from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1997, 44-49
© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
During a five-week travel
study seminar in Beijing, Walsh discovers censorship of certain
Chinese classics, deemed “yellow” books.
Gong-sun Chou: What do you mean by “understanding language”?
Mencius: When someone's words are one-sided, I understand how his mind is clouded. When someone's words are loose and extravagant, I understand the pitfalls into which that person has fallen. When someone's words are warped, I understand wherein the person has strayed. When someone's words are evasive, I understand how the person has been pushed to his limit.
Mencius
Beijing1, summer of 1995. The United Nations Women's Conference had weathered political barriers and China was hip. Travel agents, religious leaders, and women's groups buzzed with plans. Not the usual missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits going to China—and not the sinologists. China was opening up; Tianamen was five years buried, and the square was back to business as usual.
China was kitsch; it was in; it was the place to go. And I was going. The Ellen Bayard Weedon Foundation was supporting its first community college faculty member in a five-week travel-study seminar in the Chinese capital city two months before the women's conference.
I assumed that after the conference, foreign women would be less novel, a smaller problem, and I vowed to be a good ugly American. I would avoid debates on human rights; I would not join foreign journalists in the square to commemorate Tianamen; I would not demand prison visits or audiences with dissidents. So, what could I do; where could I go; what do people like me do when they can't press the margins? Book stores—we go to bookstores.
Getting to the store was “a trip.” Many of the small, eight yuan taxis, lovingly called bread boxes because of their size, wouldn't stop for a 5'9" woman with short auburn hair. They wanted to have their picture taken with me, but they didn't want the problem of transcending the language barrier to transport me across the gridlocked streets: a mixture of bumper-to-bumper bikes, cars, donkey carts, and Mercedes. I opted for a higher fee and immediately was whisked away in an air-conditioned German car with plush velour seat coverings, nicer than anything in my garage at home.
The book store was in the heart of the city's shopping district, Liulichang, where in the late 18th century, Emperor Qianlong proposed a project to compile a vast Encyclopedia of All Knowledge Under Heaven. The area then, literally translated “glazed tile factory” for the kilns which produced imperial tiles, became tremendously important for its old and rare books and was a center of cultural activity in Beijing since the 1600's2.
I arrived, armed with interest, respect, a to-buy list, and my Visa card. For the first two hours, I shopped without incident, but as the list became shorter, my problems increased. I simply couldn't find certain Chinese classics that had to be there.
“No, no, no,” she said furtively glancing around the store as if anyone would have understood my request. “We don't have that book.”
I assumed they were temporarily out of stock, so I tried again. “Maybe you can get Chin P'ing Mei3 for me from another store or from your supplier. I'll be in the city several weeks.”
“ It's ‘yellow’ book. We don't carry, I can't get. I, even, haven't read,” she labored, eyes downcast, more pained by the encounter than embarrassed.
“But,” I continued, “it's a classic; Chin P'ing Mei is perhaps the first great Chinese novel of manners. How can you not have it?”
As I puzzled over this marketing gaff, I recalled the title in translation—The Golden Lotus—but even this additional information was not enlightening. I'm not an Asianist; I just had a list of “must read” Chinese classics culled from general readings in the field, and I didn't have a clue about its plot. Through a series of strange synaptic linkages, however, I remembered that in the later Tang (923-935) a palace dancer “bound her feet to make them small and curved like new moons” (qtd. in Ebrey 217). Historical records in the 12th century and current scholarship link the tiny new moons to the lotus flower. Until the 1920's when footbinding was officially banned, these tiny purposefully deformed and misshaped feet were romantically and euphemistically valued as golden lotus—the same as the title. But even I, naïve and ignorant of Chinese culture, did not assume Chin Ping Mei had been banned because it was merely a record of footbinding.
My mind, racing through years of accumulated trivia, recalled that the tiny feet were not only signs of male dominance and serious curtailment of female mobility, but that many writers connect them to a purely erotic appeal (see Howard Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom). Men coveted them for their erotic value, and women coveted them as the lingua franca of a good marriage match. It was the kindest, if most painful, gift a mother could give her three-year old daughter. Feng Jicai's recently released novel, Three Inch Golden Lotus, examines the intricacies of footbinding, I remembered; so, how could a modern treatment of the topic be available and a classical treatment not?
Now I was getting closer to the real issue, and I was not only inconvenienced, but curious.
“Is it the content? Is it too romantic? Is it banned?” I shot in rapid fire. My Chinese is non-existent, so her English was scholarly by comparison; but the combination of staccato questions, Southern drawl, and content stopped her cold.
