University of Alberta

Approaching History: The Fictional Worlds of Ha Jin and Yan Geling

by

Rong Guo

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Comparative Literature

©Rong Guo Spring 2011 Edmonton, Alberta

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1+1 Canada Examining Committee

Jonathan L. Hart Comparative Literature / Department of English & Film Studies, University of Alberta

Jenn-Shann Lin East Asian Studies / Comparative Literature, University of Alberta

Irene Sywenky Comparative Literature / Department of Modern Languages & Cultural Studies, University of Alberta

Massimo Verdicchio Comparative Literature / Department of Modern Languages & Cultural Studies, University of Alberta

Robert J. Merrett Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta

Shaobo Xie Department of English, University of Calgary Abstract

Taken as the two most important overseas Chinese writers, both Ha

Jin and Yan Geling left China in the 1980s and attended graduate programs at universities in the United States. Though writing in different languages, Yan mainly in Chinese and Jin in English, they have some characteristics in common. Being away from China has provided them a proper distance to look back at that country and, correspondingly, a unique perspective to appropriate materials relating to the people living in China.

Literature and history are always mixed. Though fictions, including historical fictions, cannot be treated as factual reports and do not carry any authority as historical statements, all creative writing offers "insights into the social and intellectual milieu in which the writer lived, and often vivid descriptions of the physical settings as well" (Tosh 67-8). Thus, it should be feasible for readers and critics to approach history, or, in other words, to obtain a historical awareness, through fictional worlds.

As a special kind of possible worlds, fictional worlds express various aspects of reality, and consequently, readers can see the shadows or reflections of social reality through explorations in the fictional worlds. As one critic says, except for the names of characters and locations, the reality in a literary work is much more authentic than any narratives in history and politics

(Jin Kemu & Yang Jiang; qtd. in Ning Zongyi, par.1; Cao Mingzong, par.8). It is not uncommon, hence, for people to take literary works as windows to explore the history and reality of a society. This dissertation begins with a brief introduction to the theory of possible worlds and speech acts, aiming to provide an ontological landscape of fictions in general and an approach employed to interpret literary texts. The subsequent four chapters focus on two works of Ha Jin and Yan Geling respectively. Through a detailed examination of the four texts, I argue and demonstrate from different perspectives the point that the narratives of these works constitute an alternative account to the dominant official narratives about China and the Chinese people, either by filling in the gaps left by the state narratives, or by offering a counter-narrative to the official master narratives.

Undoubtedly, Ha Jin and Yan Geling's works can be studied from different perspectives, but this dissertation focuses more on their historical dimension. This study will aim to provide some examples and insights that will help with future mapping of overseas Chinese literature. Preface

This preface is partly in response to suggestions the external examiner had concerning the theoretical framework and the reading practice in this thesis. My dissertation begins with the reading of literary works, during which I developed a strong interest in writings about the contemporary past of China.

I cannot help but ask the following questions: is it legitimate to take literary texts as accesses to history? How should one treat and define fictional worlds? Therefore, when I read about possible world theory, I considered its argument about the correlation between fiction and reality, and I was happy to find Lubomir Dolezel's clarification about the bidirectional exchange between fiction and actuality. According to Dolezel, the author draws on the actual world in the creation of a literary fictional world, while the reader can access the fictional worlds through semiotic channels (21). Dolezel further asserts,

"The essence of fiction is to be located in the nature of the speech acts performed when telling or writing a narration" (10).

For this very reason, I have included a section about speech act theory. In my thesis, the theory of possible/fictional worlds is introduced from an ontological perspective while speech act theory is approached from the aspects of function. Both are related, in different aspects, to my thinking about the literary works covered in this dissertation.

In his book, Speech Acts in Literature (2001), J. Hillis Miller writes,

"Speech acts in literature" can mean speech acts that are uttered within literary works, for example promises, lies, excuses, declarations, imprecations, requests for forgiveness, apologies, pardons, and the like said or written by the characters or by the narrator in a novel. It can also mean a possible performative dimension of a literary work taken as a whole. Writing a novel may be a way of doing things with words. (1; emphasis added)

In his Literature as Conduct (2005), Miller reiterates his argument and further identifies the role of writers and readers in the cooperation of "literature as conduct." According to Miller, the author's act of writing is an act that takes the form of putting things in this way or that, while the reader, in acts of teaching, criticism, or informal comment, may do things by putting a reading into words (Literature as Conduct 2).

I strongly agree with him and take his approach as the theoretical basis of my interpretation. Borrowing from his idea of "the way literature may conduct its readers to believe or to behave in new ways," I try to explore the relations of literature to conduct by reading Ha Jin and Yan Geling's literary works, discerning what the two authors seek to convey by addressing myself to their tenets or politics of writing (Literature as Conduct 2). I take from Miller the notion that speech acts in literature can "mean a possible performative dimension of a literary work taken as a whole" and that "[p]erformative signs

(including picture, ... written language, and music) masking as constative assertions generate what we call ideology" (Speech Acts 1; Literature as

Conduct 7). Here, I reiterate this to emphasize the framework of the relation between the theory of my framework and the assumption that the novels that I analyze in the subsequent chapters constitute these kinds of speech acts.

However, in theory and practice, I also differ from Miller, who mainly analyzes the speech acts of the narrators and characters whereas I take the whole literary work as a performative speech act/utterance, in which the constative

dimension is the story of the fictional world, while the performative dimension

is what I attempt to read between the lines. Hence, my analysis works mainly

on two levels: the constative level, the characters and narrators in the fictional world; and the performative level, the act of the author's writing and my act of

reading.

Take my reading of Yan Geling's The Ninth Widow as an example.

First, I describe the female protagonist's unique view of history, analyzing the

characteristics of her innocence, comparing her with other alienated

characters in the novel. Then, I address myself to the question: why does the

author take Putao, an innocent illiterate village woman without even the

slightest sense of political consciousness, as her protagonist? What does the

author want to reveal through her story? In the novel, this innocent illiterate

woman actually plays the role of a redeemer, who not only rescues the life of

her father-in-law, but also changes the ethics of the villagers around her. The

secret of her victory is simply her adherence to the essence of being a human

being: the family ethics speak louder than the mentality of class and class

struggle, the dominant official ideologies permeating mainland China in the

early 1950s and the following three decades. I conclude, therefore, in the

section, "Tenet of writing—the politics of the unpolitical," that "[i]f people can

live well only when they are not influenced or dominated by certain ideologies,

these ideologies must be something questionable and should be censored"

(136). Similarly, after examining, from the perspective of change in setting, the degeneration of the originally innocent young protagonist in Yan Geling's

"Celestial Bath," I turn to the time of her writing, which was in 1994 when nostalgia mixed with idealistic, loyal and heroic complexes were permeating throughout mainland China and the central government and dominant influential media were promoting the mythical slogan—"no-regret youth." I write,

Taking into account the fact that the individual traumatic memory is easy to fade in the public horizons and historical discourse is likely to be distorted by official narratives, I would rather believe that Yan Geling was making a conscious effort to write against the unreliable memory and to write against the transformed and enforced historical ideology. (178-9)

In reading Ha Jin's War Trash, I explore first the "themes of entrapment, powerlessness and self-delusion" embodied in the protagonist by examining the tattoo on his body, the odd twist of his fate as a graduate of the

Huangpu Military Academy in the POW camp and his life back in China as a social outcast (Sturr 191). After that, I review the glorification of the Korean

War in the propaganda and the public memory of the Chinese people, putting forward that "no detailed information has ever been revealed from Chinese official sources, not to speak of the life stories of more than twenty-two thousand POWs" (97). As Salman Rushdie writes, "description is itself a political act," and writing itself is "one way of denying the official, politician's version of truth" (13; 14). Undoubtedly, Ha Jin's War Trash can be taken as a case of speaking for the silenced, and I conclude, "[h]istory has been merciless to those helpless people, but at least it utters, through the writing of

Ha Jin, a long and heavy sigh" (108).

In reading Ha Jin's A Free Life, I focus first on his writing about the

Tiananmen Square Massacre, which is certainly taboo in China and has been successfully "transformed into an invisible massacre, a phantom existing only in the memory of those who experienced or witnessed it" (Berry 300). Then, I elaborate on the myth of freedom by examining different aspects of his life in the US, indicating that only through the process of discarding the blind concept of nationalism and patriotism can one enjoy the real freedom

belonging to a human being. As we know, nationalism and patriotism are the most important components of education and ideological inculcation in China.

Obviously, Ha Jin is reminding people to reflect on the invisible influence of

national and official ideologies that may hinder people from thinking

independently.

In the end, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the external for spending so much time reading my thesis and

providing valuable suggestion for further improvement. Although the external and I may not agree on all matters of framework and specific interpretation, I

have taken into consideration his comments and learnt from them. In making the final corrections for submission, I have also made changes, adding footnotes, for instance, in the body of the dissertation based on the suggestions of all examiners, including the external. Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Program of Comparative Literature and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Alberta for accepting me and providing me with the FS

CHIA fellowship, which enabled me to pursue a doctoral degree.

Secondly, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Professor

Jonathan Hart and Professor Jenn-Shann Lin, my supervisor and co- supervisor, who have supported me. Professor Lin not only introduced me to the teaching jobs in the Department of East Asian Studies, but also helped me grow into an experienced instructor. He also gave generously of his time and helped me in many ways intellectually. My interests in diasporic studies and the norms of literary works are particularly indebted to him.

Professor Hart, like a navigator, always guided me. I am particularly indebted to him for his help in theoretical matters and at the final stages of the thesis.

Thirdly, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my internal and external committee members, Professor Irene Sywenky, Professor

Robert J. Merrett, Professor Massimo Verdicchio, and Professor Shaobo Xie for their commons and support.

Moreover, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Cindy

Chopoidalo, my classmate at the University of Alberta, for her intellectual generosity and for showing me what it takes to write clear English.

Further, my deep appreciation goes to Ha Jin, one of the two focuses of my thesis, for meeting me and allowing me to attend his class at Boston University. His insight and gentle disposition impressed me and encouraged me to go on exploring his fictional worlds.

In addition, my special thanks also go to Janey Kennedy and other administrative staff in the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies and the

Department of East Asian Studies for their consistent understanding and support.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Professor J. Hillis Miller and

Professor Gabrielle Schwab for encouraging me and supporting me.

In closing, I would like to express my sincere and deep appreciation to

Uzma Qazi, Xinhui Liu, Kazuko Masumitsu, and many others I have not otherwise named but have contributed to the making of this project. Their help, inspiration and encouragement will be remembered forever.

Rong Guo

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

March 2011 Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Preface v

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1

Intro. 1 My Act of Reading—Methodological Review 3

Intro.2 Literature, History, and Narrative—Methodological Legitimacy 6

Intro.3 Why Ha Jin and Yan Geling—Their Characteristics in Common 11

Intro.4 Summary of the Chapters 37

Chapter 1: Possible Worlds, Fictional Worlds and Speech Acts 41

1.1 Brief Introduction to the Theory of Possible Worlds—Ontological Landscapes 42

1.2 Speech Act Theory—Functional Perspectives 61

1.3 Speech Act Theory vs. Possible Worlds Theory 67

Chapter 2: History Sigh: Reading Ha Jin's War Trash 70

2.1 Tattoo—A Constant Concern and A Metaphor of His Predicament 74

2.2 War Trash—Prisoner of War and Prey to Ideology and Political Factions

81

2.3 Irony of Life and Disillusion with Homecoming 96

2.4 A Sigh—Conclusion of the Non-Concluded Issue 106

Chapter 3: Political Unconsciousness: Reading Yan Geling's

The Ninth Widow 109

3.1 "The Alternating Legs"—The History in the Eyes of a Woman 111

3.2 The Innocent vs. the Alienated Prisoner of the Revolutionary Ideology

124 3.3 The simple woman and the light of the humanity 131

3.4 Tenet of writing—the politics of the unpolitical 134

Chapter 4: A Trauma Forever: Reading Yan Geling's "Celestial Bath"

138

4.1 "To the Countryside! To the Frontier!"—Political and Ideological Pitfall

141

4.2 From Chengdu (the City) to Kangxi Steppe (the Countryside): the Degeneration of the Sent-down 150

4.3 "Repressive Hypothesis"—Narrative of Desire during the Cultural

Revolution 165

4.4 The Civilized vs. the Barbarian—Manhood, Desire, and Humanity 167

4.5 A Trauma Forever—A Counter Narrative of "No-regret Youth" 176

Chapter 5: A Free Life OR A Journey of Odysseus? — Reading Ha

Jin's A Free Life 181

5.1 An Open Defense against the Master Narrative about the June Fourth Massacre 183

5.2 The Elegy for "Tiananmen Orphan"—The Wandering Chinese in Search of a Home 191

5.3 Ithaka vs. America: The Myth of Freedom 200

5.4 Falling between Two Stools—A Dilemma of Its Reception 228

Conclusion 236

Bibliography 243

Appendix 264 I was once a happily innocent youth. But, having watched your play, my eyes have been opened. I can no longer take for granted the happiness in my life and the lives of others.

—Huang K'o-ch'uan, "Old Mainlander,

For You I Write," 62

[Hjistory—Althusser's "absent cause," Lacan's "Real"—is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational; what can be added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form....

—Fredric Jameson, The Political

Unconscious, 82 INTRODUCTION

Among the many overseas Chinese writers, Ha Jin and Yan Geling are usually considered as the two most important representatives (Chen Hanping

76; Gao Xiaogang 162, 204; Chen Ruilin 29). Both of them left China in the

1980s and attended graduate programs at universities in the United States.

Though they write in different languages, Yan mainly in Chinese and Jin in

English, they have some characteristics in common. Being away from China has provided them a proper distance to look back at that country and, correspondingly, a unique perspective to appropriate materials relating to the people who live there.

This dissertation examines two works of each respective author: Ha

Jin's War Trash (2004) and A Free Life (2007), and Yan Geling's "Celestial

Bath" ( {Jiffi} ) (1996) and The Ninth Widow ( «HA^*#3» ) (2006), all of which have China and the Chinese people as their concerns. Focusing on different periods, these works cover a span of sixty years or so, from the Anti-

Japanese War in the mid-1940s to the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre1 in the late 1990s, and touch different aspects of the Chinese contemporary history and politics in the twentieth century. Among them, The

Ninth Widow, opening with a scene of conflict in 1944 between villagers and the Japanese troops, focuses on the execution of a village gentry-cum- proprietor during the Land Reform Movement in the early 1950s; War Trash,

1 There are different wordings about what happened in Beijing on June 4, 1989. The Chinese government usually uses "/\EHP:ff: (June 4th Incident)" or "/NHJXIS" (June 4th Disturbance); whereas the Western media often terms it as "Tiananmen Massacre." In this thesis, I follow Ha Jin, adopting "Tiananmen Massacre" (Free Life 3). -1- set in the Korean War (1950 to 1953), describes the two-years' tragic experience of a Chinese POW (prisoner of war) in the American POW camp and the three decades' ostracism and pain he suffered back home; "Celestial

Bath," set in the mid-1970s, depicts the fall and death of a blossoming teenage girl as one of the many victims of the grand "Up to the Mountain and

Down to the Countryside" movement, which started in the 1950s and continued into the late 1970s; whereas A Free Life begins on a specific day in

July 1989, a month after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and ends in 1998 after the protagonist walks out of his emotional entanglement with China.

This thesis uses the framework of poetics, historiography, as well as theories of possible/fictional worlds and speech acts, to examine the fictional worlds created by Ha Jin and Yan Geling. It endeavours to discern the difference between fiction and history, representation and the actual world represented. In the meantime, the thesis will also explore in depth characters, thematic concerns, as well as ideological inquiries and paradoxes presented in these fictional worlds.

Historical events and writings of history are blurred sometimes, and this is particularly true in fictions of history or historical fictions. The fictional worlds created by Ha Jin and Yan Geling constitute interactions and intertextualities with the real world, and their narratives provide alternative accounts of China and the Chinese people, which either supplement or oppose the official master historical narratives.2 Through these works, my

2 The concept of "master narratives," or "metanarratives," was introduced and criticized by Jean- -2- view about the past of China has been greatly enhanced and I believe that these works have overturned the general ideas which I was taught for many years. Hopefully, my inquiry into these works will provide insight for the mapping of the broad spectrum of overseas Chinese writing.

INTRO.1 My Act of Reading—Methodological Review

This dissertation begins with the reading of four literary works and ends at the achievement of a sense of history. This way of approaching narratives happens to be coincident to what Jerome Bruner has discussed— to work "bottom-up."

In "Approaching the Literary," the first section of part one, "Two Natural

Kinds," of his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds,3 Bruner puts forward his view that there are two styles of approaching narratives. One group, dominated by psychologists, is dedicated to working "top-down"; while the other, made up of playwrights, poets, novelists, critics, editors, to working

"bottom-up," although both groups are interested in psychological and literary questions, as well as the relationship between readers, writers and texts (9).

According to Bruner, top-down partisans take off from a theory about story, mind, writers, readers, and then swoop in on the text, searching for

Francois Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In his book, Lyotard characterizes postmodernity as increasing skepticism toward the totalizing nature of metanarratives and their reliance on some form of "transcendent and universal truth" (xxiv-xxv). Simply speaking, "master narratives" in this thesis refer to whatever ideological scripts that are created and reinforced by power structures and are therefore not to be trusted. To be specific, the master narratives to be countered, respectively, in the following chapters are the glorification of the Korean War, the absolute correctness of revolutionary discourses and revolutionary moves, the "no- regret youth" of the rusticated youths, and the overwhelming silence about the June 4th massacre. 3 Thanks to Jonathan Hart, I learned of this book and Bruner's discussion of different methods of approaching narratives, which is a precedent to my approach. For more specific information, see Hart's article, "A Comparative Pluralism: The Heterogeneity of Methods and the Case of Fictional Worlds." -3- instances (and less often counter-instances) of what they hope will be a right

"explanation" of whatever hypothesis anchored on a certain theory, be it psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, a theory of memory or philosophy of history; whereas the bottom-uppers march to a very different tune and focus on a particular piece of work: a story, a novel, a poem, even a line, taking it as their morsel of reality and exploring it to reconstruct or deconstruct.

Bruner also points out that for the skilled and dispassionate hands, the top-down approach is a powerful way to work, and it is more suitable for the linguist, the social scientist, and of science generally; whereas the bottom-up approach is to read a text for its meanings, and by doing so to elucidate the art of its author. This is not to say that those who use the bottom-up method will forswear the guidance of theories during the process of pursuing their quest. Rather, the quest of the bottom-up partisans is "not to prove or disprove a theory, but to explore the world of a particular work" (Bruner 10).

Generally speaking, in the words of Bruner, those who employ the top- down approach bewail the particularity of those who proceed bottom-up while the latter deplore the abstract nonwriterliness of the former. Though the two styles of approaching narrative are incommensurable, but, as Bruner claims, they are complementary, and "depth is better achieved by looking from two points at once" (10).

Obviously, Bruner's "bottom-up" is an inductive method, rather than a deductive one. It happens to be that my way of approaching literary works is bottom-up, which starts from a particular work, exploring its fictional world and

-4- trying to provide a tentative interpretation. In this thesis, I will draw my analysis and method from what these four works suggest, rather than imposing on them a predetermined theoretical and methodological framework.

In other words, evidence from the primary texts will be the foundation of my argument and method. To cite Bruner's distinction about the different methods of approaching narratives, however, is not to compare myself to the community of playwrights, poets, novelists and critics, but to look for theoretical support for my way of approaching literary works.

As for the role of readers, or in other words, the relationship between readers and texts, both Wolfgang Iser and Jerome Bruner discussed in details.

Following up the observation of J. M. Lotman, Iser writes that the literary text

"acts like a sort of living organism, which is linked to the reader, and also instructs him, by means of a feedback system" (67). Moreover, the literary text has a special quality: "it delivers different information to different readers— each in accordance with the capacity of his comprehension" (Iser 66).

This amounts to the assertion that a reader's experience in the actual world contributes to the reconstruction of the fictional world. Different readers may be interested in different aspects of the world constructed from the literary text, and the same passage may invite radically different resonance.

For this reason, each reading is unique. One hundred readers may have one hundred different images of Hamlet.4

Bruner, from the perspective of a psychologist, reminds people of

4 For this sentence, I am indebted to Cindy Chopoidalo, whose Ph.D dissertation, "The Possible Worlds of Hamlet: Shakespeare as Adaptor, Adaptation of Shakespeare," discusses many different versions of Hamlet in different languages and cultures. -5- thinking about "how and in what ways the text affects the reader and indeed, what produces such effects on the reader as do occur. What makes great stories reverberate with such liveliness in our ordinarily mundane minds?

What gives great fiction its power: what in the text and what in the reader?"

(4). Simply speaking, Bruner would like people to ponder over the interaction of readers with texts in the process of reading and of entering a story. That is the "reader-in-the-text" as a psychological process. Bruner believes that something in the actual text "triggers" an interpretation of genre in the reader, an interpretation that then dominates the reader's own creation of what Iser calls a "virtual text" (6).

Moreover, Bruner asserts that when rereading a story, a reader may change his or her way of interpretation, and the alternate ways of reading

"may battle one another, marry one another, mock one another in the reader's

mind" (7). He concludes that the actual text is unchanged; the virtual text (to

paraphrase Iser) changes almost moment to moment in the act of reading.

This is precisely what I have experienced during my contact with these

literary works. I am excited when the characters speak my mind; in many

cases, however, the information revealed from the texts conflicts with my

education and what I have taken for granted, and I have to work out what is operating and results in the present situation. Every time I reread those texts,

new ideas will arise, revising and enriching my conception and interpretation

of the texts.

INTRO.2 Literature, History, and Narrative—Methodological Legitimacy

-6- As two disciplines, history and literature are different in terms of methodology; but, taking account of their correlation with reality, they have something in common—both of them can be considered as a kind of narrative.

In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau asserts: "What we initially call history is nothing more than a narrative" (287; qtd. in Choy 2); a similar observation can be found in Fredric Jameson's statement:

[H]istory—Althusser's "absent cause," Lacan's "Real"—is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational; what can be added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form.... (82; emphasis in the original; qtd. in Choy 2)

Both of them aver that what one reads in historical books is in fact a kind of narrative, not necessarily what indeed happens in the past, and that, except for witnesses, nobody can have access to history without the textualized narratives.

In his Poetics, Aristotle provides a classical discussion of the disparity between literature and history. Aristotle contends that poetry, the early form of literature, which can be expanded to include all literary productions, is more universal, more general than things as they are because "it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity" (32). Aristotle declares that the historian, not the poet, writes of what has already happened, whereas the poet's task is to write of what could happen. For Aristotle, poetry

-7- is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history for "poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular" (33).

About Aristotle's perspective on history, one point may need to be clarified. For Aristotle, history writes about what has happened. This seems to be indicating that historical writing is objective as it describes events in the world. According to the poststructuralist perspective on historiography, however, historical writing may not necessarily be as objective as it should be or as it is supposed to be. As Hayden White writes in the "Preface" of his book, The Content of the Form, when discussing the relation between narrative discourse and historical representation:

narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as developmental processes but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications, (ix)

Simply speaking, what White emphasizes in this paragraph is that all narratives are merely a kind of discourse, and that all discourses must contain a kind of ideology. This point of view is certainly applicable to the writer's creation of fictional worlds. During the creation of a fictional world, the author may draw on the actual world. He or she can borrow facts or anchor his or her fictional story in a historical event, but their description or representation or narrative about the facts or events may not be absolutely objective. They may have been tinged with the color of a certain writer's judgment or ideological prejudice.

-8- As for the questions whether or not literature can be used as historical source material, and as narratives, which one of them is closer to reality, different scholars may have different answers. John Tosh, the author of The

Pursuit of History (2006), writes that novels, as well as other forms of creative literature, cannot be treated as factual reports; even historical novels and historical plays do not carry any authority as historical statements about the periods to which they refer; however, all creative literature "offers insights into the social and intellectual milieu in which the writer lived, and often vivid descriptions of the physical setting as well" (67-8).

Among Chinese literary scholars, there is a widely quoted paradoxical statement describing this twister: except for names, everything in history is faked; whereas in literature, all is true except names (JSil^TA^7lKfK)LU

*h mmmifm-, m'Hmjx%mmimY, MH^IW) gin Kemu &

Yang Jiang; qtd. in Ning Zongyi, par.1; Cao Mingzong, par.8).

Peng Ruijin, a critic from Taiwan, puts forward his argument that

"when history lands itself in a predicament, literature can assume the role of navigator to bring it back to port," aiming to point out that it "was actually an elegant paradox" that literature shoulders the responsibility for historical knowledge and its sources (6; 4). As a matter of fact, literature cannot do for history things that history cannot do for itself (and it is not capable of taking the job of history), but "looks at history from an alternative perspective, finding solutions to problems from this different point of view" (Peng 6). During the era of ideological repression, however, especially when specific historical

-9- factors are in operation, this kind of practice, in that literature's use of history as a means of expression, as a compromise, is more common. To some extent, Ha Jin and Yan Geling's literary productions can be seen as a footnote to this point of view, and my own reading experience can serve as an example.

My dissertation begins with a close reading of literary texts, and I realize at a later stage that what I have achieved and valued is an awareness of history. For instance, when I read Ha Jin's War Trash, I compared it particularly with two memoirs published in China, Zhang Zeshi's Test:

Witnesses of Chinese POWs in American POW Camps (1998) and Jin

Daying's Accounts of the Volunteer Army's POWs (1987), as well as an

English book published in the US, Mass Behaviour in Battle and Captivity:

The Communist Soldier in the Korean War (1968), which is an analysis of interviews with the Chinese POWs. Many details in War Trash can be found in the two memoirs and the interviews, but compared to the memoirs, the novel focuses more on the feelings and independent thinking of the protagonist as an ordinary soldier without strong political preferences, as opposed to the heroic attitudes and behaviours of blindly patriotic servicemen portayed in the memoirs. Which account is more objective, or closer to reality?

The patriotic soldiers who do not regret their return to mainland China even after enduring three decades of political persecutions and social ostracism, or the remorse and helplessness of the repatriates when they see the honourable receptions received by those non-repatriates back from Taiwan

-10- (Jin 31; Ha Jin War Trash 348)? I might admire those heroes in the memoirs,

if I did not have an awareness of ideological indoctrination.

Salman Rushdie, the controversial British-Indian writer, expresses a

similar point of view, with a plain but rather firm tone, in his monumental

essay, "Imaginary Homelands" (1991). He writes, "I must say first of all that

description is itself a political act. ... And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians' version of truth" (430). Rushdie's assertion has

undoubtedly provided an unequivocal insight into reading productions of all

overseas writers, be they Indian English or Chinese American.

To conclude, it might be true that history contains more facts, while

literature reveals more truth. To some extent, literary texts, or serious

literature, have filled in the gaps left by the dominant official narratives, and

overcome the weakness or limit of personal memoirs caused by negotiations

and compromises of ideological controls. In this sense, it must be feasible to

approach history through literary works, and this is exactly what is being

practiced in this dissertation.

INTRO.3 Why Ha Jin and Yan Geling—Their Characteristics in Common

To write about Ha Jin and Yan Geling, it is impossible and

inappropriate not to mention the context of overseas Chinese writing and

relating research in the area. Along with the development of globalization, the

study of overseas Chinese literature has attracted more and more attention,

particularly in the last ten years, and it is gradually becoming institutionalized

in mainland China. According to some critics, however, the study of the "New

-11- Immigrant Writers" needs more attention.5

Chen Ruilin, a Chinese critic residing in Houston in the USA, argues that the study of new Chinese immigrant literature, either within or outside of

China, requires more work.6 She compares the study of overseas Chinese literature to a top spinning almost around the same point and at the same level, although the number of researchers involved is increasing annually.

She asserts that Chinese scholars in the area are still focusing on writings by overseas Chinese writers from Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas a large amount of writing by the new immigrants from mainland China since the

1980s is emerging.

To some extent, what she describes is true. Owing to a lack of communication between scholars home and abroad, the books published in other countries were not accessible to Chinese scholars; and furthermore, owing to various prejudices and ideological interference, some well-known

Chinese writers, such as Ha Jin, have not been paid enough attention.

Up to now, almost all of Ha Jin's works have been translated into

Chinese and published in Taiwan, but except for The Bridegroom (2002) and

Waiting (2002), all of the others are banned in mainland China. According to

5The concept of "New Immigrant Writers" was proposed to differentiate those writers who left mainland China since the late 1970s after the implementation of the reform and open door policy, from the Taiwanese writers who went to America in the 1950s and 1960s (Wu Yiqi 639). If we say the overseas students' writing by Taiwanese writers such as Bai Xianyong, Yu Lihua, Chen Ruoxi and Nie Hualing, are representative voices of a generation who have lost their roots, the new immigrant writings mostly reflect the difficulties of surviving in the new land. What I have chosen to focus on in this thesis are works by new immigrant writers looking back at China and the Chinese people. For more specific information, see 5.2 of this thesis. 6 Chen Ruilin emphasized this point during her keynote speech on the 14th International Conference on the Chinese Literature of the World, held in Changchun, China, from July 24 to 26, 2006. The same argument can also be found in her article, "The Top Spinning around the Same Point." -12- Ha Jin, two publishing houses once contacted him for the publication of a collection of his works, one had even signed the contract, but the plan had been straddled because of the veto from the high-ups ("Censorship" par.2).

Moreover, there have been negative views about Ha Jin and his works from the very beginning, and it is said that articles about his works are censored strictly.7 For these reasons, except for reviews of his Waiting, few articles about his other works can be found from China Academic Journals Full-text

Database. Compared to Ha Jin's great achievement and high reputation in

English writing, as well as the large number of Chinese critics, this phenomenon is abnormal indeed.

In contrast, Yan Geling's situation in mainland China is much better.

Most of her works have been published in Taiwan and mainland China at the same time, though some sensitive parts may have been deleted. This may benefit from her writing language, which is mainly Chinese, and more importantly, her network in the literary world. Yan Geling began her writing at the end of the 1970s before she retired from military service, and she joined the Chinese Writers' Association in 1986. Her father, Xiao Ma (H^,), and her ex-husband's father, Li Zhun (^'M), are both members of the Association.

Unfortunately, however, for similar reasons, the reviews about her works are not probing enough. For instance, several articles about her work,

The Ninth Widow, praise the humanity revealed by the female protagonist, but rarely do they touch the author's doubt about the politics and various policies

7 My article about Ha Jin's War Trash had been accepted and edited in 2007 by a Chinese journal, Chinese Diasporic Literature and Art, but was rejected later because of their great concerns. -13- of the Party. The next section of this thesis will present a more detailed review of these issues.

INTRO.3.1 The Absence of Humanist Tradition in Contemporary

Chinese Literature versus the Writing of Ha Jin and Yan Geling

Louis Althusser, in his highly influential essay, "Ideology and

Ideological State Apparatus," uses the term of Ideological State Apparatus," or ISAs, to designate the series of institutions that function invisibly "by ideology." He asserts that individuals are always-already subjects of ideologies, and that ideologies interpellate concrete individuals as concrete subjects (172-3). As a result, "the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by ideology" (181).

Though Althusser, as a Marxist theorist, aimed at criticizing or analyzing capitalist societies, his thoughts are applicable to socialist countries too. Ever since its establishment in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party

(CCP) has never stopped its campaign of propaganda, in other words, ideological inculcation. After the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the propaganda machine of the CCP was further intensified.

Consequently, the whole country was towed into the extremist revolutionary trend, and people were classified either revolutionists or enemies of the people, especially during the three decades from 1949 to 1979.

Unfortunately, few people living inside the system are aware of the

"interpellation" of the ISAs. In this regard, I myself am a living example. As a

Chinese student studying abroad, I felt shocked when I read the works of Ha

-14- Jin and Yan Geling. I did not know of the existence of the war prisoners of the

Korean War, nor the otherwise happy life of a widow living outside the political discourse. To me, the policy of the CCP is to give preferential treatment to prisoners. Why were the war prisoners of the Korean War wronged by the country for which they had been longing and to which they are determined to return at any cost? To me, the land reform is right and proper, and most villagers supported the movement wholeheartedly. Why, then, are there so many benevolent landlords being hit to death by their former beneficiaries? In a word, I have been "interpellated" for all these years, in schools and by newspapers, radios, TVs, and other media, and do not know the truth and facts outside of official propaganda.

Similarly, the distance, i.e. being away from the country, must have provided Ha Jin and Yan Geling an opportunity to re-examine their education and the influences upon them. They were both born in the latter half of the

1950s, Ha Jin in 1956 and Yan Geling in 1958. They both joined the People's

Liberation Army (PLA) at the end of the 1960s and stayed in the army throughout the period of the Cultural Revolution. As an important part of the

State Apparatuses, the army constitutes a main site of ideological education.

As Chairman Mao put it vividly, it must be the Party who directs the guns; in other words, the army must be under the direct and absolute leadership of the

Party. The ideas of class struggle and Maoism, as well as other party policies, were inculcated into the soldiers. As most soldiers had poor education (even with strong educational background), they were not smart enough to doubt

-15- their extremist ideological education, and consequently became victims and/or causes of others' suffering. Many of Ha Jin's short stories and poems, among which "The Dead Soldier's Talk" is a typical example, are reflections about this aspect. Similarly, Yan Geling has also made great efforts to describe the alienated people, such as Cai Hupo and Sun Shaoyong, in her novel, The Ninth Widow.

In short, the main reason that Ha Jin and Yan Geling are chosen as the subject of this dissertation is their thematic concerns. As I mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, their narratives have provided for me an alternative account of China and the Chinese people, which either supplements or opposes the official master historical narratives.

For instance, Ha Jin's War Trash seems to have opened a crack for me to catch a glimpse of those who have been deprived of their voices in their own motherland. Before I read the novel, my knowledge of the Korean War was limited solely to the historical textbooks, which naturally emphasize the heroic deeds of soldiers on the battlefield and the significance of the Korean

War's victory for China as a young socialist country. As for the destiny of more than 22,000 Chinese POWs, for an understandable but not necessarily humane reason, all official master narratives about the war have chosen purposely to remain silent. Though several memoirs have been published in the 1990s, their underlying patriotic tones and revolutionary cliches have seriously impaired their credibility and readability. Without reading Ha Jin's

War Trash, I would not have known of the twisting irony embodied in the lives

-16- of those Chinese POWs. Huang K'o-ch'iian's words, the epigraph to this thesis, have voiced indeed what is on my mind: "I was once a happily innocent youth. But, having watched your play, my eyes have been opened. I can no longer take for granted the happiness in my life and the lives of others"

(62).

The other reason that I am interested in Ha Jin and Yan Geling's works is the universal humanism that permeats through their works: the universal sympathy towards dispossessed individuals. In the West, the literary tradition of humanism can be traced back to the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or much earlier, the ancient Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, though the term itself did not appear until the nineteenth century, in George Voigt's 1859 book, The Revival of Classical

Antiquity or the First Century of Humanism (Bullock 12).

Originating from the Latin word humanitas, humanism was based on the Greek idea that education was the way to develop the potential qualities which are uniquely human and humane. What nineteenth-century historians like Voigt did was to apply the word "humanism" to the new attitudes and beliefs associated with the revival of classical learning, which were described as Renaissance humanism. From the fourteenth century to the twenty-first, though humanism has undergone several transitions and transformations and faced many challenges in the past, and surely will confront more challenges in the future, the essence of it has never changed, which is the focus on individual human beings, their values and their rights.

-17- In mainland China, however, the absence of humanism in literature is commonplace, especially during the thirty years from the establishment of the

Communist government in 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

During this period, the motto put forward by Mao Zedong at the forum on literature and arts at Yan'an in May 1942, "Literature and arts must serve the workers, peasants and soldiers," was extended and evolved into "Literature must serve the politics" and finally, "Literature and arts are the powerful tool of class struggle" (Mao 811-3; Zhou Yang 526). Under the cover of the dominant ideological propaganda, revolution was the most fashionable discourse, and the idea of humanism was strange and taboo.

After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the policy changed into

"literature and arts must serve the people" and "literature and arts must serve the socialist society."8 Since the 1990s, to uphold and enhance the "main theme," i.e., the spirit of patriotism, collectivism and socialism, has become dominant in literature and the arts (Jiang Zemin 77; qtd. in Liu Fusheng 2-3).

For many years in mainland China, humanism, as an "embodiment of capitalist emotions," was a target of criticism. According to the Chinese

Communist literary theories, human beings can be divided into different classes, and they share only the nature of that class; there is no such thing as common humanism; the so-called humanity is merely an excuse for capitalists to negate class exploitation (Shi 11). For this reason, for more than

From the editorial of People's Daily on 27 July, 1980. Web. -18- three decades, humanism, as a term, was taboo, and literary productions touching upon it were considered as heretical and publicly criticized.

Huang Ziping, a Chinese literary scholar, quotes from C. T. Hsia's argument about the "Chinese concern," asserting that the focus of the

Chinese literature is not humanity in general, but the nation (qtd. in Zhang Jin

148). This inference is certainly reasonable. If modern Chinese literature has an obsession with China, to apply the concept of C. T. Hsia, contemporary

Chinese literature after 1949 has been flooded with propaganda celebrating the achievement of the party in power, eulogizing the virtues of the new

Republic's leaderships (Hsia 534). The suffering of the unfortunate and the dark side of the Socialist country have been filtered effectively via the strict process and mechanism of censorship.

In contrast, both Ha Jin and Yan Geling have shown their commitment to universal humanism, which, very possibly, benefits from their training in creative writing in the US. Ha Jin has expressed many times that he believes in universal humanism (Ding par.7; Mindy Zhang 31; Zhou Xiaojing 274). For him, what language is used in writing does not matter much; what matters is whether the theme involves universal humanity, i.e., universal sympathy, which is the cardinal weapon that can be used to overcome the barriers of language and culture, winning the hearts of global readers (Ding par.7).

Similarly, Yan Geling also believes that the commitment of literature to humanity, that is, "to rescue and promote the destroyed primordial and benign human values," is "more significant to the projects of cultural emancipation

-19- and racial equality than mere belligerent accusation and intense emotional release" (Zhou Yupei 92). She is convinced that the "universal sense" would enable a literary text of parochial background to be humanly and universally enlightening, and a literary exploration of different languages, psychological, and emotional patterns to be comprehended by the world (The Bohemian

144).

Their commitment to humanism has been demonstrated fully in their works. Ha Jin indicates in both War Trash and A Free Life that he is writing a loser's story (War Trash 350; Free Life 247); whereas Yan Geling's protagonists, like Fusang, Putao and Xiaoyu, all shine with the light of humanity. Ha Jin and Yan Geling's commitment to humanism is not fortuitous, which is in complete agreement with the concept of "norms" in the field of narratology.9 Wayne Booth writes in his monumental book, Rhetoric of Fiction:

It is true that some great works seem to rise above differences of speculative system and to win readers of all camps. Shakespeare is the pre-eminent example. The norms in his plays are indeed compatible with more philosophies than are comprehended in most of our dogmas; it is precisely this centrality, this lack of bias, this capacity to cut to the heart of problems which all philosophies attempt to deal with in conceptual terms, that makes his plays that we call universal. (141)

9 Jenn-shann Lin suggested to me the concept of "norms" which has gradually become one of the main focus of my literary analysis. For more specific information, please refer to his book, Taiwan Fiction and Narratology. -20- What Booth argues in this paragraph is the existence and essence of something described as "universal," which expresses, in particular, the deepest and unbiased sympathy towards the suffering of those dispossessed.

In short, the sympathy towards unimportant ordinary people embodied in Ha Jin and Yan Geling's works have touched my heart, which compelled me to read and explore their fictional worlds.

INTRO.3.2 Critical Review of Previous Studies about Ha Jin

Ha Jin, the pen name of Jin Xuefei, is a naturalized American who was born on 21 February 1956 in Liaoning Province, China. His father was an officer in the PLA, and his mother a nurse. Ha Jin was sent to a boarding school when he was seven but returned home two years later when Chairman

Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution and schools were closed throughout mainland China.

For several years, Ha Jin merely loitered around as a member of the

Little Red Guard, "wearing red armbands, waving flags and singing revolutionary songs," as he recalled in an interview with Dwight Garner of The

New York Times on 6 February 2000 (qtd. in Geyh 192). At the age of fourteen, Ha Jin was enlisted in the PLA, as was actually a common practice or even a privilege at that time for children born of parents of army officers, since the army was the last haven that normal order was maintained.

After five and half years' serving in the troop stationed on the border of

China and Soviet Russia, he became a telegraph operator in Harbin Railroad

Company, a remote city in northern China. He stayed there for three years,

-21- learning English from a radio program and reading literature. In 1978, he was admitted to the English Department of Heilongjiang University, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1981. He continued his studies in American literature at Shandong University and completed his master's degree in 1984.

In 1985, he went to the United States and began his doctoral study in

American literature at Brandeis University.

With an intention to return to teach at a university in China, Ha Jin chose to work on his dissertation on modernist poetry, including the works of

Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, and its relationship to Chinese literature and culture. His plan was finally changed with the Chinese army's massacre of students demonstrating for democratic reform in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in early June of 1989.

While working at Brandeis on his dissertation, Ha Jin also studied creative writing at Boston University with Leslie Epstein, Frank Bidart, and

Allen Grossman. His first book of poetry, Between Silences: A Voice from

China, was published in 1990, which was hailed by Bidart as "a profound

book, an event" (qtd. in Geyh 193).

Ha Jin finished his PhD in 1992 and began teaching creative writing and literature at Emory University in 1993. His second book of poetry, Facing

Shadows, was published in 1996. In the same year, Ha Jin also published

Ocean of Words, a collection of short stories based on his experiences in the army.

-22- The stories in Ocean of Words are set on the border between Russia and China in the early 1970s, when the bilateral relationship between the two countries was delicate and armed conflicts were on the verge of breaking out.

Many of the stories "deal more or less explicitly with the conflicts between

Communist Party ideology, which officers try to enforce and which their troops try to obey, and the imperatives of human nature" (Geyh 194). "A Report," the first story in the collection, for instance, tells of a company of soldiers marching through the city who burst out sobbing while singing a patriotic song:

"Good-bye, mother, good-bye, mother— The battle bugle blowing, Steel guns shiny, The outfits on our backs, Our army is ready to go. Please do not weep in secret, Please do not worry about your son. Wait for my triumphant return; I will see you then, my dear mother.

For Chen Jun, the political instructor and party secretary of the company, the soldiers are brave, and they are not wrong; the fault might be his part. He writes, "My vigilance of class struggle must have slackened" and he concludes, "this song is a counterrevolutionary one" (2). Obviously, in the mind of the political instructor, the soldiers, "the best trained men," should not have emotional impulses like missing one's mother, which are signs of a

"bourgeoisie outlook" and are not supposed to concern soldiers.

-23- In America, Ha Jin's name has been associated with a series of prizes and awards. His first short-story collection, Ocean of Words: Army Stories

(1996), won the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1997; his subsequent short-story collection, Under the Red Flag (1997), the 1997

Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction; and his third short-story collection,

The Bridegroom (2000), the Asian American Literary Award in 2001 and the

Townsend Prize in fiction in 2002. Among these stories, three received

Pushcart Prizes, and four were selected for inclusion in the Best American

Short Stories volumes for 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2001. Along with three books of poetry—Between Silences: A Voice from China (1990), Facing Shadows

(1996), and Wreckage (2001), Ha Jin has published five novels, among which

Waiting (1999) won both the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999 and the

PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000, and War Trash (2004) was selected by New

York Times as one of the ten best books of 2004, nominated for the 2005

Pulitzer Prize, and awarded for the second time the prestigious prize, the

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, in 2005.

Owing to his exceptional achievement and great contribution to

American Literature, Ha Jin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on October 7, 2006. Robert D. Sturr compares Ha Jin's "spare prose style in narrating the lives of ordinary individuals trapped in political and moral ambiguities" to Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov (187). For Sturr, Ha

Jin, by exploring the world of "the Maoist Chinese culture of his youth" and focusing on "the human cost of ideological conflicts or social upheavals," has

-24- captured the struggle of his characters "to know how to behave and even how to think in order to meet the constantly changing demands of communist orthodoxy" (187), challenging "Marxist (or Maoist) political ideology not by declaring allegiance to some other ideology but by demonstrating again and again the complexity of human emotion which defies simplistic dogma" (Wong par.3; qtd. in Sturr 188). It is exactly his exploration of themes of "entrapment, powerlessness and self-delusion" that has elevated Ha Jin's name among great writers promoting and practicing universal values.

Despite his dazzling achievements in American literary circles, however, Ha Jin has not been well received in mainland China, and many

Chinese critics consider his works, particularly the novel Waiting, not worthy of serious studies. A Chinese woman scholar even said at a conference,

"People around me joked about that, 'If you wrote, you could have written much better than that.'"10 Though there was a smile on her face, her words have some truth to them. Although not all the audience present agreed with her point, her speech is quite representative of Ha Jin's reputation in China.

Why is there such a big difference regarding the acceptance of Ha Jin in mainland China and in the United States? Is it because the Americans do not have as much background knowledge as their Chinese counterparts? Or does it mean that the Americans do not have a high appetite or taste for writing about China? For me, there may exist logics of discrepancies. Those scholars may refuse to accept Ha Jin because Ha Jin is their peer or even

10 What I quote here is a remark made by Wei Jingyi, a Chinese scholar working in Jinan University, Guangzhou, on August 12 at the international conference, "Translating Global Culture(s): Toward an Interdisciplinary (Re)Construction," held atTsinghua University, Beijing, August 11-15, 2006. -25- younger than them. Or, perhaps, compared to their English proficiency, they think that Ha Jin's spare prose style of writing is not worthy of their serious study. Or, more importantly, their subconscious nationalist complex is functioning, prohibiting them from recognizing and appreciating Ha Jin's literary achievement.

Chinese critics usually analyze his works from the perspective of postcolonialism, attributing his success to depictions of Chinese backwardness and absurdity in order to cater to the Westerners' taste. For instance, Liu Yiqing, one of the pioneers launching the first round of attack, writes in her essay, "Bartering away One's Honesty," that in order to win the

National Book Award, Ha Jin has to humiliate his countrymen, acting as a means for the American media to vilify China and the Chinese people (par.1).

Her dispute is mainly over the bound feet of Lin Kong's wife, which illustrates, for her, the primitive, barbaric and backward state of the Chinese, whereas, based on her knowledge, the wife could not have had her feet bound in the context of the novel since the practice had been banned when she was growing up. In the meantime, Liu also censures the American media for

"scarifying" the standard of arts to politics.

Ying Yan, in her prize-winning essay, "Neo-Orientalism in Ha Jin's

Prize-Winning Works," even asserts that "Ha Jin's works and American literary prizes are bolstering each other in their neo-Orientalism enterprise," and she warns against "neo-Orientalist collaboration between third world diaspora writers and western literary awards" (Ying 1).

-26- A conference paper presented at "Translating Global Culture(s):

Toward an Interdisciplinary (Reconstruction" in Beijing in August 2006, states that:

Two common mnemonic practices among Chinese diasporic writers are self-victimization (capitalizing on the authenticity of the suffering "I") and self-exoticization (emphasizing on abjection to create an eternal incomprehensibility that characterizes the exotic Orient). Together they form a new discourse of self-Orientalization. The commercial success of their works also reveals a complex process of literary production that exposes a number of issues: how the Chinese diasporic writers' narratives of pain and recovery can be treated as political and commercial actions; how self-victimization can be used to forge a kind of moral authority, cultural capital, and a new identity for the diasporic Cultural Revolution generation; and how the West's continuous fascination for the socialist China encourages the Chinese diasporic writers' unbalanced and uncritical examination of their personal and their nation's traumatic past. (Lingchei Chen 4)

Coincidently, I met two experts (at least in my eyes) suggesting me to approach Ha Jin's works from a post-colonial perspective.11 It seems that for most Chinese critics, postcolonial perspectives have become a strategy to

The first time was in 2005 when I asked Wang Fengzhen, a retired researcher of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to give me some feedback about my essay (which will be attached as an appendix) when he came to lecture at the University of Alberta. He asked me directly, "why don't you criticize Ha Jin from the point of view of Orientalism, which will be more powerful?" The second time was when I presented my paper about War Trash at a mini-conference of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta in May 2007, Ma Sheng-mei, who happened to be there, asked me a question, "how do you think about the wrapped feet in Ha Jin's novel?" I take this as a hint of his perspective towards Ha Jin's works. -27- make their alternative voice heard in the West. More importantly, these kinds of voices seem to be exactly what the Chinese government hopes for.

As a student from mainland China, namely, an insider, to some extent, who is supposed to be "good" at finding signs of Orientalism, I am not sure whether I need to approach his works that way. In my opinion, post-colonial angle can be an effective way to approach Ha Jin's works, but this dominant unanimity may have impaired the depth and value of Ha Jin's works, hindering our appreciation from multi-dimensional perspectives.

In this thesis, Ha Jin's works are approached from a historical perspective. It may sound ironic but it is true that I, as a Chinese living in

China for more than thirty years, found that I indeed did not know much about

China as I thought I knew. Born in the 1970s, our generation lives in a comparatively peaceful time and we have been educated to throw off historical burdens and to look into the future. As a matter of fact, most of this generation do not have any idea of what history really means in this context and most of us never raise such a question. Most parents rarely tell about their past, perhaps, out of the consideration of humiliation, or they themselves have adopted what the government advocates, trying to forget the unhappy and to focus on the present or to look ahead. Moreover, as a generation to be educated to become "good children of the New China," we would subconsciously stop the older generation from telling their stories even before they start. As a result, China, to a great degree, has become a nation without a historical awareness, particularly the contemporary history after the

-28- Communists came to power. Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Laureate of Peace, even asserts this in his book title: (China,) a nation that lies to its conscience

(2006).

In this dissertation, the concept of universalism, as well as the diaspric perspectives, is employed to analyze Ha Jin's thematic concerns. It goes without saying that Ha Jin's works can be analyzed and appreciated from different points of view, but this thesis highlights its historical aspects.

INTRO.3.3 Critical Review of Previous Studies of Yan Geling

Born in Shanghai on 16 November 1958 to an intellectual family, Yan

Geling grew up in a very prestigious environment. She served in the PLA as a ballerina during the Cultural Revolution and later as a journalist during the

Sino-Vietnamese war (1979). Her writing career began in the early 1980s.

Between 1980 and 1989, she published a series of short stories, novellas, novels and screenplays, among which the most important, according to the author, is Female Grasslands (1989). This novel is a legendary depiction of the "Red Girls' Horse-herding Squad," who buried their fresh youth in the depths of the desolate and uninhabited grasslands in the mid-1970s but were abandoned later when the cavalry was disbanded as part of the PLA's reduction in forces. Yan admires and highly praises their noble spirits—to struggle with the harsh environment under the courage of a pure communist ideal, but she also expresses her deep sympathy towards their vain scarifice.

The members of the Horse-herding Squad live like soldiers, but they are actually urban students sent down to be "re-educated" by farmers and

-29- herdsmen during the grand campaign of "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countrysides." To some degree, this novel is a prelude to Yan's writing about the tragedy of rusticated youths, among which "Celestial Bath" is a typical case.

After the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, Yan Geling left China and later entered the writing program at Columbia College, Chicago. To date, she has published over twenty books in various editions in mainland China,

Taiwan, US, UK and elsewhere, and has won over thirty literary and film awards. For instance, Fusang (aka The Lost Daughter of Happiness) (1996) was awarded the "Best Novel" of United Daily News (Taiwan) Literary Contest in 1995; The Human Realm (1998) was the winner of the China Times

(Taiwan) Million Dollar Literary Prize for Novel in 1998; "Celestial Bath" won the Best Experimental Fiction Prize from the Columbia University Scholastic

Press Association for its English version in 1998; The Ninth Widow was selected by Yazhou Zhoukan (Asian Weekly) as the Second of the "Best Ten

Chinese-language Novels of 2006"; and Little Aunt Tatsuru (2008) was chosen as the Best Novel of 2008 by the Chinese Novel Academy.

Several of her works have been adapted for films and TV series, including Siao Yu by Sylvia Chang, which won a total of seven awards at the

Asia-Pacific Film Festival in 1994, and Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl by Joan

Chen, which swept the Golden Horse Awards (itHIt-Taiwan's equivalent of the Academy Awards) in 1998, and won the International Freedom Award in

-30- 1999 from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (a New York- based organization of film critics) for its script.

As a member of the Hollywood Writer's Guild of America and the

Writer's Association of China, Yan Geling is undoubtedly one of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists and screenwriters in the Chinese language today. In mid-November 1997, the Chinese Writers' Association held a convention in Beijing entitled "Discussion of the Works of Yan Geling," accompanied by a press conference, an honour rarely given to a living author.

As mentioned above, compared to Ha Jin, Yan Geling is much more fortunate in terms of reception in mainland China. She is rarely censured by

publishers and reviewers, and her name often appears in the Chinese popular media, such as sina.com and sohu.com. This may partially relate to the

language she mainly uses—Chinese, but more importantly, it may be the choice of her themes and subjects that have exempted her from being attacked. Most of her works written in the 1990s are about immigrants, which

is not a sensitive issue for the Chinese government and critics. For instance,

in Fusang, she writes about a Chinese countryside woman who is abducted and sold into a brothel in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Naturally, this story provides a large space for Chinese critics to write about, the humiliation of the early Chinese immigrants, racial discrimination, and postcolonial representation, none of which strikes the sensitive nerves of the government and the pride of the Chinese critics.

-31- Even when she touches upon the politically problematic past of mainland China, her Chinese language seems to have softened the tone and degree of her denunciation and lessened the temper of her critics. For instance, "Celestial Bath" was first published in 1996 in Taiwan, and later in

2008 in mainland China. Even Yan Geling herself was surprised that

"Celestial Bath" had eluded censorship.

To date, most articles about her works focus on her demonstration of

humanity and ethics, and rarely touch her political appeals. Yan Geling also asserts publicly that she is not interested in politics, but humanity in general

(Cao Xueping sec.3). Calling herself "a member of the Chinese Diaspora,"

Yan identifies with those writers who "depart from the mainstream of their

native language but are the periphery of another culture" (The Bohemian 149).

She "values the primordial—primordial emotion and primordial moral capacity—and devalues what 'modern civilization' represents and encourages as advanced," believing that "the commitment of literature to humanity is to

rescue and promote the destroyed primordial and benign human values"

(Zhou Yupei 92).

In The Bohemian Building (1999), her only collection of essays, Yan

Geling consistently explains and defends her tenet of writing about humanity

(132-44, 171-7). Taking Ang Lee, a film director from Taiwan, as an example,

Yan points out what is precious about Lee's films is not so much their rendering of cultural conflicts as their evocation of the profound commonality

in human psychology, sentiments, and intellect through cultural conflicts. She

-32- designates Lee's perception of such commonality as a "universal sense," a perception that endows each of Lee's movies with a global appeal. She is convinced that the "universal sense" would enable a literary text of parochial background to be humanly and universally enlightening, and a literary exploration of different languages, psychological, and emotional patterns to be comprehended by the world (The Bohemian 144).

To some degree, Yan Geling's openly-claimed pursuit of humanity and universal sense has shaded her appeal for a voice of resistance. As a matter of fact, to pursue humanity and universal sense is not in opposition to her appeal for a resistance. Quite the contrary, her full depiction of humanity not only helps to enlarge the intensity of her resistance, but also enables her narratives to transcend the limit of language, times and political ideology.

When someone asked Yan why her novels are often shadowed by violence, she emphasized, "My writing derives from my traumatic memory"

(Cao Xueping sec.1). In this sense, it should be reasonable to say that her impulse to write is to lodge a protest against the distorted world, and that the full demonstration of humanity helps to add a layer of depth, bestowing it a longer life of literature.

For instance, Yan Geling emphasizes in several cases her traumatic memory of Yan Fengying (PMH), a well-known actress of a local opera, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution (Cao Xueping sec.1). She not only writes about her in her novella, "A White-Butterfly Gallery," but also in her essay, "Survivor of Suicide," in order to express her strong indignation

-33- towards the society and the human beings who have not only driven her to the edge of death, but also deprived her of the last dignity as a female and as a human being.

Yan's historical narrative in Fusang is also a vehicle to express her grief and resentment touched off by the distorting and discriminating history of the early Chinese immigrants who have been exploited and bullied but have never had a voice of their own in the official master narratives of the US. As a critic points out, "What Yan Geling tries to do in Fusang is to write against the hegemonic historical narratives with an attempt to restore the authentic history" (Chen Hanping 78). Maxine Hong Kingston writes in her China Men

(1980), "No China Men, no railroad" (140). In American history, however, the

Chinese have always been absent, and all their contributions have been ignored, whether purposely or unconsciously. Yan's sympathy towards early

Chinese immigrants has mixed with the humiliation and unfair treatment she has received in the 1990s. In this context, her writing, first and foremost, gives her subjects a voice.

Yan divides her writing career into three stages: the first before 1989 when she describes her army experience in China; the second from 1989 to about 2000, when she immerses herself in the experiences of immigrants; and the third, after 2000, when she begins to look back at her past experience in China. Obviously, The Ninth Widow (2006) is a product of her third stage.

Yan writes in the preface to Fusang, "How many writers have become more excellent after they left their home and wandered in an alien land?

-34- Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, Isabel Auendene. ...

Some of them write about their immigrant life. Even those works about their

past in their homeland have been added a layer of depth and width because of their extraordinary sensitivity, which enables them to communicate with other races and languages in the world. ... This is what immigrant life has brought to them—a decisive extension and deepening in terms of

perspectives and reflections" (iii-iv).

This passage is certainly applicable to Yan Geling herself. Being away from China enables her to consciously or subconsciously distance herself from the mother culture to which she has been closely attached, re-examining those concepts and ideas that have been indoctrinated and have been taken for granted. In The Ninth Widow, for instance, she makes Putao, her female protagonist, reflect on the literal meaning of some terms that are so familiar for mainland Chinese that few pause to doubt their connotations. For example, "JMfrt^AnL]jiM¥° iM-njfS^, ^&M%.'M'tt&'M'tt& (The

Eighth Route Army are now called the People's Liberation Army. Putao heard and fell into a daze. She did not understand what had been 'liberated' and what had been 'freed')" (Ninth Widow 29). The designation of the PLA has

been employed to the present day. How many Chinese people have indeed pondered what it means? Putao is certainly reasonable. Did the army really liberate people from the abyss of suffering? The reality is that people live the same, or even worse, after the coming of the PLA. In this sense, isn't it absurd to have the "People's Liberation Army"?

-35- Similarly, the year 1949 is designated as "the year of liberation." For the mainland Chinese, the country was "liberated" in 1949, and people usually

refer to the time before 1949 as "before the liberation" or "the (iniquitous) old

society" and after 1949 as "after the liberation" or "the new society." Few

people doubt what "liberation" really means in this context. As a matter of fact,

this is merely another change of regime, but it has been disguised by an aura

of redemption.

For the same reason, Yan Geling asks Putao to challenge the man-

imposed concept of "class status" and "class struggle" with the natural and

unchanging family ethics. "HP£M, ft&#W^#= gfeU^ffl., M^Wt^

# (No matter how to emphasize class, I have to have a dad. No matter if he

is good or bad, Dad is forever my dad)" (Ninth Widow 50). During those

abnormal years, many families were broken because of the replacement of

family ethic by the awareness of class. Only people like Putao, who are

resistant to the distorted ideas of the times, can keep her innocence intact, which exempts her from bitter remorse in the future.

Most articles about The Ninth Widow focus on the humane nature of

Putao, and few touch upon the author's doubt and protest against the policy

of the Party and the government (Bai Ye 127; Gao Jingping 76-7; Wang

Guanhan 63). To me, The Ninth Widow has continued the strategy of

historical narratives in Fusang, in which Yan provides an alternative account

of the past of China in order to inspire readers to reflect on the history and its

representation. I am sure some Chinese critics may have identified her

-36- concerns, but they do not risk expressing their discovery. For a Chinese student who has lived in China for more than thirty years, this kind of narrative is breath-taking. Hopefully, my view will be insightful for other people who are interested in Chinese history and society.

INTRO.4 Summary of the Chapters

Chapter One, "Possible Worlds, Fictional Worlds and Speech Acts," provides a brief introduction to the theory of possible/fictional worlds and speech acts, addressing three issues: the reasons for introducing the frame of

"possible worlds"; the connection between the possible worlds and the fictional worlds; the correlation between the theories of possible worlds and speech acts. J. Hillis Miller writes in his short treatise, On Literature, that each literary work is a unique virtual reality, an imaginary possible world, and the access to that literary space is by no other means than reading the book (24-

6). I agree with him. To me, each literary work constitutes a performative utterance, and the task or responsibility of readers is to build up the world according to the instructions provided in the text, taking whatever lessons they have learned from the text, to write about what touches their minds most.

Chapter Two, "History Sigh: Reading Ha Jin's War Trash," explores Ha

Jin's "universal world" through a close reading of his War Trash. Taking the

Chinese POWs in the Korean War as his protagonists, Ha Jin wishes to open

"a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war" and paint "an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation"

(from the front cover of the hard copy). Like the male protagonist in Waiting,

-37- who gets divorced after eighteen years' long waiting only to find that his new marriage is a soap bubble of dream and imagination, Yu Yuan, who survived harsh conditions and sadistic treatment in the POW camps, had returned to discover that his homecoming was the prelude to his life as a social outcast.

Both are examples of helpless individuals entrapped by their times and their politics. Through the novel, the author has expressed his heartfelt sympathy towards this group of people, and as readers we cannot help heaving a deep sigh upon their suffering.

Chapter Three, "Political Unconsciousness: Reading Yan Geling's The

Ninth Widow," focuses on Yan Geling's subversive narratives and political appeals demonstrated in the novel, The Ninth Widow. Labelled as an example of the new historicism, the novel dates back to 1940s China and depicts in detail the life changes of a woman from her teens to her fifties.

Noticeably, the novel takes an illiterate village woman without any sense of political consciousness as its protagonist, and this indicates the author's norms of writing: the revolutionary ideology has hurt and even completely destroyed the ethics of folk life, which can never be reversed.

Chapter Four, "A Trauma Forever: Reading Yan Geling's 'Celestial

Bath,'" examines, from the perspective of change in setting, the degeneration of the originally innocent young protagonist, revealing Yan Geling's counter- narratives to the fashionable and dominant master narratives. For a generation afterwards, the death of Wen Xiu, like many other young female lives disappearing during the havoc, is too trivial to remember; for Wen Xiu's

-38- parents and siblings, however, her death would be an eternal trauma that could never be touched, nor cured. Yan Geling's "Celestial Bath" was written in 1994, when nostalgia mixed with idealistic, loyal and heroic complexes were permeating throughout mainland China. When people are highly praising "no-regret youth," it is important to remember the disappearance of a young female life, unknown to the public, with a reputation far away from

honor and glorification.

Chapter Five, "A Free Life OR A Journey of Odysseus?— Reading Ha

Jin's A Free Life," tries to analyze the novel from the intertwining of freedom and uncertainty, aiming to demonstrate that with the ubiquitous racism,

language incompetence, Chinese complex, and hidden rules governing the world of poets, as well as the weaknesses of humanity in general, it is

impossible for people to enjoy absolute freedom, no matter where they are.

Partly based on his own immigrant experience, Ha Jin depicts in detail the ten years' struggle of his protagonist in the United States in the aftermath of the

Tiananmen Massacre. To some extent, Ha Jin's A Free Life is a continuation of the theme of exile initiated by writers such as Bai Xianyong. As Ha Jin says in an interview, the novel is "a coming-of-age story—a man has finally

become an individual by living a lonesome life" (Mindy Zhang 30). Ha Jin intends to write a story of a man's growth from an innocent naive person, who

had been entangled in the image of his first girlfriend and the complex of nationalism and patriotism, to an independent mature man, who had outgrown his puppy love, smashed the fetters of official ideology, and been

-39- transmuted into an individual embracing a humanistic philosophy. Without the experience of living alone outside the reference frame of the collective mentality, it might be difficult to understand Ha Jin's novel emotionally, and therefore, it is understandable for some Chinese critics to write against Ha Jin and his novel. Moreover, A Free Life is also Ha Jin's farewell to his past as an immigrant from a land weighed down with so much history. As a writer, Ha

Jin's way of dealing with the past is to write it out so that he can not only download it from his memory and march on with light packs, but also survive the violence and trauma of the history. Though A Free Life is not autobiographical, there are many overlaps between the story of Nan and the life of Ha Jin. In the image of Nan, Ha Jin has embodied his ideals and spiritual pursuits as an overseas Chinese artist: to be a decent individual and solitary artist, taking literature as his religion.

-40- Chapter 1: Possible Worlds, Fictional Worlds and Speech Acts

In his essay "Narrative," an entry in Critical Terms for Literary Study, J.

Hillis Miller raises a question, simple at first sight but rather problematic after a moment's reflection: "Why do we need stories at all? Why do children listen so avidly to stories? Why do we never outgrow the need for stories and go on reading novels, mystery stories, seeing movies, or watching soap operas on television even as adults?" (68).

Besides the traditionally classic answer he borrows from Aristotle's

Poetics, that narrative plays a fundamental social and psychological role as a kind of homeopathic medicine, he also presents an answer, as simple as his question, picturesque, a little childish, but insightful and inspiring, to this reflection later in his treatise, On Literature.12

In "Literature as Virtual Reality," Chapter 2 of that book, Miller writes,

"For me the opening sentences of literary works have special force. They are

'Open Sesames' unlocking the door to that particular work's fictive realm. All it takes is a few words, and I become a believer, a seer. I become the fascinated witness of a new virtual reality. More accurately, I become a disembodied observer within that reality" (24).

The term "virtual reality," which appears here and there in Miller's book, is, in my opinion, analogous with "possible world," the notion employed first in the area of philosophy and modal logic and applied later to linguistics and literary studies, as well as other scientific fields. The following section gives a

12 Prof. Hillis Miller was working on this book when I met him in the summer of 2001.1 take it as a last resort whenever I feel confused about literary issues. -41- brief introduction to the theories of possible/fictional worlds and speech acts, both of which are applicable to literary studies; however, one is from an ontological perspective, and the other is from a functional point of view.

1.1 Brief Introduction to the Theory of Possible/Fictional Worlds—

Ontological Landscapes

1.1.1 One World vs. Possible Worlds—Change of Paradigm in Terms

of Semantics of Fictionality

Fig. 1.1 "Come back, Jack!"

Source: Illustration from The Open Court Reading, Level 2, Bookl, Page 29.

This is a picture from my daughter's textbook (Elementary, Grade

Two). In the story, a young child has crawled into another world created by

-42- his storybook. A fantasy? A metaphor? At least, for a short temporary time, the disembodied soul of the little child would escape from the actual world full

of chirping birds and hopping rabbits, and indulge in the other world described

in the book.

This, for me, may be the virtual world mentioned by Professor Miller in

his book, and we, as readers, have experienced many such situations in our

daily lives. Once we become immersed in a fiction, the characters become

real for us, and the world they live in momentarily takes the place of the actual world. We cannot help worrying, weeping, or even cursing, along with the

development of plots.

In the area of literary studies, however, the one-world frame occupied

a central position until the 1970s; this model is based on "the assumption that

there is only one legitimate universe of discourse (domain of reference), the

actual world" (Dolezel 2). In order to answer questions of why to introduce

"possible worlds" and why to discard the one-world frame, it is necessary to

examine the representative views of one-world theory. This section follows

the perspective and logic of Lubomir Dolezel, one of the main figures

introducing and engaging in the area of possible worlds theory in relation to

literary studies, to explore one by one the hypothesis and proposal of a group

of scholars, "the classical segregationists" (to apply the term of Thomas G.

Pavel), from Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, to Ferdinand de Saussure.

The doctrine of mimesis will also be discussed as an important constituent of

the one-world model.

-43- 1.1.1.1 Bertrand Russell: empty terms According to Dolezel,

Russell's view is at the extremity of the one-world semantics of fictionality because he was absolutely consistent in his "robust" realism: "There is only one world, the 'real' world. ... It is the very essence of fiction that only the thoughts, feelings, etc., in Shakespeare and his readers are real, and that there is not, additional to them, an objective Hamlet" (169; qtd. in Dolezel 2).

According to Russell's one-world model, fictional entities do not exist, fictional terms lack reference, and are thus "empty," and fictional sentences are false.

Following Russell's views of literary fiction, the truth-value of both

"Emma Bovary committed suicide" and "Emma Bovary died of tuberculosis" are considered as false since names of fictional particulars are empty terms.

Hence, in Dolezel's words, no decisions about individuating properties of fictional particulars can be made, and no descriptions of their appearance or activity can be offered (3).

Aiming to bypass these implausible consequences, Russell claimed that only concepts could enter propositions and, "on this level, we can make a distinction between unicorn and sea-serpent: 'I met a unicorn' or 'I met a sea- serpent' is a perfectly significant assertion, if we know what it would be to be a unicorn or a sea-serpent, i.e., what is the definition of these fabulous monsters. ...Since it is significant (though false) to say 'I met a unicorn,' it is clear that this proposition, rightly analyzed, does not contain a constituent 'a unicorn,' though it does contain the concept 'unicorn'" (Russell 168; qtd. in

Dolezel 3).

-44- Interestingly, Russell does not explain where his knowledge of fictional concept comes from. In any case, his argument that fictional terms, in spite of their lack of reference, do not lack significance, indicates that he has actually

"abandoned his extreme position and unwittingly switched to a softer version of one-world semantics of fictionality, the Fregean doctrine" (Dolezel 3).

1.1.1.2 Gottlob Frege: pure sense According to Dolezel, Frege's semantic treatment of fiction rests on his well-known distinction between two aspects of meaning, reference (Bedeutung) and sense (Sinn) (3). While reference is the denotation of an entity in the world, sense is "the mode of presentation" of the reference (Frege 41, 57; qtd. in Dolezel 3 ).

Similar to Russell, Frege does not acknowledge the existence of fictional reference: if Odysseus is a fictional name, then it lacks reference (47,

62; qtd. in Dolezel 4). For both Frege and Russell, there are no worlds behind fictional words. However, unlike Russell, Frege agrees that fictional terms

(representations), though without reference, are meaningful, and that their meanings are constituted and exhausted by sense. Based on this view, a softer truth-condition for fictional sentences can be posited: that, lacking reference, these sentences lack truth-value, and are thus neither true nor false. Therefore, fiction, as a part and parcel of poetry, is "a pure-sense language liberated from reference and truth-value" (Dolezel 4). It is exactly the distinction of cognitive (referential) and poetic (pure-sense) language that leads to the designation of Frege's doctrine as a semantics of one world with two languages.

-45- Though after a long delay, the significance of Frege's ideas was recognized in logical semantics and, to a certain degree, in literary theory as well, it is still not easy to understand his conception of pure-sense language:

"if sense is defined on the basis of reference, that is, as the referent's 'mode of presentation,' then it seems impossible to speak about the sense of terms that lack reference" (Dolezel 4). In the words of Evans, "It is really not clear how there can be a mode of presentation associated with some term when there is no object to be presented" (22; qtd. in Dolezel 4). Obviously, according to Dolezel, if the idea of pure-sense language is to become logically sound, sense has to be defined independently of reference; such a recasting of sense is achieved in Saussure's theory of meaning.

1.1.1.3 Ferdinand de Saussure: self-reference According to Dolezel,

Saussure was convinced that the notion of reference is tied to an obsolete, primitive view of language as a transparent medium, as nomenclature, "a list of terms each corresponding to a thing" (97; qtd. in Dolezel 5). For Saussure, the meaning of the linguistic sign is not defined on the external axis

"language-world" but on the internal nexus "signifier (significant) I signified

(signifie)." The signifier, as the form of linguistic expression, is assigned by convention a sense, or a signified. In this view, we can conclude that the semantic structure of language is independent of the structures of the world, and thus a concept of sense independent of reference comes into being: sense is determined by the formal structure of the signifier.

-46- As a founder of modern linguistics in the twentieth century, Saussure's views exerted a strong impact on literary semantics. Under their inspiration, an influential theory of poetic language was formed: poetic language, liberated from extralingual reference, is "self-referential" (Dolezel 5). Following this theory, new meanings were produced actively through the unconventional manipulations of the significant/signifie nexus. Yet, to construct a theory of fictionality in a semantics without reference is destined to fail. Saussure himself did not consider this issue, and his followers either evaded it or fused

it in the concept of poetic language. As Pavel observes, the "moratorium on referential issues" shackled the development of literary semantics of fictionality (10).

Up to this point, a conclusion can almost be made that "the one-world frame is not a propitious ground for fictional semantics" (Dolezel 5). Neither

Russell's concept of fictional nonentities nor Frege's and Saussure's ideas of the lack of reference can succeed in building up the theory of fictional semantics. Even so, it is inappropriate to discard the one-world frame without examining the doctrine of mimesis, the most ancient and authoritative version of fictional semantics.

1.1.1.4 Mimesis: actual prototypes Different from the philosophical and linguistic semantics discussed above, mimesis, designated as a theory of fictional representations, has been developed primarily in aesthetics and

literary criticism.

-47- From its very beginning, that is, since the tradition established in the writings of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics, the doctrine of mimesis has occupied a central position in occidental aesthetic thinking. Its main idea is that: fictional entities are derived from reality, and they are imitations or representations of actually existing entities (Dolezel 6).

According to Dolezel, the basic move of mimetic interpretation is to assign an actual prototype (6), and the guiding principle of such interpretation can be expressed as follows:

fictional particular P(f) represents actual particular P(a)

By doing so, mimetic interpretation actually provides a referential semantics of fictionality. In the words of Dolezel, "By matching a fictional particular with an actual counterpart—a legendary character with a historical person, a portrait with a real man, a fictional story with an actual event, a fictional setting with an actual place—it assigns references to fictional terms. The

'universe of discourse' of fictional texts proves to be the actual world" (6).

The problem with mimetic semantics is that in many cases it is impossible to locate the prototype. For instance, who is the actual individual represented by Hamlet? No historical document could tell for sure about the existence of such a person in a certain period of time. For this reason, mimetic criticism has to be adapted, and "fictional particulars are taken as representations of actual universals—psychological types, social groups, existential or historical conditions" (Dolezel 7). Hence, the mimetic function acquires the following form:

-48- fictional particular P(f) represents actual universals U(a)

As a matter of fact, this model of interpretation represents the mainstream of mimetic interpretive practices since Aristotle. For Dolezel, however, the mimetic semantics in this version becomes "a language without particulars"; whereas literature, like the other arts, is "a force of individuation, countering the universalizing pressure of language, customs, social representations" (Strawson 214-24; qtd. in Dolezel 7-8). Dolezel further claims, "Depriving fictional particulars of their individuality, universalist mimetic interpretation files them under one of its a priori categories. What fictional literature achieves, mimetic criticism undoes" (8).

Based on the above analysis of contemporary mimetic criticism, a tentative conclusion can be made that "the fictional semantics underlying its interpretive practice has a restricted scope: it accounts only for those fictional entities that can be matched with actual prototypes. If mimetic criticism attempts to move beyond this domain, it finds itself in a double bind. If it insists on interpreting all fictional entities as representatives of actual ones, it is forced into a universalist interpretation, which deletes fictional particulars. If fictional particulars are preserved, they are not explained as representations of actual entities but taken as pre-existent; a source of representation is assumed to have recovered them" (9).

For Dolezel, the theoretical failure of mimetic semantics is not fortuitous; it is a necessary consequence of its adherence to the one-world model frame (9). Dolezel believes that the mimetic and the Russellian

-49- semantics of fictionality are not only compatible but also complementary:

Russell provided a logical procedure (theory of description), mimetic

semantics a hermeneutic procedure (universalist interpretation), for dealing with fictional entities in the one-world model, but in both cases, fictional

particulars are sacrificed so that the actual world may preserve its ontological

purity. Dolezel further asserts that the fatal defect of all one-world semantics

of fictionality is that they cannot account for fictional particulars (10). Now that

"works of fiction are essentially about concrete fictional persons with

individuating properties in definite spatiotemporal locations, linked by peculiar

relationships and engaged in unique struggles, quests, frustrations, and

victories," it is necessary for us to explore alternative theoretical approaches

to fictionality (Dolezel 10).

1.1.2 Possible Worlds vs. Fictional Worlds—Particularities of

Fictional Worlds as Possible Worlds

The theory of possible worlds, in the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, is "a formal model developed by logicians for the purpose of defining the

semantics of modal operators—primarily those of necessity and possibility,

but other operators have been suggested" (3). Though Gottfried Wilhelm von

Leibniz was not the first scholar pondering over the concept of possible

worlds, his views exerted a far-reaching influence upon twentieth-century

philosophers. According to Leibniz, an infinity of possible worlds exist as

thoughts in the mind of God (qtd. in Ryan 16). Among all these possible

worlds, only one is actual, which, as the best of them all, is chosen by the

-50- divine mind to be instantiated. This privileged world is the one we live in, the one we call reality.

Leibniz's metaphysical conception that possible worlds have transcendental existence, and that they reside in the omniscient divine mind waiting to be discovered by an exceptional intellectual or imagination was modified by contemporary thinkers before it became an interdisciplinary paradigm that provides new insights into theoretical issues of natural, social and human sciences.

Nicholas Rescher proposes that possible worlds are not absolutely existing entities but constructs of human minds. The facts of the actual world,

Rescher maintains, can "unqualifiedly be said to exist" (168; qtd. in Ryan 19).

They have "an objective foundation in the existential order" which renders them "independent of minds" (173; qtd. in Ryan 19). The facts of unactualized possible worlds, by contrast, "exist in a relativized manner, as the objects of certain intellectual processes" (168; qtd. in Ryan 19).

This position about the origin of possible worlds was echoed by Saul A.

Kripke, who states tersely that possible worlds are "stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes" (44; qtd. in Dolezel 14), and by M. J. Cresswell, who asserts that possible worlds are "things we can talk about or imagine, suppose, believe in or wish for" (4; qtd. in Dolezel 14).

The radical change of viewing possible worlds as human constructs

"brings the concept down from the metaphysical pedestal and makes it a potential tool of empirical theorizing" (Dolezel 14). Following this trend,

-51- various possible worlds have been stipulated from the intentions of different cognitive activities. For instance, interpretive models, which provide the domain of reference necessary for the semantic interpretation of

counterfactual statements, are among the possible worlds created in the area of logical semantics; coherent cosmologies, derived from some axioms or

presuppositions, are possible worlds of philosophy. Similarly, possible worlds

of fiction can be considered as "artifacts produced by aesthetic activities"

(Dolezel 15).

The possible-worlds framework began to attract the attention of literary

scholars in the early 1970s. As Pavel observes, "the main legacy of possible- world theory to textual semiotics is an interest in the problem of truth in fiction

and in the relations between semiotic domains and reality—two questions

considered heretic by orthodox structuralism" (9).

According to Ryan, possible world theory has two concepts to propose to textual semiotics: the metaphor of "world" to describe the semantic domain

projected by the text; and the concept of modality to describe and classify the

various ways of existence of the objects, states, and events that make up the

semantic domain. But Dolezel warns that "a mechanical transfer of the

possible-worlds idiom into literary theory would just add more metaphors to a

metalanguage already overstocked with these dubious terms" (15-6). Dolezel

states that fictional worlds of literature are "a special kind of possible world; they are aesthetic artifacts constructed, preserved, and circulating in the

medium of fictional texts" (16). He further explains in which aspects the

-52- concept of a fictional world behaves as a possible world and what features are special for the fictional world of literature, that is, the features that cannot be derived from the possible-worlds model of logic and philosophy. For space reasons, only two points will be mentioned here, which, for me, are more related to the concern of this thesis.

First, according to Dolezel, fictional worlds are ensembles of nonactualized possible states. Positing possible worlds as the universe of fictional discourse gives a kind of legitimacy to the concept of fictional reference; fictional worlds and their constituents, fictional particulars, "are granted a definite ontological status, the status of nonactualized possibles"

(Dolezel 16). Based on this standpoint, fictional particulars, as nonactualized possibles, are ontologically different from actual persons, events, and places.

They are not able to meet, interact, or communicate with real people, even when they share the same proper name. Hence, many confusions between fictional persons and actual "prototypes" can be avoided in the actual world.

Secondly, fictional worlds are accessed through semiotic channels.

Due to the different ontological status of fictional realms, physical entry and direct observation are unthinkable, but actual persons, authors and readers, can access fictional worlds by crossing the world boundary between the worlds of the actual and the possible. In this regard, semiotics and text theory

becomes the handy and absolute resort.

In the creation of a fictional world, authors can draw on the actual world, but because of "the ontological sovereignty of fictional worlds, actual-

-53- world entities have to be converted into nonfactual possibles, with all the ontological, logical, and semantical consequences that this transformation entails" (Dolezel 21).

In contrast, readers access fictional worlds by reading and processing literary texts. Possible-worlds semantics insists that "the world is constructed by its author and the reader's role is to reconstruct it" according to the instructions provided by the author in the text (Dolezel 21). During the process of reconstruction, the reader makes it a part of his experience just as he experientially appropriates the actual world. Through the appropriation, readers can integrate the fictional worlds into their own reality.

Sectional Summary and My Observation:

Up to now, I have reviewed the main points of Dolezel about the framework of possible worlds in relation to literary studies. In the following paragraphs, I would like to add my own observation about the reason and necessity of introducing the framework of possible worlds into the study of fiction.

From April 2001 to July 2003, a lawsuit in China against Hong Ying, a

Chinese overseas writer residing mainly in London, caused a commotion in the world of literature and art. The suitor was Chen Xiaoying (PI^JNSt), the daughter of Ling Shuhua $$iW$), a celebrity of the 1930s' Chinese cultural circles, who was claimed to be the heroine of Hong Ying's novel K, despite the fact that her real name was never mentioned in the fiction. Chen indicted

-54- Hong Ying for infringing upon her parents' reputation and for hurting her own feeling.

The suit was refused twice in Beijing for the reason of venue of trial, but it was accepted for the third time in Changchun, where the novel was serialized in a literary magazine. Though Hong Ying told the media, "If I lose the lawsuit, I can never write any novels because the freedom of a writer's production has been deprived," she did lose it (Xu Ying sec.3). The book was sentenced to be banned in mainland China, and Hong Ying was ordered to pay a compensation of 200, 000 RMB. Reluctant to accept the judgment, she appealed to a higher court, and finally arrived at an agreement, which required Hong Ying to change the tile of K to English Lover, and to pay the suitor 80, 000 RMB as a make-up for the loss the book had caused.

Though Xie Mian, a literary professor at Peking University, has criticized the absolute absurdity of equating fictional characters with actual persons, nothing can change the fact that an author has been sued because of her work (sec.1). Here, I am not intending to pass judgment on the suitor or the court. This is just a real example of a writer who has to apologize for her work for being based on a prototype, and who has to suffer financially because of this work.

In the "Author's Foreword" of the English version, Hong Ying writes the following words: "I was, after all, aiming to write a novel not a biography. It was my prerogative as a novelist to use my imagination in developing the story from its historical basis, and my tale does not claim to be a factual

-55- account of the lives of the two lovers" (vi-vii). I am sure she must have something in mind to direct and to defend.

Coincidently, in 2005, after the publishing of War Trash, the author Ha

Jin was confronted with a potential accusation. The accuser, Zhang Zeshi, the author of Test and My Korean War, claimed that Ha Jin had plagiarized some details of his books. For various reasons, this claim was not fulfilled, but the phenomenon itself indicated that the persons being involved had blurred the boundary between the actual world and the fictional world, adaptation and plagiarism.

In addition, another problem often surrounding literary fictions, particularly historical writings, is whether the history presented is authentic, that is, whether it is identical to the real history that has already happened.

This may well be explained with Aristotle's distinction between literary and historical writing, as will be discussed in detail in the next section.

In short, if a fiction is considered as a possible world independent of the actual world, its author may be saved a lot of trouble. Besides, according to the poststructuralist perspective, a fiction, as well as all other literary works, is autonomous after it is finished. Like a new-born baby, it will have its own life. Even the author is dead. Thus, many years or decades or centuries later, even after the time portrayed in the novel has long lapsed, the great literary works will last and their enduring charm will attract the attention of the world, like Shakespeare's Hamlet and Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Mansion.

-56- 1.1.3 Fiction, Reality and Historiography—Reading and

Interpretation

How to understand the correlation between man, the medium, the actual world and the fictional world has always been a major concern during the development of the semantics of fictionality. In other words, how to treat reality in fictional worlds, and whether the fictional worlds created can be an instrument for understanding the actual world, are questions worthy of discussion. As we have already seen, the doctrine of mimesis or representation, which is closely tied to the one-world frame, has been discarded because of the uncertainty, confusion and potential troubles it may bring. Then it is high time to explore the relationship between fiction and reality under the framework of possible worlds.

In the "Preface" of his book, Dolezel asserts that denial of the mimetic character of fiction-making does not mean severing the strong links between fiction and actuality (x). For him, the exchange between fiction and actuality is bidirectional: in one direction, in constructing fictional worlds, the poetic imagination works with material drawn from actuality; in the opposite direction, fictional constructs deeply influence our imaging and understanding of reality.

Dolezel further clarifies that during the creation of a literary fictional world, the author draws on the actual world in many ways: adopting its elements, categories, and macrostructural models; borrowing brute facts, cultural realemes, or discursive features; anchoring the fictional story to a

-57- historical event; sharing frames of reference; combining actual places to create a fictional location; corroborating the thematic design, and so on (20).

However, Dolezel also reminds us that the material which comes from the actual world has to undergo a substantial transformation at the world boundary. That is, the "actual-world entities have to be converted into nonfactual possibles, with all the ontological, logical, and semantical consequences that this transformation entails" (21).

According to this perspective, which is actually a popular idea, we can conclude that reality can be projected to the fictional world, and readers may recognize or identify the shadow of reality, but fictional reality is never identical with reality in the actual world.

Regarding this disparity, Aristotle has a classic discussion in his

Poetics. Aristotle contends that poetry (which can be expanded to include all literary productions) is more universal, more general than things as they are because "it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity" (32). Aristotle declares that the historian, not the poet, writes of what has already happened, whereas the poet's task is to write of what could happen. For Aristotle, poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history for "poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular" (33).

About Aristotle's perspective on history, one point may need to be clarified. For Aristotle, history writes about what has happened. His theory seems to be saying that historical writing is objective. According to the

-58- poststructuralist perspective of historiography, however, historical writing may

not necessarily be as objective as it should be or as it is supposed to be.

As Hayden White writes in the "Preface" of his book, The Content of

the Form, when discussing the relation between narrative discourse and

historical representation, "narrative is not merely a neutral discursive form that

may or may not be used to represent real events in their aspect as

developmental processes but rather entails ontological and epistemic choices

with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications" (ix).

Simply speaking, to some extent, all narratives are merely a kind of

discourse, and all discourses must contain a kind of ideology. This point of

view is certainly applicable to the writer's creation of fictional worlds.

As we mentioned above, during the creation of a fictional world, the

author may draw on the actual world. He or she can borrow facts or anchor

his or her fictional story to a historical event, but their description or

representation or narrative about the facts or events may not be absolutely

objective. They must have been dyed with the color of a certain writer's judgment or ideological prejudice. Following this point, we can conclude that

fictions, including historical fictions, can also be considered as a kind of

discourse, which must have hidden the author's conception of the world.

The Chinese proverb, MiuA^., A£#0$c (A play is like a life; a life is

like a play), indicates the characteristic of verisimilitude between fictional

reality and actual reality. The two realities are not completely identical, but

there must exist countless ties in-between.

-59- As an advocate of aesthetic response, Wolfgang Iser also follows with great interest the entangled relationship between fiction and reality. He points out, "if fiction and reality are to be linked, it must be in terms not of opposition but of communication, for the one is not the mere opposite of the other— fiction is a means of telling us something about reality. ... If it is not reality, this is not because it lacks the attributes of reality, but because it tells us something about reality, and the conveyer cannot be identical to what is conveyed" (53-4). Naturally, he is leading people to approach literature from a functional standpoint, to focus on the basic interdependent intersections: the one between the text and reality and the one between the text and reader.

The next section will discuss this pragmatic view of literature in more detail.

As for what a work of fiction can tell us, different readers may provide different answers. Lars Gyllensten writes from an author's perspective that

"The interpretation or conception of a text resembles the interpretation or conception of the world in which we live in" (272). For him, a literary text can

be ambiguous because of the external conditions of readers in the actual world, and as a result, the possible world formed therein cannot be spoken of

in a clearly defined way. In this way, a text constitutes what Bakhtin calls an

"orchestration by means of heteroglossia" (366; qtd. in Gyllensten 272). How great the multiplicity is and how many voices we can hear in the text's

heteroglossia, according to Gyllensten, depend on how many conflicts and

how many ideological differences and moves can occur among people in the actual world (272).

-60- In short, as indicated by the discussions above, there exist countless links between the actual reality and the fictional reality, but they are rarely identical. As readers, we must be cautious to avoid "getting hung up on actuality" (Wolterstorff 244). Moreover, taking into account the ambiguity of literary texts, we need to be aware that each interpretation is merely one interpretation among many others. What we can do is simply to read and write about what we have experienced during the reading and what we have discerned about the author's ideological weaving. It is exactly this kind of diversity that constitutes the rich garden of the humanities.

1.2 Speech Act Theory—Functional Perspectives

Iser writes in his book, The Act of Reading, that the pragmatic nature of language has been most clearly brought into focus by ordinary language philosophy, and that the concepts developed in this manner can nevertheless serve as a starting point for the study of the pragmatic nature of literary texts, though they are not meant to be applied to fictions (54). The concepts mentioned above refer to the speech-act theory. According to Iser, speech- act theory is an attempt, derived from ordinary language philosophy, to describe those factors that affect the success or failure of linguistic communication. These factors also "pertain to the reading of fiction, which is a linguistic action in the sense that it involves an understanding of the text, or of what the text seeks to convey, by establishing a relationship between text and reader" (54-5).

-61- Iser's views of speech-act theory and the reading of fiction are echoed in J. Hillis Miller's book, Literature as Conduct. Miller writes, "Putting things in words is speech that acts. It does something that may do other things in its turn. It is a way of doing things with words" (2). He even identifies three forms of this in connection with literature as conduct; these will be addressed later in this section.

Then, what is speech act theory? Speech act theory was originally initiated by J. L. Austin. Though Austin says in a note that his ideas were formed in 1939, the posthumous publication in 1962 of his book, How to Do

Things with Words, based on his series of lectures delivered at Harvard

University in 1955, marked a watershed in the history of speech act theory.

From then on, speech act theory began to develop quickly, though, to some degree, it may have departed from Austin's original intentions.

In his book, Austin outlined his theory of speech acts and the concept of performative language, in which "to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something" (12). He first made a clear distinction between two basic forms of linguistic utterance,

"constative" and "performative." Constatives, either true or false, describe a fact or a state of affairs, while performatives, measured against the criteria of felicitous or infelicitous/infelicities, are not merely saying something but make an action happen, for example, "to name a ship." It is exactly the latter type of language that attracts Austin's attention and provokes his great interest.

Performative language, according to Austin, brings about a change only when

-62- it is used in the appropriate circumstances and accompanied by other physical and inward spiritual acts. For instance, to name a ship, the person uttering the sentence must be the person appointed to name her. Such speech acts are called performative precisely because they produce an action.

For Austin, it is not always easy to distinguish the performative from the constative; moreover, in many cases, the same sentence/utterance is used on different occasions in both ways, performative and constative (67).

He eventually concludes that most utterances are performatives in nature; the speaker is nearly always trying to do something by saying something. Austin regards the performative utterance as the paradigm of the speech act.

To further examine the different senses or dimensions which may be involved in the "use of a sentence" or the "use of language," Austin distinguishes three kinds of "action" or act relating to different types of performance: a locutionary act, "which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to 'meaning' in the traditional sense"; illocutionary acts, utterances which have a certain (conventional) force, performing some results, such as informing, ordering, warning, or undertaking; perlocutionary acts, referring to

"what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading" (109).

Austin focuses on illocutionary acts, maintaining that here we might find the "force" of a statement and demonstrate its performative nature. For example, to say "Don't run with scissors" has the force of a warning when

-63- spoken in a certain context. This utterance may be stated in an explicitly performative way, such as, "I warn you, don't run with scissors." This statement is neither true nor false. Instead, it creates a warning. By hearing the statement, and understanding it as a warning, the auditor is warned, which is not to say that the auditor must or will act in any particular way regarding the warning.

Unfortunately, Austin did not include literary language in his discussion.

He asserts that a performative utterance will "be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy" (22). For him, language in such circumstances is "in special ways— intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use— ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language" (22).

Austin's general exclusion of literature from the realm of speech acts, in the words of Miller, "fails to recognize, according to de Man and Derrida, the many ways in which literature makes something happen, as well as the many ways in which nonliterature is infected by the literary" (Literature as Conduct

8). For Austin and to some extent, John Searles, a speech act leaves intact the rules and conventions that enabled it, whereas for de Man and Derrida, each performative, "even though it may repeat a form of words used perhaps innumerable times before, is radically singular and inaugural. It changes the rules and institutions themselves, as well as the surrounding context, rather than simply depending on them to get something efficiently done" (Miller,

Literature as Conduct 8).

-64- Considering this argument, it might be safe to say that, to some degree, the deconstructionist views of de Man and Derrida have greatly expanded the domain of speech act theory, and their perspectives have contributed to the application of speech act theory in literature.

Undoubtedly, Iser also actively supports the application of speech act theory into the study of literary works. He points out that for the study of the pragmatic nature of literary texts, the illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts are of particular interest (57). In this regard, Miller has set up a successful example. He has not only written a theoretical book, Speech Acts in Literature, but also practiced the speech act theory in his analysis of Henry

James's novels.

In Literature as Conduct, Miller identifies three forms of doing things with words in relation to literature as conduct:

1) The author's act of writing, which is a doing that takes the form of putting things in this way or that;13 2) The narrators and characters in a work of fiction may utter speech acts that are a form of doing things with words, e.g. promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like; 3) The reader, in his or her turn, in acts of teaching, criticism, or informal comment, may do things by putting a reading into words. Doing that may have an effect on students, readers, or acquaintances. Teaching, or writing criticism, or

13 Miller's claim about the author's act of writing seems to have been echoed in Rushdie's statement that "description is itself a political act" (430). For more information, see INTRO.2 of this thesis. -65- just talking about a book is a doing that may do other things in its turn. (2) Borrowing from Miller's idea of "the way literature may conduct its readers to believe or to behave in new way," I will explore the relations of literature to conduct by reading Ha Jin and Yan Geling's literary works

(Literature as Conduct 2). In other words, I will read several works by Ha Jin and Yan Geling in the light of speech act theory. Unlike Miller, however, who mainly analyzes the speech acts of the narrators and characters, I am going to focus on the act of the author's writing and my reading acts as a specific reader, an insider of the setting of these works. For me, the writers, if they are serious about their career, may or may not state clearly their aims and their principles of writing, but they must have hidden between the lines their tenets or politics of writing.

In this thesis, the whole literary work will be taken as a performative speech act/utterance, in which the constative dimension is, for me, the story of the fictional world, and the performative dimension is what I am discussing about, the interpretive force of each work. Apparent constatives often work performatively. Hence, my analysis works on two levels: the constative level, the characters and narrators in the fictional world; and the performative level, the act of the author's writing. As Miller claims, the performative signs

(including pictures, moving and still, as well as oral speech, written language, and music) masking as constative assertions generate what we call ideology,

I would like to paraphrase this as follows: the fictional world masking as the imaginary world conveys/reveals the message of ideology (7). Miller also -66- points out that reading a literary work confers a responsibility on the reader to make an accounting of his or her act of reading, for a reading, as he said above, is, to some degree, a doing that may do other things in its turn. I am now making an accounting of my reading act, and I hope my accounting will shed some light for the future reader of these novels.

1.3 Speech Act Theory vs. Possible Worlds Theory

"Literary Interpretation: Semantics or Pragmatics?" is the subtitle of

Part I of Iser's book, The Act of Reading. Aiming to pave the way for his proposal of aesthetic response, Iser is actually more inclined to the pragmatic interpretation. For me, however, they are not in conflict, but two sides of the same coin. The theory of possible worlds approaches literary texts from the perspective of ontology while speech act theory focuses on their functional aspect.

Pavel and Dolezel, as advocates of the possible-worlds frame, both include speech act theory in their coverage. Dolezel writes that to account for fiction by formal or pragmatic theories is one way out of the impasse of the one-world model frame, though in his unified theory of fictionality, it has been relegated to an auxiliary status. Relocating the concept of fictionality from the

"sign-world" to the "sign-user" axis, pragmatic theory takes fictionality as a speech act convention: "The essence of fiction is to be located in the nature of the speech acts performed when telling or writing a narration" (Woltersdorff

248; qtd. in Dolezel 10).

-67- Pavel further states, "Fiction is both a pragmatic and a semantic notion, since the organization of cosmological space obeys pragmatic reasons while the structure itself is clearly semantic" (143). Following the path of Pavel,

Claudine Jacquenod "combines a pragmatics of fictionalized communicative situations with a semantics of fictional worlds" (Dolezel 10), and Anna

Wierzbicka takes a similar position, but in the broader area of human communication (Dolezel 230). Wierzbicka approaches pragmatics "as a part, or an aspect, of semantics," but she clarifies, "this does not mean that anything that has ever been called 'pragmatics' could, or should, be swallowed by semantics" (19; qtd. in Dolezel 230).

In this thesis, the theory of possible/fictional worlds is introduced from an ontological perspective and speech act theory is approached from the aspects of function. Both are related to my thinking about the literary works covered in this dissertation in different aspects. Generally speaking, my argument is developed out of or based on the points J. Hillis Miller made in his short treatise, On Literature. One is the ontological view of literary works, that each literary work is a unique virtual reality, an imaginary possible world, and the access to that literary space is by no other means than reading the book; the other is the pragmatic perspectives of how to approach literary works. To me, each literary work constitutes a performative utterance, and the task or responsibility of readers is to build up the world according to the instructions provided in the text, taking whatever lessons they have learned from the text, to write about what touches their minds most.

-68- In short, in this chapter, I have covered briefly the theory of possible worlds, the ontological landscapes of fictional worlds, and the theory of speech act, the pragmatic view of how to interpret literary works. The remainder of this thesis examines in detail the works of Ha Jin and Yan

Geling, in hopes that the interpretation of these books will be insightful for the future remapping of overseas Chinese literature in general.

-69- Chapter 2: History Sigh: Reading Ha Jin's War Trash

You have tamed the distant lands and seas, The treacherous currents of the deep With the twist of foreign speech —Stanislaw Mlodozeniec, "A Song About Conrad," 35

In the preface to his first book of poetry, Between Silences (1990), Ha

Jin writes that his interest is not merely to describe the tragic events of modern Chinese history, but also to "speak for those unfortunate people who suffered, endured or perished at the bottom of life and who created the history and at the same time were fooled or ruined by it" (2). Though three years later, he began to doubt his claim as a spokesman for the downtrodden Chinese, realizing gradually the complexity and infeasibility of the position and his silliness of that ambition,14 this statement can still be considered as a declaration of his writing act, which has set, at least to some extent, the keynote of his writing and offered "a preview of the different themes, characters, and situations that fill his later work" (Sturr 188).

In his article, "The Spokesman and the Tribe," Ha Jin not only asserts that all the writer can strive for is a personal voice, but also reiterates that only literature can "penetrate historical, political, and linguistic barriers and reach the readership that includes the people of the writer's native country" (29; 22).

14 In his article, "The Spokesman and the Tribe," Ha Jin cites as examples three exiles—the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Chinese writer Lin Yutang, and V. S. Naipaul, demonstrating that as an individual, a writer's identity as a spokesman for his people is rather fragile, that a writer's first responsibility is to write well, and that his real battlefield is nowhere but on the page (11; 28; 29). -70- Then, how can "a personal voice" penetrate historical, political and linguistic

barriers, being accepted widely as a unique and lasting piece of literature?

The answer Ha Jin provides is: universalism.

In an interview, when he was asked, "Aren't you tempted to cash in on

the current craze for flashy novels that try to 'explain' Asian cultures to the

West?" Ha Jin replied, "No. I work on similarities. At heart we are all the

same," and he added, "If I emphasize cultural difference too much, the writing will have less depth" (qtd. in Zhou Xiaojing 274). Standing aloof from the

prevailing claims and strategies of identity politics, Ha Jin insists on a

common humanity. He says in an interview with Cynthia Liu, "I do believe in

universals and that there is truth that transcends borders and time" (qtd. in

Zhou Xiaojing 274).

As a matter of fact, Ha Jin's pursuit of universality and common

humanity has precedents. Lin Yutang (1895-1976), a well-known Chinese writer in the West, writes in the prologue to his first English book, My Country

and My People:

the only way of looking at China, and of looking at any foreign nation, [is] by searching, not for the exotic but for the common human values, by penetrating beneath the superficial quaintness of manners and looking for real courtesy, by seeing beneath the strange women's costumes and looking for real womanhood and motherhood, by observing the boy's naughtiness and the girls' daydreams. This boys' naughtiness and these girls' day-dreams and the ring of children's laughter and the patter of children's feet and the weeping of women and the sorrows of men—they are all alike, and only through the -71- sorrows of men and the weeping of women can we truly understand a nation. The differences are only in the forms of social behavior. This is the basis of all sound international criticism. (15; qtd. in Ha Jin, "Spokesman" 15)

What Lin Yutang emphasizes in this paragraph is nothing more than the

universality of humanities; in other words, human similarities, despite their different ways of revelation. Though, according to Ha Jin, Lin Yutang had deviated from this principle in his later works (because of his vision of himself as a cultural interpreter of his nation for a Western audience, and the deviation impairs, in return, the lasting value of his works as literature), it does

not hurt its plausibility as a guiding principle of writing and a widely adopted

standard of viewing literary works ("Spokesman" 16).

Regarding the conception of the universal, Wayne Booth writes in his

Rhetoric of Fiction:

It is true that some great works seem to rise above differences of speculative system and to win readers of all camps. Shakespeare is the pre-eminent example. The norms in his plays are indeed compatible with more philosophies than are comprehended in most of our dogmas; it is precisely this centrality, this lack of bias, this capacity to cut to the heart of problems which all philosophies attempt to deal with in conceptual terms, that makes his plays that we call universal. (141)

What Booth argues in this paragraph is the existence and essence of

something named "universal," which expresses, in particular, the deepest and

unbiased sympathy towards the suffering of human beings. This universal norm is not only adopted by writers, but also widely accepted by critics. For instance, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 was awarded to Gao Xingjian

"for an ceuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama"; and the

Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat" ("Press Release" 12 October 2000;

7 October 2010).

This chapter explores Ha Jin's "universal world"—"themes of entrapment, powerlessness and self-delusion"—through a close reading of his War Trash, a fictional memoir of Yu Yuan, a former cadet of the Huangpu

Military Academy who was dispatched to Korea with the Chinese People's

"Volunteer" Army and ended up a repatriated POW (prisoner of war) (Sturr

191). In this novel, Ha Jin "casts a searchlight into a forgotten corner of modern history, the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War" ("About this book" par.1).

Acclaimed by The New York Times Book Review as "Powerfully moving ... a brilliant and original enjambment ... a moral fable, timeless and universal ... Nearly perfect," and "Startingly seductive ... A work of profound humanism" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, War Trash has been hailed as Ha Jin's most ambitious book to date (Banks par.1; "Praise" par.1).

Dovetailing presciently with the events of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo,15

15 Referring to the exposure of American torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib near -73- War Trash won Ha Jin a second PEN/Faulkner Award, ranking him the third author ever to win twice the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United

States.

The following part of this chapter begins with a description and an analysis of the tattoo that had been forcibly emblazoned on the belly of the narrator "I", through the exploration of his suffering as a victim of the Korean war and, much worse, as a sought-after POW of the brutal struggle between pro-Nationalists and pro-Communists, and ends with a sigh over the perversion of his destiny. Up to the present time, more than a half century has passed and the Korean War has become a "forgotten war," both in China and the United States, not to mention the destinies of those POWs who have always been marginalized and never been the focus of history and society.

Ha Jin's history-like recording of the suffering of the Chinese POWs in the

U.N. camp is undoubtedly significant, which not only reveals to the public what they have suffered in the camp and at home, but also reminds people of the absurdity of history and reality.

2.1 Tattoo—A Constant Concern and A Metaphor of His Predicament

The novel opens with the narrator Yu Yuan's description of his tattoo, which says "FUCK...U...S...," and his constant concern about it. He is writing his story, he asserts, in order that his children and grandchildren may read it and "feel the full weight of the tattoo" on his belly (5). How and why did the tattoo happen to him? What has it meant for Yu Yuan to have his body

Baghdad in April 2004 and, eighteen months later, similar treatment at Guantanamo in Afghanistan. -74- marked with this obscene political slogan? In which way does the writing of his memoir relate to the removal of his tattoo? Questions like these must be haunting the readers' minds.

When the Communists came to power in 1949, Yu Yuan was a sophomore at the Huangpu Military Academy, majoring in political education.

Commonly known as "Whampoa Military Academy" with Chiang Kai-shek as its first commandant, the Huangpu Military Academy, like West Point in the

American military, has exhibited a broad influence on Chinese history. It has not only supplied many military commanders for both the KMT (Kuomintang) and CCP (Chinese Communist Party), but has also influenced both parties' policies and governance. Especially for Chiang and the KMT, the Whampoa

Clique was pivotal during the Northern Expedition and the Chinese Civil War.

Once a dreamland for many young enthusiastic servicemen, it is also a nightmare for many people involved with it, particularly those remaining in

Communist China after 1949.

Disgusted with the corruption of the Nationalists, Yu Yuan readily surrendered to the People's Liberation Army. Upon graduation, he was assigned to the headquarters of the 180th Division garrisoned in Chengdu City, where his mother was living. Life seemed to be smiling upon him, but good times never last long. Three weeks before the Spring Festival of 1951, his

Division received orders to enter Korea.

As a result of poor equipment and incompetent leadership, his Division was decimated within three months. Grievously wounded, Yu Yuan, together

-75- with Commissar Pei Shan, was captured by American soldiers. Hence he started his more than two years' incarceration in the UN POW camps, where the pro-Nationalists, with the tacit consent of the American captors, had created yet another battlefront, which for him was equally fierce and violent.

Yu Yuan's mastery of English and his ties with the Huangpu Military

Academy made him a sought-after prize for the anti-Communists among the

POWs, but, determined to return to his widowed mother and his fiancee, Yu

Yuan declined to register as refusing repatriation. As a result, the anti-

Communists forcibly tattooed two English words on his belly, "FUCK

COMMUNISM," in order to cut off his repatriation to mainland China.

This indelible brand, which "carries a history from the prison camps as complicated, painful and emblematic as his own," bears witness to his humiliating, nightmarish, dreadful plight: the virtual condition of life-long imprisonment (Banks par. 2). On returning to the pro-Communist camp, he immediately posed his concern to Commissar Pei, the spiritual leader of the

Communist force in the POW camp. However, Pei persuaded him to leave it as it is, saying that the tattoo could help in their dealing with the Americans.

Yu Yuan's protest was silenced by Commissar Pei's words, "This is necessary for our struggle" (124).

Ironically, though, Yu Yuan's tattoo even has "its charm," because his tattoo, like a talisman, protects him for almost five decades after his repatriation to China (3). With the help of an army doctor, all the letters in the word COMMUNISM, except the "U" and "S," had been erased, transforming

-76- the original tattoo into "FUCK...U...S...." At the outset of the Cultural

Revolution, when the Red Guards exposed the tattoo on his belly as an evidence of his affection for the United States, he saved himself by explaining the meaning of the word "fuck."

After the implementation of China's Open-door policy, Yu Yuan's son went to study in the US and he was invited to come for a visit. Before going to the US, when he had a chance to remove the tattoo, Yu Yuan decided against it, though he had foreseen that the tattoo could cause him to be refused entry to the States. His reasoning is, "if I had done that, word would

have spread and the authorities, suspecting I wouldn't return, might have revoked my passport" (3). "In addition," the memoir goes, "I was planning to bring with me all the material I had collected for this memoir, and couldn't afford to attract the attention of the police, who might have confiscated my

notes and files" (3).

For contemporary Chinese readers, the old man's wariness may seem excessive, but considering his life as a POW and three decades' living in

China as the dregs of society, who would jeer at his circumspection? Like a bird that starts at the mere twang of a bow-string, he could not afford any

imprudence. To some extent, his life as a prisoner has never ended. The

mere difference is the barbed-wire fence enclosing the POW camp which has

been replaced with the omnipresent invisible eyes, from the local Party organization to political activists living around the community. On him is

-77- embodied the destiny of many Chinese with a problematic past—overcautious and discreet even in peaceful times.

Yu Yuan would finally remove his tattoo at a clinic in the US, and he seems to be happy about the arrangement of his surgery. As readers, however, we may wonder whether he will be able to shake off "the full weight of the tattoo" on his skin and the shadow of the trauma deep in his subconscious. Perhaps, when everything is gone, he will also experience the

"strange pain" and the "hollow feeling" like the two senior POWs in Show

Foong's story, "1230 Spots," who, subsidized by VACRS (Vocational

Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen), had their tattoos removed in the mid-1990s in order to return safely from Taiwan to their home in mainland

China:

TEo

ft-JfiMWT, teMHJSo "§[%:WL^"U7, "M^Jri m-uj, mm®.!, mmuj, ^^.^mmc^uj ?A^

^gft±-fflMo 5$«ifrtfi= -mffim®&,

7, w%r.7x&£;7wmm'! tfa.mm? mmm? TMMM, %x£mm±.wmmuA®fe, mm&, m mixamBl, i^TSi't. (92-3) Tang has a hollow feeling. Something like an empty stomach or dizzy head. But it's neither. Everything's gone, he suddenly realizes. Gone is "Kill Zhu and Weed out Mao," gone is "Anti-Communist and Anti- -78- Russia," gone is the map, gone is the national flag, gone is "Succeed or Die." From now on everything is wiped out, as if a ring worn out for forty years were suddenly removed, leaving nothing but a white circle. White of complete emptiness. White of complete nothingness. Where are those bloody oaths? The doctor says they are absorbed. But where do they go when they are absorbed? Into the blood, or the marrow? Subconsciously, he touches the bowl-size scar on his back. It's still there, knotted like the bark of a tree. He feels a little more secure. (70)

What happens to that tattoo has become a metaphor for Yu Yuan, no matter what tangled and agonizing decision he had to make as a captive decades ago and as a returned POW at the present time. As the old veteran feels in

Show Foong's story, the tattoo on his body can be removed, but the trauma, which has permeated his blood and marrow, is still there. With the removal of the tattoos, part of his life seems to have gone, and he cannot help pondering over its coming and going. Who should, and who could, hold responsibility for their wounds and their suffering? The Nationalists? The Communists? Or, probably, the preordained fate?

Show Foong sighs in her story, "W^WMW$itl3\MfrM&Wik, JIC*

H + H^^J^TIJISJ (SO the Korean War had continued up to this day, awaiting its finale; the epilogue was taking place forty-four years later)" (89;

66). This might be partially true for those repatriates to Taiwan, for whom the title of POW, like a ring, a decoration, and the final removal of the tattoos can

-79- be seen as an end. For those returning to mainland China, however, the title of POW, like a golden hoop bound around their head, would hurt whenever a political rustle was in motion. Though the final rehabilitation was issued in

1980 by the Chinese government, there are still returnees, particularly those living in the villages, who have never been entitled to any benefit. Along with the passing away of the old veterans one by one, their stories might be ignored completely forever. To some extent, the treatment and consolation of the war's aftermath can never be ended until the war participants, as well as their immediate relatives, leave for the other world. The visible wounds can be cured quickly, but the invisible trauma penetrating into their blood and marrow is difficult to heal.

Yu Yuan's memoir, as a matter of fact, the writing of Ha Jin, has constituted a voice for thousands of Chinese POWs captured during the

Korean War, who had suffered, physically and spiritually, not only in the battlefield and prisoner camps, but also after repatriation to their homeland, which they vowed to defend and were determined to sacrifice their lives for a return. Reading their tragedies, one cannot help but question the validity of divine providence. Hopefully, through the act of writing, Yu Yuan and his companions could finally shake off the shadow, if not "the full weight," of the tattoo and their tainted past.

-80- 2.2 War Trash—Prisoner of War and Prey to Ideology and Political

Factions

A graduate-to-be of the Huangpu Military Academy, Yu Yuan is supposed to have a very bright prospect. Yet, it is exactly this background that becomes his fatal weakness and brings his loyalty to the new Communist

China into question because, as a common sense, Huangpu graduates are usually favorites of Chiang Kai-shek, the primary enemy of Mao Zedong.

However, as a cadet who readily surrendered to the People's Liberation Army,

Yu was viewed with suspicion and had to write out his personal histories, to confess his wrongdoings, and to engage in self- and mutual criticism. This shadow of his life was not lifted until the 1980s when the political environment of the whole society began to be relaxed.

Before his Division set off for Korea, all the officers who had originally served in the Nationalist army and now held positions at the regimental level and above were ordered to stay behind. This personnel shuffle further confirmed his speculation that men crossing over from the Nationalist Army were not trusted. Aware of his own problematic past, he is on the alert and tries to demonstrate his loyalty at all times.

In the pro-Nationalist camp, when Chang Ming, his battle companion- cum-friend, joked that if he had been Yu Yuan, he would have stuffed himself with pork roast and fried squid before saying goodbye to Wang Yong, the company leader, Yu sighed with a trace of annoyance,

The truth was that Ming couldn't walk in my shoes. Though he was a college graduate too, unlike me he had never -81- involved with the Nationalists. To the Communists he was a clean man, whereas I carried the heavy baggage of my past. If I had dined with Wang Yong's men, the whole company would have known of it. Then, facing the Communists' accusatory fingers, how could I have absolved myself? Wouldn't they punish me as a traitor too? (100)

Yet, this is not the only cause for his decades-long suffering. Yu

Yuan's real misfortune begins with his captivity. The realization that he had been caught "shot a sharp pang to my heart, which seemed to jump up and block my throat" (40). His left thigh was wounded, yet his first response was:

"Why didn't they kill me? It would've been better that way. At least people back home would treat Mother as a Revolutionary Martyr's parent and the government would take care of her" (40-1).

For a Chinese soldier like Yu Yuan, to survive as a POW is worse than to be killed. In an interview with Dwight Garner, Ha Jin, an ex-soldier, admits that the impetus sustaining him to work on War Trash for four years is "fear," and that most of the soldiers fear captivity more than death. The Seventh

Article of the Conduct Code of the Communist Army states, "Never Surrender.

Never let yourself be taken prisoner even at the cost of your life." For the

Communists, and perhaps, by and large, for all Oriental people, the life of a

human being, compared to the dignity of the army and the state, is not

important at all; as the saying goes, "WMM'h, ^^^^(Compared to moral integrity, to die of hunger is not a big issue)" (Cheng). For this reason, the

POWs are always regarded as shameful cowards who have lost their moral

-82- integrity and, therefore, should be relegated to the dregs of society. The

suffering of the Chinese returnees of the World War II and the Korean War

has reinforced this point.

Before his wound had healed completely, Yu Yuan was transferred to

Koje Island, where the majority of the North Korean and Chinese captives were held. Immediately after his arrival, on his first evening in the camp, Yu

Yuan, along with many other newcomers, was ordered to go to the company's

office to sign up to go to Taiwan. Failing to put his name for refusing

repatriation, Yu Yuan was forced to move out of the well-equipped compound

and into the small shabby tent for the inmates who wanted to be repatriated.

In fact, in the words of Yu Yuan, "most of us wanted to go home not for

political reasons at all; our decision was personal," but this fact could not

change their fate of being nothing more than bargaining chips and mere

pawns in the anti-repatriation movement amongst the POWs (65).

To kill time in the shabby tent and, possibly, to seek shelter in God's

bosom, Yu Yuan asked for a copy of the Bible from a missionary working in

the camp. This revealed his mastery of English and confirmed to the camp

leaders that he was not an "ordinary fish" (76). After learning that Yu Yuan

was a former cadet of the Huangpu Military Academy, they began to take

action in coercing him to go to Taiwan; then came the story of the tattoo.

One evening, Yu was summoned to the company's office. A dinner was waiting for him. Upon his refusal to sign up for Taiwan, a heavy object hit

the back of his head and Yu dropped to the ground. When he woke up the

-83- next morning, he was horrified to see two English words tattooed on his belly, right below his navel: FUCK COMMUNISM. Obviously, the pro-Nationalists would rather use mean tricks to coerce him into becoming a nonrepatriate.

Before the "screening" for the final repatriation, a fierce struggle for prisoners was carried on in the pro-Nationalist camp. Whoever dared to say

"no" to going to Taiwan would be punished on the spot, and a special session was held particularly for those who had been tattooed but still insisted on repatriation. Intimidated by the bloody scenes, Yu mouthed that he would go to Taiwan. However, on the screening day, seeing no pro-Nationalists around him, he told the arbiters adamantly, "To the mainland" (114).

Ten minutes later, Yu Yuan was landed in a new compound:

Compound 602, where all the would-be repatriates were assembled. Yet, his excitement and happiness did not last long. He was going to face another round of interrogation and testing.

The first hit came quickly. When his application for membership in the

United Communist Association, a newly established underground organization of Chinese Communist Party members and "revolutionary" soldiers among the POWs, was rejected, he sank into a state of deep despair, tormented by the thought that he was an outsider among his comrades. He asked himself:

I had placed my fate with the Communists, but would they ever trust me? To them I had always been a marked man with a problematic past. But didn't my deeds on the battlefield and in the wilderness prove that I was trustworthy and loyal to

-84- our motherland? ... What else did they need to verify that I was as reliable as the other prisoners? (123)

With great indignation, he thought he should stay away from the herd, but on second thought, he said, "No. If I mean to return to China, I have to take part in the pro-Communist activities; otherwise I'll cause more trouble for myself. Whether I join them or not, they'll never leave me alone, so I mustn't stand aloof (123). Like many of his apolitical and stoic compatriots in the

POW camps, Yu Yuan found himself helplessly buffeted by politics. It is exactly in this sense that Yu Yuan, as well as many others with similar experiences, is taken not only as a prisoner of war, a war trash, but also as the prey for politics and ideologies within the POW camp.

On the same evening, Commissar Pei talked to Yu. Besides informing him not to do anything to his tattoo (because of its "necessity" for their struggle), he asked him to prepare for the self-examination in the forthcoming study session. Like the protagonist, readers cannot help asking, "What did he do to deserve such a treatment?"

Reading the Bible is one proof of his guilt. Though, as a matter of fact, reading the Bible had brought him great pleasure (not because of the meaning of the Scripture, but simply because he was reading something that was not just propaganda, to quote the words of Yu Yuan), Yu Yuan dared not tell the truth. He explained that he was not religious, and that reading the

Bible was only a way of improving his English and a way of killing time.

Commissar Pei immediately rebukes him: "I believe there's more to it than

-85- learning English. You must feel lonely, so you want to seek refuge in the

Christian God's world" (125). For Commissar Pei, genuine help could only come from his comrades and the Party, not from God; and Marxism, the

Communist ideal, functions as the "multiplier" that multiplies strength and courage. Obviously, but without awareness on his part, Commissar Pei (as well as his followers) takes Marxism not as a sociological theory but as a kind of religion.

Though all the other comrades also had to undergo self-examination,

Yu Yuan, again, was a special case. In the study session, questions were shot at him one after another, and he felt as though he was a traitor under interrogation. His communication with Dr. Greene, the American woman doctor who had saved Yu Yuan's left leg, becomes the focus of the cross- examination. A staff member asked him, almost jokingly, "I heard that you were quite thick with an American woman in Pusan. Can you tell us about this special relationship?" Another man put in, "Didn't you hold her hand teaching her how to write Chinese?" (127)

Up to this point, the self-examination has turned out to be a farce, revealing the weakness of humanity hiding under the cover of justice and revolution. The interrogators may envy Yu Yuan's opportunity to have a good relationship with a young American lady, or they want to display their loyalty to the leaders, or they are eager to show their clearance. How could politics and ideology dehumanize a person in such a way? To rescue or to show off one's loyalty, one needs to find an innocent lamb to one's own advantage.

-86- Before the end of the study session, Yu Yuan's Bible was turned in, which became later the source of writing paper at the headquarters of the pro-

Communist camp. The words of Han Shu, the chief of the pro-Nationalist camp, echoed in his mind, "History has shown that the Communists always treat their enemies more leniently than their own people. Only by becoming their significant enemies can you survive decently" (128). This comment may not be necessarily 100 per cent true, but one thing is obviously irrefutable that the Chinese Communist Army treated the UN prisoners so well that, believe it or not, twenty-one of them decided defiantly to stay in China after the end of the Korean War.16 What else could Yu Yuan think of then?

As a matter of fact, this cruel fiasco is only the start of his many tests.

To keep aloof was not an option, and he could only strive to prove his loyalty.

When the prisoners were sent to unload a ship at the wharf, one of the POWs noticed that an American officer had gone to sleep without locking his door and that there was a pistol in his room. He asked the Party leader whether he should take it. The party leader named Yu Yuan instead to risk his life sneaking the pistol.

Despite many other acts of selfless loyalty, Yu Yuan remained an expendable item for Commissar Pei. When the order came that four officers were to go to Pusan for re-registration, Yu Yuan was told to go in the place of one of the officers. In the registration office, Yu's false identity was seen through because his fingerprints failed to match their file. Considering that the

16 About this issue, please refer to the feature documentary, They Chose China, directed by Shuibo Wang. -87- interrogators would never let him return to the pro-Communist camp, Yu Yuan agreed to go join the pro-Nationalists in order to get out of the impasse.

Back with the pro-Nationalists, Yu Yuan was also subjected to harrowing political education. He sighed with grief, "What's the difference between you people and the Communists? Where in the world can I ever be among my true comrades? Why am I always alone? When can I feel at home somewhere?" (305) The educational session made Yu Yuan realize that in the long run, if he went to Taiwan, his one year's stay in the pro-Communist camp would remain "a hidden reef in his life, and that there would be no way to free himself from suspicion, and that anyone could invoke that problematic period against him. To disentangle himself from the fracas between the

Communists and the Nationalists, Yu Yuan made up his mind to go to a third country, which might be a better destination for a man like him, who had often been an outsider and could not fit in any political group among his compatriots.

Fate seems to be playing with him all the time. He sees the

Communist Party leader sitting in front of him at the final screening. Thinking about his mother and his fiancee, he agreed to be repatriated, hence stepping on a different, unexpected and eventful road.

On his way to Kaesong, from where the returnees would be repatriated,

Yu Yuan dropped his Bible into the roadside brambles. His encounters with the Bible reflect, from another perspective, his dilemma of being fettered. He was forced to turn in his first copy of the Bible at the end of the study session

-88- in the pro-Communist camp, whereas his second copy was left behind by himself, but again, against his will. He could read the Bible in the pro-

Nationalist camp, but he refused to side with the pro-Nationalists; in order to return home, he chose to ally himself with the pro-Communist camp, at the cost of his reading enjoyment and perhaps, religious appeal.

How many times in our life do we have to make a choice against our own will? As a former cadet of the Huangpu, a repatriated POW, an outcast from society, Yu Yuan is doomed to accept whatever he is given, good or bad, willing or unwilling. For him, and perhaps, for many others, the saddest thing

is that he has always been an "outsider and couldn't fit in any political group," but still has to choose a group to ally with (326). Out of a pragmatic loyalty, he sides with the pro-Communists, but he is never trusted; his ties with the

Huangpu makes him most desirable for the pro-Nationalists, but he cannot give up his longing for home; he is apolitical, but turns out to be the central figure in political struggles.

Yu Yuan would like his grandson to become a doctor, partly because of Dr. Greene, who had saved his legs in the war hospital, but mostly because he believes that doctors and nurses "follow a different set of ethics, which enables them to transcend political nonsense and man-made enmity and to act with compassion and human decency" (5). He is still an idealist, as commented upon by Dr. Greene (54). Fairly speaking, this is merely a humble wish of an old man and should not become an object of denunciation; yet, the question remains: as a worldly man, who could transcend this political

-89- nonsense and these man-made enemies? Now that the Communists could close down Tongji Medical School, where Dr. Greene studied, because of its connection with the Western world, why couldn't they brainwash those medical professionals? As Yu Yuan observed, "What made Dr. Greene different from others was that she had treated me with genuine kindness, which must have stemmed not just from her professional training but from real humanity" (66; emphasis added). In this sense, one's major is not the key issue, and the real problem depends on what kind of ideology one had been indoctrinated with.

Last but not least, except for his status as a representative of many

Chinese POWs who are apolitical but have to suffer and stand various political buffets, Yu Yuan, as a narrator, also embodies the author's reflection on the individual and its position in relation to the war and to the Party as an organization. To some extent, it is something worthy of a celebration that Yu

Yuan has grown from a person who would like to hang together with others, either groups or organizations, and into an individual with critical thinking who would like to take things personally, instead of following others' lead. Though he finally failed to escape the destiny of a Chinese POW as the dregs of society, he began to consciously distance himself from the herd mentality and keep himself stripped of the official and non-official ideologies of the society or a certain group.

For instance, on the position of the individual in the war, Yu Yuan realized:

-90- To be able to function in a war, an officer was expected to view his men as abstract figures so that he could utilize and sacrifice them without any hesitation or qualms. The same abstraction was supposed to take place among the rank and file too—to us every American serviceman must be a devil, whereas to them, every one of us must be a Red. Without such obliteration of human particularities, how could one fight mercilessly? When a general evaluates the outcome of a battle, he thinks in numbers—how many casualties the enemy has suffered in comparison with the losses of his own army. The larger a victory is, the more people have been turned into numerals. This is the crime of war: it reduces real human beings into abstract numbers. (193; emphasis added)

Yu Yuan's reflection on the war echoes a line of a well-known Chinese poem, " —>Rr#j $,73 #tt (YT jiang gong cheng wan gu ku; A general's achievement is established at the cost of tens of thousands of soldiers' death;

What millions died that Caesar might be great)," which catches accurately the essence of the war and points out, from the perspective of humanity, the tragedy of war for the large number of nameless soldiers.

This mode of war is not only demonstrated fully in the battleground, but also embodied in the POW camps, which have been transformed into a sub-front. Under the underground Communist leadership, the Korean POWs, with the collaboration of the Chinese POWs, planned and executed the abduction of the American general in charge of the POW camps. Except for its propaganda effect back in Pyongyang and Beijing, which had widely publicized their victory, as well as some leverage for the negotiating at

-91- Panmunjom, the event had brought disastrous consequences to the Korean

POWs: "about forty tanks and armoured personnel carriers and twelve hundred GIs surrounded Compound 76" (187). As a result, most of the tents had burned down; and the assault brigade, which consisted of about four hundred men, "were all lying on the ground, scattered like bales of rags, some still smoldering. At least half of them had been killed. A few were screaming for help like small boys crying for mama" (188-9).

For a soldier like Yu Yuan, four hundred casualties is unworthy for the

Koreans to kidnap General Bell, but for generals like Commissar Pei, "To make a revolution means to sacrifice"(195). Based exactly on this logic, the

Chinese POWs, under the direct leadership of Commissar Pei, raised a flag on October 1, 1952, which, for Commissar Pei, might be "a battle to achieve something that would change the Party's opinion of him" (237). Yu Yuan's observation may be reasonable: "In every way, a timely battle was an advantageous move for him personally" (237).

Predictably, the battle, which had been claimed as "a glorious victory" by Commissar Pei and his followers, resulted in heavy losses: sixty-three killed and more than one hundred and thirty wounded. Imaginably, in the minds of these leaders, the casualties, compared to the news value of the incident, were nothing. A merit citation or an honourable title would be the best reward for their sacrificed lives. Unfortunately, however, the massacre did not attract much attention from the outside world, for which Commissar

Pei felt depressed and apprehensive.

-92- Indeed, the passion and bravery displayed by the Chinese POWs are admirable, but, viewed from a humanistic perspective, what is the point of raising the national flag over the POW camp at the cost of sixty-three deaths and one hundred and thirty wounded men? As Yu Yuan pondered, "our national flag was actually in its infancy, not even three years old. My comrades were unlikely to have developed a staunch attachment to it, not to mention devoted love. Then why had they all of a sudden become determined to fly it at any cost?" (234) Perhaps, for the POWs, this is an opportunity to remove their shame and win back their glory. Even so, if Commissar Pei took the lives of those Chinese POWs seriously, would he design and lead this battle? Has he ever thought of the fact that they were made of the same flesh and blood, exactly as his own?

As it turns out, this event has become a highlight in the struggling history of the Chinese POWs, though it failed to achieve the goal of lifting its creators from the abyss of sins. As contemporary readers, we cannot help asking the question: is there anybody doubting the significance of flag-raising at the cost of two hundreds' casualties? At least in those memoirs, no authors express their regrets.17

Regarding the relationship between the individual and the Party as an organization, Yu Yuan has also experienced a radical change from an innocent young serviceman, who had been well disposed towards the

Chinese Communist Party (believing that the Communists had brought order

17 About this point, please refer to Zhang Zeshi's book, My Korean War, one section of which is "#r M&'rf *lf $6 (The Grievous News from Cheju)" (189). -93- to China and hope to the Chinese people) and would like to get close to the

Party, to an independent individual, doubting the principle and operating mechanisms of the Communist Party as an organization through his question,

"Who represents the Party here?" (91).

Perhaps, at this time, Yu Yuan still held some hope and persistence in believing the Party. When Commissar Pei said, "I sent you to the reregistration and the Party is responsible for what had happened" (339), Yu

Yuan did not take his words seriously any more. He knew very well that in the

POW camps, Commissar Pei embodied the Party. However, "What responsibility can he hold then?" Yu Yuan must have asked himself this question. Now that the Chinese POWs as a whole had been abandoned by the country, what role could the Commissar's Party play, which, after all, was an underground organization in the POW camp? Hence, the promise that "the

Party is responsible for what had happened" is no more than a lip service which nobody can cash in.

Yu Yuan's illusion about the Party was completely broken when he observed that Commissar Pei too "had been a mere pawn, not much different from any of us" (345). To put it plainly, all individuals are "chessmen on the

Party's board" (345); while the standard for differentiating between people is either friends or enemies, and the "Communists don't believe anyone can remain neutral ..." (123). As Yu Yuan has seen, the so-called Party organization is only a group of people making decision on behalf of the Party while these people are not necessarily as just as the Party claims to be.

-94- In reality, however, Communism has been mystified. For instance,

Commissar Pei takes the Communist ideal as a "multiplier," which multiplies people's strength and courage. For him, Communism is not a sociological theory, but a kind of religion. The same holds true for the large number of soldiers who fought on the battlefield and struggled until their death in the

POW camp. Would Commissar Pei go on believing in Communism after he was repatriated and rejected by the Communist Party, particularly when he was old and his son remained a bachelor at forty? We cannot say for sure.

The cruel life in the POW camp provides Yu Yuan with a lesson, making him realize gradually that one has to depend on oneself, instead of others like Commissar Pei, the embodiment of the Party. Noticeably, Yu Yuan is different, compared to heroes in the memoirs published in mainland China.

He is more like an ordinary man, who would change his mind under the knifepoint of the pro-Nationalists, and even cry when he misses his home and mother. At the sight of birds in the sky, he would even dream and yearn for the peaceful life of an ordinary man. He could immerse himself in his Bible, with an intention to find the "multiplier" that could multiply people's strength and courage. Which one is more authentic, Yu Yuan or the heroes of the published memoirs? Ha Jin said in an interview that he "wanted to tell a loser's story and reveal the underside of glory" ("Conversations" para.2). To some extent, a loser's story may be more convincing since most of us are merely ordinary persons, living at the low levels of society, with the humblest wishes to live a peaceful life with our family.

-95- 2.3 Irony of Life and Disillusion with Homecoming

In mainland China, the Korean War, usually termed as the "Great War to Resist America and Assist Korea," is always associated with the majestic, resounding army song, "HMM. ^CTJCTJ. ^xf^MtL (Xiong jiujiu, qi angang, kua guo yalu jiang; Valiant and Spirited, [the Chinese People's Volunteers]

Cross Yalu River), ...," and the column of heroes in the war reportage of Wei

Wei, "Who is the Most Loveable Person" (1951).18 The impassioned and lusty song was once resounding in every corner of China, from big cities to small villages, and many Chinese youths were inspired to join the Chinese

"Volunteer" Army; whereas Wei Wei's reportage, first published on the front page of People's Daily on 11 April 1951 and later reprinted in the textbooks of middle school students, has influenced several generations, and "the most lovable persons" has hence become a synonym for Chinese soldiers.

At the political level, the Korean War has always been propagated as the decisive and glorious victory of the Chinese over the Americans, which has raised greatly the national image of China, the newly established socialist country, symbolizing China's rise to prominence in the international arena.

Almost all the Chinese people were inspired by the victory, believing that the

Chinese army had defeated the No. 1 imperialist country, and the US was forced to sign the armistice in spite of the enormous gap in terms of arms, equipment, and general economic strength. The Chinese people unanimously

18 By mentioning the army song and Wei Wei's reportage, as well as the propaganda effect, I intend to highlight the huge contrast between the fate of POWs and the general impression of the Korean War on the Chinese people. It is exactly in this sense that I argue that Ha Jin's War Trash provides an alternative account of China and the Chinese people, which fills in the gap left by the official master historical narratives. -96- contribute their victory to the righteousness and justice of the war in which they had been involved (Wang Shuzeng 3).

As for the casualties on the side of China, however, no detailed information has ever been revealed from Chinese official sources, not to speak of the life stories of more than twenty-two thousand POWs. The newly published 600-page-long documentary book on the Korean War has stated this point clearly (Wang Shuzeng 601). A scholar, using archival sources for the facts and statistics on China's forces and casualties, points out that during the war, the total number of Chinese deaths reached 152,000, and the number of combat-related wounded soldiers was around 230,000 (Xu; qtd. in

Chen Jian 202), compared with 54,000 American lives, with another 150,000 wounded (Huey 409). This echoes again the well-known verse,"—% #J$<,7J#

As everyone knows, casualties are unavoidable in war, but the fact that the so-called Chinese victory on the Korean peninsula was based on the death of more than two hundred thirty thousand soldiers has never been reported publicly, and this deserves our attention. It is hard to imagine whether the returning soldiers would be filled again with patriotic fervor when the majestic army song resounds in their ears. They might recall their comrades-in-arms who have fallen on the battlefield, and doubt the illusion behind its melody and lyrics. After all, the battlefield is not a theatre stage, but an arena of flesh and blood.

-97- Let us return to the issue of POWS. Among the 22,000 Chinese POWs, only about 6000 were finally repatriated to mainland China. How many people in mainland China noticed the phenomenon of POWs if they do not have family members participating in the war? Very few, perhaps. Despite the growing openness of the Chinese society, the issue of the Chinese POWs remains a highly sensitive one. With the rehabilitation of Marshall Peng

Dehuai, the general commander of the Chinese troops in Korea, in 1980, military histories on the Korean War began to appear. By the late 1990s, several memoirs about the Chinese POW repatriates had been published, among which are Jin Daying's Account of Chinese POWs (1987) and Zhang

Zeshi's series of books, like Written Notes of a Chinese POW (1995).

Undoubtedly, these memoirs contain much firsthand data, but the underlying patriotic tones and the use of political and ideological cliches of revolutionary propaganda have decreased their readability, impairing their credibility as unbiased and candid accounts of what really happened in the

POW camps. Considering the censorship over the publication of the issue, these negotiations and compromises may be understandable, but academically, these books show a serious weakness. Compared to those memoirs, Ha Jin's War Trash has provided a rather objective perspective and a more comprehensive description of the lives of POWs in the UN camps. In this sense, War Trash has filled in the gap and provided a voice for the large group of people who have been deprived of it in their native land.

-98- By contrast, the condition of American POWs is rather fortunate. This has certainly benefitted from the great endeavors of the public who hold deep sympathy for the suffering of the POWs during their captivity. In 1970 and

1995, the US Post issued three commemorative stamps in total, "Honoring

U.S. Servicemen—Prisoners of War & Missing and Killed in Action," and voicing their firm will that POWs and MIAs will never be forgotten; in 1985, the

Department of Defense authorized the issuance of a Prisoner of War Medal to any person who, while serving in any capacity with the Armed Forces of the

United States, had been taken prisoner and held captive after 5 April 1917.

Compared to the attitude and actions of the US, the Chinese government, as well as the masses of the Chinese people, does have a lot to think about.

After fulfilling their propaganda effect, the returnees were ordered to confess the "crimes" they had committed in the enemy's prisons. According to the principles issued against them, to be captured was shameful and all captives were considered cowards; POWs were to blame themselves for being captured and not attribute this to any external cause. Following these principles, all the Party members lost their membership, and with few exceptions, the returnees were all discharged dishonorably, and became "the dregs of society".

Ha Jin mentions in a review that the title "War Trash" is a transformation of "white trash," which refers to poor and deprived white people (Ji para.3). Like waste that is not needed any more, the POWs have been "written off as a loss" (345). The main reason that the POWs had been

-99- frequently mentioned by the delegates at Panmunjom was to use their suffering to "embarrass the enemy" and to save their own face by preventing more prisoners from choosing Taiwan as their destination (War Trash 345).

Now that they were back and had no value for political struggles, they were no longer a concern of the Party, but rags to be discarded. This amounts to spreading salt on their wounds. If only they were household waste or other items, they would be exempted from their suffering as an inferior group for the next thirty years.

It may sound arbitrary, but it is not without any truth to say that their tragedy is not the fact that they became POWs, but the choice that they made to come back to their homeland. The man-made enmity and the forced-to- confessed crimes have silenced them and deprived them of their dignity.

The author does not mention this, but it does not hurt to interpret that very possibly the words of Han Shu before the screening would echo in Yu

Yuan's mind when he faced the cross-examination and the subsequent dehumanizing treatment: "You all know the Communists' discipline and understand what will happen to you as a returned POW. If you still mean to repatriate, you must prepare to go through denunciations, corporal punishment, prison terms, and executions once you're back in our homeland"

(103). Probably, he would also recall and ruminate upon a pro-Nationalist's warning, "don't miss the boat. If you don't go with us this time, you'll kick yourself for the rest of your life" (95). Unfortunately, Yu Yuan, as well as many

-100- POWs of his kind, had boarded a wrong boat and hence embarked on another much longer journey in the darkness.

Yu Yuan is apolitical and self-effacing. He is not a Party member.

What sustained him and allowed him to survive the three-month guerrilla life and the more than two years' humiliation in the camp was his promise to his widowed mother and his fiancee. Even under the knifepoint of the pro-

Nationalists and after he ended up for the second time in the pro-Nationalist camp, he had never changed his mind: to return at any cost.

However, the reality is indeed ruthless for him. On his return, he

learned, ironically, that his mother had passed away a year before, and that

his fiancee could not possibly marry "a disgraced captive." In despairing

disillusion, Yu Yuan writes,

I felt as though time had played a cruel joke on me. If only I had known about my mother's death when I was in Korea; if only I had foreseen that home was no longer the same place. Then at any cost I would have gone to a third country, where I could have lived as a countryless man, and probably as a lonely drudge for the rest of my life. Or I might have gone to Taiwan and restarted my life there. But now it was too late to change anything. (344)

As a trivial detail, the death of Yu Yuan's mother seems to be of little

importance; but, on second thoughts, it may have been given an important

symbolic meaning. Traditionally, the image of a mother is always connected with the idea of love and protection. Without the love of a mother, a home would not be a harbor to anchor one's soul any more; moreover, without the -101- mother's protection, a home is not secured. In this sense, this detail seems to indicate symbolically that China, as Yu Yuan's motherland, no longer exists; from this moment on, Yu Yuan would have to live a life of an orphan in his homeland without the love and protection of his mother.

Throughout human history and tradition, nationalism and patriotism have usually been highlighted; nationalist heroes and patriotic personages are always held in the greatest esteem and praised highly. This is particularly true in China. Historically, writes Ha Jin, "it has always been the individual who is accused of betraying his country. Why shouldn't we turn the tables by accusing a country of betraying the individual?" ("Language of Betrayal" 31-2).

Obviously, Ha Jin's writing about the tragedy of the Chinese POWs is one way of accusing China or the Chinese government of betraying individuals.

As a matter of fact, in this regard, Ha Jin is not alone. Lao She, the well-known writer who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution,

reveals his sadness through an old man in Tea House (1957), "$c3|0|=HnfK)B

W, nJ7li'i3i$ciy§? (I love our country, but who cares a dame about me?)"

(421). Similarly, Bai Hua, the famous and controversial army writer, voices his

condemnation through the daughter of his protagonist in Bitter Love (1980),

"S^, iJg&^M, ^iM^&^Hli? RT&^rfflMtg®^? (Daddy, you love this country, no matter how bitterly ...Yet, does this country love you?)" (37).

To some extent, the nationalism and patriotism advocated by the government are not the same as those of individuals. Ideally speaking, the

-102- relationship between a country and an individual should be dual loyalty; in reality, however, the country requires usually a blind patriotism, a kind of unquestioning patriotism.

Regarding Yu Yuan's sufferings in China, some readers may argue that there is nothing wrong with all of these, as, is in accordance with the traditional Oriental logic, to surrender deserves punishment. Yes, the Chinese do have a long tradition of despising the POW for their loss of moral integrity.

The most well-known story in this regard can be traced back to Li Ling ($H), the general of the Han Dynasty (B.C 202-A.D. 8), who was captured and his whole family were killed. Even Sima Qian (w] m±), the author of the masterful historical book Records of the Historian (B.C.104-91), who interceded on his behalf, was castrated as a punishment. As a Chinese service man, Yu Yuan knows these principles well. Yet, does not the human being's instinct to survive and desire to return home speak louder? What is more valuable, human life or the virtual dignity of the army and the state? If the returnees' life cannot be secured, who would wish to contribute wholeheartedly to their country in the future? Fortunately, as society has progressed, more and more

Chinese people have begun to change and show their respect and deep sympathy towards human life, including those of the POWs.

Compared with most of the repatriates, Yu Yuan is rather "fortunate" because he was not a Party member and had neither broken any promise nor followed the pro-Nationalists to Taiwan despite being a graduate of the

-103- Huangpu Military Academy. He was assigned to teach in a middle school, and he held the job until his retirement. In 1980, he was finally rehabilitated.

However, his peace of mind was broken by the appearance of his former schoolmate for the Huangpu and roommate in the pro-Nationalist camp, Bai Dajian, who had been tattooed and coerced to go to Taiwan. When he was visiting his hometown, Bai was being received as an honored guest on TV because he had not forgotten his birthplace and had, moreover, donated an elementary school to his home village.

For returnees such as Yu Yuan, the POWs who had gone to Taiwan were able to live well, and China was embracing them generously as patriots despite their belated show of love: they were lucky. Are they really lucky? Not necessarily. Yu Yuan sees only the bright and glorified scenes of those non- repatriated POWs, not the heavy and disconsolate moment when they returned to find that there were only tombs of their parents to be visited. Their wives have remarried, and their old houses have been destroyed or completely leveled, as happened to the male protagonist Tang Dasheng in

Show Foong's "1230 Spots." What they had cherished for forty years is only a beatified memory, and in reality, they have no home to return to any more.

As Chi Pang-yuan writes in her "Foreword" to The Last of the

Whampoa Breed: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora (2003), after forty years' waiting, "Many veterans no longer have homes to return to, and many return to find their homes as the young wives they left behind—aged and coarsened beyond recognition. The sharp contrast between the homeland remembered

-104- and the homeland in reality shatters their lifelong dreams" (viii). As a result, many "returned" to Taiwan, and began to accept Taiwan—the alien land and their temporary place of souvenir—as their permanent home for their remaining years, like the Old Yang in Lti Chiang's "Old Man Yang and His

Woman" and Tang Dasheng in Show Foong's "1230 Spots." To some extent, what has happened to these old veterans coincides with "the Homeric episode that shows the homeland as an alien place to the returned exiles"

(Ha Jin, "Homeland" 71).

Moreover, not all POWs going to Taiwan are successful businessmen; many of them live at the bottom of society and end their lives alone in the

Veteran Homes, like Tang Dasheng (MAM), Wang Zhengfu (3EJE?I), Lao

Jiuzhong (HAS) in Show Foong's "1230 Spots," and the many nameless

Old X in Chu Tien-hsin's "Epilogue: In Remembrance of My Buddies from the

Military Compound."

The aged and fading-away POWs of the Korean War, together with

more than a million soldiers and their dependents retreating to the Island with the Nationalist government, are generally addressed as "^^fp (Lao Yuzai,

Old Mainlanders)," which is, for many, "a stereotype with political and

psychological dimensions, a hybrid of scorn and pity," and "a collective symbol of the tragedy of an era" (Huang 61; 62). Considered as strangers for their whole life, now they have to die on that strange land. Have they ever

reflected about the absurdity of their choice? Certainly, yes. "For the price of forty years," writes Huang K'o-chuan, a native Taiwanese writer,

-105- you bought a special ticket: loneliness. With this ticket in hand, you could have gone anywhere, even to your hometown, where nobody knows you, or even to heaven. But you became an accomplished traveler by spending forty years sitting on a bench. You have apprehended the principle that to go nowhere is to have gone anywhere. (64)

Just imagine the four decades' homesickness that had been gnawing at their hearts and the years "they didn't have any tombstones to sweep during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival" (Chu 248). Only in dreams could they cross the 160-mile-wide Strait, as Huang imagines, "Night has become your sail, your tears splash from candle-flames, stars rush out from your eyes.

Your very gaze is made of stone" (63).

Life is fair, but what an irony it is!

2.4 A Sigh—Conclusion of the Non-Concluded Issue

Ha Jin's genius, according to Robert D. Sturr, "is rooted in his genuine sympathy for the ordinary people whom he chooses as protagonists" (190).

Like the male protagonist in Waiting (1999), who gets divorced after eighteen long years of waiting only to find that his new marriage is a soap bubble of dream and imagination, Yu Yuan, who survived harsh conditions and sadistic treatment in the POW camps, had returned to discover that his homecoming was the prelude to his life as a social outcast. Both are examples of helpless individuals entrapped by their times and their politics.

Though up to now, all of his books are either set in China or about the

Chinese people overseas, Ha Jin believes that his experience of "living in

-106- America—the distance in time, the space" has changed his perspectives (qtd. in Geyh 193). This may echo the words of Salman Rushdie, who, as a displaced Indian writer first in England and then in the United States, asserts that his distance and his long geographical perspective have provided him with new angles to enter reality (15). In his milestone essay, "Imaginary

Homeland," Salman Rushdie writes, "description is itself a political act," and writing itself is "one way of denying the official, politician's version of truth" (13;

14). Taking the Chinese POWs in the Korean War as his protagonists, Ha Jin wishes to open "a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war" and

paint "an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation."19

Chi Pang-yuan quotes as her title of the "Foreword" to The Last of the

Whampoa Breed, "%¥$•> ^JkifaMT (Lao yuzai, wo wei nT xie xia, Old

Mainlanders, for You I write)"; whereas Ha Jin writes on his dedication page that his War Trash was dedicated to his father, "a veteran of the Korean War."

It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that the motivation surging in their

minds must be the same: "we shall not let history be burned to mere ashes"

(Bai Xianyong, "State Funeral" 103; qtd. in Chi ix).

Undoubtedly, War Trash can be taken as another case of speaking for the silenced. Ha Jin writes, "we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them" (War Trash 299). To give a voice to the silenced is the

19 From the inside flap of the front cover of War Trash (hard copy). -107- noblest purpose of literature. Ha Jin did well in that respect. For this reason,

War Trash deserves all the attention it has received. History has been merciless to those helpless people, but at least it utters, through the writing of

Ha Jin, a long and heavy sigh.20

20 By quoting the example of Chi Pang-yuan, I intend to emphasize that Ha Jin's act of writing is not something random, but an act of recording history, "to speak for those unfortunate people who suffered, endured or perished at the bottom of life," as he claims in the preface to his first book of poetry, Between Silences (2). -108- Chapter 3: Political Unconsciousness: Reading Yan Geling's The

Ninth Widow2'1

The appearance of The Ninth Widow by Yan Geling, a Chinese woman writer residing in the United States, aroused a great deal of critique in

2006 China. Some scholars highly commend it as one of the most important publications of contemporary Chinese literature (Chen Sihe 305), while some critics rebuke it sharply for the historical nihilism reflected in the novel (Zhou

Shuitao 80). Both voices are representative, but I do not quite agree with either of them. Deeply touched by the female protagonist, who belongs to the generation of my parents, I began my journey of exploration.

As the title of this chapter may inevitably remind certain readers of The

Political Unconscious, the monumental work in the area of cultural studies by

Fredric Jameson, an explanatory note is now a necessity. In his book,

Jameson argues the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, whereas I apply the words literally to designate the most distinctive characteristic of the female protagonist in the fiction.

During the turbulent years in the last century in China, when various political movements were launched and carried out intensively, the female protagonist, Wang Putao, was always criticized as having no political consciousness, and this comment did hold water. To a certain extent, the book is indeed about "the destiny of a particular individual" and my reading

A short version of this chapter has been published. Comparative Literature: East & West. Chengdu: Sichuan UP. 12 (2010): 89-103. -109- coincides with Jameson's proposition of the anagogical interpretation

(Jameson 30-31).

For people who have finished middle school and college education in mainland China, Chinese history, especially the revolutionary history in the twentieth century, is a formalized and fixed framework of narratives. Owing to the publication and widespread distribution of the "red literary classics,"22 such as Ding Ling's The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1952), Zhou

Libo's The Hurricane (1956), Zhao Shuli's Three Mile Bay (1958) and Liu

Qing's The Builders (1966), historical events such as the land reform campaign in the late 1940s, the subsequent cooperative transformation of agriculture, as well as the extreme years of the Great Leap Forward, have been resolved and settled.

Based on these narratives, the revolutionary actions and political movements launched by the Chinese Communist Party were forcibly supported by the ordinary grass-roots masses, especially the poor peasants, and carried through enthusiastically; and therefore, these movements are historically progressive and their revolutionary significance is justified and beyond any doubt.

This kind of framework of narratives, that is, the master narratives, has influenced several generations in China, including those comparatively advanced intellectual elites like the well-known contemporary writer, Chen

Zhongshi, the author of White Deer Plain (1993), the winner of the 1998 Mao

22"£L&ii$i,"a term used to describe the literary works produced akin to the Chinese Communist Party policy about the political struggles or movements launched by the Party particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. -110- Dun Literary Reward. Chen had never doubted the credibility of the above- mentioned narratives, particularly Liu Qing's The Builders and Zhao Shuli's

Three Mile Bay, until one evening in the spring of 1982 when he was transferred to assist and supervise the implementation of the policy: to divide land into each household. A full explanation of his question and psychological transformation will be provided in the following paragraphs.

In The Ninth Widow, all these established concepts and ideas have been suspended and request further examination. Labeled as a work of the new historicism (cf. Chen Sihe and Zhou Shuitao), the novel dates back to the

1940s China and depicts in detail the life changes of a woman from her teens to her fifties. The following section explores the image of the protagonist, a young woman both complimented and censured, the historical perspective embodied by the figure, as well as the politics of the author's writing.

3.1 "The alternating legs"—The history in the eyes of a woman

In the eyes of Putao (MM, which literally means "grape"), the female protagonist of the novel, history, especially the period of Chinese history from the anti-Japanese war (1937-45) to the establishment of the People's

Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, is "the alternating legs" outside of their closed gate.

In the 1940s, as a harum-scarum teenager, she often got down on her knees, peeping through the crack of their closed gate. "^h^rlitPMT (The outside are all legs23)" (16; 17). This is what she usually reported to her

23 All translations of the novel quoted in this thesis are mine except where I indicated. -Ill- father-in-law. She had no idea of the difference between the Kuomintang army, the Japanese troops, the local forces, the civil corps, and the

Communist army. The only distinction she observed was the color of their puttees, sometimes in grey and sometimes in yellow; in her heart of hearts, however, all these legs were the same and they were merely brief visitors to the town.

Putao's point of view may sound strange to readers of the present time, but during the many years of war times in China, when "a batch of soldiers fight off the other batch, and several days later, another batch fight back and become the occupier of the place (—^Affi^— SAffS&T, MWA, X—

^.AtIMM> J$7 r^W,W-)," the civilians, especially the grass-level masses in the countryside, did know little about the political situation of the country (17).

It is quite plausible, therefore, that in the eyes of Putao, the history of the town is a series of farces of "hit and run." She was not intelligent enough to tell the justice of the war, and her simple standard of judging the various troops was whether the soldiers were neatly dressed and whether they sponged from or looted the local residents.

As a matter of fact, Putao is not the only one who thinks in this manner.

Upon the public denunciation of the landlords, an old townsman, named Shi

San-ye (jfeH^), expressed his deep concern:

I am old and I have seen a lot. Isn't it a fact that you come and I go, I go and you come again? Nobody takes root in this town.

-112- ffifMliM^Mo (46-7)

Years later, after she lived through the anti-Japanese war and the three years' civil war, as well as the various campaigns following the establishment of the PRC, Putao concludes, "Nobody [i.e. the outsiders of the town] stays here for long (iH^tt^-fc)" (218). Her testimony is abundant:

In the past, No. 14 troop24 came, stationed, and left. The Eighth Route Army25 came and left. The Land Reform Work Team came and stayed for a year, and finally left. ... In the end, what remains is still this village, this group of people, doing the same things: farming, going to the fairs, and strolling around the street. &*+0¥*7, STF7, i5*X^7c A»*7, «7o ±m\&7~<7, JM'hfe. %7, STfM^&^f, & *SA. &«^#: #jft, &m, m^» (219)

To put it simply, Putao firmly believes that the non-local-accent speakers, the forces from the outside world, would not remain for long, and the history of the town is a series of farces of fighting against each other. As she said to comfort Lao Pu (^th), the out-of-luck writer who was sent down to labor in the village,

It happens a lot. They get different persons to accuse and denounce. The one on the stage may become an audience while the one among the audience may be taken to the

24 The designation of the Kuomintang army, who came to the town to accept the surrender of the Japanese troops. 25 The designation of the armed forces led by the Chinese Communist Party during the anti- Japanese war, which was combined with other military units to form the PLA at the beginning of the civil war (from 1946 to 1949). -113- stage. ... Several days later, you might become an audience. You can also put up your fists and shout whatever slogans. Mf4Ao a-PNM^A44» £±W»J£T, STitt&PJ £±o a-p$, #^T^IIJ^T*7. mmm^m^k, #^ n£q^§-P$Pft (234-35)

The stage was the same; the difference was the central figure, which changed from time to time.

Based exactly on this logic, Putao developed, by instinct, a kind of practical strategy or philosophy of life during the years of turbulence, which is to hide whenever disaster comes. She even imparted her experience to the younger generation during the 1980s, "Go and hide. Though there is a saying that the monk can be hidden, but not the temple, the fact is we do not have a temple (IPBo ij^i£f# jm M^7)£, RjoS^W/S)" (301). The living witness that proves the success of her philosophy is her father-in-law.

Her father-in-law, Sun Huaiqing (#W#), a rich and influential landlord operating a family workshop, was publicly denounced upon the entrance of the PLA work team as a despotic landlord-cum-puppet-leader of the town during the Kuomintang Regime. At the end of the Land Reform Movement, he was shot, but stayed alive by sheer luck, among the hundreds of "reactionary" elements.

Risking her neck, Putao sneaked the dying body from the execution ground under cover of darkness and later hid him in a sweet-potato cellar.

The hiding lasted until the late 1970s when the Central Committee of the

-114- Chinese Communist Party began to admit and try to put right their left-leaning errors committed during the Land Reform Movement.

Noticeably, Putao's simple view of history is reminiscent of Master

Zhu's (?fc5fc^fe) unique perspective of the fierce power struggles on the White

Deer Plain in Chen Zhongshi's fiction. After the abdication of the last emperor in 1912, the White Deer Plain witnessed a round of highly frequent regime changes and coups d'etat. First came a group of privates nicknamed by the villagers as "Crow Soldiers" (-S;?!^, soldiers in black and with the white puttees); later on the stage was the "snowstorm" (JAM'S) initiated by the

"Peasant Association" (^cfe)26 under the leadership of the local Communist

Party branch; immediately following that was the "Home-returning Legions"

(*E# @3).27 The "Crow Soldiers" intimidated the peasants to hand in extra grain levies; the "Peasant Association" not only forced open the ancestral hall, smashed the stone plate, on which "£#]" (xiangyue, rules and regulations valid for all the inhabitants of a township) had been engraved, but also denounced publicly the local landlords and squires; and imaginably, when the

"Home-returning Legions" came, they launched a vigorous counterblow, arresting the leaders of the "Peasant Association."

Seeing the continued contests between different political forces,

Master Zhu sighed, "The White Deer Plain has been changed into a griddle

26 "Peasant Association" refers to the power organization led by the Chinese Communist Party during the Democratic Revolution in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. 27 "Home-returning Legions" refers to the armed bands formed of landlords and local tyrants who fled from the Liberated Areas to the Kuomintang areas during the People's War of Liberation in the 1930s and 1940s. -115- (SjfiiJ^ST^^clIT1!©)," to insinuate the harsh reality that the lasting power struggle among the forces of the Communist, Nationalist and the local non- regular bandits was putting the mass civilians in a very awkward situation

(254). Like pancakes fried on the griddle, the common people did not know when their bad luck would come and what would happen the next day. To survive, they had to listen to whoever was in office and hand in tax grains apportioned to them under various names.

The alternating legs in Putao's village are tantamount to the changing hands holding the "griddle" of the White Deer Plain. As a matter of fact, in the former half of the twentieth century, the whole China was a "griddle," on which one tragedy after another was enacted. All the initiators believed that they were justified and that they were fighting for the benefits and interests of the people. Rarely did they realize that they were actually sinners committing crimes against their fellow villagers or townsmen.

Similar to Master Zhu's analogy of the griddle, which had been attacked by several critics (cf. Chen Yong), Putao's view of history, or to a certain extent, the author's historical perspective, has led to the critique of

"historical nihilism" reflected in the novel. Zhu Shuitao points out that the history in Putao's eyes is repeated and cycled, as is against the social theory that history has its own route and its own motivation (82). He further asserts that all works labeled as new historical writings in China, including The Ninth

Widow, display a kind of bias against, or absence of, the "right" perspective of historical development.

-116- Obviously, for this critic, the "right" perspective of historical development is the Marxist-Leninist teaching dominant in mainland China, that the masses are the promoting forces of history, and that the radical behavior or, to put it in a different way, the fierce class struggle between the peasants and the landlords during the Land Reform Movement is understandable and should not be censured. For this critic, the series of revolution and political events in the past has promoted the social development of China, and their progressive significance should not be denied or underestimated.

Literary works are products of the authors' reflection about a period of time or a particular event. In many cases, especially under the high-handed political persecution, however, literary productions will be more often than not influenced by the dominating ideology of the times. This is exactly true of literary production in the Communist Chinese government.

Chairman Mao, who governed from 1949 to 1976, proposed in the early 1940s that literature and arts should serve the workers, peasants, soldiers and urban petty bourgeoisie, and this teaching evolved later into the political dogma, "Literature and arts should serve the politics" (811-3; Zhou

Yang 526). For this reason, the central themes of literary works produced at that time are almost all in compliance with the guiding lines and policies of the

Party. After the end of these political movements, many works that had been highly praised before were dumped out of the forum of literary study, and even the authors themselves regret their works following the wind. In this

-117- regard, the contemporary writer Hao Ran, as well as his works, can be taken as a typical example.

Widely known for his Sunny Days (1972) and The Golden Road (1972) in mainland China, Hao Ran (1932-2008) was the only author who published novels during the Cultural Revolution. His work, Sunny Days, was praised by

Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao, and he was assigned in several times to write according to her wishes. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, however, his works, as well as himself, were attacked fiercely. Bai Ye, a critic of contemporary Chinese literature, concludes that Hao Ran, as a landmark of the Cultural Revolution, is a tragedy, who could have become more excellent if not for the Cultural Revolution (Chen Xu sec.3). Obviously, his tragedy results in his ideological tendency displayed in his works, which is closely attached to the extreme politics of those absurd times.

The appearance of the new historical writings in China since the

middle of the 1980s is exactly a proof indicating that writers, or to be exact, conscientious intellectuals, began to reflect seriously on the past events and the master narratives about them. They try to return to what actually occurred

in the history and reveal the inside story under the cover of historical masks.

Chen Zhongshi's writing of White Deer Plain is precisely such an example in this regard.

As Wu Geng, a contemporary Chinese critic, points out, White Deer

Plain was published at a time when Chinese society was changing rapidly from a planned economy to a market economy; confused and puzzled, many

-118- intellectuals were pondering over the direction and the future of the socialist country (155). As a matter of fact, Chen Zhongshi's perplexity came much earlier than that. He recollected in his "Note" that one day in the early spring of 1982, late at night, when he was riding back after his work in a village, he thought of the image of Liu Qing, the author he worshiped, as well as his novel, The Builders, which he had read for innumerable times; he started, almost falling off his bicycle. He writes:

An enormous question mark lay across my mind. What I am doing at the villages along the Wei River, from the early morning to the late night, is exactly opposite to what Liu Qing had taken up thirty years ago at Chang'an Village, at the foot of Zhongnan Mount. In the early 1950s, Liu Qing moved with his whole family from Beijing to Shaanxi, and settled down at Chang'an Village, participating personally, as a vice chairman of the county, in the cooperative transformation of agriculture. ... Thirty years later, in 1982, at the sides of the Wei River, fifty kilometers away from Chang'an, I am dividing the land formerly belonging to the Production Brigade into households, according to the quality of the soil and the number of people in a household. ... The moment I saw the villagers digging the old dividing dam and planting the new boundary stone, a word occurred to me, which I did not say out loud, that the system of collective ownership in the village, which had been established and consolidated for almost thirty years, has been disintegrated completely.

mmmm-^n^^ ±i±±*e£+^m wn&mjMtMR&m

-119- xmM&^ifikm*)], ifiH+^j5^ 1982 ^#A> a

po &&m&n-^tf7fri&MRGmffimMm-M, ^

$|J, tUtMfo (91)

Certainly, Chen Zhongshi is not the sole one showing this concern. In his novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Off (2006), Mo Yan expressed a similar perplexity, a doubt, or in other words, a hidden condemnation. Viewed in this sense, the novels labeled as new Chinese historical writings are definitely not fictions without correct historical perspectives; quite on the contrary, their appearance represents a voice questioning the official ideology and a kind of revision of the former master narratives about the history of

China.

About the alternating legs, Putao is right but not without some

reservation. It is true that none of the outsiders stays for long, but what remains is never the same village. To some extent, these alternating legs constituted intruding forces for the self-contented world of the civil society.

Their comparatively orderly life had been violently and rudely interrupted. For

Putao, for instance, without the intervention of the land-reform work team, her father-in-law would not be publicly denounced and executed and, therefore, she might have had a totally different life route. As the townsmen pondered,

-120- People in Shitun could have a better life without the coming of people from the outside. Once this army or that troop comes, the peaceful life will come to an end. ... The non-locals seemed to come specially to sow discord: they incited them to feuding with Sun Huaiqing; instigated them to distribute the property and livestock of the rich; encouraged young girls and boys to say no to the parents-arranged engagement; forced them to make a clean break with the Crippled Tiger and finally drive him to the death in the manure pit. ... ^^A'R^^mMmAWin^m, Hi*TM¥fr4^+^ M, £ft&£t7. S^hiifcAM^nM: «JM]#i

7o (248-9)

When Comrade Pu, the writer who was transferred to work in the village during the Movement of "Four Clean-ups" (IZ3M), joked about whether

Putao would like him to live in her house, she retorted, "When you come, have you ever asked us whether we welcome you or not? (ifoH^, Injit^citt

JXM^JfcM7a%'? )" (219) This sounds like a joke, but truly reflects Putao's complicated mentality towards the reality around her, reluctant but having no alternatives. The guests were not invited, but Putao had no right to refuse.

Who would pay attention to the reaction of an ordinary village woman at that time?

During the extreme famine around 1960, the villagers even missed the grand wedding banquet held by Sun's family for Putao and their third son.

They could not help thinking, "If only Er-da [local dialect for the second uncle, -121- here refering to Sun Huaiqing] is alive. He knows how to get food (~ A Jc^^f

RJ#?7 > ^JbW&i^nfefft)" (174). When someone reminded his companion that Sun was a "despotic landlord," the villagers stared blankly at each other and asked, "What on earth does 'despotic' mean? (mj&'Mm'^^^ )"

(174)

Ironically but understandably, the villagers do not understand the meaning of "S§H (eba)," but they have sent Sun Huaiqing, the protecting power and their backing during the peaceful time, to the guillotine for this title.

In the name of revolution, some of them put up their hands to avenge personal wrongs, while many of them just follow suit to avoid drawing fire against themselves. As for the victim of the mass movement, nobody is responsible.

It is exactly in this sense that we argue that the alternating legs are not only the epitome of the village history in the eyes of the woman, but also a symbol of the invasion of outside forces into a self-contained civil society.

Before the Communist Party controlled the villages, as many scholars have observed, peasant views of their world were mainly based on local norms, which came from their experiences of everyday life (Madsen 4-6; qtd. in Su

Yang 127). Such customary morality emphasized intravillage harmony, encouraging villagers to become strongly committed to traditional norms and roles that were successful in maintaining the steady state of the village in the past. Compared to traditional morality, communist morality is derived mainly from abstract theoretical doctrines which hold that "one's moral obligations -122- toward another are defined by general norms equally applicable to all persons of a particular category-specifically, a class category" (Su Yang 127).

Precisely based on the logic of class struggle, the PLA work team initiated the masses to denounce Sun Huaiqing; precisely based on the logic that class status decides relationships amongst people, the PLA work team persuaded Putao not to address Er-da as "Dad"; and based on the logic that the political stand should be steadfast, the officials prevented the villagers from speaking with the sent-down Crippled Tiger. As a result, the harmonious order of the village, which had been based mainly on the Confucius tradition—to be benevolent and upright, was destroyed violently, and hatred rose, though it might be hidden temporarily, among villagers who used to be close and cordial.

The degree of this willful destruction is beyond calculation. As Master

Xu (^Tfe^fe) questioned in White Deer Plain, "Is it possible to restore human beings' morality? (A'L^$L%HWW^kAr)- )" when Bai Jiaxuan (filfff), the clan elder, tried to renovate the stone plate, on which " # *£]" had been engraved (219). Undoubtedly, Master Xu is reasonable. Human morality, like a mirror, once broken, can never be stitched and restored to the way it was before. Chen Zhongshi raised this question, and Yan Geling seems to have put forward the same question, too, to express her concern. To some extent, the alienated characters, which will be analyzed in the next section, are one of the many consequences of intruding forces in terms of spirits. Master Xu is absolutely correct. To smash a kind of order, or a tradition, can be finished in -123- a minute, but to restore the broken order, particularly, to restore humanity, is

never easy. The following section compares Putao, the innocent, with

Shaoyong ({i>M, literally means "young and brave") and Hupo (SKIS, literally

means "amber"), representatives of those who have been changed, and alienated.

3.2 The innocent vs. the alienated prisoner of the revolutionary ideology

Putao came to the town as a seven-year-old orphan, along with other

refugees losing their homes because of the Yellow River flood, and was adopted later as a child-bride (future daughter-in-law) by Er-da, i.e., Sun

Huaiqing, the gentry of the town. For Putao, "there is nothing under the

heaven that is worthy of a fuss (AT&if A A^7 fft^)" (2). She is not totally

illiterate, but has no idea about the politics or the revolutionary ideology of the times. When she heard the news that '&$$, (Luocheng, the central city near the town) had been occupied, she focused only on the sound of the word "tfe

Wi," a formal word, meaning "to be occupied by the enemy," which, for her, was a word from a faraway, big place. As for the consequences of the occupation or who was occupying, she paid no attention to.

Completely different from Putao, Cai Hupo, one of the eight "heroic widows (Hi'§3S#3)" who, at the knife-point of the Japanese soldiers, was so

brave as to take an Eighth Route Army soldier for her husband at the cost of

her genuine husband's life, is politically advanced in every way. Upon the victory of the Chinese Communist Army, she was assigned to be the leader of the village. In the eyes of Hupo, Putao has no political consciousness at all. -124- When people criticized her for claiming her husband, instead of the Eighth

Route Army men, in front of the Japanese soldiers, she countered immediately with this question, "Tie-nao is my husband. If I did not claim him, who shall I claim?! (^fi^SBA, WfM&WiW ! )" (43) In her simple mind, to comply with the Japanese soldiers' order and to claim her husband is perfectly justified and not surprising at all. She could not understand the action of the eight "heroic widows," and even feels some sympathy for them; as she knows, they suffered for it.

To view the event from the present time, there is nothing wrong with saving one's husband, instead of somebody else that one does not know well.

The problem is that, under the agitation of the revolutionary ideologies, the heroic actions of the village women had been glorified and all villagers were educated to follow suit. Nobody doubted whether these heroic actions were out of their revolutionary ideal and their enlightened political consciousness.

The individual consideration and the genuine cause leading to their actions were unimportant according to the revolutionary ideology of the times.

Take the case of Hupo, for example. Her first born, a boy, was killed in an accident when she was drawing water from the well. The handgrip of the well pulley hit her belly and the pre-mature boy was miscarried. Her second child was a girl, and thus her torment began. Her parents-in-law ordered her to pull the stone grinder while the donkey grazed idle in the field. It is not difficult to imagine how her hatred grew against them and her determination to take revenge.

-125- Thanks to her background of being a beggar at the beginning, the PLA work team finalized Putao's class status as the lowest, "people," instead of

"the enemy of the people." To their great disappointment, however, Putao fails to act in conformity with their good intention. Assuming her as a second

"Xi'er,"28 the work team inspired and urged her to expose and denounce her father-in-law's offences towards her, but she was totally muddled and failed to straighten out whom they were talking about (42-3). They spared no effort to enlighten her political awareness, aiming to "change the backward proletariat into a revolutionary pioneer (}E&^J0fMmtg^^5fettA:i)" (44), but she was stumped by the meaning of "%'M (political consciousness)" and other literary expressions such as " §ij M (exploitation)" and " B£ ill

(oppression)" (45). She showed no understanding of the times, and refused to launch a public denunciation against her father-in-law.

This is exactly where Putao is different from the other persons in the town. Those who once benefited from her father-in-law began to stand against him since they understood well the philosophy of playing safe. They would rather conceal their conscience letting him down than taking a risk to absolve him from the accusation; whereas Putao, as obstinate as a mule, could not think of the wrongs she received in Sun's family and refused to act against her natural conscience.

In this respect, the educated Shaoyong, the second son of Sun's family, who joined the underground Communist Party when he was a college

28 The female protagonist of the musical drama, The White-Haired Girl (1945), who was subjected to the persecution of a landlord and was emancipated upon the coming of the Communist Army. -126- student, is more "sensible" than Putao. He called the name of his father straightforwardly, which is against the Chinese taboo that descendants should avoid mentioning the names of their forefathers, in order to show his estrangement from his father. To demonstrate his revolutionary determination to break completely with his landlord family, he lifted up, on his own initiative, the stone slabs topping the backyard of his ancestral estate, aiming to find the silver dollars hidden by his father. To strive for further political progress, he wrote to appeal to the local government to execute his father as soon as possible (55).

At this moment, he forgot how his father furnished him with a golden

Parker pen upon his graduation from medical college (206). He merely pondered over the fact that the existence of his father had become a blemish hindering him from further political promotion. He was no longer the same

Shaoyong, who decided to study medicine because of the dying boy in his neighborhood. He used to be such a kind boy that he gave the money he saved from his boarding expenses to a relative when this relative complained of being hard up (295). A former kind-hearted young man, Shaoyong degenerated into a co-murderer of his own father, something that can only be attributed to the dominant ideological education of the times. As Putao reflects:

He authorized the villagers to divide the estate and the land of his father, voluntarily handed over his father's silver dollar for distribution, and finally appealed the government to execute his father. As it turned out, to distribute the silver dollars is not

-127- simply distributing; it is named "progress". To kill his father is not simply killing, either; it is named "progress". Look at him! He has "progressed" to such a person beyond her recognition. ^n4Ate«^a^ mfrft, X£ft##rii*nu;A3Mh MB MAffi«^l§7o m^ftAftWAAW, ^i»< £#-& w«, m&iPo mm%, a^^7^*^iA#^A7o (76-7)

Comparatively speaking, Putao is a green egg, and she is a person with a one-track mind. If she is good to someone, she will be good to him forever (55). She showed no understanding of the times, and did not change even under the strong brainwashing education about the class awareness and class struggle. It is exactly because of this attribute that Putao, without a second thought, sneaked the half-dead body of her father-in-law and hid him for about two decades. Putao knew how much effort Er-da had spent to accumulate his wealth, and she was reluctant to submit the money to the PLA work team. After being told that handing over the fortune might exempt her father-in-law from being executed, however, she took the initiatives to hand over the silver dollars Er-da had saved during his life. In her mind, "The dollar is silver, while the human body is made of meat. The life of a human being, unlike the silver dollar which can be redeemed after losing, cannot return if it islost(S&A#^flW, A^M, jfafelEWiB1, *7ftfi##o tt^4

7, «ft#*0*7)"(55).

Putao knows some Chinese characters, but she has great difficulty understanding those genteel words, such as "class, political consciousness,

-128- class stand, collective" (50; 59). She has no concept of political awareness and consequently, yet fortunately, she is exempt from the crazy and inhumane behaviors resulting from those concepts. She insisted to call Er-da

"Dad" though the woman team leader warned her again and again that Er-da was "a reactionary element," "the enemy of the people." She responded,

No matter how the social class is stressed, I have to have a dad anyway. No matter he is good or bad, dad is dad. Without this dad, I have nothing in this world.

»-M7o (50)

During the campaign of the "Great Leap Forward," the young pioneers took down the extra large iron wok Putao used to prepare the pig feed and sneaked off with it. To prevent the wok from being thrown into the simply-built steel-making furnace, she jumped into the wok and sat inside it, letting it spin

like a top. She could not understand the significance of the nation-wide steel making movement and the villagers' extreme enthusiasm for it, but she firmly

believed that without the wok, the piglets that she was in charge of would die from hunger. For the twenty or so piglets, she was fully resolved to fight it out,

regardless of the consequence of being condemned for "destroying the 'Great

Leap Forward' movement" (158).

Famous for her achievement at raising piglets, Putao was chosen to be a model worker, but she refused to attend the commendation meeting in the provincial capital. Her reason is simple:

-129- How could I know what you will do here? Today you want to smash the wok to make steel; tomorrow you grab my piglets to take photos. Once I leave, who knows whether you will kill them and sell them for money?

>t;L, &-M, Mw&Ffc-&in&&, mm? ci63>

When people from other counties came to learn from her experience, she told them directly that her experience could not be learnt, as she believed, "they do not treat people as people. How could they treat pigs as pigs? (JMltPT^

W&A, f££r$?#tt^? )" (170) Seeing her too busy, the leader of the district suggested her to find a helper; she replied,

Who works hard? All are movement-lovers. How dare I ask them to come here for a movement? The pigs know nothing about movements. Once there is a movement, they will suffer, and die of hunger.

it^ffiSA? fKtfis^! aajLnr»^M]*issjj0 M^ H«is^, -S^J, t\m%M7, #StH7= (171)

On many occasions, Putao is said to have been unchanged for decades, as is true in some sense. What is unchanged is her humanity. The more she has experienced the world, the more she believes in her own instinct: Don't trouble troubles until trouble troubles you; whatever troubles that can be avoided are not real troubles at all (^^|$A> AISV, tbl^iii tf}9$\A7M^f&W-) (109). As Shi Chunxi (i#$), the general secretary of the commune, realized, "Putao is indeed a very rare person, who lives truly to herself (H^fttM^ifffft, ««f#A)" (170).

-130- 3.3 The simple woman and the light of humanity

Yan Geling asserts in her lecture that her standard of rights and wrongs has been blurred ("American Dream" 47). This may sound strange at first hearing, but taking account of her more than ten years' residence in the

US, it is perfectly plausible. The invisible framework of the concepts that had been enforced and she had accepted was doubted and challenged, and she began to step out of the limit set by her times and experiences in China. The creative-writing education she received at Columbia College must have contributed to her change. When she first heard the legend-like true story about an executed man being hidden in the cellar for storing sweet potatoes for thirty years, she was deeply touched, but did not think of putting the story into her work. During the twenty years after that, however, the story popped out again and again, and she began to believe that the story must have some unknown relationship with her.

Preoccupied with the question of how human values are destroyed by various concepts and ideologies, she began her exploration of the female protagonist. Putao is the final achievement of her commitment of literature "to rescue and promote the destroyed primordial and benign humanity" (Zhou

Yupei 92). She is a green egg who has no political consciousness, no concept of the various terms popping out during the series of political campaigns.

-131- She does not know the meaning of "JT^fjE (da laohu)" (as a matter of fact, few villagers understand the term, but they just follow suit), and therefore she is the only person in the town who speaks with the man suffering for it. She sympathizes with his fate as a crippled man who has to carry water on his shoulder, and helps him draw water from the well. Lao Hu, the crippled, the down-and-out (his original name, Chen Jinyu PJ^3L, has been forgotten), as a normal man, thinks, "It seems to be true that Putao is unsophisticated. The sophisticated should treat me with disdain (#fe BJ^TIW

^JLT^MAff ? fflAttftfJMil^ik&il)" (101). He even wonders why there is such a person without any political awareness. Actually, this is exactly the finest quality of Putao, who is never snobbish. She treats people as they are and never hit a person when he is down. Lao Pu, the out-of-luck writer, chose to go to Shitun when he was attacked since he believed that he would not be hurt beside Putao.

In the book, Putao has affairs with several men, including Shaoyong and the two brothers, Dongxi and Chunxi, who were promoted as high as the communist party secretary of the commune. She is happy about the relationship, and she has a clear separation between her heart and her body.

Even when she was forced to have intercourse with the rascal, who discovered accidentally the secret of her father-in-law and threatened to make it public, she did not feel so disgusted as to hate and be eager to take

A colloquial term for the action during the movement against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy within the Party, government, army and mass organizations from 1951 to 1952. -132- revenge later. Though with a little reluctance, she felt sympathy to the 50- year-old bachelor and did not torture herself with traditional feudal teaching. If she were equipped with the concept of "chastity and virginity," definitely she would not feel easy in this situation.

Putao feels at home whenever she is. She does not trouble herself, nor people around her. The critic, Chen Sihe, highly praises Putao for her universal love and all-embracing generosity, saying that she is the legendary image of the Goddess of the earth who has transcended the shackles of humanity (307-8).

In my opinion, however, Putao is not such a lofty image, and I would not like to glorify her as a Goddess. She fails to accept concepts and ideologies, and therefore she has no necessity to go beyond them. She is only a half-illiterate, simple-minded village woman. She is not contaminated by dominant ideologies, and therefore avoids the extremely malicious behaviors of other human beings during that particular time.

Though the author emphasizes that she is not interested in political issues and has no ambition to achieve anything in this area ("Dialogue" 5), she is establishing her own historical narratives through the image of her protagonist and the historical perspectives embodied in this figure. The author admits that she would like her female characters to be like a Buddhist, with an infinite compassionate and merciful mind for the people around them (Cao par.1). Putao does show some characteristics of a Buddhist. Her love is universal, even for the sent-down country female youth, who was raped and

-133- pregnant. She gave her some dried persimmon, knowing that she was in need of some food at the last stage of pregnancy. She tried to comfort Cai

Hupo, the former secretary of the town, when Hupo was removed from office and publicly denounced, though Hupo never looked up upon her and always took her as a typical example of people "lagging behind." At that moment,

Putao forgot all the words Hupo once used to criticize her.

3.4 Tenet of writing—the politics of the unpolitical

Yan Geling, the author, mentions in several lectures that her legend­ like story is based on a file in the local archives she heard in the late 1970s.

She said,

I was touched deeply when I heard it, but I had never thought of writing a novel out of it. Twenty years later, however, the story still popped out again and again in my imagination, especially after I went to study in the United States. I pondered over it, believing that I must have some unknown relationship with the story. ("Dialogue" 4)

She went to the province (Henan, a densely-populated area in the middle of

China) where the story happened and even paid a visit to the cellar used to hide the person. "We experienced several decades of serious shortage in the supply, and what we are rich in are stories, various legend-like stories," she wrote (2nd cover). The problem is how to make the legend true to the readers.

In response to the accusation that she is reversing the verdict about the Land Reform Movement, she said that, as a woman, "I am not interested in the Chinese politics and history, which are not my primary concerns. I am

-134- aesthetic, and the history only provides me a background. I am not intending to pass any value judgment about the rights and wrongs of the past"

("Dialogue" 5).

There is nothing wrong with her highlighting her pursuit of universal humanity, but in order to view it from the tenet, or politics of an author's writing, there must be something beyond that claim. Herbert Read describes at the beginning of his article "the politics of the unpolitical" as "the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; ... of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests" (1), but concludes affirmatively, "to be unpolitical does not mean to be without politics: every attitude that is more than egoistic is to that extent social, and a social attitude is a political attitude" (11).

Obviously, the author may pretend to be apolitical, but she must have her own politics even beyond her own recognition. In the novel, a woman without even the slightest sense of political consciousness is highlighted, and this, to some extent, may indicate the author's norms of writing. Compared to

Putao, all the other figures who were actively involved in various political movements have changed or pondered over their past experiences. Putao is the only one who never changes, as is unbelievable but possible, at least, as a literary figure.30

30 Putao's historical perspective results from her innocence, i.e., her mentality that has not been influenced by the dominant official ideology, which urges her to rescue her father-in-law at the critical moment and differentiates her from other characters like Hupo and Shaoyong. What supports her and guides her behaviors is simple humanity. In the end, all the people changed, -135- Furthermore, without the invasion of the alternating legs, the civil society of the village would change, but definitely would not change as radically and violently as during the revolution. The revolution ideology has hurt and even destroyed completely the ethics of folk life, which could never be reversed otherwise. If people can live well only when they are not influenced or dominated by certain ideologies, these ideologies must be something questionable and should be censored.

Noticeably, the author creates a world of dwarfs, a sub-civil society that is usually forgotten by normal-sized people. Thanks to their being ignored, they are able to stand by and keep their integrity. Appearing at the upper reaches of the river every summer, worshipping the temple built for the god of dwarfs, they have the opportunity to witness the slaughter and persecution taking place in the world of normal people.

Significantly, however, it is exactly the group of dwarfs, the handicapped in the eyes of normal-sized people, who take on the role of the redeemer, clearing up the mess. The second year after the execution of her father-in-law, Putao gave birth to a boy. Knowing that Shaoyong, the young father of her son, cannot stand the existence of his father, Putao can only harden her heart, cutting off her connection with Shaoyong and leaving her two-month-old illegitimate son to the dwarfs coming to worship the temple.

Without the hiding of her father-in-law at home, Putao should have had a happy marriage and her son a happy family. except Putao. This indicates that humanity, instead of the ideology of class struggle, wins, as illustrates from another angle that ideology of class struggle, as well as other correlating revolutionary discourses should be censured. -136- Similarly, it is Putao, the village woman in great need of enlightenment and education in the eyes of the PLA work team and town cadres, who commits herself to save the innocent. In this sense, the dwarfs and Putao are the same. They seem to be physically or mentally handicapped, but actually take on the role of a savior.

To conclude, though preoccupied with a commitment to rescue and promote the destroyed primordial and benign humanity, the author spares no effort in highlighting the political unconsciousness of the female protagonist and her happiness beyond the control of various concepts. The politics of the author's writing must have gone beyond that, and therefore, her claim of being apolitical might be a kind of revealing of truth, but more possibly a kind of self-protection, or negotiation.

-137- Chapter 4: A Trauma Forever: Reading Yan Geling's "Celestial Bath"

This is Beijing at four-o-eight, An ocean of hands tumbling; This is Beijing at four-o-eight, A long, sharp whistle

The tall buildings of the station Tremble all of a sudden; Shocked, I look out of the window, Wondering what is going on.

A spasm of pain shoots through my heart, it must be Mama piercing it with her button-sewing needle and thread. At this moment, my heart turns into a kite; The other end of the cord is in Mama's hand.

The cord is so taut it is about to break; I have to thrust my body out of the window. Then, only then do I realize What is going on.

—The roaring tide of farewells Is pushing the station off the ground; Underneath my feet, Beijing Is moving slowly.

Once again I wave at Beijing, I want to grab her collar And shout out loud; "Remember me forever, Mama Beijing!"

At last, I have grasped something. Who cares whose hand it is—I won't let it go! For this is my Beijing, This is my last Beijing.

—Shizhi, "This is Beijing at Four-o-

eight," written on Dec 20, 196831

For the Chinese version of this poem, please refer to the NOTE at the end of this chapter. -138- Set in the grasslands of the Tibetan pastoral area in the mid-1970s, during the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, when many young people born in the cities, who had been sent to the countryside during the nationwide campaign of "educated youth going up to the mountain and down to the countryside," started to make their way back to the cities, the story "Celestial

Bath" by Yan Geling depicts the short tragic life of Wen Xiu (nicknamed Xiu

Xiu), a teenage girl who was labeled as a rusticated youth, from withering to the final fall.

Based on this story, Joan Chen, a Chinese actress widely known for her performance in the film The Last Emperor and the popular TV series Twin

Peaks, directed and produced her maiden work, Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, in 1998. Though it has been officially banned in mainland China for political and sexual content, the film has won many prizes, including Special Jury

Award at the 1999 Paris Film Festival, Best Dramatic Feature at the 1998 Fort

Lauderdale Film Festival, seven Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, and a nomination for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998.

Deeply touched by the suffering and misfortune of the teenage girl during the chaotic years, I chose the story as my focus of this chapter. It goes without saying that the tragedy of Wen Xiu was caused directly by the absurd policy of the government, but what aggravated her conditions and led to her death at the end was human beings around her. In the following section, I will analyze, from the perspective of change in setting, the degeneration of the originally innocent young protagonist. In the meantime, the manhood, desire

-139- and humanity entangled in the image of the male character Lao Jin will also be explored in depth.

My analysis is based mainly on Yan Geling's literary version, but I also discuss several scenes from the film to support my argument. When quoting from the literary version, the page number would be provided in the parenthesis; whereas, if I draw an example from the film, I would indicate particularly as "... in the film."

As a master of the short story, Yan Geling is very economical, saying what needs to be said and paying less attention to details that might be superfluous. Except for words such as "educated youth" and "return to

Chengdu," few details typical of the times are present in the story. For

Chinese readers, this way of writing may not constitute an obstacle, but for non-Chinese readers without historical knowledge about China, this omission may block their understanding.

As a visual medium of arts, the film has given a full consideration to this point. Considering the need of various audiences, the film employs some signs and scenes typical of the times to illustrate the story's background. For instance, the tweeter on the top of the tree, the revolutionary songs and the color of red and green are all particulars of the time of the Cultural Revolution.

Moreover, in the literary version of the story, the author writes directly from the life of the female protagonist on the grassland, with only two or three places involving her life at home; whereas the film starts from the days before her departure. To some extent, the film has filled in the gap left by the original

-140- story, making Wen Xiu's story rich and complete. For this reason, some

details from the film have been quoted in the analysis, particularly those on

the eve of her departure. Hopefully, the explanation in the front can stop any

doubt about the credibility of the details.

4.1 "To the Countryside! To the Frontier!"—Political and Ideological

Pitfall

Fig. 4.1 The educated youth go to the countryside, receiving re-education from the poor peasants. (A description as well as a call from the government.)

Source: Web. Mar 2010. http://51.xzhufu.com/pic/4633.html.

In the latter half of the twentieth century in China, a campaign of

"educated youth going up to the mountain and down to the countryside" (£niR

W^-hUjTi^S^J) was implemented nationwide, which involved millions of

urban youths and their immediate families, about 10% of the urban population at that time.

-141- Starting in the 1950s, in order to solve the problem of employment and decrease the pressure of urbanization, some youth from urban areas were organized to move to rural areas, especially the remote frontier provinces, to establish farms. On December 3, 1953, the People's Daily published an editorial article, "Organize Higher Primary School Graduates to Participate in

Agricultural Production," to affirm and promote the model of organizing urban educated youth by the State to labor in the rural area. In December 1955,

Mao Zedong, the Chairman, asserted that "the countryside is a vast world where much can be accomplished (J&ttJi—^nslfft^ifc, &fflMLfk.nfVXA

Wfr^fft)," which became the slogan for the later "Down to the Countryside"

Movement.

On December 22, 1968, when the Red Guards movement was carried on like a raging fire, the People's Daily published another editorial article, quoting directly Mao's highest order, "It is very necessary for the educated youths to go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower- middle peasants (fcqiRW^SI&fcr*, gS^T^&frtMW, ?BWi&H)"

(emphasis added).

From then on, the countrywide movement followed. Millions of urban youth, consisting mainly of secondary school graduates, were mobilized and sent "up to the mountains and down to the villages." Until the end of the policy in the year of 1979, approximately 18,000,000 urban youths were sent down to the various corners of the countryside and remote frontier areas.

-142- Impressed by the pictures of success and victory and filled with pride and enthusiasm, most young people departed for their destination without full realization that hardships beyond their imagination were waiting for them in the countryside. After the excitingly deafening ceremony of gongs and drums seeing them off and welcoming them in, the first and most important thing they needed to face was to feed themselves, which was not always easy even for the locals. In order to survive, some female youths married local peasants, and remained for the rest of their lives in the rural area. By the time they were allowed to return to their city homes, their dreams and passions had been completely worn down. What was worse, even back in the cities, they discovered that their social status had declined and they were not welcomed as they had expected, either at home or in the job market, due to various practical reasons. They became alienated in the city where they were born and where they grew up.

Undoubtedly, some "educated youths," aiming to change the backward conditions of the rural area, volunteered to go to the countryside with lofty sentiments and heroic aspiration, but it is undeniable that many of them were sent down because they had no choice. As a former rusticated youth writes in an article, "though nobody stood behind you with a gun and you yourself voluntarily signed up, withdrew your city household register and jumped on the truck delivering students to the countryside, it is a fact that you have no choice, which nobody dared to admit openly" (Tang sec. 1; my translation).

-143- In many cases, the young people simply followed suit and did not have a clear motivation for going to the countryside, like Wen Xiu in Yan Geling's story. When being asked about the reasons for going down in the film, she answered, "Everyone was signing up, so I signed up too. I heard it is like being in the army. Even skirts will be distributed." Probably the promise of a skirt or the image of being in it was more tempting for a teenage girl in the times of extreme shortage of supplies than the far and unrealistic illusion of changing the backward appearance of the countryside.

Unfortunately, to be sent down was not as good as joining the army. In the army, each soldier would be numbered and established in army units, whereas in the countryside, the rusticated youths were like sheep in the vast grassland. They were removed from the city household register and then abandoned by the city, while in the countryside they were considered and treated as contemporary outsiders, rather than permanent settlers. In addition, when admission to the army was inaccessible to ordinary people while the green army uniforms were popular objects of nationwide worship, the only pleasures left for grass-roots boys and girls to indulge were longing for a life in the army and possessing a set of green army uniforms.

As a matter of fact, many rusticated youths, especially those who were sent down after the "supreme instruction" in December 1968, used to be Red

Guards who participated in the Cultural Revolution at school and acted as daring pioneers in activities such as "Breaking the Four Olds ($£0 IB)."

According to the record, Mao reviewed the Red Guards gathering in Beijing

-144- for eleven times in 1968 before he decided to launch the nationwide

campaign of "Down to the countryside."

As it turned out, the Red Guards were like chess pieces in a board

game. Being addressed as "revolutionary generals," the Red Guards rose up

at the beck and call of Chairman Mao, but lost their favor when they became

a challenge and a potential threat that were out of control. Hence, to send

down the educated youth was, to a great extent, a strategy to transfer the

troublemakers to a less dangerous place and to cage a fierce tiger in the wild.

Though the official view holds that it was simply a continuation of the

collectivization program started in the early 1950s, and that it had nothing to

do with Cultural Revolution policies, the rustication campaign was understood

as a government measure to silence the radical voices (Vittinghoff 287). Lin

Biao was said to have formulated this view when he called the resettlement

camps "a Gulag for reeducation in disguise," but this expression was later

ascribed to Deng Xiaoping (Vittinghoff 287).

In his highly influential essay, "Ideology and Ideological State

Apparatuses," Louis Althusser raised the concept of Ideological State

Apparatus (ISAs), in contrast to the Repressive State Apparatus, to designate

a series of institutions functioning invisibly "by ideology." He asserts that

individuals are always already subjects of ideologies, and that ideologies

interpellate concrete individuals as concrete subjects (172-3). As a result, "the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by themselves', i.e. by

ideology" (181).

-145- Though Althusser, as a Marxist theorist, is aiming at analyzing how capitalist societies reproduce the conditions of production, his thoughts are applicable to socialist countries as well. Ever since its establishment in the

1920s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never stopped its campaign of propaganda, in other words, ideological inculcation. After the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the propaganda machine of the CCP became further intensified. Consequently, the whole country was towed into the extremist revolutionary trend, and people became either revolutionists or enemies of the people, especially during the three decades from 1949 to

1979, with the Cultural Revolution as its climax.

As Althusser points out, institutions such as the school, the army, and the family, play an important role in the "reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology" (132). In the situation of mainland China, different levels of

Party committees also perform the task of ideological education. As far as the campaign of "Down to the countryside" was concerned, the school, residents' committee, and the Party committees of the working units of parents formed an ally in persuading middle school graduates, including some who had not yet graduated, to leave their homes in the city.

Just imagine, when the following broadcasts buzzed around one's ears day and night, particularly during the times when politics commanded everything:

mwm, «MH! m&mmrmim

-146- The great leader Chairman Mao taught us: to develop sports to strengthen our physique; and to stay on our toes and safeguard our country. Now we started on our exercises ...32

^Amnmm, jEttmmm, M^MA. A&wmxm, #

The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis it is yours. You young people, full of vigour and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. (Mao 165; qtd. in Jiang Yarong, "epigraph")

"m\mr%%mm7, Amm±ik0 mnm7-^mA,

A, mmiA, mmm^m&AAI

We communist party members are like seeds, and people are the soil. After we arrive at a place, we should unite with the local people, blooming among the people. Go to the countryside! Go to the frontier! Go to wherever we are needed!33

How many young people could turn a deaf ear to these words and remain indifferent in such a situation? One could not help identifying with the interpellation of "young people." A common response may have been: "Yes, I am one of the young people referred in Chairman Mao's talks, and I should respond to the call to go to the countryside, to go to the frontiers!"

Particularly, when the ceremony of gongs and drums seeing off the rusticated youths took place nearby and repeatedly, one could not help but 32 Quoted from Joan Chen's film, Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl. 33 Quoted from Joan Chen's film, Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl. -147- identify oneself with the young faces in the center, like heroes with paper flowers tied in front of their chests. "Yes, I can be one of them! Why not?" one might say, especially when negative knowledge about life in the countryside was not available to ordinary people at the grass-roots level.

Most importantly, there was no choice. Universities were closed; factories were not open to new employees; even supplies, which were based on the manning quota, were not enough. One could not help but chew over the words of Chairman Mao, "We too have two hands. We should not idle about in the city!" (22 Dec. 1968, People's Daily) "Yes, we can do something to feed ourselves. Taking a risk might be a way out." Young people were most likely to dream. Then one day, one might discuss one's concerns with a classmate in the same situation, and they would excitedly, though apprehensively, enter their names. The day came when they were presented with a red paper flower, under the watchful admiring eyes of everyone, and departed for your destination.

Hence, the process of being interpellated, accepting the recognition, and taking actions, was finished perfectly. The fact was that few people, including those who volunteered and those who were coerced, realized the

"Unique, Absolute Subject" behind the manipulation of the process. When

Mao was mythologized and considered as the Saint who delivered the

Chinese people from the abyss of suffering, nobody would doubt the purpose of Mao. Everyone believed that the Great Leader was leading them to walk to another victory; as the song goes, "The East is red, and the sun rises. A Mao

-148- Zedong comes out, who is our savior and seeks for our interests (%A%L> A mft, *m&7-^%&&, ifoAjA&imm, %&AR&}A%.M.V

As it turned out, the Great Leader is a human being, who may commit unforgivable mistakes. Only quite late did people realize that they had been cheated, and that a whole generation was lost in the muddle of the countryside. They idled in the vast world squandering their youth and energy.

When universities were reopened, only a small number of lucky ones jumped successfully out of the agricultural dam, returning to the city victoriously, while a large number of rusticated youths could only take to low-paying jobs, competing with the generation ten or more years younger than themselves.

Wang Anyi, a Shanghai-based writer of the generation of the rusticated youths, was very insistent in going to the countryside in spite of the great efforts of her mother, a well-known writer, to stop her. When reviewing her past in an interview, she said, "At that time, we elementary school students were very enthusiastic about the Cultural Revolution. We wanted to do something, but we were not allowed. I particularly admired those older ones who could participate in the Red Guard Movement and go to other cities to join the 'Mass Exchange of Revolutionary Experiences' ('A$Dc')" (Leung

180). In her adolescent mind, if she could not go, she would have no future.

Beyond her imagination, however, she regretted it deeply the first day she arrived and began to doubt how she could transform the countryside.

Today, after more than three decades have passed, the former rusticated youths who have stood out among their fellows still gather

-149- occasionally to recall their rural past, and some of them even revisit the place where they once labored. While many writers owed a great deal to their rural experience in the Rustication Movement, Wang Anyi negated it totally by saying that if that was the way to become a writer, she would rather not be one (Leung 177).

Naturally, even if all subjects are interpellated, there is still some room for variation in the effect of the interpellation. Like the male classmate of Wen

Xiu in the film, a very small number of graduates tried every means to stay in the city. They usually had access to more detailed information, positive and negative, which was unobtainable for ordinary people, like the parents of Wen

Xiu.

Michel Foucault argues that all forms of knowledge are historically relative and contingent, and cannot be dissociated from the workings of power (Downing vii). As far as the generation of Wen Xiu is concerned, the small number of subjects who were not subject to the interpellation of the dominant ideology may be considered as a footnote of Foucault's argument that knowledge can never be separated from the operation of power. It is a pity that most people cannot resist the manipulation of the times, even when they are aware of this.

4.2 From Chengdu (the City) to Kangxi Steppe (the Countryside): the

Degeneration of the Sent-down

Shizhi's poem, "This is Beijing at Four-o-eight," was widely read among the rusticated youths in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which

-150- depicted vividly the grand and moving scene of tens of thousands of urban youths waving farewell to their parents. The long and sharp whistle of the moving train, like a needle, pricked through the softest part of their heart. The trembling earth under the tall buildings of the station coincided with their falling heart. In the spasm of pain and desperation, they tried to grasp something that they themselves did not know. Subconsciously, they might have realized that from that moment on, they would be floating helplessly and aimlessly, like a kite without a string. How did they wish that they could be the kite with the end of the cord still held firmly in their mothers' hands!

For many of them, Beijing was indeed their "last Beijing." Once left, they would never again be able to set foot there. Though they considered

Beijing, the place where they were born and grew up, as dear as their mother, and called in despair but with deep feeling, "Remember me forever, Mama

Beijing!" the city would not show any mercy, and it would not belong to them any longer. As someone said, nostalgia is "merely the exiled individual's one­ sided wish" (Ha Jin, "Homeland" 72). Beijing might haunt them in their dreams and they longed to return one day, but for Beijing as a city, they would be forgotten and considered as a loss. Compared to a city, an individual is too trivial.

Moreover, as a group, they left on a grand and spectacular scale, but later, when time came, the returnees were usually alone, like a solitary wild goose. Some of them died on their way back and missed the opportunity to return to their city forever. The female protagonist of Yan Geling's story, Wen

-151- Xiu, is exactly one such example. In her case, the city is Chengdu, instead of

Beijing, but the piercing pain of leaving one's hometown and the desperation for a return should be the same. She is merely the embodiment of many other male and female urban youths longing to return but losing their lives on their way back.

The following section examines the degeneration of Wen Xiu from an innocent teenage girl to a shameless prostitute from the perspective of the change of location. To illustrate more clearly the tragedy caused by her violent dislocation, some details of her life at home have been quoted from the film.

Wen Xiu, as her name suggests, is an ordinary but pretty urban girl born in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province. At home, Wen Xiu was the apple of her parents' eyes. They tried their best to prepare for her departure. Her father, an unknown tailor, is neither rich nor noble, but he is good at sewing elegant clothes for his wife and daughters. Before her departing, her father worked on the treadle of the sewing machine all through the night in order to stitch for her an extra sweater. Her mother not only prepared for her the tissues enough for six months, considering that the toilet papers were very coarse in the countryside, exhorted her to dry her sanitary belts after using, but also gave her a complete rubdown when she bathed the night before her leaving. In order to buy her some extra tissues, her mother exchanged sugar coupons with their neighbor. This meant that the family would not be able to buy any sugar for the remaining months at a time when

-152- almost all household necessities were supplied on the basis of the number of people in a family and had to be purchased with corresponding coupons.

Even her younger sister tried to lend a hand by taking water for her bath. Once she was away, however, all these cares and concerns were gone.

The red seal stamped on her hand, like a pool of blood, seemed to have announced her destiny of being removed from her cozy home and the urban environment she had been familiar with, marking the impassable boundary between the comparatively favorable conditions in the city and the hardships of the countryside. From then on, the title of rusticated youth would become her permanent identity.

The question is: did the rustication indeed work for the dislocated youths? Or in other words, had the urban youths been changed during the process of rustication? About this point, I would like to draw an analogy with the work of Yang Jiang.

Based on the experiences of people around her, Yang Jiang, the wife of the late scholar and writer Qian Zhongshu (^#43), wrote a novel entitled

Baptism ( «#fe$i» ), describing how intellectuals faced the first wave of ideological reform after the establishment of the PRC, the "Three Anti

Campaign" ("HIx.") of 1951. Those intellectuals, who came of age and were educated before 1949, were expected to examine themselves in depth, make

"self-criticisms," confess their faults, and become reformed, or remade, characters.

-153- As its title indicates, the "bath," by removing the masks they used to cover up their "self-deceptions, ambitions, complacencies, resentments, and dreams," was supposed to "wash off the filth of the old Regime so they could be reborn," but in the end, it washed away very little (Amory x-xi). Through this novel, the author was actually asking the question: were they really changed, or not? Obviously, she doubted the effect of the mass campaign.

Employing the metaphor of "tail," Yang Jiang analyzed the complicated nature of the issue of reform. She writes,

If the tails grew only out of education or ideology, then it should be possible to wash them off. But if they grew on people's bodies, they were joined to the spine and the skin. Even with the harshest chemicals, can you really wash off a tail? Of course, if you are going to wash in public you have to take your clothes off in public, but the tail will not necessarily be visible to everyone. No one will know whose tail got washed or cut off, or even who had one in the first place" (xiv).

Based on this logic, whether one has a tail, and whether one can get rid of the tail, are all myths. No one can say for sure whether oneself or others have succeeded in cutting off the tail.

Though the characters of Baptism and Wen Xiu live in different times, they share something in common. According to the supreme instruction or the original intention of the initiator of the movement of "Down to the countryside," the rusticated youth were expected to be re-educated, which suggested that they should have eaten and lived like the local people. As it turned out,

-154- however, these young people, unlike the phoenix experiencing a baptism by fire, failed to degenerate into a newly-born.

After being sent down, Wen Xiu did not pick up the habits of the local herdsman, but still kept her habit of taking baths regularly, which seemed to have been integrated into her blood, as Lao Jin bantered, "You Chengdu girls just cannot get along without bathing" (70). As a matter of fact, her bath had been simplified as a brief application of a sprinkling of water to the lower part of her body.

A symbol of civilized life in the city, Wen Xiu's bath becomes the focus of the female writer, which is not only related to her feeling of being clean and being cleaned, physically and spiritually, but also witnesses to the complicated affections of Lao Jin held towards her. It is exactly the rare opportunity of a complete bath created by Lao Jin on the steppe, where the sanitary condition was the least priority, and the final bath of Wen Xiu in the snow water after her death that constitute the climax of the story and, therefore, the origin of its title.

The phenomenon itself seems to be suggesting the failure of the mass movement of rustication. As a symbol of civilized life, to bathe is not something against humanity, but in the 1970s, this behavior was certainly a sign of refusing to integrate with the local people and the person involved could be criticized as having bourgeois sympathies and would become a target of public denunciation. According to this logic, Wen Xiu was fortunate to some extent since she was not reported and criticized for her way of living.

-155- Following Lao Jin, Wen Xiu came to the herding site, finding only one yurt-like, round military tent, which meant that she would have to share it with

Lao Jin. No matter what exactly the reason is, whether the shortage of material supply or consideration of safety, it is very common for Tibetans, men and women, to live in the same tent, even today after conditions in the

Tibetan pastoral area have been greatly improved. Perhaps, in the extremely adverse climate conditions and natural circumstances, where survival is the most important goal, people have little consideration of issues such as privacy and chastity. For Wen Xiu, a young girl of Han nationality of sixteen or seventeen years old, however, it was unimaginable, either for the consideration of convenience or the concern about her reputation, but she had no way out.

The first night in the tent, after Lao Jin went to bed, Wen Xiu hesitated and cautiously began her routine work:

... [Sjhe'd ladled out a basin of water and put it at the foot of her straw bedroll and blew out the lamp. Just as she had stripped off her panties, she heard the rustling sound of Lao Jin's straw bedroll stirring. As she had squatted, straddling the basin of water, carefully dipping the towel in the water so as not to make a sound, Lao Jin had become deathly quiet. She felt as if Lao Jin's ear hairs were standing on end. "Bathing?" Lao Jin had finally said in an intimate tone. She had paid no attention to him but splashed temperamentally with her hands, making the water sound like a flock of ducks landing on a pond.

-156- Lao Jin had then taken the initiative to break the embarrassing silence, saying, "Heh, heh! You Chengdu girls just can't get along without bathing." It was from that time that her hatred for Lao Jin had begun.... (70)

These paragraphs describe in great detail how a young sensitive girl racked her brains but failed to protect her privacy, which, in her young mind, was as important as her life, and how a bashful and angel-like teenage girl began to hold a childish hatred out of her misgivings of privacy.

From her action of blowing out the lamp and trying not to make a sound, it is easy to see that as a young girl, Wen Xiu was shy and reluctant to expose herself in front of a strange man, but as a city-born, she could not get rid of her habit of bathing before going to bed. She wanted to achieve the goals of cleaning and keeping her privacy at the same time. At this moment, her privacy and secrecy were her top priority. Lao Jin's interruption, like a needle pricking on a thin cover, had brought her little secret all out into the open, which hurt her feelings deeply. That was why Lao Jin's effort to break the embarrassing silence provoked only her hatred towards him. She was not used to the intimate tone of an adult man. Quite on the contrary, Lao Jin's

"intimate tone" for her was a kind of intruding upon her strong pride and self- respect. Her way of silent rebellion was going ahead straightforwardly, pretending to ignore completely his presence by making noises with the water.

In her mind, a voice must be reverberating, "You shameless old man! Want to listen? Just let you go!"

-157- At this moment, though physically she could not avoid exposing herself, at the back of her mind, she was trying her best to protect her privacy. On the second day, she hung up a curtain between her bed and Lao Jin's bed. The great circumspection she displayed on the first night and her extreme (but understandable) reaction to Lao Jin's good-natured words create a sharp contrast with her behavior at the later time after she was transformed into a whore open to all kinds of men except Lao Jin.

Six months passed in her day-by-day counting, and nobody from the

Livestock Bureau appeared in front of the shabby tent, as she was promised: to study for half a year and to lead a platoon of female educated youth in herding horses. With a gauze scarf and nicely combed hair, she began her waiting outside of the tent. She waited and waited until one day someone arrived—a peddler with an ox cart selling daily necessities to scattered herding camps, whose appearance marked the turning point of Wen Xiu's destination, the real beginning of her nightmare as a rusticated youth.

Staying among the boundless grassland, which was far away from the headquarters of the Livestock Bureau, the power center, Wen Xiu, who had been abandoned, did not know what was going on outside her tent. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, all rusticated youth who had clout at home were struggling to return to the city. This was the news brought to her by the demon disguised as a peddler, who had seen through the mentality of the young girl in front of him. Knowing that she must want to return, he hinted that he could establish a "good connection" for her to the Livestock Bureau. As a

-158- young girl of sixteen or seventeen years old, she failed to see through the temptation of the peddler, and fell into the net woven by him.

After the man left, she started a new round of expectation, but what she got was not the good news from the Livestock Bureau, but male visitors of various backgrounds. All of them assured her that they had connections in the Livestock Bureau, and that they could help her return to the city, until one day she was pregnant and was taken to the clinic.

Every time after an affair, she would give herself a bath, using the water Lao Jin brought with two military canteens from the little brook ten kilometers away, but did not have any concern of embarrassment or shamefulness any more. She had changed from an innocent young girl to an experienced prostitute, though without awareness of that title she was leading to. Perhaps, in her mind, to bathe was a way to restore her original cleanliness, like her response of touching herself after being touched by other men.

A perfect show of her shamelessness was displayed when she was driven by her frequenter, an important figure in the Livestock Bureau, about which Lao Jin told from the shoes he wore, to confront with Lao Jin.

"What are you, a yak? Don't you understand people-talk?!" Wen Xiu huffed as she squatted down on the ground in front of him, the bottom of the overcoat parting, revealing both that which may be exposed and that which many not be. It was as if in front of livestock there was nothing to be ashamed of, as if human modesty were superfluous. (79)

-159- Wen Xiu's image in this scene constitutes a sharp contrast with her cautious behavior at the first night. Up to this moment, she had degenerated completely from an angel-like young girl to an ugly shameless prostitute. As someone unknown says, the tragedy is to destroy something beautiful and show it to people (Lu Xun 38). Like the female protagonist in Lao She's

Crescent Moon, who had to engage in prostitution for the sole reason of survival, perhaps only when she stared at the crescent moon in the blue firmament, could she think of her parents in the far and sigh at her miserable life.

The withering of Wen Xiu, like a flower, shook the mind of her readers, inviting them to think about the reasons leading to her fall. It is certainly hard to ignore the responsibility of the mass rustication movement, but the sinister hearts of people were more abominable. The various Johns taking advantage of the innocent were obvious; even the women doctors and nurses showed little sympathy towards her situation. They openly mentioned her as "worn-out shoes" ($£$£, po xie, a figure of speech for loose woman), "the one who conceived without knowing who the father was" (82). In their eyes, Wen Xiu was obviously a degenerate woman, deserving their belittlement and sarcasm.

Nobody in the story seemed to have asked the following question: who had caused the trouble of Wen Xiu, the blossoming young girl?

Even in the ward, Wen Xiu was offended by an intruder nicknamed

"Zhang Three-toes," who slipped into her ward without paying attention to Lao

Jin who was waiting outside of the door. Ignoring the big fuss initiated by Lao

-160- Jin, the female nurses had a loud discussion among themselves, after dispersing the crowd:

"It wouldn't matter to her if it were a stud donkey!" "The bleeding just stopped and already she's luring guys into her bed." (82)

Obviously, they had ascribed all faults to Wen Xiu, the innocent girl. This phenomenon was naturally related to the Chinese tradition of thousands of years: whenever an affair was brought to light, the female involved would become the target of censure from different quarters. Everybody behaved like an apologist, blaming the female being involved, whereas few people accused the man who caused the trouble. This tradition could be traced back to the period of Spring and Autumn (770 - 476 BC), when the young lady in the poem "A Simple Fellow" ( <(tK» ) warned people of her own gender,

Ah, turtle-dove, 7-mm^, Do not eat the mulberries! Ah, girls, Do not take your pleasure with men! A man can take pleasure 7^-k^, And get away with it, But a girl Will never get away with it.

^Rfijrltilo (Yang 32)

-161- In the 1970s, even 1980s and early 1990s, the pregnancy of an unmarried girl amounted to a disaster. To be dismissed from the working unit or to be publicly denounced were all possible, not to mention the verbal belittlement behind her back. The worse was that Wen Xiu, as a rusticated youth, was by herself. She had no parents, siblings or relatives fighting on her behalf, except

Lao Jin, the castrated man in the story.

The dramatic change of Wen Xiu could also be viewed through the eyes of Lao Jin. It is hard to say for sure why Lao Jin chose Wen Xiu from hundreds of Educated Youth. From the mouth of the cadre in the Livestock

Bureau, there were several Educated Youth girls who had learned how to herd horses with Lao Jin. As readers, we cannot help wondering where they were and why and how they managed to leave the herding site. Taking into account the information revealed by the peddler, it might be concluded that some of them, namely, the predecessors of Wen Xiu, might have left thanks to their powerful parents in the city or their "good connections" with the personages in the Livestock Bureau.

The reasons that Wen Xiu was chosen are also mysterious. It might be

Lao Jin who named her as the one he wanted; or Wen Xiu might be among the several candidates who had no special backgrounds and nobody requested for a special treatment on their behalf. Therefore, Wen Xiu could be dispatched with a promise, which turned out to be a lip service. Or perhaps,

Lao Jin, an experienced herdsman, had some influence in the Livestock

-162- Bureau and leaders dared not refuse him, or would rather send him away by satisfying his humble wish to have a female in his tent.

In any case, Wen Xiu came, and Lao Jin treated her well. In the eyes of Lao Jin, Wen Xiu was still a child. He could put up with her offending words, or perhaps he was even entertained by her petty and childish behavior. He always seemed like an elder brother or even a father. Wen Xiu, following other people, just called him "Lao Jin (literally, Old Jin)," without showing any respect for a person who was much older than her, but Lao Jin never showed any signs of unhappiness. Quite the contrary, he tried his best to satisfy Wen

Xiu's daily need.

When Wen Xiu complained of itchiness, Lao Jin built an open bathtub on the summit of the slope in order to see her happy face. When Wen Xiu wanted to look at her image in the broken mirror, Lao Jin could even raise and lower it according to her unspoken wish. When Wen Xiu asked for water after her being violated, Lao Jin could ride twenty kilometers in order to take water. In his eyes, Wen Xiu was like a newly born lamb needing his care and protection. This metaphor indicates the weak position of Wen Xiu as well as the destination of her being sacrificed from the beginning to the end.

When Wen Xiu went out of the tent to pour the dirty water, Lao Jin stared at her back. In his eyes, however, the way Wen Xiu walked "was no longer very becoming" (76). When Wen Xiu squatted in front of him without any sign of shame, Lao Jin stopped his supply of water. This was a silent revolt against her degeneracy. Though she was still innocent, the fact that

-163- she was selling, trading her body for a permit to return to the city, was ugly in the eyes of the honest and upright herdsman.

In the Chinese pronunciation, "AW (tian yu, celestrial bath) and "A

WC' (tian yu, natural desire) are the same. However, the bath under the vault of heaven is beautiful, while desires out of normal relationships are vicious.

Without the interruption of men's desire, Wen Xiu might have enjoyed more pleasure from her baths under the heavens. As the Chinese saying goes, people will be depreciated after leaving their hometown (AS^l). The rusticated youth, as the abandoned, doomed to live like orphans without the warm care and concerns of their parents.

If Wen Xiu was indeed degenerated, she would not mind the vicious words from the women nurses. If she did obtain pleasure or other benefits from her sleeping with those men, she might not be worthy of any sympathy.

The fact was: she did not object to her frequenters' offences against her just because she wanted to go home, without any awareness that she would be cheated and that they were taking advantage of her. As she told Lao Jin,

"These people coming to me are important people, you know." "How important?" Lao Jin had asked. "Extremely important. They all have the power to approve documents. To go back to Chengdu, without some important people to approve some documents and stamp their seals on them, there is no way out." (77)

-164- In order to return home, Wen Xiu had paid her young life. She thought she was paving her way back to Chengdu, and she even began to justify her selling of herself. "Think of it, a girl with no money and no connections, isn't this the only asset she's got left" (78). The tragedy, that was not uncommon for females during the mass rustication movement, deserves our reflection.

Who on earth should be blamed for their degeneracy? And who should shoulder the responsibility for their fall?

4.3 "Repressive Hypothesis"—Narrative of Desire during the Cultural

Revolution

In what is probably his best-known book, the first volume of The

History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge, Foucault puts forward the

"repressive hypothesis" in Victorian Britain. According to Foucault, the repressive attitudes towards sex—"taboo, non-existence and silence"— provides only a partial picture (5). In opposition to the commonly held belief that the Victorian age was characterized by a taboo on speaking about sex, that is, by prohibition or the psychoanalytic concept of repression, Foucault demonstrates that "never before had social subjects so comprehensively been exhorted to produce confessional discourse about their sexual behaviors" (Downing 88). The problem is the phenomenon has been emphasized in history, while the significance of those discourses has been ignored.

The same thing may be said about the period of the Cultural

Revolution in China. On the one hand, the subject of sex was completely

-165- forbidden in works of literature and the arts. As Lan Yang writes, in accordance with the leadership's political orientation, "themes such as love, romance, and family were repressed" (186). On the other hand, however, things related to sexual practice were often highlighted in people's daily life.

As Ha Jin describes in his short story, "In Broad Daylight," a village woman was ferreted out by the Red Guards and openly denounced because of her sexual conduct. During the process, the woman was asked to confess the details of her affairs, for example, with whom she had affairs and how many times she slept with each man. While this phenomenon may be explained by the theory of voyeurism, it may also be taken as a literary example of the non­ verbal discourse about sex in that specific period.

During the 1990s, with the publication of Wang Xiaobo's novel, The

Golden Age ( iM&friiV) ) (1991), and the distribution of Jiang Wen's film, In the Heat of the Sun ( ((ffiMi^frt B7» ) (1994), the taboo was removed and the silence was broken. Viewed from this aspect, "Celestial Bath" can also be analyzed from the perspective of the narrative of sex during this particular time. The following paragraph described how the boring herdsmen satisfied their desires:

The Livestock Bureau put on outdoor movies. When the movie was over, as soon as the generator was shut off, ten or more Intellectual Youth girls would yelp, "Bastard! Damn your ancestors!" they had all been felt up. At that moment several dozen flashlights would intersect their beams, their shafts of light piercing the night sky like spears planted helter-skelter. That was how the guys here got their jollies. (66) -166- In Joan Chen's film, a movie entitled Heroic Sons and Daughters ( i^MJl

;&» ) (1964) was on. The hero Wang Cheng was shouting, "Fire at me! For our country, fire at me!" and the heroic melody was reverberating in the night air. In the meantime, obscene behaviors were taking place under the cover of darkness. The juxtaposition of the heroic movie and the restless audience constitutes an ironic contrast. This phenomenon seems to suggest that the ideological education might stop at the superficial level and that it might function only for young people like Wen Xiu and her companions. In the times when entertainment was limited to several model plays, the movie provided only an opportunity for seeking excitement and stimulation. The coming of young students to the vast thinly populated grassland added some warm color for the local people, with singles as the majority. Therefore, the presentation of such obscene scenes was not only understandable, but also deserved our sympathy.

4.4 The Civilized vs. the Barbarian—Manhood, Desire, and Humanity

At the very beginning of the story, before she went to the herding site,

Wen Xiu had been told that there was no need for concern about Lao Jin: his thing had been lopped off long ago during a blood feud (65). This amounted to the announcement of Lao Jin's loss of manhood. In a society of phallic worship, in which the symbolic significance of the organ is more important than its physiological function, such a man would be removed from the category of normal human beings and banished as an outsider of the community. Even women look down upon them, like Wen Xiu in the story, and

-167- therefore, their existence as a human being, like a plague, would be avoided and ignored. Naturally, a man with such a defect may appear to be physically and spiritually weak, wretched and sensitive, with a strong sense of inferiority.

As far as Lao Jin was concerned, however, these characteristics mixed and tangled together, deserving further analysis.

Looked from the outside, Lao Jin was brave and agile, which was in complete opposition to the stereotype enforced upon him. As Wen Xiu observed,

If you didn't know his story, you couldn't tell that Lao Jin lacked anything that other men had. Especially when Lao Jin lassoed a horse. His whole body formed one unbroken arc with the rope, taut as a bowstring. Once the horse straightened its legs to run, Lao Jin had him. In these prairies there wasn't another man for hundreds of miles around who had such a deft and powerful hand.(68)

These masculine features embodied in Lao Jin seemed to be testifying and amending people's bias that castrated men must be weak and lacking virility.

When two passers-by, pretending to chat with Lao Jin, actually tried to approach Wen Xiu, who was taking a bath on the summit of the slope, from the bottom of the slope, Lao Jin dragged his rifle and shot at the horn of one of the yaks they were sitting on. When the man yelled, "Just you wait, Lao Jin, you son of a bitch!" Lao Jin yelled back, "Wait for what? For you to come and bite my balls? I ain't even got my tool no more!" "With both hands he slapped his crotch, whacking it powerfully, pounding a fair amount of dust out of his trousers" (72). As Wen Xiu felt, Lao Jin's fearlessness was genuine: without -168- that thing to determine his fate, no one could threaten his life. Paradoxically, it may look that the loss of manhood had actually resolved his various concerns and strengthened his fearlessness and masculine spirit.

At the back of his mind, however, Lao Jin was laden with sorrow and grief, and he was not as brave as he looked from the outside. He had a first- rate voice. Sometimes his song sounded like a horse whinnying, other times like a sheep laughing. In Wen Xiu's ears, Lao Jin was singing about his troubled heart and his inexpressible dreams.

For those frequenters of Wen Xiu, Lao Jin's presence was paid no attention. They slipped into the tent shared by him and Wen Xiu, but never greeted him. If not because of the inferiority complex hidden in his heart of hearts, how could Lao Jin, genuinely fearless, be tolerant and keep silent about the brutal obscenity taking place right before his very eyes? He must believe that he was not a parity with these men and particularly low in this regard.

For the same reason, it was imaginable and understandable why Lao

Jin "lifted up one of his bronze-tipped boots and stamped it down on Zhang

Three-Toe's remaining toes" when Zhang, like a proud hoodlum, addressed the crowd, "What are you doing? What is the fuss? If you want in, get in line!" and, pointing at Wen Xiu's door and then at Lao Jin, teasing, "Lao Jin's first in line, I'll vouch for that!" (81) Zhang Three-Toes might not realize that he had touched Lao Jin's sore spot, and consequently, his remaining toes were stamped. This suffering was what he asked for and what he deserved.

-169- In the eyes of Wen Xiu, Lao Jin, like an animal, with the smell of the horse scent, was a barbarian, without any sense of civilization. He never took baths, and did not possess any valuable items that were popular in 1970s

China, like a wristwatch or a fountain pen. The only valuable thing he had was a gold tooth, which was inherited from his mother.

It was exactly her belief that Lao Jin was a merely livestock that Wen

Xiu failed to show any respect for him as she showed to other men. Lao Jin had a four-syllable name, which Wen Xiu did not bother to remember. She just, following other people, called him "Lao Jin, Lao Jin" without any concern of respect for a man who was twenty or thirty more years older than her. A man with high self-esteem would not be happy if someone much younger called him directly by his name.

Taking for granted Lao Jin's tolerance or affection towards her, Wen

Xiu always loudly urged him to do this or that, and even said to him directly,

"What are you, a yak? Don't you understand people talk? " (79). For Wen Xiu,

Lao Jin could not understand what a civilized life looked like. Born in Chengdu, a big city, Wen Xiu believed that she was from a big place and had seen the world and experienced the life, while, compared to her, Lao Jin did not understand the rule of a civilized society. As she explained to him, "These people coming to see me are important people, you know" (77). When Lao Jin asked in retort, "How important?" She seemed to pour out her heart by saying,

"Extremely important. They all have the power to approve documents. To go

-170- back to Chengdu, without some important people to approve some documents and stamp their seals on them, there is no way out" (77)

She did not understand, however, that these rules, which she believed were critically important for a "civilized" society, were not the dividing line between the world of human beings and that of animals, but shackles enforced by human beings.

To Wen Xiu, Lao Jin was not a real man and not worthy of her respect, though this man had been protecting her from beginning to the end. That was one reason why she could stab directly to the heart of Lao Jin by throwing at him several words, coldly and sarcastically, "Not for you!" when Lao Jin charged her for selling (80). It is easy to imagine the situation how Lao Jin was choked and petrified. The destructive power of a fallen angel is ten times stronger than a demon.

Until that day, when Wen Xiu felt the tears falling on her face, did she suddenly realize that Lao Jin was not an animal, and that Lao Jin was the only one who cared and sympathized for her sufferings. Therefore, when she tried to follow suit but could not bear to shoot herself, she turned to Lao Jin and even pressed her mouth against his lips, like a real prostitute. She thought Lao Jin might, like her frequenters, enjoy her intimacy, but she did not know that Lao Jin took her as a saint, a fairy. What he longed for was not her cheap, bargain-like exchange, but her real respect and love.

In the story, there is one scene in which Lao Jin grasped the leather shoe with the fire tongs and dropped it into the fire. Shoes, as a product of

-171- civilization, mark the departure of human beings from the life of primitive man.

In addition, during times of extreme shortage of supply, their price and quality symbolize the social status of people wearing them. However, the shoe, which was rare and could be numbered in the headquarters of the Livestock

Bureau, had been thrown into the fire. This action may be taken as a kind of rejection or disdain of Lao Jin, the barbarian, towards the "civilized" life and people to which the shoe had been related.

Though he had been physically hurt, Lao Jin still had a normal man's desire for young women. This may be one reason why he would like females in his tent. Compared to those frequenters of Wen Xiu, however, Lao Jin's desire was limited to a kind of hazy feeling hidden deeply, like a romantic nocturne. Even language was unnecessary because its directness would cause embarrassment, destroying its obscure beauty. For instance, on the first night, when Wen Xiu squatted, "carefully dipping the towel in the water so as not to make a sound," Lao Jin had become deathly quiet, and she felt "as if

Lao Jin's ear hairs were standing on end" (70). For Wen Xiu, it was an awful experience, but for Lao Jin, the quiet listening to the sound of the water might be a kind of pleasure.

When Wen Xiu took the bath under the heavens, Lao Jin shifted his gaze along with the clouds moving from one end of the sky to the other, and naturally, or perhaps, deliberately, fell on the naked shoulder of Wen Xiu. At this moment, his heart, like the "moonlight stroked and ruffled on troubled

-172- waters," must have gone through a flurry of jitters, but it just stopped there, without further actions.

Lao Jin must have held a kind of affection towards Wen Xiu, but his affection was embodied in his tolerance and pampering. When Wen Xiu announced that it was her time to leave, Lao Jin "relaxed his grip, and the firewood came rolling out onto the ground"; when she prepared for her package, Lao Jin's eyes "followed her, his hands mechanically snapping off twigs" (73). All these scarcely perceptible movements indicate the vibration deep in his mind. He was reluctant to part with her, but he controlled his emotions, not even persuading her to stay since he believed that Wen Xiu, as a rusticated youth, different from him, would not take the grassland as her eternal destination, nor would she resign herself to herding horses for the rest of her life, though according to the spirit of the rustication movement, she was supposed to settle down.

After Wen Xiu was violated, Lao Jin looked at her. In his eyes, she was

"like a newborn lamb," with her head and face were soaked with sweat (75).

The image of the lamb would naturally remind people of the sacrificing of

Jesus on the Cross. In China, the lamb is also a type of sacrifice dedicated to gods, though the meaning is different from that in the Western tradition. In this sense, the image of the lamb is symbolic, foreshadowing the fate of Wen Xiu, as a prey of the vicious lechers and a victim of the mass movement of rustication.

-173- For Lao Jin, however, a newborn lamb was a delicate and lovable creature in need of great care. That was why when Wen Xiu asked for water, he "dashed out of the tent," "dragged over his riding horse," and "gave it a vicious kick" after he swung over its back (76). When Wen Xiu poured the two canteens of water into her metal basin, Lao Jin could not help stopping her by saying tenderly, "I brought it for you to drink" (76). Though in the back of his own mind, he could not accept her way of disposing the water, which he rode for twenty kilometers and drew from a brook, he did not have the heart to criticize her severely.

In the clinic, when Lao Jin noticed that Zhang Three-Toes slipped into

Wen Xiu's ward, he could not control his anger, kicking the door and roaring,

"Beast! Beast!" (81) This is another incident to which the title of this section alludes: who are on earth the beasts, without humanity? Lao Jin, the barbarian in the eyes of Wen Xiu as well as many "civilized" people around, or those intruders represented by the leader of the Livestock Bureau and the rogues like the peddler and Zhang Three-Toes? Comparatively, Lao Jin, the nearest, appeared to be much more noble-minded than those vicious men who were physically normal. He could have been mean or contemptible, though he was sexually disabled, but he never touched her or flirted with her.

On the contrary, he tried his best to protect her and satisfy her daily needs.

Foucault, as a revisionist historian, did not propose an entirely different version of historical truth, but his relativising correctives teach us that if we only look at the accepted and well-worn interpretations, we only appreciate a

-174- partial view of history (Downing vii-viii). As far as the character of Lao Jin is concerned, we have every reason to believe that the author and the director are intending to overthrow our opinions about men emasculated.

Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, who tried his best to protect poor

La Esmeralda but failed, Lao Jin tried but he realized that he was unable to provide Wen Xiu the life she longed for. Unwilling to look at her painful struggling in vain, he sent her on the way to an eternal relief—the heavenly road according to the Tibetan religion. Again, like Quasimodo, he fulfilled his desire after his fairy would not mind any more his incompleteness.

Probably the character of Lao Jin was set aside particularly by the author to protect the sent-down girl. As the only positive figure appearing in the story, Lao Jin is the embodiment of righteousness, justice and humanity.

Unfortunately, the incarnation of justice and humanity has been castrated. He is incomplete, he has no root, and hence he is not a man in a real sense. To read allegorically, this is exactly the queer phenomenon of an absurd period, in which justice and humanity are not upheld, have no status, and not a unity of name and essence. Without root, the justice would not go far and further.

Since the time in which Wen Xiu lived was an absurd one, nobody could lawfully and legitimately protect her and prevent her from committing sins, and therefore her mysteriously tragic end seems to be the last resort for the reconciliation of her returning and her complete innocence.

The final scene of the celestial bath might be the last justice that the author has given Wen Xiu with the help of Lao Jin, which not only provided

-175- her a complete perfect bath with the icy water, but also dressed her up with the white snowflake falling down from the heavens. With the silent white earth, the God seems to say, "Come, my dear, come. When nobody cares about you in this world, I still love you. In my arms, you would not be confronted with any dangers. I will clean you and dress you up as a purest bride. Come, and come with Lao Jin, who will never hurt you, but forgive you and tolerate you for ever!"

4.5 A Trauma Forever—A Counter Narrative of "No-regret Youth"

In the scenario, Yan Geling writes, through the inner monologue of the boy who once loved Wen Xiu secretly, "Wen Xiu's life is very short, but in my mind, in the story I wrote on her behalf, her life is very long, at least as long as mine" (187; my translation). For the generation afterwards, the death of

Wen Xiu, like many other young female lives disappearing during that havoc, is too trivial to remember. As Lao Jin envisaged, "In a little while, the snow would cover them both completely" (84). The disturbance caused by the event would fade quickly from the memory of people around. For Wen Xiu's parents and siblings, however, her death would be a trauma forever that could never be touched, nor cured.

Today, more than three and half decades have passed, but the topic of the rusticated youth/Red Guards remains a particularly sensitive one, and any publication related to the subject must be approved and reported to the Press and Publications Administration for concerns that "people will be mobilized" if

-176- the dark sides of the rustication movement are stressed and responsibility ascribed to the CCP (Du 3; qtd. in Sausmikat 262).

Due to the official ban on an open discussion of the Red Guards' role in the Cultural Revolution, a proper assessment of the massive rustication has been suspended as well. In spite of that, various groups in Chinese society have responded to the high interest in the subject of zhiqing

("educated youth") in the 1990s, and a dichotomized image of rusticated youth has been produced: on the one hand, the term "Red Guards" is used to

"stigmatize them as victimizers and hooligans, while the label laosanjie

(graduates of 1966, 1967, and 1968) portrays them as loyal and patriotic contributors to the country's modernization" (Sausmikat 261). Consequently, an artificial distinction was made between the role of the "educated youth" before 1968, when they were considered as "rustication heroes," and after

1968, when they became part of the exiled Red Guards.

Along with the publication of the Reports of the Stormy Times in

Beidahuang ( UtAlfifAA^)) ) (1990), reflections on the rustication movement become a national concern. Among many other things, the exhibition entitled "Souls Are Attached to the Black Land" ( ((^II±iD) ) on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the rustication movement attracted many visitors, and more exhibitions of similar themes were held in other big cities such as Guangzhou, Chengdu and Nanjing. The exhibition of

Chengdu was entitled "The Youth Have No Regrets" ( «W#^nf§» ), which

-177- gradually dominated the public media and became the slogan-like official discourse about the rusticated youth.

About the transformation of official description, a former rusticated youth responded as follows:

I know, human beings have developed, through evolution or by instinct, a kind of psychological mechanism, which would automatically conceal its traumatic experience, covering up the bleeding wound. In order to affirm and identify with oneself psychologically, one has a tendency to seek positive factors from a totally negative experience. This is certainly beneficial for one's survival in the long term. On the contrary, those who tend to get to the root of the matters are more likely to collapse and become insane. Human beings are more or less like Ah Q, who cannot face oneself honestly, nor is it necessary to do so. And therefore, the announcement of "No-regret Youth" has its significance of existence. If I could, I would rather accept the public proclamation. Lu Xun writes, "The real warrior has the courage to face directly the gloomy life, looking squarely at the bleeding wounds." I am not that courageous. What qualification do I have to talk freely about "facing directly" and "looking squarely" at the bleeding past? (Wu sec.2; my translation)

Yan Geling's "Celestial Bath" was written in 1994, when nostalgia mixed with

idealistic, loyal and heroic complexes were permeating through the streets

and lanes. It is hard to say for sure whether it is a coincidence, or something

done intentionally. Taking into account the fact that the individual traumatic

memory is easy to fade in the public horizons and historical discourse is likely to be distorted by official narratives, I would rather believe that Yan Geling

-178- was making a conscious effort to write against the unreliable memory and to write against the transformed and enforced historical ideology. When people are praising youth without regret, it is important to remember the disappearance of a young female life, unknown to the public, with a reputation far away from honor and glorification.

-179- The Chinese version of the poem is as follows:

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-180- Chapter 5: A Free Life OR A Journey of Odysseus?— Reading Ha

Jin's A Free Life

As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them you'll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you

Keep Ithaka always in your mind Arriving there is what you are destined for But do not hurry the journey at all Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey Without her you wouldn't have set out She has nothing left to give you now And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean —Constantine P Cavafy, "Ithaka"

-181- Partly based on his own immigrant experience, Ha Jin published in

2007 his novel, A Free Life, which, set in the United States, breaks completely the labyrinth that all of Ha Jin's works are set in China (As a matter of fact, War Trash has stepped with one foot out of the territory of

China). Similar to the life course of the author, the protagonist Nan Wu went abroad to study in the mid-1980s and decided to remain in the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4, 1989, in order to assure that his son would "stay out of the cycle of violence that had beset their native land for centuries" and "be spared the endless, gratuitous suffering to which the Chinese were as accustomed as if their whole existence depended on it" (Ha Jin, Free Life 9). Unfolds, therefore, the "free life" he has experienced in the United States, the country claimed to be the most democratic and freest in the world.

After finishing the book, however, a question popped up and lingered in my mind: Is Nan Wu's life in the United States really a free one, or is it more like a journey of Odysseus, full of adventures and discoveries, but not nevertheless different completely in nature and essence? In this chapter, I am going to analyze the novel from the following aspects: the insinuated writing about the June Fourth Event; the theme of the wandering Chinese and the complex of homecoming; and the myth or the weirdness of the "free life,"

For me, A Free Life is a systematic counter narrative, which focuses not only on the event itself, but also the victims getting involved directly and indirectly in it. The event results in a huge number of Chinese living in exile, for whom the issue of homeland is naturally a great concern. In China, overseas Chinese are usually addressed as "patriotic fellow-countrymen," which is very possibly a -182- 5.1 An Open Defense against the Master Narrative of the June Fourth

Massacre

More than two decades have passed since June 4, 1989, the day on which the tanks of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) rumbled over

Tiananmen Square in the small hours, as it was occupied by protesting students as well as innocent bystanders. No official assessment or resolution has been made to confirm the students' democratic movement that lasted for six weeks and had gained the popular sympathy and support of workers, intellectuals, government employees, and countless ordinary citizens, as well as the Chinese overseas communities all over the world; similarly, no public apology or condemnation against the brutal action of the PLA towards the protesting students and the ordinary people have been made. What remain in the memory of most ordinary Chinese mainland TV audiences are still images and media coverage of soldiers and military vehicles burned and destroyed by those who, according to the official broadcasts, were either grass-roots being unaware of the truth or thugs deliberately sabotaging.

Even with numerous eyewitness reports, photos, and even videotapes

(many of which are accessible through the internet outside of mainland

China), the Chinese Communist leadership completely denied the existence of any massacre. Instead, they "summarily rounded up dissenters and protesters and suppressed any reference to the event in the media, press, and print publications, effectively writing the Tiananmen Square Massacre of

myth. Only after he underwent a painful process of discarding his blind patriotism and nationalism, could Nan, the male protagonist, become an independent thinker, enjoying the absolute freedom. -183- 1989 out of any official and state-sanctioned history," and consequently, the

June Fourth tragedy has been successfully "transformed into an invisible

massacre, a phantom existing only in the memory of those who experienced or witnessed it" (Berry 300).

According to early government reports, not a single protester, soldier, or bystander was killed on the square during the military clear-out in the early

morning hours of June Fourth. In the meantime, official reports of military

losses were much more severe than such a tally would seem to indicate:

"Over 1280 vehicles were burned or damaged in the rebellion, including over

1000 military trucks, more than 60 armored cars, over 30 police cars, over

120 public buses and trolley buses, and over 70 motor vehicles of other kinds.

More than 6000 martial law officers and soldiers were injured and scores of

them killed" (Li 5; qtd. in Berry 301). For ordinary mainland Chinese TV

audiences, the student protests had led to the riots, and the PLA soldiers were "heroes" trying to restore peace and quell the disturbance.

Due to the complete official ban on publication and open discussion of

the democratic movement and the following crackdown, few documents about

them are accessible to ordinary Chinese in mainland China. Even the book

and video of The Elegy for the River ( «M$S» ) (1988), which was believed to

be the blasting fuse of the large-scale protests and sitting-ins, were banned

and its authors were forced to go into exile.

After June 4, 1989, as Su Xiaokang, one of the six authors of The

Elegy for the River, describes in his book, "all exits have been blocked by the

-184- Chinese Communist Party except one: to seek your fortune" (180; my translation). Responding to the call, "to focus on the economic development," the whole society has been dragged into the current of seeking economic success, which, in return, gradually deprives people of their political sensitivity and ethic awareness. Moreover, the series of reforms involving education, health care, and housing have forced people to switch their focus from politics, democracy and social justice to money-making, since without money, all these improvements would be out of the question.

In the meantime, the disillusion and extreme disappointment resulting from the large-scale savage massacre of these innocent unarmed students struck many elite intellectuals in China dumb and stupefied. Their enthusiasm and active social care diminished gradually, and they became demoralized, cynical and extremely pragmatic.

On the other hand, out of the instinct to protect and to avoid unexpected trouble, or the need to gather enough courage to live on, most people tried simply to forget the bloody scenes and traumatic experiences.

The collective silence and the purposeful prohibition enforced on behalf of the government led to the present collective indifference or ignorance about the once vigorous mass movements. As Andrew Langley writes:

The terrible events of June 4, 1989, in and near Tiananmen Square have faded into the background of Chinese life. This is partly because of the banning of any public comment about the incident. The massacre has been a forbidden topic. It has disappeared from Chinese books, newspapers, and Web sites.

-185- As a result, many Chinese people, especially those born since 1989, know nothing about it. (85)

To some extent, like Xia Yu (MM), the revolutionary in Lu Xun's story,

"Medicine" (1919), those students, who chose to remain in the Square and voluntarily sacrificed their young lives for the cause of Chinese democracy, have shed their blood in vain, and the democratic course of China did not show any signs of rapid progress, particularly in terms of political reform. To the sadness of the survivors, "only the continuing protests of foreign governments and pressure groups keep the memories of the massacre alive in China," their contemporaries as well as the younger generation have all muted their voices and failed to participate in the forum (Langley 85).

Partially resulting from the setback of the democratic movement, lies and eulogies intending to prettify the reality occupy government reports and media coverage at various levels. As Danning, the established novelist in Ha

Jin's A Free Life, describes, "People don't call things by their names any more," and "[ejverybody wants to sell and sell and sell, to make money by hook or by crook" (546).

Jung Chang, the well-known Chinese writer residing in London, expressed her great concern in an interview entitled "Against Forgetting" at the gathering in London commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the

June Fourth Democratic Movement:

To be against forgetting is not only important for China, but also important for universal civilization all over the world. In most countries, people are encouraged to recall, excavate, and -186- clarify the truth of their history. In China, however, this is impossible at the present time. As far as the June Fourth massacre is concerned, it is a rather sad thing that few young people know anything about what had happened just twenty years ago. It seems that the Chinese have caught an enforced collective amnesia. This is a tragedy of the times, (par. 4; my translation).

Wang Dan, one of the twenty-one student leaders who had been arrested and served five years in Qincheng prison, reflected in his article upon the attitude of the Chinese towards the past. Taking the example that the German President, Gerhard Schroder, apologized for a second time for the crimes committed by the Germans during World War II, Wang asked in retort, "what would it be like if people touch on the history lightly, like Dong

Jianhua (Jslt^) who advised the Hong Kong people to get rid of the burden of history?" (43; my translation)

Wang did not mention the name of the Chinese government, but obviously he was indicating or accusing the Chinese government of the ban on anything related to the June Fourth massacre as well as other crimes committed by the Chinese Communist Party in the past.

Indeed, if people refuse to face their past sincerely, how could they prevent the repetition of tragedies of the same kind? For Wang Dan, the vigorous mass movement may decline and lose its ground, which is sad yet unavoidable, like the American university students in 1968 and the Chinese students in 1989, but to confront the mistakes committed in the past and to

-187- reflect upon them is the right attitude we should take toward the history. For the Chinese Communist Party, however, any activities that might weaken or impair its position as a ruling party will definitely be prohibited. Though it may be understandable in a political sense, this way of dealing with public actions has indeed severed the history, and to some extent, cheated innocent subjects.

Viewed from this perspective, the opening narrative of Ha Jin's novel about the truth of the June Fourth is undoubtedly a significant reminder as well as an open defence for the tragedy which took place almost twenty years ago. Through the dialogue between Nan Wu and his son, a six-year-old kid who came to the United States several days after the massacre, Ha Jin's novel presents another partial picture of the history. This constitutes an insinuated counter narrative of the event against the dominant official media.

Though not a full coverage, the writing itself, like an iceberg floating above the water level, deserves our attention and respect.

Starting with the coming of Taotao, the protagonist's young son, to the

United States from mainland China, the novel raises the curtain over the historical context of the story. Taking advantage of the little kid's talkative nature, the novel unfolds the dialogue, or the psychological battle, between the boy, an unreliable narrator in disguise, and his father, accessible to more channels of information.

... [T]o his parents' astonishment, the boy said, "Mama, there was a big fight in Beijing, do you know? Hundreds of uncles in the People's Liberation Army were killed."

-188- "It was the soldiers who shot a great many civilians," his father corrected him. "No, I saw on TV bad eggs attacking the army. They burned tanks and overturned trucks. Grandpa said those were thugs and must be suppressed." "Taotao, Dad is right," his mother broke in. "The People's Army has changed and killed a lot of common people, people like us." That silenced the boy, who looked cross, biting his lips, which puffed up a little. He stayed quiet the rest of the way. (9- 10)

From the above cited paragraphs, it is easy to imagine the puzzled mind of the little boy in the novel: he must be confused, pondering over who he should choose to believe in, the TV images and his grandpa, who had been taking care of him for the past three years, or his parents, who had just picked him up from the airport.

Like the little boy, many people in mainland China did see on TV the pictures of burning trucks and burned bodies of soldiers. They may still remember that Yuan Mu, the spokesman of the central government, insisted to the media press that there were no civilians nor students killed in the cleaning of the square. Certainly, behind him, there was a group of powerful hands controlling and manipulating the propaganda of the Republic.

Similar to the little kid, the majority of Chinese, especially students, had been educated with the "miracles" of the People's Liberation Army and used to take PLA soldiers as close family members by addressing them as

"Uncles of Liberation Army." Among them, most of the young generation used -189- to hold a very positive affection towards the PLA and even admire the olive green of their uniforms. It is indeed difficult for them to connect the image of a respected uncle to a hooligan on the street.

The Chinese people always say, "Believe what you see, not what you hear (ISJAL^J^, ^BJfy%ll)." Then how can one understand the phenomenon that what one has seen is not true? It is certainly hard to accept even for an adult, not to speak of a little child. Imagine that one day when the little child realizes that what he had seen was shots and scenes after the process of careful filtering by the department of propaganda, and that what he had heard was the media coverage after the leaving-no-trace manipulation of official ideology, how disappointed he would be towards the government, towards the world of the adults surrounding him? He might be confronted with a short while of psychological disillusionment, and he might be converted into a skeptic, doubting everything he heard and read. This might be good from some perspectives, but the cost of the loss of innocence does seem too heavy.

The initial discrepancy between the father and the son seems to have cast a shadow over the relationship between them, and the child never felt close to his father and "seized every opportunity to make fun of his dad" (18).

Perhaps, in his eyes, his father is not believable, but he represents the authority the boy does not want to identify with but he can only revolt in his own way. Moreover, this discrepancy between the boy and his parents must

-190- have contributed to the formation of the boy's subconscious schizophrenia accompanying him during the long process of growing up to be an American.

In a word, the crackdown upon the unarmed students in Tiananmen

Square had silenced the surviving Chinese people who were getting involved in the movement. The media coverage about it not only hoodwinked the witnesses in broad daylight, but also made fools of the innocent ordinary people far away from the movement. Ha Jin's writing about the truth is a reminder, inviting people to dig out more detailed truth. In this sense, his writing is a way to remember for ever the sacrifice made by so many young lives for the democratic cause of China and to record in black and white the crime committed by the Chinese Communist government towards these innocent people.

5.2 The Elegy for "Tiananmen Orphan"—The Wandering Chinese in

Search of a Home

The theme of exile, or the term of the "wandering Chinese" has attracted critics' attention ever since Bai Xianyong published his essay, "The

Wandering Chinese: The Theme of Exile in Taiwan Fiction" (1976). In his essay, Bai traced back the long tradition of Chinese intellectuals, who "chose to retreat from society either as a gesture of protest or simply for the practical reason of survival," in order to maintain their integrity when severe social and dislocation occurred (205).

The defeat of the Nationalists on the mainland in 1949 resulted in a period of social and political upheaval in Taiwan and a generation filled with a

-191- heavy feeling of nostalgia mixed with nihilism. The literary production of the second generation of mainlanders in Taiwan, inspired by the times and society, reflects the pain felt by people searching for a place that can be called home. Among them, Bai Xianyong, Yu Lihua and Nie Hualing are the most representative. In the following paragraphs, I am going to take Bai

Xianyong's "Ashes" (1986) and Yu Lihua's Again the Palm Tree (1967) as examples to illustrate this point.

Bai Xianyong, in his masterworks of Taipei People and New Yorker, portrays a series of images of people who have tasted to the full the hardships of being dislocated, the bitterness of nostalgia, as well as the sense of being helpless about their own drifting. For instance, in his short story,

"Ashes," Bai writes about two old Chinese men meeting in the US, reflecting on their past in the light of the present. One is Luo Renzhong (^ttlt), the high-ranking general officer of the Nationalists, who contributed a lot during the anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) but was put into prison in Taiwan because of the political frame-up initiated by his comrades-in-arm. He came to the US in the early 1970s, making a living by selling newspapers on the street. The other one is Long Dingli (jt^^L), who used to be the leader of the

China Democratic League and the initiator of "Association of Rescuing China" in 1936. Long refused to retreat from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949, but was branded as a Rightist in 1957 and silenced since then for twenty years. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, around 1979, he came to the US.

-192- The two of them were once enemies, fighting for different parties, but now they lamented together that what they had done was in vain. At an age at which one might die at any time, they had abandoned their home both in

Taiwan and in the mainland, but were unable to identify with the US. One urged his nephew, an engineer who was born in the mainland but retreated to

Taiwan and went abroad to the US, to cremate his body after he passed away and then drop his ashes into the sea, letting it drift either to Taiwan or the mainland, but not the US; whereas the other one requested the same person to help him find a burial ground in New York.

Yu Lihua, in her Again the Palm Tree, portrays a young professor Mou

Tianlei (^-AH), a PhD in mass media, who teaches elementary Chinese at some obscure American college. Tianlei makes a trip back to Taiwan, aiming to find "a haven to anchor his wandering spirit" (Bai, "Wandering Chinese"

208). To his great despair, however, Tianlei feels "even more estranged among his own people" (Bai "Wandering Chinese" 208). In addition to his parents, his fiancee insists too that they go to America, and consequently, the hero is left "wavering between the coasts of the pacific, brooding over the question: To stay, or not to stay?" (Bai "Wandering Chinese" 208).

In Bai Xianyong's "Ashes," the bitterness of the wandering Chinese in the twentieth century has been interpreted vividly and incisively; while Yu Li­ hua, as a spokesman of the "Rootless Generation," delineates subtly the desperation of physical uprooting and spiritual dislocation of the second generation of mainlanders from Taiwan in the US. Viewed from this

-193- perspective, Ha Jin seems to have picked up the relay baton in his A Free

Life, extending consciously the tradition left by his precedents, the writing on themes of exile, by concentrating on the painful souls of the wandering

Chinese in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The massacre that took place in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989

led to another wave of voluntary and enforced exile in the following two decades. Most of the student leaders and the movement activists fled from

China and went into exile in Western countries, especially the United States.

Combined with the overseas students who decided to remain abroad after the event (the number of which was estimated to be over eighty thousand, according to Mindy Zhang), these people constitute the majority of the

"Tiananmen Orphans," who, like the "Tiananmen Mother"35—the organization of the group of people who lost their children during the massacre and the following crackdown, share the same complex related to the democratic

movement on Tiananmen Square and the overseas democratic activities thereafter (29). To some extent, they had indeed become orphans because

many of them were deprived of Chinese passports and not allowed to step on the land of the PRC due to their direct or indirect involvement with the democratic movement, and they had to cut violently their cultural cord and struggle for survival in an alien land.

Because of his involvement in the democratic movement, the

protagonist of Ha Jin's novel is surrounded by a group of people with similar

35 To get more specific information about the organization, please refer to their webpage: http://www.tiananmenmother.org/. -194- backgrounds, and their lives and spiritual schizophrenia become a main focus of the novel. First, the protagonist Nan Wu's application for passport renewal was refused under the pretext that he had failed to attach an approval letter from his former work unit, and later his passport was returned with a scarlet seal that declared CANCELED without further explanation. For Nan, this was an official revenge for his involvement in the planned kidnapping of some top officials' children studying in the Boston area in order to prevent the violence from being unleashed before the massacre. In any case, the door back to

China was shut and Nan became a countryless man.

Besides the protagonist, another figure who is treated in much detail is

Manping Liu, a noted dissident, who fled the country owing to his involvement with the student movement, but later appealed to a member of the Political

Bureau for permission to go back to China for the treatment of cancer.

"Please let me die in our homeland," he wrote (355).

To view from the speeches he made either privately or in public, nobody would doubt Mr. Liu's sincerity. He was well respected in the Chinese community, not only for his incisive writings but mainly for his integrity. His five years of exile (from 1989 to 1994) in the US failed to change the basis and logic of his political argument, and he, as always, firmly adhered to the position of the Chinese government on issues such as Taiwan and Tibet. The nationalistic zeal and fervent patriotic sentiment revealed unpurposely through his words made him more like a spokesman of the Chinese government, so that Nan could not help sighing that "Mr. Liu talked as if he

-195- were still an official," and that "Mr. Liu would still belong to their native land, and his existence would still be shaped by the Chinese political center of which he had always been a part" (122, 125).

If details and flavors were added, Mr. Liu's story could be a wholly apposite example for patriotic lessons. The paradox is what had happened after his death. According to his dying wish, his wife asked Nan, who returned to China for a short visit, to take half of his ashes to Canada, where their daughter was studying.

This was certainly beyond Nan's understanding. For him, Mr. Liu had been a fervent patriot; how could he want to have his remains shipped out of their native land? In a country like China, where people would like to return to their hometown after they are old and to be buried into the graveyard of their ancestors, it is indeed difficult to understand why Mr. Liu made such a decision.

This arrangement is reminiscent of the will of Long Dingli, the character in Bai Xianyong's "Ashes." Both of them were once democratic fighters and fervent patriots. If not because of their total disappointment towards their homeland, would they have ever made such a decision as to leave the country even after they died? They must have been bitterly disillusioned, and would rather roam aimlessly than resting in the place that hurt them deeply.

Similarly, Nan's trip to China made him totally disillusioned. The sensually luxurious life of his friend as a writer in Beijing, the vanity and greed

-196- of his parents, the degeneration or depression and hopelessness of his younger brother as a reporter, all made him feel sad and regret at coming back. Like the food that tasted different from what he had remembered, China was no longer the place in his memory, or in his expectation. It had changed radically. Superficially, everywhere was thriving and prosperous, but deep down few people were living an honest life. To quote his writer friend,

"Everybody wants to sell and sell and sell, to make money by hook or crook"

(546). In the words of his younger brother, China "has run out of strength. It's already rotten to the core" (554).

Certainly, the factors affecting the social development of a country can be various, but who would deny the direct or indirect connection between the crackdown of the government in 1989 and the overall degeneration of the

Chinese people from the early 1990s to the present time? Yan Jiaqi, the well- known dissident, asserts in a recent interview,

Today, China is developing at a high speed in terms of economy; but, in the meantime, it has witnessed a large number of unjust and unrighteous events and accidents, which can all be attributed to the government, particularly, Li Peng, the Prime Minister at the time, who addressed the democratic movement as an 'upheaval' and the massacre as 'suppressing a riot.' His act of confounding black and white and misleading the public had undermined the base of the whole society, (par. 8; my translation).

Indeed, when the government and their mouthpieces of different levels are lying brazenly, playing with economic figures and indices unbridledly, singing

-197- highly of the heydays, and fooling people, how could one expect ordinary people to "call things by their names" (Free Life 546)? When the government calls people to do whatever they can merely for money, how can one expect the masses to respect the dignity of a life, either human beings or wild animals, to be environment-friendly, and to envision the big picture of harmony and sustainability between nature and human beings?

Ha Jin writes in his article "An Individual's Homeland," "[ijndeed, nostalgia is never a collective emotion and is merely the exiled individual's one-sided wish," and that "[t]he nostalgia often deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them putting down roots anywhere" (72, 63). He admits that many exiles, emigrants, and some immigrants are "possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands," but he quotes

Odysseus, a classical episode of wanderings and returns, illustrating that the homeland is more often than not an alien place to the returned exiles

("Homeland" 63, 71).

It cannot be said for sure, but it should not be straying too far from the point to deduce that Ha Jin is using the returning stories of Nan and Mr. Liu to illustrate his philosophy that China as a homeland, like Ithaka36 for Odysseus, is not returnable, and that their returns are failures because they do not have a homeland anymore. It is true that, in the eyes of their countrymen, they are overseas foreigners, as Nan pondered in the novel: "To the people in China, they were already counted as a loss" (356).

36lthaka can also be spelled as Ithaca. In this thesis, I follow Ha Jin, who quotes the poem "Ithaka" in his book, The Writer as Migrant, and I use it here as the epigraph of this chapter. -198- For more than half of a century, the wandering Chinese have been longing to return to their homeland; however, when they finally have an opportunity to return, they find that it is not the place to which they would like to return and that they would rather continue their wandering, like Nan and Mr.

Liu. Isn't this a heavier and sadder issue? Fortunately, this is not only a problem for the wandering Chinese, but a universal issue for the large

number of diasporic communities scattering around every corner of the world.

In the present times, along with the development of airlines, telephones and the Internet, the physical return is no longer an issue. To

settle down their restless souls, the wandering Chinese, as well as the tremendous group of diasporas of other nationalities, have to look for their own Ithakas and try to find ways to get there. As Ha Jin writes, "Indeed, some of the Ithakas may turn out to be different from what we expected, but with

such destinations in mind, we can have wonderful journeys that will enrich and enlighten us" ("Homeland" 85).

For the wandering people, then, where is the place they would like to

address as "home"? For this issue, one may learn from Taotao, the six-year- old boy, that "home is where his parents are and where he feels happy and

safe. He doesn't need a country" (13). This simplified conception is comparable to what Ha Jin writes in the poem, "Eventually you will learn: / your country is where you raise your children, / your homeland is where you

build your home" (635). Believe it or not, there seems to be no middle way out.

Once one steps out of one's country, one has to choose between the two

-199- options: to stick to one's original homeland and to suffer from the bite of nostalgia, or to take the place where one settles down as one's permanent home.

5.3 Ithaka vs. America: The Myth of Freedom

Ithaka, in Homer's Odyssey, is the home and destination that

Odysseus headed for after the end of the ten-year Trojan War. What had sustained him through the ten years' misery and desperation on his way back was his strong determination that one day he would reach it. In the meantime, his ten-years' wandering and hardships on the sea had prettified his imagination or memory about his home, as he described to Lord Alcinous, his host on Scherie Island:

Ithaka...lies slanting to the west...It is a rough land, but a fit nurse for men. And I, for one, know of no sweeter sight for a man's eyes than his own country...So true it is that his motherland and his parents are what a man holds sweeter, even though he may have settled far away from his people in some rich home in foreign lands. (Homer 141-142; qtd. in Ha Jin, "Homeland" 66)

The suitors of his wife, however, spoiled his high expectation, dampened his excitement, and added to his bitterness of returning, though in the end, he killed the surly suitors, restored the order of his household, and reclaimed his kingship.

In Homer's epic, Ithaka represents the regained kingdom, which not only "embodies losses to be recovered," but also "stands for the promise of a heroic return" (Ha Jin, "Homeland" 62). In Cavafy's poem, however, Ithaka is

-200- "no longer the destination of a legendary warrior whose return is sponsored by deities," but "an imagined end of a journey" that can be taken by anyone

(Ha Jin, "Homeland" 62). The plural form, "Ithakas," according to Ha Jin,

"extenuates its epical connotations and multiplies the geographic image, which becomes pertinent to everyone just as the 'you' by now has also begun to refer to people in general"; it is "a symbol of arrival, not of return" (Ha Jin,

"Homeland" 62).

Allegorically, Ithaka is the destination of a life's journey. "Arriving there is what you are destined for." As for what has been gained, it is not the focus any more. What is important is the "rare excitement" the traveler has experienced on the road. The following section explores in detail the irony or ambivalence connoted in Ha Jin's "free life."

At the end of his novel, The Crazed (2002), Ha Jin writes that the narrator "I," after being informed that the police were coming to arrest him as a counterrevolutionary because he had been in Beijing and seen the crackdown of the Tiananmen massacre firsthand, "planned to sneak across the border into Hong Kong" and from Hong Kong he "would go to another country—Canada, or the United States, or Australia" (322).

This kind of ending, in which the protagonist goes abroad after suffering deeply and losing hope inside their homeland, is not uncommon in literary productions. It seems that the author has put the protagonists on an imagined trip, inviting readers to fantastic reveries. For the Chinese author, as well as readers, to go abroad seems to be a way leading to a free and

-201- democratic world, where unlimited opportunities and a bright future would be beckoning in the forefront.

Moreover, in reality, from the mid-1980s on, after the implementation of the open-door policy, to go abroad has always been a fantasy in China, as the book title suggests, To Go to America, To Go to America (1991), by Zha

Jianying. "As long as one could speak a foreign language, one would strive to go abroad" (Ha Jin, Free Life 131). Correspondingly, "to be an American" has been a dream and a goal for a large number of people living in metropolises, like Beijing and Shanghai. This is absolutely natural, taking into account the low wage level and poor conditions of residence and infrastructure at that time, as well as the mentality of ordinary people to keep up with the Joneses and the psychology of pro-America. The United States stands for freedom, wealth and democracy, and it is no wonder that Nan and his wife always emphasize the idea and their determination that no matter where they would end up, their son "would become an American" and "must become an

American" (9, 12).

Yet again, is the US indeed as good as it has been imagined? Is it indeed full of happiness and freedom that can be enjoyed by everyone? As a matter of fact, like what Cavafy has warned in his poem, "And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean"

(lines 35-7). Ha Jin's A Free Life seems to be telling readers a story about

Ithaka, but in his context, the Ithaka has been changed to America. The

-202- following section examines in depth the real picture of the US unfolding in front of Ha Jin's protagonist Nan Wu.

Quite out of the expectation of readers at home, the protagonist Nan

Wu began his "free life" with a great uncertainty. "He was uncertain of his future and what to do about his life" (9). "[H]is mind was restless, teeming with worrisome thoughts. So many things had happened recently that he was still in a daze" (12). Mentally, he was not prepared for such a new life.

Majoring in political science, "which he had never liked but which he had been assigned to study when he was admitted to college back in China," he had planned to go back and teach at his alma mater after finishing his doctoral studies (17). The sudden and unexpected massacre changed his mind and, correspondingly, the track of his career and his life once and forever. The dirty and treacherous nature of politics revealed through the massacre and the following crackdown made him feel too sick of it to continue studying it. In order to keep far away from any political activities, Nan chose to give up his graduate work in political science. Symbolically, this is one signal of the universal syndrome of political weariness among the Chinese in the aftermath of the massacre.

Being used to the system of being controlled and managed by the work unit, however, Nan was uncertain about the great freedom spreading out before him:

Such an independent condition was new to him. Back in China he had always been a member of a work unit that provided a salary, shelter (usually a bed or at most a room), coupons for -203- cloth and grain and cooking oil, medical care, and sometimes even free condoms. As long as he didn't cause trouble for the authorities, his livelihood was secure. Now he would have to earn a living by himself and also support his family. He was free, free to choose his own way and to make something of himself. But what were the choices available for him? Could he survive in this land? The feeling of uncertainty overwhelmed him. (17)

Even after he had embarked on the right track of being a cook, Nan was still grabbed occasionally by the overwhelming frustration originating mainly from uncertainty. His eruption in front of the policeman demonstrated to the ultimate his desperation that was hidden most of the times but surfaced at the right time.

... "You are lucky today. If you don't stop next time, I'm gonna shoot you." Seized by a sudden surge of heartsickness and self-pity, Nan begged, "Why don't you do it now? Keel me, please!" "I can do that if I like." The officer kept writing without raising his eyes. "Come on, awfficer, pull out your gahn and finish me off here. I'm sick of zis miserable life. Please shoot me!" His earnestness surprised the man, who looked him in the face and muttered, "You're nuts!" Then he went on in an official tone of voice, "Stop bluffing! I've seen lots of wackos like you who don't give a damn about others' property." At this point Taotao came over and stood by his father. The officer handed the driver's license back to Nan and said, "This is revoked. You can't drive any more. You're in deep shit."

-204- "Why not keel me instead? Come on, put me out of this suffering! I'm sick of zis uncertain life. Please fire your gahn!" Nan gulped back tears, his face twisted with pain. (135-6)

Perhaps, the policeman was right: "We all have a cross to carry and only death and taxes are certain in America" (136). Besides the hardships of struggling for a life, Nan's uncertainty resulted from the sudden disappearance of his life direction and the tremendous gap between his former superior position and his present reality. The meaning of life that he

had been educated with had lost its sense all of a sudden, and what he had been struggling to obtain meant nothing to him now. His life seemed to lead

nowhere and only to reduce him to nothing. He was not able, or reluctant, to accept his change from a formerly promising young scholar and budding poet to the present low and less competent laborer. Therefore, he could not help doubting the meaning of freedom; as he said to others:

Freedom is meaningless if you don't know how to use it. We've been oppressed and confined so long that it's hard for us to change our mind-set and achieve real freedom. We're used to the existence defined by evasions and negations. Most of our individual tastes and natural appetites have been bridled by caution and fear. It's more difficult to break the self-imposed tyranny than the external constrains. (132)

In spite of his uncertainty, Nan had to go on nevertheless. Generally speaking, his immigrant life is subject to the following factors that prevent him from enjoying complete freedom: racism, language incompetence, Chinese

-205- complex, and hidden rules governing the world of poets. The following section will explore these motifs one by one.

5.3.1 Racism, the Universal Issue of the US

As a free man now—free to quit his major and free to do whatever he liked, the first thing Nan must confront is to look for a full-time job to support himself and his family, which is none the easier for him, a major in the humanities and social sciences. Without any employable skill, even the

Chinese restaurants refuse to use him because he could not speak any southern dialect.

Fortunately, a factory agreed to hire him as a night watchman, but asked him to take a physical. It was exactly the body examination that taught

Nan the first lesson of immigration: racial discrimination. At the end of the checkup,

... to Nan's astonishment, the doctor grabbed his testicles, rubbed them in his palm for three or four seconds, then squeezed them hard and yanked them twice. A numbing pain radiated through Nan's abdomen and made him almost cry out. "Any prawblem?" he managed to ask, and noticed the man observing his member intently. "No. Genitalia are normal," the doctor grunted, scribbling on the form without raising his puffy eyes. Nan was too shocked to say another word Stepping out of the clinic, Nan wondered if the doctor was allowed to touch his genitals. He felt insulted but didn't know what to do. Should he go back and ask him to explain what the physical was supposed to include? That wouldn't do. "Never argue with a doctor"—that was a dictum followed by -206- people back home. Even now, Nan couldn't understand some of the terms on the form. If only he had brought along his pocket dictionary. Perhaps the doctor had just meant to find out whether he had a normal penis. Still, the man shouldn't have pulled his testicles that hard. The more Nan thought about this, the more outraged he was. Yet he forced himself to let it go. What was important was the job. He'd better not make a fuss. (26-7)

Obviously, what functions here is the racial discrimination against Chinese, the subjects of "yellow peril." The relationship between a doctor and a client constitutes naturally a hierarchy. The superiority complex and commanding position of a doctor above his client has been strengthened subtly by the color of their skin. Out of curiosity, or the mentality of disdain and philandering, the doctor treated Nan as a pet or an animal.

Racism in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era. As a poll conducted in 2008 by Associated Press-Yahoo News and

Stanford University shows, racist attitudes, or prejudices, are harbored by a substantial portion of the U.S. population (Babington sec.1). Members of every American ethnic group have perceived racism in their dealings with other groups. However, in most cases, the invisible nature of racial bias and prejudice make it difficult for the victim to name and explain clearly in words, as deprives people of the possibility of defence.

As regards Nan, he dared not to argue with the doctor. Considering the job that was of utmost importance and dependent on the signature of the doctor, he forced himself to let it go. Superficially, the behavior of the doctor

-207- was not a big issue, but symbolically, this action was no less than a ritual of castration, which smashed all the pride and dignity that belong particularly to a man. The humiliation and indignation caused by it may either make people outraged and mad, or silence the victim for the rest of his life. Yet, to survive in an alien land, Nan had to stand it, and the trauma brought with it could only be chewed and swallowed by himself. From that moment on, he could only accept his status and lot of being incomplete and disabled, the societal stigma of inferiority.

Definitely, Nan's suffering in the clinic was not the first time, nor the last time, that he encountered discriminatory treatment. As he did not understand why the doctor squeezed his testicles hard and yanked them twice, he could not understand either why a man and a woman stopped him, compelling him to join their orgy just because they had never had an Oriental man there. "Why were they so determined to hurt him? Just because his face was yellow, not as white as theirs? How come they thought he'd like to take part in their monkey business?" (33)

Similarly, even as a security guard, he could not escape the destiny of being bullied. He did not understand why Maria, a white lady who always asked Nan to carry shopping bags for her but never tipped him, bitched about him. "Only because he wouldn't flirt with her, or take her out, or bed her? Or simply because she could hurt him? He felt outraged and disgusted" (92).

Though, as Nan pondered, "Wasn't white also a color? Why were whites viewed as colorless? Logically speaking, everybody should be

-208- 'colored,'" it is a fact that "Nan had never seen a black postman or fireman in

Woodland" (65). Obviously, the pervasive individual and institutional racism had disadvantaged the racial ethnic groups, at least in the early 1990s, when

Nan entered the job market.

For the same reason, the Italian supervisor of the factory told Nan merely three weeks in advance that the factory would move. "If Nan had been an American, Don would have been obliged to let him know the temporary nature of the job when he applied" (48). As a supervisor, Don must know the rules concerning employment, but he intentionally chose to hide the fact in order to hook somebody who was interested in the position. Subconsciously, he might believe that Nan was unaware of the rule, and that even he knew he would not make a trouble at the end. It turned out to be that he was right. Nan did know the rule, but he did not make a fuss.

Moreover, even after Nan had become a successful Chinese restaurant owner, a naturalized American, he was still surrounded by racists in his neighborhood in Georgia. Hearing that Nan's Chinese friend was interested in buying the property at auction next to Nan's house, his neighbor

Alan expressed clearly his racist attitude:

"... Well, tell him he's not welcome." Alan's tone was rather casual, but he seemed to speak accidently on purpose. Nan was taken back. "Why?" "I like you and Pingping, to be frank, and you're good neighbors. But there're too many Chinese in this neighborhood already. We need diversity, don't we?" "But we are probably zee only Chinese here." -209- "How about the big family across the lake?" "Oh, they're Vietnamese." Nan remembered seeing seven or eight cars parked in the yard of that brick raised ranch the other day. He had also noticed two young Asian couples in this area, but he was sure they weren't Chinese. Alan continued, "Mrs. Lodge, Fred, Terry, and Nate, we all talked about this. We don't want this subdivision to become a Chinatown." Nan was scandalized but didn't know how to argue with him. He managed to say, "All right, I will tell Shubo what you said. You want to keep Chinese as minority here, but don't you sink our neighborhood should be a melting pot?" "But some people are not meltable." "Maybe the pot is not big enough. Make it a cauldron, zen everybody can melt in it, yourself included." They both laughed The thought flashed through Nan's mind that some people in the neighborhood had taken his family to be interlopers all along and probably would continue to do so whether they were naturalized or not. ... (411)

Compared to the violent and bloody racist activities against the Blacks, these racist prejudices again the Chinese or other Asians are rather gentle. Even so, they hurt people's feelings all the same. The racist whites have never asked themselves: what right do they have to interfere with others' business? Under the name of "diversity" or "community safety," they are actually consolidating the benefits they have harvested at the cost of other "colored" people's suffering. Though, in most cases, taking into account the issue of being politically correct, they will pull in their horns; whenever the opportunity is

-210- mature, their racist prejudice would gain ground. The "born superior" complex, intensified by a suitable social environment, often makes them reveal accidentally their racist belief that the White is superior to other races.

For instance, Mrs. Lodge, Allan's comrade in striving for the purity of the neighborhood, put a bunch of mixed snow crocuses on Nan's doormat when he moved in, whereas she placed a vase of flowers, "tulips this time," on the welcome mat the day after Judith Goodman, a white professional lady, moved into the property next to Nan's house (413). It might sound narrow-

minded or too calculating to take offence to the welcoming gift from a neighbor, but considering her racist attitude, this differential treatment might mean something significant.

The Chinese people often say that people are depreciated after being dislocated (AM^-^k), not to mention that it is in the United States, where racism has always been a major issue. The racist bias has been ingrained

into the blood of the people. Nan should have felt strange and even grateful if

he did not receive racist discrimination.

5.3.2 Language Incompetence—Immigrants' Achilles' Heel

In retrospect, Nan described his great change at a Thanksgiving dinner party. He used to be "a real fighter" back in China, to quote the remark of his wife. "In China every day I wanted to jump up and fight wiz someone.

On buses, in restaurants, and in movie theaters, anywhere I went, I wanted to fight. Zere you have to fight to survive, but here I don't want to fight wiz anyone, as eef I lost my spirit" (51).

-211- He further explained his weird behavior. Back in China, he "knew how to deal wiz bad guys," but here, he said, "I can't fight anyone. I'm not sure how far I can go, where to stop" (51). This might sound strange to the local people, but Nan himself understood. "What good would fighting and yelling do here? Who cares what noise I make? The louder I shout, the bigger a fool I'll make of myself. I feel like a crippled man here" (51).

The reasons leading to Nan's great change and sense of being lost and disabled can be various. Racism and cultural shock are external factors.

One of the most important internal factors is the language incompetence that is typical among immigrants, which aggravates greatly their disadvantageous situation in the new land. Owing to their language incompetence, immigrants become crippled in terms of communication and, consequently, employment, and this, in return, lowers gradually their self-esteem and intensifies their depression and anxiety.

As Danning pointed out, "you speak Chinese like a news anchorman, but your English will never be as good" (96). As far as Nan was concerned,

he dared not to argue with the doctor mainly because of his difficulty with

English. "Even now, Nan couldn't understand some of the terms on the form," and he used "appendix," instead of "appendicitis," when talking about the scar on his belly (27). How could he criticize and discuss with the doctor if he did

not know how to say in English those specific medical terms, not to mention his complicated feelings hurt by the doctor's rude behavior?

-212- Nan's English was broken, hesitating, and sometimes even deadly wrong, which reflected his linguistic struggle as an immigrant. He often mismanaged the interdental sound that the Chinese language does not have, and occasionally, left out the adverbs used together with verbs. For instance, when answering the question, "why did you leave the place?" he said, "My bawss was sacked, so we got laid all together" (25).

As an immigrant, as well as a poet-to-be, Nan knew well the importance of mastering English. That was why he had seized every opportunity to learn English. He would read his Oxford Advanced Learner's

Dictionary whenever he had free time at work. He knew that in this land the language was "like a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, even though he'd feel out of element whenever he used it" (192). He must try hard to adapt himself, developing new "lungs and gills" for this alien water, otherwise, his life would be confined and atrophied, and eventually wither away.

Compared to Heng Chen, his colleague in Ding Dumplings, who,

"[having] little English, with neither hope nor confidence," lost the battle against his rival in love, who spoke English fluently and was at home in

America, Nan was lucky, but he still felt isolated and out of place whenever he was at a party. His language incompetence prevented him from mixing fully with the locals, which made him feel isolated and out of place even after he got used to the life in the United States.

-213- 5.3.3 Chinese Complex, or "Obsession with China"—Immigrants'

"Genetic Load"

"Obsession with China" is a phrase employed by C. T. Hsia to designate the universal moral burden of modern Chinese writers—"its obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity"

(533-4). Historically speaking, these writers' obsession with China's impotence represents "a new self-awareness brought about by the long series of defeats and humiliations they have suffered since the mid-nineteenth century" (Hsia 434). The establishment of the Communist rule in 1949 remade the national image abroad and this obsession was replaced by the propaganda product celebrating the achievement of the party in power.

"Genetic load" is a term borrowed from the narrator in "Broken

Tumbleweeds" (1985), a short story by Bao Zhen, a Taiwanese writer. The narrator, majoring in population biology, applies his biological jargon, "genetic load" or "the burden of heredity," which literally means the genetic traits determining the present state of a species and the most suitable condition for that species, to designate the past experience or traumatic memories that have left their mark on people and would certainly overshadow forever their personal journeys. Though "genetic load" is not a specific term used as extensively as the "obsession of China," it depicts vividly and accurately the feature of the past experience that has permeated the blood and can never be rejected completely.

-214- Though written and published in the twenty-first century, A Free Life portrays many characters who are enkindled with the same patriotic passion, including dissidents like Manping Liu, Pastor Bian, and certainly the protagonist Nan Wu. As an important part of the overseas Chinese community, these people stand for the embarrassing majority who are longing for China, but not allowed to enter the country, and exactly on their body embodied the "genetic load" brought to the new land from their homeland. In the following part, I am going to take Nan as an example to illustrate their entanglement and struggle with the mentality of nationalism and patriotism.

As a Chinese, Nan could never be rid of the baggage of China completely. Though between themselves, Nan and his wife often complained about China in harsh language, they could not stand others saying anything unjustifiably negative about their native land without giving offense. How Nan wished he and his wife "could break off with China altogether and squeeze every bit of it out of themselves" (50)!

In the novel, the narrative of Nan's emotion bound up with China and that of Nan's first love forms a parallel. China, as his motherland, had hurt his feeling deeply by refusing to renew his passport and later cancelling it ruthlessly, making him a countryless man; whereas his first love betrayed him, leaving him with a numbing heart, crushed and emotionally exhausted, incapable of loving any woman ardently, including his wife. Nonetheless, just like his first love, who he could not pluck out of his heart, China, as his homeland, always occupied his mind.

-215- When Danning said, "No matter where I go, I feel I'm a Chinese to the marrow," Nan responded, "To be honest, I don't worry about my nationality anymore. I wear my nationality like a coat" (96). However, even his friend was startled by the amount of bitterness in his voice. Though Nan claimed, "I've wrenched China out of my heart," his eyes, which were brimming with tears, showed that he was still emotionally bound to that country and that he could not remain detached, as his friend observed (96). Who would not agree that

Nan was also "a Chinese to the marrow," in disguise?

Though he had left the PhD program in political science and declared to his wife that he would never participate in any political activities, he attended, out of conscience or perhaps the habit of a Chinese scholar, the memorial meeting held at Harvard University before the first anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the talk given by Manping Liu, the famous dissident, on the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland China, the meeting between Dalai Lama and Chinese students and scholars, as well as the heated discussion of the Chinese community in Atlanta about the book published in mainland China, China Can Say No (1996).

Through the mouth of Nan, as well as his dispute with other characters, the author expresses his queries about the concept of the country, the relationship between individuals and the country, and the ossified ideological restraint of nationalism. As a matter of fact, the views contended in the book are so familiar that one can almost confirm that someone has put forward such an opinion.

-216- From those arguments, could be deduced the mental change of Nan from a patriotic enthusiast to an individual who had discarded the narrow- minded and misleading nationalistic bias and rigid ideological dogmas, and began to adopt humanism, doubting what had been formerly instilled in him and what he had blindly accepted, considering issues from the point of view of humanity, rather than any political and ideological teachings.

For instance, on the issue of Taiwan, Nan put forward directly his humanitarian perspective, when Mr. Liu claimed, "if I were the president, I might have to order the People's Liberation Army to attack Taiwan. There isn't another way out of this. China must protect its territorial integrity. Whoever loses Taiwan will be recorded by history as a criminal of the Chinese nation"

(320). He elaborates as follows:

[l]f we look at this issue in a different light, that is, from the viewpoint of humanity, we may reach another conclusion. For the individual human being, what is a country? It's just an idea that binds people together emotionally. But if the country cannot offer the individual a better life, if the country is detrimental to the individual's existence, doesn't the individual have the right to give up the country, to say no to it? By the same token, all the regions in China are like members of the Chinese family—if one of the brothers wants to live separately, isn't it barbaric to go smash his home and beat him up? (320)

Seemingly, Nan shared the same idea as Benedict Anderson, who proposed as early as 1983 that the nation was "an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (5).

Undoubtedly, for those out-and-out nationalists and politicians who have been -217- inculcated with and have accepted the official ideology that Taiwan is a part of

China and that whoever loses Taiwan will be recorded by history as a criminal of the Chinese nation, this concept is absolutely unacceptable.

For most people from the mainland, especially those "specialists," who stand at the advanced level considering strategic issues like the country's safety, Taiwan is a part of China that must "be reunified with mainland China, because if it went independent, China would lose its gateway to the Pacific

Ocean, and Japan, in addition to the United States, would control the China

Sea entirely" (319). For them, Taiwan is merely an abstract concept, a chessman, or a card, in terms of territory and geographical politics, rather than a human-inhabited land, where people just live their everyday lives like the mainlanders and the same, or even an advanced, civilization has been established.

Obviously, Nan's logic is based on his confrontation with the Chinese government. To decide not to return to China is a silent but strongest personal protest, which corresponds with the traditional Chinese philosophy of "voting with one's feet," a tradition that can be traced back to the ancient

Chinese scholar-officials who would "board a raft and float to sea" if the Way failed to be carried out (Confucius 73).37 The failure of his passport renewal aggravates and severs his emotional identification with the country. To say no to the government, therefore, reflects not only his doubts but also his deeply- buried indignation.

37 The Chinese original of this sentence is "Jl^Fff, ^kW&T-'M" which is often quoted by Prof. Jenn-Shan Lin. For further information, please refer to his article, "Driftwood and Tumbleweeds: Diasporic Writings by Pai Hsien-yung and Pao Chen." -218- The issue of Taiwan is a legacy from the past, which cannot be solved simply by a war on the pretext of patriotism. As someone said, "If the Chinese government would like the Taiwanese to return, it must do something to win their identification."38 This point of view is not uncommon at all. The speech delivered by Long Yingtai, a well-known Taiwanese writer, at Beijing

University, "My Dream of China," on 1 August 2010, can be taken as a footnote of this perspective. Long clarified the evolution of the Taiwanese identification towards mainland China and expressed her sincere wish for the future of China, which is that the rise of China must be based on the development of democracy and civilization (sec. 2 & 4). The trauma experienced by the Taiwanese in their history cannot be healed merely by the blind patriotism, and moreover, the threat of military conquest can only irritate their stronger repugnance. The rising nationalism on the island is a noticeable sign of their more and more diluted identification with mainland China. Pitifully, the government would never explain the origins of this conflict to the masses, and most Chinese, especially the young, rarely realize it. To some extent, it is the government that is agitating the hatred and encouraging the trend of separation, rather than suturing the wound left by history.

On the issue of Tibet and the visit of the Dalai Lama, Nan also demonstrated his change. Most Chinese students attending the meeting viewed the Dalai Lama as a separatist and his visit a premeditated provocation and malicious sabotage of the unity of China and therefore

38 This originates from a talk between a professor at the University of Alberta and me. As a Taiwanese scholar working in the West, he put forward this opinion for several times. -219- bombarded His Holiness with belligerent and frivolous questions that were actually devoid of any answers. In contrast, Nan respected him. For Nan, the

Dalai Lama "had a natural demeanor that belied his role of a dignity" and

"[h]is humble manner and witty words were infectious. Most of the audience could feel the generosity and kindness emanating from him" (322, 326). When

Mr. Liu said about the Dalai Lama, "He's quite shrewd," Nan retorted, "But

he's a great man, isn't he?" (327) Perhaps, it was true that Nan was always

naive, but it was a fact that he had gradually walked out of the hedge

constructed by the mentality of politics.

Nan's presence at the discussion of the book, China Can Say No, was the last time for him to attend activities relating to China. Facing the

outpourings of arguments infused with strong emotions of nationalism and

patriotism, Nan could not help addressing the audience,

You people always talk about your nation, your China, as if every one of you were a kingpin of that country. Has it ever occurred to you that this obsession is dangerous? I mean to let a country dominate an individual's life and outweigh everything else. What's the definition of fascism? Do you know? (496)

He went on calmly, "The first principle of fascism is to exalt country and race

above the individual. If you don't believe me, look it up in Merriam-Webster's

Collegiate Dictionary, the tenth edition. If we don't stop this nonsense of

China's pride, we may end up ruining our own lives here" (496). Up to this

moment, Nan must have had a better understanding of the relationship

between the individual and the collective. As Ha Jin, the author of Nan's story,

-220- said in an interview, "When I waited tables, I couldn't think of my country or my people, having to figure out how to make ends meet by myself (Mindy

Zhang 32). As a counterpart of his author to a high degree, Nan must have realized, particularly after his living alone outside the reference frame of the collective mentality, "the insignificance / of a person to a tribe, / just as a hive keeps thriving / while a bee is lost" (Ha Jin, "Spokesman" 27).

Ideally, a country should not exert official ideologies on its subjects, manipulating their wills invisibly, yet, this, as everybody knows, is impossible in the actual world. As a subject, however, an individual should avoid the destiny of being a victim of either politics or any -ism, the various embodiments of the official ideologies.

To some extent, Nan is already a victim of politics thanks to his quitting the doctoral program of political sciences. If he had remained in academia, his life course would have been completely different; at least, he would have written several books as he—as well as his supervisors—had expected and not be a loser in the eyes of others. Examples like this defy enumeration. The transient figure Li Yongxin (^7Jcfjf) in Bai Xianyong's "Ashes" and Chen

Xishan (PI^MLLI) in Ping Lu's "Death in the Cornfield" are all examples of this column. They are victims of "Protecting the Diaoyu Islands," the political event taking place in the early 1970s.

The disputed Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku Shoto, in Japanese), consisted of five islets and three barren rocks and situated about 300 km west of the main island of Okinawa and 200 km northeast of Taiwan, used to belong to

-221- China from the ancient times, about which the ancient books and maps produced in the 16th century may serve as an evidence (Qiu 60-8). After

China failed the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, they were ceded, along with

Taiwan, to Japan; in 1944, the Diaoyu Islands were sentenced by the Tokyo

International Tribunal to return to China, under the control of Taiwan; in 1945, the United States conquered the Ryukyu Islands, putting the Diaoyu Islands under its control. On 10 September 1970, the Senate of the United States, based on the Okinawa Reversion Treaty, proclaimed its plan to transfer the

Ryukyu Islands, as well as the Diaoyu Isands, to Japan (Ma 3). This action triggered the huge and grand parade of more than 2500 overseas Chinese students outside the headquarters of the United Nations on 29 January 1971.

On 10 April 1971, another large-scale parade of 2500 or so overseas Chinese students was held in Washington, DC, and the protestors stopped at the

Senate of the United States and the Embassies of the Republic of China

(Taiwan) and Japan respectively to hand in their petitions. Since then, the activities of "Protecting the Diaoyu Islands" have never stopped completely, though their scale and scope of protesting are not as huge as those in the early 1970s. In May 2009, an exhibition, as well as a forum, was held at

National Tsinghua University, Taiwan, to commemorate the footprints left by the young patriotic activists.

As activists of "Protecting the Diaoyu Islands," both Li and Chen threw themselves completely into the movement, and gave up their degree pursuits at the university. As a result, they were put on the black list of the Taiwanese

-222- government, failed to find a decent job, and could only live a dreadful life in

America. Facing their plight, the other people can only sigh and keep silent.

After all, before the hegemony of national states, individuals are trivial indeed.

To view it differently, however, as an artist-to-be, it might be necessary for him to hack his way through the vicissitudes of life so that he could evolve into a phoenix out of the fire. In any case, for an individual, it is usually a sad story to be a victim of politics or the times, and, except for sympathy

(sometimes even sympathy is absent), little can be done to change the individual's tragic fate since life is a one-way journey and nobody can rewrite his or her past.

In spite of his earnest admonishment, however, the audience, infused with the innate mind-set and ossified ideologies with which they had been provided, took Nan as insane and "a lone wolf," to quote the words of Mei

Hong, a fanatical nationalist. They did not see through the logic behind the publication of the book—"Clearly some top officials had endorsed the publication of this book, using hatred and fear to unify the populace", nor could they accept the conclusion of Nan, i.e., "All I'm saying is we ought to be decent human beings first, to be fair and upright to others and to ourselves"

(490, 496).

Greatly disappointed by the attitude of the audience, Nan finally concluded to himself, "There was no way to reason with some people in this crowd, to which he felt he no longer belonged. Their ilk had the herd mentality that assumed the fulfillment of one's selfhood depended on the rise and

-223- growth of a tribe" (497). He preferred to stand alone. Let it go, national pride and honor, country and politics, etc.

As smart as Nan appeared, he should have realized that it was not merely the fault of the audience, but the common practice of the government, which "treats its citizens like gullible children and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals. It demands nothing but obedience" (96).

Along with his trip back to China and his last visit to his first girlfriend,

Nan finally discarded completely the restraints of the concept and ideology relating to the country, as well as the shadow and grabbing force of the woman he had dreamed of for many years. To some extent, his entanglement with his first girlfriend symbolized his silliness, and his struggle with the concept and ideology of nationalism and patriotism indicated his naivety. His being able to view them—including the woman he had been loving, his biological mother and China, his spiritual homeland—from an objective distance implied his growth and maturity. Only by standing aloof could he discover their ugly side and stop his blind love, and only at this stage, after the discarding of his infantilism, could he walk out of the complex of China at the end and enjoy peace and tranquility, freed from any political and ideological perplexity. The process of his struggling with the concept of the country and the image of his first girlfriend stood side by side, witnessing his growth from a child to an adult in the real sense.

As he wrote in his poem, "Eventually you will learn:/your country is where you raise your children,/ your homeland is where you build your home"

-224- (635). As a matter of fact, for his son, a fifth grader, a country "is a place/ unmarked by missiles/ and fleets. He doesn't know/ how to run it with the power/ to issue visas and secret orders/ and to rattle nuclear bombs like slingshots" (650). If only we could live in the imagined territory designed by his son, Nan must have dreamed of. Indeed, "for a child, home is where his parents are and where he feels happy and safe. He doesn't need a country"

(13).

5.3.4 The Poetry World—"A Rough-and-tumble Territory"

As a published poet back in China, Nan had been thinking of "doing something that moneyed people can't do," i.e., to write poems, after he quit his Ph.D program in political science. However, witnessing the embarrassment of his friend Bao Yuan, a blacklisted dissident artist, who, in order to get his green card, was dependent on the whims of an old American lady, Nan was determined that if he was going to become an artist, he would be a different type, "a self-sufficient man first" (157).

He did not expect, however, that the poetry world, like "a rough-and- tumble territory," was far more complicated than he had imagined. Even Sam

Fisher, in whom Nan had seen "the free spirit of a poet who wasn't afraid of anything or anybody, a complete individual," and Dick Harrison, a budding poet, who had already obtained the position of poet in residence at Emory, had to be subject to the rules of the secular and cater to the tastes of the worldly (153).

-225- For instance, when a passerby greeted him, "Mr. Fisher, I enjoy your new book. I'm a big fan," Sam responded rather rudely: "So," Sam looked annoyed, "you want me to fuck you in the ass?" (151). Dick explained, "That's

Sam. People know him well and won't be offended," but Sam grunted, "Damn it. I just don't want to be stopped every five minutes. If he'd bought my book, that would've been different" (151). Well established as Sam was, he still took to heart whether people had bought his book.

Similarly, Dick preferred to use crimson as the cover of his second book because "[r]ed is eye-catching and will help it sell better" (405), even though Nan, as his friend, expressed a different idea. As an outsider, Nan could not understand why his friend was so concerned about the sales of his books, nor could he see the logic between the sales and benefits that his friend might get indirectly from it. For Nan, poetry was not a commodity, and anything like power and money would blemish the purity of the spirit of poetry.

"In spite of his own hard effort to make money, when it came to poetry Nan couldn't imagine it as a commodity" (405).

Moreover, Nan did not understand why the world of poetry was controlled or manipulated by some master hands like Edward Neary, "a major poetic voice of our time," to quote the fulsome praise of Dick. Mr. Neary, as an editor of an anthology of poetry by young poets, claimed to be "a powerful man," "a maker and breaker of poets," and in Nan's eyes, he acted more like a business magnate (303).

-226- According to Dick, "most poets live in cliques," otherwise it would be hard for them to survive. "The network is essential" (307). For Nan, these inside stories are difficult to accept. To him, "the poetry world should be relatively pure, and genuine poets free spirits, passionate but disinterested"

(307). Yet, in the words of Dick, many of them were territorial and xenophobic.

Nan could not help thinking about his future. "Could someone like himself ever belong to a coterie?" he asked himself. The answer was negative. He could not imagine being accepted by any clique. "To be a self-sufficient individual" was not only his ideal, but his goal of life.

In addition, Nan could not accept the perspective of a master poet,

Yong Chu, who had made his name in Taiwan, mainland China, and the

Chinese diaspora in North America. Nan was once touched by some of his poems, but for his speech at the first anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, that "the whole body of my poetry isn't even worth one drop of the blood shed by the martyrs in Tiananmen Square," he felt annoyed (95).

For Nan, poetry was more like a kind of religion; patriotism and literary arts should not be judged by the same criteria. For Nan, poetry was meant to transcend history and to outlast politics; national pride should not supersede the value of poetry.

However, aloof as Nan tried to be, he would also like to see his poems published. As he wondered during the meditation,

Probably the miserable feelings that often surged in him originated from the fact that he couldn't see any possibility of publishing in Chinese, let alone establishing himself as a poet -227- here. It was as if in front of him stood a stone wall inviting him to bump his head against it. If only he had come to America ten years earlier! Then he could definitely have given up his mother tongue and blazed his trail in English.... (409)

This pain had been accompanying Nan, and was getting worse, particularly after he paid his last mortgage. He could not stand for his life as a worm, and could not help fulminating himself mentally. "You've been living like a worm and exist only in the flesh. You are just a channel of food, a walking corpse"

(419). He wanted to have his own life, instead of "to sacrifice" for his children, but he had not see clearly where his future would be.

5.4 Falling between Two Stools—A Dilemma of Its Reception

Far from the acclaims and hails upon his former works, Ha Jin's A

Free Life failed to make a big stir in the book market, despite the sixteen years' painstaking labor he had spent on it (Cao par.1). For the Americans, A

Free Life seems to be too Right-leaning, lacking sharp and deep criticism of

American society, as Walter Kirn writes in The New York Times Sunday Book

Review:

[T]he impossible has happened. In the dispiriting age of Bush and Britney, with our military still bogged down in Baghdad and our media still bewitched by Beverly Hills, an accomplished, respected American writer (a recent National Book Award Winner, in fact) has published a serious patriotic novel. Its title, "A Free Life," is not altogether ironic. Its subject, everyday bravery and nobility in a system built on risk and too often based on mutual exploitation, is delivered straight. Finally, its Chinese-born author, Ha Jin (whose seven previous works of

-228- fiction have all been set abroad), seems positively pleased and proud to be here, (par.1; emphasis added)

For the Chinese, however, the negative criticism about China and the

Chinese people is hard to accept. In China, Ha Jin has always been criticized for his New-Orientalist inclination (as has been addressed in the "Critical

Review of Previous Studies about Ha Jin" in the "Introduction"), and his A

Free Life is no exception. The only essay that can be found touching upon A

Free Life in Chinese journals is Chen Guangxing's "Free Writing: Ha Jin's

Dilemma," which appeared on a rather privileged magazine, Comparative

Literature in China, the official publication of the Chinese Comparative

Literature Association.

