Death of Woman Wang, The
by Jonathan D. Spence
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan D. SpenceEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09-03
ISBN: 014005121X
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Death of Woman Wang, The
Book Review: My book report..
Summary: 5 Stars
The vast majority of historical books about the common man are surveys of great swaths of humanity, general histories of the masses. Reader's settle into the comfort of their reading chair with a history book, and as they read they rarely feel the strong emotions that we associate with narratives. They read a tome about WWII and the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and although they feel horror at the murders of so many, the horror is mitigated because six million is a gigantic number, a statistic, and we can comprehend it only as a number. Would we feel much worse if it had been seven million murdered or much better if it was 4 million? We naturally depersonalize numbers. The diary of Anne Frank, however, stirs our emotions and we react with strong pathos to the narrative of this one young girl. The lesson here is that we only feel for things that are intimate, close by. We fall in love with a co-worker, dislike our next door neighbor, and we feel sad when we find out about the death of someone we knew.
In much the same way, Jonathan Spence's "The Death of Woman Wang" engages us, makes us feel for these 17th century Chinese commoners. It helps that the book has a penetrating style and uses forceful imagery. Spence notes in his introduction that he has set out to make the book more personal by focusing on the stories of individuals. Rather than limiting our scope, this choice brings the lives of rural Chinese more into focus. When history does individualize, it tends to focus on the lives of the great and wealthy, yet the stories of the masses go untold, lost to the annals of time. Here we have the raw lives of commoners, sometimes more desperate, always more difficult. Perhaps, as we later remove our focus, we will be able to better understand the pains of the multitude, and extrapolate the emotional contours of their lives.
T'an-Ch'eng is our local, a small, rural county that is quite ordinary in many ways. It doesn't have any heroes, no personages of great fame are from there, no battles of any note were fought there, and it more or less resembles the counties that surround it. It is, however, a very unfortunate place. In the last 40 years the people of T'an-Ch'eng have witnessed droughts, hails of locusts, marauding bandits, floods, Manchu invaders, earthquakes, and in their wake plague and famine. The population has been decimated, and those strong enough to leave have left. The ones who have stayed behind cannot protect one another. The weak and the old count their days. The youth have become dissolute, the people murderous, not able to trust others, cannibalism abounds and "close friends no longer dare walk out to the field together." What these people face, in the words of the country magistrate, is "one of basic survival--physical and moral--in a world that seem[s] to be disintegrating before their eyes.
As Spence notes in his introduction, it is ironic that the Chinese, who were meticulous record keepers, and compiled a massive, meticulously detailed historiography of the country, failed to preserve the types of local records which are the bread and butter of historical scholarship. The registries of birth, marriage and death, coroner's inquests, guild proceedings, and land-tenancy records that medieval European scholars, for example, rely on so heavily are rare in China. In order to conjure up an image of T'an-ch'eng Spence has chosen three alternative sources that overcome this obstacle adroitly.
Our first source is called the Local History of T'an-ch'eng, and was compiled in 1673 by members of the gentry elite, headed by Feng K'o-ts'an, himself a former magistrate. Feng played witness to the catastrophes of T'an-ch'eng, and as a result his Local History is exceptional from others (they were created by every county across China) in that it presents the travails of the county in graphic, harsh detail. He wrote of T'an-ch'eng, saying that it was as if "fate were throwing rocks upon a man who had already fallen in a well."
Huang Liu-Hung, whose writings serve as our second source, served from 1670-1672 as magistrate. As magistrate, he wielded enormous power over his community, serving as both chief legal officer, financial officer, and guardian of public security. Because he is a man of such prominence, we are given entrée into areas we otherwise might have been excluded from. His two works, our sources, are his personal memoir and a handbook on the office of the magistrate, which, fortunately, were written with painstaking accuracy and detail.
The last source is that of P'u Sung-ling, a man little known in the West, but in China a famed writer, considered one of the best of his era. He was an essayist, dramatist, and short-story writer, and his stories serve as a complement to the other sources, which are straightforward accounts. P'u Sung-ling's stories give us a window into people's inner lives, their hopes and dreams, and their fears. His stories are mystical or mundane, sometimes both, incorporating magic realism into normal narrative. Although not from T'an-ch'eng, he lived very close by in Tzu-ch'uan county to the North. The two counties were separated by bandit-infested hills, which would have made forays difficult, but he did pass through T'an-ch'eng in 1670 and 1671, and we can assume that much of what he wrote about would parallel the lives of people in T'an-ch'eng.
The Local History shows us that taxes were an especially onerous burden to these people who were living already under the yolk of misery. With the demise of the Ming dynasty and rise of the Manchus things did not improve much. There were two taxes, one for the size of the land you owned, and the other on adult males. Since commoner's hardly ever had the money to pay off their taxes all at once, the taxes were collected in several installments over the course of the year.
Compounding the problem, T'an-ch'eng was located on a main road that saw the passage of government officials, military supplies, and couriers. The county was expected by the crown to provide whatever was needed to help their passage: road maintenance, transport services, and care of official and their retinues. The government provided a stipend to defray the costs, but it did not cover them entirely.
