I have to confess, I've always perversely enjoyed reading about the newest line of fake shit being sold somewhere in the Motherland. I'm just a schadenfreude type. The melamine-tainted milk, however, was flat out evil enough that I haven't been so har har about fake stuff since (especially because I and people I was responsible for consumed plenty of dairy products in summer '08--fortunately all of us were big and strong enough to not get sick from it).
But this post from the Taipei Times made me gasp. What? The "diplomatic gift" pandas from the Mainland to Taiwan in late 2008 turned out to be random forest bears painted with the right colors?! Surely not? Not the bears whose names, when joined together, actually means "reunion"?
Then I followed the post to Paul Midler's site, and whew, it was all an April Fool's hoax. As he rightly points out, though, the fact that the TP Times put up this story signifies a vast gulf between the Mainland (who is probably pulling an Unhappy China about this, if anyone even got wind of it over the Great Firewall) and Taiwan. It's called being able to laugh at oneself. Sure, in this case it's more like Taiwanese reporters laughing at the people across the strait, but what it really takes is the capacity to look at oneself and burst out laughing. I mean, if the bears had actually turned out to be fake, it's not like anyone reading on Taiwan would likely forget that the Mainland really could get away with such jabs--because they can, because the island is not unlike Seoul, balanced not so many miles away from a host of frightening possibilities. So even while the article's making fun of Chinese fakes, it's also a kind of cheerfully cynical snicker at Taiwan's own position in the world.
But now for a real fakes story: the WAHAHA. This was a fate luckily dodged in '08, but according to my bosses, in summer '07, during the scheduled excursion to a "wild" (unrestored) section of the Great Wall four hours north of Beijing, everyone bought extra bottles of Wahaha [literally, "Kids' Ha-ha"] drinking water. They drank the suckers, because the hike is long and very hot, and then everyone puked for the next week. From then on, the brand became an evil totem, its name read as an evil laugh. Wa. Ha. Ha.
In summer '06, I actually partook (fortunately without incident) of some sketchy Wahaha. The little store in the "downtown" bit of the village we were living in carried 24-packs of water, and, too spoiled to drink the excessively mineral-rich hand-pump water boiled in an ancient, disgustingly crusted kettle, we opted to buy these. Anyway, the one time we sprang for a good deal on some Wahaha it turned out to be a suspicious imitator--same red and white label, but all the graphics seemed a little...pixellated. And the name was very similar-looking, but not quite there. We tried it anyway. It tasted like old flour. We trashed them. I still kind of wonder what the hell was in that stuff--surely not real flour? How is that a better profit margin than just selling boiled tap water, anyway?...
2009/04/04
2009/03/26
Yuan Mei my homeboy strikes again...
...with a short story encapsulating so neatly the class- and language-barrier crossing legal culture of eighteenth-century China that I can barely move.
"The Real Longtu Turns Out To Be A False Longtu"*
A man of Jiaxing county [in modern Zhejiang province] named Song became county magistrate in Xuanyou [in modern Fujian province, which is frigging far away from Zhejiang**]. He was a stern, fastidious official, and thought of himself as a second Lord Bao. In one of the villages under his jurisdiction, there was a State Student named Wang. Wang started an affair with his tenant's wife, and the two got along well. It put Wang off that the husband was at home, so Wang bribed a fortune-teller to confide to the husband that it was not an auspicious year to remain at home, and that he should instead travel far away to avoid disaster. The husband believed all this and told Student Wang, who lent him capital and ordered him to go do trade in Sichuan. The man did not return for three years; all the villagers gossiped that this tenant had been done in by Wang.
Magistrate Song had also heard of this matter and wanted to right the injustice done to the tenant. One day, as he passed the village where Wang lived, a whirlwind began to blow in front of his sedan chair. He followed it and saw that the wind was coming from a well; he ordered his staff to dredge the well, and found a decayed male corpse inside. Believing it truly to be the disappeared tenant, he arrested Student Wang and the tenant's wife, interrogating them using harsh torture, under which both confessed to murdering the husband. They were sentenced according to the full extent of the law.*** Local people began to call the magistrate "Song Longtu," and there was even an opera scripted from the story that was sung in all the neighboring villages.
