The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China. By Emily Baum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 304 pp. ISBN: 9780226580616 (cloth).

Abstract

solicit matching verses on those themes from poets across the region, some as far away as southern China. Chapters 4–6 explore how Mạc Thiên Tứ used Ten Songs of Hà Tiên to promote his city as a haven for the Ming diaspora. Connecting the first half of her book with the second, Ang focuses only on the poems written by Mạc Thiên Tứ and the matching verses by Nguyễn Cư Trinh. Ten Songs takes a place viewed by many as a wild frontier and reinscribes it as a place of beauty suitable for cultured people. Hà Tiên is not dangerous, the poems suggest, nor is it a backwater. Rather, it is a place that could be central to larger cultural projects. Mạc Thiên Tứ’s poems were both an advertisement to draw in settlers and, implicitly, a statement that Hà Tiên was independent of the Nguyễn lords of Đàng Trong. Ang patiently unlocks the hidden meanings of the poems. What, for instance, are the “fish-dragons” that frequently appear? Ang persuasively argues that they refer toMing loyalists scattered across Southeast Asia. The Ten Songs project’s goal of drawing together the Chinese diaspora to promote Hà Tiên as a sanctuary independent of Vietnamese control is lost in the official Vietnamese record, which depicts Mạc Thiên Tứ as a loyal supporter of the Nguyễn lord. Ang shows thatMing loyalists in Southeast Asia were not necessarily intent on overthrowing the Qing, but rather on preserving and knitting together their diasporic community. Mạc Thiên Tứ and Nguyễn Cư Trinh, the two authors at the heart of this book, were friends. Ang includes her translation of two extant letters from Nguyễn Cư Trinh to Mạc Thiên Tứ. These letters, Ang suggests, indicate that Mạc Thiên Tứ had to be cajoled into a position of loyalty to the Nguyễn lord. Nguyễn Cư Trinh discerned the political message of Mạc Thiên Tứ’s poetry and responded with a political message of his own. Mạc Thiên Tứ’s poems implicitly promote the independence of Hà Tiên and its status as a diasporic Chinese enclave, while Nguyễn Cư Trinh’s response, coming after twenty years of Nguyễn expansion in the Mekong, instead positions Hà Tiên as an integral part of the Nguyễn realm. With this book, Ang makes a major contribution to the field of Vietnamese studies as a whole, showing that even the diverse, ever-changing, contested Mekong frontier was deeply connected to a broader and older literary tradition. These texts are challenging to translate, and few scholars have the language skills and historical knowledge to do them justice. Ang does so successfully, and with style. More than a book-length study of two texts, Poetic Transformations is a reconstruction of vanished worlds. To fully appreciate these texts, one needs to understand not just their historical context in the frontier world of the eighteenth-century Mekong but also the world of classical tradition. That Ang made these worlds come alive is testament to her skills as a translator and as a guide to lost realms.