Instead of making the tax burden less severe, disasters could cause the burden to increase. In the wake of the great earthquake of 1668, many died or fled the area, but the state did not reduce the number of adult males on its roles enough to cover the actual amount missing, yet the tax had to be paid, so the extra amount needed was divided equally amongst the survivors and paid. We can only imagine the strain this put on them, these families that were scraping by. Even if the farmers could overcome their difficulties and had enough of a grain surplus to pay the taxes, they still had to run the gauntlet of assayers, unscrupulous men in town who converted the farmer's copper cash into the silver form required by the government. And then there were many landowners who exploited the farmers. Huang Liu-Hung went after one of them with the arm of the law, but the landowner managed to avoid conviction by intimidating witnesses into silence.
The Local History offers much advice in the form of biographies. For women these biographies were designed to be moral compasses. For example, one "show[ed] how - with determination and strict moral purpose one could survive as a widow, make a living, and bring up one's children to be either worthy scholars or loyal wives in their turn." The women who were "loyal" or "virtuous" were considered paragons of upright social behavior. In the great majority of the cases the women were married. Apparently it was difficult to secure your spot in the pantheon of virtuous women if you didn't have a man to please by your actions. The virtues of "chastity, courage, tenacity, and unquestioning acceptance of the prevailing [read male!] hierarchy - unto death if necessary," might get you a mention in the hallowed Local History of T'an-ch'eng. Disfiguring your face after the death of your husband (in order to avoid potential suitors) didn't hurt your chances either.
Despite the bleak picture painted by immense suffering and turmoil, the "The Death of Woman Wang" doesn't wallow in its tears. Pithy vignettes of hope and country justice are speckled throughout, among the tragedies.
P'u Sung-ling recounts the story of Hsi-Liu, a young widow with two boys to care for. The older one is lazy and doesn't study. The younger one is "incredibly stupid" and lazy as well. Hsi-Liu reforms them both, in what we have come to recognize as the salient characteristics of the wise-ones in parables: wiliness, fortitude, and intelligence. The older son becomes dutiful and makes good by attaining the highest civil service degree possible. The younger one follows suit, only he becomes a successful merchant, making "tens of thousands in trade." This struck me as a paradox, considering that he was "incredibly stupid," but then it occurred to me that merchants were at the bottom rung of the occupational totem pole in Ming society.
The book is speckled with stories that impose their view of correct female behavior, especially how to act towards one's husband. P'u Sung-ling, however, an observer of the full spectrum of human activity, writes sympathetically about the plight of women. One story is about a young woman who is thrown into a terrible marriage, and the revenge she wreaks on her husband. Her husband is lazy, dissolute, and gambles away all their money. Once bottomed out, he sells her as a concubine. Fortunately, the girl comes from a very wealthy family, and they rescue her from sexual slavery. In fable-like manner, she flaunts her wealth in front of her ex-husband - what could have been if he had been a virtuous - more wealth than he could have ever imagined.
Last we come to the tragic story of Woman Wang, who runs off with another man in defiance of her husband and social convention. Surely her story, since it ends in her murder by her husband's hand, was included in the Local History as a warning to other women who might consider the same thing. Transgressions committed by women against the moral order were persecuted severely, as evidenced by stipulations of the legal code. For what she had done, Woman Wang "was classified as a fugitive and subject to a punishment of one hundred blows." We are told also that her killing would be considered justified in the eyes of the law if Kao was to catch her in the act.
We can imagine her, laying next to her husband, wondering what life might be like with another man, or at least not with her husband. She is surely desperate - why else would she risk so much? We feel true empathy for her once we learn that she has been abandoned on the road by her paramour. She has betrayed her husband, yet the betrayal by her lover seems more contemptible by comparison. Not only has she lost her lover, she has lost her life in the process. What hope could remain in her heart?
With nowhere to turn she makes her way home in fear. Once there, she can't bring herself to confront her husband, Kao. Instead, she finds shelter at a local temple, until one day her neighbor and Kao show up one after the other. The neighbor and Kao quarrel, and the neighbor slaps him, and we know that this slap will somehow figure into the rest of the story. Kao allows Woman Wang back, and they live with one another for several months. One cold Winter's night he strangles her to death in brutal fashion, forcing his knee into her abdomen and crushing it. Kao attempts to place the body near his neighbors house in order to frame him but is foiled by some night watchmen who scare him off. Despite his failure to implicate the neighbor, Kao goes before the magistrate and accuses his neighbor of the murder. Huang, our memoirist magistrate, quickly sees through Kao's lies and finds him guilty of the crime. He sentences Kao to a severe beating, and forces the neighbor to pay for Woman Wang's burial costs. Her burial is expensive and elaborate, done in order to appease Woman Wang, so that "her lonely spirit would be pacified."
We have tales of woe, and hardship overcome. The people of T'an-ch'eng needed both. Some of them serve as correctives to people's errant behavior, the others to show them that life is worth living, that despite all their suffering, there was some justice in the world, and hope.
Summary of Death of Woman Wang, The
Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at his hands. Magnificently evoking the China of long ago, The Death of Woman Wang also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.
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