Jin Ping Mei (hereafter JPM) circulates as an extended tale of the rise and fall of a parvenu merchant-militaryman and his family-clan set in the last decades of the Sung dynasty. The protagonist is Ximen Qing, an urban opportunist with neither family nor education, who nevertheless succeeds at amassing women, fortune and official post through seductive wiles, mercantile savvy, and political bribery. His operative mode is at once sensual and material. But it is the sensual that will ultimately lead to his death, the dispersion of his family and, by implication, the downfall of the empire. His female counterpart and the arch-villainess of the tale is the bondmaid-concubine Pan Jinlian. Their encounter had been narrated in another Ming narrative, Shuihu Zhuan, where both die for committing adultery. This episode is then rewritten at length in the JPM, postponing their deaths by several years. Meanwhile, in JPM, Pan Jinlian becomes Ximen Qing's fifth concubine (sixth "wife"), and the central figure of sexual opportunism and domestic intrigue. She is in this narrative held accountable for the successive deaths of a former master at whose house she had served as bondmaid; the cake-seller husband to whom she is given away in punishment; the bondservant's wife with whom Ximen Qing has sex; Li Ping'er, who is Ximen Qing's favorite as well as the mother of his son; his baby son Guange; and of course Ximen Qing himself. Sex and death are inextricably intertwined, according to this tale, and death is bloody and protracted where sex is non-reproductive, illegitimate and pleasurably, albeit instrumentally excessive. Death is not simply that of the individual, but of the family and body politic as well. The destructive powers/potency of base succubae women exemplified in the narrative's various bondmaid-concubine figures, and one's fatal desire for these particular women, are related to the fullest extent in graphic detail.

In its material life, JPM is a book that first appeared on literary record in manuscript form amidst a highly select circle of readers at the mid-point Wanli (1573-1620) in the Ming. Within three decades of its circulation in manuscript, the book was printed in the Jiangnan region and up for sale on the market. By the Ming Chongzhen (1628-1645), a significantly altered - a carefully edited and more formally and ideologically consistent-text was imprinted. One of the candidates for editorship of this version is Li Yu, a writer of fiction, drama, and a manual on connoisseur-ship of various modes of aesthetic consumption in the not very wealthy but very cultured gentleman's life of leisure, but also someone who owned his own troupe of actors and actresses, as well as a bookshop-printing house. Li Yu had been mentioned approvingly by Yuan Hongdao, a leading literatus of an earlier generation. Incidentally, Li Yu was also a family friend of Zhang Zhupo's father, whose talented, poor, intellectually brilliant but frustrated son (Zhang Zhupo) set to writing in 1695 (Qing Kangxi 34) a commentaried version of the XXJPM, claiming for this by now "pornographic" book the highest morality - reading it as the product of an embittered filiality. Its "dirt" was, for Zhang Zhupo, the "dirt" of an ethical abjection. Zhang Zhupo's version of JPM (hereafter the ZZJPM) soon became something of a bestseller, repeatedly reprinted despite Kangxi's imperial edict banning the publication of this among many books as pornographic or treasonous. Zhang Zhupo's commentary edition superceded all previous editions up to the twentieth century (see chapter 4).

If JPM refers to a book (which turns out, upon closer examination, to consist of several "books" in many senses), it also signifies an entire range of meanings, from a scholarly "first realist narrative of its kind in China, if not the World", to a "pornographic" narrative that cannot be cleansed, however many passages are cut and censored, and which must therefore be restricted to a "mature and/or academic readership" only. In twentieth-century popular media and consciousness in Chinese-speaking places, JPM has come to signify a moral and psycho-physiological obsession with and a concomitant fear and even hatred of particular women and female sexuality (nuse, or womansex), a view encapsulated and refuted in a journal essay in Taiwan (Taibei Pinglun, January1988) which analyzes Pan Jinlian, the licentious-woman or yinfu, as a nymphomaniac. Needless to say, the "reputation" of the book as being about "women and (female) sexuality" is sufficient in itself to explain its infamy in a space wherein women are still only legitimate and symbolically valued as reproductive rather than sexual subjects. The function of sexuality and sensualities in general and their supplemental relation to the reproductive is foregrounded precisely in the base bodies of licentious bondmaid-concubines who remain barren, unable to bear the man-child that is their sole raison-d'etre in an extended polygamous family (both in the late Ming and not so long ago in Taiwan). Sexuality is in such situations by definition foremost among excessive and potentially harmful sensual expenditures of a semen-centered reproductive economy constituting the Master's personal and socio-familial body politic. Insofar as reproduction entails and encompasses sexual/sensual contact, and to the extent that such contact might be linked to residual Daoist regimes of erotic management and hygienic self-care (as perhaps was so in the case of Yuan Hongdao's reading), moral dictates could be seen as aligned to and ameliorated by practical considerations of hygiene, health and pleasure. But such acculturated consumption could not have been available for the everyday common man, who must lack the elite cultural wherewithal and socio-symbolic status for the appropriately measured and correctly fertile or even aesthetically appreciative use of sumptuous female objects in the figures of bondmaid concubines. Thus Li Yu on the acquisition, grooming and training of bondmaid-concubines (in Xianqing Ouji ), in an age when these had become relatively common and affordable for even your everyday local literatus-gentry as well as merchant-parvenu.
I

