Tag Archive for li huiniang

Happy (research) birthday

Meng Chao (Republican period)

Meng Chao (Republican period)

Six years ago – give or take a week or two, I can’t remember when the semester started – I found one of the great intellectual loves of my life. I suppose I often think of the real birth of my research life as being tied to my actual birthday: it was at some point around the time I turned 26 that I discovered someone who would have been, had he been living, 107. A bit of an age gap, then.

My grad program was structured in a very clear way, so that during coursework, you knew exactly what was going to be on your plate: a historiography seminar in the fall, then a two-quarter research seminar. In the winter quarter, we researched (including our famous “Bataan Death Research March” to the Bay Area to hit Stanford & Berkeley – trial by fire, and what I suspect was partially designed as a real bonding experience. You get to know your classmates on a whole new level when you’re going through 10 hour days in a library after catching a 6 AM flight). In the spring, we wrote, with the final product being a journal-length essay that was hopefully up to standards for good journals in our field (indeed, many of us published at least one of our essays; some published all of them!).

I was panicked my first year & selected what turned out to be a difficult subject, compounded by my general incompetence. I decided that for my second year, I was going to research something that I knew made me happy: The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), one of the most famous of the “marvelous tales,” a big sweeping epic of a ghost play. It has undergone quite the revival in the past 15 or 20 years: how did it get to that point, I wondered?

As it turned out, it really was in need of revival – I was doing some preliminary work with Chinese theatre yearbooks (nianjian 年鉴), which include all sorts of statistics on plays performed by troupes and so on. Peony was basically nowhere to be found; I knew enough to know this would be a very tall order to research, and I needed to find some other angle. In desperation, I brought a typed up spreadsheet – listing years, troupes, plays performed – I had made to the wonderful professor who helped us once a week with our documents. “Can you just look at this really quickly and tell me if something pops out? I just don’t recognize most of these plays.” She immediately hit upon one and asked “What is this doing here?” I looked, and said it had apparently been a very popular play in the early 1980s. “Do you know about this one? It’s also a guixi [鬼戏, ghost play], but it was criticized during the Cultural Revolution – like Hai Rui [Wu Han’s Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, Hai Rui baguan 海瑞罢官].” She told me she remembered seeing big character posters in Beijing as a girl, criticizing the play and the author. How interesting, then, that it was so popular in the early 1980s.

I had never heard of it, or the author. And sure enough, when I trotted off that day to do a quick search of the literature, barely anything turned up. Rudolf Wagner, whose The Chinese Historical Drama remains a more or less unparalleled study of the “new historical play,” a quarter century after its publication, had this to say:

Among Western scholars, considerable attention has been given to Wu Han’s play, much less to Tian Han’s, and very little to Meng Chao’s. (80)

Indeed, as I noted with no small bit of wonder a little later, so little attention had been given to Meng Chao’s play that this Kun opera (kunqu 昆曲) was consistently misidentified as Peking opera (jingju 京剧). I’d discovered something - Li Huiniang – and someone – Meng Chao – and that has more or less driven my fledgling career since, even as the topic has spiraled outwards and sucked in more and more angles and more and more people and more and more stuff, as projects are wont to do. I always come back to him and his ghost – it’s hard not to, given the subject of my work, but partially because I have spent so much time with “him” (rather, the literary detritus of his life). When I’m having trouble writing, I will often turn to the parts of my manuscript that deal with him – a story I know so well, and something that can often get me over a case of writer’s block.

Over the years, I’ve collected bits and pieces of his life – I look a bit longingly at a book I otherwise wouldn’t want on the site Kongfz, which has an inscription he wrote (having Meng Chao’s writing in his own hand on my bookshelf!! I can only imagine). I’ve come to know him through his own writing, but mostly the writing of others; they flesh out the erudite, but distant, man who appears to me otherwise. An exception is reading his early zawen (sharp, satirical essays) published in the early ’40s (admittedly, he was around 40 at the time, so not quite young); I was warmed to read him discussing his work habits, his custom of working mostly at night. A friend recalled he always seemed to be running everywhere in the early 1940s, in Guilin; he had no trouble writing, and could write a zawen without thinking of it. He was also a poet. He later wrote elegant, dense prose. He – like so many of that generation of Chinese intellectuals – seems, at least from this distance, to inhabit (somewhat comfortably) strange territory between great classical traditions and new Marxist ones.

