Voicing Emotion: Who Would Look Upon My Joy and Happiness?
When we examine tz'u by women, the emotional picture obtained often seems bleak indeed. On the one hand, this bleak picture collectively reflects women's empirical experience in traditional Chinese society, where they were circumscribed physically, emotionally, and intellectually: the confinement and isolation imposed on the lives of women pervade their lyrics. Melancholy, loneliness, depression, emptiness, and vague, unfulfilled longing are common themes in their songs. On the other hand, the morbidity is reinforced by and exaggerated in the normative emotional categories of the song lyric. The tension and
[24] Grace Fong, "Persona and Mask in the Song Lyric," pp. 459–65, 484.
[25] Li Ch'ing-chao's contribution to this perception of the song lyric by virtue of the conjunction of her practice and her gender is significant.
alienation wrought by social and emotional immurement at times have broken into song—into a smoldering, desperate voice of intense ch'ing , intense emotion. This section, then, presents a particularized women's "subculture"; it explores an emotional dimension that is associated with tz'u by gifted women who were extremely unfortunate in their life circumstances.
Springtime Resentment
Alone I walk, alone I sit,
alone I sing, alone I drink, and lie down again alone.
Standing long hurts my spirits,
but there's nothing I can do about this light chill that teases one.
This feeling—who will see it?
Tears have washed away the faded makeup, hardly any left on.
Sorrow and illness, one follows the other.
I have trimmed the entire wick of the cold lamp,
still dreams have not taken shape.
Chu Shu-chen, tune: "Chien-tzu mu-lan-hua" ( CST , 2:1405)
The voice in this song lyric is well defined: it is a trapped voice. The insistent opening repetition ("Alone . . . alone . . . alone . . . alone . . . alone . . . ") inscribes the rhetorical structure with an unrelieved psychological state that is later exacerbated by insomnia. The motif of the female persona confined in the boudoir and garden here is transformed into a living nightmare told by a female voice trapped in extreme isolation (the teasing touch of an anthropomorphized chill is the only physical contact she feels). All her movements are refractions of ch'ing —emotion, feeling—and the lyric captures a moment of imprisonment, without hope of communication or understanding: "This feeling—who will see it?" To whom can she sing of her melancholia? Who is the audience/perceiver? The song foregrounds the problematic relationship between being and being seen. The self-conscious positing of the male gaze, or, more correctly of its absence, seems to efface the feminine identity—it washes away with the makeup.
By turning the emotional and psychological immurement of women inside out, this lyric thematizes radically the fate of talented women as outcasts in the tradition. While male poets participate in a tradition with role models from the literary and historical past, not to mention the friendships they enjoy with like-minded and understanding contemporaries (Tu Fu can admire a Li Po; Su Shih can look to a T'ao Ch'ien), women poets, while marginal at best in their relation to the male-dominated tradition, lack their own tradition and community.[26] Along with Pan Chao, Li Ch'ing-chao must be regarded as an extraordinary phenomenon in the conjunction of factors that allowed for her literary accomplishments. No other woman achieved the kind of literary identity and influence Li had in the elite, male-dominated tradition.
Women, therefore, if they were trained to write, wrote mostly undistinguished poetry as a light literary exercise, as many did in the late imperial period. But to some, such as Chu Shu-chen, high songstress of melancholia, writing poetry, especially the song lyric, would have provided a rare emotional outlet, a channel for the expression of feelings otherwise suppressed or ignored. Such poetry has its origin in the psychology of its practitioners. By focusing on her emotions (without an objective eye), a woman poet tends toward self-obsession in her poetry; she writes about herself over and over again.
On the Shadow
Low, the winding railing
locking in the secluded courtyard.
At night one tires of keeping smooth hair and attire.
In a vast, vast sea of regret,
I feel this body has already drowned.
How can one put up with this meddlesome lamp,
adding on one tiny shadow
when evening has only just arrived?
I really don't know what to do with you.
Even though I make it a point to care for you,
you don't know how to care for me.
Why are you again at the study window,
following me whether I walk or sit?
I guess it would be hard to drive you away,
but to avoid you should still be easy.
Hiding from your search, I pull open the bed-curtain and lie down.
