblins and ghosts must be behind this, we’re starting to love after all!’—saying this lightly, to be in character. ‘But you said long ago that you loved me,’ Liusu reminds him. That doesn’t count, he tells her, ‘We were so busy courting, where would we have found the time to love?’ If Liusu wonders what on earth he could have meant, she does not ask. I daresay readers in 1940s did not understand him either, but then they could always put it down to Fan’s foreignness, the author having wisely and conveniently given him an upbringing in England. Whatever the author herself had meant by the words she put in Fan’s mouth, they make ‘Love in a Fallen City’ count as a love story— in contrast to the Chinese ones which she has said were not love stories. Chinese critics judge Fan harshly, as a philanderer who only sports with the heroine. Hu Lancheng, for instance, is of the opinion that Fan is decadent. Fan is clever and quick-witted all right, but to Hu, whose cultural frame is all wrong for this story, Fan lacks warm-heartedness; indeed ‘life’s fire in him has gone out.’ To marry requires sincerity, according to Hu, and this too Fan lacks, and the reason he does not make a pass at Liusu is that he is crafty. Another thing that he lacks is courage, and courage is needed to marry. Fan is too timid and weak-willed for it, Hu continues; that people take him and Liusu for a married couple pleases him because the semblance of being married, even if it is a pretence, makes up for the emptiness and world weariness in him, and for this reason he is to be pitied. His telephone avowal of love is not to vex Liusu but to give vent to his own vexations.47 Hu’s views reveal more of himself, and I believe of the Chinese men of his background and time, than of Fan or his creator. I doubt if Chinese critics consider the scene of the phone call deserving of the ink I have spilt on it, nor think that finding love wanting is a good enough excuse for Fan to not make an honest woman of Liusu. Hu Lancheng could only conclude that Fan wants Liusu for a whore and friend, not wife; it would not occur to him and his kind that what Fan wants from Liusu might be disinterested love. As for the fairy-tale ending, now that has a familiar ring: the Chinese stock of proverbs is replete with phrases of the ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’ kind, so readers would see the marriage as a natural enough denouement to a story in which, as with

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tried and true friends, lovers become of ‘one heart and mind’ through ‘sharing weal and woe’ and ‘going through thick and thin together.’48 Between Fan and Liusu, adversity has brought about a deepening of feeling, and with this Chinese readers could identify. On the other hand, if you must call it true love, then they were modern enough for that too. Curiously, Eileen Chang writes this and all her stories in a form of prose derived from eighteenth-century novels like The Dream of the Red Chamber. That is her trademark style, all her own, and what makes her an extraordinary fiction writer is that with the old-style prose she expresses the most modern of sensibilities. Born that much later, she had left May Fourth iconoclasm behind, and she saw no particular need to nail her colours to the mast by repudiating Classical Chinese. In her texts old set phrases jostle with new, the modern one ‘I love you’ being a prime example of the latter. It is a testimony to her skill as a writer that we read her stories today without any sense of a misfit between the old and the new. But to elaborate on this would take me into the territory of literary criticism, and that is not the aim of this chapter, so all I will say is that it is thanks in part to her having lived in her father’s and her mother’s worlds at once that Eileen Chang’s writing is both continuous and discontinuous with tradition.

In 1943, when she was twenty-three, Eileen fell in love. Hu Lancheng was a man of letters fourteen years older than she. Commentators have uniformly lamented the affair, judging him to be the one man she ought not to have loved, as if she could have helped falling in love. Still, it is clear why they think him wrong for her: he was a collaborator and adulterer. He betrayed his country, and would betray her. His country was in the last years of its war with Japan, its eastern seaboard occupied by the enemy, the rest of it riven by the rivalry between the Nationalists and the communists. Brought down to the level of individual personalities, the rivalry was between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Everyone knew those two names, yet in Shanghai they seemed remoter than a third, that of the quisling Wang Jingwei. In 1940 Wang accepted Japan’s invitation to form a puppet government with its seat in Nanjing, and control of Shanghai and the areas round about came under that regime. No one with an ounce of patriotism in him could see the collaborationist regime as anything other than ignominious, but Hu Lancheng did not think twice about working for it, and since he had a flair for writing he was appointed to a high post in the Ministry of Propaganda and subsequently to the editorship of a newspaper that it sponsored in Wuhan. All this while he kept a home in Shanghai, just as many of the other collaborators did including Wang Jingwei himself. One day in Nanjing, he read one of Eileen Chang’s short stories in a magazine. So much did he admire it that he wanted to meet the author at once. The magazine’s editor told him that Eileen Chang was averse to seeing people, but he was dogged

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enough to make his way to the apartment that she shared with her aunt and to slip her a note. The next day she came to see him at his house, and it was a good five hours before she took her leave of him, so much did they find to say to each other, though it is a good guess that he did most of the talking. She was not at all what he had expected; he could scarcely believe that this slip of a girl was an author. She seemed so young, like a girl student in her teens utterly absorbed in her own thoughts, and though she was taller than he, she gave the impression that she was still growing. Eileen Chang was taken with his looks and dazzled by his intelligence—of someone as brainy as he, she told him with great delight, the local Shanghainese idiom was: ‘Knock his head and even the soles of his feet resound.’49 That this person, who thought the world of her writing, should come into her life like that seemed too good to be true, and she asked him, wonderingly, ‘Are you real?’ and ‘Could our being together like this be real?’50 Later, the incredible rate at which he could produce his essays enraptured Eileen, a slow writer herself. He, for his part, was amazed by the way she could, at one stroke, knock askew all his preconceptions. It shocked him, as it would any traditionally brought-up Chinese, to hear her say with every assurance that she had right on her side, ‘I don’t like my mother nor father.’ Her aloofness to others’ predicaments was total; this lack of sympathy, in a person so obviously sensitive, intrigued him. The world might be uninhabited, for all the notice she took of other people’s opinions. He could not help thinking: how rational she is, as rational as mathematics, as though purity of feeling were a matter of thinking things through until all the personalness, as well as any necessity for sentimental response, has been thought out of them. Intellectually, he admitted to feeling competitive but also conceded defeat, later confessing to having been influenced in his writing style by Eileen’s. Pitted against her, he groped repeatedly to strike the right note in her exacting ear yet failing—‘stringed and woodwind notes emerging as clangour.’ She astonished him not only by her knowledge of classical Chinese literature but by her uncanny ability to read between the lines of even the most ancient poetry. It was not what you would expect of someone with as sure a grasp of English as she. Yet so lightly did she wear her learning that he, who tended to show off his, could only conclude that she was humble. She was indeed humble, to the extent of inscribing a photograph of herself that she gave him thus: ‘Meeting him, she shrank and shrank until she shrank into the dust, but was glad, because from the dust she blossomed.’51 She surrendered to him completely, with a world-well-lost-for-love abandon, not caring at all about his politics or his married status. She took no notice when she received a well-intentioned letter from Shao Xunmei warning her against Hu. Emotionally she held nothing back, and she could have meant her own unguarded self when she said (as quoted a few pages back) that people let go of themselves more in love than in war or revolution. For her, love could never be a calculated act. She

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worshipped Hu, and with as little expectation of reciprocation as, she wrote decades later, ‘the tossing of a bouquet to someone in passing,’ or as the medieval knight who adored his unattainable lady in the code of courtly love.52 Of course, she added, she did not put it in those medieval terms to Hu, though in one of his letters, she reported, he did mention ‘the quest for the Holy Grail’ (by those Knights of the Round Table whose romances entwined courtly love with chivalry). ‘Shall we be together always?’ he said to her one evening. Of course there was no question of their getting married before he divorced his wife—or more accurately, wives. He was much married. His first wife, with whom he was matched in the traditional way, died after bearing him a son; his second wife, who bore him four more children, became mentally ill but continued to live under the same roof in Shanghai, sharing Hu’s house with his so-called third ‘wife,’ a very young former dance hostess named Ying Yingdi. The Shanghai public, who liked to gossip about Eileen Chang as about all celebrities, surmised that a wedding was in the offing when a notice came out in the leading Chinese newspaper, Shenbao, announcing the ‘termination by mutual consent of husband-wife relations between Hu Lancheng and Ying Yingdi.’ He must be divorcing one to marry another, a columnist wrote on June 1, 1945, and rumour had it that this other person could only be Eileen Chang.53 The columnist was right, though the wedding feast that he told his readers to gear up for never took place. Instead, sometime before Eileen’s twenty-fourth birthday in 1944, she and Hu simply wrote out their own marriage testimonial, she composing the one part, and he the other, doing without a formal ceremony to give Eileen some immunity should the political situation change: Hu Lancheng and Eileen Chang hereby pledge for all their days to be husband and wife, Wishful of good years ahead and peace and stability in this life.

Signing as witness was Eileen’s closest friend Fatima Mohideen, a half-Ceylonese, halfChinese girl with whom she had studied at Hong Kong University and who was now back in Shanghai. That autumn Hu left Shanghai for Wuhan to run the Dachu Bao, a paper backed by the puppet regime of Wang Jingwei. He lodged in rooms in the county hospital, and there his roving eye soon alighted upon a pretty seventeen-year-old nurse named Zhou Xunde. He was to tell Eileen about the nurse, but in such a muffled sort of way that she assumed they had done no more than flirt. In fact, he had seduced Xunde, and had even asked her to marry him. On August 15, when he was out and about in Wuhan, he heard of the Japanese surrender. Now it was all up with him, a traitor to the returning government of Chiang Kai-shek, and a marked man with no course open to him save flight. When he took his leave of a tearful Xunde, he assured her that despite their not having held a ceremony,

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they were man and wife and that they would have long days ahead together. In fact, he  never saw her again: what made her arrest and imprisonment for collaboration afterwards certain was the copying that he had made her do of his writings, and the fact that he had put her on the newspaper’s payroll for this, utterly compromising her. He got to Shanghai and after only one night with Eileen, he embarked on the days, years, of fugitive existence, running for cover under an assumed name, hiding now here and now there in his native Zhejiang province. Finding refuge with the widowed mother of an old school friend was a stroke of great good luck. She was kind to him and asked no questions, but kinder still was the widowed concubine Fan Xiumei, who was only a year older than he. It was she who suggested his next hideout, Wenzhou, the port which opens on to the East China Sea and where her mother lived; and it was she who journeyed with him there. In the course of the journey he told her about his wives, and about Eileen and Zhou Xunde. For Hu, confession was always a prelude to a practised seduction, for only if there were no taboo subjects between people, he believed, could they draw close. It took only two days for him to forge what he called ‘husband and wife relations’ with Fan Xiumei, doing so, he said, out of gratitude, for how better to give thanks than by a pledge of one’s body? He did admit to a not wholly disinterested wish to use her, but not to his tendency to alight on the nearest perch or to his susceptibility to women. He was disconcerted and annoyed when, three months later, Eileen Chang arrived suddenly in Wenzhou. He had a habit of telling his women about each other, but Eileen did not have to be told that he and Fan Xiumei were lovers—just seeing them together was enough. Eileen thought Xiumei quite beautiful, her looks more Central Asian than Chinese, and as an accomplished artist who had once thought she might become a painter, Eileen sat down to sketch her, only to find Xiumei’s features looking more and more like her husband’s. She was stricken, and could not bear to finish the drawing. If she meant to explain to her sitter why she stopped, she did not and could not. Clearly she had not quite caught up with his love life, for apart from worrying about him and missing him dreadfully, she had come looking for him to ask him about the nurse he had left behind him in Wuhan. Taking a walk down a winding lane with him, she told him that he must now make a choice between her, Eileen, and Xunde. He demurred: in her reconstruction of the conversation his answer was, ‘Why pull out good teeth? It isn’t good to have to choose.’54 In his memoirs he reports himself protesting, ‘But the way I relate to you can’t be compared to anything else, and to have to choose is to be unfair to you and to let Xunde down at the same time.’ Of all people Eileen should understand that, she who was above being aggrieved.55 His words were an obfuscation, and in her reconstruction she scorns them as not even sophistry, more like ‘a madman’s logic.’ What she understood, only too well, was that he could not be a one-woman man. In his memoirs, he has her insist, ‘I do realize,

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as you say, that the best things in life are not amenable to choice. And yet I would ask you to choose.’ But still he held back, and when she saw this, she saw further, as clearly as if he had told her, that it was irredeemable. She sighed very deeply then, and told him that if she couldn’t not leave him, couldn’t die and couldn’t love another, then her heart would wither. It rained the day he put her on the boat for Shanghai. She went away disconsolate, tears falling as she stood alone on the deck with the rain running off the rim of her umbrella. In her reconstruction she is conscious only of having reached the end of a road. She writes that ‘iron entered her soul’—an expression she knew in English but whose meaning and bitterness she now felt for the first time.56 In June 1947 he received a letter from her that shook him like a thunderclap: ‘I no longer love you;’ it read, ‘you had long ceased to love me. It has taken me a year and a half of hard thinking to arrive at this. As you were in enough trouble at the time, I hadn’t wanted to add to it. Don’t come looking for me. If you write, your letters will be unread.’ As before, she enclosed money. He knew better than to reply and wrote instead to her friend Fatima Mohideen, not really expecting a reply, and getting none.57

He eventually escaped to Japan and there, in 1959, he published his memoirs, This Life, These Times. His portrait of Eileen Chang in that book, and his unapologetic account of his other love affairs, were to rekindle considerable prurient popular interest in the couple’s relationship. This was particularly so in Taiwan, where he was allowed to enter in 1974 to lecture and where This Life, These Times was republished and avidly read. The Guomindang government, appalled at the American recognition of the People’s Republic of China, and needing all the friends it could muster, was just then in a conciliatory enough mood to bury the hatchet. In Taiwan public fascination with the life and writing of Eileen Chang, who by then was living in relative obscurity and deepening reclusion in America, flared to a fever. She, by contrast to Hu, maintained a lifelong silence that in its own way tantalized the public. So the sensation caused by the posthumous publication of her fictional memoir Little Reunion in 2009, fourteen years after she was found dead in her apartment in Los Angeles, can easily be imagined. Copies were snapped up by the cartload in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China by fans eager to learn her side of the story. The knowledge that the author, when alive, had asked her literary executor in Hong Kong to destroy the manuscript no doubt increased public curiosity. The book is a roman-à-clef; though Hu goes by a fictitious name, there is no doubt whatsoever who he is in the book. He is explicitly named in letters that she exchanged about Little Reunion with Stephen Soong, the Shanghainese friend, then living in Hong Kong, whom she had appointed as her literary executor; moreover the two accounts, Hu’s and hers, tally to a remarkable degree. Something amusing to me is that in some of the letters he is referred to as that ‘scoundrel,’ the Chinese word for

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which is an exact pun on ‘Hu Lancheng’ if pronounced in the Shanghainese (but not Mandarin) dialect. She wrote Little Reunion, or rather rewrote it, jettisoning an entire earlier draft, in the summer of 1975, and sent the completed manuscript to Soong and his wife Mae in March of the following year. She had warned them that it was ‘full of shocks.’58 One of these turns out to be its sexual explicitness. Those passages describing sexual intimacies stand out the more when set against Hu’s portrayal of the relationship; his account avoids sex in favour of the cut and thrust of the two’s intellectual intercourse. ‘We are not prudes,’ Soong assured her in his reply, but still he advised strongly against publishing the book in its present form. He cited personal and political reasons: she appears in the book to be a highly unconventional woman, one who loves unconditionally, not caring that the man she loves is a collaborator, nor that he has had many other women. She presents herself as an unsympathetic character, and though ‘some readers would attribute her behaviour and psychology to her unhappy childhood,’ the majority would make no such allowances.59 Hu had resurfaced in Taiwan, and was seeking to make his presence felt by lecturing and writing; to allow Little Reunion to see the light of day would be a gift (‘a fattened pig’ are Soong’s words) to such a man, who would snatch at the chance of limelight and self-aggrandizement by publicly contending with it and, in so doing, damage Eileen’s reputation. Soong suggested drastically redrawing the characters to disguise them beyond recognition. This Eileen did not and could not do—could not because her impulse had been autobiographical. Indeed she began work on Little Reunion at all because a member of a literary group that lionized Hu in Taiwan had written her a letter proposing to write her biography, and to do so with the help of Hu Lancheng!60 If anybody must write a book about Eileen Chang, why not Eileen Chang herself ? ‘In these cases it’s best if one exposed oneself,’ she remarked to the Soongs, than to let somebody else do it. She left us in no doubt that it was of herself she was writing when she said in her letter that in Little Reunion, ‘I’m not all that kind to myself either.’61 Some sections, she thought, would make the Soongs ‘laugh in embarrassment.’62 Stephen Soong thought it a way for her to get it out of her system. The past is not in her keeping alone: This Life, These Times has queered the pitch for her as an autobiographer. But she did succeed in setting the record straight as far as her own feelings were concerned. Yet this does not mean a soft-pedalling, far less a denial, of the depth to which she was in love with Hu: Little Reunion charts the ups and downs of an impassioned love affair, one fraught with intensities and exaltations and, on her part, sharp and enduring pain. She was aghast at his inability, so thwarting to a modern woman’s love, to love singly. And she loved and she hated. But her sense of irony never left her even in the deepest troughs of anguish, and she could find his gross insensitivity preposterous even as she was wounded by it. The title Little Reunion itself mocks Hu’s wish to have all three of his women about him:

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a ‘grand reunion’ is a stock phrase for the happy ending to a ‘scholar-beauty’ romance in which the hero passes his imperial exams and comes home to be harmoniously reunited with his family of wife and concubines. Only, in Hu’s case, the Reunion of Three Beauties, as Eileen puts it tongue in cheek, would have to wait until he stops being a fugitive, for which time she, for one, could not be counted upon to wait. The thought that she might be taken for his concubine rankled for decades afterwards, as a letter she wrote to C. T. Hsia, a scholar of Chinese literature, reveals: ‘We [Eileen and Hu] haven’t seen each other for thirty years, everyone is now old—Hu Lancheng will call me one of his concubines, out of revenge perhaps, because I didn’t reply to the many letters he wrote me.’63 The reader may recall my retelling of ‘Stale Mates,’ the work Eileen subtitled ‘A Short Story Set in the Time When Love Came to China.’ The story satirizes the fact that for all the talk of marrying for love in the May Fourth period, the Chinese male remained inveterately polygamous. Could there be a better real-life example of such a male than her former husband? I have indicated that the title of the Chinese version has the words ‘May Fourth’ in it, but I have left it until now to say that the rest of it includes ‘reunion of three beauties,’ the very phrase, in fact, that Eileen uses of the three women in Hu’s life at the time she was married to him. The one-woman man was slow to emerge in China and, wherever you looked, it was as if there had been no legal proscription of concubinage. Yes, Hu has said, ‘one husband, one wife’ is indeed ‘the correct form of human relationship,’ but there are times when ‘a beautiful flower blooms outside the wall,’ he adds, citing a classical metaphor for extramarital dalliance.64 Furthermore, he will tell her about his other women, partly out of a belief that, from knowing about them, Eileen would accept them, but mostly out of a sense of self-satisfaction.65 He would have been surprised indeed to read Eileen’s description of how he wounded her when he told her about Nurse Xunde: ‘my heart was hacked about by a cleaver until not even a shadow is left.’66 Nor was it even those two women but the realization that she ‘would never be happy’ if he and she stayed together, since there would be others.67 Years later, long after she had ceased to think about him, that pain would return all of a sudden, for no reason, scalding and washing over her like a wave of boiling water.68 It was not that she considered infidelity wrong; morality simply did not come into it. ‘It is not that she is a devout believer in the “one man, one wife” system, it’s just that she knows she can’t bear it anymore. All she could hear was the speech of her pain, the sound of her native country.’69 To see it as a case of her wanting conjugal fidelity and not getting it is to foreshorten the roots of her unhappiness. Reaching down further, you realize that only through the prism of sexual love does her pain become properly intelligible. In Little Reunion she reports her thought, ‘This person truly loves me,’ on being kissed for the first time;70 and also the thought, later, ‘He doesn’t love me

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anymore.’71 To her mind, his falling for the nurse implied that he no longer loved her, Eileen; and it was this that pained her. Once, upon hearing him ask her friend Fatima if she thought that one could love two persons at the same time, Eileen felt as if the sky suddenly darkened. In her view, you could not fall in love with one person without falling out of love with another, for it is not love unless it is sexually and emotionally exclusive. A man with several women on the go like Hu Lancheng might claim to love them all, but to Eileen this was a case of his loving them not simultaneously but serially, first one, then the other, but letting go of none. (‘Why pull out good teeth? It isn’t good to have to choose.’)72 For all their meeting of minds, in this, the matter of love, a cultural gulf existed. A chance remark, not necessarily on love, could suddenly reveal that gulf to Eileen, and she would feel as if the whole of the Central Plain, that stretch of the Yellow River basin that cradled Chinese civilization, had come between her and Hu, keeping them so far apart as to put their hearts asunder.73 One of their differences, perhaps the most profound, is that she was looking through Chinese and Western eyes into a double mirror and working in a state of constant and subtle reference between the two. He was not culturally ambidextrous, though that did not stop him from pontificating on East-West differences, using high-sounding words. An instance of this is his remark that Eileen Chang ‘belongs to Greece, and at the same time to Christianity.’ Well yes, but why not just say she was Westernized, since not all Chinese readers knew that Western civilization is descended from Athens and Jerusalem?74 Another of his generalizations is: ‘By the word “love,” Chinese and Westerners mean fundamentally different things.’ For Westerners, it is on love in and of itself that success or failure turns, not whether or not it bears fruit (by which he means marriage).75 Indeed, ‘to Westerners marriage is the tomb of love,’ he reminds his readers, citing an European aphorism that many would have heard. This, he says, is not so for Chinese, to whom love is all in the course of events, plain and simple, nothing to make a song and dance about. Drawing from life as well as from folksongs and popular stories, he says that for Chinese, relations between men and women are a business of human existence, far removed from any notion of ‘holy spirit or sin.’76 He thinks that he is drawing a distinction between China and the West when he essentializes the ‘kindred feeling’ that existed between him and Fan Xiumei; to him such a feeling, akin to the closeness that comes with belonging to the same family, has primacy over romantic love in Chinese culture. And he notes that the Chinese are often too muddled to recognize love when they warm to someone, or when they admire that person or find him or her dear.77 The terms in which he speaks of love in these instances could not be more different from those in which he describes Eileen’s: in the letter that he wrote to Fatima Mohideen after Eileen broke with him, he said, ‘It is with the whole of her being that she loves me, but now she tells me never to write to her again.’78 Such love, betrayed, lay at the root of Eileen’s pain. Such love qualified Little Reunion to be called a ‘love

