Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 4

by Pu Songling

  Pu’s negative exemplars are inevitably punished for their unworthiness and abuse of office, whether through public humiliation—like the imperial censor who falls for a confidence scheme because he covets the court connections that a phony princess offers him in “Swindles” (juzha), or Military Commissioner Hong Chengchou, in “The Statesman Who Served Three Emperors” (sanchaoyuanlao), who’s forced to acknowledge the fact that he traitorously betrayed the trust of the Ming emperor he once served—or through less obvious means that are often triggered by judgments made against them in the underworld or by supernatural agents in the mundane world. Due to Magistrate Bai Jia’s dealings with shady individuals in “Dreaming of Wolves” (meng lang), his honest and respected father receives warnings in a dream about his son’s self-destructive behavior; his son, however, doesn’t change his ways after hearing about them, and is eventually beheaded by bandits who desire not to rob him, but to “express the anger of the people over the wrongs you’ve done.”

  The tales, then, provide Pu with an instrument for denying the perception that the imperial civil service examination system is the most meaningful way for an individual to demonstrate knowledge of Confucian values, while illustrating Pu’s advocacy of those very values. The central concept of filial piety (xiao 孝), while discussed explicitly in the context of the family by Confucius and considered primarily in terms of its implications for rulers, culturally also extended beyond the family, and Pu Songling’s treatment of filial piety always serves as reinforcement, complement, or contrast with other personal qualities he assigns his characters. In Pu’s more culturally-encompassing sense of the term, the Confucian concept of xiao is taken to include one’s duties to others as well as to parents, hence reflecting Buddhist belief in the essential equality of all living creatures, and in the karmic justice that seeks retribution for misdeeds while rewarding good deeds with good fortune (or with release from misfortune). Mencius/ Mengzi, the zealous advocate of Confucian tradition whose own words were recorded and eventually revered as one of the Four Books of Confucian wisdom, dictates a three-year period of mourning for parents (as earlier advocated by Confucius), with “mourning dress made of rough hemp” and “the eating of nothing but porridge” (105).3 This dedication to one’s parents sets a high standard for an individual’s corresponding obligation to all other people.

  The hierarchical and mutually dependent exercise of filial piety at a national level is modeled in The Classic of Filial Piety, in which Confucius discusses filial piety as it is to be practiced in descending order by the emperor (Son of Heaven), the king/prince, high officials, low officials, and finally by the common people, culminating in a comprehensive set of four principles for the common people that are replicated in their own ways at each of the ascending levels: “They make use of climatic changes of the four seasons; they know well the advantages and disadvantages of different soils so as to use them properly; they act with caution; they practice economy in spending so as to provide for the needs and comforts of their parents” (9,11). Thus national harmony and prosperity can be achieved if each citizen practices filial piety as a paradigm of prudent regard for family, for resources, and for one’s obligations to the nation.

  Pu often focuses on the relationship between a filial son and his mother, in order to increase the poignancy of his filial scholars’ self-sacrifice. Huo Huan, in “Qing’e” (qing’e), is such a devoted son that he wanders the mountains to find the ingredients for a fish soup that his decrepit mother can’t stop thinking about, searching until his feet are so blistered he’s unable to walk further. The title character in “Scholar Zhong” (zhong sheng) is so filial that he refuses to take the civil service examination—despite a prescient Daoist informing him that if he doesn’t take it now, he’ll never pass it—once that same Daoist informs him that if he takes the exam, he’ll never see his mother alive again. The mighty “Cui Meng” (cui meng), who “challenged the strong and advocated for the weak, never worried about avoiding others’ reproaches or grudges,” is nevertheless asked by his mother not to engage in righting others’ wrongs and making trouble for himself. Even when he becomes infuriated with the cruelty of wicked men, or the greed of corrupt officials, “because he was a filial son, the arrival of his mother would put an end to his rage,” and he faithfully obeys her requests until her death. Each of these filial sons is eventually rewarded by powers outside the mundane world for the sincerity of his service to his mother—and, ultimately, to others.