Meng Chao (r) with family (late C. Revolution)

Meng Chao (r) with family (late C. Revolution)

He’s not handsome, not even when comparing him to the two other men his name is indelibly linked with. In his Republican-era photograph (which, admittedly, came when he was already middle age: perhaps a younger Meng Chao would be a handsomer Meng Chao), he has neither the round-faced, amenable look of Wu Han, nor the lean, dapper appearance of Tian Han. Any idealization of him I have in my head is not because I’ve been presented with a fine specimen of manhood; it’s his literary acumen I find so appealing. It’s hard to find photographs of him; I have seen only three. One – my favorite, even in the higher resolution version that makes him look older and more bewildered (it reminds me that this man had been through a lot by that age, impressive family background or no!) – shows him as a man in his late 30s or early 40s, with a face a bit like a basset hound. He looks very earnest. The next was taken sometime in the 1950s, and is a typical cadre photograph – large glasses (ridiculously so, from the vantage point of 2014), much older than the first. The last is the saddest, and shows a very old man with a daughter and two granddaughters. He looks much, much older than his 73 or 74 years. That one was taken very late in his life, after over a decade of persecution and campaigns, after being branded a niugui-sheshen 牛鬼蛇神, an ox ghost-snake spirit. There’s no trace of that earnest young man in the Republican-era photograph. What would that old man say to the young figure, I wonder?

Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 4.19.23 PMOne of the most important commandments as a historian is “Do no violence to your sources”; treat them carefully, analyze them thoughtfully, be aware of what you are bringing to your interpretation. It seems that much more important when dealing with a life, especially a life that has been so little looked at in comparison to his peers. Knitting together these disparate pieces of a literary life makes me nervous, and I wonder sometime if I’m too likely to sympathize with men like Meng Chao (after all, Li Huiniang or not, he was part of The System that took root; surely he – and his compatriots – shoulder some of the burden for the disasters that came later, even if they themselves were swept up in them?). But he’s a very human actor to me, one that reminds me that all these other names and people (and scores of anonymous people besides) were people, and these were lives, and ultimately that’s the important part of the story – not abstract ideology or theory. One of my favorite pieces I ever wrote was for The Appendix, called The Woman in Green – the story of Li Huiniang, from 1981 all the way back to 1381. I loved writing it because I got to imagine, on a scale that I can’t when writing purely academic work, scenes from a life I’ve written again and again.

Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 9.43.29 AMHe reminds me, while teaching, to impress that fact on students: that these were once living, breathing humans – not just names or faceless individuals.  I show my students a page from a theatre yearbook announcing the rehabilitation of opera people in the late 1970s (lists like this were published all over the place), and I talk them through the jumble of (to them) unintelligible characters – representations of lives lived, good and bad. Here, a luminary who died in prison; there, a star who was beaten to death by a gang of overzealous teenagers; sprinkled throughout, people who committed suicide, fearing what would happen if they didn’t. And there (in two little characters; ones that I recognize the shape of no matter how small the image I’m looking at), a man who died in a Beijing hutong, his family suffering from being attached to someone who produced a so-called fandang fanshehuizhuyi 反党反社会主义 - anti-party, anti-socialist thought – poisonous weed; broken, old, sad, and bitter. They’re simply recognizable names, poster children for all those other lives lived (and ended) in much greater anonymity. But human, concrete: not just names.

I am not so cocky as to think I’ve done some great, field-changing service by highlighting the life of this elite (but run of the mill elite!) intellectual, though I do think his story adds something to our understanding of the time that simply highlighting stars like Tian Han and Wu Han doesn’t.  But at the same time, there’s something nice about having a person to attach yourself to. He’s “my” Meng Chao, an anchor for many other things. He’s even turned my attention to subjects far beyond the bounds of opera (the 1960 conquest of Mt. Everest, for instance!). I worry often that I’m not going to be able to do him justice, but wanting to do him and his story justice is a constantly driving force.  I am doing my best for a man I’ll never meet.

