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Eileen Chang's Cross-Cultural Writing and Rewriting in Love in a Fallen City (《 倾城之恋》)

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.49.4.0565

1528-4212

Xiaoping Wang,

Autobiographical and Biographical Writing

Witnessing in her formative years the irrevocable decline of the Chinese mandarin gentry's class, the much-acclaimed literary genius in modern China, Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) (1920–1995) held to an unapologetic individualism. Located at the cracks and gaps of history, situating her in a besieged society, as fragments and residues of a previous world congealed, she appropriated her writing as a means of entering the soul of the particular class to which she belonged, to “dream its dreams and roam inside its unconscious.”1 This effort reveals the interior life being of Chinese urbanites, in particular the middle-class Shanghainese, and their anxieties about love, marriage, and personal identity, which then “become[s] an allegorical stand-in for the world of things and commodities through which a narrative totality of a historical experience can be had,” particularly the ambiguity of and dilemma faced by this precarious class situated within the unsettled contradiction of history.2To be more specific, through the perspective of her cross-cultural writing and rewriting (or appropriation) of Eugene O'Neill's (1888–1953) imagery of the Magna Mater, or the maternal goddess, in her famed novelette Qingcheng zhilian ( 《 倾城之恋》 ) (Love in a Fallen City), this article analyzes the archetypal, paramount thematic concern of Zhang's oeuvre—a profound matrimonial anxiety in a besieged city—by which it delves into the identity politics of her ostensible apolitical stories. It shows the predicament of marriage and love as social institutions in a semicolonial, semitraditional society. I suggest that Zhang's story demonstrates how individualism—the cardinal principle of the middle-class world—was in a deep crisis, which brings about a profound cultural nihilism in her fictional world, and this is because the sociohistorical reality—the semitraditional, semicolonial situation—restricted and constrained the process of a cultural embourgeoisement.Love in a Fallen City seems to be a melodramatic romance that finally comes to fruition. Typical of the writer's stories about social mannerisms, this novelette is “filled with witty conversations and relentless gossip,” “intricate codes of dress, dining, and socializing,” and “arabesque mannerisms in both private and public domains,” which are “taken as matters of life and death for those leisurely regulars.”3 But the heroine Liusu—a “typical” semitraditional Chinese woman who has received little education—is a rare figure in Zhang's stories; she takes the initiative to divorce her husband because of the unbearable abuse that she has suffered. This part of the plot itself shows the extent to which Chinese society had become more enlightened and had become accepting of such bold actions. Having returned to her own extended family for more than seven years, she is now twenty-eight years old. She is expelled by her brothers and sisters-in-laws, who apparently still have an antiquated mindset and follow traditional ways of life. Thus, she has to remarry to avoid further humiliation.From the urge to rise above her situation, an impulse to ascend into a higher class to ensure her security and dignity, comes a “narrative experiment” that defines the whole story, which “open[s] up a space unrealizable in the asphyxiating conditions of a reified existence and of an empirically unchangeable destiny.”4 A relative offers to help find a man for her, and returning upstairs, she glances at herself in the mirror in self-appreciation. A cinematic “close-up” in a subtle way conveys her psychological state as she listens to a huqin, a traditional Chinese musical instrument: “Following the undulating tune, Liusu's head tilted to one side, and her hands and eyes started to gesture subtly. As she performed in the mirror, the huqin no longer sounded like a huqin, but like strings and flutes intoning a solemn court dance…. Her steps seemed to trace the lost rhythms of an ancient melody.”5 Her performance is a rehearsal, a tryout of seduction to be performed in reality. Her behavior is like “a solemn court dance,” tracing the trajectory of ancient beauty represented in classical Chinese romance and reflecting a modern form of the traditional motif of a woman seeking her master's favor. Yet the presence of this motif also casts a shadow over her fate, as the lives of legendary ancient beauties almost always end tragically.Her self-appreciation does not end with her glance in the mirror: “Suddenly, she smiled—a private, malevolent smile—and the music came to a discordant halt. The huqin outside continued playing, yet the tales of allegiance and filial piety, chastity, and righteousness it was telling had nothing to do with her” (122). The melody in her mind is