Reception of Taiwan Literature in 1980S Mainland Ying Qian Abstract

Reception of Taiwan Literature in 1980s Mainland

Ying Qian1

Abstract:

In 1979 the mainland decided to promote Taiwanese literature as preparation for reunification. Taiwan writers, such as Bai Xianyong, Nie Hualing and Yang Qingzhu, were published for the first time in mainland literary magazines, marking the beginning of cultural exchange between two sides of the Taiwan Strait after decades of insulation. While official promotion of “serious” literature from Taiwan remained to a large extent political as writers and writings were selected to suit ideological requirements, throughout the 1980s, popular writing from Taiwan, printed via commercial channels, became widely spread and hugely popular in mainland China. This paper seeks to examine receptions of Taiwanese literature, both official and popular, in the mainland society and the various discourses it evoked. Modernist sentiments of writers like Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing, and nativist views of the “native soil” school were visions of various modernities in the Chinese-speaking world, but these visions did not enter significantly into discourses in 1980s mainland due to an over-emphasis on writers’ political stances. However, popular writings from Taiwan, such as the writings by Qiong Yao and San Mao, entered via market mechanism through the periphery provinces, and therefore managed to circle around politics and bring new visions and languages to mainland’s younger generation. Even though cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait began as a harmless rhetoric for re-unification, they gathered momentum of their own, and in the case of the singer Hou Dejian, his songs and presence in the mainland even became explosive in the end. Literary and cultural exchanges with Taiwan offered fresh inputs and challenges to the mainland in the 1980s, and were an important part of the cultural history of China in the years following the end of the Cultural Revolution.

1 Author is a visiting graduate student and lecturer at the Humanity Faculty of Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic, and a Ph.D. student of at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA.

1 Introduction

Two events of significance happened on the New Year’s Day of 1979. In the South China Sea, for decades the People’s Liberation Army of China had shelled the Taiwan-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu every two days without fail, first with live ammunition and then with cartridges filled with propaganda leaflets. However, on the first day of 1979, they quietly stopped operation.2 On the same day, Ye Jianying, head of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, issued a New Year’s Day “Message to Taiwan Compatriots”, which called for negotiations with Kuomingtang (KMT) leaders and a return of Taiwan to “the embrace of the motherland at an early date.”3 Needless to say, both events were closely related to the announcement made two weeks earlier by the American President Jim Carter, on December 16, 1978, on the United States’ recognition of Beijing. With American support, the date of reunification seemed close at hand, and the Beijing government started immediately to reach out to Taiwan after decades of hostility and insulation. The best way to call the “orphan of Asia” back to the motherland, determined by the Beijing leadership, was through literature. In February 1979, one month after the delivery of Ye Jianying’s New Year message, Taiwan novelist Bai Xianyong’s short story “Yongyuan de Yi Xueyan” was published in the first issue of a new Beijing literary magazine called Dang Dai (Contemporary). Approved and arranged by the central literary bureaucracy, this was the first publication of any literature from post-1949 Taiwan in the mainland, a gesture towards openness. With months, nine important literary magazines, including magazines in Shanghai, Anhui, Fujian and other provinces, followed course and published sixteen short stories from five writers from Taiwan.4

2 Frank Ching, “A Most Envied Province,” Foreign Policy, No. 36. (Autumn, 1979), p.122. 3 “Text of NPC Standing Committee Message to Taiwan Compatriots,” Xinhua, December 31, 1979. Quoted in Frank S. T. Hsiao and Lawrence R. Sullivan, “The Politics of reunification: Beijing’s initiative on Taiwan,” Asian Survey, Vol. 20, No. 8, (Aug., 1980), p.789. 4 In 1979, the nine literary magazines that published literature from Taiwan were: Dang Dai (当代), Shanghai Literature (上海文学), Chang Jiang (长江), Qing Ming (清明), Shi Yue (十月), Xin Yuan (新苑), Shou Huo (收获), Zuo Ping (作品), and Anhui Literature (安徽文学). Among the stories published, seven were from Nie Hualing, three from Bai Xianyong, two from Yu Lihua, two from Li Li, and two from Yang Qingzhu. Among the five writers, only Yang Qingzhu was living in Taiwan; the rest already emigrated

2 While political climate changes in 1979 led to the initial opening of cultural exchange between the mainland and Taiwan, throughout the 1980s, literature and popular culture from Taiwan entered the mainland through various channels, official and unofficial, state-sanctioned and market-driven. Who arrives through the official channel depends on the changing political climate on the mainland: authors writing in the modernist tradition, such as Nie Hualing, Bai Xianyong and others, were promoted at the beginning, but soon they were replaced by authors from the “native soil” camp, whose works bore closer resemblance to socialist realism. Authors arriving through commercial channels won stellar popularity on the mainland, filling the void of entertainment literature on the mainland. Some popular writers, such as romance novel writer Qiong Yao, and personal essay writer San Mao, became fads among mainland youth. In a 1992 survey of 1,500 people in Beijing, Qiong Yao ranked first among eight authors for name recognition (85.8%), higher than the Beijing nihilist writer Wang Shuo. When asked which of the eight authors they had actually read, Qiong Yao again ranked the first (71.8%).5 So far little work has been done on the reception of literature and popular culture from Taiwan in the mainland between 1979 and 1989. One exception is a study done by Thomas B. Gold, which focuses rightly on sociological explanations such as economics and technology but does not provide interpretative readings of particular authors who had huge mainland followings.6 Nimrod Baranovitch, in a book chapter on the return of popular music to the mainland in the late 1970s, discusses the influence of Deng Lijun, a Taiwan popular singer, in passing.7 Perry Link, in his masterly cultural history The Uses of Literature, mentions the appearance of literature from Taiwan in 1979 and the

