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  • Bringing the Golden Lily into Blossom: A Libretto in Progress
  • Jie Guo (bio)

My first encounter with Jin Ping Mei, one of the “four marvelous books” from the Ming dynasty,1 took place in a small, old classroom at Harvard fifteen years ago. As a visiting student, I was trying to sit in on as many graduate-level Chinese literature classes as possible, as my home university did not offer any. Professor Tian Xiaofei’s seminar on Jin Ping Mei was among the courses offered at Harvard that semester.2 When I walked into the small classroom, I thought I was just taking yet another course on a classic work that any student of Ming-Qing literature was obliged to read. Never did I expect that that encounter with Jin Ping Mei would be the beginning of a long engagement with the text: the novel was the subject of my first conference presentation; later, it acquired a crucial presence in my dissertation; I reference it frequently in my work as a teacher of Chinese literature; and, a decade after my first encounter with it, I embarked on the journey of turning it into a Western opera libretto, entitled Golden Lily, in collaboration with composer Fang Man.

Consisting of three acts, each of which includes three scenes, our project is well underway. During the process of creating Golden Lily, I have discovered important ways in which writing a libretto differs from writing a scholarly piece. Take, for example, the approach to characters. [End Page 2] The original novel features hundreds of characters. As a scholar, I would not deliberately overlook any character in my examination of a novel. As a librettist, however, the first task I took up in recreating the story was to significantly cut characters while trying not to reduce the complexity of the dynamic inter-personal relationships in the original story. A three-act opera simply does not have room for that many characters.

Nonetheless, during the writing, I also found that my scholarly interests—in marginalized female characters in the original novel, in women’s status and mobility in Ming-Qing China, in women’s articulation of desire—constantly leaked into, and ultimately shaped the libretto. Indeed, it was thanks to these interests that I, in consultation with the composer, eventually decided to focus on three women, Golden Lily (Jinlian), Lady Moon (Yueniang), and Granny Wang (Wang po). after having “killed off” numerous characters, including the novel’s titular characters Li Ping’er and Pang Chunmei. We decided to give Lady Moon and Granny Wang important parts in the opera, not merely because they both play critical roles in the events surrounding the main character Golden Lily’s fate, but also because these two characters, who are relatively overlooked in existing scholarship on Jin Ping Mei, are worth exploring in their own right, and their inclusion would help us better tell Golden Lily’s story.

As a scholar, I have long been interested in the contrast between Lady Moon’s position as the mistress of the Ximen household and Golden Lily’s lowly position as a penniless concubine. At the same time, I have also wondered why, despite differences in their positions within the household, they still share a similar sense insecurity about their status. Indeed, this sense of insecurity is so acute that they both go to extremes to attack and hurt anyone perceived as a threat. The “task” of writing arias for these women, which took the form of internal monologues, granted me a unique opportunity not only to voice their fears and longings but also to explore the nature of their shared anxieties.

The character most shaped by my scholarly interests is Granny Wang. I anticipate that an audience familiar with the novel might be surprised by the importance we give to her. After all, Granny Wang fades into the periphery in the novel soon after the death of Golden Lily’s husband, Wu Dalang. Indeed, like numerous other meddling “sangu liupo” characters3 [End Page 3] commonly found in late imperial Chinese fiction, Granny Wang in the novel serves as a useful device that helps move the plot forward. As soon as her...

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