Imagery and interiority of the "real" Chinese: a feminist postcolonial reading of Eileen Chang's "Love in a Fallen City".

Chen, Bi-ling

Ever since C. T. Hsia revived Eileen Chang's literary reputation in his A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961), her writings have been steadily translated into English. "Love in a Fallen City," the title story of a collection of her short fiction and her most popular and arguably finest work, is included in the second edition of Norton Anthology of World Literature (2002)--a canonical college level textbook for general education--thus solidifying the author's position in global literary studies. (1) Among scholars of Chang's work after Hsia, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Rey Chow are the most influential. Approaching Chang's aesthetics and world views respectively from the angle of a cultural historian and that of a literary feminist, both critics agree that, besides her sensuous rhetoric and intricate narrative style, what distinguishes Chang from the May Fourth writers is her disinterest in confronting politics and her obsession with the private desires of ordinary folks. (2)

While duly drawing our attention to Chang's dexterity in amalgamating Chinese cultural elements with Western modernist techniques to express a state of mind, Lee and Chow have somehow obscured the fact that, although in Chang's fiction political turmoil mostly recedes to the background, its impact on her characters' sense of self and destiny has never been a minor theme. In his investigation of "Love in a Fallen City," Leo Lee ignores the double cultural ambivalence endured by the Chinese-Englishman Fan Liuyuan, denouncing him as a mere "playboy with no sense of culture or history" (1999, 296). Fan's endeavor to acculturate and recite Chinese poems is hence "out of sync with his character." Intrigued but confounded by Chang's frequently "unexpected flights into imagery and metaphor" (285), Lee claims that they are trivial digressions occasionally revealing Chang's philosophy of life, but oftentimes "no more than a display of wit such as is also found in Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, and other English writers whom Chang admired." Rey Chow, applying Naomi Schor's theory in Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987), defends Chang's tendency to juxtapose imagery and metaphor that are seemingly irrelevant to one other. The "sensuous, trivial, and superfluous textual presences" form an "ambiguous relation with some larger 'vision' such as reform and revolution, which seeks to subordinate them but which is displaced by their surprising return" (1991, 85). The subversive viewpoint of this critical method could help shed some light on the character of the heroine, Bai Liusu, in "Love in a Fallen City," and on the political/social/cultural significance embedded in its recurring images and allusions; for example, Peking Opera, mosquito incense, the grey retaining wall at the Repulse Bay, classical Chinese poems and legends. But Chow is keener on allocating Chang into the sheer feminine and private realm in order to contrast her literary merits with those of her militant, ideologically clear and "correct" colleagues. Thus, it is "The Golden Cangue"--a brilliant but claustrophobic domestic tale--that receives Chow's examination.

Chang's critique of British colonialism and its repercussions in the lives of the Chinese, be they native-born or foreign-grown, female or male, traditional or modern, looms subtly but ineradicably behind the love story of Bai and Fan. To understand better how the author manipulates the above-mentioned images to indicate Bai's potential for self-reinvention and Fan's internal struggle with his cross-cultural identity, a feminist reading of "Love in a Fallen City" is called for. Since Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's theory of palimpsest and parody overlaps but exceeds the scope of Schor's aesthetics of the feminine detail, this essay will use the duo's theory to explore Bai's multi-layered operatic persona and consciousness. On the other hand, Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity and Edward Said's Orientalism offer us keys to the Chinese Complex experienced by Fan--specifically, his preoccupation with authentic Chinese-ness and ensuing unconscious colonization of Bai as his ideal China.

In the second chapter of their ground-breaking book The Madwoman in the Attic, "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship" (1979, 45-92), Gibert and Gubar argue that the female perspective in women's writings always looks a little "odd" when evaluated by the standards of patriarchal poetics. "Dis-eased and infected by the sentences of patriarchy," (71) such authors as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and H.D. notwithstand ing managed to "transcend their anxiety of authorship by revising male genres, using them to record their own dreams and their own stories in disguise" (73). The strategies of palimpsest and parody afford them the means to work within the male literary tradition but at the same time to stray from it. The surface devices of their works "conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) level[s] of meaning," creating a sense of "duality and duplicity that necessitates the generation of such doubles as monster characters who shadow angelic authors and mad anti-heroines who complicate the lives of sane heroines" (79-80).

