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How to read modern Chinese literature in English? The women beside/s modernism

Tan, Teck Heng

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Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 HOW TO READ MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH? THE WOMEN BESIDE/S MODERNISM

TAN TECK HENG (B.A. (Hons.), National University of Singapore; M.A., National University of Singapore)

A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE JOINT DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE AND DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

2021

Supervisors: Dr Tania Roy Dr Sebastian Matzner

Examiners: Dr Gilbert Yeoh Guan Hin Dr John Connor Professor B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis.

This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously.

______

Tan Teck Heng

22 June 2021

i

ii Acknowledgements

My studies were made possible by the generous financial support from institutions that are dedicated to promoting research in the humanities. I thank the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation for funding my undergraduate studies and the National University of Singapore for funding my master’s and doctoral programmes.

The seeds of this thesis were sown in 2016 when my supervisor, Tania

Roy, put Eileen Chang on the syllabus for the introductory module to literary studies. My experience teaching the module led to my interest in the Chinese women who wrote in English. I owe much to Tania for inspiring my topic and for guiding me through the world of academia. Her cutting intellect, expansive knowledge, and her sensitivity as a mentor, were critical to my development as a researcher and teacher.

I am also immensely grateful to my other supervisor, Sebastian

Matzner, for helping me find my black cat in a dark room. He taught me that a thesis is built on the modesties of careful word choices, a defensible sentence, a mission statement, and on writing as daily practice. His meticulous comments on my drafts demonstrate for me what scholarly engagement can and should be: kind, constructive, rigorous, and nuanced.

It is my privilege to have Gilbert Yeoh, John Connor, B. Venkat Mani, and John Whalen-Bridge engage so seriously and earnestly with my work during the oral defence. Their encouragement and astute suggestions have transformed my thinking about what form my research will take in the future.

My project also benefitted from the insights shared by numerous other scholars. Thank you to the following people: Susan Ang, for her guidance and

iii her fascinating lecture on Chang’s aesthetics of desolation; Mie Hiramoto, for nurturing me as a researcher; Heidi Stalla, for alerting me to the story behind

Ling Shuhua’s friendship scroll; James Rakoczi, for telling me about John

Connor’s illuminating course, “Realism and its Others in the Long Twentieth

Century”; John Phillips, Kevin Riordan, Nan Zhang, Anne Witchard, Cera

Tan, Grace Lim, and Phoebe Pua for their feedback on my presentations;

Kathrine Ojano, for being my partner in crime during the halcyon days of doing coursework; Rebecca Seah, for the conversations on Chang; Lim Ren

Ying, for proofreading parts of my thesis; Raymund Vitorio and Rowland

Imperial, for their constant support throughout my graduate studies.

Academic life would have been far more difficult without the aid of the administrative staff at the National University of Singapore, who are always warm and generous with their time. My thanks to Pamela Pereira,

Pearly Ang, Angeline Ang, Audrey Lee, Fatimah Ahmad, Yau Geok Hwa, and

Sally Cheng, for helping me secure funding at various junctures and for assisting with administrative matters. I also thank the supportive community at

King’s College London; Anna Katila, Shadya Radhi, Hannah Burke-

Tomlinson, Haya Alfarhan, Riognach Sachs, Julian Neuhauser, and Caroline

Laurent have all made my residency at King’s a stimulating and fruitful one.

Finally, thank you to Weng for modelling scholarly restraint, intellectual rigour, self-reflexivity, and above all, kindness and patience, and thank you to my parents, for learning how to understand and love their son in both Chinese and English.

iv Table of Contents

Summary ...... ix

Note on Chinese Names ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1

The Mid-Century Anglophonic Turn ...... 8

Actor-Network Theory and Literary Studies ...... 22

Between Wars and Worlds...... 33

The Cultural Cold War and Anglophone Chinese Writing ...... 42

Cold War Orientalism and Native Informancy ...... 47

The Tyrannies and Freedoms of Writing in English ...... 56

Beyond the Transpacific: China, England, Singapore ...... 62

Beside/s Modernism...... 80

Chapter One

Beside/s Men, Between Women ...... 91

The Roof Garden Party Photograph: A Reading in Three Acts...... 97

The Second Act: Against Eurocentrism and Androcentrism ...... 102

The Third Act: Recovering Transnational Feminist Net/Works...... 108

Towards Postcritical Approaches to Recovery Work ...... 121

Chapter Two

Beside/s the European Historical Novel:

Chinese Women’s Life Writing as “Modest History” ...... 131

Why Read Chinese Women’s Life Writing? ...... 132

The Importance of Being Modest ...... 136

v The Anglophonic Turn to Women’s Life Writing ...... 143

Yang Buwei: The Moderate “Feminist” Revolutionary ...... 148

Literary Modesty: On Humour, Simple Chinese, and Basic English 160

Developing a Sense of Youmo: Levity in the Shadow of Red China. 167

Figural Modesty: On Metonymic Allegories ...... 178

Allegories of Life Writing ...... 186

Chapter Three

Time of One’s Own: Ling Shuhua Beside/s Modernist Temporalities ... 197

No Sex Please We’re Chinese: On Valuations of Modernity ...... 209

Sexual and Textual Inhibitions ...... 219

The Modern Woman Scholar and Her Need for Privacy ...... 228

Finding Time of One’s Own ...... 234

A Temporality of Her Own ...... 243

Chapter Four

Eileen Chang: Modernist or Realist? ...... 251

On or About 2007 ...... 259

Theorising Allochronism ...... 265

Cold War Realism: The Novel in an Age of Epistemic Uncertainty . 281

Modernist Collage, Cinematic Montage, and Anti-Socialist Realism

...... 287

From History-as-Cinema to Cinema’s History ...... 298

Reassessing Eileen Chang: Allochronic Realist ...... 303

vi Conclusion

Anglophone Chinese Writing as World Literature ...... 315

A Worldly Network ...... 319

A Demotic Model of World Literature ...... 324

Women in World Literature ...... 328

Gender and Time...... 333

The Women Beside/s Modernism ...... 337

Works Cited ...... 345

Works Consulted ...... 375

vii

viii Summary

This thesis historicises a mid-century phenomenon that saw increasing numbers of Chinese writers working in English. I study this “anglophonic turn” mainly through the lives and careers of four women—Yang Buwei, Ling

Shuhua, Eileen Chang, and Nieh Hualing—all of whom produced original works, translations, or self-translations in English. Their works took stock of the successes and disappointments of Chinese modernity after the May Fourth era, while advancing stylistic experiments and political commitments through the tricky geopolitics of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Cultural Cold

War. Taken together, their individual stories of linguistic and geographical migration offer a women-centred history of how English rose to power as a global lingua franca and as one dominant language of world literature.

This corpus of anglophone Chinese writing offers fresh possibilities for comparative work in modernist studies. To this end, I adopt the orientational metaphor “beside/s” as a way of conceptualising these women’s affinities with

(hence “beside”), and divergences from (“hence besides”), anglophone modernism. “Beside/s” offers a mode of prepositional thinking that stresses the coeval and collaborative nature of the exchanges and contiguities between

Chinese and high modernist writers. Their encounters are evidence of the overlapping intellectual networks that stretched across China, the U.K., and the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. By positioning these

Chinese women beside/s modernism, I avoid the totalising risks of reading them for modernism, the antagonism of reading them against modernism, while sidestepping questions of “who/what came first?” that bedevil practices of reading before or after modernism.

ix “Beside/s” fires at multiple levels of analysis. It co-implicates historical accounts of modern Chinese literature and Euro-American modernism. It draws attention to the neglected women beside/s the famous men of May Fourth literature and high modernism. It points to the minor genres beside/s revolutionary manifestoes and novels, which include self-help works, women’s life writing, essays, short stories, and novellas. For scholars committed to the diversification of the New Modernist Studies, “beside/s” offers another interpretive tool for reading outside of the canon.

x Note on Chinese Names

Many Chinese writers mentioned in this study published under different names due to shifting conventions of Chinese Romanisation and the existence of multiple systems. This issue is further complicated in the cases of the four core women writers in this study, because some adopted their husbands’ last names. In general, I use the hanyu pinyin system and adopt the Chinese convention of putting surnames before personal names. I also use the maiden names of married women, which avoids confusion when discussing Yang

Buwei and Nieh Hualing, both of whom worked closely with their husbands on numerous projects. There are two exceptions to these rules: first, I use the names they published under in my in-text citations and bibliographical entries.

Second, I use the well-established monikers of figures who are widely known in English-language scholarship; these include Eileen Chang, Hu Shih, Yuen

Ren Chao, and Chiang Kai-shek. I offer a key below.

Hanyu Pinyin Other Monikers

Ba Jin Pa Chin

Chen Hengzhe Chen Nan-hua, Sophia Chen Zen, Sophia H. Z. Chen

Chen Jiying Chen Chi-ying

Ding Ling Ting Ling

Hu Shi Hu Shih, Suh Hu

Lao She Lau Shaw

Ling Shuhua Ling Hsu Hua, Ling Suhua, Su Hua Ling Chen, Su- hua Ling Chen

Lu Xun Lu Hsun

Nieh Hualing Hualing Nieh Engle, Hua-ling Nieh Engle

Zheng Yuxiu Tcheng Yu-hsiu, Madame Wei Tao-Ming

xi Xie Bingying Hsieh Pingying

Yang Buwei Buwei Yang Chao

Yang Xianyi Yang Hsien-yi

Zhang Ailing Eileen Chang

Zhao Shuli Chao Shu-li, Chou Shu-li

Zhao Yuenren Yuen Ren Chao, Yuenren Chao

xii Introduction

“How to read modern Chinese literature in English?” is a question asked from the confines of the English department. It assumes that there is something out there—a recognisable set of texts, perhaps—that is called “modern Chinese literature.” It assumes that most of these texts were not typically written in

English or for anglophone readerships, and therefore require some mediation—for example, curation, translation, editing, contextualisation, acculturation—before they can be duly appreciated. Further, to read these works “in English” is not only to interpret already-mediated words on a page, but also to question whether one’s own cultural and disciplinary assumptions about literature and modernity can be applied to modern Chinese texts.

One way of posing this question is to extend it as an invitation to try, and to respond with an affirming and constructive attitude. This approach is exemplified by what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have called the

“New Modernist Studies” (NMS). The term describes an “expansion” in the field of modernist studies around the late nineties to early noughties, beyond the classic period, geographical, and aesthetic considerations of its earlier phase (Mao and Walkowitz 737). Part of this phenomenon involves a

“transnational turn” (738) that attended to the relations between high modernism and non-Western literature. Scholarship on modern Chinese literature include Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern (1999), which offers the literature of thirties to forties Shanghai as successor and rival to the modernist works of interwar Paris and London. While Lee focuses on a city, Patricia

Laurence studies a network; in Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes (2003), she traces the thick connections between Beijing’s Crescent Moon Society and London’s

1 Bloomsbury Group. Shu-mei Shih’s The Lure of the Modern (2001) goes beyond binaristic comparisons of China and the West by also including Japan within her framework, depicting a three-way structure of cultural traffic during the first third of the twentieth century. These three examples, which have had an outsized influence on my present study, come from a larger body of similar work that attests to the diversification of modernist studies. However, these studies also hint at the paucity of modern Chinese literature which was made available or first written in English during the early twentieth century. Many of the writers mentioned knew English (e.g. Mao Dun, Lao She, Zheng

Zhenduo, Chen Duxiu, Ling Shuhua), a few earned degrees from the U.K. and/or the U.S. (e.g. Hu Shih, Lin Yutang, Xu Zhimo, Lin Huiyin), and some were acquainted with the works of anglophone modernism (e.g. Eliot, Stein,

Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Hemingway).1 But few ventured to write in English, and practically no such works have been elevated to canon status.

Given this state of affairs, one could perhaps read modern Chinese literature in translation, as Fredric Jameson does when he reads Lu Xun.2 In his notorious 1986 essay, Jameson reads “A Madman’s Diary” as an exemplar of “Third-World Literature,” in which “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third- world culture and society” (69). He finds, in Lu Xun’s critical depiction of

China as a land of cannibals, a kind of committed political writing that has

1 See Shih’s Lure for a sampling of the Western and Japanese writers who were translated into Chinese in the twenties to thirties (242-3). 2 Jameson was working with the 1972 edition of Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, which was translated by Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi, and published by Foreign Languages Press (“Third-World Literature” 87).

2 been forgotten by First World readers, “whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own modernisms” (66). Jameson thus reads Lu Xun to critique the political apathy of literature in his contemporary moment in the so-called First World, a quality that he attributes to the rise of modernism.

More recently in Planetary Modernisms (2015), Susan Stanford Friedman goes further by reading pre-modern Chinese literature in translation; she studies the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu by relying on “contemporary English translations” and “the assistance of critics working in the original” (191). For

Friedman, Du Fu offers a pre-Enlightenment, non-Western instance of

“modernism,” one that registers “a self-reflexive, urban concept of artistic vocation and subjectivity linked to rising mercantilism and imperial conquest, concepts of authorship typically thought to have been created first in the West after 1500” (193). Her provocative argument “break[s] away from periodization altogether” by experimenting with a radically inclusive definition of “modernism,” one that uses the term to designate any moment of

“transformational rupture and rapid change” at a planetary scale and in the longue durée (7, ix). Her goal is to decouple the concept of “modernity” from its emplacement within “the specific time of the post-Renaissance or post-

Enlightenment West” (33).

Both Jameson and Friedman read Chinese literature in translation to disrupt critical paradigms of literary modernity that are derived from studies of high modernism. Despite these pluralist intentions, both studies have incited severe critical pushback. Shih for instance criticises Jameson for “reduc[ing] the Chinese literary field to an externally imposed coherence that violently disregards multiple and contradictory developments within the field,” pointing

3 out that “so many Chinese modernists after Lu Xun wrote differently” (Lure

74, 91). Put another way, Jameson’s search for alternatives to modernism’s depoliticised aesthetics leads to an overinvestment in Lu Xun, and a corresponding generalisation of Chinese (and “Third World”) literature that does not hold up to scrutiny. As for Friedman’s work, Christopher Bush argues that her approach “risk[s] becoming the ultimate form of cultural imperialism” (687). He asks: “Do all non-European people and places want to be or have been ‘modern,’ much less for their cultures to be or have been

‘modernism’?” (687) In other words, while Friedman was using the term

“modernism” in a descriptive sense to unearth non-Eurocentric models of transformative change, Bush detects in her rhetoric a normative sense of

“modernity” that is imposed from without onto people and places that may have never claimed or wanted to be “modern” (687). In both cases, Jameson and Friedman’s selective reading of Chinese writers in translation is treated as an act of scholarly transgression that suffers from the lack of specialist knowledge.

In Against World Literature (2013), Emily Apter launches a strident critique of reading in translation—especially in relation to scholars trained in the West who attempt to read the non-West—that echoes Bush’s warnings about cultural imperialism. She argues that “critical traditions and disciplines founded in the Western academy contain inbuilt typologies—‘epic,’

‘classicism,’ ‘Renaissance,’ ‘realism,’ ‘the avant-garde,’ ‘the postmodern’— adduced from Western literary examples” (26). This leads her to argue for approaches that stress “the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability” (19). What Apter demands requires

4 intensive work across languages, which effectively forecloses the possibilities of reading in translation.

How, then, should one read modern Chinese literature in English? This is the second way of asking the question: cautiously, with bewilderment, and even exasperation. The disagreements above not only bring up the controversies of reading in translation, but raise further questions about the category of “modern Chinese literature.” Leaving aside the connotative meanings of “modern” and “Chinese” for now, what periods, spaces, and other referents do these terms conventionally denote? Put more simply, what is modern Chinese literature in the first place? Yingjin Zhang observes that

“modern Chinese literature” as used in English could refer to any period from late-Qing literature to the present day, whereas Chinese-language scholarship distinguishes “modern literature” (xiandai wenxue) from “contemporary literature” (dangdai wenxue); the former denotes literature from the late-Qing period up to the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and the latter refers to post-1949 literature (“General Introduction” 1-2). These latter two terms are sometimes combined as “modern and contemporary literature” (xiandangdai wenxue) to refer to the entire period from the late nineteenth century to the present day (2). However, “modern Chinese literature” also never quite lost its entrenched associations with the works of

New Literature (xin wenxue), which Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” exemplifies. For instance, C.T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction— widely known as the first extensive English-language study of modern

Chinese literature—begins by historicising the beginning of New Literature around 1917, and its later absorption by the May Fourth Movement of 1919

5 (3-27). In this sense, the period boundaries of “modern Chinese literature” resemble those of “modernism”; both are anchored by a canon of literary works produced around the first two decades of the twentieth century, but both also indicate a broader bracket spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.3

Then, there is the ambiguous term “Chinese,” which could refer to ethnicity, nationality, language, or any combination of these three referents.

Zhang observes that there are more precise terms in Mandarin Chinese that distinguish between Chinese nationals (Zhongguo ren), people of Chinese descent from other nations (huaqiao or haiwai huaren), spoken Chinese

3 For instance, Harry Levin’s classic essay “What was Modernism?” (1960) proposes 1857 as the start date of French Modernism, marked by the obscenity trials of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (612); he then suggests that modernism ended in the U.S. by the 1950s, when the “lost generation” writers of interwar modernism were superseded by the “beat generation” (615). Likewise, Raymond Williams’s “When was Modernism?” (1987) argues that social realist writing dating back to the 1840s offers budding instances of modernism, which can be found in the works of Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, and Flaubert (32). He ends with the canonisation of modernism after the Second World War (34). More recently, David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution” (2014) argues that “modernism” should shed its connotative meanings, and be used exclusively to denote “historically conditioned and culturally specific clusters of artistic achievements between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries” (88). In the case of modern Chinese literature, David Wang’s Fin-de-Siècle Splendor (1997) suggests that late-Qing fiction after the Taiping Rebellion of 1848 displayed emergent forms of literary modernity that were erased or repressed during the New Culture and May Fourth period. Typical end dates for modern Chinese literature range from the start of the Second Sino- Japanese War in 1937, to the founding of the PRC in 1949. See, for example, the period indicators in these titles: Jerome B. Grieder’s Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937 (1970), Shih’s The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001), Shengqing Wu’s Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937 (2014), Wang Xiaoping, Contending for the “Chinese Modern”: The Writing of Fiction in the Great Transformative Epoch of Modern China, 1937-1949 (2019).

6 (Huayu or putonghua), and written Chinese (Huawen) among many other related terms; these distinctions are lost in English (“General Introduction” 2).

Shih also discusses how “Chinese” is “a largely Han-centric designation”

(“Against Diaspora” 30); when used in the context of mainland China,

“Chinese” tends to conflate the Han ethnic majority and their standardised language of Mandarin Chinese (or putonghua, which serves as the official lingua franca) with Chinese citizenship. Shih clarifies that “there is no such group called ‘ethnic Chinese,’ only groups that can be specifically designated as Han Chinese, Tibetan Chinese, Uyghur Chinese, or Hmong (Miao)

Chinese” (30). Such conflations erase the diversity of the fifty-six official ethnicities in China and the array of languages they speak (30), which is particularly problematic in relation to the Chinese state’s programmes of

“continental colonialism” in regions such as Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Manchuria (Shih, “Concept of the Sinophone” 709-11).

The same conflations can be detected in the way “Chinese” is deployed in contexts outside of mainland China, though such uses are subject to a variety of competing ideological pressures. Since the turn to the twentieth century, successive administrations in China have used “overseas Chinese”

(huaqiao) to refer to Chinese immigrants and their descendants (Wang G. 65).

The term “overseas Chinese” is not neutral, but an invention which facilitates the extension of Chinese political and cultural influence to foreign shores;

Wang Gungwu points out that the term is backed by Chinese state entities such as the Overseas Chinese Affairs Department, which not only supported communities of overseas Chinese financially and diplomatically, but also trained teachers and provided educational materials for programmes

7 associated with “identity retention” (70). While for the Chinese state, the

“Chinese” in “overseas Chinese” primarily indicates legal or honorary citizenship, the term took on racialised meanings abroad. “Chinese” as used in

Southeast Asia and the U.S. tends to homogenise people of Chinese ancestry who do not necessarily identify with the term’s nationalist implications, and who may not even speak Mandarin Chinese. Shih notes how “Chinese” is activated in “various racialized acts of exclusion” in these regions; her examples from the late-nineteenth to twentieth century include the “Chinese”

Exclusion Acts in the U.S., the expulsion of the Hoa “Chinese” people by the

Vietnamese government, the ethnic riots against the “Chinese” in Indonesia, and the kidnapping of “Chinese” children in the Philippines (Against Diaspora

33). The conflations inherent to the term “Chinese” are thus “coproduced by agents inside and outside China” (31). Moreover, such politics of naming are compounded in English due to the lack of precise and wieldy terms. Given this cluster of concerns surrounding terminology, how does one delimit the heterogeneity of “modern Chinese literature,” before even attempting to read it in English?

The Mid-Century Anglophonic Turn

One way of clearing the critical space is to focus on the actual literary objects at stake here: modern works by Chinese authors that were available in English, either through translation or otherwise. Understood in this manner, some obvious questions follow: Who or what entities produced these texts? When, where, and why were these texts produced, and for whom? Can they be meaningfully consolidated, historicised, and theorised into a cohesive corpus?

8 This line of investigation leads me to a period in the mid-century, during which increasing numbers of Chinese writers began working extensively in

English. I historicise this “anglophonic turn” to modern Chinese literature primarily through the lives and careers of four bilingual women writers: Yang

Buwei, Ling Shuhua, Eileen Chang, and Nieh Hualing. The first two names are part of the May Fourth generation of Chinese intellectuals, whereas the latter two belong to the generation after. All four are “Chinese” in the sense that they were born in China and happen to be of Han ethnicity; however, all four left mainland China during the mid-century, ultimately migrating to the

U.S. or the U.K. This migration was driven in part by a series of crises within and beyond China, including the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), the intensification of the Chinese Civil War (1946-49), and founding of the PRC in 1949 which inaugurated the China-U.S. Cold War. Their geographical migration is accompanied by a linguistic one; all four began major projects in

English from the mid-forties to the early fifties, producing prose fiction, life writing, essays, translations, self-translations, and a cookbook. Their works belong to a growing body of anglophone Chinese writing that blossomed during the mid-century. Throughout this study, I deliberately use the neutral term “anglophone Chinese writing,” capacious in its ambiguity, to encompass the sheer variety of English-language works produced during this period.

Prior to the forties, few Chinese writers worked in English. If they did, their works were either not well documented or have faded into obscurity.

Princess Der Ling’s Two Years in the Forbidden City (1911) arguably represents a nascent example of modern anglophone Chinese writing. Der

Ling is of Han Chinese and U.S. descent, though she cultivated a public image

9 of being a Manchurian royal who served as Empress Dowager Cixi’s lady-in- waiting (Shuo Wang 73; 90). In contrast to the progressive works of the New

Culture generation that emerged after 1916, Der Ling’s romanticised account of the late-Qing imperial court seems to belong to a bygone era. Its publication date in 1911 also coincides with the fall of dynastic China. However, her memoir anticipates a key trend in anglophone Chinese writing, which is the prevalence of women’s life writing.

Five years later, Hu Shih and Yuen Ren Chao published an English- language manifesto titled “The Problem of the Chinese Language” (1916) in the U.S. periodical, The Chinese Students’ Monthly.4 They were studying at

Columbia and Harvard respectively. In this article, they call for a linguistic and literary revolution in China that is built on the modern vernacular, baihua.

Their arguments here lay the groundwork for Hu Shih’s famous essay in New

Youth, “Suggestions for a Reform of Literature” (1917), which is often cited as one beginning to modern Chinese literature (e.g. Hsia 3). Hu Shih and

Chao’s earlier manifesto reveals that the ideals underlying modern Chinese literature were in fact first extensively articulated from outside of China and the Chinese language, and in English. To put this more provocatively, one founding text of modern Chinese literature was in fact, a piece of anglophone writing. This document thus symbolises the co-constitutive nature of modern sinophone and anglophone literature by Chinese writers. One could push the logic of this case study further and ask, as Shuang Shen does, if “English can be regarded as a Chinese language?” (Cosmopolitan Publics 1).

4 This document was recovered recently by Yurou Zhong in Chinese Grammatology (2019).

10 These two texts are, however, outliers. Various bibliographical studies suggest that anglophone Chinese writing only took off from the thirties and snowballed during the mid-century.5 The late twenties to thirties saw the founding of anglophone literary magazines in Shanghai by Chinese writers who were mostly educated in the West; examples include The China Critic

(1928-1945) and T’ien Hsia (1935-1941). These platforms published translations of modern works such as Xiao Hong’s “Hands” (1937) and Ling

Shuhua’s short stories. As for book-length efforts, the earliest recorded examples include George K. Leung’s translation of Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q (1926), Hu Shih and Lin Yutang’s China’s Own Critics (1931), Edgar

Snow’s Living China, Modern Chinese Short Stories (1936), and Josephine

Huang Hung’s translations of Li Man-kuei’s plays in The Grand Garden and

Other Plays (1936) (Gibbs and Li 105; 12-6).

The thirties also saw the rise of original anglophone Chinese writing.

In 1935, Chen Hengzhe published Autobiography of a Chinese Young Girl under the pseudonym Chen Nan-hua. Widely known for writing “One Day”

(1917), the first short story in the modern Chinese vernacular, Chen’s autobiography also makes her one of the earliest New Culture writers to produce a book-length work in English. Her foreword explains her motivations for working in English:

5 See, for example, Gibbs and Li’s A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature: 1918-1942 (1975), Winston Yang and Nathan Mao’s Modern Chinese Fiction (1981), Chan Sin-wai’s A Chronology of Translation in China and the West (2009), and Ping Li’s “Translator’s Selection” (2014). These studies note that some earlier book-length translations did not print their years of publication, which makes dating difficult.

11 …so much interest is being taken recently by the English-

reading public in the Chinese life and Chinese culture and so

many books have been written on these topics, that many of my

good friends in America and Europe have expressed the wish

that we Chinese might also write something about our own

country and our own people, especially those of us who have

either ourselves lived through or personally witnessed the ups

and downs of a conflicting age such as ours. (Autobiography

iii; my emphasis)

As Chen puts it, the bulk of English-language materials on China were then predominantly produced by the West. Her autobiography bucks the trend by offering a native account of contemporary Chinese history and culture. Chen’s turn of phrase, “our own country and our own people” (ii), is echoed in the title of Lin Yutang’s My Country and My People, which was published the same year and responsible for kickstarting his literary career in the U.S. This striking connection suggests that the thirties saw a growing demand for ethnographic writing by Chinese authors in the anglophone West. Lin also worked on various translations including Xie Bingying’s Girl Rebel (1940), which was done in collaboration with his teenage daughters, Adet and Anor.

The trio revised the female revolutionary’s autobiography, and included new material gleaned from their correspondence with the author (J. Wang 183-4).

Their translation was meant to build international support for the Chinese cause in the Second Sino-Japanese War (183). While such early efforts were significant, they were eclipsed by the successes of Pearl S. Buck, the China-

12 based U.S. writer who clinched the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for The Good Earth and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.

It was only after the Second World War that anglophone Chinese writing really took off. Most were translations, some were original works that were first written in English, and others fell somewhere in between. Apart from Lin Yutang’s extensive catalogue of original writing, the most visible works of this post-war boom tend to be translations of modern classics written by the May Fourth generation. This category includes translations of relatively current texts such as Lao She’s The Yellow Storm (1951) and The Drum

Singers (1952), Zhao Shuli’s Rhymes of Li Yu-tsai (1950) and Changes in Li

Village (1953), and Ba Jin’s Living Among Heroes (1954). Others are translations of earlier texts from the twenties to thirties, which include Lao

She’s Rickshaw Boy (1945) and The Quest for Love of Lao Lee (1948), Ba

Jin’s The Family (1958), and Lu Xun’s prolific writings as collected in volumes such as The True Story of Ah Q (1946), Lu Xun: Selected Works

(volume 1, 1956), and Chosen Pages from Lu Hsun: The Literary Mentor of the Chinese Revolution (1958). These were published by presses in New York

(Reynal & Hitchcock, Harcourt Brace, Cameron Associates), Shanghai

(Commercial Press), and Beijing (Foreign Languages Press). As my sampling suggests, translations of modern Chinese literature skewed heavily towards men. A significant exception is Ding Ling, who was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1951 for The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River (1948). The novel was subsequently translated into English and published by the Foreign Languages

Press and its associated periodical, Chinese Literature, between 1953 to 1954.

However, this translation did not immediately lead to a greater recognition of

13 Chinese women writers in the anglophone world. Ding Ling would only be widely translated into English far later in the eighties, following her emergence from incarceration by the Chinese state in 1978, and after the rise of second-wave feminism in the U.S.

However, women played prominent roles as translators, and as authors of original work in English. Notable names include Helena Kuo, Ida Pruitt, and Gladys Yang. The first two also produced original work in English during the same period, which includes Kuo’s autobiography I’ve Come a Long Way

(1942), her novel Westward to Chungking (1944), and Pruitt’s A Daughter of

Han (1945). They were joined by the likes of Dymia Hsiung, who wrote

Flowering Exile (1952), a fictionalised autobiography of a Chinese family in

England, and also Han Suyin, who began her illustrious career with the novel

Destination Chungking (1942), and later found commercial success with the semi-autobiographical novel A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952). According to

Daniel Sanderson, the latter work spent several weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold well across the British Commonwealth, with the U.K. edition seeing fifteen print runs by the end of the fifties (84). Han’s novel was subsequently adapted into a film by Twentieth Century Fox titled Love is a

Many Splendored Thing (1955). The presses that published these original works are, in rough order of appearance, D. Appleton-Century Company (New

York), Stanford University Press (Redwood City), Peter Davies (London), and

Jonathan Cape (London).

To this point, I have distinguished between translated works and original efforts in English. However, some examples of anglophone Chinese writing complicate this simple binary. Take the case of Lao She’s The Drum

14 Singers. Although the novel was first written in Chinese, the manuscript was lost before it went to print; consequently, only Helena Kuo’s English translation was published in 1952 (Chan and Pollard 925-6). The novel then circulated solely as “English literature” for almost three decades before Ma

Xiaomi published a “back translation” with Beijing’s People’s Literature Press in 1980 (926). Lao She’s The Yellow Storm (1951) presents yet another fascinating case study; according to Richard Jean So, the translation process involved an intimate and often tense working relationship between the author and his translator, Pruitt. The two reportedly worked together in a small room for up to five hours a day; Lao She read sentences aloud from his manuscript, while Pruitt—who could not read Chinese but understood its spoken form— transcribed his words in English (Transpacific 197). Pruitt resisted Lao She’s wishes for an idiomatic translation of his novel and insisted on retaining a certain Chineseness in her English prose (198-9). Therefore, and as So convincingly argues, the result of their collaboration should be conceived as

“a work of creative production that engaged two creators” (197). As with some other examples of anglophone Chinese writing mentioned in this study, the backstories to Lao She’s novels suggest that it is not always possible or desirable to make an absolute distinction between translated and original writing in English.

As with others mentioned above, the four women anchoring this study stand out in a male-dominated field not only by virtue of their sex, but also because of their extensive proficiency in both Chinese and English. All four produced original work in English and functioned as translators to varying degrees. For instance, Yang’s cookbook coins English neologisms for Chinese

15 cooking techniques and dishes; Ling co-translated her own short stories into

English, whereas her memoir offers English translations of her favourite

Chinese classics; Nieh and Chang both worked as professional translators with presses linked to U.S. intelligence agencies. These bilingual women writers tend to produce novel and idiosyncratic crossings between Chinese and

English. Examples of their earliest book-length works in English include Ling

Shuhua’s Ancient Melodies (1953) and Eileen Chang’s The Rice-Sprout Song

(1955). Other works blur the line between translation and writing in English; for instance, Yang Buwei’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) and

Autobiography of a Chinese Woman (1947) are both “Put into English by her

Husband Yuenren Chao,” as the subtitle of the latter work stipulates. Yet others are “self-translations,” such as Eileen Chang’s Naked Earth (1956) and

“Shame, Amah!” (1962), or Nieh Hualing’s short stories as collected in The

Purse (1962). Nieh went even further by editing and translating short stories written by other Chinese women, which she anthologised under the title Eight

Stories by Chinese Women (1962). The entities which published these works include, in rough order of appearance, the journal T’ien Hsia Monthly

(Shanghai and Hong Kong), the Woolf’s Hogarth Press (London), Charles

Scribner’s Sons (New York), the John Day Company (New York), Hong

Kong Union Press (Hong Kong), and the Heritage Press (Taipei and Hong

Kong).

My survey of anglophone Chinese writing above is far from exhaustive, but it demonstrates two key points: First, it underscores the extraordinary work done by women writers as intermediaries between China and the anglophone West. Second, it brings into view an international literary

16 network that was invested in the production and circulation of anglophone

Chinese writing. This network comprised nodes in urban centres both East and

West, ranging from Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei, to London,

New York, Redwood City, and as we shall see later, Cambridge,

Massachusetts and Iowa City. Their efforts give rise to the notion, in the minds of general anglophone readers across the world, that there be such a thing as “modern Chinese literature,” even before C.T. Hsia’s systematisation of the field for specialists in his 1961 monograph. Put another way, this network contributed to the making of “modern Chinese literature” as a discrete and recognisable force in the world literary system, in a way that subsumes both sinophone and anglophone writing by Chinese writers within this emerging category.

My study of this print-material network builds on recent scholarly interest in anglophone Chinese writing produced during the early to mid- century. Shuang Shen’s Cosmopolitan Publics (2009) studies the emergence of English-language magazines that were based in Shanghai from the late twenties to the early forties, which include The China Critic (1928-1945) and

T’ien Hsia (1935-1941). The writers and editors involved in these two periodicals were typically Chinese intellectuals educated in the West (1).

Shuang Shen historicises this phenomenon as one outcome of how English

“transformed from a mostly commercial language to a cultural language” between the late-Qing period to Republican-era China (14). They “served as a translational platform” that mediated between nationalistic and cosmopolitan articulations of Chinese modernity (26). While Shuang Shen homes in on

Shanghai as one site of anglophone Chinese literary production, Richard Jean

17 So’s Transpacific Community (2016) thinks in terms of a regional network. He describes a transpacific, China-U.S. cultural network, developed between the

First World War and the late forties, that facilitated “East-West cultural relations that operate[d] through reciprocal interaction rather than hegemony”

(XIII-VI). Rapid technological developments during this period enabled both remote and in-person exchanges between Chinese and U.S. intellectuals across the Pacific; these include the first direct telegraphic link between the U.S. and

China in 1921, the appearance of the radio in China around the thirties (which was then dominated by U.S. programmes), and various advances in transpacific postal services (XXIII). According to Richard Jean So, this network was primarily driven by a coalition of American leftists and liberals, which “desire[d] to absorb non-American intellectuals” (XX) so it can “test the viability of American concepts such as ‘democracy’ in a foreign context”

(XX). This network hosted Chinese intellectuals such Hu Shih and Lin

Yutang, both of whom advocated for modes of Chinese liberalism that could not be articulated in China due to a “discursive environment that had become too rigid and ideologically militant” (XX), and also the Left-leaning writer

Lao She, who ultimately rejected the U.S. literary scene and returned to China

(XXXIX). In her more recent work, Shuang Shen has also referred to the

Transpacific as a “disjunctive space between the Anglophone and Sinophone worlds” (“Eileen Chang’s Self-Translation” 97-8). She suggests elsewhere that the related categories of “Chinese diasporic literature” and “Sinophone literature”—here I add “anglophone Chinese writing”—are all “intellectual categories [that] are closely connected to the historical crossings across the

Pacific” (“Trans-Pacific” 469-70).

18 I share both Shuang Shen and So’s interests in the mid-century

Chinese intellectual diaspora and the anglophone writing they produced.

However, my approach differs by drawing from B. Venkat Mani’s concept of

“bibliomigrancy” (Recoding 38), which puts the focus on the circulatory patterns of languages, texts, and books, as opposed to starting with a site- specific or region-based category such as “Shanghai” or “the Transpacific.”

My overview of the international Chinese-English literary network and the books they produced is inspired by Mani’s call to attend to “the physical and virtual movement of books—which manifests itself th[r]ough many material nodes: oral storytellers, authors, publishers, translators, traders, booksellers, printers, reprinters, collectors, political groups, librarians, listeners, and readers” (38). As Mani puts it,

such an approach helps us understand that world literature is

not a randomly or accidently circulated and distributed body of

texts. Literary works become part of networks through complex

multiple processes of acquisition, collection, classification, and

dissemination. Attention to these processes helps us to connect

the materiality of a world literary text with the aesthetic and

political issues that are read into text, along with the space in

which the text is read, which can be a public or private library

or a politically organized state. (245)

Mani’s “bibliomigrancy” offers a more flexible approach for thinking about the anglophonic turn to modern Chinese writing, which was largely facilitated by the transpacific exchanges and clashes between China, the U.S., and the

19 contested territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan, but which also extended at times to London and Southeast Asia.

The materiality of the anglophone Chinese print network also offers a grounded frame for grasping how the international field of anglophone literary production was implicated in the Cultural Cold War, during a critical period when a veritable “bamboo curtain” was drawn between Communist China and the world. The “bamboo curtain” refers to the information blackout that accompanied the rise of Communist China in 1949, an event which resembles the drawing of the Iron Curtain in Europe just four years before. The coining of the term is most commonly attributed to the journalist Zhang Guoxin

(Chang Kuo-sin), who published first-hand accounts in English of how

Nanjing (previously the capital of China) fell to Mao Zedong’s People’s

Liberation Army in 1949. Zhang was writing for the U.S. news agency, United

Press (now United Press International), and had to work around the

Communist ban on foreign news agencies in the autumn of 1949. He reportedly smuggled his field notes past Communist censors by disguising them as wrapping paper for a twelve-piece Chinese dining gift set, which he packed in a camphor chest and brought to British Hong Kong in December

1949 (Chang, Bamboo Curtain xxxiv-xxxv). These notes provided material for the twenty-one articles he published with the United Press on the Communist takeover, which were later revised for a book titled Eight Months Behind the

Bamboo Curtain (1952).

As Zhang relates throughout the book, the Chinese public was cut off from news of the outside world, and deluged with propaganda and disinformation from both Communist- and Nationalist-controlled media (25-

20 28). Within Nanjing, the first month of Communist rule saw the suspension of all newspapers barring the Communist organ New China Daily and the pro-

Communist paper China Daily (12). Zhang describes these developments as part of Communist totalitarianism, which aimed for media monopoly under a single, strictly regulated press (37-42). Chinese secrecy and censorship consequently fuelled a global fascination with insider reports of Communist

China or Chinese culture at large, a demand met by the network I am unearthing and historicising in this thesis. Zhang himself became a lasting part of this network. In 1952, he clinched funding from the U.S. non-governmental organisation, Committee for Free Asia (1951-4)—later, The Asia Foundation

(1954-present)—to establish Asia Press, Asia Pictures, and the film magazine

The Asia Pictorial (Leary 550). As with Zhang, the women writers at the core of this study contributed to intercultural exchange between China and the

West during a period of strained international relations and information blackout.

The publication of anglophone Chinese writing during this period was heavily politicised as a result of such developments, and book projects on both sides of the bamboo curtain are often part of a deliberate cultural war waged by Beijing and Washington D.C. For instance, Beijing’s Foreign Languages

Press favoured left-leaning, socialism-inclined writers such as Lu Xun, Ding

Ling, and Zhao Shuli, whereas Taipei’s Heritage Press and Hong Kong’s

World Today Press—both of which were affiliated with the U.S. intelligence agency, the United States Information Service (USIS)—produced texts that are anti-communist, or at the very least, critical of developments on mainland

China. If, for Joe Cleary, “[Western] modernism … was essentially the

21 literature of an interregnum between the dissolution of one kind of world- ordering imperialism and the consolidation of a new kind of US-Soviet imperialism in its place” (“Realism after Modernism” 261), then the anglophone Chinese works in this study likewise register such shifting geopolitics as they played out in the Asia-Pacific theatre of the Cold War.

However, the point of studying this mid-century phenomenon is not only to argue for the existence of a Cultural Cold War, but to attend to how its best works exceeded the geopolitical forces which compelled their production. In their time, these works resisted the divisive political rhetoric that pits China against the West, or the Second World against the First. For the contemporary scholar, they represent a corpus that extends the field of global anglophone writing to include mid-century Chinese migrant writers, while offering frames for comparative work related to the New Modernist Studies and world literature. In what follows, I will sketch out my theoretical framework, before developing the specificities of my argument through an introductory survey of how the core writers in this study turned to English.

Actor-Network Theory and Literary Studies

To this point, I have used the term “network” in a commonsensical manner to describe a web of connections between writers, translators, social circles, texts, corpora, literary magazines, publishers, universities, and other sites of frequent translingual and transcultural exchanges. But my method of tracing such connections is informed by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory

(ANT), which uses a specialised understanding of the term “network.” In

Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour explains that “network” in ANT “does

22 not designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected points, much like a telephone, a freeway, or a sewage

‘network’” (129; my emphasis). Rather, a network is something actively created by the scholar; it is the process of assembling “a trail of associations between heterogenous elements,” in order to formulate a cohesive account of phenomena (5). A good ANT account of a phenomenon is one that focuses on

“the ability of each actor to make other actors do unexpected things” (129).

Latour pushes this point to intervene in questions of disciplinary boundaries and knowledge production. He notes that the “social” in “social sciences” is widely conceived as a supplement to explain some other stable “non-social” phenomenon. This assumption is embedded in statements such as this:

“although art is largely ‘autonomous’, it is also ‘influenced’ by social and political ‘considerations’ which could account for some aspects of its most famous masterpieces” (3). ANT contests this idea that the social world is distinct from another central object of study—in our case, “art.” Rather, the

“social” is already constitutive of the thing at stake. The “social” designates the networked connections between entities that gave rise to the “art” in the first place.

Latour’s clarifications shed light on similar debates in literary studies, with Pascale Casanova’s argument in The World Republic of Letters (2004) being one of the more explicit and generative examples. Casanova’s argument for a world republic of letters is not only a historical argument, but one about disciplinary boundaries which is aligned with Latour’s argument. Consider the following excerpt:

23 Literature is invented through a gradual separation from

political obligations: forced at first to place their art in the

service of the national purposes of the state, writers little by

little achieved artistic freedom through the invention of

specifically literary languages. The uniqueness and originality

of individual writers became apparent, indeed possible, only as

a result of a very long process of gathering and concentrating

literary resources. This process of continuous and collective

creation is nothing other than the history of literature itself.

Literary history rests therefore neither on national

chronologies nor on a series of neatly juxtaposed works, but on

the succession of revolts and emancipations thanks to which

writers, despite their irreducible dependence on language, have

managed to create the conditions of a pure and autonomous

literature, freed from the considerations of political utility. It is

the history of the appearance, then[,] of the accumulation,

concentration, distribution, and diversion of literary wealth,

which first arose in Europe and subsequently became the object

of belief and rivalry throughout the world. (45-6)

First, Casanova makes the historical case for the emergence of literature as an autonomous domain with its internal set of rules. This involves a history of exceptional writers, their gathering of resources and “literary capital” (13), then the harnessing of these resources to disengage literature from the very econo-political forces on which it first relied. I will not repeat the specifics of

Casanova’s account, which famously begins with Joachim du Bellay’s

24 argument for the use of the French vernacular (as opposed to Latin) around the mid-sixteenth century (46-55). I focus instead on the meta-literary argument that animates this historical account, which is implied in the excerpt above and mentioned elsewhere: Casanova is arguing that the study of Literature should therefore properly include a study of the social relations between the autonomous realm of Literature, and the econo-political entities which the literary first exploited, then separated itself from. For Casanova, this inclusion is embodied by blending the French critical tradition of internal textual readings, with postcolonial critique’s external analysis of power (xiii). By tracing the associations and disassociations between texts, writers, institutions, and nations in literary history, Casanova is positing each of these entities as

“actors”—whether human or non-human—and reassembling them into a

“network” which she calls the “world republic of letters.” The assembling of this network in unexpected yet convincing ways should not be considered a

“social” or “econo-political” explanation of literature that is external to it, but should be understood as being constitutive of the literary itself. To rewrite

Casanova’s argument in Latour’s idiom, she is defining the “literary” as the complex of relations that give rise to its autonomous existence as a qualitative category, as objects, as institutions, as a network, and as a discipline. In a counterintuitive manner, Casanova’s argument affirms the autonomy of literary studies as a discipline, one which is not subject to the logics of adjacent ones such as sociology, history, linguistics, economics, media studies, and so forth.

Where Casanova differs from Latour is that while he focuses on the positive associations that make up the social, she repeats the modernist

25 suspicion of literature’s affiliations with states and institutions. Casanova’s theoretical model is drawn in part from high modernist thinkers based in Paris; her key texts include a selection from Valéry Larbaud’s oeuvre and Ezra

Pound’s ABCs of Reading (1934). Casanova does denounce Larbaud’s work among others for being “naively committed to a pure, dehistoricized, denationalized, and depoliticized conception of literature” and for a certain

“ethnocentric blindness” (23). However, she also cleaves to the modernist suspicion of institutions and states, while promoting a notion of literary merit based on the writer’s or the text’s autonomy. Consider for instance her discussion of the Nobel Prize in Literature. On the one hand, Casanova argues that the conferment of the Nobel Prize to Gao Xingjian in 2000 is “fully in agreement with the definition of literary autonomy current at the Greenwich meridian” (151). Gao is a Chinese writer and a political dissident who is in exile in France; therefore, according to Casanova, the award endorses Gao’s

“formation of an unprecedented position of autonomy in his native land—a country where literature is almost entirely instrumentalized and subject to censorship” (152). On the other hand, Jean-Paul Sartre’s majestic refusal of the Nobel Prize in 1964 is a confirmation of his autonomy: “He was one of the few persons in world literary space who … could do without the prize, a circumstance that only reaffirmed his eminent position” (153). In the first instance, Casanova uses the Nobel Prize as a foil against the tyranny of the

Chinese state; in the second, she uses Sartre as a foil against the institutional power of the Nobel Prize. In this chain of repudiation, Casanova’s modernist notion of autonomy requires at every stage a bogeyman which affirms the strength of the individualist figure or literary work, and she returns always to

26 the exceptional site which is Paris, “the capital of the literary world … an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived” (24).

Casanova’s emphasis on exceptional instances of literary autonomy tends to put the focus on two things: anti-establishment gestures, and also privileged literary entities, ones which have already accumulated enough literary capital to be independent of patronage, sponsorship, commercialism, institutions, the nation-state, and so forth.

In contrast, Rita Felski’s adaptation of ANT for literary studies offers a framework that stresses the generative power of associative ties, while allowing room for the disassociative. Drawing from Latour’s An Inquiry into

Modes of Existence (2013), Felski calls for the literary critic to examine her suspicions directed at institutions, and to renew her trust in institutional networks around which human and non-human actors congregate and cooperate (Recomposing 218). This approach to apprehending networks resists

“a rhetoric of iconoclasm and emancipation from ties, [and] it insists on the inescapability and the value of ties” (218). To this end, Felski offers four terms towards a “postcritical” approach to the humanities: “curating, conveying, criticizing, composing” (216). Two terms are of particular interest to my project: “curating” emphasises the humanities as “guardians of fragile objects, artifacts unmoored by the blows of time, texts slipping slowly into oblivion” (217), whereas “composing” refers to “the possibility of trying to compose a common world … It is about making rather than unmaking, adding rather than subtracting, translating rather than separating” (221). Curation and composition describe the constructive modalities I adopt to recover the

English-Chinese literary network. The writers and works I study are often

27 sponsored (directly or indirectly) by a corresponding econo-political complex of First World institutions and state-funded programmes, which offered refuge to Chinese writers who fled from various crises in China, whether due to general concerns for personal safety, or due to more politically charged exigencies. Given these circumstances, such examples of anglophone Chinese writing cannot fully emerge as “literature” under an evaluative rubric that valorises modernist notions of literary autonomy. As we shall see later, the widespread appeal of aesthetic autonomy as a literary value may well have contributed to the suspicious treatment of Eileen Chang’s anti-communist novels in English-language scholarship, which accounts in part for the obscurity of these projects.

My project also aims to position the anglophone Chinese literary network alongside contemporaneous modernist networks, in order to examine the dis/associative ties between these two fields of literary production. In this respect, my study fits within the “transnational turn” to the New Modernist

Studies, which seeks to “make modernism less Eurocentric by including or focusing on literary production outside Western Europe and the United States”

(Mao and Walkowitz 739). Such projects also often mobilise “network” as a concept or a metaphor, as with Friedman’s studies collected in Planetary

Modernisms (2015). In particular, Felski’s ANT-inspired modalities of

“curating” and “composing” are strikingly resonant with two terms in

Friedman’s framework for critical practice, “Re-vision, Recovery, Circulation,

Collage” (Planetary 76). For Friedman, “recovery” refers to the critic’s “act of digging, creating an archaeology of new archives—other modernities outside

28 the familiar Western ones and thus other forms of creative expressivities”

(76). “Circulation” on the other hand is intimately tied to “networks”:

the archive of mobility, calling for the act of seeing linkages,

networks, conjunctures, creolizations, intertextualities, travels,

and transplantations connecting modernisms from different

parts of the planet … Unlike a center-periphery model,

circulation stresses the interactive and dynamic, assuming

multiple agencies, centers, and conjunctures around the world.

(77)

Put simply, Friedman places an emphasis on the positive associations and conjunctures that redirect scholarship to the non-West, which aligns her with

ANT approaches. In contrast, a centre-periphery model begins with antagonism and suspicion directed at privileged centres. Recently, Paul K.

Saint-Amour has also noted a development from earlier “coterie” studies of modernism, which offer “portraits of strong social ties: siblings, partners, lovers, close friends, classmates, clubmates, patrons, protégés, and impresarios,” to recent “weaker-tie social networks” of modernism, which speak to modernism as a “temper or mode that arises largely by way of multi- directional networked exchanges, whether these take the shape of collaboration, translation, misprision, imitation, provocation, appropriation, or counter appropriation” (449-51; my emphasis). Saint-Amour suggests that this shift from coteries to networks encourages a corresponding shift in focus to marginal writers and the non-West (447-51). Further, such weaker-tie approaches ironically attest to “a field’s strength (in the normative sense)—its vitality, generativity, and populousness” (451). He takes this idea from Mark

29 Granovetter’s classic article “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973), which argues that “weak social ties enable information to travel further and more rapidly than strong ones do” (Saint-Amour 447). The gist of Granovetter’s argument is that when news is passed to an intimate, the information tends to stay within a close-knit circle, whereas if the same news is told to more distant affiliates such as colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers, “the news jumps networks as a spark leaps a firebreak to touch off dry new fuel” (Saint-Amour

447). The upshot is that modern or modernist texts and ideas tend to look far less provincial and Eurocentric when we begin tracing their surprising origins, transmissions, resonances, and confluences to and from across the globe.

One possible contention against my use of ANT is that I am imposing a social theory developed in the West on the Chinese context. Here, Richard

Jean So’s work on the Transpacific offers a surprising Chinese antecedent to

Latour and Felski’s conception of the network. So discovers that as early as the forties, some Chinese intellectuals were already using variants of the term

“network” to describe “a world propelled by endless flows of cultural contact, unchecked by national borders” (Transpacific XVI). His key example is Lao

She’s notion of a wen wang—literally, “cultural web,” or more idiomatically,

“literary network”—that “connects the United States and China via creative writing” (XXXIV). Lao She first conceived of a national literary network during his term as the leader of the literary-political society Wenxie, or “The

All China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists” (176).6 In his fifth- year report, Lao She describes Wenxie’s periodicals as the medium via which a wenyi wang or a “literary-artistic network” will emerge to “represent each

6 Wenxie was founded in 1938 as a response to the Second Sino-Japanese War.

30 part of the nation” (“The Fifth Year of the Wenxie” 208; qtd. in So 176). Lao

She’s ambitions for a national literary network developed into an internationalist one. In the early forties, Wenxie sent simple “outreach telegrams” to Leftist literary groups across the world (177). In 1945, the translation of Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy to English and its success in the U.S. would confirm the viability of a Chinese literary network, one that extended beyond China’s borders to the U.S. and into the field of anglophone writing

(180). As So sharply puts it, Lao She’s invocation of a “literary network” in the early forties anticipates the widespread popularisation of the same term in the West by about four decades; it was only around the eighties to nineties that

“network” would become the go-to term for describing “webs” of social relations across many domains, as in the idea of the inter-net (176). So’s research suggests that speaking of anglophone Chinese writing as a literary network is in fact, especially apposite.

Another possible contention is that studies of literary networks come at the expense of the literary work. However, Felski and So have both argued that the point is to insist on a definition of the literary as something that is constituted by, and constitutive of, social connections. In other words, while art and literature are determined by the social conditions underlying their production, they also offer new ways of mediating and reformulating social connections out there in the world. So notes that contemporary understanding of networks “gained definitive traction only after the Second World War and is usually associated with the rise of new information technologies in the

1970s and what broadly has been called ‘a new era of capitalism” (XXXVI).

In response, his study seeks to decouple the term “network” from such

31 connotations. The writers he studies “take literature and art as the basis for imagining connectivity between America and China,” as opposed to contemporary imaginations of networks as being “relentlessly constituted by flows of capital that one resists or kneels to” (XXXVI). Felski likewise stresses that ANT insists on the agency of literature and art to evoke new social connections between entities: “Textual actors are linked to other kinds of actors in networks of cooperation, conflict, control, and co-creation” (24).

So and Felski’s arguments clarify my method, which blends a historical- biographical approach with close reading. The four female protagonists in this study function as human “actors,” whose biographies and careers guide my recovery of the mid-century Chinese-English literary network. Because their circumstances of geographical and linguistic migration are highly comparable, the scholarly account which emerges is organised around the broader history of the Chinese intellectual exodus to the West. However, this study attends no less to their literary works. The texts I close read represent “non-human actors,” which compel the contemporary critic to reconsider the flows of social relations during a mid-century devastated by various Chinese and global crises. These literary works contain an agency that lies not only in their text- internal narratives, but also in their extratextual connections.

In the next section, Yang Buwei’s life and texts serve as an opening case study which does two things: first, it exemplifies the broader shape of the mid-century network, and second, it demonstrates my method of recovering this network’s history and material connections. My account of Yang’s anglophonic turn will suggest a dialectical relation between the human actor called “Yang Buwei,” who traversed and enfolded other actors into this

32 network, and a mass of texts — including her autobiography and cookbook — which function as non-human actors that verify and enrich my account of

Yang’s actions. My close readings of her works will suggest that they are artistic, self-reflexive, and “bottom-up” accounts of the social connections between books, languages, people, collectives, and institutions across China and the U.S. during the mid-century. But beyond that, the books’ paratextual material (as opposed to their text-internal narratives) is also instrumental in flagging Yang’s connections to significant China-related intellectuals, projects, and institutions. In this manner, ANT meets print-material and historical-biographical methods in literary studies, inspiring approaches that connect the work’s textuality to the material and historical conditions of its production.

Between Wars and Worlds

The story of how Yang Buwei turned to writing in English offers a handy opening example for grasping the broader shape of the mid-century anglophonic turn, and for explaining why its associated works represent a significant strain of modern literature. Better known as the wife of the renowned linguist Yuen Ren Chao, Yang was one of the first women trained in science-based, “Western” medicine in China, a profession which immediately flags her status as a particularly modern woman. She earned her degree from Tokyo Women’s Medical College in 1919 (B.Y. Chao,

Autobiography 132-49), started a hospital after graduation (158), but gave up the practice after marriage (182-4). Following the outbreak of the Sino-

Japanese War in 1937, Yang fled Nanjing with her malaria-stricken husband;

33 the couple first travelled separately inland to Changsha via Hankow, thus evading the Nanjing Massacre, then onwards to Kunming via Guangxi and

Indochina (or modern-day Vietnam) (265-83). Given the stresses of the intensifying war and Chao’s slow recovery from malaria, he decided to accept an earlier invitation to visit the Oriental Institute at the University of Hawai’i

(281), which was probably what allowed his family to circumvent the Chinese

Exclusion Act.7 Yang writes that she “went to Hawaii in 1938 with nothing but summer clothes” (283) in anticipation of a short stay, but their trip turned into a permanent resettlement to Cambridge, Massachusetts by 1941 (301).

Yang was the earliest of the four women to leave mainland China; the other three left between the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945 and the months right after the declaration of the PRC in 1949. Yang’s autobiography offers a nuanced way of thinking about the status of such diasporic writers and intellectuals:

Yuenren often says that there are three classes of Chinese

citizens. The first-class Chinese moved into free China in the

interior, shared the hardships of their fellow citizens, and

helped win the war. The second-class Chinese went abroad

when they could and sat out the war in safety and comfort. The

third-class Chinese remained in occupied China and became

puppets and collaborators. He considers ourselves second-class

Chinese … (290)

7 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was only repealed in 1943 by the Magnuson Act.

34 Chao’s reported comments emphasise how their state of displacement is marked by cowardice, voluntariness, and privilege. His self-depiction offers a striking contrast to paradigmatic conceptions of diaspora as derived from the

Jewish and African models, which are associated with longer histories of systematised and racialised violence and brutality. In this light, thinking of my core subjects as “expatriate” writers may seem more appropriate, but I have two major contentions with this classification: First, these women are

“migrants” rather than “expatriates” because they never actually resettled in

China; the sole exception is Ling Shuhua, who returned to Beijing in the last year of her life, after spending most of her later life in London (Welland 322).

Second, the term “expatriate literature” is intimately associated with the “lost generation” of U.S. modernist writers, who famously took advantage of a favourable exchange rate to live bohemian lives in Paris while working in their own language. In contrast to the likes of Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard,

Kay Boyle, Robert McAlmon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway,

Chinese migrant writers travelled to flee imminent danger, and had to work in their second language to support themselves. This “linguistic migration” also hints at the power asymmetry between Chinese and English, with the latter offering far more access to international markets, global mobility, and perhaps more importantly, financial stability and personal safety. I thus eschew the terminology and theoretical frameworks associated with studies of diasporic or expatriate literature and adopt the more neutral term “migrant writer” instead.

Even as all four writers were pushed out of mainland China by a series of national crises, they exploited the opportunities offered by the international

Chinese-English literary network to reinvent themselves and to pursue a career

35 in English writing. This network comprised informal intellectual circles, publishing houses, independent presses, media companies, universities, intelligence agencies, and various non-governmental organisations among other institutions, all of which translated modern Chinese texts to English, and published (or even commissioned) original work in English by Chinese writers. Returning to the example at hand, the Chaos kept themselves gainfully employed after their migration by responding to the surge of interest in

Chinese culture within the U.S. For instance, Yang taught Mandarin Chinese with a community-led “School of National Language” for businessmen and students in Honolulu (Autobiography 286). Meanwhile, Chao taught courses on Chinese culture and languages at various universities. After the bombing of

Pearl Harbor, he headed a language programme at Harvard University (from which he earned his doctorate in 1918), where he taught Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese to 150 U.S. soldiers involved in the Asia-Pacific theatre of the

Second World War (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 313; Zhou Yiliang 53). After the war, Chao reworked the course materials to publish two English-language textbooks, the Cantonese Primer (1947) and the Mandarin Primer (1948) with

Harvard University Press. During the same period, Yang published the cookbook How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945). Its resounding success would inspire her subsequent work, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman

(1947), from which much of the information in this section is taken.

Yang’s cookbook is one of the most impactful texts produced by this network. The publication history and paratextual material of How to Cook and

Eat in Chinese is filled with prominent figures from the Chinese and the

American literati, offering a glimpse of the interpersonal connections that

36 sustained the activities of the larger anglophone Chinese literary network. In this manner, the cookbook functions as a non-human actor which enables me to trace a literary network. The May Fourth luminary Hu Shih contributed a foreword and the calligraphy on its cover design, while Pearl S. Buck supplied a preface, calling the book “a contribution to international understanding” (xi).

The work was published by the John Day Company, a New York publishing house headed by Buck’s husband that specialised in China- and Chinese- related titles. Despite the lofty names involved in its production, the cookbook possessed a “cross-over” appeal which drew U.S. middlebrow readers, and its influence came to be felt in mass culture; the cookbook became a commercial success and sold well into the seventies with three editions and multiple print runs, anticipating (and perhaps even leading) the post-war demand in the U.S. for authentic Chinese cuisine (Andrew Coe 218-20). In recent years, How to

Cook and Eat in Chinese has been deemed historically significant for being one of the earliest full-length Chinese cookbooks in English (Charles Hayford

73) and is widely credited with coining and popularising the terms “stir fry” and “potsticker” (67). These neologisms represent historically important acts of linguistic and cultural translation that have since circulated far beyond its

China-U.S. origins, given their ubiquity today in culinary parlance across the globe. In fact, both terms entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004 and

2015 respectively, representing two significant instances where “non-native” linguistic innovations have circulated so widely that they came to be ratified by a key institutional gatekeeper of English, thus changing the complexion of the English language in a lasting way (“New words list December 2004”;

“New words list June 2015”). As Hu Shih notes, the Chao family has “created

37 a new terminology, a new vocabulary, without which the art of Chinese cooking cannot be adequately introduced to the Western world” (B.Y. Chao,

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese viii).

As with Yang’s cookbook, the examples of anglophone Chinese writing in this study are valuable for their historical content, but more importantly, they are valuable for being self-reflexive historical forms. For instance, Yang’s cookbook opens by reflecting on the processes of cultural and linguistic translation that contributed to its final literary form. It informs the reader that its English prose was the product of intensive collaboration and experimentation that was directed at solving two major problems: Yang’s ineptitude with English, and the lack of an adequate vocabulary in English to describe Chinese cooking. In the ironically named “Author’s Note,” a narrating voice confesses that Yang “didn’t write the book” (xii). The narrator explains:

The way I didn’t [write the book] was like this. You know I

speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in

Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English, and

my husband, finding the English dull, put much of it back into

Chinese again. Thus, when I call a dish “Mushrooms Stir

Shrimps,” Rulan says that that’s not English and that it ought to

be “Shrimps Fried with Mushrooms.” But Yuen Ren argues

that if Mr. Smith can Go to Town in a movie, why can’t

Mushrooms Stir Shrimps in a dish? So Mushrooms Stir

Shrimps you shall have, or what have you? (xii)

38 Here, the narrating “I” simultaneously naturalises and disowns its connection to its credited author, Yang Buwei, while explaining the triangulated co- authorship that led to this paradox. The idea that Yang was “cooking in

Chinese” suggests an intrinsic link between language and cooking, which requires not only linguistic but also cultural translation into English. Yang’s daughter Rulan does so dutifully by translating her mother’s spoken vernacular and cooking techniques into standard U.S. English. However, this mode of translation seems inadequate to the professional linguist Chao, who then insists on using Yang’s original non-standard English, as exemplified by her phrase “Mushrooms Stir Shrimps.” Chao then argues implicitly that such

“Chinglish” phrases should not be taken as “broken” forms of English, but ought to be understood as inventive idioms which remedy the lack of English expressions for describing Chinese cooking. This entire exchange clarifies that all forms of non-standard English in the text are artistic choices, and not due to the Chaos’ lack of proficiency in their second language. This clarification is, on the one hand, an argument for the legitimacy of pidgin English, and on the other, a justification for self-exoticisation, which works to subvert negative stereotypes of “fresh-off-the-boat” Chinese immigrants in the U.S. who cannot speak or write English. Yang’s author’s note manages to restage these conflicting concerns about cultural representation and linguistic innovation as a comical family squabble over pedantries, with a kind of self-deprecating humour that is designed to charm the text’s intended middle-brow readership.

So, even as my analysis begins by asking how Yang’s cookbook speaks to the history of the Chinese intellectual migration during the mid-century, I attend simultaneously to how the work registers that historical content in a

39 particularly innovative and sophisticated form. My analysis here serves as a paradigmatic example of my approach throughout the course of this thesis, which purposefully blends socio-political history and print-cultural history with literary criticism.

As with Yang, the other three writers in this study often draw attention to how Chinese and English collide, merge, overlap, or play off the other in their works, while also making a variety of Chinese cultural tropes, expressions, and literary references available in English for the first time.

Their efforts produced what might be called a style of “translingual modernity” that exploits a two-way traffic of influence between the fields of

Chinese and English writing, and which uses the energies of one linguistic- literary field to rejuvenate their work in the other. If Yang’s cookbook primarily refashions English to better express Chineseness, her autobiography offers a contrast by re-visioning Chineseness via English.8 In the foreword to the autobiography, her husband Chao gives an account of how the autobiography came to be written and published, and succinctly positions

Yang’s work within the history of modern Chinese literature. Through this narrative, Chao suggests that the work registers a limit to Chinese modernity that is only broken by its translingual and transcultural exchanges with the

English language and the West. He explains that Yang began writing an autobiography around 1913 but was forestalled by literary conventions in

China during this period. Chao clarifies: “in those days, when an archaic,

8 I am drawing from Susan Stanford Friedman’s notion of re-visioning, which aims at “defamiliarizing the familiar archive by looking anew through a different [cultural] lens” (Planetary Modernisms 76). In turn, Friedman draws from Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1972).

40 literary style [wenyan, or classical Chinese] was the only proper thing, she lacked a suitable medium in which to tell the story of the woman she is, and she stopped her writing before she went very far with it” (vii). Although Yang was home-schooled in the Chinese classics and was familiar with the classical style (27), she prefers speaking and writing in the vernacular (241). Chao acknowledges that Hu Shih’s call for a Chinese literary revolution in 1917 helped by making “writing in the vernacular respectable” (vii), to the point that Yang can thereafter “take courage in writing as she talks” and “even feel fashionable about it” (viii).9

Despite this freeing development, procrastination set in. Chao reports that it was only around 1945 that the couple revisited the idea of writing

Yang’s autobiography, and even then, the question of what language to write in continues to pose a problem. Chao had prepared a partial draft of the autobiography in one standardised version of vernacular Chinese, but Yang was unfamiliar with this synthetic language (ix). Yang did not speak in “any pure dialect, whether of Peiping or of Nanking”; rather, she “started [her] talking life in a sort of Southern Mandarin dialect instead of Cantonese” (viii;

17). She subsequently revised and extended Chao’s draft in her own vernacular, but a subsequent problem emerged—their publisher, John Day

Company, and the printers it worked with, did not have Chinese types on hand

(ix). Therefore, Chao translated Yang’s manuscript into English, and the work was finally published in 1947 (ix). The autobiography’s convoluted publication history reveals the numerous cultural and material hurdles that

9 I will offer a brief account of Hu Shih’s literary revolution of 1917— traditionally understood as the beginning of “modern Chinese literature”— later in this chapter.

41 prevented Yang from writing and publishing in her own tongue; it was ironically via English that Yang finally found her literary voice. This backstory to Yang’s autobiography encapsulates how for all four women, their choice to write in English was not a choice made entirely freely or easily, though English offered alternate possibilities and freedoms for their articulations of modernity. In the next section, I discuss how Eileen Chang’s anglophonic turn registers both the constraints and freedoms of writing in

English during the Cold War era.

The Cultural Cold War and Anglophone Chinese Writing

The anglophone Chinese literary network was largely headquartered within the so-called “First World” and in territories under its control. Consequently, the projects associated with this network are inevitably influenced by the First

World’s Cold War investments (both literal and figurative) in producing cultural knowledge about China and Chineseness in English. The circumstances surrounding Eileen Chang’s migration to the U.S. via Hong

Kong demonstrate the extent to which Cold War geopolitics impinged on cultural production and incentivised Chinese writers to work in English. In

1943, Chang rose to fame during the Japanese Occupation of Shanghai with her debut collection of Chinese-language short stories titled Chuanqi

[Legends]. She married fellow writer Hu Lancheng the next year, who also worked as a propaganda official with Wang Jingwei’s Japanese puppet regime. Following the Communist takeover, Hu was denounced as a Japanese collaborator and subsequently escaped to Tokyo (Kam Louie 9-10). Chang was only married to Hu for two years, but she had also published with various

42 Japanese-backed literary journals; her reputation was thus tainted by both personal and professional association with the Japanese regime (Huang 213;

Kam 9-10). Further, as So among others have pointed out, “Chang’s …

[earlier] emphasis on middle-class stories clashed with an increasingly state- sanctioned leftist proletarian aesthetics” (“Literary Information Warfare” 719).

Chang would eventually leave Shanghai for Hong Kong to enrol in a college programme (719), and in 1951, she would be “discovered” by the U.S. intelligence officer, Richard McCarthy, and find work with the United States

Information Service (USIS) as a translator and writer (Richard M. McCarthy,

Interview n. pag.).

The USIS is a foreign affairs agency that deals with matters of intelligence, cultural diplomacy, and public relations. Its global outposts fall under the purview of the United States Information Agency (USIA). While

USIA was officially founded around 1953 in reaction to the Cold War, this umbrella organisation absorbed existing state department projects and offices related to propaganda and diplomacy, some of which had been active since the twenties.10 In places like British Hong Kong, the USIA worked together with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to contain and “roll back” Communism from surrounding regions that were vulnerable to Chinese or Soviet influence through cultural warfare—as early as 1946, the CIA was already concerned with the latent threat of Communist recruitment targeting Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia (Oyen 63-64). USIS offices recruited a mix of U.S. and migrant writers, journalists, academics, public relations executives, and other

10 For a comprehensive account of the USIA and USIS, see Nicholas Cull, “Roof for a House Divided” (2013).

43 professionals from related fields, all of whom functioned as communications experts, cultural specialists, and native informants (Cull 138). Book programmes emerged as one key method of spreading pro-U.S. and anti- communist propaganda; in 1961, a chief of the CIA’s covert action staff wrote that

Books differ from all other propaganda media primarily

because one single book can significantly change the reader’s

attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any

other single medium … [this] is true significantly often enough

to make books the most important weapon of strategic

propaganda. (Qtd. in Osgood 303)

These book programmes represent some of the most deliberately orchestrated and sustained distribution of largely anglophone U.S. literature across the globe in modern history. By 1953, there were almost two hundred Overseas

Libraries around the world associated with USIA, holding around two million volumes (Lacy 146); these outposts also hosted cultural programmes, travelling exhibitions, and other educational opportunities (Travis 187). In

Asia specifically, the USIA managed 58 libraries and published roughly 33 periodicals in 17 languages totalling 24 million copies a year; in 1959 alone, they translated over 500 U.S. titles into 23 Asian languages, and distributed some 3 million copies of the books (Osgood 121). Private organisations such as book charities and coalitions of publishers complemented this state-run network; for instance, The Asia Foundation (founded 1954) shipped 20 million American books to 22 countries by 1982 including China, Hong Kong,

Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore (Benjamin 45-47). This same foundation

44 funded numerous other cultural projects in Asia, which included Zhang

Guoxin’s (of “bamboo curtain” fame) publishing and film entities, and also

Chinese-language presses such as the Hong Kong-based Union Press and its regional magazine, Chinese Student Weekly.11

Eileen Chang was a part of these extensive book programmes. During her three years at USIS, she translated U.S. writers such as Ernest

Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David

Thoreau, and Washington Irving to Chinese, and Chinese writers such as Chen

Jiying and Han Bangqing to English (Huang 213; Shan Te-sing 109-11). Such translation projects have been viewed as the transmission of U.S. literature and its values to Asia on the one hand, and as anti-communist criticism produced by Chinese writers for anglophone readers on the other. For instance, Greg

Barnhisel describes the USIS’s circulation of U.S. literature as an attempt to depict the “portrait of the evolving nation” (97) for non-U.S. readers, with a catalogue that offered “a narrative of American culture and history” (98).

Elsewhere, David Wang has described Chen Jiying’s Dicun Chuan [The Story of Di Village]—first serialised in the Taiwanese periodical Free China from

1950, and translated by Chang in 1959 as Fool in the Reeds—as “[o]ne of the earliest examples of anti-communist fiction” (D. Wang, Monster 169) in

Chinese literary history. Apart from her translations, Chang also produced two original novels: The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) in English, and Chidi zhi lian

[Love in the Redland] (1954) in Chinese; the latter was translated to English in

11 For more on The Asia Foundation, see Leary’s “The most careful arrangements” (2012) and Shuang Shen’s “Empire of Information” (2017).

45 1956 under the title Naked Earth. According to Nicole Huang, the completion of these two novels greased Chang’s migration to the U.S. in 1955 (214).

The conditions of production surrounding Eileen Chang’s USIS novels speak to how the U.S.-led First World actively courted Chinese intellectuals who were looking to exit mainland China, and exerted an influence on their mid-century literary production which was not always benign. However, even if Chinese migrant writers were incentivised or pressured to write in English under various political and stylistic constraints, the work they produced should not be dismissed as anti-communist propaganda with no literary merit, any more than say, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) should be. In Chang’s case, USIS’s influence proved especially generative, prompting a turn to

English and a major development in her style and subjects. Richard Jean So argues that

[Chang’s] writing before and after Hong Kong reveals a

curious dichotomy: in the 1940s in Shanghai, Chang wrote

[almost] exclusively in Chinese, focused on short stories, and

made use of a distinct modernist style. After 1952, she

switched to composing in English, began writing in a thick

realist style, and published a string of novels. (“Literary

Information Warfare” 720)

Take for instance the first of Chang’s English-language novels, The Rice-

Sprout Song, which depicts the brutality of Mao’s ongoing Land Reforms in rural China. The overt historical and political dimensions of this work, and its setting in the Communist countryside, marks a dramatic departure from

Chang’s earlier works about urban romances in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

46 This represents Chang’s first foray into a mode of committed realism that bears a formal resemblance to the social(ist) realism produced on the mainland, but which contains a stridently anti-communist message. I will continue this discussion in my chapter on Chang, but my larger point here is that for many Chinese migrant writers, their turn to English was not merely transactional, but also profoundly transformative for the development of their own literary sensibilities. Works such as Chang’s Rice-Sprout are the product of negotiations between the exigencies of Cold War geopolitics and artistic integrity. This process, which I locate in the translational zone between

Chinese and English, between China and the First World, is a key dynamic of mid-century Chinese writing, one which distinguishes this period from the earlier phases of modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth period up to the Second World War.

Cold War Orientalism and Native Informancy

The story of Eileen Chang’s recruitment by the USIS reveals how the mid- century intellectual exodus from China met up with the U.S.’s imperialist ambitions in Asia. This brings up larger questions of whether the works of literature they produced are so far subsumed under the First World’s ideology that they lack any aesthetic and political autonomy. At this point, it is necessary to consider the position of these Chinese migrant writers within the global structure of language, power, and cultural production during this period, as refracted through Cold War geopolitics. Scholars have broadly described the mid-century as a transitional period marked by the transfer of political, economic, and cultural power from Western Europe to the U.S. and

47 the Soviet Union. Within the domain of literary studies, critics such as Joe

Cleary have noted a corresponding shift in the world literary system, with

London and Paris handing over the reins of power to Moscow and New York

(“Realism after Modernism” 258-63; see also Andrew Rubin 12). Despite this shift, the U.K.-U.S. alliance within the First World bloc saw to the continued dominance of English as a global lingua franca, thus connecting English’s reign from the peak of the British Empire since at least the mid-eighteenth century to the U.S.’s imperialist ambitions from the mid-twentieth century

(Mufti 16). This connection is precisely why the term “Anglo-American” literature is bandied around loosely as a self-evident category in contemporary scholarship on English literature. The choice made by Chinese migrant writers to work with English—and that they had the linguistic proficiency to do so in the first place—can be attributed to the enduring currency of English and the kinds of advantages and access it offers, even within China. As Jonathan Arac puts it, “just as the dollar is the medium of global commerce, so is English the medium of global culture” (35).

Many critics have also used the term “orientalism” to describe the

U.S.-led system of cultural and knowledge production starting from the mid- century. They are of course drawing from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which historicises and critiques the epistemic paradigm that has buttressed

European colonialism in the so-called “Orient” starting from the eighteenth century. This is not the place for an extensive summary of Said’s well-known thesis, but in brief, “orientalism” is the name he gives to the discourse surrounding the Orient as produced by knowledge-making mechanisms in

Europe, which comprises “supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship,

48 imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles” (2). This discourse invented and continues to enforce a distinction between the

Occident and the Orient (6-7), one which consistently subjugates the latter to the former through a “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, [and] dehumanizing ideology” (27); in this manner, this discourse justifies colonial rule “in advance … rather than after the fact” (39).

This discourse is structural in the sense that it re-articulates its form through other content such as “imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism,

Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Splengerism” (43). The power of orientalism lies precisely in its reproducibility across history and varying contexts, which leads Said to describe the differences between British and

French orientalisms, and to track how these colonial orientalisms “are reproduced more or less in American Orientalism after the Second World

War” (18).

In Cold War Orientalism, Christina Klein extends and complicates

Said’s framework by tracing how U.S. orientalism past the Second World War marked a critical shift from the earlier racist ideology of colonial orientalisms to a “wide-ranging discourse of racial tolerance and inclusion that served as the official ideology undergirding post-war expansion” (11). According to

Klein, this shift is triggered by the U.S.’s aversion towards Nazism and its ideology of racial purity, and enabled by the work of German-born U.S. anthropologist Franz Boas, who “moved away from the idea of immutable biological difference as a way to explain the diversity of the world’s people and developed a more flexible model of cultural difference instead” (11). She argues that even as the U.S. sought to shift the balance of power within the

49 Asia-Pacific region, many quarters of the U.S. public were invested in a more pacifist “ideal of U.S.-Asian integration” (16). This ideal seeks to define the

U.S. as a “nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization” (9). U.S. intellectuals, cultural producers, and policymakers thus produced a legitimating discourse for such imperialist ambitions, one that made the U.S.’s interventionist foreign policy palatable to both the U.S. public and to the international community at large (16).

One weakness of Klein’s framework is that she mostly restricts her scope to how representations of Asia affect domestic attitudes in the U.S. towards the nation’s military and diplomatic programmes in the transpacific region. Her limited focus and rather positive view of U.S. orientalism de- emphasises the real impact of the U.S.’s military or intelligence operations in various “hot wars” such as the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War, and the roles migrant writers and cultural specialists played in such operations.

Andrew Rubin’s Archives of Authority (2012) offers a contrastive take; for him, the mid-century marks a shift from Said’s “textual Orientalism” to a kind of “militarized Orientalism” which has become even more menacing in the twenty-first century (6-7). Rubin’s opening example of militarised orientalism is the U.S. Defense Department’s “Human Terrain System Project” or HTS; started in 2005, this project attached teams of cultural anthropologists to military units to analyse subjects under military occupation (5). Rubin describes HTS as a militarisation of the social sciences, such that knowledge production about culture is “implicated indirectly in decisions regarding who is permitted to be killed and who is allowed to survive in the context of these lethal zones of cultural translation” (7).

50 My entry point into these debates is to put the focus on anglophone

Chinese writers who were implicated in the First World’s mid-century production of orientalist knowledge, and who might be described as what Said calls “native informants” (301). Said argues that native informants in the context of Arab and Islamic Studies tend to occupy subjugated positions within the U.S.’s system of intellectual production (324), and that the Arabic intelligentsia at large “is auxiliary to what it considers to be the main trends stamped out in the West” (325). This leads him to conclude that “the modern

Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing” (325). Said’s model maps somewhat onto some cases of bilingual Chinese intellectuals. Recall for instance Yuen Ren Chao’s language programmes for U.S. soldiers and Eileen

Chang’s USIS works; these are examples of textual orientalism produced by

Chinese native informants, and given that they are also funded by the U.S.’s military and intelligence operations, they arguably anticipate what Rubin calls

“militarised orientalism.” But as Shu-mei Shih and other scholars have argued, theoretical frameworks derived from postcolonial theory cannot be directly applied to the case of China and Chinese-related studies. In contrast to Said’s characterisation of the Arabic intelligentsia, Chinese intellectuals often operated with more agency, or were even party to the extension of Chinese cultural power (as opposed to the U.S.’s) across the globe. As Shih puts it,

China only ever experienced semicolonialism, and is itself a perpetrator of

“continental colonialism” (“Sinophone” 711). Today, China has inherited or recolonised territories previously conquered by the Manchu during the Qing dynasty, which includes Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia (709). The

Chinese state has also sought to “resinicise” communities of Han Chinese that

51 have settled elsewhere in the world, and has exerted its influence on areas such as Taiwan and Singapore (713-4). Such discrepancies between the case of semicolonial China and postcolonial states have led some scholars to coin the term “sinologism” as an alternative to “orientalism.”12

An account of Chinese native informancy operating under the conditions of sinologism could go something like this: the May Fourth intellectual Hu Shih could be considered a native informant for the U.S., given that he studied Western philosophy and literature at Cornell and Columbia from 1910 to 1917, and later contributed to the Western production of knowledge on China. Hu Shih’s education was, in fact, funded by the Boxer

Indemnity Scholarship, which was part of the U.S.’s programmes of cultural imperialism during the early twentieth century. This scholarship was set up with the surplus indemnity paid by the Qing government to the U.S. in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) totalling over U.S.

$333,000,000 in gold at the time (Carroll B. Malone 65). These funds were not returned directly to China, but put into scholarship programmes starting from

1906 (65). The goal was to draw top Chinese students to U.S. universities, consequently increasing U.S. influence within China (see Hunt). In this sense,

Hu Shih was very much a product of U.S. imperialism, but the subsequent role

12 The theoretical debates on sinologism are far too convoluted and extensive to bring up here, and I only introduce the term to flag the differences between Said’s conception of native informancy and the general situation of the bilingual Chinese literati. For an updated introduction to scholarship on “sinologism,” see Ming Dong Gu and Xian Zhou, editors, Sinology, Sinologism, and New Sinology, special issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought, vol. 49, no. 1, 2018. This special issue gives a survey of the field since the term “sinologism” was coined around the late nineties, and republishes seven field-forming articles.

52 he played in the New Culture and May Fourth movements can hardly be described as “self-orientalising.” In 1917, Hu Shih published the essay

“Suggestions for a Reform of Literature,” which calls for a Chinese literary revolution via the widespread adoption of vernacular Chinese (or baihua,

“plain speech”) over Classical Chinese (or wenyan, “literary language”). Hu

Shih among others opposed the elitism of Classical Chinese’s “proverbial difficulty and its pronounced archaic and poetic flavour,” and promoted modes of vernacular writing that would “disseminat[e] modern ideas among a more or less literate public,” thereby contributing to the national project of modernising China (Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 5-6).

According to C.T. Hsia, Hu Shih was “the first to assert [the vernacular’s] dignity and importance as a literary medium” (7). That same period saw the publication of Chen Hengzhe’s “One Day” (1917) and Lu Xun’s “A

Madman’s Diary” (1918), both widely recognised as the first modern Chinese short stories written completely in the vernacular.

This earlier wave of New Culture advocacy and literary experimentation would converge with the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In reaction to developments at the Paris Peace Conference during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, students and intellectuals marched in Beijing and other major Chinese cities against the impotence of Chinese diplomats, who submitted to Japanese demands for territorial rights in Shandong that previously belonged to Germany (Hsia 12). This politicisation of the masses led to intense debate about the direction and future of modern China, which played out in intellectual magazines that adopted the use of the vernacular. As

Hsia puts it, “The May Fourth Movement also assured the initial success of

53 the Literary Revolution: upon its wake, a number of [baihua] magazines, more or less literary, began publication to satisfy the needs of an eager and ever- growing audience” (12). By 1920, the Ministry of Education would introduce baihua as the official medium of instruction in elementary schools (5), signalling the Republican state’s endorsement and uptake of the reformists’ cause. The standardisation of the new national vernacular was overseen by the

Preparatory Committee for the Unification of a National Language, which recruited various New Culture intellectuals to its committee including Zhou

Zhuoren (brother to Lu Xun), Lin Yutang, Yuen Ren Chao (Yang Buwei’s husband), and of course, Hu Shih. In 1943, Mao Zedong would tie the New

Culture and May Fourth movements to the Chinese Communists’ struggle against the Japanese invasion and Western imperialism (McDougall 9; 57-8).

Hu Shih historicised these movements for an anglophone readership.

For instance, in a 1922 article for the Beijing-based English-language periodical, The Chinese Social and Political Science Review, Hu Shih likens the vernacular turn in modern Chinese literature to the earlier turns in Europe from Latin to various national vernaculars. His examples include the Italian adoption of the Tuscan dialect, as exemplified by the works of Dante,

Petrarch, and Boccaccio from around the fourteenth century; the French adoption of the Parisian dialect by the Pléiade in poetry, and Rabelais and

Montaigne in prose during the mid-sixteenth-century; and the English adoption of the Midland dialect as the national standard, as exemplified by

Chaucer’s poetry and Wycliff’s translation of the Bible in the late-fourteenth- century (“The Literary Revolution in China” 7-8). However, Hu Shih is quick to disabuse readers of the notion that the New Culture and May Fourth

54 movements are belated and derivative forms of European vernacularisation.

He explains that the vernacularisation of Chinese literature is an ongoing historical process which dates back to at least the second century (8), and that prior to the twentieth century, there already exists an enormous body of vernacular literature which is “more extensive and varied than any modern

European language ever possessed at the time of its establishment as a national language” (10). Hu Shih would continue to serve as both figurehead for, and historian of, May Fourth literature for an anglophone audience worldwide. This article was reprinted later that year in the London-based periodical, China Today Through Chinese Eyes, and in 1933, he delivered the

Haskell Lectures on the Chinese literary revolution at the University of

Chicago, which were subsequently published under the title The Chinese

Renaissance (1933) with both the University of Chicago Press and the

Cambridge University Press.

Taking my cue from Said, my account of Hu Shih’s native informancy locates the hand of U.S. imperialism in the intellectual history of modern

China, which is exemplified by the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. However, I also trace how Hu Shih contributed extensively to the development and conception of Chinese modernity on its own terms, and also to Western knowledge about the history, languages, and literature of Chinese modernity.

In some of his work, Hu Shih is “guilty” of mapping Chinese intellectual history onto the familiar terrain of Western philology and literary studies for the benefit of the literati trained in the West, but his nuanced comparisons can hardly be described as the acts of a modern Oriental who “participates in [his] own Orientalizing” (Said 325).

55 The Tyrannies and Freedoms of Writing in English

The roles Hu Shih played as a May Fourth intellectual and a native informant for the U.S. are characterised by agency. This is not always the case for the women writers who turned to English. The story of Nieh Hualing’s anglophonic turn, and her subsequent migration to the U.S., offers a complementary tale of how Chinese migrant writers largely complied with the hegemonic rise of English as a global lingua franca, even as they expanded the terrain of global anglophone literature in myriad ways. Her career speaks to the tyrannies and freedoms of writing in English.

Nieh was born in Hubei, China, in 1926. She was ten when passing

Communist troops executed her father for working as an administrative chief in Guizhou under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government (Nieh, “An

Interview” 11). The memory of this incident prompted the family to leave mainland China for Taiwan after the Communist takeover in 1949 (11). Just the year before, Nieh had acquired a degree in English from Nanjing’s

National Central University; in Taiwan, she served as literary editor for the magazine Free China Fortnightly over eleven years, during which she corresponded with Hu Shih among other leading intellectuals (10). In 1960, the magazine was shut down and four members were arrested as part of the

Nationalist government’s suppression of political discourse and dissent (12).

For the next four years, Nieh taught Creative Writing and Modern Literature at

Taiwan University and Donghai University. She also began working in

English by translating a selection of her own short stories and those by other

Chinese women. These translations were published with the Heritage Press in

Taipei in 1962 under the titles The Purse and Eight Stories by Chinese

56 Women. The Heritage Press was in fact, set up by the same Richard McCarthy who recruited Eileen Chang to USIS (Han Cheung par. 12). The Quemoy

Straits Crisis of 1958 prompted McCarthy’s relocation from Hong Kong to

Taipei, due to the U.S.’s strategic interests in the offshore islands at the centre of this conflict (McCarthy, Interview n. pag.). The Heritage Press translated and published eight modern Taiwanese novels and anthologies during the sixties (Han Cheung par. 12). McCarthy describes Nieh as “our principal editor for this book translation program” (McCarthy, Interview n. pag.).

In 1963, Nieh would meet her future husband, the scholar Paul Engle, at a dinner banquet held at the U.S. embassy (Y. Liu 611). Engle knew

McCarthy; in fact, the former was connected to various U.S. organisations that ran intelligence and diplomatic operations in Asia, and had previously spoken to the Rockefeller Foundation to “create a program to lure foreign writers away from communist nations” (So, “Global MFA” 501). Engle’s 1963 trip to

Taiwan was part of an Asian tour funded by the Rockefeller Foundation intended for this purpose (Y. Liu 611). At Engle’s behest, Nieh went to the

University of Iowa as a Visiting Artist in 1964, driven in no small part by the increasingly repressive regime in Taiwan. This led to Nieh’s resettlement in

Iowa City and to her eventual marriage to Engle in 1971. In the intervening years, Engle relinquished his twenty-five-year role as the director of the Iowa

Writers’ Workshop (IWW). Under his tenure, the programme featured the likes of Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Berryman as instructors, and trained writers such as Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, and Raymond Carver

(“Paul Engle Day and Prize”). In 1967, Nieh and Engle co-founded the

International Writing Program (IWP) as the international counterpart to the

57 IWW. The IWP brings foreign writers to Iowa to work in their own language, while facilitating intercultural exchange and collaborative work. Significant participants include Ding Ling, who visited the IWP in 1981 at the age of seventy-five after surviving her consignment to manual labour by the Chinese

Communist regime (Nieh, “An Interview” 14). In 1976, both Nieh and Engle were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for their work with the IWP. Both the IWW and IWP are still running and have contributed to the designation of

Iowa City as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2008. Nieh is currently professor emerita at the University of Iowa.

As with Eileen Chang, Nieh’s turn to English in the sixties was directly funded by the U.S.’s Cold War cultural programmes and its recruitment of

Chinese intellectuals who served as native informants. According to

McCarthy, many of the USIS’s book projects in both Hong Kong and Taipei were meant to compete with “the outpouring of works in English translation, art work from the Foreign Languages Press in [Beijing]” (McCarthy n. pag.).

However, unlike the other core writers in this study, Nieh’s subsequent career in Iowa City developed to such an extent that she contributed significantly to the U.S.’s programmes of cultural imperialism and to the dominance of anglophone writing in the international literary scene. On the one hand, the

IWP appears to have connected writers who were divided by the Cold War’s divisive geopolitics. In a 1987 article published by World Literature Today,

Nieh and Engle celebrate the IWP as an institution of world literature that fosters international peace:

The International Writing Program brings such opposites

together. The East and West Germans came, drank beer

58 together, and joked about the “wall” between them when they

entered their separate apartments. The Chinese from Taiwan

and from mainland China ate together (common food, like a

common language, is a great uniter of people), listened to the

same cassettes (many from Hong Kong), kept their tempers

over their differences, were sad when they left, knowing they

could never meet again. Where else in the world could they live

in the same building save in Iowa City? (371)

Against this utopian vision, scholars have recently criticised Nieh, Engle, and the IWP for being perpetrators of U.S. imperialism. Richard Jean So argues that the IWP operated under the ideology of “modernization theory,” which takes the view that developed nations such as the U.S. should help

“modernise” developing nations in Asia that are decolonising and recovering from World War II (“Global MFA” 500). Part of this involves the IWP’s agenda of socialising eminent foreign writers to the U.S.’s values of modernity, who will then “spread the gospel of democracy and individual freedom” when they return to their home countries (500). Similarly, Yi-hung

Liu argues that the IWP perpetuated an ideology of a “firmly set binary opposition between communism and American freedom: the United States as the free self versus its unfree others” (614).

Liu further indicts Nieh and Engle for their contributing role to what I would call “compulsory anglophonism” in the production of world literature.

Already in 1961, Engle’s vision for the IWP was to foster a harmonious international order as connected through the charmingly diverse, but mutually understandable variations of World English(es):

59 The Workshops have heard the voices of poets and fiction

writers speaking English (and writing it) in a charming and

original way, which varied according to whether the speakers

were from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines,

Ireland, England, Canada, Sweden, India. (Engle, “The Writer

and the Place” 6; qtd. in Liu 618).

As Liu puts it, “Engle’s internationalist take of the ‘world,’ in this sense, was predicated on the monolingual rubric of English, under which literatures of the world were spoken and written by poets and fiction writers representing their own nations” (618; my emphasis). Later, Engle and Nieh would create a systematised practice of “co-translation” with the IWP, in which “a gifted young American from the Writers Workshop was put to work with a foreign writer. His job was the keep the English fluent, lively, idiomatic” (“Why

Translation in Iowa” 2). This prioritisation of an “idiomatic,” frictionless translation is the exact opposite of Yang and Chao’s invention of translingual terms and idioms to better express Chinese cooking, and precisely what Apter denounces when she cautions against methods of producing, translating, and circulating world literature that “[zoom] over the speed bumps of untranslatability” (Against World Literature 18). Rather than imagining an alternative to the global dominance of English, Engle and Nieh see this state of affairs as an irrefutable fact and even as an advantage: “In some countries,

English is the one way in which different regions may talk to each other. This is also a fact of history which writers in the late twentieth century accept and use” (“Why Translation in Iowa” 2). In these moments, Nieh and Engle’s work with the IWP anticipates what Arac calls “Anglo-globalism,” which

60 refers to how the U.S.-led global system of cultural and knowledge production operates primarily through English as a linguistic medium. Arac’s critique of anglo-globalism is directed specifically at Franco Moretti’s approach to world literature in “Conjectures” (2000). As Arac puts it, Moretti’s “distant reading” of twenty national literatures comprises work by eighteen scholars who wrote in English, such that “[t]he impressive diversity of surveying some twenty national literatures diminishes into little more than one single means by which they may be known” (40). What Arac calls the “unavowed imperialism of

English; the diminishment of language-based criticism in favour of a monolingual master scheme,” can be found in Nieh and Engle’s approach to producing and translating world literature some forty years before Moretti’s landmark paper (44).

It comes with no little irony that one of the most cited, book-length criticisms of English’s global dominance in recent years is written by an IWP alumnus, the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura. In The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2015), Mizumura offers an argument that skews more towards personal reflection than rigorous scholarship. Beginning with her experience of the IWP in 2003, Mizumura strategically uses this episode to describe the sheer diversity of cultures and languages that she came into contact with, which is undercut by an anxiety with how English is becoming a

“universal language” that “sits atop all other languages and circulates throughout the entire world” (40). Mizumura clarifies that the universality of

English is not due to how many native speakers it has, but rather to “how many people use it as their second language” (40). Implicit to her criticism is the manner with which programmes like the IWP tend to be located in

61 developed English-speaking countries, and which tend to impose the use of

English on its participants. For writers seeking support, funding, opportunities, or an international readership, such programmes are hard to ignore. Against the rise of English, Mizumura warns about the “fall” of other written languages, which she defines in a non-linguistic sense: as opposed to contemporary linguistics, which tends to think of language as an entity that

“evolves” rather than “die” or “fall” (unless no one speaks it), Mizumura refers to the “fall” of languages as the loss of vibrancy in its national literature (42-3). One could easily extend Mizumura’s nation-based focus to include minority communities and non-sovereign regions that possess their own languages and corresponding literatures. Her arguments are echoed by many others including Aamir Mufti in Forget English! (2016), who notes

English’s development into a “global literary vernacular,” and how the language becomes “an apparatus for the assimilation and domestication of diverse practices of writing (and life-worlds) on a world scale” (17). In other words, the rise of a more interconnected world literature, as facilitated through

English and programmes such as the IWP, tends also to dilute the heterogeneity of the various national and minority literatures that are included within its network. Nieh’s career thus demonstrates how the mid-century anglophonic turn to modern Chinese literature is part of English’s rise as a world language, and even as the language of a modern world literature.

Beyond the Transpacific: China, England, Singapore

The stories of Yang Buwei, Eileen Chang, and Nieh Hualing share many similarities: all three were drastically affected by the series of national crises

62 that afflicted China from the mid-thirties to late forties, and all were part of an intellectual exodus from mainland China to the U.S, with intermediary stops in

Hong Kong and Taipei for the latter two respectively. All three aligned themselves with an international literary network funded largely by U.S. investments in the Cultural Cold War, which produced knowledge about

China for anglophone readers. In these senses, these three writers fit easily into Richard Jean So’s description of a transpacific China-U.S. network.

However, the case of how Ling Shuhua turned to English complements and complicates So’s transpacific paradigm. The Beijing-born Ling was a painter and writer who established her May Fourth credentials with her short stories written from the twenties to thirties. Her mid-century turn to English was facilitated by her personal connections to London’s Bloomsbury Group. This story is best related through the myth surrounding one of Ling’s personal artifacts, a “friendship scroll” (Laurence 5). As with Yang’s cookbook, Ling’s scroll functions as the primary non-human actor through which I recover a network comprising Chinese and Bloomsbury intellectuals. The scroll comprises twenty-two items such as artworks, poems, calligraphy, and inscriptions, which were contributed by nineteen members of the literati from across the globe (“Multiple artists, ‘Handscroll from Ling Shuhua’”). Sasha

Su-ling Welland explains that the practice of keeping such scrolls as personal mementoes “had been common among the educated elite of China for centuries” (177). Welland’s A Thousand Miles of Dreams (2006) offers an extensive account of how Ling’s friendship scroll symbolises the exchanges between the Crescent Moon Society to which Ling belonged, and the

Bloomsbury Group. Both Welland’s study and Patricia Laurence’s Lily

63 Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes (2003) describe a series of China-U.K. connections from the twenties to the fifties, with conduits that shifted and grew throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

The myth of the scroll begins in 1925, when Ling purchased a blank scroll and handed it to the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo (Welland 175). Ling and

Xu were both part of the Crescent Moon Society, which was comprised largely of Euro-American educated literati who were heavily influenced by

Western modernism (Shih, Lure 188). Xu took the scroll with him on his trip across Europe, which began with the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Russia, then onward to Germany, Italy, France, and finally, England, where he solicited contributions from Bloomsbury Group members, including the philosopher

Dora Russell (the second wife of Bertrand Russell) and the artist Roger Fry

(Welland 176-7). After the scroll was returned to Ling, she continued accumulating contributions from the likes of the painter Xu Beihong and the writer Bing Xin. In 1935, Ling met Julian Bell while both were working at

Wuhan University, and showed him Fry’s watercolour painting on the scroll

(Welland 247). Bell was the son of the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell and nephew to Virginia Woolf; the family was closely acquainted with Fry. At

Wuhan University, Bell worked as a Professor of English and reported to

Ling’s husband, Chen Yuan, who was the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.

Ling and Bell began a working relationship and a notorious affair. They co- translated three of Ling’s short stories into English, which were published in

Shanghai’s T’ien Hsia magazine between 1936 to 1937. Their affair, however, ended messily, with Bell joining the Spanish Civil War as a driver for the

Spanish Medical Aid (258-65). After Bell’s death in the war in 1937, Ling

64 continued her correspondence with his mother and aunt, both of whom encouraged Ling to continue writing in English (276-7).

After the end of the Second World War, Ling and her daughter slowly made their way from Leshan, Sichuan to London against the threatening backdrop of the Chinese Civil War (Welland 301). Their journey took them east across both the Pacific and the Atlantic before meeting up with Chen

Yuan in London towards the end of 1946; there, Ling’s husband had just been appointed the Chinese representative for the newly-formed United Nations

Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (301-2). Woolf had committed suicide in 1941, but Ling met other members of the

Bloomsbury Group in person. At Vanessa Bell’s Charleston Farmhouse in

Sussex, a famous haunt of the Bloomsbury Group, Ling would unfurl the friendship scroll for Bell’s eyes (302-3). With help from members of the group—particularly Marjorie Strachey, who tutored Ling in English and edited her work—Ling produced a series of reminisences that appeared in the magazines The Spectator and Country Life (302-5). These short pieces were later revised for the memoir Ancient Melodies, which was published in 1953 by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press and introduced by Vita Sackville-West. The memoir saw a 1988 republication by the New York-based Universe Books. Its dustcover lists praise from the likes of French writer André Malraux and the

Times Literary Supplement, and reports that the work was read on the BBC by the actress Peggy Ashcroft. Unfortunately, Ancient Melodies marks Ling’s first and last book-length work in English; she did not complete a planned second novel about the Sino-Japanese War but focused on painting and writing radio scripts for the BBC’s Asia broadcast (Welland 310).

65 On my visit to Charleston Farmhouse in 2019, a learned tour guide brought me through the historic location previously owned by Clive and

Vanessa Bell, which hosted the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Roger

Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and

T.S. Eliot. In one of the bedrooms, my guide described how Julian Bell’s tragic death in Spain had a profound impact on his mother and aunt. His time in Wuhan was relegated to a passing mention, and Ling’s name never came up. Where is the friendship scroll? Why is it not mentioned? These are questions that cannot be answered at Charleston. My subsequent investigation led me away from the Bloomsbury Group to Nanyang University in

Singapore, which is yet another key node of the anglophone Chinese literary network. In the fifties to early sixties, Nanyang University served as a Third

World centre for Chinese migrant intellectuals, who gathered to build a bastion of sinocentric cultural production outside of Communist China. There,

Ling’s story converges with those of other Chinese writers who wrote in

English, including Lin Yutang, Han Suyin, and Eileen Chang. Their meeting in Singapore was, unfortunately, a brief and unfruitful one. As we shall see, the university became an ideological battleground between rival political factions including British colonial officials, the local pro-communist Chinese community, the anti-communist state, and the aforementioned cosmopolitan

Chinese writers. The pressures of the Cold War led eventually to the exodus of this lattermost group and to the decline of the university. This decline is entangled with the story of how English triumphed over Chinese among other languages—in Singapore and elsewhere in the decolonising Third World—as the lingua franca of choice, due to the geopolitical dynamics of the Cultural

66 Cold War. This leg of the scroll’s journey illuminates an extension of the anglophone Chinese literary network to Singapore, bringing us beyond the contexts of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S.

To begin with: Where is the scroll? In 1989, Ling left London for

Beijing and died just months after the Tiananmen Square Incident (Welland

321). Before she left, Ling gifted the scroll to the Canadian-born British scholar Michael Sullivan, who specialises in modern Chinese art history

(Sullivan 22). The two first met in Singapore between 1956 to 1960, during which Ling taught Chinese literature at Nanyang University (Sullivan 21;

Welland 309-10). Her time in Singapore overlapped with Sullivan’s appointment as a Lecturer of Art History at the University of Malaya between

1954 to 1960 (Sullivan 16-7). Both universities would eventually be merged in

1980 to form the National University of Singapore, at which this present thesis is written. Following Sullivan’s death in 2013, his collection of Chinese art and artifacts, which includes the friendship scroll, was bequeathed to the

Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford (see

“Handscroll”).

Ling and Sullivan’s meeting signals an extension of the anglophone

Chinese intellectual network into the “Nanyang” region in Southeast Asia.

Here, I conceive of mid-century Singapore not only as a British colony, but as the cultural capital of the region known as “Nanyang” or the “South Seas” to sinophone communities. According to Wang Gungwu, “Nanyang” was historically used as a commercial term to denote Chinese maritime trade routes in the South China Sea, which includes “key coastal strips of the mainland and most of the islands of Indonesia, British Borneo and the

67 Philippines” (Don’t Leave Home 298-9). As Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli puts it, the term “originally had China serving as the reference point [of the region], long before ‘Southeast Asia’ became commonly deployed during and after

World War II” (124). Between the 1920s to 1940s, the term would be taken up by Chinese scholars to designate sinocentric research on the namesake region

(124). One example of an institution dedicated to Nanyang studies is

Singapore’s South Seas Society, founded in 1940 by Chinese scholars from the mainland (Seah 88). This organisation is linked to the Nanyang Cultural and Educational Affairs Bureau at Jinan University, Shanghai, founded in

1927, a department which represents “the first systematic attempt by scholars in mainland China to understand the region now known as Southeast Asia, albeit from a China-centred perspective as China’s ‘Southern Ocean’” (88). In this sense, “Nanyang” was an epistemic project which fits into Shu-mei Shih’s conception of the Sinophone, but the term’s sinocentric orientation “ties the

Han in … Southeast Asia to the Chinese ‘homeland’” (“Sinophone” 713).

“Nanyang” is thus closely related to the Chinese state’s dissemination of the ideological term “overseas Chinese,” which implies a Chinese migrant’s unquestioned loyalty to the motherland, and which exports a sentiment of

“long-distance nationalism for the benefit of China” (710). In other words,

“Nanyang” contains ideological and geopolitical connotations that are distinct from “Southeast Asia.” Richard Jean So includes “Southeast Asia” within his delimitation of the Transpacific, even as he acknowledges the open-ended and interactional nature of the region (Transpacific XXXIII-IV). I add to his point by offering “Nanyang” as a specific articulation of a region that overlaps with

“Southeast Asia,” one anchored in a sinocentric set of political and cultural

68 beliefs that lost traction following the mid-century decolonisation of Southeast

Asia and the advent of the Cold War.

Consider in this light the five years Ling spent teaching Chinese literature at Nanyang University. The university signifies, from its very name and inception, a sinocentric institution dedicated to entrenching and promoting the prestige of Chinese language and culture, as conceived and funded by the local Chinese community in Malaya. The idea for the university was first mooted around 1950 and publicly announced by 1953, though classes only began in 1956 with an opening ceremony in 1958 (Hong and Huang 110). By one account, it is “the first Chinese university outside of China” (Ng Kim Eng

65). The myth behind the founding of the university is well-known among the

Chinese-educated populace in Singapore. The driving force behind the university was the rubber tycoon Tan Lark Sye. As the chairman of the

Hokkien Association in Singapore, he donated 500 acres of the association’s land towards the building of the university campus (Ng 77). In his own capacity, Tan donated five million Singapore dollars and served as the university’s chairman between 1950 to 1972 (69; 76). Tan would go on to solicit donations, which stirred up fervour from like-minded businessmen and the Chinese Malayan community at large. As Ng puts it, “[w]hat was really touching were people who were normally regarded as belonging to the lower social classes like trishaw riders, taxi drivers, and dance hostesses, all put aside their sweat, toil, and tear [sic] to contribute money for the University”

(71). This phenomenon establishes the spirit of the university as a scholarly institution by the people, for the people, which can be understood as a continuation of the May Fourth spirit in Nanyang during the mid-century

69 period. The university’s council led by Tan had lofty goals; they courted May

Fourth luminaries like Hu Shih and Mei Yiqi to serve as the university’s founding Chancellor, before settling on Lin Yutang (Ng 71). According to

Qian Suoqiao, Lin brought with him an entourage of distinguished family members and other Chinese intellectuals to Nanyang University when he arrived in 1954, as if he wished “to found an oasis for Chinese higher education on a Pacific island in Southeast Asia” (Modern Rebirth 344).

Likewise, in a series of speeches and writings between 1953 and 1956, Tan

Lark Sye articulates his vision of the university as a world class institution for

Chinese education. He conceives of the university as a way to “defend and promote” Chinese culture against its eradication in Malaya, such that “Chinese culture will continue to shine forever over Singapore, Malaya and even the whole of Southeast Asia” (Tan, “Collection” 147; 180-1). His end goal is to make Nanyang University “comparable with those established institutions in

Britain and United States” (148). Both Tan and Lin’s ambitions are for

Nanyang University to revitalise and disseminate Chinese language and culture in the South Seas, a project which I am calling the “Nanyang

Renaissance.”

Even though Nanyang University is conceived as a sinocentric institution, its role in the Nanyang Renaissance has implications for anglophone writing. The founding Chancellor Lin Yutang proclaimed in a meeting with the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce that “we expect our students to be bilingual in the sense that they command not only two languages—Chinese and English—but also know the contents of the Chinese and Western civilization” (“English without Tears” 1; qtd. in Tan Eng Leong

70 47-8). Lin’s understanding of bilingualism here seems similar to the mode of

“translingual modernity” which I am arguing for, one which is comparative, trans-cultural, and which resists both sinocentrism and anglocentrism (present thesis 40). His vision is echoed by Han Suyin, a China-born writer and doctor whom Lin first recruited as a Professor of English literature, but who ended up serving as the university physician instead. An anecdotal exchange between the two illustrates how the Nanyang Renaissance relates to anglophone writing, China-related or otherwise. In her autobiography My House has Two

Doors (1980), Han recalls that Lin

…asked me to be Professor of English Literature at Nanyang. I

shook my head. I did not know anything about English

literature. “But you write English,” he exclaimed. “Not English

literature.” I did not want to teach Dickens and Thackeray,

worthy though they might be. “I’d rather be the college health

physician” … I tried to explain my idea of literature; that we

must create an Asian type of literature; we needed something

other than nineteenth-century English writers … (90)

Han’s refusal to teach English literature contains two dimensions. First, Han is resisting co-optation by the institutionalised discipline of English literature in

British Singapore, one which takes the “English” in “English literature” to also mean “England.” Weihsin Gui’s recent article “Global Modernism in

Colonial Malayan and Singaporean Literature” (2017) offers some context by tracing the connections between a group of British and Malayan intellectuals who transmitted Euro-American classics and modernist writing to Malaya

71 from the thirties to the mid-century.13 The other dimension to Han’s refusal is her argument that “English literature” no longer belongs only to the English, but to Asia as well, and that this latter strain of contemporary Asian literature is what she wishes to teach and develop. Note that while Han begins by speaking of anglophone writing in Asia, she ends with the ambiguous formulation, “an Asian type of literature,” which makes no mention of specific languages or nationality. This ambiguity leaves open the possibility of a regional literature that is translingual and transcultural in nature. Han’s vision came to fruition between 1958 to 1961, when she taught a course at Nanyang

University called “Contemporary Asian Literature in the Context of

Emergence from Colonialism” (Han, “Plenary Lecture” 20). The syllabus includes works by the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Indian modernist

Mulk Raj Anand, and the Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo (20). To offer some perspective, Han’s course on what is now generally called “postcolonial literature” came just a few years after Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

(1952) and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955), and predated

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) by two decades. What she means by “an

Asian type of literature” appears to overlap with contemporary conceptions of

“postcolonial literature,” “world literature,” “modern Chinese literature,”

“sinophone literature,” and “global anglophone studies.” In sum, despite the

13 Take the example of the English literature syllabus at Raffles College, Singapore, for the school year of 1935-6; it includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, and lectures on contemporary English and American literature, alongside F.R. Leavis’s criticism (Gui 4). The man responsible for the syllabus is Ronald Bottrall, a Cornish poet who “was praised and compared to both T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound by Leavis himself in New Bearings in English Poetry” (4).

72 sinocentric beginnings to Nanyang University, some of its intellectuals were part of local and regional attempts at establishing the non-sinocentric study of

“Asian literature” as a recognised and valued discipline in the Third World. As

Han’s comments indicate, this project was set against the global dominance of

English literature in its classic form, as disseminated and maintained through

British colonialism, and here I add, U.S. imperialism.

Such nascent articulations of translingual modernity and an “Asian type of literature” would not be fully realised at Nanyang University. The subsequent history of the university is too convoluted and contentious to summarise in full, but essentially, it became an ideological battleground between the pro-Nationalist Lin Yutang and his entourage, the communist- sympathetic local Chinese community led by Tan Lark Sye, as well as the anti-communist People’s Action Party (PAP) which came into power between

1959 to 1965, a period in which Singapore gained independence from both the

U.K. and Malaysia. Hong and Huang’s “Language Fault Lines” (2008) provides a historical overview of the university’s fate. Major flashpoints include Lin’s highly publicised resignation in 1955 over disagreements with the management board (110), Tan’s resignation from the university council in

1963 (112)—this happened while the state was revoking his Singapore citizenship for alleged subversive activities (“Tan quits university post” 8)— the PAP government’s refusals to recognise the university’s degrees, student protests in 1965 against the perceived “anglicisation” of the university, and the government’s retaliation with the “large-scale arrest, detention and expulsion of students,” among other crises (Hong and Huang 111-32). Hong and Huang explain that these developments were prompted by ideological differences

73 between the Chinese-educated community in Singapore, which founded the university based on a sinocentric Nanyang spirit, and the English-educated

PAP leadership, which was wary of the former’s “ethnic-based Nanyang approach to Malayanisation” (125-6). These differences, amplified by “the polarised Cold War environment,” would culminate in Nanyang University’s merger with the University of Singapore in 1980 (126; 110).

In contrast to Hong and Huang’s relatively neutral stance, Tan Kok

Chiang’s My Nantah Story: The Rise and Demise of the People’s University

(2017) offers a polemical narrativisation of Nanyang University’s history.

(“Nantah” is the truncated name for “Nanyang University” in Chinese.) Tan was an undergraduate at the university between 1956 to 1959, and returned in

1973 as a Visiting Associate Professor (61). He argues that “[i]n the various state-endorsed narratives, Nantah has been painted as second-rate, communal, and communist-inspired, and as such, was an entity whose life had to be ended” (56). Such narratives began with the British elites in Singapore; figures such as Sydney Caine, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya, publicly opposed the founding of Nanyang University on account of its sinocentric and ethnically divisive ideals (261-2). To Tan, Caine’s calls for a

“‘unified Malayan education system’ was nothing more than [a call for] a colonial education system that had English as the only medium of instruction”

(263), which “could only imagine a Malayan unity built on the under- development of the vernacular languages and culture” (263). Tan speculates that such British concerns surrounding Sino-chauvinism really revolved around fears of the Chinese-Malayan communist threat (281). Following this,

Tan claims that the pro-Nationalist and U.S.-based Lin Yutang declared his

74 plans to “make the university a centre of anti-communism in Southeast Asia”

(336). Indeed, a TIME magazine profile of Lin from 1954 portrays him thus:

“As the first chancellor of Singapore’s new Nanyang (South Seas) University, he will be in a position to strike a blow at Red China’s campaign for the minds of Asia’s non-Communist students” (“Academic Frontier” 79; qtd. in Qian,

Modern Rebirth 345-6). According to Qian, the Chinese-language papers in

Singapore translated and magnified this profile before Lin even set foot in

Singapore, which effectively cast him as a Western stooge and turned public opinion against him in decolonising Singapore (348). Tan then describes the entanglements between Nanyang University and the PAP government. The spectre of communism loomed large throughout this period, peaking with the state revoking Tan Lark Sye’s citizenship in 1963 for being a suspected communist (663-70). In this light, Tan Kok Chiang argues that the 1980

“merger” of Nanyang University with the University of Singapore was really a closure, due in part to an unsupportive state:

[Nanyang University] stood at the apex of the Chinese-medium

education system in Singapore. Its closing contributed to the

extinction of a system that had been built up over more than a

century; one that even powerful colonial forces had failed to

undermine. In the years that followed, it became common to

hear complaints about the decline of the language of the

island’s largest ethnic group to a “bazaar language” and the

emergence of a “chop suey culture”. It is no stretch of

imagination to say that the disappearance of the Chinese-

medium schools was a major contributing factor to these

75 developments. One could also argue that the closing of Nantah

curtailed the Chinese community’s role in nation-building. (54-

5; my emphases)

Tan thus yokes the demise of Nanyang University to the decline of Chinese culture and the Chinese language in Singapore at large, and the corresponding rise of English as a national lingua franca.

My brief account of Nanyang University’s institutional history is not meant to be comprehensive or to weigh in on conflicting views. Rather, I am stressing that the university was meant to galvanise a Nanyang Renaissance, and that this project was short-lived, due to a hostile political climate generated by the transition from British colonialism to Singapore’s independence in the midst of the Cold War. The university was built on the ambitions and efforts of a local Chinese community that was plugged into a global network of Chinese literati and elites, but as Tan Kok Chiang suggests above, its goals of preserving and amplifying the prestige of Chinese language, literature, and culture in the South Seas would ultimately fail. The case of Nanyang University, which marks the start and end of Chinese- medium tertiary education in Singapore, offers yet another case study towards what Minae Mizumura has called The Fall of Language in the Age of English.

Given this context, Ling and Sullivan’s meeting in Singapore was not purely happenstance, but part of a mid-century trend where the city functioned momentarily as a Third World go-between for Second World Chinese intellectuals and First World scholars interested in Asia. During his stint at the

University of Malaya, Sullivan also served as a founding curator of its Art

Museum, which was “the first museum of art in Singapore and Malaya”

76 (Sabapathy 67). The museum’s first exhibition in 1959 includes Ling’s ink on silk painting, “View of Penang” (University of Malaya Art Museum 11; reprinted in Sabapathy 131). Again, this connection between Ling and

Sullivan suggests that both were part of an emergent attempt to establish the production, conservation, and study of Chinese art in Nanyang. Although the university did survive until 1980, all the intellectuals whom I associate with translingual and transcultural modernity left the institution soon after its establishment; Lin was ousted in 1955, whereas Ling, Sullivan, and Han left by 1960. Their exits suggest that Nanyang University was an abortive attempt at instituting an autonomous, cosmopolitan, and vibrant Third World nexus for

Nanyang Renaissance. This failure was undoubtedly prompted by the political polarisations caused by the Cold War. As the university’s institutional history suggests, its founding was prompted by a sinocentric reaction against developments in British Malaya, and it was subsequently treated with suspicion by the local anti-communist government.

The Cold War pressures acting on Nanyang University can be also detected elsewhere in its archives. In a surprising turn, it is again at Nanyang

University that Ling’s story meets with Eileen Chang’s, albeit in an oblique way. My university library holds a first edition copy of Eileen Chang’s The

Rice-Sprout Song. Two stamps on its inner pages indicate that the book was first acquired by Nanyang University in 1959, and “With the Compliments of

THE ASIA FOUNDATION.” This is the same foundation that funded Zhang

Guoxin’s projects in Hong Kong, and which circulated anti-communist texts in Asia to roll back Communist influence (present thesis 21; 44-5). According to Shuang Shen, the foundation’s anti-communist activities in Singapore

77 between 1951 to 1961 received little interference from the local authorities, and its successes were well taken by the Acting U.S. Consul General, Robert

Donhauser (“Empire” 595). The startling convergences between my accounts of Ling Shuhua, Han Suyin, Eileen Chang, and Lin Yutang at Nanyang

University, suggest that the seemingly messy strands of the mid-century

Chinese intellectual migration, and the anglophonic turn to their literary production, were in fact phenomena that were determined by the overriding geopolitical dynamics of the Cultural Cold War.

Ling’s interlude at Nanyang University and her encounter with

Sullivan ultimately led to the scroll’s afterlife in the Ashmolean; that she and the scroll are largely forgotten today—in both the U.K. and Singapore— speaks to a broader neglect of the intertwined histories of Chinese and English literary production, circulation, and reception. As Richard Jean So puts it, the mid-century literary network which stretched from China across the

Transpacific—and for me, beyond it—remains largely understudied for two primary reasons:

The first is conceptual. We do not have a good analytical model

for understanding forms of East-West cultural relations that

operate through reciprocal interaction rather than hegemony.

We have countless studies of Western Orientalism toward

China: the way that the West creates a fantasy representation of

“China” that serves to reinforce the belief that the two are

essentially different and exist in a binary that denigrates the

non-West. And we have countless studies of the Chinese

reception of Euro-American culture from the late Qing to the

78 Republican period. Here, China historians tell us, the

absorption of Western concepts such as “democracy” was

highly ambivalent and fraught. But not entirely unlike the

West’s imagin[ation of] China, “America” was an abstract idea,

an unwieldy signifier that had to be managed. In both cases,

“America” and “China” are merely ideas for the other, not

joined by a reciprocal space of interaction.

