An Island of Women

Emma Jinhua Teng
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Gender in Qing Travel
Writing about Taiwan
Unlike early modern Europeans, who viewed the continent of Africa as a virgi- nal space, Chinese writers of the same period did not see Taiwan as a sexualized terrain. As the Europeans did with Africa, however, they pathologized indige- nous Taiwanese and Vietnamese women as hypersexualized others, highlight- ing their reproductive, marital, and sexual habits. Tales of female dominance, or gender inversion, were rife in premodern Chinese ethnic discourses about foreign lands. Nor were these stereotypes limited to Chinas external others: writers approached Chinas southern tribal peoples with the same gendered vi- sions, eectively equating them with the savages beyond their borders. Of particular note is the legend of Baozhu, a Han courtesan who became the female chieftain of an indigenous tribe, thus both fulfilling and challenging dominant Chinese notions about the relationship between women, sexuality, and power.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese travelers to the islandcolony of Taiwan perhaps imagined that they had stumbled uponthe mythical Kingdom of Women, the Chinese equivalent of the land of the Amazons. Encountering a land with female tribal heads, uxorilocal marriage, and matrilineal inheritance, travel writers noted with astonishment that native custom gave precedence to the female sex. The savages value woman and undervalue man became a commonplace of Qing ethnographic writing on the Taiwan indigenes. As a direct inversion of the Confucian patriarchal maxim Value man and undervalue woman (zhongnan qingn), this expression indexed the utter alterity of Taiwan in Chinese eyes. The anomalous gender roles of the indigenous peoples
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 39
became one of the most popular topics in Qing travel writing on Taiwan. Female sex roles, in particular, attracted intense interest not only because they appeared strange in and of themselves, but also because they served as a marker of the strangeness of Taiwan as a whole. The discourse of gender was thus central to Qing colonial representations of Taiwans savagery.
Gender and ethnicity are closely intertwined in premodern Chinese ethnographic discourse, where the trope of gender inversion (the reversal of normative sex roles) was commonly used to represent foreignness, especially in accounts of Southeast Asia and the West. The rigidity of sex roles in Confucian ideology meant that deviations from normative defini- tions of femininity and masculinity were readily interpreted as signs of barbarism. Hence, the discourse of gender became a means of demarcat- ing the civilized from the uncivilized. Other gendered tropes, such as hypermasculinization and hyperfeminization, were also employed to es- tablish the alterity of non-Chinese groups.
In Qing colonial discourse, gendered or sexualized tropes are em- ployed not only as a means of signifying the otherness of the colonial subject, but also quite often as a form of denigration. Thus, gender func- tions much as it does in the European discourses of discovery and colo- nialism: as a metaphor for conceptualizing inequality or for signifying power relations. A critical point of dierence, however, is that Qing colo- nial discourse does not represent the colonized land itself as metaphor- ically feminine or as virgin. Exploration and conquest, in turn, are not figured as sexualized acts of penetration and possession. Qing travel writers did, however, represent colonial expansion as a masculine quest for sexual experience, a trope that postcolonial scholars have identified as a major theme of Western imperialist writings. Colonial relations, too, are sexualized in their textual representations, colonial power and ethnic prestige being symbolized by Chinese sexual license with the native women. The Qing colonial discourse of gender therefore overlaps with European colonial discourses, although it is not identical. The gender dynamics found in travel literature about Taiwan reveal that insights from Western colonial theory can provide useful tools of analysis, but also that the gendered tropes of this particular literature are derived from within the Chinese literary tradition.
This essay examines the representation of the savage woman in Qing travel accounts of Taiwan and the linkages between gender and ethnicity
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40 Emma Jinhua Teng
in Qing colonial discourse. I argue that gender inversion is fundamental to the construction of the ethnic dierence of the Taiwan indigenes. One aspect of this inversion, the feminization of the indigenous men, may be regarded as a means of expressing the subordinate status of the colonized subject. However, it is less the feminization of the men than the anoma- lous roles of women that preoccupy the Chinese travel writers. This fas- cination stems in large part, I argue, from their desire to imagine another world. Taiwan frequently served as a projection of this desire in travel literature, whether as a world of the past, a world of marvels, or a King- dom of Women.
