Modern Chinese Literature- Qing Dynasty

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Volume 17 Issue 1 (March 2015) Article X

Xiaojue Wang, "The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai"

<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/X>

Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015) Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World

Ed. Shunqing Cao <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/>

Abstract: In her article “The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai,” Xiaojue Wang discusses the relationship between the urban milieu in the foreign concessions of Shanghai and the late Qing courtesan culture through a critical reading of Han Bangqing (1856–1894)’s novel Haishanghua liezhuan (Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, 1894). She considers the novel a significant departure from traditional vernacular fiction by exploring three aspects: its illustration of the connection between the courtesan culture and the rising modern city, its portrayal of the emergent female subjectivity and female space in the late Qing, and the significance of its narrative discrepancy. The novel is composed of two parts: one situated in Shanghai’s concessions and the other in Yili Yuan, an imaginary classical Chinese garden. She argues that the narrative disparity is a necessary consequence of the author’s efforts to reshuffle ambivalent cultural and ethical values in a transitional age in China.

Xiaojue Wang, "The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/X> Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao

Xiaojue Wang

The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai Han Bangqing (1856–1894)’s Haishanghua liezhuan (Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, abbreviated as “Sing-Song Girls” in the following discussions) is one of the first full-length novels dedicated to the description of the courtesan life in Shanghai of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first twenty-eight chapters were serialized in 1892 in the biweekly Haishang qishu (The Wonderbook of Shanghai), the first literary magazine that appeared in late Qing dynasty and was founded by Han himself. The complete novel with sixty-four chapters was published in monograph in 1894.

To readers of this novel, the following passage should not be unfamiliar:

耐個家主公末，該應到耐府浪去尋口宛。耐啥辰光交代撥倪，故歇到該搭來尋耐家主公？倪堂子裡倒勿曾到耐府浪來請客人 ，耐倒先到倪堂子裡來尋耐主公，阿要笑話！倪開堂子做生意，走得進來，總是客人，阿管俚是啥人個家主公！⋯⋯老實搭耐說 仔罷：二少爺來裡耐府浪，故末是耐家主公﹔到子該搭來，就是倪個客人哉。耐有本事，耐拿家主公看牢仔﹔為啥放俚到堂子裡 來白相？來裡該搭堂子裡，耐再要想拉得去，耐去問聲看，上海夷場浪阿有該號規矩？故歇要勿說二少爺勿曾來，就來仔，耐阿 敢嗎俚一聲，打俚一記！耐欺瞞耐家主公，勿關倪事，要欺瞞倪個客人，耐當心點！”(Han, Haishanghua 182)

If you want to find your husband, you should look for him in your own house. Did you ever entrust him to our care, so as to give you the right to come and look for him here? This sing-song house has never sent someone to your residence to invite our client over, yet you’re here now in search of your husband; isn’t that a joke? We’re a house open for business; anybody who walks in is a client. What do we care whose husband he is? … Let me put it to you straight: Second Young Master may be your husband at home, but when he is here, he’s our client. If you’re smart, you should keep a close eye on your husband. Why did you let him out to have fun in sing-song houses? When he’s already in a sing-song house, d’you think you can drag him out? Go and ask around; is there such a rule in these foreign settlements? (Chang, The Sing-Song 187–88)

With these words, Wei Xiaxian, one of the top-ranking changsan courtesans in Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, fights the wife of her patron, Yao Jicun, who comes to Wei’s courtesan house to search for her husband, Yao, and is rendered speechless by Wei’s strong argument. Changsan shuyu is the first- class courtesan house in the late Qing Shanghai pleasure quarter. In Sing-Song Girls, although Han gives a panoramic depiction of prostitution in Shanghai over the last decades of the nineteenth century, with prostitutes ranging from changsan, yao’er, and renjia ren to the lowest category, yeji (streetwalkers), he mainly focuses on changsan courtesans. (For a study of the hierarchy of prostitution in late Qing Shanghai, see Hershatter, Dangerous; Catherine Yeh, “Reinventing.”)

Hu Shi quotes the whole passage in his preface to the 1926 Yadong edition of Sing-Song Girls to give an example of how the Wu dialect vividly captures the mood, tone, and personality of a character. In the 1926 preface, which was later included in the Heluo edition of 1980 and the Guangya edition of 1984, Hu confirms the authorship of the novel and conducts a biographical research on Han. Hu considers Sing-Song Girls “the first literary masterpiece in Wu dialect” in the history of Chinese vernacular fiction (“Preface” 567), and Wei’s words serve as a case in point to attest to the novel’s linguistic distinction. The same passage was quoted by Eileen Chang in the preface of her Mandarin translation of Sing-Song Girls in 1981 (Haishang 640).

In addition to the uniqueness of the regional tongue, however, there is more that is unprecedented in Wei’s remarks. First, Wei protects herself and the courtesan house by invoking the yichang guiju (the regulations of the foreign concessions of Shanghai). This indicates the crucial linkage between the special political setting of the Shanghai Concession and the courtesan house as a legalized social institution protected by the Municipal Council. As the boom of courtesan culture in the foreign concessions of Shanghai occurred with the rise of the first modern metropolis in China, the modern urban configurations also considerably transformed the late Qing courtesan culture, the very site of urbanity.

Second, in Wei’s argument, the courtesan house (tangzi), regarded through the ages as a debased space at the margin of the orthodox socioethical order, stands as an autonomous counterpart to the familial sphere (fushang). (For a study of how the Confucian dictum regulated a woman’s life in the late Ming and early Qing period, see Ko, Teachers). With its treaty rights of extraterritoriality, modern urban facilities, Western-style municipal management, and relatively free economic and political status, the Shanghai Concession constitutes a new territory of “Otherness” as compared to the traditional Chinese society. This “extraterritory,” which is called yichang (the district of barbarians) or zujie and is separated from the old Shanghai city huajie (the district of the Chinese) by the city wall, also opens up a new space for the courtesan house, which is always already out of bounds, excluded from the orthodox social hierarchy.

How does the rising commercial urban milieu in the foreign concessions of Shanghai, where the top courtesan houses are situated, transform the late Qing courtesan culture? Accordingly, how is the courtesan persona in late Qing concessions defined and a new subjectivity and space of these femmes fatales shaped? These are the main questions that this article seeks to address. Furthermore, this article deals with the distinctive narrative structure of Sing-Song Girls. Ever since the rebirth of the novel during the May Fourth period, the part set in Yili Yuan, a private garden of the mansion of an elderly traditional style literatus, Qi Yunsou, has been regarded as in dissonance with the rest of the novel. In this imaginary, walled classical space, the clientele changes from concession merchants into traditional literati, and consequently the disposition of the courtesan culture differs significantly from that in the courtesan district of the city. Although Sing-Song Girls was not a popular novel in the late

Xiaojue Wang, "The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai" page 3 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/X> Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao

Qing, it received great attentions among May Fourth intellectuals including Lu Xun, Hu, Liu Fu, and, later, Eileen Chang. Chang completed a Mandarin translation of the novel in 1981 and later translated the entire novel into English. The Yili Yuan part was condemned by May Fourth critics for breaking the literary excellence of the novel. Liu, for example, emphatically rejects this part and regards it as “an intolerable flaw of the novel” (“Reading” 600). Chang, in her Mandarin rendition, truncates four chapters from Han’s original novel, all of which are from the Yili Yuan part. Whereas it was emphatically critiqued by May Fourth intellectuals including the latecomer Chang, this narrative discrepancy barely received any notice or discussions in later scholarship on Sing-Song Girls.

How to cope with the discrepancy in the narrative form? The last part of this article explores the cracks and fissures in Sing-Song Girls and argues that the narrative incoherence is a necessary consequence of the author’s efforts to reshuffle ambivalent cultural and ethical values in the transitional moment in the late Qing, when the old and the new encounter and contest the modern. The apparent disparity between the concession part and the Yili Yuan part of the novel bespeaks the imbrication of the traditional and the emergent modern aspects of life in late Qing Shanghai. Chang speaks highly of the open ending of Sing-Song Girls and regards it as attesting to the modern quality of this late Qing novel (“Postscript” 639). This article considers the novel a significant departure from traditional vernacular fiction by exploring three aspects: its illustration of the connection between the courtesan culture and the rising modern city, its portrayal of the emergent female subjectivity and female space in late Qing courtesan life, and the significance of its narrative discrepancy.

Concessions, Courtesan Houses, and the Public Garden

Late Qing Shanghai witnessed not only a revival of high courtesan culture but also a surge of

literature on courtesan life, which included a wide range of genres, such as biji (random notes), diaries, travelogues, zhuzhi ci (bamboo twig ballads), and novels (see Henriot, Belles; Zamperini, “But I;” Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love). Han’s Sing-Song Girls stands out in that the city figures prominently in it. It is pertinent to examine the interaction between the courtesan culture and the heavily Westernized urban environments in Shanghai’s foreign concessions. In discussing the temporal and spatial constellation of Sing-Song Girls, Yingjin Zhang observes that urban experiences are an integral part of the sexual adventures and “sensual experiences at the pleasure quarters in Shanghai” (The City 121). In his examination of late Qing courtesan novels as a key form of the “depravity genre,” David Wang points to the importance of Shanghai as a unique geographical locale in Sing- Song Girls and suggests that this novel “anticipates the literary style and posture later called the ‘Shanghai style,’ or ‘haipai’” (Fin-de-siècle 90). To investigate the changing relationship between customers and prostitutes and the changing courtesan practice manifested in Sing-Song Girls, Keith McMahon contextualizes the novel in the tradition of Ming and Qing dynasty courtesan fiction and maintains that its “departures from its literary past, in fact, gain much of their weight from the singular nature of the city of Shanghai” (“Fleecing” 6).

In the Qing dynasty, official prostitution was prohibited. By 1673 the Qing court formally ended the long tradition of maintaining official prostitutes in the imperial capital and the provinces (see Xue, Shanghai jinü). Ironically, it was the imperial hegemony in the Shanghai Concession that reinstated the legal position of the courtesan house and ushered in the golden age of high courtesan culture in the late Qing. The rise of the courtesan culture in Shanghai international settlements marked an emergent new urban culture sustained by economic prosperity. The reference map on the inside front cover of the Mandarin version of Sing-Song Girls charts out the topography of Shanghai over the last decades of the nineteenth century: huajie (the district of the Chinese) or nanshi (South City) versus zujie (the Foreign Concession) or beishi (North City). This Chinese/foreign constellation is already laid bare in the opening scene of the novel. When the narrator Huaye liannong (Flowers feel for me too) wakes from a dream in which he is walking on a sea completely covered with flowers, he finds himself on lujia shiqiao, the stone bridge that separates the Chinese district and the foreign settlements. At this threshold between the dreamland and the reality, the traditional and the modern, the author bumps into a young man named Zhao Puzhai, one of the main characters in the novel, and the story officially begins.

According to the treaty rights of extraterritoriality, the Municipal Council of the Shanghai Concession enjoyed legislative and administrative powers, and regulated taxation, finance, and the police force. The economic boom of the Concession did not start until the rebel troops of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace (the Taipings, 1850–1864) and the Small Swords Society (Xiaodao hui, 1853) drove massive populations of Chinese refugees from Shanghai’s Chinese City and neighboring provinces into the foreign settlements. The status of huayang fengju that separated foreigners from the Chinese population around them thus changed. “From the 1850s on, each new social disturbance in the interior sent tens of thousands of Chinese refugees to Shanghai, seeking protection under the English and French flags” (Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners 1). These immigrants brought wealth and labor into the Concession. With the development of a Westernized urban culture with totally new lifestyles, a space of “Otherness” emerged outside the walls of the old Chinese city of Shanghai.

The following data provide a rough urban physiognomy of the Shanghai Concession, which makes up the texture of life in Sing-Song Girls (see Ma, Shanghai jindai):

1864 The Shanghai Gas Company was founded by British traders; all street lamps were changed

into gas lamps. 1880 The Shanghai Waterworks was established; two years later, the Concession started to use

running water.

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1882 The Shanghai Electricity Company was founded by British traders; electric lamps appeared in

the Concession the same year. With the rise of this modern city, the courtesan house started to thrive as a licensed

entertainment business of a type and dimension unavailable anywhere else in the Chinese world, which in turn promoted the urban development of the concessions. Theaters, singing halls, storytelling houses, teahouses, and Western-style restaurants blossomed along simalu, the most glamorous commercial street, where the top courtesan houses were located.

How was the courtesan culture realigned with the new urban environment? The Shanghai courtesans were situated on the cutting edge of trends experimenting with Western fashions. They were the earliest beneficiaries of gas lamps and running water as well as the earliest regular customers of Western stores and restaurants. They were the first women whose photographs were exhibited in display windows of photo studios and circulated via pamphlets and newspapers. In chapter 21, Zhu Sanjie brags about being one of the famous “seven sisters,” seven sorority courtesans in Shanghai, whose photo was once displayed in the window of the largest commercial photo studio (Han, Haishanghua 164). In such a transitional period, to be modern meant not only to be à la mode but also to have the potential to transgress the boundaries of tradition. Western-style urban culture not only pervades these high-profile courtesans’ private living space and changes the texture of their daily life but also enlarges their venues of entertainment and enhances their public exposure. The carriage parades of courtesans and their clients through the commercial district offer the most striking example of public visibility.

While the adoption of the Western seven-day-week structure and the introduction of gas and electric lamps extended the temporal scope of courtesan life, the emergence of a new transportation system expanded the spatial parameters of the city and enhanced the accessibility of the public parks located in the suburbs. In late nineteenth-century Paris, it was haute couture to ride a horse-drawn carriage down the city boulevards. In Baudelaire’s Paris, five hundred carriages were circulated around the city for the Parisian haute bourgeoisie (Benjamin, “Charles”). Baudelaire’s contemporary writer, Alexandre Dumas (1824–1895) composed La Dame aux Camélias (1856), a novel that tells a tragic love story of a Parisian courtesan. A carriage ride under the soft light of the gas lamps is a prevalent scene in the novel. It was translated into Chinese by Lin Shu and Wang Shouchang in 1892 and has ever since exerted tremendous impact on late Qing and early Republican Chinese fiction writings. Around the same time period in the Shanghai concessions, it was also high fashion to ride with a courtesan in a horse-drawn carriage through the commercial streets to Zhang Yuan. The most popular route for carriage rides was from simalu through the Bund to damalu and then across Jing’an Temple to Zhang Yuan (see Han, Haishanghua chapters 6, 7, 12). Carriage parades constituted one of the most spectacle scenes in the concession landscape. Around five o’clock in the afternoon, after finishing tea in the Arcade in Zhang Yuan, Wu Xuexiang and her patron, Ge Zhongying, return to Wu’s courtesan house. “[Their carriage] drove from the Bund to simalu, with gas lamps brightening on both side of the streets” (Han, Haishanghua 57). In Sing-Song Girls, a carriage ride is not only an important part of a courtesan’s everyday life but also a key narrative device in the Wang Liansheng and Shen Xiaohong story.

In late Qing Shanghai, the Western-style urban culture not only penetrates into the private living space and the everyday life of courtesans but also considerably enlarges their venue and enables them to expand their activities into the public realm. Here the carriage parade of courtesans and patrons through the commercial avenues to Zhang Yuan, the first public garden in the Shanghai concessions opened to Chinese people, offers a salient example of the public visibility.

Among the first public spaces ever to emerge in China, Zhang Yuan is no doubt of great significance in late Qing literary imaginations. Zhang Yuan, also known as Zhangshi weichun yuan, was the first Chinese public garden. Opened to the public in 1885, it was a Western-style garden including a theater, a photo studio, a Western-style building named Ankaidi (the Arcadia) and a zoo. In a plethora of fictional works in the late Qing, such as Liang Qichao’s Xinzhongguo weilaiji (The future of a new China, 1902) and Li Boyuan’s Wenming xiaoshi (Modern times, 1906), Zhang Yuan is depicted as the very site for public affairs where reformers or revolutionaries meet and give speeches. The significance of Zhang Yuan at the narrative level in Sing-Song Girls will be discussed later in this essay. It is noteworthy that Han uses “Ming Yuan” to stand for Zhang Yuan in the novel while using the original names for all other locations in Shanghai.

The modern urbanism in the foreign concessions of Shanghai significantly transforms the courtesan culture and makes it a spectacle of the urban landscape. On the other hand, the courtesan culture remarkably promotes the urban development in the concessions and becomes the most appealing landmark of Shanghai. These first-class courtesans become the earliest figures of modern women in the public arena of the emergent urban milieu in Shanghai.

Public/Domestic, Inner/Outer: A Modern Female Persona?

As the modern urbanism in the Shanghai Concession rewrote the material and cultural dispositions

of the courtesan life, the courtesan culture became a new social space for high-ranking sing-song girls. How do we define this new social space, and where does it stand vis-à-vis the traditional familial system? Does the public visibility of the Shanghai courtesans in the Concession over the last decades of the nineteenth century suggest a rewriting of womanhood, the emergence of a public persona for these femme fatales?

It is pertinent to point out the Janus-faced duality of the courtesan house portrayed in Sing-Song Girls. Whereas the courtesan culture makes a glorious spectacle in the modern façade of public life in

Xiaojue Wang, "The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai" page 5 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/X> Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao

the Concession, the novel presents courtesan houses characterized by an ordinary familial style. Critics duly noted the quotidian, prosaic feature of the courtesan life depicted in this novel. Eileen Chang, for instance, observes that there is no “sensuous quality” in this fiction devoted to a sensuous topic, that is, the pleasure quarters in Shanghai (“Yi Huzhi” 154). Whereas the late Ming courtesan culture is celebrated for images of highly stylized talented courtesans situated in a realm beyond vulgar sensuality, its late Qing counterpart featured a plain, domestic atmosphere with a group of courtesan-housewives (see Carlitz, “Desire”). Whereas the late Qing courtesan culture is inlaid as a glorious spectacle in the modern façade of the public life in the Shanghai concessions, these women maintain a traditional domestic interior within the courtesan house and play the role of traditional wives.

The courtesan house in Shanghai’s concessions, a space outside the traditional home of marriage and family, is constructed on the model of the domestic sphere. The familial ties, which have been absent in this place, are imitated and emphasized in a remarkable way. Within a single courtesan house, courtesans address each other sisters, and in effect receive names suggestive of sororal relationship. In the third chapter, for instance, when the courtesan house run by Zhou Lan buys a new girl, she is named Zhou Shuangyu (literally, a pair of jade) after Zhou Shuangzhu (literally, a pair of pearl), the leading courtesan in this family. What defines the relationship between customs and courtesans is no more caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty) romance, which is prevalent in Ming and Qing literary traditions. Even in early Qing courtesan novels, such as Huangyue heng (Traces of the flower and the moon), the romantic relationship between clients and courtesans is constructed on the scholar-beauty model. (For an examination of late Ming courtesans as female literati, see Wai-yee Li, “The Late;” for a biographical study of Qing-dynasty courtesans, see Mann, Precious). The clients and courtesans in Sing-Song Girls maintain a relationship similar to that of husbands and wives in the everyday life. It is not uncommon for a client to sustain a liaison with the same courtesan for four or five years. The plethora of handbooks and guides for the courtesan world, which had flourished in Shanghai since the 1870s, take every effort to delineate the complicated rules and rituals in the courtesan house and illustrate the proper behavior for a client. In a space marked by fluid, short- termed relations, these courtesans and clients play family charades.

Whereas they maintain a glamorous appearance in the public space as modern, free women, these sing-song girls enact wifely virtues in a quasi-family space. It would be too hasty to conclude that the Shanghai courtesans open up new terrain and acquire a modern persona to subvert or at least compete with the traditional familial order, which contained women within the inner chamber. At stake is rather a complicated process of compromise and negotiations between controversial forces. Often the emergence of possibilities for courtesans to inhabit new social and family positions only exposes the strict boundary between a conventional family space and its imitator in the pleasure quarter. This demarcation is reinforced not only by obstinate defenders of the traditional social hierarchy but also, more intriguingly, by courtesans themselves. The cases of Zhang Huizhen and Huang Cuifeng merit special attention.

To marry a client as his legal wife would be the ideal for any courtesan. A more practical and seemingly easy solution was to marry a client as his concubine, thereby entering the decent family system. This is referred to as congliang (turning to respectability). Eileen Chang once observed that the most important step in a woman’s life was “going upstairs” (shanglou), either to become huaping (a vase, symbolizing a woman’s identity as concubine or mistress) or become taitai (a legal wife) (“Zou” 97-100). What happens after a courtesan realizes the elevation of her social status, relocating from the courtesan house to the respectable inner boudoir? Herein, the story of Zhang Huizhen speaks to the dilemma of domestication and the limitations regarding the woman’s position and space.

In the triangular relationship between Wang Liansheng, Shen Xiaohong, and Zhang Huizhen, Huizhen is the one who receives little attention due to her weak character. Taking advantage of Wang Liansheng’s retaliation against Shen Xiaohong—one of the top-ranking courtesans who maintains a stable relationship with Liansheng for five years and secretly pursues a liaison with Xiao Liu’er, an opera singer—Huizhen wins over Wang and turns from yao’er (courtesan of lower ranking) into changsan. Eventually, Huizhen replaces Xiaohong, the concubine-to-be for Wang Liansheng, and marries him as his concubine. Going upstairs along the social ladder from the courtesan house to the inner chamber of the Wang mansion, home of an officer of foreign affairs sojourning in the Shanghai concessions, Huizhen seems to achieve a happy ending. She ascends from the lower stratum of the traditional Chinese social hierarchy to a respectable social status, departs from the courtesan house excluded from the orthodox socioethical system, and re-enters the family domain.

Ironically, soon after the marriage, Huizhen is beaten and thrown out of the family by Wang Liansheng because she is caught committing adultery with Wang’s nephew. Leaving the pseudo- domestic space of the courtesan house, Huizhen has to lead a different life within the familial order heavily bound by Confucian norms. Whereas the entrance into the family sphere increases the social status of the courtesan, it also demands her subjection to the authority of the traditional family system. In chapters 9 and 54, Huizhen is punished twice for her committing adultery. In chapter 9, she is beaten up by Shen Xiaohong in Zhang Yuan, a public garden, after the latter finds out that Wang Liansheng has started a new relationship with Huizhen. Huizhen’s fault lies in her violation of “the family ethic” sham in the courtesan house, a make-believe domestic space. In chapter 54, after she marries Wang as his concubine, her affair with his nephew is exposed. This time she transgresses the family scruples in a real domestic sphere. And the penalty she receives is far beyond physical: she eventually loses her newly earned respectable familial and social position. As Huizhen’s experiences reveal, the imitation of domesticity within the courtesan house only stresses the unbridgeable gap separating it from a conventional familial space. Within the actual domestic space, the socioethical codes of fidelity, obedience, and chastity remain inviolable.

Xiaojue Wang, "The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai" page 6 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/X> Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao

Huang Cuifeng’s story provides another interesting case of how the distinction between the

courtesan house and the orthodox domestic sphere might be reinforced by the courtesan herself. With her shrewdness and ability, Cuifeng is one of the most impressive characters among the Shanghai sing-song girls. She is too sober to be deceived by the spectacular social façade of courtesan life, the family charade within the courtesan house, or a respectable family life in the traditional social order. Capitalizing on her relationships with Luo Zifu and Qian Zigang, the two clients with whom she maintains a stable relation simultaneously, Cuifeng eventually succeeds in buying herself out of the courtesan house and opening her own courtesan business.

Cuifeng’s refusal to enter the domestic space echoes Wei Xiaxian’s remarks quoted at the beginning of the article, which emphasize the demarcation between the scholar-gentry family and the courtesan house as a competitive, independent space. However, it would be too hasty to conclude that Cuifeng’s choice to remain in the courtesan house as an owner instead of marrying a client in effect suggests a self-conscious resistance against the traditional familial dictum. Although the novel provides little information about Cuifeng’s life after running her own business, it describes Tu Mingzhu as Cuifeng’s elderly alter ego. Tu Mingzhu, once a popular courtesan, runs her own brothel and becomes the laobao, the madame who owns the business. When she gets old and is again called on to entertain a client, she becomes the laughingstock of the town. Although she is financially secure and independent, she has by no means obtained respectable social status.

Therefore, as the novel demonstrates, although the sociocultural transformations in the Shanghai concessions brought about new options for courtesans to seek freedom, autonomy, and equality, in no case does the courtesan house stand for a utopian space, a substitute Eden. In the late Qing transitional years, the changing courtesan culture as a result of modern urbanity in Shanghai does not necessarily challenge the conventional family and gender system. There are moments when attempts to subvert the traditional social hierarchy may paradoxically fortify it.

Yili Yuan: The Untimely Classical Garden

Beginning from chapter 38 the novel shifts its focus from the urban courtesan life to the

description of a classical literati life in Yili Yuan, a traditional private garden, which makes up the bulk of the second half of Sing-Song Girls. Ever since the novel was reintroduced to the reading public by the May Fourth intellectuals, the Yili Yuan part, the so-called part of mingshi mingyuan (traditional scholars and gardens), has been regarded as a serious flaw of the sixty-four chapters of Sing-Song Girls. Lu Xun, Hu, and Liu all criticize this narrative blemish (Lu, Zhongguo 325; Hu, “Preface;” Liu, “Reading”). Liu, for instance, contends that as a result of the Yili Yuan part, “the charm of the novel transforms to monotony, transforms to dullness” (“Reading” 601). If one follows Peter Brooks’ argument that “plot is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation,” how should one cope with the apparent structural and thematic inconsistency of the novel (Reading for 10)? I argue that the particular narrative discrepancy not only bespeaks the late Qing intellectuals’ response to the controversial sociocultural values in the transitional era of the last fin-de-siècle but also reveals the ambivalence intrinsic in May Fourth notion of modernity.

Liu is right in pointing out the discordance between the two parts of the novel, with chapter 38 serving as a watershed. The main distinctions between the Yili Yuan part and the first half of the novel reside in the competition between traditional literati cultural values and a modern secular lifestyle rising in the Shanghai concessions over the last decades of the nineteenth century. The conspicuous difference between the two parts is the shift in the physical location of the plot, which is accompanied by disparate cultural and social activities. The first part of the novel is set in the prosperous commercial district of the Shanghai concessions marked by a modern Western culture and lifestyle, with Zhang Yuan, the park, serving as its epitome. The second part is moved inside Yili Yuan, a walled private garden owned by Qi Yunsou, a traditional figure of scholar-gentry.

It is noteworthy that Yili Yuan is a sheer fabrication, although the places in the first part are depicted in a realistic manner and their locations can be charted physically in a late Qing map of Shanghai. The readers would hardly miss the similarities between Yili Yuan in Sing-Song Girls and Daguan Yuan (the Grand View Garden) in Honglou meng (Dream of the red chamber), a Qing dynasty classic that focuses on the vicissitudes of life of four prestigious families. Evidently, Han uses Daguan Yuan as his primary model to fashion an ideal classical Chinese garden. The similarities rest in not only buildings and garden landscapes but also characters and themes.

What distinguishes the Yili Yuan part from the first part is also a shift in the constitution of the clients. Whereas the male customers gathering in Yili Yuan are mostly traditional literati, customers in the first part features are merchants and clerks. With the change in clientele, daily routines and activities also change. In a courtesan house, the simple, vulgar finger-guessing game, huaquan, is popular. In Yili Yuan, however, what prevails is the traditional scholarly drinking games, which demand good knowledge of and quotations from Confucian classics and classical poetry. When the merchant Chen Xiaoyun is invited to a party in Yili Yuan, he is deeply concerned that he will have to compose traditional poems in a literati banquet (chapter 48).

The author clearly places equal significance on these two parts in terms of narrative space and plot arrangement. The crucial function of the Yili Yuan part cannot be neglected. The defining episode of the novel—namely, the composition of the profiles of the top-ranking courtesans in Shanghai, from which the novel’s title comes—takes place inside Yili Yuan. Though pivotal, the Yili Yuan part seems archaic and out of place for the May Fourth critics. To account for the narrative fault, Liu argues that Han, a frustrated scholar who failed the civil service examination, intends to fill in the novel with his own works of classical Chinese prose and poems. However, such an effort to show off classical learning is bound to fail in the un-Chinese foreign concessions (“Reading”). Eileen Chang observes

Xiaojue Wang, "The Pleasure Quarter and Modern Urbanity in Late Qing Shanghai" page 7 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/X> Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao

that, through the Yili Yuan part, Han attempts to prove that he is not merely an author of the pleasure quarter but is equally as good at portraying refined, elite cultural life as his predecessor, Cao Xueqin, of Dream of the Red Chamber (“Remembering Hu” 153).

As the May Fourth critics hastily dismiss the antiquated, dying literati world in the novel, they fail to notice that the narrative controversy is a necessary consequence of Han’s efforts to reshuffle conflicting cultural and ethical values in late Qing Shanghai, a transitional moment when the old and the new confront, compete, and contest the modern. The juxtaposition of the Yili Yuan and the concessions parts demonstrates Han’s ambivalent attitude toward tradition and modern ideas. Whereas he is indulgent in the new Western-style life, he nevertheless lingers on the traditional world of literati. Just like those Janus-faced courtesans he depicts in the novel, who thrive in the grey zone between publicity and domesticity, Han plays a double role in his professional career as a writer and in his personal life.

In the first part of the novel, the author functions like a solitary flâneur navigating the labyrinth of courtesan houses, appreciating the modern life, and transforming his observations into realistic sketches. He then halts amid his modern adventure and returns nostalgically to the traditional garden with the literati life in a classical world. His own life also betrays the dual feature. Holding an imperial county-level xiucai degree, Han was one of the earliest professional writers in modern China. Han worked as an editor for Shenbao in Shanghai and founded Haishang qishu (Wonderbook of Shanghai), the first literary journal in China. Launched in 1892, Han’s Wonderbook of Shanghai appeared ten years before two other pioneer literary journals that shaped the emergence of new Chinese fiction, Liang Qichao’s Xin xiaoshuo (New fiction) and Li Boyuan’s Xiuxiang xiaoshuo (Illustrated fiction). However, Han never fully gave up the traditional path of a Chinese scholar. He took the imperial examination several times. In 1891, three years before his death, he attended the imperial examination one last time (Hu, “Preface”).

In his study of late Qing fiction, David Wang argues that in the volatile age when the imperial world collapsed, “the talk about and the desire for modernity had not been reduced to a single formula” (Fin-de-siècle 52). Accordingly, he considers the heterogeneity of voices or noises in late Qing literature as reflecting its “repressed modernities.” Sing-Song Girls can be examined in the same context. Its narrative and thematic inconsistency is symptomatic of an era of rite de passage, bespeaking the encountering and competition between traditional and modern sociocultural forces in late Qing Shanghai.

The Zhang Yuan part represents a form of commercial, Westernized mass culture for a newly arising urban middle class, which threatens the obsolete, elite literati culture epitomized by Yili Yuan. Although courtesans are brought across the boundary between these two worlds and enter the elite space, they will never mutate into scholarly courtesans of the late Ming style. Whereas Han shows residue nostalgia for a classical, elite scholar style, the May Fourth intellectuals relentlessly discard the traditional as archaic and favor the quotidian, modern world. By rejecting the classical Yili Yuan part, the May Fourth criticism betrays its dominant cultural agenda that is characterized by Lin Yusheng as the May Fourth ideology of “totalistic antitraditionalism,” which envisions a modernity as a complete break with the tradition and with the past (Lin, The Crisis). In Sing-Song Girls, however, it is the contestation and negotiation between the traditional and the emergent modern cultural values that entails the inconsistency in its narrative structure. These moments of hesitation and ambivalence in Sing-Song Girls, when the old and the new are competing and contesting the modern, attribute a distinctive modern quality to the novel. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus.” Gesammelte

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Gender. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Author's profile: Xiaojue Wang teaches modern Chinese literature and film at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests in scholarship include modern Chinese literature, critical theory and cultural studies, gender and sexuality, film and visual studies, and comparative literature, in particular, the literary relations between Germany and China. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013). E-mail: <[email protected]>