The second obstacle relates to the afterlife of this

history. This history is one of failure. With the onset of the

Cold War, this community quickly fell apart, leaving virtually

no traces. Retracing the threads that held this group together is

difficult. Their collaborations were ephemeral, and the archive

that documents their collaborations is scattered across three

continents. Moreover, we typically don’t think of these writers

as a community. Each belongs to a discrete identity category,

such as American or Chinese, and political affiliation, such as

Left or liberal. We lack a vocabulary to think about these

categories together. Political developments after the Second

World War only made things harder. Nineteenth-century

visions of America and China as antagonistic civilizations grew

reified in the Cold War. (Transpacific XVI-XVII)

Building on these insights, I find Latour’s Actor-Network Theory useful for mapping the reciprocal, if transient, connections between the writers in this network. But rather than presupposing the “Transpacific” as my object of study, I surrender more fully to what Latour and Felski have called the

79 “agency” of human and non-human actors in my recovery of the anglophone

Chinese literary network. As a chapter title in Latour’s Reassembling the

Social puts it, “Objects too Have Agency” (63), a point which Felski repeats when she writes that an object’s agency “derives not from its refusal of the world but from its many ties to the world” (Limits 154). My study of the winding itineraries of both Ling and the friendship scroll leads me equally to the anglocentric context of the Bloomsbury Group, and the sinocentric context of the Nanyang Renaissance, both of which extend Richard Jean So’s U.S.- inclined definition of the Transpacific.

Beside/s Modernism

This introduction has sketched out a historical phenomenon which I call the anglophonic turn to modern Chinese literature. In the process, I delimited a corpus of anglophone Chinese writing that straddles the disciplinary boundary between English and Chinese literary studies. From this point, the history of the anglophonic turn will emerge time and again as a recurring theme, but I now turn my attention to how this corpus of writing can be brought to bear on the New Modernist Studies. As Ling’s connections to the Bloomsbury Group indicates, the works of anglophone Chinese writing were closer at hand to the history of anglophone modernism than one might think. On a broader scale, the anglophonic turn happened alongside the systemisation of anglophone modernism as a field of study. Key examples include Hugh Kenner’s numerous studies of modernism in the 1950s, Harry Levin’s “What was

Modernism?” (1960), Lionel Trilling’s Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature

80 and Learning (1965), and Irving Howe’s Literary Modernism (1967).14 The fervour for everything modernist in the anglophone world spilled over into

Chinese-language scholarship and cultural production as well. Even in the twenties, Western-educated Chinese writers were already reading and translating anglophone modernists into Chinese (Shih, Lure 188). In the thirties, the English word “modern” was transliterated as “modeng” in

Shanghai and popularised in literary journals, thus entering the Chinese cultural consciousness along with “the whole gamut of Western literary modernism” (Leo Lee xiv). After a period of upheaval stretching from the

Second Sino-Japanese War to the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958, Chinese interest in anglophone modernism was revived in Taipei with the founding of the literary magazine, Modern Literature, in 1960 at National Taiwan

University. The periodical published translations of James Joyce, Virginia

Woolf, William Faulkner, and D.H. Lawrence (Y. Chang 4). The growing influence of anglophone modernism filtered through the Chinese-English international literary network and led some of the core writers in this study to translate its associated writers. For instance, Chang translated Ernest

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in 1954 under the pseudonym Fan

Siping (Shan 109, 123)—recall that Hemingway’s name looms large in the history of Left Bank modernism—whereas Nieh translated the likes of Henry

James, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nieh, “An Interview” 14).

Some critics have exploited such historical convergences to argue that

Chang and Nieh are not just “modern” but “modernist” writers, a claim that

14 Examples of Kenner’s studies include The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951), Wyndham Lewis (1954), Dublin’s Joyce (1956), and The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (1959).

81 connects their styles to the high modernist works of the interwar period. In contrast, the “amateur” cookbook writer Yang has been tellingly left out of such narratives and really, out of literary criticism at large. For instance, So refers to Nieh as one of many Taiwanese “modernist-liberal intellectuals …

[who] launched a literary modernist movement in the 1950s and early 1960s,” one which “clearly drew from Western models, valorizing concepts such as the autonomy of the artist, the innate self-referentiality of language, and the rejection of traditional modes and hierarchies of writing” (“Global MFA”

508). He further speculates that “Nieh discerned in modernism’s tropes of alienation a style commensurable with her own condition of geographical and psychological displacement” (508). So makes similar claims about Chang, who is apparently “widely regarded as one of the best Chinese modernists of the twentieth century” (“Literary Information Warfare” 720). He might have been inspired by Karen S. Kingsbury, who refers to Chang’s short story

“Sealed Off” as a “modernist slice-of-life anti romance” (xii). Kingsbury’s description stuck; in a 2018 article, Eric Sandberg builds on this claim to consider the place of romance as a neglected genre in the history of modernism and modernist studies.

The imperialising tendencies of the New Modernist Studies can be detected in such approaches. Critics search for more of the same “modernist style” in non-Western literature, while perpetuating tropes (“alienation” and

“displacement”) and conceptions of literary merit (“autonomy of the artist” and “self-referentiality of language”) that are derived from studies of high modernism. In the process, the aspects of anglophone Chinese writing that present alternatives or challenges to high modernist styles are downplayed or

82 skipped over. Similar concerns have been raised by Paul K. Saint Amour in his 2018 survey of the New Modernist Studies, in which he cautions that

“[e]ven as scholars of modernism seek, with good reason, to make the field more inclusive, we need to be vigilant lest inclusivity become a byword for instrumentalizing the work or presence of others” (453). As he puts it, inclusive models of modernist scholarship have to reconcile the tension between “a sense of responsibility to reach beyond what historically has been a small, Eurocentric, predominantly white male canon … [and] an entitlement to claim expertise in anything, anywhere, at any time” (454).

In response to this problematic, this study operates via the conceptual metaphor “beside/s” modernism. When I say “conceptual metaphor,” I am drawing from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By

(1980), which claims that human cognition is fundamentally governed by basic metaphors; in their words, “most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured” (56). One class of such metaphors are

“orientational metaphors,” which “have to do with spatial orientation: UP-

DOWN, FRONT-BACK, IN-OUT, ON-OFF, DEEP-SHALLOW,

CENTRAL-PERIPHERAL” (14). In this thesis, I adopt “beside/s” as a conceptual metaphor which re-spatialises anglophone Chinese writing in terms of its proximities to modernism—hence “beside”—while insisting on its distinctions, dislocations, and divergences from modernism—hence “besides.”

I argue that this mode of prepositional thinking avoids the totalising risks of reading for modernism, the dissatisfactions of reading something provisionally as modernist, or the antagonism of reading against modernism; it also sidesteps questions of “who/what came first?” that bedevil practices of reading

83 before or after modernism. My method of positioning anglophone Chinese writing beside/s modernism is perhaps what Saint-Amour calls a “weak theoretical” move that acknowledges (but ultimately disrupts) strong conceptions of modernism (442). In saying this, I take up David James and

Urmila Seshagiri’s call to return to denotative uses of “modernism” as “a moment as well as a movement … in historically conditioned and culturally specific clusters of artistic achievements between the late nineteenth and mid- twentieth centuries” (88). In the subfield of anglophone modernism, such identifiable clusters include London’s Bloomsbury Group or the American expatriates in Paris. By focusing on anglophone Chinese writing’s adjacencies rather than its identity with modernism, I redirect critical energies from establishing the former’s conformity with the latter’s aesthetic paradigm, to exploring its divergences and coeval development alongside modernism.

In the chapters which follow, “beside/s” fires at many levels of analysis, guiding my investigation of how these four writers were beside/s the people, places, presses, and pages associated with anglophone modernism, whether in terms of location, socio-political commitments, or style. But above all, genre emerges as one predominant basis of comparison. To reiterate, the core women in my study experimented with a wide variety of prose genres in

English, ranging from essays and short stories to memoirs, autobiography, novellas, commissioned novels, and cookbooks. Borrowing from Saint-

Amour’s weak-strong binary, I argue that this corpus demands more critical attention to “weaker” prose genres against the “strength” of the full-length novel in classic studies of modernism and modern literature—think for instance of Georg Lukács’s comparison of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to

84 Émile Zola’s Nana which opens his essay “Narrate or Describe?” (1936), or

Erich Auerbach’s comparison of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in Mimesis (1953). More recently,

Michael Denning’s “The Novelists’ International” (2006) offers a transnational history of the leftist novelists associated with the international communist movement, while tracing the shift from proletarian literature to the mid-century emergence of the magical realist novel in the Caribbean and

Central America (704-6; 723). The full-length autotelic novel dominates as a strong genre in these studies, each of which in turn offer a strong account of literary history. In contrast, the prose forms I study should not be conceived as formative exercises leading up to an autotelic novel; rather, their particularities, be it the limited perspective and subjectivity of life writing, the concision of the short story or the essay, the interstitial length of the novella, or the suspicious moralisms of the state-commissioned novel, should be taken seriously on their own terms.

While I am engaging primarily with Chinese women’s writing, I have yet to address the feminist concerns that motivate my women-centred focus. In chapter one, I deploy “beside/s” with an overtly feminist slant, to explicate and demonstrate a method of reading “beside/s men, between women” that animates my thesis. This method is inspired by Jessica Berman’s call for a reconsideration of modernism “through a lens that is both feminist and transnational” (10). I illustrate my method primarily through examining the dis/connections between Yang Buwei’s writerly and medical career, and that of Dora Black, a feminist reformer and writer who was connected to the

Bloomsbury Group via her marriage to Bertrand Russell. Both women met in

85 Beijing during Russell’s famous visit to China in 1920 to 1921. My research uncovers Yang and Black’s affinities, while acknowledging their disconnections. Both were birth control reformers in China and England respectively, and both believed in the importance of women’s self-help books in driving women’s emancipation. However, Yang’s medical work was not in fact inspired by Black or Bloomsbury modernism, but by the American nurse and birth control pioneer, Margaret Sanger. Through tracing these connections among others, I connect Yang to an international network of feminist activists in the West that might be described as “transnational feminism.” Here, my nomination of Yang as a “Chinese feminist” is grounded by her interpersonal contact with, and the commitment to birth control reform that she shares with,

Western (modernist) feminists. This chapter thus fleshes out the feminist methodological and contextual frames that inform my approach.

The remaining chapters offer three case studies that demonstrate the affordances of, or problems with, placing Chinese women writers beside/s modernism. Chapter two considers how Yang’s autobiography—which so vividly captures the promises and disappointments of Chinese modernity and its encounters with the West—is itself an exemplar of a genre that was partly influenced by Bloomsbury modernism, and which developed contemporaneously with the historical novels written by modernist women.15

In this chapter, I historicise the emergence of Chinese women’s life writing between the 1910s to 1950s, which was driven by the likes of Hu Shih and Xie

Bingying from within China, and Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey from

15 See Diana Wallace’s The Woman’s Historical Novel (2005), which contains chapters on interwar Britain.

86 without. I then argue that Yang’s autobiography epitomises an aesthetics of

“modest history” that characterise this feminine subgenre. Here, “modest” is my shorthand for four dimensions of Yang’s style: a sense of simplicity in expression, a sense of humility in the author’s self-portrayal, a sense of the non-epic in her narration of history, and finally, a sense of literary modesty, because her writing does not typically draw attention to its own literariness.

The point of reading Yang’s autobiography as literature today is to recover both a neglected woman writer and a neglected genre beside/s modernism.

Chapter three critiques the terms of Ling Shuhua’s inclusion within the

NMS, which began with the discovery and public airing of Ling’s affair with

Julian Bell in the late nineties. The novelist Hong Ying published a fictionalised account of their relationship in 1999, which made international headlines for its sensational content and for prompting a lawsuit and a book ban in China. Ling’s affair also opens Patricia Laurence’s monograph, Lily

Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes (2003), and it was given extensive treatment in Sasha

Welland’s dual biography of Ling and her sister, A Thousand Miles of Dreams

(2007). While these two studies among others have convincingly and rightly placed Ling beside the Bloomsbury Group, they also risk subsuming the significance of Ling’s works within modernism’s history and aesthetics. I contend that more emphasis needs to be put on Ling’s divergences from modernism. Through reading four of her short stories, two of which she co- translated into English with Bell, I allow Ling’s literary voice to intervene in contemporary appraisals of her legacy and their problematic temporalising practices. By drawing out the influence of the New Culture movement on

Ling’s work, while attending to the resonances and dissonances between

87 modernist literature and her stories, this chapter seeks to reinstate Ling within a temporality of her own.

Yang and Ling were part of the May Fourth generation of avant-garde intellectuals who rubbed shoulders with high modernists. Contrastively, Eileen

Chang belongs to the generation after, and she was relatively distant from modernist networks. Yet, she has, in recent years, been conferred the dubious honour of being a “modernist,” with the term signifying a bewildering array of meanings. Many critics drop the term without explanation, some use it to mean that Chang was reacting critically to urban modernity in Shanghai and

Hong Kong, some attempt to connect her themes and style to works of high modernism, and a select few use it to mean that Chang was directly influenced by recognisable high modernists. In chapter four, I survey these invocations of

Chang’s “modernism” to track the expanding frontiers of the NMS, and I consequently argue that when applied to Chang’s case, the term “modernist” is too imprecise to be of much use. Further, I propose that Chang’s recruitment into the NMS is part of a larger pattern, where migrant Chinese writers are classified as “modernists” to signal their anti-communist politics and aesthetics. This tendency is prompted by a binaristic understanding of modernism versus realism that is a holdover from the Cold War era, which pits one image of modernism, as allied to the First World, against the social(ist) realisms of the Second. In this context, I suggest that Chang’s aesthetics is better understood as an experimental strain of realism that falls somewhere besides and between received understandings of modernist and social(ist) realist poetics. The exceptional nature of her style offers a way out

88 of the modernist-realist divide, which has hampered a fuller appreciation of the diversity of twentieth-century literature.

To this point, I have drawn from scholarship on world literature without addressing the field directly. In the conclusion, I position anglophone

Chinese writing as a strain of world literature with itineraries that intersect with those of modernism. In Franco Moretti’s idiom, I am studying where the

“tree” of modern Chinese literature divaricates into branches of anglophone migrant women’s writing, and how these branches meet up with the “wave” of anglophone modernism sweeping the globe (cf. Moretti 67). By drawing out the themes that unify my preceding chapters, my conclusion demonstrates how my study builds on and revises prevailing models of world literature, while working towards a translingual and transnational conception of literary modernity.

89

90 Chapter One

Beside/s Men, Between Women

My introduction described a mid-century trend that saw increasing numbers of

Chinese writers working in English. This phenomenon produced a corpus of translated and original anglophone Chinese writing that broadens contemporary conceptions of modern literature in English. My recovery of the literary network that facilitated this “anglophonic turn” focuses on Chinese women, because the men commonly associated with this phenomenon (such as

Lao She and Lin Yutang) have received far more critical attention.16 My gynocentric framing implicates women’s writing within the male-dominated canon of modern Chinese literature, in English or otherwise. I then suggested that these women’s efforts offer fresh possibilities for comparative work on modern Chinese literature and anglophone modernism.

These gynocentric and comparative dimensions to my research are inspired by a lineage of modernist recovery work dating back to at least 1986.

That year, Fredric Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of

Multinational Capitalism” uses the rhetoric of recovery work to position Lu

Xun as “China’s greatest writer … whose neglect in western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuses based on ignorance can rectify” (“Third-

16 Numerous studies of Lao She and Lin Yutang have been published in the past decade. For example, Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London (2012) traces the titular writer’s experience in London at the height of modernism between 1924 to 1929. Qian Suoqiao’s monographs, Liberal Cosmopolitan: Lin Yutang and Middling Chinese Modernity (2011) and Lin Yutang and China’s Search for a Modern Rebirth (2017), detail Lin’s contribution to intercultural exchange between China and the U.S. In Transpacific Community (2016), Richard Jean So dedicates a chapter each to both writers. His chapter on Lin’s invention of a Chinese typewriter builds on Jing Tsu’s chapter on the same topic in Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (2011).

91 World Literature” 69). Following Aijaz Ahmad’s well-known rebuttal,

Jameson explains that his over-extended thesis—that all third-world texts “are to be read as” national allegories (69)—was meant to “stress the loss of certain literary functions and intellectual commitments in the contemporary American scene,” especially “the political role of the cultural intellectual” (“A Brief

Response” 26). 17 What can be recuperated from Jameson’s original essay is his point that May Fourth literature offers modes of politically committed writing that are quite unlike the “satisfactions of Proust or Joyce” (“Third-

World Literature” 65). 1986 also saw Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left

Bank, which recovered the contributions of women such as Kay Boyle, Nancy

Cunard, Janet Flanner, and Jean Rhys to the history and aesthetics of high modernism. Since then, both Jameson’s and Benstock’s approaches to modernist recovery work—one focused on the non-West, the other on Western women—have undergone a history of cross-pollination. Jessica Berman offers a recent survey of this history in “Practicing transnational feminist recovery today” (2018), which functions also as a manifesto for new directions and renewed commitments in feminist modernist recovery work. Berman calls for scholars to

advance recovery work within an expanded, transnational

frame of reference without either resurrecting an essentialist

view of the Western, white, straight, able “woman writer,” or

allowing the role of gender and gender bias to be seen as a

17 See Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987).

92 secondary or auxiliary category of analysis within global

modernist studies. (10)

Her own projects include bringing back into print Iqbalunnisa Hussain’s

Purdah and Polygamy (1944), which is “[l]ikely the first full-length novel written by a Muslim woman in English and one of the most striking novels of the late colonial period” (15).

Taking my cue from Berman, this chapter reads Yang Buwei’s

Autobiography of a Chinese Woman (1947), which was first written in

Chinese and subsequently Put into English by her Husband Yuenren Chao as her subtitle indicates. The text and its co-writers are pioneers in many ways.

The work is one of the earliest book-length autobiographies in English associated with prominent figures from the May Fourth generation. As with their peers, the couple led various programmes of socio-cultural reforms from the 1910s to 1930s. These decades saw a tumultuous period of revolution, wars, rebuilding, and rapid modernisation, following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the First World War, and the May Fourth Movement of 1919.

During the early years of the twentieth century, Yang was an anti-Qing revolutionary with Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui, a secret society which was the predecessor to the Kuomingtang. After the 1911 revolution, Yang, who was only twenty-two, served briefly as the principal of a women’s school that reskilled female revolutionaries who were “no longer needed to fight” (B.Y.

Chao, Autobiography 128). Following the outbreak of the Second Revolution in 1913, she fled to Japan and obtained a medical degree from Tokyo

Women’s Medical College (129-49). Around 1920, she returned to Beijing and co-founded a hospital with a friend. By her reckoning, they were “among

93 the earliest, if not the earliest, non-missionary women doctors to set up practice on [their] own” (158-9). Yang then worked as a gynaecologist and birth control advocate for a number of years. In 1924, she published a Chinese translation of Margaret Sanger’s women’s health manual, What Every Girl

Should Know (210). The following year, Yang opened what was possibly the first birth control clinic in China (228). After her migration to the U.S.—a move prompted by the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War—Yang published How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945). It was probably the first full-length Chinese-American cookbook in English, and it is now widely credited for coining the terms “stir fry” and “potsticker” (Hayford 67-73). The cookbook’s critical and commercial success would inspire her to publish an autobiography (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography ix).

Today, Yang’s legacy is largely forgotten, whereas her husband’s name routinely crops up in scholarship on modern China. For example, Yurou

Zhong’s Chinese Grammatology (2019) devotes a full chapter to Yuen Ren

Chao’s roles as the “father of modern Chinese linguistics,” as an originator of the “Chinese script revolution” in 1916, and as “the creator of a Chinese alphabet, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the crown jewel of the [Chinese romanization] movement” (3; 27; 32). In the twenties, he served on the Preparatory

Committee for the Unification of the National Language, the state entity responsible for standardising a national lingua franca (37). During his tenure,

Chao recorded a series of phonographs to demonstrate the pronunciation of two versions of the lingua franca (37-41).

Both wife and husband were also connected to modernist intellectuals.

Yang’s autobiography includes a photograph from 1921, which depicts the

94 couple hosting a roof garden party at their residence in Beijing. In attendance were the Bloomsbury philosopher Bertrand Russell and the social activist

Dora Black.

Fig. 1 “A Roof Garden Party in Peiping, with Bertrand Russell, Dora Black, and E. S. Bennett”; published as captioned in Buwei Yang Chao, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman: Put into English by her Husband Yuenren Chao, John Day Company, 1947, pic. 15; reproduced here courtesy of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library.

This image implies multiple stories about transnational modernities and the exchanges between China and the West during the interwar period. As Susan

Stanford Friedman puts it, “[a]n image can suggest a back story, indeed many possible back stories” (“Traveling Tropes” 7). Further, each “implied story” evoked by an image can also suggest many other possible back stories, as well as “a connection with the world that produces or reads the texts” (9). In what follows, I offer three ways of reading the photograph to draw out its implied stories. First, I adopt a historical-biographical approach to reconstruct the immediate circumstances surrounding the photograph, which involved Russell and Black’s visit to China and their interactions with the Chaos. Russell was

95 an English philosopher whose life and work have been associated with the likes of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger

Fry among other members of the Bloomsbury Group.18 Dora Black was his second wife, best known for co-organising the 1929 World League for Sex

Reform Congress with the Australian gynaecologist Norman Haire, and for her feminist treatises such as Hypatia (1925) and The Right to be Happy

(1927).19 The story of how the Russells met the Chaos allows me to position

Yang’s contributions to Chinese modernity within a transnational frame that includes the Bloomsbury modernists and their associated activities.

Next, I read Yang’s photograph as a counter-image to existing scholarship on the Russells’ visit to China. In contrast to the two men in the background, who loom large in intellectual history, the two women at the fore have largely been forgotten. However, the composition of Yang’s photograph inverts this disparity in status by literally foregrounding the two women. It compels the viewer to re-examine and critique the Eurocentric and androcentric accounts of the exchanges between China and the West, and to restore the legacies of the exceptional women who were beside/s the great men of history all along.

Third, by building on the previous two approaches, I discover a

“missed connection” between Yang and Black: both were birth control advocates, though judging from their respective autobiographies, they never

18 See Paul Levy’s Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1979) and Ann Banfield’s The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (2000). 19 See Ivan Crozier’s “‘All the World’s a Stage’” (2003), Deborah Gorham’s “Liberty and Love?” (2011), and Carla Hustak’s “Love, Sex, and Happiness in Education” (2013).

96 exchanged thoughts on the topic in 1921. Black’s flitting cameo in Yang’s book leads me to recover their potential connections to other birth control advocates. Through this investigation, I situate Yang as a birth control pioneer within an international network of feminist (modernist) activists, a network that might be apprehended today as “transnational feminism.” Yang’s autobiography then becomes a lens via which readers can glimpse a gynocentric history of medicine in modern China and beyond.

The purpose of reading the photograph in three stages is to keep in view two objects of study. The first is a minor history of the intellectual exchanges between China and the West, and the resultant social advances that can be narrated as “modernity.” The second is the developmental history of feminist criticism and modernist recovery work. My reflections on the latter topic lead me to argue for a gynocentric method that might be glossed as reading “beside/s men, between women.” Here, “beside/s” and “between” serve as conceptual metaphors that orient neglected women vis-à-vis more familiar texts and figures in modernism’s history. In the conclusion, I argue that this approach offers one way of diversifying the New Modernist Studies, one that is aligned with Rita Felski’s postcritical thought, and also with what

Paul K. Saint-Amour has called the “weak turn” in modernist studies (439).

The Roof Garden Party Photograph: A Reading in Three Acts

The year was 1921,20 two years after the May Fourth Movement and a year away from the High Modernist developments tracked by Michael North in

20 While the photograph is undated in Yang’s autobiography, it was re- published in Yuen Ren Chao’s Life with Chaos (1975) and captioned thus: “1921 With Bertrand Russell, Dora Black, and W.S. Bennett on our ‘roof 97 Reading 1922. Yang Buwei was hosting a party with her husband Yuen Ren

Chao. Their guests included Bertrand Russell and his paramour, Dora Black.

All four were enjoying drinks and snacks on the Chaos’ roof garden in

Beijing, a space frequented by Chinese intellectuals for its “‘mad tea parties’ and club meetings” (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 196). The Chinese couple were newlyweds, whereas the English lovers would get married upon their return to London. Chao was serving as Russell and Black’s interpreter throughout their Chinese tour, with an itinerary that included Shanghai,

Nanjing, Hankou, Changsha, and Beijing (175). Yang was busy managing the women’s hospital she co-founded and could only meet the party during the

Beijing leg of their travels (174). Russell was mainly lecturing on mathematical philosophy at various venues (174). His tour overlapped with

John Dewey’s visit to China; both philosophers generated considerable buzz among the Chinese intelligentsia. By Chao’s estimation, Russell’s first lecture at Peking University drew some 1,500 attendees and inspired subsequent debates in periodicals and study groups (Life with Chaos 107).

Although Russell was still married to his first wife, Alys Pearsall

Smith, he was openly cohabiting with Black in Beijing; the latter became pregnant during the trip. Chao insisted that these proceedings “made no great stir at all” (Life with Chaos 107). However, Suzanne P. Ogden’s research suggests that the Chinese “reacted in an embarassed [sic] though proper manner to [Russell and Black’s] living arrangements, although they never knew quite how to treat the couple living ‘out of wedlock’” (530). Russell and

garden’ (See p. 112)” (n. pag.). I am unable to ascertain the identity of the third man in the photograph, whose name is listed differently across both captions.

98 Black were not the only ones causing controversy; Chao and Yang’s wedding made headlines in the Chenbao for being the “New-Style Wedding of New-

Style People” (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 193). Prior to their wedding, both had broken engagements to others “at a time when engagements were never broken” (3). Then, they did away with traditional customs such as the sedan procession, the unveiling of the bride, the “kowtow to the ancestors,” the exorbitant banquet, the studio-posed photographs, and also refused wedding gifts apart from “letters, literary or musical compositions, or contributions to the Science Society of China” (192-4). In a newspaper announcement, Chao printed the time and date of the wedding as “3 p.m., Mean Solar 120º E

Standard Time, June 1, 1921, Occidental Chronology” (192). According to

Yang, China adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1912, a year after the fall of the Qing dynasty (26). The beginning of Republican China is thus symbolised by the adoption of a modern “temporality” that was imported from the West.

Chao’s precise use of Eastern Standard Time and the Gregorian calendar pointedly signals his endorsement of a modern temporality associated with the

“Occident,” while eschewing the tradition of using the Chinese lunar calendar for auspicious occasions. The ceremony itself took place over supper at the

Chaos’ new home; only the May Fourth intellectual Hu Shih and one other guest were present, both of whom served as official witnesses (193). Yang describes how Chao, like Russell and Black, “wanted to put every tradition and institution under critical doubt” (191). Upon seeing the report of their wedding in the Chenbao, Chao allegedly asked Russell if he and Yang were being too conservative, to which Russell answered: “This is radical enough”

99 (193). All four “radicals” stayed in touch; in 1924, the Chaos would visit the

Russells at their summer house in Porthcurno, Cornwall (219).

In Beijing, the sensational gossip surrounding both couples and their love lives were probably more effective at promoting vague ideas about modernity to the larger public, as opposed to the actual substance of their professional work. Ogden argues that Russell’s Chinese sponsors and audience were far more interested in his broader ideas about social reform and modernisation, as opposed to his specialist academic work on logic and epistemology (532-3).21 Drawing from Russell’s own account, Ogden explains that the traditional notion of the intellectual as a “sage” still held sway in

China during this period, a notion which assumes that “a leader in one field will be equally well qualified to speak on totally unrelated topics” (532).

Yang’s anecdotal account of one lecture and its reception supports Ogden’s view:

One evening, Russell gave a lecture on the analysis of matter at

the High Normal School. More than a dozen of our medical

acquaintances went there together. There was a big audience

gathered in the indoor gymnasium. We came back discussing

the lecturer and the interpreter [Yuen Ren Chao]. Some said

that the lecturer spoke more clearly than John Dewey, but that

the interpreter was not as good as Hu Shih (who was then

interpreting Dewey’s lectures at the University).

21 According to Xiaoqun Xu, Russell was sponsored by the same “Lecture Association” which invited John Dewey, Hans Driesch, and Rabindranath Tagore to China (71). This association was led by Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei, both leading figures in China’s New Culture and May Fourth movements.

100 “You must make allowances for the difficulty of the

subject,” I said. “Many of the terms evidently have never been

translated into Chinese before. He has had to make them up.

Besides, how can you properly explain a subject like the

analysis of matter to an audience of two thousand?” (B.Y.

Chao, Autobiography 175)

Russell’s lecture was on the philosophy of physics, but this did not deter

Yang’s circle of medical professionals from attending and commenting on his lecturing style, which they deemed to be clearer than Dewey’s. Likewise, they compared Chao’s interpretive style unfavourably with Hu Shih’s. Nothing in the passage alludes to the substance of Russell’s thought. In fact, Yang defends her future husband’s interpretive style by arguing that it is impossible to translate the esoteric content of the lecture effectively for the non-specialist audience. Prior to this episode, Yang had also privately wondered: “Why should a sensible man ever want to study such an empty subject as philosophy?” (174). Both her experience of Russell’s lecture and her disdain for modern philosophy suggest that May Fourth modernity was not just about the substance of various intellectual and social projects; rather, the forms such projects took, or their varying styles and aesthetics, could have contributed even more significantly to the zeitgeist of the era. Here, the presence of two

Western philosophers in China (Russell and Dewey), their styles of lecturing in English, plus the real-time translation of their lectures into Chinese, performed by none other than two prominent May Fourth figures (Chao and

Hu Shih), all add up to cosmopolitan and translingual spectacles of intellection that are experienced as modernity.

101 The spectacle of Russell and Chao’s translingual “union” recalls the spectacular nature of two other unions: the Russells’ cohabitation, and the

Chaos’ wedding. Reading the photograph in this manner thus weaves two stories of modern romance into the history of the exchanges between

Bloomsbury and May Fourth intellectuals. Further, Yang’s backstory (as a doctor and the co-founder of a women’s hospital) also hints at the ongoing development of modern medicine in China during Russell’s visit. In all these senses, Yang’s photograph and her autobiography not only serve as records of

Russell’s visit, but also tell multiple stories about modernity, all of which connects China to England (and as we shall see later, the U.S.) in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, marriage, medicine, and personal style. Yang’s self-narration thus offers a complex and layered snapshot of May Fourth modernity which should not be reduced to any one of its components.

The Second Act: Against Eurocentrism and Androcentrism

The previous section demonstrated one way of reading Yang’s photograph and her autobiography: via a historical-biographical method that draws out a series of adjacencies and affinities between Chinese and English modernities, which can then be turned towards the diversification of modernist studies at a transnational scale. However, one can also take a far more antagonistic approach which is driven by anti-imperialist and anti-sexist critique. I mentioned earlier that Chao sought Russell’s approval for his new-style wedding. In that instance, Chao’s deference to Russellian notions of what is new, radical, and therefore “modern,” resembles the relationship between Ling

Shuhua and Virginia Woolf among other May Fourth-Bloomsbury pairings.

102 Shu-mei Shih notes that Ling’s English-language autobiography, Ancient

Melodies (1953), was developed under Woolf’s remote mentorship via private correspondence; Shih then argues that “Ling’s Third World feminist position … required a process of voluntary self-Orientalization in order to cohere with Woolf’s First World feminist position” (Lure 216). By analogy,

Chao’s own deference to Russellian notions of what is “radical enough” can be read as a symptom of a wider trend, where many May Fourth elites sought

Western recognition to ratify their own modernness and cosmopolitanism

(B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 193). In this fashion, what began as a story about equals at a garden party can easily develop into yet another critique of

Western cultural imperialism.

To continue with this line of thinking, one might argue that Russell’s visit and his resultant publication, The Problem of China (1922), has put the

Chaos’ lifelong contributions to Chinese modernity and intercultural exchange in the shade—at least within English-language scholarship. To give some context, Russell’s visit to China is frequently mentioned across many disciplines. Ogden’s “The Sage in the Inkpot: Bertrand Russell and China’s

Social Reconstruction in the 1920s” (1982) gives an in-depth assessment of

Russell’s limited impact on Chinese intellectual and political thought. Xu’s

Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China (2014) describes a “Russell craze” (54) among the educated public upon his arrival and surveys the ensuing publications about Russell in Chinese periodicals. But one especially striking and self-contained example of how Russell’s legacy eclipses those of Black, Chao, and Yang can be found within modernist studies. In “Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes” (2006), Eric Hayot uses

103 Russell’s visit as an opportunity to implicate China in the origin stories of

Anglo-American modernism. His goal is to produce “a way of thinking modernism comparatively—as simultaneously inside and outside an internationalist frame that includes China” (122). Despite Hayot’s pluralist ambitions, his leitmotif of Russell’s “Chinese Eyes”—an allusion to Lily

Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes” in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—ultimately constrains his discussion to Bloomsbury modernism, with the usual suspects

Russell and Woolf taking centre stage. Little mention is made of Black, who plays the supporting role of nursing Russell back to health while he was grievously ill in China (135).22 Likewise, the traces of Ling Shuhua’s presence in Lily Briscoe’s “Chinese eyes” (as uncovered by Patricia Laurence) are confined to a footnote in Hayot’s article (126). Nothing is said of Yang and

Chao. While Hayot’s theoretical approach pries open a critical space for comparative studies of May Fourth modernity and anglophone modernism, the actual substance of his article remains in the realm of what he calls elsewhere

“China-in-the-Western-imagination Studies” (“Modernisms’ Chinas:

Introduction” 5). In other words, Hayot uses the notion of China to enhance the cosmopolitanism of Bloomsbury modernism without engaging with the specificities of May Fourth modernity.

22 To be fair, Ogden’s research suggests that Chinese audiences were also far less interested in Black, which resulted in a dearth of records about her presence in China: “Black’s role [in China] cannot be adequately assessed. We know very little about what she said in China, except for a few printed lectures; and we know even less about the Chinese response to her. Their interest—at least as expressed by those writing in the popular journals—was focused on Russell to the nearly complete exclusion of Black” (530). The same can be said of both Yang and Chao’s autobiographies; both did not discuss Black’s lectures with the same enthusiasm they granted Russell. Chao offered only a few lines mentioning her work (Life with Chaos 106-7).

104 That Russell’s visit to China received significant critical attention, and that his visit became the focus of the three studies mentioned above, is not in itself problematic. However, when this phenomenon is coupled with the general neglect of Black, Yang, and Chao in related scholarship, the suspicion is that Russell serves as the primary Western agent via which anglophone scholars (like me) apprehend Chinese modernity as an object of study. I have in mind Shih’s criticism of the “technologies of recognition” that underwrite canon formation and disciplinary trends, by which she means

the mechanisms in the discursive (un)conscious—with bearings

on social and cultural (mis)understandings—that produce “the

West” as the agent of recognition and “the rest” as the object of

recognition, in representation. (“Technologies” 17)

This problem is not unique to the case of Russell’s visit to China, but applies to what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz call the “New Modernist

Studies” (NMS) at large (737). To demonstrate the scale of this problem quickly, consider the recent activities of the Modernist Studies in Asia

Network (MSIA). In its mission statement, the network declares that it aims to be “[a]ttentive to modernism’s manifestations in and connections to Asia itself” (MSIA Network, “About” par. 1). Since its founding in 2017, MSIA has hosted two annual conferences in Hong Kong and Tokyo, with a third slated for Shanghai in 2021. Both progenitors of the “NMS,” namely Mao and

Walkowitz, have been invited as plenary speakers. Yet, despite MSIA’s professed goals and its presence in Asia, its conferences have been dominated by studies of Western modernism. A look at the paper titles and abstracts listed in the programmes reveal that in 2018, less than 8 percent of papers

105 focused on Asian figures, texts, and contexts (3 out of 39 papers listed).

Numbers improved in 2019 to almost 25 percent (25 out of 103 papers), but this figure drops to under 17 percent if I were to exclude two papers on the

Japanese British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, and six on how Western modernists such as Ezra Pound, Laurence Binyon, and Paul Claudel appropriated pre- modern Asian philosophy, art, and literature for their projects. Within this latter genre of scholarship, China tends to be depicted as a source of cultural raw material for avant-garde European artistry, rather than being a space and agent of cultural innovation. As Shih puts it, such approaches can perpetuate the idea that “China was the treasure house from which poetic materials could be freely grafted and redisplayed, so that Pound’s uniqueness as a poet [among other Western modernists] could be foregrounded” (Lure 9). It goes without saying that MSIA ought to welcome studies of Western modernism. However, the numbers suggest that while Western modernism has long arrived in Asia, modern Asian literature still has yet to arrive in the NMS. This phenomenon is not restricted to the MSIA network but indicates prevailing trends and problems in modernist scholarship at large. In short, when Yang’s photograph is contextualised against the reception history of Russell’s visit to China, it discloses a long history of Eurocentric and androcentric priorities that underwrite both the High Modernist and May Fourth canons.

However, Yang’s photograph also offers a starting point for recovery work by directing its viewer’s attention to the women beside/s the canonical figures of Russell and Chao.23 This leads me to a third way of reading Yang’s

23 Yuen Ren Chao is a widely recognised figure, though he typically goes unmentioned in English-language scholarship on modern Chinese literature. As a linguist, Chao is understandably eclipsed by his literary peers such as Lu 106 photograph: a method of doing feminist recovery work that looks beside/s men and between women. This approach is partly inspired by the composition of

Yang’s photograph, which inverts the relationship between each individual’s place in the frame and their current standing in history. Yang sits at the head of the table, her arm dangling confidently over the hostess’s chair, with Black to her right at the seat of honour; both return the camera’s gaze with confidence. The women anchor the image, and they visually bracket Chao and

Russell, who are smiling stiffly in the background. This composition foregrounds Yang and Black as primary subjects; it demands an examination of their lives beyond their status as “Mrs Yuen Ren Chao” and “Mrs Bertrand

Russell,” and it offers a frame through which I launch an investigation of the connections—real, imagined, or missed—between the two women. In the next section, my investigation leads me to recover a transnational feminist network that rallied around birth control advocacy. In the process, I outline my theoretical debts to, and interventions in, the subfields of the NMS, feminist modernist recovery work, and postcritique.

Xun, Hu Shih, Lao She, and Lin Yutang. For a recent appraisal of Chao’s role in Chinese language reform, see the introduction and first chapter to Yurou Zhong’s Chinese Grammatology (2019). Zhong details how Chao called for the vernacularisation and standardisation of Mandarin Chinese in English as early as 1916. The efforts of Chao and other language reformers elevated a standardised vernacular to the status of lingua franca, which then served as the medium of modern Chinese literature. From the twenties, Chao also contributed to the romanisation of Mandarin Chinese. His system of national romanisation or Gwoyeu Romatzyh would remain in use even after the People’s Republic of China’s official adoption of the Hanyu Pinyin system in 1958.

107 The Third Act: Recovering Transnational Feminist Net/Works

My interpretive moves in this chapter resemble those of Kalliney’s in

Commonwealth of Letters (2013). As with Kalliney, I started with a photograph; his is famously of a BBC recording session in 1942, which sees

T. S. Eliot and George Orwell working alongside Mulk Raj Anand and Una

Marson (4). These intellectuals were producing literary radio “magazines” such as Voice, Caribbean Voices, and West African Voices (5). For Kalliney, this transnational network is united by a commitment to “aesthetic autonomy,” which refers to the high modernist concept that “a work of art should transcend economic calculations, political partisanship, or racial tensions” (6-

7) and “instrumental politics” (13). This concept is built in part on Eliot’s theory of impersonality, which insists that “a genuine work of art rises above the mundane biographical particularities of its creator” (7). For Kalliney, the appeal of aesthetic autonomy as a creative, epistemic, and evaluative framework (i.e. the framework via which one ought to create, understand, and appraise an artwork) cuts across a colonialist-colonised divide (7-8).

While my method resembles Kalliney’s, my research suggests that

Yang and Black’s projects refused modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy.

Rather, they turned in the opposite direction towards overt activism, political writing, and mass print culture. Yang and Black’s investments in the “use- value” of writing—as opposed to the anti-utilitarian nature of “aesthetic autonomy”—can be grasped through their affinities with the self-help genre. I will restrict most of my comments on Black to her feminist tract Hypatia

(1925) in the interest of space and for two other symbolic reasons: first, it is

Black’s first significant work since her visit to China; second, the same year it

108 was published, Black inscribed a line inspired by Hypatia onto Ling Shuhua’s friendship scroll, which was in Xu Zhimo’s possession when he visited the

Russells in England. Black’s inscription reads: “The dualism of mind and matter is essentially a masculine philosophy. Hypatia” (“Handscroll with paintings”). This was signed “Dora Russell, Carn Voel, Porthcurno, July,

1925.” Such transient encounters involving Black, Yang, and Ling, speak to the buried connections between the women of the Bloomsbury Group and the

May Fourth generation.

One buried connection between Yang and Black is that both saw the value of contraception and self-help books in improving the lives of modern women; further, their advocacies tied the material practice of birth control to the pedagogical affordances of the self-help genre. Black’s Hypatia devotes its latter half to a vision of “Feminist Mothers” (Russell, Hypatia 40) who will benefit from comprehensive sex education and the use of birth control (42-6).

A particularly powerful segment reads:

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing

how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as

something so common and easy that everyone can go through it

without harm or suffering and rear her children competently

and well. Without arousing dread or horror, we should tell

young women frankly the pain and agony of childbirth, and the

anxiety and griefs which are the fate of every woman who is a

mother by choice and therefore loves her children. Nothing

whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by

109 lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and

responsibility which they will evade. (46)

To these ends, Black embraces the self-help genre as the purveyor of knowledge about childbirth and motherhood:

The old-fashioned mother had no lore, and her instinct was

inadequate. She succeeded by luck rather than by

knowledge … Since it has been the fashion for women to have

minds, the books for mothers have become more scientific and

our intelligent inquiries have been met by research and more

adequate replies. (53; my emphasis)

Black was effectively describing self-help books, which she sees as a critical part of modernising childbirth and parenting. The genre empowers women by transmitting new knowledge backed by scientific discoveries: “The lore of motherhood is a science which is now beginning … It defies sentiment, ridicules unnecessary and unintelligent sacrifice, is not content to suffer, but makes demands” (57-8).

By her own assessment, Black’s ideas were not only controversial to conservative religious leaders, militarists, and doctors at the time, but also to some quarters of the women’s emancipation movement (40). She found it necessary to “make it clear that a full life of activity for women is perfectly possible and permissible without [motherhood],” and she allows that the feminist “revolt against motherhood under present conditions is not surprising” (40; 42). To offer some context, Hypatia was published the same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and a year before Ernest

Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). The latter two works exemplify how

110 interwar notions of New Womanhood in the West were personified by the glamorous flapper girl, as embodied by Daisy Buchanan and Lady Brett

Ashley respectively. While Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s novels were set in

New York and Paris, the flapper was also a popular and contested figure in

Britain. According to Carol Dyhouse, British flappers were linked to the moral panic surrounding “wartime nymphomania,” “pleasure-seeking,” ambiguous notions of “freedom,” and the usual associations with makeup, cropped hair, cigarettes, sweets, and cocktails (71-93). Their visibility grew to the extent that the likes of Lady Olave Baden-Powell—Chief Commissioner of the Girl

Guides in 1916 and later World Chief Guide for forty years—would specifically “set out to deal with flapperdom” (73). Dyhouse argues that such anxieties surrounding the flapper girl is tied to the backlash against women’s increasing presence in the workplace, especially as men returned from the

First World War while jobs remained in short supply (84). Given this context,

Black’s focus on motherhood could be misconstrued as a call for women to retreat back into domesticity. But even as Fitzgerald and Hemingway were exploiting the sensationalism of the flapper girl, Black was already writing past the trendy figure and carving out a discursive space for articulations of feminist motherhood. In place of the flapper, Black offers Aspasia of Miletos as a feminist model. Aspasia was an immigrant to Athens and partner to the statesman Perikles, and she bore a child with him out of wedlock (c. 450 BCE;

R.W. Wallace “Aspasia”). She is “said to have taught rhetoric … and to have had discussions with Socrates” (Hornblower “Aspasia”). For Black, Aspasia offers a counter model to the false dichotomies imposed on women by patriarchal society, dichotomies which “[p]ersuade the single women that the

111 married woman is an unfair competitor” (Hypatia 31), which forces them to

“choose between love and duty to the male and service to the community”

(31), and “between physical pleasure and service to the mind or soul” (31).

Unlike the flapper girl, Aspasia personifies how women can be mothers, intellectuals, and professionals, all while insisting on their sexual freedoms and their freedom from marriage.

At first glance, the connections between Yang and Black on the feminist self-help front seem tenuous. Yang is most famous for her Chinese-

American cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945), which introduced authentic Chinese cuisine to the U.S. While the cookbook is traditionally associated with the domain of feminised work, and represents an especially commercialised genre of self-help literature, the affinities between

Black’s Hypatia and Yang’s cookbook stop there. What is lesser known—and

I have repeatedly stressed this—is that Yang was a trained gynaecologist and the co-founder of a women’s hospital in Beijing around 1920. She was also involved in birth control reforms, and the circle of May Fourth intellectuals to which she belonged was largely supportive of contraception. Mirela David explains that broadly speaking, “male Chinese intellectuals considered birth control as a social improvement measure to deal with poverty and disease resulting from China’s fast-growing population, albeit mostly at a theoretical level” (“Female Gynecologists” 34). This May Fourth interest in birth control was sparked not by Russell’s lecture tour in 1921, or by Black’s views on feminist motherhood, but by Margaret Sanger’s visit to China in 1922. Sanger was a U.S. nurse, social activist, and a pioneer of the modern birth control movement. David’s study reveals that Sanger gave speeches on birth control at

112 venues such as the Beijing National University with Hu Shih as her interpreter. According to Hu Shih, Sanger’s talk drew 2,000 attendants (David,

“The Task is Hers” par. 11).

Inspired by Sanger, Yang did her male contemporaries one better by putting thought into practice (David, “Female Gynecologists” 34). According to her autobiography, Yang’s advocacy work began with her translation of a women’s health manual from English to Chinese. Her narrating voice initially frames this project as an exercise in learning English:

I do not believe in “knowledge for its own sake.” I believe in

doing things, and if I find that I have to know certain things for

doing a thing, I can pick up the necessary knowledge while

doing it. So, instead of learning English, I started translating a

book, though I could not read much of it. (B.Y. Chao,

Autobiography 209)

This book is Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know (1916), which compiles the author’s writings on puberty, menstruation, sexuality, reproduction, feminine hygiene, venereal diseases, and menopause among other topics. Its chapters were first published as articles in the newspaper New York Call between 1912 to 1913. The same year the compilation was published, Sanger also opened “the first birth control clinic in the English-speaking world at 46

Amboy Street in the Brownsville slum area of Brooklyn” (Guttmacher IX).

This clinic was likely modelled after the very first in the world, opened in

1879 in Amsterdam by the Dutch physician and suffragette Aletta Jacobs

113 (Guttmacher IX).24 Sanger’s time in England during the interwar years would also inspire the British palaeontologist, Marie Stopes, to set up the first British birth control clinic in North London in 1921 (Sanger 171; Soloway 639).

Black noted in her own autobiography that the “credit for pioneer work in the campaign to lift the taboos on sex and birth control in that generation must be given to Margaret Sanger in America and Marie Stopes in Britain” (Tamarisk

Tree 168). In 1924, Black campaigned (with John Maynard Keynes and H.G.

Wells among others) for birth control reforms in Britain (169-73). She formed the Workers’ Birth Control Group to make contraception more readily available to working women (173). Yang’s Chinese translation of What Every

Girl Should Know is part of this transnational wave of birth control advocacy during the interwar period, and it should be considered a feminist self-help work, or what Black calls the “books for mothers [which] have become more scientific” (Hypatia 53).

While Yang modestly frames her translation of Sanger’s work as an exercise in learning English, it was obviously part of her long-term commitment to promoting birth control in modern China. Yang’s translation was edited by her husband and published by Shanghai’s Commercial Press in

1924 (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 210). On a subsequent trip to the U.S., Yang interviewed Sanger and visited birth control institutions in New York, so she could keep abreast of developments in women’s health in the West (214).

Yang writes:

24 While Jacobs founded her practice in 1879, she dispensed birth control devices openly only after 1881 (Freidenreich 184).

114 I had noticed that in China, as in the West, birth control was

practiced by the wrong end of society. Those who had access to

and made use of knowledge of contraception were mainly those

who can and should bear the burden of bringing up large

families. While I do not believe in any significant difference in

inheritance between classes, the better-to-do certainly have

better chances of educating their children. How could I reach

the masses, for whom more children would mean only more

slave labor? I carried this line of questioning with me for some

time, until I tried some answers after I returned to Peiping.

(214).

Unlike some of her May Fourth brethren, whose support of the birth control movement is partly based on eugenicist arguments directed at “race improvement” (David, “The Task is Hers” par. 1), Yang here focuses on the potential of contraception to ameliorate social inequality. Her sentiment resonates with Black’s earlier observations on the socio-economic pressures faced by working-class mothers, for whom “maternity is becoming well-nigh impossible” (Hypatia 61). In 1925—the same year Hypatia was published—

Yang would set up a birth control clinic in Beijing (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography

228), following in the footsteps of Jacobs, Sanger, and Stopes. Her husband would only reveal far later in the seventies that this clinic was illegal (Y.R.

Chao, “Chinese linguist” 60). Via the clinic, Yang

encouraged the use of contraception by the underprivileged

classes by giving them free service and charging others enough

to cover expenses. Each paying patient was also given the

115 chance of bringing five others who could not afford to pay.

(B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 228)

Yang’s cross-subsidy model resembles that of Jacobs’s private practice in

Amsterdam, which “charged standard rates to patients who could afford them, and also [maintained] a clinic for poorer women, whom she treated gratis when necessary” (Freidenreich 184). David believes that Yang’s birth control clinic was the very first in China and “the first time that the birth control campaigns [of the May Fourth Movement] were translated into clinical practice” (36). Yang’s pioneering efforts seem to be largely forgotten today, perhaps because she quit practicing after marriage (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography

184), and perhaps because her nascent projects were eventually eclipsed by the massive contributions of the female obstetrician Yang Chongrui, whose career from 1925 to 1957 is far better documented (David, “Female

Gynecologists” 45-51). Nonetheless, Yang Buwei’s ideals and achievements make her a Chinese “feminist” and a birth control pioneer in everything but name; to my knowledge, Yang never uses the terms “feminist” or “feminism” in her English-language autobiography.

As with Kalliney, I began with a photograph. But by looking beside/s men to the possible connections between Yang and Black, I recovered a transnational feminist network across four countries and three continents which rallied around the issues of sex education and birth control. I also recovered the genres they utilised, which include self-help manuals, political manifestos, life writing, and in Yang’s case, a cookbook, all of which were and are generally considered low- or middle-brow literary forms that are “non- modernist,” or “para-modernist,” if we were to go with Kalliney’s definition

116 of modernism as necessarily defined by aesthetic autonomy. To be clear, I am not refuting Kalliney’s nuanced argument; rather, both of our emphases can co-exist beside/s the other. But unlike Kalliney’s focus, my research suggests that the self-help genre represents a particularly effective format for feminist activism that was happening alongside developments in high modernism. In this respect, my stance is aligned with Beth Blum’s argument in The Self-Help

Compulsion (2020). Blum notes the modernist antipathy towards self-help books during the interwar period, which was “evident in the new vehemence with which the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ suddenly began to be brandished under the mantle of modernist autonomy” (14-15). Her examples include

Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” (1925), Gertrude Stein’s

How to Write (1931), and Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934), all of which deploy the “literary gimmick” (15) of satirising the “rising cultural prominence of self-help” (15). (Admittedly, the title of this thesis uses the exact same gimmick, though I was inspired first by Yang’s How to Cook and

Eat in Chinese.) As with Blum, I agree with Verta Taylor that the self-help genre

allows women to combine the tenets of feminism with the

professional discourses of medicine, law, psychology, therapy,

and the social sciences in the ongoing struggle to reconstitute

the meaning of the female self. (23; qtd. in Blum 30)

Taylor’s study focuses on the postpartum depression support group movement, which was initiated by predominantly middle-class white women in the U.S. around the eighties. In line with Taylor’s argument, my research suggests that self-help books on women’s health helped to transform notions

117 of women’s emancipation into medical and material practices, in both China and the West, during the interwar period. However, I am also locating an earlier network of feminists, medical professionals, women’s health manuals, and birth control programmes, all of which represent an internationalist precursor to Taylor’s focus.

Taken together, the work of women such as Jacobs, Sanger, Stopes,

Black, and Yang, resonates more with the May Fourth inclination towards accessible, utilitarian, and committed projects, than with Kalliney’s description of aesthetic autonomy as extrapolated from High Modernist thought. To give just one landmark example which demonstrates the general

May Fourth sentiment, consider an English-language manifesto dated 1916 which calls for a Chinese philological revolution. This manifesto was in fact, written by the men who will later find themselves beside Yang: her husband,

Chao, and her wedding witness, Hu Shih. Titled “The Problem of the Chinese

Language,” the four-part manifesto was published in The Chinese Students’

Monthly—the organ of The Chinese Students’ Alliance in the U.S.—while

Chao and Hu Shih were completing their doctorates at Harvard University and

Columbia University respectively. Both men’s vision for a Chinese philological revolution involves the standardisation of a lingua franca that includes standardised pronunciation, the simplification of Chinese characters, and alphabetisation (Y.R. Chao, “Proposed Reforms” 573, 581, 584). The manifesto repudiates the elitist and ornate language of classical Chinese that served as the existing lingua franca, or it calls a “dead language,” and it argues for the adoption of the vernacular as lingua franca, because vernacular expressions “are more useful in everyday life than their dead equivalents”

118 (Suh Hu 567-8). According to Chao, this new lingua franca would provide

China with a medium of communication that facilitates modernisation, because it would be easier to typewrite, print, and index, and because it would be compatible with the learning and the translation of alphabetic foreign languages (Y.R. Chao, “Proposed Reforms” 582-3). In other words, the

Chinese philological revolution was driven by a need for an accessible and utilitarian lingua franca. Chao and Hu Shih’s proposals extended beyond linguistic concerns to literary ones; Hu Shih also advocates the serious study of “vulgate texts” (570) which “are the only ‘living literature’ we now possess” (570). Chao likewise calls for a “Reform of the Literary Idiom”

(“Proposed Reforms” 579), arguing for a simplified style of modern writing that keeps classic allusions and quotations to a minimum (579-80). This philological revolution, which indeed came to pass as the New Culture

Movement, is what Yurou Zhong refers to as the “double revolution of both script and literature” (3).25

The democratising and pragmatic ideals underwriting the New Culture

Movement would inform the politics and literature of the May Fourth

Movement that began three years later in 1919. This facet to modern Chinese literature differs very much from High Modernist aesthetics as exemplified by the manifesto “Revolution of the Word,” which was published in a 1929 issue of transition magazine and co-signed by the likes of Kay Boyle, Caresse and

Harry Crosby, and Eugene Jolas. The document rails at the “hegemony of the

25 Zhong is also responsible for recovering this 1916 English-language manifesto that preceded the far more famous Chinese-language manifestos by Hu Shih, which are “Suggestions for a Reform of Literature” (1917) and “For a Constructive Literary Revolution” (1918).

119 banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, [and] descriptive naturalism …” (Boyle et al., par. 1). In contrast to the Chinese attempts to standardise a vernacular as lingua franca, this manifesto insists on the writer’s

“right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by text- books and dictionaries” and “to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws” (items 6-7). The final item of the twelve-point manifesto directly contradicts Chao and Hu Shih’s ideals: “The plain reader be damned” (item 12). In The Difficulties of

Modernism, Leonard Diepeveen argues that similar commitments to idiolectic and often difficult uses of language were constitutive of Anglo-American literary culture between 1910 to 1950, which resulted in “a fairly impermeable canon of High Modernism [that came to be] established in the university curriculum” (xiv). For Diepeveen, it is not just modernist texts that are difficult, such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, but also the kinds of reading protocols prompted by such texts:

Difficulty was thus central to people’s sense that modernism

was a sea change—not just in the properties of art works, but in

the default and most useful ways of talking about and

interacting with art. Modernism’s difficulty set up the terms

and protocols by which readers read and gained access to

modernist texts, and it became a litmus test: one could predict

both a given reader’s response to modernism by his or her

reaction to difficulty, and a writer’s place in the canon by the

difficulty of his or her work. Modern difficulty was a powerful

aesthetic, then. It also continues to be one, for aesthetic

120 difficulty retains its legitimizing force today. Modern difficulty

has profoundly shaped the entire twentieth century; one’s

ability to move in high culture continues to depend, in large

part, on how one reacts to difficulty. (xi)

Blum echoes Diepeveen’s insights on Western modernism, particularly when she argues that its high cultural aesthetics repudiated the accessibility and the

“perceived instrumentalism of the increasingly popular self-improvement handbook” (15). In contrast, my study suggests that the May Fourth elite took utilitarian modes of writing very seriously in their varied programmes of modernisation. If we grant Diepeveen and Blum their arguments, then perhaps one can further argue that the dominance of high modernist ideals in English literary studies has obscured the existence of utilitarian, accessible, and committed genres, genres which have been beside/s modernism all along, whether in China or the West.

Towards Postcritical Approaches to Recovery Work

My recuperation of Yang as a significant May Fourth doctor, writer, and feminist, fits into the current “revival” of feminist modernist recovery work that is inaugurated by Cassandra Laity’s founding of the journal Feminist

Modernist Studies (FMS) in 2018, and by Berman’s opening essay,

“Practicing transnational feminist recovery today.” Like Berman, I am invested in “the recovery of out-of-print or lesser-known writers especially from a feminist perspective” (9). Despite sharing Berman’s commitments, I am discomfited by the hostility which Laity and Berman direct at the NMS and the 2008 PMLA essay by Mao and Walkowitz that christened the field. In

121 her editorial note, Laity argues that the institutions and venues associated with the NMS have constantly negated and resisted calls for dedicated space to feminist studies:

Upon closer scrutiny of these and other “new modernist”

venues, feminist critics note that gender issues are either

largely omitted, summarily added on, or – within feminist

scholarship – subsumed under modernism’s broader intellectual

expansions into globalization, cultural studies, and

interdisciplinarity. Feminism/gender rarely serves as a point of

entry into new modernisms, yet critics continue to do important

feminist work. (1)

Likewise, Berman writes that Mao and Walkowitz’s article “sidelines scholarship on gender or women writers,” “perpetuates the division of gender issues from other trends in scholarship,” and that within their survey of the field, feminist dimensions of existing modernist scholarship have “become occluded or [been] made subservient to other seemingly more dramatic and influential trends” (13-14). Berman explains that such practices are why it

“has taken until summer 2017 for Modernism/Modernity to devote specific space to feminist perspectives and until 2018 for Feminist Modernist Studies to appear” (14). For Laity and Berman, the founding of Feminist Modernist

Studies and the revival of feminist recovery work are projects built on an antagonistic relation to the NMS.

I cannot speak to the broader institutional issues afflicting feminist modernist studies and will restrict my remarks to Berman’s critique of Mao and Walkowitz’s essay. In the latter two’s defence, much of my research is

122 driven by the NMS ethos of extending scholarship in “temporal, spatial, and vertical directions” (Mao and Walkowitz 737).26 In the course of contextualising and reading Yang’s autobiography, I have attended to the interwar exchanges between modernists and May Fourth intellectuals, and also to the TransPacific crossings that fostered mid-century China-U.S. exchanges.

