Gender Politics in Modern China

Gender Politics in Modern China

Writing and Feminism

Tani E. Barlow, editor

Duke University Press Durham and London 1993

© 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper 00
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
The text of this book originally was published
without the present introduction, index, and
essays by Yue and Liu as volume 4, numbers
1 and 2 of Modern Chinese Literature.
Second printing, 1998
Contents

vii Howard Goldblatt· Foreword

1 Tani E. Barlow . Introduction

13 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan· The Language of

Despair: Ideological Representations of the
"New Woman" by May Fourth Writers

33 Lydia H. Liu . Invention and Intervention: The

Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature

58 Wendy Larson . The End of "Funti Wenxue":

Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935

74 Carolyn T. Brown· Woman as Trope: Gender and

Power in Lu Xun's "Soap"

90 Rey Chow . Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of

Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua

106 Randy Kaplan . Images of Subjugation and Defi-

ance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of
Tian Han

118 Meng Yue . Female Images and National Myth

137 Wolfgang Kubin . Writing with Your Body:

Literature as a Wound-Remarks on the Poetry of
Shu Ting

151 Chen Yu-shih . Harmony and Equality: Notes on

"Mimosa" and "Ark"

159 Wang Zheng . Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu

Lin, Dai Qing
vi Contents

209 Richard King, In the Translator's Eye: On the

Significance of Zhu Lin.

215 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yuan Qiongqiong

and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan's
Feminine Writers.

238 Jon Solomon, Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue's

Resistance and Cultural Critique.

266 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, Feminism in the Chinese

Context: Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife.

290 Margaret H. Decker, Political Evaluation and

Reevaluation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.

304 Contributors

306 Index
Foreword
Howard Goldblatt

A good idea at just the righttime produced excellent results three years
ago, when this collection of articles and essays first appeared in Modem
Chinese Literature. It was the journal's first issue devoted to gender and
feminism, and the first anthology of its kind in Chinese literary studies. It
was immediately adopted for classroom use by many of its readers.
I foresee a similar destiny for this revised and expanded collection, so
ably edited and introduced by Tani Barlow. Rich harvests await anyone
interested in the literary activities and achievements of modem China, and
specialists and students in Chinese feminist and gender studies have already
signaled their appreciation for the project. But I believe, too, that reissuing
the volume is yet another sign that East Asian scholarship is making its mark
in cultural studies in general.
I am pleased that the editorial board of Modem Chinese Literature had
the good sense to listen to Professor Barlow back then, for this is a collection
that will be used and studied by a great many people for a long time to come.
Introduction
by Tani E. Barlow

In a satire on love and literature, the writer Ding Ling confronted her
fictional poet Ouwai Ou with a choice. His bound-footed, oriental-style
lover,little Ajin, is a tubercular prostitute. Wendy, the so-called modern girl
he courts one pale grey Beijing morning, is a profligate hysteric. Which
arouses him more (and via the magic of modernist literary metonymy,
stiffens his flagging creative resolve), the nativized girl or the modernized
girl? Actually, bad-faith relations with female objects are so prominent in
the story that it is easy to overlook the modernist codes "A Woman and a
Man" brings into play.l What codes are these? Ouwai becomes a man by
acting out a stylized heterosexual gender politics that casts him in the role
of the desiring subject drawn to a female object and held there in thrall to
her narcissism. The woman who makes him feel most manly is the one he
desires the most. His manhood, and thus his personhood, in other words is
constructed during the dance of bourgeois sexual play. The term that best
captures Ouwai (an agent who becomes a self by desiring women and
representing reality; see Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's essay in this volume) is
zhuti, which I translate "sovereign subject." Ouwai is Ding Ling's parodic
male, May Fourth intellectual who nominates himself to be the agent of
Chinese modernity. Though he is an unsavory specimen of a man, nonethe-
less Ouwai's gender performance and class skills denote him a subject in
relation to Ajin and Wendy.
The story of Ouwai Ou' s erotic dalliances, then, is a parable about the
historical mission of the gendered, class-stratified, male-dominated treaty
port elite. This class shaped its peculiar national political position through
a strategy of appropriating knowledge from the colonial powers. Along
with electricity and moving pictures, for instance, professional elites took
over social Darwinian discourse on elementary sex differences. Scientific
notions, including the dictum that male versus female constitutes the
originary difference in nature, fed into the discourses of sernicolonial
modernity in China, as a constituting element of modernist codes. That is

1 Ding Ling, "A Woman and a Man," trans. TaniBarlow(with Gary Bjorge), inl Myself
am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989),82-103.
I thank Gail Hershatter, Jnderpal Grewal, Donald M. Lowe, and two anonymous readers
who commented or contributed to this essay in various ways. Parts of this introduction were
lifted out of a shorter essay that prefaced the earlier, special issue of Modem Chinese
Literature. My thanks to Howard Goldblatt, editor of Modem Chinese Literature, who
encouraged me to take on the enjoyable task of guest-editing the journal's first special issue
on gender, feminism and women's literature.
2 Tani Barlow

one reason the gendered modernity depicted in Ding Ling's short story is
so relentlessly eroticized. 2 Ding Ling's little story plots history into a simple
decision: Should Ouwai au, emblematic zhishiJenzi, construct himself in
relation to his nativist longing for an erotically satisfactory national past
(tradition, represented in a thoroughly unproblematized fashion by the
meretricious native girl)? Or would his sense of self and historical mission
be better served in relation to the global representational economy of the
new, capitalist machine culture (modernity, embodied in the hysterical
modern girl with the flashing Garbo eyes)?3
Ding Ling's story has permitted me to introduce a number of historical
questions that I feel this volume provokes. I have read "A Woman and a
Man" as an historian. So, for the most part, have contributors to this volume
read their texts, each attempting to maintain a sense of history in the analytic
background. (The sort of history I advocate is fundamentally interrogative
rather than narrative.) In part, the shape of Chinese discourse on modernity
will seem less certain when viewed through the eyes of these gender-
sensitive critics. There is here little of the sense of inevitability that often
attends conventional history narrative because modernist discourse seems
so tentative in these readings. Mostly, however, the contributors qualify as
historians because they do not accept at face value a masculinist version of
Chinese modernity thatreinscribes, without question, European-style bour-
geois sex stereotypes over earlier gendered categories, as Ding Ling's text,
for all its burlesque distancing techniques, seems to do.
The essays here raise questions about gender and power like: What
distinguishes masculinity in Chinese modernist discourse? Is Chinese
modernity really inflected masculine? Are there conditions under which
modernity is feminine, as Wendy Larson argues? What emancipatory
potential did the recoding of male dominance in mod~rnity hold out to
women and to men? How should feminine counter-hegemonic writing be
evaluated? And what kinds of trouble did writers make who were not
entranced by the shapely outlines of the new bourgeois order?
2 Another structuring element in her work of the period was the generally ambivalent
economy of gender stratification and racial difference that structured the imaginary relation
of the would-be colonizer and the local man (nanxing).

3 For a discussion of this staple in theoretical terms, see "Japan and Postmodernism,"
a special issue edited by Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, SA Q. The ubiquity of the
modernist/nativist binary can be seen in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's history of Taiwan
literature in this volume. It is a version of the old Levensonian spider web, this time
contextualized as an effect of imperialism and colonial discourses. For an extended
discussion of colonial modernity in East Asia, see the inaugural edition of positions: east
asia cultures critique (Spring 1993), entitled "Colonial Modernity."
 Introduction 3

Essays one through six in this volume focus on the period of Chinese
colonial modernity or semicolonialism. (For cultural historians of China
this era consists of roughly the last half of the nineteenth and the first half
of the twentieth centuries.) The balance of the essays target socialist and
postsocialist versions of modernity, particularly recent attempts to regroup
the power ofliterature following the antibourgeois campaigns of the Maoist
years. All these scholars center their attention on the gendering of the
modern literary text. They assume that baihua literature differs consider-
abl y from colloquial literatures of the past because though all literatures are
gendered, each text presents itself according to its specific time and
placement. Consequently, each contributor has found herself or himself
explaining the complex ways that Chinese texts in modernist discourse
recoded femininity and masculinity. Further, the literary critics seem to
concur that historical categories are constitutionally unstable; this insight
gives questions about gender and modernity, masculine and feminine, and
feminism a new importance.
China scholars cannot avoid the gender question in studies of moder-
nity, subjectivity and history. Gender discourse and gender semiotics are
always part of the constituting forces at work in social formation. Likewise,
once the alleged natural order of male dominance is unmasked and seen to
be constructed, then, as Carolyn Brown's paper in this volume reiterates,
the hows and wherefores of each specific instance become a subject matter
of great concern to all scholars. The contribution of the essays in this volume
to the larger historical project lies in the way each evaluates the pleasures
and constraints of Chinese literary modernisms.
What do these essays convey about gender and historical modernity
that is so valuable? They support the view that since 1850 or thereabout,
changes in who was empowered to write and in the tenor of Chinese writing
itself ushered into being two new social subjects, woman (niixing) and man
(nanxing), and made them elemental categories of colonial modernity. For
instance, the Ding Ling short story I noted earlier encoded a certain kind of
performative heterosexuality and celebrated its new centrality in literary
representation. Though relatively new to Chinese discourses, the hetero-
sexual binary is recognizable from other bourgeois traditions. The question,
then, is really one of specificity. How, specifically, did new formulae for
masculinity and femininity get encoded in semicolonial China, in socialist
China, and in post-Mao China? What makes Chinese gendered modernities
distinctively different from codes in other postcolonial modernities else-
where? What makes them internally different from each other, in terms that
Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang raises here? What pressures have all this
4 Tani Barlow

recoding exerted to transform sexuality into an "identity," and have they

succeeded't
Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's ''The Language of Despair" invokes mod-
em China's multiple crises of representation, sovereignty, and subjectivity
to show how xin niixing, the "new woman" of May Fourth modernity
(roughly the 1920s), was constituted a foundation for the masculine, realist
canon. Texts by ma1e authors, Chan argues, organized themselves with
reference to a specific female literary angst which he reads transitively as
a covenant: "The root of your [female] suffering is to be found in my [male]
inability to right the wrong that society has done me [as a man]." Chan
clarifies the implications of this projection:

Her [xin nu.xing] life, her fate, her suffering, her vulnerability, her
sexuality, and her despair-all these "I" can assertively represent within
the constraints of our social hegemony, because (after all), her identity
is nowhere recognizable except in me, and (ironically) my sense of
alienation nowhere nourishable but in the marginality-if not the
impossibility-{)f "her" self. (my emphasis)

Chan's demonstration of how certain identifiable masculinist literary habits

established the sexualized, modem Chinese "new woman" speaks both to
the question of gender relations in early, rea1ist baihua texts and to the
specific codes of masculine and feminine characterizing China's colonial
literary modernity.5
Lydia Liu's argument in "Invention and Intervention: The Female
Tradition in Modem Chinese Literature" engages Wendy Larson's essay
"The End of 'Funii Wenxue'''; both inject tension into Chan's insight while
confirming its basic outline. Liu's focus is the genealogy of the female
tradition in modem Chinese literature. Her paper is deeply informed by the
rich harvest of writing about women's culture, theory, and history in
mainland intellectua1 circles over the last decade. But Liu' s point in singling
out the tremulous tradition offemale writing is her belief that in "situat[ing]
4 Feminist scholarship has established in historical and theoretical detail that changes
in discourse are always at the same time changes in gendering practices and therefore of
"gender itself." In my view, gender is neither a stable relation governing the affairs of
extradiscursive men and women nor a matter of culturally relative ways of improvising on
the same old tune of anatomical sex difference. Gender signals the performance, and
technologies enabling the performance, by means of which the sexes (one, two, three, and
more) establish themselves. The newly distinctive codes in discourses of Chinese moder-
nity were not epiphenomenal-that is, they did not just offer a change of externals. Gender
coding in Chinese modernities were the protocols through which people became them-
selves, became men and women. (The last sentence is an amended, paraphrased version of
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York:
Routledge, 1990], p. 7. Also see Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the
Category of "Women" in History [New York: Macmillan, 1988], Judith Butler. Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York and London: Routledge,
1990], and Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, Body Guards: The Cultural Politics ofGender
 Introduction 5

female subjectivity in a process that challenges the received idea of

womanhood," writers such as Ding Ling, Zhang Jie, and Wang Anyi
reinforced an "idea of the female tradition [that is] no less a potent form of
historical intervention than it is an invention" (my emphasis).
Liu raises an important point. Invention is never a benign, disinterested
or accidental exercise. The question her essay obliges the reader to ask is,
what compelled the female writers to intervene at all? Certainly the
emergence of a literary politics of hierarchical othering (where the male
bourgeois subject self-interestedly reconstructs his self through his rela-
tions with women) and a counterpolitics of female self-invention at the
same time is not a coincidence. The project of women laying claim to
literature as a means of "rewriting (the male text) and gaining authorial
control" is a key move in most bourgeois gender and identity politics. In
other words, discourses of sexuality expressed through baihua literature
and the politics of personal identity originate together. The former is a
precondition of the latter.
Wendy Larson's "The End of 'Funii Wenxue'" directly addresses the
historicity of gender codes. Larson seeks to explain why a "demotion of
gendered literature" occurred in the decade 1925-35. She makes a signifi-
cant argument that the decline was a consequence of two historical events.
These were, first, the colonial practice of measuring modem Chinese
literary norms against a stereotyped idea of the significance of the Western
canon and, second, socialism's increasing importance to the educated elite.
There is another important emphasis in Larson's piece that Randy Kaplan,
Rey Chow, Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, and Carolyn Brown all develop in their
essays, too. What kind of politics, each asks, governed contests over coding
masculinity and femininity (distinguished momentarily from simplistic
questions about the ways men exploit women), and how were the qualities
of masculinity and femininity assigned and reassigned through literary
codes?
Reading to expose how gender imbricates a text is a necessary but
quotidian, political activity. "Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu

Ambiguity [New York and London: Routledge, 1991] for discussion of the links between
discourse, representation and gender).
For an airing of these matters in a Chinese-language context, see A. Zito and T. Barlow,
eds., Body, Subject, Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
5 Speaking the truth of Chinese woman's derogation was a way of empowering young
literary men (Ouwai's more respectable brethren), in other words. Mao Dun, Yu Dafu, and
others who spoke for their wives and daughters structured the self of the speaker himself,
the sovereign subject modern Chinese man. This particularity, as historians have demon-
strated, suggests that May Fourth modernity might have something in common with
colonial modernities elsewhere. See Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds.,
Postmodernism and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press,
forthcoming 1994). Also see Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third
World (London: Zed Press, 1986).
6 Tani Barlow

Xun's 'Soap'" argues that when you look for masculine or feminine and
assume them to be shifting qualities, your reading can unfix them just as it
unfixes you. Carolyn Brown elaborates at some length on just how useful
it is to consider alternatives to the notion that gender relations are nothing
more than extradiscursive bits of the natural order. She demonstrates the
specificity of gender performance and intimates that, being historical, no
configuration can ever be completely stationary. Within her difficult
knowledge, Brown is always able to locate points where Lu Xun's texts
evade, refuse, ignore, or resist gender convention.
According to Brown, Lu Xun's eagerness to contextualize gender and
class oppression into elements of anti-imperialist, nationalist critique,
sprang from his principled refusal to renaturalize "woman" and make it into
an identity.

Lu Xun argued that the physical body-the signifier-the female-had

become the repository of a meaning-the signified-that in fact it did
not rightfully bear. In rejecting the conventional literary tropes for
configuring women and adopting the technique of realist representation
to make explicit his critique, Lu Xun demystified the unspoken tenets of
the cultural order. One function of myth is to make what is a social
construct appear to be the natural order. Lu Xun revealed it again as a
construct.

Brown read "Soap" because the story privileged a female character but
rejected the common-sense linkages between qualities of femininity and
the oppressions of women as a group. Rey Chow's "Virtuous Transactions:
A Reading of Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua" reconsiders Brown's
point that modem writers demystify older, naturalized codes of masculine/
feminine. To illustrate how linkages such as those between domestic and
feminine, writing and transgression, pretty and derogated got organized in
semicolonial times, Chow chose to examine texts of the most "feminine" of
all first-generation modern female writers, Ling Shuhua. Chow argues that
femininity is a quality born in a social transaction whereby Chinese women
"learn to give up their own desires in exchange for their social place." This
entails for them a sorrow that cannot be alleviated. Why? Because the
discipline required to maintain good behavior within the limits set by the
transaction infuses femininity into the text at the same time as the text is
itself devalued. Thus, Ling Shuhua's fiction is undervalued because "the
label guixiu pai wenxue effectively absorbs the socially transgressive
implications of women's attempts at writing by means ofclassification" by
domesticizing the text (my emphasis). Ling's only resort is parody. Her
texts delight in the moments when the most absurd stipulations of the
contract are enforced.
The assertion that femininity equals domesticity in semicoloniallitera-
ture suggests an older question. Why in twentieth-century literary history
 Introduction 7

have codes for gender hierarchy been so easily reabsorbed into other
hierarchic social distinctions (e.g., class, national, and Confucian, to name
a few)? Randy Kaplan's "Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female
Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han," which reads playscripts of
the early 1920s, explains the devolution of representations of women in
theater from a high point, the early 1920s, to a later subordinate position in
the work of left-wing dramatists. In Kaplan's view change did not prove
progressive. Even the sorrows of the male-authored May Fourth female
hero at least allowed a vision of personal autonomy and encouraged self-
willed acts. Essential sex difference, naturalized sex characteristics, and
strict binary opposition may not be natural or universal, but when May
Fourth new women adopted them as such, they at least arrogated to
themselves an invented realm of free will unheard of before; at least in
Kaplan's view. In other words, while the heroines of male dramatist Tian
Han are wimpy and whiny, they are not nearly as devalued as later socialist
woman robots, who let gender classificatory politics condemn them before
they ever open their mouths.
Kaplan's view-that socialist gender codes vitiated naturalized,
liberatory, necessary sex difference and reversed the progressive trend
toward representing women's erotic performance and freedom of choice-
is a widely held opinion among many China literary scholars now. The
prevailing view owes much to Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua' s 1989 pioneering
monograph Emerging from the Horizon of History. 6 Many scholars work-
ing in the United States but not represented is this volume, like Chen
Xiaomei, Lu Tonglin, and Zhang Yingjin, have also amplified D~i and
Meng's insight. The outlines of the earlier book's argument are visible in
Meng Yue's vehement, brilliant essay for this volume, "FeJl1aleImages and
National Myth." Her polemic argues that socialist revolution ended a
promising May Fourth liberation of women by substituting masculinist
desire for women's sexuality. The tragedy of the sacrifice of women's
sexuality and the need to recover Chinese women's literary tradition (in
Lydia Liu's usage) as the proper receptacle of female desire have become
defining points of neo-May Fourth scholarship in the People's Republic of
China and among scholars in the United States who stay current with
debates in China literary circles.
The intellectual roots and political objectives of the critique are
important to grasp. In Meng's succinct statement:

The female image in socialist fiction [ca. 1942-present] can be both a

vessel carrying the (male) literatus' private dreams, the "other" or
mirror-image of the male writer, and the representative of a certain class

6 Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu fishi dibiao (Emerging from the horizon of history)
(Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuhan she, 1989).
8 Tani Barlow

or sociopolitical group, or even the authority of the Communist Party

itself. The female image is the allegorical place where the public fuses
with the private. To a large extent, as I seek to demonstrate, the female
image in socialist literature has worked symbolically to introduce and
infiltrate the totalitarian claims of the state within the field ofthe private
conscious and unconscious.

In Meng's view, then, cultural coding of gender difference (masculine/

feminine) is suprahistorical yet vulnerable. It can be expected to be fairly
similar everywhere-unless that is, it encounters totalitarian interference,
as it did in the Maoist period (roughly 1942-1980). The aim of the female
critic and female writer who have been alerted to the totalitarian incursions
of the state is to rebuild female subjectivity on foundations laid during the
earlier period of colonial modernity. Particularly the critic's job is to
recuperate and to breathe back to life women's sexuality (Meng seems to
grasp sexuality as an essence, not a discourse), by properly representing it
in critical and literary terms.
Chen Yu-shih and Wolfgang Kubin equivocate in a rather similar
manner. A hint of desire for some reliable measure beyond history surfaces
most plaintively in Chen Yu-shih's humanist argument "Harmony and
Equality: Reflections on 'Mimosa' and 'The Ark.'" Reading mid-eighties
fiction, Chen queries her texts: how, she asks, should gender get reassigned,
in a manner of speaking, after Maoism? Sexuality and identity should be
recoupled, but, in her view, they cannot be. Why? Because even in the best
post-Mao male fiction woman just disappears. It keeps on sliding back into
the masculinist, Marxist space of the material and the natural and it, woman,
is therefore transformed yet again into an inert, exploitable, national
resource. Just as the law of necessary linkage had earlier imposed a
harmony that Chen finds deeply offensive because it disabled woman under
Confucian hegemony, so post-Cultural Revolution writer Zhang Xian-
liang's social satires recycle a notion of balance that "transforms all issues
concerning women into economic issues related to men's construction of
themselves as subject." To disrupt the mechanism that persistently returns
woman to the level of a natural resource, Chen opts for the humanist
individualism she espies in Zhang Jie's key work The Ark. Chinese women
must participate in an ongoing struggle to exceed socialist naturalization,
Chen argues. Humanism rather than any doctrinaire or foreign feminism,
offers the most aptly calibrated intellectual weapon to the insurgent Chinese
woman writer and critic.
Kubin also shares one ofMeng' s central concerns: is gender difference
always coded the same everywhere, and in cases where it apparently is not,
should it be? For several decades Kubin has been adapting the Anglo-
American feminist theology of Elizabeth Abel, Susan Gubar, and Sandra
Gilbert to his rereading of Chinese women's literature. In this essay,
"Writing With Your Body: Literature as a Wound-Remarks on the Poetry
 Introduction 9

of Shu Ting," Kubin reads poems of the immediate post-Cultural Revolu-

tion years. Female poet Shu Ting helps Kubin make his case that sexual
difference is always grounded in the physical body of woman. Beneath the
binary EastiWest, and across all opposed, binarial categories such as now/
then, elite/popular, and state/society, stretches, in Kubin's view, the one
primordial and originary divide of woman from man. No matter how
invasive the state, and no matter how it attempts to erase the gender of the
poem, body always tells in the end. The critic's job is to find the body in the
poem and locate the distinguishing marks it makes.
The strongly argued critical positions ofMeng, Chen and Kubin haunts
Wang Zheng's absorbing, frequently hilarious conversations with leading
Chinese writers entitled "Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai
Qing." These interviews are an invaluable resource. They suggest that
criticism and writing belonged to separate worlds in the 1980s. Zhu Lin's
comment that she never considered her writing to be "about women" before
she come into contact with Professor Chen Yu-shih makes this point
vividly. So does Wang Zheng's own comment that she herselffound easy
access to the writers because she could offer media exposure outside China
and therefore, in the predictable loop, greater currency at home. Richard
King's brief note on his experience translating Zhu Lin's work reinforces
the same point: Chinese women's literature is just another commodity on
the global culture market.
If decentering really does effect gender politics, then the three final
essays, by Jon Solomon, Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, and Sung-sheng Yvonne
Chang, offer intimations of resistance from a margin. Sung-sheng Chang's
historical account suggests the primacy of context. Popular writers of the
seventies and eighties in Taiwan, particularly Yuan Qiongqiong, all claim
Zhang AilinglEileen Chang as their inspiration, Chang demonstrates. But
writers within Taiwan's female literary tradition have rewritten Zhang's
oeuvre and reimagined her significance from the wildly commercial world
of Taiwan's heroic, late-developing capitalism. Chang has several motives
for pointing out how Yuan Qiongqiong's texts are feminine and how this
femininity gets constructed in the tension between Zhang Ailing's text and
Taiwan's frontier capitalist context. First, it allows Chang to shift analysis
from erotics to the political economy of the text. Second, she can suggest
ways the culturally marginalized (in relation to China's elite literary center)
Chinese-speaking intellectual community has reencoded gender and text.
Third, she contributes a theme that surfaces as a consequence of her
authorial positioning (like Ng and Solomon, Chang has scholarly ties with
Taiwan and Hong Kong): a persistent confusion, this critique argues,
smudges the line separating femininity (a normative quality) and feminism
(an ideology that unlike Marxism was always considered foreign) in the
women's tradition of literature as it was reinvented on the periphery.
In Daisy Ng's "Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang's The
10 Tani Barlow

Butcher's Wife," the indistinction of femininity and feminism becomes

acute. For Taiwanese writers of the 1980s like Li Ang. Ng points out.
literary feminism is a colonial discourse appropriated into Chinese human-
ism and not really the rallying cry of a bourgeois movement aimed at
political and intellectual liberation for women. Ng's single most important
conclusion is that the significance of the novel "does not lie in any
progressive insight into women's position in Chinese society but rather in
its challenge to the literary conventions of China." So to change the
feminine (a quality of personhood) requires changing writing more even
than transforming dress, work, family, or national policies. A femininity
ratified in literary terms resonates with concerns raised in earlier essays,
particularly those of Chan, Chen, Chow, Liu, Larson and Meng, reinforcing
the suggestion. that gender codes have worked differently in Chinese
modernities than in China's past or in the pasts and presents of other
historical traditions elsewhere. Ng concludes by noting that writing and the
feminine are linked in Taiwan literary convention and that this site of
linkage is precisely where elite contest and transgression have historically
occurred.
Jon Solomon goes to the roots of sinophone literary modernity in his
explication of Can Xue's preoccupation with power, signification and
subjectification. Solomon suggests that Can Xue' s mid-1980s texts operate
to prevent or preclude the reemergence of the (male) sovereign subject
(zhuti). In his review, resistance occurs at the intersection of post-Mao
despair and colonial anxiety, where the apprehension of subjectivity is most
acute. Solomon hints that for Can Xue the way out has been a project of
undoing the processes so lovingly elaborated in Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's
celebration of subjectification and modernity. Certainly Chan's realists,
strategizing to alleviate their own insufficiencies, sought to participate in
the project of universal representation offered under the terms of colonial
modernity. Perhaps that is why "a fear of the will to represent everything"
appears constantly in Can Xue's work, linked to anxiety over the colonial
positioning of Chinese modernity. Helping himself to Can Xue' s anxiety
takes Solomon back into the question of possible alternative genealogies.
He endorses Can Xue's "antidote: a culture made from the disease itself,"
which would neutralize the stultifying pressure of Chinese nationalist
discourse, the pressure of nationalism's requirement that its every twist and
tum be represented in a unitary rationalist historical narrative.

Can Xue's project brings us finally to the question of feminism's role

in politics, raised in the present volume. Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng and Sung-
sheng Yvonne Chang are interrogating the record in search of a Chinese
literary feminism. Why, they want to know, have literary feminisms in
Chinese-language texts so often reshaped what should be a political critique
 Introduction 11

into an analysis of sex -typed personal qualities? What might rehabilitate the
political edge of feminisms that are constantly deflected into the feminine
or dismissed as Western? Meng Yue, Rey Chow, Carolyn Brown, and
Wendy Larson, on the other hand, bring feminist humanism to bear as they
air the historical forces that in their views have shaped gender inequity and
configured its performance since modem times began. These scholars
suggest a further problem: Why do the women's movement and the new
organizations of subordination occur in Chinese modernity simulta-
neously?
Yet, most recent U.S. dialogue about feminisms in Chinese-language
contexts has revolved around the problem of authenticity. Scholars have
argued that feminisms are inapplicable to Chinese contexts, or that China
has its own indigenous feminisms, or that the accidents of birth and genetics
make some subjects more capable of speaking about feminisms in connec-
tion with China than others. What the essays in this volume suggest is that
arguments actually proceed ex post facto in light of the demonstration of
feminism's multiplicities and utilities in a variety of contexts. Scholars
from Meng Yue and Carolyn Brown to Rey Chow and Wendy Larson to
Lydia Liu and Daisy Ng have drawn on the resources of theoretical and
practical feminisms with tremendous creativity. That much is quite simply
already fact.
This reissued set of papers actuall y suggests some newer questions that
might profitably be asked in the future, including: How do feminisms
circulate internationally? What are the basic orientations of feminisms now
in China? Are there ways of thinking about justice and women's special
conditions that do not engage feminisms? If tradition is constructed
ideologically, then is feminism a critique of tradition, or is it constructed at
the same time as the binary tradition/modernity, and is it therefore simply
another "other" of tradition? Are Chinese feminisms critiques of national-
ism or not? Beyond antisexism, what do specific ferninisms have, if
anything, that might form a place for strategic affinities?
The critic must read the literary text if she is to explain in the necessary,
mundane, nuts-and-bolts fashion how gendering is discursively engi-
neered. Lydia Liu, Carolyn Brown, and Jon Solomon all discern counter-
traditions that have refused, confused, disrupted, or diffused modernist
attempts to link female subjectivity to a binary construction of gender. Most
vividly in the work of Meng Yue and Chen Yu-shih, and in Wang Zheng's
dialogue with writers Dai Qing, Wang Anyi, and Zhu Lin, feminist politics
takes the form of a straightforward call to resuscitate the historical feminism
of China's colonial modernity, the May Fourth period. Meng Yue particu-
larly attacks what she considers the refusal of the Mao era to recognize
innate gender difference. She seems to tum to a feminism rooted in female
particularism.
12 Tani Barlow

But at a different level this volume represents a current transnational

impulse in feminism? At the very least, its republication is a by-product of
the explosion offeminist criticism in the Chinese-speaking world and of the
resurgence of an educated women's movement particularly on the China
mainland during the 1980s. Looked at from that perspective, the volume
forms the meeting place of gender-sensitive cultural criticism of all sorts-
human rights advocacy from the margin (Chen Yu-shih and Carolyn
Brown), postcolonial criticism (Ng, Chow, Chang, Chan, and Solomon),
Chinese mainland-inspired critiques (Meng and Liu), and a progressive,
Western white feminism (Larson, Kubin, and Kaplan). It therefore joins
feminist movement globally, further evidencing the capacity of efforts of
social justice to engage, affiliate, and align in many progressive ways.

7 See Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, eds., Scattered Hegemonies (Minneapolis:
U ni versity of Minnesota Press, 1994).
The Language of Despair:
Ideological Representations of the
"New Woman" by May Fourth Writers
Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

The deepest longing of human existence is ... the

longing of man for selfhood, the longing to transform
the narrow peak of existence into a wide plain with
the path of life winding across it ... But every longing
fulfilled is a longing destroyed.
Georg LulGics
Soul and Fonn, 1910

It took her five weeks to learn that my work could

not be restricted by regular eating hours. . . . My
appetite was much smaller than before, now that I
was Sitting at home all day using my brain, but even
so there wasn't always even enough rice. It had been
given to [the dog] A Sui.... So there were only the
hens to eat my left-overs. It was a long time before I
realized this. I was very conscious, however, that my
"place in the university," as Huxley describes it, was
only somewhere between the dog and the hens.
LuXun
"Regret for the Past," 1925

In the turbulent times of the May Fourth cultural movement in

modern China, the search for a new subjectivity was carried out quite
frequently in terms of capturing, in a new form, the identity crisis of the
"new women" [xin niixing]. Yet the control of this form was everywhere
disciplined by the intellectual (male-centered) self, whose own dilemma of
identity tended to be posited in relation to the alien, repressed, but emerg-
ing "other" of the woman in question. Such attempts to give "form" to
women's identity during the early stages of China's modernization were
common not only in the works of female writers like Ding Ling, but more
so (though perhaps less ostensibly) in the works ofleading male writers like
Lu Xun and Yu Dafu. Mao Dun's early fiction seemed to occupy an
ambiguous position somewhere in between, as most of his female
protagonists were left, characteristically, between suffering a complete
collapse of consciousness in an outpouring of emotions and resigning to
the total silence of solitude and despair.
However, for Mao Dun, as for Lu Xun and Yu Dafu, the woman's
sense of solitude and despair, her gesture of resistance and revolution,
indeed the totality of her consciousness-all these could find a channel of
14 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

expression only through a voice that spoke in the grammar of the dominant
discourse of crisis, be it the voice of a solitary outcast (in Yu Dafu), the
voice of a half-inert, half-sympathetic bystander (in Lu Xun), or the voice
of a cool, calm and ultimate revolutionary (in Mao Dun). The result was a
mimetic movement toward the (other) self, toward some possible forma-
tions of female subjectivity that contributed to the aesthetic dimension of
modern Chinese representation nothing less than a labyrinth of discursive
modes.
My objective in this study is to address the basic question of repre-
sentation-perhaps the one common message of all realist aesthetics-by
focusing on the new images of women as they emerged in specific cultural
and historical "formations of despair" during the period immediately fol-
lowing the May Fourth Movement of 1919. As I attempt to re-organize the
classical mimetic function of realism around the enunciative performance
of language in the Chinese realist discourse, I argue that the modern
intellectual wanted desperately to re-present himself via a mutation in the
crisis of the "other." At the same time, I am also suggesting that the
aesthetic question is definitely a matter of form, but not (in the last analysis)
of form alone. Hence, my reading of some of the earliest realist writings in
modern China can also be taken as an effort to reconstruct the basic quest
for form through what might be called an aesthetics of despair. By ap-
proaching the crisis of consciousness from the vantage point of repre-
sentation-the representation of the "other" by the self, of "reality" by
language-I wish to show how the realist obsession with despair is itself an
attempt at mediating the contradictions of form. The critical problem I
want to layout is this: Given the complex of conflictual social relations
involved in the intellectual's will to implement revolution through various
new ways of subjective expression (such as love), how was it possible for
the realist form (itself the embodiment of a radical discourse) to capture
the totality of that crisis-that despair-without handling the problematic
of its own crisis-the crisis of representation?

•
Actively participating in the so-called New Literary Movement,
progressive May Fourth writers like Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun all
tried to bring home to their contemporary readers a critical sense of unrest
and bewilderment they felt as part of their historical experiences, not
because they could logically show the public the authentic meaning of
history, but because they had compelled them to either accept, reject, or
compromise the ways in which their common condition of existence was
being represented through the text. And as the social and ideological
texture of reality thus exposed to the readers was received at once with pity
and with fear, the crisis of consciousness it summoned up for them would
 The Language of Despair 15

turn out to be contained, ultimately, in a discourse of solitude and despair

that spoke to the crisis of feminine subjectivity as the "other" question of
representation for the dominant intellectual "self."
For everyday events were lived by men and women as history mostly
via detours. Often, historical moments were "summoned up" for the col-
lective consciousness without recourse to the normalizing mediation of
everyday exercise of power relations. Thus, "history" for the Chinese
populace was experienced as collective life when, during the May Fourth
era, the dominant culture of the people was being recognized for the first
time, by intellectuals and other significant social groups in the urban
community, as the actual order of a repressive systematics, namely, the
patriarchal hegemony. Reality was now being negatively identified, not as
any natural, monologic voice of history, but as the undeniable inauthen-
ticity of an aging patriarch best manifested then in the icon of Confucius
himself. What evolved through this collective crisis were not merely the
so-called "dark sides" of reality, but the actual formations of what Herbert
Marcuse calls in Reason and Revolution a "negative totality. "It designates,
for Marcuse, the overall (visible and invisible) conditions that help expose
the entire structure of reality, the total network of sociohistorical con-
tradictions in which "every particular moment [of crisis] contains, as its very
content, the whole, and must be interpreted as the whole" (159). In the
light of this problematic, it may be possible to propose that, for the May
Fourth intellectuals (among them iconoclastic writers of all sorts), to
capture the historical moments of their time was, in essence, to summon
up those experiences of crisis for a new mode of representation, and (thus)
as the question of representation itself.
As the Confucian icon crumbled in the turbulent New Cultural Move-
ment motivated by enthusiastic intellectuals of the May Fourth generation,
word about a new future for women began to spread. Ibsen's Nora became
an instant symbol of rebellion and the immediate spokeswoman, as it were,
for an alternative hegemony whose foreseeable future remained unknown,
uncertain, and unreal. But all the obstacles notwithstanding, one could still
witness the emergence of a critical consciousness that addressed women as
repressed and marginal under traditional social relationships. Since such a
phenomenon was most unusual in a culture dominated for thousands of
years by a hyper-static ethical and political order, the subversive act itself
might legitimately be considered the collective response to a major histori-
cal crisis. The prominent result was, at the pivotal point of May Fourth, a
crisis of consciousness among the new intellectuals, for whom all the
passionate urges for change came together in the formation of a normally
16 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

unethical discourse, one that was written, spoken, and read in the name of
Eros, its lack, its excess, and its reason for being, for despair.l
Once repressed, the language of despair-despair as the root of
existence, despair as the cause for life-now erupted through layers of
institutional and ideological dominance to appear in the formation of a new
ethic and a new culture. It gave rise to an alternative discourse that might
have contributed to women's new entry into history. Yet despite its revolu-
tionary momentum, the eruption, in effect, also became the very sign of
continual disruption. For given the all-pervasive constraints of the tradi-
tional hegemony, insertion into an order of legitimacy need not necessarily
allow the "new woman" to represent her own identity in, much less to
liberate herself from, the presiding Law of the symbolic Father, whose
ultimate logos was once embodied, for the Chinese, in the figure of the
Dragon. Indeed, it is my belief that even such radical iconoclasts as Lu Xun,
Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun must have lived their lives struggling amid the
contradictions between the deep sense of alienation they felt before the
symbolic Dragon that guarded the entrance to every existing institution and
a corresponding sense of alierity-the irresolvable complex of will, passion
and frustration experienced in their attempts to overcome that alienation,
to dismantle that institution, and to rationalize that very despair.
Lu Xun, for one, provides us with a perfect case in which contradic-
tions were multiplied, rather than simply resolved, in the text. As the
leading writer of his time, Lu Xun's strong concern for the status of Chinese
women was in line with his ruthless criticism of the repressive practices of
traditionalism as a whole. Yet despite his persistent commitment to help
cure the disease of the Chinese mind, Lu Xun could never separate the
ethical drive and historical mission to implement social changes from his
own private dilemma of consciousness. Such a dilemma was caused by the
inner dialectic of faith and anxiety that constituted the identity crisis for
the majority of the May Fourth intellectuals. It was this crisis of split
consciousness, of phantom reality, that caught the Chinese writer-as a
socially committed individual-between the will to hope before a dawning
future of revolution and the recourse to despair as the only remaining
powerhouse in the twilight of history. This being understood, it would be
easier to comprehend the fact that, after such prominent works as "Zhufu"
[The new year's sacrifice] had possibly set the norms for a realist fiction in
modern China, Lu Xun should choose to end, more or less, his career as a
writer of fiction by publishing a unique volume of prose poems, Yecao [The
wild grass], in which moments of intensified despair were highlighted.
In another development, the subjective condition of despair had been
so desperate for Yu Dafu from the very beginning that it would readily

1 See my discussion in "Eros as Revolution: The Libidinal Dimension of Despair in Mao

Dun's Rainbow," Journal o/Oriental Studies 24.1 (1986): 37-53.
 The Language of Despair 17

subsume any potential energy left for actual explorations into more
manifestly social dilemmas. Hence Yu's formulation of an autobiographical
mode that magnified what was equal to Lu Xun's split consciousness in an
idiosyncratic fashion. In a significant way, the works of both writers,
whether realist or otherwise, had paved the way for a discourse that
appeared, on one level, to have disrupted the dominant discourse on
women, only to end up, on another level, undermining the initial attempts
of subversion as a result of an unforeseen problem, that of representation.
It is little but hindsight for us to suggest today that the misguided practice
of the May Fourth iconoclasts was partly rooted in their failure to posit a
concrete historical as well as textual place for the new women of China.
But for the intellectual iconoclasts writing at that particular juncture in
history, where contradictions were lived as part of everyday reality, the
paradox of representation was a fundamental and critical one. Their choice
was most difficult to make-between representing the symbolic liberation
of women and disrupting the dominant mode of discourse that had initiated
the very act of subversion in the first place. As a writer and a social witness
of the new women's history, one's stand was feeble indeed~is place (as
Lu Xun would have suggested), possibly somewhere between a few scrawny
hens and an old, lonesome dog.
The fragility became even more threatening when the position to take
was one on the emotional reality of women. Caught at the margin where
rationality met irrationality, women's role was habitually normalized and
contained within the male-centered network of domestication and accom-
modation. What concerns me in the following analysis is the textual or-
ganization of the (male) intellectual "self' in relation to the (female)
emotional "other"-that act of representation that may now be recognized
as an objectifying process of the identity crisis rooted in the collective
unconscious of the May Fourth writers. Taken as the first step toward any
reassurance of selfhood, objectification is a central function in the dialectic
of form and consciousness. To objectify is to divest oneself of, to part with,
one's self, one's consciousness. The alienated form subsequently evolves
as the alterity of consciousness, whereas the wholeness of self is maintained
on the basis that it has successfully expelled that which is less coherent and
"other" than self. Thus, any possible transcendence of self is to be achieved
in its very negativity. In other words, mediation through objectification
consists in the process of containing the uncertain (the oneself: herselt) in
the certain (the one's self: his selt).
To analyze the functioning of the objectifying mode in the repre-
sentation of self as other, we shall now look more closely at a few examples
taken from works by the three major writers mentioned earlier.
18 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

•
In Lu Xun's "Shangshi" [Regret for the past], Juansheng is the first-
person narrator who, in a series of notes, attempts to look back into and
redeem the essence of his life during a period shortly after the outbreak of
the May Fourth Movement, when he has just turned from a follower of
"new thoughts" into a poor writer trying to sell manuscripts in support of
a family of two. Juansheng begins his notes with these words: "I want, if I
can, to describe my remorse and grief for Zijun's sake as well as for my own"
("Shangshi" 110; "Regret" 197). The past, it seems obvious, is here remem-
bered as much to represent his loss of a sense of honor and dignity in life
as it is to regret, to re-articulate, that loss as the loss of his wife Zijun.
Disillusioned by the mundane life they shared after an initial moment of
glory at the outbreak of the May Fourth cultural revolution, Zijun even-
tually left their home and soon died without her husband knowing. Her
"disappearance" is typically represented in the story as Juansheng's loss of
someone whom he had first inspired with revolutionary zeal (before their
marriage) and from whom he had subsequently alienated himself (after
their marriage). As the more stirring moments of the revolution had passed,
it became more and more his belief that while he was plunging hard into
life, exhausting his brainwork in the desperate hope of filling their
stomachs, the woman he loved had simply begun to drift further and further
away from a "meaningful" course of life_ To his great disappointment,
Zijun's life was now being preoccupied with none other than dogs, hens,
and other domestic trivialities. Hence, right before he was to realize his
then much-relocated "place in the universe," Juansheng tried to rebuild
the integrity of his self and re-articulate the dignity within his ego by
drawing upon the agony of which she, his wife, was apparently the cause:

Then there was the never-ending business of eating every day. All Zijun's
effort seemed to be devoted to our meals. One ate to earn, and earned
to eat; while A Sui and the hens had to be fed too. Apparently she had
forgotten all she had ever learned, and did not realize that she was
interrupting my train of thought when she called me to meals. And
although as I sat down I sometimes showed a little displeasure, she paid
no attention at all, but just went on munching away quite unconcerned.
("Shangshi" 119; "Regret" 205)

Now Lu Xun never explicitly tells us what Zijun was supposed to have
learned, and which, according to Juansheng, she had then completely
forgotten. And it need not be argued that Juansheng might actually be
justified in his recognition of the change Zijun had undergone. The point,
though, is to see the ideological function of the text revealed in the
representation of that change.
 The Language of Despair 19

In the early stage of their relationship, Juansheng and Zijun, like

thousands of other young Chinese of their time, had much to share with
respect to the new and exciting changes they recognized and anticipated in
their society. In their sharing of the experience of a new culture, as
Juansheng later remembers it, "the shabby room would be fllied with the
sound of my voice as I held forth on the tyranny of the family, the need to
break with tradition, the equality of men and women, Ibsen, Tagore and
Shelley ... She would nod her head, smiling, her eyes filled with a childlike
look of wonder" ("Shangshi" 111; "Regret" 198). We know little about
what Zijun actually thought of all those "new ideas," for we are allowed to
know her only as Juansheng remembers her. And apparently her opinions
could not be all that different from his own, because, as her mentor, he
"was able to read her soberly like a book, body and soul" ("Shangshi" 114;
"Regret" 198). Body and soul, she was there to be read and recorded in
justification of one's own assertion of self-integrity, one's own transcen-
dence of a painful crisis of identity. And this time, for Zijun, after she had
broken away from the confines of her traditional family, the one man in
her life turned out to be Juansheng, her husband, mentor and intellectual
self. Her voice is represented directly in Juansheng's discourse only once,
six months after they started discussing the "new ideas," when she is quoted
to have made the most memorable statement to her husband: "I'm my own
self; none of them has any right to interfere with me" ("Shangshi" 112;
"Regret" 198). For Juansheng, here lies the gist of his regret-that this
absolute moment in Zijun's life is never to be captured again. For Zijun,
one suspects, this would be the discourse of a Chinese Nora openly
betrayed by her share of the revolution.
Moreover, this loss of the past is also represented as her loss of the will
and passion to live the present. Even despair has been rejected as a source
of identity; For Zijun, even the despair of self has to be relocated in the
despair of the other. The objectification of its memory in Juansheng's
journal may thereby be taken to be the key-hole, the central mediation,
through which the other (masculine) self visualizes his will and objectifies
his passion; bypassing the despair of Zijun, Juansheng has found his ways
to transcend the past, re-live the present, and peep into the future. By the
end, it is more for the loss of his selfhood than for hers that Juansheng
regrets, through remembering, the passing of time:

But where could I go? I realized, naturally, there were many ways open
to me, and sometimes seemed to see them stretching before ... Here is
the same shabby room as before, the same wooden bed, half dead locust
tree and wisteria. But what gave me love and life, hope and happiness
before has vanished. There is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence
I exchanged for truth. ("Shangshi" 129; "Regret" 214)
20 Ching-kiu Stephen Cluln

Alternatively, the woman is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence the
man is allowed to objectify and exchange for "truth." The emphasis in the
citation is added here to accentuate the ideology of a certain split con-
sciousness that Juansheng reveals for his readers throughout his notes, a
crisis one can recognize no less at the beginning than at the very end as the
undeniable sign of his own anxiety: "I must make a fresh start in life. 1 must
hide the truth deep in my wounded heart, and advance silently, takin~
oblivion and falsehood as my guide ... " ("Shangshi" 130; "Regret" 215).
Evidently, here and elsewhere in the dominant literary discourse of
the May Fourth period, the other is often represented as the cause of the
selfs despair, which in tum becomes (ironically) the very incentive needed
for any further undertaking of women's liberation as a reason for revolu-
tion. The basic contradiction here lies in the fact that while Zijun has no
doubt failed to live up to an equivalent of the revolutionary idealism of a
Shelley or an Ibsen, Juansheng is likewise not able to bear the indisputable
thought that, in the face of all the historical constraints for any revolution,
he has also forgotten to allow his wife the opportunities to become what
she might have learned from his discourse. What happens to the Chinese
Nora after she has left home? Perhaps Lu Xun's answer is given in the
impossibility of a genuine representation of Zijun by her man Juansheng.
For the latter might have been able to read her body and soul like a book
within the framework of a story of despair, but he cannot in his reading
allow her to intervene and articulate her-self in language. As a result, no
authentic discourse of the "other" is represented. To put it differently, if
his own self is to occupy a place somewhere between the dogs and the
chickens, then the other questions he has forgotten to ask would perhaps
be: What is the position of the woman? How is the site of her other self
defined? Textually speaking, where is she to be found?

•
Similar traces of this form of objectification can be identified in Yu
Dafu, whose works can even better illustrate the question of aliena-
tion/representation of "self' from/in the "other." Through the organiza-
tion of a despair, the intensification of the subjective crisis is achieved.
Language mediates and produces a subjectivity caught in despair. And in
almost all ofYu's heroes one can see the integrity of selfhood both shaken
and re-assembled as the result of an "explosion" of alterity in one form or
another. This radical recognition of the alterity of woman, as one may
expect, ends up with different possible consequences: the "other" is either
more repressed, or it is more free.
2 For a detailed analysis of split consciousness in modem Chinese realism, see my "Split
Consciousness: The Dialectic of Desire in Camel Xiangzi," Modem Chinese Literature 2.2
(1986): 171-95.
 The Language o/Despair 21

In "Niaoluo xing" [The cypress vine trip], one of Yu's earlier pieces
of autobiographical fiction, the narrator writes to his wife, who has just left
on a train homeward bound after a short visit to him in the city. Throughout
his monologue, the narrator addresses his wife as "my woman, the woman
whom I can't love and can't refuse to love" (89) and belittles himself as
"sincerely" as he can in every conceivable way, trying to make explicit the
sentimental point that he too (an unworthy father, son, and husband) is
suffering from their arranged marriage just as much as she is. The subjective
narrator is supposedly engaged in writing a letter to his wife: "I" pity "you,"
the addressee, because "you" have epitomized in the "tenderness" and
"submissiveness" [roushun] of your femininity all the virtuous norms of
social behavior assigned to traditional women by the dominant hegemony.
"I" pity "you" for your weakness as a woman, and yet "I" have gotten used
to tyrannizing [nuedazl "you" simply because "you" are my woman [wode
niiren]. And as your man, "I" can't see why "you" wouldn't want to put the
blame on "me." But to be frank enough, "I" am just as vulnerable as "you"
are, only less responsible and respectful than "you" could possibly imagine.
At times, "I" might have missed "you" and the child, and even shed some
tears for "you"; but when "I" had to come face to face with my own survival,
"I" didn't hesitate to sell the diamond ring "you" had given "me" as a
wedding token. "I" know for certain that "I" have no right whatsoever to
even talk about "existence" in this world. Yet, when "I" meditated about
suicide, and attempted just that several times, the thought never once
crossed my mind as to what might happen to "you" should "I" simply
disappear from this world. But then "I" thought (and still think so now)
that the responsibility could not be mine alone. It was, after all, the
responsibility of "my parents," of "your parents," and of "our society, our
nation." "You" are therefore but an innocent scapegoat, paying for the
crimes that society has committed day after day, generation after genera-
tion. The root of your suffering is to be found in my own inability to right
the wrongs that society has done me.
lt goes without saying that, unlike Lu Xun's Juansheng, who has tried
to ask for Zijun's forgiveness and regretted not having made her happier
by sparing her "the truth," Yu Dafu's anti-hero is much more self-repulsive,
and hence, paradoxically, self-indulgent. In Yu's works, the absent "other"
is usually indicated in her implied relation with the "self' as a marginal
character repressed by the power structurally integrated into the social
relations under patriarchy. Thus, for the narrative "I" in "The Cypress Vine
Trip," my woman, or sometimes in its pure form, woman, is somebody to
whom "I" can represent. Her life, her fate, her suffering, her vulnerability,
her sexuality, and her despair-all these "1" can assertively represent within
the constraints of our social hegemony, because, after all, her identity is
nowhere recognizable except in me, and, ironically, my sense of alienation
nowhere nourishable but in the marginality-if not the impossibility-of
22 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

"her self." For Yu, typically in his representation of the dominant discourse,
"I" am everything except a decent soul, waiting to be eliminated any
moment from this earth; "I" am a superfluous nobody, a reservoir of
neurotic anxiety, the epitome of human despair. And still it is with this
emptiness of selfuood that "I" long to fill the void of her otherness, thus
articulating the emptiness in her and asserting it as woman-hood. It is with
this absence of self-identity (of the value and meaning of "self') that "I"
desire the presence of alterity, the sublimation of that long-repressed
"other." But caught inside the hegemony the repressed can have no speech.
And as "I" know her so thoroughly well, "I" will speak of her crisis through
my-self and try to articulate my despair in her and for her.
But the reverse of all this was certainly not possible in the history of
modern China. For, notwithstanding Yu Dafu's attempt at self-denial, it
was the voice of his woman that remained "superfluous," though her body
might not, appear so. She rarely spoke, as a matter of course; and even if
she did occasionally, few would be there to listen-except perhaps her
"man," the omnipresent "I," the legitimate subject of all discourse. Just as
her silence was by custom considered synonymous with her very redundan-
cy, an occasional utterance attributed to her was deemed strategically
critical for the final redemption of his lost self, his degraded manhood.
Whatever their intrinsic values to the woman might be, the silence and the
utterance together constituted a major part of the structural functions and
narrative values she carried within the hegemonic order of the Confucian
patriarchy.
Hence, in such works as "The Cypress Vine Trip," "Chenlun" [Sink-
ing], "Yinhuisede si" [Silvery gray death], and "Yenying" [Smoky shadows],
the "other" is virtually voiceless. She is either a desexualized woman sitting
helplessly at home with her feet bound, or she is transformed into a sexual
fetish waiting mindlessly in a brothel with her legs crossed. Her discourse,
if any, is almost always mediated by the solitary consciousness of the man
who, whenever in despair, would drop by to talk. But there are also cases
more subtle than this. The woman ("my woman") in "Yigeren zai tushang"
[Alone on the road]) does speak, though largely with a nightmarish voice.
Her little child, named Long, or Dragon, has just died; broken-hearted, she
believes she hears him calling "mama" in her dreams. She wakes up to her
man, crying "Do you hear? Do you hear?" He never responds, like the
"solitary reaper" he considers himself to be. "Indeed," she finally manages
to pull herself together and utter in a single breath, "Long is back." It is
indeed in the Dragon that man and woman find a common symbolic reason
to believe. With such a counteractive attempt to re-present the voiceless
paradox of the modern identity crisis, Yu Dafu has revealed the contradic-
tory nature of a discourse both too patronizing and repulsive, too narcis-
sistic and nihilistic, to be considered in any conventional sense "realist."
 The Language of Despair 23

(But whether realist or not, the form by itself is not a yardstick of the
ethical, much less aesthetic, value of the work. Rather, it is the vehicle
through which symptoms of ethical and aesthetic predispositions might be
disclosed. Despair, a specific form of the modem emotion, mediates by
objectifying the contradictions within the social relations that generated
the historical crisis of May Fourth in both its ethical and aesthetic dimen-
sions. Understood in its proper historical context, form transforms, and is
transformed by, the dynamics of reality. And if one would not hesitate to
call that specific form "realist" in this particular sense, then all literature
of the May Fourth era, Yu Dafu's works not excluded, might well be put
under its broad rubric.)
To further substantiate my argument, let me take the quintessential
prose narrative ofYu Dafu, "Chunfeng chenzuide wanshang" [Intoxicating
spring nights], written in the summer of 1923. Here, Yu's anti-hero narrates
a story about himself and a cigarette-factory girl who speaks only in a
southern rural dialect. They are now very close neighbors, sharing the same
attic in a Shanghai slum area. Strangers as they are, they seldom talk; they
seldom even see each other. She works ten hours a day wrapping cigarettes
in the factory; he reads, writes, and stretches himself mindlessly during the
day time, sneaks into the city streets at night to mail his manuscripts, and
allows himself to be "intoxicated" by the deranging breeze till another
weary day dawns in the late spring of Shanghai. Thus, for a short while, they
are two housemates, each locked up in a "free prison," alienated each in a
unique way from the latest cultural fashions and political currents of a
quasi-colonial Shanghai. One day, back from a whole day's labor, and more
silent than ever before, she walks up to him, musters her courage, and asks
him what strange books he has been reading all day long, what evil deeds
he might be engaged in during his nightly excursions, and if he would care
to stop smoking, or at least to stop smoking the brand of cigarettes she
wraps every day in her factory, the place she so desperately hates.
The whole situation is in an extraordinary way both a climax and an
anti-climax for our deeply frustrated (sexually and otherwise) hero; it
actually conjures up for him a moment of extreme ethical as well as
psychopathological tensions. In typical Yu Dafu style, this moment of crisis
soon turns into a discourse of perverted and ecstatic sentimentalism, as the
perversion and ecstasy finally culminate in an orgy of neurotic monologue
that permits the overflow of some very intense feelings-expressions of
desire, disillusion, and despair. It highlights, in effect, a moment of ethical
conflicts and psychic anxieties in which everything dehumanizing in the
external world becomes revitalized through an aesthetic undercurrent.
Instead of normalizing the subjective experience in accordance with estab-
lished moral codes, this libidinal discourse radicalizes it by reiterating the
futility of the selfs attempt to embody and empower (ethically but also
textually) a transparent "other" in the dark cell of the ego.
24 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

*
We may now recall that, with Lu Xun, the crisis of identity is also
expressed in the selfs symbiotic containment of the other. In "Regret for
the Past," the loss of woman is what posits man as the dominant subject of
discourse; at the same time, such a representation of the alienated self is
rendered historically viable only through the ideological representation of
the marginal position of the "other"-an objectification of that empty site
of a disengaging past. The whole process is then significantly radicalized,
as we have seen, by Yu Dafu, to the extent that the absence of "other" not
only helps project the presence of self, but the introjection of otherness
onto selthood also makes it possible for the alterity of a non-being-
woman-to intrude into the integral realm of being and disturb the estab-
lished hierarchy of consciousness. Mao Dun, on the other hand, starts off
with a more orthodox Western realist precept that any objective datum of
reality is separable from subjectivity before the process of representation
has even taken place. laroslav PruSek has pointed out that in order to
achieve objectivity, Mao Dun would erase any subjective voice from his
narrative: "There is no trace of the story's being related by anybody. The
author's aim is for us to see everything, feel and experience everything
directly, to eliminate any intermediary between the reader and what is
described in the novel" (123). While it is doubtful that Mao Dun actu~lly
succeeds in erasing traces of subjectivity from his narratives, one can readily
discern in them an entirely different kind of discursive practice than the
one undertaken by Yu Dafu, for whom, in Prusek's words again, "every-
thing is viewed from a single [subjective] angle; that ever-shifting dynamic
perspective which we discovered in the work of Mao Dun has here no
place" (159).
Hence, in Ye qiangwei [Wild roses], Mao Dun's first collection of short
stories, published in 1929, all the female protagonists are given in "new
woman" images of one type or another. Their identity problems, however,
should be read as part of a broader problem of representation within which
the dilemma of their ethical revolts against the dominant hegemony might
then be contemplated. There are two reasons why this problem has seldom
been directly addressed. Primarily, the omnipresence of a subject of intel-
lect freshly released from the repressive system of Confucianism had made
it relatively difficult for crises of alterity (the otherness of self) to be brought
effectively into emergent power relations within the new cultural hierarchy.
Also, the emergence of a trend of decadent intellectualism among a
significant portion of the new writers further hindered the spread of any
alternative rationality at a time when the insurgent forces of revolution
were fully legitimized in the name of Mr. De (Democracy) and Mr. Sai
(Science). As a result, it becomes difficult to identify in Mao Dun's
 The Language of Despair 25

portrayal of women a consistent voice through which the hitherto

repressed crisis of female subjectivity can be clearly implied.
One of the major outcomes of the May Fourth cultural revolution was
a common intellectual concern for the formation of self and individuality.
But to recognize the subjective crisis of identity as part of a more collective
crisis of history was also considered an important function of art by many
writers, especially those affiliated with the Association for Literary Studies,
the center of the so-called realist school, of which Mao Dun was a major
spokesman. Still, rather unlike Yu Dafu's more ostensible attempt at
alienating the self from the other, the introspective strategy of Mao Dun's
realism never allows him to treat the collective crisis of identity from an
authentically subjective point of view. But even though the realist's critical
discourse can tum inward to self, penetrating a hidden reality where the
root of the changing condition of history might be identified, his writings
seldom go deep enough to expose the private shades of consciousness. By
the same token, lacking a committed voice to speak of their otherness, the
"new women" in Mao Dun's early works do not appear disturbed or even
concerned enough to be able to experience the turbulent sociocultural
crisis as concrete problems of the subject. The dilemma of representation
is thus materialized in the search for a language that might objectify inner
contradictions as radically and effectively as it would intensify external
ones.
In his preface to Wild Roses, Mao Dun complains that most people of
his time could not recognize what the "real" [zhenshzl truly was; he urges
them to reconsider their attitudes toward "reality" [xianshzl, asking them
not to sentimentalize any more over the past, or idealize the future, but:

to focus their vision on the present (xianshi], to analyze reality (xianshi),

and to unveil the real (xianshi). (Mao Dun lun chuangzuo 49-50)

In Mao Dun's own fashion, there is clearly a conflation of several similar

yet nonequivalent concepts into the one notion ofxianshi, the root for the
Chinese term xianshi zhuyi, or realism. The "real" is taken here, quite
naturally, to refer to the moment of the "present" (xianzall, whose
protracted course in its contemporary history the realist would try to grasp.
It is also, of course, the represented and representable "external" reality,
of the "real world" (xianshi shije], upon the basis of which all the critical
and analytical functions of realism are to be carried out. Finally, the "real"
is the inner "essence" of reality, closer to a more definite notion of "truth"
[zhenshzl than to its divergent ramifications in the objective world; the
immediate structure of its appearance has therefore to be dismantled
before its underlying bedrock becomes fully visible. In Mao Dun's own
view, all the female protagonists in Wdd Roses are being taught this lesson
of "reality" [xianshll-that to capture the ultimate essence of the future of
26 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

China is to recognize the historical necessity of the present in its darkest,

cruelest, and most improbable representation out there in the "real"
objective world. Failure to recognize the various layers of "reality" in the
changing society of their time often causes great disillusionment among the
women represented by Mao Dun in his early stories.
Death, for example, seems to be the only solution for Miss Huan in
"Zisha" [Suicide], as she discovers that the man whose child she carries has
now gone to war. His sudden disappearance could mean that her loss of
virginity would be left entirely unjustified by society, that the absence of
her patron (who has left home to sacrifice himself in the name of the greater
nation-family) could only be honored by the complete extinction of her
own self, body and soul together. Hence, having dreamt that her man did
return, but opted not to become her husband, Miss Huan wakes up from
the contingent traps of reality and spells out, in despair, and in acknow-
ledgement of the irrefutable reality oflife, that "I am not myself any more."
It is, after all, the painful moment of the present that she cannot endure; it
is the monstrosity of the real world that she will not live to see; it is also the
irrationality of truth that she has refrained from comprehending. In the
whole world in which she speaks (or rather mumbles, laments), and is
spoken of (by her foster family, by her omniscient narrator), there is not
one person whom she can blame or to whom she can simply talk. Huan is
not necessarily among Mao Dun's most successful representations of
woman; but in the simple form of its narrative, the author has given us the
gist of his realistic principle of representation. Evidently, Huan's story is
told in a discourse with no real interlocutors, no authentic speaking subject.
And Mao Dun's often ambiguous attachment to a quasi-impersonal mode
further makes it difficult for one to trace the formation of an integral
subject in the way one would be able to discuss Yu Dafu's constitution of
self in an objectified other.
The realist, within the frame of his model of representation, has indeed
tried to refocus the question of subjectivity regarding women's persistent
attempts at becoming conscious agents of revolution. But his own ethical
consistency is often undermined by an aesthetic tendency in his language
to mitigate, if not vulgarize, the articulation of any alternative voice of the
woman. In the Eclipse trilogy, for instance, Jing of Huanmie [Disillusioned]
is a young woman who wants to plunge herself into the turbulent currents
of revolution to learn about the essence and reality of her self. Being
"quiet" Uing] by nature and self-consciously "new" in intellectual character,
Jing finds herself caught in a dilemma of having to choose between reality
and idealism. She is also unwilling and unable to recognize the ironic twist
of life that, in revolutionary times, suggests that not to fall in "love" of your
own "free will" is tantamount to committing a reactionary crime com-
parable to that of "counterrevolution" (Shi 70). The test of "love," as it
were, constitutes for her a personal and emotional limit beyond which the
 The Language of Despair 27

revolutionary zeal must stride before one can become a politically con-
scious and ethically responsible revolutionary. Inexperienced, ling escapes
into a hospital after an initial failure in the "test." There she expects to seek
refuge for her defeated spirit; she fakes illness, runs a real fever, and takes
in a strong dose of political medicine from her doctor, himself a new
intellectual of the conservative camp. His didacticism notwithstanding, the
doctor's treatment is enough to transform ling overnight from an ivory-
tower pessimist into a red-hot patriot. She soon devotes herself to the
Women's Liberation Movement and, when disillusioned, hastens to join
the revolutionary front at Wuhan as a last resort in her search for her lost
identity. But amid bureaucracy and corruption, ling is taken ill again in a
state of despair. During this hospitalization, her final chance for resurrec-
tion arrives with the entrance of the wounded soldier Qiang Meng
("strong" and "vigorous"), a self-described "futurist" who believes that
dying on the battlefield is an ecstatic experience worth the price of a
mundane and inert life. Qiang's world, she realizes, is one of glamor, honor,
power, and destruction. He is also a lover of blood; and to complete the
caricature, Mao Dun adds that, as a result of war, blood has been shed for
the nipple our hero has lost from his left breast. Contrasted with ling, Qiang
is passion and sensuality reincarnated. With him, the heroine experiences
a love that soars high into the mountain air, to the extent that its link to life
has been completely cut off. She has previously refused to equate love with
anything physical, but is now allowing herself to be loved frantically by a
man whose one goal in life is to die sensuously in war. And for a very brief
moment, high up on the mountain, they consummate their love. In the very
irrationality of his (alien and alienated) ideal, she seems to have found a
temporary sanctuary for her long-frustrated "self."
It is evident that Mao Dun is eager to expose the existing conflicts
among many young men and women of his generation between the pursuit
of identity and rationality on the one hand, and the tendency to indulge in
sensual and emotional expression of their ego on the other. But given the
ethical consciousness on the author's part, his narrative fails to situate the
woman effectively in a discourse that would subject her to any concrete
crisis pertaining to the collective experience of the "new women" as an
emergent category of subjectivity. Jing's helplessness, after all, is never
represented as a crisis of consciousness that might begin to undermine the
totality of the social structure or cast in radical doubts the overall ethical
order of the traditional culture. Instead, the "impersonal" mode of the
narrative adopted by the author often ends with a melodramatic aftermath
of disillusionment by, for example, presenting Jing first as a man-hater, and
then as a clear-minded progressive who suddenly comes to realize that her
rational repression of sensual desire is as beneficial to the revolution as the
armed man's frantic passion to shed blood on the battlefield of his unseemly
imagination.
28 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

Mao Dun's early works of realism, one may conclude, have not brought
forth a discursive voice substantial enough to articulate the complexity of
sUbjectivity and its crisis. When Qiang indulges himself in calling the
different parts of Jing's body by the names of the various historical sites
they have visited on the mountain, and when he permits himself to compare
the frenzy of the war experience to the first experience of love by a woman
on her wedding night, it is plainly impossible for a reader to project such
idiosyncratic mannerisms onto the broader questions of cultural and his-
torical crises. Properly speaking, Qiang does not even play the role of a
patriarch; in its form of an ethical counter-ideal, his image remains too
abstract to become aesthetically compelling. The absence of a dominant
male voice, at the same time, does not imply immediate success for Mao
Dun's representation of the female subject. For despite his attempt to
introject the historical moment onto the personal crisis of the "other," the
language of his realism fails to materialize that crisis as the inner crisis of a
conscious "self." Hence, even though Huan or Jing, or any other woman,
might have been framed to represent an objective picture of reality, the
discourse that is supposed to deiiver the problem does not appear dynamic
enough to capture the critical condition of her subjectivity.
If such a contradiction is found consistently throughout the Eclipse
trilogy and the Wzld Roses collection of stories, it may then be generalized
that realism, as practiced by Mao Dun in the early stage of his career,
operates on two interrelated levels. Initially, the realist principle governing
most of his narratives implies not so much a strict degree of truthfulness to
external conditions in the "real world" (despite his frequent exercise in the
naturalistic depiction of details), as a tendency to adhere to a properly
objective vision of reality under which a more viable form of existence is
made available for the protagonists, often women, in crisis. In form, the
ethical dilemma of the May Fourth intellectuals is recognizable as the
question of representation. Hence, while Yu Dafu's anti-heroes end up
introjecting the exterior "other" onto the privacy of an absolute "self," the
apparent lack of an integral subject in Mao Dun tends to allow the women's
voice to be heard in a more explicit form. Since, for example, no absolute
authority is fully embodied in such male personalities as Junshi in
"Chuangzao" [Creation] or Youth Bing in "Shi yu sanwen" [Poetry and
prose], images of "new women" like Xianxian and Madame Gui in the
respective stories appear more provocative than their counterparts in Lu
Xun or Yu Dafu. This absence of a dominant voice, however, does not
provide the necessary freedom for these women to articulate for themsel-
ves, and layout for their readers, the inner contradictions they experience
in trying to cope with the social crisis of reality. For Yu Dafu, the objectify-
ing process of crisis has its dialectical counterpart in the internalization of
a collective condition of consciousness distinguishable, if not separable,
from the individual concerns for ethical and emotional frustration. Indeed,
 The Language of Despair 29

the works of Yu Dafu, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun are all directed toward
disclosing the inner dilemma of the new intellectual. But as a result of the
extreme subjectivism of his form, Yu's discourse may actually be considered
more introspective (PruSek 144). Lu Xun's attempt, by comparison, is to
provide a more objectively framed narrative for his subject-in-crisis. Hence,
his "silent" narrator (such as Juansheng) often urges us to set free the
solitary consciousness of the ego in a discursive form open enough to allow
the struggle for that freedom to be integrated as part of a collective
problematic materialized through the experience of typical individuals
(such as Ah Q).
Mao Dun's effort, viewed from this perspective, is to rewrite conscien-
tiously the process of representation as a pervasive sociohistorical narrative
that aims at penetrating all crises of consciousness and locating them within
the more objective contradictions in reality. This brings us to the second
general level of his realism. For it must be remembered that one of the
reasons why Mao Dun chose the realist form as his mode of representation
was that realism seemed to display more readily a vast spectrum of objective
reality within the constraints of a single text. In this sense, the overall
principle of his realism may also be considered extrospective by virtue of
its orientation toward the representation of more immediate historical
events upon which the subjective dilemma of individuals would be
grounded. This is evidently the way in which the Eclipse trilogy was con-
structed by Mao Dun. The three individual works in it can be taken together
as a historical chronicle of various moments in the short-lived glory of the
1927 Great Revolution. But because of the contemporaneousness and
immediacy of the revolution to the author, the characters, and the readers
of the time, the very ideal of the "objective" form remains, precisely, an
ideal. In other words, whereas the aesthetic vision of history is transformed
into (and created through) the subjective crisis of the new women, the form
itself can only become ethically viable when it is also taken to be an
objective representation of the betrayed revolution.
This radical objectification, as I have suggested, is accomplished
through the aesthetic formation of despair. For Yu Dafu, the neurotic
monologue of the subject is not only a cultural representation of the alterity
pertaining to women's experience in new China, but the discourse of self
also necessitates the paradox of representation that forever undermines,
though never eliminates, the authenticity of the otherness thus articulated.
The result is that, whereas Lu Xun has succeeded in foregrounding the
deep sense of alienation the entire generation of May Fourth intellectuals
would have experienced in the face of overwhelming pressures exerted by
the traditional hegemony, Yu Dafu accentuates rather the crisis of a
solitary consciousness in its unnameable desire to at once express and
repress the ever-increasing frustration of Chinese intellectuals in their
attempt to transform, by transcoding, all external social crises into the
30 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

aesthetic dimension. And if Lu Xun's sympathetic narrator is primarily

interested in reiterating the symbolic logic of the story it relates, and Yu
Dafu's dejected anti-hero is mostly indulgent in his solitary discourse of
despair, Mao Dun's relatively "impersonal" subjects are often less con-
cerned about how well their voices can be heard than with what course of
events their narrative frames should capture in order to achieve the
panoramic vision of a "total" objective form.
Thus, to capture the modem crisis of representation in its proper
problematic amid the May Fourth intellectuals is, in effect, to read the
dominant story of that crisis as a story about the sociopathological condition
of its formation. It is only by re-enacting the interactions of text and subtext
that one can begin to analyze the semantic logic of any ostensible story of
crisis. In this study, the form of that crisis is captured as despair-under-
stood as the specific tendency in literary discourse to deal with the extinc-
tion of hope, the utter loss of the will to discourse, and the disbelief in
actions and ideas of any positive value. By identifying such a problematic
of representation in a discourse on the "new women," as it might have
emerged within the particular aesthetic and historical frames of reference
of their time, I have attempted to read the dilemma of modem Chinese
realism as a crisis in the formation of "self' for the women within a "new"
sociocultural space still very much organized by a language that spoke of
despair through the patriarchal voice.
In the process of its formation, despair becomes, therefore, the ut-
terance of a marginal subject whose enunciations can hardly express a
dynamic self-sustainable by the objective constraints of life. Indeed, the
language of despair can only speak of an external reality that would appear
neither pure nor eternal. As a result, it seems that the solitude and inertia
that constitute the consciousness of despair are rooted not so much in myth
or fetishism as in the fonn of history-in the story of collective crisis, the
discourse of love and revolution, of frustration and repression, in utteran-
ces spoken for the new women in crisis, for any new woman in search of
her-self.

WORKS CITED
Lu Xun. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 1960.
- . "Shangshi" (1925). Lu Xun quanji [The complete works of Lu Xun]. Vol. 2. Beijing:
Renmin wenxue, 1981. 110-31. English version: "Regretfor the Past." Selected Stories.
197-215.
- . Yecao (1927). Lu Xun quanji. Vol. 2. 159-225. English version: Wild Grass. Trans. Feng
Yu-sheng. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974.
LuImcs, Georg. Soul and Form (1910). Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1974.
Mao Dun. Mao Dun /un chuangzuo [Mao Dun on creative activities]. Ed. Ye Ziming.
Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1980.
 The Language of Despair 31

- . Shi [Eclipse]. Shanghai: Kaiming, 1929.

- . Ye qiangwei [Wild roses]. Shanghai: Dajiang, 1929. A collection of short stories contain-
ing "Chuangzao" [Creation], "Shi yu sanwen" [Poetry and prose], and "Zisha"
[Suicide].
Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution (1941). New York: Oxford UP, 1960.
Pr Mek, Jaroslav. The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modem Chinese Literature. Ed. Leo
Ou-fan Lee. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.
Yu Dafu. Chenlun (1921). Rpt. N.p.: Tianxia, 1974. Contains: "Chenlun" [Sinking] and
"Yinhuise de si" [Silvery gray death].
- . Dafu zixuanji [An anthology compiled by the author]. N.p.: Tianma, 1932. Rpt. Hong
Kong: Lianhe, n.d. Contains: "Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang" [Intoxicating spring
nights], "Yenying" [Smoky shadows], and "Yigeren zai tushang" [Alone on the road].
- . "Niaoluo xing" [The cypress vine trip] (1923). Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi. Vol. 5. Ed.
Zhao Jiabi. Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935. 89-102.

GLOSSARY

"Chenlun"
"Chuangzao" " ill.
"jill! 71
*"
"Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang"
" .. Jl. ill. ~ ~ It J:. "
Dafu zixuanji
{(it~tlil.»
Huanmie
«~ ill»
Jing
*
.»
LuXun
·t,~
Lu Xun quanji
{( ·t- i! ~
Mao Dun lun chuangzuo
«f Iti .:iIJ ff»
"Niaoluo xing"
"~ .-tt"
nuedai
11#
roushun
"Shangshi"
*11
"-fl."
Shi {(ft»
"Shi yu sanwen" "#~-ai:"
xianshi J..t.
xianshi shijie J.t.i!t .n-
xianshi zhuyi J.t.1- A.
32 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan

xin niixing 'f*.Ji

wade niiren ~tlJ*A.
Yecao {(Jt~»
"Yenying" ".Jj"
Yeqiangwei {(Jt • • »
YeZiming -t-f.
"Yigeren zai tushang" " -.,. A.,{! it J: "
"Yinhuise de si" "~~ I!, tlJ It."
YuDafu ~it~
Zhao Jiabi .~-i
Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi «t.ff~.k.$.»
"Zhufu" " j,lLli"
"Zisha" " tll.l."
Invention and Intervention:
The Female Tradition in Modern
Chinese Literature
Lydia H. Liu

Is there a female tradition in modern Chinese literature?

By asking this question, I intend to bring to critical attention a number
of interesting claims put forth by women critics in post-Mao China,
particularly the generation that came to maturity in the latter half of the
1980s. To many of them, niixing wenxue (female literature) is more or less
afait accompli, something that preexists the critical effort to name it as
such. I The job of a critic is thus to establish the collective identity of women
writers, pinpoint their difference from male writers, rescue them from the
lacunae of historical memory, and restore them to their rightful place in
literary history. The whole enterprise is undertaken with a view to bringing
the female tradition to light. (Something similar has also happened in the
West.) For instance, critic Zhao Mei claims that women writers as a group
are the first to bring about a radical break with the previous literature. "In
grappling with the mysteries of existence and the nature of life and desire
through the mediation of self-consciousness," says she, "women writers
successfully broke down the dominant convention of broad social and
political themes in fiction.,,2 Another critic, Li Ziyun, attributes a great
many of the avant-garde experiments in modem literature to the initiative
of women. Describing the most recent developments in Chinese literature,
This essay first appeared in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in
Twentieth-Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993). A different version was published earlier in Genders 12
(Winter 1991) under the title ''The Female Tradition in Modem Chinese Literature:
Negotiating Femini~ms Across EastJWest Boundaries."
1 As Wendy Larson points out in her essay "The End of 'Funu Wenxue': Women's
Literature from 1925 to 1935" (Modern Chinese Literature 4, nos. 1 and 2 [Spring and Fall
1988]: 39-54), the term niixing wenxue appeared in critical vocabulary as early as the May
Fourth period and was interchangeable withjUnu wenxue (women's literature) for a long
period of time. It became negative in the late twenties and virtually disappeared from leftist
and Marxist criticism afterwards, although the latter has pennitted the subcategory ofjUnu
zuojia or nu zuojia (woman writer). Since the mid-1980s niixing wenxue has acquired new
historical meanings and become extremely popular, while jUnu wenxue seems to have
dropped out of women critics' vocabulary. Most critics now regard niixing wenxue as a
literary tradition that had its origin in the May Fourth period.
2 Zhao Mei, "Zhishi nuxing de kunhuo yu zhuiqiu: nuxing wenxue zai xin shiqi shinian
zhong" (The dilemma and quest of female intellectuals: female literature in the decade of
the new era), Dangdai zuojia pinglun (Studies in contemporary writers) 6 (1986): 30.
Translation mine.
34 Lydia H. Liu

she boldly asserts: "We are witnessing a second upsurge in the literary
output of female writers in mainland China. This is marked not only by the
extraordinary number and quality of women's works but by the vanguard
role some of those works have played in Chinese literature. I am referring
to their disregard for existing literary conventions, their exploration of new
horizons in terms of theme and experience, and their experimentation with
form.,,3
In the meantime, the women's studies series edited by Li Xiaojiang
includes a number of major historical projects devoted to recognizing a
female literature that has developed over time, enjoying a homogeneous
textual and intertextual tradition and capable of legislating its own critical
vocabulary. Emerging from the Horizon of History, coauthored by Meng
Yue and Dai Jinhua, represents one of the most ambitious of such efforts. 4
On the basis of a rigorous analysis of women's literary texts, these authors
suggest that modem literature has produced not only a good number of
professional women writers but a female literature and a female literary
tradition as well. They regard the May Fourth generation as the harbinger
of that tradition: "Having rejected the status quo, May Fourth women
writers were able to initiate their own tradition in the cracks and fissures of
their culture."s
What strikes me as important here is less the truth of various claims for
a female literary tradition (which women critics have no vested interest in
calling into question) than the peculiar historical circumstances that seem
to compel those critics to identify, legitimate, and, perhaps, invent a
homogeneous tradition on behalf of women writers from the May Fourth
period down to the present. 6 To the extent that the female tradition did not
come to its own until after women scholars began to make significant
3 Li Ziyun, "Niizuojia zai dangdai wenxue zhongde xianfeng zuoyong" (The Vanguard
role of women writers in contemporary literature), Dangdai zuojia pinglun 6 (1987): 4.
Translation mine.
4 Also see Li Xiaojiang, Xiawa de tansuo (Eve's pursuit) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin
chuban she, 1988) and her Niixing shenmei yishi tanwei (A preliminary inquiry into the
female aesthetic) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuban she, 1989).
5 Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao (Emerging from the horizon of history ),
(Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuban she, 1989), 14.
6 For further reference, see Wu Daiying, "Niixing shijie he nuxing wenxue" (The female
world and female literature), Wenyi pinglun (Art and literary criticism) 1 (1986): 61-65; Jin
Yanyu, "Lun niizuojia qun: Xin shiqi zuojia qun kaocha zhi san" (On Women writers as a
group phenomenon: a study of contemporary writer groups [part ill)), Dangdai zuojia
pinglun 3 (1986): 25-31; Ma E'ru, "Dui 'liangge shi jie' guanzhao zhong de xin shiqi
niixing wenxue: jianlun zhongguo nu zuojia shijie de lishi bianhua" (Contemporary female
literature and its conception of the "two worlds": a history of the changing perspective of
Chinese women writers), Dangdai wenyi sichao (Current trends in art and literature) 5
(1987): 91-95; and also Ren Yiming, "Nuxing wenxue de xiandai xing yanjin" (The
evolution offemale literature ina modem age ),Xiaoshuo pinglun (Fiction studies) 3 (1988):
17-22.
 Invention and Intervention 35

interventions in literary criticism and historiography (a field heretofore

dominated by men) in the second half of the 1980s, their endeavor deserves
our undivided attention. Indeed, what is a literary tradition, be it major or
minor, male or female, but a product of the collaborative efforts of writers
and critics engaged in the specific historical issues of their own time? In
undertaking this study, I will neither assume or contest the raison d'etre of
the so-called female tradition but try to understand it as an ongoing
historical project that involves the agency of both women writers and
women critics in post-Mao China.

