University of Oxford China Humanities Graduate Conference 2017
(Extra)ordinary China: Practices of the Everyday
Panel Line-Up
Panel One
Traversing the (Extra)ordinary: Travel as Everyday Practice
Documenting the Everyday: Yuan Zhongdao’s Records of Travelling and Dwelling
Emily Teo, University of Kent/ Free University of Berlin
The late-Ming literatus Yuan Zhongdao (1570-1626) penned Records of Travelling and Dwelling (游居杮录), a journal which recorded the significant events of his personal and social life across a decade. Throughout his entries, we catch a glimpse of the daily life of a late-Ming literatus, as well as the larger social and political circumstances of the world he lived in. This paper proposes to discuss Yuan’s journal in light of his ambiguous social position in late-Ming society. Along with his brothers, Yuan was part of the renowned Gong’an school, a literary movement that rejected the archaic style of early-Ming writers, promoting instead more expressive writing styles. Born into a scholarly family of social and financial means, Yuan’s lack of success in imperial examinations was a source of frustration and anxiety in his personal life, particularly in a system where one’s self-worth was highly dependent on official success. Yuan’s plight was shared by many men of the gentry class, as a dearth in court positions meant that many individuals were doomed to serve as minor bureaucrats. Records of Travelling and Dwelling can be read as Yuan’s endeavour to fashion himself as an intellectual who was concerned with self-cultivation, cultural production and political engagement, despite his lack of a coveted court position. Instead, he documented his everyday life and dabbled in hobbies popular amongst the late-Ming gentry, such as antique collecting, travelling, socializing and reading. Yuan’s musings on his daily life is a fascinating look at late-Ming society. More significantly, it provides a window towards understanding how late-imperial journals were a form of social and political commentary on a state in crisis, and how everyday events were used to create an alternative space for late-Ming men who were denied official careers.
From Foe to Friend? China Through the Eyes of American Visitors, 1971-78
Pete Millwood, University of Oxford
This paper charts how perceptions of “everyday” China held by American visitors transformed between the ping-pong diplomacy of 1971 and the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and China in 1978. Using published, archival and oral sources created by visitors from a range of groups and sections of American society, this paper will show how early visitors to China began to form a consensus that, contrary to the American rhetoric of the 1960s, the Communist-ruled People’s Republic was both permanent and successful. This shared conclusion notwithstanding, visitors did not agree in their assessments of other aspects of Chinese society and this paper will also explore divergences in American ideas about China’s economic development and political system.
As well as detailing American perceptions of China, this paper also seeks to explain and contextualise them. It will posit that Americans witnessed Chinese society primarily through two categories of previous knowledge and experience: firstly, their memories of “old”, pre-revolution China; and secondly, their perceptions of their own society. Many of the first visitors to the People’s Republic had previously visited, lived and worked in China before the Communist revolution of 1949, and this was the predominant context with which visitors understood the post-1949 changes to that society. Simultaneously, many visitors found in China a foil to a contemporary America that they saw as divided, stagnating, unequal and unjust. These two contexts, I argue, help us to explicate both commonalities and divergences in the reactions of various visitors to the People’s Republic.
The changing perception of China among Americans had import for the country’s foreign policy: visitors elucidate in their accounts how the experience of travelling to the PRC changed or confirmed their ideas about how their government should deal with Beijing. This paper will, then, conclude with reflections on the influence these transnational visits had on popular support for and dissent from American China policy.
Practices of a Budget Traveler: Everyday Experience on the Road in Eighteenth-century China
Huiying Chen, University of Illinois
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau analyzes two views of a city: a panoptic view from the government producing things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, and the view from a tourist whose myriad footsteps walking in the city and their intertwined paths weave places together. Scholars of Qing China have endeavored to show how the Qing Empire, like other early modern empires such as England and Holland, has similarly projected and manipulated the panoptic view of its imperial space. Yet it remains little researched as to how an individual viewed and experienced the same space. Focusing on a series of commercial travel guides, this paper reconstructs the everyday experience of travel by an ordinary traveler in eighteenth-century China. As collections of itineraries, these travel guides contain over a hundred routes covering much of the territory within the Qing Empire. In addition to place names and distances, they contain practical travel tips such as restaurant ratings and safety warnings, revealing to us an unseen picture of everyday lives in eighteenth-century China: How a traveler with a limited budget managed to pay for food and lodging, purchase local products as souvenirs or to resell at another place, while staying away from poisonous water sources or dangerous places with bandits. Based on these travel guides as well as contemporary travelogues, this paper examines a tourist view of the space—both an eighteenth-century Chinese tourist and a de Certeau’s tourist—and paints a fuller picture of life and experience in early modern China.
Writing Diaries: Private and Public Records
Ching Kit Wu, University of California, Berkeley
Writing diaries has been a common practice in China throughout history. It is an important resource showing how the everyday life was from the perspective of the first person. Although the practice can be traced back to earlier periods, the majority of the preserved diaries nowadays are from the Song onward. In contrast to how we perceive the diary as personal writing today, many of the earlier diaries came in the form of public records on official duties such as holding the civil examination or public events such as wars. While diaries of this type were meant to be made public and read by the others, personal opinions could be easily found in the text. This can help us to understand how the personal positions approached public events among the intellectuals taking the official duties. Besides the public events, personal everyday life became the main theme of the genre in the Ming and Qing periods. The content can be from the books read to the fishes fed. More personal emotions were also expressed in the diaries, for example the interplay between husband and wife, which is considered extremely private even today. One of the most common topics was traveling. The famous Xu Xiake’s Travels written in the late Ming covered the journeys of the protagonist traveling all 16 provinces of China at that time. A lot of this type of personal diary was made public, either by the family members or friends, after the author passed away. The publishers expected it; the readers anticipated it; and most importantly the authors knew it. This is particularly interesting because the diaries were supposed to be, or perceived as, something private that was not intended to be read by the public. Some if not all of the authors pretended they did not know but they surely were aware. Some authors even would exchange their diaries to theirs friends to critique in order to make it look better before they were read by the public.
