'Taipei People' Bai Xien Yong

When I first arrived in Taiwan over 20 years ago and was looking for somewhere to live, one of the places I went to see was a room in the house of an elderly widow. Her house was one of those old one-story wooden Japanese structures that you could still see in Taipei in those days, before they were all pulled down to make way for department stores and high rises. Inside the house, except for the room to be let, were piled crates, trunks, boxes and old furniture: I had the impression the widow was at any time ready to move out. At that time my Chinese was non-existent, so I had a friend with me to do the talking. After our visit, my friend explained the luggage. The old woman was one of those who had come over from the Chinese mainland with her soldier husband in 1949 with the defeat of the Nationalists, and who had set up temporary base in Taipei. Many of them had never bothered to unpack, for they lived under the idea that one day soon they would retake the Motherland. 50 years later, even when it had become abundantly clear that this would never happen, many of these old Mainlanders had not really settled down in Taipei, and still cherished their dreams of returning to the places of their youth and of once more regaining their status in the world.

Taipei People is a collection of 14 short stories by the Taiwanese writer Bai Xien Yong describing people just like my landlady. Published separately during the 60s, and for the first time as a collection in 1971, the work is rightly regarded on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as a masterpiece of Chinese literature, a contemporary classic. The title is ironic, because the protagonists are not Taipei people at all, but waishengren, 外省人, those ‘born outside the province’, as the Taiwanese call Mainlanders, as opposed to those ‘originally born in the province, the ‘benshenren’ 本省人, as the Taiwanese call themselves. Nowadays, with the passing of the generations, these terms are losing their meanings and their bitterness, but for most of the last 50 years, Taiwanese society was divided along these lines, each side looking down on the other. Bei Xian Rong himself is waishengren, the son of a famous KMT general who formed part of the exodus at the end of the Civil War. The stories focus on those waishengren who fled with Chiang Kai Shek’s armies in 1949: the singsong girls, taxi dancers, prostitutes, Beijing Opera stars, cooks, batmen, industrialists, widows, airmen and soldiers, generals, scholars and minor government functionaries, all of whom are living out their last days in Taipei, victims of history, survivors of loss, nursing their reveries of bygone days, putting a brave face on grief, and coming to terms with exile and defeat.

Some of the stories are told by the protagonists themselves, others by an omniscient narrator. Bai makes judicious and expert use of free indirect narrative, blending reverie and memory with descriptions of current reality, using techniques taken from cinema, such as montage, and jump cutting. He is especially good on how a chance sight on the street, a random word overheard in a bar can spark a whole stream of memory and whisk off both reader and protagonist altogether elsewhere. His characters have a surface vivacity, but he also somehow manages to convey their secret loneliness and despair as they come to terms with the fact that they will never go back, that the past is irrecoverable. His dialogue is absolutely masterful, reproducing a whole range of different voices and accents from all over China, and conveying between the lines the things the characters would not dare to admit even to themselves. The text is a tapestry of styles in which ancient poems and songs from the Beijing Opera rub shoulders with colloquial proverbs and street slang. Bai is the master of the light touch, the telling detail, the miraculously well placed word which unleashes almost overwhelming emotion. I found myself frequently wiping away tears, and weeping openly especially at the tale called Winter Night, a story of two old university professors remembering the days of their youth as student rioters and activists at Beijing University in the heady days of the May the Fourth Movement, a study in failure, set in one of those old wooden Japanese houses smelling of damp tatami mats, mould and regret, with winter rain falling softly outside and the taxis wooshing past at the end of the alley.

The best stories set up a powerfully affecting contrast between nostalgia for the past and suggestions of a more optimistic future, a future in which divisions such as weishengren and benshengren are no longer so important, in which memories are not so bitter, and in which a new generation is stepping up to really become Taipei people. What links all the stories is the city of Taipei itself, the city of exiles, which Bai describes in topographical detail, in all its weathers and moods.

By the time General P’u returned to the courtyard, a wintry evening breeze had

come up: the purple bamboos rustled and shivered. In the western sky a dab of the setting sun froze blood-red. The old soldier strolled to a corner of the courtyard and paused... for a long time, his hands clasped behind his back, his full silvery beard unfurling in the wind. Reminiscences of long-forgotten episodes from the Year of Hsin Hai half a century ago came floating back to him again, until his grandson Hsiao-hsien came and tugged at his sleeve. With his hand on the boy’s shoulder, the two of them, grandfather and grandson, went in to dinner together.

'Notes of a Crocodile' Qiu Miaojin

If I learned anything about life during college, it was to turn away from my shattered ego and move on.

Notes of a Crocodile describes the college years of a young gay Taiwanese woman, her various lovers and friends during the later 1980s and early 1990s in Taipei. Like most coming-of-age novels it describes the heartbreak of youth, the gaining of experience through the harsh blows of the world, the exaltations and despairs of first love, the gradual coming together of a sense of self, of a sense of destiny. And like most coming out novels it describes the sense of isolation from society as the first realisations of same sex desire dawn, the sense of an already fragile, fledgling egohood rendered even more precarious by the knowledge of an otherness, the knowledge that one is becoming an unwilling transgressor against society.

