CHAPTER SEVEN Naming the First (New Woman' Ying

[The labor of historiographyJ .•• promotes a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility. -Michel de Certeau

In r897, Qichao 1m (r873-1929) published the biography of a Ms Aide~ 1~ in Shiwu $j ~(The Chinese progress).1 Unlike the subjects ofhis other biographies of Chinese and Western luminaries, Ms Kang was at the time obscure figure from the small town ofJiujiang fL ?I in . Although since forgotten, for a brief period before and dur­ ing the 1898 reforms, her name became synonymous with the "new citizen" of and, more specifically, with the new Chinese woman. The case ofKang Aide is interesting because of her apparent centrality as well as her hidden marginality to the project(s) of modernity. Her case il­ lustrates a peculiar historical paradox: the term "woman" was endowed with tremendous representational power during this period, but the existence and intelligibility of the concept were predicated on what was forgotten about

Part of this research was funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. I thank the staff at the General Commission on Archives and History of the United Methodist Church, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and the Library at for making available crucial archival material for this paper. My gratitude goes to Francesca Bray, Gail Hershatter, Joan Judge, Angela Leung, Susan Mann, and Harriet Zurndorfer for critiquing earlier versions of this paper and to Theodore Huters, Xiaobing Tang, and W eili for answering my queries. An earlier version of this paper was published in Nan nii in zooI. I. Liang Qichao, " Jiangxi Kang niishi" ~c ?I gs JM i;t: ±, in idem, Yinbing shi heji: wenji ~ (lJ

"women," that is to say, both her predecessors who were dismissed as "tradi­ tional" as well as elements in her that were deemed less than modern. Through the case of Kang Aide, this chapter traces the enactment of ­ dernity at a particular historical moment, an enactment fraught with ambi­ guity and often contested at the very moment of its conception. Indeed, even Kang Aide's name became a locus of dispute. Missionary publications hailed her as "a daughter of Confucius" and emphasized that her surname was . In her own writings, she used the name Ida Kahn in English and Kang ~ JJX. in Chinese. Different names, competing ­ nealogies, conflicting interpretations-she was clearly a figure in whom oth­ ers found different meanings.2 Each act of naming tells a distinctive story about Kang Aide and assigns her to a different group. Liang Qichao's exem­ plar of the new woman, the missionaries' Western-educated descendent of Confucius, a woman capable of telling her own stories-each version of her personal history implies a different version of the larger history. The 1898 reform period was a pivotal one in modern Chinese history, and these names create origin stories that become a part of modern myths, with different configurations of tradition and modernity and different roles for China and the West. 3

2. Ann Arbor News, Apr. 22, 1948, in which Ida Kahn (Kang Aide) and (Shi Meiyu) were described as "the first Chinese women graduates of University of Michigan" and "the first and only medical doctors in an area of five million Chinese" (University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, necrology ille oflda Kahn). In the early part of this chapter, I use Liang Qichao's formulation of her name for the sake of clarity; later in the paper, I switch to the other two names in accordance with the context. 3· In reading these different versions of her story-the reformers', the missionaries', and Kang' s own-this chapter does not aim to answer the complex historical question of the role of missionaries in China's modernization, which is the subject of a great deal of scholarship presented in a variety of interpretive frames. The major figures of the reform movement that are typically the subjects of previous studies on missionary influence were more or less edu­ cated in the traditional literati ·milieu but influenced by Western ideas, wielding influence from major cities at home or abroad. See Max Weber, The Religion of China (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951 (1915-20 ]); Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 1, The Problem ofintellectual Continuity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958);]ohn K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Paul Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chi­ nese Anti{oreignism, r86o-r87o (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). For are­ cent reappraisal of Weber, see Hui ?.:EB!j!, "Weihe Zhongguo xiandaixing wenti" ~ {S W$lmZI fJi, {~ ' r"~ Nlj, Xueren 6 (1994 ): 381-424. For a critical reflection on American mod­ els of Chinese history writing, see Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical