I am posting my final essay for a class on modern Chinese literature. It got a high-ish first. Should it have? Jury’s out.
Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue (金锁记) was first published in Chinese in 1943, and in English (translated by its author) in 1981 (Chang 1981:16). The novella tells the story of a woman of poor birth, Cao Qiqiao, who has married a disabled man from the rich Jiang family. Her husband eventually passes away. An affair with her brother-in-law fizzles out after she suspects him of taking financial advantage of her. She passes her emotional difficulties onto her children. Her son, Changbai, marries a young woman whom Qiqiao, by way of biting comments, drives to despair and suicide. Her daughter, Changan, pulls herself from a Western-style education after Qiqiao threatens to cause trouble at her school. When Changan’s cousin arranges a marriage for her, Qiqiao is convinced that her bridegroom is only masking a desire for the Jiang family’s finances. Changan calls off the wedding and returns home. Both children are eventually persuaded by their mother into destructive opium habits.
The story opens and concludes with the metaphor of the cangue, a heavy yoke used historically in China to hold the head still in displays of punishment. Qiqiao’s golden cangue is first imagined as a weighty device whose financial benefit - its gold - is unbearably close, but physically blocked from her taking (Chang 1981:16). The cangue stands for her first marriage, whose constriction she has undergone for many years under the promise of social mobility. At the novella’s end, the cangue becomes a weapon. Qiqiao, who has now pushed her children into a similar lifestyle, is aware that the ‘heavy edges’ she was once unable to reach have been used to hurt those around her (Chang 1981:41).
In The Golden Cangue, the presence and absence of classical allusion serves as a symbolic tool in its own right. Cao Xueqin’s Qing-era Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦; ‘HLM’), richly intertextual in itself, is a major point of reference for the novella (Wang 2011). However, Chang’s semiotic frame is not imposed on the story by an omnipotent narrator, as in Cao’s novel. Exemplified by the changing metaphor of the golden cangue, Chang’s adapted system of allusion is malleable, presented as individual to character and setting. What forms is halfway between psychoanalytic narrative and historical commentary. This analysis of Chang falls roughly in line with Edward Gunn’s in Unwelcome Muse, where the author analyses her work as containing appeals to the literary traditions and ‘collective imagination’ of pre-Republican China, impasses of ‘ethereal unreality’ and a general sense of Freudian ‘sublimation’ (Gunn 1980:222-230). However, Gunn pays little attention to Chang’s subjective, warping symbolism. It is this that roots the novel specifically in the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the Republican period.
The most illustrative parallel between Cangue and HLM is a thematic one. Both stories deal overtly with the financial tussles of decadent families who are cloaking their decline (Cao 2023:74-75). Thus they also deal with problems of reality and illusion, or delusion. This is famously clear in Cao’s novel, which follows the fortunes of the Zhen (甄) and Jia (贾) families, two surnames homophonic with the words for ‘true’ (真) and ‘false’ (假) (Wu and Wu 2000:20-21). Wang (2011:17) notes that both authors set off the crumbling surroundings of their characters, using lavish clothes and interiors as a foil. In Cangue, a similar visual metaphor takes on a political air: as bound feet are unfashionable in the early days of the Republic, Qiqiao has disguised hers with cotton wool (Chang 1981:25).
In Chang’s work, this blurring between real and fake is given, as Gunn suggests, an additional level of subjectivity reminiscent of Western psychoanalysis. Once Qiqiao gives up her affair with her brother-in-law, through her dual mask of a window and a vale of tears, she numbly watches a policeman run over by a rickshaw. She conjectures that all on the scene are ‘ghosts, ghosts of many years ago or the unborn of many years hence… what is real and what is false?’ (Chang 1981:23). For Qiqiao, who has been pressured into the same lifestyle she will make her children lead, past and future compact themselves into a singular fantasy. This recalls the novella’s opening, with its deja vu of interchangeable dynasties - a microcosm of pre-Republican China, contained entirely within the Jiang household (Chang, 1981:1). Qiqiao’s psychological claustrophobia is echoed by these surroundings. Her room in the Jiang home is so crowded with ‘gold-lacquered trunks’ that she has only ‘a few feet of space’ in which to live (Chang 1981:12). Thus she is trapped in a Qing-era feminine ‘inner realm’, a cruel parody of the concentric interiors in the HLM (Li and Yeo 2002:54-55). These trunks, in their combination of entrapment and decadence, mirror the metaphor of the imaginary cangue.
Several critics point to the moon symbolism in Cangue as the novella’s most striking evocation of traditional Chinese literary imagery. Where it appears in the canonical work of the Tang poets, the moon - a single object visible anywhere on earth - can connote a natural point of connection between relatives who are otherwise estranged (Soroka 2011:5). Chang subverts this in her novella. The moon is temperamental, changing in form depending on the psychological state of its isolated witness. At the very start of the story, Chang explains openly that the moon seen by her characters is a different one to that in existence at the time she is writing. Now the moon is ‘a reddish-yellow wet stain the size of a copper coin…worn and blurred’; but the moon thirty years ago was ‘gay, larger, rounder and whiter’, sitting in line with its traditional poetic ideal (Chang 1981:1).
