Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Dushu sheng and the Limits of Community in the Early Qing
This article explores the late imperial imagination of the nonhuman other by way of a curious creature that appears in the southern drama Dushu sheng. Midway through the play, set in the early years of the Yuan dynasty, the young literatus protagonist is abandoned on a remote island, where he is rescued by a renxiong,a fierce yet empathetic bear-like creature that takes him as its mate. Though short-lived, their union is one of several in the play in which marginal characters are brought into the (narrative and imperial) center through marriage: by the end of the play, the protagonist is wed to both the daughter of a boatman and the daughter of a Mongol official. But while this double marriage offers the possibility of a productive overcoming of the distinctions between scholar and merchant and between Chinese and barbarian, the tragic fate of the renxiong forecloses any possibility of overcoming that which divides man and beast. Rather, as the human community is expanded to include merchant and Mongol, the renxiong serves as the necessary limit, allowing the play to rescue these social and ethnic others from baseness and barbarity. At the same time, the exclusion of the renxiong from this new community is not untroubled; in resisting the genre’s compulsive imposition of wholeness, Dushu sheng dramatizes the fractures and exclusions that made possible the restoration of order in the early Qing.
Suzhou plays, chuanqi, barbarians, animals, conquest dynasties
In the thirteenth act of Dushu sheng 讀書聲 (The Sound of Reading), a chuanqi 傳奇 (southern drama) attributed to the early Qing Suzhou playwright Zhang Dafu 張大復 (before 1610–after 1661), the poor orphaned student Song Ru 宋儒 finds himself alone on a strange and seemingly uninhabited island.1 He had [End Page 149] arrived there on the merchant cargo ship of his father-in-law, Dai Laoda 戴老大—they had stopped on the island to find some herbs to treat the ailing Song’s illness, but when Song sees the ship sailing away, he realizes that he has been tricked and abandoned.2 This turn of events should not have come as a surprise, as Song’s marriage into the Dai family had been deeply fraught from the beginning. Earlier in the play, Song sought passage on Laoda’s boat in order to travel to the capital to sit for the civil service examination. When Laoda’s daughter Run’er 潤兒 was caught eavesdropping on him reciting texts late at night—the enchanting “sound of reading” from which the play’s title derives— her horrified parents accused her of impropriety; humiliated, she strangled herself with her sash. Blaming Song Ru for Run’er’s death, her parents returned to land to file a lawsuit. When Run’er suddenly revived during the court hearing, the Haimen 海門 County magistrate dismissed the charges and compelled Dai Laoda to accept Song Ru as his son-in-law, which he did begrudgingly. Back at sea, Song’s illness provided the perfect pretext for the Dais to rid themselves of the “useless” student and marry their daughter to a sturdy boat hand.
Sick, freezing, and lost, with dusk turning to dark, Song Ru sees a looming figure approach. It is the jing 凈 (painted-face role type), “dressed as a savage” 扮野人, who grabs Song and drags him offstage. The first half of the play comes to a dramatic close as we hear Song cry out in despair, “Oh no, this is really bad” 哎呀，不好了嚇!3 While the appearance of this creature is a shock to Song, the audience had already heard tell of a mysterious renxiong 人熊 (lit. humanbear).4 Earlier in the third scene, a band of pirates lands on the island looking for a place to stash their ill-gotten treasure. After a commotion offstage, several of the men report to their leader, Shi Yi 時宜, that in the forest they encountered “a savage, fierce and strange” 一個野人，勇猛異常. They tried to kill the creature, but “neither cannon fire nor arrows nor spears and daggers were able to injure it” 火砲、葉箭、鎗刀俱傷他不得. Shi Yi explains that this was not just some wild animal: “I have heard that the renxiong is a most numinous beast; it cannot be harmed” 我聞人熊，乃至靈之獸，不可傷他.5
When Song Ru reappears a few scenes later, we learn the truth of what happened after the terrifying cliffhanger. That fateful night, Song tells us, “I saw something that was like a man but wasn’t a man, like a beast but not a beast, that carried me to this cave” 只見一個似人非人，似獸非獸，負我到此山洞中. Though Song thought death was imminent, it turns out that the creature wanted to take him not as its meal but as its mate, “to perform the rites to become husband and wife” 欲我成其夫婦之禮. In the safety of the cave, the renxiong supplied Song with medicinal plants, and he made a full recovery in a matter of days. As for the renxiong, “although it is a ferocious beast, it has a sound [End Page 150] understanding of human thoughts and feelings” 只是那人熊雖則猛獸，亦頗觧人意.6 The renxiong has even taken on the role of teacher: every day, Song tells us, whenever there is free time, it teaches him how to spar with spear and sword and that he is now quite proficient.
Their quasi-domestic idyll is interrupted when Song Ru catches sight of the boat of an old friend. As Song sails off, the renxiong chases after him; when it realizes Song is gone, it throws itself into the ocean. The friend witnesses the renxiong’s suicide and mentions it to Song, who is overcome with guilt: “Dear bear, it is I who heartlessly harmed you” 熊熊，是小生無情害了你了!7 Song swears that if he ever attains fame and fortune, he will have a memorial tablet erected in the renxiong’s honor.
