Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng`s China, 1979

Transcription

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.
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provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
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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
viii
contents
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 University of Colorado in 2004. 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 Snyder, 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 Kenichi Takashima 高島謙一 also read various portions of the draft at different 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 1989 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
Hoffstädt, 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 Khazars” (“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 (Shijie 視界), no. 4 (2001): 166–179. 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 correspondence, as is evident in the notes to chapter 1, were helpful in clarifying
some questions I had in analyzing his novel. Sections of chapter 2 have
appeared in previous publications under the following titles, and special
thanks are due the editors and anonymous reviewers.
x
acknowledgments
“‘To Construct an Unknown China’: Ethnoreligious Historiography
in Zhang Chengzhi’s Islamic Fiction,” positions 14.3 (winter 2006): 687–
715.
“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,” in
Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, ed. Lauran Hartley and Patricia
Schiaffini-Vedani (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
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.
introduction
NARRATIVE AND SPACE:
A CARTOGRAPHY OF HISTORY
Different moments in historical or
existential time are here simply filed
in different 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 manifestation 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 intertextuality is less a moral matter of the influence of the past upon the
present than, according to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic approach, a transposition 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 Xiaoping 鄧小平 (1904–1997) from 1979 to 1997, which marks not only a period
of economic reforms before the turn of the century, but also changing
conceptions of history in the postrevolutionary age.
1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991), 373.
2 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Sylvia Sprigge (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1941), 19:
The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all
history the character of ‘contemporary history’ because, however remote in time
events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs
and present situations wherein those events vibrate.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge,
1988), 118.
3 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 59–60.
2
introduction
In this book, I examine ‘historical fiction’, a genre so well established
that the nomenclature has become a perpetual paradox of the factual/
fictive, objective/subjective, collective/individual, and so forth. I ask how
historical fiction from the last two decades of the twentieth century came
to reconstruct and re-create China’s past while simultaneously re-defining itself in contemporary communist China. My research, however,
is not a survey of Chinese history, nor am I a historian. As Aristotle
asserts, “the poet and historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose
…. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other
what may happen.”4 To this famous characterization, we should add the
important role played by the fictionist in between. The fiction writer, by
telling us what might have happened, blurs the boundaries between facts and
fantasy. Intertwining actual events and possible actions, fiction explores
alternative avenues for historical writing.
Narrative: From Historical Fiction to Fictions of History
In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau avers: “What we initially call
history is nothing more than a narrative.”5 A similar observation is found
in Fredric Jameson’s converse statement:
[H]istory—Althusser’s “absent cause,” Lacan’s “Real”—is not a text, for
it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational; what can be
added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in
textual form….6
The question to ask is, how is history narrativized or textualized? Thus,
the topic of my study is the more inclusive fictions of history, not just
traditional historical fiction. This allows me to transgress the established
disciplines of both history and fiction, going beyond the limits of a specific mode of writing into a boundless fictional world of historical narrative alternatives. Fictions of history, as indicated in the plural, make use
of both traditional Chinese literary modes and modern Western writing
techniques to reinvent the genre. They expand historical fiction to multiple dimensions of historical imagination. While historical fiction must
4 Aristotle Poetics 9.1451a–b; translation cited from S[amuel] H[enry] Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a Critical Text and Translation of the “Poetics”, 4th edn.
(London: Macmillan, 1907), 105.
5 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia
6 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 82; emphasis in the original.
narrative and space: a cartography of history
3
base its story upon certain real events or figures of the past, fictions of
history are free to problematize the official history by different degrees
of fabrication.
The degrees of fabrication in contemporary historical fiction once
concerned the participants of a symposium held in Huangzhou 黃州,
Hubei, in 1986, in which four propositions were advanced: first, all events
and characters in a historical fiction must be based on documented fixed
facts and real historical figures—this is called “professorial fiction” (jiaoshou xiaoshuo 教授小說); second, historical research must precede fictional
creation; third, fiction precedes history, but some research is necessary
before creation; and fourth, historical fiction is literary creation—storywriters are given full license to re-create history. It was concluded that
historical facts should not be the sole criterion of historical fiction, and
that historical fiction is impossible without imagination.7 Chinese critics
finally found that fiction is not a fact factory.
To better understand the relation between history and fiction in a postmodern sense, and thus set a tone for our discussion, Hutcheon’s concept
of “historiographic metafiction” should be introduced here. The crucial
distinction between Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction and traditional historical fiction lies in the Greek suffix ‘-graph’ (graphein), meaning ‘to write’, and the Greek prefix ‘meta-’, that is, ‘after’, ‘beyond’,
‘changed’, or ‘transferred’. Hutcheon cites Louis Gottschalk to claim that
historiography is the “imaginative reconstruction” of “[t]he process of
critically examining and analyzing the records and survivals of the past,”
hence the signifying systematization of neutral past events into meaningfully present historical facts by narrative emplotments.8 Here ‘event’
and ‘fact’, while in binary opposition, are the dual-force of simultaneously inscribing and subverting the authority and objectivity of historical sources and interpretations. With regard to this, metafiction “puts
into question, at the same time as it exploits, the grounding of historical knowledge in the past real” and “enact[s] the problematic nature of
the relation of writing history to narrativization and, thus, to fictionaliza-
7 See Hu Depei 胡德培, “Xin lishi xiaoshuo guan zhanwang” 新歷史小說觀展望 (A
new concept of historical fiction in prospect) (1986), in his Zhuwang xinghe—Jin ershi nian
Zhongguo changpian xiaoshuo yishu 矚望星河—近二十年中國長篇小說藝術 (Gazing at the Milky Way: The art of the Chinese novel in the last twenty years) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue
chubanshe, 1999), 45–48.
8 Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method, 2nd edn. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 48; cited in Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 92.
4
introduction
tion.”9 Bringing the narrator to the forestage of his/her historical play,
metafiction is a double remove from the real.
Accordingly, when confronting the complex paradoxes between historical/fictive representation, the past/the present, and author/reader,
instead of recuperating or canceling either side, historiographic metafiction tends to contradictorily establish and cross the frames of history and
fiction, install and blur the line between then and now, assert and challenge the monologue of the storyteller to the listener. Since the problem
of historical truth and falseness can be understood as both inadvertent
and deliberate errors of writing, historiographic metafiction “plays upon
the truth and lies of the historical record” by conflating facts with fabrications, and tries to foreground self-reflexively “both the collecting and the
attempts to make narrative order.”10 This makes the reader aware of and
calls into question the reliability of the received version of history, of the
conventional logics of historicity and causality. In brief, “historiographic
metafiction shows fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be
discursively structured.”11 Thus, as the very term “metafiction” implies,
there is no firm—or even soft—boundary between the two genres of history and fiction.
With its neo-liberalist nihilism of all truth and authenticity, metahistory exposes the problematic consciousness of conventional historical
writings. Therefore, ‘fictions of history’ refers not merely to a body of literature, but also to the act of writing known as historiography, which
finds an echo in Gadamer’s principle of “effective history” (wirkungsgeschichte) that “addresse[s] not to research, but to its methodological consciousness.”12 This consciousness reminds us of our prejudices in source
selection and explanation and, more importantly, the forms of narrative
employed in the production of historical accounts. Hayden White has
happily discovered:
Historiography is an especially good ground on which to consider the
nature of narration and narrativity because it is here that our desire for
the imaginary, the possible, must contest with the imperatives of the real,
the actual.13
9
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 92–93.
Ibid., 114.
11 Ibid., 120.
12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. edn. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 300.
13 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 4.
10
5
Contrary to the ambiguous dictionary definitions of ‘history’ as both
past events and their narrative, fictions of history never purport to be the
past per se, nor do they attempt, as does traditional historical fiction, to
present any ‘true story’; instead, they are truly stories that present the past
as imagined facts, as writing effects.
Neither are the poetics and problematics of historiography simply a
matter of true or false. In effect, the process of writing history is vividly
described by the historian Gail Hershatter as one of peeling an onion,
which produces no essential core but rather changing shapes under layer
after layer of investigation, while all the while the historian falls under
the spell of its smell.14 According to this alimentary allegory, the interest
of historical writing—and reading—lies in the ‘spaces’ being opened up
during the process, instead of the seeking of some ultimate truth. The
emphasis on the act of storytelling rather than the actuality of the story
has long existed in the Chinese folk art of jiangshi 講史, or ‘history-telling’,
as exemplified in the classical historical novels The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi 三國演義) and The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan 水滸
傳). There were traditions in the East as well as in the West, before the
advent of the scientific model of history in modern times, that fiction
matters to history not as matters of fact, but as manners of narration.
A brief introduction to the basic concepts of fiction and history in
the Chinese context, and in comparison with their Western equivalents,
seems mandatory and beneficial. Modern Chinese fiction grew out of
both its Western counterpart and classical predecessor, xiaoshuo 小說,
literally ‘petty talk’, which indicates a heterodox status of the genre as
stated in the “Bibliographic Treatise” (“Yiwen zhi” 藝文志) of Ban Gu’s
班固 (32–92) History of the Former Han (Han shu 漢書):
The xiaoshuo school probably originates from minor officers. It is made up
by those who engage in alley gossip and street hearsay…. As some of the
14 Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century
Shanghai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 13. The culinary metaphor is reminiscent of Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) description of what
he names “the historical rasa” in his essay “The Historical Novel” (1905), trans. Sukanta
Chaudhuri, in Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings on Literature and Language, ed. Chaudhuri
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 197:
The novel generates a special rasa by commingling with history. The novelist prizes
this rasa of history; he has no regard for its truth. If someone, not satisfied with this
distinctive scent and savor of the past, sets about extracting a sustained history from
a novel, he will be looking for whole spices in a curry.
For the Indian poet, facts and fiction are inseparable in “the sap and juice of history.”
6
introduction
sayings may prove useful, this is at least the opinion of country rustics and
dissolute men.15
Its inconsequentiality coincides with the marginality of le petit récit, or ‘little narrative’, taken by postmodern fiction to supplement and confront
the grand narrative of orthodox history. Similarly, the original meaning
of shi 史 ‘history’ as ‘event’ depicted in oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions, finds an echo in Linda Hutcheon’s differentiation of past events
from historical facts.16 Of course, traditional Chinese xiaoshuo and shi
underwent great transformations at the turn of the last century, when
they encountered Western fiction and history. While xiaoshuo received
a didactic, nation-building instrumentality from Liang Qichao’s 梁啟超
(1873–1929) “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government
of the People” (“Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” 論小說與群治之關
係, 1902),17 shi was reinvented as a scientific subject with historical objectivism in the fashion of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Marxist philosophy of history. Moreover, the traditional Chinese notion of cyclic
time, derived from the alternation of rise and fall in dynastic history, was
replaced by the modern Western idea of linear time.
China under Deng witnessed a postmodern revival of artistic history,
as against the modern practice of scientific history. While intellectuals of
the May Fourth era (1915–1927) struggled to build a modern nation by,
to borrow the title of Qingjia Edward Wang’s book, “inventing China
through history,”18 writers of the post-Mao period have attempted to
15 Ban Gu, comp., Han shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 30.1745. The xiaoshuo
group is listed as the last of ten schools of thought. I have consulted the translation by
Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang in Lu Hsun [Lu Xun 魯迅] (1881–1936), A Brief History of
Chinese Fiction (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), 3.
16 My etymological study of shi is to be found in the appendix to this book. Hutcheon,
A Poetics of Postmodernism, 89–97, 122–123.
17 See Liang Qichao, “On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of
the People,” trans. Gek Nai Cheng, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature,
1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 74–81.
18 The time span of the May Fourth movement is problematic. Chow Tse-tsung 周策
縱 (1916–2007) limits it politically to 1917–1921 in his The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual
Revolution in Modern China (1960; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 1, 5–6, whereas
other scholars date it 1915/16–1923/25. Here I prefer to perceive it in a broader sense as
a cultural enlightenment, hence encompassing a longer period, as suggested by Lin Yüsheng 林毓生 in his The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May
Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 3. Q. Edward Wang, Inventing
China Through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2001), studies the May Fourth efforts to search for a scientific presentation
of Chinese history in order to establish a modern national identity.
7
depart from and deconstruct national history by reinventing the past
through fiction. As a response to foreign imperialism and colonialism,
the May Fourth totalizing scheme of progressive history is a Chinese
appropriation of Social Darwinism, which imposes the ‘law of the jungle’
upon the human world. It is interesting to see Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962),
a student of John Dewey and a leader of the May Fourth literary revolution, translate the pragmatistic term ‘genetic method’ into Chinese
as lishi de taidu 歷史的態度, literally ‘historical approach’.19 For Hu, to be
historical is to be evolutional, since he understands history as a gradual
fulfillment of practical purpose. Originating in teleological evolutionism,
the May Fourth discourse of enlightenment and the concomitant Marxist rhetoric of revolution are inevitably value-judgment oriented. Marxist authors like Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978) periodized thousands of
years of Chinese history as a slow crawl from slavery through feudalism to capitalism, so as to darken the past and the present to show their
contrast to a bright communist future.20 When the temporal concept of
Marxist historical materialism is introduced into fiction, as Liu Zaifu and
Lin Gang 林崗 have argued, narrative times are evaluated according to
historical determinism: the past is equated with backwardness and reaction, while the future is elevated to progressiveness and revolution.21 The
narrative mode of ‘enlightenment-revolution’ has since then been institutionalized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as its fundamental
historiography. Communism appeared as evangelicalism, be it in Mao’s
political revolutions or Deng’s economic reforms.
Since the dream of national liberation had been realized in 1949, when
Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976) proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the present suddenly became a historical moment not to be condemned, but to be confirmed, to be yearned
for. Wang Ban has observed: “In the period of Maoism, the function of
memory was to evoke a past that confirmed the present and anticipated
the future.”22 Nostalgia for the present, known in the new China as yiku
19 Hu Shi, “Shiyan zhuyi” 實驗主義 (Pragmatism) (1919), in his Hu Shi wencun 胡適文
存 (Collected works of Hu Shi), 4 vols. (Taipei: Yuandong tushu gongsi, 1961), 1: 296.
20 For a survey of Guo’s periodization of Chinese history, see Arif Dirlik, Revolution and
History: The Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1978), 140–146, 188.
21 Liu Zaifu and Lin Gang, Zui yu wenxue 罪與文學 (Confession and Chinese literature)
(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2002), 305.
22 Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004): 218.
8
introduction
sitian 憶苦思甜 ‘recall past sorrows and savor present joys’, has produced
a monoglot history. The Mao discourse that long pervaded the literary
scene in mainland China is reminiscent of George Orwell’s criticism of
political writing as “bad writing” with “a lifeless, imitative style.”23 To
Orwell’s list of political humbug (manifestos, pamphlets, leading articles,
White Papers and under-secretaries’ speeches), let me add official history
and the historical fiction that embroiders it. From the 1940s through the
1970s, Chinese writers illustrated the dominant discourse of the Communist state narrative in their works either to strive for legitimacy or to
eschew troubles. Ideologically saturated and formally stiffened, revolutionary historical fiction served as both the party-approved pages of modern Chinese history and principle brainwash machine in Mao’s China.24
The rewriting of history became a prominent literary phenomenon
during the Deng era, but one which has not yet been systematically
studied in English-language scholarship.25 It began with the cathartic
shanghen wenxue 傷痕文學, ‘scar literature’ or ‘wound literature’, in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Exemplified by Liu Xinwu’s 劉心武 “The
Class-master” (“Banzhuren” 班主任, 1977) and Lu Xinhua’s 盧新華 “The
Scar” (“Shanghen,” 1978), scar literature presents the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as a hysteric history caused by leftist aberration. Dramatizing the traumatic, it parrots the official indictment that holds the
Gang of Four solely responsible for the sociopolitical disaster on the one
hand, and reconstructs the myth of humanism on the other. Patricia
Schiaffini-Vedani has neatly summarized scar stories as “heavily idealized accounts about the personal sufferings during the Cultural Revolu23 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946), in his Collected Essays,
2nd edn. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 362. The term ‘Mao discourse’ (Mao wenti
毛文體) was coined by Li Tuo 李陀 in his “Xuebeng he chu?” 雪崩何處？ (Where is the
avalanche?) (1989), introduction to Shiba sui chumen yuanxing 十八歲出門遠行 (On the road
at eighteen), by Yu Hua 余華 (Taipei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1990), 5–14.
24 Huang Ziping 黃子平, in his Geming, lishi, xiaoshuo 革命•歷史•小說 (Revolution, history, fiction) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21, defines ‘revolutionary historical fiction’ as the fictional works created after Mao’s 1942 “Talks at the Yenan Forum
on Literature and Art” (“Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua” 在延安文藝座
談會上的講話), which were exclusively about the communist revolutionary history from
1921 to 1949, i.e., between the establishments of the CCP and the PRC.
25 A pioneering work in the existing secondary literature is Ban Wang’s Illuminations
from the Past, which covers historical representations in Chinese fiction and film throughout
the twentieth century. While focusing on only one writer of the post-Mao period, namely,
Wang Anyi 王安憶, the book, as Yang Xiaobin 楊小濱 points out in his review, The Journal
of Asian Studies 65.1 (Feb. 2006): 180, “is not a systematic study of the issues of trauma and
memory in modern Chinese literature.”
9
tion” and the early Deng period as a “necessary period of therapeutic
release of repressed feelings of injustice accumulated during the Maoist
years.”26 However, in terms of ideological operation and narrative structure, scar literature and its preceding revolutionary historical fiction are
isomorphous: gone are the unfortunate years; a joyful life will start again.
The stories of political disillusionment always end in moral fulfillment.
A happy dénouement always remains in these post-Mao fairy tales: now
that the ten-year-old gross injustice is redressed, victory belongs to the
righteous people under the Party’s infallible leadership. The binary opposition of good and evil, out of which good is guaranteed to pervade evil,
maintains the cliché of an excessive “moralization of history.”27
Subversive historiographies that resist Maoism-Marxism did not appear until the mid-1980s, when the ‘rewriting literary history’ movement
was followed by a wave of reimagining history in literature. Mao’s children began to plow new paths through the dust of history by asking: What
is history? Is there a grand design behind it? Are there alternative forms
to (re-)present the past? Post-Mao fictions of history emerged as inscriptions of subjectivity onto history and parodies of the grand narrative
of national history. They challenged both Mao’s didactic discourse and
Deng’s progressionist pragmatism. Through this movement, the sacredness of revolutionary historiography has been largely diminished, if not
totally destroyed. In his study of postrevolutionary historiography, Wang
Ban attributes the phenomenon of historical fever to the losing ground of
the official mode of grand history that used to be crucial to the People’s
Republic in legitimating a national identity and designating a collective
destiny:
The decline of this ‘master narrative’ since the 1980s gave rise to an urgent
need to redefine China’s relation to the past and to rewrite history. Yet
for lack of a totalized notion concerning the relation to the past, of some
explanation about how change takes place, history writing became multiple attempts to debunk the legacy of the official historical discourse….28
The disillusion of collective missions gave the individual a sense of disorientation in retrospection of great historical events, directing writers’
attentions to marginal memories and private experiences. Critic Chen
26 Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, “Tashi Dawa: Magical Realism and Contested Identity
in Modern Tibet” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002), 165–166.
27 Hong Zicheng 洪子誠, Dangdai wenxue gaishuo 當代文學概說 (An outline of contemporary literature) (Nanning: Guangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 2000), 162–163.
28 Wang, Illuminations from the Past, 113.
10
introduction
Sihe 陳思和 has pointed out that writers formerly “saw major historical
events, in particular political events, directly influence the course of social
development, and so, major historical events have become the center of
history,” but then in the 1990s some of them “deliberately deviated from
and impaired the influence of major historical events.”29 While conventional historical fiction focuses on major historical occurrences or figures and is bounded by state ideology, for example, Yao Xueyin’s 姚雪垠
multi-volume novel Li Zicheng 李自成 (1963–1999),30 the fictions of history
I study here are based on debris in the ruin of former times and on personal perceptions of the past. There are a few exceptions as always, like
Ge Fei’s 格非 “Encounter” (“Xiangyu” 相遇), in which the main characters are historical celebrities; yet even in these cases their historically
insignificant existential aspects are emphasized, as if they were but powerless figures in the mighty torrents of history.31
Space: From the Region to the Body
The shift from major sociopolitical events to obscure psycholinguistic
experience is concurrent with a turn from diachronic historiography to
synchronic historiography, that is, from the focus on the linearity of historical development and periodization to the plates of regional and family
histories, and the even smaller shards of personal and bodily adventures.
Writers are now seeking a new historical aura by evoking the feel of place
and local community. This is a new narrative strategy that stresses the
spatial dimensions rather than the temporal dimension of history, though
the coordinates of time and space are the common axes of all historical
writings. The abandonment of the tactics of projecting forward by casting backwards in time brings an end to temporal utopianism. Concerning
29 Chen Sihe, “Suipian zhong de shijie he suipian zhong de lishi—1995 nian xiaoshuo
chuangzuo yipie” 碎片中的世界和碎片中的歷史—１９９５年小說創作一瞥 (The world in
debris and the history in debris: A glimpse of 1995 fictional works), in his Zhongguo dangdai
wenxue guanjianci shi jiang 中國當代文學關鍵詞十講 (Keywords in contemporary Chinese
literature: Ten lectures) (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2002), 220. Chen gives Wang
Anyi’s Changhen ge 長恨歌 (The song of lasting regret) and Yu Hua’s Xu Sanguan mai xue ji
許三觀賣血記 (Chronicle of a blood merchant) as examples of the literary transformation.
30 Yao Xueyin’s Li Zicheng, 5 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1999),
presents the popular rebellion led by Li Zicheng (1606–1645) as a heroic peasant uprising,
a template of Mao’s Red Army. It is criticized as “an illustration of ideological doctrines”
by Liu and Lin, Zui yu wenxue, 327, 331. See also Guy Alitto, “Yao Xueyin and His Li
Zicheng: An Interview,” Modern Chinese Literature 2.2 (Fall 1986): 211–216.
31 Ge Fei’s “Encounter” is to be analyzed in chapters 2 and 4.
11
contemporary Chinese historical fictionists, especially avant-garde historiographers, a critic has noted: “Specific time reference in their narratives
has lost its significance; it is no more than an exit for the creative subject to
enter into historical scenes.”32 There are instances of painstaking efforts
in dealing with the reference of time, such as Li Rui’s 李銳 Silver City (Jiuzhi
舊址), but their time frames are fragmented at the expense of localization,
resulting in a non-isochrony that functions “implicitly to attack the linearity of discourse and to reveal a possible ‘paragrammatism’ of historical
speech”33—an interrogation against the official and foregoing texts, say
revolutionary historical fiction and scar literature. In most experimental
fictions produced in Deng-era China, time provides only an entrance to
historical landscapes. By changing the tradition of ‘once upon a time’ to
the fiction of ‘once in a place’, the spatialization of history flattens the past
into a plane surface or, more precisely, a map, on which the shadows of
the past are projected without the depth and weight of ‘the whole truth’
of history. None of these shadows can be seen as history itself; rather,
they are the other of history, a fabulous analogy of it.
The following chapters are therefore organized into four pairs of spatial frameworks: regional romances and family fables; diasporic discourses and minority myths; nostalgia for the hometown in the country and the city; and bodily texts and textual bodies. Despite the differentiated spatial schemes, they are intended to complement each other,
since a single work may fall under more than one category. For instance,
Mo Yan’s 莫言 family epics and Su Tong’s 蘇童 Maple Village series also
concern the individual body, whereas Ge Fei’s “Encounter” requires me
to confront it first as a minoritized writing and then as a textual experiment. Thus, my study investigates how writers of Deng’s reform era
undermined the grand narrative of official history by remapping China’s
32 Cui Zhenchun 崔振椿, “Yuyan, shengcun, wenhua—Xin lishi xiaoshuo de jizhong
guannian” 寓言•生存•文化—新歷史小說的幾種觀念 (Fable, survival, and culture: Several
concepts of new historical fiction), Zhongguo xiandai, dangdai wenxue yanjiu 中國現代、當代文
學研究 (Studies in modern and contemporary Chinese literature), 1994, no. 7: 70.
33 Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in his The Rustle of Language, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 129. Mo Yan’s mix of the traditional
Chinese almanac and the modern Western calendar in his Hong gaoliang jiazu 紅高粱
家族 (The red sorghum family) will be discussed in chapter 1. For an analysis of the
lacunose scheme of time in Li Rui’s Silver City, see my “Shikong zuowei xushi celüe—
Bijiao san bu lishi xiaoshuo” 時空作為敘事策略—比較三部歷史小說 (Time and space as
narrative strategies: A comparative study of three historical novels), Shun po 信報 (Hong
Kong Economic Journal), overseas edn., 10 and 18 Nov. 1993; a shorter version of it was
reprinted in Zhong shi wanbao 中時報 (China Times Express), 11 March 1994.
12
introduction
past. It showcases a fictional cartography of history produced by eleven
contemporary Chinese authors, namely, Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, Wang
Anyi, Zhang Chengzhi 張承志, Tashi Dawa 扎西達娃, Alai 阿來, Ge Fei,
Su Tong, Wang Shuo 王朔, Liu Heng 劉恆, and Yu Hua.
The fictional texts by this group of writers, especially the three Muslim and Tibetan taletellers, represent an array of historical standpoints
drastically different from conventional and revolutionary historical fictions. These selected cases address some major issues of historiographic
practices mostly ignored by others. The first and foremost questions concern methods and theories: Should the writing of history be based on an
ideology or tied to a teleology? Are there principles of historical evaluation beyond the official standard? Who is the arbiter of history, the
victor or the victim, the ruler or the ruled? How are we to understand
the lessons and course of history outside of the morals of progression or
development? The problematics of historiography involve not the mere
matters of fact and truth but, more essentially, the politics of discourse
and interpretation in terms of the poetics of style and rhetoric. History is
thus regarded as a product of language and narrative. It is to be recovered from aphasia and amnesia, discovered in identity crisis and existential violence, and rediscovered in nostalgic imaginations and human
desires. With an extensive coverage of these topics, the study seeks to contribute to the existing secondary literature of historiographic research in
the interspace between fiction and history, where the present meets the
past, fantasy collapses facts, and imagination rescues memory.
So, my Chinese historical atlas opens in chapter 1 with regional legends and family sagas as breakdowns of the national history and breakthroughs of stylistic confines. The first writer in focus is Han Shaogong,
a pathfinder of ‘root-seeking literature’ (xungen wenxue 尋根文學), which
probes the roots of national character through local folk cultures. Of
special interest is his lexicon novel, in which the author challenges the
conventional structure of narrative and interrogates the historical hegemony of Mandarin, the official modern Chinese language, in his linguistic search of a premodern, peripheralized dialect. From this nativist
movement was derived a style loosely labeled by Chinese critics as ‘new
historical fiction’ (xin lishi xiaoshuo 新歷史小說), which is exemplified by
Mo Yan’s novels situated in Shandong province. Mo Yan also puts into
question the linear understanding of history but, unlike his fellow provincial Zhang Wei 張煒, he does so by writing history from a peasant viewpoint rather than an intellectual consciousness. Both Han Shaogong and
Mo Yan present to us a new generation of nativist narrator, whose stories
13
of the idiot and bastard heroes go against the tide of historical progressionism, alerting us to human decline, intellectual as well as physical.
Chapter 2 traces a tendency in contemporary Chinese literature to
resist the master code of the Central Plains, that is, the mainstream political culture spreading along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, by shifting focus to the marginal areas. The journey starts
with Wang Anyi’s patrilineal and matrilineal genealogies, which follow
her overseas and ‘barbarian’ ancestors’ respective migrations from the
South Pacific region and Gobi Desert to the city of Shanghai. Wang’s
diasporic discourses of overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities form a
counter-narrative to Sinocentrism with a migratory mythology. Then we
have minority literature from the Muslim storyteller Zhang Chengzhi,
the Tibetan writers Tashi Dawa and Alai, and the Han traveler Ge Fei.
In their pieces, while myths, legends, and anecdotes all become indispensable components of history, the religious and magical pasts turn
out to be implicit criticisms of the political present. Exotic as their tales
appear to be, they provide peripheral perspectives for us to re-examine
the notions of ‘Chineseness’, ‘Muslimness’, and ‘Tibetanness’ in the histories of ‘minority nationalities’. By grouping these texts together, I hope
to discover different points of view and alternative modes of writing, so as
to put into question the linear idea of history and nationalistic ideologies
of identity.
The rise of a market economy in Deng’s China resulted in a return of
literary interest from the country to the city, where urban writers staged
nostalgia for their hometowns, as shown in chapter 3. Su Tong’s twin
series of Maple Village and Suzhou city have created, in an age of prosperity, an aura of depravity. Nostalgia for him is an escape into a fictional past, a past more decadent than didactic. His and Wang Shuo’s
coming-of-age stories represent personal memories of the latecomers of
the Red Guard generation, recollecting a Cultural Revolution less burdensome than their parents’, often rather carnivalesque and playful—in
effect, Wang Shuo’s 1970s Beijing appears somewhat like a lost Eden. The
inadequacy of his age group’s historical experience has led to contemplation on the inaccuracy of language in historical accounts. In contrast
to this bad-boy literature, Wang Anyi’s descriptive historiography offers
a feminine feeling of nostalgia. Her detailed city map of old Shanghai
reduces history from a spectacular drama to an ordinary life. Amidst the
longtang alleys, macrohistory is replaced by microhistory; grande histoire is
dissolved by gossipy hearsay; great personages yield to common people;
sublimity and tragedy give way to banality and parody. While the revival
14
introduction
of urban literature effectively ridicules the rusticism in the Maoized historiography, nostalgia problematizes the progressionism of Deng’s modernization.34
If there exists a common theme in the above chapters, then it is corporal violence in its various forms. The killing fields in regional-familial
histories, massacres of Chinese by Japanese and of Chinese minorities by
the Han majority, rapes and revenges across the country and the city, et
cetera, all converge on the bodily space to be studied in the last chapter. It
is ‘scar literature’ in the literal, true sense. Food and sex, the two impulses
of violence featuring centrally in the works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and
Liu Heng, present history materially and physically as gastric and sexual
manifestations. Yet Yu Hua problematizes the presentation of violence in
his reflections on its politics and poetics through both performance and
nonperformance of historical cruelty. Thus, trauma is first dramatized in
narrative form and then de-dramatized as everyday experience. Su Tong
then diverts our attention away from the human body as a historic text
to the printed text as a physical body. Where violence visually and loudly
inscribes history on both bodily texts and textual bodies in the typography of Su Tong and Ge Fei, the latter’s topographic drawings map the
maze of historical discourses. I want to point out that body and text are
the ultimate carriers of history, hence the last battlegrounds for memory
mapping. Finally, the notion of a ‘retro-fiction’ is brought forth to summarize the post-Mao literary trend against the teleology of materialistic
progression in capitalistic communist China.
With regard to methodology, my approach is both thematic and technical or, more precisely, an attempt to discover certain themes as techniques, and contents as forms. It broadly covers a wide range of themes
pertinent to language, idiocy, identity, decadence, memory, food, sex,
and violence in terms of the literary movements and aesthetic styles of
‘root search’, new historicism, magical realism, descriptive historiography, and space plotting in historical writing. My task, however, is not to
provide a total historical picture or strong narrative streamline; instead, I
provide frequent close-ups along the thread of logical progress, allowing
my story to be interrupted, sometimes by detailed plot analyses, other
times by arguments with the views of other scholars, or even by scrutiny
of crucial Chinese characters. While my research is buttressed by a vari34 Against the current of globalization, Wang Ban, in his Illuminations from the Past, 8,
sees nostalgia as a force “to resist and critique the current impacts, equally traumatic, of
runaway modernization.”
15
ety of Chinese criticisms and Western theories, I adhere to no particular
literary theory beyond interdisciplinary study and intertextual investigation—fictional works, historical texts, and firsthand materials are closely
read side by side. This enables the reader to see when a storyteller keeps
silent, what historical event is implicitly referred to, and why it is untold;
and when the historian stops, how the storyteller begins to rebut and
retell history in alternative ways.
chapter one
REGIONAL ROMANCES AND FAMILY FABLES:
FROM ROOT SEARCH TO NEW HISTORICISM
Regionalism is limited in space, yet
unlimited in time….
– Mo Yan, “Two Scorching Blast
Furnaces”1
A literary historian has pointed out: “In contemporary mainland Chinese fiction, particularly of the 1960s and 1970s, regional and folk features
became increasingly blurred and faint.”2 As provincial distinctions were
obscured by political consensus, literature submitted itself to the state
orthodoxy of Maoism-Marxism. However, the development of regional
economies in the Deng era entailed the reemergence of regional history
as a literary phenomenon. Inspired by Latin American literature, a Western alternative to first-world literature, Chinese writers tried to regain
literary autonomy and rewrite a new, constructive national history by
way of regional re-imagination. Emphasis on native soil has bred two
historiographic genres, namely, root-seeking literature and new historical fiction, both of which experiment with narrative modes outside of
dominant state historiography.
Root-seeking Literature: Provincial History as National Allegory
Root-seeking fiction emerged after the Cultural Revolution catastrophe
and against the backdrop of modernization.3 The literary trend is con1 Mo Yan, “Liang zuo zhuore de gaolu—Jiaxiya Maerkesi he Fukena” 兩座灼熱
的高爐—加西亞•馬爾克斯和福克納 (Two scorching blast furnaces: García Márquez and
Faulkner) (1986), in Mo Yan yanjiu ziliao 莫言研究資料 (Research materials on Mo Yan), ed.
He Lihua 賀立華 and Yang Shousen 楊守森 (Ji’nan: Shandong daxue chubanshe, 1992),
421.
2 Hong Zicheng, Dangdai wenxue gaishuo, 195. This is a slightly revised statement from
his Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi 中國當代文學史 (A history of contemporary Chinese literature) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1999), 324.
3 David Der-wei Wang 王德威 has pointed out in his essay, “Imaginary Nostalgia:
Shen Congwen, Song Zelai, Mo Yan, and Li Yongping,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth:
18
chapter one
sidered part and parcel of the mid-1980s Culture Fever (wenhua re 文化
熱) movement that re-examined from a modern perspective the value of
traditional Chinese civilization, which had been radically uprooted since
the early twentieth century. Here the ‘traditional’ as a temporal term is
rendered spatially into the native soil in which the ‘roots’ lie. As a matter
of fact, root-seeking literature is often traced back to xiangtu 鄉土 ‘native
soil’ literature of late masters like Shen Congwen 沈從文 and to the works
on social customs by veteran writers such as Shen’s student Wang Zengqi
汪曾祺, Lu Wenfu 陸文夫, and Deng Youmei 鄧友梅.4
Yet the leading root-searchers are the younger generation of authors
born in the late 1940s and 1950s, including Han Shaogong, Acheng 阿城,
Zhang Chengzhi, Wang Anyi, Li Rui, Zheng Yi 鄭義, Li Hangyu 李杭
育 and others, who joined the eighteen million urban ‘educated youths’
(zhiqing 知青) sent down to labor in the rural hinterlands during the Cultural Revolution decade. “Their retrospective reveling,” reasons Wang
Jing 王瑾, “is simultaneously accompanied by their disquieting memory
of an aborted utopia and of their betrayal by the Revolution.”5 These
Urblings associate their contemporary provincial experience with early
Chinese local cultures, for instance, the Chu 楚 culture as represented in
Han Shaogong’s imaginary revisiting of Hunan province, the Jin 晉 culture in Zheng Yi’s writing of Shanxi, and the Wu-Yue 越 culture in Li
Hangyu’s Zhejiang.6 They believe that indigenous cultures uncontaminated by revolution and modernization are to be excavated in rural areas
Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Wang (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 122–123:
Returning to the customs and morals of local regions, [root-seeking] fiction first
appeared as a modest reaction against the increasingly formulaic ‘literature of the
wounded’. At a time when the whole nation of the PRC was ‘looking forward’, the
‘search for roots’ writers unblushingly looked ‘backward’, even ‘downward’.
4 For the ascription of root-seeking literature, see Wong Kai Chee 黃繼持, “Zhongguo
dangdai wenxue de wenhua ‘xungen’ taolun shuping” 中國當代文學的文化“尋根”討論述
評 (Comments on the cultural ‘root seeking’ in contemporary Chinese literature), in his
Wenxue de chuantong yu xiandai 文學的傳統與現代 (Literary tradition and modernity) (Hong
Kong: Wah Hon, 1988), 176–177.
5 Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 220.
6 ‘Urbling’ is a word coined by Rachel May to translate the term zhiqing with emphasis
on the urban background of the educated youths. See Geremie Barmé and John Minford,
eds., Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 102. There
are also non-zhiqing root-searchers, who occupy other territories on the map of regional
literature, e.g., Jia Pingwa 賈平凹 on the Qin-Han 秦漢 culture of Shaanxi, Zhang Wei
on the Qi-Lu 齊魯 culture of Shandong, and Tashi Dawa on Tibet.
regional romances and family fables
19
instead of modern cities. Li Zehou 李澤厚 has interesting commented
that root-seeking literature is actually an urban phenomenon at the inauguration of Deng’s economic reforms “to shun and resist the incursions
of market value and commercial culture.”7 For the returned Urblings, the
utopia is not to be found in the urban, but in the native soil that preserves
primitive cultures.
The literary term xungen, or ‘root seeking’, was first theorized by Han
Shaogong in his 1985 essay “The ‘Roots’ of Literature” (“Wenxue de
‘gen’” 文學的“根”).8 Born in Changsha, the capital of Hunan, the pioneer rootseeker grieved over the disappearance of historic relics in the
city of communist revolution. Han spent ten years, from December 1968
to early 1978, in Miluo 汩羅 County, site of the ancient state of Chu (704–
223 B.C.), where he sought out the roots of Chinese culture beyond the
pale of the Confucian tradition. His creative career exemplifies a shift
from the (auto)biographic educated youth fiction to the historiographic
root-seeking fiction in the PRC literary discourse.9 For Han, the hidden
or forgotten parts of the past are to be found “in the soil of folk culture,”
such as petite histoire, slang, folklore and folksong.10 According to his
manifesto, root search “does not stem from cheap nostalgia and regionalism,… but is a rediscovery of nationality, a revival of latent historicity
in aesthetic consciousness….”11 Thus, the pastoral province of Hunan
under the brush of Shen Congwen is reinvented by Han into a national
Li Zehou, “Liang dian zhuyuan” 兩點祝願 (Two wishes), Wenyi bao 文藝報 (Literary
gazette), 27 July 1985.
8 Han Shaogong, “Wenxue de ‘gen’,” Zuojia 作家 (Writer), 1985, no. 4: 2–5; rpt. in his
Han Shaogong sanwen 韓少功散文 (Essays by Han Shaogong), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo
guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 1998), 1: 125–132.
