Fate-Bound Mandarin Ducks: Newspaper Coverage of the "Fashion" for Suicide in 1931 Suzhou

PETER J. CARROLL 2006 70 FATE-BOUND MANDARIN DUCKS: NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE “FASHION” FOR SUICIDE IN 1931 SUZHOU PETER J. CARROLL, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY On 4 August 1931, the lead headline of the Suzhou mingbao (蘇州明報 Suzhou clarity journal) daily newspaper thundered, “How Disgusting! Keeping Up With Social Fashions Has Gone From Bad To Worse: At the Central Hotel (中央飯店 Zhongyang fandian) Yet Another ‘Couple Achieves Solace’ [from the worries of life].”1 In the accompanying article and a subsequent report the following day, the paper regaled its readers with the emerging details of the city’s third incident of double-suicide in four months—and the second in less than a week. A twenty-five sui retired prostitute named Mao Fengying (毛鳳英 d. 1931) and her longtime lover Duan Zhiliang (段志良 d. 1931) a twenty-six sui machinist, had tried unsuccessfully to imitate the scandalous early April deaths of Wang Wenjuan (王文娟 d. 1931), an upper-class Wuxi widow, and Feng Yifu (馮一甫 d. 1931), a former Guomindang official.2 According to the newspaper, Wang and Feng’s deaths and the media attention they had garnered had been imprinted upon the public consciousness to the extent that other couples had been encouraged to transcend societal constraints against their marriage by seeking death. The paper further claimed that the overall routine of Wang and Feng’s final days—from their visits to Jiangnan tourist sites and lodging at fine hotels, to their fatal ingestion of opium and barbiturates in a Suzhou luxury hotel room while entwined in a mutual embrace—had quickly become a pattern favored by copycat suicides. As such, Mao and Duan had not merely followed Wang and Feng’s toxic prescription for death. Like their predecessors the week before, Mao and Duan had reenacted Wang and Feng’s itinerary from the last days before their suicide, their simulation seeming to have been motivated by a selfannihilating desire to appropriate the earlier couple’s posthumous fame throughout Jiangsu and Zhejiang as “fate-bound mandarin ducks (同命鴛鴦 tongming yuanyang, i.e., paragons of romantic devotion and fidelity).”3 1 “Rouma! Xue shimao meikuang yuxia” (How Disgusting! Keeping Up With Social Fashions Has Gone From Bad To Worse), Suzhou mingbao [hereafter SMB], 4 August 1931, 2. 2 Ages are given in the traditional Chinese rendering “sui,” according to which a person is one sui at birth, and the number of sui increases by one at each lunar New Year, not the anniversary of one’s birth. The word sui is now often used to denote one’s age according to the Western convention “years of age.” This latter practice spread during the Republican period, so it is possible that the ages given in news reports are figured in “years of age.” One’s age in sui is one to two years more than the corresponding “years of age” figure. E.g., a child born in early January, before the lunar New Year, would be two sui after the New Year, while still just a month old. Given the lack of clarity in the sources, the ages are listed as sui. 3 The term derived from the traditional but erroneous belief that mandarin ducks mate for life and that their attachment was so complete that they shared the same fate: together they practiced constant fidelity, but separated they would die of loneliness. The ducks are actually serially monogamous: they mate with one partner per breeding season. The same pair may mate for another season. http://www.centralpark.com/pages/central-park-zoo/mandarin-duck.html (accessed 23 February 2006). TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 71 Circumstance and the Suzhou mingbao conspired to thwart both ambitions. In what the newspaper portrayed as the current local suicide ritual, Mao and Duan had disported for several days in Shanghai and Wuxi before arriving in Suzhou, where they took a room in the outer Chang Gate (閶門外 Changmen wai) district at one of the city’s opulent Western-style hotels on 2 August. Realizing that their limited funds were already running low, they had visited a photography studio while still in Wuxi and posed for four photos, which they then had inscribed with the signature “Fate-Bound Mandarin Ducks.” Such foresight attested to their determination...