The savage woman not only symbolized dierence to Chinese ob- servers, she was also a pivotal figure in the representation of colonial relations: colonial dominance was frequently represented in terms of Han Chinese access to indigenous women. Qing writings thus typically hyper- sexualized the savage woman, depicting her as more erotic, more promis- cuous than the Chinese woman. Intermarriage between Han Chinese settlers and indigenous Taiwanese women became a source of contention, with women serving as a kind of contested terrain for colonizers and colonized. At the same time, this intermarriage was an important vehicle for transcultural exchange in colonial Taiwan: a two-way process of ac- culturation. At other times, the discourse of gender was less about Taiwan itself than about the internal concerns of Qing society, in particular the changing roles of women. The idealization of the non-Chinese woman became a common trope for self-reflexive critiques of Chinese society: the foreign woman serves as a projection for Confucian ideals perceived to be losing their hold in China. The figure of the savage woman, then, could serve a variety of rhetorical purposes, often opposing, to suit the needs of the travel writer.
few chinese eyewitness accounts of Taiwan exist from the period prior to the Qing, when the island was a Dutch colony and later an outpost of Ming loyalist rebels. The only firsthand account of Taiwan from the Ming is Chen Dis Record of the Eastern Savages (Dongfan ji, 1603), which was regarded as highly authoritative by Qing readers. After the Qing colonization of Taiwan in 1683, the number of accounts written by Chinese, mainly colonial ocials, military men, and others who trav- eled on behalf of the Qing colonial enterprise, increased dramatically. The best-known Qing accounts include Lin Qianguangs Brief Record of Tai-
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 41
wan (Taiwan jilue, ca. 1685), the first eyewitness account of Taiwan writ- ten after the Qing conquest; Yu Yonghes Small Sea Travelogue (Pihai jiyou, 1697), a diary of a sulphur expedition; and Wu Ziguangs Taiwan Memoranda (Taiwan jishi, ca. 1875), a series of essays written by a Chi- nese settler. These accounts, among others, are emphasized here because of their representative status and their use by later writers. Owing to the high degree of intertextuality in accounts of Taiwan, the conclusions drawn here may be used to generalize about Qing representations of the island.
Chinese travel writers may have been predisposed to view Taiwan as a gynocentric society in part owing to their familiarity with tales of King- doms of Women (much as Sir Walter Ralegh was predisposed to find the Amazons in South America). Their representations of the Taiwanese in- digenes were also influenced by a tradition of regional stereotyping in both literary and historical materials. By the Tang dynasty, a tradition of feminizing the southern borderlands and masculinizing the northern frontiers had been firmly established in the Chinese literary tradition. The south was associated with sensuality, languor, literary refinement, femi- ninity, and female promiscuity; the north with barrenness, ruggedness, martial valor, and machismo. This divide between hyperfeminized south- erners (peoples such as the Miao and the Dai) on the one hand and hypermasculinized northerners (peoples such as the Mongols and Jur- chens) on the other means that the simple structural equation male/fe- male paralleling major/minor is untenable. Rather, the Han Chinese configured the other in terms of polarized opposites of sexual excess, centering the Han self as the norm.
Newly incorporated into the Chinese empire in the seventeenth cen- tury, Taiwan seemed to fit neatly into existing images of matriarchal and hypersexualized southern barbarians; in fact, writers often borrowed tropes from earlier accounts of the Miao, the Lao, and even the people of Thailand to describe the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. The gendering of the south as feminine thus provides an important context within which to read Qing representations of the savage woman of Taiwan.
certain practices emerged as indices of gender inversion in the travel literature: uxorilocal marriage, matrilineal inheritance, the prefer- ence for female children, sexual assertiveness of women, sexual division of labor, absence of postpartum seclusion, and the fact that women were
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42 Emma Jinhua Teng
not sequestered. Although the existence of female tribal heads among certain groups represented an obvious inversion of the Chinese norm of male rulership, it was the domestic roles of native women that became the focus of attention in the travel accounts. Chinese writers theorized that it was the savage womans position in the family that accounted for her social dominance.
