ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL BINARIES IN traditional China, sometimes complementary and sometimes oppositional, is that between the softer, cerebral wen—the civil literati pursuits of calligraphy, poetry, and classical learning that dominated court culture—and the more obdurate and rugged wu, the martial arts. It was long recognized that for a state to flourish and succeed, both its civil and martial aspects had to be fostered and cultivated; the notion that “both civil and military must be utilized in tandem” (wenwu bing yong 文武並用) became an axiom of statecraft that frequently appeared in the histories. Whereas in the Song and some later periods “the civil was venerated and the martial despised” (zhongwen qingwu 重文輕武), in the early Tang, with its Central Asian and steppe influence, there was more of a balance. Taizong, Wu Zhao’s first husband, is generally depicted as a virile warrior– sovereign, hirsute and rugged, a master of archery and horsemanship (see Figure 6). Many early Tang officers served in both civil and military capacities. This chapter examines Zhang Zhuo’s depictions of military men in Court and Country, revealing the extent to which he championed the civil (wen 文) camp.

In late seventh-century East and Central Asia, a number of regional powers surrounded Tang/Zhou China: the greatest threats were the Turks to the north and northwest, the Khitan to the northeast, and the Tibetans to the southwest. To counter these threats, there were more than six hundred garrisons spread around the empire, many of them around the capitals and along the northern border. As an official in Wu Zhao’s court, Zhang Zhuo generally advocated following a policy of appeasement—cleaving to the Confucian stance that it is costly, bad policy, both politically and economically ill-advised, to vie with barbarians over desert hinterlands and uncultivable steppe. This policy dictated that it was prudent to nurture and protect the fertile, agrarian core and concede the rocky, inhospitable periphery. However, other generals and hawkish ministers advocated more aggressive military policy. During the Tang, this was a common debate in discussions of foreign policy: appeasement or confrontation? Diplomacy or military action?

Introduction

The Yoruba world is a distinct pool of cultural wealth shared by a group of people united by their rich tradition, deep moral values, unique knowledge system, common beliefs, and shared space and narratives. It is described and interpreted through its language, the words, and the unique and meaningful linguistic and semantic shifts and tones. It is sustained by a universal education in oral literature and “orature” that constitutes the auditory and sensory ambiance for the narratives emerging from the children of Oduduwa. The contours of the Yoruba world and its people—the craft of the Yoruba beliefs, ideologies, and histories, the pantheons of deities and ancestral bodies, and the shared experiences of its members and their connection to a physical space—are uniquely carved into the peoples’ constellations and give them substantiation as a distinct people.

The Yoruba people trace their origin to Oduduwa and the city of Ile-Ife, in the southwest of Nigeria, which is also fabled as the spot where God created all humans, white or Black. This faith and mythology of Oduduwa, spread through his descendants, intrinsically ties the Yoruba world to the physical world, each shaping the other into mirror images. The physical world is assembled out of different domains: the atmosphere, the depths of space, and the astral bodies; land and the vegetation that grows from it; freshwater flowing inevitably towards the depths of the ocean; so is the organization of the Yoruba world. It encompasses its spatial symbolism, temporal narrative spaces, the meaning ascribed to cosmic bodies, and the effects on the people within it caused by interactions between the different divisions of the world.

The word “Yoruba” is rooted at the center of the intersection of language, people, and land. The word is the name of the language, which is the base material of how the people give and communicate meaning. Beyond language and ethnicity, Yoruba represents the choice of words, actions, demeanors, and the biological presentations and meanings of appearance that combine to describe a culture and make it easy to identify someone as a Yoruba based on their ingrained belief system and origin.

In the first part of this work, I examined the ways in which marriages emerged out of cross-cultural encounter within elite transnational communities during the nineteenth century and the extent to which the cultural and emotional dynamics of those communities facilitated those unions. In this second part, I examine twentieth-century Franco-American marriages that occurred when national borders were most solidified—during and between the world wars. Unlike those discussed in the first part, wartime-marriage participants were no longer members of an elite, transnational social network that effortlessly carved out an existence and moved freely beyond national boundaries but were instead local women restricted by the conflict around them and soldiers who acted as representatives of a nation-state and moved only insofar as the military regulations allowed. Yet, despite encountering one another during a period of heightened boundary-making and hyper-nationalism, these men and women still managed to construct families that transcended those national limits in far greater numbers than the Franco-American marriages of the nineteenth century. In 1919, the Literary Digest, a weekly American magazine explained that “[s]o many of the American soldiers in France [had] married French girls that an official pamphlet [had to be] issued setting out the legal requirements governing marriage in that country.” Likewise, in a March 7, 1918 memo to the Adjutant General, one commanding general complained that 350 marriages to French women had taken place in his division alone in a period of only seven months. At the war’s end, American military newspaper Stars and Stripes estimated that 6,000 or more Franco-American marriages had been registered in town halls across France and speculated that many more went uncounted by authorities. Just after records of the American and European militaries, on which these studies are largely based, not only overemphasize the nation-state but also rarely detail the personal motivations or emotional expectations of marriage participants.