Eileen Chang, though a Chinese woman writing in the midtwentieth century, employs strategies similar to those of her nineteen-century British and American counterparts to overcome her patriarchal society's restrictions. The fact that she names her first collection of short stories chuanqi (legend)--a genre historically dominated by male writers--suggests her ambition to update the literary form, to work inside as well as outside Chinese tradition, and to add a female outlook to the field. Appropriating three major female dans (role types) from Peking opera to portray Bai--qui yi (blue robe), hua dan (flower dan), and dao ma dan (martial dan)--Chang subverts the rule that every opera singer is supposed to play only the role type for which she is specifically trained. (3) While identifying Bai with Chinese "legendary beauties who fell cities and kingdoms" (2769), the author, nevertheless, reverses the usual notion of femme fatale, making her heroine an accidental beneficiary rather than a fatal cause of the battle between Britain and Japan in Hong Kong. Even such a trivial gesture as lighting a stick of mosquito incense is made pregnant with Bai's silent prayer for the extinction of her adversarial family members, violating the feminine virtues preached in Confucian teaching, as a "madwoman" would do.

Immediately in the beginning of the story, the reader sees Peking opera, a dramatic and musical genre with an ingrained formula, being transformed into a parodic metaphor for Chinese life in the 1940s, when all successful performers not only have to sing in tune and follow the beat but also improvise according to the demand of circumstances. The Bai household "couldn't keep up with the huqin of life" (2737); hence, Fourth Master is unable to play out a happy melody; instead, his huqin wails, "pouring out a tale desolate beyond words." Chang's omniscient narrator, however, suggests that not everyone in this family has to be trapped in the outdated way of living. Life could be resumed and turned into a comedy: "A huqin story should be performed by a radiant entertainer, two long streaks of rouge pointing to her fine, jade-like nose as she sings, as she smiles, covering her mouth with her sleeves...." (2737). In other words, Bai Liusu, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee no longer welcome to stay under her brothers' roof after they squandered all her money on the stock market, cannot afford to live the rest of her life passively. She should start to exercise the skills of a "radiant entertainer" that have been dormant in her, attentive to every note she sings and meticulous about every dance step she takes, appearing to be free of such conscious calculation by smiling charmingly without letting her teeth show.

This demure yet flirtatious and potentially lethal image contains all the characteristics of a blue robe dan, a flower dan, and a martial dan. A blue cloth dan, due to her noble background, conducts herself with dignity and reserve; her hand gestures and foot-steps are refined, and her pensive looks are punctuated by her downcast head and eyes. But a flower dan is usually a maid, characterized by her penchant for fun, her lively physical movement, her wit and brio. A martial dan is a woman warrior, carrying more dignified manners than a flower dan but a less reserved temperament than a blue robe. Bai, with a status as a declined aristocrat and a habit to "bow her head" (2746, 2749, 2754, 2769), resembles a blue cloth dan forced by her ill fate to wrap a piece of blue cloth around her head (as a sign of poverty and modesty) while traveling to find a solution for her financial predicament. Nonetheless, Bai is also a flower dan, pos sessing a gift for dance and repartee that is bound to flourish when meeting its match in Fan's skills. That she fights, while maintaining a classy demeanor, psychological battles with this whimsical suitor plus her unsupportive family, demonstrates her qualifications as a martial dan. (4)

Only by blending wisely these contradictory role types would Liusu have a chance to survive in a rapidly changing China. The task certainly won't be easy. In the scene where the heroine examines herself in front of a dressing-mirror, Chang captures the fluctuating mental process through which Bai comes to realize her ability to maneuver among blue robe dan, flower dan, and martial dan: She turned on the lamp, set it next to the dressing-mirror, and studied her reflection. Good enough: she wasn't too old yet. She had the kind of slender figure that doesn't show age--a waist forever thin, and a budding, girlish bosom.... Her cheeks had once been round, but now had grown thinner, making her small face even smaller and more attractive. She had a fairly narrow face, but her eyes--clear and lively, slightly coquettish eyes--were set wide apart. Out on the balcony, Fourth Master started playing huqin again. Following the undulating tune, Liusu's head tilted to one side, and her hands and eyes started to gesture subtly. As she performed in the mirror, the huqin no longer sounded like a huqin, but like strings and flutes intoning a solemn court dance. She stepped toward the right a few paces, then turned again to the left. Her steps seemed to trace the lost rhythms of an ancient melody. Suddenly, she smiled--a private, malevolent smile--and the music came to a discordant halt. Outside, the huqin still played, but it was telling tales of fealty and filial piety, chastity, and righteousness: distant tales that had nothing to do with her. (2743)

