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Overview
Historical novels can be windows into other cultures and eras, but it's not always clear what's fact and what's fiction. Thousands have read Ba Jin's influential novel Family, but few realize how much he shaped his depiction of 1920s China to suit his story and his politics. In Fact in Fiction, Kristin Stapleton puts Ba Jin's bestseller into full historical context, both to illustrate how it successfully portrays human experiences during the 1920s and to reveal its historical distortions.
Stapleton's attention to historical evidence and clear prose that directly addresses themes and characters from Family create a book that scholars, students, and general readers will enjoy. She focuses on Chengdu, China, Ba Jin's birthplace and the setting for Family, which was also a cultural and political center of western China. The city's richly preserved archives allow Stapleton to create an intimate portrait of a city that seemed far from the center of national politics of the day but clearly felt the forces of—and contributed to—the turbulent stream of Chinese history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804799737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fact in Fiction
1920s China and Ba Jin's Family
By Kristin Stapleton
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0106-2
CHAPTER 1
Mingfeng
The Life of a Chinese Slave Girl
This chapter begins our exploration of 1920s Chengdu not with the most powerful but with the most vulnerable members of the traditional household structure, slave girls, whose status was surprisingly little affected by the tide of social change in the early twentieth century. Here we take a closer look at the realities behind the character at the emotional heart of Family — Mingfeng, the pure and gentle slave girl who has the misfortune to fall in love with the novel's hero, Gao Juehui. When the family patriarch gives her as a concubine to an old friend, Mingfeng first seeks Juehui's help and then, desperate, drowns herself in the lake in the family's compound.
Many readers have found the story of Mingfeng the most moving part of the trilogy. The playwright Cao Yu featured it prominently in his popular 1941 stage adaptation. Relations between poor slave girls and their masters form a recurrent theme in Spring and Autumn, the later novels of Ba Jin's trilogy. The unfortunate Wan'er, who is sent to the old man in Mingfeng's place, returns to visit her former home looking haggard and breaks down in tears when discussing her married life. Qian'er, a slave girl who serves Fourth Uncle Gao Ke'an's family, is mistreated by Ke'an's wife until she falls ill. Her mistress refuses to have a doctor called, and Qian'er dies. Xi'er, who serves Fifth Uncle Gao Keding's branch of the family, submits to — perhaps even encourages — the sexual advances of Keding, who later tries to make her his concubine. The young sons of two uncles harass and grope Chunlan, another poor girl serving the Gao family. And, at the end of the trilogy, Juehui's longsuffering eldest brother Juexin marries the loving and capable slave girl Cuihuan, with all expectation of living happily ever after.
Were there people like Mingfeng, Wan'er, Qian'er, Xi'er, Chunlan, and Cuihuan in China in the 1910s and 1920s? It is harder to answer this question for these characters than for any other major characters in the trilogy, for three main reasons. First, Ba Jin admitted that, although many of the upper-class characters in the book were modeled closely on members of his own family, he made up the characters of Mingfeng, Cuihuan, and the other girls. Second, although Ba Jin's family certainly acquired and made use of slave girls, his position in the social order was far removed from theirs, and it would have been difficult for him to gain a good understanding of their worldview and motivations. He did spend considerable time with male servants in the household, listening to their stories. He was also close to several older married female servants who took care of him and his siblings. But his memoirs tell us little about the unmarried girls who worked for his family, and, as some critics have pointed out, his depiction of slave girls in Turbulent Stream may owe more to his reading of the classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber than to his knowledge of real people in that position. Finally, and most critically, evidence to document the lives of slave girls in China in the first decades of the twentieth century is hard to come by.
Despite the difficulty of understanding the world of slave girls, there are ways to approach the topic that can help us appreciate the environment in which they lived and to imagine how they might have responded to the difficulties they faced. Reconstructing the history of this social status helps us strive for a new perspective on city and family life — that of the many rural girls who were brought into the city and sold into gentry households. This chapter thus begins with a discussion of "slave girl" status in Chinese history and then turns to an overview of the ancient city of Chengdu and its hinterlands as a penniless girl might have experienced them. It then moves on to other subjects essential for understanding both slave girl life and Ba Jin's depiction of Mingfeng, including religious beliefs and the status of concubines. It ends by addressing the question of why slave girls' status changed so little in the first half of the twentieth century, despite calls to abolish the status and despite Ba Jin's sympathetic portrayal of the slave girl Mingfeng.
What Was a "Slave Girl" in 1920s China?
Mingfeng does work for the Gao family that most of today's readers would recognize as that of a maid. Wealthy Chinese families in the early twentieth century, however, distinguished between types of female servants based more on their marital status than on the work they did. Married women who worked as maids (or cooks, nannies, or wet nurses) were paid wages and, although they often lived with their employers, were free to leave the residence when they were not on duty and to quit their jobs, if they wished. Unmarried girls, on the other hand, received no wages and were always on duty, in the sense that they were always subject to the commands of their masters and mistresses. The legal term for such girls was binü; in Ba Jin's novels, the narrator uses that term to refer to Mingfeng and the other girls. When characters in the novels refer to binü, they use the more colloquial and general term for young girls: yatou ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), in which tou means "head" and the ya is a symbol representing the single braid unmarried girls wore down their backs. In his 1958 English translation of Family, Sidney Shapiro translated binü and yatou as "bondmaid." Many other translators, including the famous Shanghai writer Eileen Chang, prefer the term "slave girl," given the extreme dependency of such girls on their masters. We shall follow their example.