Official Feminism and Chinese Women

The category of women, like that of class, has long been exploited by
the hegemonic discourse of the state of China, one that posits the equality
between men and women by depri ving the latter of their difference (and not
the other way around). In the emancipatory discourse of the state, which
always subsumes woman under the nationalist agenda, women's liberation
means little more than equal opportunity to participate in public labor.7 The
image of the liberated daughter and the figure of the strong female Party
leader celebrated in the literature of socialist realism are invented for the
purpose of abolishing the patriarchal discriminatory construction of gen-
der, but they end up denying difference to women. s During the Cultural
Revolution, political correctness consisted largely in women wearing the
same dark colors as men, keeping their hair short, and using no makeup. I
am not suggesting that women ought to be feminine. But the fact that the
state did not require men to wear colorful clothes, grow long hair, or use
makeup, which would have produced an equally iconoclastic effect, indi-
cates that it was woman's symbolic difference that had been specifically
targeted and suppressed on top of all other forms of political repression.
Post-Mao Chinese women are therefore dealing with an order of reality

7 Mao's binary opposition of equality and difference on gender issues incapacitated

Chinese women more than it empowered them. It served the interest of the state through
exploiting women's labor power. Whenever a labor shortage occurred, women's participa-
tion in productive activity was encouraged as a form of gender equality. See Hongjun Su's
"Feminist Study on Mao Zedong's Theory of Women and the Policy of the Chinese
Communist Party Toward Women Through a Study on the Party Organ Hongqi," Chinese
Historian 3, no. 2 (July 1990): 21-35.
8 Meng Yue theorizes gender politics in the literature of Socialist Realism in a recent
article entitled "Niixing biaoxiang yu minzu shenhua" (Female images and the myth of the
nation), Ershi yi shiji (Twenty-first century) 4 (1991): 103-12. See this volume for English
translation. Briefly, she perceives three dominant female images that serve to eliminate
female su bjecti vity and uphold the authority of the Party. They are represented respecti vely
by the liberated rural woman Xi'er in Baimao nil (The white-haired girl), the intellectual
woman Lin Daojing in Qingchun zhige (The song of youth) who becomes a Bildungsroman
heroine under the guidance of the Party, and the strong Party leader, such as Jiangjie in
Hongyan (Red cliff) or Ke Xiang in Dujuan shan (Mount Azalea).
36 Lydia H. Liu

vastly different from that which feminists in the West face within their own
patriarchal society, where the female gender is exploited more on the
grounds of her difference than the lack thereof. Being named as the "other"
and marginalized, feminists in the West can speak more or less from a
politically enabling position against the centered capitalist ideology. By
contrast, contemporary Chinese women find their political identity so
completely inscribed within official discourse on gender and institutional-
ized by Fulian (the All-China Women's Federation) that they cannot even
claim feminism for themselves. As Tani E. Barlow points out, "The
importance of Fulian lay in its power to subordinate and dominate all
inscriptions of womanhood in official discourse. It is not that Fulian
actually represented the 'interests' of women, but rather that one could not
until recently be 'represented' as a woman without the agency and media-
tion of Fulian.,,9
There are currently two translations of the word "feminism" in Chi-
nese. The old nilquan zhuyi denotes militant demands for women's political
rights reminiscent of the earlier women's suffrage movements in China and
in the West. The new term nilxing zhuyi, emphasizing gender difference,
has been in circulation for the past decade in Taiwan and only recently in
China. The former is downright negative and the latter sounds rather
ambivalent. Contemporary women writers refuse to have their names
associated with either term. When one scrutinizes their reluctance, one is
furthermore struck by the fact that there is more at stake than the legitimacy
of Western feminist discourse as applied to another culture. It appears that
the very notion of nil zuojia (woman writer), a Chinese category, has been
thrown into question by women writers like Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi, and
Zhang Kangkang. To them, once someone is designated (or stigmatized) as
a woman writer, she is relegated to a subcategory in the mainstream (male)
literature. Zhang Kangkang voices this fear in her article "We Need Two
Worlds" using the analogy of the handicapped athlete to illustrate her point.
In games held specially for the handicapped, many people applaud the
athletes because they think that the handicapped cannot run in the first place.
The same holds true for female writers, who are often classified as a
subcategory separate from mainstream male authors "as if it were a
universally accepted truth that only men could be writers and as if they were
born writers."IO Women writers sharing the concerns of Zhang Kangkang
feel that they must constantly fight against the condescension of their male
colleagues and their own trivialization. The apparent contradiction between

9 Tam Barlow, "Theorizing Woman: Funii, guojia, jiating," Genders 10 (Spring 1991):
146.
10 Zhang Kangkang, "Women xuyao liangge shijie" (We need two worlds), in Wenyi
pinglun 1 (1986): 57. The speech was given earlier at an international symposium on
women authors in West Germany.
 Invention and Intervention 37

their objection to the term "woman writer" on the one hand and a strong
female consciousness informing their works on the other must be under-
stood in this light. 11
To contemporary Chinese critics, it is not the term "woman writer" but
"feminism" that must be kept at bay at all times. Most women scholars take
care to stay away from the word even as they publish sophisticated views
on the politics of gender and even though those views may very well be
regarded as feminist by scholars from the West. This is what critic Yu Qing
does, for example, in her theorizing of the female tradition in Chinese
literature. In her view, women's marginal position need not trivialize them:

In coming to maturity, female consciousness does not seek to

submerge its gender in order to arrive at some abstractly conceived and
genderless human condition. It aims to enter the overall human concep-
tion of the objective world from the special angle of the female subject
and to view and participate in universal human activities from the
particular viewpoint of the female gender that is uniquely constructed as
such. As we noted in the opening section, the female gender is formu-
lated in societal terms. And as long as the social factors constitutive of
the female gender remain, gendered consciousness and gendered litera-
ture will not go away. The so-called ultimate (transcendental) con-
sciousness and ultimate literature, therefore, do not and will not exist. 12

Like most other scholars in women's studies, Yu rejects the word "femi-
nism" in her writing, although she has no scruples about quoting the works
of Euro-American feminists in support of what she calls her "female"
position. 13 In order to grasp this complex situation, one must take into
account Chinese women's relationship with the state, official feminism,
and its representative, Fulian. As I mentioned in the <\bove, the latter takes
a strong position on all gender issues, claiming to represent women and
protect their rights but functioning in reality very much like other

11 In a published interview by Wang Zheng (,'Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhulin, Dai
Qing," Modern Chinese Literature 4, nos. 1 and 2 [Spring and Fall 1988 (Summer J990)]:
99-119), Wang Anyi speaks rather disparagingly of women and feminism. To gauge
Wang's complex view on the issue, it might be helpful for the reader to tum to additional
sources, such as Wang's 1986 essay "Nanren he nUren, nUren he chengshi" (Man and
woman, woman and city), in Dangdai zuojia pinglun 5 (1986): 66. Of course, a work of
fiction always speaks for itself and what it says does not necessarily coincide with the
author's private opinion.
12yu Qing, "Kunan de shenghua: lun nuxing wenxue nuxing yishi de lishi fazhan guiji"
(The sublimation of suffering: tracing the historical development of female literature and
female consciousness), Dangdai wenyi sichao 6 (1987): 55. English translation mine.
13Interestingly enough, Elaine Showalter's name is mentioned in her writing. In fact, the
names of Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and other Western feminists are frequently
brought up in the writings of Chinese women critics in the eighties who refuse to call
themselves feminists.
38 Lydia H. Liu

hegemonic apparatuses used by the Party, even though it is the least

important of all state apparatuses. 14 After all, the -ism part of "feminism"
seems to imply the same masculine area of power and knowledge as
"Marxism" and "communism."15 The women's rejection of "feminism"
therefore expresses a strong desire to position themselves against the state
discourse on gender and its suppression of women's difference. 16 Conse-
quently, terms such as niixing yishi (female consciousness) and niixing
wenxue (female literature) are deployed by critics who wish to conceptual-
ize a female tradition that will recognize women as historical subjects rather
than a subcategory under the patronage of male-centered criticism. The new
crop of journals in the eighties featuring women authors or female litera-
ture, such asNii zuojia (Female writer) and Niizi wenxue (Female literature),
the establishment of the first Women's Research Center in 1985 by Li
Xiaojiang and her ambitious series on women's studies mentioned above,
as well as the recent debates on female consciousness and female literature
sponsored by critical journals such as Wenyi pingiun (Art and literary
criticism), Dangdai zuojia pingiun (Studies in contemporary writers),
Dangdai wenyi sichao (Current trends in art and literature), and Xiaoshuo
pinglun (Fiction studies) 17-all this not only attests to a heightened aware-
ness of women as historical agents but to a significant breakaway from the
totalizing discourse of official feminism.
Having invented the terms in which the debate on gender issues will be
conducted, contemporary female critics proceed to reevaluate women's
literature and identify a female tradition for which they claim nothing less

14 Li Xiaojiang, a university teacher who initiated women's studies programs in post-

Mao China, did at first try to obtain support from the Fulian but did not get even a single
response to the letters she sent out. In frustration, she decided to rely on herself and rally
the support of her fellow female scholars. Their independent efforts have been very
successful. Zhengzhou University, where Li teaches Chinese literature, became the first
university to offer courses on women writers in China. See Li Xiaojiang, "Zouxiang niiren"
(In search of woman), in Niixing ren (The Female person), 4 September 1990: 260.
15 I am indebted to Wendy Larson for this insight.
16 "The All-China Women's Federation" is unpopular among Chinese men and women
for different reasons, which indicates the subtle ambivalence even in official feminism. The
idea of getting women organized empowers women on a symbolic level, if not in the real
sense of the word, and poses a threat to the traditional male strategy of isolating the female
gender to render it powerless. To Chinese women, however, the organization never truly
represents them. It obeys the Party just as much as other mass organizations in China. For
related studies in English, see Barlow, "Theorizing Woman: Funii, guojia, jiating"; and
Xiaolan Bao, "Integrating Women into Chinese History-Reflecting on Historical Schol-
arship on Women in China," Chinese Historian 3, no. 2 (July 1990): 3-20.
17 All four journals come from outlying cities rather than Beijing or Shanghai (Dangdai
zuojia pinglun from Shenyang, Wenyi pinglun from Harbin, Dangdai wenyi sichao from
Lanzhou, and Xiaoshuo pinglun from Xi' an), which indicates the rise of periphery against
the centered ideology. This situation is compared to siege warfare by some, parodying
Mao's famous saying, "Nongcun baowei chengshi" (Besiege the city from the countryside).
 Invention and Intervention 39

than a vanguard role in modem Chinese literature. In so doing, they are

actually reappropriating the historical category of women from state
discourse for the purpose of empowering the female gender. When those
critics talk about "female consciousness" and "the female literary tradi-
tion," they are not so much concerned with female identity as with female
subject position, or the question of who determines the meaning of female
experience. The question "Who am I?" which is the title of a story by a
contemporary writer named Zong Pu and which frequently appears in the
works of Chinese women authors, indicates a desire to unfix the meanings
which the state and traditional patriarchy have inscribed on the female
body.IS
The three women writers that I am going to discuss below-Ding Ling,
Zhang Jie, and Wang Anyi-figure prominently in contemporary literary
criticism as architects of the female tradition. 19 Ding Ling represents the
legacy of the early twentieth century and is seen as prefiguring contempo-
rary women's writing in a number of ways: the foregrounding of female
subjectivity; the critique of patriarchal ideology and institutions; and, most
importantly, the problematization of writing and discourse through gender
experience. When her "Diary of Miss Sophia" first appeared in the February
number of The Short Story Magazine in 1928, it was immediately perceived
as a major event, as one critic recalled in 1930: "It was like a bomb
exploding in the midst of a silent literary scene. Everyone was stunned by
the author's extraordinary talent.,,20 Other leading critics of the time, such
as Qian Qianwu and Mao Dun, reviewed the story and called its author the
first Chinese woman writer who "speaks out about the dilemmas of the
liberated woman in China,,21 and whose understanding of the "modem girl"
goes deeper than that of any of her contemporaries.22 Some fifty years later,
Zhang Jie' s story "Love Must not be Forgotten" seemed to mark another
turning point in Chinese literature following Mao's death, as indicated by
the controversy it provoked. The Chinese reader, accustomed as s/he was
to Socialist Realism, was stunned by the SUbjective voice of the female
narrator and the story's forbidden subject. A series of debates on love,

18 Zong Pu attracted a good deal of attention as early as 1956 when she had her
"Hongdou" (Red pea) published, for which she was persecuted. "Wo shi shui" (Who am I)
came out twenty-three years later and has been called "the first psychological fiction after
Mao" by Li Ziyun.
19 Critics mentioned above, such as Li Ziyun and Zhao Mei, repeatedly emphasize the
lineage between Ding Ling and the two contemporary writers.
20 Yi Zhen, "Ding Ling nilshi" (Miss Ding Ling), in Yuan Liangjun, ed., Ding Ling
Yanjiu ziliao (Research material on Ding Ling) (Tianjin: 1982),223.
21 Mao Dun, "Nil zuojia Ding Ling" (Ding Ling the female writer), in Yuan Liangjun,
Ding Ling, 253.
22 Qian Qianwu, "Ding Ling," in Yuan Liangjun, Ding Ling 226.
40 Lydia H. Liu

gender, and the role of the writer began to appear in the Guangming Daily,
in the course of which a critic named Xiao Lin wrote: "As literary workers,
shouldn't we be alert to and eradicate the corruptive influence of petty
bourgeois ideas and sentiments? Shouldn't we stand in a higher position,
command a broader vista, and think more deeply than the author of this story
does?,,23 In rebuttal Dai Qing, a renowned writer and critic in the post-Mao
period, defended Zhang Jie' s story on the grounds of its moral complexity
and bold expose of social problems.24 She argued for the legitimacy of the
author's personal vision and welcomed her departure from the dominant
literary orthodoxy.25 Compared with Zhang Jie, the younger writer Wang
Anyi was much less controversial. Butherrecentoutputhas taken the reader
by surprise because of its experiment with eroticism, subjectivity, and
socially transgressive themes. In the three stories known collectively as the
"Three Themes on Love," she explored sexuality and female subjectivity as
a means of testing the limits of reality and the boundaries of human
consciousness. 26 "Brothers," a story published in March 1989, challenged
the ideology of heterosexual love by pitting female bonding against the
mari tal tie prescribed by the dominant culture. If Zhang Jie' s novel The Ark
centered on the sisterhood among divorced women, "Brothers" dramatized
the conflicting claims of marriage and the emotional attachment between
women and therefore emphasized the problem of desire and choice. I hope
that my own reading of these three authors will help explain some of the
features that contemporary women critics in post-Mao China attribute to the
female tradition.

23 Xiao Lin, "Shitan 'Ai shi bu neng wangji de' de gediao wenti" (On the moral
legitimacy of "Love must not be forgotten"), Guangming Daily, 14 May 1980: 4. Note that
the reviewer favors the authorial point of view in fiction as opposed to the first-person voice
used in Zhang Jie's story.
24 Dai Qing, "Bu neng yong yizhong secai miaohui shenghuo: yu Xiao Lin tongzhi
shangque" (Life should not be portrayed in a single color: a response to comrade Xiao Lin),
Guangming Daily (28 May 1980): 4.
25 Zhang Xinxin, whom I have not included in this study, deserves mention here. Like
Zhang Jie, her debut in literature also caused a major controversy. Her novella "Zai tongyi
dipingxian shang" (On the same horizon), in Shouhuo (Harvest) 6 (1981): 172-233,
published while she was a student of drama, shocked some critics, who later on condemned
herin the official press. For that reason she was unable to find employment after graduation.
Accusing the author of "bourgeois individualism" and "social Darwinism," her critics
ignored the fact that she was actually criticizing male egotism and exploring the identity of
self and genderin its complexity. For a survey of Zhang's career and works in English, see
Carolyn Wakeman and Yue Daiyun, "Fiction's End: Zhang Xinxin's New Approaches to
Creativity," in Michael S. Duke, ed., Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals
(Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 196-216.
26 The "Three Themes on Love" consist of "Huangshan zhi Han" (Love in a wild
mountain), Shiyue (October) 4 (1986); "Xiaocheng zhi lian" (Love in a small town),
Shanghai wenxue (Shanghai literature) 8 (1986); and "Jinxiugu zhilian" (Love in the valley
of splendor), Zhongshan (Bell Mountain) 1 (1987).
 Invention and Intervention 41

Gender, Writing, and Authorship

Ding Ling's "Diary of Miss Sophia" contains an interesting allegory of
reading in which the narrator, Sophia, casts the young man Weidi in the role
of a reader by showing him her diary. Weidi fails to grasp the import of those
entries, and, believing that another man, Ling Jishi, has successfully
become Sophia's lover, he complains, "You love him! ... I am not good
enough for yoU!,,27 The diary cannot explain Sophia to Weidi, because he
insists on reading his own gendered discourse into Sophia's diary and finds
in it a stereotyped triangular situation in which his ri val gets the better of
him. His reaction to the diary is highly predictable according to conven-
tional male-centered readings. Weidi "mis"-reads despite clear evidence
that Sophia is more interested in herself than in either man. In this
allegorical encounter between female discourse and its male counterpart,
writing and reading come across as profoundly gendered practices.
The narrator's writing and her choice of a male reader in this story
introduce gender difference into the production of text and write the female
gender into the authorial position. In her involvement with Ling Jishi, the
narrator takes up a similar position: writing herself as a subject rather than
as an object of desire. The description of her first encounter with Ling Jishi
shows a devastating reversal of male literary conventions: "I raised my
eyes. I looked at his soft, red, moist, deeply inset lips, and let out my breath
slightly. How could I admit to anyone that I gazed at those provocative lips
like a small hungry child eyeing sweets? I know very well that in this society
I'm forbidden to take what I need to gratify my desires and frustrations, even
when it clearly wouldn't hurt anybody" (49).
It is the narrator's female gaze that turns the man into a sex object,
reversing male discourse about desire. Not only does the narrator objectify
the man's "lips" as if they were pieces of candy, but she ignores the phallus
and feminizes male sexuality by associating it with lips (labia). She is
empowered by writing that gives full play to her subversive desires and
constitutes her as a subject. If the first scene mentioned helps establish
gender difference in discourse, the reversed subject/object relation pin-
points the power struggle implied in the rewriting of gender.
Zhang Jie's "Love Must Not Be Forgotten" also foregrounds the
relation of writing, gender, and authorship. Unlike Ding Ling's story,
however, this narrative takes place between the narrator, Shanshan, and her
late mother, Zhong Yu, whose writing and ghostly memory she strives to
decipher; that is to say, instead of writing a diary herself, the daughter tries
to interpret the incoherent words contained in a diary-like notebook the
27 Ding Ling, "Shafei ntishi de riji" (The Diary of Miss Sophia), in Ding Ling duanpian
xiaoshuo xuan (Ding Ling's short stories), (Beijing: 1981),73. The English version used
is that translated by Tani E. Barlow, with minor modifications, in Tani E. Barlow and Gary
J. Bjorge, eds., I Myself am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989). Further references to this work will be included in the text.
42 Lydia H. Liu

mother has left behind. The self-reflexive technique of taking a phrase from
the mother's notebook and using it for the title of the story calls attention
to the textuality of her narrative, so that the latter comes across as a writing
about writing, reading, and critical interpretation. Read in this light, the
expression "love must not be forgotten" becomes ambiguous, for in the
context of the notebook it sums up the extraordinary love the mother feels
for another married man. But when the same appears in the title of the
daughter's narrative, it sounds curiously like a warning that the tragic lesson
must be remembered so that it will not be repeated by herself and others.
Through writing, the daughter conducts a dialogue with the mother about
desire and suffering: "At first I had thought that it contained only notes for
future writing, because it didn't read like a novel, or like reading notes. Nor
did it seem like letters or a diary. Only when I read it through from beginning
to end did her cryptic comments join with my own scattered memories to
suggest the vague outlines of something. After a great deal of reflection, it
finally dawned on me that what I held in my hands was not lifeless,
antiseptic writing; it was the searing expression of a heart afflicted with grief
and love.,,28
The mother's love affair that the narrator reconstructs from the note-
book also has much to do with literature and writing, A novelist herself, the
mother has a lifelong fondness for Chekhov. "Is she in love with Chekhov?"
The daughter recalls the mother's extraordinary obsession with Chekhov' s
stories. "If Chekhov had been alive, such a thing might actually have
happened" (109). As the narrator infers, part of the obsession comes from
the fact that one of the two sets of Chekhov that the mother owns is a gift
from her lover, a gift which, shortly before her death, she asks to have
cremated with her. But judging from her mother's almost religious devotion
to romantic love, the narrator is not far wrong in suggesting that the mother
is infatuated with Chekhov, for romantic love is the legacy of the literary
tradition that Chekhov represents, a tradition that idealizes love and
emphasizes internal drama and moral conflict. As if to'reinforce her point,
the narrator also situates the love tragedy in the intertextuality of
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "Juliet compared her love to riches when
she said: 'I cannot sum up half of my sum of wealth,' I suppose Mother
couldn't have summed up half of her wealth, either" (116).
The literariness of the mother's love finds embodiment in one of her
own novels in which she casts herself as a romantic heroine and her lover
as a hero. Interestingly enough, her lover is a devoted reader of her novels.
Literature and criticism thus become the field across which they indirectly

28 Zhang Jie, Ai shi buneng wangji de (Love must not be forgotten) (Guangzhou: 1980),
109. The English version used is as translated by William Crawford in Perry Link, ed., Roses
and Thoms: The Second Blooming ofthe Hundred Flowers in Chinese Fiction, 1979-1980
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), with minor modifications. Further
references will be included in the text.
 Invention and Intervention 43

"talk love" (tan [ian' ai) to each other. During one of their rare encounters
to which the young narrator is a witness, the man says: "I've read your latest
novel. Frankly, it's not quite right in some places. I don't think you should
be so hard on the heroine ... you see, loving someone is not wrong in itself,
and she hasn't really hurt anyone else. The hero might also have been in
love. But for the sake of another person' s happiness, they find that they must
give up their love" (112).
Submitting to the lover's discourse on self-sacrifice, the mother can
only use her notebook as his substitute and pour into it her yearning and
unfulfilled desire until the moment of her death.
The story would not be so interesting if it were simply the love story
some critics have suggested it is. 29 It turns out that the insistent presence of
the first-person narrator blurs the transparency of its language and
problematizes the discourse on romantic tragedy. After all, the mother's
story is told because the daughter herself faces the dilemma of deciding
whether or not she should marry her friend Qiao Lin, whom she thinks is
handsome but intellectually inadequate. She recalls her mother's advice:
"Shanshan, if you can't decide what you want in a man, I think staying
single is much better than marrying foolishly" (105). Behind that advice, of
course, lies the wreckage of the mother's life: her own marriage has been
a failure, and she ends up in love with a man with whom she cannot even
shake hands. The daughter refuses to repeat the mother's marriage, but that
is not all. She goes further and questions the latter's romantic approach to
love: "I weep every time I see that notebook with "Love must not be
forgotten" written across its front. I weep bitterly again and again, as if I
were the one who had suffered through that tragic love. The whole thing was
either a great tragedy or a massive joke. Beautiful or poignant as it may have
been, I have no intention of reenacting it!" (121, emphasis mine).
The daughter's final choice is that of rebellion-rebellion against the
discourse of a literary tradition (Chekhov and Romeo and Juliet) to which
her mother has subscribed as novelist, heroine, and woman. By reconstruct-
ing the mother's life in writing, the narrator is able to rewrite the story of a
woman's destiny so that independence rather than romantic attachment to
a man will become her priority. When she declares toward the end that
"living alone is not such a terrible thing" (122), her writing goes beyond the
mother's wisdom and overcomes the tragic/romantic discourse for which
the latter has paid with her life. By asserting her difference and exercising
independent authorship, the narrator achieves autonomy.
Insofar as the female subject is concerned, writing is always a matter
of rewriting (the male text) and gaining authorial control. The same is true
29 Most reviewers read this story as a romantic tragedy and overlook the important role
that the narrator plays here. See Zeng Zhennan, Kou Shan and Wang He's reviews in
Guangming Daily, 2 July 1980: 4. Translation mine. Further references will be included in
the text.
44 Lydia H. Liu

of Wang Anyi's story, "Love in the Valley of Splendor," although, unlike

the foregoing stories, it is told-playfully-in the third-person. I say
"playfully': because the narrator's subjectivity demands our attention,
making us aware that she is making up a story about a young heroine whose
life coincides exactly with hers in time and space. The story begins: "I want
to tell a story, a story about a woman. The breeze of the early autumn feels
so cool and clean, and the sunlight looks so transparent. All this fills my
heart with tranquility; and in tranquility I imagine my story. As I think it
over, it seems the story also takes place after an autumnal shower.,,3o The
narrator intervenes again and again to remind us of the fictionality of her
work. For example, when the heroine stands in front of the office window
looking out at a narrow lane, the narrator cuts in: "So I stand facing the
narrow lane and continue to imagine my story" (7). The emphasis on
fictionality might be interpreted as the author's reaction to the widely held
view within official criticism that fiction mirrors life itself. But this is not
simply a case of modernistic subversion of realist conventions. The situa-
tion is greatly complicated by the narrator's gender. The recurrent imagery
of the fallen leaves and the window, which provides the setting both for the
fictional world and for the extradiegetic world of writing, pinpoints the
female identity that the narrator shares with her heroine. Her closeness to
the heroine in identity, gender and otherwise, is accentuated when she
concludes the story thus:

She felt that nothing had really happened. It was true and absolutely
true that nothing whatsoever had happened in actuality, except that the
parasol outside the window had shed all of its leaves.
And it's time that my story about a story that has never taken place
came to a close. (43)

In echoing the view that nothing has transpired in this story, the
narrator more than coincides with the heroine. The truth is that the heroine
exists as an extension of the narrator, who brings an alternative self into
being through writing and imagination. Within the story proper, the heroine
also tries to break out of the status quo by creating an alternative self during
her trip to the Valley of Splendor in Lu Shan. This intricate relationship
between the narrator, the heroine, and the latter's reconstructed self results
in sophisticated writing about female SUbjectivity. If the narrator focalizes
exclusively on the heroine's point of view, the fixed focalization does not
mean the total effacement of the narrator behind the character, as it normally
does. The narrator does more here, for she claims that she knows more than
the character: "I follow her on her way out.... She felt tranquil in her heart
at the moment. But something was going to happen to her. Yes, something
30 Wang Anyi, "Jinxiugu zhi lian" (Love in the valley of splendor), Zhongshan (Bell
Mountain) 1 (1987): 4. Translation mine.
 Invention and Intervention 45

was about to happen. I am the only one to know" (5). Of course, she is not
an omniscient narrator in an ordinary sense, either. The authorial control
derives solely from a sense of identification. The narrator knows what is
going to happen to her heroine because the heroine is her written self. In
short, she wills her story and her protagonist into being. "Love in the Valley
of Splendor" stands out from the rest of Wang Anyi' s "Themes on Love,"
which focus on the human libido and its ubiquitous power. This story is not
so much about indomitable sexual drive as about a woman's quest for self
through the rewriting of the traditional story of adultery. The heroine yearns
to break out of the old identity that her marriage has fixed upon her and to
reconstruct a new self. When a total stranger, one who is about to become
her lover, approaches her for the first time in Lu Shan, she takes him for
granted: "He arrived as she had expected and she was riot in the least
surprised by it" (17). The language is highly reminiscent of the omniscient
voice that the narrator has used earlier, when she knew what was going to
happen to her alternative self. The heroine anticipates her own story and
takes authorial control over the situation. Her self-awareness and intelli-
gence distinguish her from Flaubert's Emma Bovary and enable her to
revise the old adultery plot: "She liked this new self, the self as presented
to his [the lover's] eyes. Her old self was so stale that she loathed it and
wanted to cast it away. As a brand new, unfamiliar self, she was able to
experience many brand new and unfamiliar feelings; or maybe the reverse
was true: her brand new and unfamiliar feelings enabled her to discover and
create a brand new, unfamiliar self. She was pleased to discover the
boundless imaginative and creative powers this new self was capable of'
(23).
Echoing Madame Bavary (one of Wang's favorite novels) in an
oblique way, the story rewrites the nineteenth-century French novel by
situating the heroine in an authorial position. If Emma Bovary is a reader
par excellence and deceives herself in terms of patriarchal discourse, our
heroine and her creator, the narrator, reject the role of a reader and engage
in imaginatively reconstructing their female selfhood as "authors."

Constructing Female Subjectivity

Female subjectivity has occupied the center stage of women's litera-
ture since Ding Ling, although the latter eventually decided to circumvent
the issue when her interest shifted from gender to class and she relegated the
former to a secondary and contingent priority.31 Her first published story,
"Meng Ke," contains a scene in which the young heroine presents herself

31 I am not interested in applying the Lacanian theory of subjectivity or any other

psychoanalytical theory to the works under discussion. My immediate concern is to
describe some of the specific tropes or textual strategies such as mirroring that literally
allow the female subject to confront herself in the text.
46 Lydia H. Liu

before a film director, hoping to be hired: "She had to submit herself to a

most unpleasant request: she raised her hands in silence and held back the
short hair that covered her forehead and the sides, exposing her rounded
forehead and delicate ears to the scrutinizing eyes of the man. She felt
horrible and nearly broke down in tears. But the man was apparently pleased
with what he saw.'032
The revolt against such objectivization of the female body leads to the
author's next work, "The Diary of Miss Sophia," which displays female
subjectivity with a vengeance. The first entry of the diary records an
interesting mirror scene: "Glancing from one side you've got a face a foot
long; tilt your head slightly to the side and suddenly it gets so flat you startle
yourself.... It all infuriates me.'m Examining her own image in the mirror
seems to indicate narcissism. If so, the reflexi ve act of diary writing can also
be seen as a mirroring of the self, for Sophia is at once the writer, the subject,
and the reader of her text. In this story, both the mirror and the diary come
to us as powerful metaphors for Sophia's discourse about female selfhood.
Ironically, the mirror's distortion of her image, which irritates her so much,
seems to foreshadow the inadequacy of narcissism just as the diary fails to
resolve the enigma of selfhood. Sophia's attitude toward writing and self
reflects the female dilemma of wanting to reject male-centered discourse
about gender and yet finding no alternative fully satisfying within a largely
male-centered language. The text, therefore, is filled with contradictory
expressions of self-love and self-loathing.
To the narrator endeavoring to rewrite herself into a different text, a
text which will no longer portray her as someone's daughter, sister, lover,
or friend but as an autonomous SUbject, the task is difficult. She has no idea
of what the so-called subject is, for the "I" as an autonomous female subject
has hardly existed in traditional C;hinese discourse. Sophia asks herself
repeatedly, "Can I tell what I really want?" (51) and tries to understand what
she calls her "pitiful, ludicrous self' (79). Self-interrogation, ambivalence,
and uncertainty fill the pages of the diary as the narrator struggles to "evolve
an intelligible and authentic image of the self.',34 But that comforting image
is nowhere to be found in this much-convoluted writing of the self by the
self. Her pains, desires, narcissism, perversity, and self-criticism form part
of a work that struggles with itself and finds no solutions.
It is hardly surprising that half a century later Zhang Jie' s novel The Ark
again faced the question offemale subjectivity. As it happens, the story also
contains a mirror scene in which Liang Qian examines herself in a way that
reminds us of Sophia:
32 Ding Ling, "Meng Ke," Ding Ling duanpianxiaoshuoxuan, 37-38. Translation mine.
33 Ding Ling, "Shafei nushi de riji" (The Diary of Miss Sophia), 44.
34 Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling's Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982).46.
 Invention and Intervention 47

Liang Qian stood up from her chair and saw herself reflected on the
surface of the glass insulation in the studio. She was pale and shrunken,
her hair disheveled. Weak and tired as she was, her eyes and brows wore
a fierce look as if determined to quarrel with somebody and fight with
him to death ....
She had barely reached forty and yet she already had the look of an
elderly woman. 35

Facing herself, Liang faces a confused desire that renders her nonidentical
with herself. She envies the twenty-one-year-old violinist in her crew, who
is youthful-looking, with beautiful hair, bright eyes (for she seldom cries),
and a wrinkle-free forehead (for she seldom uses her brains). She is tom by
the conflicting desire to be a woman and a professional. She feels inad-
equate as a mother and yet cannot imagine living without a career. Her
dilemma and her insecurity are shared by two other women living in the
same apartment, which is jokingly referred to by the narrator as "the
Widows' Club." Unlike Sophia, who is younger, these women must face the
consequences of their divorce and separation as well as problems brought
on by age and illness. Liu Quan is harassed by her boss at work and
stigmatized by her colleagues; Cao Jinghua suffers from a spinal affliction
that will probably lead to paralysis, and at work she is persecuted for
publishing her political views. Liang Qian, a film director, is the only one
who is not legally divorced from her husband, Bai Fushan (on the pretext
of protecting her name, he has agreed to a separation but continues to utilize
the prestige of Liang's family). He exploits and harasses her and schemes
to prevent the release of her movie.
Focusing on the common plight of the three women, the narrator
projects female subjectivity as a form of collective female consciousness,
a consciousness that the symbolism of the title suggests. The ark is inspired
by both Chinese and Western cultural traditions, for the word fang zhou
(The ark) comes originally from the History of the Latter Han and only
acquires its later biblical meaning via translation. 36 As critics have sug-
gested,3? the biblical symbolism of the ark implies the regeneration of
mankind and the vision of an alternative world that would eventually
replace the world these women inhabit, one in which "you are particularly
unfortunate because you were born a woman.,,38 The allusion to the History
35 Zhang lie, Fang dlOu (The ark) (Beijing: 1983), 23. Translation mine. Further
references will be included in the text.
36 See the epigraph to Fang zhou, which quotes from Hou han shu (The history of the
latter han): "Fang zhou bing wu, fu yangjile" (Two boats race along side by side, enjoying
the full pleasure of diving and climbing).
37 See Alison Bailey, "Traveling Together: Narrative Technique in Zhang lie's 'The
Ark' ," in Duke, ed., Modem Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals, 96-111.
38 Zhang lie, Fang zhou (The ark), 1.
48 Lydia H. Liu

of the Latter Han, on the other hand, emphasizes the dynamic spirit of the
women who defy tradition and brave hardships in their voyage to freedom.
In fact, the symbolism is already prefigured in Zhang Jie's earlier story
"Zumu lii" (Emerald), in which the metaphor of the sailboat conveys the
triumph and the cost of being a self-reliant woman and contrasts with the
comfortable but unreliable steamboat that symbolizes married life. If the
ark projects a hope, a new world evoked by its Western etymology, it also
provides the means (in the Chinese context) through which the new world
can be reached. In short, it is a collective female consciousness that looks
toward the future but is determined to wage its struggle here and now.
In view of the women's desire to protect their dignity as female
subjects, it is not difficult to see why a sense of personal space and the fear
of invasion figure so strongly in their response to the outside world. The
apartment in which the women live is an embodiment of the ark of female
consciousness that shelters them from a hostile world, but even here they
are frequently threatened by invasions from Bai Fushan and inquisitive
neighbors. On one occasion, Bai pokes his head into Liu Quan's bedroom
before she can grab a blanket to cover herself up. He visits without the
slightest consideration for their convenience. The following is one of his
surprise visits: "On an early morning like this, Liu Quan and Jinghua had
just woken up from their nightmares. But before they could recover from the
effects of their bad dreams, Bai intruded on them in such a rude manner and
destroyed their mood. His invasion completely ruined their plans for a
peaceful Sunday" (9). Bai thinks that his wife is hiding somewhere and
insists on entering but meets with firm resistance from Jinghua, who shuts
the door on his face. Shortly after his departure there comes another knock
at the door. The visitor turns out to be the head of the neighborhood
committee, Jia Zhuren, who takes it upon herself to spy on them, assuming
that divorced women always try to seduce men. Overhearing Bai's knock-
ing in the early morning, she has come to check things out. Again Jinghua
guards the door and refuses to let her in:

"Has our cat by any chance gotten into your apartment?"

"No," Jinghua said clearly and firmly, "what's your cat got to do in
our apartment?"
"Oh! Don't you know, Comrade Cao, that your tabby cat has turned
on all six tomcats in our compound? Ha, Ha!" Jia giggled obscenely.
Jinghua laughed aloud: "Ha, ha, ha! I'm proud of my cat. She is
fortunate enough to have so many admirers." (17-18)

The animal allegory used by the chairwoman exhibits the insidious lan-
guage in which people in this society relate to sex and think about single
women; it reduces woman to no more than a signifier of sexuality. Although
Jia is herself a woman, the fact that she is the head of the neighborhood
committee, which holds itself accountable to the All-China Women's
 Invention and Intervention 49

Federation, and spies for the authorities pinpoints her as an upholder of the
patriarchal order. Her invasion of the private world of the women, therefore,
is a political conspiracy designed to deprive them of their dignity. But the
fact that neither she nor Bai succeeds in getting into the apartment that
morning implies that it is possible for the women to guard their subjectivity
and dignity, provided that they have a room of their own and the support of
a collective female consciousness.
In "Emerald," an earlier story by Zhang Jie, the protagonist Zeng
Ling' er becomes a female subject not through identifying with other
women but through enduring intense isolation and overcoming her roman-
tic love. As a young girl, she was ready to sacrifice everything for the love
of a man named Zuo Wei. During the Cultural Revolution she saved him
several times, even confessing to his political "crimes." She was banished
to the countryside, where she gave birth to his illegitimate child and suffered
horrible humiliation and ostracism. In the meantime, Zuo Wei married
another woman. However, the years of hardship and bereavementZeng had
to endure-her son drowns in a river-have not been able to defeat her.
Instead, she is transformed from a romantic young girl into the independent,
resilient, and strong-willed woman that the title of the story, her birthstone,
symbolizes. Transferred back to the institute where her ex-lover works, she
discovers that she is no longer in love with him: "At this moment Zeng
Ling'er felt that she had scaled another peak in her life. Yes, she would
cooperate with Zuo Wei in his work, but this time neither out of love nor
hate, nor any sense of pity for him. She simply wanted to make her
contribution to society.,,39
If self-reliance and collective female consciousness are the responses
that "Emerald" and The Ark make to the problematic of the female subject
as first posed in Ding Ling's story, Wang Anyi takes a different approach
in "Love in the Valley of Splendor." Since the story also contains a mirror
scene, it is worthwhile to compare it with those from the stories discussed
above:
She got back to her hotel room and shut herself up in the bathroom
for a long time. She didn't know how long it was that she stood in front
of the looking-glass, gazing at her own image. The image in the mirror
was like another self gazing back at her as if that self had a lot to tell her
but had decided to say nothing, because they were able to understand
each other quite well without words. She turned her face a little to one
side and studied its angles unconsciously. But all of a sudden, she felt
alienated from the self in the mirror as if it had become a total stranger.
She wanted to recapture the self, reexamine it, and be in touch with it
again. But the self remained a blurred image and became so unfamiliar,
so remote and yet also strangely familiar.40

39 "Zumu Lii" (Emerald), Huacheng (Flower city) 3 (1984): 87. Translation mine.
40 Wang Anyi, "Jinxiugu zhi Han" (Love in the valley of splendor), 16.
50 LydiaH.Liu

The mirror scenes in "the Diary of Miss Sophia" and The Ark express
a strong discontent with the self, as the women struggle with conflicting
ideas about womanhood and subjectivity. In the passage above, however,
the female subject appears not so much contradictory as indeterminate and
elusive-something the heroine tries hard to grasp. Lu Shan, where the
mirror scene occurs and which, moreover, alludes to the classical motif of
revelation in Chinese poetry, serves here as a metaphoric locus for the
heroine's pursuit of self. The mountain, its face shrouded in clouds,
symbolizes the unfathomable depths of self, which dissolves, transforms,
and consolidates along with the mist, fog, and white clouds.41 This is a world
of imagination, dream, and fantasy in which the self becomes fluid and
capable of change and reconstruction. The heroine delights in the miracu-
lous transformation of herself into someone whom she no longer recog-
nizes: "That image was beautiful, so beautiful that she felt it utterly
unfamiliar. For her own sake and for his [the lover's], she resolved to
cherish the new self dearly. To damage it was to disappoint herself, him, his
gaze, and his feelings" (21). Her sense of self is so positive that the male
gaze is not perceived as a threat to her SUbjectivity, as in Ding Ling's earlier
stories. Instead, the gaze, which is mutual, reinforces her desire to bring
about a new sense of self and to "regain the gender she has lost" in marriage
(27). Like subjectivity, gender is presented as something to be acquired and
constructed through constant negotiation with other beings rather than as a
fixed category of identity. The protagonist's marriage, which has fixed a
sexual identity on her, only succeeds in alienating her from a fluid sense of
gender, whereas her relative autonomy at the present moment enables her
to rediscover it in relation to another man. She is proud of being different
from man and of being reminded of the fact by the male gaze, for that
difference is central to her self-consciousness as a woman. What's more
important, it turns out that her love affair is more fiction than reality, in
which the true object of desire is the heroine herself: "Her love for the self
that grew out of her intimate relation with him surpassed by far her love for
the man himself, although she did not fully realize it at the moment. She
thought that she was in love with him and felt sad at the thought of departure.
Many years were to go past before the truth would gradually dawn on her"
(31).
Like Ding Ling and Zhang Jie, Wang Anyi situates female SUbjectivity
in a process that challenges the received idea of womanhood. But in
subverting patriarchal discourse, she also tries to involve the male gender
in the constructive process, a fact that opens up the writing of gender to a

41 Since the heroine's pursuit takes the form of a romantic adventure, the imagery of
mists and clouds also retains its erotic connotations. The consummation of her love, for
example, is depicted thus: "Finally, they stepped into the wall of clouds and, sure enough,
before them lay another world" (26).
 Invention and Intervention 51

wide range of possibilities-to gender relations that are not predicated on

the desires of either man or woman alone but on the reworking of the
subjectivity of male and female each in its own terms and in terms of each
other.

Love, Marriage, and Female Bonding

Love and marriage have been almost synonymous with the female
character in literature, but the responses of twentieth-century women
authors to those perennial themes have shown significant departures from
previous literary traditions. Their works tend to focus on the conflict
between marriage and self-fulfillment and that between love and indepen-
dence. Romantic love and marriage are often rejected as a result of woman's
quest for selfhood, which explains why the majority of female protagonists
we discuss here are single, divorced, or have troubled marriages. 42 In "The
Diary of Miss Sophia," the narrator falls in love with the handsome Ling
Jishi. But it is no ordinary case of romantic love. The equilibrium of the
subject and object of desire proves fundamental in maintaining the relation-
ship. In other words, the narrator's aggressive pursuit of Ling is also
underscored by her secret fear that she will be reduced to becoming the
object of his desire. So when Ling comes into her room to express his desire,
Sophia recoils in fear and disgust: "The lust in his eyes scared me. I felt my
self-respect revive finally as I listened to the disgusting pledges sworn out
of the depths of Ling Jishi' s depravity.,,43 She revolts at the idea of
becoming the object of the male gaze. As a result, her own desire is doomed
by the need to overcome her lover's desire. This is how she describes their
kiss: "That disgusting creature Ling Jishi kissed me! I endured it in silence!
But what did my heart feel when the lips so warm and tender brushed my
face? I couldn't allow myself to be like other women who faint into their
lovers' arms! I screwed open my eyes wide and looked straight in his face.
'I've won!' I thought, 'I've won!' Because when he kissed me, I finally
knew the taste of the thing that had so bewitched me. At the same moment
I despised myself' (80-81).
This is a revelation of the power relationship in sexual intimacy as
percei ved by a woman who writes, directs, plays, and observes the danger-
ous drama of sexual liaison. The usurpation of power by the male at the
climactic moment seems to deny the possibility of heterosexual love in the
patriarchal order without power struggle. Sophia wins the battle but loses
a lover.
42 Zhang Xinxin's novella "Zai tongyi dipingxian shang" (On the same horizon) is
another good example of a work in which female subjectivity is pitted directly against
marriage and male egotism.
43 Ding Ling, "Shafei niishi de riji" (The Diary of Miss Sophia), 79.
52 Lydia H. Liu

Another important reason for Sophia's revolt against Ling is his

language, as the latter takes it upon himself to teach her how to be a woman
while reserving the role of male superiority for himself. "Our most recent
conversations have taught me a lot more about his really stupid ideas. All
he wants is money. Money. A young wife to entertain his business
associates in the living room, and several fat, fair-skinned, well-dressed
little sons. What does love mean to him? Nothing more than spending
money in a brothel, squandering it on a moment of pleasure" (65). Ling's
dream of marriage, family, financial success, and even extramarital love is
perceived as a typically male-centered capitalist dream. Sophia's lucid
perception of the link between the capitalist system and patriarchal culture
shows the firm ideological grounding of her attitude. 44 She refuses to be
written back into patriarchal discourse either as a wife or as an extramarital
lover (she later learns that Ling Jishi has a wife in Singapore). She suffers
from the thought that she has offered herself to him for his amusement like
a prostitute (66). These traditional female roles alienate Sophia from the
m~ she adores. The lovers' encounter becomes a contest between two
radically different ideologies that ends in the estrangement of the lovers and
in Sophia's despair.
By contrast, Sophia's emotional attachment to another woman,
Yunjie, does not require such antagonism. Her memory ofYunjie is always
pleasant. Recalling their final moments together, she writes:

What a life I was living last year at this time! To trick Yunjie into
babying me unreservedly, I'd pretend to be sick and refuse to get out of
bed. I'd sit and whimper about the most trivial dissatisfactions to work
on her tearful anxiety and get her to fondle me .... It hurts even more to
think about the nights I spent lying on the grass in French Park listening
to Yunjie sing a song from Peony Pavilion. If she hadn't been tricked by
God into loving that pale-faced man, she would never have died so fast
and I wouldn't have wandered into Beijing alone, trying, sick as I was,
to fend for myself, friendless and without family. (70)

The allusion to Peony Pavilion is important for undercutting fictions of

romantic love. 45 In the light of her death after her husband's abuse of her,
Yunjie's singing of love seems particularly ironical. Sophia's account of
her life inserts what a traditional male-oriented text would leave out, that is,
what would happen after the "euphoric closure" of united lovers. By
evoking Peony Pavilion, Sophia in effect accuses traditional literature of

44 When we recall the author's own life, it is not surprising that she eventually became
a dedicated communist. See Tani Barlow's introduction to I Myself am a Woman.
45 The allusion to the "pale-faced lover" is reminiscent ofthe stereotyped image ofthe
romantic scholar-lover or xiaosheng popularized in traditional fiction and drama, such as
Peony Pavilion.
 Invention and Intervention 53

enticing young people into romantic relations. Ding Ling's treatment of

women's emotional bonding in this and other stories, such as "Summer
Vacation," does not, however, envision female bonding as a positive
alternative to romantic love and marriage. With the arrival of contemporary
writers like Zhang Jie and Wang Anyi, female bonding becomes a matter
of choice just as important as subjectivity itself.46
The Ark ends with Liang Qian proposing, "Let's drink a toast to
women," at which the women pledge a sisterly bond. Each of them is
disappointed in her (ex-)husband and lacks faith in a male-dominated
society. Cao Jinghua was divorced by her husband because she did not share
his dream of raising a family and, without his permission, she went through
an abortion. Liu Quan' s stingy husband exploited her sexually as if he had
paid for her in cash. She dreaded each night, but he always attacked her in
the same manner: "You call yourself my wife, don't yoU?,,47 Liang Qian' s
husband Bai Fushan, who treated marriage as a business transaction, was
keen on making deals. When Cao Jinghua and Liu Quan overhear him
plotting against his wife, Cao comments: "Here is what you call a husband
... To hell with husbands. We must rely on ourselves" (113). The three
women therefore seek mutual support in their own community: The single
women would often spend the night sitting together in the deep shade cast
by the lamp and no one in the grimness of her mood thought of clearing the
dinner table piled high with plates. While one recounted the unfair treat-
ment she had received during the day, the others would smoke and listen in
silence. Or they would smoke in silence and listen to her pounding the arms
of the chair with her fists in anger" (49). If the divorced women in The Ark
manage to create an ark of their own-an ark of female consciousness-in
order to contend with a hostile, male-dominated society, the three women
in Wang Anyi's story, "Brothers," are not so successful and eventually drift
apart. The story goes beyond the male/female antagonism and raises
questions about desire, choice, female bonding, and women's relation to
men and family.
Like the self-reflexive title of "Love Must Not Be Forgotten,"
"Dixiongmen" ("Brothers") alludes to an art exhibition that the female
protagonists talk of organizing, without success. It also refers to the
relationship among the women themselves, which ends in frustration, like
the art show. The opening lines of the story place the subversive relationship

41> The term "female bonding," rather than homosexuality, is used here to describe the
range of female relationships explored by the three authors. In choosing not to pin down the
meaning of those relationships, I intend to emphasize the fact that identity politics, which
seems to be the main thrust of the current debate on homosexuality in the United States, is
not the way in which my Chinese authors deal with sexual relationships in their works, and
I see no reason why I should fix identities (gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight) on their
characters.
47 Zhang Jie, Fang zhou (The ark), 87.
54 Lydia H. Liu

of the women in perspective: "At college, they [the women] were three
brothers: Laoda, Lao'er, and Laosan. They called their husbands Laoda's,
Lao'er's, and Laosan's, respectively. They were the only female students
in the whole class and they surpassed their male classmates in everything
they did." 48 In choosing the word "brothers" rather than "sisters," the story
calls attention to the lack of a conventional social and intellectual bond
among women, particularly among married women. In the light of the time-
honored cult of male bonding, the choice is highly symbolic. We are told
that the "brothers," all art majors, are sloppier in their dress and behavior
than the male students. They are anything but feminine. Like the three
roommates in The Ark, they open their hearts to each other, describing their
sexual involvements with men as self-destruction and their own bonding as
salvation. But when the time for graduation comes, each is faced with a
different choice. Laosan decides to adopt the traditional life style in order
to fulfill her obligations to her husband, so she takes a job in her hometown.
Lao'er becomes an art teacher at a high school in Nanjing, and Laoda
teaches at a normal school in Shanghai. After their graduation, the initial
bond formed at school develops into a close emotional attachment between
Laoda and Lao'er, who address each other afterwards as Lao Li and Lao
Wang.
In sharp contrast to Bai Fushan and most other men in The Ark, the
husbands of both Lao Li and Lao Wang in this story are model husbands.
They treat their wives with respect and understanding and perform the
household duties with diligence. But Lao Wang is amazed at the way her
husband divides life neatly into two orderly parts, career and family, each
serving as the means and end of the other. When Lao Li visits her after many
years of separation, she finds her freedom suddenly restored to her. Foronce
she lives spontaneously: she need not get up, have meals, or go to sleep at
the usual hour. From then on, the two women write long letters every few
days and marvel at the fact that their attachment to each other is closer than
to their own husbands:

They noted cheerfully that their correspondence gave them the illusion
that they had returned to the time of their girlhood. At that time each girl
had a bosom girlfriend, with whom she could talk about practically
anything she wanted to. The girls knew each other intimately and spent
days and nights together, until the love affair of each drove a wedge
between them. They began to betray each other, learning to tell lies,
thinking about their boyfriends and guarding their secrets from each
other. The war of territory began. The women now felt that they had gone
backward in time, that is, more than ten years ago before the discord of
desire had invaded their female friendship. (20)

48 "Dixiongmen" (Brothers), Shouhuo (Harvest) 3 (1989): 4; translation mine. Further

references to this text will be included in the text.
 Invention and Intervention 55

Lao Li and Lao Wang grow so attached to each other that when the
former gives birth to a son, the latter buys a longevity pendant for the child
and is moved to tears at the thought that they finally have a child of their
own. In her mind, the child has a mother and a godmother; the father is
excluded from the picture. She offers to take care of the mother during her
confinement. Lao U' s husband is grateful for her service but at the same
time feels slightly resentful. Her presence seems to disrupt his normal
relations with his wife and banish him from his own family. Lao Wang's
husband is also puzzled by his wife's strange behavior. When the two
families gather around the dinner table on the eve of the Spring Festival, he
tries to understand what makes his wife so unlike her usual self when at
home: "At first, he thought it was Lao U's husband. But after a while he
concluded it couldn't have been he, because undeme<tth that man's polite-
ness lay indifference to his wife. He then began to observe Lao Li. It was
not long before he saw that it was Lao Li who indulged her whimsical
behavior. Whenever his wife went to extremes, Lao Li would give her a
loving, encouraging look" (26).
The climax of the relationship arrives with two juxtaposed events: the
two women's attempt to articulate their love for each other and the
accidental fall of Lao Li' s child. They are taking a walk in the park when
Lao Wang suddenly asks Lao Li, "What would happen if we both fell
desperately in love with one man?" Lao Li says she would let Lao Wang
have the man. But Lao Wang presses her further: "What if we were so much
in love that neither could surrender him to the other?" "Then I'd kill him"
(27), upon which Lao Wang's eyes fill with tears of gratitude. The two
women talk about their emotional attachment in a roundabout manner and
their narrati ve cannot but be completed at the male's expense. To articulate
love for the same sex is almost an impossibility, so that they must invent a
fictional plot about triangular love in order to arrive at it. What makes the
story so interesting is that there is something more than male discourse that
stands in the women's way. The event that follows the conversation puts
their love to the test, a test that finally estranges the two women. During their
conversation Lao Li' s son falls off the cart and hits his forehead on the curb.
The mother is suddenly transformed into a different person. She forbids Lao
Wang to go near the injured child, as if she were to blame for the accident,
and Lao Li's husband openly declares his hatred for her and orders her to
leave. Ironically, it is not until love is damaged beyond repair that Lao Li
is able to express it. As the two take leave of each other at the train station,
Lao Li says, "I love you. I truly love you!" and the story ends on a
pessimistic note: "They had never said the word 'love' between themsel ves,
a word that had become so contaminated by male/female copulation. But
she said it now. Tears gushed from Lao Wang's eyes as she wept: 'Too late.
It's too late!'" (30).
56 Lydia H. Liu

Motherhood need not have stood in the way of their love, because
before the accident they had both tended the child with motherly care. Lao
Li's overreaction to the accident reveals a mind tom by ambivalent feelings
toward desire and motherhood. Feeling guilty for indulging her illicit
desire, she opposes motherhood to female bonding so that the crisis of the
self can be resolved through self-sacrifice and self-punishment. The fragil-
ity and rupture of the female bond testify to the difficulty a woman
encounters in sorting out her desire in a society that privileges patriarchal
heterosexuality.

To return to the question I raised at the beginning of this essay: do then

the works of the women writers discussed in the above suggest a female
tradition in modem Chinese literature? Contemporary Chinese critics share
the view that female writers tend to grapple with the problem of gendered
subjectivity and to explore the relationship of the female subject to power,
meaning, and the dominant ideology in which her gender is inscribed.
Inasmuch as gender does make a difference in reading, writing, and other
literary practices, as my analysis of the three authors demonstrated, it is not
difficult to conceptualize women writers as a separate group. After all,
official criticism has always relegated women writers to such a place. The
question I would like to raise is not whether women writers constitute a
unique category, but rather what it is that has enabled contemporary critics
to make an epistemic jump from the concept of woman writer-heretofore
a subcategory in the mainstream criticism-to that of female literature and
female literary tradition. In other words, what happens when a radically
different conceptual approach and historical imagination are brought to
bear on the study of women , s works? In this regard, it might be of particular
interest to recall that women critics in the eighties and nineties almost
unanimously evoke the early Ding Ling, that is, the author of "The Diary
of Miss Sophia," as the pioneer of the female tradition, while rejecting the
later Ding Ling for being a chief collaborator in Socialist Realism. That
seems to suggest that the idea of the female tradition is no less a potent form
of historical intervention than it is an invention. Linking up women's
writing of the post-Mao era with that ofthe May Fourth generation across
several decades, the female tradition opens up the possibility for women
critics to envision a departure from the practice of male-centered literary
criticism in the past decades which they think patronizes women writers but
refuses to grant them a subject-position. Perhaps what we are witnessing
here is a profound moment of history making in which a different narrative
is being instituted by women critics for the purpose of contesting the claims
of the state, Fulian, and official feminism as the sole representative of
Chinese women. In that sense, the female literary tradition is surely in the
making and, with more and more writers and critics joining in, it will
probably take on a life of its own in the future. Nevertheless, I should not
 Invention and Intervention 57

be taken as prophesying a bright future for female literature. While my

fascination with this new literary tradition remains strong, the foregoing
discussion is also intended as a reminder of the historical contingency of our
own academic practice (myself included): To what extent are we (as
scholars and critics) also implicated in the making of particular histories
even at moments when those histories seem most neutral and transparent?
What does the making of the female literary tradition in post-Mao China tell
us about the general practice of historiography and literary scholarship?
Finally, in what ways does such an understanding transform one's knowl-
edge about the object of study?
The End of "Funii Wenxue":
Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935
Wendy Larson

This is a preliminary investigation into relationships constructed be-

tween the categories "woman" [niixing, [unii, niizzl and "literature"
[wenxue] through critical essays from 1925 to 1935.1 Although these dates
do not constitute absolute boundaries, they mark two important political
and literary events that critics generally accept as epoch-making. The first,
the May 30th incident of 1925, when protesting workers were killed by
security forces at Japanese-owned factories in Shanghai, is the beginning
of the end of the May Fourth era. It is also an initiation into a transitional
period when writers who had been "romantic" or "realist" in style and
temperment were forced to make political and literary choices that general-
ly placed them somewhere to the right or left of center within literary
circles. Events of 1927 further exacerbated this polarization.2 1935 is the
year when Mao Zedong and his forces were forced out of southern China
and began their march up to Yan'an, where they established not only
Communist political authority, but also the literary policy and practice that
continues to influence the production of the arts in contemporary China.
During the last half of the 1930s, writers chose one of three courses: they
followed the Communists to Yan'an, began a gradual process of moving

1 My thanks to Tam E. Barlow, whose work on Ding Ung has inspired me to look at
modem women writers in a new light. My use of the concept of "categories" comes from
Barlow's work; for an excellent analysis of Ding Ung's early work, see "Feminism and Uterary
Technique in Ding Ung's Early Work," in Women Writers of Twentieth·Century China, ed.
Angela Jung Palandri, (Asian Studies Publications: University of Oregon, 1982), 63-110.
2 There are countless histories and discussions of modem literature that use these dates
as boundaries. One example, which sets 1925 as a crucial year, is lin ershinian Zhongguo
wem:ue sichao tun by U Helin, published in 1939. U characterizes the years from 1925 to
1927 as a transitional period leading into an era of revolutionary literature after 1927. See
115-145. In his 1929 discussion of Ni HUIUIZhi, Mao Dun faults the novel for not including a
single true, fiery revolutionary, but points out that the "useless" nature of protagonist Ni
Huanzbi is indicative of the "consciousness" of revolutionary intellectuals in the transitional
period after May 30, 1925. See Mao Dun, 1929, 166-67.
 The End of "Funii Wenxue" 59

inland with the Nationalists as they retreated from the Japanese, or estab-
lished a difficult in-between position in Beijing or Shanghai. Thus the
period from 1925 to 1935 is a transitional time when both writers and critics
aligned themselves politically and socially, for or against a "new" kind of
socially engaged writing, and willing or unwilling to follow an overt political
cause in their work.
My thesis is that during the transitional period from 1925 to 1935, even
though there are many examples of critics placing "literature" and
"women" together and even formulating "literature" as essentially
feminine, leftist critics theorized "literature" in such a way as to exclude a
category of "women's writing" (usuallytuna wenxue, but sometimes nUxing
wenxue) that had been constructed during the period immediately preced-
ing this one, from 1916 to 1925.3 This paper will give some examples of the
means through which this "women's literature" is seemingly affirmed but
also challenged after 1925. I concentrate on the re-theorization of the
"women's literature" of the past as deficient and the creation of a literary
ideology that makes no allowance for a gender-specific literature. Even
critics who were not leftist in overall orientation were influenced by this
demotion of gendered literature. I will provide evidence for my thesis by
investigating critical articles about women and literature and about (and in
some cases by) the two writers who are frequently singled out as respresen-
tative women writers of the late twenties, Bing Xin and Ding Ling.4

3 I find that the construction of ''women's literature" continues in articles and histories
after 1925, but often with added comments indicating that change is underway. The creation
of ''women's literature" during both of these periods includes re-inventing a "women's
literature" of pre-modern China which can, aswe see in examples below, be written bywomen
or men.
4 In Edging Women Out: VICtOrian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Chonge, by Gaye
Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, the authors take the topic "Gender Segregation and the
Politics of Culture" as their first chapter. Tuchman and Fortin discuss occupational gender
concentration and the means through which men move in and monopolize a field previously
controlled by women when the social and economic rewards associated with that field
increase. The examples the authors present are obstetrics (when performed by women,
midwifery), medical care of children, and novel writing (after the novel is redefined as "high
culture"). Below I give some examples oflate 19208 and early 19308 attempts to reinscribe
Chinese literature as essentially feminine, an effort which began in the teens and extended
up to the early 19308; however, there was no point, modem or pre-modem, when
novel-writing was a woman's occupation as opposed to a man's. The effort to reinscribe
literature as feminine marks a change in ideology, not practice.
60 Wendy Larson

Women/Writers and the Critical Apparatus: "Literature" Essentialized as

Feminine
During the period 1925 to 1935, several long studies of women and
literature, literature written for women, and women writers were produced,
and many articles on these topics appeared in literary magazines. One of
the most interesting and comprehensive studies is NUxing yu wenxue
[Women and literature], edited by Huiqun and including articles by Hui-
qun, Hu Yunyi, and Liu Dajie.s According to a reference in the text, this
book was written in 1928 but published in 1933.6 Huiqun first establishes
the natural affinity between women and literature, calling as evidence the
saying "If there were no women, there would be no literature" [Meiyou
niizi, jiu meiyou wenxue]. Huiqun also uses the work of Freud to show that
the basis of all literary creation is the love between the sexes, which gives
rise to artistic emotions. Huiqun documents the fixations of Western male
authors on women as the impetus behind their work and claims that women
love literature to the extent that they will sacrifice their lives to promote
the art of their lovers or husbands. Literary art is "more important than
life" for women, and women's tie to literature is somehow innate and
pressing [Huiqun 6].7
In the article "Zhongguo funii yu wenxue" [Chinese women and
literature] by Hu Yunyi that is included in this book, the author shows that
in the history of Chinese literature this identification of women and litera-
ture is even more true. Chinese literature is basically feminine and lyrical t
and even though most famous authors have been male, men are imposters
when they try to write:

Wby do women excel in literature?

This actually is not easy to answer, yet there is no need for us to
search for a profound and mysterious reason. However, in Chinese
literature it is obviously the case [that women do excel]. The alterations
within [the history of] Chinese literature are always limited to two
tendencies: graceful and restrained, or bold and unconstrained. All
literary styles can never stray out of the boundaries of these two tenden-
cies. In considering these two different styles, [it is clear that] graceful
and restrained literature is always the orthodox school of literaturet and

S "Huiqun" is a first name or a penname, but I could not find a full citation.
6 On page 22, Huiqun writes: "Ibsen was a Norwegian and was born in 1828 in Skisn. The
present year is the hundredth anniversary of his birth."
7 For more on the relationship between literature and women, see Tan Zhengbi, 1977,
Zhongguo nibing de wenwe shenghuo [The literary life of Chinese women] (Heluo tushu
chubanshe, Taipei, originally published in 1931). Also published as Zhongguo funi1 wenwe
shi [The history of Chinese women's literature] (Bailing chubanshe, Hong Kong, 1978).
 The End of "Funu Wenxue" 61

bold and unconstrained literature is a heterodox school. And further-

more, there really is not a large quantity of bold and unrestrained
literature. The main current of Chinese literature is totally biased toward
the development of the graceful and restrained. .
Women's literature is really the heart of graceful and restrained
literature. It is truly the most beautiful garden of paradise, and we can
see many writers and scholars there using women's language. We see
many poets shaking their heads and wagging their tails in imitation of
these delicate love songs. We see many literary men taking on the laments
and emotions of the inner chambers, describing the soft warmth and
emotional attitude of women. Things are even to the point that when
seventy or eighty-year-old men write poetry, they unabashedly try to
assume a coquettish voice. No matter what they do it just does not ring
true. And these unseemly poems have already garnered great praise and
laurels in the history of Chinese literature.
Graceful and restrained, warm and soft literature must be written
by women to be really true - if we believe this, and feel it is so in reality,
then we can say that women's literature is the orthodoxy of the orthodox
school of literature. And indeed it is so, for no matter how literary men
exert themselves to understand and experience the hearts of women,
[their experience] can never be as true as what women themselves
understand. No matter how literary men describe the vividness of the
lamenting inner chambers, it will never be as perfect as the women's own
expression. So as soon as we speak of women's literature, our apprecia-
tion and interest immediately turn in a fascinating direction.
Because Chinese literature has developed towards the tendency of
the graceful and restrained and the warm and soft, and this literature is
most suited to a woman's pen, we can say that women's literature is the
heart of orthodox literature. These words may not be far from the truth
(Hu 55-57).

Chinese literature is essentially feminine, according to Hu Yunyi's

analysis, and women possess innate literary skill which would have
developed if they had been granted an opportunity to use it (Hu 68).
Furthermore, unless literature falls into the category of "bold and uncon-
strained," it is either written by a woman or by a man taking on the persona
ofawoman.
The claim of Huiqun and Hu Yunyi that the best of Chinese literature
is feminine in essence is echoed by Tao Qiuying in Zhongguo lunu yu
wenxue [Chinese women and literature], published in 1933. In the second
chapter, Tao explains the reasons why Chinese women have a special
interest in literature. The first reason is for entertainment, and in this
section Tao provides readers with a clue about the causes behind the
modern reevaluation of "women's literature:"

Although in ancient times, other than to be forcefed with a bit of

knowledge from Nil sishu [The four books for women] to consolidate
62 Wendy Larson

their basic understanding of decorum [Iijiao], women had little chance

to study, it is not true that because of this literary genius was entirely
denied to women. It is also true that women often have rich emotions
and are naturally endowed with astute intelligence. If they occasionally
gain a chance to study, they can develop towards literature. But history
and society do not allow them to make a name for themselves through
literature, and many restrictions bind them. In society, they have not the
slightest status, and they have not the slightest ability to participate in
society; furthermore, they cannot see or hear the entirety of society.
Therefore, [although] they are interested in literature, they do not seek
fame for it in society; they have no social concepts, so they do not
establish any social relationships. At the most all they do is express their
own emotions to relieve their pain and misery. Even so, in this way they
produce very good literary works (Tao 88-89).8

Women have an affinity with literature because they have "rich emotions,"
yet because women have no social identity, status, or function, they are not
public literary entities. Good literature is not investigation of social
problems, but rather the outpouring of emotions.9
Like Hu, Tao Qiuying excludes the "bold and unconstrained" works
that Hui identifies from the "special literature-sensitive brains of women"
(Tao 90). Tao also excludes court literature or any type of literary expres-
sion that is restricted by ritual [Il]. Because of the public persona that this
kind of work demands, it is off limits to women. One example of this ritual
expression is the Ya and Song parts of the Shijing, which Tao claims must
have been written by men; the Guo/eng, however, could have been written
by women (Tao 100). Tao writes that the type of literature most un-
restricted by ritual and most influenced by free thought and free will is that
written by prostitutes-women who are totally unfettered by ritual. Indeed,
this kind ofliterature is not only the most free and lyrical, but also the most
"true" (Tao 90-91). Because of their low status, concubines also produced
"free" and "true" literature; Tao points out that women's literature
developed most rapidly during the Qing dynasty, mainly through the writing
of concubines (Tao 92).

8 The Four Books for Women [Na sishu] include Najie [Admonitions for women] by Ban
Zhao of the Han, NU Iwryu [The analects for women] by Song Ruo of the Tang, Neixun [The
inner lessons] by the wife Xu of Cheng Zu of the Ming, and NUfon [Models for women] by
Liu, the mother of Wang Xiang of the Qing. The collection was compiled by Wang Xiang.
9 These critics' attempts to establish Chinese literature as feminine are much more
interesting than my brief discussion leads one to believe; a more complete understanding of
the motivations behind such a reinscription would entail investigating the entire process of
the redefinition of literature in modem China and the means by which gendering plays a role
in that process.
 The End of "Funu Wenxue" 63

A New Literary Ideology

In reading essays which establish Chinese literature as feminine, it is
easy to hypothesize that should "good literature" be theoretically
reconstructed to devalue the lyrical and emotive and then value social
knowledge and engagement, the affinity of women with literature would
disappear, and along with it this constructed "women's literature" would
become a victim of this redefinition. Indeed, it turns out that even in some
of these articles, which develop the equivalence of nil and wen, such an
affinity is already a thing of the past. Hu Yunyi pays tribute to this
redefinition when wondering why writing about the emotions of the inner
chambers should be considered a defect (Hu 60), and Huiqun brings in a
new element that redefines the formula. That element is the modem
practice of socialism, which supports "feminism" rtoernieshimu or
nilquanzhuyzl but does not allow the conflict between men and women that
feminism claims as salient to a woman's experience to become permanent.
Rather, it insists on the temporary nature of gender-based conflict:

But recent tides of socialist thought are deeply reflected in litera-

ture, and the women's movement and socialism have a close relationship.
First, I must explain this relationship.
The feminist movement is absolutely not just the struggle between
the sexes and the expansion of women's rights. It wants to eliminate all
obstacles binderingwomen and all differences between men and women.
It wants to let the abilities and nature of women, which were not allowed
expression in the past, to express themselves to the fullest .... so we can
call this kind of movement a "revolution of the mind" (tin de geming).
Socialism and the women's movement have always been related
issues and have existed on the same plane. There is no one who promotes
socialism but opposes the women's movement. There is the search for
material equality and the search for mental equality....
But we must remember that struggle between the sexes does not
equal the women's movement. As in all social movements, [for example)
the class struggle, it is only one process of social revolution. So women's
challenge to men is merely a necessary shortcut in the equality movement
between men and women (Huiqun 11-12).

As the title of Huiqun's book indicates, most of the author's efforts go to

documenting the relationship between women and literature in the past.
But when she discusses the present, the delineation between male and
female styles, emotions, and experiences that are the result of social
restrictions on women and that validate her discussion of past literary
production is no longer operative; socialism insists that this struggle is
temporary and subsidiary.
In both of these analyses of the relationship between women and
literature, the best as well as the bulk of Chinese literature is innately
feminine, and women are innately literary. Tao Qiuying even traces this
64 Wendy Larson

essential bond between women and literature back to the Shang and Zhou
dynasties, when society began to circumscribe women and they were forced
to give voice to their dissatisfaction (Tao 94). The qualities of the best
literature of the past are identified as feminine: an intense personal orien-
tation, a delving into one's true inner emotions and experience, and a
lyricism that comes from lamenting a restricted existence that is socially
authorized and systemically dehabilitating. Men who attempt to imitate this
voice do not have the years of experience that, in the analyses of these two
critics, give women their unique literary sensibilities.
After 1925, it is precisely these "feminine" qualities of writing, al-
though they are not identified as such, that come under fire. Even only
slightly leftist critics participate in branding the romanticism of the early
May Fourth era as self-centered and narrow, expressing only the emotions
and desires of the educated classes. Critics and writers call for a new
literature of social commitment that denies the validity of individual ex-
perience and emotion, substituting for it social and class awareness,
knowledge, and action. Although "women's literature" is not directly
criticized, the characteristics of women's writing as defined in the past are
not longer desireable. "Women's literature" becomes an unwary victim of
a re-construction that promotes a literary orientation to which women have
heretofore been denied access. The re-theorization of the works of Bing
Xin and Ding Ling which occurs in the late 1920s and early 1930s shows
exactly how application of socialist literary theory causes "women's litera-
ture" as it has been constructed to become deficient and undesirable.

Bing Xuz: The Ultimate Woman Writer

In the 1933 edition of Zhongguo xin wenxue yundong shi [The history
of the new literature movement of China], edited by Wang Zhepu, the
authors describe Bing Xin as a feminine writer whose work has become
outdated as society has moved forward:

Bing Xin is rich in beautiful feelings and soft emotions. Her writing
expresses true emotion and is full of poetic feelings. Although she uses
the form of foreign novels, she has the style of a Chinese woman's
needlework. The psychology of Chinese women, a mother's love, the
charming naiveteS of children, the scenery of the seaside are all expressed
through her pen. She writes little of the love between the sexes. The scope
of her writing is limited to family and school life. Although she does not,
like Lu Xun, take a profound look at society, within this narrow scope
she has been widely influential among youth.... Now, the progress of
social times has gradually muted her influence, but the representative
characters and superior female souls she created in her works have
already left an indelible impression on the minds of tens of thousands of
readers (Wang 142).
 The End of "Funu Wenxue" 65

Bing Xin is a "woman writer" in the most extreme sense, writing on

women's topics (women, mothers, children) in an emotive and poetic style.
The author does not criticize Bing Xin, but points out that Bing Xin's lack
of social criticism or even a wider social context in her work now indicates
that her stories are not "profound;" what remains, the "superior female
souls" and feminine style that she has created, is insufficient to gain the
admiration of new readers.
Writing in 1930, Huang Ying also categorizes Bing Xin as a ''woman
writer:"

She - Xie Wanying - without a doubt is one of the earliest, most forceful,
most typical woman [mixing de] poets and writers of the new literature
movement (Huang 221-222).

Although not criticizing Bing Xin specifically as a woman writer, Huang

goes on to thoroughly condemn Bing Xin and her work. In a long analysis
of Bing Xin's work, Huang finds that "all she understands is A Motherly
love; B. The great ocean; C. Memories of childhood" (Huang 233) and
locates Bing Xin as an anomaly among the more "progressive" socially
oriented trends of the May Fourth era:

Looking at the world that unfolds in her works, we see that in her works
she looks at society only from a distant point. She has not become
profoundly close to humanity, nor made a deep investigation of the
problems of society; she has only idealistically evaluated everything from
within the confmes of her own world (Huang 232-3).

Huang chastizes Bing Xin for mystifying the universe and for creating a
useless philosophy out of "universal love" (Huang 229) which, like
"motherly love," becomes a refuge to which the individual can escape to
avoid direct confrontation with social obstacles. For literary history, it is
even more significant that Huang blames Bing Xin for making use of a
decadent literary flavor of the past:

Summing it up, she possesses only a mystical, individualistic, idealistic,

fantastical, ungraspable understanding of humanity and the universe.
She is like other intellectuals who have expressed the extremely abnor-
mal attitudes of the mentally dehabilitated poets of the past and then
used these mentally abnormal illusions to look forward to the "univer-
salism of intellectuals" on the other side of this world (Huang 227-8).

When she writes of love, it is mystical; when she writes of the ocean, it is
idealistic; when she writes of children, they are poetic and romantic. Her
approach to writing about all aspects of the world indicates that she is
"expressing a passive opposition to contemporary society" (Huang 251).
Huang also faults Bing Xin for being unable to take a look at the larger
66 Wendy Larson

society around her; like many other authors, Huang's representative writer
in the area of delving into society is the male writer Lu Xun (Huang 253).
Writing in 1934, Mao Dun also finds similar and equally serious defects
in Bing Xin's work, zeroing in on the "reality" from which Bing Xin takes
off as she writes. He finds Bing Xin's "reality" idealized to the point that
someone with a "hungry stomach" could find no solace at all in her work
(1934, 117). The "reality" from which Bing Xin wants to escape is the
"emptiness of life," and her method of escape is to "hide from the rain"
under the "rubber raincoat" of "motherly love" (1934, 119-20). Bing Xin's
"problem stories" [wentixiaoshuo] only show weak people expressing their
doubts about problems they cannot solve (1934, 122). Like Huang Ying,
Mao Dun criticizes Bing Xin for myticism and lack of a wider social context.
However, he finds Bing Xin's latest story, "Fen" [Separation], an improve-
ment over what has gone before and expresses his desire that she continue
to write in a new direction (1934, 132).
Bing Xin herself referred to the hiatus that seemed to exist between
her work and the progress of society when she wrote a preface to her
collected works in 1932; whereas she characterizes the works of the times
as vivid and bright, her own work appears as a tiny common flower and
herself as an old flower seller "carrying the muted, weak blooms of early
spring" as the vibrant greens and reds of the world rush by (14). Although
Bing Xin was elevated as a woman writer in the 1920s, by the 1930s some
critics regarded her work as stories from a different era. A similar process
occurs in the late 1920s and early 19308 when critics evaluate Ding Ling's
early work.

Ding Ling: From Women To Revolution

Ding Ling became known in literature during the late 1920s, when she
published "Mengke," "Shafei niishi de riji" [The diary of Miss Sophia],
"Zisha riji" [Suicide diary] and other stories. In his 1933 article Nil zuojia
Ding Ling [The woman writer Ding Ling], Mao Dun links Ding Ling and
Bing Xin together by pointing out that in 1927, when "Shafei noshi de riji"
was published, readers recognized Ding Ling's talent and regarded her as
heir to the legacy of excellent female writing left by a now silent Bing Xin
(253). Whereas Bing Xin centered on praise of motherly love and nature,
Mao Dun describes Ding Ling's early works as distancing themselves from
this kind of "serenity and refinement" (1933, 253). However, Ding Ling
still bears the "brands" of May Fourth ideas in this story, and still writes
solely about the psychology of women:

This is a bold description; at least for a Chinese woman writer of the time,
it is bold. Miss Sophia is representative of the liberated young woman
after May Fourth and her psychological contradictions in sexual love!
(Mao, 1933, 253)
 The End of "Funii Wenxue" 67

However, Mao Dun also points out the inadequacy of this approach for
readers of the early 1930s or even as early as the year "Shafei" was
published:

But at that time Chinese literary circles were seeking more profound,
more socially significant works. The proletarian literature movement was
emerging in China. Of course Ding Ling could not long remain outside
these trends. Therefore after continuing to write several stories with the
psychological torment of women [generally sexual] as the central topic,
Ding Ling started to write a novel on the popular topic of "revolution
and love" (1933,254).

The "popular topic of revolution and love" emerged as a stronger con-

tradiction in Ding Ling's "Yijiusanlingnian chun Shanghai" [Spring in
Shanghai, 1930], with "the author striving to illustrate those struggling and
trying to progress in this era" (1933,255).
Up to 1930, Ding Ling wrote on women and love, but was she con-
sidered a "woman writer" who in body and work possessed characteristics
specific to both women and their writing, as opposed to simply a writer?
According to Yi Zhen, who wrote "Ding Ling niishi" [Ms. Ding Ling] in
1930, Ding Ling was continuing a long tradition of women writers who
focused on portraying some sort of "love" in their works:

Under the pen of women writers in the era of Bing Xin and Lu Y~ love
was motherly love and the love between husband and wife; in the era of
Yuan Jun, it was conflict between the love of a mother and that of a lover.
When the era of Ding Ling arrived, love was simply and purely "love."
When love reached Ding Ling's time, it was not discussed simply as a
common affair. It had already gone a step further, and a purer type of
love was required (223).10

"Shafei," which does not repeat the simple "I love you, you love me," or
"You love me, I don't love you" formulas of the past, is the representative
work to which Yi Zhen refers (224); it is distinctive because it accurately
portrays the psychology of women (225). Because the topics which prevail
in her stories deal with love, especially a woman's psychology when she is
in love, Ding Ling is categorized as a "woman writer."
In "Ding Ling," published in 1931 by Qian Qianwu, the author
develops the theory of the "stance of the 'modern girl' " (original phrase
in English), which many critics claim as the unique contribution of Ding
Ling's early fiction. Qian explains that this stance differs from that of other

lOLu Yi is a pen name for Su Mei, known as Su Xuelin (born 1899). Yuan Jun, also known
as Gan NUshi (Miss Gan), is a pen name for Feng Shu Ian (born 1901).
68 Wendy Larson

women writers because it is bereft of "feudal consciousness" and has many

other characteristics typical of an "end of the century" psychology. These
include a strong sense of the self, an emotional and moody mind, depend-
ency, pessimism, weariness, depression, hesitation, lack of concentration
and ability to pursue a course of action, disorganization, mental fragmen-
tation, doubt, and "mystical delirium" (original in English) (227). For the
writer and the "modern girl" protagonists of Ding Ling's stories, life is a
plaything that must be wasted to the utmost (229). The writer does not
"bring out the darkness of society" and "seeks no explanation or under-
standing of the way things are," but rather concentrates on searching for
fun, good fortune, and freedom. There are no "objective events in society"
depicted, but only "subjective desire" (229).11
Qian marks the beginning of the end of the "modern girl" era with the
publication of Ding Ling's novel Weihu. Although the novel revolves
around the conflict between love and revolution, it "focuses on love" (233)
and thus is not a totally "new" work. Protagonist Lijia is a "modern girl who
treats life like a play and herself as an actor." Lijia's boyfriend, Weihu, is
romantic, but has started to study socialism. This new study has "firmed up
his will" and turned him into a "new person," but he can only escape the
lure of Lijia's love by leaving her and going to Guangdong (234-5). Qian
shows how even though the main topic of the novel is love, revolution wins
over love, and the "modern girl" is changed in such a way as to negate the
"modem girl" of before.
The criticism after this 1931 period discusses Ding Ling's later work,
especially the story "Shui" [The flood], which revolves around the psychol-
ogy of the group rather than the individual, emphasizes class awareness and
collective strength, and does not promote gender-specific apprehension of
experience, whether group or individual. According to Ding Ling's own
evaluation, "Shui" was the work through which she criticized the "revolu-
tion and love" formula which was prevalent in society, but from which she
was moving away (Ding Yi 345).
Writing in 1932, Ding Ling expressed dissatisfaction with the way her
early work always seemed to sympathize with the weaknesses of women,
even though she herself had no such sympathy. For several months she was
unable to develop a technique that would divorce itself from her previous
work and fit appropriately with the "new content" at which she was aiming
(105-6). But like Bing Xin, Ding Ling is theorized as a gendered writer;
whereas Bing Xin marks herself as a nUxing zuojia and her writing as funii

11 For more on the theory of the "modem girl," see Fang Ying, "Ding Ling lun" (On Ding
Ling), in Yuan Uangjun, ed., Ding Ling yanjiu ziJiao [Research materials on Ding Ling].
237-245. Originally published in Wenyixinwen 22!24!1f, (August 10/24/31, 1931).
 The End of "Funii Wenxue" 69

wenxue through her somewhat traditional topics and emotive style, Ding
Ling accomplishes the same through portrayals of the "modem girl" and
her problems in love. Like the pre-modem poets discussed by Tao Qiuying,
both affirm the significance of individual female experience and psychology
at the expense of a wider social context.

"Women" and/or "Society": Dichotomy or Unification?

The above brief history of a few critics' views towards Bing Xin and
Ding Ling presents no new information or unusual analysis. Not only
women writers, but male writers as well went through cathartic changes
during the end of the 1920s and into the early 19308; some, like Guo Moruo,
appeared to radically alter their ideas of the function of literature and the
writer within society.12 However, although both Bing Xin and Ding Ling,
as well as male writers, are chastized by leftist critics from 1925 to 1935,
there is one major difference in the import of the criticisms. 13 The charac-
teristics which are singled out for attack in the works of Bing Xin and Ding
Ling-individualism, an excessively narrow scope and framework, a mys-
tifying approach to experience, a lack of social knowledge and awareness,
extreme emotionalism, pessimism and doubt, escapism, a poetic and
romantic mentality, decadence, emphasis on individual (and especially
female) psychology and on various kinds of love and love conflicts-are
exactly the qualities which other critics identify as indicative of "women's
literature." Because they have been categorized as "women writers" writ-
ing "women's literature," Bing Xin and Ding Ling must either restyle,
de-gender, and revolutionize their writing or be re-categorized as outdated
and unprogressive. In other words, by the early 19308, leftist critics have
reconstructed not "women's literature" itself, but the characteristics of the
"women's literature" of the past as negatively conservative.
What did leftist critics constitute as the "progressive" orientation of
the literature of the 1930s? The main literary debates of the times, on
ethnicity in form and language, the popularization of literature, literature
for national defense, and proletarian literature, establish the guidelines for
discussion. 14 Debate over gendered writing simply disappears from the

12 In the fifth chapter of Guo Mouo de wenxue doolu, Huang Houxing discusses Guo's
radical change after 1925, when he became increasingly interested in Marxism and
"revolutionary" literature.
13 For example, even though Mao Dun gives a positive general evaluation to Wang Luyan,
he also criticizes him for his pessimistic spirit. See Mao Dun, 1928,77.
14 Published in 1939, lin ershinian Zhongguo wenyi sixianglun [Chinese literary thought in
the past twenty years] by Li Helin uses almost 600 pages of dense print to record the historyof
modem Chinese literature. The sub-topics after 1925 include literary popularization, the
70 Wendy Larson

discourse of literary societies and journals. This paper does not deal with
the question of whether gendered literature reappears at any time before
1949, but I would hypothesize that it may briefly come back into literary
circles as a topic in the late 19308 and early 19408. The alliance between
socialism and feminism has continued to be problematic during the post-
1949 period, and the means through which this conflict is mediated in
literary discourse can provide clues to understanding the status of women
in a field that continues to be dominated by men.15

revolution in language, national defense literature, popular literature of the national revolu-
tionary war, freedom in literary creation, the ideology ofthe closed door, mechanization, and
factionalization. Gendered literature is not a concern; essentially, the 19308 schemata of
literary production makes no room for consideration of gender -specific writing or experience.