Panel Two
Landscapes of the Everyday: Writing Identity in Urban Spaces
Affecting Nostalgia: Performing the Past in Taipei People
Yvonne Lin, University of Oxford
In my paper, I argue that the polyphonic reconstruction of identity through performance in the short story collection Taipei People suggests a greater awareness of progressing time than previous critics have suggested. This seminal work of Taiwanese literature, written by Bai Xianyong in the 1960s, frequently features melancholic characters who aim to recreate their former lives in communal spaces of performance and entertainment. Despite their disparate origins back in mainland China, it is in the taxi-dance halls and entertainment houses of Taipei that they assemble to dwell and revel in an imaginary shared identity, recalling rosier days spent in escapism in Shanghai’s Paramount Ballroom or Grand Theater. Through performance, they look back from their Taipei present to wax nostalgic not about their ordinary lives but about glamorous stars and the entertainment world. What can the layers of fiction these characters have swathed themselves in tell us about the performative, embodied, often sexualized aspect of nostalgia? How is the sense of tradition imbued in song and kunqu, passed through the ages and carried over the strait as they have been, altered in this new time and place when return to the mainland is impossible? Moreover, how do these nostalgic performances allow these characters to reconstitute their present on a day to day basis? By framing these short stories using Svetlana Boym’s conception of reflective/restorative nostalgia as in conjunction with Richard Schechner’s work on ritual and performance, I hope to shed light on the way in which these characters – and more broadly, the exiled mainlanders they represent and elegize – negotiate inexorable shifts in their conception of their everyday reality.
"Informal City": The case study of Chen Shaoxiong
Di Lu, Birmingham City University
"Landscape" is one of the most classical propositions subjects in art history. It is a process in which the natural attributes of a realistic environment and the thought processes of the spiritual realm are combined together, and the material world is seen, felt, understood, transformed and, eventually, interpreted. With rapid urban development in China, the visual form of cities and people’s daily life change dramatically, changing “landscape” from a noun to a verb. For this “everyday” context, I will present the case study of Chen Shaoxiong’s work, “The Street”. Compared with traditional urban studies, the material which comes from private and everyday life most closely resembles urbanization. As Jiang Jun has pointed out, “daily life has become an important landscape of contemporary art, so it is effective in highlighting differentiated living conditions”. This kind of combination helps us to understand the relationship between urbanization and contemporary photography from a new perspective. Although the daily nature of urbanization deserves special attention, “the daily life” I choose here is a field of contemporary visual culture. The choice I made is largely “passive”, and it is a kind of “subjective reappearance and imagination”. And the choice I made is interpreted in the bigger context of urbanization in order to be adopted and interpreted specifically and conceptually. Although the choice I made can be interpreted from the daily-life perspective, this kind of interpretation is not a true understanding in the context of contemporary photography. The output in terms of images tends to reflect photographers’ personal understanding of “moving reality”.
Listening to the Everyday – Commemorating Contemporary Urban China's Resounding Loss of Identity?
L. Odila Schröder, University of Heidelburg
What sounds are selected by field recordists as representative of contemporary Beijing's soundscape, how is this repertoire of sounds used to perform Beijing in feature films, and what political and aesthetic discourses are they embedded in? First, I analyze a collection of field recordings by phonographers from Europe and Greater China in an attempt to find out what repertoires of sounds are selected and used to represent specific urban spaces like public parks, street crossings, and subway stations. Secondly, a close analysis of the feature film Shower (Xizao 洗澡, Zhang Yang 张扬, Beijing, 1999) shows how sounds are used to introduce and demarcate urban spaces. I argue that neither phonographers nor film makers are innocent in their quest for everyday, seemingly insignificant and marginalized sounds: in the process of capturing Beijing's sonic identity, phonographers and filmmakers reveal part of their own and their implicit audiences' sonic identity, cultural background, and political intent. Filmmakers commemorate sounds and the material culture and social practices associated with them. Everyday sounds are aestheticized in the process of field recording and (transcultural) sound appreciation. Depending on which subtle aspects of material culture and social practices of contemporary China are made audible, and what sounds are associated with public spaces and important historic sites, they connect to discourses around urban modernity, social class, and aesthetics. Thus, everyday sounds grow to signify and become soundmarks of personal, aesthetic, and socioeconomic struggle.
Panel Three
Echoes of the (Extra)ordinary: Experiences of Buddhism in the Everyday
Buddhist Cultivation of the Everyday in Sixth-century China
Guttorm Norberg Gundersen, University of Oslo
Buddhist cultivation is usually considered to be conducted as meditation in the seated posture or in programs of cultic devotion centred around a Buddha, Bodhisattva or a Buddhist text. Yet the Buddhist tradition in China most closely associated with seated meditation, the Chan school, is also known for its rhetorical break with seated meditation as the sine qua non of Buddhist self-cultivation. This is well encapsulated in the phrase “chop wood, carry water”: practice lies in the everyday carrying out of mundane tasks. We find the earliest articulation of the Everyday as practice in the text "Samadhi of Freely Following One’s Thought" by the sixth century Buddhist teacher Huisi, an early patriarch of the Tiantai school. The practice laid out here is organised according to the type of activity the practitioner is engaged in. In total, six types of mundane activities are discussed: walking, standing, sitting, reclining, eating and speaking. Common for all six is that they each constitute an equally valid locus for Buddhist cultivation.