from Taiwan and were living in the U.S. See Liu Denghan, Taiwan wenxue ge hai guan (Taipei, Fengyun shidai, 1995). p.182. 5 Liu Xiaobo, “Toushi dalu renmin de wenhua shenghuo”, quoted in Thomas Gold, “Go with your feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Culture in Greater China,” The China Quarterly, No. 136, Special Issue: Greater China. (Dec. 1993), pp. 914-5. For name recognition, the second and third were Cultural Revolution writer Hao Ran (79.8%) and nihilist Beijiing writer Wang Shuo (70.3%), and fourth was martial arts writer Jin Yong (64.3%). For actual reading, the second was Hao (69.8%), and then Wang (57.4%) and Jin (55.2%). 6 Thomas B. Gold, “Go with your feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan popular culture in Greater China”, The China Quarterly, No. 136 (Dec., 1993), pp. 907-25. 7 Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender and Politics, 1978-1997 (University of California Press, 2003). pp. 11-13.

3 subsequent popularity of Qiong Yao and San Mao, but his main focus rested solidly in the writings on the mainland. 8 This paper attempts to recover, if only partially, the reception of Taiwan literature and popular culture in the mainland society and the various discourses it evoked. The first section of the paper examines the state effort to promote Taiwanese studies and publication of Taiwanese writing in the mainland, focusing on the discourse concerning the modernist and “native soil” camps and the narrow interpretive possibilities restricted by ideology. The second section of the paper examines the writings of Qiong Yao and San Mao, two female Taiwan writers who had huge followings among the mainland youth. The writings of Qiong Yao and San Mao, arriving from the new channels of commercial publishing allowed by economic liberation, became much needed companion to the mainland youth as they tried to strengthen emotional ties within the domestic space to which they returned, or attempted to carve out a space of freedom for themselves aside from social roles prescribed to them. These popular writings to a large extent influenced the sensibilities of mainland youth in the 1980s, particularly their ideas about private life, romance and “technologies of the self.” This paper does not provide a comprehensive coverage, but offers itself as a point of departure, a cursory look at an important chapter in the cultural history of Greater China in the 1980s. The decade between 1979 and 1989 was an exciting one both for the mainland and for Taiwan. Understanding how the mainland started to read literature from across the Taiwan Strait could illuminate on the changing relations between center and periphery, high and popular forms of literature, and the complexity of cultural politics and popular response.

1 The late 1970s were eventful years on the mainland. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) just ended. In 1977 the university entrance examination, after nearly a decade of suspension, was restored and drew millions of young people heartened by the possibility of returning to higher education. In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of

8 Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the socialist Chinese literary system (Princeton University Press, 2000).

4 the 11th Central Committee, Deng Xiaoping announced major plans for economic reform and the “open door” policy. Relationship with the U.S. had been warming and by the end of 1978 the U.S. issued official recognition of Beijing. It was by no accident that the initial publication of Taiwan literature in the mainland was facilitated by the writer Nie Hualing. Born in the mainland and having moved to Taiwan in 1949, Nie Hualing had by the 1970s been living in the U.S. and running the prestigious writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa. She was perfectly geo-politically situated to initiate literary contact between the mainland and Taiwan. In 1979, in a warm response to the establishment of Sino-U.S. diplomatic relations, she invited two Chinese writers, Xiao Qian and Bi Shuowang, to visit Iowa and participate in a workshop with writers from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. This was the first occasion for writers from the mainland and Taiwan to exchange ideas on literature. After returning from Iowa, Xiao Qian delivered a speech on “Taiwan Literature” in the mainland in March 1980. Following the polarized literary debate in Taiwan’s 1970s, he laid out Taiwan literature in two schools—the modernist school including Bai Xianyong, Nie Hualing, Yu Guangzhong and others, and the “native soil” school, including Zhong Lihe, Wang Tuo, Yang Qingzhu, Chen Yingzhen and Lai He. These two schools had engaged in a fierce debate about what really constituted Taiwan literature, an important question concerning the island’s post-colonial and post-1949 identity. The depth of this debate did not register with Xiao Qian, who from a mainland perspective saw, incorrectly but understandably, both schools as inheriting the May Fourth tradition of Chinese modernity: the “native soil” writing in Taiwan was an offshoot of May Fourth’s leftist tradition, while Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing were descendents of the xinyuepai, May Fourth’s modernist branch. Being cautious and hoping to unite both schools for the cause of re-unification, Xiao Qian carefully avoided mentioning some “native soil” writers’ Taiwanese consciousness, though the following comment showed his awareness of it: “The ‘native soil’ camp is closer to us in their writing methodology and world view, but with the motherland they do not have an emotional bond as rooted as the modernists … We cannot look only on the surface, but

