The Death of Woman Wang

“I observe these people in the contexts of four small crises: the first involved the working of the land and the collecting of taxes from that land; the second, the attempt by a widow to protect her child and her inheritance; the third, the burst of violence that sprang from a local feud; and the fourth, the decision of a woman named Wang, who was unwilling any longer to face an unacceptable present and chose to run away from her T’an-ch’eng home and husband.” 

This explains the thesis of The Death of Woman Wang—especially the four “crises” that Spence will examine. Spence argues that these four cases provide flashpoints in which one can examine the lives and social and economic circumstances of the rural poor.

“I have deliberately tried to keep this story both rural and local, since the accounts that have been written of rural China in the pre-modern period are not based on one local area but assemble evidence across an immense geographical area and over great stretches of time, a process that makes depersonalization almost inevitable. And when local studies have been made, they have tended to focus not on rural areas for their own sakes but rather on areas that had some prior claim to fame: the number of talented men who were born there, for instance; or else the savagery of a rebellion that raged there, the variety and interest of economic conditions, the historical complexities of social organizations. Whereas T’an-ch’eng county was not famous for anything; it produced no eminent men in the seventeenth century, the data on economic and social conditions are scant, and although disasters struck repeatedly the people themselves did not rebel.”

The problem with previous rural histories of China, Spence suggests, is that they are so broad they do not focus on the experiences of ordinary individuals. Likewise, other histories focus on a region famous for an individual or an event. By focusing on an area like T’an-ch’eng, Spence can discuss issues and circumstances relevant to rural China without being overshadowed by another historical topic.

“When I came across her story by chance in a library several years ago, she led me to T’an-ch’eng and into the sorrows of its history, into my first encounter with a peripheral county that had lost out in all the observable distributions of wealth, influence, and power. I still do not know how much her story can tell us about the Ch’ing state as a whole, but I would guess there were many women like her, as there must have been many counties like T’an-ch’eng, passively suffering, paying their taxes, yet receiving little in return.”

Spence explains not only how he chose the story of woman Wang as the centerpiece of his history, but what he is trying to accomplish by examining it. By exploring the story of someone obscure, Spence wants to develop a better idea of what life was like for the many people not recorded by history.

“And Feng repeated two general observations that had been made about T’an-ch’eng by a local historian nearly a century before: first, that although one might expect an equal balance between ‘Catastrophes’ and ‘Blessings’ in the chapter of the chronicle devoted to local events, in T’an-ch’eng nine out of ten events fell in the catastrophe category; second, that while nature generally manifested itself in the form of a twelve-year cycle, with six years of abundance and six years of dearth, once in each of those twelve years in T’an-ch’eng there would be a serious famine as well.” 

T’an-ch’eng was very unlucky during the 17th century. This was not just the view of F’eng K’o-ts’an, chief editor of the Local History of T’an-ch’eng. Huang Liu-hung was concerned that “the locals had come to believe that they were caught in a series of crises that robbed their lives of all meaning” (14). His words suggest that the region’s superstitiousness partly sought to explain the truly unusual number of misfortunes it suffered.

“As Huang Liu-hung found when he came to T’an-ch’eng to serve as magistrate in 1670, the people’s problem was one of basic survival—physical and moral—in a world that seemed to be disintegrating before their eyes.”

The problems plaguing T’an-ch’eng were largely material: famine, earthquakes, bandits, and poverty. However, the morale of the locals was also a major issue, with suicide being a problem that Huang Liu-hung found necessary to address (13-14).

“[T]he world of ghosts and nightmares remained a part of T’an-ch’eng.” 

Spence notes that the Local History of T’an-ch’eng claims that the region was “unusually superstitious” (15). The implication is that this tendency in the culture of T’an-ch’eng was linked to the desperation and despair the locals felt in the wake of so many disasters.

“In many of P’u Sung-ling’s stories fantasy and reality are fused in this way, as he struggled to define the inexpressible world in which he grew up. For he was deeply interested in such local beliefs, and varied between mocking some as superstitious and taking others seriously.”

