The Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P’ing Mei
Volume One: The Gathering
Translated by David Tod Roy
Princeton University Press, 610 pages, $29.95
At the close of a turbulent century, the system is breaking down. Leadership is distracted, government is corrupt, taxes are ruinous. Everyone is out for himself. Old standards of conduct no longer apply; a middle-class businessman (in pharmaceuticals) can scrape together a fortune, bribe the local politicians, intimidate the cops, brutalize the household help, con the neighbors and sleep with all the hot girls in the neighborhood.
This debased world, which may sound like the setting of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” is China in the late 16th Century. The Ming dynasty is in decline, crumbling at its frontiers, caving in at its cultural and moral center. Men of honor, intellectuals and scholars who have given up on the idea of success in public life, are turning their backs on the bureaucracy. As scholar Cyril Birch wrote in the introduction to his “Stories from a Ming Collection,” “It was among such men that the taste for the lighter forms of literature grew, and . . . the reading, writing and publication of colloquial fiction became something of a craze.”
That craze produced the great age of the Chinese vernacular novel-“Outlaws of the Marshes,” “The Journey to the West,” “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” None is greater than “Chin P’ing Mei,” the famous (and infamously graphic) multivolume saga of merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing and his sexual exploits.
University of Chicago teacher and scholar David Tod Roy has embarked upon an ambitious new translation of this huge novel, which Princeton University Press is publishing as part of its Library of Asian Translations. Roy’s deep familiarity with both text and literary/historical context has made his ongoing effort enthusiastic and definitive.
Taking his lead from David Hawkes, creator of the superb modern English version of “The Story of a Stone,” Roy has translated and annotated everything: all episodes, all poetic asides, all explicit descriptions. More to the benefit of a general reader, his experience in teaching “Chin P’ing Mei” to a generation of American university students has led him to treat the work not as literary artifact but as living narrative-a vivid, sometimes foul-smelling story with power to involve, fascinate and even appall a modern audience.
“Chin P’ing Mei” is a tale of appetites. Its central figure, Hsi-men Ch’ing, is a local wholesale merchant with a large household, a wandering eye and enough ready cash to bankroll an exhausting succession of amorous schemes. He pursues his pleasures single-mindedly and with a devious tenacity. His stamina inspires awe.
The first volume of Roy’s proposed five-volume translation begins with a generous introduction to the novel’s literary importance. It is in fact the world’s third great novel, after 11th Century Japan’s “The Tale of Genji” and Cervantes’ early 16th Century “Don Quixote.” Roy discusses its anonymous authorship, historical setting, publication history and previous translations (notably as “The Golden Lotus” by Clement Egerton, which quaintly renders the more notorious passages into a clinical schoolboy Latin).
He compares “Chin P’ing Mei” to Dickens’ “Bleak House” in its high and low spectrum of personality types and stereotypes, social failings and follies. Roy also argues that the novel’s moral foundation may be found in the 3rd Century B.C. sage Hsun-Tzu. This may seem arcane, but it’s an important place to begin.
In contrast to early Confucian philosophers (particularly Mencius) and Neo-Confucian writers of the Ming period, and in equal discord with Buddhist and Taoist beliefs in man’s innate Buddhahood or natural harmony with “the Way,” Hsun-Tzu believed that human nature is evil. Goodness arises only from conscious activity: the following of ritual proprieties and rules set by the example of those higher on the social scale.
In bad times, Hsun Tzu writes, when moral leadership fails, humans will follow their emotional natures: “the eye’s fondness for beautiful forms, the ear’s fondness for beautiful sounds, the mouth’s fondness for delicious flavors, the mind’s fondness for profit, or the body’s fondness for pleasure and ease.”
“Chin P’ing Mei” demonstrates these fondnesses motivating actions without scruple, caution or restraint. The novel’s rendering of the physical world-faces, rooms, dress, food and sex-is powerfully sensual and startlingly clear.
As in the famous, ironically titled painting by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” both men and women characters hold each other tight in the heedless embrace of carnality. The body is obsessed with itself and its needs. Some scenes mount to excess and topple into burlesque. Yet the spirit is not Rabelaisian, except in brief set-piece episodes involving minor characters and bit players-such as a funeral whose hired monks overhear the amorous widow in bed with her lover and perform with gleeful sarcasm their drum-beating, cymbal-banging rites for her dead (in fact, murdered) husband. The mood in these episodes is comic relief, and they do provide a welcome relief from the harsh naturalism and moral judgment of the novel as a whole, the tone of which is dark and pessimistic.
In Chapters 1-20, combined here as Roy’s initial volume of the 100-chapter original, we see Hsi-men Ch’ing plan and achieve two major conquests as he simultaneously attends to ongoing subordinate intrigues. His first object is P’an Chin-lien, “golden lotus,” so named for the beauty of her tiny bound feet.
P’an Chin-lien is far from the passive victim of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s lust; she’s the second lead of the novel, its most vital and unrepentant heroine, to a modern sensibility its most attractive figure. She is bad. And she does get hers, although not until 60 or 70 chapters down the line.
After Hsi-men Ch’ing has added her to his household as fifth wife, he goes after a sixth: Li P’ing-erh, a neighbor woman who goads one pathetic husband to an early death and contemptuously drives away a second for his sexual inadequacy. P’ing-erh is perhaps Hsi-men Ch’ing’s one true love; even from her grave she will reappear to warn him of impending doom. This first volume ends as all the major characters of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s household are assembled and the interlocking wheels of crime, guilt, revenge and destructive physical excess have been set into clockwork motion.
Reading Roy’s translation is a remarkable experience. It ought to be done slowly, savoring the keen detail, the setups and payoffs of the plot, and the novel’s many traditional verses, which comment, often ironically, upon the selfish motives and squalid actions of its characters. In particular, Roy translates the verse with a fine, unmannered ear. Here, for example, is a passage that parallels and describes one of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s illicit encounters:
“Their necks entwined, the mandarin ducks sport in the water; /Their heads together, the phoenixes thread the flowers./ How joyous their delight as the growing branches intertwine;/ How sweet their pleasure as the lovers’ knot is tied./ The one sticks tightly with his ruby lips;/ The other clings closely with her powdered face./ Silk stockings in the air,/ Two new moons rise above his shoulders;/ Gold hairpins askew,/ A black cloud piles up beside the pillow./ Swearing eternal fidelity,/ He kneads her into ten thousand shapes of complaisance;/ Bashful at the clouds and rain,/ she submits with ten thousand forms of complaisance. . . ./ How true it is that `Stolen delights always taste the best.’ “
“Chin P’ing Mei” rewards close attention with a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of human evils-and the understanding that, although we struggle to lead good lives, nothing human is alien to us. This recognition alone earns “Chin P’ing Mei” a solid place in the expanding multicultural canon: the literary heritage of the world, not just the West.
We are now in a heroic age of translation, opening unabridged access to new classics for students-and also, one hopes, for readers whose classroom days are long behind them. (Great books are not written for teenagers; some years in the adult world will do wonders for one’s sympathy with Achilles or Hester Prynne.)
Besides the excellent Hawkes translation of “Story of a Stone” (also known as “The Dream of the Red Chamber”) available in Penguin paperback, there is Anthony C. Yu’s five-volume version of the fast-paced, magical “Journey to the West” from University of Chicago Press. In a large new Everyman’s Library volume, Edward Seidensticker rescues “The Tale of Genji” from Arthur Waley’s lovely but over-elaborate English. Robert Goldman is leading a team of Sanskrit scholars in a robust translation of the complete “Ramayana,” also in the Princeton Library of Asian Translations. It is a pleasure to welcome David Tod Roy’s arrival in their company.