5 need to include their complexities into our estimation.” 9 Xiao Qian also commented that the modernist writers were ideologically quite distant from the mainland socialist realist tradition, but friendship should nevertheless be extended to them, because they were almost without exception mainlanders by origin and had intense emotional ties with the motherland. Emotional ties with the motherland and socialist realist worldview became the main criteria in selecting Taiwan writings for publication in the official channels. A glimpse at the very first two publications, Bai Xianyong’s “Yongyuan de Yi Xueyan” (“The Perpetual Ms. Yi Xueyan in Dang Dai, and Nie Hualing’s “Aiguo jiangquan” (“Patriotic Lottery”) in Shanghai Wenxue (Shanghai Literature) reveals this selection’s apparent political correctness to fit the reunification rhetoric. In Nie Hualing’s “Patriotic Lottery,” poverty and nostalgia rule the lives of ex-soldiers and clerks who reside in Taiwan but long for the lost homeland. Bai Xianyong’s “The Perpetual Ms. Yi Xueyan” portrays the decadent and hopeless lives of high-class ex-mainlanders who tried to recuperate in vain the splendor of their mainland lives. Both stories portray the unbearable nostalgia for those on perpetual exile from homes. Nie Hualing had further more positioned herself as a Hunan native, a writer on exile. In 1980, when her collection of short stories Taiwan Yishi (Anecdotes of Taiwan) was published by the Beijing Publishing House, Nie wrote in a short article published in the People’s Daily, “The various characters in the stories were all ordinary folks exiled from the mainland to Taiwan. They all lost roots and were homesick; they all longed for returning home one day. I lived among them… Now, I will happily tell them in a loud voice, ‘You will all return home! You will meet readers who are your home folks!’”10 How the mainland readers read literature from Taiwan depended on how they were guided to imagine the space of Taiwan a priori and what kinds of literature were selected by the publishers to complicate this imagination. In the early 1980s, besides the agony of exile and the joy of returning home, another theme of equal importance in guiding the mainland readers’ imagination was social evils under capitalism. Yang

9 Guangtai wenxue yanjiu ziliao, published by the research office at the Department of Chinese Language, Zhongshan University (Guangzhou, 1980). The speech was made on March 18, 1980, by Xiao Qian at the Research Institute for Literature. pp.7-8. 10 Nie Hualing, “Xiezai ‘Taiwan Yishi’ zhi hou”, People’s Daily, April 29, 1980, p.8.

6 Qingshu’s “A Low Man,” selected for publication in 1979 right after Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing, tells the story of a garbage collector, who after having worked as a temporary worker for thirty years and now facing unpaid retirement, managed to kill himself in an accident at work and thereupon secure enough posthumous income for his aging father. More such stories of ordinary people living unjustly in poverty were published in 1981 and onwards. Liu Denghan, mainland scholar of Taiwan literature, wrote in retrospection that in its early days, introduction of Taiwan literature in the mainland was over-burdened by ideology, which limited not only selection of texts and writers but also possibilities for interpretation.11 A close look at the stories mentioned above reveals possibilities for much more complex readings than simply nostalgia for the mainland and labor class grievances. Bai Xianyong describes the special aura of the social butterfly Yi Xueyan, the title character, as an ageless luminance of purity, which shone like a morning star to men who wished to behold a lost past made perfect by nostalgia. The fact that her allure proved deadly for men who invested themselves in her reminded one of the strange allure of the charismatic leader and that allure’s association with fetish, violence and death. Yang Qingzhu’s story about the garbage collector problematised the act of martyrdom. While nationalist ideology often builds its foundation on the bloodshed of martyrs, Yang’s story is silently subversive to that very foundation, as he points out that motivations for martyrdom are much more complicated than what those in power have defined them to be. No subversive readings, however, were given to these stories. Bai Xianyong was praised for his attention to details, and Yang Qingzhu was commended for his role as workers’ advocate.12 Bai Xianyong, Nie Hualing and other writers of modernist tendencies actually had a lot to offer to mainland writers, who in the early 1980s began to experiment with modernist techniques in forms of “misty” (menglong) poetry and stream-of- consciousness writing. However, a dialogue hardly occurred between modernist writers on the two sides of the strait. While initially the mainland welcomed Nie Hualing and Bai Xianyong for their May Fourth inheritance and emotional affinity to the motherland,

11 Liu Denghan, Taiwan wenxue gehai guan, p. 180. 12 Guangtai wenxue yanjiu ziliao, published by the research office at the Department of Chinese Language, Zhongshan University (Guangzhou, 1980), p.203 and 222.

