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fineillsignup · 5 years

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Covering Your Ears to Steal a Bell update and wild speculation re: Gan Ning

So in the latest chapter of my (dark fic!! history is dark!! warnings!! read them!!) fic Covering Your Ears to Steal a Bell, I weave a blend of Dynasty Warriors tropes, popularly accepted history (the Sanguozhi), and the 14th century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo Yanyi) to form my own fic. When you consider that ROTK is basically historical RPF and that the late Qing reform era Anti-Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Fan Sanguo Yanyi) was historical RPF fix-it fic where the author’s OC got to marry his favourite character (whose OC I have borrowed for my own fic), I am truly standing on the shoulders of giants when I wildly speculate on what a) actually happened b) would never have happened but is fun to imagine.

Now there’s a reason why my doc file for this Gan Ning centric story is “nice pirates are still not that nice”, and that attitude is basically how I approach this character who was, after all, a pirate living in decline of the Han dynasty China. Now, note, I’m not saying “everybody has to like Gan Ning, it’s compulsory”; but I am explaining why I like him and am not ashamed of it, even knowing all I know. Gan Ning gets the longest original section in volume 55 of the Sanguozhi, and the most later annotations, so you know what, people have liked talking about this guy for a long time. Was he their problematic fave too? Probably.

Gan Ning: Chinese pirate, my problematic fave

For people who aren’t aware, but for some reason want to try and follow along at home, the background: Gan Ning was a Chinese pirate active in the southeast-ish part of China around the year 200AD as the Han dynasty was falling apart. As regional warlords jockeyed for power, he joined up first with one (Huang Zu) and then with another who was going to beat the first (Sun Quan). The second one turned out to be pretty good at consolidating power, and carved out a kingdom called Wu in southeast China that became actually the longest lasting kingdom among the titular Three Kingdoms era of China.

They make him look something like this in the game series Dynasty Warriors. The bells and the feathers were actually his Marketing Trademark, and people remember them 1800 years later which goes to show how important it is to market yourself.

So when people are like “OMG did you know Gan Ning LIKED to KILL PEOPLE???” I’m like:

"Yeah but you don’t understand he liked to kill people for NO REASON!”

Yeah I’m still sitting here not terribly shocked. Even assuming the worst stories about him in his pre-Wu days were true—that he deliberately waited in houses where the occupants were away, just so that he would get to kill the people who lived there, instead of simply looting the houses and moving on—and not embellished to make him sound like more of a terror.... well, the end result is that he sounds like a terror, which, if you are trying to make your living as a pirate, is exactly the reputation you want? Or, to come at it with the same result but reversed, a person who is that eager to kill by nature is exactly the kind of person who would rise to significant power as a pirate in a chaotic era. So look at Captain Kirk there again for my reaction.

And again, it’s the era. What’s the difference between small-scale freelance murder and theft, aka piracy, and large-scale wholesale slaughter and theft, aka invading and conquering? In the latter case, often somebody to retroactively declare that you were emperor all along. In such an environment, I am even less eager to pass judgment.

And then there’s of course, the id. “Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to just go apeshitt” as the meme says. Well, actually, I’m fine with being nice in my real life, but as Lin-Manuel Miranda says, some part of you wants to experience everything. And stories—and historical stories are still stories—are a way to do that.

So that basically takes care of “he was a killer!!” as an objection to liking him, in my books.

So in this particular chapter of my story, I deal with the other reason people usually bring up for hating Gan Ning, which is a story from the Sanguozhi (and therefore probably at least somewhat true) that involves a kind of controversy about child death (I’m on the side of arguing: probably not a child), but even without the age controversy, definitely involves murder; so not everybody wants to read it, so it’s under a cut. It’s a really fascinating story on a lot of levels so if you can handle stuff like “what happened to the princes in the tower” and similar historical horrors then you should be able to handle this.

