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!

The Bright Lights of Midnight

Yesterday I went with a pal from high school days to see Woody Allen's not-so-new release, Midnight in Paris, about which I had heard only hints and rustlings of praise, my devotion to the wonderful weekly "Filmspotting" podcast being a very novel development. The movie isn't exactly the most profound piece of cinema I've ever seen; next to the other film that I recently found to be touching and uplifting,  Tree of Life, Midnight is certainly of a much more modest scale and scope of ambition.

I'm anything but a film scholar. Nor am I even a very consistent watcher of movies (frequently I skip forward to juicier bits; often I am glazed with sweat and exertion while viewing from the stationary bike or, even worse, the bobble-head torment of the "dreadmill"). There are torrents of reviews gushing (and a few not so gush-y) about Midnight, and I have zero pretension of adding to that deluge. It's personal: lately I've been very sad at the state of the world, both in the earthly sense (solar explosions, terrifying climatic changes) and in the more abstract and man-made ones (poisonous interracial and interfaith hatred, murder, the continuing, incomprehensible absurdities of global finance). All my doom-and-gloom made watching this movie a genuinely memorable experience, my thoughts on which I'd just like to record for my future self.

I've always found Woody Allen movies kind of...creepy. No doubt part of that is an (unfair?) overlap between his screen explorations of his psychic issues, especially regarding women and sex, and how he's chosen to live those issues out. Sure, I enjoyed Hannah and Her Sisters and Love and Death, but The Purple Rose of Cairo, for instance, just made me so uncomfortable that I'd had to stop a quarter-hour into things.

Midnight has a lot of the familiar Woody Allen elements. It's a movie that, in the space of less than ten minutes, unleashes doppelgangers of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Cole Porter on the audience in a frantic onslaught that, for some reason, makes me think of dueling Pokemon.*

Don't pretend you didn't see it coming.

In other words, folks, the forecast is for a veritable hailstorm of name-dropping.  Moreover, there's a good dose of the same je ne sais quoi neurosis that has so irked me. Actually, no, I do know what that neurosis is--a panting, sweaty-palmed lust for beautiful, mysteriously charismatic women who for some reason or other always seem to  fall for the typical Allen protagonist: brilliant, hopelessly romantic doofuses. I mean, I'm all for panting lust and beautiful women and all, but what starts getting weird about the Allen brand of this lies in, I think , two factors:

(1) Woody Allen playing "Mary Sue"** and using his film as art-therapy for his Issues...as himself
(2) Disguising the deeply earthy core of those sexually charged Issues with a heavy varnish of romanticism and jokey self-deprecation, a vast Freudian bonbon

And Midnight was so much more appealing than Allen's preceding variations on this theme precisely for its revision of these elements. For one, Owen Wilson does a great job replacing the Allen Marty Stu, especially with the way he produces his lines, speaking as if with marbles in his cheeks, lumpily and artlessly.  Seeing Allen hit the replay button for his own benefit again and again, living out his erotic fantasies, an eternal (though not ever-youthful) interloper--why buy a movie ticket (or more likely, waste bandwidth streaming a movie) when one can get more than enough of that kind of psychological masturbation in the Fanfic-verse?

Second, Midnight turns the chocolate bonbon inside-out: it's all about, ultimately, the need to recognize and deal first with the thick, difficult, and disturbing outer shell of earthy, physical desire before hitting the core of idealism, higher purpose, and spiritual love that is--and should, and must be-- at the center of everything.

**Spoilers!**

In breaking off his relationship with his fianceé,  in his "minor revelation" that there is always a more halcyon past to imagine returning to (then bidding the woman of his love/lust farewell), and in choosing at last to reside in and make do with the present world first, instead of giving priority to fantasy, this is a perfect movie for dark days.
 **/Spoilers!**

In a world of fleshly desires doomed to remain forever unsatisfied, of pain, of fear and regret and guilt,  Midnight tells us that more fulfilling choice is to refuse to give these things up for a fantasy of perfection. We have to put the world, if only slightly, ahead of our dreams--because without the world, what can dreams really mean? It would be a self-satisfied illusion, a perennial quest for a golden age that never was. There's nothing really wrong with that quest, because that is what being human is about, but we can't afford to forget that we have edged the past in gilt and glamor ourselves.