The next year, the husband returned from Sichuan. When he entered the city, he saw that onstage they were putting on a performance of Student Wang's story. As he watched, he realized that his wife had been executed unjustly and immediately began to wail in sorrow. He petitioned the provincial seat for redress. The judicial commissioner took the case for him, and Magistrate Song was sentenced according to "deliberately punishing an uninvolved person to death." The people of Xuanyou made a ditty about this:
Blindly sentencing the adulterers as murderers,
a real "Longtu" turned out to be a fake.
A warning to the people who rule us commoners,
even if not corrupt, you pay for a mistake.
***
This story wouldn't have much sting if legal cases didn't have a popular circulation, through venues ranging from the terse classical tales penned by literati authors to media much more accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate. The fact that Yuan Mei had served as a magistrate for several years in three different places himself only adds to the ironic impact of the "false Longtu": sure, it's a funny story of a snobby overreacher, but the pressures on local officials to solve cases, particularly those with a corpse involved, was pretty damn heavy. Even if Yuan could look back in his leisurely retired life to criticize Magistrate Song, he must have once faced much of those pressures himself.
In fact, we know Yuan Mei used supernatural associations with the law in resolving cases: he told one story about his days as a borough magistrate within the city of Nanjing in which a young wife had disappeared, only to show up in a village far outside the city. The father-in-law wanted a divorce, saying that she had obviously been going to meet a paramour, but the woman stubbornly said that she had been carried to the village involuntarily by a giant whirlwind. Yuan sided with her and used a story from the collected works of a thirteenth-century Confucian as proof. In that story, a girl was blown away by a giant whirlwind and ended up wedded to a Prime Minister; "I only wish I could promise you that your son will get as far as that," Yuan told the father-in-law, which was apparently effective in shutting the old man up.
Given his profound skepticism toward most religious practices around him, I doubt that Yuan Mei believed that the young woman had been blown by a wind to where she was found. It's possible that he even created this story because it, like the tale of the false Longtu, is funny. But from both the story he included in his collection of "weird tales" and the one he claimed to be autobiographically true, we can see that popular expectations about the magistrate's justice, which blurred the boundaries between what we'd call fiction and fact, could not be simply put aside by even the most cynical official.
*Longtu is the courtesy name of the famous Song judge, Lord Bao, who was basically a medieval Chinese supernaturally assisted version of Sherlock Holmes.
**Not unusual, since by the "rule of avoidance" magistrates weren't supposed to serve in their home districts.
***Both would have been up for death penalties--the adulterer by beheading after the assizes, and his partner in crime by the harshest sentence on the books, lingchi, a.k.a. "death by slow slicing." [Won't go into gory details here.]
"The Real Longtu Turns Out To Be A False Longtu"*
A man of Jiaxing county [in modern Zhejiang province] named Song became county magistrate in Xuanyou [in modern Fujian province, which is frigging far away from Zhejiang**]. He was a stern, fastidious official, and thought of himself as a second Lord Bao. In one of the villages under his jurisdiction, there was a State Student named Wang. Wang started an affair with his tenant's wife, and the two got along well. It put Wang off that the husband was at home, so Wang bribed a fortune-teller to confide to the husband that it was not an auspicious year to remain at home, and that he should instead travel far away to avoid disaster. The husband believed all this and told Student Wang, who lent him capital and ordered him to go do trade in Sichuan. The man did not return for three years; all the villagers gossiped that this tenant had been done in by Wang.
Magistrate Song had also heard of this matter and wanted to right the injustice done to the tenant. One day, as he passed the village where Wang lived, a whirlwind began to blow in front of his sedan chair. He followed it and saw that the wind was coming from a well; he ordered his staff to dredge the well, and found a decayed male corpse inside. Believing it truly to be the disappeared tenant, he arrested Student Wang and the tenant's wife, interrogating them using harsh torture, under which both confessed to murdering the husband. They were sentenced according to the full extent of the law.*** Local people began to call the magistrate "Song Longtu," and there was even an opera scripted from the story that was sung in all the neighboring villages.
