China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Christopher M. Lupke, Smith College
Chair: Richard J. Smith, Rice University
Discussant: Wai-yee Li, Princeton University
A variety of social groups have invoked ming to account for the vagaries of life. Accordingly, ming has informed Chinese writing from the earliest times to the present. The second part of this back-to-back panel investigates how ming affects questions of intertextuality, class, nationality, and gender. In particular, how has ming influenced literary production and how do non-elites deal with the seemingly inexorable nature of ming in their everyday lives?
Patricia Sieber’s paper will focus on late imperial literature, particularly the role played by ming in the Xixiang ji and its intertextual relationship with Qing narratives such as The Dream of the Red Chamber. Sabina Knight considers how ming reinforces inequalities between men and women by examining three texts from the late Qing through contemporary Chinese fiction. Christopher Lupke’s reading of four recent works, two from the PRC and two from Taiwan, suggests that ming is a category that transcends regions in the broader Chinese cultural milieu. Finally, Patricia Ebrey highlights the contrast between elite and popular cultural production in an effort to problematize the other panelists’ discussions of ming, specifically with respect to gender roles in social history. The panel will leave time for and invite discussion.
Patricia Sieber, Ohio State University
This paper examines how certain particulars of late Ming and early Qing print culture interacted with interrelated literati ideas about authorship, agency and fate. With dozens of versions circulating in the late Ming and early Qing, the Xixiang ji story provides an excellent case study for examining how the simultaneity of textual materials surrounding a given set of characters shaped notions of agency and fate. Specific questions to be addressed include: How are fate and agency defined in Xixiang ji plays? What role do intertextual relations play in these definitions? How do framing and supplementary materials reinforce or challenge notions of fate embedded in the main story? How do illustrations intersect with conceptions of fate? Do editorial patterns of individual Xixiang ji editions reveal particularized and/or socially stratified views of agency and fate? How does the proliferation of sequels and revisionist texts affect conceptions of fate for the characters and for the authors? Were rewritings of popular texts so common because they allowed for the visible deviation from a fixed prior text, thus inscribing an otherwise illegible agency? Thus the paper ultimately addresses the issue of whether late Ming literati used new forms of authorship to reconceptualize elite agency in literary terms rather than defining it simply as a particular socio-political fate.
Deirdre Sabina Knight, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The deployment of fate (ming) in twentieth-century Chinese fiction raises an important question: What (and whose) interests are served by appeals to destiny? In particular, does the notion of ming mystify the gender-based oppression of social practices and institutions and encourage belief in their inevitability? Looking at how notions of fate script narratives of desire, courtship, sexuality, marriage and mothering, I will ask how ming shapes the construction and, more important, the constriction of female subjectivity and agency in twentieth-century Chinese fiction.
In this paper, I analyze the gender asymmetry of appeals to ming in three fictional works, a late-Qing novel, a May Fourth story and a contemporary novella, to show how this notion is invoked to justify particular practices, explain away the causes of human discontent and set the limits of social change. In what ways do the frames of reference, norms, values, ideals and emotional patterns that the discourse of fate reproduces for women differ from those it allows for men? How does the notion of ming work to make love, marriage and mothering imperatives of fate rather than chosen commitments? Are women more likely to resign themselves to fate? Specifically, in the realm of romance, what are the effects of ming and yuanfen (the lot that brings people together) on narratives of seduction and desire? What are love, seduction and desire if not freely chosen? Or is freely chosen love just a Western ideal?
Christopher Lupke, Smith College
In modern Chinese literature the notion of ming is one of the primary points of tension between the assertion of "the modern" and the ineluctability of "the tradition." According to May Fourth writers, as one of the aspects of "feudalism" that prevented China from transcending its past, ming was considered negative, superstitious, and yet oppressively present in the workings of everyday life. Ming has continued throughout the century to be a central concern of modern writers. This paper explores four contemporary works: Bai Xianyong’s "Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream," Zhang Xinxin’s "Dreams of Our Generation," Wang Wenxing’s Backed Against the Sea, and Yu Hua’s To Live.
I plan to ask how these writers have sought to re-inscribe what seems to be the indelible mark of fatalism in Chinese cultural discourse. Has the emergence of an individual subject position in contemporary literature challenged the hold on lives that ming has seemed to enjoy from time immemorial? Can the structure of a bizarre narrative such as Wang Wenxing’s be attributed to an attack on this "feudal" concept? Is the pervasiveness of ming a fundamental part of what constitutes the narration of "China" in a time when outposts of Chinese literature are sometimes considered regionalist? For modern Chinese writers, ming is both an emblem of the past and a trope through which the trajectory of narrative is carried out.
Patricia Ebrey, University of Washington
What effect did the elite discourse on fate have on ordinary people’s behavior? For men, at least, it rarely leads to fatalism. Both literati and peasant men are as likely to respond to fortune-tellers’ predictions by taking action as by resigning themselves to their current lot. Whatever one’s fated starting point, success depends on personal effort.
The term "woman’s fate," however, evokes different associations. The key elements are the man she ends up marrying and the boys and girls she ends up bearing, both of which were commonly spoken of as beyond human control. It is the fate of some women to bear many sons, others to have their children die in infancy. Linked to the notion of "woman’s fate" is the idea of needing to make do with what one is offered to a degree not expected of men.
In this paper I will consider this gender dimension of fate. Should we think of it in terms of a common set of ideas, shared by all, which however comes to be experienced differently by men and women because their circumstances differ? Or, does focus on the shared assumptions lumped under the term fate obscure the ways they served to underpin patriarchy? Did men at all levels participate in creating this discourse in a way women did not? Did Chinese notions of fate lead to more fatalistic women than men? Or could women use the idea of "women’s fate" in a way that authorized their agency?