二十世紀初期中國小說中的同性慾望 In the Name of Enlightenment: Pedagogy and the Uses...

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 167

In the Name of Enlightenment: Pedagogy and the Uses of Same-Sex Desire in Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction†

Ta-wei Chi

Pedagogy occupies a central position in George Bernard Shaw’s 1916 play

Pygmalion. As it opens, a character called Colonel Pickering, who has served

in the colony of India, visits the linguist Henry Higgins in London just as

Higgins is about to leave for India to call on him (Shaw 1994: 9). The two

men eventually meet in Higgins’s laboratory, where they come to educate,

with an attitude not unlike that of England toward it’s colonial India, a

lower-class girl. In the process of transforming her into a lady, Higgins

demonstrates his superiority over her but disavows his desire for her1—a

disavowal that is an oblique acknowledgment of the role of desire in the

pedagogical process.

Such a camouflaged desire in pedagogy is not unique to the British

context and can be found in other cultural contexts, including that of

China. An example is Mao Dun’s 1928 story “Creation” (Chuangzao),

which David Wang (1992: 81) considers a rendition of the Pygmalion tale.2

In the story, a husband, always obsessed with chuangzao yu (the desire

to create something) (Mao Dun 1982–84: 1: 11), attempts to enlighten

his culturally “inferior” wife, whose name, Xianxian, means “feminine

elegance.” However, once she is empowered by education, Xianxian leaves

† I am grateful to Shu-mei Shih, Theodore Huters, and Russell C. Leong for their inspiration and encouragement. I thank two anonymous MCLC reviewers and Kirk A. Denton for their insights and suggestions. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

1 The colonel asks Higgins not to take advantage of the girl, and the latter denies his interest in her (Shaw 1994: 21). Actually, Higgins betrays his fascination with her throughout the play. The charming girl causes a degree of sexual anxiety in both the scholar and the colonel.

2 Since Shaw was well known in China at the time, it is quite possible that his works directly inspired Chinese writers. Shaw visited Shanghai in 1933 and attracted much attention; he appeared to be a pedagogue of enlightenment to the Chinese. In his sardonic style, Lu Xun often wrote about Shaw (Lu Xun 1998: 4: 30–32, 491–503; Lu Xun 1998: 5: 32–38).

168 • In the Name of Enlightenment

the pedantic husband behind.3 While Higgins acts as if he were a husband

to the ingénue,4 the husband in Mao Dun’s story behaves as if he were

a mentor to his wife. Products of the early twentieth century’s obsession

with modernity, both works illustrate the idea that desire and pedagogy

inform each other.

bell hooks (1994: 191–199) and others have recognized and emphasized

the role of eroticism in the pedagogical process. Reviewing academic

publications in the late 1990s on desire and pedagogy, however, Judith

P. Robertson and Mélisse Lafrance (2000: 266) argue that the intersection

of desire and pedagogy deserves still more scholarly attention. I hope

to contribute to such discussion by focusing on desire in pedagogical

situations in early-twentieth-century Chinese fiction. All of the texts under

discussion, published from the 1910s to the 1930s, demonstrate attention

to knowledge transmission. Such attention corresponds to the zeitgeist of

the decades around the pivotal 1919 May Fourth Movement, dubbed by

Vera Schwarcz as “the Chinese Enlightenment.”5

I use the term “enlightenment” to refer not only to this May Fourth

spirit but also to the act of instruction. The texts I discuss, though not

in this order, are Xu Zhenya’s novel Jade Pear Spirit (Yuli hun, 1912), Yu

Dafu’s short story “Misty Nights” (Mangmang ye, 1922), Ye Dingluo’s

story “Boyfriends” (Nanyou, ca. 1920s), Zhang Ziping’s novella Flying

Catkin (Feixu, 1926), Rou Shi’s novella February (Eryue, 1929), and Shen

Congwen’s story “Tiger Cub” (Huchu, 1931). These texts are populated

with characters who are concerned with learning: a private tutor (Jade

Pear Spirit), teachers in modern schools (“Misty Nights,” “Boyfriends,”

“February”), students (Flying Catkin, “Boyfriends”), students’ parents (Jade

Pear Spirit, “February”), and a patron who urges his youthful protégé to

receive a proper education (“Tiger Cub”). Acts of enlightenment, ranging

from literacy training to sexual initiation, are central in these texts, where

desire is found not only in the teacher-student relationship but also in such

relationships as those between a teacher and her colleague (February), a

3 Her leaving her husband is both literal and metaphorical. She leaves home without him and moves toward a future that he cannot attain.

4 The play implies that the post-enlightenment girl can be married either to the colonel or to the scholar (Shaw 1994: 69). Her being educated is constantly associated with her being well trained to be a wife.

5 “Enlightenment” also became a motto for late-twentieth-century China. As the feminist scholar Li Xiaojiang (2001: 1277) notes, “‘enlightenment’ became the prime subject of the Chinese social agenda . . . during the modernization of the 1980s.” Since there are plural processes of modernization in China, whose modernization processes are interrupted by the changing political climate, more than one process of “enlightenment” has occurred for the Chinese.


patron and his protégé (“Tiger Cub”), and a lonely widow and her naïve

in-law (Jade Pear Spirit). Yet these relationships also appear to be modeled

after the teacher-student relationship, in which desire is pursued or rejected

in the name of enlightenment.

I focus solely on same-sex desire not because heterosexual narratives,

such as Mao Dun’s “Creation,” are insignificant or scarce in modern

Chinese literature, but because little attention has been paid to it. In what

follows, I not only identify the existence of same-sex desire in these works,

but also argue that same-sex desire is very useful to the narratives on

pedagogy. The particular usefulness of same-sex desire varies among the

texts. In some, it is eroticized as a deviation from the heterosexual norm,

so that it accentuates the unusual nature of the pedagogy in question.

Such pedagogy appears too modern or too Western to Chinese because

it is associated with the seemingly outlandish same-sex desire. In others,

however, same-sex desire is desexualized so as to protect the pedagogical

exchange from a negative taint. In this way, it functions as a buffer for

those who seek to repress desire in pedagogical situations. While the

sexualized and asexual representations of same-sex desire are opposed to

each other, together they illustrate how pedagogy appeared ambivalent

to the Chinese at that time.

Desire and geopolitics overlap in the texts analyzed. I use the term

“geopolitics” because the exercise of power, in the forms of conquering

and subjugation, is predicated upon geographical differences. Pygmalion is

an example of the liaison between personal desire and colonial geopolitics

(London is superior to India). There is a fine line between the standard

English-speaking Higgins’s desire for the dialect-speaking girl—a surrogate

India, perhaps—and his desire to demonstrate cultural superiority over

her. In the works I examine, a geopolitical hierarchy also looms large. On

the top of the hierarchy are the modern nations, such as Japan and the

European countries, where “advanced” knowledge is available. Then come

cities such as Shanghai that mediate between the geopolitically privileged


countries and the underprivileged Chinese interior. At the bottom of the

hierarchy is “the local or the regional (xiangtu, difang),” which Prasenjit

Duara (2000: 13) sees as “a site of authentic values of a larger formation,

such as the nation or civilization.” In the works I analyze, Japan, Shanghai,

and the Chinese countryside are often envisioned as forming a vertical

axis along which characters travel; Japan is equipped with power and

knowledge, Shanghai is empowered with imported knowledge, and the

countryside, a synecdoche of the “authentic” China, lacks power and

knowledge altogether. The fictional characters climb “up” to acquire

knowledge in Japan and travel “down” to the countryside in order to

enlighten the people.

Geopolitics conditions the background of the texts under discussion.

