Chinese Cultural Products Research Articles

The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature Maram Epstein The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature BY Judith T. Zeitlin. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 296. $57.00. The seventeenth-century Chinese literati imagination swarmed with ghosts. These beings and their phantom sisters-souls, fox spirits, dreams, painted images, and mirror reflections-are the ultimate border crossers; they regularly dissolve the boundaries that delineate time, place, reason, body, consciousness, and life itself. As cultural constructs, since their only function is to represent absence and yearning, they are free from the burden of the mimetic. Ghosts are intimately related to changing beliefs about the connections between body, mind, and identity. They are also linked to the rich culture of death and mourning in traditional China. Indeed, Judith Zeitlin's ambitious exploration in The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature demonstrates that ghosts are neither marginal nor liminal; they are seen and heard everywhere in Chinese culture. The passionate interest of the Chinese in ghosts continues into the twenty-first century, as seen by the phantom images that haunt contemporary East Asian media productions. In The Phantom Heroine, Zeitlin argues that, during the seventeenth century, ghosts, even as projections of a living person's imagination, took on a life of their own as agents in the production of new identities and cultural meanings; deeply coded as yin, they became an idealized expression of the feminine. They became the ultimate embodiment of qing 情 (a term that carried such a broad range of meanings during the late imperial period that it is notoriously difficult to translate; its most common meanings include emotion, passion, sentiment, and a fascination with the subjective), as both the expression of emotion and a means to induce corresponding feelings in others. As revenants of the past, they enabled a dramatization of the themes of memory, nostalgia, and the work of mourning. During this golden age of Chinese theater, the presence of ghosts on stage posed a metatheatrical commentary on questions of performativity. In addition, as disembodied forces that exist to voice the unresolved emotions of a life that ended in grief, [End Page 214] ghosts had long held a recognized place in the development of lyric poetry. In short, the figure of the ghost is so deeply interwoven with so many facets of Chinese cultural production that a study of the spectral could take us in any number of significant directions. Zeitlin's goal in this monograph is to move beyond the traditional academic cataloguing of ghosts and the basic questions about Chinese belief in the supernatural. Although characters in fictional texts frequently question the existence of ghosts and other supernatural beings, their skeptical gestures are themselves formulaic and playful, since they inevitably launch an encounter with the same supernatural whose existence had just been called into question. It is not really the existence of the spectral per se that was of interest to the writers and audiences of this period, but how spectral figures were deployed. After all, the existence of ghosts and other disembodied beings is fully consistent with a cosmology that was composed of yinyang energies and recognized the persistence of powerful emotions in the form of energy that could live on even after the death of the corporeal heart/mind (xin) which had once breathed life into them. In order to analyze the representation and meaning of the spectral in literary texts, The Phantom Heroine provides a richly textured and interdisciplinary description of the polyvalent meanings of ghosts in the seventeenth century. It builds a context for understanding the literary representations of ghosts by drawing connections to the history of medicine, burial practices, psychology (especially the fields of memory, mourning, and trauma), visual culture, and performance theory. The Phantom Heroine is historically nuanced in its mapping of the evolution of understandings and representations of ghosts that culminated in the seventeenth century. As Zeitlin argues, the "long" seventeenth century (ca. 1580-1700) spans a number of key cultural and historical events that fueled an expanded interest in ghosts. Among them was the rapid growth of the publishing industry during...

Two Shilla Intellectuals in Tang: Cases of Early Sino-Korean Cultural Connections

Tang Studies 23-24 (2005-06) Two Shilla Intellectuals in Tang: Cases of Early Sino-Korean Cultural Connections YOUNG KYUN OH ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY The Tang Empire (618-907) established a visible territory under its military and political influence and, perhaps more importantly but less obviously, a cultural territory integrating its neighboring states into the sphere of Chinese civilization, sharing such Chinese cultural products as social system, thought, education, language, writing system, and so forth. Outside its cultural territory, Tang also emerged as one of the cultural centers of the world, by interacting and forming a network with other contemporaneous cultural institutions.! Shilla *JT:m (57 B.C.-A.D. 935), as one of Tang's immediate neighbors, was an active member of the institution, a voluntary participant in the Tang cultural territory. What does it mean, however, to live on the periphery of a powerful cultural center like the Tang Empire? How did Tang deal with her neighbors to incorporate them into her cultural territory? This paper will discuss some facets of the cultural interaction and exchange practiced between Tang and 1 The terms "network" and "institution" are employed here more loosely than they should be, but the conceptualization of these theoretical entities is described in more detail as "world institutions" and "world network" by Adshead, the former being defined to be more functionally cohesive than the latter; and the latter is the "coexistence of severalworld institutions and, depending on their strength, some interaction between them." See S. A. M. Adshead, Tang China: the Rise o/the East in WorldHistory (New York:PalgraveMacmillan, 2004),3-4. Rather specifically,the Tang "network" here denotes the interaction between Tang proper, its neighboring peoples outside the political territory or in the periphery-whose successrelied largelyon the voluntary affiliationwith Tangand the cultures residing in regions, such as India and Persia, more remote from Tang than the peripheral states but trying to be associated somehow with Tang society.I interject the notion of territoriality (as in "cultural territory") in what followssimply in order to bring out the senseof "encounter" between cultures of different memories and dispositions. 119 Oh: Two Shilla Intellectuals its neighbors-Tang and Shilla in particular-through the lives of two Shillans who went to Tang in an effort to gain some insight into the early stage of Sino-Korean cultural association. The rise of Tang roughly coincides with the end of Korea's Samguk shidae .=:~ffif1i; (Three Kingdoms Period, 57 B.C.-A.D. 668), during which the Korean peninsula was divided into Koguryo ~1:i]1I (37 B.C.-A.D. 668), Paekche Ef~ (18 B.C.-A.D. 660), and Shilla, and the beginning of the first unified monarchy occupying the main part of the peninsula, commonly referred to as UnifiedShilla m-*JT~ (668-935). For the next three centuries, Tang and Shilla enjoyed flourishing exchange in almost every aspect of their societies. 2 The most fundamental medium of cultural exchange has always been the exchange of people. Records of incidents involving people moving from the Korean peninsula to Tang China appear as early as the reign ofTaizong **(r. 626-649). For example, Taizong forcibly relocated 70,000 Koguryo people to Tang territory following his invasion ofKoguryo in 645,3and 28,200 households in 668 to various locations south of the Yangtze and Huai Rivers after conquering Koguryo in alliance with Shilla.4 Also, in 660, the Tang army arrested more than 12,000 people from Paekche and moved them to Tang lands after overthrowing their kingdom.5 Koreans also migrated from Shilla to Tang, but, unlike the cases of Koguryo and Paekche, Shillans moved to Tang voluntarily and their 2 The Unified Shilla period (676-935) is also called Northern and Southern Kingdoms Period (Nambukkuk shidae 1¥i::lt~[f,f{i;), which comprises Parhae m$ (698-926) occupying the northern part of the peninsula and Shilla in the south. In addition, criticism of the term "Unified Shilla" is gaining support, mainly for the reason that Shilla did not unifY the entire peninsula or the previous three kingdoms completely. 3 Sima Guang Cf]}i!~7\:; (1019-1086), Zizhi tongjian '~'i"§j$£.t (SKQS), 198.11a. 4 jiu Ttmgshu...