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From the Inner Courtyard
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19742 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
2,944 Words |
| Author
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Joan Mooney
Joan Mooney is a free-lance writer whose reviews have appeared
in the Baltimore Sun, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia
Inquirer, St. Petersburg Times, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland
Plain Dealer, and Washington Times. |
GOLDEN LILIES
Kwei-li, adapted and with an introduction by Eileen Goudge
New York: Viking, 1991
181 pp., $17.95
Most Westerner have some mental images of imperial China from Pearl Buck or "The Last Emperor," particularly of the restricted life of a woman: feet bound as a child, marriage arranged in girlhood, a destiny centered around early marriage and the bearing of sons, and service to her mother-in-law.
It is true that a Chinese woman's life before 1900 is so alien to the experience of modern Americans that it is hard for us to understand what life was like for these women or how they thought. Kweili's two sets of letters written in 1886 and 1912, offer a delightful solution. These letters, from one of China's most volatile periods, could not illustrate the pace of change better had they been fiction written for that purpose.
Golden Lilies is really two stories: not only Kwei-li's own life, but also Eileen Goudge's discovery of her letters. She first found them in a dusty volume in the Santa Cruz public library as My Lady Of the Chinese Courtyard, translated by Elizabeth Cooper and published in 1914. Cooper, the wife of an American missionary, lived in Shanghai. She knew Kwei-li whose husband, the governor of Kiangsu, gave her a translation of the letters. Since the original letters no longer exist, it is impossible to know to what extent Cooper may have embellished them. Goudge says she changed only the archaic syntax and the thee's and thou's.
She retitled the book Golden Lilies, a phrase used in imperial China to refer to a woman's bound feet, as tiny and beautiful as flowers. The book's epigraph is an old Chinese saying, "For every pair of golden lilies there is a kang of tears." Goudge's other addition is the delightful pen-and-ink drawings of Chinese artist Zhang Qing, in the traditional style.
A universal story
Goudge's preface, recounting her discovery of the letters and her own reaction to them, touches on the reasons for the book's appeal to an audience far removed in time and place. The Far East--an outdated term, but descriptive of the way Westerners have traditionally viewed this area of the world--has always held an exotic fascination for Americans because of its very difference. But
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