This is not a post about pornographic novels or video games

And no, I am not making a Magritte joke, as cool as they are.
I interrupt the torridity of the past few posts, hypothetical reader, with some totally sweet entries from Yuan Mei's Sui Yuan Shi Dan (Food Lists from the Garden of Leisures).*

Some of them are almost as complicated/$$$ as the intricate recipes given in Cao Xueqin's The Dream of Red Mansions, with meat broths flying all over the place, crazy ingredients, and whole days spent stewing:
Sea Delicacies: Three Recipes for Sea Cucumber **
The sea cucumber is a flavorless thing, full of sand and fishy flavor, and is most difficult to pull off well. [Begging the question why anyone would want to attempt to eat it.] Its nature is thick and heavy, so simmering in a broth is out of the question. One must pick out those with smaller spines [clearly a sign from nature reading NOT FOR PEOPLE TO EAT in giant pointy font], soak out the mud and sand, bring them to a rolling boil three times in meat soup, then broil them in chicken and meat stock until they are thoroughly softened. For accompaniment use fragrant mushrooms and wood-ears [Auricula judae]; their black color will match well with the sea cucumber. If one is inviting guests on the morrow, then the cooking must start a day before for the sea cucumber to be completely soft. I've often seen them use mustard-seeds and chicken stock to make sea cucumber salad at Qian Guancha's house, which is very nice. They've also had sea cucumber cut into small pieces and stewed with small pieces of fragrant mushrooms and bamboo shoots in chicken stock. Assistant Secretary Jiang's household uses tofu sheets and shaggy mane mushrooms [NB: they probably grow on your lawn] in stews with sea cucumber, which is also good.

Some are a little more down-to-earth and sound even manageable by yours truly:
Snacks: "Dough Mice"
Use hot water [and flour, presumably] to make some dough, then boil chicken broth and use chopsticks to pinch off and drop in pieces of various size. Add some fresh cabbage hearts for an especially good flavor.

Some are flat-out cute:
Sweets: Roly-Poly Candies
Shaped like go pieces, these come in all colors. The people of Hangzhou give them to children, who think them to be treasures.

And some are crotchety, as befitting a seventy-something "I aced the exams but now I live like a king by writing poetry all day"-type hippie:
Sweets: "Persimmon Cakes"
Persimmon cakes are sweet but boring. I've never eaten a good one, and they're far inferior to tangerine cakes.
This would probably cause YM and my father to have a showdown, because latter thinks persimmon cakes are as unto the nectar of the gods.

Finally, there are some very, very strange entries:
Sea Delicacies: Fish Lips
Fish lips are heavy in texture but pure and light in quality. To retain their peculiar charms, lightly stew in chicken stock.
[A helpful note in the source indicates that YM is referring to "dried food products made from the lip areas of sharks and rays." I never knew these possessed lips--maybe someone played a little trick on zoology-impaired YM here for an extra bit of metaphorical dough. But apparently now I'll get to make really stupid jokes involving cosmetics and cartilaginous fishes!]

Conclusion: chicken stock will cure all ills, be they sandy or probably made-up.


*(See here for the original text.) OMG, major discovery. I've only seen this book rendered as the Sui yüan shih tan before--and I and apparently every other native English speaker to look at this thing (I can't imagine there are too many beside Arthur Waley and Herbert Giles himself) totally thought the tan was the nice, friendly 谈, "discuss" or "talk," but no, it's the much more businesslike 单, "list"! Probably the pervasive desire to cast my homie YM as an über-hip Renaissance Man striking again. ***

**A picture of these little fellers for your edification and/or revulsion:

***A perfectly understandable urge. YM be pimpin' it up, yo (Twelve concubines? Hottest boytoy--uh, protégé-- in town? A poetry school for "moth-eyebrowed" young ladies of good family? Mmm-hm, I think so).

Historifandom: Musou (Part 2)

After putting up the last installment, I had a discussion with a friend in which he suggested that perhaps I was overemphasizing the fannish appeal of the Musou games, viz. that the majority of players actually savor the games for the intuitive (read: idiotically easy) controls and mechanics, and the fantastic appeal of slaughtering thousands of polygonal enemies, not the satisfaction of seeing historical figures reduced to a delightful hodgepodge of over-the-top visual motifs.

