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Mapping Modern Beijing
i

Mapping Modern Beijing

Space, Emotion, Literary Topography

Weijie Song

1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2018

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​020067–​1

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Xiaojue Wang 王曉玨 and Patrick Song 宋昭齊
i

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Affective Mapping of Modern Beijing 1

Articulating Beijing in My Heart 2
Emotion, Qing, and Chinese Urban Narrative 5
Five Methods of Imagining Beijing 12

1. A Warped Hometown: Lao She and the Beijing Complex 36

Utopianist (Dis)Enchantment, Materialized Desire, and Urban
Darkness 38
Atlas of Wartime Emotions 48
Ide©ology and the Socialist Production of Space 60
Teahouse, Warped Miniature, and Self-​Mourning 70

2. Urban Snapshots and Manners: Zhang Henshui and the Beijing Dream 80
Curiosity, Novelty, and the Ghost House 88
The City and Its Family Romance 98
An Unofficial History of Emotions 109

3. The Aesthetic versus the Political: Lin Huiyin and the City 119
The Poetics and Politics of Urban Objects 122
Passion and Pain in Place 137
An Alternative Urban Blueprint 144
Oblivion and Recollection 151

vii
viii i Contents

4. A Comparative Imperial Capital: Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, Victor

Segalen, and the Views from Near and Afar 154
An Ideal-​Type City and the Performance of Pleasure 157
The Twilight of Empire and the Disclosure of the Forbidden City 170
Beneath the “Great Within,” Horizontal Wells, and Spatial Exoticism 188

5. A Displaced City and Postmemory: Relocating Beijing in Sinophone

Writing 199
Food Memory, Emotional Topography, and Bittersweet Aftertaste 200
Beijing Sojourn: Between Allergy and Eulogy 215
In(Ex)clusion and Chivalric Geography 227

Epilogue: Beijing and Beyond 239

Urban Literature in Late Qing and Republican China 239
Mapping Mainland Cities after 1949 243
Imagining Taipei, Hong Kong, and Beyond 248

Selected Bibliography 255

Index 293
 Acknowledgments

i
This Beijing project was originally inspired by a 1997 conversation with
Professor Chen Pingyuan when he returned to Peking University from a one-​year
visit to Columbia University sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Since 1999, Professor David Der-​wei Wang, my advisor and mentor, has encouraged
me to continue the adventurous and long journey into the (in)visible Beijing with
his unwavering support and wise guidance.
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to many other professors and teach-
ers, including the late C. T. Hsia, Wei Shang, Ping-​hui Liao, Wendy Swartz, Lening
Liu, Paul Anderer, Andreas Huyssen, Carol Gluck, Gayatri Spivak, Hamid Dabashi,
Elisabeth Bronfen, Michael Tsin, Robert Hymes, Haruo Shirane, Tomi Suzuki, Feng
Li, Yunzhong Shu, Dorothy Ko, Leo Ou-​fan Lee, Michelle Yeh, Xiaomei Chen, Ban
Wang, Sheldon Lu, Kang-​I Sun Chang, Haun Saussy, Ron Egan, Paul Kroll, Liu
Zaifu, Yingjin Zhang, Xiaobing Tang, Kirk Denton, Michel Hockx, Tani Barlow,
and Suisheng Zhao. I am also enormously grateful to Professors Yue Daiyun, Dai
Jinhua, Wang Hui, Zhao Yuan, Wen Rumin, Yan Jiayan, Qian Liqun, Chen Yangu,
Liu Huiying, Chen Sihe, Wang Ning, Cao Shunqing, K’o Ching-​ming, Cheung
Suk-​hong, Mei Chia-​ling, Cheng Yu-​yu, Shen Dung, Hu Hsiao-​chen, Li Hsiao-​ti,
and Kwok Kou Leonard Chan.
Parts of this Beijing book have been presented at different institutions. Friends,
classmates, and colleagues deserve my deep appreciation: Carlos Rojas, Michael

ix
xi Acknowledgments

Berry, Jianmei Liu, Letty Chen, Robin Visser, Charles Laughlin, Ann Huss,
Mingwei Song, Enhua Zhang, Christopher Rea, Michael Hill, I-​Hsien Wu, Linda
Feng, Hui-​Lin Hsu, Lillian Ho, Andrew Schonebaum, Alexander Cook, Kerim
Yasar, Eileen Chow, Jing Tsu, Chien-​hsin Tsai, Jie Li, Andrea Bachner, Yomi
Braester, Haiyan Lee, Haili Kong, John Lent, Shuang Shen, Nick Kaldis, Ko Chia
cian, Woo Kam Loon, Liu Hsiu-​Mei, Wong Nim Yan, Fan Sin Piu, Isaac Yue, Cao
Weidong, Chen Xuguang, He Zhaotian, Zang Di, Li Meng, Qu Jingdong, Wu Fei,
Li Kang, Shu Wei, He Guimei, Huang Yihan, Wu Xiaodong, Ji Jin, Pan Yao Ming,
Lin Jianfa, Rongxiang Zhang, Richard Jandowitz, Alex Brown, James Cheng, Shu-​
mei Shih, Wendy Larson, Tze-​lan Sang, Maram Epstein, Bryna Goodman, Ina Asim,
Yugen Wang, Daisuke Miyao, Wei Hong, Daniel Hsieh, Paul Dixon, Charles Ross,
Fenggang Yang, Juan Wang, Shaun Hughes, Beate I. Allert, Thomas Broden, Elena
Coda, Atsushi Fukada, Patricia Hart, Kazumi Hatasa, Benjamin Lawton, Howard
Mancing, Song No, Eiji Sekine, Marcia Stephenson, Dawn F. Stinchcomb, Mariko
Moroishi Wei, Jennifer William, Alice Wang, Ai-​Jen Wann, Victoria Beard, Michael
Beard, Ellen Widmer, Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel, Stephen Angle, Xiaomiao Zhu,
Terry Kawashima, Alexander Des Forges, Su Zheng, Mengjun Liu, Wei Su, Shizhe
Huang, Paul Smith, Suzanne Spain, Azade Seyhan, Jingyuan Zhang, Philip Kafalis,
Jordan Sand, Kevin Doak, Eleanor J. Hogan, Leo Shingchi Yip, Karen Beckman,
David Brownlee, Siyen Fei, Suvir Kaul, Ania Loomba, Victor Mair, Ayako Kano,
Thomas Moran, Robert Hegel, Zhao Ma, Chuck Wooldridge, Luca Gabbiani,
Sujane Wu, Chen Xuechao, Hua-​Yuan L. Mowry, Pamela Crossley, Sarah Allan, Wen
Xing, Susan Blader, James Dorsey, Levi Gibbs, Leonard K. Cheng, Richard Davis,
Cai Zong-​qi, Sun Yifeng, Xu Zidong, Wang Chunhong, Kwong Yim-​tze, Lau Yin-​
ping, Lee Hung-​kai, Hsu Tzu-​pin, Chan Wai-​ying, Sitou Sau-​ieng, and Wei Yan.
Rutgers University provides an extraordinarily supportive, motivating, and
rewarding environment for my research and teaching. I must express my enor-
mous gratitude to Ching-​I Tu, Richard VanNess Simmons, Wendy Swartz, Jessey
Choo, Dietrich Tschanz, Paul Schalow, Janet Walker, Senko Maynard, Young-​mee
Cho, Satoru Saito, Suzy Kim, Tao Jiang, Xun Liu, Louisa Schein, Tao Yang, Elin
Diamond, Andrew Parker, Jorge Marcone, James Swenson, Ann Fabian, Doug
Greenberg, and Peter March. Special thanks go to the generous support from the
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, the Confucius Institute of Rutgers
University, Competitive Leave Fellowship Program, Rutgers Research Council
Grants, the Chiang Ching-​kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange,
L. C. Goodrich Fellowship, Weatherhead Fellowship, and President’s Fellowship at
Columbia University.
I feel extremely privileged and proud to work with Suzanne Ryan, Brendan
O’Neill, Sarah Pirovitz, Abigail Johnson, and Alexa Marcon of Oxford University
 Acknowledgments j xi
Press, my copyeditor Henry Southgate, as well as Gayathree Sekar, Raj Suthan and
the team of Newgen KnowledgeWorks, who have been tremendously supportive,
understanding, and helpful while the manuscript was being prepared for publica-
tion. My heartfelt thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and
instructive comments and suggestions. Chapter 3 appeared as “The Aesthetic versus
the Political” in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 36 (2014);
two portions of c­ hapter 5 were respectively published as “Emotional Topography,
Food Memory, and Bittersweet Aftertaste” in Journal of Oriental Studies 45, nos. 1–​2
(2012), and “Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin’s Chivalric Topography” in
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (2015); “Epilogue” appeared
as “Writing Cities” in Blackwell’s A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature (2015)
edited by Yingjin Zhang. I deeply appreciate Michelle Yeh, Cuncun Wu, Steven
Tötösy de Zepetnek, and Emily Corkhill for the generous permission to reprint
here. All versions have been revised for this work.
My parents, Song Wenmo and Sun Guangqin, and my parents-​in-​law, Wang
Guangcai and Jia Fuxian, have offered invaluable and infinite support and help
for the completion of this book and for the birth and growth of Patrick Song. My
brother Song Weiguang also has provided constant help from Beijing in the different
stages of this project. My deepest thank goes to Xiaojue Wang, my wife, classmate,
and soul mate, who has always shared feelings and emotions with me in every step
of my life since we first met at Peking University in 1995. Xiaojue is the extremely
insightful and strict reader and critic of every chapter of my book. She is present in
many ways in my thinking and writing. I dedicate this Beijing book to Xiaojue.
Weijie Song
 The city is shown as at once a social fact and a human landscape. What is dramatized in it is a very
complex structure of feeling.
—​R aymond Williams

Emotion materializes as a moving topography.