t is perhaps this particular socio-historical conjuncture of bondmaid-concubines in numbers and proximity exceeding those of even elite households and habitual usage, when the familial and social place of women as primarily and/or exclusively reproductive bodies (mothers, wives, daughters) in a strictly bounded internal household economy seems threatened. The movement of female bodies into and out of familial thresholds as bondmaids and/or as concubines, their internal incessant competitive dynamics and sexual opportunism, their insidiously long-lasting influence and potency if/when they do give birth and the violent struggle for uterine power such concubine births might unleash - all of these might be termed a thematics of intimate politics, or of what I will term "porous intimacies" - which representation is inaugurated in definitive mold in the JPM. It is in this text and in how this text is remembered that these particular kinds of women, their base "origin" and specific trajectories conveniently forgotten and subsumed or enlarged into general woman-hood, are construed to enduring symbolic and discursive effect as potent, powerful and dangerous sexual agents - yinfu or licentious women. As if man-killing sexual agency could serve as deterrent, warning and counterpart to proper femininity and women (readers), while at the same time servicing a voyeur/masochist masculine sexuality/reading position and assuaging the latter's fears and desires. Had there been no such convenient historic gendered scapegoat of a specific social-class trajectory available for not just familial-social exploitation but as textual and cultural strategy, what would have happened - to for example the increasing class-status performance anxieties of a substratum of the hegemonic elite?

In the seventeenth century, during the Ming-Qing transition period, the frustrations and resentment, the mania and melancholy of distance and alienation from imperial bureaucratic service, signaling a new class-status uncertainty and the blurring of distinctions, the formation of a new urban culture, all of these were forces most visibly present in transmuted forms in fictional and anecdotal writings.
Writing in 1695, Zhang Zhupo specifically notes that women must not read this book, as much because they could never learn how to read this (or any) book properly, but also because their tendency to a mimetic model of reading would make the familial and social effects of their reading JPM disastrous. Clearly, the JPM was read since Wanli in fact (see chapter 2 and 3) as a book primarily for literate, if not literati, men. But just as evidently, certain women had access to such books, and could read them, therefore Zhang's indignation. The recorded readings of elite or not-so-elite men notwithstanding, or perhaps precisely because of such readings, JPM was and continues to be openly or secretly read by mostly (scholarly) men, or so it seems until the twentieth century. It is not a coincidence then that this work of all works should continue to circulate and signify in contemporary popular culture as a sign of female (but not of specifically bondmaid-concubine) desires and sexuality for acculturated male readership, while signifying at the same time a borderline literary work not suitable for female readers or women scholars. The "class/status-based misogynist continuum" sub-tending both popular and academic spaces, and their otherwise differently situated male readers, effectively produce the range of meanings that JPM continues to elicit today.

But what do I mean by "class/status-based misogyny"? Both Wang Yijia writing in contemporary Taiwan and Zhang Zhupo commenting on an edition in 1695 (which would become the best-known version of JPM for the next three hundred years) contribute to the disseminating and circulation of JPM as popular sign of personally, socially and politically dangerous desire for morally bad rather than status-wise base woman. The social base-ness (jian) of particular women is euphemistically rendered into a more generalized and universal moral bad-ness or impropriety (bu liang) and thus simultaneously naturalized as an ethical and personal rather than socio-economic or familial-political problem. This innate moral depravity conflates and substitutes the subject's desire with its improper and dangerous objects thereby conveniently eclipsing the desiring and reading subject who at least must want (to read of) sexually opportunist things.

There are then at least two kinds of "JPM"'s in terms of their spaces of circulation and their spheres of influence. One affects the contemporary popular imaginary and produces shop signs (for betel-nut stands and sex paraphernalia stores), as well as re-visions both in "traditional" forms such as the highly successful Sichuan dramatic version in China but also in modern cinematic and novelistic forms such as Hong Kong-Australia director Clara Law's the Incarnations of the Golden Lotus, based on the popular Pan Jinlian's Previous and Present Life (Pan Jinlian zhi Qianshi Jinsheng) by novelist Li Bihua. The other JPM is the cachet of book collectors, cognoscenti and academics who may read it openly or on the sly but seldom talk about it - in public (or print) that is, excepting those who profess to "study" it (myself included). But as the JPM's mythic popular aura and influence among a younger generation arguably recedes, it seems to have become the focus of increasing scholarly attention in both Chinese and English (and perhaps in other languages as well). Finally, its past cultural migration and incarnations in non-Chinese speaking Asian sites, in Japan for instance, and Vietnam and Korea, to name just two, would be a fascinating follow-up project.

This project owes a great deal to the continued social and political effect of JPM in contemporary Chinese-speaking popular imaginary - especially its mythic message of the dangers of woman-sex (nuse). Without the gender taboo surrounding this text I would not have embarked on the study of what has made and continues to go into the making of JPM as constellation of sexual meanings and gender truths in the fulcrum of familial-social hierarchic power negotiations. I should also add that there is no clear dividing line between the fields wherein JPM operates its porous powers or the readers situated in these differentiated spheres. They could be the same though unidentical subjects - linked by a homologous fear and desire.

Instead of examining contemporary cultural myths spawned in the shadow of the JPM, I will be focussing instead on the readings that have cumulatively mediated the text(s) for its twentieth century readers. I attempt to return to a range of reading-positions and investments variously embedded within and around the text(s) in the context of rapidly changing cultural and socioeconomic conditions. These include its two most well-known and influential late Ming and early Qing readers (Yuan Hongdao and Zhang Zhupo, Chapters 3 and 4), as well as earlier twentieth century scholarly efforts to dispel the JPM's residual pornographic-erotic aura (Chapter 1). Finally, I offer a counter-ethical feminist reading-position and strategy as one possible (late twentieth century) resistant reading of the narrative's intimate politics, its disciplinary gender and sexual configurations. Such a feminist reading (in Part Two) would counter albeit partially continuing a "modern" sexual and gender politics in its egalitarian individualist concern. This is however not the end of the story as it can be read. The last chapter will reflect on the possibility of alternative and as-yet-impossible reading positions and illegible sexual practices that are always already in place (or always out of place, exceeding their appointed place) in the last decade of the twentieth century in Taiwan.