In the process, I extended the spatial and temporal coordinates of modernist studies to Chinese and Chinese diasporic contexts and to the post-war period.

Further, my emphasis on the feminist self-help genre is targeted at destabilising the “quite sharp boundaries between high art and popular forms of culture” in modernist studies (Mao and Walkowitz 738). In declaring these theoretical debts, I insist that feminist criticism and recovery work can function “beside/s” rather than “against” the NMS.

As with Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique (2015), I am avoiding a

“stance of againstness” in criticism (189). Going back to my lodestone example of Yang’s photograph, my third way of reading it could be described as postcritical feminist recovery work. My argument emerges more clearly after my second mode of reading, which is steeped in the rhetoric of anti- imperialist and anti-sexist criticism—hence, quite literally, post-critical. In the process, I criticised Hayot’s Eurocentric study of Russell’s visit to China, which I connected to prevailing trends as exemplified by recent MSIA conferences. But as with Felski, I find there is a limit to antagonistic modes of

26 I prefer the word “extending” as opposed to Mao and Walkowitz’s much criticised term, “expansion” (737); for Max Brzezinski, “expansion” recalls “imperial, military, and corporate expansion” (121). If “expansion” connotes an all-engulfing mode of encroachment, then “extension” suggests limited lines of inquiry which reach towards May Fourth China and the non-West at large, which is what my research attempts to do.

123 “suspicious reading,” whether of literature or criticism (Limits 3). By

“suspicious reading,” Felski refers to interpretative methods that presuppose

“the duplicity of language,” a “suspicion of motives,” and which seek to

“‘unconceal’ what has been concealed” (31). Felski’s term is based on an appropriation of Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” (30-1) and draws from Eve Sedgwick’s argument in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative

Reading” (2003). As with Sedgwick, Felski argues that “suspicious reading is a strong theory that risks tautology in its determination to find its own bleak prognoses confirmed over and over again” (Limits 152). I am not advocating for a wholesale abandonment of critique, but for a sidestep; I am attempting modes of thinking that “avoid the dichotomy of heroic opposition or craven cooption” (Felski, Recomposing 216). So rather than reading against men or the NMS, I have made constant references to how men such as Chao and Hu

Shih supported birth control reforms that were led by women; recall that Chao edited Yang’s translation of Sanger’s work and that Hu Shih served as

Sanger’s interpreter and translator. “Beside/s” and “between” are conceptual metaphors which reorient antagonism as collaboration, even at the level of methodological debates. For instance, my own critique of Hayot’s article acknowledges his role in prying open a theoretical space for comparisons of

May Fourth and Bloomsbury modernities; likewise, I mimicked Kalliney’s opening move of reading a photograph, even as I end up with a completely different elaboration of the relation between writing and politics.

I have explained that Felski’s postcritical approach is an adaptation of

Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) for literary studies (present

124 thesis 27). As she explains, the literary critic’s assembling of networks should be guided by the agency of the art object:

once we take on board the distinctive agency of art works—

rather than their imagined role as minions of opaque social

forces or heroes of the resistance—we cannot help orienting

ourselves differently to the task of criticism. (Limits 13)

To reiterate, it is the composition of Yang’s photograph—which is to say, its formalistic agency as opposed to its passive historical content—which drew my attention to the potential connections between the two women in its foreground. Reading the photograph in this manner “leaves room for the aleatory and the unexpected, the chance and the contingent” (Felski, Limits

152). My study accordingly recovers the unexpected connections between real human actors such as Yang, Black and Sanger, and also a body of non-human actors such as self-help manuals, literary texts, historical documents, and contemporary research. In particular, many birth control advocates mentioned above penned memoirs or autobiographies: the Dutch original of Jacobs’s

Memories was the earliest to hit shelves in 1924, though it was only translated into English in 1996. This was followed by Sanger’s self-titled work in 1938,

Yang’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman in 1947, then Black’s The

Tamarisk Tree in three volumes, published between 1977 to 1985. The agency immanent in Yang’s photograph leads me to contextualise her work within a lineage of life writing and self-help books by female birth control advocates in the West.

Much of this chapter is also produced from a “surface reading” of such life writing by birth control advocates. By “surface reading,” I refer to Stephen

125 Best and Sharon Marcus’s well-known critique of “symptomatic reading” in

Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist thought (1-6), and their provocation that one should read “surfaces” instead:

we take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible,

apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what,

in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no

thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what

insists on being looked at rather than what we must train

ourselves to see through. (9)

My notion of reading “beside/s” and “between” is partly inspired by Best and

Marcus’s interrogation of spatial conceptual metaphors in literary criticism, and even more directly by Marcus’s monograph, Between Women (2007), which argues that methods of queering Victorian literature have overemphasised the hidden sexual ties between women, as opposed to taking their friendships or companionships at (sur)face value and examining the significance of such ties (9-14). But I also share Felski’s view that Best and

Marcus’s “distrust of depth” downplays how “the oscillation between surface and depth is … a matter of complementary rather than mutually exclusive approaches” (Limits 55). As Felski puts it, “[d]epth interpretation does not have to be antagonistic,” with my treatment of Yang’s autobiography being case in point (55). At various turns, Yang wilfully downplays her contributions to birth control in China. On the surface, she states that her translation of Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know is an exercise in learning English; further, the mention of her interviews with Sanger and the opening of her birth control clinic in Beijing is relegated to just one paragraph.

126 I skimmed past these moments on first reading, and it was only after seeing

Yang’s photograph, and reading Black’s explicitly feminist tract Hypatia, that

I investigated the deep connections between Yang and the transnational birth control movement. This mode of deep reading is not necessarily antagonistic or “paranoid,” as Eve Sedgwick might have it (“Paranoid Reading” 126-47). It does not pit Yang against Black, women against men, or China against the

West, but recovers a collaborative history of modernisation, one which involves the rationalisation of women’s health through medical science and committed writing.

Saint-Amour has recently recontextualised the exchanges between postcritical thought and the modernist studies as part of a “weak turn” that calls for “lower-pitched alternatives to certain ‘strong’ theoretical habits of thought in literary studies” (439). My activations of ANT can be understood on his terms, in that I am deriving a method by conceding my critical authority to the weak historical agency of Yang’s photograph. My treatment of the photograph stands in metonymic relation to the larger autobiography. It is only by putting the agency of the photograph, the text, the author, and their itineraries in the world above my own critical authority, that these objects of study begin functioning as effective actors, whether in tracing a literary network, or in recovering a partial history of birth control reforms.

My method is a far weaker version of Hayot’s stronger approach in

“Bertrand Russell’s Chinese Eyes.” In his article, Hayot argues for a

“novelistic” reading of Russell’s life and his visit to China, because

the word “novel” allows for a reading of coincidence and figure

that in “real life” will inevitably seem outlandish, extravagant,

127 precisely because it could have happened another way in real

life, or because the details chosen to make the story must

proceed by excluding the many other details that do not fit.

That’s why one person can generate any number of

biographies, whereas a character is generated by the story even

as it appears to generate the story… (138)

Hayot’s biographical study is meant to implicate Russell’s visit to China in the

Russellian theory of sensibilia, which by extension, implicates Chinese modernity in the development of Cambridge philosophy during the High

Modernist period. To do so, Hayot connects the true story of Russell’s illness in Beijing (135) to Russell’s orientalising generalisations about the Chinese apathy to suffering (136), then takes a detour through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on pain (139-42), and circles back to suggest that Russell’s Chinese experience “thus reproduces and anticipates both the basic questions of

Cambridge philosophy in the modernist period and some of its major tropes”

(144). At one level, Hayot’s approach is not particularly controversial; he is merely stating that the historian has to manipulate facts and present them as a coherent narrative. What is novel (or novelistic) here is that Hayot sees himself as the writer of an “imaginary novel on Russell and China,” and that the connections he draws resemble something like a series of cause-and-effect suppositions, when there is no evidence to suggest these links (138). By

Hayot’s own admission, it is impossible to prove that Russell’s experience of illness in China, and his stereotypes about the Chinese indifference to pain, were directly responsible for the Russellian theory of sensibilia; rather, Hayot

128 is “reading [Russell’s] experience novelistically,” in a manner which turns

“coincidence into inevitability” (139).

In contrast to Hayot’s strong assertions, my weaker approach ironically offers a stronger material basis for recovering the transnational connections between the May Fourth Movement and Western feminism, specifically in the domains of both writing and medicine. Close reading Yang’s work allows me to recover history “from below.” Her text leads me to corresponding works of women’s life writing, which narrate developments in the modern birth control movement that possess material presence with direct cause-and-effect links: there were real birth control clinics being founded, real exchanges between

May Fourth elites and Western feminists, real women’s health manuals being written, translated, and circulated, all of which contributed to real advances in women’s health across the globe. Collectively, these events signify a wave of modernisation that is motivated by the goal of women’s emancipation.

My method of reading “beside/s” modernism and men, and “between” marginalised texts and figures, may appear weaker than the critical instinct to be staunchly “against” the hegemony of canons, fields of study, and established scholarly norms. However, to paraphrase Felski’s point, “beside/s” and “between” offer modes of prepositional thinking that help re-orient feminist scholarship towards modalities of making, composing, and creating, rather than just unmaking, questioning, and subverting (cf. Recomposing 216).

In any case, such constructive modalities have always been a cornerstone of feminist modernist recovery work, ever since Benstock charted the “newly discovered country” that is the women of the Left Bank, and placed them “in conjunction with and juxtaposition to other men and women of the

129 community” (ix). In 1986, Benstock was already looking beside/s men and between women.

130

Chapter Two

Beside/s the European Historical Novel:

Chinese Women’s Life Writing as “Modest History”

In the previous chapter, I read Yang’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman

(1947) in search of her articulations of transnational modernity in Republican

China. In the process, I recovered her legacy as a birth control pioneer and situated her within a transnational network of like-minded feminist activists from the West. My focus was on mining her narration for historical content.

Now, I turn my attention to the literary form which facilitated her articulation of Chinese history—women’s life writing—and I examine how the genre itself is an especially modern one within the Chinese context. It only emerged around the twenties to forties, inspired by literary and political developments within China as well as an influx of Western literary influence. Yang’s own autobiography, which was published in both English and Chinese, is part of the anglophonic turn during this period that saw Chinese women penning life writing in English.

This chapter traces the historical development of Chinese women’s life writing and its proximities to modernism. It argues that Yang’s autobiography exemplifies an aesthetics of “modest historicism” that characterises the genre.

“Modesty” here refers to both the social and scalar meanings of the word, in the sense that women writers often adopt humble narrating voices that offer non-epic accounts of history. As we shall see, this sense of modesty was a way of transgressing the prohibition against self-narration in the Chinese literary tradition (J. Wang, When 21). In reading Yang’s autobiography as an exemplar of Chinese women’s life writing, this chapter completes my double

131

recovery of Yang as a significant doctor and writer from the May Fourth generation. In the process, I recover a feminine, non-Western subgenre of literature that has been overlooked due to the dominance of the European historical novel in anglophone literary studies.

Why Read Chinese Women’s Life Writing?

In The Woman’s Historical Novel (2005) and elsewhere, Diana Wallace takes issue with male-dominated accounts of the European historical novel, which began with Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937) and his nomination of

Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley as the genre’s classic form. She writes:

The concept of history (as dialectically evolving progress) and

the ideal of the “classical historical novel” which Lukács

develops from Scott’s work have worked to exclude women’s

texts from the accepted canon. (Woman’s 12)

For Wallace, this prevalent fixation with history as the progress of class struggle overlooks how women’s historical novels are

much more likely to be histories of defeat that explore the ways

in which women have been violently excluded both from

“history” (the events of the past) and from “History” (written

accounts of the past). (“Letters” par. 2)

Against recurrent claims that the historical novel receded after the First World

War, Wallace asserts that this period saw radical reinventions of the genre by

H.D., Bryher, Naomi Mitchison, and Jean Rhys among others (par. 3).27 Her

27 Wallace was responding to Perry Anderson’s “From Progress to Catastrophe” (2011), which argues that the historical novel became “déclassé” during the interwar period, “falling precipitously out of the ranks of serious 132

monograph describes the interwar conditions that gave rise to a flowering of

British women’s historical novels. As she puts it, the First World War “made history visible [to the British masses] in ways that were remarkably similar to the effect of the Napoleonic wars as described by Georg Lukács” (Woman’s

25). However, what makes interwar Britain distinct is that the British public’s

“consciousness of existence within history includes women for the first time”

(25). The developments Wallace narrates are well known by now, which include not only progressive events such as the Representation of the People

Act (1918), the Equal Franchise Act (1928), and the increasing presence of women in the workplace, but also the anti-feminist backlash that followed soon after (25-6; 35). Within this context, Wallace unearths a generation of women writers who were given access to university education and who proceeded to write historical fiction after equipping themselves with degrees in largely History or English (27). A recurrent theme throughout Wallace’s study is that these women’s experiments with historical writing are

“hybridised [products], cross-fertilising with romance, fantasy, the Gothic, the adventure story, and the detective novel” (3). Wallace’s attention to such hybrid forms is aimed at broadening Lukács’s narrow conception of the historical novel (3).

fiction” (par. 19). For Anderson, this fall was a reaction to the brutality of the First World War, which “stripped the glamour from battles and high politics” (par. 19), and also to the rise of modernism. Drawing from Fredric Jameson, Anderson speaks of the impossibility of the “modernist historical novel” barring Woolf’s Orlando (par. 22). What Wallace is suggesting in her rejoinder is that modernist women and their peers were in fact, writing historical novels, but these texts were not recognised as such because they did not conform to Lukácsian notions of the historical novel.

133

An analogous argument can be made for Chinese women’s life writing, which emerged during a similar time frame. Building on Wallace’s recovery work, I extend her insights to China and to a non-fictive genre that has typically been considered middle-brow. Studies such as Janet Ng’s The

Experience of Modernity (2003), Lingzhen Wang’s Personal Matters (2004), and Jing M. Wang’s When “I” Was Born (2008) establish the rise of Chinese women’s life writing between the twenties to forties, a period bracketed by the

May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the Communist victory in the Chinese

Civil War in 1949. The May Fourth era saw the radicalisation of the masses and women in particular, all of whom rallied against Western and Japanese imperialism following the unfair treatment of China in the Treaty of

Versailles. The political climate reinvigorated debates surrounding the funü wenti or “the woman question” that were first articulated in the 1890s by male reformers such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, debates which tied gender inequality and women’s suffering to China’s weaknesses (Hershatter 60-4).

Gail Hershatter’s Women and China’s Revolutions (2019) offers a recent survey of this history. One early flashpoint is the 1918 translation and publication of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House in the pages of New Youth—the literary magazine that kickstarted the New Culture Movement (97). Ibsen’s heroine, Nora, prompted debates on the social transformations which are necessary to support women’s freedoms and liberation, as exemplified by Lu

Xun’s 1923 talk, “What Happens after Nora Walks Out?” (97-8). In 1919,

Zhao Wuzhen’s suicide in her bridal sedan—executed with a razor hidden in her foot-bindings—sparked a public outcry for “an end to coerced arranged marriages and an increased say for young people in determining their own

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lives” (93). In 1931, the Chinese Civil Code was passed by the Nationalist government, which granted women limited rights related to inheriting family property, initiating divorce, children’s custody, and which also introduced protections for concubines (131-3). Then came the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, in which an estimated tens of thousands of women and girls were raped and often afterwards murdered (179-81). Subsequently, anti-Japanese propaganda circulated graphic representations of the event, tying the mutilation and suffering of actual Chinese women to “China’s dismemberment by Japan”

(181). Both the Nationalists and Communists mobilised women extensively during the war; however, the radical front of the women’s emancipation movement came to a certain end in 1942. That year saw the publication of

Ding Ling’s “Thoughts on March 8” in the Communist newspaper Liberation

Daily, in which she criticises the revolution’s lack of commitment to addressing gender disparity. Her essay drew Mao Zedong’s ire and prompted his rebuke of Chinese intellectuals and their bourgeois pursuits at the Yan’an

Forum on Literature and Art (206). The episode led to Ding Ling’s dismissal from her editorial position at the paper and a two-year rehabilitation in the countryside (206). Her subsequent writings eschewed topics related to gender conflict (206). Tani Barlow argues that the story of women’s emancipation in

China is

not a history of winners. Not only did some of the thinkers

[whom Barlow studies] become “history’s losers,” but others

are just obscure and forgotten. Yet, even when celebrated, like

Ding Ling, they are memorable in part because their longings

for a better future for women were not satisfied. (3)

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Barlow’s comments recall Wallace’s argument that women’s historical novels in Britain are “much more likely to be histories of defeat” (“Letters” par. 2).

This resonance between women’s experience of history in both interwar

Britain and Republican China forms the basis of this chapter, which extends

Wallace’s focus beyond the domain of the European historical novel to the non-fictive form of Chinese women’s autobiographies.

The Importance of Being Modest

My timeline above is by no means exhaustive, but it contextualises the rise of women’s autobiographies during the May Fourth era as a form of “modest history.” Here, “modest” is my shorthand for four dimensions of style: First, their autobiographies are usually written in simple language and are hence linguistically modest. Second, their modest self-portrayals consistently downplay their significant roles in various movements, revolutions, and reformative projects. This is linked to the third sense of modesty: women writers often undermine their authority as both historical figures and historians, which consequently weakens the historicity of their self-narration.

These facets culminate in the fourth and overriding sense of literary modesty, wherein writers typically adopt a carefully crafted persona and narrating voice to circumvent the double bind between personal and historical approaches to autobiographical writing. On the one hand, an overly personal and subjective narration leaves the writer vulnerable to criticisms that she is being self- absorbed, and that she has nothing of value to say about society or politics; on the other hand, a writer who focuses on her understanding of, and contributions to, historical events can be accused of being self-aggrandising.

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The resulting affectations of modesty are tonally complex negotiations between Chinese manners and the progressive ideals behind the New Culture and May Fourth movements.

A brief history of the genre and its modest aesthetics could go something like this: In 1919, the publication of Hu Shih’s “The Biography of

Li Chao” inaugurates a new vernacular form of women’s biographies. This short piece was based on the collated writings and correspondence of a relatively unknown woman who hailed from a wealthy family, attained an education, studied Chinese literature, and died at twenty-four from tuberculosis (36-7). In the final months of her life, Li Chao was left estranged and destitute in Beijing, cut off from the family fortune by relatives who disapproved of her studies and who wished to coerce her into marriage (41-6).

Hu Shih argues that

Her story would not only move people to sympathy and

admiration but would also capture the attention of concerned

people throughout the nation, and would arouse discussion.

Therefore I think that a biography of this woman is far more

significant than that of any great general. (37)

By opposing the modest life of an unknown woman to that of a great general,

Hu Shih subverts the notion of history as, in Thomas Carlyle’s words, “the

Biography of great men” (41). His simple narration relies heavily on block quotations from Li Chao’s writings, which allows the subject to speak in her own voice. His use of the vernacular—a form of linguistic and literary modesty—breaks numerous conventions: According to Hu Shih, traditional essayists would not typically devote a biography to the likes of Li Chao (37).

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Even if they did, they would deploy stock phrases and produce a “stilted essay” (37). Hu Shih’s conclusion turns his literary experiment into a manifesto which conceives of the genre as a female-centred account of

Chinese history from below:

[Li Chao’s] unfortunate life is representative of the lives of

countless numbers of Chinese women. Her biography can be

used as material for research about the Chinese lineage system

and the woman question in China. We can count her as a

significant martyr in Chinese feminist history. (46)

Hu Shih thus transforms the biography of an unknown woman into a catalyst for women’s class consciousness and a call-to-arms for collective action. His biography lays the groundwork for women’s life writing as a respectable form of committed literature, one which examines the social conditions that constrains women’s freedoms and which therefore serves as an index of

Chinese modernity.

Following Hu Shih’s manifesto, women’s auto-biographies gradually appeared, including Xie Bingying’s Congjun Riji (War Diary, 1928), the eponymous Luyin Zizhuan (Autobiography of Lu Yin, 1934), Chen Hengzhe’s

Autobiography of a Chinese Young Girl (1935), and Bai Wei’s Beiju Shengya

(Tragic Life, 1936). The gap between Hu Shih’s intervention and the proliferation of women’s autobiographies can be attributed to a Chinese sense of modesty. Jing M. Wang explains that broadly speaking, there was a cultural inhibition against self-narration in the Chinese literary tradition for both men and women (When 21). Prior to the late-Qing era, biographies were primarily written about dead men and served as didactic historiography (16-7). While

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there were examples of women’s biographies, these were mainly demonstrations of women’s virtues (starting from the Han dynasty) or private eulogies for mothers written by sons (prevalent in the Qing era) (18-20).

Autobiographical writing or self-narration only existed as a subset of biographies among other genres (21). In this context, the contemporary understanding of the autobiography as a book-length work dedicated to its author’s views and experiences was a relatively alien concept during the earlier decades of modern China, one which appeared egocentric and self- aggrandising to Chinese sensibilities. In 1936, Lin Yutang contrasts this

Chinese modesty against what he sees as the immodesty of Western life writing:

In the West we have come to the point when a super-tramp, an

ex-convict, a Congo slave driver, a pork king or a psychopathic

old maid, has the courage to write magazine articles and books,

so long as they feel they have a story to tell or the divine urge

in them … The average intelligent man in the West is led to

believe that if he only says what he has to say, there is a chance

of selling his goods … Henry Ford, too, takes it upon himself

to write about his own life … We have no Henry Fords in

China, but even if we had, a Chinese Henry Ford would not

dream of writing his own life. (235).

Lin’s mocking comments ridicule the ubiquity of life writing in the West and associates the genre with a rampant culture of individualism, self-promotion, and capitalism after Ford. However, his caricature of the West was also meant to disrupt persistent conventions in Chinese writing. Lin makes the larger

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point that even two decades after the start of the New Culture Movement,

Chinese literature still needs to be demystified for the larger public (235). He advocates further emulation of “the comparative simplicity of English writing, so that self-expression in writing or authorship [will cease] to be regarded with a sense of mystery” (235). The essay itself, written in English, demonstrates a style of candid and humorous prose that one might emulate in Chinese.

Underlying Lin’s unflattering portrayal of the West is a conception of life writing in the Chinese vernacular as a democratising genre of literature.

Lin’s essay explains why many women writers found the prospect of penning autobiographies both compelling and terrifying at a time as late as the mid-thirties: the genre represents a transgressive modern form which opens the author to criticisms of immodesty. Consider Jing M. Wang’s account of how writers like Lu Yin and Su Xuelin struggled with publishing their autobiographies. Around 1919, Hu Shih taught Lu Yin at Beijing Female

Normal College and inspired her to attempt an autobiography (J. Wang, When

106). Fearing that the project would make her a laughingstock, Lu Yin kept it under wraps by working in a corner of the library (Lu Yin 80; trans. in J.

Wang, When 106). She eventually discarded and burned this first effort after finding it shamefully disorganised (106). Lu Yin’s recollection of this experience is taken from her autobiography, which was eventually published in 1934. As Wang puts it,

Lu Yin’s revealing portrayal of the urge to write her

autobiography and its psychological weight on her tells of

women’s desire to write their lives and the fear and shame

associated with the act. (106)

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Wang notes that Su Xuelin likewise struggled against what Wang calls “the cultural and gender taboo of self-exposure” (120). Su’s Ji Xin (Love for My

Mother, 1929) is sometimes interpreted as an autobiography that is framed as a eulogy for her mother, whereas three shorter narratives, produced between the twenties to forties, were only explicitly labelled as autobiographical texts when they were reprinted far later in Wo de Shenghuo (My Life, 1967) (J.

Wang, When 120-1).

Despite the risks associated with life writing, Chinese women drew inspiration and courage from their male counterparts such as Hu Shih, whose

Sishi Zishu (Self-Narration at Forty, 1933) is often considered the model for modern Chinese autobiographies (J. Wang, When 33-4). Simultaneously, they were also influenced by an influx of translated life writing from the West, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and Isadora Duncan’s

My Life (1927) (J. Wang, When 38). Bing Xin’s “On Autobiography” offers a provocative and succinct example of how Chinese women innovated to make their life stories palatable to a Chinese readership. In this 1942 essay, Bing

Xin reveals that she modestly declined a bookstore’s invitation for her to publish an autobiography around the early thirties: “I didn’t think I was qualified to write an autobiography. … Furthermore, there was nothing special in my life that distinguished me from other people” (241; trans. in L. Wang 3).

However, her attitude changed in 1936 following a conversation over tea with

Virginia Woolf in London. Upon hearing Bing Xin’s anecdotes about life in

China, Woolf reportedly said: “Why don’t you write an autobiography, and have these stories recorded in detail, it would be of much value to us foreigners. Write it quickly, and I will translate it for you” (Bing Xin 241-2;

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my translation). Bing Xin accepted Woolf’s offer; unfortunately, she was interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War, which erupted a week after her return to China. In 1941, the news of Woolf’s suicide dampened all enthusiasm she had for the project; nonetheless, she ends the essay with a commitment to try. Bing Xin’s narrative seems to repeat the Chinese truism that autobiographies should only be written by great figures, all while insisting that she is unworthy of the honour. Yet, the essay is ironically a short piece of autobiographical writing that is thinly disguised as genre criticism—note its title, “On Autobiography.” Further, by mentioning two prestigious invitations for her to pen an autobiography, Bing Xin implies that she was, in fact, worthy of the form. Under the facade of modesty—one which appears to maintain prevailing literary and social conventions—Bing Xin was in fact experimenting with a transgressive, self-referential piece of life writing that breaks the Chinese prohibition against self-narration.

Bing Xin’s story hints at the exchanges between the Chinese literati and modernist writers that helped cultivate the genre. Shu-mei Shih among others notes that Woolf also had a hand in Ling Shuhua’s English-language memoir, Ancient Melodies (Lure 215-7). In a letter dated 5th April 1938,

Woolf gives Ling the same advice she had dispensed to Bing Xin:

… write an account of your life in English … As no one in

England knows you, the book could be more free than usual.

Then I would see if it could not be printed … [it] would be of

great value to other people too. I find autobiographies much

better than novels. (Woolf, “Letters” 221).

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Ling’s memoir would be published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press far later in

1953. Around the time of Woolf’s liaisons with Bing Xin and Ling, other

Chinese women were also experimenting with “highly condensed autobiographical sketches” (J. Wang, When 77). Such sketches were published in supplemental volumes by periodicals such as Lin Yutang’s Cosmic Wind and West Wind Monthly, or in anthologies such as Xie Bingying and Huang

Baoxun’s Selected Autobiographies (1945), all of which were entirely dedicated to women (78-91). This truncated form was inspired by wartime difficulties and excerpts of translated works from the West, including

Portraits in Miniature (1931) by Bloomsbury’s Lytton Strachey (J. Wang,

When 77; 91). The trend subsided in mainland China after the founding of the

PRC, when Mao Zedong’s mandated forms of socialist realism made women’s life writing untenable (J. Wang, When 13; L. Wang 23).

The Anglophonic Turn to Women’s Life Writing

However, Chinese women continued publishing life writing overseas, and in

English, from the forties to the fifties. Apart from Yang’s 1947 autobiography, examples include Madame Wei Tao-ming’s My Revolutionary Years (1943), which is the autobiography of the self-proclaimed first female lawyer and first female magistrate in China; Ida Pruitt’s A Daughter of Han (1945), which relates the life story of a Chinese working woman named “Old Madam Ning,” as told to the author; Dymia Hsiung’s Flowering Exile: An Autobiographical

Excursion (1952), a fictionalised account of a Chinese family in England; and

Ling Shuhua’s Ancient Melodies (1953), which is a memoir of the May Fourth painter and writer’s early years. The presses that published these works are, in

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order of appearance, John Day Company, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Yale

University Press, Peter Davies, and the Hogarth Press. Their locations in New

York, New Haven, and London hint at a wider network of publishers in the anglophone world which were increasingly invested in Chinese migrant women’s lives and writing.

This corpus indicates growing Western interests in the Chinese diaspora, which was prompted by major crises such as the Second Sino-

Japanese War, its development into the Pacific War, and the looming threat of a Communist-controlled China. Jing M. Wang characterises such English- language life writing as works that “integrate [the authors’] personal histories with Chinese culture, which make the stories ethnographical as well as autobiographical accounts” (When 190). Christina Klein argues that U.S. involvement in the Pacific War “created a greater awareness of and sympathy toward Chinese and Filipinos living in the U.S., which translated into a national audience for the stories they had to tell” (227). Her examples of mid- century Chinese American life writing include Pardee Lowe’s memoir Father and Glorious Descendant (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography Fifth

Chinese Daughter (1950), which were “the first book-length works published in English by American-born Chinese writers” (228). She attributes the success of these works to their “touristic quality … they guide their readers like privileged tourists through the inner workings of Chinese families, businesses, social relations, and customs,” and they “introduce Americans to a people whose integration has become a geopolitical imperative” (228).

The Western demand for Chinese- and China-related writing— particularly life writing—made it a profitable business. Richard Jean So offers

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the John Day Company as a case study. According to So, the publisher “saw a precipitous decline in revenue” following the end of the Second World War

(“Collaboration and Translation” 43). Its founder, Richard Walsh—husband to

Pearl S. Buck—was hoping to “reverse his company’s fortunes” by appealing to “a new readerly public … interested in ‘the [Chinese] immigrant experience’” (43-4). This idea was supported with research done by the publisher’s marketing division (44). Walsh thus commissioned Lin Yutang to write Chinatown Family, apparently the first novel “explicitly marketed as what Walsh and Buck would call ‘Chinese American’ literature” (41). Lin’s novel was released in 1948—the year after Yang’s autobiography was published. So’s research suggests that Yang’s work was very much part of

Walsh’s plan to capitalise on a lucrative market in the U.S., one that desired narratives by and about Chinese immigrants.

Both Klein and So’s research recovers a mid-century moment when

Chinese migration prompted the emergence of Chinese- and China-related writing in the U.S., a phenomenon that led eventually to Maxine Hong

Kingston’s watershed memoir, The Woman Warrior (1977). However, their focus on “Chinese American literature” and their emphasis on the ethnographic dimensions of these mid-century works, risk obscuring the heterogeneity of related works published during this period. The corpus of life writing I am working with were produced by people of Chinese descent stationed across the globe. Some of these works were authored by Chinese citizens, others by migrants, and yet others by descendants of immigrants.

Some of these authors remained in China, others wrote and published their works abroad, and many were well-travelled. They dealt with topics far

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beyond ethnographic accounts of American Chinatowns and the assimilationist politics of U.S. multiculturalism.

The example at hand—Yang’s Autobiography—demonstrates some of the difficulties of classifying these works. Consider the production and circulation history of her work: Yang and her family fled to the U.S. in 1937 during the Sino-Japanese War and later became naturalized American citizens.

She first wrote the work in Chinese along the East Coast during the Second

World War. Her husband Chao subsequently translated the manuscript into

English, partly because the printing press they worked with lacked Chinese types (viii-ix). Consequently, the autobiography circulated solely in English for two decades, until Yang’s Chinese manuscript was finally published by

Taipei’s Zhuanji Wenxue and released in two parts in 1967 and 1972 (J. Wang,

Jumping 204, 241). This two-part Chinese edition contains numerous differences from the English to cater to the sinophone market. Both editions, however, faded into obscurity. It was not until 1998 that Liaoning Education

Press reissued the second half of Yang’s Chinese text titled Zaji Zhaojia

(Miscellaneous Notes on the Chao Family), and not until 2014 that Guangxi

Normal University Press reissued the first half titled Yige Nüren de Zizhuan (A

Woman’s Autobiography), finally making the full work available to sinophone readers today. Recently in May 2020, the British-Taiwanese Camphor Press brought the English edition back into “print” as an eBook.

Although the book was first published in English and in the U.S., its co-authors position the work within the May Fourth lineage of Chinese women’s life writing, which I have historicised in the previous section. In the foreword, Chao introduces Yang’s work thus:

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My wife began her autobiography in 1913. She began writing it

as a novel, but soon decided that real events were more exciting

than imagined ones … But in those days, when an archaic,

literary style was the only proper thing, she lacked a suitable

medium in which to tell the story of the woman she is, and she

stopped her writing before she went very far with it. (vii)

This narrative recalls how the likes of Lu Yin, Su Xuelin, and Bing Xin went through abortive attempts at writing an autobiography before finally breaking the literary prohibition against self-exposure. The development of a “suitable medium” in which women can write candidly about their lives and in the vernacular required a protracted literary revolution. For Chao, this began with what he calls “Hu Shih’s Literary Revolution of 1917” that made writing in the Chinese vernacular respectable, and Hu Shih’s subsequent elevation of auto/biographical writing to the status of serious literature, with works such as the aforementioned “Biography of Li Chao” and Self-Portrait at Forty (vii- viii). Chao explains that following these developments, Yang

… can now take courage in writing as she talks without having

to feel apologetic about it. She can now even feel fashionable

about it. (viii)

Through narrating the backstory to Yang’s autobiography, Chao advances a historical account of how China’s vernacular movement and the development of life writing helped women writers find their literary voices.

Given the book’s foreword and also its publication and circulation history, I argue that Yang’s work straddles the conceptual boundaries between anglophone and sinophone literature, and between Chinese and Chinese

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American literature. In “The Location of Literature” (2006), Rebecca

Walkowitz argues that the late twentieth century saw the emergence of anglophone immigrant fiction which complicates scholarly invocations of

“literature in English” (528-9). Many such works “circulate in several literary systems at once, and can—some would say, need—to be read within several national traditions” (529). Walkowitz’s point is salient to the mid-century context of anglophone Chinese writing. King-Kok Cheung likewise argues that Chinese and Chinese American life writing need to be studied together such that a transnational and bicultural perspective emerges (3).

In that spirit, this chapter now turns to a reading of Yang’s autobiography. In what follows, I examine three facets to her work that exemplify the “modest historicism” of Chinese women’s life writing: First, her muted portrayals of herself as a modern woman and an anti-Qing revolutionary; second, her simple and often humorous style of narration; and third, her self-reflexive allegories of women’s life writing, which insist on the genre’s historicity. Rather than thinking of “modesty” as merely a cultural prohibition against self-writing—that is, in purely negative terms—my approach conceives of “modesty” as a generative aesthetic quality that is constitutive of Chinese women’s life writing.

Yang Buwei: The Moderate “Feminist” Revolutionary

Yang consistently portrays herself as a modern woman, but one who is not remarkably radical or inspiring. She begins the autobiography by claiming that she is a “typical Chinese woman” (3) who is married and has “four children, a very typical number for a Chinese woman to have” (3), and who has “such an

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amount of vanity as becomes my sex” (3). At one point, she describes how she has gradually turned into “an absent-minded professor’s wife” (281). Where

Yang discusses her positive traits, she couches them in negative terms. Take the following example:

I have a quick temper. I am contrary and stubborn. If you play

rough, I can play rougher; if you are reasonable, I will beat you

in reasonableness. I am on the side of the weak and humble. If I

see a wrong, I cannot look on but must meddle with what is

none of my business. (5)

Here, her outspoken nature and sense of justice are rendered as a caricature of an abrasive and difficult woman. During the course of her self-demeaning introduction, Yang cops to being “a woman with an unusual experience” (3) who

was principal of a school before [she] went to college … healed

grownups and brought a few hundred children into the

world … traveled in twelve provinces and three continents …

lived six years in Japan and thirteen years in the United States.

(3)

By framing her achievements as part of “an unusual experience,” Yang suggests that her exceptional life can be attributed to circumstance rather than to her own efforts. Further, she does not state explicitly that she was one of the earliest Chinese women who was trained in modern medicine, that she co- founded the first non-missionary hospital in Beijing, and that her birth control clinic was probably the first in China.

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Then, despite these accomplishments, Yang expresses shame at giving up her medical practice after marriage, though this was a choice made willingly and happily. In her cookbook, she begins by declaring that she was

“ashamed to have written this book … because I am a doctor and ought to be practicing instead of cooking” (B.Y. Chao, How to Cook xii). In the autobiography, she refers to this event as “the desertion of my profession”

(184). However, she also takes this opportunity to discuss the compromises that female professionals have to make. She juxtaposes her own experience as a young doctor in Republican China to that of her daughter’s—the ethnomusicologist Rulan Pian Chao—during the mid-century:

When my daughter Rulan sighed the other day over the

perennial dilemma of marriage versus career, I scolded her

roundly, because she only repeated old phrases, and old phrases

could lead to nothing new … for younger women in general,

my advice to them is usually something like this. Get as much

education and training as you can find opportunities for. Try to

find work in your line for a while before getting married.

Marriage and family will make serious inroads or interruptions

in your work, and that cuts down on the chance of a woman’s

getting to the highest degree of eminence in the professions, but

that is not the same thing as saying that no married woman can

attain eminence or that a married woman has to give up all her

work for all time. No woman need be ashamed to have

acquired a major interest in the development of the family. But

in proportion to the largeness of interest and outlook she has

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acquired in her formative years, she will be able to make the

growth of the family a help, instead of a hindrance to her own

growth. By the time children are off her hands, she will find

herself, not a back number in the larger society, but a prouder

member of it. (183)

Yang’s advice re-articulates the May Fourth spirit of breaking conventions, discarding traditional sayings and thought, emancipating women, and forging the new with an eye to the collective. The form in which Yang expresses these sentiments uses the same straight-speaking colloquial style that is pervasive in her writing and those of many other May Fourth literati, whether in Chinese or in English translation. Yet, Yang’s advice is also relatively modest; she does not present herself or her daughter as trailblazing feminists who demand an overhaul of existing systems, but as seekers of a middle way via which women can attain both professional eminence and private fulfilment with dignity, given the prevailing constraints in both Chinese and U.S. society.

Then, consider Yang’s muted depictions of her revolutionary credentials, especially in contrast to those of her grandfather. She mentions early on that she “joined revolutions and took refuge from wars” (3); later, she discloses her membership in Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui (36). This secret society was a coalition of rebels responsible for toppling the Qing dynasty, and it was the predecessor to the Kuomingtang, or the Nationalist Party. Her family was “quite mixed up with the revolutionists” (36); her grandfather in particular, Yang Renshan (given name: Wenhui), was a radical who was “not much of a loyal subject of the Ch’ing dynasty” (36). During the Taiping

Rebellion, he served in the Qing campaign against the Taiping rebels, but also

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made treasonous suggestions to his friend, the famous military leader Zeng

Guofan. Yang Buwei reports her grandfather’s words to Zeng verbatim:

“I am happy to serve under your leadership in putting a stop to

killing and plunder by these [Taiping] fanatics and in restoring

peace and law in the land. But why must we continue to be

loyal to this decadent foreign [Qing] dynasty? Now that we

have a first-rate army of our own Han people, isn’t it now a

fine opportunity to regain our freedom?” (83-4)

Zeng mercifully dispatched Yang Renshan to the backline, who was thus forestalled from inspiring a revolution against the Qing court. Today, Yang

Renshan is better known for being the founder of the Jinling Buddhist Press in

Nanjing in 1886, which was a critical part of the modern Buddhist revival in

China following the widespread destruction of Buddhist artifacts, libraries, and temples during the Taiping Rebellion (Wu Yankang). In Yang Buwei’s words, her grandfather was “Buddhism and the revolution … combined in the same person … he was such a champion of freedom in general and of my freedom in particular” (Autobiography 82). The Buddhist press hosted scholars of all political stripes who gathered to discuss religion, society, and politics:

The activities at Yenling Hsiang were not really those of

underground revolutionaries under a Buddhist cloak. Among

the visitors, there were even strong royalists … The relation

between scholarship and the revolution was much more

organic … Those who thought conservatively respected the

teacher too much to cause him trouble. Those who were

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seeking direct action found added courage for their convictions.

If the authorities were fooled in thinking that a club of

innocuous Buddhist scholars was the last place in which to look

for revolutionaries, my grandfather did not mean to fool them.

(88)

Yang Renshan was interested in the constitutional government in Great Britain and discussed “people’s rights and systems of voting” with his son (36).

However, he never lived to see the fall of the Qing dynasty, but died right before the Wuchang Uprising, during which the “first shot of the 1911

Revolution” was fired (93-5).

In burnishing her grandfather’s revolutionary credentials, and in symbolically tying his death to the start of Republican China within her narrative, Yang suggests two things: first, that the Qing dynasty was partly dismantled from above and within by its disgruntled scholar-official caste, and second, that she and other May Fourth elites owed their privileges and achievements to the progressiveness of late-Qing revolutionaries; in fact,

Yang became a doctor at her grandfather’s suggestion (89). By setting up this contrastive frame, Yang also implies that her own role in the various revolutions were insignificant. In a chapter titled “Sitting out the Revolution,”

Yang narrates how she and her brothers (cross-dressed as nuns) escaped by train to the foreign concessions of Shanghai during the Wuchang Uprising which overthrew the Qing dynasty. During the Second Revolution of 1913— which saw Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalists declaring war on Yuan Shikai’s

Beiyang government—Yang (who was twenty-four) organised the defence of the girls’ school she was heading and took partial charge of 130 soldiers (118-

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9). The fighting never reached their gates, though Yang witnessed the execution of the mutineers (120). As the conflict escalated and swung in favour of the incumbent government, Yang disbanded the school and led her family and seventy students from Nanjing to seek refuge in Shanghai (129).

Given her association with the Nationalists, Yang risked losing her state scholarship and getting arrested under the Beiyang administration; therefore, she escaped to Tokyo and pursued her medical studies in Japan instead of

England as originally planned (129-30). She picked up Japanese quickly while living under conditions of precarity as a political refugee with limited funds

(136-40). Her studies abroad meant that she missed the outcry in China ignited by Japan’s Twenty-One Demands of 1915 and the May Fourth Movement of

1919 that was sparked by the Treaty of Versailles. Yang admits to sitting out on patriotic activities in Tokyo throughout these developments, opting instead to complete her studies (144-5). Two decades later during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Yang would make similarly practical and self- preserving decisions with her husband. The Chaos fled to the U.S., which led to her husband’s characterisation of their behaviour as those of “second-class

Chinese [who] went abroad when they could and sat out the war in safety and comfort” (290).

There is a growing sense throughout the autobiography that Yang the narrator is grappling with how her life has been buffeted by historical forces, which leads her to meditate on the individual’s modest place in history. A particularly poignant strand of the narrative begins with her time as a medical student in Japan. Prior to this, Yang had described in heart-breaking detail a number of deaths among friends and family caused by diseases such as

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smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and the Spanish Flu of 1918.

These tragedies ignited her passion for internal medicine and the study of contagious diseases (146). However, Yang was forced to set her interests aside when the state ordered that “all women holders of government scholarships in medicine should specialize in gynecology and obstetrics” (146). Her career was thus shunted by sexist policies. Although Yang’s work as a gynaecologist was of historical significance, she never grew to like her specialisation:

I was both glad and sorry that I had been forced to specialize in

gynecology and obstetrics: glad, because I hated the subject

and did not find it so hard to give it up; sorry, because if I had

had an opportunity to continue my interest in pathology or

bacteriology, I might have been able to keep up some practice

or research. Even dentistry or ophthalmology (another pet

aversion of mine) could have been scheduled for less primitive

hours of the day. When one or two of my daughters said that

they wanted to go into medicine, I said:

“No, dears, you look almost as pretty as I did at your

ages. The country needs more women doctors, to be sure, but

leave it to the less marriageable ones.” (184)

This poignant passage captures how the demands made by state and society on the emergent class of professional women colluded to drive Yang from her profession and pushed her back into the domestic realm—a fate which she hoped the next generation could avoid.

This theme re-emerges during Yang’s account of her volunteer work during the Second World War, which is accompanied by an implicit

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commentary about her heavily gendered role in the war efforts. Instead of tapping on her medical expertise, Yang found work as a caterer for events such as the Chinese Relief luncheon, several church fundraisers, and linguistic projects at Yale (312). She continues self-deprecatingly:

Being a back number of a doctor, I did little that any housewife

in my place could not have done. The most I had to do with

medicine was to buy new drugs and vitamins from time to time

and send them by airmail to my friends and relatives. I did go

to meetings of neighbourhood first-aid groups and was made

one of the doctors for Shepard and Walker Streets in case of air

raids, but was fortunate in never having been needed. (312)

In contrast, her linguist husband taught Chinese to 150 U.S. soldiers and prepared a linguistic map of China for the military’s use (313). Here, Yang’s story is strikingly resonant with an episode in Maxine Hong Kingston’s

Woman Warrior. In the section titled “Shaman,” Kingston reconstructs how her mother, Brave Orchid, must have trained as a doctor at the To Keung

School of Midwifery in Guangzhou, and the glory she subsequently enjoyed:

After two years of study … my mother returned to her home

village a doctor. She was welcomed with garlands and

cymbals … My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with

big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had

gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient

magicians who came down from the mountains.

“When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagers

said, “Ahhh,” at my good shoes and my long gown. I always

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dressed well when I made calls. Some villages brought out their

lion and danced ahead of me. You have no idea how much I

have fallen coming to America.” (73-4)

The poignant final line captures Brave Orchid’s fall from being a respected

“shaman” in China and an intermediary of two worlds—one who “wore a silk robe and Western shoes” (73), and who blended modern “Western” medical training with traditional Chinese medicine (62)—to becoming a washerwoman in the Bronx (74). For female doctors like Yang Buwei and Brave Orchid, starting a family and migrating from war-torn China to the U.S. meant falling out of the professional class and (re)turning to feminised work that has been historically undervalued. In both Yang’s autobiography and Kingston’s memoir—both significantly forms of life writing—the promises of women’s emancipation in May Fourth China ended with disappointment in the U.S.

Yang’s narration toes the line between casting herself as a disappointment and defending her decisions; as she puts it in the beginning,

…all this is only what I think I am—no not even that, it is only

what I now think I am. If you want to know what I really am,

you should read the story of my life. Here it is. (5)

Instead of offering extensive self-evaluations, she typically leaves the reader to judge her actions. In taking this tack, Yang must have been aware of the possible comparisons that could be made between her and other famous revolutionaries, such as the female soldier and writer Xie Bingying. Like

Yang, Xie was born to a scholar-official family, was part of the May Fourth generation, and was a Nationalist (Xie xv-vi). Xie also migrated to the U.S. eventually, though her move came far later in 1974 following almost three

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decades in Taiwan where she taught Chinese literature at Taiwan Normal

University (xvii). However, unlike Yang, whose grandfather “connived at failure to observe foot-binding” (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 33) and helped to break her betrothal (76-81), Xie came from a far more conservative family.

The latter had her feet bound, was locked up by her mother when she attempted to breach her betrothal, was forced to go through with the wedding ceremony, and only managed to escape and annul her marriage thereafter (Xie x-xv). In 1926, Xie truncated her studies to fight with the National

Revolutionary Army in the Northern Expedition, during which Chiang Kai- shek defeated the coalition of warlords that had fragmented Chinese territories into private fiefdoms (Brissman and Brissman x). From the late twenties to thirties, Xie lived the bohemian life of a struggling writer in Shanghai

(Brissman and Brissman xi). She was thrown in prison twice—once in China for being a suspected Communist, and once in Tokyo for refusing to welcome

Puyi, the last Qing emperor, during his visit to Japan (Xie xvi).

By the time Yang published her autobiography in 1947, Xie had produced multiple volumes and editions of life writing in Chinese about her experiences as a soldier and a prisoner, all of which were hugely popular and have circulated since at least 1927 (Brissman and Brissman xvi; Dooling and

Torgeson 255). In 1940, Lin Yutang’s teenage daughters, Adet and Anor Lin, translated Xie’s first autobiography into English with major revisions and new material (J. Wang, When 183-4). The ensuing work titled Girl Rebel: The

Autobiography of Hsieh Pingying was published by the John Day Company, the same press which issued Yang’s cookbook and autobiography. In fact, the people behind the publication of Xie’s and Yang’s works were intimately

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connected. The Lins were friends with the Chaos; Mrs. Lin had known Yang since the early twenties and had previously offered to write a short biography of Yang at Pearl Buck’s behest (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography viii-ix). The John

Day Company was founded by Buck’s husband, Richard Walsh, and the couple were closely involved with many of the Lins’ and Chaos’ literary efforts. These connections suggest two things: first, that Yang was aware of

Xie’s towering corpus of life writing, and second, that Yang’s modest self- representations could be a tacit acknowledgement of the great distance between the privileges she enjoyed versus the massive struggles faced by other

May Fourth women such as Xie.

Make no mistake; Yang was a revolutionary in name and deed by virtue of her membership and participation in Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui.

But unlike Xie, Yang’s contributions to Chinese modernisation was not primarily of the heroic, martyred variety, and has more to do with reconstruction and reformation. The revolutionary figure and governor of

Anhui, Bo Wenwei, reportedly said to Yang: “We old revolutionists are only good at breaking down. It is for your generation to build up” (B.Y. Chao,

Autobiography 125). This dialectical trope of revolution as necessary destruction versus the constructive modalities of rebirth and recovery (which

Yang the gynaecologist more strongly associates herself with) plays out across

Yang’s autobiography in such moments. This dialectic is embodied by the complementary relation between more militant types such as Bo and Xie, and more pacifist types such as Yang. Yang is perhaps, quite oxymoronically, a

“moderate revolutionary.”

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Literary Modesty: On Humour, Simple Chinese, and Basic English

Yang’s modest self-styling is intrinsically linked to her modest literary style, which is characterised by simplicity and humour. The overall organisation of her autobiography suggests that it was written in small snatches and designed to be read thus. The work is split into six parts, each containing around ten short chapters; in turn, each chapter is only three to eight pages long. In terms of expression, Yang prioritises clarity and flow by generally using a modest vocabulary and short sentences with simple structures. The simple prose makes her account of the Chinese context accessible to foreign readers, whereas humour keeps her reflections on history and politics approachable.

Given that her work was published during a post-war era that was haunted by the spectre of Communist China, Yang’s modest historicism should be understood as a strategic choice, one which positions the autobiography as middlebrow literature, such that its sympathetic and entertaining account of modern Chinese history reaches the widest possible anglophone readership.

Yang’s simple and humorous aesthetics are organised around a comical rivalry between wife and husband that plays out across other binaries such as woman-man, brash-reserved, doer-thinker, simple-convoluted, and author-translator. This dynamic is sketched out in the foreword, which attempts many things in only four-and-a-half pages: it quickly links Yang’s work to the New Culture Movement, explains her prose style, reflects on the problems of translation, establishes the couple’s status as intellectual royalty, all while injecting a hearty dose of comedy. Chao begins, in the great cross- cultural tradition of gender wars and marital humour, with the following line:

“Since my wife has the last word, I shall have the foreword” (vii). However,

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his opening excursion into the history of Chinese letters is cut short by Yang’s

“interjection” on the second page:

It was only eight months ago that she really got started—

No, Yuenren, you are all mixed up. You started with the

English version eight months ago. I started with my Chinese a

year ago—

You are right, Yunch’ing, you started a year ago.28

Well, one day, while my wife was visiting New York, Pearl

Buck suggested to her the idea of writing a short—

You are wrong there again, Yuenren. I did not see Pearl

Buck on that occasion. It was Mrs. Lin Yutang who told me

that Pearl Buck had asked her if she might—

But darling, is this your foreword or mine? If you keep

interrupting—

Why not make it both yours and mine?—

That’s an idea, too. Suppose you go on from here,

Yunch’ing!— (viii)

This section demonstrates the deliberate nature and the elegance of Yang and

Chao’s modesties, which can be both funny and informative, both self- disparaging and self-promotional. Yang’s interjection adds levity by puncturing Chao’s academicism with a squabble between a middle-class couple living in “present-day” U.S.—they insert a quick mention of New York here, and later, their signoff puts their location at Cambridge, Massachusetts

(xi). The crosstalk also allows the couple to namedrop Lin and Buck, which

28 “Yunch’ing” is one of Yang’s monikers.

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indicates their membership in the elite circles of Chinese-American society.

This interjection frames the autobiography as a non-threatening family project by the Chinese-American literati, as opposed to the attestations of a Chinese female revolutionary.

Another key piece of information relayed by the crosstalk is that the text is co-produced by wife and husband, though Yang is credited as the sole author. Having barged her way into the foreword, Yang the narrator explains that she wrote in “simple Chinese” (x), that her “general reflections are few and direct” (x), and that she prefers writing in a “straightforward way …

[which keeps] the announcement of the outcome at the beginning of a story”

(x-xi). The plan was for Chao to translate her “simple Chinese into Basic

English” (x). “Basic English” refers to a system of 850 words devised by C.K.

Ogden, which was primarily meant for teaching the language to children and second-language users (C.K. Ogden 221). However, Yang complains that her husband has “not always been a well-behaved translator” (x). The recalcitrant professor “likes to indulge in verbal paradoxes” (x), prefers an “academic style of involved qualifications” (x), and occasionally renders her words into something “deep and abstract” (x). In various places, he attempts what he calls

“fictional technique” (x), where he “changed things around, so that the outcome of an incident will be delayed until the end” (x). Yang’s finger- wagging at her husband’s transgressions is accompanied by her comical self- portrayal: “I have tried to catch him doing these things and registered my protests in the form of footnotes, but I won’t guarantee that I have not let some slip by” (x). Indeed, she allows him a transgression on page 183, which was

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when Yang offers advice to young women who have to choose between marriage and a career. Her narration suddenly takes a bizarre turn:

This is of course not what a mathematician would call a general

solution. There are too many variables involved. Mine must

have been a singular case, with indeterminate solutions. (183)

Chao’s handiwork is obvious here. He downgrades Yang’s advice for young women by qualifying, via a self-involved mathematical analogy, that her wisdom may not be suitable for everyone. Yang registers her protest in a footnote: “I suspect that something has happened between text and translation here.—B.Y.C.” (183). At first glance, Yang appears to be ridiculing Chao’s affectations. However, she is also modestly implying that her husband should be credited for any artistry in the prose. Further, this comical exchange illustrates how Chao’s editorial pen keeps Yang’s assertions modest.

Such staged quarrels between wife and husband, writer and translator, author and editor, dramatise a central tension within work. On the one side, the Chaos wish to inform anglophone readers of critical developments in modern Chinese history and culture; on the other side, they wish to do so in an approachable and compelling manner. They foreground this tension by expressing it as a rivalry between Yang’s preference for simple Chinese and

Basic English, versus Chao’s inclinations towards cerebral flourishes and nuanced elaborations. Their balancing act speaks to far broader debates involving the role of the English language—especially Basic English—in mediating transnational collaboration and fostering world peace during the postwar period. The Basic system was first invented by Ogden in 1928. In a manifesto-like article titled “Round the Earth with 850 Words” published in

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1934, Ogden promotes the Basic system by referencing the rise of English as a global language:

Today the increase in any one year among those who make use

of English is greater by 1,000,000 than all the supporters of all

the international languages put together. In fact, English is now

the natural or political language of more than 500,000,000

persons. (220)

Ogden explains that “Basic” is an acronym for “British—American—

Scientific—International—Commercial,” which indicates the system’s Anglo-

American roots, its global outlook, and its utilitarian mission (221). His article is in fact, written entirely in Basic, which offers the reader “an example of what is possible within the limits of the system and what the international language of the future may be like (222). The Basic system was later promoted by the likes of I.A. Richards in China throughout the twentieth century. Richards was a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in 1929. He returned to China twice in the thirties on grants from the Rockefeller

Foundation. In 1950, he visited again by invitation of the Communist government, then made a final trip in 1979 on a lecture tour.29 In a scholarly article dated January 1945—months before the end of the Second World War, and two years before the publication of Yang’s autobiography—Richards restates and defends Ogden’s vision for Basic. He notes a critical pushback against Basic, motivated by a resentment at “the inescapable spread of

English” and “the unfairly privileged position … which Basic has given to

29 For a study of Richards’s visits to China, see Rodney Koeneke’s Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979 (2003).

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English” (65). Here, Richards acknowledges the hegemonic rise of English and Basic’s role in facilitating the phenomenon. However, he defends Basic by arguing for its urgent relevance in the joint military efforts between the

U.S. and China against Japan in the Pacific War:

A Chinese, learning to fly, for example, needs, fairly early,

about a hundred technical terms not in Basic. It has been found

(at Luke Field and elsewhere) that Basic gives us a direct and

economical (in fact a life-saving) means of teaching him how

to use them. Similarly the Chinese Armored Forces (learning

Basic as their operating language) also need about a hundred

technical words for their work and not the same ones. Basic

again is a speedy and economical way of teaching them. (63)

After the Second World War, Richards’s defence of the Basic system would take a pacifist turn. In a TIME magazine, Richards shares his opinion that

the spread of Basic as a globalingo could help avert war …

Richards is convinced that English is becoming the world’s

language; the only issue is whether it will be Basic English or

broken English. (“Globalingo” 48)

The Chaos were intimately acquainted with Basic; in fact, Yuen Ren Chao was directly involved with the dissemination of Basic English in China. He met I.A. Richards at Harvard University in 1918 while he was completing his doctorate in philosophy, and their subsequent stints at Tsinghua University overlapped (Y.R. Chao, Life with Chaos 84). Their exchanges inspired Chao to produce a Chinese textbook and a set of records on Basic English (85).

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Given these connections, I propose here that the pervasive mood of modesty in Yang’s work is built on a foundation of simple prose, which I argue is inspired by the utopian ideals behind both Chao and Hu Shih’s New

Culture Movement as expressed by their manifesto, “The Problem of the

Chinese Language” (1916), and also Ogden’s system of Basic English (1928).

As the numerous block quotations in this chapter demonstrate, Yang’s narration is executed in a stream of idiomatic English prose. Her practice cleaves to Chao and Hu Shih’s New Culture manifesto of 1916, which argues

(in English) for a simple and colloquial style of Chinese writing:

Allusions and quotations should not be multiplied unless

calculated to mystify or to show off … We should avoid

machinelike symmetry and antithethses [sic] at the expense of

spontaneity and genuineness … Our letters should be freed

from their “polite” nonsenses to give room for sincerity.

Relatives and friends should write as they would talk … An

extra page or two of formalities not only wastes time, energy

and money, but it wastes attention and interest, and, as we

say … puts a film between you and me. (579-80).

By planning for her simple Chinese to be translated into Basic English, Yang’s autobiography marks a translingual and transnational continuity between the

New Culture Movement—which strove to unite the Chinese across ethnic, linguistic, and classed differences at the dawn of Republican China—and

Basic English—which represents Ogden and Richards’s utopian quest for a

“globalingo” that would foster international collaboration and peace. Although

Yang’s autobiography was not ultimately translated entirely into Basic, the

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work remains an easy and straightforward read that could appeal to second- language users as well. One might say that the modesties of Yang’s simple prose is matched by her ambitions for the work to travel far. In this light,

Yang’s autobiography should be understood as an experiment in producing a style of ethnographic history that facilitates cross-cultural understanding, one which articulates the author’s experience of Chinese history through simple and engaging writing, and in her second language, to foreign readers.

Developing a Sense of Youmo: Levity in the Shadow of Red China

The serious ideals behind Yang’s literary style are often hidden behind the

Chaos’ sense of humour, but their humour should be taken seriously too. As with her simple prose, humour bridges the gap between Yang’s account of modern Chinese history and the postwar sensibilities of anglophone readers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Yang keeps her stories of reform, crisis, war, and revolution modest by deflating them with humour and redirecting the narration back to light-hearted topics. As the foreword already demonstrates, the comical rivalry between wife and husband forms the basis of a running gag which serves this very purpose, while reminding readers of the Chaos’

“present lives” as a non-threatening, middle-class couple living in the U.S.

