In Ling Shuhua's Ancient Melodies
In surveying the reception of twentieth-century women writers amongst Chinese literary circles, Wendy Larson calls attention to the persistent identification of Ling Shuhua as a New Boudoir (guixiu pai) artist/author, which consequently implicates her literary endeavors as mere “lightweight romantic love stories or tales of domestic life written in a feminine style” (255). Ling’s body of work has been evaluated through a recourse to her gender, which allegedly surfaces in a “feminine style” that dominates her creative sensibilities and accounts for the apparently apolitical “lightweight” character of her works; it is insinuated that Ling’s gender invariably frustrates any effort at social/political participation that exceeds the personal or “domestic.” Indeed, Yi-tsi Feuerwerker informs us, the charge that woman writers “lack the balance, the mature detachment, the finality, that make for great works of literature” (168) recurs in Chinese literary criticism. Ostensibly, then, Ling’s Ancient Melodiesappears to validate problematically such an appraisal: Ling’s memoirs, in her own words, materialize her “dreams… [of] being a little girl again, playing in old places with familiar people” (11). In a sense, Ling’s introspective, self-centered desire to “please [her]self” in Melodies mirrors the exclusive delineation/demarcation of the domestic space, a “huge mayor’s residence… divided into large and small courtyards, all of the same square shape” (11-2), as her narrative universe.
Yet, as Rey Chow cautions, the guixiu pai appellation “effectively absorbs the socially transgressive implications of [her] attempts at writing by means of classification” (73). Elsewhere, Raphael Zhang intuits that Melodies demonstrates the “tensions and negotiations… between male patriarchy and feminist consciousness” (586). As contemporary feminist re-examinations signal, dismissals of Ling’s oeuvre often derive from sexist mores, willfully occluding her energetic political/social engagements. Indeed, Melodies contests Chinese patriarchy through chronicling the conditions of women at once literally enclosed by domestic life and figuratively imprisoned by Confucian rhetoric; the act of writing/representing the Chinese household itself arguably subverts the patriarchal injunction to feminine silence and compliance, the valorized qualities that orbit around the guixiu archetype. Whereas Ling’s father discloses that “I don’t expect very much of her; I think a girl like her does not need to learn much,” the latter, who has since produced much more than “a short poem on [a] painting” (122), has conversely far surpassed her father’s expectations.
In a sense, the recuperation of Ling’s (proto-)feminism signifies an impulse to restore her agency vis-à-vis Chinese patriarchy. Chow designates Ling’s narrative strategies as ‘virtuous transactions,’ where her “subversion of patriarchy [undertakes] a different method, which reveals the horror of ideology’s ‘normal’ functioning from within… and [is thus] most suggestive of the need for social change” (41; emphasis mine). It is also further imperative to recognize that Ling’s poetics is further problematized in the case of Melodies—written in English under Virginia Woolf’s tutelage and published by Bloomsbury publishing house Hogarth Press, Melodies converses with twentieth-century global print culture and transnational circulations. As Shih Shu-mei suggests, Melodies summons the “question of a Third World feminism’s positioning vis-à-vis the West” (215). Yet, with the exception of Shih’s (half-)chapter in Lure of the Modern, Melodies’ transnational thrust remains overlooked. For Shih, this Sino-British convergence of modernisms and feminisms illustrates how “Ling’s Third World feminist position… required a process of self-Orientalization in order to cohere with Woolf’s First World feminist position” (216). Shih speculates that Ling passively surrenders to British/Bloomsbury Orientalism to secure Melodies’ publication in the Anglosphere. That this conformity crystallizes in an “emphasis on [the] historical and cultural specificity of Chinese lives to the point of [self-]exoticism” (Shih 217; emphasis mine) appears evident in Melodies: grammatically-awkward parlances such as “I only gave her a bit of color and now she wants a lot of bright red” (94) answer to Woolf’s patronizing delight in “similes strange and poetical” and exhortations to “write freely; do not mind how directly you translate Chinese into English” (8).