[26] There is more evidence of female friendships and literary circles in later periods; see the next section.
Wu Tsao, tune: "Chu Ying-t'ai chin"[27]
One cannot help being struck by the difference in tone and mood between this tz'u and Li Po's famous "Drinking Alone under the Moon" ("Yüeh-hsia tu cho"), which also personifies shadow. Perhaps animation is more appropriate in describing the male poet's relationship to his shadow: Li Po is the master puppeteer pulling the strings that bring the moon and shadow to life for his sole and supreme enjoyment. But here, in apostrophizing the shadow, Wu Tsao creates a problematic companion that is incapable of providing the loving companionship she craves. The lyric only foregrounds her state of loneliness and alienation. In contrast to the general exuberance and final invitation to transcendence in Li Po's poem—"Let us join in travels beyond human feelings / and plan to meet far in the river of stars"[28] —this lyric moves toward increasing confinement and isolation. The world closes in slowly from all sides: from an enclosed exterior space to a confined interior space, from daylight to engulfing darkness, from a self-consuming psychological space to a final symbolic interment in a bed of loneliness that obliterates light, consciousness, and symbolic companionship. The woman's voice extinguishes itself in monologue. Yet she sings of herself again, in another name:
[27] Wu Hao, ed., Kuei-hsiu pai-chia tz'u-hsüan (1914, Sao-yeh shan-fang ed.), pp. 5b–6a.
[28] Trans. by Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 138.
In this world only deep feelings are hard to divulge.
Swallowed tears well up again.
Hands twist wilted flowers,
wordless, leaning against the screen.
I am shocked, seeing myself in the mirror,
a thin, straight form.
It's not a face of spring,
It's not a face of autumn:
can it be Shuang-ch'ing?
Ho Shuang-ch'ing, tune: "Shih lo-i"[29]
As sometime readers of tz'u , we would agree that the lyric speaker in this song is a woman. Obvious feminine signs are deployed: teardrops, flowers, screen, mirror, and the gestures surrounding them. Something seems to disturb the conventional surface of the lyric, however, something held back, something threatening to subvert the sentiments and gestures. No languorous desire or longing seems to inhabit the words, only some deep, hidden emotion whose expression has been consigned to impossibility: "In this world only deep feelings are hard to divulge." The emotion is displaced in the subject's silent tears and her fidgeting with a faded flower. Speech is denied or lost; she is "wordless" both within and without the discourse. Taking the poetics of song lyrics that defines her , she writes within it and undoes it. Without it she would be "wordless," yet she sees herself outside the poetics and is "without words" of her own. Only the song form remains to tell an enigma, a paradox.
The mirror, a substitute for the gaze, usually reflects an image of feminine beauty or a woman's fear of losing that beauty. Here the male gaze is displaced; the woman sees herself through her own eyes. When
[29] Shih Chen-lin, Hsi-ch'ing san-chi (hereafter referred to in the text as HCSC ); in Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh chen-pu ts'ung-shu , ser. 1, vol. 5 (Shanghai: Shang-hai tsa-chih kungssu, 1935), p. 66; see also n. 33.
the subject looks into the mirror, she discards the metaphors that she has been transformed into—"a face of spring," "a face of autumn"— and sees an imaginary other/self with which she hesitates to identify herself. It is an image of ambiguity and dissociation. Yet through this doubling, ambiguity, and dissociation, a distinct voice is established. Paradoxically, the speaker inserts her identity by inscribing her name in a question of self-doubt: "Can it be Shuang-ch'ing?" But the paradox is only apparent. The rhetoric of negation, by discarding the gaze, creates the possibility of a female subject.
In the song lyrics of Ho Shuang-ch'ing, we find the lyric trope of self-reflexivity in the peculiarly feminine form already exhibited in Wu Tsao's song lyric on her shadow. That splitting or doubling of the self, which is projected onto an object in order to speak (of herself), recurs in Ho Shuang-ch'ing's lyrics:
Fading Lamp
Already dimming—I forget to blow on it:
were it to shine brightly, who would trim it?
In front of me, no flame that glows like fireflies.