It's probably true that the initial audience for the Musou series were more into das Hackenslashen than the, um, character-slashin', but over the years the game designers' own fannishness toward their heroes have become noticeably more prominent. As evidence I'll follow the evolution of Lu Xun, a general of the kingdom of Wu, historically married to the daughter of Sun Ce and most prominently known for his role in the capture and death of Guan Yu and his victory at the Battle of Yi Ling in 222 (see previous entry). Here he is in Shin Sangoku Musou, known as Dynasty Warriors 2 in the US (released 2000). [NB: The first Dynasty Warriors was a fighting game of the arcade face-off variety.]


And Shin Sangoku Musou 2/DW3 (note the hint of midriff) (2001):


Shin Sangoku 3/DW 4, a swing toward fuller coverage--possibly in tandem with a sweep of conservatism around the world? (2003):


Only to be countered with a decided turn for the bare-all (!) in Shin Sangoku 4/DW5 (2005 ):

And last, not least but probably fruitiest, I present Lord Lu as seen in this year's Shin Sangoku 5/DW6 for the PS3:
And have a closer glimpse of his tres chic eye makeup and feathers:
Certainly the constant improvements in 3D modeling capabilities have contributed to Lord Lu's image updates over the years, but it seems pretty clear that there's something else at work here, namely historifandom and its participants' concomitant power as consumers to actually mold the "canon" of their own fandom. And, since their canon is actually a bunch of characters from historical record reenacting actual events, they are revamping the understanding of history itself through its icons, re-imagining (or distorting, if you're less kindly disposed) the appearances and behavior of the long-dead for their own enjoyment and consumption. When a fan plunks down in 2008 to write a slashfic, would ze prefer a feathery, tribal-eye-tattooed Lord Lu to insert into hir steamy scenes or something more like this:

...they'd probably end up covering the poor fellow in sparkles and feathers anyway. Just like Nobunaga's ridiculous armor in the previous installment, I think Lu Xun's feathers and braids have some "real" roots--he was known as the pacifier of southern "barbarians," and since he hailed from the Eastern Wu (centered in the Jiangnan area), which was already coded as peripheral in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the whole exotic look kind of makes sense.* So there seems to be a general "fanon" model for Lu, and it looks a lot more like the Koei rendition--youthful, red-clad, associated with all things flaming (literally). In fact, I've got another indicator that historifandom is in fact going backward to influence corporate-produced canon, that in fact the two are becoming well-nigh inseparable in this our age of high-speed consumption:
[Screenshot from the 2007 show Koutetsu Sangokushi 鋼鉄三国志. Lu Xun on left, Zhuge Liang(!) on right ]

So consumers/fans are actively repatterning history to fit their tastes through popular culture, and apparently with more force than in previous decades. I'd call it Japanese popular culture, but a quick browse at your local chain bookstore or electronics joint will demonstrate that North American consumers are becoming a huge force in gobbling up fandom and fanculture. I do, however, think that the progression of Lu Xun's wardrobe reflects but one dimension of historifandom, that resonate with fangirl/腐女子 ("corrupt girl") culture, with its love of fruity men behaving suspiciously with other fruity men. A somewhat different fannishness has also prompted action on Koei's part--witness the case of Lü Bu, henchie of the warlord Dong Zhuo.

A Qing print, in which Lü looks skinny (according to some, a staple of Qing figurative style). But he's got the mandatory long pheasant feathers and the "Great Sky Slicer" halberd (方天画戟).


Shin Sangoku 2/DW3:
Shin Sangoku 3/DW4, beginning to get a bit darker:
And Shin Sangoku5/DW6, which is just wow(I don't think that's what people meant by "halberd"...):

So what, says the hypothetical reader. These crazy Japanese folks have decided to make more exaggerated costumes, big deal. But there are important differences in how the exaggerations have been made--always with some kind of hearkening to an ur-image or set of motifs based in textual record, but manipulated to cater to as wide a spectrum of historifandom's fan-consumers as possible, a spectrum that is no longer (if it ever was) merely a bunch of Hack 'n' Slash devotees who didn't give a thought what their avatars looked like as long as they could rack up KO counts. And the game isn't all nonstop mook-slaying; cutscenes and cinematics are progressively unlocked as the player slice-n-dices through hordes of enemies, and though the narrative merits of said scenes are questionable, they focus heavily on the heroes' character development (distortionment may be a more accurate term), embedded in historical context delivered by a solemn narrator. For example, Saika Magoichi's opening video.