15 In Feminism and Socialism in China, Elisabeth Croll outlines the conflicts between
feminism and socialism that developed in the 19208 in chapter 5, "An Uneasy Alliance:
Feminism and Socialism," and after 1949 in chapter 10, "The Cultural Revolution: Socialism
versus Feminism." In the 19308, emphasis on "unity" made some women activists impatient
with the lack of progress in solving women's problems; Ding Ling was a critic of this policy
of "unity" in the late 19308 and early 19408. See Croll, 213.
 The End of "Funu Wenxue" 71

WORKS CITED
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Palandri, ed. Women Writers ofTwenlieth-Century China. University of Oregon: Asian
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Bing Xin. Bing Xm xiaoshuo ji [The Fiction of Bing Xin]. Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1943.
Croll, Elisabeth. Feminism and Socialism in China. London and Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1978.
Ding Ling, "Wode chuangzuo jingyan" [My experience in literary creation], Yuan Liangjun,
ed., Ding Ling yanjiu ziIiao [Research materials on Ding Ling], 105-107. Originally
published in Zhonghua ribao, "Wenyi pipan" 2 (Dec. 24, 1932).
Ding Yi, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue sllilue [A short history of modem Chinese literature].
Fang Ying. "Ding Ling lun" [On Ding Ling]. Yuan Liangjun, ed., Ding Ling yanjiu ziIiao
[Research Materials on Ding Ling], 237·245. Originally published in Wenyi xin·
wen 22/24(26 (August 10/24/31, 1931).
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renmin chubanshe, 1981.
Huang Ying. XuuuJai Zhongguo nuzuojia [Modem Chinese Women Writers]. Shanghai:
Beixin shudian, 1931.
Huiqun. NiJxing yu wenxue [Women and literature]. Shanghai: Oizhi shuju, 1934. Preface
written in 1929.
Li Helin. lin ershinian Zhongguo wenxue sichao !un [On Chinese literary thought in the last
twenty years]. Singapore: Shenghuo shudian, 1947.
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[Mao Dun discusses modem Chinese authors and works]. Beijing: Beijing daxue
chubanshe, 1980. 114-132. Originally published in Wenxue 3.2 (August, 1934).
Mao Dun. "NO zuojia Ding Ling" [The woman writer Ding Ling]. Yuan Liangjun, ed. Ding
Lingyanjiu ziIiao [Research materials on Ding Ling]. Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1982.
252·56. Originally published in Wenyi yuebao 1.2 (July, 1933).
Mao Dun. "Wang Luyan lun" [On Wang Luyan]. Yuan Liangjun, ed.,Ding Lingyanjiu ziIiao
[Research materials on Ding Ling]. Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1982. 252-256.1
Originally published inXUJOshuo yuebao 19.1 (January, 1928).
Marcus, Jane. Art and Anger: Reading Like A Woman. Columbus: Ohio State University
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Oian Oianwu. "Ding Ling." Yuan Liangjun, ed. Ding Lingyanjiu ziIiao [ResearCh materials
on Ding Ling]. 226-237. Originally published in Xzandai Zhongguo nuzuojia [Modem
Chinese women writers]. Beixin shuju, 1931. Written in 1930.
Tan Zhengbi. Zhongguo niJxing de wenxue shenghuo [The literary life of Chinese women].
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Tao Oiuying. Zhongguo funiJ yu wenxue [Chinese women writers and literature]. Shanghai:
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Tuchman, Gaye, with Fortin, Nina E. Edging Women Oui: VICtOrian Novelists, Publishers,
and Social Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Wang Zhepu, ed. Zhongguo xinwenxue yundong slli [History of the modem Chinese litera·
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Yi Zhen. "Ding Ling nushi" [Ms. Ding Ling]. Yuan Liangjun, ed. Ding Ling yanjiu ziIiao
[Research materials on Ding Ling]. 223·226. Originally published in Funil zazhi 16.7
(July 1, 1930), special edition entitled "Dangdai Zhongguo nuzuojia lun" [On contem·
porary Chinese women writers].
72 Wendy Larson

GLOSSARY

BaoZhao
BingXin
ChengZu
A~
Ding Ling
T14'"
FangYing
~ft
fen
51-
FengShulan ;~)k.
foernieshimu
~"iI±*
funii
-it"*"
Funu wenxue «~*:i:.~}}
Funuzazhi «-*f'*ftt.t»
Gan niishi
it-*±
Guo Moruo ~~;l;
Guo Moruo de wenxue daolu «~~~ ~ ~!.f: il~»
Guofeng 1JJi.
Hu Yunyi ;lJJ 'l" .x
HuangYing ..-ft
Huiqun *f.Jf
Ii d
Li Helin t=t-r#:
Lijia
lijiao
.I.'"
~4t
Liu Jtl
LiuDajie JLk.~
LuYi ~i4"
"Mengke" ""?J"
Neixun « ~ 110)
NiHuanzhi «-fS!. ~ ~ »
Nu/an «*;t»
 The End of "Funu Wenxue" 73

Nujie «"*~»
Nulunyu «"*tt1j-»
Nil sishu «"* Il!l.»
nilquanzhuyi "*~.i.'"
Qian Qianwu ~ll~
"Shafei niishi de riji " " ~. :1f "* -:l:-lIlJ a ~"
"Shui"
"*"

...
Song ~
SongRuo ~~
SuMei
Su Xuelin .~#-
Tao Qiuying Fa'):;fk*
TanZhengbi If.J1.~
Wang Xiang ..I.~
WangZhepu ..I.{4"ifi
Weihu «*It))
wenti xiaoshuo ,.., :J! IJ. jj{.
Xie Wanying itt~~
Xin de geming
'u lIlJ"'~
Xu -It
Ya #
"Yijiusanlingnian chun Shanghai"
YiZhen
" - iL ,;..
1t.A-
0'" ... J;. i4: "

YuanJun vtg
"Zisha riji"
"~~i.a~"
Woman as Trope:
Gender and Power in Lu XunJs "Soap"
Carolyn T. Brown

The Context of Lu Xun's Critique

Henrik Ibsen'sA Doll House seized the imagination of China's urban
young with its appearance in 1918. The debate over the play's meaning,
given impetus by the May 1918 "Ibsen" issue of New Youth, was of necessity
conducted within the male intelligentsia, women as yet not having their
own voices. Nora's abandonment of the patriarchal household implied
more than women's emancipation. Her example announced the primacy of
individual fulfillment over social restraints, implied a wide ranging rebellion
against Confucian norms, and suggested new possibilities for China's
young, male and female. 1 Because women particularly had suffered under
the patriarchal order, progress in the androgynous issue of increasing the
individual's spiritual freedom could be gauged in part by improvements in
women's position in society.
Five years after the Ibsen issue Lu Xun joined the debate with his essay
"What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?" Given originally as a speech
at the Beijing Women's Normal College, the essay cautioned his audience
that only two futures lay available to China's would-he-Noras, prostitution
or return home. As if to underline the point, two years later he issued
another warning with his story "Regret for the Past," which detailed that
excruciating return. Lu Xun's warning, of course, did not originate in
allegiance to conservative views. A strong advocate of women's rights, he
had already attacked one extreme manifestation of female subjugation in
his July 1918 essay "My Views on Chastity." But unlike so many romantic
May 4th writers in their 20s, Lu Xun, a man in his 408, complemented his
advocacy of women's rights with a grasp of the social realities. To the debate
on women's rights he contributed the insight that women need not neces-
sarily be downtrodden just because they were oppressed, nor flee just
because they have discovered their oppression. Whereas most May 4th
writers conflated spiritual freedom and freedom from physical oppression
into a single romantic vision of youthful liberation, Lu Xun's "Nora" essay

1 Vera Schwarz discusses this issue in "Ibsen's Nora, The Promise and the Trap," in
Bulletin ofConcemedAsian Scholars, January-March 1975. The debate in Western criticism
still rages over whether or not Ibsen meant his play to be read in a feminist context ofwomen's
rights or whether it was meant as a universal statement about individual freedom. A recent
and convincing article argues for his feminist intent. See Joan Templeton, "The Doll House
Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen," PMLA, Vol. 104, No.1 (January 1989),28-40.
Templeton also corrects the widespread mistranslation ofthe title: not Doll's but Doll House.
 Woman as Trope 75

separates them into two distinct issues. If Nora is to leave home and survive,
she needs financial independence to support her new awareness.
Just as Lu Xun reframed the issue of Ibsen's Nora by asking the fateful
question about her future, so too within his stories he addressed traditional
and contemporary discussions about the ideal woman and changed the
content of the discourse. Although Lu Xun did not write many essays on
women per se, he peopled his stories with many female characters of varied
backgrounds-from traditional rural women to young, modernized urban
intellectuals. One way of understanding his views on women is to study
these stories. However, understanding how these views are present in the
text poses a hermeneutic issue worth some consideration.
Discussion of Lu Xun's characters in the critical literature focuses on
their mimetic approximation to historic realities. It is perfectly under-
standable that the Chinese criticism would proceed this way. The exigencies
of living in a revolutionary time and the Chinese awareness that literature
does indeed shape the social discourse-the way issues are framed and
understood-probably accounts for this perspective. Still Western scholars
of Lu Xun have also tended to fall in line and have not always availed
themselves of the insights offered by contemporary Western literary
theories. Such theories, arising within societies not in crisis, have the
distance to ask the technical question-how do texts create meaning?
Structuralism and deconstruction, drawing on linguistic models, have
shared the supposition that language is not inherently mimetic and thus
have redirected critical attention to the formal problems of how human
experience is represented in artistic form. Just as the speaker of a language
begins with the grammar and vocabulary available within a linguistic system
and creates new meaning within its constrains, so too the writer has
available various systems of representation-a grammar of the text, and
creativity works through the medium not just oflanguage, but of the images
and conceptual systems given by period and culture. Such theories argue
that the relationship between the literary representation of reality and the
reality itself is not transparent, as most of the China criticism assumes, but
is problematic at best. At the extreme, it is argued that any relationship
between the real world and its artistic representation is denied. Howeveri
one can reap benefits from the approach without embracing the extremes.

2 An extremely lucid and concise account of Western literary theory in the 20th century
is available in Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory, An Introduction, University of Minnesota
Press, 1983. A similarly clear but more philosophical discussion can be found in Joseph
NatOli, Tracing Literary Theory, University of Illinois Press, 1987. Briefly, in the last thirty
years literary criticism in the United States has moved from the assumption that a literary
work is an isolated Object which can be comprehended within its own system of relationships
to a post-structuralist position which argues that meaning cannot be plucked wholesale from
76 Carolyn T. Brown

Lu Xun was seriously interested in the craft of fiction as well as its

ideological power and therefore was very sensitive to the problems of
representation. His fiction shows an enormously varied experimentation
with form. 3 To understand what Lu Xun's stories reveal about his thinking
on the woman question, one needs to pay as much attention to the forms
in which he expressed his views as to the views themselves. The short story
"Soap" provides a fascinating point of entry to the problem. A brief
reminder of the principal events of the short story sets the groundwork for
the discussion.

Mr. Ssumin arrives home one afternoon and gives his wife a present
of new, foreign soap. The gift reminds her that the honey locust pods she
has been using leave her neck dirty, and she resolves to wash with it after
dinner. Ssumin commands his son to translate an English word which three
teen-age schoolgirls with bobbed hair had used to describe him. While the
teen-ager struggles with the task, Ssumin complains about impudent stu-
dents and praises a young female beggar he has seen on the street. The
beggar, despite her own hunger, gave every scrap she received to her
grandmother. He praises this "filial maid's" virtue and criticizes the crude
comments of two bystanders who had suggested scrubbing her up with soap
to make her a fit object of their attention. Later at dinner, when the son
gobbles down a delicious morsel that Ssumin himself was coveting, he
attacks the boy for failing in his assignment. His son withholds the transla-
tion, apparently unwilling to tell his father that he has been called "an old
fooL" Ssumin resumes his attack on students until Mrs. Ssumin intervenes,
defending the son and accusing Ssumin of sexually desiring the filial maid.
His weak denials are no match for her fury.
He is rescued by the arrival of two of his friends, whom he conducts
to another room. Ssumin proposes that the filial maid be made the subject
of the poetry contest that their Moral Rearmament League is to advertise
in the newspapers. The friends too have seen the young woman. But while
not disputing her exemplary behavior, one of them objects to Ssumin's
proposal because she cannot write poetry. Ssumin repeats his account of
the crowd's indifference and the bystanders' crude suggestion, and they
guffaw loudly, not at all embarrassed by their own sexual intentions. They

a text but results from complex, unstable interactions between and within the writer, text,
and reader. Some critics further argue that these interactions encode the political-under-
stood in the broad sense of hegemonic relations-values which are embedded in the
interchange. Thus the question "what does a text mean," a problem of interpretation, can
only be answered-if at all-after the question "how does meaning come into being," a
problem of semiotics, and that problem turns out to be extraordinarily complex and to have
significant implications for literary critical practices.

3 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices From the Iron House, pp. 57-58.
 Woman as Trope 77

accept Ssumin's topic and depart. Ssumin returns to his family. The soap
has not been used, and his little daughter is parroting his wife's accusatory
language. Withdrawing, Ssumin paces outside before retiring to bed quite
late. But the next morning Mrs. Ssumin washes with her gift, and thereafter
she uses foreign soap.

"Soap" is one of Lu Xun's most exquisitely crafted stories, charac-

terized by economy of plot, finely chosen detail, and subtle observation of
human behavior. Insight into Lu Xun's craft and his view of women are
provided by focusing on three women: Mrs. Ssumin, the schoolgirls (a
composite character), and the young beggar. "Soap" has three other
women: the beggar's grandmother serves as a projection of the young
woman's life into the future, and Mrs. Ssumin's two daughters--only one
is mentioned above-model their mother's words and behavior.
An important but neglected element in Lu Xun's craft is his capacity
to adapt and transform the images and conceptual systems-the tropes--of
his cultural environment. Perhaps one reason that his stories have been
treated as mimetically accurate depictions of reality is that he frames his
radical commentaries in familiar tropes, and these images and conceptual
systems are so rooted in Chinese discourse that they are felt to be true, not
to be artful. Being invisible within their own culture, they do not appear to
present a strategy of representation, one of many possible ways of formulat-
ing reality. Rather they appear accurately to present the reality itself.4
In "Soap" Lu Xun examines and utilizes traditional Chinese ways of
configuring women, and addresses explicitly and implicitly the Chinese
construction of female behavior as the measure of social morality. Through
the figure of the young beggar woman, he unmasks traditional romantic
constructions of the beautiful and virtuous young woman; juxtaposing that
figure with the schoolgirls, he plays with idealized projections of the good
and the evil woman and rewrites the modernized version of that trope so
prevalent in butterfly fiction; with the character Mrs. Ssumin he empowers
a semi-traditional woman with speech and the capacity to "re-read the male
text," making her the locus of his own value. Lu Xun's view of women can
best be described as androgynous; women's moral insight, like that of the
dispossessed, derives from seeing society from the underside. He
demythologizes gender codes, revealing their attempt to deflect attention
from issues of power by substituting issues of sexuality. In this his insights
resonate with the most contemporary of feminist theorists.

4 My forthcoming book Difficult Knowledge will address this issue in greater depth.
78 Carolyn T. Brown

Good Women and Bad Women

The figure of the filial maid derives from a common trope in the
Chinese literary tradition, the story of the cai zi jitJ ren-the brilliant man
and the beautiful woman. The typical story recounts how a virtuous and
beautiful young woman yields her sexual favors to a handsome and brilliant
young scholar; they swear eternal fidelity, often through an exchange of
elegant poems. The woman may come from a good family or she may have
been sold into prostitution. The young man inevitably earns success in the
imperial exams. Their passion may result in marriage or permanent separa-
tion. Most frequently the woman is steadier and more faithful to the
alliance than the man. Her behavior sets the standard of true morality.
When Ssumin encounters the young beggar woman on the street, he
appropriates this romantic literary trope, consciously embracing the view
of woman as moral exemplum but suppressing the sexuality of the trope.
In his imagination he transforms the miserable, starving young woman into
a moral exemplum and proposes that his Moral Rearmament Literary
League make her the subject of a poem similar in purpose to the essay
designed to "promote the Confucian classics and the worship of the mother
of Mencius so as to revive this moribund world and preserve the national
character.',s With humor Lu Xun adroitly unmasks the selfish basis for the
"high falutin'" talk. Had Ssumin's own son followed the example of the filial
maid, he would have left the choicest dinner morsel for his father.
Ssumin is too hypocritical to acknowledge his covert sexual desire.
Despite his wife's documented accusations, he acts the innocent in repeat-
ing the filial maid's story to his friends. But his cruder, more honeSt friend
Bu Weiyuan fleshes out the trope. Identifying himself with the young
scholar, he objects that the girl does not satisfy expectations: she does not
write poetry. Lu Xun's obvious point is that their idealizations enable both
Ssumin and his friend to ignore the very real misery of the person before
them: neither gives her alms. Their focus on sexuality deflects attention
from economic necessity.
But even while attacking the trope, Lu Xun adapts it to his own
purposes. The foreign soap, which gives the story its name, signifies the
intrusion of Western culture into China. Although one can only speculate
about Lu Xun's reason for building the story around this object, the young
Lu Xun in Japan must have found the superior hygiene of the Japanese
quite striking (he is said to have loved the Japanese bath)6 and perhaps
associated it with Japan's successes in other arenas.
In treating the filial maid as an emblem of the Confucian order, Lu
Xun argues that the tradition is moribund, and cosmetic adjustments-a

5 Usually I have followed the translations of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.
6 Wi\1iam Lyell, Lu Hsun's VISion of Reality, p. 79.
 Woman as Trope 79

thin layer of Western reforms-will change nothing. Scrubbing up the

beggar will leave her still a beggar. He rejects the slogan of the period-
Chinese learning for the essential principles, Western learning for the .
practical applications, and implies one of his own: throw the rascals out.
The trope of the beautiful and virtuous maid has a second face: if
woman's virtue can save society, her vices can destroy it. Ssumin voices this
view when he objects at some length to the behavior of modern women.
Having expressed his opposition to women attending school, being visible
on the streets, and cutting their hair, he continues: "What I hate most are
these bobbed haired schoolgirls. Speaking frankly-there's some excuse
for soldiers and bandits, but they [the schoolgirls] are what really turn things
upside down and they should be dealt with severely." "Soap" strongly
alludes to this darker face of the pedestal syndrome without developing it
very fully. Lu Xun did so in his 1918 essay "My Views on Chastity," which
shreds the Confucian argument that public welfare is advanced when
women commit suicide to preserve their chastity.
The trope that represents woman as either good or evil operates by
bifurcating her female functions--casting woman as filial daughter and
dutiful mother or as dangerous seducer. The good woman's sexuality is
defined according to her role in continuing the family line, with all of its
implications for submission to the patriarchy; the evil woman is defined by
her sexuality, according to her ability to give, to withhold, and to manipulate
the male's sexual gratification. The good woman preserves the family order,
the bad woman disrupts it. Seducers have been accused of using their sexual
powers to destroy the empire (and male power) and have been blamed
throughout history: the Tang Empress Wu, Yang Gueifei, Zi Xi. Most
recently Mao's wife Jiang Qing has borne far more excoriation than the
three male members of the Gang of Four. In literary representations the
seducer often has no children, the two roles being distinct. It is no accident
that in lin Ping Mei, the submissive Yueniang and the reformed Ping'er
bear sons butthe seducer Jinlian is barren. Even Dream ofthe Red Chamber
echoes this bifurcation and affirms the well defined social ideal of the filial,
yielding female whose sexuality is defined by her maternity, not by her
passion.
In all of its permutations, the good womanlbad woman bifucation is a
construction through which the male-controlled power structure defines
and controls by its definitions. Lu Xun understands this clearly. Although
"Soap" emphasizes one side of the pair-the virtuous, filial woman, Lu
Xun less frontally but just as consciously plays with the bifurcation when
he has Ssumin contrast the schoolgirls with the filial maid. Lu Xun is explicit
about his deliberateness in employing the trope. Ssumin estimates the ages
of the grandmother, the schoolgirls and the filial maid as 60-70, 14-15 and
18-19 respectively. When Mrs. Ssumin flashes her anger, she simplifies his
statement and adjusts the ages to emphasize her point. "If you men aren't
80 Carolyn T. Brown

cursing 18-19 year old schoolgirls, then you are praising 18-19 year old
female beggars. It's disgusting."
For Ssumin, the filial maid/schoolgirl pairing represents the traditional
dichotomy in modem dress. A different, updated version of it appears in
the "butterfly fiction" of the decades immediately preceding "Soap." As
Perry Link has argued, in the first two decades of the century, the popular
press in Beijing and Shanghai abounded with stories of love triangles: a
young man must chose between a traditional woman, yielding and passive,
and a modem woman, freer, more aggressive, and educated. Neither is
presumed to be inherently more virtuous. Goodlbad has become tradition-
al/modem. But still the object of discussion is woman; again, through his
choice, the male is empowered to define the female ideal.
In "Soap" Lu Xun has taken the two versions of the trope present in
the discourse of his era and synthesized them into a new configuration. The
traditional trope of the good womanlbad woman and the butterfly trope of
the traditional woman/modem woman both ask who is the ideal woman
and do so in terms of a male viewer considering issues of domestic power
and sexuality. Lu Xun uses the trope to ask a different question-what is
the ideal path for China. The amount of space given to each woman in the
plot-scant discussion of the schoolgirls, full discussion of the young
beggar-suggests that the bankruptcy of the entire Confucian tradition is
certain but the possibility of a different future is still sketchy.
Within the story nothing in the dichotomy of filial maid/schoolgirls
suggests Lu Xun's preferences on the sexual issue. In fact, Lu Xun would
not have cast his judgment in terms of good or bad. In "My Views on
Chastity" he expresses profound sympathy for people like the filial maid
who had lived according to traditional morality and been crushed by it. His
own marital life modeled his position: his legal wife embodied the tradi-
tional, his common-law wife, a former student, would embody the modem,
and when he "married" the latter he continued to support the former.
Within the story, however, the filial maid and the schoolgirls signify past
and future, and on that issue, in parallel with the strict bifucation of the
traditional version of the trope, his preferences are clear.
But however the trope is presented or modified, treating woman as
the symbol of moral and practical alternatives for China's future means
treating her as an ideological construct. For Ssumin and for Lu Xun, the
filial maid epitomizes traditional China. But even while using the metaphor,
Lu Xun tries to avoid Ssumin's mistake. Even though his text is fiction and
Ssumin's is life, Lu Xun avoids dehumanizing women by too close al-
legiance to bifucation. As if to prove the limitations of this sort of male
projection, he creates Mrs. Ssumin, a figure of great psychological subtlety
and a character who defies conventionalized categorization.
 Woman as Trope 81

Rereading the Male Text

Lu Xun, of course, is writing in the realist mode, one which avoids
conventionalized tropes and rather tries to represent actual experience of
the world in a particular time and place. In Mrs. Ssumin he has sustained
the illusion-all representation being illusion-of a woman carefully ob-
served.
Lu Xun's portrayal of Mrs. Ssumin is deft. Initially indifferent to her
husband's arrival home, Mrs. Ssumin reveals her pleasure at her husband's
gift by following his summons of their son with two calls of her own. Shortly
afterwards, she parrots her husband's distaste for modem schools and for
short-haired schoolgirls without giving any particular indication that these
necessarily are her views. Later, although she understands the implications
of her husband's story before the family sits for dinner, she says nothing
until provoked to shield her son from his father's attack.
Within that context of representation, Lu Xun endows Mrs. Ssumin
with considerable power, including the power of independent judgment-
the power of her own voice. When Ssumin narrates his adventures, he
ascribes to them a significance and interpretation that come from a Con-
fucian, patriarchal perspective. Mrs. Ssumin "re-reads" his narrative. It is
she, not the third person narrative voice, who exposes his distorting al-
legiance to the trope, his posture of praise or blame of 18-19-year-old young
women. In giving a woman the power to reinterpret the male text, Lu Xun
has anticipated in his practice an issue that contemporary feminists of the
19808 have proposed with often startling result: what if women were to read
male texts through the experiences of women, not of men?
Feminist literary critics, beginning with the premise that literary texts
powerfully reflect and shape the ideological and material realities of human
life, consistently attend to the ideological constructs of literature, par-
ticularly as they impact on gender issues. Whereas sexual difference is
biologically given, the term "gender" signifies the system of assumptions,
images, values that govern the relationships of men and women. These are
understood as arbitrary (a product of culture, not of nature), as meaningful
(an integral part of the operant power systems), and as often unconscious
(so automatic as to be mistaken for nature, not culture). Feminist criticism
seeks to unmask the operation of gender in the interest of creating more
equitable social organizations. Thus it functions as a vehicle of cultural
analysis as well as an agent for social change?

7 Carolyn J. Allen, in "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism," provides an excellent

summary of the history and presuppositions of contemporary American feminist tbeory.
Elaine Sbowalter'sFeminist Criticism offers essays by several of the major feminist theorists.
Discussing some of these critics, Toril Moi's Sf!JIJUllrrextual Politics analyzes critics in the
Anglo-American feminist tradition and distinguishes works in that tradition from those of
French feminists. My discussion centers on only one area of feminist attention, that which
focuses on the reader's reception of the text.
82 Carolyn T. Brown

In the West, feminist literary criticism is a recent phenomenon of

primarily the last twenty yeats. In the late sixties and early seventies,
feminist criticism investigated the treatment of women characters in the
texts of male writers. This procedure articulated the evidence that men's
texts frequently assume a male reader and manipulate the reader into
adopting male values. The reader need not be a male, however. Women
have been routinely trained to read "like men" and to disregard the
ambivalences that that created within them. Recently feminist critics have
asked what it would be like to read like a woman, bringing to bear on the
text values which have been affirmed by women's experiences in the world.8
The feminist perspective on the reader's response to the text has opened
established works to radically new readings and has caused the Western
literary canon to be revised, a procedure still in progress. Both endeavors
are "correcting" the previous error of mistaking patriarchal valuation for
some universal standard of excellence.
If a woman can read like a man, surely a man can read like a woman.
Or rather all readers can become sensitized to the ways that gender affects
the positioning of the text vis-a-vis the reader. To read with sensitivity to
gender means attending to the ways that the hegemonic relations between
the sexes become encoded in the text and in the interpretative perspectives
of readers at various times and places. Thus, for instance, one might
reconsider that sub-genre of classical Chinese poetry in which the male
poet creates a female speaker who pines for the husband far away, or who
weeps over her lot as a neglected palace consort. In addition to the
customary questions about historical period, author's biography, prosody,
etc., one would also ask questions about the ideology and practices that
might account for the longevity of the sub-genre. Why was this particular
depiction of woman so compelling to those who transmitted it? What social
function was played by the sympathetic portrayal of female suffering at a
time when no serious effort was made to mitigate it?
The sympathetic portrayal of female suffering, of course, constitutes
a major subject of May 4th writing. But whereas the traditional genres
found beauty in its contemplation, the May 4th writers, almost exclusively
male, attacked its injustices, seeing in female suffering the image of their
own struggles as young men in a culture that privileged the authority of the
old. In the May 4th era as in earlier times, sympathetic male depictions of
female suffering did not necessarily imply male willingness to give up
gendered hegemony. A case in point is Iou Shih's well known story "Slave
Mother." The story presents the female protagonist as a passive, powerless

8 Annette Kolodny's, "A Map for Reading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary
Texts," discusses two stories that take as their subject the differences between male and
female readings. In Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism. Also see, for instance, Gender
and Reading, edited by Elizabeth Aynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickarl.
 Woman as Trope 83

victim of social circumstance and male power, and reserves to the implied
narrative voice understanding of the causes of her suffering. Through such
a positioning of the implied narrator to the female character, the writer
adopts for himself, the male commentator, a stance of authority, even
superiority. This tendency of the elite narrative voice to be controlling or
even condescending towards the unfortunates of the narrative is not
limited to fictions about women. Lower-class characters may receive similar
treatment. In the case of "Slave Mother," both factors are operating. Some
of the post-1949 critical attacks on May 4th literature and the creation of
exaggerated, indominable proletarian heroes-and heroines-have un-
doubtedly been generated out of reaction to this portrayal.
Drawing general conclusions about how the male May 4th writers
position themselves and the narrative voice towards their female characters
would require textual analysis on a large scale. What is apparent from a
careful reading of "Soap" is that Lu Xun avoided a narrative stance of
superiority. In fact, Lu Xun not only consistently avoided condescension
in his stories, he reversed it. His self-critical narrator is a favorite strategy
towards this end-the diarist of "Madman's Diary" who "recovers," the
narrator of the opening chapters of "The True Story of Ah Q," the narrator
of "A Small Incident." The narrators who fail to understand the significance
of the stories they tell exercise a strategy which similarly causes them to
undercut their own authority: narrators of "The New Year's Sacrifice,"
"The Misanthrope," and "Regret for the Past." Further, as I have noted
elsewhere, whenever a story involves an exchange between members of
different social classes-more the exception than the rule, Lu Xun uses the
structure and content of his stories to locate the source of moral insight in
the lower-class figure-the rickshaw puller in "A Small Incident," the
peasant in "My Old Home," the women in "New Year's Sacrifice" and
"Divorce.,,9 "Medicine," which seems the only exception, is complicated
by the fact that the speaker of the author's values, the revolutionary, only
appears in the text by report. Most of the rural and urban women in Lu
Xun's feminine gallery are feisty. Their defeat comes not as a consequence
of their characters, but rather because they are greatly out powered by the
forces against them. The hindsight of a class conscious revolution perhaps
makes "Soap" appear less radical than earlier stories, but on the woman
question this is not the case.
Quite naturally the Chinese literary cannon assumes a reader who will
understand through the lens of male experience; after all literacy was

9 "Paradigm of the Iron House."

84 Carolyn T. Brown

largely a male preserve. to Thus, through the structural detail of having

Mrs. Ssumin critique her husband's narration, Lu Xun has made a radical
step in empowering women by imaginatively giving them their own voices
and the capacity to read through the knowledge of their own experiences.
The traditional trope was clearly a male reading of woman, placing the
onerous burden of social morality on her rather than on those who in fact
had far greater power over it, an absurdity that Lu Xun exposes in "My
Views on Chastity." Similarly, as noted above, butterfly fiction assumed a
male reader, as perhaps did most of the writers of the May 4th period.
"Soap's" literary empowerment of women, however, is not for the
feminist purpose of examining the power relations between men and
women. Rather Lu Xun is contemplating China's future. Mrs. Ssumin's
reading of her husband's text coincides with Lu Xun's own reading of the
Chinese tradition: within the story, the male voice speaks for the tradition
and the female voice for the modern age. William Lyell has noted that Lu
Xun thought that women, children, and others who were marginalized were
the only ones not corrupted by society. 11 In his stories one fmds few corrupt
women, few female hypocrites. Of course, as Lu Xun argued in "My Views
on Chastity," women had not had enough actual power to corrupt or
destroy very much. However, in Lu Xun's stories, no man of Mrs. Ssumin's
class, the semi-modernized traditional elite, ever serves as the spokesman
for the author's values.
In defending her son from her husband's assault, Mrs. Ssumin angrily
asserts, "Even thunder won't strike folk at a meal .... Why do you keep
losing your temper today. Even at supper you can't stop hitting the hen
while pointing at the dog." In using these aphorisms, she attributes a certain
decency and restraint in human relations to the natural order and privileges
honesty and directness. By the time she reaches her conclusion-"we
women are better than you men," she has claimed for women their tradi-
tional role as exemplums of social morality-but redefined its meaning.
Female virtue is not the chastity violated by the schoolgirls or the filial
submission of the starving beggar, but a decency and honesty in human
relations. This is a virtue perhaps better described as androgynous; that is,
a virtue equally available to either sex.
"Soap" alludes to the issue of new roles for women but without much
emphasis. Just as the bar of soap signals the unspoken Western presence
in the story, so too the bobbed haired schoolgirls evoke the impact of the

lOThis issue, however, is not simple. Preliminary evidence suggests great variation by
period and region. See, for instance, Joanna F. Handlin, "La K'un's New Audience: the
Influence of Women's Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought," in Wolf and Witke. A full
analysis of the interrelations of gender and literacy in China has barely begun.
1100 his point, see 209 and 262 in Lu Hsun's VISion of Reality. Lyell provides a
straightforward analysis of the story, 155-160.
 Woman as Trope 85

Western challenge with regard to women's roles. The bobbed haired

schoolgirls running loose on the streets provide evidence of one "peril" of
educating women-they dare to ridicule men openly. Modern education
for women, of course, ran counter to traditional roles. Lu Xun's earlier
short story, "The Story of Hair," makes explicit the challenge of bobbed
hair. Says his querulous interlocutor, "Let girls keep their long hair and
marry, becoming daughters-in-law." Probably Lu Xun was aware that in
the West a debate was also raging over the appropriate role for women.
His lifetime coincided with the period in the United States when bourgeois
feminists challenged women's assigned place and, claiming for themselves
equal rights with men, founded women's colleges and settlement houses,
led the suffragette movement, and entered China as missionaries who,
freed by the high moral calling of their work, assumed roles otherwise
denied them at home. 12
Mrs. Ssumin, however, is not interested in gender roles but moral
virtue. In "Soap" she adopts a very pragmatic solution to a potentially
radical problem: having asserted herself and chastised her husband,
Mrs. Ssumin uses her gift. She takes no ideological position. She does not
demand that her husband give up his Confucian views but seems satisfied
that he has redirected his sexual attentions to her person. Lu Xun em-
phasizes the realist illusion by projecting a future: Western soap, in a new
scent, continues to appear. However, he remains deliberately unclear
about how it appears and therefore exactly what it means.
In his domestic fictions, Lu Xun could imagine compromises between
warring forces that, acted out on a societal scale, seemed to admit of no
solution. Mrs. Ssumin is no Nora, choosing between absolutes-rejection
of tradition or marital submission. She neither rejects nor submits but finds
personal space within the givens of her life. Apparently she is content-or
at least resigned-to changing her husband's behavior. But in the societal
clash between the tradition and the modern, no compromise seemed
possible. As Lu Xun observed in "What Happens After Nora Leaves
Home," "Unfortunately China is very hard to change .... Unless an
enormous whip beats China on the back, it will never change. Such a whip
is bound to come, I think." However, because Lu Xun also understood the
social dynamics lived out on the personal level, he did not fool himself into
believing that a societal solution would automatically produce resolution
on the individual levelY In contrast to "Soap," written in March 1924,
"Regret for the Past," written in October 1925, seems to suggest that social
change is a prerequisite to personal solutions. Had he changed his mind?

12 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct.

13 Brown, "Paradigm", 118. Lyell makes the same point, 242.
86 Carolyn T. Brown

In the prose poems ofWdd Grass, written between 1924 and 1926, Lu
Xun contemplated what his personal role should be in the social struggle,
imaginatively tried out multiple resolutions, and in the final poem encoded
the solution which, in fact, he adopted in his life. 14 That is, he worked
through a personal issue in narrative form. However, he stopped writing
fiction before conclusively writing into his plots the solution to a different
problem, that presented in "Soap"-the tension between the traditional
and the modern as acted out in the public and private spheres. In his own
life, however, his common-law marriage to Xu Guangping, by reports a
happy union, coincided with his increasingly radical attacks on society.
Finding an individual space, he managed to live a modern life within a still
traditional society.

Lu Xun and Contemporary Feminism

Lu Xun gives no hint of recognizing or even suspecting that women's
understandings might in essential ways be different from men's, that some-
thing in the biology of maleness and femaleness as lived out in culture
creates identifiable differences of perspective between men and women.
Mrs. Ssumin's definition of female virtue is gender neutral. As Lyell has
noted, in the context of Lu Xun's fiction, hers is the wisdom of the
underdog, who mayor may not be female. Much contemporary Western
feminist criticism examines how women's and men's ways of constructing
their realities might be heavily gendered, and this finds little parallel in
modern China. The reasons are undoubtedly complex.
Mary Rankin has argued that in a society that assigned power and
status by role not person, woman's ability to assume a role meant that she
could accrue the benefits of that role. Joseph Lau has made a similar point
in a study of the representations of behavior in traditional Chinese ver-
nacular fiction; the motivation attributed to male and female behavior is
based on social role, not on psychological response. Tani Barlow has
confirmed that contemporary Chinese tend not to view gender as a
dominating social category, but instead deflect attention towards position
within a hierarchy, reading issues that Westerners would call feminist as
issues of status.
The work of Freud grew out of a historical context in which gender
held great social significance. Lu Xun had more than a passing interest in
Freud and probably was generally familiar with his prominent theories. In
1924 Lu Xun translated Kuriyagawa Hakusan's Symbols ofAgony, a work
which uses Freud's work on dreams to explain the creative process; and he
incorporated these insights into Wdd Grass to argue that when the con-

14 Caroline T. Brown, ed., Psycho-Sinology: The Universe of Dreams in Chinese Culture.

 Woman as Trope 87

scious mind, which he used as a metaphor for the elite, embraced the
wisdom of the unconscious, a metaphor for the underclasses, the spiritual
healing of society would be accomplished. IS In fact, "Soap" encodes this
insight as well. But the sexual theories of Freud find no similar incorpora-
tion in Lu Xun's work. He specifically rejected the Freudian emphasis on
sexuality, arguing that if Freud had lived in China he would have known
that hunger was more important than sex. 16
From today's vantage point, Lu Xun's structuring of the problem as
economic, not sexual, seems prophetic. Chinese women seem to have fared
far better than American women in realizing the promises of the 1920s. In
China women's energies and their liberation were joined to the larger
political cause of national revolution and met substantial success with the
success of the revolution.
Yet, although Western feminism has evolved to focus on issues and
values different from those emphasized in China, Lu Xun has something
yet to teach Western women of the 1980s. If the roots of oppression were
economic, that did not deny the powerful role of ideology. In "My Views
on Chastity," Lu Xun attacked the Confucian argument (alluded to by
Ssumin) that when women preserve their chastity at the expense of their
lives they preserve the social order. On the contrary, Lu Xun maintained.
If strong, able-bodied men were unable to protect their physically weaker
women from rape, certainly the women should not be punished for being
violated. In essence, Lu Xun argued that Confucian ideology had invested
femaleness with an inappropriate ideological significance, and he advo-
cated a separation of ideology from the body. Sexual assault on women's
bodies was an issue of raw, physical power and had nothing whatsoever to
do with preserving the social order and saving the world.
To use contemporary terminology, Lu Xun argued that the physical
body-the signifier-the female-had become the repository of a mean-
ing-the signified-that in fact it did not rightfully bear. In rejecting the
conventional literary tropes for configuring women and adopting the tech-
nique of realist representation to make explicit his critique, Lu Xun
demystified the unspoken tenets of the cultural order. One function of
myth is to make what is a social construct appear to be the natural order.
Lu Xun revealed it again as a construct.
What Lu Xun did tell us that seems immediately important for our
own times is that the construction of gender, whatever its specific form,
while appearing "innocently" to be about sexual desire and the definition
of the ideal woman, is really about power relationships in society. And the
battle to define the female body-whether as filial maid or as schoolgirl, as

15 See my essay in Psycho-Sinology.

16 "Listening to Dreams."
88 Carolyn T. Brown

traditional woman or as modem woman, is a battle for control of power

and privilege and for the future of the social orderP
17Today in the United States the struggle over who shall control the female body is being
waged on the issue of abortion. But while ootensibly arguing for the fetus's life, most pro-lifers
evidence little concern over the welfare of the children who are born, giving rise to suspicions
that the battle is about a different issue-perhaps about whether patriarchy will regain control
from those who demand a more pluralist notion of the proper source of social power.

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Allen, Carolyn J. "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism." Natoli, 278-305.
Barlow, Tani. Introduction. Barlow, ed. I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding
Ling. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Brown, Carolyn T. "Paradigm of the Iron House: Shouting and Silence in Lu Hsun's Short
Stories." Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 6.1-2 (July 1984): 101-119.
- , ed. Psycho-Sino1ogy: The Universe of Dreams in Chinese Culture. Washington, D.C.:
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Univ. Press of America, 1988.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1983.
Flynn, Elizabeth and Patrocinio P. Schweickart Gender and Reading, Essays on Readers,
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Handlin, Joanna F. "La K'un's New Audience: The Influence of Women's Uteracy on
Sixteenth-Century Thought." Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds. Women in
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Kuriyagawa, Hakusan. Kumen de xiangzheng [Symbols of agony]. Trans. Lu Xun. Lu ){un
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Lu Xun. "Ah Q zhengzhuan" (The true story of Ah Q]. Lu X1m quanji (The collected works
of Lu Xun), I. 487-532. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1982. (All the following
citations to Lu Xun are from this edition).
- , "Feizao" [Soap], II. 44-55.
- , "Gu xiang" [MyoId home], I. 476-486.
- , "Guduzhe" (The misanthrope], II. 86-109.
- , "Kuangren riji" [Diary of a madman], I. 422-433.
- , "Lihun" [Divorce] 11,144-155.
- , "Nala zou hou zenyang" [What happens after Nora leaves home], I. 158-165.
- , "Shang shi" [Regret for the Past], II. 110-131.
- , "Tingshuo meng" [Listening to dreams], IV. 467-476.
- , "Wozhijielieguan" [My views on chastity], I. 116-128.
- , "Yao" [Medicine], I. 440-449.
- , Ye coo (Wild grass), II.
- , "Yi jian xiao shi" [A small incident], I. 458-460.
- , "Zhu fu" [New Year's sacrifice], II. 5-23.
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Lyell, William, A, Jr. Lu Hsun's VISion ofReality. Berkeley: U niv. of California Press, 1976.
 Woman as Trope 89

Moi, Tori!. SexuaJ{l'extual Politics: Feminist liJerary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985.
Natoli, Joseph. Tracing Literary Theory. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987.
Rankin, Mary. "The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch'ing." Margery Wolf and
Roxane Witke, eds. Women in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975.
Schwarcz, Vera. "Ibsen's Nora: The Promise and the Trap." Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars (Jan.-Mar. 1975): 3-5.
Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism, Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Smith-Rosenberg, carroll. Disorderly Conduct, VISions of Gender in VICtOrian America.
Oxford Univ. Press, 1985.
Templeton, Joan. "The Doll House Backlash: Criticism, Feminism, and Ibsen." PMLA 104.1
(Jan. 1989): 28-40.
Yang, Hsien-yi and Gladys. The Complete Stories of Lu A'zuI. Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1981.
Zhao Ping-fu (Rou Shi). "Wei nuli de muqin" [Slave mother). Rou Shi xiaoshuo xuan ji.
Hong Kong: Wen jiao chuanshe, 1979.
Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of
Three Stories by Ling Shuhua
Rey Chow

1
It has been observed that, owing to their preoccupation with private
emotional experiences, Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s
were unable to move beyond the subjectivism and sentimentalism that were
characteristic of a feminine mode of writing to a broader vision of reality.
Their attempts to struggle for a new, liberated identity through writing, it
is said, fell short of the requirements of great literature:

Too much of their experience, overwhelming and inextricable from the

historic upheavals around them, entered their writing in a haH-processed
state. They lacked the balance, the mature detachment, the finality, that
make for great works of literature.1

The criteria for evaluating women writers as suggested in this passage

have determined, in an a priori manner, the conclusion that they can only
be failures. What is implied in this type of critical argument is the view that
a writer must be able to "transcend" the circumstances of his or her own
life into a vision that is larger and only thus meaningful. In other words, in
order to create a great work of literature, a writer must neutralize the
immediacy of personal emotions so that they can be more "objectively"
appreciated. However, "balance," "mature detachment," and "finality" are
not ideologically innocent demands. The aesthetics of transcending-the-
personal they inscribe is, arguably, also an aesthetics of transcending-the-
personal-as-gendered. Instead of adopting them as unproblematic
guidelines in our judgement of literature, we should ask, in each particular
case: how would "balance," "mature detachment," and "finality" be pos-
sible? Where should such qualities come from? And, if not possible, why
and how not?
If one of the major considerations in Chinese women writers' work is
that of Chinese women's relation to patriarchy, then the problematization
of these "objective" requirements of great literature becomes inevitable.
"Patriarchy" does not only refer to the documented evidence of moral
codes that are in turn enforced by the education that Chinese women

1 Yi-tsi Feuerwerker, "Women as Writers in the 1920's and 1930's," in Margery Wolf and
Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975),
p. 168. Feuerwerker sees Ding Ling as the one exception among women writers ofthis period.
 Virtuous Transactions 91

receive through their families and, in some cases, academic institutions, but
also and more importantly to the invisible ideological imprints that are left
on women's psychic life and that are perceivable only through their "per-
sonal" behavior. As such, the "personal" is always already deeply rooted in
the "social." One of the functions of the patriarchal organization of
society-in particular traditional Chinese society-is the consignment of
women to domesticity. Domesticity should therefore be seen as a
predominant, if not the only, paradigm under which many Chinese women's
thinking operates. This being so, why should the domestic space and the
associations that accompany it-such as personal frustrations, unmitigated
grief, or extreme emotionalism-not be one to which women writers
obsessively return? And if they do, why should it be used to devalue their
work as falling short of the kind of depersonalized aesthetic achievement
from which women are, by virtue of their traditional confinement to
domesticity, necessarily prevented? The vicious circle of women being
blamed for precisely the mental states to which they have been reduced by
the structure of social organization is a familiar one. In the West, it is
evident in the associations between women and insanity, hysteria,
neuroticism, and so forth.
What I am trying to say is this: instead of jUdging the achievements of
modem Chinese women writers with predetermined "objective" criteria,
could we perhaps take another approach, an approach that would take
seriously the peculiarities of the fictional construct at hand and see in them
forms of social participation? Could the Chinese women writers of the
1920s and 1930s not simply be judged as "immature," but as the producers
of a different aesthetics and a different conception of writing that make
idealist presuppositions such as "balance," "mature detachment,"
"finality," and the like useless altogether?
Among the evaluations that have been made about Ling Shuhua,
whose work is the focus of the present essay, is that she is aguixiu paizuojia
[writer of the guixiu school].2 The term guixiu deserves some discussion.
While it refers, in a complimentary manner, to a woman who has been
excellently brought up at home, it is here transferred into the language of
literary criticism to describe the work of a woman writer. The fusion of
domestic femininity and literary critical terminology is indicative of a
deep-rooted ambivalence toward the relationship between women and
their attempts at artistic representation. As is more clearly revealed by the
longer expression dajia guixiu [excellent woman from a family of high social

2 Yi Zhen, "Ji wei dangdai Zhongguo nil xiaoshuojia" [A few contemporary Chinese
women writers], Funil zazhi 16.7 (Shanghai, 1930); quoted in Qin Xianci, "Ling Shuhua
nianbiao" [Ling Shuhua's chronological table], Ling shuhuaxjaoshuo ji, II (Taipei: Hongfan
shudian youxian gongsi, 1980) 479-80. See also Chen Jingzhi, Xumdai wenxue zaoqi di nU
zuojia [Women writers of the early period in modern Chinese Literature] (Taipei, Chengwen
chuban she, 1980) 21.
92 Rey Chow

standing] in which it usually appears, guixiu signifies a type of femininity

that is upheld by traditional Chinese society. The equivalent to what in
English we would call "good breeding," the qualities of a guixiu comprise
a combination of sound familial education, graceful personal appearance
and behavior, and a keen sense of one's own role with regard to different
people. To this day, the term is frequently used with positive connotations
among the Chinese, except in cases where a "progressive" attitude toward
"class" predominates. On the other hand, however, a somewhat negative,
pejorative meaning is felt when guixiu, otherwise a term for an ideal
feminine type, is used to describe the work of a woman writer. As a
description of fictional writing, guixiu rather conjures up associations of
"lightweight, romantic love stories or tales of domestic life written in a
feminine style.,,3
Here, then, is the ambivalence with respect to early twentieth-century
Chinese women writers that I suggest. While guixiu is, traditionally, the
ideal norm for femininity, it is not, in terms of literary judgement, a highly
esteemed value. The labelguixiu pai wenxue effectively absorbs the socially
transgressive implications of women's attempts at writing by means of
classification. In the guise of objectivity, this classification reintroduces
precisely the traditional biases against the emotional associations that
surround Chinese women's domestic and domesticated status. In the
"public" realm of Chinese letters, the presence of guixiu qualities becomes
regarded as the limitations of the woman writer: she does not write enough
about "important" matters; she is too confined to the domestic world of
feminine sorrow, etc. Perceptive of this subtle discrimination in the at-
titudes toward women writers like Ling Shuhua, one critic challenges the
characterization of Ling's works as guixiu wenxue by arguinl for deep
philosophical and artistic meanings in her portraits of women. However,
while a critical revaluation of women writers' objective worth by way of
already established disciplines such as philosophy and art is absolutely
essential, it also skirts, rather than confronts, the issue of ambivalence
typified in the critical use of a term like guixiu. For, the problem at hand is
not simply that women writers' contributions to modern Chinese literature
must be recognized as having "equally" profound meanings as men's, but
how they can be recognized in their specificity.
When femininity is itself marked with historical traces of women's
social oppression and debasement, its inevitable inclusion in Chinese
women's new status as writers can only pose serious problems for a critical

3 Wendy Larson, "Review Article/Women Writers of 20th-Century China," Modem

Chinese Literature, vol. 1, no. 2 (1985), p. 254.
4 Oara YU Cuadrado, "Portraits of a Lady: The Fictional World of Ling Shuhua," in
Angela Jung Palandri, ed., Women Writers of 20th-Century China (Eugene: The Asian
Studies Program at the University of Oregon, 1982), pp. 41-62.
 Virtuous Transactions 93

tradition that valorizes "objectivity" and "detachment." To recognize the

distinctiveness of Chinese women writers' contributions, one would need
first of all to recognize the duplicit nature of their undertaking, which can
be described in terms of two different, if not incompatible, existential
spaces these writers occupy. These are, first, the space in which they are
"women," complete with femininity's historical and ideological baggage, of
which guixiu represents an ideal; second, the space in which they are
"writers," who do not only express their observations of the world casually
but consciously, with a public literary language that is itself marked with
the biases, restraints, and cruelties of history. Ironically, in the 1920s and
1930s, when Chinese women writers began to emerge, it is in terms of the
historically-determined negative qualities of their femininity that their
writing is disparaged. Instead of asking what challenge these women's
writings pose for the traditional thinking about literature, then, critical
thought conveniently understands them as "failures." And, by attributing
such failures to the limitations of "femininity," it completes the vicious
circle that helps guard the stability of a patriarchal literary tradition~
The daughter of an accomplished Confucian scholar who was at one
time the Mayor of Beijing, Ling Shuhua never showed her fiction to her
father for fear that the old man would disapprove of her use of the
vernacular.s Interestingly, though, her determination to write in the newly
advocated literary language does not mean an abandonment of her classical
Chinese training. In fact, one can go as far as saying that it is as she writes
in baihua that the stylistic features of her classical literary training appear
most distinctly. This is something that her readers hardly fail to notice. In
the laudatory comments they make about her, it is often terms which allude
to the atmosphere of classical Chinese poetry or fainting, such as ziran,
yinyi, juanyong, fengya, gupu yadan, that they adopt. In the Chinese literary
context, these terms are often used to suggest a writer's attainment of a
high spiritual level, ajingjie, which is the sign of a mature personal develop-
ment. However, while these terms may put Ling Shuhua on a par with
ancient poets and painters, they also depersonalize, and hence de-feminize,
the social contexts of her stories.
In the same way that we have noted the ambivalence in critics' use of
guixiu, we should also rethink such classical, spiritual critical terms with a
heightened sense of irony. If Ling Shuhua's linguistic style, paralleling the
guixm reputation of her personal history and narrative contents, is indica-

5 See "Xinjiabo ban Ling Shuhua xuanji houji" [Afterword to the Singapore edition of
the collected stories of Ling Shuhua], in Ling Shuhuaxiaoshuo ji, II (faipei: Hongfan shudian
youxian gongsi, 1984) 469. For substantial accounts of Ling's biographical details, see
Oin 471-487; see also Ling's Ancient Melodies (London: Hogarth Press, 1969).
6 See the short essays by Zhu Guangqian and Lian Shisheng in Ling Shuhua xiaoshuo ji,
II, 460-62, 463-66.
94 Rey Chow

tive of a "good breeding"-a good literary breeding, that is-what does it

tell us about the modem woman writer's historical situation? Here, a
consideration of linguistic style cannot be divorced from the uses to which
it is put. While Ling Shuhua's language may remind critics of the unworldly
ambience of classical Chinese art or poetry, what is remarkable is that it is
consistently used by her to portray the mundane and insignificant events
of domestic life. As has been noted, the trivial nature of Ling Shuhua's
subject matter often amounts to an "unhappening'" that typifies a female-
dominated fictional world. In other words, Ling Shuhua's works embody a
disjunction between a "scholarly" language and a kind of narrative content
which is explicitly unscholarly and feminine. This disjunction results in the
bifurcated nature of her critical reputation. On the one hand, Ling Shuhua
is applauded for her fengge, that is, "stylistic" accomplishment of that
unworldly spiritualism that is highly valued in Chinese literary judgements;
on the other, when her subject matter is pondered, she is given a more
reserved and more sexually-localized kind of praise: she is said to be like
Katherine Mansfield in her fondness for "subtle explorations of the female
psyche.',s But once we start refusing the critical habit of thinking first in
terms of "objective," "classical" formal criteria and only secondarily of the
meanings of femininity, then the disjunction between Ling's use of a
traditionally applauded linguistic style and her portrayal, in the meantime,
of trivial feminine "contents" becomes of primary importance in our
understanding of her works. In this disjunction, the complexities which are
in fact inherent to all writing processes become profoundly clear because
of Ling Shuhua's status as a woman writer.

2
In the three stories I read below, female characters rarely rebel against
their traditionally prescribed roles. What preoccupy Ling Shuhua as a
writer are not the master narratives of political revolution or salvation, but
the descriptions of what I would call "virtuous transactions." A point that
is frequently made about Chinese women is that they are, traditionally, the
victims of the social demand for a particular kind of virtue, self-sacrifice.
In addition to recognizing self-sacrifIce's close connections with the
feminine realm, however, we must also recognize the social dimensions of
the economy involved, even if this economy "functions" only in the form
of frustration, dissatisfaction, and failure. Implied in the feminine "virtue"
of self-sacrifice is a transaction: Chinese women learn to give up their own
desires in exchange for their social "place." This deliberately simple and

7
Cuadrado, p. 46.
8 Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modem Chinese Writers (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 18.
 Virtuous Transactions 95

schematic formulation is meant to highlight the contractual, rather than

private and solipsistic, basis of feminine sorrow. Once we see this, then we
see that even in their most trivial feelings and actions, women should be
acknowledged for a participatory effort to fulfill a role that is allowed them
in the social transaction. In saying this, I am not saying that Chinese women
"want" to be victimized, but that the unavailability of an alternative, be it
an external fact or a psychological perception, should be taken seriously as
a way into the problem of their oppression. The space of Ling's narratives
unfolds along this unavailability.
The victimization of a woman from a privileged class background is
the focus of "Embroidered Pillows" [XlU zhen] (1928).9 The title encapsu-
lates this victimization through fetishized objects that are closely related to
the victim. "Embroidered pillows" are the products of the time- and
energy-consuming sewing that Eldest Young Mistress, the first daughter
of a certain family, does. From the beginning, there is an uncanny sugges-
tion of a close resemblance between Eldest Young Mistress and what she
sews. The excellence of her craft matches her physical beauty in a way that
is almost too perfect to be real. Her amah Chang Ma comments:

"I used to listen to people tell stories, and I'd think that those pretty
young women in the stories, so clever and bright, were just made up by
the storyteller. How could 1 have known there really is such a young lady,
as fresh and delicate as a scallion, able to embroider like this! ..." (197)

Once finished, the embroidered pillows are sent by Eldest Young

Mistress' father as gifts to another house to entice conjugal interest in his
daughter. Eldest Young Mistress' hard work is thus an attempt to "sell"
herself into an order of life to which Chinese women are assigned by
tradition. Herself a gift, she is the maker of a second gift that would promote
her. Yet as the second part of the story begins, we are told that "Two years
passed quickly. Eldest Young Mistress was still at home doing embroidery."
Her labor has been performed in vain.
The narrative unfolds, then, by revealing gradually the cruel dis-
crepancy between Eldest Young Mistress' dedication to and the futility of
her labor. This discrepancy is chiefly the result of attentive and elaborate
descriptions of her dedication, which transforms the embroidery from a
mere pastime into a physically demanding and vital activity:

Eldest Young Mistress, her head bent over, was embroidering a back
cushion. The weather was hot and humid. All the little Pekinese dog

9 Trans. Jane Parish Yang, in Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds.,
Modem Chinese Stories and Novelkls, 1919-1949 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981 ), pp. 197-99. Page references are indicated in parentheses in the text. This story, as well
as the other two that I discuss in this essay, was originally published in 1928 in ling's collection
Hun zhi si [The temple of flowers].
96 Rey Chow

could do was lie under the table and pant, his tongue hanging out. Flies
buzzed against the windows, spinning lazily in the sullen air. Perspiration
trickled down the face of Chang Ma, the amah, as she stood behind her
mistress waving a fan. She would blot her face with her handkerchief, but
was never able to keep it dry. If she blotted her nose dry, then beads of
perspiration appeared on her lip. She saw that her mistress wasn't
perspiring as much as she, but her face was flushed in the heat. Her white
gauze blouse clung to her damp back. (197)

More details of this dedication come to us through Little Niu, Chang

Ma's daughter, who expresses a sense of incredulity at the taxing nature of
Eldest Young Mistress's work:

"Mother, yesterday Fourth Sister-in-Law told me that it took Eldest

Young Mistress half a year to embroider a pair of back cushions - on just
the bird alone she used thirty or forty different colored threads. I didn't
believe her that there were so many different colors... .n (197)

The irony of Eldest Young Mistress' existence can be described in

terms of "alienated labor." However hard-working she is and however
excellent the products of her labor, her "fate" is beyond her control. She
is not only kept permanently where she is by the embroidery, but
embroidery itself has become her living while she perpetually waits. In this
sense, her "dedication" is precisely the narrative's means of exposing a
character at her most vulnerable, when she attempts wholeheartedly and
positively to engage with what is available in, or what is prescribed by,
culture. The sense of sacrificial suffering is most overpowering as we feel
that it is when Eldest Young Mistress complies with society's demands by
"putting her best foot forward"-by cultivating excellent sewing to prepare
herself for marriage-that she is crushed the hardest.
We have, thus, a careful portrayal of a "virtuous transaction" that is
honored on the part of the domestic woman, who is nonetheless denied its
reward. For Eldest Young Mistress, society'S cruelty is most devastating
when she discovers by chance that a pair of pillow covers she sewed a couple
of years ago have since been soiled, trampled on, dismembered, and
reassembled in a bizarre fashion by people she hardly even knows. Match-
ing and mocking the fine details of her embroidery at the same time, the
narrative shows us the utterly mindless ways in which the pillows were
ruined:

... a drunk guest vomited all over a large part of one of them; the other
one was pushed off onto the floor by someone playing mahjong. Someone
used it as a footstool, and the beautiful satin backing was covered with
muddy footprints ... (198)
 Virtuous Transactions 97

With the climax of this fateful discovery, the narrative takes a turn
inward, making us aware for the first time of the intensity of sacrifice
through Eldest Young Mistress' memory. As she remembers how she once
slaved over the pair of pillows, the vivid minutiae of the physically-involved
domestic labor appear painfully ironic:

She thought back to two summers ago when she had embroidered a pair
of exquisite pillow cushions - there were a kingfisher and phoenix on
them. When it was too hot then during the day to work the needle, she
had often waited until evening to embroider. After she had finished, her
eyes bothered her for more than ten days. (199)

Eldest Young Mistress just stared at the two pieces of embroidery....

She began to recall that when she had made the crest she had had to
embroider it, then take it out, altogether three times. Once her perspira-
tion had discolored the delicate yellow thread. She didn't discover it until
she was through embroidering. Another time she used the wrong color
of green for the rock. She had mistaken the color while embroidering at
night. She couldn't remember why she had taken it out the last time. For
the light pink of the lotus petals, she didn't dare just take up the thread
after washing her hands. She had sprinkled her hands with talcum
powder before touching it. The large lotus leaf was even harder to
embroider. It would have been too uninteresting to use only one color of
green so she had matched twelve different colors of green thread to
embroider it. (199)

All the hardships the Eldest Young Mistress conquered in order to

accomplish an impeccable piece of work now become part and parcel of an
understanding of herself as a powerless victim to a situation which is likely
to imprison her forever. The distinctive quality of Ling Shuhua's writing is
that, within the narrative structure, this kind of understanding does not
transform into a real alternative to the situation. Instead, it recoils here
into a strong sense of narcissism on the part of the sacrificed woman. We
see this as Eldest Young Mistress' memory of how she embroidered gives
way to the memory of a dream:

After she had finished the pair of cushions and sent them to Cabinet
Secretary Pai's house, many relatives and friends offered flattering words
and her girl friends made jokes at her expense. When she heard these
remarks, she would redden and smile faintly. At night she dreamed she
would become spoiled and proud, wearing clothes and jewelry she had
never worn before. Many little girls would chase after her to take a look,
and envy her. The faces of her girl friends would radiate jealously. (199)

What is disturbing about this dream, which is a fantasy recalled in a

moment of self-reflection, is that it consists primarily in having others chase
98 Rey Chow

after the self "to take a look." Like her pretty pillows, Eldest Young
Mistress sees herself as "embroidered," "wearing clothes and jewelry she
has never worn before." Instead of being a way out of her oppression, her
self-reflection takes place through seeing, as others are imagined to see,
herself as a fetishized object. This "voluntary" incorporation within the
woman's self of her prescribed passive status thus demonstrates, in the
subdued manner of a graceful style, the complete efficacy of patriarchal
ideology.
A ruthless aesthetic demonstration of a similar kind is also found in
"The Night of Midautumn Festival" [Zhongqiu wan] (1928),10 which revol-
ves around the female protagonist's "fate." A story about the gradual
breaking up of a marriage due to a combination of accidental events and
superstitious beliefs, "Night" begins with Jingren and his wife (who remains
nameless) preparing for their first midautumn dinner together. On this
important occasion, everything has to be "right" so that Heaven will be
pleased. Intersecting the "virtuous transaction" between the domestic
woman and patriarchal society is thus another transaction, one between
human beings and supernatural powers. Jingren's wife, understanding the
full meaning of both, makes certain that both are properly honored. She
does this in part through fastidious instructions she gives to servants about
the festival dinner. Ling Shuhua describes this episode as follows:

Ching-jen had just paid his respects to his ancestors. Still wearing
an outer jacket and a skull cap, he paced the reception room and
smilingly watched his wife put away articles of worship as she gave orders
to the cook: "Later, when you serve dinner, no need to heat the fish again;
add some cooking wine to the chestnut chicken and stew it again; also
add some sugar to the vegetable dish and stew it some more. The
'Together Duck' is a little tough. Simmer it some more."
"That's right, simmer the 'Together Duck' some more. Could we
also add some slices of bamboo shoots to it?" Ching-jen asked his wife,
walking up to her. From his beaming face he was quite pleased with her
arrangements.
"All right, add some bamboo shoots; fish out the ham bones; make
sure the soup doesn't get too greasy." (200)

To have everything appropriately set up in this context is not unlike

performing a form of highly skilled labor, for which no detail is too small
to be neglected. Moreover, "natural" objects are no longer simply natural
but the signs of a specific system of meaning. Duck is thus "Together Duck,"
the consumption of which is supposed to bring the good fortune of familial
togetherness and harmony. But the wife's attempt to conduct this transac-
tion with Heaven to perfection is frustrated by the urgent news of Jingren's
10 Trans. Nathan K. Mao, Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, pp. 200-05. Page
references are indicated in parentheses in the text.
 Vinuous Transactions 99

foster-sister's likely death. In the midst of dinner, Jingren gets ready to

depart. At his wife's urging, he hurriedly eats one piece of the "Together
Duck" but spits it out on account of its greasiness. When he comes home
that night, husband and wife quarrel over the events that happened. To the
great displeasure of his wife, Jingren knocks down an offering vase by
accident, thus violating the festival rituals a second time.
After this night, the previously harmonious relationship between
Jingren and his wife declines. With the return of each Midautumn Festival
in the following years, we are shown an accumulated series of misfor-
tunes-the family's increasing material impoverishment, the miscarriage
of infants, Jingren's decadent personal behavior, and finally, the loss of the
family home. In the last scene, the Midautumn Festival of the fourth year
of their marriage, Jingren has left his wife permanently. The wife tells her
mother that this is the final night she is allowed to stay at their house before
the debtors claim it the next day. As she recalls the events of her married
life, she blames her own fate:

" ... Mother, this is probably my fate." She blew her nose and sobbed:
"On the first Midautumn Festival after my marriage, he and I quarreled.
He had a piece of 'Together Duck,' which he spat out. At the time I was
rather uneasy about it. Later, when his shoe knocked over an offering
vase I knew for sure it was a bad omen." (205)

Confronted with the narrative of a female character's enslavement to

superstitions such as this one, the reader has some choices to make. She
can either dismiss the entire portrayal as one of out-dated domestic trivia
that is not worthy of attention, or she can take the female perspective on
its own terms and find out what kind of critical value can be derived from
it. In this essay we do the latter. This female perspective begins, develops,
and concludes the narrative action in that it is by following the degree of
success with which Jingren's wife transacts with "fate" and with "society"
that we understand the meaning of her condition. If her labor in being a
good wife points to the existence of a contract with patriarchal society, then
her superstitions also point to the dark side of that transaction, that is, its
ability to destroy her. The narrative is therefore "completed" ironically by
the fulfillment of what Jingren's wife fears the most-that Jingren's be-
havior toward the "Together Duck" and the offering vase will really bring
bad luck. In a way that mimics the most feudalistic beliefs, the narrative
says: "Look, the superstitious woman was right after all!"
Rather than explicitly criticizing the ideology of traditional Chinese
society, Ling Shuhua's narrative exposes that society's limits aesthetically,
by exhibiting them in their cruellest, and hence most fmal, manifestations.
Accordingly, the victimization of Jingren's wife is further emphasized by
her utter loneliness. Not only is she unable to obtain any relief or support
from other women, but the latter's existence merely compounds her status

80
100 Rey Chow

as victim. There is, first of all, the suggestion that Jingren's attachment to
his foster-sister has something to do with his physical attraction to the now
deceased woman. Although not personal, the presence of this foster-sister
leads to the first breach between husband and wife. As they quarrel over
her death, Jingren's previous tender feelings for his wife give way to
misogynistic observations:

As his wife used a fresh handkerchief to wipe off her tears, he noticed
how unsightly her swollen nose was. How her lips, which he had con-
sidered pretty, looked purplish without the lipstick, dark and contorted
from crying. He also noticed how slanted her plain eyes really were, a
flaw he had failed to notice before because he was in love with her.
Suddenly he remembered what his mother used to say: "Slanted-eyed
women are the most difficult to handle." This was the frrst time in his
married life that he had become aware of her ugliness. (202)

This mother, when she comes for a visit in the third year of their
marriage, would side with her son against her daughter-in-law:

When her son would not listen to her, she blamed her daughter-in-Iaw's
stupidity. Had her daughter-in-law attended to his needs properly, she
reasoned, her son would not have squandered the family fortune. Hence,
every day she cast unpleasant looks at her daughter-in-law from morning
to night. (204)

Finally, in the last scene, when Jingren's wife talks with her own
mother about her misfortunes, what she receives from the older woman is
not personal encouragement but advice for a resignation to fate:

"It's the will of Heaven. Who can avoid these catastrophes? I think you'd
better be more cheerful, try to be good, and wait for your next life." (205)

The relentless structure of oppression means that feminine victimiza-

tion remains essentially unmitigated in Ling Shuhua's text. It is the percep-
tion of such unmitigated victimization, I suspect, that is behind critics' use
of the term guixiu pai wenxue to describe Ling Shuhua's fiction, for un-
mitigated victimization signals an unchangingly closed, confined, and
limited world. However, closure, confinement, and limits perceived as such
are already aesthetic interventions. The subversion of patriarchy they
perform takes a different method, which reveals the horror of ideology's
"normal" functioning from within. Thus it is when the woman's virtuous
transaction with her society is most complete-when her self-sacrifice is
most unreasonable-that the narrative is most poignant, and most sugges-
tive of the need for social change.
 Virtuous Transactions 101

"After Drinking" [Jiu hou] (1928it. a remarkable vignette of a young

couple coming to terms with an "improper" wish expressed by the wife,
treats the theme of "virtuous transactions" more amusingly. The story
begins as Yongzhang and Caitiao, the young couple, are resting in their
living room late one night, after all the guests of their dinner party have
departed. All, that is, but one: sound asleep on a chair across from them is
Ziyi, whom Caitiao, the wife, watches with great fascination. At first,
Caitiao's attention seems unproblematically "motherly": she puts a blanket
over him, takes off his shoes, suggests that Yongzhang and she stay around
in case he needed a drink of water when he wakes up, and so on.
Yongzhang, meanwhile, chatters at his wife in a drunkenly sentimental
manner. His sentimentalism is not reciprocated, though, and what follows
is a thought-provoking drama of emotional negotiations.
As Yongzhang asks Caitiao what she wants for the coming New Year,
he receives from her an entirely unexpected response, which sobers him
up instantly. To contextualize this response, we must begin with the way it
is triggered:

Caitiao ... still kept looking at the man who was sound asleep. Ziyi's
reddened cheeks looked as though they had been soaked through with
rouge. His eyes, thoughtful and mysterious, were closed comfortably; his
two dark eyebrows were clearly parted toward the two sides of his
forehead. His mouth, usually the source of humor and argument, was
closed like a crescent; a faint smile appeared on his lips. Caitiao had
never seen him like this before. Normally, he looked so respectful and
gentle, but now, after drinking, he looked sensuous and beautiful. After
staring at him for a moment, Caitiao's face felt hot. She said:
"I don't want anything [for the New Year], I only want you to grant
me one thing. It'll take just a second."
"Tell me quickly please," replies Yongzhang gladly. "Whatever is
mine, it's yours too. It's fme even if it should take a million years, let alone
one second."
"I want ... I am too embarrassed to say it."
"It's all right."
"He .. .n
"I'm sure he won't be awakened. Just say it."
"I ... I just want to kiss his face once. Would you let me?"
"Really, Caitiao?"
"Yes! Really!" (6-7)

Caitiao's intense gaze at a man who is not her own husband has led to
an improper wish. To kiss this other man would amount to a violation of
the taboo on extramarital physical intimacy and thus a failure in wifely
virtue. Caitiao's awareness of this is evident, for she immediately offers a

11 Ling Shuhua xiaoshuo ji, I, 3-10. Translations from this story are mine.
102 Rey Chow

rational account of her behavior. She confesses that her wish has come
about because of the admiration she feels for Ziyi, a handsome, learned,
and gifted man who has been deprived of familial affection. The more she
looks at him, she says, the more she feels the agitation of a profound,
unstoppable pitying emotion, which she must express (8).
The negotiations between husband and wife that follow are both
interesting and instructive. Caitiao takes the view that her husband should
grant her her wish simply because he loves her (and because, after all, he
loves Ziyi too). To this Yongzhang responds at first by asserting the strict
boundary between "friendly" and "marital" love. A few seconds later,
however, he changes his mind and lets his wife have her way:

"IT you indeed trust me, why won't you let me do it?" said Caitiao
earnestly as she stood up.
"You really must kiss him?"
"Yes. I won't feel all right if I can't kiss him once."
"0. K.!" said Yongzhang with resolution. (9)

With the support of her husband, Caitiao proceeds to fulfill her wish.
In spite of her daring and insistence, her path is now fraught with hesita-
tions and uncertainties:

She stood up, took a couple of steps, but suddenly turned back and
grabbed Yongzhang's hand:
"You come with me."
"Isn't it the same ifl wait for you here? What are you afraid of, that
you need me to come with you?"
"No, you must come with me."
"I can't. What's more, if I did, then it would look as though I didn't
trust you. Right?"
Without answering, she moved, and then suddenly stopped again:
"My heart is beating very fast. Don't go away."
"All right. I said I would wait for you here."
"Here I go." (9)

As Caitiao approaches her object, the physicality of her adventure

becomeS more and more unbearable. The story concludes with this descrip-
tion:

The closer she got and the closer Ziyi's features appeared, the more
rapid her heartbeat became. As she came to the chair on which he was
sleeping, her heart was pounding so loudly that she could hear it. Her
face was terribly hot. In this condition she stared at the man. A moment
passed; her face cooled down and her heart stopped pounding. Very
quickly, she walked back to Yongzhang. She sat down in silence, her head
lowered. Yongzhang asked immediately:
"What's the matter, Caitiao?"
 Virtuous Transactions 103

"Nothing. I don't want to kiss him any more." (9-10)

"After Drinking" demonstrates in a superbly economical fashion the

ideological limits that a Chinese woman internalizes in order to be a "good"
wife. In spite of her independent feelings for the other man, and in spite
of her ability to articulate those feelings, Caitiao's "adventure" is thwarted
by the invisible contractual obligations she has made with society in terms
of feminine virtue. Therefore, even as she can overcome the major "bar-
rier" of her husband, who is broad-minded enough to let her realize her
wish, the force of the virtuous contract returns to haunt her precisely at the
moment when she is about to break it. Caitiao's increasing consciousness
of the physical effects of her transgression indicates that it is in women's
emotions, not their rational thinking, that the virtuous contract is most
deeply effective. Ironically, hence, it is Caitiao's "own" physical reactions
that ultimately put an end to her attempt at "improper" behavior. Once
again, Ling Shuhua gives us the portrayal of a woman through her "volun-
tary" completion of a virtuous transaction. Consciously conservative, the
narrative conclusion of "After Drinking" marks a particular aesthetics,
which compels us to reflect on the larger implications of feminine virtue
precisely through the "limits" of the text.

3
The term "virtuous transactions" allows us to see the intertwined
relationship between the "feminine" contents of Ling Shuhua's narratives
and her social status as both woman and writer. The many facets of this
relationship should be summarized as follows. First, Ling Shuhua's narra-
tives take seriously the domestic economy that is important to the construc-
tion of femininity. Within the confines of that economy, she portrays female
characters who honor their part of the "virtuous transaction" with patriar-
chal society and who, nonetheless, are victimized in their efforts. As Don
Holoch puts it, "It is women's practical experience that, even as it deforms
them, robs the [patriarchal] order of its mystique by showing the sanctioned
goals, ideals and rituals to be the instruments of a sort of terror.,,12 The
realm of the guixiu, seen in this light, is not the realm of a privileged class
but rather a "theater of the absurd," where the most involved, dedicated,
and passionate participation in a social contract becomes a matter of
self-sacrifice, and where the more virtuous the woman is, the more
thoroughly her aspirations and desires are demolished.
Second, when the understanding of domestic femininity has been
clarified in this way, the label guixiu pai wenxue also needs to be rethought.

UHEveryday Feudalism: The Subversive Stories of Ling Shuhua," Anna Gerstlacher,

Ruth Keen, WOlfgang Kubin, Margit Miosga, Jenny Schon, eds., Woman and Literature in
China (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1985) 389.
104 Rey Chow

If part of the pejorative meaning intended by this description as it is used

on early twentieth-century Chinese women writers is that of "triviality,"
then triviality itself should now be seen as an ironic means of exploring
patriarchal ideology, whose limits are made palpable precisely through
women's so-called private and insignificant sufferings. Ling Shuhua's con-
scious reliance on triviality for the effects of irony means that it would be
a misleading reading strategy to judge her fiction on the basis of directly
present political feelings. On the other hand, the recognition of her aes-
thetic method would show that her narratives call attention to patriarchal
oppression in their own way, through the repeated mimicry of closed
ideological structures.
Third, the irony that connects triviality with social meaning is echoed
at the level of Ling Shuhua's practice as a writer. Like the other women
writers of her generation, Ling Shuhua faced the problem not simply of
how to write, but of what compromises and negotiations needed to be made
to present aspects of female domestic experience in public. In a cultural
context in which women's access to literacy itself was for so long met with
disapproval even among the highly educated, these compromises and
negotiations are most markedly felt in a style which apparently retains all
the traditionally endorsed qualities of fine writing. The crucial point,
however, is rather this: if the "cultured" linguistic style that has won her
the acclaim of Chinese critics is a sign of Ling Shuhua's successful participa-
tion in a literary world with its tradition-laden definitions of aesthetic
excellence, then the "trivial" contents of her stories, while they alert us to
the oppressiveness of social structure, also make the aesthetically-pleasing
quality of her "well-bred" literary language ironic. In terms of the act of
writing, therefore, we can also argue for a particular "virtuous transaction."
This is the virtuous transaction between the modern Chinese woman writer
and the language that is available to her. The "classical" aesthetic quality
of Ling Shuhua's writing can now be seen as the result of her effort to fulfill
her contract with this public, historical language, while her use of it for a
conspicuously feminine subject matter signifies her effort to break that
contract. Operating at various levels at once, the disjunctions that charac-
terize Ling Shuhua's work provide an excellent context for exploring the
complex interactions among woman-centered writing, reading, and politics.
 Virtuous Transactions 105

GLOSSARY

LingShuhua It~.
guixiu (t1;t
guixiu pai wenxue
(t1*~~"
ziran tll!

...
yinyi flit
juanyong jf7j<.
fengya
gupuyadan *•• it
jingjie Jt~
fengge )it#-
Images of Subjugation and Defiance:
Female Characters in the Early Dramas
of Tian Han
Randy Kaplan

In her study of women in Chinese society, Julia Kristeva1 describes a

thought-provoking paradigm of the portrayal of women in modern Chinese
dramatic literature. Her brief but perceptive examination of opera libret-
toes, screenplays, and playscripts dating from the Cultural Revolution
demonstrates that depictions of female characters with unbound feet,
freedom to choose spouses, and employment in the public sector create
superficial impressions of "feminine liberation." However, upon closer
scrutiny of modern Chinese drama, Kristeva concludes that, onstage,
women continue to be subjugated by theatrical manifestations of age-old
traditions of male domination.
According to Kristeva, dramatic action is typically set in motion by a
female protagonist; indeed, she claitns to have seen no modern Chinese
dramas with male heroes (Kristeva 152). The protagonist sparks a conflict
which, significantly, is external to those interpersonal and interfamilial
relationships that might characterize her as a woman, relationships which
are entirely absent from the drama. Instead, she channels her entire being,
all of her drives and desires, into what Kristeva calls "political sublimation"
(155). So immersed is the protagonist in competing in socio-political
spheres in which the rules and goals for achievement are defined by males
that her potential energies for internal, psycho-sexual conflict are utterly
short-circuited.
Because a female character unleashes the forces of conflict, she
appears outwardly, and misleadingly, to be a symbol of yearning, daring,
and strength (154). Though her choices sustain dramatic action through its
complications, the decisive climactic triumph that will propel the drama
toward its conclusion is not affected by the woman. Her inevitable failure
(inevitable because she is female), necessitates the dramatically arbitrary
intervention at the eleventh hour of a supporting and often hitherto unseen

1 Julia Kristeva (1941- ) is a French literary theorist whose work has influenced feminist
and post-feminist thought. She defines "femininity" and "masculinity" as being determined
by the extent of integration into the dominant patriarchal order rather than by biological
differentiation. Her 1974 book About Chinese Women was based on the journal she kept
during her visit to China the same year, during which she recorded her impressions of the
rapidly changing status of Chinese women. Although she is not a drama critic, her analysiS
of Chinese drama is unique because of the paucity of criticism of Chinese dramatic literature
from a gender-related perspective.
 Images of Subjugation and Defiance 107

male character. Taking the dramatic reins from the woman and steering
the action toward its joyful conclusion, this male deus ex machina, usually
a cadre or high-ranking Communist Party official, demonstrates clearly that
a male representative of the power structure is required to validate the
heroine's efforts. Kristeva interprets this paradigm of gender relationships
as a demonstration of the "definitive [feminine] submission" to "a [male-
generated and -perpetuated] political 'ideal of self" (152) that symbolizes
the reinforcement of paternalistically-rooted authority and power.
The significance of Kristeva's analysis lies in its implications for the
power of theater to create and reinforce role models. The propagandistic
power of theater has not been lost on the Chinese since 1912 when the
Republican government banned the performance of dramas deemed
potentially inflammatory (Gunn viii). Government obsession with drama's
potential to sway audiences has been a constant concern throughout this
century.2 Thus, theatrical depictions of women and gender relations that
are permitted to reach the Chinese stage can be interpreted as forms to be
emulated. True, onstage the ideal woman is no longer portrayed as defer-
ring to her father, her husband, and her son, as Confucian conventions once
dictated. Now she graciously defers to a male representative of the Par~
without whose guidance she cannot effectively implement her goals.
Chinese dramatic literature pays lip service to sexual equality, but it subtly
reinforces centuries-old partriarchal power structures. If Chinese women

2 Official sensitivity to drama has remained an issue throughout the twentieth century,
regardless of which side of the political fence the officials find themselves. The Guomindang's
artistic targets included the theater: it ordered the 1930 closing of Tum Han's production
company, Nanguo she [South China society] (Leyda 55), and in 1943 banned 120 plays by
many prominent Chinese playwrights, including Tum Han (Mackerras 401). The CCP's
relationship to drama has been no less tense; government reaction to Wu Han's 1961 Hai
lui Dismissed From Office (Ansley 1971; Pusey 1969) and Ttan Han's 1961 XU! Yaohuan
(Yun 1966) were among the opening salvos in the Cultural Revolution. Playwrights have
been no less aware of the power of their pens, organizing numerous organizations to promote
politically correct drama. Among those are the League of Left Wing Dramatists, of which
Tian Han was a founding member in 1931 (Tian, et al. 305-7), and the National Chinese
Theater World Association to Resist the Enemy in 1937 (Mackerras 367).
3 The perpetuation of feminine subordination is especially obvious in Cultural Revolution
ballets and dramas. The heroine's struggle in The Red DetllChmeni of Women (1964) is
eclipsed by the male leader of the female detachment. Kristeva (152-54) cites Azalea
Mountain, The Store T/uJt Is Headed For the Sun, and Green Pine Mountain as featuring
similar female protagonists whose efforts to take independent action are usurped by male
characters. Certainly the Cultural Revolution did not invent theatrical subjugation ofwomen:
in the popular opera The White Haired Girl (1945) the heroine hides in the mountains until
her childhood sweetheart rescues her.
108 Randy Kaplan

indeed "hold up half the sky," as Mao Zedong once claimed, they do so on
the stage only by virtue of the male shoulders upon which they stand.
Modem Chinese female protagonists made their theatrical debuts in
the wake of the May Fourth Movement, a period in which playwrights cast
off the fetters of traditional dramaturgy and experimented with Westem-
inspired notions of dramatic theory and theatrical production. Foremost
among those was Tian Han,4 who became the first Chinese playwright to
successfully utilize Western dramatic form and representational conven-
tions to create plays in vernacular Chinese that dramatized contemporary
Chinese concerns.S
Among those were new settings and lights designed specifically for one
play and used for no other, which were intended to signify the causal
relationship between environment and characters' behavior; fully fur-
nished interiors and detailed exteriors, including freestanding three-
dimensional set pieces, properties, and practical doors and windows; the
use of offstage space and sound effects to extend the stage beyond the area
immediately visible to the audience so as to give them the impression of
witnessing one part of a larger, unseen whole. Tian's fledgling works, Kafei
dian zhi yiye [A Night in a cafe] and Huo hu zhi ye [The night a tiger was
captured], are especially noteworthy for his sympathetic depictions of
contemporary Chinese women grappling with contemporary concerns that
were not only peculiarly Chinese but peculiarly female. When considered
in the context of a cultural framework that is distinguished by its historical
tradition of silencing the female voice (either overtly, as in the Confucian
tradition, or covertly, as in Kristeva's description), the works represent a
remarkable achievement. By choosing feminist values and struggle as the
materials of his first efforts to create modem spoken drama [huaju], then
a new form of Chinese drama, Tian Han demonstrated that those concerns
were worthy of serious treatment.
Tian Han wrote A Night in a Cafe in 1920 while studying in Japan. In
1922, the newly-established literary association, the Creation Society
[Chuangzao she] of which Tian was a founding member, unveiled the play

~ Tian Han (1898-1968) revolutionized Chinese spoken drama [huaju] and was an
important figure in the early days of Chinese cinema. His work was instrumental in laying the
foundation for an approach to theater and drama which Chinese playwrights, performers,
and audiences have continued to uphold. Mer 1949 he held numerous official posts,
including Vice Chair ofthe All China Dramatic Society. He died in prison during the Cultural
Revolution, a victim of Jiang Qing's vicious attacks, presumably because of his inflammatory
1961 play XU! Yaohuan. Tum's alleged disinterest in Jiang's acting career during the early
1930s in Shanghai may have figured in his fate.
S The notion that playwrights ought to strive to present objective representations of
material reality based on direct observation of contemporary life and manners had been
accepted in the West as established dramatic practice. Tian was instrumental in popularizing
that concept to audiences who had little or no experience with a theater that "held the mirror
up to nature." To that end, Tian called for a number of theatrical innovations.
 Images of Subjugation and Defiance 109

in the premier issue of its journal, Chuangzao jikan [Creation quarterly]

(Chen, 12). The play revolves around Bai Qiuying, a young woman whose
quest for independence in love causes her to confront the traditional
realities of gender relationships in early twentieth-century Chinese society
and to arrive, through grief and aloneness, at a fuller understanding of the
fragility of human connectedness.
When the play begins, Bai waits tables in the city cafe to which she has
fled from paternal uncles who intend to marry her off forcibly. There she
awaits her lover, Li Ganqing. Through a chance encounter, Bai learns of
Li's imminent return from his university. She shares her anticipation with
her friend Lin Zeqi, a melancholy student who frequents the cafe. Suddenly
Li Ganqing appears, escorting the elegant woman who is his new fiancee.
Bai is devastated. When Li and Bai recognize each other, the fiancee
flounces out of the cafe. Li, however, returns to confront for the last time
the young woman he once loved.
Li admits that he fears losing social face and his father's approval by
marrying a poor waitress. Anxious that Bai might blackmail him, he offers
to buy back his old love letters. Bai accepts Li's money but tosses it and the
letters into a charcoal burner. Li staggers out of the cafe, and Bai weeps
uncontrollably. Lin attempts to comfort her by swearing eternal
companionship, but the hour is late, and he must return to the university.
Bai is left alone to face the depths of the loneliness with which she must go
on living. As the curtain falls slowly, she continues to sit, motionless.
The theme of ideal love squelched by the unfeeling restrictions of
Confucian imperatives was a popular one with May Fourth era writers for
whom the idea of free choice in love was both novel and a call to arms. Tian
Han continued to develop the theme in his next play, The Night a Tiger Was
Captured and returned to it in 1928 in Hushang de beiju [Tragedy on the
lake], which became his most popular one-act drama. Outwardly, A Night
in a Cafe appears to fall into the genre of early twentieth-century Chinese
love tragedies, and indeed it is that, but closer examination reveals the play
also to be a moving illustration of Tian Han's perceptions of gender
relationships.
The young men in A Night in a Cafe, Lin Zeqi and Li Ganqing, are
both typical Chinese youth of the period, trapped between Confucian
demands of filial submission and Western-inspired notions of in-
dividualism. In both cases independence is dwarfed by incapacity or refusal
to exercise free will, though that character flaw manifests itself differently
in the two young men. Overwhelming pressures of familial expectations
lead Lin to indulge in excessive drinking, not a socially acceptable behavior,
but one that, being passive, ultimately allows the patriarchal system to
endure unquestioned. Li, on the other hand, deliberately rejects Bai in
favor of a more socially appropriate mate and asks for Bai's blessing. In so
doing, he actively upholds Confucian morality. Sublimating their own
110 Randy Kaplan

desires, buckling to the traditional patriarchal demands of arranged mar-

riage, Li and Lin are stark contrasts to Bai, who significantly is the play's
sole fully developed female character.
It is Bai Qiuying who challenges and rejects the fixed values of the
patriarchal system. Defying father and family and living alone in the city to
pursue a relationship that she herself has chosen are significant steps
toward achieving personal autonomy. The implications of that step, how-
ever, lie far beyond the mere right to choose one's spouse. Bai deliberately
decides to place herself outside the boundaries of the jia, the Chinese
extended family. In late imperial China the jia provided personal, psy-
chological, social, and economic security. When Bai rejects the jia, there-
fore, she rejects her entire cultural tradition for life in an existential free
zone. When she rebuffs Li's proposal to buy her silence her future is clear:
she physically and psychologically departs from the jia; moreover, she
refuses, on moral and ethical grounds, to perpetuate its values.
Bai's rejection of Li also demonstrates her growing capacity to fulfill
her potential as both a human being and a woman, for in the moment of
her rejection Bai consciously chooses agency over passive suffering and
thus begins to exercise free will. At the end of the play, Bai faces a
self-imposed unknown: the enormity of her decision to live alone outside
the haven of established social structures. Although Li victimizes Bai, she
is victorious. Her decision to choose aloneness rather than collusion and
live on in the face of chosen pain signifies her rite of passage from
dependency to autonomy.
ThroughoutA Night in a Cafe Tian Han characterizes male-generated
values and institutions as destructive and contrasts them with Bai Qiuying's
female ability to choose life. Bai Qiuying sees the Chinese family, struc-
tured by men to prevent people from associating on the basis of free choice,
as a microcosm of society. To Bai, Chinese family and society constitute a
parched "desert," incapable of either generating or sustaining life. Thus
Bai characterizes her friend Lin, whose deep depression is the result of his
own doomed struggle against patriarchal conventions, as a flower dying of
thirst:

Why should I let you go, Lin? When you see a person at the side of a well,
do you not pull him away? If a flower ... withers ... we must water it to
revive it. Why, then, when I see you growing thinner ... shouldn't I help
you? (Tian 1970, 18)6

When Lin responds to Bai he develops further the image of the societal
desert as a place devoid of humanity:

6 All translations my own.

 Images of Subjugation and Defiance III

One day a sandstorm blows up and buries you, and you don't even feel
it ... I am surrounded by desolation ... I would even welcome an enemy
because he and I would be forced to band together to sustain each other
... [but] I am like a man traveling through the desert all alone. I am so
thirsty. There is not even the shadow of a tree. I am so parched, I will go
mad ... (20-1)

To reverse this spiritual suffocation requires the freely-chosen com-

panionship Tian Han associates with Bai Qiuying, whom Lin describes as
"a thread of hope ... [the] one in this desert who would give me a sip of
cold water" (21). In her love for Li Ganqing Bai sees a "spring" of "infmite
hope and boundless courage" (25) bursting forth in the desert. The image
of an infertile wasteland transformed into a sea of fertility through a
woman's love is reiterated later in the play, when Bai and Lin pledge to
care for each other; only then can the desert undergo an astonishing
transformation, as Lin says:

It will be completely covered with roses, vultures will transform themsel-

ves into yellow orioles, and horse thieves will change into knights of old.
And when we are thirsty, there will be clear springs everywhere. (47)

Significantly, in 1932, after becoming a founding member ofthe League of

Left Wing Dramatists, Tian Han revised A Night in a Cafe with an eye
toward bringing the script into line with leftist literary doctrines. In the
process, male characters stripped Bai's emotional struggle of its magnitude.
In the new version, appropriately proletarian sentiments are sprinkled
throughout: when Lin begs Bai to take his hand in remembrance of their
past closeness, she refuses him, saying, "The hand of a rich man can never
clasp the hand of a poor man" (1955, 8,32), a sentiment she echoes verbatim
from Feng, a male character to whom Tian assigned the line earlier in the
play. Of greater significance, however, is the dramatic function of Zheng,
whose purpose in the original script was merely to provide a logical means
for Lin's exit by asking him to return to the dormitory. In the revised script
Zheng discovers Bai grieving over the loss of Li and chides her unconstruc-
tive behavior:

I want you to take a look at this Motherland of ours. Look at the bitterness
of the people and think of them. Our personal pain and suffering is
nothing to that ... Miss Qiu, don't allow your tears to infect other people.
You ought to know that crying is no way to ever settle any problem. (34)

Moments later the play concludes with a determined Bai squaring her
shoulders and echoing Zheng's advice, just as she parroted Feng's thoughts
earlier: "Yes, crying is no way to solve a problem. I must pluck up my
courage and go on living" (36).
112 Randy Kaplan

The 1932 version oU Night in a Cafe conforms to Kristeva's paradigm.