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story’ (whereas the love in the general run of Chinese love stories, as I have quoted her as saying, does not seem to her to deserve the name). ‘Love story’ is what she herself called Little Reunion in her letters to Stephen Soong. And she wrote it, she explained, because ‘I want to give expression to love’s twists and turns, and to what’s still left after it has completely vanished.’79 That it hurt because she loved was how she characterized her relationship to her mother, the one person other than Hu, she wrote, who made her truly suffer.80 As a child, she had adored her absentee mother, a romantic figure to the daughter until, seeing her up close, Eileen was ‘disillusioned like a theatre devotee admitted backstage.’81 When Eileen was about eighteen, she told herself that she did not love her mother any more, a realization that she describes in exactly the same way she has done with Hu, as ‘coming to the end of a long road.’82 A cord snapped when Eileen learned that her mother had casually lost 800 dollars of hers in a mah-jong game—the sum had been gifted to a financially strapped Eileen by an English lecturer at Hong Kong University to help tide her over until she got an official scholarship.83 It was the last straw in a toxic relationship founded on unreturned love. Her mother once related a dream of a murder, and Eileen wondered if she, Yvonne, subconsciously believed that Eileen wanted her dead. ‘But I never wanted her to die,’ thought the daughter, ‘all I want is to keep away so as to stay alive and sane. She’s always going away anyway. If only she enjoys the time she spends with me instead of just wanting me to benefit from every minute of her company to make up for lost time and appease her conscience. She doesn’t like me and I don’t like people who don’t like me.’84 That Eileen’s emotions mixed a one-sided love, a sense of rejection and a deep hurt is revealed by a conversation between mother and daughter: [The mother]: ‘I know your father hurt you very much, but you know that I’m different . . . ’ No! the daughter wanted to shout. But did not say aloud, how could he have hurt me? ‘I never adored him.’85

The daughter then thinks that the mother misunderstands her: ‘She thinks it’s the men [Yvonne’s boyfriends] that turned me against her. But how am I to tell her that it isn’t this at all. Then what is it? I just don’t like her? No, it’s better to let her think it’s the men. Being Chinese she will think it’s only right that I should feel this way. She’ll be resigned.’86

Had Eileen Chang not left China for good when she did, she would have suffered unspeakable persecution under the newly inaugurated communist regime for her association with Hu Lancheng, seen as an indication, along with her willingness to write for pro-Japanese periodicals during the Occupation, of her acquiescence to

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collaboration. As it was, she left Shanghai for Hong Kong in July 1952, never to return, then emigrated to the United States in February 1955. She never saw her father, who died in 1953 in Shanghai, nor her mother, who died in England in 1957, ever again. In 1956 she married Ferdinand Reyher, an American screenwriter, novelist and journalist of German descent nearly thirty years older than she. In a letter informing her confidants Stephen and Mae Soong of this, she writes that he, like her, was ‘penniless’ (she inserted the word in English into her Chinese text), had even less of a future than she, and was ‘nothing to write home about’ apart from having a degree from Harvard University. She had not thought to add that Reyher was inclined to Marxism or that he was Bertolt Brecht’s closest American friend and collaborator. In her letter she further reports that when she relayed the news to her friend Fatima, she had appended the comment: ‘This is not a sensible marriage, but it’s not without passion.’87 After Reyher’s death in 1967, she sank deeper and deeper into reclusion even as her reputation got a second wind in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She wrote not a word about America, an adopted country but not, to someone in perpetual psychological transit like Eileen Chang, home. The last of her short stories to see print during her lifetime, namely ‘Lust, Caution,’ came out in 1979. In the story’s main male protagonist, a collaborator working for the puppet regime of Wang Jingwei, many readers see the ghost of Hu Lancheng. Ang Lee, the celebrated American Chinese film director who adapted ‘Lust, Caution’ for the cinema, and an unusually well-qualified reader of its author, noted that Eileen Chang revised the story for years and years, ‘returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might re-enact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and re-imagining the pain.’88 Hu himself, meanwhile, was forced by popular pressure to quit Taiwan. He returned in 1977 to Japan, where he died four years later. He was seventy-five, the same age to which Eileen Chang would have lived had she not died a few weeks before her seventyfifth birthday in September 1995. The exact date is unknown, for she was found dead some days later in her flat in Los Angeles by the manager of her apartment building. It is true what the New York Times said of her, in an obituary published on September 13, 1995: ‘Loneliness was a theme of her life.’

Cover of ‘Bound for Moscow,’ 1930.

16 Love’s Decline and Fall

Revolutionary youth recognizes that romantic love unavoidably endangers revolution . . . by diminishing the revolutionary spirit, by making one switch one’s allegiance . . . [Love and revolution] are enemies, which is why revolutionary youth is opposed to romantic love. The New Woman, 1926

Finally, love had to contend with communism. Love was to the fore in the early to mid-1920s; now, as the decade progressed, it was revolution’s turn. There is a pumping of blood in revolutionary zeal that is not unlike the thumping of the heart in limerence, but if there is room for just one, then it is love, Chinese men of the Left thought, that should be taken down a peg or two. When two people are in love, observes a contributor to an issue of The New Woman in 1927, ‘they know only him or her’ and nobody else—neither ‘father or mother, son or daughter, country or nation, nor the rest of humanity, their world filled with only oneself and the beloved.’1 Furthermore, ‘not only is romantic love the enemy of the love of humankind, it is positively capitalism’s tool for propping up the nuclear family  .  .  .  it is fitted to the monogamous nuclear family . . . and it serves to stabilize capitalism.’2 To the Marxist, the group or the class, not the individual, constitutes the basic unit of society; he thus views with distaste the introverted, individualistic ethos of the love-based nuclear family. He applies the damning epithet ‘bourgeois’ to it, and believes that as a product of the capitalist system, the bourgeois family will disappear along with the private property upon which it is founded. The interest in revolution was not professed on paper alone. China’s youth were living through disordered times, their country carved up into so many personal fiefdoms by regional strongmen known as ‘warlords.’ The youths who pondered the compatibility or otherwise of love and revolution would like nothing so much as to stage in China a revolution such as the Bolsheviks had wrought in Russia. Stalin’s Comintern, which had been founded in Moscow in 1919 to foment revolution outside the Soviet Union, was ready to help with advisers. It was agents whom Lenin had despatched to China that gave the homegrown groups of socialists, anarchists and the more left-leaning Nationalists a direction, organization and way forward. With the

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Comintern’s support, the Chinese Communist Party was secretly founded in Shanghai in the summer of 1921; a young Mao Zedong, one day to be chairman of the party, was one of the delegates to the inaugural meeting. The party’s main aims were nothing if not ambitious: national reunification and eradication of the forces of foreign imperialism. In other words, it wanted the warlords out and the Westerners extruded. Of course it also wanted the urban proletariat organized for socialist revolution. But first things first—and the first was to build up a strong enough position, not only doctrinally but militarily, to challenge the Chinese warlords and Western imperialists. Stalin was convinced that teaming up with the Guomindang, or Nationalists, would achieve this. It so happened that Great Britain, France and the United States had demurred at backing the Nationalist cause and it had suited only the Soviet Union to come to the Guomindang’s military aid. Chiang Kai-shek, who had emerged as the military leader, was invited to Moscow to be instructed and indoctrinated. Stalin had not foreseen that Chiang would come away from Moscow with a lasting distaste for communism. The great force at play on China’s political stage at the time was nationalism, and this, in the vision of the misguided Stalin, would collapse the differences that separated the Guomindang from the communists. The fledgling Communist Party was bidden by Stalin to ally with the Guomindang, and so it was under the banner of a united front that the National Revolutionary Army set out on its so-called Northern Expedition in 1926. Commanded by Chiang Kai-shek and spouting anti-imperialist and anti-feudal slogans, the expedition advanced northwards from Canton, the Guomindang power base, to battle the warlords one by one. It was when revolution was in the air in Canton that, from April 21, 1926 onwards, a flurry of commentaries on the subject of love versus revolution saw print in the Canton Republican Daily. In the view of the article that sparked the debate, ‘stripping the veil masking conjugal love’ under the capitalist system reveals it to be a relationship founded ‘on a tie of money.’ The only means ‘of achieving true love is revolution’—that is, doing away with private property and Confucian propriety, and, based on new economic relations, creating the conditions for everyone to develop his potential to the utmost and to realize liberty and equality. Only then would true love blossom, and blossom of its own accord, naturally. Many readers concurred. One who thought love would interfere with revolutionary endeavour enjoined revolutionary youth to sacrifice false love in the present in order to win true love in the future. ‘Spilling blood on the battlefield mustn’t be undertaken at the same time as kissing’ is a thumping declaration that one imagines leaping from the page. But another reader had trouble with the idea of holding love in check, for the sexual impulse could not be so bidden. Also, rather than obstructing or retarding the revolution, love could be ‘the mother of revolutionary success,’ for a true revolutionary’s heart did not so easily alter, and indeed the encouragement of the loved one could

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arouse him to further effort and thereby increase the probability of the revolution succeeding—provided, of course, that the beloved was rich in the revolutionary spirit.3 To Marxists, the love-based marriage has been constituted to shore up capitalist domination; once the classless society of the future is achieved, everything else will take care of itself. That the problem of love would resolve itself was the belief also of a Guomindang sociologist, Hong Ruizhao, who differed from the Marxists only insofar as he hitched the resolution to the attainment not of a classless society but of true educational, economic and political liberty and equality. His 1928 monograph, Revolution and Love, drew the line at the promiscuity of the communists, which appeared to him to be an excessive freedom ill-suited to revolutionary times. In such times love has to be defined anew. It is important to do so because ‘the ebb and flow of the motive forces of revolution and love will influence the future and destiny of our party and nation.’4 Though Hong was no Marxist, still he was sufficiently affected by the heightened revolutionary mood of the time to put revolutionary work above selfish individual love. By the time his words were heard, the alliance between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party had broken down. The latter had been under the illusion that the united front was temporary and that once the nationalist revolution had succeeded, they would proceed to the next phase, a mass uprising of workers to establish a communist government in China. Unbeknownst to these communists, Chiang Kai-shek laid other plans as he marched into Shanghai in the spring of 1927: in an unexpected about-face, and with the help of the city’s underworld, he staged a surprise coup against his erstwhile allies, wreaking a bloody purge of communists that cleared the decks for his emergence as China’s supreme leader.5 In this he was showing his true colours, for communism was his bugbear and he never wavered from his conviction that that was the canker in the heart of China. The purge devastated the communist movement and forced communists out of the cities into a twenty-year exile in the countryside. Tens of thousands of Communist Party members and sympathizers were sentenced to death or murdered in the years of the Guomindang’s White Terror. Revolution was heady stuff, and authors and publishers soon discovered that fiction offering fantasy gratification by yoking the exigencies of real revolution to the theme of romantic love sold exceptionally well. Such fiction, following a popular literary formula termed ‘revolution plus love,’ tells of hero and heroine coming together (or not coming together) because they accept (or do not accept) that the revolutionary calling comes first. For the most part the two thematic elements are so facilely joined together that the reader cannot help but conclude from some stories that the protagonist embraces communism only because he or she has fallen in love with a kangminnisite (the Chinese transliteration of ‘communist’). One such story is ‘Bound for Moscow’ by the twenty-six-year-old Hu Yepin (1903– 31).6 Hu endows his hero, Xunbai (‘truly pure’), with a great deal of revolutionary

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glamour, describing him as a handsome ‘kangminnisite with ideology, wisdom and personality,’ one who is additionally a returned student from Japan. Sushang, the young, beautiful woman who falls in love with him, asks him to teach her Japanese so that she could read all those Soviet and Russian works which, so he tells her, have been translated in their entirety into Japanese. It is love across the class divide, she bourgeois, he working class. It is also extramarital—which is not as much of a problem as one might suppose because she no longer loves her husband; besides, she is a New Woman, and as such she sees nothing wrong with free love. Her bourgeois husband is, however, bound to regard it differently. As he is a high-up in the Guomindang government, his villainy is a given, and it is he who engineers the arrest and execution of the communist hero. But though the story is deprived of a fairy tale ending, it finishes not entirely unhappily; indeed, it does so on an upbeat note, with a politically awakened Sushang walking out on her marriage, a convert to communism. Not for her Nora’s quandary either—she knows exactly where to go when she leaves home. Why, she is headed as the title tells us for Moscow! Hu Yepin was not to know that his hero’s fate would prefigure his own. He completed this novella in 1929 and published it in 1930, the year he joined the Chinese Communist Party. An undistinguished writer, he is vouchsafed greater renown than his literary efforts might have earned him for two reasons: he has been enshrined as a communist martyr, and he was the lover and husband of the far more famous novelist Ding Ling (1904–86). Hu was one of twenty-four communists executed by a firing squad on February 7, 1931 by Guomindang authorities in Longhua, now a suburb to the south of Shanghai. They were victims of the White Terror that followed in the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s coup; as such, the twenty-four youths had their bodies exhumed after the 1949 communist triumph and moved to what is now a memorial park and tourist site, the Longhua Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery. Today monolithic Soviet-style sculptures of workers baring heavily muscled chests greet the visitor inside the park gates, while, at the far end, an eternal flame burns before a monolithic figure half-buried in the ground with a massive upraised hand reaching skywards. As five of the deceased were associated with the League of Left-Wing Writers, a literary organization which was instigated by the Chinese Communist Party and which publicized the event in an open letter, protests were lodged by men of letters not only at home but abroad. One of these came from the Marxist poet and author Malcolm Cowley, who wrote in The New Republic, the American periodical that he edited: Hu Yepin had become a communist. He began to associate with writers like himself . . . They took themselves seriously; on their shoulders they felt the whole burden of creating a new China. On January 17 they held a secret meeting at the Eastern Hotel in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Twenty-four communists were present; five of them, including Hu, were writers . . . All were arrested

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It is almost certain that the conspirators at the secret meeting were betrayed to the British Police of Shanghai’s International Settlement by one of their own. A member of a clique of returnees from Moscow supported by the Comintern, but not by the twenty-four, had tipped off the police so as to rid themselves of rivals in the party’s factional struggle. So those young revolutionaries did not die simply from Guomindang butchery but from that and internal party treachery. It certainly was not the blood of a dangerous demagogue his executioners shed when they killed Hu Yepin, or even that of a political adult. After reading his novella, the work of an earnest but immature leftist, my first wish was for someone to have said to his executioners, ‘He is young, just young.’ He had only just learned his Marxist literary theories from Japanese translations by Lu Xun and Feng Xuefeng (of whom more later). He had only just become acquainted with Marx’s ‘materialism’—the theory that all ideas are human and every idea is bound up with some specific social situation, which has been produced in turn by man’s relations to specific material (or economic) conditions. His work did not sell well enough for it to have any reach or influence, and you have only to read ‘Bound for Moscow’ to see that his writing could have convinced few sophisticated minds. If I propose now to take a closer look at the novella, it is not because it has any literary merit, for it has little or none, but because its scenarios link up so well with the themes of my book. The first of these is the structuring threads that Western literature wove through the stories which the Chinese writers of the time told themselves about their own lives, loves and politics as well as those of their characters. The dominant strand running through Sushang’s story is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and this nineteenthcentury realist masterwork of bourgeois life is the first of the books she is seen reading in Hu’s novella. It is impossible to imagine Hu writing ‘Bound for Moscow’ before reading Flaubert’s domestic drama about the vain, self-centred, covetous and smallminded Emma Bovary and her yearnings for a life of luxury and romantic excitement. We learn early that Emma Bovary is the literary character Sushang least likes. Yet Sushang’s circumstances have much in common with Emma’s: they are both women caged within economically secure marriages to men who repel them and whom they despise. They both yearn to live an exceptional life, but while Emma seeks it in adultery, looking for what she expects will be happiness in love affairs which quickly turn out to be disappointing, Sushang is luckier, finding happiness in not only true love but kangminnisite comradeship. But before this happens, there are tedious days to get through, hours lost in reveries, and here Hu Yepin is fortunate to have Flaubert as his guide, for ‘there is no greater study of boredom than Madame Bovary,’ writes the English novelist A. S. Byatt in an introduction to the book, boredom being ‘one of the great subjects of the realist novel.’ To further quote Byatt, Madame Bovary:

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opened a vision of meaninglessness and emptiness, which was all the more appalling because it was so full of things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens. The worst thing of all was that it was the books that were the most insidious poison.8

It is a problem for Hu that Sushang is an upper-class woman provided with what he calls an ‘aristocratic’ lifestyle by her husband, a problem because he has to make those ‘things, clothes and furniture, rooms and gardens’ odious to her at the same time as he himself revels in describing them, imitating Flaubert’s painstaking attention to detail. Sushang and her husband live in a foreign-style mansion in Beijing that is like nothing that Hu himself—or anyone, for that matter—has seen with his own eyes. The novel opens at Sushang’s birthday party and guests are seen sitting in relaxed poses in her drawing room. A coin-patterned Indian damask covers the sofa. A Greek design in a gold sheen and rose colour patterns the wallpaper. Fire leaps from the hearth. A stone Venus statue stands on the mantelpiece. A black antique vase holds a white bloom. Icarus, sprouting great wings, is adored by goddesses in a painting. Cigar and cigarette smoke wafts. Red wine (‘Italian,’ for some reason) swills in glasses. Light from a chandelier hung from the ceiling by three silver chains bathes the room in brilliance. The author is in thrall to this picture of what he supposes to be poshness when he should really be condemning it as crassness. How, then, is he to convey Sushang’s distaste for her privileged upper-class life, that profound dissatisfaction which turns her to Marxism? Of course her husband irks her, with his ambitiousness, his political networking and his spouting of Guomindang ideology. He is at meetings all day and comes home only to sleep and snore, leaving her to dine alone—but to eat by oneself is so lonely and smacks so much of ‘aristocraticness.’ And how tiresome it is, to make Stewed Knuckle of Pork (which the poor could only dream of ) the must-have dish of every meal. How utterly without meaning is her upper-class lifestyle: it is nothing but ‘loneliness, leisure and boredom’! Of course she spends much time reading, but that is only ‘a form of passive resistance, the manifestation of ennui.’ Moreover, ‘to read out of boredom is the resort of individualism, and can’t be counted as Work.’ Work—which is not defined but by which she cannot mean sweated labour—is what will give her empty life meaning, that and love. So instead of Flaubert, Turgenev, Maupassant and Anatole France, the authors Hu has her reading, she turns to books on ‘historical materialism’ and Marxist economic theory, specifically to The ABC of Communism, Nikolai Bukharin’s immensely popular textbook of Bolshevism. It is thanks to Xunbai, who has pointed her to the truth, that she knows she must advance on the path of ‘historical materialism.’ Her moment of full happiness is when she offers herself up to her ‘suffering comrades,’ feeling herself awakened to a new existence, the only one with import and meaning. She will ‘walk on that path which is thronged with numberless martyrs, that red, bloodied road.’ And even if she were to be sacrificed before she reaches her goal, ‘that is no loss, for I will at

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least have walked on that road.’ And a part of that moment of happiness, she knows, is of course love. Emma Bovary also reads books, romantic novels that are ‘the most insidious poison’ because they encourage her longings for bliss and passion. Reality does not measure up to her fantasy of it, and instead of the fairy tale ending she has dreamt of, she commits suicide by swallowing arsenic. That ‘something more, some more intense experience, some wider horizon if she could only find it’ has eluded her.9 It does not elude Sushang, who, having thrown in her lot with the communists and become part of something much larger than her bourgeois self, cannot see why so masterly a writer as Flaubert would want to write a whole book about such a small-minded woman as Emma Bovary.

