井底之蛙

I’ve been reading Cao Naiqian’s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night.

It’s an odd sort of book, and you can see why an academic press published it rather than commercial press. The stories are quite short, usually only a few pages, and the author is someone who does not really fit the model of the modern western writer, since he still works as a cop in the city of Datong, rather than chucking his job and writing full-time. He also does not write about being a policeman, but rather about life in the Wen Clan Caves. Although it is possible to criticize Mao’s Cultural Revolution for lots of things, sending city youth down to the countryside does seem to have an effect on Cao, giving him a window into how the other 90% lives that he is still looking through all these years later.¹ The  Wen Family Caves is a fictionalized version of  the area he was sent down to, (a Chinese Yoknapatawpha County) and describing the lives of its inhabitants is his main purpose. The Chinese version is apparently written in a heavy Shanxi dialect, but pretty much all that comes through in the English translation is frequent use of the word fuck. This is rather appropriate, since food, work and sex seem to be about all the people in these stories are interested in. Building the revolution, getting ahead in society or even moving to the big city are goals that are so remote as to be non-existent.

I find the stuff about work interesting, just cause I always do, and because one of the things that makes peasants peasants is that their lives revolve around physical labor the way mine doesn’t. The food is mostly pretty gross, a bowl of oatmeal with wild garlic is about a fancy as these representatives of the world’s greatest cuisine get. There is an awful lot of sex, however.  In fact, just as people in the book don’t have dreams of attending Beida, or meals consisting of 6 dishes for five people they also don’t have much for “regular” human relationships. Mostly people are struggling to survive (they live in holes in the ground) and only the most stripped down forms of courtship or family formation are going on, (marriage costs money) and lots of violations of propriety. One of the longer stories is Heinu and her Andi. Heinu was an old woman who had been something of the town prostitute (although it’s not clear if she was ever paid).

Poverty was one thing that had been handed down over generations in the village. Some men were so poor they could never take a wife. Heinu thought that chickens and dogs all mated. As a woman she couldn’t bear to see the men as less then chickens and dogs.

This led her to let Zhaozhao have sex with her after seeing him try to mount a ewe, and later having sex with most of the unmarried men. The men take care of her, and she burns spirit money to them after they are dead, since they have no family.  When the story opens Heinu is rather old, and she has been given a chick by a traveling salesman who has been unable to sell his “Australian” (a word that means nothing to the villagers) chicks. She raises it (She never had any children) and it grows into an enormous black bird that is the envy of the village. At first it lays eggs and makes her “rich” but after an illness it stops laying eggs and starts mounting all the local hens (hence the name Andi). The roosters are not happy about this and gang up on Andi, but are defeated, leaving Andi with all the females (just as Heinu had been left with all the males years before.) Eventually Andi’s rebellion becomes too much for the villagers (Andi leads all the roosters and all the hens to crow not only at dawn but all day and night) and it ends badly.² Like most of the stories this one is very sparse in its narration, and presents a human relationship stripped down to its absolute minimum.

Of course another thing that makes the book great is that they sent it to me just because of this blog. Normally all I get is American History textbooks. Other publishers looking to have their books introduced to our tens of readers should take note.

1. According the the Introduction he was sent to supervise sent-down youth rather than being sent down himself [↩]
2. My students often complain that Chinese stories always end badly. [↩]

Via Language Log, something on how to make a fool of yourself in Chinese. Apparently the Max Plank Institute asked for a nice Chinese poem for their cover and got awful calligraphy and an ad for strippers.

Not much to add, really, although I do find their struggles to read the KK加美 bit a little odd. Apparently a lot of Chinese had trouble figuring out the place in line 2 where “KK加美” is shoved into the space that should have just one character. I’m not very experienced at reading ads for showgirls, but at least as late as the early republic it was common for Chinese texts to have commentary in a smaller font interspersed with the main text. (I bet there is a word for that) so I would read those four graphs in the order KK加美. Apparently this tradition is dead enough that Language Log’s modern Chinese readers are not familiar with it. Or maybe they are better at having fun with words than I am.