In his essay, Chen writes that Ha Jin, through the mouth of the narrator, expresses publicly his commendation of the United States, and that under Ha Jin's pen, the United States looks like a paradise on the earth while

China is full of ugly and negative sights and the Chinese are both selfish and greedy (87). In a word, Chen believes that Ha Jin is catering purposely to

American values and he even quotes from Walter Kirn to bear out his point of view.

Fairly speaking, Ha Jin did illustrate the negative sides of China and the Chinese people around him, but it is not an excuse to deny or ignore the greatness of this work. As his precedent, Lin Yutang was also attacked because of his exposure of the negative side of the Chinese in his book, My

Country and My People (1938) (Gao Xiaogang 99).

-229- The Chinese always believe that disgrace should not be publicized to outsiders (MHA-^JS'l-^}). However, Lu Xun has always been reputed as a national hero because of his sharp criticism of the Chinese, and Bo Yang (tt

%), a Taiwanese writer, is often hailed among the Chinese community due to his book, The Ugly Chinaman (1985). It does not matter much because they write in Chinese. Lin Yutang and Ha Jin are severely criticized because they write in English, which help to broadcast far and fast the ill reputation of the

Chinese. It is imaginable that the pride and honor of being a Chinese will likely be hurt somewhat when they read something negative about the

Chinese, especially when the medium is English.

To some extent, this subconscious mentality behind those critics' logic of attack is coincident with "the herd mentality" criticized by Ha Jin in his novel, which "assumed the fulfillment of one's selfhood depended on the rise and growth of a tribe" (497). Understandably, this "herd mentality" has constituted the base of nationalism and it is often utilized to incite strong patriotic sentiment.

As its title indicates, Ha Jin is actually playing with or doubts the name and reality of freedom in the United States. With the ubiquitous racism, the hidden rules existing not only in the world of poetry, as well as the weaknesses of humanity in general, it is impossible for people to enjoy absolute freedom, no matter where they go.

As Ha Jin says in an interview, the novel is "a coming-of-age story—a man has finally become an individual by living a lonesome life" (Mindy Zhang

-230- 30). Ha Jin intends to write a story of a man's growth from an innocent naTve person, who had been entangled in the image of his first girlfriend and the complex of nationalism and patriotism, to an independent mature man, who had outgrown his puppy love, smashed the fetters of official ideology, and been transmuted into a humanist, an individual embracing a humanistic philosophy.

It might be said, therefore, that this is a process of de-brainwashing, and the novel is "about the emotional and spiritual existence of some dislocated people" (Mindy Zhang 32). Ha Jin always believes that there are values beyond a nation and a people, and imaginably, he would like his protagonist to adopt a humanistic value system, discarding the influence of ideological indoctrination, like the collective mentality and the national pride commonly shared by overseas Chinese.

What, then, is the ideal freedom? How can people get there? In his novel, Ha Jin seems to have offered his answer. He makes Nan totally disillusioned after he drove a long way to see his first girlfriend again, just like he was totally disappointed after returning to China. In the meantime, the author let go of Dick Harrison, his best friend and connection to the poetry world, and then his successful restaurant business. In Ha Jin's words, "He has to be alone to write" and "[o]ne has to pay a price for freedom" (Mindy

Zhang 30).

It is not clear whether Ha Jin is a Buddhist believer, but it seems that the ending he designed for Nan is coincident to the concept of "letting go (tX

-231- T)" and "freedom (g^)" in the Buddhist teachings. Only after taking down all burdens imposed either by oneself or others, could one enjoy the utmost freedom. The illusion of love, the subconscious herd mentality, and the ubiquitous desire to get rich, all in all, are distractions and disturbances, and one has to overgrow all these entanglements to arrive at the shore of the real freedom.

In short, Ha Jin wanted to "write a piece of literature that could capture the metaphysical dimension of the immigrant experience," and he understands that the book may not make sense to readers in China since it speaks to the American experience (Mindy Zhang 33). Without the experience of living alone outside the reference frame of the collective mentality, it is certainly difficult for readers to understand Ha Jin's novel emotionally, and therefore, it might be understandable for Chen Guangxing, the Chinese critic mentioned above, to put forward a completely negative view about Ha Jin and his novel.

To some extent, A Free Life is also a farewell Ha Jin bade to his past as an immigrant from a land weighed with a history. He admits candidly that two books had shaped his perception of the world—V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River (1985) and W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants (1997), particularly their way of treating the past (Mindy Zhang 32).

As an immigrant, or in other words, a voluntary exile in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ha Jin must have undergone a long-lasting pain of nostalgia, not to mention the omnipresent uncertainty and other

-232- frustrations originating from the reality of displacement. As he writes in his article, "An Individual's Homeland,"

Many exiles, emigrants, expatriates, and even some immigrants are possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands. The nostalgia often deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them from putting down roots anywhere. The present and the future have been impaired by their displacements, and their absence from their original countries gives them nothing but pain. (63)

The lesson Ha Jin has learned is: to tramp on the past if it means only baggage to you; and to make an "appropriate use of the past in establishing the immigrants' present existential order" ("Homeland" 75, 85). He writes, "no matter where we go, we cannot shed our past completely—so we must strive to use parts of our past to facilitate our journeys" ("Homeland" 86).

As a writer, Ha Jin's way of dealing with the past is to write it out so that he can not only download it from his memory and march on with light packs, but also survive the violence and trauma of the history.39 Though A

Free Life is not autobiographical, there are many overlaps between the story of Nan and the life of Ha Jin. In the image of Nan, Ha Jin has embodied his ideals and spiritual pursuits as an overseas Chinese artist, i.e., to be a decent individual and alone artist, taking literature as his religion.

Last but not least, Ha Jin does criticize the dark side of the American people and American society, but this criticism is hidden between the lines,

39 This, to some extent, echoes to the issue of the writer's act of writing, which I mentioned in Chapter 1. As an overseas Chinese reader, I perceive particularly the overwhelming uncertainty and the complex about homeland underwent by the male protagonist, which become the main focus of this chapter. -233- and many readers merely stopped before realizing his point. Besides the universal racism existing potentially in the job market, the existence of people like Mr. Neary, "a maker and breaker of poets," many other examples can be found too.

For instance, Heidi, the female owner of the big mansion that Nan and his family lived temporarily in as helpers, fearing that his wife and son might stay at her home forever, mistreated his wife by creating some difficulties in order to chase them out, and refused to apologize even after the matter was clarified (155-6). Three years later, however, when Heidi's daughter ran away from home and showed up in Nan's restaurant, Nan and his wife not only took good care of her, but also paid her to work as a busgirl in the restaurant in order to keep her in line, in spite of the fact that their business was not very profitable during the slow season (378-84).

As Ha Jin argues about humanity in general, people can be good and bad, and this is not related exactly to their races. The Chinese can be ugly, and they can also be noble-minded; whereas the white Westerns can be nice, but they can be mean too.

Along with the development of time, we have every reason to believe that this book will gain recognition and more and more people will think of it highly, as its author expected: "The immigrant experience is a minor literary subject, primarily American, since conventionally it is the exile that dominates literature. But this also means there is more promise in writing about the

-234- immigrant experience if we make it echo other great literary subjects" (Mindy

Zhang 33).

-235- CONCLUSION

Walking out of the fictional worlds of Ha Jin and Yan Geling, I cannot help heaving a long deep sigh since I have found many living examples bearing strong similarities with the characters in the novel.

2010 was the sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War, and many activities have been organized to commemorate this war, which was once so important for the new Chinese government. A feature, "Looking for 'Wang

Cheng': Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the War to Resist US

Aggression and Aid Korea," was published in Oriental Outlook Weekly, 22 (17

June 2010). In the story, Jiang Qingquan (WlA$l), a repatriated POW, who was the prototype of Wang Cheng, the widely-known hero in the film "Heroic

Sons and Daughters" (1964), recalled his fifty-seven years unknown to the public. Because of the heavy feeling of sin, Jiang, like the characters in Ha

Jin's War Trash, never mentioned his bravery and suffering in front of people around him, including his wife and children, and flatly denied it even when the journalist came to ask him. In this sense, it is reasonable to assert that, except for names of characters and locations, novels are more authentic than narratives in history and politics.

Sometimes, I cannot help asking the question: what is literature? Is it a kind of record, representation, or a creation of a possible world? As an important tool of ideological indoctrination, however, literature has been influencing people and the world for centuries. This is the "performative" effect of literature discussed by J. Hillis Miller (On Literature 37). In the case of Ha

-236- Jin and Yan Geling, their writing is not only a creation of an alternative world, but also an establishment of a kind of discourse, which is in opposition to the official ones, filling in the gaps left by the master narratives of the real world.

Henry Yiheng Zhao, a writer-cum-critic who used to reside in London, raises a question in his article, "The Japanese Camps: Fiction and History": how shall we search for history? (324) According to Zhao, if history cannot be transformed into colourful narratives, it will disappear. Similarly, Ha Jin also asserts that "without a lasting literary work, their sufferings and losses will fade considerably in the collective memory, if not altogether," and he, therefore, concludes that "to preserve is the key function of literature, which, to combat historical amnesia, must be predicated on the autonomy and integrity of literary works inviolable by time" ("Spokesman" 30).

Interestingly, writers such as Ha Jin and Yan Geling try to enter history through the avenue of their art, while I am approaching history by deciphering the messages hidden between the lines. David Der-wei Wang points out in the opening of his book, Ways of Imagining China:

Fiction is one of the most important genres in contemporary Chinese literature, which has recorded various phenomena, either funny or sad, that have taken place during the process of Chinese modernization. Meanwhile, the evolution of fiction itself can be considered as one symptom of Chinese modernization in the past century. ... The evolution of fiction seems to have nothing to do with "the fate of China," but indeed there exist many agreements. Thanks to the all-inclusive and multi-voiced nature of the fiction, its content is more reliable, compared to

-237- the condition of China in the narratives of history and politics. (1; 374-375; my translation)

Der-wei Wang is undoubtedly correct. History and fiction do often

overlap in terms of their subjects and contents. This is particularly true for

historical fiction, which becomes more memorable through the literariness of

its language and through the development of characters. Aristotle understood

that for the poet (and by extension all writers of literature), the shape and

power of the story over-rode the order of events and thus the historical

accuracy that historians have to follow.

In this regard, Jameson also argues that "[t]hird-world texts, even

those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal

dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national

allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the

embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society" (69;

emphasis in the original).

The arguments of Jameson and Wang may be limited and need further

analysis and clarification, but they are applicable to the works approached in

this thesis. To some extent, my reading of Ha Jin and Yan Geling can be

considered as an allegorical reading. In China, or for the Chinese, the fate of

individuals is always interwoven with the fate of the country and the change of

the times. The existence of an individual is more often than not a facet or a

reflection of the larger picture of the time and nation, an embodiment of a

collective memory. For this reason, to read texts about an individual is one way to touch and approach the time and the country's moves. -238- Compared to local writers in mainland China, overseas Chinese writers enjoy a larger space of freedom to manipulate their subjects and themes. In addition to their advantage of being exempt from censorship, their being away from China also provides them a unique perspective to look back at that country. Yiheng Zhao points out that the stand from the periphery, which benefits from the cultural and psychological distance that immigrant writers usually keep from the mainstream, consciously or subconsciously, provides them a more advantageous position to examine their own culture

("Preface" 2-3).

Zhao's perspective is certainly applicable to Ha Jin and Yan Geling.

Both of them mention that their distance from China has provided them with a unique point of view. Ha Jin believes that his experience of "living in

America—the distance in time, the space" has changed his perspectives (qtd. in Geyh 193). Yan Geling also admits that due to the distance in terms of time, geography, culture and language, many past events have been gained a new meaning (qtd. in Ouyang 44).

The Chinese government always encourages people to "look ahead"; in other words, to get rid of historical burdens and to walk on with light packs.

From the perspective of psychology, this guideline is undoubtedly beneficial for people's health; from a historical viewpoint, however, this attitude needs to be double checked. As a party in power, the Chinese Communist Party is certainly reasonable since there are too many rights and wrongs that have not

-239- been settled, and the party naturally wishes these traumatic memories could disappear from the public horizon.

It is exactly in this sense that I argue that Ha Jin and Yan Geling's writings constitute counter narratives against the official master narratives. In this dissertation, my argument about these counter narratives has a double sense. Except for the level of literary productions, as mentioned above, my review of these works forms another level of counter narratives. This forms a chain of "reality—texts (master narratives, mostly history and politics)— alternative texts (counter narratives, literary texts, for instance)—reviews

(conforming to the official ideology)—alternative reviews (innocent, more individual perspectives)."

The main body of this dissertation is made up of four independent case studies. These examples, which I chose because of their significance, are suggestive and not comprehensive, but should help to break new ground for those who wish to study the topic further. By limiting myself to four instances, I was able to study the texts in more detail rather than giving an overview without close attention to the works. This approach also allowed me to concentrate on two writers, which allows for some emphasis on the individual. As Ha Jin writes, "great literature has never been produced by collectives" ("Spokesman" 19). Writing is always a personal project. In this sense, there should be nothing wrong to focus on one writer and one work at a time.

-240- Moreover, both Ha Jin and Yan Geling are contemporary writers and both of them are active and productive. They will continue to produce after this thesis is completed. It is, therefore, hard to cover all of their works and all of the aspects demonstrated in their works. In addition, it is still too close to the publication of their works, and it takes time for their works to cool down and to be evaluated from more complete and more objective perspectives.

In examining contemporary works, it is also difficult to find a theoretical perspective that will take into account the shifting ground of the recent past and the present. Recently, I happened to read J. Hillis Miller's article, "The

Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction," which provides a definition of "cultural studies" by listing its main presuppositions. Among these presuppositions, Miller points out that cultural studies "may sometimes be primarily thematic, paraphrastic and diagnostic in their way of reading" (17).

Though, for Miller, this approach, like others, is not without its limitations, it seems to have some affinities to my own in this thesis. Perhaps, my project can also be placed in this inclusive basket of "cultural studies," which has more or less "politicized" the literary texts.40

So I combine close attention to these writers and their texts with a desire to place them in some theoretical and historical context. There is only so much space in a given study, and so I have left for future study more emphasis on these writers' and works' wider historical and cultural perspectives. One reason I chose fictional and possible worlds is that it

40 Here, I am applying Miller's conception. Miller argues in his article that to "politicize" art is one project of cultural criticism ("Cultural Criticism" 11). -241- develops in some ways out of Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry and puts poetics in a philosophical context. In other words, although poetics and possible worlds show an understanding of their differences from history, they do not stress history for the most part. They seek to uncover universals, or at least some transhistorical and transcultural qualities in literature that provide codes that communicate across times and cultures.

This is one way to do Comparative Literature. I have tried to compare works by two key Chinese writers working in either Mandarin or English and to convey the importance of their work to those working in the contexts of

Chinese and English. Although these writers are working recently and now

(in a contemporary context), I have tried to show by paying close attention to the text through the lens of approaches like possible and fictional world theory that their work can cross cultures and has some enduring value. Although this position may not always have been popular in departments of literature in the

West since the 1970s, it was one that Aristotle took and one that has been very influential since, sometimes even in the resistance to it. Theorists as accomplished as Bruner and Pavel have found this approach valuable, and I stand in this tradition. In a sense, I have tried to take what I thought was most effective in illuminating the texts of these two major Chinese writers in a kind of meeting of East and West.

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-263- APPENDIX

A Dialogue between Different Voices:

A Tentative Interpretation of Ha Jin's "In Broad Daylight"41

As a winner of the Kenyon Review Prize for Fiction in 1993, the

Pushcart Prize in 1995 and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in

1997, Ha Jin's short story "In Broad Daylight" has received as much publicity as is possible in contemporary American literary circles. Set in the 1960s

China, a time when the "Great Cultural Revolution" was catching on like fire throughout the country, the story depicts, from a teenager's perspective, a

public denunciation of a woman named Mu Ying and the unexpected rough death of her husband. This paper will apply narrative theories about narrators and the implied author to a textual analysis, with a focus on different voices

exemplified on figures such as the narrator, the Red Guards, the townspeople, the denounced and her husband.

The narrator-cum-observer "I," nicknamed "White Cat," is a teenager who lives in the town with his crippled grandmother. The story begins at the

moment when "Bare Hips," his pal living on the same street, "hopped in,"

informing him that Mu Ying, the Old Whore, had been caught, and urging him to join quickly the rare event in the town. The narrator "I" put down his bowl, which was almost empty, and "rushed" to the inner room for his clothes.

Under the urging of Bare Hips, White Cat finally gave up his searching for the shoes and, ignoring his grandmother's shouting behind him, ran out

41 This is originally a term paper of "China 599: Chinese Fiction and Narratology," a version of which has been published. Comparative Literature: East & West. Sichuan University, Chengdu, China. 9 (2007): 67-77. -264- barefooted. From these descriptions, it is easy to see that for the teenagers in the town, like the narrator and his companion, the event serves only as a scene of bustle and excitement. They feel no worry nor doubt, but excitement and fun at hand.

According to Rimmon-Kenan, the main sources of unreliability are the narrator's limited knowledge, his personal involvement, and his problematic value-scheme (100). By these criteria, a young narrator would be a clear case of limited knowledge, and consequently his or her reliability is questionable. In addition, in accordance with its definition, the reader has good reasons to suspect the rendering of the story and/or commentary by the unreliable narrator (Rimmon-Kenan 100). As far as this story is concerned, the young age of the narrator "I" becomes the most distinguishing mark of an unbelievable narrator, and his reliability is put in doubt.

As a group of juveniles, the narrator and his companions know little about adult life. This limitation makes their participation "a journey of discovery" (Zhou 156). When adults burst out laughing at Mu's assertion of her husband's impotence, the teenagers appeared to be puzzled. The dialogue between them shows this point clearly:

"What's that? What's so funny?" Big Shrimp asked Bare Hips. "You didn't get it?" Bare Hips said impatiently. "You don't know anything about what happens between a man and a woman. It means that whenever she doesn't want him to come close to her he comes. Bad timing." "It doesn't sound like that," I said. (8)

-265- Obviously, Bare Hips does not know any more than Big Shrimp, though his impatient tone tries to conceal this ignorance. Ignorant as he is, Bare Hips makes so bold as to cry at Mu, "Shameless Old Whore!" (4). Imperceptibly, the innocent children are acting the role of accomplice in the public denunciation against Mu. Their thoughts and behaviors manifest the influence they have received from their parents. In this sense, the innocent teenagers have degenerated from lovely angels to dreadful demons.

Though it would take several hours to finish the whole procession, the children would like to parade Mu through every street. This is a clear mark of their empty minds and boring lives. At that age, they should have been sitting in the classroom reading or listening to the teachers' instruction. Yet the reality is that they came to the school building to attend the public denunciation, an exciting yet dangerous adult game that had nothing to do with them. In addition, without any information beforehand, they "knew" where they were going. Needless to say, the White Mansion, their classroom building, the only two-story house in town, had witnessed events like that innumerable times.

Just when they felt tired and bored, Squinty emerged and said,

"Someone is dead at the train station. Come, let's go have a look" (15). The word "death" touched their nerves. The death, which should have been shocking and upset, serves them again as a thrilling scene. Apathetic as they are, the sight of the broken head accompanied by bluebottles and lizards makes Bare Hips vomit violently.

-266- It is just in this sense that the trauma in the story can be interpreted as an initiation story for the teenagers living in the town. According to the working definition offered by Mordecai Marcus, an initiation story is a kind of story in which a young protagonist experiences "a significant change of knowledge about the world or himself, or a change of character, or of both, and this change must point or lead him towards an adult world. It may or may not contain some form of ritual, but it should give some evidence that the change is at least likely to have permanent effects" (222). Jerome Beaty further points out that the shocking experience of the unscheduled event may help children understand for the first time the significant, life-changing truth about human beings, society, or themselves (163-64; qtd. in Lin 53).

In Ha Jin's story, the rough death of Meng Su, the husband, constitutes an "unscheduled event," which brings the narrator and his companions to the violence of the adult world. The public denunciation of Mu was no longer a thrilling scene, but something that touched them to their souls, evoking their introspection or maybe disillusion about the world. Bare

Hips' vomiting is a strong signal, indicating the shocking effect that the violence may have brought to him. After the shocking experience, they are no longer innocent adolescences, but adults struggling at the "threshold of maturity and understanding" (Marcus 223).

As described above, the teenager "I" can be considered as a dramatized homodiegetic narrator in the sense of Wayne Booth's and

Rimmon-Kenan's definition, but he plays only a secondary role as observer

-267- and witness (Booth 152; Rimmon-Kenan 95-96; Genette 245). Viewed from his perspective, the public denunciation of Mu sounds more like a thriller, though it turns out to be boring at the end, and the rough death of her husband arouses only the curiosity of innocent children. Obviously, this is not likely to be the "values" (or "norms") a great artistic product would like to offer.

For this reason, the assumption that the teenager "I" in the story is not reliable can be proved.

Now that the narrator has been identified as an unreliable one, the interpretation needs to reconstruct the norms of the implied author other than that of the narrator. As Seymour Chatman defends it, the concept of the implied author, "the agency within the narrative fiction itself which guides any reading of it," gives readers "a way of naming and analyzing the textual intent of narrative fictions under a single term but without recourse to biographism.

This is particularly important for texts that state one thing and imply another"

(Coming to Terms 74-75).

According to Chatman, a literary text, upon publication, becomes a self-existing thing and invention, originally an activity in the real author's mind, becomes a principle recorded in the text (Coming to Terms 81). For this reason, readers need to resort to the concept of the implied author to

"activate" "the effect which the work aims to evoke, the organizing principle informing the whole, or the meaning which the work manifests or suggests"

(Stallman 398; qtd. in Chatman, Coming to Terms 82).

-268- Chatman further points out that the implied author has no 'voice,' which only empowers others to 'speak'; and that the implied author (unlike the delegated speaker, the narrator) is a silent source of information, which

"instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices"

(Coming to Terms 85; Story and Discourse 149). By these arguments,

Chatman not only states the differentiation between real author, implied author and narrator, but also recognizes the narrator's relation to the implied author. In the case that the narrator is unreliable, to make a distinction between the narrator's voice and the norms of the implied author appears to be even more important.

In contrast to the innocent teenagers, the voice of White Cat's grandmother represents a view popular among the old people in the town.

When it was confirmed that Mu would be paraded that afternoon, her response was "Good, good! ...They should burn the bitch on Heaven Lamp like they did in the old days" (1). Though a female herself, Grandma supports the "revolutionary action" of the Red Guards without any reservation. She feels no sympathy for Mu's suffering because in her eyes, Mu is a bad woman and she deserves more severe punishment.

This point of view is typical of Chinese old women, who are instilled with teachings like "the Three Obedience and Four Virtues." For them, women, as the dependency of men, are not allowed to have their own rights and thoughts. A woman's chastity is valued more than her life, and a husband's kindness is considered as a sort of favor that requires a wife to return with a -269- whole life's gratitude, loyalty and slavery service. In the case of Mu Ying, a woman who lost her virginity in an accident, it is quite natural that, rather than being sympathized with, she would be condemned and underrated. Now that her husband has accepted her, she should have returned his good- heartedness with her loyalty, instead of bringing him shame with her illicit affairs. No wonder that the older generation like Grandmother would clap and cheer at Mu's suffering and not condemn those who brought trouble to her.

As Wayne Booth points out, "most works contain disguised narrators who are used to tell the audience what it needs to know, while seeming merely to act out their roles" (152). In this story, Grandmother actually plays the role of a disguised narrator. As a senior woman living in the town, she certainly has experienced more things than the young, as makes her a suitable candidate to act as the disguised narrator relating the past story of

Mu and her husband. As "I" was told, Mu had once been raped by a group of

Russian soldiers and left on the riverbank afterwards. It was Meng Su, the man who became her husband later, who sneaked there, carried her back, and looked after her for a whole winter untill she recovered.

Booth points out further that, though disguised narrators are seldom labeled so explicitly as God in Job, they often speak with an authority as sure as God's (152). According to Booth's perspective, the disguised narrator often acts as the agent of the implied author and more often than not, his voice represents the authorial voice of the implied author that should be taken seriously. In this sense, the view of Grandmother can be interpreted as part of

-270- the norm of the implied author. Through the voice of Grandmother, the implied author is not condemning Mu, the wife, but tries to confirm the truth that Meng, the husband, is indeed a good-hearted man, and he deserves a better outcome than that in the story. The implied author has placed his great sympathy on that poor man.

As a unique phenomenon of the times, the Red Guards, an organization that was initiated among young students all over the country to

"protect" the red socialist power during the Cultural Revolution, play an important role in the story. It is the Red Guards who caught Mu at home and organized the session of public denunciation. The author writes, "God knew how they came to know there was a bad woman in our town" (4). This actually constitutes a suspension in response to the underlying narrative.

In the atmosphere of hailing all "revolution enthusiasm," from publicly denouncing teachers at school to intervening various trifling matters in the neighborhood, the Red Guards were granted an unlimited power to take whatever "revolutionary action" that was necessary in their eyes. Assuming themselves to be holders of truth and justice, they spontaneously shouldered the great responsibility to remove any thoughts and practices that might

"harm" the socialist cause. Naturally, they would not mind traveling seventy kilometers to come and denounce Mu, the "demon" and the "snake" in the town, whom they did not know at all.

As a group of juveniles that had been brainwashed by an extremely

Leftist trend of thought, the Red Guards never realized that their -271- dehumanizing means of punishment, like planting paper hats on people's heads, cutting their hair, or parading them against their will, were flagrant violations of those people's human rights, and that they were acting against the law of protecting people's basic rights of living. They were just afraid that what they did was not "revolutionary" enough.

The most noticeable point in the story is the wording of the Red

Guards'dialogue towards Mu, "the criminal," and the three visitors of her house. They asked her first, "Why do you seduce men and paralyze their revolutionary will with your bourgeois poison?" (7). Obviously, the word

"seduce" is connotative of vicious intentions and spiteful behavior, while

"bourgeois" is a sensitive label with which nobody would like to have any relation during the Cultural Revolution. Contrarily, the frequenters of her house become people with "revolutionary will." Ironically, the Red Guard asked the question "solemnly," without any awareness of the ideological color in his wording. Mu is further depicted as the "parasite that sucked blood out of a revolutionary officer" and the "snake" that swallowed the money of a peasant; whereas the peasant who visited her house became the object of sympathy—"a poor peasant who worked with his sow for a whole year and got a litter of piglets. That money is the salt and oil money for his family, but this snake swallowed the money in one gulp" (12). Nobody in the town takes the trouble to think why Mu is the sole culprit that is condemned.

When Mu confessed that the third man that visited her house was a

Red Guard, who led the propaganda team that passed there last month, the

-272- crowd broke into laughter. This might be the response to the sentence above,

"God knew how they came to know there was a bad woman in our town" (4).

As readers, we cannot say for sure, but it is not wrong to guess that the Red

Guard, who had been beaten black and blue, may have plotted behind the scenes such a "revolutionary action" against Mu. Deploying this incident, the implied author launches a satire on the Red Guards as a whole, who are assumed to be removers of bourgeois practices, while some of them were doing something which they are denouncing. More importantly, they were taking advantage of the "revolution" to take revenge on their personal enemies. The implied author seems to highlight that the Red Guards are human beings that may err, not the saints or sagas that they are assumed to be. Naturally, their motives, values and practices are questionable.

Nevertheless, the leader of the Red Guards is skillful and experienced, who distracts the public attention with the following remarks: "We all have heard the crime Mu Ying committed. She lured one of our officers and one of our peasants into the evil waters, and she beat a Red Guard black and blue. Shall we let her go home without punishment or shall we teach her an unforgettable lesson so that she won't do it again?" (14; emphasis added).

With his words, the denunciation was directed again at Mu; and meanwhile, the introspection incurred by the episode of the Red Guard was interrupted successfully.

As a central focus of the public denunciation, Mu appeared to be

"rather calm" when she was caught at home. She neither protested nor said a

-273- word, but followed the Red Guards quietly. In her eyes, these Red Guards were only a group of children. She did not expect that the combined forces of the Red Guards and the "revolutionary masses" in the town would be tremendous enough to send her to destruction; more importantly, she did not think that her behavior had violated any rule or law. When her husband appealed to the Red Guards, she stared at him without a word, and a faint smile passed the corners of her mouth. In her eyes, the behavior of her impotent husband is pedantic and ridiculous. When the Red Guard asked her why she "seduced men and paralyzed their revolutionary will," she responded

"rather calmly" with a rhetorical question: "I've never invited any man to my home, have I?" When several women hissed in the crowd, she even tried to persuade them by citing her own experience:

"Sisters," she spoke aloud. "All right, it was wrong to sleep with them. But you all know what it feels like when you want a man, don't you? Don't you once in a while have that feeling in your bones?" Contemptuously, she looked at the few withered middle-aged women standing in the front row, then closed her eyes. "Oh, you want that real man to have you in his arms and let him touch every part of your body. For that man alone you want to blossom into a woman, a real woman—" (8)

If we do not doubt whether a woman living in the town at the end of the 1960s can speak in such an undisguised way, we may take her speech as a declaration of the women's liberation movement. In this sense, Mu is already a feminist with a strong awareness of subject. She is not only courageous in ignoring social norms, but also brave in breaking the patriarchal tradition.

-274- Analyzed from the perspective of "story time" versus "discourse time," the large space that the speech occupies in the whole text can be interpreted as a strategy the implied author uses to "invite" readers to slow down and think about the rationality of Mu's behavior. It is also at this point that the implied author has shown his controlled sympathy to its heroine Mu.

The speech, to some extent, also provides a footnote for Mu's calmness in front of the Red Guards and the gathering crowd. According to her own logic, she has done nothing wrong. Compared to the "withered middle-aged women" standing in front of her, she even feels proud of her face that is "white and healthy like fresh milk" (4).

Imaginably, as a victim of gang rape, she must have experienced a hard time of being treated with disdain. Instead of being hit to death by the accident, she has walked out of the shadow of the concept of chastity, and began to enjoy the pleasure of the flesh as well as economic benefits brought about by men, the invader of her virginity. The bitter time she has experienced has actually hardened her heart and paved the way for her further self-liberation, both physically and spiritually.

While she was indulging in her speech, a heavy blow from a stout young fellow silenced her. This is a clear signal that her declaration of liberty cannot be accepted. At the bottom of their hearts, they may agree with her, but, to defend their "dignity" and their so-called moral principles, they have to conceal their real thoughts and appear to be resisting it strongly. When Bare

Hips' mother pointed out that she had her own man and that she should not

-275- have others' men and pocket their money, Mu glanced at her husband and smirked, "I have my own man?" She straightened up and said, "My man is nothing. He's no good, I mean in bed. He always comes before I feel anything" (8). Viewed from a modern perspective, Mu has good reason to divorce her husband, yet in her times, to divorce was almost impossible, and more importantly, a divorced woman would be condemned too. If she could not bear a life without sexual love, she could only keep illicit sexual relations with other men.

As Grandma predicted, unfortunately, Mu's mole beside her left nostril was not a beauty-mole, but a tear-mole, and her life would be soaked in tears.

Like the old Chinese saying that a femme fatale often suffers an unhappy fate, it seems impossible for Mu to get rid of the odd lots. The bitter feeling of being gang raped has passed, yet the evil influence of public denunciation would linger on for the rest of her life. For a woman, the existence of a husband is, to some extent, like that of a guarding dog in the yard, which possesses a sort of deterrent force. Imaginably, as a widow in the town, she would confront harsher treatment. As long as the "revolutionary" mentality continues, her personal safety is out of the question.

When a large bottle of ink smashed on Mu's head, she broke into swearing and blubbering. In order to get rid of her "counter-revolutionary airs," the Red Guards decided to cut her hair. Despite her appeal to them, her permed hair became the sacrifice of the Red Guard's scissors. After these sufferings, she became another person, from appearance to air.

-276- At the end of the denunciation, Mu was asked to parade in the street, with a huge paper hat planted on her head and a big placard between the cloth shoes lying against her chest. On the placard, there are the following words:

I am a Broken Shoe

My Crime Deserves Death (14)

They put a gong in her hands and ordered her to strike it when she announced the words written on the inner side of the gong. Up to this point, her pride and beauty has disappeared completely in front of the strong, collective will of the Red Guards and the "revolutionary masses." She has lost her normal rights as a human being in her society. Anybody can call her names, hit her, or throw stones at her. She becomes once again a victim of the collective action under the name of "revolution."

The story ends with a plain sentence: "She was lying at the bus stop, alone" (16). With this terse sentence, the implied author again casts his sympathetic eyes on the unfortunate woman. The implied author seems to be murmuring that, after all, she is only a tool, a sexual tool for the group of

Russian soldiers, the visitors to her home, and an outlet of the Red Guards'

"revolutionary enthusiasm" and "revolutionary action." As the target of public denunciation, she is the greatest victim of the event: she has lost her beauty—her capital to be proud of as a woman—as well as her dignity as a normal member of society; and most importantly, she has lost forever her husband, who once offered her a shelter from the wind and rain outside, a material home whose existence was often ignored by her. -277- Meng Su, the husband, is a dwarf peddler, who sells bean jelly in summer and sugarcoated haws in winter. He is such a kind and humble man that he calls the Red Guard "Comrade Red Guards" and "sister," though they are much younger than he is. In order to persuade the Red Guards to set his wife free, he is ready to kneel down. Compared to the calmness of his wife and her shouting abuse when someone put ink on her head, Meng looks more like a woman than a man. This is very likely a manifestation of his position at home.

Though some people in the town consider him as "a born cuckold,"

Grandma, "for some reason, seemed to respect" him, believing him to be a good-hearted man (7). Though in the eyes of his wife, Meng is not a qualified good husband, he himself assumes in public his role as a husband and a master. When he begged the Red Guards to set her free, he said, "It's all my fault. I haven't disciplined her well" (5). The word "discipline" is connotative of a sort of power and authority. It seems that he is appealing for his children who have made mistakes at school.

Yet, when his wife revealed in front of the crowd his "shortcomings," his pride and dignity as a man and as a husband were smashed into pieces.

The gossip of the town people and the public denunciation of his wife had brought him embarrassment, but the key factor leading to his unexpected death was his wife's public disclosure of his "scar." As the story goes, Mu glanced at her husband and smirked before she announced the shocking

"secret"; yet, a few minutes later, when she turned her eyes to the spot where

-278- her husband had been standing, he was no longer there. Obviously, Meng followed the crowd to the site of denunciation though he failed to get his wife free, and hearing his wife's condemnation, he left quietly.

Like the image of Jesus in the Bible, who was born to deliver the people from an abyss of misery, but was put to death, Meng spared no effort to save his wife, providing her a comforting shelter, but was pushed to death at the end. Did he commit suicide because of feelings of shame or feelings of guilt towards his wife? Whatever the reason is, he must have been overcome by an overwhelming despair. Through his corpse with "so many openings," the implied author seems to be telling people the various injuries he had suffered. His "opening mouth" seems to be relating his feeling of helplessness in front of the social upheaval and his vast sadness as a social outcast. Like his body, his heart had been crushed to pieces too. The figure that "he looked like a large piece of fresh meat on the counter in the butcher's" (15) indicates his tragic life that was bullied and humiliated by people around him, including his wife.

The text mentions his tearful eyes several times. When he answered the Red Guards' question, his small eyes were tearful; when the townspeople teased him by urging the Red Guards to "take him too" (6), he looked scared, sobbing quietly; when his wife stared at him contemptuously, he winced under her stare; and finally he "had spoken with tears in his eyes to a few persons he had run into on his way to the station" (16). A symptom of weakness though, tears in his eyes also relate the various grievances and humiliations

-279- he had suffered and the feeling of helplessness and despair that nobody understood. However, his rough death under the running train seems to assert his bravery, his resistance and his indictment.

The toot of the train that appears twice in the story is another strategy the implied author uses. The first time it appears as an echo to highlight the farcical nature of the public denunciation. The young driver, who just toots to attract the attention of young women beneath the track, is analogous to the

Red Guards, who takes the public denunciation as a political game. The second time, however, with the use of the word "screamed," serves as a warning of the coming catastrophe. The text says, "It was strange, because the drivers of the four o'clock train were a bunch of old men who seldom blew the horn" (13). As it turns out later, this is a signal of Meng's violent death.

Just as his defense of Mu and his pleas for leniency are weak and unheard, the signal of his death stirs no emotional disturbance among the masses. As the only person in the story who defends Mu and pleads for her release,

Meng represents, for the implied author, compassion and humanity, and his death "dramatizes the loss of compassion and humanity" at least in the world of Mu Ying (Zhou 160).

The townspeople voluntarily joining the public denunciation can be considered as a collective voice, though an inconsistent one. When the Red

Guards caught Mu and decided to parade her, the townspeople, including

Grandmother, all felt a sensation of pleasure because some people have done what they wanted to do but failed to do due to various misgivings. They

-280- joined the session of denunciation not out of the "revolutionary enthusiasm" that is shared by the Red Guards, but out of the vengeful mentality of watching for fun.

In the eyes of the townspeople, Mu is different. She wore a sky-blue dress while the other women "were always in jackets and pants suitable for honest work" (4). Even the small boys like the narrator can perceive her beauty. She is

perhaps the best looking woman of her age in town. Though in her fifties, she didn't have a single gray hair; she was a little plump, but because of her long legs and arms she appeared rather queenly. While most of the women had sallow faces, hers looked white and healthy like fresh milk. (4)

To some extent, it is her beauty that makes her stand out among the masses and leads to her suffering.

When Meng appealed to the Red Guards, a man in the crowd said aloud, "If you share the bed with her, why can't you share the street?" (5).

Hearing the words, many of the grown-ups laughed, and someone even suggested to the Red Guards, "Take him, take him too" (6). Nobody paid attention to the poor man's sobbing drowned out by the wanton laughter.

Maybe because of their belief that Meng was "a born cuckold," and that he had no pride as a man or a husband, nobody would like to support him. On the contrary, they took the advantage of his bad fortune to make fun of him.

Through the behavior of these townspeople, the implied author seems to show readers the wicked side of human beings. Facing other people's

-281- suffering, they would rather stand by and watch than stretch out their hand to help.

After the session of denunciation began, a middle-aged man cried after the Red Guard, with both hands in the air, "Down with Old Bitch Mu

Ying!" (7). The text explains that this man was "an active revolutionary in the commune" (7). Through the image of this man, the implied author seems to tell us that the public denunciation of Mu have provided a chance for those

"enthusiastic revolutionaries" to show themselves off.

When Mu was indulging in her long speech about women's sexual desire, a stout young fellow struck her on the side with a fist like a sledgehammer. Yet questions like "How many men have you slept with these years?" are raised. Through these completely opposite behaviors, the implied author seems to condemn the hypocrisy of the townspeople. On the one hand, they openly sneer at Mu's confession of her own sexual desires; yet, on the other hand, they are eager to know the details of Mu's copulation with different men, and command her to confess the specifics. "The conflict between what they openly despised and what they secretly yearn for conveys the town people's distorted and suppressed desires, which have to be channeled through their verbal and physical abuse of other people who materialized their own suppressed desires" (Zhou 158-59). This is a typical display of voyeurism.

In addition, during the session, a farmer even shouted, "Sing us a tune, sis?" (11). Who is more obscene, the denounced or the "revolutionary

-282- masses"? It is very likely that they just lack the opportunity or perhaps the money to do the thing that they are publicly denouncing. Besides, it is hard to say clearly whether there are some people among the "revolutionary masses" who once yeaned for the body of Mu but were rejected by her. The public denunciation for them is a golden chance to revenge their rejected and unsatisfied desire.

With the violent death of the husband at the end and the wife Mu

Ying's "pathetic whining for home on the street" (Zhou 160), the wretched story that takes place "in broad daylight" touches the heart of every reader.

Yet who should be responsible for their tragic lots? The Red Guards? The townspeople? Hearing her heart-rending appeal, is there anybody pondering over the denunciation with which they have been involved? Who is the real

"evil monster" that has directed such a tragedy?

As Chatman points out, the implied author is the source of the work's invention (Coming to Terms 74), which "instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn" (Story and Discourse 148). The implied author in this story, deploying various narrative strategies such as a disguised narrator, the discourse time and repeated references, has rendered his generous sympathy to the husband, on whom compassion and humanity are manifested; and controlled sympathy to the wife, an imperfect figure with odd lots.

"Set mostly in a politics-intensive setting," as Zhou points out in her

-283- thesis, "his [Ha Jin's] stories often transcend politics" (154). A farce that happened in crazy times, the story itself is a full display of humanity that is not confined to a particular society or specific times.

-284- Works Cited

Beaty, Jerome, ed. The Norton Introduction to Fiction. New York: Norton, 1981.

Booth, Wayne C. "Types of Narration." The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. 149-165.

Chatman, Seymour. "In Defense of the Implied Author." Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. 74-89.

—. "Real Author, Implied Author, Narrator, Real Reader, Implied Reader, Narratee." Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978. 147-151.

Genette, Gerard. "Person." Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.243-252.

Jin, Ha. "In Broad Daylight." Under the Red Flag: Stories by Ha Jin. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1997. 1-16.

Lin, Jenn-Shann. Taiwan Fiction and Narratology. Taipei: Avanguard, 2002.

Marcus, Mordecai. "What Is an Initiation Story?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 19 (1960/61): 221-228.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. "Extent of participation in the story." Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge, 2002. 95-96.

Stallman, R. W. "Intentions." Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.

Zhou, Yupei. "Chapter 3 Ha Jin: Waiting and Short Stories." The Conceptions of Freedom in Contemporary Chinese and Chinese American fiction: Gish Jen, Yan Geling, Ha Jin, Maureen F. McHugh. Ph.D dissertation, Kent State University, 2003. 145-189.

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