The mirror in which Liusu measures her self-worth is obviously tinged with Chinese patriarchal values. Beauty and youth being the only capital she owns now, she knows poignantly that, given their fleeting nature, these qualities have to be cashed in quickly. Just when the flower dan in her is ready to step out, her old upbringing intrudes. The moralistic tales of her fourth brother's huqin music manage to subdue the coquettishness of her eyes and restrict the vibrant movement of which her supple physique is capable. The longer she follows his tune, the more serious her expression becomes, so much so that Luisu even imagines herself to be dancing in an imperial ceremony of ancestor worship, accompanied by such majestic musical instruments as strings and flutes, rather than by a huqin, an instrument that ancient Confucian elites considered vulgar. (5) By replacing the mundane (though virtuous) huqin melody with a piece of regal/celestial music whose correct rhythms have long been forgotten, Liusu almost entombs herself with all the deceased Bais, whose fate she vowed to avoid just a few minutes earlier. But this passage of Liusu's bad faith--a fragmentary passage written in the Western modernist style of stream of consciousness while detailed with Chinese cultural imagery--turns out to be a parody of outdated temple rituals and numerous Peking operas in which blue robe dans are protagonists. For, instead of dwelling upon those righteous tales, Liusu suddenly smiles to herself duplicitously, as if realizing that focusing on the blue robe dan will not lead her anywhere in real life.

The significance of Liusu's sudden "private, malevolent smile" becomes clearer if we take a look at the literary sources from which Chang draws but which she revises to distinguish her heroine's character. Among legendary beauties who caused cities and kingdoms to fall figuratively or literally, Madame Li of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) and Yang Guifei of the Tang Dynasty (618-908 CE) were especially known for their singing, dancing, and alluring smiles. The poem about Madam Li's beauty, written and sung by her court musician brother, Li Yennien, in Emperor Han Wu's banquet, is a direct inspiration for the title of Chang's story: In the north of the country, There lives a beauty, Dazzling the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. Her first smile at you would shatter your city walls, And her second smile at you would dissolve your kingdom. Do you know that crumpled city walls and collapsed kingdoms can be rebuilt, But that a beautiful woman as such cannot be found again once you lose her? (6)

Sister Li was summoned to become Emperor Han Wu's "radiant entertainer" and eventually received a promotion from a maid to a Lady. In the first half of her life Yang Guifei enjoyed a similar fortune to that of Madame Li, but Emperor Tang Ming's angry subjects demanded her execution when the kingdom failed to withstand foreign attacks. A famous Tang poem lamenting the beauty's ill fate, "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow," by Bai Chu Yi, has two much quoted lines about her smile: "A smile from you cast a hundred tons of charisma,/ paling the beauty of other ladies-in-waiting." These women's stories have been burnt in the Chinese memory, and a popular Peking opera, "Guifei Drunken with Wine," is, in particular, a showcase piece for singers specializing in the flower dan. Accordingly, it is safe to say that when Bai lapses into the moralistic tales of the blue robe dan, her flower dan predecessors come to her "rescue," helping her realize that she would rather dance their kind of dance to win the favor of a king than perform a sacrificial rite to appease the dead. Not incidentally, this scene happens right before the matchmaking party for her half-sister Baolou, in which Liusu acts like a flower dan, casting a spell on Fan with her sex appeal and dancing expertise. Nevertheless, Chang is not content with making her heroine an heir of Madame Li and Yang Guifei. In contrast to their male authors' emphasis on Li's and Yang's charismatic smiles in public, Chang highlights Bai's wicked smile in private, preparing the reader for her unleashing of the martial dan within..

The little triumph Liusu rips from the matchmaking party teaches her that, in order to thrive rather than just survive, she should exercise her combat ability more. The rasping criticisms of her "shameless" conduct from her sisters-in-law fail to drive her to tears as they used to; instead, they reinforce her fighting spirit: Liusu squatted in the dark and lit a stick of mosquito incense. She had heard every word that was spoken out on the balcony, but this time she was perfectly calm. She struck the match and watched it burn, the little three-cornered pennant of flaming red flickering in its own draft, coming closer and closer toward her fingers. A little puff of the lips, and she blew it out, leaving only the glowing red pennant-pole. Then the pole twisted and shrank, curling into the grey shape of a fiend. She tossed the dead match into the incense burner. (2746)

