Emerging from the Horizon of History: Modern Chinese Women’s Literature, 1917–1949 9819940036, 9789819940035

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Emerging from the Horizon of History Modern Chinese Women’s Literature, 1917–1949 Yue Meng Jinhua Dai

Emerging from the Horizon of History

Yue Meng · Jinhua Dai

Emerging from the Horizon of History Modern Chinese Women’s Literature, 1917–1949

Yue Meng University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

Jinhua Dai Peking University Beijing, China

Translated by Qi Sun Tongji University Shanghai, China

ISBN 978-981-99-4003-5 ISBN 978-981-99-4004-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2 Jointly published with Peking University Press The print edition is not for sale in China (Mainland). Customers from China (Mainland) please order the print book from: Peking University Press. ISBN of the Mainland of China edition: 9787301293577 Translation from the Chinese language edition: “浮出历史地表: 现代妇女文学研究” by Yue Meng and Jinhua Dai, © Peking University Press 2018. Published by Peking University Press. All Rights Reserved. This book is published with financial support from the Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also supported by Tongji University’s Center for Translating China for Global Communication. © Peking University Press 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publishers, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publishers nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publishers remain neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments from Translator

The English translation of the book is published with financial support from the Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also supported by Tongji University’s Center for Translating China for Global Communication. Its completion has benefited immeasurably from the discerning revisions of Katherine Boulay, CHEN Lin, and Daniela Licandro. Their scholarship and friendship remain a constant source of support and inspiration in course of my translation. Sincere thanks are also due to Professor Faye Chunfang Fei, Krista van Fleit, Professor Tan Ye and Professor Yan Zhang. Without their guidance and encouragement, my work could not be carried through. I would also like to thank my proofreaders, Dr. XIA Lina and my assistants CHEN Hui, ZHAI Ruoqing, and CHEN Xinyue. My deepest gratitude goes to my mother who gives me all the courage to take challenges and my husband and son who support me unreservedly. The publication of the book in English is attributable to the editors from Peking University Press, XIE Na and ZHAO Xin, and those from Springer Nature Singapore. If the book can benefit the English readers, it is primarily owing to the trailblazing work of the authors, Professor MENG Yue and Professor DAI Jinhua. The short-listed bibliography given in the Appendix is kindly provided by Professor Dai. Upon the request of the publishers, I provide all the endnotes, unless otherwise indicated, as well as the index, to amplify some noted terms when necessary. I would take full responsibility for any errors in the translation, the endnotes, and the index. The title of the book is the literal rendition of its Chinese title, Fuchu lishi dibiao, though other translations can be found in academic theses, such as Breaking the Surface of History—Modern Chinese Women Writers, 1917–1949 or Surfacing onto the Horizon of History.

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Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 Two Thousand Years: Women as a Blind Spot of History 1.1.1 Women’s (Anti-)Truth 1.1.2 From “Men Plow, Women Weave” Division of Labor Mode to “Father-to-Son” Inheritance 1.1.3 “The Beginning of Ethical Human Relations” 1.1.4 “Wife Is My Equal”—A Hegemonic Discourse 1.1.5 Female Image—An Empty Signifier 1.2 One Hundred Years: Where Have We Ended Up? 1.2.1 Women and National Subjectivity 1.2.2 From “I am Myself” to “Women Have No Truth” 1.2.3 “The Sister Xianglin Series” and “The New Women”

1 2 2 5 8 13 16 26 28 34 39

Part I (1917–1927) 2

Ten Years of the “May Fourth” Era: A Floating Historical Stage 2.1 The Era of “Patricide” 2.1.1 Patricide—The Zero Point of Recalibrating History 2.1.2 Attraction and Deprivation 2.1.3 Two Dead, One Mirror Image 2.2 From Daughters to Women—An Overview of Women Writers in the May Fourth Movement 2.2.1 “Father’s Daughters” 2.2.2 Modeling the Mother 2.2.3 Love—A Discourse of Non-aggression 2.2.4 A Contradiction Between Experience and Discourse 2.2.5 Writing Women

51 51 51 55 57 63 63 67 69 71 74 vii

viii

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3

Lu Yin: “Wimps Standing in Front of Life’s Diverging Paths” 3.1 Lu Yin’s World 3.2 A Narrow Zone Between Two Doors 3.3 The Floating Stage and Cultural Deadlock

77 78 83 88

4

Yuanjun: Rebellion and Sentimental Attachment 4.1 Love as a Path of Female Defiance 4.2 Sexual Morality 4.3 The Bond Between Mother and Daughter

97 98 103 105

5

Bing Xin: Fortune’s Favored Daughter 5.1 Born Under a Lucky Star 5.2 Holy Bond Between Mother and Daughter—A Moment of Bliss 5.3 “Lakes and Mountains Outside of My Heart”: Bing Xin’s Persona 5.4 The Daughter Who Never Grows Up

111 111

Ling 6.1 6.2 6.3

125 126 129 137

6

Shuhua: The Feminine World Trapped in a Corner Storms in the Boudoir The “Tai-tai” Class New Women and New Wives

113 117 119

Part II (1927–1937) 7

The 1930s: Myths in the Crevice of Civilizations 7.1 Samsara 7.1.1 History Stuck in a Dilemma 7.1.2 The Deified Masses and the Political Patriarch 7.1.3 A Double-Edged Sword 7.2 Divisions of Darkness, Shadow, and Daylight 7.2.1 Women Deep in Loneliness 7.2.2 The Female Body of Others 7.2.3 “Women’s Sky Is Narrow”

145 145 145 147 151 154 154 156 160

8

Ding 8.1 8.2 8.3

163 163 170 177

9

Marching Towards Battlefields and the Bottom Classes 9.1 Revolution Written in Blood and Revolution Written in Ink 9.2 Sacrificing One’s Minor Self for the Masses

Ling: Vulnerable “Goddess” Alienation and Loneliness The Two Faces of Wei Hu Resurgence and Obliteration

185 185 190

CONTENTS

10

11

12

Women in the City: On the Margins of a Glorious Page of History 10.1 Ideology of Aestheticism 10.2 Footsteps on the Debris of the “New Culture” Movement

ix

197 197 202

Bai Wei: A Survivor of Ordeals 11.1 A Woman in a “Patricide” Scene 11.2 Bomb and Migrant Bird—Women’s Destiny from the May Fourth Movement (1919) to the Great Revolution (1927) 11.3 Tragic Life—Ten Years of Solitude 11.3.1 Love Ensnarled in the Discursive Pattern 11.3.2 Women’s Love-Oriented Loneliness 11.3.3 No “Truths”?

207 208

Xiao Hong: The Brave and Wise Pathfinder 12.1 Destiny 12.1.1 Father’s Home and Grandfather’s Home 12.1.2 Youth 12.1.3 Love and Writing 12.1.4 A Feminist Choice 12.2 A Woman’s Discernment of History 12.2.1 Nature—Way of Production and life—Ubiquitous Protagonist 12.2.2 Another Type of Rural Masses 12.2.3 In the Eyes of a Feminist 12.3 The Enlightened and Compassionate

221 221 221 223 225 229 232

212 215 216 218 219

233 236 239 241

Part III (1937–1949) 13

14

The 1940s: A Divided World 13.1 The Combat Zone of the Dominant Discourse and the Liberated Areas 13.1.1 Rebirth or Wintry Night for the Nation? 13.1.2 The Goodness of the Asian Mode of Production 13.1.3 Genderless Gender 13.1.4 Accomplices Between Feminists and Individualists 13.2 Female—Woman—Feminine Discourse 13.2.1 Immurement and Freedom 13.2.2 End to the Phase of “Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman” 13.2.3 The Inception of Feminine Discourse

249

Su Qing: Women—“Civilians in the Occupied Areas” 14.1 Anomalies in the Calamity of War and Fragments of History 14.2 Femininity: Spatial Existence

273

250 250 256 260 262 264 264 268 269

274 278

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14.3 14.4

Woman, Mother, Mothering The New Women: An Absurdist Theater

281 285

15

Zhang Ailing: The Knowing Smile of a Desolate Beauty 15.1 A Vanishing “Country” 15.2 Birds Embroidered on the Screen 15.3 Civilization· History· Woman

291 292 296 301

16

Conclusion: Gender and Spiritual Gender—On the Liberation of Chinese Women

309

Postscript to the 2003 Edition

315

Bibliography

325

Index

329

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Sometime in the future, in the collective memory of Chinese women, the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, with all its historical and cultural changes, must be a moment of endless fascination: silent women who had cowered in the corners of history, as if buried for more than 2000 years, pushed their way out of the yellow earth, and, for the first time in history, rose to step into Chinese history. Of course, the rock-solid crust of history was not like the graves of ill-starred lovers in beautiful ancient folktales that could magically open, merely because of women’s wishes.1 However, Chinese women’s unchronicled, stagnant existence has taken advantage of one of the most critical moments in the history of the nation’s existence to join the temporal flow of history. As the most vocal spokespersons for their gender, modern Chinese women writers, at the advent of a cultural rupture, found their language, gained ground on public podiums, and won their own audience. This is one of the most significant events in Chinese history. It is undeniable that Chinese women’s destiny has been inextricably intertwined with the fate of China and Chinese history. Their progression from the back burner to the forefront, whether considered as a historical phenomenon or a gender-based group experience, is thought-provoking and worthy of examination. It calls for not only a diachronic study of their history, but also a synchronic study to tease out how they emerged from the underground to 1 In several ancient Chinese tragedies of romance, ill-fated lovers died and were buried, but their souls were transfigured into new lives, for instance butterflies, or their souls went back to their human bodies and the lovers were reunited because of their immortal love. Such stories include Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai dating back to the East Jin Period (317–420) and Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion) written by the great Ming dramatist, Tang Xianzu (1550–1616).

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_1

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the surface. Women’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow do not by any means represent the past, present, and future of the nation, but they can unravel what the latter has so far carefully kept secret.

1.1 Two Thousand Years: Women as a Blind Spot of History 1.1.1

Women’s (Anti-)Truth

At a certain point in untraceable ancient history, most likely the juncture when breeding and feeding descendants stopped being a preponderant way by which clans survived and the ancient Chinese began to settle in the Yellow River Basin and engage in subsistence agriculture, the female-centered matriarchal society gave way to a male-centered patriarchal society, leaving behind only a few sporadic vestiges of the former’s mute history. Only within a few centuries thereafter did this patriarchal society develop to its consummate form—a centralized hierarchal society ruled by a tripartite structure of imperial, clan-based, and patriarchal powers. This society used every means at its command, politically, economically, and ethically, to subjugate women, the preceding ruling gender, and send them to the bottom of society. These means included not only gender-based social division of labor and power distribution, but also all kinds of coercive strategies that would put the social and gender norms to practice on a personal level. Those ethical norms were strict disciplines designed to defend the sanctity of a web-like system of clan, to set the form and purpose of marriage, and to coerce matching mandatory gender roles and behaviors in society. And, as proved by many scholars in their research,2 this uniquely Chinese system was sustained by an agriculture featuring intensive farming, its self-sufficient economy, and stable and wellorganized family–clan orders and together with them, the superstructure of its emperor-central polity that was propped by the social ethical framework proposed by Confucianism. It remained unchanged in structure, in China, from pre-historic time to the eve of the Opium War, except for its transitions from one dynasty to another. In this social construct stretching over two thousand years of history, women constituted the gender group to be ruled and oppressed. Of course, this is not to suggest that the matriarchal society of apocryphal history could be a Paradise Lost irretraceable to Chinese women of later generations. What’s important is that the primeval state of women’s destiny was

2 The authors do not reference specific scholars but may very likely point to the widely celebrated theory of Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), or Fei Hsiaotung, the foremost anthropologist, and the scholars he influences. His works are regarded as classics of Chinese anthropologic study and his name synonymous with anthropology in China. In his first book, Peasant Life in China (1939), published in English, he produced the first important sociological study of traditional Chinese society and described it as “the kinship society.”

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wrapped in a shroud of obscurity. It is true that the formation of a patrilineal society was a logical consequence of gender differences in physiology, natural environment and the development of productivity of human society. However, one point that people tend to overlook is that a patrilineal society founded upon seemingly rigorous disciplines was not as equitable and impartial as imagined. Behind its face of benevolence and congeniality, which looked intelligent and diligent, was a cruel and ferocious visage, like a double-faced devil with qingmian liaoya (a blue face and poison fangs)3 in Chinese folklores. That was the side of the visage turned only to women. To borrow the words of Julia Kristeva, the establishment of a patrilineal society started from a “gender battle,” which might as well be a battle between gendered civilizations.4 This saliently gender-specific, gender-hostile, and gender-dominant socio-political-cultural system of patriarchy, with women at its swords’ point, suggested that even when the actual gender-relevant belligerence and engagements failed to be documented, at least a symbolic war is inferable: just as the capitalist socio-political system only emerged out of and developed in a long and bitter strife with its antecedent, the preceding feudal civilization, so did the system of patrilineal society, which regarded the prior matriarchal society and women as their matter-of-course rivals to their new civilization. This was obviously vested with arbitrary hostility towards women who had been defeated and whose resurgence they took every precaution to prevent. The system was so structured as to subjugate their defeated adversaries by all means of slavery and oppression. Women came to be not just a reference for the gender of women, but rather a residue of the foregone civilization, signifying the side that had been defeated in the war between the old and the new lifestyles, the one-time adversaries and dissidents of the time; they were tucked away in some innocuous corner of the patrilineal order. All the patrilineal rituals, laws, and values were primed against this opposite-gender enemy who temporarily lost her power of aggression and self-protection. It is hard even to imagine how the patriarchal system could have developed into its final accomplished form without such a gendered conflict. As a matter of fact, only with women perceived as its adversaries and dissidents did it complete the whole array of defenses and fortifications built for the punctilious purpose of buttressing the edifice of patrilineal order. From these arcane images of the male ruler and the female subject derived the ruler-subject binary opposition inherent in the patriarchal order. In addition, the triumph of patrilineal society was markedly different from other countless victories achieved in history through conflicts over political

3 An idiom to describe terrifying devils in Chinese folklore, with its origins in literature from Mudan Ting and a commentary made by Zhang Dai (1597–1689?) on a hell-motif painting of Wu Daozi (c. 680–759). 4 Julia Kristeva (1941–) a French feminist literary theorist and a famous contemporary female writer.

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power, class struggles, or social transformations. Historically speaking, paternity and husband’s authority are not simply manifestations of all powers and dominion in human society; they are the origin of all powers and dominion. The “Law of Father,” in a certain sense, is a rule of law and also the beginning of all rules of law. To say the least, even if one day people find that the hazy and untraceable matriarchal society never existed, one historic fact would remain largely unaltered: it is with the advent of gender-specific power and gender-specific domination that the two-thousand-year history of humanity, or to be exact, of the Chinese nation, became a history of rulers and ruled. At the least, the emergence of gender governance meant that of governance itself . Although ruling castes and arts of ruling varied with countless dynastic transitions in China, this structure of governance never changed from the remote past to yesterday, even today. Being the oppressed gender group in this specific patrilineal history, and the only human group in history that had no right to participate in the ruling classes’ struggles of overthrowing a dynasty and starting a new one, women turned into witnesses of the fate of the entire humanity: the strife between rulers and the ruled. The woman problem is not simply a question of gender relations or one of equal rights between men and women. It also appertains to our overall views and interpretations of history. Women’s group experience is not just a supplement to or improvement of human experience. On the contrary, it is a kind of subversion and reconstruction; it may well bring in a new narrative and re-explicate how the entire humanity existed and evolved. Of course, this does not mean that women would attribute the whole human history to one of gender struggle. In fact, what women could write is not an Other history, but rather what lies deep in the unconscious of all written histories, all that which the ruling structure suppressed, hid, concealed, and obliterated in order to prove that what the ruling structure proposes is a perfectly justified mandate of heaven. First of all, women themselves were among those who got obliterated. Male hegemony only retained designations for women in language, and then assigned them meanings; women’s true existence, however, got concealed by such definitions in a blind zone of omnifarious interpretations. Secondly, this obliteration itself was obliterated: the patrilineal society that seemed to justify itself by creating a “civilization” of its own erased such facts as “enslaving the Other” from its own sanctified highbrow from the inception of its establishment. This second-time erasure effectually hid male rule’s enslavement of women from view. By protecting it as a termless secret, male society dissembled the hegemonic nature of male rule and rendered itself a legitimate existence not to be challenged. However, if the male society had concealed the secret of its governance under layers of erasure, then, women, having experienced multiple layers of erasure, held in hand the truth about this society’s governance. The truth women held was not only a naked truth about gendered slavery or slaveries of other groups, but also the truth about the invisibility of the slaveries, and the society’s cover-up of and blindness towards them. It is the secretive mechanism and nature of male hegemony to perpetrate the cover-ups and obliterations.

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It is also in this sense that the truth women exposed testifies to the historical unconscious that has fallen outside historical interpretations and lurked deep in the ruling order. It reveals the non-history beneath the major linear historic events, and lays bare the holes, margins, gaps, subtexts, and selfdeceptions in the national collective memory. Women’s (anti-)truth has the potency to deconstruct men-made myths and subvert the existing ideological superstructures. 1.1.2

From “Men Plow, Women Weave” Division of Labor Mode to “Father-to-Son” Inheritance

Since its beginning, Chinese history has been the history of a self-sufficient agricultural society. The food-as-the-first-necessity canon in its agrarian lifestyle carries a strong overtone of the dominant-versus-subordinate in the gender division of labor between men and women, and it implies that men were the dominant primary in social production while women the subsidiary or auxiliary. This division of labor may well be attributed to their in-built physiological constitutions of men and women, but when patrilineal society arose to replace matriarchy, the social connotations of this division of labor far outreached the physiological differences between the two genders, as it entailed the male parent’s primary right to production materials and productivity, hence becoming the cornerstone of the entire edifice of Father’s order. If in a non-male-dominated society, the men-plowing-and-women-weaving mode of production tended to be none but a division of labor, then after the rise of the patriarchal system, the dominant-versus-subordinate pattern of men-plowing-and-women-weaving in the social division of labor could only lead to one consequence, that is, patrilineal inheritance, the possession of means of production and productivity by fathers and sons. The shift from menplowing-and-women-weaving mode of production to father-to-son succession marks the final formation of patriarchal social order. The construction of this patriarchal system was ineluctably pivoted on family. Family was the only model that a patrilineal society could adopt to combine the men-plowing-and-women-weaving mode of production and father–son succession into one ruling unity. As a backlash to qunhun zhi (communal marriage system) of matriarchal society,5 patriarchal society, from the beginning, contained the rival gender, the female, under the sway of its own will in a form of “family” (or in the form of clan). Family in ancient China was not only the constituent unit of social production in which individuals were interlocked in a meshwork of social labor division, not just a unit of pedigree to breed and expand members of clan; it was also something of

5

Communal marriage is said to be the mode of marital relation of a primitive matriarchal society, in which a woman might have sex and children with any men from her social group. It is also assumed to be human society of promiscuity, hence also named group marriage.

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an administrative unit of governance, which, to females, functioned as a state machine for patriarchal society at home. Family, and even clan, from the moment of its birth, carried a distinguishing mark of masculinity in terms of its gendered standards and organizational components. Familial order was a strict male-made order, and idioms in Chinese like “Sons’ succession to Father’s title,” “Sons’ inheritance of Father’s property,” and “Sons’ continuation of Father’s will” were coined to signify the successive nexus between father and son as well as the ruling principle of the same-gender alliance men made. However, on the other hand, family meant a lot more to a woman’s life than to a man’s life. In fact, her whole life was at her family’s disposal, and her status in family resided in her feminine nature and social position: as defined in Chinese classics, “Woman is a person who follows others, one who follows her Father and brother in maidenhood, follows her Husband when married, and follows her Son when widowed.”6 Although the Wife is treated as her “Husband’s equal” in polygamy with concubine(s) of lower position, nevertheless, it is also canonical that “Husband is the wife’s sky,”7 id est, the woman must “bow to serve her husband.” Being a follower and servant in the family was the umbrella term for a woman’s social existence. Economically speaking, a woman was a person who fed on others, and was obligated to obey whomever she fed on, and mentally, she also morally succumbed to the hand that fed her. It follows that whether in terms of economy or of her individuality, she had been divested of her independent right to any means of production or productivity. Therefore, “women” were inevitably duty-bound by “the righteousness of following the Three Obediences”—obedience to the father, obedience to the husband and obedience to the son—and were of no “special use.”8 Accordingly, women’s domestic utility was also their total social utility: “Just as husband is subject to rules of the dynastic regime, so wife submits to orders of Husband.” “What is femininity or women’s docility? It is to indulge the unmarried brothers and sisters in the Husband’s family and oblige every female family member before her obligations to gratify the Husband and fulfill domestic tasks of weaving and cleaning.”9 The sphere of a woman’s daily activities was that of her house and home: The man works outside, and the woman inside; the mansion is behind pavilions and courtyards, high walls and a heavy guarded door; men are not to be let in,

6 From Book of Rites, “Suburban Specialties,” Li ji, “jiao texing.”—The authors’ note in text. 7 From Book of Rituals, “Funeral Formalities,” Li ji, “sangfu zhuan.”—The authors’ note in text. 8

Ibid.

9

From Book of Rites , “Marriage,” Li ji, “hunyi.”

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and women are not to be let out; the man is silent within, the woman silent without; household chat ought not to be street gossip, nor vice versa.10

In short, all patriarchal social rules for women, including the precepts for women’s virtues of chastity, even for their manners and demeanor, were derived from the need to establish, maintain, and consolidate familial order. From the conception of “home,” which was all significant to the female, it is not difficult to construe the true meaning of the division of labor between men and women in a feudal society. One key to understanding it may be the dual concepts of “Mandate from dynastic sovereignty” and “Mandate from house and home”: unlike the concept of “dynastic sovereignty” (chao), which infers the juxtaposition of society, official career, and dominance, etc., the scope of “house and home” ( jia) is narrowly reduced to private kinship. A man who “received mandates from imperial court” (shouming yu chao) of course was part and parcel of social life, whereas a woman “commanded by family” (shouming yu jia) was excluded from society because she lived within the confines of family. The people who formed a wall around her consisted of a network of fathers, husbands, sons, and relatives. They separated her from the rest of social life, making her a hopeless prisoner by her birthright and identity, even locking up her heart in this familial cell surveilled by father– husband–son alliance generation after generation. Family was nearly a coercive system designed specifically for women; it possessed a distinct gender orientation pointing to a gendered autocracy. The “mandate” for men and that for women were genuinely worlds apart. The difference of their “mandates” or “fates” is the distinction between masters and slaves or between guards and prisoners. With family as an eternal prison and a tool of coercion of women, patrilineal society had established its own ruling order in two aspects or two steps: for the first step, the “human wall” system of family or clan immured the entire female gender and had it ruled out of the social life as Subject. As a gender, women had become outsiders to political, economic, and cultural life, and constituted the “non-political layer” of this society. As a result, male society effectively disenfranchised its natural enemy: the gender that constituted the biggest menace to its political rule. However, in the subtle sphere of reality, women could not be ruled out, because their existence itself is the prerequisite for that of the father–son relationship. Therefore, patriarchal society was disposed to reinsert women into their own order in a way that was consistent with the principles of their governance. This is another function played by family and clan system. It would bleach female otherness at the core, and transform women into something acceptable, into tools to carry on the lineage or into prescribed roles such as those of wife, mother, and womenfolk so as to incorporate them into the male order. It’s no wonder that a woman’s life could not escape the rules of family. Only in the family could she have a domestic function and become a tool of lineage, but never a Subject; 10

From Book of Rites, “Inner Rules,” Li ji, “nei ze.”—The authors’ note in text.

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and only by placing her there would she be daughter-wife-mother-female-kinand-kind-and-daughter-in-law, but never a woman. Only then could she be integrated into the system, like a cog tightened into a machine according to the instruction manual. The two functions of “family” can be described as complementing each other or following diverse paths to the same destination. Hence patriarchal society moved towards its own consummation in the process of both repelling and using women, of both taking advantage of and obliterating them. Due to the unique role of family, Chinese history has gone through the process of establishing a patriarchal social order from menplowing-and-women-weaving to father–son succession, and has taken its first step into being a civilized society on the premise of oppressing and enslaving women. 1.1.3

“The Beginning of Ethical Human Relations”

In the family, the patrilineal order, built on the power of the semi-state apparatus and father–son succession, fostered an ideological system perfectly in correspondence with these structures. This system, with its own rigorous orderliness and self-fulfilling legitimacy, successfully concealed the true cause and true essence of its ruling nature, and justified the existence of this order as a matter of course. Indeed, the ancestors of the Chinese seem to have sincerely believed that the fatherly images in legends such as the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors brought the entire Chinese civilization into being, and that the ruling laws they created were a huge blessing to mankind.11 However, the tremendous light of the ideology obscured the nature of its rule and the gender oppression embedded in it. On the one hand, according to some scholars’ research, human relations (ren lun), to the ancient Chinese, were a gender-based pecking order that could both expand and contract in practice, and was both progressive and regressive, abstract and concrete in nature. Lun, a word with a strong ethical overtone, literally means the gradation of water ripples. In practical use, other meanings of the word are far less important than the sense of “differentiation” in order that it represents: lun suggests a ranking that ranges from dominant to subordinate, from top to bottom, from superior to inferior. The ten ranks of lun that are named in The Book of Rites· Sacrifice juxtapose pairs of opposites reflecting abstract social status such as noble/ humble, kin/stranger, insider/outsider, upper/lower with opposites reflecting concrete social relationships such as god/ghost, liege/liegemen, father/son, husband/wife, etc. These social relationships emerge as distinctly hierarchal

11 Legendary deities and emperors from Chinese mythologies of remote antiquity who are extolled as the founding fathers and mother for having laid the foundation for Chinese civilization. According to Grand Historian’s Record, Shi ji, the three Sovereigns are Fu Xi, god of the sky, Nü Wa, goddess of humanity, and Shen Nong, god of the earth. The five Emperors have different sources. Generally believed, they are Huang Di, Zhuan Xu, Di Ku, Yao, and Shun.

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in nature.12 Therefore, “lun” broadly includes all kinds of complex roles and interpersonal relationships. It predicates relationships between liege and subject, father and son, elder and younger brother, husband and wife, and man and woman in general, to be dominant and subordinate, upper rank and lower rank, superior and inferior. A hierarchal implication is contained in kinships of father and son, husband and wife, seniors and juniors, just as it is in the relation of subjection between lieges and liegemen, or in that between upper class and lower class. If benevolence, justice, propriety, wisdom, faithfulness, loyalty, and filial piety are a compendium of moral values and belief systems put forward by Confucian ethics, then the tenets based on its three cardinal relations and five constant virtues (san gang wu chang ) constitute the Chinese social structure.13 The structural principle applied universally to person-to-person, person-tofamily, family-to-family, and class-to-class relationships and was conducive to a series of variants of social hierarchy in terms of class background and family background and various orderings of social power and position, even variations in manners and behaviors. It constituted the canon of how families, clans, or other larger social aggregates, even the nation, should be organized. Without the ethics of lun, without this principle of social ordering, it is hard to imagine that ancient Chinese society could have taken its form. Lun, as it is, was an order of ruling. On the other hand, there is another important dimension to the concept of “ren lun”: its opposition to the so-called “bestiality” in the promiscuous marriage system. In this case, it entails the introduction of certain kind of restraints or prohibitions over tabooed sexes such as sex within certain degrees of consanguinity. The ancient Chinese made quite a lot of explications in this regard. Most of them were related to one particular historical event, i.e., the establishment of matrimony. According to Additional Chronicle of the Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Government (Tongjian waiji)14 : In ancient times, men and women were no different. It was Tai Hao who established matrimony as a system to marry man and woman with two deer’s skin as betrothal gifts.15 He also inaugurated people of one blood line with a surname and familial names and made match-making a common practice.16 12 See Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005), From the Soil—the Foundations of Chinese Society— authors’ note in text. 13 Three cardinal principal–subordinate relations of monarch–subject, father–son, and husband–wife, and five constant virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, learning, and honesty. 14 Written by Liu Shu (1032–1078) of Northern Song dynasty as complementary to Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Government ), a magnum opus in Chinese historiography by Sima Guang (1019–1086). 15

Tai Hao, also known as Fu Xi, the first divine being, or sage emperor in Chinese mythology who is believed to be the inventor of the original Eight Trigrams, ba gua chart, Chinese writing system, and marriage system. In ancient China, a surname was separate into xing 姓 and shi 氏, with xing or surname for the consanguine clan and shi or familial name for the nuclear family in the clan, most of the time for one brother in an extended family. 16

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With ren-lun-oriented customs set up as the cardinal norm for human relations, people stopped acts of promiscuity.

Lu Jia’s New Talks (Xin Yü)17 and “Chapter Guo” of Baihu Tong 18 both noted that in ancient times, people knew who their mothers were but did not know who their fathers were. Sage Fu Xi, or Tai Hao, first looked up at the sky and contemplated the images in the heavens, and looked downward and contemplated the occurrences on earth. He laid down the law of five primary elements and instituted marriage between man and woman, hence establishing Dao for humanity, ren dao or man-made law. Thence people got enlightened and learned about paternity, fraternity, connubiality and respect for seniority, and so on. Undoubtedly, the ethics represented by the institution of marriage is one of the great historical achievements of ancient sages. It enabled ancient people to develop from ignorance to “enlightenment,” and regulated sexual relationships. However, if we put these two dimensions of ren lun together, we will find an interesting phenomenon. This ethical system, which had prevailed for more than two thousand years, even as emperors revered on top of the pecking order, did not develop its hierarchies in a top-down pattern from liege–liegeman relationship to the father–son and further on to the husband– wife affiliations. Rather the reverse is true: First there were heaven and earth, then were all living things; after all living things came men and women, who made husbands and wives; out of husbands and wives grew fathers and sons. Then fathers and sons developed into princes and monarchs, and they would have subjects, after which were the upper and the lower castes who were made to observe different rites (I Ching · Ordering of Hexagrams).19

In this light, the hierarchical order inherent in liege/subject and father/son relations was therefore the “product” of matrimony and match-making that put an end to communal marriage. This point has been expressed clearly by ancient confucians: “the way (dao) of husband and wife” is “the beginning of ethical human relations (ren lun zhi shi),” but also of “the way of the gentleman” (Doctrine of the Mean).20 In this sense, the broad concept of human relations (ren lun) is no polysemy; its seemingly unrelated two connotations 17 By Lu Jia (240 B.C.–170 B.C.), famous early West Han thinker, statesman and diplomat. Xin yü is a very important collection of theses on governance and national administration. 18 Baihu tong , or Baihu tongyi, Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall (the authors’ note in text), authored by Ban Gu (32–92 A.D.), et al.. The proceedings were collected in a famous debate on Classics that took place in the White Tiger Temple, hence the title. “Chapter Guo” is a chapter for matrimony. 19 Yi· xu gua is one of the Ten Chapters, shi yi, reputed to be written by Confucius and his students to annotate I Ching , or The Classic of Changes. 20

Zhong yong, or The Golden Mean, one of the Five Classics of Confucius.

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were essentially inseparable in the ancient social ideology. From the earlier sequence, after all living things came men and women, who made husbands and wives; out of husbands and wives grew fathers and sons. Then fathers and sons developed into princes and monarchs, and they would have subjects, after which were the upper and the lower castes. (ibid.)

It follows that in ancient China it was only because of the emergence of marriage and the roles of husband and wife that such ruling ordering and the order of governance underpinning Chinese social architecture came to the fore. In its primeval stage, this order of rule was manifested in the set-up of husband and wife, an order formed between the sexes. And in this sense, “human relations” (ren lun) comprised a governance that evolved from the bond of husband and wife, through the rites regulating relationships between father and son and between monarch and subjects, into its ultimate form. Husband–wife affiliation is deemed the “beginning of ethical human relations” not only because it alludes to the ancient sages’ remarkable creation of the institution of marriage and its attendant culture of husband and wife, but also because of the oppressive gender order between sexes embedded in that creation. For instance, from the moment matrimony first passed into the annals of history, its purpose was not only to forbid tabooed consanguine sex, but also to raise mandatory social requirements with strong gendered pertinence. It was designed with the primary purpose to “perpetuate ancestry on the one hand and produce descendants on the other,” which was none other than an injunction against any sexual act conducted not for this end, especially against those social relics from the time when people only knew their mothers, not their fathers. With it was inlayed a kind of gender-based servitude that is more clearly specified in the etymology of the Chinese characters for husband ( f¯ u) and wife ( fù); these two words developed out of relations of oppression and implicate that oppression: they denote the gender roles prescribed by patriarchal society rather than natural physiological differences between sexes. This is the major difference between “husband and wife” and “man and woman.”21 The gender roles place recurring stress upon the obedience of the female. To name a few, “fù (wife) means servitude (or obedience)” (The Book of Rites · Trivial Rites)22 ; “Wives submit to men”; “Wives should not act on their own but speak and behave as men instruct, hence their name, fù”23 (both from 21 F¯ u fù, 夫妇 two distinct Chinese words with identical pronunciation but different intonations, mean husband and wife. F¯ u, husband, was invented out of the word for “big” and means adult male. Fù for wife was written in Chinese ideographic form of a woman with a broom at her side. 22 23

LI ji · qu li, a chapter from the Book of Rites for detailed norms on specific occasions.

“Women, who follow the teachings of men and behave in accordance, have no other autonomous intent but to obey the father, husband and son in the family.” (Confucius’ Sayings to Disciples , Kongzi jia yu.)

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Dadai Li Ji · Original Destiny).24 If husband and wife were put together, though homophones, it must be noted: “‘Husband’ derives from prop ( fú), meaning to help by guiding the way, while ‘wife’ derives from prostrate ( fú, a homophone of ‘prop’), meaning to submit with courtesy” (Baihu Tong ). The etymological change from man and woman to husband and wife in the Chinese language also illustrates the inexorable process of history in which the gender roles of patriarchal society had engulfed the natural being of an individual, or to put it in another way, the process of an individual leaving his/ her natural being, stepping into his/her unitary role encoded in the order of patriarchal society and staying in the confinement of that role. What’s more important, the metamorphosis from “male” to “husband” was the completion of manhood for the male himself: to become a “husband” also meant to be the pater familias, to gain power over other family members and the social trust that came with it; whereas transformation from “female” to “wife” meant the loss of her ipseity or “selfhood”: to be a “wife” was “to speak and behave as men instruct,” to vanish in the shadow of others, so as to be integrated in the social order by removing her “otherness.” If we admit to the original context for the birth of the concept of “husband and wife”—the historic situations at the inception of the male order—then it is not hard to find that as the initial symbols of patriarchy replaced matriarchy, and patriarchy moved towards its own social institution and order, the words f¯ u fù were virtually the first victory won by patriarchal society in its historical conquest of the female. On this account, when the Confucians pronounced this as “the beginning of ethical human relations” (renlun zhi shi), the deceptiveness of their ideological conjecture was apparent. On the one hand, the allegation of “beginning of ethical human relations” perverted the beginning of the male order as the origin of the entire history of Chinese civilization, and even obliterated the real origin of Chinese history, so that there seemed to be only one history, the history of men. On the other hand, the “beginning of ethical human relations” hypothesis used the seemingly gender-neutral word “human,” ren, to erase the real historic plight of women. As a matter of fact, “human” in the phrase of “human relations” never really included women, but, on the contrary, de facto excluded and eliminated women from the game. The four characters of “beginning of human ethical relations” were a gentle and deft subterfuge to suppress the whole gender group of women into the historical unconscious, and by the same stroke, the idiom effaced their plight of being oppressed. Indeed, since the conceptualization of f¯ u fù, patrilineal society no longer put up with women in its conceptual system. The differentiation of social relations took a turn from two-gender relationships to male-only relationships, and the alignment of interpersonal relations also changed from one of two-genderbased liaisons to that of a male-to-male formula; in so doing, a tenable, even invincible ethical system was conceived and constructed. Given this context, 24 Dadai li ji, or The Records of Rites by Dai De, was written by Dai De who is believed to live around the first century B.C.

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however, the concepts of “human relation” (ren lun), and its “beginning” (shi), are not so transparent that you can take them at their face value and perceive the truth of history verbatim; on the contrary, they lost their literal relevance to truth. From the beginning, they had turned into an instrument to serve the needs of patrilineal society and become an ideological discourse or narrative about history, civilization and culture, ancestors and sages, achievements and social laws. This is true with “human relations,” and it is true with the other concepts thus concerned. 1.1.4

“Wife Is My Equal”—A Hegemonic Discourse

Taking the argument a step further, we come across another feature of Chinese history and culture, that is, the male gendered nature of the discourse that guided and manipulated the Chinese cultural system of symbols. Patrilineal society availed itself of a sub-state machine—family and marriage—to carry out its socio-historical oppression of women by direct or indirect coercive means, such as an ethical order and a conceptual system. Such a fact is clear to many, if not to the whole world. But how women were repressed in the symbolic system of culture is still little known, yet it is the deepest essence of gender oppression. The cultural symbolic system of the ancient patrilineal society is comparable to a monitoring mechanism over the historical unconscious in regard to women. It locked down all historical information, subdued females under the firm armor of rigid and orderly symbols as objects of coercion, and closed down the possibility of women’s being awakened to their being in history and culture, thus ensuring the sole legitimacy of patrilineal culture. Note the evolution of f¯ u fù at the inception of the ideology that we touched upon in the preceding section. It is fairly plain that the encoding of the two glyphs (signifiers) of “husband” and “wife” was a subterfuge or a plot machinated by male rule. The ruling male group established semantic meanings and created symbols, including symbols of women; “fù (wife) means obedience” was also a product of such male creation. Furthermore, the establishment of male power was not only marked by the establishment of its economic, political, legislative, and social structures, but also by a more subtle but profound feature: men owned the right of speech and held the prerogative to create codes and assign them arbitrary meanings, hence they were both entitled to speak and empowered to interpret. Take the statement of “Wife (q¯ı), is my equal (qí )” as an example. True, by denotation the second “qí ” means equivalent, and literally it does not imply that one is higher in status and more respectable than the other.25 However, the inventor of this statement, 25 The authors quote the definition of “wife” from the first Chinese dictionary, Shuowen jiezi (Origins of Chinese Characters ) by Xu Shen (circa 58–148 A.D.),“Wife (妻, q¯ı), a female who is equal (齐, qí) to myself.” The same definition also occurs in Ban Gu’s Baihu tongyi and Liu Xi’s Shi ming .

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the speaking Subject, is obviously male in gender. The telltale “my” (male, husband) in it, the antecedent and the first person, makes a standard for “wife” to “align herself with” and a gage to measure their bilateral relationship. A single word “my” ( ji), convertible to “myself” as its reflexive pronoun in classic Chinese, sheds light on the entire context: “myself” is both the speaker’s self-reference and a collective name for the addresser and the addressee. To put it plainly, under their tacit common reference “my/myself,” the addresser and the addressee in a conversation form a male discourse alliance in which “wife” is the “Other” that men talk about among “themselves.” Such a linguistic context makes it clear that the succinct four-character sentence “wife is my equal” includes two camps: one represented by the male speaking Subject and the male listening Subject; the other made by the Object of men’s talk (women). The opposition between the two camps is as transparent as the opposition between Subject and Object, self and other. In a seemingly fair and assertive version of statement like this, we find no audible female voice. Only the male, being the Subject of the discourse, constitutes the start point as well as the hub of the statement, and only he has the right to define as well as interpret the meanings of “wife.” Insofar as women are concerned, they are sheer Objects to be discussed and regulated. If one reflects on the fact that “wife is my equal” is no everyday talk but a prescriptive formula that is recognized and respected by the whole society, then, by extension, one can easily see that the male discourse controlled the entire semantic system in ancient China. See how Shi Ming 26 by Liu Xi in the Eastern Han dynasty construes cognate terms of the word “wife”: Wife to Emperor is called hou, meaning ‘posterior’ or ‘latter in sequence.’ She speaks after Him and dare not overstep her bounds of being the ancillary. Wife of a prince is called fu ren, fu meaning ‘prop’ and fu ren meaning the person who supports and helps her lord, the prince. Wife to a minister is called nei zi, verbatim the person within, meaning one who administers the household within the boudoir gate. Wife to a senior official is called ming fu, with ming for entitlement and fu for servitude, scilicet accredited to serve in domestic affairs, for as her husband is commissioned to the royal court, so the wife is subject to the household. Wife to a commoner, shu ren, is called qi, meaning equivalent, since her husband is so low in social status as not to deserve a title, hence the wife is called qi for they have equal say in affairs at home.

Here, man is still the one who establishes meaning, disseminates discourses, acts as Subject, and sets the standard as the First Sex. Obviously, how to define the words “hou,” “fu ren,” “nei zi,” “ming fu,” “shu ren” and “qi” was not up to the women, but up to the men that they spoke after, or supported, 26 Or Dictionary of Explanation, by Liu Xi (circa 160 A.D.–?). This is the first book of classic exegesis of words, of great value to the history of Chinese lexicology and etymology. It is also a valuable source of reference for dialectology in China and has a lasting influence for its phonetic study in determining meaning of a word by its phonetic associations.

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or served, or matched in status. The speaking Subject’s line of thinking and departure point in Shi Ming itself are strategic enough to constitute masculine hegemony. This is true of Shi Ming and of other symbolic systems. By creating words and characters related to women, men also concocted feminine values, feminine images as well as a distinct code of conduct for women, and thereby, they invented a whole narrative about women. This narrative spans from stories of “filial daughters” and “chaste women” to those about “ill-advised women” and the “femme fatale,” and from tales about illiterate women who could not read or write to those about law-abiding women who “knew their chastity and integrity should come prior to their lives.” Virtually none of the discursive acts and their attendant social norms, spanning from picture books about the universe’ genesis to illustrations of yin and yang ,27 from how the six Confucian classics were interpreted to how criminal laws were written, from the institution of nuptial rituals to the writing of history, had ever gone beyond the bounds of male rule and male-dominant laws. Even the only female textbook, Women’s Commandments (Nü jie),28 written by a female author for female readers, had nearly every word composed for the benefit of asserting male authority. In such a discourse, what women met, without exception, was men’s prohibitory injunctions. In this sense, “household chat ought not to be street gossip” was genuinely an unwarranted preoccupation on the part of male rulers. Since women could not speak inside the home and did not have the right to speak, what use was there to distinguish between “what is said inside” and “what is said outside?” Just as Kristeva points out, since such a discourse only wields power for the male and serves their purposes, there are only two likely ways for women to get themselves in it. Either she adopts his tone, embraces his concepts, takes up his stance, and draws on his prescribed symbolism, in short, speaks in such a way as recognized by men in his homogeneous voice. Or she “speaks” by not speaking, by using a different language and grammar, or by using the blanks and the fissures in the male discursive system. The former situation is exemplified by Ban Zhao and Song Ruohua.29 The fact that Women’s Commandments and The Analects for Women (Nü lunyu) got publicized and circulated at all was not owing to their creation of anything new, but owing to their elaboration of the feminine model predicated by men from a male point of view, thus reinforcing men’s narratives of women. For the latter situation, we can point to a few, preciously small in number, outstanding ancient female poets. In delivering their most secret personal experience, they turned to skills in phonology, rhythm, metaphor, 27 Yin and yang are two primal energies, according to Chinese ontology, that constitute everything in the universe, which is popularly known as feminine and masculine energies. 28

By the great female historian in East Han dynasty, Ban Zhao (c. 45 A.D.–c. 117), also honored as Master Cao, because she was married to Cao Shishu and completed The Book of Han History, Han Shu, when its authors, her father Ban Biao (3–54) and her brother Ban Gu (32–92), died. 29 Song Ruohua (?–c. 820) compiled Confucius’ Analects for Women with her sister Song Ruozhao (761–828).

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and various images rather than exploiting language itself. As the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault once alluded to, poetic language is to normal language just as a mad man is to a normal man. This also applies to Chinese women’s positioning in male discourse: the gender of the ancient Chinese women writers had to be laid outside the form of normal language. That may account for the dearth of literate women in female philosophers, female historians, and female literati in ancient China. Language was not a bridge enabling women to set foot on the other bank or conducting them into the mainstream social communication system. It was first and foremost the wall that a patriarchal culture set up to deny and tame the opposite sex, imprisoning at once women’s flesh and spirit. Women’s situation in ancient China’s discourse, analogous to their economic and political plights, featured a quandary of being both “inside” and “outside,” or being the “Outsider” with an “inside” title. Even if women writers conveyed or revealed something personal, they did so by using disguised symbolic forms, which were nonetheless filtered by the monitoring mechanism of male discourse. 1.1.5

Female Image—An Empty Signifier

Admittedly, literature, as a specific symbolic system, had also been a de facto men’s realm. Despite their difference from compulsory doctrinal discourses, such as moral ethics and legal provisions, by being closer to everyday life, the belles-lettres by male writers were explicitly brimming with gender-signifying concepts that, symbolically and aesthetically, specify feudal society’s various requirements for, imaginations about and descriptions of women and twogender relationships or sexuality. It is possible that there might be no other point of view that can better reflect the historical and cultural implications of gender relations than that of men when they imagine, configure, or describe women. The following sections examine a few illustrative examples. 1.1.5.1 Female “Objectification” and Male “Right to Desire” As an important distinction, what literature can convey but legal provisions and ethical codes cannot is people’s desires and their need to express desires. A simple phenomenon in ancient Chinese literature may help us to understand such a profound cultural proposition: Chinese literati’s idiosyncratic fashion of describing feminine beauty. In ancient Chinese poetry, we often find lavish descriptions of the beauty of women’s “appearance.” For a pictographic and ideographic language like Chinese, and for a people that is stronger in mindful observation and contemplation than in conceptualization of the abstract, such literary aesthetics of rendering “things visible to the eye” is anything but surprising. What is surprising in such descriptions is nevertheless the uniformity of the model that men of letters employed over time in imagining female appearance: this is especially manifest in a time-honored figure of speech, the “objectification” of female images, that is to employ object images as metaphors for female

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appearance. The most popular analogies include “pretty as a flower or jade,” “weak as a willow branch in the wind,” “eyebrows like distant mountains,” “fingers like spring-time scallions,” and “body as delicate as a gem with warm fragrance,” or the “ice-skinned and jade-boned,” etc. Sometimes the person described is simply omitted and replaced by an object. A bound foot woman is no longer a person who has “feet,” but is only referred to as “golden lotus” and “lotus gait.” Undoubtedly, this rhetorical form revealed how desires were encoded in symbols. But what is more worth noting is not that such a rhetorical form disclosed men’s desires, but that it changed the nature of such desire by metaphorizing it into objects. In fact, the objects that were used to stand for women were not all archetypal icons of sexuality in Freudian terms, at least not all of them were the thinly veiled erotic symbols, but rather imageries infused with much cultural dross. Under its cover, females were viewed not only as objects of sexual desires but also as material objects—the Object itself. When the appearance of women was materialized into objects such as a beautiful hibiscus, a weak willow, a sleek nephrite, a delicate spring onion, or a golden lotus, it obviously became something that could be picked, climbed and plucked, toyed with or discarded. With these metaphors that associated the beauty of human body with material things, a subtle change had actually taken place in respect to sexual desire or gender relations: they not only affirmed or symbolized men’s lust for women, but by the same token, they negated and nullified women’s desire. Therefore, what was expressed in the similes was not so much men’s desire as men’s right to desire. Indeed, now that women could be fancied as objects, then men could also imagine themselves granted a free pass to their desire; by depriving women of their desires, men naturally made women comply unconditionally with male desire. From a psychological point of view, this could somewhat relieve fear of castration that was a prevalent anxiety among male members of a society under the high-handed patriarchy (More in the next section). Moreover, if viewed from the perspective of its broader cultural meaning, this gender-based rhetoric of “materialization” actually served as a means for “fathers and sons” to incorporate women into their own cultural order as their gender opposite. As a matter of fact, since the days of “Tai Hao’s Matrimony,” women had been objectified as things of use, only never referred to in such sensual and aesthetic terms. The materialization of female appearance, along with “fathers’ and sons’” desire for her, was isogenous to her social uses. Since man regarded woman as a menace, only as a “thing” could women turn into a sexual object that could not possibly imperil the male order. After all, it is easier to harness things than human beings. We can also say that only as objects—as things—could women be accommodated by the father–son order as an unoffensive force; otherwise, it is hard to say whether they could be accepted, let alone “desired.” If not, those beautiful women who refused to be “things” would not be described as evil temptresses, or heinous femmes fatales, or even culprits to blame for wrecking a country and ruining the people. Once women

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became objects, mentally or physically, not just in social system of roles but also in men’s imagination, they obtained a certain place in the system. Because by means of the objectification of women, fathers, and sons came to fix in one manageable place these originally uncontrollable “others” who posed political, cultural, even mental and physiological challenges, and in so doing, they turned the otherwise-hard-to-understood gender group into objects that no longer needed to be understood. Only with the demise of their fear of the female could fathers and sons’ desire come into its own. In other words, the satisfaction of their desire, symbolically speaking, depended on whether their fear towards women could be exorcized. To illustrate men’s gynophobia, we can look at some artistic strategies in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi).30 On the one hand, the enchanting women who have transformed from spirits of flowers and foxes are definitively aliens to humanity; they were different from humankind. On the other hand, these beautiful “female aliens” are often innocuous, but also seductive and offer themselves for sexual intercourse. This brings to light an interesting symbolic narrative model: the male protagonists in such tales, because of their affairs with these female aliens, land in a gray zone between the real world and the magic world. Viewed from the perspective of reality, since the beauty is a fox, she is the inaccessible Other; however, if viewed from the perspective of a magic world, since the fox is a beauty, and a loveable one, she is really an irresistible object of lust. The bifocal point of view of the dual worlds overlaps in the male psycho-structure over their consciousness and unconscious of the female attraction. In men’s consciousness, women, as aliens (fox), are objects to be rejected; in their unconscious, women, as carriers of men’s desire, are objects to be reached out to. The “fox demon beauty” myth reconciles men’s or male culture’s conscious rejection of and unconscious desire for the female in a paradoxical nutshell. That is, in the process of demonizing females or incarnating females in foxes, the male obliterates the wild aura of animal aliens. As a result, stripped of their raw wildness and sinister weirdness, the fox girls, on the one hand, retain their exotic characteristics of aliens, on the other, they become objects of desire, and even objects of men’s desire that transcend “father’s law” (such as marriage). In this way a new narrative is established along with a successful ideology of the relation between the two sexes. 1.1.5.2 Gender Misrepresentation Of course, browsing Chinese literature, we may notice that this kind of metaphorical use of “objects,” especially those analogies drawn from flowers and plants, was not only applied to the female but also, more often than not, to men literati. Or rather, there had been a long tradition among ancient Chinese men of letters to refer to themselves by feminine images and female identity. 30 Also named as Biographies for Fox Ghosts, written by the great Qing novelist, Pu Songling (1640–1715).

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We can even say that this tradition stretched from Li Sao 31 to A Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng ).32 The lyrical protagonist in Li Sao sometimes recites as a man, some other times unabashedly figures himself as a female, or refers to himself with symbols that by and large apply to women. We can cite, from it, not only “Angelic herbs and sweet gracilarias I don/ And with orchids of autumn days, adorned,” but also “The maids around you were jealous of my winged brows, so they made all kinds of rumors, saying that I am flamboyant!”33 This deliberate use of cross-gender references, or the ambivalent and overlapping referentiality between two genders, was the author’s artistry to express his mettle and ambition with circumlocution and became a rhetorical convention and a creative strategy that were widely employed by Chinese literati. In Cao Zhi’s “The Beauty” (Meinü pian),34 the beautiful old maiden who stays celibate because of her lofty ideal clearly bears the author’s own forbearance and helplessness in a certain measure. His personal sorrows felicitously tally with the female melancholy: “I’d like to be the southwester wind/ That drops in Your Majestic arms./ Yet long they are not open to me/ What can I your concubine depend on?”35 Such examples in lyrics of Song Dynasty (960–1279) are too many and too varied to enumerate. We may even say, the ill-fated beauties in A Dream of Red Mansions are not unrelated to this tradition of the author’s self-referentiality, although this is by no means the novel’s only motive force and intent. For all the complexity and ambiguity of A Dream of Red Mansions , we may not call some scholars’ opinions completely whimsical when, in analyzing the love triangle of Baoyu, Daiyu, and Baochai, they argue for Baochai and Daiyu respectively being Baoyu’s superego and ego. In short, just as scholar-officials in ancient China tended to use feminine images such as “the fragrant grass that His Majesty might stoop to pick

31 Li Sao, or Lament My Departure, a long poem as self-account before death by the earliest great poet in Chinese history of Warring States period, Qu Yuan (circa 340 B.C.– 278 B.C.). The poem recited in the first person is a self-portrait of the poet himself. 32 Or The Dream of The Red Chamber, the locus classicus by Cao Xue Qin (circa 1715– 1763) in the traditional form of a Chinese novel, regarded as the greatest Chinese novel ever about a family of Qing officials, the Jias. It centers around the pubescent Jia Baoyu and the girls related to him living in the Grand View Garden, da guanyuan. 33 The lines from Li Sao: “With lavished innate qualities indued/ By art and skill my talents I renewed; Angelic herbs and sweet selineas too/ And orchids late that by the water grew, I wove for ornament.” And “They envied me my mothlike eyebrows fine/ And so my name his damsels did malign.” (ref. to the translation of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang). 34

Cao Zhi (192–232), one of the sons of the famous general Cao Cao (155–220) in the Three Kingdom period and one of China’s great lyric poets. In contending for their father’s position, he lost the contention to his elder brother, Cao Pi. He was even prohibited from taking part in politics and stayed unappreciated in his whole life. “The Beauty,” is one of Cao’s folk-lore ballads, known as yuefu poetry. 35

The lines are from another of Cao Zhi’s poems, “Seven Griefs,” Qi ai shi.

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off”36 or analogies like “a blunt lead sword that could still be used to chop” to express their modesty and fidelity, so the men literati lamented their own unrecognized talents and unrequited loyalty by resorting to the image of an aging beauty or an abandoned and slandered concubine. However, this naturally poses a further question: How did a male social culture, in which fathers and sons dominated the social discourse, generate such a literary device of “gender subtext” as men’s self-reference as female or self-effemination? This in actuality involves another peculiar point of the entire ancient Chinese cultural order. If we place the images of “grasses and plants” and “the Beauty” in “Grasses and plants have minds/ Why should they be clipped for the Beauty?” and “flower” and “connoisseur” in “Outside the station, beside the broken bridge/ Blooming alone, the flower has no connoisseur” side by side with the images of Emperor and concubine, or man and woman in “Yet long they (Your Majestic arms) are not open to me/ What can I your concubine depend on?” we will find in the two groups of poetic lines a striking resemblance between two types of fixed roles: one is the Subject, the dominator, the user or appreciator, the other the Object of value, someone in waiting to be used or to be dominated. What really matters is not gender ambivalence, but that the gender roles in the pecking order are never to be confused and ambivalent. It is clear and unmistakable that, whether identifying themselves with the fragrant grass or with women, the authors evince the female role in the “thing” they identify with, in the use of objects, in the status of the object that is in wait to be taken by the Subject, if he finds worth in it. This is particularly the case with the subordinate role in the relationship between husband and wife, or between men and women in general, which the authors take for granted to be the role for women. At first glance, it seems indeed a little bit odd that male members of a male-dominant society could possibly admire female aesthetics and identify with femininity. The truth is, this was nothing but an integral part of the whole pack of directives prescribed by the patriarchal culture in its history. Ancient Chinese hierarchical cultural evolution, or social construction, from husband-and-wife partnership to father-and-son rule and further on to monarch-and-servant order, putting aside its legitimacy justified in terms of “ethical human relations,” shows every sign of according with, or being subject to, the grand design of universe—the interplay of yin and yang , the inseparable and contradictory dual forms of energy. Only once the dialectic of yin and yang, which used to describe the changes of things, was applied to describe human relations, did it become an immutable power structure between yin and yang: yang is the cardinal, yin is the auxiliary; yang the leader and yin the aide; yang the monarch ( jun), and yin the minister (chen); yang the father, yin the son; yang the husband, and yin the wife. The dialectic 36

Revised from a famous poem by Tang poet Zhang Jiuling (673–740), “Gratitude for the Majestic Patronage,” “Grasses and plants have minds/ Why should they be clipped for the Beauty” (see next paragraph).

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of yang and yin between husband and wife has been analyzed in antecedent sections. The yang and yin in question here is the yang-yin relations between father and son, which, in addition to the binary relation of master and slave between them, has a psychoanalytic dimension. As explained by psychologists who have examined father-and-son relations, as long as the father remains in authority, the son is a non-male, so to speak. The castration complex between father and son well illustrates the “yin” status of son, or to put it the other way around, the son’s status of “yin,” of being subordinate to and obeying the father, well explains the son’s castration complex. This is true of the fatherand-son dichotomy, and also true of the relationship between monarch ( jun) and minister (chen), which is in fact the politicization of the father–son relation. Jun (monarch) is the only absolute yang —Patriarch of society. In other words, jun embodied the only unalloyed power and law. Linguistically, his selfappellations as “the oligarch” (guaren)37 and “the sovereign” firmly establish his sole right to power. In the face of this single absolute yang Patriarch, all males in the society, whether the honorable or the humble, could only occupy, willy-nilly, a “yin” or “non-yang ” position. Symbolically speaking, the scholarbureaucrats, who constituted the only social class in Chinese history that had the right to intervene in politics, were in a position to be castrated. Of course, the fear of being castrated not only indicates a kind of sexual anxiety, but also an anxiety about one’s own vital functions as Subject. In light of this state of mind of being castrated, it is no wonder that scholar-literati found it congenial to describe themselves as women. These female images were just vehicles by which scholar-literati conveyed their “yin” emotions. This “quasi-feminine” literary device did arise fortuitously; it is a design that ancient Chinese history and culture itself created to endow gender with significance. It is worth adding that this “yin and yang ” design may help us understand the image of heroines commonly seen in ancient literature. These women manifest rare talents and superior skills in combat, loyalty and integrity, and wisdom and courage. One of them, the famous female general from the Yangs38 is even renowned to have picked up her future husband while fighting with him on the battlefield and to have given birth to a child while marching to another battle with the army. They are the women warriors thrusting ahead of millions of troops and beheading archfoes without great effort. Female though they are, they are the ones who save the country from collapse and assist their monarchs in times of danger. However, here, gender still largely makes a metaphor for status. In the legend of Tang, the chivalrous swordswoman, Hong Xian, was penalized for her/his mistake of accidentally killing three people in her/his previous life and reduced to a female body in this life; her 37

Oligarch, guaren, literally means “the one who does not have enough moral virtues to rule the world” in Chinese, as a self-abasing and modest self-reference to the ruler himself but also means “solitary” and “isolated from others.” 38

The Yangs were a famous family renowned for their brave generals and patriotic warriors from North Song dynasty, which makes the prototype for popular sagas in numerous dramas, story-telling, movies, and teleplays.

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gender switch makes manifest her status of “slave-girl.” The irony of the image of the Yang female generals lies in the fact that their career is not what was expected of women in the feudal society, but what men dreamt for themselves. The female generals play an ideal role of achieving daring exploits that men in feudal society fancied achieving—a role of being yin, occupying a subordinate position, and at the same time, rendering meritorious service to their monarchs. Isn’t the unification of the female gender and male feats a projection of the castration complex peculiar to the multitude of Chinese men who had political ambitions but were unwilling to make them true? Isn’t it an effortless symbolic gratification of their yang ambition in their yin status? Of course, from today’s perspective, the appearance of these heroines in Chinese literature seems to have given voice to a certain social irony to scoff at the order of father and son, but it does not strike us as sagas of anti-feudal ethics or attempts to discard the yin-and-yang convention. Before the entire cultural commands of the father–son yin-and-yang rule lost their efficacy, the female generals who appeared on stages of storytellers’ art and drama continued to remain sexual objects in another form, objects of sexual observation and fantasy, especially in those narratives and genres of stage performance suitable for the lower culture category: being both actors on the stage and characters in the plotting, the female heroines are more plausibly within the sight and touch of a male audience. It follows that in the male—fathers-and-sons’/monarchs-and–ministers’— cultural and symbolic system, gender, especially the female gender, had long lost its original connotations. In essence, in the symbolic system of feudal literature, the initial meaning of gender in female images had been replaced (or at least partially replaced) by its social implications for women as a subordinate gender in male-centered society. In other words, what the female image signifies is no longer women’s authentic femaleness, either in its abstract or concrete sense, just as the fragrant grass in the poems has nothing to do with the vegetation in nature. Even though the female image originally denoted the female as a gender in the beginning, the gender-specific denotation was erased and furtively replaced. In its stead were objects of values that were handy to the ruling Subject and optionally disposable: inanimate objects, objects that were subject to men’s will and in tributary “status,” or objects that depended on others in the cultural ranking. It is in this sense that the female image becomes an “empty signifier” (to quote Laura Mulvey39 ), a void to be filled out by male-centered culture. Thereupon, what men adopted to refer to themselves and what they identified with were not the gender of women, but rather the feminine roles that feudal culture prescribed to women. This is a myth of identification, which demonstrates how women, as a signifier, had been compiled by males into the mythological lineage created for their own domination, whereas the genuine gender connotations of women, except for their 39 Laura Mulvey (1941–), a British feminist film theorist who coined the term “male gaze” in her groundbreaking 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

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image and the shell of the concept, had been sanitized from this myth. Woman were hushed and drowned in a sea of pre-symbolic and non-symbolic chaos. 1.1.5.3 Gender Integration The statement “men created signs” does not mean that under the equal conditions, the males, one of the two genders, first created signs, the system and the entire civilization out of nothing. Nor does it mean that men were more creative than women. On the contrary, it was out of their suppression, erasure, and deletion of women that men created “signs.” Probably the signs were invented only to erase something; hence this creation was not a neutral act, but rather, in the first place, a confrontational act on political level. In other words, rather than signs, men created ways and words to inexorably obliterate and delete women’s alienness from history, to invent a self-fulfilling and self-defending discourse to define women’s alien force, and to devise means and methods to contort and mutilate this alien force so as to subdue it into the system under their own control and rule. For this reason, such genderoriented and political confrontations have always laid deep in history, but they were just never openly acknowledged. In this context, literature actually acted as dreams in psychoanalysis. In literature, women are projected as the unconscious in the male system of symbols, which aims to cover up and bury them. The role of this symbolic system is to ease and explain confrontational conflicts in sexual, economic, political, and social realms in reality, bridge the rift zones, and finally integrate women into the father–son order, coherently and congruously, to achieve an integral discourse of false, at least symbolic, completeness. Such an integration, in narrative works, tends to constitute the endings of stories. For example, among those famous works about marriage and love, Peacocks Fly Southeast (Kongque Dongnan Fei)40 and Injustice to Dou E (Dou’e Yuan)41 both end with concocted finishes without concealing their illusory nature—a burial in the same hole for the couple and a snowfall in midsummer. However, even if Peacocks Fly Southeast furnishes the theme of love that consummates in deaths, it does not consummate with the death of Jiao Zhongqing’s wife alone. It takes the man, the person who promised to share the tomb with her, to put the seal on this love tragedy. The fate of the heroine does not measure up to a tragedy unless the man, Jiao Zhongqing, endorses her love with his own death. Imagine that if Jiao Zhongqing did not appreciate their connubiality or the strong bond between husband and wife, and didn’t “hang himself from the southeast branch,” then the heroine would die without just cause, and even might be accused of taking her own life in 40 The first known long epic in East Han period (A.D. 25–220), later adapted as a drama, about a couple, Jiao Zhongqing and his wife, Liu Lanzhi, who were forced to divorce by the feudal family and both committed suicide so as to be buried in the same tomb. 41

Or Dou E’s Tragedy, a famous drama by the great tragedian Guan Hanqing (1241?– 1340?), about widowed Dou E who is framed by a local thug and sentenced to death. The climax of the drama is a snowfall in June as symptomatic of the injustice.

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protest of the social order. Jiao Zhongqing is pivotal in the story to proving the heroine’s innocence and the value of her death. Without Jiao Zhongqing’s corresponding death as her “husband,” without their connubiality that had been filtered and acknowledged by the order, the heroine’s suicide could not have aroused people’s moral empathy, nor had any cathartic effect. So, Peacocks Fly Southeast is not to exalt a woman who rebels against feudal ritualism, but to extol a woman who, equipped with all the virtues defined by men, resists the abuse of the ritualism; what is commended is not only her unbending loyalty to her love but also her courage to die for her chastity. The beauty of the whole tragedy in Peacocks Fly Southeast lies in a crux that in fact dissembles a contradiction in gendered conflict: the heroine must be morally impeccable by the system’s standards, in the first place, and the narrative must unravel why the heroine would rather die than marry another man, which, nevertheless, dissimulates the reason why she does not have other options than the two alternatives. The death of Jiao Zhongqing’s wife is reminiscent of the deaths of many other tragic wives and concubines in ancient Chinese literature, such as Han Ping’s wife42 and Beauty Yu,43 who choose devotion and chastity over their own lives. One does so by wearing decayed clothing and jumping down a high rostrum, the other by putting a sword to her own throat to avoid being captured. Similarly, they choose death as a way to reach the culmination of their moral immaculacy. Truly, this option is meant to ward off the misfortunes brought to women if they lost their chastity and had to drag out an ignoble life, but after all, such endings of completeness or incompleteness, happiness or misfortune, have all been preordained and programmed by male society. The male narrative discourse arranged a mortal ending for the women from within the male order, such as Jiao Zhongqing’s wife, but for the women without, it cleared the decks for something new: a narrative that arranged for them to enter the order. For Cui Yingying,44 who was forsaken after having dallied with Zhang Sheng, death was no choice for a reason. For a female like her who had illicit sex and overstepped the rules of ritualism, death would not carry any male-approved value; her death would be meaningless. Since she has no right to die for love, her sentiment, unlike the matrimonial affection, is not sanctioned by the male order. Yingying’s tragedy lies in the fact that while she bravely and proactively defies normative rituals in a succession of nonconformist deeds, her ideal happiness still remains within the bounds of the order. If the order had not forgiven her faults, thereby integrating her, then her story might very well end up as a scandal of adultery. However, in 42 From a collection of folk stories, Searching Deities, Sou Shen Ji, also translated as Anecdotes about Spirits and Immortals, written by East Jin historian, Gan Bao (?–336). 43 Consort Yu, Yu Ji, loyal concubine to Xiang Yu (232 B.C.–202 B.C.), preeminent general leading the rebellion force to overthrow the Qin regime. 44

Protagonist from Story of Yingying from romantic tales by Yuan Zhen (779–831), later adapted to a popular play, West Chamber Romance, Xixiang Ji by Wang Shipu (circa 1250–1307).

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order to achieve normative completeness and emotional demands, it is best for Yingying’s destiny to be straightened out through marriage, by making her “someone else’s wife” after she is abandoned by her lover. “Initiating the female into the order” becomes an ending indispensable to ancient romance novels. Regardless of how many obstacles and impediments, in the end, all narratives must achieve narrative and ideological completeness. Through the analysis of these narrative works, it is not hard to see that malecentered society had already made a choice ahead of the decisions made by these fictious female characters. That is, the latter’s choices had been chosen by male society, only this had never been written ostensibly in ordinary narrative works. Though it is true that some writers had also written about such “insuppressible love” as she “could perish for her love, and even resurrect herself from death for love,”45 and it is also true that the “love” they wrote about could get over the natural law for life and death, however, all of them cannot but rely on a promissory note issued by the order for the love’s consummation and their stories’ completion, and their entire narration operated to cash in on this promissory note. When it ends in a marriage or a co-burial or a martyrdom or even a happy ending with Jack having Jill, the narrative aims to fulfill a sublime mission of acculturation: gender integration. It is a mission to bring women into the order that have turned the gendered slavery in reality to women’s sole ideal and source of happiness, the disfranchisement of women to a condescending grant of entry, and the exclusion of women from society to their integration; in a word, it is a mission to conceal the mandatory nature of this order so seamlessly that Cui Yingying and Jiao Zhongqing’s wife could advertently search out their own prefabricated slots in the system, and set themselves in them, in all likelihood, willingly and voluntarily. Whether in literature or in reality, women are given only two options, which are also the options in the paradigm of Hua Mulan. One option—the one she takes—is to put on the armor, march to the battlefield, and win merit and honor by fighting heroically and killing enemies. Dressed in men’s clothes, she insinuates herself into the male order by assuming a male role. In this vein, we can name twelve widows, including Mu Guiying, and a legion of women in modern history who fought bravely, risking their lives in military actions. China even saw empresses in history, as long as the male order was kept intact and they successfully passed as men or acted out male roles. The second option is to take off the armor, “put on my old skirt, wear my old dress, stay in my boudoir in wait for someone to make me his wife,” or become Cui Yingying, Huo Xiaoyu,46 or Zhong Qing’s wife, just like the female generals of the Yangs when they withdraw from the battlefields. This is the eternal fate for Chinese women (See Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese Women 47 ). Otherwise, 45

Line from Peony Pavilion, Mudan ting, by Tang Xianzu.

46

A princess reduced to a prostitute from Story of Huo Xiaoyu from Yuan Zhen’s romantic tales. Yuan Zhen (779–831), famous Tang official, poet and writer. 47

Kristeva, J. About Chinese Women, Urizen Books, 1977.

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apart from the two paths directed by others, women would be reduced to null, or to chaos, nameless and meaningless, without title or identity, unable to make sense of their own life and death. The grand and encompassing father–son order ran through the entire history of Chinese culture. This unified order resulted from the socialization, politicization, institutionalization, and symbolization of the differentiated gender roles that stemmed not only from men and women’s physiological differences, but also from the social lifestyles of the agrarian culture. Starting from the inception of matrimony and private ownership, the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity in sexual relations between men and women, with their matching dominant and subordinate roles in labor division formed around particular levels of productivity, was promoted as a model widely applicable to political rule, social hierarchy, etiquette and rituals, moral codes, behavioral norms and discourse, constituting an immense socio-cultural structure, as described in a Chinese saying, “The Skynet is sparse but not faulty.”48 In China’s more than two-thousand-year history, within its territory of more than nine million square kilometers, the majority of women were unable to break through the surface of history, except for their ad hoc appearances in their prescribed roles, in those disguised images, and speaking a preordained language. No one knows whether they remained alive and vital after taking off their armor, nor how they lived. If they did, they must have lived in a dark, secret, and voiceless world, in the blind spots of ancient Chinese history. It is conceivable that once a light is shed in this dark land, there must be a huge change to what history looks like in people’s eyes.

1.2

One Hundred Years: Where Have We Ended Up?

To women today, the glorious history of ancient China is only a “Father’s” history or a history of “Son inheriting Father’s authority.” This cycle of sons’ succession to fatherhood was not severed or interrupted until approximately one to two centuries ago, namely, the Opium War. The ensuing Revolution of 1911 and the May Fourth New Cultural Movement marked a unique era of patricide (shifu shidai) that was seen for the first time in Chinese history since the establishment of patriarchal order; it was the first era that did not implicate sons’ inheritance of fathers’ authority. After these two revolutions that bore different meanings to China, the patriarchal order that had ruled for two thousand years could no longer sustain itself in terms of its regime, its polity and its culture. At first, it was the monarch of the last dynastic regime, or the image of pater familias, Master of the House, that tumbled down from the throne of governance, and in its wake, the entire symbolic system upholding the patriarchy was subverted. The historical overturn made by these two movements in the name of patricide carried with it a gender group of women from 48 The proverb is also translated into the English proverb, God’s mill grinds slowly but surely, close in meaning.

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the dark depths of the socio-cultural structure. At this moment of historic shock, they surfaced from the deep sea of chaos and cultural unconscious and rose above the historical horizon. If we count one hundred years from the Revolution of 1911 and the May Fourth New Cultural Movement in the early twentieth century up to today, or the same length of time from the Opium War in which the patriarchal order started to be shaken at the bottom until the birth of the People’s Republic of China, it may not seem long enough to bring fundamental changes to the productive and reproductive foundations of the entire agrarian culture and feudal patriarchal order, but it did indeed stir the historical destiny of Chinese women. In a period as short as a century, Chinese women’s fate may have changed more drastically than that of any other social group. Within approximately two hundred years, they turned from slaves to masters of themselves, in legal terms, from objects to subjects, and from others’ “Other” to their own selves. Especially since the founding of New China, Chinese women, under the protection of laws, enjoy economic rights and a social status that women in developed countries are still fighting for. We know that contemporary Western feminism became the trend of the day only when the civilization of highly developed capitalism gradually outstripped the social division of labor based on people’s physiological differences and also disproved the conventional hypothesis that men and women were different in intelligence. Feminism availed itself of the essential conditions provided by the corresponding natural sciences and social sciences to gain ground. In China, nevertheless, gender equality appeared even before Chinese society entered industrial civilization. This is indeed the pride of Chinese women, or more precisely than that, the luck of Chinese women. However, this does not mean that women in China have not had problems since then. It should be noted that from its very beginning, women’s liberation in China was not a spontaneous movement preconditioned on Chinese women’s gender awakening. The issue of Chinese women’s equal status, at the outset, was raised by these prophetic thinkers in modern history, who gained the foresight from reflecting on the nation’s history, and later, it got legitimatized in the marriage laws stipulated by the government of new China. Between these two points, there had been nothing like a “women’s liberation movement” (nüxing jiefang yundong ) in a social sense, and every step forward that women took on the road to liberation was recognized at first and legitimized later. This makes it impossible for us to determine to what extent of autonomy and freedom, in terms of “liberation” ( jiefang ), Chinese women enjoy the benefits of equal citizenship, whether a woman is the “Subject” (zhuti) in her own liberation, and whether everything about her today is the rights she deserves or just the share as stated in her prescribed identity. Though these questions are unanswerable, there is still something worth questioning, to say the least, about the fate of Chinese women. Since modern times, people have unremittingly put forward important propositions concerning women’s liberation, such as women’s political and ethical status, marriage and

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family, their right to education and their economic rights, women’s code of conduct, including women’s foot-binding, etc. Today, these issues do not seem to constitute a “problem” anymore. Yet, those issues particular to women’s gendered life seem to have been ignored, or at least they have never been explicitly listed in the general propositions for women’s liberation, such as women’s various physiological and psychological experiences, including sexual behavior, pregnancy and motherhood, periodicity in a woman’s life, and so on. Although women have emerged on the historical horizon, some real problems about them have not even come into people’s sight and seem obscure and mysterious, as if they are supposed to remain so. As a result, it is impossible for us to tell whether the purpose and the end of the women’s liberation was “to liberate” an oppressed gender group, or whether it was just one of the steps to restore the original system based on the contrast between beneficiary and non-beneficiary. Therefore, although Chinese women of the twentieth century rose above the historical horizon and turned from slaves to citizens, and although nobody could remove their presence from modern historic records, as used to be done to ancient Chinese women who were deleted and left traceless in history, women’s situation, however, did not in any way become more transparent than before. With regard to this emerging gender, the few decades were not long enough to bring to light all the secrets and mysteries pertaining to women throughout history. Even women’s truths per se had got enmeshed with the new historical changes that had taken place since the earth-shaking modern times. Women may have entered history; they may have found their way out of the historical unconscious that stretched for two thousand years, but they did not completely force their way out of the political unconscious in the minds of some people and certain social groups. Therefore, to understand the condition of the new women (xin nüxing ), it takes more reflection and examination, if not about the whole modern Chinese history, then about modern political culture. 1.2.1

Women and National Subjectivity

In the two thousand years’ cycle of power between father and son, women had lived an ahistorical life. There had been wives, queens and concubines, bondwomen, and servant girls named in history, but there had been no such gender group as females. Yet from the time of Qiu Jin,49 China started to see the emergence of an assemblage of female social activists, female orators, female propagandists, female revolutionaries, and female soldiers who truly represented the trend of the new society. Unlike the heroines in peasant uprisings in 49 Qiu Jin (1875–1907) a woman revolutionary who joined the democratic revolution against the Qing government. She is regarded as the first modern feminist and mother of women’s liberation in China. She was captured and later executed by the Qing army in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, after the failure of the Anqing Uprising in 1907.

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earlier times, they broke away from the historic cycle of dynastic replacement that used to rotate within the feudal patriarchal order; they belonged to the newly born anti-feudal-order forces. In addition, since the first issue of China Women’s News (Zhongguo Nübao),50 China has had an array of journals established by women rebels. By the early twentieth century, China had also had the first batch of female overseas students, female scientists, female scholars, female writers and artists—female intellectuals in the modern sense, instead of ancient poetesses who were reputed merely for their literacy. All of them came forth around the May Fourth New Cultural Movement, which betokens that China, for the first time in history, irrefutably accepted women, other than “stooges” such as wives or bondwomen, and their behaviors into the new ideological sphere. Since then, a new concept of “female” (nüxing ), and the gender group of women it signifies, have entered the Chinese genealogy of concepts. If we do not regard “female” as a term that merely denotes biological sex of women, then it can be said that as a concept for a gender group, its primary connotations in real social life are defined by history. From the perspective of the May Fourth era, what females really imported had to be determined by distinguishing their gendered social roles and their relevance under the patriarchal order. In fact, what modern new women adopted to assert themselves was, at first, a series of denials: a woman is “not a plaything,” a woman is “not a tool to carry on the ancestral line,” a woman is “not a greenhouse flower in a vase,” and she is “not men’s accessory.” This series of denials, a string of differentiations, constituted the historical signification of the group called women. In other words, “female” meant reaction to and rebellion against long-standing male-centered social customs, men-serving gender roles, and the entire male ruling order. Her collective self, together with her gender-specific truths and the historical unconscious that had never been truly recognized, lay outside the system of rules, gender roles, and symbols of the patriarchal order. This, of course, does not suggest that members of the female collective ceased to become wives or mothers, but as a cultural concept, the term “female” hinged on women’s rejection of the male order and on the recognition of the unbridgeable disparity between women and their given socialized gender roles. Only in this way could a woman retain her femaleness and her capability of critiquing the patriarchal order and countering its interpretations of her self . It is no wonder that the Chinese women who had barely escaped the fate of foot-binding could find themselves intimately linked to Nora from Northern Europe. You may identify a similar feminist choice made by these females who were from thus dissimilar cultural backgrounds: their common choice to defy the high-handed male order, resist their alienated gender roles, and counter the definitions imposed on them.

50 Qiu Jin’s pioneering periodical for Chinese women, Zhongguo Nübao, a landmark for the beginning of women’s liberation in China, though it only had two issues in 1907.

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Here, the term “female” had got two meanings, or rather, two countermeanings. On the one hand, the term extracted a real social group from behind its given gender roles. On the other hand, in a historical sense, it included a counter-interpretative attribute to withstand the order of feudal patriarchy; the term per se was a product of countering interpretations. At the turn of the twentieth century, with the historical and cultural changes in China emerged the “female” vested with this dual meaning: it was not only a de facto gender group, but also a spiritual position; it referred not only to a social force but also to a cultural force. But above all, what is fundamental to it is that the females were historically fated to become de-constructors to all the autocratic orders that had ruled since the beginning of patriarchal society. Qiu Jin, the first female politician in modern Chinese history who made herself a sworn enemy of the feudal government and the first advocate of women’s liberation, was herself a nonconformist who forsook her nominal roles as a wife and a mother. Enlightened women writers, in this respect, regarded their female gender as a spiritual position, a position of never submitting themselves to the gender roles imposed by the male order on female individuals or the females as a group, an unequivocally anti-patriarchal-order, anti-alienation, and antimystification position. Such a position loomed through works such as “Ms. Sophia’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi riji), “Reflections on Women’s Day” (Sanbajie yougan), “In the Hospital” (Zai yiyuan zhong),51 also Tales of Hulan River (Hulan He Zhuan),52 and Ten Years of Marriage (Jiehun Shinian).53 Of course, it is also the selfsame position of Western feminism for its critical deconstruction of the entire male culture; such a position, sooner or later, will bring women’s truths and the truths of mankind to the world. It seems that, however, the appearance of the term “female” immediately disturbed the inner peace of Chinese people. Indeed, when the nation closed ranks to break free from the old father–son order, women shared the same interests and goals with the whole nation. But once the nation gradually settled in a new order, which in turn bore an obviously patriarchal bent, the female came to be excluded as the other again, because her interests deviated from those of the nation, and her liberation and her right to interpret, or counterinterpret, conflicted with the goals of the nation. As a consequence, she ended up where she used to be before her “liberation.” As a matter of fact, in 51

An important short story by Ding Ling (1904–1986), modern woman writer from Hunan Province. Ding Ling, pen name of Jiang Huiwen, with a courtesy name of Bingzhi, also writes in the pen names of Bin Zhi, Cong Xuan, etc.. She was one of the most celebrated female activists and authors in the Leftist League. She escaped from the prison of the Nationalist government (or the Kuomintang government, abbr. KMT) and went to Yan’an in1936, and she remained a devout communist till her death. See Chapter 9. 52

A semi-autographical novel by Xiao Hong, written in 1940 and published in installments by Sing Tao Daily, Xingdao Ribao, Hongkong. Xiao Hong (1911–1942), penname of Zhang Naiying, a gifted fiction writer from Harbin, Heilongjiang Province. Her numerous other pen names include Qiao Yin, Lingling, Tian Di, etc. See Chapter 13. 53 An autobiographical novel by Su Qing (1914–1982), published in instalments with a periodical in Shanghai, Talks of Winds and Rains, or Fengyu Tan, in 1943. See Chapter 15.

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the convergence and subsequent divergence of newly born women and timehonored nation, we can read a story of women. This story begins with the rise of women and ends with their fall; it begins with their hopeful and promising fight and ends in their defeat. To say the least, women retreated step by step from the stage center to the edge of the nation’s life, yet the further back they retreated, the better sense they made of men and of themselves. The “May Fourth,” the era during which feudal ethics and order got subverted, truly saw the birth of the Chinese “female.” The fervent antitraditional new culture nurtured a whole generation of young Chinese. In this context, many daughters, attracted by the banners of “humanitarianism” and “individual liberation,” bravely stepped out of their families, broke with their social roles, and strove to gain their freedom. Their denial of conventional gender norms was basically consistent with the patricide generation’s denial of feudal polity, feudal ethics, and even the feudal system of symbols. Their deviant behaviors and courage to pursue freedom were part and parcel of the social atmosphere of the entire new culture movement (xin wenhua yundong ). However, as the feudal order finally disintegrated at both levels of reality and ideology, unlike the new culture subjects who fell in “a battle array of nothing” (wuwu zhi zhen),54 the new women found themselves face-to-face with an increasingly standardized capitalist metropolitan market. Women in the 1930s found that the freedom they had just obtained in the previous stage was squeezed in the gaps between their two major roles in the new system: one as housewives in urban bourgeois families, and the other as commodities in a metropolitan market that commercialized feminine assets. In this sense, both “Ms. Sophia’s Diary” and “Mengke” (Ding Ling, 1927) sketch out the deeper conflict between the female self and her new gender roles in the postMay-Fourth society. This conflict even tore off the beautiful velvety cover of the love songs of the May Fourth period. However, it was also from the time when women pushed further ahead to resist the new gender roles assigned to them by the rising urban, capitalist culture that they gradually lost the shelter of the new dominant ideology. Her resistance to the male-centric urban order was not part of the dominant cultural trend that paraded with the mass under the banner of popularism, championing the mass in general, neither did it conform to the anti-feudal tradition of male masters who insisted on the pursuit of personal liberation. What was really left to the female was only her own self; she lost the attention that society had once directed at her. Her problems and resistance were no longer relished by society, and her voice of resistance was so weak as to be overwhelmed by the tide of the whole era, and, 54 Or “the array of nothingness,” quoted from Lu Xun’s prose, “Such a Fighter” in his early prose collection, Wild Grass (Yecao). As defined by Qian Liqun, a contemporary literary critic of Lu Xun from Peking University, it means a situation that someone “is clearly surrounded by hostile forces, but no clear enemy can be perceived. Of course, it is impossible to distinguish between friends and enemies, and no clear front line is formed; at any time, he encounters all kinds of “walls,” but they are “invisible”—this is ‘the array of nothing’” (Qian, Probing the Heart, Beijing, Peking University Press, 1997: 123).

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to a certain extent, suffocated by the mainstream culture. It was precisely this forsaken and helpless situation of women that transformed their reality and pursuit of future into a spiritual position. So, though Sophia lived and died quietly like a whisper in her life, her insight into and analysis of the so-called “feminine” women rang out as a critical stance that refused to compromise. This may also help us to understand Xiao Hong’s long-term reticence about her break-up with Xiao Jun, even to her friends, because for a woman who had time and again reneged on her given roles, it was hard to find a supporter among her friends, even those with whom she was allied by faith.55 Yet since her personal experience merged with her observation of history, she kept a lucid view of national history during the tough era of the anti-Japanese war. Such a spiritual standpoint, however, was bound to not only fall out of favor with the new dominant ideology, but also to clash with it. For instance, Ding Ling’s “Reflections on Women’s Day” and her later self-criticisms both manifest the incompatibility of the two diverse stances. This is why, during the anti-Japanese War period when the center of the mainstream new literature transferred to the KMT-controlled areas and the communist-liberated areas, we find, instead, in the Japanese occupied areas some fine works written about women’s experience and their mental world. It seems that in the liberated areas, especially after the founding of New China, women are no longer bothered by issues related to their gender roles. Various laws and policies to guarantee equal pay for equal work, selfdetermination in marriage, and equality between men and women have indeed reduced the extent of alienation between gender roles and women’s selves, and it is true that all sorts of rights that women have fought for in the previous stage are now legally guaranteed. There is a relation of non-differentiation between women and their roles. In such a system, women, together with their roles, unusually settle in a fair and just social mechanism. But there lies a problem: although women are no longer subordinate to men such as fathers, husbands, and sons, or to any specific person, “subordination” per se does not disappear. For in the seat of the Patriarch in the past, now sits not an individual from an ownership society but the incarnation of the collective—the nation. True, women are not subject to men anymore, but they, as well as men, are both subservient to this gender-neutral collective or symbolic Collective that reigns over all individuals. In the face of this colossal Collective, a woman is indeed not different from anyone else, and that is all she can be: there are no differences in social rank, nor in gender or in personality. Her economic, political, and personal autonomy and independence are all premised on her subordination and submission to the Collective, yet to obtain the independence and equality promised by this symbolic collective, she must pay the price of losing her selfhood –not only does she erase the differences between her self 55

Xiao Hong met Xiao Jun (1907–1988), a famous writer, in Harbin in 1932 when she was in deep despair, and started writing in the penname of Xiao Hong. They got married and divorced in 1938.

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and her social roles, but also individual differences. Thus, after all the discords, frictions, and even crashes in the historic progress of the nation, women’s history completed an ironical circuit that started with women’s resistance to men-prescribed gender roles and ended with their identification with their gender-neutral social roles. At this terminal, women must erase themselves in exchange for the promised equal rights. What happened to women’s gender identification and women’s spiritual position in the past one hundred years may partially explain the purpose of modern Chinese history. Since the Opium War, between the demise of the feudal society and the birth of a new country, all the achievements of our nation had not been made for the purpose of changing the nature of Chinese civilization. For instance, developing an industrial foundation on the basis of old industries, so as to make the transition from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization, was not intended to change the mode of production and lifestyle of most of our people; replacing the slash-and-burn farming method with mechanization did (not)56 change the earth-born and earth-bound georgic tradition of working at sunrise and retiring at sunset nor did it change the significant position this tradition held in the whole society. What the historical achievements of our modern history does change consists in their transforming the ruling social order, not only by abolishing the feudal monarchy, but also by turning the power-scrambling structure of rule, which was becoming increasingly unequal, exploitative and oppressive after the Opium War undermined the feudal dominance of the entire country, into a new unified public order that warrants equal rights to the people, a society without exploitation and class ranking. At last, after one to two centuries of turbulence and dissension, Chinese society is pulled together again around an authoritative center that is based on the overwhelming will of the preponderance of the people, in which every class group and those with different means of production must acquiesce. We may say that the May Fourth generation’s political aspirations to follow the “Russians’ Route” in a time of national crisis and social unrest have come to be realized, but in another sense, this new order, which is built in the maximal interest of the majority and on the grounds of equal rights and public ownership, is bound to (at least in significant measure) protect the Chinese national production mode, which, though having declined during the imperialist invasions, still provides adequate material resources to sustain the daily livelihood of hundreds of millions of people. Hence the Chinese “history of productivity and production relations,” which had been severed, or almost severed, since the Opium War, resumed its course under a better rationalized system. The new order in which people, who used to have no means with which to live in the turmoil of one to two centuries of modern times, finally get settled in such a finely categorized and arranged system, with such orderliness that everything has rules 56 There is an apparent error here in the Chinese text and the negative is added by the translator in the bracket.

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to follow, is only a power order under the unitary leadership that maintains equality and indiscrimination, i.e., indifference to differences. Leaving aside the differences between this and the utopia that the May Fourth pioneers were painfully obsessed with—the utopia of democracy, science, progress, and freedom of a prosperous and strengthened nation—a bigger problem is that the nascent order of rationalization that replaces the old system is still just an order that, like all orders, is liable to conceal its secrets: the true purpose of modern Chinese history and its inevitability. As a matter of fact, this unified order, in the realm of superstructure, not only concealed, or even wiped out, incongruity and diversity among various modes of production, even though these used to constitute the momentum to push human history forward, but also dabbed and daubed at the historical origin of the order itself—the particular inevitability of Chinese history. This is why the female’s existence stopped sharp at the moment when the nation gained a new political future: just as the nation attained the social stability it had dreamed for, so women obtained the equal rights they had craved, but neither they nor the nation gained the freedom or autonomy to which they had aspired—the right to discern truth, express diverse opinions, acknowledge oneself, and make sense of history, let alone the right of self-denial. 1.2.2

From “I am Myself” to “Women Have No Truth”

After two thousand years of benighted vassalage and submission, the “fathers’ daughters” of the May Fourth era broke away from family, with a solemn proclamation, “I am myself,” and embarked on a journey of personal growth from being objects, the Object, the non-subject, to being a Subject. This is a brave historical posture: as women started to use the reflexive pronoun, “myself,” to refer to themselves and to signify self-ownership, they set a gap between themselves and the era of “Wife is my equal” that cannot be measured by using temporal and spatial coordinates. For Chinese women, to establish the correlation between “I” and “myself” means to re-establish the correlation between female body and female will, the correlation between female physical and spiritual existence and its symbolic appellations, the correlation between women’s existence and men, as well as the correlation between women’s appellations and men, among other major issues. For one thing, women’s status as objects, the Object, the non-subjects, over the last two millennia, is evident not only in the split between female body and female will (granted that women had their will back then), but also in the split between women’s real existence and women’s symbolic appellations, the signifiers—the latter being the prerogative of male discourse. According to its strict protocol, women were even supposed to refer to themselves in the humble third person taking on the perspective of a male speaker, as if they were addressing something—the Object—as a man would do. Subject pronouns, such as “I,” “you,” and “he,” and the reflexive pronoun, “myself,” were men’s prerogative in speech acts, while women were forced by language

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to remain in a pre-subjective, pre-linguistic, and extralinguistic status in which no distinction could be drawn between the speaking Subject and the Object. For this reason, the succinct three-word sentence, “I am myself” was literally women’s challenge to the entire symbolic order and sign system. The moment when the subject pronoun, “I,” and the female existence were concatenated into one symbol is also the moment when a new discourse was born, one in which women like Zijun became Subjects57 ; this moment put an end to women’s two-thousand-year-long history of being commodities and objects, and commenced the stage in which women became Subjects. The woman standing behind “I” and “myself” not only rejected her past identity as an “object” by pronouncing her identity as a subject, but also, by dignifying herself as a speaker, she rejected the past role as the Other prescribed to her by male discourse. The emergence of the female in the symbolic system brought about great changes in the relationship between women and the whole society. The relationship between women and men was no longer a subject–object relationship, but rather an inter-subject relationship. As a matter of fact, it is at the time when the brave deeds of women like Zijun entered literature that two specified pronouns for the female third person, ta, and second person, ni, found their way into Chinese language.58 However, it is also in this symbolic system, in the symbolic order as described by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that the generative process of female subjectivity got inhibited. This is a tripartite inhibition arising from appellations of female I and myself in language, definitions, and interpretations of female I and myself in discourse, and the becoming of female I or myself in reality. The symbolic order that Zijuns entered did not provide any explanation or definition for them to distinguish themselves from other Subjects. What they faced was a void of meaning, a lack of signification. They could not even answer the questions: who is “I and myself,” and what is “I and myself”? Of course, there is the famous quote: “I am the same as you” (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House). But this is uttered only as a denial of her doll’s status, and it does not save her from her dilemma in the symbolic order of linguistic signs. If “I” and “myself” only signifies a Subject that is the same as a man, then what is lost is not only gender specificity, but also the entire history of women—the true meaning of women as women. It may very well be this quote that reveals the male gender of the author, viz., Ibsen. Historically viewed, “the same as 57 Zijun, the tragic protagonist of Lu Xun’s 1925 short story “Regret for the Past” (Shangshi), in his collection Wandering, Panghuang. Zijun becomes an iconic figure for liberated women in 1920’s who marries the man of her choice against her father’s will, but ends in tragedy when she finds herself trapped into the traditional role of a wife. Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün (1881–1936), pen name of Zhou Shuren, China’ greatest modern writer, essayist, thinker, and educator in early twentieth century and one of the foremost figures in the New Culture movement. His literature has set the anti-Confucianism trend in the twentieth century and helped shape the critique spirit to reflect on Chinese traditional culture. 58 她 and 妳 are two newly invented words for she(her) and you(feminine) with a feminine radical, 女, to them.

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a man” can only refer to a quasi-man, something like a man, because “man” is not a word shared by both sexes. Whether in Ibsen’s Europe or Lu Xun’s China, no concept or theory rendered it clear what “female” as a group was; women’s truth had never turned into a concept, into language. “Female” thus bumped into a weird logic here: on the one hand, a female, by definition, was not a doll, nor did she have to take the socially prescribed gender role, but meanwhile, she was not herself either, because the so-called “myself” only referred to someone “like a man,” a replica of a man. On the other hand, if a female denied to be the same as a man and admitted that she was just a woman, she would fall back on her old track of history, being only a wife or a feminine woman. Therefore, although Zijuns got themselves a name, it was a name without content, and only a close-circuit tautology could be formed between “I” and “myself,” like two mirrors facing each other, neither of which points to the real or open space of signification in the outside world. To fill this giant void is the critical and also the hardest step Chinese women have taken in their personal growth as Subject. It not only stands in the way of Zijun’s spiritual odyssey and accounts for the division between Sophia’s “feminine me” and the “I” that ridicules her feminine self, between the “I” of her body and the “I” of her mind, but also illustrates Bai Wei’s women “who have no truths” and Xiao Hong’s paradoxical perseverance and, at the same time, avoidance of her self ; it exhibits the plight that confronted all Chinese women in the modern period of the 1930’s and beyond. They named themselves, felt their own being, but failed to establish their own identity or elucidate themselves. They fell into the trap of the “sameness,” a metaphorical relationship among subjects of “I,” “You,” and “He,” or to put it differently, for all they knew about their difference from men, however, without her own discourse, she could not confer a name upon this “different” thing. They could not even find the vocabulary to describe it. Probably, even before they could find or create such a vocabulary or a concept or a theory, they got inundated again by torrents of others’ discourses or a discourse “like others’.” In a sense, the only truth about the emergence of women and women’s self-naming is not that they achieved equality with men, but that it exposed a structural deficiency in their growth as subjects. It consists in the process of demystifying women themselves, a process of unveiling women’s hidden experience, including their historical, psychological, and physical experience, from under the dabbing and daubing of others’ discourses or from a discursive void, and making it known to the world. If this step were left out, women might never be able to grow out of the mirror stage, the tautological mumble of “I” and “myself,” and truly step into the relational structure of “I,” “you,” and “he,” which is the final stage of completing women’s subjectivity. It is important to point out that the void manifest in the growth of female subjectivity not only concerns the females themselves, but also betrays a structural defect in the entire new culture (xin wenhua) throughout the modern history. It is not too surprising that the female did not find her way into knowledge or science, or find a vocabulary that was scientific enough to define

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her female “I.” To a certain extent, the entire new literature and the new culture that bred the generation of new women and the women writers had not yet developed so as to establish such a scientific system or vocabulary as to combat mystifications and seek after truths. This structural defect of the new culture was ubiquitous in many areas; you can find it in women’s problem as well as in the fate of Marxism and Darwin’s theory in China, which share something in common. For example, Marxism was first introduced and advocated in articles as early as the May Fourth era. Li Dazhao wrote the famous speeches, “Victory of the Common People” and “Victory of the Bolsheviks,” to extol the October Revolution in Russia.59 By the time of the Agrarian Revolutionary War,60 some people started to campaign under the slogan of “Proletarian Literature.” It is a consensus among many scholars now that the new culture is a movement navigated by Marxism. However, the most important components of Marxism as a science—its theory about modes of production, its analysis of the origin of private property and its analysis of capital as the key factor for capitalist mode of production, in addition to its dialectical ideas in contending with Hegel’s theory and its ideological theorems—in one word, all that makes Marxism a science in historical and realistic senses, were far less influential and less far-reaching in the Chinese ideological realm than the Marxism that teaches about social classes and class struggles. In other words, to marshal in the new culture movement, Marxism was not taken primarily as a conceptual system of knowledge, as a scientific worldview and methodology, or as a way of thinking and analysis. On the contrary, it entered Chinese ideology more as a theory of politics and a canon of moral values. This point is particularly conspicuous in literary criticism: from the 1930s to 1940s, to evaluate a literary work, the criterion of judgment was the idea of social class, instead of ideas about mode of production or ideology: a work would be acclaimed if it matched the canon, and denounced if not. Akin to what we encountered in women’s emancipation, we pragmatically availed ourselves of some ex parte conclusions drawn out of Marxism, but for other constituents of Marxism unconnected with ideological struggle of social classes—those knowledge and concepts that genuinely constitute the scientific part of Marxism—we tended to have them simplified, if not ignored, so that they were no longer knowledge or science to us. (Of course, this sounds inevitably biased considering the complexity of “combining Marxism with Chinese practice,” adapting Marxism to Chinese conditions.) For the case of Darwinism, which gained wide influence in China during the May Fourth period, it reshaped many 59 Li Dazhao (1889–1927), one of the leaders of the May the Fourth Movement and one of the founders of Communist Party of China, is respected as the greatest patriot and revolutionary. He was the first important intellectual to introduce Marxism and communism to China. He wrote the two speeches in 1917 after the victory of the Russian Revolution. He was captured and executed by the warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1927. 60

Also named the Second Civil Revolution between 1927 and 1937, for the armed rebellion led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) in rural areas against the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party) government.

