Tales Across The Sea

I’ve just gotten to the part where the four Buddhists get to Womanland. This is amazing stuff, both because of the author’s blindness to any actual desires women might have to live outside the Chinese paradigm, and because there are similar stories in western lit about the land of the Amazons – a men-free zone. And of course there’s the rather dull humor involving male pregnancy, ho ho. But it makes a really nice break from all that tedious demon-busting!

So the instant the women see Sanzang, all they can think about is sex. Not only sex, but establishing a male line of kings to take over from their historical female imperial line! OK, so Wu can’t get out of the Chinese habit of mind, even in the service of imaginative literature – and perhaps that’s what we should expect from someone who tried so hard to pass the examinations. Maybe this whole section wouldn’t be funny to his main audience if he had actually tried to consider women as something more or less equivalent to men, or at least not inherently subservient. Anyway, Sanzang manages to fool the queen into thinking he’ll marry her, then flees the conjugal bedchamber, “male essence” properly conserved and intact so he can still attain immortality.

The women in Womanland perpetuate their kingdom by conceiving orally – that is, they drink from the River of Motherhood, and get pregnant. If they don’t want to have babies they have to drink from the Child-Dissolving Well. Very convenient. Apparently they only bear female babies, or they kill the males (though if this is so it isn’t indicated in the translation I read) – and that’s how their women-only kingdom keeps going.

Compare the system of the Amazons, as described by the ancient Greek Herodotus (about 480 b.c.): to keep their women-only kingdom going they have an annual orgy with the male neighbors. Of the pregnancies resulting from this they definitely kill or expose their male progeny. No longing to replace themselves with a male hierarchy!

I bet somewhere along the Silk Road the rumor of Amazonia passed into Chinese culture, and by the time Wu Cheng’en wrote his story it had been thoroughly cleansed of any of its subversive tendencies. Oh well, at least it makes a change from beating up on various demons and following Wu Sunkong’s many trips to heaven. I like Monkey very much, but there’s a lot of repetition in this book.

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