Tag Archive for literature

Happy (research) birthday

Meng Chao (Republican period)

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

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

I was panicked my first year & selected what turned out to be a difficult subject, compounded by my general incompetence. I decided that for my second year, I was going to research something that I knew made me happy:Â The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting ç‰¡ä¸¹äº), one of the most famous of the “marvelous tales,” a big sweeping epic of a ghost play. It has undergone quite the revival in the past 15 or 20 years: how did it get to that point, I wondered?

As it turned out, it reallyÂ was in need of revival – I was doing some preliminary work with Chinese theatre yearbooks (nianjianÂ å¹´é‰´), which include all sorts of statistics on plays performed by troupes and so on.Â Peony was basically nowhere to be found; I knew enough to know this would be aÂ very tall order to research, andÂ I needed to find some other angle. In desperation, I brought a typed up spreadsheet – listing years, troupes, plays performed – I had made to the wonderful professor who helped us once a week with our documents. “Can you just look at this really quickly and tell me if something pops out? I just don’t recognize most of these plays.” She immediately hit upon one and asked “What isÂ this doing here?” I looked, and said it had apparently been a very popular play in the early 1980s. “Do you know about this one? It’s also aÂ guixiÂ [é¬¼æˆ, ghost play], but it was criticized during the Cultural Revolution – likeÂ Hai Rui [Wu Han’s Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, Hai Rui baguan æµ·ç‘žç½¢å®˜].” She told me she remembered seeing big character posters in Beijing as a girl, criticizing the play and the author. How interesting, then, that it was so popular in the early 1980s.

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

Among Western scholars, considerable attention has been given to Wu Hanâ€™s play, much less to Tian Hanâ€™s, and very little to Meng Chaoâ€™s. (80)

Indeed, as I noted with no small bit of wonder a little later, so little attention had been given to Meng Chao’s play that this Kun opera (kunquÂ æ˜†æ›²) was consistently misidentified as Peking opera (jingjuÂ äº¬å‰§). I’d discovered something -Â Li Huiniang – and someone – Meng Chao – and that has more or less driven my fledgling career since, even as the topic has spiraled outwards and sucked in more and more angles and more and more people and more and moreÂ stuff, as projects are wont to do. I always come back to him and his ghost – it’s hard not to, given the subject of my work, but partially because I have spent so much time with “him” (rather, the literary detritus of his life). When I’m having trouble writing, I will often turn to the parts of my manuscript that deal with him – a story I know so well, and something that can often get me over a case of writer’s block.

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

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

He’s not handsome, not even when comparing him to the two other men his name is indelibly linked with. In his Republican-era photograph (which, admittedly, came when he was already middle age: perhaps a younger Meng Chao would be a handsomer Meng Chao), he has neither the round-faced, amenable look of Wu Han, nor the lean, dapper appearance of Tian Han. Any idealization of him I have in my head is not because I’ve been presented with a fine specimen of manhood; it’s his literary acumen I find so appealing. It’s hard to find photographs of him; I have seen only three. One – my favorite, even in the higher resolution version that makes him look older and more bewildered (it reminds me that this man had been through a lot by that age, impressive family background or no!) – shows him as aÂ man in his late 30s or early 40s, with a face a bit like a basset hound. He looks very earnest. The next was taken sometime in the 1950s, and is a typical cadre photograph – large glasses (ridiculously so, from the vantage point of 2014), much older than the first. The last is the saddest, and shows a veryÂ old man with a daughter and twoÂ granddaughters. He looks much, much older than his 73 or 74 years. That one was taken very late in his life, after over a decade of persecution and campaigns, after being branded a niugui-sheshenÂ ç‰›é¬¼è›‡ç¥ž, an ox ghost-snake spirit. There’s no trace of that earnest young man in the Republican-era photograph. What would that old man say to the young figure, I wonder?

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

He reminds me, while teaching, to impress that fact on students: that these wereÂ once living, breathing humans – not just names or faceless individuals. Â I show my students a page from a theatre yearbook announcing the rehabilitation of opera people in the late 1970s (lists like this were published all over the place), and I talk them through the jumble of (to them) unintelligible characters – representations of lives lived, good and bad. Here, a luminary who died in prison; there, a star who was beaten to death by a gang of overzealous teenagers; sprinkled throughout, people who committed suicide, fearing what would happen if they didn’t. And there (in two little characters; ones that I recognize the shape of no matter how small the image I’m looking at), a man who died in a Beijing hutong, his family suffering from being attached to someoneÂ who produced a so-called fandang fanshehuizhuyi åå…šåç¤¾ä¼šä¸»ä¹‰ -Â anti-party, anti-socialist thought – poisonous weed; broken, old, sad, and bitter.Â They’re simply recognizable names, poster children for all those other lives lived (and ended) in much greater anonymity. But human, concrete: not justÂ names.

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

Coming ’round full circle

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

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

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

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

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

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

TheÂ datuanyuan Â is not some minor point for children’s fairytales (something I think we tend to associate the “and then they lived happily ever after” endings with – “grownup” media should be grittier, or more complex, and not so happy against all odds); it’s actually quite an important thing in Chinese literature, including some of the greatest things ever written in any language. Â The English translation doesn’t convey the cultural significanceÂ ofÂ roundness (as Zhang Zhen notesÂ inÂ An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937, the significance ofÂ datuanyuan goes way beyond a clichÃ©, and points to a kind of cultural conditioning – she mentions, for instance, the importance of visual cuesÂ like the typical round table used for family meals, as well as cosmological symbols like the full moon, in early Chinese cinema that had a tendency to rely on the “big reunion” as a plot structure). Cultural resonance or not, forcing aÂ datuanyuan sometimes leads to bizarre results, like in the 1926 filmÂ A String of Pearls (Yi chuan zhenzhu ä¸€ä¸²çç ), based loosely (and I do mean “loosely”) on the famous Guy de Maupassant short story “La parure” (The necklace), where the emotional punch of the story is more or less removed by an effort to ensure the happy ending. I suppose this is one complaint with happy endings in games; they can seem contrived or leave massive plot holes.

There are alsoÂ old examples of “fanfic,” intended to write the wrongs of an original narrative, or flesh things out (often appending a datuanyuan) – the ones I think of are related toÂ Dream of the Red Chamber [Honglou meng çº¢æ¥¼æ¢¦], the 18th century novel by Cao Xueqin æ›¹é›ªèŠ¹. The first printed version (in 1791) included 40 extra chapters that don’t exist in earlier Â manuscripts,Â and there’s been a great amount of debate aboutÂ what the ending should have looked like, who wrote the extra 40 chapters, the role of the editors of the printed version, etc (indeed, there is an entirely discipline dedicated to study of this novel – called Hongxue çº¢å¦ in Chinese, “Redology” – a tidbit that I stillÂ delight in passing on to students). The 19th century saw all sorts of new endings put forth, though as Jin Feng points out inÂ Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance, these have not generally been looked at from the angle of fanÂ activity, but simply as part of pre-20th century literary production.

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

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

This is much harder to do in literature, for obvious reasons, although a single work can encompass all those moments. In drama, this is helped by the fact that the sprawling Ming tales were not performed in their entirety, and were instead seen in excerpts.Â Some of the most enduring parts of Tang Xianzu’s æ±¤æ˜¾ç¥– masterworkÂ TheÂ Peony PavilionÂ (Mudan ting ç‰¡ä¸¹äº), or at least the ones that get trotted out the most, are not, in fact, theÂ end, where everything works out – they are the beautiful and rather tragic (or at least bittersweet) early scenes. Considering the fears of moralists thatÂ chuanqiÂ likeÂ PeonyÂ would drive women to madness, suicide, or worse, it seems that even having a happy ending was no guarantee your audience would gravitate towardsÂ that! Instead, portions of the reading audienceÂ seemed to fixate on the somewhat depressing (perhaps more realistic?) chapters – an acknowledgement that theÂ datuanyuanÂ was simply a fantasy, impossible in real life? The famous “Walking through the garden, waking from the dream” [YouyuanÂ jingmengÂ æ¸¸å›æƒŠæ¢¦] section is rather wondrous – and it does feature quite the fantastic dream! – yet it’s simply that: a dream. And yet the (male) authors seemed to love writing theÂ fantastical ending, no matter how improbable, even if those weren’t the parts segments of their audience gravitated towards.Â Perhaps this is partially a difference in producing and consuming; I wonder if fan-produced writing and art geared towards alternative paths or endings, fleshing out what happenedÂ after, writing a “perfect” scenario, whatever that might mean for an individual, often focuses more on the perhaps improbable yet perfect because it’s created largely to entertain one’s self and notÂ reallyÂ for an audience (publishing on fandom specific sites and the like notwithstanding) – not unlike some of the great fiction and drama in China.

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

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

Giving pleasure, not a political lesson

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

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

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

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

In contrast, a translated Japanese light novel â€œNo Game No Lifeâ€ was recently banned in China, because the protagonists won a (modified) chess game by inciting a coup in the opponentâ€™s (chess-piece) camp, and the book was deemed to promote subversion, blah blah blah,

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

TheÂ Star WarsÂ comic may seem a strange thing to try and compare to traditional Chinese opera (xiqu æˆæ›²), but consider the fact that (quoting from myÂ Appendix piece on Li Huiniang through the ages) there is a very beloved plot structure in Chinese theatre, going something like this:

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

Little guy against the big guy (even in Hai Rui Dismissed from Office [Hai Rui baguan æµ·ç‘žç½¢å®˜] – by Wu Han å´æ™— – you’re dealing with an important minister versus an even more important person – the emperor); the big guy is invariably doing something wrong (usually really, really wrong). In the case ofÂ Li Huiniang æŽæ…§å¨˜, one of the ghost plays I study most intensely, it’s a combination of gutsy young scholar & a powerless concubine. The scholar stands up for himself in the face of the evil prime minister (who is cavorting by West Lake while the peasants starve and barbarians mass on the northern borders: callous and incompetent), the concubine remarks admiringly on it, and she winds up dead at the hands of the prime minister (and returnsÂ as anÂ incredibly righteously indignantÂ ghost, at least in the version by Meng Chao åŸè¶…).