I propose, however, that Ling’s agency nevertheless remains uncompromised. If Ling is conscious of Chinese patriarchy, so too is she of the Bloomsbury modernists’ Orientalist eye; just as Ling unsettles the feminine paradigm imparted by Confucian sexism, so too does she register and insidiously disrupt the self-Orientalism demanded of her in Melodies. Put otherwise, I reframe Chow’s ‘virtuous transaction’ paradigm to scrutinize her transnational liaison as well. Ling’s translation of the Chinese poem that lends Melodies its name clarifies this: “I do not refuse to play [the ancient lute], if you want me to/ But even if I play, people will not listen” (10). Like the musician-persona of the poem, Ling intimates a consciousness of the problematic obligations that govern her contract with the West—to “play” at/with Orientalist visions of Chineseness to procure an “English audience… willing to listen” (10); her destabilization of identity politics, I posit, is innovatively encoded in the text itself.
On the one hand, Ling’s Melodies, as a mainland (Han) Chinese work penned in English, is doubly excluded by Shih’s assertion that “Sinophone studies take as its objects of study the Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted or imposed” (11; italics in original). Yet, the discipline’s critical formulations nonetheless provide a productive theoretical frame of reference. In the same volume where Shih delineates the geo-cultural parameters of Sinophone studies, Ien Ang opines, “Conceiving Chineseness as a discursive construct entails a disruption of the ontological stability and certainty of Chinese identity; it does not, however, negate its operative power… in the social constituencies of identities” (60). Melodies’ indictment of Orientalism, then, clearly coheres with—or even prefigures—the Sinophone school’s non-essentialist ethics. If a dialog between Melodies and Sinophone studies enables a reconsideration of Ling’s memoirs, it also simultaneously enlarges Sinophone studies’ geopolitical delimitations. In this essay, I argue that Melodies, while ostensibly reifying the Bloomsbury modernists’ vision of an “authentically Chinese” (10) selfhood, is also undergirded and unsettled by a transgressive nebentext [1] that self-reflexively articulates the performativity—and instability—of Chineseness as an identity formation from within; this excavation of Ling’s subtext of subterfuge through the hermeneutics of Sinophone studies, in turn, recalibrates and enriches the latter.
If Shih has attended to the general Orientalist structures that regulated the encounter between Ling, Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West (who penned Melodies’ introduction), I elaborate here the Bloomsbury modernists’ recruitment of China as symbolic capital through their ideologically-charged reading of Melodies as Chineseness textualized, a strategy of appropriation that corresponds to particular valences of Orientalist thought. Edward Said illuminates:
Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)…. Orientals live in their own world, ‘we’ lived in ours. (43-4)
Orientalist discourse is nourished by the logics of determinism mapped onto geography, imagining literal worlds of difference bifurcated as Orient and Occident, where the former functions as the insurmountable space of the Other. This rhetoric is rehearsed both in Woolf’s correspondences with Ling and Sackville-West’s introduction inasmuch as they aspired toward a transnational/cross-cultural alliance of feminisms and modernisms. That Sackville-West writes of Ling and Woolf’s encounter as a “curious correspondence… betweenChina and Bloomsbury” (7; emphasis mine) discloses the Bloomsbury circle’s identification of China as a region of absolute difference/foreignness. If, on the one hand, Sackville-West affords the Western hemisphere geographical precision through the implicit recognition of Bloomsbury, as the specific epicenter of European modernism, the Orient is denied a commensurate gesture on the other. Instead, ‘China’ functions as a free-floating signifier that consolidates the entire Far East—be it Canton, Peking, or Tientsin—and metonymizes the Orientalist fantasy of “a large wild place with a very old civilization” (7). Indeed, even Ling’s relocation to London registers as an inconvenient/inconsequential interruption of Orientalist doctrine: she is nevertheless interpellated as the ambassador of “a forgotten world… very far away” (9) insofar as her presence in the West paradoxically amplifies distance/difference.
