Performers of the Paternal Past: History, Female Impersonators, and Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction

Figure 1.

The Chinese characters of female impersonation have also fascinated non-Chinese writers. One example is the French writer George Soulié de Morant, author of the 1925 novel Bijou de ceinture (Pei Yu: Boy Actress, trans. Gerald Fabian and Guy Wernham, illus. Nemi Frost [San Francisco: Alamo Square, 1991]). Courtesy of Bert Herrman and Alamo Square Press

In Emerging from the Horizon of History (Fuchu lishi dibiao), Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua evoke psychoanalysis to compare the historical facts of patriarchy with the role of the father as kinship participant.¹ The title of the book is telling: the horizon of history resembles a membrane over the unconscious, from which the repressed—in this case, Chinese women's literature—is emerging. I extend these authors' analysis of the opposition between privileged men and underprivileged women to another, less-often discussed gender-related opposition in Chinese literature: that between normatively and ambiguously gendered characters. The latter include manly women, womanly men, and others who cannot be conventionally categorized.

I am concerned, in particular, with female impersonators, the biological men who dressed as women in traditional Chinese theater (a generic term that encompasses a number of heterogeneous schools, including the well- known Peking Opera).² I focus on the interplay between history and female impersonators in the following novels: Ba Jin's Torrent Trilogy (Jiliu sanbuqu, 1931, 1938, 1940);³ Wang Dulu's Peking Chivalric Entertainer (Yanshi xialing, 1948);⁴ Qin Shouou's Begonia (Qiuhaitang, 1942);⁵ Lilian Lee's Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bie ji, 1985);⁶ and Ling Li's Dreams Broken across China (Meng duan guanhe, 1999).⁷

Female impersonators in these works dramatize an aged and gendered history of China. As such, I name them "performers of the paternal past" where the word perform references both theatrical art and speech act theory.⁸ Often paired with paternal figures, they dramatize and visualize the past as if it were a theatrical play, but they also operate and sustain the past, as if it were a wristwatch that needed winding up. Furthermore, with their androgynous bodies, these ambiguously gendered characters represent trauma in China's history. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's explication of the abject in Powers of Horror, I argue that both female impersonators and the Chinese past exemplify abjection in these novels.⁹ The abject, like bodily excreta, is both filthy and indispensable for the subject. It lingers on the subject's borders, at once repudiated and retained. In the works that I discuss, the past is abjected by the present, and female impersonators, who seem to be detained in the past, are abjected by normatively gendered characters.

Desire, Temporality, and Ethics

Ambiguously gendered entertainers are not always unwelcome. Indeed, some twentieth-century literature offers sympathetic readings of effeminate entertainers, as does visual culture.¹⁰ More often than not, however, effeminate entertainers are abjected as symbols of China's metaphorical castration in the process of modernization. May Fourth doyen Lu Xun, for example, obsessively compares a weakened China to feminized performers.¹¹ Another May Fourth writer, Zheng Zhenduo, is openly hostile to female impersonators in his preface to The Historic Materials on the Peking Pear Garden of the Qing Dynasty (Qingdai Yandu liyuan shiliao), a collection that is, ironically, devoted to these entertainers.¹²

Figure 2.

The star female impersonators of the past have been unforgettable to the audience of the present day. A recent documentary, The Worlds of Mei Lanfang, portrays Mei Lanfang, the most celebrated among the female impersonators in modern China. The DVD cover art of the documentary (courtesy of Mei-Juin Chen and Lotus Film)

Their abhorrence registers the anxiety that female impersonators cause for these writers. Female impersonators are assumed to elicit lust and, as a result, deserve to be condemned.¹³ I find discussions of desire, especially the desire for same-sex relations, to be undertheorized in these works. Although the androgyny of female impersonators is commonly translated as "pre-Westernized...