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Language, soundscape, and identity formation in Shanghai fangyan literature and culture
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Language, soundscape, and identity formation in Shanghai fangyan literature and culture
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LANGUAGE, SOUNDSCAPE, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN SHANGHAI FANGYAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE by Yunwen Gao A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES) May 2018 Dissertation Committee Professors Brian Bernards (Chair), Joshua Goldstein, Akira Lippit II Abstract Language, Soundscape, and Identity Formation in Shanghai Fangyan Literature and Culture Yunwen Gao This is a study of the changing discourses on fangyan in twentieth-century China through an analysis of novels and other cultural productions in and of Shanghai. Fangyan is a Chinese term referring to a language of a region. However, the translation of the term in English, dialect, is misleading because it deems fangyan as a regional variation of a standard national language. My study teases out the power dynamics of the national language, Wu fangyan (Shanghainese, Songjiang fangyan, Suzhou fangyan, etc.), and Cantonese in the history of modern Chinese literature. Fangyan was a vital source for the creation of a new vernacular towards the end of the nineteenth century in China. The pioneering novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai published in the first modern literary periodical was written in Wu fangyan. Since then, fangyan literature was widely used by May Fourth writers to construct a new national language literature against the classical tradition. However, once the creation of a national language was completed, the tension between the regional and the national has led to the suppression of regional literary practices in fangyan. With the exodus of people from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places after the 1949 Communist takeover, Wu fangyan, especially Shanghainese, has been associated with their cultural identity to construct a nostalgic sentiment in a diasporic setting. The juxtaposition of Wu fangyan with other languages creates representations of Shanghai distinct from those from Mainland China. These cultural productions have been appropriated by contemporary Mainland Chinese literature, films, and online culture in a new surge of regionalism against the backdrop of mass migration in metropolitan Shanghai. III Informed by recent developments of Sinophone studies, sound studies, and cultural studies, this study is a continuing effort to understanding literary modernity in China. By tracing the legacy of vernacular literature produced in Wu fangyan region in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, I propose an alternative vision of literary modernity to the nationalist vision and reconsider the canon of modern Chinese literature. I am particularly interested in the representation of sound in written forms, and how oral tradition and narrative strategies in late imperial China continue to shape regional identities, configure time and space, and negotiate gender and class identities through the way people articulate themselves. Furthermore, by focusing on the various centers of literary and cultural productions in Wu fangyan, I envision a dynamic coexistence of various centers in dialogue with each other within the realm of China, challenging the traditional understanding of China as a homogeneous entity. Understanding the discourses on Chinese fangyan throughout the modern history will also shed light on current tensions between Mainland China and Sinophone sites such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese-speaking communities in Southeast Asia from a cultural perspective. IV Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the help of so many people in my life. My advisor, Brian Bernards, inspired me with his rigorous scholarship, his attentiveness to the development of his students as scholars, and his incredible efficiency in every aspect of his career that I dream of accomplishing one day. I also thank Professor Joshua Goldstein, who agreed to be on my committee the first time I explained my project to him and kept challenging me to think about the complexity of regional languages and culture outside of Shanghai. I share his concerns for the environment and look forward to reading his scholarship on it. Listening to Professor Akira Lippit unraveling theoretical works is always a pleasure to the ear and the mind. I miss the days when our class spent three hours discussing one footnote alone. At the University of Southern California, Professors Bettine Birge and Dominic Cheung gave me guidance in the areas of gender, ethnicity, and material culture in premodern Chinese history and modern Chinese literature and culture. I am also grateful for the teaching pedagogies I have learned from Professors Geraldine Fiss, George Hayden, and Brett Sheehan while being their teaching assistant. Professors David Bialock, Sunyoung Park, and Youngmin Choe gave me feedback and encouragement as directors of graduate studies at EALC. At the Department of Comparative Literature, Panivong Norindr, Peggy Kamuf, Antonia Szabari taught me approaches to literary and cultural studies, and prepared me for the job market. I also want to thank Professors Kerim Yasar and Mengjun Li, new members of our department, for their insightful feedback and support in the final year of my Ph.D. My Japanese sensei Yuka Kumagai, Maki Irie, Yumi Matsumoto, and John Chang, Yi-hsien Liu, Xiang Jian, and Hsiao- yun Liao from Chinese Language Program at USC helped me hone my language skills. V Over the course of this journey, many scholars kindly provided help. Professor David Wang prompted me to look at opera in Wu fangyan in relation to literary works. Christopher Rea and Roland Altenburger shared their research on Which Classic? when I was desperately looking for English scholarship on the book. Christopher Lupke, Michael Gibbs Hill, Andrew Jones served as respondents or chairs of my panels at various conferences. Their feedbacks helped shape my ideas for this project. Chen Yinchi, Lu Li’an, Yuet May Ching, my advisors at Fudan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong were the reasons I first got interested in theoretical questions and literary studies. Yanjie Wang, Yanhong Zhu, Tonglu Li, E. K. Tan, Ling Zhang, and Ling Kang are not only great scholars, but great friends to me as well. Their kindness and generosity always reassure me to look at the positive side of life in academia. I cherish the friendships I built with my friends and colleagues at USC and other institutes in the past six years. Christian Shaw, my wonder woman, always creates miracles when things seem to be impossible. My fellow GSEA members at USC, Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer, Keisha Brown, Di Luo, Chad Walker, Gladys Mac, Haiwei Liu, Youngsun Park, Li-ping Chen, Jesse Drian, Melissa Chan, Haley Wei, Kathy Wong, Rio Katayama, and Eunhae Jo at EALC, Jinhee Park at Cinema and Media Studies, Jillian Barndt at History, Ali Kulez and Vanessa Ovalle at Comparative Literature, and Viola Lasmana at English, gave constructive feedback to my mock talks and papers that partially turned into this dissertation. My little sister Melody Yunzi Li teaches me how to be confident and getting ready for good things to happen. I am proud of her great academic achievements. Lucy Lu, my former colleague from Nielsen, brought me all sorts of fun playing Wii and Xbox, watching movies, and visiting Disney and Joshua Tree National Park with me. My friends Cao Shu, Zhang Ying, Jiang Yunming, Zhao Meng, Dai Lili, Chen Xuelu, Gu Jing, Annie Yang-Perez, Xu Lizhe, Xu Lufan, and Lynn Sun listened to me rambling VI on about my crazy ideas and experiences in academia, and took me to newly-opened restaurants and boba milk tea shops in Shanghai that I have missed while doing my Ph.D. away from home. This dissertation was generously funded by the USC Provost’s Fellowship, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the support of Theodore and Wen-hui Chen Endowed Fellowship organized through the Graduate School at USC. Field trips to Taiwan, Japan, and conferences I attended were in part supported by the Graduate Student Government at USC, Tsai Family Research Grant, ACE-Nikaido Fellowship organized through the East Asian Studies Center, Harvard Yen-ching Library Travel Grant, MLA and ACLA Travel Grants. I thank Brianna Correa at EALC, Grace Ryu, Alex Wroblewski, Ji’er Dong, and Lola Shehu at EASC, and Andrew Burke at Harvard Yen-ching Library, who made these research trips possible and fruitful for me. Part of Chapter One was published in Ming Qing Studies 2015 as “Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Colonial Modernity in Liang Qichao’s Ban Dingyuan Conquering the Western Region”, and part of Chapter Four was published in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 2017 as “Sounding Shanghai: Sinophone Intermediality in Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms”. I thank Professor Paolo Santangelo, Tommaso Previato, Paola Culeddu, and the anonymous peer reviewers at Ming Qing Studies, and Professors Yomi Braester, Ioana Luca, Ping-Jung Ho, copyeditors, and the anonymous peer reviewers at Concentric, for their constructive feedback and prudent editing. My dad Gao Feng and mom Lu Hongyu are incredible parents. They encouraged their only child to leave home for eight years, chasing a dream that seemed so distant. I hope this dissertation can reflect on the local cultural traditions they brought up in. Zhijie Chen, my dearest uncle, life mentor, and greatest chef in L.A., taught me so much about Chinese history, world history, and the art of cooking. Thank Brian Chen for helping me navigate in L.A. over the VII past few years. My cat accompanied me through the solitary moments of writing for five years in L.A. They are my family on the other side of the world. VIII Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..II Acknowledgements…………………………………………..…………………………………IV Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………..VIII List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………..…..X Note on Romanization of Chinese Language……………………………………………..…..XI INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER ONE: Space, Gender, and Class: Sonic Modernity in Serialized Fiction in Late Qing Shanghai…………………………………………………………………………………..19 1. Serialized Fiction in Marvelous Writings of Shanghai and New Fiction……………….……..19 2. From Empire to Nation: Sounding the Regional Voices in Late Imperial China…..…………23 3. Sonic Modernities: Sound and Voice against Time and Space………………..………...……32 4. Gender and Class in The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai….………….……………….………...43 CHAPTER TWO: Annotation, Censorship, and Marketability: Fangyan and Reprinted Late Qing Novels in Republican China………………………………………………………..53 1. Reprinting Which Classic? and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai……………………………53 2. Which Classic? and the Use of Fangyan………………………………………………………56 3. Old Wine in New Bottles: Promotion Strategies in the Republican Era……………………...68 CHAPTER THREE: Intimacy, Estrangement, and Nostalgia: Speaking Fangyan in Contemporary Sinophone Cinemas…..……………………………………………………….85 IX 1. Disruption and Continuation: An Overview of Wu Fangyan Literature and Culture from the 1930s to the 1990s……………………………………………..………………………………...86 2. Fangyan and Sinophone Cinemas……………………….……………………………………91 3. Space and Voices in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai.………………………………95 4. The Return of Shanghai Modern: Appropriation of Sinophone Cinemas in Contemporary China….………………………………………………………………………………………...107 CHAPTER FOUR: Oral Tradition, Visual Aesthetics, and Online Literature: Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms and the Return of Fangyan Writing in Contemporary China……...110 1. Sound and Script: Creating a Model for Writing in Fangyan………………………………..114 2. Retelling the (Hi)story: Oral Tradition and Fiction Writing…………………………………120 3. Conflating Space and Time: Maps and Illustrations…………………………………………126 4. Representing the Flavor of Shanghai: Sinophone Cultures and Cinematic Aesthetics……...135 CODA………………………………………………………………………………..…………142 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………..145 GLOSSARY……………………………………………………………………….……….….160 X List of Figures Figure 1.1 An illustration of the international settlement described in the novel, from the appendix of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai translated by Eileen Chang and Eva Hung 35 Figure 1.2 An illustration from Dianshizhai Studio Pictorial by Wu Youru 41 Figure 1.3 An illustration from The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by an anonymous illustrator 41 Figure 1.4 An illustration of “Mouth Skill” from the first issue of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai 42 Figure 2.1 An illustration for a scene from Chapter 5 in an edition of Which Classic? printed before 1926 58 Figure 2.2 An illustration by Liu Fu in the 1926 Beixin Shuju edition of Which Classic? 58 Figure 2.3 The charter of Folk Song Studies Association at Peking University printed in issue No. 1 of Folk Song Weekly 70 Figure 2.4 An advertisement of Which Classic? in the gutter space of issue No. 73 of Threads of Discourse 77 Figure 2.5 A censored page of Which Classic? 1926 Beixin shuju edition 78 Figure 3.1 A banquet scene from Flowers of Shanghai 98 Figure 3.2 Wang Liansheng dining with Shen Xiaohong alone from Flowers of Shanghai 98 Figure 4.1 A poster of the drama Blossoms 112 Figure 4.2 An illustration of the book cover of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Jin Yucheng 122 Figure 4.3 An illustration of the book cover of The Plum in the Golden Vase by Jin Yucheng 122 Figure 4.4 A poster of Jin Yucheng’s exhibition of literary illustrations outside Duo Yun Xuan Art Gallery 127 Figure 4.5 An illustration of the housing complex Xiaomao and Yinfeng lived in by Jin Yucheng 130 Figure 4.6 An illustration of the corner of Ruijin Road and Changle Road in 1963, 1967, and 2000 133 Figure 4.7 A map of Luwan District of Shanghai by Jin Yucheng 134 Figure 4.8 A map of disappeared old streets and facilities drawn for Wong Kar-wai by Jin Yucheng 135 Figure 4.9 Tony Leung combing his hair in an attic, a scene from Days of Being Wild 136 XI A Note on Romanization of Chinese Languages and Translation This dissertation uses the Pinyin romanization system to denote the Mandarin pronunciation of author’s names, titles of works, and names of characters that appear in those works. I have also provided a glossary at the end of the dissertation. For writers that are commonly known by their English names, names transcribed in the Wade Giles system, and Yale Romanization of Cantonese system, I have followed the convention of translation. For the pronunciation of Wu fangyan, I have used International Phonetic Alphabet to transcribe the words. The bibliography at the end of the dissertation also includes the names of titles and authors in Chinese. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. For quotes that require nuanced reading in the original languages, I have provided the original texts in Chinese after the English translations. 1 Introduction In 2014, a family friend from Shanghai asked me to help her family locate the academic records of her grandfather at Columbia University. As a member of the elite class, her grandfather was among the overseas students who came to the United States for higher education in the 1920s. Having gone through the Cultural Revolution, the family has already lost his academic records and diploma. In the hope of retrieving relevant information, they asked me to check the alumni register in English at Columbia University. After skimming through the register several times, I was unable to find a single record that matches his name in Pinyin romanization. I called them to inform them the result. Since our previous correspondences were mainly carried out in written form (emails and instant messages), it never occurred to me that the name might be pronounced differently. However, after listening to her referring to the name, I realized that she pronounces the surname differently. It was neither the Mandarin pronunciation nor the Shanghainese pronunciation of the character, which is closer to the former. When read as a surname, the pronunciation in Wu fangyan 1 changes. I then realized that I subconsciously went for the pinyin romanization without considering the historical period during which he came to the United States. At a time when a standard pronunciation was not imposed by the state, and romanization of Chinese characters was not fixed, it is likely that people transcribed their names using the pronunciation they were most familiar with when going abroad. With this discovery, I went back to check the alumni register again and successfully located his records. This episode reminds me of the reason why I first embarked on my research topic, that is, to call attention to the diverse and dynamic soundscape of twentieth-century China subdued in the process of the promotion of Mandarin as the official national language. 1 Fangyan refers to regional languages in the Sinitic language family. I offer an elaborate definition on page 3. 2 In this dissertation, I probe the changing discourse on fangyan in twentieth-century China through an analysis of novels and relevant cultural productions in and of Shanghai. I ask, what does is meant by fangyan literature and culture? What are the criteria used to define fangyan literature and culture at various moments of modern Chinese history? Since when did intellectuals and general readers start to think that literature written in fangyan is a more “authentic” voice than that written in the official vernacular? Is fangyan literature more representative or legitimate in capturing the soundscape of a city or a region? What are the communicative and affective functions of fangyan? Ultimately, how does the sound of the local rendered in the written form construct cultural identities in relation to the nation, gender, class, and so on? How does the understanding of fangyan literature reshape the way we read modern Chinese literature? As a medium closely tied to sound and voices, while at the same mediated through Chinese scripts, and individual and collective experiences of reading and writing, Chinese literature distinguishes itself from film, drama, opera, stand-up comedy, and other oral performances. The flexibility of pronunciation of Chinese characters also adds a new layer of mediation to the representation of sound in written forms. Therefore, the power of the author dictating the ways various readers sound out the text is relatively limited compared with oral performances, as the audience of the latter would hear one variation or rendering of the text at each time of the performance. 2 Therefore, in certain historical contexts where effective communication and singular, standardized, or politicized voice is expected in place of polyphonic imagination, literature in the written form gives way to more direct and sound-based mediums as a tool of mass communication. Tracing the changing discourse of fangyan in 2 However, we should also take into consideration the performativity of oral performances, in that the same prototype or master narrative can be rendered differently in each rendition. The agency of the performer, the target audience, performing environment, and geographical location all play key roles in each rendition. 3 literature and culture of the twentieth century, I examine national language policy, prominent debates over language politics among intellectuals, popular productions and receptions of literature, as well as their repercussions in later generations in the form of rediscovery, canonization, translation, and adaptation beyond their immediate time and space. Fangyan, Dialect, and Folk Sphere in China The term fangyan literally means the language of a certain place, region, or a state. The unification of languages has been a political concern since ancient China. From the Analects (Lunyu), the official language, known as “decorous speech” (yayan), already existed as opposed to regional languages collected in the Songs of the States (Guofeng) in the Book of Songs (Shijing). A purging of regional languages in the songs of the states is said to be conducted when Confucius was compiling the Book of Songs. Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221 BCE-206 BCE), unified Chinese languages as part of his project of unifying China, however, only for a brief moment in history. In the Western Han dynasty (53 BCE-18 CE), philosopher and linguist Yang Xiong compiled the first tool book titled Fangyan by recording 669 items of regional expressions based on books compiled since the Zhou dynasty. The tension between regional languages and the official language has always existed throughout the history of China. As Lu Guoyao points out, in classical Chinese, fangyan not only refers to regional languages as we understand it in the contemporary context, but also includes languages of ethnic minorities, and foreign languages. 3 For example, fangyan in the name “guang fangyan guan,” a foreign language school opened in Shanghai in 1863 during the Self-Strengthening Movement 3 Lu Guoyao 電 , “Fangyan yu Fangyan” 因 [Fangyan and Fangyan]. 1991. Reprint. in Collected Essays of Lu Guoyao (Zhengzhou: Henan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), 1. 4 (Yangwu yundong), refers precisely to foreign languages. In contemporary linguistic studies, Victor Mair criticized the English translation of fangyan, “dialect,” as misleading, and suggested that we use “topolect,” or regional language to eliminate the implication of fangyan’s subordination to a standard language. Fangyan is different from the definition of a dialect in the Indo-European language family. Chinese fangyan are, for the most part, mutually unintelligible. The differences among fangyan in China are similar to those among different European languages. According to the Chinese linguist Ping Chen, From a historical perspective, all of the major Chinese dialects split from the same stem and independently evolved along different paths after people migrated in large numbers to different parts of the land... The geographical distribution of the major dialects as we know them today, as well as their respective linguistic features, have been by and large stable since the Southern Song dynasty. 4 While these dialects historically branched off from the same stem, this stem does not directly result in the Chinese that was or is deemed as the official language throughout the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Mandarin, whether referred to as the Official Vernacular (Guanhua) in the Qing dynasty, the National Language (Guoyu) in the Republican era, or the Common Speech (Putonghua) in the People’s Republic of China, is constructed based on one or several regional dialects. Its status as the lingua franca is largely based on political decisions. There are seven commonly recognized dialects in contemporary China: Northern Mandarin (Beifang guanhua), Cantonese (or Yue), Min, Wu, Hakka (or Kejia), Xiang, and Gan dialects. 5 A popular aphorism attributed to Max Weinreich goes: “A language is a dialect with an army and 4 Ping Chen, Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 50-51. 5 Ibid., 51-52. 5 navy.” 6 By positioning these languages as dialects of Mandarin Chinese, the state projects a seemingly coherent national identity to its citizens and the outside world. In this study, I use the Mandarin Pinyin romanization of the term, fangyan, to denote regional languages in China and trace the changing use of this term in modern Chinese history. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, with the popularization of vernacular fiction (xiaoshuo), 7 fangyan appears frequently in vernacular novels, scripts of oral performances such as Cantonese opera in Guangdong province, Kun opera and Pingtan, a collective term of Pinghua and Tanci popular in the Yangtze River Delta. 8 These texts, due to their connections with oral performance, contain vocabulary, idioms, and accents of fangyan origins. The late Qing intellectuals such as Lao Naixuan and Lu Zhuangzhang (spelled Lu Ganzhang by John DeFrancis and Jin Liu) contributed to script reform that facilitated a systematic representation of major fangyan in simplified script. Zhang Bingling (or Zhang Taiyan), a scholar leading the National Essence Movement, wrote a book title New Fangyan (Xin fangyan), named after Yang Xiong’s book as part of the promotion of anti-Confucianism. Yet a solid concept of fangyan literature is not yet formed. In the Republican era, during the heat of May Fourth Movement, fangyan and fangyan literature were viewed as a critical component of the Vernacular Movement (Baihuawen yundong) against classical Chinese language. In Hu Shi’s A History of Vernacular Literature (Baihua wenxueshi) published in 1925, he elevated the status of vernacular literature and reconstructed the history of Chinese literature as a battle between vernacular and classical languages. In preparation for the 6 There is some debate about whether this saying was coined by Max Weinreich or popularized by him. It was first expressed in Yiddish. Asya Pereltsvaig, Languages of the World: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 4. 7 Xiaoshuo, literally meaning small talks, is a classical literary genre of Chinese fiction. In the late Qing period, the term has been appropriated by Chinese intellectuals to translate and introduce the concept of “novel” in the Western tradition. 8 Mark Bender, Plum and Bamboo: China’s Suzhou Chantefable Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 5. 6 formation of a new vernacular, fangyan has been reintroduced as living languages, new material and blood for a “humane literature” (ren de wenxue). 9 May Fourth writers such as Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, and Liu Fu reintroduced fiction written in Wu fangyan to the public and recognized their literary achievements. However, as Wang Hui states, “the vernacular was proposed primarily as a written language and the issue of dialect pronunciation went basically untouched” during the New Culture Movement. 10 Fangyan and fangyan literature were recognized as a resource for the vocabulary of the new modern language only under the premise that linguistic unity and national identity be prioritized. The mass language discussion in the 1930s, and the Latinized New Writing Movement (Latinxua Sin Wenz/Ladinghua xin wenzi yundong) led by Qu Qiubai, Lu Xun, and other Leftists promoted the popularization of the alphabet writing system for national language and fangyan. A new writing system for Shanghainese was among the earliest established systems in 1936. The national forms (minzu xingshi) debate from the late 1930s to the early 1940s further linked regional languages with class identity and regional particularity as opposed to a national identity and laid the foundation for language policies since 1949. The Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages and Chinese Characters that took effect on January 1, 2001 further discouraged the use of fangyan in mass media and print industry. 11 Since then, creative and artistic use of 9 Zhou Zuoren , “Ren de wenxue” [Humane Literature], in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945, ed. Kirk Denton, translated by Ernst Wolff (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 190-195. 10 Hui Wang, The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 117. 11 The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China (SAPPRFT) controls these media through supervision and censorship of the form and the content. While the use of fangyan is discouraged in mass media for the sake of reaching out to a nationwide audience and maintaining political and cultural unity, the internet provides a low-cost forum where individuals are able to publish and respond to contents in fangyan as long as they do not concern two taboo topics: criticism of the censors and pornography. See Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 11. 7 fangyan are mainly to be found in oral performances such as stand-up comedy, local opera, and film and television. 12 Among the seven major fangyan, Northern Mandarin, Wu, and Cantonese are the most prominent in modern Chinese history because of the political and economic power associated with the regions where these languages are used. Fangyan in coastal areas like Guangdong and Fujian provinces in contact with foreign trade and missionaries were among the first to be studied and used in religious texts. 13 Since the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842 after the first Opium War, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen (Amoy), Ningbo, and Shanghai were open to foreign trade, leading to an uneven development of economics and cultural industry in China. Literary traditions in these major fangyan areas were also established and consolidated since the late Qing period. Hu Shi identifies the three major fangyan literary traditions as Pekingese (Jingyu), Wu (Wuyu), and Cantonese (Yueyu) literature. 14 Although Mandarin has been the lingua franca used for official documents, business exchanges, and prose and poetry circulated in broader regions, fangyan has dominated daily conversations in the local society, oral performance, and popular literature, especially in these three regions. However, the division between official vernacular and fangyan is not a strict one between high and low, writing and speech. Linguistic studies have shown how classical Chinese, translated vocabulary from Japanese kanji, and fangyan vocabulary jointly formed modern 12 For a historical overview of fangyan and national language movements, see Jin Liu, Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Mellennium (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 19-58. See also Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 18-48. 13 See Yao, Dadui ⼿ . “Wanqing fangyan xiaoshuo xingshuai chulun” 了名 [A Preliminary Study of the Rise of the Late Qing Vernacular Chinese Fiction]. Wenxue pinglun , no. 2 (2013): 32-39. 14 Hu Shi , “Haishang hua liezhuan xu” [Preface to The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai], In Haishang huakai: Guoyu Haishanghua liezhuan yi ⽹ I [Complete Works of Zhang Ailing: The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai in Mandarin, Part I], translated by Zhang Ailing (1926. Reprint.Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1996), 11. 8 Chinese language. Folk culture in fangyan also has a fluid identity reshaped jointly by the official culture, the popular culture, and the intellectuals. Chen Sihe’s concept of folk sphere (minjian) helps us better understand the power dynamics among these three arenas. Folk sphere refers to the “unorthodox, marginal society… carrying with it the sense of sociocultural forms traditionally practiced by rural societies and handed down through oral traditions.” 15 While folk sphere is a self-organized cultural form outside of the state’s control, the role of intellectuals complicates this binary opposition, cutting through two spaces that Chen calls the “temple” (miaotang) and the “square” (guangchang). In the case of fangyan literature, the intellectuals are the ones who appropriated folk culture through regional vernaculars. The purposes of these appropriations vary according to different historical contexts. Sometimes for the sake of state unification of language by way of absorbing regional language corpus; sometimes for the purpose of mobilization of people in a certain region against Western imperialism; and other times for popularization of literature and culture in a certain area. The ambiguity of fangyan and its class identification allows fangyan to be presented as progressive and regressive, high culture and low culture at the same time by different camps of literati. Hence, fangyan has become a contested notion throughout modern Chinese history and continues to be a problem for the century-long endeavor to unify speech and writing in China. However, due to the problems in current academic institutes, namely, the lack of linguistic training in fangyan offered by schools and universities, and the placing of fangyan studies under anthropology and ethnomusicology 15 Yingjing Zhang, A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 247. See Chen, Sihe . “Minjian de fuchen: Dui kangzhan dao wenge wenxueshi de yige chanshixing jieshi” ⽹ 享 [The Rise and Fall of the Folk Sphere: A Tentative Explication of the Literary History from the War of Resistance to the Cultural Revolution]. Shanghai wenxue , no. 1 (1994): 68-80. 9 departments only in the universities of the area where the languages are used, systematic studies of fangyan literature are relatively underdeveloped. What is more confusing is the definition of fangyan literature. While scholars like Hu Shi uses the term generously in his essays, a clear definition was never provided to the readers. A loose definition where any use of fangyan in a literary work could be categorized as practices of fangyan literature will result in almost all modern Chinese literature being regarded as fangyan literature, since most writers employ regional expressions to some extent. Then, where do we draw a boundary between fangyan literature and non-fangyan literature? Is there such a thing as non-fangyan literature in reality? In the twenty-first century, Lu Xun’s essays have gradually been removed from Mainland Chinese textbooks. One of the reasons other than ideological issues is his “nonstandard” language. 16 As the acclaimed “founding father” of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun’s literary works have been regarded as exemplary vernacular literature in the twentieth century. However, residues of old languages including the classical literary script and old-fashioned idioms, Shaoxing fangyan, and Japanese inflected grammatical structures could also be found in his writing. Contemporary Chinese writers such as Mo Yan, Wang Shuo, Han Shaogong, Yan Lianke, to name just a few, often practice writing with significant fangyan elements. Cheng Naishan and Wang Xiaoying, female writers from Shanghai, also incorporate fangyan expressions in their writing. Wang Anyi, however, regards Shanghainese as a crude 16 See Gu, Zhichuan . “Shishu yawed jiaokeshu de yuyan guifan wenti — yi Lu Xun zuopin weili” [A Tentative Account of Standard Language in Chinese Textbooks: Lu Xun’s Literary Works as an Example]. Renmin jiaoyu wang . November 18, 2009. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5375d4df0100i38l.html. (accessed March 26, 2018) 10 language. 17 Yet Shanghainese expressions like “lao kela” also appear in her Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhen ge). 18 Rather than offering a strict, fixed definition of fangyan literature, I examine the works that are categorized or promoted by the author, intellectuals, or literary scholars as fangyan literature. These works usually employ a significant amount of fangyan expressions, idioms, and/or grammatical structures, and adopt the method of transcription of words or phrases without a standard written form. These features require that the readers seek help from fangyan dictionaries, glossary offered by the authors or editors, or translations of the works into other languages (Mandarin, English, French, and so on). The genre I choose in the dissertation is novel-length fiction, usually presented in serialization in literary magazines and online forums. I focus on the novel because of its length and its choices of language. The language in poetry is traditionally regarded as a unique form of language constructed according to certain rhyming schemes, rhythms, and meters. Although free verse of modern and contemporary China demonstrates resemblance to daily languages, the length determines that poetry is less ideal than the longer novel in showcasing various aspects of fangyan usage. 19 In 1918, a group of scholars at Peking University initiated a Folk Song Campaign (Geyao yundong) in order to collect authentic voices of the folk culture. However, this movement lost its momentum soon after 1924 for various reasons. Even during the height of this 17 Wang Anyi , “Shanghaihua shi culu de yuyan” [Shanghainese is a Crude Language]. Sichuan News Web—Chengdu Evening News. Tencent, June 25, 2010. http://cd.qq.com/a/20100625/001865.htm. (accessed July 5, 2017) 18 See Wang, Anyi. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai. Translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. The phrase “lao kela” is likely to be the transliteration of old clerk, or cold class, referring to a middle-aged person who works in the office, bank, or the government. The phrase is usually associated with the bourgeois class of old Shanghai. 19 For a study of fangyan and modern Chinese poetry, see Yan, Tonglin , Fangyan yu Zhongguo xiandai xinshi [Fangyan and Modern Chinese Poetry]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2008. 11 movement, the folk songs collected by the intellectuals are the results of their selection, inevitably carrying their value judgments, not unlike Confucius’ compilation of the Book of Songs in the Zhou dynasty. 20 Yellow Earth (Huangtu di), directed by Chen Kaige, depicts a Communist soldier collecting folk songs in Shanbei for the purpose of Communist propaganda. Though a fictional film, the story reflects the political agenda of the national forms debate and folk song collection campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s by the Leftist intellectuals. By the same token, novels are never free from ideological controls by the state. However, the commercial nature of many popular novels tilted the scale towards popular tastes, balancing the cultural and the political influences in these works. Therefore, I choose to analyze novels identified as fangyan literature from the late Qing period to contemporary China in the context of cultural productions such as oral performances, films, entertainment newspapers, and so on. Voices, Soundscape, and Sinophone Studies As a cradle of modernist thought, the place of origin for Shanghai-style literature (haipai wenxue), as well as the birthplace of Chinese Communist Party, Shanghai has been the focus of many scholarly works about twentieth-century China that set the ground for modern China studies. Studies of literary and cultural modernities trace the origin of the flowering of Shanghai modern to the late Qing period. 21 Scholarship focuses on Shanghai as the frontier of modernist 20 See Ge, Henggang 和 . “Beida Geyao zhengji yundong de huigu yu fansi” [Peking University’s Campaign of Geyao Collection: A Retrospection and Reflection]. Nanjing shida xuebao no. 1 (January 2017): 136-143. 21 See Wang, David Der-wei. Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997; Huters, Theodore. Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005; Yue, Meng. Shanghai and the Edges of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005; Yeh, Catherine (Vance). Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006; Yeh, Wen-hsin. Shanghai Splendor: A Cultural History, 1843-1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; 12 ideas introduced from the West through the medium of Japan during the Republican era; 22 Shanghai as a cosmopolitan cultural hub of foreign influences and traditional roots in the 1930s and 1940s; 23 the development of film industry in Shanghai in the early twentieth century, and its influence on Hong Kong film industry. 24 These studies explore various aspects of Shanghai’s social life, economic development, urban milieu, artistic achievements, and have paved the way for a systematic understanding of Shanghai. Yet the studies have also created an image of Shanghai being a more Westernized, refined, privileged, and higher-class society than the rest of China. The China of the past, what Lu Xun calls “native soil” (xiangtu), is dissociated from Shanghai’s extremely urban milieu. The debate of Beijing-style (jingpai) and Shanghai-style literature in the 1930s that revolved around issues of taste, socio-historical, geographical differences is still present in the contemporary society. Every year in the New Year’s Eve Gala, audiences in the southern part of China do not quite enjoy the humor in the stand-up comedies performed on CCTV, China’s central TV station, as much as audiences in the North. Besides the issues of taste, Northern Mandarin remains a big problem for audiences speaking southern fangyan. Similarly, Shanghai’s stand-up comedy does not easily cross over to the north of Yangtze River. While Shanghai’s literature and culture has been celebrated as a global, Des Forges, Alexander. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007; Wue, Roberta. Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 22 See Liu, Lydia H. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity China – 1900- 1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995; Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. 23 See Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 24 See Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Wang, Yiman. Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. 13 cosmopolitan one and thoroughly studied under the spotlight, the regional, local aspects are nonetheless marginalized. Furthermore, as one of the three major Chinese fangyan with an established literary tradition, Wu fangyan lacks a standardized writing system in the Chinese script. 25 Northern Mandarin and Cantonese have their own writing systems. Although they are still not fully capable of representing these languages, they provide the basis for the audience to identify with these written forms as languages of a certain region. Therefore, writing in Wu fangyan is both a challenge and a platform for writers to engage innovatively with language. On top of the linguistic challenge, the Wu fangyan writing in Shanghai also faces the issue of migration. As an immigrant city, the largest population of Shanghainese have ancestry elsewhere. Their mother tongues are different. Hence, there is not one single Shanghainese language. Within the Wu fangyan family, Songjiang, Pudong, Nanhui, Chuansha, Chongming, Subei (North of Jiangsu), and Wenzhou (to name just a few) are commonly used in Shanghai. Located in between Northern Mandarin and Cantonese speaking regions, Wu fangyan is also constantly reshaped by its contact with these two linguistic presences. Beyond Wu fangyan, immigrants from other provinces in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and foreign countries also contribute to the diverse local culture. This linguistic fluidity allows citizens of Shanghai to identify accents, create stereotypes, and adopt accents to “pass” as members of another groups. The plurality of Wu fangyan used in Shanghai across time and space also creates problems for writers or filmmakers trying to claim authenticity by using one of these languages. Is Wu fangyan necessarily more 25 In 2008, Qian Nairong 起 , professor of Chinese linguistics at Shanghai University, compiled Shanghaihua da cidian [Shanghainese Dictionary] in the hope of preserving Shanghainese. His method combines transliteration and transcription. When the terms in fangyan lack a written form, he transliterates the terms into Mandarin. When the terms have corresponding written forms, he transcribes the term through the Chinese Pinyin system. Despite the academic and historical value of this project, his writing system has had a limited influence on the mass media and everyday life of Shanghai people. 14 authentic than Mandarin in writing the story of Shanghai? Pondering over the story of Hong Kong, Ping-kwan Leung observes, “[t]he story of Hong Kong gets longer and more complicated each time when it is told. How on earth should we tell this story? Everyone has his own answer. In the end, the only thing we are sure is that, various stories might not tell us about Hong Kong, but about the storyteller and where he stands when telling the story.” 26 A similar observation can be made about stories of Shanghai. How then, do we make sense of the multiple voices in the soundscape of Shanghai? Recent developments of Sinophone studies are helpful in unraveling the dynamic cultural and political influences embedded in the sound and voices in Wu fangyan writing in Shanghai. In Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, Shu-mei Shih defines the Sinophone as “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness.” 27 She further elaborates on the three main areas of study for Sinophone in Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader as: first, continental colonialism of the Qing empire and the result of internal colonization in areas like Xinjiang, Tibet, etc.; second, settler colonialism of Han Chinese over the century in places like Southeast Asia, Taiwan, etc.; and third, ethnic minorities and the immigrant groups of Chinese in places like the US, Australia, and elsewhere. Writing in Sinitic languages in these places reflects local concerns about Chineseness. The cultural identities of these literary practices also occupy a marginal space compared with those of 26 Ping-kwan Leung 經刚 , “Xianggang de gushi, weishenme zheme nanshuo?” 與 [The Story of Hong Kong: Why is it So Difficult to Tell?], Xianggang wenxue @ Wenhua yanjiu @ [Hong Kong Literature @ Cultural Studies], ed. Esther Mee Kwan Cheung and Chu Yiu Wai Stephen (Hong Kong: Oxford UP, 2002), 11. 27 Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 4. 15 Mainland Chinese literature. Therefore, these areas are the main focus of Sinophone studies. 28 Using Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “minor literature,” 29 which refers to the minor practice of the major language, Shih claims these literary practices as minor literature. The term Sinophone, in the sense that Shih uses, is inherently politicized in the way it challenges the hegemonic center and a unified vision of Chineseness. By refusing to claim China as the unitary cultural motherland for all Sinophone cultural productions, she emphasizes the place in which these literary works are created and argues against the diasporic studies model. While Shih’s definition of the Sinophone decidedly situates itself outside and on the margin of Chineseness, other scholars have offered different definitions of the Sinophone. Sheldon Lu’s definition, for instance, includes mainland Chinese literature as well as literature written in Chinese elsewhere, basically making the term synonymous with Chinese-language literature and wiping out the political implication of the Sinophone as Shih uses it. 30 The Sinophone studies model has been useful in various ways. In Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader, linguistic diversity in relation to articulations of cultural identities and regionality in films and literature in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asian countries, and among Chinese diasporic communities in the United States, are among the most well studied aspects. Sinophone Southeast Asia literature by Ng Kim Chew (Huang Jinshu), Li Yongping, Chang Kuei-hsing (Zhang Guixing), Li Tianbao and their connections with Taiwan are well explored in recent Sinophone studies. 31 Additionally, cultural productions within China, for instance the 28 See Shih, Shu-mei, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 29 See Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 30 Sheldon H. Lu, “Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific” Book Review, MCLC Resource Center Publication, January 2008. 31 See Tan, E. K. Rethinking Chineseness: Transnational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013; Groppe, Alison M. Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China. 16 Sinophone Tibetan writer Alai and the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden are some examples. In Sinophone Cinemas, edited by Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo, the term Sinophone is being contested in many ways to help reconsider what Sinophone studies could bring to the existing scholarship on mainland Chinese films as well as Chinese language films abroad. Queer Sinophone studies and Sinophone affect studies further bring new theoretical frameworks into dialogue with postcolonial studies. 32 In this dissertation, I consider Sinophone studies a useful model in understanding the marginalized position of cultural practices in languages other than Mandarin Chinese within Mainland China. Drawing upon the concept of the Sinophone, my study examines literary and cultural products that urge the audience to reconsider the concept of Chineseness from the perspective of the local. The particular attention to sound and voices is what I am most interested in. Contextualizing the works I study in the network of cultural products such as illustrated newspapers, literary magazines, opera performance, as well as Sinophone Taiwan and Hong Kong cinemas, I probe the medium specificity of literature in capturing the soundscape of Shanghai in the twentieth century. Chapter Breakdown This dissertation consists of four chapters. I focus on authors and auteurs of novels and films with significant use of Wu fangyan in their works. While I provide historical background to each work I analyze, I do not intend this study to be an exhaustive account of Wu fangyan literature Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013; Bernards, Brian. Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. 32 See Chiang, Howard and Ari Larissa Heinrich, eds. Queer Sinophone Cultures. London and New York: Routledge, 2014; Wong, Lily. Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 17 throughout twentieth century Shanghai. Rather, by reading the selected works closely in their socio-cultural contexts, I urge my readers to consider an alternative way of writing modern Chinese history in and beyond the scope of Shanghai literature. My first chapter explores the use of fangyan in late Qing serialized novels in Shanghai. The works I examine include The Sing-Song girls of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan 1892-1894) by Han Bangqing (1856-1894), and the Cantonese opera “Ban Dingyuan Conquering the Western Region” (Ban Dingyuan ping xiyu 1905) by Liang Qichao (1873-1929). I argue that, amongst the various innovative literary styles, the creation of an acoustic experience through transliterating Wu fangyan is essential to the construction of a modern experience and an imagined community in and around the urban space of Shanghai. The second chapter focuses on the rediscoveries of late Qing fangyan novels in 1920s-1930s China. Zhang Nanzhuang’s Which Classic? (He Dian), together with The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, were introduced in a new framework of national literature against classical literature by May Fourth writers such as Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Liu Fu, and Zhou Zuoren. While these rediscoveries elevated the status of regional literature, they placed fangyan literature on an evolutionary schedule, anticipating they would be replaced by a new national language eventually. After the 1940s fangyan literature movement in Shanghai, Guangdong, and Hong Kong, the tension between fangyan literature and national literature became a political conflict between the local and the national. In order to reconcile this tension, fangyan literature was molded by the state and Leftist writers into a type of national literature with local flavors as decoration. The promotion of Putonghua also eliminated the space for fangyan literature. Hence, creative energy rooted in local tradition and culture was therefore redirected to oral performances such as 18 movies, opera, and stand-up comedy. Sinophone cinemas in Hong Kong and Taiwan became a venue for diaspora Shanghai communities to represent the voices of Wu fangyan as an expression of their cultural identity. In the third chapter, I examine movies made in late 1990s to early 2000s by Wong Kar-wai (1958- ) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (1947- ). In particular, Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai (Haishanghua 1998) based on Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 1920-1995)’s Mandarin translation of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai juxtaposes Cantonese with Wu fangyan to construct space in relation to privacy and intimacy. Following the Reform and Opening Up of Mainland China in the 1980s, mass migration and mobility led to an identity crisis and call for Shanghaineseness. Online forums have become the platform for Wu fangyan writing in creative ways. The fourth chapter takes Jin Yucheng (1952-)’s Blossoms (Fan Hua 2013) as an example to discuss how fangyan literature capitalizes on oral traditions of Ming and Qing vernacular literature, classical novel aesthetics, and the cultural capital of nostalgic filmic productions of Shanghai in Sinophone cinemas in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Overall, my dissertation provides an alternative vision of modern Chinese literary history by incorporating the marginalized literary practices in Wu fangyan in the twentieth-century Shanghai. These literary practices are part of a nexus of cultural productions representing the vibrant soundscape of the city gradually subdued in the process of nation-building in modern and contemporary China. These works embody individual efforts of unifying speech and writing, an ideal model of vernacular writing in preparation for a new national literature, collective imaginations of cultural belongings, and the re-emergence of the oral tradition in contemporary online culture and print industry. I put fangyan literature beyond regional, and national boundaries to emphasize its global connections with other Sinophone sites. 19 Chapter ONE Space, Gender, and Class: Sonic Modernity in Late Qing Serialized Fiction in Shanghai 1. Serialized Fiction in Marvelous Writings of Shanghai and New Fiction The sixty-four-chapter novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai 33 depicting the life of high- class courtesans and their patrons in the foreign concession in late Qing Shanghai is perhaps the most widely known Wu fangyan novel in the world now. The novel was published in biweekly installments by Han Bangqing, a literatus born in Songjiang Prefecture, Jiangsu Province (now a district of Shanghai) who lived in Beijing during his childhood and failed in the imperial exams several times before giving up and returning to Shanghai. He released his own literary periodical Marvelous Writings of Shanghai (Haishang qishu) during the Guangxu reign. Marvelous Writings of Shanghai was first published on 28 Feburary, 1892, consigned to Shun Pao Publishing House (Shenbao guan), a commercial press located in Shanghai. Han was an editor of Shun Pao Publishing House, and compiled his fiction together with selected writings by famous writers from earlier periods into this literary periodical. The first nine issues were released as biweekly, followed by six issues released as monthly, spanning over one year. After fifteen issues were released, the periodical ceased printing. These works were organized into three titles, Casual Writings of Taixian (Taixian mangao), The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan), and Collections of Recumbent Travel 33 In the initial serialization, the author used “Flowers Feel For Me Too” (Huayeliannong) as his pen name. Scholars such as David Der-wei Wang and Alexander Des Forges have translated the title as Biographies of Shanghai Flowers, and Lives of Shanghai Flowers. I follow the English translation as The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Eileen Chang, abbreviated as Sing-song Girls. 20 (Woyou ji), among which The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai was the main piece of writing marketed by the author. 34 As early as its inception, Sing-song Girls already faced the problem of limited readership. However, Lu Xun’s effort to incorporate it in the history of Chinese fiction, Hu Shi’s preface to the 1926 reprint of the book, Eileen Chang’s English translation (1975) and Mandarin translation (1983) of the novel, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film adaptation in 1998 based on the latter, jointly restaged the late-Qing courtesan world beyond the Wu fangyan speaking area. 35 Today, Sing- song Girls is more well-known than Dreams of Shanghai Splendor (Haishang fanhua meng), a blockbuster of the courtesan novel written in official vernacular published between 1898 and 1903, precisely because of its deliberate regionalist effort and innovative literary aesthetics, garnering academic studies from disciplines in humanities, including linguistic, literary, historical, and visual studies, to name just a few. With the growing body of research on the late- Qing period and literary modernities, literary historians of the modern period attributed the beginnings of Wu fangyan fiction and modern Chinese fiction to Han Bangqing’s writing, 36 34 For discussions of the periodical, see Zhang, Hanbo . “Lun jindai xiaoshuo zazhi de chansheng” [On the Birth of Early Modern Fictional Periodicals]. Guangxi shehui kexue no. 10 (2011): 117-120. 35 See Hu, Shi . “Haishanghua liezhuan xu,” 3-17. See also Lu, Xun , Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue [A Brief History of Chinese Fiction]. 1925. Reprint. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006. 36 See Luan, Meijian 所 . “Lun Haishanghua liezhuan de xiandaixing tezhi” [On the Modern Features of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai]. Zhengda zhongwen xuebao no. 5 (2006): 89- 104. See also Luan, Meijian. “1892: Zhongguo xiandai wenxue de qiyuan—Lun Haishanghua liezhuan de duandai jiazhi” 1892: [1892: The Beginning of Modern Chinese Literature— On the Chronological Value of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai]. Wenyi zhengming 這 no.3 (2009): 60-65. See also Fan, Baoqun . “Haishanghua liezhuan: Xiandai tongsu xiaoshuo kaishan zhizuo” ⽹ [The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai: The Pioneering Work of Modern Popular Fiction]. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan no. 3 (2006): 1-16. 21 despite the fact that earlier efforts existed decades before this novel. 37 Ten years after the publishing of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai, Liang Qichao, a scholar, journalist, and reformist born in Xinhui, Guangdong Province, initiated a literary periodical New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo) on November 14, 1902, during his exile in Yokohama, Japan after the Hundred Days’ Reform (Bairi weixin) failed. The first eleven issues were published in Japan. Starting from the twelfth issue, the periodical was consigned to Guangzhi Bookstore (Guangzhi shuju), a Shanghai publishing house dedicated to translating Western philosophy, ideology, and literature for the purpose of enlightenment. 38 Famous pieces published in it include Liang’s “On the Relationship between Fiction and Government of the People” (Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi), The Story of the Future of New China (Xin zhongguo weilai ji), and Wu Jianren ’s Bizarre Happenings Eye-witnessed Over Two Decades (Ershinian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang). Given the importance of these literary works in the history of late Qing reform and the ensuing New Culture Movement, New Fiction was regarded as the earliest monthly periodical of Chinese fiction. In 1905, a Cantonese opera titled “Ban Dingyuan Conquering the Western Region” (“Ban Dingyuan ping xiyu,” hereafter referred to as “Ban Dingyuan”) was published in serial form under the pen name of “Master of Manshu Chamber” (Manshu shi zhuren), later discovered to be Liang Qichao himself, from issue No.7 to No.9 published in Shanghai. 39 Although the plot has 37 Zhang Nanzhuang’s Which Classic? (He Dian) incorporates a significant amount of fangyan expressions from Songjiang district. See Chapter 2 for a detailed analysis of this book’s linguistic strategies involving Wu fangyan. 38 For a study of Guangzhi Bookstore, see Wu, Yuhao 國 . “Guangzhi shuju yanjiu” [A Study of Guangzhi Bookstore]. MA Thesis., Fudan University, 2010. 39 Debates over the authorship of this piece were one of the major reasons of its limited circulation, leading to the relatively limited academic studies of it. See Li, Wanwei ⼦ . “Wanqing yueju gailiang xiansheng: Lun Liang Qichao de ‘Ban Dingyuan ping xiyu’” 博 ⽹ [A Pioneer Work of Late Qing Reform of Cantonese Opera: On Liang Qichao’s “Ban Dingyuan Conquering the Western Region”]. Academic Research (December 2007): 148-153. See also Li, Wanwei. Qingmo Minchu de Yueyu Shuxie 22 nothing to do with Shanghai as a city, nor was the opera written in Shanghai, the adaptations made for publishing show clear signs of the author’s awareness of the aesthetics and readers’ demand for installment printing in Shanghai. The story revolves around Ban Chao (32-102 CE), a famous general of the Eastern Han dynasty who was sent to inner Asia to conquer the “western region” where “barbarian tribes” were threatening the Han people. As a play written for an actual performance that took place in Yokohama Overseas Chinese School, 40 it was revised for publication after the success of the performance in order to reach a wider readership. Hence, strategic use of narratological devices including an introductory preface and a glossary of Cantonese vocabulary were added to the play in the periodical. Though heavily reliant on the knowledge of the Cantonese fangyan, Liang’s piece was more accessible to a general audience due to the existence of a standardized Cantonese writing system, accompanied by a detailed glossary at the end of the script. In this chapter, I consider the changing role of fangyan in literature from the late imperial period to the modern context. Why did the concept of fangyan literature become relevant in the new literary framework of late Qing China? What role did sound and voice play in this transition? How do we make sense of fangyan as an “authentic” mode of representation? I focus on Sing-song Girls as a case study in this chapter, and use “Ban Dingyuan” as a point of reference for comparative purposes. I begin with a discussion of fangyan usage in late imperial China (Ming and Qing dynasties) and in what ways Sing-song Girls followed this tradition and deviated from it in the first section. In the second section, I probe the construction of sonic 情 [Cantonese Writing in Late Qing and Early Republican China]. Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 2011. Chapter 3. 40 Yokohama Overseas Chinese School (Datong xuexiao) was an overseas Chinese school for students whose ancestors immigrated from Guangdong Province to Yokohama. The courses in this school were offered in Cantonese only. In 1966, the school changed name to Yokohama Yamate Chinese School 时 . See Yokohama Yamate Chinese School Webpage, school history page. 23 modernity in relation to time and space presented in the narrative as well as illustrations in Marvelous Writings of Shanghai. Last, I examine the construction of gender and class through fangyan in Sing-song Girls in comparison and contrast with “Ban Dingyuan.” I argue, Sing-song Girls marks a transition of fiction writing from late imperial to modern aesthetics, particularly by its construction of sound and voice against an urban space. By not differentiating gender and class through speech, but through differentiating Shanghai and its other by a collective voice of Suzhou fangyan, the novel establishes an aural/oral identity of Shanghainese in contrast to a northern identity. 2. From Empire to Nation: Sounding the Regional Voices in Late Imperial China The vocabulary, slang, and grammar of regional cultures existed long before the late Qing period. As opposed to classical Chinese literature, vernacular literature from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing dynasties contained regional expressions. Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs (Shan’ge) written in the late Ming is one example. 41 These works, though not written in fangyan as their narrative language or language of dialogues, employ regional expressions to add on to their local flavor. Why was fangyan usage not a major concern back then? Does the use of fangyan in these works reflect an increasing desire for realist representation of regional voices? What was the changing condition that prompted the surge of literary productions with fangyan elements in the late Qing period, and the attempts to theorize this phenomenon in the Republican era? In this section, I first examine the changes from the perspectives of history, literature, and cultural production, and the underlying reasons for these changes. Then I discuss the use of 41 For a comprehensive study of Mountain Songs, see Ōki, Yasushi . Fū Bōryū 'sanka' no kenkyū 因 [A Study on Feng Menglong's “Mountain Songs”]. Tokyo: Keisō shobō , 2003. 24 fangyan in Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls and Liang Qichao’s “Ban Dingyuan,” to demonstrate the rise of nationalism following the development of regionalism in the nineteenth century vernacular fiction. From a socio-historical point of view, the rise of fangyan usage in writing during the nineteenth century was closely related to the two Opium Wars and the opening of port cities to the Western powers along the coastline of China. Before that, the development of commercialism and printing technology since the Ming dynasty paved the way for a mature group of readers and writers who participated in the production and consumption of printed materials. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 stipulated that, “the cities and towns of Canton, Amoy, Foochow-fu, Ningbo, and Shanghai” be opened to the Great Britain “for the purpose of carrying on their Mercantile pursuits,” furthering concentrating wealth and resources to these places and privileging these cities over inland provinces where other families of the Sinitic languages were spoken. 42 According to Yao Dadui, the translation of religious texts of Christianity prompted the development of writing system for vernacular Chinese in these areas, which can be seen in the emergence of translations of the Bible and religious texts such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Ningbo, and Amoy fangyan. 43 These translations, along with the development of romanization systems of fangyan embodied in the compilation of fangyan dictionaries by missionaries contributed later on to the formation of modern Chinese lexicon. Italian linguist Federico Masini regards “literary works written in various dialects, the 42 See USC US-China Institute-documents-pre-1949 China. “Article II” in “Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking), 1842.” http://china.usc.edu/treaty-nanjing-nanking-1842. (accessed March 26, 2018) 43 Yao, Dadui ⼿ . “Shengjing yu baihua” [The Chinese Bible and the Mandarin]. Biblical Literature Studies , edited by Liang Gong, 95-124. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2013. See also Duan, Huaiqing . “Tianlu licheng zai wanqing zhongguo de liuge yiben” [On the Six Translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Late Qing China]. Journal of Hangzhou Normal University: Humanities and Social Science no. 3 (2012): 40-45. 25 Ming and Qing novels, the late Qing literature, the Japanese technical literature ... the XIXth century essays and translations of Western subjects” as essential parts of the formation of the new national language in the years to come. 44 From the point of literary and cultural history, the nineteenth century also witnessed a “remarkable rise in the importance of regionalism and local identity” in literature. 45 Song Lihua contends that, the use of fangyan in Ming and Qing storytelling scripts determines the range of circulation of the novel, and vice versa. 46 Given the influence of oral traditions on these storytelling scripts, and the collective authorship involved in the creation of these vernacular novels, many works contain more than one regional vernacular, among which Wu fangyan was most widely used. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei cihua) is perhaps the best example with fangyan expressions of debatable origin. Scholars have argued the origins to be Shandong, Hebei, Beijing, Henan, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Lanzhou, and Wu fangyan, to name just a few. 47 The point is, the difficulty in locating a single origin of fangyan expressions indicates the fluidity of the text, whether in terms of the author’s identity (single author or multiple authors, an author that was traveling in several regions), or the text’s circulation (regional vernacular of the place where it was circulated was added to one edition of the text). Wu fangyan was popular due to the geographical location (in between Northern and Southern fangyan regions) and economic prosperity (development of print industry, professional authors 44 Federico Masini, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898 (Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Monograph Series 6, 1993), 120. 45 Paize Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 164. 46 Song Lihua 出也 , Mingqing shiqi de xiaoshuo chuanbo [The circulation of Ming and Qing Novels]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004. Chapter 3.2. 47 For a summary of these speculations, see Zhang, Yuping 讓 . “Jin Ping Mei fangyan wenti yanjiu zongshu” 是 [A Summary of Researches on Issues regarding the Fangyan in the Plum in the Golden Vase]. Ming Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu no. 4 (2003):72-83. 26 and readers). Recent scholarship on the nineteenth century literature demonstrates the increase in regionalism expressed through the use of fangyan in contrast to the standard vernacular. 48 As Paize Keulemans convincingly demonstrated in Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth- Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination, acoustic imagination was an important force shaping the narratological structure of martial arts novels in this period. The printing of fangyan on paper, as part of the general approach to representing sound and voice, helped construct a provincial identity inferior to the cosmopolitan Beijing identity. While stressing the imitative nature of fangyan printing (what he calls “mimicry” rather than “mimesis”), Keulemans also alerts us to the distinction between the printing of regional accents and actual oral performance, since the former deliberately engaged a readership based on the written language. 49 Closely linked with this trend, oral traditions of local cultures such as opera and tanci performance were also undergoing fundamental reshaping. Take Cantonese opera for instance. Since the Guangxu reign (1875-1908), foreign influences reached Guangzhou through maritime trade, leading to “significant changes in its (Cantonese opera’s) content and form.” 50 Located at the frontier of cross-cultural communication, Cantonese opera as a form of traditional popular culture actively participated in the commercial activities in this region. While scholars mourned 48 For a discussion of regionalism and fangyan usage in Ming and Qing vernacular fiction, see Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Vernacular Story. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Series, 1981. See also Meyer-Fong, Tobie. Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 49 Paize Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 162-163. An earlier version of his chapter on dialect has been published in 2010. See Keulemans, Paize. “Printing the Sound of Cosmopolitan Beijing: Dialect Accents in Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction.” In From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800-2008, edited by Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, 159-184. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 50 Meng Yao 可 , Zhongguo xiqu shi [A History of Chinese Opera], Taipei: Biographic Literature Press, 1979, Vol. 3: 641. 27 over the “de-canonization of Cantonese opera” caused by commercialization, the reform certainly brought innovations to this performative genre. 51 The incorporation of local languages was one of the major innovations. Colloquial Cantonese (Bakwa), originally excluded from the performance, gradually sought its way into the lyrics of clowns (chou), then martial roles (wusheng) and female roles (huadan), with the exception of imperial roles and courtiers, who spoke classical Chinese only. 52 The juxtaposition of classical Chinese and colloquial Cantonese became a prominent feature of late Qing Cantonese opera, allowing it to reach audiences at the local level. 53 Towards the end of the Qing dynasty, Chinese theatre in general was heavily influenced by Euro-American and Japanese models of nationalist theatre. The model of new school drama (shinpa), a Western-style theatre in Japan focusing on spoken language of everyday rather than written language, thrived in the early twentieth century, provided overseas Chinese students a source of inspiration. Among these students were Chen Duxiu, Liu Yazi, Wang Xiaonong, famous intellectuals who later participated in the New Culture Movement. The changes in opera and theatre pushed Chinese literature and culture towards the unification of speech and writing. All these changes point to the decline of the central power of the Qing government, and the uneven economic and cultural development that existed previously but were further enhanced by the opening of treaty ports after the Opium Wars. The rise of regionalism in literature and culture 51 Ibid., 641. 52 Ouyang Yuqian 給 , Ouyang Yuqian quanji 給 [The Complete Works of Ouyang Yuqian] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1990), 72. 53 The case of opera reformation in Shanghai is much more complicated. The most widely recognized opera genre in Shanghai was not Shanghai Opera (Huju), but Yue Opera (Yueju), and Peking Opera (Jingju). See Goldstein, Joshua. Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1860-1937. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. See also Jiang, Jin. Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. For a study of Shanghai Opera, see Stock, Jonathan P. J. Huju: Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 28 not only mirrored the socio-political status of the late Qing period, reflecting the linguistic and cultural diversity of the empire, but also in a way actively negotiated with the hierarchical power structure. While linguistics studies may treat these literary works as a faithful record of language usage of the time the novels were written, and use them as evidence to determine where the author or authors were from, the outcomes of these studies oftentimes confuse rather than clarify the issue at stake. Far from being an authentic representation or recording of the voices in written form, the fangyan writings in the late Qing period were constructed in ways that facilitate the formation of a collective regional identity, and negotiate the regional identity versus the central identity. On the one hand, novels like Three Knights and Five Gallants (Sanxia wuyi) “reaffirmed that city’s central position in the empire by collecting and imitating other regional dialects” because of a potential fear of loss of distinction of the political and cultural authority. 54 On the other hand, writings in provincial vernacular assert linguistic specificity and cultural privilege against the central power. Read together, these literary works paint a picture of nineteenth century China as a dynamic space that is open, fluid, and home to various regional cultures. While the literati class and average citizens were not necessarily open-minded, they were nevertheless aware of other regional cultures. As Keulemans points out, Sing-song Girls is “merely the culmination of a nineteenth-century trend towards ever more sophisticated use of dialect.” 55 Sun Yusheng (1864-1940), author of Dreams of Shanghai Splendor (1898-1903), commented on the draft of Sing-song Girls. He compared his own book written in official vernacular released around the same time with Han’s Sing-song Girls, and indicated that the linguistic specificity was a potential barrier to the latter’s 54 Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper, 190. 55 Ibid., 187. 29 circulation beyond the Wu fangyan speaking communities. 56 Han Bangqing responded to Sun as follows: Cao Xueqin wrote his Dream of the Red Mansion (Honglou meng) completely in Pekingese (jingyu), so why shouldn’t I write my book in Wu?” He then pointed at several characters in his draft which he invented to match sounds in Wu, and said, “These are certainly my concoctions, but when Cang Jie invented characters, I guess he also had to arbitrarily give them a meaning… 57 Although the narrative of Sing-song Girls follows traditional vernacular novels by using classical and official vernacular Chinese, the point of departure lies in the substantive use of Suzhou fangyan in the dialogues. Different from earlier novels that borrowed fangyan vocabularies, modal particles, and grammatical structures, Han took the approach of transliteration in the hope of mimicking the sound. The lack of a standard writing system for Wu fangyan made it difficult for Han to transcribe every word and phrase in dialogue. As Han claimed in the above passage, in addition to borrowing Chinese characters of similar pronunciation to transcribe words or phrases that do not exist in written forms, the creation of characters was a necessary step in a comprehensive transformation of sound from orality to text. To give an example, in order to transcribe “fiæ,” a negative verb meaning “don’t” or “don’t want,” into Chinese written script, Han combined two characters, “ ” (fə) and “ ” (iæ) by 56 Sun Yusheng , Tuixing lu biji ⾼ [Notes from the Hut for Retiring to Enlightenment], Reprint. In Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan 道 80. Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1972. 57 Hu, “Haishanghua liezhuan xu,” 4. My translation is based on Kristof Van Den Troost’s version quoted in Fan Boqun, “Pioneer Work,” 466-467, with some slight changes by myself. 30 extracting the consonant of the first character and the vowel of the second 58 , written as . 59 No reading aid was provided to the readers for these fabricated characters. Readers were still able to comprehend the basic plot of the novel since the narrative was written in a combination of classical Chinese and official vernacular. However, in order to understand the dialogues, one has to carefully read the novel by sounding out each character, at least in their mind. This reading process was time-consuming for Wu fangyan speakers, not to mention readers from other provinces. The painstaking effort to transcribe not only required the intensive labor of the author, but also that of the readers. For a genre that was intended for entertainment, Han’s writing embodies an assertion of a regional identity, reminding readers of its linguistic specificity in every sentence, every phrase, and every character. The distinct cultural identity presented here is bounded not just by geographical locations, but the language one speaks. Instead of addressing a national audience, Han more directly addressed readers from Wu fangyan speaking communities. Thirteen years later, Liang Qichao’s “Ban Dingyuan,” written at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a clear nationalist attempt to reform the nation through mobilization the people to embrace militarism against the West at the local level. Straddling the line between performative art and literature, Liang clearly differentiated the target audience/readership of the opera performance and the published script. In the preface to the serialized script, Liang relates: 58 In late Qing Suzhou fangyan, the pronunciation begins with a labialdental, light lip sound, recorded as “fiæ” in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), dark departing tone (yinqu). In contemporary Shanghainese, the word begins with a bilabial, or heavy lip sound, recorded as “viɔ” in IPA, evenly rising tone (yangping). Suzhou fangyan cidian [Suzhou fangyan dictionary] (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 63. 59 The character was printed differently in the late Qing edition. appeared to the left of . This character does not exist in contemporary Chinese input system on computers. Another example of Han’s concoction is (vən), a combination of and , meaning “have never.” appeared to the left of in the late Qing edition as well. 31 This opera was performed in old tones and old forms of Cantonese opera. Therefore it could not be performed as it is in other provinces, but minor revisions will do… Written with vocabularies from Cantonese dialect, this script might be difficult to read for people from other provinces. Thus a glossary is attached at the end. 60 In the preface, we can see that the author was aware of the linguistic barrier of Cantonese opera and the affective power of mobilizing the people it carries as well. Therefore, narrotological assistance was provided for readers to better understand the script. A glossary of Cantonese characters and phrases was added at the end of the script. Moreover, the serial form also serves as a natural division among various scenes, each featuring one type of language. A total of six scenes were divided into three parts to be published in three issues of the magazine. Part one depicts Ban’s pre-departure activities in an imperial setting, where classical Chinese is the common language, capturing readers who were familiar with classical Chinese as a literary language. Part two focuses on the diplomatic and military affairs in the “western region” where a mixture of Cantonese, English, and Japanese were used to symbolize linguistic plurality. The third part captures conversations among soldiers in Ban’s army before their return to the Han capital. The majority of their conversations were conducted in colloquial Cantonese and classical Chinese. The tripartite structure creates a clear development of the plot, and maps out the shift of space through linguistic changes. Overall, the serialized version of “Ban Dingyuan” reflects the author’s intention to reach a national audience beyond the Cantonese speaking community, not unlike Sun Yusheng’s decision to use official vernacular in his novel. By observing the development of nineteenth century fiction, we see the rise of regionalism manifested in the increasing use of fangyan vocabulary, grammar, and the invention of written script for words and phrases that did not exist before. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, 60 Liang Qichao , “Ban Dingyuan ping xiyu” [Ban Dingyuan Conquering the Western Region], Xin Xiaoshuo. no. 7, 135. 32 Han Bangqing’s approach relies heavily on transcribing the sound of the regional voices distinct from the voices of the northerners, especially those of Beijing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the concept of a nation looming large in the mind of the late Qing intellectuals, literary works employing fangyan were adjusted and reframed for a potential national readership. Neither approach should be considered as an authentic representation of the sound and voice of the local people. These literary works were never intended as ethnographic records, but as an imaginative construction of a regional identity. As we shall see in the next section, Han Bangqing’s representation of regional sound and voice is central to his construction of an urban space known as Shanghai. 3. Sonic Modernities: Sound and Voice against Time and Space In this section, I focus on Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls as an example to demonstrate how the novel depicts Shanghai modernity not through the visual experience alone, but more importantly through the oral/aural experience. I begin with a brief overview of existing scholarship on literary modernity in Sing-song Girls. Following that, I examine the representation of sound against the backdrop of urban time and space in Han’s novel as part of his agenda of creating what I call “sonic modernities” in his Marvelous Writings of Shanghai. I define sonic modernities as a modern condition expressed and/or experienced through the medium of sound. We can trace the origin of contemporary academic studies on Sing-song Girls to Eileen Chang’s translation-cum-adaptation of the novel in both Mandarin and English, with detailed prefaces, postscripts, and systematic footnote commentary. 61 Not only did Zhang successfully 61 Zhang’s translation is based on the 1926 reprint of Sing-song Girls edited by Wang Yuanfang, prefaced by Hu Shi and Liu Fu. I will discuss the reprinting of Sing-song Girls in the Republican era in Chapter two. 33 bring the novel back to public attention, she also participated in the circulation of the work in a Sinophone network through her rewriting and commentary. 62 Since then, studies of the novel have followed two main trajectories: the literary historical studies approach and the cultural studies approach. Patrick Hanan’s study of Chinese vernacular literature places Sing-song Girls in the tradition of “city novel” influenced by “Yangzhou novels” such as Illusions of Romance (Fengyue meng). 63 David Der-wei Wang’s pioneering work on the repressed modernities of the late Qing period problematizes the idea of the May Fourth Movement as the beginning of modern Chinese literature. His discussion of the novel focuses on the generic features of the “depravity novel” as distinct from the traditional scholar-beauty novel (caizi jiaren xiaoshuo), echoing Lu Xun’s analysis along the line of xiaxie xiaoshuo (literally alleyway novel, often translated as depravity novel or courtesan novel 64 ) tradition. 65 Incorporating the socio-historical background, Alexander Des Forges’ monograph on Sing- song Girls, titled Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production situates the novel in the printing culture and consumption pattern of late Qing Shanghai. The book treats Han’s novel as an active agent in shaping modernity. In particular, Des Forges discusses 62 See Wang, Xiaojue. “Creation and Transmission: Eileen Chang and Sing-song Girls of Shanghai.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 36 (2014): 125-148. 63 See Hanan, Patrick. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Vernacular Story. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. See also Yuan, Jin . “Luetan Haishanghua liezhuan zai xiaoshuo chengshihua shangde yiyi” 因 [A Brief Study of The Sing-song girls of Shanghai and Its Significance in the Urbanization of Novel]. Ming Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu no.4 (2005): 164-170. See also Chen, Pingyuan . Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo de qidian: Qingmo minchu xiaoshuo yanjiu ⽹ [The Beginning of Modern Chinese Fiction: A Study of Late Qing and Early Republican Fiction]. Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2005. 64 Xiaxie, literally refers to the narrow alleyways where courtesans resided. Lu Xun also discussed Precious Mirror for Judging Flowers (Pinhua baojian), The Dream of the Green Mansion (Qinglou meng), among other Qing fiction in this genre. Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue, 169-177. 65 Ibid., 177. 34 Shanghai installment publication as a dominant mode of production and circulation for Chinese fiction in the last two decades of the Qing dynasty. Installment publication played a crucial role in cultivating “a new readership of Shanghai ‘addicts’ to consume that product, and to signal, through its very form, the directions in which a new ‘national’ arena of print and visual media would develop.” 66 Different from the linked chapters style (zhanghui ti) of vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties, these novels of Shanghai published in installments feature precise references to the contemporary time and space of Shanghai. As illustrated by Des Forges, Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls serves as an exemplary case of the aesthetics of Shanghai installment publication through its use of “simultaneity, interruption, and excess,” establishing Shanghai as the “central node of a dominant and expansionist mediasphere.” 67 Following the studies of courtesans and prostitutes by Gail Hershatter and Christian Henriot from a gender studies perspective, 68 Catherine Vance Yeh pays attention to the visual aesthetics of illustrations in Sing-song Girls, and argues for the importance of the female body of courtesans in its ability to “evoke the city as a whole” even when the illustrations depict mostly domestic settings rather than the cityscape. 69 These studies effectively contextualize Sing-song Girls in the socio- economic and cultural atmosphere of late Qing Shanghai. Overall, the representation of Shanghai as an urban space is essential to the author’s construction of modernity. As a story about the lives of high-class courtesans and their patrons in 66 Alexander Des Forges, “Building Shanghai, One Page at a Time: Aesthetics of Installment Fiction at the Turn of the Century,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 3 (Aug 2003): 782. This article is an earlier version of the chapter on installment fiction in the 2007 monograph. 67 Ibid., 782. 68 See Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999; Henriot, Christian. Prostitution in Shanghai: A Social History. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. See also McMahon, Keith. Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010. 69 Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 298. 35 late Qing Shanghai, Sing-song Girls adopts the trope of life as a dream from classical novels like The Dream of Red Mansion. The narrator claims himself to be someone who has been through the indulgence of decadent life. In his dream, he falls into a sea of rootless flowers all the way down to Lu Stone Bridge, which links Shanghai’s Qing-governed district to the foreign settlements. 70 The narrator encounters Zhao Puzhai, a first-time visitor to Shanghai from the countryside peripheral to Shanghai. Although the narrator constantly shifts the focus of plot among over two dozen main characters, a technique of “implicit narration (chuancha) and “intermittent revelation” (cangshan) 71 to borrow Han’s own terms, we do see that the novel ends with Zhao becoming a menial laborer. His sister Zhao Erbao is reduced to prostitution in Shanghai, completing the structure of traditional cautionary tales in Ming and Qing vernacular fiction. What sets Sing- song Girls apart is the invoking of numerous names of streets, avenues, and alleys in the colonial space of Shanghai. This narrative technique reminds readers of the time and space of the diegetic world mirroring the extra-diegetic world throughout the storyline. With the navigation of characters from one brothel to another, 70 Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, translated by Eileen Chang and Eva Hung (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1-2. 71 Fan Boqun, “Pioneering,” 475. Figure 1.1 An illustration of the International Settlement described in the novel, from the appendix of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai translated by Eileen Chang and Eva Hung 36 a concrete map of the foreign concession can be drawn based on the description of their movements in the novel. A study of the map of late Qing Shanghai also shows how accurate the geographical information is in the book. (See Figure 1.1) Does this mean that the author intended to deliver a faithful representation of late Qing Shanghai? If so, doesn't the life-as-a-dream structure contradict this intention? I argue that, rather than faithfully representing late Qing Shanghai, Han Bangqing’s literary works construct an imagined community with the urban space of Shanghai as its center. The physical space of Shanghai serves as a platform for his construction of sonic modernities for the Wu fangyan speaking communities. First, the obsession with precision and details of the concession area within an urban space in the novel mirrors the author’s deliberate efforts to transcribe the voices in Wu fangyan within the narrative framework conducted in official vernacular. Jointly, the desire to record sound, voices, time, and space in written form reflects the author’s reconsideration of the medium specificity of literature. As shown in the previous section, the use of fangyan in nineteenth century vernacular fiction succeeded in constructing a hierarchical structure of the center and the periphery. However, borrowing vocabulary alone was not enough for Han Bangqing. The regional voices, rather than being “understood” or “registered” as different from the standard vernacular, should be “heard” as different. Taking one step further to transcribe dialogues, Han compels the readers to read or virtually sound the lines aloud, transforming the novel from text to oral performance. The narrative in standard vernacular also provides a middle ground preparing readers for this transition to take place. 37 One example is the description of sound in the background of the story. In the first chapter, the narrator introduced the chiming clock on the table. “There was a clock on a table carved from tree roots. As they talked it struck twelve…” 72 In fact, chiming clock is one of the objects that the narrator keeps mentioning when he describes the interior decoration of rooms he visits. Throughout the narrative, the sound of chiming clock prompts the characters to have meals, prepare to leave for other places, or go to bed. For the readers, the sound serves as an indicator of plot development, regulating their expectation of the following narrative. Similarly, depictions of sound in the story also draw a line between interior space and exterior space within the domestic space. Lu Xiubao, a young courtesan, was introduced to Zhao Puzhai through the sound of her feet. “Not long afterward came the sound of bound feet, creakety creak all the way. That must be Xiubao coming. Zhao Puzhai had his eyes on the door curtain and saw her walk in…” 73 Walking in from outside the room, the courtesan is first presented via sound, rather than appearance here. Eileen Chang points out in the footnote that “creakety creak” represents the noise made by the wooden soles of bound-feet shoes. Through a brief description of the sound of her feet, the author captures Lu Xiubao’s identity as a courtesan with bound-feet, and her movement from the exterior space into the room. Similar depictions of the sound/noise of the feet are frequently used in the narrative to mark individual movement and the beginning and conclusion of actions. Also prominent is the acoustic supplement in the occasions of banquets. When Zhao Puzhai was brought to a banquet with merchants, he was distracted by the sound of music and singing from outside. 72 Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, 2. 73 Ibid., 5-6. Chang translated Zhao Puzhai as Simplicity Zhao, and Lu Xiubao as Jewel Lu by explaining the meanings of their first name. Here I stick to the Pinyin romanization of the characters’ names. 38 He could hear the lively sound of music and singing coming from the “study” next to the parlor and, unable to sit still any longer, slipped out on the pretext of going to the toilet. He peeped through the windowpane next door and saw six diners seated at a round table, surrounded by courtesans and their maids and servant girls. The women filled the room. The fat man sitting facing the window had a purplish dark complexion and three strands of black whiskers. He had called two girls to keep him company. The one on his right was singing a Beijing opera aria, “Plucking Mulberry Leaves.” As her face was hidden by her lute, Zhao Puzhai could not tell what she looked like. The girl on the left was older but quite pretty. Seeing that the fat man had lost at the drinking game “guess fingers,” she offered to take the penalty cup of wine for him. The fat man refused, shoved her hand away, and bent down to pick up the cup himself. But just before he reached it, the courtesan on his right halted her playing, quietly took the cup, and gave it to her maid to drink. The fat man did not see what she had done and ended up drinking from an empty cup. Everybody laughed uproariously. 74 This scene begins with the entrance of sound from the outside. Since Zhao was peeping through the windowpane, he observed the action in the next door from a distance. Where visions of the physical presence were blocked (the woman’s face was hidden by her lute), her voice took the place as her image. When she quietly took the cup of wine without letting her patron know what she did, it was the silence (she halted playing the lute) that betrayed her action to the rest of the group. This scene concludes with “uproarious” laughter, another sound that prompted Zhao to go back to his own banquet. Read together with the transliteration of dialogues in Suzhou fangyan, the novel represents an intermedial practice prompted by the development of science and technology such as the spread of the chiming clock in the pleasure quarters, a desire to record sound and negotiate the boundary between text and orality. In his discussion of late nineteenth century Japan, Kerim Yasar points out that the “unification of speech and writing (genbun itchi)” movement “took shape in the context of the introduction of the telegraph, the phonograph, and the telephone.” 75 In a similar 74 Ibid., 8, my italics. 75 Kerim Yasar, Electrified Voices: Media Technology and Discourse in Modern Japan, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2009, 1. 39 vein, the spread of technology in late Qing Shanghai is also a vector for literary experiments to mimic sound through written words. Second, in Sing-song Girls, the representation of sound in written form produces an effect of the real, so as to entertain the readers with the sensational experiences. This is best exemplified through the analysis of the issues of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai published in 1892. In an advertisement for his periodical on Shun Pao on the sixth day of the first month in 1892, Han Bangqing wrote: Advertisement for Marvelous Writings of Shanghai Release on the first and fifteenth days each month; market price: 1 jiao; consigned to Shun Pao Publishing House Marvelous Writings of Shanghai consists of three titles in serialization, published as soon as they are written, and sold by issue, for readers to enjoy immediately. Among the three titles, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is the most marvelous. It is written in the genre of fictional biography. The book tells the romantic stories in Shanghai’s pleasure quarters in Suzhou local vernacular based on the author’s personal experiences for over ten years. The book is intended as a cautionary tale to warn fun-seekers against such a lifestyle. Hence, depictions of licentious scenes were not included. In addition, delicate printing of illustrations and handwriting in regular script is another feature of this periodical. Besides Sing-song Girls, Casual Writings of Taixian is innovative and unique, deviating from the style of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Collections of Recumbent Travel is a collection of short stories full of amusement and excitement. I present them for readers to enjoy in those times (when you cannot travel). This is the general information of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai. The first issue will be available on the first day of the second month. Each issue is priced one jiao, sold by Shun Pao agents in Shanghai, and available by mail order outside of Shanghai where Shun Pao is available. Da Yi Shan Ren 76 因 因 因话 因起明 76 Da Yi Shan Ren is an anagram of Taixian , the author’s pen name. 40 意 有能本话说因 ⾏因定话因來 等果因 因同因同因 77 In the advertisement, two issues are worth discussing. First, what is meant by “marvelous”? The conventional English translation “marvelous” is based on one definition of the Chinese word “qi” , meaning wonderful, extremely good, and extraordinary. However, a more conventional definition widely used in the context of late Qing newspapers is the meaning of curious, interesting, and sensational. Rudolf Wagner’s prudent research on illustrated newspapers, Globe Illustrated (Huanying hubao) founded in 1877, Dianshizhai Studio Pictorial (Dianshizhai huabao) founded in 1884, and Flying Shadow Studio Pictorial (Feiyingge huabao) founded in 1890, prior to Han Bangqing’s literary periodical, clearly demonstrates the entertainment orientation of these illustrated newspapers. Enabled by the introduction of lithographic printing, up-to-date, sensational, and entertaining news were prioritized in the seeking of topics to cover in these illustrated newspapers. 78 The success of these newspapers inevitably influenced Han Bangqing, as is shown in the title of the periodical and the painting style of the illustrations for Sing-song Girls. Although the illustrations in Han’s periodical were not attributed to a particular 77 “Haishang qishu gaobai” 因 [Advertisement for Marvelous Writings of Shanghai]. Shun Pao, 4 Feb. 1892. 78 See Wagner, Rudolf G. “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai huabao.” In Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870-1910, edited by Rudolf G. Wagner, 105-174. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. See also Chen, Pingyuan and Xia Xiaohong . Tuxiang wanqing: Dianshizhai huabao ⽹第因 [Late Qing in Images: Dianshizhai Studio Pictorial]. Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2006. 41 illustrator, a clear resemblance to the style of Wu Youru’s illustrations is evident. 79 The illustration on the left-hand side (Figure 1.2) is from Dianshizhai Studio Pictorial. The one on the right-hand size (Figure 1.3) is from Chapter 2 of Sing-song Girls, originally published in Issue No.2 of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai. From the depiction of female characters in terms of costume, hairstyle, gesture and posture, to the use of perspective in drawing the interior of domestic spaces, the illustration in Sing-song Girls follows the style of Dianshizhai Studio Pictorial. The resemblance could also be seen in the choices of material. Many illustrated news stories from Dianshizhai focused on the life of courtesans to attract readers, which was echoed in Han’s choice of content as well. Second, how do Sing-song Girls and the other two titles embody the curious, sensational quality Han expected to deliver? In the advertisement, two attributes of Sing-song Girls are highlighted. One is the use of Suzhou fangyan. The other is the author’s personal experiences. Judging from these attributes, the promise Han made to the readers who 79 Wu Youru (circa 1840-1894) was the chief illustrator of Dianshizhai Studio founded by English merchant Ernest Major. In 1890, he left Dianshizhai Studio and established Flying Shadow Studio. For a discussion of Wu’s artistic styles and achievements, see Wue, Roberta. Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP; Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P, 2014. See also Hay, Jonathan. “Notes on Chinese Photography and Advertising in Late Nineteenth-Century Shanghai.” In Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s- 1930s, edited by Jason C. Kuo, 95-120. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007. Figure 1.2 An illustration from Dianshizhai Studio Pictorial by Wu Youru Figure 1.3 An illustration from The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by an anonymous illustrator 42 were not able to witness the courtesan houses is an audio-visual experience of the real. If the audio aspect of his promise is not clearly conveyed in this piece of advertisement, the short story “Mouth Skill” (Kouji) by Lin Sihuan, collected in the Collection of Recumbent Travel in the first issue of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai, gives us a better example of the sensational as an acoustic experience. The significance of this short story is often neglected since this piece was not written by Han Bangqing himself. Hence, most research focuses on Casual Writings of Taixian as cases of Han’s classical novel, and Sing-song Girls as a case of his experiment with urban modern experiences. However, since the stories in the Collection of Recumbent Travel were handpicked by Han, his choice of Lin’s story for the inaugural issue is a deliberate manifestation of his understanding of the sensational. Written at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, “Mouth Skill” portrays a vocal mimicry performance by a Kouji artist in Beijing (See Figure 1.4). Seated behind the curtain with a table, a chair, a folded fan, and a wood block by himself, the artist vividly mimics the voices of a man, a woman, and their kid speaking, peeing, and crying, followed by mimicry of a fire accident with thousands of people crying for help, dogs barking, and people pouring water performed by one person. Unable to see what is happening behind the curtain, the audience in the room almost flees. There are two layers to this short story. First, within the diegesis of the story, human voice and the physical sound of objects are a medium that creates a sensational feeling/experience for the audience. Second, the Figure 1.4 An illustration of “Mouth Skill” from the first issue of Marvelous Writings of Shanghai 43 text itself is a medium that mimics the sensational acoustic experience for the readers. Collected under the title of “recumbent travel” (woyou), a motif conventionally associated with the Chinese landscape painting, 80 “Mouth Skill” represents the author’s attempt to expand a genre created for the visual experience to include oral/aural experience as well. While the short story was not written in the context of late Qing Shanghai, it nevertheless helps readers understand the editor’s agenda of creating sonic modernity through written words. Overall, as part of an agenda to create sonic modernity within urban space and time, Han Bangqing’s innovation in Sing-song Girls lies in the transliteration of Suzhou fangyan against the time and space of urban Shanghai. To him, the modern experience should not only be seen, but also be heard. However, this modern experience is constructed to be sensational, catering to the needs for entertainment in the printing industry of late Qing Shanghai. In the following section, I discuss how this sonic modernity is conditioned by gender and class. 4. Gender and Class in The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai The sense of literary modernity is not only constructed through the audio-visual experiences of the urban space, but also through the gender and class of the characters in the novel. Through the use of Suzhou fangyan, Sing-song Girls creates a collective regional identity for Shanghai. In her book Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East, Rey Chow proposes the reading of Eileen Chang’s fictional writings as “an alternative approach to modernity and history through a release of sensual details whose emotional 80 Some famous examples of the woyou motif in Chinese painting include: Lishi’s Paintings of Xiao Xiang for Recumbent Travel (Xiaoxiang woyoutu) of Southern Song dynasty, Shen Zhou’s Collected Paintings for Recumbent Travel (Woyou tuce) of Ming dynasty. 44 backdrop is often that of entrapment, destruction, and desolation.” 81 As a predecessor to the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly novels of the Republican era, Han serves as a source of inspiration for late writers like Eileen Chang, Zhu Shouju, and Zhang Henshui. Much of the focus on feminine details Chang inherited from previous literature can be found in Han’s Sing-song Girls. Published prior to the blossoming of late Qing fiction writing including castigatory novels, Han’s Sing-song Girls is categorized as a “Guidebook for Brothelgoers” (Piaojie zhinan) amongst other books such as A Shanghai Swan’s Tracks in the Snow (Haitian hongxue ji 1899), and The Nine-tailed Tortoise (Jiuwei gui 1910). 82 The unique focus on feminine details sets Han’s Sing-song Girls apart from both contemporary depravity novels and 1900s castigatory novels, a genre based in social commentary. The choice of Suzhou fangyan is also associated with the focus on female characters. First, the focus on feminine details in Han’s Sing-song Girls differs from other depravity novels describing the world of courtesans in terms of its lack of focus on sexual encounters. Description of sexual encounters could be found in earlier books like the Ming novel The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan), to name just a few. Popular novels that sought to attract readers from all walks of life, particularly lower-class readers, resorted to descriptions of sexual scenes in their writing. However, it is not difficult to find that Han’s Sing- song Girls fails to fulfill the reader’s expectation as a depravity novel in terms of sexual indulgence. Readers are provided minimal descriptions of the characters in the narrative, but are expected to figure out the personalities of different characters, their social status and relationships to other characters based primarily on the dialogues. 81 Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 85. 82 A Ying , Wanqing xiaoshuo shi [History of Late Qing Fiction] (1937, Reprint, Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2010), 172. 45 Instead of focusing on sexual encounters, the author focuses on interpersonal relationships, not only between man and woman, but also among same gender groups in order to highlight the complicated social network of Shanghai. According to Eileen Chang’s postscript to the Mandarin translation, sexual desire is not that important since the elite class in the Qing dynasty usually married early in life due to arranged marriage. 83 Thus, love or romance is more in need compared with sexual desire. Gail Hershatter’s Dangerous Pleasure: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai also elaborates on the courting of high-class courtesans and the importance of stable relationships between the courtesan and the patron. The lack of sexual description gives space to more detailed portrayals of the personality of each character, enabling the readers to understand their individual agency as males and females. For example, the high- class courtesans are entitled to make their own decision whether to form a relationship with a client or not. When accumulated wealth is sufficient enough, they could even choose to buy themselves out, or marry out to one of their clients’ families. Despite the fact that these female characters are still bounded by their historical condition and trapped in the pleasure quarters of Shanghai, each of the individuals displays their agency through the decisions they make in their encounters with their patrons. Male characters are far from the dominant patriarch in their own household when they are in the brothels. Second, in addition to the focus on the actions and dialogues of each character, the elaborate details of their possessions and their daily routines set the novel apart from contemporary castigatory novels. Aside from the brief opening remarks with the cautionary message, the novel 83 Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), “Guoyu ben Haishanghua yihouji” “ ’ ’愛 ” [Postscript to the Mandarin Translation of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai], In Haishang hualuo: Guoyu Haishanghua liezhuan er II [Complete Works of Zhang Ailing: The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai in Mandarin, Part II], translated by Zhang Ailing (Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1996), 710. 46 reveals no attempt to criticize or even comment on the characters and events it describes. Instead, the narrator feeds the readers with an overwhelming amount of details including banquets at various brothels, conversations among various patrons and courtesans and gossip of other patrons or courtesans, the vicissitudes of relationships between courtesans and patrons, and material possessions. These details can certainly be read as social commentary on the hypocrisy of the elite class, the obsession with materialism, and the indulgence in the game of love if read between the lines carefully. On several occasions, courtesans sitting in the same vehicle commented on others’ jade hairpins and pendants, and talked about the price of each piece. They exchanged their hairpins to compare the color, size, and price value. When one courtesan received a good hairpin from her patron as a token of love, other courtesans who were associated with this patron would also request similar products from him. Moreover, Huang Cuifeng, a high-class courtesan who managed to buy herself out of the brothel, repeatedly calculated her possessions in front of her madam and a patron to emphasize her value as a courtesan. Readers are informed of how much the maintenance of a brothel costs, as well as how much they could make in this business. These details provide, to borrow Rey Chow’s words, “sensuous, trivial, and superfluous textual presences that exist in an ambiguous relation with some larger ‘vision’ such as reform and revolution.” 84 Although reform and revolution would only become the dominant discourse in the ensuing decades, the details in Sing-song Girls nonetheless invite readers to experience modernity in the form of material presence without hastily generating any grand narrative of modernity. 84 Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East, 85. 