Qionghua and the Technicolor Dreamshow

Last night a friend and I watched, for the first time, the National Ballet of China's production of The Red Detachment of Women. It's apparently what they showed Nixon when he came to hang out in '72. From the start, of course, we expected the experience to be deeply ironic: after all, ballet doesn't exactly stick out as the most proletarian of art forms. Though, in a pretty ridiculous tract published during the early 70s in MIT's The Drama Review under the heading "Documents from China," some defender of the production claimed that Detachment was deliberately designed to overcome the counterrevolutionary evils of classical ballet.Regardless of whether the ballet form is capable of transcending its roots in the muck of bourgeois decadence, the leading sponsors for the National Ballet were Mercedes-Benz, a luxury airline, and the Bank of China. Hmm.

As for the show itself, I am totally an outsider when it comes to dance and performance art generally. But here's what I did notice.
(1) The colors made me feel like I was watching a bunch of Legos onstage. Fierce, unyielding primaries for the leads and villainously pastel for the main landlord, "Southern Tyrant." Subtlety is not the name of the game for the "Model Operas" of the Maoist years. Red blazoned on arms and waved in the form of a huge snapping flag. Deliriously bright backgrounds ostensibly depicting idyllic Hainan Island ("the Hawaii of China").
(2) Speaking of the lack of any pretension to subtlety*: there are lots of revolutionary poses struck, firm, determined revolutionary nods made, and (on the other side) lots of sleazy bowing and old-fashioned handclasping. The music is (unsurprisingly) militant-folksy-cheery and major-key when the Good Guys are on and cool-cat jazzy when the Bad appear (the latter also get much dimmer lighting for an extra bit of "Bad Old Society" smarm).
(3) One innovation I found actually appealing was the fight scenes that drew heavily upon the physical vocabulary of martial operas. (Of course, it was also pretty...unique to include masses of company dancers wielding their bayonets en pointe, but that element of Red kitsch is given away right in the posters for the ballet--it's downright iconic.) If there had been a gong, clapper, and eight-cornered drum instead of a full symphony for some of the battle scenes, it would have felt a lot more like some clip from Romance of the Three Kingdoms than a struggle of the oppressed proletariat against landlord depredations.
(4) The interesting lack of a prima ballerina, and the similarly interesting sexual dynamics among the principals. While Wu Qionghua is certainly the protagonist, there's also Hong the party advisor to the Detachment and the commander of the Detachment. With the latter, Qionghua dances half-a-dozen pas de deux and exchanges several dramatic embraces; with the former, zero on both counts. It was all very Anchee-Min-Red-Hot-Lesbian-Tension** or Sexy Iron Girl (-on-girl), and it made me wish I were doing work on gender and sexuality of the Maoist years.

Anyway, it was a technically superb production and so worth the $30 to go see it at the bombastic National Opera House. If any of my gentle readers are intrigued, I believe there are various clips scattered about the usual places on the Internet for a glimpse of the action.

*Subtlety, as we all know well, is the first sign of counterrevolutionary corruption.
**Not intended to disparage Min's book or lesbians, of course!

Some Tips from Dr. Sex

Hail, my gentle hypothetical reader. It's been a very long while indeed since the last entry, but I sincerely hope the contents of this post will ameliorate somewhat my lamentable laziness.

Allow me now to introduce the subject of this post:

It's one of those portraits where a snide comment is superfluous.

Dr. Sex, also known as Dr. Zhang Jingsheng (张竞生), was born in 1888 in Guangdong province.* He studied at Peking University, participated in underground revolutionary activities, and was in the first batch of study-abroad students funded by the fledgling Chinese Republic in 1912. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Lyon in 1919, writing his dissertation on Rousseau.

As we all know, what happens in France...doesn't stay in France. Dr. Z had himself some bontemps and returned to take up a post as Professor of Philosophy at his alma mater, but then was ejected summarily after publishing Sex Histories (性史), at first called Sex Histories Part I, in 1926. Over the winter holidays (Coincidence...? Nay, gorging on food and being huddled inside makes everybody think about perversity, a universal condition across the distances of time and space.) Zhang sent out surveys to university students in the city, then edited together some of the responses into a book. Infamously, Sex Histories flew off the shelves and caused all manner of ruckus, including massive traffic jams. Its twelve accounts range from one by his then-wife, entitled "My Sexual Experiences," to "Looking Back On Gaining Knowledge in Childhood," by one "Jing zai" (roughly, "Respectful Dude").

