Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

Endnotes

¹ Azalea Mountain, written by Wang Shuyuan, was a popular play about the heroine He Xiang and her revolutionary exploits in the late 1920s. The play was adapted into pingju and several Beijing Opera scripts (‘revolutionary’ and otherwise), as well as a 1974 film version.

² A famous aria from Shajiabang, another revolutionary opera, named after a centre of Communist resistance to the Japanese invasion. The town lies on Yangcheng Lake, north of Suzhou in the east of Jiangsu Province.

³ Tragic heroine of Cao Xueqin’s 18th Century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. Frail and emotional, she is associated with melancholy and tears.

⁴ Many Chinese cities have outlying zones set aside to attract investment, typically offering preferential taxation and financial-support policies. A position in such a zone is, in general, highly desirable.

⁵ The Republic of China was established in 1912 (Year 1), after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The thirteenth year of the Republic would therefore be 1924.

⁶ A festival on the twenty-third of the final lunar month, a week before the New Year’s Festival.

⁷ The Hongmen banquet was an incident during the Chu-Han contention (206–202 bc), a civil war which followed the end of the Qin Dynasty. The warrior Xiang Yu tried to eliminate his rival Liu Bang during a feast held in his honour. In modern Chinese, it suggests a trap during festivities.

⁸ Tang Yin (1470–1523), also known as Tang Bohu, a leading Ming Dynasty painter.

⁹ A Qing Dynasty reign name, lasting from 1796 to 1820, more than 250 years after Tang Yin’s life.

¹⁰ There is such a place on the Three Gorges. The word being used for goddess in this story can, however, also be a (rather archaic) euphemism for a prostitute. The Chinese reader is likely to make this association by the end of this story.

¹¹ A short canon of Chinese Communist heroes. Lei Feng (1940–62) was the archetype of the ‘nameless hero’, selfless and revolutionary. Having died in an accident, he became the model for an official ‘Learn from Lei Feng’ movement. Wang Jie (1942–65) sacrificed his own life and saved those of twelve other men in an accidental dynamite blast. Qiu Shaoyan (1931–52) was a Korean War hero who burned to death rather than move and reveal his unit’s position.

¹² The song is ‘The People of the World will Be Victorious’, written ‘collectively’ by the national philharmonic in reaction to Mao Zedong’s statement in May 1970 for the ‘people of the world to unite, and defeat the American aggressors and their running dogs’.

¹³ Cai Yi (1906–92), Marxist thinker whose work New Aesthetics contained an influential discussion of the ‘image’.

¹⁴ Licheng means ‘Pear City’.