6 The Courtesans’ Drinking Games in The Dream in the Green Bower

Game of Talent, Game of Skill

The close associations of drinking games with literary creations are richly reflected in the genre of quzi ci (lyrics composed to a tune with a fixed tune title) of the Sui Tang and Five Dynasties periods (581–960 CE), the subgenre of xiaoling (short ci poem) in the ci poetry of the Song dynasty, and sanqu (song poems) of the Yuan dynasty.⁷ The seminal Honglou meng provides rich examples of women and men playing drinking games using diverse wine-drinking rules. Classic works inspired numerous inventions of drinking games. The collection Xixiang jiuling (Romance of the Western Chamber Drinking Games, preface dated 1816) anthologizes three hundred tallies on drinking-game chips, drawing from the lines in the play Xixiang ji. In the late Qing collection Honglou ren jing (Mirrors of the Persons in Dreams of the Red Chamber), every stick has inscriptions of a character’s name from Cao Xueqin’s novel, lines from the lyrics in Xixiang ji, and directions for drinking. Building on the intertextually and intermediary incorporations of operatic expressions in Honglou meng, the collection further devises games that channel late imperial readers’ creative engagement with classic texts.

Celebratory scenes of drinking games recall Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival mode in folk culture since they allow characters’ dialogues to “rise above the plot” in a relatively detached linguistic and aesthetic sphere. For Bakhtin, carnival laughter is “a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world.”⁸ In Jinghua yuan, the chapters illustrating learned women’s drinking games depict how their ludic endeavors enrich the narrative tableau through polyphonic interventions and laughter. In the ludic world, literary drinking games open spaces of gaiety and play. Much of the joy of the heroines’ game play comes from displaying their knowledge of fundamental texts, their aptitude for poetry, and their skill in commanding vernacular narratives. A prominent scene is in chapter 82. The characters draw out one of a hundred wooden sticks from a barrel, each inscribed with a specific wine-game command. The first player gives a command based on the popular shuangsheng (twin sounds, or alliterations) and dieyun (rhyming compounds) games, as follows:

All we need are about forty to fifty wooden sticks, each inscribed with phrases about cosmology, geography, birds and animals, insects and fish, fruits and trees, flowers, and plants. Next to the inscribed phrase, two characters should be added, either “twin sounds” or “rhyming compounds.” If one picks a stick on “cosmology rhyming compounds,” she shall find a cosmological phrase that carries rhyming compounds. Afterwards, the player should cite a line from classics, histories, philosophers, and collections. Then the player chooses a main word in the cited line to command another to take a drink, either using the beginning character or the ending character. At the end of the line, the next player should take a drink and continue the game.⁹

The actual play of this game, however, involves even more elaborations to help the participants consume more wine. A maiden proposes to heighten the game’s difficulty. She requires that the hundred players link their lines by connecting with the previous player’s line through twin sounds or rhyming compounds, as if all the lines are continuously composed. Below are some of the first examples from the players of this complicated game:

1. 花卉雙聲: 長春《列子》荊之南有冥靈者，以五百歲為春。‘冥靈’疊韻，敬瑞春姐姐一杯.¹⁰

Flower names twin sounds:

Eternal Spring flower; The Book of Liezi; South of Jing there is the mingling tree, it regards five hundred years as spring. Mingling rhyming compounds. A toast to Sister Ruichun.

2. 古人名疊韻: 王祥《張河間集》備致嘉祥。‘備致’疊韻，敬祥蓂姐姐一杯。¹¹

Ancient people’s names rhyming compounds:

Wang Xiang; Collection of Zhang Hejian; preparing to welcome an auspicious sign. “Beizhi” (preparing to welcome) rhyming compounds. A toast to Sister Xiangming.

3. 古人名疊韻: 張良屈原《九歌》吉日兮良辰。‘吉日’疊韻，敬良箴姐姐一杯。¹²

Ancient people’s names rhyming compounds:

Zhang Liang; Qu Yuan Nine Songs; on this auspicious day, this best of times. “Jiri” (auspicious day) rhyming compounds. A toast to Sister Liang Zhen.

4. 列女名雙聲：姬姜《鮑參軍集》東都妙姬，南國麗人.‘東都’雙聲，敬麗輝姐姐一杯。¹³

Names in Exemplary Women twin sounds:

Ji Jiang; Collected Works of Bao the Adjutant; lovely consorts from the eastern capital, beauties from the southern states. “Dongdu” (Eastern Capital) twin sounds. A toast to Sister Lihui.