As Haiyan Lee has described, Dr. Z's aesthetics mixed utilitarianism, German Romanticism, iconoclasm, social-Darwinian eugenics, and radical social utopianism into a hearty stew in which "beauty" became something each citizen of the "Republic of Beauty" had to diligently create and scrupulously uphold. This fantastic land, while full of apparent forward-thinking--viz. Dr. Z's resolute advocacy of nude, mixed-sex outdoor exercise--was decidedly not liberal or even individualistic: Beauty came in the singular, and one either met its criteria through the proper cultivation of one's erotic and aesthetic body, or one failed and became a threat to the overall beauty of society. "Nymphomaniacs," same-sex sexual liasions, and even women who wore trousers were all regarded Un-Beautiful, and warranted "correction"-- in the former case by labial surgery. Ideal men were tall, had deep orbits, high-bridged noses, and broad shoulders--that is, not Chinese. In short, Dr. Z's ideology presents another troubling example of how ideas that seem like they should be worthy of celebration and colorful parades also come with a mandatory set of less palatable accompaniments: in this case, personal liberation simultaneously endorsed with fascist domination through "biopower" remind us again of the extent to which authoritarian ideals were inextricable from the global development of modern state and society.

With that schpiel out of the way, I should note that Dr. Z's fate was an unhappy one: after the sensational publication of Sex Histories, Part I, he prepared a manuscript for a sequel (in which he planned to write about his own experiences) and was on the cusp of submitting it for publication when the backlash hit. Media appended him with snide nicknames, including "Dr. Sex," "Dr. Prostitution," and "Great Licentious Worm."** He held onto the manuscript, but the eagerly awaited Part II appeared anyway--and, according to some sources, the series magically continued until Part X. Zhang put furious ads in the papers declaiming against the people who were stealing his name brand, but to no apparent avail.

This brand was evidently still powerful (if rather tinged with salacious implications) well into the later years of the Republic, because I was able to pull a dodgy-looking volume from the nether planes of WorldCat called Strange Stories of Sexual Desire: Interesting Histories of the Art of Sex (性欲奇谈：性艺趣史). Said volume was seemingly put out by Zhang's own publishing house, The Bookstore of Beauty, and has "Edited by Dr. Zhang" prominently displayed on the title page beside the photo of a rather uncomfortable-looking nude (the chaise lounge against which she awkwardly leans look decidedly scratchy). But there is exactly zero mention of the good Doctor in the contents; instead, "Medical Doctor Wei," who narrates these Interesting Histories appears to be a woman; her name is her sole identifying feature. Real editing was ostensibly handled by one Jiang Xiaoping. In other words, by the 1930s Dr. Z was clearly hot-stuff enough that his name could help hawk anything sexy.***

Anyhow, back to the reason you, my dear hypothetical reader, have bothered to scroll down this far: Dr. Zhang will now be answering your questions, educating YOU in order that you may become a better citizen of the Republic of Beauty!

(1)On "harmonizing before having sexual intercourse":
"...first it is necessary that man and woman enter the realm of beauty at the same time. ...If either one has not yet entered the realm of beauty, that one suffers qualms throughout the night. ...In this instance I think it's best for the one who can't sleep to go to another room, read books related to all kinds of sexual learning, and supplement knowledge for the next occasion."****

(2)On female ejaculation:*****
"Women possess many types of nether fluids: one type is fragrant water and emerges from within the clitoris. The second type is vaginal fluid, and is discovered when the penis is in contact. The third is "Bartholin fluid," which is a type of fluid from the glands at the vaginal opening and is expelled only when the woman fully comprehends the joys of sex and is fully satisfied. When expelled, it shoots far [lit. "hits far away"] like a man's ejaculate. ... When this "third type of water" is expelled, the woman is as if drunken or dazed...then she becomes tired afterward, much like the state before and after male ejaculation. ...From this "example from nature," [during female ejaculation, paralleling the male's delivery of sperm,] the ovaries must be working intensely to send the ovum [lit. "egg beads"] down to the uterus to fuse with the sperm [lit. "seminal bugs"]."

(3)On changing oneself into a "beloved" husband:
"...when he awakes in the morning he should comb his hair prettily. If his wife dislikes the beard, then everyday he must not forget to shave assiduously like the overseas Chinese students in America. He should always be dressed in up-to-date fashion. ..."The greatest taboo is to come into touch with [your wife] when she is in a bad humor." ..."It is best if you and your wife live in separate houses, but if you can't you mustn't forget to partition the room or at the very least to sleep in separate beds."

(4)On "strengthening weaknesses of the sexual organs":
"the man should frequently wash his privates in cold water...avoid having intercourse excessively and must not use aphrodisiacs. He should also be diligent in washing his body."

"...woman's laxness is an extremely common defect in our country...they have never even once made an injection into the private parts and they are particularly indifferent to washing. Therefore their flesh is unhealthy and it prevents the development of sexual desires...when menstruation has finished one should inject water once into the vagina and usually do this several times monthly. Again one must bathe continuously....after washing, rub with a soft cloth until the flesh gets warm and desist when you feel like you're generating electricity. ...At the time of intercourse you must come to it with enthusiasm and conduct yourself with courage."

"...the sexual organs are overly concealed [in children]." [Zhang next describes a type of open-crotch pants for small children.] "...this is good, for in this way the sexual organs are continuously exposed to the outside air and the feelings of sensation are fostered. Secondly ...daily if possible, wash the child's sex organs and after washing rub them until they are warm. Thirdly, think of ways to prohibit masturbation and other similar kinds of dissipation..."

(5)On the proper conduct of intercourse:
"First, the number of times that the male ejaculates...should not be excessive and the sperm must not be ejaculated too quickly....Once or twice a week is sufficient for those in the prime of life....However the time for one occasion must be lengthened, at least more than twenty minutes and better if extended to from forty minutes to an hour."

"The tempo can be helped by filling or emptying the urinary bladder...before intercourse it is good for the male to fully urinate and for the woman to store up her urine. ...[This] slows ejaculation while...accelerating...the "third fluid. ...The most important thing is that the woman take initiative. It is forbidden for her to...become like a wooden doll...never etiquette and formality or a training course in Confucian ethics."
***

What a delightful pudding of hyper-sensitivity to "hygiene" with a touch of an abiding fear of male enervation through excessive ejaculation ("spermatorrhea"), all infused generously with clear, "scientific," and fascistically arbitrary delineations of acceptable sexuality and deviance! Delicious. The good Doctor will be in all week to help with egg beads, third fluids, and generating electricity from your privates.

Good night, and don't let the seminal bugs bite!

*A.K.A. Revolutionville.
** Oh journalists!
***He's actually made quite a comeback in the Reform years, as a simple Google (or better yet, Baidu) sesh will indicate.
****He so smooth. Look at that shameless product placement! Oh Doc, I wanna be just like you one day EMAIL THIS ENTRY TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
*****All passages except this one are taken from Howard Levy's 1967 translation.

Comic Books, Old School Chinese Style

The term's finally coming to an end, and so I guiltily update a horrifying two months since my last entry. To make up a little for this transgression, I've got some juicy stuff to share.

While doing some poking around in old books earlier this year, I ran across illustrations in some late Ming (early 17th century) gongan xiaoshuo, or "court-case tales." (NB: xiaoshuo is the Modern Chinese word for "fiction," but the fictiveness of the genre in late imperial times was not nearly as clear-cut as that label might imply. Thus I use a zillion synonyms, but never "fiction.")

Anyway, these pictures take up about a third of the page;

(This and all following images from the Mingjng gongan, or Bright Mirror Cases. )

block-printed like the text, they are not exactly the pinnacles of late imperial Chinese artistic genius--in fact, they are frequently quite stereotypical in their graphic vocabulary, with all the women looking like one another, all the magistrates much apparently cloned from one man, etc. Not unlike Lego characters in the recent series of popular films adapted into Lego-based action games, even when these figures' heads are lopped off they retain more or less the same expression--one of slight bemusement:

(Oh dear, it looks like this evil monk, being unable to seduce me, has lopped my head off in his fury. Teehee?)

Nonetheless, the presence of these illustrations suggests something of how the vast majority of Chinese people might have accessed stories that literate folk could read at length in the body of these xiaoshuo. The stereotyped images also have the flavor of the courtroom drama, put on and accessible to even the most "rootless" of illiterate rural people. As one would expect from the Cops of 17th-18th century China, most of the stories are pretty sensational, with lots of blood, sex, and plot twists. Notably, I've found two stories in this collection alone with women who have sex and impregnate each other.

But just about all gonagan xiaoshuo end with the successful, clever resolution of the case by a righteous judge, and, often, most unpleasant punishments for the guilty parties. More than occasionally, these sentences far exceeded the statutory regulations.

(If "a wicked monk buries the woman [he murdered, see above] and plants a tree atop her grave" isn't pretty sensational, then you, dear Reader, have probably watched a little too much true crime TV, especially since the monk is apparently a late Ming version of the Hulk or something, able to uproot entire full-grown trees.)