—​G iuliana Bruno

Introduction
Affective Mapping of Modern Beijing

i
How does an observer, whether a native, a stranger, a sojourner, a scholar, or
a foreign traveler, look at, listen to, smell, taste, or touch the ancient yet modern
Beijing?1 Does one configure the material and spiritual life of the city as a living
entity with mind and soul, with the help of scientific investigations or aesthetic
imaginations? Or trace the long history of the capital by a positivist study of count-
less files and archives? Or analyze economic activities, social organizations, or col-
lective mentalities of the metropolis by adopting the methodology of the Annales
School? Or highlight Beijing’s human characteristics, spatial diversity, political divi-
sions, cultural inertia, or “affective turn” in the “realms of memories”?2 As historians

1
From 1928 to 1949, Beijing 北京 was named Beiping 北平 after the Nationalist government moved its capital
to Nanjing. In 1937, the occupying Japanese imposed the name Beijing until the surrender of Japan in 1945.
The Nationalist government restored the name Beiping until the end of the Chinese civil war between the
Communists and the Nationalists. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the city was
chosen as the capital and renamed again as Beijing. The spelling Peking was used from 1949 to 1958. The hanyu
pinyin Romanization, “Beijing,” has been used within China since 1958. The American government continued
to follow the Nationalist government in using Beiping until the late 1960s, but since 1979, “Beijing” has been
gradually and widely adopted by governments, news organizations, and international agencies. For practical
purposes, I use Beijing to call the city and capital in the major body of my book.
2
See contemporary French historian Pierre Nora’s summary of modern French history and historiography, and
his reinterpretations of French characters by emphasizing the relations between history and memory, in “From
Lieux de Mémoire to Realms of Memory” and “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in
Realms of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1:xv–​xxiv, 1–​20. For classical documents on
history and memory at the turn of the century and in the late twentieth century, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On

1
2i Mapping Modern Beijing

and social scientists have produced considerable scholarship on various aspects

of urban planning and social movements, what insights can literature and literary
studies provide to approach Beijing’s spatial transformation, emotional vicissitudes,
modern experiences, and urban narratives?
This book considers the relationship between Chinese and non-Chinese literature
and the city of Beijing from the first half of the twentieth century. I aim to explore
the literary topography of space and emotion, the (de)formation of modern subjec-
tivity, individual desire and collective consciousness, political conflicts and historical
violence, as well as nationalist sentiments and cultural memories centering around
the ancient capital and modern city, which has framed the material infrastructures,
human conditions, mental images, political regimes, cultural identities, and literary
imaginations from the late Imperial and Republican periods to the Cold War era
and after. Urban spaces are sociocultural constructs and always underlain by affective
attachments. The city evokes emotional responses from inhabitants, sojourners, and
visitors, and awaits never-​ending writing and reading. The literary and artistic works
on Beijing that I discuss in this book were composed by authors from mainland China,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Europe, America, and diasporic Sinophone communities.

Articulating Beijing in My Heart

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret,
their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
—​I talo Calvino

When reflecting on modern Beijing’s accommodation of the past and the present,
Lao Xiang 老向 (1901–​1968), a native Beijing writer, noted in 1935, “I have lived in
Beijing for thirty years, but I can’t say that I have yet comprehended this city” (我
在北平住了三十年了，但是我不能說已經認識北平).3 The writer Xu Xu 徐訏
(1908–​1980) stated with an ironic tone in 1934, “For those who missed and recalled
Beijing with nostalgia, no one could express its special characteristics” (那些想念
與留戀北平的人，是沒有一個能說出北平的好處的).4 In his well-​known essay
“Missing Beijing” (Xiang Beiping 想北平, 1936), Lao She 老舍 (1899–​1966), a

the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980); Maurice
Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper, 1980); Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-​Memory,
Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1922); and Nora, Realms of Memory.
3
Lao Xiang, “Nan renshi de Beiping” 難認識的北平 [The unrecognizable Beijing], in Beijing hu: xiandai zuojia
bixia de Beijing, 1919–​1949 北京乎：現代作家筆下的北京 （一九一九－一九四九） [Ah, Beijing: Beijing
in modern Chinese writings, 1919–​1949], ed. Jiang Deming 姜德明 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1992), 294. Unless
otherwise indicated, the English translation is mine.
4
Xu Xu, “Beiping de fengdu” 北平的風度 [Beijing’s manners], in Jiang, Beijing hu, 375.
 Introduction j3
preeminent Beijing native writer, confessed, “There is a Beijing in my heart, but
I can’t articulate it” (我心中有個北平，可是我說不出來).5 In “Captive Peiping
Holds the Soul,” published in The New York Times in 1937, the celebrated bilin-
gual writer Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–​1976) wrote, “Peiping is like a grand old tree,
whose roots stretch deep into the earth and draw sustenance from it . . . . How can a
Peiping resident describe Peiping, so old and so grand?”6
All these remarks are interestingly focused on the unspeakability and unrepre-
sentability of the city in their minds and hearts. What is this indescribable quality
of Beijing within and without the realms of feelings and emotions? These writers
employ verbs such as “comprehend,” “express,” “articulate,” or “describe” to address
their relationship with the city, that of longing, remembering, learning, writing,
understanding, or literary representation, dealing with the city in the same way
they deal with a profound text open to endless encoding and decoding. What
is illegible and inexpressible about the city, defying reading and deciphering? In
Sishi tongtang 四世同堂 (Four generations under one roof, 1944–​1950), a novel
about occupied Beijing during the second Sino-​Japanese war, Lao She portrays
an Englishman, Mr. Goodrich, who lives in the city for thirty years and cherishes
everything in this ancient capital: mandarin beads, opium sets, shoes for bound
feet, official peacock feather insignia, and Chinese New Year woodcuts, among
many others. Regarding himself as a living encyclopedia of Beijing lore and Beijing
as his second hometown, Mr. Goodrich claims that he will write a masterpiece
on Beijing. However, this promised manuscript of his idealized Beijing is never
finished.
Centuries before Mr. Goodrich, Marco Polo (1254–​1324) wrote about the com-
pelling shock he felt upon first experiencing Beijing, the capital of the Yuan dynasty,
and about the impossibility of describing the city’s immensity and perfection:

The streets are so straight and wide that you can see right along them from
end to end and from one gate to the other. And up and down the city there
are beautiful palaces, and many great and fine hostelries, and fine houses in
great numbers. [All the plots of ground on which the houses of the city are
built are four-​square, and laid out with straight lines; all the plots being occu-
pied by great and spacious palaces, with courts and gardens of proportionate
size. All these plots were assigned to different heads of families. Each square
plot is encompassed by handsome streets for traffic; and thus the whole city

Lao She, “Xiang Beiping” [Missing Beijing], in Jiang, Beijing hu, 409.
5

Lin Yutang, “Captive Peiping Holds the Soul,” New York Times, August 15, 1937. Another version is “Captive
6

Peking,” in Lin Yutang, With Love and Irony (New York: The John Day Company, 1940), 54–​62.
4i Mapping Modern Beijing

is arranged in squares just like a chess-​board, and disposed in a manner so per-

fect and masterly that it is impossible to give a description that should do it
justice.]7

In 1972, Italo Calvino (1923–​1985), in a fictional version of Marco Polo’s story, turns
this mission impossible to learn and represent Beijing into a process of fluid and
eloquent storytelling, in which Polo describes other cities he visited on his way to
Beijing to an aged Kublai Khan, the ruler of this great city. Sensing the impeding
crisis,

that desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed
to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, . . . only in Marco
Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and tow-
ers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the
termites gnawing.8

This “tracery of a pattern” that is so intangible and unable to be grasped, yet so dura-
ble as to survive the termites gnawing is precisely what literature of the city seeks to
convey, yet simultaneously, is limited in its ability to represent.
Given the rich tradition of world literature about cities—​Charles Baudelaire and
Paris, Walter Benjamin and Berlin, Arthur Schnitzler or Hugo von Hofmannsthal
and Vienna, Fyodor Dostoevsky or Andrei Bely and Saint Petersburg, James Joyce and
Dublin, Charles Dickens and London, Saul Bellow and Chicago, Walt Whitman and
New York, Jorge Luis Borges and Buenos Aires, Yasunari Kawabata and Kyoto, Lao
She or Zhang Henshui 張恨水 and Beijing, Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) 張愛玲
or Wang Anyi 王安憶 and Shanghai, Jia Pingwa 賈平凹 and Xi’an, Ye Zhaoyan
葉兆言 and Nanjing, Xi Xi 西西 or Dung Kai-cheung (Dong Qizhang) 董啟章
and Hong Kong, Bai Xianyong 白先勇, Zhu Tianwen 朱天文 or Zhu Tianxin
朱天心 and Taipei—​the city-​text indeed invokes close reading of a wide array of
generic varieties and differentiations. Richard Lehan observes,