This island interlude is the unexpected pivot on which the entire play turns, in which a seeming geographical and narrative dead end is actually a site of renewal and profit. The ailing student not only recovers his health but also gains martial skills that will serve him well in the latter half of the play. And although dumped on the island like so much refuse, he leaves loaded with treasure: Song stumbles upon the pirates’ hidden spoils, which he takes with him when he is rescued. When the Haimen magistrate is kidnapped by the pirates, Song uses this booty to redeem the man who had once saved him and then joins the military effort to defeat the pirates once and for all. Song’s efforts are rewarded with a marriage to the magistrate’s daughter and a reunion with his faithful first wife, Run’er. The play ends with a tribute to the creature that made all of this career and romantic success possible: “The achievements and the rank and riches I have today have been given to me by that renxiong. This is a debt that I must repay” 今日功成富貴，此人熊之賜也，不可不報.8 Song recalls his earlier promise and has a shrine for the renxiong’s spirit built on the island.
Though the renxiong is crucial to the human drama of the play, its nature remains rather obscure—exactly what space between man and beast does it occupy? While in modern Chinese renxiong is used to refer to bears in general, in his Bencao gangmu 本草綱目 (Compendium of Materia Medica), Li Shizhen 李時珍 (1518–93) gives two usages of the term. One refers to the pi 羆 (brown bear) because it can stand upright like a human.9 The second usage, as another name for something called a feifei 狒狒, indicates a different kind of being entirely:
According to the Geographical Annals, the feifei can be found in the mountains of western Sichuan and Chuzhou and is called renxiong. People eat its paws and strip its hide. It can also be found in the You Mountains of Sha County in Fujian. It is over three meters tall and when it encounters a human, it laughs. It is also called Mountain Giant, Savage, and Mountain Goblin. [End Page 151]
按方輿志云︰狒狒，西蜀及處州山中亦有之，呼為人熊。 人亦食其掌，剝其皮。 閩中沙 縣幼山有之，長丈餘，逢人則笑，呼為山大人，或曰野人及山魈也。 10
A description attributed to the Shanhai jing 山海經 (Classic of Mountains and Seas) by way of Chen Zangqi’s 陳藏器 (fl. eighth century) Bencao shiyi 本草拾遺 (Supplement to the Materia Medica) offers a closer look at this creature: “[It] has the face of a man and long lips; its black body is covered in hair and it has backwards heels. Whenever it sees a human it laughs, causing its upper lip to cover its eyes” 人面，長唇黑身，有毛反踵。 見人則笑，笑則上唇掩目.11 The feifei’s body is as strange in death as it is in life: “If you drink [its blood], you can see ghosts” 飲之使人見鬼也.12
Like Song Ru’s description of the renxiong as “like a man but not a man, like a beast but not a beast,” the feifei is uncannily indeterminate. In the various descriptions in the Bencao gangmu, the feifei approaches but ultimately defers legibility in those moments of human encounter: its familiar face does unfamiliar things (the lip that covers its eyes); it makes meaningful gestures that refuse intelligibility (the laughter in the face of those who wish to eat and flay it). Though the project of Li Shizhen’s collection is to categorize knowledge and thus make things and their relations to other things clear, the proliferation of names and divergent stories—some tell of it eating humans rather than the other way around—makes the nature of this creature more elusive than less. This multiplicity is a problem that Li Shizhen himself ponders: “Xu Shen wrote, ‘Northern people call this creature a tulou; today people call it a renxiong.’ According to Guo Pu, what is called the shandu is also a feifei, but they seem a bit dissimilar. Could they be different animals but share the same name [of feifei]” 許慎云: 北人呼為土螻。 今人呼為人熊。 按郭璞謂山都即狒狒，稍似差別，抑名同物異歟?13
While the various descriptions of the creature(s) called feifei in the Bencao gangmu form a blurry composite at best, these descriptions, as well as the illustrations included in a number of editions, conjure up something more simian than ursine (the through line to the modern use of feifei to refer to the baboon is apparent), as seen in figure 1. Dushu sheng, however, frequently highlights the bear-like nature of the renxiong: Song Ru affectionately abbreviates renxiong to xiong or xiongxiong, and the play ends with the erection of a Divine Bear Shrine 神熊祠. While the fluidity of the boundary between man and monkey is one that still preoccupies modern philosophical and scientific inquiry, Dushu sheng reflects the expansiveness of the premodern imagination that enlists a much wider purview of animals—the talking fox, the sensate carp, the dreaming butterfly—in negotiating self and other. Indeed, Dushu sheng [End Page 152] participates in, and perhaps draws plot inspiration from, a long oral and literary tradition that uses bears to trouble this boundary between man and beast.14
Illustration of a feifei in 1596 printing of the Bencao gangmu, from Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu. Nanjing: Hu Chenglong 胡承龍, 1596.
