Rouge of the North
Rouge of the North -- Eileen Chang (1967)
Having lived among the "Singsong girls of Shanghai" for 6 months this year, I had to spend a little more time with the translator, Eileen Chang, who subsequently wrote this brief novel about a proper married lady who lived in the same time and place.
Well -- maybe not quite so proper.
It's a rather grim story -- since the lead character, Yindi, though a smart, feisty, healthy, pretty girl -- has a very bad attitude -- and it just keeps getting worse -- even though, by traditional standards, she was both fortunate and successful -- as a lower merchant class girl who marries into a prominent Mandarin family and
produces two generations of heirs. And in the Chinese world where the mother-in-law can make a young wife utterly miserable, her mother-in-law demanded nothing more than ritual obeisance -- and the extended family was well served by a large staff of servants and slaves. Then, after 15 years, both the mother-in-law and the blind,sick husband are dead -- and our low-born heroine got her own house and servants.
So there she was -- an attractive, independent woman in her mid-thirties -- living with a teenage son and a staff of cooks, maids, butlers etc. -- not wealthy -- but with enough to get by without ever working a day.
Doesn't really sound like such a bad life, does it ?
But oh, her life was miserable! She despised and/or feared everyone - and following the lead of her invalid husband, she became addicted to opium -- which seems to be a disastrous event in many family stories from that period -- whether high born or otherwise.
So ... the world got one more depraved dope fiend -- and why should we care ? Only because her story feels so real -- and the decline of the cute, perky shop girl into an addicted, vicious old woman is mirrored by the decline of the family into which she married -- and the decline of an entire civilization as it foundered upon the rocks of the 20th C. -- and Shanghai was rocked by revolutions and invasions.
No romance in all this dreariness -- only one brief, furtive moment when her loneliness was penetrated by a dissolute, whore-mongering brother-in-law who took a break from the singsong houses to ravish her in a Buddhist temple during the celebration of his dead father's birthday.
Boy -- was that fun! -- as she passionately hissed "enemy" in his ear, and then, immediately consumed by fear of discovery, tried to hang herself that very evening.
Thank goodness this novel was short! -- and yet -- as soon as I finished --- a framing episode got me to begin reading it all over again -- swept into the vortex its downward spiral.
Though in a way -- it's a very upbeat novel -- because there is no great misfortune -- only somebody who brings misery upon herself . (she also
manages to destroy the life of her daughter-in-law, but we never get close enough to that character to care much about her)
I've noticed that some readers have written that this story exemplifies the abuses of arranged marriages -- however -- if you read the story carefully, you'll notice that Yindi was given the right of refusal -- which she had exercised in a previous match.
Some have also mentioned that she was denied a marriage with her true love who worked in a pharmacy across the street -- but Yindi specifically rejects this union, which would make her the daughter-in-law of a poor woman in the countryside.
Both women might have been happier had they been sold as children to a singsong house.
One more note: this is a story about Shanghai high society -- so it also touches the international community --and the Mandarin family keeps an authentic English tutor on premises to coach the sons -- though, since our heroine is restricted to the women's quarters, she never meets him.
Having lived among the "Singsong girls of Shanghai" for 6 months this year, I had to spend a little more time with the translator, Eileen Chang, who subsequently wrote this brief novel about a proper married lady who lived in the same time and place.
Well -- maybe not quite so proper.
It's a rather grim story -- since the lead character, Yindi, though a smart, feisty, healthy, pretty girl -- has a very bad attitude -- and it just keeps getting worse -- even though, by traditional standards, she was both fortunate and successful -- as a lower merchant class girl who marries into a prominent Mandarin family and
produces two generations of heirs. And in the Chinese world where the mother-in-law can make a young wife utterly miserable, her mother-in-law demanded nothing more than ritual obeisance -- and the extended family was well served by a large staff of servants and slaves. Then, after 15 years, both the mother-in-law and the blind,sick husband are dead -- and our low-born heroine got her own house and servants.
So there she was -- an attractive, independent woman in her mid-thirties -- living with a teenage son and a staff of cooks, maids, butlers etc. -- not wealthy -- but with enough to get by without ever working a day.
Doesn't really sound like such a bad life, does it ?
But oh, her life was miserable! She despised and/or feared everyone - and following the lead of her invalid husband, she became addicted to opium -- which seems to be a disastrous event in many family stories from that period -- whether high born or otherwise.
So ... the world got one more depraved dope fiend -- and why should we care ? Only because her story feels so real -- and the decline of the cute, perky shop girl into an addicted, vicious old woman is mirrored by the decline of the family into which she married -- and the decline of an entire civilization as it foundered upon the rocks of the 20th C. -- and Shanghai was rocked by revolutions and invasions.
No romance in all this dreariness -- only one brief, furtive moment when her loneliness was penetrated by a dissolute, whore-mongering brother-in-law who took a break from the singsong houses to ravish her in a Buddhist temple during the celebration of his dead father's birthday.
Boy -- was that fun! -- as she passionately hissed "enemy" in his ear, and then, immediately consumed by fear of discovery, tried to hang herself that very evening.
Thank goodness this novel was short! -- and yet -- as soon as I finished --- a framing episode got me to begin reading it all over again -- swept into the vortex its downward spiral.