The next year, the husband returned from Sichuan. When he entered the city, he saw that onstage they were putting on a performance of Student Wang's story. As he watched, he realized that his wife had been executed unjustly and immediately began to wail in sorrow. He petitioned the provincial seat for redress. The judicial commissioner took the case for him, and Magistrate Song was sentenced according to "deliberately punishing an uninvolved person to death." The people of Xuanyou made a ditty about this:
Blindly sentencing the adulterers as murderers,
a real "Longtu" turned out to be a fake.
A warning to the people who rule us commoners,
even if not corrupt, you pay for a mistake.
***
This story wouldn't have much sting if legal cases didn't have a popular circulation, through venues ranging from the terse classical tales penned by literati authors to media much more accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate. The fact that Yuan Mei had served as a magistrate for several years in three different places himself only adds to the ironic impact of the "false Longtu": sure, it's a funny story of a snobby overreacher, but the pressures on local officials to solve cases, particularly those with a corpse involved, was pretty damn heavy. Even if Yuan could look back in his leisurely retired life to criticize Magistrate Song, he must have once faced much of those pressures himself.
In fact, we know Yuan Mei used supernatural associations with the law in resolving cases: he told one story about his days as a borough magistrate within the city of Nanjing in which a young wife had disappeared, only to show up in a village far outside the city. The father-in-law wanted a divorce, saying that she had obviously been going to meet a paramour, but the woman stubbornly said that she had been carried to the village involuntarily by a giant whirlwind. Yuan sided with her and used a story from the collected works of a thirteenth-century Confucian as proof. In that story, a girl was blown away by a giant whirlwind and ended up wedded to a Prime Minister; "I only wish I could promise you that your son will get as far as that," Yuan told the father-in-law, which was apparently effective in shutting the old man up.
Given his profound skepticism toward most religious practices around him, I doubt that Yuan Mei believed that the young woman had been blown by a wind to where she was found. It's possible that he even created this story because it, like the tale of the false Longtu, is funny. But from both the story he included in his collection of "weird tales" and the one he claimed to be autobiographically true, we can see that popular expectations about the magistrate's justice, which blurred the boundaries between what we'd call fiction and fact, could not be simply put aside by even the most cynical official.
*Longtu is the courtesy name of the famous Song judge, Lord Bao, who was basically a medieval Chinese supernaturally assisted version of Sherlock Holmes.
**Not unusual, since by the "rule of avoidance" magistrates weren't supposed to serve in their home districts.
***Both would have been up for death penalties--the adulterer by beheading after the assizes, and his partner in crime by the harshest sentence on the books, lingchi, a.k.a. "death by slow slicing." [Won't go into gory details here.]
2009/03/20
Some more pictures
By all rights I have no excuse whatsoever to not post something more substantial, but... well, these images kind of speak for themselves. I'm scanning a batch for a More Serious Project, and though these don't apply to that, I figure no one could possibly think
SNAKE DEMON ATTACKS (oh shi--!)
or
EPIC BATTLES BETWEEN DAOISTS AND DEMONS (calling it for the Daoists.)
unawesome. Both are from Jingshi Tongyan, a 1624 collection of tales edited by Feng Menglong. The first is an illustration of the famous Miss White Snake, who marries a mortal man for TWOO WUV but is forced apart from him at the end of the tale and imprisoned under a pagoda.* The second picture depicts a Daoist master named Xu and his students fighting the armies of an evil dragon (dragons in Chinese lore are associated with water). It's a bit hard to tell, but they consist of turtles, crabs, and a shrimp or two, all armed with swords and spears.
