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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2014 The Issue of Illegitimacy: Writing in Diaspora Wenyang Zhai
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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
THE ISSUE OF ILLEGITIMACY: WRITING IN DIASPORA
By
WENYANG ZHAI
A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2014 Wenyang Zhai defended this dissertation on May 7 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Feng Lan Professor Directing Dissertation
Kathleen Erndl University Representative
William Cloonan Committee Member
Yanning Wang Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
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To my parents, Zhai Qingkai and Liu Luqi
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to give my thanks to many people who have instructed, guided and supported me in various manners during my graduate studies and the entire time of the dissertation.
I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Feng Lan, the major professor of my dissertation committee. I benefited immeasurably from his academic advisement and patience and encouragement during my graduate study at Florida State University. The example he has set in his own scholarship, as well as the diligence, kindness and seriousness in his teaching and advising, has been a major influence in my graduate studies and will keep inspiring me in my future career. Dr. William Cloonan is among the first professors I got into contact since I started my Ph. D. program. He has provided me with valuable advice and unfailing support in both study and life throughout these years. I am thankful for his patient listening to my thoughts at the initial stage of my writing, the critical suggestions he gave me, and his meticulous reading of my early drafts.
I am indebted to Dr. Kathleen Erndl for her constant encouragement and support, Dr.
Lisa Wakamiya for her inspiring instruction and Dr. Yanning Wang for her kind acceptance of my request to be my advisor on a short notice and sharing with me her personal experiences to encourage me. I appreciate all the professors who I have taken classes with and all colleagues for their generous support, particularly, Rebecca Peters who has been a dear friend at my side.
I want to avail this opportunity to thank the sisters and brothers at my church who have been praying for my dissertation writing and job hunting. I also want to thank my dearest mother and adorable son for their love and understanding. Without them, I would not have gone so far.
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Finally, my gratitude goes to God for He has done amazing works on me and has made all things work together for the good.
Note on Romanization
Transcriptions of Chinese in this dissertation follow the different romanization practices in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong whenever possible, but generally follow the pinyin system per scholarly convention in the United States. Except when specifically indicated, all publications in
Chinese language that do not have published English translations, are mine.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... viii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Diaspora Studies ...... 4 Chinese Diasporas ...... 6 Chinese Diasporic Literature ...... 9 The Issue of Illegitimacy ...... 11 Three Chinese Diasporic Writers ...... 13 Diasporic Writing...... 16 Organization ...... 18
CHAPTER ONE: WRITING TO LEGITIMIZE THE ILLEGITIMACY— THE DISOWNED DAUGHTER...... 21 General Introduction ...... 21 An Illegitimate Daughter and Her Mother ...... 30 An Illegitimate Writer and Her Characters ...... 45
CHAPTER TWO: THE FORCE OF ILLEGITIMACY: HA JIN’S INDIVIDUAL BATTLE IN DIASPORA...... 58 General Introduction ...... 58 Between Silences ...... 62 A Sober Observer ...... 70 The Transformation ...... 81 An Immigrant Writer ...... 85 A Humanistic Writer ...... 89
CHAPTER THREE: MA JIAN—CLAIMING CENTER FROM THE MARGINAL ...... 96 General Introduction ...... 96 The Noodles and the Maker—the Distorted Bodies ...... 101 A Coma That is Hard to Wake up From ...... 112 CONCLUSION ...... 123 The Concept of Legitimacy ...... 123 Rey Chow and Shih Shu-mei ...... 126
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 138 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 146
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ABSTRACT
My dissertation explores the complicated role of “illegitimacy” in shaping the thoughts of three contemporary Chinese diasporic writers (Hong Ying, Ha Jin, and Ma Jian) and two diasporic intellectuals (Rey Chow and Shih Shu-mei). Similar to an illegitimate person who can hardly become a full member of a family or community, a diasporan can never quite belong to a host society. I thus use illegitimacy to highlight a keen sense of crisis of the diasporic subject who feels that his/her sociopolitical existence and its articulation are challenged as being inauthentic and ungrounded due to his/her displacement from the native land. Despite their different backgrounds and outlooks, the several writers in my study have shared the same experience of struggling with the anxiety that I term illegitimacy, whether literally, figuratively, or a combination of both, which is reflected in, as well as informs, their literary and critical works. However, they all strive to resolve the issue of illegitimacy through the act of writing.
They raise new questions, change perspectives, challenge conventional moralities as their literary and philosophical visions evolve. The issue of illegitimacy, as a driving force, motivates as well as restrains these writers in constructing their literary and academic careers.
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INTRODUCTION
In 2011, a Taiwanese film, Warrior of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale had an enormous box office success in Taiwan. The story of the film is based on the Wushe Incident of 1930, the aborigine Seediqs’ uprising against the Japanese colonizers. Early reaction to the film has noted its undertone of Taiwanese nationalism.1 There are two aboriginal young men who have been
“civilized” by the Japanese, i. e. these two have gone to Japanese schools and work as Japanese policemen for the colonial government as the story unfolds. Right before the uprising day, Dakis
Nomin or Ichiro Hanaoka, one of the two young men, comes to talk to Mona Rudao, the Seediq
Chief, in the hope of persuading the Chief to abandon the uprising plan the next day. Mona
Rudao confronts Dakis, “After you die, are you entering a Japanese shrine or the heavenly home of our ancestors?” Dakis leaves without giving a definite answer. The next day the tragedy occurs and a massacre takes place. Both of these two young men end up committing suicide with one hanging himself, the Seediq way, and the other exercising seppuku, the Japanese manner.
These two intelligent and capable young men, who could have served as a communicative bridge between the colonizers and the aborigines, become the first victims in the conflict. They are desperately trapped by two discourses: the Japanese colonial discourse that waves the civilization flag to justify its cruelty and extreme disrespect to the locals, and the Seediq discourse that cherishes the honor of their ancestors.
Over eight decades after the incident, we can still feel what these two young men felt then. They must have been furious and helpless at the same time, because they were not given a
1 The American Interest 2011. Web.
My dissertation focuses on three major Chinese diasporic writers: Hong Ying, Ha Jin, and Ma Jian, who have lived such an in-between life. Specifically, I will explore how a profound sense of illegitimacy derived from their social existence in diaspora has shaped both their outlooks and their literary articulations. A diasporan is someone who never quite belongs to a society in the way an illegitimate person is never a full member of a family or a community.
Although the three writers I study are often known through other different rubrics such as
Chinese American writers or Chinese exile writers, they share the same membership of the
Chinese diasporic community because they left China and chose to settle down in another society. More importantly, as Chinese diasporans, they have all been struggling with the disruptive anxiety of illegitimacy, whether literally, figuratively, or a combination of the two.
The issue of illegitimacy manifests itself on various levels: personal and national, political and cultural, ethical and psychological. The word “illegitimate” is defined in the Oxford
English Dictionary as “not in accordance with or authorized by law; unauthorized, unwarranted, spurious.” Such a definition immediately assumes the shame of being in transgression, in a state of immorality and stigma. Bronislaw Malinowski’s universal principle of legitimacy asserts:
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“The most important moral and legal rule concerning the physiological side of paternity is that no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father, that is guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community” (137). When the social father didn’t take up his responsibility the shame and stigma would have to be borne by the child. John Witte Jr., Jonas Robitscher Professor of
Law, comments with emotion: “For nearly two millennia, Western law visited the sins of fathers and mothers upon their illegitimate children, subjecting them to systematic discrimination and deprivation. The graver the sins of their parents, the further these children fell in social standing and legal protection. While some reformers sought to better the plight of illegitimate children, only in recent decades has illegitimacy lost its full legal sting. Yet the social, economic, and psychological costs of illegitimacy still remain high even in the liberal, affluent West” (1).2 Jost and Major posit: “Legitimacy is crucial to impression management as well as to developing a meaningful sense of the self as a worthwhile and valid individual. People are required by others to justify their attitudes and behaviors and to demonstrate that they are acting in a legitimate manner” (5). Even privately we feel a need to justify our thoughts and behaviors in our own eyes as well as in the eyes of others. The anxiety caused by illegitimacy involves the violation of moral rules and the counteraction against social norms. And the issue of illegitimacy invariably affects those whose identity exists in ambivalence, ambiguity and marginality.
Diasporas have long been fighting the identity battle. According to the OED, the word
“diaspora” first appeared in chapter 28 of the Septuagint (third to second century B.C. Greek) translation of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy. In this chapter, after informing the
Israelites of the many good things that will happen if they are faithful and observant, the post-
2 Witte argues that there are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents and he presses for the protection and rights of all children, regardless of their birth status.
3 exodus Moses warns them of the dire consequences of disobedience: “If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord… all of these curses shall come upon thee” (Deut. 28:15, King James
Version); Moses also insists: “The Lord shall cause thee to smitten before thine enemies: thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them: and shalt be removed unto all the kingdom of the earth” (Deut:25). Such a removal into diaspora is deemed a grave and perpetual curse of homelessness and instability. Since such a displaced life has resulted from a violation of divine laws, any psychological pains and physical torture the diasporans suffer are justified. While they have lost the legitimacy of claiming the ownership of their native identity, they have gained no right to full membership in the host societies. Their physical departure from their native lands for whatever reasons brings forth a number of questions: political allegiance, cultural identity, and self-identification, to name just a few, that permeate their diasporic life and career. In the modern times, even though the contemporary diasporas have been relieved from the same kind of traumatic experiences, the struggle for legitimate identity and the sense of crisis such a struggle engenders are still in full play.
Diaspora Studies
Diaspora studies emerged in the contexts of globalization and postcolonial cultural politics. As Feng Lan pointed out: “Unlike traditional historiography of the Jewish diaspora that usually paid attention to experiences of trauma as manifested in discourses of banishment, nostalgia, salvation, etc., contemporary diaspora studies focuses more on the positive nature of the diasporans’ transcendence over national boundaries that confine and limit the life and
4 creativity of the individual” (130)3. When Nico Israel elaborates on the difference between
“exile” and “diaspora,” he notes that these two terms “present two overlapping ways of describing the predicament of displacement. Yet there is subtle, though important, distinction to be made between the words. In terms of contemporary literary and cultural studies, at least,
‘exile,’ perhaps most closely associated with literary modernism, tends to imply both a coherent subject or author and a more circumscribed, limited conception of place and home. … ‘diaspora,’ by contrast, aims to account for a hybridity or performativity that troubles such notions of cultural dominance, location, and identity” (3). In borrowing Du Bois’ conception of a “double consciousness” to affirm the black internalization of an American identity, Paul Gilroy claims:
“One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (126). Stuart Hall has postulated two ways of thinking cultural identity in the context of defining diaspora. The first position defines it in terms of a shared culture; a sort of collective “one true self”; and it “reflects the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting division and vicissitudes of our history” (22). The second position of cultural identity is a matter of becoming as well as being: the significant difference which constitutes what we really are or what we have become.
We can see these theorists tend to drive the study of diaspora toward one open space where they celebrate hybridity and dynamism and where they seek a transcendence, a higher level from which to perceive the issue. It is constructive and empowering. However, their celebratory formulations that posit the diasporic individual as the freed subject from the
3 Lan, Feng. “Chinese Diasporic Culture Studies in the ‘Post-National’ Age: the Politics of Discourse and Theoretical Transformation.” Theoretical Studies In Literature and Art 2012. 2 (2012): 129-136. Print. 5 constriction of the nation-state may not apply to the Chinese diaspora, which has its own historical characteristics.
Chinese Diasporas
The earliest Chinese emigrants who went abroad were those traders who did their business in Southeast Asia. Merchants, under the Confucian ideology, were left at the bottom of the social scale. It was only after the tenth century, when the maritime trade with the southeastern provinces of China became substantial, that the status of the traders began to improve. Those Hokkien traders dispersed in Southeast Asia since the sixteenth century and their population increased over the seventeenth century. Chinese traders were invited to come to
Singapore in the nineteenth century to develop the port city. Although not state-sponsored and state-backed, they were able to manage to adapt to the host society. They were loyal to the thriving commercial centers and profitable arrangements, not caring about whoever was in charge of the political superstructure.
During the period of 1848-88, over two million Chinese found their way to such diverse destinations as the Malay Peninsula, Indochina, Sumatra, Java, the Philipines, Hawaii, the
Caribbean, Mexico, Peru, and the West coasts of the United States and Australia. They fell into three distinct classes—indentured workers (coolies), free artisans, and traders. These early
Chinese diasporans shared the same sojourning sentiment to the extent that they thought their stay was just temporary and they would eventually return to China. Thus cultural identity was not their primary concern while they were internally longing for the motherland’s embrace.
Around the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, these Chinese
6 diasporans not only contributed generously to, but also directly participated in, the modern nation-building cause in the homeland led by China’s revolutionaries. However, after the 1911
Xinhai Revolution, especially after the founding of the Communist China in 1949, as the sojourning option for them proved to be more difficult, they had to manage settling down in their sojourning places and gradually assimilating into their host countries.4 They were confronted with economic struggle for survival and psychological adaptation to alien culture and society.
From the 1980s to the present time, the Chinese diaspora has displayed its new vitality.
With the intensified trend of globalization in the postcolonial era, and the “Open-up” Policies of the Chinese government since 1978, mainland China began to reach out to the outside world and particularly made efforts to attract foreign investments. Meanwhile Western investors realized that they could not afford to ignore China’s vast market and great potential of economic opportunities. Along with foreign investors and their capitals, Western culture and life style— consumerism, individualism, democracy and freedom—often materialized in transnational commercial and cultural products like McDonald’s, the pop superstar Michael Jackson, and the worldwide blockbuster film Titanic rapidly occupied China’s cultural market. No longer merely sad sojourners or second-class citizens in their host societies, the diasporans now have more options in their lives in terms of economic resources and cultural pluralism. Robin Cohen has nicely summarized this new benefit of diasporas in the age of globalization: “Deterritorialized, multilingual and capable of bridging the gap between global and local tendencies, diasporas are able to take advantage of the economic and cultural opportunities on offer” (176). Chinese diasporans, for the first time, began to enjoy and even benefit from their diasporic status and became a part of what Aihwa Ong has called “flexible citizenship”. They are able to set up families in one place, normally the economically developed countries such as the US, Canada,
4I drew on Robin Cohen’s work Global Diasporas: An Introduction of the historical information. 7
Australia and European countries, and run their businesses in China where production costs are lower and production resources are cheaper. Nevertheless, certainly not all diasporas have equal success in entrepreneurship. According to Kotkin, successful diasporas share three critical characteristics: 1. A strong ethnic identity, 2. An advantageous global status, and 3. A passion for knowledge (5).
With regard to contemporary Chinese diasporas, the first two of the above three characteristics need further elaboration. A strong ethnic identity requires mutual dependence that helps the group adjust to changes in the global economic and political order without losing its essential unity. Yet it is difficult for hard labor workers who struggle to make a living to form a unified front with wealthy and highly mobile entrepreneurs. Secondly, even though in the post-
Cold War era, when ideology has substantially faded, contemporary Chinese diasporans are still under the shadow of ideological confinements. The complex and different histories and ideological journeys of mainland China (ruled by Communists for more than half a century),
Taiwan (given its Japanese colonial history, Nationalists’ rigid governance and the recent democratic transformation), and Hong Kong (with its British colonial marks and its long-time position as a global city) have considerably fashioned or somehow even further fragmented the
Chinese identity of diasporas in their host societies. Some Chinese diasporans do benefit from an advantageous global status, but a stronger and more unified global network based on mutual trust which allows them to function collectively beyond the confines of national or regional borders has not yet been built up. In fact, nationalism still plays a major role in diasporic existence, and the contention for the “authenticity” of Chineseness still remains an imperative issue of identity politics among Chinese diasporans today, which largely explains the intensified illegitimacy anxiety.
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Chinese Diasporic Literature
Chinese diasporic literature is reflective of the history of Chinese diasporas. Early texts such as Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco and Island Poetry record the psychological suffering, bitter homesick sentiments, and daily harsh life of those earlier Chinese diasporans. China, as a remote home, was where they spiritually belonged to and culturally identified with. They were clearly outsiders to the host society. They chose to cluster in an enclosed community—Chinatown— due to grave racism and all sorts of barriers and inconvenience they might come across when separated from their fellow diasporans. Making money so that they were able to support the family back home in China and return home better off was the major motivation for them to choose to live in diaspora.5 But from the early 1950s, after the devastating civil war in China between the nationalists and communists, to the 1980s, it became increasingly impossible for Chinese diasporans to return home due to the ideological split between a socialist mainland China and the pro-liberalist Taiwan. Chinese diasporans would have to make a rather radical decision before returning home. Diasporic Chinese were somehow trapped in this ideological battle, in addition to their personal struggling processes of finding their own identity. During this time Chinese diasporic writings revealed a tendency to interrogate the homeland’s nation-building project. Zhang Ailing’s The Rice Sprout Song questioned the
Land Reform Movement in the early years of Mao’s China; in a largely similar manner, Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior criticized the peasants’ revolution led by Mao,6 and
Francois Cheng’s The River Below condemned the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. These
5 For more illustration see Lan Feng’s article “A Valuable Legacy of Asian American Literature: Angel Island Poetry as Captivity Narrative.” He argues that the racialized nationalist perspective this poetry articulates serves the ideological agenda of Chinese laborers in constructing self-identity and conceptualizing the world. 6 See Feng Lan’s article “The Female Individual and the Empire: A Historicist Approach to Mulan and Kingston’s Woman Warrior.” Comparative Literature 55. 3 (2003):229-45. 9 writings exhibited the awaking of the self-consciousness of Chinese diasporans and revealed their reconsideration of the relationship between the nation and the Chinese individual.
Present scholarship on Chinese diaspora literature is not as abundant as other diaspora literature studies mostly because, first, Chinese diaspora has a relatively short history that took its visible shape only in the early twentieth century and, second, serious academic studies of the
Chinese diasporic culture have appeared only during the recent two decades. Ma Sheng-mei's
1998 work Immigrant Subjectivity is an early book-length academic study on Asian American and Asian Diaspora literature. In it Ma studies early immigrant texts and diasporic texts, and analyzes some diasporic writers' works and some nativist Taiwan writers. He particularly focuses on how these writers construct the immigrant subjectivity, namely, the process of identity formation. By exploring how these literary works unfold the contradictory identity formation where the Orientalizing coexists with the psychic need to assert one's difference from the
American majority and one's ethnic pride in these points of difference, he precisely diagnoses the nature of the diasporic being as "immigrant schizophrenic" (4). He approaches these texts primarily from a perspective of immigration in which diasporans’ efforts to assimilate into the host society are prioritized, whereas their anxiety inherent in diaspora literature has not been given adequate attention. In Ma’s new book, Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture Asian in
Flight, he follows his earlier argument to further elaborate on the paradoxical and schizophrenic nature of diasporic culture. The desire to embrace the West and the anxiety to preserve ethnic features has long been haunting the diasporic subjectivity. Ma makes an incisive observation in revealing such a long established and irking phenomenon that permeates and probably drives the dynamic train of diaspora literature. Jing Tsu, a professor of Chinese at Yale, nevertheless, seems to try hard not to take part in the skirmish among Chinese literary and diaspora literary
10 communities over who has the prerogative to write and talk about Chinese literature. Instead, she seeks to conceptualize the common condition of Chinese literary discourses in the global context, and she does so by defining Chinese literary capital as "literary governance" to underscore the tactics of collaboration across different occasions of Chinese-language writing (12). Plumbing into the century-long process of modern Chinese language's reformation, standardization, revitalization and globalization, Tsu interrogates how subnational differences have been traditionally minimized in order to push into the foreground nation-based comparisons (13).
Though she makes efforts to seek a common ground so as to connect various Chinese speaking communities via their linguistic similarity, she too realizes that if the Chinese language is what keeps Sinophone writers together as a global community, it is also the medium they learn to manipulate in order to hold themselves apart (13). Due to her priority on linguistic bindings among Chinese diasporic groups, Tsu concentrates her study on Chinese Anglophone writers’ bilingualism, frustration and gains. Being more aware of the most recent terminological disputes concerning the naming of Chinese diaspora / Sinophone communities, behind which the ideological battle and the fight for authenticity are still going on, she concludes that "an analytical category more durable than ‘Chineseness’ is called for, one that is less dependent on self-preoccupation and immediate theoretical gains" and, she further pinpoints that China's main dialogue is not only with the West but also with its own internal and diasporic others (233).
The Issue of Illegitimacy
The schizophrenic nature of diaspora and the further fragmentation of the Chinese speaking world pushes the Chinese diasporas to face the interrogation of legitimacy whenever
11 they articulate out of their diasporic status. They discover that they are not complete Chinese anymore, nor are they full members of their host societies. They are trapped in an identity crisis.
Intending to engage issues raised by the various collaborations and disputes in Chinese diasporic literature, my project focuses on elucidating how the anxiety of being deemed illegitimate fashions Chinese diasporic writings. Unlike those multiple passport holders, commercial tycoons who are probably becoming flexible citizens, Chinese diasporic intellectuals are still facing the issue of cultural identification and political allegiance while they undergo the rather painful process of finding themselves. They are pushed to the line where the legitimacy of their cultural articulation is constantly being challenged. Unlike the kind of double consciousness that the black diasporans feel so strongly in diaspora, Chinese diasporic intellectuals, writers, scholars, and cultural producers encounter more complicated disruption and deviation on each side of the doubleness. Scholars and writers originally from mainland China and now living in diaspora cannot fully embrace and proudly identify with their native culture and nation due to their aversion to the authoritarian politics that has been dominating the country for nearly a century.
They mostly adopt a contradictory and critical attitude to their native culture and society. They tend to observe from a distance and assume a self-assigned role as a critic of their native country, a role that keeps changing from a native informant in their host society to something else when the essential identity alters. On the other side in the process of adapting to the new culture and society, they demonstrate various adaptive gestures from linguistic conversion to self- transformation in their literary writing. However, the transformation is not that thorough, and they also strive to maintain distinct ethnic features that are both a personal existential necessity and an element of commercial success. The special position of these contemporary diasporic writers, unsettled, floating in air, accompanies and affects their literary writing career.
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Intellectuals from Taiwan and Hong Kong find it even more difficult to identify with a “Chinese culture” that has been considerably transformed and reshaped by socialist ideology. They either recreate a different Chinese culture or advocate a Sinophone discourse that minimalizes the connection between China and Sinophone communities in diaspora. Rey Chow’s intervention tactics and Shu-mei Shih’s motivation of envisioning a Sinophone community result precisely from such an anxiety of illegitimacy. The issue of illegitimacy perpetuates and configures their academic and literary creation in terms of genre, contents, themes, manners of writing and philosophical visions.
Three Chinese Diasporic Writers
Hong Ying was born in Chong Qing, a mountain city in southwest China in 1962. She started writing when she was a teenager. Writing poetry as well as short stories and novels, Hong
Ying adopts a unique female perspective to illustrate the desires, pursuits, feelings and emotions of the female psychology. Her works allow female protagonists to articulate in particular social and historical times. In 1991, Hong Ying left China for London. Her literary career, rather than being negatively affected for losing the familiar cultural environment, actually took off after she became a diasporic writer, marked by the publication of five novels, including Summer of
Betrayal, Daughter of the River, There Goes the Girl, K the Art of Love, and Anada, as well as several collections of short stories and poetry. Hong Ying is often compared with two other
Chinese diasporic woman writers: the Chinese American Yan Geling and the Chinese Canadian
Zhang Ling, both of whom write in retrospection of early Chinese immigrants or stories in past
China. Hong Ying is also associated with a group of woman writers who work in a genre called
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“body writing,” along with Lin Bai and Chen Ran. Their writings emphasize an individual life’s senses and sensibility and focus on female intuition and psychology, seeking for a conversation with the outside world through portraying personal body feelings. Undoubtedly, Hong Ying’s works appeal to female feelings and emotion and she places her characters back to special social and historical backgrounds. She is certainly one of the most successful Chinese diasporic writers; however, her literary ambition is more than interpreting Chinese history and culture for
Westerners or illustrating her own personal desires and aspirations. Hong Ying possesses, what I will call, “the illegitimate complex”. Her concentration on female sexuality and her unique manner of portraying women relates to her illegitimate birth. As a shameful mark inscribed on her life, the burden of illegitimacy has a far-reaching impact on her later literary career. Coming from an illegitimate origin causes her to contemplate the issue of illegitimacy and thus challenge the legitimate authority. Her later diasporic status provides Hong Ying a different perspective from which to view people who do not have a solid legitimate identity. Her protagonists counteract with social norms, disobey conventional rules, and yet they are able to live invigorated lives empowered by their strong will. Undoubtedly the concern with the problem of illegitimacy plays a critical and complex role in Hong Ying’s writing.
Different from Hong Ying’s illegitimacy, diasporic writer Ha Jin has always been accused of committing a linguistic betrayal and adopting an opportunistic approach in order to ensure his success as a writer in America. Ha Jin came to the United States in 1985 to go to graduate school. He began writing in English and was published in 1990. Within two decades Ha
Jin has become a well-known writer, winning quite a few literary awards, such as the Flannery
O’Connor Award, the Hemingway Foundation Award, the Faulkner Award and National Book
Award for Fiction among others. Jin’s persistence and diligence in writing Chinese stories in
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English allows the Western world to cast its attention back to modern China as it learns of the turbulence and pain of the modern Chinese people through his works. However, Jin’s success in
American literary world incurs criticism from China as well as Taiwan. These critics think that
Jin merely retells some old stories that have already been told by others. They question the authenticity of Jin’s stories. Some critics even accuse Jin of selling out his fellows for personal interest. Ha Jin, since the publication of his first book Between Silence, has sought to justify his identity under the anxiety of being called an illegitimate writer of Chinese stories. Ha Jin has shifted his role from that of a native representative informing Western readers of his backward homeland to that of an immigrant writer who strives to discover a new path to follow and to present a humanistic stance regardless of nationalistic, ethnic or racialist distinctions. Dealing with the issue of illegitimacy, Ha Jin has experienced three stages in which the relationship between an individual and a nation has always been a central issue. While exploring this issue,
Jin critiques the authoritarian government of China, questions the repressive ideology that intends to control the minds of Chinese people, and calls for respect for individuals from the government. Ha Jin’s diasporic experiences exemplify the process of identity crisis diasporic writers have encountered. Such a process of seeking a justified identity is best reflected in Jin’s literary works at different stages where we can witness Jin’s frustration, contemplation, and eventual transformation of his self-identity. Clearly, the issue of illegitimacy has also disturbed
Ha Jin to the extent that the accusative voice chases him and somehow shapes the theme and content of his writing.