Coming ’round full circle

I took the first week and a half of winter break to go on one of my every-nine-months-or-so gaming binges – doing the media consumption equivalent of gorging one’s self during the holidays on delicious treats with little thought to anything or anyone else (or your waistline). I played through Tales of Xillia, having played about 3/4s over spring break last year, and its sequel, Tales of Xillia 2. I do love a good JRPG – it’s one of the few genres I’ve been playing consistently – and consistently seek out – since I started “really” playing games in the late ’90s – and it occurred to me that I’ve actually played a lot of the Tales of series. They feature a pretty frenetic battle style that isn’t actually my preferred way of play (boring, old school turn based battle is my favorite!), but there’s a pleasant rhythm and often plenty of game-sanctioned grinding via side quests. I’m one of those people that loves to grind, although not if I feel like I have to do it to progress in the game; but generally, I play games to put myself into a happy space, and low-stress, repetitive-task activities (cross stitch! Organizing things! Fixing footnotes! Grinding in an RPG!) do that for me.

image-newsIn any case, I liked both the Xillia entries. I was a little suspicious of the second installment when I first started, since I don’t particularly like a silent protagonist, which Xillia 2 mostly has. My concern was perhaps heightened by the fact that I find random grunts, sighs, and other vocalizations – in absence of any other sort of voice acting – a bit irksome; at least in Persona, say, or Suikoden, the silent protagonist is, well, silent. After playing a game, I usually go poke around review sites, discussion boards, etc., just to see what conversation surrounding the game is like (I don’t tend to be playing the latest & greatest – or even popular – so thoughtful, focused criticism can be hard to find). I did so with the Xillia games, and was most interested in chatter surrounding the plot/ends of Xillia 2. There are three endings, which I guess are never officially named as “true,” “good,” and “bad,” but do seem to have some ranking, based on the kind of end credits given to each – well, the “bad” ending is rather clearly not the intended ending, since you never get to the end, and the battle to get to that ending is monstrously hard – far more difficult than the “final boss” in either of the other endings.

JRPGs often get castigated for being totally predictable, and it’s generally true (although I don’t know that most other genres aren’t equally as predictable) – you know you’re probably going to be facing down some big evil with a motley collection of people, there’s going to be criticism of organized religion and/or environmental destruction and/or technology, there’s probably going to be some kind of betrayal along the way, one of the good guys will turn out to be bad or vice versa, things are probably going to resolve well for our band of heroes, and so on. I actually don’t mind the repetitive nature, but this may be somewhat linked to what I study. Drama in China was recycled from generation to generation; the same source material provided inspiration for centuries worth of cultural production. Consider the proliferation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms-themed games in East Asia: the medium may be new, but the popularity is not. There are patterns of narrative that can be comfortably inhabited; they don’t tend to be “shocking” or introduce anything new, but if the writing is good & characterizations are on point, well – a solid story is a solid story, even if it is rehashing ground we’ve been over before. I’m also willing to suspend my disbelief at everything if I like the gameplay and other elements (there are limits though: once, after Final Fantasy XIII was released, I was talking to a friend about the skill leveling system, which seemed a little ridiculous and over the top to me, and finally said “Are we just getting too old and jaded for this stuff?” “Yes,” he responded, not missing a beat, “Yes, we are.” But had I liked everything else about the game, I probably could’ve – would’ve – forgiven the “Crystarium”).

Li Huiniang (not a datuanyuan!), from Judith Zeitlin's The Phantom Heroine (158)

Li Huiniang (not a gentle maiden!), from Judith Zeitlin’s The Phantom Heroine (158)

Xillia 2 wasn’t surprising exactly, but it was quite a bit darker than I was perhaps expecting. I was intrigued that none of the endings were really “fan service” endings – meaning happy in the sense of everything being resolved perfectly and easily. Many people liked this (it seems more mature, more realistic), many other people seemed to find it unsatisfying (where’s my happy ending, dammit!). In Chinese literature, there is a plot structure called datuanyuan 大团圆 (the “grand denouement,”  “big and happy reunion,” a version of “… and they all lived happily ever after.”): the perfect, full-circle ending where the boy gets the girl, and the job, and everything else. No loose ends anywhere, and we all walk away with the warm fuzzies. I’ve been pondering the appeal of traditional literature – rife with datuanyuan, among other things – in high socialist China, and something about these Xillia 2 endings (somewhat happy, in some cases, or moving, perhaps, but not perfect in the sense that some fans long for: any option means cutting off some possibility, some person) spoke to my intellectual side a bit. Funnily enough, the “good” (but not “true”) ending in Xillia 2 is “round” in many respects, largely because of the game’s plot point about “alternate dimensions”: there is a certain amount of “things coming full circle” due to the alternate timelines and overlapping histories. But it’s not “round” in the sense of a datuanyuan - things don’t entirely work out as they “should” for a clear cut, unimpeachably happy ending.