Sushang is repeatedly called a New Woman in the novella. This is however a point to be qualified, for as a creation of the late 1920s she is considerably more sexually emancipated as well as more left-leaning than aspirant New Women of just six, seven years before. At the birthday party with which the novella begins, the talk is of Alexandra Kollotai, the Bolshevik feminist who is famous for preaching the ideological merit of free love. Ibsen’s Nora would have been thought old hat, and even Ellen Key was on the verge of being consigned to past history. Nora merely walked out on her husband, Ellen Key made sexual morality turn on a love that unites body and spirit, but Kollontai argued that a free interchange of sexual partners in many kinds of conjugal and non-conjugal combinations, with love or without love, was better suited to a socialist utopia than proprietorial, possessive, exclusive pairing—the sort exemplified by bourgeois marriage. She espoused a new kind of love for the new Soviet man and woman, a love in which the sense of ownership and exclusiveness between partners would disappear— as would the family, in the long run—and love for one’s mate would be subordinated to love for the collective; indeed, having multiple liaisons within it, none of them allconsuming, could leave one with more emotional energy to devote to the collective. It helps to know something of Kollontai’s background to understand the mark that her sexual politics made on her country and internationally. Kollontai turned her back first on her liberal aristocratic family background, and then on her marriage and life of domesticity, when she became a revolutionary activist dedicated to destroying the privileges of the class into which she was born. In her campaigns for rights, she singled out women and sexuality. In doing so, she was paradoxically showing herself to be somewhat un-Marxist, since classic Marxist theory subsumes the question of women’s emancipation under issues of class or property, arguing that the roots of oppression are economic, and since a revolution by proletarians, whether men or women, would put an end to exploitation by the bourgeoisie, there is no need for women to press

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their own cause; to do so is divisive and counter-revolutionary. Thus it is little wonder that her rise after the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 (she was appointed the commissar for social welfare, the first woman in the revolutionary government) was short-lived and she was put out to pasture. Kollontai appears in Hu Yepin’s story as the author of ‘The Loves of Three Generations’ (1923), the story for which she became famous in China.10 The three generations, each with a progressively freer and more open attitude to sexual relations, are the grandmother Marja, mother Olga, and daughter Genia. Marja is a Narodnik, a bourgeois supporter of the socially conscious populist movement in nineteenthcentury Russia. She marries a man of her own choice but leaves him when she falls in love with another. When this other man presently betrays her with a milkmaid, she leaves him, taking the daughter she has borne him; but she never stops loving him and remains faithful to him for the rest of her life. Olga, her daughter, is a Marxist who contracts a revolutionary marriage to a comrade, Constantin. She loves him, but during his exile she falls precipitously in love with a married engineer M, a wealthy representative of the liberal bourgeoisie, and he with her. Olga hates M’s politics and the ‘sated happiness’ of his family life, despising the latter for its bourgeois smugness and triviality. But none of this lessens her passion for him, and the two experience the height of happiness when their rapturous lovemaking yields a daughter, Genia. Yet at the same time she loves Constantin, with whom she is in tune politically and spiritually, so she refuses to break with either man, much to her mother’s consternation. Eventually, neither liaison survives the hazards and separations of the civil war and revolution, and she goes cold on men in general until she meets Andrei, a proletarian considerably younger than she, and goes to live with him in Moscow. Just as her mother has failed to understand her, so Olga is now dumbfounded by Genia. When she comes to live with Olga and Andrei, Genia is twenty, closer in age to her stepfather than her mother. Living under the same roof and left to themselves during Olga’s long absences from home for work, daughter and stepfather become lovers. But when Genia finds herself pregnant and asks her mother to help get her an abortion, she is unable to tell the appalled Olga who the father is: it could be Andrei, but it could also be a comrade with whom she has been simultaneously having an affair but whom she is leaving because he is ‘becoming such a bore.’ What is more, she has had other men, quick sexual encounters when she went to the front and nursed the wounded—no time, she says, for more, with all that work waiting to be done. She has not loved any one of them, nor does she love Andrei or the other father-candidate. That Genia could so nonchalantly give herself ‘without falling in love’ is what pains and baffles her mother most of all. But Genia does not doubt: ‘I will never love as mother loved. How can one work, if one loses one’s self like that?’ And, since Andrei does not love her either but instead continues to adore Olga, Genia reasons that she

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has taken nothing from her mother by sleeping with him. So why should Olga mind? To want to chain Andrei to her is, Genia tells her mother, ‘a selfish desire for possession. Grandmother’s bourgeois training speaks to you there.’ Is Olga behind the times? Or is Genia to be blamed for disorderly sexual conduct? Which form of the relation between the sexes is more compatible with the relations of communist society: exclusivity or what Kollontai calls ‘many-sided love’? The story ends ambiguously, and the fact that the author does not condemn Genia suggested to Kollontai’s critics that she was herself as matter-of-fact about love and sex as she had made the heroine; indeed, they attacked her for dangerously preaching promiscuity to Soviet youths, who were just then being accused of treating sex as an end in itself. Grist to the mill of her political opponents was Kollontai’s famous remark, ‘The sexual act must be seen not as something shameful and sinful but as something which is as natural as the other needs of [a] healthy organism, such as hunger or thirst.’ By this remark she was not, contrary to widespread belief, proposing the ‘glass of water’ theory of sexuality, the idea that sex should be as accessible and as easily satisfied as quenching one’s thirst by drinking a glass of water. But the theory was always to be identified with her after Lenin reviled it as being completely un-Marxist. It was ‘condemned as the equivalent of “just do it,” [and] cited in nearly every major attack against sexual licence in the 1920s,’ even though her hope was in fact ‘to remove the notion of sex from the bourgeois template of valuation’ by ‘naturalizing’ it.11 In ‘Bound for Moscow,’ Hu Yepin makes one of his female characters, a friend of Sushang’s, practise what Kollontai supposedly preaches; at that birthday party, Sushang teases her, observing of her friend that she is free enough in her sexual behaviour to belong to the ‘fourth generation.’ Her friend later tells Sushang, ‘last night I had sex with my eighth—or maybe my ninth—man.’ Though Sushang, we learn, is ‘in complete sympathy with this totally sexually emancipated girlfriend,’ she herself has not been as libertarian because she looks down on most men: they excite her too little and do not, sexually speaking, give her the least bit of encouragement or stimulation. Her conclusion is that ‘men are ever stragglers when it comes to love [falling behind women], or at least Chinese men are.’ Nevertheless, it is clear that Sushang does not hold with suppressing the sexual instinct for cowardly fear of pregnancy: not for her the sensual half-heartedness she scorns as the (Confucian) ‘middle way.’ Pressed for her views on ‘Loves of Three Generations,’ she declares, ‘Everyone should do as he or she likes. Attitudes to love could change within even the same person; for a start you should do whatever you think is right.’ Yet she is not a Genia, with no time to spare for love from her busy schedule of revolutionary work. Of course, work is what will give meaning to Sushang’s new life as a revolutionary; but surely ‘love can exist inside work,’ stirring you to renewed effort or comforting you when you are tired or thwarted. Though Sushang’s author did set work next to love, Hu Yepin did not quite pit one against the other as Genia does, perhaps

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because he was too much of an heir to the May Fourth legacy to be that unromantic himself. Hence his story betrays a tension between an idealized conception of love and the non-singular, non-exclusive and non-possessive sort that Kollontai urges. It was a tension that Hu had to resolve beyond the pages of fiction, in his own life, when his wife fell in love with Feng Xuefeng. But more of this later, when I take a closer look at Ding Ling. Meanwhile, Kollontai’s writings were becoming required reading in leftist circles in China, seeing print in a spate of translations between 1928 and 1934. It was mostly leftist returnees from Japan, where there had been a boom in her writings, who rendered them into Chinese—not only ‘The Loves of Three Generations’ but such other works of fiction as ‘Red Love,’ ‘Sisters,’ and ‘A Great Love,’ as well as a couple of her essays, most notably ‘Love and the New Morality.’ There were four separate translations of ‘Three Generations’ into Chinese; in book form, the first was by the playwright and screenwriter Xia Yan (1900–1995). A student in Japan during the heyday of the so-called Japanese proletarian literature movement, one as politically engaged as that movement’s Japanese members, Xia was forced out of the country in 1927 following Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of Chinese communists from the Guomindang and the harassment of left-wing writers and publications in Japan. Upon his return to Shanghai, he wrote and worked for the underground Chinese Communist Party. Kollontai apart, he translated August Bebel, the German socialist whose tract Women and Socialism was named, together with ‘Three Generations,’ the ‘two mustread works by the young men and women of China today.’12 Engels’ apart, Bebel’s Marxist view on the woman question was one that Kollontai echoed: Bebel favoured liberating wives and mothers from domestic drudgery by instituting communal kitchens and nurseries, socializing education and health care and so on, and making women as free and as unhampered as men in their access to sexual and emotional fulfilment. Xia Yan based his translation of ‘Three Generations’ on a Japanese one by Hayashi Fusao, a Marxist novelist and critic affiliated to the proletarian literature movement (but who would later disavow his communist sympathies in favour of Japanese nationalism). Xia Yan packaged the story with an essay by Hayashi on Kollontai’s sexual ethos and brought the two out, together with the story ‘Sisters,’ in a collection named Paths of Love in 1928.13 Though aimed at elucidating Genia’s behaviour to his Japanese and, through the translation, Chinese, readers, Hayashi’s essay succeeded in befogging the latter still further. It has to be said, though, that its conceptual fuzziness is less his fault than Kollontai’s, for it is quite hard to make sense of the tract that he had used as his main source, namely Kollontai’s ‘Love and the New Morality’ (1919). What, for example, is one to make of her idea of ‘game-love,’ which her tract proposes as a replacement for the ‘great love, or grand amour,’ of the past? How were Chinese readers to understand the idea except by taking it to mean ‘playing at love’ and ‘dalliance’—conduct unbecoming, surely, to socialists? Yet curiously Kollontai

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recommends it, arguing that, far from being casual, ‘game-love’ demands ‘a great delicacy, psychological awareness and genuine and responsive sensitivity.’14 In fact, the idea is not hers but another feminist writer’s. This was Grete Meisel-Hess, an Austrian Jewish member of the radical circles of fin de siècle Berlin who advocated liberated sexuality freed from monetary gain. Kollontai’s tract was actually a review of The Sexual Crisis: A Critique of Our Sex Life, a book which Meisel-Hess first published in German in 1909. One of the chapters of the authorized English translation of the book has ‘The Sport of Love’ for a heading, and this is where it is stated that ‘the inner meaning of sportive love is that those who engage in it will not allow themselves to be yoked, oppressed, ground to powder, by erotic experiences.’ ‘Love is a game—involving serious issues,’ says Meisel-Hess. Too serious, and the players’ ‘mood passes into tragedy and they make shipwreck of their lives.’ Too ‘light-minded,’ and they ‘degenerate into horse-play or into obscenity.’ Meisel-Hess considers ‘sportive love’ to be less egoistic than ‘love of the sublime sort.’ Two players that the author has in mind are the hetaera in ancient Greece and the courtesan mistress of the patron lover in the Italian Renaissance.15 Why does Kollontai recommend ‘game-love’? The answer lies in her opposition to the property- and inheritance-based bourgeois marriage and family. As a communist, she took it as an article of faith that these institutions extended the notion of property rights to include the rights of possession to each marriage partner’s emotional and spiritual being; for all their espousal of freedom, modern lovers demanded not only physical faithfulness of the people they loved but their ‘spiritual’ faithfulness as well, this to assuage their own loneliness. Kollontai was against the surrender of the entire ‘I,’ the ‘entire self, at the feet of the partner.’ People imagine that being ‘in love’ gives them the right to the self, or ‘soul,’ of the other person. Kollontai was unsympathetic to ‘the murderous arrows of Eros’—in other words to limerence, equating it with a violent assault upon another person’s self. One is better off with ‘game-love,’ she maintained, as it does not involve the great ‘fall,’ the ‘loss of one’s personality in the waves of passion.’16 Besides, it is not given to everyone to experience the ‘great love.’ Must we then be left to loveless marriages or to commercial sex? Meisel-Hess, Kollontai told her readers, offered an alternative: ‘game-love,’ the ‘erotic friendship’ that might serve as an apprenticeship for ‘great love.’ The monogamous unions based on ‘great love’ remains the ideal, Kollontai said, but this is not a permanent or set relationship, and side by side with it are a whole range of other forms of ‘erotic friendship’ between the sexes. It is time to open wide the gates to ‘a many-sided life,’ and for a new type of woman to emerge, the ‘bachelor woman’ who has been taught to realize that love is not the whole of her life. Had Chinese readers realized that game-love was exemplified by the Greek hetaera and the Renaissance courtesan, they might have understood the concept better, for

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they had such women in their own history, and might even have brought famous courtesans like the admirable and accomplished Liu Rushi to mind. But Hayashi Fusao had led them to attach it to Genia, and this could only have been befuddling. Where, in Genia, was the ‘great delicacy, psychological awareness and genuine and responsive sensitivity’ required by game-love, she who had time only for quick sex with multiple partners but not enduring, exclusive love? One Chinese reader took ‘game-love’ to mean treating love as a game, or trifling with love. Such an approach, he thought, is no better than dalliance and philandering, and only a Marxist could think in so base and false a way; no Marxist himself, he believed love to be ‘beautiful’ instead.17 A flurry of articles and readers’ letters in The New Woman shows just how much interest there was in Kollontai and ‘Three Generations.’ The fascination of these readers with Genia is obvious, but equally apparent is their lack of sympathy with loveless sex—for wasn’t that the problem with the traditional Chinese arranged marriage? Genia has less excuse in that she is not forced into lovelessness, unlike the unfree partners in a traditional Chinese marriage, which was contracted without any regard for whether the sexual partners had any feelings for each other. As against that, everyone should be free to do as he or she pleases, and since freedom is what makes modern love sacred, it is hardly up to us, the readers, to judge Genia. Much debate revolved around Genia’s claim that she has never loved any of the men with whom she has been intimate. She couldn’t not have loved Andrei, one reader thought, for she has said that she enjoys his company, and she feels happy and cheerful when she is with him; and isn’t that love? Inevitably, one of the frames of the debate was the nature of love and how broadly or narrowly one defined its scope—to say that Genia feels no love for the people she sleeps with is surely to restrict its definition. Love had not been a problem to Chinese to begin with, observed one reader, and it was only by raising it to such lofty heights, sanctifying it and narrowing its definition that a problem was created.18 To regard love as mysterious, holy and as belonging to the soul is to see it from the viewpoint of ‘historical idealism,’ and this is bound to be rejected by a Marxist, whose materialist conception of history behoves him to look at human relations in terms of social class and economic conditions. Love is specific to a social class and historical period, contrary to the familiar claims about its universality and eternity. So in the Marxist view it is merely a matter of historical inevitability for the proprietary, exclusive variety typical of bourgeois wedlock to give way, once capitalism is abolished, to the new proletarian sexual morality of free, open and equal relations of comradeship. Some of the readers had read their Engels, and did not question the historical accuracy of his claim that it was the rise of the bourgeoisie which brought what he termed ‘sex love’ into matrimony. As we have seen, his tract The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) posits four stages: first, the promiscuous group marriage of primitive society; second, matriarchal pairing marriage; third, the patriarchal extended family, and finally, bourgeois

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monogamy. Engels’s historical scheme was adapted easily to the Chinese way of speaking, which characterized it as a progression from a system of ‘one wife, many husbands’ to that of ‘one husband, many wives’ and ‘one husband, one wife.’19 In Engels’s scheme the stages are driven by economic and social changes, and it is to such changes too that Chinese readers linked the loves of the ‘Three Generations’— grandmother Marja to the age of bourgeois liberalism, mother Olga to a transitional stage, and daughter Genia to the new era of proletarian morality. In the first, love is possessive and exclusive; in the second, it is torn between flesh and soul (M versus Constantin), while in the third game-love reigns. The Chinese, one commentator observed, were still stuck in the grandmother’s stage, or perhaps they were not even there yet. Another commentator, one of the story’s translators, seemed more upbeat. Progress there had been, he thought, to go by the fact that Alexandra Kollontai had succeeded Ellen Key and Edward Carpenter in the Chinese love discourse.20 For Ellen Key, the question to ask of a marriage or sexual liaison in order to judge its morality is not ‘Is it legal or illegal?’ but ‘Is it based on mutual love or not?’ Hers was a message that the Chinese took to heart when they were fighting against loveless arranged marriages, but here now was Kollontai, espousing what they took to be ‘free sex.’ Key’s new morality seemed new enough at the time, but against what might be called Kollontai’s new-new morality, it seemed not a little old-hat. Key required love to be a merger of body and spirit, but surely that is to falsify it, protested a participant in the debate, since love is but an ‘ordinary, commonplace thing,’ neither sacred nor supreme. To make its presence a precondition of marriage or cohabitation is as unreasonable, he observed, as making it dependent upon ‘the command of parents and the good offices of a go-between.’ No, he was absolutely opposed to the idea that there has to be love before there can be sex. History tells us, he insisted, that man-woman relations evolve and progress with the times and, given that they do, there is no golden rule on love that cannot be broken as a new age dawns. To drive home his repudiation of the old, he entitled his article ‘Writing Off the “Love is Best” Sentiment at a Stroke.’21 Let it not be thought though that Kollontai’s is a call for a libertarian attitude to sex, a worried Xia Yan hastened to tell his readers. Out of fear that a picture of sexual licence might tar Soviet Russia in the eyes of his fellow Chinese leftists, he made a point of persuading them in an article that any libertarianism is narrowly confined to a tiny minority of avant-garde Soviets caught up in the throes of revolution. It is dictated by the exceptional circumstances of the upheaval, and in no way representative of the sexual ideal of the proletarian class. Lenin would hardly have slammed the ‘glass of water’ theory if he had condoned it. To clarify things still further, and because there was something of a Kollontai boom in China, Xia Yan published his translation of ‘Love and the New Morality’ in Shanghai in 1929.22 Kollontai’s proposals for a new kind of love were part of the ferment of experimental ideas on new forms of living that were aired in the early years of Soviet Russia. The

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Bolsheviks expected the family to disappear in a fully socialist system, and Kollontai envisaged a future utopia in which all social and personal problems would be solved by housing the entire population in co-educational dormitories, feeding them in communal canteens, raising children in communal nurseries, washing their clothes in communal laundries, and so on. Liberated from child care and domestic labour, women would be free to enter the workforce on an equal footing with men. These ideas of hers were considered in all seriousness in the second national congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1922.23 They were to cause no end of public resentment when, under the people’s commune system, they were put into practice in China in the 1950s, and neither there nor in Soviet Russia did communal canteens and nurseries succeed in replacing family life or freeing women from domestic slavery. Family life and women’s lot were affected, however, by something else imported from Soviet Russia: a radical code of laws on marriage and divorce. This occurred not in China as a whole but in the Chinese Soviet Republic headed by Mao Zedong. Also named the Jiangxi Soviet, after the remote southeastern province making up the bulk of its territory, the soviet was the base of the communist struggle against the Guomindang in the years following Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of his communist allies in the cities. Radically, the marriage regulations promulgated in 1931 held out to women the prospect of casting off the shackles of the traditional family, allowing divorce, for example, on the petition of one party alone, a provision not adopted by even the advanced Western world until the 1960s and 1970s.24 The much-married Mao could not have been averse to any law that made it easier for him to move on from one woman to the next. To those who until then had no means of escape from entrapment in miserable arranged marriages, it was nothing short of a godsend. Hu Yepin certainly portrayed it that way in a short story he set there, ‘Cohabitation’ (1930): Conditions are now vastly changed . . . [Women] used to live shut up in impoverished homes, going through the futile round of cooking, washing, caring for the children, feeding the pigs—shut up like prisoners in a jail without a ray of hope for the future. Now they are like birds soaring in the sky. Their life has become free. They are no longer persecuted or oppressed. Nor do they fear their husbands any more. They can get to know men as they choose. More than that, they are free to go with comrades to register at the district soviet, and formally to start cohabiting with them. Even for the children to whom they give birth there is the provision of public care, so that the women are relieved of personal worry.25

A second set of regulations in 1934 recognized de facto marriage status for common-law relationships or unmarried cohabitation, ruling that ‘a man and a woman who cohabit are considered to be married, whether or not they have registered.’ These rules were consistent with Engels’s argument for the abolition of marriage altogether; he saw no reason why, when affection ended or a new passion beckoned, a couple should not simply agree on separation rather than ‘wade through the useless mire of a

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divorce case.’26 It is no wonder that the Jiangxi Soviet acquired a reputation for moral laxity, and though the Guomindang, whose army was repeatedly encircling the soviet to destroy it, did put about the rumour that the base was a hotbed of promiscuity where men were forced to collectivize their wives, this was not all just anti-communist propaganda, since the married lives of high-ups like Mao Zedong left one in little doubt that sexual liaisons with women were lightly and informally consummated and dissolved. All the same, though some communists were said to subscribe to the ‘glass of water ideology,’ so apparently casually did they enter intimate relationships and end them, there was not the sexual free-for-all that the Guomindang would have people believe. What did happen was that Mao, who was concerned to make mating accessible to all, particularly to the very poorest peasants and labourers who could not afford to marry under the old system, issued a decree for unmarried men and women to find themselves partners freely and quickly. Inevitably there was a rush to be paired, and just as inevitably, this resulted in a certain amount of disorderly couplings.27 Not that the sexual code among the country folk could have been all that strict to begin with: to go by Mao’s rural investigations in his own home province of Hunan in the 1920s, three-way or multiple-way sexual relations were common among the poorest peasantry. It is a good guess that this was not promiscuity so much as scarcity: lacking the means to have a woman all to himself, to say nothing of marrying one, a poor peasant could not have any access to sex unless it was shared. (Incidentally, the passage where he related this, in his 1927 ‘Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,’ has been prudishly suppressed in the cleaned up editions of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong). In 1934 the Guomindang troops dealt a crushing blow on Mao’s forces, wiping out the Jiangxi Soviet and forcing the Red Army to go on the famous Long March. A circuitous military retreat, this terminated a year later in Yan’an, a name resonant in Chinese revolutionary history. During the so-called Yan’an period of that history, 1935 to 1949, a retreat of another kind was discernible: a turning away from sexual liberation to puritanism. This was partly to fit the progressive urban ideal of women’s emancipation to the more conservative rural traditions of the countryside round about, and partly because the Red Army had to fight the Japanese within a few years of its arrival in Yan’an, and wartime exigencies called for soldierly discipline and selfabnegation, as well as a measure of asceticism.28 In the struggle for national salvation and, as the communists saw it, its necessary concomitant, namely revolution, love came a poor second to political ideals and commitment. In the criteria for choice of mate, love would feature not at all if the party authorities had anything to do with it—and they had a great deal to do with it, enjoining comrades to base sex on the ideological closeness of the partners rather than on personal compatibility. When Mao took love down a peg in 1942, it stayed demoted, never to be promoted again so long as Maoism held sway. He did this in his ‘Talks

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at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,’ a document whose influence on cultural policy remains powerful to this day. Addressed to artists and writers who had travelled from cities like Shanghai to the communist stronghold to support the revolutionary cause, the very people, in fact, to embrace European love ideals, the talks determined the dim light in which love was to be viewed from then on: It is a basic Marxist concept that the objective realities of class struggle and national struggle determine our thoughts and feelings. But some of our comrades turn this upside down and maintain that everything ought to start from ‘love.’ Now as for love, in a class society there can only be class love; but these comrades are seeking a love transcending classes, love in the abstract and also freedom in the abstract . . . This shows they have been very deeply influenced by the bourgeoisie. They should thoroughly rid themselves of this influence and modestly study Marxism-Leninism.29

A Chinese journalist who visited Yan’an in 1944 reported that love and marriage practices were standardized by the party, so that it made no difference whom you married, party doctrines having stereotyped everybody and shrunk individual differences.30 Looking ahead to the years of ever more coercive ideological conformity in the two decades following the establishment of the socialist state, I find it hard not to see the stereotyping taken to an extreme—as desexualization, with gender differences erased in the unisex style of dressing. Up to the early 1990s, foreign visitors landing in China could tell themselves, ‘Now I’m really here’ the moment their eyes fell upon the sea of blue suits worn alike by men and women. The sight calls to mind a Russian image, a 1929 poster designed by the artist of the Russian avant-garde, El Lissitzky; fusing the heads and faces of a boy and a girl into an undifferentiated androgyny, this submerged gender and sexual identities. Under Stalin, a brief period of unprecedented sexual freedom in the 1920s was followed by desexualization in the 1930s, a pattern discernible also in contemporary China, where an emancipatory phase was quickly overtaken by a repressive one. ‘Political purity’ became the first of the criteria for selecting one’s mate in Yan’an (the others being compatibility in age and physical appearance, and a readiness to render mutual help, such help including darning socks and mending shoes). Romantic love was not even an adjunct to these. As for divorce, the pretext for it was invariably the wife’s political backwardness. Equality with men proved elusive. We learn all this from Ding Ling, who had joined the party after the execution of Hu Yepin and who had been welcomed into the communist fold in Yan’an in 1937.31 It turned out that the Communist Party was not as sympathetic to an outspoken feminist as you might think—and Ding Ling was assuredly a feminist. In bringing to light women’s subservience in the communist stronghold, Ding Ling embarrassed and angered the male party leaders and blotted her own copybook, rather as Kollontai had done in the Soviet Union.

