Ying-Ying’s Story by Amy Tan and The Story of the Western Wing by Wang Shi-fu are often considered the best examples of romantic drama and fiction in China. In both stories, romance itself tends to be identified with the feminine. Despite the gendering of the genre as female, the (presumed) danger seems, if anything, to have been amplified in the case of the lady reader. Thesis The love stories represent unique romantic relations reflecting through poems, love letters, and song as a medium between the characters’ feelings and thoughts.
The Story of the Western Wing is a love comedy that depicted adventures and relations between Oriole and Zhang. Secret love and romantic relations between a young scholar, Zhang Sheng, and a daughter of a minister, Cui Yingying, is the core of this story. It is the old China experience that manifests most definitely the enormous weight of fate in the lives of the characters (Hsiung 103). On the one hand, the constrictive burden is due to the position of women in that society. In this story, poems and letters play a crucial role because they become the only possible way for Zhang Sheng to express his feelings and love to Cui Yingying. He declares:
I’ll wet the paper window and make a hole
And with silenced voice peep inside—
Probably he has slept in his clothes,
Since the front fold of his silken robe is rumpled.
There is the taste of sleeping alone:
Cold and lonely threads of thoughts
And no one to wait on him.
Observe his washed-out appearance,
Listen to his feeble and weak breathing,
Look at his yellow and emaciated face. (Act 1, Book III, 193-94)
It is possible to say that the tendency of romance narratives is to encode feelings because their worldview tends to be resistant to the notion of heroic achievement not backed up by some sort of pedigree. Within this context, however, the main characters tend to look somewhat more fantastical, and they are always presented as special and exceptional cases. Perhaps of more interest is the way that the story presents the figure of the loyal and virtuous lover.
In a world of crossed loyalties, in which one is hard-pressed to know whether to stay loyal to one’s country, father, husband, friends, or kin (since they almost invariably operate on different sides of whatever conflict is prevailing at any given time), Wang Shi-fu sets a high value on the woman who can juggle these priorities, maintaining the honor of those closest to her whilst they live in obscurity or disgrace (Hsiung 172).
Ying-Ying’s Story from The joy Love Club depicts self-identity and the formation of self. The seemingly lovable Irish husband of Ying-Ying St. Clair proudly imagines himself having “saved” his Chinese wife from some hideous, unimaginable life and passes this myth on to his daughter. In reality, as Ying-Ying reflects, she was “raised with riches he could not even imagine” (Tan 275), and he had to wait for four years “like a dog in a butcher shop” before she consented to marry him.
Once in America, St. Clair, in a sense, enslaves Ying-Ying. He crosses out Ying-Ying’s Chinese name on her passport papers, names her Betty St. Clair, gives her a new birth date and insists she speak English. “So with him, she spoke in moods and gestures, looks and silences…. Words cannot come out. So my father put words in her mouth” (Tan 278). The result: madness. Just as Tan depicts the common oppression of women, she also depicts resistance through maternal bonding and nurturing (Rosinksy 34).
The structure of both works supports plot development and helps readers to understand the role and importance of romantic relations for the main characters. The Story of the Western Wing consists of 21 acts and five parts that portray the evolution of love relations from the very beginning to maturity. On presenting the process of reading romance as a fatuous confusion of reality and fantasy, however, representations of readers also hint at the genre’s capacity to induce errancy’ – that is, ideas above one’s station as opposed to the reality of social inferiority. It is the argument that the feelings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critics of romance, however unpalatable, are not necessarily misplaced, that reading romances might indeed have harbored potential for female transgression’ (Hsiung 192).
The effect is, on the one hand, to exaggerate social distance to such an extent that only a language of religion can deal with the inaccessible spaces evoked; this authorizes the posture of extreme self-abasement as Oriole pays her addresses to her social superior. She comments on the letter:
Oh, too romantic, too devoted,
Too smart, too much the rake!
