The phantom returns: on Lilian Lee's three supernatural stories

University of IowaIowa Research Online

Theses and Dissertations

2010

The phantom returns: on Lilian Lee's threesupernatural storiesMin GanUniversity of Iowa

Copyright 2010 Min Gan

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/804

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Recommended CitationGan, Min. "The phantom returns: on Lilian Lee's three supernatural stories." MA (Master of Arts) thesis, University of Iowa, 2010.http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/804.

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THE PHANTOM RETURNS:

ON LILIAN LEE’S THREE SUPERNATURAL STORIES

by

Min Gan

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature

in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

December 2010

Thesis Supervisors: Associate Professor David H. Wittenberg Assistant Professor Jennifer L Feeley

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Copyright by

MIN GAN

2010

All Rights Reserved

Graduate College The University of Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

_______________________

MASTER'S THESIS

_______________

This is to certify that the Master's thesis of

Min Gan

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature at the December 2010 graduation.

Thesis Committee: __________________________________ David H. Wittenberg, Thesis Supervisor

__________________________________ Jennifer L. Feeley, Thesis Supervisor

__________________________________ Garrett Stewart

__________________________________ Astrid Oesmann

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To Gan Fangyi and Dai Jiabing

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The motive behind the writing of history was not objective curiosity, but a desire to influence contemporaries, to stimulate and uplift them, or to hold a mirror up to them.

Sigmund Freud The Uncanny

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea of this project originated in 2009, when I took Professor Jennifer

Feeley’s course on Hong Kong films and literature, though the methodology took shape

from 2008, as I took Professor Garrett Stewart’s thought-inspiring course on narrative

and David Wittenberg’s brilliant course on war and trauma. As I worked on my thesis,

my independent study with Professor Astrid Oesmann on Freud has enlightened me on

my textual analysis. Therefore, I am indebted to their scholarly expertise and support to

proceed with and finish this project.

I want to acknowledge my gratitude to the great friendship with Yang Haihong,

whose witty advice and positive nature have accompanied my thesis writing through its

desperate time. Besides, I am indebted to Chris Vinsonhaler for her wonderful personality

and beautiful English.

As always, I owe the unconditional love and support to Gan Fangyi and Dai

Jiabing, without which nothing would be possible.

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ABSTRACT

This thesis, based on Green Snake, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus and

Rouge, three novels written by Hong Kong author Lilian Lee, discusses the respective

supernatural heroines in relation to the Chinese folklore and to the Hong Kong status quo

before the 1997 Handover, seeking to find the allegorical significance behind the

heroines beyond the genre of fantastic.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1! Lilian Lee and Hong Kong ...............................................................................1!Lilian Lee and Mainland China ........................................................................7!The Supernatural and The Allegorical............................................................11!

CHAPTER ONE: GREEN SNAKE....................................................................................18! Inventing a Voice............................................................................................18!Xiu Xing: The Fantasy of Time ......................................................................23!A Discourse of Ambivalence..........................................................................26!

CHAPTER TWO: THE REINCARNATION OF GOLDEN LOTUS .................................33! The Fantasy of Reincarnation.........................................................................35!The Ambivalent Body ....................................................................................38!Confronting the Past .......................................................................................42!

CHAPTER THREE: ROUGE............................................................................................47! Receiving the Past ..........................................................................................47!Imagining the Mystery....................................................................................51!Prophesying the Future ...................................................................................56!

CONCLUSION: THE PHANTOM RETURNS................................................................60!BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................................................64!

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INTRODUCTION

This thesis focuses on three novels—Green Snake (Qing She 青蛇1986), The

Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (Pan Jinlian Zhi Qianshi Jinsheng 潘金莲之前世今生

1989), and Rouge (Yan Zhi Kou胭脂扣 1984)—by Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee (Li

Bihua李碧华). Written after 1982 when negotiations about Hong Kong’s future after

1997 were held between Britain and China, the three works are characterized by

supernatural heroines, who bring back directly or indirectly the discourse of the past in

the context of the present. While the heroines are invariably fictional, originating from

folklore (Green Snake), classical novel (The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus) or

romanticized courtesan tradition (Rouge), they offer a useful vantage by which to

examine how Lee, by re-imagining the past in Mainland China through the fantasy of

phantom heroines, negotiates the present in modern Hong Kong and establishes a

discourse among the past, present and future.

Lilian Lee and Hong Kong

The contemporary Hong Kong female writer Li Bihua (in Mandarin), or Lee Pik

Wah (in Cantonese), or Lilian Lee (in English), has authored at least seventy-three books,

among which twenty-two are novels. She has participated in the making of twelve Hong

Kong movies. Among them, Rouge 胭脂扣 (Stanley Kwan, 1987) and Farewell My

Concubine霸王别姬 Chen Kaige, 1993), both internationally prize-winning films, are

adapted from her novels. Moreover, she cooperated with Hong Kong New Wave director

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Tsui Hark in rewriting her novel Green Snake into a film script. Interestingly, her novels

A Terracotta Warrior 秦俑(1989) and The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus 潘金莲之前世

今生 (1989) were written first as screenplays, and later rewritten into novels. It might

strike one as coincidental that she has not only three names but also at least three varied

writing identities: story writer, script writer, and journalist/columnist, the last of which

she claims has influenced her style by making it coolly, even coldly, objective.1However,

the dominant scholarship on the film Rouge has for the most part dismissed her

excellence as a writer, attributing her success as the byproduct of cinematic production.

The goal of this thesis, therefore, is to return attention to Lee as a writer, focusing on her

texts and incorporating the corresponding film analysis only to complement and highlight

the textual analysis.

As a writer, Lee is most recognized by literary critics for her ghost romance 诡异

言情小说 (literally, “strange talking-about-love fiction”), which, according to Liu

Denghan刘登翰, inspires “contemplation in historical, social, aesthetical and

philosophical regards.” 2 Notwithstanding, David De-wei Wang王德威 criticizes Lee’s

works as “thin and pale, not worth (deep) reading.”3 The bifurcation among critics poses

a challenge to categorizing Lee in the matrix of Chinese literature. In an interview Lee

claims: “Categorization doesn’t matter. What matters is that people read my works. If

1 Lian Lee, “Three Dreams 三个梦” Yapian Fenyuan 鸦片粉圆(Guangzhou: Huacheng

Chubanshe, 2003) 272.

2 Liu Denghan, Literary History of Hong Kong 香港文学史(Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1999) 496.

3 David Dé-wei Wang, Narrating China 小说中国(Taibei: Maitian chuban youxiangongsi, 1993) 221.

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they don’t love my works, what’s the use even if I were enshrined on an altar?”4 She

boldly describes writing as a career “to exaggerate, to fabricate, to falsify, to gild (what

she writes), to invent what is non-existent, and to make a chaotic world.”5 Moreover, she

ascribes her creative inspiration to the need for money, thereby confirming her writing

work as a commodity. While Liu acknowledges Lee’s attempt at a middle route between

serious literature and popular literature, he finally pins her down in the league of writers

of consumerist romance,6 seemingly corroborating Li Zhuoxiong李焯雄 in his argument

that Lee’s name alone has become “a transcendental signifier” of consumerist literature.7

Zhu Aijun even ascribes Lee’s monetary success with her works to Hong Kong

consumerism combined with the collective imagination and formulation of Hong Kong

identity:

Hong Kong consciousness is not just a self-reflexive sense of national belonging but becomes more a fashionable and popular commodity, which everybody, high or low, is fascinated with and is only eager to own and consume so as to prove consciousness, along with other terms and concepts such as identity, history, and nostalgia, is exactly what promotes the sale of Li Bihua’s books.8

4 Lee, “Three Dreams”.

5 Lilian Lee, “The Confession of Aquarius 水瓶座的自白”, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_475afdce010000uw.html.

6 By consumerist romance, I mean the genre of fictions whose plots are bascically a clichéd relationship between a man and a woman, and whose targets are the adolescent readers, mostly female. In the1980s, such a genre has been extremely popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In Chinese, it is Yanqing xiaoshuo 言情小说, literally “talk-about-love novel”. Qiong Yao, a Taiwan female writer, has been one of the most popular names in this genre.

7 Li Zhuoxiong, “The Story of Names: A Textual Analysis of Lilian Lee’s Rouge 名字的故事－李碧华《胭脂扣》文本分析”, Xianggang wenxue tanshang 香港文学探赏识(Hong Kong: Sanlian Shudian, 1991).

8 Zhu Aijun, Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Authors (NY: Cambria Press, 2007) 252.

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Consumerism is typical of any modern city, but this fact is especially true in Hong

Kong, which became a colony in the aftermath of the Opium War (1840), after which the

island was “rented” as a port village by Britain for 99 years till 1997. During the century-

long colonization the British Government took advantage of Hong Kong’s advantageous

location to extend its influence in the Far East to develop commercial profits. In short,

because British colonization had the future of this colony designed as nothing but a port

in the Far East for capitalist consumption, the historical course of Hong Kong determines

its consumerist nature. Admittedly, the consumerist literature, derivative of capitalism,

has brought to Hong Kong writers, Lee included, a writing experience different from that

of writers in the Maoist Mainland China, where political agendas and propaganda

predominate over market considerations.

Aside from these historical considerations, critical attitudes that would blame

Hong Kong writers for excessive consumerism risk other forms of distortions as well.

Such attitudes tend to be totalizing in three ways: first, consumerist literature is not

necessarily inferior to, but different from, non-consumerist literature; second, Hong Kong

literature is not purely consumerist, but it also offers a literature of diversity; thirdly,

Hong Kong writers are first of all writers and then writers in a consumerist cosmopolitan

city. Therefore, Lee, a Hong Kong writer, might not be so much “a transcendental

signifier” of consumerist literature as signified by the consumerist accusation of Hong

Kong in general.

This totalizing literary categorization is not new, but rather the byproduct of a

centralized political situation. Since 1840, China was plagued by constant wars:

following the warlords after the fall of Qing Dynasty (1636-1911) in 1911 were the

Japanese invasion from 1937 to 1945 and the domestic war between the Nationalist Party

and the Communist Party from1945 to 1949. Throughout the battling years, Hong Kong,

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mostly a standby colony except for the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong (1941-

1945)9, became the destination for fleeing intellectuals from the mainland. When they

arrived on the island, they overwhelmed the small land with Chinese nationalism and

leftist and rightist debates. After invading Japan was defeated and the Chinese Nationalist

Party was in control of China, the leftists who favored and supported the Communist

Party had to leave the mainland due to the harsh political situation, even as a similar

situation in reverse happened to the rightists after the People’s Republic of China was

founded. Because the political refugee intellectuals staged in Hong Kong their frustrated

ideals, Hong Kong literature was categorized as Refugee Literature. Later, Hong Kong,

with its voice marginalized, if not simply ignored by both Mainland China and Taiwan,

was derogated as a “cultural desert.”

In the 1960s, when Hong Kong witnessed a burgeoning economy and freedom

from the mainland and Taiwan, where ideology predominated over everything, the sense

of local identity began to bud in Hong Kong. In the 1970s, as the younger generation—a

group unlike immigrant parents who carried with them memories of the mainland—grew

up in Hong Kong, they became an indigenous generation with unique Hong Kong

experiences. This internalized Hong Kong identity finds its voice in literary works

wherein Hong Kong is constructed as an independent locality, rather than Hong Kong

dependent upon alien powers of either mainland/ Taiwan, or Britain, though Hong Kong

is never exempt from their influences. Hence, Hong Kong is essentially an identity of

ambivalence, in that it infuses in a new appearance the intruding colonizing culture of

Britain with a Chinese identity, entailing compromises on either side. In short, Hong

Kong identity is a new appearance constructed upon an incomplete disappearance.