Spence often uses P’u’s short stories to try to recreate the cultural mindset of 17th-century T’an-ch’eng. In this example, Spence shows that even an educated and skeptical person like P’u shared some of the folklore beliefs of the locals.

“At the time, T’an-ch’eng was a small, poor county. An oddly shaped administrative area, it had the bulk of its land in a block some fifteen miles square, and from each side of this two long pincers of land curled up toward the north for twenty-five to thirty miles. The southern area was fertile, the site of T’an-ch’eng city, the county capital, and of Ma-t’ou close together, between the Shu and I rivers, which flowed straight through the county on their way to join the Yellow River. The land in the two pincers was hilly, mountainous in places, crisscrossed by smaller rivers, and surprisingly inaccessible from the county capital.”

This description of the geography of T’an-ch’eng helps explain the region’s difficulties. For example, only part of the region was fertile, even though the economy of T’an-ch’eng was mostly agricultural and had little manufacturing (56). In fact, a fertile valley belonged not to T’an-ch’eng, but to a neighboring district (34).

“The most important cause of the ongoing financial crisis in T’an-ch’eng stemmed from its geographical location on the eastern one of the two main roads to the south. […] This meant that at any time people from T’an-ch’eng might be subjected to extraordinary demands for road maintenance or transport services, and in addition had the further expense of caring for officials and their retinues passing through.”

The problems facing T’an-ch’eng were not only geographical, but also man-made. The central government placed extensive demands on the region, and the impossibility of meeting those demands exacerbated local government corruption.

“In T’an-ch’eng, Huang Liu-hung had found, the landlords used six major types of deception to lower their land tax assessments. They hired managers to run their land under assumed names so that they could not be tracked down and held accountable. They pretended that their land was in fact owned by families living in another jurisdiction. They would hand in their taxes in cash or grain as part of a neighboring family’s own tax quota—when that neighboring family was paying at a lower rate. They managed falsely to declare the quality of their land, […] They kept their land out of registers altogether. They declared the grain they had grown on their own land had been produced on someone else’s land.”

In addition to geographical difficulties and burdens put on the county by the state, T’an-ch’eng was plagued by corruption. Here, Spence lists the ways that the landlords got around their tax obligations.

“P’u Sung-ling did not believe that local officials could handle those problems of tax collection and natural disasters any better than they could control local banditry; if anything, his skepticism here was even greater.”

This explains the relevance of several of P’u’s stories—namely, the story of Hsiao-erh, the woman who tricks a local bandit leader into giving money to a poor community (53-56). The inability of local governments to adequately handle banditry is a common theme for P’u, also emerging in the story of Ts’ui “the violent,” who has to organize a local defense force to battle bandits led by a corrupt aristocrat (79-89).

“The Local History contains numerous biographies designed to show 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.”

Widows were expected to be financially self-sufficient and able to raise their children (59). Rigid ideals applied to all Chinese women, and the reality of women’s lives—especially sexual and economic exploitation by men—made it all the more difficult to live up to them.

“There is no doubt that these sections reflect gentry values or an idealized version of them”

Spence explains that the ideals expressed in biographies of women did not match reality. Instead, they merely reflected the values and expectations of the landholding gentry; for working-class women, such ideals were even more unattainable than they would have been to wealthy women.

“But in general P’u seems to have subscribed to the prevailing views concerning the need for widows’ morality and fixity of purpose.” 

P’u’s fiction could take a satirical and critical view of society. However, as Spence notes here, his fiction could also promote the ideals of his society. For example, in one of P’u’s stories, a woman who takes a lover before her husband’s funeral is completed is killed by his vengeful ghost (62).

“But in other stories P’u Sung-ling showed how neighbors and relatives could descend on a widow and strip her home and family to the bones—whittling away the land by lawsuits or by physical coercion, harassing the widow with their attentions, driving her heirs into sexual excess or inducing them to gamble away their inheritances.”

Even though P’u upheld the ideal of the loyal, self-sufficient widow, he also delves into the tragic realities widows could face from hostile relatives and neighbors. Notably, the law did little to uphold the feminine ideal Chinese society at large ostensibly endorsed, stripping widows of the means to live the respectable and self-sufficient lives demanded of them.

