Gender, Language, and Emotions: Conversations with Ja

JaHyun Kim Haboush and I met in 1994 at the planning meeting for a conference that would eventually result in our first collaboration, the volume Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. After we both relocated to Morningside Heights, we put together a graduate seminar, Gender and Writing in Korea and China, and cotaught it three times: in 2004, 2007, and 2010. During those seventeen years, Ja and I shared many dinners, lunches, and conversations that were edifying but occasionally frightening experiences. Frightening, because my ignorance of Korean history is so profound that often I had no idea what she was talking about.Ja was a gregarious conversationalist with a wry sense of humor, but she did not do small talk (at least not with me). Many a times I found myself sitting in the spacious living room of Ja and Bill’s apartment, before or after dinner, in rapt silence. I would be admiring the assortment of Bill’s remarkable collection of antique Southeast Asian ceramics displayed on side tables, a Chosŏn bamboo document sorter in a stunning geometric shape hung on the wall, or the matte sheen of a lacquered vase from Vietnam on top of a tall cabinet, when, after what felt like several lifetimes, Ja’s voice rose faintly from across the room: “So, there were no Sim Ch’ŏngs in China?!”Koreans or Koreanists know the story of Sim Ch’ŏng, but I did not. This popular story that is set in Song-dynasty China but believed to be of Korean origins was a revelation to me when I finally read it.1 Being a historian of early modern China, where the Confucian patriarchal family had been entrenched as a social and political institution for well over a millennium,2 it did not occur to me to question the human costs that attended the inception/birth of this rather peculiar arrangement of distributing power, authority, resources, and ritual responsibility within the household, and of organizing household units into virtual corporations. Confucian patriarchy was a naturalized ideology and existence for me because it was so for the women in the Ming and Qing dynasties, especially in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This naturalization, however, was far less complete or seamless in Chosŏn Korea. It is within this crack, or this disjuncture between imported Confucian values and human emotions rooted in native soil, that JaHyun Kim Haboush found her métier as a cultural historian.Historians of China tend to think of filiality as one of the Three Bonds, a key virtue that shores up the Confucian system, alongside loyalty of the subject to the ruler and chastity of the wife to her husband. The three bonds/virtues are often taken to be interchangeable, or ones that naturally grow into one another. But Ja was one of the first historians to have noticed that filiality is like no other in its seeming gender neutrality (being equally applicable to sons and daughters) but actually blatant gender asymmetry: a son can remain steadfast in his devotion to his parents throughout his life (indeed, was expected to), but a daughter has to engineer a traumatic shift in the subject of her devotion at the point of marriage, from her natal parents to her parents-in-law, often complete strangers who can be overly demanding.3 For females, filial piety is anything but natural. How young females manage and regulate their emotions is the linchpin that can make or break the very structure of the Confucian enterprise/house.4In a pioneering book that has since become a classic, Martina Deuchler documents the formulation of the Confucian didactic texts governing female behavior that underwrote Chosŏn yangban women’s recruitment into the official ideology and power structure.5 Taking this “Confucian transformation of Korea” as her point of departure, Ja asked a series of challenging questions in a seminal article, “Filial Emotions and Filial Values,” published in the same year (1995): How did this process of dissemination and indoctrination work? And how effective was this didactic apparatus, a key part of what she calls the “Confucian hegemonic discourse?”6 By culling reams of vernacular stories that originated in oral and performative traditions—such as one particular version of the “Song of Sim Ch’ŏng”—Ja found strands of indigenous sentiments and practices at the bedrock of Korean society that Confucian norms could not touch. In this sense, Ja’s method is archaeological; she dug and sieved through strata of soil, searching for fragments of bones and other organic matters.At first glance, the Sim Ch’ŏng story could not have been more “hegemonic.” How else can we construe a story of a filial daughter born to and raised by a blind, widowed father, who felt so indebted to him that she sold herself to a seafaring crew as a maiden sacrifice in exchange for three hundred sacks of white rice so that her father could regain his eyesight? But Ja was not a binary thinker. Her research strategy is to complicate the picture by borrowing an approach of literary criticism. (1) Identify and locate the various editions.7 (2) Trace the possible antecedents of the various strands of the story.8 (3) Place the Sim Ch’ŏng story in the context of all vernacular stories, especially those with similar themes such as the tales of the filial brother Chŏk Sŏnghui and his evil brother Hangui. (She then read and reread them hundreds of times, over years if not decades, until some elements started to look strange.) (4) Read theoretical literature for relevant insights and analytic rubrics that can help illuminate the