Erature About (Post-) Communist China Is
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The man who finds his country sweet is only a raw beginner; the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man for whom the whole world is as a foreign country is perfect. —by Hugh of Saint Victor (1096?-1141) 读万卷书,行万里路。——中国古训 (Read ten thousand volumes; travel ten thousand lis. —an ancient Chinese maxim) University of Alberta The Question of Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Transcultural Travel Narratives about Post-1949 China by Leilei Chen A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies © Leilei Chen Fall 2010 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Examining Committee Janice Williamson, Department of English and Film Studies Edward Bishop, Department of English and Film Studies Jean DeBernardi, Department of Anthropology Walter Davis, Department of Art and Design Shaobo Xie, English, University of Calgary For Xiaoguang and Zhenchun who accompanied me along this journey Abstract My dissertation, “The Question of Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Transcultural Travel Narratives about Post-1949 China,” aims to intervene in the genre of travel writing and its critical scholarship by studying a flourishing but under-explored archive. Travel literature about (post-) Communist China is abundant and has been proliferating since 1979 when China began to implement its open-door policy. Yet its scholarship is surprisingly scanty. Meanwhile, in the field of travel literature studies, many critics read the genre as one that articulates Western imperialism, an archive where peoples and cultures are defined within conveniently maintained boundaries between home and abroad, West and non- West. Others—in the field of literary and cultural studies as well as other disciplines—have started to question the binary power relationship. However, some of this work may well reinforce the binary opposition, seeking only evidences of the traveller’s powerlessness in relation to the native; and some, conceiving travel only on a geographical plane, seems unable to transcend the dichotomy of home and abroad, East and West at a theoretical level. My project is committed to further interrogating the binarism constructed by the genre of travel and its scholarship. My intervention is not to argue who gets an upper hand in a hierarchical relationship, but to challenge the stability of the hierarchy by foregrounding the contingency and complexity of cross-cultural relationships. My dissertation engages with the key issue of cross-cultural understanding and explicates various modalities of the traveller’s interpretation of otherness. By reading Canadian journalist Jan Wong, geophysicist Jock Tuzo Wilson, US Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, American anthropologist Hill Gates, and humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, I examine the ways in which the Western traveller negotiates and interprets foreignness, and probe the consequences of transcultural interactions. The overall argument of my dissertation—in dialogue with other scholarship in the field—is that travel not only (re)produces cultural differences but also paradoxically engenders a cosmopolitan potential that recognizes but transcends them. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of English and Film Studies and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research for granting me the prestigious FS Chia PhD Scholarship for international students to conduct my doctoral research in English at the University of Alberta. My thankfulness goes especially to Heather Zwicker, Graduate Chair in 2004, who cordially invited me to take the position, and to Patricia Clements who not only invited me but also met me at the airport when I first came and has been caring for my scholarly well-being ever since. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Janice Williamson, Edward Bishop, and Jean DeBernardi. Their scholarly input, unstinting support, and good will create a nourishing environment where this work grows exuberantly into its present form. I would like to acknowledge intellectual stimulation and generous help from Isobel Grundy. I also thank Magali Sperling Beck, Brenda Beckman- Long, Marie Carrière, Jidong Chen, Cecily Devereux, Sara Dorow, Amanda Lim, Jenn-shann Lin, Ian MacLaren, Robert Merrett, Lahoucine Ouzgane, Stephen Slemon, Margrit Talpalaru, Shaobo Xie, and Tim Youngs. My profound gratitude goes ultimately to my husband, Xiaoguang Xue, for his unwavering trust, support, and encouragement, and to my daughter, Zhenchun Xue, for being always a source of strength and inspiration although she is not always conscious herself. Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………......……….1 The Traveller as a Transcultural Subject …………………………… …..……..1 Travel Writing and the Question of Travel ……………………………..………6 Travel Writing about China ……………………………………………..…….16 The Question of Cross-Cultural Understanding ………………………..……..19 Enlightening Concepts and Ideas ……………………………….…… ……….24 Critical Reflections of the Thesis ……………………………….…… ……….28 Chapter One—The Egology of Cross-Cultural Understanding: Jan Wong’s Journalistic Travel Writing about China …………………….….…………...31 Concocting the Discourse of Difference ………….………….…….………….35 Authenticating the Egological ……………………………….…….…………..48 “Literary Cunning” ……...…………………………………….……………....57 Conclusion …………………………………………………….…………...… 67 Chapter Two—The Horizon of Cross-Cultural Understanding: Jock Tuzo Wilson’s One Chinese Moon …………………...………………..…….……….68 Preconceptions Disrupted ………………………………………………..……72 The New Vision: Validity and Limitation …………………………...…..……75 Learning through Travel as a Scientist ………………………………………..83 Critical Sensibility Engendered ………………………………………….……89 Removing Biases and Translating Cultural Differences ………………….…..93 “A Broader Humanism” ………………………………………………....…...101 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………...……105 Chapter Three—Enlightened Ambivalence: Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze …………………………………………....……….....….108 The Transculturated Traveller: Linguistic and Cultural Immersion ……........109 Epistemological Gain of Travel ………………………………………….…..123 The Travel Writer as a Critic ………………………………………………...134 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………...142 Chapter Four—Contextualizing Cultural Translation: On Hill Gates’s Anthropological Travel Writing about China ………………………..……..145 The Traveller’s Vision: Translating the Context of the Foreign ………….….147 The Traveller’s Contextualized Translation …………………………………154 The Traveller’s Self in Translation ………………………………………..…159 The Traveller’s Insights about Travel Writing and Culture ……………..…...170 Untranslatability of Culture and Self ………………………………………...179 Conclusion …………………………………………………………...……....185 Chapter Five—Locating “Cosmopolitan Hearth”: Yi-Fu Tuan’s Homecoming Travel and beyond …………….......…………………………..189 A Lifelong Traveller and the Question of Self and Belonging ……………....190 Self and Place ……………………………………………………………..….197 Self and Other Selves and Other Cultures ……………………………….......209 “Cosmopolitan Hearth” ………………………………………………………220 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………..….228 Conclusion ……………………………………………….……………………230 Works Cited …...……………………………………………………...…….…236 Chen 1 Introduction . the ‘post-colonial’ . obliges us to re-read the binaries as forms of transculturation, of cultural translation, destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever. (Hall, “When” 247) . the term ‘post-colonial’ is not merely descriptive of ‘this’ society rather than ‘that’, or of ‘then’ and ‘now’. It re-reads ‘colonisation’ as part of an essentially transnational and transcultural ‘global’ process—and it produces a decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation- centred imperial grand narratives. (Hall, “When” 247) . the only place in which the human subject dwells is between. (Radhakrishnan 8) The Traveller as a Transcultural Subject Reflecting on my travel experience in Canada, I always wonder how much one’s understanding of a place is affected by preconceptions, and how far one can go beyond them through the experience of travel to obtain a new understanding of home and abroad. I remember how excited I was when the University of Alberta granted me the FS Chia PhD Scholarship, which meant that I was able to travel to Canada, a country I imagined as a paradise on earth where people enjoy the best social welfare and a place where so many Chinese have made their second homes. Chen 2 The experience of travelling in Canada, however, resulted in successive cultural shocks; my idealized knowledge about this country was constantly contradicted by other versions I learned on arrival. In a course taken in the first semester, I was astounded when reading about Canada’s Residential Schools where First Nations children were starved, raped, and tortured: a country