The rise of the city as inseparable from various kinds of literary movements—​
in particular the development of the novel and subsequent narrative
modes: comic realism, romantic realism, naturalism, modernism, and post-
modernism. These modes, in turn, contain subgenres like the utopian novel,

7
Marco Polo, Book of Ser Marco Polo, ed. Henry Yule (New York: Scriber’s, 1903), as quoted in Lin Yutang,
Imperial Peking: Seven Centuries of China (London: Elek Books Limited, 1961), 35.
8
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 5.
 Introduction j5
the gothic novel, the detective story, the young-​man-​from-​the-​provinces
novel, the novel of imperial adventure, the western, science fiction, and dys-
topian narrative.9

How to decode a city-​text and chart a literary topography remains a challenge for
literary storytellers and scholars.
I explore the intriguing relations between literature and the city of Beijing, from
its final imperial years, to its Republican era, and to its socialist stage starting in 1949,
when the People’s Republic of China was founded. By charting the spatial trajecto-
ries of urban emotions in literary representations of modern Beijing, I address the
following questions: How did the changing cityscapes in Beijing affect the forma-
tion and deformation of a modern subjectivity and generate new perception and
apprehension, imagination and representation? And how did literary representa-
tions in turn capture and shape urban transformations and social constructions in
the worlds of physical and emotional life? Literature takes as its task conveying the
real and the imaginary, the material and the intangible of a city, and constructing in
the reader’s mind an urban imaginary that grounds the city in its multilayered lived
spaces, historical temporalities, and emotional variations while resisting the limita-
tions of its materiality.

Emotion, Qing, and Chinese Urban Narrative

In contemplating emotional life in any culturally specific setting, it seems important to note
that emotions have a linguistic life and a public and political status that frequently engender
formulaic modes of expression.
—​A rjun Appadurai

Literary writers rely on imaginative forms of cities to explore what Georg Simmel
(1858–​1918) defined as “the state of mind,”10 what Raymond Williams (1921–​1988)
regarded as a “structure of feeling,”11 and what Harold Bloom (1930–​) called “cit-
ies of the mind.”12 In his widely anthologized essay “Metropolis and Mental
Life,” Simmel suggests exploring the city by diagnosing “the state of mind” of city

9
Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 1.
10
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–​339.
11
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 64. See also his The Country and
the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 158.
12
Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in “Cities of the Mind,” a series of literary places including New York, Paris,
London, Rome, Dublin, and St. Petersburg; see New York (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), vii–​xi.
6i Mapping Modern Beijing

inhabitants, in that “the psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan

individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and
continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.”13 Williams proposes a way of
describing “structure of feeling” in his early work The Long Revolution:

The term I would suggest to describe it is structure of feeling: it is as firm and

definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least
tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture
of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general
organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to
include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major impor-
tance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed.14

In Marxism and Literature, Williams further defines structure of feeling as a set of

collective sentiments in process that has not yet been formalized in fixed ideologies
or values: “We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and
tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling
against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness
of a present kind, in a living and inter-​relating continuity.”15 The structure of feel-
ing is related to new relationships and cultural forms and mediates those affective
elements between the social and the personal. According to Williams, structure of
feeling resides in personal interactions and relationships in everyday life and reveals
itself in literature and arts of the time period.
The terms of “emotion,” “feeling,” “affect,” “mind,” “mood,” and “sentiment,”
among others, have been used loosely and interchangeably. Categories, types, and
meanings of emotions constitute one of the major issues in philosophical investi-
gations. Ronald de Sousa succinctly states, “No aspect of our mental life is more
important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what
make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the
great classical philosophers—​Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—​
had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of
events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating
characteristic behavior.” 16 Recent interdisciplinary studies seek to clarify the theo-
retical ambiguities of these keywords. Relying on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s

13
Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 325.
14
Williams, The Long Revolution, 65.
15
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
16
Ronald de Sousa, “Emotion,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published Febuary 3, 2003, sub-
stantive revised January 21, 2013, http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2014/​entries/​emotion/​.
 Introduction j7
A Thousand Plateaus and Brian Massumi’s translation notes, Eric Shouse delineates
that “feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are pre-
personal,” and further elucidates that “an emotion is the projection/​display of a feel-
ing. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned . . . . We
broadcast emotion to the world; sometimes that broadcast is an expression of our
internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations.”17
In this sense, emotion is interpersonal and social, combining individual and collec-
tive/​public feelings.
Theoretical approaches from Sara Ahmed, Teresa Brennan, Patricia Ticineto
Clough, Jean Halley, Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth, among others,
attempt to “distinguish among emotion (as tied to a particular body or subject),
feeling (the subjective response to emotion), and affect which is often imagined as
a quality that escapes emotions and feelings because it does not belong to a partic-
ular body or subject but, rather, enables a bidirectional capacity to affect and be
affected.”18 Stephanie Trigg also points out that, broadly, affect can be interchange-
able with emotion, yet for contemporary theories, affect is pursuing the emphasis
of poststructuralism and deconstruction on subjectivity, identity, and the body.19
I would agree with Stephanie Trigg that emotion can serve as an inclusive and
umbrella term for other keywords like affect, sentiment, feeling, and passion, and
emotion is also more historical, in that it pays more attention to the dialectic of con-
tinuity and discontinuity among premodern, modern, and postmodern culture.
In the larger context of traditional Chinese language, literature, and philosophy,
qing 情 carries double meanings and can alternatively refer to both emotion and sit-
uation, “both inner feeling and (actual or conceptual) circumstances.”20 With regard
to qing as emotions or feelings, Confucius (551–479, bc) says, “What are human

17
Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/​c journal 8, no. 6 (2005), http://​journal.media-​culture.org.
au/​0512/​03-​shouse.php. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Brian Massumi contends that it is necessary to make a
distinction between affect and emotion; see his Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
18
Katharine Ann Jensen and Miriam L. Wallace, “Introduction—​Facing Emotions,” PMLA 130, no. 5 (2015):
1254. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Teresa Brennan, The
Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley,
eds., The Affective Turn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.
Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Aaron Ben-​
Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre
Pribram, eds., Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2009).
19
Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories—​Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the
Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria 26, no. 1 (2014): 3–​15.
20
For a brief and extensive overview of traditional discourse of qing, see, for instance, David Der-​wei Wang, The
Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2015), 6–​10, 23.
8i Mapping Modern Beijing

feelings of men? They are joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking. These
seven feelings belong to men without their learning them.” (何謂人情？喜、怒、哀、
懼、愛、惡、欲，七者弗學而能).21 Tang Yijie 湯一介, the renowned modern scholar
of Chinese philosophy, examines emotion in Pre-​Qin Confucian moral philosophy, and
points out,

“Qing” typically refers to the “seven qing” (delight, anger, grief, fear, love, dis-
like, desire [xi, nu, ai, ju, ai, wu, yu 喜怒哀懼愛惡慾]), the “six qing” (delight,
anger, grief, enjoyment [le 樂], fondnesss [hao 好], dislike), or the “five qing”
(delight, anger, grief, enjoyment, resentment [yuan 怨]).22

Qing begins with xing 性 (human nature); this reminds of Deleuze, Guattari,
and Massumi’s recent characterization of affect as prepersonal. Martin W. Huang
remarks that Mencius (ca. 372–​289, bc) optimistically proposes, “[I]‌f you allow
people to follow their qing, they will be able to do good” (乃若其情，則可以為
善矣); by the Western Han dynasty (206 bc–​9 ad), Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (c.a.
179–​104 bc) was among the first to highlight the negative moral connotations of
qing; in the Song (960–​1279) Neo-​Confucian scheme, especially in Zhu Xi’s 朱熹
(1130–​1200) thoughts, qing is possibly overflowing and morally suspect; never-
theless, Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–​1529), a leading philosopher in the Ming
(1368–​1644) Neo-​Confucian School, unprecedently emphasizes the significance of
human subjectivity.23 Wang Yangming’s notions of “philosophy of mind” (心學),
“consistency between words and deeds” (知行合一), and “attaining the supreme
conscience” (致良知),24 enlighten and propel Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–​1646),
a follower of Wang Yangming’s School of Mind, to advocate a “cult of qing” (情教)
in late Ming vernacular literature.25
David Der-​wei Wang 王德威 further outlines the trajectories of qing from the
late Ming to the late Qing periods:

The late Ming saw the climax of the poetics of qing, represented by the works
of Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 (1550–​1616) and fellow literati. In response to the