strangeness of the texts, and that allow her to explain it in a language that others can understand.Thus, Ja found, after years of hard work, a Wanp’an version of the “Song of Sim Ch’ŏng” that was out of the ordinary in its refusal to gloss over the inherent conflict involved in a filial daughter’s split loyalty (and as a result was rather unpopular among readers and p’ansori audiences). She also found in leading cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams’s analysis of the operation of ideology and power, especially his notion of the “structure of feeling,” the theoretical language she needed. But the remarkable analysis of the subtle “changes in the popular consciousness which concerned filiality and its relationship to ideology”9 as Confucian norms sedimented in Chosŏn society is Ja’s alone.In a nutshell, she reconceptualizes filiality as consisting of two aspects: “emotions” and “values.” For females, the two are inherently in conflict. Her argument is that the story of Sim Ch’ŏng, when read in the context of the Chŏk Sŏngui tales, shows that in Chosŏn private writings that are “hegemonic” in nature, “while filial emotion—affection for one’s own parents—is being evoked, it is filial value—duty to one’s parents-in-law—that is being served.”10 The assumption, or wager, of the Confucianist is that “filial emotions can be willed to serve the social norms of the patrilineal family system.”11 Or a daughter can easily transfer her devotion from her parents to her parents-in-law like a change of clothing. This is a rather optimistic evaluation of the power of human intentions and will.12 But the “counterhegemonic” discourse (represented by the unpopular Wanp’an version of the Sim Ch’ŏng story) insists that emotions constitute an independent, autonomous agent that cannot always be subsumed under human control. Therein lies the complexity of “affective power”: it can be voluntary or involuntary, autonomous or subject to human manipulation, as well as personal or shared within a community.This affirmation of the autonomous “affective power”13 of human emotions in the Wanp’an edition, manifest in and magnified by the performative milieu of p’ansori in which the emotions of the singer interacted with those of the audience, is brilliant, but Ja is not done yet. Both the hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses, she adds, fall “within the dominant cultural discourse,”14 a version of “popular Confucian”15 culture. And the fact that this minor version of the Sim Ch’ŏng story turned out to be less popular than those with a shorter, happy ending suggests that the Chosŏn people, over time, have come to accept the optimistic Confucian view of human emotions, as a life force that can be bent and twisted by human will to serve Confucian ends.One of the most striking aspects of the “Song of Sim Ch’ŏng” is the explicit visibility, tactility, and, indeed, reality of human emotions. I don’t recall having encountered such palpable and corporeal expressions of emotions in Chinese fiction, not even the ones championing the “cult of qing/love” in the late Ming (maybe I have not read enough).16 The world of Korean emotions excavated by Ja should rank as a treasure trove by scholars in affect studies, a burgeoning field populated by humanists, psychologists, and others (focusing mostly on Europe and America) that emerged in the two decades after Ja published her “Filial Emotions” article in 1995.17This recent scholarly interest in affect is rooted in a widespread recognition, especially after the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president, that we might have overemphasized rationality; it is time to develop a deeper understanding of feelings and emotions in their individual and institutional aspects that constitute a potent “arsenal of power” in any democracy.18 By affect they mean “those visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing that can serve to drive us toward movement, thought, and ever-changing forms of relation,”19 or, in other words, all the forces that are “more-than-rational and less-than-rational.”20 As we may infer, what is at stakes is none other than a fundamental reorientation of our understanding of the cognitive process, the nature of knowledge/knowing, the entanglements between “mind” and “body,” as well as the relationship between self and others.Consider the filial emotion and trust that flowed between Sim Ch’ŏng and her father. When Sim Ch’ŏng is seven, her father touches “her two hands . . . to his mouth . . . and blows” to keep her warm; he massages her cold feet.21 Before Sim Ch’ŏng leaves home to turn herself in to the sailors, “she touches her face to his / And caresses his hands and feet.”22 The blind man touches and massages Sim Ch’ŏng to keep her body warm; the filial daughter touches and caresses her father’s body to bid her final goodbye. This symmetry of touching gestures connotes reciprocity of emotions. Later, when Sim Ch’ŏng is reunited with her deceased mother Kwak Ssi (reincarnated as Lady Yuzhen of the Moon) at the Dragon King’s Water Palace, the lady extends a virtually identical gesture: “She touches her face to Shim Ch’ŏng’s, / Then rubs her hands and feet.”23 The family is brought into a complete circle by the hand, a cognitive organ, when it touches and caresses the body of an Other. It is as if tactility melts away the boundary of the self, conjoining the personal with the social body and the body politic.If filiality and trust are positive emotions that reunited families by transcending life and death, anger and pain are negative emotions that