2-3 pages essay East Asia history and gender

Impersonating China Author(s): David Der-wei Wang Source: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 25 (Dec., 2003), pp. 133- 163 Published by: Chinese Literature: essays, articles, reviews (CLEAR) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594285 Accessed: 20-11-2016 04:16 UTC

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Impersonating China

David Der-wei Wang Columbia University

This essay deals with the relations between gender, gender performity, and genre representation of gender and national identity in modern China. It argues that the issue of nation and impersonation, sexuality and political representation, constitutes a peculiar subject for modern Chinese writers, and that among these contests for leadership positions, traditional theatre and its transvestite dramaturgy are continuously called on, as true or false impersonations of China in the theatre of the world. The cases-in-point are two works about female impersonation, one by Ba Jin (b. 1904), champion of May Fourth literature, and the other by Qin Shouou (1908-1994), a popular middle-brow fiction writer in the Republican era.

"The greatest, most long-lasting, and most popular art in China is man impersonating woman."l

Thus Lu Xun Hf wrote in an essay in 1928. For the master of the May Fourth enlightenment, female impersonation represents the ultimate oddity in the Chinese practice of gender aesthetics. "Man and woman are meant to attract each other. Eunuchs are not our concerns in this regard because nobody would fall in love with them; they are desexed...Female impersonators, however, come across as being most extraordinary because they don't always let us feel at ease. They appear to be the opposite sex from the perspective of either men or women. Men see in them women and women see in them men. They are thus forever on display behind the windows of photo studios, and in the hearts of the Chinese people."2

Lu Xun finds in the Chinese craze for theatrical impersonation an example of decadence, something that threatens to prevent the representational system of modernity. For the master, sexual impersonation causes a confusion in gender roles, thereby obstructing the normal circulation of desire. When man appears to be woman and woman, man, a phantom gender is called forth, an image of something that is neither male nor female. As Lu Xun would interpret it, this phantom Chinese gender constitutes a sexual sham in the sense that cannibals masquerade as civilized, and madmen pretend to be rational.

More intriguing is Lu Xun's contrast of female impersonators to eunuchs. Both

1Lu Xun ,f, "Lun zhaoxiang zhilei" ',,trWH,,+ (On photography and the like), in Fen (Graves), Lu Xun Quanji , IffRi (Complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin whenxue chubanshe, 1981):

2Ibid.

© Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25 (2003)

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Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25 (2003)

are deemed as men who have denied or have been denied manhood. But whereas

eunuchs, (presumably) having lost the capacity to desire, are also ruled out as objects of desire, female impersonators titillate and arouse precisely because of the uncertainty in their sexual identities. At a time when the act of physical castration had passed into history, Lu Xun might well have considered female impersonation as spiritual castration, a second ancient practice that continued to maim Chinese humanity. Indeed, his comment shows that he was startled by the fact that female impersonation could coexist with and blend into modernity. Images of celebrated impersonators were on display as often "in the hearts of the Chinese people" as in "the windows of photo studios." They had left their everlasting imprints in both psychological reflection and its technological reproductions.

Lu Xun above all is worrying about the masculinity of the Chinese national character.3 He shares with contemporary intelligentsia a yearning for a strong, virile Chinese figure, as opposed to China's old emaciated, feminine image. Lu Xun differs from his contemporaries in that he is capable of looking into the corporeal dimension of the national body politic; sexuality always occupies a prominent place in his investigation of Chinese humanity. For Lu Xun the breeding of strong, modem Chinese people presupposes love and procreation, which must not be distracted by theatrical tricks of any kind.4 What bothers him, therefore, is that the ghostly chain of make-believe

has not lost its grip on the Chinese imagination. Sexuality might end up in a wayward play of erotic games, indefinitely postponing China's serious commitment to modernity.

In female impersonation is hidden the secret of how modern Chinese watch, and listen to, gender performances. Lu Xun would have to conclude that, whereas Chinese audiences enjoyed watching a man being decapitated in actuality as if it were theatre, with an equal passion they viewed a man symbolically transgendered for the stage as if it were real. Worse, thanks to the advent of modernity, the traditional spectacle of impersonation could now be captured, duplicated, and eternalized in a magic of a photographic snapshot. Thus for Lu Xun photos of female impersonators were displayed and disseminated precisely where the slide show of decapitation, which he claimed to have seen in Japan in 1906, could have been mounted.5 Lu Xun had tried to embody the maiming of Chinese humanity in the photograph of a beheading, only now to find that the Chinese had retouched the image. There are moments in which the image of a missing head could be confused with that of a missing phallus. Now the act of castration

3For Lu Xun's contemplation on a new national character, see, for example, Lydia Liu's discussion, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity-China 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), chapters 2-3.

4Lu Xun's own sexual life comes to mind. For more discussion on Lu Xun's critique on Chinese sexuality, see, for example, Wang Xiaoming -EzB, Wufa zhimian de rensheng ,jtiAi ),XI (A life hardly to face up to), (Taipei: Yeqiang chubanshe, 1992), chapter 6.

5See my essay, "Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, and Decapitation," in Liu Kang and Xiaobin Tang, eds., Politics, Ideology, and Chinese Literature: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 174-87.

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WANG Impersonating China

has been prettied up, and a female-male image catches the wayward eye. Female impersonators are made not only to look and behave like women but also

to sound like women. They win popularity by being able to sing in high and light registers, comparable to women's. The secret is a male larynx which fails to descend after puberty, thereby keeping the vocal cords closer to the cavities of resonance. Just like the boy singers of Medieval and Renaissance Europe,6 Chinese female impersonators start vocal training in childhood. But during puberty these boys' larynxes usually descend and thus "break" their high, feminine voices.7 To forestall this natural mishap, there appeared in eighteenth-century Europe, especially Italy, the custom of creating castrati.8 Boys with a talent for singing were castrated so as to ensure the lasting feminine voice quality. Unlike the European castrati, Chinese female impersonators, at least since the late imperial era, did not undertake castration to guarantee their vocal femininity. This fact made their training all the more risky because each boy was gambling against tremendous odds. Few were the number of those who survived the voice-change period and could continue their careers; those who lost their voices ended up in minor theatrical roles or simply left the stage for ever.

Theoretically, as a simulation of feminine singing, the parts created for female impersonators could equally be taken up by women. But female impersonators, thanks to their male biological attributes, can cultivate their muscular system and physique in such a way as to form a real sounding box in the service of small-sized vocal cords. Thus when they sing, they can demonstrate a "hybrid" power and plasticity that surpass women's. For Lu Xun, as for like-minded advocates of realism in art, the resonant voices of female impersonators were the product of fakery, and therefore suspect. When May Fourth revolutionaries orchestrated the call to arms, there was no place on the score for female impersonators. In their high notes and strident coloratura Lu Xun seems to have heard lingering echoes of castrated children. Hence female impersonation as another casualty in his campaign to "save the children."

Not unlike the castrati, the female impersonators enjoyed tremendous fame and popularity for their exquisite skill at mimicking women. Thanks to their gender ambiguity, they were often pursued by both male and female fans.9 Balzac's "Sarrasine" (1830), made famous by Roland Barthes in S/Z, vividly portraits a murderous romance

6For crossing dressing and the "transvestite stage" in the Elizabethan theater, see, Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), chapter 4. Also see Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bulough, Cross-dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

7For more description of the training of a Chinese opera singer, see, for example, Isabelle Duchesne, "The Chinese Opera Star: Roles and Identity, in John Hay, ed., Boundaries in China (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 216-242.

8For a detailed discussion of the rise and fall of castrati, see, for example, Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (New York: Da Capo, 1974); Patrick Barbier, The World of the Castrati, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Souvenir Press, 1996).

9Barbier, pp. 148-158.

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Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25 (2003)

between a sculptor and a castrato resulting from mistaken gender identity. In the Chinese context, Chen Sen's NO Pinhua baojian sN4'L (A Mirror of judging flowers, 1849) provides a panorama of the life of female impersonators and their patrons, thereby inaugurating the late Qing fiction of decadence.10 Compared to their European counterparts, Chinese female impersonators tend to engender more complex sexual and social disturbances. This is due not only to their low social esteem which, up till the turn of the twentieth century, was comparable to that of the prostitutes, but also to their hidden sexual threat: although they may sound and look like women on stage, these female impersonators are "real" men in reality.

Of all the female impersonators of his time, Lu Xun may have found in Mei Lanfang MSS (1894-1961), the most celebrated male/female star of Beijing opera in modern China, his primary target." In an essay "Luilun Mei Lanfang ji qita" iST- S RAfft (On Mei Lanfang and other issues) published in late 1934, Lu Xun ridicules Mei's recent overseas tours as a sign not of his rising stardom worldwide but of his decreasing popularity in China.l2 He charges that the way in which Mei's elite patrons refined the female impersonator's art had diminished its inherent earthy vitality. But Lu Xun's most vehement attack is directed to Mei's planned performance in the Soviet Union, the holy land of proletarian revolution. He was exasperated by the fact that an aging female impersonator should entertain revolutionary cadres on behalf of China and that the star should bill his art the "purest presentation of symbolism."13 For someone like Lu Xun who had been converted to socialist realism long before 1934, symbolism meant the worst kind of art form which employs a game of metaphors to camouflage real problems and avoid real solutions. With circuitous logic, Lu Xun links Mei Langfang's ill-defined symbolism with the symbolism promoted by Shanghai Neo-Sensationalist writers such as Shi Zhecun ifMi? and Du Heng ft±, and he insinuates that both forms of symbolism are dangerous because they blur one's judgmental faculties and, worse, misrepresent revolution.14

Though aimed at Mei Lanfang and female impersonation, Lu Xun's argument boils down to the question of who was more entitled to represent China on the stage of global politics. Lu Xun was not alone in addressing such questions. As will be discussed in the following, the issue of nation and impersonation, sexuality and political

l°See my discussion in Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), chapter 2.

"For more information on Mei Lanfang, see, for example, Yidai zongshi Mei Lanfang ,J i-F1HtS (The Master of Beijing Opera, Mei Lanfang), ed. Mei Shaowu ,,Nf (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1997); Xu Jichuan tMtIE et al., Zhongguo sida mingdan g41 EqA (The four great female impersonators in Chinese opera) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1990), 1-132.

12Lu Xun, "Lueun Mei Lanfang ji qita" rSfi R ftl (On Mei Lanfang and other issues), Lu Xun quanji, 5:579-584.

13Mei Lanfang made the statement on September 8, 1934; quoted from Lu Xun, "Lun Mei Langfang," p. 583.