It is through this representation of China as a reclusive ‘hermit kingdom’ that Chineseness becomes implicated within the Bloomsbury modernist imaginary. That is, Woolf and Sackville-West’s configuration of China as a cloistered space “on the other side of the world” (8-9) lends force to the essentialist insistence that Chineseness is a self-evident “innocent reflection of a natural reality… passively waiting to be discovered” (Ang 59). Again, Said proves instructive here:
A field is often an enclosed space…. The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined…. The Orient then seems to be not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. (63)
If the Orientalist imagination apprehends the Orient as its Other, it also self-contradictorily positions the Orient as the a priori space of radical difference. For the Bloomsbury modernists, Ling’s Chineseness in Melodies is an “axiomatic” expression that cannot be displaced even by the “forces of circumstances in exile”—it “slips out quite naturally and unaffectedly” (9) through her aesthetics regardless. Forged in an apparently insular China so “very far away…. at so wide a remove” (9-10), Chinese selfhood accrues meaning, reality, and difference in and of itself. As Sackville-West alleges, Melodies “remains as the author wrote it[:] authentically Chinese” (10; emphasis mine).
Ling’s disruption of this reclusive ‘hermit kingdom’ trope in Melodies, then, dislodges the essentialist vision of Chineseness. If Melodiesbegins with an enclosed space—the Chinese domestic household—as its narrative locus, it also later broadens its geographical premise to reaffirm China’s enthusiastic involvement in mercantile transnationalism as the narrative progresses. In “Red-coat Man,” the protracted documentation of the “huge mayor residence” (11) is immediately trespassed/terminated when Ling’s mother commands Ma Tao to “take [her] out for a little ‘trotting’” (12) into a larger social space. This outward excursion subsequently culminates in “My Mother’s Marriage,” which announces Canton as a crucial node within a global(ized) economy:
Toward 1890, Canton was considered one of the wealthiest towns in the world. Every day hundreds of ships entered and left the port. They carried away a great quantity of goods much sought after by people all over the world…. The ships that arrived at the port were loaded with the best goods of the West. (21)
Here, Ling reaffirms China’s active participation in an intercontinental “export and import business [that] became bigger each day” (21). Melodies further resists the triumphalist Eurocentric presupposition that the “Orient was penetrated, worked over, taken hold of…. [insofar as] so sovereign a Western handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space” (211). Here, the global trade that China engages in is a reciprocal system that serves its economic imperatives and not one of victimhood/domination: “those who carried on this business became wealthy…. [and] gave additional wealth to Canton” (21-2). Melodies thereby establishes a series of interior/exterior dialectics only to sabotage such distinctions.
Elizabeth Chang further elucidates the “persistence with which [British] authors and artists continued to invoke a defiantly anti-realist aesthetic that they claimed to be Chinese” and cogently observes, “A foundational piece of China’s foreignness comes in its temporal difference… [where] in British minds, China’s stasis and recursion stands in contradiction to empire-building progress and order” (5; 6-7). The imagination of Orient-as-Other signifies in terms of spatiality and temporality—it figures as a space of stagnation and regression antithetical to European rationality. Once again, Sackville-West affirms this logic: for her, Ling’s narrative is an archive of “a vanished way of life” (8; emphasis mine) so mired in an almost-mythical past that it obtains “an Arabian Nights quality” (10). Indeed, as a compendium of childhood recollections, Ling’s memoirs register as a nostalgic impulse that departs from the here-and-now. Melodies, then, problematically appears to validate the Orientalist conviction of a Chinese “anti-realist aesthetic.” Yet, if Ling’s memoirs begin in an allegedly forfeited past, it also resolutely textualizes contemporaneoushistory, from the May Fourth Movement in “My Teacher and My Schoolmate” to Republican China’s crises in “Our Two Feng Cousins.” Ling’s flash-forwards further dismantle an Orientalist compulsion to access Melodies as a relic of “a forgotten world” (9). In “My Mother’s Marriage,” Ling’s reader is abruptly informed that “(Ju-lan lost all [her] treasures in the Boxer war some years later)” (34; emphasis mine)—in intrusive parentheses, no less—at the very moment Ling illustrates Ju-lan’s dowry and marriage; past, present, and future coincide. In doing so, Melodies textually disrupts an Orientalist reading; Ling revises Melodies’ representation of temporality to transgress the trope of the Orient as a space of “stasis and recursion.”