In my paper, I will discuss the characteristics of this practice and the reasons for this sudden emergence of the Buddhist cultivation of the Everyday. I argue that this earliest articulation of cultivation of the Everyday must be understood as a result of Huisi’s efforts to combine specific cultivation practices of his day with the study of Buddhist doctrine. Moreover, it is precisely the attempts at forging these two aspects of Buddhist life that led to the decoupling of practice from specific physical postures and ritual space, and consequently valorising the Everyday as locus for cultivation.
Libertine Monks and Women: Sexual Fantasies in Late Imperial Chinese Vernacular Erotica
Wai Cheuk Yee, Chinese University of Hong Kong
The image of women in late imperial China was often portrayed as the oppressed, where the practice of foot-binding, social hype for chastity and the Confucian-patriarchal kinship based society seemed to have sufficiently confined Women into a prison of morality. However, such practices took place simultaneously with a surge of vernacular erotic entertainment in the general society, and there is no reason to overlook their engagement of such culture in their daily life, which this paper intends to examine. Aside from the most famous erotic classic novel — The Golden Lotus, there are over 50 extant late imperial Chinese vernacular erotic novels that remain largely unknown to and neglected in the academia at present. One possible reason for their anonymity is mainly due to the lack of accessible first-hand materials, since they are generally scattered in different libraries or in private collections. The lack of properly edited modern reissue and translation only further reduced attention of scholars working on late imperial Chinese literature on these texts. Serving as precious records of the erotic fantasy and daily life of late imperial Chinese, one of the recurring themes of these texts is the sexual affair between Buddhist monks and women. While such stories could be interpreted as the satirical criticism of Buddhist monks’ morality, the tales are likely also a product catered to the fantasy of general women at the time. Three representative erotic novels, namely Dengcao Heshang [The Candlewick Monk], Fengliu Heshang [The Libertine Monk] and Wutong Ying [Shadow of the Chinese Parasoltree], are singled out for in-depth study. Through analyzing the sexual interactions of women and the Buddhist monks and their sentiments in the novels, this paper attempts to articulate how the supposedly cloistered women came in contact with the Buddhist monks and their sexual fantasies over religious figures. Furthermore, the paper will illustrate the elements of late imperial Chinese women’s everyday lives reflected by such stories, and their relation with possible outlets of women’s desire under the society’s watchful eyes.
Pagodas in View of Each Other: Mapping Everyday Urban Experience in A Record of Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang
Anne Feng, University of Chicago
Yang Xuanzhi, a scholar-official of the Northern Qi (550-577), claimed to have written his famous memoir A Record of Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang, as he passed by the ruins of the marvelous city of his youth. In this paper, I examine how Yang sought to capture the phenomenological experience of the everyman in the urban space of Luoyang. This spatially oriented narrative is based on individual monastery compounds that were positioned in each district of the medieval metropolis. I argue that Yang’s approach to the entire city is based on his textual construction of the imperial Yongning Monastery, a religious and political monument that stands as the temporal and visual focal point of the city. Reading Yang’s memoir against common tendencies to reconstruct the historical city, I analyze how he crafted a complex web of imaginative associations between built structures to create an immersive memory of Luoyang as an interconnected living whole. Yang’s shifting viewpoint as the everyman reveals a vision of the city based around Buddhist pagodas as public buildings that spatially and visually index the power of their elite patrons, creating an urban topography defined by a hierarchy of vertical structures. The city itself emerges as a palimpsest, mapped as a network of monasteries that corresponds to beliefs in Buddhist “divine presence,” layered over archaic traces of an ideal city planned according to heavenly mandate. By attending to the semiology of this distinctive text, the paper rethinks the ways in which religious architecture shaped both spatial perception and an emergent conception of everyday urban life in pre-modern China.
Rescuing belief from the soil: Rumor, Memory and the Birth of a Chinese Modern Buddhist Temple
Xu Lufeng, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales
In 2012, several madness rumors of witchcraft have spread in Baoding, Hebei Province, in fact, this type of rumor was popular in Northern China’s rural society always involving kinship, especially on exchanging gifts to avoid the "evil", because in a sense, a part of gifts would be used to sacrifice. Meanwhile, for my fieldwork location - Lotus Village in Baoding, these magic rumors have awakened memories of religious, so their long-term aspirations for having their own temple has realized as a sacrifice to the rumors of witchcraft. Of course, the "local knowledge" of Lotus villages, is not only in the structure of power based on the dualism between “sacred” and “secular”, but also in gender, internal and external opposition, because the party secretary in this village is a "charismatic" native man, while the person in charge of the temple is a woman from elsewhere. In addition to synchronic facts, in terms of diachronic aspects, Lotus Village witnessed and participated in violent conflicts during the Cultural Revolution, and now with the local contradictions caused by some controversial distributions of land, etc., these rumors have reproduced the political-religious memory and have also deeply influenced local villagers’ daily life. In short, this paper will analyze the structure and reality of the magic rumor in the way of ethnography, then focus on local belief reconstruction through reflecting the secular and spiritual life in the village, and finally show the interaction between religion and society, between politics and economy on the basis of a whole process of the building of a modern Buddhist temple.