The history of binü in China before the twentieth century is still not very well understood. Evidence on such fundamental questions as how many slave girls there were at various points in history, the nature of the market in slave girls and how it changed over time, the ways slave girls interacted with other servants and the surrounding community, and what masters and mistresses did with their slave girls when their years of bondage were over has not yet been systematically gathered and assessed. And it is quite possible that not enough evidence remains in the historical record to ever give us a very clear picture.
We do know that, from the perspective of legal formalities, sales of human beings were allowed by the legal codes of Chinese dynasties, including the Qing (1644–1911), but with many restrictions. Basically, heads of households were only allowed to sell dependents to save themselves and other family members from starvation. From the perspective of legal practice, however, the restrictions of the codes seem not to have been enforced most of the time. Sales of male and female children commonly occurred at all periods of Qing rule, often accompanied by formal documents assigning all control over the children to the buyers. Officials seem rarely to have intervened in the process.
In the early Qing, some slaves were the children of hereditary slaves (nubi), thus the property of their masters from birth, and some were purchased via contracts. Hereditary slavery declined after the first decades of Qing rule, according to historians of the phenomenon. The growing commercialization of the economy in the early eighteenth century made it relatively easy for adult slaves to run away and find ways to support themselves. In the 1730s, the Yongzheng emperor abolished the legal designation of "base people," which had kept many people confined to certain socioeconomic roles, including hereditary servants. Almost all slave girls in the latter part of the dynasty thus were purchased as children via contracts.
The standard slave girl contract in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries specified the number of years a girl would serve in her master's household, generally from the time she was handed over (usually when five to ten years old) to the time she was of most value for purposes of childbearing, at about twenty years old. A girl whose labor was sold by her parents — or who was kidnapped and sold by others — was given over to the absolute control of her master and mistress, who could sell her contract to someone else without notifying her birth family.
After a slave girl had served the agreed-upon number of years, most contracts assigned the master the responsibility to "choose a mate" (zepei) for the girl — often with no obligation to consult her birth family. Thus, in Family, the Gao patriarch acted according to custom when he decided to send Mingfeng to another family as a concubine. That he chose to give her to an old man adds to the tragedy of the tale. Ba Jin may have been inspired by a real-life case when he wrote this part of the story. One of Chengdu's most prominent citizens in the early twentieth century, a distinguished scholar and teacher by the name of Liu Yubo, took a seventeen-year-old girl as a concubine when he was in his late fifties in 1926. Apparently, this was seen as rather shocking at the time. But Liu Yubo nevertheless retained his reputation as a sagely man. We will examine his life and career further in Chapter Two.
In the discussion above, the term "birth family" is employed to highlight the fact that, according to social scientists who have studied them, slave girls were considered by officials and most Chinese people in general to be part of their masters' jia(family/household — the word Ba Jin chose as the title of the first volume in Turbulent Stream). Before and into the twentieth century, historian Johanna Ransmeier explains, Chinese families were defined partly in coresidential terms — no matter your blood relationship to the master, if you lived under his roof, you were part of his household and under his authority as a matter of law. A slave girl was given a new name, either by the agent who arranged the contract or by her master and mistress when she entered their household. Mingfeng and the other slave girls in the Gao household would have had different given names before they were sold, and they clearly lack family names of their own. The older women servants, some of whom may have been slave girls before marriage, are called by their husbands' family names: Zhang Sao, for example, literally means older-sister-in-law from the Zhang family.
Being part of the master's household did not imply a warm emotional bond between master-mistress and slave girl. Anthropologist Hill Gates coined the term "patricorporations" for extended Chinese families since they were often managed like a business by the patriarch, who could sell off family assets, including women and children, in hard times or buy additional people to expand the household when economic conditions warranted. On the other hand, many well-off families understood taking in children whose birth families could not support them to be a charitable act; the image of the patricorporation headed by a coldly calculating, profit-maximizing patriarch was not how most Chinese understood extended families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ba Jin himself recalled that his family had taken in a young girl named Cuifeng, the niece of an old male servant of theirs, as what was called a jifan, a charity case: she lodged (ji) at their house and worked as a maid in return for the rice (fan) it would cost to keep her alive. When the girl grew to marriageable age, one of Ba Jin's distant relatives wanted to make her his concubine, but she refused. In that case, because the family had not bought her via a contract, she was allowed to say no. Ba Jin commented that his family was amazed that she preferred to be a poor man's wife rather than a rich man's concubine, but they admired her for it too.