21
Confucius et al., The Book of Rites (Li Ji): English-​Chinese Version, ed. Dai Sheng, trans. James Legge
(Beijing: Intercultural Press, 2013), 104.
22
Tang Yijie, Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, and Chinese Culture (Beijing: Foreign Language
Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd; Berlin: Springer-​Verlag, 2015), 56–​57.
23
Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2001), 25–​28.
24
Shi Changyu, “Wang Yangming’s Neo-​Confucian School of Mind and the Growth of Ancient Chinese
Popular Novel,” trans. Yao Zhenjun, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 2, no. 3 (2009): 195–​217.
25
See Paolo Santangelo, “The Cult of Love in Some Texts of Ming and Qing Literature,” East and West 50
(2000): 439–​499.
 Introduction j9
moralistic interpretation of shiyanzhi, Tang argues that “intent is nothing but
feeling” (志也者, 情也). While valorizing the innate, primordial power of
qing, Tang and his contemporaries also recapitulated its multiple connotations.
One thus sees a wide range of approaches to the meaning, function, and con-
sequence of qing in the following centuries. For instance, Wang Fuzhi 王夫之
(1619–​1692) contemplates the fusion of feeling and scenery; Huang Zongxi
黃宗羲 (1610–​1695) differentiates zhongqing 眾情 (public feeling) and yiq-
ing 一情 (individual feeling); Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 (1724–​1763) ponders the
paradox of qing and qing buqing 情不情 (feeling nonfeeling); Gong Zizhen
龔自珍 (1792–​1841) challenges the historical and intellectual strictures of qing
(youqing 宥情); Liu E 劉鶚 (1857–​1909) yearns for a nationhood nurtured
on the cosmology of qing. With this spectrum of qing discourses, from amo-
rous attachment to historical bearing, from transcendental thought to polit-
ical awareness, Chinese moderns came to reformulate their lyrical/​shuqing
thought.26

Paolo Santangelo classifies emotions and states of mind based on Chinese literature
and history (in particular the Ming-​Qing dynasties), illustrates the closest “equiva-
lent” English translations of the emotions or mood represented directly or indirectly
in the Chinese source, and lists the following five families of emotions:

In each language emotions and states of mind may be grouped in terms of simi-
larity and affinity under the larger umbrella terms of affective complexes, which
presumably represent as many families of emotions including—​for the sake of
convenience—​variants and intermediate phenomena. Such larger complexes
of emotions are: 1. negative projections (Fear, suspicion, anxiety and surprise),
2. positive projections (love, affection, desire, hope), 3. satisfactory affections
(joy, aesthetic/​religious perception, pleasure, satisfaction), 4. aggressive emo-
tions (anger, hatred, jealousy), 5. unsatisfactory affections (sorrow, depression,
shame).27

26
Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time, English manuscript, and the first chapter “Introduction: Inventing the ‘Lyrical
Tradition’,” 1–​38. For a representative anthology of modern scholarship on Chinese lyrical tradition and its
modern interpretation, see Kwok Kou Leonard Chan 陳國球 and David Der-​wei Wang, eds., Shuqing zhi
xiandaixing 抒情之現代性 [The modernity of lyricism] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2014).
27
See his emotion database homepage, http://​users.libero.it/​p.santangelo/​database.htm, and a more detailed
and extensive explanation in his “Some Conclusive Remarks on the Examination of Different Sources: The
Analysis of Non-​literary Documents (Moralistic and Judicial Materials),” in Love, Hatred, and Other Passions:
Questions and Themes on Emotions in Chinese Civilization, ed. Paolo Santangelo and Donatella Guida (Leiden:
Brill, 2006), 404–​408.
10 i Mapping Modern Beijing

He also rightly notes that “emotions are inextricably linked to the inner life of the
individual but also to his social life.”28
In this book, I understand emotions—interpersonal, social, and historical—as a sub-
tle typology rather than a sustained discourse. Literature, a paramount form of “emo-
tion,” “feeling,” “affect,” “sentiment,” and “mind,” serves as the significant vehicle through
which the “atlas of emotions”29 of a city can be outlined and illustrated. Therefore this
book attempts to explore the multilayered and overlapping affective mapping of literary
Beijing in terms of individual and personal “lived experiences” as well as the collective,
social, political, and cultural “state of mind.” Andreas Huyssen maintains that “literary
techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively, and deconstructively
at the same time can be woven into our understanding of urban spaces as lived spaces
that shape collective imaginaries.”30 Literary authors’ points of view, sensibilities, per-
ceptions, representations, and imaginations investigate and describe the individual and
collective emotions and “mental life,” correlating and complementing what historical
and social data and statistics reveal about the material reality of a city.
In Chinese studies, cities have seldom been the focal point. With the majority of
the population being peasants, China has been considered a predominantly rural
country, where the idea of “native land” allegorically represents the nation-​state. Leo
Ou-​fan Lee points out that Chinese scholarship in Western academia was “preoccu-
pied with rural villages.”31 Joseph W. Esherick also observes, “[I]‌n a nation of peas-
ants, Chinese cities have not always received the attention they deserve.”32 Not until
the 1980s did academic research on Chinese cities start to emerge in English-​lan-
guage scholarship as the history of Chinese cities and urban lives attracted increas-
ing attention. Most of these studies were conducted in the fields of history and social
sciences, which substantially help our understanding of the unique trajectories of
Chinese urbanism.33

28
Paolo Santangelo, “Introduction,” in Santangelo and Guida, ed., Love, Hatred, and Other Passions, 2. The
three-​volume Passion, Romance, and Qing: The World of Emotions and States of Mind in Peony Pavilion (2014)
edited by Tian Yuan Tan and Paolo Santangelo (in Brill’s encyclopedic series, Emotions and States of Mind in
East Asia) provides an extensive glossary of specific terms and expressions related to the representation of emo-
tions and states of mind in Peony Pavilion, a famous drama written by Tang Xianzu in the late Ming dynasty.
29
I am indebted to Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film
(London: Verso, 2002).
30
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 7.
31
Leo Ou-​fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–​1945 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), xi.
32
Joseph W. Esherick, ed., Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–​1950 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), ix.
33
G. William Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977); William
Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–​1889 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
 Introduction j 11
Since the 1990s, English-​language literary studies of modern Chinese cities have
grown apace. Yingjin Zhang calls attention to the recurrent city-​country antithesis
“deeply ingrained in the mentality of modern Chinese writers,” and explores the
spatial, temporal, and gender configurations and changes in modern Beijing and
Shanghai.34 Leo Ou-fan Lee examines Shanghai’s literary sensibility, cultural cartog-
raphy, modern consciousness, and cosmopolitan imagination. Recently, mainland
Chinese scholars asserted that the discursive predominance of twentieth-​century
revolution and enlightenment defines and determines the nature of modern Chinese
literature; that is, peasants and villagers become the dominant images, if not stereo-
types, of modern Chinese literary narratives.35 However, the ongoing moderniza-
tion process, the rapid development of globalization, and the recent colossal growth
of urbanization, particularly in mainland China since the 1990s, among other fac-
tors, have changed the ratio, size, and scope of rural and urban population as well as
the relation between infrastructure and superstructure, and have therefore redefined
the literary liaison between the country and the city, and entailed the booming of
literature and literary studies of the cities at the turn of the twenty-​first century.
It is worth noting that “chengshi wenxue” 城市文學 (urban literature) is a broad,
loosely defined subgenre and literary keyword. The terms “cheng” 城 (city, wall),
“shi” 市 (city, market), “chengshi” 城市 (city), and “dushi” 都市 (metropolis) refer
to a set of multiple meanings ranging from county administrative centers, small
market towns, midsized cities, and large capitals, to major metropolises (including
treaty ports and commercial manufacturing centers) in terms of size, population,
function, administration, and governance.36 Chengshi wenxue has also been alter-
natively mixed with dushi wenxue in the heated debates on the rise of literary map-
pings of Chinese cities and metropolises since the 1990s. Furthermore, the Chinese

1984); and Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–​1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1989); Frederic E. Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–​1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Frederic E. Wakeman and Wen-​hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1992); David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989); Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–​1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000); Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003); and Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political
Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
34
Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), xvii.
35
See, for instance, Zhang Hongsheng 張鴻聲, “ ‘Wenxue zhong de chengshi’ yu ‘chengshi xiangxiang’ yan-
jiu” “文學中的城市” 與 “城市想象” 研究 [“The city in literature” and research of “urban imagination”],
Wenxue pinglun 文學評論 1 (2007): 116–​122; and Yang Jianlong 楊劍龍, “Lun Zhongguo dushi wenxue yu
dushi wenxue yanjiu” 論中國都市文學與都市文學研究 [On Chinese urban literature and urban literary
studies], Jianghan luntan 江漢論壇 [ Jianghan forum] 3 (2013): 11–​16.
36
Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, 6–​7.
12 i Mapping Modern Beijing

term “chengshi wenxue” vaguely indicates both “cities in literature” and “literature
in cities,” and the cities serve as geographical backgrounds, cultural settings, or
the subject matter for literary imagination and aesthetical/​political investigation.
Scholarship of Chinese urban literature has focused on, among others, the relation-
ship between the city and the people;37 the rise and fall of literary schools and nar-
rative modes;38 the configurations of time, space, and gender in urban milieu;39 the
new urban culture and alternative modernity in wartime China;40 urban imagina-
tion and cultural memory;41 multimedia, urbanism, and global transformation in
Maoist and post-​Maoist China;42 as well as emotions, feelings, affects, and literary
topography.