The datuanyuan  is not some minor point for children’s fairytales (something I think we tend to associate the “and then they lived happily ever after” endings with – “grownup” media should be grittier, or more complex, and not so happy against all odds); it’s actually quite an important thing in Chinese literature, including some of the greatest things ever written in any language.  The English translation doesn’t convey the cultural significance of roundness (as Zhang Zhen notes in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937, the significance of datuanyuan goes way beyond a cliché, and points to a kind of cultural conditioning – she mentions, for instance, the importance of visual cues like the typical round table used for family meals, as well as cosmological symbols like the full moon, in early Chinese cinema that had a tendency to rely on the “big reunion” as a plot structure). Cultural resonance or not, forcing a datuanyuan sometimes leads to bizarre results, like in the 1926 film A String of Pearls (Yi chuan zhenzhu 一串珍珠), based loosely (and I do mean “loosely”) on the famous Guy de Maupassant short story “La parure” (The necklace), where the emotional punch of the story is more or less removed by an effort to ensure the happy ending. I suppose this is one complaint with happy endings in games; they can seem contrived or leave massive plot holes.

There are also old examples of “fanfic,” intended to write the wrongs of an original narrative, or flesh things out (often appending a datuanyuan) – the ones I think of are related to Dream of the Red Chamber [Honglou meng 红楼梦], the 18th century novel by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹. The first printed version (in 1791) included 40 extra chapters that don’t exist in earlier  manuscripts, and there’s been a great amount of debate about what the ending should have looked like, who wrote the extra 40 chapters, the role of the editors of the printed version, etc (indeed, there is an entirely discipline dedicated to study of this novel – called Hongxue 红学 in Chinese, “Redology” – a tidbit that I still delight in passing on to students). The 19th century saw all sorts of new endings put forth, though as Jin Feng points out in Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance, these have not generally been looked at from the angle of fan activity, but simply as part of pre-20th century literary production.

But of course, it’s not just fans who write happy, perfect endings. One argument about the datuanyuan – and it is a pretty constant feature of a lot of Chinese fiction over the centuries – is that Chinese fiction was initially “meant to entertain the writer himself more than his readers” (Gu Mingdong, Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System). On this, brilliant intellectuals pointed out in the 1950s and 1960s that even the heyday of Ming chuanqi produced works that were generally self-indulgent on the part of the author (the translator Yang Xianyi commented in the early ’60s that “feudal period literati” paid little attention to coherence or overall structure, instead weaving together a bunch of disparate plots into one sprawling mass of a story: in essence, writing what they wanted to write, regardless of the effect it gave their audience). Owing to the unlikely chances of truly succeeding in the civil service system, literati – the producers and consumers of fiction – used these cultural products to daydream; they daydreamed not of “realistic” endings, but of spectacularly perfect ones. In some respects, it’s a more ancient and literary version of fan fiction, though in this case, the source material is generally historical in nature.

In truth, I like most datuanyuan-type endings, at least in games. I don’t seek them out – and often, designers are more than happy to give us one, so it’s interesting when one doesn’t appear – but there’s something pleasing about them, even if they’re ridiculous. I loved Final Fantasy X – which did not have a datuanyuan denouement (I cried! I snuffled lightly at all three endings of Xillia 2, but I actually cried at the end of FFX), and it’s possible I loved it because it didn’t have a perfect ending – but at the same time, I loved Final Fantasy X-2 because it tacked a company-sanctioned happy ending on to everything. I got my bittersweet ending and everything being tied up in a neat, if not entirely logical, package at the end. This is one reason for multiple endings, I suppose (that and the illusion of choice) – give the people what they want, make everyone happy! Bittersweet, sad, happy? We’ve got you covered.