Urbanites in early-twentieth-century China were enthusiastic about new

types of knowledge, including knowledge of sexuality. They were exposed

to the self-congratulatory sexologist Zhang Jingsheng, educated in France

and famous for his controversial 1926 book Sexual Histories,6 and the

German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who visited Shanghai in 1931

(Xiaomingxiong 1997: 271–277). The notion of “homosexuality” was also

translated into the Chinese context during this epoch. As Tze-lan Sang

(2003: 99–126) summarizes in her Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex

Desire in Modern China, the term “homosexuality” (tongxing lian’ai) was

transmitted to China via Japan by the 1920s, and Chinese writers started

writing about same-sex desire during the same period (133–154).

Knowledge of homosexuality, however, was unevenly distributed

among the Chinese. Shanghainese may have known “homosexuality”

as a concept, but it was less visible to local people at the bottom of the

geopolitical hierarchy, even if some of them practiced it. This unevenly

circulated knowledge of same-sex desire marks the works I discuss.

Whereas all of these works are attentive to pedagogy, not all of them

are predominantly concerned with same-sex desire. I do not include some

noteworthy works, such as short stories by Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua, partly

6 From the 1930s to its eventual republication in 2005, Chinese republication of Sexual Histories was banned. A Japanese version was published in 1999. The 2005 Chinese reprint published in Taipei is a combination of the original 1926 edition and its sequel.


because their stories are already discussed (Sang 2003: 133–148, 148–150)

and partly because they do not exhibit much concern with pedagogy.

Instead, I include such predominantly heterosexual narratives as the best-

selling Jade Pear Spirit and the acclaimed February, which are famous for

their expression of the pangs of male-female desire. I consider Jade Pear

Spirit and February in the essay not only because they center on pedagogical

relationships, but also because these heterosexual narratives accommodate

and even capitalize on same-sex desire.

I divide the works into two groups. In the first group, same-sex desire

is readily recognizable, with the characters clearly referring to the concept

of homosexuality or to homosexual celebrities in the West. I look at works

by Yu Dafu, Ye Dingluo,7 and Zhang Ziping, all of whom were associated

with the Creation Society and the Japanese model of modernity (Xiao 2003:

60–69). Current scholarship on same-sex desire in early-twentieth-century

China is narrowly focused on the Creation Society. A widely circulated

anecdote concerns Guo Moruo, a founding member of the society (Sun

2003: 1), who recalls nostalgically in his memoir his early homosexual

inclinations (Xiaomingxiong 1997: 265–269). Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping

also flaunt similar homoerotic scenarios in their autobiographical writings

(Xiao 2003: 316). In a 1928 article, Zhao Jingshen, a friend of Ye Dingluo’s,

enumerates the many non-normative libidinal acts, homosexual ones

included, displayed in Creation Society works.8

My second group of texts has received much less attention from scholars

of same-sex literature in China. It consists of texts in which same-sex desire

is conveyed much less explicitly; indeed, same-sex desire lies rather more

latently beneath the more prominent themes of relationships between men

and women and the frustration of modern pedagogy in a tradition-bound

society. Yet, unwittingly or not, the characters in this group manipulate

same-sex desire to suit their purposes; with the aid of same-sex desire,

pedagogical relationships are initiated, maintained, or prolonged. Same-

sex desire is thus critical to the works’ narrative momentum.

7 Ye Dingluo was a member of the Green Wave Society (Lübo she), a satellite of the Creation Society (Yang 1986: 1: 645).

8 Discussed in Lee 1996: 139–159. For the original article, see Zhao 1928.


Works with Explicit “Homosexuality”

With the publication of his 1921 story “Sinking” (Chenlun), which was

controversial for its portrayal of a Chinese young man’s sexual life in Japan,

Yu Dafu emerged on the literary scene as one of the best-known writers

of his time. “Misty Nights” (Mangmang ye, 1922) is no less sensational

in exhibiting the sexual adventures of a lascivious high school teacher,

whose name is Yu Zhifu, echoing Yu Dafu’s own name. Almost a sequel

to “Sinking,” “Misty Nights” features a Japanese-educated intellectual

returning to China after years of study abroad.

“Misty Nights” opens with the separation of Yu Zhifu, who is in his

mid-twenties, from his nineteen-year-old lover, Wu Chisheng. During

their days together in Shanghai, Yu Zhifu is intimate with and protective

of the effeminate Wu Chisheng, sharing his jacket and taking him to a

public bathhouse (Yu 1957: 13–14). Wu Chisheng has to leave Shanghai

to receive advanced medical treatment in Japan for his tuberculosis, a

condition that by this time had already become a common trope in Chinese

literature.9 After Yu Zhifu sees Wu off, he leaves metropolitan Shanghai to

teach in rural China. Yu Zhifu is thus deprived not only libidinally but also

geopolitically: his lover leaves Shanghai and travels “up” to Japan, whereas

he leaves Shanghai and travels “down” to the countryside.

After the separation, Yu Zhifu passes the time by comparing his

homosexual experience to the affair between the French poets Arthur

Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Although Yu Zhifu is far removed from Europe,

the top of the geopolitical hierarchy, he bridges this distance through

daydreaming. Yu Zhifu murmurs to himself, “Twenty-one-year-old, youthful

poet Rimbaud. Verlaine in 1872, the country landscape in the nation of

Belgium. An immaculate love between two men.”10 Later, on the way

to the school where he teaches, Yu Zhifu summons the names of Oscar

Wilde and Verlaine.11 The evocation of Western homosexual and bisexual

celebrities is useful to the narrative because it accentuates the exotic novelty

of “homosexuality.” However, the theme of same-sex desire mysteriously

9 As in works of Western romanticism, there are numerous sensitive characters with tuberculosis in modern Chinese fiction of the time. An obvious example is the female protagonist of Ding Ling’s 1928 story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi de riji).

10 See Yu Dafu 1957: 5. The French names “Arthur Rimbaud” and “Paul Verlaine” were originally inserted in the Chinese text.


disappears from the story after Wu’s departure for Japan. Yu Zhifu is more

preoccupied with his chronic frustrations with women than he is with his

separation from his male lover (8, 13, 22). Yu Zhifu’s same-sex relationship

is almost accidental and serves only as a temporary solace for his feelings

of loneliness. If same-sex desire is so dispensable to both the author and

his protagonist, then why did Yu Dafu introduce it in the first place?

I suggest that the homosexual relationship preoccupies Yu Dafu and Yu

Zhifu in the beginning of the story as a means to justify their ignoring of the

tumultuous sociopolitical context in which they are situated. Exoticized in

the story, same-sex desire enables both author and protagonist to prioritize

the individual over the collective, the libidinal over the political, and the

outlandish over the local/national.12 If same-sex desire is simply a means by

which the intellectual can turn attention away from the collective, libidinal

vehicles other than same-sex desire can serve the purpose just as well. In

“Misty Nights,” same-sex desire is only one of several libidinal behaviors,

all of which obsessively emphasize Yu Zhifu’s eccentricity. In other words,

same-sex desire is a means by which Zhifu—an enlightened intellectual—is

distinguished from the faceless masses.

Zhifu’s libidinal activities are eccentric not only because they defy

mainstream norms, but also because Zhifu moves from one activity to

another without any particular logical causality. Having taught for several

days, the aftertaste of Wu’s departure gone, Yu Zhifu is consumed by

two impulses: attraction for a young female student and looking for

streetwalkers in the slums. Clear-minded enough to realize that acting on

the first impulse would jeopardize his teaching job, Yu Zhifu follows the

second impulse. Wandering the streets one night, he stops in a shop and

buys a used handkerchief and a needle from the female shopkeeper. On

his return home, he sniffs the handkerchief and pricks himself with the

needle, causing a trickle of blood to flow. The narrative does not explain

why the earlier homosexual episode with Wu Chisheng is followed by this

scene of fetishism and masochism. More perplexing still, after this scene,

11 In the original text, “Wilde” and “Vearline [sic]” are indicated in both Chinese and European orthographies.

12 Duara (2000: 14–16) notes that the local is often deployed to stand for the national in early-twentieth-century China. Conceptualized this way, the local disquiet is a synecdoche of the national emergency.


and as the school is on the verge of disintegration because of extramural

and intramural conflicts, Yu Zhifu procures a prostitute whom he compares

in looks to an ape.