7 soon the inherent ambiguity of modernist writing brought anxieties. For a literary system accustomed to social realist writing, emergence of new writing techniques confronted the cultural bureaucracy with problems regarding how to assimilate these new styles into a coherent definition of socialist literature. While in the 1970s and 80s, Taiwan’s writers engaged in the definition of Taiwan literature, in the 1980s, the mainland was preoccupied with the question, what was “socialist literature.” The slogan “Literature in Service of Politics”, coined by Mao in his famous 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” was seen as too politically involved, reminding one of the nightmare of politicization during the Cultural Revolution. This was replaced in 1980 by a new slogan, “Literature and Art Should Consider Social Effects.” This slogan was replaced again in July of the same year to “Literature in Service of People and Socialism.”13 This frequent change of slogans suggested not only a lack of consensus but also a lack of dominant power and opinion, and 1980s in the mainland was exactly such an era dotted with many incidents of changing power balances and unclear ideological stances, an era when reform was done trial-and-error. Nevertheless, in a system where literature was still seen as the upholder of social order and ideology, modernist techniques were more often than not considered too inherently “unclear” to perform the function of literature, whether it served politics or people. Critics regarded “misty poetry” with suspicion, not because these poems were overtly political, but because it could not be ascertained as to what the poems really said.14 The suspicion was understandably even greater for modernist writing from Taiwan. These reasons led to a shift of focus in importing Taiwan literature, from initial introduction of modernists such as Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing, to increasingly exclusive reliance on works by Taiwan “native soil” writers like Yang Qingzhu, Chen Yingzhen, Wang Tuo and others. In August 1980, a new “Headquarters for the Alliance for Democracy and Self-Rule in Taiwan” held a major conference to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the death of Zhong Lihe, a Taiwan left-wing novelist. Because the social realism of the “native soil” writers was closer to the mainland tradition since

13 Link, The Uses of Literature, p.24 and p.26. 14 Link, The Uses of Literature, p.34.

8 the 1950s and politically safer, they gradually became the main Taiwan literary voices in the mainland via the official channel.15 The complexities of Taiwan literature, including the discussions on post-Colonial “Taiwan” identity, and these discussions’ contribution to a multifaceted Chinese modernity, were not explored in the mainland until the late 1990s.16 In 1989, Bai Xianyong’s novel “Di xian ji” was adapted into a film by the title of “Zuihou de Guizu” (“The Last Aristocrats”), directed by the mainland director Xie Jing. This film epitomized the various well-intended efforts towards re-unification made on the literary and cultural fronts and the fundamental disconnect of experiences beneath them. The story of the film was about four girls who went to study in the U.S. from Shanghai in the 1940s. The main character lost her parents to the war. Unwilling to accept the change of fate brought by History, she sank deep into depression and lived like a tramp in the 60s in the U.S., eventually committing suicide in Venice, where she had been born. This film was originally planned to be collaboration between filmmakers and actors from Taiwan and mainland. Taiwan’s famous actress Lin Qingxia was expected to act in the film together with the mainland star Pan Hong. Lin in the end didn’t join, much to the disappointment of the mainland audiences. Directed by Xie Jing, who had a huge following in the mainland for his melodramas dealing with bitter memories of the Cultural Revolution, this film was received poorly in the mainland. “Perhaps the lives of the ‘last aristocrats’ were unfamiliar to the creators of the film, or maybe due to some other difficulties that currently could not be overcome, the film was realized quite rigidly, the main characters’ changes of fate were also quite sudden and incomprehensible,” writes the commentator in People’s Daily. The same commentator also commented on Xie Jing’s strange change of style in the film. “This film doesn’t have the usual depth that characterized Xie Jing’s films. It doesn’t have the forceful feeling of the tide of time nor political enthusiasm, it doesn’t portray the social environment that supports the behavior of the characters. … It only looks at everything calmly… This will not be a popular film,

15 Liu Denghan, zou xiang xueshu yujing—zuoguo dalu Taiwan wenxue yanjiu ershi nian, internet publication. 16 Mainland scholarship of Taiwan literature in the 1990s, however, have become a source of controversy in Taiwan, as Taiwan writers criticize the mainland critics’ a priori assumption that Taiwan literature has always been part, if not periphery, of literature of China. See Xiaobing Tang, “On the concept of Taiwan literature”, Modern China, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp.402-7.

9 because it doesn’t console people’s hearts…”17 The deep pain of exile in this film came from the realization that an era had ended and one had become an orphan. The film wasn’t able to understand this orphaned experience, and the viewers in the mainland did not find catharsis in it as in Xie Jing’s other films. The mainland readers needed to wait for another decade to appreciate properly the various discourses on the Taiwan experience reflected through Taiwan’s “serious literature”.

2 In 1980, when Nie Hualing visited China for the first time from the U.S. and spoke at the China Writers’ Association, the first question she received when the floor was open for discussion was about the popular writer Qiong Yao, whose name did not appear once during her long speech on Taiwan’s literary scene. “The novels by Qiong Yao was very very popular in Taiwan, very very explosive.” Nie admitted, “Most of what she writes is sentimental novels about romances under moonlight. They are easy to read, and that’s why young people like it. Some professors, to kill time, also read them after work. … Now many of her novels have been made into films, and she made a lot of money.” Nie continues, “Her novels are very influential, and very bad. When many young people write novels, they write like her, about ‘sentiments’, ‘love’, ‘unable to let go’. The day before yesterday I saw the [mainland] TV series called ‘When will the colorful cloud return’ (He ri caiyun gui). It was a good TV drama with realistic portrayal of Taiwan. But I was a bit worried, because the dialogues in it felt similar to the style of Qiong Yao. It would be very bad influence on young people, and this kind of dialogue style should not go on further. This is a request from my heart, because the youth in Taiwan were very badly influenced by Qiong Yao’s novels, which were all repetitive and lacking in innovation.” 18 Nie Hualing’s worries in 1979 proved right: soon after her warning, Qiong Yao became immensely popular in the mainland. The impact Qiong Yao had on the mainland

17 Yu Qian, “Xie Jing dianying de fei Xie Jing moshi”, People’s Daily, Oct. 28, 1989, p.8. 18 Guangtai wenxue yanjiu ziliao, published by the research office at the Department of Chinese Language, Zhongshan University (Guangzhou, 1980). The speech was made on April 18, 1980, by Nie Hualing at China Writers’ Association, pp.38-9.

