We are looking for an assistant to archive and document the Paradise Systems Chinese comics library. Must be comfortable reading Chinese comics (simplified and traditional) and writing about them in English. A background in translation is a plus. We will be working together to organize, preserve, and document the library in text and images. You'll work from the PS headquarters in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, NY. Flexible hours, looking for one half day per week for the duration of the project, likely a few months. We can offer you $25 per hour.
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Image description: A photo of a wooden bookshelf full volumes from China. Two books by Wang XX are visible, as well as Mr Men by Anusman and books by Yan Cong and Zuo Ma.
I’m a big fan of cross-cultural mashups of folktales, myths, and legends, and of creative misreadings that twist familiar tales into strange shapes. The ancient story in Liezi of the craftsman Master Yan who built an automaton for King Mu of Zhou has the compelling ingredients—a skilled engineer, a sophisticated mechanical man who seduces palace maidens, a jealous monarch—that make it ripe for reinterpretation by present-day science fiction and fantasy writers interested in exploring robots, love, and AI.
The following piece takes a more folkloric approach, concocting a wonderfully off-the-wall story (masquerading as a folktale from Zhumadian, Henan) out of a blend of Liezi’s account and several other well-known elements. The story diverges from Liezi right from the start by reanalyzing 偃师 Yǎn shī [“Master Yan”] as the ancient settlement of Yanshi, now a district of Luoyang. It hit a sweet spot for me when I first read it on Christmas, 2017, and I’ve pulled the translation out every Easter and Christmas since then to tackle the bilingual puns. It’s coming up on Easter again and I’ve finally accepted the fact that I won’t ever crack them. So here’s an English version that doesn’t quite capture the clever humor of the original.
This translation is posted with permission from the author, a folklore scholar who posts on Douban under the name Misandao 蜜三刀.
A Story of the Birth of Christ
by Misandao
Liezi tells the story of the wooden puppet of Yanshi, describing how King Mu of Zhou passed through Yanshi in Henan on an inspection tour and was introduced to a carpenter, Yuese [“Joseph”] by name, from the Western Regions. This carpenter made for the king a mechanical man that could talk, sing, dance, and make all manner of expressions. Delighted, the king brought his beloved concubine Sheng Ji to see the curio, but to everyone’s surprise, when the wooden puppet saw how beautiful she was, it made a pass at her. The king was incensed and ordered the carpenter killed. Yuese was forced to flee that night with his wife Ma Liya [“Maria”]. The torrential Yellow River lay to the north of Yanshi, so they had to flee south, traveling in such haste that they had made no arrangements for lodging along the way but could only find refuge for the night in the stable of a large inn.
When he awoke the next morning, Yuese the carpenter saw the inn’s name on the sign hanging outside: Zhumadian 驻马店, “Horse Garrison Inn.” He knew this was a sign from heaven, for his wife’s surname was Ma [“horse”]. And so he settled there under the assumed name “Lu Ban” and made a living building houses and tool handles. Lu Ban’s superb carpentry skills and attractive, sturdy handles made his work popular with the locals. The couple bought a house and property and lived a decent life with just one imperfection to speak of: hunted as they were by the king’s army, the carpenter’s wife had lost a child well into a pregnancy and was never able to conceive again.
Lu Ban’s wife wanted children, and Lu Ban hoped for issue to carry on his craft. Every night after work, the two of them would lie in bed and sigh in despair. One day, Lu Ban’s wife said to him, “With all your skill at woodworking, why not make us a child?” Inspired, Lu Ban went into a frenzy of work shut up inside his shop where no one could see what he was making.
On the sixth day, which happened to coincide with the winter solstice, Lu Ban proclaimed, “Woman, come quickly and take a look. We have a child!” His wife hurried over but saw nothing but her husband lying exhausted on the floor of a workshop covered in sawdust and paint (this is why all carpenters thereafter have rested one day of every seven). She was just about to help him to his feet when all of a sudden a plump, naked baby tumbled into her arms with a cry of “Mama!” She looked closer: Oh! What an adorable child. She was beside herself with joy.
When the people of Zhumadian heard that Lu Ban had a child at long last, they came to offer their congratulations, and the village head even brought gifts of eggs, millet, and solstice dumplings fresh from the pot so the carpenter’s wife could take her month’s rest. However, a few gossipy married ladies kept talking behind her back about how they’d never seen her pregnant, so how had she given birth to such a big baby all of a sudden?
Rumors and gossip spread, and it was even suggested that the carpenter’s wife had gotten involved with a monk at the temple. Naturally, Lu Ban couldn’t reveal that their son was the work of his hands in wood rather than his wife’s biological child, so he simply told people that on one occasion when he had been asked to craft a statue of Guanyin for the local temple, the very night the statue was finished the two of them had dreamed an identical dream of Lady Guanyin saying that she would send a child from heaven as their reward.
When the carpenter’s son grew up, he followed in his dad’s footsteps as a skilled woodworker, building homes and making furniture for people far and wide. The lack of clocks in ancient times was a major inconvenience, but the young carpenter rose early for work and returned home late, giving him time to observe the heavens and granting him the knowledge of the changing of days. And so at the gate of every town and village, he erected a crossbar to mark the time by reckoning the sun’s shadow. He made them tall and sturdy enough to withstand the wind and rain, and over time these crosses became the emblem of Zhumadian’s carpenters.
Since the crosses were used as a standard basis (“jīzhǔn”) for inspecting and monitoring (“dūchá”) the passage of time, they were known by the abbreviated term “jī-dū crosses,” but as the years passed and the story was handed down, people ended up calling the carpenter who invented the crosses “Jīdū” [“Christ”], and his original name was all but forgotten.
From A Collection of Folk Stories, Songs, and Proverbs from Zhumadian, mimeographed edition.
(Source: 蜜三刀《基督诞生的故事》，豆瓣，2017.12.25)
Notes
The spurious citation provided in the story is to a nonexistent edition of an actual collection, part of a series devoted to local folk tales and songs throughout China.
The story of Master Yan and King Mu of Zhou is found in the “Questions of Tang” 汤问 chapter of Liezi 列子, a 4th century Daoist text. The 1912 translation by Lionel Giles is a popular one, but Graham’s 1960 translation doesn’t appear to be online. Lu Ban 鲁班 was a craftsman in the Zhou dynasty who lived around five centuries after King Mu, and was the legendary inventor of several carpentry tools and a cloud ladder for siege warfare, among other devices. Notably, Liezi’s account of Master Yan concludes with a mention of Lu Ban, declaring that his cloud ladder and Mozi’s wooden kite both pale in comparison to the automaton.
The author informs me that after he wrote this story, he discovered that according to the scholar Feng Shi 冯时, there is indeed a connection between the oracle bone character for 督 dū “monitor” and the sun’s shadow.
Like all popular novels, when something sets a trend, many imitators follow suit, until the formula becomes its own genre of sorts.
FSYY is one such genre setter. Specifically, the "Battle of Arts" (斗法) formula, where immortals and deities are added into a historical event——usually a war, but it can also be something like Admiral Zheng He's voyage——and proceed to use said setting as an excuse to battle it out using spells, magical treasures, and formations.
It's such an enduring formula, late Qing novels were still following it. And because it's the 19th century, western technology and ideas were entering China and making their way into popular culture.
My first exposure to the results comes from Legends of the Eight Immortal Attaining the Dao (八仙得道传), where the narrator occasionally interrupts the story and goes: "Electricity-based technology is totally the work of Mother Lightning, guys!"
Why am I telling you all these random facts? Because Ping Jinchuan ("Quelling the Golden Stream") is that, but turned up to eleven.
Technically, FSYY is set in Shang dynasty China. Technically, Ping Jinchuan is an obscure 1899 novel about the quelling of rebellions in Qinghai and Tibet during the 18th century by the historical general Nian Gengyao.
However, considering that FSYY has 11th century BCE gunpowder weapons, and...the entirety of Ping Jinchuan, I really doubt the claim of the latter novel's author that the story is based on the eye witness accounts of his ancestor, who worked as an advisor under Nian Gengyao.
But if you insist, here's a rough summary of the historical background: the first war Nian fought in Tibet happened during the reign of Kangxi, because the Dzungar Khanate invaded Tibet.
The second rebellion Nian quelled in Qinghai, during the reign of Yongzheng, was started by Lobzang Tendzin. He fought against the Dzungar Khanate with the help of Qing army, but rebelled together with local chiefdoms and Mongol leaders when he was not granted the rulership of Tibet afterwards.
(Confusingly enough, during the reign of Qianlong, there were also 2 other rebellions by the chieftains of "Greater and Lesser Jinchuan" in northwestern Sichuan, which might be where the novel's name came from.)
Naturally, the novel proceeds to tell a "Battle of Arts" story, about Tibetan Buddhist monks, Muslims, Daoist sages, and the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church duking it out with typical Shenmo novel treasures...and 19th century magitek.
There is potential for some serious analysis about Qing military expansion, violence on the frontiers, how foreign religions and people are perceived through the framework of popular fiction, etc. But honestly, after seeing the above summary, are you really here for *that*?
I'm not, because I don't know nearly enough about the historical context, and the entire premise is ridiculous enough to defy any attempt at taking it seriously——unless the attempts are ironic.