The story haphazardly mixes same-sex desire with heterosexual desire,

fetishism with masochism, and attraction to a young student with desire

for an ugly prostitute. While such pre-twentieth-century novels as The

Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) and The Precious Mirror of

Ranking Flowers (Pinhua baojian) clearly illustrate that in the past gentry

men could enjoy both male-male and male-female affairs, the teacher in

“Misty Nights” is influenced less by the Chinese tradition than by such

European models as Rimbaud and Wilde. In other words, the enlightened

teacher’s sexual longings are “modern” rather than traditional. In the story’s

narrative logic, these varying sexual activities are of a kind, both because

they are beyond the mainstream and because the protagonist does not

take them as out of the ordinary. They are recounted in so matter-of-fact

a tone that the “abnormal” becomes “normal.”

By conflating various sexual practices, “Misty Nights” seems to be a

radical affirmation of individuality; all sexual practices are as acceptable

as the heterosexual norm. This story is a catalogue of diverse non-

mainstream sexual acts that attract the teacher, an agent of enlightenment;

as such, the mission of enlightenment assumes a dauntingly audacious

outlook. Yet, this ostensibly subversive story, with its cavalier depiction

of Westernized homosexuality, dilutes what might at first glance appear

to be a plea on behalf of the socially marginalized homosexual. The story

collapses homosexuality with sexualities at large, and as a result it deprives

homosexuality of its potential to be a critical issue in and of itself; same-sex

desire is sidestepped rather than engaged critically. In a conservative social

context such as that of China, this relaxed attitude toward homosexuality

both elevates and trivializes homosexuality.

Ye Dingluo was a disciple of Yu Dafu (Su 1984: 325), and so it is not

surprising that his works are reminiscent of those of his mentor (Zhao 1999:


216). Like Yu’s “Misty Nights,” “Boyfriends” begins with the separation of

two same-sex lovers. One is the principal protagonist, an unnamed teacher,

and the other is eighteen-year-old Mr. C, a local of the village where the

protagonist teaches. Mr. C is similar to Wu Chisheng in “Misty Nights”: both

are young lovers to male teachers, and both are described as unmanly.

“Boyfriends” seems to pay Mr. C more respect than “Misty Nights” does to

Wu Chisheng; Mr. C is given more of the narrative spotlight and even some

dialogue, whereas Wu’s presence in “Misty Nights” is scarce. However, the

greater attention to Mr. C does not suggest that he is on an equal footing

with the teacher, to whom he is systematically subordinated. Rather, he

is like a dependent woman who adheres to conventional female gender

norms. Throughout “Boyfriends,” the pronoun used for the teacher is the

ordinary “he” (ta), while that for Mr. C is the same character with quotation

marks around it (Ye 1989: 7, 11), suggesting that Mr. C’s manliness is in

question. It is thus no wonder that Mr. C wishes aloud, in front of his

teacher-lover, that he were a woman. The pedantic teacher-lover never

expresses a similar desire (20).

Hailing from a modernized city and assigned to teach in the

countryside,13 the teacher protagonist of “Boyfriends” is upset with rural-

urban differences in general and is especially irritated with the crude

young men in the countryside (1). Desperate for any exquisite boyfriend

in school, the teacher finally locates and captures the willowy student Mr.

C. Whereas in “Misty Nights” moving to the countryside brings an end to

Yu Zhifu’s homosexual activities, in “Boyfriends” the countryside supplies

the teacher-protagonist with a lover. Fortunate as he may be to find a

boyfriend, he is after all in the countryside, where same-sex desire is not

acceptable, unlike in the more liberal Shanghai. The teacher is fired when

students at the rural school rise up in opposition to the relationship. The

tension between the hostile students and the protagonist is both libidinal

opposition between those who are against same-sex desire and those who

are for it and a geopolitical opposition between the rural and the urban.

13 “Boyfriends” does not mention Shanghai. All the names of locations are indicated with English initials rather than with Chinese characters. The text asserts clearly that the protagonist is an urbanite who loathes the countryside.


The teacher is virtually an urban invader of the countryside. With a sense of

superiority reminiscent of Lu Xun’s Ah Q, the teacher considers his expulsion

from school a badge of honor rather than a disgrace.

The superior urbanity upon which the teacher depends for his sense of

identity explains why he is more than willing to confess his non-mainstream

sexuality. Whereas “the Love that dare not speak its name” characterized

the bond between Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, the teacher in

“Boyfriends,” written merely two decades after Wilde’s martyrdom, enjoys

the love that dares to announce itself repeatedly. With his bold confessions,

the teacher is sharply distinguished from his more reserved counterparts

in most Chinese fiction that portrays same-sex desire. Nonetheless, the

confession-addicted teacher is unreliable. If the protagonist in “Misty

Nights” is incoherent with regard to same-sex desire, the teacher-

protagonist in “Boyfriends” is so smoothly coherent that his unflagging

defense of the controversial sexuality appears unbelievable.

Although the lustful teacher in “Misty Nights” and the loving teacher

in “Boyfriends” are similar in revealing homosexual impulses, they also

stand in contrast to each other in terms of their psyches. The former seems

schizophrenic and incoherent in his multiple sexual proclivities, whereas

the latter is almost delusional in his homosexual obsession. So anxious is

he to have his same-sex desire accepted that the teacher-protagonist in

“Boyfriends” appears to talk himself into a “fantasy,” which Sigmund Freud

(1953–74a: 146) defines to be “the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of

unsatisfying reality.” The protagonist struggles to hold on to his fantasy.

As Mr. C advises him to act more discreetly, the protagonist responds, “do

people make fun of this [the homosexual teacher-student relationship]?

If so, do they make fun of father-son love? Do they make fun of brotherly

love?” (19). The protagonist’s naïve casuistry is less a defense of his

homosexual relationship than it is a betrayal of his inability to negotiate

his libidinal activities with his antagonistic environment.

Fantasies are not foreign to the reader of early-twentieth-century


Chinese fiction. Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji, 1918),

for example, exhibits an explicit fantasy in which everybody appears

cannibalistic (Lu Xun 1998, 1: 487–532). In “Boyfriends,” it is fantastically

legitimate or even laudable for male teachers to fall in love with their own

students of the same sex (Ye 1989: 2–3). The protagonist actually finds

support rather than hostility from his colleagues, whose major pastime

after work is to get together and evaluate the appearances of their male

students (8).

These teachers seem to constitute a supportive homophile community,

but this community, as the cryptic story implies, exists only in the

protagonist’s fantasy; these boy-loving teachers do not materialize in

real life. Thus the protagonist is enveloped in the kind of fantasy that

psychoanalytic theorists Jean Laplanche and Jean-Betrand Ponatalis

describe as “a setting,” in which the subjects believe they participate but

which they cannot find in reality (1986: 26). As the protagonist is being

exiled, none of the fantasized colleagues ever materializes in real life to

take sides with the protagonist and come to his rescue. “Boyfriends” is

thus a story with ambivalent messages. On the one hand, it presents an

intellectual who pursues the libidinal at the risk of losing his educational

career because it is essential to his sense of self. On the other hand, it is a

satire of a modern educator deluded by egocentrism.