As table 6.1 shows, following the flower’s name Changchun (Eternal Spring), the next two players who pick ancient people’s names with rhyming compounds choose Wang Xiang and Zhang Liang. Wang Xiang carries rhyming compounds with Chang Chun in the previous line, and Zhang Liang shares rhyming compounds with Wang Xiang. In the fourth example, following the instruction on the stick, the name Ji Jiang contains an alliteration, and it shares rhyming compounds with the previous name, Zhang Liang. Also, a player chooses a character in the quoted classic text that is in the name of one of the attendants, thus selecting the next player. “Chun” 春 in line one appears in the name of Ruichun 瑞春, who is designated as the second player. Ruichun chooses the character Xiang 祥, which is in the name of a girl called Xiangming 祥蓂, making her the third player. The third player, Liangzhen 良箴, and the fourth player, Lihui 麗輝, are chosen in a similar manner.

TABLE 6.1. A literary drinking game based on the popular shuangsheng (twin sounds, or alliterations) and dieyun (rhyming compound) games.

As part of the game rules, books cited by previous players should not be alluded to again. Considering that not all classic texts contain many twin sounds or rhyming compounds, repetitive allusions to the same text are allowed with a cost (of wine-drinking). Specific rules prevent players from copying others’ ideas. Those who expose their ideas to others are punished by being required to take ten giant ewers of wine. When a player fails to create a correct line, a challenge may lead to a dramatic presentation of the player’s knowledge beyond the designations of female talent and allow her to make amendments and to continue the game at a more difficult level. As Stephen Roddy argues, the heroines in Jinghua yuan incorporate “scholarship within a framework of games.”¹⁴ Just as playing with sound permits the heroines to recognize literati traditions, drinking games allow the heroines to participate in role-play, guess riddles, emulate classical texts, and even foretell the destinies of other players. The heroines’ drinking games illustrate women’s self-empowerment through language and expand understandings of the learned women beyond established discursive descriptions.

Envisioning the Ludic Heroine

Yu Da’s novel Qinglou meng constructs an idealized perception of another group of ludic heroines, that is, the urban courtesans, who are epitomized by literacy, aesthetic tastes, and artfulness in eliciting pleasure. Resonating with Bakhtin’s polyphonic novel, Yu’s work presents drinking games that grant the characters the “equality of utterance,” allowing them to distance themselves from their social circumstances and to participate in the egalitarian process of game-playing. Contradicting voices enhance the pleasure among the players; witty or teasing explications yield amusement among the players and their diegetic audiences. The abundant variety of the courtesans’ games can be related to the late imperial trend of training maids in art and entertainment. Chloë Starr observes that the drinking game episodes in late Qing novel Huayue hen (Traces of flowers and the moon, preface 1858) are “clustered” with a regular periodicity to illustrate an idyllic vision of the courtesan’s emotional world. Qinglou meng likewise arranges drinking games in the narrative to mimic the rituals of life for the scholars and the courtesans. Drinking games create an imaginary spatiotemporal site where the players are distanced from their social circumstances and re-envision their own worth and mutual relations in the ludic world.

Reminiscent of Jia Baoyu’s residence Yihong yuan (literally, “Pleasing Red House”) in Dream of the Red Chamber, Yu Da’s Plucking Green Garden is an imagined space of leisure for the girls, as “green” connects directly to the Green Bower. Yixiang, described as “a gentleman with qing,” socializes with the courtesans and insists that among the singsong girls “there are many with true affections.”¹⁵ The courtesans express their emotive competence through poetic exchanges with scholars in “fragrant and bedazzling poems” (xiangyan shi), which, unlike the barren and bland words of scholars, “are as lofty as bright snows in the early spring.”¹⁶ Often such ornate poems are embedded in drinking games, which engage courtesans and literati as equals during the temporal and spatial setting of the game. A game demands participants acquiesce to its rules and inhabit a ludic environment of simulated fairness, despite the game players’ real social identities. In the ludic world a player’s intellect receives applause and endorsement, but “humiliations are also immediate and public.”¹⁷ The courtesans’ drinking games create spaces of leisure, whereas the participants’ playfulness constantly reconfigures these spaces.

