History, Feminism, and Duality in Tsao Hsueh-Chin's Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber is more than a fictional work. It is a historical piece that provides readers with an understanding of the traditional culture in 18^th century China: its social structure, its art, its architecture, its religious practices, its sciences, and its cultural beliefs. While the novel gives a general insight of Chinese culture, it also looks into the sociocultural aspects and values, specifically the Chinese aristocratic life of the Chia family. The richness of the Chinese literary tradition, for instance, is portrayed in the novel through Pao Yu’s general fondness for poetry, riddles, drama, and classical books. Also, with the garden of Takuanyuan – ideally representing the space with which Chinese arts and aesthetics are materialized – the novel provides a glimpse of the characters’ activities during their leisure time such as reading novels, “playing chess or musical instruments”, “painting or composing verses”, writing scrolls, and “taking a hand at embroidery” (145). Aside from this, day to day activities in an aristocratic household are also depicted in their food preparation, tea ceremony, dining manners, medical prescription and treatment, witchcraft practices, funeral ceremonies, and amusements in the family.

Dream of the Red Chamber is more than a love piece. It is a work which aspires to explore female characters and their destinies in a highly patriarchal Chinese society. As men in the novel are observably on the periphery because of their duties for the state, the lives of women are highlighted through an exploration of their psychology and personality: for instance, the frail character of Black Jade, the controlling nature of Phoenix, the power and influence of the Matriarch, the submissiveness of Madam Hsing, and the defiant character of Faith, the maid who refuses marriage. Here, we see the work as an important insight into early Chinese feminism, portrayed generally through Pao Yu’s fondness and high regard for women whom he compares to “water with clear minds”, in contrast to men who he thinks are “made of mud or unformed clay”. From the novel, we are also made aware of the social hierarchy, roles, and status of these women in the Chia household: from the primary wives to concubines; from chief maids to bondservants. While these young female figures are exalted through their character, it is implied that their inevitable destinies – to later be framed and forced into marriage – represent the tragedy of their existence as female beings.

Dream of the Red Chamber is more than a socio-realistic novel. It is a work that explores the metaphysical and dualistic aspect of existence: between the real and unreal, between illusion and reality, and between truth and appearance. The novel, as it can be recalled, starts with the story of a stone, which was abandoned by a goddess and who later sought help from a monk and a Taoist priest to bring it to the Red Dust. Here the transfiguration and reincarnation of Pao Yu from a stone and Black Jade from a flower represents the Chinese belief in “predestination” or fate. Indeed, theirs is a story of love which, from the onset, already spells catastrophe based on their dreams that blur between the fantastic and reality. On one hand, for instance, Black Jade’s dream of Pao Yu cutting out his heart and showing it to her implies tragedy and sacrifice; while on the other, Pao Yu’s disbelief that he actually married Precious Virtue appears to him as though everything is only a dream. Indeed, these star crossed lovers – mutually sick because their soul shares a common grief – are to me, reminiscent of lovers who, to borrow from John Keats, “can never, never kiss”, whether here on Red Dust or back to the mystical heaven. 

The Genealogy of Yun Ling’s Ressentiment in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

(Summary/Introduction of a full-length paper for Southeast Asian Literature class)

Teoh Yun Ling is a woman of ressentiment — a French term, explicated by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to signify a subjugated feeling of hate and negative sentiment directed against an outer force that oppresses a subject. This ressentiment, within Yun Ling, stems from her containment of memories as a lone survivor of a brutal Japanese camp during the Second World War. According to Nietzsche, one’s ressentiment – as a negative and reactive sentiment that is not acted – turns creative when it sets forth an “imaginary revenge” against an oppressor, hence giving birth to values (GM I, 10). In the case of Yun Ling, her internalized loathing against the Japanese, though not acted, becomes creative when, after working at the War tribunal, she submits herself to become an apprentice of the Emperor’s gardener and carries out an “imaginary revenge” by permeating the imagination and consciousness of her perceived Japanese oppressor.

This reading of Tan Twan Eng’s Garden of Evening Mists intends to trace the path and examine the stages of ressentiment contained within the consciousness of a war survivor who directs her subdued loathing against her former captors, the Japanese, after their occupation of Malaya. Grounding the paper’s analysis on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (GM), this paper aims to represent Yun Ling’s narrative as an interpretation on the evolution of ressentiment as an internalized hatred — tracing the origins of its conception towards its eventual dissipation. Alongside the interpretive elaboration of ressentiment is the exploration of other Nietzschean concepts pertinent to Yun Ling’s narrative such as: 1.) justice as an invention of the powerless; 2.) forgetting as a positive form of repression; 3.) memory as a painful continuation of a promise; and 4.) the body as the site of history. Lastly, these aphoristic ideas from Nietzsche are contextualized to explicate aspects relevant to Yun Ling’s character such as her Malaysian Chinese identity, the Japanese occupation of Malaya, and healing through Japanese aesthetics. 

Evolution of Yun Ling’s Ressentiment

A Malaysian Chinese held prisoner in a Japanese labor camp with her sister, Teoh Yun Ling carries within herself brutal memories of wartime atrocities committed by Japanese troops throughout their occupation of Malaya. During her internment at the camp, she not only lost two fingers and was brutally scarred by the army; but more painfully, lost her sister Yun Hong in a mass murder committed out of desperation by the losing Japanese troops. These tragic memories in the vicious camp aggravated Yun Ling’s internalized hatred towards her oppressors and initiated the formation of ressentiment against them. 

Ressentiment, a concept developed by Nietzsche to explicate the source of society’s production of a value system, is embedded in the weak and oppressed whom the German philosopher refers to as the “slaves”. Historically abused by the masters because of their inherent weakness, the slaves staged a creatively imaginative revolt against this oppression by developing a value system which judges all actions by the masters as “evil” and their own as “good”. According to Nietzsche, there was a “slave revolt of morality” when the values held by the masters – strength, nobility, and power (associated with the Greeks and Romans) – are labeled “evil”, while the slaves (Judean, Christian) consider their own values of kindness, guilt, and meekness as “good”.

In this struggle between master and slave morality, ressentiment is central to the later ascendance of the slave’s “good” morality because of its symbolic and imagined qualities. In his reading of On the Genealogy of Morals, philosopher Gilles Deleuze refers to ressentiment as the “spirit of revenge” where, due to the experience of “too strong excitation (pain)” by an individual, a reaction ceases to be acted and instead felt (senti) internally and increasingly over time (111). In other words, persistent subjugation towards a person of ressentiment leads to the buildup of resentful hatred not avenged through action, but by internalized and imaginary revenge, which denounces the oppressors’ (masters) every action and values as “evil”. 

The imaginary revenge for a person of ressentiment involves an obsessive thinking over past suffering deeply embedded within the consciousness and memory; an association which Deleuze summarily describes as:

“The man of ressentiment in himself is a being full of pain: the sclerosis or hardening of his consciousness, the rapidity with which every excitation sets and freezes within him, the weight of the traces that invade him are so many cruel sufferings. And more deeply, the memory of traces is full of hatred in itself and by itself. This is an essential link between revenge and memory” (116, emphasis mine).

Associating vengeance and memory is a feature of ressentiment related to Yun Ling’s narrative as a war survivor who is unable to overcome her resentful hatred against her former oppressor. It is through identifying Yun Ling’s judgment and unconscious actions, in the novel, that the stages of her ressentiment can be explored; for while it is known that the development of her ressentiment traces its origin from the atrocities committed by Japanese troops, it is unclear how Yun Ling’s ressentiment evolves, progresses, and gradually dissipates when she met the Emperor’s gardener in the highlands of Malaya. 

There are specifically four stages identified to demonstrate the development of Yun Ling’s ressentiment – from its conception up to its eventual dissipation – which both corresponds to the plot progression of the novel and Nietzsche’s aphoristic concepts in On the Genealogy of Morals. At first stage of her ressentiment, Yun Ling works at the War Tribunal as a clerk, prosecutor, and ultimately a judge to investigate and sentence Japanese war criminals. Seeking justice however did not allow her ressentiment to dissipate as, true to Nietzsche’s assertion, justice is an invention of the weak (slaves) who are too powerless to directly harm their oppressors (GM I: 10). 

Yun Ling’s ressentiment enters its second stage when she still failed to forget her past because post-war events surrounding her become bitter reminders of Japanese atrocities. Forgetting, for Yun Ling, is impossible since pain nurtures the memory, or more aptly, “only that which ceases to hurt stays in the memory” (Nietzsche, GM II: 3). Due to growing frustration, Yun Ling directs her loathing against external entities – her bosses, colleagues, and the state – which, according to Nietzsche, is only typical for a person of ressentiment who constantly needs to “direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself” in order to trigger its external stimuli for reaction (GM I: 10).

Yun Ling then decides, after getting sacked from her legal work, to fulfill a promise to her sister who died in the camp. On the third stage of her ressentiment, she decides to create a memorial Japanese garden in order to carry out her sister’s dreams. Here concepts of “promise”, “debt” and “guilt” – which Nietzsche considered as man’s “capacities” that allow painful remembrance – have notably haunted Yun Ling’s consciousness. Being guilty because of an unfulfilled promise leads Yun Ling to seek the help of the Emperor’s gardener, with whom she is only allowed to become an apprentice “until the monsoon season”. As will be qualified in the paper, theirs is a relationship which can be described as typical for a master and slave relationship; for while the self-assured Japanese within Aritomo is subdued by Yun Ling’s narrative of war brutalities, Yun Ling’s hatred gradually dissipated by the sublime effects of Japanese aesthetics.

The last stage of Yun Ling’s ressentiment involves ultimately the reversal of the master-slave relationship between her and Aritomo. Here ressentiment triumphs to perform a creative revenge that subtly dominates the perceived oppressor. Notably, as their relationship flourish, Yun Ling is able to awaken Aritomo’s guilt and conscience through her wartime narratives. Soon after the garden is finished, Aritomo decides to use his artistry to make an inscription on Yun Ling’s body through the art of horimono – the Japanese tattoo. Here we see how – in the act of using the body as a site for inscribing her past – Yun Ling subjugates her Malayan Chinese identity through the Japanese taboo art in order to liberate herself completely from ressentiment. With the past written on her body, she is assured that “the palest ink will outlast the memory of men” (115). Meanwhile, for Aritomo, doing horimono for Yun Ling is his last act, his final oeuvre, before vanishing without a trace deep in the Malayan jungle.

Sources:

Deleuze, Gilles. “From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience”. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. 111-119.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morality”. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufman. New York : Modern Library, 1968. 452-532.  

The Invisibility and Invincibility of Subaltern Minorities in Amy Tan’s Saving Fish From Drowning

Similar to the discomfited fates shared through national imaginings and constructions of postcolonial nations, the failure of Burma’s decolonization from the British imperial rule is determined by the wrongful privileging of a dominant nationalist group that deliberately displaces, neglects, and/or terminates the existence of its minority populations.

The trail of displacement for Burma’s subalterns – fictionalized as the renegade group of the Karen tribe known as The Lord’s Army (or Lajamee) – demonstrates how nationalist movements necessarily exclude, ignore, and/or extinguish subaltern minorities to represent and put forward the interest of a prevailing ethnic group using the state’s military apparatus.

In tracing the “itinerary of silencing” for these subaltern minorities, literary theorist Gayatri Spivak resolves that there is “no space from which the subaltern can speak” since they are already being represented or ventriloquized by the dominant discourses being forwarded not only by those who oppress them, but also by the seemingly “concerned” outsiders and other interested sectors in society.

However, for the supposed Lajamee tribe in Amy Tan’s novel, it is not enough to assert that subaltern minorities cannot speak; but that they cannot see as well – through their blinded faith – and that they are condemned, moreover, not to be seen by the dominant eyes of the state and the external populace. 

As subaltern minorities, the Lajamees are fated to be invisible. Their displaced and chartless existence – concealed behind the unnavigable jungles of No Name Place – liberates them, in fact, from being erroneously recognized, misrepresented, and manipulated by the dominant forces in society. With this, it is merely apt to contend that it is through the tribe’s initial invisibility – and their higher desire for a mystical one – that holds the key to their invincibility. In other words, making the tribe visible by hauling them out in the open will not, so to speak, “save them from drowning”.

Instead, as revealed in the novel, the tribe’s visibility suffers a predictive curse which, in fact, only emphasizes the tribe’s subalternity or the condition of being known “not as a subject, but existing in a subjected state of being” (Chakrabarty). At this point, it is perhaps helpful to transform Spivak’s “itinerary of silencing” into the Lajamee tribe’s “itinerary of ‘invisibilizing”— and contend that if ‘speaking’ does not belong to the subaltern, then ‘existing’ too does not equally pertain to them, but to the dominant and well-defined structures of historical existence. 

Indeed, as established in the novel, exhibiting the presence of the Lajamees not only allows a distorted representation of their existence but also a subsequent “instrumentalization” both by the state and interested outsiders. The newly refashioned nation of Myanmar, for instance, through its State of Peace and Development Council, denies the persecution and atrocities being done to the tribe and offers them truces and peace agreements, while luring them back to the same dominant and antagonistic relationship they had with the state.

The supposed “concerned” Americans, on the other hand, provide the means to exoticize and commercialize the Lajamees and their ways of living merely for Western consumption. Here the exposure and subsequent neglect of the tribe by Western media – and the botanical invasion for Balanophora and anti-malarial herbs at No Name Place – highlight the curse of the tribe’s visibility. 

This is not to say though that by pointing out the tribe’s “invisibility as key to their invincibility” is tantamount to saying that there is no hope for subaltern minorities to see the promise of existence. Rather, we can trace Amy Tan’s use of “Saving Fish from Drowning” to provide insights as to how mankind can gaze out to the sea but cannot assume the suffering of marine life — precisely since everything that we see, including those we cannot see in nature, have their own space and ways of adapting to life.

Narrowing this view into understanding the condition of fishes in the sea, it is essential to shove ignorance and recognize that there are those “mighty Nemos” who, by way of leaping through the bounds of nature and time, learn how to eventually crawl, walk, and even fly. 

Little Frog’s Epic Battle between the Heart & Mind in S.P. Somtow’s Jasmine Nights

A work of genius deserves an equally brilliant critique. But since the mere mortal in me cannot, for sure, write beyond eaughings and what-whatings, I turn to Seneca, who put forward in his writings the idea that, “there is no great genius without some touch of madness.” S.P. Somtow, perhaps in resembling his own creative brilliance, presents a glimpse of how the world gives birth to a literary genius – depicting, in particular, how a young and privileged intellectual constructs, contemplates, and makes sense of a world in chaos… of a world in madness. In Jasmine Nights, we see a reflection of that “lovely mess in the mind” found in Somtow’s literary craft as he blends philosophic musings with religious mysticism, historical allusions with epic fantasies, and supernatural visions with youthful and comical imaginings. 

With this, Jasmine Nights, as a literary masterpiece, cannot be simplistically classified as a mere story of initiation; for while the novel depicts a young man’s journey towards self-discovery, the work also aims to demystify mankind’s inherent pursuit of understanding the ternary alliance of life’s great mysteries – namely: death, love, and sex. Man has long been preoccupied by this trinity of mysteries — death, for its obscure finality; love, for its enduring complexity; and sex, for its endearing pleasure. Somtow, in his novel, attempts to construct these three as foundational quests for discovery towards an individual’s development of being — towards one’s journey from innocence to experience, from naïveté to maturity, and from enigma to the demystification of self. 

In other words, the life of Little Frog – except of course for his material privilege and stature – resides in us; for we all keep narratives of our first encounters with death, our initial struggles for love, and our introductory encounters with sex. Little Frog, for his part – amidst the scent of Jasmine surrounding his paradise – probed deeper into life’s great mysteries primarily through imagination, acquired and influenced heavily by his exposure to Western classics. Moving in relation to his social upbringing and reality however, he finds himself caught between the duality of man’s construction of the world: between the East and West, black and white, yentafo noodles and bacon, between likay and Greek plays, temple fairs and Limbo Rock parties — all of which signify how Little Frog’s life becomes, in itself, an epic battleground primarily between the language of the heart against the language of intellect. 

Language, particularly our acquisition and possession of it, performs a fundamental role in uncovering truths about our basic assumptions and preoccupations of the world – as mentioned: death, love, and sex. In the case of Little Frog, death, for language of the heart, is a passage for rebirth, a part of the Buddhist wheel of life; for the language of intellect, however, death is dealt with resistance or, in Dr. Richardson’s reference to Dylan Thomas’ villanelle, death is about “raging against the dying of the light”. Love, on the other hand, for the language of Little Frog’s heart, is embodied in Samlee, because of her enigma and devotion to mysticism; while, for the language of intellect, love – as Little Frog sees it in his Aunt Ning-nong – is treated as “rubbish”; existing solely as a calculated arrangement for convenience and responsibility. Lastly, sex, for the language of the heart is an inexplicable union lost amidst intoxicating smells of nam pla and  jasmine; while, for the intellect, sex is demystified through the satisfaction and brief release of a somewhat “uncontrollable sneezing” confined inside a packet of rubber. 

Indeed, the epic battle between the language of the heart and mind is at the core of Little Frog’s linguistic dilemma. He is caught between listening and expressing himself through the words of Western masters versus engaging himself and affecting the lived realities of people outside his paradise. Here, Somtow depicts a crucial and necessary phase in the development of a young intellectual’s trail to literary artistry and greatness. Because while the world, inherited by the young writer, is constructed in the constant friction between opposing dichotomies, Somtow’s work is able showcase that one can arrive at a syncretic understanding of dualities. In Little Frog’s conception of the play, for instance, he is able to demonstrate the possibility of bridging the “mythic and the down-to earth” and creating a “grand synthesis of East and West” using borrowed language and stolen lines from English literary masters, while employing his friends to play roles contrary to their epidermic appearances. 

It is notable that, in the novel, Somtow does not allow the privileging of either Thai or Western culture. Instead, the author works toward the realization of a grand scheme that will unite the language of the heart and mind as well as merge imagination and reality. Indeed, this is a reflection of greatness on Somtow’s part; for it must be noted how this idea has been echoed repeatedly by countless writers and thinkers, both postcolonial and Western. Hegel, for instance, described the formation of truth in the synthesis of thesis and anti-thesis. Hesse, on the other hand, demonstrated the juxtaposition of Eastern and Western thoughts and consciousness as a common theme for most of his novels. Derrida, moreover, sought to shake the center and deconstruct the structure of binary oppositions. Furthermore, Bhabha put forward the idea of hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence as the “in-betweens” that will destabilize binary opposition constructed by colonial authority. Through Jasmine Nights, Somtow puts forward roughly the same idea as other great thinkers of our times – syncretizing both language of the heart and mind in order to demystify and harmonize the madness found in this constructed world of ours.  

Musings on Death in Chart Korbjitti’s The Judgement

I will talk, in this paper, only of death; perhaps as a form of tribute to all Faks in the world who has lived a painful existence with their struggles not only, as Schopenhauer puts it, “against wants or boredom, but also against other people”. In Chart Korbjitti’s The Judgement, the person who best articulated death, not surprisingly, is the only one in the village who handles the dirty work for the dead. For the cremator Khai, the death of Fak stirs his thinking about the mysteries of life – how we go through it like blind men who can’t see anything because, in the first place, we do not know where we come from; from birth, we struggle through life and die – yet this death is unknown, unexpected, and unknowable, especially since “we don’t know where we go after we die”. 

This idea of blind existence, as articulated by Khai, has similarly been echoed by philosophers who themselves describe the study of philosophy as similar to a blind man’s search for a black cat inside a dark room which is not there. Uncle Khai’s understanding of existence, more specifically, is also an equivalence of Kierkegaard’s description of how we go through life, unendurably, like spiders that naturally plunges down on “an empty space and cannot find its footing however much it flounders”. In other words, there is only vagueness in life, certainty in death, and mystery in the afterlife. It is notable that, in this order, death is central between the stages of vague existence (life) and mysterious nonexistence (afterlife). In this case, the centrality and certainty of death is what precisely gives it a central position in culture – the social organization nurtured by man to nurture its ways of life – and religion, the social institution that provides man with elucidatory narratives about afterlife. 

In Southeast Asia’s many religious societies, death – existing as a passage to afterlife – is dealt with utmost reverence and importance. Thailand’s Buddhist society, in particular, performs a highly ritualistic observance for the dead through chanting prayers and giving offerings to the monks. It is notable that while death – understood in Thai society as part of Buddhist wheel of life – is convoyed naturally by sorrow; people attend to it as well through the rather festive, merit making ceremonies – gathering villagers for days in the temple grounds; highlighting thus the centrality of the institution in inhabiting the social, educational, and religious space in the lives of Thai people. The novel’s depiction, moreover, of a traditional Thai funeral – from storing the body momentarily until the process of cremation – depicts the elucidatory narrative of Buddhism about afterlife: how death becomes a passage for a person’s rebirth, occurring when the soul inhabiting the body is released through cremation. 

While the articulation of death is known to every Thai, the realization of their beliefs through communal practices is a different matter. Fak’s “useful” death and his father’s neglected funeral are attended expectedly by isolation and desolation of practice. Indeed, while death may often be deemed as the great equalizer; it is not so when facing the fact that some deaths are more important than others. Death is not equal for people inherently condemned by their subaltern status. Both Fak and his father arrived in a rural community without an identity; devoid of property, family, and social standing. Fak, in this case, must start carving out his life on the village’s social bedrock of narratives which is dependent on his relationship with the community, conformity to the norms, and adherence to people’s expectations. 

In other words, his is a nonexistent yet “useful” life that could be recounted as a model narrative either of success – about a poor man’s accession to monkhood – or as a story of misfortune about a man ostracized for his failed morality. In his lifetime, Fak unknowingly disappointed the community in two instances: first, his request to disrobe when he was about to reach the age of ordination and second, his decision to keep widow Somsong after his father’s death. The result of these underlying transgressions is social ostracism through vicious gossip and neglect, all of which are insufferable consequences especially for the weak and naïve in character. Fak’s painful existence should, in the end, remind us of our judgment or, to what Korbjitti refers to as, “the commonplace suffering that man inflicts and endures under normal conditions”. That this judgment was never altered even after Fak’s passing is a testament that time, not death, is the great equalizer — for Fak, already dead, got even with his monetary loss from the headmaster only through Khai’s effort and widow Somsong’s expulsion of her rather sticky and sticking revenge.