The Reliable and the Unreliable
When I meet her, can I interpret whether she cares or not?
YEN CHI-TAO, TO "HUAN HSI SHA"[5]
The true word, the word meant, has great power: it brings lovers together and keeps them together across spans of time and physical distances. Other things may fade: the memory of a face. Dreams may try to span distances but cannot. In "Ts'ai-yün kuei," after describing the scene of his travels, Liu Yung moves in the second stanza to recollection
[5] CST , p. 239.
of the beloved, as he so often does.[6] There are two powerful remainders: the lingering smell of her body and a "line" or "sentence." The one is dissipating, but the other stays clearly in mind.
Since we parted, most painful of all,
barely detectable in my sleeves and gown's fold,
there is still her lingering scent.
And I'm sure that she, on phoenix pillow, under lovebird quilts,
cannot help brooding on it through the long nights.
But the only thing that really pulls at my heart
is that one line, when we were about to go our ways,
that I cannot forget.
We do not know the content of the line, only a claim of its power. And perhaps the content of the line cannot be adequately reproduced in these lyrics he now writes, where they would become mere words of song, deprived of their connection to a person and a moment, open to repetition by anyone.
But the words of lovers may sometimes prove to be untrustworthy, as in the problematic conclusion to Liu Yung's "Ch'iu-yeh yüeh."[7] The opening stanza is a conventional situation in which the poet reencounters the beloved, but instead of their steamy and joyous reunion, something goes wrong.
Back then we met only to part
And I told myself there was no way ever to see her again.
But the other day I met her unexpectedly at a party.
While we were drinking she found a chance
To draw her brows together and sigh,
Rousing any number of old sorrows.
Her eyes brimming with tears,
In my ear she whispered
[6] CST , p. 36.
[7] Translation by James R. Hightower, "The Songwriter Liu Yung," pt. 2, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42 (1982): 18. CST , p. 23.
A thousand secret reproaches:
"Too bad you had things in your heart
There was no way to see."
I would like to believe she is telling the truth
And has no other ties.
Maybe I'd better just curb my fancy
And go on with her forever.
If the speaker is uncertain what is in the other's heart, the song's readers or audience are equally uncertain who is speaking and what is being said. Hightower's decision in handling the conclusion here is only one among several possibilities. For example, we might easily extend the woman's speech two more lines, so that instead of having the man doubt her sincerity in turn, we finally have only her distrust of him, at which he is so ashamed that he decides to stay true to her.
"I'm certain that in your heart
things were concealed.
I would like to believe what you say is true,
and that you were not involved with anyone else."
At this I can't help reining in my fancies
and going on with her forever.
Another, no less plausible interpretation would have the entire end in the voice of the male speaker, distrusting her, yet deciding he can't help returning to her in the end.
I'm certain that in your heart
there are certain things concealed.
I'd like to believe she is telling the truth
and that she's not involved with anyone else.
Yet I can't help stopping these fancies
and going on with her forever.
Someone distrusts the words of someone else; each reader or member of the audience may tell the story according to his or her own anticipations. Although the decision is less urgent for us, we stand in the position of Liu Yung outside the curtain, hearing the repeatable words of the song and not knowing to whom they are directed.
We might want to believe the lyricist when he tells of his pain at hearing his beloved entertain another man; but he may be only inventing a situation to elaborate the title of an old melody. In his lyrics he wonders if the beloved "means the words" in the song she sings. But the singer may be no more than a bird that repeats the same syllables with meaningless and mindless skill. In the famous Tun-huang version of "Ch'üeh t'a chih" ("Tieh lien hua") the exasperated woman locks away the magpie that keeps bringing the good news of her husband's return, words without any truth to back up their repeated syllables: "You bring good news, but when has it ever had any basis?" sung-hsi ho-ts'eng yu p'ing-chü . As the magpie later complains, the words were only to cheer her up, pure rhetoric—perhaps like the singer's profession of love in the song. And at last the magpie wishes for the husband's return so that the message of its words will be substantiated and it will be set free.
The love song is both the stylized imitation of love and at the same time the words in which a truth of love can be spoken. The singer is both a professional, paid to enact passion, and a human being, to whom love, longing, and loss can actually happen. We would be overly credulous to believe every statement of love-longing is indeed love; we would be foolishly cynical to believe that every statement of love-longing is purely professional or part of a hollow game. And we can't tell the difference. We may, as readers eight centuries later, say it doesn't matter; but it did seem to matter to the lyricists whose songs we now can only read, who were ever looking for evidence that the singer really meant it. We can say, with more acumen, that the fantasy and role-playing of these love games easily blurred into genuine feeling; but the participants themselves were concerned with an unambiguous experience of genuineness. Because overt statements and gestures were always potentially unreliable, they looked closely for the accidental slip, or some gesture or expression coming from the woman when she thought she was unobserved, free of the pressure of performance. If voyeurism is an impor-
tant motif in the song lyric, it comes from an intense concern with the genuine; and that concern in turn follows from a suspicion of mere artfulness, of being manipulated.[8] The lyricists knew that the singer's skill could instigate unskillful passion in the listener:
Before the song comes to its most tender moment,
her brows take on a seductive expression;
as the drinking companions grow tipsy,
their eyes become still wilder.