Five Methods of Imagining Beijing

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is
composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is
woven.
―Walter Benjamin

Founded in 1045 bc, Beijing has been for more than 850 years the capital of China.
Imperial Beijing with its palaces and city walls, its “preparatory divination,” “cardi-
nal axiality,” and emphasis on north-​south orientation was perceived as a belated
implementation of China’s ancient city ideal illustrated in Zhouli 周禮 (The rites of
Zhou dynasty). According to Zhouli, the capital city was the culmination of “cos-
mic orders,” which bespeak the authority of the empire. Arthur F. Wright sees in
this cosmological order the essence of Chinese cities: “Throughout the long record

37
Zhao Yuan 趙園, Beijing: cheng yu ren 北京: 城與人 [Beijing: the city and its residents] (Shanghai: Shanghai
renmin chubanshe, 1991).
38
Yan Jiayan 嚴家炎, Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo liupai shi 中國現代小說流派史 [A history of the schools of
modern Chinese novel] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989); Wu Fuhui 吳福輝, Dushi xuanliu zhong
de haipai xiaoshuo 都市漩流中的海派小說 [Fiction of Shanghai school in urban vortex], (Changsha: Hunan
jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995); Yang Yi 楊義, Jingpai haipai zonglun 京派海派綜論 [Beijing school and Shanghai
school] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2003); and Wang Dewei 王德威, Ruci fanhua 如此繁華
[Urban splendor] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2006).
39
Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film.
40
Lee, Shanghai Modern; Shu-​mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China,
1917–​1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
41
Chen Pingyuan 陳平原, Beijing jiyi yu jiyi Beijing 北京記憶與記憶北京 [Beijing memories] (Beijing: Sanlian
shudian, 2008).
42
Luo Gang 羅崗, Xiangxiang chengshi de fangshi 想像城市的方式 [Ways of imagining cities] (Nanjing: Jiangsu
renmin chubanshe, 2006); Yomi Braester, Paint the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
 Introduction j 13
of Chinese city building we find an ancient and elaborate symbolism for the loca-
tion and design of cities persisting in the midst of secular change.”43 Jeffrey F. Meyer
writes that Beijing exemplified “the earthly termination of the axis of the universe,
the center of the world, the pivot of the four quarters.”44 This cosmologically struc-
tured urban layout, which Marco Polo described as the epitome of perfection,
remained largely intact as the Chinese empire approached its end.
With regard to modern Beijing’s distinctive spatiality, David Strand points out,
“early-​twentieth-​century Beijing, as a physical entity, remained a city stubbornly
defined by walls, walled enclosure, and gates,” and was “composed of circles within
circles.”45 The spatial stability that seems to transcend the vicissitudes of time gives the
illusion that Beijing stayed static and eternal, with a quality of “positive, transcend-
ent, and enduring antiquity.”46 The ostensibly fixed spatiality of Beijing obscures a
fundamental temporality manifested in various dynastic histories as well as the tur-
bulent changes brought by modernization. From the looting of Beijing in 1860 to
larger-​scale looting in 1900, from the moment when the city wall was dismantled to
make room for the first railway in Republican China to the complete destruction of
Beijing’s city walls to materialize a socialist modernity, modern Beijing has appeared
in different spaces and in different temporalities.47 Such a complex temporal and
spatial configuration of Beijing is precisely what my book sets out to explore.
With the rise of treaty port cities such as Shanghai and Canton since the second half
of the nineteenth century, this seemingly unchanging city took on another set of con-
notations. Often regarded as the antithesis of Shanghai, Beijing was considered authen-
tically Chinese, cultural, and moral, rooted in tradition, elegant, serene, and grand. It
was everything Shanghai was not: an antiurban noncity. This binary rhetoric was at
the center of the cultural debates of “Jingpai” 京派 (Beijing school) versus “Haipai”
海派(Shanghai school) in the 1920s and 1930s. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–​1967)
mocks Shanghai culture as “fundamentally deprived of rationality and elegance.”48

43
Arthur F. Wright, “The Cosmology of the Chinese City,” in Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China, 33.
44
Jeffrey F. Meyer, The Dragons of Tiananmen: Beijing as a Sacred City (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1991), 1.
45
Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 1.
46
Naquin, Peking, 699.
47
If Cheng 城 (city) and Qiang 牆 (walls) cannot be separated in traditional definitions of Chinese cities, in which
a city can be called a city as long as it has walls within it (Sen-​dou Chang, “The Morphology of Walled Capitals,”
in Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China, 75–​100), then Beijing was confronted with the destiny of disappear-
ance when the outer city walls were eventually dismantled in the dominant Maoist urban planning in the 1950s.
Liang Sicheng 梁思成 (1901–1972), son of the cultural giant Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929) and a leading
architect in modern China, lamented with deep sorrow, “The rough opening on the wall is analogous to a fresh
wound.” See Wang Jun 王軍, Cheng ji 城記 [Beijing record] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2003).
48
Zhou Zuoren, “Shanghai qi” 上海氣 [Shanghai spirit, 1927], in Shanghai 上海, ed. Ma Fengyang 馬逢洋
(Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 1996), 62.
14 i Mapping Modern Beijing

Even the non-​jingpai writer Lin Yutang writes with a critical tone, “Shanghai is
terrible in her strange mixture of Eastern and Western vulgarity, in her superficial
refinements, in her naked and unmasked worship of Mammon, in her emptiness,
commonness, and bad taste.”49 In his study of city literature, Yingjin Zhang argues
that the Beijing-​Shanghai opposition was marked by strong emotional attachments,
which associated Beijing with a native land and cultural heritage and saw Shanghai
as a trade and commercial center, a betrayal of ancestral roots.50 Shu-​mei Shih and
Robin Visser further point out that this antiurban discourse entertained by May
Fourth Chinese intellectuals was emphatically informed by their anti-​imperial and
anticolonial cultural standpoint.51
The Beijing-​Shanghai binary rhetoric remained resilient through most of the
twentieth century. For instance, in his 1960s study of the May Fourth Movement in
Shanghai, Joseph T. Chen made a demarcation between two types of city in 1910s
China, represented by Beijing and Shanghai:

Historically, Peking was a museum city of old Chinese civilization, and an

educational and political center. As the capital of China, traditionally it has
always been identified with the North . . . . Shanghai, on the other hand, was
a modern, urban, cosmopolitan, and Western-​oriented treaty port city . . . .
While the great Chinese heritage gave Peking its quality of simplicity, serenity,
grandeur, and imperial stature, the nascent Western influence quickly trans-
formed Shanghai into a lively, mobile, competitive, iconoclastic, and materi-
alistic center.52

Shanghai modernity was measured by speed, height, brightness, as conveyed by the

neon sign “light, heat, power,” which illustrates Mao Dun’s 茅盾 (1896–1981) leftist
view of Shanghai’s spectacle in his monumental novel Ziye 子夜 (Midnight, 1933).
The imagery of Beijing, however, was shaped and defined by ancient city walls, gate
towers, the imperial palaces, historical relics, idyllic scenes, and slow yet elegant
manners, all together constituting tokens of harmony and tranquility unfolding in a
timeless, horizontal capital.

49
Lin Yutang, “A Hymn to Shanghai,” in his With Love and Irony (New York: The John Day Company,
1940), 63–​64.
50
Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, 15–​16.
51
Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 175–​177; Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Post-​
Socialist China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 12–​13.
52
Quoted in Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 78–​79.
 Introduction j 15
This prevailing analytical framework pits Beijing against Shanghai, an authentic,
traditional Chinese city against a Westernized modern treaty port, a pastoral, slow-​
paced, static, “antiurban” city situated in a “rural-​city continuum” against a cha-
otic, fast-​paced, volatile metropolis with a cosmopolitan, global orientation. Such
a dichotomous discourse carries an inherent anxiety that Beijing did not follow the
evolutionary path to converge with the type of modern city arising in the West and
best embodied in China by Shanghai. Consequently, it disables further investiga-
tions of the diverse ways Beijing as a distinctive city has been perceived, illustrated,
and imagined in literary and artistic representations.
In recent years, Beijing studies have gained increasing attention for historical
and political reasons in the English academic sphere, but little attention has been
paid to the urban experience—​empirical and imaginary—​that the “ancient capital”
has undergone throughout the modern century, and even less to the affective reg-
isters arising from that experience. This book explores the emotional and geopo-
etic dynamics of Beijing as the city encountered the challenges of modern times.
Drawing from a vast reservoir of written and visual sources ranging from literary
canons to exotic narratives, modernist poetry to martial arts fantasy, and popular
romance to urban planning, this book aims to construct new methods of under-
standing and conceptualizing the emotional topography of the urban transition
and transformation “betwixt and between” the looting of Beijing in 1900 and the
founding of a socialist capital in 1949 and beyond, against the great backdrop of the
tumultuous twentieth century.
I consider five modes of creating a city-​text that fashion Beijing:

(1) a warped hometown,

(2) a city of snapshots and manners,
(3) an aesthetic city,
(4) an imperial capital in comparative and cross-​cultural perspective,
   and
(5) a displaced and relocated city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory.

