On Eileen Chang's 'The Golden Cangue' and 'Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier'
Eileen Chang, a 20th-century female writer born into a declining aristocratic family in Shanghai, has a talent for writing women. Her representation of the delicate feminine details is specific to the first half of the 20th-century China – an era of change and instability, war and uncertainty, but also of ever-present patriarchy. Her two novellas, “The Golden Cangue” and “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” are two exemplary pieces of work that reconstruct such historicity from the perspective of women.
“The Golden Cangue” features Ts’ao Ch’i-ch’iao, a lower-class woman who marries a crippled man of an aristocratic family and who, therefore, has to bear egregious humiliation from the entire family – the sneer of women and exploitation of men. Her only anchor in life is the money his husband left her after his death, a daughter, and a son. The son she pampers into an opium-smoking, brothel-visiting rogue. The daughter, Ch’ang-an, she controls with her claws, teaching her not to trust any man, and eventually robbing her of happiness.
In “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier,” a Shanghainese girl, Weilong is trained by her aunt and an affluent widow, Madame Liang, into a courtesan and her social asset. After Weilong falls hopelessly in love with a playboy, George Qiao, Madame Liang “pimps” Weilong, marrying her to George, but actually tricking her into prostitution so as to sustain the fake marriage.
These two texts both depict women who fight in vain against the uncertainties of society that mark the early-20th-century China – women who try to “h[o]ld back the wheel of history” (“Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” 23) but ineluctably fail. Instead, their attempts could only lead them further into the prisons of patriarchy. With such “desolate” female characters and Chang’s elusive, gossip-like narrative form that is also distinctly cyclical, the authoress is able to record and reconstruct the historical reality of the era, which is a cycle of suffering, uncertainty, and misogyny.
As Chang encapsulates in her essay “Writing of One’s Own”: “In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born” (18), the history placed at the center of her literary world is also one of elusiveness – “changing dynasties” (“The Golden Cangue” 171), shifting laws, and oscillating cultural norms. The Chinese society was in a liminal stage, where changes were happening but were not quite complete. What was the norm yesterday could be against it today – Ch’ang-an’s half-bound, half-loosened feet are the exact sacrifice to such aquatic inconstancy. In such a transitional time, even the female fashion is fleeting, as a maid in “The Golden Cangue” complains: “Colorful clothes are not worn so much. With the people down river, the fashions are all for no color” (172).
Against such a background, at the center of both of Chang’s novellas are women who attempt to challenge the elusiveness that is symbolic of the era, to preserve in their life a sense of stability that is lost in national history. In order to contend against uncertainty, their attempts would naturally involve the marmoreal, things that are meant to last – the material. In “The Golden Cangue,” Ch’i-ch’iao’s obsession with money is one of such fatal attempts. With her defensive sophistication, she, a lower-class widow, is proud to provide physical stability for three. Ironically however, her money is the “legacy” of her husband’s family, in other words, an extension of the patriarchy. The feminine weapon of rebellion, therefore, is tainted with the influence of the oppressors from the very beginning. Moreover, money itself is elusive, for everyone has their eyes set on it, desperate to grasp at the slice of certainty in it. Ch’i-ch’iao’s obsession hence becomes a miserly mania, as she kicks, bites, and tramples upon her competitors with all her wiles, even her own daughter. [1] – herself becoming an accomplice to female oppression. Ch’i-ch’iao’s madness for money is a symbol of her defining herself with the measure of the patriarchy. Her tormented chants to Ch’ang-an, “Who’s not after your money?” (207) and “Did your mother’s money come easy?” (209) not only reveal her extreme anxiety in a time when nothing could last, but more importantly, reflect the oppressive monstrosity she has taken onto her feminine body through the masculine tool, money.
Compared to Ch’i-ch’iao, much more graceful is the materially affluent Madame Liang in “Aloeswood Incense,” who is described by her niece Weilong as:
a woman of great ability, and had held back the wheel of history. She had preserved, in her own small world, the opulent lifestyle of the late Qing dynasty. Behind her own doors, she was a little Empress Cixi. (23)
Madame Liang’s sumptuous house resembles a fortress at a time of turbulence, and thus is mistaken as her shield against “the wheel of history.” A closer examination of Chang’s metaphor would, however, reveal Empress Cixi’s palace to be desolate and deserted, its feminized magnificence the pitiful spawn of bargain with masculine, hegemonic countries (trading national territory and jurisdiction for the glory and dignity inside the Forbidden Palace) – the same as Madame Liang’s house, which is, after all, her remuneration for being the concubine of an old man, in other words, her reward for bowing to the patriarchy. Her house, therefore, is not her fortress against history, but an actual prison, in which herself is the willing (yet maybe unconscious) prisoner.