More politically outspoken than Ha Jin, and with a different attitude towards illegitimacy than Hong Ying, Ma Jian voluntarily declares his illegitimacy with a sense of glory. The West has called Ma a dissident, an exile, therefore ensuring his complete invisibility in China. Ma
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Jian’s works have been banned since 1987, when he left mainland China, and they can only be published after the deletion of certain contents and under a pseudonym. Thus, Ma Jian has lost his legitimate position to write for the Chinese. Though he persists in writing in Chinese language, his readers are mostly either non-Chinese persons or Chinese diasporans. The exilic and diasporic status determines his permanent separation from a legitimate discourse approved by the regime of power and knowledge in China. He writes in antagonism to the Chinese
Communist Party and he writes like a tragic warrior who vows to fight to death. Ma Jian is an immensely energetic and active person and his works are highly symbolic and powerful. But Ma
Jian hasn’t come to terms with his diaspora status. Ma Jian regards himself as one of the exilic writers, a group that consists of many excellent and influential figures over several thousand years in Chinese literary history such as Qu Yuan and Confucius. Ma claims that it is the exilic literature that carries and preserves the genuine and sublime spirit of Chinese culture and it is the exilic writing that constitutes the finest part of the Chinese literary tradition. As a well known member of the Chinese diasporic community, after the publication of his novel Beijing Coma in
2009, Ma was once again denied the entrance into mainland China which re-declares his position of illegitimacy in writing about China.
Diasporic Writing
These three writers came from different backgrounds with respect to personal experience and social status when they were in China, went through different diasporic processes due to their varied degrees of entering their adopted societies, and followed different paths to become diasporic writers. Nevertheless, the three writers can be seen to represent three major types of
16 diasporic writings. In the first type are female diasporic writers who adopt a highly feminized perspective to tell exotic Chinese stories, such as Geling Yan, Jung Chang, Anchee Min, and
Adeline Yen Mah, among others. The second type includes those who have mastered the languages of their immigrant countries where they managed to establish themselves as writers, such as, Gao Xingjian, François Cheng, Jung Chang, Ha Jin, Anchee Min, Ping Wang, and Qiu
Xiaolong. They tell stories of their homeland to readers of their host societies in an acquired language. The third type consists of those who still persist in writing in the Chinese language, mostly political exiles who confront language barriers and cultural isolation, writers such as Bei
Dao, Kong Jiesheng, Ma Jian and Su Xiaokang, to name just a few renowned figures. The three categories are not strictly separated from each other, and in fact there are writers who can be simultaneously classified into two categories. For instance, Hong Ying is a woman diasporic writer who still writes in the Chinese language, whereas Anchee Min is a woman diasporic writer who has come to write completely in English.
An extended and sustained examination of the three writers will help us to draw a new and relatively comprehensive picture of contemporary Chinese diaspora literature in the contexts of postcolonial politics and socio-economic globalization. Undoubtedly they are all dealing with the issue of illegitimacy, whether literally, figuratively, or both. What is the connection between being diasporic and being illegitimate? My study intends to uncover the complicated and critical role of illegitimacy in the literary career of these diasporic writers. I propose that the issue of illegitimacy functions as a driving force for these diasporic writers that stimulates as well as represses them in constructing their literary subjectivity. If the three writers were thought to be illegitimate children in certain sense, the question would be: who are their illegitimate parents?
What causes the sense of illegitimacy? Would they be able to write out of the illegitimacy?
17
Organization
In Chapter One I will explore two novels Hong Ying wrote in diaspora: Daughter of the
River and K: the Art of Love. I intend to show how Hong Ying’s diasporic status facilitates her path to come to terms with her illegitimate birth, how she strives to write out of its negative shadow, and how she purportedly secures her diasporic position by creating a female identity that is not accepted by Chinese patriarchal discourse in the cross-cultural literary arena.
Meanwhile, it is worth noting that her diasporic status misleads Hong Ying to voluntarily write
Chinese females as exotic in an attempt to cater to the established stereotypes of Chinese femininity.
Chapter Two will explore Ha Jin’s literary journey as a Chinese diasporic writer in
America. Instead of focusing on his language choice and his particular way of telling Chinese stories, I will study Ha Jin’s transformation in diasporic status via the fictional characters in his works where the issue of illegitimacy causes anxiety as well as works as a hidden engine that guides his transformation.
Chapter Three will illustrate how Ma Jian is often misread or politicized when he persists in using the Chinese language to write in diaspora, and how the repressive sense of illegitimacy both confines and empowers his literary creation when he suffers invisibility in mainland China while attracting a great deal of attention in the West. To Ma Jian, writing is a form of resistance, a manner of self-preservation, and more importantly a reconnection to his past and roots. To counter the superimposed accusation of his illegitimacy, Ma Jian goes all the way by questioning the legitimacy of those who judge him.
18
The concluding chapter will broaden the analysis of the issue of illegitimacy by engaging two cultural theorists/professors/intellectuals: Rey Chow (originally from Hong Kong) and Shu- mei Shih (originally from Taiwan). The issue of illegitimacy has similarly haunted Rey Chow and Shih Shu-mei so much that they have taken actions to cope with it. Being an elite diasporic scholar in America and a local resident of Hong Kong who grew up under British colonial rule,
Rey Chow has found her cultural authenticity challenged, especially with regard to the legitimacy of her discourse on China. Meanwhile, she is equally dissatisfied with the way
Western scholars still Orientalize contemporary China. Thus she writes as a marginalized
Chinese against territorial propriety or cultural centrality; on the other hand, she claims her
Chinese identity to rectify the ingrained orientalism existing in the Western academy. At the same time, Shumei Shih, a Taiwanese American professor, engages herself in creating a new discourse: “Sinophone Studies,” with which she intends to disentangle the de-territorialized
Sinic-language speaking communities from an unjust China and create a site where powerful articulations against China-centrism can be heard. She has not only rejected the diasporic project of constructing a “Cultural China” in order to reclaim a legitimate membership in it, but has also questioned the taken-for-granted kinship between the Chinese diasporas and China.
The conclusion I will draw is that the issue of illegitimacy functions as a vital and empowering force by virtue of its complexity and multiplicity. Engaging this issue has brought
Hong Ying into a broader space where she is enabled to write and think productively and creatively. Similarly, it has transformed Ha Jin and enriched his literary life. In an interestingly unique way, the same issue has both disturbed and empowered Ma Jin. In addition, it has induced Rey Chow to seek tactics of intervention and urged Shu-mei Shih to create a new discourse. Illegitimacy thus should be recognized as a powerful force that all diasporans have to
19 deal with, one way or another, for it is a dialectical force that is able to destroy and construct, or repress and enrich all at the same time.
20
CHAPTER ONE
WRITING TO LEGITIMIZE THE ILLEGITIMACY—THE DISOWNED DAUGHTER
General Introduction
Throughout its imperial history, female writers in China had to subject their cai, literary talent, to the ingrained Chinese patriarchal system. Women who wrote, poets mostly, in pre- modern China were either born out of intellectual/official families or married into such scholar- gentry families7. Only in that way could they receive education to become cainü, talented women, and be recognized and known by later generations if they had the literary potential. However, there was one prerequisite for these cainü: they must first be denü, virtuous women. Of the seven virtues8 of women documented in Confucian orthodoxy, absolute submission to patriarchy and chastity were the most crucial. In other words, these literary women of pre-modern times, who are now recognized as talented writers, must have passed two exams—being chaste ladies and fulfilling all feminine duties assigned by the patriarchy.
After entering into the twentieth century Chinese women still could not separate themselves from the patriarchal umbrella. As major male writers engaged in the cause of building up a modern nation-state, women became the subjects of their writing, because a woman’s struggle against oppression is emblematic of a nation’s struggle for liberation (Larson
7 Writing women of imperial China also include high-class courtesans who were rarely involved in direct sex trade but rather performed music and arts such as poetry to please dignitaries and intellectuals. For detailed analysis see The Red Brush Writing Women of Imperial China by Wilt Idema and Beata Grant. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004. Print. 8 The seven virtues refer to the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues” that were a set of basic moral principles. Three obediences for a woman were to obey her father as a daughter, her husband as a wife and her sons in widowhood. Four feminine virtues were morality, proper speech, modest manner/appearance and diligent work. 21
169). Female writers were equally caught up in this virulent whirlpool of modernization and proactively participated in this patriotic enterprise. Modern women, who were released from foot binding and attended schools to be literate, were then ideally suited to mother or marry modern men. But they were still daughters of the patriarchal society and they continued to sustain this male-dominated modernity. A safe and desirable female identity still, to a large extent, lay in the confirmation of her paternalistic genealogy. Most female writers of modern time were still daughters from the gentry’s class. Though the later revolutionary literature seems to have severed women from their paternalistic bind, the authorial father was only replaced by a sexless political parent, in the form of a communist/socialist regime that is no less repressive. Instead of pledging loyalty to the older fathers, women must now write in line with the new revolutionary grand narrative. Having been raised in this history, female writers of China have been perpetually bound to the patriarchal discourse that gives light to their cai on the condition of their passing the bar exam of de. It is extremely difficult to imagine a female writer who has been disowned by the patriarchal tradition, but who has continued to pursue her cai within China’s literary contexts. Therefore it deserves our attention to witness how such a female writer successfully established herself with her distinct literary talent and capability.
Hong Ying is known as a diasporic Chinese writer, a title which seems to indicate her illegitimate inheritance of Chinese literary tradition. Acknowledging the diaspora tradition, Hong
Ying admits in one interview9 that her literary experiences resemble this diasporic trajectory. She sounds rather satisfied with, and even proud of, belonging to this branch of literary tradition.
When Zhao Yiheng, a distinguished scholar, summarizes the characteristics of Chinese diaspora
9 This was a talk between Hong Ying and Chinese writer Zhi An (止庵). The talk was then transcribed and published in the Chinese language in Writer on December 15, 2011. The title is “The Talk on Diaspora Literature, Tebbit Test and Transnational Love—A Dialogue between Hong Ying and Zhi An”. 22 literature, he translates diaspora into the two Chinese characters san ju (散聚), that literally mean scatter and gather. Zhao observes that diasporic writers share three types of scattering and three types of gathering: They scatter physically all over the world but gather their hearts toward one aspiration; the languages they utilize to write differ but what they intend to express gathers toward one meaning; the literary genres/ forms they adopt to write vary but they pursue one similar theme. Zhao’s argument centers on the indivisibility of these Chinese diasporic writers from China and Chinese culture and their inheritance of Chinese literary legacy even though they seemingly write under different circumstances. Zhao calls for due attention to these diasporic writers who, he believes, have not been given adequate recognition but have considerably contributed to Chinese literature. However, Hong Ying has earned scholarly attention from both
Chinese and Western critics even though their views are different. Ironically, the literary attention she has received has always accompanied the attention to her personal life and her particular writing subject: female sexuality.
Literary scholars outside China would invariably regard Hong Ying as a Chinese diasporic writer who, they deem, plants her roots deeply in the soil of Chinese history and culture and writes consistently in a way that is connected to or represents her native past. Thus Hong
Ying is often received conveniently as an ethnic Chinese writer in Western literary world. The critics of the Chinese literary circle, however, see her as a Chinese diasporic writer who has moved away from China and participated in a dialogue with the West, and is thus more diasporic than Chinese, more of an outsider than an insider. Amy Tak-yee Lai includes Hong Ying as one of the Chinese women writers in diaspora and marks her literary works with one distinctive characteristic—cycles of return, which Lai associates with the cyclical patterns of Chinese history comprising the rise and fall of its dynasties. Lai then, in her thorough manner, analyses
23 the frame of the cyclical pattern of the five novels of Hong Ying, tracing the theme of eternal return. Thus Hong Ying’s literary articulation, though not directly put forth by Lai, serves no more than another allegorical footnote for the cyclical pattern of Chinese history. Xu Jian, a
Chinese scholar in a US university, seeks to set Hong Ying’s works apart from the other Chinese memoirs that have had success with the Western audience. But Xu focuses on one distinctive quality in Hong Ying’s Daughter of the River—developing a class-conscious subjectivity. Xu sympathizes with the “suffering working-class woman as realistic, full bodied, empathic, and unsentimental as Hong Ying’s mother, who toughens herself up, body and mind, in order to numb the unspeakable pain in her daily battle to support the family” (530). Xu believes the book stands out because it is a full length novel that portrays the suffering of a working class family living on the margin of a socialist city. Focusing on the class-consciousness and the harsh life of the poor somehow perpetuates the image of a socialist China struggling on the edge of life and death in the Western imagination. Regarding Hong Ying as a rebellious individual against the general Chinese femininity, Johanna Hood believes that Hong Ying creates an independent female identity in China that airs the voice of contemporary Chinese women apart from the official voice represented by the All China Women’s Federation. Hong Ying therefore becomes a representative who symbolizes and reflects Chinese culture, Chinese history and Chinese politics with a different independent perspective.
Interestingly, Chinese literary scholars would like to place Hong Ying in the context of world literature, exploring her recognition and acceptance in the West. They would somehow attribute her achievement to the broader vision of world literature combined with Hong Ying’s
Chinese experiences. Zhou Hang comments: “Hong Ying’s novels have appropriately interpreted the relationship between ‘national literature’ and ‘world literature.’ That is to say her novels not
24 only remove none of the national and regional characteristics but also connect tightly, to its extreme degree and under broader space, with the universality” (108). In Zhou’s opinion, Hong
Ying’s conversion from poetry composition to novel writing results from a compelled transformation originated from the psychological pain of alienation and isolation and the attempt to leave the sense of insecurity and unsteadiness of poetry. Zhou thinks her works permeate multiple spaces and times, which demonstrates her efforts to fuse with world literature. So with pride and a sense of achievement for Chinese writers, Zhou concludes that Hong Ying has participated in the configuration of what Goethe initiated as Weltliteratur, implying that Chinese literature has reached a state of parity with the excellence of world literature. Huang Hua claims that Hong Ying has “effortlessly melted into the European writing circle” (72) and discerns that the characters Hong Ying depicts are those that are without national borders. Huang places Hong
Ying together with Maxine Hong Kingston and Yu Lihua and regards them as representatives of women writers who participate in the process of women’s identity construction with their respective features such as Yu’s rootless sentiments, Kingston’s voluntary seeking for a reconstruction of feminine identity and Hong Ying’s borderless writing. Apparently, the Chinese critics are more inclined to evaluate Hong Ying in the context of non-Chinese literary discourses in order to relate her to world literature. Such an attitude may reveal, to some extent, the Chinese literary ambition to play a role on the world literary stage. This attitude of sending Hong Ying away from Chinese literature may also disclose her embarrassing status and the difficulty of fitting her into the Chinese literary genealogy.
It deserves further effort to explain the different attitudes toward Hong Ying from home and abroad. Also needed is more exploration on how Hong Ying herself reacts to this discrepancy and whether such a difference affects her literary writing. Hong Ying willingly
25 accepts the title “diasporic writer” in the aforementioned interview, although she admits that
“being a diasporan is not a desirable matter” and believes that pain creates poets. While explaining the phenomenon that many writers write about stories that occur in other places than where they actually live, Hong Ying says: “In terms of writing, one conspicuous characteristic of diaspora literature lies in its embodiment of this type of cultural tension between the native and foreign, antagonistic yet infiltrating.” Hong Ying considers herself someone who lives and writes under a tension in which, instead of being repressed or even crushed, she dwells and prospers exuberantly. Diasporic status, as Hong Ying agrees, is not a comforting position; instead it is rather psychologically traumatic and spiritually agonizing. William Safran points out in his essay
“Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return” that the diaspora community refers to several categories of people— “expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities”— individuals who have been “dispersed from a specific original center to two or more peripheral, or foreign regions” (83). Given the negative sense of being diasporic, however, Hong Ying seems to have taken the diasporic status without reluctance, or, one might say, with good grace. Critics who have recognized the crossculturalness and diasporicity in her writing have not yet clarified why she has become so unabatedly diasporic, so cozily ethnic. Shouldn’t she have some discomfort or even anxiety for her literary writing, which is situated in neither fully Chinese and nor fully Western traditions? What are the deeper causes of the difficulty for Hong Ying to fit into the Chinese literary genealogy? Is it the subject matter she writes which prevents her? Or is it the different manner in which Hong Ying depicts female sexuality? Simply classifying her as an ethnic Chinese writer from the Western perspective ignores her identity crisis and personal struggle in the process of constructing her own subjectivity. Similarly, merely ostracizing her from the Chinese literary tradition does not
26 help to explain her distinct manner of depicting Chinese females. It should be noted that two ongoing tendencies have existed in Hong Ying’s diasporic journey. One tendency witnesses her difficult yet relentless efforts in constructing a Chinese female identity: an unconventional, rebellious identity against the traditional patriarchal constrictions on Chinese women. The other tendency involves Hong Ying’s deliberate efforts in presenting Chinese females in the Western cultural context based on her contemplation and exploration of it, so as to create a Chinese female image exotic enough to intrigue the Western reading public as well as adequately distinct enough from the traditional Chinese female representation.
Few have connected Hong Ying’s status of being an illicit daughter with her distinctive diasporic writing. The sense of illegitimacy that stems from her illicit status is one of the major themes of her most significant work written in diaspora: her autobiographical novel Daughter of the River. There is a profound connection between the two critical issues. An illegitimate child is one born to parents who are unmarried to each other, a bastard whose name associates them with stigma and ambiguity, thus creating the problem of belonging. In Hong Ying’s case, as she describes it, she is an extramarital child born to her mother and a younger man; later her mother chooses to stay in her marriage so that Hong Ying becomes, at best, a half member of this family. Such a disgrace is something she has little control over, and yet it has profoundly and permanently affected her life. The moment her biological father publicly disowned her, she became a daughter who had been denied by her paternal genealogy, a daughter permanently lacking a real father. When she immigrated to London and began her life of diaspora she was relieved from the rigidity of Chinese patriarchal system that had not admitted her from the beginning. Hong Ying willingly disassociates herself from a definite category that reflects a repressive and punishing judgment on her. Dwelling beyond the territorial boundary as a
27 diasporan, she is given space to re-observe and rethink the dominant patriarchal tradition. She also gains access to and participation in Western literary discourses, from which she develops a comparative perspective and extracts useful theoretical resources to form her own unique representation of Chinese female subjectivity.
What an illegitimate daughter and a diasporic writer share is that both are disowned by the patriarchal tradition: for the former the daughter is disowned by the moral authority of the patriarchal tradition; for the latter, a diasporan is deprived of the right to represent China by the regime of authenticity. Hong Ying, having been disowned by both systems, is fortunately (or unfortunately) an embodiment of both. The difference between these two instances of disowning is that in the first instance she was forcefully disowned by the patriarchal family, whereas in the second instance she courageously disowned the patriarchal tradition of Chinese culture. Hong
Ying does not passively succumb to this disposal by the Chinese literary authority, nor does she submissively follow the steps of previous diasporic writers, whether they are overseas students or new immigrants, whose writings immerse in the sentiments of loss and rootlessness. What Hong
Ying engages in doing, I argue, is to write to legitimize her illegitimacy, to write to establish a long-sought identity that is not admitted and even despised by the patriarchal authority. Her consistent commitment to writing Chinese women, those fallen women, the women who have been avoided in legitimate discourses because of their lack of quintessential feminine virtues, displays her persistent agenda in defense of these women so as to earn identity for them. Instead of merely focusing on the individual female’s life experiences, Hong Ying is able to portray her female protagonists in larger and detailed historical, social, and cultural backdrops in order to reveal deep causes for human tragedies. More importantly, rather than unapologetically speaking for her characters, she depicts their painful struggles, their deep sense of guilt and their
28 endeavors to make up for previous behaviors. By doing so, Hong Ying writes at odds with the rigid, judgmental (and hence hypocritical) legitimate discourses and is able to earn these women a justified identity. From Lin Ying in Summer of Betrayal, “I” in Daughter of the River, to Lin in
K: the Art of Love, the characters she creates have all gone through difficult journeys. They start with abandoning sexual chastity, and then openly celebrate sexual dominance. Their journeys are full of conflicts and struggles, consisting of falling from chastity, fighting with the repressive society, and seeking for justification for their behaviors. Despite allowing these women to celebrate a freedom of female sexuality, Hong Ying still holds some reservations and later retreats from her open celebration. At certain point in her narration, her protagonists fall into a state of self-contradiction. These women grow hesitant and suffer from their previous behaviors.
It is exactly the hesitation, regret and repentance of these women that demonstrate the desire for righteousness and determination of correction. The feelings of these women present a contrast with the intolerant and unsympathetic patriarchal ideology. Hong Ying identifies with these women precisely because she herself is an illicit daughter, a child of a fallen woman. Her depiction of these women uncovers her intention of legitimizing their long-time illegitimacy.
Hong Ying’s literary diasporic status complicates her original illegitimate birth. Critics and psychologists discover that leaving home results in the relaxation of moral discipline. Facing a completely strange society, people may feel released from the last string of moral shackles from the original society. Henry Miller had to flee to Paris to write his Tropic of Cancer. D. H.
Lawrence began a voluntary exile in order to finish his most morally challenging works.
Moreover, one myth about the Western society often entertained by the more conservative and traditional Eastern world is that the Western society holds a more flexible attitude, or even celebratory stance, towards sexuality. According to the myth, sexual transgression is more
29 interpreted as the imperfection of human beings, rather than a severe moral defect. So is it such a myth that affects Hong Ying’s manner of depicting Chinese women in diaspora? Is it because she leaves China that she can boldly tell her past, revealing even the shameful experiences? Is it because the Western society provides more a tolerant environment that Hong Ying allows her female characters to fall from respectful ladies to unfaithful wives? This chapter undertakes three tasks: first, to analyze how Hong Ying writes to legitimize her biological illegitimacy with her literary articulation; second, to explore how the diasporic status affects her literary writing in terms of her different manner of portraying Chinese women, and lastly, to expose the potential problems in this sort of writing.
An Illegitimate Daughter and Her Mother
Being a bastard is never a popular topic in Chinese literature, even less a likable one. In fact, due to the long history of acquiesced polygamy in China, those children born to secondary wives were not even considered illegitimate, particularly if they were baby boys. Polygamy had always been legal and in practice in reality until the 2003 amendment to China’s New Marriage
Law, which outlaws married persons’ cohabitation with a third party, aiming at curbing a resurgence of concubinage in big cities. In reality, polygamous marriages are not uncommon but polyandrous relationships are traditionally considered as immoral, prohibited by law, and uncommon in practice. Female sexuality had always been a taboo topic, and female sexual transgression was the most condemned and unforgivable behavior in traditional society. Women who were unfaithful to their marriages were often portrayed as morally loose and lascivious in literary works. The punishment of these women was extremely harsh—complete removal from
30 their original social lives, or sometimes they were secretly put to death. Those that Chinese society generally deemed as bastards are those born to these condemned women and unidentified fathers, similar to Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Such a literary work as The Scarlet Letter, and its portrayal of a fallen woman, is very rare in Chinese literature. Children born to these women are generally thought to be illegitimate and they are symbols of shame. Hong Ying, however, not only becomes bold enough to write about such a theme, she also writes to rectify the ingrained discrimination against illegitimate children. By revealing her personal story, she, as a writer and an illegitimate daughter, writes to give herself a justified identity, to defend her mother and to launch a subtle yet powerful criticism of the prejudices of Chinese society.
Daughter of the River is not Hong Ying’s first novel in diaspora, but it is her most significant work, not only because this autobiographic piece discloses her unpleasant past but also because it marks her literary maturity and establishes her as a female writer. This novel, I will argue, can be read as an implicit and yet firm statement in defense of her mother and a request for rectification of her illegitimacy. The phenomenon of women who write about their own life stories is not uncommon, particularly for Chinese women writers who leave China and later write and get published in the West. Usually their personal stories interweave with their national histories. These works, written by Chinese women in diaspora, all seem to point to the disasters of their country as the cause of their personal tragedies. Thus, they target their criticism towards the Chinese politics and government that caused these disasters. Jung Chang’s Wild
Swan delineates three generations worth of personal adversity caused by China’s feudalist backwardness, revolutionary hypocrisy and communist political cruelty. Anchee Min’s Red
Azalea tells of a young girl’s unusual experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Adeline Yen
Mah’s traumatic childhood assists her in creating a Chinese Cinderella for the Western readers to
31 sympathize with. What these autobiographies share is the self-victimization and the accusation of the other. It is the individual micro narrative that arises to question the historical macro narrative.
Hong Ying, in contrast, sets herself and her family as targets. The exposure of the family scandal makes Hong Ying’s autobiography distinct from any of the other female memoirs popularized in the Western countries. It not only demonstrates the extraordinary courage of the author but also reveals her dissatisfaction with the judgmental ideology and her call for the re-evaluation of, if not a complete criticism of, the system that produces her illegitimacy.
Hong Ying completed Daughter of the River in London in 1997 and the Chinese version
(entitled the Hungry Daughter) was first published in Taiwan the same year. It became very popular, winning Hong Ying international fame. Later it was translated into multiple languages.
It delineates a solitary, unhappy and sensitive young girl’s discovery, on her 18th birthday, of her illegitimate identity. Upon learning the truth, the protagonist “I” begins to loathe her family and everything around her and soon leaves home to start a vagrant and decadent life. The story interweaves two major narratives with one following the protagonist’s childhood memories and the other delineating her experiences since her eighteenth birthday. During her entire childhood, the protagonist “I” feels like an unwanted child or a child deposited temporarily by neighbors at this house. The shocking discovery of the long-held family secret is worsened by a bitter love between her and her depressed history teacher. A painful abortion and the suicide of the history teacher end this unfortunate love. Through the eyes of the protagonist, readers can see how such a family scandal between husband and wife affects every single person in the family, between parents and children and between siblings. Their feelings for each other are very complex. The children other than “I” feel the pain of their mother but also show contempt to her. They intend to protect the family, but often end up hurting each other. Such a complicated family is largely
32 dysfunctional. It is not a shelter in which to evade adversities or get comfort. Tainted by grim poverty, home becomes a place where everybody takes out their grudges, fights for limited food; it becomes a place where family members take off their last social masks. Not only merely describing her family, the author also uses her sober and precise description to capture similar, and even worse, situations in neighborhoods where people struggle at the bottom of the society with poverty, hunger, and all sorts of man-made disasters during some of the most turbulent eras in modern China.
In the midst of the crowded and unfriendly neighborhood and a dysfunctional family, the ignored youngest girl grows troubled by a secret stalker and the strange atmosphere at home as she turns eighteen. The author does not give this ignored girl a real name in the novel, nor does she give names to any of the family members and all important characters; instead, she uses “big sister,” “third brother” and “history teacher” to refer to them. The entire naming system is strictly constructed based on an even stricter hierarchy of social identities. Hong Ying’s deliberate avoidance of naming anyone in her novel not only reveals her difficulty fitting into that system, but more significantly, indicates her distrust and even questioning of that system. That her full attention is given to the life stories of these people rather than to their names demonstrates her emphasis on the experiences, the feelings, and the emotions of people rather than the rigid and uncompassionate naming system. She makes a statement that it is what you have been through, your day-to-day lived experiences that define who you are, not your names that define your identity. As a refusal to take part in the naming system, Hong Ying makes a creative change of her own name. Her original name is Chen Hong-ying (in Chinese characters 陈红英) in which
Chen is her family name that follows her foster father’s. The first name Hong Ying (in Chinese characters 红英) literally means “red heroine”, a very common name for a young girl in the
33 revolutionary China of those days. But she later dropped the last name and changed her name into Hong Ying (in Chinese characters 虹影), which literally means “shadow of rainbow.”
