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Negotiating a Mortgage and Wooing a Minister

And in his introductory comments to chapter 37, he notes that Madame Xu is a wise/sagely woman (xian mu). Following this discussion, Mao turns to discuss Zhuge Liang. This pairing is not accidental, and he explicitly equates the wisdom of Madame Xu to that of Zhuge Liang.

The second Xu is Lady Xu, the wife of Sun Quan’s younger brother. The circumstances of her own heroic actions are much more threatening to her personally. Instead of a tyrant and a weak son, she loses a husband and faces two disloyal officers, Gui Lan and Dai Yuan, who murdered her husband.

Moreover, Gui Lan takes a passionate liking to Lady Xu and offers her the option of himself or death. Lady Xu is able to outwit these two and through a false pretense entices them into an ambush. With their heads firmly planted at the altar, she is able to worship at the altar of her dead husband secure in having obtained proper vengeance. The narrative voice conveys its message through a poem: So able and so chaste – in this world all too rare! – The widow lured two villains into her cunning snare.

Vassals base chose treachery, vassals loyal chose death; To this Southland heroine does any man compare? (296)

Mao simply notes, “that by the time Sun Quan had arrived with his troops, this woman had already killed the bandits. In consulting the Book of Changes (Yijing) she is a diviner, and in wielding troops she is a military leader. Such a marvelous woman, I’m afraid, would not even yield to Wolong of Nanyang [Zhuge Liang]” (Jiang 1998: 299). 比及孫權兵到, 女將早已殺賊矣。其卜易則知是女先生, 其用兵則是女將帥。如此奇婦 人, 恐不讓南陽臥龍也。

Mao here establishes the second female Xu as Zhuge Liang’s equal, claiming for her the same heavenly gift that he has (in the role of consulting the Book of Changes).

The two Xus are presented as heroines who surpass even the male heroes in valor. That their descriptions are clothed in both military and Confucian values speaks about the texts re-ordering of gender values. Although they are exceptional, it must be noted that there are a number of other women, such as Diaochan, who are equally acclaimed in the novel in their heroic abilities.

In examining the central motif of this section, gender issues arise. Liu Bei’s pursuit of Zhuge Liang, which resembles a male suitor for female lover, is the most obvious example. This construction of meaning should however be understood within the context of the tradition: the relation of Ruler to Minister was analogous to that of Husband to Wife. Liu Bei’s pursuit of Zhuge

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Liang, I believe, is structured ingeniously to present a reverse situation in which the ruler is the one yearning, and not the minister. The much older Liu Bei (whose equally aged companions Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are chagrinned by their brother’s susceptibility to these younger Daoists) makes the effort necessary to attract the brilliant and heavenly-blessed Zhuge Liang.

Zhuge’s play-acting about not being interested gives way to an acceptance that he has a happy future based in a beautiful home in the west—the region of Shu (Sichuan). This reading suggests that the state (with its ruler and ministers) works much like a family (and is the inverse of later domestic works such as Golden Lotus or Dream of the Red Chmaber, in which relations between men and women are analogous to political relations.

In this chapter, I have suggested that there is a shift of values in regard to rulers of state. The world in the early part of the Three Kingdoms is Confucian, military, and male. With chapters 36–38, we see shift toward a Daoist, cultural, and female world, at least for contending parties from the south.

Gender relations are fairly complex in the novel. For example, male gender roles include those that we conventionally consider both male and female.

These roles are in part determined by the hierarchical structure of society and particularly by the relation between ruler and minister. However, traditional attributes of male roles are taken on by the women and are praised by author and commentator. The ease with which male and female characters inhabit both male and female realms speaks of the Daoist flexibility deemed necessary in a world neither wholly Confucian nor fully masculine.

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5 INTERSTITIAL MEMORIES: THE FORENSIC LIFE OF WANG MINGDE75 C. D. ALISON BAILEY

INTERSTITIAL MEMORIES: THE FORENSIC LIFE OF WANG MINGDE

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“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Hamlet Act One, Scene 5.

“The recollected past is not a consecutive temporal chain but a set of discontinuous moments lifted out of the stream of time.”

Lowenthal 1985: 208

INTRODUCTION According to Wu Pei-yi (1990: 197), the golden age of Chinese autobiography was in the seventeenth century when writers forsook the historiographical model to craft a more fluid genre influenced by vernacular literature. While some self-narratives in this era are couched as nostalgic journeys towards enlightenment, others are more fragmented, surreptitiously slipped into other texts as interlinear commentary, travel literature, or informal jottings.

One, albeit unusual, example is Wang Mingde’s (fl. 1674) Dulü peixi (A bodkin to unravel the code). Wang, a prominent jurist working in the Board of Punishments, inserted into the final part of this highly theoretical text his Supplement to The Washing Away of Wrongs, a forensic manual that becomes a space where the personal erupts in interesting ways. It is here that we learn something of Wang’s childhood and where the figure of Wang as meticulous jurist is transformed into a story-teller and memoirist, interspersing his recommendations for cures and advice on how to read forensic signs with tales of ghosts and 75 This essay is greatly indebted to the warm creative energies and inspiration of Milena DoleželováVelingerová. It was she who initiated my interest in the seventeenth century and helped train me to read between the lines. The shared project with Milena and my dear tongxue Hua Laura Wu on the great fiction commentators Jin Shengtan, Mao Lun, Mao Zonggang, and Zhang Zhupo was deeply exciting and engaging. Milena shared her hospitality and knowledge with us, and created unforgettable memories. When I last saw her at the Atlanta AAS in 2008 we talked about my work on Wang Mingde, and I know she would have appreciated the complexities and hybridities of his fascinating text.

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