Obscene Matters

The distinction between a refined and greedy consumption is one that was central to a generation of Ming Wanli literati who began to articulate crucial and self-interested social and moral distinctions through a discourse of connoisseur-ship that ranged from the pictorial arts to domestic objects to women and vernacular fictional forms. It is no coincidence that the earliest edition of JPM to be published retains the hybrid form of a compendium of songs, drama and narrative. It is as if the work itself were the product of a "gluttonous" consumption, a regurgitation of some editor-author's favorite pieces, fused by the will, as C.T. Hsia puts it, to ingeniously concoct something never before seen in print. This cutting and pasting of diverse materials and forms itself attests to the influence of a vernacular print culture. Only with the advent of published and therefore more easily available forms of diverse vernacular materials, coupled with a possible market for ever more innovative "pastiche", could the JPM be produced, but more importantly, be read by its earliest known elite readers as the "marvelous" work that it was. These readers were themselves Ming Wanli connoisseurs of books and literature, but also of tea and rocks, travel and wine, women and food (Chapter 3). Such readers would "recognize," more important, they would adequately appraise, a new and different "object d'art" if anyone could. Not coincidentally, these readers were socially and culturally positioned to affix to any "new" object on this urban scene the marker of elite approval, whereupon the new object would immediately become "hot stuff".

The histories of readings that may be seen as encrusting the text, forming and adding to it in such a way that a textual archaeology is necessary to separate one from another's lining, to distinguish each reading's relation to its "host" text, constitute Part One of this book. The moments and structures of reading read in Part One are parasitic, yet in feeding upon their host (JPM) each reading transforms the text to satisfy its specific needs. The parasite changes but so does the host. Reading JPM in the late 20th century it is no longer possible nor is it necessary to separate host from parasite, since the former has become the sum of the latters' reformulations. In Part One, I focus on only two historical moments or two sedimentation in what might be called the complex that is JPM as received text. Chapters 2 and 3 both examine the moment of inception, the initial appearance of a marvelous manuscript in the Jiangnan region in the Ming Wanli period. Chapter 2 establishes the practical (prefatorial) and subjective effects of Wanli shifts in the culture and commodification of fiction in print. Chapter 3 closely examines the first circle of readers of JPM, especially one of its earliest readers on record (Yuan Hongdao). This constitutes the text's first layer of literary encrustation, and the fictional text that is embedded within these records of readings is both situated and advertised as a "new" narrative object, somewhat obscene but quite charming, and fit for the most refined literary taste. One such elite reader apparently read and consumed "obscene objects" without preconceptions of "obscenity." Only with subsequent considerations of wider dissemination in print did the readings of the early decades of the seventeenth century begin to concern themselves with questions of the "licentiousness" of the text. In this process the text is transformed into an offensive against the encroachment of potentially improper parvenu reading subjects in fictional literary fields then in the making. It is to this moment that one may trace the beginning of JPM's infamy as an "obscene book", a potentially pornographic work. JPM's "obscenity" however had not yet amassed the weight of a coherent and consistently articulated morality that would achieve the simultaneous inflation and deflation of its aesthetic-ethical value. This occurs about eighty years later, in the early Qing, after JPM had already been officially banned as a "licentious work" (yin shu), when Zhang Zhupo instantiates a systemic aesthetic-ethical defense of this by now thoroughly moral "obscene book" (Chapter 4). In his process of rewriting the book as filial therefore ethical, an aesthetics of resentment becomes the means for a textual innoculation against immoral readings and readers. The text itself is thus saved; and proper readers both sated and protected.

Part One of this book constitutes discrete readings of two historical moments in the changing configurations of reading practices surrounding the JPM, with the narrative text as site for shifting negotiations of gender and social power. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 together suggest how readings of JPM have changed from the Ming Wanli to the Qing Kangxi. And how such changes must be understood in relation to a vernacular fictional print culture that provided for the social and cultural articulation of differently situated literati subjects in crisis. These crises are brought on and intensified with the continuously redefined relations between a consumer-reader who has had to readjust his previously privileged relation to consumable texts. What happens when a position of virtual monopoly is eroded, and interpretative authority and control (albeit of minor and marginal not-yet-literary forms) fall into the hands of the non-officially qualified (no degree) and the relatively unknown (no fame)? This was the case with some of the editors and commentators of vernacular forms, anthologies, and other miscellaneous writings in cheap editions. This is how I would recast the perennial question of who wrote the JPM.

The answers to the question of whom or what group of persons wrote the JPM by generations of scholars in the twentieth century has however provided us with rather significant findings. On the one side are those who continue to come up with singular individual candidates, ranging from the top of the line, the "great" literati figures of Ming Jiajing and Wanli (Wang Shizhen, Tang Xianzu, Li Kaixian), to relatively lesser known figures marginal to the literati establishment, but nevertheless possible candidates in that they have all been involved with vernacular fiction in one way or another, including the publishing of fiction (Jia Sanjin, Tu Long). On the other side are those scholars who argue for a model of collective authorship that originates in oral/folk literature, and the evolving of oral material into textual vernacular forms. What both sides assume seems to be a rupture, a clear-cut divide between the individual literati author, and an anonymous collective authorship of lesser social and cultural status and resources. To restate what has already become a cliche of Ming Wanli, this was precisely the moment of the overlap between such entities as on the one hand individual elite, and on the other, practices that had belonged to a distinctly lower social status. Urban commercialization, a booming print culture and imperial political turmoil at least partially account for individual elite such as Wang Shizhen, Yuan Hongdao, or the not-so-elite such as Tu Long, engaging in cultural activities that include the published therefore public championing of obscenely marvelous new fictional works. This might have been inconceivable three generations earlier.