9 This is not to say that there is no overlap between educated youth fiction and rootseeking fiction. For example, Acheng’s root-seeking novella “Qi wang” 棋王 (Chess king)
(1984) is collected in Zhiqing xiaoshuo xuan 知青小說選 (Educated youth fiction: A selection),
ed. He Shaojun 賀紹俊 and Yang Ruiping 楊瑞平 (Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 908–955. However, the two literary trends have their specific concerns. Xie
Youshun 謝有順, in his “Xushi yeshi yizhong quanli—Zhongguo dangdai xiaoshuo de
huayu bianqian” 敘事也是一種權力—中國當代小說的話語變遷 (Narration is also a power:
Changes of discourse in contemporary Chinese fiction), Huacheng 花城 (Flower city), 2003,
no. 1: 203, distinguishes that the development from educated youth literature to rootseeking literature is a transformation from the writing of personal memory to the discourse of national allegory. Fredric Jameson holds that all writings from developing countries can be read as a “national allegory.” See Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the
Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 69.
10 Han Shaogong, “Wenxue de ‘gen’,” 126, 130.
11 Ibid., 128.
7
20
chapter one
allegory, a synecdoche of the synectics of China.12 It is in this sense that
national history is first and foremost regional history.
New Historical Fiction: Reinventing a Genre
Also derived from nativism is ‘new historical fiction’, which conducts
root search deep into the problematics of historiography. The term was
formulated by Chen Sihe to refer to those fictions about the Republican
period (1912–1949) but are devoid of major revolutionary events and are
written from an unofficial angle or, in Chen’s own words, a “popular
consciousness” (minjian/zhong yishi 民間／意識) that offers resistance to
the Party’s political interpretation of the era.13 According to Chen, these
fictions are either products of passion, infused with sex and violence, or
of dissolution of passion—in the former, the intellectual writer’s rational
pondering of history is superseded by his/her latent passion, whereas
in the latter, new historical fiction adopts from its derivation, ‘neorealist
fiction’ (xin xieshi xiaoshuo 新寫實小說), an indifferent attitude to keep life
at a distance.14 In the new fiction of history, as another critic has written,
history is no longer an objective, solidified substance; it can only be realized
when it is reopened in the process of searching. This kind of history is surely
mixed with the subjective, uncertain colors of personal experience, so as
to open up new paths for creating different meanings and spectacles of
history.15
In the introduction to his selection of new historical fiction, Wang Biao 王
彪 points out that in traditional historical fiction, while various interpre12 Jeffrey C. Kinkley, in his “Shen Congwen’s Legacy in Chinese Literature of the
1980s,” in Widmer and Wang, From May Fourth to June Fourth, 96 and 99, argues that
Han has turned Shen’s “good West Hunan” into “a bad West Hunan” in mirroring
the Chinese tradition, and that Han’s negative depiction of West Hunanese culture has
“made it into less of a regional than a national construct: a symbol of China.” Jing Wang,
in her High Culture Fever, 212, also asserts:
… for those root-searching advocates, the theoretical construction of the agency of
China’s cultural subject is considered inefficacious without a simultaneous reconstruction of an authentic and essentialist China.
13 Chen Sihe, “Guanyu ‘xin lishi xiaoshuo’” 關於“新歷史小說” (On ‘new historical
fiction’) (1992), in his Jiming fengyu 雞鳴風雨 (Cockcrows in storms) (Shanghai: Xuelin
chubanshe, 1994), 80–81.
14 Ibid., 80, 83–85.
15 Zhong Benkang 鍾本康, “Xin lishi ticai xiaoshuo de xianfengxing ji qi zouxiang”
新歷史題材小說的先鋒性及其走向 (The avant-gardity of new fiction of history and its
trends), Zhongguo xiandai, dangdai wenxue yanjiu, 1993, no. 11: 93.
21
tations of past events are allowed, historical truth always appears to be
an invariable object, which is perplexed by a disconcerting sense of loss
in new historical fiction. New historical fiction does not aim at the recuperation of historical truth through painstaking factual research; instead,
it fictionalizes the past to such an extent that history is reduced to a sheer
setting. Nor does new historical fiction attempt to efface the narrating
subject, so as to make the historical narrative look objective and credible; rather, it places the narrator’s self in the spotlight, foregrounding
personal experience, perception and, most importantly, imagination of
history. Often narrated by a first-person narrator, who jumps in and out
between the past and the present, new historical fiction turns the static
history into a subjective, arbitrary movement, an ever changing course.
Quoting the British historian Carr’s aphorism that history is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past,”16 Wang argues that new
historical fiction tries not to submerge us into the past, but to let us gaze
into it from the present perspective, penetrate into it with a modern consciousness. A favorite subject of new historical fiction, as we shall see here,
is the rise and fall of a family permeated with fatalism—a fatalism originating less in the family tragedy or in the tragic characters themselves
than from the sorrows of the storytellers and their times in retrospecting things past.17 Unlike revolutionary historical fiction, new historical
fiction uses family feud not only to present political strife, but also to satirize it.
New historical fiction-writers are engrossed in re-creating an aura of
history, or in an aesthetic of historical imagination. They are concerned
with the peripheral rather than the dominant, the legendary rather than
the logical, and the individual rather than the integral, breaking corporate wholes into fragmentary cases. History is perceived in the desires for
food and sex, in the process and ways of dying.18 On the plane of narratology, we often see the influence of the Márquezean foreshadowing in the
beginnings of new historical fiction, for instance, the flashforward open16
Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 35.
Wang Biao, ed. and comm., Xin lishi xiaoshuo xuan 新歷史小說選 (New historical
fiction: A selection) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1993), i–x.
18 Cao Wenxuan 曹文軒, in his Ershi shiji mo Zhongguo wenxue xianxiang yanjiu 二十世紀末
中國文學現象研究 (Studies on Chinese literary phenomena at the end of the 20th century)
(Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2003), 283, points out that new historical fiction has subverted
“all histories are the history of class struggle” into “all histories are the history of desires”
(emphases in the original). This is particularly true in Su Tong’s fiction, which I shall
discuss in chapter 3.
17
22
chapter one
ing of Li Rui’s Silver City: “Not until later did it occur to anyone that….”19
The vision of history is altered from the hindsight of ‘once upon a time’
to the foresight of ‘many years later’, from the traditional chronology of
‘what happened thereafter’ to the metafictional interrogation of ‘how it
ends up like this’ that reveals the perplexity of the people in the aftermath
of the Cultural Revolution.
Thus, new historical fiction emphasizes the fortuity, uncertainty, and
complexity of history against the necessity, restorability, and truthfulness of history.20 From new historical fiction theorists have abstracted a
Chinese ‘new historicism’ (xin lishi zhuyi 新歷史主義), which Wang Ban
derogates as “a pseudohistory”:
For all its apparent interest in fragments, contingencies, and submerged
memory, new historicism remains a pseudohistory. It does not focus on
significant historical events and refuses to comprehend the reason and
movement of history.21
But some new historicists do utilize major historical happenings as the
locus of fictional interpretation to problematize the official fixation of
the past. Because of its Western counterpart, new historicism as a literary style is considered by literary critic Zhang Qinghua 張清華 to be a
product of the introductions of structuralist anthropology, structuralist
linguistics, and semiotics into China in 1986–1987.22 Zhang argues that
though the Western theory of New Historicism was not yet known on the
mainland then, its basic methods—structuralism and poststructuralism
—have given rise to a literature of new historicism in China.23 Nonethe19 Li Rui, Jiuzhi (Taipei: Hongfan shudian, 1993), 3; Howard Goldblatt, trans., Silver
City (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 1997), 5.
20 See Yong Wenhua 雍文華, “‘Xin lishi xiaoshuo’ de lishi guannian” “新歷史小說”的
歷史觀念 (The conception of history in ‘new historical fiction’), Zhongguo xiandai, dangdai
wenxue yanjiu, 1993, no. 3: 32; Zhong, “Xin lishi ticai xiaoshuo de xianfengxing ji qi
zouxiang,” 90–93; Cui, “Yuyan, shengcun, wenhua,” 71.
21 Wang, Illuminations from the Past, 223. Believing that the subversive thrust of postmodernism has done its work, Wang calls for a ‘genuine’ history that takes continuous action
“collectively in search of a more just, livable, sustainable society” (p. 8).
22 Zhang Qinghua, “Shi nian xin lishi zhuyi wenxue sichao huigu” 十年新歷史主義
文學思潮回顧 (Ten-year literary thought of new historicism in retrospect), 鍾山 (Mount
Zhong), 1998, no. 4: 199.
23 The term New Historicism was first coined as a criticism by Stephen Greenblatt in
his introduction to a special issue on Renaissance literary studies in Genre 15.1/2 (Spring/
Summer 1982): 3–6, and in his follow-up essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” Southern
Review 20 (1987): 3–5, rpt. in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989): 1–14. Greenblatt defines New Historicism as a critical practice, which sets
itself apart from both the dominant historical scholarship and the formalist criticism that
23
less, I find it hard to imagine that a writer like Mo Yan would have studied these high theories and then applied them to his works. Rather, as
the new historical fictionist himself admits, he is influenced by the creative writings of his foreign forerunners, particularly the masterpieces of
Gabriel García Márquez and William Faulkner.24
Based on his Western orientation of new historicism in China, Zhang
differentiates ‘fiction of new historicism’ (xin lishi zhuyi xiaoshuo 新歷史主
義小說), as a more avant-garde style, from the general ‘new historical
fiction’, attributing the former to the Western philosophies of existentialism, postmodernism, structuralism and deconstruction theory, and
the latter to traditional Chinese folklore, such as The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms and The Water Margin.25 Accordingly, he classifies Mo Yan’s sagas
The Red Sorghum Family (1987) and Big Breasts and Wide Hips (Fengru feitun
豐乳肥臀, 1996) under new historical fiction and fiction of new histori-
regard literary works as “a stable set of reflections of historical facts” with a monological,
coherent and consistent political vision or “a fixed set of texts … contain[ing] their own
determinate meanings.” New Historicism lays bare the effect of the historian’s or critic’s
interpretation: “It tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions and
those of others….” Greenblatt takes an interdisciplinary approach to recontextualize literary discourse in its dialectical relationship with the society as a cultural system. New
Historicism is thereby an array of reading practices that transgresses the boundaries of
literature, history, anthropology, politics and economics, not a writing style for literary
creation. However, avant-garde writers may find support from another New Historicist,
Louis A. Montrose, who in his “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics
of Culture,” in Veeser, The New Historicism, 15–36, first and foremost problematizes the
reflectionist notion that writing is merely a mirror of a stable and dominant ideology.
Accordingly, what we find in the discourse of history are changing truths rather than
unalterable facts. In his defense of Montrose’s culturalogical approach to the study of
history, Hayden White, “New Historicism: A Comment,” in Veeser, The New Historicism,
301, has pointed out that the New Historicists use the “creative” aspects of a “historical poetics” to undermine predominant social norms, political laws, and cultural codes,
that their interest is in “the episodic, anecdotal, contingent, exotic, abjected, or simply
uncanny aspects of the historical record.”
24 Mo Yan, “Liang zuo zhuore de gaolu,” 420–421; idem, “Dute de shengyin” 獨特的
聲音 (Unique voices), introduction to Suokong li de fangjian—Yingxiang wo de 10 bu duanpian
xiaoshuo 鎖孔裡的房間—影響我的１０部短篇小說 (A room seen through the keyhole: Ten
short stories that have influenced me), ed. Mo Yan (Beijing: Xin shijie chubanshe, 1999),
vi–vii. For studies of García Márquez’s and Faulkner’s influences on Mo Yan, see Wang
Guohua 王國華 and Shi Ting 石挺, “Mo Yan yu Maerkesi” 莫言與馬爾克斯 (Mo Yan
and Márquez) (1987), in Mo Yan yanjiu ziliao, 151–162; M. Thomas Inge, “Mo Yan and
William Faulkner: Influences and Confluences,” The Faulkner Journal 6 (Fall 1990): 15–24;
and Zhang Xuejun 張學軍, “Mo Yan xiaoshuo yu Xifang xiandai zhuyi wenxue” 莫言小
說與西方現代主義文學 (Mo Yan’s fiction and Western modernistic literature), Qi Lu xuekan
齊魯學刊 (Journal of Qi-Lu), 1992, no. 4: 24–27.
25 Zhang, “Shi nian xin lishi zhuyi wenxue sichao huigu,” 200.
24
chapter one
cism respectively.26 As we shall discover in this chapter, like many other
works of new historical fiction, these two novels exhibit an interaction
of traditional Chinese and modern Western historiographic elements.
Therefore, Zhang’s separation of a fiction of new historicism from new
historical fiction, while theoretically acceptable, is impossible and unnecessary in textual analysis. Suffice it to discern how foreign concepts and
techniques of historical writing are blended with local folk traditions in
the chemistry of a new historical fiction.
The American idea of New Historicism was introduced into Chinese
academia in 1993, when a selection of New Historicist articles was translated into Chinese and published under the title New Historicism and Literary Criticism (Xin lishi zhuyi yu wenxue piping 新歷史主義與文學批評) by the
prestigious Beijing University Press. Relevant to the present study is a
statement made by the book’s editor, Zhang Jingyuan 張京媛, which represents the Chinese understanding of the relationship between history
and literature in New Historicism:
New Historicists hold that history and literature belong to the same semiotic system, for the elements of fabrication and the modes of narration in
history are very similar to the methods employed in literature.27
Chinese critics ascribe the first contribution of new historical fiction to
Mo Yan’s novella “Red Sorghum” (“Hong gaoliang,” 1986), the opening
chapter of The Red Sorghum Family; and the grand finale of that subgenre to
the same writer’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips.28 And Ge Fei, with his misty
and mystic experiments, is regarded as the most avant-garde writer of
the genre.29 Other representative works include Su Tong’s Maple Village
series and My Life as Emperor (Wo de diwang shengya 我的帝王生涯, 1992), Yu
Hua’s macabre and capricious stories, Liu Heng’s Green River Daydreams
(Canghe bairimeng 蒼河白日夢, 1993), Ye Zhaoyan’s 葉兆言 four novellas in
26
Ibid., 201, 204.
Zhang Jingyuan, introduction to Xin lishi zhuyi yu wenxue piping, ed. Zhang Jingyuan
(Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1993), iv. Note that half of the articles in this book are
from Veeser, The New Historicism.
28 See Chen, “Guanyu ‘xin lishi xiaoshuo’,” 81; Yong, “‘Xin lishi xiaoshuo’ de lishi
guannian,” 29; Wang, Xin lishi xiaoshuo xuan, v; Dong Zhilin 董之林, “Kouwen lishi,
mianxiang weilai—Dangdai lishi xiaoshuo chuangzuo yantaohui shuyao” 叩問歷史面向
未來—當代歷史小說創作研討會述要 (Inquire into history, turn toward the future: Summary of Symposium on Contemporary Historical Fiction Writing), Wenxue pinglun 文學評
論 (Literary review), 1995, no. 5: 13; and Zhang, “Shi nian xin lishi zhuyi wenxue sichao
huigu,” 204. Wang Biao considers The Red Sorghum Family to be both a repercussion of
cultural root-seeking and an initiation of new historical fiction.
29 Zhang, “Shi nian xin lishi zhuyi wenxue sichao huigu,” 207.
27
25
his Night Moor at the Qinhuai River (Ye po Qinhuai 夜泊秦淮, 1987–1990), Chen
Zhongshi’s 陳忠實 White Deer Plain (Bailuyuan 白鹿原, 1993), You Fengwei’s
尤鳳偉 bandit romance and wartime fiction, as well as Zhou Meisen’s 周
梅森 military literature.30 I shall concentrate in the second part of this
chapter on Mo Yan for his pioneering efforts of new historicism, and
study Ge Fei, Su Tong, Yu Hua and Liu Heng in the following chapters
for their various themes and styles.
Idiocy and Idiolect: Han Shaogong’s Root Searches in Hunan
Han Shaogong’s major works of root search are the novella “Pa Pa Pa”
(“Ba ba ba” 爸爸爸, 1985) and his maiden novel, A Dictionary of Maqiao
(Maqiao cidian 馬橋詞典, 1996), with which he digs into the idiocy of the
national character and the idiolect from the Hunan dialect, respectively.
By highlighting the idiocy and idiolect in Han’s root searches, I probe
into the idio-, the ‘particular’ derived from Greek ídios, which implies a
metonymical relationship between the region and the nation.
“Pa Pa Pa”: The Folk and the Fool
The locus of the story of “Pa Pa Pa” is an isolated citadel in the cloudcovered mountains; the time is unspecified.31 The ambiguity of the time
frame yields an abstract historical dimension rather than concrete historical events. In effect, the sequence of events in the story is plotted by a
parade of bizarre images: the moronic protagonist Young Bing (Bingzai
丙 ), his savage fellow villagers, their blood feuds with a neighboring
village as a result of drought and superstition, and finally the collective
suicide of the old and weak, the disabled and children, by taking poison
so as to save food for the young and strong to settle and continue the
30 Noteworthily, Su Tong’s My Life as Emperor, devoid of concrete time and space
references, is an innovative attempt to de-historicize the historical novel. See my “Shikong
zuowei xushi celüe.”
31 Judging from a character’s adaptation to modern terms, such as ‘report’ (baogao 報
告) used to address the government, Jeffrey C. Kinkley, in his “Shen Congwen’s Legacy
in Chinese Literature of the 1980s,” 101, 103, suspects it “takes place after 1930, or more
probably 1949,” and agrees with the author’s own remarks that the novella is “a metaphor
for the insanity of the Cultural Revolution.” Yet the villagers’ dispute about whether the
report should be written in classical Chinese or the vernacular and the mention of the
“new party” (xindang 新黨)—a reference to Sun Yat-sen’s (1866–1925) revolutionary party
—also hint at the early twentieth century.
26
chapter one
family line elsewhere. The story unfolds between the repeated references
to a mythic genealogy from Xingtian 刑天 to Jiangliang 姜涼 with the
following ancestral song of migration:
Grandma led the clan, Oh, from the east afar,
Grandpa left the east, Oh, a long long line behind,
On and on they went, Oh, the mountains were so high,
They turned back to look, Oh, their homes behind the clouds.
On and on they went, Oh, through a gap in the sky,
Grandma and grandpa, Oh, their hearts were heavy,
To the west of them, Oh, the mountains stretched so far,
The road grew weary, Oh, was the end not near?32
Appearing at the very beginning of the story, Young Bing is born mentally
retarded and physically deformed. Yet he survives both sacrifice and
poisoning. His speech is limited to two expressions: “Papa,” uttered when
he is happy, and “F__ Mama” when angry. The grotesque image of
Young Bing desublimates the peasant figure long glorified in communist
historiography. In the light of Lacan’s psycholinguistics, literary scholar
Cai Rong 蔡蓉 argues that because of his lack of voice, the freak “becomes
an empty signification” in a world of language in which his subjectivity
is denied.33 Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker also finds Young Bing vulnerable to
interpretation:
The Bingzai in Han Shaogong’s story becomes a mere cipher, a blank
space onto which the villagers can play their crude jokes, take out their
aggressions, or project their superstitious beliefs.34
In the episode in which the cretin is held up as a prophet and his ravings
as divination, the fiction-writer not only showcases how a historical hero
is arbitrarily made, but also questions the rationality of history. Quoting
Liu Zaifu’s observation of Young Bing as a prototype of Chinese deeprooted psychological weakness, Joseph S.M. Lau reads the sequestered
village as a microcosm of the until recently secluded country and the vil32 Han Shaogong, “Ba ba ba,” in Han Shaogong zixuanji 韓少功自選集 (Self-selected
works of Han Shaogong), 3 vols. (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1996), vol. 2, Ba ba ba, 122,
153–154; English rendition, “Pa Pa Pa,” in Homecoming? and Other Stories, trans. Martha
Cheung (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1992), 46, 88. The “Oh” in
the middle of each line is the melismatic refrain-word xi 兮 commonly used in the classic
Chu ci 楚辭 (Songs of Chu), one of the exotic elements of ancient Chu culture that Han
presents to his contemporary readers.
33 Rong Cai, The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 67.
34 Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant “Other”
in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 204–205.
27
lagers as a shadow of the fossilized race: “the ‘roots’ [Han] now seeks are
no longer the faint echoes of the distant past, but the atavistic deformities
of his benighted countrymen.”35
In his overview of the root-seeking movement, Wong Kai Chee cites
“Pa Pa Pa” as an instance of “negative” root seeking, which follows the
May Fourth criticism of national character and advancement of historical “evolution” (jinhua 進化), as opposed to the “positive” root search that
affirms traditional culture represented by Daoism and Confucianism and
defies the “alienation” (yihua 異化) brought forth in the process of modernization.36 While this bifurcation is inspiring, Wong’s argument that
“Pa Pa Pa” advocates evolution is unconvincing. Though the defective
aspects in the Chinese national character are mocked in the novella, there
is no voice resonating with Lu Xun’s May Fourth Madman, who urges
his people to evolve into “real men” by getting rid of their cannibalistic
animal instinct.37 In lieu of the Madman’s plea to “save the children,”
a vicious cycle of fiendish rebirth appears in Han’s chilly coda, where a
group of kids is led by the moron to shout “Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa!” Here Joseph
Lau’s rhetorical questions are worth citing at some length:
How are we to make sense of this ending? Are we to consider that history, in the narrator’s view, is cyclical? That deeds of ignorance, stupidity, superstition, and cruelty as enacted in Chicken Head Village are to
repeat themselves after the migrants are settled on new soil? What about
Bing Zai? Is his twice-miraculous survival meant to make a mockery of the
Darwinian concept of ‘survival of the fittest’?38
35 Liu Zaifu, “Lun Bingzai” 論丙
(On Young Bing), Guangming ribao 光明日報 (Guangming daily), 4 Nov. 1988; Joseph S.M. Lau, “Visitation of the Past in Han Shaogong’s
Post-1985 Fiction,” in Widmer and Wang, From May Fourth to June Fourth, 29, 31–32, 40.
36 Wong, “Zhongguo dangdai wenxue de wenhua ‘xungen’ taolun shuping,” 181–182.
Wong gives Acheng’s fiction as an example of “positive” root search. For a critique of
Acheng’s use of Daoism and Confucianism, see Kam Louie, “The Short Stories of Ah
Cheng: Daoism, Confucianism and Life,” in his Between Fact and Fiction: Essays on Post-Mao
Chinese Literature and Society (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1989), 76–90.
37 Lu Xun, “Kuangren riji” 狂人日記 (A madman’s diary) (1918), in Lu Xun quanji 魯迅
全集 (Complete works of Lu Xun), 16 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 1:
429; Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, trans., Lu Xun: Selected Works, 4 vols. (Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 1980), 1: 48. In terms of representing the Chinese national character,
Young Bing is usually compared to Lu Xun’s Ah Q. See, for example, Fang Keqiang
方克強, “A Q he Bingzai: Yuanshi xintai de chongsu” 阿Ｑ和丙：原始心態的重塑 (Ah
Q and Young Bing: Primitive mental state reportrayed), Wenyi lilun yanjiu 文藝理論研究
(Theoretical studies of literature and art), 1986, no. 5: 9–17.
38 Lau, “Visitation of the Past in Han Shaogong’s Post-1985 Fiction,” 35.
28
chapter one
Contrary to Wong’s proposition, Lau suggests that Han has challenged
the evolutionary theory of history by the traditional view of circular and
repetitive historical development. With the procreation of more Bingzai,
such repetition is rather a devolution than an evolution. In his reading
of Giambattista Vico’s The New Science, Edward Said has discerned a
pattern of repetition “characterized by a general debasement in the level
of existence, from civility to barbarism.”39
Han’s propensity to endless circles and repetitions of history is further
evidenced by Cai Rong, who infers a recyclable tradition and “a continuous re-creation of the crippled subject” from the eternal Young Bing, the
swirling rays of sunlight that he stirs up in a jug of water in the last scene
of the narrative, as well as the perpetual duplication in the title “Pa Pa
Pa.”40 In her analysis of the imbecile hero, Feuerwerker also concludes:
“That he alone survives famine, war, and fatal poison at the end of the
story strongly suggests that idiocy may be the permanent state of the culture he exemplifies.”41 Interestingly, idiocy is not limited to Young Bing,
but is also extended to the village’s ‘enlightened’ figure Shiren 石仁, who
is ironically portrayed as shortsighted and nicknamed Idiot Ren. Whenever Idiot Ren introduces new things or modern ideas from the outside,
he is depicted mock-heroically:
When he came back, he always brought with him some fancy playthings
—a glass bottle, a broken barn lantern, an elastic band, an old newspaper,
or a small photograph of somebody or other. As he strutted about in a pair
of over-sized leather shoes, the clack-clack of the shoes added to his air of
familiarity with new-fangled ways….
… Idiot Ren … changed the subject in all seriousness, “This damn
place! It’s too conservative.”
The lads didn’t understand the meaning of “conservative,” and so the
word shot up in value; and so did Idiot Ren.42
Idiot Ren’s ignorant image is evocative of Ah Q. Like Lu Xun, Han Shaogong sees modernization no exit for follies. In the author’s admission:
The focus of attention in “Pa Pa Pa” is in social history, in penetrating the
decline of a race in the background of the shamanic Chu culture. Both the
39 Edward W. Said, “On Repetition,” in his The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 120.
40 Cai, The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature, 91.
41 Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text, 207.
42 Han, “Ba ba ba,” 2: 125–126; idem, “Pa Pa Pa,” 51–52.
29
rational and the irrational become absurd, and neither the new nor the
old party can save the situation.43
Martha Cheung, translator of the novella, comments that the story “looks
at history at the same time as it looks at history in the making,” that “with
its constant references to the creation myth and the tales of survival and
migration in Chinese mythology,” it produces “a sense of the life energy
and the amazing resilience of the Chinese race.”44 Optimistic as Cheung
renders the piece, the roots that Han finds in the backwoods, however,
are backwardness and barbarism. In fact, literary scholar Ji Hongzhen 季
紅真 finds “‘Pa Pa Pa’ so desperate that it is almost an apocalypse.”45 Permeated with a dystopian mood, the text seems to ascribe the dwindling
of the clan to its folk customs: superstitious beliefs in spirits and shamans,
primitive practices of spells and geomancy, barbaric rituals of sacrifice
and cannibalism, consumption of afterbirths as a tonic and rats as lunch,
phallicism of a tree and a well, and totem worship of the phoenix.46 All
of these folkways are depicted in different degrees of detail—the more
detailed the descriptions are, the more absurd they appear to be. This
calls our attention to the folk customs that shape the historiography in
“Pa Pa Pa.”
In their treatise on ancient Chu culture, Zhang Zhengming 張正明
and Liu Yutang 劉玉堂 point out that customs, in particular shamanism,
are the least affected by dynastic and economic changes.47 Customs are
characterized by localism and traditionalism; they tend to be persistent
and perpetual, transcending political perspectives. However, “because of
their provincialism and lowliness, customs have never been valued greatly
in standard histories.”48 The above folksong about the tribe’s migration
43 Han Shaogong, “Husi luanxiang” 胡思亂想 (Wild flights of fancy), 1986, in Han
Shaogong sanwen, 1: 135.
44 Cheung, introduction to Homecoming?, xv, xvii.
45 Ji Hongzhen, “Lishi de mingti yu shidai jueze zhong de yishu shanbian—Lun
‘xungen wenxue’ de fasheng yu yiyi” 歷史的命題與時代抉擇中的藝術變—論“尋根文
學”的發生與意義 (The theme of history and the artistic changes in the choice of the times:
On the rise and significance of ‘root-seeking literature’) (1988), in her Youyu de linghun 憂
鬱的靈魂 (The melancholy souls) (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1992), 62.
46 For a discussion of phoenix as a totem worshipped by ancient Chu people, see
Zhang Zhengming and Liu Yutang, Jing-Chu wenhua zhi 荊楚文化志 (A record of JingChu culture) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1998), 404–405.
47 Ibid., 375–376, 397. See also, for a study of shaman worship in ancient Chu, Zhang
Zhengming, Chu wenhua shi 楚文化史 (A history of Chu culture) (Shanghai: Shanghai
renmin chubanshe, 1987), 112–120.
48 Zhang and Liu, Jing-Chu wenhua zhi, 397.
30
chapter one
from the east in the remote past is denied by an official historian in
the tale, who on his visit to the area rebuts that the migration was in
fact an exile resulting from their mythical ancestor Xingtian’s defeat and
decapitation by the Yellow Emperor in a conflict. But the mountaineers
prefer their venerable version to the ‘true’ history, neither because theirs
sounds more peaceful, nor because it is a mere legend of protohistory,
but simply because they believe their own songster, Bingzai’s runaway
father, rather than the outsider. As they refuse to be represented, the
problem of representation arises: How can the non-representable be
represented by the writer, another outsider? Feuerwerker has noticed this
“gap between ‘root-searching’ theory and narrative performance, the
paradox of attempting to represent what might not be representable”
in an array of questions:
Why is this ‘lower’ culture made out to be so mindless, inarticulate, and
‘dumb’? Is the implied author, speaking from his own superior position
as a writer/intellectual exercising his privileged control of language all the
more with his apparent self-effacing restraint? Or does this restraint signify
his own status as an outsider, his lack of access to the conscious life of this
community? How can one give voice to those who—apparently—hardly
know how to speak? How should one represent in literature those who are
seemingly beyond or beneath the conscious level of language? How can
the hardly verbal substratum of Chinese culture—if that indeed is where
its ‘roots’ are to be found—be represented by those who are part of the
self-conscious, self-perpetuating literary tradition above?49
Feuerwerker provides no answers to these questions. What I would like
to go on to ask against our criticism here is: How can local history be
represented in the valance of national history? Perhaps we should deallegorize the regional history, rescue it from the national fable, and restore
its local color. Since a strong “language consciousness” is in the common
possession of root-searching writers,50 it is soon realized that a region of
49
Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text, 206–207.
Ibid., 200. Note that in the ensuing paragraph on the same page, in order to attach
importance to root-seeking fiction in the history of contemporary Chinese literature,
Feuerwerker reports that “Li Tuo has particularly emphasized the central role of this fiction” by quoting his article “1985” from Jintian 今天 (Today), 1991, no. 3–4: 66, as follows:
50
In 1985, due to the rise of ‘root-searching literature’ … the history of ‘worker,
peasant, soldier literature and art’ (gongnongbing wenyi [工農兵文藝]) finally reached
its terminal point.
Li’s remarks are garbled by Feuerwerker’s ellipsis. The original statement, as faithfully
translated by Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg in Under-Sky Underground, ed. Henry Y.H. Zhao
and John Cayley, Chinese Writing Today, no. 1 (London: Wellsweep Press, 1994), 123, is:
31
‘low’ culture could tell its own history in its local speech. If the issue of
language is not confined to Putonghua (literally ‘common speech’), but
open to patois, then a regional culture can no longer be presumed “inarticulate,” “hardly know how to speak,” and “beyond or beneath the conscious level of language.” In fact, some of Han’s later thoughts on the
Hunan dialect, for example, the classical use of qu 渠 instead of ta 他 as a
third-person pronoun and the hierarchical idea of “speech rights” (huafen
話份, meaning that one’s word ‘carries weight’), have already been briefly
introduced in “Pa Pa Pa.” A shift from cultural root-seeking to “linguistic root-seeking”—be it “to seek for the roots of words, or root-seeking
through words”—is finally completed in A Dictionary of Maqiao.51
A Novel in a Dictionary: Dialect and Idiolect
A controversial work of Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao has been
denounced by Zhang Yiwu 張頤武 of Peking University and Wang Gan
王幹, a critic of Nanjing, as a plagiarism of Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the
Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words (1984).52 The novelty of the novel,
however, is defended by Nan Fan 南帆, who points out that “A Dictionary of
True, ‘Root-seeking Literature’ played an instrumental role in the ‘sudden change’
during 1985, yet I do not think that we should exaggerate its role. I do not believe
that a simple cause and effect relationship existed between the emergence of ‘Rootseeking Literature’ and the end of the era of ‘worker-peasant-soldier literature and
art.’ It would not be true to say that the former caused the latter to come to an
end.
51 Meng Meng 萌萌, “Yuyan de xungen” 語言的尋根 (Linguistic root-seeking), Dangdai
zuojia pinglun 當代作家評論 (Contemporary writers review), 1996, no. 5: 16; Chen Jiaqi 陳
家琪, “Yuyan yu jiyi” 語言與記憶 (Language and memory), ibid., 14.
52 The debates surrounding the originality of Han’s work involve the issue of copyright and resulted in one of the numerous lawsuits related to literary disputes in China in
the 1990s. On 23 March 1999, the higher people’s court of Hainan province pronounced
Zhang and Wang plus three newspapers guilty of libel. For reports, reviews and interviews on the so-called Maqiao Incident, see Tian Dao 天島 and Nan Ba 南芭, eds., Wenren de duanqiao: Maqiao cidian susong jishi 文人的斷橋：
《馬橋詞典》訴訟紀實 (The broken
bridge of literati: A report of A Dictionary of Maqiao lawsuit) (Beijing: Guangming ribao
chubanshe, 1997); also Gao Bo 高波 and Hai Ping 海平, “‘Maqiao’ gushi” “馬橋”故事
(The Maqiao story), in Han Shaogong, Han Shaogong wenku 韓少功文庫 (Collected works
of Han Shaogong), vols. 1 and 2, Maqiao cidian (A dictionary of Maqiao) (Jinan: Shandong
wenyi chubanshe, 2001), 2: 476–512. My comparative study of the two novels was published under the title “Yuyan, lishi he lishixiezuo—Maqiao cidian yu Hazaer cidian bijiao” 語
比較 (Language, history, and historiog言、
歷史和歷史寫作—《馬橋詞典》與《哈扎爾辭典》
raphy: A comparison between A Dictionary of Maqiao and Dictionary of the Khazars) in Shijie
視界 (Horizons), no. 4 (2001): 166–179.
32
chapter one
Maqiao makes use of individual entries in composing history and writing
biographies.”53 Unlike the international religious polemic that interests
Pavić, the history that Han focuses on, as it is made clear at the beginning
of his preface, is again of a little stockaded village. Han’s lexicon novel
is a local history, a gazetteer of a fictitious village named Maqiao, literally ‘Horsebridge’, in Hunan. The author began to construct the novel
with his 1985 short story “Three Anecdotes” (“Shiyi sanlu” 史遺三錄),
in which he first introduced the Luo clan, the ancestry of the Maqiao
villagers.54 Julia Lovell, the English translator of the novel, has observed
that Han does not romanticize this tiny village as a rural paradise, but
instead “achieves a balanced portrayal of the country-dwellers he worked
alongside.”55
A Dictionary of Maqiao is loosely woven in plot, lacking any protagonist or central event.56 One might consider it a collection of short short
stories, literary notes, and essays if it were not classified as a novel by its
author and publishers.57 The first paragraph of the entry headed “Maple
Demon” (“Fenggui” 楓鬼) can be read as a manifesto of new fiction:
Before I started writing this book, I hoped to write the biography of every
single thing in Maqiao. I’d been writing fiction for ten or so years, but I
liked reading and writing fiction less and less—I am, of course, referring to
53 Nan Fan, “Maqiao cidian: Changkai he qiujin”《馬橋詞典》
：敞開和囚禁 (A Dictionary
of Maqiao: Opening and locking), Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 1996, no. 5: 4.
54 Han Shaogong, “Shiyi sanlu,” in Han Shaogong zixuanji, vol. 3, Guiqulai 歸去來
(Homecoming?), 150.
55 Julia Lovell, translator’s preface to A Dictionary of Maqiao (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), ix.
56 This has been pointed out by critics, for example, Song Dan 宋丹, “Ma, Ha wenben
yu xungen wenxue ji Kundela: Jian tong Zhang Yiwu xiansheng shangque”《馬》、
《哈》
文本與尋根文學及昆德拉—兼同張頤武先生商榷 (The texts of A Dictionary of Maqiao and
Dictionary of the Khazars, root-seeking literature, and Kundera: A discussion with Mr.
Zhang Yiwu), in Tian Dao and Nan Ba, Wenren de duanqiao, 406: “The book has no
central event and complete plot at all”; and He Dong 何東, “Xianfeng de mofang: Han
Shaogong Maqiao cidian duhou suitan” 先鋒的模仿—韓少功《馬橋詞典》讀後隨談 (Avantgarde imitation: On reading Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao), ibid., 363:
… neither a coherent long story, nor a lead male or female protagonist is seen;
the structure of the entire novel is rather like a net casually cast by the author at
the reader: there are knots everywhere, but it is structurally very loose and open
among the knots.
57 Han, Han Shaogong zixuanji, vol. 1, Maqiao cidian, copyright page. For a discussion
whether the work is “a novel or short stories,” see Zhang Ning 張檸, Xushi de zhihui 敘事
的智慧 (The wisdom of narration) (Jinan: Shandong youyi chubanshe, 1997), 36–37. As
a matter of fact, some entries of the lexicon novel have been previously published in the
form of short story.
33
the traditional kind of fiction, which has a very strong sense of plot. Main
character, main plot, main mood block out all else, dominating the field
of vision of both reader and writer, preventing any sidelong glances. Any
occasional casual digression is no more than a fragmentary embellishment
of the main line, the temporary amnesty of a tyrant. Admittedly, there’s
nothing to say this kind of fiction can’t approach one angle on the truth.
But all you have to do is think a little, and you realize that most of the
time real life isn’t like that, it doesn’t fit into one guiding, controlling line
of cause and effect. A person often exists in two, three, four, or even more
interlocking strands, outside each of which a great many other elements
exist, each constituting an indispensable part of our lives. In this multifarious, scattered network of cause and effect, how valid is the domination of
one main thread of protagonists, plot and mood?58
In the Chinese original the expression “cause and effect” (yinguo 因果)
appears four times in the second half of the statement. Causality is the
key to distinguishing plot from story in narratology. Events are not only
narrated according to the chronology of the story but also to the causality
of the plot. Han opposes the classical well-knit plot characterized by
a single, predominant plotline and proposes a network structure with
multiple causalities. When this idea is crystallized in the anti-novel, Wang
Meng 王蒙 praises A Dictionary of Maqiao for its break with the traditional
view of history marked by linear causal determinism, while Zhang Ning
regards the whole dictionary as a big circle and the entries as small
circles reflecting the Chinese notion of circular time that “dissolves the
traditional conception of narrative time in novel.”59 However, Chen Sihe
maintains that “on the surface the characters and stories in the fiction are
broken into pieces by entries, and yet they are actually demonstrated in
the strict order of linear narrative”; Mark Leenhouts and Julia Lovell also
agree that the build-up of information as the work progresses through
the entries “requires a linear reading.”60 So, is the narrative mode of A
Dictionary of Maqiao linear or circular?
On the one hand, to compile a novel in the form of dictionary, or
to tell a story in terms of an entry, is a strategy of decentralized narra58 Han, Han Shaogong zixuanji, 1: 68; Lovell, A Dictionary of Maqiao, 58. Hereafter, unless
stated otherwise, page numbers in the text refer to this Chinese edition and then Lovell’s
English rendition.