This Orientalist ‘hermit kingdom’ fantasy is further impaired through the cross-border sensibility of Melodies’ Chinese inhabitants: like the text itself, Ling’s characters navigate through literal and symbolic spaces within and without China. Indeed, Melodies—in both form and content—is characterized by the trope of mobility: in a sense, it anticipates and qualifies the Sinophone school’s proposal that “‘Chinese’ and ‘Chineseness’ [are] terms activated through contacts with other peoples outside China as well as confrontations with their internal others” (27). The narrative’s traversal of intra-Chinese locations violates the Orientalist imagination wherein China figures as an amorphous and uniform landmass. Instead, Ling textualizes the internal complexities that inform the contours of (Han) Chineseness. The travel vignettes set in China’s peripheries, imparted by Ling’s godfather in “My Foster-Parents,” resonates with what Louisa Schein calls ‘internal orientalism’: “a relation between imaging and cultural/political domination that [surfaces] inter-ethnically within China” (73). Shuttling from Mongolia to Tibet to Yunnan, Uncle Chao’s travelogues provide an overt counterpoint that parallels Melodies’ narrative transitions through metropolitan Canton, Peking, and Tientsin. This contrast gestures toward a domestic core/periphery dynamic that delineates Han Chineseness. Indeed, the fantastical content of Uncle Chao’s accounts, such as a Tibetan “river of gold sand,” and his hyperbolic language that “compare[s] [Mongolia] with Paradise in a children’s book” (192-3) recall Woolf’s interpellation of China as a “large wild place” (7); they function as a parodic replication of Bloomsbury Orientalism. Through reproducing these narratives in Melodies’ text, Ling textualizes Han Chinese Orientalism and frustrates the Orientalist coalescence of an entire region, with its attendant fantasy of a singular Chineseness that subsists in a vacuum.
Likewise, in “Two Weddings,” Ling juxtaposes Eldest Brother’s “old-fashioned” wedding procession with Fifth Sister’s “new-fashioned” (185) one to index Chineseness as a discursive construct that only emerges causally via the encounter of a non-Chineseness. The collective distress at the unorthodoxy of Fifth Sister’s European-inspired wedding intimates Melodies’ problematic return to Orientalist essentialism that “channel[s] thought into an East or West compartment” (Said 46). Yet, it is also necessary to recognize that Elder Brother’s wedding is retrospectively interpellated as ‘Chinese’ only at the moment of Fifth Sister’s ‘non-Chinese’ wedding. While Ling carefully details Elder Brother’s wedding, from the “five pairs of red silk lanterns” to ‘indigenous’ conventions that dictate “everything the bridegroom and bride use should be new” (180-1), the ceremony itself was never explicitly instated as Chinese prior to Fifth Sister’s subsequent wedding; only during Fifth Sister’s ceremony does Elder Brother’s wedding become installed as a point of reference to communicate displeasure and bewilderment at an offending non-Chineseness. Tellingly, it is precisely at Fifth Sister’s “Western-styled” (185) wedding that allusions to the cross-cultural collision between “Eastern and Western customs” (186) or between “ancient Chinese music… [and] a Western orchestra” (187) materialize in Melodies’ language. Ling clarifies that Chineseness is occasioned by an alleged non-Chineseness.