As Rudolf Wagner and Catherine Yeh argue, “leisure is a gendered time/space,” and “in time/spaces with joint activities, the egalitarian utopia of leisure gives women more prominence in determining content than in other decision-making fields.”¹⁸ In Yu’s novel the exchanges between Yixiang and the courtesans operate with the premise of qing, or mutual affection. However, aside from the few Yixiang marries, his connections with most heroines are temporary social relations of leisure. Their mutual emotional commitment does not carry restrictions; a courtesan may choose to marry a patron if the patron can buy her freedom. The courtesans’ less attached economic bonds with the patron permit the girls autonomy and self-rule. Whereas the courtesans take advantage of the games to display their skill, poetic sensibility, and taste, the scholar Yixiang often resorts to the spirit of alea to seek intimacy from his genteel rivals. In chapter 15, Yixiang and a friend of his dress up as beggars to meet the courtesans and borrow travel money from them in order to test the heroines’ character.¹⁹ This game of alea succeeds in helping Yixiang win the hearts of two courtesans. However, the game of alea may also work against the hero. Once, having lost many times in the drinking games and taken wine excessively, the tipsy Yixiang attempts to summon a spirit of a peony flower, who, attracted by his talent, meets him in a dream. The following night, the peony spirit visits again, only to inform Yixiang that she has been punished by the Flower Goddess for seducing the patron and is banished from the garden.²⁰ The episode ends with the fairy vanishing as a wind in a thunderstorm and Yixiang awakening in shock. This example is a combined situation of alea-ilinx, or chance-vertigo, illustrated by the enchanted Yixiang and his failure to obtain the flower spirit.

Throughout Qinglou meng, the drinking games’ allusions to characters in Honglou meng feature mimicry by “playing the linked verse game facing the snow” (duixue lianju), forming the plum-themed poetry club, or composing poems that compare the courtesans to Cao Xueqin’s famous heroines.²¹ Whereas Yixiang good-humoredly compares himself to the amorous Baoyu, the drinking games ironically foreshadow Yixiang’s fleeting relationships with the courtesans. Yixiang’s recurrent anguish comes from his incapacity to accept such uncertainties in his fluid entanglements with the courtesans. The protagonist is by no means “a good player” who faces unfortunate outcomes with objectivity and detachment.²² His frequent entrancement by wine and beauty introduces a corruption of ilinx and nullifies the willpower of agôn. Unlike Yixiang, the sophisticated courtesans are aware of the capriciousness of their bonds with patrons and of patrons’ lack of emotional consistency as part of the game’s rules. A heroine, Aiqing, even emerges as the winner in a game of chance by first pretending to decline Yixiang’s marriage proposal but later accepting it with the assistance of an intermediary.

Because of this predestined bond with Yixiang, Aiqing’s triumph in marriage is a situation of alea (chance). In contrast with Aiqing, the thirty-six beauties are largely introduced in the spirit of ludus to highlight the scholar’s life of idleness and insouciance. The sense of leisure, even ennui, in Yixiang and the courtesans’ frequent banquets and elaborate game playing invites a reconsideration of the concept of ludus, that is, “the primitive desire to find diversion and amusement in arbitrary, perpetually recurrent obstacles.”²³ Unlike agôn, which entails tense competition with a rival, ludus often engages game play as a device to dispel boredom.²⁴ The dreamlike world of leisure, as illustrated in Qinglou meng, creates an elusive and self-contained space where characters’ destinations depend on a variety of attributes, whether skill or chance, romance or wealth. Games, whether the drinking games in the text or the novel itself as a prototypical game, depend on absolute and arbitrary rules; only by accepting these rules can the players find meaning in game play. In Qinglou meng, the game-like rapport between courtesans and literati is often lost when the affectionate Yixiang fails to realize the unreality of the romance. The heroines represent the freedom in play. They play only when they wish to and enjoy the autonomy to leave the game as they wish.

Like the drinking game, the literatus’ bond with the reincarnated fairies is no less than a game that “consists of the need to find or continue at once a response which is free within the limits set by the rules.”²⁵ Complying with the rules of the games means accepting the arbitrary, oppressive aspects of rules in the game’s illusive world. Although game play configurations can be similar to reality, “the respective activities that they subsume are not reducible to each other in time or place.”²⁶ A qualified player can identify the distance between make-believe and reality, between life and play. The ending of the narrative intersects with the closure of Yu’s narrative game when the Moon Immortal bestows each of the returned spirits of the thirty-six beauties, as well as Yixiang and Aiqing, with a magic pellet to eliminate their qing. When Yixiang takes the pellet, “Aiqing appears to him just as a stranger and could not evoke any of his feelings.”²⁷ The elimination of the characters’ qing breaks the spell of their games of romance, allowing the protagonists and readers to perceive that love and emotions are but illusions, while dictating the closure of the narrative.

As Jie Guo observes in her chapter on games in Ming-Qing erotica, games allow readers to intermix the unreality of the game world with the complex plots of the narrative artifice. In a final episode, Qinglou meng encapsulates its own narrative game in a Buddhist elucidation. “The book takes the word qing (feelings, emotions) as a wedge to lift up the plot, deploys kong (emptiness) to evoke the theme of se (form) in qing, and ultimately applies se to resolve the innate emptiness of qing.”²⁸ If the novel is a ludic pastime, the dialectics between qing and se here is playfully spatialized through the idea of kong (emptiness). When read in the milieu of game studies, “emptiness” is none other than a kernel of play, which Caillois argues is “unproductive.”²⁹ Play (be it the novel as a game of narrativization or Yixiang’s game of romance) does not generate new values. Instead, it mostly exchanges belongings between players and often ends in a situation similar to the beginning of the game.