Panel Four
Negotiating the Everyday: Visual Media as Everyday Practice
Articulating Fatherhood on Television in China
Arjen Nauta, University of Amsterdam
In 2013, Hunan Television (HSTV) debuted the reality show Where are we going, dad, featuring five celebrity dads and their children who go to several countryside locations to experience rural life and jointly complete assignments. The second and third season alone have received over 3.3 billion hits on HSTV’s website. The underlying motive for the program is the alienation between Chinese fathers and sons in contemporary life. As the fathers are busy and have little time for their children, this show stimulates these fathers to be better dads. But what does it mean to be a good father in contemporary China? How is the everyday activity of fatherhood articulated in this reality show?
In this paper, I study television as a cultural technology that governmentalizes by presenting individuals as objects of assessment and intervention, and by soliciting their participation in the cultivation of particular habits, ethics, and behaviors. I show how fatherhood is constructed in this show, and what messages of exemplary parenting are conveyed to the audience. Based on on-site fieldwork and interviews with production crewmembers (conducted in 2015 and 2016 at HSTV in Changsha), I show how these conceptions of fatherhood have been selected and developed. Moreover, I elaborate how those crewmembers that are also parents themselves reflected on the ideas of fatherhood as conveyed in the show, and what tactics they employ to navigate (and resist) their ways through environments defined by strategies that they themselves have helped to conceive.
Piercing I and i.Mirror: Flickering Animation and Alternative Realities
Linda C. Zhang, University of California, Berkeley
Released in 2010 by the Le-Joy Animation Studio, Piercing I (刺痛我) was the first independently produced, feature-length animation film to come out of contemporary Mainland China. Produced and hand-drawn frame-by-frame by the filmmaker Liu Jian, the film features a cast of young migrant worker men, businessmen, corrupt policemen, and hired hands, who all meet together in the film’s disastrous conclusion. With its grim, cynical perspective on the everyday life of urban China, Liu Jian’s film interweaves realist and absurd elements to provide an alternative and yet recognizable version of reality in the film. Piercing I introduces what I call “flickering animation,” which inverts conventional depictions of life: humans lack vitality, and what seem to be non-alive or non-animate objects are, in fact, the most alive. In doing so, Piercing I creates an animated world that resembles an absurd, exaggerated, and malnourished illusion of the “real world.” In this paper, I contrast Piercing I with iMirror, an animated documentary film directed by internationally and nationally renowned multimedia artist Cao Fei and constructed with the virtual reality user interface of Second Life, reflects the everyday world through a more fantastical and utopian illusion of reality. I ask how these two films, both Piercing I and iMirror, in their animated forms, push boundaries of representational realism by presenting an alternative or flickering mode of everyday lived reality in contemporary China. On the topic of animation, Thomas Lamarre proposes that we look at animation, particularly anime, “in terms of a nodal point in a world of circulation, a point whose mobility is today becoming increasingly evident”. Continuing Lamarre’s point on mobility and circulation, I write about these particular animated films as a hub of mobile exchanges between visual culture and media traditions. Rather than working only within the constraints of national boundaries, the paper seeks a space to consider independent animation coming out of Mainland China within the context of artistic practices and concerns about both the local, the global, and the technological.
Traces of Disappearing and Appearing Objects: Reflections on two Photographic Works by Li Jun and Jiang Pengyi
Roberto Figliulo, Pompeu Fabra University
In this paper we want to present the deep relation between “the everyday” and photographic production in contemporary China. During the last two decades, Chinese artists utilized the photographic medium to represent personal issues, far-away from the grander narratives of the power, representing their personal environment, their families and circle of friends, or their own objects in their works.
The latter are the subject of this paper: ordinary objects. We will present how this “things” capture the attention of the photographers and become a central subject. Focusing on objects that are normally not considered important is a way for the artist to move to “the everyday” or to the personal. At the same time this is also a reflection on the individual’s situations after the period of changes that China went through in the last decades.
Here we will analyze two works of two photographers that concentrate on personal objects: Li Jun (李俊) with his work “Impermanent Instant” (Wuchangshi 无常时) from 2008, where he photographs the absence of the objects and the trace that they leave on the home furniture; and the work of Jiang Pengyi (蒋鹏奕) “Everything Illuminates” (Ziyou zhi wu 自有之物) from 2012, where the artist photographs objects covered with a fluorescent material (liquid wax mixed with fluorescent powder) in dark spaces.
In both works objects are central, but in different ways. If in the first one the objects are absent in bright rooms, in the second they appear from the darkness. A mysterious atmosphere is present in these photographic works, which makes observers ask themselves about the origin and story behind this ordinary objects.
Panel Five
Narrating the Ordinary: Chronicles of the Everyday
Rhythm, Poverty, and the Quotidian in Lao She's Luotuo Xiangzi
Keru Cai, University of California, Berkeley
How does realist narrative depict extraordinary poverty and suffering when they become ordinary and everyday for the characters in a text? To gain purchase on this question, I propose to examine the rhythms of Lao She’s Luotuo Xiangzi. On the level of content, the narrative is dominated by rhythms of nature, of the modern city, of the workday, and even of Xiangzi’s footsteps. On the level of form, the narrative itself moves at varying speeds: fast-forwarded descriptions of general activities during a long span of time are punctuated by singular events that are depicted slowly, in greater detail. The sped-up portions are characterized by the use of imperfective verbal aspect, indicating incomplete or ongoing action.
On the level of content, I will show that insistence on rhythms is the result of narrative fixation on the travails of surviving day by day, moment by moment, squalor by squalor, in conditions of poverty and limited agency. The objects of narrative attention are precisely those mundane and often sordid objects that make up the characters’ material economy and the conditions of their physiological or psychological exigency: bodies and bodily effluvia, disease, coins, weather, clothing, food, shelter. These details of daily subsistence are described with a continuous, relentless rhythm that unfolds in chronology and sequence mimicking the actual lived experience of quotidian poverty.