Case In Point
The novel starts off pretty tame: Lobzang Tendzin, "King of Jinchuan", wanted to send his own Dalai Lama candidate to Tibet after the previous Dalai's death, as part of a power ploy to make himself the de facto ruler of Tibet.
He allied himself with Galdan, the Dzungar ruler, to force the Tibetans to accept his candidate at gunpoint——literally.
Their firearms and cannons got stopped by a Lama named Ding Chan, who used his meditation power to summon divine warriors and fend off the first wave of attack.
However, his meditation was broken by the plight of Jinchuan soldiers disguised as female refugees, and later, Galdan assassinated him in his sleep with a firing squad during a treaty talk organized by the Qing.
Emperor Yongzheng was not happy and sent Nian Gengyao and Yue Zhongqi to quell the rebellion. Also, Nian is actually the Heavenly Dog Star incarnate, who learned martial arts, classics, war strategy, and all sorts of neat stuff in his youth from a poor Buddhist monk.
Later, said monk and Yue's master sent a bunch of their disciples to Nian and Yue as reinforcement, before the battle began.
Then, in Chapter 4, Nan Guotai was introduced as the fictional son of the historical Belgian missionary, Ferdinand Verbiest. Nicknamed "Little Lu Ban", he was well-versed in the arts of western machinery and firearms, and the first sign of the story going completely off the rails.
The first "Battle of the Arts" round was pretty standard——Five Phase Formation, magical breaths, treasures. But Nan was ordered to make 15 "mechanical carts" that could produce flames, in conjunction with a field of landmines, to assist in the breaking of the Five Phase Formation.
Despite the similarity, they aren't tanks, but more like...trapped cargo trailers/RVs. Basically, they had "doors and windows" with built-in mechanisms that only allowed entry into the carts and could not be opened from the inside, and once the enemies were trapped, the carts became giant incinerators.
After losing the first round, the King of Jinchuan put up a recruitment poster for "talented followers of the Three Religions"...except the Three Religions weren't Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, but Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism, since the story is set in Qinghai, where there was a notable population of Hui people (Chinese Muslims).
After seeing the poster, Galdan's wife decided to seek help from her own master, the Patriarch of the Snowy Mountains. He is a Muslim sage with 12 powerful disciples...who all wielded typical Daoist treasures.
They all got overshadowed by the next round of Steampunk Shenmo Battle, though, when an unrelated Daoist showed up with his trump card: "Strong Water", a.k.a. magical hydrochloric acid.
The magical HCI was then put into giant glass syringes and fired at Nian's troops, resulting in significant casualties. To bypass the HCI syringe cannons, Nan unrevealed his latest invention: the Skysoar Orb, a.k.a. hot air balloon.
The Qing troops then mounted firearms and cannons onto the air balloon, flew it above Galdan's camp to a height where the HCI syringes couldn't reach, and started shooting. However, they were all mortals, and got decimated when the enemy immortals flew up to take control of the balloons, forcing an emergency landing via needles.
After that, the hot air balloon was manned entirely by immortals, until Galdan covered his camp in a mesh of barbed wires, blocking the aerial fire but also making it impossible for him to use his own HCI syringes.
Then a little 13 years old immortal, Gengsheng the Acolyte, joined the Qing army, who's the reincarnation of the Lama executed by Galdan's firing squad. Abandoned at birth and adopted by a Daoist master, he was able to fly on clouds since he was 8-9 years old, which he used to travel to Europe.
While he was there, a Swedish sage gifted him a powerful treasure——the Electricity Whip, which can be used to electrocute people to death...but also magically heal injuries with its currents.
I have trouble visualizing the thing. Is it a literal whip of lightning arcs (since it's described as being able to turn into a white beam), a taser, an electric cattle prod, a plasma whip, or the unholy lovechild of all the above plus a tesla coil?
Hilariously, the Electricity Whip treasure of the Nikola Tesla Sect (/sarcasm) stopped working when exposed to "dirty stuff" such as a woman's magical handkerchief. Classic folk magic style.
After a bunch of boring fighting sequences, 6 of the 12 disciples of the Patriarch decided to get the big formations out, which were broken by buckets of pig blood.
…Yeah, that's pretty much the extent of the author's understanding of Hui customs and Islam. (sigh) The surviving disciples went to get the Patriarch for help, who casted an AOE spell of poisonous smoke, water and fire to block the Qing troops' path...
Annnnnd Nan to the rescue again! With the help of Nian Gengyao's monk master, he built the Earth Travel Cart: a magitek subway train shaped like a pangolin, able to carry a hundred people and move a hundred Li per hour. It didn't need rails, you just dug a hole in the ground, put the train in, and it started tunneling through the earth on its own.
The entire army used 500 of these magical subway trains to bypass the Patriarch's AOE spell coverage, forcing them to retreat to their home base, Tianshan (Heavenly Mountain). Which is a real mountain range in central Asia and Xinjiang province, and going there from Qinghai is plausible. Kinda.
I'm still skeptical about the novel's claim that the path through Tianshan is the only path leading into Jinchuan proper, but whatever.
The Patriarch put his most powerful formation on said mountain pass——the Ice Freeze Formation, which will insta-freeze immortals, mortals, and flying birds alike when they step in range.
Then comes the craziest part of the entire novel. Honestly, everything after this chapter is pretty boring and formulaic, which makes it the perfect note for this article to end on.
Nan suddenly revealed that the current Roman Pope is the grandson of Matteo Ricci, who's the mentor of Nan's dad, and took his hot air balloon to Rome to get reinforcement. To no one's surprise, the Pope's treasure is a cross.
The Pope agreed and took his 12 disciples——supposedly because it's the same as the number of apostles——to the snowy mountain.
He gave a cross and a white candle to each of his disciples; they walked straight into the Ice Formation and broke it by holding the two holy objects up in the air, while loudly chanting (a highly localized translation of) "Hail Mary!"
After making his grand entrance, the Pope neutralized the Patriarch's spell attacks and turned his last disciples' army of soldiers back into their true forms——a bunch of farm animals.
He then told the disciples that as the Roman Pope, he had authority over "Russia, England, France, Netherlands" and all the European nations, and he'd leave the Patriarch to mind his own business if he surrendered and stopped interfering in the war.
Three of the four examples he gave aren't even Catholic, but maybe the Protestant Reformation just never happened in this novel's 18th century world because Pope Magic.
The Patriarch accepted the cease-fire treaty, went back to teach his religion to the population of northwestern China, and that's pretty much it. His last female disciple (Galdan's wife) got her troops' firearms neutralized by the Pope's cross, taken prisoner, and executed by Nian.
After revealing that the Qing immortals' power also came from the Grace of Our Lord and Savior, and that was why westerners couldn't use spells (but could make electricity-based treasures?), the Pope flew back to Rome on Nan's air balloon, exiting the novel once and for all.
Which is a pity, because in the second half of the novel, one of the defeated foes escaped to (Ottoman?) Turkey to beg their king for reinforcement, and the Russian Tsar agreed to help the Jinchuan troops to make his French wife happy. I want my Papal 13 vs. Russian Orthodox Bishops Shenmo battle, dammit!
Food for thought: if the Pope was Matteo Ricci's grandson, and Matteo Ricci was also a mentor of Ferdinand Verbiest, Nan's dad (historically, Ricci died 13 years before Verbiest was even born)...
...Is this a timeline where the Jesuits won the Rites Controversy, Ricci cultivated himself into the first Catholic immortal, and ushered in the age of Syncretic Daoist-Catholic Steampunk?
-Giant automaton. Made by Nan, like every other magitek treasure in this novel that isn’t the Swedish sage’s Electricity Whip. It wields a giant hammer, and its inside is packed with gunpowder, which blew an enemy general to smithereens when the automaton fell and he tried to finish it off with a hammer strike.
-WW1 style steel helmets and what appeared to be bulletproof vests made of hair, worn by Turkish soldiers. Can fully block gunfire and cannonfire from the Qing troops. Sadly, it doesn't protect against 50 carts of gunpowder, 500 carts of oil, and a giant forest fire.
-"Flying Pagoda". A literal flying watchtower that can hover in midair, piloted by Nan.
-"Thousand Mile Mirror". A telescope.
-Inflatable rafts. Using a Japanese-produced plank as its hull, and surrounded by a ring of "fabric sails", it can naturally float when placed in water. The Qing troops used it to survive the flood when the Jinchuan army breached the nearby river dam.
-"Water Dragons", Nan's own hydraulic cannons. Mounted on the hot air balloons and used to create an artificial downpour.
-Bamboo plumbing pipes. Used to flood a city in stubborn defiance of the laws of fluid dynamics and hydraulic engineering.
-Compasses. They existed hundreds of years before the historical 18th century, but the one Nan used had mercury in the needles. Doesn't work inside a supernatural sandstorm.
-"Cotton Mud". Basically concrete. Russians and all the western armies used it to build cannon batteries.
-Giant heliobeam. Like Archimedes' heat ray, but the mirror used to reflect sunlight is mounted on a hot air balloon. Used to blow up the gunpowder warehouse of the Jinchuan army. Nan said it was "modified" from a microscope, which raises all sorts of terrifying possibilities about this world’s tech trees.