Ho Chu, to "Che-ku t'ien"[9]
She is not speaking what is in her heart: she is performing a text; she knows the words that are coming and strikes a pose for their appearance.
Yet there might be a moment, barely noticed or dimly seen, when role and true feeling come apart, as in the following lyrics to "Ts'ai sang-tzu" by Yen Chi-tao:[10]
I saw her then, under the moon,
in the western mansion,
trying to smooth over her tear-streaked powder unobserved;
and when the song was over, she knit her brows again;
I regret I could not see her perfectly,
across the smoke rising from the censer.
Since we parted, the strands of willows
dangling beyond the mansion
have how many times changed their spring green?
Yet I, weary traveler in the red dust,
will always recall that woman in the mansion,
her powder streaked with tears.
[8] For a discussion of voyeurism in poetry, see Paul Rouzer, "Watching the Voyeurs: Palace Poetry and Yuefu ," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 11 (1989): 13–34.
[9] CST , p. 516.
[10] CST , p. 251.
The curtains that hid the singing beloved from Liu Yung here in Yen Chi-tao's lyrics become a partially transparent veil of smoke. He thinks that he has seen her trying to wipe away the tracks of tears unobserved and frowning once she relaxes the professional pose assumed in song (those brows having been trained to assume a seductive frown when she reaches the most tender moment in the song). But k'an wei chen , he can't see clearly enough, can't tell for sure (the chen here being the term of the "genuine"). These gestures and expressions on her face are marks of hidden distress, a code of loss and love-longing, but for him or for someone else?—we cannot be sure, and perhaps even he could not be. It almost doesn't matter: the particular object of love here seems less important than the moment when genuine response appeared, an uncertain vision that is fixed in memory and celebrated in this song. Such a moment, like the reliable words of Liu Yung's beloved in the earlier lyric, is something that survives time's passage, that stands in contrast to the world of public life in the red dust.
Tears or the inexplicable frown were among the oldest tropes of genuine feeling rising to a concealing surface, as in Ho Ning's famous "Ts'ai sang-tzu," where after a lovely young girl has been described,[11]
For no reason she knits her brows,
making her mother suspicious that she has springtime longings.
Or in Ho Chu's "Su chung-ch'ing":[12]
Facing the wind again, she sings of the circular fan,
her true feeling fixed on which man?
Lightly she jokes,
then barely frowns:
you can tell it's love.
Song lyric teaches a close attention to the most subtle expressions—"barely frowns"—for it is in such ripples in the surface of public
[11] Lin Ta-ch'un, ed., T'ang Wu-tai tz'u (1933; rev. ed., Shanghai: Wen-hsüeh ku-chi k'an-hsing-she, 1956), p. 102. Hereafter TWTT .
[12] CST , pp. 530–31.
appearance that reliable marks of true feeling are to be found. And yet once these become motifs in song, these too can be feigned.
One of the most striking examples of the inexplicable frown is in Chou Pang-yen's "Wang Chiang-nan":[13]
At the party with singers
the most wonderful things are those glances of love.
Jeweled coiffures glitter, from which jade swallows hang aslant;
embroidered shawls, soft and glossy, gauzes steeped in perfume.
There should always be plenty of what people like.
For no reason at all
how come she furrows her brows?
Lightly made-up, as if seen in a painting.
Yet her brilliant conversation is better than hearing her sing,
not to mention the swaying dance.
The opening stanza of the lyric is the opulent naming of paraphernalia that is typical of one type of party song, concluding with a wonderfully crass statement of indulgence—the more of what people (sc., men) like, the better. Into such unreflective pleasures intrudes the frown "for no reason at all." Other lyricists may be quick to interpret the frown's meaning, a certain index of love; but Chou Pang-yen offers it to us as a question: "How come?" And in leaving the frown as a question, he raises a larger question of interiority. The frown is the mark of interiority—silent expression, as words are voiced expression. But there are two kinds of words: those produced from oneself and the formalized words of a song. Chou first gives us the "pretty as a picture" cliché to objectify the frowning singer, but then be qualifies this "speaking picture" with one of the more unexpected statements in the tradition of party song: her conversation is superior to her song, even though song is the phase that will lead to bed (or the bushes). The frown undercuts the
[13] CST , p. 615.
momentum of the party song; the appearance of the genuine complicates the love game.