Abstract
From the perspective of Chinese diaspora, this chapter lays bare the Chinese Patriarch’s Big Lie of the feminine void of holy hole to bear—to hold and to sire—the masculine holy whole. It deconstructs patriarchal mythology in high and mass culture, in sacred texts and popular television. This exposé opens with Red Sorghum, exploring backward the male-centric tradition, particularly Tao Te Ching, contributing to Mo Yan and Zhang Yimou. It concludes with the geo-affective turn to integrate popular culture from the south—Hong Kong and Taiwan. China’s millennial TV series of the wuxia (swordplay) genre has leaned heavily toward the Jiangnan (River South) style to allegorize the whole female body. Holy Hole 2.0 on TV continues to reinforce Chinese patriarchal culture through cosplay, Jiangnan style.
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- 1.
The double entendre of “hole” and “whole” derives partly from W. B. Yeats’ “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent” (“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” pp. 254–255). To rend or to split creates holes.
- 2.
“Jiu’er” in the sense of “wine” rather than “nine” is deployed once again by Mo Yan in The Republic of Wine (1992). In a metanarrative mode, not only Mo Yan appears in The Republic of Wine, so do his novel Red Sorghum and the wine “Eighteen-Li Red.”
- 3.
The undertone of titillating sadomasochism is embedded in the power play or sex play, from the sorghum field to the winery. When Yu is spanked, he bursts out laughing and screaming: “Shuang!” “Tongkuai!” (爽!痛快!), with the cry of “Niang” (“Mommy!”) interspersed. The exclamations are laced with sexual connotations typical of conjugal moaning. The scene rings with Oedipal transgressiveness in the wake of Yu’s murder of Jiu’er’s leper husband in order to free and eventually to lie with his mother-like employer.
- 4.
What Mo Yan and Yimou Zhang have done is to redirect the Chinese apotheosizing of wine toward political purposes. Perhaps the twin Shakespeares of classical Chinese poetry, the Tang dynasty Li Bai is known as the “Wine Immortal” and Du Fu the “Wine Saint.” Li Bai is said to be inspired only when drunk, resonating with the God of Wine and of Creativity Dionysus. So drunk was Li on one occasion when the Tang emperor asked for a poem that he demanded the imperial concubine Yang Guifei hold the ink stone and the imperial eunuch Gao Lishi take off his shoes, offenses punishable by death. Both complied, and then some, as dramatized by Chen Kaige in Legend of the Demon Cat (2017). Popular culture also gives us Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master (1978) and its endless sequels and permutations. These references merely scratch the surface of the pervasive representations of wine and liquor vis-à-vis art and destruction in Chinese culture.
- 5.
See Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World.
- 6.
John Robert Shaw translates the debut of the pills in Chapter 2: “This medicine that I carry has endless uses. It completely cures numerous symptoms of many diseases. It is the Eight Treasure Pill to Restore the Dead. It is by no means one that may lie loosely with other medicines” (42). This is not only a poor rendition of the original’s form in the seven-character poetry format but it also misinterprets the original’s content: “This medicine on/from my person comes inexhaustibly / It is neither ordinary pills nor powders, nor ointment, / Any and all diseases in the world it would cure, / the Pill of Eight Treasures of Rigid Legs and a Glazed Stare” (“此药随身用不完，并非丸散与膏丹，人间杂症他全治，八宝伸腿瞪眼丸”). An accurate translation needs to reflect not only the comic tone but also the Taoist-Buddhist dialectics of either reviving or terminating, both reviving and terminating, Lazarus.
- 7.
Marx first defines use value precisely in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) where he explains: “To begin with, a commodity, in the language of the English economists, is ‘any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life,’ an object of human wants, a means of existence in the broadest sense of the term. Use-value as an aspect of the commodity coincides with the physical palpable existence of the commodity. Wheat, for example, is a distinct use-value differing from the use-values of cotton, glass, paper, etc. A use-value has value only in use, and is realized only in the process of consumption [sic].”
- 8.
The adage of triple obedience runs weijiacongfu, chujiacongfu, fusicongzi (未嫁從父、出嫁從夫、夫死從子).
- 9.
Rey Chow uses Gong Li’s facial expression in extremis from Ju Dou as the book cover for Primitive Passions (1995).
- 10.
According to Howard Chiang, the later period of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) is “the First Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs.” “The Second Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs” is the Tang dynasty (618–907). “The Third Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs” is the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) (16).
- 11.
See Chapter 4, “Kung Fu Films in Diaspora: Death of Bamboo Hero,” in Sheng-mei Ma’s East-West Montage (2007).
- 12.
Eliot writes in “The Hollow Man”: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” (italics in the original).
- 13.
See Chapter 9, “The Wolf’s Substitute Family in Chinese TV Series: Social Realism and Wuxia Fantasy” in Sheng-mei Ma’s The Tao of S (2022).
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Ma, Sm. (2022). The Holy Hole in Chinese Patriarchal Culture: Going Pop and South. In: Yunzi Li, M., Tally Jr., R.T. (eds) Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_8
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