Peony in Love (35 page)

Acknowledgments

THIS IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL, AND I WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN ABLE
to write it without the wonderful research of many scholars. For place and time, I’d like to thank George E. Bird, Frederick Douglas Cloud, Sara Grimes, and George Kates for their memoirs and guides to Hangzhou and China. For information about Chinese funerary rites, beliefs about the afterworld, the three parts of the soul, the abilities and weaknesses of spirits, and ghost marriages (which are still performed today), I’d like to acknowledge Myron L. Cohen, David K. Jordan, Susan Naquin, Stuart E. Thompson, James L. Watson, Arthur P. Wolf, and Anthony C. Yu. Although sometimes Justus Doolittle and John Nevius—both nineteenth-century travelers to China—could be somewhat patronizing, they nevertheless did thorough jobs of documenting Chinese customs and beliefs. V. R. Burkhardt’s
Chinese Creeds and Customs
is still a useful and practical guide to these subjects, while Matthew H. Sommer’s book,
Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China,
thoroughly delineates the regulation of sexual behavior and men’s and women’s rights in the Qing dynasty.

Lynn A. Struve has found, translated, and cataloged first-person accounts from the Ming–Qing transition. Two of these stories formed the Chen family’s experience in
Peony in Love.
The first comes from an account given by Liu Sanxiu, who was taken captive, sold a few times, and eventually became a Manchu princess. The second is a hair-raising account given by Wang Xiuchu about the massacre in Yangzhou. His family’s experience brutally explores the difference between volunteering to sacrifice yourself for your family and being volunteered because you’re believed to have less value. (For the novel, I have reduced the ten-day massacre to five.)

In recent years, there has been some wonderful scholarship done on women in China. I’m indebted to the work of Patricia Buckley Ebrey (women’s lives in the Song period), Susan Mann (women’s lives and education in the eighteenth century), Maureen Robertson (women’s lyric poetry in late imperial China), Ann Waltner (on the woman visionary T’An-Yang-Tzu), and Ellen Widmer (Xiaoqing’s literary legacy). I was highly amused—and dismayed—by a list in a recent
Shanghai Tattler
of the twenty criteria for becoming a better wife. Although written in 2005, many of these suggestions found their way into the novel as advice for women to make their husbands happy in the seventeenth century. For those interested in reading more about footbinding, I highly suggest Beverley Jackson’s classic
Splendid Slippers,
as well as Dorothy Ko’s brilliant and illuminating
Cinderella’s Slippers
and
Every Step a Lotus.
In addition, Dr. Ko’s knowledge about Chinese women’s lives in the seventeenth century, and the three wives in particular, is impressive and inspiring.

Cyril Birch’s translation of
The Peony Pavilion
is a classic, and I am grateful to the University of Indiana Press for giving me permission to use his beautiful words. Just as I was writing the final pages of the novel, I was lucky to see a lovely nine-hour version of the opera, written and produced by Kenneth Pai, performed in California. For more scholarly approaches to the opera, I’m indebted to the work of Tina Lu and Catherine Swatek.

Judith Zeitlin of the University of Chicago has been like a fairy godmother to this project. We began with a lively e-mail correspondence about
The Three Wives’ Commentary.
She recommended articles she’d written on Chinese female ghosts, spirit writing, self-portraits as reflections of the soul, and the three wives. I was extremely lucky to meet with Dr. Zeitlin in Chicago and spend an incredible evening talking about lovesickness, women’s writing, and ghosts. Not long after that, a package arrived in the mail. She had sent me a photocopy of an original edition of
The Commentary,
owned by a private collector. Dr. Zeitlin never hesitated to share her expertise or assist me in getting help from others.

Translations vary tremendously. For Chen Tong’s deathbed poems, what the three wives actually wrote, Wu Ren’s account of events surrounding the commentary, Qian Yi’s remembrances of her dream about Liniang, the words of praise written by the book’s admirers, and all other supplementary material that was published with
The Three Wives’ Commentary,
I have used translations by Dorothy Ko, Judith Zeitlin, Jingmei Chen (from her dissertation “The Dream World of Love-Sick Maidens”), and Wilt Idema and Beata Grant (from
The Red Brush,
their impressive and comprehensive 900-plus-page collection of women’s writing in imperial China).

In addition to
The Peony Pavilion
material, I’m also grateful to the scholars listed above for their translations of the writings of so many other women writers of that period. I have tried to honor those women’s voices by using words and phrases from their poems, much as Tang Xianzu created pastiches culled from many other writers in
The Peony Pavilion. Peony in Love
is a work of fiction—all mistakes and changes from the real adventures of the three wives are my own—but I hope I have captured the spirit of their story.

Thank you to the editors of
More
and
Vogue,
whose assignments book-ended this project. Photographer Jessica Antola and her assistant, Jennifer Witcher, were wonderful traveling companions as they followed me almost everywhere I went on my research trip to China. Wang Jian and Tony Tong served as proficient guides and translators, and Paul Moore once again handled my complicated travel plans. I’d like to give special acknowledgment to author Anchee Min, who arranged for me to meet Mao Wei-tiao, one of the most famous Kunqu opera singers in the world. Ms. Mao showed me, through an interesting combination of movement and stillness, the depth and beauty of Chinese opera.

Thanks as well go to: Aimee Liu, for her knowledge about anorexia; Buf Meyer, for her provocative thoughts about ancestral emotions; Janet Baker, for her fine copyediting; Chris Chandler, for his unending and patient help with the mailing list; and Amanda Strick, for “man-beautiful,” her love of Chinese literature, and for being such an inspiring young woman.

I’d like to thank Gina Centrello, Bob Loomis, Jane von Mehren, Benjamin Dreyer, Barbara Fillon, Karen Fink, Vincent La Scala, and, well,
everyone
at Random House for being so kind to me. I’ve been very lucky over the years to have Sandy Dijkstra as my agent. She’s simply the best. In her office, Taryn Fagerness, Elise Capron, Elisabeth James, and Kelly Sonnack have all worked tirelessly on my behalf.

Final thanks go as always to my family: to my sons, Christopher and Alexander, for always cheering me on; to my mom, Carolyn See, for believing in me and encouraging me to persist and remember my worth; to my sister, Clara Sturak, for her good and kind heart; and to my husband, Richard Kendall, who asked thoughtful questions, had great ideas, and is very brave about my being away from him so much of the time. To him I say, This and all eternities.

About the Author

Lisa See is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling novel
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Flower Net
(an Edgar Award nominee),
The Interior,
and
Dragon Bones,
as well as the widely acclaimed memoir
On Gold Mountain.
The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit the author’s website at
www.LisaSee.com.

ALSO BY LISA SEE

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Dragon Bones

The Interior

Flower Net

On Gold Mountain

Peony in Love
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from some actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2007 by Lisa See

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Indiana University Press:
Excerpts from
The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting)
by Tang Xianzu, translated by Cyril Birch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), copyright © 1980 by Cyril Birch. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

Stanford University Press:
Excerpts from
Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China
by Dorothy Ko, copyright © 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Stanford University Press,
www.sup.org.

Library of Congrees Cataloging-in-Publication Data
See, Lisa.

Peony in love: a novel/Lisa See.

p. cm.

1. Women—China—Fiction. 2. Opera—Fiction. 3. China—History—Ming dynasty, 1368–1644—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.E3334P46 2007

813'.54—dc22                                                                                          2007001623

www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-623-8

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