In her article "The Departure and Return of a Damsel in Distress," Mei Jaling briefly remarks that the whole passage smells like a bomb, (7) and that Bai's gestures signify "her declaration of war" (178). I would further argue that the "little three-cornered pennant" on the top of the burning match symbolizes a red war flag, and the lit-up mosquito incense functions as ceremonial incense that would carry Bai's silent supplication to heaven. Hopefully, the deity of Justice would help her extinguish the larger and more annoying pests--her family, all of whom want her to obey the Confucian "law of family relations" and return as a widow to her late former husband's household (2738). So determined to counterattack is the besieged heroine that she would throw herself and her enemies near the fire, risking being burned with them. But instead of allowing herself to become a victim of the patriarchal code of honor (as Yang Guifei did), Liusu would retreat in time to save herself while leaving her disintegrated evil relatives in the cinerarium. The symbolic meanings of these images are brought into further relief in the scene of Bai's final victory: "Liusu crouched in the lamplight, lighting mosquito incense. When she thought of Fourth Mistress, she smiled" (2769). "Liusu did not feel that her place in history was anything remarkable. She just stood up smiling, and kicked the pan of mosquito-incense under the table." Since the biggest mosquito (her fourth sister-in-law) has already been expelled (she decided to follow Liusu's example and divorce her good-for-nothing husband), this time the mosquito (ceremonial) incense is lit up to thank, rather than beg, heaven. As the burner (cinerarium) is no longer needed to contain the pest's ashes, Bai naturally kicks the entire gear out of her sight. In so envisioning and executing this scene, the heroine adds the martial dan to her repertoire.

But which role does Fan think Bai plays when he says: "[Y]ou're like someone from another world. You have all these little gestures, and a romantic aura, very much like a Peking opera singer" (2756)? His rhetoric suggests an ethereal blue robe dan. Just as his previous statement that "[r]eal Chinese women are the most beautiful women in the world" and "never out of fashion" ignores the individuality of each Chinese woman and changing times (2751), this generalized comparison of Bai to a Peking opera singer obscures the respective traits of martial dan, flower dan, and blue cloth dan, all of which Bai embodies. Not that Fan is unable to appreciate Bai's feisty side or is unaware of her calculating tendency; in fact, he quite enjoys her smart retorts and spares none of his arrows at female gold-diggers, of whom she is certainly one. But he has to compartmentalize her multiplicity and accentuate her disadvantageous circumstances so that he can play the role of a savior. "When I first met you in Shanghai, I thought that if you could get away from those people in your family, maybe you could be more natural. So I waited and waited till you came to Hong Kong.... Now I want to bring you to Malaya, to the forest of primitive people" (2756). Such an attempt to make Liusu purer by removing her from the China that has disappointed him is of the same nature as his urge to change her style in clothing, both of which contradict his earlier remark: "I don't want you to change. It's not easy to find a real Chinese girl like you" (2751). A forever elusive "real Chinese girl" who incarnates an equally intangible ideal China lies at the core of the Chinese Englishman's inconsistency and frustration, all of which is a typical symptom of colonial hybridity, with its roots in British Orientalism.

Hybridity according to Homi Bhabha is the situation in which individuals or groups straddle more than one culture as a result of colonialism. Through colonial education, the colonized are bound to feel affinity for the values of their colonizers while simultaneously being torn by those of their native culture. In his essay "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition," Bhabha states: "The access to the image of identity [for the colonized] is only ever possible ... through the principle of displacement and differentiation (absence/presence, representation/repetition) that always renders it a liminal reality" (1994, 118). Born in England of Chinese origins in 1909, when the hysteria of the Yellow Peril and the stereotype of Fu Manchu were prevalent, Fan grew up with his parents' romanticized tales about China and thus imagined this country which he had yet to set foot on as his true homeland. Yet, because of his formal English schooling, his vicarious alliance with Chinese culture cannot escape a constant competition with the official ideology of white supremacy. His social image and sense of self indeed become "a liminal reality," oscillating between that of a minority member/second-class citizen/colonized other, and of a wealthy, well-educated gentleman wearing a white mask over his yellow skin. Neither identity is able to register a full presence or absence of his existence.

When Fan finally visits China, his hybridity, his sense of displacement and difference in England, rather than disappearing, repeats itself, only with a slight twist. To the native Chinese, because he runs a multi-national business and carries airs of English modernity, he shares with the British in Shanghai and Hong Kong the status of colonizers. On the other hand, his limited experience living in China reduces him to the colonized status of an overseas Chinese lacking authentic local cultural currency. Fan's insecurity about his Chineseness drives him to acculturate, attending Peking opera performances, memorizing classical sayings and poems, and more importantly, to find a "real Chinese girl" to fall in love with. But the sense of inadequacy embedded in his Chinese Complex is actually intertwined with a sense of superiority fed by what Edward Said famously names Orientalism--a set of skewed views about non-whites invented by white men to justify their colonization of the East. Being a product of English education, Fan judges China and Bai according to a Westerner's civilizing mission and binary perception of the world. The beautiful motherland from a distance becomes an ugly old hag in person, from whose claws the tainted but intrinsically good Chinese girl needs to be liberated and then reformed.