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people’s understandings of historical progress and humanity itself. The evolutionist view had contributed to the ideological belief of a whole generation of Chinese in progress and development, and their certitude that “youth is superior to old age” and “youth will prevail over the hoary-headed” lighted them a path to rescue Old China. Leaving aside the different effects that Darwinism made on the issues of Western history and human beings (in the West, Darwin’s theory led to the disillusionment of purposeful history and human’s great dreams), the question was that few Chinese intellectuals followed the example of Darwin’s global scientific journeys to collect and extensively observe various biological specimens, to track down the origin of each of the phenomena from all sorts of cryptic, haphazard, and answerless documents, by studying and piecing together their natural habitats, so as to decode and make convincing diachronic explication of each chance cause. That is, few among Chinese intelligentsia took in and replicated his scientific inquiry to demystify myths and figments of imagination. Even with Lu Xun, the theory of evolution was just a conviction or an ideality he had faith in, not a scientific approach. Therefore, although his A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe)61 provides a panoptic picture of the diachronic development of fiction in China, the book shows a weak link in explicating the root causes of each and every phenomenon and interpreting their origins in the sense of a scientific research. Perhaps it is just because Darwinism had been taken in China as a faith for the benefit of its conclusions, rather than as a science by virtue of its methodology, that it suddenly retreated from the limelight after being criticized as a reactionary ideology conducive to social Darwinism. Like the woman problem, something about Darwin also fell between the cracks when people looked the other way. Modern Chinese history does not seem to make room for such an option as scientific and anti-mysticism culture. The new culture is more like a spinoff of political anxiety, or the projection of the nagging anxiety about national subjectivity, the deep anxiety towards the nation’s political future, that resulted from the fiasco in the Opium Wars and the crash of Eastern and Western cultures. In a certain sense, “female,” just like other terms—“humanity,” “individual liberation,” “democracy,” and “science”—became a symbolic bargaining chip that the new ideology used to alleviate the anxiety and stake its political aspirations on. Science, knowledge, humanity, and women had not even come into view or got clearly explained before they were shoved in the arsenal of modern Chinese ideology as its ammunition to attack the feudal order, and soon were dumped when the battle moved on to another field. It is also due to this anxiety over the nation’s political destiny as well as the exigency to alleviate the anxiety that the new culture that had merely taken shape after the Revolution of 1911 gained a secure foothold as a culture of ideology, instead of a culture of science, knowledge, 61

The first monograph about the history of Chinese fiction from mythology and legends of remote antiquity to condemning novels of late Qing dynasty. It was based on the lectures Lu Xun made in Peking University between 1921 and 1924.

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and technology. This happened fortuitously in conformity with the Chinese history of production pattern: what the modern mode of production changed in China was not its productivity, but only the ownership of production means. This alone suffices to account for the reason why the female was confined in her bi-mirrored den, with her path of self-naming blocked to arrive at the other bank of self-interpretation or counter-interpretation. Thereby, Zijun is reduced from a living woman to a dead woman, from one who rode the tides to one who was washed ashore, from the pride of “I am myself” to the pain of “A woman has no truth.” Of course, this series of structural defects in turn helped complete the new ideology. Without the choice of and emphasis made on certain part of Marxist theory and certain part of Darwin’s theory, the nation’s political future would not have been conceived and expounded; without the mystification of women, women’s liberation would not be as thorough as it seemed. 1.2.3

“The Sister Xianglin62 Series” and “The New Women”

The new culture promised women their right to speak, but women did not come by the words to speak; words failed them in the moment women opened their mouths, in the same way that the blurred memory failed them, though no one knew it better than women themselves that, regardless of whether it was put as lacking of references or absence of the signified, it all only pointed to the “void” in meaning. But before she learned to arduously modify others’ words and used them to talk about herself, something else thrusted in. For a number of reasons, many important female figures in modern Chinese literature history were created by male authors. This is not to say that there is something surprising about men’s literary rendering of women, but that many of the new concepts in Chinese about women are owed to male masters. For example, the conceptualization of traditional Chinese women is inseparable from Sister Xianglin, and that of the “May Fourth Women” is inseparable from Zijun. The image of new women during the First National Revolution63 came from Eclipse (Shi, Mao Dun, 1927), and the concept of women’s emancipation was derived from The White-haired Girl.64 Now that we have more or less learned how to identify these concepts as well as women’s stories in the new literature, what really counts is not to figure out whether these women indeed existed, but to discern the ideological motives behind these descriptions 62 Protagonist from Lu Xun’s masterpiece short story, “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” or “Blessing,” Zhufu, published in 1924. It is a tragedy of the twice-widowed woman who is destroyed by the cruel feudal society. 63

Also named the Great Revolution, da geming, or Nationalist Revolution between 1924–1927. 64 Protagonist of the eponymous five-act opera, The White-Haired Girl , Baimao Nü, based on a true story about a bereaved girl who escaped the clutches of a despotic landlord and lived in a cave for 17 years. It is a work of joint creation of He Jingzhi (1924–) and Ding Yi (1920–1998), premiered in Yan’an in 1945.

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and interpretations. Behind the women figures written by the male masters stands the new culture’s view on women, or in other words, stands an ideology about women. This ideology provides us an important frame of reference to understand the writing backgrounds of modern female writers. As far as the history of new literature goes, we can name most compelling examples of two categories in female images. The first is the Sister Xianglin series, the series of images of poor working-class women that starts with Xianglin the Sister-in-law and extends to the “slave mothers” and the “Whitehaired Girl”; the other is the “new woman” gallery that refers specifically to the image of women during the First National Revolution as delineated by Mao Dun65 and Jiang Guangci.66 In the early years of the new culture movement, with the anti-feudaltradition tide surged a host of female images, from under the pens of the pioneer authors, of poor wronged, humiliated, and damaged grassroot women: the poor and utterly helpless woman and children in “Snowy Night” (Xueye),67 the unfortunate girl who was married to a wooden memorial tablet in “The Virgin” (Zhennü),68 the old woman who leads a dog’s life and is traded as a cow in “One Life” (Yi sheng),69 and other wretched women in “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” “Tomorrow” (Mingtian),70 and “Yujun” (Yujun, Yang Zhensheng, 1924), and so on. It is no doubt that these images, for the first time in history, demonstrate the miserable situation of women being enslaved in life, and join the first rally against feudal ethics and patriarchy and the cries for women’s liberation in that era. However, from the point of view that the writers tried to spell out, the women characters in such works as “Snowy Night,” “One Life,” “The Virgin,” and “Yujun” are no more than case histories for historical anti-values: it is no surprise that “One Life” was originally entitled “Is This a Human Being?” Indeed, these novels were designed as not much more than an exercise of critical reading for readers to ask questions and then to answer themselves either affirmatively or negatively; 65 Mao Dun (1896–1981), penname of Shen Yanbing or Shen Dehong, eminent modern writer, revolutionary essayist, novelist, playwright, and prominent literary critic and social activist. He is regarded as the greatest realist novelist in modern China. 66 Jiang Guangci (1901–1931), a left-winger poet and novelist, one of the earliest CPC members. His novella “Des Sans-Culottes” (1927) is regarded as the earliest work of “Proletarian Literature.” 67 A 1919 short story by Wang Jingxi (1898–1968), modern physiological psychologist and a member of the Renaissance League. “Snowy Night” was published with the famous new culture periodical, New Tide, Xinchao. 68 A short story by Yang Zhensheng (1890–1956), modern educator, a member of the Renaissance League. 69

A 919 short story by Ye Shengtao or Ye Shaojun (1894–1988), the great educator, writer, publisher, and social activist. He was also the founder of the first literature study association in China, the Association for Literary Studies. 70

A short story by Lu Xun, published with New Tide in October, 1919. It narrates the story of Sister Shan Sisao, or No. 4 Sister-in-law of the Shan’s, who goes all out to save her dying son from death, only to be left alone morning over its death.

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for instance, you are supposed to ask a skein of questions, “Can you call this a human life?” or “Is this also called living?” before discovering the brutalities of the entire history and the inhumane nature of Old China. Obviously, the authors created these female characters not for the purpose of leaving you an unforgettable and thought-provoking image as those in the vein of aesthetic reading, but rather to corroborate the inhumanity of feudal society in history and the sins of the society by describing the women’s woes. The women’s numbness to their woes only sets off their infinite sufferings and the uncountable sins. In a certain sense, their flesh, soul, and life are just sacrifices placed on the altar of a tomb. The authors and the intended readers of the works converge in front of the dull and dumb sacrifices to veto and judge the historical evils. Comparatively speaking, we find exceptions in “The New Year’s Sacrifice” and “Tomorrow” that deal with the more complicated aspects of the female issue and somewhat show a sense of heaviness and guilt after Lu Xun discerned the sacrificial symbol in women. Just as Zijun falls a sacrifice to the new history, so Sister Xianglin is offered up as a sacrifice to the old history: her innocent female body bears a heavy load of sins of history. For the former, it is the sins that Juan Sheng deeply confesses, but as to who she is and what she has on her mind, he does not seem to care. To all the authors that Juan Sheng stands for, the gender of the “female them” is first and foremost just a vehicle to convey meanings. Then it is not surprising that this vehicle changed its meanings almost every ten years. If in the eyes of the condescending male writers of 1920s’ China, these miserable and yet benumbed working-class women are endowed with historical anti-values, then when it comes to the authors of 1930s who were inclined towards proletarian revolution, working women gained a value at an elevated angle of ideology. Ten years after publishing “One Life,” its author, Ye Shengtao, wrote “Night” (Ye, 1927) about another woman, who gets awakened by the wave of the Great Revolution. This story harbingered the first change that came around to the female image after the first decade: in the works of Rou Shi, “For the Slave Mother” (Wei nuli de muqin, 1930),71 Ai Qing’s “Dayanhe, My Wet-Nurse” (Dayan he, wo de baomu),72 and Wei Jinzhi’s “Nanny” (Naima),73 the trivial miseries of the mothers and women like Sister Shan Sisao transform into great sufferings, and thereupon, sacrifices become devotees. These women who toiled and moiled all their lives remind people of a maternal archetype, the image of Mother Earth who is altruistic, broad-hearted, lenient, and capable of bearing every blow of destiny. As such, the aphasiac female gained an extrinsic value that far surpassed her own gender; the value she represented was the ultimate spiritual and material cause rooted 71 Rou Shi (1902–1931), penname of Zhao Pingfu, a prominent left-wing writer and one of the Five Martyrs of the Left-Wing League executed by the KMT government. 72 A long poem by Ai Qing (1910–1996), penname of Jiang Zhenghan, a famous modern poet. Written in 1933. 73

A 1930 short story by Wei Jinzhi (1900–1972), a modern poet and writer.

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in the social revolution the emerging ideology set off: the poor underprivileged masses that afforded people a sense of security and hope they craved. At last, in the third decade of the new literature, another dramatic change took place, under the clear sky of the liberated area, to working-class women. All the implications that had arisen with Sister Xianglin, together with what was provoked out of the working people by land reform and other new policies in the liberated area, their resistance, added up to make it least fortuitous for the White-haired Girl to come on the scene. In the course of adapting the image of Xi’er,74 the shade of inertness and numbness in the bullet-biting Sister Xianglin and Sister Shan Sisao was diminished, while the working people’s idealized virtues, such as courage to fight against tyranny and injustice, perseverance and bravery in revenging the wrongs, etc., got increasingly magnified. When Xi’er finally appeared on stage, her image had turned from a humiliated mother to a virgin saint—she retained her female chastity with her antagonist rebellion, and therefore, she gained a greater faultless value for salvation. In the literary series from Sister Xianglin to the White-haired Girl, women turned from sacrificial offerings to devotees of inexhaustible dedication, and further on to objects of value worthy to be salvaged. They got salvaged, of course, but the “savior” was not of their own gender. It is indisputable that these works brought to light the painful lives of women, but what comes into question is that the conception of all these female images did not fulfill itself, but was to be fulfilled in by another subject outside the works, a subject such as the offeror of the sacrifice, or the beneficiary or receiver of Mother Earth’s devotion, or rather the rescuer of the rescued, etc. But whoever the subject was, he was surely of the dominant male gender. Here, women who had merely got a moiety of their deliverance did not have a chance to become Subjects before they were inadvertently abandoned and returned to make new Objects in the world of the new discourse. It is beyond question that the most striking female figures in the history of new literature are the “New Woman” series, such as Mao Dun’s series of famous women characters like Hui,75 Madam Gui, Sun Wuyang,76 Zhang Qiuliu,77 Mei Xingsu78 in his short stories from Wild Roses (Ye Qiangwei) and Eclipse and the novel Rainbow (Hong, 1929).79 The success of these images in the history of new literature is attributable to two points: in the first place, 74

The name of the White-haired Girl.

75

The disillusioned woman, who evolves from a conventional girl, from Mao Dun’s novella, “Disillusion,” Huanmie, collected in Eclipse. 76

AN iconic independent woman and revolutionary activist from Mao Dun’s novella, “Waverings,” Dongyao, collected in Eclipse. 77 A tragic and heroic woman from Mao Dun’s novella, “Pursuit,” Zhuiqiu, collected in Eclipse. 78 79

Heroine in Mao Dun’s Rainbow.

Mao Dun’s two novella collections and a novel published between 1927 and 1930: short story collections, Wild Roses and Eclipse, and the novel Rainbow.

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they are all individuals with distinctive spirit and personality; secondly, they are women with distinctive gender characteristics. In the history of new literature, we have never seen, before them, characters with such free-spirited and unrestrained personality, so persistent and detached at the same time, nor have we read about such sexy and alluring women. Both the points ostensibly show and tell the flights of fantasy on the part of the male author and the male in general. The descriptions of these female figures, as a rule, come from the mouth of a male character in fiction or are uttered from the male visual, auditory, or sensory perspective. (It must be added that it is an unconventional perspective of senses and has a Western penchant.) The male voyeur unabashedly judges her cuteness or hatefulness, attractiveness or horror in terms of the temptation or threat she invoked in him. Although this point of view has a hint of irony or a tone to that effect, because it manifests a speck of cowardice in men voyeurs themselves, its sole effect, for all intents or purposes, is to enhance the femininity of these female images. Another feminine feature of the new woman has much to do with her attitude towards sex. While surmounting the bondage of sex and sexual desire, she turns them into an experiment or an approach to her end. Zhang Qiuliu wants to salvage people by means of contributing her love and body, so as to gain a sense of accomplishment, while Sun Wuyang makes free use of her body in love games and working, and even Li Huiying80 and Madam Gui seduce men; likewise, Wang Manying in Jiang Guangci’s The Moon Cleaving the Clouds (Chongchu yunwei de yueliang ) also retaliates with her body.81 These women all share a common characteristic, that is, their ability to pilot, with calm ease, their feminine body through sex. Mao Dun was so versed in describing this feature of femininity that stories of such heroines are branded with his trademark, and his women characters often inspire awe in readers because of his art with words. However, after all, he only describes the tip of an iceberg, describing women from an external perspective. If we say the new women’s attitude towards sex is one of disconnecting sex and lust from their female being and emotions, then it is exactly the disconnection itself that was left unexplored and needed to be turned inside out. Under Mao Dun’s pen, you can find that his men respond to this disconnection with either fear or appreciation, but lose sight of the women’s split inner world itself. We will come to realize that this is just the primary difference between Mao Dun’s “new woman” and Ding Ling’s Sophia. There was something self-evident about the new women’s spiritual characteristics, to which Mao Dun also repeatedly alluded. Being the spiritual daughters of a thriving and progressive new class of bourgeoisie, who had 80 Female protagonist from Mao Dun’s short story “Color-Blind,” Semang, written in 1927. The authors’ note in the text. 81

Jiang Guangci’s novel, written in 1929, about a bourgeois student, Wang Manying, and her decadence in the ebbing tide of the Great Revolution and her redemption by a progressive-minded youth.

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outgrown their tender age of romance, an age susceptible to aborted attempts, and entered their maturity by learning to toughen their heart and sharpen their skeptical mind, their pride and ambition, their unscrupulous pursuit of ambition and sense of accomplishment, along with their naked desire and unfettered cynicism, set them apart, at a glance, as spiritual aliens to the cumbersome and wretched land of China. However, it is this kind of Julien Sorel’s characteristics82 in their spirituality that renders Eclipse a truly tragic dimension, though it looks like a farce. It is tragic because Mao Dun advisedly put in women such a spiritual character that is too flamboyant and too undisciplined to be tolerated by Chinese society, deliberately used the female images to personify the tragic elements of a vain slapstick revolution, and prepensely shaped the women as the proactive action-takers in the tragedies in his novels. For this, Mao Dun must have had his whys and wherefores. On the one hand, it is a choice that warrants a touching aesthetic effect. The female characters, not unlike colorful butterflies flittering and fluttering before a thunderstorm, decorate the desolate and grim era with their fearless and outrageous colors. On the other hand, if we keep in mind Mao Dun’s impulse to write Eclipse and his mood while writing it, we can find that such a chromatic butterfly is nothing short of a beautiful burial object with which Mao Dun meant to enter a spiritual age. She serves as a foil to contrast with the weak-kneed and the wretched, featuring something of the farcical era that could be appreciated, forgiven, lamented, and memorized. After the burial, Mao Dun moved on and stopped writing any other depressing work like Eclipse, but the spiritual characteristics of such female characters as Zhang Qiuliu and Sun Wuyang stay in that moment of “eclipse.” Even though they may reappear in corporeal form later in his other works, such as Zhao Huiming in Corrosion (Fushi),83 this time, however, the spiritual traits in Eclipse have disappeared without any trace. If we say Sister Xianglin bears the weight of all the infernal tribulations of feudal history and Zijun bears the lightness of an ideal that is too vulnerable, then the “new women image” is overloaded with ingredients of exotic heroism that shatter in the face of reality—the spiritual fragments of Julien, Eugene de Rastignac,84 Lucien Leuwen,85 or Picchulin.86 The old-time women written by Lu Xun are diagonally different from the new women written by Mao Dun, but they share something in common, that is, their relationship with their own 82 The ambitious egoist who tries to actualize his ambition by seducing wealthy women in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830). 83

Mao Dun’s 1941 novel set during the Anti-Japanese war that narrates in the diary of a woman spy, Zhao Huiming. Published in installments by Hongkong’s periodical, Public Life. 84

A poor college student from Balzac’s Le Père Goriot.

85

The eponymous character of Stendhal’s Lucien Leuwen, published posthumously in 1894. 86

The hero in Lermontov’s Hero of the Time.

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authors: they stand for the two spiritual funerals, not far from each other, for the Chinese male intellectuals. Sister Xianglin, dragging along her body bereft of life, is a sacrifice with which Lu Xun calls the malignity of the old order and the regressive old values to account and deplores them with profound sorrow and wrath in his heart. As for the new woman, damned to her spiritual mortality, she is a sacrificial object with which Mao Dun buried, not without agony in his heart, the ideals and beliefs of the bourgeois revolution. Through the female characters, both the authors completed the symbolic unloading of their spiritual encumbrances; the sacrifice or deaths of the women absolved the Subject or subjects from death, and of course thereby salvaged their own life. It is undeniable that these two types of female images do carry certain specific historical messages and even hallmarks of the era, but they are more inventions that crystallize the male authors’ views on the new woman than being an archetype of women of that era. Strictly speaking, in the early period of the new culture, due to the structural deficiency in the conceptualization of “female,” in default of the signified, the new woman, to a certain extent, served again as an empty signifier in the realm of the new male discourse, as it were. Certainly, her specific semantic meanings in the old feudal culture had been abandoned, but she was left in the old slot in the previous structure of discourse. She was still a non-referent or non-signified concept, so she remained a sheer container that something could be taken out of or put in according to the need of social concepts, ideological trends, cultural codes, or populous propensity in vogue. To put it mildly, the male masters were allegedly calling on women’s liberation and sizing up femininity with such a viewpoint on women that was projected from their masculine mind, but the viewpoint just circumvented women’s intrinsic essence and spiritual position. Of course, we have to admit that these two types of female images and their creators did not speak for the entire history of new literature, but they did represent the central and influential mainstream ideology—a new convention of discourse. In this ideology, all women could do was to wake up and rebel before going back to sleep or turning against themselves. Such a discourse that both woke women up and sent them back to sleep provided men a self-fulfilling ideological myth, but on the part of women, it could only lead to a split-up between her given self and her own self, if she persisted in the latter. In fact, from the moment when the series of issues, such as women’s emancipation, equal rights for men and women, family restructuring, women’s dignity, women’s rights and law, their chastity and social life, and so on, were raised to public contention, women had fallen into a mental trap, but also a discourse dilemma: these issues both were and were not gender-specific. At their verbatim face value, they pointed to women’s emancipation, having a distinct gender-specific orientation. In the historical context, however, they derived their meanings from the semantic register of “anti-tradition” that knit them together with other concerns of the

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time, such as “Smash the Confucian shop” (dadao kongjiadian),87 “science and democracy,” the call for vernacular Chinese writing (baihua wen), “labor primacy” (laogong shensheng ), “boycott of Japanese goods,” and freedom of love (lian’ai ziyou), etc. In the latter case, they were predominantly of ideological and historical relevance. For men, there was congruity in these two—gender and history—directions, because it was just for the historical aim of anti-feudalism that they brought up the woman issue. However, a woman could not possibly see the two on equal terms. In fact, as a consequence of the paradox, her issue became a compound of dual meanings: in light of the history-specific demands, women’s liberation was only a temporal issue of the time, for when people no longer regarded anti-tradition as a historical top priority, the woman problem would naturally be pushed aside with it; however, in light of its gender-specific pertinence, women’s emancipation is a perennial issue. It had not been solved with the abolition of the autocratic monarchy and ancient scripts, nor had it lost its significance because of the promulgation of the new marriage law in China. As the foci of ideological contentions shifted, the dual meanings of the compound started to drift apart and became increasingly divergent. Obviously, it would be a faux pas for her to find fault in the proletarian masses or the anti-Japanese war or the liberated bases to make her accusation of women enslavement. Neither was she assured whether the prospect of her liberation loomed among the masses that were ambivalent to gender, or in the communist bases, or during the anti-Japanese war. Gradually she lost her foothold in the mainstream social ideology, but meanwhile, being a female without clear referents, she could not detach herself from the fate of the whole society and that of the whole nation. She could not afford to give up the established language available to her, contaminated though it was by the history of male society, but the language did not help her express herself. The split-up in her mind and discourse marks the biggest difference between modern female writers and modern male writers. She was unable to write like a male master, on the solid grounds of an unsplit creative self and an accomplished and unified worldview and with the impetus of a monolithic discourse. She did not even have a toolkit of sheer discourses available to her. All the existing literary conventions, narrative models, and even descriptive formulas connoted the pith of masculinity; for instance, she found it hard to describe women in the Western style that Mao Dun wrote in. The point of view of female writers was split. The woman writer could not conceive of herself as an independent subjective observer. Never independent of the male subject, she was at most a semi-Subject, as it were. Her scope of vision was largely overshadowed by the mainstream male ideology, and the narrow span of her view beyond the overlapping purview seemed so insignificant as to be unworthy of mentioning or being mentioned, hence so far it 87

A rallying cry in the new culture movement for a thorough break with the Confucian tradition. The pioneers blamed Confucianism for its long influence on Chinese people’s mind as the cause of China’s all-round weakness and backwardness.

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had not gained enough attention from the society. However, if viewed from another perspective, it is precisely this partite view and the anxiety it caused, as well as her way of dealing with the anxiety, that made people have a sense of a unique centrifugal force that transcended or dissociated from the mainstream ideology. Unlike male writers, female writers tended to incorporate, aside from the influence of the mainstream ideology, certain non-mainstream and even anti-mainstream worldviews, feelings, and symbols that derived from women’s being itself in their creations. To borrow a phrase from Bakhtin, their works incorporate something of a dialogic discourse. This latter aspect probably engendered, and often actually conduced to, doubts about the mainstream conceptual system. At least, it provided a fresh angle of view and marked the starting point for us to deconstruct modern literary works and analyze their modern imagination and ideology today. Just as Ding Ling’s Sophia and Mengke and Lu Yin’s Zhang Qinzhu supply a reliable frame of reference to unravel the new women images created by male writers, so you will find in “The Field of Life and Death” (Shengsi chang, Xiao Hong, 1934), “Wife of another Man” (Shengren qi, Luo Shu, 1936), “Reflections on Women’s Day,” and Ten Years of Marriage an anti-mainstream frame of reference for descriptions of Chinese nationality, life of the masses and city life. At the same time, it may be reducible to the same perplexing plight that the woman issue, which had never gained any form of meta-language or any scientific form in the hands of female writers, aroused deeper attention and continued to be probed in the female authors’ imagination. Women’s situation you find in latter’s texts connotes even profounder meanings than what you can interpret from the legal provisions in a statute. To a writer who did not avoid her female identity, writing was not so much a “creation” as a “salvation,” a salvation of her “self” before it became “nil,” if not “nil” yet, and a salvation of female truths that had been inundated by “others’ words.” Female writing is not so much to employ canonical discourse as it is to adapt or rewrite the discourse; it is to remodify the ready-made language, ready-made concepts and ready-made narrative mode in order to find words suitable to women’s avail, instead of being normalized. The works of modern women writers have latent power to break up the ideological completeness or cohesion of the new literature. It is this power that gives us an opportunity to understand the imagination of this generation of women writers, the reality in their imagination, and the correlation between their imagination and the reality; all these have been kept covert and tacit so far. This is the charm of the women writers’ works, just as it is the purpose of our ensuing work.

PART I

(1917–1927)

CHAPTER 2

Ten Years of the “May Fourth” Era: A Floating Historical Stage

2.1 2.1.1

The Era of “Patricide”

Patricide—The Zero Point of Recalibrating History

The first generation of modern Chinese women authors—in the prevailing senses of “modern” and “author”—came forth, as their Destiny augured, during the commonly known “May Fourth Era” (1917–1927)—a period of “patricide” (shi fu) that China’s history had hardly ever seen. Since the turn of the twentieth century, a series of consequential events in China’s social and political terrains—the Revolution of 1911, the abdication of Emperor Xuantong,1 Zhang Xun’s restoration of monarchy,2 and Yuan Shikai’s3 imperial regime and its downfall—severed the chain of the father–son succession mode of rule that had hung on for two thousand years. The 1911 Revolution is called a “patricide” revolution because its purpose was not to depose an emperor or to throw a dynasty out on its ear, but to dismantle the patriarchal dominance underpinning feudal male-power society that conjoins the rule of Father, the rule of clan leader, and the rule of husband in one

1 Xuantong, regnal title for the last Emperor of the Qing dynasty, Puyi (1906–

1967). The six-year-old boy-emperor announced his abdication on February 12, 1912. 2 Zhang Xun (1854–1923), one the Beiyang warlords, led a coup in 1917 in order to restore the ex-Emperor Pu Yi to the throne. His restoration attempt failed when other warlords lay siege to Beijing, and he was forced to retire from the political stage. 3 Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), the most powerful leader to Qing’s Beiyang army, grabbed the presidency of the Republic of China in 1912, proclaimed himself to be emperor in 1915 and turned the Republic to Hong Xian Monarchy, but he died six months later. © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_2

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and the same icon. It also aimed to renounce the ancient ruling Father— the monarch and the entire feudal order itself. This is the standard by which we decide whether the 1911 Revolution eventually culminated in success or failure. The May Fourth New Culture Movement can be best understood as a 1911 revolution that took place in all spheres of Chinese culture and mindscape—a symbolic patricidal act of far-ranging radius and great consequence. The New Culture meant a great deal more than just a conflict of ideas between two generations or generations of fathers and sons, but rather, it stood for the emerging “Children’s” culture and its relentless rebellion against and repudiation of the convention of “Father idolatry” that lasted two thousand years. In the face of the advanced culture of “Mr. D” and “Mr. Sci,”4 in the face of the “must-win-the-old” youth and the “children of the future generations,” in the face of the progressive “humanity,” and in the face of articles and novels written in vernaculars of “peddlers and street vendors” and quotidian speeches of ordinary people that used to be considered “unworthy of writing,” Confucius, the Master of all Ages, along with his archaic adages and aphorisms, and Chinese ancestors’ great feats and exploits, together with their rules and norms that exhorted courtesy and righteousness, royalty and filial piety, celibacy and chastity, were all listed among the things to be “down with” and “wiped out.” Even the worthy descendants of the old school of “selected literature” (xuan xue)5 and the “Tong-cheng School” (tongcheng pai)6 writers were dismissed, without mercy, as “reprobates who conjure ghosts” (yaonie) or disseminators of “fallacies” (miuzhong ). These “fierce anti-traditionalistic” acts7 may not be systematic in their critique of the old culture, but it is quite clear that the tradition they were against was unmistakably that of the “father”-centered culture. Indeed, resonant in the essays from “Admonishing the Youth” (Jinggao qingnian)8 to “Today’s Slaughterers” (Xianzai de tushazhe),9 from “Commentaries

4

“Mr. D” and “Mr. Sci” are the popular epithets for Democracy and Science in the New Culture Movement in China. 5 Academic tradition of studying a literary anthology compiled by Xiao Tong (501–531) of Liang period (502–557), or Prince Zhao Ming, id est, Literary Anthology by Prince Zhao Ming (Zhaoming wenxuan) or The Annotated Literary Anthology by Xiao Tong. 6 A school of prose writers who advocated neo-Confucian philosophy and traditional writing, and named after the representatives from Tongcheng, Anhui. The school won its name around the mid-Qing dynasty and continued till the May-Fourth era. They were regarded as conservatives or “right-wing writers” in the new culture movement by the Left-Wing writers. 7 Quote from Lin Yüsheng’s 1980 monograph, Crisis of Chinese Consciousness : Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era—The authors’ note in text. 8 The editorial written by Chen Duxiu as the foreword to his influential monthly periodical The Youth Magazine, Qingnian zazhi, later named as La Jeunesse or The New Youth, Xin qingnian, on September 15, 1915. 9

Lu Xun’s article published in La Jeunesse in 1919.

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on Confucius ” (Kongzi pingyi)10 to “On the Clan System Being the Basis of Authoritarianism” (Jiazu zhidu wei zhuanzhizhuyi zhi genju lun),11 from “the problem of chastity”12 to “My View of Celibacy and Chastity” (Wo zhi jielieguan, Lu Xun, 1918), from the call to “rescue the children”13 to “How We Become Fathers Now” (Women xianzai zenme zuo fuqin, Lu Xun, 1919), from “Discussions on Literature Improvement” (Wenxue gailiang chuyi, Hu Shi, 1917) to “Literary Revolution” (Wenxue geming lun, Chen Duxiu, 1917) and “Human Literature” (Ren de wenxue)14 was the common aspiration of the New Culture pioneers to abandon the “imperial system” in the cultural field—the feudal “ideal Father,” who was not to be touched but towered above all fathers of flesh: his rituals, his ethics that were based on human ties, his moral norms and even his discourse—all the symbols for the patriarchal icon. Therefore, the heroes in the May Fourth era were a generation of unfilial sons (nizi). They comprise not just Sun Yat-sen15 the Regicide, Chen Duxiu16 the Black Sheep, or the unfilial Hu Shi or the rebellious Lu Xun and Li Dazhao, but also countless rebels, sons, and daughters who defied their families and stood up against the traditions and rituals of their fathers. From a broader perspective, the advent of this “patricide era” had its deep historical, cultural, and mass psychological roots. It stemmed from the split-up of the national subjectivity and a prevailing sense of identity crisis in the particular historical context. The one hundred years of modern time was an unprecedented era of China’s existential crisis of survival. For the first time in history, foreign guns and cannons and the overwhelming superiority of Western capitalist civilization posed a grave threat to Chinese people 10

Yi Baisha’s essay published in La Jeunesse in 1916.Yi Baisha (1886–1921), a pioneering thinker and writer in the New Culture Movement. 11

Essay by Wu Yu (1872–1949), published in La Jeunesse in 1917.

12

The topic to the essay, “Problem of Chastity” by Hu Shi (1891–1962), or Hu Shih, one of the leaders of the New Culture movement, famous educator, diplomat, and important advocate of classic Chinese language reform and proponent of “vernacular writing.” The essay was published in La Jeunesse in 1918. 13

A quote from Lu Xun’s famous short story, “Dairy of a Madman,” Kuangren riji, published in La Jeunesse in 1918. 14 Zhou Zuoren’s essay published in La Jeunesse in 1918. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) was an eminent essayist, literary theorist, critic, and translator in the New Culture Movement, brother of Lu Xun, regarded as the most accomplished prose writer in modern Chinese literature. 15 Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), or Sun Zhongshan, leader of the 1911 Revolution, founder of the Republic of China and father of modern China. He organized revolutionary actions to overthrow the Qing Empire and was elected as the first President of the Republic of China in 1912. 16 Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), one of the founders and leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), a proponent of communism and ideological emancipation and the founding editor of La Jeunesse, a magazine that played an initiative part in the New Culture Movement. His essays inspired the young students, which directly led to the May Fourth Movement that he played a commanding role in.

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and caught us in serious doubt about our own “planetizen-ship” (qiuji) and confusion about the deep-rooted bad habits and values inherent in our own nation-state. Since the Opium War, this identity crisis en masse had so tangled up with the profound existential crisis of national survival that they could not be unraveled overnight. Here was a series of unprecedented events that registered national shame and humiliation: the West’s arms, machines, and technology at first, and then the Western ideas, forced their way into China. This was a country that merely appeared strong to the outside world, but was unmistakably anemic and weak, a country that was structured in a grand unified social architecture with the emperor in the center, but in fact dissected and segmented by local warlords who tussled and scuffled with one another, while the people bled and suffered abysmally, and a country that only saw darkness and backwardness in its foreseeable future. Such a prospect was like a shattered mirror, into which the people, as a national group, looked only to piece together a strange and ugly self. Such an intercultural collision in modern times was more a clash between culture and culture, between self and self, than a battle with guns and knives. In the course of this confrontation, the image of the Great Old China, together with its own sui generis nationality, was kicked “from the center of the world to nowhere.” We may cite Lu Xun as an instance of the China, metaphorically speaking: he once had the experience of being seen as a “Sick Man of East Asia” (dongya bingfu) in the eyes of the “barbarian” Japanese, who used to be dismissed without regard by his ancestors. Leaving aside the crisis of national survival, such an experience surely led to a schizophrenic split of self-awareness within—one’s subjective image jarred with the portraiture by the so-called objective viewers. What is more, upon an imminent peril of a national demise, such a schizophrenic image became the source of Lu Xun’s excruciating anxiety and pain. It is plausible to argue that the imperialist powers, as invaders, not only broke into the great old land, formerly secure and unified, but also squeezed themselves, as the “Other” (tazhe), into the architecture of its national subjectivity that used to be selfcontained and self-fulfilled. Since then, “foreigners” and the “West” started to play a pivotal role in the construction of Chinese national subjectivity. They even partook in restructuring this subjective structure, which came to redefine what it meant to be “I in imagination” and “I in reality,” and what it meant to be “I the past” and “I the future.” References given by this “Other” actually provided the rebellious sons and daughters in modern Chinese history with a primary pretext to launch their “Kill the Father” crusade, that is, the accusation of the Father’s sins and wrongdoings. Whether the sins and wrongdoings fell into the feudal cultural order or the consecrated teachings of Confucius, they were all nailed down as the superintending principles of the superego or the compulsory norms of society in the old framework of national subjectivity, and, therefore, condemned as nothing but the cause of all ugliness, shames, and backwardness in the Chinese nationality. These “different” civilizations and “different” people not only vanquished Chinese people’s sense of national superiority, but also brought them around to question and disclaim the value

2

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of their own history. It is conceivable that for a nation that was struggling and vacillating between self-abasement and self-esteem, destruction and survival, its national Subject, in order to determine its own position and its future trajectory, was in dire need of conceiving a giant coordinate system to configure the centrifugal forces of the world. To address the need, the “Father’s sins” appeared in time. If this nation had been following a path with a sense of arrogance and blind optimism for thousands of years, but now came to its dead end and got cornered to be ridiculed and sliced up, then it is naturally the cultural and political Father, as the path leader and head of its social life, that was to take the unredeemable blame. Therefore, the act of patricide made the zero point on the historical axis of the coordinate system. Patricide was a choice that the national Subject made in mindscape and culture, and it was the only choice open to the nation deep in national crises; it also served to point to and thereby discharge the negative values of history that had heaped up on the minds of generations of Chinese. It seems that only by abjuring the whole lot of the old father-centered culture could we get rid of the ugly and shameful parts of our national experience, overcome the impending horror of death, and thus take a new path leading to survival and hope insofar as the people could imagine and realize. 2.1.2

Attraction and Deprivation

In perspective, however, the biggest achievement made in the May Fourth era seems to be only “determining positive values and negative values.” The short period of ten years was too short for the rebels and apostates (nizi erchen) to establish a culture of the “Children” that could be as accomplished as the culture of the “Father” in terms of its political order and economical system. It can also be said that without matching politic and economic footholds, this “Children” culture was easier imagined than actualized. These child antiheroes and rebels were even unable to establish any defense system that could withstand attempts to resurrect the old “father” culture that sought to stir in the dry bones and use the corpses to invoke dead souls. The new culture was so grand and magnificent, yet also so decidedly radical and half-formed. It consisted of appeals to the public as well as gross inherent deficiencies. On the one hand, this “patricide” era was fascinating because of the short interregnum of “no father rule.” The new culture that destroyed the old cultural empire but failed to establish a new cultural system, in a sense, was a culture without any dominant order and dominant discourse of its own. It featured a kind of polycentric “freedom,” but, inevitably, it appeared to be chaotic and disarrayed. Admittedly, in comparison with either the forgoing eras or the ensuing eras, the May Fourth culture had visions that were stunning both in scope and in spectrum: the new culture was an overwhelming sea of texts, with the influx of a motley variety of ideological doctrines, values and ideas, and many and manifold “languages” from the West of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among messages and information that were interwoven and overlapping in

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this sea of texts, one could find theories advocating individualism side by side with those advocating collectivism; Darwin, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Russell, and Dewey appeared together with Karl Marx; prospects opened up by the “French revolution” or the “Russian revolution” paralleled with those of “the German road”; and romanticism coexisted with realism and modernism. The new culture accommodated so many contradictory ideas, probably because there was no command center or dominant language or kingpin’s password behind it. Given the plural perspectives and multiple foci particular to it, the May Fourth Era, without any comparable precedent before or any likelihood of future replication, stands out as a period renowned for its unique openness and freedom. Nevertheless, the patricidal spirit of this “patricide” period had not yet outgrown its embryonic stage. This resulted in a structural defect in the new culture: during the May Fourth decade, the Father of the old rule had fallen before the father of the new rule had time to come forth. In this vacuum of power, all the cultural events that took place promised the moon to people: ideologies and a future of genuine peace, liberty, prosperity, and democracy, but they were too succinct to give people even a hint of how to realize them. The May Fourth New Culture pioneers were split in a passionate polemic about whether to take the path of the Russians or that of the Germans, only to end up with nothing but some emotionally driven options that did not even stand up to a modest analysis. The multitudinous descriptions they gave about the prospect of a prosperous and advanced country did not even have as credible a social form or as complete a theoretical framework as those of the utopians. By the same token, the patricidal move, under the banners of “Smash the Confucian Shop” and “Promote Vernacular Writing,” comprised certain cultural actions and speech acts that were much more emotionally charged than analytically cogent and, therefore, it was too untenable to constitute a new cultural system. Indeed, to put it bluntly, in the beginning when this fierce anti-traditionalistic tide rose, the concepts these disobedient children grasped to carry forward their enterprise of “killing the Father”—humanitarianism, science and democracy, freedom and equality, and individual liberation, etc.—were not much more than a “lip service.” At most, they were “calls to arms” (nahan), in the words of Lu Xun. For this generation and even several ensuing generations of recalcitrant children, nothing was more important than to speak up, in front of their ideological opponents, for themselves with a resolute rebellious attitude, but the “all in all” nitty–gritty of the “speaking” came secondary to their priority of speaking itself. Neither “humanity” (rendao) nor “science” nor “democracy” was visible or tangible to them. They were not yet a “field of research” or a “discipline.” What are humanity, science, and democracy? How can we fulfill humanity, harness science, and do justice to democracy? And can they be fulfilled, harnessed, or achieved? These seemingly simple questions had never been systematically addressed in popular readings in China, let alone defining the true meanings behind these concepts. The complete cultural architecture behind them was unlikely to be sufficiently outlined in Chen Duxiu’s mere hollers to “Mr. D” and “Mr. Sci,” neither

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could it be drafted in Zhou Zuoren’s “Human Literature.” Likewise, the May Fourth generation of rebels were incapable of elaborating the nature of the “father” they rallied to kill or explicating the karma of the “father” culture and the reasons why the “father’s culture” should be “annihilated.” Obviously, such a “children” culture was far from being fully developed: it lacked the theories to rationalize their effort to adhere to their patricidal stance, and also lack the immunity to forestall and resist the resurgence of all old ruling cultures. Such an era was the May Fourth decade, an era that arose from the exigency of the nation’s Troy-like crisis, and hence an era imbued with mixed public sentiments over the country’s survival or demise, grace or disgrace, and arduous ruminations about its past history and way ahead. But the era did not wake up people’s sober rationality to examine the jumbles that tangled China. It only brought legions of modern vocabulary into Chinese people’s horizons for the first time, but did not bring them around to comprehend these ideas. It gave prominence to key concepts such as humanitarianism, individual liberation, and science and democracy, but ignored the non-value, theoretical, and scientific connotations of the whole stock. True, it was an era of freedom and openness, but it was also riddled with many blind spots. As a consequence, its championing of freedom and openness mutated as time went on and specific historical circumstances changed until it came to naught even before its blind spots vanished. 2.1.3

Two Dead, One Mirror Image

Not unlike the concepts of humanitarianism, individual liberation, science and democracy, women were also one of the images that loomed in Chinese people’s horizons but were not necessarily really seen. The only difference is that the former were humanistic concepts, and the latter referred to a gender group. In this patricide era, in a time when Father’s rituals, Father’s family, and Father’s discourse were under attack and to be cast out, the woman problem was raised in this nick of time, if not out of necessity, then at least as a matter of course. It touched every raw nerve of patriarchal culture. Of course, it was owing to the howling and yelling of the male new culture pioneers that the woman problem could emerge as one of the first igniters to blast the edifice of Father’s culture. It is unimaginable that without the men rebels’ screams, the fate for women from Old China and the way out for new women of Young China could ever be put on the Chinese cultural timetable: whether the oldtime women, who had been bullied and abused, and the rebellious and brave new women, could be accepted as indispensable members of the civilization of China’s modern history or not. Needless to say, in the history of the new culture, except for the later communist base areas and liberated areas, women’s problem had never received as much attention from the whole society as in this era. What is more, if we say that it is the liberated areas and later the New China that guarantee women’s economic rights and personal emancipation on

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the legislative level, then it should also be admitted that the May Fourth era betokens an acme of women’s spiritual emancipation, or at least marks the measure of tolerance that the society showed to women’s liberty. It is not difficult to find such a hallmark in the works of the new culture pioneers, because they used to be spokespersons on behalf of women. But being spokespersons, they were prone to have their own missions and omissions. From the articles published in such periodicals as La Jeunesse (Xin Qingnian), New Tide (Xin Chao), and Morning News Supplement (Chenbao Fukan),17 we find that they argued against and repudiated nearly all the old norms and precepts that had been used to discipline women. They lamented women’s subhuman state of life and slave-like status in the Old China: her personal miseries and ignorance for lack of education, her sense of chastity and fealty in following the man she married, be he, in Chinese slang, “fowl or cur,” and even her small bound feet were all accused as proofs of the sins perpetrated by the decadent, benighted, and brutal old culture. This we have also learned in other novels depicting down-trodden women. However, the pioneers seemed to seldom unwrap and shake out the history in the eyes of such a woman, history as viewed from her internal point of view, nor did they examine where she clashed with society. They did not show much interest in her surreptitious inner experience, or maybe, they had never thought that a woman from Old China could possibly have another world under the surface of history and have her own right to history. Let us make a comparative study by stacking up these texts about the “Old China” women, written in the May Fourth period, against Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s Sister.”18 Though both seeking to reconstruct the history pertinent to women’s living conditions, Woolf focused on retelling how the cultural environment of seventeenthcentury Britain constrained women’s existence, while the male masters of letters in the May Fourth period were more concerned about the results of gender oppression, instead of the process. They tended to start by writing about a female being slain and “eaten,”19 and then go ahead to “do in” the environment that bred the “cannibalism,” in a narrative analogous to a detective story of tracking out a female corpse first, then setting about to hunt down the mastermind murderer, but never stopping to write the struggle between the woman victim and the murderer. They tracked down the murderer and 17 Besides Chen Duxiu’s La Jeunesse, other milestone journals for the New Culture include New Tide, a periodical by the first student union in Beijing University, led by Fu Sinian (1896–1950), et al., started in 1919 and Morning News Supplement , supplemented to Morning Bell Newspaper and Morning News in Beijing and launched in 1921. 18 An essay by the famous British modern woman writer (the Authors’ note in text), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), an extract from her 1929 book, A Room of One’s Own, about Shakespeare’s fictional sister. 19 The expression derives from the thematic metaphor of Lu Xun’s debut story, “Diary of a Mad Man,” a canonical text in modern Chinese literature. In it, Lu Xun exposes the cannibalistic nature of Chinese history and Confucianism in blotting out (eating of) individuality.

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put him on trial. This is their merit, of course, but the whole truth about the woman’s struggle was left in the depths of history and remained in the shadows below the level of people’s consciousness. In “Shakespeare’s Sister,” the heroine is a woman who gets resurrected from history in her text, while the female protagonists under the pen of the May Fourth male writers are by and large the dead in their texts: in a disproportionate number of the cases, their novels that feature work-class women end in their deaths. This antithesis between “resurrection” and “death” not only betrays the authors’ genders, but also manifests their distinct perspectives and their divergent purposes. One aims to analyze and reproduce history, while the other seeks to negate and judge history. To judge an era, it cannot be more cogent and provocative than adducing cases out of dead rolls. In this tradition of the May Fourth era, the Old China woman is an image that has been so pared down and abbreviated as to become a cliched motif: she must take the role of the “dead,” so that the authors could indict and judge the Father’s history over her body. It can even be said that only when she is deceased, sacrificed, and adduced as evidence in trials of “father’s sins” can she be bestowed meaning, referred to, and perceived. Because obviously, those who are not dead and are not wretched enough to testify against the old culture’s atrocities can hardly find their place in the culture of this era. Or instead, they would be disposed of as being complicit in the shell game of conventions for obeying the old morality. It is true, the new literature provided a place for such Old China women as Sister Xianglin. More likely than not, this inception would sooner or later be entered in the history of women’s liberation as a milestone event of cultural progress. However, what cannot be ignored is that it is only a place for the “dead.” Women’s role as the “dead” in new culture marks the boundary that women in the May Fourth era could hardly cross in their pilgrimage to spiritual emancipation and cultural liberation: for the women who had come to realize that they had been oppressed, the so-called “liberation” uncannily disjoined them from the secret world of their clandestine experience, and, on the whole, it dissevered the society that had set out to accept the idea of “equal rights for men and women” from the hidden history of females’ secret experiences. These secrets, which have resided in the depth of two thousand years’ history, remain hidden till today. Before long, another dead female character comes on the scene in the new literature, that is, Zijun in “Regret for the Past” (Shangshi).20 If we say that the death of Sister Xianglin points to women’s desperate existence in the old society, then the death of Zijun represents women’s spiritual desperations as conceived by the new culture pioneers. The path that Zijun walks down is precisely the route for women’s liberation they championed during the 20 Lu Xun’s 1925 short story. It is the translation of Ruth F. Weisse and other translations include “Passed Away” and “Lament over the Dead.” Zijun becomes Nora’s counterpart in China: she marries Juansheng against her parents’ will, only to find marriage another trap she falls in, without exit.

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May Fourth period: rebel against her father’s family and flee from it, pursue freedom of love, and marry the man of her own choice. But from there on, how far can the woman go? What can she do to get her further emancipation, so as not to tread the old path in her new shoes? These problems seem to go beyond the scope of vision of Juansheng, even beyond that of Lu Xun himself. In the tragedy of Zijun, one finds a paradigm about family that was widely accepted at the time: marriage was not only a “grave of love,” but also a “grave for women.” From today’s point of view, this paradigm has a symbolic significance inextricable from history. It tells us that in people’s mind at that time, women’s liberation went only so far as rebelling against fathers, pursuing free love, and having autonomous marriage. As for marriage, it was less a “woman’s grave” than the terminus of her quest for “liberation,” although people might argue about whether there should be any terminus whatsoever. The contribution Lu Xun makes in “Regret for the Past” is to pronounce, by dint of Zijun’s death, the boundary of thoughts or the limit of thinking for a whole generation of Chinese in the issue of women’s liberation (and human liberation henceforth). Therefore, the story of Zijun, as another dead female in the new literature, signposts the spiritual chasm between these “spokesmen” and the “women they speak for.” It is not hard to discern the relationship between Juansheng and Zijun to be one between a teacher and a student, a guide and a follower, strikingly similar to the relationship between the “May Fourth” new culture pioneers and women of the May Fourth period. Of course, Juansheng is not to be lumped together or confused with Lu Xun, but they are identical in one way: their identity as a mentor-like guide to the females in their life. Moreover, for all we know, they also share a despondent outlook for the future of women’s liberation. Therefore, we find “Regret for the Past” fraught with the rueful self-condemnation that Juansheng feels when he, as the guide, is unable to find the road that leads to a bright future for them both. His anguish is again aggravated and deepened by the pain of Zijun who shrivels, sinks low and retrogrades, and to top it off, by her death. At the same time, the excruciating pain, in turn, intensifies and accentuates his identity as the one behind the wheel in their gendered relationship of guide and the guided. Such a relationship epitomizes the self-image of these new culture pioneers in their relations between themselves and others, between themselves and women. In this context, we can better understand the advent of Zijun in literature, and her death in the end. In a sense, without the brave Zijun, it would be meaningless for Juansheng to act as the guide, whereas once Juansheng finds himself unable to lead on, Zijun is bound to collapse in spirit and damned to die; otherwise, such a liaison does not bear scrutiny in the narrative. Naturally, in the May Fourth era, the relationship between Juansheng and Zijun can be found not only in fiction, but also in real life, such as that of Lu Xun himself. But the crux lies in the fact that neither Juansheng nor Lu Xun finds it wrong to be the guide in the guide-versus-the-guided gender relationship. They cannot for their life imagine how to get along with a strong-hearted Zijun, an unfallen

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and not-dead Zijun, and a Zijun who is not there to be guided. The death of Zijun brought people around to see the destiny of the female social members like her in that particular context of the time, but at the same time, it also kept the historical gender group behind her out of people’s sight and out of their mind. If the two dead, Sister Xianglin and Zijun, make evident certain boundaries that women’s liberation then did not break through, then the other female character in the May Fourth literary world almost represents all the standard features of new women in the new culture. This is Nora of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Nora’s influence on new Chinese women in the May Fourth Movement is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be overemphasized. Whether in literature or in real life, we find that a new woman always took her first step to separate herself from old-time women by taking after the beau ideal in Nora’s spirit and in Nora’s way of thinking. She left the home of the father first and then that of the husband. Nora nearly stood for the “mirror stage” of this generation of women in China. In literature alone, we can find legions of women who follow her footsteps or are her dead ringers: Zijun determinedly leaves her uncle’s home, Xianxian leaves at long last (Mao Dun’s “Creation ,” Chuangzao, 1928), so do the heroines in Lu Yin’s “Man and Woman” (Nanren he nüren) and Hu Shi’s “Lifelong Event” (Zhongshen dashi)21 … The image of Nora virtually partook of the whole process of the May Fourth women evolving as Subjects. For all of that, nonetheless, the more decisive and profound impact Nora made in China was her influence on the finest minds of Chinese men, whose outlooks on women were also shaped by Nora. In the “May Fourth” decade, Nora was nearly the only archetype for them to size up women and think about their way out. Awakened women in their mind had Nora’s awakened individuality that refused to be a doll of the house. What they imagined women should pursue was Nora’s pursuit to behave like a “man,” and the women’s liberation as they conceived was also that of Nora who seeks to break the chains that bind her. Ergo, they also assume the plight of Chinese women to be Nora’s dilemma, one of not knowing what to do after she steps out of the door. Undoubtedly, it was a giant step forward in the revolution concerning views on women, but ultimately this epoch-making step stopped abruptly in front of Nora, or Ibsen himself: it ended as an abstract concept of gender equality, that is, “women are the same human beings as men.” As mentioned above, whether in the fiction or the play, neither Zijun nor Nora has ever been given license to speak about the historical particularity of her gender, nor is their image invested with any content of spiritual stances particular to being female. As a result, when Lu Xun incisively pointed out that Nora has no way to go after leaving her family under those social circumstances, for all intents and purposes, he actually ignored and precluded, too, the possibility of 21 A play by Hu Shi, publicized in La Jeunesse in 1919. This is one of the earliest modern stage plays written in Western style.

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redeeming the spiritual selfhood of the females as a gender group. In his eyes, Zijun’s departure from her uncle’s house is her betrayal of the old order, but her departure from Juansheng’s home could only be regarded as a dropout’s regression or fogeyism. This is because in the May Fourth culture pioneers’ and Ibsen’s judgment, between “fogeyism” and catching up with the time and “behaving like men,” there could be no third avenue for women’s spirit. If we say that it is a stark reality that after Nora walks out, she has no choice other than becoming a prostitute or coming back home, then, for the rebellious Zijun, her dilemma of choosing between “coming back home” and “shriveling in spirit” suggests the limitations of the ideology of new culture. It is easy to judge whether Zijun drops behind the times or not. But what is hard to see is the deeper meanings of the word “female”: femaleness, as well as its structural potentials and critical positioning in literature, never crossed the threshold to enter the context of the new culture. As far as the concept of femaleness is concerned, the new culture pioneers never ventured beyond the territory charted by Ibsen, and the beau ideal woman he proposed, in terms of her spiritual stance, was less a female than a non-male who has just escaped from the status of plaything. Nevertheless, “female” (nuxing ) was not just a word, not just a reference to a gender group, but a gender group per se that, for the first time in China, entered the social discourse after the overthrow of the cultural authority of patriarchy. Would she be able to find the discrepancy between her own life and being and the literal meanings of the word, and squarely address it? Would she be able to redeem herself, or rather, just see her spirit withering in the blight? Such questions are only to be answered in the writings of female writers. At this point we can only expect the advent of such an epoch: while male masters from China and abroad took the lead and set the keynote tone for women’s liberation in China, out of tune as it might be, it gave voice to the will of the female and demarcated the ideological mise en scène for female writers to emerge out of obscurity in the May Fourth Movement. In the howl and cry of anti-traditionalist rebels, these women writers suddenly opened their eyes and looked out to a magnificent vista in the foggy distance. On the road leading to that prospect, they saw two corpses of their own gender, one of Sister Xianglin and the other of Zijun. Unquestionably, the deceased marked out penalty zones in people’s perceptions. While women of Old China were placed as sacrifices on the altar, their hidden experience remained perplexingly cryptic even for these female writers. Not only that, Zijun’s mental plight thrusts such a reality in their face that they could not shut their eyes to it, because they, just like Zijun, had also trodden down the track of rebelling and walking out in pursuit of love, yet only to find themselves still forlorn and economically dependent. Therefore, they found it extremely hard to open up a mindscape, independent of the male masters’ narratives, within the extent of Old China women’s experience; they also found it prohibitively difficult to produce any conclusion, in the issue of Zijun and Nora’s way out, that could reach beyond

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those given by male masters. Even worse than that, they found it nearly impossible to get their mind across to society. If you wanted to tell your story, and if you wanted to survive the strife, being a female writer, you had to explore the uncharted and get your gendered voice heard in such subjects as humanity, life, affection and love, marriage and family, individuality, etc., though they were only remotely related to women. These subjects were broad enough to allow these women authors, while writing and disembosoming their secrets in their own loosely structured and asystematic style and with vocabulary of the time, to mesh with needs of the nation and the times. Hence, the women writers in the May Fourth Movement laid their own groundwork in the gaps and the loose terrain of the culture by carefully steering away from anything that had been established as a system.

2.2 From Daughters to Women---An Overview of Women Writers in the May Fourth Movement 2.2.1

“Father’s Daughters”

Unlike the woman revolutionary Qiu Jin who, dressed as man, determinedly abandoned her family and joined military revolts, the women writers in the May Fourth period were a far cry from the Qiu Jins. They came on the scene in the image of “daughters of a time” when the old extended along with the new in all aspects. If we call the May Fourth period a cultural era of “killing the Father,” then the female writers, such as the hapless Lu Yin22 and Bai Wei23 and the daring Feng Yuanjun,24 were the “daughters” who stood shoulder to shoulder with the unfilial sons—a generation of “father’s daughters” who were just as disrespectful and incorrigible as the sons. If we refer to the May Fourth era as the herald of “a young China” (shaonian zhongguo),25 then authors like

22 Lu Yin (1898–1934), penname of Huang Shuyi, important woman writer in early twentieth century from Fujian Province. Her penname means Lushan Mount hidden behind fog and mist. See Chapter 4. 23 Bai Wei (1893–1987), penname of Huang Zhang, important woman writer in 1940s from Hunan Province. See Chapter 12. 24 Feng Yuanjun or Yuanjun (1900–1974) important woman writer in early twentieth century from a prestigious family of famous scholars of Henan Province. She published some works in the name of Ms. Gan. See Chapter 5. 25 Liang Qichao (1873–1929) great reformist politician, educator, and writer of late Qing period and the most articulate exponent of democracy. He wrote the famous essay “Ode to the Young China” in 1900, which is regarded as the first pronouncement of a republican country in the modern sense in China.

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Bing Xin,26 Ling Shuhua,27 and Chen Hengzhe,28 who had studied abroad, were the first group of female descendants born out of the womb of the new spirit and the new culture. For these May Fourth women writers, their youthful girlhood coincided with the great changes introduced by the New Culture Movement. Many of them were in their adolescence, studying at schools; they would find themselves never so sensitive and dynamic as they were then, and never show so much audacity and disobedience as they did then, striving to climb out of the mud of convention and contemplating the future of society and their own destinies. The vigorous patricidal spirit of the May Fourth new culture happened to be in sync with an age of puberty, both psychologically and physiologically, of these young women intellectuals. They grew into a cohort of “women rebels” who stood side by side with male rebels and apostates (nizi erchen). The immense cultural mutations inevitably turned their individual experience as daughters into the collective experience of a whole generation of Antigones—the accomplices of male rebels against authority. It is the complicity whereby their group experience got reinforced and complicated, extending and expanding, and they turned their own youth, personal though it was to each individual, into the most lustrous youth that was shared by a whole generation of young Chinese. In fact, such a daughter, traitorous to her father and ungrateful to her mother, was called the Spiritual Daughter of the new culture, virtually a latent common self-image identifiable in the writings of most May Fourth women writers. Although with different female writers, this image appears in either an overt or covert way and stays either long or briefly in their texts, such a figure is the firstling with an unequivocal female gender in the writings of the May Fourth female writers and becomes a common mark of the time. Generally speaking, all important works by the May Fourth women writers tend to have a daughter protagonist, or to put it in another way, such a character was what they were best at and what they felt impelled to write in spite of themselves. In the work of those writers who were uncannily identical to their characters, it can even be said that the author, the narrator, and the character were simply the triple incarnation of the same rebellious daughter. Examples of such resemblance include the heroines in Feng Yuanjun’s work who are prone to sway between the love of their lovers and the love of their mothers. She wrote like this most likely because Feng was deeply conscious of her own unwillingness to forsake her identity as a daughter. Another case in point is Lu Yin’s novella, “Seaside Friends” (Haibin guren), in which the characters 26 Bing Xin (1900–1999), pen name of Xie Wanying, eminent woman writer of the twentieth century from Fujian Province. See Chapter 6. 27 Ling Shuhua (1900–1990), renowned woman writer and painter from Beijing, who later migrated to London. See Chapter 7. 28

Chen Hengzhe (1890–1976), woman writer in early twentieth century from Hunan Province. Chen Hengzhe was the first returned scholar and historian from the United States and the first woman professor in Peking University.

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are mostly halfway through their journey from daughterhood to womanhood. They find themselves unable to play on the role of “good” daughters in their parents’ home, but recusants as they are, they are full of anxiety about the future they are pursuing and fighting for.29 The same is true of the young girls in Ling Shuhua’s novels, who grow up in old-fashioned families and have their first encounter with new social environment, and the loving daughter in Bing Xin’s work who is dedicated to taking care of each member of the family. These characters, regardless of their identical or unidentical relation to their authors, comprise the daughters’ odyssey after all. The self-images of the women writers, together with their heroines from various social backgrounds, consist of the multitudinous “daughters’ stories” of this era: the daughters’ anti-tradition love under the pressure of interdicting convention, battles between their ideals in heart and pressures from outside, the Catch-22 plights that the daughters face when they grow mature—the difficult choices they have to make among the alternative prospects as well as the stonewalls they have to detour around when there is no prospect in sight—the conflicts between the daughters and their parents as well as links of the kin and kind, their reflections on and apprehensions for their future life and destiny, and also their aspirations, worries and fears in all the respects. Some of the daughters turn their back on their families and defy the will of their parents in order to seek love or independence, but at the same time, they must bear the cross of guilt to their parents and families. Some others, on the contrary, have never been exposed to new ideas and can only watch their youth wearing away in the closed-up world under the strict norms of conventional education and disciplines of old-style family, and still others, born with a maiden’s heart given to puzzles and perplexities, have to groan under the pressure of being caught between the conflicting old and new cultures. With such a brand-new posture as daughters commenced the tradition of modern women writers in China. The first Confucian tenet of feudal patriarchy for women that these female writers aimed to recant was that of obedience to Father before marriage. They put it on trial in a court of Daughters that judged it in terms of daughters’ feelings and daughter’s discourse, and modified the old provisions that history made for women’s behaviors from birth till death. Being rebellious and emancipated daughters themselves, the female writers took the first step to carve out a new destiny for Chinese women in writing. It is undoubted that without the practice of these rebellious daughters, there would not possibly be a collection of female writers as mature as those in the modern Chinese literary world. However, we should not overlook the limitations of the modern Chinese women’s literature in its “daughterhood.” They manifest in two ways. Firstly, in the May Fourth era, the rebellious daughter appeared in one swoop with the binary opposites of feudal parent and anti-patriarchy son, but of course, 29 Lu Yin’s 1921 novella, also translated as “Lovers by the Seaside” and “Old Acquaintances by the Sea.”

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also owing to the binary, she only gained her cultural value in this particular context. Once this father–son opposition retreated from the center of the ideological arena (which became increasingly obvious in the late May Fourth period), the daughter’s relevant meanings were also liable to dissipate: the dominant ideology would not retain such a position for her. In this light, “Daughter” did not seem to be an independent Subject, but rather a projection of the rebellious Son (nizi) as his Other. Secondly, daughterhood is not a fully self-sufficient concept, nor a fully self-sustaining stage of life. As a concept, it cannot stand alone from the definitions of parents. Indeed, these daughters rebelled against their fathers and resisted their requirements on issues of beliefs and values, but psychologically, it was very likely they were still very much attached to their parents—if they were not attached to their parents per se, they were surely attached to their daughterhood, to say the least, of being protected and not having to grapple with the world on their own. This may help us better understand the female writers who first rose above the surface of history by riding the tides of the time. Why did they indulge so much in characters with a maiden’s heart? Because, to them, daughterhood seemed to be a safe haven where a woman never had to pick and choose among puzzling options, nor to take actions, and thereby did not have to take the brunt of consequences or lose anything. It was also where she could evade the giant shadows that were cast by social history and also rose from her own heart, and dodge the strange world that had never been experienced by any person of her gender before. Hence the writings of female writers in the May Fourth Movement basically did not trespass on areas outside the scope of daughterhood. The rebellion they wrote was only that of daughters. They did not have adequate psychological preparation or cultural accretion, even the courage, to say goodbye to their childhood. It is for these two reasons that the creations of the May Fourth women writers tend to feature what such a stage of life earmarked by the word “daughterhood” suggests: exuding youth, full of sound and fury, immersed in fantasy, noted for fragility, naivety, and superficiality, not yet mellowed with the worldly-wise and determined look of adults. It is not until nearly a decade after the inception of the New Culture Movement that this generation of daughters seemed to grow into their womanhood. It is quite a surprise to readers that the “daughters” in Ding Ling’s “Mengke” and “Ms. Sophia’s Diary” stop having parents. For the first time, they display a sharp insight into the filthy world from the point of view of the female gender. Sophia’s ironical self-satire—“I am nothing more than a feminine woman”— marks her critical transition from daughterhood to womanhood. She not only grows into a “woman,” but also distinguishes herself as “Woman,” an identity that society confers on the female. For the first time, the daughters came to possess the liberal heart of the new women. This emancipated heart was no longer laden with shadows of history as when they were being Father’s daughters, neither was it just a counterfeit mimicry of the male rebels.

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Modeling the Mother

In the May Fourth era noted for unfilialness and disobedience, rebellious as they were, women writers of the era often thematically sang the praises of “mother.” In their writings, there was a vein of mother–daughter bond that was never seen before and would hardly be seen after them. In spite of their endeavors to seek freedom and oppose feudalism, Feng Yuanjun’s bold and rebellious heroines are compulsively obsessed with the only boundless love, i.e., maternal love, and their failure to resolutely reject their arranged marriages, at least in one case, is also attributable to their main concern for their mothers. Even more so is the case of Bing Xin, with whom “mother” is a consistent theme. Many people today still remember that famous verse of hers: “When the rain falls in my heart, Mum, I will take shelter in your bosom.” Even Lu Yin, a daughter who was denounced by her mother and whose actions were every bit as contrary to her mother’s will and wants as they could be, still kept thinking about how not to let her mother down, even when she was thousands of miles away from her. In the era, the relationship between mother and daughter formed a sharp contrast with that between father and son. For the latter, standing opposite to each other across the historical void, father oppressed, and son rebelled. That opposition between father and son is unequivocal as a literary vein, whether in male or female writers’ works. It is either hinted, as in such works as “A Madman’s Diary,” or depicted as in “That Man Alone Languishes” (Siren du qiaocui, Bing Xin, 1919). As for the emotional bond between mother and daughter, the reverse is true in the female writers’ hearts: their historical association never gets in the way of their mutual affection, but rather plays a pivotal role in conciliating conflicts in their ways of thinking. They share such a close emotional bond that no third party can intrude upon it: the image of father tends to be absent in such texts, and even sexual love cannot alienate them from each other. It is undeniable that this mother–daughter bond and maternal love were drawn upon some figment of imagination of these daughters: in their texts, mothers, lacking individual character, are rather a conceptual existence, and their maternal love is also depicted in abstract and sweeping terms. But, because of this, it is even more worthy to delve into why they should allow themselves to fantasize and appreciate Mother in such a manner. From one side, their emphasis on the mother–daughter bond may be due to the fact that Mother represents the underprivileged in history. Out of their repulsion at the callous and tyrannic patriarchal feudal order, daughters tended to turn to their suffering but loving Mother for moral support. From the other side, since those daughters were not independent enough to establish themselves in society, not yet a gendered Subject, they resorted to Mother in the hope of supplementing their own inadequacy. For the May Fourth sons, the father–son opposition was indispensable as an integral part of their full court press of becoming the Subject. Compared with feudal scholarofficials who took Patriarch and Emperor as their role model, the May Fourth

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generation distinguished themselves by keeping themselves at daggers drawn against their biological and cultural fathers—for those new culture Subjects, those unfilial sons, the position for the ideal Father had already been occupied by some spirit from the Western culture. “Father,” no matter what kind of father he was, had a structural relevance to Son’s growth into a complete man as Subject. But it was not that plain and simple with the case of the May Fourth daughters. Whether in a traditional or modern sense, the “Father” at the bull’s eye was a Parent of unfilial sons’ same gender, whereas unfilial daughters found nobody in that position for a Parent of their own gender, a female parent who would be all important for their growth of their gender Subjectivity, neither an ideal Mother to identify with, nor a Mother to despise. They seemed to have come from nowhere, and the antagonism between father and son over feudalism and anti-feudalism, history and anti-history didn’t apply to them. They, the female gender, had virtually no history at all as a group. History is only his-story, the story of Father, but not her-story, the story of Mother. Patriarchal mother was less a mother than the incarnation of Father’s will; stripped of this connotation, “mother” would be reduced to a mere void reference. Also, Daughter was only a daughter of her father, and her deed of patricide couldn’t necessarily turn her into a woman, or the female Subject. Therefore, her eulogy of maternal love and the close but cumbersome mother– daughter bond revealed instead a sense of deprivation in the heart of those disobedient daughters, the deprivation of an ideal mother and the deprivation of historical tradition and experience for their gender. There was a structural void that they could not fill in their growth towards womanhood as gendered subjects. Probably this is why they were only Daughters. Induced by these intrinsic and extrinsic factors, these disobedient and freedom-seeking daughters wrote, to a certain extent, as an attempt to find, create, or resurrect a mother—a mother of their ideal. In their writings, Mother tends to have many faces, sometimes being the incarnation of patriarchal will, sometimes the weak woman in history who has had a lifetime of suffering and needs sheltering, some other times the caregiver in their childhood and also a protector who has an infinite and unconditional love towards daughters. Mother’s image hence consists of such new concepts as values, affection, frailty, and love. Through their writings, women writers of the May Fourth completed the conceptualization of Mother and did so simultaneously following two different routes. One was the objectification of Mother, whereby Mother was depicted as an aged, careworn, frail, and suffering woman, upon whom father’s will was imposed and who in turn had to enforce it on her daughter despite herself. Therefore, she was not to be condemned. The mother–daughter bond resuscitated and extended, in the symbolic sense, the virtually broken historical experience of women as a gender group. The other one was the idealization of Mother, by which she was portrayed as a loving and tolerant mother of a broad heart, who toiled and moiled for her children and understood every thought in their mind and upon whom daughters could always depend for solace. This elevation from

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the objectified mother to the idealized mother rekindled the daughter’s sense of security traceable to her childhood that was provided by her mother, and also an unconscious experience of being the symbiotic one with mother. Therefore, this Mother and her maternal love were resuscitated not as a specific literary or real-life image, but rather as a symbolic female Parent, as a parent stripped of patriarchal will, as the counterpart of the biologicalnational father. And this symbol was created not for the purpose of rebelling against patriarchy, but in order to replenish the structural deficiency in the rebel daughters’ cultural orientation in an era when history was turned upside down, and it was also invented to fill up the void in their gendered Subjectivity. In the process of differentiating themselves from the same-sex parent in either conflicts or conversations, the daughters would be able to orient themselves and establish their gendered identity by tracking out their own historical, experiential, and subjective origins. In this sense, both Mother and mother– daughter bond were indispensable for women to establish their own tradition: they were a major premise for modern Chinese female writers to embark on their trek from being daughters to being women. 2.2.3

Love—A Discourse of Non-aggression

Love was another common theme that all women writers of the May Fourth era touched upon and it was a faith in which they all believed. Just as male masters were bent on pursuing societal and national ideals—a utopia of political society, so women writers sought after love—a utopia of affection. Love, as a theme of the age, first emanated from the writings of women writers, in which love was more often depicted, in comparison with those of male writers, as tender and broad love for the world, love between friends, maternal love, love between lovers, sympathy, and compassion, and even love for all things in nature. It is hard to say whether this is an intrinsic trait special to women, or just owing to some specific cultural background: for example, whether it is women who are born more sentimental, or just the particular history and society that made them so. Since it is impossible to verify the former, the latter calls for further exploration. Analyzed from historical and cultural angles, women’s susceptibility to love has something to do with their situations in history and the entire culture. The May Fourth intellectuals, in essence, were different from scholar-officials in the dynastic history of China who were inherently in complicity with feudal society, but they had one deep solicitude in common: their vantage point and ideological stance to make commitment to societal and political reforms and national education were the vantage point and approach that only the historically stronger adopted to administer a country. This is where the May Fourth intellectuals seem to be a constant variant in this scholar-official tradition. Regardless of their convergence or divergence, this tradition is a course taken for granted as reserved for men. Women, as the historically weaker, stood no chance of participating in politics during feudal

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times (even if they had the chance, it was unlikely to make any change to the patriarchal society itself; they were only there standing in men’s political positions while holding a rubber stamp of a female face; they were not there to change any of the built-in mechanisms). So situated were the modern female intellectuals in the May Fourth era, especially those under age. Of course, they might have gained more rights and more chances to express their political opinions and their concerns over national affairs, people’s livelihood and prospects for society, and they could even claim to be rebels, just like disobedient sons, challenging feudalist patriarchy and order. But once stepping out of the specific context of the father–son opposition and facing themselves, they would find the so-called “woman” was only an appellation, from of old, for the enslaved, the dominated—a name for the weaker. As individuals, they could choose to abjure their gender so as to play the roles historically belonging to men, such as joining army or going into politics. But as a gender group, they knew little about what they could be other than being the weaker, and they knew approximately nothing about what they could do, except for standing against tyranny. During the May Fourth era, women seemed to be still in the stage of being-in-itself, rather than that of being-for-itself. You cannot tell whether they were fully conscious of their existence as a gender group, let alone knew how to bear themselves as their own masters in history. The historical mutations of the May Fourth era, however, did render women conscious of their social identity as the weaker, if not of their gendered identity, because the binary opposition of master and slave, oppressor and the oppressed, the stronger and the weaker was so naturally inlaid in people’s mind and texts that they were subconsciously acquainted with the binary opposition between men and women in subtext. Like all the other underprivileged in history, they were apt to accept a benign faith or philosophy that better acknowledged the interests of the underprivileged, in a hope that they might equip themselves with the said faith or philosophy to withstand or lessen or harness or even neutralize the impact of the aggressive authoritarian stronger. Therefore, amidst the influx of foreign ideas and thoughts that surged in China, women writers first benefitted from a mixture of notions about love from Christian culture and Tagore’s philosophy of love. These notions gradually evolved into a philosophy and belief system for the weaker gender—a faith of women’s own. It served to undercut the aggressive male authority, and, at the same time, to accommodate themselves with it in a certain form. In Bing Xin’ works, love is a security code to decipher the world, which is bound to re-encode male history and male world. Sure enough, in a literary world thus encoded, we see an enclave that is, though not totally feminine, distinctly nonmale, in which the one sitting in the governing chair is neither a patriarch nor a patricide, but an icon of innocence, nature, and maternity, the uncrowned Queen of the world—love. Feng Yuanjun eulogized maternal love in her works and excluded fatherly images from it, by which she virtually emasculated the father or the male and knocked the bottom out of his dominance in her text. Since the battle cry for “gender equality” in the May Fourth period had not

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fundamentally changed women’s social conditions and historical functions (its final success was to depend upon further development of productivity and modes of production of the whole society), it is no wonder that women took on the philosophical belief of love as a means to do justice to their own existence, in the same way as Christianity was a religion for the underprivileged to keep the privileged at bay. In this sense, love should not be taken purely as a sheer emotion or a literary motif; it was rather a budding culture of compassion and anti-aggression for the underprivileged. It was supposed to provide a cultural basis to justify the existence of the weaker and the dominated, naturally including women. This is one of the reasons why the love motif could have fascinated women writers even before their awakenment to their gender consciousness, and also why such a generic term as “love” could have gained its historical significance at the time and rolled into one with the disobedient children’s anti-feudalism struggles. With its philosophical overtone and its power to castrate male culture, the cultural function of the thematic love outstrips its implication of mere “tenderness.” It would be a mistake if one confused it with the ancient Chinese concept of yin, the feminine, as opposed to yang , the masculine, and the theme of love is also poles apart from the “love” in feminine cultures that scholar-officials had secularized. The latter implied women’s meekness and submissiveness, which was reflected in their sentiments of grievances and resentment as the subordinated. Love in this sense rather reinforced women’s dependency than castrated the ruling Confucian tradition of its values. But in comparison, the women writers’ love, feminine and tender as it was, virtually advanced a new ideal to challenge the existing and underlying cultural dominators, or rather, any unhuman feudalist values. In this respect, it made a latent contrast with the domineering stance taken by traditional scholar-officials. All of this was not so much a contribution made by women writers as a colossal change that took place in cultural structures of the May Fourth Movement. 2.2.4

A Contradiction Between Experience and Discourse

Needless to say, the works of the May Fourth women writers, including many important works, are apparently naive and rough in art. This is not so much due to their immature writing skills. It is more accurate to say that the language available to the female writers tended to drift away from and even conflict with their own experience. The slogans for gender equality, individual liberation and humanitarianism in the anti-feudalism campaign of a patricidal era, maybe superficial and halfbaked, did spin off to embolden female writers to try writing about their own lives and feelings. At the same time, due to their limited life experience and narrow living spheres, most of their writings could hardly reach beyond their own experiences and the lives of the people they found around them. Therefore, to express themselves and people of their own gender—what they had gone through and deliberated on—was the repeated motivation behind

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the writings of many female writers. Among them, Feng Yuanjun and Lu Yin could not resist divulging and retelling their own stories, but weren’t Chen Hengzhe, Bing Xin, and Ling Shuhua also given to producing protagonists who are predominantly as young as themselves and of their own kind? However, this motivation to write about themselves and characters of their own gender obviously was not viable enough to turn their experience into texts, or to find access into texts at all. On its way to texts, their experience seemed to have been catalyzed or processed in some way. As a result, in the texts, what you read more often than not is all kinds of deliberations about or discussions of various abstract ideas. To our regret, we find that their texts, inundated with generic catchwords and a gender-neutral vocabulary of the times, such as “love,” “meaning of life,” “friendship,” “sacred love,” and “contradiction between sense and sensibility,” nearly drowned out the experiences that should have been the prerogative of female writers, or uniquely female experiences, and thereby dropped their uniqueness and singularity. You can often discern a dilemma in the writings of the May Fourth women writers: women’s experiences seek to be textualized on the one hand, but on the other, as soon as they enter texts, they disappear in texts. Therefore, although the characters of Lu Yin bear strong resemblance to herself, she had never brought herself around to write an autobiography in its literal sense. Nor did she manage to write about the mother–daughter Electra complex in her life that resulted from her mother’s contempt towards her, or the whole story of her unruly romantic love and the social pressures she had to endure. She seemed to always try to “hide the true things” (even the plot that may give away the truth is also “hidden”), and instead, she brandished her pen to describe the internal anxieties caused by the “things”—her conceptualized belief in life as well as her perplexations about the way out. Likewise, in the case of Bing Xin and her works, if we pick one sentence to summarize her interconnection with her characters, it can only be her own famous line: the “rain in my heart” is hidden and hidden “in the mother’s bosom.” Feng Yuanjun was indeed bold, so to speak, in her writing. In her “Journey” (Lüxing) and “Separation” (Gejue), she was candid in writing frankly about the anti-Confucianist conducts of the young men and women and their travels, but at bottom, what she evinces in the stories is not about the characters involved in these conducts or plots, but about the concepts or roles they epitomize. The conflict between her love for the lover and her love for her mother does not serve as the mise en scene for her specific and unique experience, but rather as a concept splayed out in front of readers.30 Only in the aspect that the characters in texts are guilelessly identical to their authors in the real world would the female writers make better use of the existing non-personal, abstract, and general concepts and vocabulary (literary forms) to verbalize the subtle and unique gendered experience implicit in their personal experiences. But in this process, however, most of them were unable 30

See Chapter 5.

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to fine tune the generalized non-specific discourse, nor could they adapt it to their unique experience by making fundamentally centrifugal modifications, changes that deviated from the dominant discourse. In most cases, on the contrary, they chose to get a parasitic presence in the dominant discourse of the time at the expense of their own experience. Indeed, in the new cultural corpus, except for a spectrum of generic terms for “humanity,” such as romance, sense and sensibility, love, loyalty, nature, etc., there was not such a thing as a ready-made female tradition, no female point of view or literary paradigms built on female stance (This involved other artistic skills such as plot design and narrative.) to their avail. Yet what they needed for women’s unique feelings, experiences and thoughts was a sui generis discourse of language. As a result, the May Fourth women writers found themselves nearly stuck between challenges from the vocabulary of the times and from their own experiences. The former pointed to a universalized collective discourse, above and without exception, at one end, while the latter pointed to an individualized, special discourse, taking kindly to exceptions to the rule, at the other. For the writings of the May Fourth women writers, the two axes of adverse directions could never meet to make a consistent ideographic coordinate system, but at the same time, their writings were inseparable from either of the binary sources. Their choices and the results of their endeavors are thought-provoking: they chose to use the generalized concepts to explicate those incidents that should have been particular to women and have far-reaching implications for women. For instance, they used the conflict between affection and ambition or conflict between the love of lover and the love of mother as a way to expound their anxieties caused by the irreconcilability between individual desire and social responsibility and between individual will and social taboo. They accounted for the special significance of daughterhood to themselves by borrowing phrases for worldly love and childlike innocence; they even strove to suppress their own dubiety about the prevailing ideas by probing the abstract meanings of life. From this point of view, their crude and naive works may not be simply attributed to their lack of experience (undoubtedly, even their existing experience had not really entered the sphere of literary expression). Needless to say, what they really wanted was their language preparation and discourse consciousness that could suffice for their experiential expression. Indeed, searching in the corpus of the times that idolized icons of sanctified love, dream lover, and integral humanity, it was not easy to find what they needed, whether it was to look for a plot centrifugal to the traditional mega-narrative or centrifugal details or themes to deliver their special female experience, or to engraft their experience on the prevailing discourse without forfeiting its uniqueness. It was even more so for the May Fourth women writers, who just came into the world with their first cries, like newborn babies, and were not in the least degree equipped with the psychological maturity of adults and discursive consciousness. Hence since they had been trying to express themselves in the words of others, in the convoluted and incoherent narratives of the female writers lurked a sense of deep “anxiety of expression” (nevertheless,

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they never proceeded to reflect upon the anxiety). The harder the writers tried to merge their personal experiences into the lexical system of the times, the more anxious they became. In this respect, Feng Yuanjun and Lu Yin are the classic cases in point. If they had chosen to stay in the marginal territory of feminine experience, they might have been able to retain more information of their gendered experience in their works, but undoubtedly, they would also fail to force their way into the mainstream of the new culture. For the May Fourth women writers, this writing dilemma was only the first scene of a sequence of dilemmas they were destined to as a group in the history of modern literature. In the context of these dilemmas, they strove to carve out a female tradition of their own, though, of course, this could only be an unmature tradition of the “daughters’.” But we can discern clearer themes unique to women’s lives in the periphery of the prevailing language system of the times. Compared with the more provocative themes, such as love and motherhood, they tended to be more distinctively gender-specific, but at the same time, lesser in their depth and breadth in mental and cultural spheres. These sporadic themes might appear to be merely equivocal phenomena, yet they served as an introductory phase that brought the issue to people’s attention. 2.2.5

Writing Women

Chen Hengzhe was not only the first female writer that came forth in the May Fourth new literature, but also the first author who introduced the theme of women intellectuals’ love-versus-career contradiction. Her short story “Louise’s Problem” in Little Raindrop (Xiao yudian)31 displays the double pressures of love and career on a female via the story of an educated foreign woman. She finally chooses to dedicate her life to her career and decline the marriage proposal of her beloved one, willing to keep a lifelong friendship with him. This story is a rough jade, but after all, it raises the problem faced by a highbrow female. The likes of the story include Ling Shuhua’s “Qi Xia” and “Little Liu” (Xiaoliu),32 etc. In a sense, Ling Shuhua may be an exception to the group of the May Fourth women writers. She was less restrained by the daughters’ frame of mind in the era, and her style of writing often cut deeper into the issues. In “Qi Xia,” she writes about a married woman who has a gifted musical talent. After five years of the housebound life as a wife, she suddenly realizes she feels degraded in spirit. She has a long-term battle with herself over her love for her husband and her yearning for her career. In the end, she resolutely opts for walking out to do more for society: she leaves her beloved husband behind and picks up her musical career. She would rather give up her snug family life and stay single as a primary school music instructor. Although this story has a shadow of Nora in 31 The only short story collection by Chen Hengzhe, published in 1928, includes the topical short stories, “Little Raindrop” and “Louise’s Problem,” Luyisi de wenti. 32

Collected in Ling Shuhua’s short story collection, Women, nüren, published in 1930.

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it, its focus has shifted to the contradiction among love, family, and career. The other short story of hers, “Little Liu,” narrates a story about family’s bondage on an educated woman’s spirit, which is rather an about-face to the former. Little Liu used to be a young vigorous female student, but after a few years of marriage, she becomes a stodgy housewife who is dragged by her children and lives a dull colorless life. The introduction of these themes is obviously related to the experience of the educated females in the May Fourth era. They were a band of well-read women who had received a new-style Western education, and the Western education was a unique problem particular to them. It is discernible from these works that they believed that family, even if it was a nuclear family instead of the extended traditional family, was still a bondage on their female souls. Time-consuming housework and wives’ duties conflicted with their aspiration to make contribution to society at large. At the same time, the run-of-themill family life might also lead to the deprivation of their spiritual pursuits. The works demonstrate the fear these new women felt towards a scenario of returning to the subordinate status of old-time women. They had come to realize that there was a wide discrepancy between their ambitions and the roles society arranged for the new women, and it was so wide that they had to choose between them. Out of their fear of sliding back to their old destiny, they would rather choose to give up their domestic happiness. We cannot say that they had deeply probed this theme, for in the end, both Louise and Qi Xia compromise by finding solace in a certain friendship to somehow take the place of the love they have forsaken. This is evidently an unimpeachable rhetoric of ideology to mend the rift in reality. Moreover, after Qi Xia’s departure and Xiao Liu’s marriage, the narrators could no longer look deeper into the minds of the characters. This shows that this externalized point of view may just act to introduce a conceptual ending, or to end the narrative with a compromise of their female experience with the vocabulary in vogue. The anti-feudal-patriarchy era of the May Fourth Movement also brought women’s same-gender relationship into the territory of literature. In “There is Such a Thing,” Ling Shuhua writes about same-sex affection between two female students. This relationship results from their emulating the heterosexual affection between man and woman in a rapport of same sex. The pair of girl students who play Romeo and Juliet end up falling in love with each other, but in the end, they are separated by the arranged feudal marriages. In addition to this type of works featuring same-sex amours, we can also find descriptions of friendship between women in other works. Indubitably, the majority of these friendships have a hint of passion in them. Of course, these stories are anything but tales of “homosexuality,” as understood today; they were only a section of the times’ symphony of striking-a-chord affections and emotions. But in a sense, this is the first time that the same-sex relationship was described in literature in such a manner that the crevice between men and women was seen from the females’ point of view. The sorority also attests to a sense of estrangement women feel towards men, a sense of alienation from men. This

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sensation of alienation could be traced back to some mentality of puberty caused by women’s status in history when they were regarded as the “Other.” Before long, with the ebbing of the tide of sentimentalism, Ding Ling started to prick the beautiful bubble by revealing some weaknesses in women’s relations, namely, vulnerability in maintaining their friendship, in her “During the Summer Vacation” and other works under the same theme. Friendship between woman and woman proves to be not as proactive and zealous as the fraternity described in literature. As often as not, it is just a companionship in moments of depression. This ruthlessly reminds us of the friability in women’s relations as a group in the long dark age of gender-unconsciousness. Among the May Fourth female writers, the most conscientious author to write about gender relations is Ling Shuhua. Her “Spring,” “Flower Temple,” “Drunk,” and “Women” all turn to describe husband-and-wife relation in a new-style marriage. The husbands and wives therein do love each other, but there are always some fine fissures in their relation. It is just in these fissures that Ling discovers femininity and starts to hit off her female wishes, demands, moods, and subjectivity, as well as disparities between the two sexes. She writes about the inner secrets of wives that men/husbands can never gain an insight into, whereby she debunks the incompatibility between two sexes, between lovers, and between husband and wife. This is also what Su Xuelin rolls out in her biographical Thorny Heart (Jixin).33 This may be one of the necessary prerequisites for women’s self-awareness and gender establishment. Undoubtedly, this shows a tint of dubiety and irony towards the sanctified slogan of love that dominated the prevailing ideology. Here, we can see the budding female gender consciousness awakened: she needs to set her own will and her own pursuits apart from those of her husband’s, but at the same time, it does not stop them from loving each other. Of course, the endings of the stories are mostly happy endings, wherein it is unlikely to spot anything that is aggressive, offensive, or radical, or maybe such things are only latent and concealed under the disguise of their witty narratives. This absolutely contributed to establishing women’s own tradition. Of course, the female themes in these aspects were only lightly touched upon in this period. The female writers adopted a moderate attitude in their writings about issues of unique experiences of the female group. But they stopped before probing deeper. As a group, women only made their presence felt in the gaps of discourse. But this presence testified to their existence in literature, which in turn became the base on which the second and third generations of female writers gained a foothold to squeeze above the horizon.

33 Jï xin, also translated as Heart of the Thorn Bush or Thorn Heart or The Heart of Thorny Shrubs, by a Catholic writer Su Xuelin (1897–1999) in 1929.

CHAPTER 3

Lu Yin: “Wimps Standing in Front of Life’s Diverging Paths”

The archaic tradition as old as a score of centuries, like the dirt that gathered upon tombs, weighed heavily on the coffin lids of dead women. In the fierce thunderstorms of the May Fourth Movement, this land, like a giant jailhouse, dark as iron and stinking with blood, suddenly cracked, and a generation of young women rebels of “Young China” crept out of it to emerge in history. They were so young and so exhilarated, yet at the same time so anxious and bewildered. They were “Noras” who ran away from home, among whom we find Lu Yin. The door that slammed heavily behind them was not the door to their Husband’s house where they were treated as dolls. It was instead the door to the house of their Father, where they had been brought up, “caged” and cared for, raised only to change hands once a marriage was offered. From this they fled. As resolutely as the patricide sons, they fled the “iron house” (tie wuzi),1 the narrow cage. Getting out of it, to their elation, they found the sky high and the horizon broad. Be that as it may, however, these

Lu Yin, the first important woman writer in modern Chinese literature, acclaimed as one of “The Talented Three from Fuzhou,” Fujian, enjoying equal fame with Bing Xin and Lin Huiyin. 1 “Iron house” or “iron room,” a metaphor coined by Lu Xun for the political situation in early twentieth-century China. Lu Xun invented it in the preface to his short story collection, Call to Arms , 1923: “Suppose in an iron house without windows, absolutely unbreakable, many people, sunk in sleep, will soon die of suffocation.”

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_3

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young women, these “runaway Noras,” suddenly saw themselves standing on a “broken bridge” (duanqiao)2 leading their souls nowhere.

3.1

Lu Yin’s World

Among the rebellious daughters of the May Fourth era, Lu Yin was probably the most determined and vibrant escapee with considerable courage and talent. Having been cast aside like a waif in her parents’ household, she was most sensitive to being a female child in the family and gloomily aware that being “female” meant being born with a destiny that was devoid of her-story, bereft of her own language, and muffled without a clear reference to herself. She had a sense of the plight that all new women were subject to, as if suffering a kind of collective anemia. She probably was the very first who was savvy to this plight. For Lu Yin, women in general did not have their own sky at all, rather than what was alleged, “women’s sky was low.” Standing in the vast emptiness, she beheld nothing but the void of history, the blindness of ideology towards the female and its deprivation of women as the Subject. She was a vanguard, and also one of the most well-known women in the literary world of the May Fourth era; however, she was no great thinker of enlightened insight. She seemed to be confined in the boundary of the dominant ideology, like a horse running within the ring of her time, never so venturous as to gallop out of the ring. Remembered like a most beautiful anecdote of that era, she was born at the dawn and died at the dusk of the May Fourth era. Her life and all her work epitomize all the gumption of the first-generation daughters of Young China. Her world is one of rapture, and at the same time, one of anguish and bewilderment. Perhaps that is why she befittingly stood as the spiritual Daughter of the May Fourth era. The ideological ring that kept her works within limits, along with all the antinomy or paradoxes in her situation, thus became the inscription of that period. It often puzzles people that as a May Fourth daughter of the turbulent era, Lu Yin did not talk much about that epoch. In her novels, people can hardly find the great ecstasies and griefs they find in “The Nirvana of Phoenix” (Fenghuang niepan),3 nor can they recognize any popular subjects of that era, such as national peril and crisis, social improvement and criticism, science and democracy and other topics in the groove. These subjects seemed to have retreated, together with ambiguous male characters, to the blurred background of her work, whereas in the foreground, we can only see the daughters’ stories and their loves. Being one of the Daughters of the times, Lu Yin did not write to embrace the time that “liberated” them, but rather used writing 2

A famous bridge in Hanzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, named after a tragic love story between a young man and a fairy snake woman, later a popular analogy for destined failures. 3

A long epic written by Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in 1920, representative poem of his collection, Goddess, Nüshen. Guo Moruo, penname of Guo Kaizhen, was a leading poet, writer, historian and archeologist of twentieth century China.

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as a way to eschew the turmoil and turbulence of the era. Her time was in the eye of the hurricane, which was stirring and dreadful but also dead silent. The devastating storm of the era hovered and wheeled around her women characters and headed on, leaving nothing but a shower of dust on them. In her writings, we can barely have a clear view of the figure of Lusha, resolute and jaunty, who, “at the advent of the high tides of student protests,” “braved the snow and wind on her way to meetings, and zealously preoccupied herself with the gatherings, speaking in the public, discussing every and each social issue with other youths and finding a solution whatsoever.” Given the high-flown moment of the May Fourth era as it is, such a scene is only a backdrop for Lusha to meet her beloved Ziqing (“Seaside Friends”). In like manner, we read nothing about how the enthusiastic and talented Qin Zhu4 published her first poem and founded her own poetry periodical, but we know her prototype, Shi Pingmei, had her short but ardent life virtually merged with the fire-and-blood upheavals of that era. All of the occurrences only constitute the historic mise en scene, as faint and distant as the echoes of the great epoch outside Lu Yin’s windows with the curtains drawn. The world outside was no part of Qin Zhu’s life (in spite of the fact that it was the keynote tone in Shi Pingmei’s world), even less a rickety “pivot” to pry her life. True, we read the heroine in The Conflict, Zhu Lifen,5 who died a brave hero, but we are left guessing about the nature of the cause for which she relinquishes her life. Her life, actually, is not sacrificed so much for her ideal society as for her ideal love. It seems that, with her pen, Lu Yin built a thin wall—apt to collapse with a single blow—around herself and her world. Stretching from the bedrooms and living rooms to churches and salons in her work, Lu Yin’s world was not a broad one. Even if it is on the seaside where the sky is vast and the water infinite, all she wanted was no more than “several cottages” that “sit near a white-jade pond, encircled by clear streams running slow.” The only fulcrum her world rests on is the wandering “heart of women” that “could not resist any temptation.” Her mode of narrative only accommodates one type of character, which never fails to be young women or young newly-wed women who are bright but melancholy, elegant but frail. They are audacious, but also tend to shrink at important moments; they are passionate but given to callousness in some circumstances. They seem to prefer a rainy dawn to a high noon with bright, hot sunshine, since they are afraid of withering away in the heat of the sun. They were born for love, for which they would also die, but they do so simply for the sake of love itself, not even for the person for whom they have affection. In Lu Yin’s world, all the male characters, apart from a few upon whom her women characters hinge their fantasies, are merely hasty passers-by. 4 Qin Zhu, leading character in Lu Yin’s 1930 novella, “Ivory Rings,” Xiangya jiezhi, based on the love story of Shi Pingmei (1902–1928), a well-noted woman writer and activist in the May Fourth era. 5 Zhu Lifen, leading character in Lu Yin’s three-act play The Conflict, Chongtu, a Western drama written in 1929.

