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Downloaded from Brill.Com09/25/2021 10:40:21AM Via Free Access part 2 Drugs and Cancers: From Nation to Fiction ⸪ Haomin Gong - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:40:21AM via free access <UN> Haomin Gong - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:40:21AM via free access chapter 4 Unmaking of Nationalism: Drug Addiction and Its Literary Imagination in Bi Shumin’s Novel Haomin Gong 龚浩敏 The “genesis” of modern Chinese literature is closely connected with disease. Lu Xun’s 鲁迅 symbolic shift from medical studies to literature has, over the years, become a myth in the narrative of the rebuilding of a national litera- ture. His relentless critique of the corrupt Confucian tradition and the defec- tive Chinese national character, best exemplified in his short stories such as “A Madman’s Diary” (“Kuangren riji” 狂人日记), “The True Story of Ah Q” (“Ah Q zhengzhuan” 阿Q正传) and, more manifestly, “Medicine,” constitutes a start- ing point for much modern Chinese literature and serves to shape its most striking characteristic, which is, in C.T. Hsia’s influential phrase, “an obsession with China.” What characterizes modern Chinese literature, in Hsia’s view, is “its burden of moral contemplation: its obsessive concern with China as a na- tion afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity.”1 This concern with spiritual disease, so prominent in Lu Xun’s works, as well as those of his followers, is inevitably in wedlock with national concerns, given modern Chinese literature’s “obsessive concern with China as a nation.” Re- cent studies have shown that writing of diseases in modern China is deeply shaped by sociocultural conditions and, as a result, diseases are often used as a metaphor and become highly ideological.2 However, drug addiction, a dis- ease that is so central to Chinese national crisis, has unfortunately yet been adequately explored. As I will show below, this disease, if it is so called, has been written and rewritten especially firmly within the paradigm of national- ism. It is only normal, given its critical role in modern Chinese history, that this disease be viewed as such. However, this nationalistic imagination of drug ad- diction (and, arguably by extension, many other diseases) is facing certain re- modulations in contemporary time, due mainly to the new sociocultural con- ditions under which the disease is written about and read. To be more specific, 1 C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 533–34; my emphasis. 2 See, for instance, Carlos Rojas, ed., Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 23.1 (Spring 2011), a special issue on discourses of disease. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�9��9_006 Haomin Gong - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:40:21AM via free access <UN> 124 Gong the postsocialist condition has rendered the nationalistic understanding of drug addiction less than adequate, and required that it be “consumed” in a more diverse and less political fashion. Bi Shumin’s novel, The Red Prescription (Hong chufang 红处方, 1997), pro- vides an intriguing case about how drug addiction is reimagined and refash- ioned in contemporary Chinese literature. Situating this novel in her writ- ing career and reading it in the context of postsocialism, I examine how the dimension of nation-state, which used to be predominant in narratives of disease, makes place for the discourse of multiplicity and de-politicization, and in what way gender, particularly fashioned in the crisscross of national- ism and scientism, stages prominently in this transition to the postsocialist condition. Bi Shumin is a prolific woman writer active since the 1980s, and she is best known for her medical fiction, most notable among them five novels: The Red Prescription, A Blood Treatment Project (Xue linglong 血玲珑, 2001), Save the Breast (Zhengjiu rufang 拯救乳房, 2003), The Female Psychologist (Nü xinlishi 女心理师, 2007), and Corolla Virus (Huaguan bingdu 花冠病毒, 2012), each dealing with a type of controversial disease in contemporary China—drug addiction, leukemia, breast cancer, psychological problems, and a sars-like epidemic caused by an imaginary virus.3 It is intriguing that, like Lu Xun, Bi also turned from her career as a physician to writing. Before becoming a pro- fessional writer, she had served as a military doctor in western border areas for over a decade. Her experience of medicine has a strong impact on her writing, not only in the sense that her professional knowledge provides her with subject matter, but that it also influences her writing style and informs her perspective on the problematic of disease in particular and human lives in general. Her medical experience is not merely “one of a wide repertoire of subjects” enabling the author to probe her “own selfhood and imagination” but rather, a “force majeure.” This concept, an integral part of the “externalist” view put forward by George Sebastian Rousseau, is grounded in his observation that “all types of writers enthusiastically read nonliterary works and consequently ‘import’ subject matter, and… [this] importation permits those materials to be transformed into the stuff of great imaginative literature.”4 I argue that disease, for Bi, is not used as a means, a backdrop, or a metaphor, but its very physical existence constitutes the subject of her writing. 