After the servants finish gossiping about Qiqiao, a character yet to appear in person, the moon - a portent of what is to come - grows ‘lower, lower and larger’ (Chang 1981:4). Later, as Qiqiao goads her son into preparing opium for her, the moon appears gradually from behind its ‘ferocious theatrical mask’ of cloud, heralded by a ‘ray of light’, an all-seeing ‘eye’ (Chang 1981:29). To Changan, who has just been persuaded to drop out of school, the moon is tiny, a ‘blurred chip’ in the sky that resembles an unreal ‘lithographed picture’ (Chang 1981:26). Lin and Zhang (2021:27) argue that these dual moons symbolise Qiqiao’s effort to strip away Changan’s personhood, destroying any opportunity that comes about for her daughter’s individuation outside the Jiang household. Qiqiao’s moon, menacing and personified, has swallowed Changan’s until there is nothing left.
There appears, however, to be a second dimension to Chang’s symbolic parallel. The story’s narrator has already indicated that it is time and history that shrinks and blurs the moon (Chang 1981:1). Qiqiao is confined to the traditional family she married into, and in many ways conforms still to the upper-class ideals popular in the Qing period - opium-smoking, procuring concubines, binding a child’s feet (Chang 1981:24-25, 31). Perhaps this means she is bound always to see the moon of classical literature - a shining white beacon that unifies someone with their kin. Ironically, in Chang’s new rendering of the symbol, this is not a family reunion but a forced process of manipulation. To Changan, emotionally distant from her mother and exposed already to the new possibility of foreign education, the moon holds none of its classical meaning. It stands at a physical distance, unable to loom or menace because, like a photograph, it barely seems real.
Zhishou, Changbai’s new wife, is witness to a twisted version of Qiqiao’s classical moon. Lying in bed in suicidal distress after Qiqiao has undermined her relationship with Changbai, she sees through an uncloaked window that the moon is ‘better than ever, high and full like a white sun in a pitch-black sky’ (Chang 1981:30). Here the traditional moon motif clashes with the novella’s pervading theme of truth and illusion. Moon and sun - shorthand, possibly, for the symbiotic binary of yin and yang - collapse into one jumbled mass. Here the reader is reminded of Qiqiao’s figures, who transcend the binary of dead and alive. ‘This was an insane world’, Zhishou thinks, ‘a husband not like a husband, a mother-in-law not like a mother-in-law’. Neither is the moon like a moon. Forced under Qiqiao’s manipulations, Zhishou lives in a version of dynastic China that confuses her profoundly (Cao 2023:73-74).
Ironically, the false promise brought about by Changan’s marriage is described, as in HLM, by means of a pun. Changan’s cosmopolitan match, Shifang (世舫, ‘world-boat’) is given a name which carries connotations of world travel, but sounds like shifang (释放), meaning ‘liberation’. Changan herself bears the same name as the historic capital of the Tang dynasty, famed for its classical poetry (Zhang 1943). This homophony, imposed on us by Chang’s apparently omniscient narrator, provides context for an instance of symbolism that diverges - completely, or so it seems - from the Classical Chinese tradition.
Changan, on her first meeting with Shifang, sees a neon light reflected in a shop window. It is a flower with a green centre and red petals. As she free-associates, the floral emblem is assigned two tentative meanings. First it is imagined as a lotus, pertinent as a symbol in an ancient Egyptian rite, then as a lily, serving as royal insignia in pre-Revolutionary France (Chang 1981:33).
This is not to imply any lack of equivalent imagery in Chinese verse. Classical points of reference for the passage’s narrator may include the Song poet Li Qingzhao. Hungover and barely awake, she gazes through glass at a crab-apple tree in arresting red and green (Zhang 2009). HLM protagonist Jia Baoyu hears in a dream that his life is transient, ‘a flower reflected in a mirror’ (镜中花) (Bech 2002:117). In another cruel irony, Chang has written a character with no grasp of the literary references that she is living through. Unbeknownst to her, her relationship with Shifang will be just as short-lived as Baoyu’s flower.
There is a sense of claustrophobia in the Jiang household, shown again and again to mirror the interior complexes of ancient China (Cao 2022:133). Changan is due to make her own way out of it, and simultaneously out of its intricate system of classical allusion. Those traditional Chinese metaphors, like those of the long-gone ancient Egyptians, or of the deposed French monarchy, have lost their meaning and cultural significance. Now in a wasteland of dead and disparate alternatives, Changan passes from one foreign symbol to another, with no acknowledgement of the space or time that once parted them. This passage helps to explain why she eventually chooses Qiqiao over Shifang. She is at an impasse. Without her mother, she is stripped of any identity of her own, and afforded no basic framework through which to make sense of the world.
The Golden Cangue is, effectively, a biography of language. As literary Chinese is overthrown by Republican baihua (Culp 2008), an entire system of symbolism is left to fade. The large, comforting moons of Tang poetry grow distant in the sky. A flower is plucked from its dynastic origin and offered instead to a foreign god or general. For the women trapped in antiquity, the metaphors remain, but their meanings are warped; portents of doom, rather than of aesthetic beauty. This device holds a dual function. Through her psychological examination of Qiqiao, Changan and Zhishou, Chang describes the larger collapse of an entire historical period.
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