Tales of Ming Courtesans - Print Copies Available in Hong Kong

 My author friend in Hong Kong, Les Bird, sent this photo to me! It was taken at the Bookazine IFC store. Bless him! He's the author of A Small Band of Men and will be featured at the upcoming Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Congrats, Les!

 

Tales of Ming Courtesans - UK & Europe Release

For folks located in the U.K. and Europe, the wait for the paperback release is over!

 

 

 

Liu Rushi's Spirit Lives On!

 

[Caption: This is one of several of Liu Rushi's paintings that are held at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Last year I wrote a blog post citing the relation between those paintings and a 20^th century French Diplomat Jean-Pierre Dubosc, and explaining why I featured this poet-courtesan as a protagonist in my new novel Tales of Ming Courtesans. https://bit.ly/3hA9HRE ]

The story of Liu Rushi may have ended in tragedy, but her spirit lives on!

 

In a patriarchal society where poetry writing had traditionally belonged in the male sphere, and where female writing had always been slighted, Liu was known to have purposely compiled an anthology of poems entitled 閏集, collecting poetry written by women and focusing on works by courtesans, whom society ostracized collectively as a lowly class of jianmin, i.e. worthless people. This collection was incorporated into her husband Qian Qianyi’s comprehensive collection of Ming poems entitled 列朝詩集. She could well be considered as a pioneering champion of women’s literature. Sadly a lot of Liu Rushi's calligraphy, poetry collections and paintings (along with most works by Qian Qianyi, Chen Zilong and other Ming loyalist poets/artists) had been lost during Qianlong Emperor's literary inquisition.

On a personal level, Liu was determined to seek proper marriage against all odds, as she knew this was the only way to defend herself against class discrimination. She succeeded in gaining “wife status” in literary dignitary Qian Qianyi’s household.

The multi-talented Liu Rushi was also known for her habit of cross-dressing and mingling with elitist literati in poetry societies in defiance of gender barriers and with an aim to improving her craft of writing and painting. It reminds me of the renowned 19th century French novelist George Sand, also notable for her cross-dressing in rebellion against social conventions. But Liu lived two centuries earlier, and in patriarchal China!

This all goes to show how Liu used her “spirit of independence and liberal thinking” to wage war on classism and sexism and to achieve greatness in the arts. It earned her the iconic historian Chen Yinke’s adoration and respect.  http://chinese.thu.edu.tw/upload/newspaper_upload/28/05-%E5%BB%96%E7%BE%8E%E7%8E%89.pdf

Backdrop to the Late-Ming Courtesan Culture

During my research for the novel Tales of Ming Courtesans, I discovered that a unique courtesan culture was evident in the late-Ming era, one where an unprecedented number of cultured courtesans engaged in the high art of poetry writing. It could be said that courtesans from this era enjoyed much more respect than their counterparts who lived in earlier times or after. This phenomenon had in fact been rooted in the nonconformist literati’s threefold discontent in those unsettling times.

Politically the liberal-minded scholars were dismayed with incompetent rulers and a corrupt court dominated by self-serving eunuchs. On a personal level, they felt stifled by the orthodox Neo-Confucianism teachings that advocated suppression of personal desires as well as adherence to rigid moral codes. In regards to officialdom pursuits, they were fed up with civil exams that prohibited any form of creative writing, forcing candidates to write only prosaic eight-legged essays that focused on the Four Books and Five Classics.

As a form of protest and outlet for pent-up emotions, they set up private poetry societies, where they could engage freely in political discourse, poetry writing and appreciation, and overt promotion of poetry written by cultured courtesans. It was against this backdrop that high-minded courtesans’ literary talents found a nurturing harbor.

Because of the appearance of these quasi-political poetry societies, there was an explosion of poetry anthologies that included works by both the literati and the famous courtesans. In fact, anthologizing courtesans' poetry became a popular activity at the poetry societies.

Unfortunately, this unique phenomenon only lasted until early Qing. During the High Qing reign of Qianlong, while ordering the compilation of the Library of Four Treasures 四庫全書, the Emperor used the opportunity to deliberately cull all literary works by Ming poets/scholars whom he deemed as anti-Qing.

Caught in the literary inquisition were the works by the talented poetry prodigy Liu Rushi 柳如是 and works by her husband Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 and her lover Chen Zilong 陳子龍, both of whom were famous Ming poets. Obviously, works by other Ming loyalist poets met the same fate. It’s only in recent times that such once-lost literary works began drawing a little more attention from Chinese literature academicians.

This could also explain why Ming poetry has been so underrated relative to Tang and Song poetry.

For reference, please go to this link:-

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/41887334.pdf

The following is a quatrain written by Liu Rushi (one of her famous "Eight Quatrains on the West Lake" 西湖八絕句之一):-

垂楊小苑繡簾東，

鶯閣殘枝蝶趁風。

大抵西陵寒食路，

桃花得氣美人中。

My translation:-

East of the curtained window,

Lithe willows grace the court;

Birds nestle on nude branches,

Butterflies in the breeze cavort.