Though in a way -- it's a very upbeat novel -- because there is no great misfortune -- only somebody who brings misery upon herself . (she also
manages to destroy the life of her daughter-in-law, but we never get close enough to that character to care much about her)
I've noticed that some readers have written that this story exemplifies the abuses of arranged marriages -- however -- if you read the story carefully, you'll notice that Yindi was given the right of refusal -- which she had exercised in a previous match.
Some have also mentioned that she was denied a marriage with her true love who worked in a pharmacy across the street -- but Yindi specifically rejects this union, which would make her the daughter-in-law of a poor woman in the countryside.
Both women might have been happier had they been sold as children to a singsong house.
One more note: this is a story about Shanghai high society -- so it also touches the international community --and the Mandarin family keeps an authentic English tutor on premises to coach the sons -- though, since our heroine is restricted to the women's quarters, she never meets him.
posted by chris miller | 7:34 AM
4 Comments:
You must not have had the pleasure of reading 'Flowers of Shanghai," the classical Chinese novel translated into Mandarin by Eileen Chang. (The original was in the Suzhou dialect.) In that novel, the author described how in the case of one rather inept singsong girl, "during footbinding three of her toes went missing without much ado - never mind the beating." Red-hot steel opium picks poking "fragrant scars" all over the girl's body formed "a skyful of scattered stars." And this is in the first-tier houses where the girls had some limited choices in whom they sleep with. The fates of those in the Er-yao and Wild Chicken segments of the prostitution markets can be imagined. I am afraid your views of women's lot in China at that time are unduly charitable.
Chang was not merely the translator of Rouge of the North; she wrote the first version of the story in Chinese, titled "the Golden Cangue." Yindi's pains were very complex, but sexual deprivation and the craving for love are at the forefront. Chang's touch is probably too light for the modern western ear to discern, but it would be difficult to blame Yindi as having less to complain about than, let us say, Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.
Thankyou for your thoughtful comment, Cinnabar.
Actually, I did have the pleasure of reading Chang's translation of Flowers of Shanghai, and while I do remember the mistreatment of that one inept, dim-witted girl by her frustrated owner, that sort of thing only happened once in that very long novel. It would have been more likely for a girl to harm herself to extort favors from an owner concerned with her investment.
So yes, I do think that Yindi, who was both smart and attractive, may well have had a happier, or, at least, less grim, life as a singsong girl.
Thank you for your entries – they are great fun to read and delightfully impressionistic at times.
The instance of mistreatment you recall from the Flowers of Shanghai is of Golden Flower, Zhu Jinhua. It was in her conversation with Emerald Phoenix, Cuifeng, that Emerald casually dropped the reference to Pearl Phoenix’s missing toes. This sets the stage for a later conversation about physical abuse of the girls.
Han Bangqing, Haishanghua’s author, was so subtle that even Eileen Chang failed to realize that Emerald Phoenix, Cuifeng, was shuttling between the beds of two men the night she and Luo Zifu sealed their amorous union, until she translated that part, despite having been a fan of the book for a long time. She noted how this elliptical style expects too much from the modern reader in her preface to the Mandarin edition.
Han therefore does not belabor points; one is supposed to extrapolate from a few facts. Your interpretation that a prime asset like Emerald is more likely to extort concessions by threatening harm to herself is belied by the fact that Emerald suggests the tactic to Golden Flower when advising her. Golden Flower’s madam has at most a few investments and can ill afford even losing a poorly endowed one. To look behind that strategy, what sort of straits would drive even Emerald, one of the toughest and most enterprising of the book’s wondrous gallery of women, to such desperate measures herself? She was severely beaten by her madam, and it can be safely assumed that a single occurrence would not have driven someone to suicide. As Emerald told Luo, “If I ever make the slightest mistake, she would give me a hiding – it drove me insane.”
There is clearly a concerted effort to keep the johns in the dark about the truth of what goes on within these establishments. Only Emerald dares to articulate it, and even then Luo says he does not believe the accusation that these madams torture their slave girls. Emerald however stands behind her sweeping condemnation of the "Seven Sisters." The fact that her own madam is less aggressive than some of the other ones only serves to show the depth of horrors in these places. 先生盛德，未免可欺之以方。
Yindi's situation is obviously not the worst in the world of these desperate configurations, nor did Chang intend to parade her as such. One of the effects of Chang’s peerless fiction is to show the myriad ways in which Chinese women became misshapen under the monstrous pressures of their time. Yindi’s tragedy is compounded by the fact that she had money and power over the select few in her household, and over the years she “hacked them to death with the corner of her heavy golden cangue; those who escaped were now but half-alive” (“Golden Cangue.”) It is therefore multiple tragedies in the making, and readers are meant to lend their understanding, if not empathy, to the unfolding of these inexorable destinies.
Zhang was reluctant to be Buck-lurid in portraying traditional Chinese society, and the cultural complexity of rendering that society’s repressive forces effectively probably was beyond her abilities as an English writer. But to a vast number of Chinese readers Zhang’s art amounts to a challenge to the rotten core of the tradition we are still grappling with to this very day.
Thank you, again, Cinnabar, for your comments.
I read both "Rouge" and "Singsong Girls" twice, but still feel that I missed a great deal (though I also feel that way about the things that I encounter in my own life)
Please feel encouraged to comment on any of the other books that I've discussed. You clearly know this territory much better than I do.
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