Here I want to post a complete graphic account of a case so you can pretend to be an illiterate person--little kid, young wife, old codger, bandit--of your choice and follow along, just like an episode of CSI as a comic, except Old and Chinese, which can only make the experience better...right? Thus I present "Lord Governor Chen Solves the Case of a Rape and Murder."


A local gentleman, Deng Kui, treats the scholar son of an acquaintance, Zhang Wenli, to a meal.

(Thebpody text notifies us that Deng Kui's young wife, Yu shi,* is "flowerlike in complexion and moonlike in radiance, more beautiful than Xishi and Imperial oncubine Pan of old, with hands delicate as new-sprung lily-buds and brows as fine as willow-leaves just appearing on the branch." During the Pure Brightness festival, Deng and his old mother go out to pay the customary tributes to his father's grave, leaving Yu shi home alone. BAD IDEA.)


Zhang Ba [Zhang the Eighth] tries to rape Yu shi and, failing to overcome her, murders her.

(The body text describes the young idler Zhang the Eighth, who had long lusted after Yu shi, and, when he saw the young woman's husband and mother-in-law both heading toward the graves on Pure Brightness, decided to make his move. Unfortunately for him, Yu shi shouted invectives at him and tried to flee. Suddenly realizing his difficult situation, and espying some fancy jewelry and cltohs, Zhang the Eighth grabs a kitchen knife, kills the poor Yu shi, and seizes some of the cloths and jewels before running and hiding in the hills behind the house.

Coincidentally, the young scholar Zhang Wenli passes by the Deng household and heads inside to say hello--with the ulterior motive of maybe catching another glimpse of the beautiful Yu shi. He ends up discovering her "corpse, saturated with fresh blood and lying on the floor," which scares the soul from his body. In terror, he leaps on his horse and dashes away. Zhang the Eighth, still crouched in the hill, sees all of this clearly. You may see where this is going.)

Kui returns home, sees his wife's murdered corpse, and begins to weep uncontrollably.

(The mother-in-law and Deng Kui report matters to the local headmen immediately. Zhang the Eighth makes a timely appearance, saying that he had been chopping wood in the hills and had seen Wenli ride in, then leave a short while later in a panic. "His family is rich and just has the one son," Zhang suggests to Deng. "You should take this body and carry it to their door, otherwise they'll probably try to bribe the officials with all they've got."** But Deng is reluctant--the Zhangs might send people out to grab Yu shi's corpse and thus eliminate the evidence, so he takes matters to court.)

Deng Kui turns in a petition to the county magistrate accusing Wenli.

(The text reproduces Deng's accusation as a standard "petition" form--perhaps as a way to satisfy armchair detectives who should have been studying up on the Book of Odes or the Spring and Autumn Annals instead, so they could become a magistrate and read real, but probably much more boring, petitions.)


The magistrate sends out constables to arrest Wenli.

(The magistrate, Shen, is "an impatient and harsh man" equipped with "a steely sense of justice." He's furious after reading the plaint, and straightaway sends off constables. I do like this dude's pose with those manacles--can you hear the Cops theme music in the background here?)

Zhang Shimao, Wenli's dad, sets out some wine and goodies for the two constables.

(The next morning, having deflected the police for the evening, Shimao has Wenli file his own petition, accusing Deng Kui of making false accusations: "last year Deng lent my father some silver as startup capital, which we have not yet repaid. Thus he is plotting to cheat us of money.")

Magistrate Shen conducts the inquest of Yu shi's corpse.

(The corpse has a wound on the side and another on the neck[--this does seem obvious, considering the picture shows her decapitated...]. Magistrate Shen calls in the local headmen and Zhang #8 for interrogations. I wonder what that weasel's going to say?)


Zhang the Eighth stubbornly testifies against Wenli, who is injustly condemned.

(At first resistant to confessing, even after forty strokes of the bamboo rod and collapsing in a faint, Wenli eventually confesses after being trussed up in the leg-press and having his head knocked with sticks. Even though he still denies any knowledge of the clothes and jewels, Magistrate Shen ignores him and writes up a case summary.)
Shimao appeals the case to the Provincial Judicial Commissioner's office.

(There's another "plaint" here recording what Shimao filed on the provincial level, going over the prefect's head.)

Luckily for the hapless Wenli, the Nanjing-based Governor Chen is on a tour of inspection and arrives in Huizhou prefecture at just the right moment.

("A youthful holder of the jinshi degree [the third and most advanced in the bureaucratic tests]," Chen is "bright as a mirror, able to see as clearly as a vase of ice, and careful in the details, down to matters as fine as the new-grown autumn down of birds and beasts.")

