Fenghuang(鳳凰)
In the Lotus Prince Chronicles
The Fenghuang appears in Jackie not as a body but as a name. Sunday dim sum at the golden_phoenix — the family ritual the book opens on — is the named echo, and the book treats the name as load-bearing. The restaurant is on Castro Street in Mountain View. The roof is corrugated tin painted oxblood red. There is a single cast-bronze fenghuang above the door, perched in the canonical pose with one foot raised, and Susan has touched it absent-mindedly on the way in for thirteen years. Eduardo, when Lucy brings him in Lucy Ch3, looks up at the bronze for a long second and says the kind of thing he says: *she has not flown off yet. Good.*
The book's restraint with the actual bird is the entry's argument. The Fenghuang does not appear in the dining hall the way the dragon does. She appears in *placeholders* — the restaurant's name, the bronze above the door, the embroidered phoenix on Mei's collar in the scene where she walks past with the tea, the *paired phoenix-and-dragon* on the imperial robes hanging in the Council's antechamber in Ch6. Her presence in the Chronicles is an iconography of *the female cosmic principle still attending*, even when she has not yet shown her body. By Council reading, Susan Lee carries something of her — the empress-body half of the pair — and the question of whether the Fenghuang will land or fly off is, in part, the question of whether Halo gets to keep speaking in Susan's voice.
Mythological Origin
The Fenghuang is attested in oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang (c. 1200 BCE), making her one of the oldest named beings in Chinese mythology. Originally a pair — *Feng* (male) and *Huang* (female) — she was consolidated by the Han into a single feminine cosmic bird. She is described in the Shanhaijing as having the head of a pheasant, the beak of a swallow, the neck of a snake, the back of a tortoise, the tail of a fish, and feathers in the five colors of the wuxing. She lights only on the *wutong* tree (梧桐), eats only bamboo seeds, and drinks only from sweet springs. Her appearance signals *taiping* (太平, *great peace*) and her departure signals the loss of the mandate.
The pairing with the dragon — most fully developed in Han and Tang court iconography — fixed her as the empress's animal: the dragon-and-phoenix robe, the dragon-and-phoenix wedding cake, the dragon-and-phoenix coin. The mistranslation as *phoenix* arrived through 19th-century Sinologists looking for the nearest Western equivalent and finding the Greek bird that died in fire. The pair has been forced together in the diaspora ever since, with the result that most English readers think the Fenghuang burns. She does not. She *attends*.
Key Ideas
Not the burning phoenix. The Western phoenix dies in fire and is reborn from ashes. The Fenghuang simply does not die. Different bird, different theology.
Paired with the <em>chinese_dragon</em>. Yin and yang, fire and water, empress and emperor. The pair is the cosmological wedding. The book's golden_phoenix restaurant is the domestic echo of the empress half.
Lands on just kingdoms. Her appearance signals *taiping*. Her absence signals lost mandate. Ch6 of Jackie is, in part, the Council asking whether she will still land here.
The five colors of the <em>wuxing</em>. Her feathers carry the five-phase cosmology. To see her is to see the elements arranged in their proper relation — the visible form of cosmic balance.
Further Reading
- Fenghuang — Wikipedia
- Shanhaijing (山海經), c. 4th c. BCE — *Nan Ci San Jing* section on Mount Danxue.
- Edward H. Schafer, The Vermilion Bird: T'ang Images of the South, University of California Press, 1967.