Chao takes on the character of an eccentric scholar and translator who is pushed to the margins of the text by his domineering wife. Yang explains that her husband believes in “knowledge for its own sake,” whereas she “believes in doing things, and if I find that I have to know certain things for doing a thing, I can pick up the necessary knowledge while doing it” (209). She occasionally regales the reader with her husband’s oddities. While describing

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their life at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Yang discusses Chao’s irrational dislike of his office at Harvard University:

Yuenren’s office was the best room in the building, a big,

bright room, converted from a lecture room, in Boylston Hall,

from which he could see both the Appelton [sic] Chapel and

old John Harvard. Yuenren did not appreciate the privilege of

having the best desk in the best room of the building,

commanding the best view of the “Yard.” He has a peculiar

liking for small rooms—a sort of intellectual agoraphobia, as it

were. He says that the degree of his concentration is inversely

proportional to the size of the room … Even at home, he likes

to stand bookcases and things in the middle of the room to

make it look smaller. As a matter of fact, the four hundred odd

filing cases containing the million-odd dictionary cards did

break up the big office room a little. But he still complained

that he could not concentrate. He claimed that that was why he

wrote only three books in six years—and a large part of the

work was done at home. (308)

There is more than a whiff of humblebragging here, what with the mentions of

Harvard and the “best desk and the best room of the building” that Yang inserts so smoothly into the narrative, followed by Chao’s obscene achievement of having only wrote “three books in six years.” These factoids are woven into a narrative which thematises Chao’s love for cramped workspaces. She expands on this theme later:

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Between bathing in the Caspian Lake and eating raw peas,

fresh from the vine, [Chao] thought he could put my

autobiography into English in one month. No, he didn’t write

the way I did, leaning on my elbow on the lawn, or lounging

more comfortably in the big sitting room. He would coop

himself up in the smallest bedroom in the house, with thick-

growing pines shading the sun from his windows. He was

making good progress at the rate of two years a day, and I had a

hard time trying to maintain a lead of twenty or thirty years

with my writing in Chinese. (315)

Here, Chao’s eccentric and diligent nature is set against Yang’s free-spirited way of working.

Chao adds to this dynamic by playing up his role as an editor, fact- checker, scholar, and translator. He introduces a bibliographical footnote on the foreword’s very first page and continues this practice throughout. Some footnotes conform to Yang’s narrating voice and offer supplementary information; for example, one explains Chinese terms for addressing relatives

(22-3) and another gives the conversion rate from Chinese taels to U.S. dollars

(66). But Chao also sporadically re-inserts his voice into the narrative via unexpected and comical uses of the footnote; for example, when Yang claims that he “never washed dishes,” Chao asks in a footnote, “What, never?—

Y.R.C.” to which Yang replies, “Well, hardly ever.—B.Y.C.” (308). He plays the role of the henpecked husband who protests impotently. The footnotes thus perform two types of cross-cultural mediation: they explain the finer points of

Chinese culture to foreign readers, and they add comic relief. Such tactics

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allow Yang to anchor her narration of Chinese history within the domestic frame of a migrant family that is well-assimilated to U.S. culture. And not just any family; Chao’s association with the Ivy League elevates them to “model minority” status.

A through-line can be traced between the Chaos’s comic stylings and

Lin Yutang’s “invention” of humour. Christopher Rea’s The Age of

Irreverence (2015) contains a chapter on Lin’s central role in developing humour in Chinese letters, as inspired by British and U.S. writers like Charles

Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde (134). In

1924, Lin transliterated “humour” as “youmo” and promoted it across two essays. According to Rea, Lin argues that Chinese writers are inclined towards didacticism and have neglected cultivating their sense of humour, resulting in a “stifling intellectual scene” (133). Lin notes that even academic books in the

West contained humour, and suggests that if Chinese writers did the same, they would add much needed levity and openness to intellectual discourse

(134). These ideas caught on from 1932 when Lin promoted youmo extensively in his newly founded literary magazine Analects Fortnightly (132-

4). The reputation of the Analects was bolstered by Lin’s association with two

European writers who visited Shanghai in 1933, namely the Nobel Laureate,

George Bernard Shaw, and the popular French novelist, Maurice Dekobra

(132-3). Throughout its existence, the Analects

re-printed cartoons from Punch, the New Yorker, Collier’s, and

the Humorist, often with bilingual captions … Articles

discussed the humor of Will Rogers and Charlie Chaplin, as

well as the ubiquitous Bernard Shaw. (Rea 137)

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The success of Lin’s Analects inspired the establishment of other humour- based literary magazines in the thirties; it also cemented Lin’s reputation as the “Master of Humour” (youmo dashi) within China and as a Chinese humourist worldwide (133). For Rea, Lin and his fellow humourists primarily addressed two audiences:

They wanted to convince self-flagellating writers like Han

Shiheng to relax, stop bickering, and enjoy the pleasures of life,

as a first step to changing the general cultural climate [within

China]. At the same time they countered Western

condescension with a humorous demeanor that was relaxed,

confident, and cosmopolitan. They would turn hierarchies on

their heads. (15)

Similarly, Qian Suoqiao argues that youmo represents a “cross-cultural intervention” into the polarised aesthetics of Chinese literature and culture, where in Lin’s words, “the serious becomes too serious and the non-serious too vulgar” (Youmo Zahua 1; trans. in Qian, “Translating ‘humor’” 281-2).

Conversely, youmo offers “a middle ground for Chinese modernity in which

Chinese literature and culture can shake off shackles of moral pomposity while still maintaining a gentlemanly style or taste” (Qian, “Translating

‘humor’” 282). For Qian, youmo is associated with cosmopolitan liberals, as opposed to the cutting satire and uptight moralism associated with Lu Xun and other “radical revolutionary writers” who were members of the League of

Leftist Writers (“Translating ‘humor’” 283). In short, Lin’s concept of youmo implicates affect in various epistemic and deontic projects of the May Fourth

Movement. Youmo occupies a middling position between crass humour and

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political satire, between popular entertainment and high literature, and mediates exchanges between China and the West. Through cultivating one’s youmogan or sense of humour, one learns to set aside self-flagellation or resentment, and to adopt a leisurely attitude when learning from the West.

Lin was not alone in his views; as early as 1916, Chao argues that the

Chinese

…should develop our sense of humor. Just read the

newspapers. In the editorials, one finds impotent rudeness

(when they dare it). In the comic sections one finds gross

vulgarity, but no humor. (“The Problem of the Chinese

Language” 580)

This connection between Lin and the Chaos suggests that the humour in

Yang’s autobiography marks the continuation of an earlier New Culture project during the mid-century period. This point is made clearer when one contrasts the reception of Yang’s work against that of Xie Bingying’s autobiography, Girl Rebel. When the latter book was released in 1940, a New

York Times (NYT) reviewer describes the author and her work thus:

Hsieh Pingying herself, now about 32 or 33, seems to represent

modern Chinese womanhood at its most militant and

“liberated,” and her story is as artless as militant crusaders’

stories usually are. (Thompson 17)

To borrow Lin’s words, Xie’s writing is an example of when “the serious becomes too serious” (Youmo Zahua 1). Seven years later, Yang’s book was described in the same paper thus:

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In a chatty, unpretentious way Mrs. Chao ambles along,

revealing fascinating sidelights on her native city of Nanking in

the Eighteen Nineties … There are tantalizing descriptions of

oleaginous dinners, of odd domestic details, travels and

friendships … Weddings, deaths, parties, welfare work and

studies, antique customs and the constantly expanding contacts

with the West are pointed up by the author’s spicy, opinionated

comments and reflections. (Wedeck BR12)

The difference in reception suggests that the Chaos’ sense of humour— especially Yang’s “spicy” opinions—appealed to a U.S. readership better.

This was by design; as Yang declares in her foreword, “although this book was written in Chinese, it was written for readers of English” (Autobiography x).

I further suggest that the middlebrow aesthetics, the non-threatening domestic framing, and the doses of marital humour in Yang’s autobiography, are necessitated by the social conditions from which the work emerged.

Consider some major events of 1947 as they were reported in the very same newspaper which printed the book reviews above. In January 1947, NYT published General George Marshall’s statement on the political tensions within China, in which he explained the impossibility of peace between a

“dominant reactionary group in the [Nationalist] Government and the irreconcilable Communists” (“Text of Marshall’s Statement” 3). This statement marked one ending to the postwar diplomatic expedition known as the Marshall Mission, during which the general tried to form a coalition government that would unify the warring factions. The goal was to avert a

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complete Communist takeover on mainland China, thereby mitigating the growing threat of Communism in Asia. Then, reports on the Truman Doctrine began from 16 March 1947—a month before the appearance of Harry

Wedeck’s review of Yang’s autobiography.30 In June, NYT ran a story about a possible extension of the Truman Doctrine to China in the form of a $500 million loan to the Nationalist government (Adams 16). Two years later, the

Communists would emerge victorious in the Chinese Civil War and found the

People’s Republic of China, marking one beginning to the Cold War in Asia.

Considering this state of affairs, it comes as no surprise that Yang’s work treads carefully, given that she was writing for anglophone readers within and beyond the U.S. who were facing the rise of Red China. The geopolitical climate in 1947 is registered in the manner with which Yang downplays her political views and her revolutionary credentials, all while experimenting with humour to make her work more palatable. Her strategy appears to have succeeded if the NYT review is anything to go by. The backdrop of growing China-U.S. tensions also explains why Yang’s reviewer begins with the following lines:

Unlike most recent treatments of life in the Orient, this book is

primarily neither analytical nor political in intent. But, being

the work of an alert mind, it impinges on actual conditions in

China, including the present war, and evaluates them as they

appear. (Wedeck BR12)

Wedeck’s comment on the non-political nature of Yang’s writing is only narrowly true in the sense that she distances herself from organised politics

30 See “The News of the Week in Review,” NYT, 16 Mar. 1947, p. E1.

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later in her work, and strenuously avoids discussing the civil war throughout.

Yang makes only one mention of the Communists in the entire book when she refers to the “Kuomingtang-Communist split” (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography

235). In the same chapter, she distances herself and other pro-Nationalist intellectuals from the party proper. She casts herself as a “plain naïve citizen”

(235) and declares that she “never entered politics” (235). She writes that “Hu

Shih’s Literary Revolution … had no official connection with the

Kuomingtang” (235), and that her husband “has about as much to do with

Kuomingtang as he has with embroidery” (236). She calls Cai Yuanpei— previously the President of the National University of Peking and an originator of Academia Sinica—“[o]ne of the greatest liberals in recent China” (237).

Yang’s attempts at distancing her cohort from Chinese politics and the

Nationalist-Communist conflict hints at the growing anxieties surrounding the fates of May Fourth intellectuals and their legacies during the mid-century, within and beyond China.

However, Yang’s historical account of China and its revolutions is inherently political, especially on the topic of modernisation and reform after the end of dynastic rule and through various wars, which she consistently links to women’s health, education, and freedoms. Rather than claiming, as Wedeck does, that Yang’s writing is not “political in intent” (BR12), it is more accurate to say that she veils her political remarks with humour, indirectness, and self-disparagement. This tactic keeps her remarks modest. In fact, Yang even ventures to comment on U.S. foreign policy towards the end of her autobiography. In the final chapter titled “V-J Day,” Yang describes how the end of the Second World War coincided with numerous happy incidents in her

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personal life, which includes the final stages of writing and translating her autobiography. A scene which begins innocuously turns into an account of the start of the Atomic Age:

One morning, I heard him start typing earlier than usual.

“Have you reached the 1911 Revolution, Yuenren?” I

called from the kitchen.

“I have reached August 5, 1945! Let’s congratulate

ourselves that we are still alive, Yunch’ing!”

He had just heard the first news of the atomic bomb

over the radio and was typing feverishly a letter to The New

York Times. (315)

Here, Yang’s innocent question about Chao’s progress on her autobiography develops into a juxtaposition of the 1911 Chinese Revolution against another monumental event—the detonation of Little Boy over Hiroshima. Yang engineers this surprising twist to emphasise that her autobiography is bookended by the two historical events. In establishing these historical parameters, the scene serves also as an allegory of the relation between life writing and history—from their vantage point in the mid-century, both Yang and Chao look back at half-a-century’s worth of crises within and beyond

China that brought them from the birth of modern China to Greensboro,

Vermont, while also grappling with the violent end to the Second World War.

Yang then summarises the contents of Chao’s letter to the NYT, which I do not believe was published:

Since, he wrote, the explosion had not yet spread from

Hiroshima to Greensboro, Vermont, by this time, the danger of

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the world blowing up by atomic energy was at least temporarily

over. Secondly, he said, America had not wanted to boss the

world because it was wrong and because it could not be done.

Now, only because it was wrong. Finally, if the benefits of

atomic energy that were sure to come could be distributed

sensibly, there would be no need of anybody wanting to boss

anybody else. (316)

Yang’s summary keeps Chao’s pacifist sentiments simple without adding her own thoughts on the matter, but she is also borrowing her husband’s opinions to describe a seismic shift in mid-century geopolitics, while cautioning against the impending threat of the U.S.’s atomic imperialism. But in her usual way,

Yang ends this richly woven scene with bathos: “I could not absorb so much atomic energy in one morning, but, from the way Yuenren began to neglect my autobiography, it must have been very important” (316). Yang’s metaleptic use of the term “atomic energy” dislodges it from its first literal appearance in Chao’s comments, which were on the world-changing potential of atomic technology and its relation to U.S. imperialism. She then inserts the term, now rendered figurative, into the context of an especially stimulating morning within the Chao household. By transplanting the term from the frame of world history to a domestic and familial one, Yang changes the subject—as if she were redirecting a dinner party conversation onto safer ground—and resumes her performance as the sheltered wife of a Harvard professor. Earlier in the twenties, Lin Yutang developed youmo as a new cosmopolitan sensibility in Chinese writing. In the mid-century, the Chaos’s humour captures the manners of the Chinese-American literati during the final stages

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of the Chinese Civil War and at the dawn of the Cold War era. Their use of humour not only reflects the historical conditions that produced the work, but is also aimed at transcending the divisive rhetoric of Cold War propaganda on all sides that was sweeping the globe.

Figural Modesty: On Metonymic Allegories

The previous section ended with one of Yang’s numerous allegories for life writing, which uses a scene of writing to juxtapose the Chinese revolution of

1911 with the start of the Atomic Age. Many such allegories are easily missed because they do not draw attention to themselves. Their figurative meanings are derived solely from the diegetic elements within Yang’s narration, where people, objects, and events that are internal to the reality of her story seem to signify something larger than themselves, such as an abstract concept, a territory, or a collective. As with Hu Shih, who transforms Li Chao’s life story into a microcosmic narrative of women’s lived experiences in early

Republican China, Yang’s metonymic stylings render personal anecdotes into powerful allegories of society and history. Yet, there is a sense of figural modesty to these allegories, because they avoid foregrounding their own literariness by conforming to a pared down realist aesthetic.

I refer to Yang’s allegories as “metonymic allegories,” which I oppose to “metaphoric allegories.” My formulation borrows from Roman Jakobson’s

“The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” (1956), in which he conceives of metaphor and metonymy as “two gravitational poles” of poetic language (91).

He associates metaphor with “similarity” (91). What this means, according to

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, is that a relation of similarity is inferred

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from a metaphor’s source domain and carried over to its target domain (259).

Consider Lakoff and Johnson’s examples, “Your claims are indefensible” and

“He shot down all of my arguments” (5). In both cases, a discontinuous or unexpected similarity is drawn between the source domain of “war” and the target domain of “argument,” which is a sense of attacking and defending that produces winners and losers (5). Building on this, a “metaphoric allegory” is one that draws from an unlikely source domain to animate a target domain.

Two of Lu Xun’s famous allegories illustrate what I mean by

“metaphoric allegory.” In “A Madman’s Diary,” Lu Xun draws a relation between cannibalism and society’s depravity in late-Qing and early

Republican China. As Jameson explains:

Lu Xun’s proposition is that the people of this great maimed

and retarded, disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial

period, his fellow citizens, are “literally” cannibals: in their

desperation, disguised and indeed intensified by the most

traditional forms and procedures of Chinese culture, they must

devour one another ruthlessly to stay alive. (Allegory and

Ideology 464-5).

Likewise, Lu Xun’s parable of the “iron house” serves as an allegory of the

“seemingly hopeless situation of the third-world intellectual in this historical period (shortly after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, but also after the bankruptcy of the middle-class revolution had become apparent)—in which no solutions, no forms of praxis or change, seem conceivable”

(Jameson, Allegory and Ideology 479-80). Both of Lu Xun’s allegories appear in concise form; “A Madman’s Diary” spans merely twelve pages in

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translation (Lu Xun: Selected Works 1: 39-51), whereas the “iron house” parable occupies just three lines in the preface to Call to Arms (Chosen Pages from Lu Hsun 33-4). However, in both cases, the unlikely similarities drawn between the discontinuous domains of cannibalism/iron houses and Chinese society leap out at the reader. These metaphors draw attention to the literariness (i.e. non-idiomatic quality) of Lu Xun’s allegories.

Like Lu Xun, Yang uses concise allegories that typically span a page.

But as opposed to Lu Xun’s metaphoric allegories, Yang tends to use metonymic ones. According to Jakobson, metonymy is a kind of contiguous relation between a part that is directly represented, and a whole that is implied

(90). His example is Anna Karenina’s red handbag as it is hurled under the train car; here, the fate of the bag stands in for its owner’s own (92). For

Jakobson, genres such as Russian “heroic epics” (91), “realism” (95), and

“prose” (96) tend to rely heavily on metonymy to produce a series of nested relations between different elements of the narration: “Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time” (92). Yang makes extensive uses of such metonymic functions to create allegories that upscale her personal experiences into more expansive frames of meaning. Consider the following scene, which depicts the Yang family gathering for a portrait shot when the author was only one year old. This excerpt offers a paradigmatic example of Yang’s style, in the sense that it appears early in the work and sets up the text’s overriding methods and themes:

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Photography was then a great novelty. Grandfather was the

earliest to have brought photographic equipment to China on

any considerable scale, and it was he who supplied the old Pao

Chi Studio of Shanghai with their first cameras. It was a great

event for the family … When at last everybody was made to

look nice and smile and hold their breath at the same time … I

would start to wiggle and squirm, until some brother or sister of

mine got out of place or looked in the wrong direction again. In

this way I spoiled several valuable plates in succession. Finally,

Grandmother got exasperated and said:

“Let us take the photograph without the baby. She’s

only a girl. What difference does a girl more or a girl less

make?”

Then both my mothers put their hearts and heads

together. They stood me on a quickly provided tea table near

the center background, held me tightly between themselves and

thus saved for me the first photograph ever taken of me. I

turned out to be the most expressive person in the picture.

Saved? Yes. It was in our house for some twenty years,

until destroyed by fire during the 1911 Revolution. (B.Y.

Chao, Autobiography 15-6)

Some context is necessary: The year was 1890, and Yang was one year old.

She has two mothers within the same family because she was born to her grandfather’s eldest son and his wife, but was subsequently adopted by her childless Second Uncle and Aunt. Yang explains that such practices were

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common in China (10). However, she also reveals that her biological mother was an unwilling participant in these proceedings: “being as she was, all she did was cry to herself” (12-3). The adoption would lead to a lifetime of friction between the two mothers.

The above excerpt appears to be narrating a trivial domestic event, but the concision and structural quality of Yang’s writing weaves together a series of what Sebastian Matzner calls “metonymic association[s]” that add up to an allegory of women’s place in history (140-7). To explain this, I will lead with the readings before circling back to the theoretical distinctions behind

Matzner’s term. Consider, in the above excerpt, how Yang’s narration slides from the scale of general history in the first sentence (“Photography was then a great novelty”), to a national frame in the second (“Grandfather was the earliest to have brought photographic equipment to China …”), then to the familial in the third (“It was a great event for the family”). In three sentences,

Yang builds a scene within a family setting that depicts the transmission of modern technology from the West into late-Qing China. In the process, a chain of metonymic associations is established. “Photography” expresses a notion of modernity based on technological novelty. In turn, Yang’s grandfather personifies a strain of late-Qing cosmopolitanism that was open to the importation of modernity—exemplified here by the camera—from the

West. From here, another chain of metonymic associations expressing

“Chinese tradition” serves as a thematic counterpoint. Grandmother, who wanted to leave Yang the fussing baby out of the photograph because she is

“only a girl” (B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 16), embodies how androcentric beliefs and practices in China erased women from family history. In turn, the

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family portrait is associated with the abstract concept of genealogical records, or even Chinese history at large. Within this setup, Yang’s mothers personify the late-Qing women who were caught between modernity (Grandfather and the camera) and tradition (Grandmother and her dismissive attitude towards

Yang), who have to set aside their differences to ensure their daughter stays within the viewfinder of (family) history. The scene culminates in the image of three women and a girl within a photograph—Grandmother, two mothers, and Yang—before sliding back to the scale of the familial as implicated in the national: “[The family portrait] was in our house for some twenty years, until destroyed by fire during the 1911 Revolution” (16). This evocative final line implies that women were not only frequently left out of historical records, but that what little exists was often destroyed during the turbulent transition from the Qing dynasty to Republican China. When read thus, the overall scene functions as an allegory of women’s experience of China’s transition from late-Qing to Republican modernity.

Yang’s metonymic allegories, exemplified by the scene above, express a sense of figural modesty because they do not draw attention to themselves.

To sharpen this point, it is necessary to not only distinguish between metaphors and metonyms, but also between metonyms and metonymic associations. In Yang’s narration, each element in her scene extends contiguously, within the same space and time, into far broader significations of historical phenomena or abstract concepts, before downscaling again to the smaller event at hand, and so forth. It is tempting to call these “metonyms,” but according to some contemporary research on metonymy, they are not metonyms proper because they are “non-tropical.” Michael Silk insists on

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defining metonym as “a trope whose logical basis is one of association or contiguity” (133). By “trope,” he means “a deviant usage” of language (123).

What is relevant to the study of literary metonyms (as opposed to solecistic ones) are the especially artistic deviations of metonymic writing from idiomatic uses of language. Silk’s example is a line from T.S. Eliot’s The

Waste Land: “footsteps shuffled on the stair” (qtd. in Silk 133). Eliot’s metonymic turn of phrase here is tropical because it is common to speak of footsteps shuffling on the stairs, but not of footsteps shuffling on a singular stair. Silk argues that Eliot’s line selected and recombined elements in a longer, non-tropical sequence about “footsteps shuffling on the stairs” into a tropical sequence that uses language in a “most sensuously evocative” way

(133-4).

Conversely, Yang’s expressions are non-tropical because they are expressed via idiomatic sentences: “Photography was then a great novelty”;

“Grandfather was the earliest to have brought photographic equipment to

China.” When read in isolation, these sentences express only literal meanings in idiomatic forms. And yet, Yang’s sequential arrangement of these sentences—in other words, the force of her narration—leads the reader to infer multiple scales of surplus meaning. This is where the distinction Matzner makes between “metonymy proper” and “metonymic associations” comes in use. He explains that in some cases (such as Yang’s allegory), there is “a strong impression of a word [or words] being pregnant with a certain surplus in meaning that goes beyond its usual denotative power, but—crucially— without any negation of its usual meaning in ordinary usage” (140). In Yang’s writing, “photography,” “camera,” “grandfather,” “grandmother,” “1911

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Revolution,” are used in their usual denotative capacities. Yet, through Yang’s artful and subtle narration, the dynamics between these entities compel a reading of the scene as social allegory. Yang’s uses of metonymic associations in her allegories, as opposed to metonyms proper or metaphors, make her aesthetics especially modest because of their non-tropicality.

One further scale of meaning in the excerpt is worth mulling over. I have suggested that Yang’s family portrait—taken during the late-Qing period and burnt during the revolution of 1911—is metonymically associated with the abstract concept of historical records of women. Through this association,

Yang implies that Chinese women have been erased from history through a mix of androcentric practices and catastrophes. The same scene suggests that it is the efforts between women (i.e. Yang’s mothers) that ensures Yang’s place in recorded history. I add here that Yang the author reciprocates this gesture. Consider how Yang the character was only a baby in this scene and presumably has no memory of the events. Yang the author presumably reconstructed the scene from memories of the burnt photograph and from conversations with family members. In place of the burnt photograph, she inscribes images of her mothers, in words, for posterity. In this light, this scene is also a self-reflexive allegory of Chinese women’s life writing; it is a literary genre which enables a gynocentric recovery of lost history. In the absence of records on Chinese women, Yang will keep her own.

This moment anticipates the opening chapter of the Woman Warrior, in which Kingston commemorates her aunt, the “No Name Woman” who has been expunged from family records for being pregnant out of wedlock and who died by suicide. Kingston writes: “after fifty years of neglect, I alone

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devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes”

(22). Kingston here conceives of her memoir as a symbolic record of her female ancestors who have been written out of history. This resonance between an autobiography written by Yang, a Chinese woman who immigrated to the U.S. in 1937, and a memoir written by Kingston, a first- generation Chinese American woman, speaks to the connections between May

Fourth women’s life writing and Chinese American literature that stretch across the twentieth century.

Allegories of Life Writing

Yang’s metonymic allegories are the paragon of her modest aesthetics. They are rendered in simple and often humorous language, which all too often hides their sophistication. This sense of figural modesty casts her as an unassuming writer who does not dabble with avant-garde literary experiments—an image in keeping with her humble self-portrayals as a moderate revolutionary and, for lack of a better term, a moderate “Chinese feminist.” Or rather, like the works of other May Fourth literati, what is avant-garde about Yang’s writing is precisely its modesties and its commitments to democratising literature, which may be counterintuitive to the anglophone reader who is used to a diet of difficult modernist works produced during a contemporaneous period.

Jameson makes a similar point in his readings of Lu Xun’s works:

as Western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been

formed by our own modernisms, a popular or socially realistic

third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but

as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and this

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alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader,

for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or

naïve, has a freshness of information and a social interest that

we cannot share. (Allegory and Ideology 449)

As Jameson might have it, Yang’s allegories do draw continuities between the personal and the historical, continuities which transform her autobiography into a form of “modest history.” But unlike Jameson’s Lu Xun, whose writing exemplifies how “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (460), Yang’s modesties forestall her work from being read as an all- encompassing allegory of Chinese culture and society. Rather, she situates her experience of history within contingent frames, especially by constantly reminding the reader of the privileges she enjoyed as the granddaughter of a progressive Qing scholar-official who fled to the U.S. during the Sino-

Japanese War. Beyond signifying the national and the political, many of

Yang’s allegories are also self-reflexive, in that they function as metaphors for the role of life writing in representing history. To illustrate this function, I will conclude this chapter by offering two further examples of how Yang’s mid- century autobiography is transnational in scope and extends beyond

Jameson’s characterisation of earlier May Fourth literature as primarily national allegories.

The first example involves the motif of a cat trapped in a burning house, which Yang variously re-scales to allegorise her experience as a

Chinese migrant writer in the U.S. during the Second World War. This motif was first introduced in Yang’s account of a fire that broke out at her house in

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New Haven, Connecticut in 1940. The fire left an impression on Yang’s daughter, Lensey, who wrote about the accident years later. In her story,

Lensey repeats the question, “Where is the cat?” paragraph after paragraph

(B.Y. Chao, Autobiography 300). Yang recalls that Lensey never posed the question during the actual event, but “continued to have a worried look” (300).

It was through reading Lensey’s story that Yang belatedly understood her daughter’s trauma: “[Lensey] had been afraid to ask the question aloud until she was sure that the answer was the right one, after which there was no need to ask it” (300). In this sense, Lensey’s life writing brings to light what previously cannot be expressed, or what no longer needs to be expressed. This act of writing breaks Lensey’s silence and offers Yang a belated understanding of the accident’s psychological impact on her daughter. Yang thus transforms

Lensey’s story into a self-reflexive allegory of life writing’s function in representing crises, anxiety, and loss.31

As with Lensey’s story, the last sixth of Yang’s autobiography might as well have repeated the refrain, “Where is China?” This narrative arc begins with Yang fleeing Nanjing months before the 1937 massacre with her malaria- stricken husband. Despite the gravity of the situation, Yang narrates in a kind of breathless and almost comical prattle that plainly describes her actions and the series of favours she calls in to secure ferry tickets to Hankow, then train tickets for Changsha. Her account is punctuated by a close call and some humour. At one point, Chao the refugee professor jokes during an air-raid

31 My analysis of Lensey’s story resonates with Cathy Caruth’s well-known thesis of the relation between trauma narratives, their representations of historical experience, and the Freudian notion of repetition compulsion as exemplified by his fort-da story, which I will not repeat here in the interest of space; see Unclaimed Experience, pp. 171-5.

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alert: “Do not put all your intellectuals in one basement” (273). Soon after,

Yang describes a dud bomb that fell near Lensey (274). When it happens, the

Nanjing Massacre is relegated to a short paragraph (274). As the war advances, the Chaos and their acquaintances flee via rail to Kunming City, and

Yang resumes her prattling narration, performing what resembles travelogue writing when she describes the sights, sounds, and tastes along the way. A friend’s daughter remarks: “This is not traveling like refugees. This is just traveling” (275). The family then left China for Honolulu, Hawai’i in 1938, which turned into a semi-permanent migration to the U.S. Following the house fire of 1940 at New Haven, the Chaos moved into a ten-room house with coal heating in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yang writes:

When I had nothing to write when writing, the subject of

household drudgery always came in handy as a filler. It also

eased my conscience about living in a land of comparative war

plenty when folks at home lived in a land of extreme war

scarcity. I knew they had a much harder time in Chungking or

Kunming, and it made me feel superior when, once in a while, I

heard that so-and-so over there still had a servant while I had

none. (306)

Here, Yang reveals her feelings of deserter’s guilt, finally closing the emotional distance she puts between herself and the numerous tragedies she has experienced or heard about since leaving Nanjing. Yet, she also deflates the moment by joking about her petty feelings of superiority—predicated on middle-class values of self-reliance—while scoffing at the lingering vestiges of aristocratic living that persists in war-torn China. In such moments, Yang’s

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autobiography quietly repeats the refrain “Where is China?” as her native country burns, questioning her abandonment of a homeland in need as she keeps house in the U.S.

As with Lensey and her cat, Yang’s anxious questions about China’s salvation cannot be asked aloud “until she was sure that the answer was the right one” (300). Yang’s narrative then shifts to the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, which marked the official escalation of the Sino-Japanese War to the

Second World War with the U.S. joining the fray. Yang describes her mood that day as an alternation “between tension and relief, tension when I talked with Americans, and relief when I talked with Chinese” (311). The next day, enroute to a linguistic club meeting in New Haven, the couple discovers from a policeman that war has been officially declared in the U.S. The Chaos accordingly “identified our nationality by saying, ‘Hooray!’ to that” (311).

This historical event represents a moment of personal catharsis for Yang, who has had the image of wartime China burning in the back of her mind. The declaration of war meant that Yang could finally assuage her guilt by contributing to U.S. efforts against Japan. Yang writes, with her usual modesty and self-disparagement, that she

kept myself busy with wartime activities, not because I was any

more patriotic* than others, but because I always like to keep

myself busy. I like to talk about my activities, not because I am

more boastful than others, but because I like to talk. Anyway, I

did not have much to boast of. (311-2).

In a serious footnote, Chao the translator notes that there is “need of a word which should combine the overtones of the word ‘patriotic’ and the idea of

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‘loyalty to the United Nations’” (312), making it clear that Yang’s patriotism extends beyond her loyalty to China, and possesses cosmopolitan undertones which cannot be captured by the limits of nationalistic language. This instance among others keeps Yang’s transnational framing of her life writing in view; the Chinese migrant’s experience of the Sino-Japanese War cannot be understood purely on national terms, just as the allegory involving a family portrait in late-Qing China cannot be fully appreciated without acknowledging the waves of modernisation that were sweeping the globe.

Yang completes her extended allegory for life writing by ending her penultimate chapter with the death of the family cat. Although the cat survived the fire, the Chaos lost it a few years later, and subsequently found a black cat dead from poison under a tree (314). In response to Chao’s suggestion that they get a new cat, Yang launches into a morose soliloquy:

I said no. I never play with cats, as I have said. But to me

knowing a cat is like knowing a person. I still feel bad about

having to leave our two cats behind at Lanchia Chuang when

we left Nanking as refugees in 1937. We had better not have

another cat until we knew where we were going to settle down.

(314)

Here, Yang turns the loss of all three cats into an allegory for her continuous state of displacement. The loss of a cat in the relatively peaceful suburbs of

Cambridge, Massachusetts cross-dissolves into an earlier loss of two cats in

Nanjing caused by the advancement of Japanese troops. Via metonymic extension, Yang connects a “modest” accident to an event of world-historical significance. With this denouement, Lensey’s refrain, “Where is the cat?” is

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transformed into the poignant question, “Where is home?” Yang thus concludes that there will be no more talk of cats until they are settled.

I will end with an example that offers a condensed symbol of life writing as “modest history.” Yang describes visiting the New York’s World

Fair in 1939, which recalls an earlier moment in the text:

The year 1889 was about as good as any to be born in if I had

had my choice … In 1889, my grandfather and ‘father’ were

abroad, bringing China’s greetings to Paris on the completion

of the Eiffel Tower at the opening of the World Exposition—I

am eight months younger than the Eiffel Tower. (12)

The two World Fairs bookend Yang’s experience of fifty years of global modernisation, as emblematised by the spectacular and industrial nature of these events. Back in 1939 New York, Yang describes her fascination with a particular exhibit:

I enjoyed very much the General Motors show called the

“Futurama.” It was so popular that people had to stand in line

for two or three hours to see it. It was a dream of a show. In

fact, the good thing about it was that you didn’t have to wake

up from the dream. You went into a darkish room to see some

preliminary views of the future of highways in America on a

big map, to get your eyes adapted. Then you sat down in a row

of slowly moving chairs and began to feel that you were

looking out from the windows of a bus or a train, passing miles

and miles of highways and cities of the future. You were not

conscious of the fact that the scale of the models became larger

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and larger. Instead, you felt that you were getting a closer and

closer view of the same sizes of things. As you entered the city

of the future, you noticed a nice and neat street corner, with

elevated sidewalks, so proportioned as to look like about a

block away. The “bus” stopped. You stepped out from your

chairs and found yourselves on the elevated sidewalks of the

same street corner you had just seen a moment ago. You could

not recall exactly how you began to enter and form a part of

that show. But there was no getting out of it. For this part was

continuous with the rest of the World’s Fair and thence with the

rest of the world. (292-3)

The concept behind Futurama is that its rider has already arrived in the future, but Yang’s description artfully extends this concept into a reflection of her experience and representation of modernity; further, she switches to second- person narration to implicate the reader in her experience of the ride. There are a few ways of reading this profound scene. The obvious point is that Futurama serves as a utopian symbol for the rise of the U.S. during the mid-century, especially when seen through the eyes of refugees from China. Yang’s description of Futurama mentions General Motors, images of highways, and the motorised “ride” itself, all of which are optimistic tropes associated with the facet of U.S. modernity predicated on Fordist capitalism. Many celebrated the success of the Fordist model during the postwar period. Take a news report on General Motors—Ford’s major competitor—as an example; according to the NYT, the company employed 29,929 more workers in 1939 than the year before, a gain of 24 per cent, whereas their factory wages rose $74,900,000, or

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40 per cent (“Gains by General Motors” 40). Charles S. Maier notes that following the Second World War, the Fordist model of industrialisation was so popular that Europe adopted its principles for postwar recovery (54-5). In this light, Yang’s Futurama captures the prevalent mid-century ideology sweeping the globe that modernisation will be driven by Fordist capitalism.

A second way of reading this episode is that Futurama encapsulates

Yang’s experience of modernity across the first four decades of the twentieth century. As with Yang’s experience of the ride, there was no particular moment which marks a definitive break from tradition to modernity, but a series of developments within and beyond China that led ever so surely from blueprints and sketches of the future (exemplified by texts like Chao and Hu

Shih’s New Culture manifestos, or Ding Ling’s “Thoughts on March 8”) to the present moment, where she is standing on a New York sidewalk, unaware of where the ride begins or ends, or where projections end and reality begins. As she puts it, “how you began to enter and form a part of that show” that we call modernity, she does not know, but “there was no getting out of it” (293).

At another level, Yang’s Futurama serves as an allegory for life writing. Her narration itself performs a seamless passage—in both the word’s textual and transitional senses—from the ride to the New York sidewalk. Her stream of simple and elegant prose makes her self-narration function in an analogous manner to the World’s Fair ride. Her autobiography is a synthetic creation that manipulates perception, starting from two-dimensional words on a page, developing slowly into a windowed view of history, then transiting seamlessly into multi-dimensional allegories. Like the ride, Yang’s autobiography takes the reader from late-Qing China to 1939 New York,

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through a limited first-person perspective set against a panoptic backdrop of major events in world history.

My reading of Yang’s Futurama resonates with Jameson’s reading of

Christopher Nolan’s elevator in Antinomies of Realism (2012). For Jameson, the central image of the elevator in Inception offers a leitmotif for historical representation today:

The historical novel today must be seen as an immense elevator

that moves us up and down in time, its sickening lifts and dips

corresponding to the euphoric or dystopian mood in which we

wait for the doors to open. For historicity today … demands a

temporal span far exceeding the biological limits of the

individual human organism: so that the life of a single

character—world-historical or not—can scarcely accommodate

it; nor even the meagre variety of our own chronological

experiences of a limited national time and place. (301-2)

This intriguing reading comes towards the end of a chapter that begins with

Lukács’s account of the European historical novel. Nolan’s elevator of history emblematises Jameson’s argument that “the historical novel of the future … will necessarily be Science-Fictional” (298). But while Jameson proposes that

“historicity today … demands a temporal span far exceeding the biological limits of the individual human organism” (301), I suggest that Yang’s autobiography demonstrates how a single woman’s experience, rendered artfully as a form of modest history, still has much to offer to contemporary understandings of the twentieth century and the revolutions that defined its modernities.

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Chapter Three

Time of One’s Own:

Ling Shuhua Beside/s Modernist Temporalities

The May Fourth writer and painter Ling Shuhua is not an entirely obscure figure in modernist scholarship. She is best known for her Chinese-language short stories published in the twenties to thirties, which earned her the reputation of being the Chinese Katherine Mansfield. However, she remains understudied by scholars of global anglophone literature compared to say,

Eileen Chang, due in no small part to the absence of an anthology of her works in English, in translation or otherwise. A brief history of anglophone scholarship on Ling Shuhua could go something like this: In 1988, Rey Chow published an influential essay on Ling’s preoccupation with the theme of

“virtuous transactions.” The term refers to the social “economy” within which

“Chinese women learn to give up their own desires for their social ‘place’”

(“Virtuous Transactions” 75). Chow’s crucial point is that such self-effacing transactions are not only found in the content of Ling’s short stories, but they also underwrite the author’s “social status as both woman and writer” (84).

Ling is typically characterised as a “guixiu pai zuojia” (gentlewoman writer), a term with two interrelated connotations: Ling’s literary style is often praised for evoking “the unworldly ambience of classical Chinese art or poetry” (75), but on the flipside, she is criticised for confining her scope to the “domestic world of feminine sorrow” (72-3).32 Chow’s intervention into such appraisals

32 According to Chow, Yi Zhen’s 1930 essay, “A Few Contemporary Chinese Women Fiction Writers” (Jiwei Dangdai Zhongguo Nüxiaoshuojia), first used the label xin giuxiu pai or “New Boudoir Lady School” to categorise Ling’s works.

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is to argue that Ling’s works represent a necessary compromise—in her words, a “virtuous transaction”—one that draws on classic styles (as opposed to experimenting with the radically new) to build respectability for women’s writing:

Like the other women writers of her generation, Ling Shuhua

faced the problem not simply of how to write, but of what

compromises and negotiations needed to be made to present

aspects of female domestic experience in public. In a cultural

context in which women’s access to literacy itself was for so

long met with disapproval even among the highly educated,

these compromises and negotiations are most markedly felt in a

style which apparently retains all the traditionally endorsed

qualities of fine writing … The “classical” aesthetic quality of

Ling Shuhua’s writing can now be seen as the result of her

effort to fulfil her contract with this public, historical language,

while her use of it for a conspicuously feminine subject matter

signifies her effort to break that contract. (85)

By further examining the compromises, ironies, and veiled transgressions in

Ling’s works, Chow recasts Ling’s apparent conservatisms as limited forms of subversion that expose the victimisation of women, even when they honour their social contracts with patriarchal society (84). In the process, Chow also reclaims the term guixiu pai wenxue or “boudoir literature” written by the likes of Ling from its pejorative associations with privileged femininity and domestic trivialities (84-5).

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Chow’s essay was followed by a spate of research that transplanted

Ling from the demure realm of boudoir literature to the Bloomsbury context.

These efforts revolved largely around Ling’s anglophonic turn, which produced at least three co-translated short stories from 1936 to 1937, and a series of autobiographical sketches that were ultimately revised and collated for the memoir Ancient Melodies, published in 1953 by the Woolfs’s Hogarth

Press and introduced by Vita Sackville-West. The Woolf scholar Patricia

Laurence played a critical role in these developments. In 1991, a year after

Ling’s death, Laurence noticed a packet of Ling’s letters from the Bloomsbury

Group at a Sotheby’s auction in London (Lily 1). The material revealed an affair between Ling and Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell and nephew to

Virginia Woolf. Bell met Ling at Wuhan University when he visited in 1935; there, he taught English literature until 1937, including a course on modern

British literature (44). Ling was teaching basic English classes because she lacked a degree from a foreign institution, which was an employment prerequisite for faculty members at Wuhan University; her husband, Chen

Yuan (penname: Chen Xiying), was serving as dean of the arts (Welland 215-

6). Chen is known for being a founding member of the Crescent Moon Society and the editor of the intellectual weekly Contemporary Review (1924-1928)

(Laurence, Lily 101). During his stint at Wuhan, Bell co-translated three of

Ling’s short stories into English with the author herself but failed to get them published in The London Mercury (89-90). The translations were then published in Shanghai’s English-language magazine T’ien Xia Monthly. Bell also inspired Ling to pen an autobiography in English, a project which she began after his death in the Spanish Civil War with encouragement from the

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Woolfs, Vanessa, and Sackville-West (84). Laurence first wrote about her discovery of Ling and Bell’s romance in a 1992 issue of Virginia Woolf

Miscellany before developing her findings into a 2003 monograph, Lily

Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes. The monograph examines the ties between the

Bloomsbury Group and Beijing’s Crescent Moon Society to which Ling belonged.

Laurence’s book is one of three significant works that inducted Ling into the so-called New Modernist Studies, a subfield that was institutionalised by the late nineties, and which took a transnational turn by the early noughties.33 In 2001, Shu-mei Shih’s Lure of the Modern contextualises Ling and the Crescent Moon Society within a broader set of jingpai or Beijing

School writers who advocated a brand of “cosmopolitan neotraditionalism”

(206). They were “neotraditionalists” because their works speak to a conception of “Modernity without Rupture”—in other words, a continuity between tradition and modernity—as opposed to the iconoclasm of some of their more radical peers (151-2). They were also “cosmopolitan” because they comprised largely Euro-American returnees who were heavily influenced by anglophone modernists such as Woolf, Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, and Eugene

O’Neill (187-8). These twinned facets to the Beijing School are exemplified by Bian Zhilin’s 1934 translation of T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the

Individual Talent,” and also Ye Gongchao’s allusion to the translated essay when he argues for the “inseparable relationship between traditional and modern poetry” (186). Shih’s subsequent study of Lin Huiyin and Ling

33 See Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies” (2008).

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Shuhua, the only two prominent women in the Crescent Moon Society, focuses on how their “bicultural and bilingual consciousnesses … are specifically gendered … becom[ing] internal dissenters within the [school’s] neotraditionalist discourse” (206). Shih devotes half a chapter to a selection of

Ling’s short stories and Ancient Melodies, the latter of which she sees as an unsatisfying articulation of “translocal feminism” that is produced by an asymmetrical power relation between Woolf and Ling (216). For Shih,

“Ling’s Third World feminist position may have required a process of voluntary self-Orientalization in order to cohere with Woolf’s First World feminist position” (216). Shih’s expansive and nuanced study demonstrates a rhetoric of first reading for modernism in the Beijing School of modern

Chinese literature, then reading its works against modernism.

In 2007, Sasha Su-ling Welland published a dual biography of Ling

Shuhua and her sister, Amy Ling, titled A Thousand Miles of Dreams.

Welland’s research hints that the New Modernist recovery of Ling Shuhua as a Bloomsbury-adjacent figure coincided with, or was perhaps even motivated by, a shocking resurgence of Ling’s name in the mainstream media. In 1999, the British-Chinese writer Hong Ying fictionalised the affair between Ling and Bell in the novel K: The Art of Love.34 First released in Chinese in

Taiwan, this novel made headlines in Beijing Youth News and Sichuan Youth

Daily, and in a development reminiscent of modernism’s obscenity trials,

Ling’s daughter Chen Xiaoying pursued Hong Ying in the Chinese courts for

34 Ling was Bell’s eleventh lover. Following her request for anonymity, Bell’s biographers, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, referred to her by the corresponding alphabet “K” (Laurence, Lily 2; Welland 263).

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defamation of her ancestors (Becker pars. 3-6; Welland 263-4).35 The ensuing legal battle was reported by international papers, ranging from The Guardian and The Independent to South China Morning Post and The Sydney Morning

Herald. Chen won the lawsuit in 2002; the book was banned in China, Hong

Ying was fined £7,500, and ordered to publish a public apology to Chen’s family (Becker par. 6). According to Welland, Chen sued Hong Ying “not to protect her mother’s reputation but to redeem her father’s endless, silent suffering” (264). These events were followed by Laurence’s 2003 monograph, which begins with what she calls the “cameo” that is Ling and Bell’s affair

(Lily 3). Since then, the revival of scholarly and public interest in Ling as a

May Fourth intellectual has been irrevocably tied to her sexed and sexualised status as Bell’s illicit lover.

My purpose in consolidating this circulation and reception history of

Ling’s public image and writings is to suggest that the current resurgence of interest in Ling, whether in the mass media or in literary studies, is problematically and narrowly driven by the sensationalism surrounding a carnal and literary union between the Crescent Moon Society and the

Bloomsbury Group. Jun Lei makes a similar point when she criticises the

Sotheby’s catalogue listing of Ling’s letters that drew Laurence’s attention:

To add market value to an otherwise obscure Chinese name for

London bidders, the seller evokes Ling’s peculiar connections:

a daughter of a Peking mayor, a guest at the last Chinese

emperor’s wedding, and a dubious member of the Bloomsbury

35 I am thinking of the obscenity trials of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1921 and 1933, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 among others.

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group … it emphasizes her love affair with Bell that gained her

access … (88)

For Jun Lei, the transaction of Ling’s letters at the auction evokes how Ling herself “uses the English language and her Anglo-American connections as a form of capital to progress to the world literary center [that is London] and employs China and Chineseness … to (re)claim her cultural and national identity” (91). Jun Lei is right to note the shrewdness and agency behind

Ling’s anglophonic turn. But for me, the Sotheby’s auction is more evocative of how the exposure of Ling’s affair has effectively dislodged her from

Chow’s notion of “virtuous transactions,” and inserted the writer into a contemporary economy of what I will call “scandalous transactions,” where the notoriety of her affair motivates renewed interest in her works, most of all the Bloomsbury-anointed short stories and Ancient Melodies. The Bell affair was not the only “scandal” that Ling was embroiled in; Shih notes that Lin

Huiyin and Ling Shuhua were speculated to have been involved in a love triangle with the poet Xu Zhimo, who travelled with Ling’s friendship scroll across Europe (Shih, Lure 207). However, Shih cautions against overstating the importance of such scandals; she censures the “tendency in modern

Chinese literary histories to trivialize the importance of women writers …

[who are often] trailed by gossip about their romantic lives, and their worth is measured according to the men whom they married, not their literary output”

(207).

Such economies of scandal are, of course, not unique to the modern

Chinese context, but are endemic to Western modernist studies as well. The list of modernist figures whose names are gilded by their indiscretions and/or

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marriages is a long one. It includes Vita Sackville-West and the Woolfs,

David Garnett with Duncan Grant and the Bells, Lytton Strachey with Dora

Carrington and Ralph Partridge, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nancy

Cunard with her numerous suitors among others. Such romances continue to be founts of inspiration for literary scholarship and cultural production. Take for instance the relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West; it inspired

Eileen Atkins’s 1992 play Vita & Virginia, which in turn inspired a namesake

2018 film directed by Chanya Button. Also in 2018, the Centre Pompidou-

Metz and the Barbican Centre hosted a joint exhibition titled Modern Couples:

Art, Intimacy, and the Avant-garde, which they marketed as “a different way of looking at Modernism in art, as seen through the lens of the artist ‘couple’, an elastic term encompassing all manner of intimate relationships”

(“Glossary” par. 1). The event presented well-known couples and throuples from the Woolfs and Sackville-West, to Salvador Dali and his homoerotic friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca. So much of contemporary interest in modernism continues to be underwritten by a fascination with the atypical sex lives of modernist figures, whose private transgressions seemingly enhance the revolutionary nature of their art. Many modernists contributed to such readerly practices by hinting at their indiscretions and trysts in print. I am thinking of the salacious memoirs produced by the likes of Robert McAlmon,

Kay Boyle, and John Glassco, or roman à clefs such as Ernest Hemingway’s

The Sun Also Rises and Woolf’s Orlando. Nigel Nicolson has called

Orlando—whose eponymous hero is inspired by his mother, Sackville-West—

“the longest and most charming love letter in literature” (202). Unlike these modernists, Ling kept her affair private. She requested for Bell’s biographer,

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Peter Stansky, to obfuscate her identity when quoting from Bell’s letters

(Welland 263). In her memoir, Ling makes no mention of her connections to

Bell or the Bloomsbury Group, barring a dedication to Woolf and Sackville-

West. However, given the nature of research and gossip, critics and scholars

(like me) will inevitably continue to rehash the story of Ling and Bell’s affair.

A major consequence of Ling’s induction into such modernist economies of scandal is that her legacy is now refracted through the prism of her affair with Bell, especially within the New Modernist Studies. This has produced a temporality of Ling’s life and career that is tied to milestones in

Bloomsbury modernism at the expense of developments elsewhere. By

“temporality,” I mean the imaginations of time that underwrite critical histories and appraisals of Ling’s oeuvre, and which put her writings into temporally “networked” relations with other writers, texts, and contexts. Such temporalities are subjective because they involve selective consolidations of chronological events that contain explicit or implicit judgements of what makes her works (vis-à-vis others) particularly “modern” and “literary,” or not. When Casanova speaks of a “literary Greenwich meridian,” she refers to a degree of global consensus—regulated and contested by writers, critics, and institutions among other players—on which works constitute the avant-garde, and which belong to the past (Republic 4). As she puts it, this sense of literary temporality functions like

a universal artistic clock by which writers must regulate their

work if they wish to attain legitimacy … the literary Greenwich

meridian makes it possible to evaluate and recognize the

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quality of a work or, to the contrary, to dismiss a work as an

anachronism or to label it “provincial.” (90)

May Fourth intellectuals like Ling were well aware of the “world of rivalry, struggle, and inequality” that Casanova calls The World Republic of Letters

(4). According to Shih, they strategically adopted a model of linear, national temporality associated with the West, through which they “imagined becoming contemporaries with the West in the expanded, larger community of the world, wherein China, like other countries, could be a member of modernity” (Shih, Lure 51; my emphasis). We see this dramatised in Yang

Buwei’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman when she narrates how her husband, Yuen Ren Chao, advertised that their wedding will be held at “3 p.m., Mean Solar 120º E Standard Time, June 1, 1921, Occidental

Chronology,” and how he sought Bertrand Russell’s judgement on whether their new-style wedding was “radical enough” (192-3).

New Modernist interests in Ling’s affair with Bell have led to blinkered assessments of her significance that prioritise modernist temporalities and related paradigms of aesthetic value. Consider the case of Ira

Nadel’s recent article “Oriental Bloomsbury” (2018) in Modernist Cultures, which is an ambitious and condensed survey of how “Bloomsbury and the

Orient artistically depended on each other” (14). There is however an outsized emphasis on Bloomsbury figures; the opening paragraph demonstrates Nadel’s

Eurocentric temporality with milestones such as Roger Fry’s essays on

Chinese art (1910), Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) and his “edition” of Ernest

Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character (1919), Goldsworthy Lowes

Dickinson’s visits to China (1910 and 1913), Arthur Waley’s translations of

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The Tale of Genji (1925), and of course, Julian Bell’s visit to China (1935)

(Nadel 15). The “Oriental” in Nadel’s title is initially glossed as a notional collection of consumer products, unspecified art objects, and unnamed East

Asian intellectuals, until the first brief mention of the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo five pages in. As opposed to mentioning Xu’s work, Nadel credits him for gifting Dickinson with “a silk Chinese cap” (18). Then, in an appalling development, Nadel mentions Julian Bell’s “love affair with the Chinese writer and painter Lin Shuhua” (20; my emphasis), and also a certain

“friendship scroll Xu Zhimo carried compiled by Lu Shuhua and her friends when he visited Cambridge in 1921 and 1922” (26; my emphasis). Nadel amputates the periods of Ling’s life and career that are irrelevant to her entanglements with Bell and his cohort, makes little mention of her writing, and misspells her surname in two different ways.

Barring the misnaming, a wide-ranging historical survey such as

Nadel’s must necessarily approach its objects of study from a distance and can only offer abridged accounts of their histories and significance. Still, the shortcomings noted above must prompt the question: how else should one position Ling beside/s modernist temporalities? This chapter redirects critical investments from Ling’s affair back to her works, by close reading what her short stories have to say about women, sexuality, and time. My approach reads

Ling’s fictive narratives alongside the prevailing critical narratives of her life, so that the surprising resonances or dissonances between her short stories and her life story (as told by critics) allow Ling’s own voice to intervene in contemporary appraisals of her legacy and their temporalising practices. I begin with “Once Upon a Time” and “Intoxicated”; both were collected in her

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1928 anthology Huazhishi (Temple of Flowers) but only translated in 1998.

Their portrayals of women’s forbidden desires defy numerous characterisations of Ling as a conservative writer who was made worldly by

Bell. I then examine two of the short stories she co-translated with Bell,

“Writing a Letter” and “What’s the Point of It?,” which first appeared in the

1935 anthology Xiaoge’r Liang (Little Brothers) before appearing in English between 1936 to 1937.36 These latter stories are united by a prototypical figure of the modern woman scholar, who requires solitude and privacy—or, to borrow Woolf’s formulation, a conceptual “room of one’s own”—if she is to study and write. All four stories and their social commitments not only speak to a coeval development of women’s writing and feminist thought in China and England, they can also be read as ethical “lessons” that interrupt the circulations of Ling’s reputation within a literary economy of scandalous transactions. My previous chapters argued for the unfettered recovery of wide- ranging spatial and temporal connections that enmesh neglected Chinese women writers within transnational networks, such that their lives and works are implicated in various canons and subfields. Here, I qualify that in Ling’s case, the critic might do well to emphasise facets of Ling’s life and work that resist, refuse, or fall outside of modernist paradigms. Put another way, this chapter seeks to reinstate Ling within a temporality of her own, with a heightened focus on that which lies besides modernism.

36 Bell is not credited as a co-translator for “Writing a Letter,” but Laurence’s archival work reveals that he edited and annotated Ling’s draft extensive (Lily 404-8).

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No Sex Please We’re Chinese: On Valuations of Modernity

In a 1936 letter, Bell encourages Ling to depict sex explicitly, which he frames as an experiment in pushing the limits of realist writing:

Apart from the question of decency and publication, could one

even describe the process of going to bed with someone quite

clearly and accurately and truthfully; not excited or mystical or

metaphorical, but calling everything by its right name and

giving, accordingly, all the sensations involved. I wonder if

you’ll ever do anything of the kind. Certainly you must write

stories in which people go to bed together … really truthfully

without sentimentality, pornography, mysticism, the

predominant qualities in the experience as experience. (qtd. in

Laurence, Lily 88).

For Laurence, this instance represents Bell’s attempt to export the sexual subversiveness of the Bloomsbury Group to China:

Attempting to dissolve Ling Shuhua’s cultural taboos, Julian

boldly crossed boundaries. Who else but a Bloomsberry used to

challenging Victorian repression would take on the tradition of

repression of love and sex in Chinese literature? (Lily 89).

In her assessment, Laurence casts Bell as the literary vanguard who

“attempted to open modernist perspectives on women’s constraints and sexuality, as a theme, to Ling Shuhua” (89). Conversely, Ling is cast as the prudish Chinese writer who needs to overcome her own provincialisms.

Laurence further cites, as evidence of his transgressiveness, Bell’s “infatuation and first love affair, a homosexual one, with Anthony Blunt” (89). I refute the

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comparison Laurence sets up, which implies a transgressive-conservative binary between Bell and Ling. Almost a decade before she met Bell, Ling had already depicted same-sex love between women in “Once Upon a Time,” first published in 1926 and reprinted in her 1928 anthology Temple of Flowers. The short story involves two female college students, the twenty-year-old

Yingman and the nineteen-year-old Yunluo, who become romantically involved after playing the respective title roles of Romeo and Juliet in a school production. The setting of Ling’s story in a Chinese women’s college recalls

Chen Hengzhe’s “One Day” (1917)—the first short story written in the

Chinese vernacular— which is set in a U.S. women’s college. However,

Ling’s homoerotic plot is tied to a feminist critique of arranged marriages in

China, and therefore offers a far more radical and layered treatment of the experiences of young, educated women as compared to Chen’s mainly descriptive story.

“Once Upon a Time” reads like a contemporary (if well-worn) treatment of same-sex romance, deploying tropes that are now hackneyed in mass culture. The older Yingman is “a tall, outgoing northerner who loved to joke around” (Ling, “Once Upon” 185). Her merciless teasing of the younger

Yunluo soon turns into something genuine. During their Shakespearean performance, their kiss titillates two young men sitting in the front row, whose mouths were “hanging wide open as if they were waiting for some delicious morsel of food” (187). Life imitates art; after the conclusion of the play, the two women “would stroll around campus nearly every evening, talking heart- to-heart as their classmates watched from afar, laughing as they walked by”

(189). According to Amy Dooling and Kristina Torgeson,

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The theme of schoolgirl lesbianism … was not uncommon in

May Fourth women’s writing (both Lu Yin and Chen Xuezhao,

for example, also explored the subject in short stories),

although the mildly erotic description Ling employs is a

departure from the typically platonic terms used to describe

these relationships during this period. (177)

They understate Ling’s rather explicit treatment of the physical intimacy between the two heroines; consider the following lines:

“Juliet, shall I massage your back for you?” Yingman said with

a grin as she went over to Yunluo, gazing at the ivory skin of

her exposed chest, then back down past the large collar where

she could make out the faint curve of her soft, slightly

protruding breasts …

Suddenly, Yingman flopped down on the bed too and

cradled her arm around Yunluo’s neck …

As the others laughed, Yingman seized the moment to

bury her face in Yunluo’s breast and inhale deeply. (186-7)

In another scene, the lovers share a bed in view of Yunluo’s roommates.

Thereafter, Ling inserts the suggestive line: “The room was filled with a humid, earthy smell and the rain pattered on in the courtyard” (188). The vivid smells and rhythms of the rain can conceivably be read as a euphemistic reference to lovemaking. However, Ling stops short of clarifying that her heroines have consummated their relationship.

