Dr Zhaokun Xin has recently published two articles on literary exploration of emotions in Ming dynasty (1368-1644) China. The first piece, titled “Diagnosing, Misdiagnosing, and Rediagnosing Women’s Anger in the Jin Ping Mei,” came out from the Journal of the American Society for Premodern China in 2025. It seizes on the depiction of women’s anger in this sixteenth-century full-length fiction, better known in English as The Plum in the Golden Vase, to gauge the work’s engagement with the contemporary medical milieux. By teasing out the rich layers of discursive contestation revolving around women’s anger and their varied approaches to this emotion, the article argues that the rendition of women’s anger showcases the fictional work’s stronger resonance with the etiological than the pathological strand of medical thinking. In the work, the physicians’ pathological consideration of anger’s corporeal impacts on female bodies initially appears to assume diagnostic authority. However, lay explanations in turn complement and complicate the pathological perspective, drawing the reader’s attention more toward an etiological vision. Furthermore, the etiological consideration of women’s anger solves the seeming paradox in the work that certain physicians feature diagnostic authority, but provide inefficacious treatment. In this way, the article advances a more nuanced repositioning of the work with regard to its surrounding medical contexts. In the meantime, the focus on anger significantly broadens the emotional horizon of late imperial Chinese literature beyond romantic love and sexual desire. Research for this article has been supported by the British Academy’s BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Programme (Ref. No. SRG24\241574), the Sino-British Fellowship Trust, and a Project Award from the Geiss Hsu Foundation.

The second article, written in Chinese, is entitled “Another Look at ‘Yang Siwen Encounters Some Old Acquaintances in Yanshan’ in Reference to Trauma Studies” and published in the open-access journal Chung Cheng Chinese Studies in 2025 as well. It engages the titular colloquial short story from Feng Menglong’s (1574-1646) collection Stories Old and New in an interdisciplinary conversation with trauma studies. The story is set against the backdrop of the Song-Jin confrontation (1125-1127) and features abundant reflections on resonant experience with trauma that is related to war and displacement. This article not only teases out the story’s intricate treatment of extreme experiences that are quasi-traumatic, but also enriches and broadens contemporary trauma theory through a non-Western and pre-modern text deeply invested in trauma writing. Juxtaposing both the total silence over and varied articulations of extreme experiences resulting from the dynastic confrontation, the story goes beyond the dominant dichotomy in contemporary theoretical construal of trauma as either unspeakable or not. The recurrent retellings of such extreme experiences as war, displacement, and death in the story further obscure the potentially traumatizing events themselves. Even though some recounts are putatively grounded in the act of witnessing, their ultimate unreliability ends up fundamentally questioning the act’s possibility, even that of self-witnessing. The impossibility of (self-)witnessing in turn worsens the uncertainty of the extreme experiences’ spokenness, a persistent uncertainty that situates them in what Jacque Lacan (1901-1981) terms “the Real.” At the same time, the story also attempts to designate such experiences with the Confucian moral signifier of “righteousness,” inadvertently embedding them in what Lacan calls “the Symbolic.” The extreme experiences’ simultaneous situatedness in the two supposedly dualistic orders further reminds us of questioning another dichotomous conception, that is, of trauma as either signifiable or not.

Both the Plum in the Golden Vase and the Stories Old and New have been fully translated and available online through the library catalogue. Those interested are highly encouraged to delve into these two fascinating works of world literature.

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