There's a question worth probing here in relation to non-Asian consumption of the Musou games, which is "how much do American audiences 'get' of the historical stuff," and whether that makes their historifandom one that is weaker than Asian fans, who are presumably more in the know. First of all, of course Asian fans are not necessarily more knowledgeable about obscure, short-lived generals of the 200s CE or random daimyo and their henchmen in 17th-century Japan than are American fans, who may have knowledge sufficient for them to recognize Guan Yu or Hideyoshi and be attracted to the games in the first palace.

Returning to the "Americans aren't historifans" point, when the Musou games first arrived in the US, players were maybe as a whole more content to tolerate weird names and exotic outfits--not exactly something stunningly novel in the game industry--without thinking of them beyond the game, in a way accepting them as culturally "odorless" goods. This may still be the case for some. But the Musou games seem to have also prompted a search for, or at least curiosity in, the very much culturally specific and historically rooted "real" underneath the glossy CGI. For example, the large Koeiwarriors fansite forum (http://z13.invisionfree.com/koeiwarriors/) boasts a special sublevel, the "History Realm," dedicated to "various eras of history"--it's actually got more topics than any one of the other sublevels dedicated to specific titles of the Musou series.

While changing demographics and demands in fandom successfully reshape Koei's Gross Historical Distortion, history (with lesser or greater degrees of Gross Distortion) enters into the consciousness of fans and recalibrates their demands. Intuitively it seems kind of terrible to imagine hordes of 18-35 year-olds contributing to the terror that is Shin Sangoku 5's Lü Bu or Koutetsu Sangokushi's Zhuge Liang, but really, is what the "pros" do so very different? There's money, obsession, and distortion involved in the latter case, too, isn't there? Maybe academic historifandom seems more okay because there's less money and more book-reading entailed. Probably the same obsession, though, and distortions are willfully ignored or ruefully acknowledged, not delighted in and paraded around.

(*I'll need to muse a bit on why Japanese pop culture seems to like Wu so much when Shu, which controlled Sichuan, and the 中原, or Yellow River plain, was the narrative focus of RotK.)

Historifandom: Musou (Part 1)

The other day I called home and had a slightly disheartening conversation with my kid brother:

ME: ...so, yeah, I'm doing Asian history.
BROTHER: (shocked) Asian history?
ME: Chinese in particular.
BROTHER: ChiNESE?

If I knew he could understand the joke, I'd call him a 汉奸. Oh well.

Now, kid brother is one of those chilluns who began gaming almost as soon as he could sit up unassisted. He adores RTS (real-time strategy) and turn-based games incorporating historical settings, such as Rome: Total War. But his first reaction, and, I think, that of a lot of people, is that history (and by extension historians) are inherently and irrevocably boring; the older the period, the more boring--yeah, yeah.

ME: But you campaign against the Celts and Germans every night, don't you? Isn't that cool?
BROTHER: (grudgingly) ...I guess so.

Second bias everyone's heard of: historical Asians are totally, like, boring! All Analects and test-taking and repression and famines, not to mention confusing names. Asian history's pretty dull as it's taught in East Asia, too (I can only speak for the PRC of the 90s, but somehow I doubt there's been much progress there or elsewhere in the neighborhood away from memorizing endless lists of names and filling in blanks therewith).

But some fanchildren out there know this ain't so, and in fact revel in making history (even premodern Asian history) their fandom. Of course, Asian historifandom's more common in Asia, but with the rise, especially since the mid-1990s, of North-American "otaku" culture that revels in all things Japanese (a topic that requires more updated research, for sure), there's a brand of unabashedly fannish, distinctly Asian pop culture that's begun to infiltrate the American market, which merges the historio-mythological with the sheer distorting glee of fandom in a whole new way.