Melodies’ recognition of Chineseness as a relational corollary within the province of identity politics is most evidenced in “My Teacher and My Schoolmate,” which dramatizes the unification of a (re)claimed Chinese selfhood with nationalist polemic vis-à-vis foreign antagonism. Whereas Sackville-West implies Chineseness exists a priori in an enclosed space “a long time back” (7), a rewording of the Orientalist contention that “primitiveness… inhered in the Orient was the Orient” (Said 231; italics in original), “My Teacher and My Schoolmate” conversely retrieves and incriminates the contemporary phenomenon of Western imperialism/incursions in China as that which generates and interpellates Chinese consciousness instead; Melodies bankrupts the supposition that Chineseness-as-Otherness precedes/predates the often-violent advent of border-crossings and transnationalism. Ling’s tutor, Mr. Chang, announces:
I despise the so-called ‘civilized’ nations today…. It appears to me that after the Boxer war they suddenly discovered China was an uncivilized country. Some of our young men who returned from the West often boast of what they have seen and studied abroad, and they begin to look down on everything Chinese. (236)
Regardless of whether Chineseness becomes associated with backwardness by “young men who returned from the West,” or sutured to nationalist/nativist rhetoric, Melodies explicates that the “discover[y]” of Chineseness and China as potential identity resources is precipitated by particular historical exigencies. For Ling, the inception of Chineseness must be located within a larger historical framework; it is far from an atemporal immaculate conception.
In contravening the Orientalist fiction of China/Chineseness as inert and self-evident verity, Ling thus liberates Chineseness from genetic determinism, gesturing toward its inherent malleability instead. In a sense, Melodies functions as a creative testimony to the Sinophone circle’s call to “resist convenient and comforting reductions of Chineseness [to] a seemingly natural and certain racial essence” (Ang 70). As the juxtaposition of Ju-lan’s overseas Chinese suitor in “My Mother’s Marriage” with Mr. Matsumoto from “Sakura Festival” illuminates, Chineseness constitutes flexible symbolic/social capital that can be either accumulated or divested; it is not invariably welded together with biological properties. Ju-lan’s rejection of a Chinese sojourner, “a well-off handsome young man… [from a] distant foreign country” (29), severs Chineseness from mere phenotypical reality—after all, her complaint that “she would not marry a man who could only read half a page of Chinese characters” (29) attests to Chineseness as a contingent artifact dependent on the competent performance of requisite cultural codes. Melodies proposes that cosmetic verisimilitude alone is inadequate, fracturing the Orientalist biology-is-destiny tenet.
Conversely, in “Sakura Festival,” Ling observes that Matsumoto, despite being a “typical Japanese,” nevertheless “spoke Chinese very well” (213). If Ling nominally notes Matsumoto’s citizenship, it is also counterbalanced by the corresponding suggestion that his tenure in China—“more than thirty years” (213)—has afforded him the cultural capital to qualify as Chinese—“he even talked Chinese in his dreams” (213). Read in connection with Ju-lan’s suitor, Matsumoto registers as even more Chinese than the former. Indeed, “My Teacher and My Schoolmate” conveys the fluidity of Chineseness to its logical extremes: Ling’s sister, is christened “the foreign doll… [for her] large eyes, thin lips, fair complexion” (231). The Orientalist delineation/definition of Chineseness through visual appearance is thwarted. This rupture of the Orientalist faith in biological determinism, then, resonates with Ang’s proposition that “not only does the moment of pure Chineseness never strike… the attribution of Chineseness does not make sense in the first place” (70).
At this juncture, the Sinophone circle’s caveat on language’s centrality in configuring Chineseness proves timely. Shih writes, “The dominant Sinophone language may be standard Hanyu, but it can be implicated in a dynamic of linguistic power struggles” (33). Chow concurs: “The enforcement of Mandarin in China is… rather a sign of the systematic codification and management of ethnicity that is typical of modernity” (48). Shih and colleagues caution that a failure to interrogate Mandarin’s linguistic legacy in China occludes its corroboration with a hegemonic Han Chinese identity. Melodies, as a multi-lingual undertaking, proliferates the expressions of Chinese selfhood and rectifies the Sinophone school’s preoccupation with extra-/trans-Chinese spaces as “site[s] where the most powerful articulations against China-centrism are heard” (Shih 33). Indeed, Melodies’ intra-regional traversals contest Mandarin hegemony while redeeming the competing presence of its Sinitic counterparts. In “A Plot,” Ling reaffirms and celebrates her mother’s non-Mandarin native tongue: “Sometimes Fifth Mother would ask Mother to read some Yuh-ou, a collection of Cantonese ballads… [She] had a most beautiful voice when she sang Yuh-ou” (101). If the English language Melodies communicates in potentially fails to represent China’s heterogeneous linguistic landscape properly, Ling circumvents this by textually reiterating China’s poly-lingual topography nonetheless;Melodies unsettles an Orientalist reification of a monolithic Chineseness-Mandarin-China continuum.