One story included in the Song dynasty compendium Taiping guangji 太 平廣記 (Extensive Records of the Era of Great Peace), which was reprinted in the late Ming, tells of a man who goes into the mountains to hunt deer and accidentally falls into a deep pit. There happen to be a few bear cubs also in the pit; when the mother bear appears, the man fears the worst. Unexpectedly, as the bear is distributing food to its cubs, it places the last portion in front of the man, who ravenously gobbles it up. From that time forward,
every morning the mother bear would return from foraging food and give a portion to the man, which allowed him to survive. Once the bear cubs had gotten bigger, the mother bear carried them one by one out of the pit. When the last cub was gone, [End Page 153] the man thought that he was going to die there since there was no way out. But then the mother bear returned to the pit and sat down next to him. Intuiting the bear’s meaning, he grabbed its foot; the bear then leapt out of the pit, delivering him to safety.
熊母每旦覓食果還，輒分此人，此人賴以延命。 後熊子大，其母一一負將出。 子既盡， 人分死坎中，窮無出路。 熊母尋復還，入坐人邊。 人解意，便抱熊之足。 於是跳出，遂得毋他。15
As in Dushu sheng, what at first appears to be terrifying is in fact nurturing and life sustaining. In both cases the bear’s protection brings man and beast into a kinship that explicitly evokes the most intimate of human relations: in the above story, mother and son; in Dushu sheng, wife and husband. That the feminine role in these dyads is occupied by the beast places both narratives in a long tradition that conflates the otherness of woman and animal, though with a crucial distinction. The Taiping guangji is full of stories in which a mysterious woman appears in a man’s life, whether for a night or a lifetime, only to eventually reveal herself to be an animal; these two bear stories tell instead of an animal that reveals itself to be a mother or a wife. The twist here is not that the seemingly knowable is ultimately unknowable but that the seemingly unknowable can be made known; in place of the sudden awareness of the rupture between human and beast, man and woman, self and other that we find in stories in which a lover turns out to be an otter or a fish, here we have a kind of communication across modes of being.
The possibility of overcoming the boundaries between ren 人 (human) and xiong 熊 (bear) receives a more fraught treatment in another story anthologized in the Taiping guangji in which a man goes missing in the mountains. His son searches for him and is shocked by what he discovers:
He saw his father crouching in the hollow of a tree; from his head to his waist he was covered in fur like a bear. He asked his father what caused this, and his father replied, “Heaven reduced me to this. [I must stay] but you should leave.” His son returned home wailing and despondent. A year later, his father was spotted by a woodcutter; his body had been entirely transformed into that of a bear.
見秀蹲空樹中，從頭至腰，毛色如熊。 問其何故，答云:天謫我如此，汝但自去。 兒哀 慟而歸。 逾年伐山人見之，其形盡為熊矣。16
The nature of the transformation the man undergoes remains unclear. At what appears to be the midway point of the transformation, the man still fundamentally retains his humanity: he recognizes his son; he understands what is happening and why. When he is later spotted by the woodcutter, we are just told [End Page 154] about his xing 形 (form) being that of a bear. But what of his xin 心 (heartmind)? That a bear could have the xin of a human—his memories, his knowledge, his moral commitments—is left as a tantalizing possibility; it is precisely this possibility of a human and humane xin in the xing of a beast that is taken up by Dushu sheng. And while the above story purposely obscures the precise logic of transformation, it shows more generally how in a universe generated and structured by transformation, in which all creatures are in states of becoming and flux, boundaries between one thing and another become impossible to discern.
Though Dushu sheng’s depiction of the renxiong clearly emerges out of an existing tradition, late imperial literary representations of something called a renxiong that occupies a space between man and beast are uncommon. One such representation appears in the penultimate chapter of the late Ming novel Han Xiangzi quan zhuan 韓湘子全傳 (The Complete Biography of Han Xiangzi) by the Hangzhou writer Yang Erzeng 楊爾曾 (fl. 1590–1602). Like Song Ru, Han Qing 韓清, the cousin of the titular immortal Han Xiangzi 韓湘子, encounters a terrifying beast when lost in a forest: “He saw a renxiong, its entire body and face covered in fur with only a pair of glowing red eyes shining through” 只見一個人熊，滿身滿面都是毛披蓋著，止有一雙眼睛紅亮亮露出來.17 Seeing Han Qing recoiling in abject terror, the renxiong “started to laugh, opening its mouth so wide that it stretched from ear to ear” 開口便笑，那張嘴直掀到耳朵 邊, not unlike the strange feifei of the Bencao gangmu.18
But despite Han Qing’s fears that he is about to be eaten alive, this renxiong is as benevolent as Song Ru’s and only wishes to carry the helpless man to safety (figure 2). During their long journey, Han Qing discovers that while the renxiong is unable to speak to him directly, it “seemed to possess an understanding of human matters” 他像個曉得人事的模樣 that sets it apart from other animals: “Oh renxiong, renxiong! You possess intelligence and sentience. You are not some stupid, insentient beast” 人熊，人熊，你是有靈性知覺，不是那蠢然無知的畜生.19 While Song Ru’s renxiong brings him medicine and food, this one offers Han Qing a kind of spiritual sustenance: “This renxiong is the servant of the immortal Mumu. That it carried you here is your good fortune. If you go pay obeisance to Mumu and become his disciple, he will pass on to you the formula for the elixir of immortality” 這個人熊也是沐目真人案下伏事的，他馱了你來，是你的造化到了…… 投拜真人，做個徒弟，傳些金丹奧訣.20