The Governor interrogates the murder in detail.

("Lift high the bright mirror, Sir," pleads Wenli, "and shine through my injust condemnation." Zhang #8, though, maintains that he had seen the entire rape-attempt-cum-murder from the hill where he was chopping wood. The Governor asks if he, being at such close range, had heard the woman screaming, which she must've done as her murderer attacked. "This humble person did hear," says Zhang #8. "Well, if you heard her cries, why did you not report the matter, instead waiting for Deng Kui to do so? Your words seem unreliable." Zhang #8 has nothing to say.)

A crow flies in and pecks the head of Zhang the Eighth.

(Just as the Governor is hesitating over Zhang #8's inconsistent testimony, a crow flies right in, pecks Zhang #8 on the head once, then flies off again. Everyone's shocked, until Governor Chen sternly shouts that it was Zhang #8 who had done the deed. The fellow refuses to confess until he's gotten two rounds of the leg-press and a hundred knocks from the sticks. When he finally does admit to his crime, he adds that "Heaven couldn't allow my stubborn accusation and injustice toward Wenli, and now you, Sir, are as just as the blue sky. I am resigned to paying with my life.")

The great Governor sentences Zhang the Eighth to the death penalty.

(The Governator also declares that, because Yu shi had resisted rape to the death, she would be commemorated as a chastity martyr, which probably means some silver distributed to her husband's family to erect a paifang, or arch, and a likely biography in the local gazetteer--though such institutions are much better documented as well as a lot more extensively maintained in the Qing than the late Ming.)



Wenli is cleared of the crime and sent home a free man.

(I dig his jolly look here. The blob in the sky could be anything--a comet? A dying bird? A melting sun? A cloud? But those little dark marks near the horizon are definitely supposed to be bamboo. Bamboo shoots, probably. Yum. What a lush landscape they have in Huizhou.)

The gentry and the common people alike praise the righteous, moral governance of Lord Chen.

(More blobbity things in sky, and either a really "mad cursive" inscription*** or a surprisingly postmodern representation of Lord Chen's justice. This last page of the story is taken up by an eighteen-line poem. I quote, "Emperor and lords rule with righteousness and the four seas are clear/the star of virtue hangs high and the eye of Heaven is open." Aha! Those blobs must be THE EYES OF HEAVEN. Do these lines sound a bit apocalyptic to you too, dear Reader?)

Golly, that was an epic post. No commentary--just the observation that these could be awesome if some competent people decided to make 'em into a TV series.

Next time, on THE STAR OF VIRTUE, join us for mutually impregnating lesbians and patron deities of literature--all in the name of JUSTICE, of course!



*shi has sometimes been translated as "woman," [for instance Spence's Death of Woman Wang] but it literally means "of the clan of". If only one surname is mentioned before shi, it is the woman's father's name; if there are two given, for instance Zhang Wei shi, the first is her husband's and the second her father's. Oh, the delights of Cofnucian patriarchy.
** Lest Zhang #8 seems maniacal here, this tactic was actually practiced often enough that it entered a substatue in the Great Qing Code.
***Behold:

"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."

A call for equal-opportunity ogling

Happy New Year!
Just a quick pop-media post (I swear I'll get back to more, um, "weighty" things some day): tonight I watched Chihwaseon, or Painted Fire, a 2002 South Korean film about the 19th-century painter Jang Seung-up, also known as Ohwon.* The film's title is literally "drunken painting immortal," which gives you some idea of its protagonist's major activities [being an immortal painter version of King Arthur. Another, which is my primary concern here, is his third hobby--having sex with, or at least ogling, just about every female character who appears in the film.

Now, I have no problem with looking at beautiful ladies acting in fairly frank sex scenes. It is quite hot. (The only detraction was that I was watching the movie with my parents--even someone who wants to spend time being paid to spout off about penetrative hierarchies has problems watching sexy movies with the folks, which probably indicates something.)