9 Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese Imperial forces on December 25, 1981 and

returned to the British control on August 15, 1945.

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This ambivalent identity was problematized even more by the 1984 Britain-Sino

Joint Declaration of Hong Kong handover back to the Mainland China 1997. While Rey

Chow argues that “when its term of colonization by the British comes to an end in 1997,

Hong Kong will, in a way that makes it unique in the history of Western imperialism, be

handed over to a new colonial power,”10 another scholar, Ackbar Abbas, interprets 1997

as an opportunity for Hong Kong to define its past “‘floating’ identity” with a new

subjectivity “constructed not narcissistically but in the process of negotiating the

mutations and permutations of colonialism, nationalism and capitalism.”11In either

argument, Hong Kong underwent radical changes through disappearance and new

appearance. Lee epitomizes Hong Kong in the way that “[her] experience is not very

different from that of contemporary Hong Kong that has been transformed, by itself and

by critics, from a ‘cultural desert’ to a unique culture with its unique history, past, present

and future.”12

Lee apparently shares with her contemporary Hong Kong writers the fear of the

imminent transformation of Hong Kong into a unifying nationalistic identity and focuses

also on the Hong Kong experience, often incorporating a subtext that seeks to

differentiate the island from the mainland. While her peer romance writers from Yishu亦

舒, who writes about the romance of middle class females, to Liang Fengyi 梁凤仪, who

writes about women in the business world, emphasize the unique cosmopolitan

experiences in Hong Kong unavailable to the economically subaltern Mainland China,

and while the acknowledged more serious Hong Kong writers extend their writing

10 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural

Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 23.

11 Abbas Ackbar, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: Minneapolis UP) 4-8.

12 Zhu, 230.

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beyond the middle class but remain within the framework of local experiences, Lee

explores Hong Kong in the light of the Mainland China, not Mainland China per se, but a

fictional, or imagined, Mainland China. Green Snake tests the rewriting of a folkloric tale

targeted at Hong Kong readers, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus has the reincarnated

Golden Lotus—a stereotypical literary figure—suffer a different fate from her previous

life in Hong Kong, and Rouge demystifies the typical courtesan romance in classical

literature in the context of a 1980s’ Hong Kong. In short, Hong Kong, formerly “a space

that is marginal to the Mainland center”, is “as legitimate as the Mainland, and may be

even better. For, Hong Kong provides a positive alternative political and cultural space

for the characters, and at the same time it functions as a critiques of the center.” 13 Lee,

and the majority of Hong Kong writers, are apparently anchoring a floating Hong Kong

identity in their conscious distinction from and subsequently their subtle refusal of

Mainland China as a site of abjection.

Lilian Lee and Mainland China

Meanwhile, Lee connects to the site of abjection. The three stories treated in this

thesis invariably incorporate classical Chinese literature, thus participating in the

discourse with that literary tradition. Green Snake is a rewriting of the folklore of a white

snake spirit marrying a human; The Reincarnation of the Golden Lotus is based on the

archetype of a historically notorious dissolute woman Golden Lotus, who reincarnates to

a modern China only to repeat the traumatic experiences in the different context. Ai

Xiaoming argues that “Green Snake combines the structural imitation and subversive

rewriting—the plots are retained and characters are rewritten—while The Reincarnation

13 Zhu, 251.

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of Golden Lotus is in part a structural imitation and in part a character rewriting”,14

evidenced in part by Lee’s foreword to The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus: “I have no

ambition with this book; yet, out of curiosity, I have always been wondering about her—

after the reincarnation, where has Golden Lotus of Song (960-1279) Dynasty gone?”15

Similarly, Rouge—in which a courtesan, who dies in the 1930s, returns as a ghost to

Hong Kong in the1980s to look for her lover—is a story with “deft allusions to classical

Chinese ghost literature,” wherein ghost heroines return for unfulfilled sexual

desires.16The story is further complicated in that her stay in the modern world is allowed

after a capitalist trade sacrificing her future life, i.e., her seven-day sojourn is exchanged

by seven years in her next life, even as her desire lingers on the past. In all the three

stories, participation in the traditional discourse is contingent upon sharing the same

collective memory, which is at the same time a reaffirmation and intensification of that

bond.

On the other hand, however, Lee does not simply submit to classical discourse,

but rather approaches it with destabilizing perspectives. On the back page of Green

Snake, Lee claims “the ridiculous truth” of the folkloric love story as being “a story of

seduction”.17 In The Reincarnated Golden Lotus, Lee explains the reversal to the fate of

14 Ai Xiaoming. “Xigu nongjin 戏古弄金：谈李碧华的《青蛇》、《潘金莲之前世今

生》和《霸王别姬》”. Eds. Huang Weiliang黄维樑. Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2000.

15 Lilian Lee, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus潘金莲之前世今生 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000).

16 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke UP, 2009) 151.

17 Lee, Green Snake 青蛇 (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxiangongsi, 1995).

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Wu Ruda武汝大, “Wu is a good man. He was poisoned in his previous life and died an

unjustified death. In this life he should be compensated with some ‘prizes’. Such is the

right way of the world.”18 In Rouge, the courtesan ghost Fleur (Ruhua如花) returns to

the human world to look for her dead lover, only to find him unwilling to die for their

love. Fleur’s disillusion leads the narrator to contemplate: “Such is love: in about ten

million people only one pair of lovers can die for their love and transform into a pair of

beautiful butterflies. Others turn into moths, cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies, beetles

…they simply can’t turn into butterflies19. The truth is not as gorgeous as what we

imagine.” 20 Chow’s interpretation of the Rock and Roll music in Mainland China might

apply to Lee, who “both dismember[s] and dis-remember[s] official history”.21 By

juggling the connection with and contrast to the discourse of classical Chinese literature,

Lee constructs a discourse in nostalgic relation and meanwhile voiced antagonism to

Mainland China.

If classical literature is geopolitically a Mainland Chinese discourse, Lee carries

the discourse into a modern Hong Kong context. In Rouge, aside from the exclusive

location of the story in Hong Kong in the 1980s, the heroine Fleur, who died in the 1930s

when Hong Kong was not yet a locale of independent cultural and political identity,

18 Lee, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus,152.

19 Transformation into butterflies stems from the well-known folklore romance “Liang Shangbo Yu Zhu Yingtai” (Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai梁山伯与祝英台). When their love is denied by Zhu’s family, Liang dies of despair, soon followed by a similarly heart-broken Zhu. After they are buried in the same tomb, two butterflies fly together out of the tomb, which is then found to be empty.

20 Lee, Rouge 胭脂扣 (Hong Kong: Tiandi Tushu Youxiangongsi, 1984)152

21 Rey Chow, Writing Diapora. 151.

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declares, “I am a Hong Kong citizen.”22 Similarly, the reincarnated Golden Lotus

migrates to Hong Kong and hence half of the story is staged in the modern city. By

relocating the plots in the classical story to Hong Kong, the locus of the city in relation to

these discourses is transformed from the marginal and passive to the central and active.

Though Green Snake, a historical story, is still staged in Mainland China, its relation to

Hong Kong is self-evident, when the narrator and character Green, near the closure of

Green Snake, claims that “I even intend to send my writing to East Daily东方日报, the

most famous newspaper in Hong Kong. I heard that it has the largest audience. I want to

be understood by the most people.”23Rather than excluding Hong Kong from classical

discourse, Green is seeking to be understood by it. And in Lee’s other works, the

importance of Hong Kong is evident as well. For example, the novel Farewell My

Concubine concludes in Hong Kong, unlike the film version. If discourse has a central

authority with its spheral influences, Lee participates in the discourse from the periphery,

transplanting the discourse to a new locality with its framework intact, and creates a new

discourse with a new central authority. Her revision of the classics is at once a gesture of

cooperation and divergence, submission and subversion. In other words, she de-centers

“China,” imagined through fictional female characters, and brings Hong Kong to the

forefront.

22 Lee, Rouge, 5.

23 Lee, Green Snake, 255.

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The Supernatural and The Allegorical

Significantly, Lee’s revisionist attempt is cushioned with the trope of the

supernatural: an animalistic spirit in Green, a reincarnated woman in The Reincarnation

of Golden Lotus, or a ghost courtesan in Rouge. These supernatural heroines, around

whom the stories are constructed to deconstruct at least part of ghost story tradition, are

invariably a poignant embodiment of powerlessness, as, constrained from exercising

supernatural abilities, they are virtually divested of their potential menace to the existing

world. Thus, the empowered snake spirit Green is cautioned to hide its tails and behave

like human beings, the reincarnated Golden Lotus only possesses uncanny but ineffectual

memories of her previous life and the phantom Fleur must ask for human help in her

search for her lost lover. Lee’s heroines, in their respective self-disrupting model of

supernatural power, are bereft of the typical faculties associated with the supernatural.

Nonetheless, the trope of the supernatural, as Tzvetan Todorov contends, “exempt[s] the

text from the action of the law and thereby to transgress that law”.24 In Lee’s literary

revision, while the transgressive power of the supernatural endows the narrative an

unusual authority to disregard and subvert the traditional discourse, the very

supernatural—unnatural or illusory— nature excuses and mitigates the disruptive

discourse.

Hence, the supernatural events in Lee’s three stories are not intended to generate

in the audience the hesitation before a suspended solution to the abnormality, thereby

24 Tzevetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to A literary Genre (Ithaca:

Cornell UP, 1975), 158.

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posing a challenge at least to Lim’s categorization of Rouge as the fantastic—the

uncertainty between the supernatural and the uncanny:

The person who experiences the event must opt for one or two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imaginations—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us…The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.25

When Green Snake opens with the claim that “This year I am more than one thousand

and three hundred years old”26 and The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus with “Tick, tick,

tick. The dripping blood. The blood soaked the road to the underworld”,27 the impossible

is introduced as disequilibrium situated in straightforward supernatural tales. Admittedly,

Rouge has a longer play with the uncertainty when the narrator actively justifies the

extraordinary appearance of Fleur in the context of modern Hong Kong. However, the

indecision lasts merely for a few pages, replaced soon by the confirmation of the

unchallenged supernatural order suggested from the very beginning by the discrepancy

between Fleur’s great age and her youthful appearance, rendering Rouge a

straightforward ghost story. While to Todorov the fantastic arises from an apparently

supernatural existence breaching the frame of natural law and asking for justification,

Lee’s supernatural heroines are easily identifiable as suitably within the frame: the snake

25 Todorov, 25.


27 Lee, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, 1.

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spirits fall in love and are disappointed by the betrayal of their love interest; the

reincarnated Golden Lotus is a living human responding to traumatic love events; Fleur

wants to confirm her love and is disillusioned when her expectation is not attained. The

uncertainty is hence the reverse of that formulated by Todorov: rather than the natural

law justifying the extraordinary presence, the extraordinary presence justifies the natural

law in a mundane human world.