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The male world and men’s stories were all shut out on the other side of her half-closed doors and windows with half-rolled curtains.6 They come and go, leaving behind love, hope, painful remorse, and even death. They take Lu Yin’s sisters away from her side, only to disillusion them and cause them to wither, rather than bring them happiness, accomplishment, and maturity. In the foreground, we see none other than daughterly young women or girl-like wives in Lu Yin’s works. Twenty is her favorite age, and also the age of the twentieth century. So are Lu Yin’s Lushas and Yaxias,7 a group of well-educated middleclass women who emerged from below the surface of history when the “grand valley of culture” cracked in the May Fourth Movement. However, they were only a social group, not a gender category. Lu Yin’s work started a riptide within the ivory tower of literary world, as resonant with the name of her work The Tides of Soul Sea (Linghai chaoxi),8 but it was a far cry from the clear and melodious bugle that broke the silence of the muted feminine wasteland. Her recoil from the epoch was just a due form of the “artifice of history,” a distinctive feature of the cultural “Other.” Because in the era with the father–son conflict as its basic construct, the dilemma faced by women, a fortiori, new women, was one of being marginalized in that structure. Her strategy was also a kind of “artifice of writing”: she steered clear of the epoch in her writing, wherefore she also skirted the subject of masculinity and the male world withal. Nevertheless, in spite of her sidestepping the historical moment in her work, her work itself signifies women’s contact with that era. On the horizon in the east, the advent of such an ivory tower comprised of educated women made a big spectacle in the May Fourth era. Definitely, it stood for a brave new world that had risen above the horizon of history. But ironically, a preponderance of the riches hidden in the new world was also its preponderant void. Being a new woman, Lu Yin had found the access to the discourse of the literary world on the same footing as men writers, but it was a discourse of others/men’s, a discourse that entailed the banishment of women’s experience and their circumstances. What Lu Yin found herself face-to-face with was “a battle array of nothing” and a situation of being speechless: her speech act was much less a self-defense or self-profession for the new women than a struggle to insinuate themselves into the male discourse. It seems that they exerted themselves so hard only to make their sheer feminine visage barely visible in the margins or gaps of the male discourse, and at the same time they had to cover up their existence as daughters/women that was riddled with void with the giant net of signifiers latent with cyphers of the era. On the semantic level of Lu Yin’s works, what comes forth is the expression of the dilemmas the May Fourth young intellectuals faced. Yet her exposure of such dilemmas for the new women was only “written” between the lines 6

Traditional Chinese curtains on widows were rolled up or pulled down.

7

Yaxia, protagonist in Lu Yin’s epistolary short story, “Somebody’s Lament,” Huoren de beiai, 1924. 8

A collection of diaries and short stories by Lu Yin, published in 1927.

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or on the blurred margins of the discourse. Just like the ideologies in the May Fourth era, Lu Yin’s text was also overloaded. It seems that she and her “Lushas” were first and foremost the children of the May Fourth Movement, and then the rebellious daughters. In her text, the greatest pain of the Lu Yins does not arise from the new women’s plight, but from the bewilderment that “I can’t read the human heart.” She expressed her “personal” deepest thoughts in this way, I am an emotional person, a sensible person, and a proud person by nature. I need to have my emotions nurtured, and I need to get sympathy from people. At the same time, I am standing on the tiptoe of one foot looking ahead at a destination in the distance while my other foot drags me in a whirlpool of emotions. Therefore, my two feet are pointing to opposite directions. I can neither escape nor indulge; I am lost before diverging roads—this is the root of my sadness and distress.

In Lu Yin’s work, it is not and cannot be a world of “we the women …” and “you the men ….” It can only be a world of humanity, human beings, and human life. The antithesis between men and women is obscured in the mainstream ideology of the May Fourth Movement and submerges below the text. Instead, the dichotomy between emotion and reason takes their place and forms the semantic connotation of Lu Yin’s work. Both Lu Yin’s unmarried and married women are deeply trapped in the conflict between reason and emotion. Paradoxically, they are both “welcoming and rejecting” their emotions and rationality. Their faces, as a rule, tend to be moist with tears and read the words: “my heart and mind are pitched against each other.” The paradox is not so much a conflict as it is a spellbound selfentanglement, or a crushing cross borne by the girls. Li Fen says in The Conflict, “This world is always short of something. Either emotion or reason, they are always in conflict. We poor human beings will only die in this tug of war.” And Shalü9 whispers: “I respect the greatness of affection. It is beyond all the bondage of the universe, but I also resist the command of emotions; I bow to the unnatural rule of life … My biggest distress is to live in this irreconcilable contradiction!” So, there seem to be two diverging roads lying ahead of them: if reason prevails over feelings, they will sacrifice themselves—“being hard on themselves for lifetime”; if emotions defeat reason, they will fall into mediocrity, or abandonment and even death. So Ya Xia could only sigh: “I am so bewildered. Where should I go? Let me play through life!”. From this inextricable entanglement and conflict, people “breathed” the hot, even scorching air of the May Fourth Movement, and caught a glimpse of the May Fourth “youth who are as passionate and dreamy as they could be and pursue the meaning of life while wandering ruefully in books.” A glimpse of “some young people who carry a load of thousands of years of traditional 9 Shalü, protagonist of “Where Shall She Return,” Hechu shi guicheng, a short story by Lu Yin.

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thoughts, scream for ‘self-development’ in their books, but flutter their fragile minds with numerous scruples” (Mao Dun, “Comments on Lu Yin” [Luyin lun]).10 It was in this antinomy that Lu Yin found a cut-in point that had as much to do with the era as with the female, a point where she could mesh with the image of female intellectuals as reflected in the magic mirror of the dominant ideology. This was a solution to cope with female banishment or self-exile, and also essentially a surrender to the male ideology. This antithesis between emotion/heart and reason/mind was contained in the new model of individual spiritual life championed in the May Fourth era. Under the sweeping proposition of a universal human nature, it connoted an anti-feudal and anti-patriarchal cultural code of the era. With Lu Yin, emotion was a secret argot of love both between her characters of the opposite sex and between those of the same sex. Lu Yin’s sisters’ irresistible emotions and diverse sentiments, so intense and broad, were a war cry, per se, of all rebellious children. It was their war cry in the face of a callous social system— the apathetic, hypocritical, and cold-blooded feudal order and its mandatory values; their war cry to challenge its dictate, “Lust is the very evil of all evils,” a moral buttress of the feudal social structure. In the process of re-encoding the discourse during the May Fourth period, real feelings and love were written into a code that signified strong commitment. In the new ideology of the May Fourth Movement, the rebellious daughters and patricide sons were naturally allied in a kind of tacit privity and a common endeavor to tear down the strong feudal barricades; they were tied in a bond of heart and spirit. To them, love was not only a strong thrust that propelled history forward, but also a sacred spiritual alliance based on their spiritual covenant. It was the treatise of the rebels (the stronger) who showed their flag: “Remove the fetters of old ethics and beliefs, and carry the sacred banner of love” (Lusha). It was especially so with Lu Yin, for whom emotion and love represented her rebellion and challenge to the feudal mores imposed on the females. Mind, on the other side, obviously epitomized a combination of reason and wisdom/knowledge, the other two representational codes of the era. As is known to all about the May Fourth era, reason and knowledge were indisputably the kernel cyphers of the New Culture. They were the holiest altar of the May Fourth era, just like the torchlight held by Danko.11 In the dark empire of feudalism, which was basically characterized by irrationality, fatuity, and ignorance, reason/knowledge was held as a doctrinal yardstick to judge right from wrong, good from evil. For the daughters of that era, reason/knowledge was seen as utter denial of the traditional gender norm: “A woman of no learning is one of virtue.” It was also a ladder that women 10

An essay by Mao Dun, written on June 7, 1934 on Lu Yin’s death in May, 1934, publicized in his monthly journal, Literature, Wenxue, in July, 1934. 11 Danko, the epic hero in the 1895 short story of the great proletariat Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), “Danko.” Set in the ancient time when a clan were driven into the deep darkness of the primeval forest, Danko held his heart burning like a torchlight and led his people out of the forest, and died. His heart was sanctified as a star in the sky.

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could climb up to save themselves and be saved. As such, “female intellectual” became a brand-new title referring to a new generation of women, which was significantly different from that of women of talents in the feudal age. In Lu Yin’s works, however, these two kernel codes—mind and heart, which were endowed with positive values in the May Fourth era, are set opposite to each other. Such a dichotomy is based on the definition of the May Fourth Movement as a cultural revolution, instead of a social revolution. It indicates that these young intellectuals had turned their concern from the external conflict of a feudalism-versus-anti-feudalism social struggle to their internal struggle to withstand new social realities. As to Lu Yin, this dichotomy can be rationalized as the marginalization of the two kernel codes from society, as the generalization or universalization of epochal themes. And in the process of marginalization and generalization, though, she managed to allow the new women’s ambivalent dilemmas to seep into her texts, so as to “wash down her own angst in other’s cups of wine.”12 However, if someone says that Lu Yin had found a clear expression for the “signified”—women’s dilemma—in this dichotomy, it is better to say that she just found her way to eloquently talk about meanings of life, human predicaments, impermanence of life, and disarrays of mind and heart in the conversations of her characters. Such a “surplus of signifiers” was spawned in their arguments that she could give form to the nameless and speechless great fear and pain new women felt when suppressed under the cultural coding. Their vale of woe, instead of being a female world, is more like a non-male world. When she banishes men from it, her daughterly heroines themselves are also banished from the text by men’s Discourse. But Lu Yin, after all, with her subtle dislocation from the dominant ideology, succeeded in weaving an agonizing but sincere texture of femininity in the fabric of history, the historic text, to fill the gaps and holes in it.

3.2

A Narrow Zone Between Two Doors

The world in Lu Yin’s writing was one at the intersection between the dusk and the dawn of history. For the women in her text, heart and mind were no internal conflict in their own world; they were more like two great alien forces tearing at the May Fourth daughters, attacking and torturing them. If we say this dichotomy was virtually a curtain that was to rise on the entry of the male Discourse, then to Lu Yin and other women authors like her, it was a diabolic curtain that they were unable to raise. It turned the daughters’ experience from mixed melancholy pleasures to suppressed rapturous frights and further on to agonies of a divided self. It was a situation Hamlet finds himself in. The Lu Yins were deeply convinced that they had a great mission of the era to fulfill, under a holy command; but they found it was really just their 12

The line contains the source of the Ming Poet, Li Zhi’s poem from his collection Burn Books–Various Opinions in 1590: “Grab other’s wine cup/To wash down my own angst.”

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immense inane passion, as aimless as a burning flame giving off no warmth or light. The flame could not burn through the curtain, but it could illuminate the vacuum between the women’s experience and their environment. They pushed forward, yelling slogans, but in fact still trod in a magic ring and returned to the starting point. Speaking of Lu Yin, she seemed to be perpetually plodding between the grave of Daiyu13 and the tomb of Zijun, wavering between a tragic romanticist and a forlorn iconoclast. The protagonist in her works was not some Lusha or Yaxia, but rather the tragic atmosphere of their inner world, a mise en scene of their standing on the broken bridge pointing to the horizon but leading to nowhere. This is not only the semantic information of her texts but also her narratology. In light of the French structuralist narratologist Claude Bremond’s model of narrative sequence, all narration is made up of a continuum of three actions14 :

Path of Actualization (A2^a) Completed (A3^a) Failed (A3^b) Protagonist facing an uncertain future (A1) No Path of Actualization (A2^b) The stories of Lu Yin’s daughters mostly fall in the category of the lower sequence of A1–A2b. Yaxia travels eastward to Japan in an attempt to seek the meanings of life (uncertain future A1), only returns gainless (no path A2b) and finally, laden with self-reproaches and guilt that are themselves devoid of meaning, chooses death. Lusha once dedicated herself to the great era and found her romantic love, but thereafter she withers under the pressure of people’s gossips and pines away in apprehension and depression (uncertain future A1). As the story ends when she leaves with her beloved man (path, A2a), the only thing remaining is a deserted house standing desolately in a starry night (reversal to uncertain future A1). Songwen15 and Lantian16 are bold to pursue their love in the beginning; however, they both get dragged 13

Daiyu, the tragic leading female character in A Dream of Red Mansions .

14

Claude Bremond (1929–2021), French professor of Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, author of the influential monograph, Logique du Récit, 1973. 15

Songwen, protagonist in Lu Yin’s short story “The Fall,” Lunluo, 1924. Most of her works were publicized in Short Story Monthly, Xiaoshuo yuebao, a very important literature periodical in 1920s and 1930s, edited successively by Mao Dun, Zheng Zhenduo (1898– 1958) and Ye Shengtao. 16 Lantian, protagonist in Lu Yin’s short story “Lantian’s Confessions,” Lantian chanhui lu, 1927.

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into a quagmire of loveless entanglement or abandonment by the love and both die in poverty and illness, repenting of their own “non-chastity” (uncertain future A1—no path, A2b). Except for the tug-of-war between sense and sensibility, we find no other de rigueur actions or behaviors of the conventional narrative in Lu Yin’s texts. Her heroines’ actions (fall in love, get married, and make a new-style family) always happen only in extratextual realms; the focus of her texts is always about how they invariably get stranded in a gloomy terrain in front of an uncertain future. For the other heroines, even if they do not end up in death like Yaxia, such as Lusha who obviously has survived the inflictions of the haunting feudal norms and societal scandals and even won her battle for independence and love, given all this, they are held back, as her texts progress, by the smothering “mediocrity” of marriage and their deep despondency, a spell that they are all subject to and cannot break. The lamentable women, such as Shalü and Xinfang17 seem to be destined to the woe of being “the biggest loser in life” even after their “victories.” When we fought against our families, we were determined to sacrifice everything for love. What a heroic spirit that was! Now we won the victory at last. But after all the victories, still so many woes, so little weal. I find nothing different except for a diminishing hope. Little as the hope we have, once dispelled, what fun is there left in life? I thought I could embrace our ideal life as long as I got my loving partner. However, the payoff of our trials and efforts is only to come to realize that nobody can escape the reality. Transcendental pleasure is nowhere to be found but in the deep night when the bright moon ascends. I wander around in the flowers’ aroma, feeling as if I am dating flower nymphs and flying with them between the heavens and the earth.18

Those extratextual actions have not in any way turned the daughters into women. They still remain girl-like, rambling in the labyrinth of nameless worries and dull pains. Becoming a wife or a mother does not bring them down to earth. They still trudge in anxiety over their uncertain future. There is nearly no exception to Lu Yin’s narratives that are largely half complete, with almost all endings left open, if not wound up in some sudden inexplicable or premature deaths. The sequencing of her narrative is not only incomplete but of an isomorphic structure of reversals, always returning to the hazy zone suffused with uncertainty and tension. It may be said that it is from her narrative structure, instead of the discourse of historic narration, that we get clues to a situation of the May Fourth women: a great multi-act play about women began as prophesied. Act 1: Rebellious Daughters. However, as it turns out, this was the only act to the anticipated multi-act play, and the other expected acts were hidden in the darkness behind layers and layers of curtains and crumpled up by a giant but invisible hand. Thus, the one and only act made a myth about the new women, a myth about the May Fourth movement; it was a 17

Xinfang, protagonist in Lu Yin’s 1925 short story “After the Victory,” Shengli yihou.

18

Quote from “After the Victory.”

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story that got started but never got to be completed. The incompleteness in the narration happened to concur with the deficiency in and the deprivation of the May Fourth daughters’ subjectivity. The May Fourth dominant ideology only left a transient moment for the new women/survivors to get onstage, a moment for Nora to walk downstage, which is known as “Nora’s moment.” Nora, created by the male master Henrik Ibsen, as we know, is only the empty signifier that Ibsen invented to fill in his poetics of solitude, angst, and passion. Nora’s departure is only an action that stops abruptly at the apex of the play’s climax. However, being the only female who was conspicuous in the new culture’s coding during the May Fourth re-encoding campaign, she proffered an opportunity (the only opportunity) to the rebel daughters to take actions (the traditional prerogative for men): say “No” to the feudalist patriarchal rule, i.e., “Daughters should obey the will of their fathers’ before marriage,” slam the door of the “doll’s house” and walk straight out to declare, “I am on my own!” In fact, it was also the only historical opportunity Chinese men bestowed on women in the history of the May Fourth era, the only time for the Chinese female to make a decision. Just as “old-time” women were referred to as “the dead,” “victims,” or “wimps,” which was men’s way to patronize, to sympathize, and to shake off their shame and burden of history, so Nora is the broken mirror held by men to adore and eulogize the new woman. Therefore, when the Noras crossed the threshold of the feudalist iron house, this historical moment was frozen, thereupon fossilizing the image of the new women in a statue of beauty, bravery, and resoluteness and having it placed on the altar of the May Fourth discourse. However, there remained a question, “What happens to her after Nora leaves home?” It could not be answered so easily as by saying “she either becomes debauched or returns.” When they stood on the outside of their parental house, what appeared in front of the Daughters/Lu Yins was not their dreamed “brave new world” that rose above the horizon of history, but rather a narrow zone for women that was defined or was to be redefined by history. For at the other end of the narrow space stood, not the females’ horizon, but another door that led to the Husband’s house. This place granted them the only opportunity to pursue love by themselves at that moment, and to walk in of their own accord. The door stood open to them, as if it was the only lot for them to draw. And once they chose it and stepped in, the door would be closed behind them and close the women in a world centering around their husbands and children. There they would toil and moil so as to get labeled as “a good housewife and a good wife.” Their “only responsibility” was to do the housework, attend to the family, and work in the kitchen. “Get married, have children and be a mother … with careers and ambitions ploughed under as were the old traces of the revolutionary history … Women … That is what women were born to be.”19 This is what happens in Lu Yin’s fictional world: marriage is the “destination” of all women’s lives, as written in feudal encoding, but it is also the historic 19

Quote from “Dust of Dreams,” Qian chen, Lu Yin’s 1924 short story.

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terminus for the group of new women or rebellious daughters, the demise of their historical existence. That is why in the face of marriage—what they have stood up and fought for—these alive-and-kicking young women/daughters in “Seaside Friends” could only raise up their tearful eyes, look at each other and say “in a half-drunken choking tone, ‘Now I have my fate sealed.’” Marriage means they fade again into obscurity or at least semi-submerge under the surface of the history. These new women’s moment would end, leaving behind a beautiful “May Fourth anecdote” like the “dust of dreams.” Consecutive to the prologue was not the rising action of the play, but the epilogue and the curtain fall. This is “the daughters’ world” in Lu Yin’s work, the predicament of the young women like Lusha and Yaxia: they are breathlessly forced into a tight space between the two doors, between their resolute rebellion and perpetual commitments (conventional role of women). In there, they toss themselves forward and backward, till their heads bruise and bleed. Daughters in Lu Yin’s world, therefore, are always the frail, distraught, agonized, and bewildered women, to whom to retreat to their parental house is by no means what they want, also nearly impossible, but at the same time, to take a step forward to walk in the husband’s house is too hard a decision for them to make. If we say “A resurrected soul cannot be annihilated,” their female soul that has just been rekindled is certainly not to be crucified on the cross of history again and forever. “Who could willingly accept a woman to be such a simple-minded creature?” Obviously, this rhetorical question did not arise from Lu Yin’s consciousness. In the face of their bewilderment and ambivalent emptiness, Lu Yin and her Lushas and Yaxias could not but follow their intuition and resist the temptation of stepping into the Husband’s house. Instead, they do their best to procrastinate and prolong the historical moment reserved for them, the “daughters’ moment” or the “Nora’s moment.” This is typically known as her heroines’ sense-but-non-sensibility attitude towards life and lifestyle: “Let’s play the game of life.” But obviously, for Lu Yin’s oversensitive and frail young women, this game is too treacherous and overtaxing for them to play. Yaxia, Lusha and Qin Zhu have attempted to turn themselves into heartless souls, but they have a heart that is too delicate, too sentimental, and too hypersensitive to relinquish. The new women are like newborn babies bumping into a world that is too vast, too harsh, and too grave for them. Facing them is a men’s world, or to say the least, is the others’ world, in which one tiny misstep could lead them either to abandonment like Songwen or death like Lantian. Love is the only banner they unfurl, the only shelter they find, also the only shield they have, but it is merely a prelude to marriage. After that, what comes by in their life is no longer joys of life, no more charming encounters, but only ordinary run-of-the-mill chores. In such a life, even the most common attraction between opposite sexes could become a source of fear, hostility, desperation, and sorrow. In Yaxia’s eyes, men’s courtship tells of “men’s selfishness and possessiveness,” and competition between two wooers gives proof of her assertion, “This world is horribly

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hypocritical.” Love, in essence, is men’s “greed” and a deathtrap men “set to mock and lock me in.” Brave and strong-willed as Lusha has been, after falling in love with her beloved young man, she “began to wither! Down and out!” As for the five girls in “Seaside Friends,” when love befalls them, it is also the time when they “sink, one after another, into the sea of sorrows.” In Lu Yin’s world, love is suffering, so is having no love; getting married is woe, so is squandering your life alone. Misery begets misery; in the end, her heroines never have a moment in life for freedom, happiness, and life. Their “game of life” seems to be a shield they paint on paper, but it actually turns out to be a real, finely carved double-edged knife. They use it to stab into the heart of the world and others (men?), but also make a deeper cut in their own heart. This constitutes their vain struggle between the two doors and their desperate yet doomed efforts to prolong their historical existence. Yaxia painfully murmurs, I deny it all in this world, so I practice the doctrine of treating life as a game. But I failed at my first shot, and again, and again. I failed for 5 or 6 times… Did I play the game? It is the world that played me like a game…What am I on earth? I don’t know. In front of a foggy road ahead, I could not help but feel sad and desolate.

When all is said and done, death comes to them as the only release and it also makes a perfect ending, though it does not end anything. Yaxia dies, so do Lishi,20 Lantian, Songwen, and Qinzhu, with their intractable yet painful pride. Lusha vanishes into the unknown vast vacuity. By giving up their own lives, they say “no” to the old feminine norms in their destiny; it was a “NO” written in capital. They sacrifice their lives in order to reject the commitment that women were born to take on. It is in these seemingly unnecessary and worthless tears, pains, hesitations, and deaths that we see the brave and strong new women, the souls of rebellion, who made a feeble but unyielding war cry not only against the patriarchal society but also against the male chauvinism that they never got to understand.

3.3

The Floating Stage and Cultural Deadlock

This narrow zone between the two doors seemed to be merely an intermission of the multi-act play, which was not even written in the text of history. Brave Nora, or the Daughter, walked out from the doll’s house, then, the lights faded, and the curtain came down; the hall resounded with a thunderous applause. Certainly, the curtain would rise again and the lights would turn on, one after another. Just as The Wedding of Figaro ensues The Barber of Séville,21 20 21

Lishi, heroine in Lu Yin’s “Lishi’s Diary,” Lishi de riji.

Le Nozze di Figaro, a play written by French playwright Beaumarchais (1732–1799) as one part of his Figaro Trilogy, adapted by Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte (1749– 1838) with music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1971) and premiered in 1786. Le Barbier de Séville, another play of Beaumarchais’ Figaro Trilogy, and also adapted

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so the May Fourth story would not stop; only the heroine would be replaced: since the brave daughter has silently walked into the other door during the darkened intermission, she turns from the rebellious daughter into a deferential woman—it seems that, at the same time, she has lost all her beauty, charm, wisdom, and courage. The once-time amorous and brave daughter would be replaced by another type of Daughter, daughters who would be witty, smart, and resolute. But those May Fourth daughters, like Lu Yin’s Yaxia and Qinzhu, would get stranded in the tight space, left in a netherworld, with neither narrative nor discourse to their avail. The space was like a limbo between heaven and hell, in which they had no hope of flying to heaven but a high risk of falling to hell. There would be a very long way for them to go in history before these rebellious daughters transformed into willful liberal women; along the way, history would rumble on over the women’s blood and tears, with returning echoes of their cries in the air. Among the May Fourth social myths that were elevated to “eternal paradigms,” there once was one for the beautiful liberated women. However, in Lu Yin’s stories, we can only see women whose “wings are broken” by unfulfilled romantic loves, because of the “mundane fetters” (shisu zhi geng ) and “the harsh ruthless human society that broils them to death”; or young women who are liable to be blamed at every move and hesitate at crossroads. They are less liberal women than prisoners who have escaped from prison but are still shackled in irons. Having escaped from prison does not mean winning liberty. Lantian and Songwen bear out this ruthless reality that raises the alarm. In Lu Yin’s world, the shadows the iron fences cast and the shackles on women do not symbolize so much the “ruthless” old society, which used to put women at its crosshairs, as the suppressive new norm of the May Fourth era that deviated from its initial course and the clutch of its predominantly male-chauvinistic discourse. If we agree the May Fourth new women had finally unshackled themselves from the bondage that Old China laid upon women and gained access to the discourse (though a discourse of others) in the form of a latent language in the historical unconscious, then at the same time, they were bound to be incorporated into the new order of symbols. This new order of symbols appears in Lu Yin’s text as a colossal shadow of the ubiquitous “Reason.” Though reason or sense was the high-flown banner in the May Fourth movement, in her context, however, it was not just one pole of the antitheses between civilization and ignorance or sanity and insanity; reason was also something diagonally opposite to women’s way of existence, the antipode of women’s lust and passion. Thereupon, we hear Yaxia’s desperate cry,

into the popular opera of the same title by Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), premiered in 1816.

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Alas! I am about to be drowned in a sea of depravity!... Fortunately, my strong heart weighs more. When I am about to unleash my sexual desires, it whacks my head and awakens me! I dare not indulge myself any further, but, then, where else on earth should I go?

Here in a limbo, marriage is not a prospect to be considered, whereas “indulgence of sexual desires” is not allowed to be considered, since the latter, the sensational end of the antithesis, is defined as “depravity.” For young women like Yunqing22 whose sense outweighs their sensibility, we find them capable of standing up against the family-arranged marriage, protesting that “they could not force me as long as I do not give a nod to the marriage,” but unable to fight for their love—“if my parents disapproved my love, and if it incurred the relatives’ gossip, I would choose to suffer a lifetime to repay their breeding; but to marry someone I don’t like is something I will never do.” This is evidently one instance of pure “rationality” in Lu Yin’s fiction. When Yunqing finally gives up her love and sinks in bitterness and loneliness, it is out of her free will—rationality—to say yes to her parents’ wishes, but in her dreams, her parents’ will becomes a “blue-faced poisonous-fanged devil” wearing a golden crown. “There are four big Chinese characters written on the golden crown, ‘li-jiao-sheng-li’ (victory of rites and norms).” By analogy, reason, in a sense, means women’s conscientious obedience to their parents’ will (or voluntary observance of certain social mores), and this betokens the final victory of feudal ethics. It is obvious that here the “combat between passion and reason” is not the generalized human dilemma, as Lu Yin puts it in her text; in fact, in her subtext, the so-called reason is the embodiment of the usually absent “father.” “Reason” is the internalization of Father’s words and Father’s law in the women’s mind, and it is also the coding of the new symbolic order, which has already taken shape, to restrain women’s desire and liberty. Lu Yin’s world is largely an indoor world. If we loan a phrase from Virginia Woolf, then having “a room of one’s own” may be the first step for women’s emancipation. In Lu Yin’s fictional world, the precious few warm and serene moments can only be found in studios of “Plum Nest” (mei ke)23 or “My Cottage” (wu lu).24 But it appears that Lu Yin knowingly avoided bedrooms; instead, she preferred the mise en scene of living rooms or “parlor salons.” It is an indoor space that opens to the outside (maybe it cannot be completely closed off as daughters need to be betrothed); it is a chaste virgin world, though not necessarily peaceful. It is where men may break in like passers-by, but most of the time, they would depart in disappointment or despair. Since 22

Yunqing, character in “Seaside Friends.”

23

Shi Pingmei named her dormitory as Plum Nest when teaching in Beijing Normal University Middle School. 24 Probably the name Lu Yin gave to her studio with the allusion to the famous poem by the great Tang poet, Du Fu (712–770), “My Cottage Unroofed by Autumn Winds.”

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they bring women nothing but a fierce strife between emotion and reason, their visits only result in women’s disillusioned passion and reason that chills to the bone. In this world, the only kind of harmony between emotion and reason consists in the same-gender love, i.e., love between young women. The love, clearly, is not homosexuality in the sense of sexual perversion, but the affection that is only viable in a utopia that daughters build in their hearts, the daughters’ land from which men are banished, even desires for men (i.e., sexual threat and sexual anxiety) are banished, a herland of the sisters’ fantasy. The utopia is envisioned in “Seaside Friends,” Build an exquisite house by the sea. Zong Ying and I shall write great novels by the windows which are open to the sea; You and Lingyu25 teach innocent children in the village. When you return by dusk, we will have dinner on the lawn by the beach and tell stories we hear in the day. What pleasures that would be!

That is the ideal of the sisters: “Retreat together to the riverside of the West Lake.” It seems that Lu Yin wanted to confront the insensible and unreasonable world of feudal ethics with this utopia of pure sisterhood that reconciles emotion and reason. But almost immediately, she groaned: “But I’m afraid it will stay an ideal forever!” In the end, they all get “caught in the whirlpools of affections”: the sisters scatter like stars, and the infatuated Lishi even chooses to “die of depression.” On the broken bridge of history, death turns out to be the most appropriate “ending.” Curiously, these young women in their prime of youth tend to lament the impermanence of life and show a strong suicidal inclination. They take death as a way to affirm the value of their life and love, a way to poeticize their peculiar throes. The tender life-strings of Lu Yin’s young women are bound to break. However, now that death is the only other alternative to them apart from the two doors, the ephemeral girlhood would be too long for them to squander and their ambivalent and un-selffulfilling daughterhood too heavy a load to carry. This is why they adopt the other extreme opposite to their tenacious pursuit of rebellion and love: taking life as a game. They resort to a substitute for sisterhood—the “ice-and-snow friendship” between the opposite sexes. Ironically, this both transcends and circumvents social taboos; both represent rebellion against gender norms for women and mean surrender to the mainstream ideology. It is the women’s self-exile from society—their rejection of the prescribed gender role. Yet in nature, by means of self-imprisonment and self-denial, they are observing the rule of patriarchal society: women ought to be chaste and abstinent in conduct, and they are also obliged to look as pretty as a picture and as cold as ice in the heart. But at the same time, it is also a way for the weaker (female) to revolt aggressively, because by denying women’s own desires, they also negate men’s lust and reject men’s yearnings. To borrow Freud’s term, it is a sadistic 25

Zongying and Lingyu, characters in “Seaside Friends.”

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act completed in the form of self-abuse: as the daughters restrain themselves, their action puts men in an agitating sexual anxiety, which results in actualizing a kind of castration of the male. The rule for the “life-as-game” (youxi rensheng ) is to comply and even encourage act of sexual seduction, but foul out any attempt to corporealize it. In essence, it is a gory game that often ends at the cost of life. By analogy, a metaphor for conceptual integration often appears in Lu Yin’s stories: a floating stage, to metaphorize the stagelike life. The interesting thing is that it was from the drama on the stage that the May Fourth women rebels learned to stand up and revolt; it was also there that they learned to stand on their own feet and walked out; but also only on the stage could they live out their ideal life. In her copious works, only the few short plays Lu Yin wrote demonstrate perfect contours or completed plot sequences. It shows that only on the stage can Lu Yin’s young men and women heroically face up to death (death of affirmable value—to die for something that is worth it), although the ultimate meaning of their deaths is still just to die in the name of love (to fulfill their ideal love in a solemn and sublime way). In her plays, she modeled her heroines after Nora and intended to continue Nora’s story on stage. For the characters, stag epitomizes their understandings and perceptions of life. On her stage, we watch these unsophisticated young women pronouncing solemnly, “What indeed is life about? Isn’t it just a play with everyone merely a player wearing makeup and a mask, acting on the stage?” And so are these young women. “Of course, for a person who views the world as a stage, he would try his best to make his part full of ups and downs. It would be hard for him to settle down in anything or any place.” This is a yearning that they find beyond themselves but gets magnified in the mirror on stage. I was determined to play a role in this world. Whether it would end in joys or griefs, a reunion or separation, I don’t care. Either it’s the sweetness or bitterness of life, I all hanker to taste it all … I hope I will always be the heroine in a tragedy: May I be the melancholy but beauteous lyric! To put it in one word, I reject being ordinary!

Here is another helpless confession a May Fourth daughter made with a sigh. “I lie in the bed I made myself and suffer all my life long. I appear as myself in the play. I’ve done it so well, this appalling character! It must be a mysterious twist of fortune that cast me in such a role for my life!” Yet there could also be the exhortation among the sisters, “My friend! Carry on the struggle. When we got on this stage of life, we were casted to play tragic roles. We had no other alternatives! Yet it would be a great comfort if we could write the script for ourselves in accord with our own wills.” But such a comfort is so brief, so fraught with anguish, and spells a premature end to their life. “Ugh, it is not bad to end my troubled life in this way—at least, to play in the tragedy, I succeeded in finishing an extraordinary episode and had an earnest experience

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of my short life.” These young women’s plaintive life is “earnest” and real, and they pay the price of their own lives for it. But paradoxically, it is also so illusory and unreal: for them, they are playing roles, not living their lives. Perhaps, the true semantic sub-text of such a “game-like life” is to act roles, or in another words, to have a stage-like life. The May Fourth new women were a generation born out of myths, but also a generation who had no guardian gods in the myths. If the “Oedipus complex” is a universal phase of one’s development into adulthood—a symbolic order, these new women lacked a same-sex parent with whom to identify. Because mothers—those hidden old-time women—had been eternally locked up and entombed inside the door behind these young women. Although “seeking for mother” and “resurrecting mother” were the shared themes embraced by the May Fourth female writers, in Lu Yin’s works, however, in comparison to the vanishing Father, the absent Mother seemed to leave even bigger conspicuous void or emptiness. To her, “Mother” appeared more significant as a reference, hence more spectacular as a hollow signifier than “Father.” That is why the young women in Lu Yin’s writings are only daughters, as if preordained with this built-in and abiding identity—even after some of them become mothers themselves—and never get to acquire their womanhood in the social sense of the symbolic order. Therefore, they are destined to get stalled in the mirror stage of identification, being unable to tell reality from “drama”—a mirror held up to reality. Thus, they are fated to a split self, when they act at the same time as they comment, observe and narrate. In other words, they instinctively call for a stage for their life. Meanwhile, the gap between the two doors is so narrow that they can only act on a suspended stage to unfold their lives. By the metaphor of stage, their paradoxically earnest and ruthless life, and their blood and death, are shrouded with a tint of illusion. But all the ruthlessness of this stage-like life, we must say, results from women’s “resentment” as the weaker, from their hatred and revenge, arising from their memory and subconscious, against men and patriarchal society. Obviously, this narrative is quite marginal in Lu Yin’s texts, but in fact, that is the crux of the problem in her texts, also where the rub is in her sub-text. Here’s Lu Yin’s semantic matrix:

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emotion

reason

Marriage Sex

world as a game life as a stage

Non-emotion

non-reason

feudal ethics It is not hard to find, it is a normative proposition of the times to place Daughters’ Utopia directly opposite to feudal ethics: anti-feudalism versus feudalism, or rebellious daughters versus patriarchal society. At the same time, the antithesis between marriage/sex and game-like world/stage-like life is a specific proposition for women: man versus woman. Or more precisely, it is a specific proposition for new women in the May Fourth era: the social structure of patriarchy versus the daughters’ way of life. But the crux is that Lu Yin’s matrix is an uneven rectangle, like a leaning tower about to collapse. All the positive values in the matrix are so feeble and whimsical in nature, disproportionate to those on the other side; for instance, the ideal of the daughters’ utopia (just like the fantasyland of Jia Baoyu26 ), at its best, is only a potential menace to the feudal order, a far cry from a devastating force to undermine it. What’s more, “a frail heart easily yields to seductions.” Women’s desire—the tumultuous somniloquy of the “sleeping flesh” suppressed under the Text— is itself a self-destructive force leading to the disintegration of the daughters’ utopia. By the same token, their decision on the “game-like world” and the stage-like life, which are filled with female anxiety, depression, and pain that lie deep in their latent language, are made out of their fascinations and hallucinations in the mirror stage. It is, in every respect, also the patriarchal society’s imagined redemption of women, which not only blasphemes the sacredness of male supremacy but also misreads female liberty or liberal women. Eventually, just like the ending produced by the choice of marriage and sex, it also leads to women’s exile from society and the historical death of the May Fourth new 26

Jia Baoyu, leading character in Cao Xueqin’s novel A Dream of Red Mansions . His dream in Chapter Five is the topical dream of the novel, in which he travels in a fantasyland and reads all the verdict poems for the fates of many female characters in the novel.

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women. This was a karmic hindrance to the May Fourth ideology, and also a deadlock in female history and female culture, which even death could not break.

CHAPTER 4

Yuanjun: Rebellion and Sentimental Attachment

The rebellion spirit of the May Fourth period added a rich and distinctive epochal gloss to the works of Feng Yuanjun. She appeared as a young woman rebel when she began her literary career in 1923. As soon as she had her short stories published in Creation Weekly (Chuangzao Zhoubao) and The Creation Monthly (Chuangzao Yuekan),1 such as “Journey” (Lüxing), “Kind Mother” (Cimu), “Separation” (Gejue) and “After the Separation” (Gejue zhihou), her bold style of writing swept the readers of the time off their feet. In default of such a young woman from an eminent family as Feng Yuanjun, who fought head-on with the traditional patriarchal rites, ideas, customs, and code of conducts, we may miss a focal point in the image of the generation of women rebels. Some of her stories in the collection of Juanshi Grass (Juanshi)2 are considered as a rarest extant record of the era, giving a vivid account of the youth after the May Fourth protests: that is, “they wanted to set on an audacious fight against tradition, yet they dared not. So, they turned to resurrecting

Penname of Feng Yuanjun, important female historian and writer of modern China, was born with the name of Feng Gonglan, later Feng Shulan, and wrote under the names of Yuanjun, Madam Gan, Da Qi, etc. 1 Two periodicals established by Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu and Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984) and the Creation Society. It started as tri-monthly journal in 1922, and then paralleled with a weekly paper that ran one year from May 13th, 1923 to May 1924, until it was sealed up by the KMT government as a pro-communism publication in 1929. In the text, it may be the authors’ error to put it as a weekly journal. 2

Juanshi Grass , the first collection of short stories by Feng Yuanjun in 1924. Juanshi grass is the ancient Chinese name for xanthium. The collection includes the above-mentioned four stories.

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_4

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their camouflaged sentiments of woes and rues.” (Lu Xun)3 We may also add that these stories present a truthful picture of the women who struggled to break the surface of history and resolutely escaped from the slaves’ death row on the one hand, yet on the other, had a fainthearted fear and lacked the resolution to take a new path, hence virtually got lost between the new and the old, between life and death. In such a depiction, we can read a paradoxical duality in the May Fourth young women rebels, who oscillated between audacity and dread in the process of fighting for their own emancipation.

4.1

Love as a Path of Female Defiance

If we say that Feng Yuanjun’s stories “Journey,” “Kind Mother,” “Separation,” and “After the Separation” shocked the society in any way, at first this is definitely because of her candid writing about love, and the love that was suffused with contempt for and challenge to traditional codes of conduct. This kind of material and theme in Feng Yuanjun’s writing addressed the kernel issues in the anti-feudal trend of the May Fourth period. Just like other reigning concepts of “science,” “democracy,” and “humanity,” “love” was another indicia of the New Culture value system. Before social sciences could systematically criticize or paraphrase feudalism, literary works (including translated literature) that eulogize lofty love helped enlighten and school the generation of anti-feudal youths. Endowed with such an ideological role, love was held high as a glorious banner and shone its humanistic light on the defilement of feudalism. But it is also critical to note that love itself was not the destination; it was a vehicle for anti-feudal youths to reach another destination—to demur to and cross swords with the feudal order and ethics that their parents had scrupulously observed. Such rebelliousness is particularly conspicuous in Feng Yuanjun’s fiction: starting with love that directly bears upon the tussle between the sexes, she comes to unveil a gripping social phenomenon. The protagonists in Feng Yuanjun’s works are some young new women or new-women-to-be who share two noteworthy attitudes towards love between men and women: one is their infinite trust in their lovers, the other their faith in love per se. It is crystal clear to them that their travels and even living together with their lovers, without permission of ritual law, are a challenge as well as a protest against old customs, vulgar multitude, and foul authorities; so is their choice of death over arranged feudal marriages. Even though they could have cold feet upon thinking of the pressures from both family and society, let alone reproaches of the crowd, they still firmly believe that “our history is what we should hold dear, and our spirit is what we should

3

From Lu Xun’s introduction to Chinese New Literature Series: Fiction 1.—the authors’ note in text. It is one section of the series of ten anthologies for the new literature between 1917 and 27, ed. Zhao Jiabi, Shanghai: Liangyou Publishing House, 1935.

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honor. Anyhow, we never begged for pity from anyone not trusted by our conscience.” (“Separation”) The heroine in “Journey” also writes, I dared not hold his hand for fear of causing others’ attention, but at the same time, to put it bluntly, we prided ourselves on being the noblest souls in the coach. We are proud of ourselves. We were crusading for our love, while the other travel-worn passengers were chasing fame and fortune.

Though Zuihua4 could not refuse an arranged marriage because of her love for her mother, finally she takes poison and dies with her lover, Shizhen. They would rather commit suicide than “die in front of their sworn enemies,” only to demonstrate that “We win in the end.” This is the difference between Feng Yuanjun’s sentimental sorrow-laden love story and the love tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. To the protagonists in Feng Yuanjun’s fiction, freedom of love is not only part of their infatuation that is incompatible with society, but also a kind of creed to which they adhere and devote themselves. “I can sacrifice my body and life, yet not the freedom of my will, without which, I’d rather die. If people do not know free love must be fought for, nothing else is worth mentioning” (“Separation”). To them, love is a solemn mission that inexorably runs counter to the greed and vulgarity of the profit-hunting world: “We carve out a way of dying for free love” … “We should point out perils and obstacles along the way to the youths and wish them every success” (“Separation”). Meanwhile, their love also means a series of plans of action and behavior: a love journey taken in defiance of the worldly norms is undoubtedly a ritual of apostasy in the name of love; a homecoming visit to her mother, yet girding herself with poison in case something should happen contrary to her will, apparently is a course of action she schemes with great deliberation and planning. Such an attitude that regards love as a cause to champion, a belief to uphold, and a strategic mission to carry out is the daughters’ view of “love.” With this creed-and-mission view of love, what Feng Yuanjun intended to tell us was a story about how lovers fall in love so as to build an arm-inarm fortress to resist feudalism, instead of a sheer love story of a man and a woman. In that era, at least, such a battle story gave a more candid and dynamic narration than a romantic story. As a matter of fact, it was a common approach that the May Fourth female authors adopted, besides Feng Yuanjun, in dealing with the motif of love. In this sense, they gained a chief distinction

4 Zuihua, main character of “Separation.” There might be an error in the Chinese character for “Zui” in the text.

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from some later writers, like Zhang Ailing5 and Su Qing6 who made a point of addressing subtle psychological games between lovers, or from Ding Ling and Bai Wei who wrote about the inner experience of women. In the eyes of the May Fourth female authors, it was incontrovertible that love had to and also ought to be pure and untainted, because in that age, love was the youths’ one and only battle flag they raised to demonstrate their abhorrence of vulgar multitude and old-fashioned norms. With such implicature for the flag, it should not be profaned or tainted. Nor would Feng Yuanjun and her female narrators, for the sake of the purity of such a flag or bewitched by it, allow themselves to doubt love or their lovers. They would not even show the slightest bit of amative mentality, such as suspicion or envy, when in love. Feng Yuanjun’s fictional characters unswervingly insist on the view of love of the Romantic era and guard love with steadfast loyalty and sublime affection. So it stands to reason that only such young women would not hesitate to commit suicide for the sake of love when they come into conflict with their parents. In Yuanjun’s characters, we hardly find the dubiety for life that Lu Yin projected on her characters when they fell in love. Although she also describes some sentiments of fatigue and disappointment after experiencing romance in her later “Traces of Spring” (Chun hen),7 the story still ends in a passionate love. In this way, Feng Yuanjun formed her own distinct style in handling love stories. We find no other authors in this period who could be more audacious and blunter than she was in describing and extolling unconventional love that was antagonistic to social mores. For sure, she was brave, but at the same time her style also had some evident evasions and omissions. Probably it was only by evading the issue of frailty, which might be intrinsic in love per se, and by omitting some emotive mentality common to all lovers that she could manage to turn love into a mission-like cult. The reason why such love never crumbled in her works, for one, is that the man her protagonist loved was never really objectified in her novels: he was never configured as an individual with personality or as a man—the object of her love. He remains a phantasm to her, even when she writes sentences like “When you hugged me in your arms…I was thinking that only your true love could save me.” Such omission and elusiveness might be due to her crude skill in writing, but it betrayed something else: without a real object, there could not possibly be a subject, let alone gender as the subject. In fact, she seldom used “I” and “he” to distinguish the protagonist from her lover—they are one and same subject. Thus considered, her novels do not implicate and cannot realistically describe the gender-based feelings or points of views that women might gain through 5 Or Eileen Chang (1920–1995), a prolific important novelist, essayist, and screenwriter from Shanghai during the so-called “Island Period” when Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese army. She migrated to America after 1949 and died there. She remains popular among Chinese readers. See Chapter 16. 6 Su Qing, penname of Feng Yunzhuang (1914–2982), a modern woman writer. See Chapter 15. 7

Feng Yuanjun’s epistolary novella, published around 1924.

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love. What is really missing or omitted in the narration of her female characters is their female selves. Under the circumstances of the time, such evasiveness could be adequately justified. Because otherwise, she could not possibly maintain the purity and loftiness of the banner of love. In her fiction, the basis for her lovers’ quasilove was not so much their affection or mutual attraction of their personalities, and even less their mutual sexual needs. But rather, it was their spiritual alliance engrafted on the token of love, which purported the historical-epochal united frontline the children generation set up in the parent-versus-child confrontation and their new ideology that differed like chalk and cheese from the traditional opinions on the issue of love. Such a difference, as Zuihua says, was “the conflict between two incompatible ideologies” (“After Separation”). The heroes and heroines in “Journey” and “Separation” take a series of bold actions: falling in love with someone she is not supposed to according to feudal ethics, traveling with him, “priding ourselves on being the noblest souls” and finally committing suicide in the name of love. But her courage does not stem from their love per se, but rather from the ideological alliance with which they, knowingly or unknowingly, have amenably affiliated themselves. In the context of the time, such alliance was not only a tie of love, but also a compact to fight against tradition. In comparison with behaviors like “revolution” and “transforming the society,” love was probably the most conjecturable anti-tradition action that youths of that age, especially young women, were liable to take. At the juncture when the new culture converged and conflicted with the old culture, love served as an important behavioral mode for the new generation’s cultural alliance. Love was indubitable, just as the alliance was incontrovertible. This point was particularly important for women: as illustrated in the works of that time, this alliance not only conferred love on women, but also held out a prospect for them to get the better of their traditional gender role through the symbol of love, that is, rebellious love qualified women to join the ranks of the anti-feudal rebels. In other words, the rebellious love was a primary path for women to become part of that historical time as individuals; for lots of them, it was the only path they could tread. Actually, this was the real-life experience of a large number of the May Fourth women. This subtle tripartite link among women, love, and the times may help us understand why Feng Yuanjun avoided writing about the female self or female ipseity: this evasion was indeed an endeavor to gain women’s right to play their part in history or at least to keep the path open for them. Let us suppose that Feng Yuanjun had focused her narrative on observing Zuihua’s female self, in the same way as “Mengke” or My Tragic Life (Beiju Shengya),8 then Shizhen would appear in the chasm between Zuihua’s female self and others as the Other of the opposite sex, on the other side of the female Subject, and their anti-traditional alliance of spirit (or love) would naturally become less solid and stable. And once this alliance was loosened, Zuihua would be devoid of the possibility of dying for 8

Tragic Life, Bai Wei’s 1936 autobiographical fiction.

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love. It also means that without any “revolution” she could take refuge in, she would lose the chance to be chosen by history. Thereupon, she would remain outside history—to wit, abandoned in the unconscious realm. This is not only Zuihua’s predicament, but also how things could have stacked up for Feng Yuanjun herself under the circumstances of her time. If Feng Yuanjun took her own history into account, it is undeniable that she should defend this rebellion-based love both in her life and in her novels. This means she had to give up or never thought of observing love from the perspective of her gender-based self. She explained this in the cliffhanger at the ending of “Separation”: if Zuihua dies for love, then “even if she cannot contribute to society with her learning, she can still carve out a way of dying for liberal love and point out perils and obstacles along the way to the youths after her.” In other words, just because rebellion-based love was a primary path into history that the May Fourth era opened up to women, it was worth all the prices that the “Zuihuas” and “Yuanjuns” pay to defend it and depend on it. They would live and die for the love at all costs—whether it was their female selfhood, or their own lives, or they went so far as to contrive a plot to dramatize a conflict that would lead to a death in the name of love. Of course, to insist on their female selfhood does not necessarily mean doubt towards love itself. On the contrary, it only means doubt of the myths pertaining to love. It was just in this regard that Feng Yuanjun, as a female writer, failed to debunk the myths, due to some epochal or ideological reasons; she only repeated the old myth of faithful love. For in the context of her own situation, she could not possibly find a narrative that was coherent enough to reconcile the debunking of the myths with her pursuit of following the antifeudal trend of the time. Even in her anti-feudal and anti-tradition endeavors, she probably never got wise to the fact that in the sense of old Chinese precepts, feudal society’s autocracy over women had seeped into every pore of the beautiful stories about faithful love. Instead, Feng Yuanjun had been so much swept along by the waves of the May Fourth new culture that she could not but make her heroines hold up the sacred banner of love by inventing some dramatic plots, under the premise of this myth of faithful love, so as to establish them as anti-feudal rebels and women warriors. The dramatization, in that event, provided the heroines the opportunity and capacity to stand side by side with the rebellious sons. This somewhat clumsy subconscious improvisation exposed the common puzzlement or dilemma that all May Fourth women faced. They had merely walked out of their submerged world, but in rising above the horizon of history, they could hardly find any territory where they belonged or could secure a foothold for themselves. They lacked their own point of view and their own way of thinking; they lacked the ability to critique tradition, being deficient in their own values and language. Their problems were arbitrarily classified into such irrelevant spheres of the new ideology as human rights, humanity, romantic love, and parent–child conflicts. This is the context in which Feng Yuanjun and her heroines were bred.

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Sexual Morality

Such a kind of love that sought to enter the narrative of history turned out to be a mystified love, and its biggest mystery is first and foremost sexual love. It is worth pondering how Feng Yuanjun addressed sex in “Journey,” though, of course, she never literally “wrote” sex in her fiction. Admittedly, all female writers in the May Fourth period advertently steered clear of the subject, but given the thematic particularity of Feng Yuanjun’s stories, we still find her avoidance of sex much more striking than others’ omission. This reveals something of special import. In fictions like “Journey” and “Separation,” love is not only what iconizes the spiritual alliance of the young generation but also what manifests the protagonists’ attitude towards sex. The two novels contain the gist of the same love story, viz. love of a couple who go against the feudal code of ethics and social conventions—a man who is married in an arranged feudal marriage, and a female student in the face of a marriage arranged by her parents. For various reasons, to raise a storm to break with the traditionally arranged marriages is something they cannot do, or maybe do not want and have no heart to do, so they take advantage of the interim when leaving home for schools to stage an indirect and symbolic protest: going off together on a trip. They travel together, live together, and even sleep under the same quilt, but since “the young man and woman’s love is so deep that they’d rather sacrifice their lives for this love,” they, “when staying together for more than ten days, had done nothing but hugging, kissing and whispering to each other.” (“Separation”) The story thus ends in an aura of tragic melancholy. According to the author’s original intent, there are two points in this story that were designed to fly in the face of conventional norms, both related to the morality of sex. In the first place, considering the protagonists who are either bound in a marriage or in an engagement, their journey itself conveys a hint of challenge to traditional social ideas, because it shakes the traditional foundation of family and flouts marriage’s predominance in sanctioning human feelings and sexual behaviors. Since it seems to others that their deed of traveling together implicates a novel moral outlook of sex, it is no wonder that the heroine’s sisters and mother upbraid her for her illicit cohabitation with a man. Despite her trepidation, she still bluntly claims herself to be “the noblest soul,” because she firmly believes that the deed itself culminates their mission of love. The second point involves the manner in which they undertake the “mission of love,” that is, their sharing the same bed “without perpetrating any promiscuous sexual deeds.” This is again beyond the imagination and comprehension of the philistine masses because it subverts people’s common judgment and expectations that are formed in a tradition of millenniums. Obviously, the deed, by itself, gives a refutation of the morally derogatory judgment on “illicit cohabitation” and proves that “love” can be a purely spiritual affection: “Only love can stop a man from doing what his lover does not want, no matter how much he desires.” This deed of love transcends flesh and sex, or rather it cuts

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flesh and sex loose from love. It is because it is not sex-based that the love is pure. Viewed from today’s historical vantage point, this double-purposed socialnorm-defying deed obviously sticks out with certain ideological strategies. Just as sometimes exalting someone is to demean him, so flaunting something is to evade it. If the free-love-touting and marriage-law-defying journey is an open war cry against traditional marriage-protective conceptions, then to emphasize their innocence in sex during the journey and to insinuate a new sexual moral code that entails no actual sex can be regarded as a means of circumventing certain hidden hazards. The new ideology in the May Fourth period had provided the young sufficient moral support for free love: to boycott tradition, to pursue individuality, to be a person of Subjectivity, and to behave oneself independently, instead of as a tool to “carry on the ancestral line,” etc. But these nineteenth-century notions did not provide a clear definition for the correlation between sex and love, especially no clear-cut explanation to distinguish free love from deeds of licentiousness or moral depravity. In this respect, by contrast, feudal ideology had never been ambivalent in its deeply entrenched canon that all sexual relations that were not sanctioned by feudal code of ethics were regarded as “promiscuity,” synonymous to “lasciviousness.” Therefore, when it came to the issue of sex, the new moral of free love lost its cogency on the defensive: it could not discriminate itself from the conceptual domain of promiscuity as defined by the old system. The effort Feng Yuanjun and her protagonists made to conjure the spirit of love and debase the physicality of sexual love was only to reiterate over and over again that this love was not driven by lust and it was not licentious, but impeccably pure. It was just like defending themselves by borrowing the traditional dialect of “without perpetrating any promiscuous sexual deeds.” In this sense, even though Feng Yuanjun’s call for free love was uttered in the breath of the new era, she carried on the old conceptions when depicting sexual love. And neither the author nor the protagonists came to realize that they inadvertently used the concept of promiscuity from the old system as a frame of reference when defending the purity of love, which determined the subtext for “free love.” Such consistency in interlacing and overlapping the old and new ideologies on the issue of sexual love is thought-provoking. Is it simply due to the rebels’ falling short of their ambition—“hoping to set on a fight against the tradition, yet they dare not”—and their failure to snatch a total victory? Or is it actually because the new ideology itself did not give them leave to violate the longestablished prohibitions on sexual issues? Otherwise, why did they hold onto these prohibitions? For instance, just to prove their respect for their women, why should the men have to relinquish their sexual desire? Take a look at how Feng Yuanjun made her protagonists crown their pure love by dissociating themselves from lust. As stated in her novels, the heroine is not supposed to have corporeal wants, or she should suppress such desires of hers in first place. To that end, she times again turns down her lover’s attempts at any physical

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contacts: in the beginning, she bawled him out because he stole a kiss from her; later in the trip, she gave in to his embracing and kissing her, but nothing more than that, because anything more than that would be his “lust,” not her “willingness.” By its very nature, to contain sexual love is first and foremost to curb sex on women’s part, to subdue women’s desire, and to dodge anything related to women’s experience as the Subject of sex. It is only by affirming the woman’s “unwillingness” first and then making the man conform to her “unwillingness” that this love can prove itself pure. In other words, this kind of pure love, based on the “sacrifice” of men’s desire, actually adds weight to the “ennobled” male emotions, on the premise that women should not have any desires and even if they do, they should wipe it out for the sake of dignity. In this sense, the male’s sacrifice becomes a kind of grace bestowed on the female to maintain her dignity. Now we recognize a shred of male-centered culture betrayed here—pure love, spiritual love, and the sacrifice of lust for love are all myths that are created to consecrate the male greatness, while at the same time women’s sexual needs are never regarded as a need of a Subject. In view of this syllogism, the eulogy of spiritual love and the debasement of corporeal love only illuminated one thing, that is, conceptions such as humanitarianism, freedom, and free love did not vitiate the male-centric dictatorship in gender relations that had been established by feudal society in China, and did not even touch the one in concerns of women’s will. These concepts were steeped in male chauvinism, which were only thinly veiled by the campaign of antifeudalism. This is the reason why old ideological values and those of the new overlapped on the issue of free love and sexual love. On this ground, the fight staged by Feng Yuanjun’s characters against old traditions cannot possibly come to a total victory. As a matter of fact, her real issue was not whether they pull off a victory or not; it was her switch of roles. She acted as a rebel against tradition on the anti-feudal battlefield, but when it came to gender issues, she was compelled to play a traditional role. Being the passive side in the relationship, she could not help but say, “I am unwilling to.” While she took pride in her lover’s respect for her “unwillingness,” she did not see that if she wanted to be respected for her own self, she had to forsake her right to “willingness.”

4.3

The Bond Between Mother and Daughter

What really counts as a feminine theme in Feng Yuanjun’s novels is at most that of the mother–daughter relationship, although the touch of femininity comes out in her text unbeknownst to herself. Almost every short story of hers features Mother’s love, especially “Kind Mother,” “Overdue” (Wudian), and “Separation.” Her protagonist tends to find herself caught in an irreconcilable opposition between “mother’s love” and “lover’s love.” For the lover’s love, she braves the world’s opinions and regards the arranged marriage as her implacable foe, but she cannot bear to break off her engagement because of

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her love for the mother, for whom she even wants to give up her free love. Often in the end, only death can unravel the entanglement. It may be true that, as more recent critics note, Feng Yuanjun’s time was an era when “mother’s love conflicts with lover’s love.” But it should be added that this statement only applies to female writers, not to male rebel writers. The complexity of this conflict is that it was not only an ideological disparity between two generations, but also a conflict caused by the Mother–Daughter’s attachment as well as the rupture in their emotion and mentality. It must be borne in mind that in the anti-feudal May Fourth Movement, the abject women were placed in a very prominent position, because they were the first victims who were exposed when the imperial power and patriarchal dominance, along with their laws—the feudal code of ethics—collapsed. So upon her declaring war against the traditional code of ethics under the banner of free love, Feng Yuanjun suddenly caught sight of the elderly mother in the camp of her foes. Under the era’s candlelight shed on women, she recognized Mother as the frail one under patriarchy—“Frailty, thy name is woman.” Just as it was in the spirit of humanitarianism that male writers in the May Fourth period got acquainted with the underprivileged and the weaker, it was also in this spirit that Feng Yuanjun approached the subject of Mother and the tie between Mother and Daughter. This is certainly because of her female identity as an author. However, why did Mother occupy such an important position in female writers’ creations and why did they think so highly of mother–daughter tie that it could be thrown into the scale with “lover’s love” on the other side? The questions do not seem to appertain only to the issues of morality and love, but also to the mentality—the unconscious complex—of the generation of new women who barely emerged above the surface of history. To recap, the New Culture Movement of the May Fourth era was pioneered and undergirded by the forces of “the anti-patriarchal rebels and apostates” in the spirit of patricide. In psychoanalytic terms, patricide was a symptom of the Oedipus Complex in an era when all the authorities that were incarnated in the iconic Father, such as the feudal patriarch, imperial power, and feudal code of ethics, along with their institutions, got subverted. Although whether this “patricide” era would topple the dominance of Father or not was still in doubt, it was doubtless that Feng Yuanjun and her protagonists stood with the patricide camp, partaking in the spiritual alliance of the Children’s generation. In fact, the purpose of the rebellious young generation was simply to overthrow the obsolete authority of an aged Father and replace the old male-centered rule with a new male-centered order, which stood them in good stead and was more Westernized. Although women’s liberation had allegedly been noted as an agonistic voice of rebellion, it was miles away from making an independent female camp for the women oppressed by male hegemony and far from being capable of overthrowing the patriarchal system. Instead, it was merged and even integrated into the Sons’ fight against the Father. Women’s liberation, which joined the trend of overthrowing the patriarchal power—the Confucian

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Stock9 and traditional code of ethics that were iconized in patriarchs in families and emperors—did not contribute to the abolition of male domination itself, but only to the removal of one style of governing. In this sense, with the metaphor of “patricide,” its primary connotation was that it was a contention between two generations of men. This self-evident male centrism put the new women of that era in a dilemma. On the one hand, Feng Yuanjun’s heroines were women who had acquired a loose sense of women’s emancipation. Historically speaking, being the oppressed gender, their fate depended on whether the male supremacy itself could be obliterated, regardless of whether they realized this point or not. But on the other hand, under the circumstances of that time, when they cried in protest of the feudal code of ethics, they actually stood in the crossfire of the binary opposites between the old and the young, both of the same gender—the male, that is, the father–son opposition. Although it was also for this opposition that their rebellious free love had a chance to acquire an epochal value and social significance, the gender of the young generation was male, though appearing to be ungendered. The male’s purpose, unlike that of the female, was to become Father’s substitute, not his terminator. In a large sense, this new discourse pressed the woman back to her original state of unconsciousness, only in a novel way. Probably it is due to this quandary that the female characters in Feng Yuanjun’s fiction indeterminately vacillated between the patricide phase (the Oedipal phase) and the pre-patricide phase (the pre-Oedipal phase). To the men in general, “Father” symbolically represented the supreme power (over women) and an impediment to the sons, hence a symbol of ruling authority for the whole society. Patricide, on the part of the sons, was not so much to satisfy their Oedipal love for the Mother as to establish their masculine ipseity or gendered self. It was a battle for power and discourse, a development of their Subjectivity. To the women in the May Fourth period, however, “patricide” was rather different in meaning. As a female who played a symbolic role in the patricide campaign, she could not develop from the pre-Oedipal phase— being physically attached to or mentally focused on mother’s body—into the phase of establishing a gendered self or forming her ego as Subject. The reason why she did not finish her self-identification like men is that in this process, no opposite sex object-relation appeared on the scene to provide boundaries, just like Father’s constant absence in Feng Yuanjun’s fiction. Therefore, patricide only meant that a female had to either forget her own gender and act as a male offspring, or hold fast to her pre-Oedipal object—mother, rather than the opposite sex parent. Feng Yuanjun’s heroines all have a strong sense of the anti-feudal mission for love as well as for a spiritual alliance with the sons, which convincingly epitomizes the first option; this has been deliberated in this chapter. Her heavy dependence on her mother illustrates the second option. Different from the traditional or old-fashioned Chinese women, who were delineated by the male masters as the Other, the image of Mother under 9

The young people’s slogans in the May Fourth movement: Smash the Confucian Shop!

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the pen of female writers tended to be a compassionate mother, a close family relation. Feng Yuanjun, as a daughter and a female, had a gender-based affiliation with the mother, which was an intrinsic identification and also one written in a code that was most prevailing among the May Fourth young people—the code of emotion. Owing to this kind of identification, Feng Yuanjun actually remolded the image of female parent in the history of literature. The Mother in her fiction, in terms of reason, is still the executer and key player of the patriarchal will, but speaking of emotions, she is no longer the incarnation of patriarchal authority, like Grandmother Jia10 in the novels before. The mother she felt attached to was infinitely benevolent, though so weak, helpless, and careworn that she also needed protection. Far from being a domineering figure, she was rather ordinary. In a word, Feng Yuanjun’s fiction sorted out another type of mother from the old inaccessible image that used to embody an authoritative parent and echo the Father’s will. Her type of Mother was a person of irreplaceable kinship with her. If this mother had any authority, it was not that she held sway over the fate of her children, but that she had an infinite love for, and therefore influence upon them. The May Fourth era saw all kinds of innovations and restructurings, but this type of revamp was either ignored or unlikely to be written by male masters. However, such a psychological attachment to the mother caused a lot of losses to a woman, the most important of which was that she could not develop, in the phase of identifying with and being attached to the parent of her own gender, the sense of a subjective self like that developed by male offspring. As long as she did not evolve out of the Pre-Oedipal phase, she would always only be a child under the sway of the Mother, hidden in the shadow of Mother’s infinite and undivided love—gradually the shadow would grow on her. Behind the lover’s love and the mother’s love, with Feng Yuanjun’s heroines caught in between, lurked the psychological-and-epochal syndrome that women suffered as a result of the spirit of patricide during that era. The women who had escaped from the collapsed patriarchal shrine should have taken the opportunity to complete the conversion from their pre-Oedipal phase to their gender configuration. However, inundated by the tides of the May Fourth era, they were not given much room for the conversion. In that era, the women emerging out of the epistemic nothingness could only establish themselves through dual identities: one was by being rebels—the spiritual reflection of the male rebels and apostates; the other by being the weaker—a generic term for the weaker gender group in history. But neither of these two identities had much to do with gender. First, in the loop of lover-daughter-and-mother relationships, they could not find the objectified male to make a contrast to the female self: the father did not appear, and the lover was first and foremost the daughter’s spiritual ally before his gender was noticed. Secondly, the female that could be contrasted with men was nowhere to be seen: the 10 Grandmother Jia, the Dowager in the extended aristocratic family of Jia in A Dream of the Red Mansions.

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mother’s weight in history was too light to be the father’s counterpart. The daughter was neither a Subject of her own volition nor a Subject in social– historical sense. Given the two identities, no matter how far the women got involved in the scenario of patricide in the May Fourth period, they could only land at a certain point between the pre-Oedipal phase and the Oedipal phase. Therefore, neither lover’s love nor mother’s love was dispensable to Yuanjun’s heroine; they balanced out on her scale of mental belonging. Through lover’s love, she became a rebel against patriarchy and the feudal code of ethics; through Mother’s love, she fended off the fear of growing up from daughterhood to adulthood, and thereby kept off many other questions related to the unknown, lone female gender, such as Who am I? Where was I from? and Where should I go? If they were asked to choose one identity over the other, then between the hard choice at the ideological level and no choice at the psychologically unconscious level, Feng Yuanjun’s protagonists were bound to find no path left to them but death. In this sense, it is no doubt that Feng Yuanjun’s stories supply a valuable literature about women’s dilemma in that era. It is significant enough to enable us to perceive the difficulties and obstacles on the way women marched down in the anti-tradition fight, for which they had shown the greatest possible courage and even given their lives.

CHAPTER 5

Bing Xin: Fortune’s Favored Daughter

5.1

Born Under a Lucky Star

Bing Xin1 is undoubtedly one of the most popular female writers of the May Fourth period. This is probably because her image in the literary world was as fresh, gentle, and crystal clear as the images conjured by the titles of her poetry collections—A Myriad of Stars (Fanxing ), Spring Water (Chunshui),2 and by her pen name itself, Ice Heart (verbatim in Chinese). Bing Xin has been well-respected by later critics as well, with her top-rank reputation among her female peers in modern Chinese literature. Her lasting fame may be accounted for by the fact that she had kept her fresh and gentle image unchanged for decades throughout her whole writing career. It may be worth noting that Bing Xin, who is renowned as a May Fourth female writer, was not an archetypal “father’s daughter” of the May Fourth generation in light of her family background, her life experience, and her writing style. In a sense, the patricidal May Fourth era was bound to produce rebellious daughters like Lu Yin, Feng Yuanjun, and Bai Wei, and in the character gallery of the revolutionary May Fourth era, we are also apt to find those old-style ladies and new-style couples from Ling Shuhua’s novels. However, Bing Xin was not necessarily bound by the destiny of the era, nor were her A Myriad of Stars and Spring Water some necessary outcome of the times. Her 1 Bing Xin, verbatim et literatim, icy heart, penname to Xie Wanying(1900–1999), one of the most prolific Chinese writers of the twentieth century, also famous as a children’s writer, translator and social activist. Her penname was derived from a line from famous poem by Tang poet Wang Changling (698–757), “Bidding Farewell to Xin Jian at Lotus Pavillion,” “If my friends in Luyang ask after me, My heart’s like ice in a jade pot, pure and noble as it can be.”. 2 A Myriad of Stars is Bing Xin’s earliest collection of 164 poems between 1919 and 1921. Spring Water is Bing Xin’s early collection of 182 poems.

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_5

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joy was too pure for this era, her pain too placid, her beliefs too clear, and her misgivings too otherworldly. Some scholars point out that Bing Xin was richly endowed by nature in many ways, especially in her childhood family where she was brought up. We do not have all the details about Bing Xin’s childhood, but from her later works, memoirs, and letters, it is convincible that her parents’ discipline of her was far exceeded by their love and care for her. According to these descriptions, it seems that since birth, Bing Xin had so firmly believed that she was unconditionally accepted by this world and loved by her parents that not even a trace of reprimands, guilt, or forbiddance can be found in her childhood memories or work. What we read is only understanding and attachment between her and her parents. This forms a sharp contrast with her peers like Feng Yuanjun and Lu Yin, through whom we realize that the selfcontradictory, care-laden, and even morbid minds of the rebellious daughters resulted from the strict parental admonitions that they grew up under. The love between mother and daughter, if any, that can be found in their works is never as harmonious and natural as that in Bing Xin’s texts. In fact, if Bing Xin did not fabricate the relationships between herself and her parents and siblings, then her family was not only an exception to the norm of families in the May Fourth era, but probably also a beau idéal for a hearty and vigorous family rarely found even in today’s China. The age in which she was born was an era with parent–child opposition as its reference note, but given the circumstances, Bing Xin had an extraordinarily harmonious and close relationship with her parents. It was fortunate for her, as it may be, in that her ménage quite protected her maiden heart from any possible trauma and bestowed on her benefits that her peers were not as fortunate to enjoy. This accounts for Bing Xin’s singularity. First of all, she had a unique self-image different from that of others. Due to her unparalleled family life, the image of parents in her mind bore the least possible similarity with the abominable incarnations of “Father’s Law,” and as a “daughter,” nor was her heart laden with shadows of “father.” She need not be as tragic and desolate as Bai Wei, since the latter had to construct her Self by mounting an anti-suppression resistance to her identity of being “father’s daughter.” On the contrary, Bing Xin seemed to be the only one in that era who proudly claimed to be “mother’s daughter,” a showcase of the daughter’s seamless and inseparable relationship with the mother. In fact, in view of the two diverse references themselves, we can read distinct mentalities to a certain extent. For the unfilial daughters to the patriarch of an old-fashioned family, their selfimage was bound to be one of speciosity and paradox: they were, and at the same time were not, “father’s daughters.” From the first moment of their rebellion, they had been disowned as daughters by their parents, and banished by the values espoused by their parents, while actually they could not possibly abjure their parents. The irony is that they rejected “father’s order” and the male world, but, as it turned out, the male order was the only and whole reality they could find. In the psychological dimension as implied by the identity of

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being “daughters” to “Father,” they were in their Oedipal phase, thus subject to the phasal attributes mentally unique to women, that is, the irreparable sense of split ego and anxiety. However, Bing Xin, brought up in a liberalminded family in which she was mother’s adorable daughter, seemed to have fortuitously escaped this social and historical verdict on daughters. To be a daughter, Bing Xin never had to reject or be rejected by her parents. She only needed to take her parents’ gaze of love and gaze back at herself with the same love. It seems that her growth never encountered conflicts with the patriarchal order, but only consisted of a single-sex continuum with her mother: she directly grew from a daughter to a mother by virtue of a seamless mother– daughter interrelationship. In Bing Xin, we witness a classic case of a healthy pre-Oedipal development in psychological terms. She might also have doubts in her heart, but they never divided her ego nor opposed her against herself; especially she never showed any doubt about her identity as a daughter. Roughly speaking, “father’s daughter” and “mother’s daughter” respectively represent two distinct fountainheads for the surfacing female consciousness that surged for the first time in the May Fourth era, though it remained blurred in its Oedipal stage. For Lu Yin and Feng Yuanjun, apparently, it was the patricidal era that gave birth to their rebellious consciousness, while for Bing Xin, the female consciousness had arisen from the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter, with patriarchal injunctions suspended. Thus, the nascent female consciousness had different manifestations with different people. Lu Yin and writers like her delineated women panting under patriarchy as a hell of existence, the gate to which was love with both sexes entangled, while Bing Xin described an Eden for daughters beyond the borders of patriarchy and the doors to it were maternal love and childlike innocence that steered clear of sexual relations. As a consequence, their diverse female consciousnesses also had their divergent ways out. Although both Bing Xin and Lu Yin, to some extent, had in common a deep nostalgia for their lives of being daughters, nevertheless, for the latter, it was because what lay ahead of her was the boundless father’s land that she had just forsaken, like endless ranges of mountains, leaving no path to her, while Bing Xin chose to remain a daughter, in that she had an invisible but ubiquitous mother standing behind her. It is hard to say whose path is more progressive in the social sense, but Lu Yin is undoubtedly the more miserable one.

5.2 Holy Bond Between Mother and Daughter---A Moment of Bliss Bing Xin’s blessed childhood—her unique experience as a daughter—determined that she would be the one who praised Motherhood in this patricide era and set mother-daughter harmony off as a foil to the father–son opposition. In the eyes of ordinary people, Bing Xin’s femininity was undoubtedly reflected in the motifs of motherly love and childly innocence. But perhaps it should be noted that the gender trait latent here did not derive from the tender

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emotions provoked by this pair of images or their conjunction with women’s lives, but completely from the mental reproduction of the pre-Oedipal identification. By dint of the mother–child theme, Bing Xin’s works reflect a unitary world model that has the mother–child relationship at its core and is shaped from the prototype of her childhood experience and the philanthropic spirit in Western humanism. Themed on this topic are a lot of poems in her A Myriad of Stars and Spring Water, in which maternal love to Bing Xin is distinct from other mother images such as the one described in “Threads in a fond mother’s hand/Woven into the wanderer’s coat.”3 Nor is it like Feng Yuanjun’s sanctified mother or the incarnation of forbiddance in Lu Yin’s hard-nosed mother who is so domineering that she does not dare to love. In Bing Xin’s heart, Mother seems to be her physio-psychological genesis and spatial shelter, because there is an uncut umbilical cord between her and mother like the one between the origin and derivative of life. Mother is described as the warm chest for her soul to settle in, a lap in the moonlight for her to lean her head on, a lair in winds and rains to shelter her, and the spring nurturing small flowers... These images all indicate that the life of children is part of the greater life of Mother—they used to be one, inseparable. This point is expressed touchingly in “The Ode” (Zhici)4 : If I left, like a piece of dream—— Mother! My sun! In seventy years I will return, To the center of my orbit, Your pleochroic halo, Can you still recognize this little sparkle? If I left Like a petal of falling blossom Mother! My bough! In next spring I will return To the root of my life Your towering wood Will you recognize this little petal?

Bing Xin was indeed as ethereal as the falling flower leaving branches, just as she nostalgically memorized and missed the moment when she stayed in her mother’s womb. Even her poems were also offshoots of her mother’s life: “Mother/these fragments of lines/Could you take a look?/The words, long before I was born/had hidden themselves in your heart.” Thus, for Bing Xin, parting with mother is as harrowing as if her body and life were being torn apart. Crying for mother and also for herself, she wrote: “The consummate love is the one without separation or death.” (“The Ode”) By analogy, Bing Xin regards being with mother as the greatest fulfillment in her life: 3

Famous lines from the poem by Tang poet Meng Jiao, A Traveler’s Song.

4

The Ode, written in 1922 and collected in Bing Xin’s Spring Water.

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The Creator—— If throughout Your eternal life Only one request can be granted I shall sincerely plea Let me be in Mother’s arms Mother lying in a small boat The boat rippling on the sea The sea bathed in the moonlight.5

Reading the images in this poem, a psychoanalyst will surely decode metaphors of embryo and womb—child, mother’s arms, small boat, and sea. These images are clearly indicative of the cuddling and inseparable relationship between child and mother, humanity and universe, and seem to summon people’s blurred memories back to the blissful moment of residing in the mother’s body. Viewed from this perspective, Bing Xin preserves intact her anima and miraculously reproduces all the mother-child symbiotic mnemonic information in her literary work. She has it in her faith and also wants to remind us that in the very beginning of life, child and mother shared one body and the same life. Although the Providence prescribes that they are to be split and separated, that very moment when a human life is conceived advises us what love is and what the true nature of life and the universe are. This warm, harmonious, and perfect womb-like universe itself is a pre-linguistic world and lies deep in human mind for as long as we exist. Nearly all these emotional poems of Bing Xin seem to be spiritual proliferations of this symbiotic feelings or sense of life. This may help us to understand the special meanings of the images of baby and child in Bing Xin’s work. The perfect harmony and warmth of the universe as epitomized by mother’s body can only be felt by a child, and only as a child can one, being its only beneficiary, reciprocate this plenitude of love. Both sons and daughters, especially when they are babies or children, play an important role in the symbiotic relations. No foundlings can be found in Bing Xin’s works. Even to the two babies in “Separation” (Fen, 1931) who were born into diagonally different destinies and social environments, their mothers are equally important: they never stop being part of their own mothers’ life, and will not be abandoned. Their images themselves are blessed by the happy world in Bing Xin’s heart, and they in turn relay this blessing to the world. In this fashion, children in Bing Xin’s works are all little angels. Installed in the structuration of love to stand for mother–child relationship, they are takers of love and they are also a source of love. They refresh the despondent and desperate people’s memory about the beautiful moment at the beginning of life, upon which a faith for love and life wells up in their heart. In “There are Adequate Joys and Lights in the World” (Shijie you de shi kuaile he guangming), she writes about a person who is so despaired of life as to nearly kill 5

“The Creator,” Zaowuzhe, a poem collected in Bing Xin’s Spring Water.

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himself but regains confidence in life from two innocent and beloved children. “The Last Messenger” (Zuihou de shizhe) is written in the form of an allegory about a God-blessed baby who serves as a poetic symbol of consolation and hope for the salvation of humanity.6 Babies and children become another warrant to complete the cycle of the idyllic mother–child world. What’s more, Bing Xin herself was a case in point of this mother–child symbiosis: on the one hand, she was the daughter in her poems, and on the other hand, in many essays such as “Addressing Young Readers” (Ji xiao duzhe, 1923), you also read a little mother in her—a mother narrator who has a child’s heart. It seems that Bing Xin was more inclined to make a “mother” because it was definite to her that her “daughterly” identity was inseparable from maternal love. Becoming a mother did not really mean to bid farewell to her happy childhood—the daughter’s experience—but rather extended the world in which mother and daughter lived in somatic interdependence. It can be stated here, her sui generis experience of being a blessed daughter resulted in reaching her prospective reader group and providing her whole motivation for writing. It is no wonder that she later became a very rare exception among modern Chinese female writers. Through such a bilateral “Oneness of Life” that was constructed between mother and child, Bing Xin presented a harmonious organic model of world that was latent in life but also independent from society. For instance, the protagonist of “The Enlightened” (Wu, 1924) seems to acquire her philosophy of life in an epiphany after reflecting upon and reproducing her unconscious experience in mother’s body, that is, the love that extends from the mother–child bond and transcends life and death. This love is rooted in the origin of human life and grows in the unconscious of each individual; it is virtually the source of one’s life. This philosophy is not so much saturated with a certain religious streak as filled with tropes for mother’s body, clothed in religious habit: boats, seas, and even the entire universe. Apparently, if there were any gender undertone that this mother–child world could imply, it should, first of all, consist in its distinctive pre-Oedipal features. This does not mean that only femininity features pre-Oedipal psychological traits. So does masculinity. The key lies in the well-known Oedipus’ archetype of killing father and sleeping with mother, which not only stands as a stage of psychological development in the Freudian phrase, but also marks off the inception of patrilineality or the symbolic order of patriarchy as well as the beginning of its ruling in history. And the Eden-like characteristics of the mother–child world may very well happen to have stemmed from fears of the daughters in facing the ordeal, who had just emerged out of the historical unconscious in the fetishized maternal body. To some extent, however, only when we understand females’ desperation and agony of being split in the symbolic order of patriarchy can we construe the happiness of their Eden. 6

A short allegory about a poet by Bing Xin, written in 1923.

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Or the reason why the mother–child world was regarded as “a moment of bliss” is because the daughters already found themselves at the threshold of the father–son world. In this sense, we bring in another aspect of Bing Xin’s writing.

5.3 “Lakes and Mountains Outside of My Heart”7 : Bing Xin’s Persona Perhaps nobody knows better than Bing Xin herself that even if she could project all her imagination, emotion, and even faith onto this mother–child world, she still could not turn a blind eye to the “lakes and mountains outside her heart,” which metaphorically signify the collective experience of Chinese, a far cry from her own family life, during the crisis of survival for the country. It was a father–son world, a society groaning under loads of woes and injustices, a country of autarchy in which the underprivileged were the prey of the powerful, and a vast and restless land where individuals were liable to find their life goals go down the drain as they disappeared into the faceless crowd. Being a member of such a society in that era and such an individual in the crowd, Bing Xin exhibited another persona in her fiction, completely different from that of being mother’s daughter, such a persona as the youth who cares for society or the author of problem novels. What is interesting about Bing Xin’s problem novels, whether they are about social problems or life problems, is that the protagonists, including the narrators, tend to be male in gender. We find little trace of female characteristics in the youth who crooned “Hanging alone, I’m hopeless and haggard” or the enlightened thinker who realizes the great compassion of life in one night, or the poet who regains hope in despair.8 Her transgendered voice is not only a mere change in form, but also a shift of her starting point and way of thinking and even of her strategy of narration. In a sense, regardless of whether people could recognize the male hero at a glance as the author’s ideological mouthpiece, Bing Xin seems to win her access into this “outside” world in an identity of a son, the male peer of daughters. This strategy of sexual transgression may well make sense. Let us illustrate the gap between her two gender identities under the theme of “love.” It is no surprise, though, that upon her leaving her mother’s arms and stepping into society, Bing Xin could forthwith hold up the banner of love. For love, to Bing Xin, was a tangible reality she had experienced and lived in before she adopted it as her faith. As a daughter, Bing Xin’s attachment to love was definitely not her hunger for caress that resulted from lack of family affection, nor was it due to some philosophy that she had been exposed to on the conceptual level. It is better to say that love was an attitude she had acquired 7 8

A line from the 97th poem of Bing Xin’s Spring Water.

Topical to Bing Xin’s collection of fiction, That Man Alone Languishes. The topic was quoted from a line in Tang poet Du Fu’s Two Poems for Dreams of Li Bai, “The capital teems with officials, while you languish alone.”.

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towards life in the realms of experience and mind, her schema of perceiving life, people, and human relationships. Only in this outlook could she have written these moving lyrics in “The Ode” that contained the seminal imaginary world of boat, sea, and mother. However, in Bing Xin’s novels and short stories, “love” transformed into the slogan of the era, some “philosophy” and even a doctrinal belief, all of which she had acquired not in her identity as a daughter, but in her other gender identity—son (male narrators or characters). This latter gender identity performs some function of retelling, “retelling” the sensual world between mother and daughter in phrases of abstract concepts that were common and acceptable to the world of the time. As a result, her retelling stripped her daughterly imagination of its multifarious pre-Oedipal metaphors about mother’s body and furtively filled in some fatherly verbalism behind a mask. For instance, it is through all sorts of argumentation that she winds up proving mother–daughter love as the true meaning of life or still more, the law of the world. Nevertheless, the argumentative discourse of her reasoning has virtually obliterated the idyllic life that she intended to express. Another case in point is “Enlightened.” Although the enlightenment was edified by the love between mother and child, nevertheless it eventually comes to introduce the image of the Creator, a Godlike supremacy of power. If the shift in tone to a male Creator necessarily connotes Bing Xin’s departure from her personal female world to the male symbolic order, then Love that thus gets conceptualized, philosophized and even made ethical by the male characters in their retellings is the bridge that Bing Xin builds to connect her mother–daughter world with the father–son world, or a path she constructs between her personal (feminine) experience within and the social group experience without. As regards the dual worlds, this bridge renders both gains and losses: on the one hand, a cult of love inevitably weakens the clout of the father–son world; however, on the other, it does so at the cost of sacrificing both the singleness and authenticity of Bing Xin’s world within. Indeed, the love in Bing Xin’s novels is far less touching than that in her poems, and also loses the special significance of the pre-Oedipus phase. When the mother–child love is stretched to denote human compassion, love is dispossessed of its feminine traits and even washed of its tint of anti-sexism. Eventually, it becomes part of the enlightened humanistic voices in the May Fourth era, an ideological concept as opposed to tradition and passé morals and values. In a sense, when we perceive this origin of Bing Xin’s theme of mother– child relationship, it is not hard to understand the other aspect of her writings and also her being an author of problem novels who concerned herself with social life issues. If the mother–child world is likened to Bing Xin’s “preOedipal period” in the process of her psychological and ideological maturation as a Daughter of the era, then the narrating subjects in her works, such as “Two Families” (Liangge jiating, 1919), “That Man Alone Languishes,” “Enlightened” and “The Last Messenger,” take on a somewhat “oedipal personality,” a personality or persona that usurps or intends to usurp the name of Father. This is detectable from the faint sense of fatherhood that these

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protagonists and narrators display in assuming responsibility for mankind’s future and delivering their didactic harangues. Perhaps this is because Bing Xin’s pre-Oedipal memory was so well-retained and so clear that when she entered the “Oedipal phase”—bumping into the whole patriarchal order of symbols and finding herself obliged to integrate herself in it—she was unable to develop her corresponding emotions. Instead, she resolved to view herself as a “son” and fling herself into this patricidal era in this reincarnation. In other words, it was actually by tapping transgender, or wearing a male mask, that Bing Xin made the transition from her pre-Oedipal to her Oedipal identification. Of course, this is less a transition than a rupture in her self-identification: the time of bliss in her heart of living in symbiotic unity with her mother did not fade away upon the appearance of Father. On the contrary, when she entered the father–son relationship by impersonating a “son,” she separated the mother–daughter world from that of father–son, with the latter being the order and the former left outside of the order. To some extent, this transgender, or cross-gender persona, brings about an unintended awakening, because it actually showcases in a dramatic way how the disobedient daughters of that age could insinuate themselves into the wheel of order “like a man” and join the epochal wave of overthrowing the old throne and establishing a new order. The fact that daughters had to dress up like men, or at least behave in a non-feminine way in order to be admitted into the male order, as disclosed in Bing Xin’s works, coincides with contemporary theorists’ substantiated conclusions on women’s historical situation during the May Fourth era.

5.4

The Daughter Who Never Grows Up

Among the daughters of the May Fourth generation, it seems that only Bing Xin tended to separate daughters from rebellious sons in the same way as she distinguished the mother–daughter world from the father–son world. This dichotomy kept her insulated from, or at least unscathed by the traumas that Lu Yin and Feng Yuanjun could not have skirted. As Father’s rebellious daughters, the latter were caught in a dilemma: they could neither enter the male order nor escape it. With the former, on the other hand, in accordance with Bing Xin’s separation of the female world from male world, it seems that her daughters could not help but remain Mother’s daughters who either would never grow up or have no chance at all to face the temptations and evils of male society. They never even fostered a gender consciousness. So even if she became a mother one day, it does not mean that she was a mature “woman.” It only shows that she had found a way to relay the mother–child symbiosis, or in other words, found an alibi for her refusal to enter the male order. Within this frame of reference, Bing Xin did not start her writing career by addressing the subject of sexual love as other female writers did in that generation. Instead, she focused on giving expressions to her inner feelings, maternal love, and her

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joy at being a child, before tapping the major issues and important philosophies of life when facing social realities in her persona of a rebel son. With dual identities, Bing Xin successfully and tactfully circumvented the issues around male–female relations. It was not until the ebb of the May Fourth tide that Bing Xin gradually gave up the dichotomy between daughters and rebellious sons; she even abandoned the role of narrator and adopted a more mature and adult tone. To account for the transformation, the plausible reasons are that, on the one hand, after the social climate for anti-traditional and anti-feudal struggles became less pressing, the humanitarianism of the May Fourth era, along with the “love of the world” philosophy petitioned by Bing Xin in her rebel-son voice, had already fulfilled its ideological function, including its function of cultural castration, and had become an obsolete weapon in the context of China’s specific historical situation and cultural structure. It is true that the protagonist of “The Enlightened,” Zhong Wu, in her collection The Past (Wangshi),9 enlightened in his own brooding over the true meaning of the world, may be empowered to redeem himself, but for the 13-year-old boy in “Farewell” (Biehou), living in an other’s family and bereft of maternal love, his effort to find a dispenser of salvation in the other’s sister comes to no avail. In fact, when love is elevated to the ultimate will of the Creator, it also comes to the end of its tether. Bing Xin shows even more doubts in “Separation” of her novella collection Aunt (Gugu),10 doubts about whether maternal love and other loves of the world can be communicated with others. On the other hand, in her personal life, it was during the same period that Bing Xin grew from a daughter to a wife, and, very likely, a happy wife. Her parents’ family was gradually replaced—both physically and psychologically—by her own newly formed family. Therefore, after the mid-to-late 1920s, Bing Xin bade farewell to her “screaming” period. Although “The child guide no longer holds my blind crutch/Leaving me midway on my pilgrimage,” her depiction of the mental and emotional dimensions of people’s lives started to manifest signs of sophistication and insight.11 One can find more elaborate descriptions about people’s, particularly women’s, psychological specifics in a series of her works like “Sister June the First” (Liüyizi, 1924), “Farewell,” “After the Show” (Ju hou), “A Girl Named Dong’er” (Dong’er gu’niang), “Three Years” (San nian), “Auntie” (Gugu), “Photo” (Xiangpian), “Taitai’s Living Room” (Women taitai de keting). A work that deserves a special note is “The First Banquet” (Diyici yanhui), in which the protagonist looks back in time, from the perspective of a married woman who has her own happy nuclear family and

9 Bing Xin’s collection topical to her series of proses published in 1930 by Kaiming Book Company. 10

Auntie, Gugu, Bing Xin’s short story collection published in 1937.

11

Two lines from “The Preface in Poem” to The Past.

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also feels a strong nostalgia for her time as her mother’s daughter.12 In this fiction, it seems to be the first time in her writing career that Bing Xin did not portray a mother–daughter relationship in conceptual phraseology uttered by a male protagonist or narrator. Also, it seems to be the first time that the motif of mother–daughter love made its entry into fiction territory in a narrative of such meticulous and refined texture that it can stand as a marker of Bing Xin’s achievement since she deviated from her daughterhood period. However, despite of her sophisticated outsight and writing skills, Bing Xin’s writings still tell us about her psychological identity that was fostered in her daughterhood. It was, on the one hand, derived from her habit of personifying herself in male characters or narrators, and on the other hand, contingent on her being a woman that never grew up. Let us take a deeper look into the latter first. It is true that the female characters in Bing Xin’s later works are no longer daughters in literal sense—they have grown in age and have their own happy families—but this change in marital status does not seem to cause a corresponding alteration in their hearts. The fait accompli of love, marriage, and new family does not impel them to re-identify themselves in their sexual relationships with men. Therefore, when mother’s daughter becomes wife in the new house, she does not necessarily become a woman. The protagonist of “The First Banquet” is a good wife and daughter, but insofar as her psychological gender is concerned, she is anything but a woman, unlike Sophia13 who knows herself very well as a female, nor like the women who, as those in Ling Shuhua’s Women (Nüren),14 read men like a book. To some extent, what characterizes Bing Xin’s women is also what features her own writings: her works rarely touch upon sexuality, whether the sex is based on true love or deception, or whether it is tender or vindictive. Neither do her works put forward women’s opinions and viewpoints about men. In this respect, per contra, Ling Shuhua, also labeled a “boudoir lady writer” (guixiu pai)15 like her, did contribute imposing women characters. Bing Xin, however, as attested by the women in her work, does not have a vantage point as regards sex and gender. That is, lacking insight gained from experience and sex with men, she is hence naturally deficient in perceptivity about her own gendered experience. It is self-evident that the so-called “never-grown-up” syndrome is consonant with her pre-Oedipal experience, as described in her early works. That is, both 12 Bing Xin’s 1929 short story, publicized in The Crescent Moon, Xinyue, a journal by the Crescent Society, in 1930. The Crescent Society was an influential organization in the 1920s and 1930s of famous writers and scholars like Hu Shi, Xu Zhimo (1897–1931), Wen Yiduo (1899–1946), and Liang Shiqiu (1903–1987). 13

Sophia, protagonist of Ding Ling’s Ms. Sophia’s Diary.

14

A novella collection by Ling Shuhua, published in 1930 by The Commercial Press, Shangwu Yinshuguan. 15 A group of modern Chinese women writers, including Bing Xin and Ling Shuhua, as a critical category for women writers from middle or upper social background, under the influence of their upbringing in boudoirs. Also translated as “bourgeois boudoir writers” or “School of Boudoir Lady Writers.”.

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aptly avoided the moment when a man meets a woman and they join hands to face the patriarchal order. This consistency connotes a pre-Oedipal message that best corroborates Bing Xin’s paradox in her writing: she addresses sex with the most relevant overtone she could manage, but at the same time, it is least sexual in effect. Seldom as Bing Xin described male charm or sex relations from a female perspective, nevertheless, she often times employed a male mouthpiece to describe women. “Farewell” adopts the eye and mouth of a lonely boy to describe his classmate’s sister as the ideal incarnation of mother. In like manner, “Aunt” depicts a charming female character from the point of view of a young boy. To top it all off, later in more than ten pieces of essays and short stories in About Women (Guanyu nüren),16 Bing Xin assumes the identity of a male narrator. Inevitably, this “male” persona reminds people of Bing Xin’s early works, the poet who turns life inside out and the youth who engages in social issues. However, what is important this time is that Bing Xin, incarnated in a “man,” was not to write about social problems, but rather to write women. Analogous to her mindscape when writing her earlier problem novels, this male narrator has the same frame of mind as the average enlightened Western man in viewing women. This bigender narrative perspective is not only reflected in “Spouse Selection Standard,” a short story in the opening of the collection About Women, but also in her strategy of choosing female prototypes and portrayal, as well as in her eulogistic flattering of their virtues. It can be safely said that all aspects of masculinity are flaunted except men’s sizing up of women’s sexual charm. Admittedly, to portray women under the guise of “man” may register a kind of playful tone, but in the 1940s, when it was conventional for women to write about women, there were still some discernible uncommon reasons for Bing Xin’s ideation of bigender authorship. First of all, Bing Xin owed the effect of her fiction to this male narrator, who seems to provide an aesthetic angle, or an appreciative perspective on women, that women narrators cannot provide. For example, since she ushers him in as an incarnation of social standards, the male narrator stands as both an appraiser and an admirer of female virtues, and with his gender privilege of being male, he is also entitled to comment on women—whether a wife, a daughter-inlaw, an abandoned woman, a mother or a teacher is morally desirable, lovable and perfectly performs her duties or not. In addition, he also epitomizes the new open-minded social standards; in this context, he is expected to appreciate the women’s personal appeals. To this end, on the one hand, he extols their female virtues and decides whether they are worth their salt, and on the other, he is given the liberty to relish their charm. Note another point in Bing Xin’s later fiction: the man narrator, being the man in family who tends to keep pleasant relationships with his kindred, is also the beneficiary of and witness to women’s generous sacrifice and dedication. With all his roles rolled 16 About Women is Bing Xin’s collection of 16 essays and short stories about 14 women, published in 1945.