The problem arises when the female parties all look like the same lissome twentysomething with pearly teeth, fine brows, dewy complexion, and liquid eyes, while their male counterpart, particularly in closeups, resembles a leathery potato incised with human facial features. I mean, it is a rugged, interesting face, to be sure, and its owner does some fine acting. But the contrast was terribly obvious. Such sex-based double standards of attractiveness and talent aren't a revolutionary revelation, but in this case they must've particularly gotten to me because lately I've been thinking over certain examples this trend in reverse, by which I mean attractive, youthful-appearing men to match the by-default superficials of their leading ladies in heavily-funded projects. The popularity of Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Carribean franchise, for one. As much as I shudder to mention its name on this blog for my utter hate of just about all it stands for, Twilight for another. More excitingly still, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Vintner's Luck--in production, and hopefully will join the small selection of highbrow movies with LGBT themes--both feature impressively good-looking actors.*

I am following this trend with enormous excitement, not just for the increase in the raw amount of beautiful men I get to see, but also because it may be a marker of a deep shift in Euro-American society: now viewers can actually have the chance to ogle equitably. That there is an association between equal-opportunity ogling and LGBT topics makes a lot of sense, when one considers how central the "desiring" role is to our (and many other patriarchal societies') definition of masculinity. In other words, the only desiring position is a masculine one. Thus, if anyone who did not consider hirself a man desired a man, the nearest approxmimation would be the male "homosexual."* So, there's an overlap between movies with gay themes, movies with beautiful men, and movies that have broad appeal to people who love men, because of the way desire itself is defined (or, dare I say it, constructed).

Anyhow, male objectification seems to be on the rise. Along with the nubile boys come more objectionable things. Young men are reporting body-image issues in increasing numbers; "men's magazines" are plastered with stupid diet tips and weight-loss-quick schemes just like those marketed to women. Clearly not good. Of course our goal should be to promulgate health and self-confidence for every individual, regardless of sex or gender. Yet I can't help feeling that the aestheticization, on parallel terms, of the male body is a necessary first step toward such utopian possibilities, given our race's much-less-than-ideal previous trajectory. People desire, whatever gonads they have, and sexy beautiful men in the movies can help move us toward a broader recognition and acceptance of that fact.

*By the way, it's a pretty interesting movie, if a bit stiff and dry-feeling. The 1890s' tumultuous history of the simultaneous presence of Qing and Japanese troops, the Donghak Revolution, and the fall of the royal house and the yangban are all there, and not just serving as a quiet backdrop, either.
**But don't take my word for it:***

***(Imagine #2 with some wings and other suitably divine haberdashery, svp.) If the powers that be, aka the studios, decide to tickle my horrifying period costume/angel fancy any harder, I may combust.

It's been too long...

...since I've written about sexy things!

One particular component of late imperial notions of gender and sexuality that fascinates me is that of gender transformation: in other words, how and why people (and sometimes nonhumans) move from one apparent gender to another, and what happens to them afterward. Today, I'll present a couple of translations of "weird tales" relating to this subject; afterward, I'll offer some thoughts.

As an undergrad, I wrote on the Zi bu yu [What Confucius did not Speak Of*], a collection of tales by the gentleman-poet Yuan Mei that first circulated in the 1780s. My favorite of the tales was "False Woman," alternately translatable as "Woman-Pretender."** A translation:

False Woman
A beautiful man by the surname of Hong, from Guiyan County [NB: In modern Hunan province], pretended to be a seamstress and traveled in the provinces of Hubei and Guizhou as a itinerant embroidery teacher for women. A licentiate scholar in Changsha named Li invited Hong to embroider, and then tried to seduce him. Hong told him the truth [about his sex]. Li laughed, saying, "If you really are a man, even better! I've always thought it stupid that one of the emperors of the Northen Wei [4th-6th century CE], when he called two beautiful nuns who served at his mother's side for his pleasures, found out that they were men and executed them. What an idiot that Wei lord was! Why didn't he just make them his male favorites, to have them at his pleasure while not hurting his mother's feelings?" Hong eagerly consented after this speech, and Li loved him well.

Some years later, Hong was in the Jiangxia region [in SE modern Hubei] when a man named Du also tried to seduce him. Hong tried to do with Du as he'd done with Li, but alas, the man was not one who knew the way of things, and took Hong to court. Deported back home to Guiyang, Hong was examined by the Provincial Judge: his voice was delicate and soft, his throat lacked an Adam's apple, his hair was so long that it touched the floor, his skin was like jade, and his waist was just one foot and three inches around. Yet his privates were as thick and heavy as a large, fresh mushroom. He said that he'd been an orphan since childhood and had been taken in by a widowed neighbor, with whom he later carried on a liaison. He grew out his hair and bound his feet, calling himself a woman. When his adopted mother died, he became an embroidery teacher; he left his adopted household at seventeen and was now twenty-seven, having encountered innumerable women in a decade. The Judge asked for the women's names, but Hong replied, "Isn't it enough that I'll be punished? Why must you injure those ladies?" Torture was applied, and he could not help but give up a few names. The Governor wanted to sentence him to distant exile [a codified punishment for fairly serious crimes, at distances of, say, 2000 or 3000 li, or about 660 to 1000 miles], but the Provincial Judge, calling Hong a "demon-person," insisted that he be beheaded. The sentence was approved.