10 youth, however, was more complicated than Nie’s prediction of simply being “bad”. This section will turn to the popular side of the literary exchange and examine two popular women writers, Qiong Yao and San Mao, and their impact on the young readers of the mainland. While official introductions of Taiwan literature, starting from Bai Xianyong and Nie Hualing, were well documented, it’s difficult to pin down exactly when Qiong Yao’s books arrived in the mainland, for most likely pirated copies had already been in unofficial circulation before her work appeared in official literary magazines (therefore the question directed to Nie Hualing in 1980). Thomas B. Gold reports that in 1979, he had heard the songs of another Taiwan cultural icon, singer Deng Lijun from pirated tapes from students at the Fudan University of Shanghai.19 Similar mechanism of underground circulation might have brought Qiong Dao’s writing earlier to the mainland than its official appearance. Another reason why initial publications of Qiong Yao and San Mao are difficult to track is that while Nie Hualing, Bai Xianyong and the subsequent Taiwan writers of serious literature were published mostly by Beijing, Shanghai and other more prominent publishing houses and magazines, popular writers were published first by periphery publishing houses. During 1980 and 1981, the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, previously peripheries of China, started to capitalize their geographical proximity and cultural linkage to Taiwan and Hong Kong. A few new literary magazines specializing in Taiwan and Hong Kong literature were founded then in these provinces. Qiong Yao’s short story, “Ren Zai Tianya” (Living Overseas), was published in the inaugurating issue of a new Fujian magazine called Hai Xia (The Strait) in January 1981, likely the first official publication of her work on the mainland. In March 1983, this magazine published again a longer novel by Qiong. The People’s Daily reported that copies of this issue “ were passed from hand to hand continuously, and the magazine was read to the point of falling apart, just because it had Qiong Yao’s excellent novel ‘Wo shi yipian yun’ (‘I am a cloud’) in it.”20 San Mao’s first appearance in the mainland was mostly

19 Thomas B. Gold, “Go with your feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan popular culture in Greater China”, The China Quarterly, No. 136 (Dec., 1993), p.909. 20 Lian Jintian, “Chunfeng cong zheli chuiqi”, The People’s Daily, p. 4, March 19, 1985.

11 likely to be a short story “Qing Cheng” (Fallen City), published in the same magazine in February 1982. Qiong Yao had a prolific career in the 1960s and 70s. She wrote more than 40 romance novels, most of them were reprinted in the mainland in the 1980s. Her novels are the best examples of the popular novel, an exciting combination of adventure, mystery and romance. Take for example the novel Yanyu Mengmeng, published in two installments in Hai Xia in January and February 1985. It tells a story of a daughter’s revenge to the father for him having abandoned the girl’s mother. Meanwhile it contains a detective story in which the father’s present wife and her lover engage in criminal activities. It is also a mystery novel: mysterious objects—necklaces, photos and gun— appear periodically to unveil the secrets of the characters. There are elements of the gothic tale as well: when the revenge is in full swing, and death and ghosts visit the dark ruins of the Lu family mansion. On top of all these, it is a love story and a family drama, where various shades of love, hatred and jealousy are played out between lovers and family members. Qiong Yao’s popularity can be explained first by mainland readers’ long-standing appetite for popular literature. Romance, knight-errand stories, Buddhist moral tales, ghost stories and detective stories had a long tradition in China, especially widely spread after the printing revolution occurred in Jiangnan in the 16th century. Even after May Fourth, early twentieth century literature in China had a wide spectrum, with leftist, modernist, and popular strands, native and translated, all flourishing in urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing. In early 1950s, when the Communist Party leadership took over the publishing houses, mass production of popular fiction came to an end. However, a large number of old works still circulated in old bookstores and rental places, giving people alternatives from the mainstream Socialist literature. Rentals and old book stores ceased to exist during the Cultural Revolution, when old books were burnt and only a handful of revolutionary novels were permitted for reading. However, popular literature, whether from old China or from translations of western literature, continued circultion in hand-copied volumes. The Chinese samizdat was rarely literature of political resistance, but hand-copied volumes featuring lovers, heroes and detectives, testifying to the unquenchable appetite for good stories among the reading public. After the Cultural