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

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

Until 1963 – and, for plays likeÂ Hai Rui, until 1965 – these sorts of story lines weren’t read as subversive, at least not in official channels. They were celebrated for encouraging a “resisting spirit,” “spirit of revolt” [fankang jingshenÂ åæŠ—ç²¾ç¥ž] in their audiences; naturally, they were not talking about the spirit of resisting theÂ Party, but of everything else that needed to be resisted (America, capitalism, revisionism, landlords, Confucianism, the patriarchy, whatever: the list is practically endless). Â Some of this is simply part and parcel of the game of Marxist showmanship, where intellectuals and artists trotted through a pretty standard set of narratives to justify why certain types of culture – often the things Mao had said (at Yan’an) ought to be “totally destroyed” – were perfectly appropriate for socialist China. On the other hand, I’m not keen to dismiss all of that kind of talk as meaningless: I think there was a kernel of truth underneath all those claims (that is, I think a lot of the writersÂ did believe in the power of art, andÂ did think it could be “educational”Â without being over the top, andÂ did think “the masses” probably had something to learn from watching well-loved classics).

However, there was undoubtedly an element of modern “indirect remonstrance” regarding the Great Leap Forward by senior intellectuals who were writing these revamped classical tales. But that (like the story lines themselves) is a grand tradition.Â Tian Han ç”°æ±‰, the famous playwright who also write a revised historical drama along the same lines (Xie Yaohuan è°¢ç‘¶çŽ¯), supposedlyÂ told Meng Chao thatÂ Li Huiniang‘s great fault wasÂ that opera (qÇ”Â æ›²) should be “bent” or “indirect” (qÅ« æ›²);Â Li Huiniang was too “unyielding,” or “not bent,” or “direct” (buqÅ«Â ä¸æ›²).¹ As it turned out, theyÂ were considered “too direct” – an attack on the Party, or on Mao himself – after 1963;Â Li Huiniang,Â Xie Yaohuan,Â Hai Rui, and their authors were savaged in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the first casualties of that long decade. I’ve written about all of this in myÂ Modern Chinese Literature & CultureÂ article, “A Ghostly Bodhisattva and the Price of Vengeance: Meng Chao, Li Huiniang, and the Politics of Drama, 1959-1979.”

But the terror of the Cultural Revolution was not foreordained in 1961, and it was a period of relative relaxation, insofar as parts of the cultural realm were concerned. Who could have seen 1966 coming when Chen Yi é™ˆæ¯…Â (at the time the Foreign Minister) commented on the profusion of crappy, didactic dramas that flourished during the Great Leap Forward: “Plays,” he said, “should give us pleasure and artistic satisfaction, not a political lesson.” The reasoning was, of course, that having come through such a dreadful period, people just needed to be entertained; to smile and be happy; to forget. Zhang Zhen å¼ çœŸ, a staunch defender of traditional drama throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, wroteÂ in 1956 on the overzealous application of certain rules regarding drama (in this case, the dictate that the masses should not be made the butt of jokes):

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

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

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

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

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

Besides, there were much more vicious critiques that were allowed to be published. One of my favorite essays is one I’ve written about – “I think of Meng Chao” æˆ‘æ€€åŸè¶… by Lou ShiyiÂ æ¥¼é€‚å¤· – published in 1979, where he says (in a not terribly subtle, extraordinarily sarcastic manner – and this was published in People’s Daily!) of the period of early Li Huiniang criticism:

At the time I didnâ€™t really understand â€“ how could â€œanti-Jia Sidaoâ€ count as â€œanti-partyâ€?Â Donâ€™t tell me our great, righteous, glorious, and honorable party was harboring a Jia Sidao?²

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

BesidesÂ … if I were looking for rebellion-fomenting culture c. 1980, I’m prettyÂ sure Darth Vader & a triceratops would notÂ be tops on my list of dangerous media. I mean, really: just look at it!

Show 2 footnotes

“As if our old companions have returned in a dream”

Academia is funny business: I’m sure there must be other jobs that train you for a relatively long period of time & then dump you out for your actualÂ training after you’ve secured employment, but I can’t think of any. My first semester as a real, live professor was fascinating and frustrating and wonderful and awful – all things wrapped up in one. I was fervently thankful for winding up at a nice university, in a nice department, with nice students, and nice colleagues. But I woke up many mornings feeling pretty terrible about my teaching ability, my ability to put competent syllabi together, my ability to get other stuff done in addition to teaching a big(ish) lower division survey course & an upper division course, and so on and so forth. I had a few meltdowns (though fewer than I would’ve expected, truthfully). As a colleague said to me, it’s a terribly demoralizing thing to get up in the morning and feel like you suck at your job; on the other hand, it’s not like we get any training in this stuff.

In any case, it was a learning experience & certainly wasn’t the disaster it could have been, but it’s been with no small relief that I’ve discovered I am (sort of) getting my teaching legs. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a course on “women and the Chinese revolution” at UCSD, which I taught in the way I thought it was supposed to be taught. What I discovered is that when you start in the late 19th century, it is (or it is for me) very hard to get students over the May 4th hurdle: there’s a certain narrative about Chinese women “before,” and a narrative “after,” and despite trying to illustrate the problems of – or reasons for – a particular narrative of “before,” it’s hard to do without showing. So I had a somewhat wild and crazy idea, when I decided my second semester of teaching would include teaching “Gender and East Asia,” to scrap the 20th century focus & go back: way, way back, and pull out the things that have been so compelling for me. I thought (and still think) if I could just underscore some aspects – really show them, let them read these wonderful things I love so much! – my students would come away with a better appreciation for the lives of women prior to their miraculous “emancipation” in the 20th century. Time will tell if this approach will work (the syllabus needs a lot of tweaking, as they always do), but it’s been a lot of fun seeing how students respond to these documents I love so well.

I am not a historian of gender. In my own research, I deal largely with male intellectuals (I think the only female voices – besides the “voices” of ghosts written by men – are the odd essayist or artist), and though I’m dealing with a topic that has been examined through the lens of gender with great success (Judith Zeitlin’s amazing The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature), it’s not a dimension I explore in any systemic manner. I think there’s something about the fantasy of ghostly women that I need to explore further – and hopefully will in my monograph! – but I would never claim to be part, or even really want to be part, of the amazing circle of people working on gender history in China.

At the same time, surveying my own career, my interest in Chinese history was largely sparked (and later nurtured) by both secondary works of gender history, and primary sources dealing with “the question of woman” in the 20th century, Ming-Qing women poets, and those pesky ghosts. Would I be a Chinese historian were it not for Xu CanÂ å¾ç‡¦ or Dorothy Ko, Lu Xun’s “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?” or Susan Mann? Probably not. Even my first literary love in East Asia – way back in high school – was Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. So it’s something of a pleasure to introduce to students – many of whom have no experience with this stuff – to things I love so very Â much.Â But I can find it inordinately frustrating, mostly due to my inability to package all of it as well as my professors did. I would like to think that my enthusiasm shines through & helps with some of that, but I am never so unsure of myself as when I am completely unable to stimulate discussion on a short story of Lu Xun’s, for example (this has been a bugaboo of mine since my very first time in front of an undergraduate class; I despair of my ability to ever do it well). The closer you are to something, the more you desperately want to get across “the purpose,” why it’s important, the meaning – you want to show why it’s something you love so much (or I do, at least). I realized it’s one reason I’ve been a bit frantic about the idea of revising my dissertation: I really care about these intellectuals, Meng Chao in particular, and he deserves a better biographer than me. Because if his story is going to be told in English for once, it needs to beÂ good. He deserves it. I’m afraid of not being able to do him – and his beautiful ghost – justice; the prospect seems worse than not writing it at all.

I’ve had an up and down week here, one where I’ve felt like a horrible teacher, a horrible researcher, a horrible colleague, a horrible human being, for no discernible reason (I suspect part of it is the long winter here grating on me a bit, and just general exhaustion that often hits in the middle of the semester). I’m terribly homesick for some place that’s never existed (namely, somewhere my favorite people all are, neatly collected for me), a bit lonely, and fretting about my dissertation, a fresh wound into which I continue to pour salt in a very masochistic manner. So – in between getting work done and panicking about my life – I’ve returned to old friends, most of whom I didn’t have time to introduce my students to. It’s a good reminder of why I do this stuff, even if I don’t “do” women’s writing culture in imperial China. A reminder that I’m lucky to be here, and very lucky to have the flexibility to teach topics in ways that resonate with me; a reminder that I’m probably not as terrible at conveying much of this as I think I am, as I know my affection for these long-dead authors and their lives must shine through.

Much like listening to my beloved lute music, it’s hard not to be melancholy when reading many of my favorite poets in English or in Chinese – but it often makes me feel better. It’s partially the subject, partially the fact that I have memories attached to my books, when I first read so-and-so, first learned of such-and-such. First taught this, that, or the other. I gave a colleague one of my favorite monographs (Andre Schmid’s Korea Between Empires) last week & my heart nearly broke when I pulled it off the shelf – it’s been a long time since I last read it, but it’s battered and tea stained, having been carried in my purse when it was new (along with a not-totally-empty travel mug) for several weeks. And all that seems like so long ago (and it was!). My big poetry anthology was purchased at Eslite in Taipei years ago, for the princely sum of 1225NT (around $40 – not a bad price for an enormous, wonderful book); every time I pick it up, a lot of memories come rushing back. It’s dog-eared and battered (my love of a volume can usually be discerned by its degree of dog-earedness; also on how many coffee or tea stains it has on its edges), but I still occasionally put my nose in it and inhale deeply. It represents a lot of stuff that no longer exists. So maybe that’s one reason I get anxious about teaching this stuff; I feel like I’m teaching part of me (and, as I often remind my students, histories often reflect more on the present than they do on the past they purport to represent; surely the same extends to teaching). IÂ don’t know that I’m doing these women justice, but I’m trying, and surely that counts for something.

“Shuilong yin:Â Matching Su’an’s Rhymes, Moved by the Past”Â (Xu Can, trans. Charles Kwong, from the Women Writers of Traditional China)

Under the silk tree’s flowers we lingered;
Then, I once tried to explain to you:
Joy and sorrow turn in the blink of an eye,
Flowers, too, are like a dream –
How can they bloom forever?
Now indeed
The terrace is empty, the blossoms are gone,
Leaving weeds enwrapped in sprawling mist.
I recall the time of splendid sights,
The time of bustling glamour,
Each seizing on the spring breeze to show its charm.

Sigh not that the flower-spirit has gone afar;
There are fragrant flower poems inscribed on floral paper.
Here, pink blossoms open and close,
Green shade hangs dense and sparse,
Greeting us as though with a smile.
Holding a cup, we may chant softly,
As if our old companions
Have returned in our dream.
From now on,
Candle in hand, let us admire the flowers;
Never wait till the flower sprigs have grown old.