And that's where the historians come in. (cue heavy metal anthem)


*"I choose you, T.S. Eliot! Use your Mystical Oriental Allusions Attack!" Oh what I would not give to see such a thing.
**Or rather, a Marty Stu (as the diabolically delightful TV Tropes sinkhole-of-productivity explains, there's considerable controversy about the term, but poor Mary/Marty is basically an authorial avatar injected for purposes of wish fulfillment, most frequently in the black, bleak depths of the Fan-verse).

Musings on belief and ritual

(Fushimi-Inari Daisha, Kyoto)

Dear hypothetical readers, I really have no excuses. I have been recovering from my months abroad (i.e., slacking off) at home for nearly ten days now; it's high time to do a little more reflection.

First, a brief disclaimer: I have been raised as, and remain, a nonbeliever. I am convinced that organized religion, particularly those that usurp social and cultural power to the extent that they attempt to exclude alternatives, can be extremely pernicious. At the same time, I have great admiration for what has already been created under such would-be spiritual monopolies, viz. music involving pipe organs, enormous marble statues and mosaics, oil paintings with perhaps unnecessarily sumptuous draperies, etc. Also, it is more than obvious that materialist histories that place intangibles like belief aside are simply lacking--they just do not touch upon the psycho-emotional world that human life cannot be without. For all that, though, attempts to read any doctrine inflicts upon me a throbbing headache, followed by the urge to nap for a couple of hours. [Read: the following may be incredibly shallow and/or somewhat offensive, despite my intention otherwise. Then again, what else is new?]

With that out of the way, onto the post!

Traveling in Japan during the summer meant encountering massive clumps of tourists, of course. I mostly paid visits to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, but these too were crowded with people, from the pimped-out glitter of Ieyasu's shrine/tomb to the relatively subdued Touji temple. Observing the people and the surroundings, the following points were immediately obvious:

1. Ritual observed at temples and shrines were distinctly similar, featuring the same hand- and mouth-washing, coin-tossing, bowing, and clapping. For tourists, of course, there was also frantic photo-taking (or complaining about not being able to take photos in areas that forbade it). And, aside from the peer pressure of hundreds of other tourists in close quarters, authorities put up signs with multilingual "NO PHOTOS" signs at every point that a photo-crazed person might get the urge.

2. Ritual materials also overlapped considerably. Ema (wooden placards with pictures on one side and blank spaces for wishes to be written on the other) and o-mamori (protective charms, usually wooden or paper, the latter folded and inserted in a cloth pouch) I had thought the special province of shrines, but were also offered for sale (and offering) at temples:

(Ema praying for romance.)
(Ema of various designs, Hakodate Kokoku Jinja)
(Fox-faced ema, Fushimi-Inari Daisha, a kitsune, or fox-spirit, shrine)

3. Which leads me to the next characteristic: money was evident everywhere. Money tossed at small stone Buddhas for luck; money stuck into the trunks of ancient trees planted by long-dead, famous emperors; price labels for every charm, stick of incense, candle, and paper fortune on sale.

(Piles of dough at Kinkakuji, Kyoto)
(Coins lodged in the trunk of this old tree Go-Shirakawa of Heike Monogatari fame was supposed to have planted)

Of course, this high profile for $$$ is not limited to Japanese places of worship. But a votive candle or the Pietà seem like quite different ways of displaying sociocultural capital while simultaneously expressing belief. For one, the sensation of being in some of the more tourist-laden shrines was more like strolling through an amusement park or even a department store of gifts (お土産) to buy for friends and family back home. Yet these were indubitably "places of worship"-- on the personal level, there were certain quieter spots and moments of sensory in which I felt something spiritual.

(Kinkakuji again. Not so many people snapping shots of this!)

Moreover, there were people partaking in ritual processes and material consumption of a level that probably seems rather more "faithful" than chucking your 5-yen coins at a stone Bodhisattva of Mercy. One particularly impressive scene: a family was seated in the "Shogun's Room" to the right side of main shrine of the Toushouguu 東照宮 at Nikko, accompanied by a Shinto priest who walked them through making offerings and prayers. This extremely formal occasion occurred less than ten feet from the hall where all we tourists shuffled about making noise and wishing we could blast the place, complete with its portraits of the 36 Japanese "Immortals of Poetry," with photos.

Anyway, the point is that for wearing consumption so conspicuously on their collective sleeves, the shrines/temples/tourist hotspots could not be derogated as not being sacred centers of belief and faith in some way. Which leads me to the principal question that I pondered (half-assedly) as I sweated my way through Kyoto, Nara, and Nikko: to what extent is religion fundamentally about conspicuous consumption and cash changing hands? This is not meant to be disrespectful (though the question is probably not one any devout believer would ask); in what sense are belief, ritual, and commerce one and the same?

(Nara mascots...)

In the broadest view, the three concepts could be understood as one. Commerce and ritual involve a fundamental faith in the continued significance of all social, symbolic, and material elements involved; what good could it do to trade a pear for an apple if one has not some deep belief that there is something meaningful in the trade--that will remain meaningful a hour, a day, or a week after the trade occurs? Similarly, ritual could be called a commerce of a particular stripe, and without sustained belief in the world remaining unchanged enough to give one's ritual act meaning, it could not stand. Such belief can be called faith, for its contents are not known to be a priori fact. (Unlike some atheists, I hold that trust in the scientific method and other positivisms should properly also be called "faith," of the same species as faith in ritual practice.) On the other hand, perhaps faith also requires such rites and exchanges to define it. Could any of the usual dogma of a given organized religion be explained without some idea of exchange included? Rather than denying the intangible of belief a place in more concrete and statistically measurable venues, it seems pretty clear to me that such spirituality must of needs rise from physical origins, for instance the acquisition of a new object or the swinging of a censer. Of course, there's a biological explanation for this, as senses tingling and muscle fibers twitching are inseparable from cogitation.

That was a long detour to the real point, which is that for all the apparent weirdness of shrines that look more like shopping arcades, such consumption is in fact a crucial element of belief and worship in these specifically Japanese instances and, I believe (punny!), in all organized religion at large. It's easy to condemn the "lack of spirituality" in things like these polylingual, obviously tourist-targeted fortune-selling machines,

but is it really so bad to acknowledge openly the inseparability of belief and trade? I for one thought it was refreshing to throw my coins into the collection boxes before bowing, clapping and praying to the gods and Buddha. It would help the priests and monks preserve their historical buildings and lovely landscaping, and maybe help get the attention of the divine, too.

(Touji, Kyoto)

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:

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.]

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.

*Intense folks who want to read the original from 1624 in Chinese, see here. Those who rather prefer Wikipedia, sidle on over here.

** Original here. It's pretty rousing stuff.

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"...

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.

Shoutoku: The Man, The Myth, The...Angst?

Who doesn't like some déshabillé period costume ?

Just finished reading Yamagishi Ryouko's epic Hi no izuru tokoro no tenshi [『日の出ずる処の天子』Ruler of the Land of the Rising Sun], which ran from 1980 to 1984. In a sentence, the 10-volume (in Chinese translation; I believe the bunko version in Japanese is 7-8 volumes total) was

REVISIONIST JAPANESE HISTORY, JERRY SPRINGER STYLE.

Maybe that makes the book sound unpalatable to some readers, but believe me when I say that this is not "so horrible it's good." It's so good it's horrifying. At least, enough people thought so that the work won a Kondansha Manga Award in 1983.

First, the art: Yamagishi Ryouko is famed as one of the pioneering female mangaka who jump-started the shoujo manga or "girls' comics" movement--the so-called "Year-24 Group" (二十四年組), or "Forty-niners," who were born in 1949 and were among the first women to enter the Japanese comics-making world. Most of this group's work would thus be considered rather old-school by the aesthetic terms of modern manga. Take this page from Kaze to ki no uta, by Yamagishi's fellow Year-24er Takemiya Keiko:
Major characteristics of classic shoujo from authors in this generation include stylized, glamorous-looking protagonists, cartoony cariactures in the supporting cast, an unironic abundance of flowers, pointillist bubbles, and sparklies, and an earnest deployment of coventions such as vertical lines on the face, which denote shock and/or fear. No CG technology here, folks--all the toner and ink carefully hand-applied. Most of the lines are highly organic and finished, in contrast to some of today's authors, who may strive for a "rougher" or "simpler" look. On top of all this, Yamagishi demonstrated a decided fondness for period costume and, to a lesser extent, other material bits of history (her interiors never as dense as Takemiya's, nor her page layouts as complex and thickly packed). To wit, a page from Hi no izuru:
Now that the aesthetic context is gotten out of the way, onto the juicy part. The story concerns the exploits of young Prince Shoutoku [CE 574-622], known also as Prince Umayado [厩戸]. As most know him, Shoutoku was a promulgator of Chinese culture--Buddhism and Confucian values*--as exemplified in his patronage of temples: Shitennoji, and the magnificent Houryuuji. The "Seventeen-Article Constitution" that Wikipedia so helpfully calls "one of the earliest moral dictatorial documents in history" is generally attributed to him, as well. In case you, hypothetical reader, cares, the moral injunctions were mostly pretty "duh": obeying imperial commands, not rushing to decisions by one's lonesome, etc. Awesomely, until the 1890 Meiji constitution came into effect, this document was completely valid. Even today, the Japanese constitution does not technically override it.*