According to Confucian traditions, it is so critically important for descendants to carry on the paternal family name that any breaking off from this tradition would be considered as serious violation of filial piety. A person without a family name can be compared to someone without an identity. However, Hong Ying would rather give up such an important identity than carry on a false name that could only exhibit disgrace. This decision also manifests Hong Ying’s firm determination to break from the name-based connection of familial and societal construction which creates a profound prejudice against anyone who is not born of this genealogy. We can imagine Hong Ying might have struggled in the process of naming herself as a writer, a profession in which a well-known name proves your success. Interestingly, she plays very well with the tonal characteristics of Chinese language: where the phonetics of two characters is the same but changing their tones brings forth a completely different image. By changing the first flat tone of Ying (英, heroine) to the third tone of Ying (影, shadow) and changing the character
Hong 红(red) into Hong 虹(rainbow), Hong Ying was able to pull out the little girl born in the red socialist China in the 1960s and replant her in the literary world so that she could grow poetically in the 1980s, when she made her literary debut. She established herself in the literary world with a new name that was without any attachment to the past and her family. It is a reinvention and re-creation of her identity outside the name-based discourse. Naming herself
“shadow of rainbow” may also reveal Hong Ying’s self-perception of her fluid and rootless status and its romantic beauty and temporality.
34
At the same time as this reformation of her self-identity, however, Hong Ying holds some doubts and confusions about it that are left unexplored. Hong Ying carries on the exploration of this name in another novel: K: the Art of Love. The protagonist Lin of K names her imaginary daughter Hong, meaning rainbow, taken from a poem in The Book of Songs10. Hong Ying’s explanation of the Confucian connotation of the name in the poem was interesting: “Rainbow: the result of intercourse between the sun and the rain. As it is improper yin-yang intercourse, it embodies the pure carnality of Heaven and Earth” (171). This interpretation echoes the extramarital love between the protagonist Lin and her lover in this story, which also echoes Hong
Ying’s own illegitimate birth. Hong Ying does not give this fictional girl a family name either, but only a given name: “Hong.” She lavishes affection on the girl even though she only exists in the imagination of the protagonist of K:
One wet morning Lin looked up at the clearing sky and said that if they ever had a
child it would surely be a daughter, since their lovemaking was so passionate.
And she should have a beautiful name, said Lin: Hong. … Julian loved the
imagery surrounding the rainbow. He would gaze and gaze at the sky, and dream
of a daughter born of the pure but illicit sensuality between yin and yang. At this
moment the world seemed as radiant to him as the vividly colored arcs in the sky.
He murmured to himself the soft sound of the word in Chinese: ‘Hong…’ (Hong
Ying 172).
Just like Hong, an illicit daughter without a family name, Hong Ying, as she claims, is a love child. Through her expression of love for this character, she intends to defend this great love.
Such a great love, as she claims, can be paralleled with sun and rain, yin and yang; and the love
10The Book of Songs, often known in English as The Classic of Poetry, is the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry. It comprises 305 poems and songs dating from the 10th to 7th centuries BC. It is one of the “Five Classics” traditionally said to have been compiled by Confucius, and has been studied and memorized by scholars in China. 35 is so spontaneous and natural that it just happened as it is. In contrast, the restrictions of the
Confucian doctrines on the relationship between men and women that intend to suppress this natural intimacy seem inhumane in comparison with this great natural human emotion. However, the citing of Confucian texts implies the author’s awareness and concern of the judgment the behavior may incur. It is a reinvention with pressure, a name with a curse. The entire story of the naming of either Hong Ying herself or of her characters in the novels demonstrates a gesture, if not a celebration, of commemorating this love and locating this love in an appropriate place, that, though it is flawed like any single entity in the secular world, still deserves commemoration and understanding. It is a justification and a rescue to the troubled author Hong Ying who has been continually disrupted by the issue of illegitimacy.
Undoubtedly, as a daughter, Hong Ying should not be blamed for the extramarital affair, but she becomes a target of accusation as a symbol of shame. The unfair treatment compels
Hong Ying to seek the origin of her illegitimacy. She finds her birth relates to the unprecedented nation-wide famine from 1959 to 1961. The Chinese title of Daughter of the River can be literally translated as The Hungry Daughter. This name is an example of Fredric Jameson’s theory on the third world literature, in which he concludes that third-world texts are allegorical.
Jameson emphasizes that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69)11. This hungry, lacking young girl reflects, in a general sense, the nation’s wretchedness at the time. David Der-Wei
Wang analyzes in his essay “Three Hungry Women” how hunger has been a recurrent theme, motif, or a formal challenge in twentieth-century Chinese literature while the hungry woman has become an archetype. Certainly the image Hong Ying paints in this novel makes it a work that can be placed within this list. However, Hong Ying has been able to use this long-time
11 The italics are from the original text. 36 archetype, transcend its stereotypical image, and create, for her own purposes, new discourse into this portraiture. Even the Western publishers of the book acknowledged to Hong Ying’s transcendence when they changed the title to Daughter of the River. It is not simply the hunger image but what is behind it, the extremely physical suffering and psychological pain of most working class people, condensed in and represented by this hungry girl, which makes Hong
Ying’s work outstanding and transcendental. In a review Richard King notes that what differentiates Daughter of the River from most of the autobiographical writings by Chinese nationals lies in its “concentration on the physical and emotional experiences of the author rather than on the history of the nation: it is her dysfunctional family, rather than the mismanaged states, that is the cause of Hong Ying’s adolescent misery” (94). Again, although King gives credit to
Hong Ying for her truthful depiction of personal feelings, he seems to misunderstand those ruthless descriptions. The dysfunctional family is exactly the product of that age. Extreme hunger and poverty have robbed human beings of their last decency and dignity. Hong Ying herself, strictly speaking, is a daughter born out of those desperate circumstances. Her mother’s lover is able to bring a little extra food for starving children of his lover’s family. Angela Leary says that Hong Ying’s autobiography is “a gritty, warts-and-all account of a miserable life” (44).
Hong Ying seeks to fully display the misery—the unbearably disgusting public latrine, the extreme embarrassment of sharing a narrow space among adult siblings, drown bodies floating in the river, etc. This detailed graphic delineation of daily life experienced by working class people in socialist China is a profound humiliation to the Chinese government, who claims that its aims are for the well being of the people. There is nothing for Hong Ying to hide, and it is obviously not her fault in remembering the squalid slums that pervaded the south bank of Yangtze River in the socialist China of the 1980s. While it may be personally embarrassing to have an ill-tempered
37 and spiteful mother, it is more thought-provoking to witness a woman whose previously delicate feminine body has been considerably disfigured and who has changed from a kind simple country girl to a numb insensible mother due to decades of bitterness life has forced on her. The seemingly objective representation of these sufferings is embedded in the author’s solemn reflection on the past, the causes and results. Leary further posits, “It is Hong Ying’s political naiveté which sets this book apart from other ‘scar’ memoirs emerging from China” (44). Hong
Ying indeed stands apart from other writers of feministic memoirs that concentrate on self- victimization, but she is clearly not politically naive. Communist hypocrisy is fully revealed in
Hong Ying’s narration. The devastating famine that lasted for nearly three years and starved tens of millions of people to death proves the policy failure of the government. Hong Ying’s seemingly inadvertent mentioning of eastern Tibetan rebellion also reveals the dissatisfaction of the ethnic minorities toward the Chinese government. Moreover, the class struggle education that imbues hatred to even children in kindergarten manifests the inhuman side of communist ideology. The specific reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Incident in the last chapter and the one slogan she chooses to cite there, “We Shall Lie No More,” reveal her insightful contemplation of the national fate and her personal misery. This is where the center of her social critique is found.
If this novel has disclosed the author’s personal secret and disgraceful family scandal, it has also exposed even more strikingly the darkness that has been shadowing the socialist China for forty years under Communist regime.
There are two story lines in the narrative that Hong Ying develops in a nicely controlled manner. One line describes the protagonist’s eagerness to find the truth behind her nagging feeling of being superfluous and the shame that has been haunting the family for eighteen years.
The other line always follows the first, simultaneously describing what is happening in the
38 country while each individual citizen suffers in the midst of it. The two lines are so intertwined that each individual’s suffering accompanies or cannot be separated from its national historical occurrence. As the protagonist discovers the cause of the abnormal, strange atmosphere, she unfolds one secret after another. Father was infected with syphilis. Mother married a gang leader and Big Sister was a product of that marriage. Finally she uncovers the big discovery of her own illegitimate birth. In this process, Hong Ying demonstrates her maturity as a writer. Daughter of the River is often regarded as a work marking Hong Ying’s literary maturity for her sobriety and calmness in describing the adversity of her life. Going through severe misery, the surviving daughter dwells away from homeland. Not only does the author narrate her lived sufferings, but she also depicts the psychological perversity of people under the heavy pressure of their misfortunes. These stories sound almost fatally predestined. They leave no space for people trapped in them to do anything to change. They are helpless situations. In particular, while retelling the part where Mother begins the affair, the author is prepared to arrive at its inevitability:
Forced to leave Father in the Luzhou hospital, they returned to Chongqing alone.
With five hungry mouths to feed, Mother went back to work as a coolie laborer.
… Wobbling under the weight, she sprained her ankle, but hobbled up to the
scale, where the load weighed in at only ninety-eight kilos (205-206).
With Father’s injury that keeps him away from home, Mother’s load in this time of famine is unbearably heavy. Mother’s lover not only helps with the household chores, looks after the children, and brings food to the table for them, but he also brings hope and love to this family at an extremely difficult time. He plays the harmonica for the kids, which brings laughter and joy, and he does Mother’s hair, which reminds her that she is still a woman. Hong Ying utilizes only
39 one sentence to record the final transgression: “They were powerless to prevent the inevitable, and in the vast emptiness of the room their bodies were joined” (208). It is not a kind of wicked and sophisticated adultery, but rather an inevitable love affair—the only humane beauty in this largely dehumanized life. It is only in this chapter that Mother is seen to have an affair, and in it that her feminine beauty fully springs out. Only at the time of the affair does Mother appear to show deep love for the young man. Eighteen years later she confesses to her daughter the circumstances back then, “‘You don’t know what a shameful act that is in the eyes of the world.
That’s why I couldn’t tell you. Back in 1961, I didn’t know how the family would survive. He supported us, like a messenger from heaven. Whether you want to admit or not, we owe our survival to that good and decent man’” (209). Although this love affair is despised and has been seen as a shameful scandal, it remains in Mother’s heart and memory in a different version. It is the most beautiful love she has had in her life. It also deserves to be remembered for the way it ended; the two lovers give up their love to minimize the hurt and take on the responsibilities of their lives. Mother chooses to stay in the family and the young man dutifully pays child support with his meager income for eighteen years, while he himself lives an extremely thrifty life and dies at forty-five. What we see are two conscientious people who devote themselves to making up for previous wrongdoings. Hong Ying sends a clear message to the unforgiving society: it is for such an inadvertently committed sin that the sinners suffer more than anyone. A defensive statement is made not only for both her parents but also for herself to articulate that her birth is not merely a shame but involves beautiful love and selfless sacrifice that deserve forgiveness and respect.
Without a paternal linkage to follow, Hong Ying portrays a realistic, full-bodied, empathic, and unsentimental Mother, a maternal legacy that she will carry on. Mother toughens
40 herself up, body and mind, in order to numb the unspeakable pain in her daily battle to support the family. Mother’s image can barely be found in the history of Chinese literature, yet it is bound to be an unforgettable one. Mother is a strong-willed young girl who escapes from countryside to the big city Chongqing to flee an arranged marriage. Mother has such an attractive appearance that her beauty captures the attention of a gang leader, whom she marries later.
Unable to bear the triad’s unfaithfulness and violent temper, she escapes again until she meets
Father. Although coming from the countryside with little education, she has an insightful perception of society. The mutual understanding shared between the lovers is what Mother cherishes. As she later tells her daughter, “‘He never asked to see you, because he knew that an illegitimate child was little more than a monster in the eyes of most people,’ Mother said, ‘This hypocritical society of ours wouldn’t give you a moment’s peace, nor be moved by your tear’”
(231). Mother swallows tears to live on. Not only portraying the torture and humiliation Mother endures as a lowest coolie laborer, the author also spends considerable ink on the protagonist’s haplessness of her years of growing up when she does not know the reason for her misery but has to endure just like her Mother. She senses the anxiety in Father’s eyes and unkindness in
Mother’s, the dislike and even hatred from her brothers and sisters. She cries: “Why, I wondered, was I born into a world where happiness did not exist? Why did I have to experience so many slights, so much negligence and sorrow?” (57) At school, she is the least important girl, no one would even care to show interest in. She finds one person who will listen to her and give her warmth, but this person ends up leaving her the most horrible pain. She falls in love and has her first sexual experience with this depressed man—her history teacher. But he kills himself for fear of further political persecution. Hong Ying records the physical pain of facing the abortion alone after the death of the history teacher: “Pain, swelling, and paralysis all mixed together made it
41 feel as if all my organs were being ripped from my body, chopped into tiny pieces, then crammed back into me; no amount of howling and shrieking could make this tearing of flesh go away” (259). By registering Mother’s uneven life and exhibiting the daughter’s painful experience, body and soul, Hong Ying makes an effective statement that if the Mother’s former sexual transgression was a sin, then so many years of torturing life for both the Mother and daughter would have paid the adequate amount of atonement. Rather than following a paternalistic genealogy that she does not own, Hong Ying firmly traces her maternal line. Mother is where she receives her life and from whom she is confirmed and defined.
This is a book about mother and daughter, and particularly about their suffering.
However, though Hong Ying has been through so much misery, she did not write the book in a mood of anger or vengeance, but rather in a manner of conducting profound reflection and seeking redemption. The eighteen-year-old Hong Ying could not have come to this understanding. She chose to run away from home to mix her young life with liquor, art and sex.
She missed the last chance to see her biological father before he dies. Her intense sense of guilt concerning Mother, Father and her biological father could only reveal itself years later in her writing, when she is so far away from everything. The love that should have existed between blood family members has been missing for too long. She describes Father and her siblings with honesty and bitterness, but also with understanding and forgiveness. After learning the birth secret Hong Ying reflects: “He [Father] had the right to cripple or smother or crush me, as so many people do with their own daughters, and all it would take was a claim that it was an accident” (212). After her brothers and sisters grill her about her decision of whether to leave or to stay in the family, Hong Ying writes:
42
People are funny: they can’t forget the wrongs they’ve suffered and can’t
remember the favors they’ve received. But I could agree that they had every right
to blame me for some of their suffering, since they’d gone hungry during the
famine because of me, and couldn’t hold their heads up in front of our neighbors
because they had a bastard sister at home … I preferred to acknowledge the fact
that I owed the family an emotional debt I’d never be able to repay (236).
To herself she is equally sharp: “I am a cold-hearted person, No, a cold-blooded animal” (308).12
She recalls in detail what her biological father told her back when she did not pay attention. By revealing these scars, Hong Ying expresses her regrets and repentance. She certainly remembers the favors and understands her siblings’ unkindness. If it were the dysfunctional family that had led to these adversities, then Hong Ying’s writing and the sincerity expressed in the book could have served as a peace-making statement, a scar-healing panacea, an appealing letter for her mother, and a manifesto to legitimize her illegitimacy. Among all these pursuits finding herself an identity is the most critical one.
Finding an identity is not an easy journey. It is full of contradictions and has too many facets that Hong Ying can’t manage in her real life, as she is equally incapable of changing the fact of her illegitimate birth. Despite her innocence in her own birth, she is forced to accept the consequences. If someone should be blamed, shouldn’t it be the parents rather than the children?
Isn’t Pearl more innocent than Hester and Dimmesdale who are less despicable than
Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter? We can barely find a Chillingworth in Hong Ying’s story.
She gives “hunger” the defendant’s seat. It must be noted that the literal translation of the
Chinese title is “The Hungry Daughter,” which can also be rendered into “The Daughter of
12 I translated this sentence from the Chinese version of this novel on page 308. However, the English version translates the sentence this way: “Am I too callous? Cold-blooded even?” (274). 43
Hunger” because Ji’e (饥饿) in Chinese can be both adjective and noun. Since it can be both noun and adjective, the two translations of the title, “the hungry daughter” or “the daughter of hunger”, are both true and meaningful in their own way. Hunger is what induces all. When
David Der-wei Wang searches the century-long gallery of hungry women in modern Chinese literature, he feels a bit relieved to witness this woman who stands out in articulating for herself, whose story seems to be able to provide answers for those perished and silent. Like those hungry women whose fates were determined, manipulated or closely tied up with food, Hong Ying had a
“hungry” childhood and adolescence, which even extended to adulthood. But unlike those women whose hunger, either physical or spiritual, tainted only their own lives, Hong Ying’s hunger is inherited from her mother. Thus, there are two tainted hungry women, which leaves neither of them to be free of the burden. Moreover, Hong Ying’s hunger includes the desire for food, sex, and spiritual satisfaction. Hence hunger is both physical and spiritual, both personal and social. She is hungry for food at the physical level, for love at the psychological level, and for a legitimate identity at the social level. The lack on all these levels gives birth to this hungry daughter. Just as the author hopes at the end of the novel that “maybe my own writing could eventually satisfy the hunger that had existed in my heart since the day I was born” (267), Hong
Ying succeeds in feeding up that hunger in her literary writing with a heart of love, repentance and forgiveness. She succeeds in calling people’s attention to the circumstances involving her illegitimate birth rather than merely to the shame of it. More than these, Hong Ying writes out one identity for herself that has been denied to her by the patriarchal tradition all along. She is a daughter of love and a daughter of hunger. How would she sustain such an identity in her later diasporic life?
44
An Illegitimate Writer and Her Characters
If we see that Hong Ying’s motivation for writing Daughter of the River lies in her desire to defend her mother and request a legitimate identity as a daughter for herself, then the writing of K: the Art of Love stems from Hong Ying’s longing for a legitimate identity as a female writer.
Female literary talents in Chinese literary tradition, as explained earlier, have to rely on a patriarchal figure, either a father or a husband, to bring out their literary talent so as to maintain a legitimate identity of a writer. This ensures that these female writers, and both their personal morality and their writing subjects, have been approved by the patriarchal criterions. However, because of her illegitimate birth, Hong Ying has permanently lost the right to ever become a writer in the patriarchal tradition, let alone a writer who writes about unapproved subject matter—female sexuality. K: the Art of Love features a modernized female writer who devotes herself to an extramarital love affair with a younger British man in the still conservative China of the 1930s. Hong Ying explains in the Preface of K that she is more interested in telling a good story and what she intends to express in this novel is the idea that “sex and love are inseparable”
(viii). It seems that Hong Ying merely focuses on telling an appealing romantic story that follows the normative pattern of a popular fiction. Indeed she has all the necessary elements for a successful love story, but given the specific manner in which she portrays the protagonist Lin and her obsession with the issue of female sexuality, I argue that the writing of K: the Art of Love exhibits Hong Ying’s thorough departure from, and a determined rebellion against, the patriarchal discourse that forbids writing on female sexuality.
Hong Ying adopts a celebratory attitude toward female sexuality in this novel. She portrays a distinct Chinese female who is not a docile beauty, obediently subjected to the
45 patriarchal regulations. As a writer, an intellectual and an artist, Lin perhaps represents the most intellectual of Chinese women at the time. In addition, Lin has a British lover. Hong Ying describes her as a bold intellectual woman with the knowledge of an ancient sexual skill—the
Daoist art of love and the passion to practice it. With this exquisite charm Lin wins over her lover. In Hong Ying’s narration this immoral affair is transformed into a passionate, exotic and finally unforgettable love epic. It is unforgettable particularly because Julian Bell, the male protagonist, dies in the Spanish Civil War after he leaves China. The death of a lover pronounces the end of this love affair, but also seals up all of the beauty and deep affection of this love that is often romanticized and inscribed in the memory as an eternal love. Hong Ying captures the temporality of love and transforms it into eternality. As far as the truthfulness of the story is concerned, the entire Chinese literary circle has always been evasive, even though there were rumors about the love affair between Ling Shuhua, a female writer in the 1930s, and Julian Bell.
By deliberately narrating such an intentionally hidden story, Hong Ying enables herself to become a writer, a woman writer. And by specifically focusing on such an impermissible subject matter—a sexually transgressive woman – Hong Ying has created another unconventional woman, a persona that further validates the author’s early personal experience as well as reconfirms her belief that females can live and love free from the tyranny of patriarchal restrictions.
Female sexuality is a minefield in Chinese literature. Ding Ling’s Miss Sophie’s Diary
(1927) is regarded as a landmark in the evolving role of women during the era of May Fourth
Movement. The work candidly captures the feelings and emotions, including sexual attraction, which a young woman has toward her two suitors. Its style is close to that of a confessional narration, but without any graphic description of sexual behaviors. The story caused a huge
46 sensation among Chinese readers at the time. Nevertheless, Hong Ying depicts the feelings, the senses, and the technique of their lovemaking in such a passionate, exquisitely charming and sometimes provocative way that she has turned the bed into a performing stage that attracts all the voyeuristic and lusty. Lin, through Hong Ying’s description, is transformed from a restrained, elegant, intellectual lady to a superlative Daoist sex practitioner. Daoist sexual practices have existed since the Han Dynasty (206 BC- 220 AD). Practitioners believe that by performing these sexual arts, one could remain in good health and attain longevity. The sexual arts arguably reached their climax between the end of the Han dynasty and the end of the Tang dynasty. After
1000 A. D. Confucian puritanism became even stronger so that by the advent of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), sex was a taboo topic in public life.13 This sexual skill was often taught to women in brothels to please men. Lin, however, is not an uneducated prostitute. Far from that, she is a literary talent and an accomplished painter. The Daoist sex practices are integrated with
Lin’s literary sensibility and artistic quality. Her artistic personality, in combination with the ancient sex technique, makes Lin an attractive woman with a mysterious sense. Though modernized Chinese intellectuals consider it a feudal superstition, as the most corrupt, backward, and immoral part of Chinese culture, Hong Ying not only lets the modernized Lin practice this sexual skill, she makes it a defining feature for her protagonist. One may accuse Hong Ying of her self-orientalization, since she intentionally allows a modern woman to practice ancient skill, in order to make it exotic for Western readers. Is this criticism accurate? Hong Ying states in the
“Author’s Foreword” of the English version that she is often confronted with suspicious questions from Western readers who have read her Daughter of the River and found her China unbelievable. Hong Ying recalls an American critic who wrote in the Washington Post: “‘Why
13 For the history of the sexual life of ancient China, please refer to Van Gulik, Robert. The Sexual Life of Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B. C. till 1644 A. D. Leiden: Brill, 1961. 47 are books about China always so miserable?’” To this question Hong Ying replies: “I hope that K will persuade him otherwise” (vii). Apparently Hong Ying kept in mind Western readers while creating K and she strove to create a different China to contrast the previous impoverished China.
With the intention of telling a story about a different China, the author automatically assumes the role of informing Western readers about her native country. Meanwhile, she looks for a way that is familiar and can be accepted by Western readers. Thus from the beginning, the author makes sure that what is being conveyed must be something Eastern, but in a form familiar to Western readers. In this sense, female sexuality provides a familiar form and the mysterious and erotic
Daoist art of love provides the exotic content.
Extra-marital affair or adultery has always been a popular theme for Western fictions.
Many great works center on this topic: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, to name just a few. Tony Tanner traces this phenomenon of Western literature in his book
Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. He finds adultery to be present in Western literature, from Homer to chivalric literature, and from Shakespeare’s plays to Restoration drama, as well as in contemporary novels. The transgressive nature makes adultery a different matter since it “introduces an agonizing and irresolvable category confusion into the individual and thence into society itself” (Tanner 12); in addition, Tanner asserts, adultery offers “an attack on those rules, revealing them to be arbitrary rather than absolute” (Tanner 13). What Tanner has discovered provides a historical legitimacy for Hong Ying’s agenda. Hong Ying’s portrayal of
Lin is not merely for the sake of appealing to Western readers. She intends to challenge the
Chinese patriarchal rules. The theme of adultery in Chinese literature has been an underexplored topic. The adulterers, mostly females, have been unanimously portrayed as licentious immoral
48 women. There rarely exists an area of negotiation where this social and moral absolutism can be explicitly discussed, let alone in a forgiving atmosphere.
Lin, in K, is hard to relate to those immoral women because of her prestigious family background, good education and remarkable artistic and literary achievement. Lin’s unique portrayal reflects Hong Ying’s endeavors to portray a female in a familiar image but with an exotic Chinese twist. More than this, however, Hong Ying has her own implicit agenda to implement. Let us examine how Hong Ying describes Lin in the book: “He [Julian Bell] understood why she had come to depend on him. She was sandwiched between the different tiers of her culture. Neither the progressive nor traditional elements could accept her entirely: she was effectively an outcast in her own country” (225). Is Lin as an outcast as Hong Ying used to be?
Lin’s difficulty in fitting into Chinese culture originates from Lin’s perfect combination of the traditional culture and a modernized mentality. The self-contradiction of Lin’s personality embodies the author’s own unfitness in Chinese culture as an illegitimate daughter and as a female writer who has no paternal figure to associate with. More interestingly, this monologue is
Julian Bell’s analysis of Lin. He continues: “On the other hand, he, as a foreigner, could stand aloof from both. He did not have to believe popular superstition or accept the ‘progressiveness’ of modern China” (225). The beauty and charm of Lin can only be appreciated by a foreigner, just as Hong Ying’s status as a writer in diaspora allows her to articulate her view of female sexualities and celebrate the active role of a woman in a romantic relationship. Embedded in the open celebration of female sexual emancipation is an implicit criticism of the Chinese patriarchal tradition that restricts the free development of the human nature. Undoubtedly the intention of questioning moral absolutism and calling for a more tolerant and forgiving social environment is imbedded in the narration of Daughter of The River. However, if K has a similar intention, it fails
49 to investigate social, cultural, and personal complexity. The love between Lin and Julian is far less intense than that between Mother and her younger lover. The love between Lin and Julian does not involve any life adversity and could hardly win readers’ sympathy. It is a pleasure- hunting affair, one that the British man is expecting. Hong Ying beautifies and mystifies their love in an attempt to interpret their unification in love and sex as a cultural unification. This is where Hong Ying’s diasporic characteristics manifest. She has strong interests in drawing two cultures together. Diasporic writings sometimes automatically assume the task of bridging two or more cultures. Nothing can better demonstrate the close communication of two cultures than the combination of two foreign lovers. Hong Ying writes down the development of her thoughts on writing this story in the “Forward” of K. In it, Hong Ying explains how in her early career she already cherished a strong admiration for the female writer K14. And Later, Hong Ying recalls, when she visited Bloomsbury, she saw many Chinese antiques in an exhibition. With the publication of the collected letters of Vanessa Bell, Hong Ying was able to connect all these details together. She writes: “[since] no one else had drawn the two halves of this story together,
I could no longer resist the challenge of being the person to write K” (vi). The bigger temptation of writing such a novel, Hong Ying continues to say, is to convince Western readers that China has its hedonistic side. Therefore she creates characters like Lin to break down the stereotypes.