Every bad movie is bad in its own way

I try very hard (and think I largely succeed) in not being thatÂ kind of historian: you know, the one that can’t let historical “fact” go enough to enjoy what’s supposed to be entertainment. Yes, I look askance at random insertions of historical events in films or games – I haven’t (nor will I ever) playedÂ Bioshock Infinite, but my eyebrow arched when I came across references to its treatment of the “Boxer Rebellion.” If nothing else, it seemed that no one had read Joe Esherick on the BoxerÂ UprisingÂ (though perhaps someone on the team had, at some point – who knows). In any case, other than a slightly irritated tweet that seeing references to the “Boxer Rebellion” makes me twitchy – which it does – I don’t have much to say about even wild liberties taken with historical events. I always nurture some sort of hope that coming across scattered references will encourage at least a portion of the audience to go searching for more. After all, one of my colleagues – a wonderfully talented scholar – once admitted that his interest in China was partially ignited by playing a Romance of the Three Kingdoms themed game on SNES. Maybe one of the great China scholars of generations to come will find themselves going down the rabbit hole of late Qing history courtesy a game that largely disappointed the game criticism blogosphere? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

There are some things I am less sanguine about, however, and that includes my favorite literature. Often, seeing novels translated to the big screen is a depressing experience – how can you compress the complexities in many great works down to two hours and change? Frequently, you can’t. Rarely, I like things better on the big screen than in written form, like The Last of the Mohicans (I would much rather be forced to watch the film on loop for an eternity than have to read James Fenimore Cooper’s snoozefest one more time, great American literature or no – the Deerslayer,Â I might waffle on. Mohicans, certainly not). But I usually avoid cinematic versions of my favorite works, though curiosity occasionally gets the better of me.

My touchstone novel (or one of them), one I come back to over and over again, is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. One of the first moments of serious outrage about the downfall of American culture, as viewed through popular culture, I remember having is when it showed up on Oprah’s book club. “Christ almighty,” I ranted to my mother, “it’s Tolstoy. TOLSTOY! One of the great novels of the nineteenth century! Do people really need OPRAH and a sexed up cover to tell them to read the damn book?” (probably so, is the answer). I’ve been reading it since I was 12 or 13, and I come back to it almost every year. And even when I put off the annual reading, at the very least, my very battered copy has accompanied me all over the world. That Penguin translation – inherited from my mum – is better traveled than most people. It’s an embarrassing record of nearly two decades of reading – coming face to face with what my 15 year old self thought was important enough to highlight can be positively humiliating – but an important book. I’ve read it in English and French, and I think I have a copy floating around in Chinese. I had a vague idea as an undergraduate that I might like to study Russian history, since that would mean having to learn Russian, and that would mean being able to read Tolstoy (and Pushkin and and) in their originals. Maybe I will get around to learning Russian someday, if only to commune with Anna Karenina in the original, and Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries besides.

It’s a big book. It’s a daunting book. Not only is it long (it is Tolstoy, after all), you have two relatively separate plots that come together here and there. Despite these things (or perhaps because of them), it has also proved positively irresistible for film directors. I try not to watch the cinematic versions. I have a 1967 Russian version flittering around that I’m scared to watch, although it’s been in my possession since 2006, and while I actually rather liked the 1997 version starring Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean, I first watched it under duress. I’d been studiously avoiding the 2012 film with Keira Knightley and Aaron Johnson. The initial reason for my reluctance was perhaps extremely superficial, but as it turned out, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

This is what is on the cover of my copy of Anna Karenina, the Penguin edition translated by Rosemary Edmonds:

Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1883). It’s a beautiful painting (and one with an interesting history), one that supposedly ‘inspired’ Tolstoy’s descriptions of Anna, though that’s clearly impossible based on timing. And yet, perhaps because it’s emblazoned on my trusty copy, when I imagine Anna Karenina, fictional character, I imagine something close to this unknown woman with her blue silk-edged muff.

Here is Tolstoy’s description of Anna at the important ball, one of those scenes that I come back to again and again when I think of my imaginary Anna:

Flushed, Kitty lifted her train off Krivin’s knees and, slightly giddy, looked round in search of Anna. Anna was standing in the middle of a group of ladies and gentlemen all talking together. She was not wearing lilac, the colour which Kitty was so sure she ought to have worn, but a low-necked black velvet gown which displayed her full shoulders and bosom, that seemed carved out of old ivory, and her rounded arms with their delicate tiny wrists. Her dress was richly trimmed with Venetian lace. In her black hair, which was all her own, she wore a little wreath of pansies, and there were more pansies on the black ribbon winding through the white lace at her waist. Except for the wilful little curls that always escaped at her temples and on the nape of her neck, adding to her beauty, there was nothing remarkable about her coiffure. She wore a string of pearls round her firmly-modelled neck. (93)

That description – of a beautiful, well-shaped woman who is clearly not waifish (I think here of Suzanne Farrell, and Arlene Croce’s comments about her 1960s, pre-BÃ©jart shape and the “plush” and “plump quality” of her movement Â – for all the ranting about Balanchine’s encouragement of the anorexic dancer form, none of his great ballerinas could be remotely described as bony sticks. The young Farrell is tall and long and slender, but also round in many respects) – is one reason I managed to stay away from Joe Wright’s Anna. There was just such a fundamental disconnect between the Anna in my head and Keira Knightley that I doubted could be overcome.

I hadn’t thought of the movie in ages, but one of the nice things about being back in an academic fold again is having all sorts of interesting people to talk to, including – for the first time ever in my academic career! – having people (well, one person, at least) who really have studied Russian history (formally, and they do in fact teach it – unlike my amateur interest/bathtime reading combined with the purely practical brushing up against Lenin and Stalin one must do when one studies post-1949 Chinese history) to answer all my pressing questions about late imperial Russian history (e.g., ‘When WAS the point of no return for the Romanov dynasty?’Â One answer, in case you were dying to know like I was, is 1905). Anyways, we had a nice chat about Tolstoy & his wife, and Anna Karenina; I admitted I actually likedÂ the 1997 version, but expressed skepticism on the more recent Western remake. My fellow historian hadn’t seen it.

As it happened, my mum was in town recently & in the course of sipping our wine & talking history & attempting to figure out what to do with the evening, we decided to take a chance on the most recent cinematic version of Tolstoy’s epic. And it was true: I found Keira Knightley’s mere form so antithetical to what I have imagined Anna Karenina to be like for over half my life that I never could comfortably slip into the film. It is admittedly a pretty film, and a stylized one – and Knightley’s physical presence is a nice shorthand for the bigger stylistic problems of the film, its conceits. It’s a weirdly stripped down and ahistorical portrayal of a particular period. And while it’s lush, it’s lush in a way that never quite gels.

Maybe I expect period films to be too period. But the latter half of 19th century Russia (at least among the aristocracy) seems so luxurious – so plush, like a late ’60s Farrell arabesque! -Â it seems a shame to dismantle it and attempt to build it back up again. The novel is so rich that it seems silly to layer on a conceit like “this is all taking place on a stage!” Yes, yes, we get it: the artificiality of society! It’s practically as if late imperial Russian society were proceeding according to a rigid set of conventions that they’re performing – like a play! (Being inspired by Orlando Figes is one thing, turning literal the idea of ‘acting’ is another: really? Did we have to be so literal?) There are clever bits here and there, but when it comes down to it, Tolstoy doesn’t need clever bits. There were striking bits of imagery – as when Anna is in the nursery of Stiva & Dolly’s house, and is seated in the children’s elegant playhouse – but flashes here and there aren’t enough. It’s a film, not a painting.

And then there are the arms. It sounds positively ridiculous – among so many other problems, dÃ©colletage and the roundness of arms are going to leap out? But when I think of the great many descriptions tucked into the novel, that description of Anna at the ball – looking even more glamorous than naÃ¯ve Kitty could’ve dreamed – with her rounded arms, tiny wrists, and ‘firmly-modelled’ neck (here is where I would like to know what the Russian says, and implies: not that I distrust Edmonds, but I always wonder what I’m missing) – it’s that bit of prose I come back to (not the epigraph, and not the famous first line). Whatever the Russian says exactly, we are not dealing with a fragile, willowy beauty.

Even ignoring the fact that Wright has Anna in dress that ‘full shoulders and bosom’ would come falling out of, the horrors, and Knightley’s collarbones could cut a steak – she’s beautiful, to be sure, but Anna Karenina? This becomes more obvious when everything is in motion; she just can’t quite pull off the ever-so-slight bloom off the roseness needed; her Vronsky doesn’t help in these matters, seeming like an escapee from the Corps des Pages, not an officer. They don’t seem to inhabit the roles, instead just putting on the (somewhat off kilter and nowhere near as effective as sumptuous period costumes) clothing. The Levin and Kitty thread (lifted from Tolstoy & Sophia) – often my favorite parts of the novel – show up in random sequences here and there. The contrast is never expounded upon, and while Levin may look delightful rhythmically cutting wheat with his peasants, it’s an excuse to show rippling golden wheat – not actually develop anything.

Perhaps this is nitpicking over costuming and decisions about what part of an admittedly lengthy book a director chooses to trim. On the other hand: I think the arms are my convenient scapegoat for the fact that some versions of Anna KareninaÂ are believable, and some are not. I suspect that even if Sophie Marceau’s arms had been a little less round, her shoulders and dÃ©colletage a little less full, she still would’ve been believable as Anna in a way Knightley just isn’t. Sean Bean is more convincing as the dashing Vronsky; the more current version looks as though he’s playing dress up out of a not terribly good costume closet (the women’s clothing – jarring as it is if you’re expecting some semblance of 19th century clothing – is at least luscious in fabric selection; the men get saddled with uniforms that look like they ran out of money before finishing them properly).Â She gave up everything for him? Really?

There are bones of the story that must be gotten right for everything else to work. Even seemingly minor details keep undercutting the (dare I say) authenticity of the whole project. Vronsky’s mount for the disastrous steeplechase is described in the novel as a dark bay English thoroughbred, ‘not entirely free from reproach’ but generally lovely to look upon (like Anna, then: Tolstoy never describes her as an overwhelming beauty, and she, too, would not be entirely free from reproach – but the general effect is so lovely, one hardly notices the faults). That she has been imagined in the film as a rather heavy, Iberian-looking grey horse would perhaps be forgivable if the interlude rang true (though really, how hard it is to find a bay horse); but the episode is never developed, beyond Anna’s reaction to the fall. Isn’t it more powerful if we see the parallels between the relationship that is about to overtake Vronsky and Anna and this lovely, spirited bay mare who meets a bad end? So too with the Levin-Kitty plot, left mostly untouched except for mucking up the proposal scene and random flashes here and there: doesn’t it make the titular woman’s story that much more powerful?