2009/03/06
Lazy Post
Hell of busy-ness this month, but I'd feel sad leaving my oh-so-devoted readers with nothing for so long. No Bear Wives--that may have to wait until after end of term, at least--but have some pictures from Athanasius Kircher's truly epic China Monumentatis from 1667.*
Fig. 1: The Kangxi Emperor-Monarchæ Sinico-Tartarici
One word: PIMP. Note the weird little dog (not sure if he was a doggy type in life). The really cool thing about this picture (and the others in the book) is that we can "read" them to be depictions of China in the 17th century, but they actually have a lot of improbable distortions based on how European observers saw, for instance, Kangxi's throne troom as a copy of the French king's. We can't make judgment calls about European travelers simply being unable to see the "real" things around them--only that they saw, but what they saw was processed between observation and representation. Here's a contemporary photo of the Taihedian throne room for comparison.**
Fig. 2: Father Adam Schall-P. Adami Schall Germanus I. Ordinis Mandarinus
I will pwn you with geometry. (Kangxi was actually quite into geometry. Unfortunately, the mass conversion Schall was supposed to be working toward didn't exactly occur by dint of his success in sharing the delights of triangles with the Emperor. Instead, they studied math, which is probably the opposite of mass conversion.)
Fig. 3: Green-haired turtles-No Latin caption. [Let them speak for themselves.]
Included because they can fly. [Hums "Flight of the Valkyries," followed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.]
Oh yeah, I know. I haven't ever seen them because they're from the palm-tree areas of South China. Gosh, they have some strange shit down there.***
Fig. 4: Mandarin with sidekick-Modus scribendi
This reminds me so strongly of Carl Pyrdum's medieval marginalia monkeys. Indeed, I wonder if it isn't from the same visual tradition? (Especially as this is the modus scribendi?)
I could post a lot more, but these are probably my top 4 . Maybe later I'll try to find the page of "regional costumes" from various Chinese cities, or the pictures of Chinese beauties posed in "native" styles and costumes.
*Randomly: judging from how dark these images are, I'd guess it's the English edition we're looking at. Oh well, the Latin captions are still sweet.
**NB, the Taihedian, or "Hall of Great Harmony," was the pimpest of the throne halls, and was reserved for fairly special occasions--celebrating the New Year, for instance, or the accession of a new ruler.
***Other strange shit those Southerners have: people who use tree bark to make fake injuries so to better accuse others of assault or even murder; sodomites (often rendered "rabbits" in slang); pirates; weird islands where people have holes in the middle of their chests; informal wars between gangs hired by different powerful lineages.
Fig. 1: The Kangxi Emperor-Monarchæ Sinico-Tartarici
One word: PIMP. Note the weird little dog (not sure if he was a doggy type in life). The really cool thing about this picture (and the others in the book) is that we can "read" them to be depictions of China in the 17th century, but they actually have a lot of improbable distortions based on how European observers saw, for instance, Kangxi's throne troom as a copy of the French king's. We can't make judgment calls about European travelers simply being unable to see the "real" things around them--only that they saw, but what they saw was processed between observation and representation. Here's a contemporary photo of the Taihedian throne room for comparison.**
Fig. 2: Father Adam Schall-P. Adami Schall Germanus I. Ordinis Mandarinus
I will pwn you with geometry. (Kangxi was actually quite into geometry. Unfortunately, the mass conversion Schall was supposed to be working toward didn't exactly occur by dint of his success in sharing the delights of triangles with the Emperor. Instead, they studied math, which is probably the opposite of mass conversion.)
Fig. 3: Green-haired turtles-No Latin caption. [Let them speak for themselves.]
Included because they can fly. [Hums "Flight of the Valkyries," followed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.]
Oh yeah, I know. I haven't ever seen them because they're from the palm-tree areas of South China. Gosh, they have some strange shit down there.***
Fig. 4: Mandarin with sidekick-Modus scribendi
This reminds me so strongly of Carl Pyrdum's medieval marginalia monkeys. Indeed, I wonder if it isn't from the same visual tradition? (Especially as this is the modus scribendi?)I could post a lot more, but these are probably my top 4 . Maybe later I'll try to find the page of "regional costumes" from various Chinese cities, or the pictures of Chinese beauties posed in "native" styles and costumes.