Lazi (pronounced lah-dze) and her friends spend their lives in the time honoured fashion of students everywhere: falling in and out of love, reading, attending classes, doing assignments, bickering, sleeping and earning pocket money, and analyzing every nuance of their relationships in midnight conversations. Their adventures are presented as a series of achronological entries in eight notebooks. The entries include reportage, love letters, records of conversations, sly vignettes and lyrical descriptions of Taipei, fragments, diary entries; the style ranges from the face-burningly personal – one or two of the love letters had me wincing – to the sardonic, from the wittily epigrammatic to a kind of freewheeling prose poetry. Imagine Haruki Murakami meets Banana Yoshimoto meets Rimbaud. Some sections appear to have been written right after the events, or even as those events unfold, giving them a rawness, an immediacy that can be quite unsettling, while others appear to have been written long after and come with the benefit of hindsight and reflection. The emotional intensity is relieved by satirical newsflashes about a plague of crocodiles that has overtaken the nation. Citizens are urged to exercise caution and be on the lookout for crocodiles wearing human suits and posing as real people. There is a hotline for callers to report sightings…

However, some of the entries often come across as being the mere rantings and bleatings of a rather self obsessed, overeducated but underloved overgrown child; a girl who has not yet learned the harsh truths about growing up,: that you are not as important and as unique as you think you are; an artist who has not yet learnt how to distance herself from her experiences to make them truly universal, (a kind of Taiwanese Sylvia Plath). At times, the novel seems to be little more than a ‘lightly fictionalized autobiographical account’ (words which must make many an editor’s heart sink) of growing up in Taipei. The fragmentary form of the novel only reinforces this impression of something half finished. One wonders, on first encounter with this text, what interest, what relevance, the half-baked descriptions of the trials of a college student from Taiwan can have for a reader with no knowledge of Taiwan or of Lazi’s milieu, beyond the obvious curiosity factor. One wonders also as to the book’s and the author’s cult status here in Taiwan.

Well. The narrator is highly intelligent, highly literate and highly self aware. There are references to Western literature and culture (but strangely, almost none to Chinese writers and culture). At one point when the narrator is torn between her desire for total solitude and her desire for social interaction, she wittily describes herself as clutching her copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude in one hand, and Lust for Life in the other. The form of the novel is said to have been inspired by the techniques of Derek Jarman and Genet. The translation is very good indeed: Bonnie Huie does an excellent job of capturing in English the Chinese speech patterns in the long stretches of dialogue, and even manages to convey some of the word play and puns that Lazi and her friends indulge in.

For Lazi’s is not only a queer coming of age, but a search for a self in existentialist terms that speaks directly to many (young) people in Taiwan, of whatever orientation. Lazi writes:

Most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

College in Taiwan represents the first time Taiwanese youngsters can take a breather from the utterly relentless round of examinations and cramming that has marked their childhood and early adolescence, and deal with the pleasures and the pains, the stresses and strains of growing up. This is not so much to say that Taiwanese are late developers in that sense, but more to note how the search for identity and a role in life preoccupies Western teens at a much earlier age when perhaps their ability to articulate their feelings has not caught up. Happening later, in their college years, Taiwanese are more able to articulate their dilemmas, to themselves and to their friends, and their diaries.

Reconciling the desire for self-determination and the need to meet parental and social expectations is a highly stressful and difficult balancing act that many highly educated young Taiwanese experience as an existentialist dilemma, as do the characters in the novel. One of Lazi’s friends articulates this as coming up against the wall of absurdity, a description that references both Sartre and Camus, and Dostoevsky. Another, marginal, character, a boy named Nothing by his friends, has scarred his face with a knife in episodes of self harm:

He vowed to cut through the other self that had been handed to him by other people. It wasn’t the real him. Then he traveled around the world with just a backpack and became his true self.

The existentialist dilemma is most particularly marked in two overlapping areas: family expectations, and gender roles. Lazi writes of her relationship with her family:

I let them form a new image of me. It’s been a constant struggle. I’ll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don’t, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence.

Lazi is studying Gabriel Marcel, the French Christian existentialist, (who is also a key influence on Qiu Miaojin’s final book, Last Words from Montmartre) one of whose main concerns was how an individual can create and maintain loyalty (fidelite) to a group without compromising their existential selfhood. Marcel’s concept of fidelite can stand in for the Chinese concept of filial piety (xiàoshùn

孝順). It’s telling that Lazi and her friends turn to Western works rather than Chinese works to help them deal with their crises, presumably because the Chinese classics with their emphasis on xiàoshùn孝順will be no help to them.

Qiu Miaojin was writing in a time when Taiwan was only just beginning to make the transition from martial law, into what it is today: one of the most forward looking democracies in Asia, with a woman president, with firm and unquestioned rule of law, equal opportunities for both genders, the biggest Pride festival in Asia (an estimated 100,100 attended this year’s event) and a well-coordinated and vocal LGBT rights movement that has recently secured from the Supreme Court a ruling that will make same sex marriage constitutionally legal in two years, so far the only country in Asia to do so. However, back in the late 80s/early 90s, Lazi revolts when she considers the traditional gender roles that have been assigned to her. Human relationships and mutual attraction, she writes, are based on the gender binary, which stems from the duality of ying and yang, or some unspeakable evil. But humanity says it’s a biological construct: penis vs, vagina, chest hair vs,. breasts, beard vs. long hair…. Male plugs into female like the key into lock, and as a product of that coupling, babies get punched out. Those who don’t fit into the traditional gender categories are cast into the freezing cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone.