This link between the extraordinary and the natural world justifies categorization

of Lee’s supernatural tale in the genre of allegory rather than in that of fantastic, or,

quoting what Todorov says, “[s]ince the supernatural elements are therefore not here to

evoke a universe different from our own, we are tempted to search out an allegorical

interpretation for them.”28 An allegory, according to Todorov, has at least two

prerequisites: more than one literal reading and explicit (Todorov’s emphasis) allegorical

indication29. While he acknowledges a subtler allegorical indication through repetition of

a metaphor30, he is cautious against the “illusory allegory”, in which “one may produce

the impression that there is an allegorical meaning when there is, in fact, no allegorical

meaning present.”31

Lee’s supernatural tales fall at least into this category of illusory allegory. The

three texts share the same attempt of bringing the widely-accepted historical discourse—

the White Snake legend, the Golden Lotus notoriety, and the courtesan romance

28 Todorov, 72.

29 Ibid, 63-64.

30 Ibid, 62.

31 Ibid, 73.

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respectively—back to the present context via the supernatural. The supernatural trope is

seen also in Lee’s other stories such as the short story collection The Old And New

Ghosts on Tian’anmen Square (Tian’anmen Jiupo Xinhun天安门旧魄新魂), wherein

ghosts, who are at first unaware that they are dead, retell the Tian’anmen Square

massacre from individual perspectives of the witness and victims. Moreover, to situate

Lee in the Hong Kong supernatural movie boom in the 1980s and 1990s deepens the

allegorical impression, which is further reinforced when her supernatural stories are

interpreted in light of the Chinese ghost literature tradition that is “on the whole,

singularly uninterested in horror or suspense…to displace fear back onto the specter,

whose timidity and loneliness as an abject creature arouse instead feelings of pity and

tenderness in her human benefactor.”32 Ghost (gui鬼), as Judith Zeitlin further reminds

one, is homophone with return (gui归) in Chinese, which assumes at once double

meanings, a tendency to allegorical interpretation.

According to David Dé-wei Wang, allegory “focuses on the comparison and

derivation of specific experiences and signs while deferring infinitely the meaning within,

thus imitating the trope of games,”33 The context of the game suggests distance,

amusement, and safety. Since the traumatic events in the stories, originating from the

texts of a distant time, recur inside the same framed world though in a different time,

modern readers are kept at a remove from the events. As the heroines—not the readers or

the characters that share the temporality with the readers—undergo the violence and the

32 Judith T. Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century

Chinese Literature (Honolulu: Hawaii UP, 2007) 3.

33 Wang , 25

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trauma, the extraordinary experiences can be enjoyed without exacting an affective price

from the modern readers.

Because Lee’s supernatural heroines originate in classical Chinese literature, they

are agents from a bygone time. As they enter the reality framed in modern temporality,

they bring along the disenfranchised past, which would otherwise disappear never to

return. The past, through this spectral space, revives in the fabric of a reality like fantasy,

while the present becomes uncanny, as “the boundary between fantasy and reality is

blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now

considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what

it symbolizes.”34 As the spectral heroines recall what has vanished from the present

consciousness, they carry, above all, a memory unwilling to disappear, instated as

trauma. In all three texts, the heroines are afflicted with the experience of disillusioned

love and the difficulties of negotiating the disillusion with the insistent belief in love. So,

they return. The spectral heroines symbolize through memory the past time irretrievable.

Second, the resurgence of memory reminds the present not only of the past, but also of

how the past is suppressed. Therefore, Green is shocked to find that her story is scarcely

recorded eight hundred years later, Golden Lotus to find herself branded as a slut, and

Fleur to find a Hong Kong young man who knows nothing of history. Last but not least,

as “allegory is a textual doubling that allows one stratum to be construed via another,”35

the supernatural refers back to observant present, which, in light of the past, looks back at

itself. The phantoms, whose supernatural power and vengeful intent are suppressed, and

34 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (NY: Penguin Books, 2003) 150.

35 Lim, 156

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whose presence is a site of a disparate temporality of past in the temporality of present,

turns into an anachronistic sight.

Finally, the sight of the anachronistic heroines induces nostalgia, but with a

difference. The moods of these supernatural heroines are so evocative that the ambience

of Rouge is applauded as “Tangxi Style塘西文体”—after the red-light district “Tangxi,”

where Fleur works—echoing the nostalgic zeitgeist of Hong Kong after the Joint

Declaration of Hong Kong handover. Due to the handover, Hong Kong turns into a

disappearing appearance, a space at once past and present, and a site for reminiscence.

Whereas nostalgia incurs a distance between the subject and the object, no such distance

exists in Hong Kong’s case. In other words, Hong Kong is nostalgic for itself at this

moment. Nostalgia in Hong Kong is, therefore, “but a position, an allegorical one, from

which to read and revaluate the ruins.”36 The intervention of supernatural heroines, who

are the opaque externalization of the historical ruins doubling the present ruins, generates

the haunted space by fabricating the missing distance, anchoring the nostalgic position in

the present, and projecting nostalgia to the supernatural revenants. If nostalgia ever

dwells in a glorious-sounding past in Lee’s fantastic texts, it does so uneasily. When

Fleur’s love story turns out to be a murder, such nostalgia is situated, not in an idealized

past, but in a disenchanted past, as well as a disenchanted present.

The following three chapters treat Lee’s three texts like a case study. If the

allegory has cancelled the Todorovian fantastic in the unambiguous existence of the

ghost, as, according to Todorov, allegory is antithetic to the genre of fantastic, and if

36 Lim, 160.

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Zeitlin is right in her contention that “to write ghosts is de facto to write the relationship

with the past and the history,”37 to discuss ghosts is likewise de facto to discuss the

relationship with the past and the history. The core of the discourse has to be: time.

37 Zeitlin, 196

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CHAPTER ONE: GREEN SNAKE

The sisterly Green (Xiao Qing小青), a five-hundred-year-old green snake spirit,

and White (Bai Suzhen白素贞), a one-thousand-year-old white snake spirit, bored with

their xiu xing修行, or solitary self-cultivation, transform into pretty women dallying with

the human world. Soon, White marries a young scholar Xu Xian许仙, while Xu

gradually becomes attracted to Green. As the triangle relationship subtly evolves, a

monk, Fahai法海, intervenes to rectify the unnatural marriage between a human and

snake spirit. In the end, White and Green become disillusioned upon discovering that Xu

was colluding with Fahai to trap them. White surrenders to Fahai’s imprisonment, while

Green kills Xu and retreats from the human world to the reclusive Xiu Xing. While Lee

bases her story on the folklore of White Snake, she revises the classical tale by first of all

inventing a new voice through Green, so that it is, instead of being merely a love story

between animalistic spirits and human, a discourse with the traditional folklore.

Inventing a Voice

Hundreds of years after her temporary departure, Green is back and wants to

know how the story among the four is recorded in history. To her disappointment, she

scarcely finds any except for one literary text retaining it as folklore:

A guy called Feng Menglong 38冯梦龙 has edited [the story] into his Stories to Caution the World (Jing Shi Tong Yan警世通言) and even given the story a title—“Lady White Forever Imprisoned in Leifeng Tower”(Bai Niang Zi Yong Zhen Lei Feng Ta白娘子永镇雷峰塔). I found one copy and read it. Yikes! It is not the biography that I want. It conceals the ridiculous truth. The

38 Feng Menglong冯梦龙 (1574－1646) is a famous literati writer and playwright from

the Ming Dynasty (1368－1644).

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latticework of jealousy among the rectangle relations is not mentioned in the book. I am not satisfied.39

Green’s act of reading is meaningful in three ways: first, while she reads the story about

herself and finds the Green in the story not what she thinks she is, she is undergoing a

pithy moment of “yikes”, or that of the Freudian “uncanny,” wherein a transposition of

familiar to unfamiliar occurs; second, the reading is essentially looking at her doubling in

the mirror of time—like a funhouse mirror divested of fun—Green looking at a distorted

Green framed in the text; lastly, by addressing the story and at the same time addressing

her story to Feng’s discourse, Green makes herself a discourse of the bygone events to

participate in the similar literary attempt as that of Feng, meanwhile coming into a

competing relation with it for claiming the more reliable voice.

The Stories to Caution the World, published in 1642, is a classical collection of

short stories, in which the story “Lady White Forever Imprisoned in Leifeng Tower”

40influences the later authorship—in fiction, playwriting, or visual media—on the snake

spirit legend.41 That influence is also evident in Lee, who lifts characters from “Lady

White Forever Imprisoned in Leifeng Tower.” Lee takes not only white snake spirit,

White, green snake spirit, Green, young scholar Xu Xian, and Fahai the monk , but even

the supporting characters, such as Xu’s sister and brother-in-law, and the comical Taoists

39 Lee, Green Snake, 240

40 Feng Menglong 冯梦龙(1576-1646). “Lady White Forever Imprisoned in Leifeng Tower 白娘子永镇雷峰塔” .Stories to Caution the World 警世通言. Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1958. Vol. 28.

41 Ascribing to the popularity of the White snake folklore, studies on the evolution of this folkloric tradition are mostly the same in different critical works and scholarly papers. Therefore, I am relying on http://baike.baidu.com/view/274264.html and a paper by Wang Yongen 王永恩 to locate the source materials.

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that vainly try to trap the snake spirits . The bond with the classical text being

immediately established, Lee further adopts the well-known plot points: White borrows

an umbrella from Xu; Xu visits White and Green for the umbrella; White gives Xu

money for marriage; the money is found to be the missing money from the government

storehouse; the officers investigate; Xu marries White; Xu, White, and Green move to the

neighboring city and establish a medicine shop; a monk named Fahai tries to convince Xu

of his monstrous marriage; Xu helps Fahai to imprison White and Green. Apparently,

Lee, like other authors, owes Feng a rich heritage of narrative here.

Moreover, the other authors of this folk tale have made obvious contributions to

Lee’s stories. Green mentions having read Chen Yuqian陈遇乾, who has contributed the

following original plots to Lee’s story: Xu is accidentally frightened to death upon seeing

White’s snake tail; White steals the tinder agaric, a mysterious grass that lives for more

than a thousand years, to revive Xu; and White gives birth to a son for Xu.42 Considering

that Chen, influenced by Feng, has basically transcribed his predecessor’s story through

the media of painting, Lee is even doubly indebted to Feng’s discourse.

On the other hand, however, Feng’s story is not the origin of this folklore. The

folklore of White Snake can be dated back to Episode 458 under the category of “Snake”

in the Taipingguang Collection (Tai Ping Guang Ji太平广记), which was compiled from

years 976 to 977. It tells the similar deaths of two young men, Li Huang and Li Guan,

after they have sex with a pretty woman, who, in the end, turns out to be an “enormous

42 Chen was a Suzhou chanting苏州弹词 actor. Records about him are scarce. See

“Chen Yuqian陈遇乾”. http://baike.baidu.com/view/986332.htm?fr=ala0_1. His work about the snake folklore is mentioned in “Baishe Zhuan yuanliu xiaoshi 《白蛇传》源流小识”. See http://blog.tianya.cn/blogger/post_show.asp?BlogID=818936&PostID=8191692.

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white snake.”43 After about two centuries, in another story collection entitled Yijian Zhi

夷坚志, the white snake motif reappears when a sheriff finds his wife, “an enormous

white snake,” 44 coiling in the tub. Though she promises not to hurt him, and the

marriage continues in harmony, he soon dies of fear. Between 1541 and 1543,

Qingpingshantang Cihua清平山堂词话, a collection of short stories written during the

Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties (960-1644), carries a tale of Xi Xuanzan奚宣赞,

suspiciously the prototype of Feng’s Xu Xian, who is seduced by a white snake spirit and

scarcely escapes his death. The story of the white snake spirit, hence, has become a site

of changing discourses over history.

If Feng complicates the straightforward folkloric narrative of a female monster

seducing and endangering male humans with twists and turns, Lee contributes to the

discourse with a radical new perspective by establishing Green as the protagonist over

White. In Episode 458 of the Taipingguang Collection, ggreen ssnake is not mentioned

except for perhaps an old woman in black.45 The text of the snake wife is exclusively

about a snake spirit and her husband. In Xi Xuanzan’s encounter with the white snake

spirit, there is a black-bone chicken spirit serving the white snake spirit as a daughter,

who, in her subordinate status in her bond with the snake spirit, might be the prototype of

Green. Even in Feng’s milestone piece and its subsequent evolutions, the white snake

43 Li Fang李昉(925-996). “Li Huang李黄”. Tai ping guang ji太平广记. Shanghai:

Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990. Vol.458.