One major image that Chang employs to historicize Fan's colonizing/colonized self, his persistent pursuit of an ideal China through Bai, is the grey brick retaining wall at the Repulse Bay: The wall was cool and rough, the color of death. Pressed against that wall, her face bloomed with the opposite hues: red lips, shining eyes--a face of flesh and blood, alive with thought and feeling. "I don't know why," said Liuyuan, looking at her, "but this wall makes me think of the old sayings about the end of the world. Someday, when human civilization has been completely destroyed, when everything is burnt, burst, utterly collapsed and ruined, maybe this wall will still be here. If, at that time, we can meet at this wall, then maybe, Liusu, you will honestly care about me, and I will honestly care about you." (2753)

To understand why the usually playful suitor suddenly takes on such a depressive tone and bestows so much significance upon a piece of retaining wall, we need to take a glimpse at the history of the Repulse Bay first. Although the Chinese have always called this area "Shallow Water Bay," the British named it after HMS Repulse, the first official British ship stationed in Hong Kong. Before its arrival, however, other British merchant ships had already used Repulse Bay as a base to smuggle opium to China. During the First Opium War (1839-42), pirates of all nationalities, including Chinese, invaded the bay area and took it as their post as well; all of them were eventually repulsed by the British Fleet. True to the spirit of colonizers' cartography--charting, mapping, renaming, so as to transform and control the territory they grabbed from other countries--the English name of the bay, Repulse, was reconfirmed, and the place was developed into a beach in 1910, while its namesake hotel was built in 1920. Along with the artificially extended beach came the extended retaining wall. (8)

Reminiscent of past and present Anglo-Chinese tensions, this site must arouse in Fan much ambivalence about both countries. The psychological force of the pull is such that the retaining wall, built to prevent erosion from the sea, becomes, in his hyperbolic vision, a formidable fortress shaded with war casualties. The old phrase, di lao tien huan (earth decrepit, sky deserted; that is, the end of the world), of which the wall-turned-fortress reminds him, is arguably an allusion to a well-known legend of endless love: "Meng Jianhu Wailed and Felled the Great Wall." Politically, the Great Wall, expanded throughout different Chinese dynasties to ward off foreign invasions, is a symbol of national strength. The part of Fan that is resentful of the position of Colonial Other to which England subjects him could be regretting China's present state and wondering whether it will survive World War II just as the Great Wall did various foreign attacks. Culturally, the story of Meng's search for her husband Won Shiliang stands for wifely devotion. By Fan's own previous admission, "a foreigner who's become Chinese also becomes reactionary, even more reactionary than an old-fashioned scholar from the last dynasty" (2751). The ideal China in which he would like to live is, in other words, a country maintaining its past glories, a country where the Great Wall can withhold global chaos, whose collapse, if it happens, should be caused by the tears of such virtuous women as Meng Jiangnu rather than the smiles of a femme fatale like Yang Guifei. Although in his emotional outburst Fan sounds as if he has given up such a hope, the way he interacts with Bai suggests otherwise. If he has no control over world affairs, he can still try to control her, shaping her into his ideal colony. Consciously done or not, "wall-her-in" in various forms is exactly the strategy to which he resorts.

In depicting the development of their romance, Chang shows the intersection between colonial and patriarchal domination: circumscribing the subaltern not only politically but also psychologically. Fan's Orientalist mystification of Bai parallels his androcentric mistrust of her sex appeal, which in turn erodes her self-confidence. With his financial and social power, he lures her to Hong Kong, enjoys her colorful personality and lively company, but makes sure she understands that he won't settle with a social butterfly. When she dances with other men he cuts in but denies his possessiveness: "Most men like to lead a woman astray ... and reform her till she's good. I don't go around making so much work for myself. I think the important thing, for a good woman, is steady honesty" (2751). What underscores this statement is his dichotomous view of the female sex: good versus bad. Although Liusu sees through his hypocrisy and self-righteousness, he manages to leave her unsure about which category of women he puts her into: "I promise to treat you the way you should be treated" (2752). Since he behaves inconsistently, acting like a gentleman towards her when they are alone, yet like a playboy when other people are around, Bai, besides worrying about how he would judge her character, feels "very edgy, fearing that he would suddenly drop the pretence and launch a surprise attack" (2756). Chang, without making any authorial comments, vividly depicts her heroine's paranoia in the sunbathing scene. Bai keeps naming the sand flies mosquitoes even after Fan explains their differences. If we connect this seemingly inconsequential detail with the mosquito incense scene in Shanghai, it becomes clear that deep down she is afraid that this gentleman could suddenly turn as pesky as her family, biting her witless. Their playful gesture of slapping each other's back to kill the insects actually makes our feisty "martial dan" very nervous; whether he intentionally or accidentally touches her too intimately, her dread of being seen as a "bad woman" causes her to take offense and leave the beach abruptly. If she pretended that nothing had happened, he might advance further, felling her wall of self-protection.