What I am more interested in is how this (to the twentieth-century "modern" novel reader) uncannily "recognizable" product of a late Ming urban book culture was received, how it was read, and by what kind of readers. For sure, the illustriousness of its first readers has assured it a place among great works, with however renewed scholarly hedging and qualifications. But successive readers who have wanted to "write" their readings into the text, to inhabit the authoritative position of exegete to a new cultural form, while remaking it for their particular cultural and ideological usage, need to be carefully examined as well. The historical transformations of a text in its different embodiments are the focus of the first part of this book. In focusing on the first ascertainable circle of Ming Wanli readers, notably Yuan Hongdao, then Zhang Zhupo of the Qing Kangxi period, such a project is only just begun.

Porous Intimacies

The JPM is a borderline text between the high literary and the pornographic insofar as it is said to thematize obscenities: the sexual practices between a Master and his many wives-concubines-bondmaids in an extended narrative form that conforms to cyclical retributive logic. Ultimately almost all culprits die of their sexual/sensual excesses. It can thus be read as much for as against the excesses it minutely details. The records of readings extant would actually show it to have been accessible to multiple and conflicting reading positions and investments. These are at least partially determined by the place of each reading position in the socio-political and economic state and symbolic order at the particular moment of reading. At the same time, the cumulative weight of differentiated sedimentation of readings has nonetheless produced an apparent devaluation of the text and its objects of textual and readerly desire as obscene and excessive. Only through a careful sifting through and peeling apart of different layers of readings can a previously difficult to read figure of representation -the figure of the bondmaid-concubine licentious woman - be discerned in shadowy yet vibrant and gyrating movement and speech. She is overshadowed and paradoxically made substantial by repeated readings that assimilate her familial and social base-ness (jian) in symbolic and monetary value to an innate gender moral depravity, a feminized ethical impropriety. She is thus made over, transubstantiated from penumbra- (non)-subject to the category of the classical "woman" alongside that of "little (petty) men" of whom superior men must always beware. Assimilated to the general category of "woman," she becomes nearly illegible in the specificity of her relations to gender, sexuality and class-status in the urban mercantile (informal) economies in which her kind of persons survived and/or thrived momentarily and discontinuously from at least the late Ming to the early twentieth century in "peripheral" Chinese families and societies in the flux of vertiginous socioeconomic and political changes. A feminist reading that would counter not just the cumulative gender-blind recuperative readings of the JPM, but also the ahistorical egalitarian assumption that would efface a barely perceptible differential shade between the positionalities of good-family women (liang fu) as sexual appendage and domestic reproductive instrument and debased bondmaid-concubine in her sexual opportunism and familial micropolitical machinations - this is what emerges as urgent necessity rather than program in these essays. In a sense, feminist readings inattentive to the historical class-status and gender-moral difference between good/chaste and base/unchaste womanhood risk resuscitating the moral high ground of a male literati readership. The sexual opportunism of base marginal gender persons remains illegible, or worse, is encompassed by the same victimization that might have proved her a "chaste victim" of rape in Ming-Qing times. Nowadays, residual "chastity" discourse and sentiment is reformulated to produce the correct feminist "victim" of patriarchal abuse. This then is also what emerges in attending to readings of JPM in ways that go against the grain of habitual modes of reading and thinking.

In this case, the temporal-spatial differences that merit closer attention are analogous to the spatio-temporal ones that have resulted in the recent proliferation of "feminisms", and I am thinking of the critiques of dominant "feminism" from the perspectives of post-modern, post-colonial, ethnic-nationalist and third-worldist feminists. The axiomatic of imperialism that as Gayatri Spivak reminds us is never far away from an unreflexive high feminist literary critical practice in the "West" might then be considered to parallel and indeed intersect the axiomatic of status-class-caste hierarchy (in Louis Dumont's use of the term ) structurally embedded in dynastic Chinese and Confucian-Buddhist ideologies. As Louis Dumont has noted, this hierarchic sense of persons and things does not merely go away in modern democracies. If they are actively repressed in the "western" democracies, in Asian and Chinese-speaking regions, class-status and moral hierarchic sense and sentiment have latched onto amazingly contradictory forms and figures. For one thing, the denial of hierarchy in the embracing of egalitarian ideology in progressive readings whether of the May Fourth generation or recent feminists, as much as the positing of universal therefore equal and liberatory categories (such as Woman in contradistinction to Man) together obscure the particular formation and representation of residual hierarchic person-hoods such as the bondmaid-concubine yinfu.