44 Hong Mai洪迈(1123-1202). “Sun zhixian qi孙知县妻”. Yi Jian Zhi夷坚志.Taibei: Xingxing shuju, 1960.Vol. 2

45 In the text, the old woman is dressed in Qing Yi, which is black clothes in classical Chinese and green clothes in modern Chinese.

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spirit is the unquestionable heroine, and the love story—if I might tyrannically interpret it

as a love story—is exclusively between White and Xu. However, in Lee’s story, the love

story between White and Xu is also Green’s unfulfilled love story, sacrificed to her

friendship with White when she denies Xu’s proposed elopement.46

More provocatively, Lee establishes Green as the narrator, thus approaching the

story with female subjectivity. In all of the texts that we have traced, White is a

monstrous woman, deadly threatening to male characters, and is therefore imprisoned in

the Leifeng Tower. The most generous gesture of such authorship is to confirm that the

snake spirit doesn’t deliberately mean to harm the men (as in Yi Jian Zhi), at least if her

sexual interest submits to her desire (in Feng’s “Lady White Forever Imprisoned in

Leifeng Tower”). Therefore, when Green criticizes Feng for “conceal(ing) the ridiculous

truth. The latticework of jealousy among rectangle relations is not mentioned in the

book,”47 she is criticizing the dominantly male authorship on this folk tale epitomized by

Feng, which simplifies the treatment of White by demonizing her as a monstrous woman,

and meanwhile decorates her as a trophy of male worship, like a Cinderella complex,

because White is beautiful, capable, and yet persistently desires nondescript Xu. Green,

in other words, implicitly responds to the fact that the literary tale of ghost women “was

authored by men and represents male fantasies of women as Other,” as Zeitlin notes.48

Therefore, as Feng’s narrative closely follows the handsome Xu, who, after being and

seduced by the mysterious White, helps the monk to imprison the snake spirit and retreats

46 Lee, Green Snake, 173-174.

47 Ibid, 240.

48 Zeitlin, 14.

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to the latter’s monastery world, it indubitably carries on the trope of male narcissism. By

granting Green narrative authority, Lee invents a new voice, which at once complements

and subverts the existing discourse of the snake spirit folklore that has been essentially a

mystification (who the pretty woman is), demystification (the woman is a snake spirit),

and victimization (the snake spirit is punished by imprisonment) of White, respectively.

Xiu Xing: The Fantasy of Time

To empower Green, Lee not only spares Green from White’s punishment, but also

sustains her until approximately the present day 1980s. Through xiu xing, or solitary self-

cultivation, which Green claims to be her “lifelong career,”49 she gradually has in her

possession one thousand and three hundred years.

Xiu xing is a mystic Buddhist practice that can turn an animal into an animistic

spirit, then into a human, and eventually into a god. The practice is measured by length of

time. Though the mechanism of the correlation between time and power is not explained

in the story, the power of White and Green clearly accrues with the linear passage of

time. After White saves Green’s life, Green compliments White, saying “You are prettier

than me, and have greater supernatural power than me, and are older than me.”50

Apparently, she is praising White for her three disparate attributes: appearance,

power, and age. She then follows White as a sisterly disciple, believing that “since White


50 Ibid, 7.

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was more experienced than me, she must be smarter than me.”51 By this, Green ascribes

to White two more attributes: experience and wisdom. While age and experience are

related to time, and experience and wisdom has a causal relation, Green is essentially

complementing on the time owned by White. As White tells Green that “any man who

wants to win us with his wisdom is surely to lose. As I am one thousand years older than

they are, they are not my peers at all,”52 she intimates that her power is essentially time.

Xiu xing, an occupation—in its both meanings—of time, is hence an appropriation of

power through time.

Although xiu xing wants a clear definition, the procedure is at times implicit. In

their reclusive xiu xing, White inquires whether Green feels bored. Green gives her a

negative answer, noting that “by night and by day, I have been busy enough

contemplating why I am so different from others.”53 White responds to her that “I have

started the contemplation five hundred years earlier than you, but till this day I still can’t

comprehend the myth.”54 Apparently, philosophical contemplation of the self in relation

to the world is an important constitution of xiu xing. Moreover, as Green becomes “more

than one thousand and three hundred years old, endlessly continuing xiu xing, not

knowing when and where it will stop,” she complains, “What’s the use of sticking to xiu

xing? Who know? My foremost suffering is that I can’t die.”55 As death is essentially the

51 Ibid, 8.

52 Ibid, 20.

53 Ibid, 8.

54 Ibid, 8.

55 Ibid, 2.

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terminal to the mortal possession of time, xiu xing overcomes the terminal to approximate

the fantasy of infinite time.

Green is thereby eligible for the ghostly role to “fulfill the present’s impossible

desire to interrogate a dead witness of the past.”56 As Green claims that “this year I am

more than one thousand and three hundred years old,”57 she assumes the indubitable

narrative authority by transpiring the fantasy of a witness outliving the mortal time.

Hence, she has the clairvoyance to ridicule a famous poem depicting the West Lake (Xi

Hu西湖) as a locale of a carnival, because she has the right of testimony that “the West

Lake where I once lived was never so poetic.”58 On the other hand, she is inferior to the

more knowledgeable White and has to consult her when they see an ancient tomb of the

historically famous courtesan Su Xiaoxiao:

“I don’t know her. Ah, do you know her?” “I know her. She lived in South Qi (479-502) dynasty.” “Oh, that was your time.”59

Through them, history, which has been likewise entombed in the bygone time, has a

chance of being excavated to confront the present.

Moreover, because Green is the only surviving witness, though illusorily, she

tyrannically suppresses the competing voices—namely, the dominant male authorship on

the white snake story—by depriving them of any retort, thus revenging her suppressed

56 Zeitlin, 115.


58 Ibid, 1.

59 Ibid, 10.

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voice on the defunct authors. Though she is a presumptive experiment with time, namely,

what if a witness like her, who outlives the mortal time, exists, she unsettles the granted

reliability and authority to the existing historical discourse.

Meanwhile, Green is not an objective witness, but rather a responsive character

with affectivity. Therefore, while she is seducing the readers into a subtle relation with

her by the first person narrative, which, according to Todorov, “readily permits the

readers to identify,”60 the relation is ambivalent, as Todorov also wisely points out that

“if a supernatural event were reported to us by such a narrator (the represented

‘dramatized’ narrator) we should be immediately in the marvelous...proposing that the

readers believes without really believing.”61 Therefore, if Green is but a fantasy of

immortal time, and if such a fantasy is reporting to the readers the events at variance with

the historical discourse, the readers are hesitant, uncertain not whether to believe her but

whether to disbelieve the more authoritative historical discourse.

A Discourse of Ambivalence

Green initiates her writing not as a revision to a folkloric story but as an

autobiographical narration. She claims, “I should write the story myself. No one can write

the story about other people.”62 However, as she—now over one thousand three hundred

years old—returns to the time when she was five hundred years old, she is approaching

60 Todorov, 84.

61 Todorov, 83.


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the story over a temporal lapse of eight hundred years. The chronological distance is

partially the reason accounting for our habitual hesitation toward historical

representation, because time doesn’t leave the present with a living witness to the past

like Green. Even though a witness like Green exists, the representation is still

problematic. Positing herself in the 1980s, Green looks back to pre-modern time when

she is “young and stupid”63 and declares “if I could choose it, I’d rather it had never

happened,”64 apparently endeavoring to differentiate what she is now from what she was

at that time. If indeed, according to Lim, “to speak of others as though they were

temporally behind oneself is to remove them from one’s own past,”65 Green is removing

at least that part of history from her. Consequently, the autobiography is not so

autobiographical of Green eight hundred years ago as the Green in the 1980s believes.

Besides, because the story is not only Green’s story, but the story of White, Xu,

and Fahai, her accusation that “no one can write the story about other people” calls her

own narrative attempt to question. When Xu and White have their first rendezvous in her

house, Green is absent as a witness, but she fills the gap by unsubstantiated conjecture,

saying “Do you think that I have no idea what you are up to? ‘It is a long story…’ White

must have been smiling, drying his rain-soaked clothes against the stove fire (emphasis

mine).”66 Green hence acknowledges her inventing the scene of how White seduces Xu

Xian, as if she had witnessed it happening, and essentially cooperates with the traditional

63 Ibid, 2.

64 Ibid, 1.

65 Lim, 86.


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discourse in re-victimization of White as a sexual subject, but from a new perspective.

Hence, her inveigh that “This is China: all the existing records that has been passed down

the history fail to present the truth of the protagonists,”67 directed towards the Chinese

literary discourse, is at once self-referential, disclosing the vulnerability of discourse on

the past in general.

Another complication to the facile autobiography occurs when White is freed

from the prison in Leifeng Tower due to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1968-1978).

She consults Green about what happens after she is imprisoned in the Tower, and Green,

fearing to inform White of her killing Xu, lies, saying “After you were imprisoned under

the Tower, Fahai was gone. Xu was rueful and became a monk beside the Tower.”68

Green thus answers her by recourse to the finale of Feng’s narrative, and at the same time

she plays with the rhetoric. While in Feng’s narrative Xu is rueful for being seduced by

White, Green suggests that Xu is rueful for causing White’s imprisonment. Then, Green

asks White:

“Long time ago, did you really fall in love?” “Yes.” White asserted.69

Upon hearing White’s answer, Green finds that “strangely, I don’t hate him

anymore… I almost believe that I once loved him (emphasis mine).”70The tempting

question is: if Green, instead of lying, had admitted that Xu was never rueful and died on

67 Ibid, 240.

68 Ibid, 247.

69 Ibid, 248.

70 Ibid, 249.

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Green’s hands, how would White have responded? As, at the moment when this

exchange between the snake spirits occurs, Green is still in the process of writing the

story, she is at least indirectly influenced by Feng’s narrative, which she sets out to flout.

Despite her supernatural clairvoyance, Green is unwittingly enmeshed in the established

discourse.

While Green’s narrative attempts to approach the discourse with a female

perspective, the film, adapted by the famous Hong Kong New Wave director Tsui Hark

in 1993, restructured the story from the male perspective. The film opens with a

pandemonium of grotesque people, and cuts to Fahai standing at a higher place

overlooking them. The spectators are immediately brought to Fahai’s point of view

(POV). The following scene has a shot of a benevolent-looking old monk running,

followed by a shot of Fahai chasing him. Again the subjective shot from Fahai’s POV

precedes the objective shot of Fahai. Both unlike and like Lee, who brings the readers to

the subjective world of Green from the opening lines, Tsui brings the spectators to the

subjective world of Fahai. When Tsui’s cinematic work to Lee’s original text is

compared, it is evident that Tsui expands Fahai’s perspective by minimizing the

perspective of Green, which replaces the dominant voice of Green with that of Fahai.

Therefore, it is shown how Fahai struggles to justify his violence to the harmless spider

spirit, how he eagerly seeks assurance of his own willpower to persist in Xiu Xing by

asking Green to seduce him, and how he forces Xu to convert as a monk inside his

Temple, a scene exclusive to the POV of Green, who is absent. In short, Tsui’s

interpretation of Green Snake departs from the female subjectivity voiced by Green to the

male subjectivity of Fahai.

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In an interview, Tsui discusses the differences between the novel and film:

In the novel, Green Snake is governed by her own value system. She flirts with White Snake’s husband Xu Xian out of jealousy. The tension between the two heroines reflects the sexual politics between women.