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The theme of love and female sexuality used to be Ding Ling’s forte as a fiction writer. No longer: ‘I am certainly not going to write any more about love,’ she had announced in 1931.32 Had she continued upon her old course, her Marxist credentials would have been questioned, she would have offended against the proprieties by which communists were supposed to live, and a reckoning would be demanded of her by higher powers.

Ding Ling and Hu Yepin were a couple who blurred the boundaries between marriage, cohabitation and free union. In this they were both expressive of their day and its product. Ding Ling was born late enough, and was independent-minded enough, to think that she could claim her freedom and please herself. And it pleased her, when she was about twenty, to live with Hu in Beijing, enjoying the sort of love in a garret that was reserved for the happily emancipated. It was Ding Ling but also her generation speaking when one of her fictional characters said, ‘For a woman, marriage under the old system of marriage was equivalent to prostitution.’33 It amused her that people took her and Hu Yepin for man and wife; to themselves they were a childishly innocent couple for whom love was natural, easy, involving neither unease nor fantasy nor pain. ‘We treated our love like a game,’ she was to write. Then a friend of a friend appeared in their lives in the winter of 1927, and Ding Ling fell in love for the first time. He was Feng Xuefeng (1903–76), a Communist Party member whose name has appeared once before in these pages, as the translator from the Japanese of Marxist texts on literature that Hu Yepin was studying. Ding Ling had wanted to learn Japanese, a language which Feng had more or less taught himself in the course of auditing classes at Peking University, and Feng had been recommended to her as someone with whom she might study. Her falling in love with her communist teacher is complemented too closely by what Sushang experiences in ‘Bound for Moscow’ for the story’s author to have wholly made the latter up. ‘This was the first time I had loved any man,’ Ding Ling was to recollect in an interview years later.34 The emotions stirred in her were so powerful as to have been equalled since by no other experience of love. Feng had had some poems in the new style published but it was for his promotion of revolutionary writing that he left his mark. He is also remembered today for having been a devoted disciple of Lu Xun, who in turn had warmed to him, perhaps because Feng was not only intellectually brilliant but was studious and dogged with it. There is a much-published studio photograph, taken in 1931 in Shanghai, in which the two are seen together, not so much as mentor and disciple but as family friends, with the wife and infant child of each completing the group portrait. It is the only picture I have seen of Lu Xun in which he actually smiles, and of the two men it is the

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twenty-eight-year-old Feng who appears the sterner, gazing intently at the camera as he sits cross-legged on the floor, looking handsome in a Western tie and jacket. According to Ding Ling, Feng was pleased and surprised to find such a ‘modern woman’ as she falling in love with him, his self-image being that of a simple rustic fellow. Their love affair was kept a secret for decades, and in the uninhibited and highly charged letters that she wrote to him in 1931, letters published under the title ‘Not Love Letters’ after they had parted, he remains anonymous. She signs herself as his ‘Dewalisi,’ the Chinese transliteration of tovarisch, the Russian word for ‘comrade.’ Confessing to the relationship in an interview but not naming him, she has said, ‘I stopped writing, and had only one thought—to hear this man say, “I love you”.’35 Shortly after meeting Feng, she told Hu Yepin that she must leave him, for she now knew how it felt to love. She loved Hu of course, she said, but even as ‘Yepin kissed me,’ she confessed to Feng in her love letter to him, ‘I longed for one of his many kisses to be yours.’ She intensely desired Feng, the ‘only man to set my heart aflame,’ yearning to be enfolded in his arms ‘with your hand placed on my heart.’ Just fantasizing about him ‘made my blood throb.’36 A triangle had formed. The three of them went to Hangzhou together to look for a house—whether to set up home as a ménage à trois is not entirely certain. But a tearfully distraught Hu Yepin returned after a while to Shanghai alone. A friend to whom he vented his emotions persuaded him to go back, however, and presently it was the third party, Feng Xuefeng, who left Hangzhou, bringing the triangular relationship to a painful close. To know what happened between the threesome before it broke up, you have to read the short story about one woman and two men that Hu Yepin published under the title ‘Three Disunited People’ in 1929. Though this is fiction and the names are changed, it is apparent that little else is. The story is written in the form of letters between two men; and between one of the men, Hu Yepin in a very light disguise, and a woman, Lin, whose voice sounds too much like Ding Ling’s for it not to be hers. The fictional Hu grieves for his lost love but he does not hate Lin, he tells the fictional Feng: ‘truly, because since the love between her and me was merely a form of play (a game), the fact that she now loves you—whether it’s true love or not—could have been foreseen.’ This riles Lin, who protests that she does love the fictional Hu and it is cruel of him to ‘write off their love as though he were wiping dust from glass.’ Her loving the fictional Feng does not rob him, Hu, of anything because everything that he wants from her, he could still have. She deplores the fact that in the sort of society they live in, no one understands ‘the woman who loves two men, and at the same time.’ Yet I am innocent, I have not committed an error. Nor is it anything mysterious. If one must draw a comparison, a woman who loves two men is no different from a man who loves two women. If one recognizes this to be true human nature, why regard my love as a crime?

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Feng was the one who withdrew from the triangle, not so much from the want of courage that Ding Ling accused him of as from an inability, or unwillingness, to go against his own feelings. ‘It is nothing strange for two men to live with one woman on an equal basis,’ the fictional Feng says, but in practice he baulks at it. ‘One look at her, and the image of another man beside her comes to mind,’ he says, and ‘ordinary person that I am,’ he cannot ‘behave like a superman’ and overcome ‘the jealousy that belongs to love.’ Nor can any man, he adds, ‘unless humankind were to be transformed into another humankind.’ Feng seemed set on making a clean break, but it is clear that Ding Ling found it hard to let go of him. In her fantasy she saw herself going away with him, to Shanghai, to Japan, and imagining him to care for her still after they had parted helped to allay her sense of loneliness. She would happily give up everything, she said, to hear him utter the one sentence: ‘I love you!’ She believed him to return her feelings—‘You do love me, you needn’t deny it’—but not to the extent perhaps of wanting to take her away from Hu Yepin. This could be read between the lines of her letter: Why did you not love me a little more at the time? Why did you not try to win me for yourself ? You left. In Shanghai we chanced upon each other again, and I knew that my fantasy was but a fantasy. I felt I couldn’t leave Yepin, and I felt you lacked courage; yet I have not changed a bit in how I feel about you . . . When I couldn’t not burn your letters for Yepin’s sake, what filled my heart still sufficed to give me satisfaction. Just to know that there is in the world a man whom I love and who loves me, is enough to make me happy, for all that he is absent.

‘You’d rather forget me, you’re now with another woman,’ she writes, expressing hurt that when they chanced upon each other he ignored her as if she were a stranger. She, on the other hand, still dreamed of ‘once again lying down beside you, you holding me in your arms as we speak of the love buried deep in our hearts, our eternal, inextinguishable love.’38 At the same time she hoped that he could take her for a man, which is to say that he mustn’t suppose she would tiresomely inconvenience him by protesting, as a woman would, that she loved him. ‘We’re purely comrades now,’ she reassures him. As for the aggrieved party, though Hu Yepin would wish to clear himself of any charge of bourgeois possessiveness and exclusiveness, still the sort of open-ended love that Kollontai has proposed for the socialist could only be envisaged by him in the abstract. He was not really up to so major a step forward in real life. Ideology was another matter though, and a quick perusal of his story ‘Bound for Moscow’ will reveal him to be altogether sympathetic to non-exclusive love. A subplot of this story is a university scandal caused by a three-way relationship between a girl student; her boyfriend, whom she is believed to have slept with; and her new love, a lecturer in the

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French department. The threesome is seen to be implicated in something immoral; as titters are heard in classroom after classroom and a primitive prudery in the student body rises to the surface, names (including ‘hooker’) are called and moves are made to have the girl expelled. All are adamant that a woman cannot love two men at the same time, and that if she did, she violated love’s sacredness. The students take it upon themselves to be moral arbiters. The one student who stands apart to take the girl’s side is given voice in Hu’s story, and in his emphatic defence of her, we discern a clue to the author’s own thinking: It is possible for a girl to love two men at the same time; there’s nothing dubious or equivocal about it. Nor should the boyfriend feel humiliated thereby. For a woman—or a man—to love two people simultaneously is natural, because our instinct is to love many to begin with. Besides, [I believe] love to be completely free, and no bystander has any right whatsoever to interfere.

Hu was not able to cope with a triangular love himself but that is not to say that he did not, as a matter of progressive principle, believe in freeing himself from possessiveness. The words that he puts into Lin’s mouth in ‘Three Disunited People’ are more his own than Ding Ling’s: ‘Without usurping a revolutionary’s slogan, I’d say that the “one and only” view of love should be fundamentally shaken up, and shaken up for the sake of all mankind’s happiness.’ It is a mean view of love that deems it exhausted in being given to a single person—as mean, in fact, as a capitalist’s arrogation of assets all to himself. Hu runs his ideology into Ding Ling’s attitude when he makes Lin say, ‘If loving just one person is equivalent to loving to the point of exhaustion, then sacred love is no different from the property of a capitalist. In actual fact, like other desires, love is not that simple. Since humanity is bent on satisfying its various desires to the utmost, then why doesn’t it allow love to develop to the fullest extent possible?’ To allow love to develop to the fullest extent possible is unpossessively to let it go further than just one person. In theory this was Hu’s position, but putting it into practice proved difficult. ‘Historical materialism’ being an article of faith, Hu was bound also to see malefemale relations as evolving in stages, with first feudalism then capitalism and finally socialism setting the framework for people’s experience of their personal as well as economic lives. The zeitgeist encouraged him in this belief. Marx and Engels had jarred agape the crack that his contemporaries already held in their minds about the monogamous family, the form that displaced the ‘one husband, many wives’ system; they were receptive to the (Marxist) idea that the exclusive nuclear family was basically a property relationship that developed hand in hand with class society. They were opposed to the nuclear family of course, as they were opposed to the jealousy and possessiveness engendered by the expectation of monogamy and emotional exclusivity. An opinion repeatedly doing duty for knowledge in the pages of The New Woman was that history, even Chinese history, will advance to the point where loving one

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does not necessarily put paid to becoming sexually intimate with another. Look at Olga, Hu’s peers say, she who has advanced beyond her mother’s generation in being a two-men woman. Olga knows, a contributor to The New Woman remarks, that ‘in loving a member of the opposite sex she is not restricted to just one . . . She has broadened the scope of love.’39 But Olga cannot make her mother, who is of the generation to think love holy, understand that ‘it was possible for two such passions to exist side by side—deep tenderness, affection and a consciousness of absolute spiritual accord with Constantin on the one hand and, on the other, the stormy desire for M, who, as a human being, I neither loved nor respected.’ She is unable to tear herself away from M, yet she despises his politics and, later, his meteoric rise in the world of finance and industry. She would give her life for M if he were in danger, so it is not just physical desire she feels for him—‘it’s more than desire,’ she tells her mother, who can only think of it as that. ‘It is love, a different sort of love.’ But what sort of love is that? Her mother’s failure to grasp its nature is shared by The New Woman’s readers. A definition that one contributor presently hits upon is ‘soul-flesh duality,’ a splitting of the melon of love between Constantin and M into spiritual bond and inflamed passion.40 Despising a man yet loving him to distraction: that is precisely the fix in which the heroine of Ding Ling’s most famous story, ‘Miss Sophie’s Diary’ (1928), finds herself.41 For its time the piece, written in the form of self-dissecting, tell-all diary entries, could not have been anything but shocking as well as titillating reading. Sophie’s emotions, in part hate, in part scorn and in great part obsessive need, are laid bare with a knowledge of her own shortcomings that her worst detractors could scarcely match. The man by whom she is smitten is tall (his height is repeatedly mentioned) and extremely good-looking, with soft hair and skin and moist red lips that Sophie longs to kiss. That he is an English-speaking ethnic Chinese from Singapore makes him Chinese yet not Chinese, not quite a white man but near enough to bring (three times in ten pages) the chivalric knights of medieval Europe to Sophie’s mind. A thought which readers will have difficulty resisting is that she finds him seductive because he incarnates the West. He drives her mad with desire, and if, as in her fantasies, he were to take her in his arms and smother her with kisses, she would fall on him and cry, ‘Oh I love you, oh I love you!’ At one point she wonders about love: ‘Is this love?’ It must be, to have that power. She wants to possess him, then wonders if this ‘selfish possession,’ this ‘tasteless jealousy,’ is love. Why can’t she admit that she is in love? Because she cannot possibly love anybody that superficial, that money-minded, someone whose fervours are for ‘participating in the Debating Society, playing tennis matches, studying at Harvard, joining the foreign service, becoming an important statesman, or inheriting his father’s business and becoming a rubber merchant and a capitalist.’ Yet, much as she scorns him, she feels that to be without him is to be robbed of all life’s meaning.

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When, at last, he does kiss her, her sense of triumph lasts but a moment before it gives way to disgust and self-mockery. To have craved then yielded to the embrace of a man she despises has damaged her pride and self-esteem, and she concludes that one is indeed one’s own worst enemy. The story ends with her contriving her way out of difficulty by turning her back on him and on her life in Beijing as a whole. By making the male the sex object, the female the desiring subject, Ding Ling inverts the masculine and feminine ways of experiencing love as they are usually portrayed. She did so in real life too, attempting a reversal of the usual ‘one man, many wives’ pattern by attempting polyamorousness with two men. In the evolution of modern Chinese womanhood, ‘Miss Sophie’s Diary’ is as much of a landmark as literary historians say it is, and Ding Ling herself the great feminist she is always taken to be. But the work was something of a one-off, for after she joined the Communist Party in 1932, she betrayed the passions with which she had burned in youth. Clasped at first to the party’s collective bosom only to have her independence battered and beaten into submission, she made compromises to the extent of twisting herself over the years into approved party postures. She had two more marriages, or liaisons, after Hu and Feng. But in work and in life she had been urged on to what Feng, writing dispassionately as a leftist literary critic, has called the ‘true path’ and hitched her pursuit of love to ‘the social forces of revolution.’ Completing ‘Miss Sophie’s Diary,’ Feng says, faced Ding Ling with a crisis, or a turning point: to go on writing in the same sentimental and nihilistic vein to lesser and lesser effect; or to grow with the times and connect with the revolutionary fervour of the masses.42 The pursuit of passionate love, as Feng sees it, had been the call of the times which those youths liberated by the May Fourth movement had needed to answer. So it was inherently revolutionary, and to cross from it to revolution was entirely natural and entirely right. There is certainly something in what he says about its being revolutionary, and all those calls for an end to ‘feudal’ practices ought not to count for nothing. Ground was broken, ideas altered for good and all. Yet the Chinese revolution hastened the end of love’s glory days. With the triumph of communism the authority of the all-powerful father was reinstated in the guise of the all-powerful state. The feeling that people had a right to live and love in liberty became a bitter-sweet memory, like the passing of youth. The coming of true love to China is a story without a happy ending, if by a happy ending is meant love staying ‘sacred’ and ‘the best’ for good.

Western-style double wedding in Shanghai, late 1920s.

17 Afterthoughts

Our problem is saving our nation, saving this feeble and sick people, saving this half-dead culture. In the course of this great undertaking, any borrowing, from whatever civilization, is acceptable, so long as it resurrects and rejuvenates us. Hu Shi, 1930

There is a sense in which, in very broad terms, romantic love is the same the world over, just as human nature is. Yet I say ‘a sense’ advisedly, for as earlier chapters of this book have indicated, not everyone, nor every age, means the same thing by ‘romantic love.’ Indeed, ‘romantic love’ should be put in quotes because it does not have a one-to-one correspondence with any Chinese term. A person feels something, and that feeling must be defined, in part, in terms of language. You know that the pangs, thrills and yearnings you feel are ‘love’ because society has given you a label to affix to these feelings. But a label is seldom affixed to exactly the same things in different societies. For an illustration of this, imagine two overlapping circles, a large one to the left, a smaller one to the right. The larger circle represents the Western conceptualization of romantic love, and the smaller one the Chinese conception of it. The difference in size reflects the much greater quantity and complexity of thinking on love in the West, as well as love’s far higher profile in life and culture there. The area of overlap represents what the Western and Chinese conceptions have in common; this might be broken down into sexual attraction, limerence and attachment. Though ‘limerence’ has no equivalent in Chinese discourse, the term chiqing, ‘infatuation’ or, literally, ‘daft love,’ comes close to it; the many instances of lovesickness in the literature leave one in no doubt that falling and being in love is recognized in Chinese culture. The uncovered part of the larger circle is constituted by those parts of ‘romantic love’ that were absent from the Chinese conception; of these, the ones that the Chinese were most interested in adopting at the start of the twentieth century were: love’s indispensability to marriage, its idealization and sublimity, and its exclusivity. In Chapter 8 I told the tale of the two gods whose business is to unite lovers and effect predestined marriages. The Goddess of the Moon and the Old Man in the Moon, as Chinese legend calls them, notice that business is not as brisk as before because, instead of applying for their services, young lovers are freely finding each other and

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pairing up themselves. It is 1922, and now that China is a modern republic, those young people are throwing out the old way of love and all that goes with it. As far as they are concerned, even to use the word qing (instead of lian’ai or aiqing) is to make love seem a less ‘thoroughgoing’ thing.1 A less thoroughgoing love because, first of all, it had no part to play in the joining of two people in matrimony. So if one of the beliefs of the romantic love ideology is that one should marry for love, then the Chinese were not romantic and would not become so until they could marry whomever they loved. When some did start putting love first, before filial compliance with parental choice of marital partner, a line was judged to have been crossed that had old-style qing to one side, and new lian’ai to the other. The latter showed its true colours by often having the word ‘free’ appended to it as either a prefix or suffix. It aimed to free son and daughter from father and mother, and to pit I against Them. The love-based marriage’s association with liberty made it a union of not only a modern but superior morality. To love in the Western way was one answer the Chinese found to the question of how Chinese civilization might advance to a better outcome than that to which its backwardness appeared to be dooming it. The backwardness was felt to be general; it was endemic not only to the country’s economic and social fabric but, crucially for love’s fortunes there, to its ordering of human relationships. The first of these relationships, to any Chinese, was family. The European vision of love was a stick to beat that cardinal Chinese relationship. When Hu Shi looked back in 1934 upon the rapid pace of change of the previous two decades, a change which he thought was greater than that achieved by all earlier periods of Chinese history, he was immensely cheered by the collapse of the old form of the family and all that hinged on it. Concomitant with that collapse, he said, was the raising of the woman’s place in society and the reform of the marriage system.2 Those twenty years made all the difference to how you married, whether it was by ‘the command of parents and the good offices of a go-between’ or by personal choice. He, Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu and Xu Zhimo were born within six years of each other. Had they married in 1934, instead of 1917, 1912, 1920 and 1915 respectively, they might all have chosen their own wives and married for love. A study has shown that up to 1937, more than half of the marriages of young people in China—54.72 per cent, to be exact—was arranged by parents. This might seem a very high rate of unfreedom, until you remember that just twenty years before, it was 100 per cent.3 The epigraph to this chapter quotes Hu Shi as saying that any borrowing, from any civilization, was acceptable so long as it furthered his generation’s great cause; he himself drew from Ibsen, as we have seen. For an authority younger Chinese had Ellen Key: pages of Shanghai’s periodicals bristled with her pronouncement that marrying without love was immoral, and only marriages in which love was maintained were moral. Some of the most prominent of Key’s Chinese transmitters saw liberty

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to love as lying at the core of the woman’s question; if one but loved, they believed, freedom and equality would come within one’s grasp. To make love the essential condition of conjugal union was not only to make it figure in more spheres of life than ever before but to give it a far higher place in the Chinese scale of values. This would hardly be justified were love not all-embracing and, what is more, ‘sacred’ as well as ‘the best.’ Speaking of it in a lofty accent by repeatedly calling love ‘sacred’ and ‘the best’ might have kept its value high had time been on its side. But its champions had no more than two decades to achieve what, in Europe, had taken centuries. Fortunately for them, China made more progress across the board in these two decades, according to Hu Shi, than during any previous period of its history.4 But history was not on love’s side. The field of love in the early twentieth century was divided into two great discourses: the discourse of liberation, and the discourse of revolution. In the first, love broke the chains of the patriarchal family. But in the second, love found itself fettered by patriarchy of another sort: the authoritarian family writ large in the communist state. Communist leaders were Confucians in a new guise when it came to marriage; they demanded a staggering sacrifice of personal freedom, including the liberty to give primacy to the lurchings of the heart over order and discipline. And love had to come a very poor second indeed to a couple’s ideological compatibility and devotion to the party. So while marriage was one of life’s central experiences in China, the ideal of the primacy of love never was. The Chinese were not preoccupied with love to anywhere near the same degree as in the West, where love-in-marriage has been given a uniquely strong emphasis since at least the eighteenth century. As we have seen, this led scholars like Denis de Rougemont to the conclusion that the problem of love did not arise for the Chinese. Yet a problem did arise in the 1920s; it did so no sooner than an attempt was made to Westernize it and to raise its profile. Wasn’t love the sine qua non of marriage in the West? Didn’t love conquer all there? Wasn’t it sacred? Exclusive? Distinguishable from lust? Love was not any of those things in China. Nor could it be since those things are ideals that had developed over centuries, and developed what is more from Platonic and Christian roots. To the Chinese who discovered them in the first two decades of the twentieth century, these ideals were potent. To make them their own, however, was another matter. There had first to be a new name—and lian’ai was that. Lian’ai bids fair to correspond exactly with ‘romantic love’ in being impregnated with a metaphysical dualism that opposes spirit to body. Under the influence of translated European literature, there appeared in popular writing of the Butterfly type an idealization of ‘spiritual love,’ a new Chinese category, on the one hand, and a recoil from what European formulations take to be its inverse, bodily desire, on the other. Exponents like Zhou Shoujuan aligned themselves with the Western tradition, one extending back to the