kunqunr03_03_clip_image001_0001This is much harder to do in literature, for obvious reasons, although a single work can encompass all those moments. In drama, this is helped by the fact that the sprawling Ming tales were not performed in their entirety, and were instead seen in excerpts. Some of the most enduring parts of Tang Xianzu’s 汤显祖 masterwork The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), or at least the ones that get trotted out the most, are not, in fact, the end, where everything works out – they are the beautiful and rather tragic (or at least bittersweet) early scenes. Considering the fears of moralists that chuanqi like Peony would drive women to madness, suicide, or worse, it seems that even having a happy ending was no guarantee your audience would gravitate towards that! Instead, portions of the reading audience seemed to fixate on the somewhat depressing (perhaps more realistic?) chapters – an acknowledgement that the datuanyuan was simply a fantasy, impossible in real life? The famous “Walking through the garden, waking from the dream” [Youyuan jingmeng 游园惊梦] section is rather wondrous – and it does feature quite the fantastic dream! – yet it’s simply that: a dream. And yet the (male) authors seemed to love writing the fantastical ending, no matter how improbable, even if those weren’t the parts segments of their audience gravitated towards. Perhaps this is partially a difference in producing and consuming; I wonder if fan-produced writing and art geared towards alternative paths or endings, fleshing out what happened after, writing a “perfect” scenario, whatever that might mean for an individual, often focuses more on the perhaps improbable yet perfect because it’s created largely to entertain one’s self and not really for an audience (publishing on fandom specific sites and the like notwithstanding) – not unlike some of the great fiction and drama in China.

LHN2I’m interested in literary production as self-entertainment. While I don’t think my Marxist intellectuals were generally writing to entertain themselves (though I do think sinking one’s self into the full capabilities of classical Chinese – worlds away from rote Marxist language, more “understandable” vernacular – must have been a pleasure), I do think they were writing to entertain each other, at least in some cases – something that gets lost when we focus on ideological squabbles and high politics to the total exclusion of thinking about writing and consuming literature. I’m also interested in the fantasy of it, at least as applied to the historical dramas c. 1960 I write about. We focus so much on their political meaning – the coded, yet sharp, rebukes of a system that wasn’t working for vast amounts of the Chinese population – but what about their function as escapes? As daydreams? To be sure, “righteous phantasm raining down hellfire on cruel and unjust prime minister” (as in this image from Li Huiniang) is lacking a bit of the romance of “dead maiden revived for love of talented scholar, and everything works out in the end.” But on the other hand, it’s a fantasy of a very particular kind, well-suited for a specific moment. The act of creating or consuming such a fantasy in that moment could be quite powerful, I think. Consuming the fantastical can be powerful at any moment.

We sometimes act like a story with a “fairytale” ending is necessarily simplistic, juvenile, or unsophisticated; the history of the datuanyuan in China illustrates that such things can be quite sophisticated in terms of aesthetics and artistic value. I suppose I don’t place a huge amount of value on a “round” ending in the sense of datuanyuan (though the fangirl inside me does like them in games where I’m attached to the main characters), but I do place value on an ending feeling “round,” fleshed out, and coming to a conclusion in a graceful, logical way. Games are a bit of a fantastical daydream for me, or that’s how I use them – I suspend disbelief for so many other things, a happy “round” ending is just one more thing. Not so unlike my playwrights, I suspect – they were willing to suspend disbelief for that chance of escape and daydreaming, if only for the duration of a performance. Those few hours of being thrilled at the turn of events, of imagining some other path were worth any logical gymnastics they subjected themselves to.

Giving pleasure, not a political lesson

Darth Vader lianhuanhuaWell, the Star Wars comic has proved shockingly popular; I’ve been keeping up on both where it’s going & the sorts of discussions its been stimulating with great interest. I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised that there’s been a lot of delight (and trying to figure out where the references are coming from), versus generalized grousing about shanzhai culture in China; the timbre of the discussion also seems a bit different from the usual ‘point and laugh at bizarre Chinese shanzhai whatever.’

I was burbling to a colleague about its spread & he asked why I was cordoning it off from my ‘actual work’ (‘This is your actual work!’ was basically his response), but I suppose I’ve looked at it as an idle curiosity, with barely any connections to my research topic of the past few years – especially with some of the grandiose titles authors have come up with, discussing its rarity and my “unearthing” of it (I feel as though I unearth things from the archives; this was a cheap purchase on the fly!). Unlike Nick Stember (who has been posting translations of the comics on his site, and did a wonderful post on lianhuanhua adaptations of Western movies), say, or any number of other academics, I don’t primarily study visual culture. I certainly don’t deal with interpretations of Western culture in the PRC (at least, not of this sort) - Li Huiniang (a lot of the great ghost operas, really) is about as classically Chinese, in form, language, and content, as one is going to get.

