Feng Tang's "Golden Line" Is Held in Li Yinhe's Hands

This article is published with the permission of Luo Yihang, who runs the WeChat account "Tolstoy Party" and also founded the tech outlet PingWest.

I have been unable to stand Li Yinhe for a long time. Today, after the good lady published an essay declaring Feng Tang's translation of Tagore's Stray Birds the best version there is, I decided to erupt, rationally.

I first heard of Li Yinhe in the mid-1990s, in junior high school, at about the same time I first heard of Wang Xiaobo. Then Wang Xiaobo died and became immortal, while Li Yinhe carried on alone with her research on homosexuality and sexual subcultures, and kept writing her columns. It is no exaggeration to say that Wang Xiaobo was one of my first literary mentors after high school, and Li Yinhe, in the same years, my first teacher in sociology. All right, that may sound a little out of key, but my understanding of sociology began with Li Yinhe's LGBT interviews, which is also why I read the Kinsey Reports earlier than most people. Anyway, that's how it was.

By my second year of university, as I read more books and read them more systematically, my instinct told me that Li Yinhe's work was no longer enough for me. In the first years of the 21st century, Li Yinhe didn't seem to move forward as a scholar. Her methods and conclusions on sex, gender and sexuality stayed at the level of her few books from the 1990s, though she kept submitting proposals to the legislature to legalize same-sex marriage. For that bravery and courage I admire her, and I respect her sincerely.

Next, Teacher Li Yinhe, who had always professed to keep a low profile and dislike the limelight, became an icon of popular culture. This surely owes something to social progress and to growing tolerance of diverse views, and of course the ever stronger "fujoshi" streak in Chinese youth culture since 2010, young women's taste for male-male romance, helped too. Li Yinhe came to look more and more like a campaigner for equal rights for gay people, for women and for sexual minorities, which is fine. But as Teacher Li grew more famous, many things began to feel off to me.

First, Teacher Li has many friends in the literary world. As a public intellectual, she ought to. But in my more than ten years of reading her, Teacher Li Yinhe has never been known for literary quality or the force of her prose. Her husband Wang Xiaobo's ear for language and power of argument hit me like a bucket of cold water and woke me up. With Teacher Li, in her several monographs and scattered essays I can see effort, I can see earnestness, I can see courage, but I just can't see any spark.

One more remark: in a so-called literary couple, the real talent of one half is usually in doubt.

Teacher Li Yinhe first stunned me in 2010, when she published an essay on her blog titled "Bo Xilai Is the True Communist". When I first read it, I nearly wet myself.

The essay lavished praise on Bo Xilai, then riding high in Chongqing, for restoring clean government to the city and for letting China break out of the historical cycle in which dynasties rise and fall. It called Bo Xilai an idealist who had turned the tide, the hope of the ruling party, and said that our ruling party would eventually lift the ban on other parties and hold general elections, with Bo Xilai the winner under such a system. At that point I truly fell apart.

That year was 2010. Early in the year, Li Zhuang, a lawyer who had defended Chongqing "gangsters", was prosecuted by Chongqing prosecutors and jailed. A red tide swept Chongqing, the legal profession fell silent, and a deathly hush settled over everyone. That year Google withdrew from China; the year before, Facebook and Twitter had become inaccessible in this land... How perfect must Teacher Li Yinhe's imagination be, to conjure up such a "wonderful" picture? I read the essay again and again, trying to catch some hint of irony, and failed. Come to think of it, how would anyone whose prose is as plain and clumsy as Li Yinhe's know how to do irony?

Only then did I realize that the friends who believed in free will, and the intellectuals and cultural figures who had always regarded Wang Xiaobo as "one of us", were in fact indifferent to his widow, the woman who had published his love letters as Love You Like Life.

Incidentally, if you want to feel the gap between the two in imagination, rhythm of prose and command of language, Love You Like Life makes a very good textbook.

Yes, I began to feel that perhaps 10,000 Feng Tangs stood between Wang Xiaobo and Li Yinhe.