One of the most productive and complicated May Fourth writers

(Sun 2003: 3), Zhang Ziping has been often ignored by literary historians

for political reasons.14 I group his Flying Catkin, depicting female-female

desire, with the aforementioned two stories on male-male desire because

I want to indicate that members of the Creation Society are not interested

in male homosexuality alone. Zhang’s huge body of fiction has won him a

mixed reputation. Many are commercial and known for their depictions of

women’s promiscuity (Su 1984: 327–332). Flying Catkin, for one, portrays

explicit sexual practices between two women—a girl and her aunt. Also

noteworthy is its popular reception. In the 1920s, at the same time that

14 Tze-lan Sang (2003: 128) mentions but does not discuss Zhang Ziping’s Flying Catkin. Zhang Ziping is best known for having collaborated with the Japanese (Yang 1986: 1: 604–607). Yet according to a recent book (Sun 2003: 3), Zhang might actually have been an undercover agent working for the Chinese Communist Party. Zhang’s loyalty to China, however, remains questioned in the scholarship.


Flying Catkin was enjoying popularity in China, Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of

Loneliness, one of the precursors of modern lesbian literature in English,

was being accused of obscenity in Britain. Zhang’s works were so popular

that they triggered criticism from the likes of Lu Xun and Zhang Ailing.15

Zhang Ailing criticized Flying Catkin even as late as 1988, six decades after

the book’s original publication.16 Negative as the comments from writers

as diverse as Lu Xun and Zhang Ailing are, their responses underline the

fact that Zhang Ziping’s works were in some ways unforgettable to his

contemporaries.

Flying Catkin centers on Xiuxia, a female ingénue. Xiuxia studies at

a local normal school for girls (Zhang 1926: 37). She aspires to a college

education, and hopes to be like her Auntie Yun, sister to Xiuxia’s mother.

Auntie Yun is a student at a university located in “S” city, presumably

Shanghai. Auntie Yun’s status as a university student is impressive to her

contemporaries, because female college students were rare at that time.

By the 1920s, educational resources for Chinese women were unevenly

distributed, an unevenness that is illustrated in literature. The female

students that appear in the stories of Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua, for example,

are the privileged few among the vast majority of Chinese women who

receive little or no education. In Ba Jin’s 1931 best-selling novel Family,

set in the interior city of Chengdu, women’s access to education is more

severely blocked. The uneven educational resources for women are

tellingly illustrated in a major shift in the fiction of Ding Ling, one of the

best-known female writers in Republican China. The protagonist in “Miss

Sophia’s Diary” (1928) is a female student who lives an independent life

surrounded by fellow students of both sexes. However, in her 1933 novel

Mother, schools that admit women are still seen as a novelty marveled at

by female characters. In the 1920s, Ding focuses on female students and

seems to take their status for granted, whereas in the 1930s she represents

women’s education as a luxury not available to all women.

By the 1920s, this difference between educated women and

15 To ridicule Zhang and his propensity for triangular love stories, Lu Xun draws a triangle into his critique (1998: 4: 230–232). The currently available materials on Zhang Ailing’s views of Zhang Ziping seem contradictory. On the one hand, Zhang Ailing reportedly appreciated his works (Sun 2003: 4–5). On the other hand, she wrote in an essay that she enjoyed mocking Zhang Ziping’s sentimental style (1992b: 189).

16 Zhang Ailing recalls that in an unspecified bestseller by Zhang Ziping, a young man has an affair with his “Auntie Yun.” Although Zhang Ailing mistakes the female protagonist for a man (probably the result of a failing memory), this mistake does not invalidate her opinion of Zhang’s writing. Rather, it shows how much of an impression Flying Catkin made on her (1992a: 363–364).


undereducated women is scrupulously conditioned by geopolitical

differences. In Flying Catkin, Auntie Yun, with her Shanghai cultural capital,

appears outlandish to her family in the countryside. Auntie Yun is said to

“study serious literature in college,” to aspire to “become a woman writer

after graduation,” to “prefer being single,” and to “have fallen out of love

during her stay in Shanghai” (Zhang 1926: 7). The gossip concerning Auntie

Yun has mixed messages. From one standpoint, Auntie Yun is excessively

feminine, with her pale countenance (37) and tubercular look (147). From

the other standpoint, however, she is also too unwomanly: career-minded,

immersed in the urban culture of Shanghai, and not dependent on men.

The negotiated coexistence of womanliness and unwomanliness in Auntie

Yun can be considered in light of Joan Riviere’s (1929: 38) argument

that womanliness functions as a mask “both to hide the possession of

masculinity and to avert reprisals expected if she was found to possess

it.” Unfortunately, as the story unfolds, the mask fails to protect Auntie

Yun from a sudden death, a symbolic punishment and a denouement that

commonly occurs to unconventional women in popular fiction.

Auntie Yun mentors the protagonist’s in all aspects of life, even

sexuality. Motivated by the search for knowledge, Xiuxia accepts the sexual

advances of Auntie Yun, who becomes her carnal tutor. The tutelage occurs

during a vacation, when Xiuxia shares a bed with the seductive Auntie

Yun. Like an apprentice, Xiuxia confesses, “Auntie Yun is indeed a fiction

writer, for her knowledge of sex is abundant. I did not know numerous,

secretive, amazing facts about sex until she taught me” (52, emphasis

mine). Xiuxia sees Aunty Yun as a researcher of carnal knowledge who

“often wants to know my physical mysteries, extending her hands to my

bosom and belly from time to time” (53, emphasis mine). The tutelage

goes on for two weeks.

Xiuxia recognizes tongxing’ai, one of the Chinese translations of the

term “homosexuality,”17 in her intimacy with Auntie Yun (52). However,

her understanding of tongxing’ai is not necessarily congruous with

17 For a discussion of the Chinese translations of “homosexuality,” see Sang 2003: 99–106.


contemporary understandings of the term. Engaged in same-sex sexual

acts but unaware of their ramifications, Xiuxia considers herself a virgin;

when the two-week period of daily sexual experimentation with Auntie

Yun is over, she turns her attentions to men. Unlike the protagonist in

“Boyfriends,” Xiuxia does not seek out the support of a cohort of the same

sex. Yet Xiuxia is also, anachronistically, something like a late-twentieth-

century lesbian. The affect between Auntie Yun and Xiuxia is reciprocal

rather than one-sided, as if anticipating Teresa de Lauretis’s (1994: 123)

statement that “it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian.” Not

forgetting the taste of female-female sex, Xiuxia does not want to betray

Auntie Yun by dating men (56–57). When Xiuxia cannot decide upon a

future husband with whom she can lead a monogamous heterosexual life,

she concludes that her best future is to “be single” “together with Auntie

Yun” (77). Xiuxia’s contradiction—to be at once “single” and “together”—

carries a sexual undertone. Throughout Flying Catkin, a woman’s “being

single” functions as a euphemism for female-female desire: a single woman

says no to men but yes to women.

Whereas the teachers in “Misty Nights” and “Boyfriends” end up

leaving their pedagogical spaces, Auntie Yun, who initiates Xiuxia to sex,

must die. Flying Catkin obsessively portrays Auntie Yun’s death (190–201),

apparently of tuberculosis. Auntie Yun’s death is a convenient solution to

a stalemate in the narrative, which hinges upon Auntie Yun as a vixen.

After developing a sexual relationship with Xiuxia, Auntie Yun inexplicably

competes with Xiuxia for men; in this way, the female-female relationship

will not eclipse the general heterosexual tenor of Flying Catkin. After Auntie

Yun converts to heterosexuality, she disappears, allowing Xiuxia free rein

in her pursuit of men. When Auntie Yun finally reappears, her sudden

death—a deus ex machina—lends the narrative a moralistic, antisexual

closure. The representation of Auntie Yun in the novella reveals an anxiety

toward highly educated women, women who love other women, and

women who are economically and sexually independent of men.


A more productive reading of a work like Flying Catkin must go beyond

the task of merely locating same-sex desire to interpret how same-sex desire

functions allegorically. One such reading would be that same-sex desire

functions to set off defiant individuality against the conforming multitude.

