Reading Chinese Literature

When I lived in Taizhou, there wasn’t much for an intellectual guy to do for fun. It was a boom town, which meant lots of KTV, bars, and restaurants, and I only liked the last option. The clubs and bars were all just too noisy and smoky. So once a semester I went to Nanjing and loaded up on cheap editions of Western classics and expensive translations of Chinese literature. It was an opening up of a new mindset.

 

Two of the great Chinese works of literature, “Outlaws of the Marsh” (aka “Water Margin”) and “Journey to the West” are compilations rather than original works. The stories about their characters had been floating around, expanding, and evolving to the needs of generations until the authors of the novel form brought them together into unifying story lines. Most of those stories can be told in pretty much any order, so in novel form almost all the development is in the beginning and end.  What was most interesting for me was that at the end of “Outlaws” the heroes have purified the empire (internal corruption is a more common theme in Chinese literature than external threats) and retired only to then watch the empire descend back into corrupt due to the nature of humanity. 

“Romance of the Three Kingdoms” by Luo Guanzhong is a historical novel (and play, and opera, and now movies) about the Han civil wars that has also evolved with the times.  Different dynasties needed different political justifications, so “Three Kingdoms,” in particular the plays and operas, changed their tone, raising or lowering the moral virtues of different characters depending on which side of history the present dynasty felt itself to be on. “Three Kingdoms” may have had its greatest influence through Chairman Mao.  When I read that it was Mao’s favorite book, it explained why Mao was so paranoid – the characters in the book, mostly generals and ministers, are constantly being tricked or betrayed.

 

“A Dream of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin is the empress of Chinese literature. Imagine for a moment that Shakespeare had expanded “Romeo and Juliet” into a novel the length of “The Lord of the Rings” and added so much thematic and symbolic layering that you could specialize in just that one work (the study of the book is called “Redology”).  Unfortunately the author died before finishing his book, so his friend Gao E finished it. So many people were dissatisfied with his ending that it spawned an amateur industry of fan fiction, people scribbling out their own endings to the novel. Since most writers in Chinese history, indeed most of history, have supported themselves by either day jobs or patronage, there was no conception of ‘copyright.’  Copyright is something necessary for a capitalist society, in which ideas can be turned into money, whereas for most of history the source of wealth was either land or government positions. In China, most writers were government officials who left the work of governance to underlings and focused upon literary achievements, which is probably why their four great novels are so very long.

I can understand the impulse to correct other writers; since I was so dissatisfied with the ending of “Battlestar Galactica” that I wrote my own crossover novella about the characters of BSG and “Star Trek Voyager” stumbling across each other and working together to get to Earth. I believe my version makes more sense than the endings of those shows, but oh well.  I’ll never be able to sell it, but it was only a week of evenings out of my life.

The more important aspect of “Dreams” was the attention it paid to women. The author was disgruntled with the lives of men, his family’s political and therefore economic future on the decline, and one of his themes was the corruption of men and the purity of women, a theme diluted when the women came into conflict with each other. But even the conflicts between women were over their access to the resources of men. “Dreams” was a water shed in Chinese literature, for both before and after “Dreams” men were portrayed as violent alcoholics and the women as sexual beings, but before “Dreams” the writers were on the side of the men and after “Dreams” the writers were more on the side of the women, especially the writers who are remembered like Lu Xun and Ba Jin.

Lu and Ba were early twentieth century writers of a generation of scholars educated in Europe.  In Europe, socialism, feminism, and modernism had grown up separately, with distinct and sometimes contradictory goals.  But for Chinese students, all three were Western reforms, and so were introduced to China as a package, so Chinese male authors were often more sympathetic to women’s issues than Western male writers. Even when Lin Yutang wrote novels about China in English for a foreign audience, he wrote about women in flattering terms. The weird thing for me is that he wrote about both feminine and feminist women in a positive light. The traditional and modern women are both positive ideals for him, as long as the women are good people.