On Chinese Gothic part 1

When thinking about gothic, people tend of think of soaring castles and misshapen stone spires. But the Chinese have a sense of the gothic, which has been quietly flourishing in recent storytelling like moss on the gravestone, and harks back to literary traditions.

Instead of derelict abbeys and dungeoned great houses, we have ruined temples and equally labyrinthine ancient mansions, usually enclosured with courtyards and gardens sprawling into unfathomable depths. Instead of the ghostly woman in black, we have the ethereal woman in white, for white is the colour of death and mourning for the Chinese, the white-robed woman often symbolising the innocent and pure. She is ever briefly glimpsed, through abandon quarters and desolate fields, singing, weeping, or brushing her hair. In traditional stories like Pu Songling’s Liaozhai, she’s mostly a femme fatale, a ghost or a fox demon, luring men to their demise, or leaving them to wake up cold in cobwebbed ruins.

Contemporary Chinese horror inherits this aesthetic, a prime example being Cai Jun’s novella Huangcun (which you can read in Sinophagia), but the emphasis is placed more on the phantomising of victims by traditional societal constraints and expectations. This is evident in the story of the vanishing brides in Snow Tower, the ‘ghostly figure’ at the Long Clan mansion leads the protagonists to eventually discover that the women had been murdered and buried by the clan’s deranged leader on their stormy island, where the tombs of the clan’s female infants lie hidden in the underground caves. Like a lot of gothic storytelling, pathetic fallacy such as lighting, storms and mists usually accompany the appearance of these ghostly figures. Distinct from the elusive figure that haunts the wilderness or derelict spaces in traditional horror, the ones that creep around inner courtyards and secluded gardens, seems to combine influences from European gothic with contemporary China women’s issues, becoming a metaphor for the silenced victims making themselves heard.

With an entrenched tradition of arranged marriages and the even more grim custom of minghun (ghost weddings), the traditional Chinese wedding was bound to become a source of horror storytelling.  With the popularity of games such as The Paper Bride, wedding horror has become a distinct feature of today’s spooky tales. One of the two branches of wedding horror is closely associated with the gothic. A sedan chair carried through the desolate and misty nocturnal woods, the celebratory garb of the whole entourage in stark contrast to the eerie surroundings, is a sure sign of upcoming horrors. The trendsetter for this kind of wedding gothic is Ching Siu-Tung’s Chinese Ghost Story, slow motion shots of the Black Prince’s wedding parade, flowing robes and ritualistic sangai tendrils, have become timeless setters of tone. Today’s mysteries and crime fiction such as Coroner’s Diaries have developed this aesthetic even more elaborately beautiful costumes and sets, and evermore gruesome and gory deaths.

The Chinese sense of gothic continues to evolve, whether in the representation of living characters, dialogues with haunted mansion tropes, or the presentation of gothic spaces, which I’ll be writing about soon in part 2.

 


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