Ch’i-ch’iao and Madame Liang are not the only two women in Chang’s two novellas who fail to overpower the era and who are entrapped in the prison of self-oppression. In “Aloeswood Incense,” Madame Liang’s “protégé,” Weilong is well aware that her pseudo-marriage with George Qiao, her reputation as a courtesan, and her income from “prostitution,” would all dissipate as soon as time erodes her youth. Nevertheless, Weilong has stepped into the trap “willingly” (76), creates her own prison (her relationship with George), and conducts business on her own sexual body (her actual prostitution). Chang’s ending for the story, therefore, is also her mourning over Weilong’s entrapment and her helplessness against the larger forces of the era:
On that bitter winter’s night, the flame flashed […] like an orange blossom. The blossom bloomed, then died. The cold and the dark returned. Here is the end of this Hong Kong story. Weilong’s brazier of incense will soon go out too. (76)
Flame, blossoms, incense, and stories – all are things that do not last, that are there but not quite, that are vulnerable under the wheel of larger forces, the ever-present yoke of patriarchy. Similarly, “The Golden Cangue” also ends with a metaphor of entrapment, projected onto the most marginalized and vulnerable member in society, a lower-class woman (a widow). It’s the moment when Ch’i-Ch’iao pushes her jade bracelet up to her bony armpit, and “could not believe she’d had round arms when she was young” (234). Here the “jade bracelet” fuses with the “golden cangue,” together forming a delicate, precious, feminized form of constraint that has attached itself to her body, and that might even have become part of her confined and contorted body.
As such, these women’s weapons, be it money or houses, have been tainted with traces of patriarchy and thus turned against themselves – the weapons have become disciplinary tools, or even prisons. Tragically, none of Chang’s female characters has succeeded in their attempts to fight against the era, the elusive yet unyielding time that entraps them.
Just as her characters, Chang herself has no shortage of intimate experiences with the scathing era. After all, she’s the one to exclaim, “get your fame early […] I have to hurry: faster, faster, or it’ll be too late!” (I). However, unlike her female characters who try to “hold back the wheel of history,” Chang is actually able to reconcile with it, acknowledge the larger forces in her historical fiction, and even draw from it as a writer. Her essay anthology’s title liuyan流言 (translated as Written on Water), has been wonderfully interpreted by Nicole Huang as having double meanings: one of “flowing words,” which has embedded in itself a sense of uncertainty and evanescence; the other of “rumors” and “gossip” (Written on Water XI). The first layer of meaning connotes an unyielding ephemerality, which Chang oddly attributes to her own words – as if she herself does not expect her work to last. The second layer of meaning focuses on triviality, especially that of femininity, as opposed to masculinity and patriarchy – which has an echo in the gossip-like narrative form of Chang’s stories.
Chang’s novellas often start with an omniscient-sounding narrator, an outsider to the story, luring readers into her history-saturated tale, as in the opening paragraph of “Aloeswood Incense”:
Go and fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier […] Listen while I tell a Hong Kong tale, from before the war. When your incense has burned out, my story too will be over. (7)
Readers never get to know this storyteller’s identity, hence making this narrative voice impersonal, almost indifferent – a tone prevalent in gossip, inquisitive, luring yet cold and uncaring. And Chang’s deliberate association between the story ending and the incense burning out hints at the elusiveness of the tale itself – as though the rumor-like words were made of incense smoke, disintegrating and dissipating as soon as they are spoken/written down.
However, although conspicuously feminine, and analogous to water, incense smoke, and rumors, Eileen Chang’s words are far from petty or insignificant. In the above paragraph, “from before the war” indicates the patent historicity of the story. Later, its third-person narrative voice fades away as the story formally begins, but it reappears at the end, pulling readers back from the story to whatever timeline the narrator/readers belong to. Such a structure, beneath its transient façade, is actually cyclical, even achieving permanence, as the ending of “The Golden Cangue” implies through the metaphor of the moon:
The moon of thirty years ago has gone down long since and the people of thirty years ago are dead but the story of thirty years ago is not yet ended – can have no ending. (234)
Analogous to the moon and the story of thirty years ago, the history of female suffering and misogyny in Chang’s stories is also cyclical, waxing and waning incessantly, never ending. While her female characters struggle to defeat uncertainty but instead get trapped, Chang acknowledges and then records it by delving into the historicity of the period – a cyclical era of elusive changes and constant vacillation, when new concepts (liberalism, equality) kept being born while old traditions (misogyny, patriarchy) kept coming back.
Chang’s principle of realism in writing, elaborated in her essay “Writing of One’s Own,” could further explicate how she approaches the era:
Although they are merely weak and ordinary people […], it is precisely these ordinary people who can serve more accurately […] as a measure of the times. (17)
Her realism – to write about ordinary people as a measure of the times – is in line with her dedication to writing the feminine details and these women’s failure in fighting against the era. These ordinary people who seem much too weak and fragile are exactly those who have experienced the impermanence of time, and who struggle to fight the larger forces. It is through recounting these women’s failure to “hold back the wheel of history” that realism is achieved in Chang’s words, and that an era is reconstructed faithfully.
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[1] Daughters, especially after their marriage, were treated as outsiders of their original families in the traditional Chinese society, mainly because they could not pass on the family names to the next generation.
Works Cited
Chang, Eileen. Love in a Fallen City and Other Stories. Trans. Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang. New
York: Penguin Books, 2007. Print.
Chang, Eileen. “Writing of One’s Own.” Written on Water. Ed. Nicole Huang. Trans. Andrew F. Jones. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 15 – 22. Print.
Fu, Lei. “Fu Lei: On Eileen Chang’s Novels 傅雷：论张爱玲的小说.” Feng Huang Du Shu. N.p., 7 Sept. 2015.
Web. 23 Oct. 2016. http://book.ifeng.com/a/20150907/17328_1.shtml