Alright so here’s the relevant section from the Sanguozhi, the more-or-less intending to be accurate historical record from the Jin dynasty, written by a man named Chen Shou who, to be clear, was not even born yet by the time that Gan Ning died. So “what REALLY happened???” can never be fully known in all details, particularly the little anecdotes that would naturally grow in the telling. But that just means that “so why did they write down THIS and in THIS WAY?” becomes its own interesting question.

Everyone who comes at this history seems to say “Chen Shou was biased in this and that way and what the truth must actually be is this, which coincidentally is my bias” so I might as well do that too.

So here’s the incident in question in the original Chinese in the Sanguozhi:

寧厨下兒曾有過，走投呂蒙。蒙恐寧殺之，故不即還。後寧齎禮禮蒙母，臨當與升堂，乃出厨下兒還寧。寧許蒙不殺。斯須還船，縛置桑樹，自挽弓射殺之。畢，勑船人更增舸纜，解衣卧船中。蒙大怒，擊鼓會兵，欲就船攻寧。寧聞之，故卧不起。蒙母徒跣出諫蒙曰：「至尊待汝如骨肉，屬汝以大事，何有以私怒而欲攻殺甘寧？寧死之日，縱至尊不問，汝是爲臣下非法。」蒙素至孝，聞母言，即豁然意釋，自至寧舩，笑呼之曰：「興霸，老母待卿食，急上！」寧涕泣歔欷曰：「負卿。」與蒙俱還見母，歡宴竟日。

I took only two semesters of classical Chinese but I never like anybody else’s translation of classical Chinese anyway so here goes (I also consulted a modern Chinese gloss). I am bolding stuff I am going to talk about.

[Gan] Ning’s kitchen boy [more on this in a minute] committed a fault, and ran to throw himself on Lü Meng’s mercy. [Lü] Meng was afraid [Gan] Ning would kill him, therefore he would not return him. Later [Gan] Ning brought many gifts to [Lü] Meng’s mother, going up to the house in person, so that the kitchen boy would be returned to [Gan] Ning. [Gan] Ning promised [Lü] Meng that he wouldn’t kill him. On the way back to the boat, [Gan Ning] tied [the servant] to a mulberry tree, and he himself drew the bow to shoot him dead. That accomplished, he ordered his boatmen to lengthen the mooring rope, and laid down in the boat with his clothes loosened. [Lü] Meng was enraged. He hit the drum to summon soldiers, and immediately went to the boat to attack [Gan] Ning. When [Gan] Ning heard it, he didn’t get up. [Lü] Meng’s mother ran out barefoot and scolded [Lü] Meng saying: “Our lord has treated you as his flesh and blood, giving you dominion over great things, so how can you kill Gan Ning out of your own personal anger? If [Gan] Ning dies today, even if our lord ignores it, you will have broken the law.” [Lü] Meng was always extremely filial. He listened to his mother’s words, and in a flash he comprehended their meaning. He went personally to [Gan] Ning’s boat, and called out to him laughing: “Xingba [Gan Ning’s style name, used between peers; here shows affection or comradery], my mom’s got food ready, hurry up!” [Gan] Ning shed tears, snorted, and sobbed, saying, “I let you down.” Then he went back together with [Lü] Meng to see his mother, and they feasted all day.

Okay so the first thing is this critical phrase 厨下兒 which has been glossed into some English translations as “kitchen boy” and similar and which English speakers have then looked at and then gone “oh my God Gan Ning killed a child, a literal child, a tiny baby boy”. Ok, Hold on. Please.

So modern Chinese gloss I consulted translates this as “廚房的僕人” which just means “kitchen servant”. Yes “兒“ means child but it has so many other meanings especially in a compound like this; and this “child” is not specifically the “under a certain age” form of child.