Against this negativity, however, Qiu Miaojin peoples her novel with characters who are gender fluid and who extend friendship to each other as they inhabit this wider demarcated zone, creating their own structures of love and loyalty, their own alternative queer family. The burgeoning gay scene of the period is described in terms that are remarkably prescient. When Lazi visits an underground club with a male friend, he tells her: Those people are all genderless. Or maybe I should say, they’re opposed to being bound by simplistic signifiers of gender….and in another conversation, one of the characters drunkenly proposes that they all try to establish post-gender relations with each other. Family and gender are aligned towards the end when Lazi’s friend Meng Sheng tells her: We come from a long line of deviants throughout history, a queer alternative to the ancestors that are an essential part of every Taiwanese family.

The form of the novel now starts to make more sense against this exploration of ‘existentialism with Chinese characteristics’ that is the main theme of the work. 手記 literally translates as ‘hand notes’. The book has all the appearance of having been written on the hoof, but this is merely an artifice, one that has been constructed to convey the impression of having being written on the hoof, a performance before the eyes of the world. In this it has much in common with European and American existentialist texts.

A close parallel in Western literature would be to that other great teeny angst bildungsroman, The Catcher in the Rye, with which Notes of a Crocodile shares a sense of outrage against the fakeness of an adult world, a sense of disgust against societal norms, and a similar freewheeling cynical style. Like death, college serves as a kind of escape hatch. But while death takes you straight to the morgue, college is a single rope dangling loose from the inescapable net of society. Like Notes of a Crocodile, Catcher in the Rye is a performance. Written by a thirty two year old man as an extended exercise in a literary technique known as skaz, this novel has often been mistaken for a cry of authenticity, and the unsophisticated (or simply the very young) often mistake Holden Caulfied’s rants as ‘the real thing’. Likewise, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Sartre’s Nausea, both good examples in view of Lazi’s existentialism, also purport to be authentic cries of a tortured soul. But these novels are only posing as such; their real purpose is to render through artistic means a philosophical position. Their first person narrative and fragmentary form is literary Expressionism, not to be mistaken for the author’s voice and personal experience, but to be read as the expression of a fictional creation. It’s this quality of spurious authenticity that gives these works their great power and status as works of fiction, or in the words of Jean Cocteau, ‘the lie that tells the truth.’

But there are also parallels in modern Chinese literature for the performance of authenticity. Notes of a Crocodile has much in common with the famous story by Ding Ling, The Diary of Miss Sophie, which also poses as diary/notes, and of course Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman is another example. Confucius in his commentary on the Five Chinese Classics praised the three hundred poems in the Book of Songs as having thoughts never twisty. Modern Chinese literature on the contrary has always valued twisty thoughts – or unconventionalised soul baring - as a sign of authenticity with which writers can confront the artifice of the classical tradition. Wang Dan, the Tiananmin dissident, reveals this when he writes of Qiu Maiaojin’s work that its excruciating revelation of the author’s innermost self […] is after all what makes the magic of literature. What makes the magic of this particular novel is that Notes of a Crocodile ambiguates the boundary between authenticity and performance: it’s both notes and a novel about notes.

It’s this ambiguity, allowing us to read the novel as direct expression, and at the same as directed Expressionism, that has largely accounted for the status of Qiu Miaojin’s work on the Taiwanese cultural and literary scene. Winner of the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, the United Literature Association Award, and the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature, her work appears on college syllabuses, and is the subject of numerous dissertations. But amongst the general republic of readers she has inspired rock bands, pop songs, dance pieces, blog tributes, video tributes, internet discussion groups, and a feature length documentary. There is even a high school kid reading from her work on Youtube.

It’s hard to resist the temptation to allow the knowledge of her suicide at the age of 26 in Paris in 1995 to infect one’s reading of the text. In her last novel, Last Words from Montmartre, also published by NYRB Classics, the line between authenticity and performance is even more difficult to place. In that book the Rimbaud element is more to the fore, as translator Ali Larissa Heinrich notes in his excellent Afterword, and it’s virtually impossible to read it as anything other than as notes of a pathology, or as one long extended suicide note. Death and suicide does form a persistent minor whisper throughout the text of Notes of a Crocodile, but ultimately, Qiu Miaojin ends this work on a note of hope and uplift.

Admitting I have problems is a mode of optimism, since every problem has a solution. Unhappiness is a lot like bad weather; it’s out of your control. So if I encounter a problem that even death can’t solve, I shouldn’t care whether I’m happy or unhappy, thereby negating both the problem and the problem of a problem. And that is where happiness begins.

'Existence: A Story' David Hinton

We are looking at a painting by the great Ming Dynasty landscape artist and Chan Master Shi Tao: a scholar (with attendant) on a promontory gazing out over a sea of mist to ridges of hazy mountains in the distance. On the right of the picture is a poem by Shi Tao’s friend and associate, the poet Huang Yanlu, in Shi Tao’s calligraphy. The poem describes a ruined city: images of razed walls, deserted orchards and abandoned houses, none of which can be seen in the picture. From this disjunct between painting and poem, David Hinton begins his investigation of the spiritual roots of Chinese landscape painting, calligraphy and poetry.