But perhaps my indignant response to some adaptations of Tolstoy’s wonderful novel explains my more tolerant attitude towards historical detritus sprinkled here and there. A film I love, though it’s certainly not a good film, is Le Pacte des loups (2001), which despite being a silly romp in many ways does strike some chords regarding 18th century French history. The story is preposterous, but it can feel spot on even while you’re rolling your eyes about yet another martial arts sequence. No one can recreate a period in its entirety, not even the most conscientious and obsessive historian – details are bound to be lost. We could say the same thing about recreating a novel and moving it to a new medium; what matters is not so much if every detail is correct, but if it rings true. (This isn’t to say that historians should play fast and loose with details – just that, when you’re writing a history of whatever it is you’re writing a history about, you simply can’t write everything) If I, in writing my history, haven’t managed to evoke anything about the period, if it rings false – I haven’t really done a good job of things. It may be solid history, but it’s missing something essential (of course, not all historians do work on topics or periods or themes that lend themselves to being “evocative,” and that’s fine – it’s just not the sort of history I happen to do). Perhaps this is where the most recent version of Anna Karenina fell down for me: the bones were wrong, and the silks were wrong, too.

One of the things I love most about the stories I study is that they have lived many, many lives; there are few sacred cows in the Chinese operatic tradition, and there are many examples of tinkering and adding and subtracting in the literary canon. I like it when my thoroughly Marxist intellectuals declare themselves – in highly literary Chinese – to be heirs of a great tradition, which means changing and playing and not letting it just die. It’s a testament to the resiliency of culture, and how even very old things can be reinvented over and over to remain relevant to different audiences, in different periods, in different places. I’m not adverse to beloved characters putting on new clothes, as it were – it’s fun to see, and fascinating to track. But it needs to ring true. Does Tolstoy’s novel really need flashy camera work and theatrical conceits to be made relevant? Did it really need a sexed up cover? Maybe it did – but I would like to think, if traipsing through a literary and intellectual history of socialist China has taught me anything, that literary works are remarkably resilient creatures, and many themes and stories (even old, old ones – much older than the late 19th century) don’t need much tinkering to make them resonate with the present, whenever that is. Li Huiniang wears many different clothes, but as long as her bones – the barest, stripped down essence of that Song dynasty concubine – remain solid, the adaptations work. But there are limits.

I’ve often joked – though not really joking, for if you look at my work and what I really enjoy doing and teaching, it’s really the truth – that I would’ve been happy as a clam in an EALC department as opposed to history (if we could magically subtract the considerable language chops I would’ve had to develop simply to pass my quals). I always point to the fact that Mao makes the rare appearance in my dissertation (this, despite the fact that I am a “PRC historian”), as I am much more interested in meditating on my beloved intellectuals and their literary output. But perhaps my reaction to Anna Karenina (almost all of them) illustrates that as much, if not more: I can tolerate an amazing amount of “play” with historical events, but keep your hands off my well-loved literary figures unless you’re prepared to do them justice.

“Unfortunately China is very hard to change”

I just finished my second week of school as an assistant professor, and while there is a lot of newÂ happening in my life right now on all fronts (particularly professionally), I’m traversing a lot of relatively well known ground in my two courses. I haven’t gotten to the fun bits of my introductory course on modern East Asian history, but we’re trucking along in my “Modern China” course (which is, in point of fact, a course on the history of the PRC) and I’m coming back to old friends after a long time away from them.

This week, my students read bits of Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, and Lu Xun. As I admitted to them, the Lu Xun – “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?” å¨œæ‹‰èµ°åŽæ€Žæ ·ï¼Ÿ- was a semi-selfish choice for me. It was a slightly out of place essay (we haven’t covered “the question of woman” in depth, unlike like the last time I taught the essay – which was on women in modern Chinese history). But I knew we wouldn’t have much time to spend on my favorite Republican writers, and really, while I would’ve liked for them to have read all sorts of things from Lu Xun (and a lot of others) – “Nora” was a ridiculously influential essay in my own life, and one that I think shows Lu Xun off to some of his best advantages. Â I’m not really overstating the case when I say that this one essay – actually a talk given at the Beijing Women’s Normal College in 1923 – is one of the primary reasons I became a Chinese historian. It was Lu Xun and Dorothy Ko’s account of Jiangnan women in the Ming-Qing period Â (Teachers of the Inner Chambers)Â that I really glommed on to – things that, for whatever reason, I connected with in a particular way that I hadn’t before in my other history classes. I later realized the incongruity of those two influences, but it probably has something to do with the way I’ve turned out as an historian.

“Nora,” perhaps because it’s an essay I’ve been reading for a long time, encapsulates for me the reasons I love Lu Xun: his pessimism, his snarkiness (is it any wonder that the man helped lift zawen into an art form?), his tendencies towards “There are these problems, here they are. Now youÂ figure out how to fix them.” He’s not an optimist at all, nor does he claim to have all the answers (or any). I actually like that about him, especially considering the period he lived and worked in; it’s also interesting hearing how students respond to him. So many of the sources I give them have eternal faith and optimism in this inexorable march of progress – I think it’s a bit refreshing to hand them something that says: “Great, ‘modernity.’ And? Where exactly are we going with all this?”

The first time I “taught” Lu Xun (the first time I ever stood in front of a class of undergraduates as The Person In Charge, actually), I was left in charge of an upper division class for a day while the professor was at a conference. I had no idea what to do when told “Well, just go over ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘Ah Q’ and go from there,” and I’m sure many of those students still have no idea what to-do over Lu Xun is (maybe this is one reason I come back to “Nora”: I know what to do with the essay, and it’s one that I love talking about). I paced in front of the classroom, clutching my battered and coffee-stained copy of Lyell’sÂ Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, begging the students to say something – anything. It was my first time realizing that dealing with fiction (or visual culture, or films, or whatever) in a historical manner is not as straightforward as I had thought it to be.

I still don’t know that I can adequately convey how much I love Lu Xun, and why, to my students, but I try. I show them my propaganda poster from 1974/5 (above), which has watched over me throughout grad school. I impress upon them how important he’s been in modern China, how revered – but also how dangerous his writings have been perceived as. One of my Chinese teachers in Taiwan related how she came to know Lu Xun, read surreptitiously in the period when his works were banned.

As it turned out, this was a good week to talk about Lu Xun – he’s back in the news again, because he’s continuing toÂ disappear from textbooks on the Mainland. It’s interesting to watch this from a distance, and while I have no doubt that concerns over the government’s stance that “middle school students shouldn’t be doing too much deep thinking” are well founded, I also think it’s a little ridiculous to expect middle school students – Chinese or not – to “get” Lu Xun.

I once had an enlightening conversation with a friend – who was educated in the Chinese system through secondary school – about Lu Xun. I was bubbling enthusiastically about why I enjoyed reading him and how I always found something new when I came back to well-loved essays like “Nora.” “Oh,” she said, in a pretty bored manner, “I read that stuff when I was eleven.” I was a little taken aback, and a bit offended – of course I couldn’t be so blasÃ© about having read Great Authors of Modern China at a young age, what American school kid could? – but a professor, also educated in China, said thoughtfully when I relayed this to him: “Well, don’t feel bad; he really is a giant & he’s said things that no one has said better since,” and also this, which I thought of when reading the recent kerfluffle. “It’s hard to appreciate it when the stuff is shoved down your throat from an early age.” I had a fundamentally different relationship with Lu Xun, and not just because I was American.

In sixth grade, we read Le Petit Prince. The joys of Saint-ExupÃ©ry were lost on me at that tender age; I thought it was an utterly stupid book. I mean, really – talking foxes and boys from outer space and bitchy roses? I read the book again as a senior in high school, this time in French, and I adored it – I “got” it in a way I couldn’t have, probably shouldn’t have, when it was being crammed down my throat, as it were. Of course, it was a children’s book in a way that Lu Xun’s works are not and never have been. But I think that general arc of needing a certain amount of maturity to really “get” something is rather similar.

Perhaps the government – in a scramble to prevent middle schoolers from thinking “too deeply” – is actually doing them (and all of us) a favor. Who, I wonder, got more out of Lu Xun: the 11 year old who had him and his status as a Great Writer force fed to them from a young age, or my Chinese teacher from Taipei who read him (with all the thrill of nibbling on forbidden fruit) at night, under the covers with a flashlight (OK, embellishing a bit there – but still! Forbidden or discouraged often equals desirable!)? Â I’ve watched American college students struggle with “Ah Q” and “Diary” and other writings of Lu Xun (and many other authors). I still struggle with him, much as I love him. I can only imagine what a 12 year old does when presented with one of these essays. Do they laugh at his wit and sarcasm? Ponder his pessimism? Or just consume him as they’ve been taught: reverently, or with sheer boredom? I’ve watched college students (even those, like many of mine here at MSU, who have very little experience with Asian or Chinese history and literature) ask thoughtful questions – deep questions – about his writing that I don’t think the average (or even the exceptional) eleven or thirteen or fifteen year old anywhere is ready to ask, or even think of.

My students asked questions about the very same things Lu Xun brings up in his most recently removed story, “The Kite”: forgetting, historical memory, and consequences. They also asked about dreaming for the future, holding on to the promise of Something Better if we just get through the terrible now (I was delighted with this, since it presages one of the more difficult texts I’m asking them to engage with this semester, Ci Jiwei’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism). They were the kinds of questions with no easy answers, things that aren’t really designed to be answered right then – the type of response I want my students to have to him.

Lu Xun, and a lot of his compatriots, are special (I do not hang posters of average people on my walls, after all). I wonder if this process of moving Lu Xun back to that realm of the exceptional – the off-limits – won’t do more for his legacy than continuing to flog him to students at a young age. And do more for his would-be modern readers, at that. The great whip he wrote of will come; who knows, he may be a spark for that whip. But probably not if he’s continuously relegated to the heap of “boring crap we had to read in middle school.”

Unfortunately China is very hard to change. Just to move a table or overhaul a stove probably involves shedding blood; and even so, the change may not get made. Unless some great whip lashes her on the back, China will never budge. Such a whip is bound to come, I think. Whether good or bad, this whipping is bound to come. But where it will come from or how it will come I do not know exactly.

And here ends my talk. ¹

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Dreaming of the far horizon

Fair warning: this is rough and addled; I’m in a particularly manic phase of writing/research of my dissertation, which has spilled over into all sorts of areas of my life. But it usually manifests in the desire to write something – anything – other than my dissertation, and read something – anything – other than my sources, leading to half-baked and somewhat frantic bits and pieces of writing spilling out at inopportune moments. This was originally supposed to be more on the concept of ‘female role models,’ but it wound up being more a meditation on what we find worthy of attention and valorization when it comes to female characters or historical personages.