47 The feminine details in Sing-song Girls set it apart from contemporary depravity novels and castigatory novels through their downplaying of courtesans as sexual objects while emphasizing their agency within larger social constraints, and through showcasing the world of objects as commodities associated with their identity as courtesans, further strengthening their identity as high-class courtesans in the colonial space of Shanghai. This model of writing heralds the Mandarin duck and butterfly novels in the following few decades, and nurtures writers like Eileen Chang and her disciples afterwards. The diegetic world is limited to the pleasure quarters within the foreign concession of Shanghai. Even when the novel presents this small quarter as a hybrid and fluid space, the establishment of this space as the cultural center within the diegetic world is prominent. Within the foreign concession, we see the coexistence of Japanese, Indian, British, and Chinese people through events like a fire, and the falling of a gambler chased by foreign police. In addition, the frequent references to goods purchased from compradors from Guangdong, patrons coming from Guangdong, and the eventual departure of Wang Liansheng to Jiangxi Province all contribute to the fluidity of this hybrid colonial space. However, the novel holds that only the high-class courtesan and patrons could remain intact in the pleasure quarters of Shanghai. Once you are trapped inside the net, there seems to be no way out. The most obvious example is Zhao Puzhai and his family originally from a lower-class family in the countryside and became accustomed to the luxurious lifestyle of Shanghai. They were eventually devoured by the monstrous city and could never escape from it. Huang Cuifeng could afford buying herself out of the brothel, but she chose to remain in the industry and simply moved several blocks away from her original brothel after an arduous process of negotiation with her madame. Even when Zhang Huizhen, a second- class courtesan turned into high-class courtesan, married out to Wang Liansheng after the 48 complicated love triangle, the scandal of domestic violence by Wang was spread across the entire community of the courtesans. The depiction of colonial Shanghai as a city both attractive and fatal to outsiders and insiders anticipates the discourse of the lure of the modern in the following decades in Shanghai literature, such as New Sensationist Literature (Xin ganjue pai), and in the 1920s-30s Shanghai films featuring new woman in places like night clubs. This depiction of the colonial space of Shanghai not only gives rise to the imagined community where people of different classes and social backgrounds coexist, but also carves Shanghai as an urban and modern space of high material culture and consumerism. The frequent appearance of banquet invitation tickets (jupiao), obsessive depictions of opium and hookah, jade and emerald decorations and jewelry, clothing, and the descriptions of transportation methods (Japanese sedan, rickshaw) from one place to another within walkable distance all point to the high level of economic development and urbanization. It is precisely because of the economic development and urbanization that the pleasure quarters could come into being. The pleasure quarters in the foreign concession of Shanghai serve as the high culture of the leisure class that symbolically represents Shanghai. By referring to this specific space in his writing within a larger community of Wu fangyan speakers, Han’s novel creates this cultural center that pulls everyone towards this center of modernity. The coexistence of gender and class is represented in the voices of the characters as well. The novel uses Suzhou fangyan, a language that is brought into Shanghai from outside. The choice reflects the cultural significance of Suzhou in the oral tradition of Wu fangyan region. Meanwhile, this is also a decision based on commercial concerns for a wider circulation of the novel in this imagined community bounded by a common language recognizable in written form, to compete with the northern cultural center, Beijing. In the novel, it is implied that all the 49 patrons from the elite class could speak official vernacular as part of their job requirement. Moreover, they might also be able to speak English with the officials and policemen in the foreign concession, as indicated in the fire scene when Wang Liansheng talks to a foreign policeman. Nevertheless, the language used in dialogues is still Suzhou fangyan, regardless of the gender and class. This is a distinct feature of Sing-song Girls. As we shall see in serialized fiction in the early twentieth century, speaking fangyan is frequently associated with class and education background, on top of the geographical origin of the characters. In “Ban Dingyuan,” classical Chinese is associated with official identity of high social class, colloquial Cantonese with lower class soldiers in the army, while a hybrid language of Cantonese, Japanese, and English is designed for the “barbarians” in the Western region, a metaphor of his contemporary Westerners from Europe and Japan. In Zhu Shouju’s The Huangpu Tides (Xiepu chao 1916-1921), speaking Suzhou fangyan becomes a default lingua franca for prostitutes. Even for women from other areas, Suzhou was a convenient label in the business. Once they leave the business, their speech reverts back to official vernacular. By not differentiating gender and class through speech, but by highlighting social mobility, and career development, the novel establishes a collective aural/oral identity based on the sound of Suzhou fangyan and the space of urban Shanghai, as opposed to a northern identity. Conclusion To conclude, the use of fangyan in nineteenth century novel is a common practice to construct a center-periphery binary between Beijing and other provinces. With the rise of Shanghai as an urban economic and cultural center after the two Opium wars, literature became a 50 venue for imagining a regional identity in response to Northern China. Writers like Han Bangqing participated in the flourishing print industry, and used the form of serialized fiction published in literary periodicals to experiment with literary modernity. His contribution to the construction of a collective regional identity with Shanghai as its cultural center is achieved through the creation of “sonic modernity” in written forms. He pushed the boundary of printed text to deliver an acoustic modern experience defined by the domestic space and time of urban Shanghai for readers who were seeking the sensational in print media. Rather than providing a faithful and authentic representation of Shanghai through sound, the boundaries of gender and class are obscured in the common use of Suzhou fangyan, a language pointing to somewhere else, outside of Shanghai. Reconsidering Sing-song Girls in the history of Chinese literature, we may see it as a symbol of the repressed modernity in the late Qing, as a starting point for the formation of Shanghai- style literature and culture, and as a continuation of the cult of qing (love, emotion) as opposed to yu (desire) in classical novel aesthetic tradition. As many scholars have pointed out, fangyan writing is not the only reason for the limited circulation of the book (not including the translations and film adaptation) outside of Wu fangyan areas. The reason also lies in the difficulty of placing the novel in the classical or modern literary tradition, and in the regional or national literary tradition. Sing-song Girls poses a question to our existing frameworks of studying literature as a discipline, and calls for a reconsideration of the paradigms we are using. Moreover, it is also important to consider the medium specificity of literature through the case of Sing-song Girls. As James Lastra points out in his discussion of the two general models of sound representation, the “phonographic” (or “perceptual fidelity”) model and the “telephonic” (or “intelligibility”) model are widely used in sound recording in film industry. 51 The “fidelity” approach assumes that all aspects of the sound event are inherently significant, including long or short reverberation times, ratios of direct to reflected sound, or even certain peculiarities of performance or space. The “telephonic” approach, not literally limited to telephones and voices, assumes that sound possesses an intrinsic hierarchy that renders some aspects essential and others not. As with our academic theorists, the relevant terms of comparison are uniqueness versus recognizability or event versus structure, and consequently, these terms presume different ideals of “good” representation. 85 While Han Bangqing’s approach leans towards the fidelity model in theory, the Chinese written script as a medium of representation poses a challenge to his attempt because of the fluid correlation of script to sound in different fangyan speaking regions. However, the problem is not limited to Chinese script when it comes to “fidelity.” In fact, alphabetic writing systems are also unable to capture the accent as precise as they sound across time and space. A compromise between fiedlity and intelligibility is always already involved in writing with words. This compromise is also related to the genre of novel. The conflation of the xiaoshuo genre with the concept of the novel in late-Qing-to-early-Republican-era China caused a transformation of this genre from a product of collective creation to a single-authored product, from a genre closely linked to the oral performance tradition to a print-based material designed for the eyes, from a collection of short pieces in serialized form convenient for performance and enjoyment in one sitting over several months with a group of audience/readers to a full length novel to be digested at one’s own speed. Written at the turn of the twentieth century, Sing-song Girls could be read as an experiment of the genre in incorporate the acoustic experience to the full. Yet the transformation in reading habits along with the expectations of this genre caused this literary practice to be replaced by the “intelligibility” model. As we shall see in the next chapter, May 85 James Lastra, “Fidelity versus Intelligibility,” In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 248. 52 Fourth writers reintroduced Sing-song Girls in the 1920s to a national readership, at the cost of reducing the acoustic aspect of the novel. 53 Chapter TWO Annotation, Censorship, and Marketability: Fangyan and Reprinted Late Qing Fiction in Republican China 1. Reprinting Which Classic? and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai In 1926, two late Qing novels written with a significant amount of fangyan elements in Wu speaking areas, Which Classic? (1878) by Zhang Nanzhuang and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Han Bangqing were rediscovered and reprinted. Several May Fourth writers, including Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Liu Fu, and Zhou Zuoren, helped make this rediscovery. Earlier in 1925, Beixin Publishing House (Beixin shuju) released Lu Xun’s A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, in which he categorized Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls as courtesan novel and praised the book for its plain and natural style. 86 Liu Fu (courtesy name Bannong) and Hu Shi each wrote a foreword to the 1926 edition edited by Wang Yuanfang, reprinted by the Oriental Book Company (Yadong tushuguan), a commercial press founded in 1913 in Shanghai that promoted the New Culture Movement. 87 In a postscript titled “Written after My Preface to Which Classic? upon Bannong’s Request,” Lu Xun commended Wang Yuanfang and Hu Shi for their expertise in editing and prefacing, and stated that they alone should be chosen to do these 86 Lu Xun commented on The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai as “plain and close to nature” ( pingdan er jin ziran). See Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue, 177. 87 See Liu, Fu . “Du Haishang hua liezhuan” [Reading The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai]. Bannong zawen (2 vols, Beijing: Xinyuntang shudian, 1934) vol. 1: 227-248; Hu, Shi . “Haishang hua liezhuan xu,” 3-17. Oriental Book Company (in business from 1913 to 1953) was closely associated with Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Mao Zedong, etc. In addition to their commercial books such as reprints of The Dream of Red Mansion, Journey to the West (Xi you ji), Legend of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), Sing-song Girls, they also published New Youth (Xin qingnian) and Writings of Chen Duxiu (Duxiu wencun). See Wang, Yuanfang . Yadong tushuguan yu Chen Duxiu [Oriental Book Company and Chen Duxiu]. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2006. 54 jobs, rather than Liu Fu, Li Xiaofeng 88 , and himself (editor, publisher, and postscript writer of Which Classic?) in a self-deprecating style. 89 The articles by Hu Shi and Liu Fu examined the biographical information of the author, generic features, narratological style, and linguistic traits of the book. In Chapter one, I discussed Han’s pioneering effort in installment publishing in the early 1890s. The initial serialization in Marvelous Writings of Shanghai consigned to Shun Pao Publishing contains two illustrations in front of each chapter, with two chapters included in each issue. The first nine issues were released as biweekly, followed by six issues released as monthly, spanning over one year. After Han released thirty chapters, the journal ceased printing. Han subsequently printed the novel in a set of eight volumes including sixty four chapters in 1894. The book form followed the layout of the magazine (two illustrations appear in front of each chapter). In later editions, all illustrations were moved to the beginning of the book, serving as a teaser for readers who were interested in the visual pleasure of the illustrations. The 1926 reprint differs from previous reprints in that it re-introduced the novel in the Western-style punctuation and paragraphing, and reframed its literary values in the modern Chinese literary history. In the case of Which Classic?, however, the reprint was marketed as a serendipitous rediscovery of a long-lost jewel. 90 In his preface to the 1926 edition printed by Beixin Publishing House, Liu Fu told the story of how he recovered this little book that had inspired Wu Zhihui’s 88 Li Xiaofeng (1897-1971), a publisher and translator, studied philosophy at Peking University. With the support of Lu Xun in 1925, he co-founded Beixin Publishing House in Beijing. Threads of Discourse (Yusi) was one of the fundamental publications of Beixin. In 1927, the Publishing House was forced to move to Shanghai after the Beijing office was shut down by Zhang Zuolin, warlord of Manchuria. 89 HD 2000, 196-197. 90 Lu Xun also claimed that he could not find a copy of the book anywhere before Liu Fu’s edition came out. The book might have been in a quite limited circulation. See Lu, Xun. “Ti ji” [Preface], HD 1926, Reprint, In HD 2000: 3. However, according to Roland Altenburger, unlike Liu Fu’s and Lu Xun’s claims, Which Classic? appears to have been circulated and read well before its rediscovery in 1926. See Altenburger, Roland. “Chains of Ghost Talk: Highlighting of Language, Distancing, and Irony in He Dian.” Asiatica Venetiana 6-7 (2001-2): 26. 55 sarcastic writing style from obscurity. 91 His fellow writers such as Lu Xun, Liu Dabai, and Zhou Zuoren joined the promotion and the ensuing debate regarding issues of Liu Fu’s annotation, punctuation, and censorship. Most of their writings appeared in the literary magazines Threads of Discourse (Yusi) and the Aurora (Liming) around the time of its first reprint, leading to “considerable commercial success.” 92 The renewed interest in these late Qing novels was no coincidence. These novels were among the popular genres of the courtesan novel and satirical social exposé, which general readers welcomed during the 1920s. In addition to editing the old-style classical novels in the Western-style punctuation, May Fourth writers were dedicated to re-introducing these novels in a new literary framework, in which fangyan played a crucial yet ambivalent role. In this chapter, I discuss how May Fourth writers appropriated fangyan elements and reinvented the history of fangyan literature through reprinting late Qing novels in the Republican period for a nationalist agenda. Yet in this process, certain elements of fangyan literature such as cursing and vulgarity were not easily incorporated into the new literary framework, leading to problems of balancing the entertainment value with the political and ideological value of literature. In the first section, I focus on the linguistic and stylistic features of Which Classic?, and use Sing-song Girls as a point of comparison. In the second section, I examine the paratexts of these two books, which were published mainly from 1926 to 1933, to see how they were 91 See Liu, Fu , “Chong yin He Dian xu” [Preface to the Reprint of Which Classic?]. In HD 1926b. Wu Zhihui (courtesay name Jingheng, also spelt as Woo Tsin-Hang in Wade-Giles, 1865-1953) was a leading linguist, philosopher, and founding member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). He was the chairman of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation. He was known for his rejection of Confucianism and promotion of Esperanto. Christopher Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 97-100. See also Wang, Richard Tze-yang. Wu Chih-hui: An Intellectual and Political Biography. Ph.D. Diss., University of Virginia. 1976. 92 The first edition went through at least five printings, a revised edition edited by Liu Fu in 1933, and several printings of an imitative editions in 1926. Altenburger, “Chains of Ghost Talk,” 27. 56 marketed and canonized. By paratexts, I refer to the advertisements, prefaces, postscripts, and commentaries published in the reprinted editions and relevant literary magazines. 93 I situate the discussion within the New Culture Movement to understand the role of fangyan literature alongside the Folk Song Campaign led by Liu Fu, Zhou Zuoren, and others. In conclusion, I briefly follow the reception and circulation of the novels since 1926 to discuss the impact of the New Culture Movement on fangyan writing. I show that May Fourth writers perceived fangyan literature as an interim stage in preparation for a new national literature. They did not intend it to be a category by itself, or the end product of literary revolution. Balancing their recognition of its entertainment value with their belief in the political value of literature, May Fourth writers took an ambivalent approach to fangyan literature, capitalizing on its commercial value while curbing its potential conflict with the new national literature and the larger project of nation-building. 2. Which Classic? and the Use of Fangyan Both Which Classic? and Sing-song Girls reflect the rise of Shanghai’s economic status and urban development. The latter, written after the Treaty of Nanking was enforced, further embodies the influence of colonialism and foreign trade in late-imperial Shanghai and shows the centripetal power of Shanghai as an urban center. Whether conscious or not, the authors of these two novels contributed to the formation of the Wu fangyan literary canon in Shanghai in the mid to late Qing period. Which Classic? was most likely written in the eighteenth century. According to studies by Roland Altenburger and Christopher Rea, the earliest known unpunctuated edition of Which 93 Here I borrow Christopher Rea’s use of paratexts in The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Rea, The Age of Irreverence, 195. 57 Classic? was published by the Shun Pao Publishing House in 1878. Little is known about the author, Zhang Nanzhuang. Zhang’s period of activity could be dated to the late Qianlong and the Jiaqing era (late 18th to early 19th century). Based on the afterword written by a figure using the pseudonym “The Shanghai Traveler Who Dines on Rosy Clouds” (Haishang can xia ke), Zhang was likely a scholar from the Songjiang district, south of Shanghai, who attempted at the imperial exam but was never appointed by the government. Unfortunately, all his serious scholarship was lost during the Taiping Rebellion. Which Classic?, which was intended as a leisure text, a piece of “playful scribble” (youxi bimo), 94 was circulated in manuscript form alone for over seventy years before 1878. It was considered a deviation from the author’s more serious scholarship, intended only for a small group of acquainted readers. 95 The phrase “he dian” derives from the expression “Which classic does this come from?” (chuzi hedian?), inquiring the source or reference of certain sayings. 96 This phrase appears frequently in scholarly writing in Chinese literature, history, and philosophy since borrowing from and dialoguing with the classics is a key way writers legitimize their argument. Overall, Which Classic? is a picaresque ghost story of mixed genres in ten chapters, roughly 120,000 characters, with ten illustrations depicting scenes in each chapter. 97 Each chapter begins with a Ci-poem serving as a prelude to the narrative, and ends with a commentary that re-caps the chapter offered by Mister Argumentative Interferer (Chanjia erxiansheng). 98 Many 94 Haishang can xia ke, HD 2000, 193. 95 Altenburger, “Chains of Ghost Talk,” 26-27; Rea, The Age of Irreverence, 84. 96 The title has been translated as What Source?, What Sort of Book Is This?, and Which Classic? by various scholars. I follow Christopher Rea’s translation here. See Altenburger, Roland. “Chains of Ghost Talk”; Wang, David Der-wei. Fin-de-Siecle Splendor; and Rea, Christopher. The Age of Irreverence. 97 In a 1998 Taiwanese edition of Which Classic? edited by Huang Lin 增 , twelve character-portraits and ten chapter-illustrations were included. The sources and dates are not identified but believed to be printed prior to 1926. These illustrations depict the ghosts in the story as human beings, with occasional appearances of deities. Liu Fu sketched his own caricatures of the characters close to images of ghosts in the 1926 edition. See Figure 2.1, 2.2. 98 Chanjia erxiansheng 在 refers to a person whose mind is unclear and likes to argue with others in Wu fangyan. 58 characters in the story have names that match their personalities, very similar to religious allegories such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). 99 The first half of the book focuses on the story of Living Ghost (Huogui) and his wife Female Ghost (Cigui), a rich family living in a “three-family village” (sanjia cun) in the netherworld. Craving for offsprings, Living Ghost follows Female Ghost’s brother Appearance Ghost (Xingrong gui)’s suggestion, and goes to pray at a Five-Organs Temple (wuzang miao) in Lady Meng’s Village (mengpo zhuang). Female Ghost consequently dreams of having a child and in just ten months, gives birth to Living Dead (Huosiren). Tragedy strikes when the family builds a ghost temple in order to return the favor to the deities. Living Ghost’s fortune attracts the attention of a corrupt local magistrate, Hungry Ghost’s (Eshagui), who plots against Living 99 The earliest translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress were conducted by Missionaries in classical Chinese, official vernacular, and southern fangyan during 1850-1897, later than the period of the book’s inception. See Duan, Huaiqing. “Tianlu licheng,” 40-45. Figure 2.1 An illustration for a scene from Chapter 5 in an edition of Which Classic? printed before 1926 Figure 2.2 An illustration by Liu Fu in the 1926 Beixin Shuju edition of Which Classic? 59 Ghost for his money, eventually costing him his life. Despite her vow to remain chaste, Female Ghost has a brief affair with a monk, and soon remarries Ghost-beating Liu (Liu dagui), who literally beats his wife to death after using up her dowry. The second half of the story then turns to the adventures of the orphaned Living Dead, son of Living Ghost and Female Ghost, who is treated badly by his uncle’s family. He obtains magic power, rescues a beautiful young lady, Stinky Flower (Chouhua niang), from being raped, and goes on to learn martial arts from Master Ghost Valley (Guigu xiansheng). After Living Dead successfully puts down an uprising against King Yama, he reunites with Stinky Flower. The two get married and have two sons, living happily ever after. From the plot summary, we can see the “uncanny parallels” between the ghostly world and the human society in the narrative. 100 If we replace the setting of the netherworld and the names of the characters there with those of the mundane world, the story might be easily categorized as a social exposé, not unlike Exposure of Officialdom (Guanchang xianxing ji 1905) by Li Baojia. In addition to features of social exposé, traits of other genres are also prevalent in the novel. David Wang regards the novel as a “grotesque pastiche, a hilarious mixture of fashionable narrative genres” that borrows extensively from “shenmo fiction, satirical fiction, scholar-beauty fiction, the novel of manners, the military romance, and the chivalric-court case novel.” 101 Its ambiguous generic features render the book difficult to be categorized by scholars and readers alike. While the plot can be read as a satirical commentary on corruption in the Qing government 100 David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 207. 101 Ibid., 207. 60 and immorality in the society, its length 102 and simplicity prompt scholars to regard it as a vehicle for puns, word play, slangs, and vulgar language. Twists of classical sayings also trigger laughter from the readers. This carnivalesque use of classics is closely associated with the author’s anti-Confucianism. As stated in the preface by Passerby (Guoluren), the book [relies] solely on off-hand jests and quips, I have no need for “Confucius says…” or “The Book of Poetry reads…” Why bother munching prose and chewing words, or pedantically showing off my mastery of the classical language? I’m just playing along on the occasion and spouting nonsense. Why not get riled up when the chance arises and play pointless tricks? 103 氣话 ⾞⼩为 104 Such a cynical attitude towards the literary canons was unprecedented because literary inquisition (wenzi yu) imposed by the Manchu rulers was prevalent prior to the author’s lifetime, only to be relaxed in the Jiaqing reign (1760-1820). 105 The insufficiency of biographical information for the author, and the difficulty of categorizing the book into an existing genre might be the reasons for the book’s relative obscurity in literary history. Seldom do we find scholarship on the novel until the mid-1920s. 102 Which Classic? was published under several different titles containing the phrase “chains of ghost talk” (guihua lianpian) before the 1926 edition, indicating the publishers’ intention to market it as a ghost novel. Another way of translating this title is “chains of nonsense,” playing upon the multiple meanings of the character gui. Ghost novels such as Pacifying the Demons (Ping gui zhuan), Beheading the Demons (Zhan gui zhuan) ranged from ten to sixteen chapters, similar to Which Classic?. David Wang discussed this novel in the genre of exposé, or in Lu Xun’s words, qianze xiaoshuo (castigatory fiction, tales that chastise or excoriate). See Wang, David Der-wei. Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 183. These novels, including Eyewitness Reports on Strange Things from the Past Twenty Years, Exposure of Officialdom, The Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji), A Flower in the Sea of Sins (Niehaihua), could sometimes run over a hundred chapters in length. In comparison, Which Classic? is much shorter than the average of exposé. 103 Translation quoted in Rea, The Age of Irreverence, 90-91. 104 HD 2000, 7. 105 Scholars like Chen Bohai and Yuan Jin deduced that Which Classic? was likely written during the late eighteenth century based on the severity of literary inquisition in the Qing dynasty. See Chen, Bohai and Yuan, Jin . Shanghai jindai wenxue shi [History of Shanghai’s Early Modern Literature] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1993), 11. 61 Another salient barrier for scholarly recognition is the language of the book. The story is narrated in the “official vernacular (guanhua), with copious additions of lexical items from local fangyan.” 106 A study of the origins of the sayings and slang terms in the book done by Cheng Jiang, the editor of the 2000 edition of Which Classic?, reveals that the majority came from Songjiang district. Other sources of the vocabulary include the fangyan from “south of Jiangsu and northeast of Zhejiang.” 107 The significant use of fangyan elements is justified through the construction of the narrative universe in the story. In the first chapter, the narrator describes three realms of the universe. The upper realm is the heaven ruled by the Jade Emperor, the middle realm is the world of sensual pleasures, and the lower realm is the netherworld. The story takes place in the third realm of the universe. The protagonists dwell in a place called “three-family village” within the third realm of the netherworld. Altenburger interprets the middle realm of sensual pleasures as the bustling city of Shanghai, while the netherworld equates to the rural outskirt. 108 All the ghost talk (sayings, slangs, puns, and so on) came from three-family village located in the netherworld, which is peripheral to the mundane world where official vernacular was spoken. While it is unclear whether the author intended the book to be a regionalist novel, there is clearly an awareness of Shanghai as an urban center, to which the protagonists of the novel are peripheral. Vulgarity manifests in the use of fangyan, especially related to sex, body parts, bodily excretions, is therefore linked with the identity of rural civilians. Yet once the setting of the universe is covered at the beginning of the story, the narrator does not revisit the two realms outside the netherworld, immersing the readers in the setting of a ghost novel. 106 Altenburger, “Chains of Ghost Talk,” 32. 107 Cheng Jiang , “Dianzhu houji” [Editor’s Afterword]. In HD 2000: 290. 108 Altenburger, “Chains of Ghost Talk,” 34-35. 62 Zhou Zuoren pointed out that the technique of writing in Which Classic?, namely a pastiche of proverbs, could also be found in its contemporary texts. One example is As the Saying Goes (Changyan dao) published in 1814. 109 Among the ironical uses of proverbs and “collages of standard sayings and cliches,” 110 many cases are reliant on the deployment of fangyan vocabulary and expressions. Turning away from references to classical Confucian texts, Which Classic? focuses on the oral tradition through literary devices that employ the lexical and phonetic knowledges of fangyan. These two aspects are also closely intertwined with each other. First, the novel uses fangyan vocabularies that are regional variations of common expressions in Chinese. For example, the verb “xiangbang” 111 means help in Songjiang fangyan. Readers can deduce the meaning based on a simple combination of the meanings of xiang (toward) and bang (help). The noun “xi mantou” 112 means knees in Songjiang fangyan. The shape of “mantou,” bun, resembles that of knees. A large portion of this category belongs to what editors term “dirty words” (huiyu in Liu Fu’s 1926 edition; xieyu in Cheng Jiang’s 2000 edition), referring to genitalia and sexual intercourse. Second, it also employs fangyan vocabulary that is culturally specific. “Ye tuanzi,” 113 literally wild dumpling, refers to a traditional Songjiang food made of glutinous rice and mugwort juice for the Qingming Festival. It is similar to green dumplings popular in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces nowadays. Readers from other regions will not know what the term refers to even when they fully understand its literal meaning. Third, proverbial expressions 109 Zhou Zuoren , “Changyan dao” [As the Saying Goes] (1969, Reprint, In Gua dou ji [Melons and Beans], Xianggang: Shiyong shuju), 136-145. (Originally published as: Zhitang , “Zhongguo de huaji wehxue” [China's humorist literature]. Yuzhou feng [Cosmic Wind] 23, no. 8, 1937.) 110 Idema, Wilt and Lloyd Haft. A Guide to Chinese Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 228. 111 HD 2000, 9. 112 Ibid., 54. 113 Ibid., 56. 63 originating in Wu fangyan speaking areas are playfully deployed in the novel. The author often inserts episodes in which the scenario described in a proverb literally takes place in front of the characters in the book, or uses a proverb that is generally used figuratively for its literal meaning. Another playful usage is inserting a whole proverb into a sentence, yet only using the noun component of it in the context. The rest of the proverb is usually meaningless, absurd, or even ironic in the context. 114 The three modes of fangyan usage listed above are reliant on the readers’ lexical knowledge of Wu fangyan. The following modes require phonetic knowledge from the readers. First, the verb “baixiang,” which means to play, is understandable only to native speakers because the term is a transliteration of the Wu fangyan vocabulary. The two characters “bai” (white) and “xiang” (each other, toward, photo, etc.) do not mean anything when combined. The second type of ironical use involves punning based on the pronunciations of characters in fangyan exclusive to the speakers of Wu. An example is an episode in which two characters, Appearance Ghost and Living Ghost, are boarding a boat: Appearance Ghost stepped his rear foot forward onto the boat. The boat waved heavily, almost capsizing. He stepped back and asked, “Brother-in-law, why does this boat wave like this?” Living Ghost laughed, “Aren’t you an Infernal scholar? 115 Have you already forgotten what Mencius said?” “What is that?” asked Appearance Ghost, “I don’t seem to remember.” Living Ghost said, “According to Mencius, there has never been a case where such results were achieved, yet the king was not well regarded. The boat is so small, and you stepped so heavily. How could it not wave?” Appearance Ghost laughed, “Though I became a scholar, I’ve vomited my knowledge of the Four Books and Five Classics back to my teacher. How could I remember this?” 116 114 Althenburger, “Chains of Ghost Talk,” 38-39. 115 Infernal scholar (yinjian xiucai) is the equivalent of Imperial scholar (xiucai) in the netherworld. They pass imperial exams and could be promoted to official positions in the government. 116 HD 2000, 12-13. My italics. 64 The key to understand this episode thoroughly lies in deciphering the relevance of the Mencius saying to the scenario. While the sentence following the saying explains the basic intention of Living Ghost, we cannot fully digest the satire without reading this saying in context. The saying comes from a dialogue between King Hui of Liang and Mencius regarding the proper way of ruling. 117 Students of the Four Books will immediately recall this saying since it appears towards the beginning of chapter one in Mencius. Thus, the first layer of satire comes when Living Ghost, an Infernal scholar who was supposed to know Confucian sayings by heart, completely forgot this saying, which even elementary students would be able to recite. The second layer of satire, however, relies on the reader’s knowledge of Wu fangyan. “There has never been a case where such results were achieved, yet the king was not well regarded” (Ran er bu wang zhe, wei zhi you ye) puns with “There has never been a case where boats don’t rock” (Chuan er bu huang zhe, wei zhi you ye). In order to tease out the pun, the reader has to read the sentence in Wu, in which “ran” (thus) is pronounced as “zeu,” same as “chuan” (boat) in Wu. “wang” (king) rhymes with “huang” (rock) in both official vernacular and Wu fangyan. Through a fangyan-based pun, the author twists the meaning of a solemn discussion about proper rule to a description of an everyday phenomenon, ridiculing the use of Confucian classics even further. In the original text, Zhang Nanzhuang did not provide any footnote to indicate this sentence as a pun. To fully appreciate the wisdom of the author, one has to pay close attention to the sound of the text, in addition to understanding it semantically. Such literary devices clearly delineate a boundary between readers who are insiders and those who are outsiders to Wu fangyan. The target readers of the book were likely people from a similar linguistic background who were familiar with such slang in Wu. Hence, it is safe to say that fangyan elements play a 117 Mencius 1A: 3. 65 crucial part in the author’s overall statement of iconoclasm. However, it is hardly convincing to conclude that Zhang intended the novel to be limited by its region-specificity. 118 By comparison, towards the end of the Qing dynasty, Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls demonstrates a more explicit attempt at regionalist literature in both its content and its form. As mentioned in Chapter One, Sing-song Girls faced the problem of limited readership from its inception. Treating an entertaining subject in a highly aestheticized way is not the only distinct feature of the book. Clearly aware of the great cost of writing in Wu, Han made a definitive decision of publishing his novel in this way. Hu Shi considered it “a planned literary revolution.” 119 Different from Which Classic?, in which no clear and consistent boundary was drawn between languages used for the narrative and dialogues, Sing-song Girls is narrated in the official vernacular, while the dialogues were largely based on the transliteration of Suzhou fangyan. Especially prominent is the consistent use of personal pronouns, preposition, modal particle of Suzhou fangyan. Although Han’s novel excelled in its narrative techniques, installment aesthetics, and many other aspects, its reliance on sound and the readers’ knowledge of Wu sets the book apart from novels like Dreams of Shanghai Splendor. 120 Sun Yusheng reported in the following part of the essay that his novel outsold Han’s particularly because of his use of official vernacular. However, if we consider the readers of Sing-song Girls, language suddenly became a major selling point. Suzhou fangyan was regarded as the lingua franca of people in Shanghai used by the upper class. As literary scholar Fan Boqun relates, “in those 118 Altenburger, “Chains of Ghost Talk,” 32-33; Cheng Jiang, “Dianzhu houji,” 295-96. 119 HD 2000, 4. 120 For an analysis of Sing-song Girls’ innovations in modern Chinese literature, see Fan, Boqun. “Pioneer Work,” 473-476. For an analysis of installment aesthetics and the creation of a sense of simultaneity, see Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, 73-92. For an analysis of repressed modernities in the courtesan novel genre, and Shanghai as a modern locale and city of desire, see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siecle Splendor, 89-100. 66 days, this book became the ‘language textbook’ for non-natives studying Wu in the hope of entering upper-class society.” 121 Fangyan was thus functioning as cultural capital within the Wu- speaking area. Looking at these two novels together, it is also obvious that the two authors took different approaches in rendering the Wu fangyan in written forms. Both used official vernacular as the narrative language. Dialogues in Which Classic? are also written in vernacular, yet donned with words, slangs, and proverbs in fangyan here and there. Attempts to transliterate pronouns, propositions, and modal particles, and using puns in fangyan can be spotted, yet are not consistent throughout the text. Sing-song Girls, however, takes a more “realist” approach, 122 in that the author created words to match the sounds in dialogues, including nouns, verbs, and interjections in fangyan. Personal pronouns also follow the convention in Suzhou fangyan instead of official vernacular. One distinct divergence between these two texts is their associations with various classes mediated through the lens of the literati. For Which Classic?, slang and proverbs frequently used by the lower class are used against the classical tradition cherished by the literati. Zhang Nanzhuang, a learned scholar who played with language itself, embraced the types of fangyan vocabulary used by the lower class, and indulged in the carnivalesque pleasure of vulgar language regarding genitalia and sexual intercourse. This approach of capturing the language of the lower class in written forms is fundamentally different from oral performance in people’s everyday lives because the vulgarity of language is mediated through a scholarly perspective. Essentializing the lower-class citizens and condensing the vulgarity of their language, Which 121 Fan Boqun, “Pioneer Work,” 475. 122 In chapter one, I discuss the origin and problematics of the idea that fangyan represents a more authentic voice than the official vernacular. See Ch1, section 2. 67 Classic? provides an entertaining counter-hegemonic reaction against Confucianism for the general reader. Yet deep down, the appreciation or even fetishization of low culture reflects the author’s identification with the literati in that understanding the irony and iconoclasm of the book still require the readers to be familiar with the classics the book tries to poke fun at. Similar self-identification is found among the May Fourth writers involved in the reprinting of this book in 1926. For Sing-song Girls, however, dialogues in fangyan are associated with the upper class, officials, merchants, and high-class courtesans active within the concession area. The use of fangyan is also regarded as fashionable. Han’s intention to depict the stories of the courtesans and their patrons is, on the one hand, a commercially-driven decision based on the entertaining value of the courtesan novels, and on the other hand, an attempt to label himself a high-class literatus enjoying a luxurious life despite his failure to pass the imperial exam. Fangyan use is present in the representation of both high and low cultures in the two late-Qing novels. It is hard to pin-point fangyan literature as one monolithic entity. Yet it was the attempt of many May Fourth writers to conflate the class distinction among these literary practices, and also to place them on an evolutionary scheme in between classical literature and vernacular literature. Whether intentional or not, Which Classic? and Sing-song Girls were circulated in a fairly restricted geographical scope, inspiring writers of later generations such as Wu Zhihui, and many courtesan novel writers in this area. 123 At the height of the New Culture Movement, these two novels were rediscovered as part of the agenda of creating a new vernacular literature. A close look at the paratexts related to the 1926 reprints reveals how these novels were picked and repackaged by the May Fourth writers. 123 Shuliu shanfang’s late Qing novel The Nine-tailed Tortoise, Zhu Shouju’s early Republican novel The Huangpu Tides (1916-1921), for example, feature fangyan elements in their writing. 68 3. Old Wine in New Bottles: Promotion Strategies in the Republican Era The year 1926 is significant to the development of ethnographic studies of local cultures in China. The Folk Song Campaign initiated by Shen Jianshi, Gu Jiegang, Zhou Zuoren, Liu Fu, and others in the 1920s promoted the studies of folklore, ethnography, and dialectology. Folk Song Weekly (Geyao zhoukan), issued by Peking University, published twelve articles from 1922 to 1924 studying Chinese fangyan, among which Zhou Zuoren’s “Folksongs and Dialect Investigation” (Geyao yu fangyan diaocha) equated folk songs as “poetry in fangyan” (fangyan de shi), and claimed that the study of fangyan would promote the development of “a literary national language” (wenxue de guoyu). 124 As a result of the call for folk song studies, collections such as Gu Jiegang’s A Collection of a Hundred Wu Folk Songs (Wuge jiaji), Liu Fu’s Collection of an Unworthy Man’s Work (Wa fu ji) and Whipping Set (Yang bian ji), two collections of his own vernacular poems inspired by the tonal patterns and use of fangyan in folksongs, as well as Liu’s translations of folk songs from other countries were all published in 1926. Gu’s A Collection of a Hundred Wu Folk Songs alone garnered prefaces from Hu Shi, Shen Jianshi, Yu Pingbo, Qian Xuantong, and Liu Fu. On several occasions, Hu Shi proposed fangyan literature as the source of a potential national-language literature, echoing the call for fangyan literature in his influential essay “A Constructive Revolution in Chinese Literature” (Jianshe de wenxue geming lun) in 1918. In the preface to A Collection of a Hundred Wu Folk Songs, Hu argued that, …the national language is nonetheless the fangyan that eventually won the competition. The national-language literature of today was merely a fangyan literature many years ago. Precisely because the people at that time were willing and dared to write literature in fangyan, we have accumulated quite a lot of living literature in the past one thousand 124 Zhou Zuoren , “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha” 好 [Folk Songs and Fangyan Studies]. Geyao zhoukan 好 21, no. 4 (November 1923): 1-3. 69 years…The national-language literature came from fangyan literature, and must still keep seeking new material, new blood, and new life from fangyan literature. 125 Shortly after publishing this preface, Hu quoted himself in the preface to the reprint of Sing- song Girls in the same year, further elaborating the role of fangyan literature and Wu literature (considered second only to Pekingese literature) in the history of Chinese literature. The above statement suggests that fangyan literature is particularly powerful for its liveliness, which was considered necessary to the creation of a living national language. As the source of material, blood, and life for the new national-language literature, fangyan literature exists in preparation for a national literature in the future. Liu Fu, in addition to collecting and mimicking boat songs from Jiangyin (a city south of Jiangsu Province), also provided theoretical studies of fangyan literature. In the preface to his Collection of an Unworthy Man’s Work, he argued, Language in literary and artistic works somehow always already carries mysterious functions. We cannot get rid of them when writing. The highest literary achievement we can reach is through using the language we learned from our mother when we were on their laps. The language we learned from our mother gives us the deepest affection, more intimate and flavorful than any other language. This kind of language, limited to a very small area (restricted rigorously within the smallest location) and unable to exist by itself, is called fangyan. From this nature, we can observe an inverse relationship between the circulability of a language and the affective power of it. This is something we cannot help. 那 ⽹ 125 Hu Shi, “Wuge Jiaji xu” [Preface to A Collection of a Hundred Wu Folk Songs], In Wuge jiaji [A Collection of a Hundred Wu Folk Songs], edited by Gu Jiegang, 1-2. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1926. My translation is based on Jin Liu’s version. Jin Liu, Signifying the Local, 33. 70 126 In a few sentences, Liu sketched out the strength and weakness of using fangyan in literary and artistic works. While the importance of fangyan was thoroughly discussed in these prefaces, neither of them provided a clear definition of the term. Does using fangyan alone qualify any literature as fangyan literature? How significant should the proportion of fangyan usage be in the literary piece to be categorized as fangyan literature? In what ways do we expect the text to engage fangyan? Lexical usage of fangyan vocabulary? Or transliteration of fangyan pronunciation? We can probably form some general idea about the definition based on the works the May Fourth intellectuals categorized as fangyan literature. Judging from Sing-song Girls and the collection of Wu folk songs on Folk Song Weekly, both are distinct regional literary practices that combined lexical and phonetic aspects of fangyan. Folk Song Weekly, in particular, called for a study of folk songs from all provinces in China. In their requirements listed in the Charter (Figure 2.3) 127 , three items 126 Liu Fu, “Wa fu ji dai zixu” 著⽂ [Preface to Collection of an Unworthy Man’s Work], Yusi 75, no. 19 (April 1926), 1. 127 Geyao yanjiu hui 好 . Charter . Geyao zhoukan 1. 17 Dec, 1922. 8. I will talk about Items No. 3 and No. 4 in association with the issue of censorship in Which Classic?. Figure 2.3 The Charter of Folk Song Studies Association at Peking University printed in Issue No. 1 of Folk Song Weekly 71 stand out. Item No. 2 asked the folk song collector to explain fangyan idioms. Item No. 5 invited the collector to provide Zhuyin alphabet (Mandarin Phonetic Symbols), Roman alphabet, or International Phonetic Alphabet for characters that were used only in certain regions, or for characters or words that had pronunciation without corresponding characters. Item No. 3 and No. 4 expected the collector to avoid tampering with the content; that is, do not polish, censor, or rewrite the original folk songs even when there were superstitious or obscene contents. From the requirements No. 2 and No. 5 listed in the charter, it is clear that lexical and semantic knowledge of fangyan were expected along with phonetic knowledge from the collector. However, due to the limits of printing technology and perhaps also the inaccessibility of phonetic symbols to the general readers, the folk songs in their weekly publication did not include any instructions for pronunciation. The gap between the requirements and the actual products reveals the problem or limit of the methodology of studying fangyan literature and folk culture in the 1920s. The studies of fangyan literature and culture responded to the National Language Movement (guoyu yundong) that promoted a national sound based on a mixture of Beijing Mandarin and the old language of the official (Guanhua) in that the leading scholars attempted to standardize the writing system as well as way of recording the pronunciation of fangyan. 128 It was the hope of these scholars to develop a national language and national literature through the studies of fangyan literature. However, the focus on sound was a potential threat to the unification of pronunciation of the national language. Hence, the sound component was intentionally downplayed, or presented in 128 For a historical account of the National Language Movement, see Li, Jinxi 天 . Guoyu yundong shigang 無 [History of the National Language Movement]. 1934. Reprint. Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2011. See also DeFrancis, John. Nationalism and Language Reform in China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. See also Liu, Jin. Signifying the Local. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Chapter 1. See also Tsu, Jing. Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Chapter 2. 72 an extremely professional way that excluded general readers from participation. 129 As Mao Dun later pointed out, Vernacular literature since the May Fourth has obtained an unwritten definition: the vernacular that became a literary language should be the vernacular widely used in Northern China (i.e. fangyan of Northern China), or a mixed vernacular of south and north languages based on the vernacular of Northern China, i.e. Mandarin… The term vernacular literature is monopolized by Northern-language literature… We can see that Northern language has secretly assumed the legitimate position in the New Literature since the May Fourth. One reason is based on the old tradition. The other is caused by the incorrect idea of “literature of a national language, a literary national language” (guoyu de wenxue, wenxue de guoyu) proposed at the initial stage of May Fourth Movement. This idea originated from the idea of unifying of the nation, an idea akin to legalist or even militarist rule. Such incorrect ideas should be corrected now. 130 Mao Dun’s observation reveals the logic underlying the rediscovery of fangyan literature within a new literary framework. That is, fangyan literature is valuable only because it prepares the general readers for an upcoming national literature. 131 It is within such a framework that Sing-song Girls was reintroduced to the readers beyond Wu speaking communities. In his preface to Sing-song Girls, Hu Shi praised the novel as “the first masterpiece of Wu literature” (wuyu wenxue de diyi bu jiezuo) and highlighted the literary value of the book. 132 Liu Fu also commended the “regional spirit” (diyu shenwei) in the dialogue of the book. He pointed out that novel is advantageous to tanci and xiaoqu, lyrical chantefables and tunes in popular literature 129 Flora Shao pointed out that “Today, research related to Chinese folk songs … usually finds institutional homes in universities’ social sciences programs, such as ethnography and anthropology.” Similar situation could be said about fangyan studies. See Shao, Flora. “‘Seeing Her Through a Bamboo Curtain’: Envisaging a National Literature through Chinese Folk Songs.” Twentieth-Century China 41. no. 3 (2016): 258-279. 130 Mao Dun , “Zatan fangyan wenxue” [Miscellaneous Thoughts on Fangyan Literature]. Qunzhong 2, no. 3. January 29, 1948. 131 For an analysis of the debate on fangyan literature in the 1950s, see Kang, Ling . “Fangyan ruhe chengwei wenti? Fangyan wenxue taolun zhong de difang, guojia yu jieji 1950-1961” 與— 1950-1961 [Problematizing Fangyan: Locality, Nation, and Class in the Fangyan Debate 1950-1961]. Xiandai zhongwen xuekan [Journal of Modern Chinese Studies], no. 2 (2015): 30-41. 132 Hu Shi, “Haishanghua liezhuan xu,” 10. 73 and performative arts, because the former is not rhymed. It is better in terms of both literary and linguistic values of everyday lives. 133 Compared with the massive footnotes in the 1926 edition of Which Classic? (over three hundred annotations in ten chapters), the major changes in the reprint of Sing-song Girls are stylistic (Western-style punctuation edited by Wang Yuanfang and proofread by Liu Fu). Wang attached approximately two hundred items in the glossary (for a sixty-four-chapter novel) in order to help readers understand Suzhou fangyan. The challenge for an average reader who lives outside the Wu speaking area still lay in the initial adaption to the personal pronouns, preposition, and particles in Suzhou fangyan that run throughout the entire sixty-four chapters. Overall, the reprint of Sing-song Girls is significant in the following aspects: first, it exemplified Hu Shi’s concept of fangyan literature; second, together with Lu Xun’s comment on the book (plain and close to nature), the rediscovery in the mid-1920s canonized Song-song Girls in Wu fangyan literature, and by extension, modern Chinese literature, establishing Wu fangyan literature as a major regional literary tradition. However, as Eileen Chang lamented in her postscript to the Mandarin translation of Sing-song Girls half a century later that, the novel is likely to disappear for a third time: the first time after its initial release, the second time after Hu Shi’s salvation during the 1920s, and the third time likely after her translations in Mandarin and English are released. She further assessed the reason beyond the linguistic barrier: Readers of the late-18th century China were bored by the nuanced and plain style of Sing- song Girls. When it was rediscovered during the May Fourth, true lovers of literature compared the book with the Western canon and found them quite distinct from each other. Sing-song Girls embodied the highest achievements of classical fiction, an entire deviation from Western novels in that it is more loosely organized, more minimalist, with more characters simply with a name. Readers of popular literature at that time were used to reading The Nine-tailed Tortoise, and the numerous serialized courtesan novels after that. They 133 Liu Fu, “Du Haishanghua liezhuan,” 247-248. 74 therefore regarded Sing-song Girls as a hoax and felt cheated (for the content does not match the label “courtesan novel”). 134 In an ideal world, the reprinting and rediscovery would meet the expectation of the May Fourth scholars’ agenda. Yet, literary works do not exist in a vacuum. Judging from Zhang’s observation of the market response to the reprinting, it is clear that readers of the 1920s were more interested in the novel’s entertainment value rather than its academic values. The case of Which Classic?’s rediscovery drew more scholarly and popular attention because of its successful promotion strategies in Threads of Discourse. As Christopher Rea points out, “since 1878, Which Classic? has accumulated over three dozen commentaries, about half of which date to the 1920s and 1930s.” 135 These paratexts appeared from the 69th to the 93rd issue of Threads of Discourse around the time of the reprints in 1926. Liu Fu’s promotion of the book through advertisements and debates with other scholars in the journal Threads of Discourse around 1926 exposed some key issues regarding the entertainment and political values of fangyan literature. As a writer who was familiar with steering public attention through staged correspondences on literary magazines, 136 Liu Fu successfully promoted the reprint of Which Classic? through advertisements and debates in Threads of Discourse. A close examination of the paratexts of Which Classic? exposes his marketing strategies in relation to his attitude towards fangyan literature. First, Liu drew on the celebrity effect of May Fourth intellectuals to promote the reprinting in the advertisements. Second, while the reprint capitalized on the amusement and entertainment 134 Zhang Ailing, “Guoyu ben Haishanghua yihouji,” 724. 135 Rea, The Age of Irreverence, 232. 136 In 1918, Qian Xuantong created a fictional character Wang Jingxuan as a surrogate of old school scholars who wrote a letter to challenge New Youth writers. Liu Fu replied to Wang’s challenge with a longer defense letter in New Youth. For an analysis of the Wang Jingxuan hoax, see Michael Gibbs Hill, Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 192-230. 75 brought by absurdity and vulgarity of the narrative language, Liu’s censorship of over a hundred “dirty words” betrays his attitude towards class and low culture. Lastly, debates about his editing focused mostly on linguistic and evidential scholarship, on the meaning rather than the pronunciation of fangyan vocabulary. Liu Fu was clearly aware that a driving force behind these rediscoveries was commercial success, far from purely academic interest. Which Classic? and Sing-song Girls were chosen to be reprinted not just because of their literary or ethnographic value as fangyan literature, but for their perceived entertainment value in association with the popular genres. While May Fourth writers were busy revolutionizing literature, theatre, and poetry, average readers in Shanghai enjoyed reading Zhu Shouju, Zhang Henshui, Pingjiang bu Xiaosheng, Bao Tianxiao, all popular writers of four established traditional genres: Romance, Martial Arts, Detective, and Historical drama. 137 Readers of tabloids were also attracted to sensational news about celebrity scandals and gossips. Therefore, when it comes to the advertising campaign, Liu capitalized on the fame of famous intellectuals such as Wu Zhihui, Qian Xuantong, and Lu Xun on top of the entertaining value of Which Classic?. In the 69th issue of Threads of Discourse, an advertisement with the headline “Bullshit! Bullshit! A True Absurdity!” was released without context. In the next few issues, more sentences were added to this sensational phrase. Finally, in the gutter space of the 73rd issue of Threads of Discourse (released on April 5th, 1926), a full-body advertisement with the eye- catching slogan “Bullshit! Bullshit! A True Absurdity!” in larger font was released: 137 For a discussion of popular literature during 1917-1927, see Qian Liqun , Wen Rumin ⽼ , and Wu Fuhui , Zhongguo xiandai wenxue sanshi nian [Thirty Years of Modern Chinese Literature]. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998. 90-102. 76 The Teacher of Mr. Wu Zhihui (Which Classic?) Announcement in Advance Author: Zhang Nanzhuang; Editor: Liu Bannong; Prefaced by: Doubt-the-past (Qian) Xuantong There are ten chapters in total delicately printed in two volumes on imported Xuan paper. Market price: five jiao “…I came across an exceptionally ordinary book at a bookstall…I simply read the first two sentences… since then I broke my illusion of becoming a Yanghu school classical literature scholar, and spoke freely ever since. Not forcing myself to be a vulgar literatus has been such a beneficial decision. The first two sentences (of the novel) run: ‘BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT! A TRUE ABSURDITY!’ One can only achieve the freedom and happiness of speech with this kind of spirit…” This is the testimony of Old Mr. Wu Zhihui. See Leap Forward (Mengjin) Issue No. 10. We present you with an edited reprint, so that readers who admires Mr. Wu will receive a good news. Head of Beixin Publishing House ⽣全 “⼼ 起 “發 ” ”⽣全 “ ” ⽅ (Figure 2.4) 138 The advertisement appeared months before the actual book release, as this was a common strategy for commercial presses at that time to tease readers and boost sales. Han Bangqing, for example, posted advertisements for his serialization for seven consecutive days before the actual publication. Following the first few advertisements, more issues mentioned the name of Wu Zhihui. By 1926, Wu’s radical attitude and frequent use of cursing already made him a celebrity 138 See Figure 2.4 below for the Chinese original. The middle lines are unintelligible from the copy of Yusi I obtained. I used ellipses in my translation here. 77 to the tabloids. Associating Which Classic? with him was not only a gesture towards anti- traditionalism, but also a move based on celebrity effect. 139 Moreover, Qian Xuantong originally agreed to write a preface yet was unable to write it by the time of the first print and reprints. Liu Fu spent two articles explaining the reason and apologizing to readers. This seemingly concocted scenario must have raised readers’ hopes, making them eagerly await Qian’s belated preface on Threads of Discourse and prompting them to purchase Which Classic?. Beginning in the 88th issue, the book title started to be associated with Lu Xun, who wrote a preface in place of Qian Xuantong. The advertisements were placed together with other advertisements for collected 139 For Wu Zhihui’s influence on the writing styles of his contemporary intellects, see Yuan Yidan , “‘Wu Laodie zhi daotong’— Xin wenxue jia de youxi bimo ji sixiang ziyuan” “‘ 放 ” [“The Orthodoxy of Daddy Wu:” Word Game and Intellectual Resources of the New Literature]. Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan [Modern Chinese Literature Studies], no. 2 (2017): 26-41. Figure 2.4 An advertisement of Which Classic? in the gutter space of Issue No. 73 of Threads of Discourse 78 essays/poems by Wu Zhihui, Lu Xun, Liu Fu, and so on, a clear sign of the target readers being followers of these writers. Celebrity effect is thus a key to the commercial success of the reprints. Second, besides the advertisement in Threads of Discourse, Liu Fu’s voluntary censorship of the 1926 edition is another controversial move that drew more attention from the public. As mentioned earlier, Which Classic? employs vulgar language and curse words frequently. Some characters in fangyan that refer to the male and female sex organs remain taboo characters in the contemporary printing industry, yet appear frequently as curse words in daily conversations. Liu’s decision was not to remove the entire sentence, but rather, use empty squares to replace these words, and inform readers in eyebrow commentary that the dirty words (huiyu) had been removed. (See Figure 2.5) In the preface to the first reprint in 1926, Lu Xun commented: “I have read the draft, and thought the editing a bit pedantic. The empty squares are annoying. Bannong’s literati arrogance seems to be too much.” 140 Liu Dabai picked up this comment and criticized Liu Fu in an article in the Aurora: “The empty squares creep me out. It’s not just like what Lu Xun said… Alas! This is exactly why the author Zhang Nanzhuang is incomparable! This is what he meant by ‘Bullshit! Bullshit! What 140 HD 2000, 3. Figure 2.5 A censored page of Which Classic? 1926 Beixin shuju edition 79 an absurdity!’” 141 These comments were echoed widely among readers, to which Liu Fu commented in the response essay “On the Empty Squares in Which Classic? and Others,” published in the 85th issue of Threads of Discourse: “If I collect all the scolding letters, I can ask the publisher Mr. Li (Xiaofeng) to print a book titled A Bunch of Revilement!” His response, however, beat about the bush: The empty squares in Which Classic? were actually not there in the initial printing. They were added later after reading the fourth chapter. You ask me why? I cannot tell either. I can only say, “Perhaps there are some reasons I had to do so!” In a time like ours, wouldn’t it be less annoying to show the empty squares than deleting the sentences completely? Not to mention that you are venting your [misdirected] anger by blaming me for these empty squares! 142 It is hinted in his response that the censorship had to do with the general sense of propriety and censorship policy at the time. A brief study of the censorship policy around this time reveals that due to the lack of a strong central government, censorship regulations varied greatly by geographical locations. The censorship in film and publishing industries was evidently on the rise, but was not rigorously enforced. 143 To relate back to Items No. 3 and No. 4 in the Charter on Folk Song Weekly, the Peking University journal even stated their objection to censoring the contents of folk songs. Various editions of Which Classic? published from 1926 to 1933 in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou also show that Liu Fu’s own decision to censor the book played a big part in the practice. 144 Readers’ criticism suggests that this practice was 141 Ibid., 228. 142 Ibid., 229. 143 For an examination of censorship practices and their implications in Republican China, see Zhiwei Xiao, “Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905-1923,” In The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, edited by Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow, 452-471. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 144 I examined the following five editions: 1. Beixin shuju 1926 edition edited by Liu Fu published in Beijing: censored with empty squares. 2. Shoukuang Chubanbu ⾛ 1928 edition edited by Chang Chao published in Guangzhou and Hong Kong: sentences with “dirty words” were paraphrased. 3. Beixin shuju 1929 edition edited by Liu Fu published in Shanghai: not censored. 4. Beixin shuju 1930 edition edited by Liu Fu published in Shanghai: not censored. 80 unacceptable in that Liu Fu’s decision to remove dirty words is a denial of the iconoclastic value of the book they expected, not unlike Confucius compiling the Book of Poetry. The “pedantic” self-policing therefore, is closely related to Liu’s educated background that rendered him an intellectual of “high literature.” On the other hand, Lu Xun’s postscript to the 1933 edition (in which Liu Fu restored the content removed in the 1926 edition), revealed that Liu Fu was also criticized for “falling to such a low position.” 145 These criticisms blamed Liu, a university professor, for using curse words in the advertisement and trying to be funny. Lu Xun’s defense focused on the economic needs that university professors also faced at a time when salary was not paid in time. To think critically about the issue of censorship, Liu’s attitude towards the dirty language of low literature and the criticism he received from other May Fourth writers speak volumes about the anxiety of these writers over their identity and mission, but at the same time, it reveals their ambivalent attitude towards fangyan literature. The empty squares are revealing and concealing at the same time. The sentences were not taken out from the book. The empty squares, instead of hiding these curse words from the readers, drew more attention to what was hidden behind them. The eyebrow comments also suggest that the editor decided to remove the words because they were dirty. The criteria for censorship are dependent on the goals of building a national-language literature. Yet at the same time, it is hard to dismiss the entertainment and commercial value of these unacceptable elements. The empty squares can therefore be read as a trace, an indicator of the reformers’ ambivalent attitude towards fangyan literature. Balancing between the 5.Xin wenhua shushe 1933 edition edited by Xue Hensheng ⽔ and Bao Gengsheng published in Shanghai: sentences with “dirty words” were paraphrased. No pattern could be discerned due to the limited number of available editions. I could say that at best the censorship regulations varied in time and location. 145 HD 2000, 198. 81 entertaining function and the nation-building mission, May Fourth writers found it difficult to give fangyan literature a clear definition. Lastly, beyond the issues of advertisements and censorship, readers who paid close attention to the content of Threads of Discourse would have found the debates about the reprint heavily entrenched in linguistic and evidential studies of slang in fangyan. Except for some biographical information about the author by Liu Fu and one article on the ghost novel genre by Pu Zhishui, the discussions and debates about the reprints almost entirely focused on the meaning of certain phrases and slang. Liu Dabai continually found fault with Liu Fu’s annotation, punctuation, and occasionally pronunciation. 146 One clear example is the debate over the meaning of a phrase “sprinting wolf smoke” (feiben langyan). 147 Liu Dabai argued in the 33rd issue of the Aurora: The editor’s note says, “wolf smoke means ordinary.” I’m afraid this is Dr. Liu Fu’s own speculation. Wolf smoke is far from ordinary, the sea of difference is just like the Pacific in between Asia and America… Rather, wolf smoke means the smoke coming from burning wolf feces. Because the smoke runs straightly upwards, it is easily spotted from afar. Ancient people therefore, used it as a tool of signaling in the border areas. Hence, wolf smoke means running as fast as the smoke from burning wolf feces. 148 This seemingly convincing correction triggered at least three rounds of back and forth between Liu Fu and Liu Dabai. Liu Dabai’s response on the 39th issue of the Aurora even run over ten pages in the 2000 edition, 149 quoting various sources from classics to slang, and from mechanics to aerodynamics. Liu Dabai sarcastically addressed Liu Fu as “my homie Docteur Liu 146 Many scholars and editors of later editions of Which Classic? including Lu Xun and Liu Dabai found Liu Fu’s editing and annotation problematic. One reason is that he was not familiar with many fangyan expressions. One example I found is in the first chapter of the book. Liu Fu determined the term in the sentence “ ” as the transliteration of or , and therefore defined it as “to expect, to predict.” If we read the context closely, ( ) is more likely a variant of , hence the phrase , meaning “to acknowledge, to show respect for” in Wu fangyan. See HD 2000, 23-24. 147 Ibid., 130. 148 Ibid., “Appendix,” 226-227. 149 Ibid., “Appendix,” 248-259. 82 Fu” (wujia Liu Fu boshi). As a debate about a book that mocks tradition and dismisses classics, Liu Fu and Liu Dabai fell perfectly into the stereotype of pedantic scholars who stuck to old books. It is hard to say to what extent their debates triggered readers’ interests in fangyan literature and Which Classic?, yet their sarcastic exchanges fit the mocking culture of the 1920s cultivated by the entertainment newspapers and stories, also a major selling point of the book. 150 Also prominent in the debate was the focus on the semantic aspects, as opposed to the phonetic aspects, of fangyan literature. Very few discussions addressed the correct ways of pronouncing certain characters, nor did readers or scholars necessarily care about the phonetic aspect of the book. This shift from an acoustic experience of reading to a semantic experience could also be found in the annotation of 1926 edition of Sing-song Girls, in that the editor only provided a glossary, but didn’t provide any qieyin script, a traditional phonetic script system. As the subsequent decades revealed, fangyan elements were incorporated as decorative vocabulary to add local flavors to a commonly recognized new vernacular. The phonetic aspect was largely compressed in mass media to avoid conflict with nationalization. Conclusion From the two cases of reprinting late Qing novels in the Republican period, we can see that fangyan elements were highly praised for their liveliness and power of expressing emotions in the opinions of the May Fourth writers. Readers also find literature written with fangyan entertaining, hence the commercial success of these reprints in the 1920s to 1930s. However, balancing between their views of literature as entertainment and literature as a vehicle for ideology, May Fourth writers took an ambivalent position in their treatment of fangyan literature. 150 Rea, The Age of Irreverence, 78-105. 83 That is, they embraced the fangyan literature’s values as a necessary preparation for a new national language and literature in progress. Certain elements of low culture were omitted in this process. Therefore, fangyan literature was regarded as an interim stage in the (r)evolution of national literature, rather than an end product in and of itself. A key aspect of the appropriation of these late Qing novels into the nationalistic literary framework is the downplay of the phonetic aspects of fangyan as opposed to the emphasis on the semantic level. In the process of reconciling the local and the national, the aural element was intentionally obscured in order to allow the texts to play different roles in different linguistic registers. It is also important to note that, the May Fourth writers who participated in the promotion of Wu fangyan literature were unsurprisingly from the Wu fangyan speaking areas. Both reprints were published primarily in Shanghai. Although the sales suggest a promising circulation in quantity, it is hard to know whether these two books made an impact on the average readers outside the Wu fangyan speaking community. Their influence on local writers could be seen in many literary works and oral traditions of later generations. Once the historical task of nation- building assigned to fangyan literature was completed, the tension between the regional and the national came to the fore, obscuring fangyan literature in the mainstream literary history. The declining readership could be attributed to the ambivalent position fangyan literature possessed, struggling amidst its linguistic specificity, class identification, as well as its literary functions. Comparing the afterlife of Sing-song Girls and Which Classic? also gives us some ideas about the development of Wu fangyan since the 1920s-1930s rediscoveries. In a letter dated May 5, 1932, Lu Xun introduced Which Classic? as a humorist book to Masuda Wataru, a Japanese scholar of Chinese literature, to be published in Complete Works of World Humorist Writing 84 (Shijie youmo quanji). 151 Zhou Zuoren also categorized the book in the humorist genre in his 1937 article “China’s humorist literature” (Zhongguo de huaji wehxue). However, after the KMT retreat to Taiwan, the book also ceased its reprinting in Mainland China until 1981. 152 The rise of urban culture in Shanghai, together with the renewed interest in folk culture, has contributed to the reprinting of Which Classic? 153 throughout the past three decades. Due to the nature of the book, translations in either Mandarin or English seem to defy the purpose of a book that foregrounds word play and sound-based puns. 154 Therefore, recent editions have all been published in the original fangyan version with massive annotations. On the other hand, Sing-song Girls has been translated into English and Mandarin by Eileen Chang, and adapted into a film by the renowned Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien. However, the accessibility of its translation also led to a decrease in the readership of the original. Going back to Liu Fu’s observation of the “inverse relationship between the circulability of a language and the affective power of it,” the reception and circulation of fangyan literature remains a problem in contemporary studies of Chinese literature. 151 Lu Xun, “Lu Xun zhi Zengtian She shuxin shougao” ⼈说 [Manuscript of Lu Xun’s Letter to Masuda Wataru]. May 22, 1932. In HD 2000: 1. 152 According to Hu Changming , Mao Zedong was a big fan of Which Classic? And quoted sayings from it very often in various occasions. Because of his praise, the political bureau printed one copy for each member of the bureau. It was a privilege to get a copy back then. See Hu, Changming. “Mao Zedong Xiang erzi tuijian guo de qishu He Dian” 因 [Which Classic? — A Marvelous Book Recommended by Mao Zedong to His Son]. Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen . Last modified August 18, 2006. http://cpc.people.com.cn/BIG5/68742/69118/69662/4719271.html. (accessed March 1, 2018) 153 The government-led project of Three Collections of Chinese Folk Literature (Zhongguo minjian wenxue santao jicheng) including Collections of Folklores, Collections of Folk Songs, and Collections of Proverbs led by Chinese Folklorist Association under the supervision of Zhou Yang and Zhong Jingwen began in 1984. In 2009, 90 volumes of Provincial Collections and over 4000 volumes of regional collections were published as the end product. 154 I came across a Mandarin translation of Which Classic? in my research. However, this title seems to be out of print already. Library of Congress, Shanghai Library, and Guangzhou Library each has a copy. No where else can I locate other copies so far. This might suggest the limited circulation of this title. See Zhang, Nanzhuang and Tong Tian . Baihua He Dian [Mandarin Translation of Which Classic?]. Taiyuan: Shanxi Renmin chubanshe, 1994. 85 Chapter THREE Intimacy, Estrangement, and Nostalgia: Speaking Fangyan in Contemporary Sinophone Cinemas In this chapter, I turn to the cultural practices in Wu fangyan outside Mainland China. The displacement of a regional language in the diasporic condition allows writers and filmmakers to free the language from its immediate political context, utilize its symbolic meaning and cultural capital, and create signification for a new context. I begin with an overview of Wu fangyan literature and culture in Shanghai from the 1930s to the 1990s. The shift of my attention from literature to film results from the standardization of written Chinese in the publishing industry, leaving minimal space for writers to create with regional languages. Hence, oral performance and film became ideal mediums for articulating local voices. In the second section, I explore the use of fangyan in contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. Then, I focus on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1998 film, Flowers of Shanghai, based on Han Bangqing’s novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. These works, along with a substantive body of Sinophone films about Shanghai, created a new surge of Shanghai nostalgia in the 1990s. I conclude with the appropriation of Sinophone representations of Shanghai in Mainland China since the 1990s to consider the flow of cultural capital in the Sinophone networks. I argue that the representations of Shanghai in contemporary Sinophone cinemas are a form of cultural imagination in response to the political disruption of Shanghai’s high culture. The voices of Shanghainese convey a nostalgic longing for a lost Shanghai to the cinematic audiences. 86 1. Disruption and Continuation: An Overview of Wu Fangyan Literature and Culture from the 1930s to the 1990s As I have shown in the previous chapter, the rediscovery and reprinting of Shanghai fangyan literature in the 1920s and 1930s is a significant landmark in the history of Chinese literature. In the evolutionary view of May Fourth writers, fangyan writing is an essential stage in preparation for the advent of a national-language literature. Following the rediscovery, the mass language discussion in the 1930s and the national forms debate in the 1940s further linked regional languages with class identity and regional particularity as opposed to a national identity. 155 The changes in language policy are mirrored in the literary practices in the 1930s and ensuing decades. We see a “flowering of urban culture” in the 1930s to 1940s Shanghai, to borrow Leo Ou-fan Lee’s term. 156 Popular novels in this period were written in a more standardized vernacular Chinese accessible to a nation-wide readership. They tended to emphasize individual subjectivity against an urban milieu constructed through a mixture of Western modernism and traditional culture. In this period, New Sensationist literature by Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, and Liu Na’ou was among the most popular literary works describing the lived experience of the city. 157 Since these literary works shy away from the political function of literature and the “obsession with China” called for by the May Fourth writers, 158 they were often criticized by the Leftist writers as decadent and belonging to the petite bourgeois. 