Lots of people seem to like Chinese poetry. The latest NYRB has a review of a reprint of A.C. Graham’s Poems of the Late T’ang by Eliot Weinberger.¹ The book was first published in 1965. A review now may seem odd, but it seems like its always a good time for people (everyone from Ezra Pound to Kilgore Trout) to talk about Chinese poetry. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of Chinese poetry, and especially Tang stuff, sounds very much like modern poetry once you translate it. I assume some translator of Chinese poetry has expressed this as well, but I take an example from Jane Smiley’s introduction to The Sagas of Icelanders.² The Sagas have been tremendously popular (in literary terms) in the twentieth century just like Tang poetry because they are both modern (more a novel in the case of the Sagas) and medieval at the same time. As Smiley puts it.

And yet, these stories are so clearly medieval
And yet, they are not
This is their fascinating paradox

Chinese poetry turns out to be much the same. Weinberger says that when Graham’s translation first came out “most of the poets I knew avidly read it.” One of the poems he brings up is Han Yu’s The South Mountains (南山) It is a very long poem, and he only cites a few lines out of a much longer section of similes describing mountains.

Scattered like loose tiles
Or running together like converging spokes,
Off keel like rocking boats
Or in full stride like horses at the gallop;
Back to back as though offended,
Face to face as though lending a hand

Weinberg says that this “combination of trance-inducing repetitive rhyme and hypersimilitude would not be attempted again for another 1,000 years, until the Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro’s modernist extravaganza Altazor”

As this is a blog an I have unlimited electrons, I can give you the whole section on mountains.³

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1. Graham, A.C. Poems of the Late T’ang. NYRB Classics, 2008. [↩]
2. The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection. 1st ed. Viking Penguin, 2000. [↩]
3. This is from the Charles Hartman translation in Liu, Wu-Chi and Irving Yucheng Lo eds. Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. Indiana University Press, 1990., so it is a tad different [↩]

Parade Magazine (September 14, 2008) asked Laura Bush what she’s been reading: “The Imperial Woman, by Pearl S. Buck. I picked up this book after returning from the Olympics in Beijing. The story of the last empress of Manchu China is fascinating; I can hardly put it down.”

Now from my point of view, the novel’s interest is for the history of American ideas about China, but Buck’s take on “Old Buddha” is not to be taken lightly and her appeal to the public should be respected as a “teachable moment,” not merely scoffed at.

Over the years, Buck’s staying power has intrigued me. Since I have a contrarian streak, I’ve challenged myself to respect her accomplishments (considerable) while keeping in sight her shortcomings (ditto) and to distinguish the two. ¹

Moyer Bell Publishers has a number of her books in print, including Imperial Woman. They are nicely printed and reasonably priced, including Buck’s translation of Shuihuzhuan (titled All Men Are Brothers), which is listed at $16.95. The translation is heavy going at first, as you have to get used to the labored diction she developed to reflect Chinese style, but hey, the price is right.

They offer other of her novels which are of topical interest: Dragon Seed (1939), for instance, describes the opening of the Second Sino-Japanese War with gruesome details of the 1937 invasion and occupation of the Yangzi valley. It’s not the first thing to read on the subject, but holds its own as an historical novel. Peony (1948) is set in 19th century Kaifeng and interweaves a reasonably accurate history of the Jewish community there.²

1. Charles W. Hayford, “What’s So Bad About The Good Earth?,” Education About Asia 3.3 (December 1998): 4-7. [↩]
2. The Moyer Bell catalogue descriptions of Dragon Seed and Peony, however, are switched with the write ups for other novels. They also quote Kenneth Rexroth praising her “renerding” of Shuihu, which I actually prefer to the perhaps correct but less colorful “rendering.” [↩]

In Imperial China, emperors and other high officials sometimes disguised themselves as commoners and mingled with the ordinary folk to learn what they were really thinking. For essentially the same purpose, a government office in the People’s Republic now collects shunkouliu, or “slippery jingles.”……Uncensored and uncensorable, they are the freest and arguably the liveliest medium in China, even though the government has classified the poems in its own collection as state secrets.

Perry Link has a very brief piece in the Washington Post on collecting songs in China.

Via CDT

One of my neighbors was doing some spring cleaning and brought me this.

Lin was a notable if somewhat minor intellectual figure in China but his real fame came as an interpreter of China to the outside world. In China he was known as a humorous critic of the warlord governments which got him in trouble with both Left and Right, since they felt warlordism was no joke and his emphasis on the continued value of Eastern Wisdom made him sound more like Tagore than anyone Chinese intelectuals of the period were likely to respect. He became an important figure in the West after Pearl Buck convinced him to write My Country, My People (1935) which launched his career as and interpreter of the West.