These viewpoints highlight varied, interrelated dimensions of Beijing, which

together constitute the dynamism of the city’s imagery and fabricate an urban pal-
impsest of modern Beijing.
With regard to portraying one’s native city, Walter Benjamin (1892–​1940) writes,
“The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the
foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives—​motives of
one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native’s book about his
city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there
16 i Mapping Modern Beijing

in vain.”53 Indeed, traveling into the past highlights the temporal dimension of a city
in the minds of its natives, yet the spatial traces of Beijing, in particular the interior
spaces unapproachable to strangers and foreigners, cannot be ignored. For modern
Beijing’s native sons and daughters, the “deeper motives,” the memoir representations
and the literary acts of traveling into the past, come across in factual and fictional,
psychological and emotional, encyclopedic and fragmentary eulogies of Beijing’s
aesthetic and cultural charm. But a native writer cannot be blind to certain liminal,
transitional, and traumatic moments in Beijing’s passage into the modern era. First,
in 1900, Beijing, the capital of the Qing dynasty, was looted and subsequently occu-
pied by eight allied foreign powers, including England, Germany, Russia, France,
America, Italy, Austria, and Japan, which forced open the ancient, celestial city and
the Chinese Empire and inflicted a physical and psychological wound. Second,
in 1928, Beijing was renamed and downgraded as Beiping after the Kuomintang
國民黨 (or KMT, Nationalist Party) moved its capital to Nanjing; thus the city
lost its status as political center and its original distinction. Then, in 1937, Beijing
was invaded and occupied by the Japanese troops during the Second Sino-​Japanese
War, marking yet another humiliating and distressing stage of the city’s history.
Finally, in 1949, the Gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) reclaimed Beijing
as its national capital, an event described as the peaceful liberation of the city by the
Communist Party and as the fall and decline of the city by the Nationalist Party.
From foreign invasion and looting to East Asian military violence, from dynastic
crisis and domestic warlords’ tyranny to the Chinese Civil War chaos and later the
Cold War sociocultural transformation, these ongoing crises and transitions define
and redefine the emotions and “structure of feeling” of native Beijing writers, who
portray a victimized yet survived hometown shot through with pain and ordeals,
brutality and agony, cataclysms and crisis, despair and hope, symbolic death and
rebirth. They stand at the threshold of the traditional and the modern, drifting back
and forth, wandering inside and outside, and hesitating at the crossroads, during a
liminal journey from premodern empire into modern nation-​state.
In ­chapter 1, I focus on Manchu writer Lao She, arguably Beijing’s most repre-
sentative native writer, and his major novels and dramas from prewar time via the
Second Sino-​Japanese war to the seventeen-​year period of Socialist China (1930s to
1950s). Lao She’s affective mapping of modern Beijing envisions his native city as a
warped hometown swept by the advent, expansion, and menace of modernity as well
as the whirlwind and whirlpool of political violence and historical change. From Lao
She’s point of view, Xiangzi 祥子, a rickshaw puller, lonely individual, frustrated

Peter Szondi, “Walter Benjamin’s City Portraits,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed.
53

Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 19.

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America.” “The North American ambassador so meanly dressed!”
exclaimed the lady. “Hush, madam, for Heaven’s sake!” whispered
the gentleman; “he is the man that bottles up thunder and lightning!”
I suppose my readers all know that Dr. Franklin was the inventor of
lightning-rods, by which the lightning is drawn off from buildings, and
thus rendered harmless. It was this that gave rise to the humorous
reply of the aforesaid gentleman.

Ingenious Excuse of a Schoolboy.—A country schoolmaster

once having the misfortune to have his schoolhouse burnt down,
was obliged to remove to a new one, where he reprimanded one of
his boys, who mis-spelled a number of words, by telling him that he
did not spell as well as when he was in the old schoolhouse. “Well,
thome how or other,” said the urchin with a scowl, “I can’t ethackly
get the hang of thith ere thkoolhouth.”

Keen Satire.—“You saved my life on one occasion,” said a

beggar to a captain under whom he had served. “Saved your life!”
replied the officer; “do you think that I am a doctor?” “No,” answered
the man, “but I served under you in the battle of ——, and when you
ran away, I followed, and thus my life was preserved.”

Talking To One’s Self.—Earl Dudley possessed in a remarkable

degree the unpleasant habit of talking to himself. On one occasion
he was driving his cabriolet across Grosvenor Square, in London, in
his way to Park Lane, when he overtook an acquaintance of the
name of Luttrell. It was raining quite fast, and his lordship good-
naturedly invited the pedestrian to ride. They drove on till they had
nearly arrived at Lord Dudley’s mansion, where, Mr. Luttrell giving no
hint of wishing to alight, the Earl unconsciously exclaimed aloud,
what many would have thought under similar circumstances, “Plague
on this fellow; I suppose I must ask him to dine with me!” How often,
instead of flattering speeches and soothing compliments, should we
hear unpleasant and reproachful remarks, if people were in the habit
of thinking aloud, like Lord Dudley.

Being Behindhand.—An idle fellow complained bitterly of his

hard lot, and said, that he was born on the last day of the year, the
last day of the month, and the last day of the week, and he had
always been behindhand. He believed it would have been a hundred
dollars in his pocket if he had not been born at all!

Aphorisms from Shakspeare.

A heart unspotted is not easily daunted.
One drunkard doth love another of the name.
Do not cast away an honest man for a villain’s accusation.
All offences come from the heart.
Every cloud engendereth not a storm.
Ignorance is the curse of God—knowledge the wing wherewith we
fly to heaven.
He is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man.
There’s small choice in rotten apples.
 SPRING IS COMING! A SONG.
the words and music composed for
merry’s museum.

Tell me, snow wreath, tell me why

Thou dost steal away so sly,
Why up-on the hill to-day,
But to-mor-row gone a-way?
“Spring is coming, spring is coming!”

Tell me, blue-bird, tell me why

Art thou seen in yonder sky,
Pouring music from above,
In a lay that’s all of love?
“Spring is coming—spring is coming!”

3
Tell me, foaming, romping rill,
Dashing headlong down the hill,
Why, like boy from school let out,
Dost thou leap, and laugh, and shout?
“Spring is coming—spring is coming!”

Tell me, little daisy, tell

Why in yonder wooded dell
Forth you venture from the ground,
Mid the sere leaves all around?
“Spring is coming—spring is coming!”
ROBERT MERRY’S MUSEUM.
 My own Life and Adventures.
(Continued from page 35.)

CHAPTER VI.
My new Gun.—​Obstinacy.—​Setting out on a Hunting Expedition.—​A
Strange Character.—​Mountain Sport.—​A Snow-Storm.—​
Getting lost.—​Serious Adventures.