“It's yellow book,” she firmly replied as if that should have been enough to end my queries.
Yellow, I pondered. Yellow-bellied, lily-livered a western child might taunt. So was it cowardly? Is a yellow novel about cowardice and inappropriate behavior in a society that respects honor and “face” above all things: li (propriety), yi (appropriateness), rén (benevolence). Certainly, cowardice would be inappropriate, but would it be banned?
Or was it another color-related metaphor? Yellow plague, yellow peril, and then the derogatory use of the color in a western context sprang to mind, yellow race. But why would she use it? In that politically incorrect sense, wouldn't all the great Chinese classics be yellow?
“We have Shui-hu chuan4,” (Water Margin also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh) she said with pride. “You buy and read. It Mao's favorite.”
I was pleased; Outlaws was on my list, the four-volume, one-hundred chapter Shapiro translation. After paying the seventy yuan (roughly $8.50 U.S.) for the set, I returned to my hotel happy to have a focus for those grey sleepless morning hours in Beijing, a residue of jet lag. I knew only that the novel had lots of characte most of whom were outlaws who exercised the Confucian virtues of loyalty and justice but were oppressed by corrupt government officials. So, I temporarily postponed my first request, and plunged into hoping that my understanding of “yellow” would become clearer by reading what was not.
Loosely connected vignettes set in 12th century Sung China about the “gallant fraternity” soon absorbed me. The early chapters were mildly reminiscent of Bruce Willis and Die Hard: lots of hard drinking, heavy feasting, blood letting, crude acting mixed with adventure and justice and brotherhood and sworn filiation.
By chapter 21, one of the best loved gallants, Song Jiang, is arguing with his unfaithful concubine, Poxi. She has his pouch which contains a superficially incriminating letter from the leader of the outlaw band. In her hands, the pouch and contents becomes fodder for blackmail.
Rightfully, Song wants it back and is willing to accede to her request but needs some time to raise the money. Poxi sees this as a plot to cheat her and screams to attract attention. Song “pushed her down with his left hand and with his right slit her throat... Afraid she wouldn't die Song Jiang slashed with his dagger once more...” (342) and the girl's head was more or less severed. Poxi's mother commented that she was “bad jade.” The hero must not look guilty of conspiring with the outlaws or murdering a nice girl. Clearly, nothing yellow here.
Wu Song, another of the outlaws from the marsh, kills a general, his men, wife, concubine and two children. He walks back through his carnage “found two or three more women, and killed them too, all speared to the ground. I'm satisfied at last,” he said to himself (494). At least he kills with political correctness—young, old, male, female.
In a subsequently brutal vignette, a provocative beauty named Golden Lotus poisons her husband with arsenic in order to continue a tumultuous, adulterous affair (Ch 25). She is soon beheaded along with her lover (Ch 26). Oh well, I thought to myself, some do lose their heads over an affair. I had gotten punchy if I laughed at my own bad paronomasia.
By this point in volume two, I realize that violence alone isn't “yellow” because I've seen blood and gore aplenty; I assume I'm prepared for anything.
Chapter 27 introduces cannibalism. Wu Song, the equal opportunity outlaw, is traveling. He stops at a tavern for food, breaks open a dumpling, spies a hair and asks if the dumplings are filled with “human flesh or dogs” (446).
He continues: “In my wanderings among the gallant fraternity I've often heard men say: ‘What traveller dares stop by the big tree at Crossroads Rise? The fat ones become filling for dumplings, the thin ones fill up the stream!’” (447).
While this vignette might be dismissed as unsupported rumor about tavern food, much like the mystery meat of most of our college cafeteria legends, a later chapter leaves no doubt.
One of the gallants, Li Kui, leaves the compound to retrieve his 90 year old, blind mother. Of course these guys practice filial piety. On his way, Li Kui is hungry, finds a tavern, is tricked by the owners and in anger, beheads the male, Li Gui. After robbing the tavern owners, he sits down to eat his rice lamenting the paucity of the repast:
What a fool I am. There's good meat right before me. Why shouldn't I eat it? He whipped out his dagger and cut two pieces of flesh from Li Gui's leg. After washing them in the stream, he cooked them over burning kindling... roasting and eating at the same time. (705-06)
Very straightforward — cannibalism does not make a novel yellow.
Being truthful (or untruthful) doesn't make a book “yellow,” either. Another gallant, Yang Xiong, while questioning his unfaithful wife, Clever Cloud, says “Tell me the truth and I'll spare your wretched life” (765). She confesses her adultery. Then her husband, Yang, advances and “pulled out her tongue and cut if off” then later “sliced her open from breast to belly, hauled out her organs, hung them on a tree, and cut her into seven parts” (766). Standing by one's word is not a virtue to live by, but such disappointing misogynic behavior isn't yellow either.