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fin’amors ideal, of associating the highest forms of love with the transcendence of the physical body. Then along came Ellen Key, who, out of a wish to disabuse her European readers of the anti-sex attitudes bequeathed them by the Christian Church, reconciled the two by enjoining the fusion of the soul and sensuality in fulfilled love. Her Chinese audience seized on the ‘oneness of soul and flesh’ as the definition of true love, following the Japanese in supposing it to be Ellen Key’s. The definition caused them some difficulty, for while they knew exactly what flesh was, they were not at all sure about ‘soul.’ Reconfiguring it as ‘personality’ did not help, for in borrowing the Japanese neologism for it, the Chinese took on all the ambiguity of the Japanese original, and some could only understand so-called ‘personality-love’ as the sort of love where short-lived sexual attraction and feelings played no part. An added difficulty was that even as true lian’ai united spirit and flesh, soul had to prevail over sex if lian’ai were to be faithful to the Western love model—in the European love tradition, as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, ‘the element of sublime love tends to predominate over sexual ardour.’ To be sublime, love has to be raised (as if by sublimation) to a lofty degree of purity. How to achieve that and sexual satisfaction at the same time escaped most Chinese; of the ones named in this book, Xu Zhimo alone bought into the idea. Even less did they grasp the conception of love as redemption; that your sins might be forgiven you if you but loved (like the Camellia Lady did) could make no sense to them. And who could blame them, since Christian notions did not run in their bloodstreams? Broadly, romantic love in China today has a history of only about eighty years to look back upon—‘romantic love’ in the sense that its Chinese champions in the 1920s understood it, as being free, distinct from lust and as unifying flesh and spirit. We have seen the enthusiasm with which the May Fourth progressives embraced these ideas. They could scarcely be proof against them, their appetite for Western literature was so enormous; numerous authors jostled for their attention, Goethe with Kollontai, Schopenhauer with Dante, Flaubert with Alexandre Dumas fils, and so on. For a lead many Chinese had the Japanese, on whose massive adoption of European ideas in the Meiji and Taishō periods they could piggyback. Still it is a wonder that, with so little time to digest so many paradoxical doctrines, those champions of love were not more confused. Their legacy has not been straightforward, and its effects are still unfolding. It is beyond the scope of this book to consider the place of love in present-day China, my interest being strictly historical. Yet earlier visions and experiences leave a residue that goes on secreting under today’s thoughts and sensations, and this is something I should not pass over. A great deal of sociological and anthropological research has been done on love, courtship and marriage in urban China since it rejoined the world in the 1980s and

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began to free up economically and socially. I had begun to read up on this research when a Chinese scholar friend drew my attention to a true story recounted in a book of essays posthumously published by a well-known Beijing writer, Shi Tiesheng (1951– 2010), in 1995. So well does this illustrate the deposit left by love’s makeover in the Western image that I propose to retell it here.5 The story is of a woman who felt herself to be in a quandary because, though she had raised no objection to her husband sleeping with other women so long as he loved only her (‘so long as he doesn’t love anybody else, only me’), she was suddenly struck by the disturbing thought, as the number of his sexual partners increased, that she had no way of knowing whether he still loved her and, if so, why? She did not think it was jealousy that troubled her, nor was she worried that, in feeling uneasy about her husband’s practice of free sex, she was not being modern. What pained her was that she did not know in what way she was different in his eyes from all those other women. Is she like all those other women, just another sexual partner? What, she asked, constitutes proof of love? Constant care and concern, solicitude, help and support—to her mind all these spelled parental, sibling and friendship love. Surely, she thought, true love is in a class of its own? Poor woman: had she lived in another age, say before the 1920s, she would not have been in any such quandary; for a start she would not have tried to understand her emotions in the ‘love/not-love’ frame. I cannot help recalling those questions that Leo Ferrero asked of himself that I quoted in Chapter 3: ‘Is it love or not? Do I really love this woman, or is it affection that I feel for her? . . . Am I in love with her or am I in love with love?’ Nor would she have believed, had she lived in an earlier age, that to be modern was to be tolerant of free sex. As it was, she countenanced her husband’s extramarital affairs in the belief that despite having other sexual partners he loved only her. That belief is founded on a separation of love from lust, spirit from flesh, the sacred from the profane, that I have traced in an earlier chapter to fin’amors and Neoplatonism. But what does it mean to be loved, she wondered as she suffered pangs of what she refused to recognize as jealousy? She told herself that love was something different from constant care and concern, solicitude and so on. In doing so she was in fact ‘hollowing it out’ and reducing it to ‘illusoriness’ and ‘non-existence.’6 To her appeal for proof of love, many responses would instantly name sexual exclusiveness. But that was not her response, and it was not for reasons best sought in history. She believed herself to be modern in thinking love not a matter of the body, altogether unsuspecting of the extent to which she was actually hidebound in condoning polygamy. For that was what it was in practice if not in name; as we have seen, it has taken until the second half of the twentieth century for the one-woman man to emerge in full. The idea that sexual and emotional exclusivity is intrinsic to love is a thread that has failed to be more than loosely stitched into the fabric of love’s Chinese makeover.

Afterthoughts

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It is not that Chinese never thought that ‘only he’ or ‘only she’ could satisfy the heart’s yearnings; it is that they had been concerned wholly with wifely chastity—patriliny had required it, for otherwise how could the husband be sure that his wife would not give him heirs who were not his flesh and blood? Singleness of heart was framed in terms of one-sided marital fidelity, not love. Even after love was brought into it, it was judged a rickety foundation for lifelong constancy because love was so changeable. The notion that to love at all is to love singly—or that, to quote one of Andreas Capellanus’s rules of love, ‘a true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved’7—did no more than hover on the periphery. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the deep roots which male polygamy had run in Chinese time had not yet released their grip. Have they now? Judging from newspaper reports and complaints lodged with the Women’s Federation (the Chinese women’s rights organization), the keeping of mistresses, and even open cohabitation by husband, wife and concubine, have massively increased since the late 1990s.8 Apologists for these relationships have likened them to Western urban society’s extension of nuclear families by divorce, remarriage, romantic renewals, open marriages and so-called ‘polyamory.’ They have a point, but what sets the Chinese cases apart is that in the reports and discussions on the subject, reference is hardly ever made to love. The liaisons are seen to be mercenary, or else they are put down to lechery; rarely is credence placed on any ineluctable passion. Love’s exclusivity was a point that Hu Shi tried to transplant in 1919, of course without differentiating one kind of love from another. The transplantation never took and it still seems not really to have taken today. On this I consulted James Farrer, a sociologist who has carried out ethnographic work on young urban Chinese’s mating since the 1980s, when China began its dash for capitalist prosperity. He has found that exclusiveness is a conscious decision, taken for perhaps moral, perhaps simply practical reasons, as being helpful to the maintenance of a long-term relationship. Rather surprisingly, Chinese men are readier to commit to a long-term relationship or marriage than women, surprising because you would expect the reverse to be true; in popular literature the so-called commitment phobes are invariably male. Farrer’s explanation for this is that in the minds of well-to-do Chinese men particularly, wedlock does not close off the possibility of their falling for other women; it does not have to mean giving up all women but one. So mentally, they enter matrimony with the door left secretly ajar to any extramarital liaisons that might come their way.9 To me this makes them true heirs of their multiply-wifed forbears. As for the place of love in matrimony today, anecdotal evidence suggests that it has little of the centrality it has in the West. Every other person in Shanghai will tell you that Chinese matrimony is a matter of prudential calculation, and that pragmatism trumps passion in mate selection. Farrer says that actually there is more to it than that; to put it at its simplest, people want both love and money, and would be happier

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if they did not end up with only love or only money. What further complicates the picture is that sex and marriage no longer go together quite as much as they did in the past. Today’s sexual partner might be tomorrow’s wife or husband but in more and more cases he or she might be just that, a sexual partner for the time being. In other words, sexual intimacy is increasingly uncoupled from marriage, and freer rein is given to more kinds of uncommitted intimate relationships.10 With market economics and consumerism enjoying a triumph denied them by decades of socialism, changes have been rung on love, courtship and marriage to a degree dramatic enough for Chinese social scientists to speak of a sexual revolution. I see it as less a revolution than a resumption of a process that had begun earlier. That process was interrupted by the parenthesis, now being removed, of the Maoist decades. Farrer too speaks of a ‘re-emergence’ and ‘rebirth’ of romance in the 1990s. Judged by measures such as rates of premarital sex, he said, China is changing faster than most societies. He drew a comparison with Japan, which, roughly speaking, changed equally rapidly in the 1980s but then levelled off.11 Farrer describes today’s China as, sexually speaking, ‘a loosey-goosey society.’12 Both Chinese and Western sociologists have studied the new indeterminacy of the limits of sexual freedom, sex outside marriage having increasingly escaped the boundaries laid down by earlier convention. But theirs is a moving target. Reality keeps one or two paces ahead of the researchers, scribble though they will.

Notes

Note: Brackets enclose translated titles supplied by the author while parentheses enclose existing translated titles.

Chapter 1

Love’s Entrée

Epigraph: Chen Guangding, ‘Ruhe ke shi shilian de zhiyu’ [How to heal the loss of love?], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, 1926, 209. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Shi Heng, Zhongguo funü wenti taolun ji [Collected discussions of the question of Chinese women], vol. 4. Xin wenhua shushe, 1923, 73–81. Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal): ‘Divorce,’ vol. 8, no. 4, 1922; ‘Mate Selection,’ vol. 9, no. 11, 1923; ‘Love,’ vol. 12, no. 7, 1926. Eileen Chang, ‘Stale Mates,’ The Reporter, 15, no. 4, September 20, 1956, 34–37, reprinted in Zhang, Sequel, 1988, 255–73. ‘Chang’ and ‘Zhang’ are the same surname spelled differently. Her published writings are listed in the References under ‘Chang’ if they are in English and ‘Zhang’ if in Chinese. Zhang, ‘Wusi yishi: Luo Wentao san mei tuanyuan,’ reprinted in Zhang, Sequel, 255–73. Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ Hogarth Press, 1924. Zhou Zuoren, ‘Ren de wenxue’ (Humane Literature), Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 5, no. 6, 1918. See Chen Hui, ‘Wusi shiqi xianjin zhishifenzi guanyu lian’ai wenti de tantao’ [Exploration of the question of love by progressive intellectuals in the May Fourth period], Journal of Neijiang Normal University, vol. 28, no. 9, 2013, 82–84. Fan Yanqiao, Xiaoshuo hua [On fiction], in Rui et al., vol. 1, 1926, 42. See Soong, 2010, note 50, 84. See Rui et al., vol. 1, 39. Stendhal, 61. Armstrong, Love, 93. Tennov, 15. Quoted in Gilda Carle, ‘Is it Love . . . or Limerence?’ www.match.com/magazine/article/ 12710/Is-It-Love-Or-Limerance. Accessed July 5, 2012. Fisher in Jankowiak, 25. Helen E. Fisher, Arthur Aron, Debra Mashek, Haifang Li and Lucy L. Brown, ‘Defining the Brain Systems of Lust, Romantic Attraction, and Attachment,’ Archives of Sexual Behavior,

286

Notes to pp. 10–26

vol. 31, no. 5, October 2002, 413–19. H. E. Fisher, ‘Brains Do It: Lust, Attraction, and Attachment,’ Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, 2, January 1, 2000, 34–42. 17. See Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordlund, ‘Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?’ Philosophy and Literature, vol. 30, no. 2, October 2006, 450–71. 18. Armstrong, Love, 6.

Chapter 2 Confucius and Freud Epigraph: The Analects of Confucius 16.7, Legge, 312–13. Analects 1.7, Leys, 4. Analects 4.23, Leys, 17. Analects 17.22, Legge, 329. Analects 2.2, Legge, 146. ‘Out in the Bushlands a Creeper Grows,’ no. 94, Waley, Songs, 75. ‘Wild and Windy,’ no. 30, Waley, Songs, 27. ‘In the Field There Is a Dead Doe,’ no. 23, Goldin, 25. Ibid., 73. See the Chinese Wikipedia entry on Peng Dingkang, Chris Patten’s Chinese name. Lines of Songs of Songs quoted in Miles, 334–35. ‘The Ospreys Cry,’ no. 1, trans. Goldin, 12. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 64. Wen and Zhang, 21. Chen Wen, 28. ‘Shijing de xingyu guan’ [Views of sexual desire in the Book of Songs], in Wen Yiduo, 1. Ibid., ‘Shuo yu’ [On fish], 66–91. Shaughnessy, 233. Lü, passim. Pan Guangdan, 1–66. Colour plate in Wen and Zhang, unpaginated front matter. Sang, 278. Pan Guangdan, 701. Ibid., 700. Ibid., 597. West and Idema, 179. The play’s other English titles are The Story of the Western Wing and The Romance of the Western Chamber. 27. Pan Guangdan, 619–20. 28. Guo Moruo in Zhao Shanlin, 71–76.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Chapter 3 Epigraph: Paglia, 35. 1. 2. 3.

Waley, Hundred, 18. Liu and Lo, xvii–xviii. Lewis, Allegory, 22.

Love in the Western World

Notes to pp. 26–35 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

287

Hazzard, Greene, 139. Birrell, Love, 1. Waley, Hundred, 17. Ibid., 18. Ovid, Love, passim. Dai, 1. Dai translated it from the French. Lewis, Allegory, 2. Warner, 150. Reddy, 44. I am much indebted to this exceptionally illuminating book. Ibid., 45. Andreas Capellanus, 135–36. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 123 and 197. Zhou Zuoren, ‘Ren de wenxue’ (Humane Literature), Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 5, no. 6, 1918. The English translation of Lucka’s book by Ellie Schleussner was published under the title Eros: The Development of the Sex Relation Through the Ages by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York and London in 1915. This is the edition on which the Japanese edition (entitled The Evolution of Love) is based. I am much indebted to Miho Kinnas for help with acquiring a copy of the Japanese edition. Kuriyagawa refers to Lucka’s book as The Three Stages of Love (Eros). ‘Jindai de lian’ai guan’ (Modern Views of Love) by Wu Juenong writing as Y. D., Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 8, no. 2, 1922. See under Kuriyagawa. I read the revised, ninth edition of 1934 online at http://book. ynlib.chaoxing.com/ebook/detail_11336654.html Xia’s preface to his translation of Kuriyagawa, 1. Dante, 17. The Vita Nuova came out in a Chinese translation by Wang Duqing (published by Guangming shuju) in 1934. Lucka, 231. The first partial Chinese translation of Engels’s work appeared in the newspaper Tianyi bao (Natural Justice) in 1907. Portions of the work translated by Yun Daiying saw print in the periodical Dongfang zazhi, nos. 17, 19 and 20 in 1920. Engels, 37. See Exhibition of Chinese History: An Illustrated Catalogue, Morning Glory Publishers, Beijing, 1998. Letters 1 and 2 in the periodical Xinyue yuekan (Crescent Moon Monthly), vol. 1, no. 8, 1928; then in book form in 1928. I first learned of this from Bai Liping, ‘Babbitt’s Impact in China: The Case of Liang Shiqiu,’ Humanitas, vol. XVII, nos. 1 and 2, 2004, 46–68. de Rougemont, 74. Radice, 82. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 86. The Temple Classics edition of 1901 was the fourth edition of a version by John Hughes published by J. M. Dent in 1914. The French version on which this was based was itself a paraphrase rather than a faithful translation of the original Latin text. Hughes’s version was reprinted in 1901 and ran through ten editions before it went out of print in 1945. See Radice, l. My citations from this edition are taken from the 1901 version digitally

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

Notes to pp. 35–42 reproduced by www.sacred-texts.com. This has a preface by the editor, H. Morton. Liang Shiqiu’s version includes his translation of ‘the editor’s preface to the English version.’ Comparing this to Morton’s reveals the source preface to be Morton’s. Hughes’s version, 73. Ibid., 46. Babbitt, 101. Ibid., 51. Quoted in Brown, 202. Ibid., 412. Ibid., 422. May, 99. Bruckner, 169. Hughes’s version, 56. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 54. Gospel According to St. Matthew 19:12; Radice, 82. Radice, 82. Gao Shan, ‘Jinyu zhuyi he lian’ai ziyou’ [Asceticism and freedom of love], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 4, 1926, 233–37. See Tian Pu, ‘Ai zhi yanjiu’ [Researches into love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, May 1927, 111. I owe much of my understanding of ‘Christian love’ to Simon May. 1 John 4:8 and 16. Lewis, Four, 127. May, 18. Ibid., 239. Lewis, Four, 9. Ibid., 109 and 110–11. May, 260, note 38. See Zheng Zhenduo, Xila Luoma shenhua yu chuanshuo zhong de lian’ai gushi [Love stories in Greek and Roman mythology and folklore], first published in 1929 in Shanghai. An  early outing of Cupid was in the cover design of the Chinese translation, Chun de xunhuan, of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Cycle of Spring, published by the Commercial Press of Shanghai in 1921. Cahill, 30. Lewis, Four, 91–92. Ibid., 106; Wang Yongmei, 90. Gill’s introduction to Plato, Symposium, x. Among other texts Chinese had the Symposium’s and Phaedrus’s doctrine of love explained to them by ‘Bolatu de lian’ai guan’ [Plato’s conception of love] in Lian’ai de lishi guan [Concepts of love in history], Weimei congshu she, 1929, 46–50. This was a paraphrase of an essay by Bernhard A. Bauer, an Austrian gynaecologist and the author of an encyclopaedic study of women and love. Another explanatory text is ‘Ai de lishi’ [A history of love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, 1926. Waterfield’s introduction to Plato, Phaedrus, xi–xii. Jacobs, 9. Panofsky, 144, note 51.

Notes to pp. 42–60 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

289

Ibid., 150–53. Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 38, 1928, 1387. Ibid. Shih, 147. Berlin, 139. The best known of the Chinese translations of Rousseau’s Confessions was the version brought out by Zhang Jingsheng (1889–1970), a Peking University professor of philosophy who had studied in France and who got into trouble with the authorities in China for his promotion of sex education and for his book Sex Histories. The first version of Confessions, a partial translation, came out in 1928, while a full version was published the following year and reprinted five times. See Jing Wang, 47. May, 169. Ibid., 160. May, 154. In his book Désepoirs, cited by de Rougemont, 71. Lewis, Allegory, 4. Bloch, 8. Charles Lindholm, ‘Romantic Love and Anthropology,’ Etnofoor, vol. 19, no. 1, 2006, 11. Mead, 74. See Macfarlane. This and other citations may be found in his book; see Chapter 3, ‘Romantic Love and Other Attachments,’ Giddens, 37–48. Fisher, 51–52. William R. Jankowiak and Edward F. Fischer, ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love,’ Ethnology 31, 1992, 149–55.

Chapter 4

Keywords

Epigraph: Feng, Anatomy, Chapter 7, 149. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Si standardly appears in the compound word xiangsi, literally ‘mutual longing.’ Chang and Saussy, 59. Birrell in Hegel and Hessney, 45–46. Rouzer, Ladies, 130. Rouzer, Dream, 73. Paz, 26 and passim. Analects 9.18 and 15.13. Mencius Book VI, Part A, 4. Confucius has famously pronounced on those airs (heard in the state of Zheng) that voice desire in the anthology: ‘The songs of Zheng are licentious.’ Analects 15.11. Lewis, Allegory, 4. ‘The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd. 1960,’ in Bedford, 143. Wang Shifu, 138; West and Idema, 118. For Jin’s annotations and editorial comments, see Church. For the sources of the two quotations, see Church, 345. ‘Still not’ or ‘not yet’ expressed versus ‘expressed’ is how Tang Chun-I renders the two terms in his chapter, ‘The Development of the Concept of Moral Mind from Wang Yang-ming to

290

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Notes to pp. 60–78 Wang Chi,’ in de Bary, 94. I have opted for ‘yet unstirred’ and ‘stirred’ to make them tally with John Minford’s translations in a passage I quote from The Story of the Stone in my Chapter 5. Doctrine of the Mean, I.4 and I.5. I have slightly modified Legge’s translation, 384. Martin W. Huang, ‘Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming-Qing Literature,’ Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 20, 1998, 153–84. Feng, Anatomy, Chapter 1: ‘Chastity,’ 23. Jonathan D. Spence calls it that in ‘The Energies of Ming Life,’ in Spence, Roundabout, 106. Feng, Anatomy, first preface, 1; Mowry, 13. Ibid. Feng, Anatomy, ‘Wang of Luoyang,’ 143. Feng, Anatomy, ‘Transformed into a Woman,’ 235. Ovid, Metamorphosis, 221. Feng, Anatomy, ‘Young Sun from Wusong,’ 206. Tang Jieyuan fang gujin huapu [Tang Yin’s book on the art of painting: after ancient and contemporary masters], a woodblock-printed book in seven volumes with illustrations by the great painter Tang Yin (1470–1523). Reprint, Wenwu chubanshe, 1981. Wei, Wu Jianren, 166. A Ying, 174. Armstrong, 76. James Liu, 125. I read this story not in Feng but in James Liu, 96–97. See Li, 54. Kang-I Sun Chang, 34. Ibid., 126.

Chapter 5

Two Great Works on Love

Epigraph: Sternberg, 87. The two works have appeared under other titles: The Dream of the Red Chamber as The Story of the Stone and The Peony Pavilion as The Soul’s Return. Both were banned books in history. 2. Ko, 82. 3. Tang, 1. 4. The scholar is C. T. Hsia, and the citations are from his chapter, ‘Time and the Human Condition in the Plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu,’ in de Bary, 277. 5. The translation is Chang Hsin-chang’s, 298. 6. Ibid., 298–99. 7. The scholar is Chang Hsin-chang, 299. 8. Birch, Peony, 60; Tang, 59 (Scene 12). 9. ‘Knead her into flakes’ is Chang Hsin-chang’s translation, 299. 10. The passage is rendered by John Minford as follows: ‘Before the emotions of pleasure, anger, grief and joy stir within the human breast, there exists the “natural state” of love; the stirring of these emotions causes passion. Our kind of love, yours and mine, is the former, natural state. It is like a bud. Once open, it ceases to be true love.’ Cao, 1262; Minford, vol. 5, 211. 1.