I have a real fondness for madcap adventure novels from this period.
There’s a point two-thirds of the way into The Orchid Dream 蘭花夢奇傳 when the hero Song Baozhu cables the emperor to report she has driven the rebels out of Qing territory. It’s not the first incursion of the modern world into a traditional-feeling narrative—steamships and western guns are mentioned in an earlier episode—but here it feels especially jarring coming on the heels of a sorcerer’s attempted assassination via flying sword launched from a mouth-projected beam of light.
As for Gengsheng’s electro-whip, the artist for the first edition doesn’t seem to have had much of an idea, either. And is there a reason why he’s clothed like the Michelin Man?
I was tagged a while back by @davesgonechina at the end of a Twitter exchange he had with Jess Nevins about the late Qing magical war novel
For the month leading up to the launch of The Lantern and the Night Moths (officially releasing on April 2nd, 2024), my forthcoming book of translated Chinese poetry and essays on translation, I have decided to make mini-profiles for each of the five poets included in the anthology to help folks get to know the poets.
First up is Qiu Jin.
I am also including a c-drama and tea pairing per special request.
The Stealth Cinematic Adaptation of Peach Blossom Girl 桃花女
(This post was originally appeared as a Twitter thread on 14 October 2020 and is reproduced here with minor edits.)
I’d like to talk briefly about my favorite of the live-action Disney adaptations of Chinese folk tales: the story of the Peach Blossom Girl’s defeat of the Duke of Zhou in a battle of magic, adapted, of course, into the Star Wars sequel trilogy. (No, not really. But I was struck by the similarities while watching The Rise of Skywalker, and I’d like to imagine that some of the films’ more perplexing narrative choices are in fact a consequence of adapting a centuries-old folktale into a sprawling space opera.)
A summary for those unfamiliar with the tale: Zhougong 周公, the Duke of Zhou, is associated with the Book of Changes, oneiromancy, and other mantic techniques. In this story, he runs a divination shop, and for 30 years has never been wrong (he’s got a money-back guarantee). Then his predictions begin to fail. He foresees a widow’s merchant son, Shi Zongfu 石宗辅, dying in a pit, but the man returns home safely; he predicts that his servant Pengjian 彭剪 will die in three days, but instead his life is extended. Infuriated, Zhougong quits the business.
His nemesis turns out to be Taohua nü 桃花女, the Peach Blossom Girl, a local teenager who not only excels him in divination but is also a sorcerer who can manipulate fate. He vows revenge. Forcing her to marry his son on an ill-omened day, he calls on deities to kill her.
She beats him at every turn: counters his curses, tricks a tiger spirit into killing his daughter (whom she later resurrects), and even arranges her own resurrection after he attacks the peach tree holding her life essence. Each humiliating defeat only enrages him further. The feud culminates in Zhougong’s death, but at his household’s request, Taohua revives him.
I've taken most of the details in this summary from a short novel of uncertain authorship, 桃花女阴阳斗传 (Taohua’s Battle of Yin and Yang, among other titles), published in 1848, which casts the story into the shenmo 神魔 “gods and demons” mode. But the story exists in many forms.
The earliest in print is a Yuan dynasty zaju play attributed to Wang Ye 王晔, found in Ming collections under the title “Taohua, adept in the yin-yang trigrams” 讲阴阳八卦桃花女 (脉望馆 version) or “Taohua defeats magic, marries Zhougong” 桃花女破法嫁周公 (元曲选 version).
“Miss Irisation breaks the plum formation” 云来姐巧破梅花阵 from the late Ming collection 贪欣误 tells the same tale using different character names.
In the story “Taohua fights using magic” 桃花女斗法, in the 1846 zhiguai collection 闻见异辞, the two fight with bees, tigers, and spiders.
There’s also a wide range of local operas and folk ballads, as well as a proliferation of 20th century adaptations into different media.
Turning to the Star Wars sequels, we can recognize the major characters at once, although existing canon did force some minor tweaks.
◎ Kylo Ren is Zhougong. Born into a noble family and trained in divination from a young age, Zhougong sets out on his own when the royal court rejects his counsel. He’s arrogant and vindictive, and he cares more for proving his dominance than for the lives of people close to him.
◎ Rey is Taohua. Born to commoners, she lives in seclusion until her late teens, when compassion for her neighbors moves her to use her talents, attracting Zhougong’s attention. She wields a peach branch that expands into a halberd, preserved in the film as Rey’s staff.
◎ Finn is Shi Zongfu, a merchant traveling far from home who is saved from certain death by Taohua’s intervention. The first half of the novel is largely his story, but after he demands compensation from Zhougong for the inaccurate prediction of his death, he drops out of the narrative altogether.
In a 1957 lianhuanhua retelling that recasts the tale as one of class struggle, Shi (here known as Shi Ji) is fleeing a forced labor corps when Taohua rescues him. They fight against Zhougong’s cruel, exploitative regime as a romantic pair. (Read it online.)
◎ Pengjian, Zhougong’s servant, doesn’t have an exact counterpart. Using the spells Taohua taught him, not only does he escape immediate death, he also extracts an additional 850 years of life from stellar deities, becoming Peng Zu 彭祖, an enduring symbol of longevity.
Star Wars’ resident multicentenarian, Yoda, is unfortunately of the wrong alignment and, by the sequel trilogy, already dead. After Taohua saves him, Pengjian acts on her behalf and betrays Zhougong’s schemes—Hux, basically. Like Yoda and Hux, Pengjian is a comic character.
◎ To trap Taohua, Zhougong invokes the Black Killer 黑煞, a powerful protector god. Taohua counters by invoking the Red Killer 红煞. The two gods neutralize each other but agree not to actively interfere in the fight between Zhougong and Taohua.
Instead of pitting the two champions head-to-head, The Last Jedi time-shifts the confrontation: as the Black Killer, Snoke’s big moment is getting killed off, while Luke, the Red Killer, responds to a cry for help by deflecting an attack with his enlightened nonviolence.
◎ As it turns out, Taohua isn’t a nobody—she’s really an immortal sent to stop Zhougong from revealing too many secrets. The two are a divine pair—a yin-yang dyad, if you will, avatars of a knife and sheath lost when the god Zhenwu disemboweled himself in a purification ritual.
The Daoist god Zhenwu 真武, the “perfect warrior,” is also known as Xuanwu 玄武 “dark warrior” and has the title 玄天上帝 “high emperor of the dark heavens.” He’s identified with the god of the north, Heidi 黑帝, the “black emperor.” Here’s an appearance over Mt. Wudang in 1413:
Zhenwu isn’t in all versions of the tale, but if the trilogy must have a final boss, he’s the only logical choice—even if the moral dualism of the Star Wars universe requires him to be evil. The films’ lineage of evil black-robed mages practically demands the Emperor’s return. Palpatine’s death in the original trilogy isn’t a problem, either. Zhenwu has many incarnations—at one point in the late Ming novel Journey to the North 北游记, he’s killed by the avatar of the spirit of Guan Yu’s glaive, and his companions have him resurrected to continue his mission.
When it comes to ending the story, It can’t be denied that the adaptation does stumble a bit.
① Shock reveals.
Like other literary adaptations of the period based on well-known folk myths, the novel opens with background on Taohua and Zhougong and their relationship to Zhenwu. Play audiences would have been familiar with their roles as well, so Zhenwu’s abrupt appearance on the last page of the 脉望馆 edition to reclaim his charges wouldn’t have come out of nowhere. (The 元曲选 edit omits the god altogether and never clearly explains the source of Taohua’s power.) By moving the core story to an unfamiliar setting in a galaxy far, far away, the adaptation can’t rely on shared cultural knowledge, meaning a long-dead villain’s unheralded return or a reversal where a character who’s been a nobody for most of the story turns out to be the chosen one feel contrived and unearned.
② The overstuffed ending.
After Zhougong’s total humiliation, there are lots of options for the folktale’s conclusion. In some, Taohua accepts marriage into a humbled Zhougong’s house; in others, he keeps battling her until the gods intervene. Here’s a comparison of the two versions of the scene following Zhougong’s resurrection
From the Yuan play:
(Zhougong and his children rise.)
TAOHUA
Zhougong, why aren’t you counting trigrams?
ZHOUGONG
Don’t you mock me, too. I’ve got to tell you, Taohua, today I was convinced my magic was great, but I never imagined yours would be greater still, a hundred times greater than mine. I never had a chance of beating you. Come, be my daughter-in-law and you won’t suffer by it. Let’s have the wedding banquet today, and may there be harmony between our families.
TAOHUA
Under the circumstances, harmony it is.