155 For a detailed historical account of language politics and intellectual debates, see Jin Liu, Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium, Leiden: Brill, 2013, 19-51. 156 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. 157 See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2001. 158 C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 533. 87 On the other hand, Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school novels by Xu Zhenya, Bao Tianxiao, Zhang Henshui, and Zhou Shoujuan continued to influence popular literature in Shanghai. First serialized in 1938 in Oriental Daily (Dongfang ribao), Zhou Tianlai’s The Lady in the Garret (Tingzijian saosao) is perhaps the closest to Wu fangyan literature in Shanghai. The narrator is a professional writer who shows sympathy towards Gu Xiuzhen, an illegal prostitute from Suzhou struggling with life living in the garret of his rented apartment. 159 The narrator observes Gu’s contact with different customers, none of whom can give her a happy marriage. Eventually, Gu dies from a medical condition in a hospital after an abortion. As an identity marker of lower class citizens, Shanghainese vocabulary has been generously used in the dialogue to match her identity as a low-class prostitute, despite the fact that she is from Suzhou. However, the use of fangyan in no way obstructs general readability of the novel as Sing-song Girls does. The huge success of Zhou’s novel led to a series of novels he wrote in the same genre, including a sequel to The Lady in the Garret published upon the request of Oriental Daily. After the shut-down of commercial tabloids beginning in 1949, Zhou left Shanghai for Hong Kong, and eventually returned to Shanghai in 1982 after the Reform and Opening Up policy began. 160 His literary works were rediscovered and studied only recently. 161 159 Tingzijian is a small attic used for storage in Shanghai’s shikumen-style houses. Due to the high cost of housing in Shanghai, tingzijian is usually rented out for individuals and families to live. The rent is usually cheaper than an average room in the house. 160 Zhou worked for the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong in the capacity of marketing. In 1967, he moved to Taipei and became a special correspondent of Chinese Post ( Huabao), writing essays under the pen name of “Zhou Laofu” . He returned to Shanghai in 1982. Taiwan was still under martial law at that time. He had to give up all his savings and assets in Taiwan to leave. Due to health condition, he passed away in 1983 not long after his return. See Hu Shengyu ⽇ , “Shanghaihua zuojia Zhou Tianlai” 三 [Shanghainese Writer Zhou Tianlai], Shiji [Century], April 14, 2010. 161 The Lady in the Garret was first republished in 1997 by Anhui wenyi chubanshe (Anhui Art and Literature Press). Literary historian Jia Zhifang praised the novel’s importance in describing the life of low class prostitutes and included it in his edited book series “A Collection of Shanghai-style Literature” (Haipai wenxue changlang). 88 Around the same time, Zhao Shuli, a Communist writer from Shanxi Province, published The Rhymes of Li Youcai (Li Youcai banhua) (1943). As a novel featuring Shanxi fangyan, Zhao successfully transformed “conventional associations of the local folk form with the risque and ribald release of sexual tensions… to new associations with political activism and ultimately political panegyric, to express the will of the Communist leadership on behalf of the peasantry.” 162 While association between fangyan speaking and class can also be found in Zhou Tianlai’s writing, he did not tie it to the political agenda of the Party explicitly, like Zhao Shuli did. Since 1943, Eileen Chang, then a returnee from Hong Kong, swept the local market of Japanese-occupied Shanghai with her short stories about Hong Kong later collected in Romances (Chuanqi). Despite her focus on the lives of petty urbanites in the city, she seldom wrote in Shanghainese. Her short story “Taking a Bus with a Woman” (Younü tongche) published in April 1944 is a rare example recording a conversation in Shanghainese she overheard on a bus. Chang explains at the beginning: “Every sentence here is exactly the same as what I heard. I haven’t edited or polished anything here. In fact, this should not be read as a fiction.” 163 For her fictional writing in general, her language is significantly influenced by the vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, especially The Dream of the Red Mansion and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. 164 See Chen, Sihe . “Guanyu Tingzijian saosao” 学學學因 [On The Lady in the Garret], Shuwu [Book House], no. 1. 1998. 162 Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-century Chinese Prose, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991, 134-135. 163 Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), “Taking a Bus with a Woman,” Zazhi [Magazine] 13, no. 1. April, 1944. 164 Traces of Wu fangyan grammatical structure and vocabulary could be detected in her writing as well. However, this is not a problem for readers without any knowledge of Wu fangyan. 89 The flourishing of popular literature in the 1930s-1940s Shanghai in the Chinese publishing industry is a proof of the success of the promotion of the national language, Mandarin, based on Northern fangyan. Newspapers and publishing houses were under strict control to use standard Mandarin and avoid fangyan characters and vocabularies. From the perspective of May Fourth writers, they have successfully accomplished the task of replacing classical Chinese with vernacular Chinese for the sake of unification of speech and writing. Nevertheless, the gap between the national and regional languages once again imposed a separation of speech and writing for a majority of fangyan speaking communities in Mainland China. The only space left for fangyan writing is the portrayal of lower class citizens from rural areas who are not well educated in Mandarin. Even so, the ways fangyan can be incorporated are also limited so that the intelligibility of these literary works is not compromised. Creative energies featuring local languages were thus compressed to oral performances and film industries, where visual aids such as facial expressions, body language, and subtitles could help the audience understand the language. 165 After the Communist takeover in 1949, Putonghua, the national language of the new China, also “experienced linguistic engineering, purification, reduction, formalization, and orthodoxization.” 166 Towards the end of the 1950s to the early 1960s, a series of comedies based on Shanghai stand-up comedy (huajixi) performance were produced by Tianma Film Studio (Shanghai), Haiyan Film Studio (Shanghai), and Changchun Film Studio (former Manchukuo 165 In 1947-1949, there was a Fangyan Literature Movement in South China, particularly Hong Kong. The movement is influential in the Cantonese speaking areas. A collection of essays theorizing the movement, titled Fangyan Literature ( Fangyan wenue) was published in 1949 by Xinmin Press . Contributors include Ye Shengtao 着 , Fu Gongwang 就 , Zhong Jingwen 說 , Huang Guliu , etc. Mao Dun also wrote articles on the problematics of fangyan literature. Huang Guliu’s Biography of Shrimp Ball ( Xiaqiu zhuan) is a novel written in Cantonese published in 1947 as part of this movement. However, the movement was short-lived due to its potential threat of undermining national unity through emphasizing the local identity. 166 Liu, 55. 90 Film Association merged with Northeastern Film Studio) against the historical background of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), including Sanmao Learns Business (Sanmao xue shengyi 1958) directed by Huang Zuolin, Big Li, Little Li, and Old Li (Da Li Xiao Li he Lao Li 1962) directed by Xie Jin, Those Parents! (Ruci dieniang 1963) directed by Zhang Tianci, Satisfied or Not? (Manyi bu manyi 1963) directed by Yan Gong. These comedy films, based on different marketing strategies and area of circulation, make use of Wu fangyan at different levels to evoke laughter. However, in order to justify the extensive use of fangyan, characters using fangyan in the films are generally depicted as backward, parochial, or belonging to the bourgeois class. 167 Xie Jin’s film, though shot entirely in Shanghainese, was dubbed entirely in Mandarin for the sake of national propaganda. This brief upsurge in fangyan films was soon ceased by the arrival of the Cultural Revolution, not resumed until the 1990s, with TV productions such as Educated Youth (Niezhai 1994), based on Ye Xin’s novel in Shanghainese. The Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages and Chinese Characters that took effect January 1, 2001 further discouraged the use of fangyan in mass media. Creative and artistic use of fangyan are mainly to be found in oral performances such as stand-up comedy, Shanghai opera, and film and television. Meanwhile, outside of Mainland China, Wu fangyan, especially Shanghainese, has been widely used in Sinophone cinemas in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These films about Shanghai or Shanghainese communities, with their diasporic settings, rely on the linguistic resemblance as their defining feature. In the following section, I discuss the use of fangyan in Sinophone films by Wong Kar-wai, Ang Lee, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. 167 See Ying Bao, In Search of Laughter in Maoist China: Chinese Comedy Film 1949-1966, PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008. 91 2. Fangyan and Sinophone Cinemas In the introductory chapter to Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Politics, Poetics, Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh draw upon Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” to underscore the importance of language in the origin and spread of nationalism. They summarize three types of relationships between language and the nation-state and identity formation. Namely, when the languages are coterminous with the nation, in which cases the former delivers a grand national identity; when the languages and dialects function below or beneath the nation- state in order to stress regionalism and deliver an ambivalent attitude towards nationalism and national identity; and when the languages, dialects travel across national boundaries and deliver a fluid transnational, pan-Chinese, pan-Asian identity. 168 While this categorization provides a pragmatic way of looking at the relationship between language, dialect (or fangyan as I call it), accent, and the nation-state, this method runs the risk of oversimplifying the shifting dynamics among fangyan, positions of fangyan among certain groups or nations, as well as the different associations with languages and fangyan among different audience groups. In light of Sinophone studies, a place-based analysis of sound, voice, and music in relation to the nation-state provides a contextualized understanding of Sinophone films. Using Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon as an example, Shu-mei Shih highlights the multiplicity of accents underneath the seemingly coherent Mandarin dialogues in the film to explain the polarized receptions of the film among Chinese-speaking audiences and North American non- Chinese-speaking audiences. While Mandarin in the film represents a unified Chinese identity 168 Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Introduction: Mapping the Field of Chinese-Language Cinema,” In Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005): 1-24. 92 among non-speakers of Chinese, it creates gaps for Chinese-speaking audiences in terms of identifying the film as an “authentic” representation of Chinese martial arts culture. 169 If speaking with accents in a Mandarin-based film serves as an indicator of the multiplicity of Chinese languages and culture, what then does it mean when speakers of one type of fangyan appear in a film made in another fangyan? I have observed at least two major functions of fangyan in such a context. First, take the southbound Shanghainese community in Hong Kong in the 1950s for example. Removed from the socio-political context of Mainland China, Shanghainese, the native language, the mother tongue of this community, is freed from the suppression of an official national language in the public arena. However, this freedom immediately encounters with another dominant language, Cantonese, which is in turn subordinated to English in the colonial context. For local Cantonese speakers, the peculiar sound of Shanghainese is perhaps perceptually similar to Mandarin, a language that is different from their own. For the Shanghainese in Hong Kong, however, the language not only refers back to a geographical location, their hometown, but also to an irretrievable time in the past. The Shanghainese spoken by the exiles sounds different from the Mandarin-inflected Shanghainese in contemporary China. Therefore, the sound of Shanghainese becomes a symbol of the past, the expression of an imaginary homeland. Second, in addition to the temporal and spatial references, Shanghainese is also used as a class marker. While the wealthy class constituted part of the demographic of the immigrants, the lower-class citizens were also a significant part of this group. However, in the Hong Kong films, the Shanghainese are generally portrayed as classy, elegant, sophisticated, or well-educated, clearly distinct from the local population. Similar cases 169 Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific, 1-29. 93 could be found in literary works such as Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People (Taibei ren). 170 As these representations are produced by the elite class that migrated from Mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan, their identity becomes associated with the language they use. Transformed from a language of a certain area to a language symbolizing class identity, Shanghainese becomes equated with an identity of high culture, quite different from the cases we have seen in previous decades in Mainland China (i.e. fangyan speaking linked with prostitutes, rural populations, and backwardness, etc.). In Wong Kar-wai’s films, linguistic heterogeneity is usually dissociated from cultural barrier. Rather, language itself seems to be the source of confusion in identifying one’s true desire and sense of belonging. Analyzing the creation of nostalgia through the commodification of history in In the Mood for Love (2001), and the sense of homesickness through scenes depicting domestic labor at home and in the kitchen in Happy Together (1997), Rey Chow argues, by perpetuating familiar objects and domesticity, Wong’s films present Chineseness as trans-ethnic and portable, and can thus travel across different groups of audience despite the specificity of its subject matter. 171 The linguistic dimension of Wong’s films further confirms Chow’s argument. In Happy Together, a film set in Buenos Aires and Taipei depicting the relationship between a gay couple from Hong Kong, while Lai Yiu Fai takes care of Ho Bo-wing and enhances the emotional tie through nonverbal expressions such as cooking meals, feeding, and cleaning Ho’s body, verbal communication always results in agitation and misunderstanding. Contrarily, when Fai and 170 Pai Hsien-yung is the son of Pai Ch’ung-Hsi, a prominent general in the Nationalist Army. After retrieving to Taiwan with the Nationalist Party, Pai published short stories depicting old Shanghai. Two examples are “The Eternal Snow Beauty” (Yongyuan de Yin Xueyan), “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” (Youyuan jingmeng). See Pai, Hsien-yung, Taipei People, Translated by Patia Yasin and Pai Hsien-yung, Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013. 171 See Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, New York: Columbia UP, 2007, 47-84. 94 Chang, a man from Taiwan, communicate with each other, though one speaks in Cantonese while the other in Taiwan Mandarin, the latter barely understands Cantonese and pays attention to the emotional connotation in Fai’s voice. Shot in 1997, the year when Hong Kong was returned to China, Happy Together envisions a fluid identity of Hong Kong both from a geographical other (Argentina on the other side of the globe to Hong Kong), and a linguistic other (Mandarin spoken in Taiwan). In the Mood for Love captures the life of the immigrant communities from Shanghai to Hong Kong in the 1960s. The sense of nostalgia is constructed through the glorified style of the cheongsam on Su Lizhen’s body, the fetishized objects such as the thermos for carrying wonton noodle soup, and the narrow alleyways and staircases in which the protagonists keep brushing by each other. In addition, the Shanghainese spoken by the landlords and their neighbors seems perfectly understandable for Su Lizhen and Zhou Muyun while they keep speaking Cantonese to the rest of the world. Again, the linguistic barrier is visible (or audible) only to the audience, yet transparent in the diegetic world as if they are speaking the same language. However, communication through verbal expressions in Cantonese between the two protagonists always fail to deliver what they have in mind, resulting in an unconsummated love at the end of the film. In both cases, fangyan and lingua crossing enable rather than disable the communication between characters. The problem with self-identification and the sense of belonging is presented not in the way different languages confront each other, but rather, in the incapacity of language and verbal communication in general in terms of expressing human conditions and inner feelings. Explaining the juxtaposition of multiple fangyan in Sinophone cinemas, Yiman Wang uses the example of Mainland Chinese actress Tang Wei’s performance of lingua crossing to illustrate the alter-centering of Sinophone cinema. She argues that lingua crossing, or the ability to switch 95 from one language/fangyan to another, indicates the dissolution of a fixed hegemonic center and complicates the layers of Sinophone centers. 172 In Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), Tang adopts Shanghainese and Cantonese just as her character Wang Jiazhi has to learn these languages to fulfill her task. In Ivy Ho’s Crossing Hennessey (2010), Tang acts as an immigrant from Mainland China to Hong Kong, allowing her own accented Cantonese to be justified in the film. Wang argues that the lingua crossing between Mandarin and fangyan indicate that the hegemonic center of Sinophone cinema is constantly shifting and thus not fixed. The act of crossing linguistic boundaries is also a layering process that connects many different Sinophone sites together. Using Wang’s concept of “alter-centering,” we could understand the use of language and fangyan as a way of challenging a fixed center-periphery structure in Sinophone cinemas. Overall, through the use of fangyan, the representation of Shanghai and Shanghainese communities in Sinophone sites serves as a nostalgic narrative in contrast to the contemporary society, an irretrievable past that is constantly being rewritten and reinvented. The old Shanghai thus no longer belongs to Shanghai alone, but more of a shared legacy in Sinophone cinemas. 3. Space and Voices in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai Having discussed the ways in which fangyan, especially Shanghainese, is appropriated in contemporary Sinophone cinemas, I zero in on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1998 film Flowers of Shanghai based on Han Bangqing’s Sing-song Girls translated into Mandarin by Eileen Chang. In many ways, Eileen Chang’s translation paved the way for Hou’s adaptation in a transnational context. Chang’s concerns for the target readers are readily observable in the prefaces to the English and Mandarin translations. She decided to cut the narrative framework of a dream from 172 Yiman Wang, “Alter-Centring Sinophone Cinema,” In Sinophone Cinemas, Edited by Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014: 26-44. 96 the English translation in order to avoid confusion for the English-speaking readers who are not familiar with classic Chinese literature. She also merged several chapters that require a great amount of exegesis in the Mandarin translation. Instead, she translated the dialogues into the late Qing Mandarin instead of contemporary Mandarin while maintaining the narrative language intact in order to preserve the original flavor of the book. In a sense, the film based on the translation involves multiple layers of mobility in terms of time, space, and media. Having moved with his family from Mainland China to Taiwan at the age of one, Hou Hsiao- hsien later made over eighteen films. In many of his earlier works, Hou weaves personal narrative with grand historical vision of Taiwan’s past and present. His films can be categorized into three stages: the coming of age stage featuring childhood memories of native Taiwan; historical narrative of Taiwan’s history as in his Taiwan Trilogy, and his films on cosmopolitan life in cities such as Taipei and Tokyo. However, Flowers of Shanghai, made during the third stage of Hou’s filmmaking trajectory, is generally conceived as standing alone from his other works because of its lack of reference to the Taiwan experience. Gary Xu notes that, in Flowers of Shanghai, “although ‘Taiwan’ is no longer relevant to the story of the film, its absence becomes present … because of Hou’s increasing awareness of MIT - Made in Taiwan.” 173 Indeed, the continuation of Hou’s stylistic and thematic patterns and more importantly the postcolonial investigation of colonial space, language politics, as well as gender representations in Flowers of Shanghai all suggest that this film is not a deviation from the general pursuit in his oeuvre. In this section, I analyze the building of a colonial space, the deliberate linguistic gap in the diegetic world, and the gender display with specific reference to Hada Michiko’s Japanese identity in the film to illustrate how the film could be read through the Sinophone lens. 173 Xu, “Flowers of Shanghai: Visualising Ellipses and (Colonial) Absence,” In Chinese Film in Focus II, edited by Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 2008), 114. 97 Existing scholarship on Flowers of Shanghai mainly focuses on the ellipse of time in the long takes, the visual splendor within the limited interior spaces, and the camera as a character in the narrative. 174 Not enough attention has been given to the audio dimension of the film and its relationship with the visual aspect, in particular, the camera movement. Here, I focus on the temporal-spatial condensation and the linguistic fluidity. I argue that the linguistic fluidity of the film breaks the confinement of the temporal-spatial condensation through differentiating the public and private spaces within the diegetic world. Although Hou’s film could hardly be seen as a faithful adaptation of Chang’s translation of the original novel, he did set out to re-stage the atmosphere of pleasure quarters of late Qing Shanghai. He attempted to rebuild the late Qing Shanghai on set. However, since the project deals with prostitution in Shanghai and generates a backward image of China as a whole, application for co-production with Shanghai Film Studio and shooting in Shanghai was denied. 175 Hou made several artistic decisions to reconstruct the semicolonial space of Shanghai in his film. He decided to build the brothels of late Qing Shanghai in Taipei and shoot exclusively inside a studio. To shoot a sixty-four-chapter novel in 113 minutes with tons of details and twisted plot, one definitely has to cut a lot of the plot from the original story. What Hou did was to cut the plot about lower-class prostitutes whose business activities involve street scenes, leaving only the indoor interactions among high-class courtesans and their patrons. To reconstruct the interior of the brothels, Hou’s crew went to Shanghai, Yunnan, and Vietnam to purchase furniture, clothing, and other objects including opium pipes, hookah, hairpin, earrings, 174 See Xu, Gary; Lupke, Christopher; and Zhang, Xiaohong. 175 See Xu, Yuan . “Congtou xishuo Hou Hsiao-hsien” [A Close Look of Hou Hsiao-hsien from the Beginning]. ifeng . May 26, 2015. http://ip.ifeng.com/a/20150526/15239_3.shtml. (accessed March 26, 2018) 98 bronze mirrors, kettles, and basins, etc. To add on to the superfluous interior decoration, Hou’s consultant Ah Cheng also advised the crew to put useless objects, such as lipstick, on the opium catering desk. Not only is lipstick useless on the desk, but also anachronistic. 176 Yet precisely because of the overwhelming details of material goods in each shot, the audience would not be able to figure out these details. What is lost in the negation of an outdoor space in which characters navigate freely to give the readers a sense of the community in the original novel, Hou compensates through extremely exquisite indoors decoration. The compressed space is thus used to hold an overwhelming amount of information, whether through the conversation about what is happening outside, or physically moving near the backdoor to look at the gambler who falls from the roof several blocks away. The exclusive shooting in enclosed space also forces the audience to further differentiate the indoor space and divide the scenes according to the level of privacy and intimacy. For example, banquets involving a series of courtesans and their patrons accompanied by their attendants, servants, and madam are conducted in a public area (See Figure 3.1); while intimate conversations between one courtesan and her patron are relatively more 176 See Wen T’ien-hsiang 時 and Hou Hsiao-hsien, “Dashi jiangtang: Hou Hsiao-hsien Haishanghua” ⽹種快因 [Masters Series: on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai]. Jinma yingzhan [2015 Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival]. May 11, 2015. http://ghpress.pixnet.net/blog/post/167771172-%E5%A4%A7%E5%B8%AB%E8%AC%9B%E5%A0%82-%E4%B E%AF%E5%AD%9D%E8%B3%A2%E3%80%8A%E6%B5%B7%E4%B8%8A%E8%8A%B1%E3%80%8B. (accessed March 26, 2018) 99 private (See Figure 3.2). Yet the two spaces look similar on screen, and with the frequent coming and going of servants supplying food, water, opium, and hookah, the public space often easily intrudes upon the private space, ultimately collapsing the boundary between the two. As Gary Xu notes, “…The more enclosed the space of the brothels, the more fearfully unknown and vast the colonial territory. Without displaying colonial presence, Han's enclosed pleasure quarters thus paradoxically reveal the colonial presence in a more emphatic way, which may be termed a ‘non-present presence.’” 177 The non-present presence of the outside world thus paradoxically stresses the colonial presence. Although we as audience are not exposed to the world outside, the non-present presence is transformed through Hou’s use of a series of cinematic languages, namely lighting, the long take, and fading. The extremely long take with Mark Lee’s trademark moving camera serves as an observer overseeing what is happening indoors. The camera moves at a slow pace, as if the observer is turning his head from one side of the room to the other, listlessly paying attention to the conversation. The dark lighting also creates an atmosphere which blurs the boundary between day and night, wiping out the obsession with time and space specificity in the original novel. No matter when the story takes place, the 177 Xu, “Flowers of Shanghai,”115. Figure 3.1 A banquet scene from Flowers of Shanghai Figure 3.2 Wang Liansheng dining with Shen Xiaohong alone 100 audience always sees the dark and merely recognizable indoors setting, thus forgetting the exact moment of the day during which the story is happening. The fading out and fading in that stand in between the long takes further confuses the audience in terms of time since they not only serve as the transition between two locations (brothels), but also fulfill the job of chapter breaker in the original novel rather than indicating the conclusion of an action. Bearing in mind that the entire film is shot in Taipei, the cinematic language as a whole creates a confusion of time and space, collapsing the demarcations set in the colonial space of Shanghai, in between foreign settlement and Qing-governed district, indoors and outdoors, days and nights, private and public, thus leaning towards a postcolonial representation of the colonial space of Shanghai. As Hou himself claimed in an interview, “I believe that in my films, one loses a sense of time; as in dreams, one is no longer able to measure the passage of time.” Visually, Hou’s mise-en-scène and camera movement capture the dream-like quality of the original novel with limited mobility. If the audience finds a lack of visual hybridity due to the enclosed nature of the studio, they are nonetheless compensated by the linguistic hybridity and audio diversity in the film. To add to the richness of language we already see in the original novel and its translations, Hou’s decision regarding which language to use in the film adds another layer to the linguistic diversity. According to his interview in 2013 for the 50 years anniversary of Golden Horse Award, Hou’s original intention was to shoot the film in Suzhou dialect, which is much closer to the original Wu fangyan used in the novel. However, the linguistic requirement immediately drove Maggie Cheung away from the cast and Hou had to make compromises. What he settled on was contemporary Shanghainese as a basic language, with several scenes shot in Cantonese to cater to the language ability of the leading actor Tony Leung. By merely looking at his linguistic decision, there are already multiple layers of adaptations. 101 The text that the scriptwriter Chu T’ien-wen based her script on is Eileen Chang’s Mandarin translation. Chu’s published script for Flowers of Shanghai is also written in Mandarin. 178 To shoot the film in Shanghainese, a second level of translation is involved. During the late Qing period, Shanghai was a semicolonial city of new immigrants from the surrounding area. Shanghainese as a language was developing from the interactions of the local people and the immigrants. Therefore, to use contemporary Shanghainese in the film is an anachronistic attempt to re-stage the linguistic environment of late Qing Shanghai. Moreover, in order to make Tony Leung more articulate in the film, Hou twisted the character Wang Liansheng’s identity as an official from Guangdong province coming to Shanghai, and eventually returns to Guangdong at the end of the film. Consequently, Leung only needs to speak several sentences in Shanghainese as a lingua franca on the banquet tables, and can comfortably switch back to Cantonese during intimate conversations. As if this is not complicated enough, Hou cast Japanese actress Hada Michiko 179 as Shen Xiaohong, Wang’s love interest. To make each sentence she articulates match the length of the Chinese script, her lines were also shortened in Japanese. While she mouths Japanese throughout the film, she is dubbed in fluent Shanghainese and Cantonese, ironically enabling her to be the only courtesan capable of code-switching with her patrons. From A City of Sadness (1989) on, we can observe Hou’s attention to linguistic plurality. One scene in the film depicts the characters talking in Shanghainese and Taiwanese to negotiate with each other through a Cantonese interpreter. Yet with all the accommodations he made for each actor and actress in the plot in order to create seamless communication in the diegetic world, the gaps in the soundtrack compel the audience to wonder if the complex, and sometimes 178 See Chu, T’ien-wen 真 , Zuihao de shiguang: Hou Hsiao-hsien dianying jilu ⽹種快很 [Three Times: Notes of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films] (Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2006), 173-185. 179 Hada Michiko (1968- ) was an actress at Shochiku Film Studio, the coproducer of this film at the time of the shooting. 102 anachronistic, linguistic layering is a deliberate choice of the director and what kind of audience he is expecting. To those who speak Shanghainese, most conversations at the banquet table in Shanghainese sound smooth since most of the supporting characters are native Shanghainese speakers. Yet all the leading characters speak with different accents of Shanghainese. Carina Lau speaks in Suzhou fangyan, her mother tongue; Michelle Reis, Annie Yi, and Tony Leung stutter in Shanghainese because of their Hong Kong or Taiwan background. Hada Michiko, through dubbing, speaks the most standard Shanghainese. Thus instead of creating a seamless late Qing Shanghai world, the film constantly reminds the audience of its inauthenticity. If this could be easily explained away by the limited number of famous talents who can speak fluent Shanghainese and act well, the conscious use of Cantonese together with dubbing in the film inevitably leads to more questions. For audiences who are familiar with Tony Leung through Hou’s film, it is not difficult to find that in A City of Sadness, Tony Leung’s character is mute and deaf, thus alleviating him from the burden of learning Taiwanese or Japanese at all. If Hou is already willing to dub Hada Michiko’s voice even when she is one of the leading characters, then why wouldn’t he just dub Tony Leung’s voice entirely in Shanghainese as well? First, this decision could be understood as an attempt to create a relatively fluid space within the enclosed indoor space. Characters come to the pleasure quarters of Shanghai to seek fun and facilitate business, and leave the place because of their promotion to higher level in the government. Second, by examining the occasions in which Leung’s character Wang Liansheng speaks the two languages, we could also see that the two languages are used to indicate different levels of intimacy. In the first banquet scenes that last extremely long, Wang remains physically present yet mentally preoccupied, refraining from 103 any exchange of words. In the rare occasions that he talks to a courtesan, their voices cannot be heard because they are murmuring privately. We are later told by other patrons after Wang’s departure that he is worrying about his two love interests since they were involved in a fight the day before. The next scene, when he visits Shen Xiaohong, his true love interest who seems to be gradually distancing him, the two speak in Shanghainese first among a group of patrons and servants, then switch to Cantonese briefly before the scene fades out. This conversation in Cantonese would not likely catch the audience’s attention since there is no previous mentioning of Wang’s Cantonese identity. Even when the two start talking in Cantonese, the camera shoots from behind the two. Hence, their voices can hardly be recognized. Nevertheless, this brief scene paves the way for the next major scene in Cantonese to appear 35 minutes into the film. This scene starts with a close shot on a jade hairpin on the table, with Tony Leung’s Hong Kong accented Cantonese articulating his inner monologue against the slow and mysterious extradiegetic music. The content of his monologue is the expression of Wang’s psychological frustration about his relationship with Shen, which is not from the original novel. The fact that this entire inner emotion is articulated in Cantonese creates a layer of intimacy that echoes with the spatial aesthetics of the film. Moreover, for about two minutes, the long take features the soundtrack in Cantonese without showing the characters moving their lips on the screen. The monologue starts in the background preceding Wang Liansheng’s entrance to the room. Even when he enters the scene, the voice of the monologue does not seem to associate with him, but sounds more like a voice inside his mind. Shen Xiaohong, although entirely dubbed over and thus presumably able to confidently speak in any language, is also off the camera when she speaks in Cantonese. Mark Lee’s moving camera, at this point, seems to be a shy observer that turns his eyes away, as if to indicate the inappropriateness to peep into other’s privacy. 104 By comparison, Wang never speaks to Zhang Huizhen, the other love interest he visits in order to make Shen jealous, or any other courtesans in Cantonese, except the rare occasions when Hong Shanqing, his business partner, is involved in his conversation regarding Shen. In a film that features Shanghainese as its primary language, the deliberate use of Cantonese exclusively for conveying an intimate relationship and emotional expression creates the depth within the enclosed space. Moreover, bearing in mind that the film was shot in 1998, merely one year after the handover of Hong Kong, it is plausible that Hou’s linguistic choice of bringing in Hong Kong accent Cantonese is not a coincidence. In the diegetic world of the novel, the story happens in the 1890s, during which Hong Kong was already a British colony. In addition to the purpose of presenting linguistic hybridity, a network of Sinophone colonial sites is created through the presence of Hong Kong Cantonese. Through consciously creating gaps within a seamless diegetic world, Hou not only strengthens the level of intimacy within the colonial space, but also creates a link among the Sinophone colonial sites. To add to that, the subtitles in Mandarin and in English are a translation of all the languages used in the film. While the linguistic subtlety is hardly translatable to audiences who do not speak any or all of the languages in the film, for audiences who are familiar with some of the languages, the audio experience is inevitably pointing to a Sinophone articulation that enriches the original text about late Qing colonial Shanghai. In addition to the visual and audio dimensions, gender display in the film also enriches the film’s postcolonial message. As a film depicting the colonial period of Shanghai, the general tone of the film is dark, enclosed, feminized, as well as sentimental. The selected plot is further pushed towards the sentimental tone with the choice of Wang Liansheng’s love triangle with 105 Shen Xiaohong and Zhang Huizhen. Not only are the female characters the focus of the camera along with their feminine bodies, luxurious costumes and belongings, the way they handle opium burning, moving inside the limited interior space, the male characters in relationship with them are also depicted as listless and sentimental, addicted to opium smoking and trapped inside this colonial space. In his analysis of Flowers of Shanghai, Nick Kaldis contends that, … I believe Flowers of Shanghai should be considered as an aesthetic - versus a theoretical - intervention into this one-way transnational commodification of nostalgic, historicized, and exoticized images of China for Western consumption… For, instead of falling into the trap of conservative cultural essentialism, reactionary nationalism, or joyous capitulation to global capitalization, Flowers of Shanghai actually embraces exotic images of China, multiplies them, reproduces them, and fixates on them, smothering the (Western) viewer in an excess of Orientalist fantasy. This protracted over-indulgence of the senses is achieved primarily through the combination of unedited long takes, lack of dramatic action, de-emphasizing of dialogue, and redundancy in the mise-en-scène -- including redundancy of scenes and settings, replication of lavish backgrounds, spectacular costumes, and attractive, sexualized (female) characters. 