59 Wang Meng, “Daoshi cidian haishi xiaoshuo” 道是詞典還是小說 (Is it a dictionary
or a novel?), in Tian Dao and Nan Ba, Wenren de duanqiao, 416; Zhang, Xushi de zhihui, 37.
60 Chen Sihe, “Maqiao cidian: Zhongguo dangdai wenxue de shijiexing yinsu zhi yili”
《馬橋詞典》
：中國當代文學的世界性因素之一例 (A Dictionary of Maqiao: An example of
world elements in contemporary Chinese literature), in Tian Dao and Nan Ba, Wenren de duanqiao, 436; Mark Leenhouts, “‘Is It a Dictionary or a Novel?’: On Playfulness in
34
chapter one
tion. A Dictionary of Maqiao has no narrative focus, is deficient in main
storyline and major characters; each (group) of its 115 entries presents a
distinct story. The kind of strong causal continuity found in grand narrative no longer exists between one event and the next. Such episodic
plotting purports the scattered nature of history. On the other hand, A
Dictionary of Maqiao is not arranged, as is a standard Chinese dictionary,
by traditional radicals or phonetic alphabet, nor is its English edition in
the alphabetical order. There is a stroke index (or “List of Entries” in
the translation) at the beginning, but the book is compiled in a series
of interrelated entries or events. It starts with two geographical terms,
“River” (“Jiang” 江) and “Luo River” (“Luojiang” 羅江), followed by
several entries on a brief history of Maqiao, namely, “Savages (and Savages of the Luo Clan)” (“Manzi [yiji Luojia man]” 蠻子〔以及羅家蠻〕),
“Third of the Third” (“Sanyue san” 三月三), “Maqiao Bow” (“Maqiaogong” 馬橋弓), and “Old Chum” (“Laobiao” 老表). Then there are series
of entries surrounding Long Stick Xi 希, the Daoist dropout Ma Ming 馬
鳴, the opera aficionado Wanyu 萬玉, and other figures. The novel ends
in the narrator’s return to the city, where he met the next generation from
Maqiao many years later, in the last seventeen entries. The time frame
spans 2,700 years from the Spring and Autumn period (722–481B.C.) to
the 1990s, with most episodes taking place during the Cultural Revolution years. Thus, Han chronicles the tales of Maqiao by putting related
entries together largely in the order of time. The entries of different stories stand apart from but cross-refer to each other. History is therefore
an intermittent course, in which events are separate from and yet echoic
to one another simultaneously.
Accordingly, though the structure of A Dictionary of Maqiao looks piecemeal, there is a time line throughout the network of episodes. Yet the
narrative is so discursive that its stories are rarely absorbing. The reason is not so much the segmentation of entries as the alienation effect
caused by the non-narrative, prosaic metalanguage that Han adopted
from lexicography. From the statement “As a newcomer to Maqiao, I
…” (1/1) in the opening entry onward, the author has intervened as the
first-person narrator. He chooses not to be a ‘neutral’ third-person narrator or a hidden omniscient authority as other lexicographers do. His
intervention, however, is not for narration, but for discussion. If first perHan Shaogong’s Dictionary of Maqiao,” in Anders Hansson, ed., The Chinese at Play: Festivals,
Games and Leisure, with Bonnie S. McDougall and Frances Weightman (London: Kegan
Paul, 2002), 171; Lovell, A Dictionary of Maqiao, viii.
35
son is a fictional point of view, not a usual practice for lexicography, then
the metalanguage employed by the authorial ‘I’ in explaining and analyzing the Maqiao vocabulary is precisely a lexicographic usage. Han’s prosaism of metafictional narration interspersed with comments often distracts his readers from the story, driving them out of the plot to contemplate with the author. A Dictionary of Maqiao is not only about an educated
youth’s cultural experience during the revolution, but is also a reflection
of just such an experience. The combination of the forms of dictionary
and fiction gives expression to both conceptual knowledge and personal
experience of history. It is in this mélange of styles and the use of metalanguage that Han’s antinarrative is regarded as a “marginalized new
literary form,” which subverts and transgresses the genre of fiction.61
A writer’s understanding of history is revealed not merely in his selection of data, but in his choice of genre. Hayden White suggests that
a historical discourse must be emplotted as a romance, epic, comedy,
tragedy, or any other story-form to provide a framework for interpretation.62 Even the same historic event appears completely different in various story forms. The Cultural Revolution, for instance, has long been
told as a tragedy; nonetheless, it was recently retold as a comedy.63 Of
course, White’s concern is the rhetorical nature of historical narrative,
whereas our interest here is in the historical thinking in fictional writing,
but the function of genre is equally essential to both in arranging events
and engendering a historical view. Without a story-form, there will be no
integrated account. Yet integration is based on differentiation. The task
of the historiographer is to excise materials irrelevant to the principal
idea or coherent plot so as to persuade the reader of a certain historical view. The writing and explanations of history, as White argues in the
light of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural mythology, “are thus determined
more by what we leave out of our representations than by what we put
in.”64 In contrast, the novelist constructs his-story by picking up what the
historian has given up.
61 Zou Ping 鄒平, “Guanzhu wenyi de ‘xin gongju geming’—Ye shuo xiaoshuo wenti
de bianhua” 關注文藝的“新工具革命”—也說小說文體的變化 (Concerning the New Instrumental Revolution in literature: On the transformation of the genre of fiction), Xiaoshuo xuankan 小說選刊 (Selected stories), 2003, no. 3: 128.
62 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 98, 106, 111.
63 For a comedy of the Cultural Revolution, see my analysis of Wang Shuo’s “Dongwu
xiongmeng” 動物凶猛 (Wild beasts) in chapter 3.
64 White, Tropics of Discourse, 90.
36
chapter one
The dictionary form inspires Han with its polysemous juxtaposition,
suggestive of “the necessary ambiguity between different historical positions” (45/40). For example, the word xing 醒 ‘awakened’ should have
no derogatory sense in Mandarin; yet it has long been used as an irony
in Maqiao, meaning ‘ignorant’ or ‘stupid’. The author traces it back to
the poet Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 343–278B.C.), who claims that “all men are
drunk and I alone am sober (xing)” before drowning himself in Miluo, a
lower reach of the Luo River.65 When this banished minister of the state
of Chu wandered along the river’s banks in Hunan, how was he treated
by the Luo people, the Maqiao ancestry whose state had been destroyed
by Chu? Han laments: “History has recorded none of this” (44/38). Nevertheless, he believes that as victims “[t]he Luo people couldn’t really
understand the staunch loyalty of the Chu minister,” and that the special
usage of xing in the dialect “is a fossil seam running through the unique
history and beliefs of the Luo people” (45/39–40).
In modern history, Ma Sanbao 馬三寶／保 is a legendary hero, a
leader of peasant uprising in the new county annals, but according to
the Annals of Pingsui Subprefecture (Pingsuiting zhi 平綏廳志) fabricated by the
author and based on the official Annals of Yongsui Subprefecture (Yongsuiting
zhi 永綏廳志) of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Ma is merely an incompetent, cowardly madman, and the Lotus rebellion of 1793–1794 that he
instigates is no more than a farce on the historical stage.66 Whether the
Lotus Flower Kingdom is an anti-Manchurian patriotic movement or
a disorderly insurrection, the author’s conclusion remains as a question:
“Is there perhaps more than one version of history?” (11/10). As for Long
Stick Xi, a nonnative doctor falsely charged with collusion with landlords and local despots, there are three versions concerning the course of
65 Qu Yuan, “Yu fu” 漁父 (The fisherman), in The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese
Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets, trans. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1985), 206.
66 The pseudo-place name Pingsuiting in the book title is mistranslated as a ministry
in Lovell, A Dictionary of Maqiao, 9–10. For a list of different editions of the Yongsuiting zhi,
see Jin Enhui 金恩輝 and James S.C. Hu 胡述兆, eds., Zhongguo difangzhi zongmu tiyao 中
國地方志總目提要 (Chinese local histories: A collection of 8577 annotated titles), 3 vols.
(Taipei: Sino-American Publishing Co., 1996), 2: 18.106–107. The latest edition of the
Yongsuiting zhi, comp. Dong Hongxun 董鴻勳, 30 juan (1909), 19.21b–24b, records the 1739
and 1795–1796 rebellions led respectively by the Miao 苗 chiefs Long Sanbao 龍三保 and
Shi Sanbao 石三保, who become the archetype of Ma Sanbao in the novel as it is admitted
by Han in our electronic correspondence dated Apr. 2001. Needless to say, the surnames
Long and Ma, meaning ‘dragon’ and ‘horse’ respectively, are correlated in the Chinese
tradition of animal symbols.
37
his being escorted by a militiaman to the county as well as the sentence
upon him. They are formulated in the pattern “Some people also said
…. Other people had seen …, and so on,” with no consensus of opinion,
not to mention a common sense of collectively shared truth in history:
“I don’t know how near the truth this version is” (26/22–23). The same
pattern reappears under the entry “Bandit Ma (continued)” (“Ma Bazi
[xu]” 馬子〔續〕), in which the author uses “Some said…. There were
also those who said…. Of course, there were also those who said …” to
enumerate the various rumors about Magistrate Ma Wenjie’s 馬文傑 surrender to the Communist Party. After learning that the fifty chieftains,
whom he successfully induces to capitulate, are asked to scoop out a pond
and then are killed on the spot by hidden machine guns, Ma commits suicide by swallowing opium. The author can only sum up the case, known
as the Advisory Gang rebellion, ambiguously:
I have no way of distinguishing the true from the false amongst these
accounts…. I can’t necessarily even give a proper account of how it ended,
all I can do is try my best to piece together the fragmented sources available. [121/100]
“To piece together the fragmented” is the philosophy of history that Han
articulates through the dictionary form. On the one hand, he makes
no endeavor to conceal the gaps and omissions in recorded history; on
the other, he collects a vast amount of hearsay and gossip, tallying with
the definition of the school of xiaoshuo ‘petty talks’—the modern Chinese term for ‘fiction’—attributed to minor officials instead of official
historians in the first dynastic history bibliography as mentioned in my
introduction. The monoglossia of yiyantang 一言堂 ‘one person alone has
the say’ is replaced by the heteroglossia of “some said,… other people
said,… there were also those who said….” Moreover, the anonymity of
“some people” undermines the authority and authenticity of the sources,
leading to the inconclusiveness and inclusiveness of the narrative. In
“Beginning (End)” (“Guiyuan [Guiwan]” 歸元〔歸完〕) the author considers yuan and wan, which are homonymous in the Maqiao dialect, to be
both synonymous—implying a circular, repetitive historical pessimism—
and antonymous—reflecting a linear, progressive historical optimism.67
While Mark Leenhouts elaborates this ambiguity into a “theme of the relativity of language,” Vivian Lee interprets it in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s
notion of the two temporalities of history: the “long-time span” and the
67 As the phonetic part of the graph wan 完, yuan 元 is also homonymous with wan in
other dialects (e.g., Cantonese) that preserve Middle Chinese.
38
chapter one
“brief event.”68 That is a postmodern relativism of history. The inclusive
nature of dictionary allows the incongruent definitions to be juxtaposed
under one entry. By the same token, contradictory historical statements
should coexist without compromise.
Another example of the dual temporality is the word xian 現. Han
quotes The Roots of Words (Ci yuan 辭源) and A Dictionary of Modern Chinese
Dialects (Xiandai Hanyu fangyan da cidian 現代漢語方言大詞典) to expound
the paradoxical meanings of xian as both ‘present’ and ‘past’. He concludes:
Writers look back repeatedly, writing about the past [xian], speaking of the
past [xian]. But every single word or phrase of theirs actually involves the
moment, welling ideas and emotions of the moment, the ‘present’ [xian]
moment through and through. Writers are very used to finding the present
of the past and the past of the present, always living in the overlap of times.
Their dilemma is: to discover and radically reject time at once.69
The first two sentences sound like the Chinese idiom ‘use the past to
allude to the present’ (jie gu yu jin 借古喻今), but the relation between the
past and the present is complicated by the collision and superimposition
of the two different temporal notions on one word, xian. The relativity of
time is revealed in “the present of the past and the past of the present” in
the third sentence. However, after writers “discover” time, they immediately “reject” it. This “dilemma” is not further explained by the author,
because the illustrations have been given earlier in the novel. Xiongshi
雄獅 dies of a bomb laid by the Japanese army during the Sino-Japanese
War, and yet his death does not take place between 1937 and 1945, but
in 1972. On a winter day in that year, when digging a snake hole with his
playfellows, little Xiongshi accidentally detonates the bomb left over by
history. The author remarks: “This meant that the Sino-Japanese War in
Maqiao lasted right up to the year when it claimed the life of Xiongshi”
(76/65). How can we delimit a war or event by a simple, absolute date?
Universal time becomes voidable at Maqiao. Another year, 1948, still
belongs to the Sino-Japanese War for those who “didn’t know the Japanese had already surrendered” (111/91); others call it “the year of the
68 Leenhouts, “‘Is It a Dictionary or a Novel?’,” 171–180; Vivian Lee, “Cultural Lexicology: Maqiao Dictionary by Han Shaogong,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14.1
(Spring 2002): 169–170, 172; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin
and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1: 206–225.
69 Han, Maqiao cidian, 275; my translation. “Xian” is one of the five entries that Lovell
has omitted from her rendition due to linguistic complexity. See Lovell, “A Note about
the Translation,” in A Dictionary of Maqiao, xi.
39
Great Battle of Changsha” (110/91), which is officially dated 24th December 1941–15th January 1942; and a certain person, due to questions of his
reputation, altered 1948 to 1951 on his curriculum vitae, leaping all of
a sudden from the Republican period into the Communist era. These
anachronisms, whether they be out of political ignorance or personal
consideration, result from people’s indifference and defiance to the temporal standard. “To piece together the fragmented” means not merely
to acknowledge the impossibility of restoring the whole picture of history, but also to undo the unity of time. It is a spatial tactic that allows
the writer to “look back repeatedly” on the horizon of history. Maqiao
Village is a remote rural area, and the Maqiao dialect is an “obscure linguistic corner.”70 The linguistic space indeed becomes the focus of Han’s
historiography.
Language is not merely a medium of historical writing, but the historical text per se.71 There is no history without language; language is at once
the text and context of history, setting boundaries for the past. All events,
ancient and modern, can only be disseminated and become historically
significant through language. Dictionary is the locus of language; it is the
world of words, words of the world. Thus Han declares in his appendix
to the traditional Chinese edition of his lexicon novel:
Strictly speaking, we cannot know the world; we can only know the world
as it appears in language. We create language. Language also creates us. A
Dictionary of Maqiao is simply an effort to tear some tiny rips in the layer of
language so as to uncover, together with my readers, certain truths of our
people’s and the human race’s situations.72
70 Zhang Xinying 張新穎, “Maqiao cidian suibi”《馬橋詞典》
隨筆 (Reading notes on A
Dictionary of Maqiao), Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 1996, no. 5: 21; rpt. in Tian Dao and Nan Ba,
Wenren de duanqiao, 423:
A Dictionary of Maqiao is mainly to deal with, in a given time span, a regional
linguistic phenomenon, which is mainly characterized by relatively isolated spaces.
Though we cannot rule out the element of epochal character, what the author
emphasizes is an obscure linguistic corner hidden beyond the standard common
speech.
Vivian Lee, “Cultural Lexicology,” 149–150, also summarizes the novel as Han’s “literary
journey into and philosophical reflections on Chinese history and culture as they are
embedded in the ‘ambiguous zones’ of the Chinese linguistic consciousness.”
71 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, 94, sees language, particularly non-technical figurative language, as indispensable for the historian in order to describe events, regarding
historical narratives as purely verbal artifacts.
72 Han Shaogong, Maqiao cidian, traditional Chinese edn. (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1997), 299. Translation is mine.
40
chapter one
Here language is flattened into a “layer.” Like a sheet of paper, it can be
ripped open. The time-space of our world is produced by the fission of the
word. And history is but a jigsaw puzzle pieced together with these rips
of language. Each entry is a rip, an entrance to a truth; there are many
entries for many rips, hence many truths. For Han, ‘truth’ (zhenxiang 真
相) should be of multiple appearances, and so he employs the measure
word xie 些 to denote its plurality.
However, to uncover the truths embedded in language, one must first
clarify the relationship between ‘we’ and language. In his study of the
word xia 下, or ‘low’, which “has a long history as a moral prejudice
against sexual behavior,” the author laments that the commune’s cadre
who troubles to rectify the custom of Maqiao is “just a traditional dictionary user”; so he poses the question: “do people produce words, or
words produce people?” (93/77). If the latter is true, then the principalsubordinate relationship between humankind and language is inverted.
Wang Meng disagrees: “This proposition arises from the not very new
Western linguistic theories…. I found it somewhat misleading and
alarming….”73 He is probably referring to the high theories developed
from structuralism to deconstruction, which deny the instrumentalism of
language and claim that language is beyond human control. Language is
prior to us and molds us—I speak, therefore I am. In his preface Han uses
‘language’ (yuyan 語言) and ‘speech’ (yanyu 言語) to differentiate the public,
general sense of language from its non- or anti-public, specific sense. This
is echoed in his afterword, where the former corresponds to Mandarin
—the official language that represents the society, cultural tradition, and
norms—and the latter to dialects, which relate to the individual, personal
experience, and deviations. The two linguistic terms come from Ferdinand de Saussure’s division between langue and parole.74 Yet Saussure’s
structuralist theory lays more stress on langue as a social product, whereas
Han’s literary inquiry takes more interest in parole as an individual voice.
Because Han does not want to “submit to standards of authority such
as large dictionaries,” instead, he suggests that “everyone really needs
their own, unique dictionary” (400–401/319) so as to gain one’s huafen,
or “speech rights.” The novel further seeks an idiolect from the dialect,
73
Wang, “Daoshi cidian haishi xiaoshuo,” 412.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert
Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986),
19, 123.
74
41
an idiolect that Barthes values as an “individual innovation” and Han
regards as a revival of human subjectivity in the system of language.75
Thus, when it comes to the loss of subjectivity in langue, Han bewails
language’s disastrous effect:
Ever since language has existed in the world, it’s led to endless human
conflict, arguments, wars, manufactured endless death by language. But I
don’t for a moment believe this is owing to the magical power of language
itself. No, quite the opposite: the instant that certain words take on an
aura of incontrovertible sanctity, then immediately, invariably, they lose
their original links to reality, and at moments of the greatest, irreconcilable
tension between embattled parties, transform themselves into perfectly
chiseled symbols, into the abstract simulacra of power, glory, property, and
sovereign territory. If, shall we say, language has been instrumental in the
advancement and accumulation of culture, then it is precisely this halo of
sanctity that strips language of its sense of gravity, turning it into a force
harmful to humans. [366–367/292–293]
When words lose their referents, that is, “their original links to reality,”
they remain no more than empty signs. The ideological strives between
the Red Guards’ clique that labels itself “Mao Zedong Thought” and
the other that claims to represent “Mao Zedongism” during the Cultural Revolution, the religious conflicts between Christians’ ‘God’ and
Muslims’ ‘Allah’ are, in the final analysis, products of the self-splits of
these empty signs. As words split into slogans and dogmas, humans are
split by parties and factions. Han pointedly raises the question: “is history nothing but a war of words?” (366/292). In this war humans become
prisoners of language, reminiscent of the mediaeval Catholic Inquisition
and the Qing-dynasty literary inquisitions. Chinese literary inquisition
is known for its scrutiny of wording and cooking up charges. Under the
entry “Kuiyuan” 虧元, Han gives an example from the 1950s: A broadcaster is sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment only for misreading the
name An Ziwen 安子文, the then Minister of Organization of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, as Song Ziwen 宋子文,
a very important person of the rival Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist
Party. A man could be deprived of freedom for fifteen years just because
of two graphically similar surnames—language appears to be the force
that manipulates our destiny and life.
75 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1967), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 28. Its first chapter, “Language (Langue) and Speech,”
is dedicated to Saussure’s dichotomic concept.
42
chapter one
As a medium of history, language not only transmits history, but also
makes history. The Cultural Revolution is, to a certain extent, a linguistic
revolution. Ma Ming’s remark has it: “When time is confused, it must
be a time of confusion” (33/28). The traditional Chinese character for
‘time’, shi 時, according to Xu Shen’s 許慎 (ca. 55 – ca. 149) Explanation of
Graphs and Analysis of Characters (Shuowen jiezi 說文解字) on which Ma bases
his argument, is a picto-phonetic compound of the signific classifier ri 日
‘sun’ on the left and the phonetic indicator si 寺 ‘hall’ on the right.76 The
archaic oracle-bone inscription of shi has zhi 止 ‘foot’ on the top and ri
at the bottom without the element cun 寸 ‘inch’, the early form of zhou 肘
‘elbow’, which was added only later to the pottery inscription of shi.77 The
original ‘foot-sun’ construction preserves the protonotion of shi as ‘step(s)
of the sun’, hence the pace of time, be it reckoned in hours (xiaoshi 小時),
seasons (sishi 四時), or any other duration or point of time. The simplified
shi 时, however, rid of ‘foot’ and retaining ‘elbow’, bears neither the full
meaning nor the sound of the character. The disorder in the simplified
graph of ‘time’ marks the disorder in the political situation of the time of
the Cultural Revolution.
Occurring between the 1964 “General Table of Simplified Characters” (“Jianhuazi zongbiao” 簡化字總表) and the 1977 “Second Plan for
Simplifying Chinese Characters (Draft)” (“Dierci Hanzi jianhua fang’an
caoan” 第二次漢字簡化方案草案), the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976
promotes a Marxist-Maoist view that simplifies millenniums of Chinese
history into two words: ‘class struggle’.78 Meanwhile, all professional titles
76 Duan Yucai 段玉裁 (1735–1815), comm., Shuowen jiezi zhu 說文解字注 (Commentary
on Explanation of Graphs and Analysis of Characters) (Taipei: Wenhua tushu gongsi, 1982), 7A.
314. Actually, the phonetic of shi should be zhi 之／止 ‘go/stop’, the archaic forms of zhi
趾 ‘foot’, but has long been mistakenly transcribed into tu 土 ‘soil’ in the Han-dynasty
(206B.C.–A.D. 220) clerical style and then into the modern character si 寺.
77 Ibid. The oracle form of shi was still used in the Han clerical style as a variant.
See also Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa (1957; rpt. Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1972), no. 961z–c’; and Hanyu da zidian bianji weiyuanhui 漢語大字
典編輯委員會, comps., Hanyu da zidian (Comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters),
vol. 2 (Chengdu: Sichuan cishu chubanshe; [Wuhan]: Hubei cishu chubanshe, 1987), s.v.
“shi” 時.
78 In fact, when the “Second Plan for Simplifying Chinese Characters (Draft)” was
issued by the Committee for Chinese Writing Reform on 20 December 1977, the Guangming Daily commented that simplified characters “have had a positive function in developing the Three Great Revolutionary Movements for class struggle, production struggle
and scientific experimentation….” See Peter J. Seybolt and Gregory Kuei-ke Chiang,
eds., Language Reform in China: Documents and Commentary (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe,
1979), 378.
43
that identify the personal history, such as those listed under the entry
“Little Big Brother (etc.)” (“Xiaoge [yiji qita]” 小哥〔以及其他〕), are canceled and replaced by the communist appellation ‘comrade’. Furthermore, Maqiao’s antiphonal folksongs, especially those nasty juejue ge 覺
覺歌 or flirting songs, are substituted for by propaganda clapper talks
and revolutionary model plays during the political movement. Emerging
in the postrevolutionary period are the neologisms that manifest Deng’s
economic reforms. New words like ‘kala 卡拉 OK’ (karaoke) and guodao 國
道 (highway) have become widely popular in Maqiao since the early 1990s
and are frequently used by its rising generation. The excess of political
slogans and the explosion of economic neologisms are both made possible under the enforcement of Putonghua, which, as the author admits
in his afterword, has resulted in aphasia of the dialectal mother tongue,
a loss of an individual’s or a community’s ability to articulate one’s or its
nativeness.
For the root-searching generation, a normalized language is an attempt to fix and freeze history, whereas a dialect is a medium to activate
and reactivate a community’s or one’s own past. Han’s citations from the
1990s A Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects and A Dictionary of Chinese Folk
Dialects (Zhongguo minjian fangyan cidian 中國民間方言詞典) show an effort
to legitimize the dialect.79 Worth noting are the nineteen entries each
marked with a black triangle (or a black star in the English translation),
constituting one-sixth of the total in the novel. Different from the other
ninety-six entries with white triangles (or white stars), these are the words
limited to use in Maqiao or even by an individual villager only, and
therefore cannot be found in any dialect dictionary. A Dictionary of Maqiao
documents a small village and its unknown inhabitants through their
marginal language. For the educated youths represented by the author
himself, it adds a microhistory of the individual to the macrohistory of
the People’s Republic. Remaking history in the genre of a dictionary, Han
Shaogong probes the roots of culture into dialect and idiolect.
79 Elsewhere, in an interview dated November 2002, Han changes his strategy by
reducing the national language to a dialect:
In fact, the so-called Putonghua was also a dialect…. Therefore, speaking from a
pure linguistic point of view, I don’t accept that there is a Putonghua; there is only
a distinction between major dialects and minor dialects—the northern dialect is a
major dialect, while the Hunan dialect is a minor one, and that’s all.
Han Shaogong and Wang Yao 王堯, “Yuyan: Zhankai gongjuxing yu wenhuaxing de
shuangyi” 語言：展開工具性與文化性的雙翼 (Language: Unfolding the wings of instrumentality and cultureness), Zhong shan, 2004, no. 1: 144.
44
chapter one
Banditry and Bastardy: Mo Yan’s Family Romances in Shandong
Starting with his 1985 short story “White Dog and the Swings” (“Baigou
qiuqianjia” 白狗鞦韆架), Mo Yan’s fictional world is centered in his impoverished and yet idealized hometown, Northeast Gaomi 高密 Township, on the Shandong Peninsula. Literally, gaomi means ‘tall and dense’
as the writer uses the term as an adjective to eulogize the sorghum in
the beginning of The Red Sorghum Family, in which the Gaomi hometown
and townsmen of the past are glorified: “The black soil of my hometown,
always fertile, was especially productive, and the people who tilled it were
especially decent, strong-willed, and ambitious” (8/9).80 In Mo Yan’s fiction, Gaomi County is not only “a natural geographic spatial concept,”
but also “a cultural geographic space,” or, in the author’s own words,
a “literary geographic concept” of “half fabrication and half authenticity.”81 The spatial concept is complicated in this oft-cited oxymoronic
passage:
Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and most repulsive,
most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most
heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in
the world. [2/4]
Comparing Mao Zedong’s unidirectional, monological use of the superlative zui 最, or ‘the most’, with Mo Yan’s polemical parody of it, literary
critic Lu Tonglin has effectively demonstrated that the latter’s linguistic
subversion of the dogmatic, seemingly closed system of communist discourse “presents a world of insoluble contradictions, disorientation, and
fragmentation…. There is no longer a single highest order.”82 Thus, in
the rhetoric of oxymoron, Mo Yan has dissolved Mao’s absolutism into
absurdity. Thus the township is paradoxically described as “a sorrowful
80 The first page number in parentheses refers to the Taiwan edition of Mo Yan’s Hong
gaoliang jiazu (Taipei: Hongfan shudian, 1988); the second page number refers to Howard
Goldblatt’s translation, Red Sorghum (New York: Viking, 1993).
81 Ji Hongzhen, “Xiandairen de minzu minjian shenhua—Mo Yan sanlun zhi er”
現代人的民族民間神話—莫言散論之二 (The national popular myth of modern man: On
Mo Yan, part II) (1987), in her Youyu de linghun, 169; Mo Yan, “Xunzhao hong gaoliang de
guxiang—Dajiang Jiansanlang yu Mo Yan de duihua” 尋找紅高粱的故鄉—大江健三郎與
莫言的對話 (In search of the red sorghum hometown: A dialogue between Ôe Kenzaburô
and Mo Yan), in his Xiaoshuo de qiwei 小說的氣味 (The flavors of fiction) (Shenyang:
Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 2003), 129, 132.
82 Lu Tonglin, “‘Red Sorghum’: Limits of Transgression,” in her Misogyny, Cultural
Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1995), 63–66.
45
paradise, a monument to both grief and joy, built upon ruins,” and a
sanctuary that shelters both decent emotions and heinous crimes at the
same time (232–233/181). History is best reconstructed in such incongruous terms throughout The Red Sorghum Family.
The five-chapter roman-fleuve, told by an “unfilial son” of the family,
covers more than half a century from the early 1920s, when Granddad Yu
Zhan’ao 余占鰲 murders Grandma Dai Fenglian’s 戴鳳蓮 newly wedded
leper husband and becomes master of the latter’s distillery, to 1976, the
year of Granddad’s death, with a special focus on the wartime in the
late 1930s and early 1940s. Chapter one, “Red Sorghum,” opens with
the 1939 Jiao-Ping 膠平 highway ambush for the Japanese convoy under
Yu’s leadership after Uncle Arhat, the foreman of the distillery, is brutally
flayed by the foreign invaders. Dai is killed at the age of thirty-three by
Japanese machine guns while carrying fistcakes to the guerrillas, whereas
a Japanese major general called Nakaoka Jiko 中崗尼高 is shot dead by
Father, the illegitimate son of Yu and Dai. Chapter two, “Sorghum Wine”
(“Gaoliang jiu” 高粱酒), is a flashback of Yu’s early years, his romance
with Dai, and his score with magistrate Nine Dreams Cao (Cao Mengjiu
曹夢九) of the Northern Warlord Government. “Dog Ways” (“Gou dao”
狗道), the third chapter, relates the Japanese reprisal and a new war
between the village survivors and their corpse-eating dogs afterward. In
chapter four, “Sorghum Funeral” (“Gaoliang bin” 高粱殯), Yu goes up
and down again as the leader of the Iron Society in 1941. At the zenith
of his power, he gives Dai a stately funeral, which only ends in a tangled
fighting among his gang, the Japanese aggressors, Little Foot Jiang’s 江
Jiao-Gao 膠高 regiment of the CCP, and Pocky Leng’s 冷 detachment of
the KMT. The fifth chapter, “Strange Death” (“Qi si” 奇死), recounts
a pre-ambush bloodbath, during which Yu’s second wife is raped by six
Japanese soldiers. The process of her being possessed by a demon on her
deathbed reads rather like a supernatural tale of Strange Stories from the
Leisure Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異, 1766) by another Shandong writer,
Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640–1715).
The main plotline and major characters of the novel are based on
the 1938 Sunjiakou 孫家口 ambush led by Cao Keming 曹克明 of Northwest Gaomi Township and Leng Guanrong 冷關榮 of Northeast Gaomi
Township, in which the Japanese lieutenant general Nakaoka Mitaka 中
岡彌高 and his thirty-eight troops were annihilated, and on the enemy’s
gory retaliation in Gongpomiao 公婆廟, Northeast Gaomi Township,
where 136 villagers were slaughtered, including a resistant by the name of
46
chapter one
Zhang Xide 張西德, who was skinned and “cruelly tortured to death.”83
Moreover, Cao Mengjiu is the historic magistrate who, according to
the county annals, executed eighty-odd local bandits and only one of
them, Guo Guizi 郭鬼子 from Northeast Gaomi Township, managed to
escape.84 Accordingly, the hero Yu Zhan’ao is a combined image of the
local despot Cao Keming and the bandit Guo Guizi.
The story begins and unfolds in both the Western yearly scheme and
traditional Chinese calendar: “The ninth day of the eighth lunar month,
1939” (1/3), “[s]ix days later, the fifteenth day of the eighth month, the
night of the Mid-Autumn Festival” (3/4), “[t]he twenty-third day of the
twelfth month in the year 1923, the Kitchen God is sent to heaven to
make his report” (201/157), and so on.85 These temporal juxtapositions
situate history in both the global and the local contexts, the modern and
the traditional civilizations, the linear and the cyclical concepts of time.
The agricultural seasonal occasions (Mid-Autumn Festival, Farewell to
the Kitchen God) localize the world war and the national salvation upon
a village defense.
A Sensible and Yet Ignorant Narrator
In fact, the chronological order of time is totally violated as the narrator
flashes back and forth to call up the fragments of narrative impromptu.
The “macro-narrative” of historic events is often interrupted by the “micro-narrative” of the personae’s mental activities—memories, imaginations, emotions and feelings.86 M. Thomas Inge has stated that this modern narrative technique “serves to undermine the notion that history as
truth is ultimately knowable and leads readers to put the story together
83 Yu Tianzhu 于天助, “Sunjiakou fujizhan yu Gongpomiao can’an” 孫家口伏擊戰與
公婆廟慘案 (The Sunjiakou ambush and Gongpomiao massacre), Wenshi ziliao xuanji 文
史資料選輯 (Selected edition of historical accounts of past events), ed. Zhongguo renmin
zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Shandong sheng Gaomi xian wenshi ziliao yanjiu hui 中國人民
政治協商會議山東省高密縣文史資料研究會, no. 7; quoted in He Lihua and Yang Shousen
et al., Guaicai Mo Yan 怪才莫言 (Mo Yan: A prodigy) (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi
chubanshe, 1992), 26.
84 He and Yang, Guaicai Mo Yan, 25, 29.
85 The lunar dates are ignored and mistaken for Western times by some scholars, for
example, Chou Ying-hsiung 周英雄, “Romance of the Red Sorghum Family,” Modern
Chinese Literature 5.1 (Spring 1989): 37; and Chen Sihe in his conversation with Yang Binhua
楊斌華, “Guanyu ‘Hong gaoliang’ de duihua” 關於《紅高粱》的對話 (A dialogue on “Red
Sorghum”), in Chen, Bi zou long she 筆走龍蛇 (Dragons and snakes follow the writing
brush) (Jinan: Shandong youyi chubanshe, 1997), 337.
86 He and Yang, Guaicai Mo Yan, 186–187.
47
for themselves.”87 In Mo Yan’s anachronistic historiography, history is
less ‘knowable’ than sensible. The I-narrator’s sensibility of happenings
seems to be inherited from his father, who is able to sense in the dark
his battle companions’ actions and reactions and instinctively take the
troops’ bearings during their night march to the ambush. This extraordinary sensibility yields all sorts of otherwise impossibly diminutive descriptions, such as a drop of water falling from a sorghum stalk into Father’s
mouth during the night march, a steel pellet lodged between Grandma’s
back teeth when she eats a hare, a grain of sorghum landing between her
lips after she is shot down by the Japanese, and a couple of bullets slowly
tumbling in the moonlight. While the dew drop, the sorghum grain, and
the bullets’ trajectories are directly experienced or seen by Father, the
stuck pellet can only be explained, in Chou Ying-hsiung’s words, by “the
speaker’s almost supersensory insight into the epic events of an earlier
age. It is actually historical consciousness at its most sensitive.”88
With such sensibility, the narrative voice becomes very complex: the
omnipresent I-narrator appears, at times, to be omniscient, knowing
things that none of the characters know and he cannot have known;
however, he sometimes does not know what he should know. Because
omnipresent narrators are characteristic of historiography, so that their
recountals are not limited by time and space, they are usually in the
third person. In The Red Sorghum Family, however, the ubiquitous capacity belongs to a first-person narrator, who moves freely back and forth
between scenes occurring at different times and tells all the details of the
events and situations from various characters’ viewpoints. Feuerwerker
notes in her analysis of the novel:
This lack of a stable one-point perspective from which a ‘reality’ is perceived and portrayed, further undermines any illusion of the novel as a
direct representation of objective events, but foregrounds it as one that
oscillates and mediates between remembered history and imaginative reconstruction, as a narrative in continual process.89
This can be illustrated by the episode of unearthing Grandma nearly
two years after her death, in which Father’s memory contradicts other
witnesses’ recollection at the beginning:
87
Inge, “Mo Yan Through Western Eyes,” World Literature Today 74.3 (Summer 2000):
502.
88
89
Chou, “Romance of the Red Sorghum Family,” 35.
Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text, 218.
48
chapter one
According to Father, Grandma emerged from the resplendent, aromatic
grave as lovely as a flower, as in a fairy tale. But the faces of the Iron Society
soldiers contorted whenever they described in gory detail the hideous
shape of her corpse and the suffocating stench issuing from the grave.
Father called them liars. His senses were particularly keen at the time,
he recalled, and as the last few stalks were removed, Grandma’s sweet,
beautiful smile made the area crackle as though swept by a raging fire.
[351/263–264]
But Father admits that once Grandma’s body was lifted out of the grave,
he saw only a skeleton and smelled the stench, too. Thus, the scenery
of history changes between the imagination of her beautiful smile and
peculiar fragrance inside the grave, and the reality of her white bones
and foul odor outside, vacillating between the subjective senses and the
objective actuality.
Since the I-narrator is born in the 1950s and therefore unable to witness the war in 1939 and his grandparents’ deeds before then, he utilizes
his father as a focalizer and his mother as a storyteller (“Mother told me
once,” “Mother said”) to present the past and “the past of the past.”90
By holding both his own and his parents’ points of view, he is not only
able to see what his parents see, but is also capable of chasing his father’s
fantasies of his granddad’s thoughts. Yet sporadically he goes beyond the
limits of the visions of his father’s generation, showing what he ‘knows’
about his grandparent that his father does not know:
He never knew how many sexual comedies my grandma had performed
on this dirt path, but I knew. And he never knew that her naked body,
pure as glossy white jade, had lain on the black soil beneath the shadows
of sorghum stalks, but I knew. [5/6]
This divulges that while some sources of his knowledge about historical
anecdotes are his post-memory from the family’s oral tradition, a large
part is derived from his literary conceits or, in his own words, huayan qiaoyu
花言巧語 ‘flowery terms’ (28/24). It explains why in reality he does not
even know whether the little goatherd who once sang and peed on his
father’s grave was himself or not. Feuerwerker comments:
At such moments the I-narrator openly acknowledges his own textual
operations, as when he goes beyond the one who is ‘there’ directly experiencing and contemplating the events…. He thus calls attention to the production and processes of literature itself, as he simultaneously constructs
and deconstructs the writing of his ‘history’.91
90
91
He and Yang, Guaicai Mo Yan, 187.
Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text, 221.
49
Mo Yan seems to suggest that the writing of history is a process of endless supplementation rather than a fixity. The early career of Yu Zhan’ao
as a bearer hired out for a wedding and funeral service company briefly
mentioned in chapter two, for example, is expanded into a fantastic anecdote about an enormous coffin in chapter four. While some details are
fully developed in the novel, a few incidents are not clarified. For instance,
the narrator speaks more than once of Granddad’s return from the desolate mountains of Hokkaido in 1958, but gives no account of it in the five
chapters. This is probably one of the blanks the author promises in his
afterword to leave for further fulfillment. Later it becomes the short story
“Man and Beast” (“Ren yu shou” 人與獸, 1991), which is incorporated
into the enlarged edition of the novel as the seventh chapter titled “Savage” (“Yeren” 野人).92 Here the prototype of Granddad is shifted from
the guerrilla commander Cao Keming and the bandit Guo Guizi to a
prisoner of war, farmer Liu Lianren 劉連仁 from Jinggou 井溝 Township of Gaomi, who made his escape from the Japanese labor camp and
hid out in a cave in Hokkaido for thirteen years until 1957, when he was
discovered by local hunters and accused by the Japanese government of
spying. The political event ended with the aids of Red Cross Society and
other organizations on 15th April 1958, when Liu was welcome back to
China by Chairman Liu Shaoqi 劉少奇 (1898–1969) and Premier Zhou
Enlai 周恩來 (1899–1976) in Tianjin.93 Mo Yan’s tale about Granddad’s
grapple with two red foxes and his encounter with a Japanese woman in
the morning of 1st October 1949, the precise moment when Father and
his unit are reviewed at the founding parade of the PRC at Tiananmen,
is developed from Liu Lianren’s autobiography.