The day before his death, Hong said to one of his guards, "I die without regrets, having enjoyed so much of the forbidden pleasures of this world! And that Judge will not be spared, either. I only had consensual affairs; keeping my hair long and seducing people are offenses that don't warrant execution under the law. Those affairs I had with women were all secret things that could be covered up--why did he force me to confess and embarrass them? They had to be called in and beaten; the snowy, jadelike skin of the daughters of rich men in tens of town and counties had to suffer the red sticks, for what?" The next day, he was executed in the market square. Before he died, Hong pointed at the spot where he knelt and said, "Three years hence, the man who tried me will be here, too." Indeed, three years later the Judge was executed for corruption, and all were astounded.

In a sort of postscript, Yuan Mei wonders that this story is similar to that of Sang Chong, a "demon-person" from the Jiajing period of the Ming dynasty. Judith Zeitlin's Historian of the Strange discusses the Sang Chong figure, tracing him to another collection of "strange tales," the Geng Si Bian [庚巳編] by Lu Can,*** published in the late 16th century. This "demon-person" story is a lot nastier than the exploits of our brave pretty-man hero Hong, though--get ready to cringe much harder:

The Legal Case of the Person-Demon
The Central Censorate views reports of men masquerading as women to commit evil deeds as abnormal events. A report from Jinzhou county in Zhending prefecture in Zhili province [modern Hebei] runs: criminal Sang Chong confessed that he is the nephew of Li Dagang, part of a military-affiliated household in Shanxi province, Taiyuan prefecture. As a child, Sang was sold to a man named Sang Mao of the neighboring county as an adopted son. During the first year of the Chenghua reign [1465], he heard that a man named Gu Cai, from Shanyin county in Datong prefecture, had masqueraded as a woman and taught handicrafts to women while secretly sleeping with them for eighteen years without being caught. Sang Chong decided he wanted to emulate Gu, and traveled to take Gu as his master. He trimmed his brows and face, arranged his hair into three parts and put on a hairpiece to pass himself as a woman. He learned, too, how to cut and trace patterns, sew and embroider shoe uppers, cooking and other such occupations. Afterward, Sang gratefully left for home.

Thereafter, men from nearby counties [omitting some details of proper names for sake of brevity] came to visit Sang and ask him to teach them, as well. Sang told them all, "When you go to people's homes, enter and leave carefully. If something happens, don't say a thing about me." So they each went their ways.

In the third month of the third year of the Chenghua reign, Sang had been away from home for ten years, doing nothing but corrupting people. He'd been through forty-five prefectures and counties, and seventy-eight towns and villages. Everywhere he went, he carefully sought word of pretty girls of good family, and then called himself a runaway beggar-wife, first moving into a poor household nearby to help with chores. In a few days, Sang would then make up pretenses to enter the girl's chambers to teach her womanly crafts. At night, he would retire with her, cajoling and joking with her while having his stealthy way. If she were upright and resisted, he would wait until very late and use a little trick. He carried with him an egg, the white of which he removed; also seven peaches, and seven sticks of willow, all of which he burned to ashes. He smashed a new needle with an iron hammer, and adding a mouthful of liquor to all this, concocted a drug, which he then sprayed onto the girl while silently chanting a sleeping-spell. The girl would then be paralyzed and unable to speak. After having his evil way with her, Sang would incant the release spell. Upon waking, if the girl stridently rebuffed him, Sang would plead and wheedle until the girl suffered in silence.

After three or five days of living in one spot, he feared discovery, and would move to a new place. He did this for about ten years, seducing one hundred and eighty-two women of good households, without discovery. In the thirteenth year of Chenghua, at about five in the afternoon on the thirteenth of the seventh month, he came to the house of a licentiate scholar, Gao Xuan, in Nie village, Jinzhou county, Zhending prefecture. Sang called himself the concubine of one Zhang Lin, of Zhaozhou prefecture, and said that he had run away because of his husband's abuse, and begged for shelter. He was settled in the southern rooms. That night, the son-in-law of Gao Xuan, Zhao Wenju, crept into Sang's rooms and tried to seduce him. Sang pushed and hit Zhao, but Zhao pushed him onto the kang [a heated bed platform, typical in North China] and groped at his chest; feeling no breasts, Zhao moved downward and found that Sang had testicles. Thus he brought Sang to court in Jinzhou.