*Randomly: judging from how dark these images are, I'd guess it's the English edition we're looking at. Oh well, the Latin captions are still sweet.
**NB, the Taihedian, or "Hall of Great Harmony," was the pimpest of the throne halls, and was reserved for fairly special occasions--celebrating the New Year, for instance, or the accession of a new ruler.
***Other strange shit those Southerners have: people who use tree bark to make fake injuries so to better accuse others of assault or even murder; sodomites (often rendered "rabbits" in slang); pirates; weird islands where people have holes in the middle of their chests; informal wars between gangs hired by different powerful lineages.
2009/02/06
I think someone might be turning in their grave
What with lousy weather and a case of pests in our apartment, this past week has been pretty terrible and totally un-conducive to work either serious or bloggish. Today, though, things seem to be looking up, so I thought I'd just talk about this ridiculous bit of historifandom (sort of?) that I have just witnessed.
Context: I am looking over the "Humans" section in the Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects, by Li Shizhen, famed physician of the 16th century. It's the most famous of a considerable corpus of Chinese medical texts, and features all sorts of herbs, minerals, and fauna.
Boring background over, let's get to why I'm bothering to post though a week and more's worth of reading is dangling like the Sword of Damocles above me. When I typed the title into Teh Internetz, this is what I found:
A MUSIC VIDEO OF JAY CHOU RAPPING ABOUT HERBAL MEDICINE.
Okay, in case you're not convinced that naming a song after a frigging early modern medical encyclopedia is totally sweet/bizarre, here're some on-the-spot teaser translations of the lyrics:
You can't cut the deer horn too thin,
you can't screw around when you're learning from the old master.
Turtleshell jelly, Yunnan ginseng powder
and dried caterpillars,
your own music, your own medicine,
the amounts are just right.
Yeah, listen up, Chinese medicine's bitter,
copying out formulas is even bitterer,
you better open up that Ben cao gang mu and read you some fair-copy editions.
Toads and lizards, they've traveled all over the jianghu*,
these venerable ancestors' efforts, we can't lose them.
I detest rap as a rule (and its associated culture of "hos" and "pimps" and violence, which you can witness in the first minute or so of that video**), but Chou's songs have generally been a lot more closely tied to tradition--either in musical influence or in themes, and this one is just awesomely ridiculous. I mean, FAIR-COPY EDITIONS? Can we imagine an American rapping about those?
(In case you weren't convinced yet to watch, there really are some scandalously clad ladies.)
*Jianghu-a term in martial knight-errant (wuxia) novels that refers to the sort of "parallel world" in which aforementioned knights-errant move. Literally, "rivers and lakes."
**Strangely enough, the sexy ladies seem to more or less go away after an initial "hook"...
Context: I am looking over the "Humans" section in the Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects, by Li Shizhen, famed physician of the 16th century. It's the most famous of a considerable corpus of Chinese medical texts, and features all sorts of herbs, minerals, and fauna.
Boring background over, let's get to why I'm bothering to post though a week and more's worth of reading is dangling like the Sword of Damocles above me. When I typed the title into Teh Internetz, this is what I found:
A MUSIC VIDEO OF JAY CHOU RAPPING ABOUT HERBAL MEDICINE.
Okay, in case you're not convinced that naming a song after a frigging early modern medical encyclopedia is totally sweet/bizarre, here're some on-the-spot teaser translations of the lyrics:
You can't cut the deer horn too thin,
you can't screw around when you're learning from the old master.
Turtleshell jelly, Yunnan ginseng powder
and dried caterpillars,
your own music, your own medicine,
the amounts are just right.
Yeah, listen up, Chinese medicine's bitter,
copying out formulas is even bitterer,
you better open up that Ben cao gang mu and read you some fair-copy editions.
Toads and lizards, they've traveled all over the jianghu*,
these venerable ancestors' efforts, we can't lose them.
I detest rap as a rule (and its associated culture of "hos" and "pimps" and violence, which you can witness in the first minute or so of that video**), but Chou's songs have generally been a lot more closely tied to tradition--either in musical influence or in themes, and this one is just awesomely ridiculous. I mean, FAIR-COPY EDITIONS? Can we imagine an American rapping about those?