While “Man and Beast” is written as an oral account given by Granddad (“Granddad told me …”), the novella “Father in the Civilian Laborer
Company” (“Fuqin zai minfulian li” 父親在民伕連裡, 1990), retitled “Bastard” (“Yezhong” 野種) as the sixth chapter of the enlarged novel, is an
92 Mo Yan, “Ren yu shou,” in his Bai mianhua 白棉花 (White cotton) (Beijing: Huayi
chubanshe, 1991), 127–144; idem, “Yeren,” in Mo Yan wenji 莫言文集 (Collected works
of Mo Yan), vol. 1, Hong gaoliang (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1995), 428–442. English
rendition, “Man and Beast,” is in idem, Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, trans. Howard
Goldblatt (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 59–81.
93 See Liu Lianren’s autobiography, “Wo zai Riben de 13 nian yeren shenghuo” 我在
日本的１３年野人生活 (My 13 years of life as a savage in Japan), Yan Huang zisun 炎黃子孫
(Descendants of the Yellow Emperor and the Red Emperor), 1988, no. 5: 52–53; also He
and Yang, Guaicai Mo Yan, 25, 28. Apparently, Mo Yan is so fond of Liu’s story that he
uses Liu as a prototype again when he creates the character Birdman Han in his Fengru
feitun (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1996), 408–424, 664–666.
50
chapter one
oral history transmitted from Father: “This is what Father said.”94 The
story, set in the winter of 1948, is about how Father leads a hungry laborer
company to accomplish the formidable mission of rushing thirty thousand kilograms of millet to the army granary at the front without consuming or losing a single grain. The task is completed, yet the narrative
leaves something unexplained again, as we learn from a character that
Father was once in Japan before he joined the laborer company, but all
we know is that he bit a black bear to death and nothing about why
and with whom he was there. The addition of the last two chapters and
the creation of new enigma suggest the incompleteness of the novel—
in effect, of all historical writings.95 A similar supplementation is seen in
the “Seven Addenda” to Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which I shall discuss
below.
For Mo Yan, history as an ever unfinished project is always subject to
subjective modification. Ji Hongzhen has analyzed the structure of Mo
Yan’s fiction in linguistic terms, finding that his narrators tend to modify
the subject of native culture in the past with the predicate comprised of
modern urban consciousness. Simply put, in the sentence “I believe my
grandma could have done anything she desired, for she was a hero of the
resistance, a trailblazer for liberation of the self, a model of women’s independence” (14/14), the appellation “grandma” representing an ancestry
is modified by the modern ideas of “liberation of the self” and “women’s
independence.”96 It is in the modern subjectivity that the story appears to
be anti-feudal when Grandma resists the arranged marriage. And it is in
94 Mo Yan, “Fuqin zai minfulian li,” in his Bai mianhua, 45; idem, “Yezhong,” in Mo
Yan wenji, 1: 419.
95 In “Xuetian li de hudie” 雪天裡的蝴蝶 (Butterflies in a snowy day), preface to his
Hong erduo 紅耳 (Red Ears) (Taipei: Maitian, 1998), 30, Mo Yan confesses that he had
intended to write a few more novellas as a sequel to The Red Sorghum Family, but then
gradually lost his interest to continue the series.
96 Ji Hongzhen, “Shenhua shijie de renleixue kongjian—Shi Mo Yan xiaoshuo de
yuyi cengci” 神話世界的人類學空間—釋莫言小說的語義層次 (The anthropological space
of mythical world: On the semantic levels of Mo Yan’s fiction), in her Youyu de linghun,
183. Zhu Ling has argued in the light of Luce Irigaray’s concept of specularization that
despite these feminist labels affixed to Grandma, “the author wittingly or unwittingly
resorts to the patriarchal practice of ‘specularizing’ his female character(s) in order to
construct a desired manhood.” See Zhu, “A Brave New World? On the Construction
of ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Femininity’ in The Red Sorghum Family,” in Gender and Sexuality in
Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society, ed. Lu Tonglin (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1993), 125. Lu Tonglin, in her “‘Red Sorghum’,” 58, also reads Grandma
“as a location on which brutal masculine power displays its force.” Here I alter Goldblatt’s
English translation “sexual liberation” (xing jiefang 性解放) to “liberation of the self ” (gexing
jiefang 個性解放) according to the Chinese original.
51
Mo Yan’s own subjective way that modern Chinese history is written as a
story of bandits. Xu Zidong 許子東 has observed that the image of bandit
is a new addition to the six elements of the KMT, the CCP, the ancestral
hall that symbolizes the patriarchal society, the rich, the poor, and the
scholar in the fictions of revolutionary history; and that the role of bandit
embodies both the traditional patriotism inherited from the heroic legends of The Water Margin and the modernistic aesthetic that goes beyond
the limits of the positive characters of party cadre to desire violence and
vulgarity.97
A History of Bandits, Beasts, and Bastards
In spite of this, some critics are discontented with the “genuine patriotism” that tends to undermine the heroic rebelliousness in The Red Sorghum Family.98 However, what the author attempts to question is the official
definition of patriotism, a patriotism equated with partisanship throughout modern Chinese history. The anti-Japanese hero in the epic is neither the CCP commander Jiang nor the KMT leader Leng, but a bandit
heading a band of peasant guerrillas. Lu Tonglin has pointed out that Mo
Yan’s “choice of outlaws and adulterers as anti-Japanese heroes mocks
the Communist party’s self-portrait of the national hero in the antiJapanese war.”99 Another scholar also observes that the peasant armed
force in the story is not enlightened or organized by a proletarian party,
but is brought together by national consciousness and nativism.100 Contrary to the ‘party = state’ doctrine of revolutionary historical fiction
in the Maoist period, Mo Yan’s new historical fiction first differentiates
patriotism from partisanship and then, as we shall see later in the novel,
deconstructs patriotism in panpsychism. For the first time in modern Chinese historiography, the nation is rescued from party revolution, be it
97 Xu Zidong, “Dangdai xiaoshuo zhong de xiandai shi—Lun Hongqi pu, ‘Ling qi’,
‘Danian’ he Bailuyuan” 當代小說中的現代史—論《紅旗譜》、
《靈旗》、
《大年》和《白鹿原》(The
modern history in contemporary fiction: On Keep the Red Flag Flying, “The Miraculous
Flag,” “The New Year,” and White Deer Plain), Shanghai wenxue 上海文學 (Shanghai literature), 1994, no. 10: 75, 77.
98 Michael S. Duke, “Past, Present, and Future in Mo Yan’s Fiction of the 1980s,” in
Widmer and Wang, From May Fourth to June Fourth, 391n20; and Zhang Ning 張寧, “Wenhua yantan zhong de ‘xing’—Zhongguo xin dianying” 文化言談中的“性”—中國新電影
(Sexual discourse in contemporary Chinese cinema), Ershiyi shiji 二十一世紀 (Twenty-first
century), no. 2 (Dec. 1990): 112.
99 Lu Tonglin, “‘Red Sorghum’,” 52.
100 Yong, “ ‘Xin lishi xiaoshuo’ de lishi guannian,” 29.
52
chapter one
the KMT’s republican revolution or the CCP’s communist revolution.
As David Wang suggests, in The Red Sorghum Family “the ultimate end of
narrative is to be found at the fissure between history and revolution, not
at their completion.”101
At first Mo Yan seems to value Communists over Nationalists with
Father’s admiration for Commander Jiang and Granddad’s instruction
to Father: “If I die, come get these guns and use them as a bartering
chip to join up with the Jiao-Gao regiment. They’re at least better than
Detachment Leader Leng’s troops” (266/205). But then the Party’s role
during the war is decentered and its larger-than-life image in the grand
national history is deconstructed through several episodes: the Jiao-Gao
forces take over and steal the rifles from Granddad after the Jiao-Ping
highway ambush only to clash with Leng’s troops, not to engage the
Japanese; they waylay Granddad’s Iron Society soldiers and snatch their
weapons during Grandma’s funeral, unaware of the Leng detachment
behind; finally, the political instructor of Father’s civilian laborer company fires at the female leader of a crowd of famine refugees in order to
protect their own food. Both Granddad and Father are disappointed by
the CCP. So, when Five Troubles, a member of the Iron Society, tells
Yu that he is neither a Communist nor a Nationalist and he hates them
both, Yu approves: “I like your spirit!” (381/279). And when Five Troubles asks Yu who should rule over China after the Japanese are driven
out, Yu replies:
“That has nothing to do with me. All I know is that no one would dare
take a bite out of my dick.”
“What would you say if the Communists were in charge?”
Granddad snorted contemptuously out of one nostril.
“How about the Nationalists?”
He snorted out of the other nostril. [386/282–283]
With the use of vulgar slang in this dirty dialogue, the author sets both of
the political parties at defiance.
By delineating the complex struggle on the Shandong scene, Mo Yan
exposes the fact that the primary concern of both the Communists and
the Nationalists is not the people, but the party. As a historian speculates
in his survey of the “friction struggle” in Shandong during the war,
101 David Der-wei Wang, “The Literary World of Mo Yan,” trans. Michael Berry,
World Literature Today 74.3 (Summer 2000): 490; the Chinese original, titled “Qianyan
wanyu, heruo mo yan—Mo Yan de xiaoshuo tiandi” 千言萬語，何若莫言—莫言的小說天
地 (Innumerable words, better no words [mo yan]: Mo Yan’s fictional world), was published
as introduction to Mo Yan, Hong erduo, 16.
53
fighting between the two Chinese sides may have been more intense than
fighting with the Japanese. Both Chinese sides fought to decide who would
win hegemony in the resistance camp.102
In his comparison between The Red Sorghum Family and the revolutionary
model play Sha Family Creek (Shajiabang 沙家滨), Chen Sihe reasons that
the political strife and internecine fighting between the KMT and the
CCP become a historical background only to set off Mo Yan’s modern
version of The Water Margin, in which the national hero’s nonpartisan,
bandit identity restores a popular literary theme from politicization to the
vulgarity of banditry.103 By depoliticizing The Red Sorghum Family, Chen
endeavors to reconstruct a myth of primitive popular culture wherein
the passions for sex and violence go beyond the trammels of political
ideology.104 One of these trammels is the idea of progression in human
history.
Mo Yan shares with Han Shaogong in the theory of devolution
through their respective creations of the grotesque figures of Father, one
of whose testicles is bit off by a dog, and the idiot Young Bing. The
theme of regression of the species is brought forward at the beginning
of The Red Sorghum Family by the narrator, who proclaims himself one of
the bastard-heroes’ “unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale
by comparison. Surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our
species’ regression” (2/4). Rethinking of the faith in historical progress
from Mao’s revolution to Deng’s marketization, the author finds a paradoxical “link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort” (461/334). The degeneration of humanity is likened
to the degradation of sorghum:
The sorghum that looked like a sea of blood, whose praises I have sung
over and over, has been drowned in a raging flood of revolution and
no longer exists, replaced by short-stalked, thick-stemmed, broad-leafed
plants covered by a white powder and topped by beards as long as dogs’
102 David Paulson, “War and Revolution in North China: The Shandong Base Area,
1937–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1982), 88.
103 Chen, “Guanyu ‘xin lishi xiaoshuo’,” 82–83.
104 Chen Sihe, ed., Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng 中國當代文學史教程 (A course in
contemporary Chinese literary history) (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1999), 317.
In a later article, “Mo Yan jinnian xiaoshuo de minjian xushu” 莫言近年小說的民間敘述
(Popular narration in Mo Yan’s late fictions), in his Zhongguo dangdai wenxue guanjianci shi
jiang, 177–178, Chen adds that in the binary oppositions of state/person, city/countryside,
society/individual, male/female, adult/child, majority/minority, and human/animal,
Mo Yan always stands by the latter—this is what Chen often refers to as the “popular
position” (minjian lichang 民間立場) in new historical fiction.
54
chapter one
tails. High-yield, with a bitter, astringent taste, it is the source of rampant
constipation. [495/358]
In her Bakhtinian reading of Mo Yan’s fiction, Chung I-wen 鍾怡
quotes this passage to corroborate “Mo Yan’s intention to symbolize
vitality by the violence and bloodshed of revolution.”105 However, I argue,
it is precisely in revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution, that
vitality is exhausted and human degradation begins. Yet what hastens the
fall of mankind is another kind of revolution—the economic revolution
that evolves a separate human race in the city, whose “body immersed so
long in the filth of urban life that a foul stench oozed” (492–493/356). The
new Homo sapiens is compared to the hybrid sorghum brought in from
Hainan 海南, an island in the South China Sea established as a special
economic zone and, in 1988, a new province for further capitalization.
The above citation, coming at the end of the novel, sums up the work’s
central motif of retrogression.
Regarding red sorghum and the dog as the two master tropes of the
novel, Chou Ying-hsiung further elaborates Mo Yan’s familial-regional
emblem into a national-universal metaphor.106 Chen Sihe has also discussed how Mo Yan employs the symbol of sorghum, especially red
sorghum, to bring out a glorious and yet brutal history in bold relief.107
Obviously, in the family fiction of Gaomi, the natural world and human
history correlate: sorghum wails as Uncle Arhat is skinned alive; dogs and
foxes revenge themselves on humans; a jenny falls in love with and sacrifices herself for Father on their way of transporting army provisions;
the weasel that once possessed Second Grandma is transformed into
Japanese soldiers, who rape her and bayonet her little daughter; and the
Chinese army under the camouflage of dogskins fights like a frenzied
pack of dogs. Especially noteworthy is the beast fable “Dog Ways,” which
opens with an anthropomorphism: “The glorious history of man is filled
105 Chung I-wen, Mo Yan xiaoshuo: ‘Lishi’ de chonggou 莫言小說：“歷史”的重構 (Mo Yan’s
fiction: Reconstruction of ‘history’) (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1997), 135.
106 Chou, “Romance of the Red Sorghum Family,” 38: “Sorghum is almost synonymous with primeval man”; “it symbolizes the vitality of the distressed Chinese people”
and “has become the ultimate meaning of human life.” The Chinese version, “Hong gaoliang jiazu yanyi”《紅高粱家族》演義 (Romance of The Red Sorghum Family), is available in
Chou, Xiaoshuo, lishi, xinli, renwu 小說•歷史•心理•人物 (Novel, history, psychology, character) (Taipei: Dongda tushu, 1989), 70; and the 1988 Taiwan edition of the Hong gaoliang
jiazu, 499–520.
107 Chen Sihe, “Shengse quanma, jie you jingjie—Mo Yan xiaoshuo yishu san ti” 聲色
犬馬皆有境界—莫言小說藝術三題 (The vistas of sounds, colors, dogs and horses: Three
aspects of Mo Yan’s fictional art), in his Bi zou long she, 318–325.
55
with legends of dogs and memories of dogs: despicable dogs, respectable
dogs, fearful dogs, pitiful dogs” (215/169). The chapter depicts the tactics
and “collective subconsciousness” of six hundred stray dogs at war with
their former masters:
Months of vagabond lives and feasting on rotting meat had awakened
primal memories anesthetized over eons of domestication. A hatred of
humans—those two-legged creatures that walked erect—seethed in their
hearts, and eating human flesh held greater significance than just filling
their growling bellies; more important was the vague sensation that they
were exacting terrible revenge upon those rulers who had enslaved them
and forced them into the demeaning existence of living off scraps. The
only ones capable of translating these primitive impulses into high theory,
however, were the three dogs from our family. [277/213]
Ji Hongzhen observes that while extolling human nature for its defiance of inhumane ethical norms, Mo Yan realizes the evilness in human
desires.108 The common ground between human nature and brutish nature is located in an unmarked burial-mound, where the skulls of men
and dogs are indistinguishably mixed, “revealing that the history of dogs
and the history of man are intertwined” (264/204). Finding it difficult to
make a distinction between the two species in front of the skeletons, the
narrator
doubt[s] that even the provincial party secretary could have told which of
them belonged to Communists, which to Nationalists, which to Japanese
soldiers, which to puppet soldiers, and which to civilians. [263/203]
With this vista of the same shape of skulls thrown into the same heap of
white bones, Mo Yan not only declares his anti-partisanship once again,
but also defies nationalism in the last analysis.109
In the light of Mo Yan’s cosmopolitanism and animism, Chen Sihe
reads “Dog Ways” as both a parable, in which the humanized canine
world illustrates the wicked human society, and a prophecy that widespread bestiality will eventually result in the atrophying of the human
108 Ji Hongzhen, “Youyu de tudi, buqu de jinghun—Mo Yan sanlun zhi yi” 憂鬱的土
地，
不屈的精魂—莫言散論之一 (The melancholy soil, the indomitable spirit: On Mo Yan,
part I) (1987), in her Youyu de linghun, 154.
109 Michael S. Duke has pointed out that The Red Sorghum Family is a rare case in
which a Chinese writer humanizes and universalizes Japanese character. See Duke, “The
Unchanging Image of the Japanese in Modern Chinese Literature,” in The Walls Within:
Images of Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese Abroad, ed. Kinya Tsuruta (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia, 1989), 336.
56
chapter one
race.110 Mo Yan even extends his animism to Granddad’s pistol, which
has aged with its owner, “sound[ing] more like the phlegmatic cough of
a doddering old man” (231/180). These living and non-living things are
not only symbolic, but symbiotic with human beings as well. For example,
the massacre on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1939 is preluded
with a scene of ‘decapitating’ the sorghum by a Japanese cavalryman:
Father watched him attack the sorghum ears with his sword, lopping some
off so cleanly they fell silently, their headless stumps deathly still, while
others protested noisily as they hung by threads. [218/171]
Also, after the slaughter, the dogs hunt for human carcasses and in turn
provide nutrition to their hunters:
Having fed on human corpses, the dogs were strong and husky; eating
a winter’s supply of fatty dog meat was, for Father, the same as eating a
winter’s supply of human flesh. Later he would grow into a tall, husky
man…. [365/271]
When Father and Granddad don dogskins, they look more like dogs
than humans. With dog meat as their food and dogskins as their clothes,
they are metaphorically metamorphosed into dogs. Man and dog can
no longer be separated from each other. A panpsychism, or a belief
in some immaterial force that attributes consciousness and spirituality
to all things, is thereby held to challenge the panlogism of historical
materialism maintained in Marxism-Maoism.
Mo Yan’s anti-panlogism is also evinced in his plot of happenstance.
Incidental are Grandma’s being shot dead on her way to deliver lunch to
Granddad and Father, and the discovery of the secret formula for making
an aromatic sorghum wine:
Like so many important discoveries that spring from chance origins or
a prankster’s whim, the unique qualities of our wine were created when
Granddad pissed in one of the wine casks. [105–106/85]
In a sense, we may read the relationship between Granddad and Grandma as a trope for Mo Yan’s combination of history and fiction—a relationship not bound by a legitimate marriage, but a kind of adultery
“marked by measures of spontaneity, chance, and uncertainty” (123/99).
If The Red Sorghum Family is an agnate romance, then Big Breasts and Wide
Hips is a cognate fantasy. Shelley Chan has pointed out the “impulse to
110 Chen, “Shengse quanma, jie you jingjie,” 329–331. In his “Xunzhao hong gaoliang
de guxiang,” 127, Mo Yan states that he began to believe in the emotional correlation
between human beings and natural objects when he was a shepherd at the age of eleven.
57
get the body into his historiography, to write history on the body (in this
case, female) and the body in history” as revealed in the title of Big Breasts
and Wide Hips.111 I shall concentrate on the matriarchal genealogy of Big
Breasts and Wide Hips here, and leave its bodily historiography to be dealt
with in the last chapter. The saga, which spans the whole of the twentieth
century, opens with a life-and-death scene of the Shangguan 上官 family:
the difficult delivery of Jintong 金童 and his eighth elder sister Yunü 玉
女, the illegitimate children of Swedish Pastor Malory and Shangguan
Lu Xuaner 魯璇兒, in Dalan 大欄 or Great Corral Township, Northeast
Gaomi, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, 1939, when Japanese
soldiers march into their village. It chronicles the war of resistance, the
civil war (1946–1949), the political movements during the Mao era, and
Deng’s economic reforms, and finally flashes back to the 1900 German
occupation of Shandong as a result of the xenophobic Boxer Uprising.
The author intermingles family history with national history through
the marriages of Shangguan Lu’s daughters to hostile forces: Laidi 來弟,
the eldest, is first married to the bandit-turned-traitor Sha Yueliang 沙月
亮 and then to the mute PLA (People’s Liberation Army) veteran Speechless Sun 孫; Zhaodi 招弟, the second, to the landlord and KMT commander Sima Ku 司馬庫; Lingdi 領弟, the third, also to Speechless Sun; Pandi
盼弟, the fifth, to the CCP commander and commissar Jiang/Lu Liren
蔣／魯立人; and Niandi 念弟, the sixth, to Sima’s American adviser Babbitt. The political rivalries in modern Chinese history are thus presented
as domestic discords among the sisters and their husbands. For instance,
when the CCP liberates the town, Pandi accuses Niandi, “You’ve done
well. The American imperialists are supplying our enemies with airplanes and artillery. They’re helping our enemies slaughter people in the
liberated areas.” Niandi replies, “Let us go, Fifth Sister. You’ve already
killed Second Sister. Is it our turn next?” (246/263).112 The interconnection among the familial, local, and national histories is succinctly summarized by a villager to Pandi’s face:
[Y]ou and the rest of the Shangguans are impressive. When the Jap devils
were here, your eldest brother-in-law, Sha Yueliang, was in charge. Then
during the reign of the Kuomintang, your second brother-in-law, Sima
Ku, ran roughshod over the area. Now you and Lu Liren are in charge.
[275/290]
111 Shelley W. Chan, “From Fatherland to Motherland: On Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and
Big Breasts and Full Hips,” World Literature Today 74.3 (Summer 2000): 497.
112 Page numbers in brackets refer to the 1996 Beijing edition of Mo Yan’s Fengru feitun
58
chapter one
But when it comes to the Cultural Revolution, the Shangguans are labeled by Red Guards as a “Traitor’s Family, Landlord Restitution Corps
Nest,” and as “historical counterrevolutionary” (471/444, 478/451).
Mo Yan’s rewriting of the national history as a family romance serves
not only to epitomize the one hundred years of vicissitudes in China,
but also to undermine the cardinal principle of party-state interest by
installing personal perceptions of prior events. For example, when another villager is asked to denounce the atrocities of Sima Ku and his restitution corps, the landlord is described as “a reasonable man” who, quite
different from his bloody image in those insipid propaganda drawings
and explanations, “[j]ust kill[s] those who deserve to be killed” (373/366).
As Sima is going to be executed, Shangguan Lu laments: “He’s a bastard,
but he’s also a man worthy of the name. In days past, a man like that
would come around once every eight or ten years. I’m afraid we’ve seen
the last of his kind” (385/379). This is a mixed remark, but the positive
side in the portraits of this anti-Japanese landlord and the CCP’s other
enemies alike (e.g., a Japanese military doctor’s rescue of Shangguan Lu
and her two newborn children at the end of chapter one) has aroused
antipathy among Chinese critics. When the book first appeared, it was
berated and banned for “seriously distorting history” by beautifying the
Japanese fascists, eulogizing the KMT, and vilifying the CCP—though
research outside China proper has found, contrary to the CCP’s charges,
that the KMT guerrillas in Shandong did fight the Japanese vigorously.113
It is true that the writer mocks the CCP, particularly its political rallies.
During the accusation meeting against Sima Ku, the organizers Shangguan Pandi and Lu Liren turn out to be the targets of complaint. Lu Liren
has no choice but to sentence his own nieces, Sima’s two little daughters,
and the English translation by Howard Goldblatt, Big Breasts and Wide Hips (London:
Methuen, 2005).
113 Tao Wan 陶琬, “Waiqu lishi, chouhua xianshi—Ping xiaoshuo Fengru feitun” 歪曲
歷史醜化現實—評小說《豐乳肥臀》(Distorting history, uglifying reality: On the novel Big
Breasts and Wide Hips) (1996), in Zhongliu baiqi wencui 中流百期文萃 (Best essays of 100 issues
of Midstream), ed. Zhongliu zazhishe《中流》雜誌社 (Beijing: Jincheng chubanshe, 1998), 217,
222. The collection includes seven other articles condemning the novel as contrary to
historical facts and the author as responsible for ideological decay. Cf. Mo Yan, “Fengru
feitun wenda”《豐乳肥臀》問答 (Big Breasts and Wide Hips: Q & A), in his Xiaoshuo de qiwei,
67–68. For a historical survey of the KMT camp’s resistance to the Japanese invasion in
Shandong, see David M. Paulson, “Nationalist Guerrillas in the Sino-Japanese War: The
‘Die-Hards’ of Shandong Province,” in Single Sparks: China’s Rural Revolutions, ed. Kathleen
Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989), 128–150.
59
to death, excusing his actions with the claim that he is “executing two
symbols” of “a reactionary, backward social system” (279/293). Then the
execution is disrupted by Shangguan Laidi, who plants herself in front of
the girls and exposes her beautiful breasts to the executioner, Speechless
Sun. A similarly disturbing scene takes place at a class education exhibit,
to which Fourth Sister Shangguan Xiangdi 想弟 is ‘invited’ to confess
how she amassed her jewelry by exploitation. Having sold herself as a
prostitute in order to save her family from hunger and illness, Xiangdi
exposes the commune cadres’ hypocrisy by performing a striptease and
showing “the scars and bruises all over her breasts” (671).114 All Northeast
Gaomi women in the exhibition hall are agitated. They give their cadres a
good scolding and lift up Xiangdi out of the hall like carrying a martyr for
a parade. With these scenes, the author at once demonstrates how family
relations are severed by the communist revolution and deconstructs the
grand narrative of revolution through unexpected extemporizations by
‘the masses’. Here ‘the masses’ are no longer a unified group of faceless,
obedient people, but potentially subversive subjects.
The most prominent persona in Mo Yan’s feminized familism is naturally the mother figure, to whom the work is dedicated. This figure is
embodied by Shangguan Lu, a mother of nine children and a grandmother of eight grandchildren. Throughout her life in a chaotic century
of war and revolution, she struggles to raise these seventeen kids. To use
the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s terms, what concerns her is
“to be” rather than “to have.”115 So, when Niandi reports at breakfast
that Lu Liren and Pandi are going to recapture the town from the hands
of Sima Ku and Zhaodi, Mother simply says, “Eat” (196/215). Examining the image of Shangguan Lu from the angle of historical ethics, Zhang
Qinghua asserts:
Mo Yan has vividly expounded the relation of infringing and being infringed between mainstream politics and survival of the people in twentieth-century China. This is another kind of historical memory.116
114 Since the “Seven Addenda” to Fengru feitun, 645–685, is unavailable in Goldblatt’s
rendition, translations of all quotations from these pages are mine.
115 Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 81:
In the having mode, one’s happiness lies in one’s superiority over others, in one’s
power, and in the last analysis, in one’s capacity to conquer, rob, kill. In the being
mode it lies in loving, sharing, giving.
116 Zhang Qinghua, “Xushu de jixian—Lun Mo Yan” 敘述的極限—論莫言 (The limitation of narration: On Mo Yan), Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 2003, no. 2: 67.
60
chapter one
This kind of memory is less about victory and defeat than it is about
subsistence in the gap between victory and defeat. From the 1900s to
the 1990s, “there have been heroes and rascals going in and out of the
[Shangguans’] house” (645), and yet for Mother, the primary task is to
feed her kids.
Like The Red Sorghum Family, the I-narrator in Big Breasts and Wide Hips
is not one of the influential heroes, but an insignificant bastard. After his
birth in the third-person narrative of chapter one, Shangguan Jintong
appears from the beginning of chapter two as the first-person narrator,
who then takes turns randomly with the omniscient narrator to relate
the story.117 Being the male protagonist, Shangguan Jintong finds himself
a total bastard—an illegitimate offspring of a foreigner—in his mirror
image:
I had a shock of yellow hair, pale, fleshy ears, brows the color of ripe wheat,
sallow lashes that cast a shadow over deep blue eyes. A high nose, pink lips,
skin covered with fine hairs. [392/386]
Weaned late at the age of fifteen and morbidly obsessed with women’s
breasts throughout his life, the antihero is impotent. Mo Yan’s philogynist is reminiscent of Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 (1715–1763) Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉
in the classic Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢)—both personae express their ennui and resistance against patriarchal politics.118
As a result, both characters end up with religious conversion: Jia Baoyu
becomes a Buddhist monk, whereas Shangguan Jintong joins his pastor half-brother at a Christian church. Reading Shangguan Jintong as a
freak born of Chinese and Western cultures, a Japanese monk considers his obsession with mother’s milk to be that with traditional Chinese
117 For example, in the Chinese original of Fengru feitun, 551, a sudden shift of the
narrative voice from the third-person narrator back to the first-person occurs in the
middle of a section:
In Jintong’s mind, it [the bulldozer] was coming for him, and he pressed himself
up against the damp base of the pagoda to await death.
At this critical moment, Sima Liang 司馬糧, who had not been seen in years,
dropped from heaven into their midst.
In fact, ten or fifteen minutes earlier, I had spotted the olive green helicopter
circling in the air above Dalan.
Probably in order to avoid confusion, a section break is inserted between the above last
two paragraphs in Goldblatt’s translation, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, 508.
118 See Zhang, “Xushu de jixian,” 67–68.
61
culture.119 Zhang Qinghua further infers this bicultural ‘bastard’ as an
incarnation of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, whose bigeneric
identity is formed between their background training of modern Western
ideas and their sentimental attachment to the native national culture.120
While this interpretation will fit the image of the bastard hero in Liu
Heng’s Green River Daydreams, who is a returned student and will be discussed in the last chapter, it only narrows the significance of Shangguan
Jintong down to the élite. Indeed, in the national struggle for Westernization, all modern Chinese men share the shadow of Shangguan Jintong.
With his bastardy, however, the protagonist-narrator often feels alien
to his ‘Chinese’ environment. Naturally, the family/regional history as
narrated by him cannot be in accord with the lofty tone of the party/
national history. His history is made up of deformed bodies like blind
people (Shangguan Yunü, Blind Xu 徐, and the beggar One-eyed Fang
Jin 方金), deaf mutes (Speechless Sun, his brothers and short-lived children), single-breasted Old Jin 金 (Fang Jin’s wife), the one-armed chicken
farm director Long Qingping 龍青萍, twelve-fingered Six-Six Du 杜,
seven-fingered and one-eyed Zhou Tianbao 周天寶, as well as the amputated soldier Speechless Sun. Born mute, Speechless Sun is further dehumanized by history, namely, the Korean War (1950–1953). His triumphal
return to Dalan is worth quoting:
He was dressed in a new yellow uniform with a high-collar tunic, buttoned
at the throat, a row of glittering medals on his chest. His long, powerful
arms ended in a pair of gleaming white gloves, his hands resting on squat,
leather-trimmed stools. He was sitting on a red Naugahyde pad that was
attached to him. His wide trouser legs were tied together at his waist, below
which were two stumps. That was the image the mute, whom we had not
seen for years, presented to us now. Stretching the squat stools out in front
with his powerful arms, he heaved his body forward and moved closer, the
pad strapped to his hips glistening red in the light. [394/388]
This image reminds us of the protagonist in Lu Xun’s short story “Kong
Yiji” 孔乙己 (1919), which ends in the breaking of the poor copyist’s legs:
He had on a ragged lined jacket and was squatting cross-legged on a mat
which was attached to his shoulders by a straw rope…. He produced four
coppers from his ragged coat pocket, and as he placed them in my hand
119 See Mo Yan, “Wo de Fengru feitun—Zai Gelunbiya daxue de yanjiang” 我的
《豐乳肥
臀》—在哥倫比亞大學的演講 (My Big Breasts and Wide Hips: A talk at Columbia University)
(2000), in his Xiaoshuo de qiwei, 63.
120 Zhang, “Xushu de jixian,” 67.
62
chapter one
I saw that his own hands were covered with mud—he must have crawled
there on them.121
Lu Xun’s calligrapher is pitiful because of his broken legs, raggedy old
jacket and, most hopelessly, his muddy hands, which used to write but
now are used to ‘walk’. In contrast, Mo Yan’s disabled serviceman,
brightly dressed in a new uniform with glittering medals, is rather ironic.
Most queer are his hands, in a pair of gleaming white gloves attached
to squat stools, and his hips strapped by a red pad. Such grotesque
appearances only reveal how the dehumanized body is carefully packaged by the CCP to glorify the physical violence in making the history of
a ‘new’ China. In Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the disfigured bodies embody
a hideous history, a history loaded with sufferings and pains, no matter
which political force is in charge. A history thus bastardized is one of
barbarism that delegitimizes the twentieth-century civilization.
By ‘bastardization’ or ‘barbarization’ of history, I also refer to the
words’ secondary meanings that suggest the use of discordant or disparate forms vis-à-vis common practice. For some Chinese critics, Mo
Yan’s historiography is not only ‘incorrect’ in its contents, but also unacceptable in its forms, which offend the official standard of historical writing. The novel appears to be a reveling mélange of anecdote (accounts of
ancestors), legend (war ventures), parody (of political propaganda), satire
(of economic reforms), romance (the love story of Shangguan Laidi and
Birdman Han 韓), mystery (the unknown killers of Sima’s daughters and
the contradictory endings about Babbitt), as well as yarns of the supernatural (ghost tales) and the fantastic (Bird Fairy). It besieges the standard
historiography with all sorts of popular genres, questioning the homogeneous mode of writing in official history. A case in point is the second section of chapter two, which interweaves a romantic rendezvous of Shangguan Lu and Pastor Malory with the heroic meeting of Sha Yueliang and
the Sima brothers, ending in the tragic scene of Mother’s being raped by
Sha’s men and Malory’s suicide.122 The parallelism of different storylines
121 Lu Xun, “Kong Yiji,” in his Lu Xun quanji, 1: 437–438; English translation in Yang
and Yang, Lu Xun, 1: 56–57.
122 Such synchronic jumps between two scenes are composed like the cinematic technique of montage (italics mine):
As the donkeys [of Sha Yueliang] busied themselves with whatever pleased them,
Mother struggled free of Pastor Malory’s embrace. “You’re crushing the babies,
you foolish donkey!” [67/91]
63
reveals “the multidimensionality of history.”123 Nevertheless, if one tries
to track out a trend of style in the novel, there emerges a slip from heroic
epic to bastardly satire through the chronology of the first six chapters.
Contrary to all political powers’ promises of progress, this stylistic shift
shows a general decay of the nation in physical, mental and moral qualities in modern times.
Traditional historical fiction, in particular revolutionary historical fiction,
is always infused with heroism. The ‘tall, big, perfect’ (gao da quan 高大全)
image of the proletarian heroes (workers, peasants, and soldiers), who
are stripped of basic instincts and biological desires, helps to sublimate
the party history and maintain the grandness of the master narrative.
During the Cultural Revolution, hero worship was lastly developed into
the cult of Chairman Mao. Literary critic Cao Wenxuan has summed
up this phenomenon: “The concepts of ‘history’ and ‘hero’ have long
been bound together…. History is the history of great men, the history
of heroes.”124 In Han Shaogong’s and Mo Yan’s rewritings of history,
however, a group of disadvantaged figures has emerged from the shadows
of the past to the center of the stage. While Han comes out from Hunan
with intellectual reflections, Mo Yan steps back into Shandong with a
peasant standpoint. None of their Hunan idiots and Shandong bastards
are model peasants or evil enemies of the people as stereotyped in the
official historiography, because idiots cannot be fit into any ideological
While our donkey was nursing its bastard offspring around the open-air millstone in Malory’s compound, Sha Yueliang and his band of men were scrubbing
their mounts [in the Black Water River]. [71/94]
“What can I do?” Sima Ting 司馬亭 pleaded. “As old Pastor Malory said, ‘Who
will go to Hell, if not me?’”
Pastor Malory took the lid of his pot and dumped noodles made of the new
flour into the boiling water. [74/97]
With a feigned show of anger, Mother said, “The real bastards are the sons you
[Malory] had with that Muslim woman.”
Mother’s words hung in the air as, in another place, Sha Yueliang and Sima Ting
made a toast. [76/99]
Out in the yard [at my home], Sha Yueliang was cozying up to my eldest sister,
while … all five of the musket soldiers—the team assigned to watch the donkeys—
threw Mother down on [the floor of Malory’s church]. [82/105]
123
124
Zhang, “Xushu de jixian,” 70.
Cao, Ershi shiji mo Zhongguo wenxue xianxiang yanjiu, 291–292.
64
chapter one
model, whereas the bastards under Mo Yan’s pen are illegitimate heroes.
These idiotic and bastard characters serve not only to fill in historical fiction’s narrative contents, but to renew its narrative form as well. From his
idiots’ idiolect in “Pa Pa Pa,” Han digs into the roots of the past through
the dialectics between dialect and the official language by creating a form
of metafictional lexicography with his A Dictionary of Maqiao—a form that
distinguishes the ‘private individual’, as the word ‘idiot’ originally meant
in Greek ídios, from the total national history. By the same token, Mo Yan
problematizes the standard mode of historiography with mixed styles in
his bastard historical writings. It is the derogatory sense underlying ‘idiot’
and ‘bastard’ that debases the authority of the party history.
The epigraph by Mo Yan cited at the outset of this chapter—“Regionalism is limited in space, yet unlimited in time”—suggests the infinitude
of historical writing on regional space. Han Shaogong’s Maqiao Village
and Mo Yan’s Northeast Gaomi Township are contemporary additions
to the regional emphasis in modern Chinese literature preceded by Shen
Congwen’s Western Hunan and Lu Xun’s Shaoxing 紹興. David Wang’s
observation of Mo Yan can also be applied to Han Shaogong and other
root-seeking or new historical fictionists:
The image of his hometown vacillates, depending on whether it is presented as the center of personal memory or as a negligible corner of official
history, to the point that the line separating memory from history finally
becomes indiscernible.125
What blur the boundaries between the individual’s memory and national
history are regional and family histories. Regional romances and family
fables have become the major forms of contemporary Chinese historical
fiction in the Deng era. We shall see more of them in the works of Wang
Anyi, Zhang Chengzhi, Tashi Dawa, Alai, Su Tong, Liu Heng, and Ge
Fei, which are to be discussed in the following chapters. Here Han Shaogong’s “Pa Pa Pa” and Mo Yan’s The Red Sorghum Family, as Wang Jing
has pointed out, open up “the mythological space of narration.”126 The
mythological imaginations in root-seeking and new historical fictions as
a remedy for the rationality of historical writing are also found in the
myths of the migrants and minorities, which are my focuses in the next
chapter.
125
126
Wang, “Imaginary Nostalgia,” 124.
Wang, High Culture Fever, 189.
chapter two
THE OUTLYING AND THE PERIPHERAL:
MYTHS OF MIGRANTS AND MINORITIES
I attempt to use Chinese, the Han
language, to construct an unknown
China.
– Zhang Chengzhi, History of the Soul 1
The picture of Chinese family-regional histories will never be complete
without those of the outlying and the peripheral. Writing about migrants
and minorities involves the politics of identity and representation, demanding different historiographic tactics. While diasporas invite discourses of displacement, minorities reconstruct myths of the marginal.
More often than not, both of their images overlap in stories about a
minority’s migrants and/or exiles, doubling the complexity of the narratives. The outlying group that I will concentrate on here is the Chinese
diaspora in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore as it appears in one
of Wang Anyi’s sagas. The exodus of Cantonese and Fukienese, many
of whom were Hakka (literally ‘guest people’—the Chinese Gypsy), to
this island reached 224,000 in 1911 and continued to increase rapidly
throughout the Republican period, dominating the population of the former British colony.2
China is a polyethnic country with the Han as the dominant majority. Among the fifty-five officially grouped ‘minority nationalities’ (shaoshu
minzu 少數民族), the Manchu, the Mongolians, the Hui, and the Tibetans
are the largest. Regarding the discourse of minzu, usually translated as
‘nationality’ or ‘ethnic group’, Jonathan N. Lipman describes contempo1 Zhang Chengzhi, Zhang Chengzhi wenxue zuopin xuanji (Xinling shi juan) 張承志文學作
品選集
（心靈史卷）(Selected literary writings by Zhang Chengzhi: History of the soul)
(Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 1995), 245.
2 Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J.R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 619. For recent researches of Hakkaology, see Nicole Constable, ed., Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Sow-Theng Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas,
Pengmin, and Their Neighbors, ed. Tim Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
66
chapter two
rary Chinese history as the “creation of a hegemonic narrative, a unified
story that could demonstrate the bedrock truth of minzu continuity and
consanguinity in the past, for the present.”3 This unified story serves to
construct a unified modern Chinese nation-state as an “imagined community.” Lipman goes on to suggest:
In this account, each minzu, at its own pace and according to its own
environmental and historical conditions, has followed the most advanced
minzu, the majority Han people, toward higher steps on the ladder of
history…. For Han—that is, Chinese—history, unlike other minzu histories,
constitutes the story of Civilization or Culture itself and thus represents
the Chinese version of History, the linear and rigidly structured narrative
of progress….4
Here Lipman is picking up on arguments made by other scholars, in particular Stevan Harrell, who has pointed out the three images of peripheral peoples—women (sexual metaphor), children (educational metaphor), and ancient (historical metaphor)—and the three civilizing projects in the civilizers’ or colonizers’ definition of historical progress: the
Confucian, the Christian, and the Communist.5 Except in the missionaries’ project, whose civilizing center is located in the West, it is assumed
that Han ways represent a masculine, mature, and modern model for the
minorities to follow.
According to the master narrative of the Han, the territories of Tibet,
Inner Mongolia, and Eastern Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang Uygur
autonomous region), mostly conquered by the Manchu rulers and their
Han collaborators during the Qing dynasty, unquestionably belong to
China. The minority writers and Han authors concerned about the minorities, while not daring to openly challenge the state’s legitimacy, share
a strong awareness of cultural autonomy for the non-Han ethnic groups.
Included in this chapter are Wang Anyi’s Patrilineal and Matrilineal Myths
(Fuxi he muxi de shenhua 父系和母系的神話), Zhang Chengzhi’s stories of a
Muslim group in northwest China, and Tibetan tales by Tashi Dawa and
his peers. Wang extends her father’s biography to a migratory fiction of
a Fukienese family in Singapore and traces her mother’s ancestry to a
minority tribe beyond the Great Wall, the national symbol of a unified
3 Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1997), xxi.
4 Ibid.
5 Stevan Harrell, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” in
Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1995), 9–27.
the outlying and the peripheral
67
and centralized China, mixing their legend with Mongol history. Zhang
blends literature, history, and religion in his Muslim epic, questioning the
accuracy of the official records by means of intertextual dialogues. Tashi
Dawa fuses the real with the magical, Tibetanizing ‘magical realism’ in
the Asian reception of the concept after its global tour from European
painting and literature to Latin American fiction.
From Pacific Ocean to Gobi Desert: Wang Anyi’s Migratory Mythology
The notions of Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom or China, the Chinese,
and Chineseness are incomprehensive, if not incomprehensible, without taking into consideration overseas Chinese and the non-Han sectors of the Chinese nation-state. However, Chinese exodus and ethnic
minorities have never been in high favor with the Han Chinese writers
on the mainland. Writing about migrants or minorities demands different methodological tactics. Traditions of both emigrants and immigrants
invite discourses of displacement that deal with the stories of migration in
a mythic spirit. Migratory mythology as one kind of diasporic discourse
is not only about exile, but is itself an exile of the dominant discourse,
namely, the official history that marginalizes the émigrés. The exile mentality transgresses the limits of the mainland mentality and the mainstream historiography, crossing over the boundaries between national
history and family fiction.
Unlike most male writers of her generation, whose family romances
are commonly set within the boundaries of China, Wang Anyi has
pushed her genealogical fiction beyond the national borders with a feminine sensibility. In her two-part fictional memoir, Patrilineal and Matrilineal Myths, she continues her search for the foreignness of her parents’
family backgrounds based on her earlier efforts in the autobiographical sketch “My Origins” (“Wo de laili” 我的來歷, 1985).6 The first myth
of origin, “Sadness for the Pacific” (“Shangxin Taipingyang” 傷心太平
洋), is a novella written in 1992 about her father’s family in Southeast
Asia; the second, Records and Fiction: One Method of Creating the World (Jishi
6 In Wang Anyi, Xiaobaozhuang 小鮑莊 (Baotown) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 100–130. It is interesting to note that Pierre Nora, in the general introduction
to his Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, English edn., ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–1997),
1: 12, understands the modern notion of ‘origins’ as “secularized version of myth.”
68
chapter two
he xugou—Chuangzao shijie fangfa zhi yizhong 紀實和虛構—創造世界方法之
一種), first published as a novel in 1993, traces her mother’s ethnic origin to beyond the Great Wall.7 With this transnational approach, Wang
showcases the two-way translational relationship between history and fiction always found in fictional historiography. She travels in and out of
China across periods, back and forth between fact and fantasy, creating
the imaginations of her family history.
Between the Mainland and the Island: An Emotional Oceanography
Wang’s patrilineal myth is about the migration of one Hakka family
from Fukien to Singapore and the return of a son, the author-narrator’s
father (evidently the modern playwright Wang Xiaoping 王嘯平 when
we compare Wang Anyi’s story with Wang Xiaoping’s biography),8 to
mainland China in pursuit of national salvation and communist revolution. The family’s diaspora across the South Pacific begins with Greatgrandmother, then a young widow who departed the mainland with her
son and built a big house single-handedly on Singapore island. Although
the novella is called a myth of patriarchy, nothing is known about the
great-grandfather and his kindred. The new home was established by
the great-grandmother and supported by the grandmother, the aunt,
and then the nine-year old cousin—all females of the family’s four generations. While the kinswomen shouldered the heavy burden of building up and maintaining the family, the kinsmen were either loafers or
revolutionaries. These male members represent a migratory mentality
or, in Wang Anyi’s own words, “a homeless disposition, a typical immigrant disposition” in “a rootless place, a rootless period” (8). The whole
span of this migratory history—including the two world wars and the
Great Depression in-between—is, as the narrator describes it, “a hopeless period” (13) and “a dirty age” (25). And the soil on which their home
was rebuilt is but a floating, orphan-like island. Yet even the mainland
7 These two works, “Shangxin Taipingyang” and Jishi he xugou, are published together
in Wang Anyi, Fuxi he muxi de shenhua (Patrilineal and matrilineal myths) (Hangzhou:
Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 1–85 and 87–385 respectively. Further page numbers
appear in the text; all translations are mine.
8 My assumption that the author-narrator’s father is Wang Xiaoping is based on
Wang Xiaoping’s biography in Beijing yuyan xueyuan 北京語言學院, comps., Zhongguo
wenxuejia cidian: Xiandai 中國文學家辭典：現代 (Dictionary of Chinese writers: Modern
period), vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing yuyan xueyuan, 1979), s.v. “Wang Xiaoping.”
69
is decentered as a mere bigger island surrounded by vast waters. So the
author sighs at the end of her exilic discourse:
At last let me repeat my words, “On a world map, even continents look
like floating islands.” All lands on earth are ocean reefs for humanity to
rest on. Humanity is in fact a drifting colony, and floating is its eternal fate
…. Oceans may well be the final settling place for humanity, the end of its
drifting. Herein lies all the sadness for the Pacific. [84–85]
The instability of human life is enhanced in “Sadness for the Pacific” by
an array of national and international historic events from Wang Xiaoping’s birth year on: the May Fourth Movement (1919), Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s
death (1925), Mussolini’s ascent to power (1928), Roosevelt’s New Deal
reform program (1933–1939), the Red Army’s Long March (1934–1935),
the German occupation of Austria (1938), the Germany-Italy-Japan military pact (1940), and finally the Pacific War (1941–1945).9 The two main
storylines involving Father’s return to China in 1940 and Younger Uncle’s
resistance in Singapore two years later are linked up by Japan’s military advances on the Pacific Rim:10 the takeover of Manchuria (1931),
the capture of Shanghai and the Nanking Massacre (1937), the assault at
Changkufeng 張鼓峰 Hill on the Soviet-Manchurian border (1938), the
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), and lastly the occupation of the
Malay Peninsula (1942). Detailed accounts are given of the maneuver at
the Japanese barracks in the Jiangwan 江灣 area of Shanghai in March
1941, the replacement of Konoe Fumimaro by Tojo Hideki as Japan’s
prime minister in October, the British and Japanese military deployments in Southeast Asia in December, as well as the February 1942 mass
screening and massacre in Singapore, thence renamed Shonan 昭南, or
Light of the South, by the Japanese for three and a half years.
As indicated in the novella, the resources from which Wang Anyi gathers data on Singapore’s colonial history include the 1952 Nanyang Yearbook and the 1942 Daily Yomiuri. The yearbook records presentations by
the Malay Chinese Itinerant Opera Troupe, of which the 19-year-old
9 Here we encounter an example of the author’s inaccuracy in her use of historical
records. The narrative suggests that Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a military pact in
1938, but actually Japan did not ally with the Axis powers of Germany and Italy until 1940
when World War II had already erupted in Europe. See Wang, Fuxi he muxi de shenhua,
25.
10 The author guesses that the time of her father’s arrival at Shanghai should be in the
late autumn of 1940. Ibid., 42. Yet according to Beijing yuyan xueyuan, Zhongguo wenxuejia
cidian: Xiandai, 2: 68, Wang Xiaoping returned to Shanghai in April 1940 and joined the
New Fourth Army in Subei 蘇北 (northern Jiangsu) in November.
70
chapter two
Father was a member, and the defense at the Kranji 格蘭芝 River by the
Singapore Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army, of which
Younger Uncle was a follower. The author has also consulted the yearbook on her narration of how Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), a
British East Indian administrator, landed at the Lion City in January 1819
and brought it under the complete control of the British by the AngloDutch Treaty of March 1824, and how the Japanese purged the Chinese populace of anti-Japanese elements on the island in late February
1942.11 Wang’s citations from Daily Yomiuri, in contrast, are rather lyrical
in nature. The night of the February 8th Japanese landing is depicted
as a tranquil seascape: “The westward tide in the vast Johore 柔佛 Strait
ripples quietly on the smooth, mirror-like water” (66–67). And the morning following the February 15th British surrender is peacefully filled with
the tweeting of birds. Yet six days later the sweet bird songs are replaced
by a thunderous discharge of guns, and shrieking vultures are hovering
over the sea covered with dead bodies: “Singapore is like a giant corpse,
a dead whale floating on the sea” (74).
While the entries in the semi-official yearbook constitute a centering
discourse of patriarchy, the selected quotations from Daily Yomiuri stress
the personal impressions of history. The narrator calls her family’s past
a “sad history” (shangxin shi 傷心史), attributing it to the “tragic temperament” (32) of the kinsmen. Not only are world history, national history,
and family history emplotted as a tragedy, but individual characters are
also infused with the tragic. Embedded in Father’s mind is the magnificent myth of the mainland, a legendary land with “sacrificial hue” and
“tragic aestheticism” (18, 19). His imagined sympathy for his miserable
‘compatriots’ on the mainland is projected onto the lowly Malays and
Indians on the island. In so doing, the fates of mainland Chinese, overseas Chinese, and even non-Chinese are bound together to show the universality of tragicalness. But then, during his one-year pilgrimage to the
communist base in Subei, his homesick, revolutionary fancy for China is
shattered by the everyday problem of taking showers, the language barrier, as well as the area’s desolate saline-alkali land—in short, the heaviness of reality on the central continent contrary to the lightness of his
fantasy from the Pacific periphery. Yet he soon overcomes his frustration
and, as a dramatist, is impressed by the influence of revue (huobaoju 活
11 These historic events are also covered in an earlier version of the Nanyang nianjian 南
洋年鑒 (Nanyang yearbook), ed. Yu Shukun 郁樹錕 (Singapore: Nanyang baoshe, 1951),
B4–5, 7.
71
報劇) upon the soldiers at the base and satisfied by the strong sense of
tragedy bred in the connection of drama and battle, or literature and
salvation.
As Wang Anyi makes historical conjectures upon her father’s histrionical caprice, she imagines a visceral experience of sadness on the part of
her father. On a tour of the island city in 1991, she surmises which Chinese textbook her father studied in elementary school, why his romantic
personality and nationalistic education could not have made him a realistic statesman like Lee Kuan Yew 李光耀, the first prime minister of Singapore; she imagines in what way her father and his theater group sailed
to Pinang in the summer of 1938, and how he called at Yu Dafu’s 郁達
夫 (1896–1945) house in Singapore.12 She also imagines what her father
imagined the mainland to be like in the days of his youth. This is a double imagination. If imagination of the past has to be based upon a certain
historical reality, then imagining a personage’s imagination is to abstract
a mood from such reality. The mood in the novella, as Tang Xiaobing
唐小兵 explicates it, is “a subjective mood of sorrow over past events and
retrieved memories” and “a global expression to melancholy subjectivity.”13 It translates history into passion, rendering the account of past
events into subjective and yet universal emotions. Such “sadness for the
Pacific” implies a general concern for the fate of humanity across the
geopolitical center and periphery.
Hence we find Wang’s Pan-Pacific melancholy in a synchronic parallel between her father and second uncle, both of whom participate in the
forces of resistance against Japanese aggression on the two sides of the
South China Sea. At the same moment that Father is summoned back to
the base in Subei from Shanghai, Younger Uncle is mobilized to defend
Singapore. The latter is arrested and beaten to death by the Japanese
military police in 1943. In the light of archetype, Younger Uncle can be
seen as Father’s double or alter ego, mirroring his older brother’s image
and imagination. It is the death in Younger Uncle’s prime that realizes
Father’s long-cherished desire to become a tragic hero. The mourning of
12 Yu Dafu landed in Singapore on 28 Dec. 1938 and escaped to Indonesia on 4 Feb.
1942. See Guo Wenyou 郭文友, Qianqiu yinhen—Yu Dafu nianpu changbian 千秋飲恨—郁達
夫年譜長編 (A chronicle of Yu Dafu’s life) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1996),
1572, 1796; and Yu Yun 郁雲, Yu Dafu zhuan 郁達夫傳 (A biography of Yu Dafu) (Fuzhou:
Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1984), 151, 169.
13 Xiaobing Tang, “Melancholy Against the Grain: Approaching Postmodernity in
Wang Anyi’s Tales of Sorrow,” in his Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000), 328.
72
chapter two
the little uncle also fulfills the niece-narrator’s pursuit of a melancholic
monument:
I walked under the large Anti-Japanese War monument erected in 1967.
I seemed to have seen an incomparably handsome young man approach
it with his back toward me and disappear into the misty sunlight of Singapore. Younger Uncle’s obscure name is engraved on the monument. In
the ever-changing Singapore, this monument saves the past years, transforming all bitter memories of the past into a concrete substance. This
monument is the most affective building of this international state. It casts
on us a shadow of solace and sorrow. It is a consolation I can find on this
island…. [29]
Apparently, the narrator is so attracted by this fine-looking and yet faceless figure that she turns him into the central character of her melancholic
myth:
At last came the day, as if Younger Uncle had been keeping an appointment with Death. When he was taken from his home by the Japanese, a
faint smile seemingly came to his lips. That year, he was only eighteen,
with a childish face. His eyes were full of curiosity. He had never had a
girlfriend. [83]
At the center of Wang’s emotional oceanography is not the mainland
to which the father figure has returned, but the marginal land where the
little uncle is buried. Indeed, it is out of its marginal status that Singapore
has emerged into a global economy as an “international state” and gives
a global expression to a migratory melancholy.
Beyond Reality and History: A Modern Mythology
The melancholic monument found on the Pacific island, however, fails to
gratify the writer’s thirst for a glorious ancestry. After all, Singapore, like
Shanghai, changes so rapidly that she is unable to locate her ancestral
home there. What Wang needs, as a critic has pointed out, is a “utopian
scenery of ‘history’” that functions as an “idealistic escape from the
modern city.”14 The author’s nostalgia of the exile has produced yet
another, more exotic myth about her matrilineal ancestry, Records and
Fiction. This autobiographical novel consists of ten chapters: the odd
chapters deal with the narrator’s life in Shanghai from childhood to
14 Li Jing 李靜, “Bu maoxian de lücheng—Lun Wang Anyi de xiezuo kunjing” 不冒
險的旅程—論王安憶的寫作困境 (Unadventurous journey: On the writing predicament of
Wang Anyi), Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 2003, no. 1: 30.
73
marriage, while the even chapters follow her genealogical search from
northern to southern China. They form a combination and contrast of
center and periphery or, in Zhang Xinying’s literary terms, of comingof-age and root-seeking.15 Two antithetical imaginaries in two narrative
modes take shape within one opus accordingly: the floating, desolate
urban life described in a prosaic style versus the magnificent, poetic vista
of the lost homeland in an epic scope.
The author-narrator had an awful experience of moving into the urban center of Shanghai when she was barely one: she was sitting on a
cuspidor in a train—a disgusting container on a classic means of modern migration—because she had diarrhea, and the first place she visited
upon arrival was the emergency room. Feeling all discombobulated in
the new environment, she finds herself a stranger to the neighborhood,
as her father speaks no Shanghainese, whereas her mother, an orphan in
Shanghai, refuses either to speak the dialect or to reunite with her cognations. In fact, ever since the death of her maternal great-grandmother,
her matrilineal clan has dispersed and nobody is able to relate her family
legend. Mother’s escape from an orphanage and flight from Shanghai for
a communist base are seen by the author-narrator as the revolutionary
generation’s acts to cut off their connections with the past.16 Unlike other
mothers, who know the stories about their family traditions, she tells her
daughter only modern fairy tales of revolution. The family of ‘comrades’
keeps moving, drifting from house to house in the prosperous city:
The history of our social relations is constantly suspended and restarted
due to changes of residence, which divide our history into chunks and
fragments…. House moving cuts apart my space, dividing the space of
my life into pieces. [180]17
And the inception of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution means seclusion for her, because being a primary school student she can only stay at
15 Zhang Xinying, “Jianying de he’an liudong de shui—Jishi he xugou yu Wang Anyi
xiezuo de lixiang” 堅硬的河岸流動的水—《紀實和虛構》與王安憶寫作的理想 (Solid river
bank and flowing water: Records and Fiction and Wang Anyi’s ideal of writing), in his Qiju
yu youmu zhi di 棲居與游牧之地 (The land of dwelling and nomadism) (Shanghai: Xuelin
chubanshe, 1994), 136, 139–140.
16 This is in turn interpreted by Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past, 132, as the
narrator’s “wrestles with the distress of memory that severs the links between now and
then, a temporal blank left by China’s modernization and change.”
17 The motif of being alien and unsettled in Shanghai is also found in Wang Anyi’s
“Hao po he Li tongzhi” 好婆和李同志 (Granny Hao and comrade Li), a novelette about
an immigrant family from a fishing village in Jiaodong 膠東, in her Zhulu zhongjie 逐鹿中
街 (Chasing the deer on the central street) (Taipei: Maitian, 1992), 81–121.
74
chapter two
home when classes are canceled; she is too little to join the Red Guards
and participate in the da chuanlian 大串聯 or ‘linking up’ anschluss.18 Loneliness is her historical and social conditions:
In terms of time, she has no past, only the present; in terms of space, she
has only herself, no others…. For this child living in this world, what is her
place in time? And what is her place in space? [93]
Marginalization stimulates her imagination, making her believe that she
must have been displaced into the modern city from a wild borderland.
Refusing to be an orphan of history, she embarks on a journey in quest
of her matrilineal myth.
The journey to the margins is twofold, textual and physical. Wang
begins with the only clue left by her mother, writer Ru Zhijuan 茹志
鵑 (1925–1999), and that is the rare surname Ru. She discovers in the
comprehensive history General Treatises (Tong zhi 通志) that the clan name
belongs to a northern nomadic tribe known as Ruru 蠕蠕, Ruirui 芮
芮, or Rouran 柔然.19 The nomads established a fifty-year regime in the
early fifth century. By following this nominal trace, the author tracks
down the early accounts of the tribe during the two hundred years of the
Northern and Southern Dynasties (386–589) in History of the South (Nan
shi 南史), History of the Southern Qi (Nan Qi shu 南齊書), and History of the
Wei (Wei shu 魏書).20 According to these records, the Rouran originated
from north of the Great Wall. They were renamed Ruru, or ‘worms’, by
the stronger Tabgatch (Tuoba 拓跋) people of the Northern Wei (386–
534) because of their ignorance and illiteracy, but their leader became
the first ruling khan in 402 and their expansive khanate threatened the
Tabgatch for several decades until they were destroyed by their Turkic
18 In 1966, the first year of the Cultural Revolution, all schools were closed. Classes
were not resumed till the following year when the government instructed that primary
school students should return to school and might become Little Red Soldiers. See
Ma Qibin 馬齊彬, Zhongguo gongchandang zhizheng sishi nian: 1949–1989 中國共產黨執政四
十年:1949–1989 (Forty years of Chinese Communist Party Rule: 1949–1989) (Beijing:
Zhonggong dangshi ziliao chubanshe, 1989), 291, 302.
19 See Zheng Qiao 鄭樵 (1104–1162), comp., Tong zhi (General treatises) ([Hangzhou]:
Zhejiang shuju, 1896), 28.21a, 200.19a. As a matter of fact, Ruru 蠕蠕 is already transcribed as Ruru 茹茹 in Wei Zheng 魏徵 (580–643), Sui shu 隋書 (History of the Sui) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), 83.1846, 84.1863–1864.
20 Li Yanshou 李延壽 (7th cent.), Nan shi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), 79.1986–
1987; Xiao Zixian 蕭子顯 (ca. 489–537), Nan Qi shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972),
59.1023–1025; Wei Shou 魏收 (505–572), Wei shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974),
103.2289–2303. The original passage on Ruru in the Wei shu has long been lost, and the
present version is an excerpt from Li Yanshou, Bei shi 北史 (History of the North) (Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 98.3249–3267.
75
slave blacksmiths in 555.21 Meanwhile, a branch of the Ruru migrated to
the south in the late 480s and became Sinicized. Yet, as the author found
later in History of the Southern Qi and History of the South, there had already
been two Ru officials serving the southern dynasties in the fifth century,
but both were labeled sycophantic courtiers in the histories.22
In order to glorify her ancestry, Wang arbitrarily drops the early migratory and southern lineages and links the northern offspring of the
survivors of the genocide to the powerful Mongol empire. She rehashes
the first three chapters of the Mongolian epic, The Secret History of the Mongols (Menggu mishi 蒙古秘史), into her novel, giving a detailed account of
Genghis Khan’s (1167–1227) heroic life as the backdrop of her ancestors’
reappearance among the Khan’s troops.23 At some points in the narrative
it appears as if the ‘supreme conqueror’ were her own ancestor. By interjecting a holy alliance between the Mongol patriarchy and the Rouran
minority, Wang actively places her matrilineal ancestry at the center of
historical stage, though her textual logic is no more than an array of
assumptions:
I have looked through many books, first to prove the possibility of the
Rouran’s being incorporated into the Turk, then to prove the possibility
of the Turk’s being incorporated into the Mongol, and then to prove the
possibility of some Mongol aristocrats’ being relegated to south of the
Yangtze River. [186]
The (re)search continues with her ancestors willfully put among the banished remnants of a Mongol prince’s aborted coup d’état in 1287.24
From the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368) the narrator jumps to the Qing
or Manchu regime, the last imperial period when China was once more
under non-Han control. Again, she spends considerable energy on digging up the names of a dignitary, Ru Fen 茹 (1755–1821), and his father,
Ru Dunhe 茹敦和 (1720–1791), from Draft History of the Qing (Qing shigao 清
史稿) and Complete Works of Qing Stele Biographies (Qingdai beizhuan quanji 清代
21
For the Turkic revenge on the Ruru, see Bei shi, 98.3266–3267, 99.3285–3287.
These two officials are Ru Faliang 茹法亮 (ca. 435 – ca. 498) and Ru Fazhen 茹法珍
(fl. 499–500). For the former’s biographies, see Xiao, Nan Qi shu, 56.976–977; and Li, Nan
shi, 77.1928–1932. For the latter’s, see Li, Nan shi, 77.1933–1935.
23 There are ten Chinese renditions and four English translations of the Menggu mishi,
also known as Yuanchao mishi 元朝秘史 (The secret history of the Yuan dynasty). The
version that Wang Anyi cites is Ts. Damdinsürün 策•達木丁蘇隆, ed., Menggu mishi, trans.
Xie Zaishan 謝再善 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1956).
24 Wang quotes a very brief note of this historical events from Tao Zongyi 陶宗儀
(1316–1403), Chuogeng lu 輟耕錄 (Records compiled after retiring from the farm) (1366;
Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1963), 2.48, but Tao did not specify who the remnants were.
22
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chapter two
碑傳全集).25 She is excited to learn that Ru Fen, possibly her forefather,
held such important government posts as Vice Minister of Personnel,
Minister of Works, and finally Minister of War. Moreover, she verifies
in the county annals Nanxun Gazetteer (Nanxun zhi 南潯志, 1922) that her
maternal grandmother’s family was a tycoon of the late Qing when the
Rus had revitalized their clan from their barrel business to become a
silk cocoon merchant. The author also utilizes the family name Ru as a
geographical index to grope for her ascendant’s southward footsteps. She
discovers in the voluminous Gazetteers of the Unified Great Qing: Jiaqing Revised
Edition (Jiaqing chongxiu da Qing yitong zhi 嘉慶重修大清一統志) a Ruyue 茹
越 Mountain and a Ru Lake within the Northern Wei’s territory under
the Tabgatch’s control.26 The question is: What happens after Wang has
finished her preparatory exercise of evoking all these historical references
to gazetteers, chronicles, and documents and starts on her field trip?
Assuming the exilian identity of her ancestors as a result of the 1287
coup d’état, Wang travels to Shaoxing, Zhejiang to look for their last
settlement in a village called Rujialou or Ru’s End. It is there that the
maze of history disorients her: “Here polysemy reappears in the history
of my mother’s family” (285); “Rujialou produces polysemy in the history
of my mother’s family …” (288). Not one, but seven to eight Rujialou
villages exist in Shaoxing, suggestive of an unstable plural origin. Though
she manages to search out a Rujialou, one that also bears a utopian name,
Taoyuan 桃源 or Arcadia, the historical relics in this village have already
been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The plaque with Ru
Fen’s name and graduate designation carved on it and the Ru’s pedigree
were burned; the ancestral temple was demolished; even the bridge stele
was excavated and used as pavement. Furthermore, the villagers’ oral
accounts of the Rus are so contradictory to each other that none of
them are reliable. More ironically, on Wang’s second trip to search for
25 Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽 (1844–1927) et al., comps., Qing shigao (1927; Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 1977), 14.528, 17.619, 477.13030–31; Shen Yuantai 沈元泰, “Ru Fen zhuan” 茹
傳 (A biography of Ru Fen) and “Ru Dunhe zhuan” 茹敦和傳 (A biography of Ru
Dunhe), in Min Erchang 閔爾昌 (b. 1886), ed., Beizhuanji bu 碑傳集補 (Supplement to the
collected stele biographies), 1923, in Qingdai beizhuan quanji, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai
guji chubanshe, 1987), 2: 1278c–1279a and 1392a, respectively. Wang, Fuxi he muxi de
shenhua, 300, mistakenly lists Qingdai beizhuan quanji, p. 1278, and Beizhuanji bu, juan 3, as
two different references for Ru Fen. Ru Dunhe’s biography can also be found in Jiaqing
chongxiu da Qing yitong zhi (Gazetteers of the unified great Qing: Jiaqing revised edition)
(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 36.1476.
26 See Jiaqing chongxiu da Qing yitong zhi, 146.6755 and 151.7065 for Ruyueshan 茹越山,
and 151.7069 for Ruhu 茹湖.
77
Rujialou, the local Ru families and a genealogist inform her that the
southern Rus are aborigines and have nothing to do with the northerners
bearing the same patronymic. All allusions to her remote relation to
Genghis Khan are suddenly invalidated by the words of the locals and the
genealogist. Despite this fatal mistake in her well-informed narrative, she
maintains both images of the Rouran’s martialism and Ru Fen’s civility
in her ongoing imaginary journey searching for fantasmatic roots. As she
admits, her historical reconstruction presumes a heroic figure to venerate
herself:
I must have a hero to be my ancestor; I don’t believe that in my thousands
of years of history not a single hero has emerged. Should there be no hero,
I’ll create one.… [185; my emphasis]
This calls our attention to the novel’s revealing title, Records and Fiction:
One Method of Creating the World.27 The writer’s method is to work on the
margins of official records and expands them into a fictional focus. For
instance, the whole process of the Rouran founder-khan’s escape from
his cousins’ assassination attempt is recorded in standard histories very
tersely with only one word, “discovered” (fajue 發覺), but is developed into
a long, breathtaking paragraph in the fiction.28 The author describes her
method of creation as fabrication through archaeology. Archaeology as a
systematic gathering and scanning of scattered data requires conjecture
to formulate a centering methodology, which reconstructs an imaginative
totality according to a central theme. So, in his review of the novel, literary critic Wu Yiqin 吳義勤 interprets fiction as the operation of recording:
“‘Records’, as such, are to be brought about in the mode of ‘fiction’.”29
The historical novelist is indeed a traveler who transports the past to
the present, a translator who renders records into fiction. Wang Anyi
makes use of historical facts and figures to create a factitious world of her
own until the borderline between records and fiction is muddled: “In this
moment, my pupils and my maternal great-grandma’s finally align …”
27 In the postscript to her Jishi he xugou, Wang states that other titles have come to
her mind before the current one, including Shanghai gushi 上海故事 (A tale of Shanghai),
Rujialou (Ru’s End), Xungen (Root-seeking), Hewei 合圍 (Embracing), Chuangshiji 創世記
(Genesis), etc.
28 For the historical records, see Li, Bei shi, 98.3251; and Wei, Wei shu, 103.2291.
29 Wu Yiqin, “Fankang gudu: You changkai dao chongjian—Wang Anyi Jishi he xugou
jiedu” 反抗孤獨：由敞開到重建—王安憶《紀實和虛構》解讀 (Resist solitude: From opening
to reconstruction—On reading Wang Anyi’s Records and Fiction), Zhongguo xiandai, dangdai
wenxue yanjiu, 1994, no. 11: 125.
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(308). Her record-fiction translation has reached a point at which historical view and personal vision are fused into one.
As the first-person narrator claims, she has created two worlds of a
subjectivity in alternate chapters, namely, the vertical dimension of her
family migrations and the horizontal space of her social surroundings,
where, at the end of family myth and the center of social networks, “I
have become the last spectacle” (383). With the solitary self as both the
subject and object, or creator and creature of her creation, Wang later
declared in her lectures at Fudan 復旦 University that fiction is a personal “spiritual world” (xinling shijie 心靈世界) or a “human mythdom”
(renlei de shenjie 人類的神界) that bears no clear relation to the real world.30
This is evocative of Lévi-Strauss’ characterization of mythology in that,
when compared with history, mythology is a closed system, whose means
of arranging materials is limited by a static structure of its own.31 Yet
Wang’s autonomous claim of fiction is basically an echo of Li Jiefei’s 李
潔非 article used in lieu of a preface to Patrilineal and Matrilineal Myths, in
which Li argues that Wang’s myths attempt to free narrative discourse
from all realistic and historic frames of reference, to reject the logic of
the outside world, so as to resume its primitive function of anticipation rather than verification.32 Thus, in the interior monologues of her
migratory myths, Wang imagines the margins to be the hub of the universe.
The double act of constructing a frame of reference and then undoing
it, as in the case of Wang’s two trips to Rujialou, is reminiscent of Roland
Barthes’ theory of myth today. In his Mythologies Barthes clarifies the
relations of the real world, history, and myth:
What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality,… and what myth
gives in return is a natural image of this reality…. [M]yth is constituted by
the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that
they once were made.33
30 Wang Anyi, Xinling shijie—Wang Anyi xiaoshuo jianggao 心靈世界—王安憶小說講稿
(Spiritual world: Wang Anyi’s lecture notes on fiction) (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 13, 21.
31 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York:
Schocken Books, 1979), 40–41.
32 Li Jiefei, “Wang Anyi de xin shenhua—Yige lilun tantao” 王安憶的新神話—一個理
論探討 (Wang Anyi’s new mythology: A theoretical investigation), Dangdai zuojia pinglun,
1993, no. 5: 5–6; rpt. as preface to Wang, Fuxi he muxi de shenhua, iii–v.
33 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press,
1993), 142; italics in the original.
79
The function of myth is to empty itself of memory. Unlike the complex,
contingent, and profound historical reality, the mythical world appears
to be pure, eternal, and superficial. In Wang’s matrilineal and patrilineal
myths, when all historical details are exhausted and revoked, what is left
and centered in her diasporic discourse are such natural images as the
ocean of melancholy and the desert of solitude.
If Wang’s narratives of origin, as critics suggest, are motivated by “an
anxiety of rootlessness,”34 then this modern anxiety is translated into
historical researches and transcended by transnational root searches—
searches for one’s origins elsewhere, where one’s foreignness is not on the
fringe but brought into focus. Crossing the borders of mainland China,
her Malay-Mongol myths make use of the transnational relocation of her
ancestral tribes as a trope for the translational relation between the genres
of history and fiction. This translatability does not lie in the information
of past events, but in the narration of such information. Since every
narration is navigation, the translation is also a transposition from the
real world to the historical world, and from the historical world to the
fictional world, or, in Wang’s own words, the “spiritual world,” where
peripheries are centered. Such centering methodology is Wang Anyi’s
migratory mythology, which forms a counter-narrative to Sinocentrism
with a melancholy position and an untraceable origin.
Muslim-Inhabited Loess: Zhang Chengzhi’s “Unknown China”
As a state-assigned ethnic label, the ethnonym Huizu 回族 or the Hui
nationality is, in the parlance of Harrell based on the anthropologist Dru
C. Gladney’s studies,
the strangest ethnic category recognized by the Communist project. There
is no real definition of Hui in terms of Stalin’s four criteria: they have no
common territory, being scattered throughout China; no common language, since they almost all speak Chinese; and no common economy or
culture either…. The only thing they may have in common is a tradition
of descent from Muslims….35
The Hui was put together with the Han majority and the Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan minorities in Sun Yat-sen’s five nations (wuzu 五族)
34 Zhang, “Jianying de he’an liudong de shui,” 136; Wang Zheng 汪政 and Xiao Hua
曉華, “Lun Wang Anyi” 論王安憶 (On Wang Anyi), Zhong shan, 2000, no. 4: 197.
35
Harrell, “Introduction,” 33.
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chapter two
theory for the Republic of China, and further institutionalized by the
People’s Republic of China under the influence of Stalin’s nationality
policy in Soviet Central Asia. While the term Hui or Huihui 回回 was
used in premodern China to refer to all Muslims regardless of their minzu
backgrounds, the Huizu or Huihui minzu 回回民族 as a separate nationality legalized by the Chinese Communist regime is limited to those Muslims who have long lost the ability to speak their native languages and
have adopted Chinese since the downfall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty
(1260–1368). The aphasia of mother tongue indicates a loss of identity,
leaving the Hui with nothing but a common historical experience of
religious belief and practice that would barely qualify them as, in the
words of Zhang Chengzhi, “a new nationality.”36 Consequently about
half of China’s Muslim population, those who speak Turki, Mongolian,
or a Persian-based language, are categorized under one of the other nine
minority nationalities.37 That is to say, while the term Hui historically
referred to the people sharing the religious heritage of Islam, it is now
being redefined as a minority nationality, although it is not really a single nationality by origin. I am not suggesting, as religious historian David
G. Atwill opposes, that “the Hui identity was purely religious [according
to] a modern interpretation of religion as something completely separate
from ethnic and cultural identity.”38 What I try to say is that the modern project has essentialized the meaning of ethnicity and transformed
all non-Han groups of Chinese-speaking Muslims and their descendants
into one nationality. This classification is double-edged: first, it ethnicizes the Muslim religiosity, which is antagonistic to atheistic Marxism;
second, it objectifies a group of people as an imaginary antithesis of the
Han majority in the valance of nationalism.
36 Zhang, “Huimin de huangtu gaoyuan” 回民的黃土高原 (The Huis’ Loess Plateau),
in Huangwu yingxiong lu—Zhang Chengzhi suibi 荒蕪英雄路—張承志隨筆 (The desolate road
of the hero: Essays by Zhang Chengzhi) (Shanghai: Zhishi chubanshe, 1994), 291.
37 For recent studies of the origins and definitions of the Hui, see Dru C. Gladney,
Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996), 18–26; and Lipman, Familiar
Strangers, xxii–xxiv. Muslims were erroneously called the Hui or Huihui during the Yuan
dynasty when Islam (Huijiao 回教) was widely spread in China by the Huihe 回紇, or
Uygurs, of whom not all were Muslims. The other nine Muslim nationalities in today’s
China are Uygur (Weiwuer 維吾爾), Kazak (Hasake 哈薩克), Dongxiang 東鄉, Kirghiz
(Ji’erjisi 吉爾吉斯), Salar (Sala 撒拉), Tadjik (Tajike 塔吉克), Uzbek (Wuzibieke 烏孜別克),
Baoan 保安, and Tartar (Tataer 塔塔爾).