Moreover, even in English, when we talk about English phrases like “kitchen boy” or (more prominently) “cabin boy” we are not talking about a five year old or even necessarily a ten year old. A 13-16 year old could easily be covered under that phrase in English. So please understand how a Chinese phrase like this could also cover such an age range, and remember also, that in this era, Ling Tong was on the front lines of the battlefield at age ~15 with his father when he died. So the idea of when a kid is fair game to be killed as an enemy is not our own.

So I’m even willing to go with the phrase “kitchen boy” because I feel the original conveys the sense of a minor servant. I’m certainly not going to rule out that the servant was, by modern standards, a child. Gan Ning is doing something really bad here. He knows himself it’s bad, and that’s where it gets the most interesting.

The second point I want to bring up is what it put across in the phrases “On the way back to the boat,” “he hit the drum”, and “ran out barefoot”, which is everything happens so fast. Gan Ning doesn’t even wait to get the servant home; instead, he kills him between Lü Meng’s house and his boat (which presumably was how he traveled to visit Lü Meng). And he does it by tying him to a tree! Not exactly subtle! And then he goes to his boat and just starts chillaxing! When he tells his sailors to lengthen the mooring rope, he’s doing the opposite of trying to run away. If you wanted to get away quickly, you would untie the mooring rope, or at least have it ready to untie fast. But Gan Ning deliberately makes it difficult to escape. And then the story mentions that Gan Ning loosens his clothing, or could even be interpreted as undressing, and that he lies down. Again, is that what you do when you expect to want to get away?

And then we’re back to everything happening so fast: Lü Meng, it seems finds out that the servant is dead very quickly, immediately hits a drum to summon soldiers and just runs out. And when Gan Ning hears this, he doesn’t get up. Now some people interpret this as cowardly, that Gan Ning was hiding from Lü Meng in not getting up to meet him. But if Lü Meng’s mother hadn’t caught him in time, would Lü Meng not have known where he was? No, Lü Meng knew exactly where he was. His boat was still tied to the dock by the mooring rope, and all of Gan Ning’s sailors, remember, would strictly speaking have been under Lü Meng too.

So then Lü Meng gets scolded by his mommy and realizes that he has to let Gan Ning off the hook. And he goes and the way he speaks to Gan Ning, in the original, is so casual and affectionate, which is why I translated it as “my mom’s got food ready”. Now within Chinese culture, as in many cultures, this invitation to food is in itself a mark of affection.

And then we come to the most interesting part of all: the original uses four characters to describe Gan Ning’s crying. Now, Chinese is terse, and classical Chinese is ULTRA terse. These people are not using any more characters than they have to. Yet Chen Shou spend four whole characters to describe that Gan Ning was not only “shedding tears” but “snorting” and “sobbing”. Holy shit. Believe me, if you read a lot of classical Chinese, this rings like a klaxon. The person writing this down thought this was important.

Gan Ning’s motivations throughout all of this are just so opaque. Impulsivity? But it involved a certain amount of planning. Did he want to be punished? Did he have even a death wish? Why was he so fixated on this escaped servant? (The silence of the original text as to what the servant did wrong exacerbates this. It could be almost anything.) Why did he, in some ways, play it so coolly and so arrogantly (the tying to a tree, the lying down half-dressed on a drifting boat), but then suddenly flip to abject, sobbing apology? Was the latter apology as much of a lie as his original promise not to kill the servant was? Or was Gan Ning truly stricken with remorse?

And what do we learn from the story? Utility to the state as a way to escape consequences? Crime and punishment are difficult to separate from personal considerations of revenge and anger? Efficacy of shame based on personal connection over physical attack? Chinese mothers are always right? (It’s that last one, isn’t it.)

So that’s why I had to write my own version. And yes, it’s a version that, while not condoning Gan Ning’s many horrible actions, does portray him as a person sympathetically.

#gan ning #chinese history #pirates #chinese pirates #sanguozhi #my translation #classical chinese #historical revisionism #romance of the three kingdoms #three kingdoms #dynasty warriors #my fanfic

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