by Bangqing Han
Three examples will point up the various facets of the sing-song girls’ adventures. The affair between the courtesan Water Blossom (Li Shufang) and the scholar Jade Tao (Tao Yufu) can be picked out as one of the most romantic in the novel. Water Blossom and Jade fall in love at first sight. As their affair matures, Jade proposes to marry Water Blossom as his wife, not concubine, a proposal naturally causing his family’s vehement opposition. In the meantime, Water Blossom has contracted tuberculosis. As there is no hope of a solution to the dilemma of the marriage, Water Blossom slowly withers away and dies a pitiful death.
While the love affair may first look like a Chinese version of La dame aux camélias, which had yet to be translated into Chinese in 1892,7 it tells more about morality as conceived in courtesan circles. Water Blossom knows her position from the outset, but she is not immune to the temptation of becoming a wife in a scholarly family: a happy ending as promised by any conventional courtesan romance. Ironically, after the marriage plan is denied by Jade Tao’s family, Water Blossom turns out to be a person much tougher than expected: if she cannot be a wife worthy of a scholar’s family, she can be a courtesan proud of her profession.
It is now Water Blossom’s turn to take the initiative. Thus even when she is dying, she turns down time and again Jade Tao’s suggestion to move out of her boudoir to rest in a quieter place; she does not want to die as the kept woman of her lover. One may well imagine that, if Jade had not proposed the fatal formal marriage, the lovers would have ended up living together happily as husband and concubine. But the aborted proposal brings out the self-esteem hidden in Water Blossom’s mind, driving her to achieve a kind of virtue people often take for self-abandon. However quixotic it may appear, her death in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Shanghai prostitution houses becomes a sign of moral triumph, not only over the hypocrisy of so-called decent society but also over the humble role she originally might have taken in compliance with social expectation.
In sharp contrast to this love story is the triangle of Lotuson Wang (Wang Liansheng), Little Rouge (Shen Xiaohong), and Constance Zhang (Zhang Huizhen). As their story starts, Wang, a midranking official temporarily staying in Shanghai, has been going steady with his favorite courtesan, Little Rouge. Their relationship is in danger when Wang discovers Little Rouge is secretly developing a liaison with an opera singer, behavior despised by both customers and other courtesans, because of social bias and the notoriety of opera singers’ lifestyles. Out of revenge, Wang starts a closer relation with Constance Zhang.
In a world where love and treachery masquerade hand in hand, neither Little Rouge’s nor Wang’s new affair should have led to trouble. But in this case, Little Rouge is simply outraged by her old patron’s betrayal. Little Rouge storms into her rival’s place, ruining all the furniture, and fights with Constance on the floor. Throughout the whole scene and afterward, Wang might feel embarrassed, but he never really loses his temper. He eventually goes back to Little Rouge to ask her pardon. The story thus partakes of a domestic quality rarely seen in courtesan novels. Whereas Little Rouge seems to play the contradictory roles of both an adulterous mistress and a jealous wife, Wang, in his turn, unwittingly allows himself to assume the double roles of cuckold and unfaithful husband.
The character of Little Rouge merits particular attention. She appreciates her relation with Wang (of course partially for financial reasons), but she feels just as strongly about her new lover. The passion that drives her to destroy Constance’s chamber, thus declaring in public her possessive love for Wang, simultaneously motivates her to run her own intrigue, at the expense of Wang’s love (and money) for her. The environment where she lives and thrives teaches her no domestic scruples; her professional promiscuity nevertheless sends her to undergo the trial of passion in a doubly severe way. She sticks to her unreliable new lover toward the end of the novel, at the cost of losing most of her customers. And one of the greatest prices she pays is to let Constance marry Wang in her place as concubine, an ideal domestic role most courtesans were supposed to take after ending their careers.
Little Rouge’s story does not end here. There is no doubt that she is greatly humiliated by Lotuson Wang’s marrying Constance Zhang as his concubine. But a similar humiliation falls on Wang only too soon, when the newly wed Constance is caught committing adultery with her husband’s cousin.