Therefore, while these matrimonial stories cannot be completely separated from the conflicts that facilitated them, what follows is not an account of war. It is instead an account of encounter. As in the first part, the central question rests on the cultural and emotional dimensions of Franco-American interaction; however, in the absence of elite transnational social networks like those that produced titled marriages during the previous century, this part seeks to locate new transnational spaces that were created by the war and map them accordingly.

Throughout, this study has built upon Wen-Shan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu’s concept of transnational marriage, which successfully situates the concept of cross-border marriage within a context of wider transnational processes by placing the analytical focus on the transnational networks and spaces from which marriages emerged. Based on that working definition, in the case of wartime marriages during the twentieth century, the relative absence of a transnational community or social network among marriage participants, such as that which produced elite marriages in the nineteenth century, creates a methodological imperative to locate and define new transnational spaces that were created during the world wars. Therefore, in what follows, the focus shifts from wartime othering as an emotional process to a spatial analysis of transnational courtship and marriage.

This chapter is divided into four parts. In the first part, I attempt to locate and trace transnational cultural formation across and within multiple sites of wartime encounter by examining where and how soldiers and local women met and courted one another. Here, I argue that because most couples did not share a common language, other forms of mediated cultural cues, such as dancing, provided the translinguistic means of communication that became important cultural devices in courting rituals and transnational coupling. In this fashion, public dances, like those organized by the American Red Cross, came to serve as one of the most important examples of wartime transnational spaces that produced Franco-American marriages. In the second part of this chapter, I further explore subsequent courtship rituals among participants as well as the important role of their families in the cultural negotiation of these spaces. Finally, the third and fourth parts of this chapter examine how those transnational spaces of courtship and marriage existed in opposition to national spaces. Through an analysis of the conditions and frameworks that transnational couples had to navigate in order to form recognized matrimonial unions, I argue that state and military regulations, as well as the national criticisms of wartime Franco-American marriages further solidified participants’ conceptions of the national borders that they attempted to cross.

Introduction

The Mediterranean Sea has been deadly for more than 20,000 refugees and migrants since 2014 (International Organization for Migration 2022). Some experts estimate that the real numbers could be much higher. And of the people who try to cross, reports from UN agencies and non-governmental organisations indicate that pregnant women and children are frequently attempting the perilous crossing. Indeed, the crossing can be particularly dangerous for pregnant women who can experience health complications resulting from the violence they may have encountered along the way, but also due to the lack of appropriate healthcare and inhumane conditions they have had to suffer before and during the crossing. These may include sitting on unseaworthy wooden boats or inflatable dinghies – while crossing the sea in bad weather conditions – which may lead to anxiety and panic attacks, dehydration, sunburn, nausea, physical injuries, bone fractures and even death (Cincurova 2020, 2021a, 2021c).

By way of an elaboration, this chapter will expose the trajectories of pregnant migrant women who attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea and explore the problems surrounding data collection on the trajectories of pregnant women in the Mediterranean as a whole. It is important to note that the Mediterranean Sea provides three main migration routes into Europe: the so-called ‘Central’ Mediterranean route that travels from the northern coast of Africa to Italy and Malta, the ‘Western’ route from North Africa to Spain or the Canary Islands and the Eastern route from Turkey to Greece. (Cincurova 2020). These routes can overlap for some migrants and the frequency rates change over time. However, the central Mediterranean route remains the most frequented throughout 2020 and 2021 (as of June 2021). The chapter will also explore available testimonies from pregnant women who survived the crossing and look at the possible health and psychosocial consequences for these women and their children that may have occurred during their dangerous and unsafe journeys. In addition, the chapter sheds light on the lack of appropriate care provided to these women by European authorities and the general neglect and lack of consideration for refugees crossing the Mediterranean on the part of the European Union.

Introduction and Aims

Reception of Xiaolu Guo’s Once Upon a Time in the East, published in the UK in 2017, has been variable, as might be expected, perhaps, of a work that seems to combine trauma and personal revelation, with a style of narration in keeping with much of Guo’s fictional output, that is to say, a blending of fiction and autobiography. Just as Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? was sparked by a desire to overcome the trauma of her past, and come to terms with her biography, in its cultural, as well as personal dimensions, Guo’s work, referred to, among other things, as a ‘tale of survival’ (George 2017, 32) presents Guo’s life-story in terms of a mix of deprivation and poverty and a stubborn determination to overcome the sufferings and limitations of her upbringing and environment, including a period of sexual abuse. Yet such is the manner in which her story is told that for many reviewers, Guo’s tale of survival reads more like a grim fairy tale, a kind of ‘Cinderella in China’, as the title of a review in The Spectator has it (George 2017, 32). In another review in The New Statesman, it is the book’s title that is picked out for its fairytale- like qualities (Walsh 2017, 51), given reading conventions which equate ‘once upon a time’ with the beginning of a fairy tale.