Concomitantly, the formal narrative rhythms (especially the sped-up generalizations) enact Xiangzi’s single-minded obsession with getting by day-to-day. Xiangzi is not particularly interested in other pastimes or people; he is laconic and solitary, and the paucity of dialogue and description mimics that. Formal poverty reflects the character’s material poverty. Drawing upon criticism by Lydia Liu, Fredric Jameson, and Gerard Genette, I will demonstrate how narrative can do justice to the terrible exigencies of poverty when they are a matter of everyday habit.
The Everyday Voice in Hong Kong: A Study of Leung Ping-kwan's Food Poetry
Poon Soon Yi, National Taiwan University
Leung Ping-kwan (1949-2013), also known as Ye Si, was a Hong Kong poet. He began his writing career in the 1960's and his poems always associated with “things”. More precisely, he likes to write poems of chanting things “詠物” as an effort to try to discover new angles for observing the world as well as to communicate with other people. In the late 1980’s, he had already written many chanting poems regarding furniture, lotus flowers and plants in his volumes of poems like City at the End of Time (1992) and Museum Pieces (1996). Starting in the middle of the 1990’s, most of Leung’s poems of chanting things focused on food in everyday life. For instance, two of his poetry selections which are titled Foodscape 食事地域誌 (1997) and also Vegetable Politics 蔬菜的政治 (2006) mainly incorporate the theme of food and also Chinese cuisine in Chinese daily life. The choice he made to write such poems has evoked a further question, i.e. what is the hidden meaning behind his food poems? Some researchers have been telling us that Leung’s food poetry shows the history and cultural identity of Hong Kong people and it is a political expression of the poet. However, in my opinion, Leung’s food poetry has built up a picture of ‘the everyday’ in Hong Kong which has often been hidden from macro-history or so-called grander narratives of history and power. For further discussion, this paper will be focusing on exploring the trajectory of Leung’s food poetry writing from the Hong Kong handover period in 1997 until the SARS crisis in 2003. In addition, it is also to examine and discover how Leung’s poems reveal the micro-history as well as ‘the everyday’ picture in Hong Kong by borrowing Michel de Certeau’s notion in “Making do”, in The Practice of Everyday Life.
The Writer’s Role-Type: Autobiographical Personae and the Playwright-Protagonists of Early-Mid Qing Drama
Allison Bernard, Columbia University
Historical luminaries and literary paragons have a long history on the Chinese stage. Less common is the appearance of virtual unknowns: un-exemplary figures who lacked political notoriety or literary prestige. This paper concerns a fascinating sample of early-mid Qing plays that expressly stage the ordinary playwright himself as protagonist. Focusing on autobiographical works by the frustrated literatus Liao Yan (1644-1705) and medical practitioner Xu Xi (1732-1807), I consider how their writings could valorize individual experience even as literati faced an uncertain future at the hands of the Qing government. Both playwrights exploit the generic conventions of drama to achieve an exceptional degree of authorial self-consciousness, embracing concepts of role-playing and performance even while channeling the historical impulse to document life events. They use their dramatic persona to expose the unenviable limbo of their “real” lives; for, as average men without definitive political success, they faced systemic insignificance and feared historical obscurity. Yet, neither aims to valorize himself as a stand-alone hero. These plays are thus equally remarkable for how little they endorse the writer as a philosophically independent “self.” Instead, by balancing purposeful, personal storytelling and delightfully quirky humor with pointed appeals to literary tradition, Liao and Xu draw attention to their engagement with other people: warm friendships from their lived present, and resonance with authorial personas from the past. In re-writing the world to better integrate themselves in it, their plays reveal the precarious power of writing to mediate real experience.
Panel Six
Perspectives on Gender: Representations of Everyday Womanhood
Internationalizing and institutionalizing women’s bodies: The YWCA within mission schools for girls in Republican Era Zhejiang, 1923-1949.
Jennifer Bond, SOAS, University of London
This paper explores the role of the YWCA Student Department as it functioned within mission schools for girls in Republican Era Zhejiang. Based on an analysis of the YWCA magazine The Green Year, (1916-1948) held in the Shanghai Municipal Archives in conjunction with mission school annual magazines, this paper probes how women’s bodies were regulated, disciplined and trained within the confines of missionary schools for girls. The YWCA Student Department, originally founded in the American Southern Presbyterian School for Girls in Hangzhou in 1890 and drawing much of its support base from missionary school students throughout the Republican period, has been understudied. The case study of the YWCA within Yongjiang School (Riverside Academy), an American Presbyterian and Baptist school originally established by Mary Ann Aldersey in Ningbo in 1844, shows how the aims of the YWCA reinforced the goals of missionary education for girls. The YWCA provided organizational experience, leadership training and fostered an international identity for women as part of a global Christian citizenship. It also used the school to recruit future secretaries and carry out its mission of creating an international Christian sisterhood in a very visible way upon pupil’s bodies: training them in domestic education and hygiene, inculcating internationalism through pageants and plays, and exercising their bodies through physical education and summer camps into healthy future citizens. This paper examines how young women received this education, combining nationalism, Christianity and feminism in their own unique and radical way. By highlighting pupils’ participation in global networks for women, we can better understand how Christianity and international ideas about women’s education were adapted at the local level, helping to break down outmoded binaries between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘east’ and ‘west’ still prevalent in discourses about women’s education and social status today.