But a comment on the Star Wars post got me thinking. The comment noted:

So this is a story of a rebel faction (written as 造反者, no less) fighting against the tyranny of a great empire, and it was just so casually published in China back then? I find this rather interesting.

In contrast, a translated Japanese light novel “No Game No Life” was recently banned in China, because the protagonists won a (modified) chess game by inciting a coup in the opponent’s (chess-piece) camp, and the book was deemed to promote subversion, blah blah blah,

Actually, I find this very unsurprising; of all the things that have crossed my mind, the “rebel faction fighting great empire” being problematic was not one. Perhaps if Star Wars had premiered in 1963; but 1980? The post-Cultural Revolution “thaw” of the very late 1970s/early 1980s looks remarkably like the post-Great Leap Forward thaw of the early 1960s. My research concerns opera in particular, but the relative relaxation of both periods was seen elsewhere, and for very similar reasons (and, I would guess, opera was generally considered more of a bureaucratic priority than lianhuanhua: regulation would have been stiffer for opera). The present, of course, is a different kettle of fish altogether; who knows what would be said about this presentation of Star Wars right now?

The Star Wars comic may seem a strange thing to try and compare to traditional Chinese opera (xiqu 戏曲), but consider the fact that (quoting from my Appendix piece on Li Huiniang through the ages) there is a very beloved plot structure in Chinese theatre, going something like this:

It is a time of great crisis for China, a period when peasants break under the strain of government pressure and foreign armies agitate on the borders. A cruel or impressively incompetent ruler is in power, a person who cares for little but his own pleasure. At best, he ignores pressing political issues and the unhappiness of his people; at worst, he makes the lives of the people worse through draconian punishments and inhuman land requisitions and taxation. Weak and corrupt lackeys and subordinates surround him. But there is somebody—there is always at least one person—who finally stands up to him. It may be an official with a sharply honed sense of right and wrong, or perhaps a gutsy young scholar who burns with righteous fury. And sometimes there is an innocent bystander who meets a gruesome, unjust end.

Little guy against the big guy (even in Hai Rui Dismissed from Office [Hai Rui baguan 海瑞罢官] – by Wu Han 吴晗 – you’re dealing with an important minister versus an even more important person – the emperor); the big guy is invariably doing something wrong (usually really, really wrong). In the case of Li Huiniang 李慧娘, one of the ghost plays I study most intensely, it’s a combination of gutsy young scholar & a powerless concubine. The scholar stands up for himself in the face of the evil prime minister (who is cavorting by West Lake while the peasants starve and barbarians mass on the northern borders: callous and incompetent), the concubine remarks admiringly on it, and she winds up dead at the hands of the prime minister (and returns as an incredibly righteously indignant ghost, at least in the version by Meng Chao 孟超).

An edition of Li Huiniang used by the Beijing Kunqu Troupe; it is marked "poisonous weed" above the crossed out title - below is noted that it is "evidence for criticism." From my personal collection.

Li Huiniang script used by the Beijing Kunqu Troupe, marked “poisonous weed” above the crossed out title – below is noted that it is “evidence for criticism.” From my personal collection.

Until 1963 – and, for plays like Hai Rui, until 1965 – these sorts of story lines weren’t read as subversive, at least not in official channels. They were celebrated for encouraging a “resisting spirit,” “spirit of revolt” [fankang jingshen 反抗精神] in their audiences; naturally, they were not talking about the spirit of resisting the Party, but of everything else that needed to be resisted (America, capitalism, revisionism, landlords, Confucianism, the patriarchy, whatever: the list is practically endless).  Some of this is simply part and parcel of the game of Marxist showmanship, where intellectuals and artists trotted through a pretty standard set of narratives to justify why certain types of culture – often the things Mao had said (at Yan’an) ought to be “totally destroyed” – were perfectly appropriate for socialist China. On the other hand, I’m not keen to dismiss all of that kind of talk as meaningless: I think there was a kernel of truth underneath all those claims (that is, I think a lot of the writers did believe in the power of art, and did think it could be “educational” without being over the top, and did think “the masses” probably had something to learn from watching well-loved classics).