In my screen interpretation, White Snake symbolizes humanity, Green Snake acts from impulse and gets herself into deep trouble when she tries to emulate White Snake. She becomes cynical and hypocritical after being alienated from nature.71

Consequently, he simplifies the subtlety of female affection, or “sexual politics,”

as homosexuality. In the first scene of Green, she twines her rain-soaked body with White

as they groan on top of a courtesan building. Under the roof, a group of Indian girls are

dancing erotically to the exotic music. Green then falls down naked on the floor in the

middle of the dancing group, surprising the group and the male audience, and then stands

up and dances. The dance resumes, and Green rubs her front body behind the back of the

Indian lead dancer. The lead freezes and twists her body as if being aroused. The film

returns Green to an aesthetic site for voyeuristic pleasure. When we compare this

expanded scene to the few lines in the novel:

I emerged from the middle of the dancing girls. First I blew green smoke to obtain the attention. Then, I

repeated the dancing movements I had just seen. Music resumed. I danced better than any woman, because this is nature. Whose waist can be more flexible than that of a snake?

All looked at me as in a trance, drunk with songs and dances. 72

Obviously, Tsui deliberately underscores the sexuality of Green, and hence, returns

Green to the sexual, erotic archetype in the traditional literary discourse on the

supernatural women.

71 He Siying & He Huiling, Jian Xiao Jiang Hu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong dianying

ziliaoguan, 2002) 185.


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Though it is not the task of this thesis to decide whether the screen adaptation is

better or worse than the original novel, the suppression of the voice of Green, through

whom Lee discourses not only to the Chinese folkloric tradition, but also to the modern

Hong Kong, is a definite diminishment to Lee’s revisionist story.

First, to situate the narrator Green in the same temporality with the contemporary

readers narrating a story she experienced as a witness and participant five hundred years

ago is perhaps to “forge an oppositional identification between the anachronistic savage

and the contemporary, disaffected spectator, thus telescoping the primitive to the

present.”73 On the one hand, the chronological gap relieves the present of the threat

accompanying the unnatural events, and on the other hand the voice contemporaneous

with the present, indicative of the past persisting in the modern context, which unsettles

the very thought that the past has gone.

Second, while Green writes in West Lake, she claims her intention to publish her

writing in Hong Kong. Therefore, she positions her writing in Mainland China and

targets it at Hong Kong. At the same time, her discourse in connection with and contrast

to the traditional literary discourse on the snake story seeks to circumvent a confrontation

with the latter, and hence denies a mutual conversation. In short, her discourse,

ambivalent towards the traditional discourse, is preemptive.

Third, while Green exposes her writing process, which, as I have argued, is not

exempt from uncertainty, she discloses, her story included, the difficulty of representing a

memory, and the impossibility to represent history. Her literary attempt at autobiography

is originally supposed to resurrect the true history of White, Xu, Fahai, and herself from

73 Lim, 95.

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the past, as she finds historical representation—again in the form of a literary story—

problematic. However, when she sees historic relics, she thinks:

Maybe under every torn historic relics is imprisoned an

animistic spirit devoted to love! Who knows? Therein must exist a story hard to tell, each

evolving and concluding on its own. It’s impossible for us to know them all.74

Predominating the personal story over history, Green shows preference of a discourse of

individual subjectivity to a discourse of historical totality. On the other hand, however, by

denying the possibility of understanding the past of others, she is suppressing the past to

the dead temporality entombed in the chronological linearity. Hence, her discourse is at

once, though ambivalently, a conscious revolt and an unconscious surrender to the

totalitarian linear chronology.

The story ends with White falling in love again with a young man and Green

determined to help White reenact the story of eight hundred years ago in the present,

regardless of the latter’s reluctance. The past, secured within the history and Green’s

personal memory—existing in a suppressed, and thus dead, temporality—returns to haunt

the present, a gesture that recurs in The Reincarnation of the Golden Lotus, but from a

different perspective: the memory of the past may paralyze the present and hence be

traumatic.


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CHAPTER TWO: THE REINCARNATION OF GOLDEN LOTUS

In The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, the notorious Golden Lotus (Pan Jinlian潘

金莲), a Chinese classical literary femme fatale formulated by the Outlaws of Marsh

(Shui Hu Zhuan水浒传)75and developed by The Golden Lotus (Jin Ping Mei金瓶梅)76,

is reawakened to modern China as Jade Lotus (Shan Yulian单玉莲). Golden Lotus is a

concubine of a rich but old master. The master’s wife gives her to Wu Dalang武大郎,

who is short like “a five-inch nail” and sells baked pies. Once married to Wu Dalang, the

dissatisfied Golden Lotus tries to seduce Wu Dalang’s younger brother Wu Song武松.

When Golden Lotus is declined by Wu Song, she is immediately seduced by a young and

rich master Ximen Qing西门庆, with whom she colludes to murder her husband, so that

she can be married to Ximen as a concubine. Finally, Wu Song returns home to kill

Golden Lotus in revenge for his brother.

When Golden Lotus reincarnates into Jade Lotus, the pivotal moments of the

latter’s life are framed such that they easily recall the story of Golden Lotus: Jade Lotus

is raped by an old school director where she is a student; then, she marries Wu Ruda (武

75 The precise author and year of this book are unclear. However, it is generally agreed

that it is written by Shi Nai’an (1296-1371) sometime around the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368) and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It is one of the four classic novels in Chinese literary history. The characters in this book are predominantly male, whereas the few female characters, Golden Lotus included, are either genderless or debauched and seductive.

76 The book, written by an anonymous writer pen-named Nan Ling Xiao Xiao Sheng during the Ming Dynasty, has been censored from the literary canon for its audacious sexual depiction. Different from Outlaws of Marsh, the characters of this book are predominantly female, though all of them are wives and concubines to the debauched master Ximen Qing.

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汝大), who is also short and sells pies in Hong Kong; she moves to Hong Kong and

meets her husband’s fraternal friend, Wu Long (武龙), with whom she is in love; and

when Wu Long refuses her love, she is seduced by Simon. Hence, while Jade Lotus

reenacts the concatenation of traumatic events that happened to Golden Lotus, she

becomes the site, similar to Green’s allegedly autobiographical narrative, where the past

is carried to the present.

Though both Green and The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus are rewritings of

classical stories, they approach the classical discourse in different ways. While Green

situates the revised narrative in the same context as the original text, emphasizing its

difference from the original, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus relocates the revised

narrative story in a new context, and underlines the connections to the original.

Lee is not the pioneer in rewriting the story of Golden Lotus. Early in 1985, a

Chinese Sichuan opera playwright, Wei Minglun魏明伦, wrote an influential play based

on a Golden Lotus stereotype, in which he questions “whether Golden Lotus deserves her

violent death or not, whether it is her beauty or the evil society to blame”77, thus

rendering his play a moral allegory directed at the patriarchal society in pre-modern

China. Different from Wei, Lee is more ambivalent about her position. On the one hand,

her rewriting also rescues the Golden Lotus from the femme fatale stereotype; on the

other hand, she is not straightforward like Wei, but rather evasive about her writing

intent. In the preface to the story, she claims that her ambition of this work is merely to

fulfill “a curiosity”. She says, “I have always been wondering about her—after the

77 Wei Minglun, “The Golden Lotus潘金莲”, Wei Minglun Juzuo Jingpinji (Shanghai:

Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998) 102.

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reincarnation, where has Golden Lotus of the Song (960-1279) Dynasty gone?” 78 If we

rely on Freud’s claim that “the motive behind the writing of history [is] not objective

curiosity, but a desire to influence contemporaries, to stimulate and uplift them, or to hold

a mirror up to them,”79 Lee’s rewriting of literary history is at least a mirror into which

the present looks only to find the past. Therefore, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus

resembles Green Snake in its fantasy to retain an impossible witness through Xiu Xing,

or solitary self-cultivation, the motive of which is likewise mediated by another “what if”

game—namely, what if a mortal being is constrained by the past in the present—a game

that cushions and destabilizes the very challenge that she inflicts on the traditional

narrative of Golden Lotus. Nonetheless, it is the mission of this chapter to find the

implicit and ambivalent motive behind the fantasy.

The Fantasy of Reincarnation

The opening page of the story depicts a vague underworld:

Here hovered the endless night with black shadows, light or heavy, of hills, trees, and human forms, like a painting of thousands of years, on whose edge a seal of crimson characters was stamped, furtively attempting to imprison the foul story of this woman (Golden Lotus) and to pass her story down through space and time.80

Apparently, there are two metaphors at work: the dark underworld is likened to a

painting, and painting itself is likened to a discourse that can “imprison” and “pass down”

78 Lee, preface to The Reincarnated Golden Lotus.

79 Freud, 61


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the story of Golden Lotus. As the underworld is a space of non-existence—at least in the

terms that existence is living—severed from the human world by death, the tyrannical

discourse, which preserves the “foul story,” is a collusion between the authoritative

historical discourse, which formulates the “foul story,” and death, which suppresses the

individual voice of past. The ghost of Golden Lotus “stumbles forward, apparently

unwilling to go ahead. Beside her feet snaked the blood, wriggling with her emotions and

thoughts.”81 Her voiceless reluctance to surrender her emotions and thoughts to the “foul

story” renders her dead and not yet dead, past and not yet past, or, in Lim’s words,

“merely the persistence of surmounted thought, a form of mythic survival, a relic of a

prior age.”82

As Golden Lotus forges ahead, she approaches a pagoda, where the mythic Lady

Meng (Meng Po孟婆) gives each ghost three cups of Amnesia Tea, literally Lady Meng

Soup (Meng Po Tang孟婆汤). Golden Lotus refuses to be amnesic of her previous life

and wants to seek revenge, but she doesn’t clarify the target of her revenge, until she

remembers the notorious name that she is labeled by:

Now that she had died a pathetic death, why should she, then, be branded with the stigma of the most notorious Slut in history? The notoriety would follow her for generation after generation, and there would be no way to correct it.

The red flame of fury burned in her eyes. Yes, the name of Slut infuriated her.83

81 Ibid, 1.

82 Lim 109.


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Apparently, Golden Lotus shares with Green the desire to correct a

misrepresentation and voice her story, but her very ghostly existence is endangered by

her imminent reincarnation. If time empowers the immortal Green to secure the

preservation of a past in the present through memory, it denies that power to Golden

Lotus and threatens to destroy her memory. As a ghost, which is in limbo between the

past and the present, she has to reincarnate; to reincarnate, she has to drink the Amnesia

Tea and forget her past life. In short, if Amnesia Tea is the ticket to the future presence,

she has to trade the past for that presence.

Reincarnation has been a popular superstition in the Chinese folkloric tradition, in

which the spirit of a dead person is reincarnated as a newborn baby after drinking three

cups of Amnesia Tea. It is best demonstrated in Lady Meng’s chanting: “Life is no more

than a dream, leaving no trace behind when you wake up; different then will be you and

new will be your look.”84 If we compare the life of Jade Lotus to the life of Golden

Lotus, repetition and reversal are intertwined: Jade Lotus is raped by the old director (a

repetition), falls in love with Wu Long (a reversal), marries Wu Ruda (a repetition), is

seduced by Simon (a repetition), kills Wu Long (a reversal) and loses her memory (a

metaphorical repetition of death). Therefore, Jade Lotus is and at the same time is not

Golden Lotus. The difficulty for Golden Lotus is that while amnesia is the prerequisite

for reincarnation, she doesn’t want to abandon the past. Consequently, her reincarnation

is a compromise on both sides: she reincarnates with broken memories of her past.