Notes to pp. 79–95

291

11. For Tang’s criticism of meditation and disagreement with Daguan, I am indebted to Lou Yulie, ‘Tang Xianzu zhexue sixiang chutan’ [A preliminary discussion of Tang Xianzu’s philosophical thought]. http://www.guoxue.com/discord/louyl/007.htm, 2000. Accessed July 3, 2011. 12. Chang Hsin-chang, 267. 13. The translation of these four lines is mine. 14. Tang, 47 (Scene 10). 15. Plato, Symposium, 191–92. 16. Spence, Roundabout, 107. 17. Birch, Scenes, 142. 18. Ibid. 19. Tang, 120. 20. Cao, 52; Hawkes, vol. 1, 32. 21. Hawkes, vol. 2, 376. 22. Ibid., vol. 1, 178. 23. Ibid., vol. 1, 146. 24. Matthew 5:28. The analogy is solely mine. 25. Cao, Chapter 5, 88. 26. See Faure. 27. May, 180. 28. Wang Guowei et al., 1–38. 29. May, 186.

Chapter 6

The Camellia Lady

Epigraph: Dumas fils in Coward’s translation, 17. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Huters, 106. Ibid., 107. Pollard, Translation, 6. Waley, ‘Notes on Translation,’ The Atlantic Monthly, 100th anniversary issue, 1958. Zou Zhenhuan, 122–24. Lin Shu’s translation is listed in the References with the name of his collaborator, a returnee from Paris called Wang Shouchang. Dumas fils in Coward translation, 199. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 60–61. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 146. Ibid., the four examples are on pages 128, 71, 131 and 67 respectively. Ibid., 147. Zeng, 221. Xu Zhenya, Chapter 22. C. T. Hsia, 234. Leo Lee, 44–45. The three editions are dated March 21, March 24, and March 26, 1937 respectively.

292

Notes to pp. 95–111

20. In Chinese the films’ names are Ye cao xian hua (directed by Sun Yu, 1930) and Chahua nü (directed by Li Pingqian, 1938). 21. Yu Hua, 46. 22. Wang Dianzhong, 26. 23. Ibid., 273. 24. The phrase in French is on page 118 of Le Livre de Poche edition; in English on page 87 of Coward’s translation; in Chinese on page 129 of Wang’s translation.

Chapter 7 Joan Haste and Romantic Fiction Epigraph: Pan Shaw-Yu, 42. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Haggard, 156. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 368. Ibid., 130. Ibid., 73. Yin Bansheng, ‘Du Jiayin xiaozhuan liang yibenshu hou’ [After reading the two translations of Joan Haste], Youxi shijie, no. 11, 1907. Reprinted in Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao [Materials on theories of twentieth-century Chinese fiction], vol. 1, Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1997, 228–30. Haggard, 91. Yin Bansheng in article cited in note 6 above. Jin Tianhe writing under his courtesy name Songcen, ‘Lun xieqing xiaoshuo yu shehui zhi guanxi’ [On the relationship between romantic fiction and society], Xin xiaoshuo (New Fiction), no. 17, 1905. Yin Bansheng in article cited in note 6 above. Pan Shaw-Yu, 163. See Zou. Frye, 186. Pan Shaw-Yu, 1, quoting Mao Dun. Quoted in Pan Shaw-Yu, 82. I am indebted to Pan’s dissertation for most of my information on Zhou Shoujuan.

Chapter 8

The Clump

Epigraph: Hazzard, Fire, 188. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Haggard, 150. Barthes, 147. Orsini, 293, 294, 301. ‘What Makes a Great Tenor?’ BBC4, June 1, 2010. Haggard, 369. Analects 1.5, Leys, 4. ‘To the Tune of He man zi,’ in Li Yi, ed., Huajian ji (Among the Flowers), Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1986, 231.

Notes to pp. 111–117 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

293

Bao Zhao (414–466), ‘Dai Jing Luo pian,’ in Yu tai xin yong (New Songs from a Jade Terrace), Huaxia chubanshe, 1998, 139. Birrell, Love, 287. ‘To the Tune of Cai sang zi,’ Renditions Special Issue on T’zu, no. 11 and 12, 1979, 108. John 3:16; and Matthew 22:37 respectively. These are quotes from Xu Zhimo’s poem, ‘For Mother,’ 1925, reproduced in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 21–22. Instead of aiqing, the more established term and the one used in the Chinese translation of La Dame aux Camélias was where the two syllables, ai and qing, were combined in the reverse order, as qingai. In the Chinese scheme of things, that counts as a different word. In any case it went out of fashion, and while the two terms, aiqing and qingai, coexisted in writing for a while, presently it was aiqing that Butterfly authors favoured and made their own. From the story entitled ‘Du Zichun san ru Chang’an’ [Du Zichun thrice enters Chang’an], Feng, Words, 438. In Chinese the novel is entitled Kong gu jiaren [The beauty in the empty valley], Shangwu yingshuguan (Commercial Press), 1907. Xu Zhenya, Chapter 23. Ibid., Chapter 19. Wei, Wu Jianren, 197 and 128. From Du Mu’s ‘Farewell Poem,’ in A. C. Graham’s translation, Poems of the Late T’ang, Penguin Books, 1965, 134. Gunn, 63. Lippert, 62. Tong, 22. Lippert, 57–66. Yokota-Murakami, 41. Kuriyagawa in Xia’s translation, 10. Yokota-Murakami, 87. Ibid. Kitamura was his surname but it is customary to refer to him by his given name— actually pen-name. Qi, Chapter 6, 101. ‘Lian’ai wenti de taolun’ [A discussion of the problem of love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 8, nos. 9 and 10. Orsini, 32 and 163. Quoted in Leith Morton, ‘The Concept of Romantic Love in the Taiyō Magazine 1895– 1905,’ Japan Review, no. 8, 1997, 84. Yokota-Murakami, 41. Leith Morton in the article cited in note 31 above, 84. Suzuki, 9. Yuan, Singing of Life, 144. ‘Lian’ai zashuo’ [Sundry remarks on love], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), vol. 17, 1927, 511. Ibid., ‘Xin lian’ai wenti’ [Questions on the new love], vol. 36, 1928, 1349, 1357. ‘Lian’ai wenti de taolun’ [A discussion of the problem of love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 8, nos. 9 and 10. ‘Chang’e zishu’ [Chang’e as told by herself ], in Yuan, Scene Sealed in Dust, 13–18.

294

Notes to pp. 120–131

Chapter 9

Two Ways of Escape

Epigraph: italics mine. Mencius Book III, Part B, D. C. Lau translation, 108. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

‘Nuola zou hou zenyang?’ [What happens to Nora after she leaves home?], in Lu Xun, Tomb, 127–34. Dabhoiwala, 360–61. Bruckner, 83. Orsini, 33 and 179. Lan and Fong, 80. Pollard, True. It is as well to note that since Lu Xun’s real name was Zhou Shuren, he bore the same surname as his two younger brothers, who appear as Zhou Zuoren and Zhou Jianren in this book. Haiyan Lee sees Lu Xun as pioneering a ‘self-Orientalizing project,’ one that ‘would continue to define the self-perception of Chinese intellectuals for generations to come.’ See Haiyan Lee, 231. The words ‘love alone is true’ evoke the Romantic age. They are, for example, the very ones that Werther utters in Act 3 of Jules Massenet’s opera Werther (1887). ‘How to Be a Father Today’ is in Lu Xun, Tomb, 106. Quoted in Pollard, True, 127. Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 6, no. 1, 1915. McDougall, 40. One of three compositions she published between December 1925 and February 1926, this text can be found on numerous Chinese websites, e.g., http://baike.baidu.com/view/ 901216.htm, accessed August 18, 2012. See also Pollard, True, 96. Lu Xun and Jing Song, 278. ‘Shang shi’ (Regret for the Past), in Lu Xun, Fiction, 113–38. McDougall, 58. Egan and Chou, 129 and 166. I could not have written this account of Hu Shi’s private life without this marvellous study. A Doll’s House was jointly translated into Chinese by Hu Shi and Luo Jianlun. The impact of Hu Shi’s essay ‘Ibsenism,’ published in Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 4, no. 6, 1918, was second to none. The script was published in Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 6, no. 3, 1919. On his betrothal, see his own memoir: Hu Shi, Himself. On the firecrackers, see Chiang, 87–88, and Egan and Chou, 122. Egan and Chou, 11. Ibid., 14. Hu Shi, Works, 16–17. Chiang, 76. Grieder, 12. Guo Wan, 32. Chiang, 60. Hu Shi, Works, 305. Egan and Chou, 173. Chiang, 93. Ibid., 66.

Notes to pp. 131–145 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

295

Letter dated September 26, 1933. Egan and Chou, 241. Ibid. Chiang, 123. Ibid., 121. Guo Wan, 262. Chiang, 129. Ibid., 342. Guo Wan, 163. Egan and Chou, 428. Chiang, 131. Quoted in Egan and Chou, 217. Guo Wan, 280. Grieder, 40.

Chapter 10 Faust, Werther, Salome Epigraph: Act 3 of Werther, lyric drama (after Goethe) by Jules Massenet. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Zong, Tian and Guo, 51–52. For Guo Moruo’s wedding and difficulties with parents, I have drawn on Xiaoming Chen, 11–15. Chen Jihong, ‘Lun wan Qing fanyi xiaoshuo de yingxiang’ [On the influence of late Qing translated fiction], Journal of Nanjing University of Science and Technology, vol. 14, no. 5, October 2001. Hulse’s introduction to his translation of Goethe’s Werther, 16. I have relied heavily on Armstrong, Goethe. Zong, Tian and Guo, 83. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 30–31. Ibid., 32–33. Ibid., 45. Letter to Guo Moruo, dated February 9, 1919. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 54–55. The letter is undated. Tong, 58–59. Guo’s preface in Zong, Tian and Guo, 5. Zong, Tian and Guo, 88–89. Ibid., 107. Armstrong, Love, 1. For this and other pieces of information on the Chinese reception of Werther, I am indebted to Terry Yip. Wang Fan. Yip, 170. Ye, 267–68. Goethe, Werther, 54. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 54. Guo Moruo’s preface to his translation of Goethe, Werther, 4.

296

Notes to pp. 145–154

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Ibid., 5. Yip, 44–45. Armstrong, Goethe, 59–60 and 62. Goethe, Werther, 64. Ibid., 97. Bruckner, 94. Zhou Zuoren quoted in Yip, 74. Cited in Armstrong, Goethe, 71–72. Goethe, Werther, 112. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 118. Xiaomei Chen, ‘Reflections on the Legacy of Tian Han: “Proletarian Modernism” and Its Traditional Roots,’ Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2006, 155–215. He records being introduced to Ellen Key by Honma Hisao’s work (which he names in Chinese), Xing de daode zhi xin qingxiang [New trends in sexual morality], in his article ‘Mimi lian’ai he gongkai lian’ai’ [Loving in secret and loving in the open], Shaonian Zhongguo (The Journal of the Young China Association), vol. 1, no. 2, 1919, 34. The Japanese work appeared in a Chinese translation in Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol.  8, no. 4, 1922. For Honma Hisao’s work on Oscar Wilde, see Yoko Hirata, ‘Oscar Wilde and Honma Hisao,’ Japan Review, 21, 2009, 241–66. Qi Chen, 210–11. It was first published in Shaonian Zhongguo (The Journal of the Young China Association), vol. 2, no. 9, 1921. The 2013 illustrated edition is listed in the References under Tian Han. Quoted in Chinese by Qi Chen, 281. Shanghai huabao (Shanghai Pictorial), no. 73, September 14, 1929, 3. Liangyou (The Young Companion), October 1929. Paglia, 563. Qi Chen, 280–81. Xiaomei Chen (see note 38 above), 180. Online entry on Yu Shan, http://baike.baidu.com/view/1256210.htm. Xiaomei Chen (see note 38 above), 174. Luo Liang, ‘Modern Girl, Modern Men, and the Politics of Androgyny in China,’ Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XLVII, no. 2: China, University of Michigan, Spring 2008. Xu Zhimo, ‘Guanyu nüzi’ [About women], Xinyue yuekan (Crescent Moon Monthly), vol. 2, no. 8, 1929, 1–18. Zhang Xichen, Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 8, no. 9, 1922. Havelock Ellis’s introduction to Key, Love, xv. Key, Love, 15.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Chapter 11

Ellen Key

Epigraph: Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, 1926, 131. 1. 2.

Key, Love, 15. The phrase in Chinese is lingrou yizhi. Key, Love, 93.

Notes to pp. 155–162 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

297

See Pan Shaw-Yu, 173. Ibid., 170. Qian, 23. Suzuki, 66, and passim. I shall follow custom in calling her Raichō rather than Hiratsuka. The cover design is reproduced in ‘The Taisho Era: When Modernity Rules Japan’s Masses’ by Michael Hoffman in The Japan Times, July 29, 2012. Suzuki, 13. Suzuki, 69. Tian Han circulated Key’s ideas in China by airing them in an essay ‘Mimi lian’ai he gongkai lian’ai’ [Loving in secret and loving in the open] that he published in Shaonian Zhongguo (The Journal of the Young China Association), vol. 1, no. 2, 33–35. Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 4, no. 1, 1918. Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 5, no. 2, 1919. Mao Dun’s abridged translation of Love and Marriage appeared in Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 6, no. 3, 1920. A full translation by Zhu Xunqin was published by Shehui gaijinshe in 1923. Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 7, no. 2, 1921, 24. Key, Love, 98–99. I owe the date to Miho Kinnas’ research (personal communication). Zhou Zuoren, ‘Ren de wenxue’ (Humane Literature), Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 5, no. 6, 1918. An earlier appearance of the phrase was in his translation of Yosano Akiko, ‘On Chastity,’ Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 4, no. 5, 1918. Hong Jun, ‘Maoxian de lian’ai guan’ [A risky view of love], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 37, 1928, 65. Zhang Xichen, ‘Weiba yiwai zhi xu’ [Beyond the tailpiece, continued], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 32, 1026, 888. Gao Shan, ‘Lian’ai de ling de fangmian he rou de fangmian’ [The soul aspect and flesh aspect of love], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 12, 1927, 1209. Zhang Xichen, ‘Weiba yiwai’ [Beyond the tailpiece], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 30, 1928, 884. The quote is on page 16 of the digital version of Carpenter’s book at sacred-texts.com. Huang Shi, ‘Lian’ai yu qingyu’ [Love and passion], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 30, 1928, 624. Mao Yibo, ‘Zai lun xing’ai yu youyi’ [Sexual love and friendship revisited], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 35, 1928, 1248–58. Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 29, 1928, 520. Anarchism, which advocates the abolition of capitalism and private property (just as communism does), was in vogue at the time. Ibid., 1250. Reported by Mao Yibo, ‘Fei lian’ai de you yisheng’ [A love naysayer speaks once more], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 39, 1929, 329. Shanghai was rich in graphic artists and designers but it is beyond the scope of this book to examine their treatment of love. Bernhardt’s piece, ‘Routi de ai he jingshen de ai,’ appears in Lian’ai de zhexue [A philosophy of love], Weimei congshu she, 1929, 20–21. Bauer’s piece was published in the same series. See note 62 of Chapter 3 for the full reference. Pan Guangdan, vol. 8, 65.

298

Notes to pp. 162–171

30. Tian Pu, ‘Ai de yanjiu’ [Research on love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, 1926, 112. 31. Lucka, 234. The reference to Werther is on page 242. 32. Jinkaku was a Japanese neologism coined in 1889 to stand for ‘personality.’ In Japanese usage it took on meanings, from moral character to individual dignity, not conveyed by the English word. Its imprecision is no doubt why the meaning of ren’ge, the Chinese loan (and pronunciation) of the Japanese jinkaku, is so hard to pin down. Some scholars choose to translate ren’ge as ‘personhood’ rather than ‘personality.’ I have not so chosen because I have even less grasp of the meaning of ‘personhood’ than of ren’ge. 33. Lucka, 232. 34. Ibid., 120. 35. Ibid., 120, 262. 36. See Y. D., ‘Jindai de lian’ai guan’ (Modern Views of Love), Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 8, no. 2, 1922, 7–12. This is an excellent précis of Kuriyagawa’s treatise. ‘Y. D.’ was the pseudonym of Wu Juenong (1897–1989), a tea expert who, at the time of his studies in Japan, was extremely interested in the woman question. 37. Suzuki, 6. 38. Martel, 125. Francis Mathy’s ‘Kitamura Tōkoku: Essays on the Inner Life,’ Monumenta Nipponica 19, 1964, 66–110, has been a useful source. 39. May, 164. 40. Armstrong, Love, 49–50 and 53. 41. de Botton, 138. 42. Lucka, 286. 43. See note 10 above. 44. Leith Morton, ‘The Concept of Romantic Love in the Taiyō Magazine 1895–1905,’ Japan Review, no. 8, 1997, 84, 92, 98. 45. Zhang Xichen,’ Ailun Kai nüshi yu qi sixiang’ [Ellen Key and her ideology], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 7, no. 2, 1921, 25. 46. Mao Dun, ‘Liang xing jian de daode guanxi’ [The moral relationship between the sexes], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 6, no. 7, 1920. 47. Zhang Xichen, ‘Jindai sixiangjia de xingyu yu lian’ai guan’ [Modern thinkers’ views of sexuality and love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 6, no. 10, 1920. 48. Mao Dun, ‘Xing daode de weiwu shiguan’ [The historical materialist view of sexual morality], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 11, no. 1, 1925. 49. Key, Love, 128. 50. Key, Morality, 16. 51. Key, Love, 38.

Chapter 12 One and Only Epigraph: Zhou Jianren writing as Ke Shi, ‘Lian’ai yu zhencao’ [Love and chastity], Shenhuo zhoukan (Life Weekly), vol. 8, no. 15, April 1933. 1. 2. 3.

Hu Shi, ‘Zhencao wenti’ [The question of chastity], Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 5, no. 1, 1918. See Elvin, 302–51. Brownell and Wasserstrom, xiii.

Notes to pp. 171–182 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

299

Wei, Wu Jianren, 128 and 197. Feng, Anatomy, 23. Ibid., 343. Pratt and Chiang’s translation, 29. Shen, 4. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 35. The play’s Chinese title, Lian xiang ban, has also been rendered as The Love of the Perfumed Partner and Two Belles in Love, the latter given to an operatic production of it staged in Beijing in 2010. The Beijing production has been reviewed by Xu Peng, ‘The Essential Li Yu Resurrected: A Performance Review of the 2010 Beijing Production of Lian Xiang Ban (Women in Love),’ CHINOPERL (The Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature) Papers No. 30, 2011. McMahon, 304–20. Mann, 123–24. Pratt and Chiang, 9. Pan Guangdan, Zhongguo jiating wenti [The problem of the Chinese family]. First published by Xinyue shudian (Crescent Moon Bookstore) in 1928. Reprinted in Pan, 115–16. For this paragraph and the next two, I am indebted to two papers by Lisa Tran, ‘Sex and Equality in Republican China: The Debate over the Adultery Law,’ Modern China, vol. 35, no. 2, March 2009, 101–223; and ‘The ABC of Monogamy in Republican China: Adultery, Bigamy and Conjugal Fidelity,’ Twentieth-Century China, vol. 36, no. 2, July 2011, 99–118. Bernhardt, 208. Quoted in Jonathan Hutt, ‘La Maison D’or—The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei,’ East Asian History, no. 21, June 2001, 113. Sheng, 51. Hahn, Letters, 5. Hahn, China, 15. Quoted in Cuthbertson, 140. Jonathan Hutt, see note 18 above, 122. Hahn, China, 9. Quoted in Cuthbertson, 163. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 147. Sheng, 182. Ibid., 192. Hahn, China, 9. Ibid., 12. Cuthbertson, 146. Hahn, China, 59. Hahn, Letters, 46–49. Ibid., 52. Hahn, China, 158. Ibid., 165. Shao, 273. Shao, Xinyue (Crescent Moon), vol. 3, no. 10, August 1931. Reprinted in Shao, 215.

300

Notes to pp. 182–193

40. Zhou Zuoren, ‘Zhencao lun’ (On Chastity), Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 4, no. 5, 1918. 41. Lu Xun, another to enter the fray, called them a ‘deformed morality’ in ‘Wo zhi jielie guan’ (My Views on Chastity), Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 5, no. 2, 1919. 42. Hu Shi, ‘Zhencao wenti’ [The question of chastity], Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 5, no. 1, 1918. Reprinted in Hu Shi, New Life, 221–20. 43. Analects 15.24. 44. ‘Hu Shi Answers Lan Zhixian,’ Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 6, no. 4, 1919. Reprinted in Hu Shi, New Life, 221. ‘Lan Zhixian Answers Hu Shi’ and ‘Lan Zhixian Answers Zhou Zuoren,’ Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 6, no. 4, 1919, 333–59. 45. Lan Zhixian, ibid., 353. As Lan’s ‘ren’ge-love’ excludes feelings ( ganqing in Chinese), it would not work to translate it as ‘personality-love.’ 46. Hu Shi, New Life, 222. 47. Tagore, Stray Birds, 73.4, 1916. Quoted in Shen Guangding, ‘Ruhe ke shi shilian de zhiyu’ [How to heal the loss of love?], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, 1926, 210. 48. Paz, 107. 49. Zhou Jianren writing as Ke Shi. Chapter 1 of Lian’ai yu zhencao [Love and chastity], edited by Shenhuo shudian (Life Bookstore) Editorial Department, 1933, 1–6. 50. See, for example, Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 33, 1926, 1264. 51. Hong Jun, ‘Hunzhang sheng zhong’ [A cry from amidst a melee], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), vol. 35, 1928, 1263–68. 52. Zou Taofen, ‘Xinxiang zhencao’ [Letters on chastity], in The Collected Writings of Zou Taofen, vol. 1, Joint Publishing, 1955. 53. Hu Shi, New Life, 221–27. 54. Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 7, no. 2, 1926, 26. 55. Key, Love, 13. 56. Key, Love, 22–23. 57. George Sand’s words are quoted, for example, by Jiao Songzhou, ‘Ruhe ke shi lian’ai de chengli’ [How to establish love], Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 6, 1926, 204. Zhang Xichen also cites them in Xin nüxing (The New Woman), vol. 32, 1928, 876. 58. This according to Mao Dun, see Chen Hui, ‘Wusi shiqi xianjin zhishifenzi guanyu lian’ai wenti de tantao’ [Exploration of love by progressive May Fourth intellectuals], Journal of Neijiang Normal University, vol. 28, no. 9, 2013, 81–84. 59. Just one example out of many can be found in Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), vol. 12, no. 7, 1926, 182.

