Remapping the Past Leiden Series in Comparative Historiography Editors Axel Schneider Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik VOLUME 3 Remapping the Past Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979–1997 By Howard Y.F. Choy LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008 Sections of Chapter 2 have appeared in previous publications under the following titles and special thanks are due to the editors and anonymous reviewers: “‘To Construct an Unknown China’: Ethnoreligious Historiography in Zhang Chengzhi’s Islamic Fiction,” Positions: East Asia Culture Critique 14.3: 687–715. Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. “Historiographic Alternatives for China: Tibet in Contemporary Fiction by Tashi Dawa, Alai, and Ge Fei,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 12.1 (2005): 65–84. “In Quest(ion) of an ‘I’: Identity and Idiocy in Alai’s Red Poppies,” forthcoming Spring 2008 in Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, ed. Lauran Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Verdani (Duke University Press). This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Choy, Howard Y. F. (Howard Yuen Fung) Remapping the past : fictions of history in Deng’s China, 1979–1997 / By Howard Y.F. Choy. p. cm. – (Leiden series in comparative historiography) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16704-9 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chinese fiction–20th century–History and criticism. I. Title. II. Title: Fictions of history in Deng’s China, 1979–1997. PL2443.C4455 2008 895.1’090052–dc22 2008011344 ISSN 1574-4493 ISBN 978 90 04 16704 9 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands For my teachers, Cheung Ping-kuen 張秉權 and Joseph S.M. Lau 劉紹銘, who enlightened me on the subject of literature in Hong Kong and the United States, respectively. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ..................................................... ix Introduction. Narrative and Space: A Cartography of History...... 1 Chapter One. Regional Romances and Family Fables: From Root Search to New Historicism ......................................... 17 Idiocy and Idiolect: Han Shaogong’s Root Searches in Hunan .. 25 Banditry and Bastardy: Mo Yan’s Family Romances in Shandong 44 Chapter Two. The Outlying and the Peripheral: Myths of Migrants and Minorities............................................ 65 From Pacific Ocean to Gobi Desert: Wang Anyi’s Migratory Mythology ........................................................ 67 Muslim-Inhabited Loess: Zhang Chengzhi’s “Unknown China”. 79 Tibetan Plateau: Historical Alternatives by Tashi Dawa, Alai, and Ge Fei........................................................ 103 Chapter Three. From the Country to the City: Nostalgia for the Hometown .......................................................... 133 Maple Village and Fragrant Cedar Street: Su Tong’s Southern Decadence........................................................ 136 Beijing Military Compound: Wang Shuo’s Rootless Homesickness .................................................... 159 Shanghai longtang Cityscape: Wang Anyi’s Descriptive Historiography ................................................... 169 Chapter Four. The Bodily Text and the Textual Body: The Violence of History ................................................. 185 Gastrotext: Food and the Body in the Fictions of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Liu Heng ............................................. 188 The (Non)performance of Violence: Yu Hua’s Cruel Historiography ................................................... 201 !""" #$%&'%&( Typography and Topography: The Textual Body in the Works of Su Tong and Ge Fei ........................................... 214 Conclusion. Back(ward) to the Future: Toward a Retro-fiction...... 229 Appendix. What Is Held and in Whose Hand? An Etymological Reexamination of shi................................................237 Bibliography ........................................................... 