For my nineteenth birthday, I bought myself a PlayStation 2 and a copy of Final Fantasy X. It was something of an impulse purchase, but I passed a nice week afterwards holed up on my first real gaming binge. While I’d played through the Final Fantasy offerings for PS1, FFX was the first of the series to really catch me, and it’s part of the reason I’m generally playing some JRPG or another, or nothing at all.

Ten years after the fact, I still have a great affection for the world and characters of FFX (if not always the voice acting); I’ve even gotten over my embarrassment at admitting that (a) I really do love FFX when talking to more old-school FF fans and (b) I cried at the end, and was delighted to have what amounted to an official fanfiction-esque sequel. It’s a game space I feel very comfortable in – appropriate, I think, for a game that marked the real start of my adult interest in games.

It may seem to be a bit of an odd game to select when talking about ‘female role models.’ There’s no one who comes out swinging a sword bigger than she is, or really turns expected JRPG roles on their head. Yuna is delicate and feminine (and a white mage, natch), Lulu is one sharp gasp away from heaving right out of her corset, and Rikku is young, lithe, and perky. I liked Lulu right off the bat, her snark and cynicism appealing to my own snarky, cynical self. But in the years since my first play through, I’ve come to appreciate Yuna more and more. I don’t know that I would describe her as a ‘role model’ precisely, but I like her. While she’s generally a pretty well-liked character, I used to be baffled by the occasional criticism I came across: ‘She’s naÃ¯ve! She’s weak! She’s wishy-washy! She needs a man to give her life direction! She’s so damn nice! Her voice acting sucks! I hate female characters like that!’ Even if you don’t hate characters like her, she’s not exactly the first example trotted out when talking about ‘female characters we need more of in games.’ And yet …

… and yet. There’s a quiet moral strength about her, steel wrapped in a pretty obi. It’s a strength that’s compelling to me, and has only become more so in the years since I first played the game. In my head, the ‘Yuna’ archetype runs together with a type of virtuous woman often celebrated in imperial China. I find many of them quite inspiring – for their talent, for their bravery, for their ability to get things done in adverse circumstances. They aren’t swashbuckling heroines, but there is something about them. In the same way, I find there’s something about Yuna – her sense of purpose (no man necessary), her bravery (she is not a damsel in distress), her quiet, constant belief in herself and what she’s doing. Perhaps it’s that there sometimes seems to be a small gap between a somewhat mild temperament and less bombastic forms of heroism, and women as ineffective sweetness and light – there’s something a little uncomfortable about championing this particular form of heroism. Does it hew too closely to a narrative of what women are simply expected to be? Does it simply not push the envelope enough?

(More Ancient) Iron Girls

One of the great challenges of teaching women’s history in China is walking a fine line between valorizing the agency women had/made for themselves and being realistic about social, cultural, and political oppression. I have shelves full of books that swing from one extreme to the other – there’s the 1970s feminist scholarship that decried the fate of generations of Chinese women who were utterly oppressed by the patriarchy and Confucian order. In reaction to that, we have more contemporary works that highlight the experiences of small numbers of women to show that women weren’t simply locked in the inner quarters, bound footed and pregnant. The former is hideously negative, flattening the lived experiences of women and their own voices, the latter a bit too rosy at times. When I pull out the writings of women in my own teaching, I usually tell my students that while we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the very real negatives that women had to contend with, I want to at least give them a glimpse of the inner lives of some of these otherwise faceless women. Many of them weren’t simply vessels to carry on the family line; they did have rich intellectual and interior lives, interests, friends; they were loved. They made spaces for themselves, and they were not simply blank witnesses.

One of the most treasured, battered volumes in my entire library is Women Writers of Traditional China (it’s such a favorite, I’ve made a habit of gifting it to people for whom it seems even vaguely appropriate), a spectacular anthology that pulled together some of the very best translators to cover two thousand years of women’s writings, primarily poetry. I like introducing people to these amazing women, who run the gamut from pampered daughters of elite literati families to courtesans, but the things that make them such exemplars can be somewhat unsatisfying for modern sensibilities, I think. These are generally not Mulans come to life: they aren’t marching off to war, they’re not fooling the patriarchy by passing as men, they don’t attain glory in particularly manly ways (at least, not to Western eyes: however, there is something to be said for the fame many reached in manly intellectual pursuits). It can be difficult to make these stories sing for students – they often see these women as victims at worst, at best rather dull examples of ‘good women.’ Certainly they don’t seem to be heroes.

I think the discomfort stems in part from the fact that these women have little agency in the ways that we would like. To be sure, there were plenty of constraints in the often repressive Confucian moral code. It should also be noted that their biographies hew closely to the classic tales of virtuous and moral women, which have their own patterns and expected outcomes. And certainly, there is often a lament in the biographies – sometimes quite explicitly – that ‘if only she had been a man!’ There are tales of badly arranged marriages and horrible stepmothers; a not insignificant number of the great poets were themselves courtesans.

Qiu Jin, dressed in a Japanese style & as a man

There are Mulan-ish characters, and these women often grab our attention right away. The famous revolutionary Qiu Jin ç§‹ç‘¾, who was beheaded in the waning years of the Qing dynasty for her anti-dynastic, anti-Manchu activities, is one example. A figure worthy of the ‘heroine’ title (indeed, Qiu Jin wrote in one poem, ‘Don’t tell me that women are not heroes, I rode the East Sea’s winds – alone – for ten thousand miles’), I suppose, and yet I find her friend Xu Zihua å¾è‡ªè¯ more interesting in many ways. Qiu Jin charges headlong into the unknown – there is a streak of naÃ¯vetÃ© in her actions, it’s not just confined to the sheltered, quiet good girls. But it is someone else who is left to clean up the mess, and also see the project through. After Qiu was executed, it was Xu who set off to retrieve the body of her good friend and bury her:

Red clouds closing in on all sides as evening sorrow rises;
A lonely boat in a river full of wind and snow.
How I can I bear to walk the road to Shanyin today
Where no one but me comes to bury Autumn?¹

I would be curled into a shell-shocked ball, and don’t think I would deal nearly so well with making burial arrangements for a well-loved person who was now in two pieces instead of one. Especially when such action would encourage more attention from the authorities who had just arrested and beheaded said friend.

I don’t mean to imply that it’s only these types of ‘quiet’ strength that are worthy of attention, just that perhaps we don’t give it as much attention as it deserves. It’s something that is harder to valorize than the more obviously ‘heroic’ qualities. Qiu Jin is a clear hero, and she hits some of those points we like: she shunned the expected female roles of her time (leaving her husband and children to head to Japan), she embraced the idea of revolutionary violence, she was photographed with weaponry. Delicate Chinese flower she was not, despite having bound feet. But there is heroism in Xu Zihua’s story: it is not bombastic, and it doesn’t involve assassination plots, but it speaks to a person who willingly bore a tremendous responsibility in a volatile time.

Of course, there’s a problem when it comes to talking about videogame characters and their sense of self – unlike the historical women, who were writing their own version of their life (real or imagined), Yuna is scripted, largely (entirely?) by men, and while she’s a hugely important character in the game, she’s not the main character. She is not writing her story. But she’s not simply a cookie cutter female-in-a-game, though, just as these women poets I so adore are not simply cookie cutter images of what people imagine ‘a traditional Chinese woman’ to be.

Are they women to be emulated? Are they role models? There are few characters or actual people I’d point to and say ‘We should all desire to be like that!’ Virtues of Ming-Qing China (to say nothing of fictional worlds) are not always virtues in modern society, and some of them can seem downright horrifying. The faithful maiden cult, a complement to the cult of the chaste widow (i.e., women who did not remarry after the death of a husband), is one of those – who in their right mind would point to young women committing suicide after the death of a fiancÃ© as a model to emulate? On the other hand, there is the shape of many of these stories and biographies. Would that I could write like many of those poets, or have such an intellectual command of a vast literature and history. Would that I were able to stick closely to my own sense of purpose, and see things through to completion with a clear mind. Would that I could take the vicissitudes of life in stride without balancing on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Would that I were such a loyal friend.

The Far Horizon Road

I love the candy-colored world of Spira; grey faux-medieval cities rarely do much for me (I love wandering them in real life, not so much in a game). My ideal landscape can be summed up by another Chinese poet, Zhang Yaotiao å¼ çªˆçª•: ä¸‡é‡Œç§‹å…‰ç¢§, ‘boundless emerald-hued autumn light,’ or more poetically, ‘miles and/miles of autumn/light – sapphire/turquoise,/jade.’² I like the relatively cheerful attitude of many of the characters – perhaps the brooding lead, Ã la Cloud or Squall, reminds me a bit too much of myself, and it’s not as comfortable an experience to slip into. But I also like the fact there’s a bit of melancholy that pervades much of the game. It reminds me of my favorite Chinese poems: beautiful, lush language that is by turns happy and sad. It’s wonderfully bittersweet in a way. I have the same feeling traipsing through the world of FFX: I know how things are going to end, I know that it’s going to make me sad, and even so, there’s something wonderful about everything leading up to that.

Niether Yuna, nor all my beloved poets of centuries past, are particularly likely candidates for role modelhood. They’re not particularly badass women, at least in the ways that we usually talk about it, c. 2013. They often conform a little too closely to the roles we collectively expect women to fall into (and that we fight against): quiet, cheerful, willing to subsume personal happiness for the good of the whole, naÃ¯ve. But I wonder sometimes if it’s not like focusing on the bound foot to the exclusion of the entire woman. Just as the act of binding their feet did not cripple their minds, surely having what some might define as classically ‘feminine’ traits does not mean they’re simply yet another version of the virtuous, silent, ineffective, inactive woman? Fictional characters can be rather difficult – most of us know we need to take historical people on their own terms. Paraphrasing from an excellent scholar, getting on a moral high horse about foot binding, for instance, does precious little for us; trying to understand it in context, getting past that first ‘Ohmygod, how disgusting/barbaric/appalling’ reaction, is much more valuable. But what to do with fictional women? Whose terms should we take them on? Are we reinforcing the more overtly negative portrayals of women if we embrace less overtly heroic portrayals?

There’s a lot of longing for a someday that seems forever out of reach in both classical Chinese poetry and videogame criticism. Perhaps that’s just a human impulse when presented with realities that are not currently to our liking.