It is then what Dumont has aptly termed an ideology of individual egalitarianism that subtends and explains an otherwise baffling continuity between disjunctive and even oppositional readings of progressive male intellectuals in the earlier half and feminist readers in the latter part of the twentieth century. A question I have been asked since ten years ago at the onset of this project is how and when exactly can Pan Jinlian as she is represented in JPM be read as agent in a way that would be meaningful for women (read urban professional) in spaces like Taiwan in the latter half of the twentieth century? The film director Clara Law has partly answered that question by recasting Pan (via Li Bihua's novelistic rewriting) as reincarnated romantic heroine in twentieth century Hong Kong. The question has stayed with me because it stumbles against a too easy identification with Pan Jinlian and therefore an assimilation of such representations into the repertoire available for productive retrieval by twentieth century feminist individualists. The representation of such women as Pan Jinlian in narratives like the JPM however resists such assimilative reading. These representations resist in their detailing of the situational complexities of the bondmaid-concubine trajectory at a specific moment and place, in the tale of several kinds of bondmaid-concubine and their mythic or myth-ified "fate." These are the bad ones who come to a bad end, as it were. So bad that it is difficult not to resign their lives and sentiments and positionalities to the dust-bin of "history" and "tradition" or treat them as a kind of myth, an inverted fairy-tale, no longer speaking relevantly to any kind of reality. But then, is there not a similar although perhaps reverse assimilatory logic at work in the celebratory study of the positive pole of male literati and elite or literate women's representations of self? Must not these also be treated as carefully and attentively and suspiciously as those representations occupying the negative pole? There is nonetheless a tendency to have positive representations become the representations of "our" culture to "ourselves" and to others. A tendency all the more compelling (for this writer as well) through the invisible ideologic screen of not just individualist egalitarianism (thus the focus on individual authors and women writers and selves). But a concomitant identity politics (whereupon writing and representation is seen to emanate from and affirming of identity categories such as "women" and "men" over and above say bondmaid and mistress) in the attempt to have the past evidentially conform to and confirm our relatively new world order.
To do so is however to epistemologically refuse to know/notice, and to politically efface the too obvious differences between for example the representation of idealized mistress-bondmaid relation in the Peony Pavilion, and the temporally conjunctive differently compelling inflammatory representation of bondmaid-concubines en masse in JPM. It is also to forget the psycho-social investments of reading in returns variously translated into "disinterested" academic writing that may unwittingly reproduce ideologies (of individual egalitarianism, of identity politics) constituting the very questions we now begin with.
To too quickly assimilate the particular formation and trajectory and representation that is that of the bondmaid-concubine at a certain moment and place to a general category of woman is to first assume that the latter is an a priori with specific givens against which particular exempla are measured. Second, it is to ignore the avowedly shifting distance and placement of bondmaid-concubine in the discursive spectrum or field that make up and constitute "general" woman-hood; which discursive spectrum or field more often than not is vectored toward the position of socially "valorized" women-hood. And finally, it is to erase the historical transformation and assimilation of the bondmaid-concubine status into moral (commoner) womanhood, in short, the "modernization" of hierarchic gender and sexual Chinese womanhood. The specific contours and fields wherein this transformation occurred needs further study.

As Maria Jaschok has shown in her cultural history of bondmaid-concubines , when the residual practices of bondservitude and bondmaids themselves were finally brought to the light of the court as legal cases in the mid-twentieth century in Hong Kong in court cases usually initiated by their Masters/Mistresses, the characterization of these surely very diverse women was quite consistent. "[The] list of the girls' characteristics reads like an inversion of what were considered the attributes of respectable females excelling in the virtues of filial piety and obedience, reticence, loyalty, literal adherence to prescribed conventions." The parameters of respectable femininity do not seem to have changed all that much from the late Ming to the mid-twentieth century in some familial-social spaces. Perhaps this can only be said of Hong Kong bondservitude in the early twentieth century as it might very well retain as a "peripheral" colonial Chinese society strong(er) residual imperial markers ("feudal relations"). Nonetheless, my point is that given the tendency to represent bondmaid-concubines (in the JPM in late Ming Jiangnan, in legal court cases in the twentieth century) as "typically" inversions of proper or respectable femininity, must not this very representation bear upon and negatively mark how these figures as representations, these persons as embodied entities can be read/understood? Not just from the reading position of male intellectuals however progressive and well meaning. But also from the reading-position of feminists, many of whom are female intellectuals and therefore as woman and intellectual in much greater proximity to if not entirely within the field of valorized respectable femininity. In the hierarchic Chinese-speaking world (that has not entirely disappeared at least not in some places, Taiwan for one) it is predominantly literacy and its concomitant ethical acculturation that ensure the training and grooming deemed already in the late Ming both proper and erotic-desirable in new ways (viz. Li Yu's tract on the acquisition, grooming and minimal education of one's own private concubines).

The question then is one of distance and proximity and how, when and wherefrom to measure these. To the extent that the bondmaid-concubine trajectory and figure is represented as distant from the order and knowledge that form the core of civility and humane-ness, she is tropologically close to domestic animals such as cats and dogs. These can be trained and groomed and can give pride in ownership, at the other extreme, they can be punished and killed, or given away or sold. Insofar as they are not quite-never quite humane, they must never be trusted as such. Intimacy with such an order of persons is dangerous on two grounds. On the one hand, they may forget who they "are" and aspire to what they cannot become, their ambition may make them even more agreeable and instrumental. This gives rise to the other, greater danger for the Master, for he may forget who they "are" to the point of becoming gradually assimilated in the reverse, base direction. In this particular hierarchic thinking, baseness is contaminating by an associative logic. It is both powerful (it contaminates) and weak (it cedes to superior force and place). It is a porous intimacy between the subject and its dependent-subjects - the latter being, in the words of a social-economist of the Ming, half-human half-objects. This is an imperial structuration of power, at the level of the imperial and its attendant or affinally linked wealthy or powerful families (clans). Bondservant families might, when risen to illicit power via Masters, mimic such formations, thus eunuch "families" in the wake of imperial favor (Li Ping'er's wealth and relative prestige). Merchant parvenu families might also tend to mimicry, like Ximen Qing's (thus the appositeness of Ximen's pairing with Li Ping'er). Mimicry in lifestyle and consumption patterns functions toward the transvaluation of forms of prestige and privilege, it does not always grant sociopolitical power or only vulnerable "travesties" of the latter, thus the social as well as ideological ephemeral/illusory nature of such "family" fortunes. Yet this vulnerability might itself be a myth maintained in representations such as the JPM that seek to distinguish between "real" and "fake" and therefore the legitimate symbolic hierarchy and its travesties and transgressions, amidst the fascinating and frightening blurring of these very distinctions. The proliferation of such myths (of the chaotic blurring and merging, with always already a return embedded within the extended narrative logic) at particular historical moments and places might index an increasing difficulty in maintaining hierarchic distinctions in a sociopolitical matrix such as that of the late Ming.