Regulating Qing in Game Play

Drinking games play an important role in facilitating the exchange of qing between the scholars, who are on the path to officialdom, and the learned courtesans, who are often themselves competent poets. Yixiang’s socializing with the courtesans is modeled after the Twelve Golden Hairpins in Honglou meng, with Yixiang playing the role of Jia Baoyu. In a trend of reinventing Honglou meng in late Qing novels, the hero fashions himself as an admirer of Baoyu and the compassionate patron of courtesans.³⁰ The mutual affection of literati and courtesans could be identified in the Qing literati’s trope of articulating the decline in their power and glory through nostalgic remembrance of late Ming courtesans. In Qinglou meng, narrative sympathy channeled through game play is based on the characters’ shared emotional experiences. Sympathy encompasses emotive, bodily, and mythical transmission of feelings and facilitates characters’ self-image and identification with others.³¹ Through shifting speakers and registers, literary drinking games facilitate exchanges of moral sentiments and sympathetic understanding.

As an expanded narrative game, the novel depends on qing to precipitate or delay the reincarnated characters’ journeys toward moral redemption and their return to immortality. When Yixiang witnesses the deaths and departures of most singsong girls and becomes averse to qing, a Daoist priest demonstrates for him fake and real qing. According to the priest, there are six kinds of qing, including chiqing (keenness), zhenqing (sincere feelings), huanqing (joviality in gathering), liqing (longings upon separation), chouqing (helpless sorrow), and beiqing (agonizing memories).³² As “a most affectionate person,” Yixiang’s journey in the realm of qing surrenders to fate—a game of alea. Yet, as the priest explains, keenness (chiqing) gives birth to sincerity (zhenqing); sincerity accounts for the trueness of jovial love (huanqing). Joviality foreshadows the griefs of departures (liqing) and helpless sorrow (chouqing). Together they culminate in agonizing recollections (chouqing).³³ Qing, rather than being a device of fortune or a stake in romance, is implicit in the rules of the game; it governs the process of game play, testing characters’ prudence and tenacity, imposing uncertainties, forcing the amorous to succumb to worldly vicissitudes.

Rules and conventions in drinking games contribute to emotive exchanges between the players, establishing a sympathetic equilibrium between them. The poems the courtesans compose are described as ornate and luxuriant in style, excelling in the genre of xiangyan (fragrant and bedazzling), displaying a delicate balance between qing (love and affections) and se (desire), deploying a broad variety of rhyming patterns. The term xianglian ti can be traced to Han Wo’s (844–923) Collection of the Scented Dress-Case (Xianglian ji). Li Xiaorong observes that the “scented dress-case style” refers to “poetry devoted to the aesthetic and erotic appreciation of woman’s image and the boudoir scene.”³⁴ In Yu Da’s text, scented dress-case poems display the heroines’ moderation between emotive self-expression and ritual decorum. The games using scented dress-case poems allow characters of both genders to express emotional longing. In a drinking game with Yixiang about poetry composition, Aiqing composes the following lines:

Seated in the red chamber and not yet married,

she is like a beautiful jade hidden in a case, pure and flawless.

Her sister-in-law is elder and must be more knowledgeable,

the abashed girl wears a magnolia flower in her cloud-like hair.³⁵

Applauding Aiqing’s poem for “seizing the girl’s fragrance and vibrancy, making the beauty alluring,” the mischievous Yixiang inquires why the beauty is “abashed,” and then realizes that the magnolia flower, or yehe hua, is a pun on “a nocturnal union” between the lovers, indicating sexual intimacy. As the game goes on, the enamored Yixiang becomes more eager, his poems more erotic. The poised Aiqing teases him with the following poem:

New poems fill up my Xue Tao papers,

Radiant are the flowers, full is the moon.

Do not spare this fine moment,

My lord, do not slumber away this evening.³⁶

The transformation of drinking games in xianglian poetry exchanges demonstrates the characters’ negotiations of emotion and decorum, affection and desire, and indicates the courtesans’ connoisseurship of a broad array of poetic rhymes and creative development of feminine writings. The drinking games permit Aiqing to deploy her learning and dexterity to enhance entertainment, display her aptitude, and maintain a spiritual bond with Yixiang. This example illustrates Aiqing’s competency in a game of agôn. When poetry writing becomes a game of skill, it allows Aiqing to regulate her companion and his longings.