By the azure edge of the evening clouds – do you know where it is?
Beyond the four mountains – perhaps you dwell in the mountains there.
One sheet of crimson clouds comes, cutting across the bamboo,
Two lines of white birds go, parting the smoke.
I stretch my eyes: my heart is tangled in ten thousand threads.
Leaning against the wall, I softly chant “Jian jia.”
My longing makes me dream of the far horizon,
Though I still don’t know the way on the far horizon road.³

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In summer, it is the nights that are most beautiful

Sei ShÅnagon, Edo period print

In summer the nights [are most beautiful]. Not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is! (Sei ShÅnagon, The Pillow Book, trans. Ivan Morris)

Summer in Shanghai is draining – it’s hot and very humid, and it hasn’t been raining as much as one would expect in the summers (or at least, as much as I was expecting). Nights are not particularly beautiful either, and there are no flitting fireflies, just mosquitos – though evenings are at least a respite from the sun. I’ve survived heat and humidity before; Virginia is no cool paradise come August, and Taipei is on par (at a minimum) with Shanghai temperature and humidity-wise – but it seems particularly unrelenting here. Rain storms were a near-daily occurrence in Taipei, which makes summer more bearable, and Virginia at its worst was the equivalent of a normal day in Shanghai. Which is to say, I’ve felt like doing precious little other than hibernating in air conditioning. I think the weather has contributed to my terrible case of incompletitis – the inability to finish anything. Oh, I’ve met immovable deadlines when I’ve come up against them, but it’s all that more flexible stuff: for instance, I have no fewer than five unfinished blog entries languishing in my queue. I’ll get around to finishing them … maybe.

In any case, it’s the home stretch here (I booked my tickets to fly back to the US in October – and I’m thrilled to bits at the prospect of being back in California in a smidge over two months!), and I’ve been good and working a lot. I was lucky enough to host a good friend who came down to use the wonderful Shanghai municipal archives (ä¸Šæµ·å¸‚æ¡£æ¡ˆé¦†) and soak up some of the French Concession atmosphere. It was a delight to have someone else to go archiving (after we had our morning coffee & breakfast, of course) and try new restaurants with, squeal over sources to, and gossip. I’m not used to having roommates, having had my last one at the age of 20 or so, but it’s a nice change for a few weeks – mostly because I am not used to being alone for extended periods, and in truth, it’s been one of the most difficult things about this year abroad.

But, having caught a summer cold and piled loads more activity than I’m used to on top of it, I’ve taken a few days off to lounge around the apartment, recover, contemplate cleaning (and do a bit of actual tidying), and play some videogames. I’ve been flip flopping between a few things, but currently I’m playing through ÅŒkamiden, the recent ‘sequel’ to ÅŒkami. It’s cute, though the graphics can get a bit choppy at times – but I do think the drawing mechanic is quite suited to the DS. It works better (for the most part) than it did on the PS2 or Wii, even. Still, mostly I’ve been playing through and wishing I could pick up the original again.

ÅŒkami is – and will probably always be – the only game I played (not once, but twice) because I found the aesthetic experience so damn pleasurable. It was the look that got me interested in the first place, and it was the environment that kept me playing a game that wasn’t always very good. But I was so impressed with the visuals and the idea of the gameplay linked to the tactile pleasure of writing. I loved the way the ink (‘smoke’) pooled at the tip of the brush, and the way mountains were simple outlines on the sky.

There was a certain joy of movement in the Wii version. I generally dislike the ‘Wii waggle,’ and find it excruciating when it pops up where it just doesn’t fit (particularly awful execution of Wiimote action in one game I played caused me to put the game aside totally rather than face 30+ hours of waggling my way through a JRPG). I flicked my wrist in the middle of an ÅŒkami battle, and the wolf dodged smoothly. It was elegant – more importantly, there was a connection between that little flick of the wrist and the movement on screen. It was the first time I had played anything on the Wii and gone ‘Oh, well. That was nicer than I would’ve gotten out of my standard controller.’ This is a bit funny, of course, because a lot of people criticized the lousy control scheme. I found that the learning curve was sharper, but once I got the hang of it, it worked brilliantly for me.

I liked touring the countryside; it was a pleasure to go galavanting about scenery that struck a balance between drab realism and candy-coated fantasy. There was a solidness to Amaterasu’s movements, but it never turned stiff and clumsy. Animals so frequently come off poorly in games – most representations of equids leave me aghast at the fact that anyone could think any horse-like creature could ever look like that – it was nice to see one that verged on believable. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the believable wolf was set in an unbelievable setting? The world of ÅŒkami is not ‘realistic,’ but maybe that’s why Amaterasu’s mannerisms and movements were often so real (and delightful): she was totally unburdened by the need to be ‘realistic,’ as were the things that surrounded her.

Leigh Alexander wrote a nice piece for Kotaku a few months back entitled “Why Don’t I Lose Myself in Games Anymore?“:

When games were more abstract-simple designs and massive worlds with yawning gaps in between each fragile plot point-they engaged us more, because they became worlds we could own. When all of the work of creation is done for us, when every element of lore is written in, when every object in the game world is explicable and available for interaction, there’s nothing for our hearts and minds to do except ride along. And that’s beautiful and well, but it’s just not very engaging.

Now, Leigh is speaking to the structure and plot and characterization, but some of the underlying issues here are the same, I think. It’s the gaps that capture our attention (how many people have hated big screen versions of favorite books, where someone else’s vision is played out – partially or wholly at odds with the world and characters you’d built in your head?) and allow us to fill in the blanks. The fact that ÅŒkami‘s art style was somewhat literally fuzzy around the edges is what let her become ‘real’ (at least in my eyes). Those yawns, side flops, ear scratches, tail wags, and countless other minute movements could have become bogged down in details in a game striving for realism.

All of this got me thinking about a conference presentation I saw over a year ago, at a conference I also presented at. The presentation was on early 1960s “ink painting animation” (shuimo donghua æ°´å¢¨åŠ¨ç”»), in particular two films from the noted animator Te Wei ç‰¹ä¼Ÿ. We watched clips from the 1960 release Tadpoles looking for Mama (Xiao kedou zhao mama å°èŒèšªæ‰¾åª½åª½) and 1963’s The Cowherd’s Flute (Mu di ç‰§ç¬› – the Youtube title below is wrong regarding the date). I won’t bore with details of the political maneuvering that make these two films resonate with my research on early ’60s drama, but beyond their historical significance, I found them absolutely enthralling. I’d never seen anything like it.

Except in ÅŒkami.

Of course, if all animation in China looked like this, or all games went for the fluid, the minimalist, the purposefully unrealistic, it wouldn’t be special. On the other hand, it’s less about the stylistic particulars and more about the idea of staunching the flow of this wanting-so-badly-to-be-real-that-it-hurts, which is in a lot of cases simply taking away space for imagination. It can become dull, stiff, and boring. There is something to the openness, the literal blank spaces – more room to maneuver. My favorite example of this is around the 2:00 mark below, where ‘water’ is not much more than totally blank space.

(Part two can be found here) I watch a lot of contemporary Chinese cartoons, and I doubt many of them will stand the test of 50 years like The Cowherd’s Flute (that’s for the commercial stuff, of course – there is a whole slew of independent animation, but I don’t think many people are watching, sadly). I wonder how many of the types of works that entirely spell out a world for you will be able to? There is a lot of flexibility in gaps, a lot of room for people to fill in their own present.

I opened with Sei ShÅnagon – her Pillow Book (finished sometime in the very early 11th century) is rightfully famous and I have loved it for over half my life. It’s absolutely contrived in some respects (parts of it were revealed at court, and there was editing, rewriting, and shuffling going on), but it’s such a great hodgepodge of stuff. She was witty, catty, and immensely talented – which is what makes her work such a fascinating historical record. But the thing I like most are her lists. Sometimes she expounds rather lengthily (here, part of a list on Hateful Things):

A lover who is leaving at dawn announces that he has to find his fan and his paper. “I know I put them somewhere last night,” he says. Since it is pitch-dark, he gropes about the room, bumping into the furniture and muttering, “Strange! Where can they be?” Finally he discovers the objects. He thrusts the paper into the breast of his robe with a great rustling sound; then he snaps open his fan and busily fans away with it. Only now is he ready to take his leave. What charmless behavior! “Hateful” is an understatement.

Equally disagreeable is the man who, when leaving in the middle of the night, takes care to fasten the cord of his headdress. This is quite unnecessary; he could perfectly well put it gently on his head without tying the cord. And why must he spend time adjusting his cloak or hunting costume? Does he really think that someone may see him at this time of night and criticize him for not being impeccably dressed?

And sometimes she just offers her opinion without commentary:

Elegant Things

A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat. Duck eggs. Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl. A rosary of rock crystal. Wistaria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow. A pretty child eating strawberries.

Who among them was a robe rustler? (From the NY Public Library site; the Kokushi daijiten)

Lists, observations, opinions, records of a life. An eleventh century LiveJournal, if you will.

One reason Sei ShÅnagon has stood the test of time so well is because her writing is ‘fuzzy around the edges.’ It isn’t that there aren’t tons of particulars that alert you to the fact that we are in the past (where, to quote L.P. Hartley, ‘they do things differently’). That’s one key to its enduring popularity: the time capsule effect. But somehow, the Japanese noblewoman who lived over a thousand years ago wrote passages that seem as though they could have been pulled from today. It’s the fuzzy bits that can’t be tied to specific periods, the parts that make you want to ask questions (what was so elegant about duck eggs? has been one of my perennial, flippant favorites) and make you think. That’s the other key, and probably the more important one, at least in terms of keeping translations of her work on shelves across the world. She resonates with today (whenever that today may be).

Even if she did leave one important thing off her list of why in summer, nights are the most beautiful: cicadas and roosters shut up for a few hours!

The cosmos is a weiqi board. A fair one, dammit.

Kris Ligman had a nice piece over at Pop Matters on class and games (RPGs, more specifically) – the class-blind, wonderful lands of opportunity that they are:

Is there any ludonarrative dischord greater than the capitalist, white, middle-class attitudes of unrestrained play coming into conflict with issues of class and race so utterly failed by these biases? The class- and race-obliviousness of these pastoral, easy, and free game worlds donâ€™t reflect the lives of the serf characters that we so often assume but reflect their lords instead.

(The essay is worth reading, so go take a look; however, it’s just sort of the tangential jumping off point for what follows)

From Romance of the Fruit Peddler (Laogong zhi aiqing, 1922); baddies of Shanghai's dirty underbelly playing mahjong at an all night club

This got me thinking about the subject of ‘fairness’ in games, at least in the few that I’ve dealt with directly. Â I’ll say off the bat I’m more interested in perceptions of fairness – how people have talked about it – versus technical definitions of whether a game is fair or not. Â Mostly because the world that Ligman talks about, the ‘middle class’ world we inhabit in RPGs regardless of a character’s origin story, is a ‘fair’ world, right? Â Limitless opportunity, bounded only by your own playing. Â The deck isn’t stacked against you from the get go, no matter where you come from! Â It’s a meritocratic fantasy.