On a geopolitical level, same-sex desire serves to highlight the tension

between urban individuals and rural people. Same-sex desire helps paint

the urban pedagogical protagonists as eccentric in contrast to the rural

majority, where defiant teachers are detached from the pedagogical space

(“Misty Nights”), banished by students (“Boyfriends”), or even sentenced

to death (Flying Catkin).

Works with Implicit Same-Sex Desire

In the second group of stories, representation of same-sex desire is less

recognizable but no less instrumental in the narratives. The first text in

the second group is Shen Congwen’s 1934 story “Tiger Cub.” I discuss Shen

Congwen here in part as a contrast to the writers of the Creation Society,

with whom he debated on the nature of literature in 1930s. Known as

“the Jingpai versus Haipai rivalry,” the debates marked a confrontation

between the Beijing school and the Shanghai school. A member of the

Beijing school, which preferred a literary style characterized by simplicity,

elegance, and rural color, Shen Congwen attacked the modern style of the

Shanghai school writers as commercial, sensational, and excessively urban

and Western (Yang 2003: 8–55). Works by Creation Society members are

loosely associated with the Shanghai school; by contrasting rural boredom

with Shanghai phantasmagoria, for example, “Misty Nights” can be seen

as a forerunner of the Shanghai school. More exemplary of the Shanghai

school is Flying Catkin,18 a bestseller whose author was notoriously market-

savvy.19

Shen Congwen’s “Tiger Cub” narrates the education of a young man

who is compared to a tiger cub. The figure of “tiger cub” (huchu) was

important to Shen: he named one of his sons Huchu20 and wrote two essays

18 The copyright page of the 1927 version published by the Creation Society indicates that there were five imprints of Flying Catkin within a year, yielding nine thousand copies of the book. For a representative discussion of Zhang’s marketing and self-promotion, see Yang 1986: 1: 597–607.

19 Jeffrey Kinkley (1987: 138) notes that Shen despised Zhang Ziping’s “cheap erotic subliterature.”

20 See Ling 1988: 350; and Chin 2002: 215. Shen Huchu was a member of the editorial committee of The Complete Works of Shen Congwen.


in 1934 that show his obsession with the figure of the tiger cub.21 Moreover,

a reading of “Tiger Cub” helps complicate Shen’s geopolitical position

between the Beijing school and the Shanghai school. In her essay on ethics

in Shen’s rural writings, Janet Ng criticizes Shen for selling rural flavor to

urban consumers. She concludes that Shen “sanitize(s) the bloodiness and

horrific conditions of the countryside, so that urban readers can traverse the

beautified land on a guided tour,” with the guide being nobody other than

the lyrical Shen (Ng 2001: 102). Ng’s criticism might appear harsh to those

who enjoy Shen’s writings; while her accusation of Shen’s colonization of

the local is debatable, the urbanites’ fetishism of the rural in “Tiger Cub”

is too obvious to deny.

“Tiger Cub” is set in the early twentieth century and portrays the

rural-urban conflict as experienced by xiangxiaren (country folk).22 The

rural-urban geopolitical opposition between the narrator and his brother

dominates “Tiger Cub.” Although previously employed in the army, the

narrator is an unmarried writer in Shanghai, the hotbed of Haipai writers.

His brother is a military officer stationed in West Hunan,23 which Shen’s

celebrated novella The Border Town portrays in an idyllic fashion. One a

“man of letters” (wenren), the other a “man of arms” (wuren), the brothers

form a contrasting binary that is historically significant in the Chinese

context.24 The contrast underlines the dialectic between the two men, one

a soldier who leaves the ranks to pursue letters (qi wu cong wen),25 the

other a serving officer.

In his preference for the urban over the rural, the narrator of the story

contrasts with Shen’s own adherence to the rural values of the Beijing

school. In other words, the narrator looks like a Shanghai school writer.

The narrator is interested in an orderly named “Young Soldier” (Xiaobing)

who serves the narrator’s brother.26 The narrator wants to relocate Young

Soldier from the countryside to Shanghai, because he believes that Young

Soldier is too promising a talent to remain uncivilized in the hinterland.

He proposes to civilize Young Soldier in Shanghai (16–21). The narrator’s

21 The two essays are “My Impressions of Tiger Cub” (Huchu yingxiang) and “Reencounter with the Tiger Cub (Huchu zai yu ji). See Shen 2002b and 2002c. As mentioned in the former, Tiger Cub seems to be same characters as in the story “Tiger Cub,” but the details in the two works do not match exactly. For example, Tiger Cub works with the narrator’s third brother in the essay, but in the story Tiger Cub (Young Soldier) works with the narrator’s sixth brother. “Reencounter with the Tiger Cub” appears to be a sequel to “Tiger Cub,” but there are also incongruities between the two texts. In this essay, for example, the narrator calls Young Soldier “Leopard Cub” (xiaobaozi) rather than “Tiger Cub” (Shen 2002c: 298, 304).

22 See Ling 1988: 343. This translation “country folk” is Kinkley’s (1987).

23 Kinkley (1987: 133) observes that Shen loved the regional character of West Hunan, which is fierce, barbaric, and violently opposed to social norms.

24 For a detailed discussion of the dialectic between wen and wu, see Louie 2002.

25 The two characters cong wen in this phrase were adopted by Shen for his pen name, “Shen Congwen.”

26 See Shen 2002a: 15. Kinkley notes that “Xiaobing” is among Shen’s pen names and locates portrayals of young soldiers in Shen’s works (Kinkley 1987: 43). It is tempting to assume that Young Soldier is one of Shen’s alter egos.


enlightenment project is similar to that of Higgins’s in Pygmalion, in which

the flower girl is transformed into a “duchess.” The narrator thinks, “I’ve

decided to dress him [Young Soldier] up as a prince, because he is worth

attention” (21). Also similar to Higgins, the narrator in “Tiger Cub” desires

the student, unwittingly or not, and justifies his yearnings in the name of

enlightenment. Young Soldier is frequently described as good-looking (15,

16, 21, 26, 32, 39, 41). The narrator cannot stop looking at him, and other

male characters in the story also see him as the object of homoerotic desire.27

The narrator enjoys displaying Young Soldier to friends in Shanghai (15,

26), just as the duchess-in-training is exhibited to the elites in Pygmalion.

The narrator insists upon relocating Young Soldier from the countryside

to Shanghai. But the narrator’s attitude toward the city and the countryside

is more complicated than it appears. The narrator is attracted to him partly

because Young Soldier embodies the locality of West Hunan. The sound

of Young Soldier’s local dialect moves the narrator (2002a: 27). Although

he objects to it, the historian Prasenjit Duara (2000: 14–16) recognizes

that the local in China is commonly “incorporated into the national.”

The narrator and his brother’s preoccupation with Young Soldier shifts to

the topic of national character, as if Young Soldier were a synecdoche of

China. When the brother sighs that the “chronic national habits” (minzu

jixi) in Young Soldier cannot be changed (29), the narrator becomes even

more determined to change him (30). When the brother comments that

Young Soldier can only survive the countryside as a soldier, the narrator

retorts that the lad should be nurtured in Shanghai as a future intellectual.

Unbeknownst to the two brothers, China’s future would be in the hands of

Mao Zedong’s rural men of arms, who seized the cities, leaving the urban

men of letters with no terrain of their own.

The rural-urban and military-intellectual fissures in the story are healed

by the narrator’s same-sex affection for Young Soldier. The emotional

attachment to Young Soldier rekindles the narrator’s attention to the

country folk and the military people, whom the narrator had forgotten.