The courtesans’ drinking games permit them a means of reconfiguring the legacy of women’s poetry. The same chapter illustrates Yixiang and the beauties socializing in the grand Plucking Green Garden. After playing a finger-guessing game with all attending the gathering, Yixiang, seeing that there are seven people at the table, proposes a poetry drinking game of meiren qiyong (seven odes to the beauty). The evaluation of these poems follows the xianglian genre. As Yixiang puts it, “Only when a poem fits both emotions and reason, could it be considered as a xianglian poem.”³⁷ He applauds various aspects of the courtesans’ poems, such as “subtle application of allusions, achieving a natural and expedient style,” or “producing a savoring poetic taste and breaking a new path.” The following poem by Aiqing is praised for being “refined and appropriate, fragrant in style and deeply moving.”³⁸

Bright moonlight, paper gauze, plum flower shadows,

On the pillow, an aromatic soul charms the butterflies.

Even the parrot is like thee, languishing.

Wary not to stir the lady, he rests still and silent.

As this example displays, drinking games via the mode of xianglian allow the courtesans to make feminine physicality, sensuality, and psychological activity the subject of playful writing.³⁹ Han Wo’s description of urban women in his xianglian poems allows women to speak via men, and the xianglian mode in the courtesans’ games builds on this tradition by enabling the heroines to rewrite an urban femininity and inscribe their longings and aesthetic sensitivities. As a playful mode of writing, xianglian poetry has been denounced as a wasteful digression, which, like other ludic literatures, is adopted by “government courtesans” (guanji) to deplete a scholar’s talent and prevent him from criticizing military and state affairs, politics, and society in his writings.⁴⁰ As a form of game play, xianglian poetry inscribes the central role of courtesans as ludic participants and highlights gendered performance as an integral element of gaming aptitude. To write in the mode of xianglian may be to engage in a combined game of agôn-mimicry (or competition-simulation). In a poetry competition, the adjudication of a good xianglian poem, as Aiqing presents, depends on the conditions of agôn (efficacious skills, erudition, reason, obedience to conventions), but also involves mimicry (simulated roles, spectatorship, carnival, or mirth).

Drinking games in the text are initially games of skill designed to test the game players’ learning, ingenuity, and ability to identify or draw from classical poetry, music, or riddles. However, poetic lines created from the games may frequently “bleed across the boundaries of that magic circle to reference the actual person playing, their real circumstances.”⁴¹ For example, chapter 5 depicts three scholars gathering with twelve beauties at a banquet and exploring an “elaborate drinking game” (qiaoling), with the twelve heroines emulating the Twelve Golden Hairpins in Honglou meng. The rules of the game are as follows:

This drinking game requires three proverbs. The first cites from The Book of Songs, the second line is the name of a qupai melody, the last one concludes with a line of an ancient poem which shall contain the character “flower.” The play counts the head of everyone at the table, starting from the first character of the poem. The one who is counted when the character “flower” is uttered will take over the game, have a drink, and replay the game.⁴²

The lines created to answer the game’s rules create a situation of narrative mise en abyme by allowing the characters to generate puns and create teasing humor. A girl, Yuesu, when answering the command, says, “Is it tonight or which night? Three scholars, in one day shall see all the flowers of Chang An” (今夕何夕，三學士，一日看遍長安花).⁴³ Alluding to Meng Jiao (751–814), who composed this poem after his success in the civil exam, Yuesu creates a pleasing epiphany that addresses the scholars’ connoisseurship of feminine beauty and foreshadows their felicitous pursuit of officialdom. The jovial audiences at the banquet occasionally also add playful interpretations to insinuate eroticism. When Huiqiong takes her turn to drink, she dedicates a line to the previous player, Yuesu: “And how gaily I laughed and talked, ascending the stairs. Tipsy, I pluck a flower branch and take it as a wine straw” (載笑載言，上小樓，醉折花枝當酒籌).⁴⁴ Mocking Yuesu for “being beside herself” with smiles and words because of wine, the naughty Huiqiong implies Yuesu’s desire for intimacy, eliciting laughter from all at the banquet. In game play, laughter signals what Caillois calls paidia, “a primary power of improvisation and joy,” a “spontaneous manifestation of the play instinct.”⁴⁵ Paidia is allied with ludus, another component of play. Whereas paidia represents uncontrolled fantasy or laughter, ludus disciplines paidia and emphasizes effort, skill, and training in play.⁴⁶ Paidia and ludus are two parameters underlying the rubrics of play. Huiqiong’s poem makes Yuesu an embodiment of paidia, with a power of merry diversion.