In particular, there's Koei's Musou series, which began with the heroes of the Three Kingdoms (Sangoku Musou--Dynasty Warriors in English; the first was released in 1997), then recently added a new line about the Sengoku Jidai (Sengoku Musou/Samurai Warriors, first released in 2004). Unlike the Total War series, the Musou games are far less concerned with historical accuracy--indeed, the whole point of my posting on the games (apart from being obsessed with them, cough cough) is that they sell by deliberately distorting history. Emphasis on deliberately, because the characters are still recognizable, and, like in Total War, the player can choose to reenact documented battles and events. Other than that, at first glance the games seem to have taken rather little from recorded history. Have a look at this picture of Oda Nobunaga, as he appears in Sengoku Musou 2:
For comparison's sake, a more old-school rendering:

There's something fascinating about this contrast, for me anyway. Without knowing that the top image depicted a character named Oda Nobunaga, could anyone actually recognize him? Possibly. The Musou series' heroes are condensed symbols of their historical identities, in the same way that other forms of popular culture have reduced the complexities of heroes of history and myth into distinctive visual archetypes. Take Guan Yu for example. Here's a screencapture from a Chinese serial drama (Lord Guan's on the far left):
And as he appears in Peking Opera:

And finally, as seen in the latest Sangoku Musou game (released in the US just a month or two ago):
He's got the green color scheme, the "beautiful beard," and of course the 800-jin Blue Dragon Knife, just like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms says! Now, Nobunaga's case seems more extreme, probably because Nobunaga's a much more recent personality with less symbolic detritus (no Romance of the Sengoku Jidai)to link his identity to his appearance, or maybe because Koei's a Japanese company more at ease with distorting Japanese historical figures. Nonetheless, his purple-and-black look, the decadent feather ruff, the European cuirass, and the lightsaber do make sense. Missionary Jesuits were active in Nobunaga's time, and he made pragmatic use of them against his rivals, as opposed to his successors Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned Christianity and began persecutions of converted Japanese, fearing the destabilizing potential of this imported faith. This Jesuit connection might explain the armor and cape. Nobunaga's ruthlessness and self-aggrandizement as "demon-king" (魔王, maou), whether factual or apocryphal, contributes to his evil-overlord look.

And does anyone really learn anything from this? Well, for one, that gross historical distortion (henceforth GHD) can show how the mythos of history, particularly that surrounding people, is formed and perpetuated, even in such 'crass" venues as video games. Moreover, the fact that the Musou games are popular and profitable (Koei's up to the 6th Sangoku Musou release in the US, just put out a "tactical" version of Sengoku Musou in summer 2007, and churned out Musou Orochi, a mind- and timeline-boggling combo of San- and Sengoku, last winter) reflects intriguingly on the consumers' side of historical production, too. The "hack-n-slash" gameplay, as most game review sites point out, is incredibly repetitive between new installments of the series; the cast of characters also remain generally the same. So there's something else gripping about the content--its appeal to historifandom's "historifantasies" through its reimagination and repackaging of these "boring" long-dead people into "awesome" heroes.

Sometime in the future I'd like to talk more about the sexualities at work in the Musou historifandom, the "alternate history" appeal of Musou Orochi, and of course more in depth on why and how the Musou characters are "awesome" in a specfically historifandom way.

I'm 太白金星!

I'm not sure how much hope I've usually associated with 太白金星 (the immortal Morningstar) in the past. He's always seemed to be the heavenly enforcer, antagonizing the Monkey King all over the place. But I suppose it's a good card to draw at this particular juncture.

You are The Star

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised

The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

17th-century sex education

I got a very pretty edition of Bian er chai (弁而钗)from the library, thinking I'd need it for my thesis, but all I ended up doing was reading two of the four standalone sections, namely "Chaste Love"(情贞) and "Chivalrous Love"(情侠), for fun. [The edition in question is part of a series of erotic xiaoshuo, Si wu xie hui bao, published by a joint Taiwanese-French venture, btw.]