In his psychological warfare with Bai, Fan has his share of erecting a mental wall, symbolized by the physical wall between their respective hotel rooms. Through the Chinese Englishman's misquote of a poem from The Book of Songs, Chang subtly attributes his need to play the upper hand and his inability to express love to Bai's face to his fragmented identity as a colonizer and colonized. During his phone call to her, he cites the following poetic lines: "Life, death, separation--with thee there is happiness; thy hand in mine, we will grow old together" (2759). The correct version of the second line should be: "here is my promise to thee." (9) Although Fan has no doubt that Bai makes him happy, he is still too confused about who he is to make a commitment. Bai is not particularly literary, yet by listening to his interpretation of the poem, which reiterates the idea of the limitation of human agency in the midst of World War II, she understands his "I love you" will not lead to "will you marry me?" With a conventionally feminine mindset, Bai firmly believes that "spiritual love always leads to marriage" (2754). Without hearing a marriage proposal, the enraged heroine chooses to answer the dodger with his own rhetoric of indirectness: "Why else did I come to Hong Kong?" "If you really love me, why worry if I do?" (2759). Chang leaves her readers to discover for themselves that the speaker of the quoted poem, "Beating the Drum," is a married soldier whose fate as a prisoner of war causes him to lament his failure in keeping the promise he made to his wife. By contrast, Fan, a free man with various women within his reach and inherited money at his disposal, is using life's unpredictability as an excuse for his non-commitment. A huge blind spot in Fan is that he cannot accept Bai's limitations while expecting her to accept his: "I don't understand myself, but I want you to understand me" (2754). It has never occurred to him that by withholding a marriage from her, he is forcing Bai, a product of feudal upbringing, to become independent, and that such an accomplishment requires several years of modern education; moreover, an independent woman does not exactly fit into his ideal of "a real Chinese girl." The Orientalist's split personality is at its full display when he conveniently uses Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist statement to insinuate that Liusu is a whore in the making: "Basically you think that marriage is long-term prostitution."

If a woman who has sex with a man to whom she lacks deep emotional attachment while receiving his legal financial support in exchange is a whore, then what is a woman who has physical and financial relationships with a man without receiving from him a lawful contract as long-term protection? A mistress--a stupid whore? Fan might not seriously think Bai would become the former in the event of their marriage, but after their quarrel he does take advantage of every opportunity to turn her into the latter. When strangers mistake them for a married couple, he says: "Don't worry about those who call you 'Mrs. Fan.' But those who call you 'Miss Bai'--what must they think?" "Since that's what people think anyway, why not do it?" (2760). Although Bai refuses to give in and returns to Shanghai, she really has no alternative except to become his mistress when he sends for her a few months later. Going home empty-handed makes her Hong Kong adventure "whoredom twice over" in her family's eyes (2761). But the "rescuer" is no less cruel than her family: the day after their consummation of love he announces his departure for England for a year! Doubtlessly, the virtue of his "real Chinese girl" will be truly tested during this period. Chang delicately parallels Fan with the British troops who bring in prostitutes while looting houses. They leave behind them "dirty marks," "the scent of cheap perfume." "It seemed that they had left in a hurry. The poor local looters had not been here; if they had, these things would not have been here" (2767). Since this after-bombing scene is depicted from Bai's viewpoint, it indicates that their burgeoning mutual appreciation has not eradicated her residual feeling of having been treated like a cheap whore. In her injured heart and warped perception, poor local people, even when they steal, would still behave more decently than the wealthy and the powerful.