The meritocratic bit is what turned me to my own research. Â I tackled the subject of mahjong (sort of) for myÂ third year research project. Â The paper certainly could have turned out worse, but mahjong was an unexpectedly tough topic to handle in two quarters. Â For a game that is so quintessentially Chinese, mahjong is everywhere – and nowhere at once. Â Everyone was playing it, and no one was leaving a written record. Â Which reminds me: people who whine and moan about the ‘enthusiast press’ and blogs and a lot of ‘noise’ in the game community ought to take pity on future historians, ’cause they (the PhD students of Ivory Towers future) are going to want all that stuff, no matter how poorly written – I promise.

In any case, in half of the paper, I hamfistedly blundered around grappling with old school scholars like Huizinga and Callois (both of whom loved to trot out “ancient China” as an example); in the other half, I attempted to analyze the shifts in discourse surrounding mahjong as related to class and gender. Â Mahjong is descended fromÂ madiao, a game that Wu Meicun (a famous Ming-Qing scholar-official) claimed “lost the [Ming] dynasty.” Â Wu’s meaning was that officials were too engaged in things not related to their job (which would include a ‘frivolous’ game like madiao)Â and ignoring the barbarian hordes agitating on the northern border (and worse). Â It was a game that was beneath the scholar elites to talk about and write about, but it seemed everyone was playing it. Â Mahjong retained the decadent overtones of its predecessor (a symptom of moral decay – and harbinger of terrible things, like dynasties being toppled) – and like madiao, everyone played it, and few wrote about it, except in high-handed, pedantic tones.

It wasn’t that games were bad. Â Mahjong and madiao had and have a foil, that being the ancient and eminently respectable game of weiqi. Â Weiqi is also quintessentially Chinese, although it’s known widely in the West by its Japanese name (go). Â Legitimately ancient where mahjong and its forerunners were not, weiqi has an entire genre of poetry dedicated to it, and skill in playing was something “real gentlemen” were expected to cultivate alongside ability in painting, calligraphy, and playing the qin (a type of zither). Â Frankly, I’ve never been terribly interested in weiqi, important a game as it is. Â However, my interest was piqued as I picked up an article on weiqi poetry by Chen Zu-Yan. Â As Chen argues, weiqi poetry relies on three major metaphors: “[it] approximates war, offers paradigms for social order, and teaches lessons about humankind’s moral stake in the cosmic game” (643).

A few samples. Â One by Liu Yuxi åŠ‰ç¦¹éŒ«, on watching a talented Buddhist monk play:

First, I perceived dotted stars in the dawn sky;
Then, I saw soldiers fighting in late autumn.
Your deployment was as wild geese in flight-nobody understood it,
Until the cub was caught in the tiger’s den, and all were shocked. (646)

Another by Fan Zhongyan èŒƒä»²æ·¹:

One [weiqi]Â stone is precious as a thousand ounces ofÂ gold;
One line on the board as crucial as a thousand miles.
Deep thought infuses the spirit;
How can the vicissitudes of the scene ever beÂ replicated?
Success and failure depend on character;
I should compose a [weiqi]Â history. ï¼ˆ647ï¼‰

and my personal favorite, a painting inscriptions by one Cha Shenxing æŸ¥æ…Žè¡Œ:

The cosmos is a [weiqi]Â board,
The battlefield of Black and White —
Trivial as worms and ants,
Great as marquises and kings. (650)

A Qing dynasty (1644-1911) version of the bureaucratic promotion game

All of which is to say, weiqi was serious business (it still is in many respects, with weiqi results appearing on sports pages!). Â I was intrigued by this approach to weiqi, an abstract game that had a wide variety of meanings read into it. Â Mahjong, too, is a reasonably abstract game, and also has a wide variety of meanings attached to it – primarily negative ones. Â In fact, some dour literati lambasted mahjong for the same qualities that weiqi was praised for.

While on a trip to use the UCLA collection, I idly mentioned to my advisor a type of boardÂ game (often calledÂ shengguantu å‡å®˜åœ–)Â I hoped to write a paper on someday. Â Based around the civil service system and bureaucratic promotion of the Ming and Qing dynasties, these games played like snakes and ladders and were based on a roll and move mechanic (the image at right was taken from the page here, which has more images and descriptions in English). Â My advisor asked a bit about how the game was played and remarked that it perhaps indicated that people already felt success in the civil service system was a matter of luck – something like getting a good (or bad) roll in promotion games.

This was an interesting thought, because one of the ideas behind the civil service examination system we are most familiar with in the present day is that anyone – assuming you were male, of course – could succeed in the system. Â All you had to do was prepare yourself to sit for the exams, take and pass said exams, and off you could go on your way to fame and glory as an official. Â In theory, this wasn’t far off the mark. Â In practice, the financial resources (among other things) required to support exam candidates as they crammed for years on end meant that Farmer Zhang’s eldest son chances of success were almost certainlyÂ inferiorÂ to Magistrate Lu’s kid. Â The system wasn’t fair, even though it was an improvement over systems that were more rigid. Â There was the potential for social mobility.

I came to feel that this potential is one of the things that biased the literati elites against games like mahjong. Â The yarns spun around weiqi upheld the potential for mobility. Â Weiqi, in theory, was all about self-cultivation. Â The ideal wasn’t a naturally talented player who intuitively grasped strategy and was just plain good at the game. Â The ideal was someone who cultivated the skill of playing, just as one cultivated playing the zither, or painting, or writing poetry. Â Ability in weiqi is nested in beliefs in a meritocratic system where “anyone” could succeed. Â It’s not based on luck. Â The game isn’t biased against you from the start. Â Ability is up to personal virtue in cultivating a skill. Â Despite the fact that it’s a game for two players (and a great number of poems and paintings depict bystanders hanging around a game), it’s often presented as a very solitary activity. Â Consider the following quote from a Song official waxing rhapsodic on the acoustic qualities of his quiet tower:

It is a good place to play the [qin], for the musical melodies are harmonious …; it is a good place to chant poems, for the poetic tones ring pure …; it is a good place to play [weiqi], for the stones sound out click-click. (644)

Weiqi fantasy land!

Games like mahjong and madiao require skill, of course, but have that dastardly element of luck (enemy of meritocracies? Â Perhaps that’s too strong a statement) and multiple players. Â It is possible, though unlikely, to win a mahjong game simply by the luck of the draw. Â I don’t recall reading a specific critique of mahjong or madiao in this vein, but my advisor’s statement about luck and the shengguantu games got me thinking. Â The question of how people talked about the bureaucratic promotion games remains for another day, but I do feel comfortable at least speculating that at least part of elite discomfort with mahjong is the fact that it confronts the lies of the meritocratic fantasy. Â Personal cultivation and hard work isn’t enough, wasn’t enough, and never had been enough: a healthy dose of luck and besting your competition were required to claw your way to the top. Â Sitting alone in your lovely tower listening to the click click of weiqi stones wasn’t going to secure an appointment as an official.

A critical look at weiqi proves that it was hardly the meritocratic fantasy land generations of poets had praised. Â An important skill for aspiring officials to have was the ability to gracefully (and very subtly) throw a weiqi game in a superior’s favor. Â That is, you had to know how to lose. Â No one likes an upstart, even a virtuous and cultivated one (perhaps especially not a virtuous and cultivated one). The practice of purposely losing has roots elsewhere and is certainly quite common, but it raises questions about the element of self-cultivation. Who’s to say that “talented” official wasn’t just being lost to by younger, more talented officials who were hungry for success? This is another thread I never saw directly addressed, except in satirical pieces. Weiqi, at least in the sources I looked at, remained wrapped in a veneer of equality and potential.

The point of all this rambling is that setting aside 20th century Western, middle class, capitalist notions of free play, people in a non-Western, “non-modern,” non-capitalist society liked play to be safely nestled in the same fantasy that contained the more “important” facets of life (like securing a job in the civil service). Â And a number of them really didn’t like it when they were confronted with the evidence that there was a lot to life that was unfair, both on and off the board game table.

Mahjong goes serious (1904)

Probably more directly related to Ligman’s original post is the gem above, one of my favorite finds. Â This is a “serious game” from 1904, and deals with capitalism, imperialism, and modernization. Â It was found on the pages of a radical Zhejiangnese newspaper, and was tucked in between news reports on the Russo-Japanese War and other Very Serious Subjects. Â I’ll quote myself from elsewhere here, since I don’t have anything extra to say at 10 PM on a Thursday a year after I last looked at this paper:

The game dreamed up by the author bore little resemblance, either in tiles or in play, to any variation of mahjong, and the â€œeducationalâ€ purpose is painfully obvious. The zhong, fa, and bai tiles were replaced with government types (autocracy, constitutional monarchy, and republic), while the directional tiles were mapped to four classes of people (farmer, worker, merchant, and soldier). The three suits were assigned one continent per suit (Asia, Europe, the Americas); each of the nine tiles per suit was assigned a country and corresponding government type (e.g., â€œChina â€“ autocracy,â€ â€œEngland â€“ constitutional monarchyâ€ and â€œBrazil â€“ republicâ€). A variety of tiles replaced the traditional flower tiles: the five inhabited continents, the five major oceans, and technological innovations (steamship, railroad, telegraph, printing, and hot air balloon).

…[The] essence of the new rules may be summed up thusly: republicanism and technology ruled the day. Players facing a hand of autocratic nations or, worse yet, Australian and African tiles had a near impossible task in front of them, being placed at an automatic disadvantage in terms of â€œturnsâ€ (fan), or ability to draw new tiles. Dominance in this â€œreformed mahjongâ€ … required the right government and the right technology: the player stuck with the â€œcolonized peopleâ€ tiles (Africa and Australia) had no hope of competing with the enlightened continent of Europe, and possessing technology alone would not save an autocratic China.

While the rules make some measure of logical sense … even the author recognized the complicated nature of the game, asking readers to offer up suggestions if they thought of any ways to simplify the game. Further, in the pursuit of â€œeducating,â€ this reformed mahjong seemingly removed any semblance of fun, and it is difficult to imagine anyone willingly settling down for a thrilling game of â€œimperialism in action.â€ The obviously educational component seems off putting to the extreme, and there is no evidence that this reformed mahjong made it any further than the pages of the [paper].