249 Index ...................................................................271 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book originated from the dissertation I completed at the Univer- sity of Colorado in )**+. I want to acknowledge, first of all, Professor Howard Goldblatt, who has been serving as my academic adviser, for his constant guidance and stimulating criticism. I remain indebted to other members of my thesis committee, Professors Victoria Cass, Stephen Sny- der, Christopher Braider, and Rodney Taylor, for their relentless and insightful questioning during my defense. Wendy Larson, Wang Ban 王 斑, Hayden White, Giuliana Minghelli, Carole McGranahan, and Ken- ichi Takashima 高島謙一 also read various portions of the draft at di,er- ent stages and gave me valuable suggestions, which I greatly appreciate. My deep gratitude goes to Nicole Elizabeth Barnes and May-lee Chai 翟 梅莉 for their editorial genius, especially Nicole’s long-term friendship. I benefited from the many opportunities to discuss literature with Liu Zaifu 劉再復, who exiled himself from China after the -./. Tiananmen Square massacre and has been living in Boulder as a visiting scholar. Those literary salons at his place in the magnificent Rocky Mountains are unforgettable. I am grateful to Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Vienna, for her incisive comments on my manuscript, in particular the introduction and conclusion. I thank Albert Ho,städt, senior editor of Brill, for his warm encouragement, Patricia Radder of Brill’s Asian Studies Publishing Unit and Birgitta Poelmans for their kind assistance. Many thanks to Li Tuo 李陀 for urging me to publish my Chinese article, “Language, History, and Historiography: A Comparison between A Dictionary of Maqiao and Dictionary of the Khaz- ars” (“Yuyan, lishi he lishixiezuo—Maqiao cidian yu Hazaer cidian bijiao” 語言、歷史和歷史寫作—《馬橋詞典》與《哈扎爾辭典》比較), in Horizons (Shi- jie 視界), no. + ()**-): -00–-1.. The exchange of ideas with the author Han Shaogong 韓少功 and my colleagues at Stanford University during the former’s visit to the United States and our subsequent correspon- dence, as is evident in the notes to chapter -, were helpful in clarifying some questions I had in analyzing his novel. Sections of chapter ) have appeared in previous publications under the following titles, and special thanks are due the editors and anonymous reviewers. 2 3#4%$56'789'%&( “‘To Construct an Unknown China’: Ethnoreligious Historiography in Zhang Chengzhi’s Islamic Fiction,” positions -+.: (winter )**0): 0/1– 1-;. “Historiographic Alternatives for China: Tibet in Contemporary Fic- tion by Tashi Dawa, Alai, and Ge Fei,” American Journal of Chinese Studies -).- ()**;): 0;–/+. “In Quest(ion) of an ‘I’: Identity and Idiocy in Alai’s Red Poppies,” in Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, ed. Lauran Hartley and Patricia Schia<ni-Vedani (Durham: Duke University Press, )**/). I would also like to thank my parents, Choy Nam 蔡南 and Lo Choy Yip 勞彩葉, my sisters, Loretta Li Kuen Choy 蔡莉娟 and Dilys Lee Yu Choy 蔡莉茹, my brother-in-law Chris Kee Hung Ngai 魏基雄, and my niece Chen Di 陳荻, for their understanding and support over the years. It is grievous that my parents-in-law, Chen Guoan 陳國安 and Chiang Wai Yee 蔣惠怡, who generously sponsored my overseas study, did not live long enough to see this book. On top of the list of teachers, colleagues, friends and family is my eighteen-year classmate and lifelong companion, Shelley Wing Chan 陳 穎. Together we have spent numerous days in classrooms and libraries and nights in our various residences from Hong Kong to the United States. She fills my stomach with the most delicious food in America, my brain with the latest literary trends in China, and my heart with the purest love in this world. Together we have composed our own history of tears and laughter. "%&=$7>#&"$% NARRATIVE AND SPACE: A CARTOGRAPHY OF HISTORY Di,erent moments in historical or existential time are here simply filed in di,erent places; the attempt to combine them even locally does not slide up and down a temporal scale … but jumps back and forth across a game board that we conceptualize in terms of distance. – Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism1 If Croce’s celebrated maxim that all history is “contemporary history” can still be deemed true today, then it should be understood in Linda Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern intertextuality as “a formal man- ifestation of both a desire to close the gap between past and present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context.”2 Such inter- textuality is less a moral matter of the influence of the past upon the present than, according to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic approach, a trans- position of one system of signs into another.3 Here the new context or system of signs I refer to is China under the leadership of Deng Xiaop- ing 鄧小平 (-.*+–-..1) from -.1. to -..1, which marks not only a period of economic reforms