27 In “Tiger Cub,” Young Soldier tells the narrator that when he was bathing once, the other students ridiculed him for having extraordinarily white buttocks (ma wo pigu bi bieren de bai) (2002a: 23). In “Reencounter with the Tiger Cub,” the sequel to “Tiger Cub,” the narrator witnesses how Young Soldier strips off his clothes (shangxia yifu tuo de guangguang) and jumps into a river in winter (2002c: 300–301).


As David Wang (1992: 235) comments, Shen Congwen’s representation

of passion reveals “a tendentious wish for transgression” that moves the

characters “to go beyond the limits of ordinary ethical assumptions.”

When he cannot keep Young Soldier around anymore toward the end of

the story, the narrator becomes tearful (39), resembling a man abandoned

by his male lover (37–38). He learns of the rumors that he has had a love

affair with Young Soldier (41). Because of his passion for Young Soldier, the

narrator unwittingly reverts to his former country folk identity. His libidinal

transgression, in the form of same-sex desire, redefines his geopolitical

position.

But now the narrator’s loyalties are divided between the metropolis

and the countryside, and he fails to mend the divide between the two.

He chooses to confess his failed love rather than to deny it (41). Not shy

about speaking of his same-sex affection, the narrator is reminiscent of

the confession-addicted teacher in Ye Dingluo’s “Boyfriends.” However,

although both men depend on confessions, the patron in “Tiger Cub” and

the teacher protagonist in “Boyfriends” are involved in different types of

geopolitics. In “Boyfriends,” the teacher is convinced that he as an urban

intellectual is superior to the country folk, who are crude and hostile to the

allegedly delicate nature of same-sex desire. In “Tiger Cub,” the narrator

situates himself ambiguously between the rural and the urban. “Tiger Cub”

ends with a passage describing his situation in a maudlin way:

Whether it is common in my hometown that a savage soul is contained in a beautiful box, I do not know. I only know that the mountains and waters in my hometown make the fauna and flora ferocious. Among the people in my hometown, my temperament is considered to be the least predatory. However, if we compare you, who grew up in the big cities, and me, you will feel I am already too rough. (41, emphasis mine)

The ending of the story is preoccupied with the dilemma between the local

and the urban. This dilemma is played out in the literary field: whereas


writers of the Beijing school prefer the ferocious fauna and flora in the

countryside, those of the Shanghai school are the civilized intellectuals in

the metropolises. The narrator himself is too civilized to belong fully to his

hometown and too savage or rough for the metropolis. This story, written

by a major Beijing school writer, is not opposed to the Shanghai school;

rather, the story suggests that the narrator is caught irresolvably between

the rural and the urban.

In the works of the Creation Society, same-sex desire serves to

distinguish eccentric individuals from the collective, or urbanites from

country folk. In “Tiger Cub,” the narrator’s love for Young Soldier provides

for a potential union of the rural with the urban, and the military with the

intellectual. But once the narrator loses Young Soldier—the “savage soul

contained in a beautiful box” (yeman de linghun, zhuang zai yige meili

hezi li)28—it dawns on him that his fetishistic desire for Young Soldier will

remain unsatisfied. The disillusioned narrator stops paying attention to

Young Soldier and by extension to his own brother (41), both of whom

stand for rural people. The rural-urban connection made possible by the

passion for Young Soldier eventually collapses when same-sex passion

loses its purchase.

The four preceding texts are post–May Fourth works, whereas Xu

Zhenya’s Jade Pear Spirit was published in 1912, just after the anti-Qing

revolution but well before the May Fourth movement of 1919, and is

often considered the prototype of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

school (Fan 1999: 276–277). But Jade Pear Spirit is not as alienated from

the May Fourth spirit as is commonly assumed. Scholars recognize that the

origins of the May Fourth movement can be traced back to as early as the

late nineteenth century. As David Wang (1998: 23–43) puts it, “if there

were no Late Qing, would there have been May Fourth?” By including a

pre–May Fourth work, I hope to envision a more inclusive understanding

of modern Chinese literature. Jade Pear Spirit resembles the preceding

texts because it features an educator who fails to balance his passion and

28 The phrase “a savage soul is contained in a beautiful box” is reminiscent of Janet Ng’s criticism. Lyrical as it is, the image of a beautifully boxed savage might cater to the urban consumer.


teaching profession and because same-sex desire functions instrumentally

to propel the narrative.

In the previously discussed texts, geopolitical differences dominate. The

geopolitical situation is less explicit in Jade Pear Spirit, for all the characters

in the novel are located in the affluent province of Jiangsu. The characters

are conditioned less by geopolitical differences than by differences in

mobility (which is, of course, not unrelated to geopolitics). The central

character Liying, meaning “pear shadow,” is a twenty-seven-year-old widow

bound at home. Although she lives in Jiangsu, near Shanghai, she is not

exposed to the changing world outside her home. In contrast to Liying is

her sister-in-law, Yunqian, who is enrolled in a girls’ school. (Girls’ schools at

that time were, by definition, Westernized rather than traditional.) Whereas

the homebound Liying obeys traditions, the mobile Yunqian aspires to the

modern. In other words, within the same province of Jiangsu, different

conditions of mobility exist for different women.

Liying hires Mengxia, a man educated in the transitional period

between the traditional and the modern, to work as her child’s tutor.

Mengxia has twice failed the state examinations and later enrolled in a

modern normal school (Xu 1986: 10). In spite of herself, Liying falls in love

with Mengxia. She wants to keep him around so much that she conceives a

plan to bring him into the family. Since, as a widow, Liying is not supposed

to remarry according to Confucian ethical codes, she conceives the plan of

tao dai li jiang (substituting a plum with a peach), according to which it is

not she herself, but rather her sister-in-law, Yunqian, who is to be Mengxia’s

wife. Toward the end of the novel, after Liying’s plan plunges everybody

into misery, Mengxia leaves for Japan, which, as discussed earlier, sits near

the top of the geopolitical hierarchy.29 Given the narrative as described so

far, Jade Pear Spirit would seem to be heterosexual-centered novel.

Yet, the novel also relies on a rivalry that is not necessarily heterosexual.

According to textual clues in the twelfth chapter, meaningfully titled “The

Rival of Love” (Qing di), the rivalry is neither male-centric nor necessarily

29 Mengxia eventually returns to China. He sublimates his libido to the anti-Qing revolutionary cause and dies in an uprising (176).


heterosexual. As Liying is seriously ill, presumably a result of lovesickness,

Yunqian comes to her rescue. According to the narrator, Yunqian is Liying’s

healer as well as rival to Mengxia (71–72). As Yunqian and Mengxia are

rivals, the libidinal flows are not heterosexual. It is not Mengxia who is

given the right to form a relationship with either Yunqian or Liying, both

possibilities being heterosexual; rather, it is Liying who selects between

Mengxia and Yunqian, offering potentially either a heterosexual union

or a homosexual-incestuous relationship.

The female-female love between two sisters-in-law in the novel is not in

accord with contemporary conceptions of lesbianism. As mentioned earlier,

the term “homosexuality” emerged in China in the 1920s. Preceding the

1926 Flying Catkin by more than a decade, Jade Pear Spirit does not summon

an anachronistic lesbianism. Nonetheless, according to textual clues in the

novel, Yunqian’s female-female love is indeed similar to certain expressions

of late-twentieth-century Western lesbianism. Yunqian is a rival to Mengxia

because Yunqian and Liying are intimate with each other, often physically

(72). When Mengxia does not have access to intimacy with Liying, Yunqian

does. The rivalry between Mengxia and Yunqian is further complicated by

the fact that the man and the girl are also rivals in the field of knowledge.

As a sixteen-year-old female student, Yunqian is enthusiastic about modern

learning and extends her passion for knowledge to her sister-in-law, Liying,

whom she wishes could also attend school. Since Liying is homebound,

Yunqian adopts the alternative method of educating her at home. While

Mengxia tutors Liying’s child, Yunqian tutors Liying. For example, Yunqian

teaches Liying about the new fashion for freely chosen marriage partners.

