part0011

One aspect Lacan associates with the notion of hysteria is that of gender. The question of what it is to be a woman or a man is taken up in this chapter and related to the lives of certain people met during this research. In the first section, we see that Anna identifies with Guanyin. An account of Anna’s position in relationship to the question of this chapter is examined, and an analysis is given of the myth of Guanyin, which serves as a charter for Anna’s position as a tang-ki. In the second section, The Myth of Nezha, an analysis of the myth of Nezha is undertaken. This myth serves as a charter for Wei’s position as a tang-ki. Next, in Tang-ki as Female and Male, a discussion on Chinese considerations of masculinity and femininity follows, and lastly, in the fifth section, Gender Issues in Singapore, ethnographic material is given to illustrate the diversity of situations one can encounter on the topic of gender subjectivity in Singapore. The main argument of this chapter is that involvement in tang-ki rituals and myths has helped Anna and Wei to find a position in society as a woman and a man and that tang-ki worship as a whole does speak to the issue of what it is to be a woman or a man.

Anna was at great pains to tell me that Guanyin, sometimes called the Goddess of Mercy, was a man. i She took me to look at a statue of Guanyin:

I argue that it is this very uncertainty and blurring of the binary distinction between female and male in the iconography of the god/dess Guanyin that enables Anna to use the myth of Guanyin to give herself some understanding of her own experience of being a woman. It enables her to construct a way of being a woman in relationship to the master signifiers of society, without entirely giving in to the master signifiers.

Anna, on different occasions, described herself as being somewhat more masculine than feminine and as being tomboyish:

In Taoism and in Confucianism men are in a higher position than women, according to Anna. They are the head of the home, and Anna’s husband is, in theory, the head of the shrine, even though he is not much interested in religious matters. However, in practice, everyone at the shrine recognizes Anna as head of the shrine. In some of the rituals of the shrine, men have to start the procedures. When setting up the altars for the yearly temple celebration, Anna and other women cannot go up to the altar to arrange items for fear of polluting the altars, and a woman tang-ki when menstruating should not offer consultations with people seeking help. Anna sees the fact that she no longer menstruates as a blessing for her work as a tang-ki.

Like many Singapore families, Anna and her husband are struggling to put their children through university. Their daughter studies science and has an inclination to go on to a higher degree, although Anna thought this was not entirely appropriate for girls, as it could hinder their chances of marrying. Anna commented:

Soon after meeting her future husband, Anna married, and while her husband wanted his mother to stay with them [not unusual in Chinese families], she said she also had her conditions. Anna told him she could not cook and that she was a tang-ki, so she could not carry out the traditional role of the women and had other responsibilities. In the domestic relationship, even at this early stage, one can see that being a tang-ki gave Anna some bargaining power. However, it did not remove her from patriarchal values altogether:

At times, Anna describes her husband as being chauvinistic; for example, he always has to have the last word in conversations. However, Anna did not appear to be docile. She has a vitality about her and the ability to lead and direct people. She can speak to people directly, if not roughly, at times. There were often minor conflicts between her and her husband when I was present, where she held her own point of view. Despite Anna saying women need guidance from men, she seemed to have quite a bit of freedom to make her own decisions about her daily life. Her husband felt having his wife so involved in religious matters was difficult at times.

The story starts in heaven, with the Buddha contemplating the sad state of life in the world. He, therefore, sends Guanyin [at this stage still a man] down to the earth to save the people [jiushi]. The queen, after eighteen months of pregnancy, gives birth to a baby girl, who is named Miao-shan. This was Guanyin.

The king had been encouraged by his mother to take a concubine to see if a son might be born, as he already had two daughters. The king’s hope was, however, that his wife would give birth to a son. There were strange events that surrounding the birth of the child such as changes in the weather. Some people thought a devil had been born. The prime minister, with the support of the king’s mother, tried to have the baby girl killed. The king, aided by the midwife, had the daughter taken away to live in the country to save her from harm.

Miao-shan encountered many hardships when living in the country, including encounters with demons. She learnt about medicine; and once, when her foster mother was ill, she cut her own arm and gave the blood to her foster mother to drink in order to help heal her. During her sojourn in the country, Miao-shan had many dreams that gave her knowledge about the world and helped her cultivate her ‘true self’.

However, eventually, after Miao-shan grew up, the Prime Minister got to know of her whereabouts and had her incarcerated in a convent, where she was badly treated. She had previously not wanted to marry her foster brother and now refused marriage with the Prime Minister’s son. When Miao-shan found out that her father was sick, she cut her arm and gave the blood to him to drink in order to help cure him. She then served her parents without them knowing who she was until they eventually recognized her, and they were reconciled. There was then an argument between her family and the Prime Minster, who was eventually ousted from office.

One sees in the story of Miao-shan some similarities to Anna’s own story, which gives Anna points of identification and enables her to relate more fully to Guanyin. There were strange occurrences at Anna’s birth – thunder and lightning, similar to what occurred at Miao-shan’s birth. Anna, like Miao-shan, felt herself destined for higher things in life - to save the world [jiushi]. Anna cuts her arm and puts some drops of blood in a cup for her father to drink when he was sick in order to ‘cleanse his soul’, an act similar to Miao-shan’s cutting herself for her the sake of her father. Anna, too, has many dreams that give her some insight into herself and the world around her. Anna was also pressurized to take on a more traditional way of life for a woman, and, partly, she does this, but also she comes back to her calling ‘to save the world’, which gives her a somewhat different position both in her family and in the wider world in which she lives.