Bai challenges familialism and social values, but her ultimate success and
validation, indeed, the very words that she mouths are attributable to
Zheng, the stereotypical male deus ex machina. By utterly redefining Bai's
values as his own, values she passively accepts, Zheng usurps Bai's project
of choosing her own existence.7
The Night a Tiger Was Captured, the second of Tian Han's plays
considered here, was first published in 1921 in Nanguo banyuekan [South
China bi-monthly], a periodical that Tian published until 1923. The play is
a domestic tragedy set in the mountains of eastern Hunan Province. When
the curtain rises Wei Fusheng, a wealthy and renowned tiger hunter, is
preparing for the expedition which, if successful, will ensure a dazzling
dowry for his daughter's imminent marriage into a prestigious clan. Liangu
has resisted the match, and Fusheng has sequestered her indoors until her
wedding day lest she escape with her true love, Huang Dasha (Huang the
Fool), a pauper who takes shelter in a local temple.
When distant gunshots signal Fusheng's apparent success, the Wei
women, except Liangu, prepare to receive the tiger. The hunting party
enters, but instead of a tiger's carcass, they are bearing critically wounded
Huang Dasha, whom Fusheng and his companions have mistakenly shot
for a tiger. Fusheng orders Liangu out of the room and hurries off hoping
to find a doctor, but Liangu defies her father. When Fusheng returns he
finds the two swearing eternal love and demands that Liangu leave Huang's
side. Liangu steadfastly refuses. Enraged by her defiance, Fusheng tears
the lovers apart and drags his daughter offstage, where he whips her
mercilessly. Beyond ,help and without hope, Huang Dasha stabs himself
with Fusheng's hunting knife. As the curtain falls, Huang's body lies
forgotten while Fusheng continues beating his daughter brutally.
In The Night a Tiger Was Captured, Tian Han further develops the
themes introduced in A Night in a Cafe. Each of the play's women,
Fusheng's mother, his wife, and his daughter, correspond to one of the
Confucian "Three Follows" [san cong].8 Grandmother Hushi commands
the traditional respect for age as the eldest person in the household, but
even though she reacts tenderly to her granddaughter's refusal to wed, she
yields to Fusheng's authority. Fusheng's wife, Huangshi, is utterly an
instrument of her husband's will; she has neither patience nor un-
derstanding of her daughter's fear, advising her that betrothals and dowries,

7 It is interesting to note that Bai Qiuying's loss of free will occurred at the same time as
Tian Han's acquiescence in the repression of his own creative potential by submitting to the
sterile tenets of litemry leftism.
8 The three relationships for women established by Confucian tradition which define
women as subordinate to familial males. As an unmarried girl, a woman was charged with
obeying her father, as a woman in her prime, her husband, and as a widow, her son.
 Images of Subjugation and Defiance 113

once publicly agreed upon, are immutable. Though Huangshi's and Hushi's
personalities differ, both actively uphold the economic contracts created
by men for the purpose of selling their daughters to other men.
Only Liangu represents possibility for social change. Like Bai Qiuying,
Liangu dares to question prevailing sexual standards, but how she chooses
to take action is distinctly different. Bai chooses a rich man who unexpec-
tedly turns on her and allies himself with the very values that she rejects.
Liangu, on the other hand, places herself beyond the jia's boundaries by
aligning herself with a man who is as much an outsider to the patriarchal
system as she is. Liangu strikes a blow for freedom in love when she chooses
Huang, but more significantly she negates her father's, and by extension,
society's, traditional perceptions of permissible female agency.
Throughout The Night a Tiger Was Captured Tian uses breaks in
dialogue as a means of approximating the flow of "real life" conversation.
These appear to be tangential to the primary dramatic action and therefore
unnecessary, but in fact they serve to reinforce Tian's theme of the brutality
of patriarchal dominance. Expository discussion regarding Liangu's
betrothal indicates that her prospective in-laws value the bride primarily
for her impressive dowry, which Liangu's parents hope to augment. Li
Dongyang, the village headsman, tells a story about his own daughter that
further underscores the overt hostility of patriarchy toward women. Li is
marrying his daughter, also against her will, into a large, wealthy clan. He
is aware, however, that he is condemning the young woman to a bitter fate:
everyone knows the Ho family daughters-in-law are driven to work unceas-
ingly until they collapse. Their load is not lightened even when they give
birth to male heirs. Li's wife, who adores her daughter and fears for her
welfare, opposes the match. But like Liangu, she is forced to submit. Li,
determined to marry into a prosperous household, overrides his wife's more
humane and womanly concerns.
Even the play's comic relief underscores the crux of fIXed sexual and
generational relationships to the maintenance of societal equilibrium.
When clumsy farmhands crack jokes about arranging a wedding match for
each other with a pig, they actually reinforce the public ramifications of
marriage by emphasizing the social appropriateness of a lifetime mate. Li,
Huangshi, and Hushi trade amusing anecdotes of the village elders' abilities
to outrun and outlift their middle-aged offspring. But below the seemingly
light-hearted tales rumble ominous subtextual reminders of the older
generation'S position as a force with which to be seriously reckoned. When
Liangu and her lover circumvent those fundamental relationships, they
propel themselves into mortal battle with Fusheng.
Here as in A Night in Cafe, Tian characterizes males as destroyers of
life and contrasts their instincts with the creative behavior he associates
with women. Fusheng chooses violence, whether he is hunting tigers or
protecting his daughter. His fear that Huang'S and Liangu's desire will lead
114 Randy Kaplan

to illicit sexuality has caused him to beat Huang Dasha in the past. Huang's
capture and suicide with Fusheng's hunting knife, and Liangu's brutal
beating reinforce the inhumanity of traditional patriarchical responses to
Liangu's challenge: a challenge rooted in her feminine impulse to love and
nurture.
Early in the play, Fusheng entertains his family and guests by retelling
the locally popular story of DeafYisi, a legendary hunter who lost his only
son to a tigress. The tale pits the strength of man, the destroyer, with
artifical weapons, against the terrifyingly beautiful strength of the tigress,
whose capacity for killing when provoked is instinctive and therefore
natural. Killing her cubs in revenge does not satisfy DeafYisi, who is driven
to kill the tigress herself. He dies, literally in the tigress's embrace, on his
ill-fated hunting expedition. The parallels between DeafYisi and Fusheng
are striking. Both devote their lives to stalking natural creatures who live
outside the artificial limitations men create and impose. Yisi pursues his
tiger with an all-consuming determination that presages Fusheng's fury at
Liangu's enduring love for Huang. Like Yisi's tiger, Huang lives on the
periphery of society. He is a creature Fusheng must annihilate to maintain
traditional social equilibrium.
Associating light with feminine impulses and darkness with male
imperatives, Tian reverses yang and yin forces that have governed Chinese
thought since ancient times and further emphasizes the contrast between
female and male behavior. The night is Fusheng's kingdom. He revels,
hunts, kills in it, and casts Huang into its depths when he forbids him to see
Liangu. Though Fusheng welcomes darkness, it is a source of terror for
Huang, who desperately seeks the comfort of light:

... it's unbearable enough in the daytime. But when night comes, and a
person must sleep all alone under the temple altar-it is so much more
desolate, fearful. If I lit a fire, all I would see was my own solitary shadow
... (Tian 1933,210-11)

The firelight in the temple leaves Huang empty; it merely accentuates the
darkness to which Fusheng has condemned him. Only the light that pours
through Liangu's window can nourish Huang. Night after night he hides
on the mountain to gaze at the light that warms his body and soul:

When I would see the light in that window, then it was as though I was a
child ... once more, safely encircled in my parents embrace.... espe-
cially on those nights when the frne rain would pelt down, blurring the
glow of the fire in the window so far, far away - it looked just like all the
fireflies I'd catch on autumn days, and Sister Lian would take them and
put them inside eggshells - how lovely they looked. Like a fool I would
stand there, looking ... and every night the raindrops would beat down
on me, but I never felt feJt them. I would wait until the firelight went out
 Images of Subjugation and Defiance 115

and Sister Lian slept, and then, all alone still, I would return to my ...
altar and sleep. (211)

Huang's impressionistic description of the blurred light shimmering

through the black night underscores the elusiveness of the relationship he
craves with Liangu, a connection that Huang can no more catch in his hand
than the light that radiates from Liangu's hearth through Fusheng's dark-
ness. Liangu's wedding is a death knell for Huang, for once her marriage
is consummated her light will be extinguished forever.
The recurring themes in Tian Han's two earliest works illuminate the
distinctive way the young male playwright at the forefront of the huaju
movement, depicted the struggles of young Chinese women.9 In both A
Night in a Cafe and The Night a Tiger Was Captured, he denounced the
socio-sexual norms perpetuating the traditional Chinese patriarchy as
destructive. In Tian Han's universe, men preserve power structures that
legitimate their own violent and aggressive behaviors; thus, women,
keepers of life and creativity, must defy the status quo by choosing to place
themselves outside its perimeters. The sympathetic male characters Lin
Zeqi and Huang Dasha are misfits in the male social scheme and can
empathize with Bai's and Liangu's sentience. They are, therefore, in the
most positive sense, "feminine." Those men that are seemingly rewarded
for aggression-both Li Ganqing and Wei Fusheng are motivated by
acquiring what they perceive as rightful wealth-ultimately debilitate
themselves. InA Night in a Cafe Li Ganqing is so morally crippled by the
values he upholds that he cannot mount any effective opposition. In The
Night a Tiger Was Captured Fusheng's and Li Dongyang's collusion with
tradition makes them indifferent to human dignity and dispassionate
toward the suffering inside their own families. Bai's and Liangu's responses
to paternalistic dominance are therefore not restricted to issues of
"women's liberation." Their struggle for autonomy is a struggle for
humanity'S wholeness.
Though Bai Qiuying and Liangu fall victim to the male-dominated
system, they are ultimately victorious, unlike their theatrical descendants
whom Kristeva describes as deceptively free. 1o Kristeva's heroines are
subjected to more insidious forms of domination, for they fail because they

9 Tian continued to express pro-feminine sentiments in his work. His 1925 thesis play VieW
ofa Riverside VUlage [Jiangcun xiaojing] concludes with a striking visual metaphor for gender
relationships in war: a mother mourns over the bodies of her two sons, soldiers who have
murdered each other in a man's war. The action of his 1928 experiment with poetic
symbolism, Guton de shengyin [Echoes of an Ancient Pond], depicts the outcome of a
psychosexual contest between the Poet, representative of male forces, and the woman who
eludes him. Meiying's salvation is Nature, with which she feels a deep affinity, and which she
characterizes as being female like herself (Tian 1936,74). In his 1929 play Shivers [Zbanli]
an illegitimate son whom the patriarchal system has cruelly victimized chooses to emulate his
mother's vitality.
116 Randy Kaplan

are women under a system that cloaks itself in a guise of sexual equality.
Neither Bai Qiuying nor Liangu requires the intervention of a male charac-
ter to validate their pursuits, and both undertake positive action in openly
flouting, rather than deferring to, male authoritarian structures. Neither
woman achieves her goal, but neither regrets her choices. The final image
that Tian creates of Bai Qiuying as she sits in the darkened cafe is of a
woman who has fought and been beaten, but who is on the verge of coming
to terms with an all-encompassing and existential aloneness. Liangu clings
to her defiance in the face of her father's violence. And Liangu is stronger
than Huang Dasha, for he takes his own life while she continues to resist.
~ a male playwright whose creative roots lay in a culture traditionally
hostile to women and mistrustful of their strength, Tian Han's sensitivity
in his creation of sympathetic portrayals of women resisting sexual oppres-
sion is noteworthy. In Tian Han's early dramaturgy, when women fail, it is
not because they are women and therefore must inevitably fail, but because
they are women born to a male-controlled tradition that devours human
potential for compassion. In their struggle for autonomy Bai Qiuying and
Liangu demonstrate courageous creativity, and it is their actions that signify
society's salvation in Tian Han's initial works for the Chinese stage.

lOIn the 1974 film Green Pin£ MOun/ain, for example, the eager heroine sets out to organize
a brigade of carters but is shown to be incompetent to the task and requires the aid of an elderly
carter and the Party Secretary to pick up the pieces of her disastrous project.

GLOSSARY

Bai Qiuying
Chuangzao jiknn ~**
«:ill :it. -* -llj »
Chuangzao she jlJ it.;:fJ:.
Feng ;~

Gulan de shengyin «*if.~**»

Guomindang
lfJ~'"
Hoi Rui ba guan «i4: J#, ft. 't»
Huang Dasha Jtk1t.
Huangshi its'\.
 Images of Subjugation and Defiance 117

huaju 16 jlJ
Huohuzhiye «-it bt ~ -It))
Hushang de beiju «~ J:. fr? ~ ,IIJ»
Hushi .t)! ~
jia ~
Jiang Qing ~-t
Jiangcun xiaojing «~#IJ'''''»
Knfei dian zhi yiye «~ P.1f ~ ~ - -It))
LiDongyang
!f:*-F1
Li Ganqing
!f:ft~
Liangu Jl-M;
Lin Zeqi #.4~~
Mao Zedong
~4~*-
Meiying ~~
Nanguo banyuekan «ttJ IfJ -f Jl f,J»
Nanguoshe .f11fJi±.
san cong ,;.~
Tian Han W)l
Wei Fusheng
WuHan
.. ~~
kat-
XU! Yaohuan
«'itt 1A J-l»
Yisi Jb1Z!1
YunSong j;' ;f~
Zhanli
Zheng
«fi *»
~
Female Images and National Myth
Meng Vue

Literary discourse occupied a unique position in the ordering of

Chinese socialist society before the 1980s. As a singularly important type
of writing, literature generated a mutually implicated dynamic between
state discourses and civic, private, and cultural life. Not only did literature
reproduce state policies and enter them into civic or private cultural
contexts, it also shaped the national conception of what constituted Chinese
social "reality." This was possible, in my view, because during the first few
decades of the People's Republic socialist literature formed a field where
the state's discourses appropriated public discourse by gradually displacing
all possible articulations and representations of the private into itself.
The title of this chapter, "Female Images and National Myth," derives
from this feature of Chinese socialist literature. My point is that while
socialist fiction can represent "woman" in the conventional sense, it also
uses the female image to signify either a certain class or sociopolitical group
or the authority of the Communist Party itself. The combination of authentic
political identity with womanhood is a double play. On the one hand, the
state's political discourse translated itself through women into the private
context of desire, love, marriage, divorce, and familial relations, and, on the
other, it turned woman into an agent politicizing desire, love, and family
relations by delimiting and repressing sexuality, self, and all private
emotions. To a large extent, as I seek to demonstrate, female images in
socialist literature functioned as a special agent of the state's appropriation
of the "public."

Gender and Class

To begin the discussion of female images and national myth in Chinese
literature, we may need to take a brief look at two of the most confusing
items in the Chinese socialist dictionary: "gender" and "class." While
violence against women continued unabated throughout the decades after
Liberation, the government's official position, at least since 1942, has been
that Chinese women and men were equal. Equality meant that male and
female were substantially the same. Under socialism there emerged, in
other words, a concept of sameness, or the nondifference of the two sexes.
This notion-and it can only be understood as a distortion of the notion of

This article appeared originally in Ershi yi shijie (Twenty-first century) 4 (April 1991 ):
103-12.
 Female Images and National Myth 119

the equality-lodged itself in the socialist state and was embedded in a

range of policy formulations. Nondifference, combined with the unshaken
power of the male discursive tradition, produced a vague and paradoxical
literary line on gender issues. Hierarchies accruing within male and female
images persisted in Chinese literature; they were never really challenged by
images of gender, be it a matter of sex equality or the more compromised
notion of sex identity. Earlier notions of male-female relations, however,
were no longer available to represent sexual or gender differences, because
officially no such differences existed. And so the question arises: what do
male/female hierarchies mean if they have nothing to do with gender
difference?
An analogous paradox appeared with the concepts of a proletarian
class and its class struggle. Class and class struggle had for decades been the
basic modality of literary and historiographic narrative, telling the myth of
a Chinese socialist nation-state, past, present, and future. Those were the
terms bracketing the way the state defined itself and its activity, and they
depended on their binary opposites, the bourgeoisie and its counterstruggle
for their existence. The problem is that China had no historical experience
of capitalism, save in a few cities and for a very short time. By 1956, with
the means of production and all significant private property in the hands of
the government, it was nearly impossible to locate a tangible bourgeoisie.
Each of the many successive "criticism" movements subsequently un-
leashed in literary circles over the forty years since the revolution has
always uncovered "representatives of the bourgeoisie and capitalism." Yet
when the period of relaxation came in the 1980s, almost all these "represen-
tati ves" were officially determined to have been "misclassified." The irony
is clear: China's bourgeoisie was a sham character, an absent enemy. If the
"bourgeoisie" was the product of a "misclassification," then certainly the
concepts of "proletariat" and "socialism" are also open to question. The
ideological opposition of proletariat/bourgeoisie seems consequently to be
little more than empty signifiers lacking genuine reference to social
relations or to modes of production.
Interestingly, however, terms like gender and class struggle, though
extremely problematic and fragile as key concepts for Chinese literature
and narrative especially, have repeatedly manufactured and filled in each
other's blanks, so to speak; these terms have made each other the referent
and have therefore entered into reciprocally enabling relation to each other.
To examine the problematic of gender and class in more detail, I shall
take up a popular story of Liberation, "The White-Haired Girl."! Although
1 The story has an archetype and several versions. The earliest was a yangge opera
created in the late thirties in the liberated border regions of Hebei and Shandong by teams
of writers and musicians doing anti-Japanese war propaganda. The earliest versions were
never published. The first printed version of the story is an opera script written by He J ingzhi
and Ding Yi in 1942 at Yanan. For the English translation, see Yang Xianyi and Gladys
120 Meng Yue

the plot has been repeatedly altered over the years, no one ever tampered
with the basic role structure. Xier, the fiancee of Wang Dachun and
daughter of Yang Bailao, is abducted by the landlord, Huang Shiren. Xier' s
father dies shortly thereafter. Dachun cannot rescue her and leaves the
village to join the Red Army. In the Huang household Xier suffers horribly.
When she discovers that Huang is about to sell her, she manages to escape
and disappears into the mountain wilderness. Years later Dachun returns.
The revolution defeats the landlord, and Dachun finds Xier and brings her
home. I have sketched a diagram of this plot below.

sender (Yang) = object (Xier) = receiver (Dachuan)

donor (Party) = subject (Dachun) = villain (Huang Shiren)

Given this model, there are many possible ways of developing a

narrative. Forinstance, the story can focus on the two male rivals (Le., father
versus villain or hero versus villain) bound together by themes oflove and
loyalty or hate and revenge. Alternately, there could emerge a women's
story, autobiographic or not, which focuses on the heroine's situation, her
experience, or conflicts between people of either sex. My point, however,
is that with the model schematized above it is almost impossible to construct
a narrative that lies outside of concerns with sexuality, sex, gender, and the
war of the sexes. The story's most basic framework would appear to be
either two men contesting each other over a woman, or a woman fighting
off one man by mobilizing another against him. Of course, in "The White-
Haired Girl," the hero Dachun escapes from the clutches of the landlord at
precisely the moment Xier's father dies. This leaves Dachun with no
opportunity to be a sexual rival to the villain. To put my point another way,
the possibility of a sexual rivalry between the two male characters present
in the narrative was artificially excluded from the plot chain. I find it
significant that Xier' s confrontation with the male villain-roughly speak-
ing, the whole sequence of rape and the struggle against rape-gets
foregrounded in the one place where sexual rivalry might possibly have
gotten some play.
Yet, even in such a sex-stereotyped plot, the conflict between the
woman Xier and the landlord Huang never appears as a sexual conflict or
even as a gendered one. U nUke, for example, the story of"Xi anglin' s Wife,"
which distinctly represents repression as gender based, Xier does not grasp

Yang, The White-Haired Girl (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1954). In 1950 Shui Hua
and Wang Bing made the story into a film which was produced by the Dongbei Dianying
Zhipian Chang (Northeast Film Studio). During the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai
baliewu jutuan (Shanghai Ballet Institute) produced it as a ballet in a version that
subsequently went on to become one of the eight model plays approved for cultural
performance.
 Female Images and National Myth 121

her own position as being that of an exchange object. Instead she elicits
sympathy because she has been mis-exchanged. 2 Her conflict is never-
and, consistent with her character, cannot be-with the male power order
itself.
"The White-Haired Girl" emphasizes an event of sexual violence but
deemphasizes the underlying code of sexuality.3 This deemphasis has
striking implications for ideological discourse. A new terminology of class
and class struggle stood by to fill the vacuum. The absence of the notion of
sexual oppression allowed the relation of raper and raped, oppressor and
oppressed, to be represented according to a model of class struggle, indeed
to replicate that mode exactly. The class model is quite simplified, since
modes of production are nowhere really in evidence. Therefore, it would
probably be more accurate to speak of a rhetoric of class struggle rather than
a representation.
A process of transformation in which gender oppression gives way to
class struggle can be traced quite clearly in successive revisions of Xier' s
image with each new publication of the story. Revision generally took place
at two key levels. First, there was a gradual strengthening ofXier' s political
instincts, so that, for example, newer Xiers hated the landlord immediately
rather than dreaming of becoming one of his wives. Second, there was a
gradual erasure ofXier' s body and her sexual situation. In the opera version,
realizing that the landlord has lied to her about his marriage, the raped and
pregnant Xier follows the landlord and deploys her body to demonstrate his
perfidy and the crimes of the old order against her. In the film, however, the
camera keeps the pregnancy out of sight while it informs the audience of it
and subsequently of the birth of Xier's son. Later, the ballet version
accelerated the process of disembodiment to the point that scenes of
pregnancy and birth disappeared altogether. By this point, the resurgence
of the traditional "good woman" ideal and the political imperative meant
that any Xier worth her salt would rather kill herself than suffer the disgrace
of rape and pregnancy. Late-model Xiers do not get raped at all: they
become mothers but somehow remain virgins. Finally, when Xier's body
and sexuality have completely faded from the story, the empty conceptual
space is marked by the term "class," and the political code entirely displaces
the sexual code as a functioning part of the story. The moment Xier
reappears at the "anti-landlord struggle meeting," her image as an op-
pressed nonwoman turns into the image of an oppressed class. The previ-
2 "Xianglin's wife" is the protagonist of a Lu Xun short story, "Zhu Fu" (Winter
sacrifice). See Lu Xun Quanji (Complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe, 1981), vol. 2, 5-23.
3 Baimao nu, directed by Shui Hua, was produced by the Northeast Film Studio in 1951.
Shui Hua, Wang Bin, and Yang Ruenshen authored the film script, which is available in
Zhongguo dianying juben xuanji (Collected scenarios in Chinese movies) (Beijing:
Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1959),95-145.
122 Meng Yue

ously invisible, absent, transcendental "oppressed class" is fortunate

enough to be incarnated in her bodiless image and thus becomes a fleshlike
presence in the narrative's framework of class rivalry.
Needless to say, this narrative device in "The White-Haired Girl" is an
ideological ploy. It recycles the traditional plot form of desire and realiza-
tion, separation and reuniting the family. But it uses that older form to
represent the political, symbolic order of class relations, thereby making
gender role structure into a basic frame for representing class struggle. In
this narrative device we can see the merging of public and private spheres,
or, more properly in my view, the suppression of the private beneath the
public. Events may occur in a family, between sexual subjects, or even
within an individual's psyche, each of these being an archetypal private
setting. But the meaning each event communicates is about class struggle;
and most importantly, meaning is exclusively about class struggle. The
story, the drama, unfolds only at the political and public levels. The only
code at work is the political code. In this way the image of a female in a
peasant family gets connected with the national myth of liberation.
Not only does Xier's "empty" image offer the possibility of turning the
signifier of class struggle into a narrative, but once "Xier" finds its place in
the story, the notion of class empowers itself to define the value of the
female body and even to generate female sexuality out of itself. At the end
of "White-Haired Girl," when the Red Army and Communist Party appear
and take over the village, Xier miraculously regains her sexuality. Her once
invisible female body reappears. Her lost beauty and youth are restored, her
white hair turns black again, and her living space changes back from the
wild mystery temple to the house of marriage. She is a woman again. She
is a sexual object once more and can hope for happiness, which is why the
return is a symbolic event. It joins liberation of women and liberation of
class. The resulting pri vate, personal happiness is made the consequence of
socialist new society.
However, as you will have noticed, the power that the class struggle
narrative gains from the field of gender and sexuality depends on joining
two myths: the myths of class victory and of women's liberation. To
preserve the effect, a narrative must carefully prevent these two myths from
collapsing. When they present a poor fit, as in "The White-Haired Girl ," the
tasks of the narrative include mobilization of a broader and more violent
repression of what are distinctively private sexual issues. The particular
example I have in mind is Ding Ling's The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan
River. 4 The novel, which takes land reform as its stage and represents the
paradigm of class struggle in China, includes a love story between
Chengren, the poor peasant and Communist Party member, and Heini, the

4 Ding Ling, Taiyang zhao zai Sanggan he shang (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe,
1949; reprint, 1951).
 Female Images and National Myth 123

niece of the local landlord. Heini's love for Chengren develops under the
influence of the women's liberation movement in the countryside, and he
is her hope for escape from strict patriarchal control. Their young, innocent
love, however, highlights a conflict: class struggle (public) renders mar-
riage (private, a gender question) impossible.
Unlike Xier, Heini does not embody an identification between the will
of women and the exploited poor peasant class. Heini's dual identity as a
member of an exploiting class and as a repressed woman gives the author
an opportunity to criticize either or both notions. However, as the narrative
unfolds, the opposition of Heini's gender identity and her class identity, of
the individual's private will and the demands of the class struggle, neither
stand still nor disappear. Ding Ling dealt with the apparent contradiction
quite adeptly: she had Chengren and Heini forsake their love. The narrative
also adroitly deleted conflict by giving a new oppositional identity to Heini.
Although she is technically the niece of the landlord, according to the
narrator, her position in the landlord family is close to slavery. The dramatic
conflict between Heini's niece identity and her slave identity is substituted
for the gender/class conflict, and when the narrative selects slave as Heini' s
genuine identity, the problem the solution is supposed to solve changes
drastically. The obstacle preventing Heini from loving Chengren is no
longer class struggle per se but rather the people's ignorance of her true
class status. Thus impasse turns into delay, the product of simple misunder-
standing, and the arrival of satisfaction is once again assured. The conflict-
ing demands of gender and class that appeared irreconcilable at the
beginning are revealed in the end to be nothing more than a false alarm.
The novel operates within a shifting system of identification in order
to secure the symbolic power of class. More than Heini' s sexual value and
happiness ride on the matter of her correct political identity. The happy
ending for land reform in general, and the village specifically, is contingent
upon the resolution of a single question: among three systems of identifi-
cation-gender, kinship, and politics-which is truly decisive? Can the
true political identities obscured among complex kinship relations ever be
correctly located? The villagers' first attempt at land reform failed because
one leader did not make a correct diagnosis. The land reform (and thus
national, social revolution) cannot claim victory until the political, public
class structure is uncovered beneath kinship or private relations. In this
understanding, land reform becomes a great drama of recognition, in which
kinship as a code of private life is doomed to be swept away by the truths
of the objective class structure.
The symbolic relation between public and private is totally refigured
in such love stories and female images. In literature, at least, this revised
connection is neither a conflict, as the relation between public and private
has long been conceived in the West (i.e., an oppositional binary), nor a
124 Meng Yue

separation, as was once de rigueur in the Chinese tradition. Rather, the

socialist relation was one of absolute hierarchy: not a hierarchy of two
independent layers but one built on the order of "conscious" and "uncon-
scious." That is to say, the lower layer is prevented from being questioned,
known, or even seen, since it is not supposed to exist. Upon this political
unconsciousness of the female body and sexuality, of gender and kinship
status, the empty notion of class was constructed as one of the few
nonverifiable signifiers in the socialist terminology. It is upon this same
political unconsciousness that the image of the liberated woman, or, to use
a cliched phrase, the "daughter of the Party ," has continuously functioned
for thirty years as bearer of the Party's transcendental authority into the
family, love, and the whole personal sphere. In fact, it is very difficult to
imagine how, without this gender image, the socialist myth of class struggle
or liberation and the state's ideological control over every private comer of
intellectual life could possibly have been maintained in the Cultural
Revolution. This may explain why, though there are so many strong women
characters and female images in socialist literature, none of them ever
speaks a word for their sexuality.

Nation as Class
Through the female image, the notion of class usurped the signification
of gender status and sexuality. Even so, numbers of women wrote literary
works, particularly during the 1950s, a full decade after the film version of
White-Haired Girl appeared. What sort of relationship did these texts
establish between the gendered subject (if such a thing existed) and the
notion of class? How, in other words, was the correlation between writing
self and the "imagined public" (as the state defined it, i.e., workers, peasants
and soldiers) manifested in women's Writing? As I shall clarify shortly,
women's writing of this period shows a great effort to diminish the
imaginary conflict between serving the public or nation and preserving
women's individuality and femininity. Often texts create situations for the
female protagonist in which she sacrifices or diminishes her individuality
and femininity in order to serve that public. At the same time, however,
individuality and femininity are indispensable, since the author must
employ them in order to achieve the desired narration. In other words, the
activity of writing was to a degree a process that blurred the individual's will
to serve the nation and blended it into her own desires and life choices.
The decade of the 1950s saw transformation in economic and cultural
realms, most importantly in the nationalization of private property and the
institutionalization of ideological remolding (gaizao). As is well known,
ideological gaizao and the great cultural and political movements of the
sixties and seventies were all based on the theory of class struggle. When
one asks how and why the sham terms "class" and "class struggle" were
 Female Images and National Myth 125

constructed and what such linguistic entities meant in a culture without

capitalism, one comes eventually to rest on two notions that lie beneath
class: the ideas of the nation and of the cultural agent. Movements classified
as class movements in the past performed national closure rather than
working on behalf of any real class goal. Targeting "representatives of the
bourgeois class" launched attacks against autonomous cultural elements,
never anything as concrete as a class representative.
The idea of the nation can be traced back to the 1910s and 1920s. After
failing several times to prevail against the imperialist invaders, Chinese
intellectuals suddenly recognized the crises of nation and culture facing
them in the form of Western modernity. Inspired by the October Revolution
in Russia, intellectuals began introducing Marxism and socialist theory into
China. In doing so, they sought to connect the notion of an exploited class
with that of an exploited people and a deprived nation as a means of
legitimating China's use of the term "proletarian" to describe its own
international position. 5 To achieve the conjoining of class and nation, the
intellectuals employed the mediating idea of the collective, implied in the
terms "class," "people," and "nation." This idea of the collective, which
only Marxism offered, was one of the very few acceptable units of analysis
that allowed the Chinese to conceptualize their historical situation.
Marxism's prediction ofliberation and the victory of the proletariat offered
a utopian vision in which the Chinese majority, a comparatively powerless
and weak proletarianized mass, would eventually create and deliver a better
society and a better, more just world order. This utopian vision of class
struggle allowed Chinese intellectuals to believe that they had discovered
the solution to the national crisis.
The conflation of the Marxist theory of class and the collecti ve national
victory led later to the fusing of concepts that would otherwise have
remained distinct: "collective" was fused with "totality," "public" with the
"state," and "people" with "party." Nationalists and Communists alike
claimed legitimacy by offering to represent the people. But such represen-
tation of the people slipped into appropriation, either by concealing the
existence of classes (the Nationalist policy) or by abusing the concept of
class (the Communist practice). Under the socialist nation-state form, the
notion of class became a theoretical and practical tool for homogenizing the
field of the people and transforming it into a mass. Class struggle became
a form by which the nation was constructed as one, rock-like, powerful,
undifferentiated whole. Through the claim of proletarian leadership, the
notion of class enabled the party to authorize itself as absolute, the exclusive
political representative of the nation.
5 See Li Dazhao, "Fa E geming bijiao guan" (A comparison between the French
revolution and the Russian revolution); "Shumin de shengli" (A victory of commoners);
and "Boersheweike de shengli" (A victory of bolshevism) inLi Dazhao xuangji (Selected
works of Li Dazhao) (Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1962), 101-4, 109-11, 112-18.
126 Meng Yue

The other idea lying dormant beneath class, the notion of cultural
agency, first emerged during the Yan'an period. A misconception arose
there between the dominant social structure and the cultural agency of
Yan'an literary criticism. Mao Zedong's slogan "Literature serves the
workers, peasants and soldiers" perpetuated the notion that different
literary forms were the property of various classes. 6 So, for instance, the
working and oppressed classes owned the local literary forms, while
modernist writing was considered the province of the bourgeoisie. The
upshot was that criticism eliminated distinctions between structural rivals
(in the class context, between the bourgeoisie and proletariat) as it did
between professions, cultural traditions, modes of writing and so on at the
national level. Differences between cultural agents and agencies were
frequently mistaken for class conflict even when the relations of produc-
tion, having long been nationalized, no longer marked its artifacts with a
class signature. The class-inflected concept of nation and the notion that
culture and literary forms represent class interests made possible criticism
and development in the field of socialist literature. A realm of the "public"
came into being. There the people, state, and party became exchangeable
elements of one whole. Culture, on the other hand, became a field of endless
struggle.
As to the question of women's writing, I tum now to Yang Mo's Song
a/Youth (Qingchun zhi ge).7 I selected this text not only because it was so
famous but also for the way that it trapped itself, very typically for its time,
in a specially constructed sphere of the "public." I start with two connec-
tions, or similarities, that Yang Mo's novel shares with prerevolutionary
literary traditions. First, Song a/Youth is reminiscent of the autobiographi-
cal focus that woman writers in early-twentieth-century Chinese literature
employed. There the implied author identified with the viewpoint of the
female protagonist and thus with a specific gender stereotype and gendered
situation. This usually involved a young woman seeking freedom and
eventually making choices between her ideal and her gender role. In this
tradition we find Ding Ling, Bai Wei, Su Qing, Eileen Chang, and others.
Second, the plot structure of the novel also reminds us of the sub-genre of
the Bildungsroman or rewritings of it, since each of the protagonist's
experiences turns out to have contributed to her maturation. In Chinese
literature, this subgenre generated many works expressing the lonely
individual's mental exile against the broad background of the national
crisis, and thus the genre itself is informed by intellectuals.
In a literature crammed with images of the national majority and with

6 See Ding Ling et aI., eds. Wenyi lilunji (Collection of essays on literary theory), in
Yanan wenyi congshu (Literature of the Yanan period series) (Changsha: Hunan wenyi
chuban she, 1984).
7 Yang Mo, Qingchun zhi ge (Beijing: Zhong guo qingnian chuanshe, 1958).
 Female Images and National Myth 127

Party heroes, very few works are written about individual intellectuals,
particularly individual intellectual women. Song of Youth, as one such rare
text, represents a style of writing that does not derive from the national
standard. Rather, the novel begins like some women's writing in the 1920s
and 1930s. An educated young woman, having rejected the marriage her
parents arranged for her, cuts off relations with her family and starts
wandering about in "society," struggling to achieve independence. She falls
in love and marries a university lecturer, Yu Yongze, who had once
extricated her from a situation where local gentry had planned to "contrib-
ute" her to a warlord. She splits with Yu Yongze because she is attracted to
Lu Jiachuan, a communist, and to his politics. After that she journeys back
into society, this time armed with political ideals. Borrowing Jurij Lotman' s
model, or, better, Teresa de Lauretis's reconfiguration of Lotman, the
female protagonist Lin Daojing is the "mobile character," whereas the men
in the story are "immobile characters." While the woman pursues her goal
and becomes mature, the male characters represent various plot spaces,
positions, or personified obstacles that she must enter, pass through, and
emerge from. Moreover, the narrative's end appears to depend upon Lin's
choosing among the male characters--choosing, that is, where to direct her
desire, although at the same time she is herself the object of male desire. To
an extent, Yang Mo's role structure in the novel is a gender reversal ofthe
Lotman-Lauretis model. 8
Although Lin's mobility is initially predicated on her rejection of the
male dominant order, it ends not in a broadening or a continuation of the
modern tradition of women's writing but rather with a displacement of it.
The novel never gives a revealing picture, as for instance Zhang Ailing's
Qing Cheng Zhi Lian had, of the conflict between a single woman's fortune
and the fate of the whole nation or whole civilization. 9 Nor does it offer
anything like an occasion for self-reflection on female desire under the
shadow of male discourses, as "Miss Sophie's Diary" had.1O Rather, the
gendered role structure of Song of Youth emerges in order to be offered in
tribute to the state.
The plot makes the symbolic offering of tribute plausible through the
mediation of nationalism. National crisis brings about a split in the
gendered eye we suppose Lin Daojing to possess because of what she has
seen. When Yang Mo introduced the Japanese invasion of northeast China,

8 Jurji Lotmon, "The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology," trans. Julian Graffy, in
Poetics Today 111-2 (1979): 167-84. Also see Teresa de Lauretis in Alice Doesn't
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 118.
9 Eileen Chang, "Love in a Fallen City," in her Chuan qi (New romances) (Shanghai:
Zhongguo liangyou tushu gongsi, 1946), 152-84.
10 See William Tay, ed., Xiandai Zhongguo xiaoshuo xuan, vol. 1 (Taipei: Hong Fa
Press, 1989),339-91.
128 Meng Yue

all male characters, each of whom had previously presented a possible

marital or sexual choice to Lin Daojing, begin to shift away into
schematized representations of different political forces, possible political
positions. At this moment in national life, men who had posed sexual threats
to Lin come to be seen as traitors of the nation, while Lin's husband, Yu
Yungze, who earlier had saved her from death at the hands of a feudal
warlord, now turns away from the nation's future out of anticommunist
pique. Given these unpalatable options, Lin's "desire" finally focuses on
revolutionaries: Her concern for the impoverished class becomes inextrica-
bly identified with the Party's concern for the national majority. In other
words, as soon as the nation enters any symbolic scene, all Lin can see in
the male characters she meets are political signs.
Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, following the Japanese
invasion the question of the mobile female character Lin Daojing' s m;u-
riage draws closer and closer to, finally merging with, the question of which
political force will legitimately dominate the nation's future. Her true love,
fittingly in terms of the nation's interests, turns out to be a Communist Party
member who devoted his life to the proletarian revolution; her last marriage
is also to a Communist Party member. The key point here is not political
ethics but the textual-political strategy the novel employs. Yang Mo used
the gender issue to assure the Party's political strength and subsequently its
absolute authority in the name of the nation.
Let us now turn to the other connection, that is, Song of Youth's echo
of the earlier intellectual Bildungsroman tradition. The maturation of the
protagonist through real and symbolic travel is a stereotype in prerevolu-
tionary Chinese literature, a pattern for individuals and particularly intellec-
tuals. A similar process of displacement of this tradition occurs in Song of
Youth. Here I find it useful to draw a comparison between Lin's case and that
of Jiang Chunzu, a similar character in Lu Ling's 1947 novel Sons and
Daughters ofthe Landlord, a novel which also takes the Anti -Japanese War
as its background. Each novel tends to cast its characters in a symbolic
manner. In Song of Youth, this dimension is constituted as a space of
political struggle, formed out of the characters' class identities. In Sons and
Daughters, the field for symbolic meaning is rooted in the author's
consideration of Chinese intellectuals' "spiritual aspects" and their spiritual
role in modern society. But despite the shared tendency to allegory, the two
authors, Jiang Zhunzu and Yang Mo represent character's relationships
inside the plot spaces in very different ways and place their protagonists into
very different roles. 11
Sons and Daughters situates Jiang Chunzu so that his "I" self or
personal identity is problematic. He has grown up in a large, partly
11 Examples of literary work that recapitulates this pattern are Qi Tong, Sinxheng dai
(The newly born generation) (Congqing: Shenghuo shudian, 1939) alld Ye Shengtao, Ni
Huanz/li (Shanghai: Kaiming shudian, 1930).
 Female Images and National Myth 129

dispersed traditional family, where traditional forms are in a state of

collapse. There is the father, a representative of the old authority; the older
brother, who is too weak to fight against the traditional system and goes
mad; the second brother, who is the family rebel and a social reformer; the
sisters, who maintain traditional elegance which is increasingly irrelevant;
and a sister-in-law, who is keen on procuring money and power. Although
he does not identify with anyone of his family members, Jiang meets people
even more "other," outside the kinship unit. He encounters, for instance,
both interpersonal and spiritual sociocultural spaces and socialities that are
different from his own world of soldiers and workers who possess desire
and vitality but who lack education-the "mass," silent and enduring, who
have strong unknown capacities, and so on. He confronts the wilderness,
both in actual natural settings where he must fight to live and in the symbolic
space of nothingness he must pass through on his' way. The series of plot
spaces repeatedly form for Jiang Chunzu a world of others and of otherness,
providing him the tangible conditions of social dislocation. He realizes
gradually that in the disintegrating society, under the pressures of war,
poverty, and conflict, his dislocation has provided him a space to think and
to feel what is occurring in the land.
(For Song of Youth, dislocation is an unacceptable condition since a
woman cannot go public or entertain contact with nonkin others on an equal
footing, be they commoners, politicians, or professors. Lin Daojing's
journal of dislocation unfolds not on a public social1evel but rather on a
domestic and private one. Hers should have been a feminist journey; she is,
after all, fighting social forces and agents that are trying to transform her
into one man's private possession. But in the unfolding story all feminist
possibility is eliminated. The narrative appears to assume that dislocation
from the masculinized domestic order, though undertaken at her own
choice, leaves her bereft of mirror, community, and thus meaning. Having
assured this, the novel then kills off Lu Jiachuan, the Communist Party
member Lin had earlier felt attracted to, transforming her relation to him
into a sublime one. The channel of her idealized relation allows her to
emancipate herself from the spheres of the domestic and private.
(The tricky part of the narrative, without which the myth could not be
constructed, lies in the fact that it leaves no room open for a public or
imagined public other than the one offered by the Communist Party. In so
doing, the novel displaces the public with an idealized image of the state.
The novel implies that no other possible bridge could exist between a
woman and the public sphere except that of the party and its political
identifications. In the end, the problematic relation of woman and party
disappears, having been subtly displaced by the coordination of female
image and the state. The erasure is obvious in Song of Youth. It is
particularly acute when we recall that the history of women's participation
in public life did not start with coordination between the state's public and
130 Meng Yue

the female image. Long before Song of Youth there were women who
invented their own perspectives and influenced public opinion. 12)
In his travels, the hero of Sons and Daughters may fail to find a position
or a given plot space. He may also fail to narrativize "who am I" in terms'
of preexisting identities. But the very act of understanding and his denial of
a stable identity has already shaped his role into that of pursuer of truth and
ideals. Well inside this role he finally achieves an "ideal," an "I" who
elevates his soul to cry out his willingness to know the truth and thus invents
himself as the ideal of the intellectual.
An important feature of Lin's relationship to plot space and to other
characters, and thus another significant difference between the two novels,
lies in the factthatotherness in Song of Youth is never accepted as necessary.
Indeed, it cannot even survive. "Others" like Yu Jingtang and Yu Yongze,
tum out to be evil traitors; "others" like lower-class people come to
represent the ideal model Lin seeks for remolding herself so she can become
just like one of them. Unlike that of Sons and Daughters, the world of others
in Song ofYouth repeatedly divides and is redefined according to the criteria
of political allegiance until the otherness itself falls apart and is replaced by
two monolithic, opposite categories: the "enemy" and "us." Given the strict
"enemy versus us" division of the plot spaces, Lin's "maturation" is
reduced to a simplified identification with the only available ideal subject
position, that of the national collective. In the end, she succeeds in
becoming one of "us," a comrade, facing "them," the enemy, but never an
"I" or a "self," nor a gendered individual, nor even an intellectual.
The difference that separates dynamics of self/other in these two
novels suggests a transition to a completely reversed representation of the
relationship of nation and citizen. In Sons and Daughters the individual
seeks an ideal coexistence with the nation's strength. Song of Youth, on the
other hand, presides over a devaluation and even elimination of the
gendered individual in favor of the nation. Arguably, Sons and Daughters
of the Landlord is among the last works continuing and broadening the
legacy of individualism during the national crisis, while Song of Youth
represents the prototypical drowning of the individual eye in the blind and
turbulent sea of nationalism. 13

12 I am thinking ofSu Qing, the journal writer, who worked in the mid-forties in occupied
Shanghai. The Shanghai journal Tiandi was the means of communication between her and
other women like Eileen Chang. Of course, readers consumed her work for different
reasons. Su Qing even wrote an article against the public opinion's condemnation of a
woman who had been sentenced to death for killing her husband. See her Huanjin ji (Silk
washings) (Shanghai: Tiandi chuban she, 1944) and Yishi nannu (Food and sex) 1945
(Shanghai: Tiandi chuban she), and Shishui ji (Flowing water), which she printed herself.
See as well Eileen Chang, "Wo kan Su Qing" (My impression of Su Qing), in Tiandi 19
(1945).
13 Lu Ling, Caizhu de emu men (Sons and daughters of the landlord) (Chongqing:
Xiwang chuban she, 1947).
 Female Images and National Myth 131

If, as I am arguing, the gendered viewpoint and the self-consciously

individual role of intellectuals are both stored in literature and are thus
textual traditions (which in their relations to nation and nationalism are
different from Western individualism and gendered writings), then this
blindness in Song of Youth is truly significant. What Song of Youth really
shows is a process of displacing the textual legacy. This process of
displacement takes place through a dynamic relation of personal identity
and the intellectual's role, between the female image and the gendered
division. Lin, and maybe the author, Yang Mo, too, retain the identity of
intellectual and the outlook of the single woman. Or, to put it another way,
they persist in viewing from the perspective of gendered individuals; but the
author/protagonist by no means plays either role exclusively. The novel
breaks with the tradition of Chinese women writers because it deprives the
protagonist of the gendering eye. It diminishes the role of intellectuals,
making the category into a mere shell of identity. Song of Youth undertook,
through the very process and performance of its own authoring, a textual
confiscation that can only be interpreted as a symbolically deliberate effort
to sacrifice the perspectives and conventions of all writing selves to the
state. The reason Song of Youth is so important is its success. The novel
accomplished the destruction of textual traditions, the elimination of
literary possibilities, and in so doing effected what would become a typical
symbolic action for socialist Chinese literature.
I need to mention here that even though Song of Youth sacrificed its
gendered eye and individual self to the nationalist impulse, it was still
criticized in 1959 for its "petit-bourgeois" tone. The irony of this criticism
lies in what we know occurred and how we can sense the coming disaster.
First, Yang Mo's negative textual consolidation turned out to be the only
acceptable mode of socialist cultural production. Second, by operating well
it deprived itself of its sources, materials, means, and even its very reason
for continued existence. Sooner or later, this kind of consolidation had to
face a terminal ideological dilemma. Socialist literature and culture had no
other available avenue and thus began a process of self-copying; it used
existing conventions, sometimes very beautifully, to repeat the same thing
over and over. Such repetition became extreme during the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution (GPCR), when all kinds of conventions, all kinds of
media, all kinds of genres and styles were engaged in the mass production
of a very few texts, and the authors of such minutely monitored and
restricted items were, even so, in constant danger of having the "dunce cap
of the bourgeoisie" clapped on their heads. Once creative production had
become a simple duplication, to write was to copy and to be copied, and
when the only literature we possessed consisted of copies of eight "official"
models, there existed no difference separating cultural production from
cultural death--dead, yet still self-copying. Reproduction left no room for
132 Meng Yue

thought inside hegemonic and totalitarian ideology. It left no room for a

nation's literature or culture. The only subject its products were capable of
reproducing was the image of the textualized, discursive state machine
itself.

Politicized Male Subjectivity

It is interesting that in socialist China the dominant masculinist
discursive tradition has changed its position within the literary corpus. I am
not saying that male-dominant discourse did not exist before, but rather that
it now works in ways that are very different from before. What I find unique
in contemporary Chinese literature is the total reversal of the "strong man!
weak woman" model and its replacement with female characters who are
often "superior" to surrounding male characters. The communist women
leaders in the yangbanxi serve as extreme examples. Of course, this kind of
character has its traditional conventions and archetypes in classical Chinese
literature, for example in famous works such as "Hongxian nu" (The white
snake), and "Yangmen niujiang" and so on. 14 Yet there is a very crucial
difference between the classical and contemporary "strong woman" types.
In the classical literary formula, the strong or active woman character
served to release literati anxiety because the texts where they appeared were
generically coded as sexual and were produced to bring metaphorical
pleasure (both erotic and nonerotic) to the writing male subject and his male
audience. The male literatus symbolically escapes from the highly demand-
ing cuI tural self-image which his class status imposed by imagining himself
turning into a woman, yet never assuming any of her burdens. In contem-
porary literature, however, the superior female archetype is for the most part
a censor of forbidden desires and pleasure. This new twist on the strong-
woman archetype indicates a radical adaptation of male discourse in the
socialist period.
Two short stories from the 1950s, "Party Membership Dues" by Wang
Yuanjian 15 and "Snow in March" by Xiao Ping,16 are among the first few
fictions where the female image holds a superior position to that of the male
narrator, which suggests a starting point for our analysis. Both stories share
the same narrator/narrated, man/woman relationship. "Party Membership
Dues" relates the story of an ordinary young woman, a young mother, who

14 For "White Snake." see "Bai niangzi yongzhen leifeng ta," in Feng Menglong, ed.,
Qingshi tongyan (Taibei: Ding wen shuju, 1974). Also see Menghua Guanzhu, Baishe
zhuan qianhouji (The story of white snake) (Guangyi shuju; reprinted Beijing: Zhongguo
shudian, 1988).
15 Wang Yuanjian, Dangfei (Beijing: Gongren chuban she. 1956).
16 Xiao Ping, "San yue xue," (Snow in March) from Jianguo yilai duanpian xiao shou
xuan (Collection of short stories since 1949). vol. 3 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chupanshe,
1980). 207-240.
 Female Images and National Myth 133

saves "my" life and from under the guns of the enemy preserves the Party's
property; the enemy retaliates and she is arrested and killed. When this
event occurs in "my" spectacle, "my" narrative position in relation to the
woman starts to change. She rises from the horizon of the narrative point of
view into an elevated angel, and her image shifts from that of a common
Party member and ordinary woman ("common" or ordinary because of her
youth) into a communist saint and martyr. "Snow in March" undertakes a
similar translation ofthe male/female, narrator/narrated relation. After her
death, the male narrator who once was her leader has become her
memorializer, the teller of her heroic tale, even her own surviving
daughter's teacher.
The exchange of the male/female and narrator/narrated position can be
read as a symbolic event. In it, the female changes from "my" (the
narrator's) gendered, hierarchized "other" into "my" equal, or political
mirror image. Although she has multiple identities (mother, wife, and Party
member), the woman chooses to die a Communist Party member rather than
to live as a woman and mother. In other words, she herself already seems
to have denied her own gendered identity. The narrator, of course, who
completes the heroine's image and who witnesses her as she sacrifices her
woman self, actually destroys every chance facing and describing a woman,
a gendered sexual "other." Instead, since "we" share the same identity,
Party member, the identity of narrator/me and narrated/she is suddenly
absolutely clear in the telling of the story's narrative. To an extent, the
heroine's unsexed image is an empty, improved "I." It is empty because she
is not a flesh-and-blood person but a political name, and it is improved
because her name is realized in her Party membership and her position in
relation to the Party is the very best, the most unquestionably correct one
available-a position "I" and everybody should identify and eagerly
maintain.
No doubt, while emphasizing the ungendered woman and making her
a subject position with which "I" can identify, the male narrator also
suppresses his own gender. Narration in the two stories displaces not only
the gendered other but also the male/female relation itself. In this way, the
male narrator strips his own subjectivity of its sexual difference and
sublimates himself into a political subject construction. The process must
be difficult, since we find the constant need for suppression of sex
difference in socialist literature. I assume that this uneasiness is what
stimulated the gradual development of the strong woman in literature, a
figure that emerged out of the earlier ideal and into an image of authority
and law, a representative of Party's rules and exemplar to the miseducated,
abased, derogated male character.
The process of establishing the politically authoritarian female image
is evident in "Li Xuangxuang xiao zhuan," a comical story about a
134 Meng Yue

"backward" husband, Sun, who, with the help of his "progressive" wife Li
and the commune leadership, is able to change his world view.17 The story
shows Li Xuangxuang to be her husband's superior in intelligence, political
maturity, and decision-making ability. As the story begins, because he
subscribes to the feudal sexist ideology and does not recognize the Party's
supreme position, Sun fails to acknowledge his wife's authority. Their
marital discord represents a political confrontation between the authority of
the dominant male sex and the authority of the politically dominant power,
or in other words between the "law of the father" and the law of the Party.
Since in a marital relation a wife may suffer more than the husband when
relations between the two are based on sexist principles, she is more likely
to take an oppositional position on behalf of the Party. Interestingly enough,
although the story initially does oppose sexist ideology in this way, it ends
with the husband's growing awareness of the Party's authority. During the
process of struggle, however, Li' s effort to establish "equality between men
andwomen" turns out to be little more than a strategy of forcing her husband
to obey political standards set by the state political apparatus. As soon as the
husband acknowledges the Party's authority, embodied in his wife, his
sexist discourse begins to sound comical and forgivable compared to his
newly regulated social behavior.
The conflict between the law of the Party and the law of the father, or
between the socialist and sexist standards of behavior, did not originate in
a struggle against the derogation of women. Rather, it emerged out of the
Party's desire to dominate all distracting forces, including sexism, since as
a minor dictatorship, a local authority, the localized sexist tradition held the
potential to splinter or complicate the Party's total control over society and
ideology. The comical vision in which Sun gives up his old-fashioned sexist
dreams illustrates in fact the Party's victory in the struggle to gain absolute
authority. It shows us a mutual consent established between the Party and
a male-dominant discourse, disciplined in the crucible of obedience to the
Party, a consent which simply replaced the demand for women's equality.
The image of the dominant female made it possible for Chinese
socialist narrative to create a special situation for the reconstruction of
(male) subjectivity. To some extent, the female image as authority and
censor replaced the symbolic father in the Lacanian structure of subjectiv-
ity. This reconstructive situation for subjectivity is dramatized in several
yangbanxi such as "Longjiang song" and "Duojuanshan." The operas share
the same basic structure of the communist woman leader who helps a
misguided male character to find correct beliefs. The communist woman
sermonizes, criticizes and lectures a male character whom some hidden
enemy has placed under its evil control and who is thus prone to committing

17 Li Zhun, "Li Shuangshuang xiao zhuan" from Li Shuangshuang xiao zhuan (The story
ofLi Shuangshuang) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1977),322-366.
 Female Images and National Myth 135

political errors and finally awakens him to political rectitude. In this

narrative, the infantilized male character can always be found in a politi-
cized Lacanian moment of presubjectivity. He can never differentiate
himself from the political environment, from others and enemies, and he
does not know which political category he should identify with or belong
to. This suggests a moment similar to the Lacanian pre-oedipal stage, when
the infant is not yet aware which sex it will maintain. An important task of
the Chinese socialist narrative often lies in bringing the bewildered male
character out of this situation and relocating him into a symbolic political
order, where he can become a new political subject.
In other words, the superior-man narrative is supposed to reconstruct
a male sUbjectivity. To do so and also to meet the requirements of the opera
genre, which has many melodies for the female voice but a rather limited
number of available roles, the female image makes itself available as the
political adult, responsible for the care of the male political infant. In the
given intersubjective situation, it is she who provides every condition for
the subject's reconstruction. When she speaks the language of the Party, she
imposes the name upon the male political infant. When she uncovers and
criticizes his mistakes, she introduces the Party's law. Her very existence
turns out to be a reflection of the great Other-the Party itself. In this way
a new triangle of subjecti vity appears on the stage, where the allegorical
drama unfolds and where it ends in the male character's finally being
transferred into the Party-centric symbolic order.
Once again there is a desexualizing effect in this reconstruction of
subjectivity. Not only is transcendental signifying power of the phallus
neutralized, but sexual and gender differences are also excised. The
putative female image on the stage actually indicates neither sex. "She" has
neither gender identities (mother, wife, lover, etc.), nor body, nor a gender-
based perspective. Once he accepts the new triangle of subjectivity, the
male political infant is henceforth prevented from becoming a sexual
subject, or should I say, he must pay the price of his sexuality to secure a
Party-determined subject position. This desexualizing and politicizing of
subjectivity, of course, does not mean anything like the existence of
woman-dominant discourse, nor does it prove that sexist ideology has
disappeared in Chinese literature. On the contrary, although it left no room
for male desire or subjectivity, the discourse itself is still a masculinist one.
Both its narrative focus and its implied reader-audience do not in any way
include women as a gender. There is only one respect in which socialist
narratives are different from previously male-dominant discourse. The
topic of discourse is no longer how to dominate women but rather how to
subject oneself in every possible way to the Party and to the Party's
discourse. The unique female images employed in socialist narrative were
used to create the dominated men of contemporary Chinese literature and
ideology.
136 Meng Yue

So my final point concerns the paranoic nature of the whole ideology

and state machine. Years after the revolution, the most important effort of
cultural production to achieve ideologic control and eliminate distracting
difference has achieved only one thing: the survival of a nation totally
subordinating itself to the state, in economy, social life, ideology, culture,
and personal life. The impulse and its methods are understandable; it is
nevertheless paranoid in nature, or at the very least schizophrenic. In this
statist totality there were sexes without bodies, classes without people or
substance, desire without objects, and production in which nothing ever got
produced. Absent enemies loomed, threatening "us" defined only in terms
of the slave or the subject. Such paranoia gains its symbolic satisfaction at
an extremely high price: it survives and continues because it inflicts on the
nation violence, disruptive movements, famines, prison, and blood.
Writing with Your Body:
Literature as a Wound-
Remarks on the Poetry of Shu Ting
Wolfgang Kubin

When Shu Ting, Gu Cheng shuqing shixuan [Selected poems by Shu

Ting and Gu Cheng] appeared in Fujian in 1982, the individual poems
weren't attributed to either poet, and it seemed impossible to decide who
had written which poem.· When Rupprecht Meyer published Zwischen
Wiinden, a volume of his translations into German of Shu Ting's poetry, he
did it without being able to say with certainty whether Shu Ting or Gu
Cheng had written the last six poems in his book. When I was in Peking in
December 1984 I had the good fortune of learning from Gu Cheng himself
which poems he had written. 1 It turns out that Gu Cheng wrote all six of
the poems that the German translator attributed to Shu Ting. When the
book was published, the poets thought that they would have to disguise
their identities in order to be able to publish Gu Cheng's, if not Bei Dao's
works. (Shu Ting was the only one at that time who was allowed to publish,
and she insisted on publishing jointly with Gu Cheng and Bei Dao.)
Did the poets succeed in completely disguising their identities? In my
opinion they did not. Given modern knowledge of masculine and feminine
language and style, it shouldn't be difficult to decide whether a given text,
even a Chinese text, was written by a man or a woman. I don't mean in a
simple sense that Shu Ting, who lives in a port city, lays more emphasis on
the sea than Gu Cheng, who lives in Peking, far from the coast (almost all
Shu Ting's poems in this volume have something to do with the sea); nor
is she "feminine" because in Shu Ting's poems mothers and children appear
more often and behave differently, nor do I mean that expressions of
gentleness, tenderness and weakness and the need for support (the word
"shoulder" is often used) are so common in her work. More important, in
-See 159-60.

1 The foilOloVing poems were written by Gu Cheng: Tonghua shiren, 1; "?.!" 49; Beidaihe
zhi bin, 51; Yubie, 53; Touyou, 55; Beijing shenqiu de wanshang, 70; Xiongdi, wo zai zher,
79; Huanxiang, 83; Xiang beifang, 85; Shi pei hua: shaonU yu quan, 87; Gui meng, 88; Huian
nUzi, 113; Gei Chuan laoda (?), 115; Yugeshou, 117; Zeng chuan hong yishang de shaonU,
121; Zai chaoshi de xiaozhan shang, 123; Qiang, 124; Baitiane, 134.
138 Wolfgang Kubin

my view, is the bodily aspect of Shu Ting's poetry, which places the author
in an international tradition of feminine literature.
In her study" 'The Blank Page' and Issues of Female Creativity,"
Susan Gubar showed the connection between feminine sexuality and
literature? Women, made into creations by men (Mao Dun's short story
"Creation,,3 contains a Chinese, if somewhat critical version of Ovid's
"Pygmalion"), come to see themselves as creations, which has two affects
on "feminine anatomy and creativity":

Fllst, many women experience their own bodies as the only available
medium for their art, with the result that the distance between the woman
artist and her art is often radically diminished; second, one of the primary
and most resonant metaphors provided by the female body is blood, and
cultural forms of creativity are often experienced as a painful wounding.4

That "the body is the only means of self expression" implies "the deflection
of female creativity from the production of art to the re-creation of the
body" and the abandonment of the differentiation between art and life.

. . . that she [the artist) is herself the text means that there is little distance
between her life and her art. The attraction of women writers to personal
forms of expression like letters, autobiographies, confessional poetry,
diaries and journals points up the effect of a life experienced as an art or
an art experienced as a kind of life, as does women's traditional interest
in cosmetics, fashion and interior decorating.

Thus, in feminine literature there exists an "identification of bleeding

with storytelling or singing" and, as is made clear in the above quote, writing
is a kind of injury for a woman. It is these characteristics of blood, victim,
wound and object so typical of Shu Ting's poetry that connect her to other
"feminine" writers abroad and join "feminine writing" Chinese literature
for the first time.
Behind the bodily aspect that is the subject of the following discussion
lies a new recognition of the self. When reading the reflections that Shu
Ting wrote in answer to readers' questions concerning her life and works,S
one sees that she was strongly criticized as a small child by her mother and

2 This article appeared in Elizabeth Abel's Writing and Sexual Difference.

3 An article on Mao Dun's short story collection "Ye qiangwei" [Wild roses] contains an
analysis of this story. See Zbigniew Slupski's A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature
1900-1949. VoL 2 The Short Story.
4 Writing 78.
S Shu Ting, "Shenghuo, shuji, yu shi. Jian da duzhe laixin" [Life, literature and poetry.
answers to questions from readers] in Fujian wenxue 2 (1982); Xinhua wenzhai 4
(1981):197-200.
 Writing with your Body 139

her school because of her passion for reading [shupzl- During the Cultural
Revolution, books, especially foreign books, were associated with crime
and resistance to authority. The ego we meet in Shu Ting's book is
extremely self-confident and doesn't seem to accept any authority other
than the truth. For this reason it is filled with the "desire that life return to
its original form." The doubts about traditional thinking [chuantong
gainian], which began after her return from the country (1969-1972) to the
city, are the beginnings of the awakening of the ego. She had begun writing,
however, in the country. She wrote diaries to provide information about
the lost generation in the style of Ai Wu's "Nan xing ji" [Journey to the
south, 1935]. The similarity here is the idea of education by experience.6
Only a few pages of the three thick volumes escaped destruction before
her return to the city, where she published the fragments in the first issue
of Rongshu congkan.
The form that seemed appropriate to the ego was not so much the
diary, or even the poem, as the letter. In any event, in "Life, Literature and
Poetry," Shu Ting makes the surprising remark that reading and writing
letters is the most important thing in the life of young people with secon-
dary school education. Seen in this light, letters are the place where the
ego is most likely to confront itself and others. This theory of the role of
the letter may seem somewhat extraordinary to the Western reader, but
one shouldn't forget that one of the goals of the Cultural Revolution was
the dissolution of the individual and the establishment of a collective
consciousness. Thus letter writing is not just a search for the lost self-it is
also a form of resistance.
I do not intend to follow out this insight here. What concerns me rather
is the new self ofthe generation born after 1949 and marked by the Cultural
Revolution, which expresses itself in Shu Ting's poetry, and that this self is
essentially defined by pain [tongku] and sorrow [youshang]. These words
are part of Shu Ting's basic vocabulary and are the results of an attitude
captured in the idea of running aground fgeqian]. However, the "pain of
sinking" [chenlun de tongku], which began in 1972 after her return to
Xiamen, isn't seen as completely negative. As she put it in "Life, Literature
and Poetry":

I realized many years later that running aground is a way of life.

This seems to be a basic concept that can be expressed for poetry as

follows: Experiencing a limit, expressed here as running aground, awakens

6 Ibid, 197. See alsoAkzente 2 (1985): 100, where Helmut Martin mentions the same
passage in his "Introduction." Concerning Ai Wu's "Journey," see Lee Ou-Fan, "The Solitary
Traveller: Images of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature," Robert E. Hegel and Richard
C. Hessney, eds., Expression of Selfin Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985) 294-302.
140 Wolfgang Kubin

the ego and allows it to differentiate itself from the rest of the world. It
recognizes itself there as object, victim, and loss and is simultaneously "the
blank page" on which the People's Republic of China has written its history.
Telling this story means telling about wounds, and thus writing is directly
associated with pain and the body. That is because the body is the visible
and tangible locus of the self and simultaneously the other side of what is
referred to as the "blank page."
The idea that writing poetry consists of being wounded is expressed in
an exemplary manner in the poem "Zai shige de shizijia shang" [Nailed to
the cross of poetry], which appeared in Shuangweichuan [A two-masted
ship].7 This poem, tellingly dedicated to the poet's mother, is divided into
three long stanzas, which are separated by an indented three-line refrain
(the invocation of mother). The text provides two contradictory levels and
tells two different stories, one about writing and one about the writer. The
stories are contradictory because writing is said to have a liberating affect
and to bless life, so that the people do not remain closed. (See the image
of the curtains and the cypress vine in the third stanza.) Yet on the other
hand, for the author, writing is the loss of the self and the process of
wounding and of becoming an object. The first stanza develops the idea of
writing as an assignment, the second shows the process as well as the goal
of writing, and the third discusses the effect of writing.
It is important to see that even in the first stanzas writing is seen as a
passive art, an assignment. The first statement is that of the ego being nailed
to the cross, without saying who is doing the nailing. All that is mentioned
is the assignment: "to complete a fable," "to follow an ideal." It is not said
which fable or which ideal are meant. The word fable [yuyan] could be a
premonition of the Prometheus myth in the third stanza. The verb before
the word fable is important for the context of suffering: ''fucong'' means to
obey, to subjugate oneself, and in the text that follows it becomes obvious
to whom the author has subjugated herself: the sponsor, nature, specifically
the sky, rivers, mountains; in short, traditional forms oflandscapes that are
intended to represent nature as a whole. The "heart" is a means of fulfilling
the assignment and plays the role of a victim. The heart connects the
different stories. The heart is also passive: it is, among other things,
"pierced" [dongchuan] and "polished" (note in the word "damo" the
character "da," to hit). However it develops the ability to react and returns
what it receives. This may be necessary in order to accomplish the task, just
as raising the heart out of the environment is necessary: it can only be used
as a poetic tool when it is "held high in the hands."

7 The following poems, which I will discuss presently, also appeared in A Two-Masted
Ship: "Mother," "Perhaps," "Gifts," "Testament," "Giving," "Reefs and Signal Fire," "Maple
Leaf," "My Motherland, Dear Motherland," "Voice ofa Generation," "Bougainvillea on a
Sunny Rock," "Falling Leaves" and "Meeting."
 Writing with your Body 141

Writing is giving (blossoms of pain, innocence and hands) and belongs

as such to the metaphor of victimization and passivity. "Nailed" develops
this idea in the first part of the second stanza, where the things that are
given are either identified with the passive word "bei" or with the comple-
ment "cheng" [to become]. The object of giving is to convert the receiver,
who isn't able to appreciate the gift. However, the giver does not blame
anyone else for this; she tries to identify her own failings. The word
"weakness" [ntanrno] is central, and it may be expressed in the two lines
that follow through the imagery of hair. However, these lines may simply
be a transition to the process of writing, which is the topic of the second
part of the second stanza. Writing, which takes form out of the tangibility
and detail of the world through a process that transforms reality into
symbols within the author, is, like the writer herself, a part of the world and
is a voice that is aimed at influencing all those who are not yet awakened
in the act of reception. "Gandong" [to touch] is the only active verb that
the writer uses to characterize her writing.
In the third stanza the poet interprets the sponsor in several ways: as
the sun she protects nature, as wind and rain she takes away, as a bird she
tortures and as cypress vine she represents the future. Here the ego
experiences a double process of loss of identity: first, the bodily wound
experience, transformation and the process of becoming an object follows
the removal of spiritual-intellectual autonomy; second, the ego no longer
belongs to itself, it belongs to the assignment (fable, ideal).
The notion of acting in someone else's interest, and not in one's own,
and similarly of being a medium instead of a creator belongs directly to the
context of body language. The idea that texts squeeze themselves out
instead of being created is common among woman writers in the West. As
Susan Gubar puts it in The Blank Page, "I was unnaturally aware of my
subjugation to my gifts, my total inability to make a poem at will." According
to this view, writing is suffering, and Shu Ting also sees herself in other
poems as a chosen goddess. In "Muqin" [Mother] she speaks of the "crown
of thorns'.s she wears. She makes sacrifices to rescue mankind: the death
of the poet is a guarantee of life to the world.

Perhaps we can burn out our lives to illuminate darkness,

But we have no ftre to warm ourselves.

Perhaps
Because of some irresistable call
We do not have any choice.

8 This and the following poems appeared in English translation in the Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars 16.3 (1984): 34-35: "Giving," "Voice ofa Generation" and "The
Assembly line."
142 Wolfgang Kubin

Like the poem "Yexu" [Perhaps] above, the three-stanza poem

"Kuizeng" [Gifts] reflects the existence of a writer. The first and last stanzas
follow:

My dream is the dream that a pond has

Whose existence is not merely to reflect the sky
But to let the surrounding willows and ferns
Suck me dry.
Through the tree roots I'll enter the veins of their leaves
Yet when they wither I'll not be sad
For I shall have expressed myself
and gained life.

My grief is the grief of seasonal birds

only the Spring understands such strong love.
Suffering all kinds of hardship and failure
To fly into a future of warmth and light
Dh the bleeding wings
Will write a line of heart-felt verse
to penetrate all souls
And enter all times.

All that I feel

Is the gift of the earth.9

This poem describes the task of writing poetry as passive in two ways;
first as a reflection of nature and second as a bodily consumption (draining)
that supports the psychic existence of others (willow, fern). The seasonal
dying with nature is the second death, and the poet can only interpret it as
a success because she sees sacrifice as the real form of self-expression. In
the third stanza, although she does not describe writing as a sacrifice, but
as a way of coming from the cold into warmth, she speaks of a defeat, and
therefore a wound. The comparison between "bleeding and telling or
singing" has many parallels in feminine literature in the West, as is made
clear in The Blank Page. The last lines of "Gifts" may seem somewhat
strange. They state that writing is a result of being wounded, but that all
feelings are a "gift of the Earth," and since the title of the poem is "Gifts,"
the real message must reside here. In the poem "Yichan" [Testament],
there are not only metaphors of wounding (a child's first steps are com-
pared to the opening of fresh wounds) but also a connection between blood
and the Earth. In the poem "Zeng" [Giving] the ego would like to be the

9 The English translation appeared in Renditions 19 & 20 (1983): 243.

 Writing with your Body 143

Earth to her lover, who is compared to a tree. Taken together, these

statements reveal the following: the lyrical ego identifies itself with the
Earth and is like the Earth. 10 Its special connection to the Earth is the blood
that drenches the Earth and changes its original color. The natural result
is that all feeling springs from the Earth, because the Earth catches the
blood that comes from the wound so that the pain flows into the Earth.
Furthermore, the Earth is the concrete side of the abstract lyrical ego, so
that one may say: everything that the ego feels comes from itself, specifically
from its Earthly self.
The image of wounding by hitting and the character for "hit" [da]
appear often in Shu Ting's poetry. It is reality that wounds, and reality is
often compared to the sea, as in the poems "Testament" and "Jiaoshi yu
dengbiao" [Reefs and signal fire]. Although this poem describes life, which
the individual enters already "branded," as humiliation and discrimination,
the mother says to her child that she should hold on and fight even if the
cause is lost. "All the waves intended for me / Will wash over you. / I regret
nothing. / And you should not give in."l1 The ego is also a protector in the
second poem, a bulwark between the loved one and reality, or, put another
way, the ego is the signal fire that warns of the reefs in life.
The poem "Fengye" [Maple leaf] expresses the idea of wound ex-
periences most poetically. Scars identify the leaf, which represents the
heart. The scars tell the story of the leaf, although it is never taken seriously.
It is only when the past is recalled in the second stanza that past events,
which were once light, become heavy. The existence of the scars can be
denied, despite this heaviness, but the third stanza tells us its "helpless
shivering on the end of the twig" suggests that the heart's own pain is
bearable, but that the pain of others is not.
Shu Ting often extends and intensifies the idea of a wound experience
in the "I am" formula. This appears very often in her works and defines the
ego as the result of an endured historical process. By using this formula,
Shu Ting places herself-whether consciously or not-in an international
context. The formula also occurred previously in twentieth-century
American feminine literature. Borrowing on Sandra Gilbert's ideas, There-
sia Sauter-Baillet made the following remarks about this theme:

Sandra Gilbert sees an unwavering assertion of identity and an emphasis

on a central mythology of the self in the works of modern female authors
as varied as Adrienne Rich, Diane Wakoski, Muriel Rukeyser, Ruth
Stone, Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Jong and Margaret Atwood. She refers
to the constantly recurring lines beginning with "I am" or "I am not"; 1

lONote the parallel to Neoconfucianism. In marriage, man is the Heavens and woman is
the Earth!
11 Nachrichten 213.
144 Wolfgang Kubin

am "an arrow," "a miner," "not a nurse," "not a smile" (Plath); "a
partisan," "a sword" (Wakoski); "a galactic cloud," "an androgyne," "the
living spirit that you don't describe," "not a wheat field, nor a virgin
forest" (Rich); "a quai, half in, half out of water," "not immortal, Faust
and I are failures" (Sexton). Gilbert interprets the self-describing ego of
these poets as "the answer to the dominant definition of their femininity";
first, because the ego complains that masculine myths about women
contradict its self image and second because it triumphantly discards
these myths.

The poem "Zuguo ya ... " [My motherland, dear motherland]12 won
a prize in 1981 and was interpreted by Chinese critics-wrongly, as we will
see-as a laudation. It contains the "I am" formula eleven times as "wo shi
A" and five times in the shortened form "shi A." It defines the special
relationship between the subject and the state/society.
The poem is divided into four stanzas containing various numbers of
verses. Each stanza ends with "zuguo ya" [Oh Motherland!]. The last
stanza even ends with "wo qin'ai de zuguo" [Dear Motherland!], which can
be interpreted as an intensification of the relationship between the lyrical
ego and the addressee. Such a reading, however, contradicts a statement
about the exploitive nature of the state that appears in the last stanza. The
first two stanzas are dedicated to the retelling of the past state of being. In
the first stanza a change from concrete to abstract images takes place. Since
the ego reaches back centuries into the past, it is collective, not individual,
and temporally limited: it stands for the Chinese vassal in the historical
development ofthe Chinese state, which is metaphorically restricted to the
time after Dunhuang (second stanza), that is, the Tang (618-906) or
pre-Tang period. However, no particular distinction is made between the
time before 1911 and after 1911 or before 1949 and after 1949. This
collective ego, the "miner's lamp" or conscience of the state, which sup-
presses its thoughts and rarely searches for itself in the "mine" of its soul,
is unconscious. As a victim, the group ego is always aware of the history of
the perpetrator of the crimes against it. The history is experienced and
expressed in a bodily way. Adjectives like "worn out, exhausted, wilted,
dilapidated" in the first stanza show the bodily process ending with the

12Translated in Chinese Literature (October 1980): 7S.79. This poem, which was written
by Shu TIng during the night shift at the Iightbulb factory where she was employed, was
originally turned down by literary magazines as being "unfit for young people." See Xmhua
wenzhai 4 (1981): 199. The critical character ofthis poem becomes clear when one compares
it to standard patriotic poetry, e.g., Shu Ping's poem "Zuguo wo shuyu ni" [Fatherland, I
belong to you] in Beijing we~ 3 (1983): 17, which defines the natural relationship between
state and individual (woman): the ego is the seed in the earth, the leaf of the tree, etc. This
poem is one of twenty-two poems that appeared under the headingXiangqing [Homesick]
as examples of the poetry of young women. For a discussion see Shi Zhao, Shi Kai, "Pianyu
Iingyanhua Xumgqing" [A few words about the collection Homesick] in Beijing wenxue 5
(1983): 65-66.
 Writing with your Body 145

barge run aground on the sandbank, which is the reaction to the state's
oppression (ropes on the shoulders). Dilapidation is not just bodily, how-
ever. The third stanza, dedicated to the future, (hope, liberation, blossom-
ing, morning) discusses the freedom from spiritual wounds, a freedom
which, despite sorrow, marks the beginning of a possible interest in the
state. Thus the ego consists not only of its own past but also of its future
road. In the last stanza the relationship between the state and the ego is
also interpreted as one of caring, and the image of the "scarred breast"
admits that the state has also been wounded. But this shouldn't disguise the
real character of the relationship: the final verse in the last stanza describes
the exploitation unambiguously and physically. The ego is the avalanche
caused by the state.
Examination of the images used with the "I am" formula (waterwheel,
miner's lamp, ear of rice, railroad tie, barge, poverty, sorrow, hope, blos-
soming, bud, dimple, starting line, morning) shows that images borrowed
from transportation (river, railroad, ship) and work (field, mine) occur
especially often. The reason for this should probably be seen in the near-
ness of these spheres to the human body.
Some of Shu Ting's work emphasizes spiritual deformation. "Yidai ren
de husheng" [The voice of a generation] is an example of this. The poem
explicates in the name of the generation born after 1949 a "distorted
conscience" and points out that "what's left of my heart/Is a vast expanse
of wasteland" (stanza one). Interestingly, however, it does not intervene
on behalf of the ego against the historical process (arrest, execution, etc.)
laid out in the second stanza, since that would be a privatization of the
"tragedy." It is more important, on behalf of others, after "overthrowing
one doctrine after another" (stanza one), to work for the future "so that
innocent children a hundred years from now/ Won't have to guess the
meaning of the history we left behind" (stanza three).
An abstracted historical process through which the subject becomes
object can be seen in the poems "Qiang" [The wall] and "Liushuixian" [The
assembly line]. "The Wall" establishes the dialectic unity of subject and
object-the ego and the wall-<Jf insignificance and necessity and of
adjustment and exploitation. The non-ego, the wall, is experienced as a part
of the body, as "my aging skin" (stanza two), equally sensitive to good and
evil. The insignificance of the self as plantain or "parasite" in the "sandy
cracks" of the wall defines the necessity of the wall as that inability to
"resist"; the parasitic self continues an existence that is not self-determined
and allows the other, the non-ego, the "wall", to be what it is. (Interestingly,
the second stanza introduces a cognitive process rather than the an-
ticipated notion of resistance against the wall's "tentacles.") Fleeing the
pressure to conform, the ego sees that the rest of the world is in its situation.
Thus, in the last stanza it concludes, apparently paradoxically, that it is not
alone or homeless. However, because the pressure to conform affects the
146 Wolfgang Kubin

whole society, the ego feels comfortable wherever people suffer being
pushed aside and learn to resist.
In the poem "The Assembly Line" this abstraction of subject into
object takes on existential dimensions. The entire existence of things and
people is represented as an assembly line, and life, natural and social, as
monotony, loss, sickness-an aspect that has a universal character, both
spacially and temporally. The poem speaks of "stars" and "thousands of
years," transcending the here and now and thus denying all historical
development. The conditions "now" were the conditions "once," that is to
say the conditions "per se;" the ego is only aware of changes that are
recognizably a worsening of sicknesses in others. The ego has lost all feeling
for its own body and there are no more recognizable changes in its trans-
formation to an object. It is thus the vanguard of the social condition. The
radical reading of the poem, unparalleled in modern Chinese feminine
literature, has been under attack since the piece was published. 13
Even so, in Shu Ting's poetry the world is somewhat more than the
experience of limitation, as three further poems from A Two-Masted Ship
show. Also, her work provides a feeling of unity, which manifests itself in
the physical world. The theme is nature, the essential idea that of restraint.
In "Riguangyan ... " [Bougainvillea on a sunny rock], which is about flowers
that grow on Shu Ting's veranda, the poet forwards her notion that "the
most limited nourishment/ offers the richest self." And in "Xianghui"
[Meeting] the sea makes it possible to do without the body's freedom while
yet physically experiencing the sea. The way through nature to the sea
requires a division of the self. The body feels itself only because it is divided.
But when the division is understood to be passing it ends, and the "rescue"
of the body in the sea becomes possible. This idea is expressed as a new
beginnin} in a time of decline and decadence in the poem "Luoye" [Falling
leaves], l and here it is nature that lives out of the body.