can literally kill. Lady Hyegyŏng, whose four memoirs are suffused with raw anger, grief, pain, and regret, knew this only too well. She lay awake at night, tormented by her inability to save her father: “Sometimes I felt as tough fire was burning inside of me, and on those occasions my bedding became so hot that I rose and pounded the walls in utter misery.”24 To her mind, her husband’s tragic illness/madness was born of the “terror” he felt toward his stern father, King Yŏngjo.25 “When anger grips me,” Prince Sado confessed in 1758 to his father, “I cannot contain myself. Only after I kill something—a person, perhaps an animal, even a chicken, can I calm down.”26 As Sado’s madness intensified, Yŏngjo ordered him four years later to get into a rice chest which was then sealed. Sado died eight days later. Feelings are real; they make the difference between life and death.In her analysis of filial emotions in the Sim Ch’ŏng story, Ja spoke of a hunch she had, that there might have existed an “opposite structure of feeling” in late Chosŏn Korea that, contrary to Confucian hegemonic discourse, recognized and celebrated “female real power” in art, literature, and ritual. She further speculated that this emotional need arose as a compensation for the significant loss of power suffered by women in the patrilineal and patriarchal family.27 The entanglements of the individual and the institutional aspects of this “opposite structure of feeling” strikes me as a fruitful research project for an enterprising scholar who wants to put Korea on the map of the field of affect studies.In reading between the lines of official historiography recorded in the Sillok, and in reading against the grain of popular stories suffused with Buddhism, Ja has excavated indigenous practices and values that predated the importation of Confucianism and that continued to exert its influence even as the steady encroachment of patrilineality and patriarchy in the long “civilizing process” chipped away at these sentiments and values. I have come to see Chosŏn Korea as a place that was far kinder and gentler to women than China: bilateral descent affords mothers more power and visibility than in Chinese families; the diglossia of classical Chinese and han’gŭl affords women writers bigger linguistic and representational spaces to express themselves without borrowing male idioms (hence we see vibrant female-exclusive genres such as kyubang kasa that have no Chinese counterparts); in court, the memories of female sovereigns of Silla in the seventh and eighth centuries (Sŏndŏk, r. 632–47; Chindŏk, r. 647–54; Chinsŏng, r. 887–97) allowed such resourceful regents as Queen Chŏngsun (r. 1800–1804) to rule as a female sovereign, a yŏgun 女君 (female ruler) who addressed her people in han’gŭl.28Not only has Ja revolutionized my understanding of Chosŏn history and society, she has also made me want to live in Chosŏn Korea instead of late Ming China (which is no small feat). But it is important to emphasize that in delineating these native female-friendly strands from the imported Sinic strands, Ja never drew a strict dichotomy between the two, which she attributes to such modern intellectuals as Sin Ch’aeho. Instead, “there are many indications that Chinese and Korean elements had close and mutually supportive roles in the educational processes, and that the interplay between the two in the cultural discourse was continuous and complex.”29When writing this essay, out of the blue I received an email from a high school student in Florida: My name is —— and I am a junior at —— High School in ——, Florida. . . . I am currently in the process of writing my Extended Essay (essentially a 4,000-word mini-thesis) on how the growth of Confucianism in Korea from the Three Kingdoms Period to the Chosŏn Dynasty affected the social status of women, and found your book Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. . . . Unfortunately, the book is not available in any libraries remotely near me and I have not been able to find it on the internet, so I have not been able to fully read it or use it in my paper. Is there a way that I could borrow or have a virtual copy of it? I also read the forward that you authored in The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng and wanted to let you know how helpful Professor Haboush’s work has been in my research of the Chosŏn Dynasty and gender in it; she has truly left a lasting mark on the field of Korean studies.Indeed, JaHyun Kim Haboush has left a lasting mark on the field and on our hearts and minds. As a thinker, researcher, and writer, Ja was sui generis. We have read and taught her published books and articles; we have at our disposal almost the entirety of the notes, working files, and assorted primary documents from her filing cabinets (thanks to the work of Bill Haboush, Sixiang Wang, and others);30 we are inspired by her penetrating analysis of the structure of desires and feelings in a Confucianizing family of patriarchy, the complex gender mappings of diglossia, and the implication of private sentiments and transactions in public, national affairs. But all effort to emulate Ja will end up in defeat; she is an original that has no copies. The only option she had allowed us is to strike our own path. I know that Ja would have been very pleased that Jisoo M. Kim, Hwisang Cho, Ksenia Chizhova, and Sixiang Wang did exactly that with their monographs. It is also heartening to see scholars in Korea and elsewhere have taken the essential topics opened by Ja to the next level, as evidenced by the articles in this special issue.