Anyway, Shou-chan is a very respected figure, indeed almost a saintly one, though apparently some have disputed his existence (not to mention the attributions of various things to him). Even so, he was on Japanese currency until 1984:

Don't make me get all moralistic on your a$$, yo.

Now, go and look at that pretty picture at the beginning again. Yep. Yamagishi intended it to be the same man. The flowers+hair loops visualization has apparently stuck; here's a cover from Ikeda Ryoko's Prince Shoutoku manga, which was published about a decade later [you betcha there have been some debates about Ikeda plagiarizing from Yamagishi]:

Mmm, beefy.

Anyway, here we've got a most efflorescent coiffureal delicious case of historifandom--if the pictures don't do enough to convince you, then the DRAMA better. Not to spoil anybody [warning, spoilers imminent], but if the following plot elements don't reek of TEH DRAMUS characteristic of (histori)fandom, I'm not sure what will:

-Countless plots to horribly murder various important people, quite a few of which succeed

-Quasi-incestuous marriages between step-parents and -children
-Actual incest [which, by the way, the reader sees from a mile away but is like unto a runaway locomotive in its relentless momentum], consummated via deceitful trickery
-Illegitimate children who represent about 80% of the births in the book, the most plot-central of which result from suspiciously endogamous sex
-Nonconsensual sexual acts
-Dream [GHEI] sex
-General homoerotics, riddled with more angst and Unresolved Sexual Tension than a gay Harry Potter "deathfic" and all kinds of gender issues
-Issues of which are mostly manifest in Shoutoku's repeated and highly successful cross-dressing
-Suicidal thoughts and attempts so far up the frigging wazoo that it's probably come out on the other end
-Trippy-as-hell and very distressing dreams, visions, out-of-body experiences, ESP, telekinesis, telepathy...Shoutoku will kill you with his mind

In this delightful melting-pot of freakishness, Yamagishi mixed a beautiful, cold, traumatized Prince Umayado, his [very obvious] love interest Soga no Emishi, various historically recorded folks from the Soga clan, the imperial line, and what feels like everywhere else. The thing is over two thousand pages long, so here I'll just discuss why I think this particular bit of revision is so engrossing quickly.

1. Yamagishi plotted her political and romantic intrigues with great mastery: gripping, intense, but not quite so over the top that one lost a deep engagement with the story. Mostly, she achieved this by plumbing the vast casts' psychologies with consistent dexterity. Emishi isn't just a stupid 6th-century frat boy, though that could have been his lot. His ultimate rejection of Umayado is so devastating because the reader believes that, for one, it might not have been that way "if only...", and for another, Yamagishi gives us so much insight into the human torments of the characters that we feel all the proper mono-no-aware catharsis.

2. The art feels sometimes archaic and a little stiff, but there's something about classic manga's willingness to conventialize and stylize that reveals the medium's parity to other highly formulaic yet nonetheless engaging visual genera, i.e. noh or Peking opera. It's a little silly when Umayado can't seem to put his hand on anything without making it look as delicate as possible, but then again, arguably that's part of manga's heritage from more traditional Japanese art. Where she needs it, Yamagishi makes use of the image's power to "tell all."

In short, the images and words together convey an immense, realistically textured emotional universe for not just the protagonists, but all the major characters. There are not too many absolutes in Yamagishi's world. Just about everyone is capable of making the reader groan in frustration, recoil in horror, or smile.