13 See Xinhua wenzhai 4 (1981): 199; Zhu Xujun, "Zhenqing, bu gai liushi renxin de
shamo Ii" [frue feelings shouldn't flow into the desert of the heart] in Dangdai wenyi sichao
5 (1983): 47 (defense of the poem against criticism); Wang Zhaubo "Quanquan nilerxin.
Tan Shu Ting de shi ... " [The serious heart of a woman. On Shu Ting's poetry ...] inDangdai
wenyi sichao 6 (1984): 115 (a defense of the poem against Zhou Liangshi).
14Translated in Renditions 10 & 20 (1983): 246. Dangdai wenxue falsely attributes this
poem to Yang Lian.
 Writing with your Body 147

Nailed to the Cross of Poetry

For My Mother in the North

I am nailed
to the cross of my poetry
So I can end a fable
So I can surrenger to an ideal
The sky, the Milky Way and the mountains
Have chosen me
To carry the heavy burden
So I take my heart
And hold it high in my hands
The heart pierced a thousand times
By sorrow and gladness
The heart that opens and shuts endlessly
In anger and expectation!
The heart purified and clarified
For the sake of freedom and pride!
My heart
Watched from every angle
Shines in all the colors of the rainbow

But I am tired Mother

Lay your hand
On my feverish brow

I have offered
The blossoms of my sorrow
Even if they were despised and trampled in the mud
I have offered my original innocence
Even if it was dirtied, clouded by doubt
Pure and shy I stretch out my hands
and ask all who are departing
To turn around
I do not try to hide my weakness
My flowing hair is a part of the world now too
Red houses, old banyan trees, the lights of the fishermen in the bay
Arrange themselves as words in my eyes
The words recall sounds
Which spill out in waves all around
To touch the souls not yet affected

But I am tired Mother

Lay your hand
On my feverish brow

The sun caresses me

It flows into my thin shoulders
Wind and rain weather me
148 Wolfgang Kubin

Take the childishness from my face

I am nailed on
the cross of my poetry
So all invocations, even sung in chorus
Shall fall like starry rain upon my body
So the condor, as divine retribution
Shall return daily to peck at my guts
I do not belong to myself I belong
To the fable
To the ideal
If to no one else
They have let me turn to stone
Life
Blessed by my songs
Will open the closed blinds leaf by leaf
And the bougainvillea, which cannot turn back
Will open

Even if I'm tired, Mother

Help me
To stand up front

Maple Leaf

On the side of a mountain

At the edge of a forest
With a soft hand
Picked up
This leaf-shaped heart
Perhaps not even melancholy
It only bears the scars of the dew

It stirs in me
A sunset, a treelined street
Twilight, which tender lips
falling into silence
Wafted so lightly from my shoulder
But today, returned to me
It's enormously heavy

I can deny this maple leaf

Deny it, as if brushing off a tender hand
But now with every gust of wind
I turn my head unwillingly
And see you helpless, shivering at the end of a branch
 Writing with your Body 149

WORKS CITED
Shu Ting, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng Shixuan [Selected poems by Shu Ting and Gu
Cheng]. Fuzhou: Fujian renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1982.
Meyer, Rupprecht, trans., Shu Ting. Zwischen Wlinden. Modeme Chinesische Lyrik. Munich:
Simon & Magiera, 1984.
Abel, Elizabeth, Writing and Sexual Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
KiOpsch, VOlker and Roderick Ptak. Hoffnung auf Frahling. Moderne Chinesische
Erzlihlungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980.
Slupski, Zbigniew, ed.,A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900-1949. Leiden: Brill, 1988.
Kubin, Wolfgang, Nachlrichten von der HauplStadt der Sonne. Modeme Chinesisiche
Literatur. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.
Hegel, Robert E. and Richard C. Hessney, eds.Expression ofSelf in Chinese Literature. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Shu Ting, Shuangweichuan [A two-masted ship]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenxue chubanshe,
1982.
Stephan, Inge and Siegfried Weigel. Feministische Literaturwissenschaft. Argument Sonder-
band 120. Berlin: 1980.58.

GLOSSARY

AiWu
:3t.
bei ;ft
cheng Jli..
chenlun it1t
chuantong gainian
~it"~

..
damo k,f-
dongchuan fJJjf
"Fengye" " "
fucong .. it
gandong ~fJJ
geqian 4ta1 ~l
GuCheng ,jJi~
"Jiaoshi yu dengbiao"
"Kuizeng"
" .J,#,;G
~,
*'
ff JI\t"
*f: # "

"Liushuxian" " ,'1;: ~~

1JIr..1'fJ ,n:. "
~

"Luoye" " "It."

"Muqin" " -It I.! "
150 Wolfgang Kubin

"Nan xingji" " .tJ 4t ie. "

"Qiang" ";Ii"
qin'ai de zuguo itt{fJ~1fJ
"Riguangyan" "a ;t~"
Rongshu congkan {( ¢ jj- • f,J )}
ruanruo .tt~
Shu Ting -it.jf
shupi
*14
tongku 1IlX.
"Xianghui" " :f1:1-t"
"Yexu" " .t.1t-"
"Yichan" "it,&."
"Yidairen de husheng" "-~A.~'t~"
youshang 1:11
yuyan
"Zai shige de shizijia shang" ,,-t #~ ~ -t- -f ~J:."
"Zeng" ,,.It''
"Zuguo ya" " i! 1I 11,f "
Harmony and Equality:
Notes on "Mimosa" and "Ark"
Chen Yu-shih

In the Chinese world order, the concept of harmony has played a

central role in philosophy, socio-political institutions, moral values and
literary-aesthetic ideals. "Family" before the twentieth century served as a
paradigm of harmony. People and their deeds appeared as good or as bad
in various literary discourses to the extent that they contributed to or
obstructed the harmony of a "family." Since in a tightly organized space
like the family the criterion of "goodness" is relatively simple to establish
("good" is what maintains the family hierarchy), the judgement of what
constitutes a good man and a good deed, a bad man and a bad deed, is also
relatively simple to establish. Namely, a good man is one who upholds the
family or family-like order, the bad one a person who opposes or disrupts
it. Thus, if we subsume "family" as the paradigm, the law linking harmony-
order-goodness in the Chinese frame of moral and political thinking be-
comes very immediate, logical, necessary and self-evident.
This law of necessary linkages between various forms of "good"-
good man, good deed, good words, and (in the People's Republic of China)
good class origin-has been, nonetheless, sorely challenged and subverted
in a number of recent works. Gao Xiaosheng's "Diejiao yinyun" [Falling
into a marriage]1 and Shui Yuanxian's "Zhenpo anwailu" [Unofficial
record of a criminal investigationf are two instances in which the law of
necessary linkage between good man/good deed and bad man/bad deed is
not only breached but shown to be absurd and oppressive.
In Gao Xiaosheng's story, for instance, the two protagonists, a man
and a woman, meet completely by chance. They then become man and wife
in deed to the express disapproval of their superiors. Every attempt is made
to separate the two for the communal good. But they simply cannot stay
away from one another. Punished and publicly disgraced, the two now
"bad" characters persist in their "bad" relationship. Years pass. A child is
born. History changes its course. They marry. The "goodness" and "bad-
ness" of their previous behavior simply becomes a non-issue.
Shui Yuanxian tells a story about a museum burglary. Many valuable
items have been stolen, an official investigation ordered. Yet even when
the investigation employs the full battery of investigative methods per-
fected during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution-using, for in-
t Huacheng 5 (1984): 195-212,137.
2 Huacheng5 (1984): 124-164.
152 Chen Yu-shih

stance, good or bad class origin and ideological allegiance as clues to

pinpoint suspects-it leads nowhere. The villain turns out to be a mere
petty thief, his political stature totally disproportionate to the seriousness
of his crime. There was no grand conspiracy against the State. Rather, the
theft was merely the coming together of a host of accidental factors.
By breaking the link between good men and good deeds, bad men and
bad deeds, the two stories problematize the law sustaining the discourse of
moral necessity and harmony in the community. Both demonstrate that bad
deeds in real-life situations, like the museum theft, are not necessarily
conceived and carried out by bad persons only. Moreover, good intentions
on the part of good persons, as "Falling into a Marriage" suggests, may not
necessarily develop into good deeds_ The argument then naturally presents
itself: zestful revolutionaries do not necessarily serve revolutionary goals,
"good" class origin is not necessary proof of good behavior. Sometimes life
is just too full to be contained by a simplistic law of good and bad. When
the gap between the two grows too wide, life has a tendency to continue
its own course, totally dismaying the breached law.
Zhang Xianliang's 1983 story "Liihua shu" [Mimosa]3 and Zhang lie's
"Fangzhou" [Ark],4 published in 1981, are two striking examples of how
life challenges the simple law with the elemental force of sheer existence_
"Mimosa" articulates the challenge in the form of the protagonist's intel-
lectual reflection on the process of labor-reform, and "Ark" exposes the
mechanism with which women are made to submit to the law even against
their own conviction of what constitutes their own well-being.
In "Mimosa," the protagonist Zhang Yonglin, a "petty bourgeois
intellectual," was sentenced to do hard labor at a labor-reform farm.
Theoretically speaking, this labor was supposed to have a cleansing effect
on his class background. In time, it should cleanse him of all his petty
bourgeois habits and consciousness and bring him closer to the proletariat.
Zhang Yonglin, being an intellectual and avid reader of Marx, cannot help
reflecting on the material (as opposed to the theoretical) aspect of this
reform process. Materially speaking, the labor reform places him at a level
of living that is below subsistence. There never is enough food to eat and
no provision is made for his sexual needs. Everything in his immediate
environment apparently wants to reduce him as a human being to the two
most basic animal instincts "food" and "sex." How then should he go about
transcending his own animal instincts and find an inner base for the
beginning construction of a "proletarian" class consciousness? Is there

3 Ganqing de Iicheng [A sentimental journey] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1985) 131-181.

Trans. Gladys Yang; Mimosa (Beijing: Panda Books, 1985).
4 ZhangJieji (Fuzhou: Haixia wenyi chubanshe, 1986). Trans. Stephen Hallet in Gladys
Yang, ed. Love Must Not Be Forgotten, San Francisco, China Books and Periodicals, 1986,
pp. 133-202.
 Harmony and Equality 153

something in a "proletarian" way of relating to these instinctual needs-

"food," "sex"-that differs from his petit bourgeois way?
First Zhang Yonglin thinks over the question of a man's relationship
to his own instinct for "food." How, he considers, can a man transcend that
instinct and re-shape that relationship into the basis of his class identity?
To Zhang, food represents nature and, at the level of physical survival,
"food" represents a relationship between man and Nature such that Nature
provides the source offood or sustenance for humans. In order to go beyond
the level of consumption for survival, to raise man's relationship with
Nature above instinctual gratification, deprivation and want are not the
spurs.
This causes him to reflect, in chapter twenty-nine, on the very process
of "reform" itself.

The so-called reform of a person has as its pre-requisites the reform

of the natural environment by that person, reform of his level of existence
in that external physical environment. The reform of man is no more than
what nature and society feed back to man in the process of his attempt
at reforming nature and his social environment ....
In the past four years, because I have been incessantly reforming
my external environment which is nature, I myself am also undergoing a
reform. But my own reform is not a conscious process. I can even say that
it has been an absurd process. I have been forced to adopt a primitive
and barbaric means to reform nature. As a consequence, I almost got
myself reformed into a primitive and barbaric man ....
My experience has already proven that human potential is bound-
less and mindboggling. Only death is its limit. Regrettably, before I have
learned how to think about this reform process reflectively, what is being
released from inside me [i.e., from my potential as a human being] is only
an [animal] instinct for survival.... (155)

In his attempt to understand the mechanism of labor-reform, what it

is supposed to accomplish, Zhang Yonglin relentlessly, doggedly, measures
and weighs the distance between the gratification of man's instinct for
survival and the starting point of his "class consciousness." With regard to
the instinct for "food," Zhang's thinking is fairly clear and straightforward.
Nature is man's source offood; if, however, man merely uses Nature as a
food source to gratify need and survive, then his consciousness remains at
the level of animal instinct. On man's sexual instinct Zhang's thinking
becomes more confused and less clear.
Chapter twenty-nine also finds Zhang's thoughts turning to Mimosa,
the woman who had not only freely offered him food but was also available
as a means to gratify his sex need. How should Zhang confront the
relationship with Mimosa? It does not fit into his earlier formulation that
reforming the self is part of the process of reforming external Nature and
reforming the social environment. In the following passage Zhang's
154 Chen Yu-shih

thoughts vacillate between woman as Nature and woman as un-structured

cultural object in his effort to position the relationship.

I do not want her to be aware of the gap between herself and myself that
is created by the books I read, a gap that does not lend itself to levelling.
I cannot explain it, but I feel that the awareness will destroy her, and it
will also destroy the intoxicating pleasure I am experiencing at this very
moment. I suddenly feel that at this moment, I am in a dream-like
mystical realm which comes upon a person only rarely in life - concepts
in economic theories and the life of man, rationality and emotions,
crystallized wisdom and passionate urges, austere reality and dreams
transcending time and space, a life of utter destitution and splendorous
imagination, full of life ... they all roll into one ... (156)

This moment of insight was almost an epiphany to Zhang Yonglin, a

movement of penetrating intellectual revelation during which he saw with
unprecedented lucidity that his relationship to Mimosa was completely
fluid, that there was no necessary structure to it, and that he was, in fact,
free to choose his own modality of structuring that relationship.
Traditionally, one mode that men and women in similar circumstances
have related to each other has been similar to the situation Zhang en-
counters with Mimosa. A standard narrative involved the upper-class man
who met adversity and was rescued by a woman of lower social origin; as
soon as he was out of trouble he immediately entertained the notion that
he should "possess" her sexually. At one time Zhang Yonglin had con-
sidered that traditional modality of relationship between man and woman
and had wondered to himself the degree to which it represented the man's
"gratitude" and to what degree knowing or unknowing appropriation of
the material resources represented by the other (136). Faced with the
discrepancy in social standing between himself and Mimosa, he wondered
what would happen if he applied Marx's theories of "use value and ex-
change value" to men's relations to emotion and sex (143-61).5 Could
sexual love become a part of the discourse "economic theories"? of
"rationality"? of "crystallized wisdom"? of "austere reality"? or should it
be consigned to the discourse of "life," "passionate urges," of "dreams
transcending time and space"? How, he muses, do civilizations negotiate
social order between these two sets of discourse?
"Mimosa," being a work of fiction, did not come up with an answer.
The author resolved the problem through the machinery of chance (Zhang

S In these four chapters, twenty-seven through thirty, Zhang Yonglin discoursed

extensively on the concepts of "freedom" and "equality" in the theories of the "use value"
and "exchange value" of commodities in Capital. His reflection on his relationship with
Mimosa was couched in the context of this discourse. Since he did understand "labor" as a
commodity (146), it seems reasonable to infer that Mimosa's services to him, including her
emotional investment, can also be considered forms of "labor."
 Harmony and Equality 155

Yonglin was transferred to another labor station) and thus rendered the
matter beside the point. Mimosa recedes into Zhang's recollections, a
pleasure once experienced, a memory to savor on moonlit nights.
The question, however, remains. If, in order to rise above the level of
animal existence and begin constructing civilized order, man is to conquer,
control, manage and distribute "nature as source for food," does this also
mean that man is to do the same with regard to "woman as source for sex"
(and other related needs )-that the civilized order makes it an economic
necessity and hence a moral imperative that man conquer, control, manage,
and distribute women as a free resource, like nature? How is the one sex,
Man, to legitimize or transcend this conquest and control relationships
vis-a-vis the other sex, Woman?
Zhang Xianliang continued to reflect on this problematic aspect of
the foundation of the man-woman relationship in an emerging new (i.e.,
proletarian) social order in Nanren de yiban shi nuren [Half of man is
woman].6 But the problematics shifted in the later novel. In Half the
problem is no longer one of whether it is necessary for man to conquer,
control, manage and distribute women in order to transcend his animal
existence and enter into a new social order. That question is already
subsumed. The problematic now is one of technique and legitimation: how
or by what technique can man most efficiently appropriate woman as
resource so that he may transform himself into a subject in the emerging
social order. Once made, the shift makes economic necessity one with
moral necessity, and the relation of man to woman-no longer between
man and woman-becomes one of man's balancing his "economic
theories" with his "life as a man," his "rationality" and his "emotions," his
"crystallized wisdom" with his "passionate urges," and his "austere reality"
with his "dreams of transcending time and space." The technique of
balance, which the novel's denouement illustrates, transforms all issues
concerning women into economic issues related to men's construction of
themselves as subject. When Zhang Yonglin finally succeeds in legitimating
leaving Huang Xiangjiu, sexual love has ceased to be a definitive feature
in his relationship to women and has become, instead, part of the balance
he has to acquire in order to leave the labor-reform farm and enter the
emerging new social order. The political economy of that balance, insofar
as women were concerned, required that she remain at the level of natural
resource, ever ready to be transferred, at a moment's notice, from one end
of the balance scale to the other. That is, Huang Xiangjiu gets transferred
at the end of One Half of Man is Woman from the "emotion" and "pas-
sionate urges" end of Zhang Yongling's internal scale to the "rationality"
and "austere reality" end.

6 Ganqing di licheng 200-420.

156 Chen Yu-shih

Zhang Jie's "Ark" portrays the life style of three women who actively
defy the rules of the very balance Zhang Xianliang's novel sets out. They
undermine the political economy that controls the way they live and
fragments their lives into ever-shifting moments as the "others" of men,
the other "halves" of an alien and instrumental sexual economy. They
subvert the moral and economic laws of necessity in sex matters just as the
actors subvert law in "Falling into a Marriage" and "Unofficial Record of
a Criminal Investigation." The compelling point in Zhang Jie's story is that
what is "good behavior" for the three women in "Ark" has no more
necessary connection to their well-being than good class origin has to good
deeds and good personality in the other two works in question here. In
"Ark" what is good in a woman and what is good for a woman are set
completely at war with each other.
The three women protagonists, Cao Jinghua, Liu Quan, and Liang
Qian, are either divorced or living separately from their mates. One has a
child living with her, another a child living elsewhere out of necessity
because of inadequate housing. Their jointly managed apartment space
little conforms to the traditional home-and-hearth image of conventional
domestic bliss. Crises await them constantly at the doorstep, and the ways
they confront them are uneconomical, discordant, immoral-at least from
the point of view of the men they're involved with. There is not a clean
glass to be found in their apartment when someone wants a glass of water.
Dirty dishes pile up in the kitchen sink. Cao Jinghua is preoccupied with
her dangerously controversial articles she insists on writing and publishing.
Liang Qian is forever dotting her speech with phrases like "son-of-a-bitch,"
''fuckers,'' and thus throwing the going code of acceptable language for
good women to the winds. Their lives are perpetual struggle. But they are
not dependent on men for a living, and have no qualms about getting locked
into prolonged fights with men when occasion demands it. When they are
defeated in these struggles, scenes like the following appear.

"How is your fIlm doing?" Jinghua asked.

Liang Qian cast a glance at them, not knowing whether it was better
to break the bad news to them or not.
"Forget it, forget it. Let's not talk about it, let's not talk about it."
She started to pull things out of her knapsack.
"Clang!" A bottle of beer landed on the small table.
"Clang!" Another bottle of beer landed on the small table.
"Clang! Clang!" Altogether four bottles of beer .... She put all her
heart and mind into opening those packages large and small that she
pulled out of the knapsack. She popped a piece of chicken gizzard into
her mouth, and chewed it with a vengeance.
It fell through! Jinghua could see at once.
"Why?"
"Who knows what the fuck why?" Liang Qian kicked at the stool.
"That boss named Wu said, 'I say, eh - how come that worker snored so
 Harmony and Equality 157

loudly in his sleep? Isn't this a deliberate attempt to make our working
class look bad? ...
"Bastard!"
"Then he said, 'How come the leading lady has such pointed tits?
Are they real or padded? Eh? If they're padded, then, I see in the
padding a serious problem of ideological consciousness. It needs to be
addressed. It could be pornographic, eh? If it is not to incite our young
people to go astray, tell me what is it for? We must not start turning out
pornographic movies, isn't that right? Comrade Liang Qian?'
"I said that if you want to know if the tits are real or artificial, why
not investigate? All you have to do is to feel them with your hand."
"Tits too pointed, my foot. Is it a crime now to have pointed tits?
People just have tits like that. Do you want her to slice a piece off? ...."
(198-99)

Such language, to be sure, represents a reckless transgression of the

law of linkage governing good language, good behavior and good women.
However, it is clear that however improper the language is, the impropriety
is not an intrinsic part of the speaker's character. Rather, it is a manifesta-
tion of what may happen when social obstacles are placed in the way of the
development of a woman's "human potential."
Zhang lie shows in her portrayal of three single women in "Ark" the
things women may do and say when they have learned to persist in their
efforts to develop their own potential as human beings; these are things
that women before them have not done or said. In that sense, "Ark" is a
work of art that creates new social and linguistic space for women. Cao
linghua, Liu Quan, and Liang Qian have each in their own way put into
practice what Zhang Yongling in "Mimosa" reflects on as the "reform" of
one's self, i.e., "one can hope to reform oneself only at the same time as
s/he is reforming nature and the social environment."
In striving to take their fair share of time, sOCial space, and material
resources necessary to carry out their reform, Cao, Liu, and Liang have
completely problematized a social balance that rests on, indeed could not
continue without, their availability as "nature." In so doing they have also
raised unsettling questions about an ethics and aesthetics that can only
speak of women in a language of "natural" roles. For if the goal of Zhang
lie's three protagonists is equal development of their potentials as human
beings, then their joint story in "Ark" makes it eminently clear that
"equality" cannot be accommodated inside theories that privilege
economics and family.
There are, admittedly, in "Ark," piles of dirty dishes. They seem to
bear daily witness to the lopsided, disorderly, and aesthetically unappealing
life style of the three unwomanly women. However, we must see a basic
difference between the dirty dishes that pile up in the kitchen sink of" Ark"
and other piles of dirty dishes elsewhere. The dishes in "Ark," one may
158 Chen Yu-shih

note, exist outside of a language system that controls who is thought of as

the natural person to wash them. Similarly, the household that Cao, Liu
and Liang manage also differs from the paradigmatic family, invariably
featuring a household organized around "natural" division oflabor by sex.
Cao, Liu, and Liang have no "natural" division of labor. From first to last,
we find in "Ark" no instance in which anyone of them attempts to obstruct
the pursuit or aspirations of another: there is no domination. What is
revealed finally in "Ark," like what is finally clear in "Mimosa," is a series
of questions bearing on the most fundamental law governing human rela-
tions beyond the level of animal instincts. From "Mimosa" and "Ark" we
require little theoretical sophistication to see that in human relations other
forms of oppression can exist over and above class oppression. Even in
theory, the elimination of class difference is no necessary guarantee against
oppression legitimized by natural gender difference.
 Three Interviews:
Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai Ding
Wang Zheng

Introduction
I interviewed three Chinese women writers in the late summer and
early fall of 1988 as I travelled in Shanghai and Beijing. Wang Anyi I
contacted through Ru Zhijuan, who is her mother. Wang has no phone but
does live close by her mother's place. Wang Anyi's husband called me to
say that the writer would be delighted to have me visit her and set the date.
When I met with her Wang Anyi explained that she'd asked him to call so
that she would not have to go out looking for a phone booth. Zhu Lin I
contacted by mail. She called, obviously from a phone booth, right after
getting my letter. Dai Qing, who did have a home phone, and the other
writers all demonstrated their eagerness to talk with me by their prompt
responses and welcome. As I was totally unknown to them I can only
attribute this warm reception to the fact that I was a Chinese scholar
studying abroad in the U.S.A and that the interviews were to be published
here.
I interviewed Wang Anyi at her home. Dressed simply in a white
blouse and flowered skirt, she looked very young, younger than I expected.
Her two-room apartment would be the envy of many young Shanghai
couples and was small, but quite neat. We started talking at the dinner table
in the bedroom. I liked her instantly. She was frank, outgoing and sincere,
and she talked in such a fresh way that it reminded me of my innocent years
as a young student. She hadn't a bit of worldliness at all. I felt it difficult to
connect all the influential novels Wang has produced with the young
student-like writer before me.
As Zhu Lin lives outside Shanghai, she decided to come to my
residence for the interview when she had other errands to run in the city.
I was quite surprised when she appeared with a man whom she introduced
as her friend and former editor. She explained that they had some other
appointments together and that she had brought him along. As it turned
out Zhao Yuanzhen is virtually her spokesman. I would ask a question, Zhu
Lin would pause, and Zhao Yuanzhen would offer his answer. I tried hard
to engage Zhu Lin in conversation and to hint that I was more interested
in what she had to say and not really in his responses. But the man obviously
felt he was speaking on her behalf and that he could get her ideas across
better than she could. It both frustrated me and piqued my curiosity. Why
did she grant him such a superior position? Didn't she feel that by relying
on a man in this interview she was sending mixed messages? She seemed
160 Wang Zheng

to me to trust him as a close friend in spite of the fact that he boasted

constantly about his contributions to her success. But he thwarted my every
plan and the interview includes him; it is thus a three-way and not a two-way
conversation.
I met Dai Qing at her office at the Guangming Newspaper Building
where she works as a professional journalist. She shares her rather small
office with several others who drifted in and out during the interview. Dai
Qing did not mind at all and probably even welcomed their knowing all
about her interviewer from America and the American who'd come along
to take pictures of her. In her early forties, and thus older than both Wang
Anyi or Zhu Lin, Dai Qing was courageous, upright, extroverted, and very
articulate. She spoke exuberantly and, I felt, with a strong sense of mission.
She attracted me very much, and the impression she made on me was of a
revolutionary rather than a writer. Certainly she is both.
I will leave it to readers to interpret the similarities and differences
separating the three writers whose conversations appear here. Suffice it to
say that I enjoyed meeting with each of these various but equally strong-
willed women.

INTERVIEW WITH WANG ANYI, August 1, 1988

W.Z. Do you write about female life experience and female psychology
consciously or do you not consider the fact of gender in your work?
W.A I think this is quite a complicated question. Maybe I write about
gender unconsciously.
W.Z. When you are composing your stories, do you think that because
you are a woman you want to express things "from a woman's
perspective" or experience?
W.A No. Maybe when I experience things I already do that from a female
perspective. But I do not consciously think that since I'm a woman
I should write any special way. Nonetheless, I am actually very
interested in women. Perhaps I am putting myself in a position that
angers both men and women. That is, I do not feel excessive
sympathy with women nor do I feel that they are particularly
unfortunate. I am interested in women's weaknesses and strengths.
I think that women playa great role in determining their own fate
and actually that women are more worth studying then men.
W.Z. Why is that?
W.A It's very complicated. Perhaps in China it is particularly compli-
cated. In China, women always appear in an image of weakness,
obeying the will of another person. In fact, women are strong and
 Three Interviews 161

use this means of obedience to reach an end that involves conquest.

We can see the point in our literary images. Pan Jinlian exemplifies
the contradiction and tragedy of Chinese women. She used
obedience as a means to reach her end, which was possession. But
in her possession of Ximen Qing she actually failed. To possess him
she played endless tricks. On the other hand, Pan Jinlian also
endured humiliation. She pos~ Ximen Qingyet lost him in the
end. The fate of Chinese women is very strange. I don't quite
believe that women totally sacrifice themselves for men. When
women sacrifice themselves for men they already have some
cherished utilitarian aim. Most women's life scope is very narrow.
If they want to consolidate their position in society, or gain some-
thing socially, they must rely on men. That is the torturous offense
to society.
W.Z. What do you think of contemporary women?
W.A I have come into contact with two kinds of women in the main:
intellectual women and so-called "indecent" women-women who
have no decent jobs, who stand around in front of hotels and fool
with men or prostitute themselves. Don't feel contempt for them.
Most have ideals in life and dream of something higher than the
sky. Last month, I went to a female prisoner's reformatory farm.
Most of the women there are imprisoned for prostitution. Lots of
them did it to secure a happy life.
W.Z. Not for money?
W.A Money was one element. Without money you cannot live that kind
of life. It's complicated. They simply do not want to fall into the
fate of common female factory workers, crushed each day on the
bus, with a tiny little pay packet every month and then to make
everything worse, getting saddled with a baby. They don't want
their lives to fall that low and that I think is very normal. Many of
them are the most ambitious among us.
W.Z How old are they?
W.A Between twenty-five and thirty-five.
W.Z. So you think they just made a choice about how to live?
W.A Yes, I think so. Certainly some women become prostitutes because
of personal experiences.
W.Z. What do you think of intellectual women?
162 Wang Zheng

W.A Intellectual women have already acquired a tool. They may attack
society on their own and they already have an established place in
society. But most women do not have the opportunity to confront
society directly, so often they use roundabout means, such as
conquering men. I think that women who sacrifice themselves
serving their men so they can concentrate on passing graduate
examinations is a rather ugly sight. It isn't base, certainly. Such
women aren't really committed to the men but just use them to get
to their own goals in a rather tortuous and roundabout way. Of
course, another factor is women's feelings. But I think that most
women love in a utilitarian way. Maybe it's because women have
fewer opportunities for social achievement, to compete and make
career choices. Anyway, I think that women are worth studying.
When there are only two people, a man and a woman, Chinese men
actually seem very weak. In fact the Chinese man is passive but likes
to think of himself as aggressive.
W.Z. Could you give me a concrete example?
W.A When a woman treats a man extremely nicely, the man becomes
complacent. He hasn't the vaguest suspicion that he has already
become her tool.
w.z. It would appear that you regard women as objects for study. As a
woman yourself would you say you have any "gender conscious-
ness"?
W.A I don't often think of my gender. The profession I chose suits me
well. Perhaps this choice was conditioned by my gender. This
profession provides freedom as it does not have strict time regula-
tion, something I don't like. I have never lived that kind of life
except in elementary school since right after the Cultural Revolu-
tion began. I don't like living a nine-to-five work life. I think it is
inhuman, particularly for women. Going to work at eight o'clock,
and leaving work at five, crushes imagination. My profession is free,
which suits my temperament. I can freely arrange my time and
imagine freely. My home can be my front. I like family life. It's
peaceful.
W.Z. Do you write at home?
W.A I always write at home. Sometimes the Writers Association arran-
ges trips, places for me to visit and stay. But once out, my imagina-
tion vanishes. Then I must return home to write.
W.z. You lived with your parents before your husband was transferred
to Shanghai?
 Three Interviews 163

W.A Yes. I like both big family life and nuclear family life. I always want
to go home. Perhaps this represents a great inertia in me.
w.z. Are you burdened by family? Here I'm thinking of housework.
W.A Now in my nuclear family I do housework. I like it.
W.Z. How do you two share the housework?
W.A I do most of it. He rides a bike so he is responsible for shopping
and for washing clothes. But nothing seems to get clean when he
does it because he doesn't wash thoroughly. I do the cooking and
cleaning since I work at home.
W.Z. You don't have children, which makes a big difference in terms of
housework. Don't you want a child? What does he think?
W.A Neither of us wants children. We are one on this point. We are used
to the life of two. Adding a third would make us uncomfortable.
Probably I lack femininity. I don't like to waste my time and energy
on others. Perhaps when it is your own child you don't think this
way. But if I did have a child, I am sure I'd feel a lot of grievances.
I think I can develop myself now. Plus my present life is free from
care. I don't like cares and worries. Too much emotion is a burden.
Emotional life is already a burden for me. Father, mother and
others, although they don't pressure me directly, still their emotion
itself is burdensome. Suppose you are alone, then you can go
wherever you want. Of course, I don't go anywhere now, but the
reason is that I cannot leave this home.
W.Z. Were you to have a chance to go abroad for six months, what would
you do?
W.A I would feel very hesitant. Last time I went to the United States for
six months I felt miserable and homesick. And then I was there with
my mother!
W.Z. You don't want children. But do you like children?
W.A When I see kids, I like them very much. I just don't want to serve
them. Maybe I am really selfish or at the least individualistic. These
days my sister's child has been staying with us. It is a rather unac-
customed experience for the two of us. Usually when we come
home, we do our own things first, like drinking a glass of water or
washing up and so on. But now I have to help the child to a drink
and wash-up first. She becomes number one. We are used to
regarding ourselves as the center attractions. It is hard for us when
there are others involved.
164 Wang Zheng

W.z. When unpleasant things happen to you, do you see them as related
to your gender?
W.A Sometimes. I should expand the range of my activities. I have many
plans and I want to do some surveying and research. But I simply
cannot leave home. My husband would be alone. He'd be too lonely
and would have to eat at my mother's. So I reached an agreement
with him. He lets me go when there is an opportunity to visit a
foreign country because such opportunities are rare. But activities
at home, such as conferences, I give up if I can. So this year I have
been abroad several times but I have not been to places I want to
visit at home. I've never even been to Xi'an. No one believes it. I
have only just recently been to Beijing. This is virtually a restriction
and it is related to my personality structure. I like quiet and always
long for home. If I were a man, I could go freely. But I don't like
to move. Even when it is a nearby place, I have to pluck up my
courage to make a decision. It's really bad. I know that if I went out
more, I'd definitely write better. I think it's because my life scope
is basically urban.
W.Z. Have you any plans to write a novel about women?
W.A My work usually has female characters. In my recently published
collection, I write about female love and psychology. In a novelette
published this year, I tell a story about a couple and my focus is on
the woman. In this world, when a story happens, there are usually
two protagonists, a man and a woman. There are maybe exceptions.
Both men and women have unavoidable responsibilities. I am more
concerned with the responsibilities on the woman's part. Perhaps
I do this unconsciously. Because I am a woman, it is easy for me to
understand.
W.Z. Do you treat women with sympathy or comment on them objec-
tively.
W.A I neither sympathize nor comment on them. I just try my best to
analyze them. I feel that sympathy is cheap. I used to have sympathy
in my work but in retrospect I find those works rather petit bour-
geois.
W.Z. In view of your contact with and analysis of women, what do you
think is the prominent problem facing Chinese women?
W.A Foreigners and people in Hong Kong have often asked me if I am
a feminist. When I say no, they get angry. Have you any idea what
feminism is, they say? Perhaps they thought that I was denying
point-blank because I did not actually know if I was a feminist. It
 Three Interviews 165

appears that they would very much like me to be a feminist. But I

really am not. According to their understanding, one of the
premises of feminism is to deny the distinction between men and
women. They think that women and men are the same. Women can
do whatever men are able to do. Difference is entirely socially
constructed. I even heard about a theory that in ancient times men
and women had the same physical strength.
I think China is tragic. In China women are only now beginning to
have the right, the luxury to talk about the differences between
men and women, to enjoy something that distinguishes women
from men. That is the reason I absolutely deny that I am a feminist.
I have a great aversion to that sort of feminism.
W.Z. You mean the theory that denies the distinction between men and
women?
W.A Right. I think it's unnatural. People who hold such views will
certainly taste bitter fruit soon.
W.Z. Where did you get this understanding offeminism?
W.A The people who questioned me about my being a feminist told me
about it.
W.Z. Have you ever read any books on this topic?
W.A I don't read much in translation. I don't know any foreign languages
and there is always a distance between the original and translations.
W.Z. So your understanding of feminism is derived mainly from the talk
of other people?
W.A Yes. Also I met some western feminists. In 1983, I met a delegation
of American women writers. The group was full of feminists. I
found it scary. They always emphasized women's rights and
women's liberation. They kept asking me, what problems have you
women had? How have men oppressed you? Probably feminism
occurs in higher-level societies. In our country, now the problems
men and women face together are very grave and they cover many
petty problems.
W.Z. I agree. In our country the problems men and women confront in
common are much graver than the problems between women and
men.
W.A Besides, I think that some of the problems that appear to involve
contradictions between men and women are in essence common
problems. For instance, the American feminists often asked why
166 Wang Zheng

we only want boys and not girls. As a matter of fact, the preference
is far less acute in big cities like Shanghai. Only places that have a
very backward level of production have this sort of situation. It is
related to the mode of production, which is a problem shared by
both men and women. What is more, we have just encountered
differences between men and women; we lived without such a
difference for such a long time.
W.Z. You mean that after Liberation the differences between men and
women were simply not mentioned?
W.A Yes.
W.Z. You look with favor on sexual difference, then?
W.A I think things move in waves. We are riding a brand new wave now.
For example, now we have cosmetics. If you were to say that women
shouldn't wear make-up and should be the same as men, that just
wouldn't do now. They should let us Chinese have this period of
recognizing sex differences, let women enjoy their cosmetics. Later
we may abandon such things. Although the feminism of Americans
is surging, in ten or twenty years they will come together with the
rest. That is the history of human development. We Chinese always
seem to diverge from the others.
W.Z. We promoted sex equality after Liberation. Western feminists
admire this very much.
W.A But that brought us many problems. Such as equal opportunity in
employment. Now women and men are on the job together so they
get crushed together on the buses. I think this is very unnatural.
Who will educate children? Children in the nursery school are
pitiable enough, and there aren't even enough nursery schools.
How can children get on without their mother's education? Parents
are crushed on the bus holding their children every morning.
Female factory workers do the same physical labor as male workers.
Now many women have difficult labors and few have milk. Women
are tremendously fatigued.
W.Z. How do you propose to solve these problems?
W.A I think the problem is equal opportunity of employment. In fact,
many female workers would like to stay at home and do the
housework if their husbands made higher salaries. And the men
would have backing when they got home. I think work in the
kitchen is quite suitable for ordinary women. Certainly women have
 Three Interviews 167

the same abilities as men. But I think you should let women choose.
Sometimes we are deprived of our choices.
W.Z. I agree with you that not all women want to be career women and
quite a few would like to live comfortable family lives. But now the
situation abroad is that many housewives have revolted. They feel
they lost economic status and independence, that they have be-
come appendages to their husbands.
W.A That's quite true. But now with equal employment, the problem is
that women's health is deteriorating. Women are so tired. So, when
they come home they are foul-tempered and mistreat the children;
children don't get an adequate education. This is particularly the
case among female workers on the assembly line.
W.Z. How did you feel when you were questioned by the Western
feminists?
W.A I just told them what I thought. I felt their sense of urgency, so the
problem must be quite strong and very real. But our society is
different, very different indeed. Even the problems we feel are
different. I think that in order to feel sexual inequality, to feel that
women are the appendages of men, you must have leisure time. We
don't have that leisure, and we are very, very tired. Our women do
not have the time to feel these subtle feelings.
W.Z. In many cases, men and women shoulder the burden of life
together.
W.A Yes, this is another strange phenomenon. If women leave the stove
only to draw both men and women back to it in the end, life
becomes very tiresome for both sexes. Foreign feminists never
experience such fatigue. They have energy and nowhere to let it
go, while our energy has been totally exhausted.
W.Z. Do many of the women's delegations visiting China hold feminist
views?
W.A I think that many women studying Chinese female writers do so
because they are feminists. They are interested in you from "a
feminist perspective."
W.Z. Probably many of them are trying to prove that their feminism is
universal by studying Chinese female writers.
W.A I would not like it if they were just interested in me simply because
of that. I want equality. I hope they regard me as a real writer.
Foreign feminists may think that we have had to struggle hard
168 Wang Zheng

against men to get what we have achieved today. Actually there is

a strange phenomenon in China. Because of the emphasis on sexual
equality, women get treated with special favors. Sometimes I feel
that there is too much of this favoritism. Such as in the People's
Congress, there have to be seats set aside for women. Just because
you are a woman writer, people overpraise you. It's such a nuisance.
W.Z. Is that still the tendency now? Isn't it true that the mechanism of
competition in the economic reforms has driven a lot of women out
of their leading positions?
W.A That's true. It must follow the law of productivity development.
Still, I think it is easier for a woman to succeed, easier than for a
man.
W.Z. Do you think women get special favors?
W.A Yes. Being a female writer means getting special favors. But I will
offend many female writers by saying this.
W.Z. But I think you are being very honest. After all, you are a female
writer yourself and you are admitting to receiving favors. Have you
ever experienced any obstacles in the way of your advancement?
W.A I haven't felt any. I think that the obstacles for me are not exterior
but interior. If you really have gifts then you can do what men do.
W.Z. In your life have you ever run into an experience where men make
trouble for you deliberately just because you are a woman?
W.A I can't think of such a situation. Perhaps you feel the same as I do.
W.Z. I've never encountered that sort of thing, either. Our generation is
not consciously aware of our own gender. When we think, we are
sexually neutral. We don't distinguish separate spheres, male and
female.
W.A Right. I am the same way. But this is very bad. Maybe we do
distinguish but aren't aware that we do. In China today we have
things hundreds of times more significant than gender confronting
us. Dai Qing is trying to write about a hundred women to
demonstrate that Chinese women live particularly hard lives. But I
think, were I to go out and interview people, I'd find a thousand
men living the same hard life. Some hardships are due not to sex
but because so many things remain unsatisfactorily resolved in the
process of social development. It's because of poverty, backward-
ness and stupidity, not just an issue of sex.
 Three Interviews 169

W.Z. Don't you think that Dai Qing has represented problems that are
particularly related to women?
W.A I really don't think so. For instance, she writes about a few female
bigamists. That is, they got married but their first marriages were
unhappy and their husbands refused to allow a divorce. So they
lived with other men before their marriages were legally dissolved.
We call it bigamy. Dai blames the situation on men, pointing out
how bad the men were. Actually this was not a problem of men, but
a problem of our unsound legal system. She also wrote about the
relationship, a sexual affair, between a woman in military service
and a man; but I feel the man she describes is a far more tragic
figure than the woman.
W.Z. So the social bondage doesn't just tie the women down, but men,
too.
W.A The common yoke.
W.Z. But do you think that Chinese women endure more suffering or
not?
W.A Yes. I think women's ability to endure is stronger than that of men.
&pecially Chinese women. Western women agitate for reform but
they actually suffer less than Chinese women. Perhaps their en-
durance is not so great as that of Oriental women. Oriental women
have tremendous endurance, particularly Japanese women.
W.Z. Then you do think Chinese women bear extra burdens.
W.A Women probably do since men cannot replace women at certain
things, like having babies. But I really think that in spite of our many
efforts to eliminate sexual inequality, women's burdens have ac-
tually increased; the example is the female factory workers I just
mentioned. On the one hand they have to work like men, on the
other they cannot abandon the burden that their sex saddles them
with. You may sacrifice this part and not have a baby, or maybe you
don't do housework and let men do it. Men in Shanghai have been
very well trained by women. They wash clothes, wash diapers; they
do all kinds of things. But the women of Shanghai have begun to
be concerned about manhood. They feel that Shanghai men lack
masculinity. What to do? You trained this generation of men
yourselves! Having trained the men to be this way now women want
masculinity. I wrote an article about women and men where I said
at the end: if men are too strong and control everything then Nora
leaves home. If men are weak and passively follow orders from
women then women look around for manhood. Difficult indeed.
170 Wang Zheng

W.z. There is a contradiction here. Some women want spiritual inde-

pendence and equality with men yet go on looking for manhood.
How are they defining manhood? It sounds to me as though they
still have a traditional concept of masculinity.
W.A They have two standards, one aesthetic and the other practical. It
is a contradictory concept. But I'm not sure Western women would
accept such womanish men, either. Sometimes when I look at
Shanghai men from an aesthetic perspective, I feel they really are
wimpy. But when I go other places, and compare the men there, I
find that men in Shanghai treat women very well indeed. It's hard
to say.
W.Z. Is this call for manhood in men coming from the young intellectual
women?
W.A Yes. That's where the problem lies. The macho men are the ones
who most fear intellectual women. They feel that female factory
workers have more endurance. If the man doesn't give a fig about
the family, she can bear up under his neglect. These days lots of
men hang around all day playing mahjongg outside, or after work-
ing hard all day they come home, have some wine and beat their
wives. Female factory workers put up with this kind of treatment.
W.Z. What do you think of the literature describing women's extra
burdens?
W.A It's not a gender issue. What determines everything is a person's
talent. Like Madame Curie. I read her biography when I was a child
and it really moved me. She had a baby and felt terribly burdened.
The baby cried constantly for milk and she had to feed it frequently.
The details were very touching. Nonetheless, they did not prevent
her from become a very great person and she achieved an enor-
mous lot. So it's a matter of individual personal talent. I believe that
in her time things were more feudal than now. I also think that some
feminists have too high an expectation of men; they are dependent,
since they depend on men to create conditions for them. I've met
some American feminists and I've made a very amazing discovery.
Maybe the women I met were not representative. But I found that
they could not live without men any better than we non-feminists
can.
W.Z. What gave you that impression?
W.A Take sex. We admit that we are women and have sexual needs. It's
unbearable for us to live without men in our lives. Couples in China
who work in different places bear these separations for years at a
 Three Interviews 171

time. But when I was in the United States that time to attend the
International Writer's Convention, I found that men and women
there couldn't do without each other even temporarily: except for
the Chinese, who have a greater ability to endure.
W.Z. That is a very interesting question. What do you think causes this?
W.A I don't know how to explain except to say that they are different
from us. Chinese maintain a morally higher life, though sometimes
that sort of life is rather inhuman. Westerners separate their
emotions from sex. It's like eating, not because the food is par-
ticularly tasty, but simply because when I am hungry I will eat.
Chinese women might say, well, I won't eat if it doesn't taste good,
and I won't do it if there are no feelings involved. So we will only
have sex when our emotions reach a really high level of intensity.
That seems to be a really big difference.
W.Z. You observed this matter when you were staying with them?
W.A It requires very little effort to observe. The Westerners there were
all the same and they all had boyfriends or girlfriends. It was all very
natural and I did not feel dirtied by it. Very strange, actually. I felt
that they were quite healthy. Their crazy and kind of frivolous way
of behaving seemed fine to me at the time. But if you were to ask
me to act that way, I would not do it. Maybe they thought I was still
very young, since Chinese look younger than Americans.
W.Z. Did you discuss the difference between Chinese and Western
women's attitudes toward sex with them?
W.A No. I joked about it sometimes. When they talked about feminism,
I would say: it's just because you have such elevated expectations
of men. We Chinese don't have so many requirements and just try
to make do with what we have. Western women want men to
respect and to give them opportunities, and, on top of that, they
want the men to make themselves perfect. Comparatively speak-
ing, Chinese men are worse than men of other countries, it's true.
W.Z What makes you say that? In what respect?
W.A In every respect. Chinese men have always been pampered; by the
society, by women. So they have very weak wills. Certainly this is
my personal feeling, and it is true that I have no contact with
Western men. Probably Western men are the same as Chinese
men. Probably men are just weaker human beings than women are.
W.Z. Is there a gender difference in your relationship to your readers?
172 Wang Zheng

W.A More girls like my early work and the boys who like those works
are usually sentimental students. There is some change in the
readership for my recent stuff. Men and women are pretty much
the same, and now there are even more male readers. I am not really
sure about this, but it is the impression I get from readers' letters
and reviews. I keep my distance from readers and don't really care
much about them. But one thing is certain, and that is that what I
give my readers are my genuine feelings. I never give readers
artificial things, things that do not belong to me. Actually I get more
reader responses to my early work. That's the major pleasure I get
from writing. After reading my work lots of old friends and
classmates that I'd lost touch with wrote to me. I've also made new
friends.
W.z. What do male readers say to you in their letters?
W.A Oh, the ones who write are usually similar to me in temperament.
One man wrote after he got out of prison and said that my short
story had enabled him to have peace in prison and he wrote to thank
me because he felt that I had understood his situation.
W.Z. So male readers have no trouble understanding you.
W.A Of course not. Some of my views may make feminists think that I
am tremendously oppressed by men. I actually just hope to even-
tually become a writer, like a male writer.
W.Z. Why do you say that?
W.A Perhaps it's because I've seen no ideal female writers.
W.Z. So you would evaluate male writers of Chinese literature more
favorably than female writers?
W.A Actually, I would rank male writers generally higher than female
writers in all of world literature. In my view women are fine writers
when it comes to delicate things but they don't do so well writing
really grand literature. That's because women's literature is less
powerful, less expansive in conception. Still there are female
writers whose work I do like a lot, including Jane Eyre and Wuther-
ing Heights. I don't have access to many works in translation.
W.Z. Which female writer has influenced you the most?
W.A Xiao Hong. She's certainly the Chinese woman writer I like most
of all.
W.Z. Why?
 Three Interviews 173

W.A Because she doesn't feel like a woman writer to me.

W.Z. You seem to divide writers into male and female, into two
categories.
W.A Yes, I do. That's why I think a feminist would say that I was deeply
oppressed by men.
W.Z. How do you distinguish male and female categories?
W.A Usually female writers' work exhibits a narrowness. This is not
always the case. A woman wrote Wuthering Heights but it is a
powerful, soul-wrenching novel. Usually, however, women find it
difficult to write things like that. Xiao Hong did. She accomplished
it through her severity.
W.Z. Well, if Xiao Hong could do it how do you explain your belief that
female writers are incapable of writing powerfully?
W.A My feeling is that for female writers it is too easy to get buried in
personal experience; it's too tempting to huddle up in one's own
shell and not stop and think about how pitiful she really is. Female
writers are more self-deceiving than male writers, too. She might
assume that she is a certain kind of person but actually not be. She
might like to play some sort of role but actually is not that sort of
person at all. I think we [writers] should give people genuine things.
Certainly nobody is going to disagree with that. But women are
more histrionic than men. Female writers easily fall prey to the
problem of just acting.
W.Z. Do you think female writers lack talent, then?
W.A I'm not certain if this relates to talent or if it is a matter of
temperament.
W.Z. What causes temperamental differences?
W.A Maybe this is just the way women are. A woman likes to be pretty.
Sure, I like to be pretty, too. Maybe women are more conscious of
self-display. Nonetheless, women don't often carry off self-display
very well. Take, for example, the fact that the four most famous
female character roles (sida mingdan) were all played by men and
that women do extremely well playing male characters in the Yue
opera (Yueju). Why don't women play themselves better? Maybe
they have deceived themselves. Women always want to seem to be
better. Since they don't really know what is really good they then
lack the aesthetic capacity [it takes to write well] and just end up
174 Wang Zheng

too entranced with their own images. Women love their own
images more than men do.
w.z. Do you see any difference in the way male and female writers select
themes?
W.A Male writers are more engaged in things outside the self, social
things. Female writers are concerned with the life of emotions.
w.z. I read an article in a newspaper somewhere arguing that Chinese
women's literature was just a literature of women looking for men.
W.A Who the hell said that?
W.Z. I can't recall his name. He felt that all women wrote about was
feelings, love, trying to find a man, nothing else.
W.A Then he hasn't read very much. Shen Rong doesn't write about
such things.
w.z. Have you close relationships with other female writers?
W.A No. Not close. Writers are individual workers. We haven't much
contact with each other.
W.Z. Have any circles formed?
W.A Not in Shanghai. I hear that Beijing writers are all quite close.
w.z. Do you find that your relationships with writers are the same
regardless of sex?
W.A Yes. I keep my distance from both.
W.Z. What general impression have you formed of contemporary
Western literature?
W.A It penetrates deeper into the unconscious [sheIUU Ten de neixing].
That seems to be its general tendency, including the fine arts, since
modem art tries to touch that level.
W.Z. What's your opinion of sex in Western literature?
W.A I think it's inevitable. Sex is important when writing about human
beings. I wrote something about sex last year and people criticized
me. In my story, "Xwocheng zhi [ian" [Love in a small town] I tried
to show that guilt and repression are Chinese attitudes toward sex
but that sex is an irresistible force. Sex is the struggle between
humans and Nature. The two tiny creatures having sex are already
social and cultural beings. Writing about sexuality I tried to expose
the process, how the social and cultural beings struggled with this
 Three Interviews 175

natural drive. The consequence of their struggle was that both

suffered. 1 .

W.Z. Your writing was about Chinese social and cultural pressures
repressing sexuality?
W.A Yes. I think this is something peculiar to China. In the case of two
Westerners having sex probably they would simply regard sexual
congress as a matter of course, like eating a meal, and not feel
particularly guilty about it. Writing about people one must dig into
the deepest levels of human behavior, and there you encounter the
problem of sex. Writing about Chinese sex brings up lots of ques-
tions of Chinese views of sexuality. That's natural, too. I actually
think that my description of sex was beautiful. What my readers
found unacceptable was that my descriptions of sexuality were no
more than that. Maybe your Western readers won't be able to
understand this point. In Half of Man Is Woman, for instance,
Zhang Xianliang uses sexuality to the end of exposing social ills.
That's acceptable. What Chinese readers find unacceptable is
making sex the end, the theme of the writing. That is what I did in
my three short stories. 2 People say I am making a fuss over some-
thing that is not important.
W.Z. Have you gotten any positive reviews?
W.A Far more than negative ones.
W.Z. What are the reviews saying?
W.A I've forgotten. But they seem to think I'm quite a good writer. They
used fancy new phrases, the kind I don't really understand.
W.Z. You may in fact reflect a specific Chinese culture when you write
about the conflict between social being and natural being.
W.A Quite right. There is a group of writers who consciously are taking
Chinese culture as the setting. I'm thinking of Zhang Jie's Fang
zhou [Ark], which I value very highly. I consider it China's only
feminist work about Chinese feminists. Of course, you may find that

I The story is abou t a young man and woman, both dancers, who give in to sexual passion
during the Cultural Revolution when fornication was a crime. The guilt disrupted their lives.
Theywere caught in a double bind. If they had sex they suffered social, cultural and emotional
pressure, but if they did not then they suffered from repression of natural desire.
2 Jinxiu Gu zhi lian [Love in Jinxiu Valley],XlDOCheng zhj lian [Love in a small town], and
Huangshan zhi /ian [Love on a barren mountain].
176 Wang Zheng

Chinese feminists are full of pain. They find life without men
exceedingly painful.
W.Z. Where did you publish Love in Small Town?3
W.A In Shanghai Literature, 1986. It's hard to get now. It sold out right
after publication. Chinese readers haven't anything sexual to read
so they make do with this kind of fiction.
W.Z. How do you describe male and female sexuality? Do you see any
difference?
W.A Not much difference. Once a woman has a baby differences appear.
Motherhood and increasing responsibilities repress sexuality. In
Love in a Small Town the two protagonists share one thing. They
feel all along that they are committing a crime, that sex is dirty and
they feel like criminals. In another story of mine, I write about
female psychology.4 A married woman falls in love with another
man. Her husband knows her too well. So her feelings for him are
stale and she cannot renew the role she plays with him. With her
new lover she plays a new role, gives a new performance. Of course
she doesn't really love the man but only the self that she becomes
when she is with him. She can throwaway her old self like she
throws away an old coat. What I wanted to say there was that when
women are in love not only are they in love with men they are also
in love with themselves. They discover a new self in this love and
so they change their roles each day, as an actress would. Actually
writing novels is another way of regenerating ourselves. I suspect
that this is what motivates those [American] feminists who feel so
bored at home. [They just want a new role to play.]
W.Z. I think you should be able to understand them.
W.A I do understand them. I just don't accept their views.
W.Z. If you were interviewing an American woman writer what would
you ask her?
W.A I'd like to know what they are writing about.
W.Z. What standards do you use to evaluate a literary work?
W.A I like high taste. I don't like low literature. I like high taste [quwei
gao], high aesthetic values [shenmei jiazhzl, high temperament

3 Eva Hung, trans., Love in a Small Town by Wang Anyi (Hong Kong: Renditions
Paperback, 1988). See the review in this volume.
4 Love in Jinxiu Va/Jey.
 Three Interviews 177

[qizhi gao], and high spirit Uingjie gao J. When I say "high taste" I
mean taking the high road, the high standpoint. Authors who do
not always write about personal affairs. I particularly dislike stories
that make little personal affairs into a great tragedy. So I don't like
Liang Xiaosheng's Xuecheng [Snow city]. It's too sad. Of course
such sad things really do occur in life; Shi Tiecheng's novels,
though, take frustration and suffering in personal life very coolly,
so I consider that his novels exemplify the higher spiritual stand-
point. Also I require the language to be beautiful. Lots of present-
day Chinese writers just write terribly; some can't produce a smooth
sentence. They consider language a tool and refuse to see it as an
aesthetic object in its own right.
W.Z. What's your feeling about women's writing?
W.A Zhang lie's Ark made a strong impression. Up to now there have
been very few women's fictions that had the same impact on me. I
like it very much even though I don't agree with her point of view.
It contains sharp contradictions and to me its value lies in those
very contradictions. For instance, she depicts men as thoroughly
mean and bad. There are no good men. Women are all good and
they hate the men and want nothing to do with them. Yet when the
women leave the men they live extremely sad lives. The power of
the story lies right here. It is, in my view, a representative work of
Chinese feminism.
W.Z. Then what you disapprove of is that she depicts Chinese men as
being rotten?
W.A Right.
W.Z. Have you ever encountered a Chinese woman in the situation she
describes?
W.A Yes.
W.Z. You just don't think men are the sole cause?
W.A No. [They are not.] She also has written about the weakness of
women. Her women simply cannot do without men. They long to
leave their men but once they do they haven't the strength to
sustain their lives. Even when they manage to endure, they suffer
and achieve very little happiness in life. Zhang Jie depicts such
experiences and feelings extremely well.
W.Z. The last few years I have been outside China and I'm not clear on
the situation now. When I left there were quite a large number of
women writers and I actually liked their work better then the men's.
178 Wang Zheng

W.A Actually, although the female writers of that period were more
conspicuous, quite a lot of male writers were also at work. Female
writers can make small things seem very interesting. Male writers
can't deal with interior matters but do very well with things "beyond
the doors," so to speak. Also, female writers usually have a fresher
and more beautiful writing style and so their work attracts the
literary youth. Generally speaking, more young women than young
men dream of getting into literature.

My letter to Wang Anyi

After listening to the tape of our conversation I have some further
questions I hope you will answer.
You seem to think that sexual difference should be recognized. You
oppose the view that men and women are the same. You advocate that
Chinese women enjoy the difference. But when we talk about the dif-
ference between female and male writers, you yourself say you want to
write "like a man." You base your sense of writing in what male writers do
and use that as a measure of value for the female writers you say you like.
I think there is a contradiction in your logic. If you admit sexual difference
and even advocate taking pleasure in that difference, then why do you want
to eliminate that sense of difference in your own work? If you subscribe to
the theory that sexual difference is natural, then is it "natural" for you to
want the same mentality, temperament and style of a male writer? Perhaps
you do not seek difference but rather feel badly about it. Does your sorrow
emerge because you have used a male value to measure all of these things?
A beautiful woman would not feel badly that her physique does not
resemble that of a powerful man. She knows society has "different" stand-
ards with which to judge female beauty.
I look forward to your reply.
W.Z.

Wang Anyi's reply

I intend to write works that are as good as those of men, not works
that are the same as men's. I do think that there is a point at which women
will fall behind men. This has nothing to do with restrictions placed on
women's personal conditions. It is simply a question of the quality of
women's temperament. I really feel that women writers are too pampered;
in our rather exaggerated and pretentious emphasis on women's liberation,
female writers have been receivers of tremendous favoritism (this fact
reveals inequality in and of itself; it's rather like the way actresses were
overpraised in the old society). Female writers frequently start from the
self, but they lose the self rather soon. They invent an unreal self that they
then enjoy and pity. I just don't want to be that sort of female writer. In the
 Three Interviews 179

movie Death on the Nile, the detective Poirot says: "Women like others to
love them."
I'm actually the same way. But when I sit at my desk alone, facing the
blank paper before me, I feel as though I were on a platform without the
audience. I cannot be false to myself, no matter how I adore the love of
others. At that sacred moment, I must reveal things that do not please
others but are nonetheless genuine. I am not sure I've answered your
question. If I have not, please write to me again.

INTERVIEW WITH ZHU LIN, October 5, 1988

W.Z. Do you consciously discuss the problems of women in your novels?
Do you think about gender when you write?
Z.L. I don't very much. Yet most of the protagonists in my novels turn
out to be women.
Z.Y. I think you write mainly about the life and thought of women,
particularly young women.
Z.L. That's right.
W.Z. But do you consciously choose themes that reflect women's
problems?
Z.Y. That may be the case in her recent work.
Z.L. Right. I wrote about women's issues quite consciously in my last
novel, Niixing-ren [Female-human beings].
W.Z. What made you start writing consciously about women?
Z.L. I guess I have been greatly influenced by Chen Yu-shih.5 When I
began my career, I did not give much thought to the fact that I was
writing for women. But later I discovered that all my protagonists
were women.

Z.Y. Well, I'd like to say something about that. It really isn't my place to
answer your questions, but I do know Zhu Lin very well and I'm
familiar with her work. She worked with me when she started her
first novel; I was her editor. Since then I have participated in the
process of almost everything she's written. So I know hervery well.
She writes beautifully but doesn't express herself orally very well.
When asked to comment on things, she sometimes doesn't say what
she means very distinctively.
5 Professor of Chinese literature and author of lltUlges and Ideas in Chinese Classic Prose
(Stanford, 1988), among others. Chen teaches at the University of Alberta and travels
frequently in Chinese literary circles.
180 Wang Zheng

W.Z. Oh, we're just chatting. Never mind.

Z.Y. As far as I'm aware, her writing is mainly about the lives and pursuits
of women. Her first novel, Shenghuo de lu [Route oflife], describes
the experience of a young educated woman living in a rural area.
Z.L. But I wasn't aware that that was my topic at the time.
Z.Y. Perhaps you write your own experiences and feelings, as a woman,
when you write your novels.
Z.L. Yes, that's right.
Z.Y. In fact, when we consider the issue of perspective in literature Zhu
Lin really describes and reflects life from a female perspective.
There are quite a lot of women writers active these days and some
people are even complaining that contemporary Chinese literature
has too strongly a feminine tone to it. Of course, some female
writers produce things that have no feminine tone to it at all. I'm
thinking of Fang Fang in Wuhan, who writes like a man.
W.Z. What about Zhu Lin? Zhu Lin, do you write from a female
standpoint, with a woman's heart and mind?
Z.L. Yes. Now that you have reminded me, thinking back, I've been
writing from a woman's perspective all along. But I wasn't con-
scious of this until my last novel, Female-Human Beings.
W.Z. What made you decide to write that novel?
Z.L. Do you mean what was my motive?
Z.Y. We discussed some things before she wrote this novel. We felt that
it was important to portray what the educated young people are up
to now that they've returned from the countryside to the cities.
W.Z. But why did you choose to write from a woman's perspective?
Z.L. Because I felt that of all the oppressions the most brutal is the
oppression of women.
W.Z. Do you think that writing about women is different from writing
about men?
Z.L. Yes, I do. Actually there are two themes in this novel: one is female
oppression and the other is my generation's pursuit of ideals. Many
people don't understand my themes. They think I'm calling for
humanist or praising communist ideals.
W.Z. To what extent does your work shape your female identity?
 Three Interviews 181

Z.L I think my work is a part of me. Writing about women makes me

think more about women's situation.
Z.Y. She has experienced more hardships in her career and in life
generally because of being a woman. She and Dai Houying used to
live together in the dorms when neither had an apartment. Once
Dai told her, "In China being a woman is difficult but being a
woman writer is even tougher." They've both learned this from life.
W.Z. Are you married?
Z.L No.
W.Z. How did you get an apartment then?
Z.L I just rent it. The metropolitan Propaganda Bureau assigned it to
me as a work place.
W.Z. What difficulties do you encounter pursuing your career because
you are a single woman?
Z.L. Well, there are some conveniences. Since I don't have the burden
of a family I can become completely absorbed in my writing. But
people think it's inconceivable that you aren't married and consider
you very strange. When I meet people for the first time they usually
ask me three questions: One, how old are you? two, are you
married? and three, why don't you get married? It's like a trilogy.
They never miss a part.
W.Z. Have you gotten pressure from your family, too?
Z.L. My parents were divorced when I was a child and I was raised by
my grandmother, who has since passed away. I have no brothers
and sisters, so there are no family pressures. And now the social
pressure is not as bad as it used to be. People seemed to have gotten
more used to this kind of situation. I met Li Ziyun once, the
associate chief editor of Shanghai Literature, a woman in her fifties.
She said, "You're in a much better situation than I was when I was
your age and people considered me a freak: They'd say, 'You have
both eyes and a nose; why are you still single?' Li is planning to
write a review of my novel and she says that she can understand it
automatically because she feels the same way, too.
W.Z. There are quite a lot of single women these days.
Z. Y. There are objective reasons for her being single.
Z.L. Historical reasons.
182 Wang Zheng

W.Z. Obviously getting sent down to the countryside is one reason. How
many years did you remain in the countryside?
Z.L. Six years. I was already twenty-six when I returned to Shanghai,
past my prime. I was an editor at the Shanghai Children's Publishing
House then. People looked down on me because I hadn't published
anything significant myself. So I put everything else aside and wrote
with all my might. That was in 1976, right after the Gang of Four
had been overthrown. I'd just finished the outline for Route ofLife.
I showed it to Zhao Yuanzhen and he was so positive that I went
on to write the novel. I showed it to other people, too, but no one
else thought I could write. I finished the novel only because of his
encouragement. Men Weizai, the editor of Beijing People's Litera-
ture Publishing House, decided to publish it. When the senior
editors at my publishing house heard about it it made them really
uncomfortable: they wanted to know how come all of a sudden this
young person was going to get a novel published. So they started
organizing criticism meetings, accusing me of being tainted with
careerism and so on. I had a very hard time.
Z. Y. She was even considering suicide. People then were still caught up
in the Gang of Four ideology. The rule was that if the head of your
work unit expressed an unfavorable opinion toward you personally
then you were not likely to get your book published. The publishers
would check with the head of the unit before they'd even consider
the publication.
Z.L. Some officials from my unit went over to Beijing Publishing to try
and stop them from publishing it by claiming that the novel was
harmful. It aroused such a controversy at that level that it was taken
up to the next level, to the leading body. Finally Mao Dun heard
about the controversy and stepped in to okay publication. It finally
came out.
Z.Y. Even so, our work unit still went on criticizing and making trouble
for her. They refused to let her go on living in the dorm, just threw
her bedding out. In the end the issue came to the attention of the
central government Publishing Bureau and they intervened in the
dispute.
W.Z. Why did your work unit do this? Jealousy?
Z. Y. They thought she was too young. She was really young, just trans-
ferred to the publishing house, and then all of a sudden getting a
book published.
 Three Interviews 183

W.Z. If it had been a young man, not a young woman, what would have
happened?
Z. Y. The same jealousy would have been there. It wasn't because of her
sex.
Z.L Another cause of all this was that the leadership liked people to
come by after work and visit, or chat them up during office house.
But I don't like doing that sort of thing. I just do my work when I'm
at the work unit and write my novels after work. I saw chatting as
a waste of time and seldom joined them. This made them think I
was eccentric.
Z.Y. They also despised her because she'd just transferred in from the
country. She'd published a few children's stories when she was
there. I was the one who decided to transfer her to our publishing
house. I liked her work and felt sympathetic to the educated youths
working out there. Because she didn't like talking to people much
and seldom speaks up at meetings people at the publishing house
began to think that giving her this job had been a mistake.
W.Z. Have you felt any difficulties that you would attribute specifically
to your being a woman?
Z.L That is not easy for me to say.
Z.Y. Let me say something for you, all right? Pressure from our unit
leadership eventually focussed on the fact that she is a woman.
Because she had no boyfriend they enlisted the help of a real sleazy
guy to harass and insult her. The leadership felt that they could take
their revenge and intimidate her so that she'd be unable to write
anything else. They even circulated a rumor that I had written her
novel. Their implied point was that she had had an affair with a
male editor who then supported her work. She was under such
terrible pressure that she spent a whole night crying in her dorm. I
was living in the men's dorm at the time. So a couple of the men
and I went over to watch her because we were afraid something
terrible might happen. The next day we went to talk to our superior
and suggested that he handle the matter very carefully. He said:
"Oh? She wants to commit suicide. We saw plenty of that in the
Cultural Revolution, it's no big deal. Why should we care!" Since
we could do nothing ourselves we tried to dig up some of her female
friends to come and help her out. They are the ones she went to
the countryside with. They did their best to comfort and encourage
her to go on. They read the draft of the novel she wanted, in
desperation, to tear up and they told her it was wonderful and that
she should never give up. They helped her copy the draft and made
184 Wang Zheng

her some clothes since she was so poor at that time. Without the
support of those young women she would not be alive today.
Z.L. The rumors spread all over. First I was angry. Later I didn't care.
Z.Y. But this rumor is the main factor that makes marriage rather
unlikely for her.
Z.L. The other ridiculous thing people said was that the protagonist of
my novel was me. Since she had had affairs in the village then I must
have too. It wasn't just ignorant people who thought so, either; it
was people in the literary circles and publishing houses-they all
believed it. Look, as soon as my new novel Female-Human Beings
is published, with all the sex in it, people will start gossiping about
me all over again.
Z.Y. But now your capacity to endure it has deepened.
Z.L. Yeah. Now I don't care. Then I was still young, in my twenties. I
thought love was sacred and that I could not allow people to talk
as they did. I felt I had to argue with people in order to get the truth
out. That was foolish and unnecessary. Who should you argue with?
Now, however, society has progressed; people's attitudes toward
such things have changed.
Z.Y. Actually the guys who persecuted her lost the support of lots of
other people. A dozen women in the publishing house organized
a special support group for her. They argued against the chief
editor and some of the senior editors. They even planned to write
a dazibao to criticize the leadership. The issue spread all over. Lots
of women came out to express their support for her.
W.Z. What's your situation like now?
Z.L. I've been transferred to the Shanghai Writer's Association. But in
fact, I'm pretty much excluded from Shanghai literary circles.
Z.Y. The literary circles all have lots of factions, each headed by some
powerful figure. She has joined none of them so she's excluded by
them all. The Association doesn't even contact her about conferen-
ces. She doesn't get opportunities to go abroad, either. When
foreigners ask to visit her they are often told no such person as Zhu
Lin exists.
W.Z. Do you find it difficult to publish your work?
 Three Interviews 185

Z.L None of my work has ever been published in Shanghai. This most
recent novel is the only exce;tion. XUloshuo jie [The World of the
novel] is going to publish it.
W.Z. How do you feel about the fact that your literary work has had such
an effect on your personal life?
Z.Y. It's probably best to say that her literary work brought enormous
pressure and that that has, in turn, made her tougher and much
more determined to continue working.
Z.L I feel that my life is very full and I've never felt empty. Lots of my
married friends have told me how empty they feel. I said to them,
sorry, I've never felt that way.
W.Z. You've been so busy writing.
Z.Y. She's published ten books already.
Z.L Gossip and rumors have interfered with my work. But I'm not angry
about it any more. Long ago I decided that as long as I have the
freedom to write, I shall go on writing forever. Now there are fewer
interferences. I'm excluded from literary circles which just means I
don't have to attend all the meetings and so I have more time to
write.
W.Z. What's your relationship with your readers like?
Z.L I get lots of letters from them. Many young women tell me they
have experiences similar to those of my protagonists and they tell
me about their lives and ask me how to deal with problems in their
lives.
W.Z. Are your readers mostly men or women?
Z.L Women, absolutely. It often feels strange that I can move so many
women. For instance, I let some women read my most recent novel
and got a really strong response. They were all moved to tears. The
men who read it respond differently; I think they don't quite get
the point of what I wrote.
Z.Y. I can provide an example that illustrates her relationship to her
readers. Once she was doing a survey in Jiading county. It was late
and raining and she missed the last bus, so she had to walk home.
On the way some young hooligans from the country robbed her.
They took everything, including her notebook and umbrella, but
fortunately she was not physically hurt. She was in a terrible state

6 A Shanghai literary journal.

186 Wang Zheng

by then and found a farmer's house in the village and asked to stay
there. A young woman let her in and listened to her story. The
young woman had no idea who she was. You should be staunch,
she said, and don't let such a thing get to you. I recently read some
novels by Zhu Lin, she said, and all her protagonists have such
strong characters. Later on, after this incident this woman and Zhu
Lin became good friends. These are tremendously encouraging
things for Zhu Lin. Lots of the younger women in the rural south
collect her work.
W.Z. What do you make of the difference in men's and women's respon-
ses to your work?
Z.L. I haven't thought through this question very well. But it does make
me feel strange. &pecially this time male and female reader
response has been different. Why is that?
Z.Y. It's because the men did not read it carefully enough. If they had
they would have understood it.
W.Z. Then why did all those women read it so carefully?
Z.L. Yeah. I've been thinking about this question for some time. It was
all men who decided to publish my novel and I don't think they were
prejudiced against me. On the contrary, I think they have a very
high opinion of me. They read my draft, agreed to publish it and all
said it was very creative. But they never understood the novel's
themes, while the women readers understand very well.
W.Z. [addressing Zhao] Do you understand her themes?
Z. Y. I discussed her themes with her from the very beginning. Certainly
I understand them. And I made suggestions to her as she was in the
process of writing. I think that Chinese women's burden is very
heavy because the women at the bottom have been overtly op-
pressed by feudalism, or feudalism in the name of communism or
socialism. I agree with her on this point. I think men would be able
to understand if they read more carefully.
Z.L. Another reason may be that the women who have read this novel
are all friends, so they read out of interest. The men who've read
it up to this point are all editors. Editors read like doctors seeing
patients; they have different feelings from ordinary readers.
W.Z. What do you think of Chinese women's current situation?
Z.L. My work all deals with this topic. I am trying to depict Chinese
women at the present time, the present stage. My major objects of
 Three Interviews 187

interest are the educated young women in rural areas. I am current-

ly writing a novel called The Wltch; it's the stories of several
generations of women.
W.Z. What are the pressures contemporary Chinese women must bear?
Z.Y. Zhu Lin tries to express the pressure of Chinese traditional culture
on Chinese women in her novels. Regardless of their age or educa-
tion women in the rural areas all experience the tangible and
intangible pressures of feudal culture. The mental pressure is
tremendous.
Z.L In one of my novels I tell the story of a young woman who came
from real life. This woman had many dreams in life originally and
she wanted an ideal love. But when love came suddenly she was at
quite a loss. She had a feeling for a classmate in her high school.
One day this young man came over to her house looking for her
and just jumped over the low wall around her house. She was
startled and didn't see him clearly, so she cried for help to catch the
intruder. They caught the guy and he was sentenced to several years
in prison. The woman regretted what she'd done and decided to
wait for him even though her family opposed her decision. As she
was waiting another young man with a powerful father wanted to
marry her. She refused. When the young man got out of prison,
they married, even though she was under tremendous social pres-
sure not to do it. She thought she had gotten her love. But very
soon she found that prison life had changed the man's personality
and he was not so good at farming under the new responsibility
system, so they were hardly making a living. The predicament aged
her rapidly. In the meantime the man with the powerful father was
still after her and kept showing her around his rich house, telling
her about all the great things in the house that he had prepared for
her. The woman did not know what to do. There are quite a lot of
cases like this in the rural areas now.
W.Z. What do you think of the work of other women writers?
Z.L I think I've been influenced most by the [Indian poet] Tagore's7
work. As to other Chinese women writers, I think Zhang Jie and
Shen Rong are quite good.
W.Z. Have you contacts with other female writers?
Z.L Hardly at all.

7 Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1914.

188 Wang Zheng

W.Z. What would you like to say about their work?

Z.L. I haven't read much of their work.
Z.Y. You've certainly read most of them.
Z.L. Well, I find it difficult to comment on them. I'd better not.
W.Z. What's your opinion of contemporary Western novels?
Z.L. I read them only in translation. I've not read many. None of them
particularly aroused my interest.
Z.Y. She continues to write as a realist and is not interested in following
the modernist fad.
W.Z. You mentioned that you've written about sex in your new novel.
Why?
Z.L. I want to explore human nature. I approach sex from the perspec-
tive of philosophical thinking on human life. I am interested in
Fromm's work.
W.Z. How much do you know about the Western feminist movement?
Z.L. Very little. I don't quite agree with the term, feminism. 8
W.Z. What is your definition of feminism?
Z.L. I don't think anybody can do without society or politics. To divide
human beings by gender and to focus on women seems to me quite
radical. But I've never seen anything written about a definition of
feminism.
W.Z. So where did your concept come from?
Z.L. I have the impression that feminism wants to place women at the
center. In Chinese families it is not likely that two people who are
a couple will both be very strong and will both want to develop a
career. Usually one does and the woman is usually the one who
sacrifices herself for the man. Men sometimes sacrifice for women,
though it is not that common in our society. As for me, r would
definitely refuse to sacrifice for a man even if he asked me to. I
don't know if this is feminism or not. Of course, looking around it
seems there is no one who wants to sacrifice for me, either. To grow
people need fertilizer. But I don't want to be that fertilizer and I
don't think that women ought to be the fertilizer for others. I saw
women in my childhood who spent morning till night doing

8 Ni1quan~.
 Three Interviews 189

housework. It scared me to death. That's a horrible life to live. I'd

rather work in the country than stay at home. If I took the normal
route in life, marriage, babies, I'd never be able to write a thing.
Z.Y. If you stayed home to write, what would the man do? Probably
you'd either fight like mad or get a divorce.
Z.L My luck isn't too good. It takes me ten times the effort to get one
achievement. Li Ziyun recently commented on my new novel that
'Zhu Lin has made a breakthrough with this novel; it has a feminist
spirit.' I don't know about that.
W.Z. Feminism emphasizes human rights for women.
Z.L. I haven't paid much attention to Western feminism.
Z.Y. But you unconsciously expressed it in your work. You wrote lots of
stories about women in rural areas who don't have any human
rights.
Z.L Sure. The situation is really serious in the rural areas. In the villages,
say, if a young man is recruited into military service, they feel they
must get a match for him, a girlfriend [before he leaves]. The
girlfriend is not allowed to change her mind. If she wants to marry
somebody else, then she committed a crime, violating military
marriage. Lots of young women have committed suicide because
of marriage problems.
W.Z. If you were to meet a Western woman writer, what would you like
to know about her?
Z.L About her life. What she is thinking. What impulse drives her to
write.
W.Z. What impulse drives you to write?
Z.L Feelings from life. I want to cry out for women, let people know
what women's situation and experience are like.
Z. Y. Not just women. Chinese men and Chinese women are both bound
by the yoke of Chinese traditional culture, but women are tied more
tightly. Two of my college classmates got married. Now the man is
an editor and the woman the chair of a provincial Women's Federa-
tion. But at home the woman's status is very low. She cooks all the
meals but is not allowed to eat with her husband and his guests at
the table. Both have college educations.
190 Wang Zheng

Letter from Zhu Lin

1. Short autobiography of Zhu Lin

Zhu Lin, female, native place Wuxin county in Zhejiang province.
Born in Shanghai in 1949. 1956 to 1%2 attended elementary school. 1%2
to 1968 attended high school. Graduate 1968. 1%9-1974 resided in Feng-
yang county, Anhui province. In 1974 she returned to Shanghai. In 1975
transferred to Shanghai Children's Publishing House as an editor. In 1978
published a collection of children's stories. 1979 published the novel Route
of Life describing the lives of educated youth in the countryside. In 1980
attended the first literary study program in Beijing after the Cultural
Revolution. Finished the study at the end of 1980 and went to Jiading
county in Shanghai suburbs, where she has lived ever since. During this
period she has published five novels and four collections of short stories.
All the works were set in the rural south and depict generation after
generation of people experiencing cruel political and psychological oppres-
sion by powerful feudalism and traditional culture. Intends to explore the
road of Chinese mental regeneration and emancipation. These works are
particularly concerned with the many emotional wounds and the mental
bondage Chinese women experience and with their future fate.

2. My view of the women's problem

I have not had the opportunity to learn about the history and current
situation of international feminism. Out of personal travail and myobser-
vation of reality, I have become very much concerned with Chinese
women's experience and fate.
I was born into a family environment devoid of parental love. Four
months after my birth my parents were divorced and I lived with myoid
grandma after that. Poverty and loneliness were engraved deeply in my
heart and shaped my introverted, melancholy personality. I became
reticent and inarticulate. During the Cultural Revolution I was sent to one
of China's poorest regions, Fengyang county of Anhui province. I worked
there for six years and during that time my grandma, my only relative in the
world, died. I then returned to the city, as per the policy of the time. Lacking
powerful relatives and friends to rely on, I had no hope of going to college
and could not find a job. Dragging my horribly fatigued body, striving hard
with my fate, I walked the literary road. This road, though, is full of thistles
and thorns and has been drenched with my blood and tears. As I have no
political or economic support, because I wanted to reach my goal though
individual struggle, because I am a very weak woman, I fell subject to
endless political persecution, bullying and humiliation by the work-unit
power networks. And to continuous jealousy, repression, exclusion and
attack by my colleagues and from people in literary circles. At the same
 Three Interviews 191

time I bore the slander, libel and insult that inevitably falls on a woman who
tries to stand out from others and get to the top of the literary field. As I
faced this political and cultural oppression I felt at once perplexed, disap-
pointed; I wavered. I even thought of suicide. How keenly I felt the
difficulties ordinary women in China, without power but with self-respect
and ideals, feel when they try to pursue goals in life and achieve things in
their careers.
Over the course of my long stay in the country I met women of many
different stations and I witnessed the spiritual burdens and hardships
Chinese women experience in life. Thus, most of my work consciously or
unconsciously depicts this situation. My novel, the Route ofLife, tells a sad
story about the educated young woman, Juanjuan; Kulian shu [Chinaberry
tree] depicts a tragic fate that generations of rural women have been unable
to wipe out; the short story Wang [Network] shows how feudal fascism in
contemporary society has trampled women in the name of communism; the
newly completed novel Female-Human Beings consciously describes how
Chinese women explore our own fate and consider the nation's future.
I strongly desire social transformations that will change the unfor-
tunate lives of Chinese women. I also want, using my pen, to arouse the
quest for independence and self-reliance among Chinese women. (This is
a very important issue. I think that at present most Chinese women,
including some intellectual women, have not yet realized the necessity of
an independent identity.) I hope Chinese women [will learn] to live inde-
pendently in the world as really whole beings so that they may keep up with
international culture and civilization and the contemporary feminist move-
ment.
The above are some of my thoughts. If you are interested further, I
will provide you with related material.
ZhuLin

INTERVIEW WITH DAI OING, October 11, 1988

W.Z. You wrote A Series of Chinese Females, which attracted a lot of
public attention. How did you get interested in the state of women?
D.O. To tell you the truth, I wasn't that interested at first. Others settled
on the topic and assigned it to me. I agreed to write on it because
I'd had a vague notion that the state of women represented the
state of the nation as a whole. At that time my notion was based in
instinct and I hadn't made any sort of research or investigation yet.
But when I began working I felt my insight had been confirmed.
You don't need flowery words. If you want to know how well this
country is run all you have to do is look at the women at the bottom
of society. Foreign Languages Press and Random House are bring-
ing [a part of] this book out in English under the title From the
192 Wang Zheng

Bottom of the Well. The title comes from a women's freedom song.
[singing] "The dry black well is thousands of feet deep and women
are at its bottom."
W.Z. When did you begin writing A Series of Chinese Females?
D.O. The end of last year. I took a co-author because I just didn't have
the time. I have many other things to do at the same time as this
project. So my co-author and I have divided the work. She always
seems to finish her part on time while I always lag behind. My job
is to write the prologue to each piece. It's only a few thousand words
but I had to read a lot before I started writing. Originally we planned
this to be part of a big series and it may take five or ten years to
finish [in our original concept]; it's really a pity we don't have time
to work on it. So in the end I just decided to publish one volume of
six stories. Originally we wrote it for Random House to publish in
English. But editors of several periodicals in China pressed me so
hard that I had to take these drafts out of my drawer and give them
over. The English version will consist of a set divided into three
categories. The first is women in different occupations, including
traditional professions such as teacher, actress, athlete, cos-
metician and so on, and nontraditional occupations like geologist,
engineer, truck driver and so on. The second category is married
women, including the wife whose husband has a lover, the wife
married to a handicapped husband, the divorced woman, the
woman who is a married man's lover and so on. The third is
special-case women, including prostitutes, women with bound feet,
raped women, nuns, female Catholics, and so on.
W.Z. Have you finished them all?
D.O. Some, but not all. I'm going to continue with the work. Each story
has its own object and I've divided each in three. First I introduce
the historical and social background in such a way as to explain why
this kind of woman has come to exist in China. In the second part
I, as the author, describe the woman who is being interviewed. The
third part is the woman's own story in her own words. I think the
first part is the most important, but the English editor cut it; I don't
think they grasp the value of the introduction. When the Chinese
version came out readers felt that the introduction was the best
part of it and that the book would be nothing but pop literature
without it; the addition made the volume very serious in a literary
sense. The English-language editor just thought it would be too
long.
 Three Interviews 193

W.Z. I think the first section is important, too. It would have helped
situate the foreign reader to the stories' backgrounds.
D.O. Sure. The editor said they were too difficult to translate and they
would have to provide informational notes on every other line
because I often twist the meaning of words, and that would make
it very hard for foreign readers to grasp.
W.Z. You mentioned that you read a lot of things in order to write the
introductions. Did that include any Western feminist books?
D.O. No, almost none. If it is germane to what I am writing I would
certainly read it. But I almost never see such books since there are
so few of them available in translation. There are no readers for
them. To the Chinese mind, feminism conjures up the image of a
female tiger. [laughs]
W.Z. I've seen translations of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in
the bookstalls. How are people responding to it?
D.O. What readers see is sex not feminism. [laughs] My feeling is that
Chinese are quite ignorant about things going on in Western
post-industrial societies, things like homosexuality and feminism.
Right now we are preparing a set of books for juvenile readers that
introduce histories and societies of the developed countries since
modern times. I hope one day you will write for us, too. We include
stories about Moses' offspring, the Jews, a cultural study of AIDs,
international drug smuggling. Also I want to introduce the Greens,
but I haven't come across a suitable book yet.
W.Z. Are you aware of Chinese intellectual women's response to
Western feminism?
D.O. Yes. It's very cold. Almost no response at all. That's because the
trend in China today is just the reverse of what it is in the West.
That is to say, China faces the question of whether women should
return to the home rather than the question of how to leave the
home. Western feminism occurred with the development of
productive forces, as a natural process. Of course, as productive
forces advance and people no longer have to rely on brute strength
and can use their brains, then two things are true; women can afford
to stay home to do housework and they can take on employment,
have the opportunity for wage labor and economic independence.
All kinds of political requests came about for this reason. It oc-
curred quite naturally. In China the situation was quite different.
After seizure of political power, the government gave sexual
equality to women. Even though the productive forces did not
194 Wang Zheng

really allow it, it had to be done that w~. We call it "high employ-
ment and low salary." The whole thing has proved a terrible drag
on Chinese productivity. And when productivity lags, women end
up in an even worse situation. Chinese women today should not
request individual employment per se but should consider how they
can make their contribution to modernization and the develop-
ment of productivity. In some rapidly developing rural areas, like
Daqiu Village, the women have all gone home. So Chinese women
have no reason to be interested in feminism abroad.
W.Z. Workers and farmers, it's true, are not so aware of the overseas
situation. What about intellectual women and feminism?
D.Q. Even when they are knowledgeable, it's not a hot topic except for
a few specialists. It is because the topic is quite remote from what
concerns Chinese women and the things that affect their lives.
W.Z. Do you know of anyone studying feminism?
D.Q. I guess there are a few people, like those who study Chinese
women. Li Xiaojiang is one, and there are some people in the
Women's Federation who study foreign affairs. Once a European
woman came over from the journal International Women's Litera-
ture and brought a periodical with her. When we opened it we saw
the first two lines-How many books haven't you read? How many
men haven't you slept with?-and we just burst out laughing. It
showed us how distant their lives were from the lives of Chinese
women.
W.Z. How did you learn about feminism?
D.Q. I'm not really interested in feminism. I'm ignorant about the world
situation, but I do feel that feminism is not the force to push China
forward. Nonetheless, the condition of women is the condition of
the country at large. The condition of women is a sensitive point,
a barometer. If you want to know how wealthy a country is, how
civilized or educated it is, just look at the women. Yet, pushing
China forward is not dependent on the women's movement. It is
an important factor, but generally I think that what the Women's
Federation has done since Liberation has had serious negative
effects.
W.Z. What are these negative effects?
 Three Interviews 195

D.Q. They worsen the situation because their ideas are so wron§) For
instance, they supported the contemporary "Qin Xianglians." The
old marriage law stipulated that if one party refused the divorce
then the couple could not be divorced. The law was changed in the
1980&. Now if one party insists, the dissolution will be granted. The
Women's Federation has opposed this new stipulation. At the
national conference ofthe Women's Federation this year a bill was
proposed firmly opposing this stipulation. The Federation women
said, 'Oh, these poor women. They did everything for their hus-
bands,' and used the analogy of Qin Xianglian and Chen Shimei. I
wrote an amendment to the effect that if it was simply a matter of
finances the husband could be severely punished monetarily to the
point where he had to support her for the rest of her life, but that
the marital relationship should be ended. My view was rejected.
They mixed everything together-financial, moral, and so on.
W.Z. So what is the divorce situation now?
D.Q. There is still a variety of local policies; in Heilongjiang and Shang-
hai the court punishes the "third party," for instance. If there is a
"third party" involved in the marriage, the court refuses to grant
the dissolution. It's ridiculous. Often people want to divorce be-
cause they have a lover. [laughs] So those who have lovers have to
keep the affair a top secret.
W.Z. Doesn't the Marriage Law say the marriage can be dissolved when
the people no longer love each other?
D.O. Sure, but that's not the reality. You can petition the court but the
court returns your petition. Then you have to wait six months and
start all over again. Sometimes it can last for five to eight years. It's
hell.
W.Z. I recently read one of your pieces concerned with bigamy and it
made the difficulty of divorce very clear.
D.O. The bigamists I wrote about are rural women. They live far from
civilized society and far from the possibility that urban intellectual
women would like to have of divorce on demand. These women
were sold like animals.
W.Z. What view did the Women's Federation hold on divorce in this
case?