Li Yinhe "dazzled" me again in 2014, when she made public her romance with "Daxia" (the "Big Hero"), whose biological sex is female but whose psychological sex is male, a person of the "opposite sex" in her words. It made me feel once more that Li Yinhe is brave and worthy of respect. For Wang Xiaobo's widow to acknowledge so openly a new relationship, and one that looks so "special" to ordinary people, took vision, courage and a sense of responsibility. For this society, and for many more sexual and gender minorities, it was a step forward.

But I was confused again. Not because the romance began soon after Wang Xiaobo's death and went unannounced for more than ten years, but because of how Li Yinhe described her own role in it. She insisted she was "heterosexual": although Daxia is physically female, Daxia is psychologically male. Daxia loves Li Yinhe as a man loves a woman, and Li Yinhe loves Daxia as a woman loves a man, so the person Teacher Li Yinhe fell in love with is a "man", and she therefore remains heterosexual.

Okay... fine... but then why does your adopted son Zhuangzhuang call both of you "Mom"? I have my doubts about whether this counts as "heterosexual", but I am willing to take Teacher Li Yinhe's word for it. Someone as bold and insightful as Teacher Li would not agonize over whether she herself is heterosexual or homosexual. None of us are sexologists, none of us understand these things as well as Teacher Li, and if Teacher Li Yinhe says her situation is heterosexual, then she is heterosexual.

Even if Teacher Li Yinhe redefines heterosexuality, I'll accept it. If the "golden line" between homosexual and heterosexual isn't in Teacher Li Yinhe's hands, whose hands could it be in? One of these days I'll offer myself up for Teacher Li Yinhe to mark with her golden-line pen and measure properly.

Later still, I found that Teacher Li Yinhe and Teacher Feng Tang were very close. Teacher Li Yinhe said that among Chinese novelists, Wang Xiaobo comes first and Feng Tang second. Then came the famous preface the famous Feng Tang wrote for the famous Teacher Li Yinhe's short story collection. The Weibo user Yasalong summed it up this way: "Yinhe, your novel reminds me of my own novels. I had an extraordinary gift for words from childhood... I write to relieve the swelling inside me, I write to defeat time, and in the end I write novels to explore human nature. What a winding road of writing I have walked, and my novels... Oh, right, Yinhe, I almost forgot, you wrote a novel too, didn't you? Keep at it!"

Even that, Teacher Li Yinhe accepted with a smile.

Then came this latest episode. Feng Tang translated Tagore's Stray Birds and was widely attacked, because his version strays too far from the meaning of the original poems, and because it reeks, as his writing always does, of crotch hormones and semen. Today Li Yinhe wrote a long essay to back Feng Tang up, and Feng Tang reposted it at once.

Having compared Zheng Zhenduo's translation of Stray Birds with Feng Tang's, Li Yinhe concluded that "the difference is plain to see": "Zheng's is plain vernacular; Feng's is poetry." She also said the gap exists because Zheng Zhenduo was not a poet and Feng Tang is. Finally, Teacher Li Yinhe performed another feat of miraculous logic, more miraculous even than her logic in calling Bo Xilai a true Communist: "Since it is generally agreed that Zheng Zhenduo's translation of Stray Birds was the best of the many earlier Chinese translations, and Feng's translation has surpassed Zheng's, the most logical conclusion is that Feng Tang's translation is the best Chinese translation of Stray Birds to date."

For Feng Tang, a socialist-era business-world Qianlong (in his hunger for literary standing, Feng Tang has only one real rival: that other master of both pen and sword, the self-styled "Old Man of the Ten Perfect Victories", Emperor Qianlong, who wrote more than 9,000 poems in his lifetime), having Teacher Li Yinhe as a spiritual other half, a "CP" as fans say of a favorite pairing, is a joy beyond words.

This is what I admire about Teacher Li Yinhe. She is very brave. Starting to study homosexuality and sadomasochism in the early 1990s was a kind of bravery; actively pushing for sexual liberation and same-sex marriage in the early 21st century was a kind of bravery. That bravery followed her instincts, came at the right time and was spent in the right places, so she looks great and right. Recently Teacher Li Yinhe made public her current partnership, which was also brave, because in ordinary people's eyes the relationship is complicated and unusual enough to carry many ethical pressures and worries. But Teacher Li Yinhe believed in it, and it has lasted more than ten years, which is also brave, and also admirable.