Anna, though, does accept marriage, but before agreeing to this she tells her husband about her commitment to being a tang-ki and that he had to agree that she could carry on with this commitment before Anna would accept marriage. While Anna does not fall out with her father as in the story of Miao-shan, there is, surprisingly, a greater recognition of her father near his death, seen in Anna’s kowtowing to him, something she says she had not done before for anyone. At this point, Anna is almost re-enacting the reconciliation of Guanyin with her father.

It is argued here that Anna’s identification with Guanyin can be seen to be one of the main processes of how Anna’s subjectivity is constituted. It is further argued that this particular way of constituting herself served as a pathway for Anna out of her ‘illness’ as a child and young adult, and also it gave her an answer to the question of what it is to be a woman.

The marriage residence pattern of Chinese families used to be viri-local, and the woman was seen as an outsider coming into the family (Sangren 1997: 145). In the Chinese family system, a woman was considered to be polluting and a threat to both Buddhist notions of purity and escape from the world and to the Confucian practice of patrilineal descent. Menstruation, sexual intercourse and childbirth all involve an element of pollution, according to Sangren and Yu (Sangren 1997: 144-146; Yu 2001: 414).

Full agency as a subject in Chinese culture, according to Sangren, is only by way of men and women having sons who, by virtue of filial piety [xiao], can offer sacrifices to their ancestors. Offering these sacrifices is the prerogative of the male son, and this accounts for the obsession with filial piety in Chinese cultures, according to Sangren (1997: 119).

For a woman to become a subject, she has to marry and have a son who can then carry on the rites for her when she dies. Then, when she dies, she is entitled to have her name attached to the ancestral tablets of her husband. If unmarried, a woman’s name is not included on her family’s ancestral tablets. Sometimes when a woman, or, for that matter, a man has not been married or had children, a ‘ghost’ [fictive] marriage can take place. Sangren says women do not so much identify with their fathers as with their husbands and sons or their achievements. He points to the close relationship of Chinese mothers with their sons that often brings about tension (1997: 135).

In the myth of Guanyin, one sees a way out of the position of women in Chinese society being dominated by a strong patriarchal culture. Yu suggests that the feminization of Guanyin in Chinese culture creates an opportunity whereby women can take up other positions to that prescribed as to how they should live their lives as women, namely being married and having sons (2001: 418). Yu describes how the transformation of Guanyin from a male to a female took place. Guanyin was initially a popular male deity in China, named after Avalokitesvara, a Buddhist bodhisattva in India. The name was translated into Chinese in the 6th century CE as Guanyin, ‘He who perceives the sounds of the world’. During the Sung dynasty [960-1279 CE], the representation of Guanyin started to become female, and during the Yuan period [1260-1368 CE] the process of feminization of Guanyin was completed (2001: 6). Guanyin then became a popular female deity in China.

As many of the Chinese deities were first ordinary human beings who later became gods, the Chinese Sinicized Guanyin, so to speak, by way of connecting her to the story of Miao-shan (Yu 2001: 301). Yu gives reasons as to why this change from a masculine to a feminine god took place in China at that time. She points to the importance given to the patriarchal lineage, starting with the rise of the Chou dynasty [1122256 BCE] and taken over by the Confucian establishment in the Han dynasty [206 BCE - 220 CE], which increasingly marginalized both women and female deities (Yu 2001: 412). Most importantly, Yu cites the rise of the Neo-Confucianism of the Sung dynasty [960-1279 CE] and its anti-feminist stance. She says of this:

Yu notes that throughout the dominance of Confucian philosophy, Chinese gods were mainly male gods based on the imperial bureaucracy (2001: 412). She sees the rise of Guanyin as female as filling a void and challenging both Confucian family ideology and the Buddhist monastic ideal [2001: 412, 492]. Yu suggests it offered new options for women [2001: 418], although she acknowledges that during the mid-Ming period [15th century] when there was a heightened concern for patriarchal values, the cult of Guanyin also served these values (2001: 492-493). It would seem that in the legend of Miao-shan there is an account of a woman who resists the governing paradigm or master signifier, which sets her position as marrying into a family and producing sons - Miao-shan refuses to get married. Topley (1975), Dudbridge (1978) and Yu (2001), all see the story of Miao-shan as offering an example to women of how one can resist norms of how a woman should be in a patriarchal, Chinese society.

Sangren (1997), however, is doubtful that what one sees in the story of Miao-shan can serve as a model for a different way of how a woman becomes a subject. He thinks such stories as Miao-shan are products of that which they resist, and that all they do is reproduce the circumstances that produced the story in the first place (1997: 136). Sangren suggests mythic narratives, such as Miao-shan, can be seen as manifesting a desire on the part of women for recognition denied them by the gendered kinship system (1997: 134), and that Miao-shan only becomes recognized because she becomes, in effect, male (1997: 139). Sangren sees this not as a symbolic working through of sexual positioning in narrative form that gives Miao-shan another way of being feminine, as is argued in this chapter, but as a position based on a fantasy of being a man.

The sacrifice for the sake of the father that Miao-shan carries out, sacrificing her eyes and hands in one story and a piece of flesh in another, is what a filial son would or should do, according to Sangren (2007: 142). The son offers sacrifices to dead parents.

Yu notes that the real sacrifice of part of one’s body [ke-ku - thigh, ke-kan – liver] for the sake of one’s parents that sometimes used to take place was originally a male practice but later also became a female practice due to the influence of the legend of Guanyin (2001: 338-347).

