He rose, took the tablet with him to his library, and called for Willow.
( 2 7 2 )
“Tell Cook to slaughter a rooster,” he ordered brusquely. “When she’s done, bring me the blood immediately.”
Willow didn’t question this. As she passed me on her way out of the room, I began to weep in relief and gratitude. I’d waited so long to have my ancestor tablet dotted, I’d given up believing that it would ever happen.
Willow returned ten minutes later with a bowl of warm blood. Ren took it from her and dismissed her, and then he went to the table, set the bowl down, and made obeisance to my tablet. As he did this, something began to stir in me and a heavenly fragrance infused the room. Tears filled his eyes as he stood and dipped his brush in the blood. His hand was steady as he reached out and dotted my tablet just as Mengmei had done to prove his love for Liniang.
Instantly, I was no longer a hungry ghost. The soul that had been harbored in my ghostly form split in two. One part found its proper place in the tablet. From there I would be able to watch over my family from close proximity. The other part was once again free to continue on to the afterworld. I’d been resurrected—not to life, but finally and fully to Ren’s first wife. I’d returned to my rightful place in society, in my family, and in the cosmos.
I glowed—and with me the whole compound shimmered with happiness. And then I was floating away to complete my journey to become an ancestor. I looked back at Ren one last time. It would still be many years before my beautiful poet joined me in the plains of the afterworld. Until then, I would live for him in my writings.
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Author’s Note
i n 2000, i wrote a short piece for V OGUE magazine about Lincoln Center’s full-length production of The Peony Pavilion. While doing research for that article, I came across the lovesick maidens. They intrigued me, and long after I wrote the article I kept thinking about them.
We usually hear that in the past there were no women writers, no women artists, no women historians, no women chefs, but of course women did these things. It’s just that too often what they did was lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up. So when I had a moment here or there, I looked up whatever I could find about the lovesick maidens and came to learn that they were part of a much larger phenomenon.
In the mid-seventeenth century, more women writers were being published in China’s Yangzi delta than in all the rest of the world at that time.
By that I mean there were thousands of women—bound-footed, often living in seclusion, from wealthy families—who were being published.
Some families published a single poem written by a mother or daughter whom they wanted to commemorate or honor, but there were other women—professional women writers—who not only wrote for large public audiences but also supported their families with their written words. How could so many women have done something so extraordinary and I didn’t know about it? Why didn’t we all know? Then I came across The Three Wives’ Commentary—the first book of its kind to have been published anywhere in the world to have been written by women—three wives, no less. With that, my interest turned into an obsession.
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There are several elements here—Tang Xianzu’s opera, the lovesick maidens, the history of The Three Wives’ Commentary, and the societal changes that allowed it to be written. I know they’re rather complicated and overlap a bit, so please bear with me.
tang x i an z u set The Peony Pavilion in the Song dynasty (960–1127), but he was writing about the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a time of artistic ferment as well as political turmoil and corruption.
In 1598, with the completion of the opera, Tang became one of the most important promoters of qing—deep emotions and sentimental love.
Like all good writers, Tang wrote what he knew, but that didn’t mean the government necessarily wanted to hear it. Almost immediately, different groups advocated for the opera’s censorship, because it was considered too political and too lascivious. New versions appeared in quick succession, until eventually only a paltry eight out of the original fifty-five scenes were performed. The text suffered even worse treatment. Some versions were abridged, while others were revised or totally rewritten to fit society’s changing mores.
In 1780, during the Qianlong reign, opposition to the opera escalated and it was blacklisted as “profane.” But it wasn’t until 1868 that the Tongzhi emperor issued the first official ban, labeling The Peony Pavilion debauched and ordering all copies burned and all productions forbidden.
Censorship of the opera has continued right up to today. The Lincoln Center production was temporarily delayed when the Chinese government discovered the content of the restored scenes and barred the actors, costumes, and sets from leaving the country, showing once again that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Apart from sexual liaisons between two unmarried people and criticism of the government—both serious in their own ways, I suppose—
why has the opera been so upsetting? The Peony Pavilion was the first piece of fiction in the history of China in which the heroine—a girl of sixteen—
chose her own destiny, and that was both shocking and thrilling. It entranced and fascinated women, who, with rare exceptions, were allowed to read the opera but never see or hear it. The passion this work aroused has been compared to the fanaticism for Goethe’s Werther in eighteenth-century Europe or more recently, in the United States, for Gone With the Wind. In China, young educated women from wealthy families—typically between the ages of thirteen and sixteen and with their marriages already ( 2 7 6 )
arranged—were particularly susceptible to the story. Believing that life imitates art, they copied Liniang: They gave up food, wasted away, and died, all in hopes that somehow in death they might be able to choose their destinies, just as the ghost of Liniang had.
No one knows for sure what killed the lovesick maidens, but it may have been self-starvation. We tend to think of anorexia as a modern problem, but it isn’t. Whether it was female saints in the Middle Ages, lovesick maidens in seventeenth-century China, or adolescent girls today, women have had a need for some small measure of autonomy. As scholar Rudolph Bell has explained, by starving themselves young women are able to shift the contest from the outer world—in which they have no control over their fates and face seemingly sure defeat—to an inner struggle to achieve mastery over themselves and their bodily urges. As the lovesick maidens were dying, many of them—including Xiaoqing and Yu Niang, who appear in this story—wrote poems that were published after their deaths.
But these writing women—whether lovesick maidens or members of the Banana Garden Five—didn’t just appear, and later disappear, in a vac-uum. China underwent a dynastic change in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Ming dynasty fell and Manchu invaders from the north established the Qing dynasty. For about thirty years, the country was in chaos.
The old regime had been corrupt. The war had been brutal. (In Yangzhou, where Peony’s grandmother died, 80,000 people were reputed to have been killed.) Many people lost their homes. Men were humiliated and forced to shave their foreheads as a symbol of subservience to the new emperor. Under the new regime, the imperial scholar system faltered, so that the way men had traditionally gained prestige, riches, and power suddenly had no value. Men from the highest levels of society retreated from the government and from scholarly life to take up rock collecting, poetry writing, tea tasting, and incense burning.