(From Act 4 of 脉望馆 edition)
From the Qing novel:
Zhougong’s soul returned to his corpse, and he flipped over and sat up on the ground. His eyes blazed hate at Taohua as he sprang up and seized his star-sword, shouting, “Halt, demon woman! You presume to recall my soul? I swear on my life to put you to death!” He advanced on her with his sword. Taohua pulled the compliant peach branch from her silk bag and blocked him. “This is the thanks I get for saving your life, Zhou Qian? You think you can bully me?” Again he swung his sword, but she dodged and parried with her branch, yin and yang clashing in the great hall. [. . .] Zhougong and Taohua fought from the doorway to the courtyard, but the space was too cramped to use their full powers, so they mounted clouds and battled each other into the air. [. . .] Everyone else watched them from the ground. Wreathed in rosy clouds, they waged a savage battle in the sky, receding into the distance until they finally disappeared. [. . .] The fight reached a fever pitch as they tapped every skill they possessed. The roar and thunder of their struggle alerted the Grand Coordinator-Censor who, noticing the ferocity of their fight and their proximity to the North Gate of Heaven, hurried to inform the high emperor of the dark heavens, Zhenwu. The emperor peered through his wisdom eye and understood all that had happened. He dispatched general Tortoise and general Snake to bring the two to him.
(From Chapter 16)
Having Taohua and Zhougong reconcile after she’s put him in his place (and reversed all his harm) makes sense in a wedding comedy meant to create an origin story for rites and taboos and to subvert the trope of the passive, reluctant bride. The novel is more fascinated with the magical duel. It replaces Zhougong’s contrition with a heavenly intervention, recalling the two from the mortal realm and binding them to their celestial duties with a golden elixir that will dissolve their bodies if they stray again.
The film adaptation combines the two endings, working a quick redemption for Kylo (and reconciliation with Rey) into the same epic battle that leads to what’s more or less an exit from the mortal realm—him into death, her to the isolated home of her mentor and protector. The two versions of the story aren’t really compatible, and by attempting both, the film doesn’t make either convincing.
As an aside, one odd thing about the folktale is that while the Taohua and Zhougong are clearly the central dramatic pairing, age and propriety mean the marriage proposal is made on behalf of his son, who barely appears. In the Yuan play, he has no lines and comes on stage only to die. In the novel he doesn’t even exist: Zhougong only pretends to have a son. Most adaptations pair the two directly, such as this Taiwanese opera starring Xiao-mi 小咪 as a more sympathetic Zhougong and Huang Yang-hua 黄旸骅 as Taohua.
To the novel’s assortment of incidental poems and plot-specific spells invoking various deities, the author adds an actual song to pass the time while Shi Zongfu’s mother is waiting to recite Taohua’s spell to call her son out of the deadly pit. And the dramas are chock full of tunes. Imagine if, in response to Kylo’s “Join me,” Rey were to launch into a version of the kiss-off song that’s Taohua’s answer to Zhougong’s marriage proposal (the text here is the more dramatic edit by Zang Maoxun 臧懋循 in 元曲选):
【笑和尚】我、我、我，不恋你居兰堂住画阁，我、我、我，不恋您列鼎食重裀卧，我、我、我，不恋您那雪花银三十个。（媒婆云）那周公算的好《周易》课，只有他家大官人晓得，再不传别人的。姐姐，你过门之后，他还要传这《周易》课与你哩。（正旦唱）他、他、他，论阴阳少讲习，我、我、我，论卦爻多参破，休、休、休，我根前，（做推媒婆跌科，唱）还卖弄甚么《周易》的课。
TAOHUA
(singing)
I, I, I don’t care about your halls and galleries.
I, I, I don’t care about your life of luxury.
I, I, I don’t care for the silver you say that you’ll give to me.
MATCHMAKER
Zhougong’s Changes, mantic methods he alone has access to—Take his offer, join his house; he’ll gladly share that art with you.
TAOHUA
He, he, he knows nothing of the craft of prophecy.
I, I, I have mastered all the trigrams’ mysteries.
Stop, stop, stop—
(pushes Matchmaker to the ground)
Flogging those oversold, useless old Changes to me!
Or maybe not, considering that Star Wars as a franchise doesn’t have the greatest track record for songs sung by humans. Still, that’s just one of the countless ways to make a cross-genre adaptation of a folktale do justice to the original while also taking advantage of the huge canvas of a new fictional universe. The Taohua-Zhougong story is a small domestic drama, after all, without the sweeping scale of other shenmo quest or war novels. Grafting it onto a standard Star Wars climax retread shrinks the new universe rather than expanding the source material to fill the new space.
There’s bound to be a satisfying way to make all the elements work, although it would likely take some clever plotting to make the square peg of a wedding comedy for dueling Daoist immortals fit the round hole of a space station exhaust port. ■
——————————
This post is one reader’s take on the tale of Taohua and Zhougong. I’m not a specialist in Yuan theater, Daoism, or late imperial vernacular literature, so all corrections are welcome. You’re also free to challenge my misreading of Star Wars, but please know that I’m not especially interested.
Further reading
Vincent Durand-Dastès, “Divination, Fate Manipulation and Protective Knowledge In and Around ‘The Wedding of the Duke of Zhou and Peach Blossom Girl’, a Popular Myth of Late Imperial China” for more on the novel and its magical elements.
Variations of the Peach Blossom Girl myth are covered in a 2012 master’s thesis by Guo Fan 郭帆, 《“桃花女”故事研究》 ; There’s also a 1992 master’s thesis by Liu Huiping 刘惠萍, 《桃花女斗周公故事研究》 that I haven’t seen.
A cool 2008 PhD thesis on Zhenwu iconography by Noelle Giuffrida, “Representing the Daoist God Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, in Late Imperial China”.
Sources
Character woodcuts from the British Library’s copy of the 丹柱堂 reprint of the 1848 联益堂 edition of 桃花女阴阳斗传, as photoreproduced in 古本小说丛刊第四辑 (中华书局, 1990).
Illustration of Pengzu praying to the stars from 元曲选 digitized from the Harvard-Yenching collection.
Yuan zaju play: The 元曲选 version is readable on Gushiwen.org; the text of the 脉望馆 version isn’t online but the manuscript version is reproduced in 古本戏曲丛刊第4集第25册.
Zhenwu and the knife spirit image from the 1602 edition of 北方真武祖师玄天上帝出身志传 (北游记) reproduced in 故本小说集成 (上海古籍出版社), page 129.
Appearance over Wudang image from 大明玄天上帝瑞应图录 held by Bibliothèque Nationale, available online.
Book cover for 周公与桃花女 from the 1989 中国民间文艺出版社 title by by 张鹤龄 and 周成伟. 1957 lianhuanhua 桃花女 adapted by 江澄 and illustrated by 盛焕文 and 盛鹤年, published by 江苏人民出版社. Available online.
Scholar Zhang Offends a Widow and Loses His Lodgings
Late in life, the editor and essayist Zhou Shao 周劭 (also known as Zhou Li’an 周黎庵, 1913–2003) published several collections of observations and anecdotes about the cultural and political scenes of the ’30s and ’40s. In one entry in Xiangwan manbi 向晚漫笔 [“Sketches at Dusk”, 2000], he gives a brief sketch of the life and career of Zhang Ziping 張資平, the Creation Society 創造社 co-founder whose novels were bestsellers in golden age Shanghai and who was sent to prison for collaborationist activities. Here’s Zhou’s description of the circumstances behind his encounter with the novelist:
His wife and children weren’t in Shanghai, so upon his release from prison he was all alone and had no home to return to. He had to move into a room on the stair landing* of the home of an old friend’s widow. That friend was Liu Na’ou. Taiwanese and very wealthy, Liu had built ten or twenty lane houses near Hongkou Park. He had been shot by KMT agents, and after the Japanese defeat his property had been confiscated, leaving his widow with only one unit.
* 亭子间 tíngzijiān, a cramped room over the kitchen on the first landing in traditional houses in Shanghai, similar to the garret apartment in its association with writers.
Zhang Ziping behaved badly while living at the Liu house. His poor hygiene in particular so angered Liu’s widow that she locked him out of the only toilet. This left him in a bind—on one occasion he even took a dump in his room, wrapped it in newspaper, and then dropped it outside the toilet door. For Liu’s widow, this was the last straw, and she tried to evict him. He refused to leave, so they ended up in a lawsuit.
I was a lawyer in those days, and someone set me up to represent Liu’s widow, giving me the opportunity to see the celebrated writer for myself in court. He was a dark, stocky man. Naturally, such a piddly case didn’t go to an actual verdict but was mediated by the judge, and in the end Zhang voluntarily backed down and promised to move out of the Lius’ place. I don’t know what happened to him after that.
What happened after that: Zhang managed to eke out a living as a translator and later obtained a teaching gig through Pan Hannian 潘汉年, an old Creation Society colleague (and underground Communist agent) who became deputy mayor of Shanghai in the ’50s. Arrested again on counter-revolutionary charges in 1955, Zhang died in a reform-through-labor camp in Anhui in 1959.
As anecdotes of misbehaving authors go, it’s an amusing one, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Writing in the late ’90s about events that occurred half a century earlier, Zhou’s memories are bound to include “inevitable factual errors,” as archivist Zhao Guozhong 赵国忠 puts it in a review of another retrospective collection. Earlier in this essay, Zhou’s account of one of Zhang’s literary scandals, the abrupt cancellation in 1933 of a serialization in the supplement to The Shun Pao 申報 because Zhang’s brand of torrid melodrama was out of step with a new editor’s more vocal left-wing positioning, misidentifies the novel in question as 明珠與黑炭 [Pearl and Charcoal] rather than 時代與愛的歧路 [The Crossroads of Time and Love]. The former was published in 1931 following a serialization in Lo Chun 樂群; both were banned by KMT authorities, Crossroads in 1934 for “fomenting class struggle” and Pearl in 1935 for “impropriety,” so perhaps that’s the source of Zhou’s confusion.