14Ibid.

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WANG Impersonating China

representation, constitute a peculiar subject for Chinese writers of the revolutionary age. And among these contests for leadership positions, traditional theatre and its transvestite dramaturgy are continuously called on, as true or false impersonations of China in the theatre of the world.'5

In what follows I will concentrate on two cases: Ba Jin's EB (b. 1904) short story "Dier de muqin" J i--' i (The Second Mother, 1932), and Qin Shouou's * K. (1908-1994) novel Qiuhaitang t3,C& (Begonia, 1943). Whereas Ba Jin ranks among the forerunners of May Fourth humanitarian literature, Qin Shouou earned his fame as the leading Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction writer of Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The two share little in common-in generic preferences, political alliances, social vision, writing skills, or intended readership. But their paths cross when they confront the subject of female impersonation and bring it to bear on the question of the Chinese national character. "The Second Mother" is rarely read now, when even a magnum opus, such as Ba Jin's Jia T (Family, 1931) or Hanye ,- (Cold night, 1945), no longer has mass appeal. Dealing with an orphan's unlikely embrace of a female impersonator as his mother, "The Second Mother" nevertheless seems to me to be one of the most provocative of Ba Jin's early works. It carries out his anarchist agenda, both at the sexual and the ethical level.

On the other hand, Qin Shouou's Begonia still is a major popular force in the representation of Republican China. The novel went through numerous movie, television, and stage adaptations and a fictional sequel Meibao ft (Meibao), by Qin Shouou himself, appeared as late as 1984. This novel, about a female impersonator's attempt to become a "real" man, his truncated romance with a warlord patron's concubine, and his tragic death, has been treated by critics mostly as a tearjerker. But close reading indicates otherwise. Besides telling a highly entertaining story, I argue Begonia won its phenomenal popularity because it hit home at its wartime readers' quandaries, especially regarding gender-identity, and as such it still serves as a rejoinder to Lu Xun's critique of sexual variability.

The two works, one "serious" and one "popular," have been seen at opposite ends in the spectrum of modern Chinese literature. My reading brings them together and in due course I ask how they reciprocate each other's gender/genre traits in the project of nationalism. In a way not unlike the theatrics of impersonation, each of the two works lets loose a radical potential, traversing established boundaries, and assuming powers other than those conventionally assigned to it. As a result, where Lu Xun sees a short-circuit of gender- and national-representation, Ba Jin and Qin Shouou map out

15The inter-relationship between gender, performity, and sexual politics has been among the most debated issues in contemporary Western gender criticism. My study may be inspired by but is not limited to this discourse. See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1992); Marjorie Garber, Vested Interest: cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); Lesley Ferris, Crossing the Stage: Controversies on the Stage (New York: Routledge, 1993); Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures (New York: Routeledge, 1996).

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Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25 (2003)

paths of escape from sexual and moral hegemony. This, I argue, lets them enact some of the best and most emancipating moments in modern Chinese literature.

Gender Anarchy

The year 1932 marked the most productive moment in Ba Jin's early career. In the wake of the success of Jiliu AAL (Torrents; retitled Family later) the year before, he was engaged in writing with passions stronger than ever. Among the many products of this period was "The Second Mother," a story about an orphan who is determined to finds his mother and family. After his parents' death, this young narrator/protagonist is entrusted to a widowered uncle. He leads a lonely life, though surrounded by servants, and he envies an errand boy who, despite his humble status, always finds solace and pride talking about his mother. "But what is the use of envy?...I cannot conjure up a mother from nowhere...One can be born only once and therefore can have only one mother. And my mother is already dead."16

A miracle happens one night when the narrator is taken by his uncle to a Sichuan opera theatre. Right in the middle of the show, he is approached by an elegant mid-aged woman who obviously is on intimate terms with his uncle. The woman expresses fond feelings to the narrator, who responds to her affectionately too. She holds the happy boy for the rest of the evening. When the theater is over and the boy and his uncle are about to bid farewell to the woman, she asks the boy: "You haven't called me anything yet the whole tonight. What do you think you want to call me?"

I raise my head with my eyes wide open and I look at her face. I feel reluctant to say goodbye to this loveable face. I feel moved and, not knowing how and why, I call her twice, "Mother," "Mother."17

The "mother" and "son" thus start to see each other frequently at her place. Whenever the uncle joins them, the three enjoy a wholesome family life of its own kind. As time passes on, the "mother" and the young narrator get closer and closer and she is finally compelled to tell him her story one night. She came from a poor family and was sold to an opera theatre; she was once a popular star and is now the uncle's kept person. But most stunningly, she is a man.

One can easily read "The Second Mother" as Ba Jin's attempt at rewriting his "family romance." Born in 1904 to a decaying landlord family, Ba Jin was a beloved child in early years. But the happy time did not last long; by 1917 he had seen a cluster of deaths of family members. In particular he was traumatized by his mother's passing away when he was ten. On the other hand, Ba Jin had harbored a fascination with theater since childhood, and he was not unfamiliar with female impersonation, a prominent feature of Ming, Qing and early Republican theaters. In his autobiographical

16Ba Jin E&, "Dier de muqin" I--I j (The Second Mother), first published in Mobu ji 4fTfi (Mop, 1932); I am using the text from Ba Jin duanpian xiaoshuo ji E ai/Jl~< i (Hong Kong: Jindai Chubanshe, 1966), p. 20

17Ibid., p. 22.

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WANG Impersonating China

essays Ba Jin recounts that his family was once a major patron of the local Sichuan opera theater and that his grandfather and uncles all kept close ties with female impersonators.18 Their patronage, as a fashion of elite class, has strong erotic implications. 19

Thus, in the story, the loss of the mother creates a black hole in the young narrator's mind, and this trauma is compounded by his father's untimely death. The young narrator is seen as ever hoping against hope for the return of his mother, and just as he comes to realize the futility of his dream, he finds a substitute mother at the theatre. The moment of the boy's wish-fulfillment coincides with his introduction to the world of theatrical re-presentation; he undergoes an initiation rite by entering the very place of impersonation.

One can also read "The Second Mother" in light of the revolutionary preamble shared by Ba Jin and his fellow writers of the thirties. As the story makes clear, behind the fantastic faqade of female impersonation lies a society's bent for a "wayward" sexual game-male homosexual eroticism-and this game flourishes only by means of gender and economic oppression. The Second Mother, we are told, came from a poor family and he sold himself to a theatre at sixteen so as to support his starving mother and ailing younger brother. He was made to learn female roles because of his good looks. "Each detail of his female manners has been acquired as a result of countless whippings, tears, and blood."20 The Second Mother's story, therefore, attests not only to a society's perverse sexual mores but also to its horrific sex-change economy. At the demand of market forces, children of lower social or economic status can be

regendered as needed. The above approaches, one psychological and the second ideological, cannot

fully express the polemics of Ba Jin's story. My reading suggests that Ba Jin's radical intent does not lie merely in his expose of individual fixations or social abuses, which by the thirties had become a commonplace among writers. Rather Ba Jin derives his radicalism from his effort at making sense of the social aberration he also attacks, to the point of even admitting it to his revolutionary program. This double stance is most emphatically demonstrated by his ambivalent attitude toward the story's key subject, female impersonation. One gets the impression that precisely because he recognizes female impersonation as symptomatic of social and sexual degeneration, Ba Jin appears all the more determined to redeem it in his own way, and he does so by investing it with the theme of motherhood. When he mixes divine maternity with depraved sexuality, and male with female gender, he is aiming at something no less

18Ibid., pp. 57-60.

19Ba Jin remembers especially the "friendship" between his third uncle and the popular actor Li Fengqing X,WP. This romance, plus the fact that Li later died a pathetic death in poverty and illness, may have provided the prototype for "The Second Mother." Li Fengqing and other female impersonators also make brief appearances in Family, representing the decadent old theatre as opposed to the new one launched by enlightened youth. Ibid.

20Ba Jin, "Dier de muqin," p. 30.

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than divine sacrilege. And what that "something" is merits investigation.

Mothering China

I suggest that Ba Jin's commitment to Anarchism serves as the key to his radical rewriting of motherhood in "The Second Mother," and more polemically, that, for dramatizing his political platform, female impersonation provides a most useful vehicle. Before we discuss Ba Jin's anarchism and its literary manifestations, however, let us first take a detour, by revisiting Ba Jin's obsession with the mother in the story under discussion.

After the boy narrator's recognition of his "Second Mother," the comedy of errors carries on with everyone's acquiescence. As they become more and more intimate, the Second Mother confides to the young boy that he reminds her of her younger brother, whom she has never seen again since joining the theater. She is tempted to call the boy her "little brother," and as she finally articulates her love for this vicarious brother/son, she breaks down.2' This confession scene brings the two characters' willing entrapment in mistaken identity to a new crisis (or triumph). The drama does not stop here. When he shows up later, the boy's uncle does not question the simulated mother-son-brother relations between his lover and nephew but instead joins them. Keeping the secret among themselves, the three lead a happy family life. But what a kind of family is this? The widowered uncle raises the boy as his son while living with a female impersonator as wife or concubine. The boy narrator finds in his uncle's male lover a substitute mother who in turn loves him like a long lost brother. The family is anything but normal by common sense, but it works. It comes to an end two years later only because the uncle suddenly dies.

In sharp contrast with the prevailing "tears and blood" formula among Chinese writers of the thirties, Ba Jin cultivates in his story a domestic utopia where it might be thought least likely to take place. To what extent does his male mother measure up to the mother figure as composed by post May Fourth literature? Ever since the incipient moment of modern Chinese literature, the image of mother has been invoked by both male and female writers to embody, and hopefully redeem, the nation in crisis. The ill-fated Xianglin's wife in Lu Xun's "Zhufu" ;; (New year's sacrifice, 1921), it will be recalled, undergoes numerous trials and is finally vanquished after her sole son is eaten by wolves. A bereaved mother appears among leftist writers as a most powerful figure in protest against social miseries. In stories such as Rou Shi's AE^ "Wei nuli de muqin' ,,MEr-i (A slave mother, 1930), Wu Zuxiang's :,, "Guanguan de bupin" T S tn I (Young master gets his tonic 1932), Ding Ling's Tl' Muqin -@ (Mother, 1933), and Wang Luyan's 3E~) "Chen laonai" K74 (Granny Chen, 1942), mothers are seen as tested, humiliated, or driven in despair within and without families; they serve as both the witness to and the caretaker of the spiritual and material desolation that is China. Hence Bingxin's TJL' (1900-1999), Jiang Guangci's W,,

2Ibid., p. 33.

