Mistress and Maid (Jiohong Ji) by Meng Chengshun

393 Pages·2001·1.575 MB·English

by  Chengshun Meng, Cyril Birch

Mistress & Maid
(Jiaohongji)
translations from the asian classics
Translations from the Asian Classics
Editorial Board
Wm.Theodore de Bary,Chair
Paul Anderer
Irene Bloom
Donald Keene
George A.Saliba
Haruo Shirane
David D.W.Wang
Burton Watson
Mistress & Maid
(Jiaohongji)
by Meng Chengshun
Translated by Cyril Birch
columbia university press / new york
columbia university press
New York
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance
given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester,West Sussex
Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meng,Ch˚eng-shun,17th cent.
[Chiao hung chi.English]
Mistress and maid :Jiaohongji / by Meng Chengshun ;translated by
Cyril Birch.
p. cm.— (Translations from the Asian classics)
ISBN 0–231–12168–7 — ISBN 0–231–12169–5 (pbk.)
1.Meng,Ch˚eng-shun,17th cent.—Translations into English. I.
Title:Jiaohongji. II.Birch,Cyril,1925– III.Title. IV.Series.
PL2698.M44 C4713 2000
895.1¢246—dc21
00–034583
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on
permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Lisa Hamm
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To J.I.Crump
& the chimes at midnight

Contents
Introduction ix
Signposts of Romance xxiii
Cast of Characters 1
scene 1 Legend 3
scene 2 Leaving Home 5
scene 3 Meeting with Bella 11
scene 4 Evening Embroidery 22
scene 5 In Search of a Beauty 30
scene 6 Flower Poems 37
scene 7 Response in Rhyme 43
scene 8 Trouble from Tibet 52
scene 9 Sharing the Lampblack 55
scene 10 Hugging the Stove 62
scene 11 Frontier Defense 71
scene 12 Thwarted Rendezvous 75
scene 13 Dispatching the Summons 83
scene 14 Quiet Despair 86
scene 15 Parting Vows 91
scene 16 Defense of the City 98
scene 17 Seeking a Cure 101
scene 18 Secret Pact 106
scene 19 The Portraits Delivered 113
scene 20 Cutting the Sleeve 117
scene 21 Sending the Matchmaker 126
scene 22 The Match Opposed 132
scene 23 A Drink with Courtesans 141
scene 24 The Matchmaker Reports 150
scene 25 Exorcism 158
viii Contents
scene 26 Third Visit 168
scene 27 The Slippers 176
scene 28 Petal Scolded 184
scene 29 Interrogation 190
scene 30 Viewing the Portraits 196
scene 31 Solemn Pact 202
scene 32 Petal Tells 211
scene 33 Reluctant Parting 220
scene 34 Envoys Appointed 228
scene 35 The Keepsake 232
scene 36 The Road to the Examinations 239
scene 37 Celebration 245
scene 38 Return in Triumph 249
scene 39 Bewitched 254
scene 40 A Haunting Suspected 260
scene 41 The Ghost Exposed 268
scene 42 Master Shuai Proposes 275
scene 43 Parting in Life 281
scene 44 Wedding Rehearsal 290
scene 45 Weeping on the Boat 296
scene 46 Petal Questioned 310
scene 47 Maiden’s Passing 313
scene 48 Joined in Death 324
scene 49 United in the Tomb 335
scene 50 Reunion with Immortals 342
Introduction
The author of Mistress and Maid(Jiaohongji),Meng Chengshun,
lived from 1599 to 1684.Renewed interest in his plays in China during the last
twenty years has led to the unearthing of some details of his life story,but
there are still blanks,especially for the last twenty-odd years of his long life.
He styled himself Meng Zisai,Ziruo,or Zishi,and invented sobriquets like
Squire Cloud-Rest and Transcendent Chronicler of the Isles of Flowers,
which express his disdain for worldly trammels but suggest also a mild self-
mockery.
Meng Chengshun’s family belonged to the mandarin class of Shaoxing,a
populous city in the central coastal province of Zhejiang.Shaoxing has long
been noted for the production of fine wine,lawyers,and literary talent;
Meng’s own writings reflected the libertarian ideas of his brilliant,unpre-
dictable fellow-townsman,the dramatist and painter Xu Wei,who died just a
few years before Meng was born.In the twentieth century,Shaoxing’s tradi-
tional eminence was reaffirmed by the fiery and greatly gifted fiction writer
and polemicist Lu Xun.
Meng Chengshun was already middle-aged by 1644,the year the Ming dy-
nasty finally collapsed under its weight of corrupt and inefficient senility and
the alien Manchus entered Beijing to establish the last of China’s dynasties
of conquest,the Qing.The national catastrophe did not spare the intellectual
and artistic elite of Jiangnan,“South of the River.”One of Meng’s closest
friends,Qi Biaojia,a Ming loyalist official,was a noted book collector and a
diarist who recorded an extraordinary number of dramatic performances he
had witnessed.Qi’s estate in Shaoxing was the meeting place for the con-
vivial poets,artists,and music lovers who comprised the Maple Club.But Qi
had also served the Ming as a censor and later a local governor,and in 1644
he retired to a monastery;the following year he drowned himself rather
than accept office under the Manchus.Another close friend was the famous
painter,the bohemian Chen Hongshou,who took refuge as a Buddhist
monk in a mountain monastery after 1644 and died eight years later.
Meng Chengshun was for years a member of the reform-minded Revival
x Introduction
Society,but like many of the educated men of his time he was not destined
for an important role in the imperial bureaucracy,whether of the native
Ming or of the new Manchu power.He was fifty before he passed the
provincial examination for the second degree,the juren,in 1649 and began
service as a xundao,supervising the education of prospective examination
candidates in the prefecture of Songyang,in the southern part of Zhejiang
province.He “left a fragrant name”in local records for his improvements in
the restoration of buildings and the provision of land for funding studies.A
few years in this modest post,however,was the total extent of his official ca-
reer.It has been suggested that his resignation and return home in 1656 may
have been related to his defense of local literati against the threat of perse-
cution by the Manchu authorities.1
Meng Chengshun’s claim to fame as a dramatist and scholar of the drama
was already established by the 1630s.He seems to have been a man of the
stage as well as the study,holding that it was the duty of the drama scholar
to take part in dramatic performance,and of the playwright to think himself
into the characters he was portraying.He compiled and carefully edited an
important collection of fifty-six zajuor northern-style plays from the Yuan
and Ming dynasties.Plays of this kind had usually only one or two singing
roles and could be performed in a single afternoon or evening.Meng him-
self wrote five zaju plays,which still survive (he included four of them in his
own great collection).
The other favored mode of poetic drama in Meng’s day was the chuanqi
or “southern”romance,which might run to fifty or more scenes as numer-
ous personages,almost all singing roles,worked out an involved plot.Three
of the five chuanqi Meng composed are still extant;the chuanqi romance
Mistress and Maid,in fifty scenes,is his longest play and is regarded as his
masterpiece.
Three of Meng’s plays celebrate lovers faithful unto death.There were at
least two good reasons for the popularity of such a theme in late-Ming
times.One lay in the intellectual atmosphere created by the eclectic philoso-
phers of the immediately preceding generations:liberation from stifling con-
vention,celebration of the claims of spontaneous feeling,sympathy for the
aspirations of youth.But given the political background of the time it is easy
to see the other reason:the loyalty of the romantic lover to his chosen one