38 David G. Atwill, “Blinkered Visions: Islamic Identity, Hui Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62.4 (Nov.
2003): 1084; emphases added.
81
Rediscovering Identity: Representing the Other, Otherizing the Self
The problems of political representation and poetical re-presentation are
therefore inevitable for any writer who deals with Muslim Chinese: how
can an author speak for the Hui, at the risk of otherization, and retell their
story as ethnoreligious history? Here I will explore issues of ethnoreligious
representation of the Hui in China through a novella titled “Investigation
of Assassinations in the Western Province” (“Xisheng ansha kao” 西省暗
殺考, 1989) and a novel most celebrated among the author’s Hui fellows,
History of the Soul (Xinling shi 心靈史, 1991), both composed by controversial
writer Zhang Chengzhi.39 A Muslim Chinese writer contentious in mainland China for his humanist idealism and religious enthusiasm, Zhang
and his work have become the focus of a small yet emerging scholarship
in the West. His early experience as an educated youth in Inner Mongolia
between 1968 and 1972 led him to be a writer of pastoral fiction, including the novella “The Black Steed” (“Hei junma” 黑駿馬), in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, before he spent a number of years in northwest China
and began to turn to his Hui fellows and their religious life in another
novella, “Yellow Mud Hut” (“Huangni xiao wu” 黃泥小屋). An alienated
metropolitan élite from Beijing, Zhang resided in the stark countryside
among a Muslim group and thereby rediscovered his own identity. Now
being a follower of an Islamic sect, he devotes himself to a history in
which his people were evidently severely oppressed. A new subjectivity
was shaped when the Hui history coincided with the author’s intellectual
trajectory from a Maoist revolutionist to a devout Muslim resisting Deng
Xiaoping’s capitalism. By creating intertextual dialogues of history, literature and religion, Zhang disputes the accuracy of official records and
the ideology of ‘progress’ in his uniquely gritty and tragic style.
I will provide a close reading of the selected literary texts and a cross
reading of related archival sources, situating Zhang’s fiction within the
broader contexts of Chinese literary circles and Western critical theory regarding problems of history, humanism, identity and representation. Against the backdrop of the worldwide stereotype of Muslims
as a terrifying other, this section is also a response to the reactions to
39 Zhang Chengzhi, “Xisheng ansha kao,” in Zhongguo xiaoshuo: Yijiu bajiu 中國小說：一
九八九 (Chinese fiction: 1989), ed. Huang Ziping (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1990),
186–246. In his preface to Zhang Chengzhi wenxue zuopin xuanji (Xinling shi juan), xi–xii, Zhang
proclaims History of the Soul to be his tour de force. Page references to “Xisheng ansha kao”
and Xinling shi are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text; all translations, unless stated
otherwise, are mine.
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Zhang Chengzhi, especially Xu Jian’s previous publication in positions.40
A comparatist specializing in modern Chinese fiction and culture, Xu
approaches Zhang’s Islamic fiction from the position of a godless Han
reader. Xu’s criticism appeared in the discursive context of global antiterrorism that defines Islam as dangerous radicalism, and in the commodity culture of post-Mao China that abandons the sublimity of humanism as “exhibitionist idealism.” While I share Xu’s concerns about
the ethnicity of the Hui historiography and the image of the minzu minorities in shaping the Chinese nation, my agenda here is to observe the
issues of identity and representation by rereading Zhang’s literature from
a minority positionality. Although this may sound sympathetic, the reason for me to choose such a viewpoint is rather emphatic: to seek a more
balanced critical stance by emphasizing a marginalized discourse, so as
to allow more space for the coexistence of different religious/political
positions.
In his study of Zhang Chengzhi’s late fictions, Xu Jian berates the
Hui writer’s representation of and identification with the people of the
Islamic sect Jahriyya (or Jahrinya, Zheherenye 哲合忍耶) for enabling
us, non-Muslim readers, to appropriate them as a “sublime object.” Xu
criticizes Zhang’s works for constructing a homogeneous ethnic other
from the gaze of the Han majority and for upholding the Islamic belief
as the utopic telos of history. I agree with Xu’s description of Zhang’s
documentation as “an Apocryphal counterhistory,”41 but cannot entirely
endorse his reproofs because the issues of identity and representation will
become more complex if we turn the table around and observe them
from the Muslim Chinese standpoint. Contrary to Xu’s accusation, as
I shall show in this section, Zhang promises “to construct an unknown
China” from the return gaze of the Hui minority.
Both “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province” and
History of the Soul relate the struggles of the Jahriyya in the Qing dynasty
and in the Republican era, with the novella focusing on a single historical
event and the novel covering the Muslim insurrections of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.42 The locus is the Loess Plateau in northwest
China, particularly the Jahriyya’s main residential site Xihaigu 西海固,
40 Jian Xu, “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History: Reading the Sublime Object
of Humanism in Zhang Chengzhi’s Late Fictions,” positions: east asia cultures critique 10.3
(Winter 2002): 525–546.
41 Ibid., 526.
42 For a historical account of the centennial Muslim rebellions in English, see chapter 4
of Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 103–166.
83
the acronym for the tri-country area of Xijie 西吉, Haiyuan 海原, and
Guyuan 固原 in present-day south Ningxia Hui autonomous region. The
marginal land in this milieu has geographically determined the peripheral status of its people and historically formed, as the author somatizes
it in a 1991 essay, a “big scar on the continent.”43 Serious soil erosion has
turned the fields into barren land. It is this droughty, impoverished soil
that makes possible the dissemination of “the poor people’s religion”—
Jahriyya—in a nation with little enthusiasm for conscientious devotion.
Before beginning to tackle the texts, I need to introduce briefly our
heroes, the Jahriyya. Jahriyya is one of forty Islamic sects among ten
million Hui people. It is a branch of Sufism (Sufeizhuyi 蘇菲主義), an
Islamic mysticism that “aim[s] at direct communion between God and
man” through the latter’s intuitive spiritual senses instead of intellectual
faculties.44 The Jahriyya distinguish themselves by reciting prayers aloud
(from the Arabic word jahar) in dâ˒ir (dayier 打依爾) circles, shaking their
heads and shoulders, as well as by building unadorned mosques. The
order was founded by Ma Mingxin 馬明心 (1718–1781), an ascetic who
studied Sufism in Yemen and returned to China in 1744.45 Its believers have a custom of visiting their earlier masters’ qubba (gongbei 拱北),
or tombs, which has come to carry such deep religious meaning that it
can substitute for the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.46 The Jahriyya order
grew rapidly among the poverty-stricken peasantry in the Qing empire
until the 1780s, when the situation steadily deteriorated due to brutal
suppressions and prohibition. At intervals between factional and rebellious warfare throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
according to Zhang, its members could only chant a soundless prayer of
the Profession of Faith in their hearts, and they developed a tragic spirit
under subjugation. Nevertheless, since its beginning in Gansu, Ningxia,
Qinghai, and Shaanxi, thanks to centuries of propagation on the part of
the Jahriyya and their banishment to every corner of the nation, Jahriyya
43 Zhang Chengzhi, “Libie Xihaigu” 離別西海固 (Leaving Xihaigu), in his Huangwu
yingxiong lu, 308.
44 J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 1–2. Sufism is so named because its followers wear a kind of coarse gown made of
wool, or suf in Arabic.
45 For a biography of Ma Mingxin, see Bai Shouyi 白壽彝, ed., Huizu renwu zhi 回族
人物志 (Biographies of the Hui people), 2 vols. (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe,
2000), 2: 905–911.
46 See Raphael Israeli, Muslims in China: A Study in Cultural Confrontation (London: Curzon Press, 1980), 175.
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has expanded into ten provinces in China and has four to six hundred
thousand followers today.47
After spending five years among his Huizu fellows in the desert of the
Great Northwest, Zhang Chengzhi converted to the Muslim faith and
became a Jahriyya proselyte in 1989, the year in which he embraced
the history of the sect and wrote the novella. A mainland student has
observed, “Identification with the past is an act to discover and locate his
identity.”48 It is on the spiritual and moral high ground of the Musliminhabited wasteland that the Beijing writer positions his alter ego. The
Muslim mirage mirrors his urban, intellectual self-image and affords him
an alterity of the rural and irrational. Michel de Certeau has rightly
pointed out this internal cleaving of the self: “Identity is not one, but two.
One and the other.”49 One does not know oneself before one finds the other
to oppose or imitate, and in either way objectification is inevitable in constituting a subjectivity. Such exoticism is demonstrated in the dramatized
narrative of “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province,”
but Zhang’s self-identification is incomplete until he sympathizes with
and subjectivizes the Jahriyya in History of the Soul. Thus, epistemologically speaking, otherization is prerequisite to self-identification, in which
we must recognize, to borrow the words of Julia Kristeva on Freud’s
psychoanalysis, “foreignness in ourselves.”50 Otherization is not merely
alienation of an other, but also location of the otherness within ourselves,
47 For a summary of the Jahriyya order in China, read Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim
Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 121–
126; see also Jianping Wang, Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon
Press, 2001), s.v. “Zhehelinye 哲赫林耶.”
48 Zhang Xuelian, “Muslim Identity in the Writings of Zhang Chengzhi,” Journal of
the Oriental Society of Australia 32–33 (2000–2001): 104.
49 De Certeau, The Writing of History, 314; italics in the original.
50 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 191. The idea of “strangers to ourselves” is found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s preface to his The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack (1887), in Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 149:
The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself,” will hold for us to all eternity.
The best known case of “foreignness in ourselves” in Freud’s psychoanalysis is given in
one of his last works, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage
Books, 1939), in which the Israelite prophet and lawgiver Moses is shockingly identified
as an Egyptian. For a study of the book, read the last chapter of de Certeau’s The Writing
of History, 308–354.
85
so as to know the other side of our ‘self’ and to acknowledge the other
as a part of our self. We need strangers, whether they are foes or friends,
to familiarize ourselves with our individual and collective selves. We also
need a ‘then’ to know our ‘now’—let us now turn to Zhang’s historical
fiction.
Rethinking Violence: Impossible Mission, Impracticable Revenge
A story of revenge, “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province” begins with a prelude also found in the later History of the Soul. This
episode consists of a dialogue between Liu Jintang 劉錦棠 (1844–1894),
a Qing general, and his executionee Ma Hualong 馬化龍 (1810–1871), a
Jahriyya leader who sacrifices himself and his family to compromise with
the government army on ending a Hui insurrection:
“Today we kill off your three hundred relatives. Who will be your offspring then?”
“All those who chant lâ ilâha on earth will be my offspring,” said Ma
Hualong.
“But who can avenge you?” the executioner asked.
“Forty years from now, somebody will avenge me,” Ma prophesied.
[186]51
The massacre took place at the town of Jinjipu 金積堡, Ningxia, on 3rd
March 1871, exactly forty years before the 1911 revolution that toppled
the Manchu empire. Unable to predict the downfall of the Qing, three
survivors of the atrocity commit their lives to the assassinations of Liu
and his commander, Zuo Zongtang 左宗棠 (1812–1885), a mass-murderer
responsible for the butchery of approximately two million Muslims in
China. The impossible mission is to reverse and avenge the blood bath
as it is illustrated in the illusion of Yisir 伊斯兒, the youngest and last
assassin of the three:
The old blood in the wilderness of Jinjipu … flowed back to the dead, as if
it was sucked through straws. New blood followed, coming … from every
orifice of Liu, the executioner who walked toward the slicing rack while
grinning sinisterly, and from the leaves of the complete works of Zuo, the
butcher with a gray beard.… [239–240]
51 The episode reappears in Zhang Chengzhi wenxue zuopin xuanji (Xinling shi juan), 210.
For a biography of Ma Hualong, see Bai, Huizu renwu zhi, 2: 1415–1419. The phrase lâ ilâha
is the first part of lâ ilâha illâ allâh (liang yilianghan yin anlahu 倆依倆罕，印安拉乎) ‘There is
no god, but God’ in the opening of the shahâda (profession of faith). I am indebted to
Rafeh Khalek for double-checking spellings of the Arabic transliterations.
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The task, however, is never accomplished. The first two nemeses and
their women plus Yisir’s wife all sacrifice their lives for the cause, whereas
Zuo dies a natural death, and Liu dies of a sudden illness.
Xu Jian takes a secular perspective and sees the vain attempts as
futility.52 They are nonetheless regarded as fulfillment of the mission by
the believing. Between the divine plan and human efforts, let me argue,
the point is not to ‘cancel out’ one another futilely, but to ‘carry out’
one’s mission even though it is doomed to failure. It is precisely failure—
its beauty and purity—that a martyr pursues in his/her quest for the fully
developed self. Martyrdom matters for the Jahriyya because it is always
already an honor to sacrifice for God; it also matters for non-Muslim
readers, including Xu and the present writer, to acknowledge the notion
of predestination embraced by Zhang and his Muslim audience. And
if we ask ourselves why we bother to struggle through life if everybody
will die eventually, we shall understand the import of process no less than
that of the end. Therefore, to answer Xu’s “[t]wo mutually contradictory
questionings”:
Is it due to their unshakable faith that the Jahrinya were chosen by God
to experience extraordinary suffering and pain so as to attest to the power
of the divine? Or is it that their extraordinary suffering and pain in this
world, brought about by the ills of human societies and political systems,
were the direct cause of their faith in the spiritual world?53
we should approach this divine/secular tension from the standpoint of a
hermeneutic circle rather than a linear causality. The pursuit of Islamic
faith and political sufferings interact as both cause and effect in the textual process: the Jahriyya were chosen to suffer for their faith, because of
which they were oppressed and driven further into their spiritual world;
in the meantime, social injustice compelled them to believe in God, who
manifested his might through his chosen people and their devotion. This
bilateral process is neither solely religio-mystic nor entirely psychosocial,
but simultaneously both. Equally true in the story are the Sufic mysticoreligious order and the writer’s humanist passion.
While Gladney classifies the Jahriyya as a transformationist group that
seeks “to implement an alternative vision of the world in their society,”
reflecting the quintessential Western scholar’s cultural relativism in his
schema of Islamic orders, Chinese critics, brainwashed by Marxist athe52
Xu, “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History,” 532, 534.
Ibid., 536. In fact, the same interrogation can be well directed to Christianity and
other monotheistic religions.
53
87
ism and the national agenda against separatism, often label the sectarians
as fundamentalists and extremists.54 Such labeling may also be due to the
excessive use of violence on the part of the Jahriyya as depicted by Zhang
in his cruel scenes of assassinations and the wives’ bodily sacrifices. But
how much less brutal are the Han constables when they force an ox horn
into a Hui woman’s vagina in the novella? The author seems to present
violence as a basic instinct of all peoples rather than a particular synonym
of Islam by putting hatred on a par with hunger. As tree leaves and bark
are eaten up, abandoned heads of decapitated criminals become some
famine refugees’ food. This cannibalism is remindful of the image of the
human-blood roll in Lu Xun’s famous short story “Medicine” (“Yao” 藥),
written seventy years before Zhang’s work.55 Neither the Hui nor the Han
are free of a deep and abiding desire for violence. It would be feckless to
stereotype Muslims into a terrifying ‘other’, serving only to make oneself
feel or look more ‘civilized’.
To defend the Hui by reiterating that they have no more desire for
violence than the Han, however, is not to justify their desire for revenge,
which is perpetuated by a vicious cycle of violence. Rey Chow 周蕾 has
pointed out:
The desire for revenge—to do to the enemy exactly what the enemy did to
him, so that colonizer and colonized would meet eye to eye—is the fantasy
of envy and violence that has been running throughout masculinist antiimperialist discourse … [,] a type of discourse that posits envy and violence
as the necessary structure of the native’s subjectivity.56
Accordingly, to seek revenge is to replace one masculine master narrative
with another. Yet the novella also consists in female blood, which functions to nurture a man’s maturation, to constitute his subjectivity, rather
than to wreak vengeance upon the enemy. As literary critic Ma Lirong 馬
麗蓉 observes, it is his wife’s virginal blood that turns Yisir into a true man
on their wedding night in his youth, her sacrifice that prepares him for
realizing his mission in the prime of his life, and her blood that redeems
54 Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 61; Xu, “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History,”
538. Zhang Xinying, “Bujue changliu—Zaishuo Zhang Wei yanji Zhang Chengzhi”
不長流—再說張煒言及張承志 (An endless flow: Revisiting Zhang Wei and on Zhang
Chengzhi), in his Qiju yu youmu zhi di 栖居與游牧之地 (The land of dwelling and nomadism)
(Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1994), 116, also describes Jahriyya as “a very exclusive religion that disdains to communicate with the external world.”
55 In Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, 1: 440–449.
56 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 40, 48; Chow’s italics.
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his martyrdom in his death.57 When Yisir is buried in the shared grave
with his bride, whom he killed thirty-two years ago on the eve of his retaliation so as to prevent her from being humiliated or leaking the secret,
the funeral attendants witness a miracle: the woman’s face is lifelike and
her blood is still so fresh that it reddens Yisir’s new white shroud. The
Hui revenge upon the Qing is rendered impracticable, not only because
the Manchu empire was virtually overthrown by the Han in the 1911 revolution, but also because the masculine enmity is symbolically loaded on
the female with her innocent gore. The transformation from vengeance
to nonviolence is thereby presented allegorically as a gender issue.
In his exotic objectification of the Jahriyya, Zhang absorbs the magical element of Sufi occultism into his narrative. Besides the ‘blood-shirt’
finale mentioned above, there is a scene of fanâ˒, or fantasm. The mystical stage is reached by Yisir through meditation and chanting the Egyptian poet Busir’s quintuplet Mukhmûs (Mohanmaisi 默罕麥斯). Falling into
a trance, Yisir foresees the site of their second attempt on Zuo Zongtang’s life. These miracles create an outlandish quality in the historical
fiction and estrange Han readers from their familiar impressions of Chinese history, such as that of the ‘national’ hero and Confucian paragon
General Zuo. As the author turns China into a strange land for his Chinese readers, he also makes Muslims strangers to his own Muslim self—
they are dramatis personae of a historical play, from which the authornarrator effaces himself. Being absent in his dramatized narrative, Zhang
distances himself from the historical occurrence and fictional characters
he presents. The Jahriyya become foreign to him in terms of both their
religious practice and his narratorial position. However, the covert is
transgressed in History of the Soul when Zhang emerges as an overt narrator and constantly refers to his narrating self as a Mohammedan. Fully
expanded from the prologue to “Investigation of Assassinations in the
Western Province” with an identity twist, the novel serves as the writer’s
confession of faith.
57 Ma Lirong, 20 shiji Zhongguo wenxue yu Yisilan wenhua ２０世紀中國文學與伊斯蘭文化
(20th-century Chinese literature and Islamic culture) (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe,
2000), 180. For Ma’s monograph on Zhang Chengzhi, read her Cai zai ji pian wenhua
shang: Zhang Chengzhi xin lun 踩在幾片文化上：張承志新論 (Stepping on several cultures: A
new interpretation of Zhang Chengzhi) (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 2001).
89
Redefining Humanism: Dialogue of Documents, Critique of Consumerism
The seven chapters of History of the Soul correspond chronologically to the
seven generations of Jahriyya leadership, namely, Ma Mingxin, founder
of the Jahriyya, who is executed in Lanzhou 蘭州, the provincial capital
of Gansu; Mu Xianzhang 穆憲章 (d. 1812), who transmits Ma Mingxin’s
order secretly while suffering torments; Ma Datian 馬達天 (d. 1817), Ma
Mingxin’s disciple, who is exiled to northeast China; Ma Yide 馬以德
(1775–1849), Ma Datian’s eldest son, who revives the sect in the reign of
terror; Ma Hualong, Ma Yide’s eldest son, who negotiates with, surrenders to, and is finally decapitated by government forces at Jinjipu; Ma
Jincheng 馬進城 (1864–1890), who is castrated and sent to Bianliang
梁 (Kaifeng 開封) as a slave owing to the rebellion of his grandfather, Ma
Hualong; and Ma Yuanzhang 馬元章 (1853–1920), Ma Mingxin’s greatgrandson, a reformer who is buried alive in the 1920 Haiyuan earthquake.58 The author also heroizes other Muslim figures, including Su
Forty-Three (Su Sishisan 蘇四十三, d. 1781) and Tian Five (Tian Wu 田
五, d. 1784), both killed with their Jahriyya acolytes in the shengzhan 聖
戰, or holy wars, to avenge their master, Ma Mingxin; Du Wenxiu 杜
文秀 (1828–1872), a Qadim (Gedimu 格底目／木) traditionalist who commits suicide by taking poison when his Muslim state in Yunnan is quelled;
Bai Yanhu 白彥虎 (1841–1882), a Shaanxi Muslim commander who keeps
resisting the Qing aggression until fleeing to Russia; and Ma Jinxi 馬進西
(1866–1940), Ma Jincheng’s younger brother, who separates his Banqiao
板橋 lineage from Ma Yuanzhang’s Shagou 沙溝 lineage.59
Zhang’s religio-genealogy, as Ma Lirong reads it, is woven into the
contact map of some of these figures’ qubba, scattered in various border
58 For biographies of Ma Jincheng and Ma Yuanzhang, see Bai, Huizu renwu zhi, 2:
1575–1587. Ma Jincheng died at the young age of twenty five on the twenty-ninth day of
the twelfth month in the fifteenth year of Guangxu 光緒 (r. 1875–1908), which should be
19 January 1890, not 1889 as mis-converted in Bai’s dictionary.
59 For biographies of Tian Wu, Du Wenxiu, Bai Yanhu, and Ma Jinxi, see ibid., 911–
912, 1379–1406, 1423–1428, and 1587–1589, respectively. Here I prefer shengzhan, the Chinese translation of Islamic ‘holy war’ to its Arabic original jihâd, literally ‘effort directed
toward perfection’. The reason is, as Lipman points out in his Familiar Strangers, 132,
in its legalistic Islamic sense jihad has become a general term for territorial expansion
or defense by military action, whereas shengzhan by its historical Hui usage means primarily self-sacrifice for their religion or revenge on local officials. As shown in Zhang
Chengzhi’s fiction, the communal wars fought by the Shaanxi and Gansu Sino-Muslims
were for spiritual struggle and social justice rather than territorial domination or revanchism. Shagou, Gansu, was the base at which Ma Yuanzhang re-established the Jahriyya
after the Tongzhi 同治 persecution.
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provinces.60 These memorial shrines provide an index for his search for
the Hui diasporic communities built by remainders of the 1781, 1784,
and 1856–1877 genocides and ensuing cleanups. In order to feel Ma
Datian’s exilic hardships in the dog days of 1817, the author went on
a pilgrimage to the leader’s qubba in Jilin in the summer of 1989. For
the Jahriyya, of whom at least five hundred thousand people laid down
their lives during the centuries, the qubba signifies a heroism in pursuit
of martyrdom, or shahâda (shuhaidayi 束海達依). While the “blood-shirt
complex” in “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province”
symptomatizes vindictiveness, the “qubba complex” in History of the Soul
manifests martyrdom.61 Whether a leader’s corpse truly rests there or
not (for example, Ma Hualong’s burial place remains a myth), the qubba
is a spiritual center of the Jahriyya rûh (luhan 盧罕) or soul:
The qubba (tomb of a saint) completes its symbolic and abstract meanings
in Jahriyya; with these qubba the people watch everything of theirs—faith,
feelings, fortune, and history. [63]
In the Great Northwest, where the inhabitants’ private histories are largely buried in oblivion owing to their illiteracy, the tombs, as a collective
imagery of the holy men and nameless martyrs, become landmarks of
the Jahriyya’s past.
Official documents about the “people of white caps” are voluminous,
whereas Chinese references by the hands of the Jahriyya are scarce.62
With his undergraduate training in archaeology at Peking University,
work experience at the Chinese National Historical Museum, and graduate study of ethnography at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
Zhang has exhausted a plethora of historical information in his literary
creation. To counterclaim the imperial records cited in his chronicle of
the 1781 and 1784 insurgencies during the late Qianlong 乾隆 era (r. 1736–
1795), Zhang invokes the Jahriyya early history Rashhah (Reshihaer 熱什哈
爾), the hagiography The Saints’ Virtues (Mannageibu 曼納給布) attributed to
Zhanye 氈爺, the Arabic chronicle A Tale of Lanzhou (Lanzhou zhuan 蘭州
傳), and the genealogy Al-kitâb Al-Jahri by the imam Mohammed Mansur
曼蘇爾 (a.k.a. Ma Xuezhi 馬學智).63 Similarly, the chapters concerning
60
Ma, 20 shiji Zhongguo wenxue yu Yisilan wenhua, 177.
Ibid.
62 The Qing ruler dubbed Muslims “people of white caps” (bai mao zhi zu 白帽之族)
owing to the latter’s apparel. See Qinding Shifengpu jilüe 欽定石峰堡紀略 (The imperial
records of the Shifengpu incident), punctuated by Yang Huaizhong 楊懷中 (Yinchuan:
Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1987), 1.
63 The official documents used in the novel’s chapters about the eighteenth-century
61
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the 1856–1877 uprisings throughout the Tongzhi period (r. 1862–1874)
consist of heavy quotations from primary sources of the rival camps,
with government reports on one side, and pro-Muslim materials such
as the anonymous “Record of the Event” (“Ji shi” 紀事) on the other.64
To buttress his story with foreign testimonies, Zhang also consults early
European research on nineteenth-century Sino-Muslim history, as well
as two Japanese scholars’ 1940s surveys.65 Last but not least, the author
Hui rebellions are Qinding Lanzhou jilüe 欽定蘭州紀略 (The imperial records of the Lanzhou incident), punctuated by Yang Huaizhong (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe,
1988); and Yang, Qinding Shifengpu jilüe. Al-kitâb Al-Jahri has been anonymously rendered
into Chinese and circulated underground among the Hanophone Hui in handwritten
copies under the titles Zhehanrenye daotong shi 哲罕仁耶道統史 (History of the Jahriyya tradition of the way) and Daotong shizhuan 道統史傳 (History and biographies of the tradition
of the way).
64 The government reports quoted in Zhang’s narrative of the Tongzhi Muslim upheavals include: Yang Changjun 楊昌濬 (d. 1897), Pingding Guan Long jilüe 平定關隴紀略
(Records of the pacification of Guanzhong and Eastern Gansu) (1887; Taipei: Chengwen
chubanshe, 1968), 6.671–758; Yixin 奕訢 (1832–1898), ed., Qinding pingding Yunnan Huifei
fanglüe 欽定平定雲南回匪方略 (The imperial military records of the pacification of the
Hui rebels in Yunnan), 1896, abridged edn., in Bai Shouyi, ed., Huimin qiyi 回民起義
(The Hui uprisings), 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shenzhou guoguang she, 1952), 1: 496; Yang
Yuxiu 楊毓秀 (b. 1836), comp., Ping Hui zhi 平回志 (Record of the pacification of the Hui)
(Hongxin shanfang, 1889; [Yinchuan]: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, [1988]), 2.10b, 26b–
27a; Zuo Zongtang, “Shenming panni juanshu an lü yi nizhe” 審明叛逆眷屬按律議擬
摺 (Draft memorials on the punishments upon the convicted rebels’ family dependents
in accordance with the law) and “Mu Shenghua juankou huodang fenbie niban pian”
穆生花眷口夥黨分別擬辦片 (Appendix on the respective sentences upon Mu Shenghua’s
family and clique), both dated 22 April 1871, in his Zuo Wenxiang gong quanji 左文襄公全集
(Complete works of Zuo Zongtang, Duke for the Facilitation of Culture) (n.p., 1890–1892),
92.50a–52a and 53b, respectively. Zhang’s countercharge is based on “Ji shi,” translated
into Chinese by Pang Shiqian 龐士謙, in Bai, Huimin qiyi, 3: 239–240; Wang Dingchen
王鼎臣, “Qing Xian-Tong jian Yunnan Huibian jiwen” 清咸同間雲南回變紀聞 (Report
of the Hui rebellions in Yunnan during the eras of Xianfeng and Tongzhi of the Qing),
in Bai, Huimin qiyi, 2: 304–305; and Ma Yuanzhang’s Shagou shicao 沙溝詩草 (Collected
poems at Shagou), a few of which cited in the novel can be found in Bai, Huizu renwu
zhi, 2: 1580, 1585–1587. The most comprehensive collection of official documents on the
campaigns against the Muslims in northwest China is Qinding pingding Shaan Gan Xinjiang
Huifei fanglüe 欽定平定陝甘新疆回匪方略 (The imperial military records of the pacification
of the Hui rebels in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang), ed. Yixin et al., 1896, 30 vols. (Taipei:
Chengwen chubanshe, 1968). For a history of the independent Islamic state in Xinjiang,
see Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia,
1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
65 Emile Rocher (b. 1846), La province chinoise du Yün-nan, 2 vols. (Paris: E. Leroux, 1879–
1880), whose Chinese excerpt, “Qingji Yunnan Huimin qiyi shimo” 清季雲南回民起義始
末 (The whole story of the Hui uprisings in Yunnan during the late Qing period), trans.
Zeng Juezhi 曾覺之, is published in Bai, Huizu renwu zhi, 2: 1766–1903; Henri Marie
Gustave d’Ollone, Recherches sur les musulmans chinois (1911); and the British missionary
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has interviewed a number of aged Jahriyya in addition to using the hundred genealogies and religious records they provide, incorporating their
oral history into his book. In order to keep their secrets from the Han
and Manchu, as Zhang asserts, none of the above Muslim authors used
the Chinese language as their medium of writing. While “Record of
the Event” was encoded in Arabic transcriptions of Chinese known as
xiaoerjin 小兒錦 ‘children’s script’,66 the Rashhah was not available in Chinese until it was translated by Zhang, with the help of two fellow Muslims.
Especially noteworthy, the Rashhah, or Sparkling Dew, of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century is originally composed of an Arabic
story about Ma Mingxin’s life and a Persian account of Mu Xianzhang’s
deeds. Each paragraph of this sacred and secret book begins with the formulaic “legend has it that” (xiangchuan 相傳), reminding the audience of
its oral origin. An unofficial record of the saints and the suppressed creed,
the document presents history as mystery, or keramäti (kelamaiti 克拉麥提)
in Arabic. Its style inspires Zhang with a formal innovation that merges
history, religion, and literature together.67 So, instead of adopting the traditional historiography he has learned from regular professional training,
he decides to juggle day-to-day accounts into a miracle play. The torrential rains in the arid area of Lanzhou from the 21st to 28th July 1781, for
instance, are presented by Zhang as Allah’s response to Su Forty-Three’s
prayer when the water supply is cut off by government troops.68 The act of
God not only justifies the insurrection but also exposes the Gansu relief
fraud scandal, a case of corruption that involves over a hundred local
G. Findlay Andrew’s documentary novel The Crescent in North-West China (London: The
China Inland Mission, 1921).
66 The term xiaoerjin is derived from the homophonic xiaojing 消經 ‘digesting scripture’,
commentaries written in Arabic letters to transliterate Chinese sacred text. Lipman,
Familiar Strangers, 50, upholds this extant system of Arabization originating with mosque
teachers of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to be “the first pinyin, or systematic alphabetic
representation of Chinese.”
67 See Zhang Chengzhi, “Jujue xianshi—Reshihaer beijing zongshu” 拒現世—
《熱
什哈爾》
背景綜述 (Declining the secular world: An introduction to Rashhah), in Aibu˒ailaman (Abu˒al-amah) Abudugadi˒er 艾布艾拉曼．阿布杜尕底爾 [Guanliye 關裡爺], Reshihaer:
Jingying de luzhu 熱什哈爾：晶瑩的露珠 (Rashhah: Sparkling dew), trans. Yang Wanbao 楊
萬寶, Ma Xuekai 馬學凱, and Zhang Chengzhi (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1993; Taipei:
Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1997), 159–166.
68 Official reports of the succession of rainy days are found in Agui’s 阿桂 (1717–1797)
and Li Shiyao’s 李侍堯 (d. 1788) memorials to the throne, dated 1 and 6 August 1781, in
Yang, Qinding Lanzhou jilüe, 10.169, 11.175.
93
officials fabricating drought for years on end to receive famine relief from
the central government.69 While it may not convince the unbelieving, the
recourse to God as witness for the oppressed is at least a literary device to
challenge the dominant discourse. The supernatural appears not only as
a religious absolute to counteract the political power but also as a poetic
invention to disturb the official historiography.
In his historiographic experiment the author does not put many dialogues into the mouths of historical personages as other novelists do.
Instead he lets documental interrogations take the place of the characters’ interlocutions. This is a double writing that Julia Kristeva describes
as “a constant dialogue with the preceding literary corpus, a perpetual
challenge of past writing.”70 On the one hand, there are times when official and unofficial accounts corroborate one another. The Lingzhou 靈州
family tree of five-generation leadership circulated among the Jahriyya
people, for instance, is carefully charted by Zhang with reference to Zuo
Zongtang’s “Draft Memorials on the Punishments upon the Convicted
Rebels’ Family Dependents in Accordance with the Law.” On the other
hand, private writings are often invoked to query the public records. Take
the Shifengpu siege as an example: what the imperially commissioned
military documents allege to be a pitched battle on the 19th and 20th
August 1784 was actually a murder of unarmed masses according to “A
Brief Record of the Pacification of the Hui” (“Ping Hui jilüe” 平回紀
略), written by an anonymous minor official.71 Zhang uses Chen Yuan’s
陳垣 A Comparative Daily Calendar for Chinese, Western, and Islamic History
(Zhong Xi Hui shi rili 中西回史日曆) to verify that the three thousand Muslims must have been in the midst of observing Lesser Bairam when they
were slaughtered. Because of its deliberate misrepresentation, the official history is denounced as shuchi 書恥 ‘shame of books’ (98). To the
minority, the problem of misrepresentation is not just a matter of fact
but also a question of power and positionality, an issue of identity politics. In his critique of Zhang, literary scholar Liu Xinmin suggests that
it is
69 For a study of the case, see the Hui historian Yang Huaizhong’s “Shiba shiji de
Gansu maozhen an” 十八世紀的甘肅冒賑案 (The eighteenth-century Gansu relief fraud
scandal), in his Huizu shi lungao 回族史論稿 (Essays in Hui history) (Yinchuan: Ningxia
renmin chubanshe, 1991), 371–439.
70 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (1969), in her Desire in Language: A
Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice
Jardine, and Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 69.
71 Yang, Qinding Shifengpu jilüe, 14.244–245; “Ping Hui jilüe,” in Bai, Huimin qiyi, 3: 13.
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in moments of acute conflict with the institutionalized memory (such as
official histories) … that one’s ethnic identity constantly comes alive, but
never allows itself to be codified.72
It is precisely in such intertextual discrepancies and stylistic hybridity that
Zhang rediscovers his individual ethnic/religious identity as a Hui and
reconstructs a different imagining of China as a nation-state.
Now a pious member of the sect, the author alienates himself from the
élite and proclaims himself “a son of poor people” (330). In his religious/
political manifesto for the poor, Jahriyya is said to represent the grassroots by avenging the wrongs of the underprivileged. While revengeful
representation may not be an issue of religious doctrine, it certainly moralizes the oppressed order and sanctifies the poor people.73 If we consider
the piece a preamble to the ‘humanist spirit’ (renwen jingshen 人文精神)
debate of the mid-1990s, when Zhang’s works were taken up by some literary incrowds as being too idealistic and serious for a consumer society,
then his anti-consumerism is explicit. Reproaching the façade of wealth,
he argues in History of the Soul that the economically oriented standard of
historical judgment should yield to an evaluation based on the degree of
spiritual liberty. This explains why in the postscript he eulogizes Mao,
the leader of the peasant revolution, instead of Deng, the advocate of the
market economy. From his worship of Mao during the Cultural Revolution to his criticism of commercialism in the post-Communist era, Zhang
is consistent in his position.74 No wonder that in the epic he withholds the
fact that the flourishing period of Jahriyya under Ma Yuanzhang’s leadership is largely due to the successful alliance of commerce and religion
brought about by the order’s wealthy patriarchs and economically active
adherents.75 It would be ironic to the leftist-turned-Islamite writer, who
has been longing for a purer, poorer past, that peace has at last been
achieved through prosperity rather than poverty.
72 Liu Xinmin, “Self-Making in the Wilderness: Zhang Chengzhi’s Reinvention of
Ethnic Identity,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 5.1 (April 1998): 101.
73 Deng Xiaomang 鄧曉芒, Linghun zhi lü—Jiushi niandai wenxue de shengcun jingjie 靈魂之
旅—九十年代文學的生存境界 (A journey to the soul: The living state of literature in the
1990s) (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1998), 50, reproves Zhang for confusing the
theological and secular positions through such representation: “As a matter of religion,
to say that one ‘stands by the poor people’s side’ is nonsensical….”
74 Jin Wu, in his “Zhang Chengzhi: Ethnic Consciousness and Maoist Legacy,” paper
read at 54th annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, 4–7 April 2002, in
Washington, DC, shows Zhang’s anti-intellectualism and anti-institutionalism in his ideological shift from Maoism to Islam under the pressure of rampant commercialism.
75 See Lipman, Familiar Strangers, 184, on Ma Yuanzhang’s leadership.
95
Tensions between the Han-dominated state and the Hui and other
ethnic minorities during the reign of Mao were no less severe than in
other historical periods. As regards the Jahriyya’s fate after the Communist ‘liberation’, Zhang does mention the year 1958 and the Cultural Revolution, but provides no further information about the happenings except
for the destruction of Ma Hualong’s qubba in 1958. Ma Zhenwu 馬震武,
Ma Yuanzhang’s fourth son, the eighth leader of the Jahriyya who led a
widespread movement to protect the qubba and mosques from confiscation in April and June 1958, was arrested for ‘counterrevolution’ and died
in jail.76 On 25th October Ningxia province was reestablished as a Hui
autonomous region. Then, during the Cultural Revolution, when many
mosques were closed and some qubba—including that of Ma Zhenwu—
were destroyed nationwide, a large-scale Muslim revolt against the government’s mishandling of local conflicts and demands for religious freedom took place in the Yunnan village of Shadian 沙甸, resulting in the
massacre of more than 1,600 Hui in 1975.77 In both cases the victims were
accused of attempting to establish an Islamic republic. That these events
are missing in the novel may be due to the author’s personal admiration
of Mao, the political taboo on separatism, or a prohibition of mention of
minority suppressions in communist China. In any case, the textual lacunae force us to further reflect that the Mao era, nostalgic as it appears to
be in Zhang’s writings, remains unspeakable in the reconstruction of the
Hui history. It is unspeakable, perhaps not as much because of the official or psychological censorship as the fact that the speaker’s very vehement voice is given, conditioned, and therefore precluded by the turbulent period from rebutting the age of Mao. The age of Mao has molded
the mentality of Zhang and his contemporaries, many of whom find sustenance in fetishism after the end of socialist revolution, whereas the Hui
writer turns to another faith in the grip of identity crisis.
