Homesickness

Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China

Carlos Rojas

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780674743946
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674286979
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

The collapse of China's Qing dynasty coincided roughly with discoveries that helped revolutionize views of infectious disease. Together, these parallel developments generated a set of paradigm shifts in the understanding of society, the individual, as well as the cultural matrix that mediates between them. In Homesickness, Carlos Rojas examines an array of Chinese literary and cinematic tropes of illness, arguing that these works approach sickness not solely as a symptom of dysfunction but more importantly as a key to its potential solution.

Rojas focuses on a condition he calls "homesickness"—referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the "home," conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health.

Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora—ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang—Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.

Part I

1906

Phagocytes

BORN ON FEBRUARY 7, 1906, Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi was destined to be the last emperor of China. As was conventional for an heir to the imperial throne, Pu Yi was raised in the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing, and no effort was spared in attending to his health and livelihood. All of his bodily functions were meticulously monitored, and detailed records were kept of everything from his food consumption to his bowel movements. The attention that was lavished on the infant’s body, however, stood in stark contrast to the increasingly decrepit status of the dynastic regime of which he would become a living metonym. From the nation’s defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the disruption caused by the Boxer Uprising, China had just experienced several traumatic events that dramatically underscored the nation’s military weakness. In particular, in the years immediately preceding Pu Yi’s birth, there had been numerous attempts to address the problems with the nation’s sociopolitical system, ranging from the failed Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898 to Empress Dowager Cixi’s 1901 edict calling for reforms addressing everything from the education system to the military. In 1905, the civil service examination system, which for centuries had been one of the primary routes into the government bureaucracy, was finally abolished—reflecting a growing perception that the exegetical training in the Confucian classics that had been the primary focus of the exams was not providing China’s aspiring officials with the knowledge and skills they needed in order to operate effectively in the modern world.

Pu Yi was named the Xuantong Emperor in December 1908 after the nearly simultaneous deaths of his uncle, the Guangxu Emperor, who had been held under house arrest since 1898, and the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had held the real power in the Qing court over most of the preceding several decades. Less than four years later, however, the young Pu Yi was forced to abdicate the throne in February 1912 following the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Although Pu Yi never wielded any real power during his brief thirty-eight month reign as China’s last emperor, following his official abdication he was nevertheless permitted, under the “Articles of Favorable Treatment” drafted by the new republican government, to retain his official imperial title and his residence within the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace. This peculiar arrangement—wherein the boy was treated as though he were an all-powerful sovereign while essentially remaining a prisoner within his own home—persisted more than a decade, until eventually the warlord Feng Yuxiang tired of the charade and, in 1924, expelled the teenager from the Forbidden City.

Ten years later, Pu Yi was installed as the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo in what is now northeastern China. In this new position, Pu Yi was theoretically granted authority over the new state of Manchukuo, though in reality he was merely a stand-in for imperial Japan, which held the true power in the puppet state. Pu Yi retained this latter figurehead position until Japan was defeated at the end of World War II and Manchukuo was returned to Chinese control. Following the war, Pu Yi was imprisoned by the Communists on charges of treason, but was declared rehabilitated in 1959. He quietly lived out his final years working as a gardener in Beijing while holding a token position as a member of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference. He ultimately died of natural causes in 1967, at the age of sixty-one.

From his thirty-eight-month tenure as last emperor of the Qing, to his decade-long tenure as a closet emperor under the Articles of Favorable Treatment, to his nine-year tenure as emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, Pu Yi spent much of his life in positions defined by a stark disparity between the nearly boundless political power he theoretically embodied and the strict limits that were imposed upon his person. Although Pu Yi’s situation was admittedly unusual, it nevertheless dramatizes a more general tension between political leaders’ status as mortal individuals and the idealized political stations they embody. Medieval English theories of kingship described this phenomenon as that of the “king’s two bodies,” and similar attitudes underpin understandings of Chinese dynastic authority.¹ The emperor’s mortal body is conceived as a metonym of both the office he inhabits and of the dynastic realm that he spearheads, even as his status as an embodied subject is strategically contrasted with the theoretical immortality of the political order he represents. The relationship between these two forms of embodiment is dialectical, in that the mortality of the emperor’s physical body contrastively underscores the transcendent quality of the office he occupies, and vice versa. The fall of the Qing and the effective abolition of the position of the emperor, meanwhile, encouraged a far-reaching reimagination of the nature of political power and its relationship to figures of embodiment.

An inverse perspective on this question of the relationship between abstract power and material corporeality can be found in the turn-of-the-century Boxer Uprising. Comprised mostly of poor peasants from Shandong province, the movement arose in the late 1890s during a period of acute drought and economic uncertainty. Possessing only rudimentary weaponry and having no claim to formal political authority, the Boxers’ primary strength lay instead in their sheer numbers, combined with their physical training and their belief that they were impervious to conventional weaponry. Their power, in other words, lay not so much in the super-corporeal abilities with which they believed themselves to be endowed but rather in their physical bodies themselves, and it was precisely this threatening yet vulnerable mass of humanity migrating northward from Shandong to Beijing that ended up playing a pivotal role in shaping the final years of the Qing dynasty.