He is somewhat unique in that his reputation has vanished almost entirely. His books are still in print, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in a bookstore (Although I tend not to haunt the ‘don’t worry be happy section’) and he is never assigned in courses. Even during his life he was dismissed as being someone who wrote English very well. (He was a third-generation Fujian Christian) but was not all that knowledgeable about China. You can see how he worked with these two excerpts from the story Curly-Beard

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The New York Times has published three reviews of new Chinese works in translation: Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (pen name for Lu Jiamin) and Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. What binds these works together, in particular, is that all three are — at least in part — about the experience of the Cultural Revolution.

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If you will forgive the promotion, this may be of interest to other Frogs…

Cambridge University’s humanities centre (CRASSH) recently received funding for a two-year network on China, on the theme of modernity. Most of the scholars involved are approaching this from the field of comparative literature, but also there are historians and translation scholars. There will be conferences in Cambridge (this May), Yale (later this year) and Tsinghua (2009).

Some information is online here about the May conference http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/chinaconference.html.

Everybody knows about ping pong diplomacy, but we seem to have just completed a period of Canto-pop diplomacy, as Jackie Chan has recorded an “official” song for the Olympics. Canto-pop is of course the dreadful Cantonese pop music that infects every corner of the Chinese world. More generally I suppose it can be used to refer to the general pop culture of Hong Kong¹ Just as Beijing used ping pong to try and create a connection with the U.S. so to the central government has embraced the commercial culture of Hong Kong as part of their attempt to create a Greater China. John Hamm discusses some of this in Paper Swordsmen which is partially about the rise of New School martial arts fiction but mainly about Jin Yong 金庸 and his work. Jin, a.k.a. Louis Cha, in addition to being the world’s best-selling author of martial arts novels is also the founder and long-time editor of Ming Pao once one of the more independent-minded papers in Hong Kong and now the center of a multi-national media empire. Zha was thus exactly the type of person Beijing would want to cultivate as they tried to re-unify the motherland. Zha was received by Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People in 1981, the first important figure from Hong Kong to be so honored. Zha would have been worth talking to just as a newspaper editor, but being an author of martial arts novelist made him even better. Although Beijing never accepted Tapei’s claims to be the “real” preservers of Chinese culture, after the Cultural Revolution a figure like Zha who had been critical of the CR and could make claims to be a preserver of Chinese culture was solid gold. As Beijing was trying to re-unify Hong Kong (and Taiwan) calling for a unified state was a non-starter, and so the ties of history and culture were needed. What is Chinese culture? Some bits of what might be called Chinese culture were not perhaps things Beijing wanted to play up, such as the Confucian concept of government by a class of incorruptible officials chosen for their skill rather than their connections. Everyone likes gong fu heroes, however, and given that so many of Cha/Jin Yong’s stories had strong anti-imperialist/ nationalist elements he was a perfect fit.

Jackie Chan is in some respects ever better for this than Louis Cha. He is, I think, about the last of the martial arts movie starts to have had real old-fashioned opera training. He is also a bit less prickly. Cha’s Ming Pao has been accused of cuddling up to Beijing a bit more than some would like, but he was also quite critical of Beijing, especially after 6/4. Chan is not critical of anything, as far as I can tell, and this sort of ties in the comic persona he takes on in most of his films.² Bruce Lee does not work as well for Beijing’s purposes as a living symbol of Hong Kong culture. Besides being dead and thus unable to turn up for events far to many of his roles (and Jet Li’s) involved playing people who defied corrupt power-holders. The Jianghu (rivers and lakes) tradition that was at the center of martial arts fiction always had a problematic relationship with authority (That’s why so many of the stories have elements of Ming loyalism/ anti-Manchuism. That way one can defy cruel oppression and be loyal to the true rulers.) Jackie Chan has none of that (compare his Wong Feihong in Drunken Master with Jet Li’s in Once Upon a Time in China) If you want a nice, non-threatening haohan Jackie Chan is your man.

1. At least I will use it that way in this post [↩]
2. I suspect that many of our readers know gong fu flicks better than I do [↩]

Ang Lee’s (李安) new movie Lust, Caution (色，戒) is apparently being released later this week in the United States. The movie won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (where it was labeled as coming from “USA/China/Taiwan, China“), received a full mix of reviews (1,2,3,4,RT), and may ultimately get an unusually limited showing due to its NC-17 rating. The version which eventually cleared censors in China supposedly had to cut some thirty minutes.