I have said enough as to the indulgent manner in which I was

treated at my uncle’s, not only by him, but by others, to show that no
very great restraints were laid upon my wishes, or even my caprices.
At the time, I thought it very pleasant to be permitted to have my own
way; but I have since been led to believe that most of the serious
evils of my life have flowed from this defect in my early education.
We all of us need to be brought up to follow duty rather than
pleasure, or, to speak more properly, to find our pleasure in doing
our duty. If parents send their children to school, it is the duty of their
children not only to go, but to improve all the advantages offered
them. It is their duty to learn their lessons well and thoroughly, and to
obey the rules of the school; and children that are properly educated,
and who have right feelings, will do this with cheerfulness and
satisfaction. Thus they will find pleasure in following the path of duty.
This is very important for the happiness of children, while they are
children,—for there is no pleasure so sweet as that which is found in
doing something useful and right; but it is still more important in
another point of view. In early life, we form habits, and they are likely
to guide us ever after. It is easy for us to act according to habit, and it
is difficult for us to act otherwise. A child who is brought up in the
habit of finding pleasure in doing his duty, is likely to go on so
through life; and thus he will secure happiness in this world and that
which is to come: while a child who is brought up without a sense of
duty, and at the same time is permitted to follow his fancy, is apt
always to be guided rather by his whims, his caprices, and his
passions, than by any right feeling or right principle. Such a person is
almost sure to meet with much trouble in life, and there is great
danger that he will turn out an unhappy and unfortunate man.
Now I was brought up in this manner, and though my uncle
intended me the greatest kindness by his system of indulgence, it
was, in point of fact, the most mischievous that could have been
devised. I grew up headstrong and passionate, and though my
temper was naturally good, it seemed rather to be injured than
benefited by the manner in which I was treated. I could not bear
anything that thwarted my wishes. I was very easily offended, and
became selfish, unreasonable, and unjust, in proportion as I was
petted and flattered. Thus it happened in my case, as it always
happens, that having my own way made me what is called a spoiled
child; and accordingly, I became disagreeable to myself and almost
everybody else.
I am particular in telling all this for two reasons:—first, to show to
parents, that if they do not wish their children to be miserable and
disagreeable—if they do not wish to lay the foundation of
selfishness, caprice, and injustice in the hearts of their offspring—let
them govern their children, make them mind, make them do right. If
parents do not wish to have their children ruined, let them avoid a
system of indulgence. My other reason for giving these details is,
that I hope to persuade children to do their duty cheerfully, because
this is really the best, the happiest way. It is not only the best for the
future, but the present; not only best in view of manhood, but for
childhood itself.
I am now going to relate some circumstances, which will illustrate
some things I have been saying. It will show not only how much my
temper had been injured, but into what evils a thoughtless and
headstrong youth will rush, if given up to his own guidance.
 On a certain day in January, it had been agreed between Bill
Keeler and myself, that we would proceed to the mountain for the
purpose of hunting. My uncle had bought me a new fowling-piece,
and on this occasion I was to take it with me. I looked forward to the
day with great impatience, and when at last it arrived, Bill and myself
were up by day-break, ready to depart. The winter had thus far been
remarkably mild and open. There was as yet no snow on the ground.
But when we were about to leave the house on our expedition, my
uncle, who had been out of doors, told us that it was going to snow,
and we had better not venture among the mountains. I was
immediately angry at this advice, and told my uncle that I would go,
whether he thought it best or not. With more than ordinary spirit, he
replied that I should not go! This resistance set me in a blaze. I
seized my gun, uttered some words of defiance, and rushed out of
the house. Finding me thus determined and incorrigible, my yielding
uncle told Bill, who stood still all the time, seeming to know how it
would turn out, to go with me, and take good care of me.
Accordingly, he soon joined me, and we went on together, laughing
heartily at the scene which had just passed.
We soon reached the forests that lay at the foot of the mountain,
and while it was yet somewhat dark, we began to climb up the
ledges. As we were passing through a small copse of tall trees
without underwood, I heard the step of something near by, and
immediately discovered a dark object passing slowly on before me. I
drew up my piece, and was on the point of firing, when Bill struck
down the barrel of my gun, and exclaimed, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t
fire!—it’s Old Sarah!” This was said and done in season to prevent
my shooting the object at which I aimed, but not to stop the
discharge of my firelock. The shot struck the ground at the very feet
of my companion, thus coming very near taking his life.
The noise of my gun aroused the attention of the singular old
woman, whom, with the ardor of a youthful hunter, I had taken for a
wild-cat or a wolf. She turned round, and began to speak in a
warning voice. “Go back!” said she, at the pitch of her lungs, “go
back! for the snow is already falling, and you will both get lost in the
woods. In one hour the paths will be covered, and then you cannot
find your way among the mountains!”
Bill and I both laughed at all this, and I am sorry to say that we
returned the kind anxiety of the old woman for our safety, with jeers
and gibes. “Take care of yourself! and we will take care of
ourselves,” said I. “Keep your breath to cool your porridge,” said Bill.
With this and similar impertinence, we passed up the acclivity,
leaving the decrepit old woman to climb the mountain as she might.
I had seen this personage before, and had heard something of
her story; but I was now curious to know more. Accordingly, I asked
Bill about her, and he proceeded to tell me all that was known of her
character and history. She was a native of Long Island, and during
the war of the Revolution had become attached to a British officer,
who was stationed there. He wronged her cruelly, and then deserted
her. With a mind somewhat bewildered, she wandered into the
country, and took up her abode in a cave of the very mountain we
were now ascending. Here she had lived for years, visiting the
villages in the vicinity in the open seasons, but retiring to her den
and subsisting on nuts and roots, during the winter. Many wild stories
were told of her. It was said that she had lived so long in the
mountain, that the foxes had become familiar with her, and would
come and lick her hands. It was said the crows would sit on her
head, and the rattlesnakes coil in her lap. Beside all these tales, it
was said that “Old Sarah,” as she was called, was a witch, and many
persons declared that they had seen her just at dark, or before a
thunder-storm, flying through the air on a broomstick.
Bill’s narrative was cut short by the sudden whizzing of a partridge
from a bush just before me. Another and another soon followed.
These creatures are very cunning. They are always on the watch,
and when they hear or see any one coming, they get on the opposite
side of some rock, or thicket, or tree, and remain concealed till the
person comes near. Then they burst away with a startling, rushing
sound, taking good care to keep the rock, or tree, or thicket between
them and their enemy, until they are at a distance.
 At least a dozen of these fine birds broke away from their cover,
but neither Bill nor myself had a chance for a shot. So we went on,
greatly excited, however, by the game we had seen. It was not long
before we met with another covey of partridges, and firing at random,
I killed one of them. Great was my exultation, for I had never killed a
partridge before; and beside, I had shot it with my new gun; and,
more than all, Bill, who was expert at every kind of sport, had as yet
met with no success. As I picked up the large and beautiful bird, still
fluttering and whirling round in my hand, and held it forth to my
companion, I imagine that I felt of as much consequence as
Bonaparte did when he had conquered the Austrians in the famous
field of Austerlitz.
Excited by this triumph of skill and my new gun, we continued to
push forward, though it was now snowing fast; and the ground was
already covered to the depth of two or three inches. Frequently
meeting with some kind of game, though we got little of it, we
traversed one ridge after another, until we were involved in a sea of
small and thickly wooded ridges and ravines, that crowned the top of
the mountain. Scarcely heeding the course we took, or thinking of
return, we proceeded for several hours. At last we came to a small
hill, and it was agreed between Bill and myself that he should take
the valley on one side, and I on the other, and we would meet
beyond it.
I had not gone far before a rabbit rushed by me with prodigious
bounds, and entered a thicket at a little distance. I followed it, but as
I approached, it plunged farther into the bushes. Intent upon the
pursuit, and guided by its footsteps in the snow, I pursued it from
place to place, from thicket to thicket, but without being able to get a
shot at it. At last it disappeared amid a heap of stones. As these
were loose and not large, I began to pull them away, expecting every
moment to reach the object of my pursuit. But after working here for
some time, I was obliged to give up the effort in despair, and leaving
the place, I set out to join my companion. So intent had I been upon
my object, that I had not marked my route or noticed the lapse of
time. As soon as I began to think of joining him, however, I became
conscious that I had gone a considerable distance out of my way,
and had spent a long time in the chase of the rabbit. I therefore
proceeded with as much rapidity as the rugged nature of the ground
and the dense forest would allow, and in the direction, as I
supposed, toward the extremity of the ridge, where Bill and I were to
meet.
It was not long, however, before I became assured that I had lost
my way—and that, instead of approaching the point designated, I
had wandered a great way from it. I now began to retrace my steps,
and for a time was guided by my tracks in the snow. But the storm
had set in in earnest. The large flakes fell thick and fast, filling the air
with a dense cloud, and seeming to pour down upon the earth as if
shovelled from some reservoir in the skies. In a few minutes after I
had passed along, my tracks were completely covered up, and no
trace of them could be seen.
My situation was now serious, and I began to consider what was
to be done. The advice of my uncle came to my mind, and the
warning of the grizzly old woman crept over me with a sort of
shudder. I fired my gun, hoping to make Bill hear it, and waited in
breathless anxiety for a reply. But the wind was roaring in the tops of
the tall trees, and neither the mountain nor the tempest seemed to
heed my distress, any more than if I had been an insect. I was never
in my life so struck with my utter helplessness. I was not accustomed
to take care of myself. In any difficulty heretofore, I had hitherto
always found some one to extricate me. But I was now alone. No
one was here to aid me. At first I gave way to despair. I threw my
gun to the ground in a pet, and lay down myself, and with bitter
lamentations bewailed my fate. But the gray, gnarled old trees and
sturdy rocks around took not the slightest notice of my distress. I
fancied that I could almost see them smile at my vain wailings. They
did not, at any rate, rush to my relief, and soothe my agony. For
once, I was obliged to rely upon myself; and it was a stern lesson,
which I have never forgotten.
After a few moments, I rose from the ground, brushed off the
snow from my clothes, and began seriously to devise some plan of
action. But here, again, my habit of dependence came in my way.
Little accustomed to think or act for myself in any emergency, I was a
poor hand for contrivance. My convenient friend, Bill Keeler, had
been accustomed always to save me the trouble of making any
mental or bodily exertion. O how ardently did I now wish that he was
with me! How did I fill the mountain with cries of his name! But there
was no return. Even the throat of the mountain, that had ever before
been so ready with its echoes, was now choked up with the
thickening shower of snow. Nothing could be heard but one
deafening roar of the gale, chafing the uneasy tops of the trees.
I concluded to set out in what seemed to me the direction of my
home, and to push straight forward till I was extricated from the wilds
of the mountain. I began to put this scheme in execution, and for
more than an hour I plodded on through the woods. I proceeded with
considerable rapidity for a time, but the snow was now a foot in
depth, and as it impeded my progress, so it diminished my strength. I
was, at length, obliged to slacken my pace, and finally, being
completely wearied out, I sat down beneath the branches of a large
hemlock tree, to rest myself. This spot was so sheltered by the
thickly woven branches as to be free from snow, and here I
continued for some time. When I got up to proceed, I found my limbs
so stiffened that it was difficult for me to move. At the same time a
dizziness came over me, and I fell to the ground.
It was not till the next day that I had any consciousness of
existence. When I awoke, I was in a dark, rocky cavern, with a
grizzly old woman by my side. At first, I fancied it all to be some
strange dream, and expected to awake and find myself in my
comfortable bed at my uncle’s. But pretty soon, remembrances of
the preceding day came back, and guessing at the truth, I asked—“Is
that you, Sarah?” “It is me,” said the old woman; “and you are in my
cave.” “And you have saved my life, then?” said I, half rising from my
recumbent position. “Yes—yes,” said she; “I found you beneath the
hemlock, and I brought you here. But you must be quiet, for you
have suffered, and need care and rest.”
I need not attempt to tell how gratefully I thanked the poor old
hermitess, and how I begged pardon for my impertinence on the
preceding morning. I then began to inquire about other things—the
depth of the snow; whether anything was known of my companion;
and how and when I could return to my uncle. In reply, I was told that
there was at least four feet of snow on the ground; that it was
therefore impossible to attempt to leave the cave; that Bill Keeler,
being an expert woodsman, had no doubt found his way home; and
that in all probability I was given up by my friends as lost.
I was obliged to be content with this recital, though it left me much
cause of anxiety, especially on account of my companion, for whom I
entertained a sincere affection. Being, however, in some degree
pacified, I began to consider my condition. Here I was, in a cave
formed by nature in a rock, and my only companion was a gray old
dame, her long hair almost as white as the snow-drift, her form bent,
her eyes bleared and colorless, her face brown and wrinkled. Beside
all this, she was esteemed a witch, and while feared and shunned by
mankind, she was regarded as the familiar companion of the wild fox
and the rattlesnake.
Nor was this all that rendered my situation singular. There was no
fire in the place I inhabited, yet, strange to say, I did not suffer from
the cold. Nor were there any articles of furniture. The only food that
was given to me consisted of butternuts and walnuts, with a little
dried beef and bread which Old Sarah had brought from the village.
For two days and two nights I remained at this place, the greater
part of the time lying upon the bottom of the cave on my back, with
only a ray of light admitted through the cleft of the rock, which served
as a door, and which was partially closed by two large pieces of
bark. On the third day I was looking from the mouth of the cave upon
the scene around, when I saw a figure at a considerable distance,
attempting to make its way through the snow, in the direction of the
cave. At first sight I knew it to be Bill Keeler! I clambered upon the
top of a rock, and shouted with all my might. I was soon discovered,
and my shout was answered by Bill’s well-known voice. It was a
happy moment for us both. I threw up my arms in ecstasy, and Bill
did the same, jumping up and down in the deep snow, as if he were
light as a feather. He continued to work his way toward us, and in
half an hour we were in each other’s arms. For a short time I thought
the fellow was stark mad. He rolled in the snow as you sometimes
see an overjoyed and frisky dog—then he exclaimed, “I told ’em so! I
told ’em so! I knew we should find you here!” Then the poor fellow
got up, and looking me in the face, burst into an uncontrollable fit of
tears.
I was myself deeply affected, and Old Sarah’s eyes, that had
seemed dry with the scorching of sorrow and time, were now
overflowing. When I noticed her sympathy, however, she shrunk from
notice, and retired to her cave. Bill then related all that had
happened; how he hunted for me on the mountain till midnight, and
then, with a broken heart, went home for help; how he had since
toiled for my discovery and deliverance, and how, against the
expectations of everybody, he had a sort of presentiment that I
should be found in the shelter of Old Sarah’s cave. He farther told
me that my uncle and four men were coming, and would soon be
with us.
I need not give the details of what followed. It is enough to say,
that my uncle soon arrived, with sufficient assistance to take me
home, though the depth of the snow rendered it exceedingly difficult
to proceed. I left Old Sarah with abundant thanks, and an offer of
money, which, however, she steadily refused. At last I reached
home. Not a word was said to remind me of my obstinacy and folly,
in going upon a sporting expedition, against counsel and advice;
nothing but rejoicing at my return was heard or seen. My uncle
invited in the neighbors at evening; there was hot flip in abundance,
and ginger and cider for those who liked it. Tom Crotchet, the fiddler,
was called, young and old went to dancing, and the merriest night
that ever was known, was that in which young Bob Merry who was
lost in the mountain, came to life, having been two days and two
nights in the cave of “Old Sarah the hermitess.”
I am not sure that I did not appear to share in this mirth; but in
truth I felt too sober and solemn for hilarity. The whole adventure had
sunk deep into my mind, and though I did not immediately
understand its full effect upon my character, I had at least
determined never again to scorn the advice of those more
experienced than myself. I had also been made in some degree
aware of that weakness which springs from being always dependent
upon others; and a wholesome lesson had been taught me, in
finding my life saved by an old woman, whom a few hours before I
had treated with rudeness, impertinence, and scorn. I could not but
feel humbled, by discovering that this miserable old creature had
more generous motives of action, a loftier and more noble soul, than
a smart young fellow from New York, who was worth ten thousand
dollars, and who was an object of envy and flattery to more than half
the village of Salem.
(To be continued.)
 The Great Northern Diver, or Loon.