The text also offers many examples of games of chance, particularly games that are combined with gambling and allow playful diversion. In one Yixiang plays a variation of an old dice game with the girls. The dice in the basin (covered by a cup) are laid out in advance in a certain format. A line of an ancient poem is used to make the player guess the layout of the dice.⁴⁷ When Yuesu gives the line “when the blossoming apricots of ten li come to his view” (一色杏花紅十里), Yixiang makes the right guess that the dice pattern is “five dice showing number two, and the last one showing number four” (二五子四點).⁴⁸ The following line, “The First Scholar urges his charger to bear him with speed” (狀元歸去馬上飛), carries an auspicious indication about the hero’s success in the civil exam.⁴⁹ Yixiang, having deciphered the dice pattern and Yuesu’s wishes, suggests naming the game tongxin ling (same-heart drinking game) to indicate his appreciation of Yuesu’s understanding. The imperative of qing is reinforced through the ludic conventions and establishes an emotional equilibrium between the courtesan and the scholar. In exchange for Yuesu’s sympathy for Yixiang’s situations in the game and in the quest for fame and fortune, she earns a pledge of love from him.

Whereas qing governs the characters’ emotional exchanges in the ludic sphere, riddles and proverbs are often used to create mirthful, lighthearted, and playable games, denoting the power of paidia. In chapter 45, Yixiang and twelve beauties are at a banquet on a boat and play a popular game to add entertainment to wine drinking. The game is as follows: “The player first gives a lantern riddle, the answer of which is a line from the Four Books, and concludes with two proverbs. All three parts need to be consistent in subject.”⁵⁰ This blended game allows the heroines to match classical texts with vernacular expressions of resonant circumstances, creating a hybrid textuality that bespeaks the heroines’ novelty and humor. What follows are a few intriguing lines created by the courtesans.⁵¹

上不在上，下不在下，左不在左，右不在右—不偏之謂中。諺語云：四面勿著實，記記打來鼓當中.

Up not above, down not below, left not on the left, right not on the right. —Not to be inclined to one side is called hitting the center. The proverb goes: do not put weight on the four sides, make every strike at the center of the drum.⁵²

楊君脬大無醫治，宰去嘐嘐始獲安—殺雞。諺語麼，只管羊卵子，不管羊性命。

A man with the surname Yang had an oversized bladder and could not find a cure. Only after he had it removed could he regain comfort and ease. —Killing the Fowl. The proverb goes, “A greedy and cruel person only cares to take the sheep’s testes, even at the risk of killing the sheep.”⁵³

拜倒妝臺聽訓責—是焉得為大丈夫乎。諺語云：「怕老婆，跪踏板。」

Kneeling before the dressing table to receive her chiding—“How can such men be great men?” The proverb goes, “Fearing the wife, he kneels on a step board.”⁵⁴

Eliciting instant understanding from the audience and inducing amusement, these witty lines created through the games exemplify “moments of lyric poetic performance” characterized by a multimodal, hybrid textuality. The courtesans’ extension of literary games to popular forms such as riddles and proverbs produces lines that are discordantly relational and expresses a vernacular aesthetics created through the culture of drinking games. Qinglou meng demonstrates the heroines’ openness in reinventing drinking games beyond classical texts, from poems of sensuality and eroticism to riddles, proverbs, dice games, and jokes. The novel’s depictions of courtesans playing drinking games invite a consideration of the economies of leisure when endorsement or punishment is carried out through wine drinking.

The characters’ performative use of humor in drinking games also induces paidia, that is, clamorous, boisterous laughter. At one point when Yixiang and the thirty-six courtesans meet and dine, Yixiang recounts an old joke told by a friend about the legendary eight immortals.⁵⁵ When three of the eight immortals dine together, they play a game using four sets of diezi (reduplicative characters). Each take a cup of wine after completing four lines using “huhu tutu” (puzzling puzzling), “qingqing chuchu” (clear clear), “rongrong yiyi” (easy easy), “fanfan nannan” (hard hard). Building on this game, Yixiang creates another set of four lines using the same reduplicative characters and encourages the girls to continue the joke sharing. Wanqing seizes the occasion to tease the hesitant Jiangxian:

笑話不說糊糊塗塗，An unsaid joke puzzling puzzling,

說了笑話清清楚楚。A joke told clear clear.