Apparently Julian Bell and Lin are symbols that are meant to embody their specific cultures.
Western culture is embodied through Julian Bell, the young British poet who comes to
China in the turbulent 1930s. He is portrayed as an arrogant and cynical brat who mocks the sentimentality of Chinese literature and sneers at the aesthetics of Chinese art. He is an indecent
14 In the novel K: the Art of Love, Lin is the name of the woman protagonist and K is the way Julian Bell, the male protagonist, addresses his lover in his diary and letters to his mother Vanessa Bell. Hong Ying did not reveal who K was in reality. Hong Ying uses K to refer this woman writer in Author’s Forward and uses Lin in the novel but all the surrounding details suggest K or Lin is actually Ling Shuhua (凌叔华), the writer who was active during the 1930s in China. 50 womanizer who sexually offends the hostess the first time he is invited to their family dinner. He later becomes a sex addict, a man completely subject to his mistress’ sexual dominance.
Bloomsbury, Julian Bell’s spiritual home, is constantly mentioned as a sacred land in which he can escape from moralistic judgments and social conservatism. In modernist thought,
Bloomsbury illuminates many dimensions of modern life and plays an important role in the history of liberalism, feminism, pacifism, gay liberation, and other aspects of culture and politics.
In the early twentieth century, it maintained a special attraction to Chinese intellectuals who were then desperately seeking a new path for their falling nation. But the multi-dimensional
Bloomsbury in K is reduced to a boundary-free wonderland that tolerates all kinds of sexual relationships, whether desired or fantasized. In this example, Hong Ying illustrates
Bloomsbury’s liberalism: “[It] was the year he was born, and she had been quarrelling with Aunt
Virginia’s recent entanglement with Clive. Unnoticed by them, Lytton Strachey walked into the room. He said nothing but pointed to a mark on Nessa’s dress and asked, ‘Semen?’ They burst out laughing. This single word dissolved all their enmity” (59). The complex relationships among sisters, in-laws, and friends are bonded and also lubricated by their unscrupulous attitudes about sex. Without exploring the more complicated entanglements between Bloomsburians that certainly existed, Hong Ying prioritizes free love that presumably dominates all other relationships. This unrestrained openness to all kinds of sexuality— heterosexuality, homosexuality, extramarital affairs, polygamy etc. — is indicated in the book. In other words, it is the consensus of the complete freedom of sexuality among all members of Bloomsbury that defines what Bloomsbury means. Just as Julian “did not consider it a moral issue to have an affair with a married woman” (73), Bloomsbury, under Hong Ying’s description, is a morality- free zone, particularly in terms of acts of sexuality. Such a reduction cooperates with the author’s
51 intention to create a great love affair that is free of any social order and only subject to personal feelings and sexual attraction. By bringing in Bloomsbury’s unrestrained and non-judgmental atmosphere, Hong Ying enables this romantic couple to evade potential accusation. Their affair begins with undisguised temptation from Julian, to which Lin quickly responds. It reaches its climax while they are on their Beijing trip. The couple falls into an alluring bed, where a reserved intellectual Chinese woman is converted into a nymphet, a master and practitioner of
Daoist sexual intercourse, and a young perplexed British poet is completely conquered by toxic sex. By not exploring the complexity and ambiguity of this love affair, Hong Ying concentrates on its sexuality, particularly female sexual dominance. She details the Daoist sexual practice and how it provides great pleasure to the lovers.
China and Chinese culture are projected onto Lin. Though there are other Chinese cultural elements such as the interpretation of Chinese painting and Chinese polygamy, the major concentration gathers around the spinning bed and their unrestrained sex. Lin is not a traditional
Chinese woman who abides by the principle of three obediences, like women of older generations. She is a modern intellectual, but what she utilizes to attract a modern man is not her modern knowledge and intelligence, but rather the most primitive game between man and woman—sex. Lin learns this skill from her mother. Her mother, as a concubine of her father, holds this secret to win his favor. Again, Lin is portrayed as a modernized/westernized woman, but what really defines her lies in her inherited ancient Chinese treasure. Unlike Daughter where
Mother’s love affair encapsulates too much desperation and helplessness and hence is forgivable,
Lin in K does not live in a hopeless situation. On the contrary, her respectable social status and admirable marriage should make her a happy woman. The love between her and Julian originates from a deliberate seduction and is sustained mostly by physical attraction. As Patricia Laurence
52 comments, “It is what happens out of bed, or in the minds and cultures of the protagonists, that remains, unfortunately, opaque in her novel” (29). Hong Ying fails to present two fully developed characters. Instead, she makes one into a novelty hunting brat with surplus male hormones and the other into a hypocritically insatiable woman who betrays her husband without any justification.
Hong Ying states that these two characters are based on two truthful persons in reality.
Like the strategy she adopts in the autobiography Daughter of the River, in which several family photos are added to the English version of that novel to prove its authenticity, in K, the author emphasizes that the narrative is based on a true story. Her obsession with authenticity pertains to
Hong Ying’s self-assumed role of being an informant for her native culture. Claiming authenticity also reveals her anxiety over possible criticisms that might accuse her diasporic writing of being inauthentic. There are always critiques of diasporic writers’ inauthentic representations of their native stories; thus their intentions and even their integrity are questioned. The emphasis on authenticity also reveals the author’s either voluntary or compelled submission to the powerful orientalist gaze that desires an unhindered presentation of female sexuality. Does such erotic writing of Chinese women suggest that Hong Ying is also subjected to what Rey Chow has theorized as “coercive mimeticism”15? That is to say that Hong Ying only writes so because she feels the pressure of writing something that can be distinguished as authentic Chinese culture. Otherwise she becomes the focus of criticism, particularly when hegemonic culture has already regarded her as an ethnic Chinese writer. It should be noted that
15 Rey Chow points out that minority individuals become ethnic through the pressure created by social system to write self-confessional literature or literature that seeks to explore one’s own ethnicity. The self-confessional literature allows the hegemonic culture to evoke a stereotyped ethnicity from individuals. Individual minorities must act “authentic” in representing an ethnic culture or they become the focus of criticism. Chow calls these performances of ethnicity “coercive mimeticism”. For detailed analysis, see Rey Chow’s The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. 53 both of the covers of the English versions of Daughter of the River and K: the Art of Love present female nudity that relegates serious literary works to erotic literature. In the case of Hong
Ying the question remains: has Hong Ying portrayed Julian and Ling genuinely? Why does the truthful depiction matter so much? The real Julian of the 1930s was a confused and discontented young man who needed to figure out his future direction. Rather than an arrogant brat, he was depressed by his “lack of achievements” and he also regretted his “lack of definite specialized abilities” (Stansky and Abrahams 285). Throughout the entire affair Julian was in a state of doubt and uncertainty. He wrote to his mother, “Be prepared for a cable saying ‘all is discovered’, and a demand for money to pay my passage home, or news that I’ve married her and found some other job in the country. Or that she has committed suicide, as she fairly often threatens”
(Stansky and Abrahams 266). He and his Bloomsburian parents were aware of, and definitely concerned about, the moral regulations on the other side of the world. When he and K were at their happiest together, he wrote to his mother: “Be tranquil, my dear… The situation is well in hand and I am quite clear now that marriage would be disaster. I think even if there is a scandal, it would only mean my returning this autumn instead of next” (Stansky and Abrahams 269). For
Ling Shuhua, the fictional K in real life, the love affair was far from a one-time wistful indulgence. Her traditional family pattern and its complicated family relationship16 allowed her to see enough of the coldness and ugliness of life. Her earlier literary writings, which describe the bitterness of women in love and marriage in a very reserved manner, reflect her precise and meticulous contemplation of love and female psychology. Ling did not write one word about her relationship with Julian Bell during her lifetime. It is understandable that her education and her
16 Ling Shuhua was one of the many daughters of an ex-Mayor of Peking. His father had six wives and she was the youngest of the fourth wife. Her life stories during her early years were written into her autobiography called Ancient Melodies in English. She was encouraged by Virginia Woolf to write this book in English and published it in 1953 with an introduction by V. Sackville-West. 54 nature would not allow her to explicitly state how she felt about such a disgraceful event. From the way Julian Bell described her in those letters to his mother and friends, one can see her seriousness and devotion to this love. Her later warm correspondences with Virginia Woolf,
Julian’s Aunt, somehow show that their love, if not for Julian’s sudden death in 1937, might have developed into a long-term relationship, or at least an unforgettable beautiful memory.
Their deep feelings must have been more than just pure sexual attraction. There are some ramifications of their love affair in Chinese literary circles. The special identity of Ling and
Julian Bell, one being an excellent writer and talented painter and the other a British poet from avant-garde Bloomsbury, makes their love a romantic story rather than a despised scandal.
However, critics and scholars in China have in general kept silent about this love affair. The silence may also be for the sake of Ling’s husband Chen Yuan, a reputable cultural official and scholar. The sudden death of Julian Bell thus coats their love with a unique sense of romance and sentimentality. It is literarily beautiful and poetically sorrowful. Therefore, in the literary circle of China, there was not any accusation against Ling’s affair with Julian on the grounds of moral judgment nor was there any explicit description of the love affair, considering its indecent nature.
Ling Shuhua lived till 1990. The entire Chinese literary circle and its members may hold admiration, appreciation, or aversion toward this affair, but they have been unanimously silent about it. This silence illustrates the Chinese manner of downplaying a dishonorable event.
However, Hong Ying’s literary imagination completely broke the long-time and carefully maintained balance between fictional romance and realistic morality. The serializing of K in one local newspaper in mainland China caused a libel case.
The libel case brings an intriguing twist to the cultural conflict. Chen Xiaoying, daughter of Ling Shuhua, sued Hong Ying for slandering her parents in the guise of fiction. What
55 infuriated Chen was not that the story was written out, but that K was described as an insatiable woman who would be despised and severely condemned by the Chinese culture. In her defense,
Hong Ying insisted that this character is a product of creative composition based on blended elements. In Hong Ying’s philosophy, however, the explicit expression and bold practice of sexual desire for women should be encouraged and even praised. It is a precious quality in
China’s sexually repressive and patriarchal history and society. Besides, instead of judging K on moral grounds for her betrayal, Hong Ying actually simplifies the whole case into the relationship between sex and love. She writes in the Foreword of the novel: “What I am actually trying to express in this novel is the idea that sex and love are inseparable” (viii). Hong Ying portrays K as an unconventional new modern woman with respect and admiration. She believes
K embodies a fearless woman who dares to sacrifice for love and to shed off the hypocritical fetters imposed by the patriarchy that have constrained Chinese woman for a very long time. Her affection for K alludes to her sympathy and her intention to defend transgressive women, like the
Mother that she depicts in Daughter. However, this effort is completely misunderstood, because an adulterous woman is doomed to be condemned in Chinese society, be it an intellectual or an ordinary woman. The case closed with the agreement that K would be published under a different title, English Lover, in Mainland China and a public apology would be made by Hong Ying.
Though there are some opinions stating that Hong Ying’s loss of the lawsuit involves certain political pressure, this lawsuit, on the other hand, further discloses the permanent illegitimacy of
Hong Ying in traditional Chinese cultural and social contexts: both of her biological illegitimacy and of her literary illegitimacy. The patriarchal authority can only accept her as a diasporic / remote writer who is not allowed to participate in domestic conversations for fear that she may disrupt the established social order.
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Whether or not the portrayal of the characters is authentic should not be used as an excuse to question and evaluate the legitimacy of Hong Ying as a writer. However, the way
Hong Ying approaches the issue reveals her enduring anxiety about her status of illegitimacy. By writing a story of female sexual emancipation, Hong Ying confirms her identity as a literary writer, a credit that the Chinese patriarchal authority may not grant her. It is the discourse behind the legal case that reveals the problematic in Hong Ying’s struggle for legitimate recognition.
Born with double illegitimacy, the illegitimate daughter and writer, Hong Ying has always intended to defend illicit love and challenge the patriarchal tradition. With Daughter of the River,
Hong Ying is able to expose the hypocrisy and rigidity of the patriarchal society and effectively defend for Mother and her illegitimacy. However, in K: the Art of Love, Hong Ying’s complex of illegitimacy has shifted its attention completely onto the illicit love. The writing situation in diaspora compels her to adopt familiar literary patterns appealing to Western readers while filling her narratives with exotic Chinese contents. These complicated and multiple aims and desires result in the simplification of her characters. Hong Ying ignores a further exploration of the socio-cultural backdrops behind her characters. Her personal life has been the driving motivation for her literary writing. It is her illegitimate identity that gives birth to her writing, through which she intends to create a justified identity for herself. The demand for a legitimate identity as a writer leads her onto a journey to look for a more open, tolerant, and rational societal and cultural tradition.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE FORCE OF ILLEGITIMACY: HA JIN’S INDIVIDUAL BATTLE IN DIASPORA
Immigrants are people on their own. They cannot be judged by the standards of their older culture. Culture is like language, ever developing. There is no right and wrong, no purity from which there is decline. Usage sanctions everything. ---- V. S. Naipaul
General Introduction
Ha Jin is by no means the first Chinese writer to adopt English as the primary medium of his creative work. There were Lin Yutang, Zhang Ailing, and Ling Shuhua before him, to name just a few. Nor is he the first writer who writes voluminously about China. There were plenty of memoirs published in the West that uncover the Chinese mystery—Chinese women’s bound feet,
Communists’ political persecution and its radical policies. But Ha Jin is the first courageous and persistent fighter as an individual against the hegemony of the home nation. He is an unremitting explorer and seeker of a justified identity for an individual, an identity that contains his past experiences and consists of his future existence and, more importantly, confirms the process of seeking. Ha Jin’s successful English writing career in America and the controversy his works have provoked in Mainland China are not just accidental. He emerges in the cross-cultural contexts of the new millennium, particularly as China is anxiously longing for the recognition of the world after a century’s persistent endeavor to build a modern nation-state. On the other side, the rest of the world is curious about what is happening in China when viewing China’s economic rising. But to Ha Jin, writing is an individual behavior. His writing career starts from
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America when he leaves China and becomes an alien person in the new country. He has to reconsider the relationship between himself and his native country. His writing originates precisely from his contemplation of individuality, of the fundamental connection an individual has with the larger community that sustains him or her. The collision between the individual and the collective becomes conspicuous when Ha Jin has to redefine and re-navigate his new social existence.
One can discern an essential theme that permeates almost all of his literary works: the relationship between the individual and his or her country, the conflicts between one individual and the collectivity, and an identity the individual keeps seeking under the overriding context of a collective identity. Ha Jin makes his characters go through individual reflection on the past and present. Just as his literary characters are looking for appropriate positions in his works, Ha Jin himself is doing so through his imaginative writing, The intense antithesis between the individual and the collective reflected in Jin’s works reveals his awareness of the individuality and his desire to emphasize and express this individuality. This awareness comes into being exactly at the time when Jin physically leaves his native country and grows emotionally detached. When discussing one’s identity, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates have pointed out: “Ethnic and national identities operate in the lives of individuals by connecting them with some people, dividing them from others. Such identities are often deeply integral to a person’s sense of self, defining an ‘I’ by placing it against a background ‘we’” (3). Ha Jin became a solitary ‘I’, isolating the ‘I’ from the previous ‘we’. Reflecting on the past ‘we’, he began his journey of looking for his ‘I’ not only referring to the previous ‘we’ but also distinguishing from the repressing ‘we’.
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Ha Jin’s redefinition of his identity draws different voices inside and outside China.
Yiqing Liu, a Chinese Fulbright visiting scholar from Beijing University scathingly criticizes Jin in her essay after attending a reading by Jin of his award-winning novel Waiting (1999). She writes later: “Jin has paid too high a price for his National Book Award, for which he has… been forced to curse China, disown his parents, and become an instrument of the U.S. media in vilifying China.” Liu’s criticism represents a typical opinion among those disapproving of Jin’s way of portraying Chinese society. Ha Jin, from his first day of writing in English, has been under the attack of selling out his native fellows’ misery for his own good. He has frequently been criticized concerning the authenticity of his stories and questioned about the legitimacy of his writing about China. The choice of English has allegedly become the most explicit evidence of his betrayal. Different opinions gather whenever a new work of Ha Jin is published. Chinese critics are particularly interested in whether Jin’s stories are historically genuine. Jin’s works were not published in China with the exceptions of the novel Waiting and the short story collection A Good Fall before 2010. And even these two works were deemed as Jin’s self-
Orientalizing gesture. In 2011 Ha Jin’s sixth novel Nanjing Requiem was published, for the first time, simultaneously both in China and America. Chinese media then engaged in extensively introducing Ha Jin to Chinese readers in contrast to their earlier intentional neglect. At that time
Chinese media hailed Jin as a sort of national epic writer who used his pen to record a great part of the nation’s history. Ha Jin suddenly became a favorite topic. In 2012 Amerasia Journal’s winter issue of “Towards a Third Literature” has a special section dedicated to Ha Jin’s works.
The issue gathered six commentaries, including Jin’s self-reflection, on Jin’s five works by critics from China and abroad. Ha Jin is sometimes introduced as a Chinese American writer, sometimes an immigrant writer and sometimes a diasporic writer; and his works have been
60 interpreted separately in different contexts probably to serve different purposes. These works have never been read and interpreted in a consistent framework. The isolated method of reading
Ha Jin’s works cannot identify a diasporic writer’s dynamic transformation. Ha Jin’s existential circumstance and writing states are never static or independent from each other. Therefore any independent reading and critiquing which focuses on only one or two of Jin’s works runs the risk of viewing a partial truth or be trapped by an intentional misinterpretation.
The issues that Ha Jin explores in his works often relate to his personal experiences at different times of his life. During the process, the changing themes of his works also reflect the transformation of his self identity over time. His English career does not serve to solely convey
Chinese culture to the English world, as the cultural ambassador Lin Yutang would love to do, nor does Jin struggle to maintain Chinese flavor in English as Zhang Ailing used to strive for in her works. Jin is also different from most memoir writers who engage in telling touching and sometimes shocking personal stories or portraying significant figures and special events in
Chinese history. He certainly has a different journey to earn an identity in America from writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Gish Jen and Frank Chin, although they all write in
English and write about China. Jin’s language choice involves pragmatic elements as well as creative courage. More significantly, unlike Lin or Zhang, who wrote without difficulty in identifying with their Chineseness, Ha Jin has been writing with the burden of a problematic
Chineseness17, and his writing has always been entangled with this problematic Chineseness. Jin has been continually and consistently seeking an individual position while confronting
17 Chineseness has always been a contested term, a special globalized identity, from Han culture essentialized through Han, Tang and Ming dynasties. Manchuria domination since 1644, the establishment of the Republic China in 1912 and the founding of PRC in 1949 have made the term more complicated due to different ideologies and historic evolution. The identification with such Chineseness for the overseas Chinese grows to be so difficult that a process of redefinition of Chineseness initiated. For more overseas Chineseness, read Anthony Reid’s article “Chineseness Unbound” Asian Ethnicity vol. 10, No. 3, October 2009, 197-200. 61
Chineseness. Therefore any fragmentary reading of Jin’s works results in missing a coherent and solid line that is gradually taking shape in Ha Jin’s works over the decade of his industrious writing. I will argue in this chapter that Ha Jin has been conducting an individual battle against a compelling force of being an allegedly illegitimate writer since his migration into diaspora. The accusation of the illegitimacy concerns his diasporic status and his linguistic conversion to
English while continuing to write stories about China for majority of non-Chinese readers. For
Jin, this is an uneasy and dynamic process. He feels the discomfort and his role in diaspora has been constantly adjusted in the process as he defines and redefines his identity with his past homeland, his present homeland and his future belongings. The transformation of his identity can be read from his literary articulation. A chronological reading and analysis of Jin’s works is critical to accurately interpreting Ha Jin, and to demonstrate his transformation.
Between Silences
The iconic writer of Modern Chinese literature Lu Xun famously remarked: “Silence, silence! Unless we burst out, we shall perish in this silence!” (60)18 These words are often cited later when people are compelled to air their opinions under certain critical and dangerous situations. This sentence precisely captures the passive existential circumstance of the Chinese people: to tolerate injustice or unfairness till death or being forced to turn to violence. In fact,
Chinese history indeed follows such a cyclical pattern that one dynasty replaces the other via violent uprising and revolution. It is no surprise that modern Chinese literature stems from such a long-time repressed eruption. It is no accident that Ha Jin’s first poetry collection, Between
18 This remark is cited from Lu Xun’s essay “In Memory of Miss Liu Ho-chen.” Lu Hsun: Writing for the Revolution Essays by Lu Hsun and Essays on Lu Hsun from Chinese Literature magazine. 2 (1976): 57-62. San Francisco: Red Sun Publishers. Print. 62
Silences, has a meaningful subtitle: A Voice from China. Obviously Ha Jin does not want to be the silent one. Yet his eruption projects not to his Chinese compatriots, but to Americans, in
English. Although both writers have directed their criticisms at China’s disease, Lu Xun became a patriotic writer, while Ha Jin is suspected of demonizing China by Chinese critics, whereas in the West Jin’s individual articulation gets condensed into a more ethnic representation. Western readers are intrigued to learn Jin’s different Chinese stories. Ha Jin at the time was performing the duty of being a Chinese intellectual who felt obligated to speak for the populace. In the
Preface, Jin writes: “As a fortunate one I 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). This poetry collection serves as the first cry of the beginning of Ha
Jin’s English writing career as he assumed the role of representative for his native people. This representative role reflects, on the one hand, Ha Jin’s unconscious Chinese nostalgia to return to the past to define himself and, on the other hand, his attempt to differentiate himself from others by strengthening his ethnicity in a new and strange social context, so as to obtain a new identity.
He has to write something that can be recognized as particularly Ha Jin rather than anyone else.
Therefore “A Voice from China” defines Jin’s initial identity—a Chinese writer speaking for his native people. However this role, from its conception, carries an intrinsic conflict: Jin has to attach to what he has left to identify in the new context, i.e. he remains attached to China, when in fact he already has left her behind. This compelled attachment, i.e. writing about China, dominates Jin’s works for a long time. The conflict also causes anxiety, incurs controversy, and renders Jin’s identity problematic.
Not being antagonistic against China, Jin adopts a more objective attitude and focuses on recording what might have perished otherwise: some small characters and relatively insignificant
63 events that he seeks to describe. Jin regards them as “victims of history” as well as “the makers of the history.” Instead of holding an accusatory tone toward the past darkness, Ha Jin, with a sense of detachment and remoteness, captures the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of these common individuals and tells how their personal lives are permanently affected by momentary political campaigns. He once told an interviewer that he never trusted great people and was unwilling to glorify any of them.19 His distrust of great people and empathy for common people not only reveal his awakening recognition of fakeness of the Communist propaganda in which great figures were portrayed as role models for common people; they also predict his later insightful interrogation of the dislocated relationship between the individual and the collective.
This attitude displayed his initial identity as an independent individual to think and to create voices. Yet he was still closely bound with his past, not being able to let go and not wanting to.
He intended to speak for others, believing his efforts would bring attention to the memory of those voiceless, unfortunate people.
Ha Jin strives to evince a contrast between the rhetoric of truth and falsehood. The communist political discourse maximizes the importance of the collective and requires the individual’s unconditional submission to the collective. In juxtaposition, Jin’s poetic writing expresses the genuine and unsophisticated feeling from the individuals beneath that propagated discourse. The truthful expressions from the small figures are so realistic, yet complex, and they contrast and even ridicule those sanctified big figures and their discourses. This poetry collection consists of 39 poems divided into four sections with one thematic poem standing separately at the beginning that manifests the contrast. The poem is called “The Dead Soldier’s Talk” and is based on a true story—a young soldier who drowned saving a plaster statue of Chairman Mao.
He was celebrated as a hero and was buried at the foot of the mountain in Hunchun County, Jilin
19 Zhang, Mindy. “A Conversation with Ha Jin” from Valley Voices.8. 1 (2008): 29-34. Print. 64 province. The poem is composed in the first person conveying his loneliness and confusion while witnessing his visitor’s changing attitude. The event occurred in 1969, during the heyday of the
Cultural Revolution, and the poem is purely Jin’s literary invention for the protagonist who died in the incident, since he had permanently lost the chance to speak for himself and the deed itself was quickly forgotten a few years later after the craziness of the time subsided. Even though it is impossible for such a thing to happen in today’s China, its occurrence then led it to be considered a great deed by the fanatic personal cult of the great leader. Yet it was quickly ignored when the great leader passed away and the era changed. The story certainly would fall into oblivion, had
Jin not registered it in his poetry. What Jin reflects in this work is a whole generation’s silenced confusion: how it had happened that the enthusiastic loyalty and love for the great leader was quickly replaced by the new zeal for accumulating economic wealth. The glorious ideals, and the vibrant young lives lost pursuing the ideals, were locked in history, nonsensically and permanently. Present readers may complain about the absurdity of the entire event. What will be felt even stronger is the sense of helplessness of the dead soldier, of his visitors, and of the readers embedded in the lines that emit a silent power through Jin’s poetic revisit to this story.
This silent power compels readers to interrogate the event on a micro level of the loss of a vigorous young life and on a macro level of the destructive nature of the society. Ha Jin utilizes his plain and simple words to make a deafening voice, indeed representing the dead soldier, to whom otherwise no one would have paid attention. Writing in the Winter 1992 issue of World
Literature Today, K. G. Leung praises Jin as “a master of understatement” who expresses a
“quiet cynicism about the military that recalls the World War I poets.” (203) Ha Jin does not hurry to a judgment or a comment, but faithfully narrates a dead soldier’s psychological change.
At the end of the poem the soldier grows furious:
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Damn you, why don’t you open mouth?
Something must have happened.
What? Why don’t you tell me! (6)
The young soldier will never know that time changes and the great leader dies. His sanctification has ceased and his heroic deed becomes unspeakably ridiculous. No one will tell the young soldier’s story, nor would anyone dare to criticize it, except Ha Jin here in English to his
American readers (though the yelling may sound more meaningful to Chinese readers). This poem sums up very well Ha Jin’s determination to speak for the dead, the forgotten, and the voiceless. In addition, he speaks the unspeakable in the Chinese language.
Linguistically, these poems are more prosaic than poetic. Each poem is one short story.
The people in these stories are victims as well as prosecutors, much like those in the poem “A
Thirteen-Year-Old Accuses His Teacher”. Young people growing up in that particular society have nowhere to learn truth and are either silenced by intimidation or learn to survive in lies. The following four parts of the poetry collection respectively describe differing themes. Poems in the first part mainly depict the dehumanization of human beings on cruel battlefields and people’s struggles with the consequences of it. “A Hero’s Mother Blames Her Daughter” describes the mother’s painful but conflicted emotion in the turmoil of losing two sons to the wars and seeing a daughter going to another war.