Although the Boxer Uprising is often referred to in English as a “rebellion,” the movement’s precise political implications are in fact rather complicated. A rebellion is conventionally understood as an insurgency that challenges the legitimacy of the existing political order, but the Boxers were nominally dedicated, as one of their key mottos put it, to “supporting the Qing, and exterminating the foreigners” (fu Qing mie yang). After the Boxers reached Beijing in June 1900, they forced the foreigners and Chinese Christians in the capital to barricade themselves inside the Legation Quarter. As the Boxers were initially mobilizing, there had been considerable controversy within the Qing court over how to respond, and in the end Empress Dowager Cixi directed the Qing imperial army to stand behind them. As a result, after foreign troops under the command of the Eight Nation Alliance put down the rebellion, the alliance proceeded to hold the Qing court responsible for the uprising and demanded that it pay an enormous financial reparation that would outlive the dynasty itself.

The Boxers occupied a curious position within the Chinese body politic. Although they announced their intent to support the Qing, their uprising nevertheless directly contributed directly to the eventual collapse of the dynasty a decade later. This is because the Boxers not only failed in their stated goal of expelling the foreigners from China, they also inadvertently weakened the Qing court’s position with respect to those same foreign powers. In this respect, the uprising could be compared to an autoimmune condition wherein the immune system misrecognizes its target and ends up attacking the body’s own tissue. Seen in these terms, the Boxers resembled immunological elements that inadvertently comprised the stability of the very organism they were ostensibly attempting to defend in the first place.

As chance would have it, in 1908—the same year that Pu Yi was named Qing emperor—the Russian-born scientist Élie Metchnikoff was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his research on the immune system over the preceding three decades, and specifically his discovery of the ability of the body’s white blood cells to target and consume foreign pathogens. Metchnikoff realized that this process, which he dubbed phagocytosis, played a critical role in helping identify and eliminate harmful agents—though he also came to recognize that if the immune system had the ability to recognize harmful pathogens, it simultaneously had the capacity to misrecognize its targets and begin attacking the body’s own healthy tissue. Analogously, the Boxers could similarly be seen as an immunological force attempting to rid China of foreign pathogens but which in the process ended up undermining the Chinese dynastic regime it was ostensibly attempting to support.

The immune system offers a useful model for conceptualizing broader processes of sociopolitical transformation. Generally speaking, societal change may be driven either by the existing political establishment, independent social groups, environmental or contextual factors, or by a combination of all three. Under some circumstances, the political establishment and independent social movements may complement one another, though under others it is equally possible that they may end up operating at cross-purposes. A grassroots movement, for instance, may challenge or attempt to overthrow an existing political order, while the political establishment may in turn view the movement as a destabilizing and illegitimate. If viewed in immunological terms, accordingly, the political establishment and the grassroots forces may each be acting in ways that reflect very different visions of what is in the best interests of society itself.

In the following three chapters, I examine several clusters of texts and discursive fields from the period immediately following the Boxer Uprising. These literary interventions reflect different responses to what was widely perceived as the sickness afflicting contemporary Chinese society, ranging from reform to rebellion to revolution. Drawing on an array of uncanny elements positioned at the structural margins of the sociopolitical system itself, these texts simultaneously defamiliarize contemporary Chinese society even as they offer the possibility of reimagining what that same society might become. Depending on the context, these uncanny elements may symbolize either a societal disease, and potential cure for that disease, or even the degree to which the disease itself might offer the possibility of its own cure.

We find a paradigmatic example of this uncanny quality in the figure of Pu Yi himself, who was positioned at the interstices of past and present, foreign and domestic. As the last emperor of the Qing, Pu Yi was a living embodiment of a traditional dynastic system that had already become a virtual anachronism, while in his subsequent role as emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo he represented a foreign presence positioned at the very margins of the Chinese nation. Although in neither instance was Pu Yi perceived as a national savior, his presence on the contemporary political scene nevertheless helped ground contemporary debates over the nation’s future. Pu Yi functioned, in other words, as a symptom of the structural fissures that existed within contemporary China’s sociopolitical order, while at the same time pointing to the possibility of alternative configurations.

1

Reform

THE FIRST CHAPTER of Liu E’s 1906 novel Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji) opens with a description of the protagonist’s encounter with a man suffering from a mysterious disease that causes “his whole body to fester in such a way that every year several open sores appeared, and if one year these were not healed, the next year several more would appear elsewhere.”¹ The patient’s family notices that the sores appear to follow a seasonal rhythm, erupting every summer and then subsiding around the time of the autumn equinox. The family has no idea how to treat the disease, however, and therefore they seek Lao Can’s assistance.

