His daughter translated the lyrics for him:

What is the best thing to arise from 5,000 years of Chinese culture?
That which is played by the most people throughout the ages is the best!
Everyone knows how to play the East, West, South, North, Bamboo, Circle and Character tiles,
I can play three days and nights without leaving the table, so Im the most awesome!

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Plum, Orchid, Bamboo, Chrysanthemum,
If I get one, I score one!
5 matching sets, chancing upon a winning tile, winning without discarded tiles,
This will leave you all looking like morons.
I strive to reach the highest score with a dragon set, or one of each kind,
But unless I complete the set, all my efforts are in vain (epic fail)!

Hoarding tiles, hurling insults,
This shows your character is the suckiest.
When you discover the tiles you relied on to win were being hoarded,
You curse the heavens for your misfortune.
When luck is not on your side or you commit a fatal blunder,
Others will laugh at you in their hearts, but wont show glee on their faces.
Hoarding tiles, counting tiles, if I dont win, neither will you!
Sabotaging you is exactly my intention!

When your victory is imminent, people play it safe and the round has no winners.
When you dont need other players tiles to win, then divinity is shining on you.
With the help of the heavens, victory is certain!
Win with a middle-fortune-blank set, a directions set, a dragon set, or an all-one-kind set,
And everyone will envy you.
Long live mahjong
Long live mahjong
Long live my wife!

He throws himself into his dancing with great enthusiasm and no trace of irony whatsoever. It’s pretty awesome. The good stuff starts around 5:20:

So the questionable fashions and “funky” dancing of the 80’s weren’t just limited to the U.S. and Europe — not by a long shot. No, the 80’s left their pastel-and-punk mark even on Red China.

This performance, my husband tells me, launched Fei Xiang’s career, as pop stars were something of a rarity in China back in the 80’s, especially those who danced. Fei Xiang was quite the heartthrob back in the day, and is still active in the music industry. His Wikipedia page, obviously written by a fan, contains such adorable details as his reunion with his grandmother (“When she met her grandson the first time, she was surely surprised by his looks and his height, however there was instant love between them and they accepted everything of each other.”), the change in his appearance over time (“Fei Xiang has greyish blue eyes which won thousands of his fans’ hearts. Although he was pretty fat as a young boy, he is well-built and muscly now as an adult.”), and his return performance in 1997 (“[W]hen Hong Kong came back and was classified as a part of China again, at the congratulations concert he returned to sing in China in public for the first time since he left and entered Broadway. This caused many mature women to remember their youths and their frantic love for him.”). Though the page doesn’t exactly meet Wikipedia’s standards for objectivity, it’s so cute that I kind of hope they leave it up.

In the 90’s, Fei Xiang hit Broadway, appearing in Miss Saigon and (erp!) The Songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber. There are plenty of clips of his performances up on YouTube, including many in English, and I have to say he’s quite the charismatic performer. I especially like his rendition of “Unexpected Song,” which shines despite the poor sound quality of the video:

Pan Jinlian

Outlaws of the Marsh, awesome as it may be, is basically a man’s book. The primary relationships it describes are brotherly (its alternate title is All Men Are Brothers), and women, when they’re not relegated to the sidelines, are portrayed as lustful, catty deceivers who betray the men who rescue them. Twice in twenty episodes the same storyline is repeated: good man marries poor beauty, only to have her cheat on him. He forgives her and even offers her a no-strings divorce so she can be with her lover, but she continues to make demands, and, eventually, meets a violent end. Her killer is vindicated as a moral man who was simply pushed to the brink by this conniving she-demon. One starts to suspect the author, Shi Naian, must have been drawing on memories of a nasty breakup when writing Outlaws!

But Shi Naian’s plan to vilify women seems to have backfired with his creation of Pan Jinlian, the “Golden Lotus,” who remains an enigmatic and influential  figure in Chinese culture to this day. Pan Jinlian “enjoys” a status like that of Helen of Troy’s in Western culture – her name has become a byword for an untrustworthy seductress.

Wu Da reunites with his brother Wu Song.

Her story: A beautiful woman married to an ugly dwarf named Wu Da (or Wu Dalang), Pan Jinlian attempts to seduce the dwarf’s brother, the warrior Wu Song. Being an upright guy, Wu Song rebuffs her. A crafty neighbor woman, Mrs. Wang, arranges for her to meet a wealthy playboy named Ximen Xing, and the two soon embark on a torrid love affair. Eventually, they’re caught in the act by Wu Da, who generously offers not to tell Wu Song – a Tarantino-esque killing machine who would certainly avenge him – about their treachery on the condition that Pan Jinlian remain faithful to him in the future.

