Her Name is Butterfly

In an intriguing hypothesis sketched out in Plagues and Peoples (1976), William McNeill speculates that Europe’s 14th century Black Death plague may have had its origins in the Eurasian Steppes, where the virus may have been endemic among the region’s burrowing rodents for centuries before finally being transmitted to China, then the middle East and Europe by horse-riding Mongols as they established the Mongol Empire (1206-1368).

Although many scholars (including Graham Twigg, Susan Scott, and Christopher Duncan) now question whether the Black Death was actually a case of bubonic plague, or any bacterial disease, or was even necessarily any single disease at all, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the last world-wide pandemic of bubonic plague (known as the “third pandemic”) did in fact have its origins in central China before eventually spreading to Hong Kong in 1894, and then (like the SARS outbreak threatened to do a century later) on to trading ports around the world. While the worst of the 1894 Hong Kong epidemic was controlled relatively quickly, the global pandemic which it precipitated dragged on for decades, and was not officially conquered (according to the WHO) until 1959.

It is this outbreak of the plague in 1894 Hong Kong which provides the backdrop for Shih Shuqing’s (施叔青) 1993 novel, Her Name is Butterfly (她名叫蝴蝶), the first volume of her acclaimed “Hong Kong trilogy” (a very abridged translation of the trilogy, by Sylvia Lin and Howard Goldblatt, has just been published by Columbia University Press under the title City of the Queen). Her Name is Butterfly centers around the figure of Huang Deyun (黄得云), a young woman from rural China who was sold into a Hong Kong brothel in 1892 at the age of 13, and her subsequent lover Adam Smith, a young British colonial administrator who makes his reputation helping to suppress the 1894 epidemic.

Adam Smith is the young assistant to Mr. Dickson (狄金逊), the general manager of the colony’s Bureau of Hygiene. After Dickson himself dies of the disease, Smith is appointed to replace him. Smith’s solution is to isolate the area of the Hong Kong where the epidemic has hit hardest, relocate its Chinese inhabitants, and burn the area to the ground. Like his famous namesake from a century earlier, therefore, the novel’s fictional Adam Smith stands for the deterritorializing movement of capital and colonial authority across national borders. At the same time, however, his role in helping to control the 1994 plague outbreak positions him in precisely the opposite role of reasserting the firm spatial and social borders precisely in order to staunch the flow of disease and contagion.

This tension found in Smith’s relationship to social and spatial borders, meanwhile, also characterizes his relationship with the teenage Huang Deyun. On the one hand, the relationship that develops between them seems to contain elements of genuine affection, although Smith does abandon Huang soon after she becomes pregnant with his child. On the other hand, the narrative consistently uses colonial metaphors to characterize Smith’s relationship with Huang, and thereby implicitly reaffirming the power differentials which separate them. For instance, the following description is not atypical:

This languid female body underneath the candle light exuded an intoxicating blush, leaned to one side as if yearning to be ridden/mastered. Her female body with its thin bones and delicate frame, its soft flesh and bones, allowed him to recklessly play with her and fold her over. Smith was the owner of this woman’s body. Huang Deyun says that he is a sea lion who has climbed on top of her body, a lion which hold in its hand and in its heart the sexual lust of this fragile yet poor woman who is a usurper of lust and desire. Butterfly, my yellow-winged butterfly. He placed her feet on his shoulders—he was her ruler, and she willing lie beneath him and allow him to ride/master her.

This is not love, Smith told himself, this is form of conquest.

Paralleling the slippage, in this passage, between the references to Huang Deyun as an autonomous individual and the references to her “female body” (女体) as the object of Smith’s conquest, is the similar slippage in narrative perspective from third person omniscient to first person perspective (“Huang, my yellow winged butterfly”). Both slippages, in turn, reflect a fundamental ambivalence within the text concerning Smith’s relationship with both Huang Deyun and the native Chinese community she represents.

Smith’s contradictory positions as a force for both (economic) deterritoritorialization and (hygienic) territorialization come together in a curious discussion of canine teeth about half-way through the novel. The discussion stems from Smith’s recollection of having read about how the Bali shamans would file down men’s canines in order to curb their desire, leading him to speculate that:

If his [own] canines were filed down, his desire would disappear, thereby allowing him to extricate himself from Huang Deyun, and to leave the Tang brothel together its foot-long centipedes, its poisonous-web weaving black spiders, its lice hiding in dark corners, and the white ants which swarm inside its wooden columns—all of which share the same living space with those women (100).

On the other hand, two paragraphs later there is a parallel description of how the figure of Huang Deyun

was a trap, a cunning vampire with sharp canines, who feeds parasitically on my body and uses her tireless and preternatural energy to suck dry my blood. Butterfly, my yellow-winged butterfly. She attracts me, pulling into a licentious hell (101).

An almost identical description, meanwhile, can be found near the end of the volume, in a passage describing how “Adam Smith arrived, as if sleeping-walking, at the race track complex [in which is located the brothel in which Huang used to work], and wandered around beneath Huang Deyun’s window,” where he is reminded of how:   

that vampire [Huang Deyun] with long, sharp canines would shake her head full of gold hairpins and green jade, and use her inexhaustible energy to suck out my fresh, bright blood. My joyous and guilty love (205).

Canines are used in each of these passages as a symbol not only of Adam Smith’s own sexual desire, but also of Huang Deyun’s vampiric eroticism. That is to say, canines, from Smith’s perspective, represent not only his own libidinal drive which must be controlled, but also the prostitute’s parasitism which he must avoid in order to retain his own strength.

These tensions and contradictions associated with the canine teeth in the novel, in turn, are also characteristic of the figure of vampirism itself. Vampirism has long been a potent metaphor, used as a symbol both for the cannibalizing force of empire (as Hardt and Negri observe in Empire, “Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude—as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living”), but also for the ethnic and national minorities who are caught at the interstices of the homogenizing force of capital and empire (Dragan Kujundzic notes that vampire are figures “of the reaction of society against itself, or the 'other' and itself… Vampires stand as a negative, like a film, that a society doesn't want to recognize”).

This invaginated, recursive relationship between parasite and host which we observe in both the figure of the vampire as well as in the pointy canines that function as the vampire’s metonymic substitute, can also be found in the language used in the passages cited above. In both passages, that is to say, the narrative shifts, at precisely the moment of discussing Huang Deyun’s vampirism, from a third person omniscient perspective to a first person narration written from the point of view of Adam Smith himself. That is to say, it is precisely the symbolic and rhetorical threat of Huang’s alleged vampirism which appears to encourage Smith to assert a first-person voice within the narrative.

“Butterfly, my yellow-winged butterfly.” This line recurs mantra-like throughout the text, invariably functioning as an island of first-person address within a sea of third-person omniscient narration, and as such it represents a recurrent process of “reterritorialization,” a reassertion of the necessary intersubjective boundaries between Self and Other even as those same boundaries are being challenged by the inexorable flows of capital and contagion around which the novel revolves.

Curiously, Shih Shuqing also uses a variant of this same line to conclude her preface to the volume itself: “Butterfly, my yellow-winged butterfly, my Hong Kong.” Shih is referring here to the fact that the yellow butterfly in question is a species found only in Hong Kong, and as a result functions as a symbol for the island itself. At the same time, her borrowing of Smith’s trademark first-person line here suggests both a potential identification between the author and Adam Smith, while at the same time suggesting that the novel’s “yellow butterfly,” Huang Deyun, also functions as a miniature symbol of her adoptive island home.