9 Qin Xianliang, who, with her husband Chen Shimei, have come to represent the modem
woman who refuses a husband's request for divorce and a husband who requests divorce in
order to marry another woman, respectively.
196 Wang Zheng

D.Q. They just protect the woman in case men abandon the wife.
W.Z. What about when women want the divorce?
D.Q. They don't interfere with that. Sometimes they seem to think that
the woman who requests the divorce is immoral and has a lover.
They have a lot of outdated notions. My views are quite different
from theirs on most things.
W.z. Have you read any contemporary Western novels?
D.Q. Very few. Fewer than almost anything else, actually.
W.Z. But have you noticed how preoccupied Westerners are with sex in
their novels?
D.Q. Yes. Sex remains a taboo subject in China. Mer Xing kaifang niizi
[Woman of open sex] is considered hereticll. 1
W.z. Why did you write it?
D.Q. Because I think it is a serious phenomenon. We can already see it.
W.Z. So when you wrote [about a married woman who has a lover] it was
from your observation of reality, not from an idea?
D.Q. Certainly it is based in reality. But it is also fused with ideas. Firstly,
I think it is ridiculous for Chinese people to avoid talking about sex.
In reality the situation is that at the bottom of society there is sexual
repression and at the top sexual indulgence. That's unfair. It's an
important part of injustice and inequality in China right now.
Secondly, it just is no longer possible for the authorities to maintain
sexual repression as they did before the GPCR. When people don't
have much sexual knowledge, including biology and psychology,
they aren't psychologically prepared; that this is a reality in our
country is very obvious. And very bad. The paucity of basic
knowledge about sex hygiene has caused an epidemic of venereal
disease, while the lack of psychological knowledge has caused the
infliction of damage mentally, too. It's impossible to estimate how
severe this damage has been, since we have no social outlet or place
to discuss the problem. How do you know when people are emo-
tionally hurt? Lots of things are absolutely necessary and yet we
still do not possess them! In Open Sex I didn't just talk about my
own views but rather told the story objectively. I meant to tell
readers that such people exist. Actually I think the young girl in the
story is pathetic. But after the story was published it aroused a

10 Shouhuo No.2, 1988.

 Three Interviews 197

tremendous controversy and response. There were two sharply

opposite responses, actually. One reader wrote to say that she was
so moved she couldn't sleep; I guess she probably had been unfairly
punished for her sexual activities. She wanted to establish a regular
correspondence with me. Most of the letters, however, reviled me.
W.Z. In what way?
D.Q. They say I am obscene.
W.Z. What kind of people say so?
D.Q. Cadres.
W.Z. Male?
D.Q. No, actually most of them female. Recently someone told me about
a really gross example that just came into our editorial department.
After reading a reader's letter criticizing my story the chief editor
wrote on it that it should be passed around to all editors so that
everybody could see how I am getting cursed out. [laughing] I don't
care. I told my colleagues that being reviled or not is not the issue
here and getting chewed out is not by definition such a bad thing.
What I find significant is what they are cursing about. I think that
over the next five or ten years there will be two major issues
preoccupying Chinese social life. The first will be de-Maoification.
This the people will carry out through a process of ongoing discus-
sion and historical self-examination in which the historical truth is
revealed. The other will be the issue of sex. I anticipate a great
conflict and tremendous discussion and a transformation of
people's behaviors and attitudes.
W.Z. Do you think the conflict will take place between the generations
or between men and women?
D.O. Not between men and women. Certainly between the old and new
generations.
w.z. Are the readers who write in saying they like your work men or
women?
D.Q. It is difficult to judge by their names. I have many readers, both
male and female. My recent book, Intenliews with Scholars, has
provoked more response from male readers. Men seem to prefer
academic discussion and women the sentimental or romantic
stories. These days I deliberately eradicate the romantic elements
in my work. If I fail to do so I consider that I've failed. I even want
198 Wang Zheng

to purge them in a subjective sense. Even when I write about

women I do so without any romanticizing sentiment whatsoever.
w.z. Did you write A Series of Chinese Females from a female perspec-
tive?
D.O. No, and actually Li Xiaojiang, who studies women, criticized me
for this. I have always sought to reach beyond gender. The people
I have the most contempt for are the cadres of the Women's
Federation. I really feel that the only people who work in the
Federation are those who can do nothing else. [laughs] The situa-
tion in China is this: I think that if a woman wants to do anything
she must forget about her own gender. Li Xiaojiang has said that I
suppressed my female sense and that was a loss. Maybe she was
right. Once I wrote a story called My Little Crooked Poplar, in which
I described the relationship between a mother and her hand-
icapped son. Were I to go on in this vein, I suppose that I might be
able to write sentimental stories, and many female writers are really
good at writing stories about subtle emotions. But I am interested
in social problems now. I don't like being considered a strong
woman, to be sure. And Li Xiaojiang has convinced me that females
should keep their own characteristics. I don't think my colleagues
would say that working with me is the same as working with a man.
But often I am the only female in a group of men and we manage
to get along with each other quite well.
W.Z. When did you start writing?
D.O. After 1979. I graduated from Harbin Military Institute and majored
in missile launching. I liked reading literature. My first story was
called Longing.
W.Z. In Longing you told a very touching story about a couple who lived
apart for a long time. Was this a personal experience?
D.O. No. The story had nothing to do with me. Some female writers can
only write about themselves. I'm not that kind of writer. On the
contrary, I put a lot of energy into camouflaging myself.
W.Z. Where does your husband work?
D.O. Here at the same newspaper. He does managerial work.
W.Z. Have you any children?
D.O. One daughter. She's a junior at Beijing University majoring in
Chinese history. She often recommends books to me and is both a
good friend and a good helper.
 Three Interviews 199

w.z. As a female writer and reporter, mother and wife, do you ex-
perience any conflict between your career and your family?
D.O. Yes. This morning I said to my daughter: "The great pity in our
family is that we have two fathers and no mother." [laughs] For-
tunately my daughter has grown up and is quite a help now. She
washes the dishes and does the food shopping. I haven't washed
dishes in three days. [laughs]
W.Z. Does your husband do housework?
D.O. Absolutely nothing. One leg of my chair is broken now and he
hasn't fIXed it yet. I told him that if he didn't do anything about it,
I may fall down and die because of that chair. [laughs] Nobody does
housework in our family and everything is very simple.
W.Z. When your daughter was a baby, who did the housework?
D.O. That was during the Cultural Revolution. Our whole family was
sent to the countryside, so I had to send my child to stay in a
stranger's home in Beijing. It cost me forty-five yuan a month from
my salary of fifty-six. For three years I was prohibited from going
to Beijing and thus could not see my child. She had ear infections
but people didn't dare tell me about it. When I finally saw her, she
was already three years and six months old. She was pitiful. Other
children learn to walk by toddling from mother to father, the
parents holding the baby's hands. But my child had no one to hold
her. The family that cared for her had eight children; their youngest
child, who was only six at the time, took care of my daughter. Then,
whenever I got a letter from them I would just cry my heart out. I
haven't written about this period of my experience. I will in the
future.
W.Z. What writer do you like most? Have you been influenced by this
writer?
D. O. Lu Xun. That's because in my juvenile years and particularly during
the Cultural Revolution nothing else was available and I had to
read and reread Lu Xun. So I became a Lu Xun scholar. I actually
published an article on Lu Xun that some scholars think is very
good.
W.Z. Who is your favorite female writer?
D.O. The American novelist [Joyce Carol] Oates. I like her novel Sad
Song of the Coffee House .
.W.Z. What about Chinese women writers?
200 Wang Zheng

D.O. I like Zhang Ailing [Eileen Chang], a female writers of the 1930s.
You could compare Zhang Ailing's work to that of Chen Naishan.
Zhang was a real young mistress of her bourgeois family, but she
grasped the true nature of her social group and was thoroughly fed
up with it; Chen, of course, wants to be a young mistress, but finds
that she cannot realize her dream. [laughs]
W.Z. Do you have close contact with other Chinese women writers?
D.O. The close friends I have are normal compared with other female
writers. Zong Pu and Fen Xiaoyu are friends. Some of the female
writers are difficult to get along with; people like Zhang Jie and
Zhang Xinxin, whom even male writers try to avoid.
W.Z. Why?
D.O. They're too self-centered. That includes Dai Houying. You have
always got to coax and praise them. It's tiresome. Once or twice I
don't mind, but it's tedious to have to go on doing it all the time.
For instance, I sympathized with Dai Houying a lot at first. At one
conference we were allowed to choose our roommates and I chose
Dai. But after talking for half an hour we decided to maintain a
distance and we've been very polite to each other ever since. She
delivered half an hour's lesson to me on the Marxist theory of
literature the very first time we met! [laughs] Later when the
authorities treated her badly, she wrote me constantly asking me
to find connections in Beijing who could help her out. I did what
she asked me to do but we could never become friends. I feel she
is too much for me to handle. I don't have many friends among the
female writers but I do count as friends some female scholars like
Li Oingfan and Li Xiaojiang. I interviewed them both. And Wang
Rongfen, classed a political criminal at one time, now a sociologist
studying Max Weber. There aren't many female scholars, though,
fewer and fewer these days. At academic conferences you often see
very good young men. But I've only met one young female scholar,
Li Xiaojiang. I'm extremely glad to have met her.
W.Z. Do you have this feeling recently that women are tending to hang
back?
D.O. It's because men have advanced so fast. Nowadays in China there
are plenty of opportunities for men to exert their potential.
W.Z. Why not women, then?
D.O. I think it has something to do with learning ability. You may not
agree with me, but I think that God made females' biological
 Three Interviews 201

structure different from males; women give birth to babies and

breast-feed them, so their brain structure must be different, too.
[laughs] Women have to bear more important responsibilities in
life.
W.Z Then how do you explain yourself?
D.O. As for myself, I have an idea. I was a science student so I want to
use a coordinate to illustrate my point. It's called the normal curve.
On this coordinate, the highest female intelligence is equal to the
highest male intelligence but the number of each group is different.
There are simply more highly intelligent men then women. Cer-
tainly the coordinate has a temporal line as well, so it is possible
that in some eras and at some levels of productivity women's
highest intelligence will not be fully exerted. At least that is my
theory. [laughs] In Nature there are many things that have such
normal curves, such as human weight. Fewer people are extremely
fat or thin. Most are in the middle. There are fewer very bright and
very stupid people, too. Male and female curves will never be the
same, though. I think feminists will be strongly opposed to my
theory. [laughs]
W.Z. Feminists would say that there is actually almost no difference in
intelligence. Rather a lot of standards in the world have been
decided on by men and that men have used their standards to
evaluate women. Certainly this disadvantages women who cannot
accord to male standards.
D.O. I can argue that Nature has made human beings this way for
millions of years. Human civilization has existed for only a few
thousand. Civilization is not long enough yet to change Nature and
human biology is not irrational. I think that we can say with as-
surance only that we do not understand the reasons yet.
W.Z. Some feminists deny sexual difference while others admit it. But
difference does not necessarily imply superior or inferior.
D.O. Almost all the highest representatives of human civilization-
philosophers, mathematicians-are men, though. It's been so long:
it's been thousands of years. I want to write an essay on this. I
absolutely disagree with sexual equality. Men and women are
different; they are born different and cannot be equal. We can only
allow equal rights when the specific area is clear. As the civilization
and culture change the content of equal rights should differ.
W.Z. In the United States, if women want equal rights they have to deny
sexual difference. Not long ago there was a major law suit over
202 Wang Zheng

women's maternity leave. Some men said that giving women mater-
nity leave was discrimination against men. Equal rights meant
treating everyone exactly the same.
D.Q. That's ridiculous. Men have an instant of pleasure but women get
stuck with a nine-month pregnancy, and so women should be
compensated.
W.Z. American feminists are faced with this dilemma. If you want to
emphasize equal rights then you cannot admit sexual difference. If
you emphasize sexual difference it can always be used as grounds
for discriminatory practices and preventing women from having
equal payor equal employment opportunities.
D.Q. 1 think that American society is in a transitional phase. Of course,
when China solved this problem by fiat then productivity
decreased. Chinese productive relations cannot afford to pay for
women's maternity leaves. China is just not qualified to extend
[maternity leaves to all]. And women end up having to suffer more
at this low level of productivity. Looking back, we know that women
in primitive society did all sorts of things wrapped in nothing but
leaves. And look at women in places like Huian county, Guangdong
province, who have to do everything. We enjoy fifty-six days of
maternity leave now. That's all Chinese women enjoy. If you raised
the leave prematurely productivity would suffer. Women don't like
to hear this. They say: hey, we want to live a good life and you're a
woman, too, so how come you don't understand the situation. But
this is the cruel reality. When [Chinese] society is more advanced
women should have welfare. 1 have a feeling the United States is
at this stage right now.
W.Z. What's your general view of Chinese women today?
D.Q. China's productivity has been static for so many years. This is the
reality and it forces women to think: what should we do? Certainly
what women can do is not a question that can be answered by
individual women but that has to be decided by the whole society.
However, we advocate individuality now and we do think that every
person needs to think [for herself]. Consideration should not simp-
ly be from individual need, things like "I should not be fired." We
need theoretical workers to dispel this leftist and unenlightened
notion in order to set women free. Then women can find new ways
for themselves. These days the Women's Federation is helping
women who've been fired and unemployed women to find new
jobs. 1 approve of this. 1 want to start a periodical called
Housekeeper. This makes people feel funny when they hear it. But
 Three Interviews 203

I really think that we need to instill rationality, rational patterns of

life and modern concepts into housekeepers because they are more
important than anyone else. I believe that a country that wishes to
change, to carry out something like birth control, for instance, must
begin by educating young girls. When girls are educated they will
know what to do. I knew, and I have only one child. In those days
I could have had three children, but did not want to. Moreover, I
already know how to educate children and what sort of family life
we must have, and so on and so on. These are all problems that can
be solved. The education of young girls is extremely important.
Some notions we used to have are obsolete now. They seem to be
there to benefit women but actually it is women who are hurt by
them. I came to these views because of Li Xiaojiang. She en-
lightened me. [laughs] Before I met her I'd never thought about
women's questions and I wanted to forget I was a woman.
W.Z. Why when we mention the family do we always think of women?
What is the man's place in the home?
D.Q. That can't be separated from history. Again, I'd put it this way: God
made human beings this way, and women just like to keep house.
If a married couple want to reverse things and the man wants to
stay at home, that's fine, too, since this is something people should
decide for themselves. Of course custom dictates a lot, and many
women want to stay home these days. And if, after women return
home, they are bored and want out they are free to do so. I think
these decisions should take place in a relaxed and free atmosphere.
The major problem now is that housework is so heavy, so boring
and so dull that it cannot be called a pleasure.
W.Z. Do you ever feel sad because you are a woman and a writer?
D.Q. No. Why should I? I fee happy because there are lots of things I
cannot express even to my husband or relatives but can put into my
work. I can express myself fully and freely through my work. Of
course, if you want to write about sex you have to be cautious and
keep something back. [laughs] But that is because of cowardice in
our hearts, not because of the social environment. If you are a
woman who has the identity of a writer many people are waiting to
read your stories; you can communicate directly with readers about
what you have thought and what you have felt. This is a wonderful
thing. It does not make me feel unhappy, ever.
W.Z. Some female writers have felt upset and suffered because their
writing on sex has caused gossip.
204 Wang Zheng

D.O. The people who gossip are wrong. Their gossip does not change
the fact that you are always yourself. I don't care about such things.
Remember my mentioning that the chief editor passed the negative
letter around to all the other editors? I really don't care. Do
whatever you want. You can expel me from the Party and that suits
me just fine. Of course, I don't violate the law, and we differ only
on matters of opinion. We can debate in the newspaper. Would
you dare debate with me? Well, I don't care. If we are quite
confident about our own behavior then we have nothing to fear
from what others say about us.
W.Z. Do you distinguish male from female Chinese writers?
D.O. Once I wrote an article on Chinese women writers in which I
divided them into two categories. One writes with instinct, about
themselves, like Zhang Jie. When they write about themselves their
writing is gorgeous and their work attractive and sincere. Others,
like me, try to hide themselves as male writers do. Why don't we
find these two categories among male writers? Again, I think it is
a matter of learning ability or intellect. To be a writer of the social
type [like me] you need to read a lot and really understand society.
If you are the little mistress type and all you want is to be comfy and
sit in front of your vanity table with your pen, it's much easier. Just
write out all your daydreams. I think many female writers limit
themselves because they don't like learning. Certainly their work
has markets, too. Actually lots of people want to find that kind of
little corner to pleasure themselves or seek solace. Such work will
mold people's personalities, as the other kind does, but it will never
have a great impact.
W.Z. If you had the chance to interview an American woman writer, what
would you ask?
D.O. [pausing] Were you to ask this question to an ordinary person you
would get an easy answer. But I'm a reporter. When you ask me
this question I automatically think: Who is this person I'm inter-
viewing? What has she written? Perhaps I'd want to know how she
produced her work. I'd have to do research first. See how I've failed
to answer your question today. [laughs]
W.Z. Well, just thinking of yourself as Dai Qing and not a reporter, what
would you like to know about Western women writers?
D.O. I'm not that interested in them. I went to Australia once for five
weeks. I was part of a Chinese women's studies group, and we
stayed in several homes. I met different people, among them a
woman writer. Australian women's lives are quite different from
 Three Interviews 205

ours. And their status as writers is different from ours. They have
a real sense of mission when they write, but primarily they see it as
a hobby rather than as a source of income. They write seriously and
they do exert individuality to express the self. I, on the other hand,
think of my responsibility as primarily social. If you let me choose,
I'd go to a nursery and write about three-year-olds because I adore
children. But that just won't do. I recall that the case ofChu Anping
hasn't been raised by anyone yet. 11 The Trotskyist case hasn't been
mentioned yet, either, and so on and so on. I write from a sense of
mission, so I feel I am quite different from them. I could say that
my conditions are not as good as theirs or that theirs are inferior to
mine; since their lives are so simple all they have to write about are
their interior feelings. We, on the other hand, confront so many
problems-the danger of being sent to prison, the need to fight
against powerful authorities, and all the other serious problems.
But this is pleasure. When I sit with Western female writers I sense
that we have little to communicate. I would have no interest in them
at all unless I regarded them as the subject of my research.
W.Z. What do you think of the issues raised by gender?
D.Q. I seek harmony. Nature is set this way already. People don't have
the power to change it, so we should treat it with awe and try to
maintain harmony. In China today gender conflict is not so serious.
Other conflicts are far more severe. Chinese women are con-
stituted of different groups. Divorced women are in a real predica-
ment and women at the lower rungs of the social system are too
sexually repressed. However, this is not a sexual issue, really, but
an issue of poverty. Intellectual women like us are fortunate in-
deed. We feel no repression, and so for us there is no sexual
oppression.
W.z. Your articles are often sharp and daring. Why are you so daring?
D.Q. I have nothing to lose. I'm just a reporter. I have no other titles.
W.Z. What about your Party membership?
D.Q. They can expel me if they like. When Liu Binyan was expelled I
actually considered quitting. When a Party member like Liu is
expelled, what's the point in staying on? But because I did not want
to make a scene I stayed on. Well, the cadres in our Party branch
treat me well.

llLabeled a Rightist in 1957. Dai Qing is trying to raise this injustice to urge the
government into rehabilitating Chu.
206 Wang Zheng

w.z. What is your current writing project?

D.Q. I am editing a set of books on the Cultural Revolution and a set of
readings for juveniles.
 Three Interviews 207

GLOSSARY

ChenShimei ~~l:
Chen Yu-shih ~~..ti
Cheng Naishan -u.JiJ,f
ChuAnping lf~-t
DaiHouying A)J~
Dai Qing Aat
"Fang zhou" ":if-A-"
"Huang shan zhi lian" " t. J.I :t.. fa "
"Jinxiu gu zhi lian"
jingjie
"'* ~
~JF.
$-:t.. ~"

Kulianshu «~tijf»
LiZiyun ~-rt;
Liang Xiaosheng ~~.
Liu Binyan 11-l j(J.
MengWeizai .i.1*~
Nanren de yiban shi niiren «11 Air? - .f Jl *" A»
niiquan zhuyi *";fJ.t..k
«*" ·tt - A»
j..
Nii xing-ren
Pan Jinlian
*~~
qizhi
Qin Xianglian I--j-~
quwei ,it~
ShenRong ili:
shenmei jiazhi 1f :lit it
Sheng huo de lu «1- n; ir? J$.»
Shi Tiecheng t..JAi.
208 Wang Zheng

"Wang" "!11'4"
WangAnyi .l.*.tf;
"Xiao cheng zhi lian" " I J- JAi,.:t. m"
XiaoHong l"k
Xiaoshuo jie «'J- ltJP>
"Xing kaifang niizi" " ·Ii MJ .a "* -r "
Xuecheng « ~ JAi,»
Zhang Ailing [Eileen Chang] 5l~*
ZhangJie !l~
Zhang Xianliang !J:~~
Zhao Yuanzhen ,tlJt..,A.
ZhuLin ##.
zhuti xing .i. ft·J±
In the Translator's Eye:
On the Significance of Zhu Lin
Richard King

Pecking order in the literary establishment is a subject of consuming

interest among Chinese authors. It is evident that good relations with the
powers that be are a vital complement to creative ability in the pursuit of
the glittering prizes of a literary career: publication anywhere, publication
in a major journal, membership in a state-sponsored literary association,
employment as a full-time writer, national awards, travel abroad, an inter-
national reputation and the coveted trip to Stockholm which all are con-
vinced will accrue to one of them in the near future. Competition for
celebrity tends to engender an atmosphere of mutual suspicion among
authors, a jealous protection of their position by the eminent and an
envious resentment among those trying to break into the privileged ranks.
For a combination of reasons both personal and artistic, Zhu Lin finds
herself on the periphery of the literary establishment of her native Shang-
hai. The author of three novels and numerous mid-length and short stories
published since 1979, she still has difficulty placing her work in nationally
circulated publications and has yet to travel outside China. While a suspi-
cious nature and a diffidence towards authority may well be factors in her
limited acceptance, she has also been slow to follow literary fashion,
persisting with the revelation of social and political injustice when most of
her peers were moving to other themes, and hesitating to experiment with
popular innovations like a stream-of-consciousness narration. l Thus, when
the leaders of the Shanghai Writer's Association were required, in the fall
of 1988, to rank their members into four grades, Zhu Lin was categorized
as falling between the top and second echelons, 2 a ranking that she feels
to be lower than she deserves. Still, even for one just outside the elite few,
the rewards of authorship in the age of economic reform are not incon-
siderable: on the eve of publication of her first novel in 1979, Zhu Lin was
making a poverty-line monthly salary of 34 yuan as an editor, first at
Shanghai's Youth Press and then at Shanghai Literature;3 ten years later,

1 An exception is the story "Yanjing" (Eyes), She zhentou hua [Snake's pillow]. n.p.
(Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1984) 22-43, which has modified stream-of-consciousness
narration in dream sequences.
2 Personal correspondence, November 11, 1988.
3 Interview, September 30,1979.
210 Richard King

the accumulation of salary and royalties was enough for her to buy her own
apartment in Shanghai.
Zhu Lin is a member of that "lost generation" that graduated from
urban high schools in the latter 1960s and spent several years of "rustica-
tion" in the countryside, in her case in Fengyang County, one of the poorest
areas of Anhui Province. Her first novel, written after her return to
Shanghai in 1975, reflects the psychological damage suffered by many of
the young urbanites in their years of rustication. That novel, Shenghuo de
lu [The path of life14 portrays a hostile natural world whose menace is
paralleled in human society by unscrupulous and oppressive exercise of
power. Its protagonist, Tan Juanjuan, a city girl languishing in an alien
environment, is sucked into a mire of political intrigue, caught between her
virtuous but insensitive boyfriend Liangzi and the Machiavellian official
Cui Haiying; she is eventually driven to suicide. In the disposition of the
three principals and in the fate of the protagonist, the novel bears a striking
resemblance to Thomas Hardy's masterpiece Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a
novel with which Zhu Lin was unfamiliar when she wrote The Path of Life.
Juanjuan is, like Tess, an exceptional and refined young woman in a lowly
setting. Both women attract two men, a strait-laced idealist (Liangzi/Angel
Clare) and a hypocrite posing as a zealot (Cui/Alex D'Urberville). Defiled
by the hypocrite, the heroine can no longer face the idealist; both women
are helpless before the fate that destroys them. Yet Juanjuan, though
forced into deceit and compromise, is still a heroine, like Tess in Hardy'S
controversial subtitle, "a pure woman.',s
The tragic plot, the triangular relationship of a pure woman, a rapa-
cious official and an inadequate protector, and the use of rape as a
metaphor for the relations between man and woman (or ruler and ruled)-
all are features that recur in fiction written by Zhu Lin in the early 1980s.
A further aspect of her writing already evident in The Path of Life but used
with greater sophistication in the short-story collection Snake's Pillow is
the use of images drawn from nature to symbolize the savagery of human

4 Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1979. I have translated chapter 13 of the novel,
"Yukuang xulou," as "Downpour on a Leaky Roof," in Michael S. Duke, ed., Contemporary
Chinese Literature (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985) 30-34.
S Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (First edition, 1891; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978).
 In the Translator's Eye 211

society.6 The snake's pillow flower that gives its name to the volume's title
work is a symbol of female sexuality and is also identified with the story's
tragic protagonist, a village girl whose beauty attracts an official and thus,
inevitably in Zhu Lin's fictional world, causes her downfall. The girl's fate
is linked to that of the flower in the fable of sexual possession and
oppression that is told at the end of the story to explain the flower's name?
In a similarly exegetical passage that ends "The Web" in the same collec-
tion, a spider, "like a member of the gentry in shiny black jacket," catches
and devours small flies; the protagonist, like those small flies, has been
snared in the web of society and devoured by the latter-day gentry.s I will
cite one further instance of this kind of symbolism from the same book,
which will allow me to offer a sample of the author's writing. The
eponymous character of the final work in the collection, "Tiddler's Tale,"
is a peasant genius who rises to the dizzy heights of a university education
and a position at a top-secret research establishment and then falls
precipitately, returning home disgraced and deranged after his best friend
confects evidence to blame Tiddler for an economic disaster and then steals
his girl. The traitor is symbolized by a fISh, the "spiny blowfish," said to have
been observed by Charles Darwin when the Beagle reached Brazil, which
enters the belly of other fISh and destroys them from within. The un-
balanced Tiddler confuses it with a local fISh and persists in his delusion
even when his error is pointed out to him. Towards the end of the story,
the narrator, whom Tiddler once tutored, returns from college to honor
him as her teacher and to persuade him to emerge from his reclusion and
contribute to society; she discovers him by the stream where they first met:

He was hardly recognizable. His body seemed to have shrivelled.

The white-rimmed glasses had yellowed, and the frames were broken on
one side; a string attached to one grubby lens was hooked around his ear.
He shuffled along the bank, a bamboo basket over one arm and a bundle
of straw under the other.
A pack of gleeful children swarmed around him, jumping up and
down and chattering as we once had, imitating his 'foreign stuff.'
"Tiddler, here are some scurry-ftsh," the children squealed.
Tiddler hurried over to the low bridge, put his bundle of straw on
the step as a cushion and slumped down, dangling his scrawny ankles
into the water and swishing them about to stir up the mud. Then he pulled

6 I have discussed this use of imagery in "Images of Sexual Oppression in Zhu Lin's
Short-Story Collection Snake's Pillow," Michael S. Duke, ed., First Person Feminine (M.E.
Sharpe, forthcoming).
7 She zhentou hua 135-157; my translation of this story is forthcoming in an anthology
edited by Yu-shih Chen for Random House.
8 Zhu Lin, "Wang," She zhentou hua 103-22; "The Web," trans. Richard King, Renditions
16 (Autumn 1981, published Spring 1983): 112-21.
212 Richard King

out a fishing-line, baited it with a scrap of bread, dropped it into the water
and flicked it out again. A stream of little scurry-fish flapped out of the
water and into his basket. I would never have dreamed that anyone could
catch fish with such delicacy.
Suddenly the call came from children on the other bank: "Tiddler!
Over here!" He jumped up, hurried over the bridge and dangled his feet
again. In went the line, and out again ...
I couldn't bear to watch any more. I went over to him: "Tiddler...
er, Teacher, let's go home."
He shook his head: "I can't, we haven't caught all the scurry-fish."
"You want to catch all of them?" I couldn't understand. "Why?"
"The scientific name for the scurry-flSb is the spiny blowflSb." He
adjusted his glasses - or rather he pulled at the string that had replaced
the broken frame - and began to lecture in the tone I knew so well:
"Darwin noted it in his circumnavigation of the globe; it purposely enters
the stomachs of other fISh, gnawing at their vitals and destroying them
"
"But the scurry is a fresh-water fISh, and the spiny blowfISh lives in
salt-water!" I hoped the correction would help him regain his com-
posure.
Ignoring me, he ranted on: "The world is being destroyed by these
scurry-fISh, loathsome shit-eaters who thrive in muddy waters!"
He picked up his fIShing equipment and headed off along the bank.
I chased after him: "Tiddler! Where are you going?"
He turned to me, then looked up into the heavens. Earnestly,
darkly, he replied: "Back into the world! To catch scurry-flSh!"9

The early fiction described above may not only have served the social
purpose of exposing the inequities witnessed by the author in her formative
years, but may also have gone some way towards exorcising the author's
personal demons. Certainly the later fiction concentrates less on violence
committed by men against women. In her 1987 story "The Festival of
Graves" oppressor and victim are both women, as an over-zealous Maoist
cadre forces her step-daughter into a third-trimester abortion on her
second pregnancy. to The picture of village life in Zhu Lin's more recent
fiction is less bleak than in The Path of Life, where peasants are seen as
being condemned to an eternity of poverty and suffering: "Year in year out,
they will always have to carry huge burdens on their shoulders, buffeted by

9 "Amoxiao de gushi," She zhentou hua, 173-92, qt. 190-91.

lOuMing hua bu hao," Shanghai wem:ue (December 1987): 47-52 My translation
appeared in ~anoa 1.1(2 (Fall 1989): 124-36.
 In the Translator's Eye 213

gales and drenched by rain, and their only reward will be a bare subsistence
of yams and sorghum."ll Later works (set, it must be noted, among the
more prosperous peasantry of the Shanghai suburbs) concentrate more on
getting rich than on avoiding starvation. In the mid-length story "Da erduo
Ada he tuwei bagou" [Flap-eared hulk and his bob-tailed hound],12 an
ambitious if intellectually limited peasant manages, after several failed
attempts at making his fortune, to succeed in the business of raising angora
rabbits. Authority remains perfidious, but it is more foolish and less menac-
ing: in the story just mentioned, hunting is condemned in a Cultural
Revolution campaign to "cut off capitalist tails," and Hulk is ordered by a
local official to kill his hunting-dog Lazybones. Honor is satisfied when
Hulk cuts off his dog's "capitalist" tail, and Lazybones is allowed to survive.
Descriptions of, and the imagery of, sexual oppression are less a feature of
the later writing. Zhu Lin still writes a good deal of natural description: as
with other writers who set their fiction in the countryside, many of her
stories begin with a passage of physical setting, frequently of the "it was a
dark and stormy night" variety. (Perhaps the Bulwer-Lytton laureate might
be closer than the Nobel, if eligible Chinese novelists would lower their
sights somewhat.)
One constant feature of Zhu Lin's work from her earliest fiction is its
concern for the awkward position of women in contemporary Chinese
village society, a concern which, to judge from the title at least, will be
continued in her third novel, titled Nilxing-ren [Women are human1 and
set for release in 1989. 13 Her work has many resonances with the interna-
tional body of twentieth-century women's writing and should provide
worthwhile material for future research by feminist literary scholars.
My association with the author came about through a personal intro-
duction and began with a long conversation the night before The Path of
Life went on sale in Shanghai. We met at her father's house and then went
to the offices of Shanghai Literature Publishing House, where, unknown
to most of her colleagues, she was spending her nights; she would hide her
quilt during the day and spread it on tables to sleep. In similar secrecy she
had written her novel, first fearful that she would be condemned for her
harsh portrayal of the rustication program, and then sensitive to accusa-

11 Shenghuo de Iu 113.
12 Diyu yu tiantang. n.p. (Henan renmin chubanshe, 1984) 129-96. The "capitalist tail"
incident is on 136-37. My translation will appear with "Snake's Pillow" in Yu-shih Chen's
anthology.
13 The novel, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Shanghai journal XlQOshuo jie.
214 Richard King

tions that she was neglecting her editorial work to pursue literary fame. I
had intended to talk to her about her experience in Anhui to support a
study of Cultural Revolution rustication fiction;I4 but the conversation
soon turned to the hardships involved with writing The Path of Life and
getting it published. While grateful to those who had supported her work,
Mao Dun and Feng Mu chief among them, Zhu Lin was also distressed at
the way the novel had been edited by the publisher, People's Literature
Publishing House. She spent much of the rest of that night restoring long
passages that had been excised and noting editorial changes in the copy of
the novel she gave me as I left Shanghai next morning with my bus-load of
tourists. As I read the novel, I was struck by the pessimism that set it apart
from previous rural fiction: the bleak view of the countryside, the ineluc-
table sense of tragedy and the painful portrayal of the internal and external
forces that drive the protagonist to her fate. The opportunity to compare
sections of published text with manuscript also permitted some insights into
the editorial process in post-Mao China.
In the ten years since then, I have maintained contact with Zhu Lin,
and have been privileged to receive not only copies of her published work
(much of which appears in fairly obscure journals), but also, on occasion,
the manuscript versions as well. IS Meetings with her have given me a
chance to resolve problems of translation and discuss her work, though she
is disinclined to hear it analyzed; after listening patiently to my interpreta-
tion of one of her stories, she merely remarked "You might say so" [keyi
zheyang shuo] and changed the subject.
It seems to me that the best of Zhu Lin's writing stands comparison
with better-known women writers like her contemporary Wang Anyi and
the older Zhang Jie; its rural setting also offers an interesting contrast to
their concentration on urbanites, often of the "intellectual class." A body
of reasonable translations might win Zhu Lin some recognition among
Western readers, and thus (since that is how things work in China) increase
her popularity and standing at home.

14 A project which led circuitously to the essay "Models and Misfits: Urban Youth in
Chinese Countryside in Three Novels of the 1970's," Merle Goldman, William Joseph,
Christene Wong and David Zweig, eds., New Perspectives on the Cullural Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
15 I compare the manuscript and published texts of "The Festival of Graves" in "Syst~me
et texte en Chine contemporaine," Les Cahiers du Centre d'ttudes de I'Ask de I'est (University
of Montreal, forthcoming).
Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for
Eileen Zhang Among Taiwan's.
Feminine Writers
Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

If literature of the People's Republic of China has suffered from

having been fitted into the strait-jacket of a narrowly defined "socialist
realism," then the literary tradition of Taiwan's post-1949 era has seen a
different kind of constraint, one deriving from the dominant culture's
ratification of privatized, neo-traditional, effeminate, and often sentimen-
talized artistic visions. As Raymond Williams once said, "most versions of
'tradition' can be quickly shown to be radically selective."l In Taiwan, this
is patently the case. Among writers ofxinwenxue [new literature since the
May Fourth Movement] in Taiwan, the tradition of "critical realism" has
apparently been suppressed. The heritage of the most inoffensive and
non-subversive literature produced by Anglo-American wing writers af-
filiated with Wenxue yanjiu she [The literary association] and Xlllyue she
[The crescent moon society] has been selected out for emphasis. Conse-
quently, despite the ban on the works of those xmwenxue writers still alive
on the China mainland, subjective structures of feeling like the idyllic
lyricism of Shen Congwen and the sentimental, romantic idealization of
Bing Xin have nonetheless played an essential role in shaping the dominant
aesthetic mode of Taiwan's post-1949 era.
Understanding the heritage of female writers current in Taiwan today
requires some brief review of relevant events in the country's literary world.
The Xiandai wenxue yundong [The modernist literary movement] of the
1960s and the Xumgtu wenxue yundong [The nativist literary movement] of
the 19708 may be appropriately conceived as "alternative" and "opposi-
tional" cultural formations within Taiwan's current hegemony, which, aside
from suppressing negative presentations of the society in literature, con-

t In Marxism and Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 115,
Williams comments: "For tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant
and hegemoniC pressures and limits. It is always more than an inert historicized segment;
indeed, it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation. What we have to see is not
just 'a tradition' but a selective tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past
and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and
cultural definition and identification."
216 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

stantly tries to enlist the country's writers in projects that promote its
political causes.2
By the late 1970s, however, the Modernists had been largely incor-
porated into the dominant culture, and the counter-hegemonic activity of
the Nativists had been increasingly channeled into direct political involve-
ment. With the passage of time, some of the inherent shortcomings of both
movements were exposed: the Modernist works, in their more radical
forms, contradicted the predominantly lyrical aesthetic sensibility of native
readers, while the militant political agenda of the Nativists both threatened
and bored the middle class, who were largely satisfied with the status quo.
The subsiding of these contesting voices thus paved the way for the rise of
a "serious" literature of the more popular nature and a resurgence of the
lyrical and sentimental strain in the following decade.
Even at the height of the Modernist and Nativist influences, the more
conservative, conformist veteran writers of the 1950s and 19608, who were
fundamentally allegiant to the Nationalist government and therefore sup-
ported Taiwan's hegemonic order with considerable self-identification,
never ceased to be the real backbone of the country's literary community.
Such established poets and fiction writers as Ya Xian, Lin Haiyin, Zhu
Xining, and Peng Ge, among others, have served as literary editors, pub-
lishers, and literary bureaucrats, and have carried on a tradition of their
own in their prominent institutional roles.
Since most of the young writers arising in the late 1970s and early 1980s
owe their success to success in literary contests sponsored by the two major
newspapers, Lianhe bao [The united daily] and Zhongguo shibao [China
times], they have naturally established close ties with literary institutions

2 As Taiwan's Modernist Literary Movement adopted literary concepts developed in

Western capitalist societies, it naturally brought with it such typical bourgeois social values
as individualism, liberalism, and rationalism. It is certainly true that, like their counterparts
in the Western high-culture art, Taiwan's MOdernist literature showed an iconoclastic
tendency that was potentially subversive. However, as most of the Modernist writers
advocated artistic autonomy and were politically disengaged, the subversive elements oftheir
works were easily diluted by the hegemonic cultural forces. The Nativist Literary Movement,
on the other hand, may be more appropriately seen as a counter·hegemonic cultural
formation which explicitly challenged the dominant cultural orders. It was a by-product of
the nation's diplomatic failures during the 1970s and a manifestation of the native
Taiwanese's dual discontent with the unbalanced political power distribution and
socio-economic problems created by industrialization. The proclaimed goals of the Nativists
are threefold: to undo the political myth of the Nationalist government, to denounce
bourgeois-capitalist social values, and to combat Western cultural imperialism.
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 217

outside of the "independent" core groups of Modernists based in the

academy and politically subversive Nativists. This alliance has significant
bearings on the new writers' aesthetic preference and vocational vision.
Even while they avid!y absorb the sophisticated techniques of the Moder-
nists and the thematic formulations of the Nativists, the general tenor of
their works significantly departs from the Modernists' elitist intellectualism
and the Nativists' socialist political activism. Among a group of young
women writers that professed influence from Zhang Ailing [Eileen Zhang]
there has emerged a tendency toward lyrical sentimentalization that is
particularly noteworthy. 3
This essay investigates the intricate relationship between the new
cohort of women writers and their mentor Eileen Zhang and provides an
analysis of the fiction of Yuan Qiongqiong, whom I consider the finest
representative of this group. What I wish to demonstrate here is that these
conservative young women writers are by no means insulated from the
ongoing, profoundly disturbing ideological debates of their times. In fact,
their development is deeply enmeshed in the formation of politically
determined cultural movements between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s.
Eileen Zhang, a mainland writerofthe pre-1949 era who has been residing
overseas since the early 1950s, has the significant advantage of having never
really been touched by the postwar Taiwan hegemons. For precisely that
reason, Zhang has provided an inspiring alternative for writers like Yuan
who search, in some confusion, for strategies that will allow them to
reformulate in literary terms the extremely complex socio-political realities
surrounding them.

The Eileen Zhang Phenomenon

The growing popularity of Eileen Zhang's fiction in Taiwan between
the mid-1970s and mid-1980s is easily explained with reference to social
development. As the urban milieu of Taiwan's big cities became increas-
ingly metropolitan, the characteristic sophistication and cynicism of
Zhang's love stories, set in Hong Kong and Shanghai before the Com-
munist Revolution, catered to the taste of educated young people studying
or working in the cities who formed the main body of readers and con-
stituted the pool of potential writers.

3 Since the late 197~ we have seen a notable proliferation of young women writers in
Taiwan. Such names as Xiao Sa, Uao Huiying, Li Ang, Zheng Baojuan, Xiao Lihong, Jiang
Xiaoyun, Zhu l1anwen, Zhu lianxin, Su Weizhen, Zhong Xiaoyang, and Yuan Oiongqiong
have appeared frequently in literary supplements of major newspapers and best-seller lists.
The last seven writers on the list have to varying degrees displayed influence from Eileen
Zhang.
218 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

In the wake of the commercial expansion of Taiwan's culture industry,

the mode of artistic production has become increasingly mass-mediated
and geared toward consumerism.4 More and more writers create with an
eye on popular fame and monetary rewards; the days of coterie journals
and highbrow standards are obviously over. Most of the young women
writers mentioned above, whose subject matter frequently revolves around
love and marriage of young urbanites, have come to occupy the center stage
of Taiwan's cultural production, winning literary contests and contributing
scripts for films and television series. Some of them have, however, found
themselves in a new quandary: in the eyes of serious critics, they are
sometimes indistinguishable from hack writers of entertainment literature,
particularly stigmatized types of popular romance such as the fiction of
Qiong Yao. Eileen Zhang, whose first short story collection bears the title
Chuanqi [Romance], has offered young women writers a welcome model
because of her unpretentious, professional respect for the mass readers
and, more significantly perhaps, because of her excellent appropriation of
the structure of popular romance in the frame of serious literature.
Zhang's frankly expressed wish to make her literary fame by gaining
popularity among a "predictable," peculiarly loyal mass readership,s and
her total dedication to craft even while writing for "undeserving" readers
have puzzled some of her best critics.6 But her predilection for popular
romance appears to be genuine. The technical, generic link between
Zhang's fiction and the popular romance is quite obvious. But thematically,
rather than reenforcing them, Zhang seems preoccupied with deconstruct-
ing romantic visions of life. She returns again and again to the devastating
effect of the deluding but irresistible romantic illusions and their conse-
quences for private emotional life. 7

4 Writers deemed as possessing exceptional talents are even offered yearly stipends by
private industries to research and write new books.
S See Eileen Zhang's remarks inLiuyan [Floating words] (faipei: Huangguan chubanshe,
1968) 10-11.
o Her most staunch admirer, Shui Jing, for instance, remarked, with explicit regret, that
Zhang should not have taken the self-demeaning step in submitting her first work to Zhou
Shoujuan, a literary editor of the popular "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly" school of her time
(Shui Jing, Zhang Ailing de xiaoshuo yishu [The art of Eileen Zhang's fiction] [Taipei: Dadi
chubanshe, 1973] 96).

7 Such tbemes are found in stories like "Cbenxiangxie: diyi lu xiang" [A10esw00d
ashes-the first burning], "Hong meigui yu bai meigui" [Red rose and white rose], and
"Oingchengzhi Iian" [Love in a fallen city], as well as in the sub-plot of "Jinsuo ji" [The golden
cangue], which centers on the pathetic victim of such an illUSion, Changbai. Zhang Ailing
duanpian xWoshuo ji [Collected short stories of Zhang Ailing] (Hong Kong: Tianfeng
chubanshe, 1954).
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 219

Both Zhang's pragmatic (if somewhat cynical) acknowledgement of

the reality of the author/reader relationship in a consumer culture and her
power to artistically transcend the generic confinement of popular
romance with an acute sense of reality and a formal self-consciousness are
closely echoed by her younger follower Yuan Qiongqiong. Yuan once
remarked that, treating her creative works as "pure commodities," she had
gained a certain conscientiousness, a sense of responsibility toward their
quality control.s In an autobiographical note, she observed how she had
outgrown her adolescent attraction to the popular romances written by
Qiong Yao. She saw this as a sign of her own maturation. 9
Both Zhang and Yuan, though maintaining a continual affection for
the subject-matter of popular romance, have paradoxically built their
artistic strength on undercutting stereotypical notions of romantic love that
are the very foundations of that genre. This particular trait provides an
interesting contrast with many other women writers in modem Chinese
history. In the course of their evolution as writers, women in modem
Chinese literary history-Ding Ling, Ouyang Zi, and Wang Anyi, among
others-have typically undergone a transformation which enabled them to
outgrow their juvenile fantasies and to adopt "serious" literary modes
ranging from socialist realism to liberal-humanist modernism. Different as
their later choices are, there is always the same stem rejection of their
earlier, more sentimental approach to literature. Eileen Zhang and Yuan
Qiongqiong, however, have followed a different path. Without entirely
renouncing their earlier passion for popular romance, they have dedicated
themselves to improving the genre in its own terms. Unlike the other
women writers who sought to be assimilated into the male-dominated
mainstream tradition, and thus necessarily developed a sense of self-denial,
these two writers, by choosing to deal with a "feminine" genre, and hence
inevitably with the specific ideology of the form, have gained valuable
ground in coming to terms with their own socially determined feminine
experience.

8 See "Yiwai-wode diyiben shu" [An aCCident-my first book], in Hongchen xinshi
[Intimates thoughts from the red dust] (faipei: Erya, 1981) 155.
9 Qiong Yao, a prominent figure in Taiwan's popular culture industry, seems to be the
model of the self-deceptive woman writer ridiculed in Yuan's "Gushi" [Story]. In this story,
Yuan's rejection of the melodramatic falsification of reality with rigid formulae of popular
romance was dramatically announced.
220 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

Because they write the way they do, Zhang and Yuan are both
rewarded by and made vulnerable to criticism. On the one hand, the
romance genre has brought them considerable commercial success. On the
other hand, dealing with delicate sentiments of women has deprecated
them in the eyes of orthodox critics. 10 They of course perceive themselves
as responsible writers, consciously appealing to a mass readership. And so,
it is arguable that their writing implies a form ofself-assertion, if not protest.
In any case, their widely acknowledged artistic accomplishments force us
to reflect on gendering of literary genres and on problems surrounding
notions of "high" and "popular" art in an age of consumer culture.
Thematic attraction aside, there were other reasons why writers of
Yuan's generation reached out for Zhang's literature. The cultural nostal-
gia of the decade between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s certainly con-
tributed to Eileen Zhang's incarnation as a cultural symbol. Cultural
nostalgia was the by-product of a nation-wide movement toward self-
reassertion in response to the country's recent diplomatic losses. It involved
Taiwan's postwar generation in the self-conscious effort to legitimize its
independent political identity by calling attention to the new cultural
identity that had evolved in the post-1949 eraY
In a capitalist society, however, the evocation of a cultural past is
immediately the subject of commercial exploitation. Traditional images
were reproduced in store signs, fashion, stationery, and decorative acces-

10 A comparison of the critical reception of Yuan Qiongqiong and a male peer of Yuan,
Huang Fan, can be very revealing of the gender -related bias among the mainstream critics.
Although Huang Fan's work is no less contaminated by the law of commodification than hers
is, he has enjoyed a much better reputation among serious critics primarily for his political
themes, his pose as a self-conscious intellectual writer, and his supposed experimentation
with new aesthetic modes, such as postmodernism.
11 After the United States normalized its diplomatic relationship with the People's
Republic of China in 1979, with the increase of oppositional political activities in Taiwan, the
myth surrounding the sovereignty of the Nationalist government over the Chinese mainland
was openly questioned, which posed a considerable threat to the relative homogeneity ofthe
country's large middle-class population. The cultural movement mentioned in the text had
the functional purpose of rekindling solidarity among various social groups. Such popular
movies as Yowna caW [Ab Fei] and Wo zheyang guole yisheng [Kwei-mei, a woman] serve
as good illustrations ofthe movement's positive outlook and pragmatic spirit. Both films trace
the life story of a woman, one Taiwanese, one mainlander, from the early postwar years of
arduous struggle with poverty, through the growing affluence of Taiwan's economic
expansion in the 19605 and 19705, to the current middle-class prosperity. By representing the
masses' satisfaction with the status quo, they clearly helped to consolidate people's allegiance
to the present government. In this regard, they echoed the official ideology embodied in the
government -promoted BenJuhua yundong [Taiwanization program]. Different sectors ofthis
movement almost uniformly insisted on a distinct "Taiwan experience" shared by native
Taiwanese and mainlanders alike. However, as the discourse on political demythification
gained its momentum, it became obvious that they sought to reconstruct Taiwan's new
"national" history with different rationales. Two opposing factions quickly emerged: one
stressing the narrowly defined regionalism claiming that Taiwanese is not Chinese, and the
other the China-centered nationalism which looks forward to an eventual reunification with
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 221

sories, in much the same manner in which they were often manufactured
for tourism~nly in this case it was primarily aimed at satisfying a domestic
demand for consumption of native cultural signs. Influenced by the
Nativists' perception of an opposition between indigenous and foreign
cultural forms, artists made serious attempts to integrate traditional
Chinese and modem Western art. 12 However, while the sign function of
many of these endeavors far exceeded their achievement in the artistic
rejuvenation of traditional forms, the cultural splendor of an ancient
China~f the Tang Dynasty or of the time when the Shi jing [The Book
of songs] was composed~erved more as a source for exoticism and
sentimentalization than for artistic inspiration.
In the literary arena, cultural nostalgia was best exemplified by the
veteran writer Zhu Xining and the Sansan shufang [Double three book-
shop], around which Zhu's literary proteges were gathered. 13 Zhu was
among the most ardent champions of Eileen Zhang, and his views exerted
considerable influence on the young women writers under discussion.
Since the early 1970s, Nativist critics have impelled public awareness
of a certain incongruity in "Chinese" modernist literature. Eileen Zhang,
on the other hand, seems to these neo-conservative writers as having
beautifully integrated Chinese and Western elements in her art. Despite
the variety of techniques Zhang employs that are traceable to the influence
of modem Western fiction, her highly suggestive verbal images clearly
evoke the rich intensity of classical Chinese poetry. Employing emotionally
charged metaphors, she retains an essentially "lyrical" effect even in the
Western realist form. Typical of her style is a distinctive personal touch

the mainland. These ideological stances are generally referred to as the "Taiwan jie" [faiwan
complex] and the "Zhongguo jie" [China complex] respectively. The phenomenon we shall
describe in this essay can be aptly summed up as the "China complex" of a group of young
women writers of this particular period.

12ne Yunmen WUlUan [Cloudgate dance troupe], Lanlingjufang [Lanling drama house],
Yayin xiaoji [Minor series of an elegant tune] (modified Peking opera) were celebrated
examples.
13 Zhu Xining and his family publishing house, Three-three Booltshop, an editorial
subgroup of the Huangguan Publishing House, provided a home base for the emerging
conservative young writers of the 1980s. With accented patriotism, this group sentimentally
embraced China's cultural past in a highly eulogistic manner. Within the context of Taiwan's
literary politiCS, these writers' creative vitality brought an effective overhaul to forces
supporting Taiwan's dominant culture. Their conservative ideOlOgy, critique of radically
westernized modernism, and defense against the Nativists' tendency towards narrowly
identifying nativism with socialist activism gave them a rather distinctive profile in the 1980s.
222 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

which signals the author's subjectivity in spite of the third-person narrative

voice. All these seemed to offer a welcome alternative to the obstinately
impersonal, painstakingly deliberate Western style of some of Taiwan's
Modernists. At the same time, Zhang's unmistakable "modern" sensibility
seemed preferable to the older form of Chinese lyricism, with its placid
mood and conventional poetic vocabulary.
Another interesting twist to Zhang's appeal was the period's cultural
nostalgia for mainland ethnic and cultural roots. 14 In one sense, Zhang's
pre-1949 fiction was a rich source for a nostalgic look at typically "Chinese"
patterns of living and at social relations rapidly fading from the cultural
landscape of Taiwan's increasingly capitalized society. Zhang's portraits of
blemished Chinese character, her criticism, are tinged with a melancholy
evocative of the irreversible disintegration of an old China. This feature
understandably held special charm for a group of writers in Taiwan born
after the war-especially the second-generation mainlanders-who had
been made conscious of the fact that their link with their cultural past was
becoming more and more tenuous. In another sense, as a poignant and
perceptive witness of the drastic change of social orders around the Com-
munist Revolution in 1949, Zhang's caustic criticism of life in both the
feudalist and the Communist societies contains much more disconcerting
truth than the lyrical reminiscences of the same period by most older
mainland writers living in Taiwan. So one important thrust of this nostalgia
for the mainland past is not so much sentimental as political. It points
directly to a particular "political unconscious" of the residents of Taiwan,
to their uneasy awareness of the country's still unresolvable relationship
with the People's Republic of China, and to their new generation's demand
to get beyond the current hegemony's political myth and more rationally
recomprehend contemporary Chinese history.
Among conservative young women writers, such as Jiang Xiaoyun,
Zhu Tianwen, and Yuan Qiongqiong, we frequently encounter stories
depicting their parents' mass migration to Taiwan from the mainland in
1949. To be sure, unlike the older generation of conservative writers, these
writers avoid explicit, politically charged rhetoric aiming to ratify the
present regime. And their fiction demonstrates their concern with such
sensitive issues as the country's mainland policy and the TaiwaneseIMain-
lander integration problem. Nevertheless, their works remain
predominantly reflective rather than protesting. Their rendering of con-
temporary historical events is for the most part personal, restrained, and

14Hou Dejian's "Long de chuanren" [Children of the dragon], which was sung by
pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square before the massacre, was composed in this
period. Hou was among Taiwan's best-known "XlDOyuan minge" [Campus fOlk-song]
musicians before he defected and went to live in the PRe.
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 223

often cloaked in subjectivist lyricism. The probable cause for this ab-
sence of political criticism is on the surface a consequence of censorship
and the writers' close collaboration with government-sponsored media.
Yet at a deeper level, it signifies the writers' inability to express their
discontent without betraying their community. The result is a profound
ambivalence in these writers' attitudes toward history.15
One of the crucial functions of Eileen Zhang's influence has been to
give writers the means to articulate paradoxes inherent in their own
political experience. Writers like Yuan Qiongqiong, Zhu Tianwen, and
Jiang Xiaoyun, in dealing with the delicate subject of contemporary history,
seem to have adopted various aesthetic strategies-poised evasiveness,
passivity with heightened consciousness, and self-indulgence in subjective
sentiments-that are characteristics of Eileen Zhang's writing.
Eileen Zhan& once expressed her premonition of "a greater destruc-
tion in our time." Her reaction to this seems to be a peculiar kind of carpe
diem attitude: a fatalistic sense of doom has intensified her appreciation of
ordinary life and led her to rejoice in things that are distinctively
"human"-"human" sometimes precisely because they betray human
weakness and moral vulnerability. Thus her carnivalesque relishing of
crude expressions of the life force in popular theater and primitive folk art,
her ambivalent celebration of the selfish, vulgar, plebeian complacency of
Shanghai residents, and her intoxication with the impending danger during
the Japanese bombing are all underscored with an acute self-consciousness
of her own powerlessness, capsulated in the term "wunai." The juxtaposi-
tion of beauty and horror, pain and ecstasy, love and self-interest in her
work all convey a sense of keen awareness of the ephemerality and ar-
bitrariness of subjective experiences. Self-consuming, personal anguish is
ultimately irrelevant in the face of the overwhelming violence of history,
nothing more than an excellent subject for sentimentalization.
Appropriating Zhang's peculiar sense of history, her followers in
Taiwan were able to describe with detachment such realities as war and
revolution as irrational and beyond human control, while focusing on
registering personal and emotional responses with an acute, delicate sen-

15 The Nationalist government's attitude toward the artists' increasing interest in dealing
with sensitive political issues is inevitably ambivalent. On the one hand, the Jiang Jingguo
government itself started to promote, with considerable success, the Taiwanization program,
which aimed to alleviate the accumulated tension resulting from the more rigid
anti-Communist poliCies of the previous leader. The conservative writers may very well be
enlisted in its own political project. On the other hand, however, when artists began to touch
on previously tabooed areas, and to address, in a more realistic manner, the interaction
among Taiwan's recent social, political, and ethnic realities of the post-1949 era, their works
easily became the epicenter of subversive political discourse.
16 See "Chuanqi zaiban zixu" [Preface to the second edition of Chuanq'l (Collected Short
Stories of Eileen Zhong 3~).
224 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

sitivity. In other words, by suspending judgement on history from social or

political perspectives, and by displacing rational interpretation with aes-
thetic appreciation, they evaded direct ideological confrontation. The
reasons for an entire cohort of writers embracing this strategy are the
conventional social restraints on women engaging in public affairs and the
culturally preferred "feminine" trait of passive submission.
There is, however, a crucially fundamental difference between Zhang
and her followers in Taiwan. The ambivalence of Eileen Zhang, her
submission to life's uncontrollable cruelties, carries a bitterly defiant,
protesting overtone. Her Taiwan followers, on the other hand, invariably
display more tolerance and empathy. They share her compassion for
inevitable human failures and usually magnify her sensitive, gaily apprecia-
tive embrace of life in its mundane ordinariness. Yet in varying degrees
they have mitigated her poignancy. In their works, the characteristic
double-vision of Zhang's writing is conspicuously missing.
Several critics in Taiwan, disappointed with the lack of sophistication
in some writers following Eileen Zhang's style, have attributed the problem
to their authors' emotional and artistic immaturity. I would like to suggest,
however, that their fundamental difference is not aesthetic, but ideological.
As already demonstrated, when writers from Taiwan appropriated Eileen
Zhang's seeming historical evasiveness, they inevitably tailored it to suit
their own ideological frame. By the same token, the marked difference in
the level of social criticism of their writing should be attributed in great part
to very specific, socialized attitudes and personal postures. Eileen Zhang's
signature negativity emerged out of her effort to transcend her own sense
of marginality, the result of her sensitivity toward her peculiar position in
the class and gender hierarchy of her time. Zhang's aristocratic family
background, privileged education, and her progressive self-image as a
woman intellectual have, in a sense, determined her social marginality. This
incongruity-between her and her environment-is never resolved in her
work. It could be a reason why Zhang has embraced the life and art forms
of a commoner.
Autobiographical materials suggest that we read her life as a conscious
struggle between conflicting, determinant forces: her rebellion against
tyrannical paternal control and her attraction to her mother, her model of
the female quest for self-realization. This domestic conflict lies at the root
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 225

of many attitudes expressed in Zhang's literature. 17 Zhang's reputation as

a modem intellectual is manifested in her unconventional views of cultural
history, her original art and literary criticism, and a well-demonstrated
sharp distaste for received dogma. And it is mainly such tendencies to
question the established hierarchy of values that have given her seemingly
"frivolous"-in the opinion of many leftist critics-literary works an essen-
tial subversive edge.
For instance, inherent in Eileen Zhang's characterization of women
is an accented double-vision. On the one hand, Zhang depicts femininity
in all its stereo typic negative qualities: her women characters are almost
invariably scheming, petty-minded, and querulous. Yet, on the other hand,
negative female traits as such also appear as survival strategies that women
develop against their disadvantaged social positions. The author remains
persistently neutral about women's moral responsibilities under these
conditions.
Zhang's attitude toward political leftism provides another example of
her peculiar transgressiveness. In a short essay, "Da ren" [Beating people],
she remarks on how her habitual callousness toward the ugly side of society
left her when she saw on the street a cop beating people for no particular
reason. IS But she hastens to observe that this did not arouse her class
consciousness. With a touch of perversity, she says: "I only wanted to
become an official, or the Chairman's wife, so I could go ahead and slap
that cop's face." Amid the widespread leftist altruistic idealism of the 1930s
and 1940s, Zhang insisted on a clear distinction between instinctive indig-
nation and ideologically preconditioned reaction to human injustice. In-
stead of living up to the ideals set by the dominant May Fourth literary
ethic, Eileen Zhang chose a reading public that treated literature frankly
as entertainment. In a dubious attempt to defend herself against criticism,
she sarcastically apologized for the fact that she could only write one kind
of literature, that she was incapable of writing in the proletarian style. The

17 On the one hand, her father's house preserves much of the decadent life style of
traditional officialsofthe "old China," where one still finds opium and concubines, and where
Zhang read numerous Chinese popular novels that have come to exert great influence on
her literary taste. Even though she has usually associated moral decadence with everything
on her father's side, Zhang's upbringing as a leisure.class lady also seems to have set the
boundary for her creative activity. Her essay "Tan dushu" [On reading] provides ample
evidence of how her mode of acquiring literary knowledge has the flavor of the old-fashioned
gentry--connoisseurian, non-utilitarian-and ultimately game or pastime (in Zhang /can
[Zhang's outlook) [Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1976] 179-228). On the other hand, the
Western-style apartment shared by her mother and aunt to which she took refuge after
quarrelling with her step-mother came to represent the modern and the "civilized," where
she conversed as a new-style intellectual.
18InFloalingWords 129-130.
226 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

implied criticism was her sense that leftists made illegitimate use of litera-
ture by politicizing it. 19
Even this obliquely subversive edge in Zhang's work, however, was
lost when her style reached Taiwan. The young women writers there, who
found the pessimistic cynicism of Eileen Zhang so fascinating, nevertheless
held rather positive world views. The constructive spirit of these socially
well-integrated young women writers must be attributed to the value placed
on social conformity, an important part of their generation's collective
experience. As postwar babyboomers born to middle-class families-many
of them have been brought up in the military compounds where interper-
sonal relationships are particularly close-they have typically developed a
strong sense of identification with their community. In postwar Taiwan's
predominantly bourgeois society, where the traditional Chinese gentry
elite have been largely transformed, the young writers naturally adopt
cultural forms that are middle-class and urban and are therefore without
Zhang's aristocratic condescension.
The focus of the second section of this essay, Yuan Qiongqiong, a
mature and sophisticated writer in her own right, may serve to exemplify
how, as Taiwan's young women writers simulate Eileen Zhang's am-
bivalence and her various idiosyncratic postures, they have nevertheless
embodied a different episteme in their works.
Self-identification with the community may be the explanation for
Yuan's genuinely positive vision of mundane reality in contemporary
Taiwan. It is best communicated through such warm-hearted and
humorous, though slightly sarcastic, sketches scattered through all of her
collections, such as "Chendian" [Sediments of society], "Fusheng tu"
[Portraits of the floating life], "Xi" [Stage of life], and "Zhongsheng"
[Multitudes of beings]. Typically these pieces present the life of the "com-
moners" with an unfeigned empathy. They thus form sharp contrasts to
Eileen Zhang's well-known portraits of the Shanghai citizens of the 1940s
in stories such as "Liuqing" [Lingering love], "Hongluan xi" [Happy
matrimony], "Guihua zheng, axiao bei qiu" [Shame! Amah], and
"Fengsuo" [Curfew], in which her caustic cynicism is unreservedly dis-
played.
In Taiwan during the 1980s, the society's new openness and the impact
of the international feminist movement awakened the country's more
progressive intellectuals to the serious sociological implications of many
feminist issues. The young women writers, however, have not responded
to such waves of thought in unison. Amid the prevailing tendency toward
female self-assertion, some of Taiwan's conservative young women writers
nonetheless deliberately extol the "traditional" Chinese concept of
femininity. They celebrate, with a tone of nostalgia, such female virtues as

19 See Zhang's remarks in "Xie sheme" [What to write?] in Floating Words 124-125.
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 227

self-sacrifice and self-denial, mainly as a gesture of resistance against the

growing utilitarianism in Taiwan's urban life.
Occasionally Yuan Qiongqiong has also displayed such a tendency. In
several of her works, especially in the reminiscences about her father, who
died when she was a teenager, Yuan expresses a sentimentalized view of
manhood, revealing her' romanticized vision of old China's patriarchal
order. Unlike Eileen Zhang's work, which passes a harsh verdict on social
institutions that subordinated women in traditional Chinese society,
Yuan's most cogent exposure of such institutionalized forms of gender
oppression is usually infused with a non-committal neutrality.
In summary, finally, a few words on Yuan's modification of Zhang's
stylistic influence may be in order. The nature of this influence is inevitably
complicated by the fact that writers of Yuan's generation are directly
nourished by Taiwan's Modernists. Consequently, despite Yuan's more
subjective, sentimentalized approach, she has also undoubtedly internal-
ized a whole set of Modernist artistic views and narrative techniques, such
as the careful arrangement of plot, economic use of language, and imper-
sonal narration. Her works are thus free from the irrelevant details and
lavish descriptions that at times overburden Zhang's fiction; and her adop-
tion of Zhang's richly imagistic texture and suggestive analogies is nicely
incorporated into her works' objective voice and tightly-woven narrative
structures. In other words, instead of the ostensible stylistic affinities
between these two authors, such formal peculiarities of Zhang's writing,
like the excessive, self-indulgent rendering of sensuous details and a ten-
dency toward fragmentation-features that may be interpreted as ideologi-
cally determined textual strategies-are always subjugated to a formal
control that tends to erase their original inscriptions.

The Works of Yuan Qiongqiong (1950- )

One dominant theme in Yuan Qiongqiong's first collection of short
stories, Chunshui chuan [Spring water boat, 1979],20 is spiritual loneliness.
Characters in these stories are typically self-sufficient, practical individuals
who are suddenly caught in a debilitating quandary: patients with terminal
illness ("Dengdai yige shengming" [Waiting for a life], "Jieju" [Con-
clusion]); a husband waiting outside of the labor room, feeling hopelessly
alienated ("Sheng zhi guocheng" [The way to life]); or a housewife haunted
by hallucinations ("Huanxiang" [Fantasy]). The theme is even more
pronounced when more lasting forms of isolation have been imposed:
insanity ("Feng" [Madness]), blindness ("Mangmu de ren" [The blind]), or
the acute sensitivity of adolescence and young adulthood ("Jiang Yu de

2OTaipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1979, 1st ed.; Taipei: Hongfan shudian, 1985, 2nd ed.
228 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

aiqing" [Love of Jiang Yu], "Jimo" [Loneliness], "Xiyuan shiliu sui" [A girl
sixteen years old]).
That Yuan had exceptional talent was clear even at this early stage:
her selection of details is brilliantly precise, her dialogues, especially those
of children, strikingly lifelike; and the unfolding of plot in her stories is
invariably done with expert deftness. Yuan herself wrote in a 1980 essay
about how she had gradually developed a professional attitude toward
writing: treating her creative works as "pure commodities," she said, she
became more conscientious and attentive to their qualities. A very good
illustration of Yuan's goal of providing readers with aesthetic gratification
is the skillfully written, but thematically hollow story, "Ye de qingshi" [The
night's secret affair]: A nurse on a night shift lovingly reflects on her
relationship with her kid sister, trying to explain away to herself the
disturbing signs of her sister's recent restlessness. The reader, however, is
led to suspect, and finally discern for ~rtain, the fact that her sister is the
person being admitted to the emergency room, having just attempted
suicide. The interest of the story resides primarily in the cleverly contrived
dramatic irony. Stories like this one are reminiscent of O. Henry-enter-
taining, artificial, and with no pretense of profundity.
Even with the frequently banal, sentimental themes, stories in Spring
generally manage to convey subtleties of obscure inner feelings, in par-
ticular those of women. For example, in "Waiting for a Life," a newly-wed
young woman who has cancer decides to get pregnant after listening to a
neighbor casually chatting about her six-year-old daughter. The neighbor's
little girl looks so much like her mother that the mother often has the
uncanny feeling that her life is being relived. The mysterious maternal
instinct of life has then dramatically changed the protagonist's attitude
toward death. Or, in "Madness," an old woman, a submissive housewife
and loving mother, suddenly becomes mentally ill, much to the dismay of
her grown-up children. Fraught with hints about an oppressive marital
relationship, the outburst of this old woman's bitterness and hatred is all
the more disheartening.
With the publication of Ziji de tiankong [A space of one's own, 1981 ],21
Yuan Qiongqiong convinced many readers of her ability to represent the
particulars of individual experience with keen sensitivity and masterful
narrative skill. A Space may very well be her best collection so far. Two
excellent stories about children collected in this volume, "Xiao ren'er"
[The little people] and "Yishi" [Ritual], deserve special comment. In
dealing with the emotional turbulence of a seven-year-old son of querulous
divorced parents that has resulted in an attempted suicide, "The Little
People" avoids the usual formula of social-problem literature and recap-
tures with subtle nuance the child's psychological complexity and sense of

21 Taipei: Hangfan shudian. 1981.

 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 229

pride. The "Ritual" is a beautifully written vignette: A little girl prostrates

herself on the ground, gazing intensely through the eyes of a devil's face
drawn by an older playmate, while piously praying to an unknown God to
let her have a look at her deceased grandmother. Later, upon returning
home, however, she refuses to bow to Grandma's picture when her mother
commands her to. The stern, rigid expression of the old lady in the
photograph is so completely different from the girl's all-too-vivid memory
of Grandma: the loose, cool, and soft sensation of Grandma's body more
resembles the feeling of the mud drawing of the devil's face. The mother
sighs over the shortness of children's memory. Grandma has been dead only
a few weeks. The very untruth of the mother's interpretation betrays the
impossibility of communication between the two worlds, that of the adult
and of the child, each with its own rituals.
In both volumes, A Space 0IOne's Own and Spring Water Boat, Yuan
also clearly indicates her preference for urban love stories, an interest she
has continued in later collections. Recapturing the Weltanschauung of
middle-class Taipei residents of the 1980s, Yuan's love stories typically
demonstrate how romantic relationships are invariably subject to erosion
by mundane reality or other practical concerns: a young, marriageable
couple reluctant to make commitments ("Xiaoqing yu Song Xiang" [Xiao-
qing and Song Xiang), abortive affairs that leave a lingering sorrow and
sense of loss ("Weiyun" [The light cloud] and "Liushui nianhua" [Of years
gone by like a stream]), the fatigue of married couples in the face of the
triviality of middle-class life (best represented by "Wuyan" [Beyond words]
and "A Space of One's Own"), and tenuous extra-marital relationships with
all their uncertainty and elusive promise ("A Space of One's Own" and
"Tumihua de xiawu" [The afternoon of a roseleaf raspberry]). Characters
in Yuan's stories are perpetually conditioned to compromise, always
vigilantly guarding their self-interest, yet always vulnerable to titillating
thoughts of romance.
Cynicism about love is not uncommon among writers of the 1980s, but
Yuan Qiongqiong distinguishes herself by repeatedly equating love with
fantasy. In several early stories, such as "Haoqiu qu" [Lover's serenade],
"Spring Water Boat," and "Feng" [Wind], the protagonist's romantic
illusion is clearly revealed as a blind projection of the ego, and the conse-
quent follies are openly ridiculed. In "Haibin zhi ye" [One night at the
beach], Yuan illustrates the stereotypical, fantastical attraction of foreign
men to Chinese young women, shown clearly as desire entirely divorced
from reality. (This motif recurs in "Lin~a nuer" [The neighbor's daughter]
of Cangsang [The mulberry sea, 1985], a later collection of Yuan's). With
undisguised sarcasm and subtle deflation, Yuan discloses the notion of
romantic love as a socially constructed illusion, momentarily seizing upon

22Taipei: Hongfan shudian, 1985.

230 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

the private fantasies of individuals_ This anti-romantic view of love cul-

minates in "Story," where a young girl visits a famous woman writer she
greatly admires to tell a story about her dying husband. Her husband, a
former high-school teacher of hers, fat, plain-looking, and much older than
she, has nevertheless enlightened her as to the true value of love with his
honorable behavior of self-sacrifice. The conversation, however, moves in
such a direction that the girl finally has to yield to the writer's insistent
demand for stereotypes and portrays her husband as a young, Werther-like,
self-sacrificing lover. Again, poking fun at the unexamined assumptions of
unsophisticated readers and a mediocre writer deluded by her own cliches,
the story is not as profound as it might sound in a thumbnail sketch.
Nevertheless, a certain self-referential quality transforms it into an inter-
esting self-analysis revealing a fundamental paradox about Yuan
Qiongqiong's writing: underlying Yuan's numerous love stories is a wish to
undermine the very foundations of popular romance.
The main resource of Yuan Qiongqiong's creative inspiration is un-
doubtedly her sensitive observation of life. In dealing with life at its more
mundane level, she has distinguished herself from the Modernists. Never-
theless, in certain thematic choices, one can still discern traces of prevailing
Modernist concerns. Many stories in Spring Water Boat and A Space of
One's Own are preoccupied with the discrepancy between human percep-
tions and the crude reality of life. They tend to project a vision of existential
absurdity. "Taowang de tiankong" [The sky's escape] is perhaps the best
illustration of Yuan's occasionally rather deliberate attempt to write a
"modernist" story. The hero of the story is a Vietnamese refugee who has
escaped from Saigon two years after the city's fall. After his experience
there, in a city where life feels just an inch away from death, the self-com-
placency and prosperity of Taiwan's residents appear to him absurdly
unreal. "Escape" is an effective comment on the fragile human existence
that superficially seems stable. However, as in Taiwan's Modernist works
generally, the contrived plot and use of historical references not for their
own sake but rather to make a familiar philosophical point about the
universal human condition seriously mar the piece.
The 1985 collection The Mulberry Sea represents an interesting phase
of Yuan Qiongqiong's thematic exploration. The majority of stories in this
volume deal with some form of abnormal psychology.23 This new interest
is in a sense an extension of the egoistic self-indulgence theme found in
Yuan's earlier collections. It clearly stems from a deep-seated obsession
with the appearance/reality dichotomy. However, Yuan adopts a new
sensationalist approach. Most stories in this book involve some social
scandal: an overly possessive woman determines not to send her husband

23 With the exceptions of "The Mulberry Seas," and "Multitudes of Lives," which belong
to two other distinct categories.
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 231

to the hospital for an illness that eventually kills him ("Shao" [Fever]); a
sensitive young man haunted by a traumatic childhood experience con-
nected with his mother's suicide develops a life-long phobia about marriage
("Yan Zhen" [Yan Zhen] and "Tanhua" [Conversation]); a mother who
has adopted two girls in order to provide sex-mates for her retarded son
when they grow up murders one of them in a fury when the girl refuses to
carry her son's child ("Jiajie" [Family misfortune]); a vengeful young
mother jumps from a fourth-floor apartment holding her four-year-old boy
right in front of her ex-lover ("Hui" [The roundabout escape]); the mental
problem of a teen-age girl at first shocks the family but later on becomes
such a nuisance that her institutionalization brings everyone relief ("Yishi"
[A strange happening]); a husband finds himself on the verge of collapse
as his wife, uncertain whether or not she has conceived during a rape,
refuses under any circumstance to have an abortion ("Mude zhi ye"
[Mude's evening)).
With all their resemblance to popular thrillers, these stories neverthe-
less betray an intellectual curiosity reminiscent of the Modernists-in
particular Ouyang Zi, whose stories typically explore the boundary be-
tween normal and abnormal human behaviors. Yet it may be even more
rewarding if, rather than dwelling on such ostensible similarities, we pay
attention to the points on which Yuan and the Modernists differ. While
Taiwan's Modernists treat literature as an epistemological quest and have
as their ultimate goals the exploration of "universal human nature," Yuan's
stories are obviously less philosophically oriented. They are too mundane,
too close to their source materials to acquire a symbolic dimension.
The merits of Yuan's stories lie elsewhere. By furnishing realistic
details and creating an atmosphere of ordinariness, many of the stories
achieve the effect of demythification. Sensationalism, after all, is the
product of public imagination. Stories in The Mulbeny Sea usually succeed
in restoring the reality-status of what would ordinarily count as heretical
social scandals. However, with their many references to the contemporary
social context, these stories have much stronger immediate sociological
implications than works of the Modernists. While she uses modernist
techniques mainly to sustain a sense of wonder, Yuan does not subscribe
to the most quintessential premises of literary modernism.
Yuan's talent for contriving dramatic irony, devising suspense, and
using other means of providing exciting reading, is, as I argued previously,
truly superb. Mere craft, however, practiced without innovation or substan-
tiating ideas, risks becoming mechanical. Yuan's latest novel,linshengyuan
[Affinities of this life, 1988],24 a semi-autobiographical story based on the
history of her own family, fails to fulfill its promise precisely for this reason.
The novel's primary failing lies in its lack of structural integration.

24 Taipei: Lianhe wenxue chubanshe, 1988.

232 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

For better or for worse, Yuan is now a famous writer and has written
several successful TV series. Affmities of This Life, which has been serial-
ized in newspapers, shares with serialized television soap opera the same
episodic structure, well-calculated periodic climaxes, and certain
melodramatic solutions to smooth over potentially disturbing incidents in
the story. Yuan claims to have begun work on the book with ambitious
plans, but compromised many during the process of writing it. Perhaps
Yuan's voluntary conformity to the demand of mass readership has begun
to take fuller control of her artistry. The way her well-acclaimed narrative
techniques have been put in the service of the commercial art, with its
strong conventional and formulaic tendency, would certainly be deemed
by the Modernists as a step toward degeneration.
With regard to gender issues, we find in Yuan's works contradictory
assumptions that sometimes echo popular stances of her time and some-
times deliberately reject them. For example, while her prize-winning story
"A Space of One's Own" aptly illustrates a feminist theme on how conven-
tional marriage hinders the full development of a woman's personality and
diminishes her self-esteem, it also endorses an attitude toward extra-mari-
tal sex modeled upon the "progressive," "liberal" Western capitalist
society, which still unwittingly endorses a concept of femininity as defined
from the male perspective. In "Xiaoqing and Song Xiang" she shows her
suspicion of the integrity, if not the principles, of a self-styled feminist,
treating her as a superficial fashion-seeker as well as an opportunist who
wants to have the best of two worlds. In an early essay from Hongchen xinshi
[Intimate thoughts from the red dust, 1981],25 Yuan is rather explicit about
her skepticism toward the burgeoning feminist movement in Taiwan and
criticizes women who neglect their young children in order to hold jobs. 26
Such shifts in attitude reflect personal responses to fleeting trends in her
circle that will not necessarily endure and therefore are unreliable sources
for getting at Yuan's real attitudes toward gender relations.
A better source is perhaps her own characterizations of women. Yuan
seems to harbor a deeper sympathy toward women who possess a "female
consciousness," who have a natural instinct toward responsibility and the
role of preservation, such as Mrs. Lu in "The Mulberry Sea," Huixian in
Affmities of This Life, and Jingmin in "A Space of One's Own." These
women are resilient and capable of adapting to adverse environments.
Their independence from men is more often than not an involuntary
compromise. In their conciliatory efforts to cope with life's adversity, they
are made more humane and thus embody a kind of passive, traditional
femininity. The reverse side of this traditional virtue is the different ver-

2STaipei: Erya chubanshe, 1981.

26 "Shangxin wi" [A record of heartbreaking incidents], in Intimllte Thoughts from the Red
Dust 107-199.
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 233

sions of female defiance, like Yang Qing in "The Mulberry Sea," the young
women in "Xiaoqing and Song Xiang" and "The Borderline of Love," and
the wife in "You liang you nuan de jijie" [A season both chilly and warm,
1986].27 These women are carved, in less than flattering images, as selfish
and manipulative.
In the same vein, Yuan's attitude toward men is rather conservative.
Her recollections of her father show nostalgic sentiment toward old-
fashioned manhood and, if only by implication, a romanticized appreciation
of the patriarchal social order in the old China. Her typical portrayal of
men of the younger generation-vain, spoiled, egoistic but unsustained by
strength of personality-is often teasingly sarcastic, yet obviously more
pampering than critical.
However, despite Yuan's essentially non-partisan stance toward the
battle of the sexes, the fact that she records her subjective observations of
life with an insistent artistic integrity has enabled her to occasionally issue
powerful feminist indictments of inequality.
A feminist reading can probably extract a great deal about Yuan's
unconscious concern with gender struggle from her explorations of the
dark corners of the human psyche in stories about abnormal psychology
collected in The Mulbeny Sea. Women in these stories are not treated as
passive, innocent victims, but rather as people who perversely react against
their oppression, some even with such extreme forms of revenge as suicide
and murder. Several stories generate disturbing questions about mother-
hood and gender relations. For example, the mother in "A Roundabout
Escape" (and an earlier story, "Mama" [Mamma]) resorts to killing her own
child to avenge her frustrated relationship with men. In "Mude's Evening,"
the woman insists on keeping the baby despite the fact that she may have
conceived it during a rape and nearly drives her husband to a mental
breakdown. The overall effect is rather that of the protest story, in which
female resistance is expressed with irrationality and violence.
Particularly noteworthy is the book's title story, "The Mulberry Sea,"
perhaps Yuan's most artistically accomplished work so far, which offers an
excellent treatment of women's responses to explicit and hidden forms of
domination and repression in a still fundamentally patriarchal society.
Yuan delineates for us here how the social sex code imposes a double bind
on women's behavior-through overt punishment of those who transgress
and through covert repression of those who conform, respectively repre-
sented by what happened to Yang Qing and Mrs. Lu. Yang Qing's rebellion
against marital obligations was harshly punished, both through the
community's moral condemnation and through her own children's denun-
ciation. Mrs. Lu, on the other hand, had internalized society's moral stand-
ards and willingly enacted the roles society prescribed for her. Nonetheless,

7:1 You liang you 1IUIJ1I de jijie (faipei: Linbai chubanshe, 1986).
234 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

her conformity to the traditional role of women also involved a high price.
The story skillfully demonstrates how Mrs. Lu failed to completely over-
come her unconscious resentment for society's pervasive sexual repression
and at least once expressed it with a twisted vindictiveness. What emphati-
cally contrasts the constraints on these women's choices in life is the
society's leniency toward Mr. Bao, the male protagonist of the story. By
virtue of the universal double standards for men and women, Mr. Bao gets
off easily with his incredibly heartless neglect of a father's duty and enjoys,
without any trace of ill conscience, a much greater degree of sexual laxity.
The disturbing messages conveyed in these works, regardless of the
author's conscious intentions ,may prove to be extremely valuable sources
for our understanding of gender ideology in modern Chinese society,
particularly because the writer is unwittingly situated within such an ideol-
ogy. It is perhaps only through a feminist reading practice that we are able
to unravel from an ostensibly conservative woman writer's work truthful
records of women's consciousness and their relationship to the world as
experience. Good works of art, after all, transcend false consciousness.