Even though it’s just a show,
Smaller abilities cannot achieve this. (Act 2, Book 3 196-203)
On the other hand, however, producing this distance as one of virtue – of true nobility – has the effect of erasing any hint of presumption,’ as she puts it, in her letter. The assertion of a shared interest in honor,’ goodness, and virtue, focused through the figure of Oriole, is quite explicitly supposed to deflect any possible accusations of impropriety.
In contrast, Ying-Ying’s Story does not portray sacred love or feelings but underlines the role and importance of life experience and self-formation. Ying-Ying St.Clair blames herself more than her circumstances, but it is her early social circumstances that structure the experience that so haunts her and cripples her psychically.
An episode with a fantasy/folk flavor and a motif of dreaming seems to represent a naive, open but mechanical relationship to culture—opposed to vital reciprocity of being. Ying-Ying (the childhood nickname here may be intended to suggest the regressive nature of her trauma) describes her adventures on a boat cruise during the Moon Festival, which in her account becomes a symbolic episode, a psychological drifting from the fundamental reality of family. While everyone else sleeps, the little Ying-Ying watches in fascination as some boys use a bird with a metal ring around its neck to catch fish (Rosinksy 54).
The rhetoric in both works is based on dreams and inner struggle, search for truth, and self-identity. Love and romantic feelings are the essences for both Zhang Sheng and Cui Yingying. The comically irrelevant mistake is the most revealing and shocking moment of the story when Yingying’s mother takes her word back and wants Yingying to marry a wealthy official (Hsiung 411). To some degree, this acute psychic sense of and fear of being abandoned by their family is a basic reality: it leads to a fundamental separation from family, an ultimate wedge of circumstances between mother and child.
Or lotus root fibers bind the wings of the giant peng bird,
Or a yellow oriole snatches away the ambition of a great swan.
Don’t let this one beauty between halcyon hangings and brocade curtains
Ruin you, [one of the] three scholars of Jade Hall and Golden Horse [Gate].” (Act 1 Book 3 197)
Similar to this story, Ying-Ying is feared of her dreams and the life situations she is faced with. For instance, she tries to cover the spots by painting her clothes with the turtle’s blood. When Amah appears, the servant is angry and strips off her clothes, using words that the child has never heard but from which she catches the sense of evil and, significantly, the threat of rejection by her mother.
Left in her underwear, Ying-Ying is alone at the boat’s edge, suddenly looking at the moon, wanting to tell the Moon Lady her “secret wish.” At this key moment in her young life, she falls into the water and is about to be drowned when miraculously she finds herself in a net with a heap of squirming fish. The fishing people who have saved her are of a class known to her but a group from which she has previously been shielded. After some initial insensitive jokes about catching her, they attempt to restore her to her family group by hailing a floating pavilion to tell those aboard they have found the lost child.
Instead of the family appears to reclaim her, Ying-Ying sees only strangers and a little girl who shouts, “That’s not me…. I’m here. I didn’t fall in the water” (Tan 283). Though Ying-Ying is finally restored to her family, the shock of separation has become too intense a reality (Rosinksy 46). She tries to explain, “even though I was found—later that night after Amah, Baba, Uncle, and the others shouted for me along the waterway—I never believed my family found the same girl.” (Tan 284).
Her self-accusations at the beginning of this story become a miniature autobiography: “For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me…. I kept my true nature hidden….” (Tan 285). Later she accuses herself of becoming a ghost:
In both stories, the two sides of the critical achievement come into direct conflict with each other, love and separation, romantic feelings, and social position. Songs, letters, and poems become a medium of romance, reflecting the inner feelings and values of the main characters. Letters, poems, and songs because a genuine expression of feelings of love, whether the real point is not, in fact, to suggest one’s virtue, precisely by surrounding oneself with just such an elaborate protective textual amour as hints at an aristocratic discomfort with such brazen self-promotion through the medium of print.
Works Cited
- Hsiung, L. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Foregn Languages Press, 1959.
- Rosinksy, N. M. Amy Tan: Author and Storyteller. Compass Point Books, 2006.
- Tan, Amy. Ying-Ying’s Story. Ballantine Books, 1995. pp. 274-288.
- Wang Shi-fu. The Story of the Western Wing. University of California Press, 1995.