聽挹香說容容易易，For Yixiang to say it easy easy,

要絳妹講煩煩難難。For Sister Jiang to play hard hard.⁵⁶

Two other girls take turns, one telling a story using a pun, another using a self-mocking trope. The mischievous Yuesu now joins and contributes a couplet:

歪嘴丫頭歪嘴歪嘴歪嘴,

A maid with a twitched mouth her mouth twitched twitched twitched,

搭腳娘姨搭腳搭腳搭腳。

A concubine with unbound feet her feet unbound unbound unbound.⁵⁷

This playful couplet with cleverly matched patterns illustrates the animated actions of maids and concubines at the courtesans’ houses. Engaging framed narratives at multiple levels, this game is a fictional element in an embedded joke in a reported conversation between Yixiang and a male friend. As Yixiang tells the story, he simulates the scene of conversation, in which he jokingly creates four lines using the reduplicative characters to mock his friend, taking the joke/game from the story of the immortals to the second level of narrative—the conversation with his old friend. The shared joke mobilizes the audience (the courtesans) to emulate the formulaic pattern and make up new jokes about the original joke teller or an intimidated player, or to make fun of their own situation to induce mirth, or to create a joke with innovative patterns of reduplicative characters. The embedded drinking game serves as an apparatus for storytelling and may seem to allow the courtesans to insert their own circumstances at the banquet into the lines. However, both the hero and the singsong girls are aware of the game as a secondary reality, which, generated through mimicry, cannot replace the real world in which they live.

Epilogue

Literary drinking games are built on a combination of various game rubrics. Implementation of awards and punishments follows stringent rules, emphasizing skill, forbearance, and tenacious commitment to extended game play, which are crucial to agôn. The combination of dice games and gambling with linked verse games, however, adds the element of alea, creating uncertainties in the game’s outcome even for the most efficacious and sophisticated players. Ludic enactments following eminent characters create situations of narrative mise en abyme and ludic mimicry, which obfuscate the secondary reality of the game world and heighten the irreducible difference between the jovial dreamworld and the characters’ impermanent lives. The penalty of wine drinking for those who transgress against the rules or fail to meet the challenges of the games causes intoxication, leading to the corruption of ilinx (failure to control vertigo) and resulting in the less competent players’ loss of ability to play.

Granted that the novel is a narrative game, the plot amplifies the imperative of qing through wide-ranging formulations such as chiqing (keenness), zhenqing (sincere feelings), huanqing (joviality in gathering), liqing (longings upon separation), chouqing (helpless sorrow), and beiqing (agonizing memories). These formulations of qing structure the novel’s subplots and function as drivers of an arduous game that tests the hero’s moral and emotional aptitude (i.e., zhongqing, concentrated feelings) through his encounters with the courtesans. The narrative game of the novel resolves the imperatives of qing and demonstrates the characters’ transformations from zhongqing to kong (emptiness in state of mind), signaling the idle nature of their ludic participation. Yet cultured courtesans who compete in drinking games and engage in combat for their personal destinies are not mere game devices. Instead, they exercise a ludic agency by demonstrating talent in gendered modes of expressions, outwitting their patrons in game play skills or even remonstrating the patron’s behavior through linked verses. If the novel is a dreamworld of ludic diversions, it is the courtesans who conceive the conditions of play, determine their own actions in gambling with fate, and often set the mechanism of the game, be it the game of life or a pastime.

Notes

1. 1. Juan Wang, Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897–1911 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 51.

2. 2. Juan Wang, Merry Laughter, 40.

3. 3. Rudolf Wagner and Catherine Yeh, “Frames of Leisure: Theoretical Essay,” in Testing the Margins of Leisure: Case Studies on China, Japan, and Indonesia, ed. Rudolf Wagner, Catherine Yeh, Eugenio Menegon, and Robert Weller (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2020), 306.

4. 4. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 14.

5. 5. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 17.

6. 6. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 18.

7. 7. See Kang Baocheng, “Drinker’s Wager Game and the Dissemination of the Yuan Musical Plays,” Literature and Art Studies, no. 8 (2005): 62–73.

8. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Carnival and the Carnivalesque,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 254.

9. 9. Li Ruzhen 李汝珍, Jinghua yuan 鏡花緣 (Shanghai: Shanghai yadong tushuguan, National Digital Library of China, 1923), 82:3.

10. 10. Li Ruzhen, Jinghua yuan, 82:5. Changchun (eternal spring) refers to Catharanthus roseus. “South of Jing there is the mingling tree, it regards five hundred years as spring” is from “Tangwen” (The Question of Tang). Lie Zi 列子, Liezi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, 1961), 5:3.

11. 11. Li Ruzhen, Jinghua yuan, 82:6. Wang Xiang, a nobleman of Jin dynasty, is one of the twenty-four paragons of filial piety. See Guo Jujing 郭居敬 (Yuan dynasty), Quanxiang ershi si xiao shixuan 全相二十四孝詩選 (woodblock printing, Ming dynasty, National Library of China), 4. The cited line is from Dongjing fu 東京賦 (Eastern Metropolis Rhapsody) by Zhang Heng 張衡 (78–139), trans. David Knechtges, Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 1: Rhapsodies on Metropolises and Capitals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 243–309.