(In case you weren't convinced yet to watch, there really are some scandalously clad ladies.)
*Jianghu-a term in martial knight-errant (wuxia) novels that refers to the sort of "parallel world" in which aforementioned knights-errant move. Literally, "rivers and lakes."
**Strangely enough, the sexy ladies seem to more or less go away after an initial "hook"...
2009/01/16
"Person-demons," part 2
Remember this post wherein I translated a couple of tales about gender-transformed men, or "person-demons," and promised I'd get to talking about their bizarre circumstances? Well, it's taken me about 2 months, but here I am, getting to it! (Mostly because I have just discovered another version of the infamous "Bear Wife" story and want to talk about it badly, but would feel overburdened with guilt if did not present some thoughts about person-demons first.) Spoiler hint--if you haven't read that previous post, might want to jump there for a quick peek. I promise it's exciting--mushroomy penises, long silky hair and all.
First, these two tales are very interesting because they break down, component by component, the assemblage known as "gender." Now, I can't claim to be a strict constructionist in the old "social construction or biological inheritance" squabble, but I do think that packaging is at least as important or "meaningful" as what's on the ingredients list, if you will. (And if you've ever eaten something sketchy but colorfully wrapped from a Chinese convenience store, you definitely will.) So, in "False Woman" and "The Legal Case of the Person-Demon," we witness some decidedly acquired characteristics that were, within the universe of the stories, apparently very good at making everyone around the impersonators think they were bona fide women. A recap [of course, both wore women's clothes]:
in the red corner, Hong the Heroic (from Zi bu yu):
-delicate, soft voice
-hair down to the floor
-15" waist
-jadelike skin [NB: I think in reference to the white, not green, variety]
-Adam's apple-less throat
-bound feet
-sewing and embroidery
aaaaand the challenger, in the blue corner, Sang the Salacious (from Geng si bian):
-groomed brows and face
-tri-parted hair w/ hairpiece
-cooking, embroidery, and sewing
All very well and good. With an understanding of modern human physiology, one might dispute that an Adam's apple-less throat could be a sign of "real" intersexuality, viz. hormonal or genetic variation from the norm. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that the men deliberately imposed these abilities and characteristics upon their own bodies; in Hong's case, he actually confesses to growing out his hair and binding his feet as a young boy. Sang Chong's meager arsenal, even more so than Hong's, seems to point to a certain ease in becoming a woman: just get the right amount of hair in the right place and learn to sew.
But even with Hong's commendable self-modification, masculinity turns out to be not so easily erased. For both "person-demons," it is sex--more directly, their possession of a penis--that confounds their carefully cultivated feminine identities. Both have had sex with women but end up being "outed" by men; their judgment in the court of law is entirely concerned with the former, but not with the latter. Thus, the phallus is the hinge upon which both stories turn.* But Sang is an evil monster while Hong is a chivalrous hero, though both went around sleeping with women illegally. Why the distinction?
For one, Hong's seductions were consensual, "affairs," not black-magic-induced rapes. Where Sang's story linked its protagonist to a lineage of dangerously heterodox and socially destructive rapists, Hong is portrayed as an isolated case, inspired by an amorous widow/foster-mother.
For another, the authors' backgrounds seem to have been at odds: Yuan, though fairly successful in the imperial exams, retired in his 30s to become an aesthete and poet who dallied with young men and women "students." Lu, on the other hand, served many terms as a county magistrate and was famed for his commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Zuo Commentaries.** Their moral outlooks, judging by these pieces, were quite different: where Lu was concerned about the transvestite's power to disrupt the normative relations of the family and (with the secret-cult component) maybe even the state, Yuan's focus was on celebrating the ultimate supernaturally-aided triumph of "free love" over prejudice and ignorance. Hence all the time devoted to relating all the grisly details of just how Sang made his numbing powders, and, on the other hand, to giving us the incident of Hong's remarkably "enlightened" male lover.
