Romance of the Western Bower (Xīxiāngjì)
A young scholar falls for the daughter of a prime minister, but her mother will hear nothing of it.
Never fear: the lovers find a go-between in Rose, a sharp-tongued maid who reminds the boy of his Confucian duty one minute and accidentally gets embraced by him the next. Oops.
If this set-up sounds ripe for a comic opera, it is: the Romance of the Western Bower has inspired everything from Peking Opera to exquisite ivory fans.
Set during the Tang Dynasty, the play by Wang Shifu (1260-1336) is “the most important lyrical drama in the history of Chinese literature,” according to translator Xu Yuanzhong.
The reader may enjoy the flowery romance or the coded eroticism of such lines as “Her pistil plucked, my dewdrop drips/ And her peony sips/ With open lips.”
I must admit, though, that I sorely missed the music that would breathe life into the stylized characters and familiar sentiments. The play tantalizes the reader with the names of the tunes to which the lyrics should be sung. “Song of Flirtation” I can imagine well enough, but what did “Parasitic Grass” sound like? Or “Bald Head” or (my personal favorite) “Better than a Gourd”?
Still, the thinking reader has plenty to work with in the text itself. You might call the Romance a Mozartian comedy of class in which the maidservant Rose is the real wit. Or, in lit-crit mode, think of it as a parable of restricting desire to a certain class (no embracing the maid!) and gender (don’t hug the page!). The scholar’s “accidental” embrace becomes a sort of Freudian slip of the arms. His pursuit of marriage and a government career shows a channeling of extramarital desire into socially accepted forms.
Or read it simply for the language of high romance, with its thirsting flowers and lovesick lutes.
If you but look at me without turning away,
I would rhyme with your verse till the break of day.
Translation: Foreign Languages Press, 1992
