Chapter 1 begins with a short foreword followed by a prologue. The foreword describes the novel as an exposé of the wiles of the prostitutes of the trading port Shanghai and stresses that it is in no way pornographic. In the prologue, the author, under his pen name Hua Yeh Lien Nung,1 or “Flowers Feel For Me Too,” dreams that he is walking on a sea completely covered with flowers, a simple conceit, as Shanghai means “On the Sea,” and a flower is a common euphemism for a prostitute. In his dream, he sees chrysanthemums, plum blossoms, lotus flowers, and orchids tossed by the waves and plagued by pests. These flowers, which weather autumn chill or winter snows, rise above mud or withstand loneliness in empty hills, fare worse than the less highly regarded varieties and soon sink and drown; which so distresses our author that he totters and falls into the sea himself—dropping from a great height onto the Lu Stone Bridge that separates the Chinese district and foreign settlements in Shanghai. He wakes up to find himself on the bridge, an indication that he is still dreaming—a dreamer living in dreamland—and bumps into a young man rushing up the bridge, the prologue thus merging into the story proper.
The sentiment in the prologue shows where the author’s sympathies lie and is clearly at variance with the moralistic introduction, which is just the routine disclaimer of all traditional Chinese novels that touch on the subject of sex. Closely modeled on Dream of the Red Chamber’s preface-cum-prologue, but without its charm and originality, this section of the book, so uncharacteristic, would bore foreign readers and put them off before they had even begun and would only serve to mislead the student of Chinese literature looking for underlying myths and philosophies. Not a best-seller when first published in 1892, this little-known masterpiece went out of print a second time in the 1930s after its discovery by Hu Shih and others in the May Fourth Movement.2 Perhaps understandably concerned about its reception abroad, I finally took the liberty of cutting the opening pages.
The epilogue is omitted for similar reasons. Weakest in scenic description, where he was generally formalistic and used conventional literary expressions, the author here pictures at great length the joys of mountain climbing without gaining the top and its panoramic view, thus explaining why most of his subplots are left dangling, but with deducible and inevitable endings.
As Hu Shih pointed out, a poem and an erudite pornographic tale have been worked into the book just to show off the author’s prowess in other realms of belles-entendres such as “Blood flowed, floating pestles away,” a quotation from the classics about the amount of blood shed in a battle. Unfortunately, the other quotations with double meanings are not as translatable. Neither are the scholarly drinking games that often give quotations a clever twist. The poem would be unwieldy and labored in translation and would create an effect quite different from that intended. These are the only excisions I have made and patched over, I hope unnoticeably, to maintain continuity and pace.
I had long been familiar with the book but, until I translated it, had never realized that on their first night together Green Phoenix came to Prosperity Lo from another man’s bed, which should be no surprise in a whorehouse but was still a shock because of the domestic atmosphere of these sing-song houses, and especially after all her posturings. In this and a few other instances of extreme subtlety, my footnotes are more like commentary, at the risk of being intrusive.
Eileen Chang
Notes
1. [In pinyin romanization, Huayeliannong. E.H.]
2. [In pinyin romanization, Hu Shi. E.H.]