With that in mind, here’s a report from a mid-1947 issue of New Shanghai Weekly 新上海 that describes a lawsuit between Zhang and his landlord:
Under the puppet government, he served as a senior technical officer in the puppet Ministry of Agriculture and Mining and was also head of publications for the enemy’s China-Japan Cultural Association. Where he ought to have been satisfied with not being arrested after the war was won, he went and got into a fight over his flat in New Yiding Apartments on Edinburgh Road. The situation blew up and when the other party wanted to sue him, he got scared and fled Shanghai for Guangzhou, where he apparently found work at some official agency.
But Zhang refused let the matter of the flat on Edinburgh Road rest, and once the government stipulated it would no longer turn over traitors for prosecution, he crept back to Shanghai last month, intending to approach the other party to negotiate the return of his rooms as soon as he was settled. But news travels fast, and because Zhang was a suspected traitor, the prosecution bureau of the high court seized the moment to refer him for investigation. He cooperated. When the investigation revealed his was not a serious case, his bail was approved, and he went on to negotiate the reclamation of his apartment, as had been his expectation all along. Fully prepared for a lawsuit when he came to Shanghai, the fact that he ended up in court didn’t bother him—and now he must be exceptionally pleased with himself.
So what does this mean? Here are some possibilities:
Zhou misremembered the year of the lawsuit, placing it after Zhang’s prison sentence rather than before his arrest and situating the house near Hankou Park (now Luxun Park) rather than Edinburgh Road (now Jiangsu Road);
Zhang was a problem tenant inclined to get into legal battles with his landlords; or
The court-mediated settlement Zhou describes was merely one episode of a long, drawn-out grudge match between Zhang and the widow.
I've written about Zhang Ziping's misbehavior before, way back in 2008: Willow fluff and trashy romance novels. (Just look at how those links have rotted!) And read about more badly-behaved literati: When editors lash out (2015).
Sources
The header image, by Cao Hanmei 曹涵美, is an illustration for the serialized version of Zhang’s 1941 novel 新紅A字 [A New Scarlet Letter] that ran in the fortnightly journal 華文大阪每日 [Chinese Osaka Daily] (7(4), p21), a Japanese organ promoting regional co-prosperity under the empire.
Zhao Guozhong 赵国忠. “周黎庵及《葑溪寻梦》”. 书脞谈录, 2008. Readable at https://www.xuges.com/xdmj/zhoushao/009.htm
I went for a walk through Houhai for the first time in a while and was surprised to find the gardens around Wanghai lou 望海楼 (“Seaview tower”) open to the public. For as long as I’ve lived in Beijing, that property has been closed off, and I’d always heard rumors that it was somehow tangled up in the Chen Xiaotong corruption scandal (one variant also connected it to Liu Xiaoqing’s tax evasion case). The web tells me public access was granted in 2018, more than two decades after construction on the tower was completed in 1997. I know I’ve walked past it since then, but I believe the gardens were behind a barrier for much of the pandemic.
Chen Xiaotong was the son of Chen Xitong, the former mayor of Beijing and the subject of a corruption scandal of his own that earned him a 16-year prison sentence in 1998. Granted medical parole in 2006, he lived the rest of his life mostly out of the public eye until he succumbed to cancer on 2 June 2013 at the age of 83. In the grand tradition of banished statesmen, Chen the elder retired to the wilderness where he turned his mind to poetry and art, styling himself Chief Custodian of the Dragon Garden 龙园施长 (Lóngyuán shīzhǎng), an obvious play on the nearly homophonous Mayor in the Garden Cage 笼园市长 (Lóngyuán shìzhǎng). From his retreat among the groves of Xiaotangshan just outside the north Sixth Ring Road in Beijing’s Changping District, he snapped nature photos, penned light verse, and took friendly calls from retired cadres and other travelers out for a visit to the local hot springs.
Chen may have read in Chinese literature at Peking University in the ’40s, but when I had a chance to flip through a copy of 心随天籁 (“Inspiration from the sounds of nature” perhaps?), the third in his self-published series of oversize, lavishly printed photobooks, nothing in it suggested to me that his turn to politics had robbed the world of a creative genius (although to be fair, middle-aged poets aren’t usually empowered to declare martial law). The photography is blandly inoffensive—the mid-range images resemble vacation snapshots, the landscapes are reminiscent of motivational posters. And it’s all accompanied by equally banal poetry that hews closely to the visuals. Hardly surprising, when you consider that Chen’s most visible contribution to cultural heritage is a mandate that new buildings in the ’80s and ’90s be crowned with classical-style pavilions.
For even more evidence of Chen’s aesthetic sensibility, here’s an anecdote that circulated in Beijing after the 1990 Asian Games, as retold in a column by Zhao Mu that ran in Southern Weekly 南方周末 in 1996. The story goes that Chen Xitong dropped in on a rehearsal for the Games’ opening ceremony. Asked by the director for his opinion, he demurred, and instead told a story about a trip he had recently taken to France, where he had seen a blank canvas titled “Cow Eating Grass.” Where was the grass? he had asked. Eaten by the cow. And the cow? Gone. The director understood immediately: Chen found the performance far too abstract. Zhao concludes: “So the opening ceremony we eventually got to watch was inanely concrete.” (The source for this account is an old blog post titled 陈希同与“牛吃草”, at a link that’s now broken. Zhao Mu tells a slightly different version of the story in a later post.)
Some of the poems do have an amusing playfulness that makes them read more like riddles when divorced from the photography:
信鸽岂畏玩具虎
谁家信鸽落窗前？
巧遇饵水啄饮欢；
惊见老虎原非虎，
索性陪它玩一玩。
(2009.12)
Why should a pigeon fear a toy tiger?
A homing pigeon lands outside,
It stays, enticed to drink its fill.
Surprise! That tiger’s just pretend,
So why not stay and play a while?
For a brief moment after Jiang Zemin was reported to have died in July 2011, I heard murmurs that Chen Xitong might be rehabilitated. After all, he had only accepted 550,000 yuan in bribes, and even taking into account all the villas and opulent entertainment, his corruption paled next to that of officials in the new millennium. Surely the Shanghai Clique that had engineered his downfall might be willing to make a deal now that he’d outlasted his arch-rival. But then Old Jiang turned up alive and went on to outlive Chen by almost a decade.
But could there have been something substantive behind the rehabilitation rumors? Earlier that year, two poems credited to the Chief Custodian appeared in the January 2011 issue of China Green Pictorial 中国绿色画报 to mark the 90th birthday of Shan Zhaoxiang 单昭祥, who served on the Capital Forestation Commission in the 1980s and founded the Beijing Forestation Foundation in 1996. Was the ex-mayor taking a tentative step back into the public sphere and attempting to burnish his own legacy by lauding a colleague whose achievements had taken place largely under his administration?
This post was previously a Twitter thread made on 15 October 2020 in response to a claim by Quite Interesting @qikipedia:
In the 1960s, one Chinese economic journal reportedly used the following text as a template for rejection letters:
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that, within the next thousand years, we shall see its equal—we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.
In this instance reportedly means it was quoted in N. R. Barrett's “Publish or Perish,” Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, vol. 44, no. 2 (August 1962) as being routinely used by a Mandarin Chinese Journal of Economics.
Given the esteem in which Norman Barrett CBE is held we're inclined to believe him, but without the primary source we thought it best to include the word 'reportedly'. 🙂
As should be obvious, this is a bullshit orientalist myth. It dates back over a hundred years, in fact. The earliest example I’ve found is in the 1 March 1895 issue of The New York Times, where the following item ran on page 4:
“Declined with Thanks” in Chinese.
The following is said to be an exact translation of the letter sent by a Chinese editor to a would-be contributor, whose manuscript he found it necessary to return.
“Illustrious brother of the sun and moon—Behold thy servant prostrate before thy feet. I kowtow to thee and beg that of thy graciousness thou mayest grant that I may speak and live. Thy honored manuscript has deigned to cast the light of its august countenance upon us. With raptures we have perused it. By the bones of my ancestors never have I encountered such wit, such pathos, such lofty thought. With fear and trembling I return the writing. Were I to publish the treasure you sent me, the Emperor would order that it should be made the standard, and that none be published except such as equaled it. Knowing literature as I do, and that it would be impossible in ten thousand years to equal what you have done, I send your writing back. Ten thousand times I crave your pardon. Behold, my head is at your feet. Do what you will. Your servant’s servant. THE EDITOR.”
From there it got picked up by other outlets such as Publisher’s Weekly (9 Mar) and New Outlook (30 Mar); sourcing was soon stripped and the text framed with stereotypes. The Writer (June) remarks ironically, “And yet the Chinese are called half-civilized!”
Five years later, a second version began circulating, via The Religio-Philosophical Journal (26 April 1900, p4). This was then picked up by The New York Times (11 Aug 1900, p24), with no reference to their prior reporting.
