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100 CHAPTER SIX Fleecing the Customer in Shanghai Brothels of the 1890s The Passing of a Master Two models of master figures stand behind the man who would become a polygamist or philanderer in late-Qing fiction. One is the dry Confucian father who discourages excess and disparages romance (like Jia Baoyu’s father Jia Zheng); the other is the potent polygamist and brothel master who confidently enjoys his many women (like the hero of the erotic romance). A third master enters the picture with the intrusion of Western nations in nineteenth-century China: the wellarmed , technologically advanced European monogamist. In fiction, when does his presence register itself in a way that signals paradigmatic change—in particular , change in the form of the end of the polygamist fantasy? Wang Tao is the first one to register a shift when he notes the definitive arrival of the Western ships that link all the “fairy isles.” But he still declares allegiance to the native mode of enjoyment of the affair with the Chinese prostitute and thus still takes comfort in the role of the master philanderer. Something like the end of the polygamist fantasy makes its first fictional appearance in the 1892 novel Flowers of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan), by Han Bangqing (1856–1894).1 The end occurs not in a literal sense, however, since there is nothing like an outright dismissal of the institution of polygamy or prostitution, and the custom of monogamy among Westerners is never a topic. But unlike the authors of Courtesan Chambers or Tale of Filial Heroes, Han Bangqing refuses to write on behalf of the lucky man who steadily ascends into polygamous fulfillment. Instead, he stages the emergence of a new kind of remarkable woman in a categorically new kind of setting: the prostitute of the foreign-ruled concessions of Shanghai. It is in this setting that the role of the traditional Chinese master, whether Confucian father or potent polygamist, drastically weakens and where the vigorous and entrepreneurial prostitute profits from that man’s foolish and outmoded fantasies. Along with her emerges a new kind of man, neither brilliant, nor virtuous, nor valiant, like old-mode heroes. He simply adapts himself to the fast-paced present and learns to be neither nostalgic about the pre-Shanghai past nor bitterly victimized by the glittering but unstable present. This and the next three chapters each treat a single novel in order to examine three separate presentations of the sexuality of polygamy and prostitution in the last two decades of the Qing: the 1892 Flowers of Shanghai and the prostitutebusinesswoman ’s fleecing of the brothel patron, the mid-1890s Shanghai Dust and the pathos of the last Chinese polygynist, and the 1906–1910 Nine-times Cuckold and its proposal for a modern Chinese polygynist. All three novels and a few more I include take place in the Shanghai brothel, which becomes a metaphorical staging ground for portraying the destiny of the polygynist-philanderer and his female counterparts in China in a period of paradigmatic change. The pathos of the polygynist’s claim to pleasure figures centrally in each case. The main question can be phrased as follows: Will that claim as it has been known until then come to an end, and if it does, how will it do so and who will be the new man and woman, and if it does not, what will the new and self-consciously modern polygynist-philanderer and his female counterparts be like? Flowers of Shanghai is remarkable among late-Qing novels in that all at once it embodies at least three levels of radical change: the status of its author, its physical setting, and the presentation of a new kind of man and especially woman, which is my focus in this chapter. In terms of authorship, Han Bangqing was a literatus and a first-level exam candidate (xiucai) who abandoned the pursuit of office for the life of professional writer, an occupation that only came about with the formation of the second of the above three levels, the foreign concessions of Shanghai. The novelty of this development pervades the literature of the 1890s, especially when it comes to exposing the naïveté of the Chinese man and woman who first arrive in the city. As for the presentation of a new kind of man and woman, this will be the subject of the sections below discussing the status of love and “doing business” in Shanghai, the prostitute’s emotional control of the...

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