Elsewhere, Ling’s conversation with Aunt Shih in “Moving House” further confirms Melodies’ disruption of the conflation between Mandarin and Chineseness:
‘You were born in Peking, didn’t you know? The first time I saw you, you spoke only Mandarin. You did not understand our talk. I am afraid now you have forgotten Mandarin.’
‘My eldest sister often talks Mandarin to Mother. It sounds very interesting, because they make a burr like birds when they say an R.’ (47)
Just as Chineseness can be forfeited, so too can Chinese languages be “forgotten.” In a sense, even Melodies’ mobilization of the English language can be read as a strategy of exceeding Mandarin hegemony. If Ling is affiliated with the May Fourth campaign, which privileged Mandarin through the dissemination of a Chinese vernacular (baihua), [2] Ling’s decision to write in English—as dictated by Melodies’ transnational ambitions, to be sure—enables a transcendence of Mandarin’s impositions. In other words, English is co-opted as a linguistic implement that affords an egalitarianism baihua cannot guarantee—whereas to deploy baihua would (re)valorize Mandarin at the expense of its Sinitic cousins, English allows for a recognition of Cantonese, Mandarin, and other Sinitic languages as distinctive yet commensurate tongues. The redemption of non-Mandarin Sinitic languages, mediated through English, unsettles a master-narrative of Chineseness as soldered to Mandarin. Ling’s subversive activation/appropriation of the English language withinChina’s geopolitical parameters merits a recognition of Melodies as a Sinophone project: “just as the Sinitic languages are multi-tongued, [the] Sinophone is not monophonic but polyphonic” (Shih 9).
In writing of the power differentials that structure Orientalist thought, Said pertinently observes, “It is Europe that articulates the Orient…. [It] represents, animates, and constitutes” (57). Orientalism derives power through the claim to executive representation or, in other words, to visualize/materialize the Orient on its behalf. Likewise, Chang tells us China signifies as a “field of imagined visualpossibility that directed many other kinds of rhetorical and material interaction” (1; emphasis mine) for nineteenth-century England. That is, partially shored up by an ocular dimension, Orientalism manifests through a voyeuristic gaze. Just as “conditions of culture, governance, and race do matter in constructing a history of vision” (Chang 4), so too is the reverse true: vision is a determining force. Woolf’s “sound advice” to Ling attests to this gaze—she instructs Ling to “give as many natural details of life, of the house, of the furniture as you like” (8). Melodies’ Chineseness has to be rendered visible and exhibited for the Bloomsbury modernists’ Orientalist eye. After all, the act of reading is a visual engagement itself. Ling thus becomes identified as a transparent and available corporeal envoy of “a large wild place with a very old civilization” insofar as the Bloomsbury modernists “get hints of [Chineseness] in what you write” (7). If so, Melodies, characterized by excessively visual prose and supplemented by Ling’s illustrations, appears to legitimize the Orientalist gaze problematically.
Yet, as “Red-coat Man” demonstrates, this debilitating gaze is deflected/refracted—albeit insidiously—insofar as Ling’s subjectivity remains uninjured. If Sackville-West reads Melodies as Ling’s “good life of peaceful contemplation and exquisite thoughts” (9), it is arresting that Ling’s memoirs is inaugurated by the decapitation of a criminal, an episode of spectacular violence as registered in the “spreading blood [that] filled me with unbearable horror” (116); this violence registers even more overtly through its anachronism—Melodies’ ensuing sketch, “My Mother’s Marriage,” occurs prior to the events of “Red-coat Man.” The narrative’s self-reflexivity here demonstrates Ling’s consciousness of Melodies’ artifice as an aesthetic commodity and the presence of the Orientalist gaze, as insinuated by the narrator’s queries that allude to the theater—“What would be the next play in the program at the theater? What part would the Red-coat Man take? Would the play be interesting?” (15). If Orientalist authority is dependent on the self-centered principle that the Occident is the exclusive representational force of the Orient, Melodies’ metafictive dimensions conversely intimate its cognizance of the Orientalist gaze, thus fracturing its potency. Indeed, the titular character’s brutal execution mirrors the epistemological violence enacted on Ling by Woolf and Sackville-West’s Orientalist eye: Ling represents for the Anglosphere a desired/desirable Chineseness. Yet, in encoding her recognition of that injustice through the poetics of self-reflexivity, Ling redeems her agency and subverts the Orientalist gaze, thus charging that this Chineseness that allegedly emanates from Melodies is performative.