Both versions continued to circulate for decades as a space-filler. The editor was given a name, WANG CHIN, apparently by Readers Digest, according to a pickup in Armour Tech News (16 Feb 1937, p4), a student paper in Chicago:
Harlan Ellison, in No Doors, No Windows (1975), writes, “I used to send the following rejection note, but I don't even do that any more” and quotes the item, naming the editor WAN CHIN.
Brian Herbert writes that in 1964, his father Frank was losing hope of a book publication for Dune. “Trying to maintain his sense of humor, Dad came up with this: Chinese Rejection Slip . . .”
It even got picked up by a Chinese weekly (《汗血周刊》 1935 年 [第5卷 第8期, 151页]). The translator clearly declines to identify it as a Chinese notice, since (1) the attribution to a Chinese editor is omitted, and (2) the rendering is not into the cultured literary language you’d expect for a rejection notice in that era. It sounds utterly ridiculous.
Even more ridiculous is the fact that this bogus letter was busted 120 years ago, when The Academy, which had run the item on 28 July 1900, printed a correction from an informed reader on 22 December:
A PARAGRAPH which we printed last year, giving what purported to be a Chinese editor’s form of words for the rejection of MSS., has been beating about the world ever since. It will be remembered that this letter of rejection was full of flowers of speech, and that the rejected contributor was addressed as “Brother of the sun and moon,” and told that his MS. was only rejected because it would set a standard of merit which the Emperor would require him to keep up. A Chinese correspondent, resident at Hanyang, near Hankow, has seen our paragraph. He writes as follows:
I venture to say that whoever sent you this paragraph has drawn so largely on his imagination as Dean Swift, or Oliver Goldsmith in his Citizen of the World. I have just endeavoured to translate it for the delectation of my able Chinese co-editor, but, as it contains no one Chinese phrase, and is full of idioms that are quite outlandish to Chinese as to English ears, the only result has been his wondering query: “What nation under heaven talks rubbish like that? ‘Brother of the sun and moon’! ‘Rolling at thy feet’! ‘Kisses the earth’! ‘Both speak and live’! —how could a dead man speak? He must be alive. ’To live after speaking’ —is that it? An editor anywhere in the world writing like that! Why you must be joking, Signor!”
“How would an ordinary Chinese editor write a letter to accompany a rejected MS.?” I asked, for I have no such document in my possession.
“Oh, he would be careful not to find fault with the scholarship, as that would be an insult. He would say ‘Lack of space,’ or ‘Not in accord with the general character of the paper,’ and so on.
“Just as we should in England,” I added.
There would be a little polite flourish at the first—a couple of phrases such as are stock materials for all letters, amounting to “Honourable Sir.” Instead of the big “I” there would be a small character, “servant”; and at the end, “ignorant junior bows.” But, eliminating these formalities, the epistle would be very like one which you, Mr. Editor, yourself might send, if you are in the habit of acknowledging rejected communications.
Lately I’ve been dipping into scholar-beauty romances. A recent favorite is Jin xiang ting 錦香亭 (“Pavilion of Fragrant Brocade”) by Guwu su’an zhuren 古吳素庵主人 (Master of the Simple Hut of Suzhou), which dates to the early Qing.
It’s a short novel that fits a surprising amount of action into its sixteen chapters. The main love story between Zhong Jingqi 鍾景期 and Ge Mingxia 葛明霞 is standard scholar-beauty stuff—imperial exam success, an exchange of poetry, a scheming rival, missed connections, a helpful nun, resourceful concubines, mistaken identity resolving into a wedding, and a happily-ever-after conclusion—but it’s embedded in a larger historical narrative: the An Lushan Rebellion erupts midway through the book. Court intrigue, battlefield strategizing, and tides of refugees heighten the tension of the romantic plot and somehow make the bizarre coincidences the genre relies on seem more believable.
But the plot’s not the reason for this post. A version of the same story is told in the lost Yuan-dynasty play 孟月梅寫恨錦香亭 (“Meng Yuemei Writes of Regrets in the Pavilion of Fragrant Brocade”) about characters named Chen Gui 陳珪 and Meng Yuemei. Songs memorable enough to be preserved in other sources can be found in Song Yuan xiwen jiyi, a 1956 collection of play fragments compiled by Qian Nanyang. Here’s a delightful aria about spring, assembled from quotations of older poems; a quick translation follows:
Spent on spring pleasure, ease back into the spring wind: spring colors mix into an amiable mood. Spring fills the mortal realm, spring bursts with red and green. Spring clarity is graceful and inviting, spring swallows build spring nests. Spring hearts get drunk on spring love. Spring minds make merry, spring vistas linger. On a new spring morn, rise early to a vision of gorgeous spring mountains. By mid-spring, think how long spring may last. Spring is two-thirds gone. Refrain from spring melancholy; one part returns to dust, two parts to water. Spring warmth and spring mist, spring rain splashes into spring pools. Spring dreams harbor pleasing spring desires, bringing spring exams to these spring grasses and ponds. Enjoy spring flowers as spring wine overflows spring cups; spring fruits: clusters of spring peaches and spring pears. Hear the spring oriole sing a plaintive spring song. Spring lies within spring flowers. Fresh green spring means missed spring rendezvous on spring nights; when spring departs, spring cannot be retained. Spring gets me: spring love, spring heartache, and rare spring tidings.
I love this—the hypnotic repetition of “spring” transports me back to a class on early 20th century literature, when our professor read aloud the opening to Chapter 19 of Xu Zhenya’s bestselling 1912 sentimental romance novel in parallel prose, Yuli hun 玉梨魂 (“The Soul of Yuli” or “The Jade Pear Spirit”). For the last two decades, the lines of 秋心 “Autumn Heart” have often come to mind when the weather turns and the leaves start changing color.
Yellow leaves rustle, green moss fades. When the begonia has flowered and the snow geese have arrived, wind and rain hasten autumn’s signs, cold and chill carry autumn’s sounds. Autumn halls are vacant, autumn swallows turned sorrowful autumn travelers. Autumn windows are empty, autumn insects vex the autumn soul. Autumn’s scenes are bleak, autumn’s visage is desolate. Autumn emotion grows distant, autumn elation lies heavy. Today’s autumn boudoir holds a solitary quest for an autumn dream. What day will an autumn moon shine on an autumn pair? Layered autumn melancholy comes with unending autumn regret. Fleeting autumn vistas spur shameful autumn trysts. At the boundless vision before us, our souls take flight. In the unbearable draw of the seasons, can the sojourner remain unmoved?
I have to say I prefer the freer lines of the Yuan lyric to the constrained pulse of four- and six-character phrases that makes up the pianwen style. Here I’ve prioritized the repetition of “autumn” and tried to capture at least at least some of the parallelism, and while this approach does manage to set a mood, the amount of amplification necessary in English would, I feel, make for excruciatingly verbose prose whenever anything actually had to happen. I’m not sure I could keep it up for more than a paragraph or two, or be capable of reading much more than that, to be honest—and the novel runs to 30 chapters. But someone’s given it a try: an English translation by Gong Xiaohui under the title The Death of Yuli was published earlier this year. I’m honestly curious about the translator’s approach.
But I’m more keen to find additional examples of this type of dense repetition in Chinese writing. Any suggestions?
This week was my first back in the office since mid-November, the first time in I don’t know how many months that I didn’t have to scan a health code in the main lobby or have my temperature taken at the office door, and the first week in equally long that I didn’t have to align my lunch time with a short line at the testing booth. It was also a glacially slow work week — maybe four hours of actual tasks over the course of three days — and I couldn’t distract myself with chores and side projects like I’d done while working from home during the holiday lull of late December.
I passed some of the time fiddling with a mash-up poem inspired by a two-year-old @bokane tweet. The rhymes are mostly lazy, and the scenario doesn’t exactly correspond to the photo — although I’d wager that what’s portrayed there is less a colossal wreck than an unfinished folly.
Frostymandias
I met a sledder from a frozen block,
Who said: One squat and shapeless mound of slush
Sits on the front lawn.... Near it, by the walk,
Half ice a trodden visage lies, whose clutch
Of buttons, cobs, and hunks of sable rock
Stay silent, showing no trace of the spell
That brought them warmth and life: the children know.
They scattered when a hail of icy shells
Whisked from their minds his fairy-tale refrain:
“My name is Frostymandias, man of snow;
We’ll have some fun and I’ll return again!”
A promise breached, a hat lost. Eager hands
Dug hoards of missiles out of his remains:
Unmade before the hot sun thaws the land.
I guess one good thing about Twitter collapsing is that at least now there's no danger of anybody finding anything you write. I finished R.F. Kuang's Babel yesterday, and would love to talk about it with other people who have read it. Tumblr is a lot less susceptible to context collapse and also nobody's here, so there's probably less risk of pile-ons and unnecessary bad feelings.
I wrote up some initial impressions of Babel as a sort of hypertrophied tweet thread -- initially posted on my alt, then edited a bit when my mom e-mailed to ask about Babel after seeing it mentioned somewhere, then edited a bit more. Throwing these out as discussion points, in case there's anyone still using Tumblr, rather than as conclusions: I may be wrong, am probably missing things, and have been in a generally fucked-up headspace lately so I could be getting all of this completely backwards. The tl;dr is that there's a lot to like in Babel, but the author is capable of doing a lot more, and there are places where it feels as if she was butting up hard against the limits of what can be done with YA.