3 [For a detailed discussion of Save the Breast, see the next chapter by Howard Y. F. Choy. Ed.] 4 George Sebastian Rousseau, “Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field,” Isis, no. 72 (1981): 408–9. Haomin Gong - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:40:21AM via free access <UN> Unmaking of Nationalism 125 Moreover, the postsocialist condition in China, under which Bi writes and against the backdrop of which she sets most of her stories, shapes her writing at various levels. Bi’s approach to disease, particularly drug addiction, is re- markably different from those of her predecessors, be they of the May Fourth, revolutionary, or socialist period. Her writings are almost apparently free of the nationalistic and moralistic burdens assumed by her predecessors. With her, diseases seem to register as de-politicized characteristics—characteristics, that is, to be viewed not in terms of national honor, but of an urge to sepa- rate from it. Along with this change of emphasis appears a re-fashioned gen- der consciousness, because as disease is reimagined and redefined in today’s world, a certain gendered nationalism comes under sharp scrutiny in her work. However, this apparent feature of de-politicization, paradoxically, precisely reveals the ideological complexities specific to the postsocialist condition. The increasingly commercialized and ideologically diversified society serves as the very politics that mark the characteristics of the reimagination of drug addiction. Beyond the National: Contouring Drug Addiction Studies of literature and disease over the past decades have become a burgeon- ing field in the Western academic world. With the publication of the journal Literature and Medicine in the u.s. in the 1980s, this promising area began to attract increasing attention, and has by now grown into a fertile field. Mapping this field, Charles E. Rosenberg sees it as an interactive system between the distinctions—“ontological versus physiological, disease versus illness, biologi- cal event versus socially negotiated construction.”5 More specifically, disease is at once a biological event, a generation-specific repertoire of verbal constructs reflecting medicine’s intellectual and institutional his- tory, an occasion of and potential legitimation for public policy, an aspect of social role and individual—intrapsychic—identity, a sanction for cul- tural values, and a structuring element in doctor and patient interactions. In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it.6 5 Charles E. Rosenberg, “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” Introduction to Fram- ing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Lynne Golden (New Brunswick, n.j.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xxiii. 6 Ibid., xiv. Haomin Gong - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:40:21AM via free access <UN> 126 Gong Insightful as this observation is, however, one important dimension (or “frame,” to use Rosenberg’s term) in the Western articulations of disease remains under- addressed—that is, nationalism.7 While nationalism does not play as a promi- nent role in the Western discourses of disease as in China, it predominates and shapes Chinese people’s lives and imagination. For example, the “Sick Man of East Asia” (Dong Ya bingfu 东亚病夫), among other terms, may be the most vociferous expression of Chinese nationalism with respect to disease. The Chinese, as a nation, were regarded as being weak and sick physically, and by extension, spiritually. Remarkably foreign in its origin, the term had been de- tailed in both real and imagined ways, so as to spur a nationalistic sentiment. Understandably, its foreign character was markedly stressed, and as a result, the Sick Man of East Asia has become a national unconscious, the specter of which has to be exorcised repeatedly on various occasions thereafter.8 The modernization of medicine in China, as an integral part of the efforts to shed this humiliating title, is also tightly locked with the Chinese nation-state. Ruth Rogaski has shown in her seminal book, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, how the term weisheng 卫生 “hygiene/ sanitary/health” in modern China was discursively formulated in the course of national liberation and strengthening. The nation-state played a determinant role in the formulation of the term because the idea of weisheng originated in Chinese people’s internalization of their national deficiency; almost all of the campaigns to achieve weisheng were orchestrated at a national level by the state, and the aim of being weisheng was, besides individual welfare, ultimately a modern nation, be it a capitalist or socialist.
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