Hinton sees the white space and multiple perspectives of Chinese landscape painting as a visual expression of the perpetual movement between Absence and Presence which, according to the first verse of the Dao De Jing, gives rise to the ten thousand things of mental and material phenomena. He reveals how this tension operates within Chinese characters – strokes organized around a void, within the sweeping gestures of calligraphy - in which a balance is sought between the being-in-the-moment of the movement of the brush and the residue of that movement/moment in the ink stroke left on the page. He also shows how classical Chinese grammar itself – with its absence of pronouns, verb tenses and deliberate ambiguity of syntax and word class - is also a manifestation of this dynamic interchange.

Along the way he makes some fascinating observations about the differences between Western languages and Chinese. Western languages impose a barrier between the things of the world and descriptions of them; at the same time as they describe the world, they try to transcend it. The relationship between words and things is arbitrary and mimetic, as Saussure and the Structuralists noted. In our creation myth, language comes before the world and the world is somehow a creation of language: And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. In the beginning was the Word, and so on. Chinese creation myths, on the other hand, begin with the hexagrams of the Yi Jing which represent every possible combination of ying and yang, and which rather than describe the particulars of reality, embody the deeper forces and processes of reality, Hinton writes. The clear division into noun and verb of Western languages imposes a fixity on the world that blinds us to its real nature as a process of perpetual impermanence. Whereas Chinese, in which words can be both neither noun or verb and both noun and verb, retains that fluidity and that awareness of the underlying processes of change.

Moreover, Chinese poetry, calligraphy and painting represent an attempt on the part of the practitioner to get behind the false dualities of Absence and Presence, ying and yang, observer and world, language and reality, to the fundamental essence that lies behind them, represented by the mysterious character 玄 xuan,  ‘dark enigma’ which also appears in the first verse of the Dao De Jing. Out of this dark enigma everything rises, and back into it everything sinks in a perpetual movement of becoming and passing. This is related to the Chan meditation practice of observing how thoughts come and go and in the process, stilling the everyday mind and letting the true mind 本心ben xin come forth. This true mind is our true nature, the true nature of reality, and which exists before all thoughts begin, and which precedes and underlies all duality, the true mind obscured by the fleeting dust of delusion, as the 5^th century First Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma puts it in the Essence of Mahayana.

The book is fascinating, with a wealth of ideas to contemplate about language, translation issues, Chinese art and culture, the relationship between Daoism and Chan, the evolution of the Chinese writing system and the meaning of individual characters, the practice of calligraphy, dragons, the tumultuous history of the transition between Ming and Qing, the biography of Shi Tao. Along the way, Hinton offers us different, provisional translations of the poem in the painting, based on his and our evolving understanding of the deeper issues involved in bridging two widely differing cultures. It’s rather like being part of a translators workshop. What lifts the book above mere cultural commentary, however, is Hinton’s brave decision to use a prose style that reflects as nearly as possible what happens in Chan meditation. It’s one thing to be told that a painting and poem is a meditative practice, and quite another to become a part of that process itself, to be drawn in to the process by means of a style which is circular, elliptic, recursive, and poetic rather than academic, and which never tries to impose (a delusory) clarity of expression onto something that is ultimately inexpressible by means of language and that must be experienced personally. Many readers might be put off by this indirectness, but a reader who is also a meditator will instantly grasp what Hinton is trying to do.

The book is lavishly and beautifully produced by Shambhala, with a full color pull-out of the painting under discussion, 9 more full color plates of some of the greatest paintings in the genre, and copious black and white illustrations of details from those paintings, and examples of calligraphy. A singular and unclassifiable masterpiece by the greatest translator of Chinese poetry and philosophy of our age.

'Diary of a Madman and Other Stories' Lu Xun

Lu Xun’s two published collections of short stories, Cheering From the Sidelines, (1922) and Wondering Where to Turn (1925) reveal him as one of the supreme masters of the short story to rank alongside Chekhov and Maupassant, and the greatest writer of modern China, at once that country’s Dickens and Joyce.

Dickens because, like the great Victorian, Lu Xun creates characters who enter the folklore and become symbolic, mythological, and yet remain rooted in the contemporary. You can see Lu Xun’s characters all around you every day, but it took Lu Xun’s descriptions to make you notice they are there. Who can forget Ah Q once you have read his story, and not see him in all the louts, layabouts and betel nut chewers who hang around at taxi ranks and MRT station entrances of the poorer neighbourhoods? Like Dickens, Lu Xun is the master of realism and atmosphere, with Dickens’s same ability to delineate and capture character in one swift fleeting gesture. Like Dickens too, Lu Xun is motivated by a deep compassion for the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised and by the desire to achieve some kind of social change through his writing.

Joyce because, at the same time as being China’s greatest realist writer, Lu Xun is also its greatest innovator in linguistic and formal terms, its greatest Modernist. Lu Xun was the first writer to write serious literature in the speech of the common people, an innovation that seems less creative unless you know that for thousands of years the common speech was not regarded as being suitable for literature, and that literature was the domain of classical Chinese, a language that the common people could not read. In the way that Joyce wove classical references into the hidden fabric of his language, Lu Xun cites the classics, usually to satirise them and to expose what he sees as their nullity. In the story A Warning to the People, describing a public execution, the focus is on the crowd. The victim is there wearing the customary placard detailing his crimes, but none of the bystanders can read it. The crowd is ultimately distracted by a traffic accident and disperses to take an interest in other things. The decapitation is never described, but it is there nonetheless in all the opportunities the text takes to display the word ‘head’ in a myriad of different connections. This lifts the text out of the realm of mere reportage into the realm of great literature.