180 To further Kaldis’ argument, the feminine details as seen in the original novel are maximized in the film to trigger a carnivalesque aesthetic experience. The juxtaposition of excessively Orientalist images with extremely mundane events such as a love triangle, fraud, business, and the type of money calculation that we often see in contemporary TV series and films subverts the Orientalist gaze and bores the Western viewers looking for the Orientalist fantasy. In addition, the film’s postcolonial message is further complicated by the involvement of Japanese investment and a Japanese actress. The original novel briefly mentions the existence of Japanese through the Japanese cars (Dongyang che) as a common vehicle in the concession area, without mentioning ethnic Japanese or Japanese language speakers. The story mostly happens within the British concession in Shanghai. The film, however, closely engages Japanese capital and talents from its very beginning. Initially, Hou was invited by the Hirado government in 180 Nick Kaldis, “Compulsory Orientalism: Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai.” In Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, edited by Chris Berry and Feiyi Lu. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 130. 106 Nagasaki Japan to shoot a film about the city to promote its tourism. Since the target audience is mostly Taiwanese, Hou started researching the link between Hirado and Taiwan and found out that Zheng Chenggong (aka Koxinga), the legendary figure in the Ming dynasty who recovered Taiwan from the Dutch colonial force, was born in Hirado. 181 However, this Hirado promotion project failed because of the lack of a story or narrative that Hou was seeking. Yet during his research, a side project about the novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai was brought to Hou’s attention by Chu T’ien-wen. He was carried away by this world described in the novel and decided to make a film adaptation of it. Shochiku Films (Shochiku Eiga), the producer of Tokyo Story (1953) and Cafe Lumiere (2003), invested two thirds of the total production budget while Hou’s own company invested one third of the total amount. Furthermore, upon knowing that Maggie Cheung withdrew from the shoot, Shochiku suggested Hada Michiko to take over her role in order to increase the film’s marketability in Japan. Hou took this advice and cast Hada Michiko as Shen Xiaohong in the film. Instead of making Hada learn to speak Chinese, whether Shanghainese or Cantonese, Hou decided to take away her voice and use dubbing. Hada was at a loss in many scenes about what kind of emotion she should express. Her interaction with the rest of the crew was always mediated through the interpreter and thus lagged behind. While transnational coproductions frequently encounter similar communicative problems, the case of Flowers of Shanghai becomes particularly interesting because of the subject of the film. A colonial Shanghai story shot in Taipei, with an actress from Japan acting as a Shanghainese prostitute speaking Shanghainese and Cantonese. The complex vortex of linguistic plurality seems also powerful in bringing in the colonial history of Taiwan by the Japanese, in addition to the colonial history of Shanghai and Hong Kong I discussed above. On top of the diegetic world 181 See Shimazaki, Satoko. “Fantastic Histories: The Battles of Coxinga and the Preservation of Ming in Japan,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, no. 1 (2015): 17-53. 107 in the film, the production of the film adds to the link among Sinophone sites in relation to their respective colonial history. Overall, Hou’s film makes use of different fangyan, Shanghainese, Suzhou fangyan, and Cantonese to demarcate private and public spaces, while indicating different levels of intimacy and estrangement. 4. The Return of Shanghai Modern: Appropriation of Sinophone Cinemas in Contemporary China As we have seen from the discussion of Wong Kar-wai, Ang Lee, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, Shanghai signifies a cultural imagination for an irretrievable past, a fantasy of high culture, and a deviation from the contemporary political atmosphere of Mainland China. The voices of Shanghainese and other forms of Wu fangyan also serve as an identity marker, connecting the individuals who speak the language with those speaking other fangyan in the Sinophone network. Old Shanghai, or more specifically “Shanghai modern,” takes on a new meaning for Mainland China after the Reform and Opening Up in the 1980s and 1990s takes on a new meaning. Ackbar Abbas’s “Cosmopolitan De-scription: Shanghai and Hong Kong” provides a theoretical probing of the differences in the two cities’ attitude towards the past. On the level of government decisions, while Hong Kong’s preservation of the past comes at a historical point when it faces the loss of its cultural identity, Shanghai government’s planned preservation of historical buildings, according to Abbas, is a self-conscious effort to preserve the past so that the present could rival against its past. Using the example of the two sides of Huangpu River, one side being the Bund, replete with colonial period constructions displaying cosmopolitan 108 modernity, and the other side being Pudong district full of skyscrapers like we see everywhere else in global cities, Abbas claims that the preservation project in Shanghai is far from a nostalgic one, but more of Shanghai government’s aspiration to surpass the modernity in Republican Shanghai. Not “back to the future” but “forward to the past.” By looking at the film industry, it is also easy to find similar attitudes toward the past. Shanghai Film Park in Chedun has a large section of building replicas of 1930s Shanghai. The colonial period buildings, the trams and railroads, Nanjing Road, and the Garden Bridge in the film park are all part of the established mise-en-scène associated with Shanghai’s past. In films like Perhaps Love (2005) and Lust, Caution, we see these places as the backdrop of the story. However, in recent over-commercialized films like the Tiny Times Quadrilogy (2013-2014), materialism presents itself in an excessive manner through the luxurious clothes and interior decoration symbolized through the skylines of the Pudong area. Yet precisely at the beginning of the film, the narrator has to walk out from an old style Shanghai building in the Shikumen neighborhood in the downtown area that nowadays are mostly in the preserved area. Written and directed by the Sichuan writer Guo Jingming who is regarded as an outsider by most Shanghainese, this quadrilogy of Tiny Times about the materialist lifestyle of Shanghai that is far from the average life of Shanghai must begin from the old-style buildings that confirm the authenticity of Shanghaineseness and the legitimacy of this representation. From there onwards, the story is free to evolve into a monstrous capitalist vision of new Shanghai. Conlusion To conclude, the representations of Shanghai in contemporary Sinophone cinemas are a form of cultural imagination in response to the political disruption of Shanghai’s high culture in the 109 Republican era. Through the voices of Shanghainese, a nostalgic longing for a lost Shanghai is conveyed to the audiences. The juxtaposition of different fangyan creates a fluid cultural identity, making use of the cultural capital of Shanghai as an image of the modern in various colonial contexts to address a Sinophone audience. Once introduced back to Shanghai in the post-1980s, the feeling of nostalgia is appropriated at the surface level. What lies behind the revisiting of old Shanghai is a desire to claim legitimacy in competition with the representation from elsewhere. In the following chapter, we shall see how Sinophone cinemas by Wong Kar- wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien are appropriated in contemporary Shanghai literature in the 2010s. 110 Chapter FOUR Oral Tradition, Visual Aesthetics, and Online Literature: Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms and the Return of Fangyan Writing in Contemporary China Since its publication, Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms (Fan Hua 2013) has won many prestigious literary awards in China, including the Mao Dun Literature Prize (Mao Dun wenxue jiang) in 2015. 182 Jin Yucheng was born Jin Shushu in 1952 in Shanghai. After eight years of living in Heilongjiang Province as a “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) during the Cultural Revolution, Jin became an editor of and contributor to Shanghai Literature (Shanghai wenxue) magazine in the late 1980s, and published novellas, short stories, and essays. In 1987, he was awarded the Shanghai Literature Prize, and joined the Chinese Writers Association (Zhongguo zuojia xiehui) the following year. Since then, he has been better known for his role as an editor for Shanghai Literature, and less well-known for his creative writing. The general plot of the book revolves around a group of Shanghai urbanites, Husheng, Abao, and Xiaomao, three men all born after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The protagonists dwell in the downtown area of Shanghai from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1990s. Their stories are split into two streams of narratives, one following their childhood during the Cultural Revolution, and the other following their adulthood during the Reform and Opening Up period. The dual narratives appear in alternating chapters. Despite their different family and class backgrounds, the three characters form friendships because of their geographical proximity, shared childhood experiences, and a similar series of changes that 182 Other literary prizes include: 2012 Chinese Fiction Institute First Prize in the category of Novel ( Zhongguo xiaoshuo xuehui Zhongguo xiaoshuo paihangbang changpian xiaoshuo diyi ming), 2013 Lu Xun Culture Prize Annual Book Prize ( Lu Xun wenhua jiang niandu xiaoshuo), and 2013 Sinophone Literature and Media Prize ( Huayu wenxue chuanmei dajiang). A full list of prizes can be found at Shanghai Writers Website: <http://www.shzuojia.com/zhuanti/2015fanhua/index.html>. 111 occurred in their lives alongside historical events in and outside China. The life of each character branches out into various areas of Shanghai, forming an intricate network of people from all walks of life. Overall, the story, not unlike many cases of Internet literature in China, provides a linear experience of reading. However, as Michel Hockx observes, rather than featuring nonlinearity as its point of departure from printed books, Internet literature in China can “have innovative characteristics that pose unusual challenges . . . using conventional methods” without being nonlinear. 183 In the case of Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms, innovative characteristics are evident in his use of Sinophone intermediality to challenge the linearization of history in the PRC’s official account of history. Since the publication of Blossoms, adaptations of the book have been made in all types of media. According to Wang Yin, Wong Kar-wai has purchased the copyright of Blossoms and may release the film around 2020. 184 The first season of Pingtan performance was launched in December 2016 in the recently renovated Great World (Shanghai dashijie), an amusement arcade and entertainment complex built in 1917. As the first official adaptation of Blossoms, the Pingtan performance led by Gao Bowen 185 began the trend of collective nostalgia for old Shanghai, particularly the 1960s through 1990s Shanghai, as the promotion strategy. Following this trend, 183 Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 7. 184 Wang Yin , “2020 nian, kan Wang Jiawei de Fan Hua” 2020 [Watch Wong Kar-wai’s Fan Hua in 2020], February 16, 2016. http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/bk/2016-02-16/85895.html. (accessed July 5, 2017). 185 Gao Bowen (1970- ) is a National Class One tanci performer and current deputy head of Shanghai Pingtan Troupe. He performed pingtan in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) as well. The series of pingtan adaptation of Fan Hua are titled “Gao Bowen shuo Fan Hua” [Gao Bowen tells the story of Blossoms]. See Shanghai Pingtan Troupe . “Gao Bowen” [Gao Bowen]. Last modified 2016. http://www.sh- pingtan.com/detail1.aspx?id=3141. (accessed March 3, 2018) 112 the drama version of Blossoms directed by Ma Junfeng premiered in Jan 2018 at Majestic Theatre (Meiqi da xiyuan) in downtown Shanghai. Tickets were sold out way ahead of time, leaving scalpers wandering outside the theatre in the heavy snow. Inside the theatre, however, audiences were welcomed with a small pack of candies, White Rabbit creamy candies and prune candies popular in the 1980s and 1990s Shanghai, as part of the whole atmosphere of old Shanghai. On the poster (See Figure 4.1), images of food stamps, cloth stamps, Bus No. 24, St. Nicholas Church, 186 the barber’s pole of an old hair salon, Caoyang New Village, 187 among others materialize the Shanghai presented in the drama. Other adaptations of Blossoms include comic books and radio broadcast series. 188 While adaptation of online literature is a common phenomenon in the new millennium, it is rare to see 186 St Nicholas Church was a Russian Orthodox Church on Rue Corneille 起 (now Gaolan Road ) in the former French Concession built in 1932. It was closed in 1949. The church is an important landmark in the plot of Blossoms. 187 Caoyang New Village ( Caoyang xincun) was built in 1951 as the first state-supported housing for workers in Shanghai. See Boxer, Baruch. “Shanghai.” In Encyclopedia Britannica. Last modified: April 11, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/place/Shanghai. (accessed March 3, 2018) 188 All adaptations marketed around the idea that Blossoms represents the authentic voice(s) of Shanghai. However, most of these adaptations had to translate the book from Mandarin to Shanghainese since the author had significantly revised the language for the general audience. Figure 4.1 A Poster of the Drama Blossoms 113 online novels made into traditional oral performances such as Pingtan. The adaptability of the novel into various genres further proves its Sinophone intermediality. Here, I define Sinophone intermediality as the integration of media such as Internet writing, oral performance, film, and so on in traditionally defined media such as print literature. The Sinophone, as discussed in the previous chapter, refers to “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness.” 189 Current Sinophone studies center on literature and culture outside Mainland China, or in non-Han cultures such as those of Tibet and Xinjiang. I find the model also useful in understanding the marginalized position of cultural practices in languages other than Mandarin Chinese within Mainland China. Drawing upon the specificity of each medium in Sinophone cultures allows one to constitute a porous, flexible, and interactive cultural product that urges the consumers of Sinophone media to reconsider the concept of Chineseness from the perspective of the local. While traditional print culture tends to privilege the visual and semantic aspects of the Chinese language(s), intermedial practices enable the author to bring forth the sonic and phonetic aspects unique to the multifaceted, place-based, and often marginalized Sinophone cultures in conjunction with the former. In this chapter, I examine the role of Sinophone intermediality in Jin Yucheng’s reconstruction of Shanghaineseness. In the first section, I discuss the incorporation of features of Internet literature in the book by tracing the cross-media adaptation of the story with regard to the choice of languages and the use of sonic elements. In the second section, I focus on Jin’s integration of interactive storytelling strategies borrowed from Wu fangyan literature and culture in conjunction with the online medium’s ability to disrupt the linearization of history in the 189 Shih, Visuality and Identity, 4. 114 PRC’s official account of history. Third, I discuss the incorporation of illustrations, maps, and music scores in the book as a supplement to the narrative of the story, conflating time and space against the linear narrative. Finally, I situate Jin’s story within the network of Sinophone cultures to see how he re-enacts contemporary representations of Shanghai through cinematic aesthetics evident in Sinophone cinema from Hong Kong and Taiwan. In these aspects, rendering sounds and voices in written forms to the readers plays a crucial role in the storytelling and determines the narrative strategies Jin uses. In addition, visualizing space and time in history supplements the disruption of linear narrative. I argue that, through intermedial practices that reinvoke literary and cultural traditions in fangyan and Sinophone cinematic aesthetics, Blossoms challenges the linearization of history in the PRC’s official history writing and reconstructs Shanghaineseness shaped by the sounds, voices, and lived experiences of the city of Shanghai. 1. Sound and Script: Creating a Model for Writing in Fangyan Announced by its author as having been written in a “Shanghainese mode of thinking” (Shanghaihua siwei), Blossoms is appealing to both general readers and literary critics primarily because of its distinct linguistic and narrative style. 190 Although the plot and characters provide critical density and complexity worthy of critical acclaim, the use of Shanghainese components is what distinguishes the story from other contemporary novels about Shanghai. Consequently, the use of Shanghainese becomes the selling point of the book, as can be seen in its promotion strategies and its various adaptations. In this section, I explore how the book offers one way of 190 Jin Yucheng 开 , “Jin Yucheng zhuanfang: wo yong shanghaihua siwei xie Fan Hua” 开 : [An Interview with Jin Yucheng: I Write Blossoms in a Shanghainese Mode of Thinking]. Southern Metropolis Daily. Sohu. 28 Apr. 2013. http://cul.sohu.com/20130428/n374358498.shtml. (accessed July 5, 2017) 115 articulating the voices of Shanghai through the incorporation of features of Internet literature. In particular, online serialization allowed Jin to highlight the aurality of Chinese characters through references to practices in fangyan literature as well as fangyan expressions, grammar, and syntax shared by online communities. In the book edition, the author completed a transformation from Shanghainese as a sound to Shanghainese as a mode of thinking to address a nation-wide Mandarin-speaking readership. In 2011, Jin started posting short passages on the predominantly Shanghainese-speaking website, longdang.org, using the screen name “Going Up to an Attic Alone” (Dushang gelou). 191 According to the author, there were between twenty to thirty readers who regularly commented on the thread. 192 They made requests to the author to write more about particular districts in Shanghai, or to expand on specific historical periods. Jin would then tailor the story to cater to the requests of his readers. The daily posts continued for over six months under the thread titled, “It Is Best to Go Up to an Attic Alone at Night (Dushang gelou, zuihao shi yeli)”. 193 The serialization immediately caught the attention of mainstream literary critics. In 2012, Harvest (Shouhuo) invited Jin to revise and publish the story in its fall and winter issue designed for novels. 194 The following year, Jin expanded the story into a one-volume novel, published by 191 “Longdang” is the transliteration of the term in Shanghainese. It refers to interconnected lanes that form residential communities in Shanghai. The longdang.org website has been shut down multiple times due to censorship and financial and technical issues since 2011. On May 2, 2017, the owner of the website decided to move it to Wechat and Sina Microblog because of their relatively low cost of maintenance. See Duanduan. 192 Jin Yucheng, “Wo xie Fan Hua—chuangzuo zishu” — [I Write Blossoms: My Account of the Writing Process], Changpian xiaoshuo yuebao: Jin Yucheng zhuanhao :开 [Novel Monthly: Special Issue on Jin Yucheng] (June 2013): 4. 193 Ibid., 4. 194 The transition from online serialization to the Harvest edition marks a critical move from online medium to print form. Based on the Harvest edition, the book edition further incorporated literariness and visual supplements. For the purpose of this dissertation, I focus on the online and the book editions because of their distinctive methods of media appropriation. In terms of comparison of all three editions, see Zeng, “Locality Production,” who points out that the author changed the name of the protagonist Mr. Ni (Ni xiansheng) to Husheng (literally “born in Shanghai”) first in the Harvest edition, indicating his attempt to tell a story of an average Shanghai citizen. 116 Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House (Shanghai wenyi chubanshe). While the basic plot remains unchanged, the story went through a dozen major revisions that involved the choice of languages, the shift of narrative voice, as well as the inclusion of visual supplements such as maps, illustrations, and sheet music. 195 In the online serialization and the printed book, the choice of languages reflects the author’s understanding of and engagement with both online participatory culture and print media. This strategy resolves the challenges to traditional print media regarding fangyan. Jin employed colloquial expressions and transliterations of terms in fangyan that appeared in literary works or were shared in online communities. He also created his own ways to transliterate uncommon Shanghainese phrases through Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese characters. The appropriation of Mandarin pronunciation for writing in Shanghainese marks a deterritorialization of the former from its conventional space (print media). In order to fully understand the meaning of each phrase, readers have to rely on the pronunciation of Mandarin in addition to their knowledge of Shanghainese. The bilingual prerequisite further narrows down the potential readership, forging an exclusive online community able to read and respond in a similarly coded language. This practice could also be seen in Jin’s contemporary novelist Hu Baotan’s 2011 Shanghainese novel Longdang. The novel takes the form of a dictionary of Shanghainese expressions. There are approximately 100 entries organized alphabetically based on the Wu fangyan pronunciation written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The author gives one humorous episode to illustrate each item, and provides glossary for new vocabulary at the end of each episode. The narratives are independent from each other. Most of the items are old 195 According to the author, the online serialization amounts to approximately 380,000 words; the Harvest edition has approximately 290,000 words; and the book edition totals approximately 350,000 words (Jin, “Wo xie Fan Hua,” 4). 117 expressions that contemporary readers might no longer be familiar with. 196 The novel uses transliteration extensively, not only for verbs and nouns, but also for personal pronouns and prepositions, making it nearly impossible for Mandarin speakers to read. Take the following entry for example. Break up Big Guy started dating. His dad supported him with loads of money, just like feeding him with ginseng and royal jelly. Once he got money, Big guy started showing. He often invited girls to movies and dinner… His dad warned him, “one for today, one for tomorrow, aren’t you playing Merry-Go-Round?”… Big Guy thought, dad’s right. He used his money like interwoven ropes all at once to invite the most beautiful girl to dine at Hilton for a whole day… Next Monday, the girl asked someone to tell Big Guy that, he was too luxurious and squandered money away. He’s not able to manage life well. So break up. Big Guy’s dad shook his head, “If you weren’t my son, I would have broken up with you too.” au doe 197 打 — ⼤ 死 ⼥⽹信⼥ [kau]每每 每打⽹⾧ 實 實 ⾧打 198 The words and phrases I underlined have been given definitions in the glossary. “yila” means his/her/their. “At” (lala, literally spicy spicy) is a transliteration of at/in/on, transliterated elsewhere as “lele.” 199 To some extent, the novel did draw more readers’ attention to the preservation of Shanghainese than Qian Nairong’s 2008 Dictionary of Shanghainese 196 For example, on page 92, 在 (Pinyin: Jiachan er xiansheng; Wu: kah zoe nyi sie san listed under “K” is a variation of the pen name 在 used by the commentator of Which Classic?, a book written approximately 200 years ago. See Chapter Two, footnote 98. 197 International phonetic alphabet of the phrase. 198 Hu Baotan, Longdang, 3. 199 See Footnote 201. 118 (Shanghaihua da cidian) because of its humorous narrative. It has been discussed by netizens and made into an internet radio broadcast series on Himalaya FM since 2016. 200 The emphasis on transliteration and the phonetic aspect of written Chinese among netizens is particularly successful in facilitating a new narrative voice. Online readers not only recognize common expressions of Shanghainese shared in fangyan literature and online, but they also understand the author’s rules in creating new phrases through transliteration, turning the reading process into an acoustic experience—one that involves sounding out the words from the screen, and figuring out the exact meaning based on the sound. Similarly, it is through this interactive practice that Jin Yucheng gradually found his own rhythm and tempo in writing Blossoms. Once the online serialization migrated to printed form, the author did not simply reproduce the past online practices. A major shift from the online edition to the book version is a series of changes from the sound-based usage of written Chinese into a written language that is highly influenced by grammar and syntax of Shanghainese tailored for readers without any knowledge of Shanghainese. The book version keeps the basic narrative style and sentence structure. Jin replaced many personal pronouns, question particles, and prepositions with those in vernacular Chinese that are more familiar to a general audience. 201 However, he kept certain verbs and nouns in Shanghainese that are less frequently used in vernacular Chinese. 202 He also replaced 200 Ala dingguagua 如如 , “Hu Baotan Shanghai hua xiao xiaoshuo ji—Longdang” [Hu Baotan Shanghainese mini Novel: Longdang]. Himalaya FM. Last modified March 25, 2018. http://www.ximalaya.com/36541004/album/5403205/. (accessed March 26, 2018) 201 For example, for personal pronouns, he used ni, / ta and women instead of ⾧ nong, yi and ala for you, he/she, and we; for question particle, he used ma instead of 点 fa; for prepositions, he used zai instead of 我 lele for at. 202 For example, for verbs, he used chi instead of he for drink; for nouns, he used shiti instead of shiqing for things. Both and are understandable to vernacular Chinese readers, although they are not conventional expressions. 119 many previously transliterated terms with homonyms that have connotations closer to their meanings in Shanghainese. 203 Occasionally, when the same term refers to different things in Shanghainese and vernacular Chinese, he replaced the term with another mutually acceptable term. 204 These changes shifted the focus on the pronunciation of Shanghainese to the semantic and syntactic aspects of the language. As a result, any reader with literacy in Chinese would be able to understand the basic plot, while Shanghainese speakers would be able to spot the unconventional usage derived from Shanghainese. Nevertheless, since the narrative language cannot be easily categorized as either vernacular Chinese or Shanghainese, it draws readers’ attention to the intentional use of the regional language. Along with the shift from sound-based writing to grammar and sentence structure, the narrator also draws readers’ attention to the languages spoken by the characters in the book version. For instance, in many conversations during dinner banquets, the narrator would meticulously record the languages of each character. In addition to conversations in Shanghainese, Jin also points out Northern language (beifang hua), Taiwanese Mandarin (guoyu), Subei language (subei hua), accented Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and so on. In place of Putong hua, Mandarin spoken in Mainland China, Jin uses Northern Language as opposed to Shanghainese (a Southern language) and Guoyu, Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, probably to avoid confusion, and also to position Mandarin on the same level as Shanghainese. While readers cannot hear Shanghainese by reading the book version aloud as they did with the 203 For instance, the term xiaqi (meaning: quite, very) has been transliterated as (xieqi, meaning: evil influence or evil force) since the 1930s. Jin replaced with 過 (meaning: rosy cloud around the sun) to modify “beautiful” (過 xiaqi piaoliang) because of “its colorful connotation” (“I Write Blossoms” 5). 204 For example, the term is most commonly used to refer to one’s father in Shanghainese. In the general context, however, it means one’s grandfather. In this case, Jin used , a less common term for father adopted in Shanghainese under the influence of Mandarin usage, to denote father. 120 online version, nevertheless they can imagine the polyphonic conversations through verbal descriptions in the book. This change demonstrates the author’s attempt to address a wider Sinophone readership who lack knowledge of Shanghainese. The online serialization prepared the author for developing a narrative voice that is based on Shanghainese pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Without this early “exercise,” Jin would not have been able to carry out his literary experiments in a 400-page novel. Meanwhile, the cross-media adaptation opens the possibility of representing voices that are not just in regional languages, providing a model for writing in fangyan in contemporary Chinese literature. Sinophone readers from all over the world without the knowledge of Shanghainese who are attracted to Jin’s writing also visit the longdang.org website for the original serialization. 2. Retelling the (Hi)story: Oral Tradition and Fiction Writing The online serialization not only laid the foundation for a new model for fangyan writing, but also allowed an interactive type of storytelling. Oral storytelling performances are rooted in classical Chinese literature and culture. In Blossoms, the oral tradition in the Wu fangyan culture forms the base narrative of the book. Invoking the Wu fangyan oral tradition, Blossoms probes the possibility of an alternative means of telling the (hi)story in contemporary Chinese literature. 205 Literary modernity and urban cosmopolitanism in Shanghai have been perceptively studied by scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee (Shanghai Modern) and Shu-mei Shih (The Lure). Incorporating Western and Japanese modern influences, May Fourth writers heralded a new 205 Jin refers to his probing of an alternative means as “finding what is in between the modern genre of novel and old texts.” Here, old texts refer to story-telling scripts ( huaben xiaoshuo) originated in the Song Dynasty. See Jin, Fan Hua, 443. 121 vernacular language in place of classical Chinese. Along with the linguistic changes, the genres of fiction and new poetry were privileged over the storytelling scripts (huaben xiaoshuo) and classical poetry (jiutishi) that were popular in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Liang Qichao, for instance, advocated for the political fiction as the perfect genre for renewing the nation and its people because of the former’s ability to “permeate,” “immerse,” “shock,” and “transcend” (xun, jin, ci, ti). 206 Like Liang, many May Fourth writers rejected classical Chinese writing because of its embedded patriarchal and outdated values. Nevertheless, against the grand narrative of enlightenment and nation-building, many female writers engaged in writing what Rey Chow calls “feminine details.” 207 In a famous essay written by Eileen Chang in response to Fu Lei’s criticism of her focus on the “petty” and the “passive” domestic lives and loves of largely female urbanites, she suggests that “the placid and static aspects of life have eternal significance.” 208 Chang’s effort of rescuing Sing-Song Girls through translations, together with her academic studies on The Dream of the Red Mansion, demonstrate her investment in the classical literary tradition. In a similar vein, Jin Yucheng’s writing revisits the classical literary tradition associated with oral performance and storytelling scripts. Indeed, Jin’s writing style not only relates back to Wu fangyan writing in classical novels such as Sing-song Girls, but also alludes to the “worldly affairs novel” (shiqing xiaoshuo) tradition represented by The Dream of the Red Mansion and The Plum in the Golden Vase. 209 (Figure 4.2 and 4.3 are two illustrations he painted as a tribute to the classical novels.) 206 Liang Qichao, “Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi,” 3-6. 207 Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity, 84. 208 Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 15-16. 209 Lu Xun, Wu Han 经 , and Zheng Zhenduo 会⾃ all pointed out that Jin Ping Mei Cihua used a large amount of fangyan in the dialogues. See Zheng Zhenduo, “Tan Jin Ping Mei Cihua” 因 (On The Plum in the 122 In this section, I examine Jin’s use of oral traditions from classical Chinese literature to challenge the writing of linear progressive history in the PRC’s official account. The online forum functioned as a stage for traditional oral performances and installment publishing during the late Qing period. Traditional oral performances include storytelling and ballad singing onstage. Suzhou Pinghua and Tanci, collectively known as Pingtan, for instance, remain popular as genres of folk culture in Shanghai. The storyteller narrates a segment of the story to the audience from a third-person perspective in the performance, and acts out the various characters by uttering their lines with different gestures and tones. It is important to adjust the flow of the story according to audiences’ response each time the story is re-enacted. Golden Vase). In Jin Ping Mei Lunji (Essays on The Plum in the Golden Vase). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1986: 1-18. Figure 4.2 An Illustration of the book The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Jin Yucheng Figure 4.3 An Illustration of the book The Plum in the Golden Vase by Jin Yucheng 123 Another prominent performative genre in Shanghai is stand-up comedy. Traditional stand-up comedy, known as Huajixi, includes a single-actor performance called Dujiaoxi and double- actors performance similar to northern-style Cross-talk. The performance in fangyan enables the actors to draw on the lives of local people as sources of humor, farce, satire, and practical jokes. Gauging the reaction from the audience, actors on the stage control the content and the way they tell jokes. 210 Likewise, the online forum allows Jin to incorporate readers’ responses and requests into his storytelling and generally to experiment with different strategies in his attempts to appeal to his readers. The author and the readers could revisit previous segments to ensure the continuity of the plot, and anticipate the coming of the next segment. Similarly, online serialization is also reminiscent of installment publishing in the late Qing period. 211 Blossoms did not have a formal ending before Jin started revising the story for publication. Even though the final book edition has a complete structure in the sense that it has a prologue and an epilogue, it could still be seen as one version of the multiple renditions of the story. Thus, the constant revision of the story challenges the credibility of the narrator and the authenticity and finality of the (hi)story. While readers’ online forum responses are not included in the story, two significant features of interactive oral performance and installment publishing are evident in the book, dialogue- driven narrative, and unreliable storytelling. 210 In 2006, Zhou Libo (1967- ), a local Huajixi actor claimed to have reinvented the stand-up comedy genre as Shanghai-style stand-up comedy ( Haipai qingkou) to cater to the taste of a new generation of Shanghai audience. His performances including Shanghai-style Stand-up Comedy ( Haipai qingkou) (2006), A Laughable Talk on the Past 30 Years (活 Xiaokan sanshi nian) (2008), A Laughable Talk of Great Shanghai 活 (Xiaokan da Shanghai) (2009), etc. were well received in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta. He was involved in an ongoing court case involving gun and drug-dealing by March 2018 when this chapter was written. 211 See Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, 73-92. 124 Dialogue is the major component advancing the plot and shaping the narratological style of Blossoms. Readers get to know the characters and the plot through the dialogues. The narrator offers minimal intervention in the storytelling, foregrounding the voices of each character in the narrative and allowing the conversation to flow smoothly. In place of silence, the term “does not make a sound” (buxiang) frequently appears in a conversation, without any descriptions of the person’s inner thoughts and emotions, which are often seen in contemporary fiction. 212 Thus, an average paragraph generally runs over one or two pages, and usually ends with the end of the conversation. There is also no distinction between the dialogues and the narratives due to the absence of quotation marks, which blurs the boundary between subjective and objective storytelling. 213 In Shen Jiaxuan’s linguistic analysis of Blossoms, he underlines the frequent use of run-on sentences and clauses with few characters. 214 Run-on sentences with few characters in each clause distinguish the narrative from contemporary literature influenced by translated novels from Anglophone literature, creating a reading experience familiar from the classical storytelling tradition. Overall, the narratological style of the book reminds the readers of oral storytelling traditions, and dissolves the line between subjective and objective storytelling. If the form of the storytelling challenges the credibility of the narrator, the content of the story further destabilizes the authority of history writing. Instead of providing a single narrative, the text immerses the readers in multiple narratives that threaten to contradict each other. For instance, Apo, a nanny who comes to Shanghai from Shaoxing City in Zhejiang Province, 212 “buxiang” means “does not reply” in Shanghainese. According to Yan Bin, this term appeared over 1500 times in the book. In the online version, the narrator would describe inner emotions or thoughts of the person instead of using “buxiang” when he/she is silent. See Jin and Yan, “Jin Yucheng” (“A Literary Interview”). 