12 Revolution, Beijing announced in early 1979 the permission for the general public to own and read a list of nineteen classics of Chinese literature and sixteen Chinese favorites of foreign literature. Queues of miles long appeared at the door to bookstores. All books in stock were sold within a week.21 New contents were desparately in need, and Qiong Yao filled in this void in a timely fashion. Qiong Yao’s stories also arrived at a time when people were completing the odyssey to the domestic space. After the Cultural Revolution, urban youth who had been sent to the countryside gradually returned to their home cities. Many were still single, their chances for marriage having been affected by politically unfavorable family backgrounds and involuntary job assignments. The lack of urban development in the previous ten years created housing shortages as these young people of the baby boom generation returned to their parents’ small apartments. The congestion of the domestic space, lack of material well-being and estrangement due to previous politicization between family members created many familial conflicts, well-documented in literature of that time. Meanwhile, the large number of unmarried “advanced age” youth (in their late twenties) brought increasing anxiety in a society traditionally relying on family for stability. In early 1980s, newspapers and magazines started to timidly publish discussions on dating and marriage. By mid-1980s, such columns had expanded in length and become regular. Illustrated articles in newspapers gave advice to girls on how to sit and stand gracefully, how to dress and make hairdo, and “how to attract the opposite sex.” 22 Qiong Yao’s novels provided catharsis to people’s new emotional problems, and offered satisfying resolutions based on forgiveness and renewed love between the parties involved. In Yanyu Mengmeng, for instance, the father was portrayed as a violent and dominating patriarch, who would beat his uncompromising daughter with a horse whip

21 Perry Link, The Uses of Literature, pp.6-7. The list of Chinese classics included Dream of the Red Chamber and Three Hundred Tang Poems. The foreign list had among others One-Thousand-and-One Nights and Anna Karenina. Link reports that on the day the books went on sale, a two-mile-long queue waited at the gate to the main branch of the New China Bookstore on Beijing’s Wangfujing Street. Even after temporarily suspending sales for a few times due to congestion and fighting among customers, the store sold its entire stock of 800,000 volumes within a week, and reported finding of more than twenty shoes that customers had apparently lost or forgotten during fistfights and chaos to acquire these limited book copies. 22 For an example, see “nu qingnian zenyang zhan, xing, zuo” (“How does a young girl stand, walk and sit”), Qingnian wenzhai, September, 1984, p.30. “Guanyu nuxing dushen de fei wenxue baogao” (The non- fiction report on single women”), Qingnian wenzhai, February 1988, p.57.

13 and refuse food to his third wife and her bastard son in order to starve them to death. The novel for numerous times also hinted at his feeling of guilt as his hands had been stained with innocent blood from his warlord times in the mainland. Such a hateful figure, however, turned out to have been tortured by his own unfulfilled love when young, and became increasingly affectionate, benign and worthy of sympathy towards his death. This gesture of forgiveness of the patriarch and violence done in the past might have been important in the mainland in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, when many were haunted by guilt. In fact, men in Qiong Yao’s novels were almost without exception good at heart and capable of love, even though on the surface they appeared rude, violent and cold. Family conflicts, then, could be resolved when men’s love was called back by the female figures. A Taiwan literary scholar Lin Fangmei points out that in Qiong Yao’s concept of romance and family, relationship between men and women is inherently harmonious. “Qiong Yao’s concept of love is relatively naïve,” Lin writes, “Love itself has no contradictions and conflicts, the difficulties and hindrances are all external”.23 Love is unproblematic and it achieves resolution and forgiveness—such is the sentimental utopia created by Qiong Yao’s stories. This utopia is in a way similar to the cult of Qing (emotion), which arose in the Ming Dynasty to counter-act the pragmatism and growing rigidity of Neo-Confucianism. It is a sentimental revolution aiming at re- ordering life’s priorities according to emotional linkages between the individual and the society. The mainland critic Gu Xiaoming finds Qiong Yao’s novels helpful for exploring the individual’s conflicting roles in the family and society. Another mainland critic Gu Jitang explains Qiong Yao’s popularity in the mainland by the “Chineseness” of her characters as they try to fulfill various responsibilities.24 The cult of “Qing” was not only a movement of romanticism; it had very deep political ramifications in the Ming. The 1980s re-awakening to “Qing” might have had similar political consequences. Dardess points out that the Chinese protest culture relies on the population’s emotional

23 Lin Fangmei, Jiedu qiongyao aiqing wangguo (Shibao wenhua, 1994). p.95. 24 Gu Jitang, “Taiwan aiqing xiaoshuo de ji dacheng zhe qiongyao”, Taiwan xiaoshuo fazhan shi (Taipei: wenshizhe chubanshe, 1989). Gu Xiaoming, “Lijie Qiongyao he ta naxie meihao de gushi”, Xiandai ren xunzhao diushide caomao (Taipei: Guiguan, 1989). Quoted in Lin Fangmei (1994), pp.252-254. These opinions differed significantly from those of critics in Taiwan, who, having had more close contact with modernism, criticized Qiong Yao for not exploring the “self” enough.