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WANG Impersonating China

(1901-1931), Wang Duqing's t-SA (1898-1940), Fang Zhimin's J5,½t (1899-1935), and Ai Qing's Zt* (1910-1997) poetic exclamations of eternal yearnings for mother. But in terms of supreme maternity, the best example is that of Yu Dafu %5~ (1896-1945) or his hero in "Chenlun" ZL (Sinking, 1921) calling, "Oh China, China, be strong quick! Many, many of your suffering children long for your rescue!"22 Little surprise that in their Freudian analysis of the "deep structure" of Chinese national character both Lung-kee Sun and Rey Chow should conclude that Chinese men are trapped by their eternal desire for a missing Mother.23

Ba Jin no doubt belongs to this discourse by writing profusely about his mother.24 But his Chinese Oedipal complex undergoes a useful twist in a story like "The Second Mother" because he makes a double of the presumably singular role of mother and, more, assigns the female role to a non-female. An ideologically correct reader can point out that the story suggests no more than a boy narrator's innocent look at uncomprehended perversity since he is too young to see the world otherwise. Therefore, the story serves at best as a negative example about what should not have happened in reality. Ba Jin must have been wary about the latent laxity of the story's political message too. Thus at the end of the story appears his I-narrator, now a young man with revolutionary thoughts, informing us of the story proper as an event that happened in the old society. Looking back, he deplores the social and sexual abuses inflicted on a person like the Second Mother, and vows to fight and put an end to them. Nevertheless, in a strange shift of tonality the narrator also tells us that deep in his mind he misses his Second Mother more than ever, and that his foremost wish (after revolution?) is to look for "that (second) mother;" "to find her back and live with me the happy life as we used to."25

Somewhere along Ba Jin's narration a lapse takes place. Following the prevalent revolutionary logic of his time, Ba Jin should have wished the Second Mother to be rehabilitated and become a useful cog and screw in the new social machine. But as his story ends, Ba Jin or his narrator seems reluctant to let go of his childhood fantasy. Not only does his narrator remember fondly the good old days he shared with the impersonated mother, he also longs to reinstate their happy family life in the future. Flanked between the lost, simulated state of maternal love and its imaginary return, writing "The Second Mother" becomes a gesture of nostalgic anticipation, a textual

22Yu Dafu ]AL-, "Sinking" (Chenlun), Yu Dafu duanpian xiaoshuo xuan MI:SS,4iA/J\ l (Short stories by Yu Dafu) (Hong Kong, Shidai, 1959), p. 23.

23Lung-Kee Sun ]R;14, Zhongguo wenhua de shenceng jiego l3t k6,EJ. l; (The deep structure of Chinese culture) (Taipei: Jiegouqun, 1989), Wei duannai de minzu XfSi~ b (China: a people yet to be weaned) (Taipei: Juliu tushu gongsi, 1995), chapters 1-3; Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), chapter 4.

24See, for example, Rey Chow's analysis of Ba Jin's masochistic inclination in describing his fond feeling of his mother in his early stories, in Woman and Chinese Modernity, pp. 150-155.

25Ba Jin, "Dier de muqin," p. 36.

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encore, in calling forth a future that will only be the repeat of the past.

With such a tongue-in-cheek depiction of motherhood and family ties in "The Second Mother," Ba Jin may have invited criticism from both rightists and leftists. For the rightists, Ba Jin's proposal that a family be organized by an orphan, a male mother, and a substitute father simply violates traditional familial value in toto. For the leftists, that Ba Jin should relish the memory of such a domestic anomaly, even when History has already promised its transcendence, reveals him being a reactionary who has wandered off the path to revolution. To these charges Ba Jin could have retorted that his critics were too limited by conventional ideologies to grapple with the radical intent of his story. The family he describes in "The Second Mother" must be regarded as not a compromise but a break with traditional social institutions of any kind, and his vision can make sense when seen in light of Anarchism.

In the Anarchist Family

In the scope of this essay I cannot delve into Ba Jin's Anarchist heritage, but it is a subject that has been much studied.26 What can be iterated is that of all the discourses of rethinking China from the late Qing to the post May Fourth era, Anarchism appears the most utopian, in its celebration of ideals such as justice, equality, mutual cooperation and happiness that transcends any form of government, and its continued promulgation of love as the final goal of humanity.27 Critics have pointed out that when transplanted to China at the turn of the twentieth century, Anarchism integrated Buddhist, Daoist, and Moist thought on polity into its premise of the total liberation of humanity from state apparatus. It filled an intellectual and ideological gap when China was undergoing a drastic experiment with political structure. As Liu Shifu ItJ TU epitomises it, the ultimate goal of Anarchist revolution was to "build a community that banishes landlords, capitalists, social parasites, governmental bureaucrats, military troops, police forces,

26For a general discussion of Anarchism in China, see, for example, Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); For Ba Jin's involvement

the Chinese Anarchist movement, see, for example, Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth between the Two Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), chapters 2-8, Vladimiro Mufioz, Li Pei Kan and Chinese Anarchism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: The Revision Press, 1977), Nathan Mao, Pa Chin (Boston: Twayne, 1978), Song Yuejia E H *, Yongsheng zai qingchun de yuanye 7ftltiTF l (To live in the plain of youth forever) (Jinnan: Shandong wenyi chubanshe, 1997), chapers 3-5.

27John Clark suggests that, "In order for a political theory to be called 'anarchism' in a complete sense, it must contain: (1) a view of an ideal, noncoersive, nonauthritarian society; (2) a criticism of existing society and its institution based on the authoritarian ideal; (3) a view of human nature that justifies the hope for significant progress toward the ideal; (4) a strategy for change, involving immediate institution if non coersive, nonauthoritarian, and decentralist alternatives" (quoted from Zarrow, pp. 238-239). While early Chinese anarchists appeared to meet all four requisite, the school of which Ban Jin played an important role highlighted the necessity of love and compassion. See Song, chapters 3-4, Lang, pp. 46-51, Zarrow, chapter 10.

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religion, law, [and] marriage."28 Ba Jin came to know the tenets of Anarchism as early as his adolescent years.29

Through revolution, he envisions the fusion of individual and collective subjectivity, a state free of any form of political sovereignty. "Everybody knows we (Anarchists) intend to overthrow any form of government."30 Not unlike his European counterparts, Ba Jin is attracted to overthrow the status quo by means of drastic measures, which in his case were violence and martyrdom on the one hand, and love and sacrifice on the other. While the rise and fall of the assassin Du Daxin in Miewang -tL (Destruction), part one of Aiqing sanbuqu JlN'Ei St (Love trilogy, 1929), demonstrates Ba Jin's flirtation with bloodshed,31 the tragicomedy of "The Second Mother," on the other hand, affirms his unconditional allegiance to passion and compassion. These two are but two sides of one coin, constituting the tensions within the Anarchist utopia.

A truly liberated society, as Ba Jin visualizes it, should allow the existence of all forms of good-intentioned humanity, however, eccentric and anomalous. "All mankind intends to live. Each of us has only one life and can live only once, so each of us is entitled to live out the best possible ways of life...No one should deprive us of our right to live and to be happy."32 His works of the thirties feature an array of social underdogs from different walks of life, classes, and nationalities. He sees his characters as victims of forms of social injustice and proposes on their behalf a drastic sociopolitical overhaul. In the present case, Ba Jin seems to suggest that if Confucian idealism results only in unhappy families like the one in Family, we might as well settle for the inauthentic but happy family of "The Second Mother." As long as both the Second Mother and the narrator wish to be reunited and resume their old, "decadent" ties,

there is no reason for them to feel prohibited by laws social or moral whose validity is already in doubt. This kind of Anarchist vision can be accomplished only on the condition of an all-embracing love for all mankind. "Happiness lies not only in individual well-being or any welfare founded upon self-interest; real happiness stems from one's being part of the people and being willing to fight for truth and justice together with the people."33

In actual life, Ba Jin too found himself a "second mother." During the thirties he

28Quoted from Zarrow, p. 154.

29For a detailed description of Ba Jin's initiation into Anarchism, see, for example, Lang chapter 2.

30Ba Jin, "Wuzhengfu zhuyi yu shiji wenti" ,tf 'E:l R~rA (Anarchism and realistic issues), Ba Jin quanji E3i:S (Complete works of Bajin), 18: 119.

31Also see Feigan (Ba Jin), "Wuzhengfu zhuyi yu kongbu zhuyi" j,iRfR LjtW~E~ ' i (Anarchism and terrorism), Minzhong VS (People's bell), 1927, quoted from Song Yuejia, p. 62.

32Ba Jin, "Cong ziben zhuyi dao anaqi zhuyi" ,f l!;4 :: AJ6FA:t-A~ (From capitalism to anarchism), quoted from Song Yuejia, Yongsheng zai qingchun de yuanye, p. 88.

33Ba Jin, "'Rensheng zhexue: qi qiyuan jiqi fazhan', shangbian, yizhexu" ,ALT/ : , AE ~'r ti , _L,. , X }j (Translator's preface to part one of 'the philosophy of life: its origins and development'), Bajin quanji 17: 102.

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developed an intimate tie across the Pacific with the American Anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940). While Goldman was known for her compelling attacks on the system of marriage and family, she perhaps impressed Ba Jin more for her posture as a self-anointed mother to the world. "I want to find an outlet for my mother-need in the love of all children," declares Goldman.34 Not only did she start a magazine entitled Mother Earth, in her intensive affair with Ben Reitman, her long-term supporter, confidant, and lover, she did indeed play the role of belated "Mommy."35 For a maternal-lovelorn writer like Ba Jin, Goldman came across as an ideal object of his desire. In a way not unlike the boy in "The Second Mother" who is eager to find an alternative mother, Ba Jin is so attached to Goldman that he calls her "spiritual mother."36

A story such as "The Second Mother" brings out the early Ba Jin at his most provocative. One may read it as an Anarchist remake of a Chinese family, in which "the insulted and the wounded"-from the orphan to the socially despised actor-are all given a second chance to become what they want to be: a son, a mother, a brother. For our concern, the most intriguing part is that this domestic paradise evolves within the trope not of originality but of duplication and derivation. Impersonation is introduced

first as the epitome of the old society's corruption, but by means of radical renegotiation Ba Jin turns it into an emblem of a happy new society. In other words, theater and role-playing provide Ba Jin with the powerful metaphor he needs to embody an Anarchist vision of disseminated sovereignty, both personal and public. Only when their fixed identities are uprooted can the citizens of Ba Jin's ideal world enjoy the free circulation of subjectivities. Yet by broaching the subject of forced and voluntary impersonation, Ba Jin opens the cover of a Pandora's box of multiple identities. Between his preoccupation with primitivism and his attachment to theatrical artifice there is still a great gap. How Ba Jin filled that gap can be made to show how he re-presented, or impersonated, China.