This translation, with excellent introduction and explanatory notes, really brings the text to life for a non-Chinese audience, and captures the blend of bitter cynicism and compassion that is Lu Xun’s unique voice.

'Dream of Red Mansions' Cao Xueqin

I live in town without all that racket

horses and carts stir up, and you wonder

how that could be. Wherever the mind

dwells apart is itself a distant place.

picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,

far off, I see South Mountain: mountain

air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

returning home. All this means something,

something absolute. Whenever I start

explaining it, I’ve forgotten the words.

Tao Qian

trans: David Hinton

This enormous novel occupies the same central place in the literary culture of the Chinese as the works of Shakespeare do in English, as Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin does in Russian, and as Dante’s Divine Comedy does in Italian literature. Like them, it creates a whole world that is at once very specific to a time and place (China in the middle of the 18^th century) and yet also universal. Like them it embodies the paradox of great art, best expressed by Matisse: All art bears the imprint of its historical epoch. Great art is that in which this imprint is most deeply marked.

And yet in the West the novel is hardly known at all. Reasons for this no doubt include unfamiliarity with the world the novel describes and creates, the vast number of characters (with names which are more than usually difficult for Western readers to remember) and its sheer length. It’s even difficult to arrive at a fixed title for the work, compounded by the fact that in Chinese it has many names, all of them given in the text itself. These titles include: The Story of the Stone, The Precious Mirror of Love, The Twelve Beauties of Jingling, and Dream of Red Mansions. The Penguin translation by David Hawkes uses the first of these titles. Dream of Red Mansions is the closest translation (by Yang Hsien Yi and Gladys Yang) of the most common Chinese title, but other translations of this title might also include A Dream of the Red Chamber, or Dreams in a Red Chamber. This plethora of titles and translations of titles neatly reflects the great difficulties of translating a work from a language in which ambiguity is prized and preserved, into language where it is not.

Given these difficulties for a Western reader, perhaps the best way to approach this work is to look closely at the three characters which make up the most common title in Chinese. In so doing, we shall see that each one loosely defines a category that might help us to orient ourselves in the multifarious world of the Hong Lou Meng.

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紅/hong/ red

This character consists of two elements. On the left is the ‘silk’ radical /si/, on the right is the ‘work’ radical, /gong/, here to give a suggestion as to the correct way to pronounce this character.

Silk is of course the quintessentially Chinese product, and silk cultivation and production has been known in China since the Neolithic age. Silk is a signifier of wealth and patronage, and has been used since ancient times as an instrument of foreign policy. Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han dynasty, records how the first Han emperor sent a specified quantity of silk floss and cloth, grain and other food stuffs each year to the Xiongnu, the ancient enemies of the Han, so that the two nations would live in peace and brotherhood. In the Hong Lou Meng, at weddings and festivals, the fabulously wealthy Jia family are presented with rolls of silk, and they lavish gifts of silk on their superiors. The early part of the novel especially is filled with descriptions of clothes and furnishings, all of them costly and beautiful.

The silk radical also appears in characters to do with ‘binding’, ‘braiding’, ‘roping’, and also in characters to do with ‘patterns’, ‘succession’ or ‘continuation’, ‘experience’, in other words, the underlying patterns of everyday life, familial associations and experiences, in which communities are bound together through work, ritual ceremony and festivals. Red is ubiquitous in the Chinese world to an extent that is not so in other cultures: a red light always burns before the family altar; a wedding is not a wedding without the presence of red; red lanterns adorn the temples and gifts of money are made in red envelopes. Likewise in the Hong Lou Meng, red is everywhere. Baoyu, the male protagonist, lives in a pavilion called ‘Happy Red Court’, and in Chapter 1, Cao Xueqin is described as having written the work in his studio called ‘Mourning-the-Red Studio’.  In its widest form, red always symbolizes festival. The novel is full of lavish and evocative descriptions of ceremonies and festivals, weddings, funerals, New Years Eve celebrations, the Lantern Festival celebration; Cao Xueqin writes with a painterly hand, creating images as unforgettable as the cinematic images of Zhang Yimou. In the novel, as in Chinese life, great prominence is given to rites and rituals, both on major state occasions and the minor rituals of dining at home with family. In Chapter 2, an official is impeached, and a list of the crimes against him is given; the second item on this list is ‘tampering with the rites’ which shows the importance given by the Chinese to rites and ceremony.

Red also symbolizes art and beauty. A white, black and grey ink painting is not considered beautiful until it is set off by the artist’s seal in red ink. One of the women in the family is a talented artist and she is painting a huge picture of the garden in which a great deal of the action of the novel takes place. Her picture becomes a symbol of the Hong Lou Meng itself.

