Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans.

• Author: Ling, Xiaoqiao

Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans. Translated and edited by WAI-YEE LI. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. 328. $60 (cloth), $20 (paper).

Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge is a critical translation of two memoirs'. Mao Xiang's (1611-1693) commemorative account of his deceased concubine Dong Bai (1624-1651) and Yu Huai's (1616-1696) memoir on the entertainment quarters in Nanjing. While both are considered classical examples of literature on courtesan culture in the seventeenth-century Qinhuai area, they belong to different literary traditions. As Wai-yee Li notes, Mao Xiang's recollections are a radical departure from the tradition of literati records of courtesans with its profoundly personal memories captured in an "unprecedented attempt to bring the minutiae of daily life and the frank avowal of emotions to the commemoration of a beloved woman" (p. xxiv). Mao's memoir spawned imitations in the form of eighteenth and nineteenth-century memoirs about wives and concubines, the most notable being Six Records of a Floating Life (Fusheng liuji) by Shen Fu (1763-after 1809). Yu Huai's memoir evokes the earlier tradition of writing about courtesans, such as Xia Tingzhi's (ca. 1300-ca. 1375) Houses of Pleasure (Qinglou ji). Yet Yu's account emphasizes rupture in a tumultuous time without Mao Xiang's consistent self-righteousness about his choices. Plank Bridge also brings together a close-knit community of scholar-officials whose poetic lines, cited by Yu Huai in a manner evocative of the collection of authentic sounds of an age for the Book of Odes, constitute a repository of collective memory.

There is much more than the translation of these two works. Li has also provided contextualizing materials by introducing texts that focus on two famous courtesans in particular, Liu Rushi (1618-1664) and Chen Yuanyuan (b. 1623). She selected accounts for translation that offer drastically different viewpoints to bring out the rhetorical complexity underlying their divergent representations. In the case of Liu Rushi, she chose accounts from Gu Ling (1609-after 1682), a disciple of Qian Qianyi, who married Liu Rushi as his concubine in 1641; Niu Xiu (1641?-1704), a Qing official, who sustained an interest in the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in his writings: Qian Zhao'ao (b. 1729), whose anecdotes on Liu Rushi were a mixture of rumors and facts that attested to the abiding appeal of Liu in the post-conquest imagination; and finally the modern...