“P’u Sung-ling had little faith in local officials’ ability to handle situations of this sort, and the moral of the following story about Ts’ui Meng was merely that such violence must ultimately be controlled by the individual’s will; if channeled for the good of the community there was then a hope that it might ultimately help to make up for the officials’ neglect and enable the local villagers to protect themselves.”

Like P’u’s story about Hsiao-erh, the woman who tricked a local gangster into giving money to an impoverished community (50), the tale about Ts’ui explores the limits of the government’s ability to impose order over powerful bandit gangs (79-89).

“You’ll have a chance to avenge your brother’s death. The day after tomorrow I’ll be coming to check levies in the eastern district.”

This one line reveals the thin line between a feud and official government action. Although a magistrate acting on his responsibility to impose law and order, Huang invites the surviving Li son to join the militia he is raising to bring in the Wangs, giving Li the opportunity to avenge his father and brothers. This speaks to the local government’s weakness; even a well-meaning official like Huang had to rely on the whims of families like the Lis to enforce the law.

“Wang San was long remembered by the people of T’an-ch’eng. Though his death from his wounds showed that he was not a heavenly spirit as some had believed, nevertheless people could not forget the extent of his operations, the size of his gang, or that final act of astounding bravado: when he himself was the killer, coming in person to the court and standing guarantor for the man who had been falsely accused in his stead.”

Spence shows how folklore and current events could merge together. In a place as superstitious as T’an-ch’eng, Wang San could become a figure of awe and terror, capable of defying the government with impunity.

“The virtues fostered were those of chastity, courage, tenacity, and unquestioning acceptance of their prevailing hierarchy—unto death if necessary.”

Seventeenth-century Chinese society pressured women to follow a specific list of virtues, which Spence describes here. Biographies of virtuous women even encouraged wives to literally sacrifice themselves for the sake of their husbands. These deaths by suicide were “considered morally ‘correct,’ as they showed the depth of the woman’s reverence for her husband” (100).

“The insistence on the wife’s loyalty to the husband was so strong that it applied even when the couple were betrothed rather than married.”

The idealization of female sacrifice held true even for women who were simply betrothed to their future husbands. For example, a girl hung herself rather than meet a new suitor when her family broke off her betrothal because the would-be husband had an affair with his widowed sister-in-law (101).

“Local society offered P’u Sung-ling endless sources of inspiration, since he was intrigued by the entire gamut of problems that lurked within sensual relationships: the cash nexus, first of all, and from various of his stories one can compile a list of his rather mocking estimate of comparative female costs.”

Economic pressure is a common theme in P’u’s work—specifically, the idea that the better a woman is for a man, the more expensive she is likely to be. P’u was also “interested in strong women who could have their babies and go right on working” (106)—that is, women who were a financial asset to their husbands rather than a drain on their resources.

“The couple needed somewhere to hide, for by the mere act of running away from her husband, woman Wang had become a criminal in the eyes of the law. Only if a wife was severely hurt or mutilated by her husband, or if she was forced by him to commit sexual acts with others, was she free to leave him.”

It was not merely social pressure that demanded that women be subservient and loyal to their husbands. The law actively sought to punish women who committed adultery. Yet in the case of the woman Wang and her husband Jen, there was no official interest in enforcing the law against men taking back their adulterous wives (126-27).

“By Ch’ing law, both Jen and his father should have received the death penalty for falsely accusing an innocent person of a capital crime. But Huang found massive mitigating circumstances. In the first place, the father had known nothing about the crime; second, he was over seventy and Jen was his only son; third, Jen himself had no children, so the family line would certainly die out if he was executed; fourth, woman Wang had not followed the tao of a wife—she had betrayed her husband and had deserved to die; fifth, Jen had indeed been provoked in the temple by Kao, who should never have hit him.” 

Even though Jen was found guilty of murdering his wife and falsely accusing Kao, he received a light sentence. This demonstrates how much premodern Chinese society valued the continuation of patriarchal family lines and the loyalty of women to their husbands.