Sometimes a young boy was purchased to provide a legal heir to a branch of a family, which was essential to maintaining control over land and other property and for carrying out the proper rituals for the family ancestors (on family rituals, see Chapter Two). This sort of adoption to establish an heir was supposed to be arranged among brothers or cousins of the same surname. For example, in Autumn, the Gao patriarch's concubine plans to adopt one of Gao Ke'an's sons formally as her grandson and heir. But sometimes there were not enough boys available within extended families. Although adoption of an heir through purchase of a boy from a different family was banned in the law codes, officials generally did not prevent it.
Sometimes a girl was brought into a household as a child bride, engaged to a young boy in the family. Her birth family would be paid a bride price, and her future husband's family would feed her, train her, and put her to work. Frequently the work included serving as her husband's nanny, since child brides were often a few years older than their fiancés.
There are no child brides in Ba Jin's Turbulent Stream; daughters in the Gao family and their circle are educated at home and married into their husband's households in their late teens. In the early twentieth century, and perhaps in previous centuries as well, the practice of taking in child brides seems to have been common in some rural areas; there is less evidence for it in the cities. Each of the branches of the Gao family, however, does have a slave girl.
Why would families buy slave girls? Some historians argue that the growth of the commercial economy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to a strong demand for status markers such as slave girls. Wealthy patriarchs could practice conspicuous consumption by buying slave girls as maids and companions for their wives, daughters, and concubines. Fang Bao, an eighteenth-century scholar-official who opposed the practice, blamed his own wife and other elite women for making slave girls a necessary fashion accessory. Anthropologist James Watson gives another "demand side" argument for a growth in the slave girl phenomenon during the Qing: the growing popularity of bound feet: "People in many parts of South China made a direct connection between mui-jai servants [the southern Chinese colloquial term for binü] and mistresses with bound feet who, because of their stylish deformities, were not expected to perform domestic labor." Some south China families bought slave girls for their daughters when they started binding their feet, according to Maria Jaschok. Coming from poor families, slave girls were much less likely to have their feet bound and could carry heavy trays and stand in one place longer than their bound-footed mistresses (see Chapter Six for more discussion of footbinding).
All writers on the sale of women and children in Chinese history also stress the supply side. Steady population growth during the Qing — from an estimated one hundred million in the seventeenth century to close to four hundred million by 1900 — helped create a large pool of people who could not be supported on the land, particularly during droughts, serious floods, and other crises. Rural unrest due to warfare, very common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, made kidnapping relatively easy. Opium and gambling addiction sent more children to dealers.
How opium addiction could lead to child selling is described in detail by Old Mrs. Ning, a woman who grew up poor in north China and was interviewed by social worker Ida Pruitt in Beijing in the 1930s. Mrs. Ning's addict husband sold one of their young daughters in 1889 for a small quantity of opium and sweet potatoes; when he came home, Mrs. Ning forced him to help her track down and recover the girl. But he later sold her again, this time to a childless woman who said she would treat the girl like a daughter. Since this woman promised to allow her to visit the girl, Mrs. Ning went along with the deal. The girl's new family moved out of town a few years later, and Mrs. Ning lost all contact with her daughter, but she was satisfied that at least she had seen they were treating the girl well.
It is clear that by the early twentieth century many families across China purchased slave girls. A 1909 memorial on slavery, submitted by an official to the emperor, noted that slave girls could be found not only among the large clans of high officials but even in all middling and modest households. In 1921 the British colonial government of Hong Kong — which ruled a population of 625,000 people, almost all immigrants from south China — required masters to register their slave girls. More than 8,600 were reported, most between the ages of ten and fourteen. It is likely many more went unreported. James Watson concludes from field research in Hong Kong's New Territories that the sale of children was routine in the early twentieth century. "Members of the regional elite ... actively bought and sold children according to the needs of their domestic units."
Unlike Mrs. Ning's daughter, most slave girls were probably unable to stay in touch with their birth families at all. Arrangements to buy and sell children were handled by agents, often women, many of whom also earned a modest livelihood as matrimonial matchmakers. Agents tried to keep the exchange simple by preventing contact between the two sides. Many children were taken far from their homes to make the break even more irreversible. In the eighteenth century, government officials reported that there were long-distance networks of child-marketers, including kidnappers as well as entrepreneurs who made a profession out of buying and rearing children for sale as maids, actors, prostitutes, and concubines. Johanna Ransmeier, who examined many legal cases involving slave girls in Beijing in the early twentieth century, points out that long-distance trade in girls was boosted by new transportation technologies such as steamships and trains. A commentator writing in 1932 asserted that six cities on the east and south China coasts were headquarters for the "flourishing business" of female slave trafficking. Some girls were even sent from south China to serve families in Singapore and other overseas Chinese communities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fact in Fiction by Kristin Stapleton. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Ba Jin's Fiction and Twentieth-Century Chinese History1. Mingfeng: The Life of a Chinese Slave Girl
2. The Patriarch: Chengdu's Gentry
3. Juexin's City: The Chengdu Economy
4. Sedan-Chair Bearers, Beggars, Actors, and Prostitutes: The Worlds of the Urban Poor
5. Students, Soldiers, and Warlords: Protest and Warfare in the City
6. Qin: Chengdu and the "New Woman"
7. Juehui: Revolution, Reform, and Development in Chengdu
Epilogue: Family and City in China's Twentieth-Century Revolutions