Now your horns are strong and you turn around
to gore your mother. If I did anything wrong,
I did it for you. You are the person who benefits.
What did I get from it? Two martyr cards?
Do you think I can live on them?
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Do you think I enjoy looking at them!
Anybody may have the right to blame me
except you. You don’t have the right to do it! (24)
The natural affection between mother and daughter has been disrupted and distorted by the national ideology—to unconditionally sacrifice for the country constitutes an absolute honor. It takes two “martyr cards” for the mother to realize what she has lost. Yet the young daughter is still fanatic about going away, very likely running the risk of dying. The poem reveals the immensity of love as well as the distorted relationship between mother and daughter. Ha Jin insightfully points out how badly the public life penetrates and ruins the private life. It is considered normal for one’s private life to give way to the public life. The private life is often ignored and becomes worthless in front of the public life. The poem captures the disillusionment of the common people and their realization of those long-standing lies.
It does not do justice to these poems if one looks at them from one specific aspect, because these poems convey multiple layers of meanings and display a dynamic tension connecting the characters in the poems to the author and readers. They drag one back to that historical time to share the experiences with the people of that time. “My Kingdom” in the poem below may refer to the narrator’s previous ideal that has been worn away until it is buried deep down in the ocean. It may also refer to “the great communist cause” that every youth was educated to be devoted to. What it turns out to be is a sinking paper ship. Either way, the poem records the consumption of a young life and soul.
My kingdom was a little paper ship
launched into the Pacific Ocean.
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It sank every minute,
but it went down slowly for many years,
and none of us was aware of its sinking.
It disintegrated step by step
losing you one after another
who swam away from my ship
and changed into the mermaids
serving the Dragon of Fate in the Water Palace
until finally my princess deserted her boyish father
until at the bottom of the dark sea
I was crawling as a lonely crab. (29-30)
Thousands of young lives were consumed or crushed in their prime and ended up as “lonely crab[s]” without realizing what had happened to them. Ha Jin might have become one of them, but his emigration switched the direction of his life, and though still lonely, he is able to make his voice resolute for the sake of the people fading out in history. Meanwhile he speaks for himself in announcing his identity in a new country.
Not only does Ha Jin endeavor to write the sadness and sentimentality of the lives of these small figures in history, but he also captures in this collection the genuine beauty of love among common people even under the suffocating social environment. “The Haircut”, “A Young
Worker’s Lament to His Former Girlfriend”, “An Editor Meets His Former Girlfriend in a Fish
House” and “An Old Novelist’s Will” all reveal the purity and sincerity of love despite being tragic and heartbroken love experiences, destroyed by an entire set of false political rhetoric. The discourses of loving the country and loving the party form a repressive force that encroach the
68 private lives of common people. A personal accusation of not subjecting to these discourses could destroy one’s career and even cost them their life. Ha Jin deeply senses this repressive force. The last two poems seem to explain his personal anxiety and the reason he has to make his voice heard:
At our last dinner you told me
you had delayed so long to go back
because you could not shut your mouth.
The photograph you sent me
shows how happy you are back
with your wife and kids.
Behind you the winding paths
look the same on the Small-Monk Mountain.
It is so tranquil.
Still, I am worried
about your smiling mouth.
would “be silenced”.
Once I have the freedom to say
my tongue will lose its power.
Since my poem strive to break the walls
that cut off people’s voices,
they become drills and hammers.
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But I will be silenced.
The starred tie around my neck
at any moment can tighten into a cobra.
How can I speak about coffee and flowers? (79)
He doesn’t speak about coffee and flowers. Ha Jin, after this poetry collection, fully immerses in a serious reflection on China. He hadn’t returned to China since his immigration to the US in
1985 to pursue his graduate studies. The shock of the Tiananmen Protests of 1989 changed his life forever. Tanks and guns on Beijing streets shattered his ambition of becoming a professor of
English back in China after earning a doctoral degree at Brandeis University, and he decided to remain in the United States. Almost automatically the decision necessitated a process of relearning China and redefining his relationship with China. He began his serious contemplation of the Chinese society and its fundamental problems. At this time Ha Jin entered into the second phase of his literary writing: he wrote as a remote observer and a new nostalgic exile. The troubled relationship between the individual and the collective was further questioned during this phase.
A Sober Observer
Ha Jin’s literary footprints follow his past life journey. After five years of military service and three more years of working as a railroad telegrapher, in 1977 when colleges reopened after the Cultural Revolution, Ha Jin entered Heilongjiang University to pursue higher education and later went to graduate school at Shandong University. His creative attention switched from recording military life in earlier works such as Between Silences (1990), Ocean of Words (1996),
70 and Waiting (1999), to writing more about contemporary Chinese society, with a focus on small figures, such as in Under the Red Flag (1997), The Bridegroom (2000) and In the Pond (1998).
This change not only reveals his exilic nostalgia, but also, more importantly, evinces his earnest and proactive thinking and critique of the society and system he came from. These works seem to have imprinted on Jin an intelligible mark in his American writing career. Ha Jin is an ethnic writer with distinct subject matters—Chinese stories. Jin seems to have become another overseas
Chinese writer who cannot get over an obsession with China. As C. T. Hsia theorizes, modern
Chinese writers were “obsessive with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity” (533-34). However, different from the modern Chinese writers whose obsessive patriotism directs to China in the attempt to invoke reforms, Ha Jin’s critique of China lacks this urgent and explicit aim. The direct readers of his writings are American readers and their knowledge of China’s problems will not lead to changes in China. Just like Jin’s fictional character Mr. Yang does in The Crazed, he himself experiences a self-reflection and goes through a process of self-awakening in writing
Chinese stories. This novel reveals this type of obsession, in which Mr. Yang, a literary professor and a quintessential Chinese intellectual who is always concerned about the country and the people, is eventually driven crazy by the repressive system in which he can’t realize his ambition of serving the country but is manipulated into become anything but a decent intellectual.
The Crazed has impressed its English readers because it reminds them of Dickens and
Balzac. However, I argue that in terms of the themes, plots, and psychological tension, The
Crazed still walks along the Chinese literary tradition, particularly modern Chinese literary pursuits. The insanity narrative of the novel is not an invention of Ha Jin. Lu Xun’s canonical short story Diary of a Madman had long ago created this image of an insane and paranoid man
71 who insists that all those around him are either disguised or unabashed cannibals. In modern
Chinese literary history, Diary of a Madman is regarded as the first cry criticizing traditional
China for its backwardness, stupidity and hypocrisy. Lu Xun’s madman begins to rave and calls people cannibals. Through the madman’s mouth, Lu Xun, at a critical juncture of the Chinese society in the early years of the twentieth century, excoriates the cannibalistic nature of traditional China, where the bureaucrats, intellectuals, and even the common populace remain dumbly complicit in sustaining the man-eating sickened social milieu, whereas only a madman speaks the truth. Though revealing the truth, the madman is not taken seriously for his insensibility and craziness, and is thus considered a superfluous person. Literary scholar Zhang
Qinghua has explored the pedigree of intellectuals in twentieth century Chinese literature.20
According to Zhang, the intellectual as “a superfluous person” has repeatedly appeared in a number of works by modern and contemporary Chinese writers, ranging from Lu Xun’s madman to Qian Zhongshu’s Fang Hongjian21, from Yu Dafu’s protagonists22 to Mo Yan’s characters23.
In this sense, Ha Jin seems to have followed his native literary tradition by creating another superfluous intellectual image, though in English, but Jin doesn’t simply stop at this point to just propose a question without further investigating or seeking for solution. Zhang’s analysis,
20张清华[Zhang, Qinghua] “The Pedigree of intellectuals in Twentieth Century Chinese Literature” Yuehaifeng Online Version 5 (2007) Web.
Unfortunately, however, they were not even able to rescue themselves.
Unlike Zhang, who could only minutely list so many superfluous images in Chinese literary works and even compared them with Hamlet and Don Quixote from Western literature,
Ha Jin goes further to reveal the in-depth causes for the dysfunctional Chinese intellectuals and seeks for an effective solution. More significantly, Ha Jin creates a memorable character in Jian
Wan, a younger generation intellectual of China and the protagonist of the novel. Jian Wan is at a crossroad in his career choice during a critical time of China, but unlike his elder generation, he eventually breaks away from the academics, abandoning his student identity and fleeing. Instead of reading this novel as an old man’s disclosure of his long, complicated and disaster-ridden life, we could also construe it as a Bildungsroman, describing the growing up process of Jian Wan under his professor’s “education.” In this light, the crazed professor is not a superfluous figure but a critical one. Like an alarm clock he awakes the young generation from the dream of changing the disappointing reality through literary writing and literary scholarship, just like Lu
Xun’s ambition when he was studying medicine in Japan. Lu Xun believed that spiritual health was more important than physical health and only through literature could he wake up the common people from the spiritual sickness. Writing to enlighten people and calling them to participate in salvaging a falling country has become a patriotic myth for modern intellectuals.
They all hold this goal as their sublime destiny and endow their pursuits, no matter their successes or failures, this great significance. Professor Yang in this novel is one of these
73 intellectuals. By going through his past life, professor Yang assists Jian Wan in unpacking the myth of the intellectuals’ patriotic complex. The process of awakening and reflection is a crucial step in re-discovering China for people like Ha Jin who have abandoned China’s ideological inculcation. The process is also provides meaningful and crucial growth for people like Ha Jin who have become diasporans in terms of philosophical vision and psychological preparation.
Therefore The Crazed stands as a significant turning point for Ha Jin’s English writing career. It is a thorough analysis of the sudden and gradual changes that take place in the protagonist as well as in the author. Writing about the1989 Tian’anmen Square Incident has made this book a politically sensitive piece, and as a result, the novel was banned in China. But just like Professor
Yang’s stroke, the occurrence of the 1989 incident consists of its inevitability and contingency.
In the spring of 1989 an esteemed scholar, Professor Yang Shenming of the Literature
Department of Shanning University, suddenly suffers a stroke and falls into a delirium. Jian
Wan, the graduate student under his guidance and also future son-in-law, is assigned to take care of him at hospital since both the professor’s wife and daughter are away from home. Then an intense and special interaction begins, though it is between a sober mind and an insane one.
Normal minds are guarded and regulated by social norms but crazed ones are pardoned for their inappropriate behaviors and expressions. Insanity thus becomes a way of escaping society’s oppression and constraints and of obtaining more freedom. Mr. Yang’s craziness begins in the aftermath of his stroke. Rational and sensible words and nonsensical ravings alternate Mr.
Yang’s remarks. He is off guard and falls into a free land that only dissocialized children were able to enjoy for a short period of time. His rambling consists of fanatical, outdated expressions that were inculcated into his head during the Cultural Revolution, his sycophant words to the government, his truthful viewpoints on the academia, his daring conversations with different
74 people, and all kinds of complaints, grumbles, and criticism that have been smothered within him over years. One of the prominent issues Mr. Yang repeatedly talks about is the suffocating surroundings of his living and working environment as well as his personal feelings. He begins his first long raving by telling of a man trapped in a windowless rubber room. Mr. Yang continues “But he lives in a room without a door or a window and without any furniture inside.
Confined in such a cell, he faces the insurmountable difficulty of how to end his life. … All the time he imagines how to stop this kind of meaningless existence. … He’s thus doomed to live on, caged in an indestructible cocoon like a worm” (16-18).
The depiction immediately reminds us of Lu Xun’s “iron house,” the famous iron house that ignited the fire of anti-traditionalist thought for early twentieth century intellectuals in
China. Lu Xun was a pioneer and role model of the anti-traditionalists who dropped out of medical school in Japan to study literature. He believed curing the minds of people was more significant than curing their bodies. For the fiercest mental struggle, Lu Xun envisioned an iron house. Different from Ha Jin’s rubber room, there are many people inside this one:
Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many
people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since
they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry
aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer
the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn? (6)
For the writer, this is more of a painful realization of the brutal reality of modern China’s society than the actual dilemma of choosing between waking up those sleepers and not taking any action.
Obviously an insomniac himself, Lu Xun chooses to wake sleepers up, believing that “if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house” (6). More than half a century
75 later, Ha Jin creates the character Mr. Yang who, as a literature professor, is supposed to fulfill this responsibility of waking people up to change their spirits, but he goes insane. If Lu Xun has pioneered to posit the societal responsibility for the intellectuals in his essay, Ha Jin, in The
Crazed, has carefully explained the reasons why intellectuals have been failing to fulfill that responsibility.
Ha Jin delineates the harsh academic environment of China and the grim living and working condition of Chinese intellectuals. A purely academic argument about Li Po’s birthplace could be used as means of personal retaliation. The bureaucracy of the university delays Mr.
Yang’s trip to a Canadian conference. Although he somehow manages to go, Yang misses the meeting and the trip turns into visiting friends and sightseeing. Because of this, Yang is demanded to pay back the expenses of the trip. An estranged wife and a faraway daughter do not provide him any family warmth, and in addition to the heavy load of teaching and guiding graduate students, Mr. Yang has been living under unbearable pressure and in perilous health.
The discrepancy between the sublime ideals that sustain the intellectuals’ spiritual world and the grim and unchangeable reality he has to face every day places Mr. Yang in a helpless and powerless situation. However, his intellectual nature compels him to question himself about what he should do, and his inability to change the situation tortures his inner being. Eventually he goes crazy under the pressure. Insanity provides a cover for Yang, from which he finally vents out the long repressed grudges. Yet his offensive raving arouse suspicions as to the causes of his craziness since his words are fill with complaints about authority. Is Mr. Yang’s insanity a form of rebellion or submission? Neither. From Lu Xun’s madman to Ha Jin’s crazed professor, intelligence and its sober mentality has become a curse for Chinese intellectuals. In the book,
Jian Wan’s roommate Mantao, another graduate student, quips that “China was a paradise for
76 idiots, who were well treated because they incurred no jealousy, posed no threat to anyone, and made no trouble for the authorities—they were model citizens through and through” (92). There is an example Ha Jin includes in the novel to demonstrate this ridiculous comment. Little Owl feigns madness in the 1950s in order to avoid beating, interrogation, and backbreaking work during his stay in a prison camp, which makes him a real idiot now. The destructive system will only let go of the insane or those who don’t think. Endurance, silence and self-sacrifice are the virtues valued in this country. The deprivation of humanity by humans themselves creates either idiots or the crazed. Stripping thoughts from people’s minds leaves intellectuals, whose essential value is to create thoughts and ideas, living in the most wretched circumstances. Ha Jin actually put forth serious questions that he, as an intellectual, can’t avoid: what exactly is the social function of intellectual and why are Chinese intellectuals are trapped in wretchedness?
Ha Jin approaches these questions through the interaction between Mr. Yang and his student Jian Wan. During the 1980s, intellectuals in China faced a difficult decision because the great income disparity between intellectuals and business people forced many intellectuals to quit from their academic jobs and enter the business world. While facing a well-paying job opportunity in the Hong Kong Trade Company, Jian receives different suggestions. One teacher says: “Don’t just have a one-track mind, Jian. Whatever we do, teaching or writing, in essence we all struggle to make a living” (65). Mr. Yang instructs him: “If you are determined to study literature, spiritually you must be an aristocrat. Many of us have been poor all our lives, but we are rich in our hearts, content to be a Don Quixote” (67). However, in his delirium Mr. Yang confides with Jian his longing to be a real official with power and wealth, which reveals his contradictory psychology, struggling between a poor academic life and a rewarding official life.
This empleomania among Chinese intellectuals is not uncommon. Becoming a scholar-cum-
77 official somehow represents the highest achievement for the intellectual. In the long history of
China, academia and officialdom are always inseparable; as The Analects instructs: “Those who excel in office should learn; those who excel in learning should take office” (180). These teachings are found not only in Confucian texts, but also in the earliest basic literacy text for school children in pre-modern China, the Thousand Character Essay: “Studies superior, step up to serve; be given your duties, join government’s work.”24 It has long been embedded in the traditional mode of education and thus deeply rooted in the minds of intellectuals, encouraging them to step into official positions if they should excel in their specific areas of studies.
Gradually it grows to be a criterion on which to evaluate how excellent a learned person is in the area of his expertise, since only the outstanding ones will rise to an official position. Yet several thousand years of feudal imperial and centralized ruling patterns established and strengthened a system where, in order to be a successful official, one has to be a successful scholar. This special mode of selecting officials continued during Chiang Kai-Shek’s autocratic reigning years. Later the communist totalitarian government still employed this system, though the communists would be cautious in using intellectuals. However, the long-standing system that binds the academic journey with the career of becoming a government official has intrinsically eliminated the crucial independence of the intellectuals. Furthermore, such a system cultivates a particular type of social ethos that values officialdom over intellectuals. This official-oriented ethos eventually caused the general public to worship power, and made everything else dependent on and evaluated by statuses of officialdom. The dependency on power throws intellectuals into a
24 Zhou, Xingsi. Thousand Character Classic. This is the Chinese nation’s earliest and most widespread basic text still extant and in limited use today, mostly for calligraphy, personal improvement and preparation for study of classical Chinese. It was written by Zhou Xingsi (?- 521) of the Southern dynasties’ period (420-589) Liang Dynasty. I cited from Nathan Sturman’s English translation. Web.
78 position of irresolvable contradiction. Their duty of critiquing society and their desire for personal success are mutually conflicting. The more insightfully an intellectual sees through a society, the more criticism he is supposed to produce. That means the ruling authority can be harsher in repressing his opinion in order to maintain stability. Chinese intellectuals lacking independence results in the fatal destiny of those intellectuals—they either abandon their duty to critique the government and subject themselves to the ruling regime or fall into irresolvable self- questioning and self-doubt.
Not only does Ha Jin pinpoint this severe weakness of Chinese intellectuals through his character, a senior scholar gone insane, but he also gives more thoughts to the younger generation scholar Jian Wan in an attempt to offer some solutions. Jian Wan easily reminds readers of the author Ha Jin, who studied American literature in Shandong University before coming to the US. Jian transforms from a passionate and idealistic young scholar into a cynical thinker after witnessing his respectable adviser’s presumably successful life falling apart. Mr.
Yang‘s death strikes Jian to his core. A voice in his mind dictates: “At all costs you mustn’t die a death like his!” And then he reflects,
As a human being, I should spend my life in such a way that at the final hour I
could feel fulfillment and contentment, as if I had completed a task or a journey.
One doesn’t have to be an accomplished scientist, or a consequential official, or a
billionaire, or a great artist to feel that death is no more than a natural change like
a sleep after a long day’s work. In short, death should be a comedy, not a tragedy.
This realization strengthened my resolve to leave the university for the Policy
Office. (262)
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Later, while arguing with his fiancée, Jian conveys his idea: “I want to be a knife instead of a piece of meat.” (277) “A piece of meat on the chopping board” is Mr. Yang’s metaphor for intellectuals. But Jian’s trip to the countryside, a task assigned by the Secretary of the
Department, makes him realize that the poor villagers are also meat on the chopping board.
Readers may wonder why the author suddenly draws his protagonist out of his personal struggle with the university to go on a countryside trip. Ha Jin means to bring Jian to a complete and comprehensive realization about the Chinese society. Peasants in remote countrysides still live in extreme poverty and most of them are illiterate. Keeping warm and keeping their stomachs full remains the priority in their life, and the concern for the country is out of their minds. In the city, a restaurant owner rudely treats and even bullies common customers but fears Jian upon learning that he will be working in the Policy Office. Ha Jin effectively weaves the lives of intellectuals, peasants, and city dwellers together to present a dysfunctional and diseased society in which the outbreak of the Tiananmen Incident is far from accidental or merely regional. At the end of the novel, Jian burns his ID and decides to use a different name. It is a great pity for a talented and diligent young man to leave his beloved career, and it is saddening to watch him become a fleeing outlaw. However, the tragic ending indicates the author’s adamant and thorough resistance against the system. Jian Wan’s turning away from his academic career is not that different from Lu Xun’s quitting his medical career, since both lose faith in their previous career choices. Lu Xun’s change still suggests hope in his new engagement, whereas Jian’s leaving is sad and hopeless and he has nowhere to go. China is still fighting its old battles after half a century. Jian’s growing up process is a journey of self-awakening, yet he gets caught in a dead end. However, Ha Jin, unlike his awakened character, chooses to leave the country and the
80 repressive system of the time. The sharp break Ha Jin makes can be seen from his focus of the next work. After The Crazed, Ha Jin starts to place his characters in America.
The Transformation
Between his works Between Silences and The Crazed, Ha Jin undergoes a rather painful process of transformation. The self-assumed role as a spokesperson for his unfortunate native people pushes Jin to portray, one after another, the lives of unknown or ignored individuals who otherwise would never attract attention. Jin spares no pain in disclosing the illnesses of the
Chinese society, to the extent that people question his intention of writing about China in an unapologetically negative manner. This specific way of writing about China is embedded within the intense struggle between Jin’s shaky ethnic identity in the US and his agonized nostalgia for
China. Being an intellectual from Mainland China, he nonetheless presents an oppressive, abnormal, immoral, and unjust Chinese society. Being a native master in the Chinese language, he only engages in writing in English. Being of a Chinese ethnicity, he displays his ethnic distinction via a critique of China, a source of inspiration that sustains his ethnic identity while abroad. The tension born out of the multiple contradictions draws Ha Jin down a long channel of serious reconsideration of the relationship between him as an individual and his native country, and between his personal identity and his literary writing. However, his writing has always been accompanied by poignant criticisms from China and other Sinophone areas. One major opinion accuses Jin of adopting a self-Orientalizing gesture and participating in the configuration of neo-
Orientalism, and questions his claim of writing free of Western influence. Regardless of the political influence on their criticism on Jin, many critics call the authenticity of Jin’s stories into
81 question. One of the often-attacked examples is the bound feet of Shu Yu, a character in Jin’s
Waiting. They criticize Jin for making an anachronistic error in letting Shu Yu have a pair of small bound feet during the time from the late 1960s to the 1980s, a time when women had long ago stopped binding their feet. They believe that Ha Jin’s intentional portrayal of this detail precisely displays his subjection to the Orientalist imagination of China. Difficult to be accepted in China’s literary circle, Ha Jin’s works are also not treated with kindness in Taiwan. The prominent Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianwen thinks Jin does not produce anything new, and that he just “retells what other people have already narrated, except not as well” (103). Zhu’s protagonist in Wuyan regards Jin’s literary writing as, at best, an abridged version of documentary of
Chinese stories that could only be interesting to foreign readers. Zhu once again takes the issue with Jin about the intention behind his writing. She touches on a fundamental criticism of diasporic writers: they get financially rewarded by selling out their native people. The label of selling out the native country for their own benefits in another country constitutes the original sin of the diasporic writers. At times, this label even calls the writer’s integrity into question. This original sin explains the long existing identity crisis of these diasporic writers and the difficulty of categorizing their works. Ha Jin is no exception to this anxiety and difficulty. Ha Jin’s perplexity raises the question: is it true that an individual’s literary creation is no longer a personal matter but rather concerns their loyalty to the nation and even their morality? It is a sensitive issue to write one’s home country in a non-favorable way, particularly when such writing brings success to the author. Ha Jin is often accused of betraying his native country and he is undoubtedly disturbed by the accusation. After writing so many works about China, Ha Jin seeks a new identity that defines his transforming individuality, gradually detaching himself from China and becoming more assimilated into American society. In 2008, Ha Jin was invited
82 to the Hong Kong Book Fair to give a speech entitled “The Individual and Literature.” Sensing the anxiety and ambiguity of his identity, Ha Jin admitted his status as an outsider in terms of being a Chinese writer or writing in the Chinese language, but that he believes great artists or writers need to be outsiders. Ha Jin observed that twentieth century Chinese literature has not adequately explored the theme of the relationship between individuals and their nation. The grand narration of nationalism and the national salvation dominates modern Chinese literature.
The value and significance of the individual becomes a minor issue and thus has been largely neglected. Ha Jin’s works fully display these individuals, the small figures whose lives were permanently altered by the national campaigns, whether political or social. The individuals were lost and were never in control of their own lives. Departure from China propels Ha Jin to discover himself as a full individual who will not be attached to that grand narration. As an independent individual, he has to define his new identity and answer the question of what it means to be a Chinese person. Responding to the accusation of betrayal, Ha Jin makes the point that literature is an individual matter and any utterance represents a personal creation. Here Ha
Jin revises his previous self-perception as a representative for the voiceless Chinese people, becoming instead an independent individual who should be given the freedom to write about whatever interests him.
Ha Jin’s book of essays, Writers as Migrant, published in 2008, signals the change of his identity from a representative and an observer of China to a free and independent writer. The book consists of three parts. The first is called “The Spokesman and the Tribe,” in which Ha Jin revises his previous aspiration of being a spokesman writing in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese. Instead of perceiving himself as a Chinese writer, he identifies with
Anglophone immigrant writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. In the second part,
83 when dealing with the issue of betrayal, Jin courageously puts forth: “Why shouldn’t we turn the tables by accusing a country of betraying the individual? Most countries have been such habitual traitors to their citizens anyway. The worst crime the country commits against the writer is to make him unable to write with honesty and artistic integrity” (32). Thus Jin justifies his English writing. He then lists many writers who write in a language other than their mother tongue. He concludes that “these writers should be able to contribute to the literature of their original countries as well” (58), although he admits that dual loyalty could be only a Don Quixotic ideal.
He emphasizes that the writer must be loyal only to his art. He releases writers from the obligation of being politically loyal to their native countries. The third part is called “In
Individual Homeland,” in which Jin illustrates that “homeland is no longer a place that exists in one’s past but a place also relevant to one’s present and future” (65). Through analyzing plenty of immigrant literary and classic texts, Jin concludes that the real homeland actually exists within the individual, and is not bound to a specific place. This conclusion somehow reflects the author’s urgent desire for writing as an independent individual, and it reveals the immense pressure that he has endured. However, complete separation from the past and the demarcation of politics and art are not able to fully resolve Jin’s identity crisis. In fact, at this point, Ha Jin has not found a justified and suitable path to take. By evading the essential issue of the political loyalty and cultural identification of the individual, he is isolating the individual and only allowing him to connect to his art. This attitude was a forced choice, coming at a time when he couldn’t completely resolve the issue of his legitimacy of writing about China in diaspora.
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An Immigrant Writer
In the case of Ha Jin, writing is never merely a personal matter separate from what fosters it. It is an act of constructing the identity, a means to finding the self and, pragmatically, a survival skill. Contrary to his statement, Ha Jin never walked away from his Chinese culture or stopped paying attention to China’s politics. What makes Jin a distinguished and successful writer are the vivid stories he tells about his fellow country people. Whether he would like to admit it or not, Ha Jin is a spokesperson and an informant in the West for his fellow countrymen.