This episode is ironic and ominous, because all the marriages in the novel

are of the traditional, arranged sort (77–78).

In contrast to the youthful Yunqian, Mengxia, an intellectual caught

between traditional scholarship and modern Western learning, frowns upon

the xinxue jie (the new academics circle) (54). For Mengxia, Yunqian is a


rival in desire, but she also embodies a modern, Western form of learning

that competes with his own traditional education. Despite their rivalry,

the widow loves both of them so much that she wants to reconcile their

differences by having them marry. Her plan infuriates Yunqian, who always

prefers the modern to the traditional. Yunqian argues that she herself is

opposed to arranged marriages, not because she has learned bad habits

from the xinxue jie30 but because she, being enlightened, understands how

women are victimized by traditional patriarchal hegemony (132–133).

After a tug-of-war between the sisters-in-law, the one stressing modern

ideals and the other trumpeting conventional values, Yunqian surrenders

(133–134). She not only accepts an arranged marriage, but, to everybody’s

surprise, she also gives up her modern education, which has been so central

to her life. Yunqian caters to her sister-in-law by sacrificing her beliefs in

free love and modern knowledge (141–142). Whereas the educated Auntie

Yun in Flying Catkin dies, Yunqian commits metaphorical suicide by rejecting

her modern self. Rather than be resentful toward each other, however, the

two sisters-in-law remain devoted. When Liying dies, the death is more

heartbreaking for Yunqian than for Mengxia (152). Of those surrounding

Liying’s deathbed, Yunqian is the most wretched (162–163).

The narrative of Jade Pear Spirit moves forward at the expense of

female-female love. When given a choice, Yunqian chooses to satisfy rather

than disappoint Liying by accepting her whimsical proposal. At the same

time, she disappoints herself. Liying’s manipulation of female-female love

helps link the traditionalist Mengxia with the pro–new learning Yunqian.

The gap between the two types of intellectuals is thus provisionally bridged

by a desire alternative to the heterosexual norm.

My final text is Rou Shi’s novella February.31 A beloved student of

Lu Xun’s, Rou Shi was a left-wing writer executed by the Nationalists in

1931 (Yang 1986: 2: 277–278). Known for expressing compassion for the

underprivileged in his writing (Yang 1986: 2: 293), Rou Shi had a frustrating

literary career; publishers found his works unmarketable because they did

30 Her words imply that “new academics circle” was at the time a pejorative term.

31 February was adapted into the film Early Spring in February by the director Xie Tieli. It became a television show in 2004.


not indulge in romantic love and sex (Yang 1986: 2: 279).

February is both similar to and different from the previously discussed

works. On the one hand, the novella’s plot, in which characters are torn

between passion and the teaching profession, is archetypal and is similar

to the other works in this genre. In his introduction to February, Lu Xun

summarizes the story in a way that makes it sound like the plot of Jade

Pear Spirit: “The militant warrior, the naïve orphans, the young widow, the

passionate woman, people with respective beliefs, in a stagnant society

where whispers are exchanged . . . [there is] such an archetype [referring

to the protagonist in February] among the youths nowadays” (Lu Xun

1929: 1–2). However, the novella is also atypical in being the least obviously

sexual among the texts I consider. In fact, this novella does not indicate

any same-sex desire at all. While same-sex affection is locatable in “Tiger

Cub” and Jade Pear Spirit, it is not in February. Same-sex desire appears

in the work in a more oblique fashion. The teacher characters repress

heterosexual desire by finding a haven in same-sex affinity, as if same-sex

affect were not sexual at all. I suggest that same-sex desire occurs not only

to characters of the same sex but also to a man and a woman when they

imagine themselves to be in a same-sex relationship.

In Lu Xun’s summary, the warrior refers to the unmarried intellectual

Xiao Jianqiu, who in the month of February, a time that evokes the

hopefulness of the coming spring, leaves Shanghai to teach at a rural middle

school. In the small town, which contrasts geopolitically with Shanghai,

Xiao Jianqiu finds himself torn between two women. One is “the passionate

woman” (Lu Xun’s words), the twenty-four-year old Tao Lan, Xiao Jianqiu’s

sexually aggressive colleague in school. The other is the “young widow,”

mother of “the naïve orphans,” the twenty-seven-year-old Wensao (also

known as Mrs. Li). Wensao’s husband Mr. Li, Xiao Jianqiu’s former classmate,

died fighting in a revolutionary uprising. In the “stagnant society where

whispers are exchanged,” provincial people ridicule Xiao Jianqiu over

whether he will choose the oversexualized Tao Lan or the desexualized


Wensao. They interpret Xiao Jianqiu’s devotion to Wensao as a sign of his

lustful interest in the widow, who by traditional social norms is supposed

to be asexual. Bombarded by sexually suggestive rumors, Xiao Jianqiu

leaves the village for Shanghai, ending up as yet another fictional teacher

distracted by desire from the enlightenment mission. It is easy to imagine

why Xiao Jianqiu is interested in the sexualized and youthful Tao Lan, but

he is at the same time drawn to the desexualized and weary Wensao. The

death of Wensao’s husband is not only a personal loss for Wensao but also

a reminder of Xiao Jianqiu’s absence from the revolutionary movement.

He is determined to help the widow and her children, so that he can help

his former classmate and compensate for his own lack of commitment to

the masses.

Xiao Jianqiu’s mentality reflects the May Fourth obsession with

widows.32 Lu Xun, for one, expresses the May Fourth sentiment in several

writings, including his essays “My View on Chastity” (1998: 1: 116–128) and

“Widow-ism” (1998: 1: 262–269). In “New Year’s Sacrifice,” the first-person

narrator pities the twice-widowed Xiang Lin Sao but can do nothing to

relieve her misfortune. February seems to respond to “New Year’s Sacrifice,”

with the protagonist Xiao Jianqiu choosing to intervene in Wensao’s life.

Xiao Jianqiu indulges in mourning his lost classmate—the revolutionary

martyr, the dead husband and father—to such a degree that he plunges into

a Freudian “melancholia” (Freud 1953-74b). In the process, Xiao becomes

a surrogate Mr. Li. Thus, Xiao Jianqiu stands in an ambiguous relationship

to Wensao: since he is not Wensao’s husband, he has to avoid any sexual

associations with her; yet, since he functions as a kind of surrogate husband,

he must be loyal to her and resist any “extramarital” affairs. In other words,

Xiao Jianqiu has to disavow any desire for the seductive Tao Lan so as not

to betray the widow qua wife.

Torn between Wensao and Tao Lan, neither of whom he should

legitimately desire, Xiao Jianqiu comes up with a solution to legitimize his

relationships with the two women. He decides to marry Wensao and to

32 Is, asks Marston Anderson (1990: 26) rhetorically, the writers’ “real reason for writing about others a desire to help them or to distance themselves by labeling and defining them?” Among the “others” are widows, whose rich connotations preoccupy writers such as Lu Xun and Rou Shi. In their works, on the one hand, male intellectual characters fear widows because these women embody social injustice so much that the men are stricken with guilt. On the other hand, they need the widows as objects for their humanitarian project and as a means to relieve their sense of guilt.


treat Tao Lan as a brother.33 Although Xiao Jianqiu is an “enlightened” May

Fourth intellectual, his solution is very conventional. Arranged marriages

and assigned brotherhoods are relationships that have been reproduced

in and valued by the patriarchal tradition. Xiao Jianqiu is neither sensitive

to a woman’s position in an arranged marriage nor aware of the potential

libidinal operations in same-sex bonding.

The relationship between Xiao Jianqiu and Tao Lan is also ambiguous.