But soon enough Pan Jinlian and Ximen Xing are back to their lustful ways, and, fearing that Wu Song will kill them if he finds out, team up with Mrs. Wang to poison Wu Da with cyanide. In the Outlaws of the Marsh version of the tale, when Wu Song discovers the truth about his brother’s murder, he beheads both Pan Jinlian and Ximen Xing, while Mrs. Wang is arrested and executed – by the “death of one thousand cuts” — for her part in the crime.

Wanton hussy: Pan Jinlian cavorts with Ximen Xing in a teahouse while Mrs. Wang stands guard.

In the erotic classic The Golden Lotus, however, Pan Jinlian marries Ximen Xing after Wu Da’s death, becoming just one of his many concubines. This book, so racy it was banned in China for centuries, features Ximen Xing in hundreds of bedroom escapades. And its version of Pan Jinlian as lascivious seductress is the one that’s persisted in the public imagination. Google her name and you’ll find that she pops up as a character in several NSFW videos. These illustrations (not explicit) represent her as a conniving slut with a heavily painted face, utterly ungrateful to her good-natured husband.

In 1986, the playwright Wei Minglun revisited the story in his opera Pan Jinlian. There, he portrayed Pan Jinlian as a victim of her culture who would have simply divorced Wu Da had she been able to. Other characters in this avant-garde opera include Anna Karenina (!), who advises Pan Jinlian to run away, and a modern-day female judge who excoriates Wu Song for his cruelty.

Bound feet of an elderly Chinese woman.

The CCTV adaptation also presents a revisionist version of Pan Jinlian, though it’s not quite as feminist as Wei Minglun’s opera. It portrays her actions as understandable, though never excusable: she’s less a shameless hussy and more of a bored housewife. Mrs. Wang observes that she never leaves the house, and one can see why she might seek out a romance with Wu Song: she has bound feet and Wu Da is almost her only connection with the outside world, and she probably had little choice as to her husband was. In the T.V. version, she’s also initially reluctant to take up with Ximen Xing and is conflicted about whether to get back together with him after Wu Da forgives her. Ximen Xing and Mrs. Wang are portrayed more as the aggressors and Pan Jinlian as the confused, emotional, and somewhat stupid girl who can be easily led astray by those with stronger personalities. She’s not very moral, but she’s not out-and-out evil, either.

Shi Naian seemed to have a problem with women who revealed a strong sexuality or who were independent and meddled in the affairs of men (Mrs. Wang). One of the few “good” women in Outlaws, Lin Chong’s wife, was a model of constancy who refused to divorce her husband when he was sent to prison, and who hung herself out of grief at his absence. She even told her husband not to take revenge on a man who tried to rape her, as the man was the son of a powerful official who could cause trouble for their family if anything happened to his son. So, in this narrative, a woman can either be utterly self-effacing and good, and wind up dead, or crafty and lustful and wicked, and . . . wind up dead. CCTV, to its credit, portrays Mrs. Lin with much the same nuance as it did Pan Jinlian: she’s not held up as a model wife but as a good, albeit hurting, woman, whose suicide appears as the logical extension of her self-effacing nature. It’s a subtle testament to a changed China.

John and I continue to watch Outlaws of the Marsh, and we keep remarking at how much the Outlaws remind us of Klingons. A few episodes back, we watched a scene that was remarkably similar to one from Deep Space Nine. Seems Klingons and Song Dynasty bandits have the same ideas about how to deal with incompetent leaders (oh, if only we had a few of them around during the last administration).

Some background:  over the course of the last several episodes we’ve been watching, Lin Chong was framed, sent to prison, escaped, and was taken in by a group of outlaws living on Mt. Liang. He’s also been further characterized as a righteous man who has a very gentle demeanor – unless someone breaks a key moral law. So put him in the stocks and make him walk for miles to the next province to be thrown into jail, and he won’t say a word against you; heck, he’ll even give you money for wine. After all, you’re just doing your job. But betray him to a group of assassins, and he’ll show you no mercy, even if you beg and plead for your life. The importance of gratitude is shaping up to be a major theme of Outlaws so far: there have been several characters who were taken in by rich and powerful men, only to stab their benefactors in the back – and later come to violent (and, mostly, well-deserved) ends.

Chao Gai, known as the "Heavenly King."

While Lin Chong is hanging out with the Mt. Liang cabal, another group of outlaws is forming in Shangdong Province: seven assorted ruffians and strongmen under the leadership of the wealthy Chao Gai. These guys, the “Righteous Seven” have sworn to fight government corruption. Word gets out that they’ve stolen a shipment of jewels and silks intended to be a birthday present from one government bigwig to another, and they too take shelter at Mt. Liang. (Of course, they all swear an oath that they didn’t steal the birthday presents “for personal gain.” For the story to work, you have to put aside your cynicism and accept them as Robin Hood-style heroes.)

But the leader of Mt. Liang, Wang Lun, doesn’t want to let the Seven stay, fearing they’ll take over. After he not-so-subtly tries to give them the brush-off, Lin Chong denounces him as an incompetent leader and a “man without honor” and runs him through with his sword. Everyone then exclaims that Lin Chong should take the role of leader, but he insists that Chao Gai would be the most appropriate choice. They argue back and forth for a bit, in a manner amusingly reminiscent of my parents and John’s vying over who will pay the bill in a restaurant (“No, no, we’ll pay. You paid last time.” “No, it’s okay!” “Courtney, take the check away from them!” – it’s so Chinese!) until Chao Gai relents and Lin Chong sits him down on the leader’s chair.

Watching this, John and I were reminded of the nearly-identical scene in Season 7 of Deep Space Nine, in which Worf denounces Gowron, kills him in a bat’leth duel, is upheld as the new chancellor, but insists Martok would make the better leader. We watched that same scene right after Outlaws, and the parallels were striking: there’s a symbol of the transfer of power, in this case the Chancellor’s robe; the would-be leaders both try to cede their title to one another; and Worf also claims Gowron is unfit to rule and lacks honor.

Gowron. Yes, his eyes always look that way.

Okay, so Lin Chong doesn’t roar over Wang Lun’s dead body, and Gowron doesn’t try to pay off the crew of the Rotarran with silver ingots and jewels. Still, it’s interesting that nearly-identical scenes should exist in two very different media. The Star Trek writers probably hadn’t read Outlaws of the Marsh, but the Klingons definitely seem inspired by Asian warrior cultures. Or maybe it’s archetypal: when you get a bunch of belligerent guys together, make them obsessed with honor, and create a power imbalance, things just tend to play out the same bloody (and entertaining) way.

Update:

By way of comparison, here’s the scene from DS9:

And the corresponding scene from Outlaws:

Lu Zhishen, called the "Tattooed Monk" or the "Flowery Monk"

Recently I’ve been introduced to one of the great classics of Chinese literature – Outlaws of the Marsh. As I can’t read Mandarin, though, I’ve been watching the highly entertaining version of the novel produced for Chinese television, and John’s been doing the captions in English for me. It’s fun stuff: a string of interconnected stories about a band of outlaws whose favorite pastimes are drinking, feasting, and busting people’s heads. They’re antiheroes, a la Robin Hood and his merry men, and their antagonists are the usual gang of corrupt officials and aristocrats featured in many works of Chinese literature.
John and I figure whoever created the Klingons must have known a thing or two about Chinese culture. The Outlaws are warriors with mad swordfighting and martial arts skills whose levels of aggression would not be out of place on Kronos—and yet they have their own unspoken code of honor based on honesty, loyalty, and directness.

This Musketeer-like guy is Lin Chong.

Right now we’re following the stories of Lin Chong, the impossibly nice drill sergeant (he begs forgiveness for the two men who try to assassinate him, arguing that they had to do it or they’d be killed themselves by the official who paid them off), and the hotheaded, musclebound monk Lu Zhishen. These guys are like the superego and the id, making for lots of comedy, as Lu always wants to rough people up and Lin has to talk him out of it. Lu Zhishen’s story has been a comedy of errors so far: he’s gotten kicked out of one monastery for getting drunk, been demoted to security guard of the vegetable garden in another, and has had a band of ruffians (vegetable thieves he tossed in the “fertilizer pit”) glom onto him. Oh, and he’s also uprooted a massive tree with his bare hands, just because he can. His heart’s in the right place, though – you’d definitely want this guy to have your back.
We don’t have anything quite like this in Western literature, though I’m sure Chaucer would have enjoyed it. I have to admit that I knew next to nothing about Chinese literature before meeting John – so stuff like Outlaws of the Marsh has come as a delightful and unexpected surprise. I may well attempt to read it in translation some time in the future.

Paper cutout of Lu Zhishen. Much like Catholic saints, the most famous Chinese heroes have attributes by which they can be recognized, in Lu Zhishen's case his beads, muscular physique, and Shaolin spade.

Paper cutout of Lin Chong, who is recognizable by his staff, gourd, large knife, and stylin' hat.

Though no merry man, Worf would make an excellent Outlaw of the Marsh.