14 appeal to the head of the social hierarchy. For instance, the 1989 protestors did not have concrete political agendas. They perceived themselves not as “agitators” but as sincere, loyal and loving subjects whose selfless devotion to the motherland and sentimental appeal to the ones in power could awaken the moral sentiments of people and solve all conflicts.25 This was exactly how Qiong Yao’s novels would usually end. San Mao’s novels arrived in the mainland a few years later than Qiong Yao’s, and provided a fairly different model of writing and individualism from Qiong’s family dramas. San Mao’s writings were mostly autobiographical, about her studies and travels overseas. Having left her family behind and ventured into the exotic, modern space of Europe, San Mao in her writing provided a model for a more independent self hoping to transcend social roles to find true freedom resting in self-realization. In 1982, San Mao’s “Qing Cheng” (Fallen City) was published in Hai Xia, likely San Mao’s first entry to the mainland. It was an autobiographical short story set in Berlin in 1969, where the author was studying German at the Goethe Institute. Living on a tight budget in a foreign country, the protagonist was studying extremely hard, driven by her deeply felt responsibility to fulfill expectations of her parents, who were funding her studies out of their own meager income. Life in West Berlin was portrayed as constant striving to improve oneself according to social demands. The protagonist’s boyfriend, a west German student who aspired to become an ambassador, even placed a small radio under his pillow to listen to audio books when he was sleeping: “even though the body is sleeping, it is still helpful to listen to books subconsciously.”26 When the protagonist made spelling mistakes in dictating social commentaries from German newspapers, the German boyfriend said to her, “You might become the wife of an ambassador in the future, but your German like this would be useless. You cannot even spell.” The present time was seen as an opportunity to prepare for the Future; it was also seen as fulfilling one’s responsibilities to the Past: protagonist denied herself entirely of any material comfort, because “I always think about father, everyday working at his desk. Each piece

25 John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620-1627 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 2002). See the introduction chapter on discussions on modern protest culture. 26 Hai Xia, February, 1982, p. 61.

15 of bread that I eat is like drinking blood of my father. How could I then go and buy meat and buy clothes? All material desires are reduced to subsistence.”27 The mainland youth could very well identify with this heightened sense of responsibility for the future and for the past in the early 1980s. The re-opening of universities in the late 1970s brought much optimism, but by early 1980s, optimism had turned into much stress to the young generation. The Youth Readers’ Digest (Qingnian wenzhai) in early 1980s carried articles on strategies to study for the college entrance exams and success stories of students at an advanced age (late 20s or even early 30s) who were denied entrance to university during the Cultural Revolution and now finally achieving their dream of entering university. The drive to work hard was relentless. In one article published in the Qingnian wenzhai, a 24-hour chart was provided, with recommendations for various study strategies for each waking hour.28 As the story in San Mao’s “Fallen City” developed, the protagonist, who lived in West Berlin, traveled to East Berlin for a day to apply for a transit visa to go through East Germany. As she wandered hopelessly between immigration offices where her plea was rejected due to her Taiwan passport, a young officer noticed her and offered help. The two people, one from East Germany, and one from Taiwan, became instantly attracted to each other. It was a love that defied any sense, any ideological affiliation, any future, any family and national responsibility, in stark contrast to how the protagonist organized her life in West Berlin. When the young officer escorted the protagonist to the train, which in the end took her, delirious and sick with fever, back forever to West Berlin, the author wrote:

“The last train, you go!” He said. I opened mouth and wanted to speak, but didn’t know what I wanted to say. I was pushed by him, I swallowed tears and wanted to speak again, and he pushed me again. Then I screamed: “you come with me.” “Impossible. I have parents, you go!” “I stay for one day, just one day. Please, I beg you, I will stay for just one day.” I want to die. I don’t want to live any more. After all what do I have? What’s the meaning of West Berlin to me!29

27 Ibid., p.61. 28 Qingnian wenzhai, February, 1983, p.53. 29 Ibid., p.64.

16 In “Fallen City” and her other writings, San Mao persistently asked what was the meaning of generational, national and social expectations on young people, and what was the freedom left to them when they, in order to shoulder such expectations, deny themselves the chance to seek their own meaning of life. One of her early short stories is named “The tale of escaping from school”, where the protagonist could not fit in the calendar of school education and tried to carve out an independent space for her own growth apart from what the social regime asked of her. San Mao’s marriage to a Spanish man and her writings from the Sub-Sahara desert, where the couple lived for years, became an inspiring life story for young people, an example of a modern individuality that could find one’s own homeland regardless of political and national prescriptions. San Mao wrote autobiographically and also communicated with her readers personally via letters. In “If I were you: a letter to an unhappy girl”, published in February, 1988 in Qingnian wenzhai, San Mao consoled a 29-year-old unmarried female reader who wrote to the author asking for advice. “I am 29 year old, unmarried, work as the lowest clerk in an office,” the reader wrote to San Mao, “My appearance is too ordinary, my abilities are limited, I don’t have special hobbies, and never has any boy become interested in me.” The question she wanted San Mao to answer was, “What is the ultimate meaning of life?” To this question San Mao replied, “Based on my personal experience, I also have thought many times, what are the meaning of life and its ultimate goal? Now I have only one answer, a very simple one, that is, ‘to find authentic freedom’, and then enjoy life.” She then suggested the unhappy reader to take some concrete actions, such as decorating her room with new self-made curtains and lamp shades, buying a few inexpensive but colorful new dresses and changing into a different hairstyle. This letter was included in a collection of San Mao letters called Tan xin lu, published already in the mainland. This specific letter was reprinted in the magazine, upon recommendations by 53 mainland university students, testifying to its relevance and popularity. Qiong Yao and San Mao arrived in the mainland also at a time when young people became interested in fashion as a way for self-expression. China during the Cultural Revolution was often portrayed as a country where people wore colors of military outfits, such as blue, green and grey. In 1980s, young people started to