12. 12. Li Ruzhen, Jinghua yuan, 82:6. Also see Qu Yuan (339–278 BCE), Jiuge 九歌, The Songs of Chu: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poetry by Qu Yuan and Others, ed. and trans. Gopal Sukhu (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 6.

13. 13. Li Ruzhen, Jinghua yuan, 82:8. Ji Jiang refers to noble ladies from aristocrat families. Ji 姬 was the Zhou royal surname; Jiang 姜 was the family name of the Qi kingdom. See David Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 85; Bao Zhao 鮑照 (405–66), “Wucheng fu” 蕪城賦, Bao Mingyuan ji 鮑明遠集, ed. Ge Yinliang 葛寅亮 (Ming dynasty), juan 1, 3–4.

14. 14. Stephen Roddy, Literati Identity and Its Fictional Representations in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 203.

15. 15. Yu Da 俞達, Qinglou meng 青樓夢 (1878) (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1994), 1:3.

16. 16. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 1:3.

17. 17. Chloë F. Starr, Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 220.

18. 18. Wagner and Yeh, “Frames of Leisure,” 305.

19. 19. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 15:67–70.

20. 20. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 11:47–48.

21. 21. See Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 7:25–27; 17:76–79; 18:84.

22. 22. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 49.

23. 23. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 31.

24. 24. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 31.

25. 25. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 8.

26. 26. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 64.

27. 27. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 64:277.

28. 28. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 64:277–78.

29. 29. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 10.

30. 30. Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 162.

31. 31. See Jeanne Britton, Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 2.

32. 32. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 58:255.

33. 33. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 58:255.

34. 34. Xiaorong Li, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China: The “Fragrant and Bedazzling” Movement (1600–1930) (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2019), 49.

35. 35. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 14:63.

36. 36. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 14:63.

37. 37. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 14:93.

38. 38. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 14:65–66.

39. 39. Xianglian has been translated as “Fragrance Vanity” (Upton), “Fragrant Toilette” (Ko), “Scented Dress-Case” (Xiaorong Li), and “Fragrant Dressing-Case” (Nanxiu Qian). See Beth Upton, The Poems of Han Wo (PhD. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Nanxiu Qian, Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Robert Tuck, Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 21.

40. 40. Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 (1792–1841), “Jingshi yueji shuo” 京師樂籍說, in Gong Zizhen xuanji 龔自珍選集, ed. Sun Qinshan (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 2020), 293.

41. 41. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of this chapter for this insight.

42. 42. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 5:18.

43. 43. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 5:18. “Is it tonight or which night” is from Book of Songs, poem 118, “Choumou” (Fast bundled). See Arthur Waley, trans., The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 93. “In one day shall see all the flowers and beauties of Chang An,” see Meng Jiao 孟郊 (751–814), “Dengke hou” 登科後 (After Passing the Examination), in Meng Jiao Jia Dao shixuan 孟郊賈島詩選 (Selected poems of Meng Jiao and Jia Dao), ed. Lu Yisheng (Hong Kong: Sanlian Shudian, 1986), 62.

44. 44. “And how gaily I laughed and talked” is from Book of Songs, poem 58, “Mang” (A simple peasant), Waley, 50. “Tipsy, I pluck a flower branch and takes it as a wine straw) is from Bai Juyi, “Tong Li Shiyi zui yi Yuanjiu,” in Quantang shi全唐詩 (Complete Tang Poems), vol. 3 (Wuhan: Hubei Renmin Chubanshe, 2001), 1435.

45. 45. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 13.

46. 46. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 27.

47. 47. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 9:40.

48. 48. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 9:40. See Yang, Qingyun ji, 2:1.

49. 49. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 9:40.

50. 50. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 45:201.

51. 51. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 45:201–2.

52. 52. “Not to be inclined to one side is called hitting the center” is cited from Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–200), “Zhongyong zhangju” 中庸章句, Sishu zhangju jizhu 四書章句集註 (National Digital Library of China).

53. 53. Shaji (killing the fowl), see Confucius, The Analects, trans. James Legge (Auckland: Floating Press, 2010), 165.

54. 54. “How can such men be great men?,” see “Teng Wengong xia,” in Mengzi and Yan Xinglin, Mengzi (Taipei: Bulage Wenchuang, 2019), 97.

55. 55. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 29:128.

56. 56. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 29:129.

57. 57. Yu Da, Qinglou meng, 29:129.