Lao Can recommends that the family look to the teaching of the ancients for a potential cure. Noting that whereas for other diseases one might seek guidance in the works of the legendary sage emperors Shen Nong and Huang Di (the “Divine Farmer” and the “Yellow Emperor”), in this case he recommends that they instead turn to the methods of the Great Yu and the Han dynasty physician Wang Jing. While Shen Nong and Huang Di are traditionally credited with having authored two of the foundational texts of traditional Chinese medicine—Shen Nong’s Herb-Root Classic (Shennong bencao jing) and Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi neijing)²—the Great Yu’s primary technical expertise lay not in medicine but rather in flood control. In particular, Yu is reputed to have spent thirteen years taming the flooding of the Yellow River, as a result of which the emperor at the time, Shun, appointed Yu to be his co-ruler. Seventeen years later, Shun abdicated the throne, leaving Yu as the emperor of what Chinese historiography has traditionally recognized as the nation’s first hereditary dynasty, the Xia.

Lao Can’s appeal to the teachings of the legendary sage emperor Yu suggests that his patient—whose surname, Huang, literally means “yellow,” and whose full name, Huang Ruihe, is a close homophone of the phrase huangshui he, or literally “yellow-water river”—symbolizes the Yellow River, and that Huang’s recurrent skin sores correspond to the river’s devastating floods that have plagued China throughout its history. Originating in the Bayankala Mountains in the northwestern Qinghai province, the Yellow River traverses China’s heartland before emptying into the Bohai Sea, and it gets its name from the large quantities of yellow silt it picks up in North China’s Loess Plateau—silt that lends the river its distinctive color while also contributing to its destructive propensity to overflow its banks. To the extent that the fictional Huang Ruihe symbolizes the river that has been viewed as not only a national treasure but also a perennial scourge, Lao Can’s efforts to treat Huang’s sores represent contemporary attempts to address China’s sociopolitical challenges.

While the Great Yu used his success in taming the flooding of the Yellow River to establish himself as the founding emperor of what has been traditionally regarded as China’s first dynasty, the Xia, Liu E was writing roughly three thousand years later during what would prove to be the final years of China’s last dynasty, the Qing. By Liu E’s time, China’s political system had become increasingly compromised by factors that included not only foreign assaults but also internal rebellions, an inflationary economy, and a critically weakened imperial court. Just as the history of the Yellow River has been characterized by a series of devastating floods and dramatic course changes, China’s three millennia of dynastic rule have similarly been punctuated by recurrent periods of political instability and regime change. In symbolizing the Yellow River, therefore, Huang Ruihe simultaneously provides a compelling metonym for a set of conflicting visions of the Chinese nation itself.

By opening Travels of Lao Can with an allegory that aligns his protagonist with one of China’s most legendary leaders, Liu E underscores the importance of using traditional principles to address the challenges facing contemporary China. The irony, though, is that by the early twentieth century many of these early principles had already been partially forgotten, and consequently in reintroducing them Lao Can was offering something that was nominally familiar yet also distinctly alien. One of his key principles emphasizes the importance of maintaining a happy medium between mutually opposed forces or elements, which also describes his own efforts to maintain a balance between the familiar and alien connotations inherent in his own approach. In order to accomplish this objective, however, Lao Can had to position himself as a tacitly alien element within the same cultural and political structures that he was attempting to reform in the first place.

RIVERS AND LAKES

In Chinese, the same verb zhi may be used to describe the practice of medicine or managing the body (zhishen), governing the nation (zhiguo), managing rivers and waterways (zhishui), suggesting an underlying continuity between medicine, politics, and flood control. These three areas are not only brought together in Travels of Lao Can’s initial discussion of Huang Ruihe’s mysterious sores, but they also reflect the author’s own primary areas of interest and professional expertise. Like his protagonist, Liu E was also a practicing physician and had written two volumes on Chinese medicine. In 1888, he was appointed to help repair a breach in the dikes of the Yellow River in Henan province, whereupon the governor of Shandong invited him to come serve as his official advisor on flood control. Liu E’s novel itself, meanwhile, may be viewed as an attempt to use literature to offer a commentary on the political challenges facing contemporary China, as it explicitly juxtaposes discussions of governmentality with ones of medical treatment and flood control.

The novel’s initial discussion of Huang Ruihe’s illness is immediately followed by a sequence in which Lao Can and his companions notice a ship out at sea that appears to be listing dangerously. After observing the vessel’s predicament from a distance with their telescopes, Lao Can and his companions decide to try to help, and they recruit a small fishing boat to carry them out to the ship. More specifically, having determined that the ship is in need of orientation, they attempt to take it a compass, a sextant, and other nautical instruments. Before they arrive, however, Lao Can and his companions notice that several men on board appear to be encouraging their fellow passengers to give them money, whereupon the men promise to give the passengers their “freedom and lifeblood” in order to “lay the foundations of a freedom that is eternal and secure” (12/10).

Upon observing this development, Lao Can and his companions decide to lower their sails and sit back to see what happens. After collecting everyone’s money, the men on board the ship encourage the passengers to attack the ship’s captain and helmsmen, arguing that if the passengers act together they will surely be able to overpower the ship’s crew. Some of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. 1906: Phagocytes
• Part II. 1967: Pharmakons
• Part III. 2006: Phantasms
• Chinese Glossary
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index