The porousness of intimate relations sometimes in the trangressive reverse direction extended at this historic conjuncture not just to patriarchal familial relations (the Master becoming livestock in his reduced humane-ness in the everyday company of cat-like concubines, see Chapter 7). It could also be metaphorically extended to the relations between reading and writing and authoritative authoring and publishing in new fields of literary or wenren (cultural) work. That certain commentaried editions (by names of cultural renown) could create "masterworks" out of base vernacular genres and pastiches in a new market for popular books, this had effect not only on accelerating the "institutionalizing" of commentaries for a more popular "private" consumption (consumption not geared toward "public" government service). It also affected the way in which fiction commentaries came to be viewed as yet another genre of "writing" or cultural work in the hallowed sense . There is a sense then in which urban market relations and literati writing, perhaps especially in the form of intimate records of reading on the margins of heretofore base popular texts came to be mutually constructed and enhancing. It is in this sense that one could then look for the traces of these porous relations, between new modalities of writing and reading, and commercial or market logic and concerns (Chapters 2 and 3).
A Counter-Ethics of Reading

My focus on readings is in alignment with two recent strands of thinking. One is the rethinking of reading and writing beyond or this side of the solitary, individual and individualist figure emblematic of reading/writing since the 16th century in Anglo-European art and civilization. This figure of the solitary reader tends to foreclose what Elizabeth Long has termed the "social infrastructures of reading." That is, how reading must be taught, and as socialization occurs within specific social relationships, as well as the ways in which reading is socially framed through collective and institutional processes that legitimate certain texts and how to read them. The other is the close attention enjoined by Gayatri Spivak among others to the ethico-politics of particular subject positions formed in and enabled by different (positionalities of) readings available in a text, without forgetting the institutional and geographical boundaries that condition and limit such a responsibility in pedagogy and reading.

This book's textual readings of letter notations, prefaces, and commentaried editions of JPM in the late Ming and early Qing largely remain within the parameters of a literary discipline that has taken for granted and perhaps even in its close readings reified some solitary reader embodied in a text. At the same time, the particularities of each reading's different conditions of possibility at least suggest the institutional and socio-economic vectors of reading as social practice. This is how JPM is shown to become not one coherent text/myth, but an agglomeration of different readings at different times and places, for various social, economic, and psychic uses. Who can accede to such readings, even if only to undo their power and reality effects, and what kind of position of reading in the present can re-inscribe an avowedly feminist rewriting? That is the question addressed in the latter part of the book. Communities (or aggregates not recognizable as "communities" and without the latter's resources) as well as lone practices of readings remain that are difficult to sight/site and cannot easily obtain academic sanction and social recognition.

Who reads the JPM in this particular study is on another level circumscribed by my consideration of the text(s) as narrative. I have primarily used the three major recensions of the JPM, that is, the Wanli Cihua edition, the Chungzhen lightly commentaried edition, and the Zhang Zhupo fully commentaried edition, in both photocopied and newly typeset modern editions. I have chosen to focus on these texts as narrative without recourse to the "novel" to loosen and dislodge as much as possible unnecessary comparative assumptions that arise in the wake of the analyses of the various readings. JPM appears at a moment and place where a form of hybrid storytelling (prose interlaced with verse) whether in manuscript or print had not quite congealed sufficiently into an easily recognizable literary genre with clearly targeted readers (on the market). It had to be made literary, and its place determined through successive readings, editorial polishing, published notational comments and commentaried editions.

Yuan Hongdao's reading of JPM as comparable to the Qifa, a fu or prose-poem whose transformational affective powers are at once subject and form of the narrative, suggests the possibility of reading the JPM in a way difficult to imagine after Zhang Zhupo. What is interesting is not so much that Yuan was among the first to "value" JPM aesthetically (that is, as "literature"). In fact, I would argue the reverse, that it is Yuan's recommendations, however off the cuff, that to some extent set the course for JPM's subsequent literary trajectory. But this is not to disregard Yuan's recommendation. Rather, it opens up the possibility for reconsidering Yuan's comparison, not in the service of retrospectively establishing a fictional aesthetics, but in order to approach as much as possible a mode of reading that is no longer readable. Such a heterogeneous reading points to beyond the yinshu or pornography debate, as well as before the ethico-aesthetic principles realized by and instituted in Zhang Zhupo's commentaried edition. Thus, embedded within the JPM is a (Yuan Hongdao's) prose-poetic model of reading articulated to psychophysiological transformative powers, which can only perhaps today be approximated to necessarily different exorcistic effect through a psychoanalytic reading.

As a form of storytelling, or more precisely, as the story of a particular kind of domestic hierarchy between one man-Master and several categories or symbolic values of women, and among these different women. As the story also of legitimate sexual services and illicit sexual opportunism as well as the latter's punishment-retribution, JPM has exerted tremendous and lasting influence. Its influence has been a textually verifiable force (its various editions, its continuing to be circulated and read through the Qing censorship, its rewritings in sequels, in personal commentaried editions, the shadow of its influence in the Dream of the Red Chamber, its rewritings in contemporary drama and film, and so on). It has also been an infinitely reproducible figuration and plot, an ideologeme. It is this aspect of JPM that has both necessitated its reading as narrative, as well as made that reading itself a narrative, another form of storytelling (Part Two, chapters 5-7).