her own internal movement; she aims to break out the old world and its moralistic straightjacket to adventure into a new world. Hypocritical or not, this role-play defines her new identity, individual as well as national, insofar as her current identity of being a Chinese woman is specified by the traditional code, which now has “nothing to do with her” (122). This repudiation of the traditional Chinese ethical-moral code is simultaneously a process of formation of a new subjectivity, which is also a new class identity; before this process is complete, she is still a woman torn between two incompatible worlds.At a party, Liusu by chance meets Liuyuan, an over thirty, Hong Kong-based, British-educated, Chinese dandy who has just returned from England. He is the mirror image as well as the “other” of the devastated Shanghai middle class, a man of seemingly refined tastes in this vulgar age who harbors a sort of nostalgia for sophisticated Chinese traditional high culture. But Wylie Sypher has pointed out that a dandy is only “a substitute for the aristocratic who has lost its castle, … a middle class aristocrat, a figure who could make its entrance only in the cities that were becoming the milieu for the bourgeois.”6 In contrast to its image in its original Western context, where the poet as a dandy “distances himself from the bourgeois values that brought his cultures into being,” Liuyuan's dandyism is much less a mockery than a by-product of Shanghai's proto-bourgeois middle-class values.7 Yet analogous to Baudelaire, Liuyuan is nostalgic for “a spiritual homeland or city that exist[s] beyond the visible world” and has an internalized “sense of decay and decline” of culture.8Seeing this as a rare opportunity to pursue her fantasy, Liusu sets aside her female dignity, as well as her traditional ethical-moral code, and follows Liuyuan when returns to Hong Kong. A series of flirtations take place at dance halls, restaurants, in the hotel's lobby, on the beach, and in the heroine's room, all of which had once been the living rooms of the leisurely middle class and were now a part of an overseas colonial land. Leo Lee has subtly insinuated that this is not a realistic scenario because Liusu, being “a traditional, nearly illiterate woman,” should not be able to engage in such “sophisticated flirtation and witty repartee” (it seems, he says, “almost out of character”).9 However, the loosening of a rigid caste system in a turbulent time as well as Liuyuan's particular taste, thanks to his peculiar experience (and the anachronistic façade of a performed “authentic” Chinese femininity as represented in Liusu), might help to explain his interest in Liusu. Moreover, Liusu's will to remarry is motivated by hardship in her family life, but Liuyuan only wants to court her to be his mistress. For both, love as a passionate emotion and an act of self-sacrifice is only a luxury.Since Liuyuan is apparently aware of Liusu's intentions, he “treats her as an exotic Oriental woman under his ‘colonial’ gaze,”10 which only serves to further humiliate her. Realizing that Liuyuan not only does not want to marry her but also publicly maintains an ambivalent façade and lets her shoulder the burden of public opinion (in order to subdue her pride and make her willing to be his mistress), Liusu returns to her home in Shanghai. Yet she still harbors a deep hope that Liuyuan might come after her since he still has not owned her body.Once the fall passes, Liuyuan indeed sends her a telegraph. Liusu, however, feels she has failed because she is older now, that his procrastination has cost her. But she does not fail completely; at least, what happens the night she arrives in Hong Kong is exactly what she expected at the beginning when she practiced her seduction in front of the mirror. In this mutually willing consummation, he quietly walks behind her, twists back his face and kisses her, and then “he pushed her into the mirror, they seemed to fall down into it, into another shadowy world—freezing cold, searing hot, the flames of the forest burning all over their bodies” (154–55). In this scene, the lust of desire finally prevails over any mundane calculations.What this mirror scene—which reminds us of a famous scene in The Story of the Stone, a cautionary tale about the dangers of lust—indicates is that this moment only reveals the ungrounded and vulnerable nature of their relationship. After this moment of pleasure, Liuyuan decides to depart for England again. He refuses to take Liusu with him, still just wanting to keep her as his paramour. But the Japanese bombing of Hong Kong forces him to change his plans. Now the shadow cast over Liuyuan's mind finally disappears. Both are struggling for their survival in a crowded and besieged city, and as such, they have to help one another, so they muddle through their days and get married. Do they love each other? The only indication of such a feeling is conveyed in this way: “She suddenly moved to Liuyuan's side in bed and embraced him through the quilt. He pulled out his hand to take hers, and they saw through each other. It was a mere instant of complete understanding, but the flash could enable them to live in harmony for the next eight to ten years” (164). Their understanding of each other's selfishness is apparent from the very beginning. At this peculiar moment, they merely reach a mutual compromise and forgive each other. Yet it also signifies Liuyuan's concession of his idealism, which yearns for an eternal happiness but not ephemeral pleasure.11Nevertheless, here the narrative voice celebrates this success: In this world of turmoil and tumult, wealth, property and all other things that used to last forever were now all unreliable. All she could count on was the breath within her throat and this man sleeping beside her … He was just a selfish man, and she just a selfish woman. In this age of military turmoil, there was no room for individualists, but there was always a place for an ordinary couple. (164–65) We cannot tell whether this is the narrator's voice or the interior thoughts of the heroine. In fact, the two are now inextricable, which is unusual for the author, who mostly keeps an ironic distance when narrating her fictional texts. From the perspective of Liusu, this is a consummate moment, which is also the climax of her (non)romantic adventure. To her, the man sleeping beside her is really the only one she can count on at that critical moment, and vice versa for Liuyuan. But if this is a mutual “complete understanding,” then they both know—as the narrative voice also acknowledges—that it is hard to predict how long they will stay together after the war is over. As critics, we have to refrain from falling into the Liusu and Liuyuan's overt sentimentalism articulated by this lyrical flight and be honest enough to question, literally, the “literary” rhetoric. The narrator notes that there is no peaceful and safe place for individualists to go during the war, so how can this selfish couple find a room wherein to drag on their lives, no matter whether they are really “ordinary” or not? (167).12Obviously, this illusion of an eternally still life not only belongs to the protagonists but is also the narrator's, who now becomes their alter ego. To be sure, they realize the fragility of their existence amid a chaos that leaves them helpless, yet this realization does not guarantee that the dandy will change his character as the woman hopelessly wishes. Still, the narrator passionately exclaims: Hong Kong's defeat had fulfilled her dream. But in this irrational world, who knows what is cause and what is effect? Who knows? Perhaps it was for her fulfillment that a great metropolis was leveled. Countless thousands of people die, countless thousands of people suffer, and what follows is an earthshaking reform … Liusu didn't feel that her place in history was anything remarkable. She stood up, smiling, and kicked the pan of mosquito-repellent incense under the table.The legendary beauties who felled cities and kingdoms were probably all like this. (167)13 The expression of a privileged feeling notwithstanding, the exclamation also subtly produces an ironic twist that finally deconstructs what it meant to convey. As easily recognized by the average Chinese, the last sentence echoes and brings out the theme of the title (and the story in general), because the original Chinese phrase for “love in a fallen city” can also be read as “love that topples cities,” which is idiom that refers to story in which a concubine enchants a king to such an extent that he is willing to send out false alarm signals to call back his forces. After several such false alarms, nobody arrives to answer his call when an enemy does in fact make an advance; as a result, the kingdom is overthrown. From a feminist perspective, this traditional story can be read as a misogynist narrative (regardless of whether it in fact happened or not). Yet the narrative voice here (which goes beyond psycho-narration, borders on narrated monologue, and even confuses itself with the female character's psyche) alludes to this story in an effort to give voice to a wholly “irrational” feeling and “absurd” rationalization: it is the contemporary war that levels the city and brings thousands of people to their to death in order to “fulfill” (a literal translation of the original Chinese word “chengquan” [“成全”]) her dream. The narrative indeed subverts conventional ideas of male-dominated history and patriarchal historiographical writing, yet this indulgence in her “success” not only leaves some readers cold but also falls into the same traditional pitfalls of most misogynist representations.To be sure, this repudiation of civilization has its own rationale in the text, which is conveyed through the imagery of a dilapidated wall. When loitering around the ruins and observing the wall, Liuyuan tells Liusu, “One day when our civilization is completely ruined and everything destroyed—burnt, burst, utterly collapsed and ruined, maybe this wall will still be there. If, at that time, we can meet at this wall … then maybe, Liusu, you will show a little sincerity toward me, and I will toward you” (139). According to this confession, if their marriage indeed indicates that there is any sincerity between the two, then at least partly it is because in his eyes, the civilization has almost come to its end.Liusu immediately rebukes him, pointing out that what he is saying is that he would never have sincere feelings for her. It is a complete subversion (as the reverse) of the famed original Chinese classical verse line that Liuyuan's phrase is based upon: “Dilao tianhuang bu liao qing” (“地老天荒不了情”), which means “our love will never end until the moment when the earth ages and the heaven grows old.” It signifies a distrust of love as a genuine, selfless emotion.The conjuring up of “aged earth and deserted sky” alludes to dynastic changes, the displacement of people, their exile, and their tragic death, which casts an ominous shadow. Even in the moment of climactic scene of courtship, which leads to the consummation of their physical desire, this sentiment still prevails. This scene takes the form of a phone call and ostensibly looks like a formulaic scene from Hollywood's romantic comedies. Late at night, Liuyuan calls Liusu and quickly says: “I love you” and immediately hangs up. After a moment he calls back again and asks, “Do you love me?” Again, quite out of sync with his character, he quotes a classical Chinese verse to convey a profound anxiety: “Life, death, separation—with thee there is happiness; thy hand in mine, we will grow old together,” and says “I think this is a very mournful poem which says that life and death and parting are all enormous things, far beyond human control” (149).This lamentation discloses Liuyuan's premonitory sense of doom and thus the cynicism that nourishes his dandyism. Indeed, this sentiment saturates the atmosphere of the whole story. When we break through the façade of private, overwrought flirtation and courtship and tie in the statement with the broad historical context as its subtext, this lamentation is not enigmatic and not hard to understand: his class, as an amorphous stratum straddling between the residual aristocratic gentry class and the emergent bourgeois middle class, had missed its historical opportunity. Caught in the historical conjuncture of a slowly progressing social engineering that was furthermore stymied by imperialist invasion, it faced the blank wall of the “end” of history in its destiny as an immature yet precocious social group.Here, Liuyuan's distrust of love and marriage should not merely be seen as part of his nature as a playboy but should also be situated within the historical experience. Although his vision of a “civilization is completely ruined and everything destroyed” is still not a real prospect, nevertheless it is already an imaginable vista in the mind. This pessimistic view reflects a mood of despair in advance of the looming, aggravated, and protracted Second World War and the loss of hope on the part of this defenseless middle-class stratum in its ability to consolidate power and wealth. Therefore, though Liuyuan's anxiety is a projection of the author's own point of view, it is not out of sync of his character.14On the other hand, veteran playboy that he is, Liuyuan also looks for genuine affection and pleads for Liusu's understanding. So he even emerges from behind his cold façade when he recites the poem from the Shijing (《诗经》) (Book of Songs). He longs for a spiritual love born of a desire for a long-term relationship—he is not satisfied with his alienated, debauched life either.Both Liuyuan and Liusu are alienated from themselves. Liuyuan partially because he straddles two worlds: his experiences in Britain have endowed him with a highly rationalized mind, so he even feels bored and longs for some “orientalized” flavor; yet the Chinese socioeconomic situation is so hopeless that his plan of keeping a mistress is blown away by a hardly abrupt foreign invasion. Similarly, Liusu is also torn between two worlds: the traditional household that she decides to abandon and a rationalized bourgeois life in which, due to her background, her role can only be as a mistress in normal circumstances.15 While the seemingly “abnormal” temporarily leads to an unexpected alliance and transaction between the two worlds, what will happen when the “normality” returns? It is the inevitable return of the “normal” that accounts for why desolation (“canliang”), an aesthetic state that literally means “bleak and cold,” defines the narrator's feelings about the world in general and love in particular.Liusu immediately refuses Liuyan's rationalization about how life, death, and parting are beyond our control, seeing it merely as an excuse for not marrying her. She changes the direction of the conversation deliberately misinterpreting him: “A person so careless like you, if you cannot decide matters, who can decide them?” Liusu might misunderstand his feelings because she is ignorant of sociopolitical circumstances, as what consumes her mind is to arrange a marriage; yet Liuyuan curiously follows her lead, exchanging his premonition of doom for an expression of private love. When she says coldly, “You do not love me,” he reciprocates by saying that he cannot “waste money by marrying a woman who feels no emotion toward him” and rebukes her, claiming that “essentially you regard marriage as a long-term prostitution” (149). What they are fighting about in this second stage of the argument does not concern sociopolitics, which Liusu might not be interested in and has no knowledge of, but rather whether genuine love exists between them and whether marriage as a social institution is viable. Their discussion conveys the message that genuine love is the moral basis of a marriage rather a way to secure economic safety.Throughout her life, Liusu has a clear consciousness of her own precarious position—her class status—in the world. Her preoccupation with perpetuating her mode of life as a ritualistic mannerism of mundane enjoyment reveals the repressed unconscious of the precarious status of the petit bourgeois middle class that always feels threatened. In the story, the couple feels the vulnerability and helplessness of the middle class. Liusu's deliberate misunderstanding thus supplies a means for a negotiation, which supposedly leads to the final mutual understanding between the two. But more importantly for us, the process of negotiation itself features heterogeneous voices and shows us two value systems colliding with each other. One is Liuyuan's belief that love ought to be the basis of marriage, a perspective he acquires when he studies in England. The other one is Liusu's idea that traditional practice and morality underwrite marriage.The two value systems coexist because there are two worlds present. This romance can only take place in Hong Kong because it is, as Lee has noticed, “a thoroughly alien colony with none of the native sights and sounds of Shanghai.” In this alienated world, ingrained traditional values no longer hold sway (there are not many middle-class families there), and so in this unfamiliar setting without close relatives, Liusu can disregard gossip (though only to a certain extent). She can perform any tricks and display any unconventional gestures that are pleasing to her. In a word, they court each other in borrowed time and space, or a chronotope. Though this colonial setting also is unpropitious for her in certain respects, it is also a haven for overseas refugees. Liuyuan can flirt with other oriental women, including an Indian princess in exile, to mitigate his attraction to Liusu and to stimulate her envy and desire.If the existence of two worlds contributes to the (im)possibility of love, then what kind of wall triggers Liuyuan's tinge of emotion and passionate lament at the moment they take a walk near the Shallow Water Bay? “This wall,” Liuyuan says, “I don't know why, but it makes me think of the old sayings about the end of the world.” It is “a gray brick wall,” “cool and rough, the color of death” (139). A remains of historical catastrophe, it is a symbol of death.However, this is only part of the story. That the wall is also “so high that its upper edge could not be seen” can be easily overlooked (139). We can hardly imagine that this residual ruin of history could still be so magnificent (just as we can barely believe a dandy with insufficient Chinese learning could express such a profound longing for eternal love). These might be read as formal incongruities. But as Jameson informs us, “The very formal contradictions are themselves the most precious indications as to how we stand with respect to the concrete reality of social life itself at the present moment of time.”16 Thus they should be explored with consideration of authorial intervention. This does not mean a ruin in actual life could never happen to be so high, but what we need to inquire into is why the “endless” height and the coldness of death are placed together. The wall is surely visualized as short in readers' minds owing to the fact that the text evokes the Chinese idiom “duanbi canyuan,” which refers to crumbling walls and ruined curbs.Another statement of Jameson's might offer us cues: “The influence of class consciousness on thought is felt not so much in the perception of the individual details of reality, as in the overall form or gestalt according to which those details are organized and interpreted.”17 The issue is not how the wall appears in reality, but how it appears in the viewer's mind. In this light, the wall, in its grand, sublime figure (despite its “cold, rough” surface), disregarding the erosion of time and alien invasion, also symbolizes the middle class's consciousness of a timeless, natural present of a sustainable life, or the will to such a life. It is a reification into which the outside world was frozen. However, it can also be viewed as a utopia or as a submission to “fate” notwithstanding, in