However, there was undoubtedly an element of modern “indirect remonstrance” regarding the Great Leap Forward by senior intellectuals who were writing these revamped classical tales. But that (like the story lines themselves) is a grand tradition. Tian Han 田汉, the famous playwright who also write a revised historical drama along the same lines (Xie Yaohuan 谢瑶环), supposedly told Meng Chao that Li Huiniang‘s great fault was that opera (qǔ 曲) should be “bent” or “indirect” (qÅ« 曲); Li Huiniang was too “unyielding,” or “not bent,” or “direct” (buqū 不曲).1 As it turned out, they were considered “too direct” – an attack on the Party, or on Mao himself – after 1963; Li Huiniang, Xie Yaohuan, Hai Rui, and their authors were savaged in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the first casualties of that long decade. I’ve written about all of this in my Modern Chinese Literature & Culture article, “A Ghostly Bodhisattva and the Price of Vengeance: Meng Chao, Li Huiniang, and the Politics of Drama, 1959-1979.”

But the terror of the Cultural Revolution was not foreordained in 1961, and it was a period of relative relaxation, insofar as parts of the cultural realm were concerned. Who could have seen 1966 coming when Chen Yi 陈毅 (at the time the Foreign Minister) commented on the profusion of crappy, didactic dramas that flourished during the Great Leap Forward: “Plays,” he said, “should give us pleasure and artistic satisfaction, not a political lesson.” The reasoning was, of course, that having come through such a dreadful period, people just needed to be entertained; to smile and be happy; to forget. Zhang Zhen 张真, a staunch defender of traditional drama throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, wrote in 1956 on the overzealous application of certain rules regarding drama (in this case, the dictate that the masses should not be made the butt of jokes):

… the clowns have all washed their faces clean [referring to the traditional makeup style of clown characters] …. This is most odd. Can it Screen Shot 2014-05-31 at 11.25.24 PMbe that there are people who believe that the construction of socialism and laughing are incompatible? Some people think these little comedies have no didactic purpose, but I think in regards to [them], we should just want them to give the audience a healthy laugh, and this is enough.

The tension between didactic drama and artistically valuable drama (or just entertaining drama) is felt throughout the period. But in the short thaw of the early 1960s, although playwrights and intellectuals didn’t back away totally from the need to justify their work on socialist merits, they weren’t tied to producing works of often questionable creative and artistic standards (indeed, the performance of contemporary-themed revolutionary works – never terribly robust – drops to practically nil in the period between 1960 and 1964).

In any case, the Cultural Revolution didn’t kill these plays (their authors were another matter entirely); in the period following Mao’s death and the fall of Jiang Qing’s clique, known as the Gang of Four, in 1976, drama journals resumed publication, photographs of ballerinas with bayonets and opera singers dressed in the dull olives and blues of military uniforms were replaced (gradually) with those of plays that hadn’t seen a stage for a decade or more – actors in beautifully embroidered robes, actresses resplendent in glittering headdresses. Li Huiniang returned in 1979, one audience member recalling that when the curtain went up on the first performance in Beijing, the audience’s nervous, excited energy was palpable.

Part of this was due to the political situation, no doubt – a sign that other, more recent specters of the past were at least locked in jail – but it’s also a testament to two things: one, the enduring power of these types of classical tales (and their incredible adaptability); two, to a much more relaxed atmosphere of cultural production, one that hadn’t been seen since the early 1960s (again, this is all relative).

So, in a climate that was downright encouraging of plays like Hai Rui and Xie Yaohuan and Li Huiniang – not just plays that could be read as subversive, but had been actively criticized as attacking Mao and the Party (it’s probably a testament to how neutered traditional drama has become that it’s now pretty much in the camp of “safe and glorious national product,” ghosts or no ghosts) – plays that celebrated the long odds of the little guy versus overwhelming (usually state) power, Star Wars would’ve fit right in. Sure, it was American in origin, but it’s not like it was set in America – it’s science fiction (frankly, I’d think this less dangerous in many respects than classical Chinese tales set in China – never mind classical Chinese tales set in China that have already been accused of trying to bring down the Party). So many of the Cold War-era, space racey elements “could have” been read as us (China, the little guy!) versus them (American capitalists! The Soviet Union!) – without venturing into us (the masses) versus them (the CCP). Even more topically, it could be read as us (the masses) versus them (the Gang of Four & the excesses of the Cultural Revolution).