Problems involved here are not just infidelity or moral retribution, or just different ethical assumptions held by (ex-)courtesans and their customers, but the endless self-delusion and desire to seize what is unavailable or forbidden, sparing no one. If even a marital relation cannot check the overflow of desire, why be serious about an affair of betrayal outside the bonds of marriage? Or, the other way around, shouldn’t one cherish more a romance with a courtesan like Little Rouge, because it demonstrates the intensity of emotional bondage, however short-lived, under impossible conditions?
Thus, possibly with these thoughts in mind, Wang visits Little Rouge again after learning that business has sunk to the very bottom. Instead of Little Rouge, he is greeted by her servants. He takes up an opium pipe when “without good reasons, two tears dropped from his eyes.”8 It is at this moment that Wang seems to come to an awareness that he and Little Rouge are after all in the same boat, endlessly drifting in the stream of desire, while his residual passion for her helps him ascend to the plane of compassionate understanding.
My third example is the case of Second Treasure (Zhao Erbao), which serves as the underlying plotline for the entire novel. One can hardly miss the naturalist aspect of Second Treasure’s story. She comes from the countryside and yearns for the glamour of Shanghai. She is lured into the courtesan trade, and in a short time she has made herself a popular success.
Precisely because this success comes so easily, Second Treasure is twice as susceptible as her fellow sisters to the spell of the fantastic scholar-courtesan romance. She falls in love with a wealthy young man, Nature Shi (Shi Tianran), and, at the latter’s suggestion, she willingly gives up everything for a future as a decent wife. What follows is not difficult to guess. Shi never comes back, and Second Treasure finds herself deep in debt for the dowry she has prepared.
Second Treasure is described as too vain and naive to see the misfortunes awaiting her. But this does not mean that Han Bangqing intends only to criticize his heroine. He seems to indicate that these courtesans are all too human when they are deluded by the impossible dreams and virtues they of all people should see through and that the sad clichés of fiction do happen and are made to happen repeatedly simply because they are part of the real human condition.
For this reason, it is extremely suggestive that the novel ends with Second Treasure’s awakening from a dream. In the dream, she is first harassed by an old patron and then followed surprisingly by the messengers sent by Nature Shi for the overdue wedding. Overjoyed as she is, Second Treasure is shrewd enough to keep her mother from telling anyone the longings and pains they have been through. But then Second Treasure is reminded that Nature Shi is actually long dead, and with this warning, the messengers suddenly turn into monsters, threatening to grab her and take her away.
It is at this moment that Second Treasure wakes up, and the novel comes to a sudden end. This device of “waking from a dream” (jingmeng) reads like a parody of the famous dreaming and awakening scenes in Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1616) Peony Pavilion (Mudanting, 1599) and in fact bears imprints of the climax of Jin Shengtan’s (1608–1661) seventy-chapter edition of The Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan, ca. fifteenth century) where Lu Junyi awakes from an ominous dream foretelling his and his sworn brothers’ future. An interesting dialectic can be discerned here. In the dream, Second Treasure has shown us her capacity to love, suffer, and forgive—virtues celebrated by all great courtesan romances. But in the novel’s realistic context, these are virtues more dreamed of than upheld by courtesans and their patrons. Here, Han Bangqing lays bare his scheme of realism on two levels: first by letting his girls i
ndulge their dreams and then by making them take reality as a dream. Awakening from the dream, would Second Treasure come to an understanding that dreams vanish as fast as nightmares and that she might have been deceived not only by her desires but also by those self-imposed virtues, virtues that might be vanity for her?
Both Eileen Chang and Hu Shi highly praise Second Treasure’s generosity and selfless love.9 In so doing, they have ignored the dreamlike quality of Second Treasure’s virtues and therefore exposed themselves as wishful consumers rather than critics of romantic idealization in courtesan literature. Whereas Second Treasure has awakened from her dream, Chang and Hu still think that the dream should come true and that a courtesan is desirable because she acts out virtues that would jeopardize her profession. The last paradox of Sing-song Girls thus is its secret, anticipatory retort to even its most sympathetic defenders, showing how easily the grounds of realism and fantasy can be confused at every level of the courtesan romance.
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I have discussed Sing-song Girls as a masterpiece that helped modernize late imperial Chinese fiction at least in three aspects, representing a new typology of desire, an arguably modern rhetoric of realism, and a unique instance of the urban novel. As Eileen Chang observes, in a cultural and ethical environment where the individual pursuit of romantic love could still be overruled by the norm of prearranged marriage, Han Bangqing made the brothel a substitute Eden, a garden in which the forbidden fruit of free love was made available to Chinese intruders.10 The tragicomedies enacted by the characters of Sing-song Girls appear surprisingly moving, in the sense that these men and women are shown as lonely souls, seeking consolation in the most unlikely circumstances, and that they find bliss, however tentatively, in their fall.
The desire so equivocally defined by Sing-song Girls lends light to the realistic project embedded in the novel’s narrative scheme, one that surpasses in many ways the foreign models to be introduced and sanctioned by writers of the next generation in the name of the modern. Whereas nineteenth-century European novels such as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina base their dialectic of desire and realism on the tension between adultery and fidelity and between the crime of romantic yearning and realistic punishment, Sing-song Girls denies such a (melo-)dramatic dilemma by making its heroines professionals of romance. Emma Bovary’s romantic fiasco has been treated as a climactic moment in European realist discourse. In Emma’s futile effort to bridge the gap between words and the world, between what she wishes to become and what she can be, (nineteenth-century) realism manifests itself as a discourse that articulates desire by narrating the inaccessibility of the desired object. By contrast, the courtesans in Sing-song Girls take an even more treacherous path in desiring love, since they are trained from the outset to embody the fickleness and unreliability of love. Thus when they plunge themselves into the sport of romance, these girls appear to be twice as vulnerable as their European counterparts.
The city of Shanghai plays a crucial role in etching this drama of desire and the discourse of realism. This is a city that sees hundreds of girls descend into a world of no return; indeed, with its ever-changing facets, Shanghai may well appear as a vamp, mysterious, seductive, and dangerous. Not unlike most characters under his pen, Han Bangqing, too, was an immigrant to Shanghai and stayed in the city till his death. A connoisseur of courtesan culture, Han Bangqing could not actualize his own drama of love and lust without invoking the city’s magic name. Shanghai as the embodiment of the city is a touchstone through which the novel’s intelligibility can be verified, and yet this effect of the real is found nowhere better than in the observed circulation of values and desires. A paradox: to write a realistic Shanghai means to celebrate the city’s capacity continually to demand investment of desire, in power, money, land, and bodies and to refuse final judgments as contrary to the fluid nature of the urban economy.
Mixing both the cosmopolitan and local color unique to Shanghai, Sing-song Girls renders an urban regionalism that anticipates the literary style and attitude later called the Shanghai style, or haipai. The haipai school comprises writers who assume postures ranging from the newly imported flaneur to the old-style literatus and features a hybrid of trends as far apart as Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction and neoimpressionist sketches. Arising from and nourished by a commercial culture, the Shanghai style is flamboyant and changeable, with dilettantism and frivolity as its twin trademarks. But beneath their flamboyant style lies the writers’ inflamed desire to catch up with time; tear down the ostentatious and frivolous facade of the text, and one finds a desolate city threatened with the menacing power of modernization. At a time when realism was sanctioned as the canon of modern Chinese literature, the Shanghai-style writers played with the canon in such a way as to reveal the impotence of its promises.
The neoimpressionist texts by writers such as Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou, and Mu Shiying have won increasing attention in recent years, thanks to their patent modernist sensibilities.11 Forty years before the neoimpressionist writers shocked their readers with recourse to exotic styles and nonchalant mannerisms, Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls had quietly broken the same rules by inserting an indigenous modernity into the traditional discourse of courtesan fiction. As argued above, the novel in many ways anticipates or even surpasses the May Fourth practice of romanticism and realism; its achievement has long been underestimated. It was Eileen Chang, the precocious woman writer of wartime Shanghai, who came to appreciate the modernity of the aesthetics of Sing-song Girls and put this aesthetics into practice during the Japanese occupation period, while her weakness for Western middle-brow romantic literature further enriched her personal vision of Shanghai. As she puts it, the courtesan house as highlighted by Sing-song Girls no longer serves as the major topos of twentieth-century Chinese romantic imagination,12 but the taxonomy of desire the novel evokes has survived to become the emotional index of life in Shanghai. Suffice it to say that Chang would become the finest interpreter of the fin-de-siècle cult of the Shanghai-style fiction of the forties, under the shadow of Japanese aggression and Communist revolution.
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Eileen Chang came to the United States in 1955, and she spent the rest of her life in increasing reclusion. Perhaps contrary to her wishes, however, she has been fervently embraced by Chinese readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas since the sixties, thanks to the praise of C. T. Hsia, then a professor at Columbia University, and other critics. C. T. Hsia’s full-length study of Eileen Chang was published in Wenxue zazhi (Literary magazine), a leading literary journal in Taiwan, edited by T.A. Hsia, as early as 1957. This marked the beginning of Chang studies. Chang became an important phenomenon for all Chinese communities in the eighties and nineties.
If one asks why Chang’s works now appear more compelling than ever, the answer may be that her inquiries into human frailties and trivialities, stylized portraits of Chinese mannerisms, and celebrations of historical contingencies make her a perfect contrast to the discourse of orthodoxy represented by such writers as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Ding Ling. Above all, we may say that as early as half a century ago, Chang was practicing a premature fin-de-siècle poetics.
Chang was never a productive writer, and she wrote only a handful of works in the last thirty years of her career. But Sing-song Girls remained one of the few projects she continued to take interest in. As mentioned above, a slightly truncated Mandarin Chinese translation of the novel came out in 1983; meanwhile, Chang kept working on the novel’s English version. But except for the first two chapters, which were published in the translation journal Renditions in Hong Kong in 1982, little information about her progress was made public. As time moved on, Chang even left her friends with the impression that the manuscript was never completed and that it had been lost in the course of her numerous moves.
Sing-song Girls was made into a movie in 1998 by the famous Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hien, and the script writer was Chu T’ien-wen, author of The Notes of A Desolate Man (New York: Columb
ia, 1999) and longtime admirer of Eileen Chang. Hou’s movie was well received worldwide, and Chang’s rendition of the novel again became a focus of public interest.
After her death, Chang’s estate was entrusted to her friends in Hong Kong, Stephen C. Soong, founding editor of Renditions, and Mae Soong. In 1997 Professor Dominic Cheung of the University of Southern California sought from the Soongs the favor of donating select manuscripts by Chang for a memorial exhibition at the USC. Among the materials Cheung subsequently obtained was a box of manuscripts typed in English. Ms. Lillian Yang of the East Asian Library took an interest in several piles of unidentified manuscripts. Their content appeared obscure to everyone; Yang did research on them, consulting C. T. Hsia’s writings and other sources. This led to a discovery most exhilarating to worldwide Chang fans: the manuscript was none other than the purportedly lost translation of Sing-song Girls.
Among Chang’s papers was a full rendition of the original in sixty-four chapters, along with two additional revised but incomplete versions of the first. After reviewing all three versions, Yang selected the better revised chapters and merged them into one. As such, the reconstructed manuscript Yang sent to Columbia University Press reflects Chang’s own revisions to her original draft.
Still, as it stood, this composite manuscript remained unpolished; to make it publishable, more work had to be done. Thanks to Professors C. T. Hsia’s and Joseph Lau’s recommendation, Columbia University Press and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, were able to enlist Dr. Eva Hung, director of the Translation Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to undertake the editing and revision of Chang’s manuscript. Dr. Hung is an internationally renowned translation historian and a first-rate translator and fiction writer in her own right. As she points out in her afterword, the time and energy she invested in revising and editing Chang’s manuscript almost amounted to retranslating the original from scratch. She was willing to take up the laborious task, over a period of almost three years, because of her respect for Chang’s achievements as well as her own commitment to literary scholarship: such collaborative work had long been a practice in the history of Chinese translation.
