The Words of Women Bard’S a New Anthology Compiles the Stories of China’S Female Writers to Amplify Their Voices, Family Yang Yang Reports
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16 | Monday, September 14, 2020 HONG KONG EDITION | CHINA DAILY LIFE Book on The words of women Bard’s A new anthology compiles the stories of China’s female writers to amplify their voices, family Yang Yang reports. wins prize hen Zhang Li was full-fledged feminists, who are often around 6 years old in divided among themselves. LONDON — Maggie O’Farrell the 1970s, she was sent The anthology is like a jigsaw puz- won the Women’s Prize for Fic- to Baoding in North zle of different women’s situations, tion on Wednesday for Hamnet, China’sW Hebei province to live with Ji says. a novel that explores the lives of her maternal grandmother for a year. “We wanted to create an inclusive William Shakespeare’s often-ma- During many afternoons in the book, a chorus of different voices, ligned wife and lost son. countryside, her grandma took her open and cutting-edge, poignant, O’Farrell’s novel beat finalists to a big pagoda tree that women gentle but tough, all faithfully talk- including Hilary Mantel’s Tudor from the village liked to gather ing about women’s lives from differ- saga, The Mirror and the Light, under after lunch. ent perspectives,” Zhang says. and Bernardine Evaristo’s Book- These farmers’ wives busily sewed “We don’t emphasize feminism. er Prize winner, Girl, Woman, shoe soles, wove straw, breastfed It’s about women’s lives, like house- Other, for the 30,000-pound and shucked corn while chatting. wives, their work and feelings — all ($39,000) award. After playing hide-and-seek with kinds of female voices.” The Northern Ireland-born other kids, Li would sit and listen to The stories in the book touch on O’Farrell says she had long been the women talk — someone’s daugh- various topics. They address such fascinated by Hamnet Shake- ter became prettier, someone’s hus- issues as parental relationships, speare, who died at age 11 in 1596 band made more money, some old philosophical thinking about the — likely from the plague. His people had died and someone had a relationship between existence and name is echoed in the playwright’s new baby. language, surveillance society and great tragedy Hamlet, which was Li remembers a woman once self-reflections on the collective first performed several years later. burst into tears while talking, and trauma caused by the violent earth- “You only have to read the first showed the others her bruised arms quake in Wenchuan, Sichuan, in act of Hamlet to realize that it is and legs. May 2008. all about this deep undertow of Another time, a woman told a “These stories are not only about grief,” O’Farrell says. joke and the group burst into laugh- love and family but also about the Yet Hamnet is “lucky if he gets ter, sounding like a flock of birds bigger world,” she says. two mentions in those huge, brick- that had suddenly taken wing. “So, I divided them into three like biographies of Shakespeare”. But, as a 6-year-old, Li did not groups according to three themes — “His death is all too often understand a lot of things. love, secrets and beyond.” wrapped up in statistics of infant There was a woman who came to These themes, Zhang says, are not mortality in the Elizabethan age, the village to marry a man without stereotypically female, which is one which, of course, was very high. the official introduction of a of her principles for compiling the But (it’s) almost as if the implica- matchmaker or a wedding ceremo- book. tion unspoken was that it wasn’t ny. Although she seemed to live a As a literary critic, Zhang finds really that big of a deal,” she says. nice life, people gossiped about that, although more young women Shakespeare himself is never her. are brave enough to write about mentioned by name in Hamnet, There was another bride who their lives authentically, many pur- which centers on his children cried all day. Li later heard that she posefully shun cruel realities, espe- and wife Anne Hathaway, called was abducted from Southwest Chi- cially commonplace domestic Agnes in the book. na’s Sichuan province and was violence. O’Farrell says Hathaway has been being watched all the time. Female writers are generally very portrayed as “an illiterate strumpet” There were conversations about We wanted to create cautious when writing because, in because she was uneducated and pregnancy, abortion and the family- the end, this is a male-dominated eight years older than Shakespeare. planning policy. It wasn’t until she an inclusive book, a world, despite the fact that women’s “She’s always been treated grew up that she realized how brave chorus of different social status is improving, she says. with such hostility and suspi- that woman who married against In March 2019, she conducted a cion, and actually just barefaced custom was, that people should help voices, open and poll among 60 male writers about misogyny for the last 500 years,” the abducted woman