Zhang’s detestation of intellectual circles is a result of their capitulation
to capitalism. After examining the novel and Zhang’s essays of the 1990s,
Liu Xinmin concludes that Zhang is neither a radical totally against modern material comforts “nor an extremist with religious fundamentalist
zeal,” as he is labeled by his detractors:
Rather, he is adamant with the intellectuals’ frailties in the face of social
malfunction and injustice as a result of harried economic policies, and he is
76
Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 136; Israeli, Muslims in China, 125.
For the Shadian Incident, read Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 137–140; and Dillon, China’s
Muslim Hui Community, 165–166.
77
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outspoken about what little critical awareness the educated class can foster
against the blindly raging ‘market forces’ and the new alliances of wealth
and power.78
Zhang chides the intellectuals in his last chapter:
I cannot remember when I began to feel that my ears were filled with [the
Chinese intellectual’s] clamor about China’s humanism…. I somehow
loathe them and subconsciously knew I could not follow them. In China,
the human, humanity and the will of the people can be found in other
ways. [278]79
The way he finds is religion.80 Thus his humanism has two definitions:
first, human spirituality is equated with religion, which serves as his
springboard to critique consumerism; second, it means passive resistance
to high-handed rule, as exemplified in the Shifengpu suppression. He
also calls the surrender of Ma Hualong to negotiate for amnesty for the
Muslims around Jinjipu “the beauty of sacrifice” (xisheng zhi mei 犧牲之
美) in the title of the fifth chapter. From the novella to the novel, there
is apparently a shift toward nonviolent resistance as a strategy to expose
the ugliness of the ruler and strive for social justice.
Remapping China: Diasporic Geography, Ethnoreligious Historiography
By demonizing Zuo Zongtang and his imperial patron, Zhang Chengzhi
is trying to reverse the positions of the victim and the victimizer in his
moral fantasy. Despite the politics of the reversal, the representation
of violence is inevitable in either a victim narrative or a victor narrative.
Whether the Jahriyya are presented as political victims or moral victors,
or both, their story of victimization and/or victory is not immune from
78 Liu, “Deciphering the Populist Gadfly: Cultural Polemic around Zhang Chengzhi’s
‘Religious Sublime’,” in The Modern Chinese Literary Essay: Defining the Chinese Self in the 20th
Century, ed. Martin Woesler (Bochum: Bochum University Press, 2000), 234–235. Notice
that “the educated class” here is understood in a rather restricted sense of humanistic
education.
79 This excerpt is translated by Zhang Xuelian in “Muslim Identity in the Writings of
Zhang Chengzhi,” 114, in which the original Chinese terms renxing 人性 and rendao 人道
are rendered in one word, i.e., “humanity.”
80 Zhang Chengzhi also relates religion to humanity in his 1990 essay “Yuyan chongjing” 語言憧憬 (Longing for a language), in his Huangwu yingxiong lu, 57:
For foreigners, religion may be a convention; but in China, dare to declare and
defend one’s religion is a sign of humanity (renxing, rendao), a declaration of spiritual
(xinling) freedom.
97
representing violence and, more important, violently representing, hence
derogating, their enemy as an evil force. Nonviolence cannot be articulated without writing about violence, just as silence cannot be heard without making some noise. Quiet are the Jahriyya in chanting their prayers,
so as to hide their identity between conflicts, but they are not silent victims when forced to confront the imperial power. It is through violence
and silence that Zhang tells the tale of the Jahriyya’s quest for nonviolent
insubordination and condemns the tyranny of the Qing government. It
is also through the noise in history and his own voice that he breaks the
silence of the forbidden chanters.
On reading History of the Soul, a mainland critic comments that the
Jahriyya represented by Zhang yields a “soul without history,” that the
so-called history is merely one of a religious group’s secular struggle
against the state power—a history overwhelmed only by rancor and
revenge.81 There are indeed many violent scenes from both institutionalized and private memories: fierce fighting, corpse exhumation and pulverization, public display of a chopped-off head, plus all kinds of punishments, such as castration, burning, scalding, slicing, roasting in oil,
and dragging by horse. Though the author admits that bloodshed can
be a force to alter history and a seed to spread religion, and that feud is
the historical reality between the Han and the Hui, he exhorts: “Slaughter is in violation of religious principles under any circumstances, even if
one is in the plight of being slaughtered” (165–166). Moreover, we should
not downplay the importance of the Shifengpu and Jinjipu immolations,
as well as the last two chapters, in which Ma Jincheng refuses to evade
castration and Ma Yuanzhang finally leads the “blood-throat religion”
onto a dovish road. Castration is not only an inscription of law upon
the body but also a deprivation of virility in both senses of disrupting
biological reproduction and destroying the masculine vigor. Here castration is paradoxically compared to circumcision, an Islamic rite of passage
for young men, suggesting that the perfection of masculinity is achieved
through sacrificing the self to stop the vicious cycle of violence.82 Ma Hua81
Deng, Linghun zhi lü, 55–56, 59, 61.
Another emasculatory mortification mentioned in the novel is the Jahriyya’s trimming of their whiskers so as to rid themselves of the characteristic full beard, and to
memorialize the Qianlong massacres. There is a slightly different explanation of the
beard cutting in Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 53:
82
Many Jahriyya Hui shave the sides of their beards to commemorate their founder,
Ma Mingxin, whose beard is said to have been shorn by Qing soldiers before his
execution in 1781.
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long’s hesitance in joining the nineteenth-century Muslim upheavals, Ma
Jincheng’s self-sacrifice to end the vendetta, and Ma Yuanzhang’s compromise with infidels all show the Jahriyya’s gradual move away from
resorting to force.
Jonathan Lipman has argued that Muslim violence cannot be stereotyped into a nature of the Hui or a virtue of their faith, nor can it be
explained by a racist policy of the central government; instead, in all
cases of the Qing dynasty, it was the local officials’ anti-Muslim sentiment, misjudgment and killing that raised debts of blood, hence violent
vengeance.83 The Salar 撒拉爾 revolt of 1781, for instance, was in its onset
no more than doctrinal disputes between two rival Sufi orders, namely,
the Jahriyya, pejoratively called the ‘new teachings’, and the Khufiyya
Multicolored Mosque (Huasi 花寺), the ‘old teachings’. Only after the
Jahriyya found the provincial officials partial to the Khufiyya, which
had had an accommodation with the government, did they murder the
officeholders. Thereafter followed the arrest of Ma Mingxin, the campaign to release this spiritual leader, his execution, and the revengeful
revolt resulting in repression and more rebellions. Lipman’s account and
Zhang’s narrative of the event are consentient. Both also agree that there
were times when the Hui coexisted with their Han neighbors without a
scuffle. Because violent acts are always ascribed to Muslims, the Jahriyya
in particular, Zhang “takes a devotional vow” (juyi 舉意) to speak up for
the Jahriyya, who dared only to pray quietly in the long centuries when
their faith was banned.
The Jahriyya’s tradition of vocalized chanting has made their prayer in
‘silence’, in the light of Rey Chow’s diasporic theory, “the evidence of imperialist oppression.”84 Yet Zhang is hasty to resurrect their voice: “I seek
to use the archaeological real to fabricate an intuition and mood of the
hundreds of thousands of the Jahriyya. I always want to change silence
into speech” (245). Although today they reportedly believe that “silence
has come to an end” (137), that it is the beginning of understanding, the
Jahriyya cannot speak themselves and still await a living agent to articulate their past. In the politics of subaltern representation, as Gayatri
Spivak avers, “elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utter-
A photograph of the Jahriyya beard style is given on p. 240 of Gladney’s book.
83 Jonathan N. Lipman, “Ethnic Violence in Modern China: Hans and Huis in Gansu,
1781–1929,” in Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture, ed. Lipman and Stevan
Harrell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 67–68, 77, 81–82.
84 Chow, Writing Diaspora, 38; emphasis in the original.
99
ance’. The sender—‘the peasant’—is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness.”85 Representation is always already interpretation, as the writer acts as an interpreter for the personages in history, the
dead of the past. The Jahriyya’s history can only be insufficiently mediated through the historian by means of quotation and translation; their
“unspeakable history” (137) is unquotable and their silent moments are
untranslatable. Now that their defiled image from the authoritative discourse is turned into an oppressed victim in the blood narrative, they are
sanctified by their representative. At this point Chow warns us: “Defilement and sanctification belong to the same symbolic order.”86 There is no
difference between state historiography and Zhang’s victimology in making the enemy less than human and the self more noble. In this regard,
the novelist’s depiction of the Jahriyya’s silent space and linguistic visibility deserves more attention than his demonization of the rulers and
extolment of the victims.
Despite some common Chinese surnames (e.g., Ma and Mu from
Mohammed) and Islamic dietary restrictions (such as the pork taboo and
abstentions from smoking and alcohol) shared by the Hui, the Muslims’
original ethnic identities are forgotten due to the dual loss of native place
and native language:
The Hui people—ever since they entered China in their capacity as passengers on the fleets of a long voyage on the Indian Ocean, or as masters
of trade caravans on the Silk Road, they have forfeited their hometowns.
Ever after their scattered settlements throughout China, after their inheritance from the first generation by blood, they have gradually grown to
speaking Chinese and gradually forsaken their mother tongues. What is
left to their names? [284]
Seven hundred years (the seventh century to the fourteenth century) of
Sinicization had led to the aphasia of the Hui people’s mother tongue,
85 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), 287. The quotation echoes Karl Marx’s tautological aphorism about the
1850s French smallholding peasants in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New
York: International Publishers, 1963), 124: “They cannot represent themselves, they must
be represented.” The answer to Spivak’s question by Harrell, “Introduction,” 34, is:
… the subaltern can speak on the sufferance of the civilizer. Voice is granted on
the provision that it will speak in favor of the [civilizing] project, or at least in the
project’s terms.
One may of course doubt that such a granted voice is a genuine voice.
86 Chow, Writing Diaspora, 54.
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be it Arabic, Persian, or another Central Asian language, making them
almost linguistically invisible. Thanks to the diasporic Hui communities,
their religious language has been preserved. The Chinese Islamic vocabulary has created an idiolect, or what Ma Lirong calls a “social dialect,
a kind of linguistic variation.”87 In a recent pilgrimage log, Zhang reaffirms that in historical research “it is more solid and concrete to draw
evidence from language than to rely on records or excavations.”88 It is the
Islamic scriptural idiolect rather than the northwestern Chinese dialect
that Zhang adds notes to in “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province” and employs extensively in History of the Soul as a defining
feature of Hui discourse and identity. This crucial instrument of ethnic cultural and political identity construction brings Zhang’s writings
beyond the Mao discourse to the level of what Walter Benjamin calls
a “true language” or “pure language” that renders history into emotions rather than information, feelings rather than meanings.89 With the
Chinese transliterations of the religious loan words, the author strives to
make his Chinese writings “transgress square characters,” intending to
“use Chinese, the Han language, to construct an unknown China” (284,
245).
The conception of “an unknown China” is the most intriguing idea
and most effective tactic in Zhang’s historiography. For the Hui, their
Chinese “hometown is forever their land of exile,” where they “have built
a spiritual pure land in a secular remote place,” a garden on a wasteland (11–12). The author traces Muslims’ migration into China from the
Tang (618–907) to the Yuan dynasties. Among the immigrants are merchants, artisans, and soldiers from North Africa and West and Central
Asia. Centuries later in China, while the Jahriyya base is forced to move
around the northwestern townships of Hezhou 河州 (present-day Linxia
臨夏), Xunhua 循化, Guanchuan 關川, Pingliang 平涼, Jinjipu, Shagou,
and Lanzhou, the rebels’ families and followers are banished far away to
87 Ma, 20 shiji Zhongguo wenxue yu Yisilan wenhua, 184. Here I use ‘idiolect’ in Roland
Barthes’ broadened notion that “define[s] the idiolect as the language of a linguistic
community” in his Elements of Semiology, 21.
88 Zhang Chengzhi, “Xianhua de feixu” 鮮花的廢墟 (Ruins of flowers), Huacheng, 2004,
no. 4: 155. Zhang’s travel notes serialized in Huacheng recently represent his search for a
global Muslim identity.
89 See Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of
Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens” (1923), in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 77–82. Benjamin was referring to Holy Writ
when he put forward his idea of “the true language,” but I think that the concept can
also be applied to other sacred writings.
101
the borderlands of Xinjiang in the northwest, Heilongjiang in the northeast, Yunnan in the south, and four coastal provinces in the east. Their
diaspora has created “a new geography” (154), in which an out-of-theway place like Shanshan 善 is well known in its Turki pronunciation,
whereas the big city Shanghai is obscure and the national capital Beijing
is decentered as “a frontier of faith” (75). This topography of China tilts
not toward the politico-economic centers along the eastern coast, but
toward the holy land in the western hinterland. Likening the Jahriyya to
the Jews in terms of the eradication they have experienced in China and
Europe respectively, Zhang laments in one of his chapter-ending poems:
“Who would have ever imagined—/Within the national boundary is
my boundless prison” (140). On Zhang’s histomap China is less a unified
nation than a floating plate of displacements. His geo-historiographic
fiction of the marginalized minority has deconstructed the nationalistic discourse that normalizes territorial integrity and economic exploitation.
To the Han, Zhang’s vision of “an unknown China” undermines the
long-standing state scheme for wealth and power. From the Jahriyya’s
perspective, the Qianlong epoch was not the last model of a rich and
strong China in history but rather “an age of false prosperity” and corrupted bureaucracy (42). This view is shocking to Han readers and
spawns a “disturbing effect” similar to that which Rey Chow describes in
her hypothesis of the native’s pre-colonized gaze upon the colonizer, who
“henceforth became ‘self-conscious’, that is, uneasy and uncomfortable,
in his ‘own’ environment.”90 Its purpose is not retaliation but reflection
—to let the Chinese look at their own past and present in a new light.
The China seen by the Jahriyya is unfamiliar to the Chinese; it is radically different from the China projected on the pages of official history.
A prosperous and powerful China is simultaneously bereft of humanist
spirit and religious freedom. In order to obtain absolute freedom of the
soul and maintain ethnic ethics, or, in his own words, “the beauty of
heterodoxy” (yiduan de mei 異端的美), Zhang rejects assimilation to Confucianism, the orthodox Chinese belief system that has successfully secularized and syncretized Buddhism and Taoism. As the British missionary
Marshall Broomhall notes, “Confucianism has modified the teachings of
the Arabian prophet” to a certain extent.91 Contrary to the Qadim, the
90
Chow, Writing Diaspora, 51.
Marshall Broomhall, introductory foreword to Andrew, The Crescent in North-West
China, viii. In the introduction to his The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims
91
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majority Chinese Muslim group known for its appropriation of Confucian terminology,92 the Jahriyya consider “Confucianization, secularization, or Sinicization to be a more insidious enemy than the ‘state’ cleaver”
(147). What Zhang envisions is not a prosperous China, but a religious
China.
This anti-syncretism generates a methodology that espouses a certain
religious worldview as the basic interpretive tool for the understanding
of history: “History is secret”; “religion should incorporate history” (226,
206). Regarding historical writing as an ‘amal (ermaili 爾麥里), or religious
practice, Zhang introduces his religio-historiography as follows:
More is to be found in an unspeakable history…. Because of our personal participation, this kind of historiography is absolutely true, but it
transcends language; it is emotional rather than rational, following a kind
of elusive, obscure logic. More importantly, it requires a private religious
experience cherished by both the speaker and the listener; it requires the
spirituality of a human. [137–138]
Since “historical fact does not exist” and memory is slippery (146), historical details cannot be obtained by any research methods, only through
telepathy with the ancients, intuition, and inspiration. Derived from historical preordination, Zhang’s occult art of history renders historiography in ecstasy, a subjective state beyond rational thought. Metaphorically, the writer’s imaginative venture into the historical scenes is not
unlike his character Yisir’s mystic fanâ˒ in “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province.” It is an idealist conception of history
against the grain of the materialistic world in the age of a global economy.
And Zhang Chengzhi’s historical idealism is pessimistic upon returning
to the present: “Because the contemporary age is not subject to retrospection, it is the darkest” (294).
in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3, 12–13, Zvi
Ben-Dor Benite poses a question: “Must the making of a ‘Hua’ [interchangeable with
‘Chinese’ and ‘Confucian’ as noted by the author] mean the unmaking of a Muslim?” to
which his own answer is: “Chinese Muslimness” can be “at once fully ‘Muslim’ and fully
‘Chinese’.” However, he does not mean any dual identities, but a dialogical construction
of “an imagined space that belonged to and corresponded with both ‘China’ and ‘Islam’.”
Yet Ben-Dor’s object of study is the Chinese Muslim literati élite in the Yangtze Delta,
instead of those poor peasants in the western provinces.
92 See Wang, Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms, s.v. “Gedimu.”
103
Tibetan Plateau: Historical Alternatives by Tashi Dawa, Alai, and Ge Fei
The summer of 2001 saw the Beijing government celebrate the fiftieth
anniversary of its ‘liberation’ of Tibet. Communist propaganda continues
to justify the Chinese occupation of the area in the dual name of history
and the motherland as set forth in the opening sentence of the 1951
“Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet”:
The Tibetan nationality is one of the nationalities with a long history
within the boundaries of China and, like many other nationalities, it has
done its glorious duty in the course of the creation and development of the
great Motherland.93
Establishing the “development of the great Motherland” as the purpose
of history, the statement provides no evidence to verify the historical
claim that Tibet was part of China. The developmentalism of history
and the greatness of the motherland excuse the irredentism that maps the
territories of Tibet “within the boundaries of China.” In today’s official
rhetoric, such development and greatness are said to have been proven
by the spectacular material betterment in Tibet thanks to Deng’s economic reforms.94 The half-century master narrative of this ‘autonomous’
region of China, from liberation to modernization, holds but a unilinear
view of history toward the utopia of communism. The teleological historiography, however, is rejected by the new generation of Tibetan and
Chinese writers, who bring under question the state’s iron law of progress
and discern alternative patterns of history.
In Herbert J. Batt’s brief introduction to Tales of Tibet, the first selection of Chinese fiction about Tibet published in the Anglophone world
also in the summer of 2001, the word ‘alternative’ is used four times to
describe the spirit, values, vision, and model yielded by these literary
efforts.95 The word suggests the otherness of Tibet as a colony of China,
especially when Tibet is inscribed in the Chinese language and repre93 For the full text and a discussion of this 17-point treaty signed on 23 May 1951, see
Hugh E. Richardson, Tibet and Its History, 2nd edn. (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984),
290–293 and 187–195 respectively; also Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A
History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 449–452,
for a slightly different translation of the agreement.
94 A case of this official fanfare is Xizang jixing 西藏紀行 (Touch Tibet), a 200-minute
news series produced and broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV) in 2001. See
http://www.cctv.com.cn/english/zhuanji/xizhang/index.html.
95 Herbert J. Batt, ed. and trans., Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 1, 3–4.
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sented in Chinese literature. While some Tibetan critics argue that such
representation can never be authentic, Tsering Shakya in his foreword to
the book reflects on the problem in the light of Edward Said’s postcolonial idea of the voyage in: “It is a journey to wage a discourse against the
dominant group and transform the discursive practices of the hegemonic
power.”96 In what ways can this southwestern periphery write back to the
center and disrupt the standard history invented by the colonizer? Here I
will analyze six texts by two Sichuan born Tibetans, namely, Tashi Dawa
and Alai, and one Han Chinese, Ge Fei. These pieces, complementary to
each other along the timeline of history from the 1900s to 1980s, at once
rewrite the local history of the plateau and present alternative models for
Chinese historiography by adopting the metropolitan language.
Tashi Dawa: History as Hiatuses and Cycles
The itinerary of root-seeking in Tibet began in the mid-1980s with Tashi
Dawa’s novella “Tibet: The Mysterious Years” (“Xizang: Yinmi suiyue”
西藏：隱秘歲月, 1985).97 The textual story is framed in three historical periods: 1910–1927, 1929–1950, and 1953–1985. In the opening section, we
find the aged Mima 米瑪 and his wife, Caxun 察香, as the last remaining
household in the barren Gokam 廓康 mountain area in Southern Tibet,
since all other villagers have gradually moved downhill, leaving only the
little boy Dalang 達朗 to accompany the old couple. Caxun becomes
pregnant at nearly seventy and only two months later gives birth to Cering Gyamo 次仁吉姆. As a baby girl, Cering Gyamo shows supernatural
talents, yet they are soon overpowered by Captain H.T. Morshead, the
assistant to Colonel F.M. Bailey, both of whom have followed the British
Expeditionary Forces into Tibet. As a young lady, Cering Gyamo falls
in love with Dalang, but her parents, immediately before their deaths in
1927, tonsure her and make her an oblate to serve the mysterious monk
in a cave atop a mountain for the rest of her life.
96
Tsering Shakya, “Language, Literature, and Representation in Tibet,” ibid., xix–
xx.
97 In Tashi Dawa, Xizang yinmi suiyue (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 1993),
1–46; also collected in Wu Liang 吳亮, Zhang Ping 章平, and Zong Renfa 宗仁發, eds.,
Mohuan xianshi zhuyi xiaoshuo 魔幻現實主義小說 (Magical realist fiction) (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1988), 152–198; English translation by Liu Shicong, in Tashi Dawa,
A Soul in Bondage: Stories from Tibet (Beijing: Chinese Literature Press, 1992), 41–106. Hereafter all references are given in brackets after quotations with the first page number referring to the 1993 Chinese edition and the second, the English rendition.
105
In the middle section, Dalang saves a woman from an exorcising ritual
in a village, and she bears him three robust sons. The brothers share
a wife, who resembles and is also named Cering Gyamo. When this
Cering Gyamo follows the second son down the mountain, a white stone
is transformed into another Cering Gyamo and stays with the other two
brothers. Three years later, in the final section of the novella, a group
of soldiers bring Dalang a letter from his second son, who has joined
the PLA and will become a high official in the Tibetan government.
The oldest son, Tashi Dawa 扎西達瓦, is elected chairman of the poor
peasants’ association and promoted to be secretary of the commune Party
branch. In 1985, a twenty-four-year-old Cering Gyamo, the second son’s
daughter, comes from Lhasa to Gokam as a doctor. In the last scene she
puts a white handkerchief on the corpse of the first Cering Gyamo, who
on her deathbed dreamed of marrying Dalang.
“Tibet: The Mysterious Years” tells a brief history of Tibet through
a family saga of five generations (including Dalang’s great-grandson).
The second part of the title in English translation indicates its mystical approach, especially that of magical realism. In fact, Tashi Dawa is
said to be “known for a number of short stories that attempt to imitate
the magical realist style of Latin American literature,” and he himself
acknowledges the influence of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist
masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, on his fiction.98 In her research of
Tashi Dawa’s magical realism, Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani argues that the
Tibetan writer not only appropriates the Latin American literary mode,
but also carries over in it the supernatural and the fantastic from classical Chinese tales.99 In addition, Tashi Dawa draws on the technique
of ancient Tibetan chronicles, a genre replete with both mythical elements and factual details.100 After pointing out the common ground of
historical processes and religious richness between Latin America and
Tibet, Schiaffini-Vedani further particularizes the term ‘magical realism’
in the socio-political circumstances of modern Tibet and suggests, “[T]he
author has to play with time and history so as to avoid political or ethnic
responsibility.”101 However, it should not follow, as the feminist critic Lu
Tonglin berates the story for maintaining political and sexual hierarchies,
98
Barmé and Minford, Seeds of Fire, 450; Batt, Tales of Tibet, 264.
See Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, “Tashi Dawa: Magical Realism and Contested Identity in Modern Tibet” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002), 155–165.
100 Batt, Tales of Tibet, 264.
101 Schiaffini-Vedani, “Tashi Dawa,” 205.
99
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that Tashi Dawa “renounces his Tibetan identity,” and that “[b]ecause
of the lack of resistance, his marginality mainly serves as a decoration for
the Chinese cultural center.”102
In “Tibet: The Mysterious Years,” magic blends with mundane life.
The esoteric practice of ‘resurrection of the dead’ by biting off a corpse’s
tongue, dreams of munching a woman’s leg or a room’s pillar, incarnation
of a savior, miraculous birth and death, to name just a few, are part of the
characters’ daily lives. Free from ideological constraints, magical realism
counteracts the socialist realism endorsed by the Communist Party from
the 1950s to 1970s. Tibet in the fiction of Tashi Dawa is, to borrow Fredric
Jameson’s words, “a reality which is already in and of itself magical
or fantastic.”103 Supernatural experiences and inexplicable myths are
not inserted in the history of Tibet, but mixed with it. In this startling
combination of mythical details and realistic elements, the reader is able
to defamiliarize him/herself with the alleged factual history. However,
unlike García Márquez, who makes his political and social engagement
clear by putting his imagination in the service of history, Tashi Dawa does
not interrogate the official history overtly. Instead, as Batt observes, he
“obfuscates political implications beneath the complexities of his magic
realism.”104
As suggested in the second part of its original Chinese title, “Yinmi
suiyue” or “The Mysterious Years,” the story starts in 1910, deliberately avoiding the Sino-British-Tibetan conflicts in the first decade of
the 1900s, and blanks out the years 1951–1952 when Tibet was annexed
to China. Although the bloody events caused by the British and Chinese
invasions occur under the camouflage of skillful time shifts on the part of
the author, they are hinted at passim. For instance, the 13th Dalai Lama’s
being driven out to India by the Sichuan troops in 1910 is related as a
brief news item from the outside world, amid the aromas of mutton stew,
buttered tea and snuff tobacco.105 An indication of the British interests in
102 Lu Tonglin, “Quest in Time and Space as a New History of Ancient and Modern
Tibet,” in her Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics, 128. In the mood for
misandry, Lu interprets “Tibet: The Mysterious Years” as a misogynistic discourse, in
which Dalang and the Buddhist monk—instead of the British military men and the PLA
—represent the masculine power as well as political suppression.
103 Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986): 311.
104 Batt, Tales of Tibet, 264.
105 The troops were led by Zhao Erfeng 趙爾豐 (1845–1911), the Qing Grand Minister
Resident of Tibet. See David Snellgrove and Hugh Richardson, A Cultural History of Tibet
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 234, 276.
107
Tibet is the 1903–1904 expedition led by Col. Francis E. Younghusband
(1863–1942), whose name is mentioned once only to introduce two of his
followers. Yet the presence of these peripheral figures of the imperialist
history is destructive enough to subdue Cering Gyamo’s inborn arcana,
bereaving her of her innate ability to perform the dance of a guardian
warrior of the Yellow Sect of Lamaism and her extraordinary wisdom to
draw totems of the life-and-death cycle. The moment Captain Morshead
kisses her right cheek, she ceases to be an incarnate dakini (dumu 度母), a
female initiatory deity in Tibetan Buddhism. She must wash herself in a
stream of snow-water in order to ease the itching from head to foot. Her
suffering is relieved only after Mima lets her put on the army jacket left
behind by the officer, which she never takes off again. Cering Gyamo’s
magical bodily reaction to the Englishman’s kiss and uniform is not just
a sexual metaphor of the British military control and lingering influence
on Tibet but, to borrow John Burt Foster’s term, a “felt history,” whereby
a persona experiences history’s immediate “physical impact on the body
and the senses.”106
The author exercises more caution when it comes to the Chinese colonization. He skips the two years in which the Sino-Tibetan Agreement
was signed and the 10th Panchen Rinpoche was enthroned as a puppet.107 The advent of the Liberation Army is foreshadowed as if it were a
miracle witnessed by Cering Gyamo:
Suddenly, she saw a violent blast of wind blow up at the foot of the mountain, sweeping up clouds of dust in which a row of men in dark clothes
appeared to be moving across the sand dunes…. Standing motionless in
the water, Cering Gyamo was held in thrall by the extraordinary phenomenon. When she saw a piece of red cloth fluttering in the air and
moving in the direction of Gokam, she became very excited. She was convinced that it was a gatha from heaven. As the red cloth glided overhead,
she jumped out of [the] water and grabbed it with her hands. It was rectangular, about half the size of her room, with some bright yellow signs
embroidered on it, the meaning of which she could not make out. Before
she knew what was happening, the red cloth slipped out of her hands. Flying up and down a few times, it swept off downhill along with a gust of
swirling wind.
106 John Burt Foster, Jr., “Magical Realism, Compensatory Vision, and Felt History:
Classical Realism Transformed in The White Hotel,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995), 273.
107 For the enthronement of the Panchen Rinpoche on 30 June 1952, see Shakya, The
Dragon in the Land of Snows, 112–113.
108
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It was a red flag with several Chinese characters which read: “March
Towards Tibet!” [29/81]
And after they finally arrive at Gokam in 1953, the army is called Bodhisattva-sent soldiers because they have come to grant agricultural loans,
claiming “to relieve the people of their sufferings and hardships” (32/86).
Dalang takes it as a good omen when two calves are born that afternoon,
so he hangs a portrait of Mao Zedong over the altar with great respect.
Eulogistic as they may sound, these scenes are actually ironic if one does
not forget the 1959 uprising and how it was violently quenched by the
“Bodhisattva-sent soldiers.” Though the story is silent about the repression, when Cering Gyamo sees Chinese characters again in 1970, she
considers the unintelligible signs left by visitors as ominous incantations
and tries to wash them off the rock of the sacred cave. The linguistic
exorcism can be interpreted as a symbolic act of the Tibetan resistance
against Chinese rule.
Despite the influence of One Hundred Years of Solitude on Tashi Dawa’s
fiction, the Chinese critic Wang Fei 王緋 argues that contrary to the
historicism of cyclic time in the Colombian novel, the moral of Tashi
Dawa’s novella is “the historical progress of the nation.”108 Wang sees
the first Cering Gyamo, who spends her lifetime offering food to the
monk in the grotto, as a phantom of the local religious tradition, and
the last Cering Gyamo, who plans to go to the United States to study
medicine, as an avatar of modern Western science. The death of the old
Cering Gyamo and the arrival of the young Cering Gyamo imply the
end of a history of backwardness. Hence, “there is no repetition of Cering
Gyamo’s fate by Cering Gyamo, but a negation and betrayal of Cering
Gyamo by Cering Gyamo.”109 Apparently, Wang has read revolutionary
ideology into Tashi Dawa’s magical realism, thus describing his heroine,
the aged Cering Gyamo, as “ignorant and stubborn” (yuwan 愚頑). It is
true that Cering Gyamo the doctor finds that what has been in the cave
is a fossilized skeleton of a man, but this is not intended to mock the life
of the deceased Cering Gyamo, as Wang concludes.110 The discovery is
not a simple answer to history because the finale remains mysterious—a
108 Wang Fei, “Mohuan yu huangdan: Zuanzai Zhaxi Dawa shouxinr li de Xizang” 魔
幻與荒誕：攥在扎西達娃手心兒裡的西藏 (Magic and absurd: Tibet in Tashi Dawa’s
palms), postscript to Tashi Dawa, Xizang yinmi suiyue, 391–392.
109 Ibid., 391.
110 Wang’s view is shared by another mainland critic, Ma Lihua 馬麗華, in her Xueyu
wenhua yu Xizang wenxue 雪域文化與西藏文學 (Snowland culture and Tibetan literature)
([Changsha]: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 135.
109
Buddhist rosary with 108 beads suddenly falls in front of the doctor and
an old man appears from the grotto, revealing a secret to her: “Every one
of the beads is a period of time. Every one of them is a Cering Gyamo and
Cering Gyamo is every woman” (46/106). There is virtually no difference
between this Cering Gyamo and that Cering Gyamo, be she a nun or a
physician. The story ends with the statement: “Miracles take place every
minute, but there is only one river of time that flows with eternal history
and the thousands of men and women….”
On the question of history as progress, Schiaffini-Vedani regards Tashi
Dawa’s disruption of conventional time as
a statement of cultural autonomy against imposed temporal constructions
such as the concepts of linear history or Marxist evolution, which can be so
easily used to support imperialistic or totalitarian needs. Tashi Dawa seems
willing to portray a different conception of time, one that is not linked to
the idea of a materialistic progress.111
But then she realizes from Johnannes Fabian’s theory of postcolonial
anthropology the danger of using ‘cyclical’ or ‘repetitive’ temporal reference because it serves as the colonizers’ device to distance themselves
from the colonized, and so Tashi Dawa is trapped in his position: “In this
sense, Tashi Dawa’s recurrence in portraying Tibet involved in a cyclical
time still reflects the point of view of an outsider.”112 However, with his
hybrid identity of mixed Tibetan-Han Chinese blood in effect, having
said that he stands as an outsider to the Tibetan culture at once implies
that he is also an alien to the Han civilization. It is exactly in this double foreignness of himself that the Sino-Tibetan writer transcends the
idea of Marxist evolution and considers history a mystery rather than a
dichotomy between the backward and the advanced. For example, the
reservoir built by the commune under the leadership of ‘Tashi Dawa’ in
1969, once “a symbol that nature could be transformed by man” (35/90),
instead mysteriously dries up and falls into disuse. All human projects are
eventually overshadowed by the power of nature. After all, even the Cultural Revolution was a vain attempt at transformation, leaving only a
shallow pit in Gokam. Nothing has been accomplished.
So the author suggests: “Since yesterday was already gone, what had
happened in the past was but a dream” (31/85). To reconstruct history is
111
Schiaffini-Vedani, “Tashi Dawa,” 197.
Ibid., 199. Schiaffini-Vedani proceeds with her conclusion: “It seems as if Tashi
Dawa’s attempt to disrupt imposed conceptions of time and progress had failed due to
his own inability to go beyond the concept of Marxist evolution.”
112
110
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thus like recollecting a dream—something becomes lost, whereas its trace
is fantasized. Cering Gyamo’s ragged army jacket intrigues two students
from Beijing University, who do not know when the British invaded
Tibet but easily invent a scenario: “This old woman must have been the
mistress of a white man in Division 5 of Army A” (37/94). Nevertheless,
the author resists dramatizing the British and Chinese inroads into Tibet
or, more precisely, he undermines the major events by means of time-out
in his chronicles of Gokam. In effect, the absence of those “mysterious
years” in history makes the flow of time in the narrative rather awkward,
hence reminding us of the sensitive years by silence.
If bending the time frame into a loop is to deviate from the linearization of history, then feminizing the space of a historical site may serve as a
counterdiscourse of the male dominant discourse. In “The Old Manor”
(“Guzhai” 古宅), Tashi Dawa tells a story about a beautiful and cruel
aristocrat, Lhamo Quzhen 拉姆曲珍, and her handsome slave, Langqin
朗欽.113 Langqin is chained in the basement of Lhamo Quzhen’s mansion during the day so that he cannot see any women, and is tantalized
by her seductive postures in her bedroom at night. However, when Tibet
is ‘liberated’, he transforms himself from a helot into a hero by capturing
his escaped mistress. Instead of livestock, farm tools, and silver dollars, he
demands Lhamo Quzhen from the reform team. He then moves into her
bedroom and becomes the new master of the house, leader of the cooperative team, director of the peasants’ association and chairman of the
people’s commune. Not only are Lhamo Quzhen’s cooks and servants
at his disposal, but every female commune member, “be she married or
single, beautiful or ugly, clever or stupid, buxom or frail, vivacious or
sedate” (139/179), also offers up her body and leaves his mansion with
the reward of a small piece of butter or jerky. Within ten years, these
women are proud to bear him 237 daughters, each with a red eye-shaped
birthmark on her left arm. Langqin’s fertility, in its astounding scale and
gender dimension, may be seen as a stubborn resistance to Chinese colonization.114 His numerous daughters represent the feminine regenerative
capacity of Mother Nature that the masculine military power of the Liberation Army can never overcome. The red eye-shaped birthmark on
113 In Tashi Dawa, Xizang yinmi suiyue, 138–151. Future citations are given in the text by
page numbers from the Chinese and the English translation by Shi Junbao, in idem, A
Soul in Bondage, 178–196.
114 Langqin’s fertility makes him a “repugnant stereotype” (ling ren exin de renwu dianxing
令人惡心的人物典型) in the moral view of Ma Lihua, Xueyu wenhua yu Xizang wenxue, 140.
111
the left arm can be seen as the brand stamped by the leftist regime of the
newly born red China.
In the meantime, Lhamo Quzhen suffers from degradation and disempowerment. She lives in a stinking storeroom among the servants’
shacks, and is raped by any man who wants her. However, all men who
have sexual relations with her feel an icy chill and their tongues go numb
the following day. Only Langqin is free from being attacked by her body’s
cold air because he only sleeps with her during the full moon when her
blood is warm, although he is ignorant of the moon’s effect. Believed to
be an incarnation of Rakshasa (luochanü 羅剎女), or a female devil, the
pretty noblewoman stops aging once she is removed from her manor.
The manor as a chronotope suffers the vicissitudes of history; it undergoes the alternation of its owners, becomes the commune’s office and a
grain warehouse during the Cultural Revolution, and finally collapses in
the 1980s when its mistress is rehabilitated:
She had moved back into her manor and had become doddering overnight. Her hair had grown thin and silvery, and wrinkles creased her eyes.
When she emerged from her front door, supporting herself against a stone
wall, people were shocked at her appearance. She had become a senile old
woman, not far from her grave.
Like its mistress, the manor looked battered and dilapidated. Weeds
flourished in the crevices, and part of the roof had collapsed. The beams
and stone walls had begun to rot and crack. [150–151/195]
Lhamo Quzhen’s teetering body and the tottering stonewalls have united
into one organism as age suddenly creeps up on them after decades of
political upheavals. The decrepitude of the female corpus and the house
carcass testifies against the brave new world of Chinese communism in
Tibet.
Langqin also dies with a strange expression mixed of sorrow and satisfaction on his wrinkled face. His extravagance in the mansion house
ends in a cycle of punishment in 1968 when he is denounced as a “corrupt, degenerate element”:
He painfully straightened his neck and asked, “What sort of crime is that?”
“It means you are decadent and have slept with too many women,”
someone beside him explained.
… So sleeping with women was a crime, was it? An unforgivable crime!
He had never heard of it referred to as such before, neither in the history of
his own forefathers nor in any of the traditional social customs or statutes.
[147/190]
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Langqin never understands what revolution is all about, nor do other
Tibetan villagers. “None of the staff in the manor knew what was happening” (143/184) during the liberation. At best they can associate the
Paris Commune with the concept of Nirvana, but both are no more
than empty phrases to them. The meaning of revolution is beyond their
comprehension; or, in the author’s own words, it is a “world beyond the
ridge of mountains surrounding the village” (138/178). The ideology of
revolution is without their tradition and their forefathers’ history, but
ignorance does not protect them against the intrusion of outside forces
and the imposition of the master code. The tears of compassion shed by
Langqin’s women at the accusation meeting are deliberately interpreted
by the revolutionaries from the county as his victims’ grief.
