Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I read Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China mostly because I was interested in the world of Chinese author Li Yu. The historians Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang use the life of Li Yu as a lens to see the dynamism of the Ming-Qing period. They also show the reverse, how the social and cultural upheavals of the period shaped the course of this innovative playwright, author, intellectual and publisher. They argue: His first intellectual and professional pursuit, before the demise of the Ming, was his preparation for a career as a scholar-official. After the Manchu conquest, Li Yu became a professional writer, but he was never interested in the study of Neo-Confucian philosophy. Thus, the priority Li Yu placed on his intellectual and professional pursuits coincided with the intellectual and professional trends of his native region. Here again Li Yu becomes a microcosm of the Lan-chi-Chin-hua cultural and intellectual traditions. The theory under which the ...

The Ming-Qing playwright, novelist and publisher Li Yu (1611-80) is an ingenious writer, and he is proud of his ingenuity. Time and again the narrator of his short story collection Shier Lou ( Twelve Towers ) praises his own inventiveness, especially in subverting some literary tradition, cultural assumption, or social hierarchy. In A Tower for the Summer Heat , Patrick Hanan has selected and translated six of the twelve stories (or "towers"), enough to give a very good idea of Li Yu's range. I have read and enjoyed Silent Operas , Li Yu's earlier collection, but I think the Towers rise above the Operas. The title story literalizes the imagination in the form of a Western optical invention, which a man deploys to court a local beauty. In the next story "Return-to-Right Hall," invention is embodied in a successful con man. The story proves that a reformed man is greater than a good man. In "House of Gathered Refinements" a homosexual ménage à troi...

I've been putting together a mini spring course for my seniors, a course on the Chinese short story. I settled on the rather arbitrary number of three writers. Having read Li Yu (Ming-Qing) and Lu Xun (Republican era) at Sarah Lawrence, I know I would want to discuss their consummate and subversive artistry in class. I want a modern woman writer to complete the trio, and Chen Ruoxi fits the bill perfectly. I did not know her work until WL pointed me to her. The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a collection of eight stories. They tell, in a powerful and subtle manner, how Mao's disastrous experiment affected--destroyed--the lives of ordinary people. Their dominant tone is not denunciatory or self-righteous, but empathetic and observant when narrated in the third person, and self-protectively detached or complicit when narrated in the first. Many of the narrators share Chen's background: a former overseas scholar who ...

My last night in Singapore. I am flying back to NYC tomorrow, transferring at Heathrow, and I am so ready to leave. The weather has been intolerably hot, only slightly cooler after the rains of the past two days. I saw a lot of friends this time: former school-mates, national service mates, ex-colleagues from the school I taught at, writer-friends, clubbing friends. I enjoyed catching up with people, but felt as if I was dropping in on their lives, parachuting in, and then ejecting out, and their lives continue as before, like mine. Since I no longer live here, in any meaningful sense, these brief meetings are like the rains: intense, over quickly, hopeful of new growth. Tagore, whom I've been reading in Singapore, loves the rain. For him, it represents inspiration, refreshment, vitality. His poem on rain begins: "My heart, it dances like a peacock, it dances, it dances." He is a marvelous lyric poet, but allies his lyric gift with metaphysical daring. "Last Honey...