Struggles and Strategies: Single women’s Abortion in 1940s Shanghai.
Chang Liu, King’s College London
Even though medical journals and marriage guides published in Republican China had exposed people’s frequent desire and anxiety for sex, the practice of sex in ordinary people’s lives in this time remains largely obscure in academic attention. This paper focuses on the abortion of single women who lived in the middle or at the bottom of Shanghai society, such as salesgirls, maidservants and laundresses, in the 1940s. More work and educational opportunities for women since the 1920s had provided single women with increased chance to have affairs and to challenge the moral standard against premarital sex. As a result, abortion became a battlefront for different groups to define sex and marriage. Because it was illicit in the 1940s either to have abortions or to assist with them, single women could only turn to old-style midwives and clandestine hospitals and clinics that discreetly peddled their business in code in newspapers. It was made wretchedly hard and dangerous for single women to have abortions when police and big medical institutions cooperated to forbid it. Moreover, the difficulty in availing themselves of sanitised professional medical services further put the single women’s lives at risk. In addition, part of the paper tells a story of a lawsuit in which public prosecutors, relatives, and the accused seducer contested around sexual morality after a girl’s death in abortion. Based on trail records, newspapers and magazines, this paper highlights what these lower middle-class or working-class single women experienced among their relatives, lovers, clinics, policemen and judges in the event of abortion. The paper argues that abortion of single women had become a paradigm and manifestation of sex that was repeatedly defined, and it therefore offers a vantage point from which to explore singleness and sex in people’s daily life in Republican Shanghai.
Subversively Ordinary: Love and Women in Stories of the Strange
Josiah Stork, Middlebury College
Men, women, love, and sex have existed since the beginning of the human species. Nothing can be more natural. However, two genres of prose narratives that developed throughout the course of medieval Chinese history, zhìguài (志怪) and chuánqí (傳奇), often treat these incredibly ordinary relationships as extraordinary. These genres, often studied together and called Táng tales or "stories of the strange", are bound together by the common subject of the human world interacting with the uncanny or supernatural. Dragons, magicians, ghosts, and demons fill the pages of many anthologies of stories of the strange. However, amongst all the stories of the monstrous and wondrous lie many stories about love and women. As the majority of these stories were written by the empowered group of the time, namely educated Chinese men, the women are portrayed as Other and take the role of objects of men’s desire either to be feared or protected. In some characterizations, a male protagonist’s desire of a woman leads him into a physical danger or away from his other duties and responsibilities. In other characterizations, women fall into a version of the damsel-in-distress paradigm and require the man to rescue or protect them. Yet, regardless of the plot points, the relationships between men and women in these stories are cast in the light of the strange. In many ways, they subvert the conventions and expectations of how men and women should behave and make the most ordinary parts of the human condition seem extraordinary.
The Spinning Wheel in Wartime China: Women in-between Confucian Tradition and Socialist Revolution
Maria-Caterina Bellinetti, University of Glasgow
During imperial times and across all levels of society, women contributed to the family economy according to the old saying “men till, women weave” (男耕, 女织). Weaving, spinning and embroidery were nügong, ‘women’s work’. Along the centuries these daily and ordinary activities ascended to moral virtues and became part of the iconography used to portray traditional virtuous women (see for example the Gengzhi Tu 耕織圖). Using as case study the photograph “Evening in a Farmer’s Home” by Li Tu published in 1943 as the back cover of the Jin Cha Ji Pictorial, this paper is going to contextualise and point out the symbolic duplicity of the ordinary object that is the spinning wheel. While along the centuries the wheel symbolised one of the four Confucian female virtues, during the war against Japan, the wheel was transformed by the CCP into the symbol of women’s contribution to the war effort against Japan as well as the tool necessary to achieve economic independence and gender equality.
Through the investigation of relevant sources, it appeared evident that the decision to use the traditional iconography of women spinning cotton as the new, modern and emancipated women, strongly clashed with the CCP’s appeals to break away from the traditional gender roles of Confucian society. As part of an effort to analyse the photographic representation of women in propaganda publications of the decades 1930s-40s, this paper aims to explore whether representing women at the spinning wheel was actually empowering and in line with the CCP’s discourse on gender equality, or whether it was only a political move to win the favour of the women through the use of a set of pre-existing values and iconography that were simply adapted to the new socialist ideology.
Panel Seven
Reconsidering the Ordinary: Material Culture as Everyday Practice
Everyday Life in the Ruins: Experiencing the Ming Dynastic Sites in the Early Qing
Yayun Zhu, Australian National University
When a dynasty crumbles, what becomes of its dynastic sites? Do they suffer from neglect and lurch towards oblivion, or do they gain renewed life under the succeeding imperial rule? How do their destinies impact on the everyday experiences of living in an urban space? The Manchu takeover of Nanjing in 1645 affords insight into these questions. The former Southern Capital of the Ming (1368-1644) not only housed important historical sites that were a visual reminder of the collapsed dynasty; it also stood as a politically contested space for the Ming loyalists who straddled the temporal boundary of the dynastic transition. Previous studies on dynastic sites often tell the story of physical dilapidation, revival and reconstruction through the prisms of grander narratives such as imperial strategies, community responses and local elite discourses. This paper departs from this approach by considering the life and afterlife of Nanjing’s cardinal Ming sites — the Xiaoling Mausoleum, the Ming Palace and the Bao’en Pagoda — in light of everyday individual observations, rituals, travels, chance encounters and imaginary in the early Qing (1644-1911). By focussing on three particular material objects (pines, ruins and lanterns) on these sites, this paper uses a variety of sources such as poems, gazetteers and historical records to explore local literati’s representations of urban spaces in the aftermath of conflict, their dynastic memories and cultural responses to the new regime. This paper further contends that the everyday commonplace of urban ruins generates a cultural space for individual interpretations of the political significance of the past and for contestation over legitimacy in the present.