213 The dialogues can either be read as direct quotations from the speaker or indirect remarks retold by the narrator. 214 See Shen, Jiaxuan . Fan Hua yuyan zhaji 再 [Linguistic Notes on Fan Hua] (Nanchang: 21 shiji chubanshe jituan, 2017), 21-24. Shen cited three paragraphs where one sentence contains more than 45 commas. On p. 55, Shen randomly selected 5 pages from the book. Altogether, there are 584 sentences containing 2,955 characters, averaging 5 characters per sentence. 125 repeatedly tells Beidi, the daughter of her host family, the story of her grandmother who escaped from the Nanjing imperial palace during the Taiping Rebellion. Each time, she brags about the wealth of the Taiping Rebellion leaders, and the gold her grandmother managed to smuggle out of the palace before the fall of the regime. The gold was then stored in Apo’s grandma’s coffin. Beidi challenges Apo by asking her to clarify the details of the story, to which grandma always responds with even more exaggerated descriptions of the story. Together with Beidi, the readers are made aware of the discrepancies between Apo’s various accounts of the story (40, 90). When Apo finally takes Beidi to visit the tomb of her grandma, to her disillusionment, the alleged gold is nowhere to be found in the coffin. This anticlimax prepares the readers for the mysterious ending of the lives of Apo and Beidi. Beidi’s parents were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution due to their bourgeois background. After her parents had been taken away from the family, Beidi describes to others several times that Apo transfigured into a fish and jumped into a river. 215 In one account, the story goes like this: The next morning, Beidi and Abao wake up and see a crucian carp in the goldfish pond. Beidi cries, Apo. The fish moves. Beidi reaches out to the fish, and it remains still. She reaches her hand down the belly of the fish, it remains still and finally swims away. Beidi says, Apo, are you happy? The fish swims around. Abao does not make a sound. The following morning, scales spread all over the pond . . . the crucian carp disappears . . . 然間然間 然 然 只間 216 215 Jin Yucheng, Fan Hua, 92-99. 216 Ibid., 98-99. Questions marks are not used in the original text. I replaced the period with a question mark to comply with English usage. 126 Later, Abao, Beidi’s best friend, explains Beidi’s sudden disappearance in a similar way. 217 In the context of the close-to-life storytelling found throughout the book, Beidi and Apo’s story stands out as the only magical realist part. Through plain yet childlike language, the narrator transforms a traumatic experience into a fairytale-like memory. This account of Beidi’s story alludes to the untold history of the Cultural Revolution. By providing personal accounts of history, Jin invites the readers to reflect on other such accounts that were silenced in the face of the PRC’s official account of Chinese history. Drawing on traditions of the Wu fangyan literature and culture, Blossoms challenges the linearization of history. By interweaving the past and the present, the old and the new forms of storytelling, Jin urges readers to reconsider the process of writing history, and rediscover what has been lost during the process of official history writing. 3. Conflating Space and Time: Maps and Illustrations The visual components including illustrations of scenes from the story and maps were added to the book when it was published. A self-taught illustrator, Jin not only successfully supplemented the narratives of Blossoms through the visual medium, but also established his own painting style. His personal exhibition titled “Disappearance and Departure: Exhibition of Jin Yucheng’s Literary Illustrations” (Xiaoshi yu bieli: Jin Yucheng shouhui wenxue chahuazhan) was held in the Duo Yun Xuan Art Gallery and the Shanghai Municipal Library from August to September 2017 (See Figure 4.4). In this section, I discuss Jin’s construction of public and private spaces in history using visual supplements in the book. The change of space in 217 Ibid., 166-167. 127 time serves as a record of history, witnessing historical events carved on the city, architecture, as well as individual bodies and minds. City space in the book serves as a venue for people to meet and interact with each other, for the witnessing of historical events and the formation of communities with old and new members coming in and out. First, Jin uses love and sex as a trope to discuss the relationship between individuals and space. Surveillance over moral behaviors (zuofeng wenti, as Jin Yucheng calls it) revolved around marriage, dating, and extra-marital affairs during the Maoist period, closely monitoring what one could and could not do in the public as well as privately. Under rigorous social control, sexual desire was also magnified, finding outlets in various forms. Figure 4.4 A Poster of Jin Yucheng’s Exhibition of Literary Illustrations outside the Duo Yun Xuan Art Gallery (2017) 128 Public spaces such as streets, cinemas, restaurants, coffee shops, hair salons, and private spaces such as homes and hotel rooms are the venues for romantic and sexual encounters in the story. However, the boundary between public and private spaces is also fluid and porous. Dark corners of coffee shops, hidden sections of factories, and rear seats inside the cinema are all situated within public spaces, yet treated as private or semi-private spaces. Beidi’s parents, for example, met and fell in love with each other at a cinema. Husheng dates his girlfriend in dim corners of coffee shops so they can make out. Xiaomao accidentally witnessed two co-workers having sex behind a lathe at work. On the other hand, private spaces are also open to public surveillance all the time because of the density of the population and the limit of spaces. The Shikumen 不 (Stone Gate) style housing creates alleyway spaces in between houses, where information (particularly gossip) travels fast. Scandals about extra-marital affairs (wai chahua shiti, as Jin calls it) are soon known to everyone in the neighborhood, thus gossip becomes a social practice of surveillance, controlling the community through moral judgments. 218 Domestic fights at home and quarrels with neighbors cannot stay within the four walls as neighbors can all hear what is going on around them. The following passage from Blossoms describes a game for young men and women in the 1970s in the public. In 1970s Shanghai, “Street Game,” or stalking, was popular among young men and women from 16 to 26 years old. Usually two pretty girls walked together, wearing clothes that were not too eye-catching. Only insiders of the game would recognize them. Big Sister and Lanlan were two butterflies on the street, attracting male butterflies. Two young men from Shanghai followed them for over ten bus stops, keeping a distance of about 20 steps. The two parties did not speak to each other, yet communicated telepathically. 218 For a discussion of gossip and social space in Shanghai, see Li, Jie. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 141-162. 129 1970們最 上知們 知 219 Having played such games many times, they finally got caught by plainclothes officers who were patrolling the street looking for immoral behavior in the public and punished because of this. The public games of chasing were severely oppressed by the society. Yet at the same time, such oppression in the form of surveillance added more excitement to the game, prompting the youngsters to play hide and seek with the system. Turning to the private sectors of city space, Jin also illustrates the impact of sexual oppression. The story of Xiaomao and his neighbor Yinfeng downstairs is a tragedy of sexual oppression. Yinfeng, a young woman in her twenties, married a Marine in the 1960s who stayed away from home most of the year. According to the PRC marriage law, the spouse of an Army member is not allowed to initiate a divorce unless their spouse committed a major mistake in marriage. 220 Staying alone at home all the time, Yinfeng felt lonely. Her next-door neighbor, a middle-aged man, attempted to harass her while her husband was away, to which Yinfeng rejected. However, having had many chances to get along with Xiaomao, then a teenage boy with almost no knowledge about sex, Yinfeng started having an extra-marital affair with him. This affair was made possible by the proximity of their physical distance, but later also unveiled 219 Ibid., 226. 220 See Chapter 5 Item 19 of the 1950 “Zhonghua rennin gongheguo hunyin fa” [The Marital Law of the People’s Republic of China]. This law is still in use now. See Item 33 of the 1981 “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyin fa” [The Marital Law of the People’s Republic of China]. 130 in the public due to the same reason. Readers will be able to understand the space with the help of the illustration below. (See Figure 4.5) As shown in the illustration, in the three-story house, the first floor is a hair salon. Yinfeng’s family shares the second floor with the middle-aged man. Xiaomao’s family lives on the third floor. The floor was made of wood, squeaking every time one walks on it. Gaps in between the wood pieces also allowed light and sound to penetrate above and below. When she is available, Yinfeng turned on and off the electric light at night, sending Xiaomao a signal so that he would walk down quietly to her room. The housing structure hence provides convenience for the two. However, as revealed later in the story, the middle-aged man living next to Yinfeng also received the signal because there was only a thin wall between their rooms. He dug a hole in the wall to Figure 4.5 An illustration of the housing complex Xiaomao and Yinfeng lived in by Jin Yucheng 131 spy on Yinfeng and made a record of the times the two had sex in her house to give to her husband as an act of revenge. Convenience provided by the physical proximity also enabled the voyeuristic gaze from the neighbors. Yinfeng’s family had to move elsewhere due to the pressure from the neighbors. Read together, these two episodes demonstrate the penetration of surveillance over members of the society, conflating public and private spaces in 1960s Shanghai. While contemporary readers would think the 1970s sexual oppression would provide the source of individual tragedy, the Reform and Opening Up storyline in the 1990s goes on to tell another story. Accumulation of wealth and the relaxation of moral standards regarding love and extra-marital affairs endowed the individuals more freedom to pursue love and sex. Public spaces such as restaurants, banquets, and karaoke allow individuals to meet new friends and form bonds with them rapidly. The availability of hotel rooms and rented houses provides a chance for them to spend private time with each other without alerting their partners, spouse, or neighbors. Taotao, a middle-aged seafood shop owner engaged in too many extra-marital affairs, found it convenient to visit these women at their apartments or hotels. Lili, a young lady escaped from her family and reduced to prostitution for a while, also found freedom in not having to commit in any relationship. However, rather than achieving happiness in love and marriage, these characters met unanticipated fates. Taotao finally found his true love Xiaoqin and divorced his wife to remarry her. Unfortunately she fell to her death from her unrepaired balcony, and left Taotao with a diary revealing that she cheated on him with another boyfriend. Lili, having been pursued by various men for a long time, eventually decided to become a nun. Freedom of love and sex, in this sense, is not more progressive than sexual oppression since the former does not grant happiness to any character in the story. 132 Second, beyond the individual level, public spaces in the story also bear record to historical events as a form of collective memory. During the Cultural Revolution, architecture was demolished and rebuilt; European-style houses were divided into small compartments to be shared by multiple families, to name just a few changes. In the Cultural Revolution storyline, Shuhua and Husheng walk past a church in downtown Shanghai: There used to be a Catholic church called L'église du Bon-Pasteur at the corner of Ruijin Road and Changle Road. Shuhua and Husheng were there when it was demolished. One day, they passed by the corner. A four-story scaffold was built out of the blue… They walked into the chaotic Changle Middle School, and climed up to the roof above the fourth floor. Looking at the scaffold, they saw a white statue of Mao about 8 or 9 meters high inside the neat scaffold. Construction workers climbed up the scaffold made of bamboos, busying around, just like preparing for a rocket launching. 的太吃吃吃友中對 221 An important scene alluding to the ongoing Cultural Revolution in 1967, this passage lays out the impact of history on the cityscape, showing people in a collective frenzy at that time. Husheng, whose parents were cadres of Air Force Soldiers, participated actively in the Cultural Revolution. He adopted the revolutionary language in daily conversations, which his close friends frowned upon. The story, therefore, presents the characters not only as victims of the Cultural Revolution, but also as participants or even persecutors in these historical events. In the Reform and Opening Up storyline much later in the narrative, readers are told that the New Jinjiang Hotel was built in 2000 in the same location. Read together with the above-mentioned scene, a sense of history emerges. The city is like a palimpsest, bearing witness to the shifts of historical trajectories, going back and forth, left and right on the spectrum of ideology. 221 Jin Yucheng, Fan Hua, 147-148. 133 What the illustration (See Figure 4.6) does in the story is to highlight this sense of history. The illustration consisting of the street corner in three moments, 1963, 1967, and 2000, appears together with the above passage, allowing readers to jump ahead of time and view the described scene in a broad historical overview. Rather than indulging in the very moment of the Cultural Revolution, the illustration disrupts or fast-forwards the narrative and reminds the readers to reflect on and question the linear narrative of history writing in general. On top of illustrations of public space, Jin’s obsession with map-making forms another documentation of the city’s mobility and changes over time. Following the precedent of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, in which real street names were provided in the storytelling to sustain the reliability of the fictional narrative to the readers, Jin maps his fictional characters onto the historical maps of Shanghai from the 1960s to 2000. 222 The neat layout with 222 In an interview I conducted with Jin Yucheng in June 2017, Jin acknowledged that map-making is the most important component he borrowed from The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai when writing Blossoms. Though the original version of Sing-song Girls does not include a real map, Han Bangqing’s verbal description made it possible to read the book as a tour guide to the pleasure quarters. Zhang Ailing’s Mandarin translation published by Huangguan chubanshe added a map of Shanghai’s concession area based on the descriptions in the book. Figure 4.6 An illustration of the corner of Ruijin Road and Changle Road in 1963, 1967, and 2000 134 names of streets listed in handwriting is complicated by the word bubbles highlighting old architectural landmarks that no longer exist in the new millennium. Moreover, the name of the district, Luwan District, is also a historical name no longer in use since 2011 due to the new administrative division in Shanghai (See Figure 4.7). Myriads of historical architecture and former residences of celebrities are located here, including Xu Zhimo, Mei Lanfang, Ba Jin, and Zhou Enlai, to name just a few. Similarly, in a map drawn upon Wong Kar-wai’s request in preparation for the film adaptation (See Figure 4.8 below), Jin sketched the disappeared streets and buildings from Shanghai. The maps serve as historical documentation of the city, materializing the past for readers who have memorable experiences in those places. For instance, the state-owned second-hand store on Huaihai Road (Huaihai lu guoying jiuhuo shangdian, abbreviated as Huai Guo Jiu) in Luwan District bore witness to the Cultural Revolution because many furniture items and collectibles confiscated from rich families were sold as second-hand Figure 4.7 A map of Luwan District of Shanghai by Jin Yucheng 135 goods there. In Blossoms, Beidi’s family piano was confiscated and never retrieved afterwards. After she disappeared with Apo, Abao often went to Huai Guo Jiu to look for traces of Beidi on different pianos stored there. 223 Such a place becomes not only a physical presence of historical atrocity, but also a venue for sentiments and nostalgia for the past. Overall, maps and illustrations in Blossoms supplements the aural elements in complicating the linear progressive narration. 4. Representing the Flavor of Shanghai: Sinophone Cultures and Cinematic Aesthetics In his foreword to Blossoms, Jin makes the following allusion to a scene from Wong Kar- wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990): It is best to go up to an attic alone at night. In the ending of Days of Being Wild, Tony Leung squanders his youth fooling around with women. He counts a stack of money under the electrical light, then puts it in the inner pocket of his suit, then counts another stack. He takes out a set of playing cards, fans them out, then takes out another set. Then, facing the mirror, he styles his hair, giving it a right-side parting. He is dressed up in a tailored suit, but acts indolently. At last, he turns the light off. What a positive note on which to end a tragic story. The last half minute shows the flavor of Shanghai. (1; emphasis added) 223 Jin Yucheng, Fan Hua, 167-171. Figure 4.8 A map of disappeared old streets and facilities drawn for Wong Kar-wai by Jin Yucheng 136 因⾥⼥ 樂 樂⾯ 以以过 (See Figure 4.9) Correspondingly, the novel ends with two Frenchmen discussing with Xiaomao their plan to make a Francophone movie about Shanghai. Xiaomao eagerly explains the historical context of Shanghai in the 1930s to help them correct historical mistakes in their script, only to find that they do not care about facts or authentic representations. 224 “Can they make movies like that in France?” asks Husheng. Abao answers, “French people do not understand Shanghai. That is why they can shoot whatever they want.” 225 Bookended by two films (one completed, another in the making) from outside the city, Blossoms situates the entire narrative within a global network of representations of Shanghai. What is the flavor of Shanghai? Can outsiders portray Shanghai authentically? Is the regional language of Shanghai a must when representing Shanghai? If so, what qualifies as the regional language? Mandarin? Shanghainese? Or something else? In this section, I explore the use of Sinophone cinematic aesthetics regarding the aurality in Blossoms. These two features help the 224 Ibid., 441. 225 Ibid., 441-42. Figure 4.9 Tony Leung combing his hair in an attic, a scene from Days of Being Wild 137 author negotiate the authenticity of Shanghaineseness with representations of Shanghai from other Sinophone sites. As discussed in the first section, marking the languages each character speaks can be understood as a shift from sound-based to semantic-based writing, which enables the representation of a polyphony of voices accessible to readers without the knowledge of regional languages. Meanwhile, it also corresponds with the diegesis of many Sinophone films. In her discussion of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Shu-mei Shih points out that the jarring accents of Mandarin spoken by the actors “[break] down the fourth wall of illusion” and “foreground the differences and tensions among those geopolitical spaces the accents come from.” 226 While conventional Chinese-language cinema projects a seemingly coherent community in which characters with different accents are dubbed in standard Mandarin, Sinophone cinema stresses the “inauthenticity and incoherence” through the juxtaposition of languages, dialects, and accents. 227 As discussed in Chapter Three, many Sinophone films feature Shanghainese displaced in a diasporic setting amongst Cantonese and Taiwanese speaking communities. Wong Kar-wai’s representation of the diasporic Shanghai community in Hong Kong in In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004), Stanley Kwan’s Everlasting Regret (2005), Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), to name just a few, constitute a corpus of Sinophone representations of Shanghai. In Wong’s In the Mood for Love, the Shanghainese spoken by the landlords and their neighbors seems perfectly understandable for Su Lizhen and Zhou Muyun while they keep on speaking Cantonese to other characters. In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai (1998), actors and actresses from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan speak Shanghainese and Suzhou fangyan with 226 Shih, Visuality and Identity, 2. 227 Ibid., 3. 138 heavy accents, disrupting rather than restoring a sense of authenticity in the (re)creation of the pleasure quarters in late-Qing Shanghai. Linguistic diversity, however, is not exclusive to Sinophone communities outside Mainland China. The cultural identity of Shanghai people has been constantly reshaped as a result of dramatic increases in the migrant population in the city since the 1980s. In 2001, Huang Ju, then Secretary of the Municipal Party Committee of Shanghai, proposed the concept of “New Shanghai People” (xin shanghairen) to include new residents as part of Shanghai. 228 In Blossoms, this trend is also reflected in an increasing appearance of characters from outside of Shanghai as the story progresses. These characters speak various languages. With the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity, the core group in the story also becomes more dynamic. In the maps drawn by Jin, we also see an expansion of geographical locations covered along with the increase of characters and the progress of time. Jin encourages readers to perceive Shanghai as an open space that embraces people from other places. Adopting the use of dialogues with a linguistic diversity in Sinophone films mentioned above, the narrator of Blossoms attempts to capture the multiplicities of voices in the written form. In the beginning of Chapter 14, for instance, following the end of the lunch banquet, a conversation between several ladies takes place. Ms. Gu says in Northern language, where is Miss Wang from Shanghai, the wife of Mr. Hong. Ms. Kang says in Northern language, this woman, something is weird about her recently, I am badmouthing behind her back, Miss Wang is reluctant to accompany her husband in social occasions, she said she wanted to change her way to live. Ms. Lu says in Northern language, Shanghai women, so demanding (zuo). . . . Ms. Lin says in Taiwan Mandarin, a couple should certainly appear together in social occasions. . . . Miss Wang says, it’s hard to be a woman, it’s OK to dress up if your husband is with you, but if you go 228 Lu, Xiaoxin 動 , “‘Xin Shanghai ren’ xuyao zhengmin ma?” ? [Do We Need to Rectify the Name of “New Shanghai People”?], Shanghai Weekly, January 26, 2010. http://sh.eastday.com/qtmt/20100126/u1a687190.html. (accessed July 5, 2017) 139 out alone like this, to use Shanghainese, it’s called a vixen (hulijing). . . . Ms. Gu says, vixen is a term widely used in China. . . . 年年 多你今你今 229 Moving from one character to another, this narrative strategy appears almost every time in the 1980s Reform and Opening Up chapters, regardless of whether the character has appeared before or not. The narrator never assumes any character would speak the same language consistently with other people, or respond to one other in their mother language. Hence, each character’s lines are introduced with the language they speak, mirroring the incoherence and distinctions among these characters. The Sinophone aurality is further enhanced by using camera-like angles to focus on the external rather than the internal world. As in Flowers of Shanghai, conversations during banquets form the skeleton of the chapters set in the 1980s in Blossoms. 230 In Hou’s movie, the camera floats from one side of the table to another, slowly and quietly, just like a silent observer sitting at the banquet, turning his head to where the conversation is going on, yet never lingers when it stops. Similarly, the narrator of Blossoms records the conversations without contemplating the inner emotions of the characters or the connotations of each sentence. Silence is captured with the word “does not make a sound” where a whole paragraph of speculation 229 Jin Yucheng, Fan Hua, 178-79. Pay attention to the characters in red. “er ” and “ye 多” are suffixes attached at the end of sentences. “Er” is a diminutive suffix frequently used in Beijing fangyan, while “ye” often appears in Taiwan Mandarin. 230 The intertextual reference is clearly associated with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s movie adaptation instead of the novel. The novel features various settings within the concession area of Shanghai. Yet due to the difficulty of shooting the film in Mainland China, Hou’s movie relied heavily on indoor settings in studios in Taipei, with extremely long takes of banquets and slow camera movement as its trademark. 140 could have been written instead. The absence of subjective commentary and probing into the internal world of each character henceforth foregrounds the voices of each character as they are articulated. These voices jointly form the polyphony of Shanghai as a city, without labeling anyone as an insider or an outsider. Through the incorporation of Sinophone cinematic aesthetics, Jin situates his literary rendition of a Shanghai story in the network of Sinophone sites, opening valuable dialogues with other locations that share similar issues such as identity politics, colonialism, and nationalism. Borrowing cinematic representations of Shanghai from outside Mainland China, Jin creates a polyphonic Shanghai by negotiating with various Sinophone representations of the city. Conclusion Having examined the Sinophone intermediality of Blossoms, we have a picture of Jin Yucheng’s efforts to incorporate the interactive online medium, oral storytelling, and audiovisual aesthetics in traditional print culture. The online forum provides the author with a space to develop a narrative voice that is influenced by fangyan literature and culture in Shanghainese and oral storytelling tradition in classical Chinese. In the book edition, Jin revised the narrative to make it accessible to readers without the knowledge of the regional language while preserving the references to these cultural traditions. The maps and illustrations further conflate time and space, disrupting the linear progressive narrative and negotiating the sense of history with the readers. Moreover, Jin’s use of Sinophone cinematic aesthetics situates his rendition of Shanghai in the network of Sinophone sites. Through intermedial practices that reinvoke literary and cultural traditions in fangyan and Sinophone cinematic aesthetics, Blossoms challenges the linearization of history in the PRC’s 141 official history writing and reconstructs Shanghaineseness shaped by the sounds and voices and lived experiences in the city. Jin’s intermedial practice powerfully reconstructs the Shanghai identity against the backdrop of mass migration and global integration in China and invites a reconsideration of literary modernity and (hi)story writing in China. 142 CODA In a sense, the century-long journey of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai from Shanghai to the broader Sinophone world perfectly embodies the trajectory of my research. In the late Qing context, literary magazines served as the frontier of literary experiments in representing orality in written forms. The New Culture Movement elevated the status of late Qing novels as a necessary step towards a national literature, at the cost of reducing the dynamic soundscape in the texts. The text traveled from Mainland China to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States along with the immigrants exiled from their homeland, seeking new readers in a Sinophone network of spaces and communities outside Mainland China. Translation and adaptation enable the text to be read and heard, in a nostalgic form that essentializes and fetishizes cultural elements of the text. Eventually returning home, the text has been appropriated by a new generation of writers resorting to the oral tradition of storytelling in the Wu fangyan literature canons. The gap between speech and writing is a lingering problem for Chinese literature. The neighboring countries in Asia, including Vietnam, Japan, and Korea, all opted for phonetic systems of writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Chinese script, having been exposed to multiple possibilities of abolition (Esperanto, Latinization, Simplification, and so on), remains the writing system of contemporary China. 231 The challenges for Chinese writers as well as readers are unparalleled in other cultural contexts. However, this unsolved issue also provides an opportunity for us to reconsider sound, script, medium specificity, and identity formation in modern Chinese literature and fangyan writing. I have often heard people suggest that fangyan studies is a dying field. According to them, with the promotion of Putonghua in Mainland China, 231 See Bachner, Andrea. Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 143 there is simply no room for fangyan writing to exist. It is not my intention to preserve fangyan in the first place. Nor do I claim Wu fangyan as the legitimate, authentic, or authorized language(s) to represent some kind of essence of Shanghai culture. Eileen Chang and Wang Anyi both use Mandarin as their narrative language. Yet their works are considered representative of the Shanghai character. Language alone does not determine the quality of representation. Rather, my study seeks to demonstrate the multiplicity of languages in the writing of the story of Shanghai and Shanghainese people. With the invention of the internet and the blooming of online participatory culture, 232 the innovative use of fangyan is widely seen and heard in online forums, online podcasts, and multimedia advertisements. Literature joins this rising trend in capturing these voices of the urban and rural areas in and around Shanghai. Moreover, similar practices can also be found in other fangyan regions, including Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and so on. One does not need to speak the language to feel its affective power. While recognizing the fluid identity constructed through fangyan writing, I also acknowledge the implicit hierarchy in the reception and canonization of fangyan literature and culture. Imperialism and colonial power were the reasons behind the flourishing of major regional languages we know as of today. Studies of other fangyan areas are as important as those of Wu fangyan and Cantonese. One of the goals of this research is also to expose this implicit hierarchical structure in the process of writing literary history and to question the paradigm of “colonial modernity” by foregrounding the folk culture and literary tradition before the advent of “literary modernities.” Meanwhile, it is also important to acknowledge the issue of class and gender. While many of the works I studied are closely related to the oral tradition, they are nonetheless print materials designed for educated readers. Evelyn Rawski estimated the basic 232 See Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 144 literacy in the nineteenth century China to be between 30 to 45 percent among adult males and between 2 to 10 percent among adult females. The number was much higher in urban areas. 233 With the simplification of the Chinese script since 1935, the literacy rate has increased to 96.4 percent by 2015, with a gender difference of 3.7 percent. 234 However, reading novels is not an entertainment accessible to everyone. Limitations of these books’ reach to the lower classes prevent them from directly migrating from oral performance to printed texts. Another curious point I noticed is the gender gap. While it is hard to know how many male and female readers of these books were there in total, all the novels I studied here were nonetheless written by male authors. In the nineteenth century, women were involved in the writing of tanci fiction. But seldom did they choose local language tanci (tuyin tanci) over official language tanci (guoyin tanci). Among modern and contemporary writers, fangyan writing is also rare for female writers. This could be because of the association of fangyan with vulgar language, curse words, and sex- related expressions, which might be detrimental to the image of female writers more than for male writers. More research needs to be done to provide substantial evidence of this explanation. Finally, due to the scope of this dissertation, I have only dealt with fangyan literature and its immediately relevant materials, such as film adaptations. Oral performance contains more use of fangyan that deserves to be studied as well. 233 Evelyn Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 23. 234 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “Adult and Youth Literacy: National, Regional and Global Trends, 1985-2015.” September 2015. http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/adult-and-youth-literacy-national-regional-and- global-trends-1985-2015-en_0.pdf. (accessed November 19, 2015), 43. 145 Bibliography Primary Texts Han, Bangqing . Haishanghua liezhuan [The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai]. Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1926. —. Haishanghua liezhuan [The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai]. 1892-1894. Reprint. Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi, 2011. —. Haishang qishu [Marvelous Writings of Shanghai]. Lithographed edition. Consigned to Shun Pao Publishing House, 1892. —. Haishang huakai: Guoyu Haishanghua liezhuan yi : I. 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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This is a study of the changing discourses on fangyan in twentieth-century China through an analysis of novels and other cultural productions in and of Shanghai. Fangyan is a Chinese term referring to a language of a region. However, the translation of the term in English, dialect, is misleading because it deems fangyan as a regional variation of a standard national language. My study teases out the power dynamics of the national language, Wu fangyan (Shanghainese, Songjiang fangyan, Suzhou fangyan, etc.), and Cantonese in the history of modern Chinese literature. ❧ Fangyan was a vital source for the creation of a new vernacular towards the end of the nineteenth century in China. The pioneering novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai published in the first modern literary periodical was written in Wu fangyan. Since then, fangyan literature was widely used by May Fourth writers to construct a new national language literature against the classical tradition. However, once the creation of a national language was completed, the tension between the regional and the national has led to the suppression of regional literary practices in fangyan. With the exodus of people from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places after the 1949 Communist takeover, Wu fangyan, especially Shanghainese, has been associated with their cultural identity to construct a nostalgic sentiment in a diasporic setting. The juxtaposition of Wu fangyan with other languages creates representations of Shanghai distinct from those from Mainland China. These cultural productions have been appropriated by contemporary Mainland Chinese literature, films, and online culture in a new surge of regionalism against the backdrop of mass migration in metropolitan Shanghai. ❧ Informed by recent developments of Sinophone studies, sound studies, and cultural studies, this study is a continuing effort to understanding literary modernity in China. By tracing the legacy of vernacular literature produced in Wu fangyan region in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, I propose an alternative vision of literary modernity to the nationalist vision and reconsider the canon of modern Chinese literature. I am particularly interested in the representation of sound in written forms, and how oral tradition and narrative strategies in late imperial China continue to shape regional identities, configure time and space, and negotiate gender and class identities through the way people articulate themselves. Furthermore, by focusing on the various centers of literary and cultural productions in Wu fangyan, I envision a dynamic coexistence of various centers in dialogue with each other within the realm of China, challenging the traditional understanding of China as a homogeneous entity. Understanding the discourses on Chinese fangyan throughout the modern history will also shed light on current tensions between Mainland China and Sinophone sites such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese-speaking communities in Southeast Asia from a cultural perspective.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Gao, Yunwen Southern
(author)
Core Title
Language, soundscape, and identity formation in Shanghai fangyan literature and culture
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Publication Date
04/10/2020
Defense Date
03/19/2018
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
fangyan/dialect,Modern Chinese literature and culture,OAI-PMH Harvest,regional literature,Shanghai literature,Sinophone studies
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Bernards, Brian (
committee chair
), Goldstein, Joshua (
committee member
), Lippit, Akira (
committee member
)
Creator Email
oliviaorsino@gmail.com,yunwenga@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-6545
Unique identifier
UC11671842
Identifier
etd-GaoYunwenS-6219.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-6545 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-GaoYunwenS-6219.pdf
Dmrecord
6545
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Gao, Yunwen Southern
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
fangyan/dialect
Modern Chinese literature and culture
regional literature
Shanghai literature
Sinophone studies