What really tickled me were the frequent interjections from the commentator, which are to me best described as those of a "seventeenth-century literatus fanboy." I'm sure this, er, epithet will strike about zero of the people who actually work with Bian er chai as serious or even accurate, but...well, I should probably let others decide. Starting today I'll post some translated bits of the text with commentary here, and if anyone ever reads them they can sort out the fanboy-or-not question hirself. [NB: no translations of the text into English exist, as far as I'm aware. All the better because my rendition can't get compared to real professionals'!]

To assure you, dear hypothetical reader, that I'm not in this for prurient ends (alone), I should add some FYI about BEC first. Its author is known only as "West Lake-Drunk Master Moon Heart" (醉西湖心月主人); he put out another erotic anthology called the Yi chun xiang zhi (宜春香质, "Fragrance from the Court of Spring"). BEC's full name is Bi geng shan fang bian er chai (笔耕山房弁而钗), "Cap and Hairpin of the Bigeng Mountain Room," and was published late in the Ming dynasty, during the reign of Emperor Chongzhen (r. 1627-1644). The commentator called himself "Resisting Heaven is Futile Daoist Ha-ha " (奈何天呵呵道人--I know the translation sounds like Babelfish, but it's the best I could do). Master Moon-Heart wrote in baihua, or vernacular Chinese.

Now that I've gotten some kind of gesture toward edification out of the way, let me begin the first installment:

Chapter the First: The Interested Hanlin Scholar Disguises Himself to Seek a Friend; The Charming Student Shows Himself a Hero.

The tale goes that there was a student in Yangzhou prefecture, Jiangdu county, who was named Zhao Wangsun, with the courtesy name Zijian. He was fifteen, with delicate, long eyebrows and bright, quick eyes. (Daoist Ha-ha: Nice portrait.) His hair was black as if painted and hung to his shoulders. His face was pale as if powdered, and his lips red as if rouged. His teeth were white and his flesh glowing. Even an immortal would probably be not much better than this. All who saw him were bewitched.

But student Zhao was also a diligent student who had all the classics at his command, and was ambitious, so he never interacted with devious people. (Daoist Ha-ha: Good means of self-preservation.) ...[cold young master Zhao goes to attend a private school headed by one Master Qin, and is assigned a room.] After meeting his Master and hearing the strict rules of the school, student Zhao returned to his room, which was quite tidy and pleasing. Satisfied, he murmured to himself, "Now I'll be free of those lewd companions for good." (Daoist Ha-ha: Not necessarily.) ...

[Enter one hotshot Hanlin scholar, Mr. Feng, who happens to also "love the man-route." Cute Wangsun bumps into his procession one day, and there's some mutual glancing.] That Hanlin sitting on the sedan-chair was not more than twenty years old, in black-satin cap, white-soled boots, blue robe and silver belt, his face as jade and his gaze as autumn water. (Daoist Ha-ha: Like a picture.) Suddenly catching sight of student Zhao, who sparkled blindingly, the Hanlin's soul quickly vacated his flesh. He thought, "What kind of old crone gave birth to a pleasing little piece like this?"
...
[As the Hanlin and his servant-boy "Fragrance" engage in the first sex scene of the book:]
Fragrance cried out, "Sir, harder. Inside it doesn't hurt, doesn't itch, isn't sore, isn't numb--I don't know what it is, but it's uncomfortable." (Daoist Ha-ha: The Western Nirvana-paradise has appeared.) ... The lewd fluids" burst from Fragrance. (Daoist Ha-ha: Marvelous.)

Okay, I think that makes the point pretty well.

Next time, I will bring you the Joys of the "Rear Courtyard." Stay tuned!

Obligatory self-introduction

Welcome to String between Pearls, in which I (would-be gender historian of imperial China, blithering fanchild, and specfic writer wannabe) plan to wax verbose about things historical, gender-y, and cultural; fandom, and intersections thereof. I am the happy reader of a number of delightful medievalists' blogs, but it seems to me that there is a lack of Asian studies counterparts out there--I mean lighthearted ones. Serious blogs, there are quite a few. But sometimes I just want to talk about Tokugawa Ieyasu using a "cannon spear" in the hack-and-slash video game Sengoku Musou, or how the seventeenth-century collection Bian er chai details the ins-and-outs (pun intended) of anal sex... and so here I shall.