The description of the renxiong in Dushu sheng as alternately a savage (yeren 野人), a beast (shou 獸), and a bear (xiong 熊) recalls a similar conflation in a scene from the mid-seventeenth-century play Shiwu guan 十五貫 (Fifteen Strings of Cash), attributed to the Suzhou playwright Zhu Suchen 朱素臣 [End Page 155] (c. 1620–after 1701), in which a prefect has a prophetic dream. According to the stage directions, “from offstage, two savages enter and dance for a bit; holding two rats in their mouths, they kneel and cry” 內二野人舞一回介, 作啣二鼠跪哭介 upon waking, the prefect uses the same language to describe this vision to the audience: “As I started to drift off, it seemed like I saw two savages” 朦朧之際， 仿佛見兩個野人.21 Later, when two prisoners surnamed Xiong 熊 (“bear”) are kneeling and crying before him, the prefect suddenly understands his dream: “In my dream there were two savages, holding rats in their mouths and sobbing. Those savages were xiongs (bears)/the Xiongs” 夢有兩個野人，啣鼠哀泣。 野人者，熊也.22 Indeed, as the alternative title of the drama tells us, this was a dream of two bears (Shuangxiong meng 雙熊夢).
Illustration of the renxiong carrying Han Qing over the mountain ridge, from Yang Erzeng, Han Xiangzi quan zhuan. Nanjing: Jiuru tang 九如堂, preface dated 1623. From a microfilm held in the collection of the Harvard-Yenching Library.
At the same time, the renxiong of Dushu sheng exhibits a particular agency and depth unseen in other representations. More so than the renxiong of Han Xiangzi quan zhuan, Dushu sheng’s renxiong demonstrates not just a capacity for human understanding but a desire to enter into human relationships—to not just do its master’s bidding but become an actor in this human drama. And unlike Shiwu guan, Dushu sheng presents the renxiong not as a symbolic [End Page 156] apparition but as a deeply real and literal presence on stage—grabbing, carrying, moaning, jumping, dying. Played by the jing, a painted-face role typically reserved for male characters, the renxiong’s terrifying exterior masks a surprising capacity for feeling. The stage directions, though limited, reveal the renxiong’s final scene to be a bravura performance of heartbreak that cycles through desire, anger, and resignation: “The jing enters dressed as a savage and crying out” 净扮野人呌上, and then, spotting the ship, gesticulates to the men sailing away, “making a beckoning gesture” 招介. When that does not work, it “angrily throws stones” 恨介擲石 before “throwing itself in the water and rolling off stage” 自投水滚行下.23
The unexpected emotional performance given by the renxiong does not happen in isolation from the larger moral drama of the play. Rather, it can be seen as part of the play’s overall project to expand a certain kind of personhood to those who would otherwise be considered objects and not subjects. Set in the early years of the Yuan dynasty, Dushu sheng places at its center the ever deepening reciprocal exchanges between two men whose relationship is freighted with nothing less than the weight of dynastic transition: Song Ru (lit. Song [dynasty] Confucian) and the Haimen magistrate, the ethnic Mongol Yelü Wulitiemu’er 耶律鳥梨鐵木兒. Yelü grants Song his freedom and his first wife; Song buys Yelü’s release and marries his daughter as his second wife. The path of their relationship from recognition (in which the magistrate sees the true character of the falsely accused student) to mentorship and ultimately kinship echoes the homosocial bonds that structure many late imperial chuanqi. That Yelü is a member of the Mongol royal family brings this development of affinity (and affinal bonds) into the realm of ethnodynastic politics.24
However, while Yelü’s blood and bureaucratic ties to the Mongol Yuan court are repeatedly mentioned, markers of ethnic difference are conspicuously absent. When Yelü, played by the wai 外 (older male role type), makes his first entrance in scene 7, he is led onstage by a procession and is wearing a cap and belt as befitting a (Chinese) official, in a striking contrast to the ethnic others that often appear on the late Ming stage, like the Southeast Asian princes of Shuang jinbang 雙金榜 (Twin Golden Placards) dressed in their foreign robes and “plopping themselves cross-legged on the floor” 盤腳坐介 or the Jurchen envoy in Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (Peony Pavilion), who “enters on horseback, clothed in a barbarian costume and brandishing a sword” 扮番將帶刀騎馬.25 While the princes and envoy speak in incomprehensible tongues, Yelü speaks in guanhua 官話, the standardized language of officialdom.26 As Yelü insightfully adjudicates the case against Song Ru, the role that he embodies—the upright and perceptive judge—owes a significant debt to the Song dynasty personage-turned-legend [End Page 157] Judge Bao.27 And when Yelü is kidnapped, his daughter Maozhuan 茂賺 fully inhabits the role of the devoted Confucian child, willing to sell her own body to pay her father’s ransom.