The recognition of the Orientalist repercussions of Melodies’ position in the Western hemisphere is reiterated in the latter half of “Red-coat Man,” where Ling’s female family members clandestinely observe Father appraising suspects in the courtroom. Multiple gazes collide and intersect, counteracting one another. Here, the (anti-)Orientalist gaze undertakes gendered implications. If Said fails to address this, David Hwang’s M Butterfly productively clarifies: “The West thinks of itself as masculine… so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor… but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique” (83; ellipses in original). It is clear, then, that the femme fatale prisoner Father interrogates, variously a “fox-like woman” and a “great beauty” (19-20), metonymizes China/the Orient; Father, as “judge of final appeal,” embodies the Orientalist gaze—his “gentle smile” and “kindly voice” (17) parodies Woolf’s ostensibly benevolent “sound advice” (8). If so, the women characters’ voyeuristic contemplation “behind the screen” (17) transgressively unsettles patriarchal authority and inverts the Orientalist gaze itself. Elsewhere, Ling’s self-reflexive destruction of the Orientalist logic that conflates femininity and the Orient recurs in “Ghost Stories”: the corpse of a “beautiful woman… became a patch of water, her dress became ash, and was blown away by the wind” (155). The Orientalist configuration of a feminine Orient is an illusion “like the flower in the mirror and the moon in the water” (20). If Melodies appears to problematically rehearse the clichéd association of women with nature—Ju-lan’s “fingers appear like white orchid petals” (31) while Ling’s sisters are a “branch of exquisite flowers” (106)—Eighth Sister’s song in “Sakura Festival” cautions: “Flower, yet not a flower” (216; emphasis mine). It is precisely Ling’s lyricism, which Sackville-West obtusely identifies as apolitically “reflecting [a] thirst for beauty” (9), that self-reflexively disrupts an Orientalist vision of Chinese femininity.
Melodies’ metafictive dimensions perhaps register most overtly in “Ghost Stories,” where Ling confesses:
To make this story more real, I added some details. For instance, I told them that as I thought it might be a dream, I scratched my hand till it felt painful, but I did not awake. (I copied this from old stories.)… The more descriptions I gave in detail, the more delighted I found my listeners. Then, each time when I was asked to [re]tell the ghost story, I naturally added something to make the ghost appear more and more vivid to people. (156)
In a work accessed and asserted by the Bloomsbury modernists as “authentically Chinese” (10), Ling subversively intimates that Chineseness is fundamentally performative; it accrues verisimilitude and “appear[s] more and more vivid to people” only through the self-reflexive and self-parodying strategies of fabrication and rehearsal. Indeed, Ling’s disclosure that “the more descriptions I gave in detail, the more delighted I found my listeners” directly responds to Woolf’s command to “give as many natural details… as you like” to gratify “an English audience” (8; 10); it demolishes the Orientalist fiction of an “authentic Chineseness” (10) that the Orientalist eye “get[s] hints of in what [a Chinese artist] writes” (7). Put otherwise, Melodies itself functions as a “ghost story” of an insubstantial Chineseness—the Orientalist gaze that desires and proclaims a self-evident “Chinese flavor” is thus frustrated.