The ‘silk’ radical which makes up the character ‘red’ also appears in the characters for ‘literary classic’, and ‘paper’. The Hong Lou Meng itself has given rise to a paper mountain of critical commentary, known as Redology紅學.  The Hong Lou Meng abounds with descriptions of people interacting with the classics, and creating art and literature of their own. Baoyu and his soulmate, the beautiful and doomed Daiyu, read the Romance of the West Chamber 西廂記 together, a Yuan dynasty play. In Chapter 37, the young people in the Jia family start a poetry club, in which they drink, eat and set each other subjects – and rhyme schemes -  for poetry.  At one autumn meeting of the club, the chrysanthemum is chosen as a subject, but someone objects that this is too hackneyed a subject for an autumn poem. Then someone has an idea that instead of writing about chrysanthemums, they will focus on the people looking at it and on their reactions to the flower. They come up with a list of subjects:

Thinking of the Chrysanthemum

Seeking out the Chrysanthemum

Visiting the Chrysanthemum

Planting the Chrysanthemum

Facing the Chrysanthemum

Displaying the Chrysanthemum

Writing about the Chrysanthemum

Painting the Chrysanthemum

Questioning the Chrysanthemum

Wearing the Chrysanthemum

The Chrysanthemum’s Shadow

A Dream of Chrysanthemum

The Withered Chrysanthemum

And then go on to create an album of chrysanthemum poems. This is a picture of the pastime of leisured, rich, educated, secluded women, but it’s also a picture of the age–old activity of the literati/scholar class. The novel is full of such scenes. There is a great deal of sophisticated wordplay, both by the narrator and by the characters and absolutely untranslatable jokes and puns. The characters (people) discuss the meaning of characters (words, symbols), and they seem able to make up poems according to a rhyme scheme proposed by someone else at the flick of a sleeve, quite an accomplishment, given that many of them are only teenagers. But what’s most interesting to note about this little scene is the tension, the dilemma it voices between following the traditional rules laid down by the masters (Confucian idea), and originality (Daoist idea), a tension that can be seen in the Hong Lou Meng as a whole.

Etiquette and manners are also presented with the full importance which they are given in real life; who sits where, who serves whom, who takes precedence over whom, who gives face to whom, an incredibly complex affair in a family as large and multi-generational as the Jia family with its army of 200 - 300 retainers, all with a pecking order of their own.

‘Red’, then, in the Hong Lou Meng represents the world of art and beauty, literature and scholarship, rite and ceremony, manners and etiquette, which bind the family and the wider society together.

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樓 /lou/ building

This character (pronounced ‘low’) consists of four elements. On the left is the ‘wood’ radical /mu/. The ‘wood’ radical is found in all characters describing objects made of wood, and in characters to do with constructed objects, such as machines and engines and buildings.

The right element consists of a character that can stand alone, independently, with the same pronunciation as the composite character, when it is the name of a constellation, and a common family name.

This character is composed of three elements. The top element used to be a slightly different character meaning something like ‘don’t’, and this character combined with the character for ‘woman’ meant ‘seclusion’, or the women’s quarters which were taboo to outsiders. The middle element is actually the same character for ‘middle’ /zhong/ and it’s the character which appears in ‘China’: ‘the Middle Kingdom’. The bottom element is the character for ‘woman’ /nu/.

The character has a range of meanings, most literally any building more than two stories high, and the floors in such a building. But the history of the character shows us that it was also associated with that part of a building that was reserved for the women, and to which outsiders were not permitted.

The action of the novel revolves around two huge mansions, the Rong mansion and the Ning mansion, and an enormous park or garden which lies between them. There are almost no glimpses of nature outside the compound walls. Most of the scenes take place in interiors, or in the carefully controlled ‘natural’ environment of the ornamental park, specially constructed for the visit home of an elder daughter of the family who is an Imperial Concubine. The two branches of the Jia family gain much of their social prestige and wealth from this daughter’s position in the Imperial household, and her death is one of several turning points in the fortunes of the family.

 

Women occupy a central place in the novel, just as they do in Chinese culture, which is and always has been a matriarchy. Power relationships in Chinese culture are predicated on the family, and in the family it is the oldest woman who rules the roost. The Lady Dowager rules her family with a rod of iron and even her eldest son – a minister in the Qing government – defers to her decisions. Her personal favourites achieve positions of prominence and privilege within the world of the family. Much of the action of the novel centres on the intrigues between the women of the family, the mothers, the mothers in law, the sisters, the wives, the concubines, the maids of the sisters and wives and concubines, the maids of the maids of the sisters and wives and concubines, and the lowly serving maids who serve all those maids. The novel is full of domestic detail:  a teacup is overturned; a handkerchief is lost; a precious cloak is spoilt by a burning ember. These incidents are not trivial for those concerned, however, as they result in an adjustment of power positions. Suicides and murders are often the result of these feminine intrigues, and in one sense the novel may be read as an examination of the politics of the harem.

This domestic world is the scene of operations of that archetypal figure in Chinese culture and history: the uberbitch. Jia Xifeng, the wife of one of the grandsons first achieves prominence through her exceptional organizational skills at the funeral of another woman in the family, and soon thereafter is given the overall management of the Ning mansion, a task that she manages with aplomb, maintaining everyone in the lavish lifestyle they are all accustomed to, while secretly putting aside silver and lending it out at interest, which activity eventually contributes to the downfall of the family. Her position is protected because her ready wit makes her a special favourite of the Lady Dowager. When she secretly discovers that her good-for-nothing husband has secretly taken a second wife and established her in a household of her own in a lane behind the family compound, Xifeng insists on having  the second wife brought into the mansion and installed as official concubine, treating her with fastidious kindness and correctness. She then poisons her, after months of physical and mental torture and calculated cruelty. Xifeng comes from a long line of Chinese uberbitches: the Han dynasty Empress Lu cut off her chief rival’s hands and feet, plucked out her eyes, burned her ears, gave her a potion to drink which made her dumb and had her thrown in to the privy, calling her ‘the human pig, Sima Qian tells us. Ironically, that 20^th century uberbitch Madame Mao- Jiang Qing- used Hong Lou Meng as a pretext to launch a political attack on an old rival from her sing-song girl days. But it is in the nature of uberbitches that they fall, and many pages and chapters later, Xifeng meets her own miserable end.