It is this daughter who will serve as the physical link between the Yelü and Song Ru, between the Yuan and the Song, between Mongol and Han, when she is given in marriage to Song Ru. That this marriage comes at the behest of the emperor himself, rather than a low-level official (as in Song Ru’s earlier marriage, which was arranged by Yelü), highlights the larger symbolic significance of this union between the Mongolian royal family and a “Confucian of the Song.”28
The depiction of Yelü as an upright magistrate and his daughter Maozhuan as a filial exemplar folds the Mongol other into normative neo-Confucian identities constructed around scholarly practice, civil service, and proper conduct. Similarly, Run’er’s refusal to remarry, despite parental pressure and strong financial incentive, demonstrates an innate capacity among nonelites for a particularly neo-Confucian performance of wifely chastity. In much the same way, the renxiong demonstrates an intuitive benevolence (ren 仁), revealing a truly human(e) heart in contrast to the villainous Dais, who are derided for having “the face of a human but the heart of a beast” 人面獸心.29 Despite not being fully Chinese, fully elite, or fully human, Maozhuan, Run’er, and the renxiong become the play’s exemplars of filiality, chastity, loyalty, and compassion, very much in keeping with the late Ming discourse of qing 情 (sentiment) that lauds the spontaneous moral behavior of those outside the reach of traditional Confucian education.
The play ends with a happy polygamous union between Song Ru, Run’er, and Maozhuan, the formation of new kinship relations bringing these women from the margins of elite culture into the center. That “a Confucian of the Song” marries the daughter of a boatman and the daughter of a Mongol offers a particularly loaded lesson to an early Qing audience, showing how the imagined distance between scholar and merchant and between Chinese and barbarian can be overcome. But what of Song’s third “wife,” the renxiong? Why can only the boundary between man and beast not be overcome? Perhaps it would be instructive to look at another character, also tied to the island in the middle of the sea, who cannot be assimilated into this new family-cum-polity: the pirate leader, Shi Yi.
While pirates constitute a not infrequent presence on the late imperial stage, the pirates of Dushu sheng are of an entirely different ilk than the acquisitive and bloodthirsty archetype that often appeared in chuanqi. Here the leader of the pirates is a former Song dynasty general who enters not bragging of [End Page 158] the destruction he has wrought or the riches he hopes to accrue but bemoaning the dire state of affairs that drove him to the life of an outlaw: “The Song ruling house was destroyed, and ten thousand people were slaughtered” 宋室摧殘萬姓屠. In an echo of much of the (Qing-sanctioned) discourse surrounding the fall of the Ming, he blames the collapse of the Song not on northern invaders but on “treacherous officials” 奸臣 who “undermined the state and harmed the people” 誤國害民. Shi Yi has gathered a band of “heroes and exemplars” 英雄豪傑 who style themselves after the Liangshan outlaws and participate in complex shadow economies in order to fund their loyalist activities.30 In the third scene, one of Shi Yi’s men presents him with “gold, pearls, jade, and silk; strange perfumes and unusual treasures from foreign lands” 金珠玉帛，外國奇香異寶.31 These valuables are hidden on the abandoned island until the time is right to launch their attack on the capital.
The impetus to launch a land campaign arrives with the abduction and imprisonment of the historical martyr Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 (1236–83) in the capital Yanjing (modern Beijing). Since the magistrate of Haimen is a member of the Yuan royal family, the pirates decide to loot the city, hold the magistrate for ransom, and from there continue inland to the capital. But this loyalist economy, through which the pirates fund their exploits, is also the source of their ruin. Song Ru steals their hidden treasure and uses it to pay the magistrate’s ransom; when the pirates return to the island to retrieve this treasure, they discover that they have been tricked and pay with their lives.
When he is captured by Song Ru in battle, Shi Yi defiantly faces his imminent death: “Today I have become a dragon out of water.32 There is nothing left but to die” 我今日成失水之龍。 有死而已.33 No attempt is made to recruit him to his enemy’s side; unlike the bandit rebels in the early Qing play Liang xumei 兩鬚眉 (Two of Beard and Brow) by the Suzhou playwright Li Yu 李玉(c. 1610–after 1667), Shi Yi’s unwavering loyalty to the previous dynasty cannot be overcome.34 Shi Yi’s steadfast dedication to his cause is treated with a nuance not usually reserved for chuanqi antagonists, which can perhaps be attributed in part to the character’s historical antecedents, which are barely below the surface. Shi Yi is clearly meant to evoke the Ming general turned loyalist pirate Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (aka Koxinga 國姓爺, 1624–1662), with Shi Yi’s attacks on the Mongol Yuan recalling Zheng’s exploits against the Manchu Qing: Shi Yi’s abortive campaign to retake the northern capital, Yanjing, echoes Zheng Chenggong’s failed attempt to take the southern capital, Nanjing, and just as Zheng retreated to Taiwan in the face of this defeat, Shi Yi flees to an uninhabited island. The pirate’s loaded name, with its reference to “taking action according to the circumstances” 因 時 制 宜, not only makes explicit the [End Page 159] connection to the present day but also offers a justification of sorts: Shi Yi is resorting to piracy only as an expedient means in a time of grave crisis.