In a sense, the exhortations for Ling to “come as close to the Chinese both in style and in meaning as you can…. Do it as you would were you writing for the Chinese” (8) affirm the Bloomsbury modernists’ Orientalist rhetoric: their collective Orientalist eye is dependent on a unidirectional West-to-East traffic; Ling’s transnational aspirations that look to the West have to be suppressed insofar as author and text must write/be written “for the Chinese” only. Yet, Melodies precisely resists this high-handed command—Ling intermittently, and intrusively, addresses her Euro-American audience. In “A Plot,” she cheekily discloses, “Americans call [Feng-sien] touch-me-not” (105). Ling’s self-reflexive intercultural/intertextual allusions are most transgressive in “Tutor Ben”:
[Tutor Ben’s] voice often reminded me of the winds on an autumn evening in Peking…. [which] come from the remote Mongolian desert, carrying large quantities of fine sand mixed with yellow loess, passing the great north mountains and the famous Great Wall, then blowing through the Imperial hunting forests and the capital—Peking. The sound is rich and powerful. Only a symphony of Beethoven has that quality. (119)
If Ling’s prose registers here as most faithful to the Orientalist fantasy of China as “a large wild place” (7) insofar as Orient and the Oriental man are conflated, this vision is also ultimately and comically disrupted when Ling sutures it to the aesthetic hallmark of Western civilization, “a symphony of Beethoven”; what is claimed as the epitome of European high culture becomes subversively connected with Oriental “wild[erness].” It is precisely at the most conspicuous/condensed moment of Ling’s alleged “[self-]exoticism” (Shih 215) that she dismantles Orientalist expectations. The Orientalist gaze, hitherto indulged in an excess of compliant/complicit images, is abruptly blinded.
Ultimately, Ling’s Melodies anticipates and enunciates the Sinophone school’s foundational thesis: “How Chineseness is made to mean in different contexts, and who gets to decide what it means or should mean, is the object of intense contestation, a struggle over meaning with wide-ranging cultural and political implications” (Ang 59). If Woolf and Sackville-West have endeavored to frame—in both senses of the word—Melodies through a modernist-Orientalist optics, a nuanced re-approach to Ling’s memoirs, as informed by the Sinophone circle’s recent innovations, enables an excavation of Ling’s non-essentialist principles: Melodies’ transgressive nebentext ruptures the alleged ontological fixity of Chineseness, retrieving instead its performativity and contingency. Melodies thus revises the incumbent delimitations of the Sinophone school, demonstrating that a Han Chinese creative endeavor produced in a non-Sinophone tongue can nevertheless cohere with its ethical ambitions. Ling’s agency vis-à-vis the intellectual mechanisms of Bloomsbury Orientalism is thus recuperated; distilled as such, her voice remains “cold and clear” (10).
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[1] I borrow here the language of theater studies. Martin Esslin (see bibliography) distinguishes between the haupttext and the nebentext in drama, where “the latter consist[s] of stage directions [and] the former comprises the words that are actually spoken on the stage by the actors… insofar as the ‘haupttext’ is the only portion of the text that is available to the spectators of a performance as a producer of meaning while the ‘nebentext’ appears in the form of other non-verbal sign systems” and contends that the nebentext is of more significance than its counterpart.
[2] The May Fourth movement was a student-instigated ideological campaign inaugurated in 1919 that responded to European and Japanese imperialism in China by championing radical reform and revolution on all fronts as the means to recovering indigenous autonomy. To that end, prominent left-leaning artists and intellectuals such as Lu Xun and Hu Shih championed the construction and dissemination of a new Chinese vernacular script, baihua (lit. plain speech), to supplant classical written Chinese, wenyan (lit. literary speech), which was by then completely divorced from the spoken Chinese tongues and which they thus considered obsolete. As these individuals were natives of Mandarin-speaking Peking, the cultural center of the movement, the invented script inadvertently registered as Mandarin textualization, privileging it over other Sinitic languages such as Shanghainese and Cantonese as baihua circulated across the Chinese landmass. See Schoppa, “Constructing a New Cultural Identity,” in bibliography.
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——. “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua.” Modern Chinese Literature 4.1-
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——. Introduction. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. Ed. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-tsin Tsai, and Brian
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——. “Gendered Negotiations with the Local: Liu Huiyin and Ling Shuhua.” The Lure of the Modern:
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