The star-crossed lovers will eventually be forced apart when Yunluo is pressured into marrying her brother’s section chief, a lascivious widower of

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only two months (190). Following the summer vacation, Yunluo does not return to school after spending a blissful spring term with Yingman. The suggestion throughout is that women’s homoerotic performances are fine fodder for the heterosexual male gaze—as when they kiss onstage—but their homoerotic desires are not ultimately sanctioned offstage in wider society, and only tolerated within the cloistered context of a women’s college. By its conclusion, the story’s title, which translates to “rumour has it there was such a thing” (shuo you zheme yihuishi), takes on a second meaning. The sense of wonderment expressed by the title seems to be initially directed at the question of same-sex love between women, but it is later redirected to the horrors of the traditional arranged marriage. When Yingman overhears a rumour that Yunluo has quit school because she has indeed, married, she blacks out and dreams of the alternately crying and laughing face of her beloved; as she regains consciousness, the story ends (195). Ling implies that the rumour of Yunluo’s coerced marriage ought to be more shocking to the reader than salacious rumours about same-sex love between women. The duplicitous title compels readers to consider what is truly astonishing in her story. Are readers gawking at Yingman and Yunluo’s intimacies, like the two voyeuristic young men who salivate over their onstage kiss? Or should readers reserve their astonishment for the devastating tradition of forcing arranged marriages onto young women, while depriving them of an education?

This modern morality tale advances numerous critiques of tradition. It depicts the college as a space of relative freedom for young women. It puts same-sex love between women above a coerced heterosexual marriage. It sublimates same-sex love as one form of women’s freedoms and part of what

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Gail Hershatter calls Republican China’s “family revolution” (93). It hints at the tolerance of same-sex partnerships between women in some circles of

Chinese society—Ling makes a quick mention of two primary school instructors, Miss Chen and Miss Chu, who have been “living together for five or six years” (191). When Yunluo cries over her arranged marriage, Yingman cites the instructors’ cohabitation as a possibility:

You mean to say we can’t be like them? … My love for you is

deeper and more permanent than any man’s could ever be,

surely you know this. Can’t you just consider this the same as

being married to me?” (191).

In other words, Ling was mooting an alternate family unit to the traditional

Chinese clan system, where women’s fates were more or less determined by their male relations.

Ling’s story is, in fact, a rewrite of Yang Zhensheng’s “Why Did She

Suddenly Go Crazy?” (“Ta weishenme huran fafeng le?”), undertaken at the male author’s request (Ling, Huazhishi 83). Tze-lan D. Sang’s study of The

Emerging Lesbian (2003) in May Fourth writing asserts that Ling’s version is superior:

Ling is especially daring in asserting that the relationship

between the two teachers [Miss Chen and Miss Chu] is

essentially the same as that between Yingman and Yunluo, that

same-sex love can be the chosen lifestyle of adult women as

well as a maddening passion between adolescents. (150)

I add that Ling’s story is arguably ground-breaking not only in China, but also by modernist standards. The first publication of “Once Upon a Time” in 1926

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predates Woolf’s Orlando and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness by two years. Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., a novella about an unhappy lesbian relationship, was first written in 1903 but would only be published posthumously in 1950 as Things as They Are (Benstock 14). Likewise, in the domain of gay male modernist fiction, there is E. M. Forster’s Maurice and

Glenway Wescott’s “A Visit to Priapus,” both published posthumously in

1971 and 2013 respectively. Unlike these modernists, Ling had the privilege of writing as an ostensibly straight woman who married the respectable New

Culture figure, Chen Yuan. However, she also risked her reputation by publishing a controversial story in the nascent stages of her literary career.

When Bell tells Ling to “write stories in which people go to bed together … really truthfully without sentimentality” (qtd. in Laurence, Lily

88), he may not have been aware of “Once Upon a Time,” or he may have disqualified it as a truthful depiction of sex because of its coyness and sentimentality. The story is a self-professed piece of “sentimental” fiction; at one point, Yingman uses this exact term in English when she teases Yunluo for being especially morose: “You really are so sentimental; you can’t even bear the spring breeze or the bright moon!” (Ling, “Once Upon” 190). Yunluo was in fact just about to inform Yingman that she was being pressured into marriage. But what does “sentimental” actually mean or connote? I.A.

Richards’s Practical Criticism offers some clarity. The English scholar’s work was published in 1929, the same year he took up a residency at Tsinghua

University as a visiting professor, and three years after Ling’s “Once Upon a

Time” was first published. His analysis of the term “sentimental” (spanning a full chapter) is thus salient to Bell and Ling’s context on several fronts.

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Richards notes that “sentimental” is often used imprecisely to deride a work of art:

Among the politer terms of abuse there are few so effective as

“sentimental” … though often it may mean something precise

and capable of definition … it is sometimes not so much the

instrument of a statement as an expression of contempt. Such

an expression cannot, of course, be defined as though it were a

scientific term. (255)

Richards then offers a cluster of meanings within the context of literary criticism. The word can describe an author who is “too easily stirred to emotion,” and/or a reader who is “too easily moved” (261). In both cases, there is a sense of emotional excess that is disproportionate to the situation at hand (263). For Richards, sentimentality is often the result of distorted recollection, perception, and/or depiction: “If a man can only think of his childhood as a lost heaven it is probably because he is afraid to think of its other aspects” (267). The remedy to sentimentality, in art and in life, is to

“take the distorted sentiment and work it into close and living relation with some scene concretely and truthfully realised, which may act as a standard of reality and awaken the dream-infected object of the sentiment into actuality”

(269-70). Richards’s explanation seems applicable to Bell’s dismissal of the sentimental, which the latter ascribes stereotypically to the Chinese temperament. Laurence’s archival research suggests that Bell

adopted a “crusading spirit” while teaching in China and often

spoke of “shaking up” the “timid” students, particularly about

sex and the expression of sentiment … He lectured on the

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“indecencies of the moderns” and he criticized the students’

“sentimentality.” (Lily 51)

In encouraging Ling to write about sex “truthfully without sentimentality,”

Bell attributes an essentialised (but also imprecise) notion of Chinese sentimentality to her style, while casting such sentimentality as un-modern as opposed to the “indecencies of the moderns.”

Against Bell’s dismissal of a certain Chinese sentimentality, another

Bloomsbury writer defends sentimentality in both comportment and fiction within the context of same-sex love in England. Forster’s Maurice, first written around 1913 to 1914, has a first part (of four) that parallels Ling’s

“Once Upon a Time.” Forster’s title hero is nineteen when he meets Clive

Durham at Cambridge, who is in the year above. Like Yunluo and Yingman

(who are of the same age), the two men begin a rather tactile relationship of friendly teasing and jostling. Then, in a confession mediated by Plato’s

Symposium (which Clive exhorts Maurice to read over the summer vacation),

Clive declares his love, or “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks” (Forster 51).

Just as Yunluo and Yingman’s relationship is sparked by the college-ordained performance of Romeo and Juliet, Clive communicates via a classic. Right before his confession, Clive lies entwined with Maurice, listening to the latter’s “turbid agony” about how “man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven” (58). This tender moment is metaphorically interrupted by a call from society:

They were lying breast against breast soon, head was on

shoulder, but just as their cheeks met someone called “Hall”

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form the court, and [Maurice] answered: he always had

answered when people called. (58).

This scene of chaste tenderness mirrors Ling’s depiction of the intimacy between Yingman and Yunluo, but where our male lovers hide their physical affections from the other Cambridge men, the women’s peers merely laugh knowingly. The interruption jolts Maurice back into polite society and leads him to dismiss his earlier heart pouring to Clive as just “ordinary talk … but too sentimental” (58; my emphasis). When Clive confesses his love, Maurice repudiates homosexuality as “the only subject absolutely beyond the limit …

[and] the worst crime in the calendar” (59). The two then fall out, causing

Maurice to sink into despair. Like Yingman, who initially dismisses Yunluo’s sentimentality but later collapses in the style of a tragic heroine, Maurice first dismisses, but later indulges his own sentimentality, by crying into his sheets and smashing the crockery (Forster 61).

Through these events, Forster suggests that sentimentality is the clear- eyed response to reality. His suggestion runs counter to both Bell’s and

Richards’s conventional associations of sentimentality with untruthfulness, excessive emotion, and the distortion of reality. It is Clive’s sentimentality— or his ability to feel and know himself deeply—which grants him self- knowledge of his sexuality and an understanding of his fraught place in society from a young age. Forster casts him as one who “suffered little from bewilderment as a boy” and who grappled with the conflict between his piousness and his Sodomic desires to the point of breakdown in his sixteenth year (69). Unlike Maurice, who feels the desires and terrors incited by his sexuality only “dimly,” for Clive “they were definite, continuous … he never

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mistook them” (69). When Maurice returns home for the vacation, which takes him away from Clive’s prying intellect and sensitivities, his old provincialisms descend upon him, his mind “crossed by clouds” (56). His is a kind of provincialism that is “afraid of action” and that “prefer[s] comfort to joy” (56).

When he reunites with Clive, Maurice fears that the “mist would lower again … and with an unhappy sigh he pulled Clive’s head against his knee, as though it was a talisman for clear living” (57; my emphasis).

The parallels between Forster’s and Ling’s works suggest that the

“sentimental” offers a transcultural mode that is particularly suitable for depictions of same-sex love in their time. Their quartet of fictive lovers push against conventions in Edwardian England and Republican China by indulging in their true sentiments (in the word’s neutral sense of denoting “thoughts,”

“feelings,” and “opinions”), which in the face of repressive mores, can only be expressed as the sentimental (in the sense of “effusiveness”). Life imitates art; in many ways, the fictive dismissals of sentimentality by Maurice and

Yingman around 1914 and 1926 anticipate Bell’s dismissal of Ling’s sentimentality in 1936. Like his Cambridge counterpart Maurice, Bell’s provincialisms descend upon him like a mist when he derides a certain

Chinese sentimentality. Ling’s story suggests that sentimentality represents a valid and suitable mode of expression for young Chinese women (and women writers) who are caught between stifling traditions and the modern freedoms that are almost (but not quite) within their grasp. Yingman and Yunluo, Clive and Maurice, are all sentimental as if they are melodramatic figures from a bygone era, because social conventions from a bygone era still exist in modernity. Bell’s anti-sentimental stance forecloses the possibilities afforded

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by sentimental writing, especially that of implicating the sexual in the social that Ling and Forster were both attempting.

I stress here that while Ling had direct contact with the Bloomsbury

Group, the parallels between her short story and Forster’s novel appear to be coincidental. Forster’s work was famously kept hidden until 1971 and was only circulated among a small group of friends prior to its posthumous publication (Foster 250). In the world of published letters, Ling’s work emerged first—not that I am reading for precedence. Rather, a sense of serendipity, of being beside/s but unaware of the other, suffuses this parallel between a Crescent Moon and a Bloomsbury text. To use Susan Stanford

Friedman’s “mushroom analogy,” the resonances between “Once Upon a

Time” and Maurice do not “operate by direct encounter … [but] spring up disconnected like mushrooms [after the rain]” (“Transnational Turn” 23).

Sexual and Textual Inhibitions

Ling never heeded Julian’s advice on writing explicitly about sex. In fact, her anglophone works eschewed discussing sexuality, almost as if her professional prudishness could compensate for her private indiscretion. But rather than speculating about the reasons behind Ling’s literary prudishness, I offer a reading of Ling’s “Intoxicated” instead, a story which provides a compelling allegory of the parallels between women’s sexual desires and the woman writer’s desire to depict the taboo aspects of women’s sexuality. Through reading this story, I reformulate a question about Ling’s authorial intent—

Why did Ling avoid writing about sex?—to a question of how to close read—

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How does Ling’s story portray women’s sexuality, and the modern woman writer’s desire to write about sexuality?

In “Intoxicated,” Ling depicts the aftermath of a dinner party hosted by a young couple. All the guests have left save Ziyi, a man who is drunk and fast asleep in their living room chair. Yongzhang is romancing his wife, Caitiao, when she unexpectedly seeks her husband’s permission to kiss Ziyi’s face.

Following extensive negotiations between the couple, Caitiao finally gets the go-ahead, only to stop herself at the last moment. For Rey Chow, this story demonstrates

the ideological limits that a Chinese woman internalizes in

order to be a “good” wife. In spite of her ability to articulate

those feelings, Caitiao’s “adventure” is thwarted by the

invisible contractual obligations she has made with society in

terms of feminine virtue. Therefore, even as she can overcome

the major “barrier” of her husband, who is broad-minded

enough to let her realize her wish, the force of the virtuous

contract returns to haunt her precisely at the moment when she

is about to break it. (“Virtuous Transactions” 84)

I contend that this story is far richer than Chow’s framework of “virtuous transactions” allows. “Intoxicated” is not merely a critical depiction of

Chinese patriarchy and how its ideological limits are internalised by women of virtue. Rather, I suggest that the power of Ling’s story lies in the ambiguity surrounding why Caitiao ultimately decides not to kiss Ziyi. The simplicity and abruptness of the story’s concluding line, “I don’t want to kiss him any more,” hints at an inner negotiation that is left unsaid, which generates a

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number of interpretive possibilities for “reading” Caitiao’s desire and self- denial. Is she a chaste wife, experiencing a moment of weakness? Is she a transgressive modern who is playfully testing the boundaries of a monogamous relationship? Or is she a repressed wife seeking freedom through adultery? The narrator’s refusal to confirm any of these possibilities is also a refusal for women’s desires to be held up for public evaluation, or to satisfy the reader’s desire for resolution. In this light, Caitiao’s refusal to explain her decision to her husband, and the narrator’s refusal to make

Caitiao’s state of mind available to the reader’s gaze, is a protest, an insistence on privacy. In this manner, Caitiao’s refusal to kiss is coterminous with the implied author’s refusal to write the kiss into the story.

The parallels between Caitiao’s sexual desire and the implied author’s desire to depict a kiss is suggested throughout, pushed along by a narration that aligns Caitiao’s taste in men with her literary taste. Ling portrays the husband, Yongzhang, as a lover who, like a trite romance novelist, uses hyperbolic clichés to woo Caitiao. At one point, Caitiao chides him for “going on like a novelist” (180). But Yongzhang persists in the style of Shakespeare’s

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” He grasps at similes but fails to find suitable comparisons that do justice to Caitiao’s beauty:

What flower boasts a more charming color than the slightly

drunken blush of your cheeks? A peach blossom? I’m afraid

that’s too common. A peony? No, too gaudy … None of them

even come close … What could compare with these two

eyebrows? Mountains in the distance? No, they’re too faint.

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The feelers of a silkworm moth? Too curvy. Willow leaves?

Too straight. (180-1)

He then declares: “I’m convinced that if a person is truly beautiful on the outside, her inner soul is sure to be beautiful as well” (181). Yongzhang’s platitudes and his conflation of outer with inner beauty represents Ling’s satirical portrayal of the romance novelist who gives his female characters beauty but no depth. In contrast, what makes Caitiao alluring as a character is not that which lies on the surface, freely available for her husband or the reader to admire, but her inner life, which Ling wilfully obscures.

In contrast, Ziyi is the idealisation of male scholarly intellect and beauty. Caitiao seems indifferent to Yongzhang’s compliments and gazes at

Ziyi instead. Her consciousness bleeds into the narration:

Ziyi was now fast asleep and his red cheeks looked as though

they had been daubed with rouge; his mysterious eyes were

now shut peacefully; his jet-black eyebrows spread distinctly to

his temples; his mouth, usually full of erudition and wit, was

closed in a slight curve as though he were smiling. Indeed,

Caitiao had seldom seen him look this way before. He always

seemed so respectful and elegant, unlike his current state of

mellow relaxation. (181-2)

Between Yongzhang and Caitiao, Ling sets up an opposition between the male gaze and that of a gentlewoman. For Yongzhang, outer beauty indicates inner virtue, whereas for Caitiao, literary beauty enhances superficial beauty.

Caitiao is unmoved by her husband’s philosophy of aesthetics and prefers admiring Ziyi’s state of “mellow relaxation.” Likewise, Ling’s narration

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parodies romantic clichés and renders Ziyi’s beauty in a relaxed lyrical style instead. Here, Ling establishes a parallel between Caitiao’s taste in men and the implied author’s taste in literature.

At this point, Caitiao comes clean with her desire to kiss Ziyi’s face.

Her halting confession turns into a torrent of justifications that asserts a relation between her love for literature and her attraction to Ziyi’s scholarly beauty:

“Lower your voice. Let me finish explaining what I’m feeling.

As you know, I was born with a peculiar love of literature, and

whenever I read a truly marvelous essay I always imagine how

dignified the author looks, though writers with beautiful literary

styles aren’t necessarily graceful in manner or speech. But

he … what really makes me adore him, well, everything! … I

have never had the nerve to tell anyone about this, since the

average person would misunderstand. Today after the wine the

way he spoke enchanted me even more. Thinking about the

aggravating situation he has at home—a wife without an ounce

of affection for him, a bunch of distant relatives who only want

his money—I can’t help but feel profound sympathy for him.

Poor fellow! … My dear, how regrettable it is that such a fine

and noble man doesn’t have anyone to love and care or him.”

(182-3)

While Caitiao’s appreciation of masculine beauty seems far more concrete than Yongzhang’s hackneyed descriptions of feminine beauty, her justifications for wanting to kiss Ziyi are also unclear and contradictory. At

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one point, she admits that she finds Ziyi attractive: “his manner, the way he speaks, the way he gets along with people, these things have often attracted me to him” (182). Yet, she also suggests that her desire stems from a kind of chaste, literary sensibility. When she says that the “average person would misunderstand,” she speaks as if there is nothing unseemly about her feelings, though the force of her request suggests otherwise (182). Then, she further qualifies her request by pointing to Ziyi’s piteous state of being unloved by his wife and relatives, as if pity were a proxy emotion for attraction. Given that

Caitiao’s account of her desire gets increasingly unreliable, the reader can only speculate if it is sexual attraction, platonic admiration, pity, or some mix of the three that arouses Caitiao’s affections for Ziyi.

After Caitiao’s shocking confession, Yongzhang functions as the reader’s proxy by trying to “read” her state of mind, which involves processing her desire into expressions that he can understand, tolerate, or accept. He first responds with incredulity—“Really, Caitiao?”—then assumes that she is “drunk tonight too,” which she denies (182). He then reaches a realisation about the reciprocal feelings between Ziyi and Caitiao, after which he retorts: “Oh, so you want to go kiss him, Caitiao?” (183). The word “kiss” is rendered in English in the original Chinese text. Notably, it is Yongzhang who introduces the English word. At one level, Yongzhang is signalling the transgressiveness of Caitiao’s desire by rendering it in a foreign tongue, as if he were alluding to either European or American practices of cheek kissing that serve as greetings between friends, or even to notions of free love and open marriages that were then propagating in the bohemian circles of, say,

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London and Paris.37 At another level, Yongzhang is in fact trivialising

Caitiao’s desire by insinuating that she is merely playing at non-Chinese fantasies, whether of the chaste or risqué variety. Understood thus, it is

Caitiao’s initial articulation of her desire to kiss Ziyi’s face in Chinese—“wo zhixiang wenyiwen tade lian” (Ling, Temple 9)—that is far more transgressive in its immediacy and candour.

Caitiao subsequently picks up the English word “kiss” when she reiterates: “all I want is to kiss him for a second, then I’ll feel better”; “I won’t feel right if I don’t go and kiss him once” (“Intoxicated” 183). This seems to suggest that she is accepting the terms on which Yongzhang frames her desire.

However, in the concluding moments of the story, Caitiao’s desire intensifies, then suddenly subsides:

As she drew nearer she could see Ziyi’s face more distinctly,

and her heart began beating faster. As she reached the front of

the chair, her heart was throbbing so rapidly that the beating

seemed to have become louder. Suddenly her cheeks grew

unusually hot and her heart fluttered strangely. After she had

fixed her gaze on Ziyi for a moment, her face cooled and the

fierce pounding of her heart subsided. In two or three steps she

was back in front of Yongzhang; she sat down without a word,

and lowered her head. Yongzhang looked at her and asked

impatiently, “What is it now, Caitiao?”

“Nothing. I don’t want to kiss him any more.” (184)

37 See, for example, Katie Roiphe’s Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939 (2007).

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Note that Ling details the somatic symptoms of Caitiao’s desire but occludes her thoughts. The restraint Caitiao shows at the end—“I don’t want to kiss him anymore” (184), where “kiss” is once again rendered in English—can be read in at least three ways. The first possibility is that Caitiao’s self-denial is a refusal of Yongzhang’s anglicised expression, which has twisted her request into something unrecognisably foreign and inauthentic. His misinterpretation and misarticulation of her desire have drained the excitement from an intensely private and candid moment between the couple; to kiss Ziyi after all that is futile. A second possibility is that for Caitiao, it is the confession and the scandalous negotiations with her husband that she finds titillating, as opposed to the actual kiss itself. Ziyi the sleeping friend is significantly a passive object of desire in the entire narrative; any erotic drama is generated by the dialogic intercourse between wife and husband, who are pushing at the boundaries of a monogamous marriage. This game of testing each other’s limits offers a dynamic of seduction that is far more titillating for both than

Yongzhang’s hackneyed attempts at romancing Caitiao. Still one further possibility remains: perhaps Caitiao is afraid of finding the kiss exceedingly exciting. Her refusal then is a refusal of the consequences and complications that will arise from the kiss.

However, both Caitiao and the narrator’s refusals to confirm any of these possibilities is also an insistence on keeping Caitiao’s privacy intact.

This choice may seem socially conservative, because Ling withdraws, at the last second, from depicting a scandalous kiss. But it is simultaneously a choice that should be understood as literary transgression, because in refusing to depict the kiss, and in refusing to explain Caitiao’s emotions and thoughts,

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Ling forfeits narratorial and moral resolution. She keeps the story from going one of two ways: it could have, in Chow’s words, turned into a tale about “the ideological limits that a Chinese woman internalizes in order to be a ‘good’ wife” (84), but it does not, because the cat is out of the bag—Yongzhang now knows Caitiao is attracted to Ziyi. Caitiao has already failed at playing the role of being a “good” wife by confessing her attraction and making the request in the first place. Or, the story could have turned into a modern morality tale about women’s freedoms, in which Caitiao’s kiss is taken as an act of liberation. This would have been a kind of scandalous transaction, in which

Ling exchanges a depiction of a scandalous kiss for her credibility as a modern woman writer who is not afraid of writing about taboo topics. But Ling’s silence on the mysterious reasons behind Caitiao’s desire and self-denial refuses these transactions of virtue or scandal. Instead, Ling offers a model of feminine privacy that is more transgressive than going through with, or depicting, an adulterous kiss. To invoke Caitiao’s closing words, the reader is left with “nothing,” no further lessons about women, sexuality, and modernity;

Caitiao just does not want to kiss Ziyi anymore and that is all we need to know.

To the contemporary reader who is aware of Ling’s affair with Bell, the parallels between “Intoxicated” and the author’s personal life are unmissable. Ling kisses Bell but doesn’t tell; their relationship had to be uncovered by Hong Ying and Laurence among other researchers. Ling’s indiscretion connects her to Bloomsbury modernity in two ways: she builds an interpersonal connection with his network in England, and she also seemingly adopts the modern attitude of a Bloomsberry who is unafraid of social

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impropriety. Or so the story goes. But the non-lesson that “Intoxicated” offers today is that the reader—of Ling’s story, of Ling’s biography—will do well to avoid inserting Ling and other women into various interpretive economies of virtuous or scandalous transactions, which produce evaluative rubrics of what constitutes conservatism and modernity based on feminine sexuality, and to respect women’s privacy instead. The demand for feminine privacy of this order is also a form of modernity.

The Modern Woman Scholar and Her Need for Privacy

By way of reading Ling’s “Once Upon a Time” and “Intoxicated,” I have attempted to reconcile the scholarly gossip surrounding Ling’s affair with her actual literary works, thus turning the attention back onto what she has to offer in her professional capacity. These “scandalous” stories also predate the three short stories she co-translated with Bell into English, which are far more

“prudish.” Like her protagonist Caitiao who refuses to “kiss” Ziyi in English, it is as if Ling was wilfully refusing to write about sex and sexuality in

English, despite the general perception in her time (and ours) that a Western readership is far more receptive to tales of indecency. For example, Laurence comments that in her anglophone works, Ling

could write with an imaginary English audience and say what

could not be said in China. This notion of a shadow audience is

true today when contemporary Turkish writers may write more

freely in Germany or Algerian writers, in Paris. (Lily 89)

Yet, a closer look at Ling’s co-translated stories reveals that she did the exact opposite. In contrast to the salacious themes of the two stories I dealt with

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above, “Writing a Letter” and “What’s the Point of It?” focus on the vestal figure of the woman scholar who requires privacy and solitude to work. The sentiment uniting these latter two stories has an ironic relevance to the state of

Ling’s professional reputation today, which has been overshadowed by her affair with Bell. In the following sections, I analyse Ling’s portrayals of the modern woman scholar, which she sets against other feminine archetypes.

Both stories sketch out the competing models of modernity that play out across gender, class, manners, education, and literature in Republican China.

In “Writing a Letter,” the illiterate Mrs. Chang dictates a letter meant for her husband, an army official stationed in Hunan. She is helped by the educated Miss Wu, who is otherwise busy preparing for the imperial examinations.38 Barring the opening paragraph, the entire story consists of

Mrs. Chang’s monologue; Miss Wu’s presence and reactions are indicated only by implicature. Throughout the story, Mrs. Chang relates her worries to

Miss Wu, which include money, her husband’s gendered favouritism towards their son, his corresponding lack of affection for their daughters, and his potential infidelity. However, these complaints never make it into the letter; the central irony in the story is derived from the disparity between Mrs.

Chang’s loquaciousness, and her final decision to include merely two lines in the letter:

38 By mentioning that Miss Wu is studying for the imperial examinations, Ling pushes her story into ahistorical and anti-realist territory. As Laurence notes, the examinations were reserved for men; the only exception occurred during the short-lived reign of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851-1864) and only within its borders (Lily 414). Lily Xiao Hong Lee et al. corroborate this fact; apparently, Fu Shanxiang is the first and only woman scholar who passed the examinations in 1853 (43).

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“…Tell him not to worry about home, his mother is well, and

the children are good—Oh, I remember, you’ve already written

that, haven’t you? …

“Two sentences are quite enough, if he really ever gets

the letter. Thank you, Miss.” (“Writing a Letter,” 513)

Plagued by numerous concerns about how her husband might receive a frank letter, Mrs. Chang sticks to conventional expressions and keeps her grievances to herself.

Ling’s story exemplifies key tenets of the New Culture Movement that began around 1916, which marks one beginning to modern Chinese literature.

The movement famously advocated for the adoption of the vernacular

(baihua) over the use of Classical Chinese (wenyan). Its leading figures opposed the elitism of Classical Chinese’s “proverbial difficulty and its pronounced archaic and poetic flavour,” and they promoted modes of vernacular writing that would “disseminat[e] modern ideas among a more or less literate public,” thereby contributing to the national project of modernising China (Hsia 5-6). In “Writing a Letter,” Ling’s extensive use of direct speech recalls Chen Hengzhe’s “One Day” (1917), which is often cited as the first short story written in the vernacular. Chen relied heavily on dialogue to circumvent using Classical Chinese; she would otherwise have had to invent a consistent vernacular style that is appropriate for the task of third- person narration. Ling’s “Writing a Letter,” written almost two decades later, might be read as an homage to Chen’s ground-breaking work, a connection which reminds the reader that one of the earliest pieces of New Culture fiction was a story written by a woman about women.

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The premise of Ling’s story also cleaves to the demotic ideals behind the New Culture Movement. In their 1916 manifesto for a linguistic and literary revolution, Yuen Ren Chao and Hu Shih note that Chinese conventions of letter writing are needlessly stifling and should be discarded:

Our letters should be freed from their “polite” nonsenses to

give room for sincerity. Relatives and friends should write as

they would talk … An extra page or two of formalities not only

wastes time, energy and money, but it wastes attention and

interest, and, as we say … puts a film between you and me.

(Y.R. Chao, “The Problem of the Chinese Language” 578)

Ling’s story dramatises this argument through fiction. Mrs. Chang reveals that she has, in fact, first approached an elderly male letter writer, who tells her that “writing a letter isn’t like talking, there are all sorts of words you can’t write down” (512). In turning to Miss Wu, Mrs. Chang is hoping that a young, educated woman can help her communicate her grievances to her husband more accurately. Laurence puts it beautifully when she argues that Ling’s

“epistolary device highlights the representation of the voice of an illiterate woman through the pen of an educated one” (Lily, 90). She further reads the story as an allegory of women’s exclusion from historical records:

If we read this story as a letter on the cultural margins, or

perhaps a letter lost in cultural space, we note that though the

women of China may have a great deal to say, it never gets into

“official letters.” … Two levels of a woman’s voice are then

captured in Shuhua’s story—private and public—through the

device of “telling” another woman the story of her life while

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repressing this story from being “written” in the public letter.

(92-3).

I add here that “Writing a Letter” deploys an imperfect correspondence between Miss Wu the character and Ling the implied author; while Miss Wu dutifully turns Mrs. Chang’s banal sentences into a short and perfunctory letter, Ling narrates the earthy and poignant backstory behind those two simple lines in Mrs. Chang’s vernacular. As a New Culture writer, Ling has the freedom to write about the experiences of uneducated, commoner women in a radically candid fashion. She differs from the fictive Miss Wu, who is probably rote learning the classics for the imperial examinations. With

“Writing a Letter,” Ling suggests—pace Gayatri Spivak—that the subaltern woman can speak, if only by proxy and through the modern woman writer’s sympathetic and daring pen, as opposed to the woman scholar who is confined within the outmoded system of imperial examinations that had been abolished by 1905. Via this story, Ling revives Chao and Hu Shih’s argument with comedy and drama, while suggesting that there are still persistent social problems to address (and often gendered ones) two decades after the start of the Chinese literary revolution.

Ling’s story of cooperation between women across classes is, however, matched by an undercurrent of rivalry in Mrs. Chang’s words. She is envious of Miss Wu’s education:

You don’t know what it’s like to be blind with your eyes open

(i.e. illiterate). How nice it must be to be able to write down

anything you think of. I have always had a grudge against my

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mother for not letting me go to school. (“Writing a Letter,”

508)

She theatrically stresses her respect for Miss Wu’s time (which ironically takes up more time), while hinting that the latter keeps to herself and studies far too much:

I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you to be free …

Ten days ago I had wanted to ask you to write a letter for me,

but I noticed that you go to school every day, and when you are

at home you are always reading and writing, so I didn’t like to

bother you. (508)

She seems painfully aware that Miss Wu belongs to a different class, and she repeatedly apologises for impinging on the latter’s time:

“…Why, there’s the twelve o’clock gun, and I haven’t got

anything said at all yet. Time goes so fast, it’s already your

dinner time. …

“Oh no, Miss, don’t take so much trouble over me …

(513)

Throughout the story, Mrs. Chang also sets up a series of problematic feminine archetypes. She speaks of “modern girls [who will] run away with some wild young man” (508). In contrast, she praises the educated Miss Wu, who is apparently “still quite a lady and not a bit modern” (508). Then, there is the diligent and filial Miss Hwang, who “works much better than a boy, earning a hundred dollars a month, but not a copper for herself, for she just gives her mother her paycheque without touching it” (511). Unfortunately,

Miss Hwang the modern working woman is as unattractive as she is capable:

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“Whatever she wears, she looks like a sack of potatoes” (511). Mrs. Chang’s stereotypes come to a head when she discusses her husband’s potential infidelity. She hears from her brother’s friends that officers in Hunan tend to date “girl students” (512). She repeats her brother’s truism: “these women may call themselves girl students, but really they’re nothing but a lot of whores!” (512).

By keeping the mysterious Miss Wu hidden from the reader’s view,

Ling refuses to confirm Mrs. Chang’s characterisation of the heroine as a paragon of virtue. Instead, Ling makes it clear that Mrs. Chang, while a sympathetic character, is a rather unreliable judge of people, due in no small part to her lack of education and to the gossip she is fed by well-meaning but small-minded relatives and acquaintances. Ling’s silence on Miss Wu’s personality and demeanour suggests that she is allowing Miss Wu to be as modern as the reader’s imagination fancies, whether of the “modern girl” or the “Miss Hwang” variety, or something else altogether. What is relevant is the sympathetic ear that Miss Wu lends to Mrs. Chang. The woman scholar, in other words, has a social duty to aid her commoner peers, but should also be accorded privacy when it comes to personal affairs. The lesson that Ling weaves into the story offers a timely reminder to contemporary scholars like me who are fascinated by Ling’s affair with Bell.

Finding Time of One’s Own

Ling expands on the theme of privacy in “What’s the Point of It?” The story depicts the ennui faced by a married woman scholar, Ru Pi, who struggles to balance domestic chores and social obligations with her literary work. Its

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premise and setting in Wuhan suggest that Ling drew inspiration from her life there. According to Welland, both Ling and Chen Yuan “despaired at the oppressive provincialism of Wuchang” (216). In a 1929 letter, Chen Yuan writes: “This place for Shuhua though is really like being buried alive. She is suffocating to the point of tears, and I have no way to comfort her” (qtd. in

Welland 216). In the story, privacy and time of her own elude Ru Pi, who is forestalled from reading and writing as she attends to constant interruptions from her maid, a guest, and her husband. Ling’s sketch of the oppressions of domestic life that impinge on the woman writer is possibly inspired by Mrs

Dalloway (1923) and A Room of One’s Own (1929).

The opening scenes depict Ru Pi’s battle against mould. Here, mould serves as a double-barrelled metaphor for the never-ending list of chores and also the pervasive sense of ennui that hangs over her. As she rids her cupboards of the tins and jars that are covered in mould, she recalls a comment made by her husband, who is absent throughout the story: “If you looked at them under the microscope I’m sure you would see that they were covered with all sorts of little beasts” (53). His vivid observation registers the progress of scientific knowledge, which only serves to enhance the regressive atmosphere of provincial living in Wuhan. The oppressive atmosphere of the mouldy house leads to an existential outcry, where Ru Pi’s thoughts are aligned with the narrative voice:

“With this sort of thing human beings will grow mouldy next.”

After all, there would be nothing strange about that; one day

everyone will lie in the earth mouldy and well-behaved. One

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breathes, walks, sits, yet inside the body there may be already

mould and decay. (55)

For both Ru Pi and the narrator, the decay of one’s inner life is connected with adherence to good behaviour and social form.

Ru Pi’s attempts to clean up the mould and at improving her living conditions—an allegory for self-improvement—are resisted at every turn by her maid, Chang Ma, who personifies frugality, conservatism, and the intrusive nature of domestic duties: “Chang Ma had been in Ru Pi’s family for more than ten years, and thought of her mistress’s property as if it were her own” (53). Chang Ma refuses to throw away the mould-covered tins and jars and chides Ru Pi for spending money on beautifying the garden. The domineering maid justifies her frugality with conventional wisdom:

There’s a saying we have that the old people plant the trees and

those who come after get the fruits. Are you sure you will never

move house again? If you do move, it all goes to other people

and you get nothing. (54)

But such attitudes and habits, which keep the house in a state of disrepair and mustiness, are precisely what Ru Pi is resisting. She argues:

We Chinese never spend money on planting trees and flowers,

and so the houses with their bleak smoky walls look like pieces

of rotten, black stuff, while the places where the foreigners live

look nice and proper. You look at that Boone University

compound, it’s just like a garden. (54)

Significantly, Ru Pi alludes to the intellectual space of the missionary university as a site of beauty and dignity. But Chang Ma, who is ever right

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about the practical things in life, retorts: “So you say, but see what a fine life the foreigners lead. If there’s trouble in China they all run away” (54).

In a rare moment of solitude, Ru Pi retreats to her study and gains respite from the ennui. Ling here offers a portrait of the modern woman scholar, who finds solace while working in the privacy of her study:

She pulled up a chair and sat down, reading the book and

grinding her ink at the same time; as she read and grasped the

meaning of the book she felt her heart grow lighter, and when

she had finished a chapter she began to translate a line or two.

(55)

The ennui lifts momentarily, only to be interrupted by Chang Ma’s decision to let a visitor in as a matter of course:

“My mistress is at home; please come in and sit down,” Chang

Ma spoke in a cheerful voice, as though she were welcoming

her dearest friends. Ru Pi had to drop her brush; there was

nothing to do but come down. (55)

The guest is one Mrs. Pai, the very picture of the traditional wife and mother of five who discusses her children with “all the vanity of a creative artist”

(56). The narrator’s sarcasm peaks with the revelation that Ru Pi had already heard the story Mrs. Pai was telling “at least three times” (56). And so, our heroine’s literary production is interrupted by reproduction: of children and of (repetitive) stories about children. Here, Ru Pi’s lack of privacy is configured as an exposure to social pressures and distractions that are detrimental to forging a new way of living, one that is nourishing and freeing for the modern woman’s mind and soul.

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This scene is followed by descriptions of Ru Pi’s neighbours that read like dioramas of wifehood. The section is prefaced by an image of plants fruiting, as if to suggest that Ru Pi is merely waiting to bear children herself:

“Outside, the flowers of the Chinese plants had already been replaced by the fruits” (57). Ling’s dreary caricatures of the neighbours are presented as if they symbolise possible futures for Ru Pi. The woman to the east was crying; she and her husband, both almost thirty, “often quarrelled, yet often went out walking side by side and hand in hand” (57). To the south, a corpulent woman of around forty is saddled with seven or eight children; she is always “going in and out, her fat body shaking and quivering, a child on one arm, and holding another by a hand” (57). She stays up late to wait for her husband and sometimes cooks a supper for him (57). Her time is not her own. In contrast to the houses east and south, Ling’s third example presents a non-normative possibility. The property is “a small foreign style building” from which music, laughter, and the sound of conversation often emanates (57). The young couple who resides there frequently stays out late, but when the wife is home, she freely entertains young men and a couple of “smartly dressed women”

(57). The mystified neighbours speculate that the house is “a kind of ‘salon,’ and the sort of thing smart women were doing nowadays” (58). Although Ling depicts this household in a glamorous light, there is an undercurrent of disapproval that is directed at the wife’s ostentatiousness, her materialism, and the liberties she takes with her visitors. She is always “dressed and made up,” and she typically returns from afternoon trips with “her rickshaw full of parcels, perhaps material for a dress, or new shoes” (57).

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Ling’s portrait of the lattermost woman might be an allusion to Bing

Xin’s short story, “Our Mistress’s Parlor” (1933), which likewise offers a critical portrayal of the lady of a salon. Bing Xin’s story is voiced by a sycophantic servant, but the narration takes on what Bakhtin calls “double- voiced discourse,” where the author uses the effusive praises of her narrator to satirise the pretentiousness of the story’s titular mistress (Bakhtin 324). The narrating servant describes the European and Chinese influences on the parlour’s design; the space features “French windows adorned with long flowing curtains of pale yellow silk” and “an exquisitely detailed carpet in the

Imperial Garden style” (313). A portrait of the mistress and her daughter depicts “their jadelike arms wrapped around each other’s necks as in a famous

European painting” (312). The vain mistress rarely takes a picture with her husband because “he’s common and vulgar” (312). She keeps a library of

“hardbound collections of foreign literary classics,” but omits Shakespeare because she has no patience to “read that old stuff!” (312). A particularly biting segment reads:

Daisy is the servant girl who came with our mistress when she

was married. Although our mistress raves on and on about

women’s rights and absolutely deplores the buying and selling

of women, when it came to getting Juhua as a dowry present,

she didn’t utter a word of protest. Juhua is Daisy’s real name,

but our mistress thought it was too common and thus began

calling her Daisy. After her name was changed, Daisy even

began to pick up a few words of English. Whenever a new

European or American artist arrives in Beiping and calls on our

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mistress to invite her out somewhere, Daisy answers in very

polite and clear English: “Mrs. is in bed, can I take any

message?” (314)

Apart from the obvious swipe that Bing Xin takes at bourgeois, educated women who are only superficially concerned with feminist issues, the other source of humour in this excerpt stems from Juhua’s name change. “Juhua” in

Chinese means “chrysanthemum.” In changing it to “Daisy,” the mistress only manages to substitute a floral name that is “too common” in Chinese, for one that is equally common in English. This high-handed renaming of a servant girl thus discloses the mistress’s own ignorance of English culture. As with

Bing Xin, Ling’s portrayal of a salon lady in “What’s the Point of It?” is critical of the character’s vainglorious and theatrical performances of modern bourgeois living.

Ling’s dioramas of married life and its limited possibilities culminate in a lament, where Ru Pi characterises domestic space as a prison for women:

… [Ru Pi] thought there was a great deal to be said for the

scholar who had explained that the word for “home” (chia) is

the same as that for “chains”, and that the character is written

as a pig under a roof. …

It was true, though, a pig’s life was pointless, except for

eating and sleeping and begetting, sleeping and eating and

begetting again; what more could you expect? Pig, be calm and

peaceful, stay in your pen! She repeated the words to herself

with an ironical smile on her lips. (58)

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Even this private moment of bitter reflection is interrupted once again by Ru

Pi’s social duties; her husband had sent word for her to buy a present for an uncle’s birthday (58). As she ventures into Hankou, Ru Pi encounters scenes of urban filth that recall Ling’s opening motif of mould: “The hollows in the road were filled with puddles of black mud, and from the gutters came the stench of mould” (59). The shopping trip is yet another chore that takes Ru Pi away from the joys of her literary work.

Laurence has called Ru Pi a “Chinese Mrs. Dalloway” (Lily 99).

However, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Ling’s “What’s the Point of It?” offer diametrically opposed characterisations of quotidian life for bourgeois women.

For Clarissa Dalloway, the streets of London and the “ebb and flow of things” are enlivening; they “lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist” (Woolf, Mrs Dalloway 70). This, despite how the “late age of world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears”

(70). As she shops, Clarissa discovers some cosmic revelation about mortality in Shakespeare’s line from Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” while she gazes into the Hatchards’ shop window (70). In contrast, Ru Pi finds only insipidity in town; Hankou is full of zombie-like people walking the streets; “their faces were bloodless and their eyes glassy” (“What’s the Point”

59). In a silk shop, Ru Pi gets “confused by the quantity of colours, and walked along the showcase without being able to make a choice” (59).

Moreover, consider the differences between Clarissa’s and Ru Pi’s sensation of time. Woolf famously renders the striking of the Big Ben lyrically:

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There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour,

irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. (Mrs

Dalloway 66)

The recurring motif of the leaden circles, a metaphor for clock time, connects

Woolf’s characters. When Clarissa ruminates on Septimus’s suicide, the Big

Ben’s striking returns her to the land of the living:

The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally

and Peter. And she came in from the little room. (225)

Clarissa’s conformity to clock time and social form grants her respite from her dark thoughts. In Ling’s story, conformity to social form makes time pass both grindingly slowly and frightfully quickly. In a moment of frustration, Ru Pi snaps at Chang Ma: “I don’t know what you think one ought to do; I suppose just sit about at home in between meals and wait until it gets dark” (“What’s the Point” 54). But Ru Pi also feels that time for her writing keeps slipping away as she attends to the banalities of bourgeois living. Following Mrs. Pai’s visit, Ru Pi “looked at the watch on her wrist; it was almost quarter to twelve: the whole morning had been wasted” (58). Realising that she still has to shop for a gift after lunch, she counts the hours—one for eating, one for traveling— and pictures herself “wandering from shop to shop like a homeless ghost”

(58). Later, while she stares at the bewildering array of silks, “her watch showed that it was already three o’clock” (59). Unlike Clarissa, who is lifted like mist by the branches of trees as she walks around in London, Ru Pi walks

“as if everything was covered with a fog, and she did not wish to look clearly”

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(61). The vibrancy of Woolf’s London is not to be found in Ling’s Wuhan, where time paradoxically passes too slowly and too fast.

A Temporality of Her Own

It becomes clear that Ling is illustrating a series of intersecting and competing modernities, each with its own relentless pace that drives Ru Pi mindlessly on and into a state of ennui. There is the pace of married life for bourgeois women, which Ru Pi likens to that of a penned-up sow, comprising only

“eating and sleeping and begetting” (58). There is the pace of capitalist production, symbolised by the rapid fashion changes of Chinese silk prints:

Who says the Chinese never do anything new? The plum

blossom, bamboo and chrysanthemum patterns, the clouds,

pine-tree and stork—one never sees them nowadays. And the

European roses and violets are already out of date; the new

patterns one sees are cubist designs. (59)

Then, there is the pace of state-led development, represented by the

Nationalist government’s New Life Movement inaugurated in 1934, one which blended a neo-Confucian sensibility with nationalism.39 At the same silk shop, the salesman foists what he calls “New Life Movement ‘tweed’” onto Ru Pi, assuming that she is “certainly in favour” of Chiang Kai-shek’s civic campaign simply because she is “one of the young intellectual set” (60).

He suggests that the fashionably named “tweed” (which is really silk) would make a good gift for her like-minded friends (60). According to Gail

39 For the manifesto that inaugurated the New Life Movement, see Chiang Kai-shek’s “The Object of the New Life Movement” (1934).

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Hershatter’s recent study, the New Life Movement was partly aimed at eliminating the so-called “three evils” of prostitution, gambling, and opium

(138). Chiang “drew on fascist practices in Germany and Italy, [which] sought to involve every citizen in nation building, down to the level of bodily habits”

(159). The campaign encouraged women to return to domestic roles and to cultivate “housework skills, industriousness, frugality, and mothering” (159).

(Note here the frugality exemplified earlier by Chang Ma’s proverbial wisdom; her traditional ideas cohere with Chiang’s campaign of modernisation.) However, women were also prompted to “work in teaching, public health, and handicraft production at home” (160). Later, the movement pivoted to involve women in war efforts (160). Hershatter notes that the campaign’s “message about women’s societal roles was not consistent” (160).

With the scene in the silk shop, Ling references the New Life Movement to connote not only the disconcerting speed of fashion changes in the Nationalist government’s biopolitical strategies, but also their uptake by consumer capitalism.

These discordant tempos of modern life are encapsulated by the motif of the rickshaw, which recurs throughout the story and ends it. Earlier, Mrs.

Pai, proud mother of five, left in a rickshaw with a haughty look on her face

(“What’s the Point” 56). This haughty look haunts Ru Pi as she ponders the trajectory of domestic life—as if the image of Mrs. Pai on her rickshaw is an implicit reminder for Ru Pi to beget children soon. Then, the materialistic lady of the salon is associated with “her rickshaw full of parcels” (57). Towards the story’s conclusion, Ru Pi decides to leave without purchasing a gift, overwhelmed as she is by the bustle of Hankou. The image of Ru Pi on a

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rickshaw is rendered as a metaphor for her conflicting experiences of time as being simultaneously too static and too fast:

She sat down in it, and the rickshaw boy started off at full

speed. He looked busy and proud, as if he was pulling some

important personage, and all the other rickshaw boys must be

filled with envy and astonishment. “What a joke! What

important business can I have, to want him to run so fast? How

preposterously upside down! Someone who has nothing to do

asks a man to use all his energy and run as fast as he can. There

was no reason at all why this young man should waste so much

energy; it was a shame, a crime.” (61)

This allegorical image captures the tension between two different classes and their opposing but co-implicated senses of time. The bourgeois wife who has too much time is at rest sitting on a rickshaw, whereas its young puller embodies the cheap labour that enables her speed and ease of mobility for nothing of consequence. Ru Pi is reminded of a scene in Beijing:

… she had seen a woman driving in a rickshaw, with staring

eyes and very oddly dressed; everyone had followed, and they

all knew she was mad. …

“Here I am sitting in this rickshaw; there’s not much

difference between us.” (62)

Ru Pi’s realisation—that the madwoman who travels around pointlessly on a rickshaw is the true image of society’s madness—resembles a scene in Lu

Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” (1918). In part X of the story, the protagonist declares to his brother that the villagers are all cannibals, and that the Chinese

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have been cannibals “since time immemorial” (Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary”

49). His ramblings draw a congregation of villagers who gawk at the spectacle

(49). His brother disperses the crowd: “Clear off, the whole lot of you!” he roared “What’s the point of looking at a madman?” (49). But it is in fact the protagonist who is sane; he “expose[s] feudalism as essentially barbaric cannibalism” (Xiaobing Tang 1227). As with Lu Xun’s protagonist, Ru Pi realises a certain truth about society’s madness and therefore breaks away from social conventions. She alights and walks on her own two feet, asking herself: “What is there to be busy about?” (62) Although she appears mad for stopping the ride suddenly—the rickshaw boy “looked at her with suspicion”

(62)—she is the clear-eyed intellectual who is enacting a minor act of resistance and defiance.

By ignoring the unyielding pace of domestic duties, biological reproduction, capitalist production, and state projects of social reformation, Ru

Pi takes time into her own hands, even if this window of private time is to be spent on a long walk across muddy roads that smell of mould. This prompts a consideration of Ling’s story as a rejoinder to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

For Woolf, “time, money and idleness” is needed for women to write (81).

She says of her hypothetical woman writer, the mediocre novelist Mary

Carmichael: “give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days” (81). For Ling, the bourgeois woman scholar may have money and a study of her own, but she requires privacy: The privacy to spend money as she likes, away from the judgmental eyes of society, its norms, and the insubordinate servants who enforce said norms with

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tyrannical benevolence; and above all, the privacy to spend time as she likes, time of one’s own that is insulated from quotidian distractions, domestic chores, and social obligations that impinge on her day.

In an oblique and poignant way, Ling’s ruminations on private time seem especially relevant to her position within modernism in her time and ours. When Nadel reduces Ling’s historical significance to her affair and the friendship scroll that “[m]aterially mark[s] the China-Bloomsbury link” (26), her life and work are subsumed within the temporalities of the Bloomsbury

Group. When Bell dismisses a certain Chinese sentimentality in favour of the

“indecencies of the moderns” (Laurence, Lily 89), he activates an imagination of literary time that puts Western modernism and its immodesties ahead of

Chinese prudishness and sentimentality. When Laurence casts Bell as the literary vanguard who “attempted to open modernist perspectives on women’s constraints and sexuality, as a theme, to Ling Shuhua” (89), she maintains a transgressive-conservative binary between Bell and Ling.

As an intervention to such temporalising practices, I began by reading two short stories that predate Ling’s meeting with Bell. I suggested that Ling’s depiction of same-sex love in “Once Upon a Time” arguably puts her in advance of many prominent writers in queer modernism. I proposed that her portrait of women’s desire and restraint in “Intoxicated” illuminates how Ling prizes feminine privacy over transgression; or rather, that demanding privacy is transgressive. As for the two short stories that she co-translated with Bell, I examined the confluences between New Culture and Bloomsbury writings by the likes of Hu Shih, Yuen Ren Chao, Chen Hengzhe, Bing Xin, Lu Xun, E.M.

Forster, and Virginia Woolf. In these ways, I have attempted to delineate a

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temporality of Ling’s own, one that variously anticipates, follows from, intersects with, runs parallel to—or, as I prefer, developed beside/s—the temporalities of the Bloomsbury Group and other Chinese intellectuals.

Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz use the term “expansion” to describe the transformations in modernist studies around the late nineties to early noughties (737). Such “expansions” involve casting a wider eye across the temporal, spatial, and vertical axes of literary and cultural production beyond the high modernist canon (737-8). In his polemical rebuttal, Max

Brzezinski argues that

there is no reason to believe that expansion in content should be

celebrated in and of itself, given that … expansion can mean or

be attached to military operations, imperial occupation, and

capitalism’s overproduction crises or creative destructions.

(121)

Ling’s inclusion within the New Modernist Studies does suggest that New

Modernist imaginations of literary time can sometimes reproduce hierarchies that resemble imperialising structures. However, the fact that Ling’s activities in Wuhan around the 1930s, and in London up to the 1950s, are now included within the ambit of the New Modernist Studies, should be taken as an indication of the field’s ongoing commitment to diversification, as opposed to its expansionist tendencies. Without diminishing the work done by New

Modernist scholars, this chapter offers alternate idioms for conceptualising the connections between Bloomsbury modernism and modern Chinese literature, and perhaps even between high modernism and other modern literatures at

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large, with a vocabulary that stresses “contemporaneity” and “coevality,”

“parallel developments,” and a practice of reading “beside/s” modernism.

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Chapter Four

Eileen Chang: Modernist or Realist?

In a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ) titled Peripheral

Realisms (2012), Joe Cleary, Jed Esty, and Colleen Lye critique a prevalent

Three-World Model of mapping twentieth-century literature that relies on a

“realism/modernism antinomy,” which maps correspondingly onto a

Second/First World divide (Esty and Lye 269). Cleary’s opening salvo offers an ambitious historicisation of the agon between realism and modernism. He begins with the seminal assessments of European realism in Lukács’s The

Historical Novel, Auerbach’s Mimesis, and Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World

(“Realism after Modernism” 255-7), through to the debates between Adorno,

Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, and Lukács that are collected in Aesthetics and

Politics (261-2), and up to the impact of the Cold War on conceptions of literary realism and modernism, during which Western Europe ceded its global hegemony to the U.S. and the Soviet Union (262-3). In Cleary’s account, the most influential works of early twentieth century literature came from Russian realism and international modernism, all of which emerged from (then) semiperipheral regions such as the U.S., Germany, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, and Bolshevik Russia, to rival the dominance and provincialisms of

French and English realisms (257-9). During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s uptake of realism led to the U.S.’s reflexive championing of modernism (262-

3). Within this constellation, both “realism” and “modernism” emerged as

“reified categories and as the obvious termini of modern ‘world literature’”

(264). As Cleary puts it, “wherever strong communist cultures were forged, their writers tended to favor realist modes of one form or another” (262).

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Building on Cleary’s historicisation, Esty and Lye problematise a widespread fixation on modernism as “the definitive prism through which we recognize aesthetic innovation” (274). They argue for the necessity of

“reassert[ing] the aesthetic range of non-Euro-American literary practice beyond that of conformity to an international modernist style and its offshoots” (270), especially by attending to the twentieth-century realisms that have been overlooked. Esty and Lye land on the term “peripheral realisms” as a way of theorising writers who were not aligned, politically and aesthetically, with the “liberal modernism” or “socialist realism” that were reified by First and Second World institutions respectively (269). For Esty and Lye,

“peripherality” offers a way of “thinking relationally across different kinds of subordinated positions on different scales” (272), whereas their notion of

“realism” draws primarily from Lukács’s theory of critical realism, which, simply put, is invested in a text’s “depiction of historical forces in motion or the dynamics of society” (Esty and Lye 277).

In the same issue, Petrus Liu attempts to transcend an “ossified view of contemporary Chinese fiction as divided into a residually socialist realism associated with the People’s Republic of China and a progressive, diasporic modernism associated with Taiwan (or Hong Kong)” (Esty and Lye 283). His article stakes out various conceptual “centres” of realism and modernism which have dominated analyses of twentieth-century Chinese literature, against which an emergent account of “peripheral” realisms can be defined.

The centres of Chinese realism include May Fourth literature (exemplified by

Lu Xun) and proletarian literature (inaugurated by Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the

Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” in 1942), which critics have

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characterised as forms capable of “systematiz[ing] the workings of modern capitalism” (395-6). This realist canon has been conventionally put in opposition to Taiwanese modernism, which emerged in 1960 (399). Yvonne

Chang’s landmark study, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance (1993), tracks the origins of Taiwanese modernism to the founding of the magazine

Modern Literature (Xiandai Wenxue) at National Taiwan University, which published high modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Kafka, alongside ostensibly modernist experiments by the university’s students (Liu

399; see Y. Chang, 4). As Liu notes, Chang’s study replicates the realism/modernism divide in miniature within Taiwan itself, by opposing its modernist writers such as Pai Hisen-yung, Wang Wen-hsing, and Ouyang Tzu, to a strain of “‘socially conscious’ nativists, such as Ch’en Ying-chen (Chen

Yingzhen), Yu T’ien-ts’ung, and Liu Ta-jen” (399).

Within this context of two Chinas, “modernism” tends to be deployed as a term that is defined first by political opposition to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with literary qualities attached thereafter. In a 1992 PMLA article, Xiaobing Tang notes that the eighties saw invocations of “modernism” on the mainland as a way of signifying

that which has been eliminated and excluded as dangerous and

subversive heterogeneity, and its appropriation necessarily

signals a deviation from, if not a rebellion against, the official

policy of realism. … The [mainland] Chinese denunciation of

modernism—a simplified Lukácsian dismissal of modernist

Western literature as a symptom of “morbid eccentricity” and

of the bourgeois subject’s inability to grasp the whole—

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functions ideologically to maintain an almost cynical

instrumentalization of literary practice. In recent years every

organized attack on modernism has followed a paranoid

rejection of so-called bourgeois liberalization, which,

incidentally, can refer arbitrarily to anything from illegal

pornography to Western Marxism … In short, [an

institutionalized realism in China] sets up a self-consolidating

other (the wretched West) as both devil and scapegoat. (1225)

From his vantage point in 1992, Tang’s article reads Lu Xun as a Chinese modernist “to bring about an epistemological break and to introduce challenge and crisis to the ideological establishment in contemporary China” (224). In a complementary manner, Petrus Liu rereads Taiwanese modernist literature to

“facilitate a more precise understanding of both [its] transnational basis and its continuities with the May Fourth tradition on the mainland” (399). By reading texts across and astride the interpretive regimes associated with Chinese realisms on the mainland and Taiwanese modernism, both Tang and Liu seek to uncover dimensions of literary works that have hitherto been obscured, subsequently producing a fuller picture of the continuities and resonances between mainland Chinese literature, diasporic Chinese literature, and

Western modernism.

Liu’s article sketches out the central problematic I am preoccupied with in this chapter, which is how the realism/modernism divide reified by the

Cultural Cold War continues to exert a residual influence on assessments of anglophone Chinese literature today. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in recent scholarship on Eileen Chang, whose persona and works

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are the site of a literary-ideological contestation between critics who read her as a modernist, and those who read her as a realist. Building on the theoretical framework constructed by scholars of peripheral realisms above, I pose my titular question, “Eileen Chang: modernist or realist?,” only to overturn the false dichotomy it implies, and to make visible the pitfalls that come with subjecting Chang’s oeuvre to exclusionary modernist or realist readings.

Chang offers an especially provocative case study because she was directly involved in the China-U.S. cultural and propaganda battles that circumscribe the realism/modernism divide in the Asia-Pacific theatre of the Cold War. In

1952, Chang left Shanghai for Hong Kong and was hired as a translator and writer by the United States Information Service (USIS), an American state department that funded the Cultural Cold War. Chang’s first English-language novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), was commissioned by USIS as anti- communist literature.40 The novel depicts the devastating impact of the PRC’s

Land Reform Movement on a village as famine hits. Its anti-Communist critique and agrarian setting mark a dramatic departure from Chang’s previous stories about urban life and modern romance in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The circumstances surrounding the production of this novel have led to its neglect.

On the one side, scholars of modernism prefer Chang’s earlier short stories, which resonate with high modernist experiments in representing the alienating and fragmentary nature of quotidian life. On the other side, scholars sympathetic to May Fourth or Communist realisms find Chang’s critique of the Communist Land Reforms in Rice-Sprout suspect, particularly given her

40 For a more substantive account of Chang’s exile in Hong Kong, refer back to the section, “The Cultural Cold War and Anglophone Chinese Writing,” in my introduction (present thesis 42-6).

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distance from these events. Further, Chang’s transaction—anti-communist literature for employment and refuge—appears as the story of literature’s double capitulation to global print capitalism and American propaganda. This story does not chime with either high modernist notions of literary autonomy or with realist critiques of global capitalism. As a result, Rice-Sprout has received far less critical attention than her other works, and it presents an anomaly in assessments of Chang’s oeuvre.

The clearest articulation of this dynamic can be found in Richard Jean

So’s assessment of Chang’s career, in which he activates a modernism/realism opposition:

…in the 1940s in Shanghai, Chang wrote [almost] exclusively

in Chinese, focused on short stories, and made use of a distinct

modernist style. After 1952, she switched to composing in

English, began writing in a thick realist style, and published a

string of novels. (“Literary Information Warfare” 720; my

emphases.)

While So is right to emphasise this abrupt change in Chang’s writing, the only explanation he offers for his uses of the freighted terms, “modernism” and

“realism,” comes by way of a sketchy dichotomy:

Chang’s modernist style and emphasis on middle-class stories

clashed with an increasingly state-sanctioned leftist proletarian

aesthetics. (719)

I detect, in all three of So’s sentences quoted above, the realism/modernism binary critiqued by the peripheral realists. Here, modernism is associated with bourgeois matters, urban life, and the episodic nature of the short story,

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whereas realism is associated with leftist politics, the Communist regime, the proletariat, and the realist novel. Rice-Sprout, a work of anti-communist realism that critiques the Land Reform, does not fit on either side of this binary.

It is precisely in the way Rice-Sprout defies Cold War literary orthodoxies, and in the way it fits uneasily within Chang’s oeuvre, that the novel transcends the realism/modernism antinomy. It reveals an interstitial nature to Chang’s poetics that connects traits associated with modernist literature—urban culture, alienation, experiments with language, a preoccupation with the quotidian—with those associated with realism— historical fiction, social critique, psychological realism, and depictions of national or world historical crises. The interstitial nature of Chang’s poetics puts her somewhere between, astride—or as I prefer, beside/s—the reified poles of modernism and realism. The necessity of finding a new vocabulary to describe her aesthetics leads me to propose the term, “allochronic realism.”

I will elaborate on the theoretical underpinnings of this term later, but for now, a functional definition: “allochronic” is typically used in biology to denote “species, populations, features … existing or arising at different periods of geological time” (“allochronic,” OED). In much of Chang’s fiction, women are depicted as inhabiting a different socio-material reality from men, as if they are a segregated population that exists in a parallel dimension of time and space. This sense of allochronism results from the vestiges of old patriarchal orders and new mutations of sexism that keep them apart from

“modernity,” understood broadly as a period of transformative changes and accelerating mobilities that does not always lead to women’s emancipation.

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Chang expresses women’s experiences of allochronism in myriad ways. Some of her female characters are portrayed as anachronistic figures in “modern day” China, whereas others are forced into antiquated performances of womanhood to survive in especially repressive sectors of society. Yet others experience events in the diegetic “present” as a repetition of traumatic history.

Chang also experiments with alienating uses of language, so as to implicate the reader in her characters’ experiences of allochronism. In “Writing of One’s

Own,” she explains that her serialised novella, Lianhuan Tao (Chained Links), adopts anachronistic registers of language to create a jarring effect of temporal displacement, as when her Cantonese and foreign characters “speak like characters from The Golden Lotus [c. 1610]” (Written on Water 22). She writes:

My original intention was this: the romantic ambience of Hong

Kong as envisioned by Shanghai people would set up one sort

of distance and the temporal divide between the present and the

Hong Kong of fifty years ago would create another. So I

adopted an already antiquated sort of diction in order to

represent better these two kinds of distance. (22).

Here, Chang discloses an inclination towards using anti-realist effects to dramatise the mechanisms of othering in the Chinese cultural imagination, which apply to unfamiliar periods and places even within China. However, her uses of anti-realist techniques is meant to enhance her realist accounts of women’s experiences in mid-century Shanghai, Hong Kong, and later, rural

China.

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In what follows, I examine recent characterisations of Chang’s purported modernism and how these run up against appraisals of her works as realism. I suggest that the mass of meanings attributed to these freighted terms confuse, rather than clarify, Chang’s position within twentieth-century literary history. I then flesh out my conception of Chang’s poetics as allochronic realism with readings of her earlier short stories and Rice-Sprout. The way in which Chang’s works straddle, or fall between, the realism/modernism divide, exemplifies the heterogeneity of literary forms that have been obscured by the legacies of the Cultural Cold War.

On or About 2007

On or about 2007, numerous scholars began describing Chang as a

“modernist.” This curious phenomenon coincided with releases that made

Chang highly visible to the anglophone world. 2007 saw the arrival of Ang

Lee’s film, Lust, Caution, which is adapted from Chang’s novella Se, Jie

(1979). That same year, Penguin Modern Classics anthologised her stories under the titles, Lust, Caution and Love in a Fallen City, whereas Columbia

University Press collated her essays in Written on Water. The latter two anthologies contain prefatorial comments that refer to Chang as a modernist.

Karen Kingsbury describes the short story, “Sealed Off,” as a “modernist slice-of-life anti romance” (Fallen City xii). Andrew Jones makes an oblique connection between Chang and Virginia Woolf by translating the title of

Chang’s essay, “Zijide Wenzhang” (“My Own Essay”), as “Writing of One’s

Own” (15). In 2012, Chang’s “Sealed Off” was included in The Norton’s

Anthology of World Literature under the section “Modernity and Modernism.”

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In 2018, Sandberg reads “Sealed Off” as a “modernist romance” (237-8). The next year, Chang’s essay “Dream of Genius” (1940) was included in the

Bloomsbury anthology, Global Modernists on Modernism.

These scholars differ in their activations of the term “modernism,” which I generally find unconvincing. Some use the term broadly. Take for instance the premise behind Chang’s inclusion within Global Modernists. Co- editor Stephen J. Ross conceives of Chinese modernism as “a state of mind, an orientation towards freighted topics like aesthetic form, imperialism, nation, the individual, the unconscious, the foreign, and the spiritual” (281-2). He proposes that if China can be said to have had a “textbook modernist moment”

(whatever this may mean), “it happened in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s”

(281). Chang’s essay “Dream of Genius” is included because she is “[p]erhaps the most influential chronicler of Chinese urban life during this period” (283).

Ross’s broad-strokes approach is not very helpful because he does not engage extensively with the dis/connections between Chang and the prevailing critical, materialist, or formalist understandings of high modernism.

Yet others attempt to argue that modernism directly influenced

Chang’s writings. For example, Kingsbury refers to “Sealed Off” as a

“modernist slice-of-life anti romance” (xii) partly because of Chang’s associations with a set of writers:

Chang’s great achievement was to meld the language and

conventions of Qing-dynasty vernacular fiction with the ironic,

worldly stance of Edwardian British writers (there are several

direct nods to H.G. Wells, and many echoes of Asian travelers

like Somerset Maugham and Stella Benson), then project her

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stories by means of a visual imagination that absorbed many

scenes and techniques from the Hollywood films of her day.

(Fallen City xiii)

But what Kingsbury reveals here is that Chang is more closely acquainted with modernism-adjacent figures such as Wells, Maugham, and Benson, who are not typically mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Woolf, Stein,

Eliot, Lewis, Joyce, and Pound. Chang’s preface to the second print run of

Chuanqi in 1944 makes a fleeting reference to Wells, whereas her essay

“From the Ashes” critiques Wells’s The Outline of History for being an overly rationalised depiction of world history (Love in a Fallen City 4; Written on

Water 40). In the fifties, Chang translated Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The

Yearling and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Both Rawlings and Hemingway are connected via their editor Maxwell Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald.41 In 1956, Chang married the playwright

Ferdinand Reyher, a friend to Bertolt Brecht (D. Wang, Rice-Sprout xvii).

However, it is difficult to ascertain how much influence these arguably modernist or modernism-adjacent writers exerted on Chang. L. Maria Bo is the rare scholar who finds a direct link. She notes Chang’s praises for

Hemingway’s “dull” (pingdan) sentences that “are in fact full of the anguish of life,” and argues that Chang mimicked the simplicity of his prose in Rice-

Sprout (Chang, Two Selected Translations 16; Bo 264-5). For Bo, Chang’s mid-century style “suggestively fuses American modernism with early modern

Chinese writing” (265).

41 See, for example, Rodger L. Tarr’s “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Meets F. Scott Fitzgerald” (1998) and Scott Donaldson’s Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald (2000).

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Yet others use “modernism” to indicate stylistic and thematic similarities between Chang’s works and high modernist literature that are indirect and non-synchronous. Sandberg adopts this definition, while also exploiting the connotations of “modernism” to flag Chang’s divergences from

May Fourth realism. He argues that “[w]riters aligned with or influenced by the 1919 May 4th Movement, for example, tended to produce works dealing with large questions of social and political development,” whereas Chang’s works express “an interest in the everyday,” which is “a defining feature of modernism more generally” (237). His examples of quotidian modernism include Joyce’s Ulysses and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage (237).

However, one critic’s modernism is another’s realism. Shuang Shen likewise seizes on Chang’s fascination with “the everydayness of violence and trauma,” which defies the “canonical realism” of Chinese literature during the thirties to forties, which were marked by grand “political ideals of revolution or nationalism” (“Provocation” 571). But unlike Sandberg, she describes

Chang’s style as a “realism” that is inspired by the Mandarin Ducks and

Butterflies School and classic Chinese vernacular fiction, particularly Cao

Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (570-1).

Across this sampling, “modernism” heaves with multitudinous meanings. It weighs down rather than clarifies Chang’s aesthetics. Further, now that Chang has been “resolutely inserted into a hypercanon in modern

Chinese literature” (Zhang Yingjin, “Counter-Canon” 611)—and arguably the hypercanon in world literature—the belated conferment of the title

“modernist” on Chang seems suspect. At best, Chang offers an example of how some Second-World writers were producing literature that resonates with

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modernist texts, despite their disconnections and dislocations from high modernism’s networks. At worst, her consecration as a modernist serves only to shore up modernism’s brand as the defining cosmopolitan literary movement of the twentieth century.

I find in Xiaoping Wang’s Contending for the “Chinese Modern”

(2019) a model for thinking about the way Chang’s aesthetics straddle the modernism/realism divide. Wang argues that “Sealed Off” and “Love in a

Fallen City” can be read as modernist texts because both deal with “the motif of alienation,” but qualifies that this should be counterbalanced with an appreciation of Chang’s realism (201). His qualification suggests that arguments for Chang’s modernism tend to carry the connotation that her works are anti-mimetic and/or anti-realist. He intervenes by insisting that

Chang’s stories are realist, because they function as social allegories of a

“newly developed, yet weak and unprotected, proto-bourgeois class, who are living in an extremely precarious, semi-colonial, semi-traditional society”

(256). The context Wang glosses here was shaped by upheavals beginning with the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that toppled the Qing dynasty, up to the

Sino-Japanese War of 1937. The consequent decline of the late-Qing scholar- official caste during this period forced their scions into an emergent middleclass, within a modernity that was heavily influenced by China’s semi- colonisation by Japan and the West. Like Yang Buwei and Ling Shuhua— both of whom were descendants of the illustrious Qing scholar-officials Yang

Renshan and Xie Lansheng respectively—Chang was part of this phenomenon. Her great-grandfather Li Hongzhang was an official who served as the “chief architect of foreign policy in the late Qing,” and was conferred

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the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order by Queen Victoria

(Kam, “Introduction” 3). However, by the time Chang was born, “the family fortunes had declined considerably” (3). In the essay “From the Mouths of

Babes,” Chang describes the pleasures and pains of being a “self-supporting” professional woman (Written on Water 3). She bears her class identity like a cangue:

Whenever I see the term “petite bourgeoisie,” I am promptly

reminded of myself, as if I had a red silk placard hanging from

my chest imprinted with these very words. (3)

Rachel Leng likewise notes that Chang’s first-hand experience of this socio- economic phenomenon features prominently in her fiction. For instance, the first part of Little Reunions centres on the protagonist Julie’s “aristocratic but decaying family background when she is growing up during the beginning of

Republican China” (Leng 3). Leng extends this insight to “The Golden

Cangue” and The Rouge of the North, wherein Chang’s portrayals of Cao

Qiqiao and Chai Yindi as “monstrous, embittered wom[e]n suffering from psychological and bodily decay” serve as allegories of the “contemporary malaise of social and marital relations” (4). The overriding suggestion in

Leng’s article is that Qiqiao’s and Yindi’s transitions from being the scorned daughters-in-law of decaying aristocratic families, to being paranoid widows who inflict their pain on their children, is also the story of China’s volatile transition from the traditional Chinese family unit to the nuclear family unit.

Each structure offers its own forms of tyranny, alienation, and disappointments, the bulk of which are unevenly borne by women.

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These insights inform my notion of allochronic realism, which is substantiated by close readings of Chang’s earlier work and Rice-Sprout. In the process, I contest Richard Jean So’s characterisation of a modernist-realist schism in Chang’s oeuvre. I argue that her allochronic poetics should not be resolved neatly to either side of the realism/modernism antinomy, but recognised as a style that developed beside/s and between the two reified poles. Along the way, I examine Chang’s interstitiality in relation to various politico-literary orthodoxies, while intervening in appraisals that subject her aesthetics to calcified realism/modernism taxonomies. The exceptional nature of Chang’s realism offers a way of (re)imagining literary histories and futures that reach beyond this dyad that has dominated discussions of twentieth century literature.

Theorising Allochronism

While the ideas undergirding my notion of allochronic realism were first derived from close readings of Chang’s writings, I took the term “allochronic” directly from Johannes Fabian’s polemic in Time and the Other: How

Anthropology Makes its Object (1983).42 Fabian famously critiques the “denial of coevalness” in anthropology, by which he means “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (31). He refers to this tendency as “allochronism” rather than “anachronism,” because

42 I was first alerted to Fabian’s notion of allochronism by Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity (1991), but her extensions of Fabian’s ideas are not directly relevant to my argument here.

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[a]nachronism signifies a fact, or a statement of fact, that is out

of tune with a given time frame; it is a mistake, perhaps an

accident. I am trying to show that we are facing, not mistakes,

but devices (existential, rhetoric, political). (32)

Allochronism creates temporal distancing between the subject of anthropology and its objects of study. As Matti Bunzl explains, the “temporal structures so constituted thus place anthropologists and their readers in a privileged time frame, while banishing the Other to a stage of lesser development” (ix).

Fabian primarily locates the allochronising devices of knowledge production at the level of discourse. Take for instance anthropological uses of the

“ethnographic present,” or “the practice of giving accounts of other cultures and societies in the present tense” (80). Fabian argues that a statement such as

“the X are matrilineal,” where “are” signals the persistent truth of the statement, has the effect of “‘freez[ing]’ a society at the time of observation”

(81). Such practices foreclose the possibility that X can be a pluralistic, changing collective, and that X “may no longer be matrilineal by the time [the] ethnography is published” (81). Even worse, such statements may contain

“assumptions about the repetitiveness, predictability, and conservatism of primitives,” or in other words, their inability to change, develop, adapt, modernise (81). As Fabian notes, allochronism is endemic to anthropological discussions of concepts as innocuous as “kinship,” to more obviously loaded terms such as “savagery” and “primitive” (75; 82).

Chang’s fiction anticipated elements of Fabian’s theses on the exclusivist nature of twentieth-century modernity, especially at sites of accelerated modernisation and intercultural contact. But while Fabian was

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largely concerned with the creation of knowledge about Others by Western anthropologists, Chang’s writings suggest that allochronism is not limited to the rarefied realm of scholarly production, but is also a lived reality in the daily lives of mid-century Chinese women. In her stories, women are persistently denied coevality by different quarters of Chinese society. Some bear the burden of maintaining “tradition” at home, often under the tyranny of monstrous relatives, even as men elsewhere enjoy new-found mobilities in a rapidly globalising world. Take for example the case of Bai Liusu in “Love in a Fallen City” (1943). The heroine is trapped in a family which has squandered her savings and dowry, and which now wishes to return her to her abusive ex-husband’s family (Fallen City 112-6). The Bai family’s refusal to acknowledge Liusu’s divorce contravenes the Republican Civil Code of 1929-

1930, which offered limited protections for wives seeking divorce on the grounds of cruelty or abuse.43 From the very first paragraph, Chang establishes the Bai’s archaic ways by using the metaphor of conflicting clock times:

Shanghai’s clocks were set an hour ahead so the city could

“save daylight,” but the Bai family said: “We go by the old

clock.” Ten o’clock to them was eleven to everyone else. (111)

Chang evokes allochronism in two short lines. She portrays Liusu’s environment as a pocket of domestic time-space that is literally an hour behind the rest of society. This allegorises the persistence of outmoded misogyny in parts of metropolitan Shanghai. However, another kind of allochronism awaits

Liusu even after she snares a desirable suitor. The Chinese Malayan

43 See Margaret Kuo, “Spousal Abuse,” Modern China, vol. 38, no. 5, 2012, pp. 523-58.

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businessman Fan Liuyuan, who personifies a debonair, modern masculinity, sequesters Liusu as a kept mistress in an empty mansion in Hong Kong (156).

Liusu lives in limbo, lacks the socio-material stability that comes with marriage, and is alienated from society, with only a servant and her daughter for company; meanwhile, Liuyuan travels to London for business (156-7).

Liusu wonders:

…could she keep from going mad? Six rooms, three up and

three down, all ablaze with light. The newly waxed floors as

bright as snow. And no sign of anyone. One room after another,

echoing emptiness. (157)

The social vacuum Liusu finds herself in becomes yet another form of purgatory. However, Liusu ironically regains a sense of reality the very next day, with the eruption of the Battle of Hong Kong. This world historical event, which marks the escalation of the Sino-Japanese War to the Pacific War, literally and metaphorically levels the uneven playing field between Liusu and

Liuyuan. The invasion keeps Liuyuan trapped in Hong Kong and renders his assets and social capital valueless (159-65). Chang marks this pivotal moment by printing the exact date, which kicks off the final movement of her story:

“That was on December 7, 1941. On December 8, the bombing started” (158).

With this, Chang breaks open the allochronic atmosphere, and transforms her story of manners into historical fiction. The war prompts Liuyuan to marry

Liusu out of convenience and self-preservation, because “[i]n this age of chaos and disorder, there is no place for those who stand on their own, but for an ordinary married couple, room can always be found” (165). In the conclusion,

Liusu wonders: “Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated?” (167)

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Chang thus suggests that women’s emancipation—or in this case, mere vindication—is not always brought about by gradual reforms such as the

Republican Civil Code, but rather by upheavals that obliterate the privileges traditionally enjoyed by men. The meagre freedoms gained by women in modern China are not conceived here as progress, but as “a tale too desolate for words” (167).

A second sense of allochronism has to do with how Chang’s heroines are fetishised as embodiments of an authentic “Chinese” cultural past by men and forced to perform as such. In “Fallen City,” Liuyuan exoticises Liusu thus:

“It’s not easy to find a real Chinese girl like you.” (135)

“I can’t imagine you running through the forest in a

cheongsam. But neither can I imagine you not wearing a

cheongsam …

“The first time I saw you, I thought that you shouldn’t

bare your arms in this kind of trendy tunic, but neither should

you wear Western-style clothes. A Manchu-style dress might

suit you better, but its lines are too severe …

“What I mean is that you’re like someone from another

world. You have all these little gestures, and a romantic aura,

very much like a Peking opera singer.” (143-4)

Liuyuan waxes nostalgic for a lost “Chinese” past that is not available to him, being the descendant of Chinese immigrants to Malaya. His very name is suggestive of this nostalgia: “Liu” is associated with the willow tree, and

“yuan” means “source” or “origin.” The corresponding image is that of a

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willow tree leaning over the waters that nourish it, signifying a yearning for one’s origins. Liuyuan’s nostalgia, expressed here as sexual desire, casts Liusu as an ahistorical figure who does not quite fit into any particular time period, denoted here by varying sartorial styles: the modern cheongsam, Western- style clothes, and the Manchu dress associated with the late-Qing era. Yet,

Liusu’s interstitial aura of being between time periods and cultures seems to make Liusu more of a “real Chinese girl.”

An explanation for Liuyuan’s paradoxical fantasies can be found in his specific reference to Peking opera. His allusion recalls Chang’s discussion of how Peking opera idealises a form of femininity that heaps unrealistic and contradictory expectations on women. The same year “Fallen City” was published, Chang wrote and self-translated an essay into English titled “Still

Alive,” in which she argues that the opera Spring in the Hall of Jade

(Yutangchun) “typifies the countless tales in China on the theme of the virtuous prostitute” (437). Its heroine functions as a male fantasy of the perfect woman: “That she makes her living on her looks implies that she must be attractive, in addition to which she is good. The modern Chinese has outgrown many ancient ideals, but not this one” (437). In “Fallen City,” Liusu is aware that as a divorcee—or one who is simultaneously sexually experienced but still “chaste”—the role of the “virtuous prostitute” is made for her, and precisely what a worldly man like Liuyuan would find desirable. In a transitional scene, she literally practices her performance of the virtuous prostitute in front of a mirror:

Out on the balcony, Fourth Master had once again taken up his

huqin. The tune rose and fell, and Liusu’s head tilted to one

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side as her eyes and hands started moving through dance

poses … She took a few paces to the right, then a few to the

left. Her steps seemed to trace the lost rhythms of an ancient

melody.

Suddenly, she smiled—a private, malevolent smile; the

music came to a discordant halt. The huqin went on playing

outside, but it was telling tales of fealty and filial piety, chastity

and righteousness, distant tales that had nothing to do with her.

(121-2)

Chang subsequently dramatises how Liusu’s seduction of Liuyuan involves calculated performances of both modern sensuality and traditional meekness, which produce an alluring sense of allochronism. At one point, Liusu muses to herself:

“Your [Liuyuan’s] idea of the perfect woman is someone who

is pure and high-minded but still ready to flirt. The pure high-

mindedness is for others, but the flirting is for you. If I were an

entirely good woman, you would never have noticed me in the

first place!” (Fallen City 135)

Therefore, Chang makes it clear that what Liuyuan finds most endearing about

Liusu—her “little gestures” and her “romantic aura” of a Peking opera singer—are all part of the resourceful heroine’s high-stakes act.

Chang riffs on this theme elsewhere. In “The Golden Cangue” (1943),

T’ung Shih-fang is a returnee from Germany who seeks a match (Fallen City

218). He is introduced to Ch’ang-an, the much-abused daughter of Ch’i- ch’iao, a rancorous woman warped by her repressive marriage into the Chiang

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family. As Shih-fang has “no[t] seen any girls of his homeland for many years,” he is “struck by Ch’ang-an’s pathetic charm and rather liked it” (221-

2). He had previously fought with his parents to break an arranged engagement, so he could pursue a relationship of his choice in Germany (222).

The eventual failure of this “modern” romance convinced him that “old- fashioned wives were best” (222). He thus mistakes Ch’ang-an’s fragility for a feminine meekness that he interprets, in allochronic fashion, as traditional

Chineseness. However, Shih-fang subsequently encounters the true face of women who have been twisted by allochronism, when he finally meets

Ch’ang-an’s mother, Ch’i-ch’iao:

Shih-fang looked over his shoulder and saw a small old lady

standing at the doorway with her back to the light so that he

could not see her face distinctly. She wore a blue-gray gown of

palace brocade embroidered with a round dragon design, and

clasped with both hands a scarlet hot-water bag; two big tall

amahs stood close against her. Outside the door the setting sun

was smoky yellow, and the staircase covered with turquoise

plaid linoleum led up step after step to a place where there was

no light. Shih-fang instinctively felt this was a mad person.

(231)

Ch’i-ch’iao’s appearance evokes the Empress Dowager Cixi, often depicted as the Dragon Lady whose decadence drove China’s last dynasty into the ground.

Chang captures Ch’i-ch’iao in this arresting scene as a vengeful matriarch who inflicts her pain onto the people around her, most of all her own daughter (she eventually traps Ch’ang’an with her by frightening Shih-fang away). This

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moment circles back to Chang’s earlier description of a far younger Ch’i- ch’iao as a pinned butterfly, who was then newly married to the Chiangs’ crippled Second Master for the dowry: “She stared straight ahead, the small, solid gold pendants of her earrings like two brass nails nailing her to the door, a butterfly specimen in a glass box, bright-colored and desolate” (186).

Between this gruesome image of a pinned butterfly and Ch’i-ch’iao’s development into a spectral incarnation of Cixi, Chang captures the workings of a toxic patriarchal system, which musealises women and turns them into monstrous matriarchs who perpetuate the cycle of allochronism.

Chang’s lyrical portraits of individuals who experience modernity as allochronism can also be found in Rice-Sprout, in which Chang shifts the target of her critique from urban modernities to Mao’s Land Reform in rural

China. First, a summary: Rice-Sprout can be described as a minor historical epic with an ensemble cast. Its plot is emotionally anchored by a young peasant family comprising the husband and model worker, T’an Gold Root, his wife Moon Scent, who has returned from working in Shanghai, and their daughter, Beckon. The reforms have made Gold Root (among others) a landowner, but this change in status does not lead to real improvements in his quality of life. In fact, a mix of natural disaster and Communist oppression leaves the villagers worse off than before. In an evocative scene, Gold Root unfurls the land deeds for Moon Scent:

[The land deeds] were beautifully handwritten, marked with the

biggest chops and seals. He knew the numerical characters and

he pointed out to her where his name was. They pored over it,

their heads bent close together in the pool of light. (40)

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Moon Scent basks in this moment of conjugal bliss and visualises a “future that stretched out generations ahead like endless rice paddies in the sun” (40).

Here, the land deed represents the legal form of the land reforms, which the couple interprets as happiness and security, given its promises of progress and prosperity. But the scene is troubled by a poignant undercurrent; the illiterate couple cannot access the content of the characters on the pages. Gold Root can indicate where his name is written, but Moon Scent does not actually recognise it. This allegorical moment foreshadows how the legalities of the

Land Reform are essentially just empty structural form, devoid of socio- material meanings for the peasantry. In any case, by the middle of the novel, the Communists were already taking the “first steps towards collectivization, the painful process of weaning the peasant from the land he had just received”

(91). Tragedy strikes eventually; the villagers’ hunger and anger boils over into an uprising that ends with the razing of the granary. These events tear the

T’an family apart. Their miserable lives allegorise the upheavals caused by

Mao’s ambitious agrarian reforms, which were rolled out aggressively in the name of revolution and progress. The story ends with the Communists restoring order by the New Year. Chang leaves the reader with the macabre image of the surviving villagers—largely elderly folk—performing the rice- sprout song on empty stomachs when there is ironically no harvest to be celebrated.

Chang’s understanding of the Land Reform as a failure of Communist modernisation is written into her titular leitmotif. Also known as yang-ko or yangge, the rice-sprout song is

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[o]riginally a ritual dance performed by villagers during the

lunar new year [that] was spotted by Yenan cadres for its

propaganda potential. A certain Liu Chih-jen is said to have

been the first to modernize this folk form by instilling

revolutionary content and by combining it with other forms of

popular theatre. (Leo Lee, “Literary Trends” 481; my

emphasis)

This reinvention of a rural ritual represents a Communist mode of cultural modernisation, wherein folk forms are infused with revolutionary content, then re-circulated amongst the peasantry as pedagogical performance art. As

Chang’s haunting final scene suggests, this modern art form would eventually be forced on the entirely instrumentalised bodies of the peasantry: “Their old faces puckered in their habitual half-frown, half-smile, they tried to ‘wriggle the Rice-Sprout Song,’ throwing their arms creakily back and forth” (Rice-

Sprout 181). Such Communist processes of cultural modernisation have historically been treated by some scholars as if they are regressive phenomena that are antithetical to cosmopolitan modernities. To cite a recent example, recall the terms of Chang’s inclusion in Global Modernists; co-editor Stephen

J. Ross associates her with 1930s to 1940s Shanghai as “the indisputable center of modernism,” and suggests that “indeed, some would argue that

Shanghai modernism of this period is the only cultural formation we can meaningfully describe as Chinese modernism” (282). Further, his alternate examples of Chinese modernisation only include the New Culture Movement, the “revival of high modernist aesthetics in Taiwan in the 1950s,” and the

“avant-gardist refusal of social realism in the reform period following Mao’s

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death in 1976” (281). By pointedly skipping over Communist developments on the mainland between 1949 to 1976, Ross refuses the possibility that they were, in fact, programmes of modernisation. As Johannes Fabian might have it, Ross is reproducing an allochronic discourse that relegates Mao’s China to a “non-modern” temporality. This discourse obscures the fact that the Land

Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese state’s uptake of socialist realism, all represent the development of a

Communist modernity that was coeval with, say, the resurgence of modernism in fifties to sixties Taiwan. In contrast to Ross, Chang acknowledges and critiques Communist reforms and literature as one face of Chinese modernity.

Her scene of Gold Root and Moon Scent poring over land deeds, and the latter’s vision of endless rice paddies, are tropes that lyricise the ideals behind

Communist modernisation, though she offers these only to heighten the brutality of the Land Reform’s dismal failures. Xiaoping Wang offers a better way of framing this point; to borrow his formulation, the Land Reform should be understood as one of “various political and cultural forces [that] vied with and competed against each other,” forces which are “contending for the

‘Chinese modern’” throughout the twentieth century (2).

Throughout the novel, Chang describes a repressive political climate that asserts and polices a discourse of the Land Reform as progress, while hiding the dismal state of a countryside in the grip of a famine. The incongruity between what the characters feel in their lived realities—typically, pangs of gnawing hunger—and what they dare to say aloud, creates an air of unreality that is experienced as allochronism. Consider for instance the

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experience of Comrade Ku, a Communist intellectual who is newly posted to the village. Upon his arrival, Ku is shocked by its condition:

All they had here was a watery gruel with inch-long sections of

grass floating in it.

Of course he could not speak to anybody about the

matter … So he had no means of finding out whether the

situation was only local or spread over a large area. He could

find no mention in the newspapers of famine in this or any

other part of the country. (84)

The extent of propaganda and censorship creates in Ku a sense of allochronism, which Chang describes as “a curious sensation of having dropped out of time and space, living nowhere” (84). He cannot validate his experience of starvation via the newspapers or through interlocutory others.

That same chapter, Chang devises a scene where Ku engages in a passive-aggressive game of political sparring with his colleague, Comrade

Wong. Their exchange dramatises the temporalising mechanisms of allochronic discourse in Communist propaganda. Wong, the earthy veteran soldier, first gushes about his experiences during the earlier stages of the Land

Reform: “You should have seen the look of sheer joy in the farmer’s eyes when they had the landlord’s farming implements divided among them” (90).

Ku recognises this as a slight; Wong thought of him as “a latecomer to the scene, purely an opportunist” (90; my emphasis). Ku counterattacks by drawing on his cultural capital:

“But that kind of joy is out of date now … The Literary Journal

had a special article about it last month. It says writers are not

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to dwell on the happiness of the farmers after the Land Reform.

That must only be a passing phase. It is time to move up a

step.” (90; my emphases)

Ku puts Wong in his place by redefining their temporal positions in relation to the revolution; he recasts Wong as a complacent veteran who is preoccupied with celebrating an earlier triumph, while positioning himself as the informed newcomer who is current with political thought. Having been outwitted, Wong quickly agrees that the celebrating farmers “are still backward. Their Political

Awareness needs Elevating” (91; my emphasis). This exchange portrays how linguistic manipulations of temporal idioms in daily talk—“latecomer,” “a passing phase,” “out of date,” “backward”—are integral for the accumulation of power, or even just for survival, within the Communist regime. Ku and

Wong’s joint casting of the peasants as “backwards” also elides their differences in opinion, while placing themselves in a shared temporality that is positioned over and against that of the peasant’s.

Within this context, Chang depicts how the peasants find it impossible to stay current with party politics as they play out at the local level, which are further refracted through the petty personal feuds between Communist officials. Chang renders the villagers’ perfunctory performances of political awareness with humour and profundity. In a comical scene, Big Aunt pays tribute to Mao, but she confuses the Communists with previous waves of revolutionaries:

[Big Aunt] was at the top of her form … To Comrade Fei she

flung all sorts of remarks, which might not have direct bearing

on the present conversation but which were always well-timed

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and musical. “Ai, everything is fine now! The poor have

turned! Now things are different from before. If not for

Chairman Mao we would never have this day! We will go on

suffering, I don’t know how long, if our comrades in

Kêmingtang had not come!” Big Aunt mixed up Kunch’antang,

Communists, with Kêmingtang, revolutionists, which only

meant the early revolutionaries who had overturn the Manchu

dynasty, back when Big Aunt was a young girl. So she

persisted in referring to the Communists as Kêmingtang and

sometimes even as Kuomingtang, the Nationalists who had

been chased over to Formosa. But it was a pardonable mistake

at her age, and on the whole she impressed Comrade Fei as

being a remarkably progressive old woman. (15)

Here, Chang not only satirises the mental labour required to conform to

Communist discourse, but also glosses the history of modern China. Through

Big Aunt’s faux pas, Chang alludes to various revolutionary movements, each with its own promises of progress, starting from the anti-Qing revolutionaries, through to the Nationalist-Communist split, and up to the Communist triumph in the civil war. In the process, Chang implies that for Big Aunt, the actual ideals driving each political faction do not matter, because these ideals did not historically make a real difference to her life.

Chang expands this theme by depicting Big Aunt’s experience of history as not merely a cycle, but a cycle of trauma. In chapter twelve, Big

Aunt and her family are forced to slaughter a pig for the New Year offerings.

In his anger, Big Uncle says: “I will never rear a pig again” (128). Big Aunt

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retorts: “That was what you said the other time” (128). Her words prompt the family’s collective memory of a similar incident during the Japanese occupation, during which they attempted to hide both their son and their pig from patrolling Japanese soldiers (130-1). Both were found and taken; their son never returned (136-9). The family’s present loss of a pig makes them relive the previous loss of their son: “And now, seven years later and another pig gone, [Big Aunt] shouted at her daughter-in-law who was bending over the wooden tub in the courtyard, blubbering chokingly in the wind” (139). With this revelation, Chang brazenly suggests that Chinese peasants suffer no differently under the Japanese occupation or the Communist regime.

In this section, I examined Chang’s preoccupation with vulnerable people who have been left outside of various “modernities” and their narratives of historical progress. In the process, I seized on her lyrical depictions of allochronism as a thread that runs from her earliest stories and essays to the first of her USIS novels. Some characters, like Liusu, are forced into paradoxical performances of both “tradition” and “modernity” to escape precarity. Others, like Ch’i-ch’iao, have been scarred so badly by misogynistic cultural norms that they have mutated into musealised monstrosities who perpetuate the system. In Rice-Sprout, while male Communist cadres like Ku and Wong are also subjected to the bewildering allochronisms of party ideology and propaganda, it is peasants like Big Aunt and her family who experience history as a vicious cycle of traumatic upheavals, suffering, and loss. My readings here are aimed at disrupting the prevailing scholarly view that Chang’s work in the forties exemplifies a certain “modernist” aesthetic, whatever that may mean, which is sometimes contrasted with the “realist”

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Rice-Sprout. However, my analysis does suggest that Rice-Sprout marks a turn in her critical depictions of mid-century modernities: with the novel, Chang shifts from her earlier focus on women’s continued oppression in metropolitan contexts, to launching a searing attack on the Land Reform that was transforming rural China during the mid-century. In the next section, I address the second term in my coinage, “allochronic realism.” In the process, I shall position Chang as a realist writer whose aesthetics resemble or drew directly from diverse genres and mediums such as socialist realism, film, and modernist montage.

Cold War Realism: The Novel in an Age of Epistemic Uncertainty

When I say “realism,” I am working with Fredric Jameson’s understanding of the term as derived from Lukács’s The Historical Novel and “Narrate or

Describe?” In the afterword to Peripheral Realisms, Jameson writes:

… for Lukács totality was history, and that in reality (sic) his

conception of realism had to do with an art whereby the

narrative of individuals was somehow made to approach

historical dynamics as such, was organized so as to reveal its

relationship with a history in movement and a future on the

point of emergence. Realism would thus have to do with the

revelation of tendencies rather than with the portrayal of a state

of affairs. (“Realism-Modernism Debate” 479)

However, rather than purely imposing a preconceived definition of Lukácsian realism onto literary texts, Jameson also proposes that realism can “name any narrative that is organized … around the very interrogation of realism and the

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realistic itself” (478-9). In other words, the application of theory from without must be counterbalanced by an appreciation of the individual literary work’s realist poetics. By “realist poetics,” I mean a text’s immanent processes of working out its own relation to the historical conditions from which it emerged.

As Jameson might have it, Rice-Sprout is indeed a “literary work which raises the question of realism … to problematize it or to attempt to reinvent it” (“The Realism-Modernism Debate” 478). This is demonstrated by

Chang’s paratextual material across the English and Chinese editions of her

USIS novels, Rice-Sprout and Naked Earth. Her comments, while brief, reveal her conception of the novel as a truth-telling genre, one which necessarily arises from the conditions of epistemic uncertainty and news scarcity during the early years of the China-U.S. Cold War. In her preface to the first edition of Rice-Sprout published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1955, Chang discloses that her plot was inspired by an article in People’s Literature, an organ of the

Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This article was a piece of self-criticism written by “a government worker in a small town in north China during the spring famine of 1950” (“Preface” v). This unnamed writer reportedly witnessed an uprising by the hungry townspeople, who attempted numerous raids on the public granary. He defended the store alongside the village chief, a party veteran, who, despairing at having to attack “The People,” said:

“Something has gone wrong—we have failed” (v). The writer subsequently turned his harrowing experience into a story that is presumably critical of the

Communist revolution, which he now regretfully denounces in the midst of

Mao’s Three Anti’s Campaign (v-vi). Here, Chang alerts the reader to the

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problem of Cold War realism on both sides of the First-Second World divide.

On one side, Chang’s story of the Communist writer who condemns his earlier work implies that Communist-sanctioned forms of realist writing are suspect.

The party’s autocratic measures suppress accounts of true events and coerce writers into distorting, denouncing, and self-censoring their work. On the other side, Chang casts suspicion on her own work by foregrounding its fictionality and by disclaiming first-hand knowledge of the Land Reform. She explains that the People’s Literature article “made a deep impression on me, weighing on my mind until it merged with other things I know of” (vi). This suggests that her narrative is, at best, an impressionistic composite of secondary sources.

Christopher Lee has likewise noted that Chang consistently foregrounds the tension between realist fiction and factual truth in her paratextual remarks to the USIS novels (34-6). The afterword to Yangge—the

Chinese edition of Rice-Sprout—expands on her sources for the story, which includes

a short story published in 1950 about a rural uprising prompted

by famine; various eyewitness accounts of famine during land

reform; an isolated newspaper report on famine relief in the

northern city of Tianjin; and a propaganda film that featured

the burning of a grain store. (C. Lee 35)

But Lee stresses that these materials do not testify to the “truth” of Chang’s realism; rather, the details they offer merely enhance the quality of the realist affects she creates (36). Lee astutely notes, in Chang’s preface to Naked Earth, an unresolved tension between her instinct (and that of the general reader) to

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prize “real” stories over fictive ones, and her understanding that fiction does not have to be factual to be “good,” “fresh,” or “evocative” (36). She writes:

It sometimes happens that when I describe one of my stories,

I’m met with a puzzled look. “This really happened! I’ll say

(maybe a touch defensively), as if that automatically increases

the story’s worth. Of course whether a story is good or not

really has nothing to do with whether it’s true or not. Even so

I’ve become almost compulsively fixated on reality, believing

that real experience, no matter whose, will never become stale,

but will remain always fresh and evocative.

Naked Earth is based on real people and their true

stories. Fiction is, at heart, not reportage, however, and in this

novel I’ve changed the names of characters and some places;

I’ve drawn from many stories and compressed, trimmed, and

reorganized them into the story you read here … [The novel

was] meant to capture the atmosphere of the time … my hope

is that readers, in turning its pages, get a whiff of what real life

was like for the people living through those days. (Naked Earth

xiii)

Lee argues that Chang’s extended olfactory metaphor—note the words “stale,”

“fresh,” and “whiff”—reframes the relation between fiction and reality in terms of an ambiguous “sensuality” and as “a matter of subjective experience” as opposed to hard facticity (36). Chang’s conception of realism thus hinges on capturing a certain “atmosphere of the time” as opposed to reporting the unvarnished truth. The true stories of real people she collects might be thought

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of as raw materials capable of evoking sensory affects in readers, which she must weave into a larger fictive complex that captures a broader sense of history in motion.

Chang’s preface to Naked Earth thus confirms her method of assembling news reports, hearsay, personal experiences, and even fiction by others into a resonant, novelistic whole. This, in itself, seems unremarkable.

But consider Chang’s method vis-à-vis David Shields’s extremely brief history of the novel in Reality Hunger (2010), which rehearses axioms about the genre’s European origins:

The origin of the novel lies in its pretense of actuality. (13)

Early novelists felt the need to foreground their work with a

false realistic front. Defoe tried to pass off Journal of a Plague

Year as an actual journal. Fielding presented Johnathan Wild as

a “real” account. (13)

The novel has always been a mixed form; that’s why it was

called novel in the first place. A great deal of realistic

documentary, some history, some topographical writing, some

barely disguised autobiography have always been part of the

novel, from Defoe through Flaubert and Dickens. (15)

Within this lineage, Chang’s assembly of non-fictive and fictive scraps into a novel is par for the course. What makes her USIS works novel is that unlike

Defoe or Fielding, who “foreground[ed] their work with a false realistic front,” Chang’s paratexts stress the unreliable nature of her accounts instead.

In fact, she gestures to a geopolitical climate wherein narratives of the real are under suspicion due to ideological pressures on both sides of the First-Second

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World divide. Chang here is alluding to what is commonly called the “bamboo curtain”; as previously mentioned, Zhang Guoxin is widely credited with coining this term, which is his metaphor for the lack of trustworthy news exchange between Communist-held China and the rest of the world (present thesis 20). Zhang was a journalist with the U.S. news agency United Press, who witnessed the Communist victory in Nanjing. In December 1949, he fled to British Hong Kong—three years before Chang did—and reportedly smuggled his field notes past Communist censors by disguising them in plain sight as wrapping paper for a twelve-piece dining gift set (Chang K., Bamboo

Curtain xxxiv-xxxv). Zhang’s anecdote speaks to the Cold War phenomenon of news scarcity, in which information was obstructed from crossing or entering Communist borders. In her afterword to Yangge, Chang herself would mention the “many types of iron curtains inside the iron curtain,” “a complete blockage of news between the Eastern and Western districts [in Shanghai],” and the ubiquity of “propaganda statistics in the newspapers” (trans. in C. Lee

35). Written from the context of British Hong Kong, where she was keeping her ears open for news from the Communist mainland, Chang’s afterword describes a Cold War variant of “reality hunger” that Shields identifies in twenty-first century mass culture. Within Chang’s historical moment, Rice-

Sprout was meant to offer a sense of true events happening on the mainland that could only have been represented in fiction, or as fiction, given the extent of Communist censorship and propaganda. This stands in sharp contrast to

Shield’s diagnosis of our contemporary moment, where in the succinct words of a reviewer, “nonfiction [is] increasingly serving the functions that the novel once served” (Marche par. 3).

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Within the Cold War context, Chang’s paratextual material reveals that collage—or the assembling of disparate news sources—is the predominant way in which the modern individual, who is by necessity a reader, accesses the Real. Zhang Guoxin’s image of his smuggled field notes echoes this idea of a collaged reality; his crumpled jottings must be smoothened out, compiled, and revised as journalistic pieces upon his arrival in Hong Kong. Such depictions of epistemic uncertainty and news scarcity during the Cold War resonate with discussions about the so-called “post-truth” era today, where the individual must sift through an overabundance of dis/information to consolidate a provisional sense of the truth.

Modernist Collage, Cinematic Montage, and Anti-Socialist Realism

I further propose that Chang’s “collaged” realism is not solely inspired by the exigencies of the Cold War’s ideological warfare, but also by the rise of cinema and its uses of the montage. I return here to Shields’s Reality Hunger, which offers a way of thinking modernist collage, cinematic montage, literary realism, and the twentieth-century novel in the same thought. Shields juxtaposes all these seemingly disparate things in his chapter on the collage.

He manages to do so because the work is, itself, a collage: Reality Hunger comprises pithy observations, aphorisms, allusions, quotes, and literary analysis among other fragments, all of which are assembled in numerical sequence (as if it were Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project) to imply a linear argument. Shields’s form might be described, in his own words, as

“Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage” (121). His chapter

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on the collage makes some suggestive links between the art form and modernism:

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced

items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp’s

“Fountain”—urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation

between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly

seen. (117)

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. (123)

The latter line is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (line 430). Beyond these references, it is well known that high modernism was heavily influenced by collage as an artistic method. Robert Rosenblum argues that Picasso’s collages contain visual and verbal puns that are comparable to the writings of

James Joyce (75). Patricia Leighten connects the newsprint used in Picasso’s collages of 1912 to 1913, to the artist’s Anarcho-Symbolist politics vis-à-vis current affairs in Barcelona and pre-war Paris (653). More recently,

Bartholomew Brinkman thickens the connections between the “collage techniques of the visual avant-garde” and Marianne Moore’s “poetic collage,” which is a “hybrid method of composition, and modern poetic quotation”

(106). Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde conceive of collage as feminist resistance, against the emergence of a professional culture that has traditionally excluded women (517-30), and against the “metaphors of productive women’s work—sewing, mending, or tidying scraps of material into a pleasing whole” (538). They note the genesis of Virginia Woolf’s Three

Guineas in three scrapbooks compiled between 1931 to 1937, and subsequently make a case for the resonances between Woolf’s method and

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Kate Zambreno’s fragmentary notebook-blogposts, which were published on the website Frances Farmer Is My Sister from 2009 (522, 531-40). Susan

Stanford Friedman theorises collage as a scholarly method of “radical juxtaposition,” one which is ideally “a nonhierarchical act of comparison, a joining that illuminates both commensurabilities and incommensurabilities”

(Planetary Modernisms 77). Collage as a distinctly twentieth-century method has proved extremely generative for both modernists and the scholars who study them.

Shields adds to this discussion by further connecting modernist collage with cinematic montage. He writes in the same chapter:

All definitions of montage have a common denominator; they

all imply that meaning is not inherent in any one shot but is

created by the juxtaposition of shots. Lev Kuleshov, an early

Russian filmmaker, intercut images of an actor’s expressionless

face with images of a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a

child with a toy. Viewers of the film praised the actor’s

performance; they saw in his face (emotionless as it was)

hunger, grief, and affection. They saw, in other words, what

was not really there in the separate images. Meaning and

emotion were created not by the content of the individual

images but by the relationship of the images to one another.

(115)

He was not the first to make this link. Back in 1997, Budd Hopkins argues that

[t]he collage aesthetic is the sole methodological link between

such modernist masterpieces as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,

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Joyce’s Ulysses, the music of Igor Stravinsky, and the

architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and it lies, of course, at the

very heart of the century’s most important new art medium—

the motion picture. (5)

Instead of Kuleshov’s sequence, Hopkins offers D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) as an example. Griffith was filming in 1912, around the time that Picasso and Georges Braque were experimenting with collage (5).

Griffith’s final cut deployed “radical editing” that used “collage techniques— sequences of quick, disparate images” to create “a new kind of elliptical narrative” (6).

Following his interlude on cinematic history, Shields makes a further connection between collage, montage, and the twentieth-century novel’s increasingly fragmentary and non-linear narratives. He speaks of the “collage novel,” with his prime example being Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976), described as “the antinovel, built from scraps,” and as “an evolution beyond narrative” (115). For him, Speedboat “captivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice,” where Adler “changes subjects like a brilliant schizophrenic, making irrational sense” (115).

This returns me to Chang’s mode of collaging and composing secondary sources in her USIS novels. To be clear, Rice-Sprout is nothing like

Speedboat. Given its style and subject matter, Chang’s novel might be described as the obverse face of Chinese Communist socialist realism, which is typically produced on the other side of the bamboo curtain. Take for example Zhao Shuli’s Li Jiazhuang de Bianqian (1946) and Ding Ling’s

Taiyang Zhao zai Sangganhe shang (1948), both famous works of socialist

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realism that offer positive portrayals of the Land Reform. These were translated into English by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, and published with

Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press as Changes in Li Village (1953) and The

Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1954) respectively. It is not by coincidence that Chang’s Rice-Sprout followed soon after in 1955. The USIS officer who hired Chang, Richard McCarthy, has revealed that the book projects he presided over in Hong Kong and Taipei were designed as direct counters to “the outpouring of works in English translation … from the

Foreign Languages Press” (McCarthy, Interview n. pag.). These three novels, when read together, offer a glimpse of the thematic preoccupations, stylistics, and print-material conditions underlying what Richard Jean So has called

“Literary Information Warfare” in the Asia-Pacific (722-3). As David Wang puts it, Zhao and Ding Ling belong to a group of leftist writers who believed that the “reform of the Chinese landscape would lead to the reform of the

Chinese mindscape” (Monster 132). Contrastively, Chang’s novel “rewrites this land reform discourse”; she “maintains a festive atmosphere in The Rice-

Sprout Song” as if she were “parodying the jubilant tone of Communist land reform novels” (132).

Shield’s notion of the collage novel is not relevant to Chang’s foray into what might be called “anti-socialist realism.” However, his historical framing enables my examination of how collage and montage function as both method and metaphor in Chang’s understanding of art’s relation to reality, in a manner which places her work of anti-socialist realism beside/s those of the brand-name modernists mentioned above. Numerous scholars have noted that

Chang was a screen writer and film critic, and that the rise of cinema in forties

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Shanghai had an extensive impact on her aesthetics across multiple genres.

Leo Ou-fan Lee notes the influence of Hollywood’s sophisticated screwball comedies on Chang’s screenwriting, and her appropriation of this genre by adding “an ethical dimension centered on the family” (Shanghai Modern 278-

9). Her prose fiction also draws from cinematic techniques; Sandberg notes that in “Sealed Off,” Chang

borrow[s] a film-making technique, the close-up, … to indicate

the ways her characters’ imaginations are inhabited by the

world of the cinema and to transplant the emotional charge of

cinematic romance into her story. (244-5)

The influence of cinema can likewise be discerned in Rice-Sprout, which contains a plotline on filmmaking involving Comrade Ku. Originally from

Shanghai, Ku is “a director-writer sent down by the Literary and Artistic

Workers’ Association to Experience Life and collect material for his next film” (Chang, Rice-Sprout 61). His purpose is to search for “story material that might be interpreted in such a way as to throw light on the flourishing and progressive state of the peasantry after the Land Reform” (86). Ku represents the young urban cadres, intellectuals, and artists who were part of the

Communist rustication movement, which is also known as the “xiaxiang” or

“to-the-village” movement. According to Mark Selden, the rustication movement began quietly in 1941 with “reports of cadres and students proceeding to the countryside to assist in the grain harvest” (226). By 1942, students and intellectuals would study in Yan’an prior to village assignments

(226). They were not only expected to “participate in farming and other productive tasks,” but also to “serve as teachers or to assist in the tasks of the

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local party and government” (226). The aim was to “overcome the mutual ignorance and prejudice of intellectuals and peasants through sharing a common experience, to bridge the gap between town and back country, and to overcome barriers separating mental and manual labour” (226). A complementary goal was to foster the production of revolutionary art and literature: “it was hoped that the insights gathered by painters, writers, and musicians in the countryside or at the front would subsequently appear in their art, an art to be devoted to the resistance and to improving the quality of rural life” (227). Many of these dictums are expressed in Mao’s “Talks at the

Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” (McDougall 57-86). This was a speech he gave in 1942 that was subsequently published and read as one founding manifesto of Chinese socialist realism.

Through Ku’s plotline, Chang depicts the conditions of cultural production in relation to three things: the rustication movement, Mao’s strictures on revolutionary art and literature, and the allochronising technologies of propaganda. Her portrayal of Ku is sympathetic to the precarity faced by Communist artists, who must navigate through a minefield of political taboos. During an exchange with Comrade Wong, Ku is struck by inspiration:

It was then he got his great idea for the story of the dam.

Suppose that the stream overflowed every year, flooding the

fields and wiping out part of the crop. Well, let’s make the

engineer from the city and some old farmers put their heads

together and solve the problem by building a dam with a door.

This would serve to illustrate the union of technical knowledge

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and peasant wisdom. If the engineer thought it up all by himself

he, of course, would be guilty of the Self-glorification of the

Intellectual. And if the old farmers refused to co-operate,

relying only on their past experiences, they were guilty of

Experiencism. This idea would avoid both. (92)

In his excitement, Ku shares his idea with Wong and asks if there is a dam nearby. There is not, but Ku persists with his idea. This prompts Wong’s incredulity and ridicule: “Why would you want to make [a story] up, when there is so much story material around, in this great age?” (93). With this scene, Chang stresses that the great works of socialist realism in Chinese literature and film are, like her novel, works of fiction. She indicates here that the demands made on Communist art are exacting: It must capture the revolutionary spirit of the times, conform to official ideology, and evade political taboos. This requires fiction, not reportage. This sentiment echoes her paratextual comments, and implies that her own situation is not entirely different from that of Ku’s. Simultaneously, Chang critiques the naivety of readers like Wong, who assume that reality already contains great stories, and who believe that committed literature must directly reflect reality for it to bear any political and emotive power.

Ku thus functions as a diegetic double of his implied author. As

Richard Jean So observes, Chang, like Ku, also wrote film scripts, and “the novel itself is a similar attempt to represent rural China for [U.S.] state interests” (Literary Information Warfare, 740). David Wang puts it more strongly: “Through Ku’s story and her own afterword, Chang seems to have written an allegory about the vulnerable situation of Chinese writers of the

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time, Communist and anti-Communist alike” (Rice-Sprout xxiii). This dynamic enables Chang to turn her critique of Communist cultural production back onto her own work of anti-socialist realism. Ku’s idea for his film is generated from a mix of surveying the rural landscape, his understanding of party ideology, and prior knowledge of socialist realist conventions:

There had been numerous films about the engineer and the old

factory workers putting their heads together and working

wonders … But hitherto the situation had never been applied to

the farming population. He had opened up a whole new vista.

(92-3)

As with Ku, Chang collaged, cut, and spliced existing materials including a

People’s Literature article, a news report on famine relief, and a socialist realist film into a novel. However, Chang also transformed pro-communist materials into an anti-communist story through a process of critical reading and revising. As Perry Link puts it in the introduction to Naked Earth,

Chang did travel to rural China, at least briefly, in the years

immediately before and after 1949, but most of her material for

her novels seems to have come from secondhand accounts or

from published sources. “Self-criticisms” by officials and

descriptions of famines had appeared, after combing for

political correctness, in the state-run press. Chang could read

past the propaganda overlay and infer what had happened. She

also appears to have learned from The Sun Shines over the

Sanggan River, Ting Ling’s party-approved long novel

(published in 1948 and winner of the Stalin Prize in 1951)

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about land reform in Communist-held areas in the 1940s.

Chang Ch’ien-fen has noted a broad range of “intertextuality”

between Sanggan River and Naked Earth on questions that

range from how farmers wash their hands to what public

“struggle sessions” look like.” (viii)

For Chang, the realities of the Land Reform are not directly available, but must be gleaned, inferred, and back-formed from Communist propaganda. The techniques she uses resemble those in filmmaking; as Shields explains via the

Kuleshov effect, meaning and emotion in film are “created not by the content of the individual images but by the relationship of the images to one another”

(115). Through the montage, the audience sees “what was not really there in the separate images” (115). In the face of news scarcity and epistemic uncertainty, Chang montages material from communist propaganda into a novel to create a sense of reality that was unavailable in non-fiction. With

Ku’s story, Chang devises an autoreferential moment which foregrounds and critiques her own manipulation of facts. This plotline speaks to the fraught conditions of cultural production during the Cold War, and the risks undertaken by artists and writers who were involved with politicised art.

However, Chang’s sympathetic portrayal of Ku develops into a scathing critique. Driven by an increasing desperation to produce results, Ku ends up fabricating a hackneyed plot that is entirely disconnected from reality.

Chang dramatises the unethical nature of Ku’s artistic process by juxtaposing his self-involved concerns about filmmaking—which, to be fair, are tied to his survival—against the horrors inflicted on Gold Root, Moon Scent, and Beckon that are unfolding in a parallel plotline. With this development, Chang

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distinguishes between fiction that strives to uncover an otherwise unavailable sense of reality, and fiction that distorts reality to satisfy its contractual obligations to its patrons or sponsors. Chang begins narrating Ku’s descent into depravity by mentioning that he is working on a “Glorious Family” poster; meanwhile, the T’an family is ironically being torn apart in the riot

(146). After the uprising, Ku gazes upon the burning granary, and fantasises about his magnum opus; Chang will later inform the reader that Moon Scent perished in this fire:

As he watched, the gongs and the soaring flames roused a wild,

primitive exultation in Ku. “But this is just what I am looking

for,” he thought. “A splendid and stirring spectacle for the

climax of my film. Just move the story a few years back.

Recount how the peasants under the old regime were driven by

hunger to rob and burn the storehouse.”

The he remembered that there had been explicit

instructions in the leading magazines for literary people.

Writers were not to dwell on the unsavory past as if with a

lingering relish, but to turn to the bright, new, constructive side.

“Rather than curse the darkness, praise the light!” (170; my

emphasis)

Ku inverts the meaning of the burning granary by changing it from a symbol of the Land Reform’s failure, to the failure of the pre-communist regime.

Recall that Ku was disoriented when he first arrived, because the lack of news about the famine created in him “a curious sensation of having dropped out of time and space, living nowhere” (84). Now, Ku has come full circle. He is

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entertaining the possibility of moving the present event “a few years back” such that he can fabricate a narrative of progress for the Land Reform. He has become complicit with the mechanisms of allochronism that underwrite

Communist propaganda and censorship.

From History-as-Cinema to Cinema’s History

Chang’s engagement with film does not stop at the level of content, where she dramatises the impingement of ideology on socialist realist filmmaking. At critical junctures, her prose takes on the quality of montaged footage. The effect is a sense of exteriorised, imagistic reality, one that seemingly illustrates a series of actions and reactions that can be interpreted as cause-and-effect links, but which feels irrational and meaningless. Her narration of the peasant uprising and its fallout thus appear chaotic, senseless, and arbitrary. This captures the individual’s experience of history as the amalgamation of complex forces and random events far beyond one’s control. At the climax of the novel, a meeting at the Village Public Office descends into chaos as villagers begin arguing with the Communist officials, who are collecting New

Year rice cakes (143-5). Chang marks the exact moment argument flips to violence with a cinematic image: “A carrying-pole struck him [Comrade

Wong] at the back of his head” (145). Chang mimics a close-up shot by depicting the dispossessed carrying-pole as if it is moving of its own volition.

It is not attached to any one human actor, but functions as an agent of narrative action and history at large. Chang renders this sentence with a seemingly simple subject–verb–object order, but by refusing to name Wong in the sentence, and by placing him in the object position, she obfuscates the

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social significance of the striking. The reader has to get to the middle of the sentence, parse who the ambiguous “him” refers to by checking the previous paragraph, before understanding that a villager has struck an official. The reader then realises belatedly that the hierarchy of power has been broken.

This creates a moment of delayed decoding in the readerly experience which resembles a slow-motion shot. Chang sustains this sense of temporal protraction and affective distance by intercutting a series of interactions between the Communist militiamen and the villagers, as if mimicking a shot/reverse shot sequence:

Then the three militiamen who carried rifles pointed their guns

at the crowd. One of the T’an brothers grabbed for one of the

guns and the militiamen who held it shot him in the stomach.

The other militiamen fired and the crowd was stunned into

silence. Then the militiamen backed up, working the bolts of

their rifles to reload, and the mob growled and surged toward

them. (145)

These montaged images depict a series of cause-and-effect relationships which leads to the peasant uprising, but they also focus solely on external events without providing an emotional anchor. Chang then switches gear into high tragedy two short paragraphs later by returning to Moon Scent and Beckon.

Her “objective” narration of how the uprising started is now complemented by an intensely emotional portrayal of how mother and daughter experience the event subjectively:

“M-ma! M-ma!” Beckon went on screaming flatly, with never

the slightest variation in tone.

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“Beckon! Beckon!” She was not far off but Moon Scent

could not move an inch toward her, jammed tight in the

stampede. In that nightmarish moment it was as if they had

been calling to each other throughout eternity. (145)

Beckon’s name, which initially connotes a beckoning, optimistic future, is twisted here and symbolically tied to her frantic gestures for help as she is trampled to death. Her fate allegorises the failures of the agrarian reforms and their promises of a better future for the ostensibly liberated peasantry.

Chang’s image of a desperately beckoning child caught in a hunger- mad stampede is uncannily repeated in the ending scenes of Yellow Earth

(1984), the breakout work of the Fifth Generation filmmakers directed by

Chen Kaige, with cinematography by Zhang Yimou. This “coincidence” speaks to the inter-generic influences between modern Chinese literature and film across the twentieth century. Set in 1939 Shaanxi, Yellow Earth offers a far more sympathetic treatment of rusticated Communist artists. The protagonist is Gu Qing, a soldier who researches and records folk songs that, like the rice-sprout song, will later be reformulated as pedagogical performance art. He stays with and befriends a peasant family comprising a single father, his fourteen-year-old daughter, Cuiqiao, and a younger son

Hanhan, who seems afflicted with selective mutism. The father plans to marry

Cuiqiao to a much older man; her dowry will go towards her mother’s funeral and Hanhan’s future engagement. Gu Qing gradually bonds with Hanhan by teaching him pro-Communist songs, and inspires Cuiqiao with stories of emancipated women in the Eighth Route Army. However, he is later reassigned and leaves the children behind. Cuiqiao tries to escape her fate, and

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apparently dies in an attempt to cross the Yellow River at night. The film’s final sequence depicts starving villagers performing a rain dance during a drought and famine. Their headlong rush engulfs Cuiqiao’s brother, Hanhan.

Like his drowned sister and Chang’s Beckon, he wades against the surging crowd as he cries to a distant Gu Qing (who has belatedly returned to the village) for help. As with Chang’s Rice-Sprout, Yellow Earth suggests that the ideals and promises of Communist agrarian modernisation, while laudatory, did not translate into reality for the peasantry. Although both works were set around the early fifties and 1939 respectively, their emotive power and sense of historical dynamics reverberate far beyond their immediate frame of reference. Both their works recall numerous disasters across twentieth-century

China, such as the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961. According to one source, between 15 to 30 million people died in the event, due in part to a mix of the Great Leap Forward, natural disasters, and the state’s failure to respond quickly (Stevens 252). In Chang’s words, the image of a child screaming for her mother in a stampede seems to have recurred throughout Chinese history,

“as if they had been calling to each other throughout eternity” (145).

In Yellow Earth’s closing shots, the camerawork frames Hanhan’s almost inaudible cries—the cries of a child with selective mutism, who now yells, “Brother Gu! Save our people!”—as simultaneously an address to the audience. The film thus compels its viewer to heed the unheard grievances of the agrarian subaltern. The same sentiment can be found in Chang’s Rice-

Sprout. Following the uprising, Moon Scent escapes with a gravely wounded

Gold Root while carrying their daughter’s body:

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She had known for a long time that the limp, crushed child in

her arms was dead. In the end, sheer exhaustion forced her to

abandon her and there was no time for grief. (151)

While Moon Scent goes into the neighbouring Chou Village to seek her sister- in-law’s help, Gold Root kills himself to free his wife of the burden of caring for him (161). Moon Scent’s trip was for naught; the sister-in-law rebuffs her pleas for fear of aiding and abetting the T’an family, who have since been scapegoated as “fan kê-min” or counter-revolutionaries (158). Chang implies that as a final act of resistance, Moon Scent returns to her village and commits suicide by burning down the granary, destroying what little there is of the harvest that has been requisitioned by Communist officials. Her body was found in the rubble, “in a cave made between two walls propped up by each other” (176). It was miraculously posed “in a sitting position and was a smooth, bright pinkish red all over,” like “one of the bald, slim images of

Arhans lined up on both sides of a temple” (176). The villagers witness but do not speak of this miracle (176). Her corpse would eventually be torn apart by wild dogs (176). Meanwhile, Ku rewrites Moon Scent’s story into an appalling film, by casting her as a concubine of a rural landlord; “her main function was to lean decoratively against the table by the light of the flickering lamp and lend atmosphere to the various treasonable dealings of the dispossessed landlord” (179). Only the memory of Moon Scent's deathly repose remains; it haunts the villagers who saw or heard about it, testifying to a truth that cannot be spoken, a truth that has been warped by Ku's propaganda. As Gayatri

Spivak might have it, Moon Scent is the subaltern who cannot speak while living (cf. Spivak 103-4). Her denials of being a counter-revolutionary would

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not have been believed. Instead, she speaks only by virtue of her miraculous death. The short-lived miracle of her Arhan-esque corpse is Chang’s way of conferring dignity onto the agrarian female subaltern’s suffering, a dignity that can perhaps only be fabricated in fiction, but which cannot be found in reality.

Reassessing Eileen Chang: Allochronic Realist

With Rice-Sprout, Chang startlingly prefigures the images, tropes, themes, and sentiments that will be found three decades later in Yellow Earth. Yet, her novel has not been accorded the same status as Chen and Zhang’s seminal film in literary criticism. Xudong Zhang’s appraisal of Yellow Earth exemplifies the conventional view that the film

successfully ‘demolished’ the socialist-realist tradition by

providing ‘superior’ visual quality … sailing smoothly into the

global market … catering to a truly international audience …

(204)

More recently, the 2019 Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) offered a retrospective of the Fifth Generation films, which includes a screening of Yellow Earth. The South China Morning Post’s coverage of the event rehashes the legacy of these works, which “modernised … Chinese filmmaking” (Havis par. 10). Director of programming at HKIFF, Geoffrey

Wong, says their “sophisticated reflections on the country’s history, culture and its evolution … mark a distinct departure from the conventional social- realist filmmaking that preceded them” (Havis par. 12). Conversely, Rice-

Sprout’s assault on socialist realism, which was launched near the very beginning of the Cold War, has been treated with suspicion by numerous

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critics. Christopher Lee has recently consolidated this reception history, and his survey grants two key insights: first, that “critics from the mainland … tend to read the novel as a piece of American propaganda that flagrantly misrepresents life under socialism,” and second, that “critics of different critical persuasions have … erroneously relegated [the USIS novels] as isolated exceptions rather than important examples of [Chang’s] life-long engagement with the politics of realism” (33-4). I give two further examples of these trends: Liu Zaifu has faulted Chang’s liberal manipulations of secondary sources to structure the plot in Rice-Sprout, while bringing up her unfamiliarity with rural life. He writes:

Eileen Chang resorted to using news dispatches and rumors to

write Rice-sprout Song … the idea for setting the granary on

fire in Rice-sprout Song came from a movie and the author did

nothing more than flip the movie’s political stand … Eileen

Chang was familiar with the city, not the countryside. So she

knew very little about the rural society or the minds of the

peasants. Of course it would be impossible for her to succeed

when she chose to write about things she was unfamiliar with;

with all her linguistic skills, she could still only produce a weak

novel. (“Part II” par. 15)

Here, Liu insists that Chang’s craft alone cannot make up for her lack of lived experience in rural China, which he views as a necessary condition for realist works. Elsewhere, Xiaojue Wang acknowledges that Chang’s USIS novels should be appreciated for their “unique notion of history, which is marked by temporal discrepancies and ruins as against any grand narrative of historical

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monumentality,” but she also states, with some disdain, that they “bear the clear imprint of the propagandistic anti-Communist novel and belong to the genre of roman à these” (258).

This disparity in the critical reception of Yellow Earth and Rice-Sprout seems to be driven not only by evaluations of what is internal to the works, but also by assessments of their conditions of production. The Fifth Generation filmmakers were born around the time that the People’s Republic of China was founded, came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and lived through the rustication movement.44 In 1978, they enrolled at the Beijing Film

Academy, which reopened at the start of Deng Xiaoping’s so-called “Post-

Socialist” era. After their graduation in 1982, they produced masterworks that were critical of the Communist regime. Their rise to fame appears as the story of how art gains a degree of autonomy from politics within Communist China, while achieving commercial and critical success worldwide.45 Conversely,

Rice-Sprout’s anti-communist critique was commissioned by the U.S., a major antagonist to Communist China, and written by a self-identified petit- bourgeois writer who fled the mainland and never returned. Chang’s biography suggests an entirely instrumentalised mode of producing art that verges on treason. The circumstances surrounding the publication of Rice-

Sprout is also indicative of Chang’s interstitial position vis-à-vis political and

44 For an insider account of the Fifth Generation filmmakers, see Ni Zhen’s Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation (2002). Ni Zhen was their screenwriter and teacher. 45 For English-language studies of the Fifth Generation, see for example Xudong Zhang’s Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms (1997), Jerome Silbergeld’s China into Film (1999), and Paul Clark’s Reinventing China (2005).

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literary orthodoxies within and beyond China. As a writer in Japanese- occupied Shanghai who contributed to the Fascist-linked magazine The XXth

Century, and who was married for a spell to the Japanese collaborator Hu

Lancheng, Chang is hardly a model of patriotism for either the Nationalists or the Communists.46 Her subsequent migration to the U.S. via Hong Kong is also tainted by hints of opportunism: Following Mao’s victory on the mainland, Chang produced two Chinese-language novels, Shiba Chun (1951) and Xiao Ai (1951), both of which David Wang described as “tongue-in-cheek pro-Communism” (Monster 158). Around four years later, Chang published

Rice-Sprout and Naked Earth (1956), both staunchly anti-communist novels.

These novels probably greased Chang’s migration to the U.S. However, Wang defends Chang’s vacillating stance on politics: “It bespeaks … not her opportunism but her predicament as a Chinese writer trapped in the drastic imperatives of an ideological age” (Rice-Sprout xiv). Likewise, Xiaojue Wang argues that Chang’s obsessive practice of rewriting and self-translating her stories is “a kind of literary schizogenesis,” one that represents her strategy of

“deterritorialization, a way of avoiding any political dominion over literary creation by either side of the Cold War antagonism—Communist or anti-

Communist” (295).

I add that Chang’s interstitial position in literature and politics is, like that of her characters, informed by a sense of allochronism. Her poetics seem to lie somewhere beside/s, between, or outside the familiar accounts of literary modernism and realism in the twentieth century. Rice-Sprout in particular

46 For a study of The XXth Magazine, its editor Klaus Mehnert, and Eileen Chang, see Shuang Shen’s Cosmopolitan Publics (2009), pp. 135-44.

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flouts various modernist and realist criteria. Its sponsored political content is antithetical to one common image of “strong modernism,” which is “the portrait of the artwork as locus of autonomy from ideology and the portrait of the critic as heroic demystifier of ideology” (Saint-Amour 439). While Rice-

Sprout arguably demystifies Chinese Communist ideology, it is also paid for by the U.S.’s anti-communist ideological warfare. On the flipside, Chang’s public persona is at odds with typical portraits of committed realist writers in

China. She was silent on organised politics during the early forties, and reversed her political leanings from Communist to anti-Communist during the mid-century. Conversely, Lu Xun and Ding Ling were members of the League of Left-Wing Writers; Lao She, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, and again, Ding Ling, belonged to the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists, which was formed in 1938 as a reaction to the Sino-Japanese War.47 It comes as no surprise that Liu Zaifu compares Chang unfavourably with her contemporary, Zhao Shuli, who joined the Communists in 1937 and worked as a propagandist and writer in the countryside (Feuerwerker 116-7). For Liu,

Zhao is the “rural intellectual … nurtured by two kinds of culture: the new culture and new ideas of May Fourth, on the one hand, and the folk culture rooted in the countryside, on the other hand” (“Part II” par. 17; my emphasis).

Liu insists that the characters in Zhao’s fiction are “genuine peasants full of life,” whereas those in Rice-Sprout are “fake peasants” (par. 15).

I have noted that scholars who classify Chang as a modernist tend to engage exclusively with her earlier stories set in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

47 See Charles Laughlin, “The All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists,” in Literary Societies of Republican China, edited by Kirk Denton and Michel Hockx, Lexington Books, 2008, pp. 379-412.

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This discloses a persistent ideological bias in modernist studies that privileges metropolitan contexts, with a corresponding neglect of rural modernities.48 To conclude, I now discuss briefly the ideological tenets behind critical understandings of Chinese realisms, which may be responsible for Chang’s ostracism within this field. Liu’s analysis above repeats two common refrains in Chinese literary criticism: that writers should be familiar with the socio- material conditions they depict, and that committed writing should be faithful to reality. One origin of such assumptions is Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an

Conference on Literature and Art” (1942). In his published speech, Mao first conceives of revolutionary literature in terms of its potentially formidable readership or “market”:

The audience for works of literature and art here consists of

workers, peasants, and soldiers, together with their cadres in

the Party, the government, and the army … Just to take cadres

alone … They outnumber by far the readership for any book

published in the general rear, where one edition usually

consists of only two thousand copies, and even three editions

only amount to six thousand; while cadres in the base areas in

Yan’an alone include more than ten thousand who can read.

(McDougall 59-60)

For Mao, revolutionary literature can only succeed if writers and artists “get to understand and know these people [the target readers] properly” (60). He problematises the estrangement between writers/artists and their audiences:

48 One recent intervention to this trend can be found in Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey’s edited volume, Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (2018).

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…until now [writers and artists] have been heroes without a

battlefield, remote and uncomprehending … Our workers in

literature and art are not familiar with workers, peasants,

soldiers, or even their cadres … Yours is the language of

intellectuals, theirs is the language of the popular masses … If

you want the masses to understand you, if you want to become

one with the masses, you must make a firm decision to undergo

a long and possibly painful process of trial and hardship. (60-1)

Mao then cites his own experience of living and working alongside workers, peasants, and soldiers, which he views as a necessary stage in the process of

“changing over from one class to another” (60). Mao thus insists that revolutionary literature must be produced via a highly involved ethnographic method, which requires writers to cohabit with their subjects so as to alter their class consciousness.

Liu’s recommendation of Zhao over Chang evokes the spirit of Mao’s beliefs about revolutionary literature. Against the terms of Liu’s argument, I would contend that first-hand experience should not be seen as a prerequisite for committed writing, nor does it necessarily contribute to a work’s most outstanding qualities. Note, for instance, that the same demands are not typically made of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), which like Rice-

Sprout, is a stridently anti-communist novel published during the mid-century.

Orwell certainly did not live directly through the events leading up to the

Russian Revolution of 1917 or through Stalin’s regime—nor are such issues typically a focal point in discussions of Orwell. One might counter-argue that, unlike Orwell’s satirical allegory, which draws from the conventions of animal

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fables to create a farcical distance between his narration and actual historical events, Chang’s Rice-Sprout evidently belongs to a mimetic mode of realism.

Consequently, one might argue, her novel should be held to a higher standard of verisimilitude. I would rebut such lines of argument by pointing out that demands of this sort are also not made of Lu Xun, who incidentally, like

Chang, hailed from a privileged family that declined around the fin de siècle.

(His paternal grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, was a Hanlin scholar who was arrested and imprisoned for bribery; see Denton par. 11). Consider the case of

“A Madman’s Diary” (1918); to my contemporary sensibilities, this founding story of modern Chinese literature reads like a scintillating psychological thriller shot through with a Marxist critique of traditional Chinese society. To put this more provocatively, I am proposing that in terms of form, Lu Xun’s work has more in common with Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) than with Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). For me, the enduring power of Lu Xun’s masterwork, and the pleasure and shock of reading his story today, comes from its anti-realist depictions of China as a land of cannibals in disguise, seen through the eyes of an unreliable protagonist experiencing a psychological breakdown. Like Memento, “A Madman’s

Diary” compels its reader to identify with its frazzled protagonist and to solve a mystery—is the protagonist mad, or does he really live in a society of cannibals?—which will reveal the underlying meaning of the work. Yet, Lu

Xun is (rightly) celebrated, irrespective of his departures from verisimilitude and reality, and often cited as the exemplary writer of May Fourth realism. In the light of Lu Xun as a parallel test case, the critical demands made on

Chang’s realism—that the author ought to have stuck to facts, that she ought

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to have experienced rural living before writing anything like Rice-Sprout— seem unwarranted.

As opposed to evaluating Chang’s aesthetics based on the criteria of facticity, verisimilitude, and the author’s lived experiences, I have argued the following in this chapter: Chang’s forties to fifties output should be appreciated for the way it advances a critique of both urban and rural modernities. Rice-Sprout may be an indictment of Mao’s Land Reform and the rustication movement, but Chang recognises these programmes as historically significant forms of rural modernity nonetheless, programmes which rival urban development in Chinese metropoles. Further, Chang crosses the urban- rural divide by depicting allochronism as a shared experience of vulnerable groups, particularly disenfranchised women, who have been systemically left out of the promises and improvements offered by competing models of modernisation. Rice-Sprout marks the extension of her insights on the allochronic mechanisms of misogyny in Shanghai and Hong Kong, to the workings of Communist propaganda and censorship in Mao’s China.

I conceive of Chang’s aesthetics as predominantly realist because her works register—often in brief flashes, oblique references, or through a semiotically-rich image—the historical dynamics starting from the fall of the

Qing dynasty to her mid-century moment, which comprise a series of revolutions and reforms that failed to deliver their promises of progress. Her brand of realism matures with Rice-Sprout precisely because she was writing outside of her comfort zone. Rather than capitulating to the problems caused by ideological warfare, news scarcity, propaganda, and censorship during the

China-U.S. Cold War, Chang works with the restraints put on her. Her

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paratextual remarks and autoreferential moments within the story perform a double interrogation, specifically of the circulation of disinformation and propaganda in mainland China and British Hong Kong by both Communist and anti-Communist entities. In the process, she reinvents realism as a self- reflexive and self-questioning genre, while also reasserting the power of fiction in mediating our access to the Real, especially under conditions of widespread epistemic uncertainty.

However, I have also proposed that Chang’s aesthetics is continuous with formalistic innovations that have largely been associated with modernism. Her manner of assembling disparate sources for the novel resemble two things: first, modernist uses of the collage to make sense of a fragmentary, modernising world; and second, the cinematic montage, which she mimics in prose to depict history as a series of seemingly linked events, but which feels irrational to the individuals buffeted by its turbulence. This dissonance between Chang’s objective narration of plot action, and her characters’ subjective experiences of the unfolding events as chaos, is informed by Chang’s feminised aesthetics of desolation. As Chang puts it, her characters are “not heroes, but they are of the majority who actually bear the weight of their times … They lack tragedy; all they have is desolation”

(Written 17). For Chang, tragedy is the purview of heroes, whereas desolation focuses on “merely weak and ordinary people [who] cannot aspire to heroic feats of strength” (17). Their sense of the mid-century is thus that of chaos:

In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new

things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches

its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People

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sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of

order, out of order to a terrifying degree. (17).

While these words were written around the mid-forties, they have an obvious relevance to Rice-Sprout, where Chang’s characters experience history as temporal disjunction or cyclical horror. The links between Rice-Sprout’s activations of cinematic techniques, its treatment of the Land Reform, and

Chang’s notion of history as desolation, have not been duly appreciated. By arguing that these aspects of Chang’s novel prefigure the key conceits of the much-celebrated Yellow Earth, I bring the scholarly neglect of, and critical attacks on Rice-Sprout, into sharper relief.

The interstitial poetics of Chang’s “allochronic realism” offer a way of thinking about the literary twentieth century without falling back on antagonistic binaries of modernism and realism, which reproduce Cold War ideologies of art’s relation to politics. I will end by saying that the difficulties of classifying Chang’s aesthetics, and the detrimental effect of such difficulties on her legacy, should not be regarded as something that has now been transcended, given her increasing prominence in literary studies today.

Rather, the manner with which Chang’s works resist alignment with either side of the dyad should be treated as an opportunity to assess the limitations of, and to weaken the dominance of, the modernism-realism paradigm.

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Conclusion

Anglophone Chinese Writing as World Literature

This thesis opened with the question: “how to read modern Chinese literature in English?” At first glance, this might be taken as an insinuation that there is something difficult or problematic about reading literature in translation.

Stephen Owen’s “What is World Poetry?” (1990) comes to mind, in which he criticises contemporary Chinese poetry and their translations as a new “world poetry” that is merely “a version of Anglo-American modernism or French modernism,” which satisfies the Western reader’s search for “some exotic religious tradition or political struggle” (28-9). The occasion for this polemic is his review of Bei Dao’s The August Sleepwalker (1990) as translated by

Bonnie S. McDougall. Owen dismissively calls it “supremely translatable poetry” that benefitted from a “gifted translator” and “successful advertising”

(32). A series of normative claims about literary merit are embedded in his arguments: Owen views poetry that is written-for-translation as a capitulation to print capitalism; he also prizes elements of writing that resist translation, because he privileges literature’s deep connections to the particularities of its source language and culture. In other words, Owen is telling readers and critics how not to read Chinese literature in English—as a literary tourist who leisurely consumes a form of domesticated otherness.

Owen’s disdain for translatable literature is echoed by other scholars in recent debates on world literature. For example, in Against World Literature

(2013), Emily Apter claims that the institutionalisation and expansion of world literature studies in our time is characterised by an “entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the world’s cultural resources” (17). She

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contends that such programmes of scholarly expansion encourage practices of translation, and of reading in translation, which “zoom over the speed bumps of untranslatability in the rush to cover ground” (18). She advocates a return to

“literary comparatism that recognizes the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability” (19). As with Owen,

Apter is wary of an international translation industry that is driven by profit- centred “literary globalization” in which a homogenised and superficial form of “airport literature” reigns supreme (Casanova, “Literature” 74).

This is not the spirit in which I stated and responded to my titular question. Rather than opening with a set of prescriptive recommendations about reading modern Chinese literature in English, I began with description by asking: “What is modern Chinese literature in English?” That is to say, what selection of works by twentieth-century Chinese writers were available

“in English” (via translation or otherwise) to a global anglophone readership?

When were these works made available? What conditions drove their publication? Who wrote them, and who were their intended readers? These questions led ultimately to a “how to” question, namely: How to assess the historical formation of anglophone Chinese writing?

I found, in B. Venkat Mani’s Recoding World Literature (2017), a productive method for grasping the emergence and circulation of anglophone

Chinese writing across the twentieth century. As with Mani, I am not interested in “offering another argument against reading in translation” (5). He argues that scholars who caution against writing for, and reading in, translation (he mentions Apter and Spivak here) are fixated on “presentist concerns of globalization and the purported cultural homogeneity that comes

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with it” (5; see also 28-9). As opposed to these scholars, who are critiquing the contemporary industry of world literature studies, Mani proposes a print- cultural investigation of world literature which attends to the material conditions facilitating its emergence at key periods in history, and which stresses the gains made through translation and transcultural exchanges.

Likewise, I am invested in studying the historical conditions under which the exchanges between China and the anglophone West led to the formation and circulation of anglophone Chinese writing in the world. Focusing on what

Mani calls “the nodes, the agencies, the points of transfer that become key to the construction of world literary spaces and collections and inventories,” my research suggests that the anglophone Chinese literary network emerged around the middle of the 1930s, roughly two decades after the start of the New

Culture movement and right before the Second Sino-Japanese War (38). This network was led by a handful of bilingual Chinese writers who were connected to nodes in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S. They worked with editors, intellectual collectives, presses, universities, non-governmental organisations, and state agencies, all of which contributed to the incubation, publication, and circulation of anglophone

Chinese writing. These entities are part of a larger international literary infrastructure which made the imagination and realisation of “world literature” possible in the first place, regardless of whether “world literature” is defined as an ideal, a canon, a mode of writerly or critical practice, or as various concrete projects.

By way of conclusion, I will now summarise and refract my arguments through current scholarship on world literature, which I have drawn from

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implicitly throughout this study. I make four key points: First, anglophone

Chinese writing as world literature is located, following Mani’s formulation,

“at the intersection of libraries, translations, and the publishing industries”

(“Bibliomigrancy” 285); it is, in David Damrosch’s words, “less a set of works than a network” (What 3). Second, I suggest that anglophone Chinese writers were largely operating with a demotic model of world literature that prioritises simplicity and accessibility. They tend to focus on what is gained in translation (or by writing in English) rather than what is lost, because of their commitment to international understanding in an era marked by conflict between political factions within China, and by tensions between China,

Japan, and the U.S. Third, I argue for a women-centred perspective to charting the history of anglophone Chinese writing. This supplements prevailing attention to male writers such as Lin Yutang and Lao She, or American female writers such as Pearl S. Buck and Agnes Smedley. Fourth, in line with the

“how-to” ethos of the self-help genre, I offer the conceptual metaphor

“beside/s” as a heuristic for orienting these Chinese women in relation to modernism, such that the dis/connections between literary developments in

Chinese and Anglo-American contexts can be drawn out. The term’s affiliative prong, “beside,” has to do with proximities and affinities. It asks:

Did these women meet or communicate with modernist writers? When and where were their encounters? Were they working in the same cities or institutions? How did they influence each other? Conversely, the term’s disaffiliative prong, “besides,” stresses difference, divergences, and dislocations. It reminds the critic that these Chinese women’s writings should not be subsumed within modernist paradigms of what constitute literary merit.

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A Worldly Network

For Mani, the pre- and interwar period saw promising developments regarding the proliferation of world literature as a cosmopolitan ideal within and beyond

Germany, an ideal that was later distorted and instrumentalised by the Nazi state (Recoding 132-3). This period saw a revitalisation of Germany’s literary culture due to rising literacy rates, an expanding publishing industry, the publication of book series and anthologies related to world literature, and increasing numbers of public libraries (132-3; 139-47). Beyond Germany,

Mani mentions two Nobel laureates—Rabindranath Tagore, who won the prize in 1913, and Romain Rolland, who won in 1915—who were working with a vision of world literature that includes Germany, India, and France. In

1923, Rolland came up with the idea of a world library (Weltbibliothek) which would house important literary works and host exchanges between intellectuals from around the world; this concept was inspired by the university founded by Tagore outside of Calcutta (138-9). Tagore and

Mahatma Gandhi gave the German translation rights for their works to

Rolland’s German-language publisher, Rotapfel Verlag, in support of the establishment of the Weltbibliothek (139). While Rolland’s project would ultimately fail, it nevertheless illustrates the grand ambitions of cosmopolitan writers during this era who were experimenting with inclusive models of world literature.

According to Jing Tsu, the earliest invocations of world literature in

China emerged around the same period. The late-Qing official Chen Jitong was probably the earliest proponent of world literature. Prompted by the asymmetrical literary exchanges between China and Europe, Chen argues in

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1898 that China must participate in world literature (shijie de wenxue) to expand its global presence (“Getting Ideas” 293-4). This requires

…translation on a grand scale. Not only should we bring

others’ masterworks into our language but our own works of

merit must also be translated en masse into theirs. (Trans. in

Jing Tsu, “Getting Ideas” 294)

The first half of this equation, which involves bringing the world to China, was realised over the next three to four decades, with Zheng Zhenduo playing a prominent role (“Getting Ideas” 299-315). In 1920, Zheng echoes Chen’s comments in the preface to the debut issue of Wenxue Xunkan (Literature

Trimonthly): “To sever relations with the world’s literature is to sever contact with humanity’s highest spiritual,” Zheng writes, and he advocates

“introducing world literature to China, on the one hand, and […] creating the literature of China, on the other, in order to contribute to the world’s literary domain” (trans. in Jing Tsu, “Getting Ideas” 300). In these earlier invocations of world literature, both Chen and Zheng’s preoccupations with China’s global positioning vis-à-vis great or rising nations appear to reduce “world literature” to an instrument of nation building and of accumulating cultural influence. For instance, Zheng argues that China should follow the examples of Ireland,

Japan, and Poland, all of which have “acquired their luster” in the world of letters, whereas “the Indians, the Semites [youtai], and the Portuguese are showing their blades” (trans. in Jing Tsu, “Getting Around” 300). Alongside many May Fourth intellectuals, Zheng believes that translating the world’s literatures into Chinese will contribute new perspectives to Chinese

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modernisation.49 Simultaneously, he sees the translation of Chinese literature into the world’s languages as a means of establishing China’s international prominence.

Two years later, Zheng would elaborate on the more idealistic facets of his vision in “A View on the Unification of Literature” (1922). Here, he pushes a Gorky-influenced vision of literary universalism, wherein “the world’s literatures are exactly a reflection of the spirit and sentiments of its people,” with “no separation by country or people” (61-2). Against the backdrop of a tumultuous decade that saw the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the power struggle between Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai, the conflicts of the

Warlord Era, the First World War, and the May Fourth protests against

Western and Japanese imperialism, Zheng suggests that the empathy induced by world literature will foster peace: “If people see in literature their own sentiments, their crying and painful sentiments, how can they still torture each other?” (62). To this end, Zheng envisions a unified discipline of literature— like that of philosophy—which underscores the interconnections between literature in different cultures and languages‚ facilitated by reading expansively in translation (59-64). Inspired by H.G. Wells’s The Outline of

History (1920), Zheng later attempts what he calls “the first general history of literature” (67) with Wenxue Dagang (The Outline of Literature, 1927). He was subsequently chief editor for the book series Shijie Wenku (The World’s

Literary Collection), published by the Shanghai Life Bookshop from 1935

49 For example, Lu Xun argues in “Some Thoughts on Our New Literature” (1929) that “we must read more foreign books, to break through the cordon around us” (288). “Cordon” serves as his metaphor for the barriers between the “common people” of China and the foreign world, which is gatekept by cultural intermediaries (286).

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(Chan 467). In its first two years, this series translated over a hundred titles from across Europe and the U.S., bringing literature from mainly the global

North to China (Chen Yugang 284; Chan 467).

While Zheng’s translation projects brought the world to China, the writers mentioned in this study brought China to the anglophone world. Some works of anglophone Chinese writing conform to Damrosch’s model of world literature, in the sense that they are texts that “circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (What 4). Examples include the numerous translated anthologies of Lu Xun’s writings. But many others are translations or original works in English produced outside of mainland China, in collaboration with foreign entities, and for a global anglophone readership. Works of this order are better described, in

Walkowitz’s words, as texts “written by migrants and for an international audience, that exist from the beginning in several places” (“Unimaginable

Largeness” 223). Most of the works mentioned in this study belong to this latter category. For example, Yang Buwei’s cookbook and autobiography were written in the U.S. and were supported by Yuen Ren Chao, Hu Shih, Lin

Yutang, Pearl S. Buck, and Richard Walsh, all of whom made numerous trips across the Pacific, but who also organised themselves around the John Day

Company in New York. Likewise, Ling Shuhua’s memoir Ancient Melodies was written in England with extensive input from the Bloomsbury Group and subsequently published by the Hogarth Press.

While Yang and Ling’s projects attest to the collaborative nature of an international literary network, the backstory to Eileen Chang’s The Rice-

Sprout Song reveals the impingement of China-U.S. geopolitical rivalries on

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anglophone Chinese writing. Chang’s story parallels that of Nieh Hualing’s in

Taipei, where Nieh served as a translator and editor with the USIS-affiliated

Heritage Press. These twinned nodes of anti-communist literary production were countered by Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press, which produced

English translations of pro-Communist works such as Zhao Shuli’s Changes in Li Village and Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River. State- commissioned literature was thus produced on both sides of the bamboo curtain and circulated to an international readership. This phenomenon demands a critical practice that reads such examples of world literature with and against the grain of the Cultural Cold War that both funded and constrained mid-century literary expression.

My cartographical tracings of anglophone Chinese writing challenge

Pascale Casanova’s assertion that Paris was the cultural capital of the World

Republic of Letters (2004) from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century, even as she allows that London and New York competed for dominance within the anglophone realm (11; 23-34; 117-9). Joe Cleary similarly takes issue with

Casanova’s conception of a “singular or uniform” world literary system, proposing instead that

a number of rather discrete (even if sometimes overlapping)

“literary worlds” have co-existed, some of these more or less

indifferent to Paris or certainly not nearly as subservient to its

pre-eminence as Casanova assumes. (209)

He points out that in Casanova’s account, “China, its literary domains or cultural capitals is simply not registered” (209). Likewise, Paris does not feature in my study, though the city was linked to other significant Chinese

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figures. For example, Tcheng Yu-hsiu, China’s first female lawyer and judge, studied for six years at the Sorbonne and received her Doctor of Laws in 1924

(Wei 106-8; 138). Also at the Sorbonne was the literary scholar and writer

Qian Zhongshu, who studied there from 1937 to 1938 (Zhang Longxi 82). In the art world, Paris hosted May Fourth painters such as Xu Beihong, Lin

Fengmian, Liu Haisu, Sanyu, and Pan Yuliang, all of whom drew on European techniques to break new ground in Chinese painting and calligraphy (Tong

141).50 But for the women at the core of my study, other cities featured prominently in their international careers, including Shanghai, Beijing, Hong

Kong, Taipei, London, New York, New Haven, Iowa City, and Cambridge,

Massachusetts. Their movement between these cities were enabled by their bilingualism, their cosmopolitan outlooks, and their social ties to key figures and institutions. The connections these women forged speak to their canniness in parlaying social capital (i.e. the value of knowing important people) into cultural capital (i.e. the accumulation of literary recognition and prestige).

Their itineraries speak to a polycentric model of world literature, as opposed to a unified world literary system headquartered in one capital city.

A Demotic Model of World Literature

Mani notes that the German writer Herman Hesse worked with a democratic model of world literature which “embraces the ordinary reader, the cheap edition, the material artifact of the book, the act of reading in translation, and, most of all, the democratizing of the act of selection” (151). A similar

50 For more on Paris’s influence on modern Chinese cultural production, see for instance Angie Christine Chau’s dissertation Dreams and Disillusionment (2012) and Nicolai Volland’s “In Search of the City of Light” (2019).

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inclination towards the demotic can be found in the projects of the anglophone

Chinese writers mentioned in this study. From the interwar to the mid-century period, anglophone Chinese writing was in short supply. In response, bilingual

Chinese writers contributed to a nascent global print industry facilitating

China-related publications and translations in English, with a focus on the translatable and the accessible, due to a combination of pragmatic reasons and loftier ideals. Some were working in exile due to upheavals in China throughout the first half of the twentieth century, so they had to seek foreign readerships to survive. But many also felt the urgency of representing this transformative period of Chinese history for a global readership.

Consider the case of Yang Buwei; in her autobiography, she acknowledges the unsettling effect of writing in English by describing her work as “a portrait of a Chinese woman in oil painting” that looks

“inescapably foreign to a Chinese eye” (xi). Her metaphor suggests that the process of re-staging the self in a foreign medium, for a foreign readership, will inevitably alienate some “native” readers, who may criticise the resultant work for being inauthentic or even self-exoticising. However, and quite unlike

Owen and Apter, Yang and her cohort were less fixated on valorising the untranslatable; rather, they prioritised making the translatable accessible to anglophone readers. Accessibility here refers to two things: the material availability of anglophone Chinese writing, which is achieved through the business of producing and circulating literature, and also the writerly choices that make Chinese writing easily comprehensible to a general anglophone readership. Most of the works studied in this thesis are written in a stream of simple, readable prose. Recall that Yang’s style was inspired by Basic

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English, a system of 850 words designed for second-language users of

English, which was promoted after the Second World War as a utopian project that would facilitate international communication and world peace. Nieh

Hualing’s Eight Stories by Chinese Women (1962) further exemplifies this commitment to accessibility. In the anthology, Nieh dons three caps as an editor, translator, and writer of anglophone Chinese literature. Her breezy introduction mentions important women writers from the Han, Qin, and Song dynasties, surveys literature by May Fourth women, then briefly assesses the state of women’s writing in early sixties Taiwan. Nieh touches on the labour conditions of women writers in her time:

Most writers have to supplement their income by other means;

most women writers have to help their husbands support the

family. Some are editors, others are teachers and civil service

employees. (ix)

Here, women’s freedom to work and write is no longer described in emancipatory terms. Instead, Nieh highlights the pressures women face across both professional and domestic realms, while noting the undervalued nature of writing as a vocation. The stories she translates are meant to offer “a fair sampling of the short stories written in the last few years by Chinese women writers, in Taiwan and abroad” (x). In these ways, Nieh’s slim anthology makes modern Chinese women’s writing a legible and accessible genre for anglophone readers, while also surveying its pre-modern lineage and its contemporary conditions of production.

Nieh and her peers saw anglophone Chinese writing as a means of bridging the rift between China and the West, which has been deepened by the

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“century of humiliation” stretching from the First Opium War to the founding of the PRC (1839-1949). One articulation of this cosmopolitan sentiment can be found in an English-language speech given by Eileen Chang on numerous occasions between 1966 to 1969, which Christopher Lee has recovered from the archives at the University of Southern California. Titled “Chinese

Translation: A Vehicle of Cultural Influence,” the text documents Chang’s historical understanding and working theory of translation culture in the

Chinese context. She describes two peak periods during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The first involves Lin Shu’s prolific translations of foreign literature into classical Chinese, which were done in collaboration with oral interpreters (491). His efforts overlapped with the vernacular turn of the

New Culture and May Fourth movements, during which “the best of the West” was translated into baihua, then read with an eye to rebuilding China as a modern nation—Chang mentions Tolstoy, Marx, Russell, Dewey,

Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, and Hans Christian Andersen (491-2). The next phase is led by Xiaoshuo Yuebao (Fiction Monthly, 1921-32), a literary magazine that printed the earliest stories of famous May Fourth writers and translations of nineteenth to twentieth-century Western and Japanese literature

(e.g. Bernard Shaw, Wilde, Kikuchi Kan and Akutagawa Ryunosuke) (493-4).

This golden era ended when the magazine’s publisher, The Commercial Press, was “hit by a Japanese bomb during the fighting in Shanghai,” a catastrophe from which the state of Chinese translation never quite recovered (493).

Following the Chinese Civil War, “[b]oth Chinas play[ed] down the May

Fourth Movement and suppress[ed] its literature for being too liberal” (496).

Thereafter, the Cultural Revolution suppressed foreign literature on the

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mainland, whereas in Taiwan, translations leaned towards escapist writing and already prestigious works, with film adaptations exerting a disproportionate influence on the print industry (496).51 In closing, Chang laments the dismal state of literary exchanges between China and the West during the late sixties, which “fall[s] far short of the auspicious beginning seventy years ago” (496).

She critiques a mutual state of parochialism, where “the Western view of

China is as set and restricted as the Chinese conception of the West” (496-7).

As Lee puts it, Chang’s speech is “itself a performance of translation” that traces the history of literary translation in China for a U.S. audience (“Chinese

Translation” 489). Further, Chang’s own (self-)translation projects—which she modestly neglects to mention—signal her commitment to transcultural and translingual literary exchanges despite the unfavourable conditions of the mid- century period.

Women in World Literature

My women-centred focus is meant to address the problem of the hypercanon and related issues of gender representation in World Literature studies.

Damrosch argues that the impossibility of engaging meaningfully with the vast expanses of the literary world has created a coping mechanism: the formation of a hypercanon, where “as in some literary Miss Universe competition, an entire nation may be represented by a single author” (48). In the domain of non-Western women’s writing, such overinvestments in a single

51 Chang mentions film adaptations of literature and drama such as The Great Gatsby (1949), The Moon is Blue (1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and numerous Hemingway-linked releases such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and The Sun Also Rises (1957).

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writer are compounded, because the elected writer implicitly stands in for her nation’s literature, its women’s history, and the radical alterity of the non-

West. Deborah Castillo’s 2012 survey of World Literature anthologies published in the U.S. suggests that Eileen Chang is one of few non-Western women, and usually the only Chinese woman, included in such compilations; as with her peers, she serves double duty in the “gender” and “non-Western” sections (400-1). This pattern speaks to the commodification of identitarian pluralism in academic publishing, where “the need to sell to a textbook market requires what Chandra Mohanty calls ‘carefully placed and domesticated’ token voices” (Castillo 394; Mohanty 212).

Inspired by the tenets of feminist recovery work, my study responds to the above problematic by consolidating a network of women writers who led the anglophonic turn to modern Chinese literature. I recuperate less-discussed names such as Yang Buwei, Ling Shuhua, and Nieh Hualing, while situating them alongside other women who worked in English, including Helena Kuo,

Dymia Hsiung, Ida Pruitt, Gladys Yang, and Han Suyin. At various points, I connect their mid-century efforts to Chinese-language writing by May Fourth women such as Chen Hengzhe, Bing Xin, Xie Bingying, Su Xuelin, and Ding

Ling. By thinking of these women as a network, I attend to the heterogeneity of their political thought and aesthetic concerns, while appreciating the overlaps and resonances between their work. In comparison to Eileen Chang, many of these women—even those from the May Fourth generation—have been neglected in World Literature studies. Their texts do not have an

“effective life as world literature” because they are no longer “actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (Damrosch, What

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4). But this should not disqualify their authors from being considered as significant world writers. Rather, their obscure works may shed new light on world literary history precisely because they have been excluded from it.

Indeed, these women’s works and biographies teach us plenty about

China and the world. When read together, their stories describe an epochal shift where the social, artistic, and political freedoms of the May Fourth era were curtailed by the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. Driven by extenuating circumstances, these intellectuals among others migrated to anglophone territories and began working in English. Yang’s Autobiography of a Chinese Woman in particular captures the transition from the Republican- era exchanges between China and the West—a relatively prosperous period of intellectual ferment from roughly 1919 to 1937—to the exodus of Chinese writers from the mainland beginning in the late thirties. This transition is also emblematically captured by the movements of Ling’s friendship scroll. It first followed Xu Zhimo to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway in 1925, then subsequently returned to Ling, who met Julian Bell at Wuhan University in

1935. In contrast to this earlier period of leisurely tours and vibrant scholarly exchanges, the scroll’s journey to London in 1946, and its sojourn in

Singapore between 1956 to 1960, were trips undertaken in the shade of the

Chinese Civil War and the Cold War. As for Chang, she left mainland China in 1952 and migrated to the U.S. via Hong Kong. Shuang Shen argues that this individual journey

indexed a significant shift and an important threshold in

modern Chinese literary history … After this period, one

cannot speak of modern Chinese literary history without

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evoking an acute awareness of the borders of the nation-state

that separate those inside from the outside. (“A Provocation”

568-9)

Over a decade later, Chang’s essay “A Return to the Frontier” would reflect on the moment she crossed the Lo Wu Bridge that connects Communist

Shenzhen to British Hong Kong:

That fateful bridge has often been compared to the Naiho

Bridge between the realms of the living and the dead … Too

bad that many of us have to go back over that bridge when we

can’t make a living outside. (40)

Written in English, these words express the precarity faced by Chinese writers living in geographical and linguistic exile, for whom returning to the mainland is potentially a death sentence. Taken together, these case studies among others mentioned in my thesis register how the U.S., the U.K., and their associated territories and proxies, offered refuge to Chinese writers fleeing from Japanese-occupied or Communist China. Correspondingly, working and writing in English became a matter of course for these writers, a development that contributed to the growing hegemony of English as a global lingua franca and a hegemonic language of world literature.

However, anglophone Chinese writing is also defined positively by literary experimentation and cosmopolitan ideals. Yang’s How to Cook and

Eat in Chinese developed anglophone conventions for describing Chinese cooking, which include the neologisms “stir fry” and “potsticker.” Her autobiography offers a form of “modest history” that pushed at the boundaries of women’s life writing—then a relatively new genre within the Chinese

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context. Ling, in her memoir, offers an idiosyncratic selection and translation of Chinese classics comprising six Tang poems, a Song essay, and three anecdotes from the Warring States period, which were taught to her in childhood by one Tutor Ben. These represent some of the titular “ancient melodies” that pervade her artistic unconsciousness: “When I look at anything beautiful or am in a poetic mood, I often unconsciously chant the verses I learnt from him” (Ling Chen 124). Writing in mid-century London, Ling continues the spirit of Beijing School writers in Republican China, many of whom rejected the mainstream May Fourth discourse of anti-traditionalism and iconoclasm, and who believed instead in “recuperating the traditional as constitutive of the modern” (Shih, Lure 152; 205). Then, consider Chang’s numerous projects of translation and self-translation, which scholars have theorised as sites of cross-cultural mediation that contended with the geopolitics of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the Communist-Nationalist split, and the Cold War.52 One oft-cited cluster of Chang’s self-translations is linked to the novella “Jinsuo Ji” (1943); versions of this work include the unpublished Pink Tears (rewritten between 1956 to 1958), Yuannü

(1966/1968), The Rouge of the North (1967/1988), and “The Golden Cangue”

(1971) (Li 392). Jessica Li argues that these obsessive self-translations overwrite notions of an originating source text and language, and “suggests instead a multiple and non-hierarchical structure for the process of translation”

52 See Jessica Li’s “Self-translation/rewriting” (2010), Shuang Shen’s “Betrayal, Impersonation, and Bilingualism” (2012), Wang Xiaojue’s “The Politics of Rewriting” in Modernity with a Cold War Face (2013), Sun Yifeng’s “Transition and Transformation” (2013), Shan Te-hsing’s “Eileen Chang as a Chinese Translator of American Literature” (2014), Christopher Lee’s editorial work on Chang’s “Chinese Translation: A Vehicle of Cultural Influence” (2015), and Maria L. Bo’s “Freedom Over Seas” (2019).

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(393). Xiaojue Wang describes Chang’s self-translations as “prolific repetitions” and “trans-lingual and trans-generic fission of works devoted to the portrayal of epochal transitions,” which “confound the apparently relentless Cold War dichotomy [of Communism versus anti-Communism]”

(Modernity 295). These appraisals suggest that while Chang’s anglophonic turn was, like those of her contemporaries, prompted by various crises and political exigencies, it was also marked by a degree of writerly agency.

Together, these women’s writings offer complex portraits of twentieth-century

Chinese literature and history, which refuse easy polarities such as China versus the West, tradition versus modernity, or Second World versus the First.

Gender and Time

So far, I have positioned these writers within the context of a mid-century

Chinese diaspora, and I have addressed issues of geographical and linguistic migration in relation to crises within and beyond China. But what is specifically gendered about their experiences of, and writings on, this phenomenon? One unifying thread throughout my study is that Yang, Ling, and Chang’s writings offer appraisals and critiques of Chinese modernity that implicate gender in imaginations of historical, national, and/or quotidian time.

Their texts defy a longstanding tendency—at least in generalist accounts of

Chinese history—to imagine “China” as a “politically continuous entity thousands of years old,” when in fact, the PRC was only founded in 1949

(Millward par. 22). According to James Millward, this practice stretches back to Sima Qian’s (c. 145-86 BCE) Records of History, which “locked in a historiographic model that represents China as a succession of legitimate

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dynasties, each comprised of a succession of legitimate emperors, each state writing its predecessor (and enemy) into its own origin story” (par. 22).

Yang’s Autobiography, which I described as “modest history,” contests such imaginations of legitimate succession by depicting the modern period as a history of frayed ends, involving major upheavals, abortive revolutions, promising social transformations, and subsequent disappointments, ending with her (happy enough) migration to the U.S. that leaves behind war-torn

China. Her minor role in the 1911 revolution, her exilic experiences in Japan and the U.S., her disappointment with having to specialise in gynaecology and obstetrics over internal medicine and contagious diseases, her pioneering role as a birth control reformer in Beijing, her subsequent retreat from the medical profession back into domesticity, and the ingenuity she demonstrates by leveraging her culinary talents to produce a ground-breaking cookbook, all speak to the resilience and ingenuity of modern Chinese women who ran up against limits imposed on them by historical forces, but who persisted in pushing boundaries. Yang makes her personal experience of the twentieth century speak to how the development of women’s emancipation in China is, in Tani Barlow’s words, “not a history of winners” (3), but remains only a partially fulfilled aspiration of the May Fourth generation.

In contrast to the sprawling scope of Yang’s autobiography, Ling’s short stories generally deal with the domestic and quotidian lives of upper- class women, but they also attend to the mechanisms of competing ideologies and social practices that impinge on women’s privacy and time. In particular,

“What’s the Point of It?” lyricises the pressures exerted on an emergent class of women scholars, each with its own relentless pace. By taking the reader

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through a day in the life of Ru Pi, Ling sketches out the daily grind of social obligations and domestic chores, the time of biological reproduction, the pace of state-led reformation, and the accelerating rhythms of capitalism in the mid- thirties, all of which drive Ru Pi into a state of ennui and forestalls her writing.

Ling develops this theme in “A Poet Goes Mad” (1937), also co- translated with Julian Bell, in which she offers a fantastical vision of what fulfilment might look like for the woman scholar. In the story, the poet Che

Hsing leaves his monastic retreat in the mountains to attend to his neglected and ostensibly ill wife, Song Ch’eng. Ling portrays the latter as a ghostly figuration of the repressed woman scholar; she suffers from ennui and lethargy, is “always asleep with a book in her hand,” and later “gave up sleeping at night … wander[ing] out into the courtyard, sometimes with a book” (410). On one of her nightly jaunts, Song Ch’eng visits her husband in his study, as if she is a spirit beguiling a hapless male scholar in the style of Pu

Songling’s classic, Liaozhai Ziyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, 1766).

In Pu’s stories of the bizarre and the marvellous, the feminine (yin) typically takes the form of ghosts or fox spirits. Some are benign or self-redemptive presences that play a supporting role to their male lovers’ scholar-official careers, as in “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag” (Tale 41); others are malevolent, vampiric agents that seduce and eventually ruin the male scholar– as in “Fox Enchantment” (Tale 38). Ling echoes such tropes by having Song

Ch’eng lure her husband into the garden, where he experiences nature anew in the moonlight and night mists; at one point, Che Hsing exclaims: “This is the first time I have ever heard an oriole sing so beautifully” (420). As Shu-mei

Shih puts it, Song Ch’eng is “a poet in tune with nature … [who] speaks in a

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language rich with a kind of modern lyricism” (Lure 227). She inspires her husband to “live the lyricism that for him has [only ever] been mediated by written culture” (227). The story ends with the couple enjoying a life of sauntering down garden paths together and working in the study, with villagers gossiping that both have gone mad (Ling, “Poet” 421). Ling implies that in her time, the only way in which society can conceive of a female intellectual as an equal to her scholarly husband, is to cast her in the role of a madwoman or as one of Pu Songling’s parasitical ghosts. But Ling’s concluding image of conjugal bliss is also a feminist rewriting of such views.

Song Ch’eng leads her husband towards a new way of living, studying, and creating art, as equal partners, that ignores societal conventions.

Chang’s stories likewise capture the sense that the freedoms promised by modernisation are not always available to women, despite the May Fourth discourse of women’s emancipation, and despite related reforms such as the

Republican Civil Code of 1929-1931, which granted new protections to wives and concubines. Chang’s brand of allochronic realism depicts women as if they have fallen out of the present into the past, signifying the ways in which they continue to be forced by society into restrictive traditional roles. Chang’s depiction of Ch’i-ch’iao in “The Golden Cangue” as a pinned butterfly offers a succinct image of this sentiment (Fallen City 186). Likewise, Chang’s portrayal of the Bai household in “Love in a Fallen City”—a household that refuses to turn their clocks forward by an hour to match daylight savings— renders them literally “behind the times” (111). By implication, their appalling treatment of their widowed daughter, Liusu, is cast as a form of outmoded misogyny that persists in modern Shanghai. In Rice-Sprout Song, Chang

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extends her critique to the Land Reform movement, where the abolishment of the landlord class in the countryside and the redistribution of property to the peasants led only to further disappointments, famine, oppression, and deaths.

Chang’s cadres and peasants do not experience the Communist promises of liberation as “progress.” Some, like Comrade Ku, feel a sense of temporal and spatial disjunction, given the bewildering differences between official propaganda and his own experiences of reality (84). Others, like Big Aunt, experience the Land Reform as a repetition of traumatic events from the Sino-

Japanese War (128-39). Through such lyrical instantiations of allochronism,

Chang critiques the state of uneven modernities in Chinese history, where the freedoms, mobilities, and privileges brought about by modernisation are not always extended to disenfranchised groups, especially not women.

Taken together, the writings of Yang, Ling, and Chang suggest that from women’s perspective, Chinese modernity was not primarily defined by a sense of progress or political succession, but by disenchantment or even—to use Chang’s favourite word—“desolation” (Written 17). Their works flesh out the fractured and conflictual state of relations between older conventions, competing ideological factions, and world historical crises, all of which stalled the programmes of women’s liberation that began during the May Fourth era.

The Women Beside/s Modernism

We might think of these three women and their relation to modernism in terms of a spectrum. Each of their careers is marked by varying degrees of connections to, and influence from, “modernism proper,” which might be conceived as a canon of texts and figures, a print-material network, a set of

337

recognisable literary styles, and so forth. In Ling Shuhua’s case, the

Bloomsbury Group seems to have had an almost unidirectional and outsized influence on her anglophone efforts. Her meeting with Julian Bell was a result of his employment at Wuhan University, where he taught a course on modern

British literature that may have included To the Lighthouse (Laurence, Lily

44). His presence in China hints at the ongoing canonisation and institutionalisation of British modernism abroad. Further, Ling’s first forays into self-translation were edited by Bell; later, her correspondence with his aunt, Virginia Woolf, led to the writing and publication of her memoir. In these ways, Ling’s contact with modernism conforms largely to Simon

Gikandi’s model in “Modernism in the World” (2006), where he argues that

“modernism represents perhaps the most intense and unprecedented site of encounter between the institutions of European cultural production and the cultural practices of colonized peoples” (421). Gikandi locates two mid- century nodes of modernist dissemination at University College, Ibadan, and

University College, Makerere, both of which produced famous African writers such as J. P. Clarke, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo (422). While

Gikandi never quite says it in these terms, he is advancing a strong account of modernism as world literature that influenced significant literary movements in the non-West across the twentieth century. Following Franco Moretti’s twinned cognitive metaphors of trees and waves, Gikandi’s understanding of modernism in the world might be thought of as “a wave that runs into the branches of local traditions” (Moretti 67).

At the same time, however, Gikandi’s model is conceptually over reliant on arboreal-genealogical notions of direct influence, which posit

338

modernism as the germinal site of postcolonial African literature. He argues at one point that “without modernism, postcolonial literature as we know it would perhaps not exist” (421). This is demonstrably not true of modern

Chinese literature on the whole, despite its extensive borrowings from

Western literature; nor is it true of anglophone Chinese writing, which drew inspiration from Chinese classics, New Culture literature, and multiple lineages of foreign literature. Further, the work of some May Fourth writers not only broke conventions in China, but would have been considered radical in the modernist capitals of London and Paris. This places them among an international avant-garde that preceded, or was contemporaneous with, their

Anglo-European peers. Returning to the example of Ling’s short stories, recall that “Shuo you zheme yihuishi” (1926) offers a portrayal of same-sex love between college women that preceded the earliest works of queer literature in

Anglo-American modernism. Consider also Ling’s almost exclusive use of dialogue in “Writing a Letter” (1937), in which an illiterate woman relates her life story to a silent woman scholar. This is an experiment in a kind of occlusive narration that represents only the surface of a quotidian conversation, but which implies the complex dynamics between the two women separated by class divide, and their vastly different positions in, and perspectives on, society. Ling’s technique is significant in its radical divergence from extensive uses of stream-of-consciousness or free indirect discourse in modernist writing that lyricises the inner thoughts of characters.

My study of the relations between anglophone Chinese writing and modernism thus also highlights the need for alternative models of analysis that, in Haun Saussy’s words, look beyond “tree-shaped comparativism”

339

(338). Saussy offers an alternative model by conceiving of reading as “a collision” between unexpected elements (338). Each addition to the chain of collision demands an account of a mutual coherence that “produce[s], rather than discover[s], meanings” (339). Kenneth Reinhard likewise argues for comparative methods where texts are “not so much grouped into ‘families’ defined by similarity and difference, as into ‘neighbourhoods determined by accidental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter” (785).

Citing Saussy and Reinhard among others, Susan Stanford Friedman argues for a dynamic “juxtapositional model of comparison [that] sets things being compared side by side, not overlapping them as in a Venn diagram, not setting up one as the standard of measure for the other, not using one as an instrument to serve the other” (“Why” 758).

My own approach places anglophone Chinese writing “beside/s” modernism. The contiguities implied by my term refer mainly to the institutional or print-material networks that put anglophone Chinese writers and modernists within the same “neighbourhood,” to use Reinhard’s term.

This offers the grounds of comparison from which I examine the different directions their roughly contemporaneous projects took. However, the “tree” model of charting literary genealogies should not be cast aside. Rather,

“trees,” “waves,” and “beside/s” among other conceptual metaphors should be taken as complementary tools in the critic’s tool kit. Take the case of Yang

Buwei’s relation to modernism; her contact with Bertrand Russell and Dora

Black puts her in the proximity of the Bloomsbury Group, but this did not seem to have had an extensive impact on her writing style or medical practice.

Rather, it was Margaret Sanger’s sex education manual, What Every Girl

340

Should Know (1916), which inspired Yang’s work as a birth control reformer.

Yet, a case can be made for the Bloomsbury Group’s indirect influence on

Yang’s Autobiography (1947). Starting from the late twenties, Chinese women experimented with life writing; examples include Xie Bingying’s Conjun Riji

(War Diary, 1929) and Chen Hengzhe’s Autobiography of a Chinese Young

Girl (1935). This development within China met up with modernism in the thirties. During this period, Virginia Woolf inspired Bing Xin and Ling

Shuhua to pen autobiographies, whereas works like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent

Victorians were translated into Chinese to exemplify the possibilities of biographical writing. Yang’s autobiography belongs to this feminine subgenre of modern Chinese literature that drew from Bloomsbury modernism among other sources. In my account of Chinese women’s life writing, I consolidate a tree-shaped lineage of women’s life writing in China, while also considering the encounters and contiguities between Chinese and modernist writers that contributed to its development.

In my chapter on Eileen Chang, “beside/s” functions in the negative by pointing to the author’s dislocations from modernist figures and contexts. As I have argued, Chang’s connections to Western writers involves largely modernism-adjacent characters such as H. G. Wells and Somerset Maugham.

Yet, critics have repeatedly cast her as a Chinese “modernist” in recent times.

One of the clearest articulations of Chang’s purportedly modernist aesthetics comes from Eric Sandberg, who argues that she expresses “an interest in the everyday,” which is “a defining feature of modernism more generally” (237).

But when it comes to arguments driven by text-internal analysis of style and theme, one critic’s modernism is another’s realism. Shuang Shen contrastively

341

argues that Chang’s fascination with “the everydayness of violence and trauma” is a “realism” that is inspired by the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

School and classic Chinese vernacular fiction, particularly Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century novel Dream of Red Chambers (“Provocation” 570-1). For

Shuang Shen, Chang’s focus on the quotidian defies the “canonical realism” of Chinese literature during the thirties to forties, which were marked by grand

“political ideals of revolution or nationalism” (571). My take on such disagreements is that the generally unconvincing recruitments of Chang into the New Modernist Studies are symptomatic of a calcified modernism-realism binary that was inherited from the Cold War era. Such interpretive protocols tend to read diasporic Chinese writing as a strain of modernism aligned with the First World, as opposed to more esoteric realisms that diverged from the social(ist) realism prevalent on the Communist mainland. In this context,

Chang’s dislocations from modernist networks lead me to conceive of her style as a brand of allochronic realism that falls somewhere between modernist and social realist aesthetics.

In sum, “beside/s” offers a way of framing the serendipitous encounters or sustained exchanges between disparate writers, social circles, institutions, literary canons, and cultural lineages. It encourages a vision of world literature as not one that is determined by a singular standard of literary time—as in Casanova’s “literary Greenwich meridian” (Republic 4)—but by multiple meetings between contemporaries, in a relation that is defined first by coevalness and collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, “beside/s” draws attention to the neglected figures, works, and contexts that have always been next to more familiar entities. In my case, “beside/s” co-implicates the history

342

of anglophone Chinese writing with that of Euro-American modernism. It recovers the neglected women beside/s the famous men of May Fourth literature and high modernism. It draws attention to the minor genres beside/s revolutionary manifestoes and autotelic novels, which include self-help texts, a cookbook, women’s life writing, essays, short stories, novellas, and state- commissioned writing. It adds to our stable of prepositional terms—such as

“before,” “after,” “ahead,” “beyond,” “for,” and “against”—that undergird critical imaginations of time and space in literary comparison.

343

344

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