  It’s not at all inconsistent for Pu Songling to treat Confucian philosophy with such veneration while also exhibiting analogous respect for Buddhism and Daoism. The three systems often intersect in values, particularly in terms of public behavior, for “the symbolic realm of ritual was multivalent and could be expanded without much change in the performative structure” (Chow 36). Since each system promotes principles that revere peace and self-awareness, Pu sees no contradiction in respecting each for its potential benefits to contemplative individuals. In this he shares the position of his contemporary, Tang Zhen (1630-1704), a “middlebrow” Confucian, who never advanced through the state system of Confucian scholarship, and who separated ideology in the abstract from political practice: his “bitter disillusionment with contemporary Confucianism and with what he perceived as China’s abhorrent despotism” didn’t lead him to create a false correlation between “his unhappiness with the reality of Confucian ideals and their ultimate validity” (Hsiung 206-7).4 Daoist and Buddhist monks, and supernatural entities, often function in the stories as catalysts for self-reflection or change within Pu’s scholar characters. In “Xiucai Guo” (guo xiucai), a group of playful nature spirits disguise themselves as Confucian scholars in order to tease scholar Guo into relaxing and drinking some wine with them (“What a stuffy pedant you are!”), prompting him to enjoy himself with them and to reveal a talent for mimicry. Wang Mian, a talented, top-scoring scholar in “Island of the Immortals” (xianren dao), is also unbearably arrogant until broken of his habit of “criticizing and rebuking others” by his encounter with a Daoist immortal. It is precisely Pu Songling’s homogeneous respect for philosophies and belief systems that makes his engagement with the supernatural and the inexplicable so intriguing: the characters in his stories exist at the intersection of quotidian reality and ideological potentiality, typical in their humanity but exceptional in their individual behaviors, and thus their interactions with the “strange” often reveal to us what is both best, and worst, in ourselves.

  Notes

  1 See volume one, “The Mystery of the Disappearing Artist: Pu Songling’s Voice and Persona in the Stories” (xi-xxii). For an account of Pu’s own examination experiences, see especially pp. xv-xvi.

  2 Yet a scholar’s impoverished background isn’t necessarily a predictor of how he will handle the perquisites that accompany success in the examination process. Scholar Mu, in “The Ugly Fox” (chou hu), is a penniless scholar like Cui and Chu, and like Chu, he receives help from a supernatural source. A good deed by Mu is rewarded by a female fox, but as Mu and his wife begin to prosper, their triumphs breed greediness which eventually undercuts their previous success. But Mu’s response is also not all that surprising, given that the pressure to achieve was engrained early in young men; hence fifteen was the age at which one was usually “expected” to pass the county level of the civil service examination. So when Pu has Gao Fan, in “Jiangcheng” (jiangcheng), pass it at the precocious age of fourteen, wealthy families consequently “began contending to offer him their daughters for marriage” since he shows excellent promise. But the standards and expectations for subsequent levels of the examination were progressively more demanding; given the mental pressures and privations of preparation, critics of the system argued that to pass the provincial level, for example, “a man needed the spiritual strength of a dragon-horse, the physique of a donkey, the insensitivity of a wood louse, and the endurance of a camel” (Miyazaki 57).

  3 Interestingly enough, Mencius/
Mengzi also proposes a scenario which suggests how funereal ritual originated: despite public practice of disposing of the dead by throwing them into a gully, at some point, there was theoretically a son who witnessed a parent’s corpse “being eaten by foxes and sucked by flies and gnats. A cold sweat exuded from the brows of the son, who looked away, unable to bear the sight. . . . Probably he went home to fetch basket and spade for the burial” (125).

  4 Tang would certainly appreciate the negative examples in Pu’s “The Outlaws’ Lair” (dao hu), wherein obedient, law-abiding scholars are forced by Magistrate Ling to forfeit their possessions in favor of wicked tax dodgers. This culminates in two rogues arguing, each claiming that the other is a xiucai, a scholar who has passed the civil service examination at the county level. In normal contexts a designation of honor, here it becomes an undesirable tag because it equates status with taxable revenue. Pu ruefully concludes, “Alas! These men were eager to be identified as outlaws, but shunned the title of xiucai; what a strange reversal!”