Primitive Passions, Putative Passions

Female impersonation was part of an old tradition in premoder Chinese theatre and it reached its peak in the late Ming and Qing dynasties, when theatrical enterprises thrived on boy actors acting female roles.37 While gender role-switching constitutes

34Quoted from Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon, 1984), p.145.

35Ibid.

36Ba Jin, "Linghui de huhao" SAi$ Wn (The cry of the soul), Sheng zhi chanhui It ''WI (Confessions of a life), (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), p. 63; see also Lang, p. 46, Song, p. 43.

37For more information about boy actors from the late Ming to the early Republican era, see, for example, Wu Cuncun Jlq:, "Qingdai shiren xiayou xutong fengqi xulue" {-lfU il Pt 1ff,N R (A general survey of the custom of liaisons and cultivating boy actors among Qing literati), Zhongguo wenhua 4g1Zt{L (Chinese Culture) 15, 16 (1997): 231-43; Wang, Fin-de-siecle

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one of the oldest forms of virtuoso performance, the rise of female impersonation in late imperial China had much more complicated reasons. It certainly indicated changing fashions in performance and patronship, but strictly theatrical factors aside, it partook of a strong erotic motivation. Only a blurry line remained between female impersonation and male prostitution, and beautiful boy actors could be treated as if they were beautiful girls.

Ironically, this sexual custom was made possible thanks to the governmental regulation of heterosexual behavior. Both the Ming and Qing regimes strictly forbade bureaucrats and upper-class men from frequenting houses of female prostitution. In response, male actors and courtesans were introduced as substitutes. One might assume that if female prostitution was held in condemnation, pederasty and other homoerotic attachments would be treated as doubly depraved. Evidence contradicts this assumption. For all the increasingly strict implementation of sodomy laws, male-male liaisons came under less rigorous classification and scrutiny than their heterosexual counterparts. In the guise of theatre, male courtesan culture went theoretically underground, all the while becoming a surrogate for straight erotic culture.

The result is a spectacular masquerade on and off the stage which might have served as a palatable oriental case for Foucauldian sexual studies. Boy actors/courtesans are trained to act like women so as to create simulacra of female beauties, and their

patrons are accordingly pleased to treat them as women. This is truly a social milieu wherein life imitates art, a mirror world which inspired the Qing literatus Chen Sen (ca. 1796-1870) to write a full-length novel, Pinhua baojia (A precious mirror for judging flowers, 1849). I have discussed the gender dialectic of this novel in detail elsewhere:38 heterosexual and homosexual males are seen as jointly participating in an escapade in developing, or even discovering, their alternative desires. It projects a society's desire to see what it wishes to see. When instinctive and institutional motives are so mixed

together, a new constellation of sexual subjectivities arises. The theatrical performance of female impersonation continued to thrive into the

twentieth century, culminating in the celebration of Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu WEE fFk (1904-1958), Xun Huisheng 4tL (1900-1966), and Shang Xiaoyun /J\ (1900-1973) as "the four greatest female impersonators" in the Beijing opera of the time.39 Mei Lanfang, in particular, was able to achieve the status of a national treasure, and this is where Lu Xun intervened, with his diatribe that "the greatest, most long-lasting, and most popular art in China is man impersonating woman." In my subsequent discussion of Begonia, more will be said about the rise and fall of female impersonation in Beijing

Splendor, pp. 61-71; Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 56-161; Matthew Sommer, "The Penetrated Male in Late Imperial China: Judicial Constructions and Social Stigma," Modern China, 23, 2 (1997): 140-80.

38Wang, Fin-de-siecle Splendor, pp. 61-71.

39For the lives and careers of these female impersonators, see Xu Jichuan et al., Zhongguo sida mingdan.

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opera in the Republican era. Suffice it to say that for Lu Xun and his followers, female impersonation confuses gender distinctions and therefore emasculates the already enfeebled image of Chinese nationality. Worse, this practice hides legal, economic, and ethical injustices; behind their glamorous female exteriors is the truth that most boy actors have been "made" into women, by brute force, if necessary. As a result their natural desires will necessarily be perverse, and their unnatural advantages can only add to that perversion. The art of female impersonation, accordingly, must be regarded as a most deceptive form of incarceration-Lu Xun's favorite image-trapping Chinese men in gender and social roles in disregard of what they want or should want.

Where Lu Xun leaves off, Ba Jin takes over, in a story like "The Second Mother." Ba Jin shares Lu Xun's predilection for revealing social and sexual abuses in the practice of female impersonation. But along the way he is more willing to toy with other implications, due to his Anarchist bias. For him, impersonation, besides hinting at incarceration, may also be a staged form of emancipation, one that liberates the trapped souls of a society and enables them to assume roles they otherwise would have been denied. Thus at the climax of his gender anarchy, as in the case of "The Second Mother," on the ruins of the Confucian family a premature "Queer family" is established.

We are now back to where we started our reading: an orphan searches for his lost mother and ends up making a female impersonator his Second Mother. Can a man in drag assume the role of a mother? More, is this male mother to be identified with China? In her survey of the visual and textual representation of China, Rey Chow coins the term "primitive passions" to describe the emotional symptom of artists and audiences obsessed with China. In cinema as in literature, suggests Chow, one constantly encounters figures or scenes presented in such a raw and impoverished manner as to evoke a mixed feeling of repugnance and fascination.40 Through these images China appears to be the eternal focus that arouses one's "primitive passions"-an ambivalent yearning for long-lost origins. At the base of these primitive passions is a peculiar nostalgia, not so much about the primal scene of loss as about the apparatus through which the primal scene took shape. Following Chow's theory, one finds a powerful manifestation of the "primitive passions" in the peculiarly Chinese parade of suffering mothers. By naming China mother (or vice versa), writers and readers prolong infantile, originary longing while at the same time they betray deep-seated reluctance to "configure" a Chinese subjectivity.41

The above analysis of Ba Jin's mother-country complex adds to Chow's "primitive passions" an additional dimension. As his mother-country, China of course means a lot to Ba Jin. But in his expanding Anarchist vision, China serves at best as a mediating point on his way toward a modus vivendi that transcends all governments and nations.

40Rey Chow, Primitive Passions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 21-22.

41Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, chapter 4; Lung-kee Sun, Wei duannai de minzu, chapters 2-3.

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In a way China exerts her inspiring force on the writer only by default, just as the Mother motivates the search of the boy narrator for identity because of her absence. If the boy narrator, in his longing for his lost Mother, can "conjure up a mother out of nowhere" and endear himself to a surrogate mother, with passion even stronger than for the original, then, by corollary, Ba Jin can be justified for "conjuring up" a new mother-country, one inspired by China, but far more endearing in her political magnificence-despite or perhaps because of the perversity in the final solution.

The primitive thrust in Ba Jin's story and the political theory behind it raises more issues as it prevails on an artificial-theatrical-foundation. The Second Mother appears to be counter-productive by traditional ethical, erotic, or biological standards. She is incapable of a mother's natural vocation of procreation and preservation but is instead only a plaything subject to male desire and consumption. She arouses in the young boy a flux of "primitive passions" which later proves to result from a willing suspension of disbelief on both parties. Masquerade is the key to their discovery of genuine feelings. When ethics, erotics, and theatrics are blended, "primitive passions" reveal roots in what I will term "putative passions." But Ba Jin would have argued, somewhat anachronistically, that insofar as "primitive passions" are always already derivative of a lost origin as Mother, isn't a Second Mother, twice removed from the motherly position because of his social class and gender orientation, more worthy of "primitive passions?"

Ba Jin's idea "The Second Mother" might even appear as a replay for informed readers of a narrative tradition about mothering that arose in late imperial China. Coming to mind is a now-famous story, "Nan Mengmu jiaohe sanqian" S-tf X (A male Mencius's mother educates a son and moves house three times), by the early Qing literatus Li Yu 4ffi (1601-1689). In the story, the young hero is so driven by passion for his lover that he castrates himself to show his unconditional self-sacrifice and chastity. After the death of the lover, this young (wo)man raises the lover's son from a previous legitimate marriage. (S)he even changes homes three times, as was the case with Mencius' mother, to ensure the boy's proper education and eventual success in the civil service examination. For his (her) feminine virtues and maternal dedication, the hero(ine) earns the title of "male Mencius Mother."

Li Yu's imagination lets him play with the rules of romantic literature in such a relentless way as to turn all the Confucian morals against themselves. In his study of Li Yu Patrick Hanan points out that the story pokes fun at such prominent themes of Chinese fiction as "heterosexual love, heterosexual marriage, chaste widowhood, and strict motherhood."42 Taking Hanan's observation one step further, one could say Li Yu ridicules not only the moral and sexual prudery of "normal" society but also the self-deception and hypocrisy of those homosexuals who are oppressed by that society

42Patrick Hanan, Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 175; See also Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University, 1988), pp. 97-8. See also Sophie Volpp, "The Discourse of Male Mother: Li Yu's 'A Male Mencius Mother."' Positions, 2, 1 (1994): 113-32.

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yet choose nonetheless to obey the strictest aspects of its laws. Thus, by pushing ribald imagination to its limits, Li Yu's story renders an ironic critique of the moral and sexual transgressions and limits of a premodern moment.

More than three hundred years after Li Yu's caricature of the ethics and erotics of the late Ming and early Qing society, Ba Jin took up similar issues but he reached rather different conclusions. Where Li Yu appears frivolously cruel, Ba Jin lavishes humanitarian sentimentalism; where Li Yu aims at arousing laughter, Ba Jin induces tears and a "call to arms." As playful interpreter of the late Ming cult of passion or feeling (qingjiao), Li Yu appears far more tolerant than May Fourth liberals in acknowledging the multifarious possibilities of human desire, and he is not afraid of laughing at, and laughing with, any of its deviations. In "Male Mencius Mother" a woman is made by voluntary castration, and male homosexual desire is as much endorsed as it is ridiculed in light of the womanly "natural" rights to widowhood and maternity. For all its embedded irrationalities, these events happen in Li Yu's world as if they did no harm, at least no more than could be done within a Confucian edifice of benevolence and propriety.