Descriptions of uxorilocal marriage and matrilineal descent among the Taiwan indigenes commonly invoked the notion of inversion. As Chen Di wrote in his Record of the Eastern Savages:
The girl hears [the suitors music] and admits him to stay the night. Before daylight he straightaway departs, without seeing the girls par- ents. From this time on he must come in the dark and leave with the dawn when the stars are out, for years and months without any change. When a child is born, she for the first time goes to the mans home and [brings him back to her home] to be welcomed as the son- in-law, as [the Chinese] welcome a new bride, and the son-in-law for the first time sees the girls parents. He then lives in her home and supports her parents for the rest of their lives, while his own parents can no longer regard him as their son. Therefore they are much hap- pier at the birth of a girl than of a boy, in view of the fact that a girl will continue the family line, while a boy is not sucient to establish the family succession.
This passage clearly represents an interpretation of native customs through the lens of Chinese gender ideology. Chen Di employs the dis- course of inversion in likening the savage bridegroom to the Chinese bride. The phrase to be welcomed as the son-in-law, as [the Chinese] welcome a new bride sets up the equation savage man = Chinese woman. At the end of Chens description, he delivers what would become a quint- essential formulation of gender inversion: they are much happier at the birth of a girl than of a boy. This inversion of normative Chinese values serves as a basic index of the dierence between Chinese and savage. Rather than simply marveling at the strange nature of this inversion, however, Chen provides a rationale for this reversal of values. As it is the savage women who assume the function of continuing the family succes- sion (an all-important role in Chinese culture), an inversion of value results: daughters, not sons, become the privileged progeny. In identify- ing the inheritance system as the root of the strange gender hierarchy,
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 43
Chen represents gender inversion as a product of social convention and economic relations. Such an explanation serves at once to distance the savages (they are matrilineal and we are patrilineal) and to normalize them (they, like us, value the sex that assures the succession of the family line).
Following Chen Di, discussions of marital customs and their eects on the gender hierarchy became a standard element of descriptions of indige- nous customs. Yu Yonghe provides this account of native courtship:
In marriage they have no go-betweens; when the girls are grown, their parents have them live separately in a hut. The youths who wish to find a mate all come along, playing their nose-flutes and mouth-organs. When a youth gets the girl to harmonize with him, he goes in and fornicates with her. After they fornicate, he goes home of his own accord. After a long time, the girl picks the one she loves and holds hands with him. The hand-holding is to make public the private commitment. The next day, the girl tells her family, and invites the hand-holding youth to come to her home. He knocks out the two top bicuspids to give to the girl and she also knocks out two teeth to give to the boy. They set a date to go to the wifes house to marry, and for the rest of his life he lives at the wifes residence. . . . The parents are not able to keep their son. Therefore, after one or two generations the grandchild does not know his ancestors; the savages have no family names.
Highlighting female agency in mate selection, Yu paints a vivid picture here of the sexual assertiveness of the savage woman, an image that would have been most shocking to Chinese audiences, for whom ar- ranged marriage was the norm. For Yu, gender inversion signaled the disruption of the entire kinship system, leading the savages to forget their own ancestors. The notion that the indigenes did not recognize their ancestors was another indication of their savagery. For Chinese, ancestor worship was one of the cornerstones of civilization.
Other writers decried the subordination of the savage male by ux- orilocal marriage practices, viewing him as debased and emasculated. To these authors, uxorilocal marriage was not simply dierent and strange, but contemptible. The equivalence drawn in Chinese eyes between the savage groom and the Chinese bride provided an impetus for this inter- pretation of gender relations. That is, the notion of inversion, of a mirror
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world, conditioned Chinese understandings of gender relations that dif- fered from the Confucian norm.
the inversion of gender was also represented in the travel literature by descriptions of the sexual division of labor. Numerous Chinese ob- servers expressed surprise at the fact that it was the indigenous women, and not the men, who were engaged in agricultural production. This perceived reversal of sex roles was interpreted by the Chinese as female industriousness and male idleness, as Chinese literati did not recog- nize the male occupation of hunting as productive activity. As Lin Qianguang declared: All of the tilling is done by the wife; the husband on the other hand stays at home waiting to be fed. This image of the mans childlike dependence on his wifes labor recurred frequently in the literature, providing yet another rationale in Chinese eyes for female dominance.
the depiction of Taiwan as a matriarchal land can be regarded as part of a long tradition of southern exoticism in classical Chinese literature and historiography. A popular theme of this literature was the native woman bather. The Dai became particularly famous for the custom of bathing openly in streams, an image that remains popular among prc tourists today. Indeed, the hypersexualization of non-Han in southern China has maintained a certain consistency over the centuries.
Female dominance, or gender inversion, was another favorite motif of accounts about southern barbarians. An entry on The Lao Women from the Accounts Widely Gathered in the Taiping Era (Taiping guangji), for example, focuses on gender inversion as its central point of interest:
In the south there are Lao women. They give birth to children and then get up. Their husbands lie in bed. Their diets are exactly the same as a nursing mother. They do not protect their pregnant women in the least. When the women go into labor, they give birth on the spot. They do not suer in the least. They prepare food and gather firewood as usual. It is also said that according to Yue custom, if a wife gives birth to a child, after three days, she bathes in the stream. When she returns, she prepares gruel to feed her husband. The husband bundles the infant in the bedclothes and sits up in bed. They call him the par- turient husband. Their inversion is to such a degree.
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 45
This feminization of the south was contrasted against the masculiniza- tion of the northern frontiers in both literary and historical sources. These gendered stereotypes were influenced by several factors: the existence of matrilineal customs among southern barbarians; the association of northern barbarians with warfare; theories of environmental determin- ism of human character (the environment of the north being rugged and that of the south being wet and fertile); and the relative strength of the expansionist northern dynasties vis–vis the overrefined and declining southern dynasties during the Six Dynasties era. These stereotypes were further developed in Tang literary treatments of the northern frontiers and the southern borderlands. The southern male was in eect emascu- lated not only by contrast to the empowerment of the southern female, but also as part of a general feminization of the region. The feminization of southern peoples and the masculinization of northern peoples served to center the ideal Han Chinese self of the central plains as a privileged norm. The feminization of the Taiwan indigenes should thus be under- stood not simply as part of a general case of feminizing the other, but also as part of this particular economy of regional stereotypes within the Chinese literary tradition.
The image of Taiwan as part of the exotic/erotic southland was pro- moted by descriptions of female bathers, native sexual habits, and re- marks on female beauty. Yu Yonghe, for example, frequently includes notes in his travelogue about the physical appearance (and, indeed, sexual attractiveness) of the women whom he encounters. His diary entry for one day includes the note, Of the savage women that we saw, many were fair-skinned and beautiful. On another day he observes: There were also three young girls working with mortar and pestle. One of them was rather attractive. They appeared in front of outsiders naked, but their composure was dignified. Although there is frequent reference in the literature to both male and female nudity (nakedness in general being a sign of impropriety and thus cultural inferiority), it is only the savage womans lack of shame concerning nudity that receives comment from the travel writers. One of the chief markers of proper femininity in Chi- nese culture being the shrouding of the body, the savage womans lack of shame regarding her body must have appeared to Chinese observers as particularly strange and oensive (and titillating).
Travel writers expressed great interest in the bathing habits of indigene women, noting in particular the frequency and openness of this prac-
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tice. Liu-shi-qi, a Manchu ocial who traveled to Taiwan in the mid- eighteenth century, devoted an entire entry of his account to Bathing in the Stream. His description eroticizes the act of bathing by linking it with play, flirtation, and voyeurism. This objectification of women is also particularly apparent in Qing ethnographic illustrations, where women are often depicted in festival dress or bare-breasted.
The image of Taiwan as a land of exotic sensuality was perhaps most promoted by descriptions of native courtship and marriage practices. A standard favorite in the Taiwan literature was the anecdote about youths sealing partnerships with young girls based on their ability to harmonize with them on the mouth organ, to harmonize being a pun on to couple. For a Chinese audience, such anecdotes were reminiscent of poetic motifs in the ancient Classic of Poetry and thus conjured up images of a primitive past. At the same time, the notion that the savages lacked an understanding of sexual propriety signaled their uncivilized status.
Chinese observers also took the lack of both segregation of the sexes and proscriptions against physical contact as marks of sexual impropriety among the savages. However, travel writers who disparaged the savage practice of men and women sitting together mixed or without order often themselves indulged in voyeurism and other behavior taboo in their own society. Liu-shi-qi, for example, made this note under the heading of Suckling the Child: The savages have no taboos against contact be- tween male and female. When the savage woman nurses her child, those who see will play and tease from the side. She will be very pleased, think- ing that people adore her child. Even if one touches her breast she will not prevent it. Contrasting the savage womans body with the Chinese fe- male body, which ideally remained out of sight and beyond touch, added titillation to ethnographic description. It bolstered the image of Taiwan as a fantasy island where Chinese men had free license with the indige- nous women.
The image of Chinese men in unrestricted sexual intercourse with savage women was used in travel writing to buttress the self-image of the colonizer. Interethnic marriage or sexual relationships served in numer- ous narratives as a means of representing the ethnic hierarchy of the colonial society, the unequal status of Chinese and indigene. Yu, for exam- ple, observes of the Chinese men on the island, They take the barbarian women as their wives and concubines. Whatever is demanded of them they must comply with; if they make a mistake they must take a flogging.
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 47
And yet the barbarians do not hate them greatly. Yu attributes the avail- ability of indigenous women to ethnic privilege: Should the [Chinese] guests take liberties with them [the women], they do not get angry. A husband, seeing a guest becoming intimate with his wife, is very pleased, saying that his wife is really charming, and that therefore Chinese like her. . . . However, should one of their own people fornicate with [a savages wife], then he will take his bow and arrows, search out the adulterer, and shoot him dead. But he will not hold it against his wife.
For a Qing audience, such stories portray the indigenes as subordinate to the Chinese, supplying women and labor without animosity, and confirm its own superior status. In such narratives, the savage woman is reduced to an object in a contest for power.
Other travel writers contradicted Yus claim regarding the liberties allowed Chinese men, recording conflicts between Han settlers and indi- genes over such relations. Indeed, as rates of intermarriage increased dur- ing the Qing, owing to an unfavorable sex ratio among the settlers, colo- nial ocials came to view the Chinese demand for indigenous women as a source of ethnic conflict. After a local revolt, the Qing administration prohibited intermarriage between Han Chinese men and indigenous women in 1737.
Yet, there were no social prohibitions against such couplings. John Shepherd found that the Chinese perceived no racial divide between Han and aborigines that would impede the ability of aborigines to ac- quire Chinese status characteristics or deny legitimacy to mixed marriages and their ospring. In fact, intermarriage between Han Chinese and indigene was even perceived by some ocials as an expedient means of assimilating the indigenes. As one local ocial argued: With marriage and social intercourse, there will be no separation between the savages and the people. If the ocials do not segregate them as a dierent race [zhong], then after some time they will naturally assimilate [hua]. As wives, then, indigenous women could be regarded as key vehicles for transculturation. Indeed, anthropologist Melissa Brown has argued that during the Qing, intermarriage was the primary mechanism for introducing and spreading Chinese values and practices into Aborigine communities.
as han women rarely married indigenous men until the late Qing, few such marriages are mentioned in the Qing literature other than the fas-
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cinating legend of Baozhu, a Han Chinese courtesan who became the female chieftain of an indigenous tribe. One nineteenth-century traveler, Ding Shaoyi, reconstructs the identity of this mysterious figure by en- twining two items of local lore, one about a female chieftain and the other about the Chinese consort of an indigenous ruler:
Prefect Deng Chuanan of Fuliang says in his Measuring the Sea with a Calabash: During the Jiaqing period (17961821), the female chief- tain Baozhu made herself up like an aristocratic lady of China. In her administration, she followed the law. Someone sent the ocials a me- morial [stating that her tribe] followed the law obediently and re- spectfully, not killing people, not rebelling. Even though this place is beyond the pale, how is it dierent from China proper? Legend has it that during the Zhu Yigui rebellion, the chief of the Beinanmi, Wenji, decided to get a beauty for his consort. There was a courtesan in Taiwan city who heard of this with delight and volunteered to go. The savages value women to begin with, and since the chieftain got a courtesan, he doted on her to the extreme, doing whatever she com- manded. Then they got rid of their old customs, and were civilized with the rites and laws of China. Therefore the seventy odd villages of the Beinanmi are the most orderly, and their customs were long dif- ferent from those of the other savages. Baozhu is not like a savage womans name. Perhaps this so-called female chieftain is after all a prostitute?
The equivalence between these two figures, Baozhu and the Han cour- tesan, is based on one central point of coincidence: the womans role in initiating the assimilation of her tribe to Chinese culture. It is an equiva- lence that is also allowed for by the liminality of both women, one a savage who resembles a Chinese, one a Chinese who resembles a savage. Ding thus speculates that they must be one and the same.
By crossing ethnic boundaries to live among the savages, this figure Baozhu was able to take advantage of both the gender inversion in savage society and the superior status of her ethnicity to elevate her standing; in other words, she placed herself in a position in which both her femininity and her Chineseness were valued. The story thus nicely demonstrates how, in certain cases, it is ethnicity that brings privilege, while in other cases, it is gender that brings privilege. In dramatically rising from the station of a prostitute to that of a chieftain, Baozhu crossed not only
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 49
ethnic boundaries but also status lines, dressing herself up like an aristo- cratic lady of China. Baozhus identity thus remained in a liminal state, between the savage and the civilized, between the lowly and the noble, between the matriarchal and the patriarchal. It is from this liminality, this ambiguous status, that Baozhu derived her power. The figure of Baozhu serves as a metaphor for the unique culture produced in the contact zone of the frontier; it is in giving up her Chineseness that Baozhu induces the savages to give up their savagery. By straddling the in- sider/outsider opposition, by becoming a hybrid, Baozhu in eect obliterates this opposition. As Deng Chuanan phrased it: Even though this place is beyond the pale, how is it dierent from China proper? In being placed at this point of cultural transference, on the cusp between dierent ethnicities and dierent gender ideologies, the figure of Baozhu illustrates how ethnicity and gender combine variously in the constitution of power.
gender inversion was also employed as a rhetorical device, often in a self-reflexive critique of Chinese mores. The device is generally linked to the mode of primitivism, in which the less civilized other is seen as a repository of values associated with a more virtuous, simple past. The status of the foreign woman as other made her a figure on which not only undesirable, but also idealized traits could be projected, making her a foil against which to contrast the flaws of Chinese womanhood.
This technique is employed in a Qing story about a merchants travels to Vietnam. Entitled, On a Journey to Vietnam a Jade Horse Miniature Is Exchanged for Crimson Velvet (Zou Annan yuma huan xingrong, ca. 1661), the story uses the exotic setting of Vietnam to demonstrate a moral lesson about the laxity of contemporary Chinese women. Two of the central devices employed to establish the foreignness of Vietnam are the familiar tropes of gender inversion and hypersexualization. In particular, it is the violation of Chinese norms of gender segregation that captures the attention of the narrator. However, a satirical twist in the storys rhetoric shifts the story into the mode of self-reflexive critique. While proclaiming Vietnamese women to be inferior in their customs and lax in their sense of public propriety, the narrator reveals his true object of criticism to be Chinese womanhood. A description of the public bathing habits of Vietnamese women becomes an opportunity to satirically deride Chinese women for their hypocrisy. He declares:
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[The Vietnamese women] cannot measure up to our Chinese women, who close the door so tightly when they take a bath that no breeze gets through and furthermore insist that the maid stand outside the win- dow for fear that someone will peep on them. But these womens false pretenses are really just a big show. Just look at our women of the south, all day they go touring in the mountains or by the waters, visiting temples, leaning on gates and standing in doorways, going to plays or societies; they let the public see their powdered faces. And yet they want to criticize the shortcomings of men! Commenting and laughing at the looks of passersby, they do not know how to cherish the face of the family. But if the breeze so much as lifts up their skirts to reveal a bit of leg, or if they are feeding a baby and their breast is exposed, or if they are going to the toilet and their thing is exposed, they make a hundred gestures to cover this and conceal that, and put on airs of distress. They do not know that face and the body are one: if they want to cherish the body they should cherish face; if they want to conceal the body, they should cover the face. The ancients said it well: if the fence is secure, the dogs will not get in. If you had not let outsiders see your face, how would they think of violating your body?
Although the author portrays the Vietnamese as less civilized on account of their failure to segregate the sexes, his criticism is aimed at the moral degeneracy of Chinese women, as manifest in their transgressions of gen- der norms. The structure of the story allows the author simultaneously to indulge in exotic fantasy and to advocate greater conservatism in gender roles.
The nineteenth-century writer Wu Ziguang engaged in a similar self- reflexive critique, idealizing the indigenous women of Taiwan as para- gons of ancient simplicity and virtue: Their clothing is all frugal and plain . . . and they have a profound understanding of the proprieties of antiquity. Moreover, they do not use cosmetics, just like the lady of Guo who feared being stained with color. They do not paint their eyebrows: even if they had the brush of Zhang Chang they would not use it. Their manners are far superior in virtue to those of Chinese women.
Wu makes the claim here that it is the savages rather than the women of China who maintain the proprieties of Chinese antiquity. The women of China, he implies, have conversely become degenerate and frivolous.
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 51
Rather than seeing an inversion of gender in the foreign culture, Wu projects a hyperrealization of Chinese gender ideals. The idealization of the foreign woman as a foil to contemporary Chinese womanhood may have expressed an anxiety concerning the new social roles for women emerging during the late Ming and Qing. Confucian ideals that were no longer upheld by Chinese women were thus projected onto foreign women.
The most famous Qing example of this type of gender play is Li Ruzhens celebrated novel, Flowers in the Mirror. In this work, Li creates a number of fantastically learned foreign female characters whose under- standing of the Confucian classics far surpasses that of the average Chi- nese male. Throughout the novel, female literary talent is given an aura of glamour, and it is implied that China would be well served by the de- velopment of such talents among the female population. Li furthermore employs gender inversion in the Kingdom of Women episode of this novel, to satirize, and thereby denaturalize, Chinese sex roles. In particu- lar, he calls into question the humanity of practices such as footbinding. Through both satire and utopian vision, Li Ruzhen presents an idealized model of accomplished (albeit still Confucian) femininity, embodied in the women of fabulous countries.
Whether through the idealization of the foreign woman or through gender inversion, gender serves as a ready vehicle for the expression of ethnic otherness in Qing travel accounts. The linkage between gender and ethnicity is particularly strong because the dierence that is built into gender can be readily converted into the dierence of the foreign, and vice versa. In Qing ethnographic writing, Woman became a stand-in for the Other; the strangeness of the savage woman of Taiwan represents the strangeness of her culture. The figure of the indigenous woman also mediates between colonizer and colonized, expressing relations of desire, domination, and exchange. The multiplicity of gendered images, more- over, demonstrates that the linkages between gender and ethnicity are not simply based on a direct metaphoric equivalence, the analogy Chinese : savage :: male : female. This is particularly true in the colonial or cross- cultural context, where gender itself is already racialized, or ethnicized, creating an instability around the terms of gender. Therefore, although feminization may be a form of denigration, not all women are denigrated. What it meant to be a Han Chinese woman in colonial Taiwan was vastly
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52 Emma Jinhua Teng
dierent from what it meant to be an indigene woman, as the legend of Baozhu so nicely illustrates.
the continuities between Qing and modern discourse are aptly demonstrated in a media article from the 1960s entitled Aborigine Women of Taiwan March toward the Realm of Civilization, which touts the achievements of the kmt in modernizing indigenous lifestyles. The author, Yang Baiyuan, not only employs many of the old tropes of gender inversion but also argues that owing to the vital role played by women in the matrilineal indigenous societies, governmental eorts at civilizing the indigenes must be directed primarily at the women. Once again, indigenous women are expected to serve as vehicles for the transmission of Chinese culture. The discourse of hypersexualization has also con- tinued to be employed, with some very real consequences for indigenous women, namely, their commodification in the tourism and sex industries.
Poverty is a driving force behind this phenomenon. Also at play, how- ever, are stereotypes about the indigenes propensity for heavy drinking, which are used to justify the natural suitability of indigenous women as bar hostesses and night club entertainers. Beginning in the 1980s, the feminist and indigenous rights movements in Taiwan generated greater social awareness of discriminatory attitudes toward indigenous women, and we have seen a rejection of some of the older colonialist discourse. It remains to be seen what new images will emerge.
Notes
. Editors note: In uxorilocal marriages the husband lives with the wifes family or at her place of residence. . Translated in Laurence Thompson, The Earliest Chinese Eyewitness Accounts of the Formosan Aborigines, Monumenta Serica, xxiii (1964), 173174. . Yu Yonghe, Pihai jiyou (Small Sea Travelogue), 35. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Chinese are Emma Tengs. . Nineteenth-century writer Deng Chuanan, for example, writes: According to sav- age custom, the men who marry uxorilocally are just like women who marry virilocally [in China]. Obedient and dutiful, they do not dare to take their own initiative; they are debased to such a degree. Deng, Lice huichao (Measuring the Sea with a Calabash), 10. . Translated in Thompson, The Earliest Chinese Eyewitness Accounts of the For- mosan Aborigines, 181. . Charles McKann, The Naxi and the Nationalities Question, in Cultural Encounters on Chinas Ethnic Frontiers, ed. S. Harrell (Seattle, 1995), 45.
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Gender in Qing Travel Writing 53
. Taiping guangji, 3629. . Yu, Pihai jiyou (Small Sea Travelogue), 1819. . Liu-shi-qi, Fanshe caifeng tukao (Taipei, 1961), 7. . Thompson, Earliest Accounts, 196, 192193. . Melissa Brown notes that specific rates of intermarriage cannot be estimated. Brown, On Becoming Chinese, 52. . John Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 16001800, 379, 462 n. 85. Shepherd notes that the Dutch regarded intermarriage as a vehicle for Christianizing the Taiwan indigenes. . Jiang, Taiyou riji (Travelogue of Taiwan), 46. . The term transculturation was coined by Fernando Oritz in the 1940s. Mary Louise Pratt defines it thus: Ethnographers have used this term to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Trans- culturation, 6. . Brown, On Becoming Chinese, 45. . Ding Shaoyi, Dongying zhilue (Brief Record of the Eastern Ocean), 78. . Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 6. . Zhuoyuantingzhuren, Zou Annan yuma huan xingrong (On a journey to Viet- nam a jade horse miniature is exchanged for crimson velvet), 6162. . Wu Ziguans, Taiwan jishi (Taiwan Memoranda), 31. Zhang Chang was a native of Pingyang during the Han dynasty who became governor of Changan under Xuandi. He was famous for having painted his wifes eyebrows. . See Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. . Yang Baiyuan, Jinru wenming lingyu de bensheng shandi fun, 163169.
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