Extraordinary Display and Everyday Encounter: The Agency and Transcultural Appropriation of a Chinese Painting Motif
Feng He, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
This paper focuses on a Chinese dancer motif, which appeared on different artistic media among diverse cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With an investigation of transcultural appropriations of the motif on various artefacts, the paper argues for agency of the artefacts in everyday social encounters with human agents, and as frontstage social settings for human agents.
Originating from paintings by Qiu Ying (c.1494-1552), two prototypes of dancer motif passed down for generations of Chinese artists and artisans. The motif circulated from paintings to woodblock prints produced in late Ming Nanjing and lacquer screens by Qing craftsperson. Through the global trade of mass-produced Jingdezhen porcelain, the motif travelled to ceramics manufactured in Delft and Berlin, Dutch doll’s houses, Berlin lacquer table and cembalo, and Indian stain-dyed cotton chintz. With a comprehensive chronology of variations, the paper analyses at least five historical stories that had been attached to the motif, which make the iconographical identities of the dancer even more complicated.
After analysing the origins and meanings of the motif, the paper strives to reconstruct its original contexts for (extra)ordinary display with cases of seventeenth-century Chinese literati circle, eighteenth-century French Jesuit François Xavier d'Entrecolles, Prussian court, and nineteenth-century British merchant Frederick Richards Leyland. From the perspective of theatrical theory, artefacts with the dancer motif function as frontstage settings for the owner’s self-presentation in daily life. From an anthropological perspective, the artefacts also act as social agents in everyday encounter with human agents, casting agency to and shaping habitus of the latter. Within a framework for conceptualising material agency, this paper contributes to the understanding of twofold roles of the objects for everyday display.
Extraordinary Everyday and Extraordinary Shape: A Doctor’s Desk from Canton
Xiaoxin Li, SOAS, University of London
Departing from the restrained aesthetics of Ming furniture, furniture design in the Qing dynasty celebrated elaborate forms and decorations. The furniture-making industry in Canton (modern day Guangzhou) was particularly proactive in this fashion, creating forms embedded with elements of Western decorative arts. Whist some new designs are directly appropriated from Western prototypes, others are shaped by emerging new conditions and everyday experiences as part of the city’s engagement with the West.
This paper examines a pedestal desk in a private collection in Guangzhou. The design of this desk, dissimilar to any other types of desk or writing table in Chinese classical furniture, is an odd combination of Western and Chinese elements. This type of pedestal desk was often commissioned by doctors who practiced Western medicine in Canton during the nineteenth century to early twentieth century. Its peculiar form was specially designed to meet the everyday needs of the doctor’s clinic.
This paper attempts to explore how the recreation of a furniture type that had been established for hundreds of years is associated with changes in everyday experience. The first section of the paper draws on the history of Western medicine in China and various visual sources to reconstruct an extraordinary experience in nineteenth-century Canton: attending a Western doctor’s clinic for the first time. The second section discusses what challenges were presented to doctors who practiced Western medicine among local Cantonese patients and how these challenges contributed to the design of a new form of furniture.
The Circulation of Things in the Chin P’ing Mei (金瓶梅) and the Novel as Moral Critique
Jiang Chenxin, University of Chicago
The famously salacious Ming Dynasty novel Chin P’ing Mei (金瓶梅) is often read as a Confucian morality tale in which the protagonist’s large family functions as a microcosm of society, but the everyday practices detailed in the novel contain better clues about its functional ethics. My paper examines forms of gift-giving and reciprocity in the context of the yamen and family compound’s power structures. Within their favour-trading economy, gifts, money, the outcome of cases in the yamen, gossip and sexual favours circulate as mutually fungible. Quotidian practices such as food preservation techniques or sartorial choices prove crucial to the momentum of the plot. Throughout the third decade of the novel, the institution of officialdom is associated with the giving and receiving of favors. Hsi-men Ching gains his office as a result of bribing Great Preceptor Ts’ai with gifts, and celebrates assuming office by hosting a lavish banquet that demonstrates his largess. My paper focuses on the circulation of a single bribe through Hsi-men Ching’s household in Chapter 34, and its ripple effect as the silver changes hands. I show that the novel surprisingly fails to depict a character’s refusal to accept or failure to offer a bribe as a mark of integrity; nor does bribery always function as an agent of disorder and the perversion of proper Confucian human relations. By paying attention to the material details of the story, I argue that the novel embodies a more morally skeptical view of society than influential Confucian readings of the narrative (Plaks 1987, Volpp 2005) would have it.