Another notable example of a son’s officiating function in a ritual for his mother is seen in the ‘blood bowl’ ritual where, on the death of the mother, the son drinks red wine symbolic of his mother blood, thus transforming the mother’s blood into ‘yang’ or a male substance. This ritual allows for ancestral worship of her and also for offerings to be made to her (Sangren 1996: 160). Sangren sees these examples of sacrifice as placing Miao-shan in the subject position of being a filial son, thus purifying herself of her gender and ridding herself of her femaleness (1997: 146). Sangren quotes Grant’s translation of a Buddhist Sutra:

Nezha’s mother was pregnant for three and a half years, and after being visited in a dream by the Taoist Immortal Taiyi, she gave birth to a strange ball of flesh. Her husband, Li Jing, rushed in thinking it was a demon and struck the ball with his sword, whereupon a small child jumped out. Taiyi comes upon the scene, names the boy Nezha and adopts the child as his disciple.

Nezha was very mischievous. At around the age of seven, he got into trouble with various deities and, in one version of the story, with the Emperor. Because of this, his parents were going to be arrested, but Nezha kills himself to save his parents. He then goes in spirit back to his master, Taiyi, who advises him to appear in his mother’s dream to ask her to build a temple so that after some time, with the burning of incense and candles, he might be born again. Her husband dismisses the dream and is against the building of the temple, but she goes ahead. When Nezha’s father finds out, he is furious and he destroys the temple. Nezha on hearing of his father’s destruction of the temple says:

Thus, Nezha cuts himself off from his father, an almost unheard of act in Chinese culture where filial piety is a major virtue. Then Taiyi creates an immortal body for Nezha out of lotus leaves. Taiyi gives him a magic fire wheel so he can travel very fast and also gives him a fire-tipped lance to add to his magic hoop. Nezha returns to earth and sets out to take his revenge on his father. He battles with him several times and tries to kill him. At one time, Murzha, his older brother, separates him from his father and reminds him that to murder one’s father is a capital crime and that, ‘Parents are always right on matters concerning their children’ (Creation of the Gods 1992: 161). However, Nezha escapes and gives chase to his father again until a Taoist, who has Nezha caned by his elder brother, stops him. His master sets him free, but, later on, another Taoist makes him kowtow, reluctantly, to his father. Finally, his father is given a small pagoda that can encircle Nezha and send out burning rays to control him when he gets out of hand.

The setting of the story of Nezha is in the last years of the Shang Dynasty [1766-1123 BCE], whose last king was a tyrant, and the early years of the Zhou dynasty [1122 -256 BCE]. In the story, there are numerous accounts of wars fought out between the two groups, both sides being supported by various spiritual beings. Nezha and his father, when they were later reconciled, supported the Zhou dynasty and were involved in various battles to help establish this dynasty.

The myth of Nezha is sometimes considered to be the ‘Chinese Oedipus’ myth (Ho 1988). However, as Sangren points out, the story of Nezha can be read as more than just a story of repressed Oedipal hostilities deriving from an internal libidinal instinct, as in a more traditional Freudian perspective; it can be read in a Lacanian way as being about the ‘structuration of the male subject’ (1997: 112). However, Sangren does not see a Lacanian position as doing full justice to the story and he utilizes Piaget’s ideas to inform his analysis of the story. Sangren first points out the very high valence given to the concept of filial piety in Chinese culture. He then draws on Zito’s (1987) analysis of ritual, sacrifice and filiality to point out that the person with the most power in a relationship of filial piety is not so much the father, but the ‘sacrificer/son’. The son is the one who sacrifices to his father, this being an active position, while the father’s position is passive, basically being created by his son. Without the sacrifice, the father would not exist as a subject (1997: 119). Sangren sees this process as the magical power of being able to constitute the self as an autonomous ‘self-producing subject’ by displacing the father to a transcendent position (1977: 119). He sees it as a fantasy expressed in myth because in reality the patriarchal authority is all too real and one is required to submit to it, which Nezha does not do (1977: 119-121).

Sangren sees Taiyi, Nezha’s spiritual guardian not so much as a symbolic father who gives a subjective position to the son as a Lacanian might see him, but as, ‘… an alienated representation of Nezha’s power to produce himself’. He describes this position of Nezha with the psychoanalytical terms egocentric, omnipotent and narcissistic (1997: 120-123).

Sangren then uses Piaget’s concepts of accommodation and assimilation to come to his conclusion about the egocentric nature of Nezha’s way of being. Rather than accommodating the fact that one has to take into account other’s desires and thus recognize limits on one’s own desires, Nezha assimilates; he becomes one with that which sets limits (1997: 128-129). Sangren thus sees the story as an ideological mystification or alienation involving disguising the narcissistic wish for the ability to create one’s self and disguising real patriarchal power and hegemony (1997: 121).

Nezha is omnipotent and free from restrictions; he is infantile and does not see himself as a product of the social world. Therefore, he can have his own way and do what he wants (Sangren 1997: 129). It is interesting that when tang-kis are said to be possessed by Nezha, they nearly all appear as a boy of seven years of age and are sometimes seen sucking on a dummy [pacifier] or drinking from a baby’s milk bottle. Sometimes, also, the tang-ki will play with marbles. For Sangren, no doubt, this would be further evidence that in the myth of Nezha as played out in tang-ki rituals there is a denial of patriarchal authority and a reluctance to grow up and accept the restrictions of life. At the same time, it might also show that contrary to how Lévi-Strauss and Sangren use mythological analysis, myth cannot be read outside of how it is used by a particular group of people.

It would seem that Sangren would see the tang-ki Wei, possessed by Nezha, the devotees at the Redhill temple and the tang-ki and devotees of the Ang Mio Kio temple as engaged in fantasy production. He might see their engagement in rituals, waving swords around, overcoming non-existent aggressors and magically curing people with talismans as examples of this fantasy production, keeping them oblivious of the very real constrictions on their lives.

Sangren’s work is interesting in that it is one of the fullest accounts written of a psychoanalytical analysis of a Chinese mythical story, in this case, two myths that of Nezha and Guanyin, and especially one carried out from a Lacanian point of view. Although Sangren does not look to the beliefs and lives of mediums and temple worshippers in his work, he does point to this being a fruitful avenue of inquiry (1997: 34). However, interesting as his analysis is, it can be faulted on several points.

Firstly, Sangen’s analysis lacks contextualization. He, himself, points out that there is a lack of ethnographic material in his work, and that his work is based primarily on textual narrative (1997: 2). He narrows his analysis down to the analysis of family dynamics without considering the political/social milieu in which any particular family is embedded. While Sangren criticizes Lacanian approaches as lacking anthropological imagination in not paying enough attention to the specifics of how desire is produced by real families, he falls into the same trap, as one does not find in this 1997 work any account of actual families. While it is taken for granted in studying Chinese culture that the issues of patriarchy and filial piety play a part in the life of Chinese people and that, as he says, ‘filial piety …is at the centre of what it means to be Chinese’ (Sangren, 1997: 10), Sangren does not show how this major theme might differ according to historical period, socio-economic circumstances, education or the religion of a particular person. Bray (1997), for example, shows that a woman’s position in Chinese society in the period from 1000-1800 CE could differ according to socio-economic position and changes in economic practice. The contributors to Ferris, Lee and Rubinstein’s (2004) work on gender roles in modern Taiwan show various differences in modern Taiwan as to how the issue of filial piety and patriarchy affect women.

Secondly, Sangren essentializes the local terms male and female, seeing them almost as biological qualities. Such an essentializing of gender categories would skew his analysis as to what it is to be a man or a woman, or an adult for that matter, in any particular Chinese group and in any myth that he might analyze. One could ask whether Guanyin is necessarily taking on a masculine position in, for example, offering parts of her body to her father. This question needs to be asked, especially given the fact that this offering of parts of one’s body to one’s father also later became a female practice. Could not Miao-shan’s actions in the myth be seen as successfully challenging and breaking down a particular male prerogative and the myth taken as helping to enlarge the domain of a woman’s world? Sangren’s essentializing of the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ is neither a Lacanian position nor, for that matter, according to Lu (2004), is it a Chinese understanding of gendered positions. Lu (2004) says that Chinese categorizing of male and female is not an essentializing operation but is a positional one, based partly on yin-yang polarity where ‘male’ is not immediately opposed to ‘female´. She says that in Chinese culture a person’s position in a web of relationships defines how s/he acts towards others, rather than being guided by some essentialist idea of what it is to be a woman or a man (Lu 2004: 225). This conception of male-female relationships is similar to Marilyn Strathern’s ideas about the relationship of male to female in New Guinea (1988).

Thirdly, with reference to the Lacanian concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, it is argued that Sangren reads the two myths as imaginary constructs – as being similar to dreams and as being about feelings between individual people rather than seeing the myths as products of a symbolic system. This difference between imaginary and symbolic can be understood by utilizing Obeyesekere’s (1990) development of Freud’s notions of ‘regression’ and ‘progression’. Sangren can be seen to have made an interpretation based on a theory of regression, where the lives of Miao-shan and Nezha are analyzed in terms of individual psychic conflict. If an analysis in terms of progression was utilized, the two myths could very easily be read as being ‘works of culture’ where, ‘… the transformation of the archaic motivations of childhood into symbols that look forward to the resolution of conflict and beyond that into the notion of the sacred or numinous’ takes place (Obeyesekere 1990: 16-17). While Sangren does not use the term hysteria to characterize the subject position of Miao-shan, it does seem that the understanding of hysteria as a neurotic ‘illness’ with an imaginary identification with a male position being at play is implied. I am suggesting, instead, that one regards Miao-shan as not neurotic but as engaged in the discourse of the hysteric. Here, in the story, the identification with the male is not an imaginary identification based on fantasy but is a symbolic identification [as one who has the phallus – the phallus not literally being the penis but the symbol of power] that gives her a symbolic position in society. It is suggested that this is also the situation with Anna. In regards to Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, I argue that the two myths, as taken up by Anna and Wei, do not function as master discourses but can be seen as embodying the discourse of the hysteric. Furthermore, I argue that they can also be shown to be an example of Lacan’s fourth discourse, the discourse of the analyst. In Chapter Six , a discourse more specific to tang-kis is developed – the discourse of the tang-ki that acts to deconstruct prevailing master signifiers and allows participants to form their own master signifiers.

Fourthly, Sangren’s view of religion, in general, and his view of the myths of Miao-shan and Nezha, in particular, are determined to a large extent by his Marxist assumption that cultural production is alienated ideological production, where myths like Miao-shan and Nezha are seen to be covering over real relationships of power amongst people (1997: 11). This concept could very well fit into some psychoanalysts’ ideas of fantasy as covering over a lack or gap in being of both the subject and the symbolic order. iii However, I argue, to the contrary, that the myths and rituals of tang-ki worship reveal the lack in being and also the real power relations in society.

It has been suggested that there is an element of femininity associated with tang-kis. Schafer (1951) thought that tang-kis derived from female shamans of the Wu period and so acquired some of their feminine traits. Stafford, similarly, places the position of mediums as being on the side of the female and of children, rather than that of the male (1995: 142). In arguing this, he starts with the proposition that part of what it is to be filial [xiao] includes a commitment or identification to the nation, even to the extent of dying for the nation, and that the nation seems to have taken over the ideals of patriarchy. For Stafford, identification with a patrilineal state involves a point of tension against an identification with a matrifocal family (1995: 113, 126). Stafford suggests that people, usually mothers, take their children to tang-kis for protection from risks; one of the risks being to a whole system of family loyalties, including that of reciprocities [yang] within families [here the word yang is not the same as the word yang that is contrasted with yin] (Stafford 1995: 123). A risk to these loyalties can be from outside forces (Stafford 1995: 123).

Stafford goes on to describe the tang-ki as childlike in some respects and as taking up the role of an unfilial child. He reminds us that the very meaning of the word tang-ki is ‘divining youth’. He points to self-lacerations and piercing by the tang-ki, often seen at temple celebrations, as acts of unfilialness, symbolically cutting the flow of patrilineal blood and also being against the Confucian ethic to do no self-harm (1995: 138). Stafford also talks of the tang-ki as a child associated with the powerfulness and dangerousness that children have, in that they are partial outsiders, not yet socialized into the patriline and because, at birth, they are said to be composed of their mother’s menstrual blood (1995: 140). Tang-kis can offer bodily protection for the children, thus going against the State’s idea of patriotic sacrifice. Stafford concludes that tang-kis are more on the side of the woman than on the side of man (Stafford 1995: 142).

Chan considers the idea that tang-kis are on the side of the female but concludes that this is not the case because from her point of view mediums were descended from male spirit mediums of the Zhou period rather than female shamans of the Wu period (2002: 178). She characterizes tang-ki worship as particularly being a man’s domain and says that it is based on warrior gods and the tang-ki as a warrior medium (2002: 158, 163). Chan characterizes the modern tang-ki as continuing, ‘… the performance of masculinity’ started by Yao and Zhou ritualists (2002: 180). She assumes this masculine character of tang-ki practices throughout her work despite a very interesting discussion of child tang-kis that suggests that the concept of masculinity that tang-kis portray is not as solid as she thinks.

At this point, there is some resemblance between Chan’s position and Stafford’s position of mediums being on the side of women and childhood. First, Chan notes the importance of boy roles in Taoist rituals and also points out the meaning of the word tang-ki as ‘child-diviner’ and the idea of the child as innocent and as representative of the imperfect and incomplete (2002: 198). She points to the use of the stomacher [a piece of cloth which covers the chest and stomach] by mediums as symbolic of a tang-ki’s youthful status, as it is a type of bib, a traditional undergarment worn by babies to protect the baby from wind entering the navel.

Secondly, Chan speaks of the dual nature of the soul [linghun] in Taoism, divided between the po or yin part of the soul, which is the flesh part that becomes reincarnated after death and the hun or yang part of the soul, which becomes either a shen [god] or gui [ghost] after death. At birth, the po part is completed but not the hun. Thus, there is room to take in more spirit by being possessed (2002: 199). A male youth is supposed to be strong in yang energy (2002: 196), especially if he has not had sexual relations with women, which would introduce him to female yin energy. Chan’s position here is not quite clear as she is saying the yin or female aspect of the soul is fully formed at birth, whereas the yang or masculine aspect is not; and yet she is saying that the male child is strong in yang energy. Does this not suggest then that the child represents yin power, or is it that, when possessed, he possesses yang power, which she hints at in one part of her work? (2002: 200). In another part of her thesis, where she comments on that part of the Daodejing that speaks of knowing the male and holding on to the female [quoted at the beginning of this Chapter], Chan talks of the tang-ki as a mortal man being yang but when in trance taking on female yin energy and becoming like a new born baby situated in a liminal place and becoming ‘the ravine of the world’. She sees this place as one of potentiality and productiveness (2002: 313). It seems, then, that whether the tang-ki is on the side of woman or man, she or he is in close contact with ‘the other’.

While the two main tang-kis described in this research could not see what they were doing as related to ideas of yin and yang, Chan (2002) and Stafford’s (1995) analyses are very helpful in discussing the concept of male and female in tang-ki practices. They allow one to question essentialist conceptions of gender that make of these categories fixed positions. Chan first portrays the position of masculinity as a strong fixed position from which the tang-ki operates, but in the above aspect of her work she, perhaps inadvertently, seems to have placed this in question. This questioning would then make the notions of male and female to be not fixed positions, and the tang-ki would end up as a somewhat ambivalent and liminal figure.

The above discussion points to the somewhat ‘masquerade’ nature of both masculinity and femininity, which is a very Lacanian view of the nature of gender positions. With this view, one sees the importance of repeated performances of masculinity or femininity, and it is claimed here that this is one aspect of tang-ki rituals; sometimes the yang element is emphasized, at other times the yin. This conclusion is in agreement with Moore’s idea of the performative nature of the establishment of gender, where one becomes gendered through an ‘ongoing and ceaseless process of reiteration’ and that this takes place in particular cultural contexts rather than through an invariant Oedipal process’ (Moore 2007: 5,117).

My first impression of the Redhill shrine was that it is a men’s shrine. Most of its members are men, and it is seen by some people at the Ang Mio Kio shrine to be a shrine for men, with the Ang Mio Kio shrine being more of a women’s shrine. The men look to be a strong group of men with a few of them having tattoos. In Singapore, tattoos are associated with either secret societies or tang-kis and are seen negatively. Anna was at pains to present her shrine as somewhat cultured and did not encourage rough-looking people to attend. When going out with people at the Redhill shrine, I became aware that some people were a little in awe of the group. However, while the view of the Redhill shrine as strongly masculine may be correct, it is a somewhat paradoxical image given that the main tang-ki, Wei, is possessed by a child deity and can be seen on occasions when possessed to be sucking a dummy or playing with marbles.

Guan Gong, also one of the main gods of the Redhill shrine is known from the story about him for personifying a strong image of masculinity as a warrior. There is in the story, however, something about the way Liu Bei, the person Guan Gong is fighting for, gains his position in society as the leader of men and as a potential emperor that goes against the traditional way of achieving such a position in Chinese society. The story of Liu Bei seems to reflect on the issue of masculinity. Liu Bei and Guan Gong are key characters from the well-known novel THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS (Luo 2004), the only book I was told to read and understand thoroughly in order to obtain an understanding of Taoist belief, despite the fact that the book hardly breached ‘religious’ topics. One young man at the Redhill shrine had read four different versions of this story. The tang-ki before Wei, also met in the course of this research, had Guan Gong as the god that possessed him, and he had a reputation of being very ferocious when possessed.

The story of THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS is about the fall of the Chinese Han dynasty and the division of the Chinese empire into three kingdoms and the fight to reunite it. This novel, like the Fengshen Yanyi, was written in the early or mid-Ming period (1368-1506 CE), after the Mongols were driven out of the country, and is seen by Roberts as using the Han dynasty to symbolize the rightful rule of China by the Han Chinese (Roberts 2004: 939).

The novel starts with talk of rebellion in 184 CE by the Yellow Scarves [Huang -chin] (Luo 2004: 6), a Taoist millenarian sect. It was as a reaction to this rebellion that Liu Bei volunteered to serve the Emperor. He then formed a ‘brotherhood’ with two other men, Zhang Fei and Guan Gong. Together they formed an army and went out to fight the Yellow Scarves. After this battle, they continued to support the Emperor, but the empire became split into three parts. Liu Bei became a contender for the position of Emperor of a restored China against two other contenders. He lost out in the end. However, Liu Bei and his two ‘blood-brothers’, especially Guan Gong, become the heroes of the novel.

The story is interesting in terms of it serving as a charter for tang-kis, as Anna suggested. Guan Gong and the other two brothers are first seen fighting with a rebellious Taoist sect, but later we see Guan Gong fighting against unjust rulers. Roberts draws attention to the two bases that serve as Liu Bei’s claim to be the emperor: one, because of his lineage and two, because of his virtue [de], and he says that the highest quality here is Liu Bei’s virtue, which makes him appealing to his associates and those he rules. If Liu Bei came to the throne by virtue, his mandate would be by way of the Mandate of Heaven, which Roberts calls a revolutionary concept in that it sidelines the patriarchal principle of descent and filial piety (2004: 943). In one version of the story, there is the saying, ‘The empire belongs to no man but to all in the empire; he who has virtue shall possess it’ (2004: 944). Roberts says that the brotherhood of the three main characters in the novel is formed initially because of the uprising but also because the uprising was based on corruption at court so that the three were not just for the strengthening of the establishment but were fighting for a just rule (2004: 944). Roberts says that here in the story, the brotherhood of the three contrasts favourably with the divided ruling family. He says, ‘...the family itself as the dominant political institution is implicitly questioned through comparison with the brotherhood, anti-dynastic in form because it is hostile to filial right’ (2004: 945). There is here, then, a major point of tension in the story. However, given that Liu Bei or his descendants do not win the throne, the concept of loyalty and brotherhood stand out as even more important and it is for this reason that the three men are known by the people at the shrines in Singapore.

While ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS certainly does not feminize men, it seems revolutionary in that it does not build up the masculine adult subjectivity of Guan Gong and his two companions in the usual Confucian fashion, by way of patriarchy and filial piety. Rather, other principles are invoked – brotherhood, loyalty and justice. This way of establishing their subjective position in the world is similar to the way Nezha accomplishes the same task. Nezha’s process, though, is even more revolutionary, in that he does not have to become a man to become a man, so to speak. Nezha does not grow up; he is unfilial so could not become a man, but, at the same time, he became the major general of the celestial army. The same unusual process of establishing one’s identity position is seen in the story of Miao-shan, who does not marry or have sons.

While finding Sangren’s analysis of family relationships in Taiwan interesting, his characterization of Chinese family life does not resonate completely with how I experienced it in Singapore. The characterization of Chinese family life as governed by virilocality, patriarchy and the idea of women as polluting seems dated and not reflective of the heterogeneity of family life in Singapore and the multiple gender narratives contesting for dominance in the modern or post-modernist, globalised, Singaporean Society. As Purushotam (1998) points out, Singapore is largely a middle-class society with middle-class values. There have been vast changes in the position of women and men in recent decades. For example, more people, especially graduates, are deciding to remain single or to marry at a later age than before and to have children when older. Divorce is increasing. Arranged marriages are no longer the norm. For most Chinese people in Singapore, inheritance of property in a male line is now seldom practiced. Whether a child is a girl or boy is not such a major issue as it used to be.

However, this does not mean the life of Chinese peoples in Singapore is unrecognizable from the life of people living in other parts of the world, as if there is now just one globalized way of life. There are themes discussed in this chapter about family and gender that can be discerned in some of the people met during the research. In the next section, scenarios of various people are given to show their relationship with issues of gender and to support the argument that tang-ki worship has enabled some to take up their role of female, or male, more easily. The terms traditional and modern, heartlander and cosmopolitan, working class and middle class, all overlapping to a degree, can be of use in characterizing some of the people discussed.

Anna is middle class, relatively well off, drives a Mercedes car [a Singaporean icon], completed high school [a high standard of education in the fifties] and appears to be very modern in outlook. One would not usually associate such a person with tang-ki activities. In general, tang-ki worship is more the activity of those who are less well off. Anna, though, has some conservative or traditional views that make it hard to categorize her as being entirely modern – having the views that a man is head of the house, the necessity of having children, the importance of a male child and a belief in the importance of a strong division of the sexes into male and female. This perception of Anna came across to me, particularly, when she and other women from the Ang Mio Kino shrine noticed that my ear had at one time been pierced. The women were uneasy about this and questioned me further on my relationships with women. According to Anna, only women should have their ears pierced as wearing earrings helped make a woman docile. She said, on further discussion, that some of the modern young men that one sees in Singapore with earrings and coloured hair were unisex. iv Despite these conservative views, many people in the shrine saw Anna as personifying a capable, modern woman.

Anna’s views and style of life contrasts completely with another person of her age met in the course of research, Ming-Li. This person studied for a higher degree in economics in a European country, has never married nor had children and now heads the family manufacturing business. This person can be classified as middle-class, cosmopolitan and modern. Anna differs from her in being more heartlander than cosmopolitan and not having gone to university. While very recently, for a short period, Ming-Li became involved in Buddhism, overall she has no interest in religion. She has many friends like herself - single, rich and well educated. Her friends and similar kinds of women constitute a group that the government became particularly worried about and, in 1984, set up the Social Development Unit, a type of dating agency, to try to get people like Ming-Li to marry and have children.

While Anna and Ming-Li appear to be very different from each other, they seem similar in terms of their confidence, assertiveness and ability to lead others. While Anna had worked in the finance world and could talk about this area, usually her husband dominated any such conversations. It was in the subject area of religion that Anna showed herself to be knowledgeable and authoritative. Here her husband did not have any competence. While being a tang-ki might be looked down on by others and, even for a while, was embarrassing to Anna’s husband, it seems that Anna gains much from being a tang-ki. Anna’s shrine offers a place for some women, on occasions, to talk to each other and to support each other – issues such as husbands having second wives, husbands being too disciplinary towards children and husbands not allowing wives to go out were often discussed. However, despite differences between Anna and Ming-Li, Anna stood out as someone who had not only confronted problems in relationship to a man’s world but had found answers to these problems and had found some equality with men, despite her denials that women are not equal to men.

Both men and women look to Anna for help with their problems. Anna is an advisor to various people, including some rich men; she socializes more freely with both men and women than many other women. It is true that Anna has identified, at some level, mainly a conscious one, with a masculine position as noted in the first section of this chapter but it seems clear that this is not just a hysterical neurotic position hindering her gaining a sense of herself as a woman. On the contrary, it would appear that Anna’s take up of the story of Guanyin is in part a way of negotiating the task of being a woman in a world where men dominate; and where she did not have other models, such as that adopted by Ming Li to help this process. In the words of Lao Tzu, she is able to know, ‘…the male and yet holds on to the female’ (Lao Tzu 1982: 164) and find her way in both areas of life, a delicate balancing act. While verbally attesting to the dominance of men, Anna does not entirely subordinate herself to men. She is in a position of being able to lead men, including her husband. Anna is also able to mediate to others a way that has helped her to understand, interpret and live in the world she has been fated [ming] to be born into.

What Ming-Li has achieved through university education and business management, Anna has found through tang-ki worship. v Paradoxically, in Anna’s marriage relationship, where she started out as a modern English educated person married to someone who is traditionally Chinese, she has, in becoming a tang-ki, somewhat reversed this relationship. Now Anna can be seen to be traditionally Chinese [being a tang-ki exemplifies this, as does speaking in Hokkien], related to her husband, who is modern/Chinese, seen in his speaking English and Mandarin, being a ‘free-thinker’ [rationalist or agnostic], having a position of management in a large commercial company and also by his interest in local community issues.

Wei’s initial ‘illness’ was debilitating. The medical authorities saw it at that time as ‘psychological’ or ‘psychiatric’. The illness can be understood as having taken Wei out of the social world, if he was ever in it, and placing him into a narcissistic world locked up in himself, or enclosed in a bond with his mother. Nevertheless, Wei managed to find his way back into the social world and eventually to find a position where he became a leader of a men’s shrine. If Ownby (2002a) is right about the importance of marriage and having children in Chinese societies, we could say that Wei managed to find a position as a man without having to be married or have a child. According to Ownby, in both traditional and modern China, being married is an imperative and, ‘In the eyes of most Chinese an unmarried man is not truly an adult, not truly a man. Indeed even a married man who has not yet produced [preferably male] offspring remains somewhat less than an adult’ (2002a: 242).

While it can be argued that the imperative to marry is not such a central feature of Singaporean society as it might have been for society in China, given that in Singaporean history the population of men for a long time vastly outnumbered the population of women due to more men emigrating from China in early Singaporean history, this is not entirely the situation. I was surprised when being taken out by Anna’s husband and before meeting one of his friends, a senior clerical officer, Anna’s husband said to me that this person was not married, and he asked me not to say anything about this in front of the man in case the man might be embarrassed. I could not see this type of statement being made about Wei, even though Wei’s world seems more traditional and thus more likely to be governed by traditional values than that of the person Anna’s husband introduced me to. I met another person in his mid-fifties, not involved in tang-ki worship, who was single and slightly estranged from his family. This person could be described as modern and cosmopolitan in outlook. He had once worked in the stock exchange as a broker. He was intensely concerned, however, about not being married and even talked about childless couples needing to adopt children. The reason he gave for this was to have someone to look after one when one was older.

Wei’s involvement in tang-ki worship and the myth of Nezha enabled him to find a position of worth in society as a leader of a men’s shrine. While at one level, it could be said that Wei has not taken up the traditional role of being a man - having a son, it does appear that his involvement in tang-ki concerns has not just been a pure fantasy but has enabled him to become a man in a way other than the traditional way. Just as Nezha, an unmarried unfilial child, could become a leader of a large army so Wei could become a leader of a men’s shrine. Just as Liu Bei could obtain his position as a leader outside of a patrilineal line and through loyalty, brotherhood and justice, so Wei has could obtain his position as a leader through the ethic of brotherhood and fighting against evil.