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into one, what this male narrator is meant artistically to do is to describe the beautiful females who have been approvingly recognized by society with such justified assurance that women writers could not themselves give, for despite their effort, they still need to be recognized by society. Of course, now that her male narrator incarnates male social standards, she could never possibly write women from a female point of view. As a matter of fact, through such an agent, her women characters have never appeared as a gender category in her texts. In this regard, Bing Xin seems to have fallen into the snare laid by herself: probably she had singled out a man avatar as a means to enhance her convincingness in singing praises of and portraying women, but came to create nothing but females as stipulated by the male standard, even though it was a relatively advanced standard. Of course, the scenic presence of this male narrator is not only reducible to the choice she made among alternatives in conceiving stories and putting them to words, but also can be traced into Bing Xin’s inner heart. In fact, if we take a sweeping look at Bing Xin’s complete works, it is not hard to find that she never made any self-appraisal or selfanalysis in regard to her own gender. At least, she never attempted to theorize the sexual differences between women and men. But this does not mean that compared with other female writers, she was indifferent to women’s social situation, including her own. Otherwise, she would not have written “Final Rest in Peace” (Zuihou de anxi)17 in her early career and “Sister of June the First,” “Aunt” and About Woman in her mid-term writing career that thematically tap the issue of her own gender. Bing Xin’s problem is that her budding female consciousness stalled in the pre-Oedipal stage and thus was not sufficient for her to define and describe herself as a woman in a gendered society. On top of that, her stock of cultivation and learning did not provide her any established language that originated from her self-awareness as a woman, or could promote her to develop a self-awareness as a woman. Borrowing a mouthpiece of the “male” narrator is actually tantamount to borrowing a “male” point of view of women, and this borrowing, together with her works created with the borrowed point of view, obviously suggests a certain note of succumbing to the male order. (If viewed by people of that time, this borrowed view of women made a more acceptable one.) It implicitly proclaims that Bing Xin, the daughter outside the male order, eventually turned to and moved closer to the male order, though, strictly speaking, it is not sheer submission or accession without reserve. After all, we know for certain that About Women still has a grain of prankishness. Imagine the female author and the male narrator become one at a point where their gender difference is dramatically presented as a “dress up.” But this time, the motive lurking behind this is that Bing Xin, as a writer seeking her female selfhood, is unable to go any further beyond the male order.

17 A representative novella of Bing Xin’s early problem novels, publicized as serial story in Beijing Morning News in 1920.

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Although in the history of women’s growth in young China, as the firstgeneration new woman, Bing Xin failed in the end to transcend the limitations imposed by the historic era and the culture of the time, and became a daughter who never grew up, she was still a writer of irreducible singularity and never misused the gifts she got from her family and upbringing. She shared the whole gamut of her experience with the world and in the history of women in China, she established herself as an extraordinary configuration of her “love philosophy” and with her cross-dressing identification in the mother–child world that she created in her work. And this constitutes the femininity lurking in Bing Xin’s work.

CHAPTER 6

Ling Shuhua: The Feminine World Trapped in a Corner

In comparison with other famous female writers in the May Fourth period, such as Lu Yin, Bing Xin, and Feng Yuanjun, etc., Ling Shuhua is more distinguished by her emphasis on, and her forte at as well, describing women who play their social gender roles—wives, missuses or tai-tais,1 mothers, young ladies, mothers-in-law, and daughters-in-law. They may not have a distinct sense of the times like Lu Yin’s Lusha or Ding Ling’s Sophia, who are so close to the lives of the authors themselves, and to a certain extent, are projections of the authors’ female selves. However, Ling Shuhua’s characters are closer to history: with the women’s positions in realistic environment considered, they seem more like creations of the society, rather than those of the writer. It should be noted that such a point of view shows Ling Shuhua’s singularity in it for herself. First, if the Lu Yins and Feng Yuanjuns strive to judge and remold the historically prescribed gender roles for women with the cry of female resistance, to the effect that their female characters are mostly unsocialized, uncompromising idealists, Ling Shuhua seems to be devoted to exposing gender roles’ directive and coercive effect on women’s existence and mentality. Secondly, if the characters in Bing Xin’s and Lu Yin’s writings tend to end up as the incarnation or spokespersons of concepts, under the influence of the times, Ling Shuhua contributes more diverse female characters 1 Tai-tai is an address to a married woman of a relatively rich leisure-class family.

Ling Shuhua, known as an important short story writer during 1920s and 1930s, was born in an influential Qing intellectual official family and got her early education both in traditional art and literature and modern education. She entered Yanjing University in the same year as Bing Xin.

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_6

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that are vividly true to life. Her point of view is complementary to those of other female writers in the May Fourth period. She reminds us that in addition to rebellion, patricide, and modeling on their mothers, there were also the covert, feudal, pathetic, and despicable aspects that abounded in women’s lives in that era.

6.1

Storms in the Boudoir

Among the impressive female characters in Ling Shuhua’s writing are a group of old-fashioned young women who were almost forgotten by the patricide era, such as the Eldest Miss in “Embroidered Pillows” (Xiuzhen, 1925), Fang Ying in “The Tea Party” (Chi cha, 1925) and the two sisters in “After the Tea Party” (Chahui zhihou, 1926). These old-fashioned young ladies were obviously of little value to readers and authors in the New Culture. Other than Ling Shuhua, almost no writers took them as leading characters in their writing. Set side by side with rebellious girls, they seemed like lackluster residues of Old China, the last of the young women from feudal families. They had never been exposed to the influence of the New Culture Movement. Instead, they were enclosed in their boudoirs, adhering to the traditional code for young ladies of well-bred families. However, it was just their old-style peculiarity that set off Ling Shuhua’s singular angle in writing. First of all, through the eyes of this group of women, who were on the verge of being abandoned by the times, she found a position, either by accident or on purpose, to touch upon an important female issue that was neglected by the “new women:” the subtle connection between women and history, between women and progress. Then, instead of describing these women, whom people considered to be, in all likelihood, a thing of the past, as museum display of antiques, she had them resurrected to retell the experience and destiny of this last generation of daughters of noble birth in Old China. As a result, she presented the phenomenon of that era in her work and suffused her stories with a rich sense of history and gender characteristics. “Embroidered Pillows” may be the only work during the May Fourth period that brings women’s inner experience out into the open. In the foreground, it showcases the living space of old-fashioned women that used to be hidden away from people’s sight—a boudoir, a secluded world of dead silence. Sitting alone in it, the maiden protagonist, not betrothed yet, does embroidery almost mechanically. During the two years of the story, nothing has changed, except for her inner world which is in flux of thoughts, the thoughts she does not know how to tell others and has nobody to tell. For such a boudoir life, the society and rapid changes of the age, the Father’s world, her future husband, and even the social life in which she may appear in public, are all in the distant background. We are not sure whether this is why Ling Shuhua is labeled as a “boudoir writer,” a writer of the guixiu school, but we ought to point out that what individualizes her work is not her subject of boudoir maidens, the guixius, but the way how she writes about their life. It is the

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latter that makes the fundamental difference between her writing of boudoir life and the traditional image of a boudoir lady in ancient literature. What she uncovers is the side hidden behind the beautiful myths of traditional guixius — their cryptical and dismal side, devoid of meaning and worth. The boudoir in “Embroidered Pillows” can even be regarded as a spatial metaphor for the life of old-fashioned young women, a metaphor for their dull and forlorn life of seclusion and their unself-sufficing consciousness: there are only recipients but no agents of action here, no doers here; the dweller of the boudoir is no master of her own destiny, and how she should act, even whether she is to leave or stay, is determinant upon the male world outside the boudoir. In the boudoir there is only a young female upon whom a value will be placed by others, not by herself; whether it is the value of her labor—her embroideries, such as the embroidered pillows she does, or other products of her labor—or even the value of the to-be-betrothed Elder Miss herself, their worth is all to be decided by others. Here, people see nothing but a continuity of such a state of life, no change to it: two springs and two autumns pass, and Eldest Miss’s embroidering turns from an action imbued with hope to one of “waiting for Godot” inertia. As such, the work bears out an underlying conflict between the boudoir, the world of old-fashioned young women, and the outside world in a story told in a conversation: a pair of exquisite embroidered pillows she made in the boudoir were placed on cushion chairs in a gathering of guests and lords in an official circle, but grievously they were vomited and trampled upon by the guests. This is a blaring metaphor in itself, which not only implicates the brutal trampling of women by male society but also seems to suggest that the whole array of elegance and beauty of decent society, together with old-fashioned ladies from high-born families, has passed their prime time and come to the end of a blind alley. “The Tea Party” is slightly different from “Embroidered Pillows.” Its story takes place in an era when social mores had already changed, but it still has one thing in common with the latter, that is, the conflict between the internal experience of the old-fashioned girls and the external environment, only becoming even more conspicuous. Fang Ying2 gains her imagination about love and conjugal relationship of “(the lover) seeing you combing through crystal drapes” all from her backgrounds of family, cultivation, and breeding. In this cultural background, she seems bound to hinge this imagination on her classmate’s brother, a student who once studied in Western countries, on his manners, courtesy, and lady-first etiquette. Such a ridiculous misunderstanding she made also leads to her first emotional trauma. Fang Ying’s embarrassment highlights the cultural gap between the two codes of culture that the generation of Chinese young women faced in the 1920s. According to the cultural code of Old China, a young man’s consecutive courtesy of invitation and visit carries a “sexual” undertone, very likely to indicate his “having feelings” towards her. However, according to the Western cultural 2

Fang Ying, main character in “The Tea Party,” means “beautiful shadow” in Chinese.

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code, those actions may well be out of sheer etiquette and good manners, not necessarily sexual intent. Fang Ying’s perplexity lies in the fact that, in the face of a changing new world, she gets lost in the original standard that used to work in gauging gender relations. How can she determine herself to be somebody’s object, and how to identify herself as a man’s “significant other” or his “beloved one?” If she used to be a “woman” awaiting in the boudoir, then now, she is nothing in the gap. From this perspective, Fang Ying, as a victim of the old order, does not get what she deserves from the ideas imported from the West. “After the Tea Party” seems to be related to the previous two stories in terms of time sequence—if the boudoir is regarded as a space symbol for “tradition” to a certain extent, the two young ladies in this story no longer have such a boudoir or private space. Under the new circumstances, the two sisters are obligated to go out to participate in certain social events. They do not make any more mistakes like Fang Ying, but they share the same problem as Fang Ying in essence: Once the ancient touchstones for interpersonal relationships and women’s code of conduct collapsed, they find themselves put out of gear, knowing nothing about love, freedom, and personal beliefs, and left with no other choice but to face a society that seems prone to shut them out. The old and familiar lifestyle has gone, but the new one is so strange for them that they find the future uncertain and their own fate ambivalent. It is imaginable that their melancholy and gloomy state of mind not only originates from the heart of young women in adolescence but also from such a situation where there was nothing for them to rest their hearts and feet on. If the above stories of Ling Shuhua are infused with some deep thought she gave to the relationship between women and history, it is, first of all, reflected in her writing techniques of combining irony with compassion. In terms of the plots, these stories, more or less, have a caustic tone of irony in some scenes and endings. Elder Miss in “Embroidered Pillows” exerts herself to embroider a pair of pillows on sweltering summer days, staying up red-eyed, only to have her embroidery dismissed as worthless, picked up by the maid and taken back to her boudoir. In “The Tea Party,” the young man who made Fang Ying indulge in her fantasy of love not only ends up marrying another woman but also asks her to be the bridesmaid. In others’ eyes, Fang Ying’s unrequited love was taken as nothing but a storm in a teacup. The two sisters in “After the Tea Party,” who gossiped about the modern youths they met at the party, actually want to disguise and hide their own fear and envy towards them. The ironic, even comic, vein in these plots ruthlessly pronounces that these oldstyle young women are so incurably behind the times, so ignorant and straitlaced, and so paradoxically whimsical as to lay themselves open to ridicule. But all this results from the changes and progress of history and culture—the changed times are bound to leave them behind. Here, it shows a dimension of her historical and cultural speculations. But at the same time, her stories also provide another perspective, another stance to defend the characters. Insofar as the narrative of these plots is concerned, the irony or ridicule does not sound

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condescending in the least. On the contrary, the voice of narrators often trails away and the characters’ inner soliloquies or depictions of montages in their minds take over. The narrators’ viewpoint tends to merge into that of the characters, for otherwise, it would be impossible for her to write about the innermost plight of these women or their feelings about life. This virtually unveils the pitiable side of these characters’ lot: as individuals, as females, they do not have sufficient reasons to justify their existence, let alone the right to happiness, in a time of historic vicissitudes. The course of history smashes their secluded space—boudoirs, but could not break the shackles on the souls of the daughters closed up in boudoirs. The entire contradiction between the destiny of these young women and the times and society is that they are doomed to play the role of clowns in a historical comedy for people to watch, but in turn, history only assigns tragedies to them: they are not worth salvaging by the standard of the times, but they are individuals who crave to be salvaged. Therefore, in this generation of old-fashioned guixius, Ling Shuhua inadvertently manifested a certain relationship between history and individuals in the context of cultural changes and exposed an ideological flaw in the calls for equality between men and women and those for women’s liberation. This may be another implication of this type of female image, besides mere guixiu.

6.2

The “Tai-tai” Class

Huang Renying3 notes in On Modern Chinese Female Writers (Dangdai Zhongguo nüzuojia lun) that there are two types of tai-tais in Ling Shuhua’s writings: one is new women or intellectual tai-tais, such as the heroines in “After Drinking” (Jiuhou, Ling, 1924), “Temple of Flowers” (Hua zhi si, Ling, 1925), and “Spring” (Chuntian, Ling, 1926); the other is typical Chinese old-fashioned tai-tais, madams brought up in traditional families, such as those in “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival” (Zhongqiu wan, Ling, 1925),“A Blessed Person” (Youfuqi de ren, Ling, 1925)and “Tai-tai” (Tai tai, Ling, 1925). The former type has a certain close correlation to the “new woman” image of the same period in the history of literature, while the latter seems rare in modern Chinese literature, reputedly nonexistent with modern male authors. It may be added that this is because men are inept at writing these old-fashioned characters from the vantage point of female writers. Indeed, the heroines in “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival,” “A Blessed Person” and “Tai-tai” are anything but particular as far as their literary image is concerned. They remind us of the hackneyed types of faceless wives, parents, and depraved concubines we see in movies, TV series, and novels, 3 Huang Renying is believed to be the pen name of Gu Fengcheng, an important leftleague editor in 1930s who contributed to a series of influential dictionaries, anthology and history books to modern Chinese literature. His edited On Modern Chinese Female Writers (Shanghai, Guanghua Press, 1933) is regarded to be the first essay anthology on modern Chinese female authors. But no complete detail can be found in history as to his personal life.

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who are without any character or aspiration or anything memorable—they are so commonplace that they can hardly garner our sympathy. It is safe to say that the leading character in “A Blessed Person,” in a sense, is a dead ringer of Grandmother Jia,4 only of a lower rank. The way they talk, and their vision and grief, even the annoyances in their life, are all so quotidian that their stories are a far cry from tragedy; they are so depraved and narrow-minded that they are even not worth people’s notice. It seems that their philistine and uncultured minds render these tai-tais on the decline even more contemptible than the snobs in male society. These women are reduced to an existence that is even more vulgar than snobbish men, and this adds up to their tragedy or destiny, which had never been put into words. In the era aiming to transform the national spirit and advocate humanity, they were held to be despicable, hence even more lamentable. Let us first take a look at the two types of housewives in Ling Shuhua’s writing. One archetypal tai-tai is the one in “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival:” She takes it to heart when her husband declines to eat the “reunion duck” on the eve of the festival and she holds the grudge obsessively; in so doing, she deplorably falls victim to the trite superstition of old customs. The story fails, as it were, to portray a round character5 —as an individual, she is characterless, but its plotting, i.e., the causal development of events, rather successfully demonstrates the mentality of a female stuck in a cultural rupture. There are two prime causes in the generative causal narrative here: one is the cause-and-effect retribution conjectured by the female protagonist, and the other is the logic in the development of events itself, a prior event leading to a subsequent event. The psychological factors governing the hostess’s mood, emotions, judgments, and even deeds, are the motives arising not from her realistic needs of ego or id, but actually from a superego, some kind of ritualized inscriptions of superstitions: eating a “reunion duck” on Mid-Autumn festival embodies family reunion while not having it portends a bad omen. She not only regards eating the “reunion duck,” or not eating it, as the final cause by itself that leads to the subsequent events of the changes in her and her husband’s relationship from the harmonious beginning on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival to the marriage breakdown in the end. In fact, it is virtually by this default framework of causality, or the model of the formal equation that “Not eating the ‘reunion duck’ portends a bad omen,” that she shapes her life and her relationship with her husband and henceforth invents the events that pass into reality. For example, mentally, she takes her husband’s visit to his dying stepsister Yu on the Mid-Autumn festival, later the news of her death, particularly the accidentally broken vase, as signs of disunion, the first

4 Grandmother Jia, the Dowager of in the extended aristocratic family of Jia in the Chinese classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber. 5 A round character, a term in Aspects of the Novel written by E. M. Forster in 1927, is a character that is well-developed in the story.

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step towards their marriage breakdown. Her reaction to this is also predetermined by the inscriptions, the mores inscribed in established customs—return to her parent’s home (disunion of her marriage). The superstitious taboo in the inscriptions acts as a deterrent to her mentality, working on her far more potently than its effect on men. For a woman who has no other social relations except for those with family, life can only be either reunion or disunion. As a wife, she is only the spiritual-psychological Object of a Subject of specific identity (her husband), anything but an initiator or prime agent of emotions and will. The reason why she relies on the uncanny customs that are inscribed in her mind, or the inscriptions as a source of her sentiments, like joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, is because, beyond that, she has no affective motive of her own even for crying, laughing, or chafing and fretting. Observing the inscriptions is her only way of experiencing the world, feeling herself, and understanding others. Therefore, the ending that the omen, foretokened by not eating the “reunion duck,” “getting news about the death of a relative” on the festival, and breaking the vase, finally comes true only makes it plain that she is incapable of understanding her husband, others and even herself or getting the point of their conjugal relationship with sobriety, nor taking actions other than following the cue of the self-fulling augury—she simply does not have such a mechanism for action built in her mind. In this sense, even without Sister Yu’s death, her life is doomed to be a tragedy. In line with such a pseudo-cause-and-effect plot, there is no doubt that, since the social gender roles in the old culture divest women of the prospect of becoming the Subject—the Subject of emotion, thinking, and volition in decision-making, the meanings of self and others, love and being loved are all smothered by a superstitious omen for conjugal relation. The protagonist’s indifference to her husband and his stepsister Yu is not even out of her selfishness, but rather at the mercy of superstition. In other words, what the gender role creates is not a female, or an individual, but only a mechanism of reaction. Apart from acting on, or reacting to, this mechanism, she is good for nothing, devoid of the ability to love herself or the gift to love others. Moreover, what is ridiculous and lamentable about this tai-tai is that the inscription system of superstition keeping her under the thumb is utterly irrelevant to the cause and effect of her situation in reality. If the superstition were supposed to serve the purpose of explaining something unexplainable in reality, it might still make sense. But as the narrator recites, the truth is that, in light of the real logic behind the development of these events, the husband’s conduct and the whole events are not hard to comprehend; his affectionate attachment to his dying stepsister can be appreciated even instinctively by a woman, without resorting to modern theories or concepts. Ridiculous though it is of the huge disparity between the protagonist’s assumptions and what’s what in reality, it is also her lamentable tragedy. Her imagination or conception of reality, disjointed from the real reality, is a poor microfiche of the ideological explanation of her own situation, but at least it shields her from a more terrible reality—the breakup.

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The second half of the story clearly shows another role played by the superstitious inscription of the culture in the entire events and in the protagonist’s mental process: it conceals her real predicament, that is, she could neither be loved nor love others, and it distorts the breakup as reductive to the omen that comes true—this is something she could accept and enables her to make do with the breakup in her inescapable predicament, like a dead moth on a cobweb, by which she epitomizes the destiny of tens of thousands of women, leading a dog’s life under duress of the old gender roles. The wives in “Tai-tai” and “The Send-off” (Song che, Ling, 1927) belong to the other type of tai-tais. They stand for the gender role of “housewives,” stripped of its ethical implications, which accrues cultural dregs of urban bourgeois society and deep-rooted bad habits of Chinese people. The wife in “Tai-tai” is plainly a parasitic character, depending on others, and indulging herself only in gambling and vanity, she does not even have the expectation and trepidations for conjugal life that the protagonist tai-tai shows in the “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival.” Mrs. Bai and Mrs. Zhou in “The Send-off” appear as guardians of the declining feudal beliefs, and embody the spiritual victory of Ah Q’ism6 with their moral superiority, which is endowed by the traditional gender roles but no longer justifiable. In fact, this kind of tai-tais was a product of historic transitions and caught in the gap between the old civilization and the new one. During the May Fourth period, the gender inscriptions for a good wife and a loving mother, as part of the old value system, were abandoned, but at the same time, the historical function of a woman as in the basic structure of the society and the family continued to play its role in the second-hand capitalist urban lifestyle. In other words, at that historical turning point, the socialization of feudal gender roles, such as women’s education, their way out, the standards, and their functions, continued to bring up a stratum of middle-class women, who were unlettered and unskilled, and only equal to taking on feudal family duties. Women of this stratum naturally rejected the new system’s view on women. But in China, it was also this social stratum that first lived up to a bourgeois lifestyle that depended on salaries as their economic income. This money-based lifestyle somewhat shattered the interpersonal relationship of the agricultural society that was based on personal status and social rank and also undermined women’s social responsibilities upheld by the feudal ethics. In modern Chinese history, just as the bourgeoisie class and the feudal landlord class were virtually two in one, the same demographics in different categories, so the women addressed as tai-tai in Chinese urban life were no more than a social group where these two lifestyles lapped over each other. For this group, there was no essential change in their lifestyle—they depended on others for 6 Ah Q, a tragic character from The True Story of Ah Q , an episodic novella, written by Lu Xun between 1921 and 1922, that contributes an important literary figure for a Chinese penchant of inferiority by rationalizing defeat with self-deception, so-called “spiritual victory.”

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living as they used to—except for the varied purposes of living. Insofar as marriage purported, they still adhered to the old custom of being arranged by match-makers into marriages with families of equal status; as for their duties after marriage, nevertheless, they no longer followed the old-type “feminine ethics” ( fu dao) for daughters-in-law and wives. They absorbed from the two lifestyles, the new and the old, what is most parasitical of them both, living a leechlike life. In this concern, their mental life was not subject to the code of ethics like “feminine virtues” ( fu de) or “feminine ethics,” nor aimed at the elegance that ordinary middle-class housewives faked. Their lackadaisical spirit and vulgar mentality are attributed to the duad of feudal thinking and capitalist lifestyle. Besides, since the women were historically limited in education, uncouth in taste, short-sighted in outlook, and without a progressive mind, these wives, who were brought up in feudal education for women yet lived a style of bourgeois life, epitomized the most negative and degenerate parts of feudalism and capitalism, the dross of the two cultures and ideologies, which was also the easiest part they were inculcated with. The conversation between the two tai-tais in “The Send-off” is a rare specimen of ideological discourse in everyday life. Here, you can identify the mercenary and miserly state of mind peculiar to bourgeois society side by side with the dregs from feudal thoughts concerning social ranks and status. From their derogatory feelings towards other women, it is also apt to discern their fear of losing their superiority. It should be admitted that these two cultural types, viewed from the perspective of women’s self-examination, unveil another aspect of modern Chinese society that few writers had ever dealt with so far: the degeneration of the social class in a cultural rupture. Ling Shuhua contended that of course, the time of great social changes saw the emergence of women like Sophia, Bing Xin, Xie Bingying,7 Zijun, and Aigu,8 but it was also the scene for a social group called “Tai-tai,” along with their culture that mingled the most decadent parts of the two forms of society. In a sense, her contribution to bringing them to light can be incorporated into the fine tradition of critiquing Chinese national character in the history of modern literature. Indeed, in the housewives’ culture, which was even more vulgar than that of vulgar men, we have a chance to see the worst of the rotten depravity in the petty bourgeois mentality of modern Chinese urban dwellers, compared to whom, Ah Q, people from Cat Country (Mao cheng ji)9 and the bureaucrat from “Mr. Warwick” (Huawei xiansheng)10 are still relatively innocent. The duo of Chinese bourgeoisie and feudal power might produce heroes, knights like Wu Sunfu,11 and even spawn outlaws, but more importantly, it could also breed a mediocre culture and crowds of vulgarians, among whom there 7

Xie Bingying, originally born as Xie Minggang (1906–2000), a female soldier writer.

8

Aigu, the female character of “Divorce,” a short story written by Lu Xun in 1925.

9

Cat Country, a dystopian satirical novel by Lao She, in 1933.

10

A famous story written by Zhang Tianyi (1906–1985) in 1937.

11

Wu Sunfu, main character of Mao Dun’s Ziye (or Midnight: A Romance of China).

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were no heroes nor villains, only those who could not even be said to be evil, but had no individual characteristics or wholesome minds. However, this is a hidden but by no means small social stratum in Chinese social life. If you ask where to find the most decadent fraction of modern Chinese culture, and what underpins the numb and apathetic national spirit and mindset, just take a look at these housewives portrayed by Ling Shuhua and you will find the answers. Her works are not only relevant in regard to women’s problem, but also preciously documentary of the history of modern literature. However, it may be just because of Ling Shuhua’s focus on women that the important cultural significance of her works tends to be neglected. In a fact, Ling Shuhua’s exposure to the dark sides of Chinese culture is much milder than that of other writers in her era, but it does not mean that what she reveals is not profound. Her scrutiny of gender roles is both sober and tender, both critical and tolerant, and presents an angle of observation that male masters despise or refuse to give a glance. That is, from the perspective of female inner experience, she discloses the vulgarity of the women who are even beneath vulgarity and describes their tragedy, the wretchedness of those ridiculous and even contemptible women, thus acquiring an elevated viewpoint of rethinking gender roles so as to show how low women’s sky could be. In fact, it is also because of this focus that Ling Shuhua not only detached herself, in her writing, from the romanticist sentimentalism of the era but also outstripped the delusion of negation, a wonted device of irony for the radical anti-traditionalist ideology. This is particularly obvious in these stories of hers. For example, as regards the narrative tone, the voice of narrators in Lu Yin’s and Bing Xin’s novels comes from a narrating Subject that identifies with that of the characters, or the reverse is true with other satirical novels in the May Fourth period—the narrating Subject and the characters have opposite values. However, the narrative tone in Ling Shuhua’s works shows a tendency of pluralism. In “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival” and “A Blessed Person,” we can hear at least two different cadences. One is calm and resonant with criticism and sarcasm: “Usually speaking of lucky and blessed people, those who knows Grandma Zhang will undoubtedly say, ‘Grandma Zhang is definitely the number one blessed!’” Is Grandma Zhang in “A Blessed Person” really blessed? The speaker obviously has reservations about it. “At that time, when going out to pay a New Year’s call or congratulate someone, she wore an upper garment with a round patch full of cranes, an embroidered court skirt and court beads, leisurely behaving like a titled lady.” The last clause is vaguely indicative of the narrator’s tone of sneer. As such, Grandma Zhang’s whole life—the ostentation and extravagance she had seen, her contempt for the new-style wedding ceremony, her generosity towards concubines, as well as her authority at home—all became objects of irony. In line with the narrator’s tone of lampoon, she is a classic case of feudal women in the old time, a model of feudalism that hangs in the air and shares nothing in common with target readers. The other tone of voice in her narrative, to the contrary, is different and full of sympathy and even warmth: on the third

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day after her birthday, Grandma Zhang sat alone in front of the sitting room, smoking a hookah in a good mood: “Her thoughts gently wandered, like a light breeze of the end of April that softly landed on a field of wheat blossoms, carrying a sweet green fragrance and lightly falling on another lot of field. This often brought a gracious smile on her cheeks and her ivory hair glowed silver against the setting sun.” What we hear here is not the cold and slightly mocking voice of the former narrator, but that of another subject, which immediately evokes our memories of the poetic flavor in Ling Shuhua’s other novels. From this voice, we can identify the temperament of the implied author that resonates throughout most of Ling Shuhua’s works. This tone of narrative instantly brings us about to a new angle to view Grandma Zhang either in terms of the authority she maintains in the household or as a titled lady in the past. She is approachable and even understandable. The novel flat out presents her retrospection of her own childhood and nostalgia she feels for her grandmother, her pride in becoming a grandmother herself, a towering presence in the family, as well as her feelings for her daughters-in-law who she assumes to be emotionally attached to her as chicks to a hen. These two tones comprise a polyphonous style of the dual narrative, i.e., the narrator and the implied author in her fiction, or to put it in other words, they constitute the division of the Subject, a dialogue of the speaking subjects. The divided Subject in the narrative happens to correspond to the complicated situations faced by Grandma Zhang, that is, the double-faced social relations around her. Within just one day of the story, she has an about-turn in her being from a blessed person with lots of children and grandchildren and one who wins the venerable towering position in the family with both her virtue and talent, esteemed by others and herself, to someone who is jockeyed and soaked by her daughters-in-law. In other words, she suddenly falls from her perfectly constructed fantasy based on the ideal human relations in feudal society into the value network of another society. In this society, where the value network and interpersonal relationship center around desire for money as its core, her old consistent and viable self-esteem is suddenly hollowed out. Here, not only is the acme of perfection, which she pursues like a faith, trampled upon, but she herself is reduced to something like a doll, an instrument that others profiteer by and abandon after gaining profits. This is in the context of a historical change in China that went deep into family—the alterations that happened to relationship between mother-in-law and daughters-in-law and that between people and their own self-images. The polyphony of the two narrative tones in the story can be regarded as a reflection of the complexity of this historical change. The narrator’s tone of irony, out of the vantage of historical necessity, degrades, pierces, and mocks the values of the feudal era and the “old age is all perfect” standpoint of life, while from an individual perspective, the poetic formal language of the implied author discloses the other side of this historical change: how insignificant individuals can be when they can no longer seek shelter with their ideology, especially those gender-identified individuals who used to be defined by history. The fancied link between self and reality

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in Grandma Zhang’s imagination, in the face of the money-oriented relationship between her and her daughters-in-law, renders her unable to defend her gendered individuality as prescribed in her system. At this moment, Grandma Zhang forthwith turns into a pathetic woman of life-long repression. Here, you can see the consistent theme that runs through the “Embroidered Pillow” series. If the narrator displays a historical view of rejecting the old ideology to which Grandma Zhang lays claim, then the implied author identifies, from a gendered point of view, with the weaker exposed in history due to the collapse of the old value system—an individual—female. This is not an ideological identification: the work clearly shows no signs of missing the old feminine virtue due to the abomination of money. Rather, it is a gender identification. That Grandma Zhang regards court beads as her glory could, of course, be seen as comic and funny. However, when court beads, virtue and talent, the title to ladyship, and even offspring are all stripped of their grandeur and significance in the original ideological sense, this matriarch of Grandma Zhang has nothing of her own left, and her glories and splendors in the past are all undone and wasted, as vain as an indigent bride-to-be making wedding dresses for others, as the Chinese saying goes. With respects to this side of Grandma Zhang, the implied author does not snigger or snicker but rather finds her worth pity. This is, after all, the destiny that an individual of her own gender is subject to in the entire history, and in the end, this is the defeat, or tragedy, that only befell women. It can be said that this dialogic split-up is in effect as obvious as in “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival.” The double-toned narration, to some extent, shows the dual value standards confronting the writer: in view of time and history, she sneers at both the mother-in-law and the daughtersin-law, which is a gender-neutral judgment of values; but from the angle of a woman, she shows sympathy towards women who are disadvantaged and inferior in scale of values, which is a gendered value standard—it is better to be called empirical identification, which manifests that the empirical identification of gendered experience and the value standard of history and the era are different and diverse. It is such incompatibility in the writer’s realm of experience and conceptualization that led to the divided tonality of the narrating subject. This was probably the common alternative faced by women in that era. This is something that New Year’s Sacrifice and Une vie 12 fail to touch upon. In the other series of novels written by Ling Shuhua, namely the series of new women who take on new gender roles, this has been internalized in the characters’ situations.

12 Une vie, translated into English as A Woman’s Life, the first novel written by Guy de Maupassant.

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New Women and New Wives

There are two ways of escape for new women in the history of literature: either enter a new family and end up in day-to-day life, thus effacing their glittering personality of “I am my own”—this is the fate of Zijun, or reject marriage and family and treat life as a game, refusing to take on social gender roles, getting socially involved (still purporting to find pure love and romance and escape the fate of being parasitic) and maintaining their independence, such as Zhang Qiuliu. The two ways out demonstrate, on both positive and negative sides, that choosing between independence and parasitism, between “belonging to themselves” and “belonging to him,” puts the new women in a dilemma. This dilemma actually marks the crisis that perplexes women with new ideas (see the discussion of Lu Yin in this book). Viewed from this perspective, many of Ling Shuhua’s works virtually seek a route to transcend the above dilemma. Apart from the old-style young women, she also created a discrete type of female image, which is seldom found in the history of new literature: the new-style wives. Their stories start where can be regarded as the perfect terminal that the characters in Feng Yuanjun’s writing take pains to arrive at, that is, the triumph of love or the ultimate victory of new values against feudal notions: forming a new family with their lovers—a world for them two. Indeed, stories in such novellas by Ling Shuhua as “Illness” (Bing), “A Day of Their Own” (Talia de yiri), “After Drinking,” and “Temple of Flowers” take place in a new type of family that is not based on the consuetude of “making a marriage between two families,” but rather on love. A family built on such a premise is afforded its basic significance to transcend and renounce the connotations of “wife” defined by Chinese history for thousands of years. A new-style wife, aside from its meaning of gender, also connotes the most significant concept of “humanity” defined during the May Fourth period, a concept including human emotions, pursuits in life, and intelligence. This new-style family organized around love, both in fiction and reality, represents society’s internalization of the New Culture values. However, it is also worth noting that this new-style family does not import a new lifestyle and its distribution of gender roles is no different from that of old-style family, in which the “tai-tai”, taken care of by her husband, does not need to come upon the stage on an individual basis. Only combined with her husband can she and her husband make a unit of the society. In this context, Ling Shuhua’s fiction displays a third situation of new women, which happened to be a situation that did not come to the attention of Mao Dun or Lu Xun. The wives in her writing do not turn out to be increasingly mediocre and ordinary in their run-of-the-mill life like Zijun, nor choose to reject family in order to avoid being subordinative in marriage as Zhang Qiuliu does. Of course, it is needless to say, these new “Tai-tais” are a band of lucky young ladies of noble birth—they are well-educated, intelligent, and talented; they do not need to worry about daily necessities or to struggle

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for survival; what’s more, they have love and are loved. But besides their established superiority provided by their bourgeois background, in the theoretical sense, they also contribute to unveiling women’s living conditions in reality. It is precisely by counting out all other external factors that it is likely to lay bare the problem that these “new” women, or to be precise, women exposed to new ideas and living up to new values, have to face: what else can women do when they have gleaned love and marital happiness in life? What is the relationship between a happy family and a woman with new ideas? Are they satisfied or not? How far can they go in their gender relationships? There is one common constituent that “After Drinking,” “Temple of Flowers,” and “Spring” share, that is, a certain alien factor, either real or imagined, lies between the married couple. The imaginary Other hidden in the woman’s mind, other than her husband, comes on the scene: after drinking, the tipsy Caitiao tries to get her husband’s consent to her kissing a drunken male friend of theirs13 ; Xiaoyin missed a sick admirer in the spring.14 The function of the other men here is not to change or destroy the relationship between husband and wife, but to give the women a very subtle sense of psychological compensation: the male Other (whether Ziyi15 or Junjian16 ) refers to something that husbands are unable to give to their wives—some other kind of relationship between men and women outside of conjugal relation. It can be seen from “After Drinking” that Caitiao’s husband finds his wife’s behavior puzzling and perplexing. In his view, his friend was a threat to them, but he finally accedes to her entreaty to kiss him only to show his absolute trust in his wife. However, for Caitiao, to kiss Ziyi was no more than to realize one of her girlhood dreams. The work does not write point-blank about Ziyi per se—he is solely a man in Caitiao’s mind, so that the sloshed and sleeping Ziyi is what Caitiao can define and annotate at liberty. For her, Ziyi is in toto a symbol. In the behavior of kissing the symbol, she is not a wife to someone, but just an ingenue girl. She breaks through her role as a wife—the role of belonging to, being loyal to and loving her husband, and becomes a yearning, loving, and love-pursuing gendered self. For all we know, she may attempt to revisit the feeling of admiration that is no longer essential in her marital life. Ziyi is merely an assumed undertaker of this form of affection. Of course, since the story does not make it explicit, it is hard to speculate on Caitiao’s mental activities. However, the relationship between Ziyi and her and that between her and her husband form a subtle contrast. What is discrete in her roles in them is that in her fancied relationship with Ziyi, Caitiao is an admirer. In this role, she is safe to assume that the man she admires is obliged to receive or reject her admiration. In a word, Caitiao is in the role of taking action and what awaits her is an open ending. In her relationship 13

Caitiao, the heroine in Ling Shuhua’s 1924 short story “After Drinking.”

14

Xiaoyin, the heroine in Ling Shuhua’s 1926 short story “Spring.”

15

Ziyi, the drunken friend in “After Drinking.”

16

Junjian, Xiaoyin’s admirer in “Spring.”

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with her husband, Caitiao also gives and receives love, but the other one (her husband) does not necessarily have to answer or refuse her love—the ending is closed and the meaning of her love is fixed. She cannot and also does not have to act or choose in any way, because, in this relationship, she plays a passive role, as a possession or a piece of belonging. Therefore, the relationship betokened by Ziyi and the one represented by her husband gives Caitiao diverse self-images: one is a beloved wife—a fine decoration in the living room, an Object of aesthetic appreciation; the other is a new woman—a Subject that can express her pursuit, admiration or love and has the right to give them. The latter image is what Caitiao yearns for. Of course, it is only a yearning. At the end of the story, Caitiao “doesn’t want to kiss him any more,” which may prove the case in the negative that the object of Cai Tiao’s aspiration is not Ziyi, but rather the subjective role that she is apt to play in the symbolic relationship with Ziyi. Once she wins the role from the husband (which means she successfully and symbolically breaks away from the moral expectations for her role as a “wife” for the moment), it does not make any sense to “kiss Ziyi.” The extramarital factor inserted between the husband and the wife is a pro forma label that Caitiao uses to prove herself to be an independent individual as the Subject and maintain her right of being one; however, the label itself also indicates her lack of subjectivity in self-identification. “Spring” showcases the same theme in a certain sense. Judging by appearance, it is a story about the lassitude the heroine, Xiaoyin, feels on an annoying and discomposing spring day. An early spring day, turning from rainy and sunny, in the morning, the seemingly gold-plated wings of white pigeons looking lively white, which can also be said to be deathly pale in an inexplicable way, as well as the pastel blue sky and the gloomy gray sky—a succession of hues and colors in the description constitute a metaphorical mise en scene for the psychological experience and feelings between rain and shine, life and death, and denote a specific mental root. As a matter of fact, the latent relationship among the characters in “Spring” bears a remarkable resemblance to that of “After Drinking,” though it is presented in the cadence of music in “Spring”: at first it is a low-pitched tone like a touching murmur, in a mood with too many sentiments to be put in words; next, it turns to a high pitch, sizzling with heat of volcanic eruptions—“the unstoppable and lonely cries and prayers resulting from the loss of the greatest love;” then it comes down and suddenly stops, as if waiting for a reply, and a minute or two later, there is only one short and stinging sentence of disharmonious melody. In this description, the heroine hears a dialogue between two people from the music. She tries to recognize a silent beat in the cadence of prayers, a vacancy for an answerer, a rescuer, or simply a giver, and imagine that it was left for her. With her, we can identify two kinds of expectations faced by the heroine: one was the expectation for her role of a wife in marriage, and the other was for a role that has not yet been socialized, a giver of affection, a rescuer of life and a comforter of soul. The latter expectation apparently derives from a person that expects not in a social sense, id est, the ailing admirer who asked for solace in his letter.

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These two roles and two kinds of expectations split Xiaoyin up into two parts, two conflicting parts in her. What tortures Xiao Yin is less the unfulfilled love, or even less the dying of the friend, than the hesitation and faltering she feels in choosing between these two roles. That counts for her dysphoria of being divided, with schizophrenia-like symptoms in early spring. These two stories reveal the female divided self-images and their split inner world to us. This had never been so obvious and discernible in the feudal era but got to become manifest in the frame of new culture. It is not hard to nail down the reason—it is the division between the gender role defined by the old lifestyle and that by the new values for subjectivity. The social role of “Tai-tais” conferred happiness to women on the one hand, but also deprived them of the prospect of acting as a Subject. In the shell of “Tai-tais”, women were only left with affection for and warmth towards their husbands and families, becoming an incarnation of gentle love, but such love must not impair their identity of being wives. In such a divided reality, if the women wanted to survive and preserve the stability of family, they had to either live with it or imagine that the division was wiped out. In this regard, “Temple of Flowers” provides an interesting example. It tells a story of how the dual roles are disguised to be one. The design of the plot is quite intriguing and thought-provoking. Yanqian, wife to a poet, writes a finely-versed letter to her husband in the tone of an anonymous female reader, in which she compares him to a gardener who nourishes her like watering a small grass with spring water and brings beautiful blossoms out of her. In the end, she invites the poet to meet, to enjoy the spring scenery of nature, at the Temple of Flowers on the outskirts on the second day when the morning sun shines and lights up the earth. Utterly kept in the dark, the poet thinks the appointment may very well be a wonderful dream and gladly goes to meet her. Then, of course, he meets his wife, and the two of them return with joy and laughter. Putting aside the poet’s character, the duality in the heroine’s character is perceptible at a glance. The discrete nature of her two-fold role can be distinguished by the subtle difference between the writer “I” and the “I” in the letter. At first, the “I” in the letter is a female stranger without a name, in fact, the Yanqing in disguise. The hand to plot the flipflop is the writer “I.” Only in this way can she express her soul and call her husband’s attention to it. In other words, only by means of identifying with “another person” can Yanqian confirm and identify her female self, so as to reinstate her position in her relationship with her husband. This “other” that becomes “I” is the mirror image of Yanqian. She recognizes herself in this mirror image and turns it into “I,” in such a way that she could find the name of the game about “I.” This process may bridge the divided worlds of women in a symbolic sense. Then, from the other side of the text, this mirror image, or this set of discourse of “another person”, also gives us a glimpse into the discrepancy between a certain socially recognized feminine standard, prevailing at that time, and what women think of themselves. To adduce evidence, we may as well quote from the story:

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Two years ago, I was just like a plant of withered yellow grass at the base of a high wall, where even the gentle east wind would not pass by, not to mention the warm sunlight and sweet rain. I lived a dull and dark life for a long time until I met a kind gardener who moved me to a place in the sunlight, where I can also stay in the wafts of the east wind and get irrigated by clear water. Then I gain my vigor back, sprout vivid green leaves and even bloom luxuriantly several times a year—swaying in the air to compete for the charming spring time with other flowers. Oh, Mr. Youquan,17 you are the gardener of this grass; you give it life; you give it colors—they are also its beautiful soul.

In this letter, if tripped of its beautiful metaphor, its semantic content can be easily figured out. “I” in the letter, as a female, is a creation of the poet (a male), his product. Only owing to the poet and with his help does “I” become “beautiful,” and hence worthy of appreciation and self-appreciation. Such a statement of her beauty and value is made from a male perspective. It only affirms man’s creativity, not woman’s ipseity at all. But at the same time, the letter obviously produces some kind of ridicule and even irony in effect. The writing behavior of the letter writer seems to mock and tease the feminine standards prescribed by men. After all, the letter writer, as the narrator, is not equivalent to the character she narrates. The character utters the words to express her mind, while the writer handles the words and “acts” as the “I” in the letter. This writer who “acts and handles the words” is a Subject distinct from the character, the “I” in the letter. In the narrative dimension beyond the letter, it is this Subject, handling the words, rather than the one uttering the words, who comes to push around the actions of the husband. This subject does not have a language of her own. All she has in command is to mock and joke about the discourse of feminine standards and handle the words; barring that, she would be wordless. From this point of view, it is deducible that “Temple of Flowers” reveals to us two kinds of standards for females and two sets of discourses. The first set is to use females as proof to prove men’s creativity in inventing the normative feminine standard and discourse; the other set is a discourse to satirize the first discourse—it is better to call it a blank discourse, or a discourse kept at a distance, etc. In this wise, Ling Shuhua’s work inadvertently uncovers a semiotic dilemma of women: the symbolized image of femininity and the unsymbolized female ipseity or selfhood are not only different but also contradictory to each other. In terms of their pertinence, the former is symbolically invested with social norms, while the latter finds no access to the symbolic order; therefore, the former is the oppression of the latter. Women, under the circumstances of the May Fourth culture and reality, were fundamentally far from being liberated, free and independent. On the contrary, they were again repressed into the realm of collective unconscious by a new symbolic order, new shackles of symbols. The new symbolic order was not to objectify female images as flowers or moon, 17 Youquan, husband to Yanqian, the male character in Ling Shuhua’s 1924 short story “Temple of Flowers.”

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but to subject them to creations or works, out of the loving hand of a male creator who was brimful with affection and poetic grace, such as a beautiful “grass-like” soul instilled with new ideas—the object of the man’s affection, pretty but without individuality in the eyes of men. Following this logic, we can track down the issue of communication between men and women that Ling Shuhua’s fiction naturally touches upon. Her stories basically center around the psychological drama of women characters, a unique world that their beloved and the people closest to them are either unable or unwilling to enter. If the husband in “Spring” is the latter who cannot understand his wife, then Jingren in “The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival” is reluctant to understand her at all. The story of her female protagonist is often presented as a drama that takes place in her mind, a spontaneous and self-fulfilling action. It may be deliberate on the part of Ling Shuhua that through such a relation of wife and husband, she throws light on the segregation between genders. The woman in “Temple of Flowers” uses letters as an effort to break down segregation, but the result is two-sided. On the one side, the husband paid her attention to her again, which can be regarded as a victory on her part, but at the same time, she did it in disguise of someone else and by using another’s words—what he turned his eyes to at first was someone else. This is in turn a failure, a fiasco for her self-worth. Such a failure signifies that she is shut outside of his heart, vice versa with her husband. Finally, it must be pointed out that what Ling Shuhua left to people today as a legacy perchance is not only her transcription of the imprints the generation of women left on history but also a narrative art dedicated to feminine nature (nüxing lingxing ). Among the women writers of her generation, she was, if not the only one, certainly the distinctive one who outshone others in this respect. In the early years of the New Culture Movement, she picked up the art of Western fiction from a feminine perspective and rebuilt it into a form of expression befitting Chinese femaleness. Her characterization, her design of plot, her tones of narrative, and even her point of view in narration all reflected the particular volition unique to a woman writer. She turned female experience from a minor league issue or war cries to an art. This is the biggest constructive contribution that the generation of new women, barely emerging above the surface of history, could make. In a sense, she carried on the tradition of Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield, which was very rare in female writing at the time in China.

PART II

(1927–1937)

CHAPTER 7

The 1930s: Myths in the Crevice of Civilizations

7.1 7.1.1

Samsara1

History Stuck in a Dilemma

With the debacle of the Great Revolution in 1927, the phenomenal cultural changes that had taken place on the floating stage of the May Fourth era passed into history as a frozen moment. Not only did the iconoclastic daughters, such as Lu Yin and Bing Xin, get tied up in this eternal moment, but the spirit of “patricide” that had overturned the conventional cultural authorities also froze into an unprecedented tableau, which gets embedded in people’s (selective) memory of modern Chinese history. With a dizziness caused by the clash of Eastern and Western cultures and the anxiety over the fate of the nation, the “May Fourth” generation unanimously stood by an ideal society—the ideal of building a democratic and advanced “Young China” that would revive with scientific strength. However, after clearing away those stumbling blocks in the cultural, political and military spheres, the real resistance came forth from a realm that could not be changed by merely introducing a new culture, or by protests and demonstrations, not even by wars, that is, the economic foundation of Chinese society. In actuality, the Chinese society had given it all it got—whether it was the colonial and semi-colonial system of industrial productivity, traditional individual production of agriculture, or any other economic progress it had made—but could not keep the promise of the bright future for a powerful China. As we all know, in the 1930s, China’s vast rural society was unable to withstand the shockwaves of the capitalist commodity market or to 1 Lunhui in Chinese is the same word for cycle of seasons in nature, and samsara in Buddhist sense for metempsychosis or reincarnation.

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expand its production savings as it used to or to turn the negative frictions it had with industrialized regions into positive complementarity. It could only manage to survive China’s production transformation as a huge redundant entity hanging outside the times. Then there comes a historical paradox. On the one hand, in the context of the twentieth century, the aging Chinese agricultural civilization could no longer and should not continue on its old track of closed-circuit self-sufficiency; on the other hand, however, it was carrying on in actuality. By contrast, the toddling Chinese industries in the early twentieth century, with the birthmarks of colonialization and semi-colonialization, were still in their fledgling stage and unsustainable on their own, because they were unable to avert the exploitation of foreign capitalists and their Chinese agents on the one hand, and neither were they able to survive without huge consumer groups of individual farmers and handcraft workers on the other. As a result, national industries only became agricultural-consumer-oriented, not technology-oriented, and became industries of heteronomous type, not the self-determined and self-regulated type. Inevitably, they were merely an accessory to two dominant economies, one of traditional agriculture and the other of foreign capital. Their grapple with the traditional structure of the economy was a double-edged sword that hurt both sides, and it hurt them vitally. It is in conjunction with their respective dilemmas and their mutual dependence on playing off against each other and undermining each other, all combined, that the presidency of the first republic finally fell into the wrong hands after the Great Revolution, which introduced a government that represented the interests of a bureaucratic comprador community, attendant with the worst vices of both feudal and capitalist civilizations. Therefore, after the Northern Expedition, the interval of social peace, which was won by getting rid of the warlords and leaving behind the havoc they wrecked, neither satisfied nor sustained people’s original hopes for the future of the nation. On the contrary, the social reality very distinctly reproduced the historical rift that lay across the land since the Opium War; it reproduced the hesitant steps of history that could neither advance nor retreat, stuck in its dilemma between indigenous agricultural production methods that had tilled the land since ancient times and the colonial and semi-colonial industrial production methods that spawned in the near past. The country, as a national entity, reached an impasse, lost between the aged body of Old China and the budding spirit of “Young China.” It is in this insurmountable historical divide that the “May Fourth” movement, which should have led China to a bright ideal society, turned out to be a floating stage: all the cultural preparations it had made for the bright society only floated on the level of discourses, in a way similar to the political architecture designed by Sun Yat-sen. However, when Chiang Kai-shek claimed the presidency and wielded ultimate power over cultural issues, even such a floating stage was about to topple. The gradual stabilization of social life, formed under his high pressure and various coercive means, set two huge disparate strata to rights: one was a series of newly urbanized areas, and the

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other was the broad old countryside. The cities, as a social territory that gathered cultural elites of Young China, gradually settled into an order that was permeated with an increasingly striking characteristic of colonial and semicolonial society. Its capitalist lifestyle, commodity market, and cultural market were all underway to be completed; nevertheless, they did not grow out of some self-restrained aggressive forces of a new civilization from within the society but were rather some awkward replicas of the cultural dross dumped by Western civilization. Like industrial development in China, the appearance and development of new-style cities were induced by social forces from outside, rather than from inside. The cities, in default of any historical creativeness, were a rootless existence in China. In a country with 90% of the population engaging in agriculture, which was backward in science, technology, and production facility, and underdeveloped in the industrial foundation of colonial and semi-colonial China, the seemingly capitalized metropolis was but an empty concept without its substantial signified nor any cogent connotations for production method. Correspondingly, although its commodity culture and the market would be put into order in time, the metropolis still was only an incubator of the cultural scraps of capitalism. The reverse of the urban areas was a giant rural world, which never stopped being the world of traditional Chinese society. Just as the Revolution of 1911 did not wake up the drowsy minds of Ah Q and old ladies like Jiujin Laotai,2 so the “May Fourth Movement” and the Northern Expedition did not make an impact on the rural populace of China greater than the terror they struck into the villagers’ heart; it was just like a breath of wind that blew across this vast rural land. The people there, together with their culture and customs, their lifestyles and behaviors, beliefs and values, and even their ignorance and hardships, roughly remained intact, just as they used to be hundreds and thousands of years ago. The huge body of the countryside, with its people’s mosquito-like life, and its established value system and lifestyle passed down from generation to generation, had hardened into a monolithic entity of historical inertia. Under the squeeze of the two social strata that gradually stabilized into a clear-cut social structure, the May Fourth generation as well as the spirit of the “May Fourth Movement” fell from the well-lit stage that was performing a magnificent drama and got caught in a gaping crevice of history and culture. 7.1.2

The Deified Masses and the Political Patriarch

Chinese history never really promised a democratic, free, and equal society, or at least, the new political situation in the “milestone year of 1927” shattered such a promise, if ever there had been one. The patricides of the May 2 A character from Lu Xun’s short story “A Hassle,” Feng bo, in his 1923 collection Call to Arms , Nahan. Jiujin Laotai literally means Old Woman named Nine Grams, because her husband was born nine grams, hence her name. Being the oldest in the village, she represents the old generation who bemoan that the clan is in decline.

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Fourth era only overthrew a symbolic father—the feudal monarch and feudal cultural tradition, but they were obviously unable to shake patriarchal rule at the bottom. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek came onto the stage of history as a new political patriarch. He and his clique brushed aside the image of the feudal era’s political patriarch, who ruled by inheritance from generation to generation, and in its stead, forced another historic form of the Patriarch upon Chinese people. The authoritarian rule they installed by force and maintained through high-handed pressure, even by intimidating by means of massacre, though not the kinship-based rule any more, after all was still the governance of a political father per se. If the May Fourth literature features a conflict of parent–child antagonism comprised of the collisions between parents and rebellious children, between the parents’ generation and the children’s generation, then in the second decade of the new culture, the overarching conflict was between the political father and political children, but with the father– child ties and affections beside the question; to put it more precisely, the conflict was between the privileged and the underprivileged. The rise to power of the new political father sent the “patricide generation” of “May Fourth” back to their situation of being emasculated; they were regarded as effeminate, in physical, spiritual, and social senses, under the sanction and suppression of this political father. The powerful political father deprived them of their hopes for future society, threatened to wipe out their ambitions, and even undermined their sense of subjectivity that was barely established during the May Fourth Movement. Under the crushing pressure of the new political father, in addition to the encumbrance of the two social strata, a large number of intellectuals retreated like a flash from the modern historical drama’s “fatherkilling” scene. As a matter of fact, they were shepherded into the second act after the “father-killing” scene, even before they had time to perfect and consolidate values for their generation. This second act had the colonialized city and the traditional countryside as the backdrop of history and cast the ruler in power and the weak under rule, or autocratic masters and rebellious slaves, as main characters. Standing as a lonely person, a subject, or a slave that had been historically defined, a group of intellectuals continued and extended the value legacy of the “May Fourth Movement.” They insisted on seeking anti-feudal and human liberation solutions. For example, in the works of Ba Jin,3 Lao She,4 and Cao Yu,5 humanity and individuality never lost their value or extinguished their aesthetic light. They are their objects of writing, the 3 Ba Jin, penname of Li Yaotang (1904–2005), a liberalist writer and one of the most acclaimed modern novelists in 20 century China. Ba Jin’s Torrent Trilogy, Jiliu Sanbuqü, includes The Family (Jia), Spring (Chun) and Autumn (Qiu). 4

Lao She, penname of Shu Qingchun (1899–1966), one of the most important modern novelists and dramatists in 20 century China, best known for his novel Rickshaw Boy, Luotuo Xiangzi, and play Tea House, Chaguan. 5

Cao Yu, penname of Wan Jiabao (1910–1996), the most important modern playwright in 20 century China. A pioneer in hua ju, a westernized genre of theatre, he is best known for his play Thunderstorm, Leiyu.

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starting point, and the sources of catharsis of their writings. It is in light of these humanistic claims that the image of “family,” whether it is the one of Ba Ji or the one by Cao Yu, has virtually expanded from a specific concept referring to the head of the family to a trope signifying all dark rules of despotism in complicity with patriarchy. This more or less attests to the continuity of the spirit of the May Fourth Movement. However, a greater number of radical writers chose another path. This is understandable, if viewed from the perspective of political and social utilitarianism, in that they found the beaten track of the May Fourth movement coming to the end of its tether: all the means of resistance, like resisting old ethics, abandoning traditions, walking away from home to pursue liberty and individuality, and even rejecting the old symbol system, all were unable to destabilize the heavy history or unable to directly contend with the power of the political father. So many of them decided to quit this track. Envision how things stacked up at that time: despite the fact that the dynastic monarchy (dizhi) was overthrown, the “Sanctified Confucius” (kongsheng ) and the use of the ancient Chinese language (guwen) thrown overboard, history tried in moral courts, and the image of Young China also deeply rooted in people’s minds, granting all these achievements, ten years later, the nation still did not negotiate a favorable turn. China’s fate had not taken any turn: the people’s sufferings were getting worse, and the new regime that governed the future of society was unreliable. For these reasons, it is conceivable that the intellectuals, who were sensitive to everything, felt anxious in the face of such a state of affairs. Under such circumstances, in a semantic context of the culture, a new ideological myth duly took form, in conjunction with the rudimentary model of Marxist social revolution and the particular mentalities of the Chinese intellectuals at that time. This ideology had its embryonic form in the creation of “proletarian revolutionary literature,” and later became perfected in criticism and adjustment of the Left League. It was an ideology that had bearing on the capitalists’ and bourgeoisie’s exploitation and the proletariats’ resistance, on the awakened strength of the underprivileged masses, and also on the masses’ rising up in a revolution to overthrow the political father, etc. Undoubtedly, it contained an analytical system to explain Chinese history and social reality. It can even be said to contain a complete narrative about ways out for Chinese society, but the truths and values it upheld were not as convincing as the Marxist theory on which it was built. Although later history witnessed the outcome of the popular revolution to overthrow the political father as it proposed, the outcome, however, is very likely to have a historical value discrete from what was assumed in it. The “quasi”-truth of the series of opinions in the ideology is only nominal, first of all because when people used the concepts borrowed from Marxist theory, they had virtually replaced the original signified with their own suppositions. To a certain extent, the “class” in their writings was not so much a concept related to a specific mode of production as a collective term for two types of people, divided into the poor and the rich. Obviously, they did not care about the scientific connotations

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of Marxist concepts. What Marxism really touched them in the heart was the model of antagonism that turns all the criteria for the strong and the weak in reality upside down, and the scenario that the majority of the opponents to the authorities would eventually liberate themselves through fight. Barring the question of whether to remove the connotation of the mode of production from the concept of “class” had deviated from Marxism, in terms of class and modes of social revolution alone, radical intellectuals, under the action of their given mentality, had turned it into an ideological myth with distinctive utilitarianism and put it on a grandiose pedestal. Their faith in “social revolution,” first and foremost, was not to salvage Chinese society, but rather to redeem the radical intellectuals who fell prey to anxiety in the chasm between the two major social strata and in their repressive status of being subjected to a political patriarch: they shoved the “proletariat” masses, especially the huge rural multitudes empowered when awakened, in the foreground with a prospect for the revolution and its victory in establishing a new regime, while, by virtue of a wealth of their imagination, they adeptly pushed the checkmate of the two major strata, two discrete civilizations, and the stagnation of the May Fourth Movement to the background. But more important than that, it established a latent (or conjectured) “social subject” (shehui zhuti) that was capable of installing the existing political patriarch in a position to be castrated. To achieve the goal, intellectuals invented an imaginary role for the castration of power by abbreviating Marx’s theory of social revolution to Chinese reality. That is, the title role was to be played by the oppressed mass heroes in overthrowing the political tyrant patriarch, as a means to veto the social structure in reality. Therefore, in the place of the “children’s alliance” was a banner for the masses, the god-like masses in the 1930s’ literary works. They were no longer the benumbed, apathetic, and insignificant creatures described by Lu Xun, no longer a collective of unnamable and unconscious killer legions (sharen tuan). On the contrary, they appeared as a huge group that must be looked up to, a huge entity that accounted for the largest proportion of the populace in China, the giant who was asleep but would wake up any time to turn the universe upside down, a painful, suffering, and thus the incontrovertible incarnation of the absolute value of all judgments, a standard of beauty and goodness. Those eyes that looked up at this image with reverence tell us that the masses were no longer the sum total of the lower classes that one knew from experience and perception; the image was inherently insulated from experience and reality. Rather, it was a simplified ideology with the social revolution model on the podium, a kind of “mythical norm” that prescribed China’s largest population as the interest group of social revolution. The glorious image of “the masses” was supported by the ideological myth of social revolution. Indeed, without the ideology of “social revolution” at the time, it is hard to imagine whether people would still recognize the importance of the broad masses of the lower classes as an interest group in real life, whether they would believe in their role in the political future, whether they would treat their sufferings as an

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ordeal before the final judgment, and whether they would still be regarded as giants. Therefore, the image of the masses in literature is nothing less than a collective deity, or the deified masses, with implications related to ideological mythology. According to the logic underlying this myth, the power and size of the masses far surpass those of individual heroes. Such a god connotes a new social prospect, and the political potency latent in it confirms that none other than God is as good as the undertaker of “law,” and none other than God is endowed with the authority that truly conforms to the “Father’s Law,” whereas the ruling group occupying the position of the political father at the time is just an impostor who usurped the position. It is also in this sense that the masses as the God, who are deified by ideology, become a god of castration, who is empowered, in an unprecedented symbolic sense, to castrate the usurpers. 7.1.3

A Double-Edged Sword

The ideological appeal of the “the Masses the God” (dazhong zhi shen), in the domains of politics, ethics, social power, and values, attracted flocks of progressive writers who followed it as the only path of “justice” available to them in their confrontation with the political patriarch. Since the 1930s, this ideology that hinged on the concepts of the deified masses and “social classes” ( jieji) gradually matured and developed, in conjunction with the Left League that put it into practice, into a dominant ethic in modern literature. It may well be due to the emergence of the masses as the God of castration that the political father never got to occupy a ruling position in the field of literature as he did in reality. On the contrary, within the ambit of literature, whether written in texts or not, he is dealt with as a villain or antagonist in the senses of history, morality, values, and aesthetics. However, not unlike other ideologies, this the-masses-as-God-centered ideology was a double-edged weapon. One side of its sharp blade was turned towards the political father at the time, and it was also from this unambiguous guideline that many intellectuals embarked on their resistance and opposition to the control of the ruling group and unveiled the darkness of the society. But the other side of the blade inevitably also daunted and even wounded the marginalized and the weaker. To speak with candor, the omnipresence of the masses the God, given its castration scare tactics aimed at the tyrant political father, was no less than an autarchy to the marginal and defenseless cultural constituents. For example, in the creations of left-league writers, when tackling the relationships between the individual (minor self or xiao wo) and the whole nation (major self or da wo), individuals and collectives, urban intellectuals (except for those who really worked on behalf of the communist party) and the masses of workers and peasants, they nearly never failed to fall in the stereotype of belittling the former and aggrandizing the latter. No “minor self” that betrays the “major self,” neither any lonely and proud “individual” who isolates himself/herself from the world, nor an urban intellectual

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who despises the workers and peasants could be positively judged or depicted. What is more common in the work is a critical stance from the viewpoint of the “major self,” groups, and the masses to refute, desert, or inundate individuals, “minor selves,” and urban intellectuals. The lasting debate carried out in the 1930s on the “popularization of literature and art” seems to reflect the same problem from another dimension, that is, taking the standard of the masses as a yardstick to even out differences in individual intellectuals. The masses and individuals seem to be a pair of incompatible concepts like day and night, and since the masses are such a powerful, worthy, and beautified divine incarnation, then the minor self and individuals are bound to be placed in an insignificant and subordinate position. If you do not submit to the will of the masses, you are to be abandoned by the people and have no future for yourself. Behind the compulsory option that the deified masses thrust in front of each individual intellectual looms a coercive power. This is not to suggest that individuals must be superior to the masses in some way, but only to put forward a metaphorical supposition that an ideology with the masses at the core, in the same time as it castrates a tyrannic ruler, also tends to impose a coercive scenario for those cultural constituents that are comparatively detached from or not involved with the core, and hence turns itself into a kind of despotism (it should be said that the antithesis between the concepts of “individual” and “masses” per se was conceived in the ideology and got things rolling in the reality of the 1930s). This point already bears out a new form of “quasi-governance” in the mass ideology, and this may be a necessary consequence when it had not improved upon and surpassed the “law of patriarchy” and “law of the political father.” Not surprisingly, women were among the most immediate victims of the powers that be. In the writings of leftist writers,6 female images cluster in two prescribed scenarios. First, a number of new images of working women come in sight, such as those miserable women in Ye Shengtao’s “Night” (Ye, 1927), Wei Jinzhi’s “Nanny” (Naima),7 and Rou Shi’s “For Slave Mother” (Wei nuli de muqin),8 etc. They are, on the one hand, variant versions of “Mother Earth,” the embodiment of the Spirit of Sacrifice and the Spirit of Giving, tolerant and selfless, who would unhesitatingly sacrifice herself and give all she has freely; and on the other hand, they are also exuberant with the spirit of resistance and instinctively embrace revolution most of the time. Their images metaphorize revalorization of the female that is very different from that of the May Fourth decade: she is no longer pathetic and helpless, 6 The League of Left-Wing Writers, commonly abbreviated as the Zuolian in Chinese, was an organization of writers formed in Shanghai, China, on 2 March 1930, under the influence of Marxism and CPC, as well as the leadership of Lu Xun. 7 Wei Jinzhi (1900–1972), Left-League writer, always reputed as a “rural author,” had his short story “Nanny” publicized in his topical collection of short stories, Nanny. 8

One of the most famous short stories of Rou Shi (1902–1931), activist and LeftLeague writer, “For Slave Mother” was publicized one year before his execution by KMT as one of the “Five Martyrs.”

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instead, she is great and respectable. This change in her worth is obviously not due to the gender of the character, but because she is received as one of the masses, a group that is far larger in number and stronger in ideology than the authors themselves. They signify not so much women in reality as masters of China mythicized as the “Mother Earth” in proletarian politics. Therefore, even though both “In the Mountain Gorge” (Shanxia Zhong)9 and “Intoxicating Spring Nights” (Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang)10 are about the archetypal relationship between a down-and-out educated youth and a grass-roots woman, Ai Wu never tackled the relationship, in any way like Yu Dafu, as one of freemasonry and empathy between two persons who share the same misfortunes; instead, the “I” in his story only feels awe and respect towards Wild Cat, and seems too negligible and diffident to hold a candle to her. In Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi), the traditional images of the untouchable female from Chinese culture, “femme fatale,” “temptress,” and “ugly woman,” are rolled up and parceled out to the exploiting class Hu Niu, while attributes of innocence, chastity, and beauty are assigned to the poor dispossessed and exploited Little Fuzi.11 Is this a stratagem to tell the classic story of the “vixen” and the “virgin” in a new code of re-evaluate women in terms of “social classes?” Besides this, the second prescribed scenario is for a group of new city women, such as the character series penned by Mao Dun and Jiang Guangci, often referred to as bourgeois and petty bourgeois women. These characters are again divided into two categories: one is Ms. Jing,12 Mrs. Fang13 , and the Mistress Lin type in Midnight (Ziye, Mao Dun, 1933), who pursue their personal happiness and live in their insular families, obsessed with romance and courtship and disjointed with the time; the other category is the pungent and unrestrained new woman, such as Hui, Sun Wuyang, Zhang Qiuliu, Mei Xingsu,14 and Wang Manying. They share a free and untamed personality and all tend to dismiss their personal happiness from mind; in this sense, they are “no superficial romanticists.” They may have shortcomings, but their saving grace is their “revolutionary aspirations.” The contrast between the two types of women, who are discrete in personality and temperament and also differ in their pursuits and paths, gives a clue to a dilemma that the male writers, or rather the dominant ideology, put women in a Catch-22 of either pursuing personal happiness and leaving the world behind, or plunging into the current of the time by forsaking their own love and family life. 9 A short story written in 1934 by Ai Wu (1904–1992), a Left-League writer and novelist. 10 Or “Spring Fever,” by Yu Dafu (1896–1945), well-reputed Left-League writer, novelist, essayist and poet. 11

Lao She’s representative novel, written in 1936.

12

Female protagonist from Mao Dun’s first novel in 1927, Disillusion, huan mie, the first of his trilogy, Eclipse, shi. 13

Character from Mao Dun’s novel, Rocking, dong yao, the second of his trilogy, Eclipse.

14

Character from Mao Dun’s 1929 novel, Rainbow, hong.

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Obviously, these female images are dominated by the entire ideological myth contingent on the deified masses. First of all, if the lower-class working women are portrayed in juxtaposition with urban intellectual women, then there is no shadow of doubt that the former are in close proximity to the masses the God, hence more likely to become “heroes”—they seem to be born revolutionaries as soon as they open their eyes. This is not the case with urban women. They are not blessed with this kind of heroic quality, a natural gift for revolution; at best, they only have “aspiration for revolution.” Secondly, in terms of the distinction between the “wishy-washy romanticist” type (qianbo langman xing ) and the “revolution idolatry” type (yao geming xing )among urban women, the latter is more desirable to the ideology. Rather than grind away at one’s “ego” or “minor self” and relinquish their hold of the times, they abandon themselves to revolution and merge with the bottom classes into revolutionary struggles, so that they may have a chance to pick up some of their “divinity” and be salvaged. With this myth operative, women are arrayed in a spectrum radiating from the center—the masses the God: the farther away from the center, the less their value and the lower their status in the ideology. Leaving aside whether this division is justifiable or scientific, what is more important is that with the division, the female gender as a whole was divided and suppressed, and even the entity of the female gender as a whole was virtually obliterated and eliminated. Under the deterrence of the deified masses, the woman problem, which used to linger in the periphery of the culture, slid back to the collective unconscious again to some extent.

7.2

Divisions of Darkness, Shadow, and Daylight 7.2.1

Women Deep in Loneliness

Due to the double-edged sword of the dominant ideology, the situation women writers faced was very much like that of the aforementioned female figures, certainly, the category of new women who grow up under the new culture. As a gender, women were moved, inch by inch, out of the shelter of the ideology they once had during the May Fourth Movement, and, inch by inch, they were forced by the new ideology into terra incognita. If in the May Fourth Movement, the rebels, after all is said and done, had emancipated some youths, or sent a band of goblins at large in their action to tear down the feudal patriarchal temples, and the iconoclastic daughters at least had a seat reserved for them in the “alliance of rebellious children” (ziyibei tongmeng ), then in the 1930s, in the contention between the “political father” and “the Mass the God,” the female gender was passed over, in the same manner as a girl could not possibly have a part in the scramble for the throne between Hamlet and his usurper uncle. It is not that they did not get the point of the ruling structure for the governing and the governed under the “law of father.” On the contrary, as a social existence standing outside the “father-son order,” they were most rightly in a position to criticize and subvert this structure. However,

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taking their marginalized position at that time into account, if they had not given up their female position, they could only have had to stay invisible in the shadows behind the sacred light of the whole masses, remaining outsiders to the interlacing relations between God and Adam, between political father and the masses. Not only that, the reality of the 1930s suddenly looked them straight in the face in an extremely grim and harsh way. Such a vast land, a territory that was once swept across by the May Fourth Movement, had no place for rebellious daughters up to the 1930s. They were left alone between two monolithic social strata, as if between a rock and a hard place: the vast poor and backward countryside, on the one side, was removed from them by an era, where the way of living and rural women there were the epitomes of their past history or “non-history” past; on the other side, the urban life that became increasingly regularized and ossified under the rule of the new political Father inherited the male norms particular to capitalist societies in a sudden social transformation and had even developed and perfected a package of new socialized roles for the female: fine flowers in vases within domestic confines, social butterflies on occasions catering to social celebrities, objects of pornographic fascination in the cultural market, docile and gentle, or numb and shallow wives or ladies in city dwellers’ lives, as well as all kinds of standards for “femininity” (nüren wei), and various definitions as regards female beauty, female virtue, female wiles, the feminine mystique, and temptations. All this is completely at odds with “Nora’s” pursuit of freedom of the women rebels. It may well be because the daughters lost the protection of any ideological shelter and the alliance of male comrades that they felt forlorn and lonely. And it may also be because they had problems that male masters did not and would disdain to worry about that this generation of rebellious daughters got to grow, unnoticed, into women. It is no surprise that, in the history of modern Chinese literature, the complete awakening of their female consciousness was inseparable, nearly commensal, with a strong sense of social alienation: the first gender-conscious figure, Ms. Sophia, has good awareness of being alien to society and adheres to her stance of an outsider. She becomes a paradigm, based on a real-life woman, for women of arrogant and defiant personality that swells with “femininity” as well. Such personality and temperament are by no means invented haphazardly, but rather, in a sense, result from the confluence of their social gender roles as an ostracized group by society and their own female physical characteristics. To put it with dire candor, in a male-centered society and culture, a prerequisite for a woman to establish her gendered self is to be aware of her being an “alien” or “outsider.” The word “alien” is the only vocabulary that women could find to signify their own identity in a state of nameless chaos of the male political unconscious. Otherwise, women would not even be able to talk about themselves, being muted, hidden, and unseen by society. With the rebellious daughters’ departure from the stage of identifying with the rebellious sons and the sense of alienation they acquired in the dark, the female tradition in modern Chinese literature had taken a significant step

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forward, either by accident or by choice. Women began to appear on the stage of the times as a repressed but independent gender group, even though they only appeared at the edges of the stage. In fact, these aliens’ point of view was perhaps the most precious contribution modern Chinese women writers made to modern literature. Since the 1930s, a tradition of necessarily criticizing the entire modern culture from the perspective of the aliens had loomed in the creations of female writers. The most prominent examples include criticisms of the commodity culture of urban life and those of the dominant ideology. When the norms for the urban life that was regularized by capitalism started to take shape, it seems that only women upheld a resistant and critical attitude towards the entire system. It is in “Mengke,” “A Girl called Ah Mao,” “After the Wedding Banquet,” “Nora’s Way Out” and other such works that people got to see how the values advocated by the May Fourth generation came to be treated snobbishly as tradeable objects in a commodity market, how love and faith in freedom got traded in the vanity fair, and how people’s subjectivity was alienated and engulfed by the mechanism of this commodity civilization that was under the sway of commercialism and eroticism. By contrast, such issues never emerged in the vision of the leading ideology that held aloft the banner of the Mass God of Castration. The latter had a very simple view of the city, since, to them, everything could be classified by the social class dichotomy: the exploiters and the exploited. Because of this, they lost sight of what the female writers had criticized. In the like manner, when the deified masses were raised high on the altar, and the collective and collectivity dominated individuality and differences, it is natural that a large number of intellectuals sincerely believed the bright historical future lay with the masses at the juncture of national crisis. Then it seems that only a small number of female writers and the few who insisted on dissident opinions continued to reexamine the cannibalism of the culture and stagnation of the history, redefine the numbness and apathy of the masses, rehash the issue of “petty production pattern of thinking rampant in the revolutionary ranks,” and reiterate the deep-rooted feudal forces and the imperativeness of anti-feudalism. All of this, of course, points to the “mythical nature” of the God myth. “Reflections on March the Eighth” and Tales of Hulan River measured the stasis of history and production methods since modern times with a yardstick produced by the women aliens in their anti-God-myth campaign. And the critical subtext of this antimyth was not discovered until today, another era having all the earmarks of the May Fourth Movement. This sense of alienation and this dissident tradition at the social margins should be considered to be an innate cultural and ideological feature of the female gender group defined by history. 7.2.2

The Female Body of Others

In the 1930s, female writers proceeded to put an end to the specific stories of the rebellious daughter of the May Fourth generation. If some of Bai Wei’s

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works, such as Bomb and Migrant Bird (Zhadan yu Zhengniao),15 Tragic Life (Beiju Shengya),16 and the later creations of Lu Yin and Bing Xin, provide the female experience in the transition from youth to explicitly gendered adulthood, then a new generation of female writers like Ding Ling and Chen Ying brought brand new content to the female tradition. Their keen and sober perspective of the female way of looking and their accurate perception of the male world and their female self, bring us into the next phase in their physiopsychological trajectory after the “father’s daughter” period, a phase of both awakened gender identity and social independence, albeit not self-conscious yet. Their works touch upon problems particular to women in this phase, i.e., confusion and contradictions. It is safe to say that awakened gender identity is an epoch-making watershed, a demarcation for us to distinguish the first and second generations of female writers in modern Chinese literature. The first noticeable sign of growth is the female’s awakened sense of body. If we remember how the “May Fourth” female writers, in writing about the Platonic spiritual alliance, recoiled instinctively from their own and others’ bodies and passed up anything related to sex, then it is not hard to find in “Mengke” and “Ms. Sophia’s Diary” that the female body has got a pair of curious eyes, unaccounted for in the May Fourth works. The female had acquired the knowledge and ability of a gendered adult to see all the penchants of flesh, hear the voice and language of flesh, and understand the meanings of flesh and body. For the first time, we find in “Mengke” a narrator who is quite au fait with men’s desires and their sexual behavioral patterns as well as this “pure sensual” world. Here is a description in “Mengke:” It was another night to play chess. She was sitting on the opposite side of Danming. Xiaosong sat behind her chair, tilting close to her. He insisted on being her consultant, and from time to time stretched over her arm to grab a chess piece. When he leaned forward, his soft breath made her neck feel warm and itchy, so she turned her face sideways. That enabled Xiaosong to see the shadows of her eyelashes elongating to the bridge of her nose, so he also turned her face way and tried to look closer at the dark pupil of her eye in the lamp light and moved his chair up to her. Mengke was bent single-mindedly on her own move and did not notice the gaze of another pair of eyes from her opposite, scrutinizing her slender fingers, those neatly trimmed red nails on a pair of snow-white hands. Her skin was nearly transparent, in the pure and clear inside of which many purple veins and thin strands of blue veins were faintly discernible. Danming seemed to be thinking of something beyond the hands, so he always had to be urged before a move. He looked as if lost in the game but was certain to lose in the end.

This narrator knows better than the innocent young woman Mengke about men’s true erotic motive behind their gentleness and solicitous courtesy and 15

The first full-length novel of Bai Wei (1893–1987), published in 1929.

16

Bai Wei’s autobiographic novel, written in 1936.

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also understands that this erotic motive is the momentum behind the code of male behavior in the commodity market of urban life. His insight into erotic ethics laid a general background for the actions that happened to Mengke, a background centered on gender-specific slavery, especially the enslavement of flesh and body. Against the background, in the relationship between master and slave, buyer and commodity, Mengke is destined, by her “national beauty and celestially fragrant” (guose tianxiang )17 female body, to be the latter. She can run away from somebody’s cousin who played with her feelings but cannot get away from the vast machine of capitalist civilization that operates the entire male world. The only way this machine deals with women is to process them into the standard cogs in its own apparatus. In the case of Mengke, her body is supposed to be processed into a hollowed husk to bear the onus of male desires and their shallow delights, a high-end commodity displayed in the window of the urban cultural market for sex and sexuality. It should be pointed out that in the 1930s, the fact that female writers “saw” their body derived from their passive awakening, or only from their being awakened rather than from their self-consciousness. In a sense, it was the purely sensual social ethos of urban culture that first galvanized the corporeal awakening of the rebellious daughters. Or it was because of the gaze of the male world that they noticed their own female body for the first time. Yet, as soon as they began to pay attention to their own corporeal existence, their bodies left them and became a commodity in reality and pornography on screen. What they saw was actually their alienated female body. So, this passive corporeal awakening is, in essence, different from women’s later active understanding of their own physio-psycho existence: the awakened yet alienated body does not bring female writers so much self-identification as a kind of bewilderment, a puzzlement about her own female bodies that only gain meaning by virtue of others. In “Ms. Sophia’s Diary,” the pair of eyes opened up to the corporeal body, for the first time, exposed the protagonist, Sophia’s inner mind and laid her desire bare, as a woman, for a good-looking man of “refined deportment.” This sign of gender maturity gave a number of male critics a shock. But neither the implied author nor the protagonist narrator is sure whether the desire proceeds from her female body or from the male-centered culture’s prescript for the female body. Sophia’s mien of both acknowledging and denying her own corporeal desires actually reveals a de facto alienation in herself: women who have stepped into their “womanhood” stage (nüren jieduan) still have no right to study, read, and construe their bodies, nor do they have the habit of explaining their bodies. She hates the various ways male society defines her female body, but at the same time, she is incapable of distinguishing what the female body signifies to herself. The second sign of women’s growth is that they started to regard men with deep suspicion, in other words, to establish a rival gender difference to 17 An epithet for peony, which is China’s national flower, and also for female beauty in Chinese.

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themselves. The market machine of the erotic economy in urban life crushed into pieces of unfulfilled promises the daughters’ faiths in pure love and a happy family. In an urban environment that comprised of all arrays of betrayals, deceits, hypocrisy, and indifference, women gradually learned the artifice of defense—all kinds of survivalist ways and means of seduction and rejection, learned to wheel and deal with social situations, learned to stay out of harm’s way by deploying emotions at every turn and twist of the game, and learned to hide their true feelings. Behind all this, what women really learned was to reexamine the men-women relationship with distrust, to look at love, family, and marriage and regard happiness with a grain of salt and, of course, to take a new look at men and themselves. Indeed, in the works of female writers in the 1930s, almost none of the lovers, married couples, or families displays a streak of the “spiritual alliance” of the previous era. On the contrary, behind the curtains of their homes, a gender war is unfolding in a variety of forms. For example, as a writer from last generation, Ling Shuhua’s comic short story, titled “Woman,” subtly portrays a wife who knows that her husband has a lover outside, and describes how she carefully plans a dramatic scene for the unwitting third party to understand she is being deceived by a married man. In the end, the wife wins the tug-of-war, not for the purpose of saving their mutual affections, but for her practical interests, namely, those of breeding their children and the wellbeing of the family. Such is a woman who wised up to urban life in the 1930s and to the family relationship in these circumstances. This is also the same pattern of love between men and women in Bai Wei’s Tragic Life and Chen Ying’s After the Wedding Banquet and some other works, in addition to Ding Ling, only varied in their own respective perspectives. Their writings bear witness to the fall of love from the divine altar of the “May Fourth” era to the red dust of the urban market for sex and sexuality, becoming a sheer transaction and competition divested of good faith and mutual trust. Love, barring its trauma in women’s hearts, is only a dramatized presentation of the sex war between betrayal and counter-betrayal, conquest and counter-conquest, abandonment and counter-abandonment. If the male-desire-dominant market for sex and sexuality fostered the daughters’ awareness of their female body for the first time, then this latent war between the sexes enabled the daughters to perceive “womanhood” for the first time, and to feel and experience all the implications and complexity of its cultural status at once. First of all, “womanhood” is a fallacious term for women per se. When Sophia says “I am some very feminine woman,” it is laden with self-mockery. Bai Wei even pointed out with her first-hand experience that in a patriarchal society, “women have no truths.” If “womanhood” means the object of desire and of conquest for men, then for women, it signifies the alienated part of their being. But at the same time, the daughters, after being betrayed, put up for sale, and even traded time after time, found themselves, as a social existence, first and foremost defined as “otherness” to men in any kind of relationship between the sexes. With the disintegration of the spiritual alliance, what remained in women’s physio-psycho-social experience

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of the sexual relationship with men was the timeless differences between themselves and men. With a view to distinguish their own way of living from that of men, they could not but accept the appellation of “womanhood.” Indeed, they were far from getting the genuine right of interpretation to this word, but after all, this was the only distinguishable word sanctioned by usage. It is also from this perspective that Ling Shuhua entitles her story “Woman,” which may betoken profound meanings, including the emergence of gender awareness—awareness of gender distinction, and the initial sobriety, gained by women, in judging the relationship between their “self” and “others.” Otherwise, this work, even this generation of women, would be rid of the mere opportunity of talking about themselves, even with a misnomer. Without the ideological shelter, women actually mark off and perceive themselves by going to the lengths of improperly labeling themselves and accepting a certain alienation of themselves. There can be no better proof than this to evince women’s historical and cultural plight at the crossroads of their self-awakening. It also shows how difficult it was for women to walk out of the labyrinths of misnaming and alienation and gain thorough self-insights. 7.2.3

“Women’s Sky Is Narrow”

For most female writers in the 1930s in China, their awakened gender awareness was a far cry from being enlightened. On the contrary, just as suggested by a perhaps unintentional move of Ding Ling when she named her first collection In the Darkness (Zai Heian Zhong, 1928) in her sober eyes as a female, the title was more congruent with the situation confronting awakened women, which, analytically speaking, was supposed to be a double-layer darkness that females faced. The first layer of darkness came from the dominant ideology, a shadow cast by the deified masses who played an important part in the mythological scenario of “social revolution,” an overwhelming shadow to dim out the lesser ones. As afore mentioned, it also ousted women from the main stream of the times. The second layer of darkness proceeded from women’s hearts, the roadblocks and barriers in their self-discovery expeditions. In history, if all the hollow signifiers for women were removed, signifiers such as being men’s creation, being men’s named, being the object of male desires, and even incarnation of fears, females themselves would fall into the historical unconscious, into the male unconscious, and in the same breath, into their own unconscious as well. Even some women had awakened to the truth about misnaming and alienation, but the moiety of truths they had learned were yet to be redefined and re-interpreted in a sea of the nameless unconscious. The two layers of darkness, arising from the environment and the inner unconscious, sent the awakened female self into another inevitable closedown, into a common creative stasis for female writers. Because women who had just entered the stage of womanhood were not yet a self-conscious group, still unable to integrate their sporadic feelings about the male world as well

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as their own female selfhood into a systematic narrative, nor could they independently put themselves aright, after having been long buried deep in the historical unconscious. What they wrote was only what was given license to by the male society, and also what their own imagination allowed. As such, if they insisted on their feminine standpoint and described women’s lives away from the scope of vision of the mainstream ideology, then not only would their limited subjects and trivial and trite incidents hardly resonate in society, but even more importantly than that, they might very soon come to the outer limit the society allowed them to write within, certain insurmountable limits set by the society of the era for women, which women tried to traverse in vain. To illustrate the woman-problem-centered novels of this period as examples, they tended to end with either-or options in issues such as either career or love, either freedom or family, either ipseity or social roles; within the limits allowed by society, women’s stories did not make a step forward. Neither was it impossible for them to advance. Before women could advance out of their collective unconscious, it is unlikely for the unique experience of women as a group, especially their physio-psycho experience, to enter the field of expression. In the creation of the 1930s, such experience, like that of motherhood viewed from a female perspective, was rarely seen, of course, not to mention the sexual experience of women, or to thoroughly and candidly probe into the physiological differences between men and women and the issue of gender slavery. As it turns out, the stories about women that were allowed by society had nearly all been written and exhausted, but those beyond social tolerance never occurred to the women writers. That the latter did not emerge from a black sea of the unconscious for the time was inevitably ascribed to the star-crossed washout of the second batch of awakened women in modern history. But of course, if they had struggled to resolve their dilemma of survival and creation by giving up the painful attempts within their reach on the fringe, then they might very likely drop even the merest chance of critiquing what they could. The large number of female writers in the 1930s were not contented with writing within the narrow confines of women’s life for their creation, but from today’s vantage point, they did not go any further than those egoists who clung to their narrow world. As a matter of fact, once they merged into the main trend of the times, they would no longer retain their female self, and no longer have a clue to their anti-myth endeavors. The reverse is also true: in the event of abandoning their female self, they could only yield to mainstream ideology, become an average creator of myths, and help bury the female gender deeper in the unconscious at the bottom of history—the foundation of the ruling order of the dynastic past. Ding Ling is an example of the latter. She turned herself to the leading ideology, thus solved her dilemma in literary creation, but also deprived herself of the critical stance of a dissident, which she could only obtain when standing in the historical position of a woman. In a nutshell, the sky for women was low and narrow. It was illustrated by the women’s enclosed world in literary works, by the marginalized space that women were despotically dismissed to, and also by the dark collective

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unconscious females themselves were wrapped up in. Above the awakened women was a sky that constantly dwindled. Therefore, although the 1930s was a period of women’s maturation, it was not one of women’s harvest. Only a few women of tremendous audacity and resources finally managed to surpass the limits of this era.

CHAPTER 8

Ding Ling: Vulnerable “Goddess”

8.1

Alienation and Loneliness

Ding Ling’s youth in the 1920s was a time when another generation of daughters were swept up by history in a tide of cultural migration from the countryside to city, from a feudal rural lifestyle to a capitalist lifestyle—another generation of daughters who had been brought up conventionally, left their homes with a passion of youthful rebellion to seek employment or study in big cities, and joined the ranks of young urban women. Hitherto, the war cries and petitions for democracy, freedom, and humanity, which used to shake the soul of aged China during the May Fourth new culture movement, had been shattered in the face of the gradually regularized cultural market of capitalism under the monopolistic political pressures. As a result, they had either turned into whispers or fallen into silence. For this generation of daughters, the city had been reduced from a plot of liberal and progressive cultural soil, fertile for the growth of magnificent ideals, to a market that commercialized sexual assets under the corrupting influence of capitalism. In these markets, one found no trace of the “friends by the sea” discussing and exploring the life, nor tender lines lauding maternal love; even the age when a love-stricken woman like Zuihua died a martyr for love had passed into the background. In this colossal market, any human dignity, individual character, and worth could be put on the shelves and tagged with a price. Among them, love became a best-selling yet cheap commodity. Even acts of reading, art, and culture were pure kitsch, tinted with a shade of tawdriness that could not be washed away. And the women, who had rebelled against their parents’ will, ended up either as a new type of doll in the house—wives, or tai-tais, or as sexy stars or preys in male voyeurs’ eyes. Even retreating to sitting rooms and talking profusely

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_8

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about “revolution” had become a trend of the parasitic lifestyle that had an artsy and pretentious streak and a broad hint of the erotic. Not only did Ding Ling herself stay away from the revolutionary camp out of her extremist sentiments of utmost rebellion, but also the entire generation of daughters, who got trapped in the culture of the capitalist market, no longer forged any spiritual alliance or belonged to any camp. Yet it is also for this reason that they underwent the loneliness that the earlier generation of daughters had not experienced, and saw a darkness that had hardly been heeded by the latter. But this also bred their unrestrained and haughty, sophisticated, and cynical character, something that was not conspicuous with the earlier generation. Ding Ling’s early works are about the inner world, particularly the loneliness, of this generation of women. In Ding Ling’s debut story “Mengke,” the first conflict, which unfolds at the beginning of the story, marks off the new situation confronting the second generation of Chinese daughters: the incident of a female model being insulted, a conflict in itself, no longer plays up the conflict between a feudal parent and a recalcitrant daughter, nor the conflict between morality of the old society and the new lifestyle. Instead, it features a conflict between erotic male predators and enslaved women in modern urban life. This conflict runs throughout the novel and becomes a control lever that operates the fate of the leading character, Mengke. Mengke’s story epitomizes the common destiny of the women who entered the metropolitan life of capitalism: their migration from countryside to city, assumed to be one from anti-feudalism to freedom, far from being a passage to liberty, turns out to be a process of passing from feudalist gender slavery to capitalist sex slavery, also a process for women to turn, step by step, from being men’s possessions into pornographic commodities. Mengke, a good-looking girl, left her hometown to study in the city. Because she was filled with contempt and resistance to the dirty air at school, she dropped out of school and came to live with her aunt in Shanghai. During this period of time, she was moved by her cousin’s gentleness and fell in love with him. However, when she realizes that she, together with her pure feelings, is just a chip in their game of love, she leaves her aunt’s house and falls into bad mental and financial straits. In order to survive, she eventually embarks on a path not unlike that of the model she helped at the beginning of the novel, and becomes a movie star in a world of “sheer sensuality” (chun rougan). In a plot consisting of a succession of “migrations,” each migration brings Mengke a step closer to the status of a commodity. At first, it is Mengke’s dream of art that is sold, as art is no more than a means to satisfy lust; then it is her feelings that are sold, as a maiden’s love is a topnotch plaything for an urban dandy; thereafter, it is her dignity, when the filmmakers talk about the features of her face as if criticizing an object; finally, her feminine body is put up for sale, because Mengke’s image becomes something for men to place their erotic reverie upon. Mengke grins and bears it in this purely carnal society because

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she cannot survive unless allowing herself to be alienated as a pornographic commodity on the capitalist commodity market. The proneness to be alienated into this pornographic commodity is not only manifested in Mengke’s experiences, but it is also infused into her inner world like a blast of urban air. Compared with Mengke, Sophia is more relevant to the deep internalization of the alienated female-ness. Sophia is the more skeptical one, in whose diary the inner contradiction disclosed—the separation of sexual love from soul, or rather the separation of desire from soul—actually hits upon the primary impact made by the commodity and market culture on women. Indeed, everything in urban life was marked by male desires, and thus, sex, no longer a vinculum of private emotions that is not supposed to be tradeable, became one of the yardsticks to evaluate everybody’s market price. Under such circumstances, Sophia’s desire for Ling Jishi per se is an alienated love. His beautiful figure, tender and red lips, sunken corners of mouth, soft hair, and knightly demeanor all add up to a legendary perfect lover…All these things that obsess Sophia are in fact shaped by the standards of the urban market for masculine sensuality. In other words, Sophia’s desires are not so much her own as they are fabricated and proffered to all women by the ideology of a male-centered urban life. The good-looking Ling Jishi of “refined deportment” represents a model for the ideal sex for women set by society. In such a society, what is generally regarded as “beautiful” in a man is not so much up to a woman’s demand for love, but rather a male society’s prescription for the female to love. Indeed, romantic stories, popular novels, and movies of the time had a strong impact on this generation of women and subtly conditioned the dimensions for their fantasizing: for instance, to fall in love with a dream man of such “archetypal beauty.” This, as Sophia says, means nothing but making herself feel “very feminine,” fainting in the arms of the knightly handsome man, losing herself in his superficial and disgusting whispers and lingering with him by flowers in the moonlight; however, there is no more mutual companionship like that of Zuihua and Shizhen1 on their pathway through life, let alone understanding and support between two souls like those friends by the sea. In regard to the dimensions for female fantasizing, there is something that is obviously prescribed by capitalist ideology, that is, to oust love from women’s mind, and in its stead, lodge a desire for sex that is tradeable as a commodity. If a woman indulges herself in this illusory and skin-deep “flesh love” and takes it as on faith, then she has set foot in or is on her way to the erotic market of sensations, not in any way as a consumer in it to dally with men, but rather as a sacrifice to dedicate her love, her personality, her body and soul in such a way that she becomes a commodity in the transaction and consumption of love. If she admits this is not love, then she would confront a situation, which Zuihuas could not have ever imagined: desire betrays love or is divorced from love to a certain extent. And this desire, as the one Sophia feels for Ling Jishi’s red lips, soft hair, and 1

Zuihua and Shizhen from Feng Yuanjun’s “Separation.”

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sunken mouth corners, stems from “male discourse,” some prevailing principle of carnal consumption in the male-centered urban sex market. Women could play with men, but it does not mean that they can find love. In this manner, women’s desire gets alienated, divorced from love by stereotypical masculinity normalized by society and by the sex rules defined by men.2 This external force of alienation leads to the alienation of Sophia’s inner heart. She is thus bound to fall into a deep contradiction in love. Her contradiction is not only the conflict between her desire and her moral reason but also the conflict between her two selves, as manifest in the discourse of the fiction: one is the “I” behaving in compliance with alienated desire and the other “I” is the diary writer that records, observes and reflects on the happenings. The latter “I” disparages the alienated desire, and disdains the former one, that “very feminine” female who submits her desires to the vogue of urban life and lives the mores. If the former self is subjected to alienating forces, then the latter self is a rebel to resist the rules of erotic consumerism in the urban market. From this perspective, Sophia’s story is not about how to conquer lust, but about how to recognize alienated desires and about the female inner struggle between inclinations of alienation and anti-alienation. Sophia’s “victory” does not lie in her action that she kicked Ling Jishi away after receiving his kiss, but in her perception of the fallacy of her desire that the kiss verifies. Only through this does she realize she is not the type of woman who would swoon in the arms of handsome men, not a woman who gets infatuated in the skin-deep “love” that is commercialized in the erotic market and is reduced to selling her body and soul as prescribed by the society. It is because of that kiss that she comes to relinquish the alienated desire. Chances are that she will have other desires, but that will be desires that belong to her female self. Her “victory,” in this sense, is the victory of the female selfhood that defies alienation. But it is worth noting here that this victory is premised on women’s failure and their status of humiliation in urban life. In order to avoid becoming the male’s plaything if kowtowing to the will of the society, Sophia must first remake her life as “her own plaything.” Even with her final victory, the woman is left with nowhere to go, because she runs counter to the whole of urban society and exiles herself from that society. Therefore, Sophia will have to face vaster loneliness and an existence of “living voicelessly” and “dying unknown.” The external alienation that Mengke is subject to is, in essence, the internal alienation Sophia finds herself in. This may help us understand the theme of loneliness in Ding Ling’s early novels. This loneliness is initiated by the environment but also proceeds from her own volition of choice. It does not arise from her shallow self-pity, but rather from her discovery and denouncement of the two-fold reality of the clan system in feudal villages that dies hard and the 2

Sophia and her favored man, Ling Jishi from “Ms. Sophia’s Diary,” Ding Ling’s debut diary fiction that won her instant influence as the most important feminist writer when published in Short Story Monthly in 1928.