Over against this chambered world of the women, is the wider social world of the men. Baoyu is sent to school where he learns to interact with boys his own age after a lifetime spent only in the company of women. This incident is one of the main homosexual episodes in a novel that contains many homosexual characters and scenes. The men in the family have social obligations and political roles outside the family. The Lady Dowager’s two sons are active ministers in the Qing government, and the fortunes of the family are closely tied to their fortunes in the political world. It’s this aspect of the novel where Confucian ideology is most visible. Baoyu is sent to school to study the Four Classics of Confucian thought 四書; throughout the novel, incident after incident shows the workings of the Confucian concept of filial piety 孝, most notably in Baoyu’s relations with his father, and in everyone else’s relations with their parents. This is extended to include filial piety towards ones ancestors. Towards the end of the book, when the mansions are raided by the government, Baoyu’s father’s first worry is how to protect the ancestors from the fall from grace that this will entail for the family. There is a subplot involving a peripheral member of the family who is arrested for murder, which gives us a wealth of information about Qing legal procedures (and how they are corrupted as a matter of course). However, despite these occasional excursions to the world outside the mansion, the men are usually assigned to a peripheral role and serve most often as messengers – both literally and symbolically - from outside the walls of the mansion, or a means by which women can assert their dominance over other women through marriage, concubinage or sexual liaison.

Here, then,  in our reading of the Hong Lou Meng we let ‘building’ stand for the sequestered world of the women’s quarters, the constructed social order both within the mansion and without, and the Confucian ideals of social harmony and correct behaviour.

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夢/meng/ dream

This character (pronounced as the first syllable in ‘mongrel’) consists of four elements from top to bottom. The top element is the ‘grass’ or ‘seedling’ radical /cao/; next comes a radical that can mean both ‘eye’ /mu/ and ‘net’ /wang/. Under this is the ‘roof’ radical, /mien/, with one small stroke missing. The bottom part of the character is the sign for ‘dusk’ /xi/, which is a representation of the moon. So we have a character highly evocative of the way dreams sprout from the imagination at dusk under a roof and are caught in the net of the mind’s eye.

The character for /meng/ contains a picture of the moon. 20th century Lao Tzu commentator Du Erwei draws a connection between the Dao and the moon; the Ying Yang symbol of the Dao is a picture of the waning and waxing moon. And so we let this character stand for the Ying side of the novel, for the many dreams, ghosts and hauntings, and the spirit of Daoism that pervades the book.

The novel contains many magnificent night scenes and moon sightings. Dreams abound. In the first chapter, an old scholar dreams of an encounter between a Buddhist and a Daoist monk, a dream in which the symbolic,  metaphysical meaning of the novel you are about to read is explained. Baoyu has a very significant dream in chapter 5, which he then dreams again in Chapter 116. These dreams are not so much dreams as Shamanistic spirit journeys of the kind described in the Li Sao, a famous poem from the 3^rd Century BC anthology Songs of the South 楚辭. Such dream journeys are an intrinsic part of Daoist poetry and meditation practices. In the Hong Lou Meng, when characters die, or are about to die, they appear as ghosts or are seen by other characters in dreams. Indeed, the whole novel is seen as a dream, in the way that Daoist and Buddhist thought see reality as a dream.

Against reality and against the Confucian ideals of familial piety and obedience to your superior are set the more esoteric teachings of Daoism and Buddhism, which teach that all such ideals, -  and indeed, reality itself – are illusions. The novel can be understood as a site of interplay between these three great systems of Chinese thought, in which the author comes down heavily on the side of Daoism. Confucianism, it is carefully suggested, is null and does little to stop the corruption of officials or the debauchery of men. People pay lip service to it, and it creates hypocrisy. Buddhists are presented as charlatans who use planchettes and sand writing to foretell the future. The most significant Buddhist character in the novel – the beautiful maid Miaoyu - meets a highly unpleasant and tragic end. While plenty of Daoist texts are quoted verbatim in the novel – especially the Zhuangzi - (as far as I remember) not one Buddhist sutra is (although the famous Bodhi tree gathas of the contest between Shenxiu and Huineng are).

Dreams, ghosts, divination are all intrinsic to Daoist ideas and practice. The novel’s overriding theme and structure – the vicissitudes of change – is also a primary Daoist concern. Characters muse on their own fates and the fate of the family and wonder how change could come so suddenly. These meditations on change and destiny are limited to the effects of change in this life only (and the afterlife) but there is almost no appearance of a theme connected to repeated lives, no discussion of karma, a prime Buddhist concern.