After mentioning the topic of men being married, Ownby talks of the close relationship between Chinese mothers and sons, which can lead to conflicts, and he talks of the father in the traditional household becoming more distant from the son when the son becomes six or seven (2002: 243). Ownby discusses the psychoanalytic view of masculine conflict as being due to an absence of masculine figures and closeness to feminine figures that can produce a hyper-masculinity, which he thinks may be the case with some members of bandit groups in Chinese history. One could point out here that Wei’s father died when he was nine years of age. One wonders if Wei and his brother were thrown back into the company of their mother by the death of their father and whether Wei’s brother’s way out of this situation was to involve himself on the edges of gangsterism, which Ownby suggests can be seen as a place of hyper-masculinity. I argue that Wei’s identification with Nezha and Guan Gong has supported his identity as a man rather than him having to become a gangster or remain ‘ill’. Similarly, to Anna, Wei has also been able to mediate to others, through tang-ki rituals, some of his experience of how he gained his position in life.

Christopher, discussed in Chapter Two , who went to Anna’s shrine for help with his illness, can be described as modern, university-educated and cosmopolitan in outlook with a tendency to identify with the Chinese aspect of the Singaporean way of life. In this respect, his position is close to Anna’s husband. Christopher was given a notion by a Chinese medical practitioner that he has, in some ways, a strong feminine aspect to his personality that needs to diminish and that he might gain help by going to a psychologist. He was once called ‘gay’ by his sister. Recently, he married and went to live in Taiwan. While Anna has managed to balance maleness and femaleness together in some ways, it seems Christopher has not and is still prone to ‘illness’ symptoms – headaches and a sense of emptiness.

Carol, Christopher’s sister, is thirty years of age. She is a modern, cosmopolitan, university-educated, professional woman, who shows a tendency to identify with the European aspect of a Singaporean, Chinese person’s life. She likes European music, clothes and magazines. She is in a long-term relationship with a boyfriend. Recently, Carol went through a period of about five months of intense jealousy over the close relationship of her brother Christopher with his girlfriend. She did not like the fact that the girlfriend could stay overnight in the family house.

Carol was described as sometimes going into rages, screaming, shouting and occasionally pulling at her hair. She stated to her parents that they had always preferred boys. Carol’s interest seems to be highly stimulated by the desire of her brother, whom she once called gay, for this other woman. This could be characterized as a hysterical position. There seems to be no way that Carol could come to terms with her behaviour, apart from through a moral position where she sees her behaviour as a lapse in self-control over her temper. Anna, however, would probably refer to Carol’s behaviour in terms of a discourse of possession. Another person, fully immersed in a psychological culture, might refer to it as motivated by unconscious fantasies and see it as an acting out of a hysterical position.

James, a cousin of Christopher’s, is in his early thirties. He is modern, cosmopolitan, well-educated and a professional. He lives at home with his parents. However, according to James’s relatives, there has always been a bad relationship between James and his father that seems to have left its mark on James. Recently, for example, in a discussion, his father in a rage kowtowed to him sarcastically, an action beyond imagination for most Chinese people. His brother and sister are doing better in life than him. The younger brother had when young received a ‘godparent’ deity. Sometimes the mother thinks James might have been given an unlucky name and that he, also, should have had a deity ‘godfather’ like his brother.

Unlike the woman mentioned on page 70 , who found some help for ameliorating her husband’s rage towards their son by consulting with a tang-ki, this did not seem to happen in the case of James’s mother. James’s father came across as a strong, traditional, patriarchal type of man and his mother, according to James, could be seen as having given up her desires in life for the sake of her husband. We can see in the story of Nezha that Nezha’s father has a similar attitude towards his son as James’s father. Nevertheless, in the story of Nezha, Li Jing, as a spiritual father [Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father, was able to mediate to him a position of father as symbolic that helped Nezha take up his position in life as head of an army. This mediation has not happened in James’s case, and he remains unconfident, with difficulties establishing himself in the world, personally and professionally.

James has a very close relationship with his mother, and his mother has been very protective of James. When James was twelve, he was not allowed to play football in case he hurt himself. Recently, James went on a day trip in his car before which his mother said to him, ‘Oh you are leaving us’. James was highly upset by this remark. James recognizes the problems he has with his family, but said he would not leave home as his mother would be devastated. We can see in this situation much of what Ownby describes when speaking about the close relationship between a Chinese mother and her son, although in this situation it has not produced a hyper-masculinity [this might pertain to James’s father who was orphaned and adopted by his single aunt] but rather a softness. Unlike Wei, who seems to have found a way out of closeness with his mother [produced partly by the death of his father] by identification with Nezha, James has not yet discovered a way out of his situation.

These scenarios show that issues of gender and sexuality are varied amongst people in Singapore and that people take up a position of masculine or feminine in different ways under different influences. These scenarios lead one to thinking that those who have in some respects leaned on the myths of Guanyin or Nezha to help establish themselves as female or male are not in a worse position than those who have not. Christopher and James can be seen as not yet having established a firm position in the world. Christopher is thus plagued by somatic symptoms and James by a depression and lack of drive. In contrast, Wei has a strong sense of drive and a satisfaction in life.

Carol has not yet established a secure position in relationship towards the world of men, and we see her position as breaking down when confronted by a desire of her brother that is somewhat different from how she conceptualized it to be. Anna, in contrast, has established a viable position for herself. It would seem that the situation of Anna and Wei at the early stage of their life and also of Christopher and Carol can be described as hysterical in the classical sense. However, as I have progressed with the analysis of the above people’s situation in life, it has become apparent that Anna and Wei have moved away entirely from any hysterical illness. They have moved to a position where their discourse can be characterized as a discourse of the hysteric in that it has, at its centre, a questioning and challenging of what it is to be a woman or a man. The tang-ki myths and rituals can be looked at as having helped Anna and Wei to develop a position as sexed beings without having to remain hysterically ill.