In going back to the readings that have cumulatively formed the JPM as both obscene object, and ideological aesthetic-ethical countering of the obscene in the first four chapters of this book, I have been propelled by an alternative feminist re-reading (Part Two). At the same time, this feminist reading needed to confront what had implicitly called it into place. What happened in the encounter was an unanticipated transformation of both. The readings of Yuan Hongdao and Zhang Zhupo reading JPM opened up onto a continual questioning and re-cognition of this project's epistemological assumptions and ignorance. One of these assumptions has turned into a primary preoccupation of this book. That is, an aesthetics-ethics of reading which can be traced to the ethical-political exegesis of "Chinese" canonical texts in general and literature in particular. This particular model of literary theory and critical practice must be understood in the context of a position of the literati always and already as potentially and ideally in service, bureaucratically and ideologically, to the (imperial) state. This usually male intellectual subject position of the reader/writer of a text is often taken for granted, if it is not reproduced and reified as trans-historical structure (see Chapter 1). A feminist reading of JPM must necessarily take on both the legacy of readings that have made it the formidably pornographic/anti-pornographic text that it is, and the problem of countering those readings by instancing a "feminist" reading and reading position of the text.

It is precisely at such a juncture, following the staging of an encounter between a feminist reader of JPM in late twentieth century Taiwan, and commentators of JPM such as Zhang Zhupo, that further complications arise. Complications stemming from the extent to which feminist revisionist work such as this one derive their authority and legitimacy from as much as against the literati subject position of reading under critique. It is this difficult re-cognition of the continuity of authoritative (intellectual-academic) positions occupied that is of ethical and political significance, without however underestimating the ideological and political discontinuities achieved. Feminism introduces an angle of reading that in its textual and historical im-possibility constitute a critique of both JPM's textual ideology and historicity. But, it also interjects in its re-visionary reading the shadow of its own historical moment and concomitant egalitarian-individualist common-sense, just as it might well come to occupy a reformulated yet nonetheless authoritative position of reading. This is how I would now understand the eroto-phobic residues or shadows of a certain feminist re-vision of JPM. According to such a re-vision, the force and forms of a misogynist representation would exactly reproduce systemic gender oppression. Such a reading leaves little space for transformative knowledge or practice besides or alongside the position occupied previously by the would-be elite and state-servicing literati, and now inhabited by a feminist reader. Without critical re-cognition of the possibility of such continuity, entailing the embodied habits (habitus, too) of authority, statism and leadership, and the implicit identification with a professional (middle) class, such a feminist position of counter-reading could become yet another literati reading position for a new time and place.

In fact, this has already unwittingly as well as strategically happened. The reading of Yang Zhao's preface in Chapter 8 is one example of a contemporary (male) literary critic who reads from a position informed by a gender-politics sensitive position. Yet, as I have argued, Yang obstructs the very possibility of reading a "lesbian" erotic writing to the extent that his reading wishes to recuperate such "lesbianism" as something always already known and know-able (in this case, a particular "Taiwan-ness" coded in narrative realism). One might say that in Yang's case, a sense of the politics of sexuality welded to nationalist sentiment produces the latter dictating the (again) aesthetic-ethical evaluation of the former. This continuation of the position of the erstwhile literati as always and already in potential service to the state has also occurred in the feminist debates around the licensed prostitutes issues in Taiwan from the fall of 1997 through 1998.

In Chapters 6 and 7 the focus is on JPM as a representation of bondmaid-concubine women and agential sexual opportunism with enduring "truth effect" that would erase the "bondmaid-concubine" and the "agential" traces of writing-reading thenceforth sublimated into the "mythic truth" of (potentially all) women as embodying a sex that kills (potentially all) men. Such an insistent encircling of specific figures and sequences in the JPM works toward undoing the certainty or reification of object and subject with which this study began. The identity of woman as reader and woman's agency as instantiated through re-reading can only be sustained through attention to the impossibility of such a project, insofar as re-reading draws forth difference and particularity. I would like to think that the project is a step towards not the fixing of identities but the forging of connective tissue and political solidarity between a never fully readable Pan Jinlian as bond-maid turned concubine arch-yinfu for all (Chinese) time, and present-day sexually transgressive and opportunistic enu as representations of queer women in Taiwan (difficult to categorize and recognize in contemporary high literary terms or dominant ideology). The connective tissue is woven in the representation of their sexuality and in its readings as both constitutive yet simultaneously critical of (rather than simply denigrating and denying) their particular gender-class trajectories and sexual practices. Perhaps reading Chen Xue and her enu alongside Yuan Hongdao and his Qifa is one way to rethink yinfu as not merely the composite tropological object of misogynist representation but one whose assemblage-like bodyparts and sexual/market opportunism continue to resist and critique progressive intellectual appropriation and criticism (including my own). This is where political solidarity can become the intellectual and practical mediation or lining that allows for contact between the two, yinfu and enu, as representations inhabiting at once different and coeval time and space, read here side by side. The figure of a feminist woman-intellectual reader, in reading and service to yinfu and enu, shifts away from models of universal liberation (centripetal to the US and Europe) as well as the historically authoritative position of the intellectual/literatus (centripetal to some culturalist and/or statist Chinese-ness) toward new interventions and struggling aggregation. This is how an examination of misogynist reading structures can then begin to excavate in the "past" (Yuan Hongdao's letters) and in the "present" (Chen Xue's short stories) sensual/sexual sentiments in reading and writing that are lines of flight from the strictures of modern democratic bipolar gender dominance.