But there's a lot of entangling ambiguity here, too. You could almost read Lu's account of how Sang assembled his repulsive roofies as a "recipe" for the audience--"pretty young widow of your friend catch your eye? Fret no more!" And, lest we all start imaging Yuan Mei to be some kind of Love-n-Peace hippie king from 1760,*** Hong, in relation to the other young men penetrated by other men in Yuan's stories, seems vindicated and heroic only because he "proves" his manhood by penetrating women. cf the village boy who, having some decent looks, never repelled a would-be suitor and ended up being humped at by a mallard in the pond, which he was obliged to beat to death lest it fulfill its lustful purposes.****
In short, there's much to be gleaned from reading these apparently crazy stories. They remind us that, despite the passage of time, some of our ideas about sex and gender and other human beings have been plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. For the historian, they can be invaluable in tracing the contours of a mental landscape of "uncanny valleys" and freaky bear-women in caves and murderous nannies--as parts of everyday life, not so dissimilar to using tabloids or blockbuster films to chart the anxieties and desires of people in more contemporary contexts. Plus, they're creepily intriguing. Also, make for great if somewhat nerdy party chitchat (might be better than talking about the time the elven ranger in your D&D party screwed up big-time and aggroed a DR13 rok that ate the cleric and the dwarf).
*Let's not dwell too long on that image.
**Some of the other parts of that terrifying beast they call the "Confucian canon." Yes, there were things in there apart from the Analects and The Way of the Mean.
***Admittedly that would be awesome.
****To make matters even more traumatizing, the villagers gathered 'round and laughed instead of helping out. For the rest of his life he was called "the duck's lover."
First, these two tales are very interesting because they break down, component by component, the assemblage known as "gender." Now, I can't claim to be a strict constructionist in the old "social construction or biological inheritance" squabble, but I do think that packaging is at least as important or "meaningful" as what's on the ingredients list, if you will. (And if you've ever eaten something sketchy but colorfully wrapped from a Chinese convenience store, you definitely will.) So, in "False Woman" and "The Legal Case of the Person-Demon," we witness some decidedly acquired characteristics that were, within the universe of the stories, apparently very good at making everyone around the impersonators think they were bona fide women. A recap [of course, both wore women's clothes]:
in the red corner, Hong the Heroic (from Zi bu yu):
-delicate, soft voice
-hair down to the floor
-15" waist
-jadelike skin [NB: I think in reference to the white, not green, variety]
-Adam's apple-less throat
-bound feet
-sewing and embroidery
aaaaand the challenger, in the blue corner, Sang the Salacious (from Geng si bian):
-groomed brows and face
-tri-parted hair w/ hairpiece
-cooking, embroidery, and sewing
All very well and good. With an understanding of modern human physiology, one might dispute that an Adam's apple-less throat could be a sign of "real" intersexuality, viz. hormonal or genetic variation from the norm. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that the men deliberately imposed these abilities and characteristics upon their own bodies; in Hong's case, he actually confesses to growing out his hair and binding his feet as a young boy. Sang Chong's meager arsenal, even more so than Hong's, seems to point to a certain ease in becoming a woman: just get the right amount of hair in the right place and learn to sew.
But even with Hong's commendable self-modification, masculinity turns out to be not so easily erased. For both "person-demons," it is sex--more directly, their possession of a penis--that confounds their carefully cultivated feminine identities. Both have had sex with women but end up being "outed" by men; their judgment in the court of law is entirely concerned with the former, but not with the latter. Thus, the phallus is the hinge upon which both stories turn.* But Sang is an evil monster while Hong is a chivalrous hero, though both went around sleeping with women illegally. Why the distinction?
For one, Hong's seductions were consensual, "affairs," not black-magic-induced rapes. Where Sang's story linked its protagonist to a lineage of dangerously heterodox and socially destructive rapists, Hong is portrayed as an isolated case, inspired by an amorous widow/foster-mother.