The trope of reincarnation calls into mind Hong Kong’s concession to Britain, a

historical event to which Hong Kong had to submit. From the concession, Hong Kong

84 Ibid, 3.

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consequently and subsequently was no longer a Chinese territory, but a British colony,

although it was promised to be returned to China in ninety-nine years. After the

concession, a political transaction in which Hong Kong had no voice, the old Hong Kong

was “dead” without disappearing, “reincarnated” as a colonized Hong Kong, that, like

reincarnated Jade Lotus, is and at the same time is not what it was. In short, the new

Hong Kong is not so much new as of “discontinuities with apparent

continuities”(Abbas’s emphasis).85 Comparing Jade Lotus to Golden Lotus, the same

claim applies too: reincarnation is discontinuities with apparent continuities.

The Ambivalent Body

Following the reincarnation, the narrative jumps to Shanghai at the beginning of the

Cultural Revolution (1966-1967). Jade Lotus, a young orphan around eight years old,

tries on a pair of new ballet shoes:”Suddenly, her feet curved and shrank in front of her

eyes, and the satin shoelaces transformed into white cloth strips. The girl was shocked. It

tightened, and tightened…no, she rubbed her eyes to find that they are still her ballet

shoes.” 86 The white cloth strips, culturally loaded, are suggestive of bound feet. As

Golden Lotus is most well-known for her tiny bound feet, the relation with the past is

established, though the present reality is immediately restored. By subjecting an innocent

little girl to the arbitrary power of the past, the former’s innocence manifests the

85 Abbas, 136.

86 Lee , The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, 7.

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arbitrariness of the power. Soon she has the chance to glimpse at the title of the book The

Golden Lotus, which brings her to a trance that she habitually finds herself in:

Upon seeing these three words, which she didn’t quite understand, Jade Lotus felt her heart leapt, yet she couldn’t make any sense of it. These three words, like a delicate hand in the shape of an orchid, waved to her. And she found within her a lingering fixation with them. She is confused. Who is pushing behind her back? She rushed forward, attempting to save the book with her hand. Before her fingers reached the fire, the book was turned into ash.87

While the book epitomizes the past discourse of the “foul story” of Golden Lotus, to

which Golden Lotus refuses to surrender, Jade Lotus tries to save the book of the past at

the risk of burning her fingers. A discrepancy thereby arises in Jade Lotus: while inside

her uncannily dwells the Golden Lotus who is dead and hence past—“uncanny” as

defined by Freud as “everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has

come into the open”88—her body feels the bond to the past but not the obligation to it. In

other words, it is a body both in the present and in the past, while at the same time in

neither. The paradox, which virtually paralyses the function of Jade Lotus in her trance,

renders her body a site of ambivalence towards the two temporalities.

The discrepancy is unified when Director Zhang章 rapes Jade Lotus:

She sees him. (A disgusting face, dressed in silk broad-sleeve robe,

embroidered with character and flower, a rich man of ancient time. Again and again he penetrates her. Master Zhang张 pulled up her skirt, and, squinting his eyes, looked at the blood drops on it.)89

87 Ibid,10.

88 Freud, 132.


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The parentheses and the smaller font, which frame the narration of the past, are external

textual interventions axiomatic of the superimposition of the past on the present, and

meanwhile recall the suppressed memories to complement the present event. In the film,

this scene is composed by quick cuts between ancient Master Zhang, who is raping

Golden Lotus and her contemporary, Jade Lotus, who is suffering Director Zhang’s

sexual violence. The montage creates the effect that the past and the present not only

cooperate to accomplish the crime, but that the past penetrates to the present and

perpetrates the violence.

The Chinese title for reincarnation is literally “previous life and present life,”

which might be more suggestive of the perceivable causality between the past and

present. Bergson has identified the process of perception as “condensing enormous

periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an

intense life, and in thus swimming up a very long history.”90 To put it simply,

perception, by condensation, is open to misperception. The causality between the past life

as Golden Lotus and the present as Jade Lotus is induced by such condensation,

involving not only how to perceive the past but also how to perceive the present.

Condensation is apparently the mechanism by which Golden Lotus remembers her

previous life when she looks into a magic mirror:

The men in her heart— Altogether there were four. O, what an illusionary dream of the past! The expanse of

the desolate prairie was suddenly blackened, like a piece of white paper immersed in black ink, leaving a thin slot through which flowed in a wisp of mystery.

A pathetic past—91

90 Henri Bergson, Memory and Matter (London: Allen & Unwin, 1911), 275.


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The past of Golden Lotus is thus condensed into four men, which subsequently

frames the experiences of Golden Lotus with four similar men. Again the similarity

between the two characters is established through condensation, intensifying the

similarities and ignoring the differences. The easiest way, albeit superficial, is to compare

the names. Golden Lotus Pan (Pan Jinlian潘金莲) is reincarnated as Jade Lotus Shan

(Shan Yulian单玉莲): out of three characters in their respective names only the one

character, Lotus (Lian莲), is shared. Likewise, the names of other characters are similarly

reconstructed: Wu Dalang 武大郎 versus Wu Ruda武汝大, Wu Song 武松 versus Wu

Long 武龙, and Ximen西门 versus Simon. Hence, condensation is also a totalitarian

unification by sacrificing the differences.

It is this very totalitarian unification that brings the historical course of Hong

Kong into mind. In colonial Hong Kong, being an island of China had receded to the past

and faded in memory of the newer Hong Kong generation, whereas colonialism was the

present status quo. Hence, to the citizens of Hong Kong, their identity is more connected

to the colonial space than to the national structure from which they were severed, until

the 1984 Joint Declaration of the 1997 Hong Kong Handover back to China. To subject

the contemporary Hong Kong to a contract made ninety-nine years ago, which was

supposed to restore justice to colonialism, resembles forcing Jade Lotus to carry out the

intent of revenge claimed by Golden Lotus. Hence, the body of Jade Lotus is essentially

the body of Hong Kong, which is a site of the ambivalence towards the pre-colonial past

and the colonial present until the confrontations with the past.

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Confronting the Past

There are three crucial moments when Jade Lotus actually confronts the past,

instead of merely perceiving the connection with the past. One such moment is when she

meets her husband’s great grandmother, whose “greatest contribution is having given

birth to fourteen children and surviving proudly to this day like a goddess.”92

Notwithstanding her great age, she is yet “too old to be expressive of her ideas.”93The

sarcasm and the paradox reduce her to an existence without voice, or in Lee’s own words,

“an unearthed relic of history.”94 However, upon seeing Jade Lotus, the old woman

humiliates her, calling her a fox spirit who seduces men. Thereby, she extends the

victimization of Golden Lotus as a promiscuous woman in the historical discourse to Jade

Lotus and tyrannically imposes the order of the past on the structure of the present.

The second confrontation between Jade Lotus and the past is when she meets an

old woman with a “gloomy, stony face,”95 who says to her, “Miss, you come here, and

yes, you can have your wish fulfilled. But dream is still a dream. Alas, why do you make

fuss over it? It’s better that you stop and forget all the hatreds of your previous life.”96

Apparently, the old woman is Lady Meng, the mythic figure of the underworld. As the

enigma of her words occludes her communication with Jade Lotus, Lady Meng, like the

92 Ibid, 43.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid, 118.

95 Ibid, 97.

96 Ibid, 98.

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great grandmother, is inexpressive of what she attempts to communicate. In other words,

though the past warns Jade Lotus of an impingent disruptive force, the prophecy is

enigmatic beyond her comprehension.

The third confrontation is when Jade Lotus finally reads The Golden Lotus in its

entirety:

Her memories returned. Her previous life, the life that had been awaiting her, looking for her everywhere, undergoing the anxiety of a thousand years, finally found her. She was its owner. It was lucky for the life, after waiting so long, through the soil and fire, to be carried on. She didn’t abandon it in the wild. She meets it and two souls are united. It was the book of her fate. 97

By reading the story, Jade Lotus is discoursing with the disappeared past and brings the

past back to her memory in the present. Notably, while the past desires the reunion with

her, her subjectivity is suppressed: she is obliged to receive the past. Therefore, the past,

an “unearthed relic” with a “gloomy, stony face,” is a totalitarian force over Jade Lotus.

Immediately she attempts to declare her autonomy from the force:

In this life, she is Jade Lotus, a woman who is experienced, has strong willpower and thus can protect herself. She is a modern woman. How could she allow the tragedy to happen again?98

In other words, reincarnation is, as Jade Lotus understands it, a process wherein Golden

Lotus disappears and Jade Lotus appears. It might be appropriate to relate this to the

disappearance of Hong Kong before 1997, which, according to Abbas, “is more a

97 Ibid, 140.

98 Lee, 142.

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question of misrecognition, of recognizing a thing as something else.” 99 Jade Lotus,

hence, is “misrecognized” as Golden Lotus, as much as colonial Hong Kong is

misrecognized as the pre-colonial port ceded to the colonizing power, which, after the

colonization (a disappearance), should return as the same port.

Reviewing Hong Kong’s disappearance, which, to recapitulate, happens not once,

but twice (the concession and the handover), it is almost necessary that Jade Lotus

disappear again in the end. Interestingly, the novel, which is written from the film script,

is different from the film. While in the film Jade Lotus dies as her car explodes in hellish

fire, she survives the car accident in the novel and becomes amnesic. The film is

apparently more pessimistic and provocative than the novel. In the film, when the past

reclaims the present, the future is denied by a violent death; in the novel, however, the

future is a disappearance of subjectivity, when the amnesic and voiceless Golden Lotus

wakes up in the hospital under the care of her husband:

He held half a watermelon in hand and fed her spoon by spoon. He reminded her of this life, stimulating her to regain her memory. He told her in great detail:

“Do you remember? That day you wore a pink blouse and ate half a watermelon. The moment I saw you I knew I couldn’t leave you. This is fate. Why are you together with me this life? This is inexplicable, indeed, inexplicable.“

Jade Lotus maintained her innocent smile. She was happy. 100

Like an automaton, Jade Lotus becomes a receptacle of a patriarchal discourse

that attempts to establish the attachment that she is obliged to accept, which recalls Rey

Chow’s argument that the motherland of Mainland China is essentially another.

99 Abbas, 8.

100 Lee, 154.

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To sum up, reincarnation is a totalitarian condensation, through which similarity

is augmented and differences are minimized until uniformity is superimposed on

disparate entities. It is violent in two ways: it forces Golden Lotus into disappearance,

and subsequently subjects Jade Lotus to a surrogate of the disappearance. Like

reincarnation, the correlation of Jade Lotus to Hong Kong in the 1980s is plausible only

through condensation. The point is not to convince the readers of the allegory, but to

tentatively build a bridge between the fantasy of ghostly existence and the reality of a

traumatic Hong Kong. While Green and The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus are both

ambivalent discourses of the present with the past, one through writing and the other

through Jade Lotus, they both betray the motive behind Lee’s curiosity. She is not so

much curious about Golden Lotus as to how Golden Lotus might affect Jade Lotus in a

tyrannical way, or how the past might influence the present. To paraphrase Zeitlin’s

generalization of the historical ghost story as a historical trauma and transplant it in the

case of Lee: the recurrent discourse, built on similarity and refreshed by difference, is a

traumatic experience with time, and specifically, the past.101

As the pages of The Golden Lotus fly in the air and block the view of Golden

Lotus, so that she “can’t see the future,”102 the trauma, stemming from “forgetting” and

“repeating” the past, contradicts Bergson’s argument that “the interest of a living being

lies in discovering in the present situation that which resembles a former situation and

then in placing alongside of that present situation what preceded and followed the

101 Zeitlin, 99 .

102 Lee, 151.

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previous one, in other to profit by past experience.” 103 By “profit,” Bergson implies the

linear time of a present looking ahead to the future. Jade Lotus, whose view of the future

is blocked by the book of past, is a sacrifice to, instead of profiting from, that past. When

the past is put alongside the present situation in the case of Jade Lotus and Hong Kong,

the present experiences not linear time but a temporal loop, or, as one speculates,

anachronism. Such anachronism manifests itself in Rouge, when a ghost courtesan

dressed in 1930s fashion walks though the space of modern Hong Kong.

103 Bergson, 323.

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CHAPTER THREE: ROUGE

Rouge is perhaps Lee’s most acknowledged novel so far, which has won her both

commercial success and critical acclaim. Like Green Snake, Rouge also uses a first

person narrator, who, unlike Green, is a mortal, Yuan Yongding 袁永定 in modern Hong

Kong. When Yongding transcribes the oral narration of Fleur (Ruhua 如花), a ghost

courtesan who returns to the human world, into words and incorporates the narration into

his narrative about himself and his girlfriend, Ling Chujuan凌楚娟, he is empowered

with, though indirectly, the clairvoyance of the past similar to that of Green. Meanwhile,

like Jade Lotus, he retains a distance from that past. The ambivalence, situated between

clairvoyance and distance, creates an imagined nostalgia at work in this novella, echoing

to the ambience of Hong Kong in the 1980s.

Receiving the Past

When Yongding first meets Fleur, he mistakes her 1930s’ style of dress as very

fashionable:

My eyes moved up from the thirty so-called “Pretty Beauties” and encountered a girl of twenty one or two…For some time, I thought a candidate for Miss Hong Kong was walking around on the stage here.—But no, a girl like her would not apply to attend [the Beauty Contest]. Her dressing was tasteless, but she was pretty.104

104 Lee, Rouge, 1.

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In other words, instead of distinguishing Fleur, the agency of a different temporality,

Yongding incorporates her readily into the contemporary time frame via Miss Hong

Kong. Miss Hong Kong is a popular cultural event held annually by TVB, an influential

Hong Kong TV company. During the contest, Miss Hong Kong candidates, or “Pretty

Beauties”, dress up in fashionable clothes, including clothes designed after antique styles,

to please and be judged by the audience and the referees. Hence, Yongding is not

surprised to see the unusually dressed Fleur, especially as he, before meeting Fleur, was

looking at the pictures of the “Pretty Beauties” printed on the newspaper. If Yongding’s

ready reception of Fleur, with the underlying logic that the latter’s dressing is possible in

modern Hong Kong, suggests a successful, at least in appearance, replica of past in the

present, three questions then arise: doesn’t Fleur return to the present because she would

and should? Is her return, thereupon, perhaps a cooperative work between the past and

contemporary time, so that a third time format, or “double temporal framework”(Abbas’s

emphasis),105 impregnated with time loop between multiple times, takes shape to replace

the chronological linearity? Does the cooperation start before or after Fleur’s return? To

start with, one grave point deserves clarification. Because Fleur, representative of the past

at least in 1930s and extensible to a wider chronological expanse, is juxtaposed alongside

contemporary time firmly and up until Fleur’s intervention securely anchors in Yongding.

The space holder of the latter becomes a site of anachronism, wherein the suppressed past

time revives, emerges, and at times works on top of the natural present time.

To recapitulate the argument: Hong Kong has been a site of anachronism since

the 1984 Britain-Sino Joint Declaration of the 1997 Hong Kong Handover. Based on Rey

105 Abbas, 42.

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Chow’s contention that the Hong Kong handover is a new colonization, Abbas further

suggests that, different from the usual colonialism wherein the more advanced colonizes

the less advanced, Hong Kong witnesses not just uneven development but reverse

development: “the colonized state, while politically subordinate, is in many other crucial

respects not in a dependent subaltern position but is in fact more advanced…than the

colonizing state.”106 If the advanced position is extended to the historical line of

evolution, it might be feasible to posit Hong Kong ahead of Mainland China, and

therefore, the handover of the former to the latter is a later time returning to an earlier

time, a movement that counters the progression of time, so that the progressive temporal

linearity is replaced by a backward chronological movement.

Because the transition from the present to the past is sudden, before the present is

ready for a transformation to the past, it finds the past penetrating the present. As Fleur’s

seven-day stay in the modern human world approaches its end, Yongding suggests Fleur

to take a good tour around Hong Kong: “You know those double-trip tour groups from

Mainland China would, if possible, absorb the whole Hong Kong into the depth of their

hearts within seven days, or one hundred and sixty eight hours.”107 Yongding thereby

intimates the resemblance between Fleur and the Mainland tourists, which is soon

reaffirmed by Chujuan, who jokingly suggests that Fleur return after Hong Kong’s

Handover to China, as “everything retreats to fifty years ago…You will be better

accustomed to Hong Kong.”108 The similarity between Fleur, a ghost from fifty years

106 Abbas, 5-6.

107 Lee, Rouge,155.

108 Lee, 74-75.

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ago, and Mainland China, fifty years behind Hong Kong, is evident, and Hong Kong

being haunted by Fleur has the same anachronistic experience of being haunted by the

mainland tourists. The result is that “fifty years disappear into simultaneity while space in

turn becomes heterogeneous and mixed…two periods of Hong Kong history are brought

together in a historical montage.”109 The simultaneity, in which two separate

temporalities rejoin, forces the uni-directional time, either forward or backward, into a

time warp.

Though anachronism is not new in Hong Kong, it is through Fleur that Yongding

is enlightened on the anachronism and thereby reviews Hong Kong from a new

perspective in the light of the past. When Yongding comes out of the library, frustrated

by his fruitless study on the history during Fleur’s lifetime, he takes the trouble to go

from the Central Station (Zhong Huan中环) to Nan Bei Hang南北行, where Fleur’s

lover, the Twelfth Master (Shi Er Shao十二少), used to work. In his stroll there, he is

attentive to the existing relics that has evidenced the past time: “Although, with the old

buildings torn down and new ones being constructed, this place was changed beyond

recognition from its old time, among them, some old names, broken as they were,

remained on the wooden billboards. ”110Therefore, the present is never a pure present,

but a present on the relic of the past, like palimpsest; meanwhile, the past is split into that

which has disappeared and that which still exists and hence insists. The anachronistic

return of Fleur tears open the facile appearance of chronological linearity to reveal the

109 Abbas, 41.

110 Lee, Rouge, 65.

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time-loop underneath. Rather than a seemingly chance event like the return of Fleur, the

persistence of a past has, until her return, simply been ignored by Yongding. Therefore,

Fleur returns not to impose a new structure of time to the present temporality, but to

remind Yongding of the double temporal framework in Hong Kong, even in the

newspaper that Yongding reads when he first meets Fleur, where pictures of modern girls

who resemble Fleur are printed.

Imagining the Mystery

Now, one question: what is the “past”? Past is a temporal annihilation, thereby,

between the past and the present there is an intransigent gap. When Yongding chances by

Mo Luo Street嚤啰街 where the antique collections are sold, he finds the same locket

that Fleur shows him, which was given to her by her lover: “I saw the rouge locket. The

same style and size. If what I had seen the night before was a ghost, this noon, I saw a

corpse!”111 If the rouge locket has a past, its past is an organic unity of the “ghost” and

the “corpse”. Thus, Bergson’s definition of the past as “that which acts no longer but

which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation of which borrows

the vitality”112 is, to transplant to Rouge, the ghost of past. On the contrary, Zeitlin

defines a ghost as “what goes away and does not come back” (Zeitlin’s emphasis).113

She might have meant what goes away and should not come back. It may be plausible to

111 Lee, Rouge, 136.

112 Bergson, 320.

113 Zeitlin, 4.

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say that the past is a past separated from its ghost by temporal abeyance of functionality.

The past, hence, is not defunct, though the separation is irreparable. Even if the ghost, a

surrogate for the past, returns, it manages only, instead of restoring the past in the present

per se, to restore the past in the imagination. At least in Rouge the past is constructed via

double imagination—the imagination of Fleur and the imagination of Yongding.

The locale of the imagination is a love story between a courtesan and a young

master, who, when their love is obstructed by the reality, decide to commit suicide

together. Yongding, the speechless audience in a consumerist modern world, is thrown

aback:

I don’t believe such a love story. I don’t—it never happens to anyone around me114

Committing suicide for the sake of love, you see, is an act of extreme difficulty and craziness. It fits only in the fiction115.

The claim of disbelief is more out of fear that it might not be true than of hope that it is

fiction. Earlier on, Yongding has already been eager to transcribe Fleur’s courtesan

narration into his own imagination, as if he has Fleur’s clairvoyance on the history in its

presence:

Before my eyes there seemed to be a long rickshaw cart, driving those famous beautiful, flirtatious and sexual prostitutes audaciously through the downtown. She went to work again in the long rickshaw cart for the highest-ranking prostitute. The cart, with a colorful cocktail screen behind her seat, was immersed in all colors. Copper bell was installed on the cart, and sounded all the way as the rickshaw ran along. 116

114 Lee, Rouge, 34.

115 Ibid, 51.

116 Ibid, 49.

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Idealizing the past on the basis of the unreliable story from a ghost, Yongding on the one

hand betrays his eagerness to admit the past, even if it is fictional, and on the other hand

constructs, with recourse to Fleur’s narration, an existence anchored neither in the present

nor in the past, but rather ambiguously in between--an imaginary past.

Even after the ghost of Fleur disappears after she finds the ugly appearance of the

past in the present, the imaginary past remains secure within Yongding. Moreover, it

improves his once frustrated relationship with his girlfriend. Earlier Yongding dissects

Chujuan’s name into Chu and Juan, explaining Chu 楚 as a tyrannical Chu楚 State that

exploits its subjects to surrender “contributions” (Juan 捐 homophone of Juan娟)117.

Now, after fully incorporating Fleur’s discourse, he finds a new layer of meaning with the

name of Chujuan in the disclosing lines: “Chujuan, ha, what a name, like the name of a

prostitute! I doubt I was a Dou Fen Shui豆粉水[a male servant to the prostitutes] in my

previous life. Wouldn’t it be possible that she was a colleague to Fleur?”118 By

reviewing her formerly oppressive name through the courtesan culture, Yongding adds an

illusory charm to her and to his realistic relationship. More significantly, the imaginary

past provides him a foothold to look back from his present, or a home of which to be

nostalgic, as Rey Chow rightly and poetically points out, “to be nostalgic, we remember,

is to be homesick.”119 If Fleur is a ghost of the past, the imaginary past formulated by

Yongding and lingers is the ghost of the ghost.

117 Ibid, 7.

118 Ibid, 193.

119 Chow, “A Souvenir of Love”, Modern Chinese Literature (v7. 1993) 71.

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Rey Chow has a sophisticated argument about nostalgia in the space of Hong

Kong by contending that “[n]ostalgia is not simply a reaching toward the definite past

from a definite present, but a subjective state that seeks to express itself in pictures

imbued with particular memories of a certain past-ness.”120 In other words, nostalgia is

not about what is missing from the past, but about what is missing from the present,

accompanied by a self-deceptive act of locating it in the past and relocating it in the

present. To Yongding, what he looks for is a love story.

According to Todorov, the supernatural is always linked to “the theme of love,”

manifesting the “desire in its excessive forms…[it] makes its appearance in order to give

the measure of sexual desires which are especially powerful and in order to introduce us

into life after death.”121 Love and death is thus mutually dependent in the matrix of the

supernatural; while the latter intensifies and perpetuates the former, the former transcends

and triumphs over the latter by a supernatural transformation. Therefore, Zeitlin has the

justified claim that supernatural ghost is “conceived as the best way to give qing an

external form.”122 Qing情 is literally love. Zhu’s argument that “love/romance, not Hong

Kong… provides an alternative space” to the “nationalistic discourse” for women might

be extended. 123 The ghost love and romance also provides an alternative space to the

temporal linearity for Fleur, Chujuan and Yongding.

120 Ibid, 64.

121 Todorov, 138-139.

122 Zeitlin, 140.

123 Zhu, 256.

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The moment Fleur finds her lover Twelfth Master still alive, the idealized past is

disrupted by the pathetic old Twelfth Master in the present. Instead of dying for the love,

he survives until the present, only to be deprived of all his glory. If this should be taken

as a punishment for the investigation of the past in the present, for what is the punishment

intended? Fleur knows that the Twelfth Master is unwilling to die with her, so she

stealthily drugs him with sleeping pills; and she knows that it has been fifty years since

her death and that she should be prepared to see an old man in his eighties rather than her

lover in the glorious twenties or thirties. She disappears, as if she were a victim to the

present, whereas she is indeed a victim to the past.

Carlos Rojas summarizes the film Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987) as “Located on

the eve of the prohibition of prostitution in Hongkong in 1934, a Chinese

prostitute/courtesan attempts[ing] to live out a romantic ideal inspired most directly by

nineteenth-century courtesan novels.”124 The film opens with Fleur making up, followed

by the cross-cutting of her singing the opera lyrics The Sorrows of The Autumn Traveler

(Ke Tu Qiu Hen客途求恨), which allude to the scholar-courtesan romance of an older

time and praise how, despite separation cross the lovers miss each other, and the Twelfth

Master walking up the stairs in a brothel. As she sings, the Twelfth Master looks at her,

followed by the cross-cutting of their faces; she stops at the last sentence, and he finishes

the last sentence; they fall in love. I want to hereby repeat Rey Chow’s pithy

interpretation of this scene as an “encounter with the text that is the past, the lovers

124 Carlos Rojas, Flowers in the Mirror: Vision, Gender, and Reflections on Chinese

Modernity. (UMI:9985944, 2000) 509.

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becomes[ing], as it were, that text’s actualization and self-fulfillment.”125 In other

words, if the lyrics inspires in Fleur the imagination of the romanticized past inaccessible

to her, her attempt to actualize it in her present by enacting the romance with her lover

and her later search of the Twelfth Master in Yongding’s modern Hong Kong to prove

the love/romance constitute the crime to transgress the intransigent gap between the past

and the present—a double crime since she transgresses three temporalities: her past, her

living present, her ghost present(also Yongding’s present)—not to mention that the very

past is problematic for its imaginariness. Though Lee’s 1984 edition doesn’t contain The

Sorrows of The Autumn Traveler, the text appears in her more recent edition as the

postscript126, which is probably Lee’s confirmative gesture to the significance of this

intertextual reference. Nonetheless, the content of the past is further deferred, as

Yongding relies on Fleur’s narration to construct a past while Fleur relies on a text for the

past. Past becomes a mystery, accessible only through imagination.

Prophesying the Future

Like Golden Lotus, Fleur refuses to drink the Amnesia Tea. Rather than

submitting to a compromised reincarnation like the former, she “begs for a return to the

human world(emphasis mine),” even if “the price for a return of seven days to the human

world is a decrease of seven years of life in the next life.” 127Fleur’s return is first of all

125 Lee, Rouge, 72.

126 Lee, Rouge Shengsi Qiao胭脂扣生死桥. Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2007. 136-137

127 Lee, Rouge, 110.

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not a natural choice but an unnatural struggle. She has to beg for an alternative to the only

choice of reincarnation. The alternative is a tyrannical equivalent of “seven years” in the

future with “seven days” in the present, a trade based on a deflation of future time.

Moreover, it is a conditional either-or choice: either she abandons the previous life in the

past for a new life in the future, or she trades a shorter time of the present by paying a

longer time of the future. Time becomes a commodity. Moreover, the transaction

involving the future is executed without the future’s presence. Similarly, the 1997 Hong

Kong handover has been decided, instead of by the 1984 Joint Declaration, almost a

century earlier when Hong Kong was conceded for a total of ninety nine years. The

returning phantom, one has to recapitulate, assumes allegorical implications for the

political and social trauma of Hong Kong.

Among the repeated remarks about 1997 throughout the novella is this

straightforward conversation between Fleur and Chujuan:

“1997? Is this a code? Does it have anything to do with our 3877?”

“Do you think everyone has a secret code like you?” A Chu (Chujuan) replied listlessly, “That’s our doom day.”

“Doom day?” “Yes. At that time we will wear gowns, walk by foot, ride

rickshaws, smoke opium, and submit to our fate. As our dream will not be realized, we will have to immerse in love. Everything retreats to fifty years ago. It’s better that you come then. You will be better accustomed to Hong Kong. ”128

While Chujuan’s prophecy, with gowns, rickshaws, and opium, renders the future

of Hong Kong as a site of anachronism, she, both like and unlike Yongding, who

accesses past via imagination, approaches the future through imagination but with

128 Lee, 74-75.

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negation. To her, it is not so much that Fleur should return after 1997 than that Hong

Kong would proceed to Fleur, a space of past, or, death. Whereas Yongding’s poeticizing

of the past arises from the past-ness of the past, Chujuan’s depreciation of the future

underlines the future-ness of the past. Future is at first predetermined by past, and then

becomes past.

On the first evening of her return, Fleur asks a fortune-teller to prophesize the

future of her search for her lover. She picks up a tiny scroll, which turns out to be

“darkness”(An暗 ).

The old man asked: “What for?” She answered, “Look for a person.” “It’s a good sign.” He said. We both looked at him. … “The character ‘darkness’(An暗) is composed by two

characters of Ri日 (literally, ‘sun’ or ‘day’). It means you will find what you look for in days.129

“Is he here?” Fleur was anxious to know. “Yes,” the old man wrote the letter with a chalk on a small

blackboard, “this is Ri日 and that is Ri日. The masculine/living air (yangqi阳气) is strong. He is alive.” 130

Fleur mumbled, motionless with uncertainty whether to be excited or surprised,

“How could he be faster than me?”131

Fleur, determined to come back by mortgaging seven years in her future reincarnated life,

is yet unsure of her return and turns to a fortune-teller for a positive outlook to the short

seven days. The trade becomes a risky gamble sacrificing the possibility of the future.

129Ri日can mean either “sun” or “day”.

130 According to the superstition, the living carry a positive/masculine air related to the “sun”(the character of “sun” is the same with that of “day”), and the dead a negative/ feminine air related to the moon.

131 Lee, Rouge, 11-12

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Even when the prophecy is proved, the desire of the past is not fulfilled. The implied

script of “How was he faster than me” is he has died and reincarnated. What Fleur wants

to prove is not that the Twelfth Master is alive, but that he dies for their pre-scripted love

by the romanticized courtesan love in the lyrics. Therefore, when she is informed of his

living, she understands it otherwise. Fleur as the agency of the past is thus murderous.

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CONCLUSION: THE PHANTOM RETURNS

When the phantom returns, it provides the present a voyeuristic opportunity to see

what is vanishing or has vanished in the progression of time. Whether it be the gowns, the

rickshaw, the opium, or the rouge locket, these objects, as anachronistic as the bound feet

of Golden Lotus, make the phantom a gallery of extinct social relics, through which the

objects, or “corpses,” of the past are assembled for an active instead of passive discourse

with the present. This discourse occurs because they, being part of the ghost—an

animated living, or verisimilitude of the living—are capable of linking the past to the

present through the ghost’s subjectivity. Meanwhile, as “the social details from the past

constitute a kind of ethnography, a culture-writing,”132 the phantom assumes an

ethnographical role, but with a compromise. Specifically, the phantom does not prove the

past to convince the present, but rather impresses the present with the past—not past per

se, but a possible past or a fantasy of past, ineffectual like a mirage. Deprived of its

potential harm by its very past-ness, the phantom is a mere site, and a sight.

To the audience, however, this phantom has an effect: memory. To impress is to

create memory. Memory has the same anti-linear temporal movement as the phantom,

which “does not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary,

in a progress from the past to the present.”133 If the return of the phantom to the present

is a chance event of temporal transgression, memory is a daily event of temporal

transgression characteristic of its backward movement. Viewing it in this light, the

132 Chow, “A Souvenir of Love”, 68.

133 Bergson, 319.

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phantom is indeed a fantasy in its external form, a personified memory. The unfulfilled

desire of the phantom is the same desire that has been repressed in the memory and now

returns to the present. The desire might as well be called trauma.

Through the return of the phantom, the backward look on the past is

communicated to its audience, at the same time it is, on the part of the phantom, a second

look from an intransigent temporal distance. As the loss of the past is irretrievable, the

look, intensifying the deprivation, is nostalgic. While a ghost is essentially a

personification of pastness, the remedy for the trauma in the past through the mediation

of the phantom is indirect and illusive, reinforcing the nostalgia by a repetition with

theatrical grandeur.

On the other hand, the phantom provides the present an outside view on the

present, or, in Lim’s word, “a third eye,” which is not so much a “recognition of one’s

objectification by the look of another, a resistant assertion of a denied subjectivity”134

but a recognition of one’s identification by looking at another, a constant projection of

the neglected subjectivity. A look at the phantom produces two images: the image of the

phantom and the image of the present. The phantom becomes a mirror, or an allegory,

reflecting the nostalgic look back to the viewers in Hong Kong.

The imminent disappearance of Hong Kong in 1997 generates an unusual

temporal outlook: the pastness of the present predates its disappearance. While nostalgia

is a search for the absent with afterthought, the nostalgia in Hong Kong is a pre-thought,

which:

134 Lim, 93.

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made Hong Kong people look at the place with new eyes. It is as if the possibility of such a social and cultural space disappearing, in the form we know it today, has led to our seeing it in all its complexity and contradiction for the first time…of love at last sight.135

While nostalgia is usually ineffectual, it is effective in Hong Kong by restructuring the

present with what will vanish. While Hong Kong anticipates the phantom to return, it

turns itself into an insistent pastness, and thus a phantom.

Lilian Lee’s phantom heroines offer, as in the case of Rouge, Green Snake and

The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, an opportunity to re-imagine the past in order to

anchor the confused present—confused because the future is reduced to a chronologically

sequential after-present without progression. The phantoms from the past either directly

rewrite the past, as Green does, or indirectly disclose the incredibility of the past, as Fleur

does. In either case, and also in the case of Jade Lotus, it is a reinvention of the past in the

context of the present. Meanwhile, the subversive rewriting is exonerated by the medium

of the phantom, as the reinvention is essentially a fantasy outside the historical discourse,

especially when the phantom originates from a fictional rather than a historical discourse.

However, the phantom, by flouting the limit of historical time and outliving human time

to represent a discourse related and contrasted to the historical discourses, challenges the

historical discourses with a carefree attitude, because a phantom has neither

responsibility—responsibility being a word denoting a reality and a temporality related to

the present and the future while a phantom is confined to the pastness of past in the

present—nor influence upon the unalterable past even though its major concern is the

temporal injustice of the past. The power of the phantom, illusory as it is, is its mobility

135 Abbas, 23.

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in time between the past and the present, unconfined by the progressive linearity of time.

When the incorporeal phantom returns, as in Lee’s more recent ghost novel Dumplings (

饺子2004), wherein a woman eats mythical dumplings to retain her youth, the present

can and can only let out a cry: the phantom returns.

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The phantom returns: on Lilian Lee's three supernatural stories