The rest of the account recounts how the case unfolded: Sang's confession was corroborated, and a list of the girls he'd violated was compiled. His "master" and "students" were all brought to court and tried together "to warn those who follow." But the women were spared any punishment, for they had all been coerced with Sang's "trickery"; plus, there were too many of them. In the eleventh month of Chenghua, the emperor himself wrote an edict: "Yes, this fellow has committed a vicious and ugly crime that damages custom. Punish him with lingchi [the infamous "thousand cuts" form of execution, reserved for the worst capital crimes]. No need to submit a reply. As for the other seven, prosecute them strictly and bring them to justice."

Translating these have already taken up a huge chunk of space (not to mention time I was going to spend working), so I'll reserve some observations for next time. Brief note before I go to do "useful" things, though: if you search any of Sang Chong's case on the Chinese Internet (tm), you'll turn up bunches of Reader's Digest-type sensational stories about this "Strongest Pervert in History."

*One of those Classical allusions so well-loved by people of letters even today. The reference is to a passage from the Analects: "Confucius did not speak of oddities, feats of power, disorders of nature, or spirits." [子不语怪力乱神] Thus, Yuan let people know that his book was in fact about all of these things.

** Readers who are just dying to see the text in its original can look here; the story's a little less than 1/4 of the way down the page. Kam Louie and Louise Edwards have done the fullest English translation of the collection, as Censored by Confucius: Ghost Stories by Yuan Mei, and you can read this tale, which they translate as "The Female Impersonator," therein.

*** Enterprising (or masochistic readers not caring about their vision) can see the original here
as part of the Gutenberg Project. The tale is about 2/3 of the way down the page.

On the tragedy of coercion

Can I just tell you how good Watase Yuu's Sakura Gari is? (Yes, the Fushigi Yuugi woman. No, it's not as hackneyed, obviously.*) Warning, may spoil you, though this "sneak preview" color page from 2007 could give some things away as it is.

(On the right, our hardworking protagonist Masataka. On the left, our charming failed hero Souma.)

It combines the best dramatic trademarks of Yuki Kaori's work--gothic houses, hopelessly beautiful psychotic aristocrats, fancy clothes (in this case Taishou-era period wear, which is thumbs-up for sure), violence, and sex. The last is perhaps where some readers would have issues with the manga, because though this is an exceedingly sexy work, not very much of it is warm or fuzzy.

I've been thinking about why I can stomach some types of coercive sex--what I could probably call "non-sex-positive" sex--and not others (for instance, what apparently occurs in the Twilight series). The reason here may be that Watase manages to tread the delicate line between inspiring disgust at sexual violation and cathartic, tragic sympathy for the inability of the characters to escape their pasts. In this sense, the visuality of manga gives it a distinct advantage: it can convey horror and despair even as unspeakably violent, destructive acts are being perpetrated. It can accomplish a degree of psychological revelation that is almost certainly harder for the novelist. And it is that insight into the souls of Watase's dramatis personae that makes this less a suspect piece of rape apologetics than an excruciatingly well-executed piece of tragic drama that is almost Greek in its amounts of helpless self-destructiveness. The best Yuki Kaori manga have also this sense of epic personal failure. Thus we the readers can sympathize.

Another possibility might be that the players of this sad game are male. Some time ago, I read one person's account of how, as a gay man, he felt violated and horribly objectified at Yaoi-Con, "A Celebration of Male Love and Beauty" that happens not too far away from here annually. What if the target of the sexual violence here were a young woman? I suppose that would generate more distaste, at least personally, if only because (a) young women are still by far the target of most reported sexual violence and (b) the biological capacity for childbearing adds another, highly unpleasant layer onto the already problematical physical and psychological domination. In this case, then, I am siding with the explanation for "why is yaoi so popular (especially among female fans)" that attributes it to a leveling of the sexual playing field between partners. The baseline power differential is smaller than if Masataka were Masako. Furthermore, there is certainly physical force in this coercion, but much of it is in manipulative mind-games--just as abusive, but with less potential to viscerally revolt the reader than the kind of purely physical power that is all too often the basis of "normal" (that is, not same-sex) erotic manga.

Of course all this could perhaps be seen as my self-justification, but I truly feel that this work is not a massive attempt to allow prurient readers to revel in sexual exploitation. But maybe I'm the only one who sees the echoes of Classical tragedy--everyone else's just enjoying the power play and admittedly technically polished sex scenes...

*Actually, several of her lesser-known works (Ayashi no Ceres, Imadoki) are supposed to be quite good in contrast to the very, very mainstream and much less challenging FY.