Besides, there were much more vicious critiques that were allowed to be published. One of my favorite essays is one I’ve written aboutI think of Meng Chao” 我怀孟超 by Lou Shiyi 楼适夷 – published in 1979, where he says (in a not terribly subtle, extraordinarily sarcastic manner – and this was published in People’s Daily!) of the period of early Li Huiniang criticism:

At the time I didn’t really understand – how could “anti-Jia Sidao” count as “anti-party”?  Don’t tell me our great, righteous, glorious, and honorable party was harboring a Jia Sidao?2

A fantastical space opera tale, no matter what kind of resistance it was encouraging, looks pretty tame in comparison to some of the cutting remarks of senior CCP members who had been through the gamut & had had it. So I suspect it was “allowed” because, as Chen Yi & Zhang Zhen discussed drama in the ’50s and ’60s, it could entertain people, and the people desperately needed to be entertained. Further, there were much more important things to keep an eye on. Just as bureaucrats had in the wake of the Leap, attention was turned towards getting the economy and society back on track, and away from tighter control of the cultural sphere. Policing lianhuanhua must have been pretty low on the list of things to take care of.

Besides … if I were looking for rebellion-fomenting culture c. 1980, I’m pretty sure Darth Vader & a triceratops would not be tops on my list of dangerous media. I mean, really: just look at it!

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Show 2 footnotes

  1. Clever bit of word play from a clever man; unfortunately, none of them were clever enough to get themselves out of the trouble they inadvertently created for themselves by writing historical dramas.
  2. Surprise: it was!

Placeholder & recent writing

From Benjamin Breen's interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

From Benjamin Breen’s interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

As I’m currently in the frantic final stages of writing my dissertation (for a 26 July defense – grad school is almost over! I still can’t quite wrap my head around it) as well as trying to get my life in order for a big move to beautiful Bozeman, Montana to take up an assistant professorship at Montana State University (I really can’t quite wrap my head around that – even though I’ve known since December, it’s still baffling and quite wondrous, and I’m thrilled with how things panned out this year), I’ve had less time to write than I’d otherwise like. But I have cranked out two pieces I was rather pleased with & they have both appeared in the past month:

The first was a reworked excerpt on a Chinese proposal, c. 1904, to “reform” the game of mahjong. The piece was pulled from my third year research paper (on mahjong & its social/cultural standing from the late Qing through the Republican period), which I have written about a few times here already. I was delighted to be included in Zoya Street‘s new effort, Memory Insufficient, an e-zine that hopes to encourage high-quality historical writing on games. With Zoya at the helm, we can look forward to a lot of good material & I hope the effort really takes off (it’s off to a splendid start, so I can’t wait to see how it develops). In any case, my piece “Mahjong as edutainment” can be found in the second issue, which is on Asian histories in games.

The second is a piece I’m particularly pleased with, on an important subject of my dissertation: the literary figure of Li Huiniang. I hardly ever say I’m happy with a piece of my own writing, but I’m really tickled with how well my recounting of the tale of Li Huiniang – moving from 1981 all the way back to 1381 – came out in “The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981-1381.” Ages ago, Maura Cunningham put me in touch with Christopher Heaney, one of the founders & editors of a new journal of experimental and narrative history out of UT Austin (The Appendix). Chris was fantastic to work with, especially considering I was in a particularly flakey period, and the whole staff is putting out such a fantastically creative publication (I absolutely adore Benjamin Breen‘s take on one of my favorite photographs of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang – a bit of his version is seen above, the original is below). I hope the piece was worth it in the end, and just like Memory Insufficient, I am really looking forward to seeing how The Appendix develops – they have already gathered some really impressive, very creative pieces in their first two issues. I hope I’ll have more fun things to contribute in the future. Getting out of the formal “academicese” box is so very valuable for us (and a blessed break from the dissertation for me).

And with that, it’s back to the grindstone. Where has the time gone?

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang