THE GOLDEN CANGUE (Jin sou ji)
by Zhang Ailing, 1943

Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), an important novelist and short story writer, has achieved fame in China's postrevolutionary period. A talented Chinese-English translator, Zhang has translated her own novelette The Golden Cangue (Jin sou ji), inspired by the Dream of the Red Chamber, an eighteenth-century Chinese novel. The story continues in later lengthier versions: The Embittered Woman (Yuan nu) and The Rouge of the North, which she wrote in English. Zhang's "Nightmare in the Red Chamber" discusses the classical source of The Golden Cangue.

The Golden Cangue illustrates the decadence of the idle rich. Set in Shanghai, the novelette unfolds the degeneration of the heroine, Qi Qiao, and her family. The golden cangue symbolizes the destructiveness of the protagonist, who metaphorically bears the frame used to hold prisoners in old China; she is both imprisoned and imprisoning. She uses the golden cangue as a way of mutilating others psychologically, while the instrument ironically stands for her own exploitation. The motifs of moon, madness, and mutilation and the themes of exploitation, moral degeneration, and destruction merge with images and symbols of the moon, gold and green, and the cangue.

The repetition of the motifs evolves through the narrative perspective. At the beginning of the story the moon functions not just as an image but also as a symbol, seen from the viewpoint of the authorial we. The perspective is of a futurist present looking backward to the Shanghai of 30 years earlier. The Shanghai moon frames both the beginning and the ending of the tale. The point of view shifts from first person at the start to an omniscient third person who centers upon the protagonist.

The tragic heroine of humble origins who marries a cripple suffers an unhappy and unfulfilled life. The third-person narration focuses upon the consciousness of Qi Qiao, who marries into a rich family, and documents her struggles as a daughter-in-law of the old mistress and her constant battle for acceptance. As the spouse of the disabled second son, Qi Qiao, the daughter of a sesame oil shopkeeper, was saved from becoming a concubine by her brother, who arranged her marriage through a matchmaker. The heroine discovers that she has escaped concubinage only to fill the lowliest role in the family. She learns that women fight for power in the household's hierarchy, illustrating the point that women of lower status suffer in Chinese society.

The novella's plot consists of two parts: the period from the protagonist's marriage to the death of her mother-in-law and her husband, and the period after their demise. In the first part Qi Qiao lacks freedom; in the second part she achieves control over others. After a brief flirtation with her brother-in-law, Qizi, she becomes disillusioned with love because he tries to exploit her financially. Qizi professes his love for the heroine in an effort to gain her trust, but his real intention is to take away her money in a property transaction. Torn by the possibility of love and her disdain for his motives, Qi Qiao realizes that he only wants to use her and continue the pattern of exploitation in her life. When she angrily throws her fan and sour plumb juice spills on his clothes, the juice becomes the objective correlative of her emotions. Love, like Qizi's robe, is spoiled and soiled. The woman's refusal to negotiate costs her the one chance for love and happiness, however flawed.

When the heroine fails to find fulfillment in love or marriage, she dominates her children and daughter-in-law and falls victim to her opium habit. She manipulates the life of her son after her invalid spouse dies, and she gains independence. The sufferings inflicted by Qi Qiao upon her son's wife and her daughter, Chang An, are detailed. In particular, Chang An, a less handsome version of her mother, suffers her erratic orders. For the daughter her mother's madness passes for normalcy. Chang An leaves school because of embarrassment over her mother's scenes. She breaks her engagement with Shi Feng because she realizes that her mother's interference will ruin any chance for happiness. Even her opium habit has been instigated by her mother.

Not content with manipulating her daughter's love affair, Qi Qiao causes the death of her daughter-in-law, whom she ridicules by using metaphors of mutilation to expose her planned destruction. Jealous of her son's bride, the mother-in-law keeps her son at her side at night while smoking opium and while making him reveal his sexual intimacies with his wife. She even gives her son a concubine and makes him smoke opium to drive him further from his wife. Finally, the ill-fated bride dies under the garish light of a huge white moon.

At the conclusion of the story, Qi Qiao lies in an opium stupor, reflecting upon her ruined life and the hatred of those around her:

For forty years now she had worn a golden cangue. She had used its heavy edges to chop down several people. She knew that her son and daughter hated her to death, that the relatives on her husband's side hated her and that her own kinfolk also hated her.

The protagonist destroys or mutilates every close relationship, but at the end she is conscious of the bitterness of her life and the hatred she had engendered. She realizes that the golden cangue that imprisoned her has cut her off from those who loved her.

The story offers information on family social structure, styles of living, and conversation. While focusing upon the theme of love lost, The Golden Cangue, through brevity and symbolism, paints a devastating picture of its protagonist's destructiveness.

Zhang's brief fiction re-creates the traditional world of Chinese families and culture and the hierarchical order of households. In The Golden Cangue she also shows her modernist side in the use of time and symbols. The issue of the exploitation of women strikes a resonant note with Western readers, as do the power struggles among women family members and servants. The juxtaposition of love and hate and of jealousy and revenge, however, creates universal themes and symbols. Zhang's acute perception of female consciousness and her often ironic observations point to her movement from the traditional to the modern.

—Shirley J. Paolini