Binbin Yang’s Women Writers of Huizhou: Imaginaries of Space and Place in Qing China makes a solid contribution to the growing literature, in English and other languages, on late imperial writings by women. Sensibly, Yang chose to focus on those who left relatively abundant sources and who have attracted significant attention from scholars seeking to recapture the voices of Qing women. Although poetry takes pride of place, Yang shows that women also left a significant corpus of essays, letters, dramas, and even novels. By the Qing period, virtually every character in a poem carried echoes of its use in earlier poems; virtually every placename was freighted with allusions to the past. Unpacking these resonances for those who would otherwise fail to appreciate such subtleties, Yang deftly demonstrates the skill with which these writers exploited such possibilities.
Yang also shows the yawning gap between the impression the writers’ own words leave on us and that conveyed by accounts—however laudatory—written by the men who commemorated them. Thus, Sun Caifu left a collection of poems paying tribute to the women she had met in the course of her family’s flight from the Taiping in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the Hu lineage publishing house printed these poems, neither her husband Hu Peixi nor his illustrious friends—Yu Yue among them—seem to have been particularly interested in this aspect of her experience (Chapter 5). Instead, they emphasize the conventional virtues she showed in her role as steward of the patriline’s social and material fortunes.
Important as is the reminder of the vital importance of reading sources by (rather than simply about) women, it is of course also true that women writers represent a highly rarefied window into the female condition in the Qing. The conventional estimate is that only one or two in ten women were functionally literate; except perhaps in Jiangnan far fewer were those with the erudition and talent to produce works their male relatives regarded as worth publishing.
There is considerable diversity among Yang’s subjects, nonetheless. The dramatist He Lanxian, who has attracted scholarly attention for “cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity” (92), is an outlier: most of those represented were models of Confucian respectability. Yet respectability came in many flavors.
The first chapter, for example, is devoted to Xu Deyin, regarded by Yuan Mei as “foremost among women with poetic talent” (23) of the day. We learn that “dressed like a young scholar, she met her father’s guests” (33), later receiving such male luminaries as Yuan Mei and Shen Dejian. Given that her father died when Deyin was six years old, and that she was well into her fifties when she received Shen and Yuan, such conduct would have passed muster in the eyes of all but the most rigid enforcers of the boundary between inner and outer. The bulk of her work (5 of 6 juan) appears to date from the first decade of her marriage. In company with her husband, she visited the most famed sites in and around Yangzhou. As Yang points out, Yangzhou was by then famous for its painted boats and young prostitutes known as “slim horses.” Her husband regularly evoked those aspects of local reality; Deyin’s answering verses matched the rhyme scheme while scrupulously avoiding reference to anything even mildly scandalous.
While Xu Deyin contrasted her own high-minded asceticism with the conspicuous consumption of her neighbors, the He sisters (Chapter 3) actively sought what they euphemistically dubbed a “small place” in Yangzhou elite society. On the other hand, Wang Ying (Chapter 4) championed propriety much more explicitly than Xu. In her surviving letters and essays, Wang presents herself as the erudite moral conscience of the family and community into which she married. Yang portrays her as a practitioner of statecraft in the tradition of Chen Hongmou.
Had Yang been content to present her material as contributing to our evolving understanding of highly educated Qing women, it would have been easy to argue that she had succeeded in achieving her goal. There is a second agenda here, however: the book is intended as a contribution (and implicitly a corrective) to Huizhou studies. As Yang notes, previous scholarship has emphasized the extreme conservatism of gender roles in Huizhou, a place that prided itself on being a bastion of Song Neo-Confucianism. The typical elite Huizhou wife and mother often spent years with her in-laws while her husband pursued a career in distant corners of the empire. Huizhou ladies were expected to be obedient daughters-in-law, devoted mothers, and (not infrequently) chaste widows, effacing themselves in service of their husband’s patriline.
It is hard to reconcile that image with the women Yang discusses. But were they truly “of” Huizhou? In what sense? None was born and raised in Huizhou; several seem never to have visited the place. In most cases, it seems that the family had started burying its dead where they resided, rather than returning encoffined bodies to the ancestral village—a crucial step in changing one’s official registration in the Qing.Footnote 1 Had they continued to bury their dead in Huizhou, family members would have had to return to the Huizhou community on a regular basis. None of Yang’s families did so. These women were surely conscious of their lineage, but how large a part of their identity was it? Was it similar enough in all these cases to justify lumping them together? Do these women writers truly represent the experience of Huizhou women in the Qing?
While one’s place of origin was a major way people defined themselves and others in late imperial China, its salience seems to have varied—particularly in the case of individuals separated from that native place by generations. Although her father and husband traced their lineage to Huizhou, Xu Deyin “is usually identified as a woman poet whose natal family was from Qiantang (Hangzhou), Zhejiang” (22). Born and raised in Yangzhou, Wang Ying (1781–1842) at age 29 resisted moving her family to Huizhou as her husband wished. Having lost that battle, eight years later she sent her son back to Yangzhou to take advantage of the superior educational opportunities there (104). She not only lectured her husband’s kin on the need to maintain a charitable estate but also quarreled with them for slighting her by refusing to issue the customary rewards for her son’s examination success (111). Once her son passed the jinshi examination (1834), she hastened to join him in Beijing, spending her last eight years there. We do not have evidence from their side, but one can imagine her in-laws regarding her as a self-important scold from the big city pompously lording it over the back-country hicks.
Yang frames this book as a contribution to Huizhou studies. While explicitly recognizing the “transregional” nature of her subjects’ experience, she claims them all for Huizhou. There is ample precedent for this: the 1699 Huizhou gazetteer noted that the “rich families of Huizhou have all moved [elsewhere] … [taking] with them the bones of their grandfathers and fathers to bury them in those remote places.”Footnote 2 Nonetheless, Huizhou historians remained eager to claim for Huizhou the achievements of anyone and everyone whose lineage could be traced back to Huizhou. The ways in which the ascriptive characteristic native place was reframed as generations passed, lived experience accumulated, and social (even marital) networks diluted local ties is one we have just started to think through systematically. Read in tandem with Yingtao Du’s study cited herein, Women Writers of Huizhou affords us an excellent place to start.