One of the things that this chapter will set out to achieve is to understand why reception of Guo’s memoir has included a strain that reads it not so much as an account of an eventful life but as a fabular tale (Feigel 2017), and to consider why this might be, in conjunction with a sense of what Guo sees herself as trying to achieve, in order to understand the kind of relationship that is in place between Guo’s earlier fictions and her memoir. Moreover, the chapter will be concerned with interrogating further received ideas, assumptions and expectations about genres, as they relate to notions of fiction and non-fiction, life and art, narrative personae and the so-called autobiographical contract.

HOWARD WECHSLER HAS REMARKED THAT, by the early Tang, rulers “drew upon the newer legitimating values of Buddhism and Taoism in order to expand the conventional body of philosophico-religious legitimation that had previously been centered on Confucianism.” David McMullen seconds this sense of the Tang as a cosmopolitan, multidenominational era, remarking that “the transcendental faiths of Buddhism and Daoism also exerted claims on the emperor’s commitment, time and resources.” On elite and popular levels, numerous cults developed around eminent Buddhist and Daoist figures in the pluralistic and multiethnic realm of seventh-century China.

Though Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism were collectively known as the “three teachings” (sanjiao 三教) in the Tang, an ideological rivalry existed between them. In the period—excepting clergy, monks, and adepts—a person did not identify as a Daoist, a Buddhist, or a Confucian the same way someone in contemporary times might consider themselves a Democrat or a Republican. On a folk level, these “three teachings” were intermingled and jumbled; on an elite, textual and scriptural level, they were differentiated. Even literati and ministers might be “workday Confucians and weekend Daoists,” escaping from the structured rigidity and tribulations of official life by wandering the hills, drinking wine on an open pavilion, writing free-flowing calligraphy, waxing poetic in inebriated company, or practicing Daoist breathing techniques to relax and prolong life. These same individuals might retreat to a Buddhist temple for prayer or hold a Buddhist mass for a deceased parent. Nonetheless, when wielding their calligraphy brushes in discursive combat, Confucian court officials—Zhang Zhuo was no exception—sometimes cast Daoists as charlatans and frequently skewered Buddhism as a wasteful and extravagant foreign religion. On the whole, Zhang Zhuo’s attitude toward Daoism is much more open-minded and less skeptical than his biased perspective toward Buddhism.

A number of anecdotes in Court and Country reveal that Zhang Zhuo was not a stone-cold Confucian rationalist, impervious to folk superstitions and popular beliefs. Many accounts—not necessarily skeptical or dubious in tone—provide interesting insights into the practices of diviners, shamans, achillomancers, and interpreters of dreams. Other stories and snippets offer curious and distinctive glances into beliefs about the supernatural.

WU ZHAO’S ZHOU DYNASTY CONTAINED ROUGHLY 350 prefectures (zhou 州), presided over by Prefects, and 1500 districts (xian 縣), administered by magistrates. Each prefecture was broken into three to six districts. “As late as 657,” Denis Twitchett observes, “there were only 13,465 ranking officials to control a population perhaps in excess of 50,000,000.” With a population of 50 million people in the early Tang empire, the average magistrate was responsible for 60,000 people. The primary role of these local officials was to collect revenues—grain and cloth tax—and to coordinate corvée labor. Prefects with appointments in and around the capital were often up-and-coming men on a fast track to promotions to higher-ranked positions in the imperial court. On the other hand, a court official guilty of offending the ruler or committing minor malfeasance might be punished with a demotion to become a local official in a remote district. As in any other culture, premodern or modern, some local administrators were conscientious, competent, and effective, while others were negligent, inept, and avaricious. While stories of both good and bad local officials appear in Court and Country, Zhang Zhuo was clearly partial to the more lurid stories of maladministration, power-mongering, and staggering incompetence.

JUDICIOUS PEI ZIYUN SOLVES THE CASE OF THE MISSING COWS

Known as the “father-and-mother official,” the county magistrate was the lowest-level official who was part of the formal government bureaucracy. They were aided (or, at times, hindered) by an extensive sub-bureaucracy of clerks, village heads, local elders, wardens, bailiffs, strongarms, and runners. In addition to reporting to the Prefect, these magistrates were also responsible for levying grain and cloth taxes; managing floods and droughts; supervising construction and repair of dikes, roads, and bridges; adjudicating local disputes; and solving crimes. Thus, these local officials were also detectives. Extensive Records places the passage from Court and Country below in its chapters on “Brilliant Investigators” (jingcha 精察):