1) I enjoyed Babel and also feel like there’s no way of critiquing the book without coming off as being all #NotAllWhiteSinologists about it.
2) I love the conceit at the center of the book, and really love the way Kuang stealthily drops a good overview of issues in translation theory on her unsuspecting readers. Ditto for the disguised intro to center/periphery and its subsequent payoff. These are things that should be common knowledge, and this is a really cool way of getting us to that point. Language nerds will love this book and translators will find themselves seen and depicted by someone who gets it. This part is so good, you guys. I'd recommend the book for this alone.
3) But it feels like the worldbuilding falls short of its own standards: the world of Babel operates according to extremely different rules, and has for centuries, but somehow ended up geopolitically and socially in sync with our own as of the mid-19th c. Obviously this is necessary for Kuang to tell the story she wants to tell, but it feels less than fully satisfying. This is even more the case, in ways that I think are worth unpacking, for all the anachronisms of fact, speech, and thought: Babel's footnotes and general attention to contemporary events and pop culture recall Susanna Clarke, but Clarke's characters had 19th century brains in 19th century bodies and it is impossible for me to imagine them using the word "feminist" in any sense, let alone a positive one.
4) There were real people in the 19th century who accurately perceived and courageously fought the injustices of their day, and for Babel to have its characters speaking and thinking in the ways they do feels very much to me like 21st-century Twitter Discourse colonizing 19th-century justice movements. The problem is not that the characters are always saying things like "non-zero chance" or that they're opposed to the exploitation and degradation of their homelands by the British Empire; it's that in their speech, actions, and thoughts they flatter the contemporary reader instead of honoring people who actually existed. In a less ambitious or more carelessly written book, this probably wouldn't have been as noticeable, but Babel does itself the disservice of being otherwise thoughtful.
5) Would it replicate colonizing dynamics of knowledge production to note that by the book’s own logic Robin should have been speaking Nanking Mandarin as the prestige dialect, that even in Beijing those velars hadn’t fully palatalized before high front vowels yet, and that the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system used here wasn’t invented for more than a century and reflects pronunciations that didn't become the official standard until the early 1950s?
(Obviously the above is all nerd shit. But Babel is thoughtful and well-researched, so things like this jump out much more than they would in a book whose author had not invested the same quality of thought and care.)
I actually do mean this as a live question. When a person who looks like me makes comments that look like this about work by a person who looks like Kuang, it is ~~uncomfortable~~ for very good reasons. Reading Babel as a white sinologue is discomfiting, and the book does a good and (to my mind) convincing job of explaining why that should be.
But I worry that in doing so, it will encourage at least some readers to adopt the sort of weird zero-sum views that disguise truculence and intellectual laziness as social justice and anticolonialism. I'm pretty sure that's not what Kuang was out to accomplish with the book -- but it's a clearly identifiable tendency, especially among the kind of people who post about YA fiction online. I love Twitter and am already grieving it, but there's a reason I didn't post this there.
The word "problematic" is, as a noun, an invitation to examine and think through complex issues. As an adjective, it is mostly deployed as a verdict: "problematic (adj.)" registers discomfort and prevents further discussion. Babel does a good job of describing a problematic (n.), but it does so for an audience mostly inclined toward the adjectival use of the word, and if I were to phrase my concern in terms of the book's devices, I guess I'd say I'm worried that in translating complex and discomfiting issues into the idiom of YA, Kuang creates a "problematique / problematic" match-pair that risks backfiring.
6) A lot of my criticisms basically are over things I would’ve liked to have read, rather than the things that Kuang was actually trying to write. In an earlier version of these thoughts, I wrote that Kuang succeeded admirably at the task she set for herself, but on further consideration I'm not actually sure what that task was. Babel's plot and characterization mark it as YA, and judged by that standard, it is a remarkably well done and thoughtful book. (Full disclosure: I believe that YA is actively bad for people and should absolutely be eliminated as a commercial and conceptual category, so I enjoy and admire the way Kuang makes it clear here and in her earlier work that being a YA protagonist is incredibly bad praxis.) But taking Babel seriously means judging the book by (what I take to be) its own standards, and I don't know if it clears that bar.
I enjoyed Babel and found a lot to like in it -- but Kuang is obviously capable of doing a lot more if she ever wants to, and I hope she will.
Hmm — my reaction is basically the opposite of yours. As a story, Babel was gripping enough to read in one sitting, but the further it progressed the more let down I felt by the central conceit. The introduction of translation theory and its applications for imperial power were cool and all, but the specific mechanisms involved felt like they diverted the syllabus onto an occult path immediately after introductory classes, leaving the characters in the weeds of freshman historical etymology for their entire translation studies careers. Makes sense, given the worldbuilding, and on some level further illustrates how empire and capital corrupt all that they touch, but I ended the book feeling like it was more enamored by the “dark academia” experience as a whole than the subjects studied.
As you bring up in point #5, the novel smooths out a lot of interesting linguistic complications. One thing that stood out for me: a footnote explains that Cantonese was the protagonist’s “preferred native tongue”, but he exclusively uses Mandarin from almost the first page (using yīnggōubí to describe the professor) — apart from a few reported conversations and the episode in the opium den where he understands but is unable to speak due to shock. I’d chalk this up to prioritizing pacing not only over historical fidelity, which doesn’t really bother me, but over character as well, which (at least for me) significantly weakens the book. It’s a cool story with badass heroics accomplished by characters fueled by incandescent rage, but it ends up feeling pretty slight.
I’m not all that bothered by historical fiction that doesn’t attempt to reproduce a historical mindset — a modern story told in an anachronistic setting allows the writer to dial in the focus on issues that would require much more convoluted machinery to bring out using period-accurate characters. It’s one of the things that makes portal fantasies and chuanyue fiction so compelling (you could easily read Babel as a Step Into the Past-style chuanyue fantasy missing its opening chapters set in the present that fling the four translators into past lives). We sit here in the 21st century discussing the past, so why shouldn’t we be able to embed those discussions into a ripping action story? As far the present colonizing previous centuries, when the world is as divergent from ours as Babel’s is it bothers me far less than Guy Gavriel Kay injecting magic into history he’s scratched the serial numbers off of.
When I read Babel, I was in the middle of reading 潮汐图 by 林棹 on my daily commutes. Another youngster in 1830s Canton is essentially adopted by a Brit adventurer come to collect unique curios from the orient and is eventually taken to London for a chilling conclusion that pulls the mask off the face of empire. It’s the best book I’ve read this year. The author builds on the gorgeous prose and narrative webs that sustained 3/4 of 流溪 (avoiding that novel’s misanthropic, railroaded conclusion), and builds a world out of Macau and river dialects of Cantonese. It’s a book with so many indelible lines, but here they actually add up to something meaningful, with deftly drawn characters and a few tour-de-force scenes (the burning of St Paul’s is incredibly done). Oh, and the protagonist is a giant toad. I’m sure my reaction to Babel is colored by an inadvertent comparison to 潮汐图, which does more of what I’m interested in at the moment. It’s not really fair because the books are attempting different things. (Really, read 潮汐图.)
One of my usual runs takes me past the west gate of Zhongnanhai, where there’s a police van up on blocks. It’s electrified by a cable strung over the sidewalk into the compound. I like to think that when all-night PSC bull-sessions get a little heated, Li Keqiang slips out a side door, locks himself in the van, and chills out to some 90s rock.
There’s a scene in Chapter 4 of Zeng Pu‘s A Flower in a Sinful Sea 孽海花 where Gong Xiaoqi is editing the unpublished work of his late father and strikes the man’s funerary tablet whenever he corrects an error, in repayment for the blows he suffered in childhood.[1]
Gong Xiaoqi is a fictionalized version of Gong Cheng, an eccentric scholar of the late Qing who apparently disliked his father (and who is infamous in popular history for allegedly suggesting to the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force that they torch Yuan Ming Yuan[2]).
In his comment on the line in Gossip About a Flower in a Sinful Sea 孽海花闲话, Mao Heting 冒鹤亭 can’t confirm that Gong Cheng actually struck the tablet of his father Gong Zizhen, but does offer two anecdotes about editors taking out their frustrations with Zhu Xi 朱熹:
When Mao Qiling was writing Corrections to the Four Books, he carved a wooden figurine that he labeled “Zhu Xi,” and whenever he corrected an error, he would strike the figurine and say, “A-Xi, you’re wrong!”
When Dai Wang was at Jinling Press writing The Correct Meaning of the Analects,[3] whenever he came up with a new meaning, he would go to the Confucian Academy and urinate on Zhu Xi’s tablet. Hong Rukui, the press supervisor, hated him and complained to Ma Xinyi, Viceroy of Liangjiang, and he was let go. Upon Ma’s assassination, Zeng Guofan returned as viceroy and inquired after Dai Wang, only to be told of Dai’s dismissal and its circumstances. He said, “That poor scholar,” and rehired him. (Hong Rukui was not at all pleased when Dai returned to the press. One day, looking over a new cut of Mencius that Dai had proofread, in which “As if a cup of water could put out the fire of a wagon-load of wood” was rendered “…put out the water of a wagon-load of wood,” he said he had salary (薪水) on the brain and docked him a month’s pay, leaving him strapped. When Zeng Guofan passed away, Dai prepared to go pay his respects, informing Hong, “Today you should treat me as a guest and see me off.” So Hong got up to see him off. When they reached the stairs, Dai said loudly, “Stop here. Wait while I go take a piss.” Out in public view, there was nothing Hong could do about it.)