The fact that Fan returned to Bai in the midst of bombing proves that he does care about her and love her sincerely. His mental wall collapses as his character passes the test. The grey retaining wall at the Repulse Bay which he endowed with an apocalyptic significance now ceases to mean anything to him. His colonial/patriarchal in scription on Bai's psyche runs deeper though; the wall still haunts her, as if their love continues to rely on its survival. Through Liusu's nightmare, Chang portrays how her heroine struggles to realize that the marks she can make in Fan's life are not limited to the fingerprints on the wall of their house, against which she, like a madwoman in the attic (to borrow the title of Gilbert and Gubar's influential book), pressed hysterically after she saw him off at the harbor. Echoing the scene of Liusu's first awakening, in which she decides to play more roles than a blue robe dan, Chang blends antique Chinese cultural elements with the Western modernist technique of stream of consciousness to portray her heroine's nightmarish second awakening, thereby accentuating the difficult and elusive process of self-growth in the era when tradition and modernity, East and West, collide on a larger-than-life scale: Then, at night, there were no lights, no sounds of people in that dead city; there was only the strong winter wind, wailing on and on in three long tones--oooh, aaah, eeei. When it stopped there, it started up there, like three grey dragons flying side by side in a straight line, long bodies trailing on and on, tails never coming into sight. Oooh, aaah, eeei--wailing until even the sky dragons had gone, and there was only a stream of empty air, a bridge of emptiness that crossed into the dark, crossed into the void of voids. Here, everything had ended. There were only some broken bits of leveled wall and stumbling and fumbling about, a civilized man who had lost his memory; he seemed to be searching for something, but there was nothing left. Liusu sat up hugging her quilt and listening to the mournful wind. She was sure that the grey brick wall near Repulse Bay was still standing straight and tall. The wind stopped there, like three grey dragons coiling up on top of the wall, the moonlight glinting off their silver scales. She seemed to return in a dream, back to the base of that wall, where she met Liuyuan, finally and truly met him. (2768)

Together with the wall, the oooh, aaah, eeei sounds and the three grey dragons not only help to connect Bai's past, present, and future, but also transform her into an emblem of everyman--more specifically, every Chinese--looking for lost traditions and new directions in the ruins of human civilization. Chang suggestively compares the oooh, aaah, eeei sounds of the winter wind to three musical scales (the "three long tones" in Kingsbury's English translation of the story). In Bai's dreamy, subconscious attempt to recall how she arrived at the scene of the collapsed wall, the oooh, aaah, eeei could sound to her more like three long wailing tones let out by a Peking opera singer, resonating the desolate huquin music her fourth brother often plays. And although the expression of "flying grey dragons" is a common Chinese visual metaphor for tornado-like wind, Chang, delineating Bai's search for something to hold on to, also evokes the cultural significance that Chinese people have associated with dragons since the beginning of their civilization: mystery, felicity, and nobility. Rather than allow the dragons to whirl her back to that depressive and oppressive part of Chinese culture, Bai hears them changing their tune, oooh-aaah-eeeing their blessings to her. With the kind of unfathomable power that separated Heaven from Earth, that ended Chaos and began the World, they also help her level the wall of her old grudge against Fan, inspire her to see things from a new light, and then disappear into the depth of the universe. After all, Fan, despite his male egoism, risked his life in the war zone and came back to fetch her. This action is as good as Meng Jiangnu's search for Won Shiliang at the Great Wall, and as good as the promise of the soldier to his wife in the poem from The Book of Songs. Liusu's vision that the retaining wall still stands high and upright, imbued with the mysterious creatures' benediction under the moonlight, is hence not an unrealistic wish-fulfillment; it is her mental reconstruction--a necessary step to the mutual epiphany she and Fan ultimately achieve: in this chaotic world, nobody can afford to be an individualist; they are fortunate to have each other to depend on. When the mental walls between man and woman, between East and West, between oneself and the stranger within oneself collapse, the regeneration of a shattered civilization begins.

A resolution achieved through such a shared experience usually would give the reader a sense of closure and an illusion that Bai and Fan are totally transformed people. Yet, Chang is a realist looking at life with a cold eye. Bai, for all her ability to play blue cloth dan, flower dan, and martial dan, will maintain her aristocratic mentality that a lady, especially a married one, should not have to earn her own means. In fact, she never changes her marriage-oriented reasoning: "Who knows? Maybe it was in order to vindicate her that an entire city fell" (2769). Gilbert and Gubar's theory helps us detect the nuances of Chang's feminism and Bai's feminist potential, but the author's understanding of human nature is sophisticated enough that she resists overstretching her heroine's progress. Bai indeed has a long way to go before becoming a genuine modern woman. Likewise, Bhabha's and Said's postcolonial theories help us unlock the complexity of Fan's character, which has eluded critical attention until now. Fan's ambivalence towards China and England will probably remain under his skin for the rest of his life. And to use Chang's own words from her essay "Writing of One's Own," Fan's commitment to Bai "steers him towards a more settled existence" (Jones 2007, 17); their marriage, however, is "prosaic," "earthbound," and "nothing more." Fan will still keep his dandy persona outside the home, enjoying smart conversations with attractive and culturally indeterminate women like the exiled Indian Princess, and maintain his view that people basically cannot decide such things as "[d]eath, life, separation" (2769). Yet at least the consternation on Bai's face brings out his thoughtful self-restraint as a spouse--he stops saying what he knows will upset her. If anything, "Love in a Fallen City" teaches a lesson that authentic selfhood, be it Chinese, English, or both, is a relational identity affected by others' subjectivity, rather than an insulated autonomy that discredits those who benefit one's existence, directly or indirectly.