I have indicated in the above the multiple contexts that have served as fulcrum to the major concerns of this book. Let me now go through each of the eight essays in turn. In chapter 1 the "modern" egalitarian and individualist sexual ideology of major twentieth century scholarly studies and interpretations of the JPM are reviewed and analyzed. Symptomatically, however otherwise researched, erudite and sophisticated the scholarship, most studies reproduce a consistent gendered logic.

Chapter 2 examines the transformations of the mental world of literati of the mid to late Wanli period, reading in detail the prefaces of Li Zhi and Jin Shengtan for the SHZ in order to establish the shifts in concerns vis-a-vis an increasingly distant imperial bureaucracy, and an increasingly vibrant and ever-present urban market in fictional books. This shift of focus, from imperial service to market management parallels the expansion of a "public" space that had hereto been envisaged and represented as "private," that is, having little to do with bureaucratic and official service to the imperial state. The rise and commercialization of such a non-state-service oriented "public" space marks the beginning of new discursive battlegrounds, defining and negotiating new subjects of representation, of consumption, of ownership. The Wanli proponents of minor literary forms include among them famous and influential admirers of the SHZ (JPM's previous shorter life) and the first readers of a manuscript version of JPM, the earliest recorders to date of a JPM's appearance.

Chapter 3 reads some of these earliest records of readings. One of these readings (Yuan Hongdao's) makes a telling comparison. This comparison holds the key I suggest to understanding some of the embedded cultural meanings of a new fascinating cultural object. The reading of JPM is through such a comparison subliminally articulated with what has been called the "shamanistic substratum" of popular fictional forms . This articulation retrieves for all those who have the necessary cultural capital or knowledge a structure of reading that correlates illness, melancholy, and everyday consumption, in a rhetoric evoking daoist hygienic regimes of the body and its preservation. The problem then becomes one of distinction, or internal stratification within a reading public which at this time ranged from elite readers, the cream of the Wanli crop of Imperial examinees, to overreaching and newly wealthy provincial clerks and even bondservants. Sensual/sexual consumption presents a terrain par excellence for struggles between men as to what can and should be consumed by whom, in what circumstances and forms, and for whose good, what kind of benefit? Aestheticization is one answer to the problem, since an aestheticized erotics can serve to both distinguish between users (readers), and between modalities of use (ways of reading, whether exhortational or prohibitive, gluttonous or refined).

In chapter 4, I take a closer look at one instance of such aestheticization as reading strategy through analyzing Zhang Zhupo's prefaces and how-to-read listings for "his" JPM. In arguing specifically against a "pornographic" reading of JPM, and promoting an ethical, filial even, alternative reading, Zhang Zhupo produces both the moral (pornographic) subject, and his pornographic (immoral, antimoral) "other", Pan Jinlian, yinfu for all ages.

Part two is made up of successive and sequential interventionist readings of JPM. The first sequence, in chapter 5, is the preliminary "Seduction." Textual seduction works through a staging of an eroticized battle between a martial-warrior Hero and a Tiger. This is then juxtaposed to the same Hero pitted against an adulterous and licentious sister-in-law, as representative yinfu.

The second series of narrative moments, read in chapter 6, are the moments of fascination. Textual fascination is produced in pictorial set-ups and narrative paralleling of a concubine-yinfu hanging from her feet, with her vagina as receptacle for plums and penis; wives, concubines and bondmaids swinging in pairs on a swing in the garden; finally a bondservant's wife, the most recent favorite of the Master hanging from the rafter in her room. Bondage imagery is for women whose familial and sexual place is that of bondmaid, concubine or bondservant's wife. Bondservants abound at this particular moment and place (late Ming Jiangnan) via a commercial urban economy whereby they are sometimes able to overreach their socio-familial base status, to become sexual/market opportunists and wielders of an insecure wealth and an intimate power.

In chapter 7, I read the tropes whereby bondmaid-concubines are made over into "obscene objects"-a cat, dog's piss, but also the Master's urine are all associated with the yinfu in such a way as to show up the contaminating powers of intimate domestic and sexual appendages. This particularly abject-ing narrative sequence finales with the anti-filial Master reduced to livestock (thus of a less than human(e) order) befitting one who played his extensions, dependents and appendages to excess yet also marking the revenge of the feline/female.

Chapter 8 offers a retake on Zhang Zhupo in the light of recent literary developments in Taiwan. The appearance of lesbian erotic stories and queer fiction in Taiwan has elicited both formal responses from the literary establishment, readings as prefaces and criticism in major literary journals, and the informal ever-extending discussions on the internet, especially among the various gay and lesbian and queer discussion boards. I juxtapose Zhang Zhupo's reading of JPM with Yang Zhao's preface to Chen Xue's collection of short stories, Enu Shu, and find the continuing problematizing of the representation of female sexuality from self-claimed "representatives" of the literary field. But, whereas Zhang Zhupo evinces a desiring and highly ambivalent relation with his textual objects, Yang Zhao's relation is both more condescending and prescriptive. This is not surprising in view of the new social and political forces at work in Taiwan at the moment, when democratizing momentum is fast transforming into a reticent policing of social and sexual dissidents. In siding with historical yinfu and contemporary enu, this study proposes a counter-ethic of reading that would forge dissident erotic relations alongside and away from hegemonic male-female modalities of desiring, reading and writing.

Preface