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monolithic capitalist urban life that specifies norms. This loneliness is not only what women choose as a defiance, but also the inexorable structural aftermath of Chinese society in the 1920s. To break it down, the thematic loneliness is manifested in two aspects of Ding Ling’s fiction: one is the solitude (both spiritual and psychological) related to women’s survival in society, and the other is on the metaphorical level, that is, women’s soliloquy-like voices as irrelevant to any realm of the leading culture and discourse. After leaving her aunt’s house in Shanghai, Mengke does not return to her father’s house in her hometown. It is possibly because she still harbors in her heart some false hope and reluctance to reconcile, determined to break the shackles of marriage, while “homecoming” is, to her, admitting defeat. But the fundamental reason is, between rural and urban life, she finds no home for her heart and soul. This female dilemma is also explored from diverse angles in several other works in In the Darkness (Zai heian Zhong ),3 such as “The Girl called Ah Mao” (Amao guniang), “During the Summer Holidays” (Shujia zhong) and “End of the Year” (Suimu). Ah Mao is completely distinct from Mengke in temperament and experience, but the different spiritual paths they tread lead to the same destination. As an innocent girl who grew up in the countryside, Ah Mao holds an infinite fantasy that is inspired by capitalist urban culture. She is a classic case of Sister Carrie, to be true, but the difference is that, though fascinated by urban life, she still lives in the reality of Chinese countryside. In her spiritual self-exile, Ah Mao experiences Mengke’s journey of discovery, but in reverse. Ah Mao also turns, in her spirit, against her hometown where she grew up. At first, she seemed to see happiness in the beautiful urban women who enjoy high social position and great wealth. Her fevered imagination conjured up an affirmed vision for pursuing this happiness. But before long, due to an accidental opportunity, Ah Mao not only perceives the ephemeral happiness of urban life from the vantage point of “death,” but also finds the happiness to be null and void: urban women have everything that Ah Mao dreams of, but they have no happiness. “Happiness is only in the eyes of others, either out of admiration or jealousy, and the person, by and of herself, can never get a taste of this sweetness.” And this is exactly Ah Mao’s epiphany about the predicament of commodity-like women. The female existence is only there for people to watch. No one really cares about whether she herself has ever had a taste of happiness, just like Mengke, a “raging beauty” that “puts the Moon and flowers to shame” though she is in others’ eyes, who has to “live with” the reality, just to gratify others’ superficial pleasures and lust. Ah Mao’s suicide, in the end, demonstrates her double disappointments at the two mainstream lifestyles of urban and rural Chinese society, and proclaims that she finds no spiritual community to belong to in this world.

3

The first collection of Ding Ling’s short stories, published in 1928, including “Mengke,” “Ms. Sophia’s Diary,” “The Girl called Ah Mao,” and “During the Summer Holiday,” etc.

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Such a huge city, or such a vast land, where there lived so many men and families, is no woman’s land, if this woman wants freedom and independence and does not want to make a commodity out of herself. Ding Ling’s fiction seems to assert that in Chinese society from the late 1920s to the 1930s, a self-reliant and liberal-minded individualistic woman was bound to face a lonely life. Several characters in “During the Summer Vacation” represent such a destiny of the generation of women who made a living on their own. If they pull, voluntarily or involuntarily, out of the feudal rural life and also refuse to enter the urban market for feminine sensuality, turning down the only two options available, they will hardly be patronized by love, and have not the slightest hope for love. Their autonomy and freedom, together with their loneliness, consist in their unwillingness, or failure to become wives, or tai-tais, or commodities, or expressly, just because they have not become wives or commodities and endure the loneliness well, they remain free. In view of the ending to “During the Summer Vacation,” it is no doubt that taking the loneliness means giving up the felicity of love. For this reason, they also envy other’s family life and find relief in some quasi-love, fragile, and unstable same-sex relationships. But the other side of the coin is that loneliness can be a mixed blessing, in that it averts them from a life of vulgarity, from being trapped in the entanglement of bad husbands or the trivial banality of marriage. When the work of the school pulls them together, the author seems to imply that loneliness, though not changed, has acquired its significance. The importance of the work seems to be worth it for them not to be a wife or commodity. Work is taken as a reprieve for their loneliness: work brings a life force to the world of the women who would otherwise wither in their loveless solitude. As mentioned earlier, another kind of loneliness Ding Ling’s fiction also touches upon is women’s desolation in the field of culture discourse. So situated is Mengke that she can only “grin and bear it” when she falls victim to deceptive love and personal insults. After the death of her cousin, she can no longer find any confidant who is able to understand her feminine feelings of a betrayed woman. She is touted, and maybe also abused by others, but she finds no way to weasel out of her commodified shell and tell people “who I am” in her own identity. So is Ah Mao, suffocated in this loneliness. It is not that the people around her do not understand her, but that they do not listen to her “jabberwocky” at all, so indifferent that she resolves to protect her words as if keeping a secret, for otherwise, her words would be trampled on. So, she holds her tongue. Likewise, Sophia is in an analogous situation, but contrary to Mengke, she at first makes every effort to tell people about herself. She agonizes for no one in this world understands her. She even tries to explain her diary to Brother Wei, but her words only receive misunderstanding in return, and in the end her talk becomes a soliloquy that only resonates in her own heart. The issue is that the female, whether it is Mengke or Sophia in the city, or Ah Mao in the countryside, not only live and die alone, but also live and die “silently.” The whole world of discourse, touting females’ “national beauty and

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celestial fragrance” (guose tianxiang ), has stripped women of the opportunity to tell female stories, in an attempt to bury the female world in the grave by means of insulating their discourse. In this sense, women’s endeavor to narrate their stories and express their loneliness, in itself, was a means of opposition. Ah Mao could have avoided death, but death is her choice, for she takes suicide as an aggressive way to express her loneliness. Sophia writes diaries in defiance, and the heroine in “Wild Grass” (Yecao, 1929) also turns to writing, because either suicide or writing, in a certain sense, converts their silent loneliness to a voiced one, and converts female loneliness from nihility to something that lays claim to existence. If women were doomed to be muted, without audiences, then at least they should learn to talk to themselves and listen to themselves. If women’s existence was destined to be ignored, then at least they could appeal to their pen and leave their traces in this world. Therefore, writing and suicide have become a measure of salvation to them, preserving women’s words that no one has heard and saving them for the future. They help women step out of the nihility of history, and leave an indelible trace. Sophia lived and died as still as a mouse, but her diary is the witness to her soul that once existed. Even Ding Ling herself took up writing also because of the imperative to save herself from being annihilated by loneliness. Her early works that focused on women’s plight were a desperate outburst in silence. It is the first genuine feminist cry audible since the May Fourth era, unlike the echoing clamor made by her peers in that era. For her yell was not blended with any elements loaned from male discourse. Therefore, the thematic loneliness in Ding Ling’s works contains two layers of meaning: on the one level, it scratches the surface of women’s existence and reveals their spiritual culture; on the other level, it is also an option chosen by their female self. This is sort of an ideological strategy for self-protection by women in the face of an alienated society. It taps a self-refrained way of remaining alone to turn down alienated society and its alienated discourses, and loneliness becomes their phraseology to express the female ipseity that the urban ideology tries to wipe out. However, under the gross monolithic urban circumstances, rolling themselves into a shell seems to be the only option, except for committing suicide, available to the female to safeguard themselves against society, after all, such a dark and lonely woman’s land is not suitable for them to stay in long. So they may end up getting gnawed hollow by the long-term isolation, only to be left face-to-face with their inner emptiness. On that account, in several of Ding Ling’s short stories, published in 1929, the desperate cries finally give way to the tired and weary howling of trapped animals. In “On the Small Steamboat” (Xiaohuolun shang, 1929) the forlorn state of mind of Sister Lu, who was dismissed by the school and left alone and lost, can be seen as an epitome of all these lonely women’s predicament. Time has lost its meaning for her, and her life seems to stop at a certain point like her watch. All purposes are no longer sound purposes. She has no sense of a destination. Such a situation of desolation is not accidental to Sister Lu. Plainly, a free-minded woman like her can never get along with the order of

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urban life. She is merely a passer-by and finds no place in this world to stow her injured heart. In a like manner, even if the sisters in “During the Summer Holidays” get jobs for the autumn for their subsistence, that is only a temporary occupation to keep them from the contingency of being unemployed. But who can ensure that their hearts would not stop at a certain point, like Sister Lu, and that their lives would not become a closed cycle of loneliness? Such grim pictures are also seen by the protagonist in “Sun,” who reads coarse and foolish thoughts in the eyes of the unkempt urban poor as well as the welldressed upper-class citizens. What she does not find there are signs of human life, as well as the meanings of time that passes in her life. She gets tired of the fact that life is just a meaningless cycle of “Tomorrow, everything will be the same as usual.” In the solidified and stereotyped boredom, she feels a profound sense of ennui and gets more convinced of the hopelessness of the world. Writing, including Ding Ling’s own writing, does record the footmarks of women’s lonely existence, but finally the footmarks tend to mill around, like the trapped animals pacing in the cage; they crave for a way to break through the cage but struggle in vain. This is nothing less than the end of the road.

8.2

The Two Faces of Wei Hu

In 1930, Ding Ling’s writing changed. This change can be said to be caused coincidentally by two factors: the internal crisis as a female writer and the ideological particularities of the time. Until April 1929 when “Sun” (Ri) was written, the women characters described by Ding Ling all tread on a selfprotective path of antagonism, a strategy of self-protection that was unruly, aloof, and arrogant, despising the world and loathing vulgarity. In this regard, Ding Ling is in the same boat as the protagonists in her fiction. On such a path of resistance, by choosing to be only “me, myself and I” as a defense, even without an ideological coat of mail, she was unable and unlikely to carry on the fight against the alienated urban environment. For example, she could not portray Mengke’s deeper insights into urban alienation under her shell of a movie star. For the same reason, she was incapable of looking straight at the nature of the relationship between the defiant women in the city and the “revolution.” The women and female writers who had been chewing bitterly over their loneliness were actually caught in a double crisis of spiritual and writing dilemmas. Such a woman faced a barren world of “me and my shadow” and had no new possibilities in prospect, no other people or crowds around, and even no enemies in sight. She fell into an abyss of darkness—a blind zone of ideologies. Yet this is also the recalcitrant loveliness of Ding Ling’s early works. Her characters insist on uncompromising resistance in the blind zone of ideology. However, it is also in this sense that Ding Ling’s change in her line of writing is irreversible. It is impossible for her to find a chance to survive outside the existing ideology or find groups that would enable her to get out of the abyss of loneliness and despair.

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However, it is worth considering that this change is characterized by giving up the female focus and making a sacrifice for a broader vista. In just one year, Ding Ling followed the tide of the times and turned from an author distinctive for her feminist consciousness to a realistic leftist writer, serene and impartial. As a writer, she overcame the crisis in writing and emerged in the literary world with a fresh posture for writing. This change was hailed by readers. People acclaimed Ding Ling’s new work, “Flood” (Shui),4 while belittling the Ding Ling who wrote “Sophia’s Diary,” but few people asked how she, as a woman, disposed of the life and fate of those characters of her own gender. We only find in this transformation the feminist theme running through Ding Ling’s early works stopped abruptly. The focuses of her creation before and after the transformation are binaries opposed to each other: female/mass, individual/ revolutionary. As Ding Ling moved towards the masses, the lonely women from her earlier work, as a gender entity, vanish in her writing or fade into the void. Only a few exceptions may well reappear in the nick of time in mass struggles, yet it is also on the grounds that they have wiped out or been wiped out of their gender traces as lonely females. The omission of the female as a gender group can be said to have become a signpost of an irreversible transformation in Ding Ling’s writing. In her endeavor to reach out to the masses, Ding Ling abandoned all and every single valuable achievement that a generation of women had struggled for, including the insights they gained about the capitalist market of sensuality. It seems that under that circumstance, the feminist position and that of the masses, if not incompatible with each other, could not be possibly maintained at the same time. It may be true, considering that the masses—farmers and lower-class city dwellers—did not need such a thing as feminism. But such a major shift of focus certainly consists of many factors. It is necessary to point out that when Ding Ling first came to an impasse in her writing, it was also when Hu Yepin, whom she had lived with, began to be extensively exposed to Marxism and dedicate himself to the revolutionary work.5 It was then that Ding Ling changed from the nameless wife of a passionate poet for two years into the wife of a revolutionist, and before long, the widow of a revolutionary martyr. It is probably out of this experience that several of her works, such as Wei Hu 6 and “Shanghai, Spring, 1930” (Yijiusanlingnian chun shanghai, Part I and Part II),7 touched on women’s relationships, precisely, relationships between liberated urban women and revolution. If “Shanghai, Spring, 1930” (Part I) merely adds a revolutionary destination to Nora’s lifepath after her walking 4

Ding Ling’s novella published in a serial in 1931 with a Left-wing Writers’ magazine, The Big Dipper, Beidou, with which she was the editor-in-chief. 5 Hu Yeping (1903–1931), Ding Ling’s first husband, and a leading figure in the China League of Left-Wing Writers, executed as one of the “five Left-wing martyrs” by the Nationalist government. 6

Ding Ling’s debut novel of revolutionary literature, published around 1930.

7

Ding Ling’s short story serial published in Short Story Monthly in 1930.

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away, the other two texts more or less get to the frictions that liberated female intellectuals had with the revolutionary camp that left no room for women in its dominant ideology when they ran into each other for the first time. What’s more, the frictions gave a clue to the incompatibility between free-minded urban women and the masses. It is of no doubt that in Wei Hu, Lijia, the heroine, has not got to know about revolution, nor does she want to commit herself to it. But the reason why the love between her and Wei Hu is not accepted by the revolutionary camp is not that Wei Hu gives up his work for the love, but that his comrades—the lower-class mass—envy his deportment of upper-class gentlemanship and his lifestyle. In his comrades’ scrutinizing eyes and aggressive and insulting words, love between man and woman is an affair of the upper class, and naturally Lijia is viewed as a coquettish bourgeois woman. Here, the conflict between love and revolution is not a conflict between a revolutionary “husband” and a non-revolutionary “wife.” It is actually the conflict between the liberated urban women and Revolution, the conflict between them and the revolutionary embodiment, the masses. Moreover, it is manifest that when dealing with this conflict, Ding Ling shows her contradiction, a perspective of great paradox in her novel: one can identify two paradoxical points of view that not only overlap and also collide with each other in her narration. One is the haunting female voice that carries on from her forgoing works, a perspective that persisted in Ding Ling’s literary description of such a love: for instance, it is from this viewpoint that she wrote the revolutionary camp’s enmity towards Li Jia and Wei Hu’s love. The enmity may not necessarily be personal to them, but it is undoubtedly directed to their way of life, in spite of the fact that this liberal style of urban life is gained by hard struggle by the rebellious sons and daughters in the May Fourth era. What’s more, the narrator hints that this enmity does not arise from some political consciousness, but rather from their grudging resentment, the narrow-minded and gloomy jealousy that is not seldom found among lower class of people, which can be said to be a certain deep-rooted bad habit in Chinese people. Such people are prone to hold a mean feudal gender viewpoint, in accordance with old ethics, to find fault with a woman against whom they bear resentment: Lijia’s image is thus distorted into a depraved and sinful “femme fatale” (huoshui) in the eyes of the “comrades.” The residual female point of view is retained in Lijia’s critique of the hypocrites in the “revolutionary” camp: “They seem to have learned a little new knowledge, and blurt out some uncanny nouns…Then there’s nothing but these nouns. So much muddled and arrogant.” In a word, when the narrator stands in the shoes of a woman and does justice to Lijia’s personality, one would find her love is not skin-deep and her opinion, though inevitably a bit biased, contains her intuitive aversion to hypocrisy and opportunism and shows the sophistication of a woman who has tempered herself in urban life. If Ding Ling continued to mellow out along this perspective, her writing may well present another prospect: she unleashed her potential to tap the unique angle of lonely women and touch a raw nerve in the new ideological idolatry.

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In fact, the text itself already suggests that the feudal ethics of the lower-andmiddle class masses in the “comrade” camp could surge to not only force the high-aiming Lijia to withdraw back to the old ethics under duress, but also bring the cause of humanitarianism, gender equality and women’s liberation that the whole May Fourth generation cried and fought passionately for to a grinding halt before reaching its destination. However, when “Shanghai, Spring, 1930” (Part II) came out, the dominant viewpoint in the text was changed to another point of view, to that of the revolutionary camp or the masses. The male protagonist, a revolutionary named Wang Wei, even thinks that if Mary8 were a country woman, a factory worker, or a middle school student, their love would be more appropriate, because the revolution is for the benefit of the masses. This fiction has an identical plot with Wei Hu. Not only does Wang Wei remind people of Wei Hu, and Mary also has similar experiences and personality to Lijia. However, the reproduction of what characterizes Lijia in Mary is ingrained this time with a “revolutionary” rationality that disparages petty bourgeois women; her view of the revolutionary camp now is regarded as the pride and prejudice held by the upper class towards the working class. Her refusal to be restrained also looks like being driven by vanity, and her lifestyle is written off as the pursuit of luxury and pleasure. Such derogation may be due to a kind of revolutionary utilitarianism: the masses, i.e., the urban workers and rural farmers, on whom the revolution depended, did not need this kind of female freedom and value, or gender awareness. This kind of rationality is also a ramification of the ideology impeding her independent thinking: the myth of the proletarian heroism is not to be debunked because it is the central pivot the dominant ideology hinges on. For its sake, some people shed blood and sacrificed their lives. Among the martyrs was the father of Ding Ling’s child. And the faith of the deceased cannot be touched. It is evident in this work that revolutionary rationality has inundated and blinded Ding Ling’s eyes, through which she used to see female issues. The female self in Ding Ling’s creation compromised with revolutionary rationality, and this became a signpost to her creation that indicated her acceptance of the 1930s’ leading ideology. It should be noted that, if viewed from a broader aspect of the ideological transmutation, the compromise women made to revolutionary rationality is part of the far-reaching compromise made by progressive urban intellectuals to farmers, workers, and the bottom-class masses. The intellectuals came to realize that urban politics could not go far in China, and they turned to the source of the historic inertia—the vast rural lower-level masses—for a solution to save the distressed country. This makes sense, but to align themselves with the majority group, the cost is to compromise on certain issues, among which the woman problem, along with the capitalist lifestyle, which had been put on their agenda, was removed from the final list. The female urbanites’ political interest gave way to that of the lower classes, the social group which 8

Female protagonist of “Shanghai, Spring, 1930” (Part II).

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was the biggest beneficiary of revolution. In light of Ding Ling’s works, the female self’s compromise to revolutionary rationality was the first step she took to compromise her intellectual frame of mind with the grassroots culture of peasants and lower-level urban workers. This point is verified in Ding Ling’s work after “Shanghai, Spring, 1930” (I and II), like “One Day” (Yi tian) and “Hub of Tianjia Chong” (Tianjia chong). The protagonist in “One Day” differs from her previous recurrent female characters, and, with the appearance of the new type of protagonist, her former female self, as the narrating Subject, also disappears. “One Day” tells about the experience of Lu Xiang, a fervent, educated youth who just started to be engaged in revolutionary literary work, and had his first contact with the grassroots masses. He was misunderstood and greeted with hostility by the “ignorant hoi polloi,” even regarded as a thief. Even if proven to be innocent, he still was not spared some people’s malicious insults. But he bites the bullet and endures it all because of his unwavering faith in revolutionary work. He used to be all nerves about the weakness of the lower-class mass, but out of the needs of the work and his empathy for the sufferings of the masses, he adopts a tolerant attitude towards them. When he views it from another angle, stupidity becomes loyalty, and ignorance can also be appreciated in sympathy. In “Hub of Tianjia Chong,” such a gap is bridged, in an idealistic pastoral manner, between The Third Miss, an educated woman committed to revolutionary work, and a farmer servant. The characters in “Hub of Tianjia Chong,” as representatives of the masses, no longer have the marks of weakness of the masses, except that they are not awakened yet. The confrontation between urban culture and that of the masses was just a false alarm. In such a manner, Ding Ling was welcomed and loved by the masses, and she, in turn, led them to awakening. It is hard to tell today whether this rapport was due to her optimism and belief or was a whitewash to make the best of the bargain. But from the changed viewpoints we can identify a voluntary retreat of her intellectual self that would affect her career in a profound way. Although “One Day” no longer resorts to keen and hyper-sensitive female narratives, it still keeps the intellectual’s personal viewpoint, which retains its sensitivity to the weaknesses of the masses, as an agency to tie up the actions of the plot. It is this point of view that serves as a seminal factor for antagonizing the intellectuals towards the masses. By contrast, “Hub of Tianjia Chong” is narrated through the eyes of the Youngest Sister and other lower-class characters. In their unsullied and kindly eyes, the incongruity of the intellectuals is nowhere to be found. Intellectuals no longer appear as narrating subjects in this work. If we keep note of how Ding Ling’s early works adopt the viewpoint of lonely individuals to expose what is vilely ludicrous about their environment, perhaps we can have a better idea of the significance of this change in viewpoints. That is, Ding Ling had completely withdrawn from the female self and the intellectual self. After her withdrawal from women’s point of view, the issue of people’s feudal mentality, which used to mostly strike women to the quick, is kept out of harm’s way. In the same way, when Ding Ling turned the narrative power over

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to the working class, which was presumed to be innocent, uncouth, and guileless, naturally dissident narrating subjects were kicked out of the arena, but at the same time, she would find no more nonconformists to catch on and tackle the weakness of the masses. From this perspective, Ding Ling’s shift towards the classic realist panoptic device, considering its ideological significance, is not impartial and progressive.9 Flood marks another height of creativity in the aftermath of Ding Ling’s transformation. This apex of her realist fiction, to some extent, was the outcome of the disappearance of gender narrative and personal narrative from her works. Her realistic stories present a gallery of portraits of laboring people in such a magnified way that she won high praise from Mao Dun. The “huge multitude” united by the will to survive in the face of death seems to be the hope of the revolution and the bright prospect of history. This work tosses out an assemblage of peasant proletarians who unite against natural and political odds with such solidarity that is, itself, portrayed with strong abandon, and that makes it a style of her own; it is the first time in literary history to feature commonalty in such fashion. This is almost out of the question for Lu Xun, who was preoccupied with delving into the deep-rooted bad habits in the Chinese national culture. The implied author in Lu Xun’s works never gets to throw the individualist stance overboard, a rational and critical stance particular to Chinese intellectuals. Yet therefore, Ding Ling could be no heir to the literary heritage Lu Xun campaigned for, for the tradition of debunking what is lax and lacking cohesion in the culture, and what is haphazard or smallholder farmers’ parochialism among this seemingly unified multitude, and criticizing them from the vantage of a progressive ideology. From Wei Hu and “Shanghai, Spring, 1930” (I and II) on, to “One Day” and “Hub of Tianjia Chong” (Tianjia chong), and again to “Flood,” Ding Ling, in the course of writing, left behind the depressed female self, went beyond the intellectual self and finally pledged allegiance to the majestic multitude, the masses of unfailing triumph in history, which she imagined to be bigger than life. Living in the urban environment and with the cultural vibes of the left-wing writers’ circle, this band of left-wing writers was too far removed from the rank and file to write about them. Even if they wrote about the masses, it was merely to fill the bill of their ideology, to resist corrupt monolithic politics, and to flaunt their cultural attitude. But on the other hand, such writing was not hard, since the masses, as a remote group, only existed in their imagination, and thus could also be glossed over in the imagination. It is for this reason that Ding Ling’s conformity to the epochal trend also incurred losses on her own part, loss of her female self and her intellectual self; the latter not only signifies that the intellectuals voluntarily gave up their historical value, but also means their abandoning of the critical tradition that emerged

9 “One Day” and “Hub of Tianjia Chong” (also translated as “Tianjia Village”), Ding Ling’s short stories written in 1931, collected in her 1932 short story collection, Flood.

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for the first time in history during the May Fourth period, suppressing critical voices and stopping being critical, that is, stopping criticizing the residue feudal ideas, bigotry, and benighted mentality that sedimented among the Chinese masses of the 1930s (a social group comprised of peasants and lowclass urban dwellers). As a matter of fact, under the shadow of the myth of proletarian revolution, a catchword in the left-wing literary world at that time, the backward aspects of the masses were lost to the view of the writers, even hidden from their mind’s eye in their narration, let alone “critiqued.” Even if they perceived the infirmities of the “masses,” they were usually primed to forgive them and put blame on the darkness of the semi-colonial and semifeudal society. Although technically speaking, Flood and Ding Ling’s later stories can be said to be a breakthrough from the naive “leftist” mode of proletarian revolutionary literature at that time, ideologically, they are no more than more accomplished literary variables of the same myth of mass culture, meant to maintain rather than debunk it. In 1933, Ding Ling was critically ill and then was put in jail by the Nationalist government for three years. In her writings during that period, the voice of the uncompromising, critical, and anti-popular-culture antagonist soul had been snuffed out. Works like “Run,” (Ben)10 “Mother Yang’s Diary” (Yangma de riji)11 and “Song Zi” (Songzi, 1936), all reciting the sufferings of the masses and eulogizing their awakening, do not surpass Flood in literary artistry. The discriminative Wei Hu, who abhors injustice and evils as deadly foes, unadvisedly has the masses anointed as his god and consecrates them as his beacons of goodness and absolute value. From there on, he only zooms in on the “smiling face of Buddha” ( fomian) of the people, and the “evils” he wishes to wipe out become streamlined and simplified, and shrink out of proportion. After the ideological baptism, Ding Ling also reviewed women’s fate in the eyes of the “Buddhist convert” Wei Hu. In the sacred halo of the masses, the Sophia-paradigmatic theme of solitary women faded into obscurity, but there appeared another type of female characters, who fortunately took the right path of history. Such an attempt to merge the interrupted thinking about women and the fate of the masses into one is evident in her epic novel Mother (Muqin) and other later novels.12 In 1930, Ding Ling tried to write the novel Mother to put the fate of women back in the vicissitudes of Chinese history. As a self-reliant female image that has been pushed on the path of rebellion by history, the Mother’s forward-looking personality and “pursuit of belonging to the multitude” are “the Buddha face” Wei Hu sees in his idolatry of mass culture. 10

Ding Ling’s 1933 short story, written before her arrest.

11

Ding Ling’s short story published in Young Companion, Liangyou, in August 1933.

12

Mother was started in 1932 and published as a serial in the journal Continental News, Dalu Xinwen, but was interrupted and unfinished because of KMT’s secret arrest of Ding Ling on May 14, 1933. But the finished first part of the novel came off the press a month later as part of the Left-wing league’s effort to rescue her.

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Resurgence and Obliteration

Around the outbreak of the War of Resistance, Ding Ling escaped from the prison of Kuomintang and made it to Xi’an, where she started to be involved in the revolutionary work on the front lines under the Communist Party of China. During this period, she wrote about ten stories with the thematic subject of the Anti-Japanese War, such as “An Unfired Bullet” (Yili wei chutang de zidan), “A Crushed Heart” (Yasui de xin), “Family of A County Magistrate” (Xianzhang jiating), “Join the Army” (Ruwu), “A New Faith” (Xin de xinnian) and so on. In these stories, she juxtaposes the sufferings of the masses and their awakening with the invasion of Japanese imperialists. With the exigencies of nationwide resistance against Japanese aggression, Ding Ling moved further and further away from urban life, from her intellectual self, and from women as a female entity. Wei Hu, the “Buddhist convert,” zeros in on the profound benevolence or propensity towards benevolence inherent in Chinese history and philosophy at that time: under the aggressors’ ravages and in terror of death, the grassroots masses, as well as the peasant multitude, gradually awakened to their own infirmities, came to rise above them and stand up against the invaders and eventually became heroes armed with new ideas. “An Unfired Bullet” tells the story of a young Red Army soldier. When losing contact with his troops, he is captured by KMT soldiers as a spy, but his fearless Anti-Japanese speech even moves those KMT soldiers. “New Faith” tells about how the evils done by the Japanese invaders turn a mother and grandmother into nemeses. In the face of gross sins, the working masses’ virtue of tender love transformed into a virtue of strength. The characters here, though not identical to the gallery portraits presented in Flood, are no longer individuals, since each of them appears for the collective ensemble. But when Ding Ling, in Yan’an, ran out of the materials about the antiJapanese war, she had to face the ordeal (if not her real-life experience), the fracture that she had striven to heal in her mind or imagination—the historic and cultural fracture in lifestyle and values between revolutionary urban intellectuals and ill-informed rural masses. When the masses walked out of the ring of their sacred halo and appeared in front of you individually, you would find it hard to associate each of them with the refined image you envisioned for the masses en masse. Surely Wei Hu has caught a glimpse of that part of reality outside of the aureole. During this period, Ding Ling’s works more or less evince this conflict, which is another subtle shift in emphasis in her writing after “Hub of Tianjiachong” and “Flood.” This conflict first appeared in “When I was in Village Xiacun” (Wo zai xiacun de shihou), one of Ding Ling’s important short stories written about the communist base areas. The story has a real-life prototype she knew by hearsay, but in the process of writing, Ding Ling did make deliberate choices; in terms of narratology in this story, we find a first-person narrator, “I,” with the discriminative self-awareness that had disappeared long from her fiction, instead of the effaced narrator in “New Faith.” To some extent, the

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narrator “I” is in close proximity to the incongruous ingredient in her earlier fiction that engendered the discrepancy between the masses and intellectuals; or rather, adding “I” to a story as a non-character narrator may have been out of some impulse that Ding Ling herself may not have detected. Zhenzhen had been oppressed by rural feudal forces, in the same way as children and women were oppressed, just as protested by the May Fourth generation, before she was taken by force by Japanese soldiers to serve as a prostitute in the Japanese army, where Zhenzhen was ravaged demonically and contracted venereal disease. For all that, she ardently involved herself in the underground revolutionary work and won others’ respect. But when she returns to the base area, she finds herself besieged by people with a feudalist mindset and finds it hard to pull through. In the story, Zhenzhen’s sufferings in the Japanese army retreat to the background and are only related in retrospect, while in the foreground there unrolls her conflict with the old ethics advocating chastity. This may indicate that the author gives note to the fact that outside of the immense aureole of the nation’s “goodness,” there still lurk some “evils” hidden in the shadow. And here the narrator “I” plays a role as a witness to the personal attacks leveled upon Zhenzhen by the villagers sticking up for moth-eaten feudal values; “I” is not only the witness to the “evils” in the shadow but also one who knows that the “evils” are to be loathed. And it is in the evils “I” loathes that we catch a glimpse of the existence of another group of “masses,” a group of victimizers, a killer regiment with a murdering mindset that sprang from its feudal peasant collective unconscious, which had been gathering for thousands of years. This group wants to add Zhenzhen to the list of their victims simply because she had been subhumanly abused and lost her chastity.13 In this concern, through the eyes of the narrator “I,” we see a character different from those who incarnate the masses in “New Faith” and “Dongcun Event” (Dongcun Shijian). Zhenzhen does not belong to any paradigm for the masses, not a paradigmatic miserable woman to be rescued. She is the first female from the lower class with a distinctive personality and self in Ding Ling’s works. To some extent, it is inevitable that she could not possibly mix up with the villagers in Xiacun. As her deeds trespass on average moral standards, she is bound to be exiled by the masses as an individual. This can also be regarded as a self-banishment. It is not hard to discern that the narrator “I” and Zhenzhen share an uncanny sense of identification: they both exile themselves from the multitude, they both reflect on themselves, and they are in essence outsiders, aliens to the masses, whether by nature or nurture. In a sense, the rupture between Zhenzhen and the backward-minded villagers is very close to or nearly the same as the rift between intellectuals and the masses, between individuals equipped with advanced ideology and the rural 13

Ding Ling’s 1941 short story about Zhenzhen, a rural girl who was raped by Japanese troops and forced to serve as comfort woman, during which time she helped the Chinese Resistance force. However, when she returns, she gets alienated by the people around.

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community stuck in a regressive frame of mind. Only the defaming scandals about Zhenzhen can best reflect the feudalistic characteristics of the popular will: a vile ideology about sex. Of course, Ding Ling may not have realized the implicit recurrence of this subject. In her consciousness, needless to say, the immense historical goodness that the “Buddhist convert” (chaofo) Wei Hu sees in people provides one of her motives to write this work; Zhenzhen’s image, as well as the image of moral righteousness in the narrator “I,” is upheld by the anti-Japanese and self-salvation actions. If it were not for the pains in body and solitude in mind that Zhenzhen underwent in the process of carrying out her anti-Japanese tasks, there might never have been such a story, let alone any attempt to probe into the dark side of mass culture. In that event, even if Zhenzhen remains an individualist outside the collective, “I” may not feel a strong affinity with her. For all that, the internal contradictions in the base area, unlike the combat on the Anti-Japanese front, were not as clear-cut as the bloody rivalry between the nation and its invaders. This relatively self-contained world had its own style of living, somewhat detached from the clear sense of good and evil established by the nation and the nation’s history. The conflicts Ding Ling was exposed to might still be the dissensions between the local villagers and the intellectual newcomers. Placed among the rural people, the intellectuals found themselves not so easily “dissolved” like salt into water as they expected. After all, what ruled the roost in the vast and uninformed countryside still was the feudal thinking that governed premodern China and its culture and the pernicious conventions that were spawned in the smallholder farming economy. For intellectuals who thought they had passed the bourgeois revolution and moved towards socialism, this reality was tantamount to a huge retrogression. When people criticized “In the Hospital” and talked about Lu Ping in the same breath as Sophia, they were right in the point that both Lu Ping and Sophia are female intellectuals of Young China, while the masses in the base area are still prototypes of the callous Ah Q from Old China. With such incongruence, the halo of the deified masses, as the intellectuals envisioned in their imagination and conceptions, is bound to dissipate in the face of underdeveloped feudal productivity in reality. Struck by reality, like a piercing cry from earthly life, out of the twilight zone in the divine light of Buddhism, Wei Hu came around to find his roots of six sensations not cleansed (liugen wei jing )14 but his critical thinking restored. Ding Ling vigorously called to carry forward the tradition of cultural criticism in articles like “Magnanimity, Tolerance and Literary Daily” (Dadu, kuanrong yu wenyiribao)15 and “We 14

A Buddhist term for people’s six kinds of craving, or tanha, or fetter, that need to be ended or rooted out in practicing Buddhist disciplines. They are cravings for forms (eyes), for sounds (ears), for smell (nose), for taste (tongue), for tactile sensation (body), and for ideas (mind). 15 Ding Ling started and edited the journal, Wenyi Yuebao (Arts Monthly) with Xiao Jun and Shu Qun (1913–1989), which ran from January, 1941 to September, 1942 for

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Need Essays” (Women xuyao zawen).16 She writes, “All the deep-rooted bad habits in China that existed for thousands of years are not easy to eradicate, and so-called progress is not to drop from the clouds. It is closely related to the old society of China” (“We Need Essays”). “In the Hospital” was written in such a context. This work, which was later lambasted as a “poisonous grass” (ducao),17 is not that deep in thought and even lacks the perspective of the above quotation, but it pungently touches upon some sensitive issues. It was written from the perspective of an ordinary intellectual, Lu Ping. She is the type of intellectual who dare not act nor think aloud in front of the masses. She follows the beaten path for intellectuals and becomes a party member. However, she feels overwhelmed by the party’s will and realistic contradictions. She works hard, but her work receives an underwhelming response. The scientific suggestions she proposes do not even arouse the least curiosity among the rural masses. She is no brain, but she has got her eyes, a pair of a nonconformist’s eyes, which record the backwardness in entirety. “In the Hospital” is not even a work conceived with adequate forethought, and we cannot find such deliberate designs as the unconscious killer regiment in Xia Village, but it definitely is a work to raise questions. It “proposes the issue of overhauling the ideology and conventions of smallholder farmers and handicraftsmen,” which was raised for the first time in the areas led by the Communist Party. This is the value of the work. Such work, written with a semi-resurrected spirit of critique, suddenly reminds us of the critical faculty that once sparkled in Ding Ling’s writing. Just as the withdrawal of her female self was her first step in an intellectual’s compromise with the masses, so the resuscitation of the intellectual’s viewpoints led to the resurrection of her female perspective. “Reflections on Women’s Day” is another essay written after Ding Ling’s critical faculty was partly restored. Evidently, her seemingly hibernating female self was resuscitated, and all at once she could not help her outrage when seeing, in the well-reputed liberated areas, the cadres’ display of their feudalist attitude typical of the rural gentry towards women. In the same manner, “Night” explores the dark side in the mind of the peasant cadres, but also demonstrates the resuscitation is not completed. For the young Lu Ping, whether she should think and what to think are to be “approved” by the party; under such circumstances, she is not expected to dig into any problem under its surface. Whether Ding Ling or Lu Ping, their intellectual or female self could only go so far as to see small-scale production and feudal ideology as residues or leftovers of the past society or historical period. But what they saw concealed 17 periodicals. The journal was renewed in the name of Shanghai Wenxue (Shanghai Literature) in 1958. 16 An influential article Ding Ling wrote in Yan’an, publicized in Jiefang Ribao (Liberation Dail y), Yan’an, October 23, 1941. 17

A term for the literary or artistic works that were critiqued for being not in line with the mainstream political values of the period of Cultural Revolution and poisoning people’s mind.

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a critical fact, that is, these intellectuals, who had been cultivated by the new culture after the May Fourth Movement, were actually only exposed to a small feudal society that nearly remained intact. In this neck of the woods, the wheel of history had not only “not turned full circle,” but had actually never turned. However, what these intellectuals confronted was not historic residues but a living reality. Lu Ping and Ding Ling herself criticized the bad practice of small-scale production, but they never touched on the ideological kernels that engendered this practice: instead, they tried to interpret the nature of Chinese society and dream up a way out for it under a simplified umbrella mode of Marxism, which was attached to the myth about the proletarian masses and their subjective evaluation of the imaginary bourgeoisie and capitalism. And because she never reached the level of ideological criticism, she could not go any further beyond raising questions, raising some specific questions. In this context, even Wei Hu “could not be preoccupied in his meditation.” The intellectuals who handed over their thinking to the communist party were unable to prick the bubble of the mass myth, in spite of their cognitive weaponry from the new culture. On the contrary, they fell into an abyssal ideological dilemma: they acquired a dual identity. On the one hand, they created a god out of the masses; on the other hand, they had to surrender to their self-made “god” and in turn to be reformed by Him. Being both the master and the slave to the “god” trapped them in inextricable internal doublethink and external conflicts. A major result of the Yan’an Ideological Rectification Movement (ya’an sixiang zhengfeng ) in 1942 was that it established the absolute political position of the lower class and disqualified intellectuals as the leader of the masses. To be fair, this result did not come right out of the blue. Considering the facts that China was, after all, an agricultural country with farmers counting up to 90% of the population, and smallholder farmers and producers were the largest social community of beneficiaries, this determined that the dominant ideology was bound to adapt to serve the needs and interest of this group of the population. Intellectuals, as a product of capitalist culture of industrialization and commercialization, were obviously incompatible with the interests and will of this group. They did not belong here, nor did they belong to this group, so naturally, this group of people felt no sense of belonging towards them either. Yan’an Rectification made it plain that intellectuals, an energetic minority, would remain an alien force to the majority. Thus addressed, intellectuals’ inner doublethink was easily solved, and their image streamlined: they did not have to shillyshally in their attitude towards the masses; they just had to follow the masses and take pains to transform themselves into members of the group. This role for them was historically determined. It follows that Ding Ling incontrovertibly made a public self-critique. She proclaimed that she believed a rebirth in the ideological reformation was her way out, since only the masses represented the way out for China. After the rectification, Ding Ling felt relieved because she had shed her former self, which attested to the heavy load of the ideological dilemma she had groaned under, and

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admitted that repentance was her salvation. It is conceivable that Ding Ling must have felt relaxed after the rectification, but it was at the expense of the transformation of “Wei Hu”—he turned in both his faculty of discrimination and his right to weapons to the masses, and not just that, he also turned himself into a loaded weapon that would fire upon command. As a writer, Ding Ling no longer had to observe and describe things within the ambit of an ideological blind zone. She only needed to write about an eligible subject determined by the dominant ideology, and proceed to enrich and artistically process it according to existing models in the dominant ideology. Her writings no longer raised questions or provoked thinking, but, in close proximity to translating, converted ideological concepts into empirical, aesthetic, fullbodied artistic images, and texts, and steered clear of touching on the concepts per se. Such a transformation is indeed a “fundamental change” in Ding Ling and in her subsequent works there was no sign of the self in her past works. The theme of her writing turned to serve the interests of the rural masses, and the conflicts embodied in character relations were also reproduced in a detailed and vivid paradigm of class struggles. Her narrative became aloof and objective, hence neutral in tone. The psychologies of the characters were also disposed of in sync with their social classes. In her masterpiece, The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River (Taiyang Zhao zai Sangganhe shang ),18 written after this transformation, we can see that Ding Ling’s creation is consciously adapted to fuse into the axial vein of thoughts of the dominant ideology. “When I was writing, I centered around a central idea, that is, the peasants’ aspiration for an overturn, ‘changing the heavens,’ and it is by this idea that I decide on the material and characters for the work” (“Life, Thought and Character” [Shenghuo, sixiang yu renwu]).19 From her impulsion to “write about those backward farmers and about how they become new people in the course of revolutionary development,” we may question, who are “new people?” The ending of the novel seems to answer this by showcasing that the people who turned the world upside down, i.e., “changed the heavens,” are the “new people.” The conception of the novel was obviously done within the confines of ideological utilitarianism, and also proved she had given up criticizing feudal farmer parochialism. Heini’s transformation from a landlord’s daughter to a landlord’s niece, from a carefree girl to someone not affected by “family influence,” is to better fit the ideological axis. Therefore, the so-called “collecting materials in every corner of life” is probably not so much to find inspiration from reality, as to look for materials to flesh out the skeleton of the established paradigm. The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River is a complicated story

18 Ding Ling’s most important novel, published in August 1948, about the Land Reform in North China’s liberated areas. 19 “Life, Thought and Character,” a speech made by Ding Ling in the Film Scriptwriting Seminar in 1955.

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of strong artistic appeal, but it is based on Ding Ling’s skill and acumen in an instrumentalized art. Ding Ling’s path of creation represents the path of modern Chinese intellectuals. After they alienated themselves from the dynastic feudal society and became an independent community, they rejected capitalist political culture on the one hand and on the other, they tried to transform the rural populace. But in the end, in the course of fulfilling their vision to reform the masses, they were transformed by them. Out of their national sentiment and sense of responsibility towards the country, they maintained a critical attitude to capitalism, but in the face of the native rural culture, they retreated step by step, and finally, when their ideology completely developed into one oriented to serve the rural masses, they gave in to them. Furthermore, Ding Ling’s path of creation also represents the road of Chinese women’s liberation. As a gender group, women were only awakened in the cosmopolitan environment of alienation. However, as the literary value of urban life was marked down in the camp of left-wing writers, this gender consciousness flowed back into a blind zone.

CHAPTER 9

Marching Towards Battlefields and the Bottom Classes

9.1 Revolution Written in Blood and Revolution Written in Ink The second decade of New Literature began with the Northern Expedition in 19261 and ended in the artillery fire of Japanese invaders in 1937; it concurred with the surging labor and peasant movements that swept across the whole country. For the main camp of New Literature located in Shanghai, although far away from the frontlines, the smoke and sound of gunfire and battling lingered incessantly. It was also during this decade that several female writers surfaced in the literary world in the image of women soldiers or warriors, causing quite a stir. Xie Bingying’s War Diary (Congjun Riji), written on her way to the Northern Expedition in 1927,2 “Red Diary” (Hong de riji) written by Feng Keng, one of the Five Martyrs of the League of Left-Wing Writers,3 and Full Retreat (Zong Tuique) by Ge Qin,4 joined the image of women, for the first time in Chinese history and literary history, authentically with 1 The Northern Expedition was a military campaign launched by the National Revolutionary Army of the Kuomintang against the Beiyang government and other regional warlords in 1926. 2 Xie Bingying, or Hsieh Ping-ying (1906–2000), a female soldier and writer. War Diary was her first book collecting her early prose, mostly autobiographical, that recounted her experiences in the Northern Expedition troops battling warlords in eastern China. “War Diary” was translated into English by Lin Yutang (1895–1976), prominent writer, translator and scholar. 3 Feng Keng (1906–1931), a female revolutionary poet and author, was executed by KMT on February 7, 1931, being the only female martyr of the “Five Left-wing Martyrs.” 4

Ge Qin’s first story collection, published by Shanghai Liangyou Publishing House, Liangyou Tushu Yinshua Gongsi in 1937. Ge Qin (1908–1995), a woman writer and a member of The League of Left-Wing Writers.

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guns and fire, revolutions of bloodshed and sacrifice, battlefields and life on battlefields. They exhibited new identities and roles for the female in historic caprices and in women’s grapple to get rid of their shackles. Before we extol these women warriors for their heroism, we cannot fail to see that the identity of female warriors had arisen from the crevices of historic transformation after society shook loose in the era. Despite the fact that the Central Military Academy5 at the time had a team of about 150 female soldiers and that numerous women’s associations and other women-supporting organizations and groups came forth during the climax of the Great Revolution, even granting all this, it does not mean that the political system had ensured women’s human rights. It only means that politics, which used to be a dominion of feudalist unitary power and influence, had developed different structural functions to tackle historical changes and become a public arena open to various social forces and a realm that facilitated people with historical options. It was through the gaps between the wrestling forces in the open arena that a host of anti-feudalist female rebels, escapees of domestic bondage, could insinuate themselves into the political realm of historical options. Therefore, the acquisition of a new identity was first of all linked to their own rebellion—seeking to squirrel out of the historical unconscious, that is, the gaps provided them with a good opportunity to develop their own gender role in the anti-tradition rebellion. They first found, in such fields as the military and political movements, where as a rule only men belonged, a prospect of uttermost possibility for opting out of their traditional roles: rejecting their “female body,” or at least rejecting the traditional functions specified for the female body by history. Such a prospect was what Xie Bingying, the renowned female soldier writer, held for her life; she once resented herself for not being a male. The crevices in history coincided with women’s rebellious aspirations and engendered the literary figures of women warriors like Bingying and Feng Keng as well as the characters they created. But the historical function of this new identity and its significance to women should be viewed from both sides of the issue. On the one hand, nobody could better represent the vital force of women emerging above the surface of history than women warriors and revolutionaries. On their road to battlefields as modern Mulans, except that they would never return home or take off their armors, the women participated in historical choice-making for the future China and for the first time had a great cause of their own to fight for people’s well-being and China’s prosperity, hence gained a signification unseen in history. In the masquerade of military uniforms, they turned from objects in history into historical subjects, and the heroic fighters among them even made their way to a future by making a mark, with their lives, in a 5 Central Military Academy, known as the Huangpu (or Whampoa) Military Academy, founded during the Great Revolution (1924–1927, also known as The Nationalist Revolution of China). The military academy produced many prestigious commanders who fought in wars in the first half of the twentieth century.

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history that never provided women with adequate rights. History virtually recognized the women’s potential, if unleashed, to be men’s equal in physical strength, courage, and political talent. This prompted women to quickly leave their marginalized position in history and step onto the Chinese political stage that had refused admittance to women for thousands of years. It also propelled them to shed their shell of individual rebellion against feudal families, of only seeking an individual’s way out, and to “put on their shoulders the duty of completing the national revolution (guomin geming ) and building a prosperous and powerful China.” In this vein, a band of female heroes like Qiu Jin came on the scene, who deserve all the praises and tears people paid them. Women “progressed from the age of bound feet to that of natural feet,” and “escaped from feudal families by whose chains they had been tied tightly and struggled through insults and pain only in order to throw themselves into the revolutionary furnace, and to rise up from the ashes to stand abreast with men and join them in devotion to the revolution” (see Girl Rebel [Nübing riji]).6 This truly rocked the world. But on the other hand, to find the access to this path was a matter of fortuity and opportunity. In an era when women had not yet been provided with sufficient political rights, it remained a question of how women embarked on their way to the political arena or a battlefield, and in which gender they went to war. What is definite is that they did not appear on the political stage as a social gender group; military uniforms and battlefield armor were something of male masquerades. Paradoxically, for the purpose of resisting their conventional gender roles, they had to consign their gender to oblivion and allow masculinity to be a measure of their abilities. Truly, it was the paramount clause to this new role that women were to be tantamount to men—having natural feet, being able to fire guns, mobilizing the masses, sparing no sacrifice, charging in battles, and accepting historical missions…. Ma Ying,7 one of Feng Keng’s characters, says, “A red woman should forget that she is a woman, otherwise it will interfere with the progress of the revolution.” By forgetting or erasing their gender traits, women embarked on a venture to war, joined the revolution, bled, and sacrificed, only to cease to be their real selves. This was the price of the female self that history claimed from them. Not only that—to pay the price and go to war was only the beginning of the problem. Women’s participation in the military and politics was a choice they made for their own destiny, yet in the end, this choice needed to be chosen again by history. Women who had stood in the center could no longer detect their destiny under the manipulative history that they used to peek at from marginal seats, and thus inevitably, they were at the mercy of history, just as actors on center stage are bounded within the limit of the stage, and 6 Girl Rebel: The Autobiography of Hsieh Ping-ying , written by Xie Bingying in 1933, adapted into a Taiwanese movie, Chinese Amazons, and translated into English by Adet Lin in 2007. 7

Ma Ying, main character in Feng Keng’s Red Diary.

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they might only see this limitation after they stepped down and removed their makeup and costumes. This should not be denied. In this view, we can come to understand the value of what they left us with pen and ink, flesh and blood, and even for the price of their lives. Xie Bingying was such a woman who experienced ups and downs in the whirl of historical choice-making. Born into a scholar-gentry family in Hunan, Xie Bingying grew up with a competitive and recalcitrant personality. At the age of twelve, she undertook a hunger strike in order to study at school. Later, under the influence of her two elder brothers, she was exposed to new ideas. To evade arranged marriage and seek freedom, she took the examination to join the female soldier team at the Central Military Academy. She joined the Northern Expedition, and on the warpath, with her knees as a desk, she wrote the famous War Diary. It instantly attracted many readers and was translated into a variety of foreign languages. It sold well for two reasons: one is its publicity and the other is its documentary style. These were also the motives driving the author, Bingying, who was primed to die on the battlefield at any moment. We indeed read in it what the author tried to describe: solemn and stirring stories of some vigorous and great revolutionaries, the atrocities of warlords, the cruelty of war, and the beliefs and will of the populace. We also see a twelve-year-old girl who wants to become a true revolutionary, shedding blood, not tears, and fearing neither woes nor hardship, she was also an inexperienced and unkempt girl soldier with passion and a resolve to change the universe, writing on her knees as a desk. Of course, what the work “shows and tells” us is primarily this side of “changing the universe” ambition. This may account for her way of drawing and selecting materials to serve the purpose of publicity. With such source materials, “the documentary style” is reflected by the authenticity of the narrator and her turn of phrase. Her writing is full of life and vividness about a young female student’s curiosity and excitement, about her personality and guilelessness, and before all else, about the writing environment. It was not until the second edition of War Diary that Bingying debunked, in “A Note at the End” (Xie zai houmian) and “To K.L.,”8 the other side of the “changing the universe” ambition: it turned out that what she recorded in War Diary was not a realistic picture, as she intended, of the “National Revolution,” because the revolution itself was one of disillusion; by becoming a female soldier, the author herself did not break, as she had yearned, feudal shackles placed on women. Just as the author said in Girl Rebel, “I did not expect that what we conceived for tomorrow could turn out to be a hell that buries us.” After the team of female soldiers was disbanded, the life of the female ex-soldiers and their depressing environment reflect the contrast between their ambition to change the universe and the family’s trap. It was such a big gap that even Bingying wanted to abandon herself to despair. It is perceivable here how history decides the fate of people who aspired to 8 “A Note at the End” and “To K.L.,” two essays Xie Bingying added to the second edition of War Diary in 1929.

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“change the universe.” Pinned under the thumb of history, Bingying finally turned from a woman warrior on the battlefield to a woman warrior in literature. When Bingying wrote her second masterpiece Girl Rebel from 1936 to 1948, we can see that her motive to gain publicity and as a combatant largely gave way to motives for documentary literature. This can be viewed as both a source of regret and fortuitousness for the author. From War Diary to Girl Rebel, Bingying experienced the struggle between choosing and being chosen by history. The “National Revolution” that might have transformed the society, which she had tried to keep a great record of, was shattered by reality. The most valuable record she eventually left us perhaps is her own story—the life, destiny, and secrets of a modern Mulan, including her family, parents, love, friendship, and marriage, and their connection to her life as a female soldier. Indeed, Xie Bingying’s reputation in the literary world is owed to her War Diary, but if you want to understand her and her historical experiences as a woman soldier, you have to resort to Girl Rebel —there you can find not only a woman in military uniform, but also the real experiences of a woman. Feng Keng is also a woman who made historic choices and in turn was chosen by history. She was determined to devote herself to the revolution after witnessing the atrocities of Chiang Kai-shek’s military forces in the “April 12 Incident,” but her field was literature rather than the battlefield.9 For her, writing is not a record, but an act of revolution itself, so her work is imbued with a stronger hue of combat propaganda. “The Woman Who Sold Her Child” (Fanmai ying’er de furen, 1928) is crammed with accusations against class oppression and extortion; in comparison, her “Red Diary,” written in 1930, takes a further step forward. This work, based on the speeches made by delegates of the National Soviet People’s Delegate Conference, simply moved the revolution that was not realized in reality to the paper.10 Its plot is patterned on a socialist proletarian revolution that is about to succeed: wherever the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army go, the old system will be overthrown, factories given back to workers themselves, each laborer provided with enough food, harsh taxes, and levies eliminated together with reactionary forces, and homeless workers relocated to newly allocated clean dwellings, etc.11 “Little Ah Qiang” (Xiao aqiang) writes about a leader of young pioneers

9 “April 12 Incident,” also known as April 12 Counter-revolutionary Coup or Shanghai Massacre of 1927 that happened on April 12, 1927, in which the KMT President, Chiang Kai-shek launched a bloody suppression of the workers led by the Communists, marking the start of all-scale purge of communists as well as the first civil war in twentieth-century China. 10 The National Soviet People’s Delegate Conference was held in Ruijin, Jiangxi province on November 7, 1931, in which a Provisional Soviet Republic of China (1931–1934) was established under the leadership of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Zhu De (1886–1976). 11 The Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, the forerunner of People’s Liberation Army.

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in Chinese Soviet area (su qu),12 and its description of the political struggle demonstrates the same optimism. However, Feng Keng’s life ended in a brutal reality that was a different world from her work: the Chinese political stage was not flooded with such brightness as she imagined in “Red Diary:” “Don’t shed a drop of blood” and the old system will be overthrown in people’s cries and slogans. But it did not happen in reality. In fact, she wrote down the naked truth of the combat on the Chinese political stage with her own blood and life, rather than with pen or propaganda. Contrary to what she thought, the brightness she wrote about in ink camouflaged the darkness that was written in blood. This might be the other side of publicity literature. The Chinese political life written by this female writer with her pen and its reality written by the female martyr with her blood display an agonizing disparity not only between her ideal and reality, between her imagination and reality but also between an ideology and reality. This is the legacy that Feng Keng truly left. It is worth thinking that to a woman who stepped onto the political stage, the question is not only whether or not she needed to forget that she is a woman, but also whether she could understand the difference between her imagined “combat” and the combat in reality, and the difference between the imaginary tomorrow and historical reality. This is the same question as whether she could understand the difference between the stage role she played and her actual female body and situation.

9.2

Sacrificing One’s Minor Self for the Masses

Fighting side-by-side with Bingying and Feng Keng, but in another field, were female writers like Luo Shu,13 Cao Ming,14 and Bai Lang,15 whose writings were oriented towards the rural masses. This was a battleground in the periphery, but closely related to politics. If Bingying and Feng Keng forsook their female body, in the traditional sense, under the armors of warriors, Cao Ming, Bai Lang, and Luo Shu, with a tool kit of pens and words, forsook the symbolic female image and even discarded the gender-iconic mask for the daydreaming girls invented by Lu Yin, Bing Xin, and other first-generation new women. These female writers no longer wrote about themselves but turned to write about the life of wider social communities that carried a more prevalent and greater social significance, in view of the state of affairs of their 12 Commonly called the Jiangxi–Fujian-Guangdong Soviet, was the largest component territory of the Chinese Soviet Republic, established in November 1931, led by Mao Zedong and Zhu De. 13 Luo Shu (1903–1938), penname of Luo Shimi, female short-story writer from Chengdu, Sichuan. Her short yet brilliant writing career ended with her death of childbed fever. 14 Cao Ming (1913–2002), penname of Wu Xuwen, modern woman writer from Shunde, Guangdong. She joined the League of Left-wing writers in 1933. 15 Bai Lang (1912–1990), penname of Liu Donglan, woman writer from Shenyang, Liaoning. She joined the League of Left-wing writers in 1935.

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times. This was a remarkable step forward in the history of women’s life, progress in the history of Chinese culture. Especially considering the narrow marginal leeway that was left to the woman’s problem in history, opening up another front was an unprecedented attempt that called for unimaginable courage. This phenomenon reflected not only women’s aspiration to “become the same as men,” but also their writing ability to be no lesser than male writers’. Compared with female writers of the previous generation in the May Fourth period, the outstanding female writers in this generation markedly improved their artistic ability. Even in comparison with the male masters of the same period, they exhibited something sui generis and singular. However, no matter whether they made headway towards battlegrounds or to the rural countryside, the historical-cultural backgrounds of these female writers were the same. That is, they appeared, not as a gender group, in these social spheres where they had never belonged in the past. Just like in the 1930s, various literary societies sprang up like mushrooms, but there was none for female writers. That is, there was no literary society organized in the name of the female gender and also no sign of the female perspective in criticizing and combating social realities. Anyway, neither history nor society nor culture left adequate elbowroom for women’s self. In order to break through this cramped world, women must put gender-neutral masquerades on their latent potency to create. Otherwise, they seemed unable to merge into the era’s mainstream that gave vogue to prioritizing the motif of the hard times afflicting the masses over the theme of urban intellectuals’ life, and their manuscripts may not have been accepted by literary editors, readers, and critics in the framework of the trend. Therefore, although these female writers were not as resistant to the concept of gender as Feng Keng purposively was, their gender awareness was obviously assimilated or weakened by the framework of that era. This was particularly striking with Cao Ming and Bai Lang, the two female writers who grew up under the influence of the Communist Party. In this environment, their gender awareness may not have developed or mellowed at all. Cao Ming began her writing in the early 1930s, starting with short stories such as “Tipping” (Qingdie, 1933) and “The Toothless” (Meiyou le yachi de) to novellas like “Impasse” (Juedi, 1936). Her works in this period are not much more than the same motif told in different ways or told in the same narrative model: the great sufferings of the masses and their final awakening. Although some characters in her works are female, they are just female sufferers who do not feature their femaleness because the theme of these stories has nothing to do with their female identity. Bai Lang’s works also concern people’s resistance, mostly under the theme of anti-Japanese-invasion resistance; as for the subject of gender characteristics in her writing, there is a general resemblance between her and Cao Ming, only with some minor differences. The theme of “Beneath the Wheels” (Lun xia, 1936) is the resistance of people and the bestiality of enemies. In the story, Lu Xiong’s wife and child do not want to see him being arrested, try to stop the train, and both die beneath the

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wheels. “Life and Death” (Sheng yu si, 1936) is about an old woman who is a jail guard in a Japanese jail for political prisoners. However, she has a deep hatred for the Japanese because her son and daughter-in-law were killed by them. She sympathizes with the prisoners and gets killed when helping them escape. “A Strange Kiss” (Yige qiguai de wen, 1936) portrays a revolutionary couple’s strength and fearlessness, showing no fear of death, yet their love also has nothing to do with sex. It seems that the only feature to indicate women’s femaleness is that they suffer more pain. Indeed, the mainstream ideology, formed in the face of irreconcilable social crises and stagnant history, in order to simplify the intricate social contradictions, probably had no other choice but to invent a conceptual system packed with political myths. In this system, except for heroes and antiheroes, protagonists and antagonists verified by allegorical myths, other groups and individuals that do not belong are insignificant—this frames the imagination and the way of experiencing for writers like Cao Ming, Bai Lang, and Feng Keng. The grand path of new culture—making headway to the bottom of society by sacrificing the individual self—took a turn at a time when a radical mainstream ideology held sway, and became a narrow path for literary writing that featured a genre of obliterating gender and simplifying reality. The literary works following this path are at best an illustration of political myths. Of course, not all writers who turned to writing the rural life and people in the bottom strata followed this path. While describing the sufferings of the masses, Luo Shu’s novels evince some complexity beyond simplistic political myths. This is not to say that Luo Shu was in a position to better explain the myths. Rather, the cultural background she was brought up in happened to be an overlapping territory, or maybe a crevice, between radical mainstream ideology and democratic ideology. An important fact is that, unlike Cao Ming and Bai Lang, she did not live under the influence of Communist Party activists, instead, she was more directly educated and influenced by Western civilization. This woman, who trusted in the political myths of mainstream ideology yet did not completely discard thoughts of democracy, humanitarianism, and even some Western literary heritage, presents more than two different aspects in her works: on the one hand, there are things in her works that are closely associated with the mythical pattern of the socialist revolution, analogous to Cao Ming and Bai Lang; on the other hand, there are things that surpass the pattern, which Cao Ming and Bai Lang never produced in writing. And it should be pointed out that it is precisely in these things beyond the mythical pattern that some gender-specific implications, though trimmed down, are preserved. According to male masters like Ba Jin and Li Jianwu,16 Luo Shu, a type of good wife and loving mother who was gentle and considerate in her life, was a fighter of social revolution in literature. Of course, a “fighter” to Ba 16 Li Jianwu (1906–1982), novelist, playwright, theatre critic and translator of midtwentieth century, writing in the penname of Liu Xiwei.

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Jin is obviously different from Feng Keng’s fighter in the military, which is understandable if one has knowledge of what kind of fighter Ba Jin himself was and his relation with radical mainstream ideology at the time. The characteristic of Luo Shu as a fighter is that she reintroduced what was once rejected and neglected by the “fight” in mainstream tussles back into literature. While making accusatory and condemnatory claims, she revived some aspects that were ruled out by the political consciousness, such as emotions and a sense of shame in the characters’ inner world. She also resurrected a kind of humanity and, in a certain sense, even aestheticist viewpoints in writing. The complexity of her works can be analyzed in terms of two classic concepts in narratology: “story” and “discourse.” “Story,” as a narrative dimension composed of events and a chain of actions, tends to be put in the paradigmatic mode of the time, and in her case, it is the paradigm for people’s sufferings and their resistance. Her “Wife of another Man” tells about a wife being sold by her husband to a stranger because of poverty.17 Other stories like “The Salt Worker” (Jing gong), “The Vale of Fish” (Yu’er’ao), “A Corner of the Ground” (Dishang de yijiao), and “The Oranges” (Juzi) also remind people of realistic rural scenes in the works of other writers of the 1930s: underpriced grain caused scathing losses to farmers; peasants’ economic bankruptcy resulted in such oddities that an orange grower could not afford an orange and salt workers did not have salt in soup; life was suffocating, like an eternal night. On the narrative discourse level, her fiction flickers of another value that transcends the suffering itself: that is, the love that the couple in “Wife of another Man” show upon their separation, the heart-to-heart connection between the mother and the son under the guise of indifference and hostility in “Ah Niu” (A’niu), the awakened affection between the father and the son under duress in “Thief” (Zei), and a benumbed soul under the burden of life and sufferings coming to her senses about life in “Aunty Liu” (Liusao). Surprisingly, her story and narrative discourse seem to spring from two discrete implied authors. In terms of story, what we see is a gender-neutral writer who seamlessly ties in with the era’s paradigm—the fighter against social reality. But at the narrative level, there are discernible signs of a thoughtful female writer. Considering how the dominant ideology in the 1930s hankered for battle and battlefields, staved off subtle emotionalism and aestheticism and other related factors in writing, denied the “bourgeoisie” lifestyle by denying the existence of gender and turned to rural life, it is not hard to understand why Li Jianwu praised Luo Shu for her “great insight into women’s inner life,” and why Li Liewen18 could see the “female’s loveliness” in Luo Shu’s writing. The comments on her, whether it is “being full of emotions,” “being perceptive in understanding people,” or having “subtle” insights into people’s heart, are all words for female/feminine, 17 18

Luo Shu’s 1936 short story, publicized in Ba Jin’s Literature Monthly, Wenxue yuekan.

Li Liewen (1904–1972), author, translator, scholar and editor. He wrote an article, “About Luo Shu,” guanyu luoshu, upon Luo’s death, and publicized it with Ba Jin’s “To Commemorate a Friend” in Wenxue Yuekan.

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in comparison with “fighting.” Aren’t they? Delicate, elegant, tender… In the vocabulary of general critics, they are nearly the bywords for female writing. Of course, these feminine words do not denote the gendered nature of women, but rather a downplayed description of the female character—symbolizing women’s status and its connotations in the dominant ideology. In today’s point of view, such symbolized femaleness obviously does not break away from the specified stereotype for women, but at that time in history, it appeared in Luo Shu’s writing, to boot, the precious moiety was better than none. To say the least, it enabled Luo Shu, in an era when gender-related concepts were almost obliterated from the scene, to adopt a kind of toned-down attitude to express female perceptions of society, and restore motifs of richer and more complicated subjects, such as humanity, emotion, and mentality, which were brushed aside by the prevailing aspiration to focus on the suffering masses and expose the darkness of society. Luo Shu’s writing that is both related to and aloof from the dominant ideology—this duality, is the key to our understanding her two-sided image as both “good wife and loving mother” and “social fighter.” Between them, there lies a hidden gap, as well as compromise, between the dominant ideology and women, between radical political myths and democratic thoughts and beliefs. The result of the compromise is that although Luo Shu’s observations and descriptions reflect the delicate insights of a female writer, her identity as a female writer, if not as “a friend’s wife,” actually entered people’s memory because of her premature death in a calamity unique to women—childbed fever at the age of 34. A work by Lin Huiyin,19 another female writer during this period, may be worth mentioning here. This is her “In Ninety-Nine Degree Heat” (Jiushijiu du zhong, 1934). This story’s superb conception and narrative were always favored by her peer writers, but for us, what is more noteworthy is that, compared with other works, this rural-flavored story is quite a gender-free work. If we admit that her poems and other work involving her inner world show an understated female perspective, it seems that in this work involving the field of rural life, she obviously has difficulty finding a niche for female conceptions in such a realistic scenario. Perhaps it is not necessary to find such a niche. The female self and the mythical rural land have very little in common. In this sense, in modern history there still existed barriers to hedge women off from society, but after the May Fourth Movement, the barriers transformed from legal barbed wires to psychological barricades, moving from the realm of the political conscious to that of the political unconscious. When women rose to people’s consciousness by breaking the silence, breaking out of their tight world, and forging ahead to join society, the bottom strata of society, the female self in the unconscious could not be rediscovered or resurrected. Today, we cannot tell whether the female writers who fought on the battlefields or in the countryside realized their beings as women or not. Maybe 19 Lin Huiyin (1904–1955), amous architect and architectural historian, also a poet and writer, from Fuzhou, Fujian.

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they had really forgotten their female identity; maybe they did not have to face up to their plight of femaleness under the shelter of their happy marriage and family life; or maybe they had realized this plight, but found no words for it. Therefore, they all escaped, consciously or unconsciously, the inevitable gender-specific agony in this period of history; yet, they also lost the opportunity to reflect on this historical agony. Only for women like Xiao Hong, who had no escape, could such reflections become their last salvation.

CHAPTER 10

Women in the City: On the Margins of a Glorious Page of History

10.1

Ideology of Aestheticism

Due to the inherent deficiency of capitalism in China and its later anemic development, as the major social contradictions of 1930s’ China skewed to the countryside, together with intellectuals who also turned their eyes there, the nation’s listless urban life and culture was virtually sealed off from the times and left to rot on the sidetrack of history. Compared with the female writers who went to the battlefield or the countryside, those female writers who, though also educated by the May Fourth New Culture, for various reasons failed to jump off the bandwagon of urban life, stayed hidden in the deep shadow of the dominant trend of the times. Their writings and imagination were never capable of covering the vast regions and the majority of people in China, neither were their visions far-sighted enough to encompass the aspirations and life goals of the interested majority of the populace. Their artistic antennas only spread to scan the lives of people in their own circle. However, the other side of the picture is that the woman problem that disappeared from the scenes of the battlefields and the countryside at this time did not disappear from the urban enclave, but rather stuck around and surfaced in a more explicit fashion. In a way, these female writers who had been inaudibly floating in the undercurrents of the times virtually carried on the marginalized tradition of “women writing women’s stories” in this great era. They never got to fight on the frontline as warriors or fighters, and many of them are little known today, but they were offered an opening to grow into “women” and they also left a line of faint female footprints on the edge of this glorious page of history. The women writers who wrote stories about women in this era were not few in number. Before them, among the first generation of female writers after © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_10

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the May Fourth Movement, Lu Yin and Bing Xin had indeed written on the woman problem in Ivory Rings, A Woman’s Heart (Nüren de xin, Lu Yin, 1931) and About Women. On the basis of the preceding authors, Ling Shuhua introduced some novelty to female writing. Her skit-style story, “Women” (Nüren), and stories such as “Xiao Ying”1 in her collection Two Young Brothers (Xiao gelia, 1935) are noted for her unique conception and artistic forms. In this tradition, Su Xuelin, one of Lu Yin and Bing Xin’s contemporaries, did not publicize any of her work until 1927 when she published a collection of short stories, Green Sky (Lütian), and a long biographical novel, Thorny Heart (Jixin), in this period.2 In addition, it is worth noting that, apart from Ding Ling, Bai Wei, and so on, among the new generation female writers who hammered away on the woman issue were also such unrenowned writers as Lin Peizhi and Chen Ying.3 As to the latter’s presence in modern literature, what matters is not that any dimension of their works was obscured, but rather the fact that the conventional propositions on the woman problem they addressed were not noted in the “May Fourth Movement” era, even deemed unworthy of attention in the 1930s. Since many of the writers mentioned above are discussed in separate chapters, here we devote the chapter to the creations of the other two of them, Su Xuelin and Chen Ying. The sentence on the title page of Su Xuelin’s first collection of short stories, Green Sky, reads: “To Jianzhong—In Commemoration of Our Marriage.” It is not difficult to infer the theme of the six stories collected herein. Except for “Little Butterfly with Silver Wings” (Xiaoxiao yinchi hudie), which rhetorically describes the author’s thoughts and mood when she was studying in a foreign country, the other five stories almost all describe the life of newlywed couples, or the heroine’s longing for her husband that is evoked by all small items around her during their temporary separation from each other, or the joy and happiness when the husband and wife get together. Compared with Ling Shuhua, who was also good at writing about married life, it seems Su Xuelin’s works do not have anything unusual as regards their characterization and plotting, but her narratology displays an aestheticist pursuit of expressions. It can even be said that only when readers read her at an aesthetic level could they appreciate her heroines, who are otherwise almost indistinguishable if only understood in terms of plot and the ways their roles shape their personalities. She is an expert in depicting flora, all details of vegetation. This not only sanctions nature as indispensable to a happy life and the intimate emotions of married couples, but also turns nature into a kind of expression and figure of speech for the heroines’ minds. 1

There is an error in the name of “Yingzi” in the authors’ original text.

2

Su Xuelin (1897–1999), born Su Mei, writer and professor of Chinese literature teaching in several universities in the main land and Taiwan. Green Sky (1928) and Thorny Heart (1929) are two of her debut works published in her pen name, Lü Yi. The former is her prose collection, and the latter her biography about her mother. 3 Lin Peizhi (1907–1984?), writer and translator from Zhejiang, once teaching in Yenching University. Chen Ying (1907–1988), writer and translator from Shandong.

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It is obvious that the heroines from such stories as “Green Sky,” “Doves’ Correspondence” (Ge’er de tongxin, 1928), “Our Autumn” (Women de qiutian), “Harvest” (Shouhuo), and “Kitten” (Xiaomao)4 are all bathed in nuptial happiness in their newly married life. However, this kind of happiness is not expressed in the intimacy of love, but in the space that the heroine shares with her husband, lush with the beauty of vegetation and all the lovely things that can be found in the world. Lively creeks, verdant grass, towering and disfigured ancient trees, melons, and vegetables in autumn, together with chickens, pigeons, cicadas, goldfish, and cats, all compose a pictorial and elegant flavor of “home.” In the heroine’s narrative, these mundane objects and ambience are elevated as spatial symbols of the home of the newlyweds for aesthetic value. The narrative features a beautified nature: open and wide, but at the same time, quiet and secluded, clear in the air, brimming with different rustic charms and tranquil vitality, which obviously stand for the incarnation of the heroine and her husband. It may be more appropriate to use established metaphors in Green Sky: This home is their ideal “Eden on earth,” a home for love located in nature and remote from society, where there are no politics, no social contact, no vanity, only luxuriant greenery, and bright-colored flowers, springs, and streams in woods and moonlight cast on the moss. In this milieu, life is not disturbed nor polluted. Just as the innocent Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden, so the newlyweds live on this earth. In such an artistically fanciful world that is out of harm’s way, the female writer put forward a viewpoint that was subtly different from that held by others of the May Fourth generation: family is not a tomb or bondage of women, but on the contrary, for her heroine, “The world is narrow, but the family is broad” (“Kitten”). She does not mind comparing herself and her husband to pigeons or kittens. She sincerely hopes to build a small family with him and regards the family as her whole world. As women who grew up under the reconstitution of the New Culture, the first-person character, “I,” in Su Xuelin’s work differs from those of Lu Yin and Ms. Sophia, but at the same time, nobody can deny that women of the May Fourth generation sincerely desired joy in their heart, and this was a scenario of reality as well. A life of being coddled and cuddled in a warm nuclear family, apart from society, full of poetry and laughter, such a life is not only far from unacceptable. On the contrary, it may very well animate the minds of the women of the May Fourth generation. Opposing their rebellion and bellicosity, this life very likely cognately answers their utmost misery and loneliness. Moreover, if the conditions permit, many of the daughters who rebelled and ran from their feudal families would gladly turn themselves into gentle wives and mothers in such new-style nuclear families. This counts as a text of ingenuity that Su Xuelin bequeathed to readers today. Definitely, however, if we take a look from the reverse angle, Su Xuelin’s works can be construed in a dramatically different way. For example, scratching 4 The first four works were from Su Xuelin’s first collection, Green Sky, and the latter published in semi-monthly periodical The New North, Beixin, in 1928.

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its surface and bringing in a seemingly far-fetched interpretation, we can find a different story of a woman, which is not so fascinating, in the narratives of the heroines: a woman lives alone in this idyllic-seeming home and the whole meaning of her life is tied to her husband. Bereft of her own will to act; she starts to languish in the comfort zone of her happy newlywed life, in the downright inanity of her life after her husband leaves, for all her aesthetic sense of home and the environment, this is nothing other than the heroine’s cautious masking and filling up of her own emptiness in this picturesque realm. For all we know, the two contradictory interpretations happen to be an ideological paradox that the women of the May Fourth generation, who had come by happy family life, had to face up to: family is a colorful and expansive realm in one sense, but in another sense, it can also be dull and lonely, narrow and pent-up, just as society is colorful and expansive, but from a different angle, also dull and desolate, narrow and cramped. It all depends on how one sees and how one reasons because in the empirical world, one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Such a reality helps us figure out whence Su Xuelin derived her artistic inspiration. Since she found it impossible to gain a position for her “entire” self in the society and the mainstream of the times, then as an escape device, she invented an aesthetic world to stow the self in its entirety and seek shelter for her being in an ideology that was less threateningly aggressive and more suitable for the women who were still in a vulnerable situation, just like the philosophy of love that Bing Xin advocates. For Su Xuelin, as a woman on the fringe of the mainstream, the quick fix of the aesthetic approach is indeed not only an artistic means but also an outlook on life and a way of living. The writer wrote in the voice of the Little Butterfly with Silver Wings a self-referential trope: “We butterflies have a life like a beautiful and graceful poem. Even if we have pains and sorrows, they should be termed in mournful but flowery words.” Such is the aesthetic impulsion in her that is inseparable from the faith she lived by. Therefore, Su Xuelin, insulated as she was from the dominant ideology of fighting and struggle, never ended up as a nun, but rather turned herself into an author, in the same manner as the Butterfly With Silver Wings bids farewell to the Earthworm, who feeds on the decayed soil and drinks the muddy spring and wriggles its way to the underworld of eternity, and flies up into a beautiful world above the surface of the earth—both of them, lived for the sake of being in the present, rather than in eternity, with their female corporeality.5 Besides Su Xuelin, to a certain extent, Lin Huiyin and Ling Shuhua also partly resorted to this ideological framework of aestheticism to deal with the relationship among their selfhood, society, and literature. Yet only Su Xuelin’s works are identified for their unequivocal streak of this ideology. For example, it is not difficult to detect how aestheticism plays a distinct ideological role in

5 “A Story of Little Butterfly with Silver Wings,” Su Xuelin’s prose collected in her 1928 Green Sky.

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“Green Sky” and “Little Butterfly with Silver Wings;” both stories implicitly reject modern industrial civilization and utilitarian capitalist urban life, and at the same time extol, in aesthetic terms, the leisurely, tranquil lifestyle of blending in with nature, built upon the basis of a natural economy. The heroine of “Green Sky” moves from a region reeking with modern industrial marks (chimneys, darkness, and rumbling trams and motorcycles) and a house with a deep and narrow patio to an open and secluded deserted garden, overgrown with green grass, with moss-covered footpaths, ancient trees, and rare flowers. She feels extremely happy and thinks this untarnished place has the fresh air that has been there ever since the genesis of heaven and earth and has never been polluted by dusty markets. She even envisions an image of a peaceful and blissful world, where there is no harm. Even the crocodiles and snakes do not eat people, and the lion sleeps with a lamb in its arms; by the riverside live Adam and Eve, made by God out of the mud. Here, all images from ancient, even primitive, times posit aesthetic value as an accusation of the capitalist market, and the so-called analogy of the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve virtually challenges the marriage market priced on utilitarian and erotic scales. Of course, the so-called primitive or primordial fresh air only exists in the author’s imagination, a symbol of her ideal of ideological value. In 1933, Su Xuelin republished Thorny Heart —her second important work. This novel was written to commemorate her mother and is also based on her own life experience, but it no longer has the ostentatious aestheticism manifest in Green Sky. This novel, published in the 1930s, not only contains her personal path of studying in a foreign country but also to a certain extent amends her work of the previous period with the missing tradition of daughters. The “ingrained and indelible” love the heroine Xingqiu (the author’s incarnation) holds for her mother, and her willingness to obey her mother’s will as an individual, both remind us of the heroine in “Juanshi Grass” written by Feng Yuanjun. It is safe to say that the mother’s “thorny heart” and the mother–daughter relationship in Su Xuelin’s eyes run in the same groove as Feng Yuanjun’s. All originate from daughters’ psychological problems against the backdrop of the same era and history but are only more keenly felt by those who travel overseas to live in a foreign country. Yet, after all, Thorny Heart was written ten years later. The profound affection and deep conflict between mother and daughter get written no longer for dramatic effect; on the contrary, they seem to be more authentic and unembellished. Such a characteristic of Thorny Heart may also belie a weakness of the novel. It simply records the emotions and choice of religious faith that the author experienced when studying in France as a woman coming from ancient China from the 1920s to 1930s which was a shared experience of the May Fourth generation. But apart from its simplicity, she did not open up any broader domain, in terms of content and ideas, than the women writers during the May Fourth period. The novel becomes an epilogue to works of the preceding decade.

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10.2 Footsteps on the Debris of the “New Culture” Movement Chen Ying falls in the second generation of female writers in the history of modern literature. Although she is not as outstanding or well known as other authors we hail, her work also has a style of its own. Collections of works she published in the 1930s include The Dead of the Night (Yelan), After the Wedding Banquet (Xiyan zhi Hou), an epistolary novel Some Maiden (Mou Shaonü), and a later collection of short stories Women (Nüxing ). The topics she explored are mostly related to women’s lives, such as the mental status of lovers when the love between them wanes, the contradictions women face in urban life, women’s hesitation in the face of choosing between career and marriage, or women’s dejection in the depression period after the defeat of the Great Revolution, etc.6 As a female writer of the second generation, Chen Ying wrote a kind of love completely different from that by Feng Yuanjun, Luyin, and Su Xuelin, the love that accentuates relations alienated by capitalist urban life. In her stories, the men and women in love have no trust in or loyalty to each other; they no longer take the vow “till death do us part,” no longer appreciate the happiness and sweetness of love, even do not take the trouble of telling the difference between unfaithful love and true love. Because love itself, to them, is synonymous with hypocrisy, suspicion, and flirtation for fun and it becomes a semi-advertisement, treated as a semi-commodity. In that era, the “market dust” of urban life invaded and polluted people’s sentiments and emotions. At first, it hurt and mortified ordinary women who still sought love for happiness, then it consumed and depleted their passion and sensitivity, and at last, it alienated their affection. They no longer believed in or latched on to their true feelings. Such a chain of deterioration is traceable from her “The Beginning of Love” (Aiqing de kaishi), “After the Wedding Banquet,” “Time and Space” (Shijian yu kongjian), to “Life” (Shengya) and “Afternoon” (Xiawu) as a serial. The women in these stories swallow their pride in the beginning, then whine and whimper and finally sour with envy. The woman in “The Beginning of Love,” who is in torment over the man’s unfaithfulness, will not give up her illusory hope until the man makes a hypocritical confession of his love, and after that, she also learns the tricks of fighting for man’s favor and the artifice of wheeling and dealing with others. In a similar manner, the heroine of “After the Wedding Banquet,” battered by unrequited love, wants to get emotional compensation from another man who used to love her desperately. But soon she feels bored by this relationship and resorts to the wile of using the wooer’s influence to evoke love from the man she truly loves. However, his phony reply dashes all her hopes to pieces. In “Time and Space,” the woman has outgrown the him-or-nobody zeal of her first love, and narcotizes herself through a social 6 Chen Ying’s short story collections include The Dead of the Night (1929), After the Wedding Banquet (1929), Some Maiden (1929), and the later Women (1934).

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life of mixing with men who flaunt masculine charms. The heroine of “Life” is caught in a quandary over whether she is still in love. Love, to her, is like a dream that evaporates in tiresome conjugal life and the gentle gimmicks of the petty bourgeoisie in city life after the revolution. For the woman in “Afternoon,” who cowered from the revolution and goes adrift in the market’s dust, she never has any relationship that is not deceptive. Put in a nutshell, the author hit off the desolation, or rather feelings of suffocated repression, that women of this generation lived with, unlike the misery-stricken emotions Lu Yin depicts. Freedom, pursued by the previous generation of women at a heavy price, including the ideal of a liberal love, was crushed by capitalist mores and the capitalist lifestyle. In this era, capitalism prevailed in cities and blew up the worrying quandary raised by Ibsen in A Doll’s House. The women’s problem was not just their status of being housewives, whose freedom was prone to be ignored by their husbands, but the contradiction between women as a whole and institutions of family and society, especially the conflict in women’s mind caused by the changing environment. We see this in the group of high-spirited high school graduate girls in “Old Rain” (Jiu yu, Some Maiden). After being admitted into universities, most of them are brought back to home and marriage by their love and betrothments and end up stuck in the house with their children. Although the few who insist on finishing college are unwilling to yield to the circuitous path, it seems that an analogous future, albeit a couple of years apart, is awaiting them. Here, women’s ideals are in conflict with the entire social institution, without the feeblest prospect of getting reconciled with it. The wife in “Women” originally deemed motherhood as a hencoop for women for it costs a woman all her ambitions and ideals, so she made up her mind to have an abortion, for all the great pains it inflicted on her. However, when she recovers, she never gets around to turning the page over nor strives to realize her ideal as she planned before. On the contrary, she starts to aspire to be a mother again, and simultaneously she cannot stop thinking of her aborted child. The woman in this story walks down two divergent alleys, both to dead ends. The story starts from her fear of being constrained by the “coop” and ends with her obsession with it but the principal contradiction in the novel comes full circle at the end. The story both begins and ends with an intrinsic antithesis between women’s ambition and their family, between their career and reality, which are unattainable at the same time; it both begins and ends with the essential conflict between women’s individual ambitions and the social responsibility, even libido, of women as a whole. This is a kind of contradiction between women and society that authors like Feng Yuanjun and Su Xuelin had not encountered or dealt with, but the likes of Chen Ying could not have avoided it. It is a mission, as well as an opportunity, to unveil this contradiction, that history bestowed on Chen Ying, as a female writer who was trussed fast to a firm social framework of androcentric capitalism and urban life on the one hand, and was unwilling to yield to them on the other.

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Moreover, this predicament Chen Yings found no escape to weasel out of greatly impinged on their female mental states. While Ms. Sophia, conscientiously resists the erotic market that regards women as a commodity, her mentality manifests a certain divided self, however, for the undistinguishable ordinary women in Chen Ying’s works, their mentality more often showcases the weaker and more cowardly aspects of femininity. Her stories are fraught with scenes of the women characters in a cleft stick, and their psychological activities of wishy-washy hesitation and indecision. Lichen in “Homecoming” (Huijia, 1928) comes home with the original intent to say farewell before heading for a “great mysterious country,” but upon reuniting with her longmissed kin and kind, she no longer has the heart to leave them. Added to the lineup of her dead ringers is the girl in “The Void” (Kongxu) who falls in love but is scared of an intimate relationship. Of particular note is the heroine in “Snowing” (Xiaxue), who used to be a brave rebel against her family, but now she is unable to insist on her will in the face of her husband’s demand for her to stay.7 All this may result from the internalization of the contradictions that urban women faced in reality, rendering a conflicted mind part of their nature. In such a light, it also conduces to another theme that features Chen Ying’s works, that is, her probing of women’s frailty and faint-heartedness when they lose their original aspirations and become worn down by their insipid family life and banal relations. She illuminates that when the female cannot help herself in the face of the ineluctable contradictions in her life, they get “internalized” into her mind, which renders women faint-hearted and cold-footed when they come to decide for themselves. Ultimately, both the infirmities would grow on them like invisible fetters. Under the double bondage of the two fetters, none of them could possibly turn into the cynical Ms. Sophia who is also desperate but luxuriates in staying alone. As a final note, the author herself, in a sense, was also tightly bound to the dual contradictions between women and society. Chen Ying could not cast femininity into oblivion like Cao Ming, Bai Lang, Luo Shu, and others who had accommodated themselves to the masses or the battlefield and forgotten their particularities as women. Now that she had chosen the women’s world as her object of narration, she felt obliged to depict the women who were bound to bear the ordeal under the strict rules prescribed by history. Under the low sky of the women’s world, and on the margins of dominant ideologies, women’s lives only counted for little, as a moiety and isolated part of the whole in the entire social stratification. Within the limited territory history meted out to women, there was little space for their imagination where female writers could put pen to paper, nor expanse for them to write in a greater variety of modes of storytelling unless they could knock the bottom out of this prescript—history itself. The latter was beyond the reach of Chen Ying, insomuch as her vision and capabilities are considered. The boundary 7 All the three stories were collected in Chen Ying’s After the Wedding Banquet , 1928. “Homecoming” was her debut work that instantly won the praise of Mao Dun.

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of her imagination and thinking happened to overlap with the chasm between women and society, which in turn recurred in her consciousness and imagination. In this regard, Chen Ying lived up to what the times vested in her, in terms of her creation, her contribution as well as her limitations. After Ding Ling’s “Mengke” and “Ms. Sophia’s Diary,” it is by the writers such as Chen Ying and Lin Peizhi (who wrote the collection of stories Nora’s Way Out ) that the trek from daughterhood to womanhood was carried forward and deepened, and it is also from them that we can discern the traces of female growth in the history of modern literature and read their insights and self-inquiry. They failed to write reality and history in the eyes of women, but they did write women in the eyes of women, those lonely women who wandered alone in cities.

CHAPTER 11

Bai Wei: A Survivor of Ordeals

Among second-generation New Literature female writers, Bai Wei was among the small handful who wrote with a female heart, instead of a gender-neutral brain. This may be because her own story plays like a woman’s drama in Chinese modernity. From her scattered memories and accounts, we can draw inferences that she had a stern father of the old school; he forced her into a “tiger’s lair” marriage even before she was of age; she could not bear the abuse of her husband and mother-in-law, so fled to attend school; then she sought self-exile in Japan, friendless and forlorn; she also had a dire and grievous love affair and ended up chronically ill. As was the case with other fathers’ daughters at the time when China was undergoing historical changes in the early twentieth century, hers was a story of struggle and strife. For such a woman as Bai Wei was, with her heart burnt with traumas inflicted by family, love, poverty, and malignant disease, a woman who was betrayed by her father, friends, and lover, and a woman who wanted to go to the battlefield in the conjuncture of national crisis yet was not cut out for it, her writing might be the writing most autobiographical among modern female writers. Taking up a pen became her only recourse in combating pain and was an act of hope via which she could vent her passion for as well as resentment of life. Bumps in her life provided Bai Wei the means to go one step further than most “May Fourth” writers, for most of the source materials she drew from her life for her writing were never overshadowed by ideology. On the contrary, most of the time, her experiences so much outdid her language that she found no set phrases with which to express them.

Bai Wei, penname of Huang Zhang (1893–1987), modern woman writer.

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In Bai Wei’s writing, a feminine consciousness rendered in simple and unmodified phrasing is evident from the beginning of her writing career. As early as 1925 when she wrote the poetic drama Linli,1 which among the writings of female writers at the time was considered to be a daring work, she gave an audacious expression to love between men and women. But, of particular note is that the two female protagonists also represent the author’s dual attitude towards love and men. Lin Li is dedicated to love: “falling down like petals in front of you” is her motto, and finally she did fall and die in the name of love. By contrast, however, Li Li tends to regard love and men with a sober suspicion: “Men play the field.” These two characters, having similarsounding names, obviously incarnate the theatrical conflict of women’s inner world. This concurs with Lu Yin’s depiction of women’s “love and ambition” conflict—except perhaps that Bai Wei puts it in a more lucid manner. In her subsequent series of plays like Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda (Dachu Youling Ta)2 and Paradise (Letu),3 as well as her fiction including Bomb and Migrant Bird and “Suffering Women” (Shounan de nüren men),4 Bai Wei proves to be a writer who, in terms of theme, truly sets out to champion women’s liberation during the May Fourth period and spared no pains to expose the oppression of women. In describing male oppression, she manifests more stylistic vigor in her work than other ordinary female writers do. In 1936, under siege by a disillusioned love and several chronic diseases, compounded by her lingering horror of “dying before finishing her work,” she wrote a long autobiography, Tragic Life. This was uncommon for female writers at the time and at the same time was a rare testimony to women’s living conditions in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course, Bai Wei’s writing was still not to be called a great epic of realism, and her sky was still narrow, and her feminine world enclosed, but she had produced what could only possibly be written by her, owing to her sui generis experience as a simple bona fide woman. At last, with her pen, blood, tears and life, she convincingly made her mark on the history of modern literature, a mark that is distinctively gendered, a mark that a lonely woman drew, yet it was loneliness that provided an opportunity for women to move towards a larger group of the masses.

11.1

A Woman in a “Patricide” Scene

According to Bai Wei’s “Preface” to Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda, this work was completed in 1925, but after being sent to an editor, it disappeared like a rock that dropped into the sea and nothing was ever heard of it even when she made several inquiries. It was not until 1929 that she only rewrote 1

Linli, a poetic drama written by Bai Wei in 1925, explores themes of love and betrayal.

2

Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda, written by Bai Wei in 1928, is one of her most wellknown plays. 3

Paradise is another of Bai Wei’s major plays.

4

“Suffering Women,” is Bai Wei’s short story.

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it from memory. However, “It’s never the whole enchilada of the original manuscript.” When several of Bai Wei’s plays were published in a collection in 1931, they were titled Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda, from which we can see Bai Wei’s trajectory of thoughts during her “father’s daughter” stage. The existing manuscript of Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda may appear naïve in certain respects such as its atmosphere of classic romanticism and plotting of conflicts, but it still retains the untrammeled gumption and passion of anger and defiance to evince the trend of the May Fourth era; only its style of writing and depth of thought are more daring and straightforward than works of other female writers in that period. The opening act of Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda is termed “Social Tragedy,” and it marks a milestone in Bai Wei’s writing to distinguish itself from the girlhood theme of Linli. Just as Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda is based on the legend of the Leifeng Pagoda that suppresses the White Snake,5 so it points to the thematic formula of a family being a hell for females and the latter’s fate of being ghosts in that hell. The story takes place in the house of a despotic landlord, and the patriarch here, Hu Rongsheng, has a concubine called Zheng Shaomei, a son named Hu Qiaoming, and an adopted daughter, Xiao Yuelin, who was an orphan when adopted. In the opening scene of the play, Hu Rongsheng covets the young and beautiful Yuelin, while Yuelin falls in love with Qiaoming, a believer in new ideas, and meanwhile, Zheng Shaomei is not resigned to being a concubine and exerts herself to walk out on the family. Xiao Sen, head of the Women’s Federation, comes to visit Shaomei. She does not find her in but is received by Yuelin. When talking with her, however, she finds that Yuelin is actually her lost daughter that she had when she was deceived by a man due to her young age. And that man is in fact Hu Rongsheng, Yuelin’s biological father. As the action proceeds, Hu Rongsheng attempts to rape Yuelin, upon which Qiaoming fights with him, only to be killed by his father in the act. Witnessing his death, Yuelin is frightened to the brink of insanity. With Xiao Sen’s commission, the household’s steward Guiyi, who is also Yuelin’s first foster father, tries to help Yuelin escape, but he also dies in Hu’s killing zone. With that, Yuelin is in a precarious situation and out on a limb. At this juncture, Shaomei and Xiao Sen, dressed in black and armed with guns, enter and reveal the truth of Yuelin’s birth. Hu is shocked and shoots at Xiao Sen. Yuelin throws herself in front of her mother and shoots Hu to death. Finding her mother in the final hours of her life, Yuelin leaves the world with joy.

5 White Snake, a snake-spirit-turned woman, is the legendary heroine in the Madame White Snake Jailed Eternally in the Leifeng Pagoda by Feng Menglong (1574–1646). The white snake, Bai Suzhen, transforms into a woman and falls in love with a human named Xu Xian. According to Madame White Snake Jailed Eternally in the Leifeng Pagoda, the White Snake is finally suppressed under the Leifeng Pagoda by a Confucian monk, Fahai. Leifeng Pagoda has become a symbol of supressing the female, and also a famous tower for sightseeing and popular folk stories, which is located on Sunset Hill, south of the West Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

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The salient female point of view in the script is first reflected in the setting of the dramatic conflict. At the outset, the conflict is manifested in the form of father–son antagonism. It seems that it will unfold into a hackneyed plot in which a feudal parent prohibits his son’s freedom in pursuing love. But in actuality, as Hu does an about-face in his attitude towards his adoptive daughter Yuelin, changing from a specious father–daughter affinity to undisguised desire, especially after Qiaoming is killed, the dramatic action switches from the conflict between father and son to one between genders. In this regard, the switch of the plot distinguishes itself with a conspicuous “antiOedipus” feature, which deflects from threadbare and conventional paradigms. It virtually lends a striking gender dimension to an otherwise gender-blank issue, rendering the conflict more gender-specific. Thus, it makes plain the all-but-forgotten gender-based contradiction lurking below the father–son conflict. By the same token, for the denouement, the final resolution to such a conflict is not dealt with through a gender-void means (for example, using peasant revolution as a means to strike down the local tyrants and evil gentry, and extraneously also ensure male domination), but rather by the agency of women themselves who have awakened to wreak vengeance on Hu to pay off old scores of blood and life. Apparently, this denouement puts an emphatic accent on the differences, notwithstanding the consistency, between women’s liberation and the liberation of the oppressed classes. Meanwhile, it also seems to preclude the possibility of regarding women only as objects of salvation, hence reserving the opportunity for self-redemption for women themselves. In the sense of anti-feudalism, Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda features its portrayal of the “Father” as a stark male ruler with feudal authority, which also tallies with Bai Wei’s thinking during her period of being a “father’s rebellious daughter.” Considering the prevailing fad of fixing “Father” up as an absentee among the female writers in the May Fourth period, the stage image of “Father” as it is in Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda, by contrast, is unlikely to go unnoticed at the time. This “Father” is not just a feudal parent in the socalled “pedicide or child-murder culture” in the general sense, or just a despot who restricts the spiritual and personal freedom of his children, or an evil landlord who profits by exploiting the oppressed and trading in opium. This “Father” is, in the first place, a fully fledged tyrannic sex abuser. At one time, he dallied with and abused Xiao Sen before deserting her. He also once arrogated a widow’s assets and raped her, which finally led to her death. After he has taken young Shaomei by force, he starts to lust after his adopted daughter, who later proves to be his own daughter—in fact, at the very beginning, it was with the evil intent that he purchased her. To fulfill his lust and maniacal autocracy, he does not hesitate to put two other people to death, one of them being his own son. This father image bulges out to permeate the entire household, hence turning the “home” into nothing other than a hell reigned over by a male demon, and the name of “father” stands for the male prerogative to enslave women, both physically and spiritually. When the daughter finds herself in a head-on collision with this father, she faces not only the patriarch

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but also a powerful man of libidinous lust who holds sway over not only her destiny but her body as well. As the drama develops, the daughter’s psychological reactance has gone down a path that is different from the son’s, a path to establish her gender self. It consists of three steps: the first is her stage of being a plaything or a possession. Not only does she depend on the father for living, but she is totally at the mercy of her father, both mentally and physically, in her moment of madness. Her ego at this stage is yet unborn or suppressed even before being born. The second step is the birth of the gendered self. She accidentally kills Hu in the interest and name of her mother. This fatherkilling by a daughter endows her with a sense of subjectivity, like that of a rebellious Son. “I am the illegitimate child of this brute I killed. I am the father-less mother-less illegitimate child.” This patricidal conduct pronounces her utter veto of and severs her link with the superego—the kindred, male, and authoritative father. Therefore, there comes forth an independent person—“I was born.” Nevertheless, this step only completes her task of being one of the “Children’s” Generation. For Yuelin, the skipping of psychological development is the third step, that is, the culmination of having a mother, having someone she can identify with in gender. Here, blood ties in the traditional sense acquire a new implication: Yuelin vetos her physical blood tie with her father in furtherance of her spiritual blood tie with her mother, which in turn gives her a sense of belonging in gender identity. Hence, she sings, “I broke out of the Dark Pagoda of ghosts, to have my mom,” notwithstanding her death in the third stage. But she dies as a female, as a mother’s daughter, not a father’s daughter. In view of the play’s standpoint of switching from a parent–child conflict to a gender conflict, the whole play complements the anti-feudalism ideology of the “May Fourth” period by adding a perspective that had been simplified and understated, that is, the feudal rule was not just a “child-killing” rule, but also a rule of gender slavery and gender abuse. All things considered, even child-killing was nothing but a means for fathers to maintain their male right to gender enslavement. Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda may be one of the few works in modern literature that openly portrays the alignment of female revolt with a “fatherkilling” scene. Yuelin’s rebellion, unlike Feng Yuanjun’s, does not appertain to the spiritual alliance of the Children’s generation, in which the gender issue is overwhelmed by the alliance. Fate takes a hand in turning it gender-salient. It is not decided by herself; instead, it is determined by the quintessence of “Father.” She cannot be protected by Qiaoming who belongs to the spiritual alliance of the Children’s generation; nor by Ling Xia, chairman of the Farmers’ Association, who fails to wake up Yuelin; even her foster father, Guiyi, dies under Hu’s gun in attempting a rescue. It is none but the mother who really kindles Yuelin’s spirit of revolt. In the final climax of the play, all the oppressed and humiliated women appear on the stage as a female league—a gendered group. Among them are the victimized mother, the bullied concubine, the tortured daughter, and the servant girl—they align themselves into a gender league of avengers. With the emergence of such an oppressed gender

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group, the bell tolls for the collapse of the “Dark Pagoda of Spirits,” the debacle of the rule of patriarchy and male dominion. This group of revenging women, breaking away from their status of being objects of value, are no longer objects to be salvaged, but a self-conscious and united gender front of self-redemption. Their revolt is not aimed to overthrow one tyrant or a lascivious father, but to topple the entire “Dark Pagoda of Spirits,” the entire entity that once suppressed the White Snake, as a concerted endeavor to create “our world.” In this sense, Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda is indeed a “social tragedy.” It discourses on the deepest foundation of the ruler-versus-the-being-ruled social structure, the groundwork of men-versus-women dominion, which had been stipulated and perpetuated since the beginning of exploitation in this society. Therefore, it also touches upon the binary opposition of gender that constitutes the basic structure of society: the opposition between the male and the female. This point is beyond the reach of ordinary anti-feudalism works in general.

11.2 Bomb and Migrant Bird---Women’s Destiny from the May Fourth Movement (1919) to the Great Revolution (1927) In 1930, Bai Wei wrote one of her important novels—Bomb and Migrant Bird. Like Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda, this seemingly mediocre work epitomizes a sketch of that period from a unique female perspective. What is written therein is about the first group of women in China who experienced ups and downs in society after leaving home. Writers of the “May Fourth” period flocked to write about this Daughters’ era. But in the period of the Great Revolution (1924–1927), these rebellious daughters began to enter the second phase of their lives journey. They started by rebelling against families and came to grow into a unique generation of women particularly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, who could be tentatively called “free women.” The erstwhile Noras, the unfilial and rebellious daughters, though faced with the question of what to do after leaving home like Nora, did not “die or get depraved,” neither did they “return home.” They were drifting with the current in society, freed from any binding social relations, and the constraints of maintaining social relations. They had no families, no fixed jobs or careers, and even no promising prospect of gaining shelter from a stalwart and unified spiritual alliance, like that of the May Fourth period. However, given their freedom, they did not automatically gain their female selves. Society forthwith had a diverse assortment of new positions and roles for them but in general, as long as they did not work or fight in a war like men, they probably fell back into male power as social butterflies. A social butterfly or a party girl was one of the female roles prescribed by male society for women at the time. In this socialized role, there were two types of women.

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One type is represented by Bin, who spends her life flirting with men and trifling with their affections. She is enthusiastically preoccupied with cheap dalliance and coquetry—not for love, only for performance. Women of this type are, as befits their roles, performers: they seem to be playing with men, but in actuality they have forsaken their freedom as women because they never reflect upon the roles they take in society. The other type, on the contrary, as represented by Yue, is a woman who reflects on the social role for her, so she tends to find the disparity between requirements intrinsic to the role and her own pursuit. She is unwilling to be some sort of frill to decorate the social scheme; instead, she wants to keep herself unsullied and free, and reserves her right to resist the role. Only for women like Yue who become alert to the differences between their role and their self, there arises the question of making choices. For example, Yue’s biggest choice is whether she should give up love to join in the revolution, or do the reverse, and just pursue love. As a matter of course, Yue is bound to choose revolution, because love has lost its anti-traditional undertone, and become a new insignia of femininity or a discipline to keep women tractable in the new socialized role—as if falling in love is everything a woman is supposed to do. Love keeps women captive. Contrarily, the revolution, more or less, imports some “non-woman,” or at least, non-“social-butterfly” femaleness, providing another female image not on even terms with the male-centric “social butterfly” role. Therefore, this choice could be more attractive to the latter type of women, to those who are conscious of the difference between the “woman” role and their own pursuits and aspirations. They tied their destiny up with revolution, instead of love; with the battlefield, instead of the realm of love affairs. This in itself was a rebellion against the socially prescribed role for “women,” although they rebelled by acting as men. Speaking of characterization, Bin and Yue seem to correspond to the two types of women characters described by Mao Dun, but the two authors are obviously different in dealing with the categorizations. For Mao Dun, the loveliness of “poetic” women and the temptation of “prose” ladies are determined by their influence on and relationship with men, and either their poetic or prose natures seem to have a subtle bearing on whether they could participate in a revolution. According to his novels, prose-type women who have no scruples in love and life seem to be more susceptible to revolution. However, in Bai Wei’s writing, the destinies of her two types of women are a far cry from those of Mao Dun’s characters. She affords us another picture of reality, another destiny for women. She lifts the veils between women and revolution, veils like social status, roles, and code of conduct that society and the male assigned women. The reason why the women were inclined towards revolution, other than their impulse to assume the duty of fighting for national prosperity and people’s livelihood, is their inner impulsion related to their gender, that is, the contradiction they found between their female selfhood and the socialized female role, as well as its resultant repression and their endeavor to combat it. Therefore, in Bai Wei’s writing, it turns out to be the

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self-indulgent bourgeois daughters, like Bin, who demonstrate less measure of sincerity for revolution: Bin and her identification with the assigned role. In this sense, the revolution was often one of the means that women could avail themselves of in order to resist the socialized role, or perhaps it was the only way to achieve the goal at that time. However, it was only a way that led to nowhere. In fact, the revolution, the Guangzhou Uprising,6 was of little help to changing women’s destiny itself, but rather expediated the final expulsion of their spirit. Firstly, the revolution did not restore women from their socialized role to their female self; instead, it aggravated the alienation of the female self. In the event that Yue could not charge with a weapon in hand like a man, she had to turn to her body as a weapon, as an “instrument” of “revolution.” Above all, Yue took it in an entirely good part. What appears to be at issue here is that sex became a tool—something separated from the Subject, the woman. And this means that the person who had the tool and put it to certain uses was gender-less or gender-neutral in spirit, but never a female. Secondly, this revolution did not achieve the intended purpose women counted upon as the oppressed. Its final victory was very much a farce. As it is in the novel, whether Yue persisted in her fight and starved, or dismissed her gender from mind, or used gender as a tool, these all had nothing to do with fighting for the masses and the oppressed. When the farce came to its end, being a female, she could not even continue as the incarnation of male soldiers to fight on for the masses. In consequence, women were hereinafter cast into the wilderness of senses, no good as revolutionaries, nor adequate to be female, as neither the established “revolution” nor the established “female” that men needed were relevant to them, and they could not make any sense of them, either. They were abandoned only as substandard “revolutionaries” and substandard “females.” To compound the issue, they found themselves null in meaning. For all that Yue later “took up an exciting life,” it remains a question of where she would end up. Unless she became a “social butterfly” or came to a compromise with the role, she would be condemned to eternal banishment. Bomb and Migrant Bird describes the destiny of such a generation who grew up from rebellious daughters to “free women.” Since the second half of the manuscript was lost, we cannot read the endings of their lives. But the unfinished first half reflects the trend of the era from the unique perspective of women that bristles with turmoil, youth, and banality. It affords a vivid sense of that era that provides us with something that may well be what Eclipse cannot provide, although the former still reads so naive, crude, and inaccurate. It allows us to see that, in regard to the bourgeois daughters, the differentiation between the “superficial romance” and “revolutionary inclination,” and the aesthetic values of women, the two authors of different genders could make different interpretations and discrete expressions.

6 The Guangzhou Uprising was a failed communist uprising in the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China in 1927.

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Tragic Life---Ten Years of Solitude

In 1936, Bai Wei completed her long autobiography, Tragic life, during her illness—it is a truthful record of the painful love that she experienced from 1925 to 1935. Apropos of the fictional character, Yue, she chooses to lead an extremely stimulating life in her spiritual exile. Yet, using her gender as armament and once accustomed to the rhythm of the no-game-no-life society, she falls out of the echelon of women like Jing,7 and joins the ranks of Zhang Qiuliu and Sun Wuyang8 ; released from any fetters or scruples, she turns into another colorful butterfly before becoming a wisp of storm cloud. But for the woman in reality, in other words, the author herself, life was bound by unbreakable fetters. To survive the world as a woman, she had to grapple with all kinds of constraints from within and without: in the face of her bumpy destiny, she had nowhere to place herself or her heart in the undercurrent of the times, and had to live with a dismal financial situation and endure stifling spiritual forlornness, intrinsic loneliness, not only as a person but as a female, that she could not help. She was probably the cryptic other half of Yue’s self, kept ulteriorly secret. From 1925 to 1935, the New Culture Movement completed its transition to the second stage, in which the community of the second generation of writers created a dynamic literary realm. Their literary creations turned from depicting the ideological struggle between new and old conceptions in the preceding era to describing realistic social struggles between the oppressing class and the oppressed. Love which used to be a sacred phrase in the eyes of Lu Yin and Feng Yuanjun was overshadowed by mass resistance, almost fading out. However, it was precisely in the tideway of this era, but out of sight, that the rebellious daughters were quietly growing into women with a clear gender awareness. Thematically, Tragic life does not conform to the trend of that time but is about the more truthful and secret experience of modern women. This experience lay in the crevice between ideological trends from the May Fourth period to the 1930s: love on the personal level was something that many female writers in the 1930s thought unworthy to write about. This may be because the private domain of personal love, in comparison with the greater Self of the whole nation, struck them as being too cloistered, pokey, and remote from the reality of the era, or maybe because they perceived it to be a hazy area, a desolate and unpromising wasteland, and shrank from it as much as possible. In the same vein, for the writers of the May Fourth period, personal love was an inexorable topic that they tapped into but dared not probe into. They tended to exalt the men they loved as their ideal paragons, whether in the conceptual or personal senses, braving thick and thin together with them, upon whom their own meanings were built. However, it is exactly on the blank page that the two 7 Jing, whose full name is Zhang Jing, is the main character of “Disillusion,” Huanmie, which was written by Mao Dun in 1927, collecting in Eclipse. 8 Mao Dun’s three novellas, “Wavering,” “Disillusion” and “Pursuit,” consist of a trilogy, all published in the 1928 collection, Eclipse.

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generations of female writers left that Bai Wei wrote the experience of a demystified love, describing the man lover as an “anti-hero” and construing her own regrets and penitence as the woman in the snarl of affections—a process of rueful discovery, recognition, and contemplation of her own loneliness and infirmity, and moreover, of her exertion to get rid of the loneliness. In this sense, Tragic life is not only a summing-up of the author’s personal experience of love but also a survey of the path that women had trekked as a gender group from the May Fourth Movement to the 1930s, the likes of which was rare in modern Chinese literature. It reviews all the entangling loves, all the tiring and even weary quagmires of passion that women of the time faced time and again and from which they wanted to extricate themselves but only wound up falling deeper into. However, it is also true, that what we get from such a review is, as the author put it, no less than a “sexual anatomy of sons and daughters born in that era.” 11.3.1

Love Ensnarled in the Discursive Pattern

After the May Fourth Movement, the generation of anti-feudal daughters first encountered and experienced love. However, in a sense, this new experience fell into an archetypal pattern that had existed in literary works since ancient time. The protagonist’s love in Tragic life epitomizes the paradigm’s imperatives for the female’s identity as the receptive Mother Earth. As it is in the novel, this love pattern has established roles for the hero and heroine from the very beginning. Bi Wei (the avatar of Bai Wei) appears at first in front of Wei Zhan, on behalf of a friend, as a savior to him when he is in agony, since his beloved woman, Hong, has a new sweetheart. Decadent in spirit, he is attempting to quit school to go into business or even planning to kill Hong for revenge before committing suicide. This is how their rocky relationship begins. Their love begins to gestate when Wei points out his fragility and encourages him to carry on his spiritual pursuit. Attendant to it also is the “Catch-22 rule” that governs their relationship. Zhan is indeed a child who complies to the trend of that era, but he does not become one of the “Children’s generation” who cared for the fate of the country with a strong sense of social responsibility and a concern for human suffering. Instead, he turns to become their opposite: for all the romantic temperament of a poet that he has, loving and appreciating beauty, innocent and unassuming, he also typifies frivolous frailties in will and soul—instability and lassitude—and in this way is like most other romantic talents of the generation. As well a child of the era is Wei indeed. But she is anything but Sun Wuyang’s sort of tough and vigorous female, nor is she a social butterfly. Instead, she becomes a woman who exhibits a salient sense of self-esteem, selfreliance, and self-redemption, a woman rich in soul. Regarding the relationship between the two, the issue of critical relevance, however, is that the rule that governs it is the ancient model of the taker/giver paradigm. According to the taker/giver rule, Zhan puts Wei under an obligation to give, and Wei turns

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Zhan into a leechlike taker. It seems to be the rule of the game that sustains this relationship. In this fashion, Wei, as the giver, becomes a character like Mother Earth, who upholds this love with unfailing forgiveness and dedication. For, otherwise, the breach of the rule means severing the ties of love. To a certain extent, both of them hew the line closely. Therefore, in accordance with this rule, whatever Zhan does is forgivable: he could guiltlessly consort with other women in the same breath as saying, “I love Wei most,” because being a poet he should be given the liberty of such romance, and also this reason is good enough to vindicate “romance.” With the avowal of “I love Wei most,” he would take it as a matter of course to disregard Wei’s illness and leave her bedridden alone to meet his lover, with only the excuse that he is a poet and therefore not liable for any worldly duties or obligations; he even would not take the blame for the gonorrhea Wei contracted from him—it should be blamed on “society” or “both of them.” In line with the same rule as well, all that Wei has done is taken as the duty of a self-reliant woman such as her. She should pay her dues by bearing his weakness and wrongdoings, sharing his disease and physical needs, empathizing with his mental anguish and raising up his decadent soul, and overall, living with his affairs and liberty, simply because she is a self-reliant, self-respecting, and strong-willed woman. If such a woman craves love, it is her fate to act as a broad-hearted selfless Mother Earth. Such a relationship between the two roles in love used to be described by writers before Wei and Zhan’s love and was recognized by society, becoming the appointed roles for men and women in love. The problem does not lie in Wei’s tolerance of Zhan’s socially sanctioned love-rat romanticism or in his proclivity for libertinism as a gesture of eschewing the mundane world now that she loves his poet’s soul, or in Zhan’s condemnable deeds, but in the fact that she is divested of any choice other than this, insomuch as Wei loves him. The love of Wei and Zhan is a complex that combines a by-product of the times with ancient roles for men and women in love. Even though love tends to be something unsolvable and inexplicable, their love is provided with a solution in conventional discourse. In a society where, though people claimed more allegiance to capitalist culture and its ideas than to feudal conceptions, conventions prevailed. The meeting between a romantic and frail specimen of the era, Zhan, and Wei’s type of daughters of the era who are self-respecting and self-reliant to a fault, once they meet and fall in love, is destined to fall into the paradigm of Mother Earth, which was only beautified by modern concepts. It is the inextricable destiny for an aspiring and self-dependent woman like Wei to act as the savior, giver, forgiver, and contributor in her love with a man of weakened soul. And as it turns out in what actually happens later, once this savior begins to claim what she deserves, whether it is a request for affection or commitment, or credit as a friend, she forthwith turns from donor to beggar, from man’s shelter to his prison and from his great asset as his savior to his liability. For her, there is no viable alternative other than to love in conformity with the rule, which means to give and contribute, and to be loved according to the rule, which means to be possessed and accepted. For all her unfailing

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loyalty, in return she can never expect to get love beyond the ambit of the rule, that is, to receive love from his lover and get devotion from him. The love experience of a breed of rebellious daughters turns out to be a replica of the ancient discourse of love, which may account for the tragedy from which they could not disentangle themselves. 11.3.2

Women’s Love-Oriented Loneliness

It is obvious that the giving/soliciting game is iniquitous to Wei, but in fact, if Zhan is sincerely in love with her, this relationship may as well endure as long as they do. However, the two persons’ outlooks on love and the relationship are as different as day and night. From that era, they have inherited two views of love that conflict with each other. In Zhan’s case, he has the liberty to love two or three women at the same time—he could split his love ninety-nine percent for Wei and one percent for Hong, or ninety-nine percent for Hong and one percent for Wei, or in addition to loving Wei and Hong, he could even indulge himself in flirting with young bar girls or consorting day and night with the dissolute widow. But for Wei, however, she should not for a minute be disloyal to her love—she turns a blind eye to other men, either never emboldening them to brownnose her or escaping from their courtesies. Even two years after breaking up with Zhan, when she accepts another man’s arms at a haphazard occasion of “just recovering from a long illness,” she deeply blames herself for behaving “like a slut.” Aside from the sheer ethical and moral values of these two outlooks, only in view of their effects on the relationship between Wei and Zhan, the difference between them has sealed Wei’s destiny as the loser. Due to Zhan’s disloyalty, it makes no difference whether Wei maintains or quits the game. She is doomed to disaster in her endeavor to get equal affection from him in return. As a matter of fact, it evinces in Tragic life that Wei loves the person of Zhan, the beautiful part of his nature, whereas Zhan only loves the love of Wei. Zhan never gets puzzled or worried by his disloyalty in love; his polyamory does not create any problem or conflict for him. He never takes the trouble to clear up his different love for these women, never cares about the authenticity of love, and never refuses nor dodges a love thrown to his door. On the other side, however, Wei not only rejects other men but also relinquishes some quasi-love or pseudo-love emotions brewing in her own heart. She feels obliged to differentiate among what is love, what is amity, and friendship, and what is an entreaty for sex. In light of their different attitudes towards the relationship, Wei comes to realize that the love she falls into is bound to a single-lane road, rather than a two-way road, of affection that signposts no reciprocal return of love; it is the inertia that spontaneously drives the emotion to run its course until it perishes. In the course of the love, she only gets her loneliness in return. She finally discovers that Zhan’s love is pointed towards his goal of sex, rather than the soul-to-soul communication that she hopes for. She also finds that to achieve his goal, Zhan would give no regard to her life, and likewise, in

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order to defend Zhan’s integrity, she herself could also disregard her own life. She also detects that every time she was on the verge of a physical or mental breakdown, Zhan tended to shun her and head for the hills. It never fails to be her female friends and ordinary unrelated strangers who sympathize with her and attend to her, which barely keeps her alive. Consequentially, only after Wei discovers and admits to her dyed-in-the-wool loneliness does this love come to its final end, and it only wraps up after she is repeatedly betrayed and let down—Wei has reached the end of her forbearance of loneliness. 11.3.3

No “Truths”?

It is at the end of this ill-starred love “game,” which is doomed to be a tragedy from the very start, that the last conflict between Wei and Zhan comes into view, that is, the major divergence in their ways of thinking on the issue of truth. It is almost two discrete stories that they tell about their relationship. In Wei’s eyes, Zhan’s selfishness, callousness, and irresponsibility are conspicuous, out in the open, but for Zhan, it is completely a different story: it is Wei who deceives and conceals the truth; she is ungrateful, selfish, and insidious; she has a stain on her reputation and skeletons in the closet. He, on the contrary, is deeply infatuated with her, innocent and pure, and does all that makes her happy, despite her fraud and deceit. The toughest issue is not about which of the two stories is closer to the truth. The truth lies in the fact that there are two different interpretations of the same story, and more than that, that there is a world of difference between them. It not only indicates the breakup of the spiritual alliance that pulled the Children’s generation together in the 1920s and 1930s in shattering women’s psychological groundwork for love but also, to say the least, showcases the fact that in a male-centered society, “women have no truths.” In fact, Zhan’s narration not only is an expression of his personality, but it also has its social grounds. To a certain extent, it is Wei’s withdrawal from her normative role of “Mother Earth” that provokes Zhan and incites his fabrication. Since bowing out of the overarching title of the Mother Earth role, Wei becomes a woman that is no longer warranted by the norms of society or literature—neither as a savior or a giver, nor as a proud princess or even a slutty woman. And it is exactly such a woman that Zhan is unable to make sense of. She cannot be pigeonholed as any kind of woman he knows, and that figuratively cripples him in finding one, limited logic to compose a plausible narration for this love between them. In this sense, Zhan represents the male discourse that was actually a scheme of restoring male ideology. He is supposed to reintegrate the anormal and unclassifiable women like Wei into an intelligible system— the existing concept for “women.” Therefore, we see words like “monstress,” “treacherous,” “deception” and “cruel” in his descriptions of Wei. Here is implied another female archetype in the ancient male discourse: the witch. In order to rank the substandard Wei in a single file of this archetype, Zhan

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spares no effort to revise Wei’s diary page by page—tampering with her factual record of their relationship, when Wei was critically ill and even in a coma. In complete antithesis to his tale, Wei’s narrative was disadvantaged by the absence of such ready-made concepts or norms as those to Zhan’s avail. Her long-winded, repetitive, and disjointed narration reveals her sort of “anxiety in expression.” She had a treasure house of facts on the one hand, but on the other, she finds no ready-made model for a man–woman relationship available for them. She clearly felt the hostility of social norms and male-centered society in general towards her, which schemed to smear and distort the facts, and to compound the issue, she herself was unable to lift the narration of her own situation from a detailed recounting to a theoretical understanding. So, in a certain sense, she could only resort to the simple convention—“A spoony woman meets a man who is unfaithful in love”—to condemn the male standpoint represented by Zhan. As a case in the genre of female narration, the strength of her writing does not lie in the conceptual dimension, but in the simple and unabbreviated facts and details of her experiences. This may bring us to understand the implications of the allegation, “women have no truths,” from another angle. In the era utterly devoid of female discourse, the “truths” were inevitably covered up, even in a woman’s narrative to a certain extent, in the same way as the female writers in the May Fourth period used to camouflage female experience with the gender-neutral language of rebellious sons. To a certain extent, it is in such a predicament that Tragic life gives up its further exploration of the whole event and ends with moral condemnation. However, Bai Wei’s uniqueness also lies in this telling covering, which does not impair the thrilling experience she presented to us. We find ultimately a “sexual anatomy of sons and daughters born in the era” of the 1920s and 1930s, an anatomy of women’s life as a group in that era, a foothold for future generations to reflect upon, understand, and review, and a testimony of female survival that was never inundated by male discourses.

CHAPTER 12

Xiao Hong: The Brave and Wise Pathfinder

12.1 12.1.1

Destiny

Father’s Home and Grandfather’s Home

“In 1911, in a small town, I was born in the house of a squireen. My father was only too prone to be imbruted by greed. He treated his servants, his children, and my grandfather alike with stinginess and indifference, even ruthlessly…”. “Also in this small town on Hulan River lived my grandfather.” “Whenever I was beaten by my father, I would run to my grandfather’s… Grandfather would put his hands on my shoulders, and on my head. Then I would hear such a voice in my ears: ‘Grow up quickly, and it will be fine when you grow up!’” “I learned from Grandfather that life also affords warmth and love, except for coldness and malice” (Tales of Hulan River). According to Xiao Hong’s retrospection and scholars’ review of her work, Xiao Hong seemed to have been born into a two-tiered world: the cold loveless family her father epitomized and the warm world her grandfather stood for. Her paternalistic father and her biological mother loathed and ignored Xiao Hong just because she was a daughter. Being a daughter, like wearing a birthmark of original sin, Xiao Hong was predestined to her lot in her parents’ home: she never found warmth there; instead, she only got indifference and

When Zhang Naiying met Xiao Jun and published her first novel, The Field of Life and Death, in the name of Xiao Hong, she kept onto this name. Xiao Hong is regarded as one of the Four Talented Modern Female Writers, besides Lü Bicheng, Shi Pingmei and Zhang Ailing. Because of her natural gift and great contribution to the modern literature, she is also acclaimed as Goddess of Luo River in 1930s literature, wenxue luoshen.

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_12

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even abuse from her parents. The coldness of her parents, replete with their feudalistic ideas, left her with lifelong trauma: for a young girl who instinctively craved her parents’ attention and care, their absence imprinted in her heart a dearth of domestic bliss. Perhaps it never occurred to Xiao Hong herself that her later prank-like misdemeanors, such as stealing steamed buns, ganging up with poor children and sharing with them eggs she stole from home, etc., and for which she was scolded and beaten, punishments which themselves repeatedly reopened old wounds, were acts to resist the oppression of her parents or to attract their attention (see “Some People Outside the Family” [Jiazu zhiwai de ren]1 ). The inadequacy of paternal and maternal love left her with lasting injury and traumatic memories. Nevertheless, there was another world outside this hapless world of her parents’: that is her grandfather’s world. The doting and charming relationship between this lonely old man and his granddaughter stood in lieu, in a sense, of the absent parent–child love. The backyard garden where Grandpa and his granddaughter had a great time working and playing together, the infinite sky, the rich earth, and the luxuriant vegetation, their carefree laughter and chanting of thousands of poems, comprised the happiness of Xiao Hong’s childhood—a world without animosity, injury, cruelty, and humiliation, but one with sincerity, warmth, trust, and freedom. Grandfather’s home and Father’s home, like two poles of the earth, like the gate to the Garden of Eden and the one to hell, were juxtaposed in Xiao Hong’s childhood, the very first stage of her journey from baby to Subject. Living between them, Xiao Hong instinctively sought warmth in the former and avoided the coldness in the latter, but as she grew older the dichotomy between the chilly parent–child relationship and the warm and unrestrained grandparent–granddaughter relationship conditioned Xiao Hong’s perception and interpretation of life, herself and others. It constituted her first key, the first pattern, the first pair of concepts. This is detectable from relevant chapters of Xiao Hong’s famous essays about childhood, “Some People Outside the Family” and “Eternal Vision and Pursuit” (Yongjiu de chongjing yu zhuiqiu), as well as her Tales of Hulan River. It is also perceivable in Luo Binji’s Brief Biography of Xiao Hong 2 that it was through this bifocal lens or this pair of concepts that Xiao Hong evolved a sense of herself and others and built relevant relations based on it. There were only two ways of getting along with others that she was accustomed to: one was the approach of earnest and unrestrained relationships, drawn from her grandfather–granddaughter bond, such as that with her poor friends with whom she shared fun and with her Second Uncle You for whom she felt an inherent empathy and with whom she identified3 ; the other was the approach of indifferent inimical relationships, 1

Xiao’s autobiographic prosaic short story written in 1936.

2

A biography of Xiao Hong by Luo Binji (1917–1994), penname of Zhang Pujun, writer from Jilin. He was the man who stayed with Xiao Hong when she died. 3 Second Uncle You, You being his name, appears as the topical character in her “Some People Outside the Family” and again importantly in Tales of Hulan River. His prototype

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a fanning-out of the parent–child animosity, for example, the sense of disaffection and estrangement she felt towards her stepmother and grandmother. She also had only two frames of mind in dealing with people: in the face of iciness and indifference, injury and humiliation, she put on her armor of arrogance and dignity and defended herself by means of being alone and shutting her mouth and heart; but if she encountered someone in a genial, sincere, and harmless environment, she would open up to him forthrightly with her candid and unfettered innocence. Xiao Hong’s childhood years, torn between love and despite, warmth and coldness, not only galvanized her artistic sensitivity, enabling her to become a talented female writer, but also engendered Xiao Hong’s most remarkable mentality as an individual. Despite the fact that everyone has a seminal childhood and a pivotal parent–child relationship, Xiao Hong’s childhood never seemed to be dimmed out or in retreat from her adulthood. On the contrary, her life and legend from her adulthood to her death seemed to somehow reenact her childhood stories: her relations with friends and lovers ultimately brought her nothing less than a variation or duplication of one of the binary opposites of warmth and icy-coldness—being loved and cherished, or being despised, ignored, and abandoned. In her life, she never seemed to have the opportunity or the ability to run out of this predestined rim, though it was achieved by her art in the literary world. If Xiao Hong were living today, then she would probably find that her childhood was a rich goldmine for her writing in that it had a hidden root cause for the “traumas of spiritual slavery” inflicting the whole nation, and it also buried a recurring motif of human existence that could not be avoided, a motif about person-to-person relations, about absolutism and freedom, about love and isolation. 12.1.2

Youth

With the support of her grandfather, Xiao Hong finally broke through the impediments that her father, stepmother, and the arranged fiancé’s family erected around her, and left remote Hulan County to study in Harbin’s District No. 1 Girls’ High School. From the beginning of her secondary school life, woes betided her one after the other, from the death of her grandfather, to a forced marriage and her escape from it to her pregnancy by a cheat and her wretched days in the attic of a hotel in Harbin where she was almost sold to a human trafficker. Xiao Hong was subject to aberrant girlhood, which was also the period during which she had her first contact with the world and culture outside her family. Her adolescence was a phase during which she suffered pangs of humiliation, both physical and mental, as she became psychologically matured as a woman.

was an unrelated old tramp who was sheltered by Xiao Hong’s Grandpa and stayed ever since as a member of the family from outside.

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To Xiao Hong, studying in secondary school meant that she had stepped out of the paternalistic kinship domain into the culture-and-ideology domain of society, and it only further expanded her particular mentality formed in her childhood. The new cultural atmosphere of the secondary school, where, in a relatively free environment, she learned sketching and drawing alongside other students, provided Xiao Hong a certain social spiritual affiliation or spiritual shelter from her instinctive resistance to her father’s house. Moreover, literature and art, especially painting, were as good as a back garden to Xiao Hong. Under the firmament of art, she seemed to have rediscovered the wayward ease, freedom, and joy of the part of her childhood she spent in nature. Therefore, secondary school, together with her exposure to its cultural messages, had a natural interlinkage to her grandfather’s world. It was also Xiao Hong’s critical transition from a happy child in Grandpa’s backyard to a heroine in a socialized but idealistic world of freedom and art in the future. However, before long, it was with the death of her grandfather that the “father’s house” again cast a huge shadow over and posed an increasingly pressing threat to the adolescent Xiao Hong. With a series of blows, such as her stepmother’s abuse and confinement by force, her escape from an arranged marriage, and the deception and abandonment by her fiancé, Wang, what Xiao Hong faced was no longer merely her parents’ inimical indifference to a female child, but rather society’s rejection of a woman who was unwilling to bend. This time, it is no surprise that Xiao Hong, who had studied at the No. 1 Girls’ School, could be persecuted by her father and stepmother’s family, her fiancé’s family, and other social forces, because of what they saw in her, a female student, was an antagonist, hard as nails, from the enemy camp. And Xiao Hong withstood, on her own, the whole bag of tricks of hostility and surveillance the surrounding society marshaled against the opposite camp. Apart from the secondary school period, Xiao Hong’s teenage years were also pervaded by this spillover of general indifference or hostility, inimical, even lethal to her growth. Soon enough, she was pregnant and abandoned, left penniless and desperate in a cul de sac of deep crisis even before she had time to envision love and select her own cohabitant. The antipodes of warmth and coldness continued to divide Xiao Hong’s youth into two halves after her childhood. The only difference was that the two paradoxical worlds were no longer juxtaposed in the same physical realm but belonged to two inverse dimensions of her spiritual life and physical existence, each of which, to be precise, featured Xiao Hong’s two-fold worlds: the world in her mind and the world in reality. Her grandfather’s death took warmth and love away from her life in reality. Xiao Hong could only fully maintain half of her personality that was merry and innocent, developed under the protection of her grandfather, in the world of art and literature. And for the reality of Xiao Hong’s youth, it consisted of nothing but the biting indifference from her father, stepmother, fiancé’s family, and society in general. Such a world, in turn, enabled this sensitive and self-respecting dissident girl, who knew well that she was disliked, to learn to sneer and bear it. Such a

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paradoxical snapshot described by Xiao Jun4 when he first saw Xiao Hong in a room on the top floor of a hotel in Harbin was a coherently symbolic epitome: in reality, she was grounded in the locked shabby room, unaccompanied, in deep crisis of late pregnancy and starvation, while in her spirit, she preserved a transcendent country of liberty for her painting, sketching, calligraphy and covetous reading. In the warm and innocuous imagined world of the arts, Xiao Hong felt untrammeled and thrilled with herself, giving free rein to her imagination, whereas in wintry reality, charged with hostility, she appeared tolerant and passive, submitting to confinement by and abuses from others. After such an adolescence, to survive this split world of opposed dimensions, Xiao Hong seemed to have to adopt two approaches or a two-fold self to trudge between her imagination and bleak reality. The tension between them ignited Xiao Hong’s first impulse, an intractable beast in her heart, to ramp up her artistic career with audacity. 12.1.3

Love and Writing

In 1932, the 21-year-old Xiao Hong, deep in despair, met Xiao Jun. There and then, they fell in love and began to live together, and since then, Xiao Hong’s life entered a new phase. The refreshing spiritual environment of their new family life infused new vitality into the two-tiered world that had accompanied Xiao Hong for more than two decades. On the one hand, the freedom-loving and broad-minded spirit that she cultivated in her grandfather’s back garden sprouted and flourished under the influence of the new culture, and with it, her artistic soul also found a medium of expression in literature. On the other hand, the icy world in reality also seemed to thaw and started to change for the better. She loved and was loved at the same time. She had a new home, one of her own, built by the two of them who had common ambitions and pursuits and helped each other to weather adversity in the same boat. With the twoperson family and also more trustworthy teachers and friends, her “unyielding vision for the future and pursuit of it” seemed likely to secure its promise in reality. Even if the new family had a hard time amid their tempest-tossed life and poverty, this did not disrupt Xiao Hong’s newfound harmony of her spirit and reality. She joined the new culture camp, the only anti-feudal-oppression culture camp in China at the time, and she seemed to have a natural sense of belonging to it. In the first few years of living together with Xiao Jun, Xiao Hong’s forbidding and sensitive ego started to come together with her broadhearted, free-wheeling, and emancipated self, and her spiritual world that was prone to split into two halves was about to heal and become one. If she were lucky enough, she might very well have felt relaxed, unrestrained, and liberated 4 Xiao Jun, penname of Liu Honglin (1907–1988), author in 1930s acclaimed for his anti-Japanese novels. He went to visit Xiao Hong in her hotel because of her letter for help and rescued her. They started to live together in 1932, adopted the same surname for their allonyms and published their work together. They separated in 1938. Xiao Hong later married Guanmu Hongliang, born in the name of Cao Hanwen (1912–1996).

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both in reality and in her imagination, and have consummated both her love and her literary work. However, Xiao Hong was not that lucky. With the increasing stability of life and the gradual stabilization of their positions in the camp, they no longer had to stick together to combat crises for survival, but when they faced each other as man and wife, they were left face-to-face with the gaping rift between man and woman, and their love started to slide off in the reverse direction. From falling in love with Xiao Jun to their conflicts and ultimate divorce was another consequential turning point in Xiao Hong’s life. It is from this turning point that we see that her divided world and her two selves that were about to be mended suddenly ripped open and split even more widely apart. As regards the real reason for the breakup of the “Two Xiaos,” different people have different conjectures, but it is undisputed that the “Two Xiaos” had their own discrete views on love. Of particular note was that later Xiao Hong once said: “I can never understand why you men are so rude, treating your wives as a doormat and being unfaithful to them” (See the preface of Nie Gannu’s Selected Works of Xiao Hong [Xiao Hong Xuanji]).5 Xiao Jun said: “The woman I loved is not Lin Daiyu, Xue Baochai, but Wang Xifeng”6 (Notations on Xiao Hong’s Letters [Xiao Hong shijian jicun zhushi lu]).7 What we can fathom is how much Xiao Hong, who experienced the kind of childhood and adolescence that she did, should crave tenderness from the man she was so deeply in love with to heal her wounded heart, how keenly she aspired to be respected and cherished by Xiao Jun, and how much she loathed living with his uncouth rudeness and indifference. It is even more facile to imagine how Xiao Jun, who went all out to be a “strong” man, a heroic man, in his selforientation and self-discipline, would disdain and reject, or rather eschew, any bond of emotional subtlety or inextricable sentiment that Xiao Hong incarnated. Suffice it to say that Xiao Hong could defend herself against society’s hostilities with her pride and haughtiness as a shield, but when love unfixed and removed her defensive armor in mind, she legitimately exposed her vulnerability and bared old scabs on her heart to Xiao Jun; if injured again, that would be fatal to her. As for Xiao Jun’s side, he could have fought heroically to rescue Xiao Hong from deep water, being consistent with his self-image, but afterward, it is also within reason that he disdained to be merely a caring husband who was to protect his wife, treat her with respect and give every 5 Nie Gannu (1903–1986), poet and author, who was imprisoned for ten years for his free speech in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution. He founded the literary periodical Seagull, Haiyan, with Xiao Jun and Xiao Hong in 1936 and also wrote an article and complied Selected Works of Xiao Hong to commemorate Xiao Hong. 6

Lin Daiyu, Xue Baochai, but Wang Xifeng are all principal characters from Dreams of the Red Chamber. Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai are generally considered to be learned young ladies, well-read and well-versed poets, but Wang Xifeng is the other type of female talent who is illiterate but intelligent with worldly affairs and business management. 7 Notations on Xiao Hong’s Letters , edited by Xiao Jun in 1981. The authors note the book as Xiao Hong shuxin jizhu.

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attention to her temperament and tender heart. It is true that their disparate personalities obviously and inevitably led to the separation of the “Two Xiaos,” but it also reveals a social and historical cause-and-effect necessity for Xiao Hong: evidently, a taxing load of thousands of years of history heaped upon her mind and shaped her way of thinking—her psychological vulnerability, or her greatest weakness, resulting from her early life of being abused and ignored (or rather, resulting from her unwillingness to be abused or ignored). She could not overcome the traumatic memory of her childhood, or surpass the female collective memory of history, or rise above the female collective unconscious, the frame of the unconscious mind that was shared among women who complained of being enslaved but at the same time grew unwittingly accustomed to being enslaved. However, in Xiao Jun’s conviction, we can spot the epitome of the leading social ideology: setting heroism against individualistic valence, he found no grounds more high-sounding than denouncing the saccharine petty bourgeoisie to rationalize his hardcore machismo. Moreover, Xiao Jun de facto fell heir, though not necessarily at his discretion, to the collective memory of feudal male chauvinism. For certain, between the two Xiaos, Xiao Jun had come on top with more advantages both ideologically and socially. In the 1930s, intellectuals held the masses in high regard at first, and when they compromised their individuality they got overwhelmed and submerged by the masses. Later with the exigencies of the War of Resistance hanging over their heads, their entire ideology was inundated with bloodand-fire revolution, fights and calls to arms, the masses’ sufferings and riots, elimination of the frail and the weak, and advocacy of adamancy and bravery. By contrast, individuals’ personal pain, honor, and disgrace, the liberation of the individual, and the whole lot of concepts related to “individuality,” such as affection and love, that once were rallying cries against feudal forces, if not reduced to derogatory terms, at least seemed beneath mention, and were cast aside to the periphery of the times. Viewed from the perspective of such an ideology, it is not hard to see what was the cause, as well as its implications, of the “strong” or “quasi-strong” bent, beyond his natural disposition, that obsessed Xiao Jun. Besides, seeking shelter with this ideology, Xiao Jun did not have to feel guilty for his inborn macho temperament or his virility. Contrary to Xiao Jun’s unashamed masculinity, Xiao Hong’s thirst for warm human sentiment and love was unsheltered by any ideology. In the era when only “oppressed working women,” not intellectual women, were mentionable, Xiao Hong’s inner callings found no willing ear in the entire domain of the leading ideology, no fulcrum that she could rely on; even the position she occupied was one to be devalued. In terms of social life, the “Two Xiaos” obviously had roles in their relationship that had a telltale streak of gendered servitude. Although Xiao Jun repeatedly claimed that he never made demands on Xiao Hong’s wifehood, Xiao Hong still appeared as his wife in his social circle. Besides, as Xiao Hong not infrequently helped copy manuscripts for Xiao Jun, which may well be a favor she voluntarily did, Xiao Jun, however, took it for granted and never

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seemed to do anything to show his appreciation. The problem is not whether Xiao Jun asked for “wifehood,” but that Xiao Hong was too smart not to see the injustice between them: when “I toiled as a housewife every day, he would just sit down, when meals were ready, to eat and sometimes to drink a couple of cups of wine, fully at ease, and yet behind my back, he would join his friends to pour scorn on me.” In six years of living with Xiao Jun, Xiao Hong in fact came to feel some of Nora’s loneliness and pain in marriage. Except for her attachment to Xiao Jun, she saw herself thrown upon her own resources, marooned and isolated. She did not even have friends of her own. But unlike Nora, she could not bring herself to slam the door and walk out, for she would easily be found by (Xiao Jun’s) friends, and in addition, the owner of the painting studio who initially accepted her paintings would say: “Without your husband’s permission, we are not to take your painting” (see Luo Binji’s Xiao Hong’s Biography). For many people, indeed, to admit the similarities between the “Two Xiao’s” family and A Doll’s House is bound to disrupt the ideological unanimity of the circle, because the gender oppression that Nora is subject to is supposed not to be found in the new, left-wing cultural camp. If the oppression was found there, people would rather turn a blind eye to it. In this sense, the conflict between Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun was not entirely a conflict in their affection, but rather a conflict that could not be resolved by any form of “affection,” that is, the conflict between the female and the dominant ideology, or even the entire society. What Xiao Hong wanted to divorce was not just a Xiao Jun, but the entire male society of “male chauvinism” represented by Xiao Jun and his “pseudo-hero” sexist clique, who brought nothing but spiritual stigma and harm on a new woman and turned a blind eye to her existence. The “cold world” came back to her life in slow but sure steps, and the coldness was oozing from the camp she somehow called her own. Unlike what she underwent in her childhood and adolescence, to combat the injury this cold world inflicted upon her, Xiao Hong was no longer able to defend herself by hiding in her grandfather’s cabin, nor could she, as she did in secondary school, seek comfort, relief, and shelter from a far-away imaginary land. This time, Xiao Hong willy-nilly treaded on an irreversible path of tragedy. On the one hand, her two formerly unbridgeable worlds were coming further apart: as a writer, she had fully fledged and gained more liberty in writing, like a golden-winged bird soaring high; as a woman, however, she keenly felt increasing anguish, since the more forbearance she showed, the more deplorable she found it to be caught in the roles prescribed by society and her friends. On the other hand, all that Xiao Hong aspired to and strove for in life were precisely what was missing in history at that time. As Luo Binji notes in Xiao Hong’s Biography, it was difficult for a woman who wanted to obtain her independence to find a supporter in her social web of the time: “Nowadays, this historical flaw has been recognized by society, but those who had started their dreams before that time could only lay hope on the future.”

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229

A Feminist Choice

In the context of this flawed history, Xiao Hong’s tragedy grew a bit deeper and more bitter at every turn of events in her life and with every decision she made of her own volition. Now she was not just a writer in the progressive camp, but disconcertingly also a woman who was not recognized by the camp she belonged to, a representative of a gender that was not recognized by the times or history. She saw a prospect that was bifurcated, “I seem to have two personages… it’s not bad, so far as I can fly, though at the same time I fear that I could fall from the sky.” In the grim struggle for life in which the nation was engaged, vast as the world was at the time of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the sky was low for women. The battlefield, the frontline, and the Northwest Battlefield Service Corps (Xibei Zhandi Fuwu Tuan)8 could harbor Xiao Jun on firm ground as a progressive writer, and certainly also Xiao Hong the progressive writer, but not Xiao Hong the female; the battle zone was no place for Xiao Hong to crawl to lick her wounds, no place for women as a gender. Therefore, shortly after the outbreak of the AntiJapanese War, Xiao Hong found herself trapped in a quandary of triple crises, ranging from the national crisis to one of love and her identity as a woman, and to unravel this quandary she was forced to choose between the dominant cultural camp and her female self. Choosing the former, as everyone in the camp was willing her to do, was the safe bet for her, for it would only take the least effort to comply with the given role so as to be bound up with history. Choosing the latter, however, meant being a lone wolf and fighting on her own, facing unpredictable perils. Xiao Hong chose the latter. From today’s viewpoint, her choice was a naive one but also one made by a wise and brave woman. By her own innocent volition, Xiao Hong left Xiao Jun for Duanmu. Not unlike leaving the rude and crude for the lily-livered, it was an act which may have been driven by a flight of fancy. On the other hand, picking Duanmu contentiously, Xiao Hong availed herself of a pretext to leave the dominant cultural camp, which rendered it possible for her to explore her female freedom. What is obvious about it is that she refused to go on playing a gender role in the new camp that was much the same as that for women in the old era. By doing so, she was also vetoing the feudalism inherent in the new cultural community, and saying no to its indifference to and alienation of a liberty-seeking female, despite its pronouncement, at the conjuncture of national crisis, that it stood for the future development of history. Through the agency of this choice, she staked out a claim to her female rights from history and society, a claim to the human value and human freedom that were once promised to Chinese people but never honored. She declared herself adamantly and enounced that the residue of historic dross and dregs, lying deep in the leading ideology since the new culture movement, should not be forgotten and forgiven merely because the nation was facing an imminent 8 A voluntary team of writers and artists to report on war and perform variety shows in the front, established in 1937, with Ding Ling as the chief director.

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war. For, as a matter of fact, it had always played a complicit role with feudal oppressors in the oppression of the gender group of women. To this extent, the choice she made was no less than a daring decision to impugn the leading majority and call the dominant ideology into question. It was a decision wisely and courageously made to pronounce her unyielding autonomy. Xiao Hong did not go to Xi’an, or Yan’an,9 but went southward with Duanmu. However, it was precisely for this decision that Xiao Hong paid down, finally at the expense of her own life, the last prospect of fair shake that history had in stock for women. Simply by trailing her personal contour of her own footprints, she met the wrong person again this time. Not only did she start copying manuscripts for Duanmu, but also resigned herself to his ridicules of her own writing (only this time it was open mockery in her face), and to top it off, she never failed to be what Duanmu resolved to forgo first should he be in danger. In peril of Japanese gunfires, he left her alone in Wuhan when she was already nine months pregnant. There she stumbled on a dock and fell to the ground with no help around she could resort to. But more importantly, as far as her gender role was concerned, she found that she was still in the old groove of being secondary and subordinate to men: she was once again regarded as the common “other” by Duanmu and their friends. As a female, she was predestined to be ignored and effaced, despite the facts that the male friends around her were relatively frail and infirm, and that she more often than not shouldered the heavy load of life that Duanmu shirked and flinched from. Imagine the tragic scene of Xiao Hong’s deathbed: Hong Kong was under Japanese occupation. Amid artillery fires, in a city hospital occupied by Japanese soldiers, Xiao Hong’s trachea was cut open. Unable to utter a word, and in the last few hours of her distressing life, there was no one around her. Isn’t this a trope for the ultimate destiny of a woman, in the deep catastrophe of the nation, dying in extreme desolation and utter aphasia? Today, we have no way of knowing the whole of Xiao Hong’s view of her relationship with Duanmu. The last few years of her life might not have been as wretched as Nie Gannu said, her life “was handicapped by her self-sacrifice spirit and slumped into the grave for slaves” (nuli de sisuo)10 (see the preface of Selected Works of Xiao Hong ). Yet her life with Duanmu does remind us of the surrender Xiao Hong made to escape from her first marriage. It was more similar than different: just as she knuckled down and submitted, at that time, to Wang, the scion of the wealthy family, whom she never liked, so she yielded to Duanmu, with whom she knew well she could never share weal or woe. Or maybe Xiao Hong did once love Duanmu, but after her agonizing Wuhan nightmare and her miscarriage, the love obviously waned and no longer stood 9

Yan’an was the stronghold of communist army during the Resistance War till 1949.

10

A phrase Nie Gannu quotes from a Russian poet, Vasili Eroshenko (1889–1952), who was stranded long in China around 1922 and had close friendship with Chinese writers like Lu Xun. Nie wrote in the preface, “Fly to the sky, Xiao Hong! Do you remember the words in Eroshenko’s fairy tale? ‘Don’t look down! Down there are graves for slaves.’”

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to reason for Xiao Hong to live with Duanmu as lovers. From a female point of view, the more likely motive behind was her compromise out of consideration for mental peace, a motive born out of the serenity or maturity in her heart. Since Xiao Hong had used the only other possibility of fighting reality this time, she had admitted to and accepted the reality that this monolithic society had in stock for women—unmitigated loneliness—and more importantly, she had made up her mind that, come what may, she would strive to live on, and write, in this loneliness. In an unperturbable or mellow prime time of her creative life, she really did not care at all with whom she lived, whether it was Duanmu or any other man. The biddability she showed to him was not at all out of love or callous numbness, nor because she was succumbing to dependence. It was in the same frame of mind as she would doubt that if Xiao Jun should show up to take her out of the hospital in Wuhan, it was in any way meant to be his repentance. She would rather regard it as a condescending revelation. Xiao Hong’s antagonism to history and society was bound to be a lone wolf’s battle. Of course, if she had taken the path to the Yan’an Liberated Area, she might not have died so desolately, but neither would her feminist thoughts and pursuit of female liberation have had a better chance in the rural world and camp of local writers, unless she surrendered her feminist pursuit first. In this lonely fight, Xiao Hong touched the sedimented floor of history and the mass of women frozen there. Only in this sense is there a monument to Xiao Hong’s martyrdom: she bore, on her lone shoulders, the entirety of the loneliness the female group had endured since time immemorial and set it forth in her writing while swallowing her own loneliness; she offered herself as a sacrifice, and in so doing, she proclaimed the immense sacrifice the nation made in the course of historic progress—the sacrifice of anti-feudalism and humanity. Out, out was the candle of her brief and anguished life, but it shed light on the structural defects ( jiegou xing quesun) of our society and culture. Only after she dropped, and dropped as a sacrifice into the grave for slaves, did people look up and see that the sky was too low for women to fly. Xiao Hong is indeed “a great golden-winged bird” (see the preface of Nie Gannu’s Selected Works of Xiao Hong ), but her wings were not strong enough to carry her female body over the barriers of history. Xiao Hong’s two-fold world was thus ripped apart by history. She could only spread her wings in the imaginary world of art and literature, but in real life, her wings were nailed fast to the “grave for slaves.” However, and in turn, by describing her dual worlds, Xiao Hong’s nimble pen also severed history into two halves: her female body was buried in the dirt of thousand-year history, whereas her soul, flying in the sky, is written in today’s history and that of the future.

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12.2

A Woman’s Discernment of History

The great golden-winged bird dropped dead from the sky, but left several millions of words written in manuscript, recording the life of this great, brave, and resourceful soul, as well as the interrogations she made of history both as an individual and as a woman. It is generally believed that Xiao Hong’s creation is divided into two phases with the year 1938 as the watershed. Her earlier literary work includes Trekking (Bashe),11 a short story collection coauthored with Xiao Jun, and “The Field of Life and Death,”12 “Hands” (Shou, 1936), “Riding an Ox Cart” (Niuche shang, 1936), Market Street (Shangshi jie)13 and “Bridge” (Qiao),14 “Some People Outside the Family” and some other stories and essays. Her later major work consists of “Yellow River” (Huanghe, 1938), Soul of the Nation (Minzu hun),15 “Random Notes on Lu Xun” (Lu Xun xiansheng sanji, 1938), “Down the Mountain” (Xiashan, 1939), “Cry of the Wilderness” (Kuangye de nahan, 1939), “A Small Town in March” (Xiaocheng sanyue, 1941), Ma Bole,16 and her best-known novel, Tales of Hulan River. Within one year of the publication of her apparently rough-edged early work, which was published under her first pen name, Qiao Yin, such as “Death of Sister Mao” (Wangasao zhi si),17 “Nightly Wind” (Yefeng, 1933) and “Watching Kites” (Kan fengzhen, 1933), Xiao Hong completed The Field of Life and Death, a tour de force of her earlier phase. Upon its publication at the end of 1935, it made instant shockwaves in the literary circle in Shanghai. At that time, Xiao Hong was still a green hand who had only started to write under the encouragement of Xiao Jun and his friends. In a sense, she was a woman who was supported by Xiao Jun, his wife and his manuscript scribe. Both her literary and social life hinged on Xiao Jun, hence this put her not only at the edge of their social contacts, but paradoxically, it is also because of her position on the fringe that her mindscape outstripped the ideology predominating the 1930s’ China, and her mental agility was not limited to the several common narrative modes shared by intellectuals living in the urban environment. It maybe should be mentioned that apart from “revolution + love” theme, there were also quite a few other narrative 11 Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun’s collection of short stories published in the names of Qiao Yin (allonymous Xiao Hong) and San Lang (allonymous Xiao Jun) in 1933. 12

Xiao Hong’s novella written in 1924 and published in 1935 with the help of Lu Xun.

13

Xiao Hong’s collection of essays of 1936.

14

Xiao Hong’s lyric-style short story of 1936.

15

Or National Soul, Lu Xun, a pantomime play written in 1940 in Hong Kong by Xiao Hong to commemorate Lu Xun’s 60th Birthday, premiered and made a sensation in Hong Kong. 16 17

Ma Bole, Xiao Hong’s satirical novel of 1940.

Wang A Sao zhi si, instead of Mao A Sao zhi si (the authors’ note in book, maybe an error of the authors). The text is reputed to be the first short story by Xiao Hong, writing under the name of Qiao Yin, and written in 1933 when Xiao Hong was 22 years of age.

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patterns in fiction that were in vogue among writers in the 1930s. Among them was a narrative mode about intellectuals’ strengthening of their bond with the masses, a narration that proceeded from lack of mutual understanding to mutual admiration, or from intellectuals’ ego bigotry to their abandoning their self or giving up their original background to plunge in revolutionary torrents, and so on. There was also a model for stories about peasants who acquire class consciousness amid tribulation and suffering and resist oppositions as a class, with the storyline starting from characters’ keeping on the straight and narrow to rising up in resistance, or from their being benighted and obdurate to their awakening, or from their struggling in the darkness to their enlightened consciousness of revolution and joining the revolutionary ranks, etc. Also, there were novels that described, from point of view of classoriented social analysis, the bankruptcy of rural life, natural and man-made disasters, economic bankruptcy, and people’s lack of livelihood in the countryside. These narrative modes were unequivocally guided by Marxist theory with its distinct thematic concepts. As far as the works themselves are concerned, they were dosed with a strong sense of realism, but to the extent that history was concerned, it was a sense of mythic reality. Behind the description of peasants’ wakeup as a class, what was missing from the scene was the truth that they come short of history-making leading characters. These novels more or less lend themselves as supporting materials to a certain sociological theory: they seemed only to bear out a theory but have never provided anything beyond the existing theory. In contrast, Xiao Hong came forth from outside of this myth, and also wrote outside of this myth. “The Field of Life and Death” appears as a fringe work of a marginalized female writing. In comparison with literary work themed on theory, the novella appears unfeigned and veracious, pristine and coarse; it presents a crude narration that is out of range of the mythical narrative mode of the dominant ideology. But her crude unpolished narration offers something very different from the mainstream mode. 12.2.1

Nature—Way of Production and life—Ubiquitous Protagonist

First of all, in “The Field of Life and Death,” Xiao Hong focused her thoughts on writing about the historical inertia that fell out of people’s attention in the 1930s. Throughout the book, we cannot find a character-centered plot or even characters that are sufficiently portrayed so as to leave us with a clear impression. This deliberate design of the work, which has always been regarded as its artistic flaw, in fact, metaphors an omniscient view of a non-human and invisible protagonist, a protagonist standing for all living beings, who is hidden in a recess under all the phenomena of life. Set in a rural land where both human beings and animals are preoccupied with living and dying, death and childbirth, which are equally frequent, demonstrate an antithesis between the dearth of purposes for life, either in an individual life or in a pack of lives, and the incessant reproduction of lives. People here are vibrant in primal human

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needs. In spite of “the tyranny of Nature and two-legged despots,” in spite of the poverty-driven back-breaking laboring, even in spite of life-obliterating infectious diseases, legal penalties, deaths, and suicide, they tenaciously survive. The people here are also promiscuously fecund: countless women, such as Fufa’s wife, Jinzhi, Second Aunt Li, and the Pockmarked Woman, are found pregnant with the arrival of summer, and the little lives, upon birth, either live or die. But on the flip side, they have not the least idea of where they are heading in such a life of mere survival and reckless procreation. To them, survival is not fun. It is not intended to feel the goodness of life and love it. Neither does it offer any hope; life merely means existence. Begetting a child is not for the “grand joy” of having plenty of offspring nor for the practical need to reproduce labor. Childbearing is not even for the propagation of the family line—they could impetuously throw a newborn to the floor to kill it. Life is not the life of this or that person, but is rather taken as that of this group of people in this village. Hence life loses its meaning, is even bereft of its original and most primeval goal, or the value of life degenerates. They have become a kind of mechanical, habitual, and contentless part of nature. Their bodies work in keeping with a programed procedure, no longer life itself, but rather a pause, a suspension of life that paradoxically manifest itself as the phenomenon of life. This pause of life is also a pause in history. The brief fragments recounted from Chapters 10 to 11 of this book propose a temporal-spatial imagery that reveals a hidden parameter in the life of this group of people: how the history of the countryside tied in with the cycling of nature—the mode of production. It is also the secret omnipresent protagonist in the field of life and death of this book. Ten years pass, but the wheel of history has not turned an inch with the passage of time, and nothing has changed in the content of this life: no change happens to the mode of agricultural production nor to the lifestyle of the people who, at the mercy of natural forces, still depend on the heavens for food, and still hum the old folk songs. In the decade, even centuries and millennium before the red flags of communism, never before seen in this land, started to fly on the snowfield, the same scene of epic drama had been unremittingly performed in this enclosed rural world, the scene set in a land that withered and flourished as a year came and went, with wheat fields, orchards, and hillsides changing their looks seasonally—lush in summer and cotton-packed in winter, sown in spring and harvested in autumn—where people become a function of or play a minor role in this epic drama that goes on without discernible end or beginning. This drama plays a treacherous game balancing humans’ hard work against their bare subsistent need for food and clothing, so as to keep on a never-ending return of itself. The purpose of life for the people as a group, who become puppets chained to the millstone of nature and production, and for their reproduction as a species is interred and annihilated, amidst sweat and toil, and the barely guaranteed living they earn. Such a mill is the rural world, abandoned by time, and the turning of the mill never ceases, around which the people constantly revolve, running the course

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from birth to death: what kind of historical picture is this? Not a single hero can be found and is unlikely to be found, among the people who revolve in the orbit of the millstone. For apart from this rural lifestyle, the group cannot make a living, and on the other hand, as long as they are still confined to this mode of production, the chance to change the cycle of history is also minimal. In this vicious circle, you can no longer tell whether the masses of people who live and die like animals have created the stagnant mode of production, or whether the stagnant mode of production has brought about the animal-like masses. And this circle constitutes the oldest and heaviest part of our nation, the deep inertia of our history. This historical cycling or metempsychosis, however, stopped sharp under the trampling of the invaders. As soon as the smoking Japanese cars rode into the quiet village, everything was effaced beyond recognition. The artillery fire left the wheat fields burned and barren, melon gardens blighted and overgrown with grass, and chickens and dogs were killed out; people lost their families, women, even pregnant women, were raped, and babies butchered. The annual cycle of springtime planting and autumn harvesting stopped abruptly, no more May festivals, no more busy childbirths, and even the graveyard was bereft of wild dogs. Under the Japanese iron hoof of invasion, the grandiose drama of the metempsychosis of nature that had been performed for thousands of years came to a halt. “Fortune’s wheel has turned” in reverse, which first and foremost means defeat as well as a deathward passage on the part of rural history—the omnipresent hidden protagonist in the drama. The demise of rural history makes a majestic tragedy. There is a historical irony here: it is just the tragic ending of this history that galvanizes the benighted men and women, the mosquito-like lives, into actions of lofty grandeur: their earth-shaking pledge, and their high-blown horns that pierce the sky. Isn’t it to drop the curtain on the grand drama of rural history? It is no wonder that Nie Gannu said that “The Field of Life and Death” wrote “a big event, an extremely big event;” it was so profound as to transcend class consciousness, to far outweigh the awakening of peasants and their resistance, and also to surpass the art of expression of rural novels in the 1930s. In so doing, Xiao Hong put us all in her debt, for what she wrote is history itself, a history of the nation’s character and destiny, a history of the catastrophe and tragedy of the nature-bound mode of production and lifestyle on which the majority of people in this nation lived for thousands of years. It is a tragic irony if we view it from a global perspective. That is, it was introduced by the invasion of a foreign nation. In this context, not only is the obstinate Wang Po, who never gave in to woes, awakened but so is the good-hearted Zhao San. Even Erliban, whose tunnel vision used to see none in the whole world but his goat, wakes up with a start. But behind the awakening of the rural people are Xiao Hong’s reflections, also her problematization of Chinese history and to a certain extent of agricultural civilization in general. At least, she did not flinch from the contradiction of these two questions: how to survive all peril was an imminent

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problem for the rural masses, the largest and poorest population of Chinese; and the other problem is, rural life remained the most prevalent and inert factor in China’s historical backwardness and paralysis. In contrast, a large number of novels in the 1930s that reflect the economically destitute countryside, its social conflicts, class antagonisms, and peasant resistance seem to never probe into, or just circumvent, the tragedy and the contradiction of this rural history, which had arisen from agricultural production methods and civilization. To carve out a way for the advancement of Chinese history, these novels tend to stake their claim on the awakening of peasants’ class consciousness and their resistance. Such an explication contains a historical hypothesis that actually conceals the irreconcilable contradictions in reality. In this sense, “The Field of Life and Death” raised issues that were ignored by the dominant ideology in the 1930s. 12.2.2

Another Type of Rural Masses

Antithetic to such postulation of history, what is striking about “The Field of Life and Death” in another respect is that it takes up Lu Xun’s mantle and carries on his legacy of exploring Chinese national mentality. Xiao Hong touched Chinese nationality to its spirit in “The Field of Life and Death;” however, her interrogation is not targeted at an individual, but at the herd mentality that appears in the image of the rural public. Undoubtedly, only thus targeted does it echo the inert kernel of a rural lifestyle. This also manifests Xiao Hong’s reflections on the peasant masses. In “The Field of Life and Death,” the herd mentality congruent with the rural lifestyle can be roughly reduced into three categories. The first is the animal mind in it which was in sync with rural nature-dependent production methods. The primordial animal mind in the people’s behaviors coincides with the annihilation of purposes for life in the natural course of metempsychosis. The local people’s joys are animal-like in nature: they have no other desires than those of the flesh; their pains are also animal-like in nature: they only feel the pain of the flesh, not any grief of the soul; so is their destiny, brutish in nature: Yueying’s sick body becomes food for bugs and the sick children also turn into a delicious meal for wild dogs. Their modes of behavior and thinking are also in the vicinity of those of animals. They, like old horses, behave from force of habit, without thinking: courting in autumn, giving birth in summer, falling ill, and waiting for death. These animal-people have brains but no thoughts, have desires but no hope or despair, feel pain but no grief, have memories but no history, have families but no domestic affection, and have bodies but no souls. The second type is a non-political and noncultural mentality corresponding to rural social life that we may refer to as a non-subjective mentality. “The Field of Life and Death” describes a group of people who lived in a social enclave isolated from any level of political and cultural life of the time, even insulated from political forces such as bandits, revolutionaries, and the Chines public which had received Western medicine

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via five-inch glass needles, rubber tubes, and potions. Ill-informed and undercivilized, the people lose their cognizance and sense of subjectivity: they make no moral judgment, nor have the need to judge; they have no choice, nor need to choose; they have no likes or dislikes, nor is there anything for them to like or dislike. Erliban sees no further than his own sheep in this world, and the likes like Zhao San only see a curse in the increase of land rent, but after all, because of their good conscience, the rent increase is not taken as an evil. Simply because there is no moral judgment, no option, and no likes and dislikes with them, the rural social life described in “The Field of Life and Death” is a life without Subjects. Most people here do not act in the way people as Subjects act. On the contrary, they are passively acted upon, not only by nature and their desires, but also by history, tradition, and ideas that they inherit; in general, they are passively scripted by others. They only have kneejerk reactions. Of course, aside from this animal-like, slave-like mentality, they also manifest an unbending obstinance in suffering, an awareness of life, and the senses to accept or reject life (such as Wang Po). Although they manifest such ways of thinking as belong to mankind, it is very rare to find a “human being” among them that stands upright. It is not until the invaders’ iron hoofs kick death in front of their faces, making it imminent that the benumbed people come to their senses of shame and grief for the first time, that they stand up from the pillaged field like “humans,” defective though they still are. “The Field of Life and Death” reveals the weakness in the group mentality of rural Chinese, the largest group closely bound up with the fate of the nation. Different from the trend in the works of the 1930s wherein lethargic peasants rise up when awakened to reality, the people under Xiao Hong’s pen are lethargic, not because they have not acquired political thought, social insight, or awareness of their own social status, but because their state of existence has not yet evolved above the stage of animal evolution, and their psychological structure has not yet developed into the stage of Subject, and all this is inseparable from the natural environment and the mode of production and living caught in nonprogressive historic cycles. Due to the differences in their natures and levels of their lethargy, their awakening is also different from that of other rural figures like Duo Duo Tou, Old Tong Bao,18 and Xi Dayou.19 The latter rise up amid social vicissitudes, such as “harvest calamities” ( fengshou cheng zai),20 by abandoning their long-held beliefs and habits of life to embark on the path of class awakening. Hence their awakening is their awakened political consciousness or their being awakened from their dormant 18 Lao Tong Bao and Duo Duo Tou are two leading characters, son and father, in Mao Dun’s 1932 short story, “Spring Silkworms,” Chun can. 19

Protagonist of a 1933 novel about the Northern countryside, Mountain Rain, Shan yu, written by Wang Tongzhao (1897–1957). 20 Human-made calamities vicious social groups inflicted upon farmers in times of good harvest of agricultural produce often happened in 1930s China and became a thematic subject in many authors’ writing, such as Mao Dun’s “Spring Silkworm” and Ye Shengtao’s 1933 story “Three or Five dous of Rice Overtaxed,” Duo shou le sanwu dou.

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political sense. However, the people in “The Field of Life and Death” must go through the whole process, from the very beginning, of emerging from animal to human, from pre-Subject or non-Subject to Subject, from being ignorant to being exposed to information received from outside, from apathy towards ignominy to an increasing sense of shame, from indifference and dullness to dolor and sadness, and from being passively chosen to choosing on their own. For that reason, their awakening is the awakening of humanity, the awakening of their Subjectivity. The difference between the two types of awakening exists for a reason. Undoubtedly, they differ in the regions as apart as chosen by the authors for their different backdrops: the countryside described by Mao Dun is a disintegrated society from inside, while that in “The Field of Life and Death” is an integral “rural land” that is invaded and occupied from outside. But the major reason for the differences is probably the two authors’ diverse writing intentions. Whether it is about peasants’ uprising in the event of a crop-price squeeze that infringes on their interest, or a harvest calamity, or their rebellion in times of natural disasters, the author aimed to write that the peasants, as the oppressed class, would eventually become makers of history, that is, the protagonists of the “serious drama” of Chinese history. However, on the other side, what Xiao Hong wrote is about the herd mentality and the national spirit: whether dealt with or without compassion and empathy, the people she wrote about are tragic heroes of our historical “tragedy.” In other words, Xiao Hong’s diagnosis of the rural spirit is more complex than the leading ideology prescribed. The rural masses have indeed awakened with a cathartic pitch of solemn weight, but it does not mean that they will stride forward towards the future of proletarian mass revolution. It is worth noting that “The Field of Life and Death” differs from “Flood,” “The Hub of Tianjia Chong” and “Stars” in its treatment of the masses. In it, the rallied masses, who once allied under a pledge taken with guns pointing at their own hearts, suddenly dissolve, just as they have suddenly assembled. The masses as such never proceed to gain knowledge of self-awareness. It even remains a question whether the “group” could be pulled together, because just as what concerns Wang Po is worlds apart from what worries Jin Zhi and her mother, so is it with how Zhao Laosan, Li Qingshan, Erliban, and Ping’er each feel about the times. Those who eat the meals given by the patriots’ army, just as those who choose to join the People’s Revolutionary Army, make a decision haphazardly as chance would have it. History in “Flood” is a sequence of twists and turns following consecutive progress from oppression to resistance, from despair to hope, whereas in “The Field of Life and Death,” history is disjointed and the cycle of history comes to an abrupt halt. Is this something to kindle hope in any way or something with which to lament the history of the nation? It is hard to say. These rural people, dislocated from the wheel of history after the historic cycle has come to a halt, still have to drag their heavy and inept legs to trudge their way out of the vacuum left by it and to merge with the procession marching on the path of proletarian mass revolution; yet, as in the trend of the 1930s, there is still a slim chance for them to become heroes, class-conscious

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heroes in pursuit of class emancipation, heroes rising above the masses! Xiao Hong was really not in a position to take pity on her characters, for their woes are not something she could possibly show mercy on. But neither did she place them somewhere lofty to look up to. In her eyes, she is on the same plane as they, even with their animal side counted in—both stand at the edge of the myth about the masses, interrogating it. 12.2.3

In the Eyes of a Feminist

It shocked the world at the time that people found all the keen deliberation on history and serious critique of the national spirit in “The Field of Life and Death” to be actually written by a young woman. However, this should not have come as a surprise. In a certain sense, the historical insight that Xiao Hong shows in “The Field of Life and Death” transcends the dominant ideological model, and coherently interfaces with her later challenges she made to interrogate the historical and social inertia that victimized a female on her path of life. Xiao Hong, who was barely 22 or 23 years old when she wrote “The Field of Life and Death,” was still innocent in regard to her way of dealing with others, but considering her born perspicacity and courage that was developed by her particular experiences, she no longer easily yielded to notions and beliefs held by others. Otherwise, we can hardly understand her boldness in the choices she made later in her life. Of course, this is not to say that it is because of the author’s female identity that “The Field of Life and Death” broke through the set pattern of 1930s’ novels, but rather to state that her thinking and feeling about history and the rural masses, as well as her articulation of her insights, were no different from the perspicacity she later showed in discerning women’s situation in the “camp.” Both derived from the same angle of view and the same stance, i.e., from the brink of the dominant ideological camp, even from the blind spot in the dominant ideology. This marginalized perspective of hers is not equivalent to a female perspective, but under the circumstances at that time, it contains a female perspective. What particularities was the work endowed with by the author’s female identity? To a certain extent, Xiao Hong’s creations deviated from those of the majority of other female writers in the left-wing camp of the 1930s. Unlike Bai Wei, she never zeroed in on women as her primary subject matter, but neither did she completely abandon her female self, as Ding Ling did after her political conversion. In her sagacious examinations of life, we never fail to find a pair of women’s eyes. In fact, it is the female acuity and flight of fancy originating from feminine experience that contributes to her idiosyncratic artistic conception of “The Field of Life and Death.” The theme of “The Field of Life and Death” is ascribed to a series of images related to life and death. Among them are reproductive behaviors, such as pregnancy and childbirth, and these unique events in the female experience constitute the basic framework for the phenomenon of group life. In Xiao Hong’s writing, she gives these events unique interpretations. In sections such

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as “The Vegetable Garden” (Caipu) and “The Day of Punishment” (Xingfa de rizi), female childbearing is described as pure pangs of the body. Neither childbirth nor motherhood brings women any spiritual satisfaction. The pain they suffer is neither something they opt for nor what they can refuse. It does not pay off, or make sense; it bears no meaning and serves no purpose. This reminds us of Xiao Hong’s first short story “The Death of Sister Wang,” in which pregnancy and childbirth means nothing but suffering and throes, even death. It also calls to our mind what Xiao Hong personally experienced herself, her first pregnancy and childbirth—the birth of her first-born whom she left as collateral to the hospital. Aren’t her experiences tantamount to those of Sister Wang’s, unrequited, futile, and purportless? It is precisely in this metaphoric sense that the author’s female experience, that of pregnancy and childbirth, initiated her into perceiving the essence of life throughout the entire rural society. It also became a bedrock in her writing to construct a coherent framework of dichotomous tropes of “life” and “death.” Undoubtedly, there is nothing other than such an assortment of worthless and helpless, meaningless and purposeless physical aches and pains and death-like births that better reflects the dearth of life among rural communities. Her experience as a woman, being the starting point for Xiao Hong to gain insight into the nature of rural life and rural history, also shaped her conception of her literary images. By the time Xiao Hong regarded childbearing as a nonsensical female woe, she was already resorting to her female imagination which had a direct bearing on her female experience—imagery, metaphor, and simile. This is not to say that metaphor and simile are particular to women, but only refers to Xiao Hong’s experience per se. As a woman, Xiao Hong’s growth from daughterhood to womanhood was an odyssey of too many excruciating memories and indelible encounters. Such indelible traumatic memories could only be expressed in symbolic form, or perhaps be recalled and purged by symbolized associations and expressions. Needless to say, this kind of symbolism and association was a semiotic expression that Xiao Hong found most familiar and was au fait with, because it was closely bound up with her female psychological process, and even consisted of one of her endeavors to maintain her psychological equilibrium. Although symbolism and association are not badges of feminism, they actually turn out to be the way that Xiao Hong found to merge her female experience with the group experience, and also to accommodate, in a symbolic way, her female self with the world. “The Field of Life and Death” precisely showcases the expansion and socialization of this symbolic means that derived from her female psyche. Therefore, what renders the novel most far-reaching in its significance is not the expressions that are socially recognized as comprising fiction, such as characters, plots, and objective detail, but its expressions in tropes: animality is a figure of speech, so are the historical cycle and the clumsy legs. Without these metaphorical juxtapositions, Xiao Hong may not have been able to express what she felt most deeply in heart, nor able to invest, and establish herself as the author of such an epic story about the experience of a national group. We

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may as well assert that metaphorical associations act as an information channel leading Xiao Hong’s concealed female self to this neutral society, and they are a window through which a woman looks out at the world. Perhaps it is because of this that the art of fiction in this novel, compared with that of mainstream novels at the time, appears to be extraneously nonconformist, unsophisticated or off the beaten track. But, it is also thanks to such a narrative method, that Xiao Hong can give expression to the profound implicature of “The Field of Life and Death” in such a penetrating and powerful manner, and that we can fortunately read in “The Field of Life and Death” such a wealth of razor-sharp and incisive interrogations and adjudications of history from a woman, as well as her sui generis interpretations of history and rural people.

12.3

The Enlightened and Compassionate

After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Xiao Hong’s mental life confronted a dilemma caused by the two-fold and inextricably intertwined calamities, one from the pillaged nation in deep peril and the other from her individual life as a woman. As a woman, she felt the unwieldy weight of abiding feudal history that had a more direct bearing on her than on her male friends in the same camp, and therefore unlike the men authors who tended to let it slip from memory, she was more susceptible to it. Her foes were not only the Japanese invaders and the ruling class in China but also the historical sedimentation of old ideas that lay deep in people’s minds and lifestyles. Her situation of being one of the stigmatized female subordinates of men made it unlikely that Xiao Hong would be as optimistic towards the past, present, and future of Chinese history as her male friends, and yet this enabled her to soberly discern the sedimented situation in a clearer eye. While, in the face of the foreign invasion and an era of great nationwide anti-Japanese upsurge, the history of inertia faded from people’s vision, however, it never vanished from Xiao Hong’s life. On the contrary, the deeper in danger the nation, the more heavily it weighed on the people. After all, it was actually the internal cause of the crises that the ancient civilization confronted under the invasion of foreigners. Attacks from both inside and outside of assaults on the internal construct of inert history and the devastating invasion of external forces coincided to place the nation and its women in a common predicament. But in such conjunction, woe was the anguish caused by inert history and borne only by the doleful hearts of liberal-minded women and their observation of history, and, despite their authenticity, they were destined to find no willing ear in this era. For a people deep in the crisis of national subjugation, they definitely needed faith and power of will, much more than doubt and questioning, or even truth. As such, in this era of tragic solemnity, Xiao Hong was alone and found no dialogue partner for her thoughts, just as she was lonely in love and life. Thereupon, it was on her lean back that Xiao Hong had to carry the whole unwieldy history, and in her own loneliness she bore the solitary rationality of a nation.

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This point of view furnishes a clue to understanding Xiao Hong’s work in the last phase of her creativity. For instance, it naturally becomes a matter of course for her to admire and cherish an indelible memory of the late Lu Xun, in that he is an uncompromising critic of history, and to carry forward his spirit with an impregnable will. To name further illustrative examples, several of her later important works, such as “Down the Mountain,” “The Cry of the Wilderness,” “March in a Small Town,” and “Ma Bole,” manifest a trait of restrained tenacity and depressed sobriety that had never been evident in her earlier work. As many scholars have come to note, the theme of suffering that runs through Xiao Hong’s oeuvre also mellowed from physical and physiological pains to distress that forced its way to be released from her spirit. In the period before the War of Resistance Against the Japanese reached its climax of ferocity, in works like Soul of The Nation, she wrote on patriotism and anti-Japanese themes, but later, she relinquished these themes, and instead, extended her writing to probe the undercurrents that ran still but deep beneath the surface of the social torrents of the anti-Japanese era. Of course, the work that best represents Xiao Hong’s progression in thought is none less than Tales of Hulan River, her later masterpiece. Tales of Hulan River is another tour de force, after “The Field of Life and Death,” imbued with her deep retrospections of history. It seems that Tales of Hulan River traces back to the memories of the author’s childhood, before those she writes about in “The Field of Life and Death,” but as a matter of fact, in a certain sense, it is a sequel or a rewriting of “The Field of Life and Death.” As a sequel, history appears in Tales of Hulan River in an image that is no longer the same as in “The Field of Life and Death”—not the cycle of natural production and reproduction. Instead, it is a continuum of a stagnant society and morbid civilization. The national spirit lurking in Tales of Hulan River was no longer the animal-like, non-subjective rurality, but a horde of nameless, unconscious killers. Even the hope that looms in Tales of Hulan River is not one for mass awakening induced by some life-or-death crisis, but a kind of primal vitality that has not been inundated by civilized society. Tales of Hulan River amasses a repertoire of Xiao Hong’s life experiences and thoughts in the last few years of her life. The beginning of Tales of Hulan River replicates the theme of “The Field of Life and Death”—the endless cycling of spring, summer, fall, and winter and the circumvolutions of human activity embodied by the same content of life in a small town. To be exact, the small county town of Hulan, with its Cross Street, two East roads and two West roads, not to mention its countless small alleys, is not a rural backwater of pure nature where people live a land-and-weather-dependent agrestal life, but it none the less also reflects the characteristics of rural civilization—people’s attachment to nature or their captivity by land. If it is safe to say that “The Field of Life and Death” solely describes people’s physical and psychological attachment to nature in their agricultural labor, i.e., the bondage of human body and soul by the mode of production, then we say, in Tales of Hulan River, human bondage further

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expands to people’s subservience to civilization and a culture, that is, their self-conscious, or at least automatic, attachment to a culture that takes man’s subordination to nature as its prerequisite as well as the destination it aims at. It is also safe to say that it is just from the life of this small town, albeit remotely related to land, that you are in a better position to catch a glance at how closely knit together was the ancient Chinese civilization and tradition with people’s dependence on land, and how this culture works by every means to maintain this land-man interdependence. You may as well discern the symbolic meaning of the unforgettable big mud pit on Second East Road. The local people think of various ways to surmount this mud pit and overcome the inconveniences caused by it, but none of them is anything more than a way of circumvention; they never think of filling it up with earth. People even find fun in the mud pit, and thereof get the benefit of incessant topics of storytelling and conversation. It is not their ignorance or their laziness, but their subjection to nature, surrendering themselves to a unique way of thinking and conceptualization framed by nature-paramount civilization, that limits their scope of vision. All their thoughts, responses, and behaviors, as well as the consequences of these, are nothing but compliance with the natural environment, a manner of surrender to the mud pit that Providence has put there. In a certain sense, it is the people’s subjection and subservience to and their dependence on the Providence that provides the main impetus for the development of such a rural culture. However, this is still not the essence of the rural culture. More importantly, once this civilization, at the cost of man’s resignation to nature, is established, it would thereupon wipe out all those who refuse to attach themselves to it. On such cultural premises, man’s surrender to nature, land, and environment comes to be a yardstick for its disciplines and precepts at the kernel of civilization. In the novel, the high-flown spiritual undertakings of the Hulan townspeople (that is, their various sacrificial rituals to ghosts and gods) are all about their worship of heaven and earth, ghosts and gods, all of which are meant to renounce their autonomy over their lives. The rituals themselves are ways to galvanize people’s attachment to the land. Naturally, this culture could not possibly tolerate anyone who shows disrespect, however slight it is, to this dependence on providence. Even the fact that the big mud pit, though it is not as ancient as time, drowned people is also regarded as the will of gods of nature, retribution for the disrespectful, such as those who study and seek scholarships at schools. The other thing this culture cannot tolerate is that some surrenderers and dependents are not loyal to it: it does not allow people to show solicitude for the living, or to dote on life, or sympathize with those in misfortune, or respect individuality. The unfortunate are, at best, classified as dissidents, as fools or lunatics. The townspeople’s hearts in this civilization are sterilized, impotent, and barren, so life in this small town remains unvarying and monotonous for thousands of years. Time seems to die; things like births, aging, diseases, and deaths do happen, and pass, leaving no mark on people’s hearts. The society under this civilization is monolithic,

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without the least room for difference and non-conformity. Reliant on its inherited concepts and precepts to maintain unanimity, the society of the small town spares no effort to ostracize all dissidents. Since the Child Bride was not like a child bride in people’s minds, not like a 12-year-old, her death was destined, and even the underworld she went to after her death is no better than this one. As to the last point, this culture forbids any utterance that could possibly expose the tacit nature of the people’s acquiescence. It is all right for them to eat pork of swine-fever-affected pigs, but when a child speaks loudly of the toxic pork, he will be beaten till he shuts up. Under such circumstances, the townspeople barely survive as appendants to the tyrannic culture or as “slaves to all masters with the bullying license it gives.” Such a culture is nurtured by China’s unique agricultural life and which in turn nurtures it is another source of historical inertia that Xiao Hong brought to light. As regards this brainchild of her contemplation, it is important to note that Xiao Hong’s observation of the national spirit here was a major change from her writings during the period of writing “The Field of Life and Death.” Though they are both about the same rural community, in “The Field of Life and Death” the benumbed villagers are characterized by a homogenous naivety as victims of history, towards whom Xiao Hong shows pity and laments their miseries, whereas the case with the townspeople in Tales of Hulan River is far more complex. There are wheels within wheels in it, whence Xiao Hong ascertains a fact conducive to the standstill history: these callous townspeople should also take the blame. It is true that they get their due when described as slaves, non-subjects, and even brutes, and also true that they harbor no malice, but what makes a critical difference is that once these non-subjects are put in the leading role of culture and at the center of social life as Subjects, they will instantly turn into indentured accomplices to the tyrant culture, “unmalicious,” but cruel. Didn’t the Child Bride die in the hand of this rabble of inculpable killers who are sublimely unaware of committing murder? Indeed, if we assume that in the distress of the moment when the foreign aggressors broke in to demolish their old way of life, the national awakening only imports people’s changeover from animal beings to human beings, from Non-Subjects to Subjects, it would be a simplistic stretch of fancy. It would also be naïve to ascribe the nation’s callous spirit in Tales of Hulan River only to its “animality,” or to human’s servility to nature and to all his masters. It must also be recognized that as a slave, he is first of all an imitator of all his masters, and a performer, even enforcer, of the creeds of all his masters. Far from falling below the mark, he tends to outdo all his masters. On this account, among the 1930–1940s’ works that aimed to explore the roots of the nation’s bad habits in the modern literary legacy from Lu Xun, it is hard to find any work that could surpass Tales of Hulan River in revealing the nature of a horde of unconscious murderers with no prime culprit to blame. With such a culture that strangled humanity, with such a group of inculpable unconscious killers,

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the history of China could only be bound, increasingly tight, to the wheel of circumvolution, spellbound, and defenseless, awaiting its doom. Such a civilization built upon the bedrock of humanity’s subordination and surrender, together with such a posse of unconscious killers, shepherded but not by a nameable prime culprit, rounds off and rewrites historical destiny in “The Field of Life and Death,” a destiny imposed upon humanity by methods of natural production. This rewritten destiny is almost a providence: the nation’s crisis of survival, which precipitated under the iron hooves of the Japanese invaders, was in fact predestined and traceable to the time thousands of years ago, to the day when the Dragon Lord, Temples of Goddesses, and religious rites first appeared in history. Before they were butchered by the Japanese invaders, the Chinese had already been killed, by our own civilization, by Nature and by all orders of masters and by obsequious slaves to the masters of all orders. As Qian Liqun points out, in writing Tales of Hulan River, Xiao Hong trekked and traversed a long road with her young female body, time after time perused history with the clairvoyance of her female eyes, and finally stood on the same horizon with Lu Xun, achieved a deep understanding of Chinese history, civilization, and the spirit of the people in the past, present, and future of the nation.21 If we say the thought about the national spirit prompted Lu Xun to beat the drums for a reckoning of history, then in the 1940s, Xiao Hong’s life of drifting from place to place through the hail of bullets during the war turned out to calm her mind and give birth to a thorough understanding about herself and the people. “What is an individual, and death? So what?” This can only be uttered by a person with a calm watch-andsee attitude, fully enlightened by her own experience. In front of the crushing fate of history, she found no need and no way to beat the drums and scream, and no one would listen even if she did; she wiped away her tears and feelings, for there was no place for sentimentality; in lieu of shouting and sentiment, on the contrary, there arose a sense of calm, serenity and great empathy and compassion in her heart, compassion towards those who struggled and were still struggling in the face of unalterable history, compassion for the “darkskinned and sniggering” Child Bride, compassion to the “loud-voiced” First Girl in Wang’s, the ridiculous and pathetic Second Uncle You, and the respectworthy Crooked-legged Feng, and compassion for the compassionate childlike Grandfather and his little granddaughter, the old and young masters of their gorgeous back garden of innocent joys, who filled his loneliness in his old age with love. The compassion also thawed Xiao Hong herself, only two years prior to her death, with rare precious warmth. This is the reason why Tales of Hulan River exudes such matchless breathtaking beauty, brought out by her narratology that resembles terroir paintings and idyllic poetry. With the rhythm and tone of her language are imbued a streak of composure and tranquility and the profound compassion that came 21 Qian Liqun (1939–) retired professor of Chinese literature in Beijing University, and prestigious scholar of Lu Xun study.

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along with her great enlightenment. At the bottom, this work of Xiao Hong is not just her autobiography, autobiographical though it strikes us, and a nostalgic mood as it certainly renders, but much more than it. Nostalgia is a form of empathy one feels after gaining a thorough understanding, and it is true, in the stirring and tragic era of the 1940s, Xiao Hong did think back about her desolate hometown with tears and smile, but it was because she was able to stand at today’s vantage point that she gained a foresight to view history and humanity in a rational spirit of lenity. It is probably the case that Mao Dun had not perceived this. In this sense, her broad-hearted vision is one more proof of the fact that Xiao Hong is a brave and wise path-finder. During the period when she wrote Tales of Hulan River, though Xiao Hong had been mature enough in her feminist thoughts, she never jumped on the bandwagon to write about women and herself in the same manner as other female writers during the anti-Japanese War. Xiao Hong remained reticent about her female self and withheld her female voice and femininity in her steady gaze into the depths of the stagnant history. Her feminine experiences and feelings during this period become a mystery for later generations of scholars. It is also a regret that they leave a blank page in the record of the female life of the time. But for Xiao Hong, this may well be a desired result of her choice, which again may be related to her thorough understanding of history. Women’s destiny was also the destiny of the nation’s history, and endings to women’s dramas had already been written by this history. The only thing that had not been written, also what the male camp had never got around to writing or had the ability to write, is history itself, the history that submerged the being of women and individuals, and also dictated stories for women and individuals. And this is what Xiao Hong chose to write, and also the fundamental difference between Xiao Hong and her contemporary female and male writers. We cannot but say that this is an exceptionally precious contribution that women of that era made to history.

PART III

(1937–1949)

CHAPTER 13

The 1940s: A Divided World

As the Japanese blasted open the gateway to the North China plain, the sword of Damocles that had hung over Chinese people’s heads since the Opium War portending their impending doom finally landed on this large swath of the country. It had been looming since the 1930s. For Chinese society in the face of the impending historical crisis and the people who were caught in the crags between the two social strata of colonial cities and traditional rural areas, the head-on impact of this immense national calamity was that it dispossessed the Chinese people of most viable options and left them no choice for a historical way out—not even a symbolic one. When the whole nation’s existence was in peril, they had no recourse left to them except for one possibility: other than sitting and waiting to be slaughtered, the only option for the nation’s survival was to fight to drive out the invaders and rebuild the environment for living or, rather, the premise for survival. However, this recourse certainly held different meanings for the multifarious groups of political forces which had been playing opposing roles in modern history and whose interests were locked in fundamental antagonism to one another. As it was, upon the Japanese army’s moving deeper into central China and the very sudden fall of coastal cities into Japanese hands, which was aggravated by the KMT army’s inept resistance and the massive migration of large populations together with industrial and commercial enterprises out of the occupied areas, not only did the patriotic ardor that had barely rallied for the War of Resistance decline. As well, in the hail of crushing blows, the political, social, and cultural groundworks of Chinese society, including the community of writers, started to crumble and fall apart, which in turn led to a reshuffling of social forces. Only in such social and cultural contours was the third decade of modern Chinese history demarcated: as the initial anger, fervor, and riots, arising at the war’s start began to gradually deepen, what © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_13

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increasingly loomed large were the three major regions of distinct political, economic, and cultural characteristics, three different social spaces coexisting in the same historical time dimension, taking shape one by one: the Nationalist Government controlled areas (the KMT-controlled areas), the Resistance Base areas or liberated areas, and the Enemy-Occupied areas. They also separately, as well as jointly, stood for the triple destiny of the nation that only came to light at the moment of convergence when various historical issues were thrown together. The three interrelated destinies, naturally not excepting those for women, resulted from the interaction of all these historical factors as both cause and effect to one another. When calamity stalked the country, it is hard to put in one word the final destination for those daughters who had turned their back on their families, those women living “in the dark,” those women warriors with their gender consciousnesses buried in battlefields, and those who felt oppressed by the dominant group and society in general and could only find the meaning of existence in their reflections on their gendered selves. Their spiritual tradition from daughterhood to womanhood, along with their female social existence, was also segmented by these three regions. The three social spaces also attached different statuses and significances to women. It seems that these trifold differentiations signified three potential outcomes of one story. Although the final ending still lay in the palm of history, we are hence provided with a better chance to keep the woman issue in perspective.

13.1 The Combat Zone of the Dominant Discourse and the Liberated Areas 13.1.1

Rebirth or Wintry Night for the Nation?

Among the three spatial images juxtaposed in this historical moment, the KMT-controlled area should be counted as the one that best reflected the pressures and tensions of various crises inside and outside the nation. Here were stacked up all the overriding forces in the nation’s political, economic, and cultural arenas that had appeared since the beginning of modern Chinese history. In the early days of the War of Resistance, many intellectuals were convinced by the patriotic upsurge throughout the country that through this war the nationalistic actions that meant life or death for the nation would give the nation’s fate a turn for the better. However, as the war raged on, they abounded with evidences that the reality in the KMT-controlled area was completely contrary to this expectation. The pressures and trepidation of war were discharged onto all aspects of social life by the bureaucratic comprador groups that held central power. At the crossroads of national crises and perils, this ruling group, which knew more about exorbitant profiteering and power than mobilizing the society’s productive forces, had increasingly revealed its anti-historical nature. People of all orders of society had a hard time: national industries were smothered at the chokepoints of production and marketing by

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this monopoly group, the country’s commerce and handicraft industry were forced to close down or shrink to reduced scales of production due to policy and extortionate taxes, the bottom classes in cities lived in dire poverty because of inflation, farmers could no longer make a living under the new-style feudal landlords who joined league and colluded with monopolist businesses and officials. For the intellectuals and in cultural circles, though away from the life-and-death struggle on the front lines of the war, under duress of censorship of publication and the coercion of prison and bullets, they strongly felt the crunch under the rule of this brutal political father, seeing no light at the end of the dark tunnel for the nation and history. This national crisis and the political darkness caused tremendous pain to intellectuals detained in the KMT-ruled area, the selfsame awakened in the “iron house” as the pioneers of May Fourth New Culture. Of course, if Lu Xun was worried about whether or not he should and could arouse the sleepers in this iron house, then it seems that the intellectuals in the KMT-controlled area would sooner—although only on the level of their imagination—figure out how to break down this iron house.1 In fact, such a prevailing impulse is discernible in the literature of the KMT-controlled area. Most left-wing writers probably turned to the strength of the written words for the purpose of exposing all the “new and old maladies, all the pernicious social phenomena that are detrimental to the War of Resistance and reform” (Sha Ting2 ). Or at least, at this critical juncture of national crisis, under the circumstances of “the Japanese foes encroaching on the land and the people finding no place to bury their dead,” “their hearts burning,” they felt obligated to “wake up the Chinese people with literature” and “boost the national morale” (Zhang Henshui3 ). To this end, there came forth “Mr. Warwick,” “In Qixiangju Teahouse” (Zai qixiangju chaguan li, Sha Ting, 1940), Corrosion, Homecoming (Huanxiang Ji, Sha Ting, 1946), Dream of Promotion (Shengguan Tu),4 Ghost Hunting (Zhuogui Zhuan),5 Folk Songs by Ma Fantuo (Ma Fantuo

1

See Chapter 2.

2

Sha Ting (1904–1992), penname of Yang Zhaoxi, a famous modern writer who ranked among Ba Jin, Ma Shitu (1915–), Zhang Xiushu (1895–1994), and Ai Wu (1904–1992), extolled as “The Five Elderly from Sichuan.” 3 Zhang Henshui (1895–1967), penname of Zhang Xinyuan, a popular and prolific modern novelist and a leading figure in the “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School” of authors, known for his traditional writing style of novels with each chapter headed by a couplet caption. 4 Play written by Chen Baichen (1908–1994). Premiered in Congqing in 1946 and ran nonstop for 43 evenings. Chen Baichen, penname of Chen Zenghong, was a famous playwright renowned from 1930s for his comedies and scriptwriting. 5 Play by Wu Zuguang (1917–2003) in 1947. Wu, penname of Wu Zhaoshi, was an influential playwright and activist in post-modern China.

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de Shan’ge),6 The Long Night (Chang Ye)7 as well as Cat Country (Lao She, 1933), “Wish you All Prosperity” (Wuzi Dengke), and Eighty-One Dreams (Bashiyi Meng ).8 It is no wonder that the most striking phenomenon in the literature of the KMT-ruled area was the exposing of the darkness, in which the intellectuals fought off the new and old maladies afflicting all levels of social life, and in a more aggressive manner combatted the rampant mediocrity and corruption of reactionary systems and rulers. This trend in the literature of the KMT-ruled area, putting aside slight differences, was very much like the outcry of the proletarian revolutionary literature in the late 1920s and the left-wing convention of describing the sufferings and the wake-up of the masses throughout the 1930s; it landed the ruling party a crushing blow in public political opinion. It seemed to this generation, the “iron house” was a transparent political signifier. The themes of exposing darkness, the portrayal of ugly bureaucratic harlequins, the genre of brutal and acrimonious satire, with its specific techniques and forms, such as irony, ridicule, and innuendo, as well as the icy “subversive laughter” to avenge the wrongs in reality, all comprised a corpus of “aggressive literary forms” in the history of modern literature, and also represented an apex of political literature in China. This kind of “brute force” aimed at political enemies in the cultural arena had indeed achieved its anticipated effect: the unscrupulous bullies in society were no more than a gang of insignificant hypocrites, despicable dirty dogs, and leeches on the cultural stage. In the sense of cultural imaging and conceptualization, the ruling caste in reality was somewhat reduced to a position of being ruled and censured. However, we should not fail to note that there is a fundamental difference in conceptual notions that separates this generation of intellectuals in the KMT-controlled area from pioneers of the new culture movement like Lu Xun. Lu Xun, filled with deep and abiding indignation at the nation’s history as he was, yet never seemed to be convinced that the “iron house” incarcerating national life could be torn down by mere turmoil. For him, this iron house meant a lot more, well-nigh the entire historic inertia of the nation in essence. However, the reverse was the case with the “awakened” in the KMTcontrolled area, who believed in and unremittingly preached the significance of the War of Resistance to national transformation, and it seemed to them that the overthrow of a ruling power would naturally bring about a brandnew society. In this, isn’t it clear that they had underestimated the difficulty of making economic, cultural, and ideological reforms without the economic and cultural foundations as a necessary premise for building a new society? 6 Poem collection by Yuan Shuipai (1916–1982) also known as Ma Fantuo. Published in 1946. 7 Autobiographical novel by Yao Xueyin (1910–1999) about his childhood kidnapped by local bandits. Published after the victory of the War of Resistance. 8 Both by Zhang Henshui. “Wish You All Prosperity” was his novella published in installments from 1947. Eighty-One Dreams was an allegorical novel written in 1941.

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As a matter of fact, before long, most of the politically combative works in the KMT-ruled areas, hors de combat, came to join in the craze for the great “social revolution myth” that had been the fashion in the left-wing ideological circle since the 1930s. Its “mythological” nature did not consist in its prognostication of the inevitable ruin of the ruling group, but in the fact that it placed its hope solely in claims on the political level, in a political imaginary, to iron out the national crises in modern times, which were, for all intents and purposes, deeply rooted in the history, the archaic production methods and culture, the quality of the populace and even the natural environment of the nation. They wanted, in one fell swoop, to alleviate the dismay and anxieties that generations of intellectuals felt when exposed to progressive Western culture and the living reality of China. The simple crux of this myth is that as its ultimate objective, it addressed the crises simply by replacing the dark, evil political father with a bright, good political father. (This is inferable in works like “The Story of the First Stage” [Diyijieduan de gushi, Mao Dun, 1938], Corrosion , and others.) However, in so doing, it circumvented the root of the issue: why had the nation’s history lapsed into inertia? Speaking of the myth, it was a natural outgrowth of the same strain from folk myths to political myths. Indeed, ever since the Opium War, particularly since the incident of “State Examination Participants’ Petition to the Emperor” (gongche shangshu),9 in spite of all the pains generations of elites in this country had taken, no fundamental changes had taken place to the country’s reality. The people fought in vain to create a prosperous and advanced country and failed to escape the fate of being divided by foreign powers and the shame of being called Sick Men in the East Asia; even capitalism or endeavors to reform the national mind prematurely aborted. Nevertheless, what seems ironic is that the only thing that could be changed was the regime, the political system, and power structure. On all accounts, this may be a result of the norm for dynastic changes of political regime that took place interminably in this unchanging land of China. Also, it was vested with the charm of the political arena and stage. That is, only the political power construction could possibly be changed. For the generation which was caught not only in a nationwide war but also in the gap between history and civilization, nothing can galvanize their faith in the future and their hope of survival other than restructuring the regime and transforming the power structure. But it is only when they dedicated themselves without reservation, as a matter of life and death, to creating a spiritual shrine to prop up the political myth, and sought social support under the shelter of this myth, that they forgot a point of vital importance. That is, according to the May Fourth calls for democracy and science and the promises to the young China, they were not only 9 In May 1895, more than 1000 participants of the state examinations were mobilized by the famous reformist, Kang Youwei, to submit a petition to the Qing emperor, requesting the Qing government retreat from the unjust treaty concluded with Japan in the wake of Qing’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and asking as well for governmental reforms in all domains.

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supposed to overthrow a pro forma political father, but also turn over his de facto ancient regime itself, which had long lasted and occupied all the title pages of history in the past. They also should turn the deep soil that bred this authoritarian edifice of big Old China, break the closed cycle of stagnant production methods that circumrotated in the doldrums of history, and sweep away the cultural dross and inveterate feudal ideologies that time forgot. For all we know, we are justified to say that the more sublimated was the myth of “mass revolution” to a political level, the more it tended to corroborate the nation’s perplexing discomfiture in bidding farewell to Old China and stepping onto the phase of a rejuvenated China in modern history. Besides that, Japan’s inland encroachment without resistance compounded the cataclysmic issue. In this respect, it was a number of intellectuals outside of the “myth”-vaunting circle that somehow sensed the gravity of and committed to paper the wretched historical reality that bogged down the country. Quite an array of work in the literature of the KMT-controlled area expresses in common, though by vague implication, the disappointment, lament, and reflections about the slow pace of historic progress in modern times. When talking about his magnum opus, The Sons and Daughters of a Plutocrat (Caizhu de er nü men), Lu Ling clearly stated: “What I have reviewed, criticized, and affirmed is the several material and spiritual worlds of Chinese intellectuals. This involves the complex life of China, in which lies the great stormy landscape of a war for the nation’s liberation” (Lu Ling’s inscription to The Sons and Daughters of a Plutocrat ). And to explore the worlds of Chinese intellectuals is to answer “in the current life, in this world, what is most precious that should be affirmed” (Liu Ling’s inscription to The Sons and Daughters of a Plutocrat ).10 Indeed, Chinese intellectuals were by-products of the modern history, but also a resilient force for setting modern history afoot and promote the new culture. Their odyssey from the commencement of the May Fourth Movement to finding outlets in modern times is a touchstone of our historical progress. It is from the reciprocal relationships between intellectuals and history, between intellectuals and society, that Ba Jin felt the chills of the long wintry night shrouding the nation, and Lu Ling experienced the sorrow of “calling with high-held soul” but getting a quite muted response. The plight facing and ways out for genuine intellectuals, for individuality, for science and knowledge themselves in China constituted ubiquitous subjects of intellectuals’ self-reflection (also their social and historical reflections) that were tried in the literary works of the KMT-controlled areas. In it, if the Sha Tings saw an opportunity for national transformation during the War of Resistance, then the Ba Jins saw the historical destruction of the erstwhile illustrious values of the May Fourth Movement in petty scholars’ vain strivings to survive the cold night, the annihilation of their individuality, humanity, and historical 10

A two-part novel by Lu Ling in 1945. Lu Ling (1923–1994), penname of Xu Sixing, is a leading writer of the “July School,” initiated by Hu Feng (1902–1985) with his literary journals of July (1935–1941) and Hope.

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value as intellectuals themselves. From Lin Tong in The Teacher of All Ages (Wanshi Shibiao)11 to Li Zhusun in A Wintry Year (Sui Han Tu),12 from Shusheng and her husband in Cold Nights (Hanye, Ba Jin, 1947) to Jiang Chunzu under the pen of Lu Ling, although they once audaciously “called with their high-held souls,” they all wind up lost “with no way out,” and “do not know where to go”; although “only when the year grows cold do we see the grit of pines and cypresses,” however, “the night has been really long and cold.” For all their lofty aims, it is possible, however, that if this society would not budge an inch, neither could they achieve their ambitions. Twenty years had elapsed between the May Fourth Movement and the War of Resistance. Shusheng, as good as a soul sister of the obsolescent Zijun, is relinquished by the myth, and serves as a foil to Jiang Chunzu, who, epitomizing the last generation of the wealthy family’s unfilial sons, relinquishes the myth. Thereupon, they come around to find themselves face-to-face with the same iron house; even if the original iron house fell, there cropped up another new one. They land up the same way, facing their own deaths alone and chewing on the same portion of bitterness for being the “awakened”; or, at least, their authors did. Such an anguished lament is conveyed in Cold Nights , “The Fourth Ward” (Disi bingshi, Ba Jin, 1945), A Wintry Year , and The Sons and Daughters of a Plutocrat ; in a sense, if put together with Xiao Hong’s Tales of Hulan River, they make a heavyweight saga with their serious reflections on the history, people in the history, and the fate of the “Young China.” What these works describe of the past, present, and future of China, about the Chinese way of life and its roots, and about where the inertia of Chinese history lay, happen to be the missing aspects and perspectives that had been concealed by political mythologies. It is from these descriptions that we read the fate of women. It is also true, though, even for those “awakened,” “humanity,” “individuality,” and the “Young China” had yet to find a way out in a history stuck in impasses. Given this, then what might be said of the women who were part of them? Of course, according to mainstream ideological mythology, a broad road stretched out for women to follow. This was what Yu Ru wrote in her novella, “The Remote Love” (Yaoyuan de ai). It tells how a woman embarks on this road bright with sunshine, that is, a road on which she could “contribute herself wholeheartedly to the nation” (Mao Dun) and give up or even despise her own individuality. It is undeniable that there were indeed hundreds and thousands of such women in the social reality of that time, but it does not belie the fact that in the prevailing notions at the time, individualists and women, and their happiness as well, were not compatible with the future of the groups. It is not until Luo Weina time and time again purges her original self of personality and a feminine stance that she gains admittance to the myth narrative and 11 The four-act play by playwright, Zhang Junxiang (1910–1996), in the penname of Yuan Jun, in 1943. 12

The four-act play by playwright, Chen Baichen in 1946.

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becomes a heroine who “catches up with the main trend of the times” and “strides” on the road (Mao Dun, “About ‘The Remote Love’”). It is hard to say whether this is women’s victory or their defeat, whether it is a smooth road or rather an impasse for women. To answer these questions, counterevidence may be found in women’s fate under the clear sky in the liberated area.13 13.1.2

The Goodness of the Asian Mode of Production

As a social territory antithetical to the KMT-controlled area, the liberated area of communists was regarded as a country of light. It is probably safe to say that in China’s dark moment of juxtaposed crises of social progression and national safety, the liberated areas epitomized an increasingly important, both politically and economically, historical solution unique to China at that time. The new revolutionary regime created a new society that was completely different from the orders of the dynastic emperors and bureaucratic comprador groups of the past, a society built on new land proprietorship and new system of ownership, one of new class relations and new institutions such as the family with new parent–child and male–female relations, a new type of rural society. However, for all intents and purposes, it never created a new civilization marking a sharp departure from that of the Old China. It never brought changes in the structure of the Asian-style rural world or in any aspects of its source of energy, resources, and mechanical means of production, but only mobilized its agricultural productivity by means of transforming the political power structure and the individual–society relation to the best of the limited natural geographical conditions and specific lifestyles. If people can pronounce the biggest evil done by the bureaucratic comprador government in history to be the extinction of the vital force of society, then we cannot keep silent about the historical good done by the new social order established by the Communist Party in the countryside because it created sound and solid conditions for the nation to survive the crises. Similarly, by our tacit agreement, whereas the practical and ideological power structures of the KMT-ruled area thwarted women as a gender group in their attempt to emerge in the historical and cultural realms, land reforms in the liberated areas and the politics of annihilating feudal powers in the countryside had salvaged the Chinese people by granting them legal rights, and by doing so, given women an opportunity to stand up as equals. Just as the cultural revamping during the May Fourth Movement inevitably drew on women as a key force to deconstruct the feudal patriarchal structure, so the government of the liberated areas inevitably relied on communities that used to be suppressed, which held the status of slaves and among which women were at the bottom, to rebuild a new rural social system. In the modern history of China, there were two times that the issue of women’s emancipation took on practical significance for the entire society, not just for 13 Yu Ru’s debut work completed in 1942. Yu Ru (1921–), penname of Qian Yuru, is a renowned female journalist and editor from Zhejiang.

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women themselves: once in the May Fourth Movement, and the other in the Liberated Area. Yet, as for the biggest difference from the May Fourth era, women’s liberation in the liberated areas, for the first time in history, affirmed men and women’s equal social status in the broader respects of politics and economy, not just within cultural psychology. Also, for the first time in history, women rose to the same status as men in terms of their economic rights and political-social value. From encouraging women to leave kitchens to work in the fields to equal pay for equal work for both men and women, from advocating freedom of love and marriage to the establishment of women’s working associations and various organizations pertaining to women’s work, equality between men and women had practically become part of the new social order in the liberated areas and been institutionalized to play a major part in the social entity. It is such an institution, or rather institutionalized equal relations between men and women, that gave rise to the way we women live today. Since the patriarchal edifice of feudal emperors started to tip in the Opium War and Qiu Jin and other female heroes came on the scene, Chinese women had, for the first time in thousands of years, chucked off their tragic fate of being killed and eaten. Finally, they no longer took it as their kismet to be economically exploited and personally abused by others and unleashed themselves from Sister Xianglin’s destiny of freezing to death on streets and being lashed and carried under protest to hellfire and brimstones or being sold like livestock by the family of their fathers and brothers and bonded in marital rape and lifelong enslavement and insult. They were emancipated. It is no wonder that while Xiao Hong wrote about the Child Bride being offered in witchcraft by her mother-in-law and the “unnamable unconscious murderer legion” (wuzhuming wuyishi sharen tuan) of onlookers as a sacrifice to ghosts in the small county of Hulan, writers in the liberated area were describing the life of women, always rejoicing in sunshine and rising again under the clear sky of the liberated areas. The rural female figures best epitomize the tremendous changes in the liberated areas in people’s life, body, and soul. Numerous excellent literary works of this period, such as Kong Jue’s The Sufferers (Shouku Ren),14 the long-running musical The White-haired Girl , Zhao Shuli’s “Young Erhei’s Wedding” (Xiao’erhei jiehun),15 Ruan Zhangjing’s Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (Wang Gui he Li Xiangxiang ),16

14 A collection of short stories, published in 1947, by Kong Jue (1914–1966), penname of Zheng Zhiwan, writer from Suzhou, Jiangsu, who took suicide in the Cultural Revolution. 15 A short story, later adapted to popular movie and operas, authored by Zhao Shuli (1906–1970), popular novelist from Shanxi, who was persecuted to death in the Cultural Revolution. 16 A 1946 long narrative poem written by Li Ji (1922–1980), poet from Henan. There should be an error here with the authorship in the text. Ruan Zhangjing (1914–) wrote another famous long poem in the same year of 1946, The Water of Zhanghe River, Zhanghe shui.

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and Sun Li’s “Lotus Creek” (Hehua dian),17 all drew on this theme, to a greater or lesser degree, and recorded from this perspective the great changes that took place in the physical and spiritual life of the people in the liberated areas. Thus, a third type of working women character appeared on the literary scene, in addition to the wretched benumbed woman in the archetypes of Sister Xianglin and the heroic Mother-Earth-like women represented by the “slave mothers,” that is, Xi’er (White-haired Girl), Xiaoqin (“Young Erhei’s Wedding”), and the women in “Lotus Creek.” This new image is imbued with a brand-new view of women: women personify the new values the society exalts (political consciousness of class oppression, anti-feudalism, and the life experience of having gone through much bitterness and having a deep class hatred), embody a new peasant morality of being industrious, rustic, and full of rebellious spirit, incarnate new feminine beauty (persevering, lively and gentle, implicit in emotion) and are even new icons for being sexy (healthy body but not without femininity). These remained for a long time the norms for the image of beautiful women in rural areas. However, if viewed from another perspective, some more subtle aspects of women’s lives seem to have been overlooked in such a cultural proposition for women’s liberation in the liberated areas, aspects such as female selfhood, women’s spiritual freedom, and relevance of marriage that had once been dealt with from the onset of the May Fourth Movement. The May Fourth women commenced their striving for the liberation of individuality, self-will, and self-worth by breaking out of the family and pursuing freedom in love; this trajectory of liberation came to its end with the moot issue of Nora’s post-departure economic problem. On the side of women in the liberated areas, they started with economic autonomy warranted by the new institution, freed from the fate of being victims of physical abuse, and arrived at their destination of free love. In a sense, women in the liberated areas were much luckier in their life than the May Fourth female intellectuals. They did not have to face the latter’s dilemma of either giving in or dying for being unable to live on their own economically. But on the other hand, they also fell short of the height of the May Fourth female as Subjects in spiritual and psychological dimensions. They found no word to tell or doubt whether they had achieved the consummation that they craved as females after they gained freedom in love and marriage. In a certain sense, the liberated area’s literature, on the whole, took economic autonomy and freedom of love as the ultimate ending of women’s liberation. A woman who was given social values equal to men’s, freed herself of the marriage arranged by her parents and family, and won love by her own choice; then this was the summit of a new woman’s happiness. This may very 17 A representative work of Sun Li (1913–2002), which was published in 1945 and is well-known as a “poetic fiction,” influencing a group of writers who are named as the “lotus creek school.” Sun Li is the penname of Sun Shuxun, famous writer and essayist from Hebei.

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well indeed be true. But the problem is that such an omnipresent ending in the literature, being too perfectly culminated, most likely negates other possibilities of imperfection. It may not be accidental that in the liberated area’s literature, women’s liberation was mostly dealt with by male writers, and it was even delivered with a certain narrative trope—as to where the story of women’s liberation begins and where it ends, it is entirely up to the male masters to decide and arrange the endings for women like Sister Xianglin or Xi’er; it is not something the women have the freedom to choose. Taking The WhiteHaired Girl as an example, the entire plot and character arrangement largely retain the gender trope of traditional male-centered folktales: Xi’er, serving the female role’s function in the plot, remains an Object of moral worth that the hero and the villain, the good and the evil, compete for. She was snatched by the villain landlord and returned to the man she loves with some godly intervention. After all, it is none but the perpetrator and the salvager, or the social classes they respectively represent, that are the real Subjects, the real hands behind the action of the narrative, and the real factors determining the ending. Given Xi’er’s image as a rebel, she largely retains ancient literature’s traditional virtues for women, namely, loyalty to the male. In the course of modifying Xi’er’s image in later adaptations, the increasingly resistant character is directly proportionate to the increasing loyalty in her. Obviously, it aims to strengthen a rural woman’s beauty in resisting the evil by removing the unfaithful elements (such as revising the text to delete Xi’er’s fantasy for Huang Shiren, etc.) in the original. Granted, if Xi’er really holds any illusions about Huang Shiren, then not only will her charm to be greatly reduced, but probably her salvation by Dachun, who finally joins the Communist Party, would also have subtextual meanings, such as salvaging a depraved woman. Although Xi’er’s loyalty does not specifically refer to her physical chastity, it is a kind of generalized loyalty that is so much beautified and emphasized that we can only reduce it to the male-centered aesthetic standard and the male-centered point of view in writing. Hereupon, we at least have a glimpse of the imperfection in the narratology of women’s liberation in the liberated areas. That is, women had not yet gained the right to speak for themselves. To put it in terms of discourse, they either leave the story of their liberation and turn it over to others—male writers—or tell it by imitating the male voice; they seldom use their own point of view and language, neither do they know how to, or they simply have no point of view or language of their own at all. This is extremely disproportionate to the elevated status of liberated women in the liberated areas. It leads to broader issues: why had women gotten economic rights but not the right to speak, and why were they provided with economic rights after all? These issues must provoke us into rethinking women’s liberation in the new society of the liberated areas, for it laid the foundation for the fate of women today.

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13.1.3

Genderless Gender

Today, in order to make sense of this gender equality system, and to understand the nature and range of effect of women’s liberation, we cannot ignore an intrinsic factor that was rooted in the depth of the specific civilization and environment, that is, the liberated areas were hard up against meager crop production, large tracts of wasteland, limited human resources, outmoded forms of agricultural production, and various items of public spending other than what was necessary in order to provide for themselves. Under such specific circumstances, women were found to be more than just the opposite of rural rulers, but also recognized as a labor reserve for potential productivity. They were a huge, idle labor force of much avail to the rural society that struggled desperately for subsistence. Needless to say, mobilizing a labor force to the best of available human resources, including women’s labor, is a sine qua non of the Asian production and economy itself. Only by reclaiming wasteland for farming and increasing human resource inputs could they galvanize the vitality of this production method. In this sense, whether it was the liberated areas’ agitprop to encourage women to participate in mass production, or its policy of equal pay for equal work, or its subsequent institutionalization of equal rights and marital autonomy between men and women, they were all political strategies that were deployed to tackle the hidden needs of agricultural production. Another factor that cannot be ignored in understanding women’s liberation in the liberated areas is the particularities of the social structure, especially those of the power structure. The new government removed the original discrepancy between rich and poor, obliterated the polarization of power in society and family, and instead, established a social order based on equality. For example, besides the policy of distributing land on equal terms, family was something else that reflected the order of equal rights. With the changes in the division of labor to wipe out the archaic men-tilling-andfarming-and-women-spinning-and-weaving mode of production, individual workers—without reference to gender—instead of families, became the basic unit of prime human resource for agricultural production, the building blocks of the society, which meant that they were attached to society and enjoyed the rights provided in the same measure to the basic unit they served in society. In other words, family was no longer the crux of the original network in social politics and economic and power structures, as it was under the rule of dynastic empires. On the contrary, every worker was member of the society, directly allegiant to a regime that represented the common interests of all members of the society. Even a woman or a child no longer belonged to the society through the intermediary of their family, parents, or husband. As a result, a non-discriminatory and equality-based power structure of subordination came into being, in which no one should be denied equal rights, whether it was an individual versus the group or the people versus the administration.

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However, a failure in the virtuous new power order is that to represent the common interests of all members of society, it only attained its egalitarianist goal by forcibly eliminating individual differences. Non-discrimination or nondifferentiation was all but the essence of this power structure. However, as a matter of fact, when it comes to land reform, or stratification of social classes, or more hidden issues of cultural psychology or women’s emancipation, it was impossible not to differentiate in any event. Therefore, the undifferentiated configuration of power turned out to be another form of authoritarian power, since when a governance rubbed out individual differences in dimensions of material possession rights, though for the purpose of keeping with the common interests shared by the majority, by the oppressed and the lower classes, it would be reduced to an authoritarian regime in essence. From this perspective, the ideological transformation of the intellectuals in the liberated areas was in essence a movement to eliminate cultural differences. As it turns out, the reformed intellectuals joined the rural masses to pledge allegiance to the jurisdiction of this social and cultural power structure configured in an indiscriminate and equal manner. Given the above analyses, the equality between men and women actualized in the liberated areas proceeded from two aspects: it sprang from the demand of the means of production on the one hand, and on the other, the demand for a new social order. And the “equality between men and women” is, to a large extent, a case in point to give a gender-related expression to individuals’ unified subordination to the masses, and people’s unified subordination to a regime that stood for the common interests of the whole society, and this way of uniform subjection was achieved by eliminating differences among individuals and groups. In another sense, equality between men and women was almost a synonym for no distinction or no gender. As such, “women’s liberation” became a catch phrase of putatively simplistic connotations, which only meant women’s rising from a status lower than that of men to the same status as men, and thus it seemed as if the problem of gender oppression, the woman problem, had been solved. However, as we read in the literature of this period, this movement of “women’s liberation” that seemed to have been achieved without reference to the word, gender, was no gender-based liberation at all. The consequence of flinching from the issue of gender could only lead to the continuation of the male viewpoint and male standpoint, i.e., male subjectivity—men’s consciousness of being masters—that continued to play the leading role in the cultural psychological scene, even though women had been promised equal social status and equal economic rights with men. This “incomplete liberation” of women may be extraordinarily illustrative that the new order was none other than another configuration of authoritative power that sought to establish an undifferentiated and equal social order by ironing out differences in society. On the one hand, it uprooted the old rule that used to bring evil to the people and hinder the progress of productive forces, and on the other, it eradicated centrifugal forces of any kind by eliminating all kinds of difference. This includes the difference between the rich

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and the poor, between the intellectual and rustic people, between an individual and the collective, between the upper and lower classes, and even the intrinsic distinctions between men and women, and stamped out attempts at rebellion and suspicion, so as to consolidate the basis for the new order; even the primeval and bottommost gender-based centrifugal force was no exception. In the face of this power structure, women, individualists and individuals, and whoever was inclined to defend their individual differences and resist the despotism of collective totality, were bound to turn themselves up as sacrifices. 13.1.4

Accomplices Between Feminists and Individualists

Whether in the KMT-controlled area or the liberated area, women as a gender group more often than not lay outside the ambit of concepts and vocabulary of dominant ideologies. The literatures of the KMT-ruled area and the liberated area, in spite of their disparate themes and distinct literary styles and forms, had one thing in common. That is, they both implicitly admired and idolized a certain collective, totalistic authority, and both virtually repelled and suppressed all that were endowed with a centrifugal force, deviated from and were unable to become part of the monolithic ruling entity, the rule of the masses. Thus, things like individual existence, signification of individuality, counter-popularism, non-collectivist discourse, gender consciousness, along with their ideological expressions such as anti-feudal individual liberation, independence of art, humanitarian concepts and female discourse, etc., all faded en masse to the edges or background of the dominant culture. It may be due to their similar situations of being marginalized during this period that some close link developed between women’s female ipseity and individualists’ ipseity, including the intellectuals’ ipseity. This link was by no means natural and inherent, but rather a derivative of historical and ideological necessity. In modern history, the liberation of women and the liberation of individuality were coincidentally added to the historical agenda together, and the notion of individuality even parented women’s gender awareness. Both femaleness (nüxing ) and individuality (gexing ) had origin in the same historical ideology, which can also be said that feminists and individualists were both born antagonists to the traditional feudal unitary order, and both empowered to deconstruct the unity of this ruling order. It is no wonder that in the third decade after the May Fourth era, female issue and individuality were again uttered together in the same breath, because at this time, women’s imperiled female self was at hazard of being squeezed out of discourse and could only hole up in the concept of individuality as its last shelter. Truly, it is only in the KMT-controlled area that you can discern obscure traces of female figures, the female gaze, or female-related themes in those genres of literature on personal fate, personal experience, or personal memories. In a sense, Cold Nights is such a work that deals with a theme of individuality and female issue combined in one. However, what was more important at this historical juncture was that since women and individualists were obviously ruled out of the dominant

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ideology, the fact that they converged and joined hands congealed to a deconstructive perspective of history, which in turn stood out in the mist as the third signpost on the road along which modern Chinese women developed. It was to anatomize history and society and criticize slavery and ruling power from the perspective of females. This point is perceptible in Xiao Hong’s works, as discussed above. Almost contemporaneous to her, in the liberated area, in a virtually different country, Ding Ling’s “Reflections on March Eighth” displayed the same tendency: to anatomize reality with the confluence of both her intellectual self-conscience and female sensitivity. It points out, like in Xiao Hong’s work, that the residue of old history stuck like a limpet to the revolutionary camp and remained fully intact in the form of gender slavery. Women of modern Chinese tradition had matured from daughterhood to womanhood, and after experiencing the gloom of a period of despair, they finally came to the third milestone in developing their female selves in alliance with the conceptual individuality, i.e., to reflect on male-centered history. Combined, they consisted of a phenomenal deconstructive force that would sooner or later uncover mankind’s history of ruling/ruled, repressing/repressed since its inception. However, “individualism” itself was also in jeopardy in this era. In the era of national crisis, individuals’ survival seemed to be insignificant on the one hand, and paradoxically, very important on the other. It was all in a day’s work to have a multitude of fictions about individuals and their personal lot. But it is worth noting that these fictional individuals were almost all bereft of the “present.” Among them, there were no heroes of the age, nor villains of the age, no philosophers of the age nor lovers of the age, and even the good old love was also dropped. There were only those who personified the continuity of the past: Shusheng in Cold Nights faces a familiar can of worms, i.e., smothering family, lifeless love and boredom and loneliness; writers such as Luo Binji, Shi Tuo,18 Jin Yi,19 Shen Congwen,20 etc., if for a period of time staying outside of the political mythology of the time, could only justify their existence as individuals by delivering recollections of their life experience and retrospectives of their psychological and spiritual ontogenesis in a graceful and melancholy tone of nostalgia. What they did in their work was to redeem individualism by giving a eulogy for the past. That is, they tried to retrieve the significations of “humanity” and “individuality” from their memory and psyche ground by the chugging wheel of a dehumanized ruling structure that was strengthened under the shadow of national crisis. This may be a necessary choice made by the intellectuals, the centrifugal force in history, who were 18 Shi Tuo (1910–1988), penname of Wang Changjian, also wrote in the name of Lu Fen, modern novelist, script writer, and editor from Henan. 19 Jin Yi (1909–1959), penname of Zhang Fangxu, modern prose writer and editor from Tianjin. 20

Shen Congwen (1902–1988) or romanized Shen Ts’ung-wen, penname of Shen Yuehuan, famous modern writer from Phoenix County, Hunan, best known for his popular prose.

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bound to be cast into the repressed stratum by history and fall between cracks in the social structure of colonial China. You might as well call these people the last group of individualists in the history of modern Chinese literature, or more precisely the last group of modern describers of individualists. After them, individualists and an individualistic tradition with centrifugal force ceased to be a tradition. With them were the burgeoning feminists, and their deconstruction of history and critique of the power structure also faded away with the expiration of this alleged tradition. The Chinese women were liberated, or “partially liberated,” but never developed into a force for cultural and historical examination and reflection, just as the Chinese intellectuals never restored the ability to decode the collective myth of the masses. Maybe, this remains a regret in history.

13.2

Female---Woman---Feminine Discourse 13.2.1

Immurement and Freedom

Both in the KMT-controlled Areas and in the Liberated Areas, the number of outstanding female literary figures was not small in this period, but the feminist voice for their own selves almost passed into silence there, although this voice had barely become audible in the preceding ten years. At the same time in the literary world of the occupied region, however, a considerable number of women writers, who lived arduously under the power of armed Japanese invaders, came to the fore. Among them were Zhang Ailing and Su Qing, the two most gifted female writers in the history of modern literature. With them also emerged a large number of sophisticated works of women’s literature, some of which still attract large crowds of readers today. If it is a tenable argument in the preceding section that the KMT-ruled areas and the liberated areas were in no cultural condition to produce excellent works, then it is not astounding that modern Chinese literature could have its third zenith of female literary creations in the occupied areas under the rule of the Japanese invaders. If we boil down the reasons, it can be attributed to the following factors: The first reason was because of the peculiarity about the Japanese invaders’ cultural occupation. Like its military occupation, the Japanese invaders could only govern the colony’s culture with selected foci to hold in leash as precautions against public disobedience. The selected foci naturally referred to the so-called “regular warfare” on the cultural front, such as seizing and controlling all kinds of important cultural institutions, including schools, radio stations, and major newspapers, and of course, prohibiting all talks of antiJapanese and patriotic topics or other topics related to the nation’s destiny and social affairs. Conceivably, the result was that they violently intervened in what had prevailed in open forums since the 1930s, such topics as nationality, politics, social revolution, and the masses; they nipped them in the bud as

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venomously as they closed down a school that refused to teach Japanese. Such cultural “regular warfare” staged by the Japanese suppressed and choked off all prevailing ideologies concerning China’s political future that once led mainstream symposia in the 1930s: whether it was the political narrative schema for social revolutions that aimed to overthrow the political father, or the image of the awakening masses, or the realist tradition of the 1930s that focused on the changes of social life or the “obsession with China” (ganshi youguo).21 They had to retreat from the battlefield of dominant discourse in occupied areas, together with patriotism, resistance to Japanese, and national consciousness. However, the farthest that the Japanese “regular warfare” could get to was only a number of forbidden zones they could regulate, which meant that the Japanese had not established an all-round cultural hegemony in the occupied areas. Although these cultural invaders attempted to set up an invaders’ discourse, by promoting the use of Japanese language and SinoJapanese goodwill literature in the bargain, to enforce their invasive power, obviously, only a handful of Japanese soldiers and traitorous Chinese scholars could hardly prop up such an ambition. Thereupon, in this casual interval during the full-scale hot war between the two countries, an uncanny typhooncenter-like calm gave a certain measure of freedom to literary creations in some prison of the occupied areas. As those subjects pertaining the masses, the nation, the state’s future, and social revolution were kept out on the other side of the prison bars by the Japanese police, writers inside the prison, nevertheless, were left with full liberty to write on all remaining subjects other than these, including individuality, self, love, and sexual relations. Left in the narrow gap between the forbidden state-related narratives and the traitors’ literature, with not much in their survival kit, writers in the enemy-occupied areas fortuitously found a feeble thread of life by clutching merely at the straw of discourse. This interspace was barely wide enough to bear their “unbearable lightness of being” under the duress of immurement. This kind of fettered dancing in the confinement of inaction was imbued with an extraordinary creativity and charm, simply because it had naturally flown out of the paradox of their ineffable hope and hopelessness of life. If such a sense of hopelessness and uncertainty about life was rampant among people in the enemy-occupied areas, then women there had an additional layer of uncertainty about their female destiny. This is another important reason for the evolvement of female literature in the enemy-occupied areas. For the female self that had always been on the fringe of society since the 1930s and gradually lapsed into silence after the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the interspace of discourse that was left by Japanese cultural aggression and that the female found herself intercalated in by chance was indeed a kind 21 The controversial phrase is used by the famous Chinese literature scholar, C. T. Hsia to describe the patriotic sentiment of modern Chinese writers in his monograph, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1971. C. T. Hsia. Xia Zhiqing (1921–2013) or Hsia Chih-tsing, abbr. C. T. Hsia, a Chinese-American scholar of Chinese history of literature, Professor Emeritus of Chinese with Columbia University.

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of freedom in prison. As far as freedom is concerned, the female writers in the enemy-occupied areas were no longer hemmed in by the dominant ideology’s norms and requirements for femininity in the name of the state, the masses, and national subjectivity. They stepped into a godless time, a time of neither a gendered god nor the deified masses, and the shrines of the past for the ruling values and mores had become mottled and crumbled between intermeshing despairs and hopes. Yet it was also a time of disorder that they entered, for, except for the disarray under the rule of the invaders, traditional gender roles that used to be normalized by urbanity had lost its formidable sway and ceased to be the order. It might be easy to note that female writers in the occupied areas were seldom “someone’s wife” like the female writers in the May Fourth era or in 1930s. So, they could give ample rein to their writing and had no scruples about describing themselves or describing other women or men in the eyes of women. Speaking of the metaphor of prison, it is obvious that the act of writing about themselves necessarily had something to do with their being forbidden to write about society. They did not even have the options that were splayed before Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, and Xie Bingying, and had nowhere to drown their female bodies. They were nearly forced, at gunpoint, into their female standing; it was not without pain for them to face the ordeal for which they were not given any choice, but the truth of this inevitable ordeal turned to lift their art to one of beauty and one of sober-mindedness and open-mindedness in their self-knowledge. Secondly, another issue to take note of when considering the development of female literature in the enemy-occupied areas is a new factor lying deep in the cultural-psychological structure. Since the War of Resistance, the bulk of the principal strength of the new culture camp had transferred to the liberated areas or the KMT-controlled areas, and the writers who remained in the cultural circle of the occupied zone were the fourth and fifth generations of modern writers, a hybrid of traditional Chinese and Western cultures. They were no longer overshadowed by the giant figure of the new culture father or brother in front of them, neither were they shaped in conformity with the newculture-dominant tradition established and inherited by the first, second, and even third generations of writers. They seemed to be a brand-new generation of writers who were born in prison. They had no sense of the father/brother consciousness, and being imprisoned, they had never thought of or assumed the dominant social and cultural paradigms. Therefore, their imagination and creative texts had never been subject to influence of the overwhelming image of the father or brother that lay far beyond their view when they peeped out between the bars. In addition, the mainstream ideology of the 1930s, along with its opponents, also shifted the battlefield to the liberated areas or the KMT-controlled areas after the beginning of the War of Resistance. Many of the erstwhile popular beaux idéals of literary creation or convention prevailing in the literary world, from the social anatomy school to rural literature even to works that bore traces of proletarians’ revolutionary literature, all lost their mainstay force and support of public opinion as well. In such a cultural climate,

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nevertheless, some non-classical literary conceptions and paradigms that used to be marginalized, or were introduced later into China, got retained as chips off old blocks. In this specific cultural and psychological context, what counted most to this generation of writers in prison was far less the sense of social responsibility with the father and brother generation for the content that they produced than a heart for artistic play. In other words, it is no longer what to say, but how to say it, or how to “express what was not to say,” that really mattered. It is not whether what was said was important or not, but whether it was implicitly delivered, or whether “the texts were definite, but the subtexts were infinite,” that mattered much to them, even if it was mere trivialities that they wrote. It is no wonder that some of the works by the writers in the enemy-occupied areas render a flavor of modernist work. No matter whether they were influenced by Western modernist literature or not, their cultural backdrop was somewhat akin to that of the latter: the duress of war, uncertainty and hopelessness about the future, the diminishing influence of the stalwart father and brother, the vanishing glory of the classic and deified tradition, and lonely masked urbanites living a cold life. Women writers in the enemy-occupied areas were among such a group of fatherless and brotherless urbanites who sought freedom in a prison. For the first time, they coined their own vocabulary, like lexicons of their shackled dancing, that had a chance to develop a viable and communicable glossary. This is because people in this cultural landscape which was marked at the time by the absence of fathers and brothers had become accustomed to terms and various unknown expressions that were distinct from the customs of the new literature. Due to the combined effect of various specific factors of cultural mentality, women writers in the occupied areas helped promote the female tradition, in its progression from daughterhood to womanhood, in modern literary history to a new height that women writers in the KMT-controlled areas or the liberated areas could not possibly arrive at. Withal, they differentiated themselves from Xiao Hong, who also contributed to promoting the daughter-to-woman tradition, but in a different way: with Xiao Hong, the female experience was inhibited, even hindered, by the powerful mainstream ideological discourse, so she could only distill her female spiritual stance or perspective in symbolic forms; yet her resort to female spirituality could call social reality and history in question, but it could not provide Xiao Hong with any means to survive the reality. However, it seems that the reverse was true with female writers in the enemy-occupied area, especially those in Peking. Though confined in immurement, they had nigh forgone all the foregoing pressures and taboos inflicted upon them. There, the ideological straightjackets that the new literature used to put on women to bundle up their bodies and hearts were removed, and what female writers unfolded to readers was female experience stripped of ideological standardization. We may safely say that since the inception of the daughterhood motif in modern literary history, we have never seen such a brave portrayal of naked femininity and masculinity, and the complicated and

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inextricable sex relations as theirs. Not even in Bai Wei’s authentic experience that cut her to the heart or in “Ms. Sophia’s Diary.” We may as well observe the significance of the female writers’ creations in the occupied areas to the female tradition in several respects. 13.2.2

End to the Phase of “Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman”

If the rebellious daughters, having been left on their own by protective ideologies since the 1930s, started to grow into female adulthood, then the characters described by women writers in the enemy-occupied areas, mostly sophisticated women, take a further step forward towards maturation. The difference between them, if not the gap between the age of majority and maturation, is at least the distinction between innocence and sophistication. Zhang Ailing’s Bai Liusu and other characters from her “The Gold Cangue” (Jinsuo ji, 1943) and “Aloeswood Incense” (Chenxiang xie, 1943) all demonstrate a kind of sobriety that was unseen in fictional female figures before. For one thing, they remain sober-minded about their own situation: they know where they are positioned and how they are evaluated in social relations and can also perceive what men want of them. For another, they keep a cool head about their own purposes in life, crystal clear about by what means they can live a decent life, and what pains they must take to get through it. Therefore, Zhang Ailing’s love stories are not so much about “affection” as about gender battles in which men and women deploy strategies of competition; some of them end in crushing defeat, while others win by a fluke.22 The protagonist in Su Qing’s short story “Moth” obviously showcases this sobriety of character; only it is not reified in actions that distinctively feature Liusu (including psychological actions), but in her speech acts, such as the heroine’s inner monologue with centrifugal subtext interlaid in the dialogue. Obviously, these matured, fully fledged, and even worldly wise female figures derive from the authors’ own nature of sober nature. This is evident in certain articles written by Zhang Ailing and Su Qing, which evince that their perception of male-centered society went beyond the dimensions of “sheer sensuality” (chun rougan) or “hierarchy of power,” and their outlook on women’s living conditions was also not confined to expressing resentment and hatred over women’s situation of being oppressed, bullied, and betrayed. They had passed their gender’s “frailty” phase, grown into women who were no longer tagged with epithets of the weaker or victims, serfs to be salvaged, or dependents waiting for handouts. Women to the core and grown into capable and talented 22 Zhang Ailing is acclaimed as the greatest modern woman novelist in the 1940s, who migrated to the United States after 1949 and disappeared from mainland China readers’ view until the 1980s, when she emerged above the surface of history as a surprise rediscovery (see Dai Jinhua’s postscript) and many of her novels have been adapted to popular films. Bai Liusu is the leading character in her most renowned novella, “Love in a Fallen City,” Qingcheng zhi lian, which was published in 1943, the same year as her other important debut works, “The Gold Cangue,” and “Aloeswood Incense.”

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women, they gained a firm foothold in the male world through their own identity. Such a woman was not disposed to refrain from men, but instead, she knew men better, understood herself better, on the grounds of being well acquainted with all the turns and twists of gender relationships, inclusive of love, of course, and also knew how to hedge her bets to get on in the world. It is no wonder, therefore, that to draw people’s attention, Su Qing could have audaciously tampered with an ancient adage, while she herself felt imperturbably at ease. She wrote that “to feed on men is women’s great desire,”23 and on a par with her, Zhang Ailing also felt it easy to ridicule and satirize men’s folly and women’s infirmity in her essay “Scandals about Women” from her essay collection Written on Water (Liuyan, 1943). Neither is it a surprise that “Love in a Fallen City,” “The Gold Cangue,” and “Moth” all aptly illustrate an attribute of “a flying moth” that darts into the fire, seeking light and its own doom in the bargain. Plots of such undauntable acts are not supposed to be conducted by the cowardly or the dejected, but only likely by women who had freed themselves from overpowering ideologies and made a clean breast of themselves in self-definition. This kind of open-mindedness was rarely seen in Sophia, in Mengke, or in Tragic Life. Although women in the 1930s could be regarded as grown-ups, they were still accustomed to seeking justice from men’s society via the identity of being the underprivileged. For women in occupied areas in the 1940s, however, now that this society was founded on the gender injustice between men and women, they had better do themselves justice by standing up on their hind legs, fair and square—to be a woman, of course. Not to be any longer an empty signifier for others to fill in meaning. This suggested a sense of rebellion, a subtext of social criticism and self-identification as a female community that never got effaced by being a woman. Because the decision to be a woman with clear insight into women and men was by no means a surrender to their gender roles in the dominant ideology of the society. In comparison with those who labeled as “Frailty, thy name is woman,” “silently die” or bear a resentment and plaintively beg for justice, women here took a more positive attitude that mounted stronger resistance to male society, or more assertively, a more vigorous and cogent ideology with which to deconstruct male-centered ideology. 13.2.3

The Inception of Feminine Discourse

Evolving out of the frailty phase, female writers set out to expose women’s gender-based oppression by male-centered society from a completely different dimension: what they unveiled did not just scratch the surface of gender oppression, as what had been brought to light, such as the flesh trade, body tyranny, and other palpable social inequalities, but rather the hidden dimension of inner psychological repression. As the case might be, their new vantage had 23 Su Qing’s manipulation of the famous adage of Confucius, “Eating, drinking, man and woman, wherein lie human’s instinctual desires” (from “Li Yun” of Book of Rites ).

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something to do with the socio-psychological climate of the entire enemyoccupied area that was permeated with unrest, dead silence, and despair. Therefore, symptoms of inner psychological depression tended to manifest morbidity in women’s conducts. They seemed bent on proving by another fact that women’s innermost secrets they closely guarded in male-dominant society did not consist in their tender and sentimental nature or in their frailty and stupor resulting from their nurture, nor in the conflicts they had between their awakened reason and deep emotions or between mother and lover, but rather in implicit or explicit symptoms of psychoses. The mother and daughter in “The Gold Cangue,” Jingui,24 and Changan, are illustrative examples for the latter prototype. Jingui turns from an emulative young woman to a perverse schizoid. She treats the whole world with enmity and hatred; she is equally cruel and even vicious to her own daughter and son. On the other hand, she indulges in a warped self-love bordering on narcissism. The daughter appears to suffer a compulsive fixation to childhood phase: she expends her whole youth on a game of depersonalization, literarily in the Freudian sense, and obtains a certain contentment by rewriting (symbolically repeating) her traumatic experience of childhood. To cite a case for implicit psychosis, the “I” in Ten Years of Marriage is a relevant instance. In her ten years of marriage, her act of eating dirt has developed into a habit and a tactic to maintain her psychological equilibrium as the abused, a mentality of inertia to triumph over her pleasure-principled libido. Such description of women’s psychological abnormality or deformed mentality not only opens up the horizons of artistic expression to portray female life as subject matter, but more importantly, it contains a brand-new, female cultural point of view. Whether or not this is what the writers themselves deliberately pursued does not matter. Only insofar as the artistic effect is concerned, these works did nothing short of rewrite female images in the history of literature. For example, works like “The Gold Cangue” had virtually rewritten the archetype for female “madness.” In the history of literature, madwoman and demon are always regarded as two of the one kind, as epitomized in Rochester’s narration of the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre. The problem of this male chauvinist narration is not that she was mad or not, but that she stopped being a human being just because of her “madness,” which people took for granted. Bereft of speech or as a consequence of aphasia, she is tenably “demonized,” or even supernaturalized or mystified. In this sense, “The Gold Cangue” was conducive to demystifying, to a certain extent, the demonization of the madwoman, for it enabled us to find the subtext of the “madness,” its origin, its manifestations, and even its inevitability in terms of its welded interface with the life of oppressed women. In essence, madness has nothing to do with the value judgments of good and evil, and it is nothing less than human, but only is one of the countless visages of human tragedy, an act 24 Jingui should be the authors’ error for Qiqiao, who is the leading figure in “The Gold Cangue,” and Changan is Qiqiao’s daughter.

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of tragedy that is not presented as cathartic or sublime. In like manner, Ten Years of Marriage rewrote the archetype for a “benumbed” or “submissive” woman to some extent. Unlike the compliant women in “The New Year’s Sacrifice” and “One Life,” the insensibility of “I” in it is not inducive to the ignorance and dullness of an obtuse thickhead of little education, but to an attitude of indifference she adopts. The narrator “I” seems to be an outsider to the character “I,” but her eyes are never dull, and her narration does not display in the least the aphasia in Sister Xianglin’s or Yi’s speech acts. As it turns out, they result in two quite different effects: for the aphasic Sister Xianglin and Yi, the authors put their spokespersons in a male narrator or a narrating bystander, whose whole concern is to make a value judgment in terms of their manifestations of “spirit-numbing” and “resigning themselves to adversity.” This in turn bears on two purports that are not so relevant to women: on the one hand, they remind people of the human-nature-twisting ghosts in society, and on the other hand, they go on bended knees to piteously beg saviors for alms. Yet in Ten Years of Marriage, nevertheless, we find no value judgments; instead, there is only a record of symptoms and epistemological diagnoses of the syndrome of gender thralldom. What it reveals is women’s psychological gambit of self-protection or self-evasion in the form of indifference and numbing “submissiveness” in order to survive in the male-centered feudal-style family. It is true, such a pacifism of defensive regression back to infantile ego, a kind of protective apathy and indifference, to live with the intimidating reality that they cannot change or take flight from, is not even as good as an ideology; it is a kind of passive tactic of psychological retreat to the prenatal zone of comfort.25 But it is precisely what lies in the unconscious of female psyche that acts as the motivation behind the symptoms of spiritnumbing and the necessity for their ploy. To set the works side by side, it is indisputable that what Ten Years of Marriage discloses by shedding light onto the female subconscious is exactly the blind spot in “The New Year’s Sacrifice” and “One Life”—women’s enigmatic experience in history and reality. The rewriting of the two archetypes for women can be said to be the first full-blown rebellion, so to speak, staged by modern Chinese female writers against male-dominant literary conventions, and also a significant contribution to women’s own literary traditions. For the rebellion was staged in the domain where the great male masters had established themselves, and the rewriting was actualized in a domain of literary genre that had already bred tremendous works that were viewed as classics. To look back on the whole history of modern literature, we can find no other proof than this head-on assault the brave female writers unleashed, wittingly or unwittingly, that could better corroborate their full-bloom development. They invented vocabularies 25 The Chinese term for the regression to infantile phase here is tui ying , a phrase that appeared in ancient classics and only gained wide currency in modern literature because of Lu Xun’s famous line, “Exclusivism is prone to foster admiration for the ancient, which inevitably leads to tui ying , regression to the nation’s infantile phase, and in the end, the art naturally declines.”

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in writing their novels that had broken with influential conventions established in male perspectives in the history of literature, and embedded female information into them, via new plots, new perspectives, new narratives, and new methods of expression. Hence an authentic feminist discourse, so to speak, came onto scene. The above two respects feature female writers in the enemy-occupied areas who had acquired an unswerving gender-based self-awareness in the given cultural circle and developed their independent gendered identity in thinking and acts of narrative. It is more often that we come across their inquiries about themselves and their relationships with men, which are more aggressive and greater in depth than their peers of the same gender in the previous two decades. Su Qing’s famous saying about “women’s great desire” is by no means a mere grandstanding remark to grab attention; to say the least, her statement was underpinned by her article that touched upon many important issues about women in the Collection of Select Essays .26 In a certain sense, these articles and works written by women writers in the occupied areas were no less than trailblazers in the jungle of world literature at the time. However, this kind of freedom in prison, after all, was only liable to come to an end when it was blasted together with the prison itself, and the new history started to roll on to obliterate the prison en bloc with the female as a gender group and a gendered subject in it. The generation of the talented women who wrote these works seemed to cease to exist in China for quite some time. The daughter-to-woman tradition that had barely advanced to the crest of its maturity stopped sharp at the moment of the nation’s rebirth, and suddenly disappeared from people’s vision of historical description and even from people’s memory. This flash in the pan seems to be a destiny to Chinese women: their future is historically doomed not to coincide with the future of our nation, as suggested in the meaningful ending of “Love in a Fallen City.” Predestined by kismet, Chinese women simply could not have it both ways.

26 Huan jin ji, Su Qing’s 1944 collection of her better-known essays, including the article “On Women” that contains this famous saying.

CHAPTER 14

Su Qing: Women—“Civilians in the Occupied Areas”

Like the girl in the folktale who unsnarls, behind her back, a crimson tulle bundle sent from an exotic locale, Su Qing appeared in the era’s background, overshadowed by a time soaked in blood and fire, and the bundle she unraveled was the historical and cultural knots that entangled the Lu Yins till their death, the new women’s knots. Su Qing’s Ten Years of Marriage was unequivocally a historical continuation of the “Ten Years of Lu Yin.” It seems as if, lubricated with blood and sacrificed lives, a second door creaked open at the end of the alley, in the historical crevice the May Fourth daughters were caught in, from wherein resonated Su Qing’s distinctive voice. However, Su Qing was no legend of that beautiful, mysterious, nameless crimson-tulle-packageunraveling girl. Her presence in literature provided no gospel to deliver the country from the abyss of misery and neither did it unyoke women from the weight of history. She just filled the blank signifier for woman, a void concept, like an open door for men to pass through, with something that was not yet the signified, but something that was nonetheless actually existing, as if giving a cardboard cutout a real face, a naked and not necessarily beautiful female face. It is in a simple and unadorned, bold and daring female self-statement that she finished her retelling of the male world and the female figment of male imagination. In Su Qing’s world, one cannot find Bingxin’s spring-creek-and-starrynight meekness, or Lu Yin’s pathos of hanging alone in a deserted graveyard. She is no Ding Ling, either. Nor is her work the second movement to the symphony for unshackled wild-hearted women; neither is she some Bai Wei summoning determination to “fight out of the dark pagoda of ghosts” even when flung in the abyss of blood and tears. Su Qing is just a narrator who told stories of females’ deep anguish in her subdued and piquant voice that flowed out of the era’s extremely suffocating trough of low pressure; a narrator © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_14

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who related a kind of almost self-abusive and self-destructive behavior of the female who lived desperately in the dead silence under the repression of men’s symbolic behavior of sexual conquest. And it is exactly such a woman’s selfdestructive narrative that convincingly disintegrated the pervasive images and representations of women deemed essential to male society. This is a version of statement made by women who emerged above the surface of history about their existence below the historic surface.

14.1 Anomalies in the Calamity of War and Fragments of History As the first person to resolve Lu Yin’s knots, it is by no means fortuitous that Su Qing came to light in the occupied area of Shanghai. The unclad bloody rule of foreign invaders and the Japanese “Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere,” like the lethal top of a closed gas chamber arching over China, obliterated all indigenous cultures in bloodshed. Both the thematic male tradition and Chinese culture’s mandate to men were brutally sterilized in a rite of castration. When the orthodox national culture and mainstream male literature were facing abolition, disintegration, and even their demise, the female, who had always struggled to barely keep their heads above water under conventional predicaments of national peril and social crisis, happened to have a chance of dragging out an ignoble and anomalous existence dropped in their lap, just like the patches of wild flowers that bloomed uncannily on the scorched land of Hiroshima after the atomic bombing. For Su Qing, this land was not somewhere that she “was not quite acclimatized to” (Fu Lei1 ). The occupied area, ruled by despotic invaders holding Death’s scythe, turned out to be an enclave insulated from the direct scourge of war, and hence isolated from the rest of the country, much like Camus’ isolated town in the rampant plague; it became a wasteland of no time, no history, and no name. For the people of the occupied area, living in the cells spreading out from the central surveillance tower of the panopticon, freedom meant death, and survival was no more than dragging out a symbolic existence of humiliation. The alien invaders were the existential and powerful Subjects, also “Others” to citizens of the occupied areas, who in turn were reduced to dehumanized Objects whose fate was held in the hands of Others to be ravaged, disregarded, trampled upon, or used. All of this reified, in the form of the national catastrophe, and highlighted the historical verdicts and historical destiny that had landed on women for five thousand years of civilization. “Civilians in the occupied territories” epitomized the existential situation of women/new women/liberated women. This nomenclature signified a category of pacified city dwellers, a type of residents in the occupied areas who, in 1

Fu Lei (1908–1966), the greatest translator of the twentieth century in China and a critic who is well-known for his influential essay on Zhang Ailing in 1944, wherein the quotation can be found in the very beginning.

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line with the stipulations, “lived and worked at peace and with contentment” (anju leye). For them (her), the war was over. They allegedly enjoyed freedom and “the same dignity and rights as nationals of the occupying country.” However, it goes without saying that they were, “as a matter of course,” a populace of “inferior nationality,” or a group of “second-class citizens.” They knew it well that their rights and freedom were bestowed by the occupiers as a favor, and with grace they should be satisfied, suffused with gratitude and contentment with their lot, and know their place and keep to their places without vain hope. The irony is that the bitter experience of the civilians in the occupied territories, the Chinese in the so-called promised land of the Japanese Emperor, was analogous to the historical experience of women as the eternal “Second Sex” in a male-centered democratic society, masqueraded as women’s liberation and equality between men and women. Thus, female literature crept onto the surface of the land, as a nonmainstream marginal culture, and sprouted in the occupied areas, wearing an innocuous and inoffensive look. It is in the interval when mainstream male culture was in the midst of abolition and the repressive force of national and masculinist history was castrated and weakened by an alien rule, in such a moment of stagnation, that Su Qing pushed herself adroitly forward to tell the authentic story of a woman and told it plainly and candidly. And her relating of the real, rather than imagined, circumstances of women’s existence, by all means, not only released female existence from the historical unconscious, but also made a telling metaphor in the new political unconscious and incisively disclosed the living conditions of civilians in the enemy-occupied area. Su Qing’s indulgence, none too soon and none too late, might account for the successes of her emerging out of obscurity and of her well-marketed books, such as The Collection of Select Essays and Ten Years of Marriage, which saw record sell-outs of dozens of editions. Su Qing was “belauded” by people for facing up to women’s existential reality bravely as well as for her plain and unadorned language earmarking feminist discourse for deconstructing history. The Japanese and their puppet regime in the occupied areas, on the other hand, being besieged on all sides, also felt so much on a razor’s edge that they had no time and were unable to censor and recognize such female literature as Su Qing’s to be in any sense rebellious inside their order, nor had they realized its hidden potency and significance as a disruptive force in the society. In the eyes of the self-acclaimed male master/cultural victor Liu Xinhuang, such feminist writings were not anything that could satisfy the criterion of his “spirit of the Chinese people” (chunqiu dayi)2 as he reasoned in his The History of Literature in the Occupied Areas During the Anti-Japanese War,3 in 2 The term is from the book, The Spirit of Chinese People, by Gu Hongming (1857– 1928), or Ku Hung-ming, a prestigious scholar of Chinese study and famous professor in Peking University. 3 Liu Xinhuang (1915–1996), historian of modern Chinese literature, stationed in Taiwan since 1949 till 1996.

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the same tone as in “Biography of the Defectors” (Panchen zhuan) and Ministers Serving Two Dynastic Empires (Erchen Zhuan).4 And this is precisely why and wherefore, as soon as the Japanese occupiers were expelled in 1945, Su Qing was slandered as the “debauched writer” or “sex trafficker” who “was on the side that was even worse than the writers of the “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School” (yuanyang hudie pai)5 in a crusade mounted by the Kuomintang regime that had always shrunk behind in the rear areas and now came to “reclaim the lost territories” and restore their political father’s rule and repressive cultural authority. But one should not dismiss from mind that history had blotted out a fact. That is, Su Qing’s feminist factual narration was not only irrelevant to the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school, but actually the very reverse and deconstruction of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School’s deployment of female images as a mythical female figment of their imagination, or a blank signifier for women as object of men’s desire. Anyhow, Su Qing was finally blotted out. Together with Zhang Ailing and some other female writers in the occupied areas, she passed into the oblivion of history, submerged in a black sea of the historical unconscious by the history of oppression, and vanished from the ink-written literary history. And when Su Qing and other talented female writers rose up once again, through twists and turns, above the historical surface, it was already the new era when China re-entered the world market to join the integration of the world economy and the burgeoning consumer culture helped diminish the pervasive and suppressive mainstream culture with its unique corrosiveness that disintegrated dominant authority. But today, what remains of Su Qing are actually only fragments that can hardly be completely restored to their original and only offer a case of mosaicked parody as proposed by the theory of literary deconstruction. After all, however, in a procession of fictional females from Zijun to Yaxia to Sophia and finally to Huaiqing, the windlass of history had finally loosened a link on its rusted chain. This is the process of women emerging above the surface of history; rather than merely a gallery of female “characters,” it is the process of women progressing from zombie-like, living dead beings to living people who are destined to die, and to women who are struggling to live with humiliation. It is the process of becoming a living person and a historical subject from being the historical sacrifice and object in the male discourse of

4 “Biography of Defectors” is from New History of the Tang Dynasty (1054) and Ministers Serving Two Dynastic Empires was compiled under the command of Emperor Qianlong (1711–1799) in 1776. 5 The Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School is a very influential school of popular fiction writers between 1912 and 1949. It derived from romance fiction of late Qing dynasty and thrived in Shanghai in early twentieth century. Since its clichéd story about love between a young talent and a beauty reduced it to a derogative term in literary value, many writers refused to be named as a “Mandarin Duck and Butterfly” author. Leading writers include Xu Zhenya (1889–1937), Xu Xiaotian (1886–1946), and Zhang Henshui. As they were first mostly published in the journal, Saturday, they are also called the “Saturday School.”

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the May Fourth sons. In this metamorphosis from the “ivory ring”—a “bonedry band of bondage,” a cream white circle—to a candle “Moth” that would rather fly into the flame and bring destruction on itself, just in order to have a touch of the burning reality and leave an inky paint of “madness” on it, in such ways, Su Qing either whispered or shrieked, which dazzled Chinese literature of the twentieth century, and became a high-pitched treble of female literature in Chinese “modern literature.” Although Su Qing cut a brave figure in her time by punctuating/rewriting saint Confucius’ axiom of “Eating, drinking, man and woman, wherein lie human’s instinctual desires,” in her heroic parody and thereby “offended the prevalent common sense,” for all intents and purposes, Su Qing was not a feminist in the modern sense. In comparison with Xie Bingying and other female writers who portrayed new women/the strong female who raised a war whoop by shouting “gender equality, and everybody joins the army,” Su Qing’s works were more about the survivalist existence of the weaker gender/women who “combined the traditional and the modern.” However, if compared with Bing Xin, Feng Yuanjun, and others who masqueraded their discourse as the weaker sex with the banner of “love,” Su Qing’s narrative text is charged with words of a mighty heart. With the kind of courage of “a moth darting to the fire,” she tore down the hidden historic barriers alienating women and brought back to the center the marginalized female experience which was written by female writers of the 1920s whose liminal feminine experience was banished from their texts. As regards the female experience, she only described it without defensive explanation, and narrated it without speculative analysis. Her female consciousness was manifested in the texture of her text, rather than in a hollow war cry. What she rendered literally was a woman who dares to ride naked on a galloping horse, without even long hair to cover her body.6 She said: “One of the biggest difficulties for female writers in writing fiction is that what she writes is liable to be taken by people as proof to identify with her herself. In this respect, of course, the same is also true of male writers, but only female writers tend to be more thin-skinned and timid, and, therefore, lose courage and stop describing. As for me, I have little regard for that, thus giving them something to slander me with.” However, Su Qing’s astounding female nudity was not meant to be a price to be paid by women or a temptation to men, as it was to her predecessors. It is astounding in effect not so much because of her deliberate ploy as because of its inherent impact on the real situation of women in her text. In other words, it is the sensuous presentation of the dead and blind spots in the May Fourth mainstream cultural code that shocked the world.

6 Here the authors may draw the analogy from the English legend of Lady Godiva from Roger of Wendover’s Chronica (c. 1236). She is said to ride naked through the marketplace in order to convince her husband, earl of Mercia, to reduce Coventry’s heavy taxes.

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14.2

Femininity: Spatial Existence

If the enemy-occupied area can be defined as a space where time, culture, and history were all disrupted by the war, then the women described by Su Qing, in mesh with the tradition-modernity mixture, were just such a spatial existence in Chinese history. If we compare the Lu Yins or the daughters of the May Fourth Movement to Hamlet who is paralyzed by his procrastinating deliberation, then Su Qing, on the contrary, is more like a female Don Quixote who acts more boldly than advisedly. Su Qing’s literary world does not outshine others in the aspects of women’s introspection, self-defense, self-justification, and self-approval, nor in artistic forms of geometric crystal arrangement and exquisiteness. Her world seems to stand out just for being transparently feminine, a self-defined articulation of female life. And her “truthfulness” in her writing does not proceed so much from the built-in facticity of the story as from the veracity in her tone of the narrative. She never told any unheard-of anecdotes or strange tales; what she told in a plain and simple narrative tone was nothing but the trivialities pertaining to female existence below the horizon, which men writers used to tell, too—the ever repetitive and banal quotidian trifles, like a labyrinth with no exit, a path beginning nowhere and leading nowhere. That is a country without the dimension of time, a space in a stalemate, and a wasteland in perpetual lockdown behind the “locked doors of the high terrace” and the “curtains drawn low.”7 Su Qing only retold the men-told stories about the women who live in this kind of women’s space—decadent and agony-stricken, the female spatial existence. Like a couplet hung on the door of history, the first scene of Ten Years of Marriage is “Wedding with a Unique Mix of Traditional and Modern,” on which occasion the wedded woman turns from a daughter to a woman and then to somebody’s wife. This is a scene that Lu Yin banished from her text, and also the second act to the multi-act drama about women’s liberation as promised by the May Fourth Movement. In Su Qing’s world, however, marriage is neither a hair-pinning ceremony for women as it is a capping ceremony for men, a ritual of naming, nor a milestone to mark the realization of a new woman’s dream, not even an “induction of sex”; it is only a spatial displacement, a kind of “exchange” in the sense of Levi Strauss’ theory—an exchange of a woman between two families, but with the woman’s participation ruled out. Through a narrow, confined space, a “dark and sulking” bridal sedan, it is the daughter, not her husband, who would be displaced from her father’s house to her husband’s house; only to become a piece of furnishing to decorate the more closely monitored and more tightly enclosed space. From then on, she lives like a container that gives birth to heirs to the family. Su Qing described marriage-related facts in a pungent and self-abusing tone. When Huaiqing transfers from one space to another on a sedan chair, it 7

Quoted from the first two lines of a poem written by a Song poet, Yan Jidao (1030– 1106?), “Riverside Daffodils—Awake from dreams, I find the locked terrace high,” lin jiang xian –menghou loutai gaosuo.

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not only purports the end of her daughterhood (her age of schooling), which is her only short life of temporal existence as a daughter, and also, in a space between the two doors, disillusions and shatters her dream for “the red-lipped pale-faced man wearing white helmet and white armor.” When Huaiqing dedicates her virgin body, nevertheless, she does not become “somebody’s wife”; instead, she becomes a “daughter-in-law,” a young mistress in the extended family, an existence of the “eleventh class B” in a space with women laid out as furnishings and men bustling in and out. She is also a servant to wait on her mother-in-law (the “eleventh class A” who is also one of the rejects from the eligible humans in the family), a sworn enemy in the eyes of her sister-in-law (an unidentified woman), and, thrown into the bargain of her hybrid identity, she is also the master-to-be to the house maids.8 Like the first chapter, the first few scenes in Ten Years of Marriage all tell the story of a daughter from the Old China, about stages of her life as a dead-alive zombie. Su Qing tore down heavy curtains to unveil the secret existence of the hidden woman. If in the eyes of Juehuis (Juehui from Ba Jin’s The Family), a feudal family is a narrow cage ruled by evil demons for the young who are, in identities, “somebody’s son” and “somebody’s grandson,” then what Su Qing revealed is the fate of being “somebody’s daughter-in-law” in this closed space. Even in Ba Jin’s The Family, a woman in this identity is at most an unnamed existence hidden behind the types of good women (Ruijue, the Mother, the Third Aunt) and bad women (Grandfather’s Concubine, the Fourth Aunt, the Fifth Aunt). Such a fate is not necessarily tragic, nor the miserable immuration under a “bad jailer” (i.e., mother-in-law = feudal parent), nor assuredly is it naked ritualized cannibalism and sacrifice. It is only a grindstone of the mill that never stops, perpetually grating on the women who keep dreaming before getting lost, a paradoxical destiny of living under perennial surveillance and negligence. Among the scenes, “Flowers and Candles in the Bridal Room,” “Kitchen on the Third Post-nuptial Day,” “Between Sisters-in-law,” “Maternity Ward and Birth of a Girl Baby,” are none but rituals whose original meanings have been forgotten, the repetitious stage blocking, the cat endlessly walking with a certain gait when being displaced from one area to another. The woman in the scenes is like the puppet in a crass show, but always cherished by everyone like a container that will carry some treasures, and also like a disposable container, she will be ruthlessly disregarded when used and cast to a neglected corner. The sole function of the so-called young mistress/daughterin-law is to “give birth to a son,” to beget a male heir to carry on the family

8 The topical term from Su Qing’s short essay “The Eleventh Class Humans,” Di shiyi deng ren, collected in her famous prose collection Food, Men and Women, Yinshi Nanü, published in 1945. The essay starts by quoting Legends of Spring and Autumn Century by Zuo Qiuming (circa 502 b.c.–circa 422 b.c.), abbr. Zuo’s Legends, Zuo Zhuan, which classifies human beings into 10 classes in the chapter of “The Seventh Year of Zhao Gong.” Su Qing parodied this by counting women as the eleventh class of human beings. Women were further classified as the eleventh class A or B, maybe C and onwards.

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line, while “bearing a daughter” is at best adding a new vocabulary to chitchat and at worst tolerating it, willy-nilly. In Ten Years of Marriage, Su Qing lets us see the spatial existence— women—in the “inner court” of a Chinese-style non-nuclear family or extended feudal family from her own point of view as a “person in the know.” Except for some presumptuous molesters’ intrusion, this place seems to be a “territory” utterly untrodden by men. This is a world composed of women, kept under the control of the senior female parent—the Mother-in-Law, and filled by trivialities and boring intrigues and infighting among the women within. Even the first note Huaiqing heard and the first images she saw at the wedding were “silver high-heeled shoes,” “silver long cheongsam,” “protruding breasts wrapped in the silver cheongsam,” and “a pretty charming red caltrop-shaped mouth,” which belonged to her “brother-in-law’s wife,” and then she saw a “girl with thick yellow hair, high cheek bones and slanted head bones”—her sister-in-law, somebody’s wife-to-be in some future time but a jinx to her sisters-in-law for the time being. Above them all is the Mother-inLaw, a quasi-patriarch, who is not convincingly benevolent, but at least lenient, and more strict than malevolent; below them are the maids, wet nurses, etc., who are not regarded as women by them. In this female world, apart from the absurd etiquettes such as “serving morning tea” and being available at Mother-in-law’s beck and call, their only expectations, if any, are either for men (husbands), simultaneously mired in suspicious and jealous infighting over men’s favor, or for what is finally taken out of the treasure box/wife’s womb—a baby boy (man), with accompanying feelings of waiting anxiously or being left out if not. This is a world made up of women’s reciprocal harsh judgments, reciprocal abuses and tyranny, and reciprocal scorn and slight. “To bear a daughter” nearly purports a medium-scale disaster in Su Qing’s female world, and also a mischievous mockery the daughter-in-law/puerpera made of this female world. A girl baby is not taken as a baby, at least not as an “immaculate” baby, just a false alarm, “a dumb firecracker!” (“Bearing a Son or a Daughter” [Shengnan yu yunü]9 ) So, the women started to gabble: “Well, first bloom(daughter), then bear fruit(son)!” or “You are bound to have a little brother next year!” or “Have a girl for the first-born, and you will play safe. Anyway, girls’ lives are cheaper,” or “What a pretty doll! When grown up, she can carry her brother.” A baby girl, in this women’s world, is born “cheap”—a “distress commodity.” She is just an obscure thing that falls in between nothing and hope for something. Even the crowded maternity ward instantly becomes a cursed “red room,” the forbidden place reserved for the abandoned puerpera (not even a mother) with an ominous taboo surrounding it. The daughter-in-law/puerpera is left alone in the “red room” to swallow her bitterness, grievances, resentment, and regret for her own “incompetence” and “mistakes,” and to hide her “facelessness” and “shame.” Even her own 9 Su Qing’s debut prose published on June 16, 1935, in Lin Yutang edited periodical, Analects.

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mother could only thus comfort her: “Taking my hand, she whimpered: ‘My girl, you must bow to fate. We women are supposed to withstand wrongs. If only you could bear a boy next year ……’” Thus and so inexorably starts another cycle of apprehension and expectation of getting pregnant again for the woman, another round of hope, pain, and loss. Before taking a baby boy out of her treasure box, time is set at naught, and what exists is just the same space as the “red room” that is devoid of content and voices, seemingly more spacious than what can be filled with her loneliness, others’ curses, and her own slim or vain hopes. It is not until the birth of a male child, a future man, that this space acquires a temporal dimension, brought about by the baby boy, that poses the whole spectrum of possibilities to her from “holding high hopes for the male child,” becoming a mother-in-law in some future time, to being promoted to “Eleventh Class A.” If we borrow a pervasive phrase nowadays, at the time Su Qing’s world is inhabited by a multitude of “ugly women” who slight and abuse each other, and themselves as well, and cannibalize each other, and who are no less than executioners of the “unnamable unconscious killer legion.” Nevertheless, the real hand that pushes the wheel of this world to rotate in its orbit of unnamable and clandestine caprices of ugliness is the men who, absent though they are most of the time, define femininity. Patriarchal society defines women as an entity eternally as Object, eternally the opposite side, and inherently flawed, something is missing within. Therefore, it is the “immaculate” child/patriarch (the would-be patriarch) that is the real object of the women’s anticipations/competitions/defenses, the real signifier of her space. Because only the visitation of the father/husband/son trinity can put an end to the endless nihilistic cycling of the woman’s world and give this space its name and a time dimension. Su Qing’s presentation of hidden women as “ugly women”10 in her sequence of works is not only intended to disclose women’s true existence, or the introspection of women struggling in the existence stuck between the old and the new, but also to blaspheme, mock, and deconstruct the female representations in male discourse as either “sacred” or “evil” or “humble.” This is where Su Qing outshines her contemporary female writers, and also surpasses the moral justice of the domestic feminism of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who counted on the unimpugnable personality of the female/the underprivileged to denounce the monopoly of patriarchal society.

14.3

Woman, Mother, Mothering

According to the male master Lacan’s theory, women born in a patriarchal society are bound to live in perpetual anxiety and humiliation for the want of phallus (the image of male genitalia, which is not a real biological phallus, 10 The authors summarize Su Qing’s female characters as “ugly women” by loaning the name of the popular book by Bo Yang (1920–2008), Ugly Chinese, probably because of their inferior and distorted personalities. We can hardly find a woman with a beautiful heart in Su Qing’s work.

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but a symbol, a metaphor for father, for patriarchy), and they can only access the symbolic order by means of begetting a child—her imagined phallus— from a man. Therefore, it is her fertility, not the marriage itself, that ritualizes a woman’s transition into adulthood and her naming in regard to it; it is her child, not the husband, that extricates the woman from the anxiety and obscurity of her deficiency. However, what Lacan’s argument conceals, but what Su Qing reveals, is that a woman’s imaginary phallus is not a genderneutral child, but a child of a gender that is positive in existence: a son, a male child. For all that, in all of Su Qing’s works, one finds such a child is the only trophy a woman gains in life, the source of all her comfort. In her mighty-hearted narrative, the only myth that remains in her factual account of women is about being a mother, motherhood, and maternal love. “As if extricated from a disaster, my heart is filled with relief. I just feel that the whole universe becomes crystal clear … because I had my son, I’ve also had my most treasurable child!” “Having a child, no matter who she is, she must be kind, because mothers are the kindest people in the world. Being a mother, it is not hard to be kind. There is nothing purer than her heart, for there is only her child in there, nothing else. I dare not think of anything like cherries…and what not.” The child, if it were not her acquired imaginary phallus, is at least a substitute for the love she has put on a sacrificial altar and disencumbered herself from (“Two Cherries” [Liangke yingtao]).11 Being a mother has come to be a woman’s only “vocation” and her only glory. It embodies the only social function of women/containers in a patriarchal society. It is also allegedly the most “suitable” social role for women. On the issue of this social role, Su Qing, contrary to most other female writers, did not “tamper with the authoritative discourse of men” by mimicking the male cultural tradition of the “spiritual father”; instead, however, in the course of striving to subvert the male myth of femininity, she seems to have unwittingly stumbled into a trap laid for women in the male discourse, that is, motherhood. She retained a core myth for the female, that is, the “myth about mother” or the “discourse strand about an authoritarian mother” in her own narration of mighty-hearted women and their living conditions. Motherhood, as stated, is not only an attribute of women, but also women’s only salvation for their sub-surface existence, which also affords them self-sufficing grounds to sustain women in their continuing destiny as slave mothers. Children are “always depended upon as the only crumb of comfort for their unrelenting loneliness, to fill their emptiness and ignite them with the fire of life” (Talks on Women [Tan Nüren]).12 However, this turns out to be the very ideological inscription that was carved in the cultural language of modern society as a mesmerizing axiom to women. This inevitably splits Su Qing’s world, carving a crack into the texture of her text and giving away the patriarchal framework of society in her world. Here Su Qing was caught in the pitfall, a pitfall on 11

Chapter 5 of Ten Years of Marriage.

12

One of Su Qing’s prose collections, edited by Fang Ming in 2016.

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her way of escape from the spatial existence, which evinces that the “female,” even as mighty-hearted as Su Qing, is susceptible to “fears in their deep unconscious and phantasies about their [selfhood] life in a patriarchal society” (E. Ann Kaplan).13 It is even the tenderest and most eager dream of Mingzhu, a brave fire-fighting candle moth, to be a mother, notwithstanding that she is a single unmarried woman (“Moth”). In addition to her unwitting fall into the trap, Su Qing’s retention of the “authoritarian mother narrative” is, nevertheless, much of a strategy of her feminist conscious in Ten Years of Marriage, and through her vindication of mother/motherhood it is the means by which Su Qing conceals the hard edge of her subversive text. With maternal love and the motif of mothers’ practice of sacrifice, she posed the gesture as a plea for clemency from patriarchal society. When she had gone through all the hardships and finally decided to end her “ten years of marriage,” she ironically chose such a title for the last chapter of Ten Years of Marriage: “All for the Sake of Children.” With this quick fix, she suddenly brushed aside all the facts of gender-related repression, humiliation, abandonment, and abuses through the whole of her narration, and pinned on Huaiqing’s contraction of tuberculosis and thereby loss of the ability to raise their children as the only reason for her divorce and walking away. Throughout the text, one can find too many motives for Huaiqing to leave, but in the last section Su Qing forcibly introduces an extraneous disease that has never been hinted in the text as Huaiqing’s only pretext to leave the family. As a textual strategy, tuberculosis, an incurable contagious disease at the time, is introduced to cast the rebel/the strong Huaiqing into the shade as the victim/the weakling, thusly giving unimpugnable proof to her “unbearable” life of all kinds of hardships, and for all intents and purposes, turning “Nara’s” resolute move to walk out on the doll’s house into an ancient story of great maternal love and sacrifice she made “for the sake of children.” Tuberculosis in the text, in place of the discreditable “humble birth” or “infamy” of a mother in melodramatic plays, serves a comparable function as an unspeakable compelling reason for the mother to leave her children with tears. In this way, the proactive and decisive act to leave has turned into a conventional, passive, masochistic sacrifice. This is the most obvious textual fracture in the text of Ten Years of Marriage. But it is also probably her strategy of feminist turn in the text, because Su Qing herself later calmly defended herself with another “anti-authoritarian-mother narrative” in an essay “Rediscussing Divorce:” Now I have to part with the children again, and of course I feel even sadder. But it’s not that overwhelming pain. When I’m busy at work, I don’t have them in my mind at all. Because I believe that even if you love your children,

13 E. Ann Kaplan, American feminist and scholar of film theory, was invited to Peking University as lecturer in 1987.

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you must first sustain yourself. If you can’t even support yourself, how can you afford to love them?

It is in this short essay that Su Qing disclosed the single reason for her own divorce, which was to “stop being a slave mother for the whole life” and to terminate the excruciating pain, not to make sacrifices as a mother in the slightest degree. Besides this, as stated in the “All for the Sake of Children” section, tuberculosis was not only conceived as a “textual plot” for the mother to abandon her children, but also to secure herself a life of abstinence and chastity on another level. The latter point is spelled out through the mouth of the goddesslike female doctor (the only beautiful female represented in Ten Years of Marriage), Zeng Hezhi, who says: “Then I want you to listen to my advice: You cannot marry again, no matter whom, until your lung disease gets cured.” This word of discordant “advice” helps whitewash Huaiqing’s divorce of any “unclean” intents, and also makes milder, with an alternative consolation, any inciteful tone of offense to patriarchal society that is likely provoked by her conduct. After all, however, Su Qing was no six-pence author of sentimentalist stories. As far as the “authoritarian mother’s narrative” she retained in her text goes, she merely used it as a strategic device to put across her feminist thoughts and certain female fantasies. Forasmuch as motherhood was considered to be one of the pillars propping up men’s femininity myth, Su Qing had never showed any evidence of “bona fide idolatry for motherhood, neither in forms of filial piety, chastity or love for family nor in virtue of humility,” except for a few imaginative turns of phrase. Ten Years of Marriage almost subverts and dismantles the hypocritical discourse all together with her establishing and keeping her “authoritarian mother’s narrative.” She first disclosed to us that the so-called mother is not a mother of any “child,” but only a mother of a “son,” to the extent that a woman who “gave birth to a daughter” is not presumed to be a mother at all, or is actually deprived of the title to being a mother. In order to “be physically readied to bear a boy as early as possible next year,” Huaiqing is told “not to (forbidden to) breastfeed the new-born girl.” Denied the right of mothering and left alone to nurse her own wound and boredom, she pricks up her ears to listen to her baby’s voice and compete with the hired wet nurse for the love of the child and the right to caress her. And almost immediately after Huaiqing vowed that “for the sake of my child, I dare not think of anything like cherries…and what not,” she “lies on the bed alone in the ‘forlorn January’ after childbirth, staring at the sky outside the window, with a fantasy rising in her mind. In a bleak autumn evening, the Lake Behind the Mount should be full of broken stems and remnants of lotuses. If people do not turn up, will the mount and the lake feel forlorn too?” And she would “shed tears” when her husband begged for sex, and say: “I will never have a child again, never never ever.” Even in the text, it is unequivocal that Su Qing/Huaiqing knows a happy mother often turns out

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to be a mask worn by an unfortunate wife. There is a stark reality behind the mask: while her husband turns his back on her and takes up with another woman, or she has to beg him for money to cover the family’s daily expenses, she would “dress up Lingling as pretty as possible and groom Yuanyuan as clean as she could” and she herself would “wear a light red thin woolenette padded cheongsam with a long black coat with a narrow waist over it.” She took her daughter in her arms, pushed her son in a stroller, and appeared in public, so that “people on the roadside would never know the truth and think that I am a happy young mother.”14 As such, Su Qing’s narrative text inevitably demonstrates a rupture that cannot be closed between the authoritarian mother’s narrative and the subversion of the narrative by a feminist self-statement, and a facture between women’s fantasia about motherhood and the reality of being forced to abandon children. But it is this rupture that bespeaks more, than the narrative of the text per se, about women in the predicament of the blended new and old of the 1940s, about the dilemma the “new woman” confronted after they had become somebody’s wife and a mother.

14.4

The New Women: An Absurdist Theater

If we say it is a tragicomedy of the Chinese-style extended feudal family/nonnuclear family that Su Qing presented in the first half of Ten Years of Marriage, then in the second half of the novel and her other works as well, her emphasis was focused on ripping up the pervasive “new women myth” extant since the May Fourth Movement, and unmasking the existential plight of the “new” women. This is a world fraught with paradox, like a scene in an absurdist theater with the characters always facing a “Catch-22” situation of restrictions. If the only freedom women (at least intellectual women) had yearned for under the May Fourth Movement’s sanction was the freedom (semifreedom) of love, i.e., the freedom to choose her own lover and have the choice of marriage in her own hands, then the outcome of such a free-willed marriage, nevertheless, only turns out to be her re-entry, or, if appropriate, her metempsychosis back to the extended feudal family. If free love had been assumed to be a downright patricidal conduct of the daughters in the May Fourth Movement, as argued before, and their blatant defiance of the feudalist motto: “Obey Father in your maiden home,” then this marriage only signifies a fact of her new life: “Obey Husband when married,” which is also synonymous with her admitted obedience to the authoritativeness of her husband’s father, her father-in-law. For such a hat trick of destiny, we may have had an inkling of this fact in Lu Yin’s “Dust of Dreams,” but in Ten Years of 14

Lingling, means “water caltrop” in Chinese, Huaiqing’s daughter. As all Chinese names have certain significance, water caltrops are cheap and planted in the muds of little ponds. Yuanyuan, her son, betokens completion of a cycle.

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Marriage, it has become a colossal reality and the biggest dilemma women face. Therefore, even if she fell in love with a man via “liberal correspondence” and their Westernized wedding was held in the Youth Union, this marriage would only turn a daughter into a wife, and more importantly, turn a daughter into a daughter-in-law, a container or an objectified organ of reproduction. With this juggling of identity, her life also turns from a temporal extension to a spatial existence. Even when the young couple finally moves out like “birds out of the cage” and sets up their dream nuclear family, the feudal clan/parents’ family remain their only source of finance and psychological underpinning. More absurdly, for the “new woman” who finally ends up as a wife and even a mother, the authority of the parents-in-law, though suppressing and threatening to a certain extent, at the same time also poses a sense of belonging to her, or a psychological coefficient that provides her a sense of security. For if the May-Fourth-Movement-new-youth husband, “at liberty to be fickle in his affection,” finally gets tired and rejects his wife, then the wife still can have recourse to the in-laws for help; or even worse, if the husband has “married another woman,” as long as the parents-in-law still take her as their daughter-in-law, then, at least, she can avoid being completely reduced to an “abandoned woman” and ensure that she and her children will not perish from cold and hunger. In Su Qing’s world, this is not only the absurd fate of the new women in the 1940s, but also that handed down from mothers to daughters, the inheritance of despair and distress for two generations of women (“Mother’s Hopes” [Muqin de xiwang], “Affection, Kindness and Good Looking” [Zhengqing shanyi he meirong]). The mother in “Mother’s Hope” is also “college educated” and should be regarded as one of the most stunning and courageous “May Fourth daughters” among the trendsetters at the beginning of the May Fourth Movement. However, when her husband, who had studied in the United States, ceased to be faithful to her, she could only mesmerize herself by muttering “husband and wife always treat each other with respect like guests”; while she “gets thinner day by day, and speaks softer,” she tries to “be more precautious” with her in-laws, and “be more careful with her children.” At this point, what she strives to maintain is no longer her love, but only her status in the family: “Fortunately, I still have my son and daughter, and a wife is always a wife. Do you think, just for a kept woman, he should drive me out of the door?” But in spite of her optimism, her status in the family is still contingent on her parents-in-law. This is why when her hard-won “nuclear family” finally thrives, Huaiqing invites her dear parents-in-law over to root for her, and also why when the husband has a new sweetheart, she “writes a long letter to her parents-in-law in detail, in which she writes emotionally: ‘My life is not blessed and not worthy to live, so I won’t regret if I die. But what should I do with the children who are still in their infancy?” She never falters in winning her parents-in-law’s sympathy and support in the heartrending words of the weak and the identity of the mother of a future heir to the family. It is beyond doubts that this blends bitter tears in the absurd drama of the new women/intellectual women in China of 1940s.

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It is true, the “new” woman in Su Qing’s world can rebel against the feudal code, with the same drive and grit as in her quest for love and happiness; if not for her pregnancy, Huaiqing might also have resolutely left her husband to fulfill the “two cherries” dream with He Qimin in the spirit of the May Fourth Movement. But once she becomes a mother, in order to secure her own title and precarious status in the family, she does not hesitate to take advantage of the feudal moral code to keep a tight grip on her husband (not love), with no expense spared, and even does not hesitate to slander another woman just to reach her goal. For example, Huaiqing “pretends to be speaking inadvertently of a marriage that, started with a rape, is bound to be unreliable,” before “she warns that a divorced woman is unlikely to turn in authentic love to her new husband after remarrying,” etc., only to slander her former girlfriend, Hu Liying, who now is suspected of having an affair with her husband. She “knows that she has said all this actually against her own conscience. What does virginity have to do with a woman?” But in order to keep her husband, she always “fights” relentlessly. It is preposterous, however, that the target she aims her animosity at is neither the patriarchal society nor its gender discrimination, but instead never fails to be those of her own gender, woman who have the same hard lot, the same fate with her: Ruixian who is widowed, Xingying who is unmarried and ugly, and Liying who was abandoned. Paradoxically, she cannot but hurt other women because of men (her man), with the same weapons that patriarchal society uses to torture her. And such squabbles of continuing strife, either in an overt or covert way, are no longer started for the sake of love and happiness, but only for survival—an existence of living on for herself and her children, without regard to honor. Perhaps in the trivialities of “cohabitation,” “without carnival, without rage,” or perhaps in a family that “combines the traditional with the modern,” lies the deepest secret of women’s dilemma, that is, the juxtaposition of her desire and abstinence. It is a paradox between women’s sexual desire and their instinctive resistance to sex when they find themselves used as a reproductive tool to carry on the family line. In the case of single women, a paradoxical situation springs from the antinomy between sex and love, between rebellion and order. Even though Su Qing wrote in a tone of her unique candidness: “Marriage, nonsensical as it is, can be one of convenience to a decent woman,” then there comes her uncanny discomfiture: “I don’t know how to treat my husband well? I want to please, yet I’m afraid of getting pregnant; if not fawning upon him, I’m afraid someone else might get him. I don’t love him very much, neither do I want him to love another woman.” That is also where women’s desires run head-on against social prohibitions. The giant maddening shadow of Yaxia’s fear, “Lust is the evil of all evils,” lengthened to hang over Su Qing’s world. Even though Mingzhu repeats it like a refrain: “Desire is fire, but woman is a candle moth that flies to the fire,” and even though Su Qing described the psychological loneliness and physical desire of such a single woman in “Moth” to the effect of astounding society, she/Mingzhu still laments, though “Darting to the fire, in pursuit of your passion, if perishing

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in the flames, it is still a death of stirring tragic beauty,” yet still “I am afraid of only getting burned, not dead but damaged in the wings, hitting the dirt in a deserted corner, totally alone, eating dirt.” One can perceive the difference between Huaiqing and Mingzhu in that the former is comparatively more snobbish and wretched, and the latter is endowed with a smidgen of idealist tragicality. What is most realistically presented of the dilemma of female existence is Su Qing’s depiction of a woman’s maintenance of her dignity at bare minimum and her economic dependence on her husband. Once husband and wife fail to keep on good terms, the wife has to “beg” the husband for money, which can be an extremely humiliating experience. The husband may throw money at her face, and pour venomed words in her ears: “Even if you ask me for money, you should at least pay me a smile … If I give the money to a dancer or a girl usher, they would bow and scrape to please me!” He may even grossly treat their conjugal relation as nothing but the bare trading of sex: “From now on, don’t imagine you can get a penny from me. Now that you don’t fulfill a wife’s obligations, why should I do a husband’s duty?” Juxtaposed with this kind of humiliating experience, on the other side, are a woman’s attempts to struggle for her economic independence and tackle men’s undermining restriction and suppression of her sphere of life sanctioned by the masculinist canon of “men go out, women stay in.” In the eyes of the man, though he marries a “girl student,” the motto “mediocrity is the virtue of a woman” is still of paramount importance. To her husband, Huaiqing’s “learning” is good for nothing except helping him copy notes and mark test papers; her idle time of endless leisure and boredom should better be squandered than spent reading newspapers or books. He even takes away the newspapers and locks them up in the bookcase. When Huaiqing resolves to write articles for newspapers and magazines in pursuit of keeping her merest dignity by sharing in supporting the family, what she gets in return is a “cold look” on her husband’s face, and “a word in a determined voice:” “Please stop writing any more articles. I will provide for you if you need.” Thereafter, he even starts to accompany her every day and, quite out of character, be generous with her, just to turn his wife’s “interest” back to domestic sphere. As Su Qing wrote with pungent humor: I know that men are not afraid of their wives being too vulgar, or too boring, even not afraid that a wife spends too much money or looks ugly. He can live with all these, but he is afraid that his wife is more talented and capable than him. It is a prevailing notion of society that women are obliged to be weaker, or at least pretend to be weaker, in front of men. There is no harm in women being smart, but they would be treacherous if they are so capable as to be ambitious and proactive; such a can-do character with women is a venial fault within the domestic sphere, but if they must take up a public career to flaunt their talents, then they will bring shame to their husbands. Also, it is not desirable for women to be knowledgeable, since average men are apt to be not as knowledgeable. They are afraid that their wives may make wiser remarks than they do.”

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(Ten Years of Marriage: Postscript )

In her subtle and accurate revelation of women’s insidious repression and their entangling predicament, there is a feminist message about the tricky reality of patriarchal oppression and gender discrimination in modern society that Su Qing needs to transmit. For the female, this reality reverberated much longer in history than their acute humiliation of begging men for money. The superposition of the paradoxes in female existence staged the new women’s “second act” under the “lonely lamplight and shadow of greenery,” and rendered the “post-Lu-Yin” female world an absurdist theater. The women within, much as is the case with the new women, are not only impugnable civilians in occupied territories, and the perpetual “second sex,” but also the disfranchised in eternal exile or aliens to the nation. For once she becomes a daughter-in-law or a wife, she is no longer a daughter to her mother, neither a citizen to the country, not even a member of the female group. She is just a subordinate creature to a man, addressed in his surname, alone and apart, functioning as the object of the man’s (husband) desire and the man’s (son) nurturer. Su Qing’s female world abounds with the absurdity and hopelessness of “waiting for Godot.” The women in it are a “breed” who were promised to be salvaged, but the promise is never kept. The excruciating process of enduring and expecting consists of Huaiqing’s woes; the sempiternal resistance and rejection of the air castle comprise Mingzhu’s ennui: “There is no happiness, no pain … and nothing. Only she is left alone in the boundless and timeless loneliness and emptiness and barely keeps her head above water.” So, the empty city in “Moth,” which was deserted under threat of air raids, metaphorizes the existence of a woman rebel in the symbolic sense. But her quixotic striking back at the emptiness is no more than an attempt made by a moth to fight the fire. With this metaphor, Su Qing patched up the rupture in her narrative, bridging the deep gap between the living/new women and the dead/old women as defined in the mainstream discourse of the May Fourth Movement, and scratching a deep mark on masculinist inscriptions about women in patriarchal society.

CHAPTER 15

Zhang Ailing: The Knowing Smile of a Desolate Beauty

If Su Qing got from the existential reality of the enemy-occupied area a flash of revelation and found a metaphor about the condition of women then, Zhang Ailing only saw ruins and shambles there, an image of “desolation.” It was the menacing background in Zhang Ailing’s mindscape, like an ill-boding omen lingering in the distance. In the looming background was “dilapidated rubble” smoking in the ashes of war. It was a wasteland not only for women, but also for the Chinese people, a wasteland where the fate of the ancient Chinese civilization was hanging by a thread. Against this desolate backdrop, Zhang Ailing displayed and revealed in a proud array of texts a country that was passing away and a “breed” (zhongzu) living in it that was also on the verge of perishing. This “breed” does not refer to Chinese people in the ethnic or territorial sense, but a social class—an aristocratic lineage of Old China, a refined but frail “breed” bred by Goddess of River Luo, the most graceful and ethereal mythological female. Zhang Ailing’s world is like a long scroll of exquisite painting, accomplished in elaborate, even pompous, brushwork, timeworn but radiant with a pale golden brown marking the irrevocable passage of time. Zhang Ailing’s narrative swells with a deep and melancholy nostalgia, and a hatred that has dissipated into despair, narrated in a leisurely tone, as if she, holding herself aloof, gazes into the days of antiquity through the dusky years. This world is permeated with an eschatological sense of decadence for the doom of the civilization. We live in an era, but this era is sinking into darkness like a shadow. People in it feel that they have been abandoned. In order to corroborate their existence and grasp at something real and fundamental, they have recourse to their memory banks for the old times, memory of all ages human beings have passed through, for it tends to produce clearer and more cordial pictures than a vision into the © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_15

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future. Thus and so, she develops an uncanny feeling about the reality around her, whose eeriness entertains a suspicion that this is an absurd world of the old times, dim but also bright. She finds the awkward paradox in memories conflicting with the reality from time to time, which only results in a solemn stir, mild as it is, a sincere struggle inside her that she could not name yet (Written on Water, “Writing of One’s Own”). Even if the individuals can wait in time, the times are rushed, inexorably on the way of destruction, and still greater destruction is pending. One day, our civilization, whether in a denouement of sublimation or vanity, will become a thing of the past (Preface to the Second Edition of Romances [Chuanqi]).1

In such an eschatological tone across the whole array of her work, Zhang Ailing sang a mourning dirge, wearing a helpless and tired smile on her face, to accompany the ring dance for the dead of the ancient Chinese civilization. Apparently, she knew this civilization and this “breed” as she knew her ten fingers, since they had gone through “the best part of her life.” She continues that “Rather than allow others to put an unsightly finishing stroke to it, she had better wrap it up herself before it is too late. In a gesture of bleak beauty….” In this plaintive song, Zhang Ailing narrated in a tone of deliberate ease, as if planting a forest of symbols on the quicksand of the civilization, carving the last few lines of inscriptions on a tombstone that had already collapsed and was destined to be submerged.