3. Also importantly, the manga isn't shy about its facts. The machinations of Soga no Umako, Emishi's doggedly conventional father, and virtually all of the characters, are situated with what was a surely considerable amount of research. The politics of 6th-century Japan are not just about sleeping with sisters and cross-dressing to impress, but related to international history: the Paekche-Koguryo-Silla standoff on the Korean peninsula, for instance, is of great import to the cast--and even if the reader didn't have any clue about the situation, its immediacy in the story. On the mainland, the Sui dynasty exterminates the Chen and unites a huge swathe of formerly divided territory. And, of course, the title takes its title from the famous missive Shoutoku wrote to the Sui emperor in 607: "From the ruler of the land of the rising sun, to the ruler of the land of the setting sun, greetings...."

To draw hundred of pages in quest of the legendary creature who wrote those haughty words and coined the phrase "Nihon" is impressive enough, but to give these long-dead folks, often without much more than a name, the dimensionality of people trying to cope with their situations, their emotions, their pasts, is truly the most admirable point of good history as well as good historical fiction. Sometimes the boundary isn't so clear, and verification almost seems unimportant. Yamagishi's Shoutoku, with his angelically beautiful androgyny, a boy by turns cruel, vulnerable, brilliant, loveable, domineering, and passionate, is nothing like the moralizing gentleman with a respectable beard whose portrait is printed in history books. But his divergence from that man fails to signify after we pass through the landscape that Yamagishi drew for him. That's the sign of the best kind of historifandom: with enough power that it can stand alongside what is conventionally accepted as "reality," in a strange and attractive symbiosis.

Basically, if you have time to spare and would like to spend it marathoning through an epic of some kind, Hi no izuru is an excellent choice. Have another nice thing to look at, to whet your appetite:

From left to right: Prince Umayado, Futsuhime, Emishi, and his sister Tojikome. Aka Emishi and his harem. Damn frat boys with Mickey Mouse hair always get the fun.

*Yeah, they didn't really have Buddhism in Japan back then. Crazy, huh? They even had a war over it. They didn't even have horses in Yamato until the late 4th century CE. And there was even a time...(hushed voice) when Japan didn't have domesticated rice. That's right. NO SUSHI. It must have been terrible.
**Oh Wikipedia, educational as always.

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.

For the love of monkeys

When Carl "My Inspiration, Basically" Pyrdum at Got Medieval started posting about images of monkeys, I was inspired. Also, I laughed, cried, and gave it many thumbs up. And people should give him a super-duper Medieval Lit job.

But returning to my inspiration: I knew that someone had to do something about Chinese monkeys, and where better to start than with the Chinese monkey, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven齐天大圣, the mighty Sun Wukong 孙悟空, the Beautiful Monkey King 美猴王，the immortal Simian 猢狲himself!*

Behold! My fuzzy cheeks, my rosy glow, my large magical stick. Sorry, I'm a celibate Buddhist, and besides, the dude who created me invested in me the vices of Pride and Anger, not Lust or Gluttony.
(Image from the nostalgia-riffic mid-1980s CCTV show, with the opera star Liuxiao Lingtong as Mr. Sun)

The goal of this post is to take an initial look at some representations of the Awesome Ape** over time and in various media, and to muse about why a monkey, of all creatures, became the uncontested hero of this extremely influential story.*** In general, the trend seemed to be one of "domestication," especially considering that this block-print, dated by the authoritative Wikipedia to the 16th century, depicts a rather more bestial incarnation:

("Pilgrim Sun." Frontispiece from the oldest surviving copy of the Journey to the West, c. 1590.)

I am pretty sure that this isn't His Apeness way back before he learns human ways, because he's wearing clothes and has got his magical staff from the Sea Palace. In fact, this is probably supposed to beSun the Pilgrim (the label in the left margin says as much). So even in his role as protector and disciple of the sutra-seeking monk Tripitaka, Wukong looked a bit more au naturel. He's also blending in nicely with that peach tree behind him. Maybe the hairiness is a side-effect more of printing technology than of any initial visual type, but that would require looking at more illustrations from later copies, which maybe one day I can convince someone to pay me to do.

On the stage, Lord Monkey acquired a more standardized look. Here he is as the Great Sage, with the long partridge feathers of a warrior and the yellow robes of a ruler:

And here he is as a more modest Pilgrim en route to India with his master.

Dramatic****, coded facial makeup is emblematic of Peking opera in general, but note the decidedly nonhuman features highlighted by the contrasting red and white, and the orange fabric balls for extra-large monkey ears. But of course, these bold, recognizable colors and patterns are also a way to "tame" the hairy, bulgy-eyed Ape of earlier times into brightly-colored familiarity for theatergoers.

More recent iterations began to get creative. Witness Sakai Masaaki-san as the Sage in the 1978 Monkey [also Monkey Magic!] (or as I like to call it, "the more politically incorrect Journey to the West TV series"). Compare his relatively more "normal" skin and hair color to the CCTV Wukong, as well as the abstracted monkey-ness of the opera makeup.

Next comes the many faces of Goku from that venerable, ridiculous, and horrifically unattractive anime known as Dragonball***** that I nonetheless watched for lack of anything else (oh, bygone days when no American kid watched weird Japanese shows instead of hearty, patriotic, made-in-the-USA cartoons). The link (as far as I know) between this Goku (the Japanese pronunciation for "Wukong") and our favorite simian are tenuous. Apparently sometimes this one has a tail, and he can fly around on a cloud. Also, he is powerful. More interesting is that his hair grows really long when he enters "Super Saiyan mode"--a kind of lycanthropic (simithropic?) transformation, a bestial reversion maybe.

(AM I PORCUPINE OR MONKEY OR MAYBE A BUNCH OF POLYGONS??)

The tension between Wukong's conformation to Buddhist (or in some cases Daoist) tenets such as mercy and patience and his "wild," impulsive streak forms some of the central conflicts in Journey to the West, the primary one being between Monkey and his master Tripitaka. But how ironic that it seems to be this very "human" weakness of impatience and pride that is contrasted to the virtues of an actual human (Tripitaka)! Plus, as I'll discuss in more detail below, Tripitaka is not the hero of Journey--so it's really these "untamed" qualities of the Monkey King that attract our human admiration, even as his image was domesticated.

But of course then postmodernity and that dang globalized media thing has to go and screw the trend of domestication up (in that annoying half-assed postmodern way). So we got the anomaly of a pretty much human looking beefy hero named Goku who "reverted" by growing long bushy blond hair. Japan of the late 1990s brought us another charming version of Goku:

(Son Goku from the manga Saiyuki by Minekura Kazuya which, though not overtly ghei, is ghei by (many) implications.)

Bushy hair, check. Stick, check. Traveling-clothes, check. You don't know this, but occasional outbursts of violence in a weremonkeyish manner, also check. The weird thing is this Goku's childlike image; indeed, instead of being basically the only competent member of Tripitaka's little party, this Goku is kind of airheaded. It's Sanzou (Japanese rendition of Sanzang, in turn the Chinese rendition of Tripitaka) who's the cool operator. Then again, Sanzou uses a revolver to blast demons away while Hakkai (Bajie/Pigsy) is an emo one-eyed user of "ki blasts." So. Some revisionism here. What meaning does this have, aside from indicating the popularity of dark-drama manga that transcends traditional genre barriers? Unclear. But I should point out that Goku retains something apart from the obvious from the original novel--his asexuality. This is something that'll be important when I take a look at the history of monkeys in older folklore.

Here we have a Jet Li-Monkey from the recent Forbidden Kingdom, which I haven't seen but in which I am mildly and guiltily interested. The armor's been updated--no more tacky yellows and reds! It also has a bit of a Japanese look to it, but maybe it's supposed to be Tang-style. But importantly--nothing really very apelike about this Sage except for the hair. The more "natural" blond hair (as opposed to the heavy-duty goldenrod of the CCTV version), tied in a not-very-Chinesey tall ponytail. This man looks more like what a Chinese person who'd never seen a blond Caucasian might imagine one to be like (hairy, very hairy, with slightly sketchy grin) than an animal.

(Damn, that looks soooo itchy.)

And finally, Sun Wukong (as far as I am aware, he is known by this name and not Son Goku) from the very recently released Musou Orochi 2: Maou Sairin video game by the Japanese company Koei. His attitude resembles that of a surfer more than that of a Buddhist pilgrim, and he allies himself with the (eeeevil) monk Taira no Kiyomori, who takes Tripitaka's place in freeing the Monkey.

(Thanks to http://koeiwarriors.co.uk/ for the image.)

As far as I can tell, the Sage looks like (again) a "foreigner" with weird hair more than he does a monkey, tail aside (even the tail looks like an accessory and not a hint of a deep bestial nature). Perhaps coinciding with a man-objectifying trend I identified in a post some time ago, he's got a really impressive midsection.