The movie is based on a novella by Eileen Chang (張愛玲）which in turn is inspired by an historical event: the attempted assassination of Ding Mocun (丁默邨 1903-1947) on December 21st, 1939 by the 22 year old half-Japanese spy Zheng Pingru (鄭苹如 1918-1940).

Ding Mocun was a leading figure in Chinese intelligence in the 1930s until his execution in 1947. He was a former Communist Party member who recanted and rose quickly to power in the Nationalist party with the support of the CC Clique and especially Chen Lifu (陳立夫). When he was squeezed out of power in a 1938 reorganization of the Nationalist intelligence services into the Zhongtong¹ and Juntong² and accused of corruption, he left unoccupied China and together with Li Shiqun (李士群 1905-1943) worked for the creation of a spy agency supporting Wang Jingwei’s (汪精衛/汪兆銘 1883-1944) peace movement in Japanese occupied areas.³ The headquarters of the resulting organization, founded in April, 1939, was located on 76 Jessfield Road, Shanghai, and became a site of infamous torture and death often simply referred to in Chinese accounts as “#76″ (七十六號). In its twenty or so holding cells Ding and Li’s operatives, along with Japanese officers, extracted what information they could from suspected Communists and supporters of the Nationalist government in Chongqing before dispatching them.

Ding is now usually listed among the dozen or so most famous Chinese traitors (hanjian 漢奸) for his collaboration with Wang’s government and the Japanese. He was arrested in September, 1945, convicted of treason in February 1947, and executed on July 5th.⁴ Like many of the leading collaborators put on trial after the war, however, Ding pleaded that he secretly cooperated with the Nationalist spymaster Dai Li (戴笠). Many of the other leaders in the Wang government, most famously Zhou Fohai (周佛海 1897-1948) also claimed be working closely with the Nationalists in great secret. This came to be referred as the argument of “saving the country through twisted means” (曲線救國, more on this at my personal blog, Muninn). With the arrival of a movie which is inspired by the story of Ding and the attempt on his life by Zheng Pingru, there has been renewed interest in his case.

Roland Soong, who runs the world’s best weblog covering the Chinese media, ESWN, recently posted a translation of an article by the famous writer and critic Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) discussing the new movie and the historical figure Ding Mocun: Lung Ying-tai on Lust, Caution

You can find the original Chinese version of her article here: 贪看湖上清风──侧写《色，戒》

In her essay Lung responds to criticism that Eileen Chang did not portray the character of Mr. Yi (who is inspired by Ding Mocun) as a sufficiently evil person. I certainly commend her for this, as I really don’t think Chang’s fictional character Yi needs to be everything that Ding Mocun was. However, many writers who try to counter efforts to portray the wartime collaborators as one-dimensional evil-dooers and malicious traitors, in my view, take the completely wrong approach: the reversal. Instead of restoring nuance, or at least moving beyond simple nationalist critiques to evaluate the legacy of these figures in terms of their acts while in positions of power (under whatever regime), Lung embraces a strategy I find frustrating, to say the least: the evil-dooer wasn’t evil at all, he was, in fact, a patriot.

小说和电影之外，民国史里头的“易先生”，其实也不见得是个多“坏”的“坏人”

“the novella and the film aside, the Mr. Yi in the history of the Republic of China was really not a very “bad” person.”⁵

Lung writes that she read through the archival materials related to Ding’s various positions in the regimes of occupied China and his trial records along with the memoirs of Chen Lifu.⁶ Lung argues that we should reevaluate the historical figure Ding because beginning in 1941 he 1) began to secretly work with Chiang Kai-shek’s government, 2) helped rescue some secret agents, 3) continued to serve the Nationalist government to repress bandits (read Communists) in the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the war and his work was highly valued both by Dai Li and Chen Lifu.
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1. 中國國民黨中央執行委員會調查統計局 [↩]
2. 國民政府軍事委員會調查統計局 [↩]
3. Brian Martin, “Shield of collaboration: The Wang Jingwei regime’s security service, 1939-1945″ Intelligence and National Security 20, No. 4 (2001): 100. 劉傑 『漢奸裁判』 (The Hanjian trials)　(東京：中公新書、2000), 176 [↩]
4. 劉傑 ibid. [↩]
5. All translations from the article are Soong’s [↩]
6. Though she doesn’t use it, I think the full title of his memoirs is 成敗之鑑：陳立夫回憶錄 [↩]