15.1

A Vanishing “Country”

Though derogated as a “pop fiction author,” Zhang Ailing knew better than many “serious authors:” art is more a mirror image of the soul than a quest for authenticity and truth; a search for lost time is not a resurrection of the old world, but rather a collage orchestrating salient cultural aspects of the old world; the moment art gets born is a flash of “heart-rending” revelation, which is rare in the reality of chaos. Being such a “search of lost time,” or an act of consigning the past to future remembrance, Zhang Ailing’s narrative every so often easily finds itself among the narrative discourses of A Dream of the Red Mansions, The Golden Lotus (Jin Ping Mei),2 and Pearl Buck’s “Chinathemed” novels, and she developed it by harnessing the confluence of the narrative mode prevailing in feudal civilization at its juncture of splintering off with the narrative trend in vogue of the semi-feudal and semi-colonial China, which was marginal to the society in general, “unhealthy,” but which took on “singular wisdom.” She was au courant with the fact that women made 1 Zhang Ailing’s collection of novellas and short stories, first edition in 1944 and the second edition was published in 1947. 2

Also translated as The Plum in the Golden Vase, written anonymously but believed to be authored by a writer in Ming dynastic period (circa 1573–1620) in the penname of Lanling Xiao Xiao Sheng. This book was most of the time banned for the erotic descriptions in it.

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an appearance in the culture but had no presence in it. But she never henceforth yelled or protested. Because to her, everything in this world, including the woman issue, was only a world in the mirror—afloat, leaping and flashing, lifelike, but it would sooner or later get dimmed by the last rays of the withdrawing sunlight, or in the giant sinister shadow of backlighting, and disappear into a dismally dark tunnel with no light at the end, lost forever. Zhang Ailing’s world was a decaying country with one foot in the grave, pervaded with the breath of death. But it was not the appalling smell of decomposing corpses, but the smell of pulverization of a mummied corpse, a faintly discernible smoke of aloeswood incense. Paradoxically, this land for the dead was anything but deathly pale; it was, instead, full of colors. The narrative space of her fiction hovers above this rich and dazzling stretch of dull and deep hued colors, just because “a tragedy in China is always a bustling, noisy, and ostentatious spectacle”; because “in Peking opera grief is also presented in bright and fiery tone of colors” (Written on Water, “Foreigners Watching Beijing Opera and Others,”). Zhang Ailing had an extremely lucid and refined sense of colors. Perhaps it derived from her keen eyes of a woman who had once bathed in woes and sorrows, rendering them susceptive to colors; or perhaps from her last caressing gaze of love at the old world—her homeland— and coloring it with her wistful soul after all her scathing tears had been shed upon its forced surrender. If we say that Su Qing’s female world is like a hollow, punishing, and icycold prison, then Zhang Ailing’s is a claustrophobic world that is suffocated by colors, masses of dense colors that seem to have coagulated in flows, tragically beautiful and also grimly dim, suggesting that something is dying. They are the “resplendent backdrop of vermilion dotted with gold,” and the “dots of pale gold that were the timorous eyes of the people in the past”; they are an “iron gate painted in rust red,” and a “blue antimacassar against a time-worn, rose red carpet”; they are a row of bookcases and red sandalwood boxes, faintly discernible in the dimness, with books stamped with green clay inscriptions in them, placed from floor to ceiling along one side of the wall in the hall. On an altar desk in the center of another wall stands a blue lacquer enamel chime clock, its case broken, that has not worked for many years. On both sides above the clock hang a pair of scarlet couplets glinting with golden prints of longevity flowers, above each of them was a big Chinese character written with dripping ink;

they are “lugubrious purple flowers visible from under the bottom of the writing” and “giant dark shadows passing over a stretch of dim olive-green, portending a storm and thunder.” This is a country that is dying in anguish and passing away, only after “Awake from dreams, I find the towering terrace locked; Sober from wine, I see the curtain hanging low.” The rich colors suggest its past of “a dream

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life on Qinhuai River” (qinhuai jiumeng )3 and “old days of prosperity.” In reality, however, all had been tainted, all rudely torn. Even time itself had been dunked in a layer of gray taint and dirt that could not be washed away. One saw no pure white, no cleanliness, no sunshine, no refreshing air in this world. With the demise of time and its circulation, it came to the end of its cycle, in stagnancy and solemnity, and completed the decadence and collapse of space. Much the same as the empty room in Zhang Ailing’s memory, in which she was beaten and shut up by her father, “the bluish white of the walls under the moonlight and in the dark, two-dimensional, insane”; “the blue moonlight on the floor,” lying in a “quietly murderous ambush”; behind the window is “a tall magnolia tree with big white flowers, like soiled white handkerchiefs, or wastepaper, tossed there, and forgotten” (Written on Water, “Whispers”). Perhaps as a resident of Hong Kong and Shanghai, two cities misshapen by colonization, Zhang Ailing was on the front of a storm of splintering collision between ancient Chinese culture and Western civilization; or perhaps as the abandoned daughter of the last generation of her decadent/licentious patrician family, as well as a Modern woman drifting from place to place in the occupied cities, Zhang Ailing had better vibes and a deeper understanding, than Su Qing, of women’s identity as all-time aliens, a fraction of humanity driven into permanent exile in the name of inexpiable sins and an existence that was “not healthy enough, neither morbid enough” to make men. Distinct from Su Qing, for one, Zhang Ailing was born in an old-fashioned big family to a prodigal father and a mother who left her and the family to live in Europe and America and returned only to leave again for an erratic life abroad. And for another, for her whole life, she was never attached (or refused to be attached) with such an “identity” and “status” as “daughter,” or “boudoir lady,” or “wife” or “daughter-in-law.” What she was from the beginning to the end of her life is a drifter, a stranger, a signifier that was not empty but neither had a clear societal signified. Virtually in exile as she was, however, she was never subject to the self-pity and self-sabotage of the banished. On the contrary, Zhang Ailing used her “dubious identity,” as if setting up a glass wall, as a means to safeguard her mind to drift out of the reality that was only too harshly real and weighty, in such a way that she could always gaze at this world through the fresh and detached eyes of a stranger (“A Shanghainese Anyway” [Daodi shi shanghairen], “Foreigners Watching Peking Opera and Others” [Waiguoren kan jingxi ji qita] and “Pedestrians’ Eye-Contact Greetings” [Daolu yi mu,]).4 Inside her heart, there was a touch of specious 3 A saying about the nostalgic sentiment in ancient Chinese poems for Qinhuai River, a river that runs through ancient capital city of Nanjing, especially the remorse and hate the Chinese felt in Qing period. Since Qing was a Manchu rule over the han Chinese, han Chinese fondly remembered the preceding Chinese regime of Ming and its prosperous capital and told stories of the thriving life on Qinhuai River, especially some popular love stories between scholars and sing song girls in the pubs on Qinhuai River. From then on, the idiom signifies nostalgia for the golden old days. 4

All from Written on Water.

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detachment, but de facto deep attachment, a strand of gentle tolerance and mockery, but genuine pangs of insoluble sorrow and sadness. Also distinct from the innocent persistence and the naked presentation in Su Qing’s works, and distinct from her eruptions of indignation and accusation, Zhang Ailing’s fictional world abounds in more subtleties and niceties. Moreover, her characters are always in the thin haze of a befogging mist, wrapped in layers of costumes, like a “carry-on mini theatre.” She never intends to complain, nor to groan. Just to relate some “irrelevant,” “I-care-not-if-thyspeech-be-sooth” tales on the strings of huqin 5 that resonate intermittently in the wind and rain. But her tune is not the chill of indifference, but rather a “fair-spoken despair, sinking slowly in the shadow”; just as in “the immeasurable verdant green,” a “serene lament for trauma victims” is uttered (Written on Water, “Poems and Nonsense”). It is only after she had witnessed Chinesestyle cruelty and lived through woes and traumas, nevertheless, that she found that the victimized had grown “used to it,” so henceforth she could only feel a deep pang of “bleak sorrow.” That said, Zhang Ailing relocated the “serene lament for trauma victims” and the “bleak sorrow” into her narrative realm, into her articulation about colors. The dilapidated prison described by Zhang Ailing is a moribund country where time was deceased. “Against the pale blue sky of the late autumn, on the arch over the gateway opposite protruded some upturned gray-stone antlers of deer, and under them were two rows of small figures of bodhisattvas in stone, cheek by jowl with each other—people living here were oblivious to which dynasty and whose reign it was now; they were born in this house in a daze, and also dazedly died here? If so, they would be buried in the garden behind” (Written on Water, “Whispers”). The Mansion of Bai’s is a bit like the cave for immortals: when people within spend a day here, with their wandering mind, a thousand years have passed in the outside world. But by the same token, a thousand years here is also like a day, because everyday life here is as monotonous and boring as any other day … You are too young? Never mind, you will be old in two years. Youth is a dime a dozen here. They have more than enough youth and children get born one after another, with fresh bright eyes, fresh red mouths, and new intelligence born with them. Yet year after year, the eyes glaze and people get blunt, and still another new generation gets born again. (Romances , “Love in a Fallen City”)

In this world, the dead in the decadent, yet still luxurious, ancient house are staring at the pale, elegant, and ghostly living beings; on the other hand, the living are whispering, as if they are afraid of disturbing the ghosts, thronging the air, that have a potency of deterrence. Zhang Ailing’s novels provide a full spectrum of texts that seamlessly stitch up the tear in the fabric of Chinese ink painting, elegant and simple, with the 5

A traditional Chinese musical instrument.

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fullness and exquisiteness of colors of Western oil paintings; to sew the narrative discourse of A Dream of Red Mansions onto British aristocratic culture; to patch together the epitaph to ancient Chinese aristocratic lineage and the apocalypses of the priestess that modern civilization is bound to be destroyed. In her pastiche of subtle art, the former are projections of decrepit semifeudal China, as if a colossal 3000-year-old mummy slowly disintegrated, and they also mirror the ghostly existence of the posthumous offspring of this mummy, while the latter stand for semi-colonial China, a freak born with intrinsic slyness, cruelty, and improbity, with its sealed destiny of coming to a premature end. A mysterious and grim Cassandra’s prophecy for modern civilization’s self-destruction metaphorizes the alien rule of the occupants and modern warfare. We find in her a narrative about the semi-feudal and semicolonial China under alien rule, a presentation of the society on the fringe detached from the kernel of mainstream discourse.

15.2

Birds Embroidered on the Screen

As noted, Zhang Ailing’s world, a reflected image of frangible beauty, like colored glass, cracking and shattering, was not held out with any hope of salvation. Her preponderant mood of melancholy stemmed from her empathy for those graceful weaklings in the breed she lamented, because they were the same kind as Zhang Ailing, and also the only breed that peopled Zhang Ailing’s “Land for the Dead.” As exiles of the times, they no longer found access to the real world that was packed with others or people disparate from them. However, it is these disparate people, not they, that could face the ordeal with their “sweaty-faced humor,” and none but them could survive the world, even in a new “savage era,” an era beyond the ambits delimited by their civilization. “In the future wasteland, among the ruins of broken tiles and dilapidated walls, only such women as huadan in the Pingju opera6 can survive, without a hitch, in any time and in any social environment, because they can find a home anywhere” (The Preface to the second edition of Romances ). That said, Zhang Ailing wrote an inscription, with a melancholy resignation and a weary indulgence, by virtue of Freud’s determinism and her pessimistic turn of phrase, of mourning for those of her own kind, from her own class. There are only two kinds of people eligible to be Zhang Ailing’s “breed:” one is the beautiful, frail, pale-looking, and despairing female; the other the men whose age is never specified and who are therefore always “young.” These men “are just infant cadavers soaking in bottles of alcohol.” If “smashingly good-looking,” he “looks like the iconic young gentleman drinking Lacovo 6 Pingju opera, commonly known as Beng-beng opera, is a local opera in north and northeast China with a relatively shorter history and borrowed tunes and acting styles from other operas like Beijing opera, or Peking opera, and Hebei Clapper opera. Huadan is the woman role in operas for an unmarried woman, often not of a high social status, entertaining audience with her vivacious and coy acting and quicker movements on stage.

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and smoking a cigarette on the advertisement,” but if “putting on shorts, he becomes the little boy who is gulping baby pills, and turns into the old gentleman, the icon for an instant tonic, if wearing a handlebar moustache, and he can also make a Santa Claus once his beard is white” (Romances: Withering Flowers ). But more often than not, he is “the type of fair-skinned young man, slight of figure and with a little stoop, wearing golden-rimmed glasses, having fine facial features, and often smiling absently, with a gaping mouth” (Romances, “The Gold Cangue”). Except in a specific scenario, he is virtually a zombie with no life, no emotion, and no power. The specific scenario always involves his mother, opium, women, being abused and an abuser, and always ends up as “a consecutive farce.” The specified scene for it never fails to be the death-land of color: “The house is crammed with too many memories, like pictures heaping upon one another in one photograph, and the air from wall to wall is a little hazy. Where there is sunlight, he is apt to doze off, but in dark sunless places he feels the sobering cool of ancient tombs. The lividity at the house’s dark heart is sobering, and there he finds a safe refuge for his own weird world” (“The Whispers”). Thus reading, one finds in Zhang Ailing’s world only one story, the story about escape, or more precisely, the story about the eagerness to escape. In this story of escape are men—father/son; and also women—mother/daughter-inlaw/daughter. Although escape is the only motif, other than that of death, tenable to this “breed,” it is not the exclusive domain to men. In Zhang Ailing’s ceasing-to-exist land, men are an undreaming “species.” Barring the “farce,” opium, and women, they are beings without youth or aging. They are mother’s son, son’s father, but they have never been a husband or a man. Just like the Second Master in “The Gold Cangue” who only appears in that title and a photo as the deceased hung on the wall, otherwise absent from the text, he is presented as a crippled body, a “flabby, heavy, and numb” body. Doubtless, he used to be a docile son (for his mother would seek comfort in opium if he were not amenable enough). He could also be a father, but a father that is bound to die in the text; even if he is allowed to live on, he would unquestionably be made redundant, an additional accomplice to aggravate the ordeal of his son’s mother (but in essence not his wife). Here with Zhang Ailing, men were a mere material existence in the decadent kingdom. They could at best either stage the “consecutive farce” to accelerate the extinguishment of the “Mirror City,” or allow others (their mothers) to extinguish them at their will. After all, Zhang Ailing’s world is a women’s world or a world about women, different, though, from Feng Yuanjun’s herland of a mother–daughter bond in conformity with the leading discourse of the May Fourth Movement. Zhang Ailing’s world also varies from that of Bing Xin’s basking in the happiness of “mother-daughter symbiosis.” True, Zhang Ailing also told stories about mothers and daughters, but in her narrative, they are both seized by the unnamable feelings of estrangement and hatred. They segregate themselves from each other, each living in a corner of the ancient house for the dead,

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exorbitantly attempting to chill the other to the bone with their freezing gazes. In Zhang Ailing’s “country,” the authoritarian ruler is the mother who sleeps on the bed in the inner room. This is a fatherless world. It may be that Zhang Ailing’s country comes in the wake of the historical act of patricide of the May Fourth movement; or it may be that she subconsciously uses a metaphor of the fatherless world to signify the overturned order and reality in the face of imminent destruction. In spite of the female come-back, however, in Zhang Ailing’s viewpoint, Mother’s rule is anything but a feminist rule, nor a benign and benevolent rule; it is a kind of deterrent dominion close to that of witches and demons. In the most tyrannical form cut from the same cloth as patriarchal society, Mother will play with the power in the driver’s seat to dictate other’s (son’s) life and “inflict all kinds of classified mental maltreatments” on him. She turns herself into a Nemesis because it is the only way for her to retaliate against patriarchal society. Like Su Qing, Zhang Ailing also borrowed the “discourse strand of authoritarian mothers” from patriarchal society, only she did so for another purpose. The difference is that Su Qing used it in the sense of motherhood and maternal love of the nineteenth century, while Zhang Ailing imported the sense of the demon-mother construed in context of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. In the context of Zhang Ailing’s narrative discourse, the ideal mother only lives in her imagination and delusion, which is the daughter’s dream at the core. “In a spasm of demonic possession,” she would “fancy she was resting her head on her mother’s knees,” “crying and sobbing:” “Mom, mom, mercy, I’m hanging on your wise decision!” However, almost there and then, she would come around: “The mother she entreated and the mother in reality are not one person at all” (“Love in a Fallen City”). The former is only the phantom in her dream “gazing unwinkingly from the window,” the maiden in an old photograph clipped in a faded album. Unequivocally, this is love, but only an illusory love that is developed in seeking the “pre-Oedipal mother” in the Freudian sense. In the photo, the woman is not so much a mother as a daughter. If we say that Zhang Ailing’s only story is about escape, then with undreaming men ruled out, this theme of escape and the dream to escape are the prerogative of daughters. For it seems that in the framework and rules of patriarchal society only a daughter could attempt an escape from the kingdom of death through intermarriage with a man from a disparate social group. So only she could keep the hope alive, could struggle to escape, and could even stake herself in the gamble of life. Lamentably, however, the only case of successful escape in her fiction is “Love in a Fallen City.” As for others, they do not have an earthly chance to escape because in light of Levi Strauss’ category, the exchange of women should be carried out with men of their homogeneous group, i.e., she must marry one of her fellow “breed” because she is supposed to be traded for another woman. So, for a daughter dreaming of escape, she can do nothing but sit “waiting for a man, or for news.” And at the same time “she knows it clearly that the news will never come. But the

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daylight lingers long before getting dark in her heart” (Romances, “Jasmin Tea”). Her story is always a beautiful lie told on the blockade: a touching and solicitous encounter, but just an “impossible dream.” Therefore, “life is like the Bible” that is lost in translation after it has been translated several times. Upon completion of the exchange, a daughter becomes a daughter-in-law, with a heart as dark as night. A daughter-in-law is the dead body of a daughter, a butterfly nailed on a board, as it were, “vivid but pathétique.” It is the pathos of deathly life or living with death. She could only, in the dark night alone, watch her “feet in the deadly still shadows under the moonlight” turning from “blue to green then to purple, the colors of a cold carcass” (“The Gold Cangue”). “She is the bird embroidered on a screen—a depressing purple satin screen, and a white bird woven onto the gold-threaded clouds. As the time went by, its feathers somber and moldy, moth-eaten, and dead on the screen” (“Jasmin Tea”). “The bird embroidered on the screen” is the dominant metaphor in Zhang Ailing’s narrative. It has a pair of permanently immured wings that are only flying forever and ever in the imagination. It is not so much an image of flying and escaping, as it is an image of death and captivity. Zhang Ailing’s country is not even a cold iron cage and death row; nay, the female/daughter-in-law in it is not even so good as a caged bird. For when the cage door is opened, the caged bird may well be able to flutter its broken wings and fly to realize its dream of flying in the sky. The women in Zhang Ailing’s narrative, however, are just flat, bright-colored but lifeless drawings on pages of history that had been flipped over. Tides and time wait for none of them, and on top of that, they are even bereft of life in their flesh and blood. To them, life only means time’s insidious eternal erosion and damage of space. Although by this time “the Chinese have learned to ‘walk out’ like Nora in the play A Doll’s House, and undoubtedly, it was true that this unconventional but desolate gesture of departure impressed the average Chinese youth deeply,” a “walkout” escape as this is, however, if not an absolute tragedy, at least a bleak absurd comedy of “ ‘Go! Go upstairs!’—anyways, when dinner is ready, they will come down on call” (Written on Water, “Go! Go upstairs!”). “The bird embroidered on the screen,” the “depressing purple satin screen,” and “the gold-threaded clouds” are as much parodies and devious gibes of the Dream of Escape. If we say the situation with the new women of the May Fourth Movement at this time was like “the civilians in the occupied areas” and “the emancipated black slaves,” as argued in Chapter 14, then Zhang Ailing’s women/daughters-in-law were all but the forgotten prisoners in the death row dungeons of the emancipated Bastille Saint-Antoine. They had no earthly hope of being rescued, even not provided with a Godot’s promise to come. The purple satin screen does not display a field of life and death for their bodyand-soul struggles, but rather a scene for the death of souls and a mortuary for bodies. They found no husbands here, instead, only men who could get them pregnant but had already been castrated. Opium pipes had replaced the Phallus in this world. Therefore, if Zhang Ailing’s women had not languished and died

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in silence, they would have been turned into angels of death, demon mothers, and omnipresent and smothering jailers in the ancient house by “the unspeakable trying melancholy,” their innermost thirst of desire, and their spiritual sadism and masochism. In her narrative flow, Zhang Ailing unraveled a mystery about the life of the dead/old-style woman, and demonstrated the birth of a female sadist, which was at the outset a product of the covert and relentless ill-treatment and repression perpetrated by patriarchal society. The women’s/mothers’ madness and perversion were originally born out of an act of revenge against patriarchal society. To expound the myth of the mad woman in this approach, Zhang Ailing subverted Freud’s demon/mother with a gendered narrative from a female perspective. She called into question the prevailing narrative of authority/mother as the inner and psychological ego of man’s/son’s in Western patriarchal society, and brought a real, socialized gender existence to public view. Zhang Ailing first introduced the mother/son relationship between a viciously sick mother and a physically sick and cowardly son, which exhibits to the world a Chinese-style family structure. In Zhang Ailing’s mother– child relationship, mother is no longer a symbol for the absence of desire/ prohibition, but an abiding presence of authority. She does not seem to act as the object of her son’s Oedipal desire, or as a suppressive force to stifle her son’s desire for other women; on the contrary, she always “generously” shoves women in front of her son (it is the duty of a Chinese mother to find a wife and even concubines for her son; for Zhang Ailing, this is the sole means for her to “possess her son”), and then she thrusts herself between her son and her daughter-in-law. Her sadistic abuse is not directed at her son, but clandestinely at the daughter-in-law. For the latter, this is a “crazy world, where the husband is unlike a husband, and the mother-in-law unlike a mother-in-law. Either they are insane, or she is insane” (“The Gold Cangue”). It is by turning the daughter-in-law (or any woman “in the possession” of the son) into a dirty object that the mother completes her castration of the son. If this does not work to her goal, she will get him addicted to opium until he is fully turned into a lithopedion and an infant cadaver. In the sky of this kingdom of death, she is “the gruesome unnatural bright moon—a blinding small but white sun against a darkened sky” (“The Gold Cangue”). This is an insidious and cruel murder that gives one the creeps. It is a murder committed in the moonlight’s dark shadows. By the irony of fate, the murderer is the woman who has been imprisoned in eternal captivity, the “mad woman in the attic,” who will kill with the “madman’s sobriety and shrewdness.” This murder resounds like an echo, a woman’s vengeance against patriarchal society’s bloodless and silent torturing of an innocent and hopeful girl to death in the distant past. Like a couplet, the other line that rhymes the mother–son relationship in Zhang Ailing’s world is the mother–daughter story. This relational formula is the inscription Zhang Ailing carved on stone to subvert “the narrative strand of authoritarian Mother.” In Zhang Ailing’s narrative, mother does

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not “place her desires above her daughter’s requirements and health.” Her mother–daughter relationship remains one between a woman and another woman. But neither are these two daughters rivals in terms of fighting for the love of a man (husband/father) in the Freudian sense, because there is no “man” in their lives (as a compensation, Zhang Ailing wrote a naive “Electra” story, “Heart Sutra”). What one finds in the relation is only jealousy and hatred between a female condemned to the death row of the land of the dead and a female prisoner who may be released one day; it is the struggling with and wrestling between the veto of escape and the possibility of escape in a gladiatorial arena. It would be still fine to fathom if the daughter only trod on the old path of her mother’s death road; in Zhang Ailing’s formula, however, the mother cannot bear the prospect that the daughter/another woman might escape, might be absolved, might possess that silent and gorgeous cloister by the “open green grass—the endless quiet corridor”; she cannot bear that she might have claim to the “star-lighted dreams of phantasy” under the “translucent black silk umbrella.” If so, at the very moment, she would appear as the mother, quietly emerging from “where there is no light,” and would black out all light from her daughter/another woman. As such in Zhang Ailing’s land, the world where the daughter lives is not only a fatherless world, but also a motherless world. In lieu of the mother and father is only the absolute authority of Death, only “the gruesome unnatural bright moon,” “the blinding small but white sun” against the darkened sky. It is nothing less than a dead soul reincarnated in the body of a mother/woman who had been murdered by the patriarchal spirit. When the white bird embroidered on the purple satin screen finally rots on the screen, what is left is no longer the bird, the soul, but only the screen’s sneer.

15.3

Civilization· History· Woman

Among Zhang Ailing’s sequential texts, “Love in a Fallen City” is the only exception in the theme of escape and its success. However, the successful escape is a far cry from a legend of the white bird spreading its wings and flying out of the golden-threaded clouds on the embroidered screen. It is a pure accident of a fortuitous history that the flames of war set afire the infinitely delicate and infinitely heavy screen. Out of the fire, a dead woman “is resurrected.” But in this text, Zhang Ailing’s narrative focus turned to rewriting the patriarchal mythology of “women in history,” which invented stories about femmes fatales as the cause of cities’ or nations’ falls. It is her deconstructionist deciphering of the female archetype of Helen of Troy. “Love in a Fallen City” is surely the most beautifully and exquisitely written of Zhang Ailing’s short stories. It is a love story between “a selfish man” and “a selfish woman.”

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They are no heroes. They are just two of the vast commonalty of burden bearers of this era. Although they are not thoroughgoing, after all, they are sincere and earnest. They are more desolate than tragic and solemn. Tragedy and solemnity are a thoroughgoing accomplishment, while desolation is a revelation. “Writing of One’s Own”

In this beautiful, antiquated, gorgeous, and melancholy story, Zhang Ailing told an apocalyptic story with a bleak flash of revelation, a story about history, civilization, and the female. As an important symbol in the text, a plastered wall in the vicinity of the Repulse Bay in Hongkong renders a palpable message: At first glance, the wall is extremely high, too high to look beyond it. This side of the wall is cold and coarse, the color of death. Liusu leaned her face on the wall. Against the wall, it also changed its features—red lips, watery eyes, a face of blood, flesh, and thoughts.

The wall, as the symbol of Chinese history, is the extension of space of the Bai’s deadly silent mansion, in which “a thousand years are like one day”; it is also the ruins of the civilization, like the enigmatic rubble left behind by an ancient glorious civilization after its extinction. And this gray wall that “frames” Liusu’s face sets history, civilization, and woman in juxtaposition; yet this triple symbol is also a fissure in Zhang Ailing’s narratology, which is nearly indistinguishable from and can be confounded with the decorative texture in her work. The face with “red lips” and the “watery eyes” against the gray wall imports a life born in ruins, and forebodes a narrow escape from the cave-in of the wall of time, history, and civilization. It is no less than an exodus on Noah’s Ark, with the woman born in the ruins signifying life or continuity of life. Zhang Ailing said through the mouth of Fan Liuyuan: I don’t know why this wall reminds me of those cliches like ‘till the end of the world.’… One day, our civilization will be wiped out, all over, everything—all burned, bombed, demolished. Only this wall probably will be left. Liusu, at that time if we could meet at the foot of this wall … then Liusu, maybe you will treat me with more sincerity and I will treat you with more sincerity.

This is Zhang Ailing’s favorite theme. Although she casts a sheen of approaching death and an “antiquated” underside of lustrous light over her city of death, the Mirror City, she never failed to cling onto mankind’s rebirth in her creation with a traumatized, mournful but sincere and beautiful language of her own. If it is said that when she was chewing the bitter cud of her own “desolateness” while looking into the future, only to see huadan actresses surviving, without a hitch, in the wasteland and giving a curtain dance to the deafening music of “gongs and drums,” she was only mourning the death of her own class, her own civilization and era. With that being said, when her eyes turned to Michelangelo’s sculpture of Morning, tears of a desperate

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joy welled up in her heart with prayers for perpetual life of mankind. If it is without dispute that Cao Qiqiao’s story is about a woman being buried alive and living within the ambit of death in an ancient tomb, then the story of Bai Liusu is about a poignantly tearful resurrection—the flight and rebirth of humans/humanity, not the flight of the white embroidered birds, or even not the rebirth of women. It is rather humans/humanity that take flight and get resurrected in the guise of women’s bodies. This is a variation or a retelling of the Mother Earth archetype. Zhang Ailing once said: “For all her faults and imperfections, there is a moiety of Mother Earth’s embryo in the spirit of a woman” (“On Women”).7 In essence, however, this is not a far cry from a classic illustration of patriarchal/male discourse. For men, what counts in a woman is not her spirit, but her body; her body is a fusion of Mother Earth and whore, a fusion of woman and object of salvation, as Eugene O’Neill elucidated in Great God Brown. So is the metaphor of Zhang Ailing’s “woman in ruins,” which is a replica of the authoritative discourse that patriarchal society tells about women. This replica, however, rather than a duplication, is much more a manipulation of the dominant discourse. When Liusu’s/woman’s face of “blood, flesh, and thoughts” leans on the plastered wall, the original significance of life/ death is being tampered with and displaced. The woman’s “red lips and watery eyes” seem to have become a historical inscription engraved on the plastered wall; thereby, the lifeless silent plastered wall gains a life of a spooky waterlogged yin quality. Neither is the inscription any longer that of a living woman in embryo, but rather of a dead woman with a sentence of lifelong imprisonment by the discourse of history. In Serbian folk epics, there is a tale that not until a beautiful woman was built into the foundation of a city could the city building be finished; and in myriad myths, legends and historical records of nations all over the world, one can find stories in which people blame on a witch/a beauty for a war that finally led to the subjugation of the country and even genocide. At the starting, as well as at the terminal, point of every civilization, we always find a face of a woman carved in stone, a “woman” who is destined to be absent but also destined to be imprisoned in the discourse of history. If we agree that in the narrative of Iliad Helen is always an absent presence, then she, as both the cause and trophy of this war, is undeniably an omnipresent fact. She does not appear until the city of Troy is razed, and she appears as a trophy to the winners. In the face of this kind of male authoritative discourse about history/civilization/women, Zhang Ailing completed her ingenious and euphemistic deconstruction of the discourse with “a woman’s presence,” the story of a man and a woman meeting in the calamity of war. Zhang Ailing was not as soberingly incisive and fumingly indignant as Su Qing; instead, she just “smiled” with a blunt trauma and melancholy and rewrote the old story. 7 Tan nv ren, Zhang Ailing’s essay inspired by an English book called Cats and publicized in a journal, Tian Di, in 1944.

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The fall of Hong Kong rounded off her story. But in this outrageous world, who knows what was the cause and what the effect will be? Who knows if it is not just in order to fulfill her dream that a metropolis was overturned.... Neither does Liusu think she could make some snippet of history. What’s subtle about it? The femmes fatales in legends all tend to end like this.

It is true: this is a legend. Because it tells of an alluring love in a fallen city. Because “there are legends everywhere, but there is not necessarily one of such a complete ending.” Besides this complete ending, however, what “Love in a Fallen City” tells is still a story of a woman in the dead country, who was buried alive in a house of antiquity, nailed to the “vermilion couplet” of history, dying and being dried in the dripping ink of the character “Longevity” written on the golden round flower pattern. She used to rebel and was divorced. She had escaped from her ex-husband’s house, but only to escape from one prison back into another. She fled again, this time at most only to escape “upstairs.” Just like Qiqiao in “The Gold Cangue,” in order to defend the golden lock she carried her whole lifetime, she madly dispels the fleeting sunshine when she could “bask in the glorious light,” dispels the “thin thread of music” and “brief moment of elation,” and would rather bear the “late night leaks of rain—one drop by one drop, one hour by one hour… till a year, and a hundred years,” but she could only stare, desperately and cravingly, at the man, the object of her desire, “walking out,” watching “the breezes of the sunny day go into his chiffon pants and gown, like a flock of white doves, nestling in everywhere in, fluttering and flapping their wings.” In the case of Bai Liusu, her scrambling out and in stems from a grim reality: her need to seek “financial security.” Cao Qiqiao also expels the man she “infinitely painfully” loved out of her demand for more “financial security,” and likewise, Bai Liusu, for, in the narrowest sense, her “survivalist purpose,” turns to a man she does not love any more or at least cannot spare the time to love. If Weilong would rather sell herself in exchange for money in order to buy the love of the man she loves, then Liusu is not the slightest bit better than this, since she sells herself just to “make a living.”8 In fact, “her” selfhood and “her” body are the only assets that women can capitalize on in the market recognized by patriarchal society. “To please men with her beautiful body is the oldest profession in the world, and it is also a very ordinary profession for women. All women who marry for a living can fall into this category” (“On Women”). To Zhang Ailing, this is not so much a disturbing fact as it is a bitter and helpless reality. To keep afloat, Liusu can only trade herself, and only at a price/value ratio that sets her apart. She is only “lucky” enough to avoid becoming a “stepmother to five children,” because she is genially favored by a man who was willing to pay an exorbitant price: he loves her. Just because Fan Liuyuan regards Liusu as beautiful per se, her appearance befitting a “Chinese 8 Ge Weilong, leading heroine in Zhang Ailing’s serial novella, “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier.”.

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woman.” However, this love is nothing more than a man financially keeping a woman, like keeping a painting or cherishing a pet. It may be safe to say that the long-lasting charm of “Love in a Fallen City,” as well as the reason why Zhang Ailing is distinguished from other female writers “churning out” love stories, resides in the fact that the love legend of “Love in a Fallen City” is a loveless love. It is the bitter fate of women under countless ancient lies, fictions, and words. It is a successful deal that is accomplished by disaster in history. In this text, it is not women that save mankind from a catastrophe, but rather a catastrophe that saves a woman from madness and destruction. This is supposed to be a theme for a conventional comedy written by a male writer: a man and a woman, “both are bean counters, cannily smart and selfishly calculating.” They set traps for each other, each watching the other with eyes peeled and sounding the other out with devious questions. Finally, both fall in love. But in Zhang Ailing’s scenario, it is a game of love that only the woman partakes in, risking danger, all or nothing, in desperation. Because, in the first place, if a woman takes the bait and falls for a man’s line, she is to be deceived and damned; if she holds out bait to a man, she gets the name of adulteress; if a woman wants to bait a man but to no avail, instead she is fooled by his bait, then she is a double slut. For such a woman, stabbing her with a knife would defile the knife.

As for the man, it suffices for him only to draw on money and society to churn out a story. In this light, Liusu is bound to fall flat and resign herself to Fan Liuyuan and finally become his mistress. Although this is called an escape, it is better to regard it as another prison. How can she while away the years after this? Go to Mrs. Xu’s to play cards or go to theatre with her? Then gradually she would join her rank, flirting with actors, smoking opium, and walking down the same road as other mistresses... Of course, she wouldn’t go so far as to disgrace herself! She is not that type of vulgar woman. She can keep herself in check. But could she keep herself from going mad? The three rooms upstairs are lined up in the shape of 品, all brilliantly lit with lights, and the floor newly polished with wax, illuminated without any shadow or a soul to be seen. One after another room, screaming emptiness.

This would be Liusu’s “narrow escape.” However, then came the war. At this juncture when “all is over,” standing in front of death and with minimal odds of survival, men and women seem to cling to each other truly on equal and even terms. Thereupon they concur that “The world always has somewhere to shelter an ordinary couple.” Liusu merely gets though and lands safe, but no one knows how her story develops. No one knows whether this narrow escape is only another limbo.

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In this way, Zhang Ailing retold the old story of “a beauty getting rescued with the fall of a city,” a beautiful but wistful story told from a woman’s point of view with a touch of humor and a hint of bitterness. The ebbs and flows in Zhang Ailing’s world at the interregnum of dusk and dawn are cast with a wide spectrum of colors that are gloomy but lush and sumptuous, just like the first ray of dawning sunlight at daybreak that has not woken up from the bad dreams of last night. What Zhang Ailing continues to enrapture readers with is not so much interpreting her work in the realistic sense as appreciating her sense of reality in a continuously coagulating and dissolving fluidity. Her world seems to be a colossal mass of darkness, with its edges diffused and vaporized. It is the kind of charm of “a flower in the haze,”9 a specimen of female discourse. It is through a glass clouded with water vapor that we seem to catch a glimpse into her plaintively bleak and beautiful world that is passing into senescence. It is “the moon seen thirty years ago,” “a red and yellow wet halo the size of a copper coin, like a teardrop fallen on the writing paper bought at Duoyunxuan,10 decrepit and blurred.” It is a sort of saddened beauty, a grievous glance back into the golden old days; “It’s like light green set off by peach red,” a jagged contrast. Perhaps just as it is the tragicomical destruction of the city that brought Liusu the happiness she craved, so the survivalist existence as the subdued in the occupied areas lent lasting charm to Zhang Ailing’s work—a canny narrative distance and narrative tone put the finishing stroke to the cultural inscription she engraved in love compounded with hatred. As the last generation daughter of a decadent aristocratic family, Zhang Ailing felt a piercing hatred towards Old China and the civilization and existence of Old China; this is presented in her text as nightmarish in her condemnation and despair. However, being a talented woman in the era of the nation’s subjugation, she seemed to have grown more intelligent about the benign side of life amidst war, death, and suffocation, and developed a deeper love and understanding of her homeland, her mother country and the ordinary people who were her compatriots. This was an infinite “tolerance that grows beyond herself,” and that only turned into a “serene trauma:” “A lovely and lamentable era!” It only turned into an affectionate gaze from behind an opaque glass wall; only turned into a joyful agony or agonizing joy, like the two sides of a paper: A kind of loveliness is part and parcel of living in China: amongst the sordid, chaotic and laden with grief, one finds precious things as slick as a whistle

9

The line quote from Bai Juyi’s short lyric, “A Flower in the Haze.” The poem reads “The flower is no flower, The haze is no haze. It comes in the small hours and leaves at daybreak. It appears brief as a dream sweet; And disappears like morning mist without trace.” (ref. trans. Qin Dachuan.). 10 Duoyunxuan Art Shop is a famous century-old art shop in Shanghai, with the best selection of art, Chinese paintings and calligraphy and Chinese stationery.

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everywhere, something that exhilarates her/him a whole morning, a whole day, even a whole life;

it only turned into a knowing smile of a desolate beauty.

CHAPTER 16

Conclusion: Gender and Spiritual Gender—On the Liberation of Chinese Women

Thirty years after the “May Fourth Movement,” the founding of New China became another indelible event in the history of Chinese women. The new social system treats men and women equally in terms of legal, political, and economic status, and at last officially negates the enslavement of women and stops treating them imperiously, which had been the cultural code for two thousand years. The promulgation of policies and laws related to concerns of equal pay for equal work and individuals’ autonomy in marriage gave the female a basic guarantee of existential dignity in terms of personal liberty and personality for the first time in Chinese society. It is no wonder that the founding of the People’s Republic of China has always been regarded as a synonym with the liberation of the laboring masses, as well as that of women. Thus, from a conceptual viewpoint, the May Fourth New Culture and the birth of New China are like two axes on the grid of Chinese women history. One signifies the growth of women’s spiritual and gendered selfhood, from rising above the surface of history to awakening their consciousness as a gender group, and the other betokens women’s transformation in social status from slaves to citizens, from nonhuman subordinates to human beings who earn their own living. The two axes, when cross-referenced, are x and y coordinates on the curve of Chinese women’s liberation. It includes two reference points to measure its progress that were yielded by the two processes themselves: the spiritual liberation of the female gender and the elimination of female body slavery. It is gratifying that this frame of axes manifests two positive integers at the crossover point when China’s modern history merged into its contemporary history. For one, Chinese women were one step ahead of the world in terms of their throwing off the oppressors and standing up for themselves © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2_16

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in social life; on the other hand, culturally speaking, a mature image of the female self, along with the emergence of a host of creations of “women’s literature,” was looming among countless women figures in literature; or at least, a female culture with women’s perspectives, women’s standpoints, women’s insight into life and gender relations, in addition to their feminine aesthetic outlook, unleashed themselves from the corrupted male or gender-neutral culture and exposed the ulterior motive of this male culture. However, it is also at this same moment of great metamorphosis of social life that the proposition of women’s liberation together with this coordinate itself was actually quietly thrown into the oblivion of time. This is why today, decades later, when we are about to end this retrospective on women’s spiritual life and literary creation, we have to mention something in particular. This is because it is directly related to the situation of Chinese women today, and history and the dead were silent again. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it was in discrete contexts of discourse that Chinese achieved the spiritual growth of the female populace as a gender group and the elimination of social servitude. In literature, it has long been an unflagging theme to sing praises of women’s striving to become their own masters and of women who stand up as their own masters. However, the gender identity stance that modern female writers fought to establish in the whole course of their self-maturation from daughters to women not only stops being carried on as a tradition, but also becomes a taboo subject and left without anybody to care about it, let alone being developed and deepened. Uncannily at some point, the term “sex/gender” has become redundant in literature, unless there is a dispute relevant to revolutionary truth and fallacy; otherwise, the male and the female, each go their own way without interfering with the other. The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women emblemize women’s exploit of gaining their self-determination and autonomy, hence remained popular in the literary world for decades and exerted artistic influences on more than several generations of Chinese, but the works by female writers in the enemy-occupied area, appearing almost simultaneously with Xi’er, not only came to be mostly unheard of, but even libraries with considerable collections rarely house them. If we perceive the difference between “females being narrated” and “females’ self-narration” and see that it lies between singing praises for women’s liberation and expressing spiritual gender selfhood, we realize that the two terms belong to two different discourse traditions. Or if we take another look at the history of modern literature, in which the discourse tradition in the dominant cultural camp used to have conflicts, indirect or direct, with the tradition of female self-statement, then it may be worth noting that the different situations of these two traditions shed light on specific issues. Let us take The White-Haired Girl to illustrate the first case: Xi’er’s image makes an initial paradigm for emancipated women in literary works and also a most lasting paradigm.

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What best reflects the tradition of “female being narrated” in it is not that Xi’er is pinned down as the object of description and observation, but that the way of telling her story follows traditional male-centric literary conventions. From the perspective of narrative structure, Xi’er’s harmonious father–daughter familial bond in the beginning was torn apart, her love was brutally severed, and since then she was hellishly tormented in the Huang household before she was finally rescued. It is a paradigm by which Xi’er remains an object of value for which numerous good or evil forces have been contending and her primary function is to be salvaged: she is presupposed to be snatched away, and destined not to die, only to be saved in the end. Her narrative function is to trigger the redeeming action of reclaiming something lost. As far as female archetypes are concerned, Xi’er is synonymous to Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, a paradigm created and endowed with values by men: She, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, wait in a hidden, secret, mysterious cavelike space for some prince to find them, wake them up, and turn them from a ghostly being into a human being, from someone inferior to someone dignified. In this sense, Xi’er’s resistance and liberation is a continuation of the fairy-tale schema, of a fully male-centered cultural tradition, and has become a part of the myth of contemporary women’s liberation. Like all fairy tales, this myth never exists for the sake of women. However, it is worth noting that the message of gender domination in The White-Haired Girl is not as simple as that in fairy tales. It should be born in mind that the storyline of “the White-haired fairy” being rescued from the cave and reincarnated as Xi’er was collectively added by the writing crew of The White-Haired Girl .1 Xi’er’s metempsychosis revises the symbolic connotations of the entire narrative, and casts political symbolism into its fairy-tale narrative style of savior/delivered, subject/value object, and other simple gender roles. Specifically speaking, Xi’er’s salvation differs from the ending of a fairy tale in general, in that for her, being rescued means rebirth or return: it means coming back to the world from a cave deep in mountains, and changing from a wandering ghost that haunts nature at night to a living human being with flesh and blood, with a name and a surname, from a white-haired fairy to a black-haired girl; in a word, it means that Xi’er gets reborn into the human world out of the wilderness, the dark night, the underworld for ghosts; this makes a story of so-called “new society turns ghosts into humans.” This plot of rescue, as purported resurrection, is not so much an emphasis on Xi’er’s standing up as her own master, as it is to introduce a clandestine Savior with the power to give life. Evidently, this savior is not Dachun; Dachun is only the performer of the great will of the Savior, and he only gained this qualification of performing on behalf of the Savior after he joined the revolutionary army. As an agent of the Savior’s will, Dachun himself is not empowered to 1

The authorship of The White-Haired Girl is believed to be a team of writers who adapted a folk story in the regions bordering Shanxi, Hebei, and Chahar provinces at the time.

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complete the resurrection of Xi’er. Here, the Savior who gets Xi’er resurrected and redeemed is not a particular male character as those in the ordinary schematic fairy tales, but a male character with a specified identity, a “father” incarnation which symbolizes the communist Eighth Route Army. This ending subtly echoes the beginning of The White-Haired Girl : at the beginning of the story, Yang Bailao, Xi’er’s biological father, was incapable of protecting his daughter, which results in their sanctified father–daughter bond being brutally severed, whereas at the end of the story, a new father–daughter bond, even more sacred, reappears on the metaphorical level, even if this “father for her rebirth” does not abide in the flesh. “Father” comes back thanks to Xi’er’s second birth, and Xi’er and Dachun’s marriage gets reaffirmed by the new “father”; hence the narrative comes to its perfect completion. As this political symbolism gets more and more explicit, Xi’er’s image gets constantly revised and finally tends to return to her “daughterhood stage.” In the original script, her fantasy about Huang Shiren, her pregnancy, and the child she gave birth to in the forest deep in the mountains, get deleted little by little, step by step. In the final dance drama we saw in 1964, Xi’er had already transformed from a humiliated mother to a virgin. She is supposed to retain her virginity so that she can change hands from her biological father to the symbolic father of her rebirth for the purpose of maintaining the transcendental sacredness of the father–daughter relationship: before Father marries her away, she only belongs to Father. Thereupon, Xi’er is established in her spiritual gender identity as being a daughter subordinating to “Father.” In addition to Xi’er, this spiritual gender identity of “daughterhood” was shared by women not only in early New China literature and in reality, too. In The Red Detachment of Women, which is as famous as The White-Haired Girl , this point is more than clear. The Red Detachment of Women imports two-fold salvation. The first is to save Wu Qionghua’s body: Hong Changqing redeems her from Nanbatian’s water prison, pointing out a way of life for her; the other is to save her spirit or get her resurrected: the women’s army helps her learn to submit herself to the will of the party, and finally grow into a spiritual daughter of the party. Of special note is the fact that she is a “daughter of the party,” not a “girlfriend of the party,” because there can only be a relationship of worship and idolatry between Wu Qionghua and the Party Representative, Hong Changqing, and the latter, as the savior, must eliminate his part as an individual and a male, so that Qionghua’s original adoration of and gratitude for him, which was easily turned into admiration, would be transformed into adoration of the party, so that she would not become a girlfriend of an individual party member, but rather, first and foremost, the daughter of the party. The image of “Daughter of the Party,” a positive female literary image that had been in vogue for nearly 30 years, prescribes an unsurpassable spiritual gender identity for women in the New China. Only in this way can The White-Haired Girl possibly stay popular for decades. This original and most enduring model for the archetype of upstanding women represents exactly the identity and status of the new order

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of symbols placed on the female community. From the limitation of this spiritual gender identity per se and its relationship with the symbolic Father, we can see where the new doctrinal ideological discourse conflicted with that of women. Chinese women appeared on the historical horizon as a spiritual gender only after their intrepid and arduous struggle of defecting from their families and their fathers from the outset of the “May Fourth Movement.” Their identity as “rebellious daughter” ruptured the sacrosanct father–son alliance cemented for thousands of years, and thus commenced their growth of female gender awareness. But such a subtext for their gender’s historical significance is not legible in the “daughters” in The White-Haired Girl or The Red Detachment of Women. A strong trend for women’s spiritual liberation, which arose after female gender selfhood, as well as its own tradition, had taken form. It initiated a backlash that inundated discourse about the female, and pushed it back to the time when the concept of gender was yet to germinate. It promoted a model daughter who was nescient about gender/sex. In light of the model daughter in these two works, it seems that her spiritual gender identity, regardless of how she differs physically, mentally, physically, and intellectually from others, can be none but the daughter in the father– daughter relationship, and what’s more, a faithful daughter—a yin or sub-yin status, a subordinative case in reference to the Father. If, in accordance to the plot, the daughter’s return is for the Father to return to the scene, then by the same token, the daughter’s immortality means the father’s immortality. In this way, this perpetual father–daughter bond is bound to preclude any likelihood of the daughter being awakened to her gender or understanding her gender as apart from that of men. It is safe to think that one of the textual purposes of designing such a divine and inviolable father–daughter relationship is to enable the father–daughter bond to override the distinction between the sexes, and to leave this distinction out of sight, out of mind, as much as possible. The reason why the father–daughter bond must override the gender relationship is as plain as plain can be. For the “father-daughter” relationship renders it unnecessary and meaningless to draw the distinction between “male and female,” and thus the father’s authority is not open to doubt. On the contrary, in the men–women relationship, gender is the first and foremost code to break, but “Father” is irrelevant in this nexus. Therefore, if the Father wants to keep his identity intact, he must prevent the “daughter” from becoming a “female,” a person in her gender, because once the “Daughter” enters the gendered antagonism between men and women, the “Father” naturally loses his authority and even his relevance. That is also the ideological reason in which the daughter’s unsurpassable identity lies. In a certain sense, all the loopholes and round-off errors in Chinese women’s liberation were all closely related to this “father-daughter” relationship that had long prevailed the movement: whether it was the female discourse that was swamped by the wide canvass for gender equality, without concern for gender difference, or the feminine mystiques that remained

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abstruse, even insolvable, or many other various subjects in women’s selfcognition confined in the forbidden zone. The identity of “daughter,” a pre-gender-conscious spiritual gender, compounded by the gender-erasing equality between men and women and women’s social status of holding up half the sky, constituted the very unique predicament of Chinese women: in the myth of liberation and standing up as her own master, she was not only completely bereft of her mere self, but also deprived of the very reason and ability to look for it. In a society where men and women are equal, it seems beside the point, even presumptuous, to seek for her deprived self and her gender group. Under such circumstances, the path ahead for Chinese women to tread on was still very rough and rugged, and their road of liberation was different from the liberation of Western women, because they had their own reality and past to bear on their back. For Chinese women, “Equality between Men and Women” was a mythical trap, and “Equal Pay for Equal Work” was not a voluntary option, but one of compulsion. Gender difference was not at all a concept that should be discarded, but rather the route women must take to find their selfhood. Women’s liberation in China still faces numerous challenges of history and reality; it should not stay as a theoretical presumption. So far, what they have to say, and are capable of saying, may not be “what is a woman,” but rather what the male, and men-dominant, history is; that is what she should speak out about, what she is speaking about and what she continues to speak about. And we firmly believe that this will become a new reading in the coordinate system for women’s liberation in China.

Postscript to the 2003 Edition

This time, Emerging from the Horizon of History (Fuchu Lishi Dibiao) is indeed going to be reprinted. It is like gladly paying off all the debts we owe to readers, not so much for myself as for the sake of my friend, Meng Yue. At the end of 1989, we published Emerging from the Horizon of History. It was the first book for both of us and its timing was not perfect. Both of us had just turned thirty. Although we were not so ambitious as to “count the mighty as no more than muck,” we also felt like other “schoolmates in their prime, imbued with scholarly enthusiasm.”1 But for this book as beginners, we never really promised ourselves the moon, even less than others would mention it with the term “first” as prefix. Back then, elated, I used my negligible author’s earning to buy some sample copies and presented them to my relatives, friends, and colleagues in the Film School I was working with. Although we were engaged in discrete fields of study, I forced a book upon each of them, and very quickly the books I bought were given away. A few years later, I found myself deluged with requests from home and abroad asking where to buy the book and complaining about missing mail orders from the publisher. Libraries phoned and wrote asking me to donate books. After Meng Yue, the book’s veritable first author, left China, I naturally “took over full authorship” and dutifully acted as “plenipotentiary spokesperson” on our behalf. But as a matter of fact, there was virtually nothing to speak for other than lending my own book for others to copy, or making sincere apologies for being unhelpful. Once the book was lent out, I would be told that it was “passing from hand to hand” and that it had gotten too far away to return to me. Fortunately, some of my students combed the shelves of the publishing house and found one copy and therefore I was able to keep the one volume on my bookshelf. What is intriguing about it is that a copy of this book had been placed in a quite obtrusive position in the window of Wangfujing Xinhua Bookstore, Beijing, for a long time, and thus 1

Both lines from Mao Zedong’s 1925 poem Qin Yuan Chun—Changsha.

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2

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was hyped, but when people (including myself) walked in to ask about it, we got a puzzling answer: this impressively displayed book had never been put on sale in this bookstore. This is probably one of the most interesting anecdotes from the pre-marketing era. Therefore, people more often than not started to talk about reprinting this book. However, for one, I seriously thought re-editing it was a daunting job, and to top it off, I am a chronic sufferer of a “old-work-repenting complex,” compounded by my natural indolence; Meng Yue was far away across the Pacific Ocean on the one hand, and on the other, she is disposed to take fame and influence lightly and leave the course of her old work to itself. So I was left procrastinating, and the reprinting of the book was dropped. But I tended to feel I owed something to the readers and friends, home and abroad, who had traveled all the way to the collection room of the Peking University library just in order to read and take notes from this book. Now it seems that the debt is somewhat cleared. The advent of this book is more or less unplanned. In college, we were fascinated by the works of women writers. We seemed to have heard something in consonance with our inner mind and to have been touched by flashes of inspiration therefrom, subconsciously seeking to identify with the authors of our own gender, observing their expression of our common gender identity, and perusing answers to many agonizing confusions we had in the course of growing up. Of course, these blend with projections of the various unutterable emotions such as narcissism and self-pity we had during girlhood, as well as our deep doubts about the overarching gender order. It was also about this time that I read a dog-eared literary volume of the Taiwanese version of The Second Sex and learned about a core figure of existentialism that prevailed at the time: Simone de Beauvoir and her other side of research; and with her, I discovered a new doctrine: feminism. But at the time I did not find it so mind-blowing as to alter my frame of mind. It was only after teaching at the Film School that I came to realize the depth of feminism and cultivate a sense of affinity with it. What was instrumental and intriguing to me is that although film is a new art born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has successfully built patriarchy and patriarchal order into its art. Whether it is the grammar of classic film-making language, or the mainstream film producing system, or the filmviewing aesthetics constructed and elicited by its narratology, the patriarchal and male-centered discourse has become an intrinsic part of them. Therefore, it was impossible to skip over feminist theory and its history in teaching when it came to post-war European and American film theory. Needless to say, when I found my access onto the main road of European and American feminism from an unorthodox footpath, I gained the experience of epiphany, like beholding the sun blazing forth from behind the clouds. As far as I know, Meng Yue dived straight into feminism through the “main gates” of de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Hélèna Cixous, and Gayatri Spivak.

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In the late 1980s, Meng Yue joined a “lecturer group,” a soi-disant cultural aid to alleviate rural poverty, but also an activity bordering on intellectuals’ relegation and thought-remolding, and went to the hinterland of Henan, where she met Ms. Li Xiaojiang who happened to be soliciting contributions for the first series of books on women’s studies since 1949. Meng Yue called to her mind my “personal hobby” for female writers and took a portion of the workload for me, but she never thought that I was too sophomoric and callow to face the music. As green as grass then, I was determined that writing books would be my career, but it was in the time yet to come; among my friends, I was even known as an “epicurean bookworm,” reading for reading’s sake. Secondly, I was then so much stuck in the mud of movie theory study as to forget my academic “background” in literary study. As a result, the two of us began “passing the ball” to each other and “haggling” over it before we finally reached an agreement: Meng Yue was responsible for the general outline, as well as introductions to each period of modern history, and I was responsible for the reviews of selected writers’ works. As we used to in the past, two of us met for night-time talks and drew up an outline for the chapters; we put our heads together to hash over various issues, and seemed to be gearing up for the book. But in view of our youth in the 1980s, full of sound and fury, in addition to my “bad habit” of procrastinating, always counting on my being a quick hand in writing who ironically would start writing only out of dire necessity, I still stayed in the same old groove of being consumed with sedulous research work, and being quicker in thoughts than in action, I did not set pen to paper. As such, I dragged my heels until I was hit by a serious illness, being hospitalized and hanging between the jaws of death for more than a year, only to find the deadline for submission was drawing near, and only Meng Yue was left to tackle the task in a desperate effort to turn the tide on her own. When I “discharged myself” from the hospital before getting fully recovered, I announced that after this narrow escape from death, I was disillusioned about fame and success, and took my share of quiet conscience to be increasingly free from responsibility, leaving Meng Yue alone working day and night to pay what we owed to the publisher. As it turned out, it was because Meng Yue had insisted and taken me to her father’s hospital for a check-up that I luckily avoided blowing out my candle at the age of 27. Now that I had survived the ordeal, everyone around me had no other expectation than to pray for my recovery. Meng Yue and all our friends did not in any way press me for the work and, out of mercy, spared me. I readily availed myself of their kindness, and with complacency, picked up several writers familiar to me, and my truly favorite authors, and started to write. In the end, due to my delay and deferral, the amended last section of the chapter for Lu Yin on her Ivory Rings missed the typesetting for the first edition and got lost. Because it was during a time of writing by hand, the original manuscript was never found again. I vaguely remember having analyzed the female performance in the novel, taking the approach of a performance study and life-as-a-stage argument. Today’s chapter for Lu Yin, as a matter of fact, is unfinished. It is only

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because Meng Yue is the architect in drawing the masterplan that this book ends in a relatively clear line of literary history and achieves rigorous completion and depth in theory. Even some of my best friends were time and again brought to doubt my authorship, and Meng Yue also taunted me for picking easy jobs and shirking hard ones. Some interesting tidbits about this book deserve mention as follows. One day around the early 1980s, when I was delving through the basically deserted library of the film school, I accidentally found in a pile of unsorted and uncatalogued books, donated by some unknown senior, a volume of selected works of female writers, edited by Tan Zhengbi in 1940s, that opens with Zhang Ailing’s “Love in a Fallen City” and Su Qing’s “Moth.”2 For a moment, I was lost in ecstasies over it, as if taking a bite of an exotic delicacy, and regretted I had not known them sooner. Yet turning the book from cover to cover, I failed dismally to find a single word about the authors. Conceitedly considering myself as a graduate of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Peking University, and at home with the histories of all kinds of literature, and besides, obsessed with reading Lu Yin, Bing Xin, and Xiao Hong since my childhood, nonetheless, I shamefully never knew who Zhang Ailing and Su Qing were. So I heard my mind inveighing against the violent writing of history. Another time at a meeting, I happened to find a copy of the history of modern literature written by Sima Changfeng (note: not the more orthodoxic version by C. T. Hsia) in the hands of a friend who also attended the meeting; I quickly browsed it and was overjoyed to learn about the “paramount” importance of the two women authors in the literature of the occupied areas.3 Unfortunately my friend declined when I asked to borrow the book. Later, I got to read “The Gold Cangue” reprinted in a column for old works by the literary journal October (Shiyue).4 So when Meng Yue and I were thrashing out the outline for the chapters of Emerging from the Horizon of History, we “resolutely” listed the two authoresses for independent chapters, fancying ourselves filling the historical gap and rewriting the history of literature, or in other words, priding ourselves on rediscovering Zhang Ailing and Su Qing and bringing them out of the blind zone of history. At that time, Meng Yue turned library collections inside out, most of which had just been reopened to readers, and found the old editions of Romances and Ten Years of Marriage (before long, these two books were released as photocopies). On the other hand, I found another monograph by Tan Zhengbi on the literature of the occupied areas: in conformity with “the Spirit of Chinese Culture,” he angrily denounced the “traitors’ literature,” but he did provide an extremely 2

Tan Zhengbi (1901–1991), important editor and literature historian.

3

Sima Changfeng (1920–1980), penname to Hu Xinping, scholar and professor of Chinese literature and literary history of Hong Kong Shue Yan University and Hong Kong Baptist University. 4 October is the most important bi-monthly periodical for novellas, short stories, poems, and novels that was started in 1978.

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brief account of Zhang Ailing and Su Qing. I also found several Taiwanese editions of Written on Water and In the Eyes of Zhang in a pile of books for overseas students’ leisure reading. After my illness, I capitalized on these limited resources in an endeavor to “rewrite the history of literature” and felt smugly complacent with it. I should note that at that time, I had never read Mr. C. T. Hsia’s literary history, and never knew his prestige of naming Zhang Ailing.5 (On account of where I was and the times, it was a privilege beyond my grasp to get Taiwan and Hong Kong publications). I was ill-informed about Zhang Ailing’s status in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas; neither at that time, or for quite some time thereafter, did I get to read, or even know the existence of, her work such as The Rice Sprout Song (Yangge) and Naked Earth (Chidi zhi Lian).6 This is to say nothing of her stories in Hu Lancheng’s This Life, These Times (Jinshi Jinsheng ) wherein she was called a refined “lady of the Republican era,” “the one in the Republican era who would only deign to kiss flowers reflected in water,” etc.7 My knowledge about Zhang Ailing’s life basically derived from second-or-third-handed materials, and most of them only provided a few words and phrases out of context, and for her life after 1949, especially her overseas experience, it was absolutely a blank page to me. I honestly did not know that she was married to Hu Lancheng, to say nothing of her marriage with Ferdinand Reyher8 in the United States. Therefore, a conjectural “conclusion” was made in the first edition of the book that all her life, Zhang Ailing had no father, no husband, no home, and no country. It was because when I was writing these two chapters, the texts I relied on, limited to those I could lay my hands on, for the argumentation was far from the two authoresses’ complete corpus of works. This is undoubtedly the most blinding of this book’s “historic limitations.” In 1989, and especially in 1990, when I was still “immersed” in the complacency of “discovering Zhang Ailing,” a craze for reading Zhang Ailing suddenly came out of the blue. Overnight, it seemed that book stalls on every 5 In the West, Zhang Ailing is known as Eileen Chang. This is due to C. T. Hsia who was first contacted by Zhang Ailing in the States and provided firsthand with her materials. Therefore, Hsia is also regarded as an authorized expert on Zhang Ailing. C. T. Hsia introduced Zhang Ailing to the world in the 1960s. He devoted forty-two pages to her in his A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917–1957 (1961), naming her as an equal to Lu Xun in literary achievements, sometimes even higher in her position, which caused a lasting controversy among scholars within and without China. 6 The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth (verbatim, Love in Redland), both novels were written by Zhang Ailing in Hong Kong, around 1954. 7 Hu Lancheng (1906–1981), writer and politician who was notoriously known for his brief service as a propaganda official in Wang Jingwei’s regime, the Japanese puppet government in China during the Anti-Japanese War. He was Zhang Ailing’s first husband from 1943 to 1947, when he divorced her for another woman. In his prosaic autobiography, This Life, These Times , he described Zhang Ailing as a proud and demure woman, particular to the era of the Republic of China (1912–1949). 8 Ferdinand Reyher (1891–1967), American scriptwriter and novelist. Married with Zhang Ailing in 1956.

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street corner of Beijing were stacked with all kinds of poorly printed editions of her work; soon, Su Qing zealotry followed in its wake. All kinds of material and research on them gradually surfaced on the mainland’s cultural landscape, until the fad gathered momentum to raise Zhang Ailing on par with Lu Xun in the historical position of literature. I could only wonder and sigh at it, for I took a dim view of such opinions and thought otherwise. In a sense, the campaign or ideological trend of “rewriting history of literature” in the 1980s unexpectedly provided resources and maps for the first wave of popular books on the market at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, in a rather unique spectacle old books were republished and became popular not as a phenomenon of nostalgia, but out of a new vogue. This illustrated the trend of overturning the old mainstream and the rapid debut of the new mainstream in the last 20 years of the twentieth century. In Emerging from the Horizon of History our research on Zhang Ailing and Su Qing, especially our research from the perspective of feminism, was the first of a number of related studies on the mainland after 1949: though it had nothing to do with the emergence of the Zhang Ailing fad, at most, it involved us, like history-making worldlings, in the fad. Perhaps the most important statement that needs to be made is that this book, at great length though we have argued, does not have a footnote, endnote, or to speak of the nethermost academicism, a bibliography, etc. Verily, this cannot but be a huge dearth of scholarly attention to sacred academic norms. And indeed, it cannot be forgiven under the pretext of being “writers as young as we were.” When this book was published in traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan, the duty editor Zheng Zhihui worked so hard as to find all the prerequisite notes one by one, but unfortunately, they were not adopted at the time of publication; however, it was my luck to find another good friend in her. In all fairness, this book, without annotations, is indeed below standard, but even today, I am not shy of saying that it does not forfeit its value because of this. In my opinion, academic norms are always a double-edged sword. Their positive significance lies less in normalizing scholastic games themselves than in guaranteeing the inheritance of knowledge and accumulation of thought to a certain extent; their negative side is also obvious today: when norms, standing as a compulsory imperative, outweigh the work and meaning of thoughts themselves, and even become shackles that stifle thoughts, then more often than not, the normative veneer has become a fig leaf to cover the absence or paleness of thoughts. Sixteen years after the writing of Emerging from the Horizon of History, rereading it, we are more startled by all sorts of blemishes, here and there, conspicuously abounding in the text than just the absence of annotations, an issue which turns out to be “secondary” to our concern. But I am not ashamed to say that this book, authored by two young women, does not fail to present keen youthful insights, which are in proper proportion to its puerile fallacies. More importantly, since then, ensuing researches and monographs on modern and contemporary Chinese women’s literature have appeared in quick succession.

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After the 1995 World Women’s Conference, Chinese women’s studies have made spectacular achievements in an all-round way, naturally mending and rectifying the mistakes in Emerging from the Horizon of History and surpassing our work. In the sixteen years since the book, Meng Yue and I myself have also made progress in our own research. We might even say that many of our points of view have changed. That we deliver the original book for reprint is first of all, of course, because of our laziness, and secondly (it may be another fig-leaf rhetoric turn of phrase), now that it is to reprint an old book, let it stay as it was. It is also true, when a book is published, its umbilical cord with the authors has been cut and it becomes an independent life. We pray that readers share our erstwhile youth and forgive us for the awkwardness of it. Dai Jinhua August 2003, in Beijing

Further Words The fifth edition of Emerging from the Horizon of History is in the print house. This time, reading the version that was carefully proofread by editor Min Jie, I seem to hear the echo of years and life in my body as blood gurgling deep through my ear drums. Thirty years have elapsed since the publication of this youthful, blatant, and blemished “monograph” which we were so emboldened as to “declare to be the first of the kind in the world.” Thirty years is a time period long enough to separate generation from generation. This is especially the case in China where time is fleeting and thirty years comprises more than two “generations.” During this time, teaching for a living and wandering in the world, I have seen social changes and reversals, tragic collisions and comedic encounters; having traveled away and back again, I came full circle, only to find my skin wrinkled and soul etched by a life of daily tedium and necessities that callously rushed me onto the return journey of life. After thirty years, face-to-face with the new layout and proofs of the book, for the first time, I faintly came up with a pipe dream: this immature but vigorous little book may end up slightly outliving my body of flesh and blood. Although I have come to look death in the face and known deep down that all things are inevitably bound for the destination of annihilation, and nirvana and oblivion are essentially good deaths, I am still disposed to have such a day dream, which may well have sprung from a ghost of fear: out of my personal apprehension, my death in the semiotic sense of my life may precede my death in the biological sense. I have never been a premature or prescient person who strove to make one’s name known as early as possible. I was thirty years old, an age of “accomplishment” in Chinese, when Emerging from the Horizon of History came out as the first monograph that Meng Yue and I collaborated on. Today, thanks to the effort of the friends from PKU Peiwen Group, this book gains its second birth in a beautiful layout and edition, and as time goes, I am about to be sixty years old, making a full cycle in the Chinese way of numbering years. It is not

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unlike what I experienced when my life was barely past half a century—as if suddenly dawned by a light, my mind was broadened, and everything clicked into place. At the time, all the pains, burdens, hurt feelings, resentment, and even my body were shaken off like dew; in their stead was such a joy that it was like an unending drizzle that washed clouds off the sky of my life. I feel truly graced by another reprint of this book, and another opportunity to merrily think aloud: I have loved, hated, reflected and written, been on odysseys, and practiced what I preached. If my life goes like this, I have no more regrets. Today, when glancing back at Emerging from the Horizon of History, the first thing, if anything, that needs to be posted as addendum is of course in regard to females (women?), relevant to feminism, gender, and gender studies. I have a clear sense of myself and the book’s worth in this: the reason for the book being republished and reprinted time and again, and to be constantly cited, cross-examined, and used by young friends as a footing for their own studies that take off and surpass this one, is not that it excels others in any aspects, but that it was written while tapping the interrogation of the perplexing questions that originated from our personal lives and even our bodies, thus contributing to the surge of feminism and gender studies in China. As regards this book, Meng Yue and I just got a bit good luck in timing of it. I should say that we owe it to our “riding the fair wind” of favorable circumstances. However, other external factors to agitate public attention to this aged book are not so simple or pleasant. Indeed, since the second half of the twentieth century, the gender issue has become one of the basic yardsticks and main parameters for surveying and measuring social progress. But it is also the prominence of this parameter that reveals a discourse or mythology of the so-called linear progress of society as a whole and so-called upward development. Looking around at our whereabouts at the moment, it appears so true as to be a particularly apposite mythology. On the one side, it detonates the core of the European and American world: breakthroughs made with a bang in issues of homosexuality/gender and sexual minorities. At the same time as laws and legal rights have been rewritten in major European and American countries, the clandestine “fandom” for gay culture that was once exclusive to the female community has become a new economic growth point for global entertainment and popular industries. On the other side, in comparison with the storm and stress of the 1960s, the MeToo Movement appeared only to attest to the decline in or faltering of global women’s living conditions and their social ecological being. While the Hollywood movie industry desperately makes money by chasing and imitating the taste of the new global fashion of “fandom chasers,” the feminist philosopher Judith Butler still faced personal attacks for her identity as a queer theorist and lesbian. In brief, this is another witch hunt to be persecuted. We may look the other way while the crusaders waved the time-worn familiar flag of violence: The witch! Burn the witch to death! We may also disregard the common traits of this community of witch hunters: (Brazil) the marginalized, the bottom class, people who have been

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crimped and crushed, even expelled in the process of globalization.9 Put all these aside, and it may suffice just to note the ambiguity of people’s identity in the internet age: on the one hand, just as “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,”10 so “On the Internet nobody knows you’re male or female”; every man/woman’s identity on the internet is no more than a signifier, a word or phrase, a sliding-and-drifting-at-all-time, multi-tiered and pluralistic polyseme, and a name for self-definition (/imagination) that is distinguishable but does not necessarily draw a distinction between oneself and others. On the other hand, the new technological revolution is bound to be another round of fragmentation, “evaporation,” of society and the world, another Mephistopheles to collect the souls of corrupt men, when their bodies decay, to fill the power plant of the modern world, just like every technological revolution that produced non-humanity in the name of relocating human resources—to expel “humans” from the “human world” with its technology. Once such a process takes place, it will undoubtedly happen in an inexorable sequence of the “ancient” logic of social class, gender, and race; to complement the logic, if needed, a contemporary dimension may very well be age. Therefore, there is no doubt that when artificial intelligence and new biotechnology are employed to rewrite the composition of the labor force across the whole world, they will bring around a new round of expulsion and create redundant human beings—among them, middle-aged and aged women of lower classes will bear the brunt. To reiterate some points of common sense: humanity, itself being an invention of modernity, claimed a right/prerogative to itself upon the birth of its culture and society, and at the same time made tacit declaration of specific existentiality of the subhuman, quasi-human, ghosts, or demons. Accordingly, the Declaration of Human Rights,11 one of the famous cornerstones of modernism, was undoubtedly signed on the backs of women. It was not until 1995 that the World Conference on Women in Beijing finally urged relevant UN agencies to accept women’s rights as an essential part of human rights and have them written into the document. In other words, after hundreds of years of struggles of women philosophers and feminist movements, women, one half of humanity, finally won the status of “being human” at the level of cultural prescriptions and legal rights. This progress not only set in motion a process of putting this status into effect in all aspects of reality, but also intensified the internal division among women as social groups. It becomes increasingly evident that only in developed countries and regions, and only women 9 Here the author probably refers to the incident of right-wing groups in Brazil to protest against Judith Butler’s visit to Brazil in November, 2017. 10

The sentence is the caption to Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. 11 In view of its influence on modernism, this should be the document written by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789, the Declaration of Human Rights of Man and the Citizen. But with ambiguity in Chinese, this is assumed to be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

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with a sufficiently high level of education and youth (increasingly important), can they enjoy the whole range of social and technological progress and its achievements, while other women, sinking in the increasingly intensified social disparity and consolidated hierarchy, are damned to an invisible existence in culture and society. Contemporaneous to a riot of colors “above the horizon” is the endless darkness of the world below it. As regards women and gender issues, indices of progress or retrogression, radical or conservative, are no longer effective indicators of a healthy society, nor measurement of its dimensions. Today, one hundred years after Chinese women, as well as women in the world, “emerged above the horizon,” and thirty years after the first edition of Emerging from the Horizon of History was published, what to speak of women and how to speak of women become (or remain) a new proposition. My daydream that Emerging from the Horizon of History may survive my physical being is actually my hope that there will be no social need to bring the subject up for a discussion of such kind. I have a strong sense that, being steeped in history, I have gained a first-hand knowledge alive to the magnificence as well as the absurdity of history itself. When its fifth edition goes to press, I feel like asking a question: the hope for equality, the respect for differences, and the wish for all lives born on this earth to live with dignity and have a future, are they merely beautiful and naive delusions? What has passed in my life, the weathered years, a bustling life with people around, leaving me and coming back, is not prologue to a worldly sophistication and wisdom that I have never acquired. I still hold fast to the love for people and never give up the naive dreams for a reasonable world and a sensible tomorrow. Once again, when a book is ready for bookstore shelves, it is like the authors sending a bottle adrift. May it travel to meet, touch, and kiss the hand that picks it up. Still again, on behalf of Meng Yue without her consent, I request that readers who choose to read it share and be lenient with our youth and youthful thoughts. Somehow, I am filled with humble gratitude. Dai Jinhua On the road, midnight on April 15, 2018

Bibliography

Ai Qing, Ai Qing xuanji [Selected works of Ai Qing] (Beijing: Kaiming Shudian, 1951). Ai Wu, Ai Wu duanpian xiaoshuo xuan [Selected short stories of Ai Wu] (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1978). Ba Jin, Han ye [Cold nights] (Shanghai: Chenguang Chuban Gongsi, 1947). ———. Disi bingfang [Ward no. four] (Shanghai: Chenguang chuban gongsi, 1947). Bai Lang, Bai Lang wenji [Bai Lang’s collection] (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1984). ———. Bai Lang wenji 2—zhongpian xiaoshuoji [Bai Lang’s collection 2—novella collection] (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1985). Bai Wei, Bai Wei zuopin xuan [Selected works of Bai Wei] (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985). Bing Xin, Bing Xin wenji 1–3 juan [Bing Xin’s Collection: Volume 1–3] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1982–1984). Cao Ming, Caoming xuanji [Cao Ming’s selected works] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1959). Chen Baichen, Shengguan tu [Dream of promotion]; Sui han tu [Severe winter]; Chen Baichen juzuo xuan [Selected plays of Chen Baichen] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1981). Chen Hengzhe, Xiao yudian: Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi cankao ziliao [Little Raindrop: references to modern Chinese literature] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1985). Chen Ying, Xiyan zhihou [After the wedding banquet] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1987). Ding Ling, Shafei nüshi de riji [Ms. Sophia’s diary] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1985). ———. Ding Ling wenji, 1–6 juan [Ding Ling’s collection: Volume 1–6] (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1982–1984). Feng Keng, Chongqin qilai [Rise up again] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1986). Feng Yuanjun, Juanshi [Juanshi grass, published in the name of Ms. Gan] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1983). © Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2

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———. Chun hen [Traces of spring, published in the name of Yuanjun] (Shanghai: Beixin shuju, 1930). Ge Qin, Ge Qin chuangzuo ji [Collection of Ge Qin’s works] (Shanghai: Xinxin chubanshe, 1947). He Jingzhi, Ding Yi and Ma Ke, Baimao Nü [The White-haired girl] (Bejing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1945). Jiang Guangci, Jiang Guangci xuanji [Selected works of Jiang Guangci] (Beijing: Kaiming shudian, 1951). Kong Jue, Shouku ren [The sufferers] (Shanghai: Haiyan shudian, 1949). Lao She, Luotuo Xiangzi [Rickshaw boy] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1962). ———. Mao cheng ji [Cat country]; Lao She wenji, di qi juan [Collection of Lao She’s works, Volume 7] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984). Li Ji, Wang Gui yu Li Xiangxiang [Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang] (Shenyang: Dongbei shudian, 1946). Lin Huiyin, Xiaoshuo xuan [Selected short stories] (Shanghai: Dagong baoguan, 1936). Lin Peizhi, Nala de chulu [Nora’s way out] (Peking: Yanjing yinshuasuo, 1939). Ling Shuhua, Hua zhi si, Nüren, Xiao gelia [Temple of flowers, Women, Two young brothers] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1986). Lu Ling, Caizhu di er nü men [The sons and daughters of a plutocrat] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985). ———. Lu Ling xiaoshuo xuan [Selected stories of Lu Ling] (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1986). Lu Xun, Panghuang [Wandering ]; Lu Xun quanji, di er juan [Anthology of Lu Xun, volume 2] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981). Lu Yin, Haibin guren [Seaside friends] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985). ———. Lu Yin xuanji [Selected works of Lu Yin] (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1983). Luo Shu, Luo Shu xuanji [Selected works of Luo Shu] (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1980). Mao Dun, Ziye [Midnight] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953). ———. Shi [Eclipse] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1954). ———. Hong [Rainbow] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1983). ———. Mao Dun quanji, di yi-jiu juan [Anthology of Mao Dun, volumes 1–9] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1984–1985). Rou Shi, Rou Shi xiaoshuo xuanji [Selected stories of Rou Shi] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1954). Sha Ting, Zai Qixiangju chaguan li [In Qixiangju teahouse]; Huanxiang ji [Homecoming], Sha Ting xuanji [Selected works of Sha Ting] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1959). Su Qing, Jiehun shinian zhengxu [Sequel to ten years of marriage] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1989). Su Xuelin, Su Xuelin zixuanji [Su Xuelin’s selected collection] (Taibei: Liming wenhua shiye gongsi, 1975). Sun Li, Hehua dian [Lotus creek] (Shenyang: Dongbei shudian, 1948). Wei Jinzh, Wei Jinzhi duanpian xiaoshuo xuanji [Selected collection of Wei Jinzhi’s short stories] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1954). Wu Zuguang, Zhuogui zhuan [Ghost hunting], Wu Zuguang juzuo xuan [Selected plays by Wu Zuguang] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1981).

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Xiao Hong, Hulan he zhuan [Tales of Hulan river] (Shanghai: Xin wenyi chubanshe, 1958). ———. Xiao Hong xuanji (Selected works of Xiao Hong) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981). ———. Shengsi chang [The field of life and death] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981). ———. Shangshi jie [Market street, published in the name of Qiao Yin] (Shanghai: Wenhua shenghuo chubanshe, 1940). Xie Bingying, Xie Bingying zuopin xuan [Selected works of Xie Bingying] (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985). Yao Xueyin, Chang ye [The long night] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981). Ye Shengtao, Ye Shengtao xuanji [Selected works of Ye Shengtao] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1959). Yu Dafu, Yu Dafu xiaoshuo ji [Collection of Yu Dafu’s stories] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1982). Yu Ru, Yaoyuan de ai [The remote love] (Shanghai: Ziqiang chubanshe, 1944). Yuan Jun, Wanshi shibiao [The teacher of all ages] (Shanghai: Wenhua shenghuo chubanshe, 1947). Yuan Shuipai, Ma Fantuo de shan’ge [Folk songs by Ma Fantuo] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1955). Zhang Ailing, or Eileen Chang, Liuyan [Written on water] (Taibei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1984). ———. Zhang kan [In Zhang’s eyes] (Taibei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1984). ———. Zhang Ailing xiaoshuo ji [Collection of Zhang Ailing’s stories] (Taibei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1984). ———. Chuanqi [Romances] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1985). ———. Jinsuo ji [The golden cangue] (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1987). Zhang Henshui, Wuzi dengke [Wish you all prosperity] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1957). ———. Bashiyi meng [Eighty-one dreams] (Chongqing: Nanjing xinminbao Chongqing she, 1942). Zhang Tianyi, Huawei xiansheng, Zhang Tianyi xuanji [Mr. Warwick, Selected collection of Zhang Tianyi] (Beijing: Kaimin shudian, 1951). Zhao Shuli, Xiao’erhei jiehun [Young Erhei’s wedding] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1961).

Index

A A Doll’s House, 35, 61, 203, 228, 299 A Dream of Red Mansions , 19, 84, 94, 296 Ai Qing, 41 Da Yan He, My Wet-Nurse, 41 Ai Wu, 153, 251 In the Mountain Gorge, 153 Anthology learning, 52, 129

B Bai Hu Tong , 10, 12 Bai Lang A Strange Kiss , 192 Beneath the Wheel , 191 Life and Death, 47, 192 Bai Wei Bomb and Migrant Bird, 157, 208, 212, 214 Breaking out of Ghost Pagoda or Breaking out of the Dark Pagoda of Spirits , 208 Lin Li, 208 My Tragic Life, 101 Paradise, 208 Suffering Women, 208 Ba Jin, 148, 192, 193, 251, 254, 255, 279 Cold Nights , 255, 262, 263 The Fourth Ward, 255 Ban Gu, 10

Bai Hu Tong or White Tiger Conference Proceedings , 10 Ban Zhao, 15 Women’s Commandments , 15 Barber of Séville, The, 88 binary opposites, 65, 107, 223 Bing Xin About Women, 122, 123, 198 After the Show, 120 A Girl named Dong’er, 120 A Myriad of Stars , 111, 114 Auntie, 120 Enlightened, 118, 120 Farewell , 120, 122 Final Rest in Peace, 123 Separation, 115, 119, 120 Sister June the First , 120 Spring Water, 111, 114, 115, 117 Taitai’s Livingroom, 120 That Man Alone Languishes , 67, 117, 118 The First Banquet , 120, 121 The Last Messenger, 116, 118 The Past , 120 There are Plenty of Delights and Lights in the World, 115 Two Families , 118 Biography of Defectors, 276 Book of Rites Funeral Formalities , 6 Inner Rules , 7 Marriage, 6

© Peking University Press 2023 Y. Meng and J. Dai, Emerging from the Horizon of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4004-2

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INDEX

Sacrifice, 8 Suburban Specialties , 6 Trivial Rites or Qu Li, 11 Book of Title Explanation,Shi Ming , 14, 15 bound feet, 58, 187 Bremond, Claude, 84 Butler, Judith, 322, 323

C Cao Ming Impasse, 191 Tipping , 191 Toothless , 191 Cao Yu, 148, 149 Cao Zhi, 19 Ode to Beauty, 19 carry on the ancestral line, 29, 104 celibacy, 52 Central Military Academy, 186, 188 Changfeng, Sima, 318 chastity, 7, 15, 24, 42, 45, 52, 53, 58, 153, 178, 259, 284 Chen Baichen, 251 A Wintry Year, 255 Dream of Promotion, 251 Chen Duxiu, 52, 53, 56, 58 Admonishing the Youth, 52 Literary Revolution, 53 Chen Hengzhe, 64, 72, 74 Little Rain Drops , 74 Louise’s Problem, 74 Chen Ying Afternoon, 202 After the Wedding Banquet, 202, 204 Life, 159 Old Rain, 203 Snowing , 204 The Beginning of Love, 202 The Dead of the Night , 202 The Void, 204 Time and Space, 202 Women, 198, 202 China Women’s News , 29 Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, 189 Cixous, Hélèna, 316

code of culture/cultural code, 45, 82, 127, 128, 277, 309 code of emotion, 108 Comments on Confucius , 53 Confucian Store, 46, 107 Confucius Analects of Confucius , 15 Confucius’ Sayings to Disciplines , 11 The Doctrine of the Mean, 10 Congwen, Shen, 263 courtesy, 12, 30, 52, 127, 157 Creation Weekly Magazine, 97

D Da Dai Li Ji, 12 de Beauvoir, Simone, 316 deep-rooted bad habits, 54, 132, 172, 175, 180 Ding Ling A Crushed Heart , 177 A Girl called Ah Mao, 156 A New Faith, 177 An Unfired Bullet , 177 Dongcun Event , 178 During the Summer Vacation, 168 End of the Year, 167 Family of a County Magistrate, 177 Flood, 171, 175–177 Hub of Tian Jia Chong , 174, 175, 177, 238 In the Darkness , 160, 167 In the Hospital , 179, 180 Join the Army, 177 Meng Ke, 31, 47, 66, 101, 156, 157, 164, 166–168, 170, 205 Mercy, Tolerance and Literary Daily, 179 Mother, 176 Ms. Sophia’s Dairy, 30, 31, 43, 66, 121, 166, 171, 205 One Day, 174, 175 On the Small Steam Boat , 169 Reflections on Women’s Day, 32, 180 Shanghai, Spring, 1930, 171 Sun, 170 The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River, 182 Wei Hu, 170–173, 175, 182

INDEX

We Need Essays , 180 When I was in Village Xiacun, 177 Wild Grass , 31, 169

331

The Moon Cleaving the Clouds , 43 Guangzhou Uprising, 214 guixiu school, 126 Guo Moruo, 78, 97 Nirvana of Phoenix, 78

E Emperor Xuantong, 51

F Farmers’ Association, 211 Fei Xiaotong, 2, 9 From the Soil –the Foundations of Chinese Society, 9 feminine ethics, 133 feminine experience, 74, 239, 246, 277 feminine virtue, 133, 136 femininity, 6, 20, 43, 76, 83, 105, 113, 116, 124, 141, 155, 204, 213, 246, 258, 266, 267, 281, 282, 284 Feng Keng Little Ah Qiang , 189 Red Diary, 185, 187, 189, 190 Feng Yuanjun/Yuan Jun/Yuanjun After the Separation, 97, 98 Journey, 72, 97–99, 103 Juanshi Grass , 97, 201 Kind Mother, 97, 98, 105 Overdue, 105 Separation, 72, 97–99, 102, 103, 105 feudal order and ethics, 98 feudal patriarch, 27, 29, 30, 65, 106, 154, 256 filial piety, 9, 52, 284 Foucault, Michel, 16 From the Soil –The Foundations of Chinese Society, 9 Fu Lei, 274

G gender identity, 118, 157, 211, 310 gender issue, 105, 211, 322, 324 Ge Qin, 185 Full Retreat , 185 good wife and loving mother, 192, 194 Great Revolution, 39, 41, 43, 145, 146, 186, 202, 212 Guangci, Jiang, 40, 43, 153

H herd mentality, 236, 238 historic inertia, 173, 252 How We Become Fathers Now, 53 Hsia, C.T.,/Xia Zhiqing, 265, 318, 319 A History of Modern Chinese Literature 1917–1975, 155 Hua Mulan, 25 Huang Renying, 129 On Modern Chinese Female Writers , 129 Hu Lancheng, 319 This Life, These Times , 319 human relations, 8, 10–13, 20, 135 Huo Xiaoyu, 25 Hu Shi, 53, 61, 121 Discussions on Literature Improvement , 53 Lifelong Event , 61 I Ibsen, Henrik, 35, 36, 61, 62, 86, 203 I Ching, 10 Injustice to Dou E, 23 inscription, 78, 130–132, 254, 282, 289, 292, 293, 296, 300, 303, 306 J Jane Eyre, 270 Jingxi, Wang, 40 Snowy Night , 40 Jin Yi, 263 Jinzhi, Wei, 41, 152, 234 Nanny, 41, 152 Jiuling, Zhang, 20 Junxiang, Zhang, 255 The Teacher of All Ages , 255 K Kong Jue, 257

332

INDEX

The Sufferers , 257 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 15, 25 About Chinese Women, 25

L Lacan, Jacques, 35, 281, 282 La Jeunesse/New Youth, 52, 53, 58, 61 Lao She, 133, 148, 153, 252 Cat country, 133, 252 Rickshaw Boy, 148, 153 League of Left-Wing Writers, 152, 171, 185, 190 Li Dazhao, 37, 53 Li Jianwu, 192, 193 Li Liewen, 193 Ling Shuhua A Blessed Person, 129, 130, 134 A Day of Their Own, 137 After Drinking , 129, 137, 138 After the Tea Party, 126, 128 Embroidered Pillow, 126, 128, 136 Illness , 137 Little Liu, 74, 75 Qi Xia, 74, 75 Spring , 76, 142 Tai-tai, 125, 129, 137, 168 Temple of Flowers , 129, 137, 141, 142 The Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival , 129, 130, 134, 136, 142 There is Such a Thing , 75 The Send-off , 132, 133 The Tea Party, 126, 128 Women, 74, 121, 198 Lin Huiyin, 77, 194, 200 In Ninety-Nine Degree Heat , 194 Lin Peizhi, 198, 205 Nora’s Way Out , 62, 156, 205 Lin Yüsheng, 52 Crisis of Chinese Consciousness , 52 Liu Xi, 13, 14 Shi Ming or Dictionary of Explanation, 13, 14 Liu Xinhuang, 275 The History of Literature in the Occupied Areas during the Anti-Japanese War, 275 Lu Jia, 10 New Talks or Xin Yü, 10

Lu Ling, 254, 255 The Sons and Daughters of a Plutocrat , 254, 255 Luo Binji, 222, 228, 263 Biography of Xiao Hong , 222 Luo Shu A Corner of the Ground, 193 Ah Niu, 193 Aunty Liu, 193 The Oranges , 193 The Salt Worker, 193 The Vale of Fish, 193 Thief , 193 Wife of another Man, 47, 193 Lu Xun Call to Arms , 77, 147 Dairy of a Madman, 53 How We Become Fathers Now, 53 My View of Celibacy and Chastity, 53 Regret for the Past , 35, 59, 60 The History of Chinese Novels , 38 The New Year’s Sacrifice, 39–41, 271 Tomorrow, 40, 41, 170 Lu Yin Ivory Ring , 79, 198, 317 Man and Woman, 11, 61 A Woman’s Heart , 198

M male-dominant law, 15 male rule, 4, 13, 15 Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, 251, 276 Mao Dun Color Blind, 43 Comments on Lu Yin, 82 Corrosion, 44, 253 Creation, 61 Disillusion, 42, 153, 215 Eclipse, 39, 42, 44, 153, 215 Midnight: A Romance of China, 133 Rainbow, 42, 153 The Story of the First Stage, 253 Wild Rose, 42 May Fourth Movement, 53, 61–63, 66, 71, 75, 77, 80–83, 85, 89, 106, 107, 147–150, 154–156, 181, 194,

INDEX

198, 216, 254–258, 278, 285–287, 289, 297–299, 309, 313 Ministers Serving Two Dynastic Empires , 276 monolithic social stratum, 155 Morning News Supplement , 58 Mu Guiying, 25 Mulvey, Laura, 22

N national beauty and celestial fragrance, 169 national economy and the people’s livelihood, 70, 213 National Soviet People’s Delegates Conference, 189 national spirit, 130, 134, 238, 239, 242, 244, 245 natural feet, 187 new culture movement, 31, 35, 37, 40, 46, 52, 53, 64, 66, 106, 126, 142, 163, 215, 229, 252 New Culture value system, 98 new literature, 32, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 59, 60, 74, 98, 137, 185, 207, 267 new women, 28, 29, 31, 37, 39, 43, 44, 47, 57, 61, 66, 75, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85–89, 93–95, 98, 106, 107, 126, 129, 136, 137, 142, 154, 190, 273, 274, 277, 285, 286, 289, 299 Nie Gannu, 226, 230, 231, 235 ed. Selected Works of Xiao Hong , 226, 230, 231 Northern Expedition, 146, 147, 185, 188 nothingness, 31, 108

O objectification, 16, 18, 68 October, 318 Oedipal phase, 107, 109, 113, 119 On The Clan System being the Basis of Authoritarianism, 53 Opium War, the, 2, 26, 27, 33, 38, 54, 146, 249, 253, 257

333

P patricide, 26, 31, 51, 53, 55–57, 68, 70, 77, 82, 106–109, 113, 126, 145, 147, 298 Peacocks Fly Southeast , 23, 24 Pingju Opera, 296 Pingmei, Shi, 79, 90, 221 political myth, 192, 194, 253 pre-Oedipal phase, 107–109 Promotion of Vernacular Writing, 53, 56 Q Qian Liqun, 31, 245 Qiu Jin, 28–30, 63, 187, 257 Qu Yuan, 19 Li Sao, 19 R Records of Rites by Dai De, the, 12 Ren lun zhi chu/beginning of human relations, 8–11, 13 Revolution of 1911, the, 26, 27, 38, 147 righteousness, 6, 9, 52, 179 rites, 274 feudal code of ethics, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109 Rou Shi, 41, 152 For Slave Mother, 152 royalty, 52 Ruan Zhangjing, 257 Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang , 257 Ruohua, Song, 15 Confucius’ Analects for Women, 15 S San gang wu chang /three cardinal relations and five constant virtues, 9 Second Sex, The, 275, 316 self-sacrifice in peril of losing chastity, 230 Sha Ting, 251, 254 Homecoming , 167, 204, 251 Shi Tuo, 263 Sick Men of East Asia, 253 Smash the Confucian shop, 46, 56, 107 Snowy Night , 40

334

INDEX

spirit alliance, 82, 101, 103, 106, 107, 157, 159, 164, 211, 212, 219 spiritual and gender selfhood, 310 spiritual gender identity, 312, 313, 316 spiritual liberation of femininity, 45 Spivak, Gayatri, 316 Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, 18 subjectivity, 26, 28, 35, 36, 38, 53, 54, 68, 69, 76, 86, 104, 107, 139, 140, 148, 156, 211, 237, 238, 261, 266 subnormal deficiency (inherently flawed, something wanting within), 281 subtleties and niceties, 295 Sun Li, 258 Lotus Creek, 258 Sun Yat-sen, 53, 146 Su Qing Affection, Kindness and Good Looking , 286 Collection of Selected Essays , 272, 275 Moth, 268, 269, 283, 287, 289, 318 Mother’s Hope, 286 Talks on Women, 282 Ten Years of Marriage, 30, 47, 270, 271, 273, 275, 278–280, 283–286, 289, 318 Su Xuelin Green Sky, 198–201 Kitten, 199 Little Butterfly with Silver Wings , 198, 200, 201 Thorny Heart , 76, 198, 201

T Tai-tai, 125, 129–133, 137, 140, 163 three cardinal relations and five constant virtues, 9 Tongcheng School, 52 tui ying , 271

U Unnamable (inculpable) and unconscious killer legions, 257, 281

W Wedding of Figaro, The, 88

White-Haired Girl, The, 39, 40, 257, 259, 310–313 ‘without any licentious sexual behavior’, 104 Women’s Federation, 209 Woolf, Virginia, 58, 90, 316 Shakespeare’s Sister, 58, 59 Wu Yu, 53 On the Clan System being the basis of Authoritarianism, 53 Wu Zuguang, 251 Ghost Hunting , 251

X Xiao Hong A Small Town in March, 232 Bridge, 232 Cry of the Wilderness , 232, 242 Death of Sister Mao, 232 Down the Mountain, 232, 242 Eternal Vision and Pursuit , 222 Hands , 232 Ma Bole, 232, 242 Market Street , 232 Nightly Wind, 232 Random Notes on Lu Xun, 232 Riding an Ox Cart , 232 Some People Outside the Family, 222, 232 Soul of the Nation, 232, 242 Tales of Hulan River, 30, 156, 221, 222, 232, 242, 244–246, 255 The Field of Life and Death, 47, 221, 232, 233, 235–242, 244 Trekking , 232 Watching Kites , 232 Yellow River, 232 Xiao Jun, 32, 179, 221, 225–229, 231, 232 Notations on Xiao Hong’s Letters , 226 Xie Bingying A Note at the End, 188 Girl Rebel: The Autobiography of Hsieh Ping-ying , 187 To K.L., 188 War Diary, 185, 188, 189 Xun, Zhang, 51 Xu Shen, 13

INDEX

Sh¯ uowén Jˇıezì or Origins of Chinese Characters , 13 Y yang , 15, 20–22, 71 Yang, Zhensheng, 40 The Virgin, 40 Yu Jun, 40 Ye, Shengtao, 40, 41, 84, 152, 237 Night , 41, 152 One Life, 40, 41, 271 Yi Baisha, 53 yin, 15, 20–22, 71, 303, 313 Young China, 57, 63, 77, 78, 124, 145–147, 149, 179, 253, 255 young lady of noble birth, 137 Yuan Shikai, 51 Yu Dafu, 97, 153 Spring Fever, 153 Yu Ru, 255, 256 The Remote Love, 255, 256 Z Zhang, Ailing/Chang, Eileen

335

Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, 268, 293, 304 “From the Ashes” , 187 In the Eyes of Zhang , 319 Love in a Fallen City, 268, 269, 272, 295, 298, 301, 304, 305, 318 Naked Earth, 319 “Pedestrians’ Eye Contact Greetings” , 294 Romances , 292, 295, 296, 318 The Gold Cangue, 268–270, 297, 299, 300, 304, 318 The Rice Sprout Song , 319 Written on Water, 269, 292–295, 299, 319 Zhang Henshui, 251, 252, 276 Eighty-One Dreams , 252 Wish You All Prosperity, 252 Zhang Tianyi, 133 Mr. Warwick, 133, 251 Zhengbi, Tan, 318 Zhao Shuli, 257 Young Erhei’s Wedding , 257, 258 Zuoren, Zhou, 53, 57 Human Literature, 53, 57