While the two teachers seem to be in love, they tend not to define

themselves as lovers or lovers-to-be. In chapters 2 and 4, Tao Lan

emphasizes that she is intellectually inferior to Xiao Jianqiu. In the name

of enlightenment, she wants to get close to Xiao, who serves as her teacher

and guides her through everything. But Xiao interprets his relationship

with Tao Lan otherwise. He sees his intimacy with Tao Lan as an affinity

“between men” that lacks any sexual connotations. In correspondences

with her, Xiao Jianqiu calls her “younger brother” (didi), as if by doing so

he could avoid anything sexual in their relationship (Rou 1929: 69). At first

disturbed by it, Tao Lan eventually accepts Xiao Jianqiu’s desexualizing

form of address because there is no alternative and addresses him as “elder

brother” in correspondence (80–81). Xiao Jianqiu and Tao Lan engage in

linguistic cross-dressing, or, more precisely, “cross-addressing.”

This cross-addressing recalls the famous correspondence between Lu

Xun and his student Xu Guangping, who became his common-law wife.

According to Eileen J. Cheng, although Lu Xun is critical of those who enjoy

watching women, he is not as “ascetic as he purported to be” (2004: 30).

Cheng supports her conclusion by mentioning “gender role reversals” in

Lu Xun’s letters to Xu Guangping, who is addressed by Lu Xun as a xiong

(elder brother) rather than as a woman (1977: 30). Following Cheng, I argue

that “gender role reversals,” through which Lu Xun and Xu Guangping

enjoy an epistolary brotherhood, function as a passageway between Lu

Xun’s asceticism and his heterosexual life. In other words, the verbal same-

sex relationship enables Lu Xun to abandon asceticism for a heterosexual

33 His plan ends in a tragedy similar to that in Sophocles’s Oedipus: the widow, like Jocasta, commits suicide offstage at the prospect of being married to her dead husband’s successor, who exiles himself from the village.


relationship. In her extensive study of the love letters between Lu Xun

and Xu Guangping, Bonnie S. McDougall (2002: 109) finds that “Lu Xun

departed from the norm in addressing a young woman as xiong,” and

she suggests that his repeated use of xiong might be related to “Lu Xun’s

awkwardness with female students, or to a wish to establish relations of

sexual as well as generational equality with his students” (108). Conceiving

their relationship in male-male terms allows the two to proceed comfortably

with what was a socially taboo relationship.

Although the Xiao Jianqiu and Tao Lan exchange is similar to that

between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, there are also substantial differences.

Whereas Xu Guangping willingly accepts Lu Xun’s cross-addressing, Tao Lan

only agrees under duress to play Xiao Jianqiu’s verbal game. The guise of

male-male friendship facilitates Lu Xun and Xu Guangping’s heterosexual

love, but in February it plunges the couple’s repressed affair into despair.

Xiao Jianqiu imposes the cross-addressing on Tao Lan as way of repressing

any possible sexuality between them. For her part, Tao Lan appears to

go along with the cross-addressing but at the same time sabotages it

by resexualizing their relationship (80–81). In her letters to her “elder

brother,” Tao Lan becomes increasingly passionate. The same-sex guise is

thus convenient for both Xiao Jianqiu and Tao Lan: Xiao Jianqiu is convinced

that their relationship is not at all sexual, whereas Tao Lan finds the cross-

addressing sensuous, albeit in an oblique way. The same-sex linguistic

relationship heals the rift between the sexually repressed Xiao Jianqiu

and the sexually expressive Tao Lan. As long as the man and the woman

pretend they are affectionate brothers, they seem to be able to channel

their heterosexual desire. The two teachers return to their pedagogical

positions as if satisfied by their cross-addressing intercourse.

Influenced by Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick announces in her far-reaching Epistemology of the Closet,

“‘knowledge’ and ‘sex’ become conceptually inseparable from one

another—so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge;


ignorance, sexual ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort

seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion” (73). While

Sedgwick’s focus is modern Europe, which is substantially different from

modern China, her argument is pertinent to the works discussed here, in

which knowledge and sex crisscross. The characters in early-twentieth-

century Chinese fiction are portrayed as not only subjects of knowledge

but also objects of knowledge; they transmit notions of enlightenment

while bearing its inscriptions. Meanwhile, both subjects and objects of

enlightenment, these characters are also sexual subjects and objects, or even

sexual victims and sexual martyrs. Whereas the agents of enlightenment

depicted in the works of the Creation Society pride themselves on a showy

homosexuality, the promoters of enlightenment in “Tiger Cub,” Jade Pear

Spirit, and February plunge themselves into same-sex love as if this type of

love were a haven of pure asexuality.

There is a gap between the more obscured same-sex desire and the

more mainstream male-female one. This gap permits the characters in

the works discussed here the illusion that they can maneuver their own

sexual positions. Some characters decorate themselves with same-sex affairs

because of the belief that same-sex desire is more “advanced” (that is,

European and thus enlightened) than male-female desire; others find same-

sex love a shelter in which they can survive the passage of enlightenment

with the conviction that same-sex love is more modest (that is, asexual)

than male-female love. By turns eroticized and asexual, same-sex desire

leaves the characters an ambivalent space for wishful maneuvers; same-

sex desire is useful to these characters and to the narratives in which they

appear. If the characters were involved in male-female desire, whose

connotations are relatively more fixed than those of same-sex desire in

modern China, the aforementioned maneuvers could be unimaginable. As

the protean values of same-sex desire enables the characters to glorify or

rationalize their sexual activities, the already clearly defined male-female

desire remains a “straightjacket” for the characters. Overshadowed by a


sweeping enlightenment, teachers and pedagogues in modern Chinese

fiction seek outlets to relieve their interlocking anxieties, including those

of a sexual nature. Consciously or otherwise, the participants in the mission

of enlightenment submit themselves to seemingly convenient same-sex

desire, whose contradictory values reveal that notions of sexuality were

still in the making in early-twentieth-century China.


Glossary

Ba Jin 巴金baihua wen 白話文Chuangzao she 創造社chuangzao yu 創造慾didi 弟弟difang 地方Ding Ling 丁玲Eryue 二月Feixu 飛絮Guo Muoro 郭沬若Haipai 海派Honglou meng 紅樓夢“Huchu” 虎雛Jingpai 京派“Kuangren riji” 狂人日記Ling Shuhua 凌叔華Liying 梨影Lu Yin 廬隱Lu Xun 魯迅Lüpo she 綠波社ma wo pigu bi bieren de bai 罵我屁股比別人的白“Mangmang ye” 茫茫夜Mao Dun 茅盾Mengxia 夢霞minzu jixi 民族積習“Nanyou” 男友Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑒qi wu cong wen 棄武從文qing di 情敵Rou Shi 柔石shangxia yifu tuo de guangguang 上下衣服脫得光光ta 他tao dai li jiang 桃代李僵Tao Lan 陶嵐tongxing’ai 同性愛tongxing lian’ai 同性戀愛wen 文wenren 文人Wensao 文嫂wenyan wen 文言文wu 武


Wu Chisheng 吳遲生wuren 武人Xiang Lin Sao 祥林嫂xiangtu 鄉土xiangxiaren 鄉下人Xianxian 嫻嫻Xiao Jianqiu 蕭澗秋xiaobaozi 小豹子 Xiaobing 小兵xinxuejie 新學界xiong 兄Xiuxia 琇霞Xu Guangping 許廣平Xu Zhenya 徐枕亞Ye Dingluo 葉鼎洛yeman de linghun, zhuang zai yige 野蠻的靈魂, 裝在一個 meili hezi li 美麗盒子裡Yu Dafu 郁達夫Yu li hun 玉梨魂Yu Zhifu 于質夫Yun yimu 雲姨母Yunqian 筠倩Zhang Jingsheng 張競生Zhang Ziping 張資平

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二十世紀初期中國小說中的同性慾望 In the Name of Enlightenment: Pedagogy and the Uses...

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