GLOSSARY

Bentuhua yundong '*- J: ~t. if -tJJ

"Cangsang" "ikA"
Chuanqi «~.t»
Chuanqi zaiban zixu «-f4 -t -it It&. tJ Jf»
"Chendian"
" ~.t .. "
"Chenxiangxie: diyi lu xiang" ",itt-hi: ~-~ .. "
Chunshui chuan « .. 1j<. :An- »
"Da ren" " ~T A. "
"Dengdai yige shengming"
" "" #- - 100 1. ~ "
Ding Ling -rlt
Eileen Zhang ~~lt
"Feng" "}.i\. / .. "
"Fengsuo"
"Fusheng tu"
"#f""
III "
" )!f- 1.
"Guihua zheng, Axiao bei qiu" " ~ .ft ~ , fif ,j, £ ~k. "
"Gushi"
" it .. "
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 235

"Haibin zhi ye" "~i~ ~-Jt"

"Haoqiu qu" " if i! >Jil "
Hongfan shudian i* tl!.. m
"Hongluan xi" " ;~ ~ :f4."
"Hong meigui yu bai meigui" " n. Ji. J~ ~ f=J .Jt J~ "
Hongchen xinshi « n.&.\;.»
Hau Dejian ~~{.t
"Huanxiang" " ~ tt!. "
Huang Fan ifJt
"Hui" lm
Huixian ;tt~
"Jiajie" " ~ /rJ] "
Jiang Xiaoyun ,'ff1lJi'k
"Jiang Yu de aiqing" " ~.J:. ,mj {t.; ~ ·tt "
"Jieju" " I.t HJ "
Jinsheng yuan « + tt !#.»
"Jinsuo ji" "1tJR~"
Jingmin it4t
Lanling jufang &1i ft Jf1 J~
LiAng ~tp
Liao Huiying .f.*,*
"Linjia niler" "~~*jL"
Lin Haiyin #.iSi:-t-
"Liuqing" " fl! ·tt"
"Liushui nianhua" " $/.i.7j<.1f- • "
Liuyan « $r.u 1"')}
"Long de chuanren" " ft tJI.J ~ A "
"Mangmu de ren" "if m {t.; A"
"Mama" " 1.f, .j.~ "
Mr.Bao ~:5ttt
Mrs. Lu 4:k.:k.
236 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

"Mude zhi ye" " 1!.f~ ~ ~"

Ouyang Zi ~ f~-t-
PengGe ij -lJk.
QiongYao JtJ&
"Qingcheng zhi lian" ,,~~.t~"
Sansan shu fang ;...::. .- J;f
"Shao"
" it"
"Shangxin zhi" " PfY1 ,,':'
l"il. "o.JI "* "
,~

"Sheng zhi guocheng"

" 4.. .t i§. ;f£ "
Su Weizhen
Taiwanjie
.-.1* J!
4~~
"Tan dushu"
" 'it tk .. "
"Tanhua"
" tit 11; "
"Taowang de tiankong"
" l! i:" fJI.J ~ ~ "
"Tumihua de xiawu" ,,~.-1t fJI.J r 1f-"
WangAnyi .£4(-.!:t
"Weiyun"
" .fa 'l" "
Wenxue yanjiu she ~~-'Jf)t~
Wo zheyang guole yisheng «4\ i! .tf. i§. T - 4.. »
wunal
A~
"Wuyan"
" It. 1" "
"Xi" ,,~"
Xi Murong ,*i1.~
Xiao Lihong itXiL
"Xiao ren'er"
" 'J' A...iL"
XiaoSa .j.(
"Xiaoqing yu Song Xiang"
Xiaoyuan minge
" ,J'
~st rm
* *'~.fJk
~ #- "
"Xie sheme"
" ~ -It- Jl- "
Xinyueshe i1Jl~
"Xiyuan shiliu sui" " ~ .it t 7\- .l "
 Yuan Qiongqiong and Eileen Zhang 237

YaXian ~ft
"Yan Zhen" "X~ ;fi"
Yang Qing tit
Yayin xiaoji
"Ye de qingshi"
$-t 'J' ~
" .Jl tr.J 1t."
""~"
"Yishi"
"Yishi" ".;t~"
"Yiwai-wode diyiben shu" "t ~r -
~ tr.J ~ - '*- it "
You liang you nuan de jijie « 5l ;r. 5l ql tr.J -t- ~ »
Youma caizi « ~ ~ tff»
Yuan Qiongqiong t1111
Yunmen wutuan 'l "-4-00
Zhang Ailing (Eileen Zhang) ~tJt
Zhangkan « ~;fr»
Zheng Baojuan J!s W~ij
Ziji de tiankong « a e. tr.J Jt ~ »
Zhongguo jie til$!
Zhong Xiaoyang 4t Ii fl
Zhu Tianwen *-~.t.
Zhu Tianxin *- ~.\;
ZhuXining
*-11'
"Zhongsheng" "i,1."
Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue1s
Resistance and Cultural Critique
Jon Solomon

Dw/ogues in Paradise. By Can Xue. Translated by Ronald R. Janssen and

Jian Zhang. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989, aoth,
$17.95; Paper, $8.95).

Among the thirteen short stories collected in this translation,

"Skylight" is exemplary. A close reading of this story reveals that Can Xue's
work is extremely concerned with the relation between political power and
subjectivity. "Skylight" enacts a breakdown of subjectivity, seemingly resis-
tant to all boundaries of difference, including that between text and reader.
One would therefore expect any reading of Can Xue (as of any text) to
begin with a pronounced reflexivity, a keen sense of where the differentials
between text, context and reader are necessarily rendered problematic. Yet
there is a moment in Can Xue's stories which seems to invite identity. I am
going to privilege it as a crucial moment in China's continuing relation to
coloniality and imperialism, for it reflects many Chinese intellectuals'
reluctance to find a voice that could resist the hopeless dialectic movement
between East and West and the formation of a putatively unified subjec-
tivity implicated therein.
Can Xue, whose real name is Deng Xiaohua, was born in Changsha,
Hunan, on May 30, 1953. Her father and mother were both old-guard
revolutionaries. During the Anti-Japanese War they walked from Hunan
to Manchuria to join the resistance there. After Liberation, they returned
to Hunan, where Can Xue's father became the chief editor of the New
Hunan News. During the campaigns of 1957, her father was capped an
ultra-rightist, and both parents were sent down for labor reform. In 1959,
the family was moved to the rural outskirts of Changsha. Deng Xiaohua
had just finished elementary school when the Cultural Revolution broke
out. Her father was jailed and her mother was sent to a cadres' reform
school. In 1970, Xiaohua's eldest sister helped her find a job in a factory, a
job she held for ten years. In 1979, her father was rehabilitated and restored
to a post in the provincial Political Advisory Bureau. Obstacles remained,
however; unable or prevented from finding a new work unit, Deng Xiaohua
and her husband, Lu Yong, began to learn tailoring. Eventually they set up
Solomon: Can Xu.e Taking Tiger Mountain 239

a flourishing private tailoring business. Can Xue began writing in 1983, but
was not first published until 1985. Her stories had become well-known in
Chinese literary circles by the end of 1986.
Dialogues in Paradise relates most of this information in "A Summer
Day in the Beautiful South," a short autobiographical piece that peppers
disconnected reminiscences about the author's family with straightforward
factual account set off from the main text by italics. The primary facts of
her life, given in the italicized portions, are constructed around familiar
themes: betrayed ideals, repressed intellectual autonomy and the modest
success allowed for by Dengist reforms. This portion of the autobiography,
like the plain journalistic style in which it is written, seems designed to
underwrite the coherence of the author's own subjectivity. Everything
makes sense; dilemma, much less contradiction, are not even hinted at-a
striking contrast to the sorts of characters depicted in her fiction. The
italicized voice can thus be seen as an authorization of the author, an
assurance that the problems revealed by her fiction can be safely contained
therein. The ostensible coherence of this position is challenged, however,
by the remainder of the autobiography in standard print. In this portion the
text is primarily devoted to descriptions of people in the author's family
other than herself. Especially vivid is the image of her grandmother, a
wizened old woman who chases after ghosts and speaks enigmatically about
snakes in the toilet and magic vests. In fact, this is hardly an autobiography
at all, but a remembrance of others and otherness. Although ostensibly real,
these others take shape in ways very similar to the characters in Can Xue's
fiction.
One cannot simply explain this similarity by recalling the truism that
an author draws her substance from the experiences of everyday life. In
Can Xue's work, reality and fiction occur as mutually implicated repre-
sentations. About her grandmother, Can Xue writes: "Her whole body
looked furry in the moonlight,,,t echoing a similar line from "Skylight": "In
the shining blue sky a gigantic red moon appeared like a furry monster"
(106). Moving from reality to fiction, the body is displaced and transferred.
The grandmother disappears, but her substance is retained, fusing with the
light to produce a red moon. The circular wholeness suggested by the moon
is thus achieved only as the Aufoebung of a movement outside itself
(symbolized by the moonlight), in the moment when it is reflected upon
another. Of course the light projected by the moon is not its own; it operates
representationally (moonlight is a re-presentation of sunlight). Somewhere
there is a center, however, in the unifying perception of furriness. This
center is not the coherent subject that knows itself, as implied by the
italicized authorial voice, but rather one is precariously caught between.

1 Janssen{Zhang 1. In my use of this translation, I have modified it where I feel

appropriate. Page references are given in the text. .
240 jon Solomon

The text forces the question of the reader's complicity. The reader
who seeks coherence in an author is reading as much for him or herself as
for the other. To the extent that the italicized voice would seem to
authorize the author as a reliable speaker, it would also guarantee the
reader's own authenticity. Yet Can Xue's text clearly undermines the
position of that voice. To the extent that there is no possibility of a
transparent reality completely freed from distortion, the text challenges the
urge to formulate a platitudinous, consistent subjectivity. But it is not
wholly resistant. While the text desperately seeks to avoid the Cartesian
split, Can Xue's writing attempts to embrace everything within an unlimited
homogeneous sphere. Quite unlike any standard notion of autonomy,
there is a moment when Can Xue's writing, seen in the example of
"Skylight," at least raises the possibility of resistance as a generalized
existential problematic. As the homogeneous sphere expands, however,
resistance inevitably collapses into mere negation. While Can Xue's text
does not allow for radical otherness, it is at least destabilized by the memory
of that otherness.
"Skylight" is a narrative told in the first person. Very little can be said
about this person with any degree of certainty. The character is never
referred to by name, and even his or her gender is a mystery. Considering
various sexual innuendos surrounding an old man's "grapes," it may be
possible to infer that the narrative "I" is female, but the possibility of a
homosexual relationship is certainly reasonable. We do know, however,
that the character is a productive member of society, if only for the simple
reference to a certain co-worker at the beginning of the story, which
suggests that the "I" does at least have a regular job. The character's age
can be determined at forty-three. 2 Among all the facts that can be ascer-
tained about this character, the most important concerns "her" family life.
She is still unmarried at forty-three and lives at home. "I" 's family consists
only of her mother, father and two brothers. Except for the suggestion of
a job, the character is never shown in relation to other members of society
beyond her immediate family and the old man. She is an outsider to society:
"As a matter of fact," she says at one point, "everybody knew about my
walking out. This was an open secret. They only snorted through their
noses, considering my unconventional actions despicable" (108).
If the identity of the main "I" of the story is not clear, that of the old
man is even less so. Like the narrative "I," he too is an outsider to society.
According to the narrator, the old man has been living alone for at least
the last ten years. His profession as a cremator makes him not only an
2 See 114: "My young brother is forty this year. I am three years older than he." Although
the date may be insignificant, such an age would place the speaker within the range of China's
"lost generation," i.e., the group of young people most directly affected by the turmoil of the
"Great Proletarian Cultural RevOlution." However tantalizing this fact may be, it is
nonetheless virtually superfluous to the rest of the story.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 241

outsider to society, but virtually an outsider to life as well. Working as a

cremator, he stands at the gateway between life and death, where time
stands still. He is always referred to as "the old man," and yet unlike "I,"
he is never given to reminiscing about his youth. At one point, the old man
gives his age: "Since the shadows got frozen, I count my age as one hundred
and three in my heart" (113-14). His phrasing suggests that the figure must
be inaccurate. The use of the word "since," combined with the image of
frozen shadows (the words translated as "frozen" here, tingzhi bu dong,
refer to a state of immobility), suggests that the old man exists in a
superfluous realm where time stands still, where particularly oppressive
ancient memories reappear, synchronically, as it were.
The identity of the old man is one of the crucial riddles presented in
the story. At two different points in the narrative, "I" asks him, "Who are
you?" Each time, the old man responds with surprisingly nonchalant,
slightly absurd answers: "Me? Just a cremator" (109). "An old fogey who
digs tunnels in the graveyard" (114). The humor created by the old man's
understatement belies a more complex answer. The first time the "I" asks
the old man "Who are you?" she tells us that, "My hair stood on end."
Whoever, or whatever, this old man is, the problem of his identity instills
fear in the narrative "I."
. The point of relation between the old man and "I" is precisely where
the first facet of the old man's true identity reveals itself: "At midnight the
old man appears in the mirror of the cupboard. He is a skein of vague stuff
like a puff of air. He stretches his hand toward me from inside the mirror.
It is covered with the greasy, smoked smell of burnt flesh" (104). Appearing
out of a mirror, the old man is nothing more than a reflection! The object
reflected is indeed "I" itself. Grasped at this level, the story suggests an
interior monologue carried on within the psyche of the narrative "I."
There is other support for this interpretation. At the very conclusion
of the story, the narrator says: "At long last I have become enraptured by
my own voice. It is a kind of low voice, both soft and beautiful, pouring out
eternally to my ears" (120). This remark more than any other confirms
suspicions laid down at the story's outset. Nor does the conflation of
different characters stop there. The narrative also suggests that "I" can be
identified with the old man's "little daughter" as well. The old man
recounts: "Twelve years ago, my little daughter stood by the door and said:
'Pah!' I saw a huge tumor in her chest; it was pressing tightly against her
little heart" (105). The tumor growing in the daughter's chest bears a
striking resemblance to "I" 's description of "sprouts" growing in her own
chest: "The grown-up sprouts were suffocating my lung" (115).
An interpretation that considers the old man as father and the narra-
tive "I" as daughter can be supported by a Freudian reading of the text. In
his lecture titled "Femininity" (No. 33 in The New Introductory Lectures to
Psychoanalysis, 1933), Freud charts the course of a female Oedipus Com-
242 Jon Solomon

plex. Reduced to its most basic form, Freud's view is that baby girls begin
with a love for the mother, which turns into a strong hatred during the
"phallic" phase of early development. This period is accompanied by great
frustration over the lack of a "penis,,3 Mter this point, a young woman
develops greater affection for her father. Hatred of the mother never fully
recedes, according to Freud, but is rather subsumed and repressed during
later development. This feminine Oedipus Complex is precisely the rela-
tion depicted in "Skylight." The story is filled with sexual innuendo, all
touched with a hint of incest. When the narrator describes her home to the
old man, she mentions that, "I sleep inside with my family" (108). The use
of the word "sleep" rather than "live," which would be more common in
this instance, is significant. In China, just as in the West, the word "sleep"
is often used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse.
The most blatant example of sexual innuendo in "Skylight," though,
concerns the old man's "grapes." The description of these "grapes" leaves
no question as to their nature:

"The grapes are good." The old man stoops down. Smacking his lips with
great relish, he grabs my hand and sticks it into a dark place. I touch a
heap of something soft and wet that feels like the entrails of an animal.
It has a sour stench. (111-112)

"Those things he calls 'grapes," , as the "I" puts it, have the unmistakable
quality of genitals. The hermaphroditic association of "grapes" (testicles),
innards, and a sour stench (vagina) reemphasizes the idea of a repressed
(dual) sexuality of the sort Freud described. The image of a vagina could
also be read as an anus, of course. The termxingwei [sour stench] is often
used to describe a fishy-smell, just as in English, and it suggests the
misogynist view of the female genitals. I would like to raise this possibility,
preserve its indeterminacy, and return to it in a moment.
Following Freud's thesis, the female Oedipus Complex should include
not only attraction to the father, but intense hatred of the mother. The text
of "Skylight" conforms to this pattern, although the interpretation at this
point is rather inferential. On pages 107-108, when "I" describes her
childhood and her family, she stops at the point where her description turns
to her mother. A bit further on, she thinks of screaming out something, but

3 Freud's essay has received much criticism from feminist readers. In my reading of the
text, I follow those who would understand Freud's use of the "penis" in a sense as much
symbolic as literal.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 243

the words do not come. The old man tells her: "Mommy, that's what you
want to say. Mommy.'>4 While the father is someone who can be talked
about, there is something about mother that makes it almost impossible for
"I" even to mention her name.
According to Freud, "girls hold their mother responsible for their lack
of a penis,,,5 and "the mother becomes the girl's rival, who receives from
her father everything that she desires from him." The old man mentions at
one point that his mother is consumed by an "astonishing sexual desire"
that makes her "dance the whole night through" (113). Where the old man
is identified with the narrator herself, then the old man's mother is also the
narrator's mother. The old man says, "I've been trying to learn from
Mother, trying all my life, but in vain" (113). His yearning to identify himself
with the mother, translated into terms of the narrator's own yearning,
suggests the envy of which Freud spoke. Furthermore, a passage such as
"Mother was pushed out in a bathtub. Her head was covered with blood.
In one hand she held high a cluster of white hair with clumps of white skin
attached to the roots. She couldn't scream because a bone blocked her
throat" (110) could be read as a cryptic phallic image. The mother's head,
stripped of hair and covered in blood, can be construed as a sign for the
"castrated penis" that occupies a central part of Freud's thesis. The dis-
placed presence of the penis is marked by the "bone" in the mother's throat.
At this juncture, it is useful to recall the fact that in spite of the
narrative "I" 's mature age, she is introduced as a spouse-less character.
Aside from supporting the character's status an an outsider, her marital
situation supports the Freudian concept of the feminine Oedipus Complex.
According to Freud, "it may easily happen that the second half of a woman's
life may be filled by the struggle against her husband, just as the shorter
first half was filled by her rebellion against her mother.,,6 The absence in
this case of a husband serves to intensify the primary Oedipal struggle
against the mother. There is no chance for the conflict to be worked
through in a displaced relationship between husband and wife.
One problem in the interpretation given above is the dual reading of
the old man. He can be identified with either the narrator herself, or with
the narrator's father. This confluence makes it difficult for the reader to
know when to make the appropriate substitution. In terms of the Freudian
psychological model we have been discussing, Freud does talk about the
young girl's identification with her father; however, this idea, according to

4 The translators have rendered ma·ma as "mother." "Mother," a more formal term in
English, corresponds closest to the Chinese muqin. The Chinese text raises the specter of a
return to the safety of the womb; thus the baby-like call "mama" or "mommy" is more
appropriate in English than "mother" would be.
s
Freud, New Introductory Lectures 129.
6 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures 133.
244 Jon Solomon

Freud, should eventually lead the girl to long for her father's baby. There
is no direct reference to this sort of idea in the text, but it may be inferred:
"When darkness falls, the old man digs a hole in the piled-up mosla. We
squeeze into the hole and seal up the entrance" (111). The dark, enclosed,
cave-like hole can be read as a symbol for the womb, and the characters
(two selves collapsed into a single "we") may be understood as the baby.
The next line in the above passage hints at sex: "Uttering a note of
satisfaction [the translators mistakenly gloss qieyi as 'uncomfortable'], we
quickly fall into a dream" (111). Through ellipsis and associative imagery,
it is possible to fill out the Freudian idea, albeit in a rather forced fashion.
Even without this final caveat, the parallel with a Freudian idea is quite
striking.
A fear of the will to represent everything, correlate to the remem-
brance of otherness, is a constant theme in Can Xue's work. This theme
can be accessed through descriptions of sight. The acts of seeing and being
seen are both imbued with symbolic meaning in "Skylight." As with many
of the images in Can Xue's writing, these actions are associated with great
pain. The narrative "I" says that her "eyeballs are always swollen and
pained" (108). The pain of seeing is reflected elsewhere in more general
terms: "Under every tea bush there was a gray eyeball, which blinked
constantly, giving out clear, dewlike tears" (115). The impersonal nature
ofthese eyes lends to them a universal quality. Their function in the story
may be taken to represent the act of sight in the abstract. We are not told
why these eyes shed tears, but the simplest answer would be to conclude
that they are crying. In the next moment, when the eye is discovered by the
narrator, "immediately it turns to powder and a puff of smoke in my palm."
This self-destructive disappearing act, literally made behind a smoke-
screen, suggests the nature of a defensive response. It is as though the eye
were trying to avoid being seen by others.
This paranoid reaction associated with being seen surfaces in other
parts of the text. The most striking feature of the "carnivorous night bird,"
which occasionally hounds the characters, is its eyes: "The carnivorous
night-bird has come back, its two green eyes glaring covetously" (112). Fear
of being seen drives the story's characters to hide themselves: "Everyone
refuses to give up [shiruo 'look bad'] and wears himself out. When night
comes, we sneak in panic into the house like rats looking for the darkest
and remotest place" (108). At the opening of the story, the narrator tries
to hide her secret of the letter from the rest of her family. Her comment,
"They have already seen through my mind" (104), reveals the true nature
of the paranoia associated with being seen. The narrative "I" is afraid of
being represented as a transparently knowable object.
The themes of paranoia and repression come together. What is being
seen in this story, that is to say, the source of the pain associated with the
act of sight, is none other than the self. In effect, the first person, the
 Taking Tiger Mountain 245

narrative "I," of the story, is itself a kind of eye. This narrative "eye" begins
its story by looking in the mirror. The phantasmagorical world reflected
therein is the world of the inner psyche. All the externals have been
stripped away, just as the house in which the characters live stands alone
in a barren pile of ruins. The view from this vantage point, revealing deep
fears and repressions within a tortured inner psyche, is an understandably
harrowing-and we may say courageous-one, to say the least. Whether
one is looking inside oneself or inside one's own culture, this process of
looking is a difficult but perhaps necessary step.
One necessary question about Can Xue's Freudian parallel is the
extent to which it shares in Freud's misogynist vision. As a Chinese woman
writing in ways that challenge standard ideas of representation in China,
Can Xue could be expected to be sensitive to this problem. As I mentioned
above, the "sour stench" or "fIShy-smell" initially suggests the front-side,
but it could be related to the back. The enduring value of Sun Lung-kee's
work in The 'Deep Structure' of Chinese Culture is to have opened up a
discussion of this entire problematic within the specific context of Chinese
culture? Here Sun's most apposite point concerns the notion of ego
development. Sun follows a reductive Freudian schemata, tracing the
development of an individual through various stages (oral to anal to
genital) on the road toward an ultimately independent and balanced ego.
Sun argues that Chinese development processes tend to result in a fIXation
on the oral and anal stages. Thus a truly "independent" individual does not
emerge. The problem of family relationships and their formative influence
upon the individual is a recurrent motif in Can Xue's writing. Based on a
preliminary reading of "Yellow Mud Street" (not contained in the present
translation), Sun concludes that Can Xue "delves more into the anal,"
which he relates to "the putrid, the filthy and the stenchy."s I will not
attempt to recapitulate Sun's discussion and the implications that a fixation
on this stage of development has for Chinese culture as a whole. In terms
of Can Xue's work, however, we should follow Sun's interpretation, while
still allowing for the indeterminacy of Can Xue's opaque innuendo.9
7 This is what distinguishes Sun's work from similar efforts such as Richard Solomon,
Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971). Sun's work is a more poignant critique of intellectuals.
8 From personal correspondence with the author, 1988.21.
9 I have raised more questions that I can answer here. Sun's attempt to relate processes
of individual development to cultural development is not without its limitations: in as much
as his argument follows Freud, Sun stumbles into the same essential problems that remain
unresolved in Civilization and Its Discontents. In short, it would be a great mistake to assume
a direct one-to-one correspondence between individual psychology and cultural psychology.
246 Jon Solonwn

Most importantly, any interpretation based on an idea of the universal

human psyche inevitably creates serious problems for the attempt (shared
by Sun and this essay alike) to establish a "social construction of reality,,10
specific to China. Sun Lung-kee's analysis of the "underdeveloped nature
of the ego" and the general "infantilization" of Chinese culture are un-
doubtedly addressed to similar questions within the same problematic. Sun
never explicitly articulates the standard against which he judges China, but
it is clearly based on an idea of the "fully developed" individual. While Sun's
analysis reveals many important insights, his basic terminology smacks of
modernization theory. The term "underdeveloped" assumes an idea of the
"developed," and this in tum suggests the assertion of a certain ethical-
universal, an idea of how subjects should be constructed. The question of
subjectivity is central. The divided subject posited by psychoanalytic theory
to refute humanism's myth of a unified self is glossed over by the emphasis
on developmental stages moving toward wholeness. Angela Zito's work on
imperial grand sacrifice in the eighteenth century lays the groundwork for
a concept of the subject specific to the Chinese context. l l As Zito writes,
" 'SUbjectivity' [as an analytic category] enables us to grant that human
'selves' are not substantialized unities that everywhere and in every epoch
interact according to the same set ofuniversallaws.,,12 In Zito's concept of
eighteenth-century Chinese personhood, the self is a, "planar, surface
signification that assumes no fixed boundaries between the internal self
and the external world ... people mediated, through total participation, an
immediate boundary.,,13 This idea of personhood departs radically from the
sort of Cartesian subjects assumed by Freud and Sun alike. In her work
Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes, Dalia Judovitz finds the
origins of modernity and the typical western concept of the subject within
Descartes. Judovitz states that the Cartesian worldview "is best encapsu-
lated in terms of the ... dependence on a foundational principle [the logic
of geometry] which reifies the experiential relations of the self and the
world. ,,14 In other words, the Cartesian view establishes a notion of the self
as an "individualized essence" that opposes its subjectivity to a world of
objectified things. In Zito's thesis, the eighteenth-century Chinese subject

!OThis phrase, I suppose, was first popularized by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman
(The Social Construction ofReality, New York: Doubleday, 1967), but I am only referring
to the idea in a general way.
11 See Angela Zito, Grand Sacrifice as TexUPerformance: Writing and Ritual in 18th
Century China, Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Chicago, 1988.
12 Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).
13 Ibid.

14 Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins ofModer-

nity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 13.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 247

is not defined in terms of such a fixed position, but seen rather in terms of
spatio-temporal fluctuation, a process which Zito calls "centering" (from
the Chinese word zhong).
It is beyond the bounds of this review to consider in detail the problem
of subjectivity in pre-modern Chinese history. The attempt to reduce
Western notions of subjectivity to a unified Cartesian schemata, and the
similar effort to define a different concept operative in China, both run the
risk of cultural essentialism. Can Xue's stories, exemplified by "Skylight,"
are undoubtedly an exploration of the problems surrounding subjectivity
in contemporary Chinese culture.
In a nutshell, "Skylight" presents a sort of crazed internality un-
bounded by any discernible relation to an externality. This prolific inter-
nality is symbolic of the breakdown of the sort of traditional personhood
described by Angela Zito for the eighteenth century, without its having
been replaced by any other coherent concept. A colonialized, western-
derived Cartesian concept is visible in this work, notably in terms of what
I have demonstrated are the Freudian parallels. Yet the appearance of a
Freudian motif in "Skylight" is purely "unconcious." Given the notorious
unavailability of Chinese-language translations of Freud in China (basic
texts such as The Interpretation of Dreams were only issued after 1985), it
is highly improbable that the author could have been exposed to the ideas
in Freud's article on "femininity." Indeed, the author has said as much to
me in personal conversation. If we are to explain this uncanny parallel,
perhaps the answer will be found in terms of an historical genealogy that
examines the category of the person in twentieth-century China.
Although the impact of Western imperialism upon China is a well-ex-
plored area, there has been little consideration of the ways in which
"colonial" discourses, especially those about "national character" and
"social Darwinism," were themselves accepted by certain Chinese intellec-
tuals as the framing terms for a critique designed to be at once anti-tradi-
tional and anti-imperialist. The tension inherent in this position is part of
a predicament from which Chinese today still have not been able to
extricate themselves. On the most reductive level of analysis, the
paramount problem in this situation has been the breakdown and at-
tempted rearticulation of subjectivity. In other words: the terms of a
critique ostensibly designed to save and protect sovereign China (from the
West) were, ironically, decided for Chinese intellectuals by the West in the
Chinese acceptance of a putative cultural unity in "the West." This unity
was first expressed in China through the ideals of "democracy" and
"science," on the one hand, and attendant notions of "national charac-
teristics" and "social Darwinism" on the other. After a dictatorship of the
proletariat was established by Mao, et at, in 1949, the West was primarily
defined in terms of "bourgeois imperialists." The supposed putative unity
(of the West) was still assumed, in spite of significant changes in the ruling
248 Jon Solomon

structure of the Chinese state. Ultimately, China's relation to the West may
be seen as the theoretical horiwn within which power operated. Accep-
tance of the West's unity must have functioned as the source for a smooth
boundary of difference, designed to allow for inclusion and control. And
yet the pressure to "modernize" in order to defend led to the appropriation
of Western concepts of subjectivity from which Chinese (not just intellec-
tuals) found no escape. In the epistemic violence wrought by Western
intrusion, the "native" voice was constructed and problematized as the
inferior pole of a binary opposition. Chinese intellectuals were left with no
other choice but to articulate their position through the West.
Lu Xun (1881-1936) engages this problematic in paradigmatic fashion
in his short story (1921), "The True Story of Ah Q." Several critics have
associated Can Xue's work with that of Lu Xun, and the comparison is
worth making. IS
Since the story first appeared in 1921, it has engendered much discus-
sion, particularly about the Chinese national character. According to this
argument, Ah Q16 is undertsood as a composite figure, supposedly bringing
together all the negative traits specific to Chinese cultureP Indeed, in
modern usage, the so-called "Ah-Q character" (A-Q-xing) is virtually
synonomous with the term "national character." In fact, however, Ah Q's
identity is high~ indeterminate, and has been a site for contestation since
the late 1920s. There is no reason to fall into this trap. Ah Q's indeter-
minate identity is important because it resists the move to anchor "national
character" (as a discursive construct) on any concrete individual or group.
The category of national character has been raised repeatedly by Chinese
throughout the twentieth century, invariably incorporated as a preliminary
move to establish Cartesian subjectivity.
What must focus our attention here is the switch in perspective that
occurs in the final pages of the story, the public execution of Ah Q, for this
is where the problem of subjectivity is most salient: Ah Q is to be executed
15 See a recent article by Wang Der-wei in Dangdai, Taipei, 1988.
I'The central figure in this narrative is known as "Ah 0," which the author settles upon
after a lengthy discussion, ostenSibly for want of a better name. The use of the Roman letter
"0" more than signijies-it is in itself part of the irrepressible intrusion of Western forms.
Although the West never actively enters the author's narrative, the "0" is a constant irritant
(modern editions always contain a footnote telling Chinese readers how to pronounce this
letter), reinscribing the "colonial" horizon.
17 For a recent discussion of the place of "national character" in Lu Xun's writings, see
Bao, Jing, ed., Lu Xun guomirWng sixiang taohmji (TIanjin: l1anjin renmin chubanshe,
1982).
18 See AYing (Oian Xingcun, a "progressive-leftist"), and Su Xuelin ("on the right") for
criticisms of Lu Xun's Ah 0 from different perspectives.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 249

for his participation in the "revolution" (historically referring the reader

to the Republican revolution of 1911), but it is an execution ill-warranted
by the bumbling, ineffectual Ah Q. Ah Q is so passive in his approach, he
does not even realize that he is about to die until the eleventh hour: "Then
he realized that they were making a detour to the execution ground, so he
must be going to have his head cut off after all.,,19 The reader has been
aware of Ah Q's fate since the beginning of this chapter (if not much
earlier), so the narrator's use of the word "detour" is an extremely sarcastic
choice. "Ah Q had originally thought they were going somewhere else?-
What a fool," we think. Until and through this point in time (when Ah Q
rides on the army truck and realizes he's going to be executed), the
narrative has concentrated mercilessly on all the "bad" and passive charac-
teristics of this figure of Ah Q. The narrator invites the reader to join him
in his bitter cynicism and Ah Q fulfills his every expectation. Not a single
call for help ever issues from Ah Q's mouth. In the final passages of the
story, however, the narrator leaves Ah Q shifting his gaze onto the sur-
rounding throng. The last thing we are made aware of before the execution
is the crowd's gaze. Skipping to the final paragraph, the narrative sarcasm
previously reserved for Ah Q shifts onto the whole town, the spectators to
Ah Q's execution.
This displacement from subject to spectators should shift the focus of
our involvement onto the crowd; but the final line is highly ironic: "They
had followed him for nothing." Who was "following" whom? They, the
townspeople, had followed him, Ah Q, for nothing; but hadn't he also been
following them, forced at gunpoint to "follow" some form of public
opinion? In any case, the crowd's only concern seems to have been disap-
pointment with a poor show. In other words, the crowd's brutish lack of
humanity (the people described as wolves) generalizes or dialates the
extent of the "Ah Q character." In this sense, "Ah Q character" applies to
the entire social collective, and it is impossible to find an effective boundary
by which to distinguish Ah Q from the spectators. In this situation, where
everybody seems to be following someone else, the subject is noticeable by
its absence. Absent, of course, because it is about to be executed. To the
extent that the crowd shares in the "Ah Q character," we can say that what
they are watching is really their own execution. Watching Ah Q, for the
sake of spectacle, the crowd identifies itself with the subject of execution,
and as a result, is witness (is subjected) to its own objectivation. From this
. point of view, we can say that what is being "executed" is none other than
the position of the subject itself. As Ah Q is executed, he feels "as if his
whole body were scattering like so much dust.,,20 Death for Ah Q is related

19 Lu Xun, tr. Gladys and Hsien-yi Yang, The True Story ofAh Q (Singapore: Xingzhou
shijie shuju, undated) 150. Emphasis added.
20 Ibid., 152.
250 Jon Solomon

in terms of a complete dissolution. In symbolic terms, this execution is

emblematic of the breakdown of subjectivity. Significantly, the Chinese
people are depicted as participating in the loss of their own subjective
power. What remains is only for them to be made an object, the objects of
Western imperialism, to be sure, but also the objects of a gaze that denies
the possibility of subjectivity to any of its "subjects." Why should Chinese
governments in the twentieth century challenge the putative unity of the
West, when to lose that would remove the grounds of its own power to
control?
Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" simply ends with the presentation
of this problematic; his storyteller's role is to shed light, not to master.
Writing some sixty years after Lu Xun, Can Xue still operates within the
same problematic; compared to "The True Story of Ah Q," however,
"Skylight" is more insistent, more desperate in its predicament. While
"Ah Q" seems designed to enlighten the reader, "Skylight" aims to destroy.
Can Xue's work moves toward a destruction of the "objectfied" world that
allows the "native" to be positioned as a unified object of "colonialist"
knowledge; behind this movement, her fiction would seek liberation
through resistance to subjectification.
The obvious question here is, To what extent is Can Xue successful in
her Samson-esque gesture ("If I had my way, I would tear this old building
down") of resistance and destruction? "Skylight," as I have meant to
suggest, enacts the consciousness of a radically overbounded ego divided
against itself in a kind of "schizophrenic,,21 monologue. This is the point of
true pathology in Can Xue's stories, against which any possibly Oedipal
motifs have only secondary importance. Perhaps we may say that the two
motives (Oedipal and "schizophrenic") together symbolize the predica-
ment of Chinese SUbjectivity in the twentieth century. Although the highly
psychological nature of Can Xue's works and the close relationship be-
tween characters in the text would suggest the possibility of dialogized
discourse, the overriding presence of a single consciousness invades all
aspects of the narrative and prevents the emergence of dialogism. In effect,
Can Xue relies on monologism, the very mode of discourse utilized so
effectively by the dominant practice of cultural centering in China, in order
to blow it apart. In this respect we may say that Can Xue's works have a
symptomatically critical relation to their context: they both attest to and
suffer from the pathological element in contemporary Chinese culture.
Can Xue's predicament is replicated by the interaction between text
and reader. Pushing these themes of identity and interior dialogue another
step further, it is even possible to provide a reading of the text that projects
these themes on to the reader. Just before the penultimate paragraph, "I"
is asked if she were trying to camouflage ("disguise") herself. The idea of

21 I do not intend to define "schizophreniC" in a rigorous, clinical usage.

 Taking Tiger Mountain 251

camouflage itself immediately recalls the question of appearance and

identity-in the world of "Skylight," things are not always what they seem
to be. The dialogue that begins the second to last paragraph starts as "I" 's
response to her interlocutor. Midway through the paragraph, however, a
transition occurs. The speaker's voice moves from an interactive mode of
response to assume the quality of a monologue. The action described at
the end of this paragraph, such as the lighting of a match and the character's
subjective response to gnawing on other people's cheeks, is similar to other
parts of the narrative that are not described through speech in quotation
marks. The action of gnawing on other people's cheeks is also highly
significant when read as a symbolic erosion of the smooth boundary
provided by "face" in Chinese culture.
In effect, "1" 's dialogue becomes a monologue that assumes the
function previously assigned to the narrative voice (outside of quotes). This
situation repeats in reverse an earlier passage in which "1" 's speech is
unbounded by end quotes, thus blending into the narrative voice. (In the
current Janssen/Zhang translation, this important aspect of the Chinese
text has unfortunately been "corrected.,,)22 By enclosing narrative descrip-
tion within quotation marks, the story creates a situation whereby the
reader is marginalized. The "I" is no longer speaking to a third party, i.e.,
the reader, but has instead shifted to address only itself. However, since
the reader continues to "hear" what is being "said," perhaps we may say
that even the identity of the reader is being thrown into question. In much
the same way as the story had previously subsumed the identity of the old
man within that of the narrative "I," this transition from dialogue to
narrative monologue in quotes carries a similar potential. Sharing the same
"ear" with the narrator, the reader herseJfbecomes effectively implicated
within the narrative. As a result, this implication may constitute an exten-
sion of the individual psychological problem onto the whole society, as it
were. Although the narrative does not delve into abstract theorizing, the
reader's unavoidable involvement with the text effectively opens up the
whole sticky problematic of the relation between self and other.
Within the text itself, the larger context or setting of the stories is never
fully described but appears only as a kind of haunting memory of the past.
As a "story" of sorts, "Skylight" nevertheless absolutely refuses to enact
any sort of diachronic concept of time. There are certain events in the text
that the reader is free to associate with actual events in recent Chinese
history: for instance, the passage about going out to look for scrap metal
in "Skylight" suggests comparison with similar scenes during the Great

22 The dialogue beginning on 107 of the Janssen/Zhang text is continued into the next
paragraph on 108. In the Chinese original, the quotation marks beginning the dialogue on
Janssen/Zhang's 107 are never closed. The two quotation marks on 108 have been added by
the translators.
252 Jon Solomon

Leap Forward movement. Events such as these are merely suggestive,

however, and their meaning is ultimately marked by indeterminacy. Time
is not absent from the narrative; in fact, it is a central theme. Even the old
man talks about "the fleeting passage of time." Nevertheless, it is impos-
sible to ascribe any sense of chronology to the narrative. Time passes so
quickly, as it were, that everything is caught in still-life, like the frozen
carcasses gobbled down by the nocturnal bird. The whole flow of the
narrative is like the alarm clock that appears periodically throughout the
story, ringing continuously the whole time. Events from the past seem to
occur simultaneously with events in the present and even those in the
future. This is one aspect in which the present translation is particularly
unsatisfactory. As the reader already familiar with the Janssen/Zhang
translation will have noticed, in my discussion of "Skylight" I have consis-
tently changed narrative past tense to present tense. It is well-known that
Chinese, in contrast to English, emphasizes completion rather than tense.
Generally speaking, Chinese narratives are best translated in the English
past tense. The case of "Skylight," however, warrants a different approach,
I think. My suggestion would be to begin the story in the past tense, but to
move into the present tense at the moment (one page into the story) where
the cremator appears in the mirror. The simple present tense in English is
especially appropriate because it implies generalized habitual action. "I go
to school" implies the possibility that I am going, will go and have gone
before; moreover, it removes the action from any specific notion of "here."
This synchronic vision of time brings "ancient memories" into presence.
This is essential to Can Xue's writing because underlying the text's presen-
tation of time is an implicit resistance to history.

History in China has essentially been limited to narrative accounts

designed to define and strengthen the primary task of "centering." In this
sense, the traditional expectation of narrative history in China has been to
find a central meaning that could effectively master all that chaos. This kind
of search for meaning requires as its prerequisite a diachronic time scale
along which events can be ordered into a coherent pattern of sense. Can
Xue's stories are like a piece of dynamite placed at the foundation of this
elaborate edifice, this temple to the god of a cultural "myth of centering."
Her adamant refusal to admit a diachronic time-scale combines with the
lack of concordant narrative closure to inhibit the search for satisfying
"meaning" on the level of the imagination; the reader is thus forced to come
 Taking Tiger Mountain 253

to terms with the unresolved problems that the story reveals in an inten-
tionally uncomfortable way.23
The stories in Dialogues in Paradise will inevitably incur associations
with magical realism or sexual surrealism. While these observations are
certainly appropriate, and they are the ones made by most Chinese critics,
Can Xue's work may equally well be seen as an attempt to reclaim some of
the ancient Chinese literary aesthetic outside the conventions of Con-
fucianist tradition. The Chu ci anthology of lyrics is a notable point of
comparison in this respect for several reasons. Can Xue's home province
of Hunan is the area traditionally associated with this anthology;24 educated
residents of the area allude to the Chu ci anthology when they note with
pride that Hunan is known for its preponderance of "demonic energy"
(guiqi hen sheng). The "energy" referred to here is the more "uncontrolled"
shamanistic aspect of the text that was historically marginalized by Con-
fucian commentators who were busy with the canonization of pre-Oin
discourse. Although the Chu ci anthology was subjected to the same kind
of canonistic commentary that had been applied to the Shi jing, it is worth
reflecting on the fact that the Shi jing was chosen as a principal canonical
text, while the Chu ci was not. 25
The idea of reconstructing a distinctly "Chu" form of discourse that
was historically marginalized by Confucianist canonization suggests pos-
sibilities-all more or less ahistorical to a certain extent perhaps, but

23 "One way a novel makes challenging contact with "reality" and "history" is precisely by
resisting fully concordant narrative closure (prominently including that provided by the
conventional wel1-made plot), for this mode of resistance inhibits compensatory catharsis and
satisfying "meaning" on the level of the imagination and throws the reader back upon the
need to come to terms with the unresolved problems the novel helps to disclose." Dominick
Lacapra, History, Politics and The Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) 14.
24 It should be noted, however, that the actual historical boundaries of the area covered
by Chu were apparently to the north of Dongting hu and most of modern-day Hunan
province, according to both the account in Hawkes' translation as wel1 as the chapter on the
Chu ci in Zhongguo shi ci Jazhan shi (Taipei: Lantian chubansen), esp. 87-89. (This edition
is a reprint of a work titled Zhongguo shi shi published in two volumes in the P.R.C.).
Nevertheless, Chinese today still associate the Chu ci with the area in Hunan around the river
Xiang.
25 This phenomenon coincides with an interesting cultural footnote: "To the people of the
Shih Ching Ch'u had been .the name not of a great state but of a group of hostile tribes beyond
the southern limits of Chou civilization. Thus the China of the earlier Ch 'u Tz'u poems was,
both culturally and politically, a very different place from the China of the Shih Ching songs."
(David Hawkes, tr. Ch'u Tz'u: The Songs o/the South [London: Oxford University Press,
1959] 3). The Chu ci anthology was not compiled in its present form until the second century
C.E. (ibid., 2, see also 10, where Hawkes notes that the Li sao was "composed at a time when
an al1egorical interpretation [which he previously relates to the Confucianist process of
canonization] was already beginning to be put on the Shih Ching songs. "), and the very fact
that it was not compiled until that time suggests that it was, intentionally or not, part of the
hegmonistic Han effort to assimilate resistant cultural trends in the creation of a dominant
Confucianist tradition. The differences, vis-~-vis the Zhou tradition (source of later Han
254 Jon Solomon

certainly not without associative power. Both the Laozi and the Zhuangzi
texts have been related to the same Chu culture that apparently produced
the Chu ci. Both texts and the entire range of philosphical Taoist discourse
spawned by them played an important counterpart to the development of
Confucian tradition in Chinese intellectual history. Many people have
portrayed the Taoist tradition as a vita contemplata in contrast to the vita
activa espoused by the Confucian school. While some have tried to point
out the benefits of this system in terms of a yin-yang interchange, more
recent commentators, such as Sun Lung-kee and Liu Xiaobo, have em-
phasized that Taoism functioned primarily under the hegemonic influence
of the dominant Confucianist discourse. According to this view, the more
radical unrestrained tendencies of the Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi texts were
effectively domesticated within the acceptably Confucianist framework of
"self-cultivation." As Sima Qian records in the Shi ji, the people of Chu did
not consider themselves to be part of the "Central Kingdom": "King Xiong
Qu (ofChu) said: 'We are barbarians [wo manyiye], we do not adhere to
the name of 'the Central Kingdom' [bu yu zhongguo zhi hao yz].,,26 None-

culture), that marked Chu culture are nevertheless still apparent in the Chu ci text itself, as
Hawkes notes in his own fashion. (And for that matter, the Shi jing itself displays a number
of thematic elements that ultimately challenge many of the canonical interpretations ascribed
to them. A1> Hawkes also notes, the Shi jing itself was also subjected to a similar process of
domestication designed to accommodate pedantic Confucianist ethical values.) In the con-
temporary context of iconoclastic critique of Confucianist tradition (recent scholarly interest
in Chu culture in the P.R.C. has been self-consciously related to the 1980s "Cultural Critique
Movement"), the Chu ci may still represent to some extent the marginaliaties of Chinese
culture long repressed by the dominant discourse of tradition. A1> an adjunct to this idea, it
might be interesting to look at the work accomplished under the auspices of Prince An ofHuai
during the Han Dynasty. Prince An was killed by Emperor Wen Di for a treasonous plot to
overthrow the empire. At the same time, Prince An also supported a number of scholars to
work on compilations of Taoist -oriented texts. In addition to the Hu.ainan.zi, the Zhuangzi text
was apparently also one of the texts compiled during this time (see Huang, Jinhong, ed.,
Zhuangzi du ben [Taipei: San Min Shuju, 1981] 9). Given the ideas discussed above, it is
perhaps not surprising to see the Chu ci text and other related "marginalized" discourses
cropping up in an atmosphere of intense political intrigue. The pattern of Taoist-inspired
rebellions and their ideologies never really posed an effective threat to the whole "myth of
centering" established earlier. In his bookArt, Myth and Ritual (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1983), the renowned archaeologist K.C. Chang treats the period and texts I have
discussed here in a very different way. Chang does not address the problematic nature of
ancient Chinese texts, in spite ofthe presumably reconstituted form in which they have been
handed down to posterity since the Qin. Central to Chang's thesis is the idea that Chu culture
and the texts associated with that culture form part of a lineage that can be traced directly
from the Shang dynasty to the Han (and from there up to the present). Chang asks: "Was
shamanism a practice that extended beyond Ch'u? .•. The answer is undoubtedly yes" (Art,
Myth and Ritual 48). Although Chang would seem to have uncontrovertible evidence, he does
not produce it for the reader to judge. Chang cites a reference in the Guoyu text, but that
passage is about shamanism in Chu, not Zhou or anywhere else.
Having thus exposed my own ignorance, I hope these ideas may stimulate debate.

26 Sima Qian, Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1985), Chu shijia 1692.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 255

theless, the discourse of Chu (as much as we know about it from available
texts that were by and large compiled during the Han) clearly became
incorporated into that of the "Central Kingdom." The picture that emerges
as a result of this schematic figure is one in which the discourse of two
initially hostile cultures (Chu and Zhou) becomes synthesized-within a
clearly defined hierarchy of dominance, of course-as part of the larger
"centering" process effected by the victorious Qin and Han dynasties. This
cultural process of "centering" acquires all the weight of a myth (which is
perhaps why Zhou is central to charts of dynastic lineage while Chu is not),
and in fact finally develops in the modem period into a kind of cultural
obsession.
The Chu ci style of poetry and Can Xue's writing interestingly share
some common features. All the poems in the Li sao style are recorded in
the first person, as are almost all of Can Xue's short stories. The super-
natural world figures prominently and there is a profusion of symbols. In
Hawkes' words: "[in] the dream-like movement of the narrative ... the Sao
poet is no ordinary neurotic. He is, or aspires to be, a magician.'.27
Much the same way as the Chu ci lyrics, Can Xue's works are filled
with a plethora of flora and fauna, completely unmediated by conceptual
narrative. And her narrative characters are certainly not the "usual"
neurotic type; there is definitely something magical about the vivid descrip-
tions and bizarre happenings. But the most striking comparative point
between the Sao-style poems and Can Xue's writing occurs in terms of
reversal. As Hawkes says of the Sao-style poems: "All proclaim the poet's
purity and integrity in the face of an evil and corrupt world. In all of
them-or nearly all-he seeks escape in distant travel, either to an imagi-
nary fairyland peopled by mythical beings, or into a a mundane scenery of
rivers and mountains.',28 In Can Xue's first-person narrative short stories,
this motif is virtually reversed. The narrative "I" is no longer distinctly
separate from the evil of the surrounding world; he or she is equally
implicated in the corruption. Moreover, the "travel to distant lands" is
attempted (e.g., the journey with the old man in "Skylight"; the taxi ride to
a deserted island in "Dialogues in Paradise"; and the trip to the hut on the
mountain in "Hut on the Mountain"), but there is no real qualitative
change between the travel-land and the land left behind; escape is out of
the question, since there were no boundaries to begin with.
This idea raises a further question about the function of subjectivity
in Can Xue's writing. To a certain extent, the schizophrenic language allows
Can Xue to establish a world completely apart from ideas of reality and
reason. The world of these stories is encased by a "wall," as it were, which

rT David Hawkes, tr., Ch 'u Tz'u: The Songs ofthe South (London: Oxford University Press,
1959) 8.
28 Ibid.
256 Jon Solomon

attempts hermetically to seal its characters and even the reader within itself.
This "wall" is one of the elements that make Can Xue's stories so daunting
for the reader. Although (and perhaps because) the reader is implicated
within the text, it may produce a condescending effect upon the reader.
Among the stories included in Dialogues there is not a single character-
protagonist with whom the reader can fully sympathize. Through a series
of disgusting images and irrational events, the narrative establishes a
"pristine" world that stands in sharp contrast to the "reality" of most
readers. The boundary dividing this world from that of the reader's can only
be seen as an intentional device, a kind of trap laid out in advance. In order
to defend the autonomy of this world, the narrative denies the reader any
foothold in terms of conventional plot devices and claims every advantage
for itself. This kind of uncompromising attitude has all the zeal and dog-
matic qualities of a troop of Quotations-waving Red Guards. Given the
breakdown of effective surface boundaries within the story, this "wall" must
be seen as highly significant.
At this point the reader is virtually forced to find a way of coming to
terms with the absolute extremity of the text. Perhaps even more patient
readers would be persuaded just to put the text down and read something
else. Fair enough. But if we sit for a moment with the dis-ease, a whole
problematic involving the most sticky kinds of antinomies is allowed to
arise. Without doubt, the effect of the text's extremity raises the question
of binary opposites. The unselfconscious reader may simply rely on stand-
ard polarities such as reality and dream or reason and irrationality to
conventionalize this more radical element of the text. The operative pro-
cedure in this kind of reading establishes these antinomies in a rigidly
defined hierarchy: reason dominant over irrationality and reality privileged
over dream. When one of these opposites is, however, weighted too
heavily, to the extent that communication and creative interaction with its
other half is precluded, their relation tends toward a kind of pathological
unbalance.
In terms of traditional Chinese cosmology, these sorts of unbalanced
situations are depicted in the Yi jing as a time fraught with danger. We may
meditate on the idea (with a sigh perhaps) that if only reason could stamp
out irrationality, then all would finally be "light" (guangming), as it is often
termed in emancipatory discourses of all kinds. Practically speaking, how-
ever, this effort is compromised from the start; it is, in fact, the pinnacle of
irrationality. Can Xue's text functions as a way of challenging the standard
assumptions behind opposites paired into such hierarchies. Although this
may seem unnecessary, within the Chinese context of extreme monologism,
 Taking Tiger Mountain 257

it is highly pertinent.29 To say that the world of Can Xue's stories is like an
"irrational dream-state" (lei lixing de mengjing)3JJ is not as accurate as it
would be to say that her stories are a form of uncompromising resistance
to the hegemonistic position accorded to a certain monologically defined
"rationale" in contemporary China. In Can Xue's stories, "irrationality"
and the "dream-state" are used as tools to construct a wall-the first line
of defense, as it were.
Can Xue's defensive effort ultimately has an offensive quality to
it-offensive both in the sense of an attack upon Confucianist tradition
and in the sense of a disturbing intrusion upon "good taste." Can Xue's
work raises, I think, an interesting problem of strategy. Although her work
would ostensibly seem designed to explode the strait-jacket of pathological
monologism, it does not offer any alternative by itself to this mode of
discourse. In this respect, the transformative possibilities of Can Xue's
efforts are seriously compromised by this symptomatically critical ap-
proach. What Can Xue would offer is an antidote: a culture made from the
disease itself. The idiom yi du gong du (use poison to fight poison) conveys
all the risks inherent in this kind of remedy. This may just be a problem of
strategy, however. By defiantly proclaiming another discursive practice
opposed to all the standard hierarchies of dominance in language, Can Xue
may be taking the necessary first step. Given the extremely unbalanced
state of recent Chinese discursive practices, in which the voice of the
internalized other has been consistently repressed to the point of asphyxia-
tion, it is probably necessary to enact a moment of cathartic reversal. The
danger is that this reversal may become yet another point of fixation and
obsession. As Dostoyevsky's Underground Man notes, "Sometimes a man
is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering. ,,31 The sense of
paranoia that pervades "The Skylight" may be symptomatic of a similar
sentiment in its national context.

29 By reintroducing the play between antinomies through the grotesque and tbe absurd,
tbis reversal may also perform a regenerative function similar to that described by Mikhail
Bakhtin's discussion of the Camivalesque. See Mikhail Bahktin, Problems ofDostoyevsky's
Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 122-37.
30 Critics sucb as Wu Liang and Cheng Depei in China, as weU as myself, have at one time
or another used this kind of terminology to describe them. While it would not be untrue to
make such a statement, I have come to the conclusion that it is misleading.
31 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Jesse Coulson (London: Penguin
Books, 1987) 41.
258 Jon Solomon

As I have suggested in an earlier preface to Can Xue's work, 32 her

writing is best situated in the context of a loosely defined movement in
post-Mao China which is commonly referred to as the wenhua fansiJun-
dong ("cultural critique movement"). Su Xiaokang's River Elegy, Jin
Guantao's Behind the Phenomenon ofHistory,34 Sun Lung-kee's The "Deep
Structure" ofChinese Culture and Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinese35 are notable
examples of this disparate critical process in textual form. More specific to
the field of literature per se is Liu Xiaobo's essay titled "An Inescapable
Reflection: Thoughts Provoked by the Image of the Intellectual in Con-
temporary Chinese Literature.,,36 Although each of these works displays
significant differences in terms of focus and approach, they do share a
common view. As textual practices of critique operating in a Chinese-lan-
guage medium, they represent "China" as a stultifying discourse which,
they would claim, exercises a deterministic and paralyzing effect on Chinese
in general. Can Xue's Japanese translator, Kondo Naoko, characterizes
Can Xue's writings by their relation to a critical moment in the recent
experimental fiction of the New Era ("post-Mao") Literature: "To put it
in a general way, what has become the center of these experiments is the
conscious or unconscious destruction of 'China' as an historical tale (I.
rekishi monogatari Ch. lishi wuyu).'.37 The basic feature of this tale for
Kondo is ittai-ka eCho yiti-hua), generally glossed as unification, but also
suggestive of homogeneity. The mass of written material that is produced
in China rarely, if ever, breaks through the static repetition of familiar
themes to explore other possibilities. In effect, writing in the P.R.C. today
often functions as a kind of "pink-noise," a plethora of verbiage that fills
up the limited discursive area represented by the party with a safely
repetitive hum. The center of this mass is occupied by the party; in other

32SU Zhean (Jon Solomon), "Cong Ji'an zhong zhanfang shengming de Iingguang" [A
magical life-light bursting forth from the darkness], preface to Can Xue, Huang ni jie [YeUow
mud street] (Taipei: Yuan shen chubanshe, 1987).
33 Su Xiaokang, Wang Luxiang, He shang (Beijing: Xiandai chubanshe, 1988).
34 Jin Guantao, Zai /ishi de biaoxiang beihou [Behind the phenomenon of history]
(SiChuan: Renmin chubanshe, 1984).
35 Bo Yang, Chou/ou de Zlwngguoren [The ugly Chinese] (Taipei: Lin Bai chubanshe,
1987).
36 Liu Xiaobo, "Wufa huibi de fansi: you jibu zhishi fenzi ticai de xiooshuo suo xiangdao
de" in Zhongguo 4 (April 1986): 109. The English title is taken from an unpublished
translation of Liu 's article by Harold M. Tanner.
37Kondo Naoko, "Konnichi no ChiIgoku Bungaku to Zan Setsu" [Can Xue and
contemporary Chinese literature], in Can Xue, KondO Naoko tr., SO-fO taru Fu-un (Tokyo:
Kawade ShobO Shinsha, 1989). "Ittai-lea" is also emphasized by Chinese writers such as Jin
Guantao and Su Xiaokang, but unlike these writers, KondO's position allows her to be more
aware of the nature of historical writing as representation.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 259

words, the party is central because it occupies a representational center.

The sheer volume of literary production in what I would call a "pink-noise"
mode assures the continual turgidity and safety of the discursive terrain
thereby staked out. Can Xue operates in a context where discourse has
already been solidified into the monologic sludge of post-Yan'an Maoism.
In order to understand Can Xue's writing, therefore, it will be necessary to
devote our attention to the historical formation of Maoism.
While the sort of "pink-noise" associated with Maoism is commonly
assumed to produce a stultifying effect upon Chinese (especially intellec-
tuals), one must understand that it is primarily a ground within and from
which Chinese have been able to articulate themselves. The area and limits
of this narrow discursive terrain are ultimately established by the Chinese
Communist Party Central, but in the actual process of production, the
party's role cannot be seen in coercive terms. The party speaks to a relative
truth for many Chinese (although perhaps far less so for urban residents
these days). Ideology cannot be seen as false conciousness, but must be
understood in its enabling aspects. Viewed schematically, Chinese intellec-
tual activity in the twentieth century has been patterned on the model of a
hegemonic project. A "hegemonic project" is defined discursively: a means
of structuring the areas open for public conflict. It allows conflict only on
certain issues; everything outside of that purview is proscribed. Hegemony
opens up specific subject positions, from which concrete individuals are
enabled to act socially.
The clearest example of a hegemonic project in recent Chinese history
is Maoism. Under the CCP's leadership, the parameters of conflict have
been strictly defined and enforced through campaigns, but as I have
mentioned above, this ideology was also extremely enabling for many
Chinese. A purely functionalist view, one that sees discursive categories as
mere tools-to-an-end, is unable to explain ideology except in terms of
coercion. This distinction becomes clear the moment one questions the
operation of "universal" western values. The ideals of science, democracy
and equality -the Enlightenment-{}id not come to the Chinese as free-
floating universals, but rather as intimately connected with the particular
historical contingency of Western power. Contrary to the wishful thinking
of humanism's universal dream, it is fundamentally impossible to distin-
guish la lumiere from its own Volksgeist. Since their insertion from the West
(one should be careful not to say by the West, because Chinese have been
active participants in the process), these ideals have remained as a struc-
turing feature of Chinese discursivity.
Thus modernity, not socialism per se, must be recognized as the
fundamental theoretical horiwn for Chinese in the twentieth century.
Western studies of China have consistently confused the present-at-hand
structures of socialist organization with the entire horiwn within which
Chinese could articulate specific subject positions. Socialism, as a
260 Jon Solomon

hegemonic project, could only be recognized as a meaningful ground by

virtue of reference to this horizon. Maoism, as a hegemony, existed by
negating the West through the West. Even in Mao and Ai Siqi's claims to
a Chinese particularity, the West still lies on the horizon as the universal
reference point through which Chinese could recognize their own par-
ticularity. With this displacement the potentially liberating and enabling
aspects of Maoism dialectically engendered their opposite. Homogeneity
is a crucial element in the Chinese Communist Party's strategy of resistance
to the West. To the extent that monologism can be identified with the
"subject adequate to itself," it can be fairly related to homogeneity.
The Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi was immensely concerned
to describe this sort of resistance to the west. I introduce Takeuchi's work
here because I think it provides an example of the Hegelian-existentialist
position in anti-colonial discourse which is at once very similar to that
adopted by Frantz Fanon and yet also has the advantage of being much
closer to China. Sakai Naoki's reading of Takeuchi Yoshimi explains his
idea of resistance to the West: "[It was] Takeuchi's conviction that, in order
to counteract the West's aggression, the non-West must form into nations.
Then what is heterogeneous to the West can be organized into a kind of
monolithic resistance against the West. A nation can oppose heterogeneity
against the West, but within the nation homogeneity must predominate.
Without constructing what Hegel called the 'universal homogenous
sphere,' the nation would be impossible. So, whether you like it or not, the
. modernization process in the formation of the modern nation should entail
the elimination of heterogeneity within. Exactly the same type of relation-
ship between the West and the non-West will be reproduced between the
nation as a whole and heterogeneous elements in it. In this context, the
nation is always represented by the state so that it is a subject to which its
members are subject, whereas heterogeneous elements remain deprived
of their subjectivity so that they are not subject to the subject.,,38
Takeuchi himself could not have forseen the implications of his ideas,
primarily because of his faith in the purity of the "people" [minzoku], its
conflation with the "nation," and the emancipatory discourses of moder-
nity.39 But he did see the dangers in using class struggle as a category
through which the "people," or "race," could be realized: "Proletarian
literature is no exception. (They] succeeded at introducing the new element

38 Sakai Naoki, "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and
Particularism," in The South Atlantic Quarterly 87.3: 500.
J9Takeuchi Yoshimi, "Kindai Shugi to Minzoku no Mondai [The problem of modernity
and the people]," in Takeuchi Hyoronshii (Tokyo: Chikuma ShabO, 1966). Sakai's reading
of Takeuchi is significant because he points out the ways in which Takeuchi, commonly
assumed to be an anti-modernist, is in fact quite devoted to the project of modernity.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 261

of class struggle, but were not at all concerned with saving the oppressed
people. Indeed, they used class to suppress the people, and made class into
a panacea. Naturally, it won't work to begin from an abstract idea of the
free individual and apply to it the idea of class struggle.'o4O Takeuchi's
remarks were directed at the Japanese situation. But on the first level of
reading discovered by Sakai, Takeuchi's description of resistance to the
West is quite apposite in the Chinese context. Although Mao would have
never accepted the idea of the free autonomous individual, his idea of the
subject really does not offer a different alternative. In Mao's formulation,
subjectivity is realized exclusively in the party-state. Chinese, through the
CCP, could assert their heterogeneity against the West, but within the
nation, homogeneity would prevail. Thus the CCP's hegemony contained
within it the contradictions against which it had been struggling. The CCp's
negation is redoubled by the homogenous nation, so that the CCP's posi-
tion in China is essentially a displaced colonialist (or imperialist) one. This
is the predicament from which Chinese writers of all sorts have been unable
to escape.
Tani Barlow explains this predicament in relation to contemporary
Chinese literature: "The new Chinese intellectual fiction is colonialist, in
other words. If it sounds a little derivative now it's because the people
producing it were there when Mao breathed his own sacred breath into the
big pink bubble of Chinese Communist self-satisfaction, and then watched
it explode in his face .... They write colonialist novels now because their
experiences have led many of them to identify 'China' with failure.'.41 Can
Xue's work does not wholly escape this sort of generalization, but it does
at least suggest the possibility of resistance. In its obsessive fear of the will
to represent everything, "Skylight" speaks primarily to a fear of the
Western teleological moment.
In his reading of Takeuchi, Sakai "detects a thread suggesting a
different reading of [Takeuchi's] term resistance. For the Orient, resistance
is supposed never to contribute to the formation of its subjective identity.
In other words, resistance is not negation by means of which a subject is
posited in opposition to what it negates. Hence, resistance has to be linked
to negativity, as distinct from negation, which continues to disturb a puta-
tive stasis in which the subject is made adequate to itself ... Resistance
comes from the deeply rooted fear of the will to represent everything, the
will essential for modern subjectivity. ,.42 One cannot limit an interpretation
of Can Xue's works just to a resistance against Maoism. Although her
40 Ibid., 278.
41 Tani Barlow, "Who Speaks for China," in San Francisco Review ofBooks (Spring 1989):
54.
42 Sakai Naold, "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and
Particularism," in The South Atlantic Quarterly 87.3: 500-501.
262 Jon Solonwn

stories are clearly designed to challenge standard Chinese modes of repre-

sentation, they are not without their sideward glance at the West as well.
Can Xue resists subjectivity, to be sure. But I don't think her work fully
attains Takeuchi's second meaning of resistance, negativity, as described
by Sakai. Resistance in Can Xue ultimately returns to the construction of
an homogenous sphere. For this reason, Can Xue's work is essentially
monologic. It would be a great mistake, however, simply to equate
monologism with non-democratic forms of government and dialogism with
democracy. Giles Gunn interprets the Bakhtinian notion of dialogism as a
"true plurality of voices, each with its own perspective on the world, all with
their own claims to integrity.'.43 The notion of mutually inaccessible voices
communicating with each other, anchored by reference to their own essen-
tialized wholes, is a fair characterization of contemporary America per-
haps, but not of Bakhtin's dialogism. Bakhtin discovers dialogism through
his reading of Dostoyevsky: "In Dostoyevsky almost no word is without its
intense sideward glance at someone else's word. At the same time there
are almost no objectified words in Dostoyevsky, since the speech of his
characters is constructed in a way that deprives it of all objectification.,,44
Dialogism, in Bakhtin's terms, has to be associated with the resistance to
subjectivity. The will to integrity is what defines the modern, Cartesian
subject; as such it has no place in any properly Bakhtinian notion of
dialogism, but speaks rather to the basis of an underlying monologism. In
order to resist this, I suppose, Can Xue would have to relinquish even the
homogenous sphere.
While Can Xue's work does not go this far, it raises important ques-
tions. If the "historical tale" that was China is destroyed-and Can Xue's
work is by far the most thorough of any recent Chinese effort-the question
remains of how to represent China. This question has become especially
apparent in the wake of the Western media blitz surrounding the student
demonstrations of this spring. There are two separate answers implicit in
recent works that can be seen as part of a single trend, which I would like
to address. The first is Paul Cohen's idea, explained in Discovering History
in China,45 of restoring China to a position of centrality in Chinese studies.
Among the paradigms Cohen critiques is what he calls "traditionlmoder-

43 Giles Gunn, The CultW'e of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987) 134.
44Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 203.
4S Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent
Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
 Taking Tiger Mountain 263

nity." According to Cohen, the emphasis this paradigm places on the

Western presence is merely symptomatic of a Eurocentrism that "robs
China of its autonomy and makes it, in the end, an intellectual possesion
of the West:.46 Worse yet, according to Cohen, is that "the posssibility of
modernizing change taking place without the West becomes unthink-
able.'.47 To the extent that Cohen's critique is aimed at modernization
theory, his remarks are well-warranted. The problem, however, is that
Cohen's move effectively erases the delimiting aspects of the Western
presence. Cohen's reliance on a notion of autonomy suggests that the study
of China will be a moment of identification for the West. By recognizing
China's autonomy, the West's position and its own illusions of subjective
autonomy are guaranteed. Thus can Cohen confidently proclaim: "at last
we have transcended the intellectual imperialism of the old paradigms and
are treating Chinese history on its own ground, in its own terms.'.48 I do not
know where "its own ground" could possibly be, and the idea of addressing
Chinese history in its own terms seems to rely on a very simple notion of
textual production and consumption. Mter all, Cohen is writing in English,
and his work is addressed within a certain[reid. Whether or not China could
have developed into a modern nation on its own is a moot point; this sort
of "what if' scenario is symptomatic of the moralizing sentiment underlying
much of American involvement in East Asia, in which Americans are
constantly haunted by the question of whether imperialism was good or bad
for the Chinese. If China could be represented as an indigenous move
toward capitalism, those haunting questions surrounding "our" involve-
ment could be effectively laid to rest, and what's more, "we" could provide
China with the authorizing recognition. This erasure of the Western
moment leads exactly to the sort of rhetoric now going on. While Chinese
leaders complain of deep western involvement in the events surrounding
June 4, Western political leaders, with their belief in Western values as
universal, deny any such idea. Ironically, this denial leaves an element in
the field of relative truth open to articulation and exclusive occupation by
the CCP, a position which the CCP has always negotiated.
This procedure is echoed in a similar way by Zhang Longxi's critique
of Western Orientalist views on China.49 While Zhang provides a much-
needed account of various Orientalisms in the history of Western views on
China, the figure of Chinese participation is noticeably absent. Orientalism

46 Ibid., lSI.
47 Ibid., 152.
48 Ibid., 195.
49 Zhang Longxi, "The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West," in Critical
Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988).
264 Jon Solomon

as a problematic cannot be understood without accounting for the ways in

which it is mutually constitutive. In Zhang's article, Chinese intellectuals
appear merely as curious information-gatherers: "The future of China
depends on a successful reconciliation of the two [East and West]. To
achieve that success, however, a better knowledge of the Other is absolute-
ly vital. That explains why the desire for knowledge of the West may be said
to characterize the Chinese intelligentsia during the entire modem
period."so Implicit in this description is the idea that the West can be
treated as an object and exhaustively known; it is simply a question of
gathering all the data one needs in order to make an informed choice.
Needless to say, this sort of representation is itself the recuperation of
Orientalism. Zhang ends his article with a line that suspiciously recalls the
resort to a universal: "Thus, in demythologizing China as the myth of the
Other, the myth disappears but not the beauty, for the real differences
between China and the West will be clearly recognized. China's true
Otherness will be appreciated as contributing to the variety of our world
and the totality of what we may proudly call the heritage of human
culture."Sl This intonation of a universal brotherhood in vaguely Mencian
tones recalls Giles Gunn's conception of a plurality of voices. China's
difference can be essentialized as a concrete reference point through which
"our" universal humanity may be appreciated.
Zhang's article does not admit to the fact that in "our" writing we are
also constituting "our" identity. One cannot help but detect in this move-
ment a familiar dialectic, exemplified by Hegelian historicism. The West
cannot be the West unless it can represent its universal against various
particularisms. "In short, the West must represent the moment of the
universal under which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is par-
ticular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in
relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities."s2
Whether the East resists or capitulates, it plays only the role of a subor-
dinate moment in the ceaseless reaffirmation of the West as a self-con-
sciousness that is certain of itself. The omission of Chinese participation in
Oriental ism, like Cohen's erasure of the West, only serves to inscribe and
delimit the subject.
The current translation, although quite readable, is an odd mixture of
deft renditions and clumsy botches. "Smacking his lips with relish" (jinjin
you wei de zazhe zui) becomes an incomprehensible "making clicks."s3

SO Ibid., 152.
51 Ibid., 131.

52 Sakai Naoki, "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and
Particularism," in The South Atlantic Quarterly 87.3: 447.
53 Janssen/Zhang 111.
 Taking Tiger Mountain 265

Examples like this abound, and one suspects that the reason for these sorts
of problems lies in the manner of the translation's collaborative production.
Ronald Janssen, who spent a year teaching in China, is no stranger to it,
but he doesn't read or speak any of its languages. Presumably the text was
first rendered by Jian Zhang (the only one of the two with direct access to
the text) and then reworked by the two together. The style acheived by
Janssen and Zhang is minimalist, but Can Xue's writing is not always so. In
his afterword, Janssen aptly points out that Can Xue's works do not
conform to the mode of realist fiction previously dominant in China since
(according to Janssen) the rise of Maoism. Janssen also points out that
these stories speak poignantly to a Chinese reality. Janssen states: "Love
and anger, lyric and satire, not the political commitment of Chinese fiction
or the detached irony of much Western modernism, are the twin impulses
of her fiction.,,54 Stated thus, the appearance of Can Xue's works in
translation seems to occur as the discovery of a twice-repressed margin-
either the repressed margin of Maoism or the repressed margin of a "world
literature." The minimalist rendition would seem designed to appeal to the
recent interest in "marginal literatures." Inside China, however, Can Xue's
works don't represent just the margin but rather seem to speak of a move
toward the center and resistance to that move. Can Xue's work is extremely
suspicious of that center, which seeks to represent marginality. Reading
Can Xue as a twice-repressed margin can only succeed to the extent that
it presumes a specific subject position (reader) to whom it is directed, and
most importantly, from which it can be described. In fact, it is the primary
function of this sort of interpretation to guarantee the reader's own
subjectivity. There is no small truth in the dedication given by the trans-
lators at the beginning of the book: "Tol Zhong Ming! for discovering! the
subject." Here, the "subject" is discovered by a Chinese, for a Westerner
to be sure, but perhaps even more predictably, for some Chinese as well.
The appearance of Can Xue's works in translation is to be welcomed. In
the present case, however, the manner of production and presentation
suggests that there are still many people interested in preserving the West
as a supplier of recognition: "Which is to say that the West is never content
with what it is recognized as by others; it is always urged to approach others
in order to ceaselessly transform its self-image; it continually seeks itself in
the midst of interaction with the Other; it would never be satisfied with
being recognized but would wish to recognize others; it would rather be a
supplier of recognition than a receiver thereof. ... In this regard, the West
thinks itself to be ubiquitous."ss If Can Xue's work does not immediately
point to a way out of this predicament, it is clearly disturbed by it.

54 Ronald R. Janssen, "Can Xue's 'Attacks of Madness'," in Janssen/Zhang 164-165.

ss Sakai Naoki, "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and
Particularism," in The South Atlantic Quarterly 87.3: 477.
Feminism in the Chinese Context:
Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife1
Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

As work is to marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially

constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet
historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and
mind.
Catharine A MacKinnon2

Among contemporary Chinese women writers, Li Ang is probably the

most controversial figure. Li Ang, whose given name is Shi Shuduan [Shih
Shu-tuan], was born in Taiwan in 1952. She is the youngest of three literary
sisters. Her elder sisters, Shi Shunu [Shih Shu-nul and Shi Shuqing [Shih
Shu-ch'ing], are a critic and a novelist, respectively. Li Ang began her
writing career at the age of sixteen with the publication of a short story,
"Huaji" [The flowering season].3 Now in her mid-thirties, she has gained
both fame and notoriety over the nearly twenty intervening productive
years. Critics have acclaimed her work for its artistry while also severely
criticizing her for its explicitness about sex. So while Li Ang's best-known
novella, Shafu [The butcher's wife],4 for instance, won first prize in the
annual fiction contest sponsored by the Lianhe bao [United daily news], it
has also earned the enmity of "moralists" for its bold descriptions of sexual
scenes. One critic even opined that the novella's sexual brutality might
traumatize young girls.s

1 This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on Comparative

Uterature East and West: Traditions and Trends, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 4-7,1988.
I am grateful to Dr. P. K.l.eung, Mr. A Hirvela and the editor and anonymous reviewers
of Modem Chinese Literature for their valuable suggestions on the original version. I am
particularly indebted to Mr. C. S. Leung for his encouragement and comments.
2 Catharine A MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for
Theory," Signs: lOU1'IfIIl of Women in CuItwe and Society 7.31 (1982): 515-44.
3 Collected in HUIJ Ii (The flowering season], U Ang (Taipei: Hong Fan, 1984).
4 U Ang, Shafu [Husband·killing]. English version: The Butcher's Wife, translated by
Howard Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung (San Francisco: North Paint, 1986). Subsequent
citations will rely on this text. Another translation of the prologue and first two chapters of
Shafu by Fan Wen-mei and John Minford has been published in Renditions 27 & 28 (Spring&
Autumn 1987): 61-75. Extracts of these three chapters of Fan's translation are also found in
Geremie Barmt and John Minford, ed., Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (Hong
Kong: Far Eastern Economic Review Ltd, 1986) 209-17.
5 Hu Yun, "Miji duanping" [Short reviews], XlIIShu yuekan [New books monthly] 4 (Jan
1984): 34-35. Lugang Ren rebuffs Hu in "Tan duiShafu de jige wujie" [On certain misinter-
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 267

In fact, Li Ang's concern with sex is very serious. To her, sex is "the
most incisive force breaking through a conventional society.'.6 In a number
of stories, such as "Renjian shi" [The world of man], "Xunxi" [The mes-
sage], "Zuoye" [Last night] and "Mochun" [Late spring]/ which provoked
particularly vitriolic critical attention, Li Ang attacks sexual taboos operat-
ing in school, family and society (Lin 217). Her probing into the social,
moral and psychological dimensions of sex allows Li Ang to challenge the
values and conventions of society.
Li Ang also grounds her exploration of women's experience in
sexuality. To her sex is "a form of self-affirmation," a vital part in the
process of growth (Lin 214). In many of her stories, sex constitutes an
integral part in a woman's search for identity. Sex also provides the grounds
for Li Ang's literary feminism. It is the basis upon which she exposes the
inequality between the sexes and women's oppression within a patriarchal
society.
In the following discussion I will examine Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife,
which presents the oppression of women in terms of sexual depredation. I
will argue that it is a feminist novella that discusses the socio-economic
nature of women's victimization.
The terms "feminism" and "feminist," however, demand to be clarified
at the outset. Given the diversity in the development, philosophy and
programs of feminism in different countries and in different periods, it is
impossible to take the term "feminism" as a self-evident one. As Rosalind
Delmar points out,

The fragmentation of contemporary feminism bears ample witness to the

impossibility of constructing modem feminism as a simple unity in the
present or of arriving at a shared feminist defInition of feminism. Such
differing explanations, such a variety of emphases in practical cam-
paigns, such widely varying interpretations of their results have emerged,
that it now makes more sense to speak of a plurality of feminisms than
of one. (Delmar 9)

The contradictions and diversities in the meaning and scope of

"feminism" have produced heated controversies over the definitions and
connotations of the term; nevertheless, feminism has in general been
pretations ofShajU ],Xuuhu yueknn 5 (Feb 1984): 77. Lugang Ren argues that the cautionary
and educational message of ShajU is in fact directed at men rather than women.

6 Lin Yijie, "Panni yu jiushu" [Rebellion and salvation], interview, Li Ang, Tamen de
Yan/ei [Their tears] (Taipei: Hong Fan, 1984) 214.
7 The four stories were all written in 1974. "Renjian shin and "Zuoye" are collected in Li
Ang,Aiqing shiyan [The test of lave] (Taipei: Hong Fan, 1982), the other two in Tamen de
Yan1ei.
268 Sheung, Yuen Daisy Ng

associated with the development of women's movements in the West.8 In

fact, part of the self-image of contemporary feminism in the West is the
identity between feminism and a woman's movement.
In China, women's movements took place in the context of political
changes and were aligned with other social movements. The emancipation
of Chinese women began in the late nineteenth century. In the face of
Western invasion, policy-makers wooed female resources to increase
productivity and strengthen national defense. Women were given equal
educational opportunities and, with their increasing participation in politi-
cal movements, women's status began to improve. Women played an active
role in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the birth of the Republic.
Yet after the Revolution (1911) the ruling Nationalist Party refused to
make provision for women's suffrage and gender equality in the Constitu-
tion of the Republic. A women's suffrage movement and continued
protests from women's groups failed to effect any change. 9
Women's movements once more sprouted during the May Fourth
Movement (1919). Beginning as a patriotic movement of Chinese intellec-
tuals in reaction to domestic turmoil and the threat of Japanese militarism,
the May Fourth Movement developed into the New Culture Movement,
which was an attempt to reform China. The intellectuals challenged tradi-
tional culture, which they believed was the root of many age-old problems,
and turned to Western culture to find new solutions. '''Women's problems'
were also an important issue in the general humanitarian concern of these
reformers" (Ku 1988, 180). They advocated equal rights for women and
condemned old customs such as foot-binding, arranged marriage, con-
cubinage and prostitution. In 1924 legislation was passed giving equal rights
to men and women in law, marriage, education, economic opportunity and
political participation. 1o Yet the institutionalization of equal rights for
women did not bring about a substantial improvement in women's lives, for
traditional values were still predominant and resistant in society.
Political and social movements provided the context for the develop-
ment of women's movements in mainland China, but the experience of
Taiwan was different. Taiwan was ceded to Japan by an unequal treaty in
1895. Japan's fifty-year colonial rule "intensified the already existent sub-

8 Many feminists, such as Olive Banks, have considered feminism as a social movement.
9 The Women's Suffrage Association forced an entry into the House and finally resorted
to violence. This incident happened to coincide with the suffrage movement in Britain, and
the British Suffragettes sent a telegram to show their sympathy and respect. The suffrage
movement has been regarded as the first organized and collective expression of feminism in
China (Ku, 1988, 180).
lOThe institutionalization of equality of men and women has been praised as "a bloodless
social revolution" (Yeh 118).
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 269

missive nature of women's position" in Taiwan (Yao 199).11 In 1949 the

Kuomintang (KMT) and its Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan
after losing to the Communists in the Civil War. To counteract drastic
changes in the mainland, the Nationalist government assumed the guar-
dianship of tradition and cultural heritage. As the government sought to
tighten social control, women were encoura~ed to play supportive and
subservient roles both at home and in society. 1 Not until the 1970s was the
traditional role of women in a patriarchal society questioned.
Women's movements in Taiwan were initiated by Lii Xiulian [Lii
Hsiu-lien] in the early 1970sY Lii's involvement began with her writing
articles on two fervently discussed topics dominating in the media in 1971
and 1972: the protection of men against competition from women in the
joint college entrance examination and the overwhelming sympathy shown
to a wife-killer. 14 Lii's writing on these topics from humanitarian and
feminist perspectives caused great controversies. From 1972 onwards Lii
made numerous attempts at organizing women's associations and in-
stitutionalizing her ideas of equality, but encountered strong resistance
from both the government and society. Lii was later involved in an open
clash between the political opposition and the KMT in December 1979 and
was sentenced to jail. As a result of Lii's imprisonment the women's
movement in Taiwan was at a low ebb until the Awakening group was
established in 1982 by Li Yuanzhen [Li Yuan-chen], a professor of Chinese
literature at Tamkang University. IS
In Taiwan there has never been a large-scale, aggressive, organized
and political women's movement comparable to those of the West. This
has led some to comment that "from the point of view of participation,

11 Although there is no direct reference to Japan's colonization of Taiwan in The Butcher's

Wife, the background of the novella appears to be the time around the Sino-Japanese War.
12 The Central Women's Department, headed by Madame Chiang Kai·shek, propagated
the maternal image of women and promoted "feminine virtues" through the mass media,
formal education and its women's policy (Ku 1988,181).
13U1 Xiulian was born in 1944. She studied law at the National Taiwan University from
1964 to 1969. She received her Master's degree in Comparative Law from the University of
l11inois in 1971. In the same year she returned to Taiwan.
14 In June 1972 a student studying in the U.S. murdered his wife and returned to Taiwan
for trial.
IS Reacting to the conservative nature of most women's magazines, which taught women
to accept patriarchal values, in 1982 a small group of women launched a monthly magazine,
Awakening [FunU xinzhi], to raise women's consciousness, encourage self-improvement and
voice feminist opinions (Ku 1988,182).
270 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

strictly speaking there has never been any women's rights movement in
Taiwan. There have only been activities calling for better rights for women"
(Li Meizhi 34). In the conservative society of Taiwan, a women's movement
that advocates some basic changes is naturally regarded with suspicion and
hostility. Because of social and political constraints, feminists follow the
path Of mild, moderate campaigns to raise women's consciousness and
effect changes in social attitudes toward women and carefully avoid any
radical image such as the bra-burner. "Feminist separatism" is naturally out
of the question. 16 In fact, the feminist convictions held by the leaders of the
women's movement are a far cry from the beliefs of many feminists in the
West. A clear example is Lii's three "Basic Principles" of "New Feminism,"
which consist of the following:

"First become human, then be man or woman."