I listen to the cold rain on the earthen steps
dripping through the third night-watch,
alone by myself, sick and sleepless.
Hard to extinguish—
you too are excessive in feeling.
The scented oil is finished,
but your fragrant heart has not cooled;
do keep company with Shuang-ch'ing for awhile.
Star after star
Fades gradually into motionlessness.
But I hope you will suffer through
and then blossom forth again.
It will surpass those fishing lamps swaying
in the chaotic wind on the wild pond.
When autumn's hardworking moths scatter,
I am already ill,
and when has my illness ever diminished?
Long we watch each other,
vaguely sleep comes upon me. . . .
In sleep I am frightened awake again.
Tune: "Feng-huang-t'ai shang i ch'ui-hsiao" ( HCSC ,
pp. 105–6)
A woman alone, at night, no longer waiting for or complaining about her lover, a woman "without a mirror" talks to a dying lamp ardently, with great feeling. It is so obvious in this song lyric that the personified burning lamp is a figure of the self. The identification is drawn on the basis of ch'ing , that intense, objectless, unnamable emotion that translates here into a will to live completely at odds with destiny: "Hard to extinguish—/ you too are excessive in feeling./ The scented oil is finished,/but your fragrant heart has not cooled." That single, self-consuming flame of the lamp only illuminates the encroaching darkness: it marks the site of struggle between the forces of destruction and survival. As she watches its slow dissipation, she sees an analogy for her own life that is wasting away. She thus tries to console and encourage the lamp as a way of encouraging herself. Yet ultimately there is no escape from imminent destruction. We can guess only too easily at the fate of the lamp as she starts up again from having drifted off to sleep.
Both in the ever-stressful wakefulness of the insomniac world of darkness and confinement, and in an apparently idyllic world of nature that conceals dangers and deceptions, the self's doubles take on different forms and shapes. It is often the survival of these object-doubles that concerns Ho Shuang-ch'ing. About chrysanthemums she says, "I feel gladdened that the flowers' stems have not grown thin:/incessant rain
they have endured past the Double Ninth / and fortunately survived to the time of Small Spring";[30] and she counsels the wild goose, "Do go along a sandy shore or half a stream/just to pass the fleeting years: / with the rice grains recently used up, / the nets are just waiting in earnest."[31] These innocent creatures of nature—Ho Shuang-ch'ing's doubles, her scattered selves—are threatened by destructive forces that are not within their power to avert: even the enduring chrysanthemums finally "droop their heads" in the killing frost, and the companionless wild goose, "fatigued from flying, lodge by mistake in the fields" where the nets must lie hidden.
The impulse for an addressee/friend is so compelling in Ho Shuang-ch'ing's autobiographical discourse through song lyrics on objects that in a most telling example subtitled "Taking Food to Do Spring Ploughing" (tune: "Ch'un ts'ung t'ien-shang lai," HCSC , pp. 175–76), she transforms spring and springtime creatures into both agent and recipient of her emotions with whom she achieves a momentary sharing. Yet the duplicity of nature, in the ominous subtext of spring, disrupts that unitary vision. The first stanza begins in a narrative mode as she sets out on her farm chores in an idyllic setting:
Purpled paths bright in spring weather.
Slowly I tie a spring gauze scarf on my head
and eat by myself while spring ploughing.
The small plum tree is thin in spring,
fine blades of grass glisten in spring.
At each step along the fields spring springs to life.
At this point during her sprightly walk to the field, memory intrudes with a troubling subtext that punctures the glistening, innocent surface of spring:
I remember, that year in a fine spring
to a spring swallow
I blurted out spring feelings.
And now at this time,
[30] To the tune "Erh-lang shen"; HCSC , p. 93.
[31] To the tune "Hsi huang-hua man"; HCSC , p. 93.
I think spring letters and spring tears
have all melted with the spring ice.
The meaning of spring suddenly leaves its agrarian context and assumes the conventional poetic connotations of love and romance; the seasonal context has provoked a sudden remembrance of a failed love. It is a supremely vague, typological confession of the sentiment, ch'ing , that suits the connotative, subtle, "feminine" poetics of the song lyric; it is therefore immaterial whether that love in the past actually had a recipient or was simply the vague stirring of a young woman's heart that remained unfulfilled. The stanzaic structure of the song lyric also allows that ambiguity to be suspended, deferring its resolution.