For another, the authors' backgrounds seem to have been at odds: Yuan, though fairly successful in the imperial exams, retired in his 30s to become an aesthete and poet who dallied with young men and women "students." Lu, on the other hand, served many terms as a county magistrate and was famed for his commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Zuo Commentaries.** Their moral outlooks, judging by these pieces, were quite different: where Lu was concerned about the transvestite's power to disrupt the normative relations of the family and (with the secret-cult component) maybe even the state, Yuan's focus was on celebrating the ultimate supernaturally-aided triumph of "free love" over prejudice and ignorance. Hence all the time devoted to relating all the grisly details of just how Sang made his numbing powders, and, on the other hand, to giving us the incident of Hong's remarkably "enlightened" male lover.
But there's a lot of entangling ambiguity here, too. You could almost read Lu's account of how Sang assembled his repulsive roofies as a "recipe" for the audience--"pretty young widow of your friend catch your eye? Fret no more!" And, lest we all start imaging Yuan Mei to be some kind of Love-n-Peace hippie king from 1760,*** Hong, in relation to the other young men penetrated by other men in Yuan's stories, seems vindicated and heroic only because he "proves" his manhood by penetrating women. cf the village boy who, having some decent looks, never repelled a would-be suitor and ended up being humped at by a mallard in the pond, which he was obliged to beat to death lest it fulfill its lustful purposes.****
In short, there's much to be gleaned from reading these apparently crazy stories. They remind us that, despite the passage of time, some of our ideas about sex and gender and other human beings have been plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. For the historian, they can be invaluable in tracing the contours of a mental landscape of "uncanny valleys" and freaky bear-women in caves and murderous nannies--as parts of everyday life, not so dissimilar to using tabloids or blockbuster films to chart the anxieties and desires of people in more contemporary contexts. Plus, they're creepily intriguing. Also, make for great if somewhat nerdy party chitchat (might be better than talking about the time the elven ranger in your D&D party screwed up big-time and aggroed a DR13 rok that ate the cleric and the dwarf).
*Let's not dwell too long on that image.
**Some of the other parts of that terrifying beast they call the "Confucian canon." Yes, there were things in there apart from the Analects and The Way of the Mean.
***Admittedly that would be awesome.
****To make matters even more traumatizing, the villagers gathered 'round and laughed instead of helping out. For the rest of his life he was called "the duck's lover."
2009/01/14
A truckful of quizzes
For self-knowledge is the first step to self-improvement! (Or more probably in my case, complacency.)
1)The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test
2)The Greek Mythology Personality Test
3)Which Roman Emperor Are You?
4) The What Kind of Reader Are You Quiz
To no one's surprise:
"Last stages of a Ph.D" eh? Hmm.
1)The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test
Your result for The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test ...
N-S-R
You scored 100% Non-Reductionism, 33% Epistemological Absolutism, and 33% Moral Objectivism!
More specifically, I'm an Epistemological Idealist and Moral Subjectivist. Hooray!
2)The Greek Mythology Personality Test
Your result for The Greek Mythology Personality Test ...
Dionysus
33% Extroversion, 33% Intuition, 72% Emotiveness, 86% Perceptiveness
"Although deeply emotional, you are extremely lacking in self-knowledge. You are somewhat needy, and when bored, may become very hedonistic. Your life is a quest for meaning, above all else. ... You are, at heart, a good person. You are very affectionate, and you are very loyal to your friends and family. ... Famous People Like You: John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner."
I mean, flattering that I'm the eternally youthful, ravishingly attractive god of wine, but...what? Britney Spears?! Michael Jackson?!
Also, it told me that "You are very reluctant to burden others with your own problems, to the point that this in itself can become a problem for the people who care about you." This is a complete lie. *Suspicion*3)Which Roman Emperor Are You?
Fairly awesome. I note that my second possibility was Hadrian. :)4) The What Kind of Reader Are You Quiz
To no one's surprise:
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane. | |
| Dedicated Reader | |
| Book Snob | |
| Literate Good Citizen | |
| Non-Reader | |
| Fad Reader | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz | |
"Last stages of a Ph.D" eh? Hmm.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)