The novel’s alignment with Daoist over Confucian and Buddhist ideologies is seen most clearly in the character of the protagonist. Although Baoyu in the early part of the novel is called ‘Little Bodhisattva’ by his nurses, this is no more than a standard term of endearment for a young child. As he grows up, Baoyu reads Zhuangzi when he should be studying Confucian classics. In chapter 21, he reads The Housebreaker text from the Zhuangzi, whose basic message is that out of destruction comes liberation and creativity. He is inspired to create his own commentary to it, adapting Zhuangzi to his own circumstances. Do away with affection, he writes, and in the inner chambers fair and foul will then be on an equal footing. Advice kept to oneself does away with the danger of discord; beauty marred obviates affection, intelligence dulled cuts out admiration for talents.  On another occasion, exasperated to his wits end by all the emotional demands  made on him by the women of his chambers, he is reminded of this passage in Zhuangzi:

The ingenious work hard, the wise are full of care, but those without ability have no ambition. They enjoy their food and wander at will like drifting boats freed from their moorings.

At the end, Baoyu rejects the Confucian world that has opened up to him by his brilliant performance in the examination, and goes off, not to shave his head and join a sangha as a Buddhist monk, but to roam the countryside as a Daoist bum.

It makes sense that a writer as sophisticated as Cao Xueqin should ultimately come down on the side of Daoism as a resolution for his protagonist’s fate, because the teachings of Daoism come closer to an understanding of the perennial concerns of the really great novelists, namely the nature of fiction and its relationship to reality. Daoism has a more, creative approach to illusion, allegory, and symbolism; at the same time it also has a thorough awareness of the difficulties of communicating these things through language than either Chan Buddhism or Confucianism.  The name that can be named is not the constant name, says the first line of the Dao Der Jing.  Zhuangzi writes: The Dao is not named/Great division is not spoken….who can understand division that is not spoken, or Dao that is not named? In chapter 102 the characters consult the Yi Jing, and the hexagrams the oracle gives them foretell the fates of the characters consulting them, in an example of sophisticated structural foreshadowing that the Chinese prize as one of the great literary innovations Cao Xueqin made in the novel as a literary genre.

Lin Yu Tang, an early 20^th century cultural commentator, wrote on the influence of Daoism in Chinese literature: All good Chinese literature, all Chinese literature that is worth while, that is readable and that pleases the human mind and soothes the human heart is essentially imbued with a Daoistic spirit.  

The Daoist underpinnings of the work result in an almost post-modernist awareness of itself as a work of fiction, an illusion. The very first named character in the novel is Zhen Shiying, which is a homophone for ‘true things disappear’; Jia, the family name of the main characters, is a homophone for ‘unreal’, ‘fake’, ‘false’. Jia Baoyu has a distant relative his own age, also called Baoyu, who is in effect his double, but his name is Zhen Baoyu, which means ‘real’ Baoyu. These two encounter one another in a dream, and when they awake, neither of them knows who the real Baoyu is. Zhuangzi, famously, dreamed he was a butterfly, but upon waking could not decide whether he had been Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. If reality is a dream, then a novel about reality is a dream within a dream, in which dreams about reality appear in a reality about dreams.

In chapter 1, as the reader is embarking on this sojourn into a fictional world,  a Daoist priest begins a journey into the Land of Illusion, passing through an archway on both pillars of which is inscribed the following couplet:

When false is taken for true, true becomes false

If non-being turns into being, being becomes non-being.

This of course is meant in a metaphysical sense, but what if we read it meta-fictionally, as Cao Xueqin seems to be asking us to do? As devoted readers, when we immerse ourselves into a fictional world, isn’t false taken for true? As we yearn to follow the fate of our favourite character, doesn’t being become non-being?  Near the very end, the narrator comments in another couplet:

A book not of this world records events not of this world.

A man with two lives reverts to his original form.

As we finish the novel - any totally absorbing novel - we revert to our original form, to ourselves.

The whole novel is set within a framing device which can, on the one hand, be seen as a Daoist metaphysics, and on the other, as a literary meta-fiction designed to forestall any possible political fall out for the author. The whole novel is revealed as having been engraved on a huge stone. This stone then reappears in the mouth of Baoyu at his birth (‘baoyu’ literally means ‘precious jade’). The whole engraving is copied down by a Daoist monk called Reverend Void and given to CXQ, who spends 10 years working it up…

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The Hong Lou Meng, with its cast of hundreds of characters, its great length, and the timespan covered, is an epic novel. But to read it is to get an impression of intimacy rather than heroic size. Cao Xueqin’s emphasis on the inner life of the characters, on scenes of domesticity, on the economic and political sphere as it operates within one (huge) family make the novel a series of miniatures. The closest parallel to Western literature, stylistically and in terms of genre, I suppose, would be the novels of Jane Austen, or Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, or other novels which focus on women or family life and which use this as an allegory for a wider political view.

The novel is not an easy read: at first, the world of Qing dynasty China appears to have no relevance to the reader, and it does go on and on and on, demanding a large investment of time (and patience, it must be said). The first chapter is particularly taxing, which does Cao Xueqin no favours. But, inexorably, if you stick with it, you are drawn slowly in; the incidents are ones which reach across cultures and centuries to our own lives and remain imprinted in memory: a child’s temper tantrum, first love, a grandmother’s death in the bosom of her family, a birthday celebration, a sleepless night caused by anxiety over the future, the pangs of lust, the love of home.

Daniel Johnson wrote in his review of another long, modern novel, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy words which might just as fittingly be applied to Hong Lou Meng: You should make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life.