The second stanza returns to a self-contained present with an anthropomorphized nature/spring as a companion with whom she shares the food she has brought:
I cherish spring, dote on spring—for how many springs?
By an expanse of spring mist
the spring oriole is locked in.
You present gifts to a springtime me,
and I offer presents to a springtime you:
am I, or are you, the spirit of spring?
Yet nature, to whom she turns and by whose office she seeks to lose her solitary state, is belied by its very duplicity and brings disenchantment, as she has intimated in her songs on the sad fates of its creatures. She seems to point to the delusory nature of the positive, innocent aspects of spring and finally slides back into a postlapsarian anguish, in which spring acquires a demonic mask:
You can count on the start and end of spring,
but in spring it'll be hard to count on my waking from a spring dream.
Why does the spring demon
make a whole spring of spring sickness?
Spring has misled Shuang-ch'ing.
The late Ch'ing critic Ch'en T'ing-cho greatly admired Ho Shuang-ch'ing's song lyrics; among his praise and comments on her song lyrics in the Pai-yü-chai tz'u-hua , he notes that while they contain the characteristics of the "feminine" style, her diction does not resemble that of any of the master orthodox poets such as Wen T'ing-yün and Wei Chuang of the late T'ang, or Chou Pang-yen, Ch'in Kuan, Chiang K'uei, and Shih Ta-tsu of the Sung. He concludes inconclusively: "So, is she an immortal fairy or a ghost? I can't name her realm [ching ]."[32]
Ho Shuang-ch'ing's song lyrics do indeed have a highly individual and intense voice. The uncanny subjectivity and the overwhelming psychological dimension of these songs sometimes make them appear like the disturbed visions of an alienated woman. At the same time, her lyrics are crafted pieces with a naturalness and flow that conceal the artifice, in ways reminiscent of Li Ch'ing-chao's art. Certain poetic devices, such as effective use of reduplication and cumulative repetition of words, are obvious emulations of Li Ch'ing-chao's famous style. In the song lyric on spring ploughing quoted above, the character ch'un , "spring," occurs in every line. Since spring is a double-edged metaphor, its repetition is both apposite and central to the metamorphosis of meaning. In another example (tune: "Feng-huang-t'ai shang i ch'ui-hsiao" quoted below), reduplication is used unobtrusively in almost every line to produce a cumulative emotional force.
So far I have deliberately avoided giving any historical or biographical context for Ho Shuang-ch'ing's song lyrics, when in fact they would frame an interesting set of questions regarding the "feminine" modality of the song lyric, questions that lie outside the scope of this paper but deserve to be explored. Briefly, Ho Shuang-ch'ing came from a peasant family native to the rural regions of the southeast, and the way she learned to read and write and compose poetry was quite by accident. She had an uncle, a teacher in the village school, who, seeing that as a child she was extremely intelligent and quick to learn, taught her how
[32] In Tz'u-hua ts'ung-pien , ed. T'ang Kuei-chang, 4:3896; see also pp. 3895–97.
to read and write. When Ho Shuang-ch'ing grew up, her family, observing the class boundaries and social hierarchies of the time, married her off to a peasant. Her husband was not only illiterate, he was a perfect brute as well. Together with his mother, the proverbial evil mother-in-law, he abused Ho Shuang-ch'ing physically and emotionally. Suffering from malaria, she managed hard farm work and the household chores, although constantly berated and often beaten by her husband and his mother. Ho Shuang-ch'ing seems to have borne their abuses well, being the very model of a submissive and virtuous wife and daughter-in-law. She had the habit of writing poetry, especially song lyrics, which were much admired and sought after by the scholars and literati of the region. Not wanting her lyrics to be preserved, however, she often wrote them on leaves, using powder in place of ink, making them perhaps the most ephemeral compositions ever written. All in all, only about fifteen lyrics have been preserved. Most of these have appeared in anthologies of works by women poets of the last two hundred years, and they have all been acclaimed by some of the most astute critics and scholars of the song lyric in the late Ch'ing dynasty and the twentieth century.
Everything we know about Ho Shuang-ch'ing, including her extant poems, comes to us from a work called Hsi-ch'ing san-chi (Random notes from the western green) by Shih Chen-lin, a relatively unknown and unsuccessful literatus who lived in the eighteenth century.[33] Shih had traveled in the Hsiao-shan region where Ho Shuang-ch'ing lived. His work, which reads something like a diary, records his encounters with Ho Shuang-ch'ing, the tragic story of her life, her wasted talent. He tried, in short, to preserve her life and work for posterity. Some twentieth-century scholars, skeptical of the unverifiable source, have questioned Ho Shuang-ch'ing's identity, claiming that she is a fabrication of the author. Interestingly, the basic presumption of the non-fictionality of Chinese poetry has naturally led to a reading of her poems as records of the empirical experience of a historical person. And with their intense and passionate tone, her poems seem to stand out as records of emotion. Yet might not the author be exploiting precisely this empiricist assumption in the reading of poetry to create a fictional character with historical verisimilitude, and the genre's association with the "feminine" to construct the gender of this fictional character? Or, in a less convoluted manner, might he not have exploited the "feminine"
[33] Ho Shuang-ch'ing is called simply Shuang-ch'ing in this work. It is not clear how or when she came to be referred to by the surname Ho. Lin Yutang has translated Shih Chen-lin's preface to the Hsi-ch'ing san-chi in Translations from the Chinese (The Importance of Understanding) (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963), pp. 86–88.
mode to create some unique poems to attribute to a real woman whom he portrays as Ho Shuang-ch'ing? Or, simpler still, might he not have "edited" the poems as he recorded them, along with fragments of their author's life? The questions as they are phrased presume a complex set of motives and manipulative moves on the part of Shih Chen-lin, and an attempt to probe for answers would involve, to begin with, a careful reading and analysis of the content of Hsi-ch'ing san-chi and an examination of its textual strategies in a comparative context in relation to motives and modes of discourse in late Ch'ing China.
Here we have to conclude, like Ch'en T'ing-cho, with an inconclusive question: who wrote the following song lyric, Ho Shuang-ch'ing or Shih Chen-lin? According to Shih Chen-lin, Ho Shuang-ch'ing had a friend in a bright neighbor girl, a peasant who, though illiterate, had loved Ho Shuang-ch'ing's calligraphy and had asked her to copy out the Heart Sutra and to teach her to recite it. This girl was leaving the area soon to return to her new marital home after a visit at her parents'. Sick with a bout of malaria, Ho Shuang-ch'ing was unable to attend the farewell dinner, so her friend sent over some food she had wrapped up herself. On receiving it, Ho Shuang-ch'ing wrote two song lyrics, on leaves, lamenting the loss of the friendship.[34] The following song lyric is the second of the two:
Inch on inch of scant clouds,
ray after ray of fading light,
being there and not there, flickering, will not vanish.
Just at this moment, the brokenhearted soul is severed,
reeling and swaying.
I gaze and gaze at the hills and streams—
the figure moves farther and farther away, indistinct.
From now on,
pain and plight
will be only like tonight.
The blue sky is remote.
I ask heaven, it does not respond—
look at tiny little Shuang-ch'ing,
weak and frail and listless.
Even worse, whom do I see and who sees me?
Who would dote on the flower's charm?
Who would look upon my joy and happiness
and secretly sketch them in plain powder?
Who would still care, age after age,
night after night, day after day?
[34] Hsi-ch'ing san-chi , pp. 127–28.
Tune: "Feng-huang-t'ai shang i ch'ui-hsiao" ( HCSC , p. 128)
In its "feminine" discourse, there is again that intense preoccupation with the relationship between being and being seen. The subject, in order to constitute its identity, needs an external perceiver. Though the perceiver would function as a reflector, thereby affirming the being of the woman perceived, it is not just the mirror, the male gaze, but that longed-for, absent chih-yin , the understanding and caring friend who can break through the boundaries of loneliness and alienation to touch the heartstrings of the self. Ch'ing , emotion, desires its fulfillment in the other. Who is the feminine subject of the song?