"What one is [man or woman], like what one should be!"

"Develop to the full everyone's potential [regardless of sex]," (Lii 156)

In these "Principles" and in much of her theoretical work, Lii makes

clear that she does not agree with "American feminists' advocation to break
down sexual differences" and sees no need to question "masculinity" and
"femininity" (Lii 152). Under the pressure of prevalent conservatism, "Lu
[Lii] tried to make compromises by praising feminine attributes such as
being tender, sweet, graceful and loving, while injecting the ideal of equal
access to education, employment and political participation" (Ku 1988,
181). Lii further maintains that feminism is "a human rights [renquan]
movement, not a woman's rights [nUquan] movement" (Lii 156).
Li Ang's views echo Lii's feminist credo. In the Author's Preface to
the translation, The Butcher's Wife, Li Ang restates the position she staked
out first in the Chinese text, namely her express intention that The
Butcher's Wife be a "feminist" work:
I cannot deny that I approached the writing of The Butchers Wife with a
number of feminist ideals, wanting to show the tragic fate that awaited
the economically dependent Taiwanese women living under the rule of
traditional Chinese society. But as I wrote, I found myselfbecomiog more
and more concerned with larger issues of humanity such as hunger,
death, sex. What I want to emphasize here is that the ultimate concern
of a piece of "feminist literature" is, after all, human nature.

16 Barbara Hendrischke defines "feminist separatism" as "a departure from all previous
traditions which are made by men, and the attempt to completely recreate the world from a
female point of view, in particular the forms of language, modes of thinking and artistic
expression as well as patterns of social behaviour" (397).
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 271

Both here and in her essay, "Wode Chuangzuoguan" [My creative stance],
Li Ang takes great pains to assure her readers that she is concerned less
with "femininity" [mixing] than with "humanity" [renxing].17
When applying the concept of Western feminism to the discussion of
Chinese works, it is thus necessary to make adjustments in light of different
cultural contexts. Yet to exaggerate discrepancies in sweeping statements
such as the following is equally misleading: "What is clear is that the
problems that face Chinese women who are emerging from a feudal
Confucian society have nothing to do with the problems of Western women
who are trying to get out from under the thumbs of capitalism and
monotheism" (Kristeva 139-140).
Insofar as "woman is traditionally use-value for man, exchange-value
among men" (lrigaray 105), both Chinese women and their Western
counterparts share the common struggle to free their bodies from being
the property and propriety of men. Feminist scholarship, whether Chinese
or Western, works toward the same goal of exposing the collusion between
ideology and cultural practices and deconstructing predominantly male
cultural paradigms.
In the following I will attempt to read The Butcher's Wife from a literary
feminist perspective, but with sympathy for the author's intentions. I8 I am
here welding two critical tools, which, in Annis Pratt's terminology, are:
"textual analysis" (which determines whether a work is novelistically suc-
cessful) and "contextual analysis" (which considers the relevance of a work,
even if artistically flawed, as a reflection of the situation of women) (12). I
will attempt to show that The Butcher's Wife is a feminist fiction that
examines male-female relationship within a socio-economic context and
that it reveals the web of role expectation in which women are enmeshed.
I will also argue that Li Ang's overwhelming concern to portray women's
oppression by men nevertheless takes her away from the central issue,
power between the sexes, with the result that she polarizes the male-female

17 Li Ang,Anye [Dark nights] (Hong Kong: Bo Yi, 1985) 185-86.

18 Elaine Showalter suggests that feminist literary criticism can be divided into two distinct
modes. She calls the first type "feminist critique," which is concerned with woman as reader.
It offers feminist readings of texts that consider the images and stereotypes of women in
literature and the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism. Showalter coined
the word "gynocritics" for the second type, which is concerned with woman as writer. It
considers the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by woman. In other words,
the two major foci of feminist scholarship are "deconstructing dominant male patterns of
thought and social practice; and reconstructing female experience previously hidden or
overlooked" (Greene 7). There are many different approaches striving toward these two
aiQlS, as noted by Annette Kolodny and other critics. Interested readers may find KK
Ruthven's introductory book useful.
272 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

relationship into a paradigmatic opposition between oppressor and op-

pressed, master and slave.
The Butcher's Wife was written out of a desire "to investigate the
relationship between men and women and to articulate the role and status
of women in a traditional society. ,,19 The significance of The Butcher's Wife
as a feminist novella, nevertheless, does not lie in any progressive insights
into women's position in Chinese society, but rather in its challenge to the
literary conventions of China. In Chinese literary history women's writing
has always been considered sentimental and trivial, circumscribed by love
and the domestic domain. The Butcher's Wife is an attempt to break away
from the mainstream "feminine" writing and assert itself as a serious
feminist work.

I
The Butcher's Wife is based on a homicide that occurred in Shanghai
in the 19305. Li Ang's novella describes the tortured life of Lin Shi, an
orphaned only child turned out to survive in the street with her mother
following her father's death. The specter of starvation in wartime leads
Lin's mother to sell herself to a soldier for two rice balls. When her act is
discovered the clansmen judge her guilty of adultery. The narrative does
not indicate what happens to Lin's mother afterwards. One "source" has it
that she has been drowned in the river in the manner of traditional
punishment of adultresses, another that she and the soldier have been
chased out of Lucheng after a sound beating, a third that she has eloped
with the soldier. Lin remains a maidservant in her uncle's house. When she
reaches the age of puberty, the family trades her in marriage to a pig-
butcher, Chen Jiangshui. The man subjects Lin to unspeakable abuses. Lin
is also ostracized by the entire village community, represented by Auntie
Ah-wang and her friends. The superstitions and presumptions of the
villagers leave Lin no choice but to submit to Chen's ill treatment of her.
Gradually Chen's brutality and Ah-wang's character assassination unhinge
her, and Lin finally kills Chen in a demented frenzy. Since in traditional
Chinese society any woman who murders her husband is presumed to have
done so because of adultery, the authorities execute Lin despite the fact
that there is no proof of an extra-marital affair.
Most critics have agreed with Zhang Xiguo that The Butcher's Wife
forces readers "to recognize the nature of the male-female relationship"
(30-31). The male-female relationship presented in the novella is a
polarized relationship between oppressor and oppressed. Sexual depreda-
tion is thus the index of gender oppression; according to Cai Yingjun,

19 U Ang, Foreword, Sha/u, viii.

 Feminism in the Chinese Context 273

"sexual torture represents the most direct abuse and persecution of women
by men in tradition" (98).
Sex can be a weapon of terror because sexuality is a form of power. As
Catharine A MacKinnon points out, "sexuality is gendered as gender is
sexualized" (1983, (35). Sexuality is a social process that structures gender.
Gender, as socially constructed, embodies sexuality by maintaining a
division of power that institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female
sexual submission. Sexual abuses thus "express the relations, values, feel-
ings, norms and behaviors of the culture's sexuality" (MacKinnon 1982,
533). In feminist analysis, therefore, "a rape is not an isolated or individual
or moral transgression, but a terrorist act within a systematic context of
group subjection, like lynching" (MacKinnon 1983, 654).
Li Ang's portrayal of sex in relation to death in The Butcher's Wife
seems to echo this view of sex as an act of terror. On a number of occasions
when Chen violates her, Lin believes that she is unquestionably going to
die. "Dying" is nevertheless a common euphemism for "coming," the
ecstatic moment of orgasm. Lin's morbid fear of death in ravishment may
thus be read as a parody of the masculinist ethos that women enjoy being
raped.
This perverse view of female masochism is an elaboration of the
pervasive belief that desirability to men is women's form of power. Ah-
wang's claim that "all women have the hots for a man's tool" parrots the
common belief that women's sexuality lies in the capacity to arouse desire
in men (Li 101). While the novella does not digress much on Ah-wang's
sexual behavior, except for a brief mention of her adultery, there is a subtle
suggestion of her as a nymphomaniac pandering to male expectations
through her voyeuristic interest in the Chens' sexual activities.
When Lin surprises Ah-wang creeping off after peeping at the sexual
intercourse Chen has performed on her, Lin sees in Ah- wang's eyes "the
look in Chen Jiangshui's eyes" whenever he makes sexual advances toward
her (Li 43). Ah-wang's gaze is, therefore, a "male" gaze, which establishes
a power relation between the knowing subject (Ab-wang/Chen) and the
known object (Lin). Ah-wang seems to be an exemplary of the Freudian
theory of "penis envy," a phallocentric theory that privileges the penis as
the only recognized sex organ of any worth. The basic assumption behind
this theory is the woman's visual perception of her lack of a penis. The
theory holds that the woman first sees her clitoris as a small penis and then
decides that she has already been castrated. As a result of recognizing this
inherent "deficiency," the woman tries to appropriate the penis for herself.
She seeks the equivalent of the penis by all the means at her disposal, such
as by servile love of the father-husband, by her desire of a penis-child, by
gaining access to certain cultural values that are exclusively masculine, etc.
As Luce Irigaray and other feminists have observed, the Freudian paradigm
theorizes female sexuality only as an attempt to possess the equivalent of
274 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

the male sex organ (Irigaray 99). Man projects both his fear of castration
and his desire for a reproduction (image) of himself onto woman. Ah-wang,
who apparently experiences vicarious pleasure out of Chen's torturing Lin,
is a monstrous exemplification of the man's image created within such
masculine parameters. What Lin recognizes in this woman is virtually the
"negative," the "mirror-image" of the man.20
Ah-wang's voyeurism provides a foil to men's scopophilia (i.e., love of
looking). Neighbors claim to watch Lin stare foolishly and fixedly at men
and interpret virginal little Lin's vacant gaze as the moony expression of a
lovesick person. One of the men even says that "he felt like he was being
swallowed up by that hungry gaze of hers" (Li 11). This is an obvious
example of the male projection of libidinal desire upon women. Actually
Lin is overwhelmed by a haunting nightmare and her gaze turns inwards to
her own thoughts. The woman's subjective inwardness contrasts with the
men's presumption of objective knowledge. The men profess to read Lin's
mind by observing her. From the male point of view Lin is a knowable
object, and in MacKinnon's words, "[w]oman through male eyes is sex
object, that by which man knows himself at once as man and as subject"
(1982,538).
The Freudian notion of the gaze theorizes the voyeuristic desire as a
form of sadistic mastery over a masochistic object. This "gaze" is particular-
ly obvious in a scene when Chen stares at Lin, naked from the waist down
and recovering from his latest assault, as she wolfs down food. In fact,
Chen's gaze operates sporadically. His tyrannical control of Lin is so severe
that he does not need to assure himself of his power by watching over her.
Most of the time Chen does not look at Lin at all. He never greets her on
his return, ignores her at meals and hardly ever addresses her. After
assaulting her, he invariably falls asleep the instant he rolls off her. Lin is
no more than another object in Chen's house.
Sexual objectification obliterates the mind/matter distinction and
reduces woman to mere merchandise for sexual exchange. Chen's sadistic
satisfaction in raping Lin is, therefore, a negation of the woman's being. In
his anger against her attempt to fend off his assault, Chen lets out a steady
string of curses as he ravishes her: "I'll fuck the life right out of you! I'll
fuck the life right out of that stinking cunt of yours! I'll fuck the life ... fuck
the life right out of you! " (Li 61).
Li Ang denounces the dehumanization of women to mere sexual
objects by comparing violation to slaughter. As Joyce C.H. Liu and others
have pointed out, pig-butchery and sexual intercourse are linked by "recur-

20 It is interesting to note that the description of the facial features of Ah-wang evokes the
image of a photo negative by the contrast of white hair with dark skin: "The woman, who was
in her fifties, had the typical dark skin of the fishing folk of Chencuo. Her face was deeply
wrinkled and her snow-white hair was coiled into a bun at the back of her head" (Li 22).
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 275

ring overlapping metaphors" (70). Lin's screams of pain on the wedding

night sound to people's ears like "the bleating of ghostly pigs" (Li 13). On
the following morning, one of the slaughterhouse helpers jocosely asks
Chen if his woman squeals like a pig about to be butchered on his wedding
night. As a reply Chen raises his pointed knife, a gesture both menacing
and sexual. Later in the morning Chen goes home and rapes Lin, causing
her to bleed again. The butcher knife reappears on the marital bed overtly
associated with blood: "Next to the spots of blood lay an even more
menacing object-a shiny, long, sharp blade. Chen Jiangshui's butcher
knife which he had casually set down before climbing into bed" (Li 20-21).
The symbolic gesture of plunging a knife deep into flesh is made even
more explicit in a later description of Chen butchering a pig:

This was Chen Jiangshui's moment. As the knife was withdrawn and the
blood spurted forth, he was infused with an incomparable sense of
satisfaction. It was as though the hot stream coursing through his body
was converted into a thick, sticky white fluid spurting into the shadowy
depths of a woman at the climax of a series of high-speed thrusts. To
Chen Jiangshui, the spurting of blood and the ejaculation of semen had
the same orgasmic effect. (Li 75)

Chen's perverse demand that the woman he has intercourse with

"scream her head off the whole time" is reminiscent of the squealing of
pigs in the face of death (Li 80). In fact, the other butchers call Chen
"Pig-Butcher Chen, partly in jest over the way he handled women" but
partly also in concession to his skills in butchering pigs (Li 14). When Lin
refuses to scream for fear that the neighbors may mistake her moans as
lascivious cries, Chen tries every form of abuse to force a cry from her. He
tortures her to the extent that panting hisses escape from between her
tightly gritted teeth, "like the gasps of a tiny animal in the throes of death"
(Li 109). Later he even threatens to take Lin back to the slaughterhouse
and really show her "something good" if she doesn't scream.
Sexual intercourse, a procreative act, becomes brutal annihilation of
the woman's being. Li Ang compares such violence committed against the
woman to Chen's slaughter of a pregnant sow-"[t]he destruction of the
womb, the source of all life under heaven" (Li 121).

II
The metaphor of pig-butchery underlines the economic nature of
women's oppression by men. Pigs are reared and then butchered for the
meat they yield. In a similar way, Lin has been bought, reared and
"butchered" for her flesh. The essence of her marriage as a manifestation
of the flesh trade has in fact been made clear from the very beginning. Lin
is traded like a sow to Chen by her uncle-her flesh is sold for the meat
276 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

Chen brings to her uncle's door every ten days or two weeks, and "the
neighbors all remarked enviously that Lin Shi was able to exchange a body
with no more than a few ounces of meat for pork by the pound" (Li 12).
The economy of flesh constitutes a specific, material oppression of
women enclosed within the domestic economy of the family. Men trade
women as commodities on the conjugal market. Women's value is primarily
the provision of free labor within the family and free sex for the husband.
It is more than a show of vulgarity when Chen calls his wife a "slut."
In sexual commerce Lin's value as an object of transaction is not much
higher than a prostitute. Chen in fact treats his favorite prostitute, Golden
Hower, more like a wife (indeed, more like a mother) than he treats Lin.
Compared to his inhuman behavior toward Lin, his attitude toward Golden
Flower is strangely "humane." Since both women serve only a single
function, sexual gratification, they are simply interchangeable. Lin's value
to Chen is clearly revealed in the episode in which he starves her to force
her to scream during sexual intercourse:

''When whores want to eat, they have to work, you willing to work?"
"Doing what?" Lin Shi asked, hesitantly, timidly.
"You just moan a few times, like before, and if I find it satisfactory,
well, I'll reward you with a bowl of rice." (Li 126)

Chen's victimization of Lin is sustained by his complete economic

control over her. The feudal system's forced economic dependency of
women reinforces the sexual economy in which women are merchandise.
Women are forced to "sell" their bodies either exclusively to a particular
man on the connubial market or indiscriminately to any man in the flesh
trade, depending on their individual luck. The "value" of a woman and the
form of her "prostitution" are further determined by the paternalistic
"protection" (offather, brother, husband, son and of social values that are
predominantly masculinist) available to her. The material and sexual op-
pression of women in The Butcher's Wife indeed echoes lrigaray's ideologi-
cal argument: "Women are marked phallically by their fathers, husbands,
procurers. The stamp(ing) determines their value in sexual commerce"
(105).
The cases of Golden Hower and Lin's mother in contrast to that of
Ah-wang illustrate this point. Golden Flower was a peasant woman whose
husband died early. Being childless, she was turned out by her late
husband's family and has to make her living as a prostitute. Similarly, Lin's
mother was driven out of her home after her husband's death because she
has only a daughter but no son (the female is not considered an heir in the
feudal system)_ Forced by extreme starvation, Lin's mother has to sell
herself to a soldier for two rice balls. Ah-wang, on the contrary, has given
birth to a son and thus an heir. Though widowed, she is able to hold on to
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 277

her late husband's property as well as her familial position. She also tries
to consolidate her social status by hypocritically upholding the ethical
values of the patriarchal culture.
Li Ang underpins the economic nature of women's oppression in a
patriarchal culture by closely relating hunger to sex in The Butcher's Wife.
This point is carried to extremes in the episode of Lin's mother selling her
body to a soldier for two rice balls. At first the act is depicted in language
that evokes a stereotype of female concupiscence: "Pinned beneath him
[the soldier] was her mother, whose face, whose ha~ard face, was flushed
bright red and all aglow with a greedy light" (Li 7). The repeated occur-
rence of "ya" in relation to "kan" (see) is significant. The daughter,
helplessly witnessing the oppression of the mother, cannot escape the same
"curse" on women that passes on from one generation to another.
The apparent impression of the woman's carnal desire is, however,
immediately countered in the following paragraph:

She was chewing on one rice ball and clutching another in her hand. Low
moaning sounds escaped from her mouth, which was stuffed with food.
Half-eaten grains of white rice, mixed with saliva, dribbled down the side
of her face, onto her neck, and down her shirtfront. (Li 1)

The juxtaposition of sexuality and hunger sets off the grim fact of prostitu-
tion for survival. The ravenous look on the woman's face, which seems to
suggest sexual voracity, only signifies her primordial greed for life.
Li Ang adds a deeper irony to this scene by depicting Lin's mother
being clad in her wedding dress, which is all the poor woman has left to
wear. The wedding dress, being red, evokes the metaphor of blood: virginal
blood as well as the blood of a slaughtered pig. The wedding dress also
equates marriage with rape and prostitutuon. Being "quite new and in good
condition, still showing the creases" where it has been folded, the wedding
dress labels the woman as still a possession of a man, albeit a dead man (Li
9). Significantly, the dress is neither tom nor removed during her forced
sexual intercourse with the soldier.
The wedding dress symbolizes the bonds of marriage that lash the
woman to the pillar of traditional virtues. In the same vein, the "memorial

21 While the English translation deserves applause for its concision, force and immediacy,
it has omitted the important word "ya" (press) appearing twice in the original. A literal
rendering of the sentences in question reads:

Lin Shi could clearly see the man in soldierly unform who was pressing on her
mother's body ... and then Lin Shi saw the mother who was being pressed
underneath. (ShaJU 78-79. Emphases added.)
278 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

arch"-an obelisk erected in commemoration of a chaste woman in tradi-

tional China-is in reality nothing but a pillar to which she has been trussed.
Lin's last memory of her mother as "dressed in red and tied to an ancestral-
hall pillar as big around as a single embrace" foreshadows her own fate (Li
9). In her torturous life with Chen, Lin is haunted by a nightmare of her
mother clothed in red, and with her lower portion bound by several coils
of a long, thick rope.22
Lin's marriage is in essence a repetition of her mother's forced pros-
titution. The description of Lin's wedding night drives home this point:

She forced herself to bear the hunger as she waited for the last few
guests to leave, but exhausted and famished, she was close to collapse.
Drunk though the groom was when he came to bed, he insisted on
fulfilling his conjugal obligation, causing Lin Shi to exhaust with pitiful
screams what little energy she had left....
When it was over, Lin Shi was nearly in a dead faint. Chen Jiangshui,
who was an old hand at this, quickly forced some wine down her throat,
and she came around at once, choking hard. Still groggy, she complained
that she was hungry. Chen Jiangshui went into the living room and came
back with a big piece of pork, dripping with fat, which he stuffed into her
mouth, skin and all. With bloated cheeks, she chewed on the pork,
making squishing noises as fat oozed out the corners of her mouth and
dribbled down in rivulets to her chin and neck, all greasy and wet. Just
then her tears fmally brimmed over and ran down her face, sending a
chill through her. (Li 13)

The nature of marriage as prostitution is, moreover, demonstrated by

Chen's contemptuous act of throwing some "defloration money" [kaibao
qian] to Lin. Conventionally presented by a customer to his chosen pros-
titute who is still a virgin on the first night of trade, the "defloration money"
denotes the value of a woman as an object of sexual transaction. By putting
a price tag on her flesh, the "defloration money" negates the existence of
the woman.
It is of metaphorical significance that Lin folds up the "defloration
money" in the oil paper wrapping of the ointment Ab- wang has given her.
The ointment is supposed to soothe the pain in her private parts caused by
Chen's assaults, making it easier for Lin to stand further suffering. Yet the
denial of the instinctive response of pain is conversely an annihilation of
her natural body. Both the "defloration money" and the ointment are
therefore instruments of dehumanization severing the woman from her
body.

22 There may also be an implied reference to an old superstitious belief of the Chinese that
if a person nurses grievances and dies wearing red clothes, the soul of the person will become
a ghost haunting the earth to seek its revenge.
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 279

Lin uses the "defloration money" she has received from Chen to breed
ducklings, hoping to make some money to provide for herself when Chen
does not bring any food home. Inevitably Lin's procreative enterprise
encounters a brutal end. Chen, who will not allow Lin any economic
independence, slaughters all the ducklings on which she has placed the
hope of making her own living. The bloody slaughter symbolizes the
violence with which Chen has crushed the life and spirit out of Lin.

III
Throughout the incidents shown in The Butcher's Wife, Chen does not
once call Lin by her name. Other than treating her as if she were non-ex-
istent, he calls her a "slut." Chen also frequently uses foul language on Lin,
who hardly dares opens her mouth in front of him. Chen's verbal abuse of
Lin is an assertion of his mastery over her. His control over speech and his
perverse naming of his wife as whore demonstrates, in Adrienne Munich's
words, "a paradigm for male dominance over language" (238). Munich
views the masculinist monopoly over naming as "a male will to power and
a willing of female absence" (239). Chen's abominable treatment of Lin
seems to illustrate this point. On many occasions Lin is "apparently forgot-
ten" by Chen who, without even acknowledging her presence, sits down to
eat, drink and sing completely at ease (Li 28, 90).
The patriarchal monopoly over naming leaves no voice whatever for
women. The female is reduced to the level of the silent, the unconscious.
Shortly after she has reached puberty Lin is obssessed by a recurring dream
of pillars. Trying to rationalize this dream, Lin repeats it over and over to
her neighbors. Tired of hearing, people cut her off whenever she attempts
to talk about it. Lacking a listener, Lin grows taciturn. Her silence, which
is induced by social estrangement, is, however, interpreted as "lovesick-
ness" by her neighbors. This provides an excuse for Lin's uncle to marry
her off by accusing Lin of being "in a tearing hurry to get laid," just "like
her mother before her" (Li 11).
Lin is silenced and erased by the patriarchal society, yet Ah-wang
convinces her that her grievances can be voiced after death. Ah-wang
relates to Lin the ghost tale of Chrysanthemum, a maidservant who threw
herself down a well in Chencuo. Instead of highlighting the fact that
Chrysanthemum has committed suicide to escape torment, she diverts Lin's
attention to the kindness and power of the Chen Clan Elder, the deity
worshipped in the Temple, by allowing people who have suffered injustice
to air their grievances after death. The "cosmic order" of deities is, how-
ever, still envisioned as a patriarchal hierarchy. Inevitably, women's voices
are made meaningless within the patriarchal order. No wonder that the
ghost of Chrysanthemum is not "seen" by people as "a terrifying specter
with a horrible bloody face or a frightening long tongue," but instead, is
280 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

said to be "a melancholic but beautiful spirit," forever wordless (Li 82).
Lin's naivete in invoking the spirit of Chrysanthemum to be her protector
only adds a deeper irony to the muting of her grievances.
Ah-wang complies with the victimizer in silencing Lin. Lin is slandered
by Ah-wang, who tells other village women that Lin's painful cries during
Chen's assaults are but lascivious screams. Overhearing Ah-wang's slur of
her, Lin tries to stifle her moans every time Chen assaults her. The result
is, of course, a stepping up of Chen's abuse. Realizing that she has been
made into a laughingstock among the women of Chencuo by Ah-wang's
malicious slander, Lin avoids the society of the women. Since her uncle has
declared that her family ties ended on her wedding day, Lin has no one to
tum to. Finding neither understanding nor sympathy for her ordeal, Lin is
reduced to absolute silence. Even when Chen brutally slaughters all the
ducklings in which she has vested her hope, she utters not a cry. While Chen
is himself overwhelmed by the terror of his bloody deed and breaks down
into wailing, Lin "just stood there without making a sound" (Li 123).
Finally, when Lin is forced by starvation to beg employment from the
fishing folk, none of the households will accept her for fear of Chen. The
scene in which Lin desolately heads toward "home" represents her total
social alienation: "There wasn't a sound to be heard or a person to be seen.
It was as though the whole of Lucheng had disappeared, leaving her alone
in the bitter cold between the deserted sky and the desolate earth" (Li 131).
The world of the oppressed woman is a world of deadly silence.
Lin's refusal to moan under Chen's continuous physical abuse and
starvation is her last attempt to hold on to her human dignity. Paradoxically,
this attempt is simultaneously an act of dehumanization: a severance of
human emotions and a denial of the true responses of the body. Inevitably,
her last hold on humanity, and hence sanity, is finally overwhelmed. When
Chen rapes her just before his brutal end, "Lin Shi didn't struggle. She just
whimpered softly like a small animal. It sounded to Chen Jiangshui like
moaning, and he was satisfied" (Li 137-38). More than an estrangement of
her words (language) from her body (counter-text to her words), this final
rape alienates the woman not only from her body, but also from her voice
(identity). It is a dehumanization of the human cry (emotions) into the
squeals of a pig, signifying nothing but death. It is therefore important that
when Lin kills Chen, the images that flash into view are first the face of the
soldier who raped her mother, then "a squealing, struggling pig" (Li 138).
By turning Chen into a hog to be butchered, just as she has been
"butchered" like a sow, Lin reverses the process of dehumanization. Her
slaughter of Chen constitutes a breakdown of the phallocratic logic of flesh
for meat.
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 281

N
Lin and her mother are doomed victims of the sexual double standard
prevalent in society. The ethics of the patriarchal society demands that
women yield their bodies up as sexual tools for men's use but censures them
if they themselves gain pleasure from such use. Just as the clansmen wilfully
mistake the hungry look in Lin's mother's eyes for a lustful craving, Lin's
painful moanings are perversely considered by the villagers as incontinent
cries of orgasmic ecstasy. Even after Lin's voice has been stifled, Ah-wang
still traduces her: "She even stopped moaning toward the end. I wonder if
that means that Pig-Butcher Chen couldn't control her any longer. Heh-
heh, I even heard him accuse her once of taking a lover!" (Li 141).
Lin and her mother are victimized by a society that refuses to listen to
women's sufferings. Their tortured cries are drowned within the deafening
din of phallocentric discourse ironically trumpeted through the mouth of
another woman:

"You know the old saying 'There's no murder without adultery,"

Auntie Ah-wang intoned solemnly. «Just look how it turned out - mother
and daughter both in trouble for the same reason. I tell you, we women
really have to watch our step."
Her listeners nodded their heads in agreement. (Li 141)

The causes for the wreck of Lin and her mother are never questioned. On
the contrary, they are made to bear the blame for their suffering. Ah-wang
expresses only contempt toward Lin's ordeal:

«All a woman has to do is put up with it a while, and it'll pass. Who ever
heard of someone yelling and carrying on until everybody in the neigh-
borhood knows and no other woman is willing to speak up for her?
Honestly!" (Li 142)

The irony hidden behind this speech is, of course, that instead of speaking
up for Lin, the women of Chencuo on the contrary speak ill of her. In reality
women are oppressed not only by men, but also by other women.
The fact that women who are unconscious victims of patriarchal
culture invariably become accomplices in the oppression of other women
has been established at the beginning of the novella. Unwittingly, Lin
causes the ruin of her mother. Noticing the soldier's stealthy entry into the
ancestral hall where she and her mother have taken shelter, the naive Lin
vaguely discerns danger and runs to her uncle for help. She never realizes
that by calling forth her clansmen, she has, in fact, summoned the per-
secutors of her poor mother.
The point that women who have internalized ideological assumptions
of patriarchy are equally victimizers of other women is clearly developed
282 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

in the character Auntie Ab-wang. The vivid description of Ab-wang's feet

captures the essence of her being:

Although once bound, they had subsequently been freed, which is why
they weren't particularly small. Since there had never been any attempt
to bind them into "three-inch golden lotuses," they were nearly as long
as those of the average woman. The only difference was that she walked
somewhat unsteadily, seemingly lifting her legs straight up, then setting
them straight back down. She could only take small, mincing steps, and
even those took a great deal of effort, so for her the simple act of walking
was hard work. (Li 24)

The deformation of the feet symbolizes the disfiguration of the mind.

Like her feet, which have been bound so long they have lost the ability to
carry a woman's weight even after they have been freed, Ab-wang has been
steeped in phallocratic values to the point where she is shockingly insensi-
tive to other women's suffering. She is also characterized by "a full set of
teeth, so gleaming white they looked more false than real" (Li 22). This set
of gleaming white teeth recurs in later descri~tions with a menacing
suggestion of Ab-wang's ingenuity in calumnies.
Ab-wang preys on other women so as to uphold herself as the archan-
gel of morality. The values she appears to champion, such as women's
obedience to their husbands and female chastity, are overwhelmingly
phallocentric. Although her own behavior is a far cry from the principles
she proclaims, Ah-wang seeks to submit other women under the iron rule
of patriarchy. Herself an adultress, Ab-wang condemns Lin's mother for
adultery. She also pries into the sexual life of Chen and Lin, malevolently
vilifying Lin as a slut.
By aligning herself with men in oppressing other women, Ab-wang
exploits the double standard of morality to her own advantage. She further
safeguards her power by implanting in other villagers superstitious fears.
When Harmony, her defiant daughter-in-law, exposes her adultery, Ab-
wang vindicates herself by pretending to hang herself. Ab-wang's fake
hanging is a maneuver of the so-called traditional "weapons" wielded by
women: "First, cry; second, make a scene; third, hang yourself' [)Ii ku, er
nao, san shangdiao). Through staging this act of attempted suicide, Ab-
wang relates herself to the hanging ghost to frighten other women. She
clearly achieves her aim, as even the insolent Harmony is subdued by fear
of antagonizing Ab-wang's hanging ghost: "Fearing the ghost might seek
her out for revenge, Harmony's attitude toward Ab-wang had changed

23 Although the translators have given as close a rendition as possible, the adjectival phrase
"baisensen" in the original carries a menacing undertone that the phrase "gleaming white"
cannot convey. The conventional use of the adjective "sen" in combination with other
adjectives to form phrases such as "senran" [awe-inspiring] is to suggest grimness and
gloominess_
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 283

radically-she was now the model daughter-in-law, a study in obedience"

(Li 96).
Ah-wang's association with the hanging ghost is highly ironic. Since
the hanging ghost is conventionally envisioned as a specter with a long
bloody tongue, the image vividly portrays the horror of Ah-wang's malig-
nancy. The hanging ghost serves, furthermore, as a foil to the silent spirit
of Chrysanthemum, who represents the silenced, suppressed women like
Lin.
The image of the hanging ghost lays bare Ah-wang's sin and unveils
the ludicrous nature of the notion of "divine retribution." Under the
influence of Buddhism it was widely believed that people committing the
crime of calumny would be punished by having their tongues cut off in the
netherworld. The fact that Ah-wang can tum around superstitious beliefs
and use the hanging ghost to manipulate people through their fear reveals
the falsity of the logic of "divine retribution."
Ah-wang is able to escape social punishment for her adultery by
assigning her blame to the hanging ghost: "Not that I want to sing my own
praises, but not long ago there was that problem with the hanging ghost.
Luck was with me and I escaped with my life, but Pig-butcher Chen, he
wasn't so lucky" (Li 141). Guilefully exploiting the susceptibility of the
villagers, Ah-wang stamps out any reasoning by attributing everything to
"luck."
Superstition can be a weapon to induce blind submission in women
and thus perpetuate the hegemony of patriarchy. Right at the beginning of
their acquaintance, Ah-wang threatens Lin with the idea that she will have
to share Chen's infernal punishment for pig-butchery in the netherworld.
Ah-wang persuades Lin to offer up sacrifices to expiate part of Chen's sins
at the Temple of the Chen Clan Elder, a deity representing the patriarchal
rule. Ah-wang also exalts the benevolence and authority of the Chen Clan
Elder for allowing oppressed women such as Chrysanthemum to voice their
grievances after death. Cherishing the illusion of vindication in the other
life, Lin continues to endure Chen's torture and offer sacrifices to deities.
The idea of offering sacrifices is ironic. The "cosmic order," formed
by male deities such as the Chen Clan Elder, is but a patriarchal hierarchy.
Both the social order and "cosmic order" command women to offer
"sacrifices" to both men and male deities; otherwise they will be punished
for their "sins." By assuming the responsibility for instructing Lin in sacrifi-
cial offerings, Ah-wang plays the role of an adroit sorceress who wields the
enthralling power of superstition to induce fear in people.
During the Festival of Dead Souls, Ah-wang leads a group of women
from door to door to compare the sacrificial offerings displayed by each
household. Stopping at Lin's door, Ah-wang completely ignores Lin's warm
and sincere greeting, but "turned to the offerings on the altar, closely
scrutinizing and evaluating each and every item" (Li 94). Her criticism of
284 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

the sacrifices Lin offers on the altar echoes her criticism of Lin's "sacrifices"
to Chen. Ah-wang turns a blind eye to Lin's suffering, but criticizes Lin for
not having "enough sense to count her blessings," telling other women "1
don't know how many generations of virtuous cultivation it takes to be able
to live that kind of life" (Li 141-42). The injustice done to Lin is, however,
justified by the notion of "divine retribution" and all too easily explained
away:

"It was her cruel fate, that's what it was. The mother got into trouble, and
since theirs was a family short on luck, the daughter wound up commit-
ting murder for the same reason. It was in the cards, I tell you, it was
divine retribution!"

and Ah-wang's audience readily rejoins:

"How true! It was divine retribution," the others agreed. (Li 142)

A priestess jealously guarding the absolute sovereignty of the patriarchy of

which she is a parasite, Ah-wang defuses any doubt toward the uprightness
of social order by invoking the arbitrary order of deities. The "divine
retribution" imposed by the "cosmic order" is, after all, a male system of
retaliation. Women who commit the "sin" of not offering enough
"sacrifices" to men/male deities are severely "punished."

v
Lin's sacrificial offerings to her mother in the murder scene subvert
the order of phaUocracy. Lin's slaughter of Chen symbolically inverts the
male logic of women "expiating" their "sins" by offering up sacrifices to
male deities. Along with the paper figures and clothing and bowls of food,
Chen is "sacrificed" at the altar to redress the grievanceS of Lin and her
mother.
Some critics have viewed Lin's murder of Chen as a restoration of
balance in the power struggle between the sexes. Zhang Xiguo, for in-
stance, interprets the murder as a rite: "Through such a rite, the sexual
oppression of women by men is expropriated" (30). Zhang considers the
rite of mariticide (husband-killing) as comparable to the rite of patricide
(father-killing) in some primitive societies, and that "some forms of 'the
rite of husband-killing' are essential to women's awakening" (30). Another
critic, Gu Tianhung, also views Lin in the light of an avenger establishing
justice on the scale of "divine retribution": "With a swing of the knife, Lin
Shi ends all the grievances [yuan] and sins [nie ]-the oppressed finally
emerges in a heroic image" (43).
The point, however, is that the rite of mariticide does not lead to an
awakening of Lin or other women. I agree with Cai Yingjun that "even up
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 285

to the moment of gripping the knife to slay her husband, Lin Shi has not
reached any self-awareness" (98), and further, with Joyce Liu, that Lin's
breakdown "does not mean any triumph of her self-awareness or self-asser-
tiveness, but a total collapse" (73).
The "grievances and sins" of the women, moreover, do not end with
the mariticide. Although Lin appears to have avenged the oppression of
her mother and herself by killing Chen (who is, after all, only one of the
victimizers), male dominion in society has not been overturned. In fact,
Lin's victimization continues after her own unjust execution by the
authorities. She is falsely accused of adultery, the only possible motive
considered by both the authorities and society for a woman to murder her
husband. Ah-wang's slander on Lin's character simply echoes the prevalent
view in society as represented by the two fictional news reports included as
a prologue to the story. One of these delivers the following paternalistic
moral:

Even without proof of her infidelity, the public exhibition of an

adultress-murderess can serve as a warning against immorality, and in
the final analysis, the parading of Chen Lin Shi was a necessity. Surely
all the women who saw her will take heed and refrain from imitating
foreign women, who are always clamoring for equality and the right to
attend Western schools. Such demands are actually little more than
excuses for a woman to leave house and home and make a public
spectacle of herself. They comprise a mockery of the code of womanly
conduct and destroy our age-old concepts of womanhood.
We hope that the parade will inspire concerned citizens to redouble
their efforts in the fight to stop the decline in womanly virtues. (Li 4)24

Ah-wang and the village women of Lucheng accept such views and refuse
to understand Lin's predicament. They concur with the news reports that
the wife's murder of a husband has always been the result of her adulterous
affair. The rite of mariticide, therefore, has not aroused any awareness in
other women. On the contrary, the unjust execution of Lin only reveals to
other women the "divine retribution" of patriarchy imposed on the uncon-
forming ones. The tyrannous grip of patriarchy is henceforth strengthened
rather than weakened.
I would argue that in refusing to allow Lin and other women insight
into the nature of the women's oppression, Li Ang wishes to convey her
pessimism on the headway Chinese women have made since the 1911
Revolution. Like Ah-wang's disfigured feet, the minds of Chinese women
in the modern era continue to be distorted by phallocentrism rooted in

24 In traditional China, as a means of propaganda, a convict sentenced to death is escorted

to the execution ground by a parade. It was hoped that people witnessing the horrifying end
of criminals would be frightened and refrain from committing crimes.
286 Sheung-Yuen Dais-j Ng

society. Historical change has not changed patriarchy, as Lin's recurring

nightmare seems to suggest:

Several pillars, so tall they impale the clouds, disappearing into a pitch
darkness that stretches on endlessly. Suddenly, a rumble of thunder,
moving inexorably nearer and nearer. Then a loud boom. Not a trace of
flames anywhere, yet the pillars become instantly charred, without so
much as wobbling. FmaIIy, after the longest time, dark red blood begins
to seep from the cracks in the blackened pillars. (Li 10)

The pillars, symbol of the mores of patriarchal tradition, remain erect

despite the thunder, which suggests the onset of the Sino-Japanese War
and a change of era. This may be read as Li Ang's bleak view of the
liberation of Chinese women in the first half of the twentieth century.
What is at stake, for Li Ang, is more than manufactured optimism or
character development, both accounts on which The Butcher's Wife has
been criticized. The heart of the matter lies in feminism as the basis of
political and ideological power: "Women become feminists by becoming
conscious of, and criticizing, the power of symbols and the ideology of
culture," Maggie Humm has written recently (4). My point is that because
Li Ang's feminism is severely circumscribed, she cannot envision a relation
of women to power that is not a simple matter of female victimization.25
In The Butcher's Wife, Li Ang seems to be concerned only with
exposing the injustice women suffer in traditional Chinese society. She has
stressed that "a writer should only raise questions, not solve them.,,26 Thus
I would argue that her "feminist concerns" fall within the scope of "literary
feminism" but no further. As Agate Nesaule Krouse notes:

Literary feminism is indirectly of service to the feminist cause because it

provides documentation that the traditional definitions of women are
inadequate or that women suffer injustices because of their sex. It need
not deal with feminists themselves, nor does it need to provide a positive
blueprint for the reform of society. (282)

1S As Tori! Moi points out in her discussion of another writer's work:

[W]omen's relationship to power is not exclusively one of victimization. Feminism
is not simply about rejecting power, but about transforming the existing power
structure-and, in the process, transforming the very concept of power itself.
The extreme polarization of the powerful and the powerless in the novella seems
to me to be a simplification of the complex roblem of power and a reduction
of sexual politics into mere sexual antagonism between the oppressor and the op-
pressed.
26 U Ang, Foreword, Shafu, viii.
 Feminism in the Chinese Context 287

In fact, Li Ang's feminism itself reverberates the understanding of

feminism in Taiwan generally. In this popular view feminists are regarded
as female avengers. Feminists are, moreover, being looked upon as West-
ernized women who adopt particular manners of dress, haircut and uncon-
ventional (even anti-social) behavior, particularly in sexual relationships.27
The pressure of being a feminist, and especially one who voices the
unavoidable question of sex, is obviously tremendous in the relatively
conservative society of Taiwan. Thus even Lii Xiulian, the pioneer feminist
in Taiwan, refrains from direct challenge of culture-specific questions and
traditional assumptions about gender behavior.
Li Ang and Lii converge in viewing feminism as being only an expres-
sion of humanitarianism. They are wary of criticism that confines them to
the ghettoized world of woman. Their fear of marginalization reflects the
popular view of feminism as being confined to the narrow world of woman
and separated from the general field of human endeavor. There is very little
recognition of feminism as a serious intellectual current and a large body
of speculative theory. As a result, feminine writing (writing by women) is
frequently confused with feminist writing. Feminism in the Chinese context
has yet to be created as a gender-specific way of thinking and accepted as
an intellectual tendency.

27 In fact, Li Ang has been troubled by the attitude of the public toward The Butcher's
Wife. She says in the Preface to Dark NighJs:

When I was writing Shafu [Mariticide], I also planned to write another novella,
Shaqi [Uxoricide], with the same aim of employing a feminist perspective to exam-
ine social phenomena and the essential question of male-female relationship. The prize
awarded for Shafu, however, has caused me a great deal of unnecessary disturbance
and severe criticism from moralists. As a result of this, although I have collected all the
material, I have put off the writing of Shaqi.
288 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng

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GLOSSARY

Auntie Ah-wang
Jfvf~1'
Chen Jiangshui
'*~*'t
Chencuo
Chrysanthemum
,*Jf
~H~
Golden Flower -t-1t
kaibao qian Bt1 ~~
LiAng ~JP
Lin Shi ~ifi
Lii Xiulian
Shafu-Lucheng Gushi
yi ku, er nao, san shangdiao
g~il
{( ;ft A. -
-~, -=-M,
At ~ ;it .»
;.J:.,!j1
Political Evaluation and Reevaluation
in Contemporary Chinese Fiction
Margaret H. Decker

One Half of the Sky: Stories from Contemporary Women Writers of China.
Trans. by R.A Roberts and Angela KnOx. New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1987. 143 pp. $16.95.
The Rose Colored Dinner: New Works' by Contemporary Chinese Women
Writers. Trans. by Nienling Liu et a1. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., Ltd.,
1988. 166 pp. Paper. No price given.
Half ofMan Is Woman. By Zhang Xianliang. Trans. by Martha Avery. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.285 pp. $17.45.
Love in a Small Town. By Wang Anyi. Trans. by Eva Hong. Hong Kong: A
Renditions paperback published by The Research Center for Translation
at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1988. 104 pp. No price given.
The Piano Tuner. By Cheng Naishan. Trans. by Britten Dean. San Francis-
co: China Books and Periodicals, Inc., 1989. 176 pp. $16.95. Paper $8.95.

These five books of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in

translation group together only along general lines. All of them inform the
reader concerning a specific set of political and cultural circumstances, both
in terms of content and of the constraints these circumstances put on
creative and artistic expression. Since four of the works are by women
writers and since the title of the male-authored one, HalfofMan Is Woman,
suggests a focus on gender, it might be tempting to categorize them further
as concerned with gender issues. However, the women are not at all
homogeneous in their degree of interest in this topic; and the man, Zhang
Xianliang, overtly translates and subordinates his focus on gender and
masculine sexuality into a broader political allegory. In fact, in reviewing
these books, the reader ultimately returns to a familiar conclusion regard-
ing contemporary Chinese fiction: that a concern with politics, which may
encompass, overwhelm, or overlook gender issues, makes up the single
thread which runs through them all.
Both One Half of the Sky, translated by R. A Roberts and Angela
Knox, and The Rose Colored Dinner, translated by Nienling Liu et al., are
 Contemporary Chinese Fiction 291

anthologies of short stories by women writers. The Roberts and Knox book,
in its conscientious effort to provide a range of generationally and histori-
cally representative works, offers examples of May Fourth literature, the
revolutionary romanticism-revolutionary realism from the 1950s, and post-
Mao works, thus providing a ready mini-historical survey of modern and
contemporary Chinese fiction. The Liu volume also includes works by all
three generations of writers, but in this instance the work only comprises
stories written between 1979 and 1981, and their order of presentation is
random.
Such generational differences are significant, not only in terms of
literary developments, as Roberts and Knox suggest, but also in the matter
of thematic choice, presentation, and as a theme itself. Together or singly,
the two volumes offer much material for comparison along these lines.
Both the post-Mao writer Wang Anyi in "Friends" (Liu) and the May
Fourth writer Bing Xin in "Loneliness" (Roberts, written 1922), for in-
stance, tell a similar tale regarding the loss of a childhood companion of
the opposite sex, but while the former emphasizes the children's emerging
sense of gender roles as the cause of this separation, the latter embeds
issues of gender development in a narrative focused on the development
of a friendship and the experience of loneliness. Wang Anyi's tone is
confrontational, suggesting high expectations and a disappointment close
to the surface regarding gender equality. Bing Xin, on the other hand,
subtly reveals through the games and conversation of two children a
concern with the question of nationalism and its relation to a sense of family
and belonging. The interest in childhood relationships and separations
found in both stories illustrates a shared urge to explore social and
psychological development and gender differentiation.
A more pervasive and rich theme for exploration in these stories is the
question of the role of "revolution" in the psyches and experiences of the
different generations. A simplistic heroism or nostalgia for a wartime
period which offered greater opportunity for brave and selfless deeds often
colors representations of the 1949 revolution in stories by the older writers.
"Lilies" by Ru Zhijuan (Roberts) is such a retrospective piece, written in
1958, interesting not only for revealing the conventions of and constraints
on fictional writing at that time, but also for the telling contrast it offers
when read against the same author's later work, "My Son, My Son" (Liu).
The earlier piece straightforwardly valorizes sacrifices made in the name
of revolution. (These are sacrifices which appropriately demonstrate the
historic role of peasants and women as conceived at that time-a young
man dies in battle, and a young peasant woman is moved to contribute a
quilt, transformed by her action from a "feudal" object of her trousseau to
the "proletarian" product of her own labor, to wrap his dead body. Thus
the author demonstrates that peasant women are shrugging off their feudal
past to join the struggle of the proletariat and symbolically implies that
292 Margaret H. Decker

women have a spiritual enhancement to offer to the glory of the revolution

and man.) "My Son, My Son," on the other hand, reflects with confusion
on the significance of memories of wartime adventure and glorious mo-
ments for a mother who has long since dedicated herself to securing her
son's future, rationalizing that "the revolution was already safe and secure"
(118). Now she lies dying and is horrified to see that all the work she put
into raising her son may result only in an ordinary worker who wants to
marry a stylish young woman and live a "good life." As the narrator, the
dying woman's best friend, sees the dilemma, "She had to turn over her
world; she could not help it, but to whom was she going to give it? To offer
her whole world to an 'unworthy' son, with a 'bitch'?" (119).
It is not hard to imagine the extent and depth of such inner conflict
among the old revolutionaries. They risked their lives once, motivated
powerfully by the urge to "save the children," and later they allowed
inconsistencies to creep into their daily life as they sought to save their own
children. Now what have their children become, and what has happened
to their revolution? Are slick materialistic temptations like Western-style
dress and permanent waves stealing it all away? Or, an even more uncom-
fortable thought, is this older generation now being forced to see that those
deeds which they held most sacred in their memories did not secure a new
world but only, as Ru Zhijuan boldly concludes, created a particular set of
"entanglements, dependence, and opposition" (122)?
Yu Ru's story, "Early Summer" (Roberts), adds another perspective
to the sense of generational differences regarding the experience of the
revolution. This piece was written in 1962 and offers the reflections of a
mother watching her young daughter mature, innocent of the tragic op-
pressions of pre-49 China. "Today's youth," she muses, "live in a bright,
pure, spiritual world unshadowed by demons and monsters," and even
while she feels she should educate her daughter, she cannot bring herself
to disturb that peaceful world by telling her of past evil and sufferings. Now,
one cannot help but read this idyllic rendering of China in 1962 with a sense
of irony, even pain at the apparently willful (self-) deception of that
generation of writers. Either they had closed their eyes to or they dared
not speak of the disillusioning lessons they had already begun to learn about
New China. Certainly they must have had doubts after the anti-Rightist
campaign in 1957, if not after the earlier rectification of intellectuals in
Yan'an in 1942 and criticisms of Hu Feng and many others in the early
1950s.
Zong Pu's "Who Am I?" (Liu), Ding Ling's journalistic piece,
"Sketches from the 'Cattle Shed' " (Roberts), and Ding Ning's "The Poetic
Soul of Youyan" (Roberts) all register defensive protests against past
condemnations of writers as "Rightists" or "counter-revolutionary." Zong
Pu makes effective use of a surrealistic style as she records the thoughts of
a woman about to commit suicide during the Cultural Revolution (1966-
 Contemporary Chinese Fiction 293

1976). Overwhelmed by political accusations and censure, the protagonist

has visions of herself variously transformed into a monster, a poisonous
plant, and a worm. A flight of geese in the configuration of the character
ren , for person or human, ultimately recalls for the woman her own
humanity, her dedication to and sacrifice for the Revolution. At the end,
"she plunged quickly into the lake seeking the warmth of the Fatherland-
the bosom of Mother-whose embrace Wenqi [her husband] and she had
never relinquished all through their life" (104).
Ding Ling reminds us insistently of her revolutionary stature as an
early participant in the struggle for liberation. She asserts her sense of and
continued belief in this identity while imprisoned as a counter-revolution-
ary during the Cultural Revolution. ("Even though I had been expelled
from the Party at the end of 1957, over eleven years ago, I still considered
myself a member, made demands on myself as one and regarded everything
from the point of view of a Party member" [47].) Not only does she defend
herself with this assertion of a long-term and unambiguous loyalty to her
revolutionary past and attribute to it much of the strength which helped
her endure years of labor reform and imprisonment, but she especially
encodes her struggles during the Cultural Revolution in similar terms. As
she sits in solitary confinement, "all I could do was quietly recite to myself
a poem from the days of the underground struggle ... : 'Prisoners, prisoners
of the times. We have committed no crime. We are here from the front
lines, from the firing line of class struggle. No matter how it is repressed,
blood is still boiling' " (42). While undoubtedly not Ding Ling's intention,
the parallel she offers between the oppression of the proletariat by the
ruling class and the repression of intellectuals by radical revolutionaries of
the Cultural Revolution undermines the reader's sense that the lines
between who was right or wrong were ever unambiguous, in the criticisms
of intellectuals sympathetic to the CCP in 1942 or 1957, and also in broader
terms as regards sides in the struggle for liberation. Just how guilty and
"criminal" was the bourgeois class? and how innocent and correct the Party,
the proletariat, or the peasants? Even as Ding Ling defends her right to
the title of loyal Party member and veteran revolutionary, she unwittingly
makes suspect the purity of those terms.
Ding Ning's piece, a eulogy for the poet Yang Shuo, emphasizes Yang
Shuo's excitement in wartime struggle, his perception of powerful poetry
as that derived from the battlefield, and his conviction that "heroic eras
produce heroes" (89). She enhances this with the recollection of a roman-
tically tragic rumor that he lost a childhood sweetheart in the course of the
revolution, advising the reader not to reflect on whether or not the rumor
is true, for "if it were true, was there any need to re-open old wounds? And
if it were false, then there was even less need to discredit this moving tale"
(87). Ding Ning is revealingly protective as well as nostalgic here about that
bygone "heroic era" provided by the Revolution. She apparently sees the
294 Margaret H. Decker

need for a re-sanctification and spiritual purification for the Revolution, a

"baptimism"like that Yang Shuo wants for his own soul: "I want the sea
to wash it clean" (91). As Yang Shuo was one of those writers persecuted
to death during the Cultural Revolution, Ding Ning evidently is moved not
only to insist defensively on the revolutionary nature of these wronged
writers, but also to resist anything but a view of the past as a time when the
battle lines were clear.
Unlike these older writers who came to maturity before 1949, the
middle-aged or younger writers are demonstrably less inclined to invoke
"revolution" or Party as the symbols of purity and ultimate defense of
integrity. The middle-aged writers, Chen Rong ("The Rose Colored Din-
ner" and in Liu) and Dai Qing ("No" in Liu) both reveal more complex
attitudes. Chen Rong very effectively depicts the guilt, disillusionment,
cynicism and sense of betrayal felt by a young man who was inspired by the
rhetoric and events of the Cultural Revolution to denounce his artist
father. Providing a metaphoric echo with the Ding Ning piece, the young
man also expresses a quasi-religious desire to have sins of the past washed
away: "0 deluge, why can't you cleanse the human soul, let the past die and
a new day be born?" (27). However, in this instance the wish emerges from
a deeply personal sense of guilt and despair and he wants not simply to wash
off the debris which accumulated and came to cover the Revolution, but
to wash away the past entirely.
Demonstrating cynicism with revolutionary rhetoric from another
perspective, Chen Rong's "Regarding the Problem of Newborn Piglets in
the Winter" (Liu) is a very satisfying example of recent bureaucratic satire.
It reveals the fate of old revolutionary cadres in a post-revolution world
where they have nothing but their self-importance to offer. The author
traces a totally unnecessary series of phone calls, initiated by an elderly
high-level Party Secretary when he feels a draft. The calls proceed down
level by level until finally the message is delivered to the peasant Mammy
Guo that she should take precautions to protect the newborn piglets from
the winter cold. Needless to say, Mammy Guo didn't need anyone to tell
her how to care for the pigs she had contracted to raise.
In Dai Qing's "No," another old revolutionary cadre, one who is dying,
despises the motivations he suspects behind the efforts of his younger wife
to keep him alive. He has the insight that it is not, as his wife claims, the
Revolution that needs him, but rather he who cannot do without the
Revolution. He is plagued by the contradiction between the heroic life
made possible by wartime and his unheroic, privileged and meek
bureaucratic existence since 1949. Unlike Ding Ling, he cannot protest
innocence by asserting loyalty. His son berates him, "China was ruined by
such loyalty" (13). Consequently, he imagines his epitaph: "Here lies the
Communist Party Member Liu Dayong. Throughout his life what he
 Contemporary Chinese Fiction 295

wanted to do, he was not allowed to accomplish; what he did not want to
do, he didn't dare not to" (11).
This. epitaph is echoed in "The Spirit of Fire" (Liu), a story by the
young writer Zhang Kangkang, which employs a quotation by Tagore: "I
seek for what 1 cannot attain. 1 obtain what 1 seek not." The same sense of
contradictions evident between one's revolutionary ideals and one's actual
life was expressed ironically in Dai Qing's story, but here the younger
author gives it a more contrived and dramatic form. As a Red Guard during
the Cultural Revolution, the protagonist of the story callously burns a
manuscript which begins with this politically suspect quotation, causing the
writer to have a heart attack and die on the scene. Later, in the Northeast
wilderness area of China, he is rescued from a fire by the daughter of this
same writer. Thus, he comes to appreciate the truth of the quotation and
value of the manuscript in a self-awakening: "Once we realized that we
ourselves would be destroyed by fire, then we began to see what we had
done" (69). As in the Chen Rong story, the younger generation is
portrayed as more chastened and disturbed by the uncontrollably destruc-
tive energy released by their fervor to "make revolution" and by their acts
of betrayal against friends and family considered politcally suspect. Zhang
Kangkang's story ends with what is a relatively common vow in stories about
the Cultural Revolution, the determination to write and essentially bear
witness to a past which many still find difficult to understand or acknow-
ledge.
The effect of recent history, or more broadly of Chinese political
culture, on human relationships is another major theme underlying most
of these stories. Zhang Kangkang's "The Right to Love" (Roberts), Zhang
Xinxin's "How Did I Miss You" (Liu and Roberts), and Xu Naijian's
"Because I'm Thirty and Unmarried" (Roberts) all illustrate ways in which
the Cultural Revolution has complicated the possibility for love and mar-
riage in the lives of women who have already passed the usual marriageable
age. In "The Right to Love" a young woman is completely cowed by the
experiences of her family in the Cultural Revolution and keeps with her a
piece of paper on which she has written down her father's deathbed
instructions: "When you marry, you should choose a worker ... whatever
you do, don't ... get involved in politics ... don't love .. .!" (57). Zhang
Xinxin's protagonist, on the other hand, has been toughened, made into a
"woman with an overly masculine temperament" (Roberts 120), thus
ruining her chance to win the interest of the man who attracts her. For Xu
Naijian's main character, as well, the possibility of romantic love seems to
have evaporated. As a sent-down youth she had deliberately put off all
consideration of marriage until she could get transferred back to the city.
Now that she has returned, she finds the process of introductions to eligible
men thoroughly humiliating, and a shopfront advertisement is offered as a
2% Margaret H. Decker

metaphor to her circumstances: "Clearance of Old Stock-Once Only

Cut-Price Sale" (135).
While these three stories offer very personal and straightforward
depictions of the havoc wreaked on love lives by the Cultural Revolution,
Zhang Jie's story, "An Unrecorded Life" (Liu), presents a more subtle
portrait. It is the tale of a man who faces death alone, never having married
and with only the memory of a brief, unexpressed and unrequited love.
None of the recent events in Chinese history is held directly accountable.
It is a story which the translator calls mystifying and which is described in
the introduction as a "Sino-Chekhovian tale which could be located in any
country, at any time" (vi). There are elements of the story, however, which
strongly suggest that for the writer this is very much a Chinese tale, that on
a symbolic level the pathetic and unfulfilled life of the protagonist repre-
sents the fate of the writer in China. The protagonist is a scholar of history
with a cat he has named Master Historian, in obvious reference to Sima
Qian, China's first historian and a literary giant. The motivation for Sima
Qian's masterpiece, The Book ofHistory, is generally attributed to the rage
he felt at having to undergo the shameful punishment of castration, in-
flicted on him for his frank expression of political opinion against the
Emperor (the Emperor had banished a general for losing a battle). While
he does not presume to stand on a level with Sima Qian, Zhang Jie's
historian is effectively castrated in his solitary existence and also feels
compelled to write history. He tells us, "I knew I had no talent, but I had
an obsession to devote my thoughts, body and soul to studying our heritage.
I could not help writing. I could not live without writing" (40).
The question is, what is the cause of his "castration"? The historian
blames himself; he believes it is his obsession with matters of history that
has scared people away. However, Zhang Jie gives another tantalizing clue
as to where the problem might lie. The narrator regrets as he is about to
leave his home for the hospital, where he expects to die, that he hasn't yet
edited an article titled "Zhu Yuanzhang and the Red Scarf Army." Zhu
Yuanzhang was the peasant rebel who founded the Ming dynasty. He is
also famous for the cruel methods he used to consolidate his power and for
his almost paranoid attitude toward the literati, whom he suspected of
formulating insulting puns and therefore punished harshly. Zhu Yuan-
zhang provides an obvious parallel, particularly with mention of the Red
Scarf Army, for Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic, leader of
the Red Army, and known to be highly suspicious and repressive of
intellectuals. Thus, Sima Qian, Zhu Yuanzhang and, by implication, Mao
Zedong stand as symbols of a politically repressive state, a state which
inhibits writers' creativity by threat of punishment and leaves those bold or
devious enough with anger and rage, not love, as motivation for writing.
These two historic references from the story are clearly not arbitrary,
and attention to them makes Zhang Jie's story into a broad and devastating
 Contemporary Chinese Fiction 297

condemnation of the pervasive and almost unseen ways in which China's

political culture has crippled its intellectuals from the time of Sima Qian
to that of Mao Zedong. When read this way, her historian's apology for the
nature of his writing-"I had wasted so much paper and let my readers
down. I had betrayed them"-becomes the poignant confession of Chinese
writers who are compelled to write even at times when they cannot express
their thoughts candidly.
Zhang Xianliang's novel, Half of Man Is Woman, is essentially an
elaboration of the spiritual castration theme in Zhang Jie's "An Un-
recorded Life." In this instance a prisoner, Zhang Yonglin, doing labor
reform during the Cultural Revolution marries but finds he is impotent.
Whereas Zhang Jie only offered hints toward an allegorical reading of her
story, Zhang Xianliang makes the direct connection between his charac-
ter's political and sexual emasculation entirely explicit. It is obvious even
to the prisoner, who at one point in the narrative has an imaginary conver-
sation with a gelded horse on the similarity of their circumstances. The
horse tells him, "You know as well as I do why people have castrated us: it
is to remove our creative force, make us tractable.... Even Si Maqian [sic]
himself said that 'people who have been punished cease to be courageous
in their speech' " (147). The significance of a reference to Sima Qian is
spelled out clearly this time.
Zhang Yonglin's sexual problem is solved only after a flood offers him
the opportunity for a heroic deed, making him a "man" in the eyes of his
community and himself. Having served to provide final proof of Zhang's
sexual masculinity, the peasant woman who is his wife in the story sub-
sequently becomes unnecessary. In fact, she is now a burden and threat to
him. Her domesticity can only serve to dull his appetite for becoming a full
man in political terms, and her knowledge of his actions makes him too
vulnerable. Even while he doubts she would expose him for the writing he
has begun in secret, her closeness to him could implicate her should that
writing ever be discovered. After battling with him over his intention to
leave her, the woman resigns herself to the inevitable, generously giving
him one last night to remember before relinquishing him to his greater
glory. As the novel closes we are told, "Women will never possess the men
they have created" (285). The role conceived for a peasant woman does
not seem to have changed much since 1958, when Ru Zhijuan wrote about
the peasant woman sacrificing her dowry quilt to the brave dead soldier in
"Lilies. "
Zhang Xianliang's novel illustrates how personal relations and inten-
sely private issues continue to have a political level of significance for
Chinese writers. It is a level of significance that should not be overlooked,
even when it only forms a subtle background, as in the case of a novella by
Wang Anyi. Love in a Small Town is a very lyrical and almost obsessive
narrative describing the powerful physical attraction and passionate
298 Margaret H. Decker

relationship which develop between a young man and woman. As members

of a ballet troupe, the couple have known each other since early adoles-
cence. Neither is attractive or significantly talented-she is too heavily built
and he is too short-but they keep each other company as they practice
with particular devotion to perfect their modest skills. The nature of their
companionship changes as they grow aware of their sexuality and a stormy
pattern of loving and hating each other develops. The author dwells on the
closeness of pain and pleasure for the two, on their helplessness to resist
their desire each time it is aroused and their subsequent sense of shame
and guilt regarding their actions.
The two are oblivious to anything outside this relationship. The girl is
described as simple-minded, and while the man is said to be clever, his
cleverness does not lead him to any contemplation of the political cir-
cumstances of the nation. The time of the story is set at the beginning by
the mention of dance segments from The Red Detachment of Women, a
model ballet from the Cultural Revolution. However, no evaluative com-
ment is made regarding the politics of that artistic experiment by either
narrator or characters. Just as the reader is tempted to conclude that for
once maybe such external matters are unimportant to a Chinese story, the
author inserts the only specific historical reference in the story. Dramati-
cally presented, it occurs right after the young couples' sexual affair has
begun and nearly halfway through the book:

A sense of uneasiness drifts through the streets like a wandering spirit,

as if something extraordinary is going to happen.
And sure enough, just after Chinese New Year the news comes that
Zhou Enlai has passed away.
Since the sense of uncertainty has been given a concrete answer,
the uneasiness gradually subsides.
And then General Zhu De, Commander-in-Chief of the People's
Liberation Army, also passes away;
And then comes the earthquake in Tangshan;
And then the country's leader Chairman Mao passes away;
And then,
Comes the fall of the Gang of Four. (44)

The significance of the insertion is not spelled out. The usual joy with
which the final item of news is related in other stories is absent. The
narrative merely goes on to describe a new stage in the relationship when
the lovers are exhausted physically and emotionally and their sense of
shame and remorse causes them to despair and hate each other. There
seems no direct connection to the events just mentioned. It is possible that
the author is merely emphasizing the self-involved depths to which these
two are immersed in this overwhelming first love, highlighting human
nature's independence of politics in the matter of sexuality. As I read it,
 Contemporary Chinese Fiction 299

however, the reference creates a connection between the confusion, ig-

norance, and shame with which these two face their sexuality and the
attitudes and conventions encouraged as regards sex and love by a specific
set of cultural and political circumstances, even though these are not
spelled out.
The affair ends when the woman becomes pregnant In marked con-
trast to the break-up in Zhang Xianliang's novel, here it is the woman who
suddenly no longer needs the man. The lives she carries (twins, a boy and
a girl) completely replace him in her emotional life, and she guards them
jealously from him, refusing to name him as father, avoiding him, and
keeping the children away from him after they are born. Her passion is now
calmed and "after the baptism oflust she is cleaner and purer than at any
time before" (103). She is dropped as a performer in the troupe for her
transgression, but she remains with it as a gatekeeper. He, on the other
hand, is still tormented by desire for her and turns successively to gambling,
marriage, and drinking. A resulting kidney disorder ultimately ends his
career with the troupe and he returns to his horne town for an inglorious
clerical job.
Wang Anyi's interest in gender issues takes on a much more developed
form in this novel than it had in her short story, "Friends." As in that story
about young children, there is a psychological emphasis to her exploration
of emerging gender differentiation, and she presents the story from a very
restricted focus. In this instance, however, there is no confrontational tone,
no refusal to accept limitations assigned to woman. Her challenge to the
assumption of male superiority now takes the form of an assertion of
women's spiritual superiority, an advantage specifically tied to mother-
hood. The story ends: " 'Mama!' the children shout repeatedly, and their
voices reverberate in the empty studio. It is like a voice from heaven. She
feels enveloped in a sense of sacred solemnity, so she too becomes solemn."
As anyone who has watched Chinese movies of this past decade can attest,
"Marna" is a sacred cry, not the focus of ambivalence seen in our literature.
Wang Anyi's presentation of this as well as of the lovers' guilt and shame
would seem to be her own peculiarly modem appropriation of the "good
mother and virtuous wife" model recommended by traditional Confucian
ethics. She also shares the view found in Yu Ru or Zhang Xianliang of
women as more spiritual and clean, specifically because they embody the
maternal potential for unconditional love and self-sacrifice, which gives
women the strength to escape the dependent role men would have them
take.
The collection of Cheng Naishan's stories is more similar to the
writings of Zhang Kangkang, Zhang Xinxin, and Xu Naijian. Unlike Wang
Anyi in Love in a Small Town, Cheng Naishan describes people's lives with
explicit reference to the effect of recent events on them. In addition, she
approaches the issue of class difference more boldly than many post-Mao
300 Margaret H. Decker

writers who avoid it by writing only about intellectuals or intellectuals

temporarily miscast as peasants and workers, and by gingerly maintaining
a distance between them and peasants or workers. Zhang Xianliang, it may
be recalled, explained the peasant wife as someone his intellectual
protagonist rejected mainly because she was Woman, not because she was
a peasant.
Cheng Naishan, on the other hand, observes relationships between
classes, acknowledges the snobbery, the respective senses of superiority
and inferiority, and the resentment. In the process she expresses her sense
of pessimism regarding the possibility of a successful marriage across these
boundaries. In one story, an educated male youth marries a working-class
woman in order to get transferred back to the city after years of living in
the countryside ("No.2 and No.4 of Shanghai"). In another, such a couple
develops out of loneliness during the years when the young man's family
was socially despised and economically dispossessed ("The Plea"). Once
the husbands' former high social positions are reaffirmed by changes in
political and economic policies, these marriages grow strained. In two other
stories, ambitious workers, the son of a tailor and the apprentice to a piano
tuner, long for women of a more cultivated and monied class, but realize
the folly of such a dream even if their own economic status has improved
("The Piano Tuner" and "No.2 and No.4 of Shanghai"). Even a homely,
thirty-three-year-old professor's daughter who contemplates rejecting a
socially appropriate suitor (a widower with children) for a more spiritually
sympathetic, crippled watch repairman, does so with a consciously defiant
attitude, acknowledging the great importance of class difference: "So let
people talk about the 'social and financial "mismatch" , or about the
'spinster who had to settle for a cripple.' Even if he might refuse me, it
didn't matter-I was resolved to seek him out" (128, "In my Heart There
Is Room for Thee"). In "No.2 and No.4 of Shanghai," Cheng Naishan
suggests that the volatile condition between classes extends beyond marital
relations. Overhearing some present-day workers sarcastically describing
his daughter and son, the patriarch of the Yeh family, the pre-Liberation
owner of a fashion business, says, "that talk going on out there in the alley
simply illustrates that you need but touch a match to a haystack doused with
gasoline for it instantly to explode into fire. Like a mass campaign, which
can start anytime!" (14).
Cheng Naishan's portrayal of continued economic class differences
and tensions is part of her broader effort to depict and analyze all kinds of
relationships: class, marital, parental, sibling, or business. She does this best
in the longest and most fully developed piece of the collection, "No.2 and
No.4 in Shanghai." While the translator notes an optimism to her work
which "teaches that, although the world she knows is imperfect, it surely
can be improved" (xiii), such optimism is difficult to discover in that piece.
As the story ends, the newly successful young factory manager is aware of
 Contemporary Chinese Fiction 301

the lonely life his ambition has created for him; old man Yeh is cynically
balancing the mutual benefits to be derived from a consultant relationship
with the young man and at the same time is depressed over his own son's
failure to "shine;" the daughter of the Yeh family realizes that the young
manager has merely used her to get to her father and despises him for his
vulgar ambition; and the young manager's working-class former girlfriend
has taken up with a slick but less prestigious relative of the Yeh family. The
attention to the depressing and often claustrophobic nature of relations
between characters in this story is reminiscent of the work of another
Shanghai writer, the pre-Liberation writer Eileen Chang. Though Cheng
Naishan lacks Chang's intensity, the parallel between the two gives us a
sense that generational succession can show continuity as well as change.
A spot check on the quality of translation of these five books gives a
widely ranging set of impressions. By far the most expert is Eva Hung's
translation of Love in a Small Town. She does a faithful yet not literal
translation of the original, smoothly adding explanatory phrases where
necessary and providing a flowing English version which matches well the
work's lyrical mood and emotional intensity. Britten Dean's versions of
Cheng Naishan's short stories offer a close second, although the more
familiar socialist-realism form and plain language of the original is perhaps
responsible for a less exciting impression than that offered by Love in a
Small Town. Apparently out of consideration for readers not familiar with
pinyin, Dean has chosen to use Yeh for Ye and to avoid the q's and x's of
pinyin, idiosyncratically substituting Chiu for Qiu, Sinjiang for Xinjiang,
and Syu for Xu.
The other three volumes, however, show signs of overly eager and
hurried execution. The Rose Colored Dinner and One HalJ of the Sky share
one story in common, Zhang Xinxin's "How Did I Miss You?", but fre-
quently provide completely different translations for the same phrase. In
one instance, "in her eyes something uncommon glistened" (Liu 135) and
"to her eyes everything had a sameness about it" (Roberts 93) are offered

*
as translations of "zai tade yanjingli, fangfu yiqie dou you xie yiyang "
( ,(i 1t (fJ Oil it .£, f:r -up - 1:;] ~;Jf ~ #. ), which I understand actually to
mean "to her eyes it seemed that there was something different about it
all." Overall the Roberts and Knox book reads better.
Martha Avery'S English rendering ofHalJof Man Is Woman reads very
naturally and satisfyingly but, when compared with the original, seems often
more impressionistic than accurate. Avery has edited out or condensed
some passages in the narrative and, given the quality of Zhang Xianliang's
writing, I do not see good reason for this. Nor do I see any reason to
translate xuehua (snowflake) as "snow flower." At times, inaccuracies in
the translation create radically different impressions from the original. For
instance, Avery translates "tade dongzuo wo shi shuxi de" ('*«!!. ~ tb 11'
302 Margaret H. Decker

t lit I:. 6lJ) as "I knew that her every action was practiced" (181) rather
than "I was familiar with her movements."
Avery has also not been as conscientious as she might in researching
and illuminating literary and political references. In one footnote she has
apparently confused Song Jiang with Wu Song, identifying him as a char-
acter in The Water Margin who kills his sister-in-law for being unfaithful to
his brother (166). Song Jiang's significance in Zhang Xianliang's narrative
rests on his role as the leader of the outlaws of The Water Margin and the
one who forces them to capitulate to the emperor. Questions linger to this
day over whether he betrayed his mission, also about his slaying of his own
mistress, Yan Poxi. The first point is important as it clarifies how criticism
during the Cultural Revolution of this figure from traditional literature was
in fact an attack on Deng Xiaoping, who used the nickname Song Jiang in
the early 1950s for its positive connotations. When he tried in 1975 to
reverse the more radically leftist policies of the Gang of Four and replace
them with pragmatic ones (hence "capitulating" to imperialism and
capitalism and committing the crime of revisionism), a major campaign
against Song Jiang ensued. The second point is offered as a contrastive
parallel to Zhang Yonglin and his reaction to his own wife's infidelity.
Compared to Song Jiang, whose mistress had also been unfaithful, Zhang
behaved rather well. By contrast, Wu Song, who had killed his brother's
wife for her infidelity, is actually a rather positive figure. He would not have
worked as a metaphor for the somewhat guilty, somewhat self-righteous
Zhang Yonglin.
Despite such occasional carelessness in translation, these are exciting
works to have available in English. They offer valuable material for deepen-
ing students' knowledge of contemporary Chinese literature and society
and particularly the writer's place in that society.
Notes on Contributors

Tani E. Barlow teaches history at San Francisco State University and is

senior editor of positions: east asia cultures critique. Her most recent
publication is Body, Subject, Power in China with Angela Zito (University
of Chicago Press, 1994).

Carolyn Brown, Associate Dean and Professor of Chinese, Howard

University. Brown is a Lu Xun scholar, a pioneer in the study of dreams in
Chinese literature and the author of Psycho-Sinology: The Universe of
Dreams in Chinese Culture (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Interna-
tional Center for Scholars, 1987).

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at

the University of California, San Diego. Chan is presently a Lecturer in
English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His articles appear
frequently in MCL, Tamkang Review, and many other journals.

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang is Associate Professor of Chinese at the

University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Bamboo Shoots after the
Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan (Feminist Press,
1990) and Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese
Fictionfrom Taiwan (Duke University Press, 1993).

Yu-shih Chen is Professor of Chinese at the University of Alberta in

Canada. She is the author of two books, Images and Ideas of Chinese
Classical Prose: Studies of Four Masters, and Realism andAllegory in the
Early Fiction of Mao Tun, and is the founding and chief editor of the
Chinese journal Nuxingren (W-M Semi-Annual) published in Taiwan.

Rey Chow was educated in Hong Kong and the United States. She is
currently an associate professor of comparative literature at the University
of California, Irvine. Her recent publications include Writing Diaspora:
Tactics ofIntervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1993), "Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-
Writing in the 1990s" (Diaspora 2.2), and "A Shower of Love" (an essay
on Hong Kong film and culture), forthcoming in Modern Chinese Litera-
ture.

Margaret Decker, Assistant Professor of Chinese language and literature

at the University of Minnesota. Decker has published several translations
of contemporary Chinese short stories and is currently working on a book-
length study of Gao Xiaosheng.
304 Notes on Contributors

Randy Kaplan, Assistant Professor of Dramatic Arts at State University of

New York, Geneseo. Kaplan is author of a forthcoming book on modem
Chinese dramatic arts.

Richard King is Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of

Victoria. A volume of his translations ofZhu Lin's fiction will be published
by the University of Hawaii Press.

Wolfgang Kubin is Professor of Sinology and Chinese at the University of

Bonn. He is editor of the journal Mininma Sinica and Orientierungen
Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens. His publications include Essays in Modern
Chinese Literature (1982), Woman and Literature in China (1985), Hunt
for the Tiger: Six Approaches to Modern Chinese Literature (1984).

Wendy Larson is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature

at the University of Oregon. She is working on women and writing,
modernism, and aesthetics and emotion. She is the author of Literary
Authority and the Chinese Writer (Duke University Press, 1991).

Lydia H. Liu teaches Chinese and comparative literature at the University

of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a book -length project
on translingual practice between East and West. Her most recent publica-
tion is an essay called "Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individu-
alism Between China and the West," in positions 1 (Spring, 1993).

Meng Vue is one of the editors of Literary Review, sponsored by the

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and co-author of Fuchu !ishi dibiao
(Chinese Woman Writers, 1917-1949), published in 1989 by the Henan
renmin chubanshe. She is currently a graduate student in the Department of
East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the U ni versity of California, Los
Angeles.

Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng is a graduate student in the Department of East

Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University.

Jon Solomon is a graduate student at Cornell University.

Wang Zheng was educated in Shanghai and California. She is a graduate

student in American history at the University of California, Davis and has
published a book in Chinese on women's history. She is completing her
dissertation.
Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 8 DaiQing,9, 11,40,159,160,168-69,191-

Ai Siqi, 260 206,294-95
Ai Wu, 139 Darwin, Charles, 211
AU-China Women's Federation, 36, 37, Dean, Britten, 301
38n,49,57, 194-96, 198 Decker, Margaret H., 290-302, 303
Avery, Martha, 301-2 De Lauretis, Teresa, 127
Delmar, Rosalind, 267
Bai Wei, 126 Deng Xiaoping, 302
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 262 Ding Ling, 1-3, 5,13,39,41,45-47,50-53,
Barlow, Tani, 1-12,36, 38n, 52n, 58n, 261, 56,59,64,66-70,122-23,126,219,292-
303 93
Beauvoir, Simone de, 193 Ding Ning, 293-94
Bei Dao, 137 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 257, 262
Bing Xin, 59, 64-66, 68-70, 215, 291 Dream of the Red Chamber, 79
Bo Yang, 258
Bronte, Charlotte, 172 Fanon, Frantz, 260
Bronte, Jane, 172-73 Fen Xiaoyu, 200
Brown, Carolyn T., 3, 5-6, 11, 12,74-89, Feng Mu, 214
303 Flaubert, Gustav, 45
Freud, Sigmund, 86-87, 241-47, 250, 273,
Cai Yingjun, 272, 284-85 274
Can Xue, 10, 238-65 Fulian. ~ All-China Women's Federa-
Chan, Ching-kiu Stephen, 1,4,10,12,13- tion.
32,303
Chang, Eileen. ~ Zhang Ailing Gao Xiaosheng, 151-52
Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne, 3, 9, 10, 12, Gilbert, Sandra, 8, 143
215-37,303 Gu Cheng, 137
Chekhov, Anton, 42, 43 Gubar, Susan, 8, 138, 141
Chen Rong, 294-95 Gunn, Giles, 264
Chen Shimei, 195 Guo Moruo, 71
Chen Yu-shih, 8, 9,10,11,12,151-58,179,
303 Hardy, Thomas, 211
Chen Xiaomei, 7 Hawkes, David, 255
Cheng Naishan, 299-301 Hegel, G. W. F., 260, 264
Chow, Rey, 6, 10,11,12,90-105,303 Henry, 0., 228
Chu Anping, 205 Holoch, Donald, 103
Cohen, Paul, 262-63 Hu Yunyi, 60-61, 62, 63
Colonial modernity, 2n, 4n, 5n, 81-83 Huang Ying, 65
Croll, Elizabeth, 70n Huiqun, 60, 61, 63
Curie, Marie, 170 Humm, Maggie, 286
Hung, Eva, 301
Dai Houying, 181,200
Dai Jinhua, 7, 34 Ibsen, Henrik, 74-75
306 Index

Irigaray, Luce, 271, 274 Meng Yue, 7-8, 9,10,11,12,34, 35n, 118-
36,304
Janssen, Ronald, 265 Meyer, Rupprecht, 137
Jiang Qing, 79 Munich, Adrienne, 279
Jiang Xiaoyun, 222
Jin Guantao, 258 Ng, Sheung-Yuen Daisy, 9-10, 11, 12, 266-
lin Ping Mei, 79 89,304
Jou Shih, 82
Judovitz, Dalia, 246 Oates, Joyce, 199
Ouyang Zi, 219, 231
Kaplan, Randy, 7,12,106-17,304
King, Richard, 9,209-14,304 PengGe, 216
Knox, Angela, 290-91 Pratt, Annis, 271
Kondo Naoko, 258 Prosek, Jaroslav, 24
Kristeva, Julia, 106-7, 112, 115-16,271
Krouse, Agate Nesaule, 286 Qian Qianwu, 39, 67-68
Kubin, Wolfgang, 8-9, 12, 137-50,304 Qin Xianglian, 195
Kuriyagawa Hakusan, 86 Qiong Yao, 218

Lacan, Jacques, 134-35 Rankin, Mary, p. ?

Larson,Wendy,2,5,10,11,12,33n,58-73, Red Detachment of Women, The, 298
304 Roberts, R.A., 290-91
Li Ang, 10, 266-89 Ru Zhijuan, 291-92
Li Qingfan, 200
Li Xiaojiang, 34, 38, 194, 198, 200, 203 Saikai Naoki, 260-62
Li Yuanzhen, 269 Sauter-Baillet, Theresia, 143-44
Li Ziyun, 33-34, 181, 189 Shen Congwen, 215
Liang Xiaosheng, 177 Shen Rong, 174, 187
Lin Haiyin, 216 Shi Tiecheng, 177
Ling Shuhua, 6, 90-105 Shu Ting, 9, 137-50
Liu Binyan, 205 Shui Yuanxian, 151-52
Liu Dajie, 60 Sima Qian, 254-55, 296-97
Liu, Joyce C. H., 274, 285 Solomon, John, 9, 10,11, 12,238-65,304
Liu, Lydia H., 4-5, 7,10,11,12,33-57,304 Su Hongjun, 35n
Liu Nienling, 290-91 Su Qing, 126, 130
Liu Xiaobo, 254 Su Xiaokang, 258
Lotman, Jurij, 127 Sun Lung-kee, 245, 254
Lu Ling, 128
Lu Tonglin, 7 Tagore, Rabindranath, 187
Lii Xiulian, 269, 270, 287 Takeuchi Yoshirni, 260, 261
Lu Xun, 5-6, 13-14, 16-20,24,28-29,30, Tao Qiuying, 61-62, 63-64, 69
74-89, 199,248-50 Tian Han, 7,106-17
Lukacs, Georg, 13
Lyell, William, 86 Wang Anyi, 5, 9, 11,36,39,40,44-45,49-
51,53-56, 159, 160-79, 214, 219, 291,
MacKinnon, Catherine, 273, 274 299
Mansfield, Katherine, 94 Wang Rongfen, 200
Mao Dun, 13-14, 16,24-30,39,66,67, 138, Wang Yuanjian, 132-33
182,214 Wang Zhepu, 64
Mao Zedong, 108, 126,260,261,296-97 Wang Zheng, 9, 11, 159-208,304
Marcuse, Herbert, 15 Water Margin, The, 302
Men Weizai, 182 Weber, Max, 200
 Index 307

White Hair Girl, The, 119-22, 124 ZhangJie, 5, 8, 36, 39,40,41-44,47-49,53,

Williams, Raymond, 215 152, 156-58, 175, 177, 187,200,204,
214,296-97
Xiao Hong, 172-73 Zhang Kangkang, 36-37, 295, 299
Xiao Lin, 40 Zhang Longxi, 263-64
Xiao Ping, 132-34 Zhang Xiguo, 272, 284
Xu Naijian, 295-96, 299 ZhangXianliang,8,152-55,175,290,297-
302
Ya Xian, 216 Zhang Xinxin, 40, 200, 295-96, 299, 301
YangMo, 126-32 Zhang Yingjin, 7
Yi Zhen, 67 Zhang Yonglin, 297
Yu Dafu, 13-14, 16-17,20-23,24,25,28- Zhao Mei, 33
29,30 Zhao Yuanzhen, 159, 179-89
YuQing,37 Zhu Lin, 9,11,159,160,179-91,209-14
Yu Ru, 292, 299 Zhu Tianwen, 222-23
Yuan Qiongqiong, 9, 215-17, 219-20, 222, Zhu Xining, 216, 221
227-34 Zhu Yuanzhang, 296
Zito, Angela, 246-47
Zhang Ailing, 9, 126, 127,200,215-27,301 Zong Pu, 39, 200, 292-93
Zhang Jian, 265
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gender politics in modern China: writing and
feminism / Tani Barlow, editor.
p.cm.
The text of this book originally was published without
the present introduction, index, and essays by Yue and
Liu as Volume 4, numbers 1 and 2 of Modern Chinese
literature.
Includes index.
IS8N 0-8223-1376-6. - ISBN 0-8223-1389-8 (pbk.)
1. Chinese fiction-20th century-History and
criticism. 2. Feminism and literature--China-
History-20th century. I. Barlow, Tani E.
PL2442.G46 1993
895.1'099287'~c20 93-2401 CIP