But misapplied, this bravery becomes frightening. Teacher Li Yinhe very bravely judged Bo Xilai to be the hope of the ruling party, and even judged that Bo Xilai would one day lead the ruling party to universal direct elections, a claim to make one's legs shake and bowels give way. When she said it, Teacher Li Yinhe was not being the least bit cunning. She is not of the Kong Qingdong or Sima Nan sort. She acted on her "independent thinking" and her brave judgment. But the very fact that she could reach such a judgment shows how wide a gulf lies between her inner world and that of Wang Xiaobo, the man she has declared the love of her life. Wang Xiaobo's real common sense, and his wariness, about totalitarianism, lies and freedom: she has none of it, only a surface smattering.

This also explains why Li Yinhe's subculture research, in its approach to fieldwork, its texts and its conclusions, is still stuck in the 1990s, while her view of the world and of culture is still stuck in the 1980s. That is simply who she is: she gives off the air of an early-1980s intellectual, and even studying sociology in the United States could not shake it off. A little liberal enlightenment, plus the state's language of reform from within.

In another field she is not good at, fiction, Teacher Li Yinhe is also very brave. To be honest, I don't have the courage to read Teacher Li's sadomasochism trilogy, for fear of the smell of raw flesh and bodily fluids stirred by a scalpel. Teacher Li Yinhe's ear for language and gift for words are limited, which is why she could make the absurd claim that in fiction Wang Xiaobo comes first and Feng Tang second. She probably thinks both men have the courage and the skill to write about sex freely and without restraint, and she now happens to have that courage and skill herself. But she cannot tell the sex in Wang Xiaobo's writing from the sex in Feng Tang's. In Wang Xiaobo, sex is animal nature and spirit soaring together; in Feng Tang, sex is just animal nature, one gush that spills out "ten miles of spring breeze" and is done.

And the sexual acts and experiences Teacher Li Yinhe has described are, for the most part, animal nature too. A fascination with that kind of sex, the kind that gushes a thousand miles, is what Teacher Li Yinhe and Teacher Feng Tang share in their understanding of sex and of literature.

Teacher Li Yinhe and Teacher Feng Tang are both brave people, and both lack a fully formed, sound set of values. Teacher Li Yinhe calls for sexual liberation and freedom, and for freedom in the ordinary sense, but at the crucial moment cannot tell freedom from totalitarianism. She loves words and loves fiction, yet cannot tell one kind of fiction from another. But she has tied a white cloth around her forehead with the single character "brave" written large on it, and so for 20 years she has done as she pleased, sometimes moving us, sometimes making our jaws drop. Teacher Feng Tang is the same. He has craft, a talent for business and a little literary flair, but insists on immortalizing that little flair as literary genius and a place in literary history. While still alive he works himself to the bone building his own shrines and memorial temples, and does anything that might raise his standing in literary history, forgetting only one thing: literary achievement does not come from a life of wine pools, meat forests and a swollen crotch.

Yet Teacher Li Yinhe and Teacher Feng Tang both care intensely about where the "golden line" lies. Teacher Feng Tang says literature has a golden line, and anything below it has not reached the standard. In practice, wherever Feng Tang's own literary standard sits, that is where the golden line is. Teacher Li Yinhe is the same: she says she is still heterosexual, so tomorrow the more than 1 billion heterosexuals in China can measure themselves against Teacher Li Yinhe's golden line and see how far they fall short of the perfect heterosexual.

This time Teacher Li Yinhe and Teacher Feng Tang once again stand one at each end, pull their golden line taut, and so the highest standard for Chinese translations of Tagore's Stray Birds is born.

Image sources: chuansong.me, forum.iask.ca, thenewslens

Cover image source: yoka

For more of the author's commentary on the pulling of Feng Tang's book from sale, follow this link: Public Opinion Killed Feng Tang's Stray Birds, and I Take Not an Ounce of Pleasure in It