What constitutes his present identity is exactly the sum of his past experiences. Though trying to become an independent writer who is only loyal to his art, he has constantly encountered the issue of how far an individual can move away from his or her nation and its culture. The novel A
Free Life deals with a new immigrant’s hard life in America. For the first time, Ha Jin places his characters somewhere other than China. Yet what bedevils his characters are still the essential questions: how can an individual really be independent? What constitutes an individual’s identity if not their past experiences? What defines a person? Does the language they speak, the political views they hold and festivals they celebrate determine who they are? In A Free Life, Ha Jin strives to weave together all of these questions to demonstrate a complex, difficult and contradictory process of the transformation of a diasporic individual. A Free Life does not show how Western freedom alters people’s lives, but rather seems to teach a lesson that freedom must be paid for. In other words, the novel posits an earned conviction that free life is never meant to be free.
Just like the protagonist Nan Wu in A Free Life, who is on a lifelong journey to adapt to the American life, Ha Jin, at the time the novel was written, was still on his journey of self-
85 transformation. Instead of describing China and her past, he relocates his characters into America.
Immigrant literature may not be a new genre for American readers, but for Ha Jin, such a switch demonstrates his determination to break from the past and his efforts to join American society.
The writing of American life releases Jin from the position of being accused or challenged concerning the legitimacy of his works involving China. Jin is completely legitimized in writing in English while writing about what happens in America for American readers. Ha Jin seems to be able to free himself from the anxiety of illegitimacy, yet, ironically, his protagonist Nan Wan has not had one moment of free life. On the contrary, the Wus live a cautious and difficult life in
America, struggling to make sense of the past and make a decent living in the present. Book reviewer Walter Kirn calls A Free Life, not without irony, “a serious patriotic novel”. Kirn later continues his review in a lukewarm tone, calling Nan, Jin’s protagonist, a neo-puritan and regarding Jin’s uneventful three-to five-page chapters as having Zen-like composure. What Kirn deems as uneventful, however, is full of action that native Americans would not see as important.
However, to immigrants, a tiny encounter in daily life could end up changing their lifestyle. For instance, when Nan Wu works as a security guard, he runs out to a market for a snack and finds himself waylaid on the return trip by a boozy, aggressive man and woman who badger him to come with them to a party packed with pretty girls. Nan’s confusion about their motives panics him and he later decides to never go out again at night. Another time, when Nan and his wife decide to buy a restaurant, they grow distrustful of their lawyer. Not knowing the legal process the couple falls into a fearful waiting, worrying that they will sell their business for only one dollar. With limited social resources, new immigrants have to re-navigate and re-map constantly.
One moment of feeling lost could panic their already alert minds. In fact, readers will be
86 impressed by Nan’s overcautious, self-restrained, reticent, rather analytic personality. These traits grow out of a lifetime of experiences under uncertainty and high pressure.
Besides depicting the uneasy life of new immigrants in America, Jin engages in redefining the conception of home and identity and exploring the relationship between the country and the individual person. Home to the Chinese is more than a single geographic region and, to a large extent, it represents who one is and says a lot of one’s family background, social class, and even level of education. Home in traditional Chinese culture is a significant concept and it may consist of multiple references such as birthplace, father’s birthplace, ancestral home, and hometown. This emphasis on discerning one person’s origin renders the importance of family and regional identity. One’s ancestral home or birthplace plays an important social role in their personal identity. Not only does home have a physical existence, because of the reliance on home to define one’s personal identity, but it also grows to be a spiritual entity that holds a unifying power for those who leave home to remember. However, Ha Jin asserts that “homeland is where you build your family” and “your country is where you raise your children” (635). Ha
Jin concretizes “home” by adding “land” and gives the immobile concept the dynamic dimensions and by using two verbs “build” and “raise” which transform the traditional land- bound concept of home. Home thus becomes something that grows and changes. Moreover, this conception of home is more of arrival than departure and more of the present and future than of the past. The Wus in A Free Life demonstrate the changing and growing process of building home. Nan Wu’s pain, much the same as Jin’s, centers on how to stand as an independent individual. Ha Jin, through Nan’s poems, expresses his own opinion: “Indeed, loyalty is a ruse if only one side intends to be loyal. You will have no choice but to join the refugees and change your passport” (635). He emphasizes that loyalty should be a two-way street and that it is
87 unreasonable and unjustified to demand an individual’s unconditional loyalty to the nation without requiring society to provide respect and protection in return. This is the most forthright response to the accusation of his linguistic betrayal and political disloyalty. He strives to equalize the status of an individual and a nation and demands a fair relationship between the individual and the nation that is guided by justice and integrity. By doing so Jin proves that he is able to make an effective self-defense in response to the long-standing accusation against his diasporic writing of China.
The change of subject matter from critiquing China to immigrant life marks Ha Jin’s transformation from a representative of his native people to an immigrant writer. His next work, a collection of short stories entitled A Good Fall (2010), similarly focuses on the hard life of new immigrants in America. What’s particularly worth mentioning in this book is that each character tries hard to be loyal to their mother country, but is worn down by the long-distance attachment.
They all hope to explore their new freedom and have better lives. However, it is perplexing that while Ha Jin has been attempting to overcome his sense of illegitimacy and position himself in the tradition of American immigrant literature, his most recent novel, Nanjing Requiem(2011), once again returns to a Chinese topic—the national trauma of the rape of Nanjing. This novel was surprisingly publicized in Mainland China. For the first time Ha Jin appeared in the Chinese media and his work was hailed as an epic novel of “coming back.” Using the same phrase, Ha Jin mentioned “coming back” in an interview. He said: “After you are aging, when the body and psychology are not that strong, the past comes back. You can’t repress it.”25 Does this coming back to the past provide Ha Jin with a path to legitimacy where he is finally able to reconcile with his home country, even with his abandonment of the “mother tongue” in his writing? As a
25 Zhu Youke “Ha Jin: Just tell it clearly—Nanking Requiem’s Logic” Nan Fang Zhou Mo (Southern Weekly) Web. November 13 2011.< http://www.infzm.com/content/65110> 88
Chinese diasporic writer, is his writing the story of a traumatized Nanjing a reflection of nostalgia connecting his personal history to the national history, thus creating a stairway that legitimizes Ha Jin’s role in writing China again?
A Humanistic Writer
The Nanjing Massacre remains a highly controversial topic. Many in Japan still deny or play down its brutality. The initial glossing over of the event by the Chinese government during the 1950s to the 1970s and its re-emergence in the 1990s Chinese nationalist discourse all relate to the political interests of the Communist regime at different times. Being politically correct, as well as depicting Japan’s atrocity and the Chinese people’s tenacious resistance, are the all-time favorite approaches for Chinese filmmakers and writers. It is easy to take Nanjing Requiem as another work in a category that echoes Chinese nationalistic discourses. That is why this novel made it to domestic Chinese media, whereas most of Ha Jin’s works were banned in mainland
China. However, Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem is not part of the Chinese nationalistic discourse. It is the new endeavor of Ha Jin to explore the nature of human beings from a humanistic standpoint when people’s nationality, political loyalty, morality, and religious faith are all contested under the atrocity of massacre. Ha Jin seeks a more sublime position from which to investigate humanity, in an attempt to transcend static and narrow nationalism. Meanwhile
Nanjing Requiem does not demonstrate Ha Jin’s return to a Chinese subject, as I will show, but rather reveals the pursuit and plight of diasporic individuals. It can be seen as a new round of efforts on Jin’s part to write from the anxiety stemming from his position of illegitimacy. The reviews and comments that tend to interpret Ha Jin’s narrative of Nanjing Massacre as a part of
89 nationalist discourse, especially from the Chinese media, either misunderstand the writer’s intention or manipulate the situation to serve their purposes. In addition to the stories that Jin tells, which take place in China, the narrative emphatically features is a group of foreigners, i.e. diasporans in China. The ruthless slaughter of Chinese civilians and other atrocities committed in
Nanjing place those foreigners through trials of the conscience, religious faith, and political allegiance. Jin is more interested in nuance than grandness, more personal than national, and more psychological than political. Jin sees his characters struggling to be decent diasporic human beings. They struggle under double identities and compromise and contradict themselves so as to survive in the safety zone, an area of supposed neutrality.
When Chiang Kai-shek abandoned Nanjing to the Japanese, some Western nationals chose to remain. The Americans who stayed were mostly missionaries; among them was Minnie
Vautrin, someone who has appeared in other fictional or non-fictional works.26 Minnie was the acting head of the Jinling College and an important worker for the Nanjing Safety Zone. She held a firm faith in a Christian God and carefully performed her duty as an educator. In Nanjing
Requiem, she is worshipped by thousands of refugees as a living Goddess of Mercy for her courageous and selfless work. Minnie, who provides a shelter during wartime, is definitely worshipped. Disliking being worshipped, Minnie says: “I hate to see them confuse humanity with divinity” (141). In reality, Minnie is tortured by the loss of humanity and the absence of divinity. As a mere human being she has to comply with Japanese soldiers’ unreasonable demands of women as their “comfort women.” Striving to do as God teaches: “love our enemies and even do good to them” while facing the Japanese cruelty, she only wishes that the Christians in Japan knew what their countrymen have been doing (97). With the politics within the college
26 Works that feature Minnie Vautrin include: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, Hu Hua-Ling’s American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking, Galbraith Douglas’s A Winter in China, Lu Chuan’s 2009 film City of Life and Death, and etc. 90 and the Japanese monitoring the international mail, Minnie “couldn’t be completely candid about what was happening” (99). Eventually Minnie Vautrin commits suicide from the guilt of not being able to save more lives, despite suicide being considered a sin in Christianity. The War’s atrocity and evilness thoroughly destroys the possibility of keeping the integrity of a human being. Jin depicts Minnie’s suffering and disillusionment in the grim situation of war. John Rabe, the German representative of Siemens in Nanjing and a member of the Nazi party, led the extraordinary effort to set up the safety zone and tried every means to help rescue refugees from the Japanese. In the novel, when he is about to return to Germany, more than three thousand women and girls kneel on the ground, wailing and begging, “Please don’t go! Please don’t abandon us!” (107) Rabe is deemed as a protective father and a hero to the refugees while his mother country is fighting together with the Japanese as allies. Though all fighting under their double identities, this group of foreigners, in fact, plays a crucial and irreplaceable role in war- ridden Nanjing as the Nationalist government literally abandons the city to the Japanese. These foreign citizens are supposed to remain neutral while residing in the Safety Zone, but their neutrality is hard to maintain, as the atrocities the Japanese soldiers show to common Chinese people damage the very basic morality and integrity of a human being. Not standing up to protect or provide assistance in front of such crimes tortures the souls and minds of honest people. The novel reveals the pain and struggle of the real foreigners who were actually witnesses to the tragedy. Ha Jin makes up for the absence of Chinese nationals in the Safety Zone by creating the character of Gao Anling, the only Chinese national in the novel and its narrator. This fictional literary character serves as a spokesman for Jin and for the absent Chinese who, had they been present at the time, would have been able to attest to the entire event. Gao also serves the function of maintaining a Chinese perspective in Ha Jin’s narration. If the foreigners can
91 theoretically keep neutrality, so too must Gao Anling, as a Chinese national, bury her hatred and hide her enormous sadness to survive this war in the safety zone. However, the complicated situation of her family tears her apart even more: her son-in-law fights in the Nationalist army, her husband, who once studied in Japan, admires the advanced Japanese technology, and her only son marries a Japanese woman and serves in the occupying army. During peacetime when
Japan and China reach out to each other, Gao Anling’s family may be admired for its deeper cultural communication. Yet in wartime they are forced to take sides, and either side they choose to take costs the family enormously. Under these circumstances, one’s political standpoint or nationality does not have the full decisive force to determine their behaviors. If it is not nationality or political loyalty, then what is the ultimate decisive power that affects people’s behaviors? Ha Jin pulls his characters out of their socially and politically defined roles and engages them in doing what they think is right. The novel portrays a Nazi party member who, instead of aligning with the Japanese allies, rescues thousands of refugees. It depicts an
American missionary, who stays on in the horrific war and tries not to offend the Japanese in order to protect more people while maneuvering between her faith in God and the unbearable cruelty she encounters. Similarly, although the members of Gao Anling’s family have special connections to Japan, their growing hatred toward the Japanese invaders tear their hearts apart, especially her son’s. Marrying a Japanese woman and being a doctor who serves in the Japanese military, Haowen is doomed to be labeled a traitor. Anling speaks for her son after his death:
“Had he not been a family man, he could have abandoned his wife by deserting the Imperial
Army soon after he’d landed in China. . . . But he’d been doomed by his nature as a good, faithful, average man” (246). Not only are the main characters torn between obligation and duty, love and hatred, and the persistence of justice and necessity of survival, but minor characters also
92 fall into complicated circumstances. They do what they are not supposed to do during this irrational and cruel war. The Japanese Christians and some officials come to donate food to
Chinese refugees. Dr. Chu, who obtained his medical degree in Germany, treats Japanese as well as Chinese patients. Some of the officials in the puppet municipality are not necessarily bad, yet they have to survive even though in general they are deemed shameless traitors.
Featuring this international group of people during the war, Ha Jin’s novel makes the statement that nationality is far from a dividing principle or a limiting force that regulates people’s actions, let alone their spirits. Jin’s depiction of the Nanjing Massacre not only displays the Japanese atrocities, but more importantly and in contrast to the previous fictional and non- fictional narration, his depiction also reveals his own efforts to push readers to see the hypocrisy of politics and government and the weakness of the human nature. He does not make simplistic accusations of people who work with the Japanese during the war, nor does he deify those who help the Chinese refugees. These foreigners are doing what they believe they should as human beings. Rabe leaves China in the heat of the war. Dr. Chu, deeply involved in assisting his countrymen, regrets returning here to take on all the troubles himself. Even Minnie Vautrin has to do things that go against her heart. The fictional narrator Gao Anling is a character of pragmatism. She constantly calculates her own possible loss or gain before doing something. She tries not to get into the office politics among the American colleagues that may affect her work.
However, Jin allows readers to enter the hearts and minds of these characters and to think and reason with them, feeling their pains and reaching understanding. He holds a broader and more compassionate vision of looking at these people. Jin’s diasporic perspective allows these
“insignificant figures” in history to be restored. Jin explores the possibility of constructing a transcendental position that is higher than nation, politics, race, and even religion, a position
93 where a universal rule is observed and respected. He expresses his desire to have such a place through the mouth of Holly, another American teacher at Jinling College:
I’d heard her say that before, so I shifted the subject a little. “I admire your
devotion to our people. You’ve become one of us.” (Anling said)
“Not really. I belong to myself only.” (Holly said)
“But you’re a Chinese citizen, aren’t you?”
“Citizenship is just a piece of paper, I belong neither to China nor to America.
Like I said, I’m on my own.”
“Still, you’ve been helping us in our cause.”
“That’s because I believe it’s the right thing to do. I’ve followed only my heart.”
“Come on, Holly, you’re living a hard life, and so is your friend Siuchin. You
cannot say you two haven’t made sacrifice for this country.”
“We’ve been doing the work only because we believe it’s worth our efforts. One
doesn’t have to love a country to do what’s right.” (240)
The ultimate living principle, “to do what is right,” be it out of morality or from religious beliefs, stands higher than patriotism or nationalism, which only demonstrates a narrow, sometimes fanatic, and unreasonable craze for a nation. Jin appeals for a universalism based on the personal integrity and the welfare of all human beings. However, as hard as Jin has tried, could such universalism exist? In the novel, a safety zone, a supposed neutral area, may serve to accommodate such universalism. Jin’s characters all live in Jinling College, a safe zone during the war. These diasporic foreigners do what they believe is right and they live in a neutral area where national identities are not supposed to be important. By characterizing this safe zone and these foreign people who endeavor to protect it, Jin expresses his fantasy of creating such a
94 middle ground for all marginal people, one where they don’t have to worry about the confrontation of national identity and will be protected. In reality, however, this is merely an idealistic fantasy. Just as it is described in the novel, this safe zone exists right in the middle of extreme national antagonism and it is constantly disturbed and even attacked by Japanese soldiers. People in this safety zone are not actually safe. The very existence of such a safety zone is based on constant compromise and sacrifice of some women’s lives.
The force of illegitimacy has led Ha Jin to embark on an unremitting journey to seek a suitable identity. He fights various battles and is still on the road in this pursuit. The force of illegitimacy has always been the driving force for Jin’s writing. His new endeavor to eliminate the national boundaries in Nanjin Requiem, though unfortunately still not successful, displays
Jin’s efforts once again.
95
CHAPTER THREE
MA JIAN—CLAIMING CENTER FROM THE MARGINAL
The Language is my mother country.
– Ma Jian
General Introduction
If Hong Ying’s sense of illegitimacy stems from her status as an illicit daughter and Ha
Jin’s sense of illegitimacy originates from the anxiety of his linguistic conversion, then Ma Jian’s sense of illegitimacy relates to his explicit political attitude toward the communist regime of
China. Ma Jian is an adamant opponent of the authoritarian polity. He became known in the
Chinese literary circle after his work Stick out Your Tongue was published in People’s
Literature, one of the most prestigious literary magazines in China, with the recommendation of
Gao Xingjian in 1987. Soon the piece was banned and the editor in chief was removed from his position because his publication of it. Since then, Ma Jian’s works have been completely banned in mainland China, and he has been forced into an exile. Stick out Your Tongue does not openly challenge communist ideology, nor does it involve any political issues. It tells five stories with themes of love, family affection, morality, religion and how modern civilization affects traditional Tibetan life. The candid, sober tone and realistic narration of the poor common
Tibetans’ life, in particular the writing of sexuality and incestuous sexuality, were what annoyed the Chinese government. Jian’s manner of narration simply did not reflect, as the government phrased it, how the Tibetans actively engaged in the socialist construction of China. Ma Jian
96 began his exilic journey in the late 1980s. He moved to Hong Kong in 1986 and then to Germany, eventually settling in London.
In the history of Chinese literature, there has never been a shortage of exile writers. The most recent group of writers that were exiled is the Tiananmen generation. They are the several hundred intellectuals, writers, and poets who were either forced to leave or willingly left China for fear of political persecution before or after the June Fourth Incident27 in 1989. Gao Xingjian,
Bei Dao, Su Xiao Kang, and Liao Yiwu, the most recently well known exiled Chinese writer in the West, all became exiles for political reasons. The only difference is the degree of their banishment. Some names were completely removed from the official publications in mainland
China and some can still publish works under specific conditions, which merely depends on the content of their works. Yet one thing is similar— their names become strange or completely unknown to domestic Chinese readers and their literary creations have been permanently affected by their exilic status. Writing in their native language becomes a troublesome issue, since it either faces very limited readership or none at all. Many were active during the first few years of exile but quickly were forgotten even in the West. Once in a while the Western media would feature one of them for interpreting the current affairs of China or for reminiscing on certain historical or political events that they might have been involved in. However, largely these exiled writers are not as literarily productive as before. Serious scholarship on their works becomes less
27 The naming of the incident on June Fourth in 1989 on the Tiananmen Square reveals the wholely different views of different people on this political event. June Fourth Incident refers to the crackdown by the Army on the night of June 3rd and early morning of June 4th. Names like June Fourth Movement and ’89 Democracy Movement may refer to the entire democratic movement that lasted for several months in Beijing in 1989. Democratic supporters and sympathizers often call it June Fourth Massacre and June Fourth Crackdown. In English, the terms Tiananmen Square Protests or Tiananmen Square Crackdown are also often used to describe the entire movement, though most of the killing did not take place on the Square. The name of this event in the Chinese official discourse has gone through changes as well, because the Chinese government intended to neutralize its crackdown that resulted in death of still uninvestigated numbers and downplay its political intensity. It was initially called Counterrevolutionary Riot, then just Riot and later Political Storm, finally being called the “political turmoil between the Spring and Summer of 1989.” 97 possible, since, for one thing, their literary production has decreased considerably and, moreover, their literary works are often politically interpreted. Their names only sporadically appear in the
Western media, where stories of how they have been persecuted in China are told. This attention only perpetuates the politicization of their works and further negatively affects their literary writing.
Ma Jian is one of the few exceptions. Though he was banned by the Chinese government at the beginning of his writing career, he persistently continued his literary writings. Since the
1980s Ma Jian has published the novels Bardo (1989), The Noodle Maker (1991), The Nine
Crossroads (1993), Red Dust (2003), Beijing Coma (2009), and The Dark Road (2012), as well as the collections of short stories Stick Out Tongue (1987), A Dog’s Life (1987), and The Lament
(1996), in addition to other non-fictional works. Unlike most other exiled writers who gradually lose their voice even in foreign countries after being silenced by Chinese government, Ma Jian establishes himself as a Chinese exile writer in diaspora by persisting in writing in the Chinese language while remaining critical of China’s authoritarian polity. The word exile in Chinese is often associated with negative or passive meanings—banishment as a form of punishment by the government. Since their banishment is not assigned by government, the self-exile often reflects in eremitism—a voluntary withdrawal from political service in order to maintain one’s own integrity or for the more practical reasons of survival in times of upheaval. This self-exile, inspired by Daoism, forms a counterpoint to Confucian sociopolitical engagement and often induces exiles to return to their hometowns, away from political power centers, and to pursue their art, literature, or scholarship. Ma Jian’s exile belongs to a combination of both types of exile. He was denounced as an illegitimate writer but never removed his attention from China’s sociopolitical reality. On the contrary, he captures every piece of sociopolitical reality that the
98 official version of Chinese literature may have left out. His literary subjects are chosen from among what has not been featured in contemporary literature. What is not allowed in China becomes an attractive topic for Ma Jian. For instance, the June Fourth Incident of 1989, which is still taboo in Chinese media. Ma Jian writes it into the novel Beijing Coma which meticulously records this event from beginning to the end and features dozens of students that can be easily identified with the student leaders in the movement. His most recent novel The Dark Road criticizes China’s One Child Policy, which in China is considered an effective and beneficial method of controlling Chinese population. To counter the superimposed accusation of his illegitimacy Ma Jian goes all the way in questioning the legitimacy of his judges. He believes that the literature approved by the present Chinese government abounds in third-rate ingratiating works that lack moral justification. The only valuable literary works come from underground literature that is not accepted by the establishment of official literature. Therefore being an exile or being deemed illegitimate precisely proves that Ma Jian’s works contain the genuine Chinese value and tradition that the official version of Chinese literature has long lost.
One may wonder why Ma Jian’s exilic writing career thrives instead of withering. How does Ma Jian solve the problem of being removed of his cultural roots? How does he deal with his marginal position as a diasporic writer? This chapter will address these questions by exploring Ma Jian’s works and analyzing how politics affect his literary writings. Ma Jian’s prolific exilic literary career certainly relates to his personal perseverance and faith in the value of writing, but more importantly, I argue that his enthusiasm and motivation for so persistently writing about China is deeply rooted in the very anxiety of not being able to be a visible and legitimate Chinese writer. The anxiety resulting from the actual alienation from geographical
China and the artificial separation from a Chinese cultural milieu propel Ma Jian to seek a
99 connection with China and Chinese culture so as to sustain an identity while he is away from it and therefore cannot have an active role in Chinese society. Inadequate knowledge of English blocks Ma Jian from conveniently entering into the British society. His rejection by the Chinese government and the humiliating manner in which he is ostracized compel Ma Jian to embrace a political resistance that further marginalizes his literary writing, though his initial literary expression does not contain an explicit political pursuit. Ma Jian’s literary illegitimacy accompanies his political illegitimacy. Ma was forcefully pulled into the political vortex when his Stick Out Your Tongue was accused of damaging the ethnical relationship in China. The criticism of a literary work quickly became a political issue28; the editor was punished as well.
But Stick Out Your Tongue, in fact, does not address any political matters. In terms of making literary innovations, it is often praised for its author’s efforts to experiment with Modernist writing when most Chinese writers were still enamored with Realism. However the political framing of Ma’s initial literary endeavor thoroughly changed Ma’s later literary career.
Ma Jian since then migrates into exile and his works fall into a different type of obsession with China. Unlike the group of Chinese writers in diaspora with a sense of guilt for leaving the home country, defined by David Der-wei Wang as having the complex of being “obsessive with
China”, Ma Jian has a justified reason to leave China. He does not have any patriotic burden nor is he willing to proclaim his loyalty to the Communist regime. Actually there is not one political regime that Ma Jian is willing to be loyal to. Thus, Chinese culture, theoretically still guarded by the Chinese government, becomes, according to Ma, inauthentic and adulterated. What Ma Jian strives to do is to counter write, rewrite, or supplementarily write Chinese topics that have been incorrectly configured or intentionally left out. Therefore the spirit of resistance characterizes Ma
28Gao, Xingjian. “旧事重提” [Telling an Old Story] Independent Chinese Pen Center. Web.
Jian’s literary writing as he states solemnly: “The life truth of mine is to consume my life in resistant writing, to keep conscience at the right place, to let humanitarianism and freedom of thinking become the only sublimity and to light up the holy fire of freedom in memory.”29 Thus
Ma Jian endows his literary writing with a significant function –to carry on authentic Chinese culture that relies on the truthful memorization of history. This historical mission burdens Ma
Jian with two unavoidable forms of writing China. One is to spare no pains in critiquing contemporary Chinese society to demonstrate how the traditionally glorified Chinese culture and traditions have been destroyed by the prevailing ideology. The other is to meticulously record historical events and people in the attempt to demonstrate the falsehood of the officially chronicled Chinese history. These two characteristics somehow decrease the literary nature and result in the politicization of his literary writing. Meanwhile, as an individual diasporan, Ma
Jian’s literary articulation is bound to be entangled with politics. His isolated cultural status leaves him with no other entities besides the human body to explore, which explains his obsessive description of it.
The Noodles and the Maker— the Distorted Bodies
The Noodle Maker is completely a diasporic product. Its Chinese version was published first in Hong Kong in 1991 after Ma Jian left mainland China four years prior. Ma believes that one has to take a detour to get to the center of the Chinese culture; thus, to leave is always a better way to know. Ma Jian’s desire to leave the center started even before his exile. He worked as a photojournalist for a magazine published by the All China Federation of Trade Unions in
29 Ma Jian. “重建历史与记忆的文学—获奖答谢” [The Literature of Reconstruction of History and Memory—The First China Free Culture Award Lecture] delivered on April 11, 2008. Independent Chinese Pen Center. Web.
Beijing, a privileged central position, but in 1983 he resigned from the job and started a three- year vagabond journey travelling to the northwest deserts, the hinterland along the banks of the
Yellow River, Tibet and the southwest mountain area and the southeastern coast. These experiences were written into Ma Jian’s travelogue Red Dust (2003), which is the first intimate interaction between Ma and his country and the people of Chinese society. He later writes about his amazement concerning the insensitivity and follies of the people toward the oppressive system as well as the contrast between the richness of the landscape and the poverty of the people. This around-the-country journey disenchants the still idealistic Ma Jian, and the trip is also the starting point of his later poignant criticism of the Chinese society.
The Noodle Maker can be seen as a collection of social comments and insightful analysis of post-1989 Chinese society featuring ten different characters. It is Ma Jian’s first major work published after he settles in London. Scholar David Der-wei Wang thinks the novel portrays eccentric men and weird occurrences in a totalitarian society with absurdist approaches. Wang points out that Jian’s works are full of bodies or parts of bodies that are humiliated, distorted, cut apart, and consumed. These stories about disintegrated bodies, like the end-of-world testimonies, depict a crazy society with all kinds of sicknesses and perversions.30 Wang compares Ma Jian’s body writing with the works of Yu Hua, Mo Yan, and Ge Fei and calls them the spokesmen of the cruel aesthetics. However, I argue that Ma Jian’s writing of these distorted bodies does not aim to create a certain aesthetic principle nor does he share with the several writers that Wang lists the trans-historical cruelty and violence that expose the primitivism of the human beings.
Ma Jian’s narration of distorted bodies has a realistic significance. The book can be seen as the first thorough criticism of contemporary Chinese society. What Ma’s writing reveals is not the
30 Wang, David Der-wei. “荒谬的辩证法—评长篇小说 拉面者 ” [Absurd Dialectics: Review of The Noodle Maker].Independent Chinese Pen Center. Web. < http://blog.boxun.com/hero/majian/27_1.shtml> 102 distorted bodies themselves but the invisible forces that have damaged and violated them. More importantly, if the novel is viewed together with Ma’s later works, The Noodle Maker reflects
Ma’s initial diasporic characteristics— disillusionment and destruction; disillusionment with the communist ideology along with the intention of destroying it.
Diasporic writers share something in common during their pre- and post-exile periods: they all go through two critical phases of transformation. One phase consists of a moment of disillusionment that results from a journey of searching and then being disappointed with what is discovered. What emerges in the literary works of these writers in this process is the narrative of fragmentation, distortion and abnormality where the urgency of destruction is implicated.
Following the destruction, the next phase consists of a self-construction project. The second process often occurs after the writers leave the homeland. The cultural alienation not only rouses nostalgia, but more critically, induces the intensive identity crisis. The previous rejection of the original society and the sudden cultural isolation leave these exiles as cultural and social orphans.
Therefore, the theme of self-construction often dominates the narrative of the second process.
What manifests in their works reflecting these two phases involves at first a strong sense of disillusionment and then the ambition of creating something new and different. For instance, Gao
Xingjian’s Soul Mountain depicts a disillusioned man who embarks on a journey down to the adjacent mountain and countryside areas in an attempt to find something pure that can rescue the fallen souls of men. His One Man’s Bible is clearly a self-construction project recalling his childhood, revisiting the disastrous Cultural Revolution so as to reconstruct a self. The painful destruct-construct process occupies the initial stage of diasporic writings. Ma Jian’s The Noodle
Maker falls into the process of disillusionment and destruction, reflected in the narration of distorted bodies.
103
La Mian, the Chinese title, literally the stretchable noodle, is a well-known dish from
China’s northwestern area that has now spread all over the world. The hand-made noodles require a well-kneaded lump of dough that can be repeatedly stretched and folded and finally made into noodles in various lengths and thicknesses. The stretchable noodles are known for their chewiness, which results from the multiple folding and stretching that lets the glutton be well-kneaded. The specific skill of making dozens of thin and long noodles is often considered as a work of art and needs a good training. Though the stretched noodles may be of various length and thickness, the well-kneaded gluten keeps them pliable. This encompassing noodle metaphor seems to have nothing to do with the stories that feature city dwellers in China during the 1980s and 1990s. Their lives are somehow manipulated by an invisible yet so repressive force that they all have to eventually succumb to, making the exquisite and well-trained skill of kneading and stretching noodles parallel the ubiquitous political control of people’s lives. Just like the noodles, those people who are manipulated by this force are subjected to the maker. This metaphor is made from the perspective of an outsider, someone distant from what is happening. Ma Jian’s diasporic status makes this observation possible. It is also a multi-layered metaphor with multiple references. By kneading these ten stories into one novel, the writers, both the professional writer in the book and Ma Jian himself, can be seen as noodle makers. Yet unlike the chewy resilient noodles, the characters sculpted by Ma Jian are deprived of backbones and even souls. The absurdity and eccentricity of their behaviors presents the atmosphere of a mixture of realism and surrealism. They are the fictional characters that seem to be found everywhere in reality but they are somehow deprived of human qualities in order to become formalized prototypes. The second story of the novel depicts a manual worker. Without any particular skills or backdoor connections after returning to the town from the re-education camp, Vlazerim, whose nickname
104 comes from a hero of an Albanian propaganda film, eventually joins the town’s blood donors. By selling blood, Vlazerim is able to become a millionaire. Another story recounts how an entrepreneur makes a fortune by providing special services by cremating bodies. This soulless man ends up burning his own mother alive.
The characteristics of these personages are exaggerated or minimized to such a degree that they can be pinned down as a prototype, a pure form, and thus seem unreal. Difficulties and dilemmas permeate everybody’s daily problems and common pains, such as the shortage of inspiration for writers, the hidden embarrassment of husbands who are always outshined by their wives, or the peer pressure of just being different, like the girl who has large, protruding breasts.
Their social identities, invading all their private needs and desires, become the only identifiable facades. The actress in the fourth story “The Suicide or The Actress” performs her suicide on stage and the street writer is permanently caught up in the letters he writes for his clients.
Through these stories, readers are exposed to a context of horror that makes them alert of fall into victimhood. Ma Jian’s literary career is cultivated during the late 1970s and early 1980s as rigid ideological control relaxed and all kinds of trendy Western thoughts swarmed into Chinese literary circles. The Noodle Maker consists of nine novellas, with each novella featuring one protagonist with two antithetic titles. The first title refers to the social identity of these characters and the second one is the author’s commentary on their nature that exposes their real function or realistic existential circumstances. This highly antithetic categorization of people reveals Ma
Jian’s poignant criticism of a society where an entrenched force regulates and classifies its members into easily managed groups. The repressive defining force turns out to be a ruining power that violates what is essential in human nature. Living in a repressive society, these characters have been stripped of the essential qualities of human beings. They can be easily
105 labeled or recognized by one particular form, such as, the swooner, the possessor or the abandoner. Their behaviors and remarks sound unreal and ridiculous.
The first featured protagonist in the opening story is a professional writer, who is paid a small monthly salary by the government to write. He sits in his narrow apartment, smelling the flavors wafting from his neighbor’s soup, complain frenetically that the soup lacks an essential ingredient—ginger. The fish soup without a necessary spice resonates with this troubled writer who is also lacking an essential ingredient—working for the government, he has been stripped of his social function as a writer: the ability to critique the society. Upon being assigned to write a story about a new, contemporary Lei Feng31, the writer searches around him and cannot find one character that still carries Lei Feng’s altruistic and optimistic qualities. What he ends up writing are unreal, absurd and yet lively figures: a blood donor who sells blood to make a fortune, an entrepreneur who runs a cremation business and burns his mother alive, a lost-love woman acts out her suicide in public, a once accomplished writer threatened by his wife’s success, who starts taking mistresses, seducing them with the possibility of getting published. These stories are written separately with the professional writer appearing occasionally to comment on these characters’ actions, knowing that is the only thing he can do. Without one more novel he is not able to enter into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers, a great honor that every writer desires to gain, nor is he able to make a decent living; meat is a luxury for daily meals. He relies on his friend, a blood donor, to bring delicious and nutritious food to the table. He ends up being a flavor thief, obsessed with various smells wafting out of kitchens in the building. By not being
31 Lei Feng was a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Lei Feng was portrayed as a model citizen, and the masses were encouraged to emulate his selflessness, modesty, and devotion to the Communist Party, Chairman Mao, and the people in China. Lei Feng was not widely known until after his death. In 1963, Lei Feng’s Diary was first presented to the public in the first of many “Learn from Lei Feng” propaganda campaigns. Lei Feng remains a cultural icon representing earnestness and service. His name has entered daily speech. March 5th has become the official “Learn from Lei Feng Day.” 106 able to be the conscience of the generation, the writer is reduced to a person who pays attention to his surroundings, merely an onlooker who is not able to participate. This professional writer is a condensed miniature of Chinese intellectuals in general. The intellectuals’ inability to change anything and their indignation towards this situation all come together in the character of this professional writer. He is sensitive and observant. He is caught between his desire to write and the task he is assigned. He swears and always complains. He becomes just a useless person surviving on a meager subsidy.
Another intellectual character, the chief editor of a literary magazine, has an accomplished literary career and has become an admirable writer, one who has entered The
Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers. Old-Hep, a nickname he got due to his one-time contraction of hepatitis, lives a double life. Overshadowed by his wife’s more successful career,
Old-Hep’s status at home sinks lower and lower. He seeks for some balance from the kitchen at home and falls into daydreaming at work, recalling his past glorious days. Later he learns to take advantage of young female writers who want to get published in his magazine. He takes various women as his mistresses. His duplicitous life of being a servant to his wife and a master to a textile worker, one of his mistresses, is interrupted when his affair is revealed to his wife. After being kicked out by his wife, he becomes slovenly, slow-witted, and forgetful. Near the end of this story, the professional writer asks: “‘Is this what we all work for? What we go to university for, make friends for? Tell me is it worth all the pain?’” (109). Chinese intellectuals, with their intrinsic ambition of being think tanks for the government or being critics of the society if they are not employed by the government, may be considered a failure if they achieve neither of these ambitions. However, both the professional writer, who is not successful at all, and the editor/writer, who is seemingly successful, are merely worthless men whose bodies are
107 consumed up in material and sexual indulgence while their spirits are tortured with their incompetence and inability. They have no way out in their society. The irony is that there are still a lot of young men and women dreaming of becoming one of them, regarding these careers as sublime and holy. It is the deep-seated system that deceives people and keeps the vicious cycle that catches intellectuals in disillusionment and nihilism running.
By contrast, manual workers, men who live by laboring, seem to have more fulfilled lives.
Vlazerim, the nickname of the blood donor, joins the crowds of the town’s blood donors after two years of living on the streets. After seven years of hard work, the blood donor becomes a millionaire. Not only is he able to provide for his family, he is also a reliable and welcomed friend who brings meat to the sparse dinner table of his writer friend. He is satisfied and even proud of his way of making a living as he says “If it weren’t for me, the national blood banks would be empty. I’ve bled myself dry for this country” (13). Ma Jian presents a contrast of these two individuals, with one selling intelligence and one selling blood; yet both bodies are irrecoverably damaged. In order to continue to constantly give blood, Vlazerim has to swallow jugfuls of water before each donation, so that his organs do not grow weak. His body is merely a blood-making machine. The writer has a weak heart, and a troublesome pair of lungs which spew out globs of phlegm at inopportune moments. None of the organs below his stomach are quite right either (18). In a diseased society, the intellectuals or thinkers are not allowed to think and the laborers cannot survive on their labors alone. Only by selling blood can the worker live a better life. These two characters are two representatives, two strings of noodles, whose lives are not just influenced but controlled and violated by the noodle maker. By explicitly showing these suffering bodies, Ma Jian forces his readers to ask the questions: what causes the damage to these bodies, spirit and flesh? Who possesses these bodies? The professional writer confesses
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“He knows that his life is almost entirely devoted to the Party. But he has no idea who the Party is. He knows that the Party was around before he was born, and has controlled him his entire life.
Every part of him belongs to the Party. The Party told him to write novels. It could tell him to die too if it wanted—he’d have no choice in the matter” (16). The controlling force of the Party is invisible, yet so powerful that it can still be seen in its control over female bodies. One story displays this control that not only constricts the thought, but also the shape of the body, the flesh itself. The big-breasted girl is shamed into suffering for her large, soft, pendulous breasts; she is only 20, yet she has the breasts of a matron twice her age. She is the topic of gossip among her female colleagues, who suspect her of applying a cream or letting men fondle her breasts to make them big. Later, the girl goes crazy and runs down the street naked. Her life is completely ruined by her insane naked run, because she shows her protruding breasts. Protrusion of any type, including protrusion of the body is not tolerated, a highly symbolic condemnation of the Party’s severe control over everything. This long and repressive control penetrates the minds and bodies of the people and results in a selfish, indifferent, and unfriendly social environment which provokes coldness and craziness even among family and lovers. When the entrepreneur sends his mother to the crematorium alive, and when the young actress performs her suicide on the stage, the lack of compassion and the insensitivity of men are fully uncovered. The distortion and abnormality of the entire society are what the criticism really targets.
The entrepreneur in the story “The Swooner” who burns his mother alive and the actress who commit suicide in public are two such unbelievable characters. The way Ma Jian writes about them leaves readers drifting between real and unreal. Just as the title “The Swooner” suggests, everyone is swooning and eventually there is no one sober. Ma Jian tears down the cover of life and makes people see the ugliness that they would never want to see. He draws
109 readers to the realization that everybody can be deceived and can lose rationality. When absurd things occur, one is no longer able to discern their absurdity or act to stop them. The mother who is about to be cremated by her son feels that helplessness. She recalls her reflection when she was told about her father’s suicide many years ago. She laughed upon hearing of her father’s way of suicide—hurling himself from the top of a building. When people are accustomed to a senseless and soulless routine life, the gap between life and death is shortened and merged.
Death is no longer feared and somehow becomes even a goal for those still living.
In the middle of narrating other stories, the professional writer, the protagonist of the first story, always jumps out to express his opinions. More often than not he gets involved with characters in those stories. These characters are supposed to be protagonists of this professional writer’s works, yet he keeps getting involved with them. This special manner of narration creates a space of awareness that breaks down the wall between fiction and reality, characters and writers. As it goes, because of the blurring of fiction and reality, life and death, the narration becomes unreliable. The remarks of human beings are unreliable and untrustworthy, whereas a three-legged hound serves as the most reliable witness to this crazy world. The last story records the dialogue between a dog and a painter in which the dog sounds wiser and more dignified but the man can only speak what he is taught. After the men are robbed of dignity and the freedom of thinking they are further relegated to dogs’ inferiors. However, these mental and emotionally disabled men are still able to destroy and harm, for example, by killing dogs. The professional writer, looming in and out of every story, makes his last appearance and sadly realizes
“Everything fades and dies. There’s nothing I can do about it…” (179). The fishy smell that he abhors for its lack of ginger permeates the air, this time not from his neighbor’s kitchen, but from
110 his own body. It is a precise symbol of his assimilation by the spiritless atmosphere; he has become like the others.
The Noodle Maker allows Ma Jian to realize his ambition of being a writer who can freely critique society and the government. Meanwhile politics finally penetrates into his literature. Ma maintains that Chinese literati share two major characteristics: escapism and lack of rebellion. Ma posits that such a spirit of “no-action” ends up nurturing the authoritarian polity.
Contemporary Chinese literature has already grown into a hybridization of commercial literature and official literature. Writers are not writing with souls, but instead pursuing a state of eremitism in order to avoid persecution and survive in their secular lives. However, Ma Jian is able to avoid this persecution and attributes this to his diasporic status. He makes use of his marginal position to confront political issues that domestic writers would not and could not do.
The damage that politics may produce on literature is obvious. The sabotage is displayed in the long-time practice of censorship. In the case of China’s censorship, the socialist artistic principle requires literature to serve political purposes, i.e. literary works should be made to assist the ruling party in governing. Any works that condemn the government will certainly be censored.
Even more devastatingly, the long-time practice of the system of censorship causes writers to become equipped with an internal censorship, in that is they know what to and what not to write even before they sit down to write. This self-censorship promotes “a cold literature” that aims to disengage literature from all ideological -isms and return to the criterion of art for art’s sake.
Compelling issues that may be best represented in literature will often be avoided by writers because of their potential political sensitivity. Ma Jian does not withdraw himself and his works from the political stage. He writes in one essay: “Eighteen years later, when the English version of my Stick Out Your Tongue is about to be published, I open this banned novel again and realize
111 that I am not that wandering Han young man in Tibet any longer. If I were to write another novel about Tibet, I would definitely add politics, add the murdering of Tibetan religion by the communist authoritarian government.”32 To Ma Jian, writing becomes his weapon with which to resist the communist regime. Writing is also a method to preserve history and memory. If we treat every culture or society as a cultural construct, Ma Jian argues that the communist cultural construct is a distortion and perversion of all of what China represents. Essential to his works is the depiction of how the communist construct of China distorts and corrupts the ideals that form the basis of a true China. A true China needs a factual knowledge of history. Ma Jian’s Beijing
Coma intends to honestly record history.
A Coma That is Hard to Wake up From
In 2009 Ma Jian published his new work Beijing Coma, a novel that depicts the student
Dai Wei’s ten years in a coma after being shot in the head in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Dai Wei, a PhD student at Beijing University, becomes intensely involved in the organization of the student demonstration at Tiananmen. The book consists of two ongoing plots, with one line following Dai Wei’s private and interior recollections of his life and the other recording his sensory perceptions from his sick bed of the ten years following 1989. The two narrative lines converge at the end of the novel, when Dai Wei’s recollections end with the bullet piercing his head and his decaying body left lying inside his mother’s shattered building, which is being leveled. The book, due to its subject matter and the time of its publication, which comes on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Democracy Movement, is categorized as another
32 Ma, Jian. “西 人的困境” [The Plight of Tibetan People] Independent Chinese Pen Center. Web.
China’s new colonialism as the new Empire of the twenty-first-century. These reviews do not avoid the tendency towards the politicization of exilic writers’ literary works. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the novel’s literary innovation from the diasporic perspective, fail to explore the profound cause of such documentary-like narration, and fail to interpret the multiple and complicated, sometimes even contradictory, pursuits of the writer. Given its politically sensitive topic, Beijing Coma is also one of the most important and longest works of Ma Jian’s diasporic writing career, not only in terms of the length of the novel, which is over seven hundred pages in the English version, but it is said that it took ten years for the author to research and write the book. In an interview, Ma Jian talked about how he tried every means to collect information and spoke to every individual involved he could find33. I argue that Beijing Coma demonstrates Ma
Jian’s intensive desire to articulate as a diasporic writer. Forbidden to participate in Chinese social life by Chinese government, Ma Jian writes to engage himself in contemporary Chinese society and politics. Not only enabling himself to engage in Chinese social life, Ma Jian in
33 Ma, Jian. “馬建談創作北京植物人的文學意念”[Ma Jian Talks about His Writing of Beijing Coma.] Interview. Web. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr1vPE742sA>
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Beijing Coma allows himself to obtain an omnipotent perspective from which he becomes an insightful observer and the only knower of truth. Choosing to stay in such a position also reveals his deepest anxieties of being an illegitimate writer. By mastering all the facts and truths, he is able to claim the legitimacy to speak. Writing about a still forbidden topic, Ma Jian takes advantage of his diasporic status to analyze the most important social and political event in contemporary China. It is a task that can only be completed in diaspora. This book also shows
Jian’s efforts to configure his legitimate identity from diaspora and his consistent longing for a free, beautiful and harmonious homeland, which, if not given, will be created independently.
Serving as his political resistance through literary narration, Beijing Coma represents more of Ma
Jian’s desire to construct a self-sustained legitimate agency in writing about China as well as his urgency to do so.
Under the title of an exile writer, Ma Jian’s diasporic features are often ignored. As earlier stated, diasporic writers may go through two processes. After going through the destructive process, diasporic writers engage in creating something new and different. Ma Jian’s
Beijing Coma proves that he has entered this process of re-building. To Ma Jian, this project of construction must be an independent and self-sustained one that includes the configuration of authentic Chinese history and the construction of a self-identity without being subject to the discourse of legitimate Chineseness that still dominated by the Chinese government. China’s rapid rise as a new economic power with its industrious pursuit of economic prosperity and global dominance constitutes the leitmotif of twenty-first century China. In the middle of its main theme of opening, China, with its double digit GDP growth and the unified international image it presented to the world during the Olympics in 2008, pushes aside or completely silences almost all dissident voices. Ma Jian, however, creates the comatose protagonist Dai Wei who
114 sings a totally different tune from the main theme, albeit in a marginal corner, invisible from the center of the nation. What Dai Wei experiences is not the economic prosperity of an increasingly modernized China but the deformed economic growth of a paranoid police state that places endless surveillance on its citizens, persecuting them at the expense of social justice and morality as well as the natural environment. Unlike other characters in the novel who are based on the real student leaders of the movement and can be easily identified, Dai Wei is purely a fictional figure,
Ma Jian’s own literary creation. Dai Wei is just a stinking, dying body without any physical faculties of a human being. He cannot have any social interaction or social participation in
China’s current society. As marginal as the author Ma Jian, who is completely invisible, whose works are banned, and whose temporary presence is tightly monitored in China, Dai Wei does not exist to any other Chinese people except his mother, and there only as an unbearable burden.
She is expelled from the Party, stripped of chances of better work opportunities, deprived of her ownership of the apartment and often questioned and monitored by plain-clothes policemen. But
Ma Jian gives Dai Wei an omniscient perspective. Dai Wei is able to clearly recall the cruelty of the Land Reform in the countryside during the 1950s, the turmoil of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the devastating Cultural Revolution. He remembers his father’s past experiences and every detail of the student democracy movement. Moreover, he is also able to accurately discern the psychology of his mother, every visitor, and even every policeman. In addition to his full knowledge and sensibility of every blood vessel, he can discern every single odor or every gust of wind. Despite lying on his sickbed, he knows of important social events as well as the trivial troubles of his family and others. He is an oracle of the past, evening know events that he himself has not witnessed. Ma Jian allows Dai Wei to indulge in memory and observation of the past even though Dai Wei has zero contact with the society in which he lives. Yet in spite of the lack
115 of contact, he has a hundred percent knowledge of it. Just like his character Dai Wei, Ma Jian is deprived of all legitimate rights to access the Chinese society.34 However, he manages to enter his forbidden zone through his literature. He allows Dai Wei to possess knowledge and visceral feelings of Chinese life, which he is able to indulge at will. Transcending the limits of a person’s knowledge scale or capability of sensing the feelings of others, Dai Wei can always return to details of the craziest days of the Cultural Revolution, such as the horrible details when an angelic girl Liu Ping is carved up and eaten by several monstrous men. He can sense thoroughly how each of his visitors feels the moment they stand at his bedside. Except for not being able to talk or participate in the ongoing life, Dai Wei is the most reliable narrator of past events and the most critical analyzer of current affairs. This diasporic creation of an omniscient and reliable narrator who is able to indulge in memory of the past and the narration of the ongoing present displays the author’s ambition of preserving a truthful history through memory and of creating a self-sufficient and self-contained realm where his self-constructed identity can be recognized.
The distorted bodies from the Noodle Maker, which symbolize the paralyzed and twisted society, are now turned into a completely dysfunctional body, a vegetating one. The body obsession in Beijing Coma can be interpreted on three levels of meaning. This dysfunctional body symbolizes the contemporary Chinese society. This society is sustained only by materialist richness and it ignores its spiritual growth. The government is no more effective in maintaining the social justice and morality. The body, isolated and suffering physical pain, exposes author
Ma Jian’s unbearable confinement as a diasporan, a lonely individual who aspires for a real home and belonging but is trapped in the past, as Dai Wei sadly admits: “People only escape into the past when they have nowhere left to go. I’ve had to flee down this backward path for the last ten years.” (671) The Chinese title of Beijing Coma is called rou zhi tu, literally flesh earth, flesh
34 After the publication of Beijing Coma in 2009, Ma Jian is officially forbidden to enter into mainland China. 116 prison. Though Dai Wei knows everything and can travel wildly to every mountain and river of
China in his imagination, he is locked up inside his body, completely physically immobile. Ma
Jian shares this same experience with Dai Wei. No matter how closely he pays attention to China and Chinese life, to its people and its culture, he no longer has that legitimate (and thus natural) intimacy and interaction with them. His feelings, whether of love or hate, his thoughts, and his longings have to be locked inside of his mind and body as well, irrelevant to most of his Chinese compatriots. Therefore he desperately needs a space where he can store what he has been carrying and where he is able to go back to his past when he wishes. This space must not create false history and fabricate facts, as Ma firmly condemns the government’s self-flattering rewriting of history and purposeful reshaping of memory. Since Ma Jian has detached himself from the concrete land, the human body is the only available and usable territory for him in which to preserve and create. The body of Dai Wei’s, though a comatose one, becomes a site of truth and facts. The characters and events are thinly fictionalized; Bai Ling, Ke Xi, and Han Dan can be easily recognized as the famous student leaders Chai Ling, Wu’er Kaixi and Wang Dan – even the names of these personages share the same characters with those of real student leaders.
Some characters share the exact names as the real figures they are based on, such as the
Taiwanese singer Hou Dejian, who appears in the novel as himself. These realistic portrayals may effectively curtail any possible accusation concerning Ma’s inauthentic narration of Chinese reality, as Chinese critics often take this issue with diasporic writers’ works.
The pressure of being authentic has turned Ma Jian’s literary writing into a kind of historical documentary, intended to be faithful and analytical. Ma Jian endows this body with the great mission of retaining the true history and facts that cannot be found in the official documents. However, this seems unrealistic and implausible, even for the ambitious author.
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Meanwhile, this mission turns this piece of literature into a historical document. Dai Wei’s body decays; as it is already losing its essential functions, how can this dying body contain anything eternal? As the body declines, the memory disappears. At the end of the novel as Dai Wei asks
“If my body comes back to life, will my soul return to its previous comatose state?” (670), Ma
Jian’s agony as the sole person of knowledge yet not a participant in events is passed on to Dai
Wei. Dai Wei fluctuates between staying in a coma and waking up. Staying in a coma means Dai
Wei knows exactly what has happened. Waking up from the coma means he must join the amnesiac majority and forget what he has known. This vegetating body belongs to one generation. Dai Wei is the only person who is still obsessed with Tiananmen Incident, at a time when everyone else has moved on to their new lives in a totally different atmosphere. They conveniently become forgetful. Dai Wei, and by extension Ma Jian, look for a way to break out of this flesh prison, as he tells himself at the end: “You will no longer have to rely on your memories to get through the day. This is not a momentary flash of life before death. This is a new beginning. But once you’ve climbed out of this fleshy tomb, where is there left for you to go?” (703) This question is not merely addressed to the comatose protagonist, but also to people like Ma Jian. It also speaks to the greater Chinese society, which is just as comatose. The protagonist Dai Wei faces the choice of either dying or getting up to join the forgetful majority.
People like Ma Jian, a diasporic remote individual, can either continue to resist but drift away from China, or give up and return to China. The comatose Chinese society, with people unconscious of its very recent history and its government not attending severe social problems, also faces the choice of revealing the truth or continuing hiding it. Right now neither the author, the main character, nor the Chinese society has any place to turn. The author again calls for the government to reveal the truth to the people, but as time goes on, the truth is buried deeper. One
118 shocking example of this occurs in PBS’s documentary The Tank Man, when the photograph
(well-known in the West) of the white-shirted young man trying to stop a queue of tanks is shown to four students of Beijing University, none of them is able to make any connection with contemporary Chinese history.