which there is a hidden utopian sentiment that bears a strong will to live an eternally peaceful, comfortable life. It is utopian in the sense that this sentiment holds that “the ultimate ethical goal of human life is a world … a world in which meaning and life are once more indivisible, in which man and the world are at one.”18 Thus, Liusu puts her existential understanding into practice in her life; the world that she lives in and she herself are at one, and this is her ultimate ethical code. Seen in this light, the wall here is a symbol for an ironclad will of power to drag on with a difficult life, to keep a self-privileged world, to fight against any historical vicissitude.We can understand another image related to the wall, a female figure in a local folk genre called bengbeng opera, in the same vein. In the preface to the second edition of Romance, Zhang describes this image in a way very much reminiscent of the rhetoric articulated by Liuyuan in discussing the wall: “In the wilderness of the future, amidst the ruins of buildings and walls, only a woman like the heroine from a bengbeng opera can survive and live on peacefully, because there is a home for her in any era, any society, anywhere.”19 It is obvious that the “sublimity” of the wall is identical to the “vitality” of the woman. Lee thus has aptly noted that Liusu is “very much modeled after such a heroine.”20 That Zhang focuses on the description of this figure in her short preface is noteworthy, as it implies that the spirit of the coquette is the core of most of her robust, unabashed female characters. Therefore, a more detailed examination of the nature of this character is warranted.Bengbeng opera is a local opera for lower-class audiences. In Shanghai, this earthy genre had been “out of fashion” at the time. But although she hesitates, Zhang still wants to watch it: “I'm too embarrassed to admit that I'm interested in such a rubbishy, lowbrow sort of thing” (“对这种破烂, 低级趣味的东西如此感到兴趣，都不好意思向人开口”).21 After watching it, she describes two scenes featuring two noted figures, Li Sanniang, an empress who in the play is still a laboring countrywoman, and a wench who murders her husband and in the play tries to explain the crime before an interrogator.In offering these two figures as representative of the vivacious young woman or coquette (huadan, a fixed role in Chinese opera), the intention of the author is rather ambiguous. Although she refutes the general impression of these “women who acquire power in the primitive and barbarian world” (“蛮荒世界里得势的女人”) as having “seared and passionate big eyes” (“ 燥烈的大黑眼睛”) and as being “firmer than men, holding a horsewhip in hand and whipping people now and then” (“比男人还刚强，手里一根马鞭子，动不动抽人一下”), she does not give any clear explanation of how she feels about this type of character.22 Yet the earthy language and the primitive energy shown by the two women suggest that their spirit can be generally understood as robust, audacious, and unabashed, unencumbered by any sense of shame wrought by civilized culture.That Zhang, a woman from an aristocratic high-class family with refined tastes, should identify with this vulgar image, in the same way that she identifies with lower-class, folk culture, might seem surprising. Yet I see this as a variation on her sophistication and refinement and as a projection of her anxiety over being a vulnerable woman—now an unprofessional, semitraditional middle-class woman without practical skills and thus bereft of financial security in the “new” society. What Zhang implies is that in harsh times, only primitive, “genuine” human instinct (both of which are related to the feminine and the sexual) free of any hypocritical and masculine (read: patriarchal) traits can survive in the world. But since men play no role in this matriarchal fantasy (except perhaps as sex servants), it is another myth without metaphysical or historical grounding. In other words, while Zhang's emphasis on the primitive might be understood as “a reaction against modernity,” to see it as “a return to native Chinese sources for intellectual nourishment and aesthetic pleasure” is only a hallucination or an optical illusion, because neither Li Sanniang nor the vicious wench who commits matricide can shoulder the burden of “fulfilling” the ideal of “liv[ing] on peacefully … in any era, any society, anywhere.”23 Fundamentally, this idea is still a projection of a different sensitivity nourished by traditional Chinese folk culture (which nevertheless derived its ideological inspiration from the imperial high-brow culture) and modern Western art (such as the image of the prostitute in Eugene O'Neill's drama The Great God Brown), which is founded on a cultural-political anarchism premised on primitivism.24 But what is the reason for this weird invocation of a vigorous dancing woman, which apparently appears to be an epiphany?This sudden appearance of epiphany seems to derive from mythology, but we need to make a distinction between the sense of vitality imparted by myth,