Chapter 13

Looking for Love: Yu Dafu

Epigraph: Diary entry on February 17, 1927, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 227. 1. 2. 3. 4.

The italicization indicates that the words are in English in the text. The story is Chunlun (Sinking) and is collected in Yu Dafu, Autobiographical, 20–66. Tong, 70, 49. ‘Xueye’ [Snowy night], in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 58. ‘Yi feng xin’ [A letter], ibid., 159.

Notes to pp. 193–205 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

301

Ibid., 157. Chen Zidong, 102–3. ‘Boundless Night,’ or Mangmang ye in Chinese, is in Yu Dafu, Classics, 75–96. Yu Dafu interpolates Edith Wharton’s statement in English in the text of his essay, see Chen and Wang, 288. ‘Late-Flowering Osmanthus’ (Chi guihua) is collected in Yu Dafu, Classics, 168–93. ‘Silvery Grey Death’ (Yinhuise de si) is in Yu Dafu, Autobiographical, 1–19. Yu Dafu wrote about Dowson in ‘Jizhong yu Huang mian zhi de renwu’ [The people clustered around the Yellow Book], in Chuangzao zhoubao (Creation Weekly), nos. 20, 21, 1923. The essay is collected in ‘Bi zhou ji,’ Yu Dafu quanji [The complete works of Yu Dafu], vol. 5, 1721–40. Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 75. Paglia, 233. Yu Dafu’s words of commendation come from his essay ‘Lusuo de sixiang he ta de chuangzuo’ [Rousseau’s thought and his writings], in ‘Bi zhou ji,’ Yu Dafu quanji (The Complete Works of Yu Dafu), vol. 5, 396. Yu Dafu, Works, 311 and 341. Chen Zidong, 149. Quoted in Tong, 89. Yu is quoting Max Stirner, the German author of a work known in English as The Ego and Its Own (1845). Yu Dafu, Works, 311. ‘Ling yu zhe’ (A Superfluous Man), in Yu Dafu, Works, 168–74. ‘Nanxing zaji’ [Record of a journey south], in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 171. Preface to ‘Niaoluo xing’ (Wisteria and Dodder), 1923, in Chen and Wang, 5. Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 219–20. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 171. Jiang, 45. Preface to Jilei ji [Chicken ribs], 1927, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 69. ‘Niaoluo xing’ (Wisteria and Dodder), 1923, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 79–93. ‘Yi feng xin’ [A Letter], in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 157. ‘Niaoluo xing’ (Wisteria and Dodder), in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 89. Ibid., 91. Diary entry for January 12, 1927, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 209. An account Wang Yingxia wrote of her life with Yu Dafu, ‘Bansheng zishu’ [Half my life as told by myself ], was published in 1982 and excerpted in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 289. Quoted in diary entry for April 16, 1927, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 272. Letter (1927) may be found in Yu Dafu, Works, 391–95. Diary entry for February 28, 1927, Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 235. Letter, April 16, 1927. For source reference see note 34 above. Preface to Jilei ji (Chicken Ribs), 1927, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 69. Diary entry for March 26, 1927, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 256. Diary entry for February 27, in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 233. Jiang, 276. Ibid., 344. Wang Yingxia makes these complaints in her memoir (see note 32 above), excerpted in Yu Dafu, Self-Account, 303.

302

Notes to pp. 208–219

Chapter 14 Exalting Love: Xu Zhimo Epigraph: Letter to Lu Xiaoman, March 10, 1925, in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 321–22. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Hu Shi, ‘Zhuidao Xu Zhimo’ [In memoriam: Xu Zhimo], first published in Xinyue (Crescent Moon), vol. 4, no. 1, August 1932, reprinted in Hu Shi, Works, 97. Quoted in Spurling, 192. Ibid., 193. Actually he was not northern Chinese, his birthplace being Zhejiang province to the south of the Yangtze. Buck could have been following ‘deep southerners’ like the Cantonese in making a relative distinction. Chiang, 176. Xu Zhimo, ‘Xiyan yu wenhua’ [Smoking and culture], in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 78. Wood, 193. Quoted in Hu Shi, Works, 98, see note 1 above. I reckoned the ‘ten years’ from the date (1912) of publication of Jade Pear Spirit, a novel which links love and freedom, see Chapter 8. Xu Zhimo, Supplement, vol. 1, 1. Xu Zhimo, ‘Wo suo zhidao de Kangqiao’ [The Cambridge I know], 1926, collected in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 80–89. Chen Xinhua, 68. Quoted from a letter he wrote to Jiang Dongxiu, see Egan and Chou, 185. The guest was the painter Liu Haisu, see Chen Xinhua, 120. Ibid., 120–21. Xu Zhimo, Himself, 234. Letter to Hu Shi dated January 7, 1927, in Hu Shi, Himself, 360–61. Su Xuelin, in preface to Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 8. Ibid., 6. Hu Shi notes this in his essay (see note 1 above), 98. ‘Xing shi yinyuan xu’ (Preface to Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World), Xu Zhimo, Supplement, vol. 3, 396–415. Hu Shi quotes from Liang’s letter of January 1923, in Hu Shi, Works, 98–99. Ibid., 99. Quoted in Chen Xinhua, 121. Xu Zhimo, Supplement, 413, see note 20 above. The airing is owed to Hu Shi’s 1918 essay in New Youth on Ibsenism, reprinted in Works, 14. Letter from Xu Zhimo dated March 3, 1925, in Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 145. Analects 9.28. Xu Zhimo, ‘Jiushi da po le tou, ye haiyao baochi women linghun de ziyou’ [We must preserve our freedom of spirit even if we were to have our heads broken], nuli zhoubao, no. 39, January 28, 1923; reproduced in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 158. Xu Zhimo, ‘Taige’er lai Hua’ [Tagore comes to China], September 10, 1923, Xiaoshuo ribao, vol. 14, no. 9, September 10, 1923; in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 244. ‘Taige’er’ [Tagore], Chenbao fukan, May 15, 1924; in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 253. Letter to May dated March 11, 1925, in Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 151. Quoted in Chen Xinhua, 88. Ibid., 111–12.

Notes to pp. 219–228 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

303

Ibid., 90–91. Ibid., 106. Quoted in Hu Shi, Works, 102–3. Translation is based on Michelle Yeh’s. Diary entry for March 18, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Diaries, 188. Diary entry for March 15, 1925, ibid., 186. Diary entry for March 25, 1925, ibid., 197–98. Letter dated July 17, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 133–34. Letter dated March 22, 1925, ibid., 110–11. Letter dated July 17, 1925, ibid., 133–34. Diary entry for March 15, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Diaries, 186. Spence, Gate, 177. Xu Zhimo, Innocent. Letter dated April 1, 1931, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 217. Letter dated July 8, 1931, ibid., 233. Xu Zhimo, ‘Bailangning furen de qing shi (er)’ [Mrs Browning’s love poetry (2)], Xinyue (Crescent Moon), vol. 1, no. 1, 1928. Letter dated June 16, 1931, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 228. Letter dated March 7, 1931, Xu Zhimo, Innocent, 195. Xu Zhimo, ‘Gei muqin’ [For mother], composed on August 1, 1925; in Xu Zhimo, Himself, 20–23. Xu Zhimo, ‘Art and Life,’ first published in Chuangzao jikan (Creation Quarterly), vol. 2, no. 1, 1923; reproduced in Xu Zhimo, Supplement, vol. 3, 441. Ibid., 433–59. For example, in letter to May from Paris dated June 25, 1925, Xu Zhimo, Himself, 329, 330, 331; and in diary entry dated August 9, 1925, in Xu Zhimo, Works, 362. Diary entry for January 6, 1927, excerpted in Xu Zhimo, Innocent, 261. Xu zhimo, Xinyue (Crescent Moon), March 1928, in Xu Zhimo, Works, 344. Letter dated March 3, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 142–45. Letter to May, August 14, 1925; Xu Zhimo, Works, 366. Extract from Xu Zhimo, ‘Ai de linggan’ [Love’s inspiration], Works, 203; very finely translated into English by Cyril Birch in his paper ‘English and Chinese Metres in Hsü Chih-mo,’ Asia Major, vol. 8, Part 2, 1960, 285–86. For an example, see ‘To Fanny Brawne,’ Xu Zhimo, Supplement, vol. 1, 213–15. Excerpted from Cyril Birch’s translation in the paper cited in note 59 above, 288. Xu Zhimo, Supplement, vol. 1, 184–89 and 203–13. Letter dated March 10, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 149. Diary entry for August 11, 1925, Xu Zhimo, Works, 363. Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 167. Rieger, 68. Xu Zhimo, ‘Ting Huaigene (Wagner) yueju’ [Listening to Wagner’s music dramas], first published in 1923, collected in Xu Zhimo, Supplement, vol. 1, 4–8. The poet Shelly Bryant has richly added to my appreciation of this poem by translating it into English. ‘Qing si’ (Liebestod), in Xu Zhimo, Works, 11–12. Rieger, 108. The idea of redemption through love, too deeply ingrained in the cultural DNA of the West to be thrown over, is at the core of Wagner’s other operas, notably The Flying Dutchman. For its untranslatability to another culture, see Chapter 6. Ibid., 108.

304 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Notes to pp. 228–237 Letter dated June 25, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 167. Letter dated March 3, 1925, Lu Xiaoman, Flowers, 144. Diary entry for August 14, 1925, Xu Zhimo, Works, 366. Leo Lee, 149. Hu Shi, Works, 101.

Chapter 15

Love Betrayed: Eileen Chang

Epigraph: Brookner, 149. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Eileen Chang, Change, 25. Zhang, Reflections, 22. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 106. Ibid., 131. ‘Hua diao’ [A withered flower], Zhang, Stories, 463. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 140. Ibid., 283. ‘Siyu’ (Whispers), in Zhang, Water, 145–46. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 130. Zhang, Water, 147. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 131. Ibid., 184. Bernhardt, 188. ‘Cubist’ is what would be termed ‘art deco’ years later. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 212. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 200. ‘Siyu’ (Whispers), in Zhang, Water, 150. Eileen Chang, Change, 70. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 261. Eileen Chang, Change, 27. Ibid., 26; Zhang, Reunion, 236. The paper was Libao, August 24, 1944, quoted in Xiao, 23. Eileen Chang, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions,’ in XXth Century, vol. 4, 1943, 59. Eileen Chang, Reunion, 128, 236. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 201, 132. Eileen Chang, Change, 3–4. Eileen Chang, Reunion, 288; and Change, 108. Eileen Chang, Change, 54. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 264. Zhang, Reunion, 138. Zhang, Water, 23. Zhang, Reunion, 288. Zhang, Stories, 150–202. Eileen Chang, Pagoda, 283. Zhang, Reunion, 57. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 162.

Notes to pp. 237–250 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

305

Zhang, Water, 75; Xiao, 129. Eileen Chang, Change, 269. Zhang, ‘Ziji de wenzhang’ (Writing of My Own), in Zhang, Water, 22. Liu Chuan’e, 128. Kingsbury, 141; Zhang Ailing, Stories, 228. In Chinese the title is ‘Qingcheng zhi lian.’ Hong Kong falls to the Japanese in the story but as the words qing cheng, ‘city-toppling,’ are usually used of a woman beautiful enough to cause the fall of a city, Eileen Chang intended ‘Love in a Fallen City’ to be open also to an alternative interpretation: ‘A Love that Fells a City.’ Xiao, 41–42. Kingsbury, 149. Zhang, Reunion, 171. Zhang, ‘Jing yu lu’ (From the Ashes), 1944, in Zhang, Water, 47. Hu Lancheng, ‘Ping Zhang Ailing’ [Zhang Ailing: an appraisal], 1944; in Hu Lancheng, Literature, 210–11. In Chinese the stock phrases are tong xin tong de (of one heart and mind), tong gan gong ku and huannan zhi jiao (sharing weal and woe or going through thick and thin together). Hu Lancheng, Life, 154. Zhang, Reunion, 228. Hu Lancheng, Life, 146. Zhang, Reunion, 165. Xiao, 53–54. Zhang, Reunion, 273. Hu Lancheng, Life, 245–46. Zhang, Reunion, 274. Hu Lancheng, Life, 274. Letter dated January 25, 1976, in the preface to Zhang, Reunion, 6. Letter from Soong to Zhang dated April 28, 1976, ibid., 13. Peter Lee, ‘Eileen Chang’s Fractured Legacy,’ Asia Times Online, April 29, 2009. Letter from Zhang to Soong dated July 18, 1975, in the preface to Zhang, Reunion, 4. Letter from Zhang to Soong dated September 18, 1975, ibid., 5. Quoted in Kao, 151. Hu Lancheng, Life, 193. Zhang, Reunion, 237. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 234, 310. Ibid., 324. Ibid., 277. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 257, 306. Her words are: ‘To love more than one is actually not to love them at the same time; it’s really to love only one but to hold on also to the former loves simultaneously.’ Zhang, Reunion, 236–37. Zhang, Reunion, 188. Hu Lancheng, Literature, 209. Ibid., 75, 76. Hu Lancheng, Life, 185.

306

Notes to pp. 250–263

77. Hu Lancheng, Literature, 74. 78. Zhang, Reunion, 310. 79. Letters dated January 25, 1976; March 14, 1976; April 22, 1976; in the preface to Zhang, Reunion, 6, 10. 80. Ibid., 138. 81. Eileen Chang, Change, 54. 82. Zhang, Reunion, 23. 83. Eileen Chang, Change, 100. 84. Ibid., 103. 85. Ibid., 107. 86. Ibid., 108; Zhang, Reunion, 288. 87. Letter dated July 31, 1956, in Soong, 157. 88. Ang Lee’s afterword to ‘Lust, Caution’ (‘Se, jie’), in Eileen Chang, Lust, 59.

Chapter 16 Love’s Decline and Fall Epigraph: Gao Shan, ‘Jin yu zhuyi he lian’ai ziyou’ [Asceticism and freedom of love], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), vol. 1, no. 4, 1926, 237. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

Yan Shi, ‘Da Jianbo Qiandi er jun’ [In reply to Messrs Jianbo and Qiandi], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 21, 1927, 517. Ibid., 517, 520. Guangzhou minguo ribao [Canton Republican Daily], April 21 to June 16, 1926. For coverage of the debate, see ‘Lian’ai yu geming wenti de taolun ji dui “geming jia lian’ai” chuangzuo de yingxiang’ [Discussions of the question of love and revolution and its influence on ‘revolution plus love’ writing] at http://blog.sina.com.cn/wind1007, dated July 20, 2009. Quoted in Bryna Goodman, ‘Appealing to the Public: Newspaper Presentation and Adjudication of Emotion,’ Twentieth-Century China, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, 65. The classic account of the Guomindang–communist split is Isaacs’s. Hu Yepin, ‘Dao Mosike qu’ (Bound for Moscow), Guanghua shuju, 1930. I read it at http://www.millionbook.com/xd/h/huyepin/001/001.htm. Quoted in Tsi-an Hsia, 167–68, with Hu’s name changed into pinyin by me. A. S. Byatt, ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life,’ The Guardian, July 27, 2002. Reading this greatly helped my understanding of the novel. Ibid. In Kollontai’s collection A Great Love, read online at marxists.org. Carleton, 40. Li Jin, ‘Keluntai he Sulian de xing wenxue’ [Kollontai and the sex literature of the Soviet Union]. Zhongguo wenxue wang [Chinese Literature Site], http://www.literature. org.cn, accessed September 28, 2013. Xia Yan published it under his real name, Shen Duanxian, Lian’ai zhi lu [Paths of love], Shanghai Kaiming shudian, 1928. Hayashi Fusao’s essay was translated by one Mozhi under the Chinese title, ‘Xin lian’ai dao’ [New way of love]. This first saw print in Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 33, 1928. The same issue carried a Chinese translation of ‘The Loves of Three Generations’ by one Zhi Wei, no doubt a pseudonym. Apart from Xia Yan’s,

Notes to pp. 264–275

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

307

two other Chinese translations appeared in book form. One, by Li Lan, came out under the title Weida de lian’ai (A Great Love) in 1930; published by Shanghai Xiandai shuju, this included three stories, ‘A Great Love,’ ‘Sisters,’ and ‘The Loves of Three Generations.’ The other translation, by Wen Shengmin, was brought out under the title Lian’ai zhi dao [Ways of love] by the publisher Qizhi shuju the same year and included only ‘Three Generations’ and ‘Sisters.’ Kollontai, Morality, 23. Meisel-Hess, 128, 129. Kollontai, Morality, 23. The previous quote is on page 25. Zhu Mei, ‘Lian’ai de xianzai yu jianglai’ [Love now and in the future], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 36, 1928, 1373–74. Jing Yuan, ‘Lian’ai zhishang de masha’ [Writing off the ‘love is best’ sentiment at a stroke], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 36, 1928, 1385. Ibid. The translator Wen Shengmin also makes this point in his preface to Ways of Love, see note 13 above. Wen Shengmin, preface to Ways of Love, see note 13 above. Jing Yuan, see note 18 above. The quote in this paragraph is from Mencius, see the epigraph to Chapter 9. Li Jin, see note 12 above. See Chen Hsiang-yin. Huang, 239. Quoted in Spence, Gate, 229, with a slight modification to the translation. Quoted in Wei Xu, 132. Chi-hsi Hu’s paper, ‘The Sexual Revolution in the Kiangsi Soviet,’ The China Quarterly, no. 59, July–September 1974, 477–90, has been invaluable. Wei Xu, 157, 170. This speech is reproduced in full at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected…3/ mswv3_08.html Wei Xu, 176. A translation into English of Ding’s essay, ‘Thoughts on March 8, International Women’s Day, 1942,’ may be found in Barlow and Bjorge, 318. Quoted in Spence, Gate, 242. Qin, 54. Alber, 192. Ibid. ‘Bu suan qingshu’ [Not love letters] in Ding, 266, 265. Hu Yepin, ‘San ge bu tongyi de renwu’ [Three disunited people], Honghei zazhi [Red and black magazine], no. 3, 1929, 19–35. Letter from Ding Ling to Feng Xuefeng dated January 5, 1932, in Ding, 270. This paragraph’s other quotation (about being comrades) is from a letter that she wrote on August 11, 1931, in Ding, 267. Jing Yuan, see note 18 above, 1928, 1389. Yao Fangren, ‘Guanyu “San dai de lian’ai” de fenxi guancha’ [An analysis of ‘The Loves of Three Generations’], Xin nüxing (The New Woman), no. 36, 1928, 1385, 1365. ‘Shafei nüshi de riji’ (Miss Sophia’s Diary), in Ding, 43–81. Qin, 72 and 96.

308

Notes to pp. 279–284

Chapter 17

Afterthoughts

Epigraph: Hu Shi, ‘Jieshao wo ziji de sixiang’ [Introducing my own thinking], 1930, in Hu Shi, Works, 372. 1. 2.