The “imperialism in action” statement is perhaps a bit too much of my own opinion creeping in. Â But I think this little ‘reformed’ gem points to the same problem that Ligman’s piece raised for me. Â Namely, the sort of people who would appreciate a game of “imperialism in action” – or being taken out of the meritocratic RPG fantasy and forced to grapple with the injustices of discrimination and inequality – aren’t the sorts that the game(s) are being aimed at. Â The anonymous author of the above mahjong set was aiming the theoretical game at the vast masses of people who he desperately wished were doing something productive with their mahjong time. Â The people most likely to play the game were people like himself: the kind of people who didn’t need Imperialism 101 in mahjong form to take a look at the situation facing them and their country. Â I suspect that for a great number of people, the very fact that the game wasn’t fair would’ve been an extreme turnoff. Â And when I mean “not fair,” I mean that it was possible to find one’s self in a position that took away any hope of winning – by the very virtue of the hand dealt you.

Not so unlike the reality of class, race, gender, and education, eh?

(I’m sure someone’s written about perceived fairness in games; if anyone has any good suggested reading, please send it along.)

—

Chen Zu-Yan, “The Art of Black and White: Wei-ch’i in Chinese Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.4 (Oct-Dec 1997): 643-653

Recharging the batteries

How I clean up my laptop desktop

So I’ve had the occasion – thanks to a visit from family – to completely set aside work for about two and a half weeks & just relax. Â One thing I’ve found since starting grad school, lo those many years ago, is that “relaxation” is sort of a misnomer for what’s going on when you’re not working. Â I tend to be tightly wound and neurotic (several doctors at the clinic on campus have noted with some wonder how tight my shoulder muscles are!), and saddled with a Type A personality with a streak of laziness (a Type A-, perhaps?) – which compounds the neuroses. Â In a conversation with an undergraduate contemplating grad school, I opined that separation and compartmentalization can be hard to achieve; work comes home with you, never stays where it’s supposed to, and you can never quite turn off the nagging voice in the back of your head telling you to start working and stop watchingÂ TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras marathon.

In any case, I always have a very long to-do list & this has only gotten worse since I’ve been set loose with only a vaguely defined agenda: “research dissertation” is quite different than, say, “write historiography paper that’s due in two weeks” or “research X topic for the next 10 weeks while updating seminar on progress weekly.” Â I will be trekking up to Beijing at the beginning of April for a two week business-pleasure trip: the pleasure part is seeing good friends I haven’t seen in months and months (or longer), the business part being seeing one of my advisors. Â I am actually quite relieved at the prospect of being able to have a talk – and having a very real, very definite deadline coming up soon has definitely helped my thinking on what work I have gotten done and where I hope to go.

But I haven’t been thinking about that for the past two weeks, no. Â I’ve been mellowing out in a happy cocoon of family and pleasure reading. Â One thing I have been taking a lot more time for since crossing the qualifying hump is reading for me, not for my research. Â My first three years of grad school were stuffed full of a lot of books (of course), but precious few were for my own pleasure. Â Those that were could generally be tied in some way, shape, or form back to research or teaching (I had a six month spate of using late Meiji and Taisho era Japanese fiction as my “bath time fluff” – one never knows when one might be called upon to teach a course and need those kinds of materials! Â I like to be prepared for most reasonable eventualities). Â For once, I haven’t had the overwhelming guilt of “But I should be doing something else!!!”; I’m hoping that this lengthy pause to regroup and rest up will mean better, Â more productive weeks ahead – I really needed a break, and I’m finally getting to the point of being able to take one with only a little guilt.

Last summer, I bought a Kindle on a half asleep, 7 AM whim. It actually turned out to be an excellent purchase – I don’t have to worry about access to English language books in China & I don’t have to worry about storage anywhere. Â It’s actually made me more inclined towards pleasure reading, since I don’t have to go through the checklist of: Do I actually want to own a physical copy of this book? Â Do I need a physical copy? Â And finally, would I be embarrassed to have this sharing shelf space with the rest of my books (an important question, to be sure)? Â OK, the last bit is an exaggeration – but as I find myself acquiring ever more (academic, research-related) books, space is at a premium & my “light reading” is the first to get pushed out in favor of Serious Secondary Sources.

Looking over what I’ve read in the past few weeks, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, particularly – it’s just not “serious” (as in, having a direct relationship to my research or field of study). Â A lot of it is still historical & the vast majority is non-fiction – but I always find it interesting to compare with friends what we consider “fluff,” since it tends to vary wildly. Â I have just moved on from a six month sojourn with Tudor history (mostly pretty serious history books; but again, it’s not my field & I can just turn off and enjoy in a way I can’t when I read Chinese history books), where I read good stuff, bad stuff, and in between stuff (and still have a few volumes I need to finish off for good measure). Â I’ve been tending towards the slightly more eclectic of late, though still sticking to some favored genres. Â Anyways, a couple of highlights:

George Catlin, Sioux Indians hunting buffalo, 1835

Two books on the Battle of the Little Bighorn (here is where e-books drive me crazy: what I really wanted was Evan S. Connell’s seminal – utterly wonderful – Son of the Morning Star, which of course was not available). Â First up was A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – the Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan (2009), then Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (2010). Â I read these in quick succession, which was good for comparative purposes. Â The Little Bighorn, like the Civil War, has a terribly devoted fanbase and has basically been done to death – which isn’t to say there isn’t anything “new” to say, just that an awful lot of books seem to crib unabashedly off forerunners (you can feel Connell’s influence on both newer volumes – Son of the Morning Star has aged exquisitely). Â Still, it’s one of those subjects I like to come back to, as my mother likes to claim that a trip as a 4 year old to Crow Fair – including a sidetrip to march around the battlefield – was a formative event for me as a youngster. Â She’s possibly right; I do know that when I read accounts, I find myself wanting to go back (it’s on the list for next year or the year after, I hope). Â In any case, while neither book was particularly enlightening, they were solid introductions and reasonably researched popular histories (Philbrick was in desperate need of a better editor). Â I’m still hoping Connell’s magnificent narrative will show up in digital format sooner rather than later ….

I read two biographies, drawn from wildly different perspectives: Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life (2010)Â and Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love by Yehuda Korean & Eilat Negev (2008). Â Not simply divided by time & subject matter, the books were on opposite ends of the spectrum, quality-wise. Â Schiff’s take on Cleopatra was surprisingly good – considering the dearth of sources we have, and the fact that Schiff is not a classicist, really good. Â I came across it on the hunt for Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (also not available in digital format – sigh), and while it wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to sink into, it was a nice diversion for an afternoon. Â The author also spent a fair amount of time considering how history has come to be, at least insofar as it reflects on the telling of Cleopatra’s life. Â Parts of it felt like coming home & I’ve already downloaded a copy of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to flit through for fun at a later date, since I’ve been feeling renewed interest in at least sort of returning to well-loved Latin tomes of yesteryear. Â I got the impression from Amazon many people were expecting a much “beachier” read – it wasn’t taxing, but I did find it quite satisfying and well written. Â It wasn’t mindless fluff to be wandered through without thinking, though I guess the cover image deceived a number of people.

The biography of Assia Wevill, on the other hand, was one of the less satisfying books I’ve read recently – actually, it was just plain bad. I imagine some of the difficulty came from the fact that no one in the story comes off as very likable – Wevill is constantly in odd triangular relationships with a husband and a lover, Plath is, well, Plath & prone to depression and rages, and Hughes comes off as an insensitive jerk, albeit a very talented one. Â But the authors didn’t seem clear on how they wanted to package Wevill – thus the narrative came off as confused, and red herrings were tossed into the text with little explanation (does a later feminist poet’s view that Hughes “murdered” Wevill really matter when thinking of what led to the event? Â Would it not be better to put that into the, say, section reflecting on her legacy or lack thereof?). Â It’s a bit unfortunate, because Wevill comes up only tangentially in biographies of Plath, or of Hughes, or of Plath & Hughes, so the promise of a biography centered on “the other woman” was intriguing. Â In the end, though, the only one I felt sorry for was the young daughter of Wevill & Hughes, Shura, who wound up dead on the floor of the kitchen alongside her mother.

I read some other assorted things – a book on the Donner party, two books on Anabaptists in the US – which were consumed in much the same way I consume TV: they just sort of were. Â However, I’m currently trotting through a very fun history book that involves one of my very favorite genres of non-fiction – namely, high-altitude climbing tales. Â Now, I am not a climber. Â I will never be a climber; I will certainly never be a high-altitude climber. Â I’m not even sure when I developed a taste for climbing literature. I do remember being totally fascinated when they found George Mallory’s beautifully preserved body on Everest a few years back, and I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air a few years after it came out. Â Other than my inborn hillbilly love of mountains – and the Himalaya and other high ranges are certainly impressive ones – there’s really no rhyme or reason for my affection for non-fiction stories centered on climbing this or that crazily high point. Â Maybe it’s simply that it’s so out of the realm of possibility for my life – I can’t even fathom wanting to do something like climbing Everest or K2 – that it goes from non-fiction to high fantasy. Â There is something otherworldly about the high mountain scenes captured by talented photographers.

In any case, while I’ll usually read (guiltily, in the bath, ravenously)Â memoirs and accounts of varying quality as my most favored of fluff reading, Amazon – for once – had a good suggestion for me in Maurice Isserman & Stewart Weaver’s Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (2010). Â It is possibly telling that my favorite book of the past few months was published by a university press. Â In any case, unlike most climbing literature which (at least these days) takes the form of memoir or disaster narrative, this is a delightful, juicy history that puts climbing in the Himalaya into context & situates it in larger forces. Â It’s really fun and really interesting – and quite a change from my usual guilty pleasure climbing reading. The authors have less interest in obsessively documenting the details of specific expeditions (probably wise, since a great many books exist with only the subject of this or that expedition); rather, they sketch the outlines of what happened while devoting the bulk of their efforts to detailing why this all matters in a bigger picture. Â I’m finding it engrossing, but good enough that I’m trying to spin out the reading experience as long as possible – thus only reading in chunks here or there. Â Luckily, it’s a pretty “weighty” tome (or would be, if I had a paper copy), so there’s plenty of pages left to be spun out.

I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would bore anyone looking for a quick, light, inspirational (or cautionary) tale to tears, but it’s the sort of “fluff” I love best: serious history that has no bearing on the stuff that I do. Â Or at least, if I don’t take notes, I don’t feel bad. Â Which doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t read the footnotes! Â I’m looking forward to getting back to my realm of expertise, but a few weeks of diversion has been restful & good for me – I’m feeling more energized than ever to delve back into Meng Chengshun, Meng Chao, opera, and various other projects.

Vittorio Sella, Camp Below the West Face of K2, Karakoram, June, 1909

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