17 experiment with color, and books written by Qiong Yao and San Mao became their guide. When describing a girl who was weak-minded and had no personality, Qiong Yao in Yanyu Mengmeng wrote, “She never dares to speak with strangers, and if she had to, she would inevitably embarrass herself with inappropriate wording…Furthermore she is almost a retard in choosing matching color for her clothes. Just now she wears a grass- green winter jacket on top, but a pair of pants in eggplant-purple, and a floral scarf around her neck. When she appears all of a sudden, one would think that she were a character from Peking opera.” The protagonist, on the other hand, knew exactly what to wear: “I dressed myself in a black sweater, a black wool narrow skirt, tied a red silk ribbon to my hair, and covered myself with a new dark red, long winter coat. Looking at myself in the mirror, I feel happy with myself. I like to wear mostly dark colors, but highlight it with some bright color, so I look grounded.” The protagonist not only knows how to dress, she also knows the art of conversation. On the night when both girls are introduced to a handsome young man, the protagonist wins his heart by her ability to speak about western literature such as Tolstoy and Turgenev. The art of dress and conversation became highly sought qualities among mainland young girls. While Qiong Yao’s novels provided models for middle-class fashion and living (mansions, cars and wool winter jackets), San Mao provided a Bohemian alternative, a simple grace achieved by creativity and spiritual freedom rather than by wealth. In the mainland society, economic liberalization brought increasing inequality and disorientation in values, and the voice of San Mao was loved by young people, because even though she argued against materialism, she advocated creativity rather than frugality, and aesthetics of living rather than ideology of poverty. In her short story collection “The Stories from Sahara”, she wrote about building a home with her Spanish husband using garbage they collected on the road, including a sofa made with the frame of a tractor wheel. Mainland commentators of San Mao described her as “modern”, “anti- capitalism” and “transcending pragmatism”30 Despite their differences, both Qiong Yao and San Mao inadvertently became stylizers for the mainland youth who lived in a society where personalities were not yet

30 Sun Weichuan, “San mao ri yu xiandai yishi” (“The Popularity of San Mao and the Modern Consciousness”), Hai Xia, No. 4, July 1987, p167.

18 worn as sweaters and jeans, nor translated into creative home décor. In Qingnian wenzhai, one finds such descriptions of a girl’s appearance: “She wore on the top a white turtle neck sweater, in the style of Qiong Yao, and a pair of tight jeans like San Mao.”31 Fashion became a technology of self-definition; it allowed the mainland younth to ally with the successful love stories of Qiong Yao and the Bohemian life story of San Mao.

3 Taiwan literature entered the mainland through two channels. Serious literature entered through the official channel starting 1979, as the mainland cultural bureaucracy sought to engage more with literary productions in Taiwan in anticipation for reunification. Bai Xianyong, Nie Hualing and other modernist writers were published in the mainland first, for their close ties with the motherland; but soon after that, the “native soil” literature gained upper hand, as their styles were closer to the socialist realist tradition on the mainland. Due to this process of official selection away from the unfamiliar and opting for the familiar, high literature from Taiwan did not contribute as much to the discourses in the mainland as it should have. On the other hand, starting in early 1980, popular literature from Taiwan started to be published by magazines and publishing houses at the periphery, riding on gradual liberation of the publishing markets as well as readers demand. Their influences on the mainland youth have been very significant. So far little scholarly writing had assessed this influence. This paper has attempted to cover some initial ground for such research. The mainland not only welcomed popular literature, but also relished in Taiwan’s popular music, especially a genre named xiaoyuan gequ (ballad, or campus songs) from Taiwan. Hou Dejian, singer/song writer who defected to the mainland from Taiwan in 1983, epitomized the incongruity between state-sanctioned import of culture and this culture’s explosive potential. I would like to briefly evoke him as a conclusion to this paper. Author and singer of “Descendants of the Dragon”, a patriotic song expressing longing for the motherland and pride as a Chinese, Hou ended up as one of the four intellectuals staging a hunger strike to support students at the Tian’anmen Square. His signature song, “Descendants of the Dragon”, was initially promoted on the mainland

31 Qingnian wenzhai, June, 1990. p.24.

19 after his defection in 1983 as a re-unification rhetoric. By 1988 the same song was featured in the first episode of documentary series “The Elegy of the River,” as the film called for deepening reform, westernization, acknowledgement and integration distinct experiences with modernity in the Chinese-speaking world. In 1989, when the song was sung again by the singer at the Square accompanied by thousands of students, its meaning had long departed from its initial rhetoric and interpretation. The exchange between Taiwan and the mainland prompts us to reconsider the idea of “core and periphery” in terms of creativity and dynamism of contemporary Chinese culture, and the intended and unintended consequences of changing international relations and economic liberalization. The geographically peripheral Chinese societies of Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities have managed to bring to the mainland a glimpse into the various modernities in the Chinese-speaking world, and stories and new languages to deal with and express social anxieties and hopes.

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