But while Shi Yi is treated sympathetically by the play, he is not the heroic redeemer of a fallen dynasty like other Zheng Chenggong proxies that appear in early Qing narratives, such as Shuihu houzhuan 水滸後傳 (Later Tales of Water Margin).35 As his name makes clear, it is Song Ru and not the loyalist pirate who is the true inheritor of the Song’s cultural tradition. While Shi Yi’s loyalist commitments are treated with empathy and respect—which is to be expected from an elite playwright emerging from midcentury Jiangnan—there is no place for him in the new order. His death is a necessary precondition for the formation of a posttransition community; as he says, he is a dragon out of water, a man out of joint with his time, who can do nothing but die.
The death of the renxiong is similarly one of resignation, of recognizing that the world of the protagonist has no room for a creature like it. Like Shi Yi, the renxiong fulfills a narrative function that allows the polity to be put back together again by delimiting what is inside and what is outside, where it begins and where it ends. In extending its community to include the barbarian but not the beast, the play disentangles the late imperial discourses that conflated the foreign and the subhuman—a conflation made visible on the late imperial stage in the pointed resemblance between the barbarian character dressed in furs and babbling incomprehensibly and the wild beast grunting and covered in hair.36 Positioned against the depiction of Yelü Wulitiemu’er in Han clothes, speaking guanhua and inhabiting a familiar role, the renxiong allows the play to rescue the conquest dynasty from barbarity.37
The exclusion of the loyalist and the savage in order to construct a new community between the remnant and the barbarian is necessary but not untroubled. Their deaths, treated with sympathy and regret, are experienced as losses, not gains; in resisting chuanqi’s compulsive restoration of wholeness, they gesture to the fractures and exclusions that made the restoration of order in the early Qing possible. In the final reunion scene, we cannot but feel a bearshaped hole, but there is no place in this world for the love of a renxiong except the bottom of the sea. [End Page 160]
arielfox@uchicago.edu
ARIEL FOX is assistant professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include late imperial fiction and drama, the early modern imagination of wealth and surplus, cartography and foreign trade routes, and numismatics. She is currently completing a book manuscript on seventeenth-century drama and the staging of commercial experience.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2018 Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, where I received much helpful feedback from my fellow panelists I-Hsien Wu, Paola Zamperini, Yun Bai, and Qiancheng Li. I am also grateful to Wai-yee Li, Donald Harper, Daniela Licandro, Yiwen Wu, Jake Werner, and the two anonymous JCLC reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
Notes
1. The only extant edition of Dushu sheng is an incomplete and undated manuscript from the collection of the famous jingju 京劇 (Peking opera) actor Cheng Yanqiu 程硯秋 (1904– 58), who possessed a number of manuscripts attributed to the circle of early Qing playwrights referred to in modern scholarship as the Suzhou pai 蘇州派 (Suzhou school). The first scene and part of the second are missing from the extant play text, so it is unknown if an author was originally listed; the consensus of the scholarly community on the attribution of the play to the Suzhou playwright Zhang Dafu (style name Xinqi 心其) is largely based on a reference in Gao Yi’s 高奕 (fl. early Qing) Xin chuanqi pin 新傳奇品 (New Southern Dramas). However, it is impossible to know if the extant undated manuscript is the same play as the Dushu sheng written by Zhang Dafu in the early Qing. The very limited scholarship that exists on Dushu sheng ignores this problem altogether; most prominently, Li Mei’s 李玫 monograph Ming Qing zhi ji Suzhou zuojia qun yanjiu 明清 之際蘇州作家群研究 (Research on the Late Ming and Early Qing Suzhou Writers’ Group) does not discuss the problems with this attribution and instead treats the extant text as authored by Zhang Dafu in the early Qing. A similar treatment can be found in Gu Lingsen’s 顾聆森 “Shuzhai neiwai liang zhong tian: Lun Zhang Dafu chuanqi Dushu sheng, Kuaihuo san” 書齋內外兩種天:論張大復傳奇《讀書聲》、《快活三》(The Two Worlds Inside and Outside the Study: A Discussion of Zhang Dafu’s Southern Dramas The Sound of Reading and Three Kinds of Happiness). However, while it is impossible to say who wrote the extant edition or when, the structure of the play and its use of Wu dialect and of source materials from Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) collections are typical of the early Qing Suzhou playwrights. As I discuss later in this article, the content also speaks very specifically to the coastal crises and ethnopolitics of early Qing Jiangnan (and the political commitments of Zhang Dafu) such that even if the extant text does not itself date from the early Qing, it nevertheless bears the traces of a prior work produced in the early Qing.
