Chinese Theater: Women Make Meaningful Choices
Not always, but very often - women are the ones who make the dramatic choices
(Photo: Actress Jenny Zhang - playing a fox-like consort of the Qianlong Emperor in the Story of Yanxi Palace)
This essay is part of a set of essays on the topic of Chinese Theater. Other essays are:
For many years, Imperial China has been viewed as culture in which women were excluded from meaningful participation in the society. For the middle and upper class, the ideal woman stayed inside her home, gave birth to her children, and managed the house. Women were not expected to have any job nor were they expected to know enough to even comment on the issues of the day. Educating women beyond basic literacy and simple math was considered a waste of everyone’s time.
And yet… in the majority of Chinese theatrical plays, women are the morally significant agents. Women are the characters who actually have choices to make and their decisions drive the story.
Example: A Handful of Snow
This play, written around the end of the Ming, is about an evil servant who, together with a corrupt minister, plots against his former master, Junior Minister Mo. The corrupt minister Yan Song, wants to acquire Junior Minister Mo’s family heirloom, a jade cup of pure white stone poetically called A Handful of Snow. The play begins with the evil servant telling Minister Yan about the white jade cup owned by Junior Minister Mo. Yan then requests that Mo give the cup to him. Mo has an artisan create a copy and gives the copy to Yan Song. The evil servant inspects the copy and informs Yan Song that this is a copy, not the real thing. Yang Song then orders Mo arrested and executed. Mo flees but is eventually found in a distant town.
At this point, facing certain death, Junior Minister Mo is saved by his long-time servant and likely distant relative who tells the cavalry officer that he is Junior Minister Mo and is promptly executed, while his master escapes. [This act of self-sacrifice by Mo’s man-servant is certainly brave and highly praise-worthy].
The head of Mo’s executed servant is sent back to Beijing and again, the evil former servant is able to tell that this is not Junior Minister Mo’s head. However, at this point a women enters the picture. Junior Minister Mo’s second wife is the woman the evil servant has been lusting over for years. She tells the evil servant that she will consent to marry him if he tells the evil Yan Song that this is Mo’s head. The evil servant agrees. On the wedding night, Mo’s 2nd wife first kills the evil servant and then herself.
Who is the moral agent in this story? Who actually makes a choice in the story? The greedy Yan Song never changes. The evil servant never changes. Junior Minister Mo does very little other than run away. Mo’s servant clearly makes an important moral decision to impersonate his master, and is killed for it, but the play isn’t about him. The central character is the evil servant and he is killed by Mo’s 2nd wife. She is the active player in this drama. By killing the evil servant and then killing herself, she resolves the plot.
When Do Chinese Men Make Moral Choices?
In general, Chinese men in the stories are rarely shown making moral decisions. It’s just a given that a Chinese man will spend years studying for the Imperial Exam and, when he finally passes, that man will then do exactly what the government tells him to do, and go where the government tells him to go, without regard for his wife or children. Often he will leave his wife behind to study in Beijing for three years. At times, if he is sent to a distant post, he will leave his wife and children behind again for another three years. Similarly, when a man chooses to join the army, he is simply gone for ten or twenty years and he then comes back - and all of this takes place off-stage and the audience is simply told the man returns as #1 Graduate or War Hero.
Perhaps part of the reason why Chinese men in dramas are rarely shown making tough decisions is that the moral choices for a man were fairly clearcut and plays which tried to show alternative ways of thinking - different moral systems - ended up being suppressed by the State censors.
The Saga of the Three Kingdoms is Different
The Three Kingdoms stories are nearly all male-centered. Women play an important role in just three of the 60 major plays (Xu’s Mother Berates Cao Cao, Sweet Dew Temple, & Interlocking Strategies). The rest of the time women are barely seen. This may account for why Chinese men are so enamored with the Three Kingdoms period, its all about men showing off their skills, dealing with adversity, winning battles, and making some tough moral choices. Because the Three Kingdoms dramas are are important, it is easy to miss the fact that women play major roles in the non-Three Kingdoms plays.
Why Might Women Play Such Important Roles in Dramas?
The first answer is: at the beginning - in the Yuan Dynasty - all roles were played by women. This continued into the Ming Dynasty as the audiences were largely men and the men doubtless enjoyed seeing pretty women performing on stage (and potentially in bed as well, if they had enough money to spend on after-show entertainment). The actresses would not be convincing in battle scenes and it proved easy to create dramas with women playing important roles.
The second answer is that women in China actually had freedom of choice in a number of dramatic situations. For example:
If a woman’s husband died, she could remarry, or not. Her choice. By contrast, a man with any money at all would almost certainly remarry if his wife died.
If a woman is faced with the choice of saving her child or her husband, she can choose freely. For men, the rules were quite clear: save the life of your leader, save the life of your sworn comrades, save the life of your chief wife, and then - last of all - save your children (first-born son first).
If a woman was faced with death or dishonor, she could choose dishonor. When entire families were sentenced to death for some terrible crime, it was usually the case that the women could choose to become slaves instead of being executed. In some of the stories the women who accepted dishonor were later able to redeem themselves through their own acts or via their children’s deeds. Men rarely had this option. For most men, defeat in battle meant death. For most men, the punishment for a serious crime was death. Military leaders were expected to die in battle - never to retreat. If they did retreat, Chinese military commanders were often executed for cowardice.
Women had the legal right to refuse any marriage. Very often women were put under intense pressure to marry a man their father or clan elder had chosen for them but a strong-willed woman could insist on her decision to not marry the man chosen for them. Quite a number of plays center on this exact issue: who will the woman marry? Again, this places the woman front and center in the drama.
I note that in the recent Palace Dramas (like Story of Yanzi Palace or Empresses in the Palace, or Ruyi’s Royal Love) created for Chinese TV audiences, the women are the key players of the dramas. {See the Sage’s review of The Story of Yanxi Palace here}
In part the reason for this is because the many wives of the Huangdi (AKA: Emperor of China) have legitimate moral choices to make. Some of the wives just want to be happy, some just want to survive, and some are scheming day & night to make sure their son survives and is picked by the Huangdi to be his heir so that one day they will be the Mother of the Huangdi - which is the pinnacle of power for a woman in Imperial China.