It is unknown whether Gong Cheng struck his father’s tablet, but it is a fact that he wrote pointedly in a commemorative biography of his late mother: no mother was more loving than his, but no father was more evil. My maternal grandfather Zhou Jikuang saw this in person.
Mao’s Gossip mostly consists of notes on the historical figures and situations that the author fictionalized in the novel, but relates amusing stories only occasionally. Slightly earlier in the same chapter, the characters come across John Fryer, a foreigner who speaks excellent Chinese. Mao remarks, “The funny thing is that foreigners saw the great accomplishments of Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, and Li Hongzhang, and noticed that they all came out of the imperial examination system, so many of them asked to read their examination papers. After a while, they’d say they couldn’t find anything militarily significant in them, not realizing that eight-legged essays were merely a way to get in the door.”
[1]A translation by Rafe de Crespigny and Liu Ts’un-yan of the first five chapters of that novel appears in the special issue of Renditions devoted to middlebrow fiction (Nos. 17 & 18, Spring & Autumn 1982).↩
[2]See Geremie Barmé’s essay, Gong Xiaogong and the Sacking of the Garden of Perfect Brightness, in China Heritage Quarterly, December 2006↩
[3]Perhaps Mao means Annotations to The Analects 论语注, since Correct Meaning 论语正义 is a work by Liu Baonan 刘宝楠?↩
When editors lash out was originally published on Xiaokang2020
I was tagged a while back by @davesgonechina at the end of a Twitter exchange he had with Jess Nevins about the late Qing magical war novel The Pacification of Jinchuan 平金川 (also known as General Nian’s Conquest of the West 年大将军平西传), written by Zhang Xiaoshan 张小山 and published in 1899. So I went and read the book, and then wrote up a reply. I’ve reposted it here, lightly edited from the Facebook comment version, with a few additional notes.
First chapter of an illustrated edition of Ping Jinchuan published in 1900. The sketch is of the monk 更生童子 and his whip. (Source: 99ys)
Here’s the original Twitter conversation, concatenated:
@davesgonechina: Hey @jessnevins, did you once write about early Chinese pulp where the Roman pope fought a Chinese sorcerer on a mountaintop? Can’t find.
@jessnevins: Nan Guotai appeared in Nian Dajiangjun Pingxizhuan (1899). Nan Guotai is the son of the Jesuit missionary Nan Huairen, a.k.a. Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688). Nan is also an inventor of military technology–the 17th century Chinese version of SCIENCE!–and during a Tibetan rebellion. Nan offers his newest weapons, including the shengtian qiu (aerial balloon) and dixing chuan (underground ship), to the Chinese Imperial Army. But the conflict spreads, and Nan’s weapons go up against traditional Chinese magic weapons. Chinese yanzhi jin (“rouge garments,” or tampons) are used to absorb the electricity of dianqi bian (electric whips) and and the Master of the Snowy Mountain and the Pope engage in mortal combat.
The summary suggests a steampunk-style clash between reason and mysticism that’s quite different from the book’s full-on magical warfare, where even the modern technology is treated as little more than a tech-flavored form of sorcery (at least in the first half; magic recedes later in the book as the war becomes more grounded in late 19th Century reality). The actual science isn’t a focus, and the inventions are pulled in when the plot requires it and then forgotten. The development of the subterranean vehicles, for example, is literally sparked by someone asking, “Hey, your balloons are pretty impressive. Have you ever considered making ones that go underground?” and the inventor replying, “No, but I’ll get right on it,” and then ten days later, he’s got a couple hundred ready for launch.
I find that brief summaries of popular literature (Qing, Republican, 1990s pulp explosion, Chinese SF, edgy satire) tend to emphasize the novelty or boundary-pushing qualities of the work, giving you room to imagine all manner of crazy possibilities that seldom play out in the full version. You’re invariably left disappointed over what might have been. It’s an understandable approach in a historical overview of a particular field, but I still can’t help feeling betrayed when a promising premise is overhyped. Still, while Ping Jinchuan might not be accurately summarized as “that novel where the Pope fights for the Qing army,” that’s not to say it isn’t an entertaining read—it’s at least a fun story competently told, which is more than can be said for a lot of other seductively summarized slogs. It’s just that the pope episode barely fills one of the book’s 32 chapters, and he doesn’t engage anyone in mortal combat so much as temporarily neutralize all other magic and convince the enemy to go home.
With the Master of the Snowy Mountain, a Muslim patriarch who reluctantly threw in with Galdan at the urging of his wife, Lady Anu, holed up behind an icy death trap keeping the imperial army from reaching him, the pope is fetched by balloon from Rome. Upon arrival he marvels at the might of the Chinese army (so different from the stories he’s heard), declares his supreme authority over the European powers, and then leads his twelve disciples, crucifixes held high, through the icy mountain defenses that have no hold over them. With the pope unwilling to do violence, the crucifix isn’t really a weapon, but it does render the enemy’s guns inoperative and turns enchanted enemy soldiers back into the domestic beasts they were created from. The pope then orders one of the Master’s remaining disciples to carry back a message: Go home, or Islam will be wiped out. He goes home, since he’s fundamentally a wise man who was temporarily misled, and drops out of the story altogether.
The electric whip vs. tampon bit is less science vs. magic than powerful magic vs. rustic magic. As is typical in this sort of tale, the named warriors fighting out in front of faceless troops each has a unique fighting style and impressively-named weapon. In a bit of low comedy, the grand weapons of the six female disciples of the Master of the Snowy Mountain—Spirit-Binding Rope, Stupefying Kerchief, Spirit-Tying Belt, Rouge Towel, Mandarin Duck Silk, and Coiling Phoenix—are actually repurposed from ordinary items of clothing: topknot band, undergarment, belt, “unclean cloth” (I’d probably read this as some sort of menstrual belt, rather than David Der-wei Wang’s “tampon”), sandal lacing, and embroidered shoes. They (and the six male disciples) are formidable enough that the imperial army calls upon a 14-year-old monk (who’s the reincarnation of a holy man murdered by Galdan) for assistance. The monk’s electric whip, which he obtained from a Swiss mentor during a trip to Europe (don’t get any ideas—-the trip is dispensed with in half a line), makes short work of the enemy, except that as a virgin and former top monk he’s forbidden from coming into contact with unclean objects and doesn’t even attempt to fight the Rouge Towel. I’m not sure it’s even meant to absorb electricity, since when the monk does eventually get mad enough to attack its wielder, she dies and her weapon disappears, just like everyone else. His whip does malfunction, but the plotline’s not followed up on and it’s likely meant to be due to the sacred/profane interaction rather than a blown fuse.
A follow-up note:
The author throws together key individuals from various stages of the Dzungar-Qing War, making deliberate hash of history to generate a more richly populated setting. Nian Gengyao’s campaign to suppress an uprising by Lobsang Tendzin, a Dzungar prince, took place in 1723. Galdan Boshugtu Khan, ruler of the Dzungars in the late 17th Century, and his wife and counsellor Lady Anu fought against Qing troops personally commanded by the Kangxi Emperor in the 1690s; Lady Anu was killed in battle in 1696 and Galdan the next year. The Galdan of the novel, in addition to being mighty warrior, is a skilled inventor given the nickname “Zhuge Liang of the West.” The Dzungar tribe he leads is subordinate to Lobsang Tendzin, who is the “King of Qinghai” here; Galdan is made general of the Qinghai forces.
It’s not a period of history I’m familiar with, and in trying to make sense of the chronologies, I ran across a very useful digital version of A Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Chinese Popular Fiction 中国通俗小说鉴赏辞典 (1993), edited by Zhou Juntao 周钧韬, Ouyang Jian 欧阳健, and Xiao Xiangkai 潇相恺. The entry for the novel breaks down the historical, magical, and scientific elements of the narrative in a way that portrays it like the entertaining pulpy adventure story it is. Lots of fun, but not the blow-your-mind lost classic I’d been sold.
Some notes on General Nian’s Conquest of the West was originally published on Xiaokang2020
Lobsters 龙虾 is a 1959 stop-motion short directed by Jin Xi 靳夕, adapted from a play by Lu Dan 芦丹. A restaurant proprietor attempts to dispose of his stock of spoiled lobsters by placing an ad for a dinner conference on Marxism.
I first saw this aired on TV back in 2002 or 2003, and have been trying to locate a copy ever since. Now thanks to the CCTV6/SAPPRFT venture M1905, it’s available online at last.[1] It’s a short and hilarious satire, so I won’t spoil it with a plot summary — just watch it:
The action takes place in an unidentified country sometime in the 1950s, with advertisements and newspapers that contribute an international flavor. On closer inspection the text is Romanized Chinese.
“Foreign” newspaper from Lobsters
[1] Note: I started this post in May 2014. This blog’s been dormant for a while. ↩
Capitalist lobsters! was originally published on Xiaokang2020
