If you asked an expert what a 400-year-old classic of Chinese erotic writing might sound like, you wouldn't be surprised to learn that a euphemism for the penis is "jade stick." You would be less likely to guess it might also be called a "steeple" or a "cudgel."
"Well, I tried to vary the words so the reader wouldn't be bored," says Lenny Hu, a slender, bespectacled, 43-year-old scholar who has given the world its first-ever English translation of a peculiar book called The Embroidered Couch. "Since I don't really have any sexual experience in English, I had to rely on the dictionary." He pauses thoughtfully. "For example, I have no idea which class or community in America might use the word 'johnson.' Do you?"
Um, no.
But that's one of the charms of Hu's translation, which (he claims, and who can contradict him?) faithfully reflects the tone of the original book, written around the year 1610. On the one hand, it's full of the kind of courtly exoticism you might expect from so long ago, in so exotic a country: allegorical poems where a sexually exhausted male is compared to the defeated Emperor Huizong, and a delighted woman says her orgasm feels like "thousands of caterpillars with pointed nibs" inside her.
It's a lot racier than anything you find in Shakespeare, who was writing at the same time. And much racier than anything produced until then in the rich pornographic literature of the Ming dynasty. "It's probably the first published book in the world to use really filthy language," says Hu, "the kind of gutter talk you hear in bars or among young people."
He's not sure how or why this happened, because erotica was suppressed in China in 1644, and stray copies of The Embroidered Couch were destroyed wherever found for the next three centuries. But it had been hugely popular when first published, and a few Chinese libraries "surreptitiously" kept copies in back rooms where only academics could look at it. Most of these coughed politely, and concentrated their efforts on respectable ancient erotica, such as The Golden Lotus, where a ménage à trois was described as "the butterfly flying from east to west."
But Hu, who discovered The Embroidered Couch after doing a doctorate in Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia, found himself intrigued by the identity of its mysterious author, who used the pseudonym Master Perverse Love. He did some scholarly sleuthing, and proved that the writer was actually a respectable playwright and theatre critic named Lu Tiancheng. Lu was familiar with the popular erotica of the day, and had noticed that books like The Golden Lotus flirted here and there with street language, and hinted at subjects like pedophilia and lesbianism.
No more than hints, though; and that seems to have bothered Lu Tiancheng. "I think he wanted to see how far he could go. And so, for the first time, you have a book where the whole narration is full of bad words. It's a breakthrough. You can suddenly see the whole atmosphere of China at that time."
For Hu, The Embroidered Couch is a strangely contemporary world where you find lesbians, bisexuals, voyeurism, masturbation and incest. There is even a variant of free love, where husbands, in a spirit of fair-mindedness, encourage their wives to have lovers as well. It's reminiscent of the California sixties: Big Sur with bound feet.
It's also an extremely unlikely subject for a slender, buttoned-down scholar -- he wears a suit and tie for the interview -- who grew up in the puritanical China of Mao Tsetung. Hu's father had run a pharmaceutical business in Shanghai until he was forced to sell it to the state in the mid-fifties. After that, the family lived comfortably ("in a big, Western-style house") until the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, with its determination to root out the bourgeoisie once and for all. "We lost everything," Hu recalls. "Fortunately, I was too young to be sent to the countryside for 're-education.' "
With barely concealed disdain, he speaks of how the Communists "destroyed" the system of education. He managed to learn a little classical Chinese from his father. Later, he took private lessons from the scholar Zhang Yi, who had been president of Fudan University before the revolution. "He was the finest scholar in the Chinese language of that time, and he also had a great affection for the West. He translated Henry VI and Walter Scott's Ivanhoe."
Hu came to the United States in 1987 to study English literature, with the intention of returning to China to teach it. But the suppression of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 changed his life irrevocably. Like thousands of Chinese abroad, he decided he would never go back. He switched his field of study to Chinese, thinking he'd have a better chance of a North American academic job teaching Chinese rather than English literature.
"But of course, so did many of those other Chinese students," he says wanly, "with the result that there are perhaps 100 applicants for each academic job that appears."
He now lives in Vancouver with his wife, whom he met as a student in China.
Hu sometimes comes to the University of Toronto to teach, and it was while sifting through texts in the university's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library that he came across excerpts of The Embroidered Couch. "I had trouble finding someone to teach me about it. Some of my professors were too conservative. So with them, I worked on milder books. This is a unique book."
Studying it privately, Hu found that The Embroidered Couch was also a very funny book. And he became fond of the characters: the scholar Easterngate, his pretty and insolent wife Jin, and Easterngate's bisexual lover Dali, who also becomes Jin's lover.
Hu has translated several books into Chinese, but hesitated before attempting to translate into English. He was 29 when he came to North America, and there are still corners of the language he hasn't investigated (the word "trailblazer," for example, takes him by surprise). "And even professors with better English than mine thought this book was too hard to translate," he says. "The surviving copies are hard to read because they were printed badly, probably illegally."
Lu Tiancheng had lived in the same region (Yuyao county in Zhejiang province) that Hu's own family came from. He imagined Lu speaking with an accent similar to his own, although of course the dialect used in The Embroidered Couch has disappeared, much as Elizabethan English dialects have vanished. "And I had to guess at the meanings of some of the [sexual]words, because you never will find these kinds of words in a dictionary."
But he is quite pleased with the outcome of the project, saying:
"I actually like multiculturalism. And Canada is less aggressive to minorities than the United States. So this is my way of making a contribution to Canada."