Panel Eight
Rhythms of the Everyday: Mobile Practices in Public Spaces
Arrhythmic Ordinary Life: Dust in the Wind (1986) and Taiwanese-Dialect Cinema
Xiaoyu Xia, University of California, Berkeley
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind (1986) is widely regarded as representative of 1980s “Taiwan New Cinema.” Whereas much scholarly attention has been paid to the film’s dialogue with foreign master directors, in this article, I will focus on how the film pays homage to 1960s “Taiwanese-Dialect Cinema.” It is my contention that the film foregrounds the divorce between the Mandarin-speaking cinematic space and the Taiwanese-speaking extra-cinematic space. The Mandarin-speaking cinematic space in this film is represented by three meta-cinematic moments: a Hong Kong martial-arts film, an ideologically charged televisual documentary, as well as a film directed by Li Hsing, a major director of Taiwan “Healthy Realism” Cinema; whereas the extra-cinematic space houses the ordinary life of a group of youths eking out a living in the city of Taipei. That quotidian space, steeped in all kinds of ellipsis, loss, and bereavement, debunks and disrupts the illusion of prosperity promulgated by those Mandarin-speaking films and documentary. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of "rhythmanalysis", I take the quotidian space in this film as a site of “arrhythmia.” Rather than viewing the arrhythmia only as pathological or symptomatic, I argue that the arrhythmic ordinary life may well disturb and perturb the illusions of “eurhythmia.” Finally, I would venture to suggest that the everyday aesthetics of Hou’s cinema, despite the surface escapism, in fact bears witness to his critical intervention in reality.
Dance Dance Revolution: Factory Dance, Creative Labour, and the Socialist Everyday in 1950s China
Benjamin Kindler, Columbia University
The coming of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to power in 1949 witnessed a sustained interest in dance, as a highly effective mode of political pedagogy and social mobilisation. This project seeks to contribute to the emergent field of Chinese dance studies by examining a particular iteration of socialist dance practice in the form of factory dance (gongchang wudao). Factory dance was one of the most theoretically provocative forms of performance undertaken by the party during this period. Throughout the 1950s, CPC cultural activists imagined factory dance as a new mode of performance art that would incorporate the movements (dongzuo) and rhythms (jiezou) of industrial labour, as well as the spaces and infrastructure of factories themselves, in order to create dance performances that would activate the everyday experience of the working class at the point of production. Activists imagined the factory floor as a dance space, in which the instruments of production and the sounds of machinery would be deployed as part of an aestheticisation of the quotidian movements of the working-class body. In its first section, this paper traces the evolution of the theoretical categories and practices of factory dance in the 1950s, and does so through theoretical texts on working-class recreation, especially the writings of Qian Xingcun, treatises on dance performance drawn from Wu Xiaobang, and choreography textbooks demonstrating dance performances. The paper goes on to theorise these interventions and movements through the conception of the socialist industrial everyday, in which dance and labour would mediate one another. As a consequence, the factory space itself, as the site of quotidian labour, would be transformed through dance performance. In these terms, the paper examines the role of an understudied mode of performance art in transforming and reimagining everyday life under socialism.
Exercising the Everyday: Modern Chinese Calisthenics as Physical Redemption and Remediation
Wentao Ma, Columbia University
As an important session in Chinese sports history, mass calisthenics has been engaged as the everyday physical exercise from the late Qing Dynasty until now. Moreover, it has been institutionalized as a political method of practicing the national ideologies and of negotiating the public and private spheres. However, academia has not largely emphasized calisthenics as a reflective conjunction of body culture, sociopolitical climates, and media literacy in the modern era of Chinese history. This paper aims to approach the mechanics of calisthenics as an everyday national institution, and to establish a theoretical framework among sports, body culture, and the image of early media in modern China. The first section of the paper unveils the importance of the “everyday” as, what Rita Felski claims, “the essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane activity” that intrudes “more esoteric experiences” to temporally popularize the national ideology. This section also historicizes mass calisthenics as an everyday physical practice into three monumental periods of modern China (1893-1949) based on historical research on primary resources, when calisthenics served, respectively, as a subject of physical education, civil militarism, and cultural nationalism. The second section examines how the authority motivated the national citizens to practice Chinese Calisthenics as an everyday practice of “redemption” via mass media. A close analysis of the press articles during this period suggests a subtle construction of “punitive mechanics” to approach, as Foucault argues, “the political technology of body”. The calisthenics functioned as a productive resolution for the citizens to atone for their sinfulness of physical weakness, which caused a failure of national salvation. Therefore, the authority has fulfilled the civil discipline towards the citizens by positing calisthenics at the center of its punitive mechanics and acquired the mastery of bodies. The final part of the paper focuses on the body as an everyday medium to remediate the national ideology to the personal agenda by practicing calisthenics to keep physical perfection. Furthermore, it has realized an inevitable negotiation between public and private spheres through exercising calisthenics as a way of labor.
Evaporating Aesthestics: Everyday Practices of Water Calligraphy
Laura Vermeeren, University of Amsterdam
As early as seven o’clock, groups of retired or middle-aged men and women flock to the park to dance, work out, talk, sing, laugh and meditate. Among them are groundwriters, men and women using hand-cut brushes made from sponges and broomsticks or umbrella sticks to letter the floors of the public park with calligraphy in all shapes and sizes using water instead of ink. The majority of them spend almost every morning until noon writing on the floors of the park. This particularly public type of calligraphy started after the Reform and Opening-up policy at the beginning of the 1980’s and spread from the capital of Beijing to public parks all over China. It is called water calligraphy, or ground writing in Chinese (dishu 地书) and the activity forms a large part of the everyday life of a growing number of people in China. How are these distinctive spatial and ephemeral characteristics of water calligraphy constitutive of new imaginations in calligraphy? Critical interrogations of power, space and creativity in everyday life will be taken up through the theoretical perspectives of de Certeau on everyday life in his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau has theorized on how spaces, as the lived places in which everyday life occurs are the spaces where there is the possibility of life lived differently, outside of life orchestrated by commodity culture and capitalism. This ‘life lived differently’ is characterized by de Certeau as a ‘creativity’ that responds to the situation of living in a system constructed by someone else. These theorizations will be employed to ask how this everyday calligraphic practice carries a potential to creatively rearrange traditional practices.