To sum it up, from the initial publication of the Journey to the West to the twentieth century, it seemed like the general trend in image/imaginings of the Monkey King was one of codification and concomitant domestication. He was powerful, but not an object of terror. The narrative of the novel also concerns the Monkey's taming, of course. As some people who know vastly more than I will ever know about this have written, the Monkey's journey is one of being appropriated by the strictures of religion and made not only human but holy, rather like a Chinese St. Christopher.****** The Monkey of Journey is, however, the inheritor of two traditions, neither of which is quite as friendly. The first is that of the White Ape, whose legends mostly concern the kidnapping and raping of human women (some of whom apparently could be bestialized by the experience and "forget" their humanity). This obviously threatening figure is a target of men's attacks, and ultimately dies at their hands--a dangerous, racially distinct Other intent on "stealing" womenand subverting human society tameable only by violence. The ethnic quality of the White Ape's otherness seems especially striking when recalling the blondness of several of the images of the Monkey above, and particularly of the recent versions. Monkey-as-foreigner is thus one mode.

The other is that of the rebellious ape, a Titan-like creature born naturally of the earth and locked in battle with a god in the form of a young man. This monkey is not nearly as obviously evil or dangerous as the White Ape, and it's pretty clear that its attempts to usurp a "higher" authority are echoed in the Monkey's pre-pilgrimage exploits. Basically, then, the monkey was a symbol of conflict between chaotic earthly forces and lawful human ones--the pivot being a threatening sexuality, which, as I pointed out, Sun Wukong does not have. That, I think, is an important factor that puts him, and not the actually more human-looking Sandy (Shasen) or the actually human Tripitaka, in the role of the hero.

Sandy's in fact not a very central character in the party, so let me look more closely at Sun Wukong, Tripitaka, and Pigsy (Bajie/Hakkai) instead, because they represent three ways for the reader to identify with the action.

Tripitaka's the only human being--so there's a superficial level of self-recognition for the reader. Furthermore, he's the most spiritually accomplished in the human world-order of Buddhism. Of course, he's a sexual teetotaler, being a holy monk and all, but there's a crucial difference from Monkey's abstinence: he lacks sexual agency. It's not only his being a monk that emasculates him, but his personality (vacillating, credulous) and his looks (effete, and outright "tasty" to the various demons that try to eat and/or have sex with him). Not something a virile young reader would want to fully sympathize with.

(In some cases, Tripitaka has been actually played by an actress, as here in Monkey. Cute, though <3.)

Pigsy, on the other hand, is bestial, even monstrously so, and voracious in both sexual and literal appetite. He's the sins of greed and lust made obvious in a porcine package. His failings also include, however, incompetence at defeating demons/protecting Tripitaka (all of his abilities are explicitly described as inferior to Wukong's), and dishonesty. He's an aspect of human weakness, but the most repulsive one of these three main characters.

(I do recognize that pigs are in fact intelligent, cool animals. But most 16th-century Chinese probably didn't.)

Thus Monkey is the only one left to make our hero, and the fact that the first major section of the novel is actually all about Monkey's exploits only reinforces that link. For a contemporary reader Wukong didn't have the sexual "gross-out" factor of either looking too girlishly feeble or too disgustingly greedy. The motifs of sexual/racial threat are still in the imagination of His Monkeyness, but apparently neutralized into abstract representations of his identity as the Monkey.

It was the Royal Ape's very human self-discipline, capability, intelligence, along with his irrepressible impulsiveness and irreverence that made a perfect hero. Novels and print culture are associated with an early modern consciousness in Europe--though the appellation has only been controversially applied to China, maybe the Great Sage's intense individualism in the face of Confucian authority, along with his presence in a widely printed novel, could be an argument for a similar spirit in the Ming and Qing.


*He is a man(?) of many faces, of many passions, of many Risible and Old-Fashioned Literal Translations... [BTW, I am delighted to note that my Chinese input system automatically supplied these proper nouns. Even the computer is a fan.]
**Not an actual epithet, but one I am sure His Awesomeness would appreciate.
***If you need a refresher, or maybe just a fresher, on what the hell is going on here with the monkeys and pilgrimages and Buddhist satire, here's a rundown.
**** Badummmmp!
*****For sake of simplicity, have omitted other suffix letters (Z, S, etc.)
******See Whalen Lai's article, "From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint." 1994.