and that the cutting-edge, their gender views. No male writer O’Farrell says from her home in woman with bruises was a victim of said they must abandon their gen- Edinburgh, Scotland. domestic violence. poignant, gentle but der consciousness in writing In the novel, Agnes is an inde- “It wasn’t until many years later tough, all faithfully because gender is simply an immu- pendent woman, an expert in that I realized the women’s chatting table fact. medicinal herbs who hunts with under the pagoda tree was not only talking about women’s “Female writers are worried a hawk. storytelling but also a kind of crying lives from different about their gender because, since For research, O’Farrell visited out and searching,” Zhang writes in the end of the 20th century, Chi- Anne Hathaway’s house near the preface to An Anthology of Short perspectives.” nese women’s writing has been Stratford-upon-Avon, made rem- Stories by Chinese Women in 2019. Zhang Li, editor of An Anthology associated with their personal edies from homegrown herbs “While telling their stories, they of Short Stories by Chinese experiences. Whatever they write and learned to fly a kestrel — “the processed their lives and healed Women in 2019 will be considered their own experi- most fun thing I’ve ever done in themselves. In storytelling, we look ence,” she says. the name of work”. for and recognize ourselves.” “A lot of women writers at that Founded in 1996, the Women’s The 49-year-old editor of the time wrote stories about sex that Prize is open to female English- anthology is also a professor of Chi- they claimed were based on person- language writers from around nese literature at Beijing Normal and ourselves in the mirror.” “Now, gender awareness is wide- “About half of the 20 writers in the al experiences so as to attract read- the world. University. Zhang was inspired to compile spread in China. So, it’s time we book are not very famous. Most ers. As a result, this title, ‘female The awards ceremony took Ji Yaya, deputy editor-in-chief of such a book when she was a doctoral should construct such a women’s lit- were born after 1985. They’re very writer’, has since been stigmatized.” place online because of the coro- the prestigious Chinese literary candidate working on her disserta- erary tradition, starting from the young and not yet known to the However, as writers, women navirus pandemic, with one of magazine, October, says this anthol- tion about the starting of Chinese fundamental work of compiling public. So, it’s a rather risky selec- should have the courage to break the judges, The Girl on the Train ogy’s compilation is a very meaning- female writing over 100 years ago. annual anthologies.” tion,” she explains. down prejudices and established author Paula Hawkins, traveling ful “literary action”. “I wanted to map out the history Zhang and her two doctoral can- “But we need to discover new norms to face the bloody reality, she to Edinburgh to give O’Farrell “Zhang Li is an intellectual, who of Chinese women’s literature, didates, Yan Dongfang and Hua female writers on the one hand. And says. the prize statuette. finds her research interest in person- including not only famous writers Cheng, started searching for women on the other, we hope it can encour- “I have confidence in young O’Farrell says that “having lived al experience and the contexts of dif- but also obscure ones,” she says. writers and their works on various age those young writers, which is female writers. As women’s social through this COVID crisis, in a ferent times. She has continued “I wanted to find out how Chinese platforms, including the most pres- very important.” status improves, women writers will sense, I feel closer to the Elizabe- turning her personal experiences women’s literature developed over tigious literary magazine, Harvest, Zhang writes in the preface: “That exist within a friendlier environ- thans”, who lived with constant and thoughts into energy through the last century. But it was a very dif- and websites like Douban, which I care about women and female gen- ment. I’m looking forward to great fear of the plague and other illness- action, including this collection,” she ficult process.” are more welcoming to new writers. der identity, and emphasize anthol- female writers, just like Eileen es, along with periodic lockdowns. says. She searched for female writers, Instead of just including the most ogizing female fiction is not Chang’s emergence in the 1930s, “I feel I have a slightly greater Zhang writes: “For me, selecting one by one, among old literary maga- famous voices, Zhang wanted to intended to exclude but rather to and more female writers who write understanding about what it stories for this anthology was like zines, such as New Youth in 1919 and find refreshing writers, who could better unpack and understand the about the lives of grassroots wom- must have been like because they trying to construct a fictional Fiction Monthly in 1921, and gradu- represent women’s current lives female world.” en,” she says.