By the time Ba Jin came along, Chinese literature had long subscribed to the age of enlightenment and yet this literature became so engaged in rectifying known evils that it refused to tolerate unconventional goods. With the ambiguous resolution of "The Second Mother" Ba Jin seems to find a momentary relief from the strictures of mainstream reformism. Still, his Anarchist carnival is evoked only as a remedy for social cannibalism, and his Second Mother is introduced not to poke fun at but to indict the symbolic castration of Chinese humanity. Nowhere in Ba Jin's story can one rediscover the wry and flamboyant moods of Li Yu's fiction. Whenever passion is invoked, it is still excused in the name of compassion.

Last but not least, by way of Li Yu's story, we can also rethink the most visible and yet most obscure layer of Ba Jin's story, the layer of homo-eroticism and transvestism. By all accounts, the story is motivated by these arguably deviant forms of Chinese sexuality. Though he never makes any direct reference to homosexuality in the story, Ba Jin must have assumed that it is a shared presumption between his characters and readers, and that his task is to integrate this unspeakable sexuality into the gender discourse of his humanitarian anarchy.

Thus next to the climax where the boy narrator calls the Second Mother "Mother," an equally significant moment happens when the Second Mother calls the boy narrator his "Brother." All men are brothers. "Brotherly" love is articulated as the utopian dominator among all forms of human emotional faculties. A feminist can criticize that this is where the story's male homoeroticism is subsumed by male homosocial bonding. In a story about anarchist fraternity, woman in the image of mother is sanctioned only insofar as she helps substantiate the male-centered federation. A different reading suggests that, as long as man-in-drag has to come onstage to impersonate Mother/China, modern Chinese masculinity has yet to be fully remolded. Ba Jin's male mother blurs the line of traditional gender politics, forcing us to begin the remodification of Lu Xun's famous attack on impersonation.

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Immediately after its publication Ba Jin seems to have already sensed the slippery gender dialectic of "The Second Mother." The story first appeared in his 1932 short story collection Mobu ji -~tiU (Cleaning cloth) with the title "The Second Mother." It was retitled "Muqin" or "Mother" when re-published in his 1934 story collection Chenmo ji riLM. (Silence). "The second" was gone, but it was added back to "Mother" in later reprints. What made Ba Jin change his mind and then relent? Naming and renaming "Mother" seems to be not mere play with rhetoric but symptoms of an author wrestling with the ethical and gender legitimacies implied in all naming.

The most significant truncation of the story took place in the fifties, however, when Ba Jin changed the gender attribute of his Second Mother from a man to a woman. In that version, the Second Mother is said to be no more than a poor woman opera singer in search of her long lost brother in the boy narrator.43 The Second Mother's sexual change on paper, significantly, coincided with the triumph of a male national discourse in the People's Republic of China. It coincided with the abolition of female impersonation, i.e. the restriction of male students to male roles (and female students to female roles), in the curricula of opera schools nationwide.

The motive for Ba Jin's textual surgery of "The Second Mother" may have less to do with its implicit homosexuality, since it could too easily be denounced as defending the corruptions of the old society. When Ba Jin rectified the Second Mother's gender, he might have been more concerned to conform to the ethical and political order than to introduce strict separation of the genders. Gone were the days when Ba Jin advocated a society that would break the bonds of class, gender, ethical, national and historical consciousness. His refusal to abide by any prescribed model of family or other social institutions had once challenged Marxism's determinist order. And his simultaneous embrace of social normalcy and social abnormality threatened to expose the essential antihistorical puritanism of the Marxist Revolutionaries, who were in the final analysis more attuned to traditional violence and dogmatism than to tolerance and innovation. The paradox was, that by reducing the "male mother" to a "real woman," the repentant Ba Jin helped carry out the emasculation of all Chinese males, and ultimately the political defeminization of all Chinese, female and male alike.

Gender Rehabilitation

Arguably the most popular novel of the Second Sino-Japanese War period, Qin Shouou's Begonia has enjoyed a dubious position ever since its serialization in Shanghai in 1941. When the novel first appeared on the "Chunqiu" *tk (Autumn and fall) literary page of the newspaper Shenbao FtP, in February, 1941, Shanghai had entered its fifth year as a wartime "orphaned island" city. As Japanese troops swept through other parts of China, Shanghai was left "bracketed" thanks to her semi-colonial status. This momentary pause in history gave rise to the city's miraculous prosperity,

43The revised version has been adopted as a definitive edition of "Dier de muqin" in the PRC since the fifties.

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particularly in the culture industries. The phenomenal success of Begonia was a case- in-point for such political circumstances. The novel already had drawn thousands of fans during its ten-month newspaper serialization, and it was an immediate bestseller when the bound edition came out the next year. A stage adaptation won equal popularity in 1943, followed by a tanci narrative production and a movie, which also were box office hits.4 Moreover, the next five decades would hold a continuously warm reception for the novel in various media formats, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and on mainland China.

Literary history, however, has given this novel little credit. To mainstream critics, a novel like Begonia was negligent for having failed to strike clear patriotic postures during the war. Spanning the twenties through the forties, the novel vividly portrays Chinese warlord brutalities but makes only a brief reference to the war. Qin Shouou may have had good reason to be evasive about the war because when the first edition of Begonia was published in 1942, Shanghai had already fallen into Japanese hands and censorship was strictly enforced. But Qin always insisted that, unobvious as it may seem, Begonia was a patriotic novel. He never fully exonerated himself, and the dispute about Qin's conformity to the standards of patriotism has continued to date.45

Can a novel be enrolled in the canon of wartime literature even if it barely touches on Japanese aggression and, more, attributes Chinese misery mostly to the evildoing of Chinese warlords? Prominent political issues aside, a more deep-seated reason for Begonia's suspect position may be that it belonged to the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school of fiction. Until recently this genre was deemed inferior to the May-Fourth tradition in subject matter, rhetorical register, authorship, and readership,46 and as such it was presumably incapable of being taken seriously.

44Begonia was published first in July, 1942; its movie copyright was obtained by the famous director Maxu Weibang in August, 1942 and the movie was premiered in late December, 1943. A stage production based on the novel ran from December, 1942 to May 1943, with more than 150 performances. It was followed by other forms of performing arts such as the tanci narrative. For the serialization, publication, and reception of Qiuhaitang (Begonia), see, for example, Fan Boqun ;fS T, Minguo tongsu xiaoshuo yuanyang hudie pai ljdJ\ I i4,A ai l (Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly school: the popular fiction in the Republican China) (Taipei: Guanwen tiandi zazhishe, 1989), pp. 251-68; Fan Boqun ^{flE, ed. Zhongguo jinxiandai tongsu wenxueshi t4 ! f Zt@-~Set (A history of popular literature in late Qing and modern China) (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 305-12; Wei Shaochang I,, H, Wokan yuanyang hudie pai R -,~V W!J; (My view of Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction) (Taipei: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1992), pp. 148-55.

45See, for examples, Fan Boqun's edited book, Zhongguo jinxiandai tongsu wenxueshi which was published in 2000.

46For a general survey of the Mandarin Ducks school fiction in English, see Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Also see Thomas Barthelein, "'Mirrors of Transition': Conflicting Images of Society in Change from Popular Chinese Social Novels, 1908 to 1930," Modern China, 25,2 (1999): 204-27.

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My reading, however, suggests that Begonia is one of the few wartime novels that transcend the limitations of reportage and propaganda. Although barely referring to the war, it offers a unique perspective from which to view a nation in crisis. Instead of foreign invasions, it focuses on homefront, and instead of the battlefield, it describes life-and-death struggles in a theatre. Indeed, the novel's theatrical motif is crucial because among other things it fully situates Qin Shouou's patriotic endeavors. He is a Mandarin Ducks writer assuming a May Fourth discursive posture, and, being under Japanese rule, he dresses up patriotic agony as harmless romance. In any case, apart from the tactics of wartime publication, Qin Shouou still leads attentive readers toward a rethinking of the issues of performity and representation, insofar as readers are ready to undertake a radical reconfiguration of their national identities.

Impersonating China

The plot of Begonia evolves along with the rise and fall of a Beijing opera singer, from early Republican days to the Sino-Japanese war. Its protagonist, Wu Yuqin 3T1 X, first appears as a popular Beijing Opera female impersonator. In Beijing and in Tianjin he draws hundreds of female and male fans, including the warlord Yuan Baofan AlY. Despite his popularity, Wu is discontented with his female stage role, especially so when it results in unsolicited homosexual liaisons off the stage. He wants to be a "real" man of the theatre. Wu escapes Warlord Yuan's approach, only to fall in love with Luo Xiangqi ,AP, a girl student recently tricked into becoming a concubine of-none other than Warlord Yuan! The opera singer and the concubine lead a clandestine life together, and as a result their daughter, Meibao vf, is born. Their relationship is finally exposed, and Warlord Yuan punishes Wu not by killing him but by carving a big cross on his face. Wu's career is ruined.

From such a summary of part one of Begonia, one can already discern the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies style. Qin Shou-ou draws his characters from stereotypes of the old society, relies heavily on melodramatic twists, indulges in sentimentalism, and takes a narrative stance suggestive more of an old-time storyteller than of an enlightened representative of the New Literati. But Qin differentiates himself from his Late Qing and Mandarin Ducks predecessors by grafting his novel onto nationalist discourse. Under his pen the triangle between warlord, Chinese opera actor, and concubine, a stale convention of Mandarin Ducks fiction, is turned into an allegory of national self-renewal. Qiu Haitang's struggle to become a man is presented in parallel with a growing romantic and nationalist consciousness.

Nationalism, admittedly, had itself become a literary cliche by the early forties, but it had seldom been so ingeniously packaged in a popular formula as in the case of Begonia. This is where Qin Shouou broke new ground. By combining an incredible romantic tear-jerker with an equally incredible allegory of political emancipation, Qin Shouou blended the crude and predictable discourse of patriotism with the irresistible and vulgar discourse of sentimentalism, reaching a vast audience that could hardly understand, much less imbibe, the new political consciousness. Thus, Begonia

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demonstrates both an eager approximation of mainstream subjects and a shrewd appropriation of "marketable" vulgarity in service of the new national awareness.

All these arguments hinge on the protagonist Wu Yuqin's pursuit of gender identity. At the suggestion of Yuan Shaowen M,,R, a conscientious patron who happens to be Warlord Yuan's cousin, Wu renames himself Qiu Haitang or Begonia-a flowering plant whose leaves resemble the shape of China. "The map of China is shaped like a Begonia leaf. Japan and the other invaders are just bugs eating the leaf...If these bugs can't be driven away now, they'll soon devour the whole leaf.'A7 To express his patriotism, Begonia even draws a painting of a begonia leaf being consumed by insects and has it hung on the wall; he titles it "chumu jingxin" f ,,L, or "eyes open in shock.A48

The re-naming of Begonia triggers a cluster of analogies between the young female impersonator and his nation. Just as Begonia suffers from unfulfilled manhood, so China appears to be a country suffering from frustrated sovereignty. For the newly inspired Begonia, singing female parts on stage can no longer be mere routine performances, any more than a dramatized call on the shared fate between a humiliated man and a humiliated nation. Impersonation helps flesh out gender and national authenticity in distortion.

Compared with the aforementioned works with similar subject matters, such as Chen Sen's A Mirror of Judging Flowers and Ba Jin's "The Second Mother," Begonia clearly registers its protagonist's awakening to his gender ambiguity and his attempt at altering the set course of fate. But there will be an irony in Qin Shouou's treatment of Begonia's struggle after he has his stage name changed. Instead of pursuing a new social role, as would have been expected of a formulaic May Fourth hero, Begonia settles for fame and fortune as a female impersonator. Meanwhile he directs his desire somewhere else by falling in love with Warlord Yuan's embittered concubine Luo Xiangqi. Whereas Warlord Yuan wants Begonia because he looks like a gorgeous woman on stage, Luo Xiangqi is charmed by him because he is definitely not a woman off stage. More complications ensue. Xiangqi encourages Begonia to cultivate his masculinity, to the point where Begonia sings for her a xiaosheng /J\t aria, written for a young man's role, thus consummating their love that night. Begonia capitalizes on his being both man and woman. His profession as an effeminate becomes good camouflage for his secret, masculine love affair, and it provides him with the extravagant

resources to afford such an affair. Left unattended, ironically enough, is the nationalist cause, which presumably gave Begonia the idea of this new, exciting double-life.

A critic like Lu Xun would not have approved of Begonia's way of "becoming a man." The actor's romance at best proves Lu Xun's fear of female impersonation: by playing with his gender ambiguity, Begonia personally embodies the ambiguities in Chinese civilization. And so he acts out Lu Xun's curse that female impersonators are like un-castrated eunuchs. Whereas a eunuch, a man-turned-nonman by reason of

47Ibid., p. 19.

48Ibid.

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castration, is prevented from sexual activity, a female impersonator represents a society in sexual chaos because in his feminine guise he hides a male sexual drive and intentions.

The arrest and private trial of Begonia and Luo Xiangqi at Warlord Yuan's residence best symbolizes this new crisis. Warlord Yuan is outraged by Luo Xiangqi less because she betrayed him than because Begonia turns out to be her seducer-the man he once wanted for himself. On the other hand, for all their adulterous behavior, Begonia and Luo Xiangqi win our sympathy because both are people wronged by a society whose claim to justice and morality is questionable. They are nevertheless to be faulted for their inadequate resistance and naivete in the face of danger. When homosexual and heterosexual desire, familial and social justice mix, Qin Shouou demonstrates a keen awareness of the conflicting ethical/sexual forces of his time, and he is willing to push the conflict even further. At the suggestion of one of his followers, Warlord Yuan decides not to kill Begonia; he instead prolongs the actor's pain and humiliation by cutting the cross on his face.

A Scarred Face and A Severed Head

As a physical trace of a wound, a scar represents the body's way of simultaneously affirming and denying a certain man-made or accidental injury. The scar is a sign of healing, and sealing, of that which has been unnaturally opened and exposed. But so long as the line of laceration remains, it is a reminder of the moment of violence. Implied in the scar is its corporeal testimony, pointing to the infliction upon the body of intrusion, to the passage of time, and to a contested desire to deny, while revisiting, the scene of violence. Upon the examination of one's scars, memories are brought back and an implicit narrative takes shape.49

By the early forties descriptions of wounds and scars had become subjects familiar to modern Chinese readers. I have discussed elsewhere how Lu Xun's obsession with

decapitation-the fatal wound that never scars-motivated his inscription of Chinese literary modernity. For Lu Xun, the headless body spews out a maimed national imaginary, and the ontological break with the past is manifested as physical mutilation. Hence the (truncated) origin of modern Chinese literature.50 I argue that the scarring of Begonia's face contains a somatic allegory no less provocative than the one evoked by Lu Xun's from a headless body. Given that Begonia was created to embody China, any violence inflicted on the actor takes on a symbolic dimension as a crime perpetrated upon the nation. Therefore, when Warlord Yuan cuts into Begonia's face, he is not merely behaving like a cuckolded patriarch punishing the seducer of one of his concubines; rather he impresses one more as an imperial autocrat abusing an unfaithful slave. The informed reader understands that Yuan's choice of punishment represents

49Odysseus' scar, therefore, is treated as that which motivated the mimetic discourse of Western realist narrative in Auerbach's classic study. See, Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), chapter 1.

50See my discussion in "Lu Xu, Shen Congwen, and Decapitation."

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something far more than it appears; among others it reminds one of the ancient penal device qing . or inscribing/tattooing signs of criminality on the convict's face.51 With his sword Yuan reinscribes his power over the actor's body; the scar on Begonia's face is meant to be a permanent reminder not only of his sexual misconduct but also of his social and political vulnerability.

The violation of Begonia, however, may warrant a different reading. For critics in the vein of Lu Xun, Begonia may be excused for his sexual misdemeanor, but is still liable on a larger account, since his problem did start from a matter of face. One needs to rethink the meaning of that scar: the scar is left on the face of Begonia as a female impersonator. Begonia's face is a male face that, when properly made up, will be taken for a woman's-a face that tantalizes its audience because it replaces depth, biological or social, with charm. In the eyes of the May Fourth hard-liners, Begonia's face could not evoke any aesthetic simulacrum but a morally ingrained crisis of representation. As if his stage transvestitism were not dubious enough, Begonia causes more ambiguities when he assumes a cluster of new faces off stage, as patriot, as lover, as husband, as father, and as Chinese Everyman. It is in this realm of "real life" that Begonia is seen as blurring the distinction between performity and lived experience.

In an essay "Luelun zhongguo ren de lian" MB:h EP), S n] (A brief discussion of the Chinese face, 1927), Lu Xun observes that, compared with Westerners and Japanese, Chinese appear to lack something in their faces. What Chinese lack, and what Westerners have, is "a bestial nature" or shouxing Kt'. For Lu Xun, this shortage of bestial nature in the Chinese face does not mean that Chinese are more human; instead, it points to the docile and tamed character of a domesticated animal. Cultured by the long tradition, the Chinese face has become so malleable and "obscure" that it betrays the deficiency of the Chinese national character. Lu Xun could not tolerate Chinese people's callous yet gratified facial expressions at the beheading of some nameless compatriot. He also abhored the way in which "Chinese open their mouths and let their jaws drop way down when marveling at a certain strange incident or a pretty woman."52

Lu Xun would have no doubt extend his attack to the face of "the pretty woman" had he known it belongs to a man. Extrapolating this Lu Xunesque logic, one sees in Begonia's "face-off" adventure a double betrayal. When identifying himself with China, Begonia destabilizes rather than strengthens his nation's gender identity. And when diverting his newly gained nationalist sentiment to personal, heterosexual desire, this female impersonator insults nationalism, a sentiment which above all demands that one do away with individual, erotic yearnings in deference to love for one's nation. Insofar as he mixes the art of simulation with reality, Begonia is not an innocent victim. Rather he acts out a familiar malaise of bad faith and as such he is as culpable

51See, for example, Wang Yongkuan's IEijIt discussion in Zhongguo gudai kuxing tP Mt f JiffU (Brutal forms of punishment in ancient China) (Taipei: Yunlong chubanshe, 1991). pp. 93-103.

52Lu Xun, "Luelun zhongguo ren de lian" XR''Jff ,i .)\ (A brief discussion of the Chinese face), Lu Xun Wenji, 3: 413.

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as the Chinese spy Lu Xun saw in the controversial slide show. Where the Chinese spy scouts for foreign armies who make China a paradeground for their cruelties, the female impersonator belies his origins in service of perversions which make the theatre a showplace of their temptations.

The last twist of the argument could be this: since Begonia's face is the origin of his seductive power, to dissipate its spell, something as drastic as scarring must be regarded as a necessary evil. Without beauty, Begonia no longer enchants; rather he can live life regardless of appearance, as a "real man." For those who sense the cynicism of such logic, Lu Xun might be brought to its defense. Rethink his comment on the necessity of decapitation: "the people of a weak and backward country, however, strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made examples of, or to witness futile spectacles; and it does not really matter how many of them die of illness.'"3 For Lu Xun, before the Chinese soul is rehabilitated, the Chinese body will be used as the raw material for decapitations and futile suffering. And, until the Chinese national subjectivity is reformed, it does not really matter how many pretty faces are slashed, or cut in pieces, by brutish Chinese armies. This logic can lead (did lead) to most sinister conclusions. Thanks to War Lord Yuan's exquisitely Chinese justice, Begonia is at last forced into the manhood he has always yearned for. Warlord Yuan is thus fiendish persecutor, secret sharer, and deus ex machina all in one!

But one must ask whether the kind of manhood imposed on-carved into-Begonia really brings him this ideal masculinity. It will be recalled that, with his decapitation complex, Lu Xun ended up having trapped his nationalist ontology in a "headless condition," the dichotomy of body and soul bringing him nothing but bifurcation of the terrible Void of Identity which haunted him. When turning to Begonia's rescue by deformation, one discerns a parallel recapitulation of a lack in the unsatisfactory opposition created to hide it. That is, Begonia's scar does not merely make him a man by cutting off his means of continuing his feminine past; it also incises into Begonia's face the symbol of his infamous prior achievements. As will be shown, the female impersonator may (accidentally) restore his masculinity as a result of disfiguration, but paradoxically enough, the scar also emasculates him, depriving him of male pride, if any is left. It injects into Begonia's imagination the haunting idea of lack, or spiritual castration.

The Making A Male Mother

As the story resumes, Begonia, upon seeing his scarred face in the mirror, collapses and almost loses his will to live. Having lost his face, he can no longer carry on his career. Meanwhile Warlord Yuan has detained Luo Xiangqi and is looking for new excuses to humiliate him. To survive, Begonia decides to take his daughter Meibao and leave Beijing for good. In the following episodes, we see Begonia returning to his

53Lu Xun, preface to Nahan NU)fi (A Call to Arms), in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans.

Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1981),p. 3

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home village, reunited with his peasant brothers, hiding away from curious village folks, and sulking continuously about his fate. When his savings are almost gone, he comes to realize that, for his daughter's sake, he must start life anew. He overcomes his embarassment and joins his brothers as a farmer. He changes his name again, this time from Begonia to the rural Laosan _E, becoming just Wu The Third.

As Qin Shouou puts it in his preface to the novel, "in the most wretched circumstances Begonia returns to the country, engaging in the task that we Chinese should all be proud of and obliged to-farming."54 Farming represents for Qin the foundation of Chinese civilization. If theatre encapsulates the illusory and decadent nature of city life, agriculture brings one back to the congenial, authentic contact with mother earth. Qin takes pains to describe the trials Begonia undergoes in learning to be a good peasant. Working hard under the sun day after day, the ex-female impersonator becomes tanned and coarse, and his erstwhile effete mannerisms change into those of a rustic countryman. As time passes, "nobody can associate this dark, haggard, middle- aged-looking peasant with the star who charmed every city just a few years ago."55

Nevertheless, Begonia's metamorphosis is not complete. He has come to the countryside with his daughter Meibao and, as the narrator keeps reminding us, bringing up Meibao becomes the only goal of his life. In the years that follow, we are told, Begonia undergoes all the hardships to ensure Meibao's good life and education. To his consolation, Meibao grows up to become a pretty, intelligent, and filial daughter.

Echoing Qin Shouou's idealization of the Chinese earth, critics have discussed the peaceful days Begonia and Meibao lead in the countryside as a return to the roots of "Chinese everyday life," one underlined by its self-sufficient domestic economy and ethics.56 What they have ignored is the fact that, this idyllic episode may project nothing but Qin's own wartime yearning for an earthy utopia. There are cautionary elements about Begonia's "everyday life." Despite his hard work in the field, Begonia is never an integral part of the village. Nor can he truly forget his scar, which always scares people on first encounter. Most important of all, although he is a loving father, he cannot make up for the absence of a woman householder in his home.

We thus come to the key issue of the second part of the novel, about the absent mother. As the narrator tells us, given all the circumstances, Begonia actually has several chances to be reunited with Luo Xiangqi, especially so after Warlord Yuan loses power. But he deliberately bypasses these chances, and later on he even rejects his daughter's request for a mother. He tells the village folks that his wife Luo Xiangqi is dead.

Along with Qin Shouou one can conclude that, as someone who has "lost his face," Begonia cannot bring himself to see Luo Xiangqi, the person who truly appreciates his male identity. I suspect that the scarred actor may harbor a deeper motivation. Luo

54Qin Shouou, Preface to Begonia, p. 3.

55Ibid, p. 176.

56Mau-sang Ng, "Popular Fiction and the Culture of Everyday Life: A Cultural Analysis of Qin Shouou's Qiuhaitang," Modern China, 20, 2 (1994): 131-56.

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Xiangqi is not only Begonia's lover and common-law wife; insofar as she encouraged the female impersonator to recognize his gender, to become a "born-again" man, she played a spiritual mother role too. This fact adds one more psychological dimension to Begonia's resistance against being reunited with her. His inferiority complex resulting from the scar notwithstanding, Begonia shows an increasing tendency toward self- inflicted loneliness and suffering-masochism, indeed-as if only through pain and separation could he atone for his impossible love for Xiangqi.57

What concerns me here is how Meibao's repeated invocation of her missing mother calls forth Begonia's longing for his own lost object of desire, and how, in answering Meibao's need, he quietly transforms his life into a theatre by assuming a mother-like role. As the years continue, Begonia takes care of every detail of Meibao's life; he acts as if he were determined to "create a mother from the void," in a way reminiscent of the orphan boy in Ba Jin's "Second Mother." Begonia's endeavor excels, however, in that he has the expertise to carry out the fantasy. Before he was a father, he was in the first place a superb impersonator of feminine roles. Now, performing on the stage of ordinary life, he does not even need make-up or costumes to activate the impersonation. Driven by paternal as well as maternal love for Meibao, he "naturally" acts out, for Meibao as for himself, a semblance of the "Second Mother."

If his is a story about a Chinese man's search for masculinity, Begonia's demonstration of motherly nature must lead one to insinuate the novel's actual premises. When hundreds and thousands of fathers and sons are marching toward the frontlines, Begonia does his best by staying at home, taking care of his daughter like a true mother. The call for motherhood, it will be recalled, originated with the sentimental strain of May Fourth nationalism and it gained increasing currency during wartime. To safeguard Mother China and eventually to return to her tender embrace became as much a moral imperative as the emotional need to survive hard times. To that extent a novel like Begonia amplifies the national imaginary of motherhood. Although masculinity is what the formation of the national subjectivity is all about, it presupposes the continued invocation of, and return to, motherhood, the only form of femininity sanctioned by wartime discourse. (The hundreds and thousands of mothers and daughters were encouraged to stay at home and produce more sons for the frontlines, or if necessary, to work at the frontlines in motherly or other peculiarly feminine occupations.) My point, nevertheless, is that as a Mandarin Ducks writer, Qin cannot curb his inherent impulse to melodramatize his version of motherhood story and that,

57In a way his is already a case verging on masochism, a psychological mechanism which fashions the subjectivity through its self-deprecation and even self-negation. Freudian critics suggest that the masochistic impulse compels the subjectivity to reenact a "theatrics" of loss, above all the deprival of the desired origin, Mother. See, Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in "Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty" by Deleuze and "Venus in Furs" by Leopold von Sacher- Masoch, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989). For a recent application of masochism to modern Chinese literary texts, see, for example, Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, pp. 123-27; Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 143-56. It is interesting to note that both Chow and Tang use Ba Jin's works as cases-in-point.

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precisely by making a man a mother-like figure, Qin brings to the fore the sexual and gender complex the May Fourth Mother/China myth tries to suppress. What mainstream discourse fetishizes, Mandarin Ducks narrative transposes.

The Unmaking of A Male Mother

Halfway through the novel, the Second Sino-Japanese war breaks out. On the eve of the Japanese takeover of their village, Begonia and Meibao flee to the south. By then Begonia's health has deteriorated as a result of years of hard work and unhappiness. After all the ordeals of refugees, father and daughter arrive in Shanghai, only to meet more frustrations in the urban jungle. At the end of his wits, Begonia finds his way back to the stage, signing on as supporting acrobat, the least paid and most exhausting job in the traditional theater. From female impersonator to male impersonator, Begonia thus completes the circle of theatrical roles.

Mau-sang Ng suggests that in withstanding bruises, wounds, and harassments from leading actors, Begonia wins back fellow actors' and theater managers' admiration, and he has finally "succeeded, albeit, tragically, in his quest to acquire manliness--the singing of female roles is displaced by the masculinity of doing somersaults."58 This is an overstatement. Impoverishment, disease, and shame have already consumed the man's dignity; he is buying the last bit of his life in exchange for a little "manliness." He finally collapses on the stage, making a public spectacle of himself.

Now it is Meibao's turn to take care of her father, resorting to her secret talents at singing Chinese opera. As a street singer she makes a little money from one restaurant to another, till she comes across a young customer. The two develop a crush on one another and the young man confides in his aunt, who just happens to be Luo Xiangqi! The process through which Luo Xiangqi left Warlord Yuan and ended up in Shanghai comes as one long string of cliches. At stake here is how her surprise appearance and reunion with Meibao affects the relation between Begonia and Meibao. All along we have been informed of Meibao's dream to be reunited with her real mother, as opposed to Begonia's reluctance to discover her whereabouts. The return of Luo Xiangqi functions like a precondition for the ending of Begonia, not only because it serves as a device to consummate the genre's melodramatic expectations but also because it completes an inherent psychological circle. When Meibao finally sees her mother, it is a moment of fulfillment, one that makes each party's waiting and longing all these years seem worthwhile. From the perspective of the "maternalized" national imaginary we have discussed, the return of the missing mother fulfills the popular desire for a restoration of Mother China, the state of primordial plenitude.

But Begonia has not been brought into this scene of reunion, and his absence creates the final suspense of the novel. We are told that, as mother and daughter reunite, Begonia is dying in a dilapidated attic. He has hidden himself from Xiangqi

58Ng, 139.

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for almost twenty years. Now, bedridden and penniless, will he see his old beloved one last time? Upon learning his perilous condition, Xiangqi rushes to Begonia's bed in the hope of bringing him to the hospital. It is too late. Just moments before her and her daughter's arrival, Begonia has ended his life by jumping out of his window.

The death of Begonia saddened thousands of contemporary readers who would rather have seen the novel end in a grand, happy finale. Zhou Shoujuan J , f Q, Qin Shouou's friend and editor-in-chief of the Shenbao literary supplement in which Begonia was serialized, even ventured to write a sequel to resurrect the ill-fated actor after Qin rejected his request to do so. Zhou allegedly wrote the sequel for his three daughters, who were among the vociferously protesting fans.59 Mandarin Ducks fiction, of course, had a long tradition of concluding with the death of its protagonist(s); among the best examples are Xu Zhenya's ~,ti, (1889-1937) Yu Lihun T,L (Jade-pear spirit, 1911) and Zhang Henshui's R'R7Jt (1895-1967) Tixiao yinyuan ;XN,* (A romance in laughter and tears, 1930), two all-time bestsellers. For a genre specializing in sentimentalism, death-especially the untimely death of virtuous characters-was frequently invoked as a device to inspire sighs and tears. What then made the death scene of Begonia so controversial?

Qin Shouou actually offered three different versions of Begonia's death. In the 1941 Shenbao serialization version, Begonia dies at home moments before the arrival of Luo Xiangqi and Meibao. In the 1944 version, on which this discussion is based, he jumps from his window. In the 1957 version, he returns to the theatre despite his frail health and, upon seeing the arrival of his wife and daughter, rushes on stage, only to be fatally wounded by fellow actors playing swordsmen roles. Before he dies, he rants against the evils of the old society and entrusts Meibao to Xiangqi.60

Of the three endings Qin Shouou favored the second one. Deplorable as it is, Begonia's suicide reveals an aspect of his personality hitherto unknown to us. Having been through too many ups and downs in his life, he takes charge of ending his life as if he was still determined to take action in defining his own fate. In view of the actor's life-long pursuit of beauty in both male and female terms, scholars such as Fan Boqun suggest that Begonia's suicide is an artist's decision because it is the only way by which he can maintain his pride and leave Xianqi, the primal connoisseur of his art, a lasting memory of his beauty. By contrast, Qin Shouou's comment holds that the abrupt ending reflects nothing but the Buddhist view of the contingencies of life: Begonia's death is only part and parcel of the unexplainable and unending mutations of humanity.61 The two interpretations form a conventional dialogue, with one stressing the autonomy of art and beauty and the other inculcating the ephemeral nature of human illusions.