On the spring-scented path by West Lake,

Peach blossoms and beauties share a friendly taunt.

This poem attracted the attention of her future husband Qian Qianyi, who responded with another quatrain:-

草衣家住斷橋東,

好句清如湖上風。

近日西陵誇柳隱,

桃花得氣美人中。

My translation:-

The Straw Cloak Taoist lives east of Broken Bridge,

A good verse refreshes like a breeze from the pond.

I’ve lately commended Liu’s talent by West Lake,

Peach blossoms and beauties share a friendly taunt.

 

Both the above poems, plus others, can be found in the novel.

Book Review - The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This was a deeply engrossing read! The sad news is that this talented Spanish novelist has just passed on June 19. May he rest in peace! 

The story, set in Barcelona around the mid-1900s (from the start of the Spanish Civil War to 1956), revolves around a young booklover Daniel Sempere’s quest to solve the mystery as to why someone has been seeking to burn all the books written by a certain little-known author Julian Carax. We follow Daniel’s personal growth journey that witnesses his transformation from an immature lad caught in and wounded by his puppy love for an older but sophisticated woman, to a compassionate young adult who has come to learn the meaning of true love and how not to squander it.

While on this journey, we follow Daniel into another world, a world with Julian Carax and Javier Fumero at the epicenter, two childhood friends turned archenemies. This maze of a world is full of gothic intrigue and mystery and spins around unrequited love, soured brotherhood, jealousy, cruel personal vendetta and brutal political machinations at the expense of innocent lives, but it is also illumined with true and selfless love and loyal friendship. Daniel discovers that where love is concerned, his fate runs almost parallel to Julian’s: his lover Bea eludes him just as Julian’s Penelope remains out of reach. But ultimately, Daniel is much luckier than Julian.

Daniel is the main narrator of the story, but toward the end a long chapter is devoted to Nuria Montfort’s narration, and Nuria is the woman who falls inextricably in love with Julian but knows his heart belongs to Penelope. Nuria is also the one who holds the key to the mystery that Daniel has been trying to unravel, and for this she pays dearly.

From the author’s lively description of the streetscapes and landscapes of Barcelona, one can sense his intimate love for the city in which he was born.

Here are some of my favorite passages:

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

One loves truly only once in a life time, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.

Beas says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, and that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

My heart ached for Julian when I put down the novel. I’m giving this novel 4.6 stars, rounded up to 5.

 

Book Review - The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy

I found this short novel surprisingly touching. It tells what life in Chinatown Vancouver was like in the years leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937 – 1945) for a Chinese immigrant family, whose children were born on Canadian soil.

Seen through the eyes of three young children of this family, Liang (a girl), Jung (a boy) and Sekky (a boy), everyday life with all its joys, worries, cultural and language conflicts, juvenile mischief, generational squabbles and wistful homesickness emerges vividly with bits of puerile logic and humor.

The senile but sharp-minded grandma is at once loved for her mesmerizing China stories and feared for her ability to see through the young minds. The straitlaced and erudite father is given due respect for his head-of-family status and forgiven for his occasional angry outbursts out of growing anxiety about the onslaught of war in his homeland. The mother plays her submissive wifely and motherly roles with grace and tolerance, but whose opinions are always valued by family members in precarious situations.

Through the three children’s perspectives, readers also see them caught between the contrasting Western and Chinese cultures, and how they eventually adapt to the identity challenge and make the best of it. Also woven into the narratives are hardships of first-generation Chinese immigrants in scraping a livelihood in mining and railway construction projects that were fraught with danger, as well as all-round discrimination that Canadian-born Chinese suffered (they were stamped as “Resident Alien” on their birth certificates, meaning they could not become Canadian citizens) and effects of the prohibitive 1923 Chinese Immigration Act.

It was overall an educational and poignant read. I’m giving it 4.4 stars.

Barbara Sotcan's Review

 

One dull day last week I looked into my email inbox and found this review sent to me through friends by a reader named Barbara Sotcan from Sacramento, California. It instantly perked up my day!

 

Review of Tales of Ming Courtesans as excerpted from Barbara's email:

 

"Only a woman could have written this book. Only a Chinese woman could have written this book. Only a Chinese woman scholar could have written this book. I'm more than impressed with the amount of research that went into the creation of this historical novel. And I'm sure there are other scholars who might have done this amount of research. But to have that ability and also the ability to write engagingly is truly marvelous.

 

I have to confess that I had to work very hard to keep all the names straight, but I don't think I lost any threads of the story due to occasional confusion. I remain so outraged at the injustices suffered by women throughout history, and I applaud the resilience of the women in this book. I won't hesitate to recommend it to any of my more literary friends. It really would make a fantastic movie. The next best thing would be to add pen and ink illustrations, as it really is a visual feast."

Thank you so much Barbara!