Now, I'm no prude. Mayhem, murder, and malevolence are the stock in trade of many fiction writers. I'm not turned off—I'm perplexed. I go to a bookstore to buy a book but I can't because it's yellow and they won't sell yellow, but what I'm reading isn't yellow. Okay!
It's early and I'm awake, awake and perplexed. Bikes are whizzing up and down the heavily overcrowded thoroughfare, so maybe the bookstore is open. I'm off in search of yellow.
The salesperson is there, her usually inscrutable persona sagging a little as she sees me walking toward her. Recognition precedes panic.
“Well, did you get it in?” I ask bruskly wanting her to feel my “American” impatience. Quickly, she recovers the unfathomable demeanor.
“So sorry,” she said as if she didn't understand the question.
“Chin Ping Mei. You were going to try to get a copy in for me; it's been over a week.”
“No, no, you misunderstand. We not sell that book, we not sell because...”
“Yes, yes I know, it's yellow.”
“Yes, yellow,” she said, clearly pleased that this barbarian, the Chinese word for foreigner, had finally understood the obvious.
“You finish Outlaws of Marsh—great book. Classic. You like it.”
I was speechless, a rarely experienced condition. This bright young woman was being honest. There was no subterfuge in her eyes, in her words; she was convinced that I shouldn't have Chin Ping Mei. But why? She had never read it.
I would try one more approach: “You know, you really can't control what I read. Humans can't dictate what kind of material other humans buy or read; it's not, not....”
What was I saying and where and why? I was in the heart of Beijing, China, and she (or the government) most definitely had in the past, did in the present, and could in the future control what I read and bought in their country. The epiphany was chilling. I returned to my hotel, empty handed.
A year has passed, and she was partly right. I loved Outlaws. I re-read some passages for the sheer power and fun of them, and I even plan to use some of the vignettes in a new fall course on Chinese Fiction and Film. But, on hot evenings, when I'm in a pensive, philosophical frame, I wonder about Mencius and Gong's chat: “What do you mean by ”understanding language"? And later, “When someone's words are evasive, I understand how the person has been pushed to his limit.” Book burning, censorship, scholar purges—all can accomplish the same end, or simply call it “yellow.”
Notes
1. That the anglicised name Beijing replaced Peking is not surprising. What is shocking, however, is that westerners, perhaps desirous of exoticizing the city even more, mispronounce the capital city and that now Chinese have accepted our mispronounciation and use it almost as the standard. To correctly pronounce the capital avoid the prolonged “dj” sound settling instead for the clipped “jing” in jingle.
2. Books in China have endured through both good and bad times. During the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC) the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, ordered all books save those on medicine, agriculture, and divination be destroyed to “make the people ignorant” and prevent the “use of the past to discredit the present.” Scholars who had committed many of the old texts to memory reconstructed originals; further, some scholars had hidden copies of certain texts. However, many books were permanently lost to world bibliophiles in the Emperor's misguided attempt to control the people.
3. Old translations are difficult to find and often unsatisfying. Look for a new translation soon to be released from the University of Chicago.
4. One of the issues related to infusing Chinese materials into existing courses is the difficulty for nonspecialists caused by multiple systems of romanization. Wade-Giles is most often used in reference to classical Chinese texts, scholarly writing, and some familiar names. China, not Zhongguo and Tibet not Xizang are examples of the familiar Wade-Giles spelling being retained.
In 1979, the People's Republic of China officially adopted Pinyin (phonetic spelling). Since Shapiro's translation came out in 1988, he renders character's names in Pinyin. The title of the novel, because of its familiarity, is rendered in Wade-Giles.
Works Cited
Cotterell, Arthur. China: A Cultural History. New York: Mentor, 1990.
Mencius. Trans. D.C. Lau. New York: Penguin Books, 1970.
Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong.
Outlaws of the Marsh. Trans. Sidney Shapiro. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1988.
Bettye Walsh received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in Higher Education Administration with areas of concentration in law, policy analysis, adult learning, and English. Serving as a part-time instructor at PVCC in the late 70s and full-time since 1984, she has taught technical writing, public speaking, college composition, world literature, and both developmental and honors English. She remains passionate about bringing the world to her students whatever their preparation or past experience. Most recently, she used her sabbatical to work on a non-western textbook project and to develop a course in Chinese Fiction and Film.