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Speaker: Christopher Rea, Professor of Chinese at the University of British Columbia.

In the erotic Ming novel Jin Ping Mei, Pan Jinlian reveals her promiscuous inclinations and oral fixation by habitually cracking melon seeds. In the earliest surviving full Chinese film, the comedy Laborer's Love (1922), the first thing our hero does is to saw open a watermelon. The image hints at his desire for the girl next door, alluding to the expression "split the melon" (pogua), a food-sex metaphor based on a graphic pun dating back to the Song dynasty. Melons show us that even an unlikely object can offer new perspectives on literary and cultural history. From Ming dynasty fiction to sublimated fantasies of the Mao era to the fetishistic extremes of Tsai Ming-liang's pornographic film The Wayward Cloud (2005), Chinese artists have long associated melons with bodies, and with pleasures of the flesh. Why? Rea argues that some answers can be found in the language of gua, which create associations not found elsewhere. Gua also alert us to how objects can inspire metaphors of a certain intonation- in this case, from ripe to overripe.

This lecture is made possible with funding from the Anthony Koo/Kwan-sai So Endowment managed by the MSU Asian Studies Center and is organized by Dr. Tze-Lan Sang, Professor and Program Director of the Chinese Program, College of Arts and Letters