I suggest that Begonia the male mother must excuse himself from the world

59See Zhou Shoujuan WJgl|, Preface to Xin Qiuhaitang WfkCg: (Shanghai: Zhengqi shuju, 1949), pp. 1-4.

60See Fan Boqun, ed. Zhongguo jinxiandai tongsu wenxueshi, pp. 310-311. Ng, 152.

61Qin Shouou, Preface to Qouhaitang, p. 3.

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when the "real" mother returns. Despite his determined search for authentic love, gender, politics and family ethics, he proves to be at home the most when he takes up roles on behalf of these goals. The return of Luo Xiangqi reminds what he has failed to carry out, as a "real" man, and what he is actually good at, as a female impersonator. This is of course the ultimate dilemma for a novel claiming to redefine Chinese manhood. One can argue that, by jumping from the window to end his own life, Begonia manages an ultimate, unrepeatable affirmation of his right to choose his own life. It is a "final performance," one that terminates all previous ones. But if masculinity constitutes the core of the novel, there must be an irony to see only two women weeping over a man's body at the ending. Begonia tries to do away with his label as an emasculated man most of his life, and he dies an emaciated man.

Coda

With female impersonation as my point of reference, I have read Begonia as a text that lays bare the gender theatrics of Mandarin Ducks fiction. Qin Shouou found in the world of Beijing opera a repertoire of virtues-from teachings of ethical edification to the wisdom of surviving daily life-that obviously resonated with those endorsed by Mandarin Ducks fiction.62 But he could not be unaware that the theatre, just like the fictional genre he inhabited, suffered from a tarnished image in the eyes of modernity- minded critics. Beneath his chronicles of the joy and sadness of theatre life, Qin inserts a subtext, one that adumbrates the charms and limitations of Mandarin Ducks fiction.

The subject matter of his novel, female impersonation, invites an allegorical reading. Insofar as it is a "feminine" genre perfected in the hands of male writers, Mandarin Ducks fiction features a textual spectacle not unlike that of theatrical female impersonation. Both enchant us not because they are womanly arts as such but because they induce a specular sensation among the audiences making gender attributes appear to be transferable artifacts. In vocal terms, both depend on falsetto-a voice with such a high pitch and refined tonality that surpasses ordinary woman's-to cultivate the acoustic aspect of feminine similitude.

For mainstream readers and critics, the visual and vocal artificiality in female impersonation or in Mandarin Ducks fiction threatens to undermine the "effect of the real"-real man, real woman, real life, real modernity, real politics, real war-a guilty self-indulgence during the national crisis. Indeed, at a time when the whole nation was reverberating with battle cries, falsetto, whether textual or theatrical, was bound to grate and irritate the new establishment.

What Qin Shouou tried to accomplish with a novel like Begonia is not unlike what Begonia tries to accomplish in the novel: a textual as well as a sexual rehabilitation of masculinity (and reality). By having Begonia scarred, Qin Shouou enacts a symbolic surgery of his narrative, as a way to cut open the surface of the genre and reveal the "dark reality" hidden in it. At the violent laceration of Begonia's face, an old performing

62See Ng's discussion, pp. 139-41.

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art is torn apart. Defaced at the same time, by corollary, is the simulacrum brought about by the Mandarin Ducks vision of life.

I have argued, however, that the scar does not reveal reality any more than conceal it. Begonia accomplishes his most intriguing performance, as the Second Mother, only after he is denied the privilege of impersonating woman on stage. The reality Qin Shouou and Begonia pursues best reveals its "effect" not in Begonia's metamorphosis but in the discrepancy between what he hopes to be and what he becomes. Genuine masculinity, just like genuine femininity, remains an object to be desired and named best in fictional terms.

While Begonia may never be able to grapple with the evasive nature of his identity, his wartime readers must have. Traditional critics hold that they enjoyed the novel merely as an escapade. But along the way they must have sensed that the textual break-and physical scar-dramatized their truncated circumstances in imagining and embodying China. For all the national machine mandating heroism and machismo, majority wartime Chinese, especially those who lived in occupied areas such as Shanghai, were keenly aware of their incomplete eligibility for total, virile citizenship and their subjection to changing roles so as to survive Chinese reality. It is in this sense that Begonia "embodies the spirit of Chinese people."

One more comment on the "effect of the real" accomplished by Begonia. In an uncanny way it prefigured the political choice of selected female impersonators in real life in the forties. The novel makes a clear reference to Cheng Yanqiu, one of the Four Great Female Impersonators in the Republican era. Cheng won plaudits for his melancholy and repressed tonal interpretation; in fact he is cited in the novel as Begonia's rival before the latter's career was ruined by his scar. Cheng too was celebrated for playing roles of delicate, suffering women in traditional society. Offstage, however, Cheng appears to have been a man of tall and robust physique. After the fall of Beijing, Cheng, like most of his colleagues, kept a low profile under the Japanese and their collaborators. He carried on with his performances, till one day in November of 1941, when he is said to have been harassed by several inspectors at the Beijing railway station, so much so that he lost his temper and scuffled with them. As the story goes, Cheng turned out to be a good at martial arts and he succeeded in knocking out his adversaries in a matter of seconds.63 Thus the renowned female impersonator became a chivalric superman for the citizens of Beijing, a fine example of life imitating art. Later in 1943, in protest of the continued Japanese oppression, Cheng Yanqiu quit the stage altogether and took shelter in a suburb of Beijing, where he led a life as a farmer.64 He thus lived out the fate assigned to his fictive rival Begonia.

Yet more pertinent was the case of Mei Lanfang, the leading modern Chinese

63Xu Jichuan et al., Zhongguo sida mingdan, pp. 176-77. Hu Jinzhao MiS3U[J, Cheng Yanqiu t 4mRk (Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 1987), pp. 124-28.

64Ibid., pp. 178-79. Hu Jinzhao, pp.129-34; also see, Ding Bingsui T-_, Qingyi, hualian, xiaochou A a I X (Gentle women, masculine figures, and clowns) (Taipei; published by the author, 1979), p. 61.

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Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 25 (2003)

female impersonator and the presumed target of Lu Xun's critique. In 1938, one year after the breakout of the war, Mei Lanfang brought his troupe and family to Hong Kong and took refuge there after his performance was over. In the following three years he continuously turned down Japanese invitations to return to the stage. Hong Kong fell into Japanese hands after Pearl Harbor, and Mei was again under pressures to cooperate. But in early 1942, Mei Lanfang made a public appearance which shocked both his fans and enemies-he had grown a mustache.65 With this conspicuous flaunting of a male facial trait, Mei Lanfang gestured farewell to his past as female impersonator, a drastic deed indeed. In a way, his mustache brings to mind Begonia's scar, in that both are bodily signs of a return under duress to ordinary manhood, and that both are redundant signs written on an otherwise impeccable (sur)face of theatrical illusion.

But Mei Lanfang's mustache after all became the prop of another form of his performance, this time on the stage of life. More than Cheng Yanqiu's demonstration of martial skills and seclusion as a farmer, the mustache of Mei Lanfang represents the ultimate token of the Chinese opera's contribution to the manmade campaign of patriotism. In response to national crises, the two female impersonators were willing to let go of their makeup and costumes and reveal their true faces as patriotic men. They were hailed as new symbols of heroism. But compared to the millions of lives tortured and destroyed in the war, to what extent do we see a martial kick, a farmer's image, or a mustache represent the rejuvenated, male national subjectivity? Can it be possible that Mei Lanfang's and Cheng Yanqiu's live stunts constitute no more than part of the repertoire of wartime myths, of which the most important is masculinity lost and regained?

Both Cheng Yanqiu and Mei Lanfang resumed their stage lives after the war, but traces of incurable severance, of historical scars, had been left by the war on their theatrical careers. Thanks to his age and rural life during the wartime, Cheng Yanqiu had put on enormous weight, so much so that post-war audience was often stunned by his over-size stage physique.66 He was able to charm them nevertheless with his unique voice and stylized acting skills. Mei Lanfang shaved off his mustache on August 15, 1945, the day when China declared victory over Japan, as if newly won nationalist pride would permit him to resume his professional womanhood. And his performances were as popular as ever, despite obvious signs of age. For their fans, neither age nor weight could matter, and gender was not even an issue. But could such art withstand the hostility of the powerful and the indifference of the young?

Cheng Yanqiu and Mei Lanfang continued to perform after the founding of the new China. While they were respected as popular artists, their art of female impersonation had been abolished from the curriculum. In the new China, men were expected to act like men and women were supposed to act like women. Artists like Cheng and Mei had become national treasures, or more exactly, living antiques. Behind such a rectification of gender roles, however, lay an international subjectivity which

65Xu Jichuan et al., Zhongguo sida mingdan, p. 105. Mei Shaowu, Mei Lanfang, p. 216.

66Ding Bingsui, p. 52.

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WANG Impersonating China

was committed to gender simplification and national unity. It was not yet obvious that these resolutions would lead not to men who are men and women who are women but

to a new, unisex design, in which both men and women dressed alike, worked alike, thought alike, and, viewed from afar, would be seen to function as one mass. In Xueping Zhong's words, China was a culture suffering from a syndrome of "masculinity besieged."67 This leads one to observe that a great country can turn a sweeping spectacle of male impersonations into an even more astounding carnival of sexless impersonations.

Cheng Yanqiu and Mei Lanfang were sworn in as Communist Party members in 1957 and 1959 respectively, perhaps a party recognition of their gender restorations as much as their political conversions. In their new political circumstances, Mei Lanfang's and Cheng Yanqiu's stage transvestism, be it as exquisite as it was, could never be what it had been. They were the last masters of a closed tradition of female impersonations; each performance signalled a deeper gap between the new masculine China and the old feminine China. Haunting their poses and songs are the invisible existence of a mustache, a slippage of a manly tone, a scar, arraying the national theatre and its two sopranos a step closer to the sexless perfection of old age and death. They did not live long enough to experience the ultimate unification of ancient and modern, theatre and criticism, in the period of the Model Plays, or yangbanxi t&i fi, and of Jiang Qing M3, the premier male impersonator of the new age.

67Xueping Zhong, Maculinity Besieged: Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press).

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