2. Dushu sheng brings together two narrative threads. The first derives from a story from Feng Menglong’s classical tale collection Qingshi 情史 (A History of Love), “Wusong Sun sheng” 吳淞孫生 (Student Sun from Wusong), which was expanded into the vernacular tale “Cuo tiaoqing Jia mu li nü; Wu gaozhuang Sun lang de qi” 錯調情賈母詈女, 誤告狀孫郎得妻 (Over Mistaken Accusations of Flirting, Mrs. Jia Curses Her Daughter; From a False Lawsuit, Mr. Sun Obtains a Wife) in Ling Mengchu’s 凌濛初 (1580–1644) Erke pai’an jingqi 二刻拍案驚奇 (Slapping the Table in Amusement, Second Volume). The second thread comes from a story in the 1597 anecdotal collection Ertan 耳談 (Tales Overheard) by Wang Tonggui 王同軌 (c. 1530–after 1608), which was anthologized in Feng Menglong’s Qingshi as “Jin San qi” 金三妻 (The Wife of Jin San). This story is given an expanded treatment in Feng’s Jingshi tongyan 警世通言 (Comprehensive Words to Caution the World) as the vernacular tale “Song Xiaoguan tuanyuan po zhanli” 宋小官團圓破氈笠 (Mr. Song Brings about a Reunion by Means of a Tattered Felt Hat). This use of material from the collections of Feng Menglong and Ling Mengchu was common among the Suzhou playwrights, as was the intertwining of two narrative threads in the construction of a chuanqi. However, in a departure from many of the other plays attributed to the Suzhou playwrights, Dushu sheng draws primarily from the classical anecdotes and not the elaborated huaben 話 本 (vernacular short story) versions. The renxiong discussed below is an innovation of the play; no such creature appears in any of these source texts.
3. Dushu sheng, 1.21a. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
4. Because of the complexities of translating this term (as I discuss later in this article), I refer to the creature as a renxiong throughout.
6. Ibid., 2.4b.
7. Ibid., 2.6a.
8. Ibid., 2.23a.
10. Ibid., 2.2921. For a discussion of Li Shizhen’s approach to creatures that tread the boundary between human and beast, see Nappi, Monkey and the Inkpot, 122–30.
12. As above, Li cites this line from Bencao shiyi. A similar description appears in the Youyang zazu 酉陽雜俎 (Miscellaneous Morsels from the South Side of Mt. You), which is elsewhere used by Li as a source: “If you drink its blood you can see ghosts” 飲其血可以見鬼. Duan, Youyang zazu, 2.1207.
13. Li, Bencao gangmu, 2.2921. Other writers classify these names as different kinds of beings. In his Nanyue biji 南越筆記 (Miscellaneous Jottings on Southern Yue), Li Tiaoyuan 李調元 (1734–1803) uses the above quote from the Shanhai jing to define the feifei, which is distinct from both the renxiong and the feifei 狒狒 that he describes before and after. Li, Nanyue biji, 9.2b–3b.
14. For a survey of premodern bear lore and worship, see Ye, Xiong tuteng.
15. “Shengping ru shanren” 昇平入山人 (The Shengping Era Man Who Went into the Mountains), in Li et al., Taiping guangji, 5.3611. This story is attributed to the late fifth-to early sixth-century Xu Soushen ji 續搜神記 (Sequel to Records of the Search for Spirits). On the history of this text, see Campany, Strange Writing, 69–75.
16. “Huang Xiu” 黄秀 (Huang Xiu), in Li et al., Taiping guangji, 5.3611.
17. Yang, Han Xiangzi quan zhuan, 2.842. For an English translation of the novel, see Yang, Story of Han Xiangzi.
19. Ibid., 2.844. A similar depiction appears in Xia Jingqu’s 夏敬渠 (1705–87) novel Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 (A Rustic’s Words of Exposure), in which the hero, Wen Suchen 文素臣, and his servant, lost in the mountains of Taiwan, are carried off by a pair of renxiong to their cave. Though fearful that this means certain death, Suchen is relieved when the renxiong treat him with kindness and offer a meal of exotic delicacies. The six renxiong that Suchen encounters in the cave can understand human speech and moral behavior— Suchen explains to them which of the humans they are holding captive are deserving of their freedom, and they assent to release them. The renxiong are ultimately positioned as sympathetic creatures who have been subject to vicious attacks by the yakshas and shanxiao 山魈 (mountain goblin) that live in the mountains. Xia, Yesou puyan, 63.5b–8b. My gratitude to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out this reference to me.
20. Yang, Han Xiangzi quan zhuan, 2.848. Han Qing never receives this elixir, as Mumu deems him to be unworthy. Instead the renxiong conveys Qing back to the capital, where the emperor installs him in office.
22. Ibid., 2.7a–b. There is a long history of bears as prophetic dream apparitions. In the Zuozhuan 左傳 (Zuo Commentaries), a sick ruler dreams of a yellow bear 黃熊 entering his room; this bear is the transformed spirit of Gun 鯀 and requires sacrifices in order for the health of the ruler to be restored. Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, 1289–90. Another kind of prophetic bear dream appears in the twenty-third chapter of the Ming novel Fengshen yanyi 封神演義 (Investiture of the Gods) in which King Wen 文王 dreams of a tiger with wings. Wen worries that this is an ill omen, but his minister San Yisheng 散宜生 tells him that the creature was actually a bear and recounts a story about the Shang king Wu Ding 武丁 having a dream of a flying bear. San Yisheng tells the king that the dream augurs that he will gain a talented adviser; later in the chapter King Wen meets Jiang Ziya 姜子牙, whose alias is Flying Bear. Fengshen yanyi, 182–88.
24. While this name does not refer to a historical personage, Yelü 耶律 was the surname of a prominent Khitanese clan whose members attained high office during the Liao and Yuan dynasties.
26. In this sense, Yelü recalls certain depictions found in the huaben tradition of assimilated others. One such example appears in Ling Mengchu’s “Zhuanyun Han yu qiao Dongting hong, Bosi hu zhipo tuolong ke” 轉運漢遇巧洞庭紅，波斯胡指破鼉龍殼 (A Chinese Man Changes His Luck with the Help of Dongting Tangerines; A Persian Man Breaks Open a Turtle’s Shell), which tells of a Persian merchant who “had, as it turns out, lived in China for so long that his clothing, speech, and movements were not all that different from a Chinese person’s. Only his shaved brows, trimmed beard, sunken eyes, and large nose were a little strange” 元來波斯胡住得在中華久了，衣帽言動都與中華不大分別。 只是剃眉剪鬚，深目高鼻，有些古怪. Ling, Pai’an jingqi, 1.57–58. Another example can be found in Feng Menglong’s “Yang Balao Yueguo qifeng” 楊八老越國奇逢 (Yang Balao’s Extraordinary Encounter in the Kingdom of Yue), which describes the fate of Chinese captives of Japanese pirates who “after living in Japan for about a year, would acclimatize to their surroundings and learn to speak Japanese, in the end appearing no different from a real Japanese person” 過了一年半載，水土習服，學起倭話來，竟與真倭無異了. Feng, Gujin xiaoshuo, 675. However, in these cases, there remains something uncanny about this act of assimilation, some sense that it remains a surface-level act and that some core, stable identity (of Persian, of Chinese) lies below. The treatment of Yelü here contains none of this anxiety; no move is made to show that he does not belong in the cultural Sinosphere.
27. On the post-Song emulation of Bao Zheng 包拯 (999–1062) as the epitome of a “pure official” (qingguan 清官), see Idema, Judge Bao and the Rule of Law, ix–xxxiv.
28. That Maozhuan is given as Song’s secondary wife 二夫人 might reveal fault lines in this seemingly harmonious solution. While the marriage between Song and Run’er certainly predates the union of Song and Maozhuan, the final configuration whereby the daughter of a boatman is accorded a higher rank than the daughter of an aristocrat-cum-official serves as a comment on the increasing acceptability of marrying across status while perhaps expressing some unease with this fantasy of an assimilated Sinosphere authored by the rulers of conquest dynasties.
30. Ibid., 1.2b.
31. Ibid., 1.3a.
32. Unlike Western dragon iconography, Chinese dragons live in the water and are closely associated with both bodies of water and rain.
34. On the distinction between “local bandits,” whose loyalty is a free-floating quality that could be redirected, and “roving bandits,” who cannot be redeemed, see Li, Women and National Trauma, 254–68.
35. The real villains of Dushu sheng turn out to be the treacherous Dais and the murderous boat hand Wu Xiaosi 吳小四, who in the final scene suffers the ignominy of being hacked into a hundred pieces.
36. One passage frequently associated with the renxiong in late imperial texts comes from a description in the Shanhai jing of the people from the foreign land of Xiaoyang Country 梟陽國. Shanhai jing jiaozhu, 319. The rhetorical slippage between barbarian and beast was common in the late Ming (see, e.g., He, Home and the World, 236–38), though perilous in the early Qing.
37. The text’s attitude toward the ruling mandate of ethnic others, while unusual for a Suzhou play, accords with an attribution of the text to Zhang Dafu. Zeng Guoguo argues that the titles of Zhang’s nonextant zaju 雜劇 (northern drama) seem to indicate that they were zhushou xi 祝壽戲 (birthday celebration plays) written for the Kangxi emperor or the empress dowager. Zeng also notes that Zhang’s qupu 曲譜 (aria manual) Hanshan tang Xinding jiugong shisan diao nanqupu 寒山堂新定九宫十三調南曲譜 (Newly Established Southern Scores in the Nine Modes and Thirteen Tones from Cold Mountain Studio) lists his sons’ courtesy names as Junfu 君輔 and Junzuo 君佐. These names, which Zeng argues were most likely given in the early Qing (and at the very least not changed by the time of the qupu’s publication during the Kangxi reign), demonstrate a commitment to helping the new regime (i.e., “assist the ruler with governing” 輔佐君王). Zeng, “Rushi guan wei Zhang Dafu suo zuo xianyi,” 50.
