ABSTRACT
This chapter studies Han Bangqing’s late 19th-century courtesan novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai as an exemplary xijie xiaoshuo and a modern text of fictional realism. Combining a broad social view with a microscopic angle, the novel pushes through the surface of coded behaviors and commodified social relations in courtesan houses into the inner chamber in both physical and psychological terms. Han also adopts a seemingly neutral position of seeing and listening to give impartial attention to both major and minor characters. His sensitivity to the latter’s small voices and loud cries has profound aesthetic-ethical implications. Meanwhile, harkening back to earlier xijie xiaoshuo, his detail-rich literary mise-en-scène of the everyday is created with a consciousness of temporal continuity. Abiding by the logic of time and phenomena rather than plot and drama, it yet bears certain resemblances to “the image of duration” in modern cinema.