  II. Purchasing Posterity: Wives and Concubines as Domestic Commodities in Pu’s Tales

  While following the amorous adventures of Pu Songling’s scholar protagonists, readers may be surprised to discover in the midst of a scholar’s extended liaison with some female who eventually turns out to be a ghost, a shape-shifting fox, or a demon, that the scholar is already married—yet he seems to feel absolutely no sense of guilt or marital betrayal as a consequence of his actions. Judith T. Zeitlin has noted that these relationships “are frequently allowed to become permanent: the supernatural woman may be incorporated into the human protagonist’s household as a legitimate wife, and she may even be enlisted to fulfill the social mission of the family by reproducing the patriline” (2001: 199). Alternatively, the scholar might choose to make his otherworldly beloved a concubine—a role subsidiary to a “proper” wife’s, with little legal protection or social status—or to take her into his household as a maidservant. The determination of the roles, however, of wife (妻 qi), concubine (妾 qie), or maidservant (婢 bi), was ultimately a matter of commercial negotiation: “Wives were acquired through a betrothal process that entailed exchange of gifts and ceremonies; concubines were purchased through a market in female labor much as maids were” (Ebrey 2002: 3).1 By the time Pu Songling was writing during the early Qing dynasty (1644-1911), this economic model of domestic partnering had already been culturally reinforced for over a millennia.

  The first step in the traditional marriage process in Pu’s time was for some member of the prospective husband’s family to go in person to speak to the prospective wife’s family about the possibility of a match, or, more conventionally, to hire a 媒 (mei), a matchmaker or go-between, to present a compellingly positive portrait of the prospective son-in-law. Hence Gan Yu, in Pu’s story “A-Ying” (a-ying), who has raised his little brother, Gan Jue, by himself ever since their parents died when they were still children, works tirelessly to arrange a suitable marriage for his brother once Jue develops into a handsome, promising scholar. After this initial contact between family representatives, a算命 (suan ming), or forecast of the couple’s potential future fortunes, derived from comparison of their individual birthdates, would be obtained from a fortune-teller before discussion could proceed. A positive outcome would lead to the presenting of the bride-price (财礼 cai li, literally “gift of riches”), presents and money lavished as generously as financially possible on the bride’s family. Then the 通书 (tong shu), or almanac, is consulted by a diviner on behalf of the groom’s family (since it’s a “closed” book to most Chinese, “opened for them by specialists when the need arises, such as for marriage, funerals, travel,” etc. [Palmer 13]) to derive an auspicious date for the marriage, with an announcement message sent subsequently to the bride’s family.

  The Chinese reader of Pu’s “Xiaocui” (xiaocui) recognizes how extremely suspicious it is, once Chamberlain Wang brings up the subject of bride-price to a woman offering a beautiful girl as a wife for Wang’s idiot son, Yuanfeng, for the woman to reply that if the girl “could live in a large home with servants, feeding upon fine foods, where she’d be satisfied, and my responsibility to her would be fulfilled, why should I dicker and make demands!”2 Indeed, it’s doubly suspicious: a man of Wang’s financial position could afford a hefty bride-price, and that price (with its attendant expectation regarding costly gifts) would ordinarily be even further inflated in acknowledgment of the beauty of the prospective wife. This marriage proposal also deviates from the norm in that there were any number of reasons for parents to try to marry their children to families of approximately equal social status (while concubines, on the other hand, could be selected from an inferior social class): wealthy, influential families tried “to avoid the appearance of needing to purchase a spouse for a child” through the presentation of bridal gifts, or of a dowry which the bride would take with her as she moved into her husband’s home; regardless of status, no family would want to risk losing face by marrying into a family of inferior social status, though everyone recognized marriage as a chance to secure interfamilial connections “that would be advantageous or prestigious for both sides”; and the bride’s family could rest assured that their daughter would be able to adjust readily to her new environment, in terms of the mutual expectations of bride and in-laws (Mann 12).

  An analogously suspicious offer appears in “Empress Zhen” (zhen hou): Liu Zhongkan’s mother adores his lovely intended bride, Chen Sixiang, so she discusses a marriage proposal with Sixiang’s maidservant mother, who doesn’t ask “for any kind of engagement gift,” but “simply waited there until they held the wedding ceremony, and then left.” Sixiang’s supernatural nature is subsequently revealed when Liu begins to question how he could acquire such a beauty so inexpensively.

  The actual cost of obtaining a wife, then, varies widely from story to story in Strange Tales from Liaozhai. Wang Mian, in “Island of the Immortals” (xianren dao), offers his son twenty gold taels “to purchase yourself a wife,” while the fee and its negotiations are much more complex in “The Huo Daughter” (huo nü). The story’s title character repeatedly exploits her desirability as a commodity, bankrupting two affluent men who are unworthy of her before attaching herself, free of charge, to Huang, an impoverished scholar who can’t possibly afford her or the quality of life to which she’s become accustomed. While the bride-price ordinarily functions as a sort of market value commentary on the prospective wife, such commodification becomes considerably more explicit in transactions to acquire concubines. Patricia Ebrey has described “body price,” the purchase price for a concubine, as “a hybrid between advanced wages and a bride-price” (1986: 10), for the concubine’s function was explicitly to serve as a subordinate to the primary wife in a household, while performing the sexual labor of conceiving a male heir for the man who purchased her. Unable herself to produce an heir, the title character of “The Huo Daughter” exploits her sexual marketability by convincing Huang to let her sell herself to a merchant’s son for 800 taels, so Huang can later pay for a concubine who can produce a son for him.3 The author himself was not unfamiliar with concubinage, as Pu Pan, Pu Songling’s father, had two concubines, surnamed Sun and Li (Chang and Chang 114), whom he acquired out of concern that his wife had produced no male children; in time, Pu Pan had five sons, their births occurring when he was already in his forties.

  The female hierarchy within a household was unambiguous: principal responsibility for domestic management of servants and household supplies fell to the first wife; a wife was essential for the orderly operation of a large household, since men were “not called upon to take charge of the kitchen or the loom,” and the duties of a wife in “an elite household, if taken seriously, were taxing and time-consuming” (Ko 180). When the title character in “Slender Willow” (xi liu) marries into the family of scholar Gao, she manages all of the household matters, including business accounts: “From the time she got up in the morning till the time she
went to sleep, she managed their financial records, filling them in diligently.” Second and additional wives were subject to the domestic tasks assigned at the discretion of the primary wife; concubines were expected to serve the first wife specifically in skilled tasks, such as sewing; and maidservants performed labor-intensive chores assigned by the primary wife.

  Concubines were legally considered secondary spouses, rather than wives per se, but the children they bore to the men who purchased them were considered equals in status and rights under Chinese law to the children of the wives in the household. Circumstances could occasionally lead to a reordering of the hierarchy by way of redefining a woman’s role within it: a maidservant, for example, might be promoted to a concubine; or if a wife were to die, a concubine might be legally promoted to take her place (Perkins 99). Hence concubine Li advises her daughter to show respect for the title character of “Fourth Daughter Hu” (hu si niang), herself the daughter of a concubine, since Li recognizes that the combination of Hu’s natural talents, and the diligence of Hu’s ambitious husband, will almost certainly guarantee the couple’s eventual social elevation.

  Unfortunately, the potential for a concubine’s upward mobility was often impeded, or thwarted altogether, by a jealous first wife who could read constant reminders of her own failure to produce a male heir in the (almost inevitably younger) concubine’s household presence. Although during the Ming and the Qing a concubine was the legal subordinate of the principal wife, “a concubine who was favored by the husband could often get away with arrogant treatment of the wife” (Wu 24). Chai Tingbin’s shrewish wife, Jin, proves infertile in “Ninth Sister Shao” (shao jiu niang), so he takes a hundred taels and buys a concubine—who’s abused so badly by Jin that she dies a year later. After Chai calls for a marriage broker to find him another concubine, he later obtains an adopted daughter from the Lin family, whom Jin soon drives to suicide; in both cases, the proprietary nature of the relationship between the concubine and the family “owning” her, in conjunction with the norms of domestic hierarchy, shield Jin’s actions from prosecution. Domestic violence was often judged by a relative standard: “It was less serious for a family head to kill a maid than to kill a concubine; it was more serious for a concubine to injure a relative of her master than for a wife to do so” (Ebrey 1986: 6). The title character of “Ninth Sister Shao” escapes the fate of her predecessor concubines largely because her selflessness shames the vindictive Jin into changing her ways after the independent-minded, learned Shao stoically suffers the familiar humiliations associated with concubinage.4