The genus to which this bird belongs are all of a large size, and
entirely aquatic; they are seldom on land, and, although they have
great power, they seldom fly. The construction of their feet at once
points out their facility of diving and their ability to pass rapidly
through the water; the legs are placed far back, and the muscles
possess great power; and the whole plumage of the bird is close and
rigid, presenting a smooth and almost solid resistance to the waves
in swimming or diving.
The Great Northern Diver measures two feet and ten inches in
length, and four feet six inches in the expanse of the wings; the bill is
strong, of a glossy black, and nearly five inches long. It is met with in
the north of Europe, and is common at Hudson’s Bay, as well as
along the Atlantic border of the United States. It is commonly found
in pairs, and procures its food, which consists wholly of fish, in the
deepest water, diving for a length of time with astonishing ease and
rapidity. It is restless before a storm, and its cry, which foretells a
tempest, is like the shrill barking of a dog and maybe heard at the
distance of a mile. It is a migratory bird, always departing for warmer
regions when its fishing grounds are obstructed with ice. It is difficult
to kill these birds, as they easily elude their pursuers by their
astonishing faculty of diving.
The people of some parts of Russia tan the breasts of this bird,
and prepare them in such a manner as to preserve the down upon
them; they then sew them together, and sell them for pelisses, caps,
&c. The articles made of them are very warm, and perfectly
impervious to rain or moisture, which renders them very desirable in
the severe climates where they are used. The Greenlanders also
make use of these skins for clothing, and at the mouth of the
Columbia river, Lewis and Clarke saw numbers of robes made of
them.
 The Laplanders cover their heads with a cap made of the skin of
this bird—which they call loom, a word signifying lame, and which
they apply to it because it is awkward in walking.
The loon is not gregarious, but, as before said, is generally found
in pairs. Its aversion to society is proved by the fact, mentioned by
travellers, that only one pair and their young are found on one sheet
of water. The nest is usually on the edges of small islands, or on the
margin of a fresh-water lake or pond. It contains two large brown
eggs.
In building its nest, the loon usually seeks a situation at once
secluded and difficult of access. She also defends her nest, and
especially her young, with great courage and vigor. She strikes with
her wings, and thrusts with her sharp bill as a soldier does with his
bayonet. It is, therefore, by no means easy to capture the nests or
the young of this bird.
Mr. Nuttall gives the following account of a young bird of this kind
which he obtained in the salt marsh at Chelsea, and transferred to a
fish-pond. “He made a good deal of plaint, and would sometimes
wander out of his more natural element, and hide and bask in the
grass. On these occasions, he lay very still until nearly approached,
and then slid into the pond and uttered his usual plaint. When out at
any distance, he made the same cautious efforts lo hide, and would
commonly defend himself, in great anger, by darting at the intruder,
and striking powerfully with his dagger-like bill. This bird, with a pink-
colored iris like the albinos, appeared to suffer from the glare of
broad daylight, and was inclined to hide from its effects, but became
very active towards the dusk of evening. The pupil of the eye in this
individual, like that of nocturnal animals, appeared indeed dilatable;
and this one often put down his head and eyes into the water to
observe the situation of his prey.
“This bird was a most expert and indefatigable diver, and would
remain down sometimes for several minutes, often swimming under
water, and as it were flying with the velocity of an arrow in the air.
Though at length inclined to be docile, and showing no alarm when
visited, it constantly betrayed its wandering habit, and every night
was found to have waddled to some hiding-place, where it seemed
to prefer hunger to the loss of liberty, and never could be restrained
from exercising its instinct to move onwards to some secure or more
suitable asylum.”
Mr. Nuttall makes the following remarks in respect to the voice of
the loon: “Far out at sea in winter, and in the great western lakes,
particularly Huron and Michigan, in summer, I have often heard, on a
fine, calm morning, the sad and wolfish call of the solitary loon,
which, like a dismal echo, seems slowly to invade the ear, and, rising
as it proceeds, dies away in the air. This boding sound to mariners,
supposed to be indicative of a storm, may be heard sometimes for
two or three miles, when the bird itself is invisible, or reduced almost
to a speck in the distance. The aborigines, nearly as superstitious as
sailors, dislike to hear the cry of the loon, considering the bird, from
its shy and extraordinary habits, as a sort of supernatural being. By
the Norwegians, its long-drawn howl is, with more appearance of
reason, supposed to portend rain.”