Yuan, see Chapter 8, note 39 above. Hu Shi, ‘Xie zai Kongzi danchen jinian zhi hou’ [Written after Confucius’s anniversary], 1934. Reprinted in Hu Shi, Works, 308. 3. Hou, 91. 4. Hu Shi, as in note 2 above, 305. 5. See Shi. I owe my discovery of this essay to Ni Yibin. 6. The words in inverted commas are my translation of Ni Yibin’s; he gave me his thoughts in an e-mail dated December 23, 2013. 7. Andreas Capellanus, 185. 8. Jianfu Chen, 430. 9. James Farrer, interview on December 29, 2013. See James Farrer and Sun Zhongxin, ‘Extramarital Love in Shanghai,’ The China Journal, no. 50, July 2003, 1–36. 10. James Farrer in Davis and Friedman. 11. James Farrer, Gefei Suo, Haruka Tsuchiya and Zhongxin Sun, ‘Re-embedding Sexual Meanings: A Qualitative Comparison of the Premarital Sexual Scripts of Chinese and Japanese Young Adults,’ Sexuality & Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2012, 263–86. 12. James Farrer, interview, December 29, 2013.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in bold type refer to illustrations. Abelard and Heloise: and courtly love, 33; Letters of, 33–35, 36–37; Stendhal on, 45–46 ai (to love), 111–12, 115, 116 aiqing (love), 112–13, 115, 116, 279, 293n13 Andreas Cappellanus: Art of Courtly Love, 29, 30, 283 Babbitt, Irving, 35–36; Dhammapada, 36 Bao Tianxiao. See under Joan Haste Bebel, August, 263 Bible, the, 17, 20, 89, 112, 224 Book of Songs (Shi jing), 14–18, 51, 240; Freudian reading of, 19; moral reading of, 18; political reading of, 17, 18; sex in, 18, 19–20, 21, 54, 57 bound feet, 68, 124, 128, 142, 230; campaign against, 13, 23; condemned, 150–51; as fetish, 22; as object of desire, 22, 56 Buck, Pearl S. See under Xu Zhimo Buddhism: Babbitt and, 35–36; contrasted with Christianity, 36; and desire, 36, 60, 79; in Dream of Red Chamber, 81, 85; and Neo-Confucianism, 59, 60, 78, 81; in Peony Pavilion, 79, 80, 81; renunciation in, 79, 81, 85, 86; Schopenhauer and, 85, 86, 227; yuan and yinyuan (dependent origination) in, 79–80 Cao Xueqin. See Dream of the Red Chamber, The Carpenter, Edward, 159, 160, 163, 266

Chang, Eileen, 229, 230; Ang Lee on, 252; aunt (Zhang Maoyuan) of, 230, 233; cult, 234; death of, 252; experience of love, 237, 243, 244–45, 246–47, 249–50, 250–51; father of, 231–32, 233, 243, 252; in Hong Kong, 234; on love, 5, 7, 26, 235, 237, 238, 251; on May Fourth movement, 235; relationship to mother, 234, 235–36, 251; remarriage, 252; works of: The Book of Change, 235, 238; The Fall of the Pagoda, 235; The Golden Cangue, 236–37; Little Reunion, 235, 247–49, 251; ‘Love,’ 237–38; ‘Love in a Fallen City,’ 238–43; ‘Lust, Caution,’ 252; ‘Stale Mates,’ 3–4, 5, 111, 249; ‘A Withered Flower,’ 231 chastity, 94, 185, 186, 187, 283; attacked, 86, 183–84, 187; Chinese terms for, 170–71, 188; Feng Menglong on, 171; Key on, 188; as morality, 58, 184; and sexual double standards, 6, 33, 184, 283; Yosano Akiko on, 182–83. See also concubines Chen Zilong, 69–70 Cheng Fangwu, 193, 201, 202 Chiang Kai-shek, 243, 245, 255; coup against communists, 202, 156, 214, 257, 263, 267; Northern Expedition, 202, 214, 255 Chinese Communist Party, 255; Guomindang breaks with, 256, 257; members forced out of Japan, 263;

320 members martyred, 256, 257; united front with Guomindang, 256, 257. See also Chiang Kai-shek Chinese (language): Classical, 5, 90, 131, 243; Japanese loan words in, 108, 113; modern vernacular, 5, 50, 131; reform of, 131 Christianity, 26, 38, 41, 50, 51, 55, 86; asceticism, 29, 31–32, 37, 54, 155; contrasted with Buddhism, 36; and fin’amors, 29, 54; and marriage, 42, 45, 188; and metaphysical love, 31; misogyny, 37; and Neoplatonism, 41; Original Sin, 36, 142; and redemption, 38; sexuality and, 34, 36–37, 42, 281; sin in, 29, 36, 37, 38, 96, 99, 138, 147 Christian love: as agape, 26, 38, 39, 86; and caritas, 38, 41, 42; versus Confucian humanity, 38 cloud and rain ( yunyu), 39–40, 54, 77, 81 concubines, 2, 123, 125, 147, 170, 215, 249; and adultery, 176–77; and bigamy, 176, 177; changing attitudes to, 175–76; and courtesans, 171–72 Confucianism, 2, 6, 14, 15, 50; and chastity, 94, 171; and civil service examinations, 14–15, 56, 57, 60, 74, 75; emotions in, 59; ethics, 78, 121; and propriety, 54, 57, 215, 255; sex and, 14, 16–17, 31, 32, 101; virtues and values of, 15, 60, 62, 67, 69, 112, 171, 218. See also Confucius; Neo-Confucianism Confucius, 5, 14, 15, 35, 59, 123, 125, 141, 168; on Book of Songs, 14, 15, 16, 54, 289n9; concubine of, 172; Golden Mean (middle way) of, 145, 223, 262; Golden Rule of, 184; on emotions, 60; on sex, 53. See also Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism courtesans, 2, 52, 68, 172, 186, 264–65; as aspirant concubines, 171; and men of letters, 91, 199, 70–71; Renaissance, 264; of Shanghai, 71 courtly love. See fin’amors Cupid, 8, 39, 42, 100, 102, 288n57

Index Dai Wangshu, 28 Dame aux Camélias, La, 89, 90–94, 98, 101, 102, 103, 112; afterlife of, 95, 96; as Camille on film, 87, 95; redemptive love in, 91–92, 96; whore/virgin idea in, 92–93 Dante, 31, 147, 281, 287n21; and Beatrice, 31, 42, 159, 197, 204; and courtly love, 159; -type love, 42 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 209, 224 Ding Ling: and Chinese Communist Party, 269, 275; and Hu Yepin, 257, 270; and Feng Xuefeng, 270, 272, 275; in love triangle, 271–72; ‘Miss Sophie’s Diary,’ 274–75; ‘Not Love Letters,’ 271 Dream of the Red Chamber, The, 74, 78, 89, 155, 175, 290n1; Buddhist renunciation in, 81, 85; Dame aux Camélias compared to, 90; hero (Baoyu), 81–85; love and lust in, 84–85; Schopenhaurian reading of, 85–86. See also lust of the mind Dumas fils, Alexandre. See Dame aux Camélias, La Ellis, Havelock, 20, 21, 22, 158, 160 Engels, Friedrich, 202, 263, 265–66, 273; on fin’amors, 32–33; on marriage, 45, 265–66, 267, 273 eros: and agape, 26, 38, 39, 86; and caritas, 38, 41, 42; as Cupid (Eros), 39, 264; in Neoplatonism, 41; in Plato, 41; Venus in, 40–41, 84 eroticism, 39, 77, 164; defined, 53, 57, 185; in Salome, 148, 150 Feng Menglong, 50, 171, 172; An Anatomy of Love, 8, 61, 62–65; Constant Words to Awaken the World, 112; as man of Feeling, 61, 62, 112 Feng Xiaoqing, 20–21, 75 Feng Xuefeng, 258, 263, 270–72, 275 Ficino, Marsilio, 41, 42. See also Neoplatonism fin’amors (courtly love), 10, 28–29, 31–32, 58, 195, 245, 282; and Abelard and Heloise, 33; Art of Courtly Love, 29–30;

Index as chaste love, 31; and chivalry, 29, 32, 33, 245; and Dante’s Beatrice, 31, 42, 159, 197; purifying, 29, 31, 46, 195; as true love, 28, 29, 54; as womanworship, 28–29, 30, 31; and Virgin Mary, 30, 31–32; as romantic love, 10, 29; as Western invention, 44, 45, 46 Flowers in a Sea of Karma (Zeng Pu), 94 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 20, 75; repression, 22–23, 193; sublimation, 195 Fryer, John, 89 Futabatei Shimei, 114, 158 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 137, 141, 142, 281; Faust, 139, 142, 143; Sorrows of Young Werther, 42, 62, 138, 139, 143–47, 163, 164, 227, 294n8; and Storm and Stress movement, 42–43 Guo Moruo, 138, 141, 149, 202; and Anna Satō Tomiko, 138, 140, 147; on bound feet, 22, 23; Cloverleaf, 143; and Faust, 139–40, 142, 143; and Goethe, 138, 139, 141; marriages of, 138–39, 142, 143, 200, 279; and Tian Han, 140, 141, 142; translation of Sorrows of Young Werther, 139, 143, 145 Haggard, Henry Rider. See Joan Haste Hahn, Emily, 178–81 haose (sexual desire), 53, 54, 57, 58, 85 Hayashi Fusao, 263, 265 Hiratsuka Raichō, 156–57 homosexuality. See under love: same-sex Honma Hisao, 148, 157, 166, 296n39 Huang Yifan, Yvonne, 230, 231, 232, 233; death, 252; divorce, 232; motherdaughter relationship, 234, 235–36, 251; views of love and sex, 234, 235, 236 Hu Lancheng, 237, 241, 242, 243–45, 248, 251; collaboration of, 243, 245; death of, 252; as fugitive, 245–46; on love, 250; This Life, These Times, 247, 248; wives and women of, 245, 246–47, 248, 249, 250 Hu Shi, 119, 127–28, 209, 278, 280; and Browning, 135; and Cao Peisheng,

321 132–33, 134, 135; and Clifford Williams, 128–30, 131–32; on Dame aux Camélias, 130; and Ibsen, 127, 129, 228, 279; Life’s Biggest Event, 128; on love, 134, 146, 283; marriage of, 128, 134, 279; memorializes Xu Zhimo, 215, 228; mother of, 128, 129; politics of, 133; reforms written language, 131 Hu Yepin: ‘Bound for Moscow,’ 253, 256–58, 272–73; ‘Cohabitation,’ 267; joins Chinese Communist Party, 257; executed, 257–58; in love triangle, 271, 273; and Madame Bovary, 258–59; ‘Three Disunited People,’ 271, 273 Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House, 120, 127, 129; The Lady from the Sea, 127. See also Nora infatuation, 9, 65, 66, 84, 113, 145; in Chinese, 65–66, 278; of Joan Haste, 100, 101, 110. See also limerence Japan, 5, 139, 156, 166, 284; Chinese students in, 30, 88, 113, 263; Chinese word loans from, 113–14; as conduit of Western concepts, 89, 156, 281; Meiji, 113,114, 166, 281; Taishō, 156, 164, 192, 281; wars with China, 88, 143, 179, 205, 233, 245; writing system, 113 Jiang Dongxiu, 128, 131, 134, 213 Jin Shengtan, 55–59, 74 Jin Tianhe, 101, 103 Joan Haste (Henry Rider Haggard), 97, 98–101, 102, 112, 155–56; avowal of love in, 108, 109; Bao Tianxiao and Yang Zilin’s translation, 98, 101, 102; enthralls Guo Moruo, 139; Lin Shu’s translation, 98, 100–101, 109, 110 Key, Ellen, 141, 147, 153, 157, 279, 281; as China’s love guru, 147; on divorce, 154; doctrine of, 151, 154, 157; evolutionary ideas of, 154–55; on free love, 168, 188; in Japan, 157; Love and Marriage, 154, 157; The Morality of Woman, 154; new morality of, 151, 154, 157, 168, 266; superseded, 266; writing

322 style of, 158; and woman’s question, 151, 280. See also oneness of soul and flesh Kitamura Tōkoku, 114, 165 Kollontai, Alexandra, 260–61, 281; Chinese translations of, 263, 266; and ‘glass of water’ idea, 262, 266, 268; in Japanese, 263; ‘Love and the New Morality,’ 263, 266; ‘The Loves of Three Generations,’ 261–62, 274; reviews Sexual Crisis, 264; sexual ethos of, 260, 263–64, 266 Kuriyagawa Hakuson, 163–64, 166, 168; Modern Views of Love, 30–31, 114, 163, 167 Lan Zhixian, 184, 185 Lawrence, D. H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 54, 55, 58, 99; The Escaped Cock, 182 lian’ai (love), 107, 160, 167, 201, 217, 280, 281; as Chinese for ren’ai, 115, 116, 156; contrasted with aiqing, 116, 279; and qing, 117, 118, 279 Liang Qichao, 89, 212, 213, 214; view of love, 216, 217 Liang Shiqiu, 19, 20, 148, 149; and Babbitt, 35, 36; translates Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 35 Liang Sicheng, 212, 218 Li Dingyi, 155 limerence, 66, 99–100, 110, 116, 202, 222; coined, 8–9; and infatuation, 9, 66, 278; as romantic love, 9, 10 Lin Changmin, 209, 211–12 Lin Huiyin, Phyllis: betrothal and marriage, 212, 218–19; in London, 209–10; and Xu Zhimo, 210, 211–12, 219–20; work, 218–19 Lin Shu: Dame aux Camélias, 90–91, 92, 93; Joan Haste, 98, 100–101, 104, 109, 112 Liu Rushi, 68–71, 265 love: avowal (‘I love you’), 108–110, 243; brain system, 9–10, 46, 66; capitalism and, 33, 160, 254, 255; chaste, 31, 32; and chivalry, 32, 65, 66–67, 245; Dante-type, 42; divine, 32, 39, 42, 54, 112; dualism (spirit and flesh) in, 10,

Index 32, 42, 99, 100, 110, 155, 158, 161, 280; as escape clause, 54, 58; evolution of, 30, 31–33, 162, 163; exclusivity of, 175, 185–86, 262, 273, 278, 282–83; filial piety and, 112, 123, 223; free, 117, 157, 168, 187–88, 235, 257, 260; freedom of, 7, 37–38, 113, 116, 126, 143, 157, 167, 188, 210; game-, 263–65; metaphysical, 31; in mythology, 39–40, 54; Platonic, 41, 42, 157, 161–62, 163, 235; poetry, 27, 51–53; publishing boom on, 161; pure, 2, 30, 86, 138, 146, 194, 197; redemptive, 58, 91–92, 96, 99; and revolution, 2, 118, 238, 254, 255–56, 275, 280; sacred, 7, 37–38, 154, 166, 167, 188, 235, 265, 280; same-sex, 21, 41, 63, 174; and self, 156–57, 163, 164, 165–66, 264; self-sacrificing, 98, 102, 167; semantic domain of, 8; as sexual friendship, 160, 161, 264; Venus as carnal element in, 40; Werther-type, 42. See also Christian love; eroticism; fin’amors; limerence; romantic love; true love Lucka, Emil: Evolution of Love, 30, 31, 32, 163, 166, 287n17; and personality, 164; posits psycho-physical unity, 32, 163. See also oneness of soul and flesh lust of the mind: in Dream of Red Chamber, 84, 86, 155; Shao Xunmei and, 182; Zhou Zuoren and, 182, 183, 297n17 Lu Xiaoman, May: divorce, 213; heart condition, 214, 215; looks, 221; opium smoking, 214; paintings, 221–22; and Weng Ruiwu, 214; and Xu Zhimo, 212–13, 220–21, 222 Lu Xun, 120, 121, 122 123, 294n6; on filial piety, 123, 223; lovelessness, 123, 126; marriage, 123–25, 200; ‘Regret for the Past,’ 126–27; and Xu Guangping, 125–26 Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, 8, 103–4, 116, 280 Mao Dun, 157, 188 Mao Zedong, 122, 243, 255, 267, 268; on personality, 122; Selected Works, 268

Index marriage: arranged, 2, 23, 45, 94, 103, 113, 121–22, 130, 154, 265, 266, 267, 279; and Christianity, 45; in England, 122; in France, 122; historical evolution of, 32–33, 265–66, 273; in India, 122; love-in-, 44, 45, 280; monogamy, 32, 33, 44–45, 46, 162, 168, 171, 175–76, 177, 187, 273; predestined, 65, 79–80, 117; for procreative purpose, 27, 32, 42, 60, 163; under socialism, 267–68, 269, 280; Soviet-inspired regulations on, 267; in the West, 45, 280. See also chastity; concubines May Fourth movement, 1, 5–6, 19, 170, 230, 275; generation of, 27, 125; and language, 50; and self, 198; and Storm and Stress, 42–43 Mencius, 53, 120, 121 Neo-Confucianism, 59–61, 117; and Buddhism, 60–61; emotions in, 59, 60, 77–79, 102 Neoplatonism, 41, 42, 86, 282; and Sacred and Profane Love, 42 New Culture movement, 5, 50, 120, 127 Nora (A Doll’s House), 132, 150, 151, 230, 257, 260; Hu Shi on, 127–28, 129, 130; Lu Xun and, 121–22, 126, 127; Xu Zhimo on, 217. See also Ibsen, Henrik oneness of soul and flesh (lingrou yizhi), 10, 32, 156, 162, 166, 239; Chinese debate on, 158–62; Japanese formulation of, 158, 163; and Key, 154, 157–58, 160, 163, 266, 281; as psycho-physical unity, 32, 163; Yosano Akiko on, 183; Zhou Jianren on, 186; Zhou Zuoren on, 158, 182 Ovid, 28, 64 Pan Guangdan, 20–22, 162, 175–76 Peony Pavilion, The, 72–73, 74–77, 78, 102; Buddhism in, 79–81; compared with Romeo and Juliet, 74; English translation of, 80–81; Freudian reading of, 75. See also Tang Xianzu

323 personality: in Chinese translation, 163; in Japanese translation, 163, 281, 298n32; linked to individuality, 164, 217–18; linked to love, 183, 184–85, 186, 217, 264; Lucka on, 164; Nora’s, 121, 122, 217; Tagore as supreme exemplar, 218; traits lauded by Confucius, 218; -union, 163–64, 186, 281; women’s independent, 121, 122, 149, 162, 165, 176, 217. See also ren’ge Plato, 43, 78, 85, 86, 114, 223, Symposium, 41, 80, 162; Phaedrus, 41; Platonism, 38, 42, 55, 58. See also love: Platonic; Neoplatonism Qian Qianyi, 68–69 Qian Zhongshu: Fortress Besieged, 156 qing, 59, 61, 66, 85, 101, 111, 112; cult of, 61, 62, 78; as emotion, 59, 112; as Feeling, 59, 102; Neo-Confucian view of, 60–61, 117; as sensibility, 62, 66; as sexual desire, 64; versus aiqing and lian’ai, 113, 117, 118, 279; versus lust, 63 Qi Rushan, 114 Ren Baitao, 31 ren’ge (personality): as Chinese for jinkaku, 163, 298n32; joined up to ‘union,’ 163–64; -love, 184–85. See also personality Revolution and Love (Hong Ruizhao), 256 Romance of the West Wing (Wang Shifu), 22, 23, 55–58, 102 romantic love, 10, 44–45, 95, 281; and capitalism, 45, 160, 254; Chinese understanding of, 66, 114–15, 116–17, 160, 280; complex, 45, 46, 47, 155; as infatuation, 66; and fin’amors, 29, 44; as ideal in marriage, 14, 44–45, 103, 279; in India, 115; as limerence, 9, 10, 66; modernity of, 45; sublimity of, 46, 278, 281; universality of, 10, 43, 46, 278; usages of term, 10, 44, 45, 46, 278, 281; as Western invention, 10, 43, 44–45, 46. See also fin’amors; love; true love

324 Romanticism, 42, 43, 55; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 43, 165; love in, 43, 46 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20, 35, 43, 164, 235; Confessions, 43, 198, 289n71; self and, 43, 165 Sacred Love (Ouyang Yuqian), 102 Salome (Oscar Wilde), 148–51 scholar-beauty romance, 7, 58 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 85–86, 281 Sexual Crisis, The (Grete Meisel-Hess), 264. See also Kollontai, Alexandra Shao Xunmei, 169, 177, 181, 182, 230, 244; and Hahn, 177, 178–81; marriage of, 177–78; on spirit and flesh, 181–82 Shen Fu: Six Records of a Floating Life, 172–75 Sheng Peiyu, 169, 177–78, 179, 180, 181 si (longing), 51, 52, 289n1 Smedley, Agnes, 208–9 Smith, Arthur H.: Chinese Characteristics, 123 Sun Quan, 200–201, 202, 204–5, 206. See also Yu Dafu Tagore, Rabindranath, 127; in China, 212, 218; friendship with Xu Zhimo, 218; works by: ‘Chitra,’ 212; The Cycle of Spring, 288n57; Personality, 218; Stray Birds, 185 Tang Xianzu, 74; and Buddhism, 79; and Neo-Confucianism, 77–79. See also Peony Pavilion Tian Han: Cloverleaf, 143; on Goethe, 141; on Key, 141, 147, 150, 157; and Guo Moruo, 140, 141, 142; membership of Chinese Communist Party, 150; and Salome, 148, 149–50 true love, 2, 8, 9, 66, 81, 102, 210; defined by avowal (I love you), 109; exclusivity and fidelity of, 170, 185, 186, 283; as fin’amors, 28, 29, 54; oneness of soul and flesh, 10, 32, 154, 158, 281; personality, 164; ren’ge, 184; revolution as means to, 255; as spiritual, 74, 100, 155; as ‘unstirred’ emotion, 78, 290n10;

Index as what makes a man finer, 94; as worth dying for, 226 Wagner, Richard: Tannhäuser, 32, 195–96; Tristan and Isolde, 226–28 Waley, Arthur, 26–28, 43, 47, 90 Wang Guowei, 85, 86 Wang Jingwei, 243, 245, 252 Wang Shifu. See Romance of the West Wing Wang Yingxia, 199, 200, 202–5, 206. See also Yu Dafu Wen Yiduo, 1, 18–20 Westermarck, Edvard (The History of Human Marriage), 187 Wilde, Oscar. See Salome Williams, Edith Clifford, 128–29, 129, 131–32 Women in Love (Li Yu), 174, 299n11 Wu Jianren, 66, 171 Xia Mianzun, 31, 167 Xia Yan, 263, 266 Xu Guangping. See under Lu Xun Xu Zhenya: Jade Pear Spirit, 94–95, 103, 112–13 Xu Zhimo, 207, 208, 209, 279, 280; and Buck, 208; in Cambridge, 209, 210, 211–12; on Chinese marriages, 215–16, 217; on Chinese tradition, 218, 223; on Chinese women, 150–51; and Christianity, 224; death, 208, 214, 228; and Dickinson, 209, 224; divorce, 210–11, 215, 216; on filial piety and love, 223; on Goethe, 145; influence of Romantic poets on, 212, 224, 225–16; and Lin Changmin, 209, 211–12; love-death and, 226–28; love ideals of, 215, 216–17, 223; ‘Love’s Inspiration,’ 224–25; love for Lin Huiyin, 209–10, 211–12; love for Lu Xiaoman, 212–13, 222; memorialized by Hu Shi, 215, 228; Neoplatonic influence on, 223–24; remarriage of, 213–14; on Shao Xunmei, 177; and Tagore, 212, 218; and Zhang Youyi, 210–11, 215 Yang Zilin. See under Joan Haste

Index Ye Lingfeng, 144, 149 yin (licentiousness), 54, 101, 289n9; Romance of West Wing charged with, 55, 57, 58, 74 Yosano Akiko, 182, 183, 184 Yu Dafu: and courtly love, 195–96; and Japanese, 192; lovelorn, 190, 193, 200; personas of, 198–99; self-exposure of, 197–98, 205; sexual frustration of, 193–94; and prostitutes, 192–93, 199, 200, 203; on soul and flesh, 193–94, 195; and Wang Yingxia, 199, 200, 202–5; works of: ‘Boundless Night,’ 194; Chicken Ribs, 201; ‘Late-Flowering Osmanthus,’ 195; ‘Record of a Journey South,’ 200; ‘Silvery Grey Death,’

325 195–97; ‘A Superfluous Man,’ 198–99; ‘Sinking,’ 190–92, 193, 203 Yu Shan, 148–49, 150 Zhang Ailing. See Chang, Eileen Zhang Tingzhong, Timothy. See under Chang, Eileen: father of Zhang Xichen, 114–15, 117, 159, 161; and Key, 157, 188 Zhang Youyi. See under Xu Zhimo Zhou Jianren, 186–87 Zhou Shoujuan, 104, 155, 280–81 Zhou Zuoren, 30, 146, 158, 182, 186 Zhu An, 124, 125, 126 Zong Baihua, 138, 141–42; Cloverleaf, 143 Zou Taofen, 187