For ordinary Chinese, June Fourth has faded out of the people’s memory. Due to the strict censorship all terms that relate to the Tiananmen Democratic Movement are politically sensitive and thus banned from media. More often than not, Western coverage of this political event focuses on the students’ courageous pursuit of democracy and the Chinese government’s violent crackdown. Ma Jian’s detailed narrative of the movement makes up for the embarrassing blankness of Chinese publications. More importantly, his thorough depiction of each character including their behaviors, remarks, and thoughts on the Square, reveals the weakness of these young people, which, at least, partially results in the failure of the entire movement. To
Westerners, the students at Tiananmen seemed united, but Ma Jian’s novel portrays them as egotistical and fractious. They sacrifice by going on a hunger strike, but they also fight for power, establishing different organizations to claim leadership of the movement. They are all
“power-crazy” (369). Educated in the communist system, these patriotic students have inherited some characteristics, probably unknowingly, from the communist regime. The methods they adopt in power struggles are similar to those that have been utilized to persecute their grandparents and parents in previous political movements. It seems impossible to rely on these young people to succeed in another battle for political democracy. Nor can they be depended on to regenerate or restore the goodness of Chinese tradition and culture. Dai Wei’s omniscient narration connects two intersecting lines with one witnessing the drastic social changes from
1989 to 1999 and the other chronologically recalling past events and the people victimized in
119 these disastrous persecutions, including his parents. The two merging lines of the past and present in Dai Wei’s narration indicate the connection Dai Wei’s generation can make. This division also shows the critical break-up of 1989 that completely changes China’s political and economic landscape. University students could have been the refreshing generation, one that had not gone through the cruel Cultural Revolution, and could revitalize the lost, condemned and distorted Chinese cultures as the entire society progressed in a peaceful manner. But the crackdown brought these beautiful hopes to a sudden halt. The intellectuals’ aspiration to regenerate China through restoring traditional Chinese culture evaporates because of the failure of the Students Democratic Movement.
The cultural construction following 1989 becomes stumbling and fragmentary. In the
1990s there was a new wave of nationalism led by Chinese new leftists. After the new millennium, national studies, such as learning Confucius’s The Analects, became popular and even broadcast on the national television station. Yet none of these can reach the root of many social problems in China, such as the general decline of people’s moral standards, the loss of courteous behaviors and manners in public, and the seriously corrupted government. People have no faith to cling to and no cultural essence to be proud of or identify with. In Beijing Coma Ma
Jian describes this anxiety of cultural diffidence and the desire to learn among young college students. Dai Wei and his schoolmates avidly read many different kinds of book on philosophy, history and literature, from both China and the West. One all time favorite of Dai Wei’s is an illustrated version The Book of Mountains and Seas which Ma Jian uses extensive quotations from throughout the novel to connect Dai Wei’s two lines of narration. The Book of Mountains and the Seas, a Chinese classical text dating back at least 2000 years, consists of a vast topographical compendium of China interwoven with Chinese myths about mysterious animals
120 and plants, ancient medicines, and religions. The Book of Mountains and the Seas, as Dai Wei’s favorite book, connects the present and the past, reaching back to prehistory and the original unaltered natural lands. By bringing in this classic text, Ma Jian suggests an alternative form of epistemology of Chinese culture. He suggests that Chinese culture should be looked for in the ancient world. Ma Jian intends to justify his legitimate inheritance of the unadulterated Chinese culture, and his intention is carried by his creation of Dai Wei, even though it lies in a comatose body. Keeping the classical texts in an isolated body also shows Ma Jian’s attitude of voluntarily avoiding access to current Chinese discourses but rather being one significant truth-bearing honorable body. Again Ma Jian resumes such a hope inside one body as Dai Wei exclaims
“Have I now explored all 5,370 mountains of The Book of Mountains and Seas? On my travels through my body, I’ve discovered that all the wonders described in the book exist within me”
(679). By featuring one proactively engaging body that has omniscience and omnipotence that transcends time and space, Ma Jian is able to create an independent site to accommodate his dissident mind and allow him to reconnect with his past and to pass on genuine Chinese culture, thus to justify his legitimacy as a Chinese language writer. Meanwhile by creating one fictional and comatose body, Ma Jian criticizes the paralysis of present Chinese society that is driven by materialism and repressed by the hegemonic political powers, thus ending up losing its most valuable essence as it dies spiritually. By making Dai Wei travel the mountains and seas, exposing him to the mysterious animals and plants in the uncultivated lands, Ma Jian suggests a return to cultural origins, to the memory of the past, in order to initiate a construction based on truth and facts – which all can originate from one body. However, as if with the conflicted and complicated functions Ma Jian endows this body, Dai Wei’s comatose body struggles between the coma and the waking state. This struggle also indicates Ma Jian’s plight of justifying a
121 legitimate diasporic identity while proving that the repressive system has long lost its legitimacy by turning a lively life into a vegetating body. The isolated body, severed from contaminated
China, cannot sustain the heaviness and complication of Chinese history and culture. The mystery and miracle of prehistory cannot assist with solving modern and contemporary difficulties and challenges. Even Dai Wei, the comatose man, must be awakened by the ongoing deafening noises of the tearing down of building at the end of the novel.
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CONCLUSION
The Concept of Legitimacy
Exile writer Ma Jian’s illegitimacy emanates majorly from his dissident political views.
He was proclaimed by the incumbent government to be an illegitimate writer for the people of
China. This type of proclamation is undoubtedly of China’s hegemonic nature—the state machine bullying an individual with brutal force. The proclamation is arbitrary, yet strictly implemented. Ma was forbidden to enter Chinese territory after the publication of Beijing Coma in 2009. In the clash between a state and an individual, the individual is doomed to be dismissed, disposed and discarded by the state. However, as Ha Jin has asked: why do we not turn the table and ask if the country that incessantly requires our loyalty is loyal to us? We, as individuals, have the right to require loyalty and protection from our state. The same situation exists with
Hong Ying’s illegitimate birth: isn’t it more reasonable to question the parents rather than place blame on the child? When a citizen is announced to be illegitimate, is this citizen able to turn his or her head to check the legitimacy of their judge? What does it take to maintain political legitimacy?
In a political sense, legitimacy is the popular acceptance of an authority, based upon the belief that the actions of a legally constituted government are appropriate uses of power; John
Locke defines this as: “the government is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed” (Ashcraft 524). However, the difficulty lies in reaching that consent, when in practical operation, the decision made is far from a unanimous agreement. One example is the differences in winners between the electoral and popular votes in American presidential
123 elections. This is an unavoidable defect of political democracy. Though unanimous consent may be the highest goal for every government, it is unrealistic. Legitimacy must also pass a bar test, as Seymour Martin Lipset explains that legitimacy “involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society” (64). The American political theorist Robert A. Dahl describes this concept by stating that as long as the water is still at a given level, political stability is maintained and the government is considered legitimate. Therefore political legitimacy involves a dynamism and interaction between the governing and the governed, regardless of the actual running methodologies, democratic or authoritarian, of the government. Communism and
Fascism maintained legitimacy in their respective nations of extended periods of time in history.
If we enlarge the conception of political legitimacy to the socio-cultural field then how does one person obtain his or her legitimacy in claiming a cultural identity? What makes a person become a legitimate member of a group or a community or a nation in a socio-cultural aspect? Is ethnicity, culture background, or political allegiance the determining factor? Things become genuinely complex when ethnicity, cultural origin, and political attitude are elements that can be mixed, hybridized, and changed. Any judgment based on these unfixed elements may also be subject to uncertainty and insecurity. As Earth is becoming more globalized thanks to highly technological lifestyles, more and more traditional categories are broken and boundaries are crossed, in spite of their national or cultural associations. While these boundaries are blurring, the conventional authorities—the owners of legitimacy— that guard the territories within these boundaries are being challenged. People who cannot conveniently be included in the traditional categories face certain identity crises. For instance, a Chinese person can be a naturalized French citizen. A Japanese native can write in German and be published worldwide.
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A Russian exile can still write in Russian but remain in the United States. One person can own dual citizenship and also be trilingual. However, under these complicated circumstances, how does the Chinese French person identify himself culturally? Do works of the Japanese German writer belong to Japanese literature or German literature? Where does the Russian exile place his political allegiance? Does citizenship guarantee political loyalty? Does cultural resemblance secure cultural identity? There are no clear-cut yes-or-no answers to these questions. So why are they still important?
There is an intriguing story that is often told to interpret the complication involved in a persona’s emotional attachment to their native culture and practical political allegiance. A
Chinese American watches a volleyball game between the Chinese national team and the
American national team. People are interested in which team this person will cheer for. Can we say whichever the team the person cheers on or wishes to win decides their political loyalty or cultural identity? If no, what is the one particular theme that contributes to the decision? Let us use a little imagination. If America were at war against China, which country would this person side with? Will there still be space for this person to express his or her opinion? Will this person be imprisoned as the U.S. government did to Japanese Americans during the World War II?35 It should be noted that many of those being put into War Relocation Camps were actually
American citizens who were of Japanese heritage. I believe the last thing this Chinese American wants to see is military antagonism between China and America, because this radical antagonism will make the people who exist in-between face an extremely difficult choice. They can easily be
35 The U.S. government ordered the internment in 1942, shortly after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The internment of Japanese Americans was applied unequally as a geographic matter: all who lived on the West Coast were interned, while in Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans comprised over one-third of the population, only 1200 to 1800 were interned. Sixty-two percent of the internees were American citizens. "The War Relocation Authority and The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II: 1948 Chronology," at www.trumanlibrary.org. Retrieved September 11, 2006. 125 targeted by both sides simply because they are not able to fully identify with either. In 1988,
President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the
Japanese internment on behalf of the U.S. government. Yet the nearly three-year internment caused irreplaceable personal property loss, psychological injury, and even death among detained Japanese Americans. The legislation admitted that the actions of the government were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”36 Racism is such a notorious notion that people today often do not like to be associated with it. Yet isn’t the classification of human beings into fixed categories according to their cultural or geo-political origins, linguistic preferences, and political views equal to this failure of fundament reverence to the freedom of human rights? Isn’t it worse than racism to categorize people so as to dismiss and dispose of them? These well-fenced categories, whether born of nationalism, cultural essentialism, or political correctness, resemble those internment camps in that they repress people from pursuing freedom of soul and peace of mind and restrict people from configuring real subjectivity.
Rey Chow and Shih Shu-mei
The three writers that I have analyzed in previous chapters are the people in-between, the diasporans. They share the sense of illegitimacy, though for varying reasons; the unsettling forces resulting from this sense of illegitimacy have incited them to justify their own identity, to defend their socio-cultural existence, and to resist the hegemonic manipulation of their legitimacy. Changes of geographical location, acquirements of another language, assimilation into another culture, and alteration of citizenship often cause various types of not fully belonging
36 100th Congress, S. 1009. Web.
“illegitimate” members. However, the deep anxiety caused by changes in status, as I have analyzed for each writer, rather than harming or discouraging them, functions as a stimulant for driving energy and creative powers. Their cross-cultural existence provides them with broader vision whereby to reflect on conventionally defined categories, reevaluate established discourses sustaining these traditional categories. More significantly, this existence compels these
“illegitimate” people to seek for new spaces and create new discourses from different perspectives so as to justify their social, cultural and political existence. Therefore the sense of illegitimacy functions as an innovative driving force that leads diasporans to renovate their perspectives, investigate older discourses, create new discourses and eventually enlarge communicative spaces or build possible bridges for different voices, thus facilitating reconciliation and enabling understanding and respect.
The driving energy and creative power of the sense of illegitimacy can also be best illustrated by two “Chinese diasporic”37 scholars: Rey Chow and Shih Shu-mei. Though sharing the title of being illegitimate Chinese and struggling with a sense of illegitimacy, Rey Chow and
Shih Shu-mei adopt entirely different attitudes towards this burden. Instead of taking it as a confining and repressive power, Rey Chow engages in celebrating and embracing her status as a marginal Chinese as well as a marginal American, while Shih Shu-mei goes even further to completely resist the entire discourse of legitimacy. Refusing to follow along the center-diaspora binary, Shih has invented a new discourse called Sinophone Studies, which enables her to study
“the Sinitic language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic
37 I put the two words in quotation marks because these two scholars may not want to be referred to as Chinese diasporans. I will explain this in the following analysis. 127 productions” (710). The “illegitimacy” of Chow and Shih differ from the three earlier discussed writers because, unlike Hong Ying, Ha Jin, and Ma Jian, who originally come from mainland
China, Chow is a Chinese American from Hong Kong and Shih is a Taiwanese American. The special circumstances surrounding their “Chineseness” play a decisive role in their theoretical construction and creation. Their marginal positions have compelled them to innovate and inspired them to create new discourses so as to justify their socio-cultural and socio-political existences.
Rey Chow is one of the leading scholars in Cultural Studies and one of the most accomplished Chinese intellectuals who have achieved remarkable success in the American academy. Chow was born and grew up in British colonial Hong Kong and educated in post- colonial American academy, according to her account. Her English is as good as a native speaker and her mother tongue is not Mandarin, the official language used both in Mainland China and
Taiwan, but Cantonese, which is usually regarded as a regional dialect. She lives in the United
States and writes in English. People may wonder to which political entity Chow pays her loyalty.
Does Chow identify more with socialist China or capitalist Britain in terms of cultural affinity?
As an American intellectual, how does she critique Chinese society and culture? Her complicated political, social, and cultural backgrounds make Chow’s identity strikingly special and distinct.
Rey Chow is not a woman from China, not even a Chinese woman from Hong Kong, but a
Chinese American woman from Hong Kong. She is a cultural critic specializing in 20th-century
Chinese literature and film and postcolonial theory. But with her marginalized position, she is frequently questioned about her cultural legitimacy in interpreting and representing Chinese culture and history. In a piece of academic work, Chow tells a story about her personal
128 experiences. Near the end of the Introduction of her book Writing Diaspora she details, rather emotionally, this episode:
This essay was presented in my absence at a major conference in late 1990. My
discussant was someone who is a graduate from Harvard and a faculty member of
a university in the U.S. In the original essay I had made a mistake, my discussant
trashed the entire essay, commenting to the audience that, after all, “she’s from
Hong Kong.” The question behind this statement of the fact of my geographical
origin, I suppose, was: How can this Westernized Chinese woman from colonial
Hong Kong, this cultural bastard, speak for China and Chinese intellectuals? Had
it been my ambition to represent China or be authentically Chinese, I would have
been shattered in shame (26).
Reluctant to be addressed as Chinese, yet irritated by the challenge of her authority in representing China, Chow possesses enormously complicated emotions towards her Chineseness.
However Rey Chow does not argue against how her discussant is wrong in questioning her legitimacy of interpreting China, nor does she strive to prove she is justified to do so. Chow takes her marginal status as it is and perceives and speaks from that position.
In an essay where Chow discusses Hong Kong and Hong Kong author Leung Ping-kwan, she provides an alternative perspective for reading coloniality and colonial literature. She emphasizes the uniqueness and resilience of Hong Kong’s history from the nineteenth century to the present. The uniqueness and resilience of Hong Kong influences Rey Chow’s unique perspective on cultural studies in the China-Hong Kong-West triangular framework and reveals her persistent resilience in resisting hegemonic discourses. Her uniqueness derives from her full embrace of marginality, the position of cultural periphery from which she emerges to relate to
129 the rest of the world. Rejecting the conventional notion of dismissing Hong Kong as “cultural desert,” Rey Chow endorses Leung’s portrayal of Hong Kong as a colony that provides an alternative space for Chinese people and culture to exist in, a hybrid for one to reflect upon the problems of a “pure” and “original” state. (213-15). Rather than lamenting the pathetic state of
Hong Kong as colonial victim, Chow posits that “coloniality, a transindividual condition of history that carries with it all the tragedies of marginalization, can nonetheless become a form of opportunity, in which the daily experience of oppression is synchronized with a self-conscious search for freedom in alternative forms” (222). It indeed provides an alternative form: a form of opportunity.
In critiquing Chinese culture, Rey Chow, ultimately as an outsider, is able to problematize scholarship on Chinese culture and history and offer oppositional critiques of official discourses. While writing about contemporary mainland Chinese cinema, Chow notes that filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s are obsessive with pictures of the 1960s, which she calls
“returning to nature” (35). Filmmakers, particularly fifth-generation directors such as Chen
Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang (who are internationally well-known directors), devoted themselves to depicting China’s rural life and its oppressed women in their films made in the 1990s. These elite directors were striving to return to the past, to the primitive, to find cultural roots lost after the devastating Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Chow points out that this return to nature by way of capturing the “authentic” China, far from consolidating
“Chineseness” as some form of essence dwelling in China’s center, in effect helps to “other”
“China” (43). In the early 1990s when Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou won awards at different
International film festivals, foreign spectators had, for the first time, access to modern China through big screens. What they saw, however, was either the barren Chinese earth, the poverty of
130
Chinese rural life, and the illiteracy of its peasants in the case of Yellow Earth, or the patriarchal oppression of women and the incestuous love in Ju Dou. This tendency of returning to the past and returning to nature, theorized by Rey Chow as “primitive passion”, further alienates China from developed Western countries and perpetuates a rural, impoverished China in the West.
Chinese intellectuals could not have managed such insightful critiques, nor could Western scholars. It is Chow’s special marginal geo-political position that allows her to make these observations.
Rey Chow’s significant intervention in the critical conversation is also reflected in her exploration of ethnic subjects. Staying on the marginality of Chinese culture as well as Western culture, Chow is sensitive in detecting the subjectivity of ethnic minorities. In her book The
Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism Chow argues:
When minority individuals think that, by referring to themselves, they are
liberating themselves from the powers that subordinate them, they may actually
be allowing such powers to work in the most intimate fashion from within their
hearts and souls, in a kind of voluntary surrender that is, in the end, fully
complicit with the guilty verdict that has been declared on them socially long
before they speak (115).
Minority individuals feel they must act “authentic” in representing an ethnic culture, or they become the target of criticism. The force that presses ethnic minorities to perform ethnically is called by Chow “coercive mimeticism.” More importantly, Chow points out that often the individuals who provide the coercion are not of the hegemonic culture, but rather members of ethnic communities. Thus identification of individuals as ethnic can become a tool for belittling individuals of minority cultures as well as a means of maintaining the hegemonic subjugation of
131 those individuals. This is a rather precise interpretation of the problematic that exists in the subjectivity of ethnic minorities. It also explains the constant questioning of Rey Chow’s legitimacy of being Chinese by other Chinese fellows. Fully conscious of her marginal position, writing “as a kind of diasporic person in diaspora, a Hong Kong person in North America” (23),
Chow nonetheless does not consider herself as a victim but of “a specific kind of social power”
(22). She advocates tactics of intervention that interrogate “essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety and the ‘otherness’ ensuing from them; unattested claims of oppression and victimization that are used merely to guilt-trip and to control; sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made merely in the name of righteousness”; Chow goes on to emphasize that “all these forces… [are] ideological premises remain unquestioned” (17) and calls for a process of the “intellectualization” of a “diasporic consciousness.” These successful interventions would not have been possible if
Rey Chow were not a diasporic person in diaspora and if she was not personally entangled in the issue of illegitimacy.
Another prominent scholar who has been affected by the sense of illegitimacy is Shih
Shu-mei, a Taiwanese American professor. Shih Shu-mei originally came from Taiwan and is now a university professor in America. The completely different history and politics of Taiwan have made the Taiwanese identity a problematic issue for several decades. The political rivalry between the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), together with the complicated composition of the Taiwanese population and their cultural legacy, have made the definition of Taiwanese identity a debatable term. Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of
China (ROC). But in the world’s sporting, political and economic circle it goes under a variety of different, and sometimes awkward, titles. In the World Trade Organization, which Taiwan joined
132 in 2002, Taiwan is referred to as the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and
Matsu. And while participating in the Olympic Games, the island’s team is referred to as Chinese
Taipei. Such awkward and inconsistent naming of Taiwan relates to the complication of
Taiwanese politics. In 1949 Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Taiwan with his Nationalist forces after being defeated by the Communists in China’s civil war. Even though he lost, Chiang continued to consider himself the rightful ruler of China, and expected to retake it at any time. So, Taiwan was referred to as the Republic of China. For three decades, due to the People’s Republic of
China’s self-isolation from the Western world and the well-known “Taiwan miracle”38, Taiwan indeed was the real and sole representative of China and Chinese culture in the international arena. However, since January 1979, as the USA government switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing, the international recognition of Taiwan as “China” has increasingly shrunk. By 2013 there were twenty-two countries worldwide that maintained diplomatic relations with the ROC, whereas, there were only 172 countries that had established diplomatic relations with the PRC.
Taiwan, which the former Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist government claimed as the only legitimate representative of China and Chinese culture, has gradually lost its position of legitimacy as the PRC rises as a growing economic and political power on the international stage. Taiwan faces unprecedented challenges, politically, economically and culturally. Not only is Taiwanese’s role in international affairs squeezed by the rapid growth of the economy of the
PRC, but its own internal economy is also affected. Since 2011 the implementation of the
Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), a preferential trade accord between
38 According to Stevan Harrell and Huang Chun-chieh, “The Taiwan “miracle” is well known; it involves the successful economic development of the island from a poor periphery of the Chinese empire in 1895, a heavily exploited colony of Japan in 1935, a territory partly destroyed by war and partly pillaged by Nationalist mismanagement in the late 1940s, to the world’s thirteenth largest trading economy, a producer and exporter of high-technology as well as ordinary consumer goods, a per capita income of over $8000 and a populace whose education resembled the developed countries more than the developing by 1990” (1). 133
Taipei and Beijing, has reshaped the structure of economic relations across the Taiwan Strait.
More importantly, as Chen Ming-Tong predicts, “the accord will impact cross-Strait political and societal relations by bringing the two sides much closer and increasing Beijing’s influence over
Taiwan” (74).
In terms of Taiwanese culture, politics continues to play a role in the conception and development of a Taiwanese cultural identity. Historically, Taiwan’s culture and cultural legacy have been largely shaped by the processes of imperialism and colonization. For most of its colonized existence, Taiwan remained on the cultural margin, far from the centers of civil and cultural life of each regime; with each regime change, Taiwan’s cultural center shifted. At various times Taiwan’s cultural center has been indigenous Taiwan, Amsterdam, Xiamen, Qing era Beijing, and Imperial Japan. Under the authoritarian Nationalist government, Taiwan was realigned from a Japanese imperial center to a Chinese nationalist center. Between the 1960s and the 1980s Taiwan’s culture was defined as a bastion of traditional Chinese culture that had preserved “true” Chinese values and culture against the “false” Chinese culture of post-
Communist China. After the lifting of the Martial Law in the last twenty years, Taiwanese localization has become the most important symbol of cultural change. Bentuhua or
Taiwanization advocates identification with Taiwan’s unique historical and cultural legacy, rather than regarding Taiwan as an appendage of China. Taiwanese population of more than 23 million has a varied composition; among them live Taiwanese aborigines, speaking Austronesian languages, and immigrants of Han Chinese, speaking both Mandarin and Taiwanese. Given the complexity of Taiwan’s history and culture, it could be a difficult matter for a common resident of Taiwan to find a satisfied and justified self-identity.
134
For the Taiwanese American scholar Shih Shu-mei, it is even more difficult to do so.
How does a Taiwanese person identify with China? Cheng Tuan-Yao, a research fellow at
National Chengchi University, said: “When we use the term ‘Taiwan’, mainland China is not happy. They think it means we are moving towards independence. But, on the other hand, they will not let us use the name ‘Republic of China’ so people are angry.”39 If Rey Chow is dismissed by arrogant mainland critics as a cultural bastard of China, Shih’s Taiwanese
American identity, particularly given today’s completely changed political and economic landscapes of mainland China, is probably even more difficult to define. This is probably why
Professor Shih feels the need for a new discourse from which a unique Taiwanese identity can arise. Taiwanese need a new discourse that does not need to get involved in the political rivalry nor does it have to perpetually suffer the marginal position, which thus causes it to often be ignored or deemed illegitimate. For Taiwanese, still holding on to Chineseness means they must fight for the legitimate ownership of Chinese culture, yet completely giving up their Chinese heritage makes no sense. Therefore, Sinophone communities that can sustain their Chinese heritage yet can also distinguish their socio-cultural existence from that of mainland China emerge.
Professor Shih Shu-mei does not merely confine Sinophone studies to Taiwan alone. As she defines it: “Sinophone studies—conceived as the study of Sinitic language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions—locates its objects of attention at the conjuncture of China’s internal colonialism and Sinophone communities everywhere immigrants from China have settled” (710). Sinophone study is a language-based discourse with an anti-colonial nature. Further explaining the scope and nature of Sinophone
39 Bristow, Michael. “Taiwan’s Identity Crisis.” BBC News. 17 May 2002. Web. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia- pacific/1993608.stm > 135 communities, Shih postulates that “inner ethnicities Mongols, Manchu, Tibetans and many other ethnic peoples in China today often speak more than one language. They are Sinophone to the extent that they speak and write in the standard language of the Han, which they willingly acquire or have imposed on them” (713). What Sinophone excludes are the Hans who speak the
Chinese language in mainland China. Again, what is the necessity of demarcating the Hans and non-Hans? As Shih’s definition indicates, the Sinophone is a resistant discourse with post- colonial characteristics. The minority ethnicities have long been under-represented and have always been situated in marginal positions. Even though they are given the identity of Chinese, they have never been able to legitimately represent China or Chinese culture. On the other hand, they feel they are not fully Chinese but are still referred to as Chinese. The fundamental nature of the Sinophone is a fight for legitimate voices for minorities, a fight for recognition and a fight for a justified and legitimate identity. Even though the exclusion of China from the domain of the
Sinophone is criticized by Sheldon Lu as “unsound theoretically and inaccurate empirically”, the conception of the Sinophone provides an alternative approach in viewing cultural productions in various Sinospheres other than mainland China. Undoubtedly the theory of the Sinophone derived largely from its creator’s intense struggle to overcome the anxiety of illegitimacy. With such a theory, marginal positions obtain a legitimate and justified identity with which to express themselves. It is a process that deconstructs China-centrism and establishes new centers in various Sinosphere.
Fundamental Confucian philosophy believes: “If the name is not correct, the words will not ring true. If the name is not right then speech will not be in order, and if speech is not in order then nothing will be accomplished.” The writers and scholars I have discussed in this inquiry are trying to secure legitimate names so as to make their words and speech legitimate.
136
Legitimacy is the original and fundamental cause for the anxiety of these diasporans. The issue of illegitimacy contains an immense energy that propels those who face the question of illegitimacy and urges them to rectify their names. This anxiety originates from the ultimate pursuit of the justice and righteousness of humanity. It is these people who suffer the sense of illegitimacy that make us reevaluate the conception of legitimacy and put a check on its definition, so that the legitimate maintain what is required to be considered legitimate.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Wenyang Zhai holds a BA degree in English and MA in American Literature from Tianjin
Foreign Studies University, China. Her research interests include Chinese Diaspora Literature and Culture, Modern Chinese Literature and Chinese Cinema.
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