References

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. "Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition." Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cameron, Nigel. 1991. An Illustrated History of Hong Kong. New York: Oxford University Press.

--. Hong Kong: The Cultural Pearl. 1978. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Chow, Rey. 1991. "Modernity and Narration--in Feminine Detail." Woman and Chinese Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. 1979. "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship." The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Gomez, Terence and Benton, Gregory. 2008. "British Racism and the Shaping of the Chinese Community." The Chinese in Britain, 1800'Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jones, Andrew, tran. 2007. Written on Water. Eileen Chang. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lau, Fred. 2007. "Music and Ideology." Music in China. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lee, Ou-fan Leo. 1999. "Eileen Chang: Romances in a Fallen City." Shanghai Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mei, Jialing. 2003. "Feng Huo Jia Jen De Chu Tsou Yeu Hue Gue." Yuedu Zhang Ailing. Yang Tse, ed. Gueling: Guangxi Normal University Press.

Rafferty, Kevin. 1990. City on the Rocks. New York: Viking Penguin.

Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Wichman-Walczak, Elizabeth. 2004. "Beijing Opera Plays and Performance." Chinese Aesthetics and Literature. Corinne H. Dale, ed. Albany: State University of New York.

Bi-ling Chen, University of Central Arkansas

(1) All the quotes from "Love in a Fallen City" in this essay are from Karen Kingsbury's English translation in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of World Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 2737-70.

(2) Leo Ou-fan Lee, "Eileen Chang: Romances in a Fallen City," Shanghai Modern (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999), 267-303. Rey Chow, "Modernity and Narration--in Feminine Detail," Women and Chinese Modernity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 84-120.

(3) Renowned opera singer May Lan-feng, whose artistry Chang admired, invented a fourth female role type, hua shen, (flower shirt), by combining the traits of the aforementioned role types, to enrich new characters he portrayed. Chang's characterization of Bai might have been inspired by May.

(4) For details about the traits of each role type, see Wichman-Walczak, Elizabeth, "Beijing Opera Plays and Performance" in Chinese Aesthetics and Literature, ed. Corinne H. Dale (Albany: SUNY, 2004), 129-52.

(5) Confucius considered music a demonstration of virtue and objected to using it as entertainment. He insisted that a ruler should have the right kind of music, Yayue (elegant proper music), performed in the court. Sheng, xiao, and strings were proper musical instruments used in state sacrificial ceremonies. One of the reasons why the Zhou dynasty collapsed, according to Confucius, was because rulers at different ranks stepped out of the boundaries of rites and performed vulgar music. For details, see Frederick Lau, "Music and Ideology" in Music in China (New York: Oxford UP, 2007).

(6) The English translation of this poem, and of the lines from "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow," is mine.

(7) The translation of the title of and quote from Mei Jialing's Chinese essay is mine. For details, see "Feng Huo Jia Jen De Chu Tsou Yeu Hue Gue" in Yuedu Zhang Ailing," ed. Yang Tse (Gueling: Guangxi Normal UP, 2003) 172-87.

(8) For details of the history of Hong Kong, see Nigel Cameron, An Illustrated History of Hong Kong (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). For the history of Repulse Bay, see Nigel Cameron, Hong Kong: The Cultural Pearl (Hong Kong: Oxford UP, 1978), 155-66; Kevin Rafferty, City on the Rocks (New York: Viking Penguin, 1900), 66-68.

(9) It is unfortunate that Karen Kingsbury, probably assuming that Chang was the one who had a slip of mind, corrects Fan's misquote in her revised translation of this story when it was published with others of Chang's stories also translated by her. See Love in a Fallen City (New York: NYRB Classics, 2006), 149. Chang knew the poem by heart, which is evident in her correct citation of the poem in her essay, "Writing of One's Own" in Written on Water, trans. Andrew Jones (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 15-22.