Yet the denunciation is immediately defied by the hero’s extraordinary
sexual prowess as the rally is interrupted by the 237 daughters of his own
flesh and blood:
Suddenly, from amid the thronging crowds, a multitude of tiny black heads
emerged. Girls, some only toddlers, others as old as seven or eight, poured
onto the stage, babbling excitedly. “Papa! Papa!” They rushed to his side,
enveloping him in a tight circle. The stage was in turmoil as little girls
darted to and fro like newly-hatched chicks….
Langqin was untied. He caressed the little faces that surrounded him,
finding it hard to believe that he had so many daughters. He sat on the
ground and tried to gather them all to his breast, laughing loudly and
happily. [147/191]
The author seems to suggest that primitive instincts are stubborn enough
to resist political changes. Thus, on the point of death, old Langqin
finds himself surrounded by his daughters again, one of whom informs
him that the people’s commune no longer exists. Tashi Dawa devotes a
long paragraph to depict the icy, unyielding landscape of the Tibetan
Plateau, setting the traumatic events of the time against the backdrop of
the “eternal, sacred, indomitable” tableland (148/191). “Mysterious and
unfathomable” (148/192) nature remains unchanged by people’s goals
and ambitions.
With the array of grand adjectives in describing natural wilderness, the
writer appears to believe that the miraculous power of nature can withstand the malevolent force of history. History proves transient before the
constant production of life, be it the 108 Cering Gyamos or Langqin’s 237
daughters. However, nature is not a means to escape from samsara, the
cycle of suffering. At the same time that they disclaim the omnipotence
of history, the omnipresent mountains condemn the villagers to abide
113
within permanent natural boundaries. People might eventually be free
from the oppressive nearness of the past, but they can never surmount
the barriers of nature. It turns out to be a complicity that both nature
and history are repetitive and irresistible in fixing man’s fate. The exslave Langqin is reduced once again to servitude under the new master
of the Chinese Communist Party. After the rally, he is sent to dig ditches,
which
were full of thick, turbid water and he had spent the entire last few years
trying to scoop it out with a broken brass basin. Thus had his declining
years been squandered in the futile repetition of a most mindless chore.
[138–139/179]
In effect, neither the colonizer nor nature offers real liberation to the
native Tibetans. Paradoxically, Tashi Dawa first seeks nature as a possible
way of transcending colonial history, and then erases the idealization of
it.
In “Tibet: The Mysterious Years” and “The Old Manor,” magical
realism is at once a literary form and a historiographic mode. Tashi
Dawa’s magic is not only informed by descriptions of shamanistic practices, but also by the Buddhist cyclical vision of time, which holds that
the universe has no beginning nor end but is always. Thus Tashi Dawa’s
historicism, with the three doubles of the kaleidoscopic Cering Gyamo
throughout different ages, echoes the ideas of reincarnation and karma,
timelessness, and even, by the narratives’ circular nature, the spinning
of prayer wheels and circumambulation of holy sites. Furthermore, in
“Tibet: The Mysterious Years,” the author also breaks the linear timeline by omitting those years of great significance in the officially licensed
history. As a result, the way in which his magical realist historiography
problematizes the colonialist master narrative of Tibet is twofold: first,
the circularity exposes the sameness of all colonizers; second, the hiatuses imply the unspeakableness of the colonized.
Ge Fei: Historical Nihilism and Cynicism
While Tashi Dawa deals with the British invasion only implicitly in his
imaginations of history, Ge Fei’s novella “Encounter” confronts the 1904
combat between Britain and Tibet in detail.115 The Chinese writer’s
115 Ge Fei’s “Xiangyu” (Encounter) is collected in his Tiaowang 眺望 (Overlook) ([Nanjing]: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1996), 48–89; and translated in Batt, Tales of Tibet, 77–104.
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venture into the fictional kingdom of Tibet is the result of his two-month
trip to Lhasa in the summer of 1992.116 Ge Fei leaves the lower Yangtze
Valley, the region of his childhood and setting of many of his works,
guiding us along the route of the Younghusband Expedition. The story in
nine sections unfolds with a calamitous prophecy made by a high lama of
the Potala Palace, but no one knows whence the catastrophe will come.
Many years later, in the summer of 1903, an armed force of English,
Sikh, and Gurkha soldiers sets out from India and sneaks into Tibet
along River Tista 蒂斯塔.117 In Khamba Dzong 甘宗壩, its commander,
Col. Francis Younghusband, ignores the simultaneous visit of the Chinese
official He Wenqin 何文欽 and the Scottish missionary John Newman; he
wants to negotiate alone with the Grand Abbot of Tashilhunpo 扎什倫布
Monastery. The two men talk for two hours, but their debate focuses on
whether or not the earth is round. The discursive dialogue drives them
astray from any useful propositions. From section three to the end of the
story, we follow in Younghusband’s footsteps from Guru 古魯 canyon to
Lhasa between 16th January and 7th September 1904, the year of the
wood-dragon in the Tibetan calendar.
Three hundred twenty one corpses of Tibetan soldiers are found after
the initial British attack in the Guru valley on 17th January. Stunned
by the news, the abbot decides to follow the missionary’s advice to kidnap Younghusband and thus sends forth sixteen hundred Khampa 康巴
tribesmen to accomplish the task. Ignorant of assault tactics, the tribesmen are defeated and the young Khampa leader escapes from the British
command post into a forest, where he has a chance encounter with He
Wenqin and kills him for no clear purpose. Meanwhile, having waited
ten days for the signal from the Khampa leader in vain, the abbot passes
away quietly. On the verge of death, this lama leaves a verbal testament
of a great secret: Jesus came to the Himalayas and studied Buddhism
in his youth. As for Younghusband, he is removed from command and
ordered to leave Tibet after signing a “ridiculous” (tixiao jiefei 啼笑皆非)
treaty, historically known as the Lhasa Convention, with the Tibetans
on 7th September without authorization from the British government.118
116 See the author’s preface to Tiaowang, 1. The traveling date is mistakenly given as
1986 in Batt’s introduction to his Tales of Tibet, 2.
117 Due to the inconsistency in romanizing Tibetan place names in Batt’s translation,
the ones I adopt throughout my discussion of “Encounter” are from Patrick French’s
“Route of the 1903–1904 British Invasion of Tibet” in his Younghusband: The Last Great
Imperial Adventurer (London: HarperCollins, 1994), map 3.
118 For a historical account of the signing of the Treaty of Lhasa on 7 September 1904,
115
The story ends with the colonel’s recollection of his conversation with
the abbot, who insisted, “The earth is not round, but triangular, shaped
like a shoulder of mutton.”
Reading “Encounter” as an account of the conflict between Western scientific rationalism and Tibetan religious mysticism, Batt considers
Younghusband’s departure from Tibet a fiasco of modern military technology at the hands of traditional Buddhist spirituality.119 Such crude
dyads of Western/Tibetan, modern/premodern, science/religion, technology/spirituality, and rational/irrational, however, oversimplify the
story if we reflect on its final statement, characters’ destinies, and overall
aura. The ostensibly fabricated quotation about the shape of the earth
from the abbot can be found in Patrick French’s biography of Younghusband:
There was a glimmer of hope on 21 August when the Abbot of Tashilhunpo Monastery and his retinue arrived for discussions. Tashilhunpo was
the seat of His Serenity the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second spiritual leader
after the Dalai Lama, and a figure of substantial political authority at certain points in the country’s history. Younghusband was hopeful that the
Panchen Lama’s court might put pressure on the Lhasa administration to
begin proper negotiations. But the Abbot, while affable and keen to engage
in metaphysical debate (he insisted that the earth was not only flat but triangular, shaped like a shoulder of mutton), could offer no practical suggestions beyond a British withdrawal followed by the prospect of talks.120
Ge Fei seems to use the geographic fallacy that the earth is triangular to
portray the historic reality of the tripodic Sino-Tibetan-British relations.
The relationship produces no winner among the three parties: the Chinese official, after being reprimanded by the Qing-dynasty Grand Minister Resident of Tibet for his impotence, is accidentally killed; the Tibetan
abbot fasts to death while his plan to capture Younghusband is aborted;
and the British commander is dismissed from his post by the Secretary of
State for India, St John Brodrick, who deems his performance in Tibet
uncultured. Furthermore, the Scottish missionary, unsuccessful in converting any Tibetan to Christianity, returns to Britain. These front-line
personages, playing more or less important roles in the game of history, are all losers. Their types are a mixture of the centric (Younghusband) and the marginalized (the abbot, the official, and the missionary),
see French, Younghusband, 246–248.
119 Batt, Tales of Tibet, 2–3.
120 French, Younghusband, 185.
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but none of them meet a happy end—their collective doom embodies a
nihilistic view of history in the fiction.
With the deaths of the official and the abbot and the departures of the
colonel and the missionary, all appear to be meaningless at the end. In
fact, from the beginning the story is immersed in an indolent atmosphere.
For Younghusband, it is an experience of total negation as summed up
in the last paragraph: “Since he had entered Tibet all his most fundamental, deep-seated notions had somehow incomprehensibly changed
—even his notion of time itself.”121 The wretched highland weather and
difficult mountain terrain delay his plan, cause sickness and death in
his camp, and ultimately upset his worldview. Moreover, his victory in
the battle of Guru wins him nothing but criticism on the home front.
Among voluminous documents accessible today, Ge Fei chooses to play
upon a squib in Punch: “We are sorry to learn that the recent sudden and
treacherous attack by the Thibetans [sic] on our men at Garu [Guru]
seriously injured the photographs that the officers were taking.”122 The
evocation of the voice of the past from this marginal material is on the
one hand, to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s words, “to lend a feeling of verifiability … to the fictional world” and, on the other, to evoke an air of
cynicism toward the historic event.123 And Younghusband’s final achievement, the Treaty of Lhasa, is described as an international joke, because
it demands an indemnity of 7.5 million rupees, or over five hundred thousand pounds sterling, which the poor Tibetan government cannot possibly afford.124
The denial of the British mastery, however, does not affirm a triumph
of the Tibetan culture. Although at certain points the abbot claims that
Christianity is descended from and therefore not superior to Buddhism,
the lifelike image of the Buddha on the leaf, which the missionary picked
from the sacred tree in Tashilhunpo Monastery and placed between the
pages of his Bible, has already vanished when Lhasa falls into Younghusband’s hands. The theme of the void applies to both modern developments and ancient civilizations. As symbolized in the Tibetan art of Man121
Ge Fei, “Xiangyu,” 89; Batt, Tales of Tibet, 104.
In the 20 April 1904 issue of Punch, or the London Charivari 126 (Jan.-June 1904): 276.
There are more amusing lampoons about the British expedition in this volume, pp. 23,
211, 269, 428. Note that the version in Batt’s Tales of Tibet, 85, is a translation of the Chinese
rendition Ge Fei cites in “Xiangyu,” 61, not the English original.
123 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 114.
124 According to French, Younghusband, 257, the indemnity was later reduced two thirds
under the renegotiation between London and Peking.
122
117
dala sand painting, all painstaking constructions in this world are bound
to be dismantled, hence impermanent. Ge Fei’s nihilism is absolute in
his antihistorical fiction, which eradicates all successes and failures in the
past.125 As a Han writer, he ironically undercuts any merits or demerits
of colonization, be it British or Chinese.
Alai: Identity and Idiocy
With Ge Fei supplementing the Anglo-Tibetan history at the start of the
twentieth century, another Tibetan writer, Alai, bridges over the chasm
of 1951 left by Tashi Dawa. Alai’s autobiographical novella “Bloodstains
of the Past” (“Jiunian de xueji” 舊年的血跡, 1987) is a family romance
from the Aba 阿壩 Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan province.126 The year 1951 marks the forced liberation of Tibet and the confiscation of the Lhoba 若巴 family’s property. The 13th headman of the
family mysteriously disappears, allegedly following the 13th Dalai Lama
to India or fleeing to Canada. The headman’s wife, soon joined by a Muslim tradesman and his woman, drowns herself in a river. The headman’s
son, Lhoba Yangzom 若巴雍宗, namely, the author-narrator’s father, volunteers to fight for the Chinese government on the Aba prairie until the
rebellion is quelled in 1958, but then his family background is discovered
and he returns to his native place, Serku 色爾古 Village in Markham 馬爾
康 County. There he is assigned to cut and carry five bundles of firewood
for every production team assembly, which he is forbidden to attend—
even though his family’s glorious past is a popular topic of conversation.
Under the “burden of history” (lishi de zhongya 歷史的重壓), he has gradually lost the dignified bearing that the narrator’s teacher, a young woman,
admires so much. He does not even have the courage for revenge when
125 In his Tales of Tibet, 260–261, Batt neatly classifies Ge Fei’s stories into surrealistic,
antihistorical, and traditional narratives, but these three groups, I think, are largely overlapping. E.g., “Encounter,” given its “traditional narrative line,” can also be categorized
as “antihistorical fiction.”
126 In Alai, Jiunian de xueji (1989; rpt. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2000), 62–133. The
Tibetan area in Sichuan straddles two of the three historic Tibetan provinces, Amdo (now
split into Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan) and Kham (largely incorporated into Qinghai,
Sichuan and Yunnan). Only western Kham and U-Tsang, less than half of pre-liberated
Tibet, are today referred to in Chinese as Xizang, literally Western Tibet, which is the
Tibet Autonomous Region created in 1965. The demarcation of Tibet has been the focus
of disputes between the Beijing Administration and Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Government
in Exile. I am indebted to Yangdon Dhondup for Tibetan spellings of the Sinicized names
in Alai’s fiction.
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his beloved dog is killed, calling the bloodstains “predestined” (mingding
de 命定的).
“Bloodstains of the Past” is not about emancipated serfs, the favorite
subject of earlier works on Tibet, but a fallen landlord family. The narrator laments for his great-grandfather and the latter’s brothers over their
failure in obtaining a chieftainship, and is proud of his great-grandfather’s poppy business that gains the family’s leading position in the community during the early Republican period. But he hates his father, who
bequeaths to him only a brand of a disadvantaged class: “I’m a bad person, because I’m a bad person’s son” (86). Because of his class status, he
is not allowed to go to high school or join the army. One gastro-symbol
that obsesses the I-narrator is the three huge copper caldrons installed by
his great-grandfather. Placed in the square of the village, they are used
to cook tripe and offal to feast the serfs after harvest. Before liberation,
only the headman has the power to instruct his servant Galo 嘎洛 to open
the lids. The timing of this ritual is a cruel way to manipulate people’s
desire. After liberation, the power falls into the hands of Galo, now the
production team leader. ‘I’ believes that the caldrons together with the
food should belong to ‘my’ family, and that it would have been ‘me’ who
issued the order, if only the village had not been liberated. At last the
narrator smashes the caldrons and runs away. He attempts to break the
cycle of karma, as symbolized by his forefathers’ caldrons, and embarks
on a quest for his own identity.
The identity crisis brought forth by the advent of the Chinese is also
found on the character Galo, who becomes the protagonist in a later
short story entitled “The Eternal Galo” (“Yongyuan de Galo” 永遠的嘎
洛).127 In this memoir we learn that Galo took part in the Long March
and lost the sight in his left eye as well as part of his memory as a result
of an accidental explosion in 1936. Thanks to the mercy of the narrator’s
grandfather, he gains land plus a hardworking wife from the headman
when he wanders into the rural village of Serku, where he becomes the
wealthiest man circa 1950. Ironically, he is categorized as a ‘poor peasant’
after liberation. Galo, meaning ‘blind person’ in the Tibetan language,
is not his real name. For the sake of their own careers, his son and daughter make up all kinds of heroic stories for his disabilities. Galo’s amnesia
and his children’s lies invalidate the various versions in this biographical
fiction. His fragmentary memory prevents him from resuming the revo-
127
In Alai, Jiunian de xueji, 202–227.
119
lutionary image of a peasant soldier. Although he becomes a party member and is promoted to production team leader, he cannot prove that he
was a Red Army veteran. The local elementary school tries to help him
recollect some details of his past by reading to him various names found
in newspapers and magazines, but they are exclusively names of great
celebrities. None of the obscure commanders under whom he fought
are reported. Since they are not textualized, they are forgettable, hence
nonexistent in history. Upon his death in 1986 Galo is filed as “anonym”
on the front page of his dossier in the Bureau of Civil Affairs.
The above two stories by Alai demonstrate an intertextual referentiality, opening up a dialogue between a declined noble family and its
ex-servant. Antagonistic and yet sympathetic, this dialogue vocalizes the
suppressed consciousness of those who have been confused about their
identities after the liberation. The liberation of 1951 does not actually
set any Tibetan free: for Lhoba Yangzom and his son, liberation means
not merely an oppression of the landlord class they were born into, but
a deprivation of their dignity and identity as well; for Lhoba Yangzom’s
foe and friend, Galo, liberation is confinement—he is confined to “eternal” blindness (lost sight) and blankness (lost memory). Liberated, they
all lose their selves under foreign control. That is why the breaker of caldrons, having nothing to his name, starts on a journey for an identity of
his own. Born in 1959 and educated in Chinese, Alai represents his postliberation generation in pursuit of a selfhood between Chineseness and
Tibetanness.
Disoriented in the identity crisis between Chineseness and Tibetanness, the self of such a Chinese Tibetan as the writer Alai is so confused
that he can only present fictionally and fictitiously his identity in idiocy.
Inevitable in Tibetology is the inquiry of minority identity, an inquiry in
both collective and individual senses of the word ‘identity’: the quality of
a person recognizable as the ‘same’—from Late Latin identitâs—as other
members of a group and, at the same time, the ‘sameness’ of an individual always being him/herself rather than someone else. Thus, identity
refers paradoxically to both collective characteristics and distinct individuality. ‘Idiocy’ is a derivative of Greek ídios, meaning ‘personal, private’. With the etymological reference of Greek idiôtês ‘private individual’
extended to a layman with no specialized knowledge (hence the Middle
English derogatory sense of ‘idiot’ as an ‘ignorant person’), idiocy is commonly defined today as a psychological state of being unable to learn language or defend against dangers. It takes a political turn, however, when
it comes to the colonial condition: being incapable in heritage of one’s
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native dialect and/or in acquisition of the ‘national’ language, and being
incompetent to guard against foreign invasion. Alai is a poet of idiocy in
search of identity.
A native of Four Chieftains (Situ 四土), officially known as Markham
County today, Alai finished in 1997 his maiden novel Red Poppies (Chen’ai
luoding 塵埃落定, literally ‘the dust settles’), which relates the end of the
age of chieftains by focusing on the last Maichi 麥其 Chieftain and his
dramatic rivalry with the other three chieftains on the Tadu 大渡 River,
namely, Wangpo 汪波, Lha Shopa 拉雪巴, and Rongong 茸貢.128 Ten
years in quest of a lost, or, more precisely, an imagined, identity of a
‘Tibetan’ have led the author further into the backwoods of local history. Red Poppies, a creative celebration of the chieftains’ last carnival in
the Republican period, tells the story of the sudden flourish and collapse
of the Maichi Chieftain from the viewpoint of his younger son, who is
believed to be retarded by those around him. As the fool’s fictive autobiography develops, however, we find the first-person protagonist-narrator
a round character growing from a mere moron to a wise fool, who magically manages to save his people from starvation, expand his family’s turf,
and remodel a border fortress into an open market, bringing peace to the
marginal region. The first capitalist hero—in fact, the wealthiest person
—in the history of chieftains, he redefines the word ‘fool’ as a synonym
of good fortune. His triumphant return from the frontier turns out to be
a Rabelaisian fool’s festival:
… a pair of strong men lifted me onto their shoulders, and suddenly I was
riding above hundreds of bobbing heads amid deafening cheers. I towered
over the crowd, drifting on an ocean of human heads and tossed by raging
waves of human voices.129
But being a fool, he fails to seize his day by taking power. After the 1951
liberation of Tibet, he is murdered by his father’s feudist.
128 The four chieftains in history were Zhuokeji 卓克基, Suomo 梭磨, Dangba 黨壩,
and Songgang 松崗, with the first being the most influential on the eve of liberation.
See Sichuan sheng Aba Zangzu Qiangzu zizhizhou difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui 四
川省阿壩藏族羌族自治州地方志編纂委員會, eds., Aba zhou zhi 阿壩州志 (Gazetteer of the
Aba prefecture), 3 vols. ([Chengdu]: Minzu chubanshe, 1994), 1: 762–763, for an official
account of the “peaceful liberation” of Situ in 1951.
129 Alai, Chen’ai luoding (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1998), 276; Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, trans., Red Poppies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 294.
Hereafter page numbers in the text refer to this Chinese edition and then the English
rendition.
121
The theme of the historical novel may be explored by a pair of classic questions of modern identity frequently enunciated from the middle through the end of the work: “Where am I?” and “Who am I?”
(192/204–205 passim). They are raised in the morning—the moment
of transitioning from drowsiness to soberness, from subconsciousness to
consciousness, from dream to reality—when ‘I’ wakes up and feels lost.
Since “Where am I?” is posed prior to “Who am I?” my identity is predetermined by my position. Often when these core questions are cast, the
protagonist is put in a different place as the plot opens out: the first time
is when he is sent by his father to the northern border of Maichi territory
to compete with his brother in the south for heirship; the second time is
when he is kidnapped and taken to the female chieftain Rongong’s camp
during the food bargaining on the border; then, he awakes again at home
after missing the golden opportunity to direct people’s craze to usurp the
Maichi chieftainship; lastly, however, after he has returned to the border, these two everlasting questions no longer bother him, as he finally
knows where and who he is before being assassinated. As an ethnically
and culturally hybrid writer, Alai seems to suggest that one can only find
his position and identity in repeated exiles, that a second exile is actually
a comfortable homecoming, and that in order to define and shape his
Tibetanness against the background of Han society, he will have to be
elsewhere, away from home, only where is he considered a true Tibetan.
The powerful and wealthy Maichi Chieftain gains his legitimacy not
from the religious center of Lhasa to the west, but from his political ties
to China to the east. This is reflected in the beginning, when Maichi
files a complaint against his neighbor, Chieftain Wangpo, he goes to the
military government of the Republic of China with an official seal conferred by the former Qing emperor and a map. It is not the official title
inscribed on the seal, but the geographic location defined on the map
that determines the political inclination of the marginal subordinate—a
subordiNation to both the political authorities of Beijing and the religious
orthodoxy in Lhasa, the latter of which considers its Tibetan compatriots
in this limbo ignorant and impure as they follow different sects of Buddhism blended with Bon 本. Though Wangpo also has a seal from Beijing, he always goes on pilgrimages to Lhasa as a result of his geographic
ignorance in believing that his chiefdom is bigger than China. In any
case, “even though they [the chieftains] considered themselves kings, they
still had to kneel before those in power in Beijing and Lhasa” (97/102).
Despite the proverb “the Han emperor rules beneath the morning sun,
the Dalai Lama governs beneath the afternoon sun,” the black-turbaned
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Tibetans’ proximity to the immense Chinese territory has influenced the
Maichi for their geopolitical position:
We were located slightly to the east under the noonday sun, a very significant location. It determined that we would have more contact with the
Han emperor to the east than with our religious leader, the Dalai Lama.
Geographical factors had decided our political alliance. [18/20–21]
Geographical factors indeed contribute to the black-turbaned Tibetans’
ambivalent positioning and ambiguous identity. The Aba Tibetan and
Qiang 羌 Autonomous Prefecture, one of the two Tibetan autonomous
prefectures in Sichuan province reestablished during the 1980s on the
basis of the previous Sichuan Tibetan Autonomous Region and Aba
Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, is a polyethnic gray area between the
eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau and the hinterland of China, a heterogeneous locus of the unified nation. It is in this ‘in-between space’
in the midst of mountain folds, as Alai admits in his travel notes, that his
stories unfold.130 The special region, known as Jiarong 嘉絨, “was considered an uncivilized, barbarous wilderness, be it in the view of the westward expanding Tang dynasty, or from the perspective of the eastward
extending Tibetans.”131 Following in the footsteps of the Qiang (4th cen.
B.C.) and the Tibetans (8th cen.), the Han and the Hui began to settle
in this land on a large scale during the tenth and fourteenth centuries,
respectively. Different religious forces, including various sects of Tibetan
Buddhism, Bon shamanism, Daoism, Islam, Christianity and Catholicism, contend with each other to evangelize the polyethnic inhabitants.
Serving as a juncture of the three provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai, Aba derives its name from the Chinese (mis-)transliteration of Awa
阿瓦, which in turn is short for Aliwa 阿里哇, meaning ‘migrants from
Ali’, an area in the western most Tibetan region.132 Thus, with its diasporic history, the hybrid place and its nomenclature are already inscribed
with an alien and heterodox Tibetan identity.
Geologically, the Aba area, lying amidst the Eurasian plate, the IndoAustralian plate, and the Pacific plate, between the Yangtze platform and
the Tibetan fold, is frequently under the influence of two fault zones.133
130 Alai, Dadi de jieti 大地的階梯 (Terraces of the earth) (Kunming: Yunnan renmin
131 Ibid., 29. The Jiarong region includes the Aba area.
132 See Yan Songbo 燕松柏 and Que Dan 雀丹, Aba diqu zongjiao shiyao 阿壩地區宗教史
要 (A brief religious history of the Aba district) ([Chengdu]: Chengdu ditu chubanshe,
1993), 3; also Alai, Dadi de jieti, 35.
133 Yan and Que, Aba diqu zongjiao shiyao, 1; “Aba Zangzu zizhizhou gaikuang” bianxiezu
123
There a total of twelve tremors over 5.0 on the Richter scale were recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, with the first epicenter right in Markham,
which is identified by geologists as one of the five major seismic areas
in the region.134 What does the complex tectonics of earth’s history tell
us about the problematics of ethnic identity? If the two fracture zones
can be interpreted as the Sino-Tibetan tensional forces that have been
tugging the Aba Tibetans, then there is no doubt that Alai deftly employs
the violent shakings of the earth’s crust caused by tectonic collisions as a
metaphor of political subduction.
When asked about the implications of the two earthquakes in the epic,
Chinese critic Bai Ye 白燁 sees the second seism, starting with the maniacal movements of the adulterers and adulteresses, as a condemnation
of morbid lust.135 Rather than inclining to moral judgments, I perceive
the tremors as presages of the political upheaval. The scene immediately
before the first quake, when Chieftain Maichi attempts to find a spot in
the field to make love to his third wife, can be seen as a colonial allegory
of territorial violability:
Let me remind you that this impatient man was the master of boundless
lands, yet he could not find a place to lie with his beloved woman. The
empty spaces were all taken up by animals of unknown origin. [64/68]
One wonders what on earth these “animals of unknown origin” are in
the colonial history on the fringe of the Tibetan Plateau. They abruptly
appear when the mysterious fragrant, flaming flowers from China form
a spectacular carpet across the Maichi manors. These foreign species
suddenly occupy the Tibetan territory. Although its gigantic stone structure survives the temblors, the chieftain’s seemingly unshakeable estate
is razed to the ground by the PLA’s artillery fire in the end. As the dust
settles, these eastern Tibetans are no longer under the rule of their kings,
but are identified as the subjects of an alien authority.
In effect, as the story develops, Alai demonstrates a subtle shift of influence on the Tibetan periphery from the west to the east by first exhibiting
an array of Indian imports (balms, incense, snuff, tiger skin capes, gem-
《阿壩藏族自治州概況》編寫組, comps., Aba Zangzu zizhizhou gaikuang (A brief survey of the
Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture) (Chengdu: Sichuan minzu chubanshe, 1985), 4.
134 Sichuan sheng, Aba zhou zhi, 1: 314, 316–317.
135 Bai Ye, “Bailuyuan, Chen’ai luoding ji qita—Dangqian xiaoshuo chuangzuo dawenlu”
《白鹿原》
《塵埃落定》及其他—當前小說創作答問錄 (White Deer Plain, Red Poppies and oth、
ers: Recent fictional writings Q & A), Zhong shan, 1999, no. 1: 201.
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studded daggers, fruits, flowers, drugs) but then gradually changing to
an enumeration of Chinese products (poppy seeds, firearms, wax, candy,
tea, china, silk, sedan chairs). Among these exotics, especially noteworthy are the last Indian item and the first Chinese thing found in the fiction, namely, the pink pills that cure syphilis and the red poppies that
bring as much wealth as dearth. From the place which the Tibetans
refer to as Gyaghar 迦格 (Gyakar), or Land of White Robes, i.e., India,
comes the medicine as remedial as Buddhism; from Gyanak 迦那, Land
of Black Robes—China, comes the narcotic as addictive as power. The
opium poppies transplanted by the Chinese emissary stupefy the chieftains, making them believe that they have control over their lands. Thus,
the poppy plant, with its giant blossoms rapidly reddening the gray area
between the white and black lands, is not only a hallucinogen and an
aphrodisiac,136 but also a biological metaphor and color code of a new
form of Chinese colonization. Introduced into the Four Chieftains area
around 1938,137 poppy planting was finally banned with the abolishment
of chieftaincy and the advent of communism, for the Red Chinese now
prescribe their red utopia as a more effective opiate than red poppies.
Furthermore, the territorial aggrandizement of the colored Chinese
is also metaphorically associated with the sexually transmitted disease
that follows the spread of poppies: “Before falling asleep, I kept thinking
about syphilis and about ‘them’. I’d take a stroll on the street as soon
as I got up the next morning to see if I could spot the colored Han”
(369/393). Instead, he runs into a family feudist, whose brother enlists
as a Red Tibetan in order to avenge their father’s death from injustice
upon the Maichi. At the end, ‘I’ is killed not by ‘them’, the Red Han
Chinese, but by one of ‘us’, his Red Tibetan compatriots—that is, not by
the colonizer other, but by the colonized self. So, though I am here, here
has now become a domain of there, as we have become a part of them,
and I, a stranger within myself. This leads our attention to the loaded
question of colonial identity.
To answer the question “Who am I?” is to identify ‘I’, to define ‘I’;
and to define the self is to describe it not as a subject, but an object, that
is, to objectify it or differentiate it as the other. This does not seem to be
136 Singapore historian Zheng Yangwen, in her The Social Life of Opium in China (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10–24, has studied that opium was initially
consumed at the Chinese court as an aphrodisiac during the middle period of the Ming
dynasty.
137 Sichuan sheng, Aba zhou zhi, 1: 108.
125
a problem in the beginning when, in the first quarter of the novel, ‘I’ is
a member of an ethnic group which is casually distinguished from the
Chinese by the foreign missionary Charles:
If, like the Chinese, you are worried about the intentions of Westerners, then
wouldn’t Wangpo Yeshi’s 翁波意西 religion be a good one for you? Isn’t
his derived from the teachings of your religious leader, the Dalai Lama?
[94/99; my emphasis]
By comparing the Tibetans with the Chinese, the Westerner actually
makes a statement contradictory to the imperialistic claim that the Tibetans and their territories are within the boundaries of, and therefore
belong to, China. Yet it soon becomes an issue when the Maichi family
is accused by other chieftains as “traitors to the Tibetan people,” even
though the accusers themselves have also been granted their fiefdoms
by the Chinese emperors (104/113). The concept of ‘traitors’ (pantu 叛
徒), which can be equally easily, if not more effectively, used by the Chinese government to condemn the Tibetan separatists, reveals the acute
anxiety arising not only from the conflicts of interests between the two
peoples, but also from the struggle for power within an ethnic group.
Interestingly, it challenges the idea and role of a fixed identity, suggesting a split identity under the double pressure of expectations from both
sides, for traitors are traders of dual identity.
Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has felicitously argued that the singular identity is unsettled by hybridity, which he defines spatially as the
margin where continuous contacts and conflicts of cultural differences
would release an identity from its stable construction based on oppositional categories such as race and class, giving rise to an “in-between
identity.”138 Conceived when his father was drunk, the idiot I-narrator is
the child of a chieftain and his second wife, a Han prostitute who becomes
a Tibetan aristocrat through interracial marriage. Hybridity is found in
his mixed blood as well as in his noble and low origins. Trapped between
Tibetanness and Chineseness, nobility and lowliness, his ethnic and class
status—two of the key components that constitute an identity—are problematic, though the class concern is not as much emphasized as the ethnic
question in the story. Identity hybrids are also found in his parade, including two maidservants, an adulterine slave, an executioner-photographer,
a priest-turned-historian, and a disloyal wife of noble birth. Together,
138 Homi K. Bhabha, introduction to his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), 18.
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these complex characters represent a highly hybrid humanity that casts
in a carnivalesque light the complexities of collective identity-formation.
Literary critic Yue Gang 樂剛 further interprets the nitwit-narrator
as an alter ego of the author himself by reading into Alai’s multiple
hybrid biography and citing his words about his aspirations for “raw and
uncultured folk wisdom”:
Above all, the ‘hybrid’ would be the easiest way to characterize an obvious
point: the protagonist and I-narrator of the novel is the son of a Tibetan
father and a Chinese mother. In fact, Alai himself is ‘hybrid’ twice over, of
Tibetan and Hui parents, raised in a Tibetan village but formally schooled
as a teacher of Chinese and married to a Han teacher of English. His cultural hybridity engenders something different from, if not entirely beyond,
the concept of ethnic identity developed in our academic discourse. His is
a position of an epistemological order that blends a deep-seated folk wisdom with a distanced position of prophecy and culminates in an aesthetic
of historical melancholia.139
Such “an aesthetic of historical melancholia,” as I understand it in the
fool’s epic, originates from the narrator-writer’s nostalgia for the Tibetan
empire’s early colonization.
Pained enough in his identity questions/quest as he suffers from amnesia in the detritus of history, the protagonist-narrator only barely remembers the glorious past of the independent Tibetan kingdom during the
seventh and eighth centuries, when his nomad ancestors settled in northwest Sichuan.140 The disintegration of the Tibetan empire left in the vast
Jiarong region as many as eighteen chieftains registered under the Ming
and Qing sovereignties. Ethnologists tend to adopt among diverse theories the explanation that Jiarong is an abbreviation of the Tibetan place
name Jiamu chawarong 嘉木察瓦絨, which means “the agricultural area
139 Gang Yue, review of Red Poppies (April 2005), Modern Chinese Literature and
Culture Resource Center (http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/yue.htm), listed under
“Book Reviews.” Alai’s words of aspirations are found in Ran Yunfei 冉雲飛 and Alai,
“Tongwang keneng zhilu: Yu Zangzu zuojia Alai tanhua lu” 通往可能之路：與西藏作家
阿來談話錄 (A path to possibilities: A dialogue with Tibetan author Alai), Xinan minzu
xueyuan xuebao: Zhexue shehui kexue ban 西南民族學院學報•哲學社會科學版 (Journal of Southwest Institute for Ethnic Groups: Philosophy and social sciences) 20.5 (Sept. 1999): 9; and
in the translators’ note to Red Poppies.
140 Remember how Bhabha defines remembering in “Interrogating Identity: Frantz
Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative” (1990), in his The Location of Culture, 63:
Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful
re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the
trauma of the present.
127
(chawarong) under the mountains of local gods (jiamu),” whereas the epicist
prefers the interpretation of jia as Tibetan reference to the Han people,
who lived nearby the agricultural valley (rong).141 Without a unanimous
conclusion, while the former view is rather religious, the latter points
directly to the other, with whom the nomadic settlers encountered. The
Jiarong Tibetans were first localized by the Sichuan natives and then
Sinified to become farmers in the many centuries of colonization. Being
the colonizers yesterday, they were counter-colonized then and are recolonized today. Colonization is therefore never a unidirectional effect,
nor does it occur only once.
Such processes of colonization are epitomized in the epic by the lamaturned-historian Wangpo Yeshi, whose tongue is cut twice as punishment
for his frank criticisms of Chieftain Maichi. Historically, the Jiarong
Tibetans also became mute twice. First, being counter-colonized, they
suffer from aphasia of their distinct dialect:
Later, when the Tibetan kingdom fell, nearly all the aristocrats who had
come here had forgotten that Tibet was our homeland. And we gradually
forgot our mother tongue. We spoke the language of the conquered natives.
Of course, there were still signs of our own language, but they were barely
perceptible. [96/101]
Then, being re-colonized, they adopted, but did not acquire, Chinese as
their metropolitan language: to show off the support of the Manchu and
Republican rulers, an imperial plaque with a Qing emperor’s Chinese
inscription, “INSTRUCT AND ASSIMILATE BARBARIANS” (daohua
qun fan 導化群番), and a poem claiming the chieftains’ territories by the
Nationalist government’s special emissary are proudly displayed in the
guestroom of Chieftain Maichi who, ironically, “knew nothing about
poems, let alone one written in a tongue he didn’t understand” (38/42).
The Maichi idiot is not interested in learning Chinese, either, when his
Han mother offers to teach him. For the Tibetan chieftain, what matters
are not the meanings of the Chinese characters, but the authority and
superiority that the foreign language as a master code represents. For the
Tibetan writer, it is precisely the foreign national language that facilitates
his narration of the native colonial history, when the native language is
forever forgotten.
By foreignizing the ‘national’ language from the native perspective,
the unified notion of ‘nation’ is problematized in the meta-narrative:
141
Yan and Que, Aba diqu zongjiao shiyao, 7–9; Alai, Dadi de jieti, 13–14.
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Please note that Father used the word nation. That doesn’t mean that
he really believed he ruled an independent nation. It’s all a matter of
language. The word thusi 土司, or chieftain, is a foreign import. In our
language, the closest equivalent to chieftain is gyalpo 嘉爾波, the term for
‘king’ in ancient times. Chieftain Maichi had used the word nation instead
of other terms, such as territory. [37/41]142
The official language is thereby estranged as senseless, if not entirely
empty, signs. Questions about a total national identity and ideology for
a strong, unified country are beyond the concern and knowledge of the
local kings:
… even the smartest person in this land would appear to be a moron as
far as such issues were concerned, because not a single chieftain had ever
really wanted to know what nation and nationality were. [351/374]
In idiotism, the dominant discourse of nation and nationality is but regarded as grand nonsense, because the moron could not have the least
idea of these modern notions.
Nor does ‘liberation’ appear in its legitimate sense in the fiction. While
the official chronicle Gazetteer of the Aba Prefecture (Aba zhou zhi 阿壩州志)
highlights the PLA’s distributions of relief grain during the liberation,143
Alai satirically suggests that this has already been done by the chieftain’s
idiot son before the advent of the communists. Moreover, the Maichi
moron has announced his insane plan to set his slaves free on the eve of
liberation:
The Liberation Army, which was fighting for the rights of the poor, had not
yet arrived, and the slaves were acting as if they’d already been liberated….
[T]he steward said, “If this is how things are going to be, the Communists
won’t have anything to do when they get here.” [389/416]144
So, when the Communists come to ‘liberate’ the area, they are in a rather
embarrassing situation:
142 I have altered the English translation of guojia 國家 from “country” to “nation” for
the sake of consistency with the quote that follows and its further implication in the
political sense of a particular people and their territory that were formerly independent
but are currently colonized. While gyalpo was maintained until fairly late, there is also the
ancient Tibetan term btsanpo ‘emperor’.
143 Sichuan sheng, Aba zhou zhi, 1: 36.
144 Here I resume from the Chinese original in the novel the term “Liberation Army”
(Jiefangjun 解放軍), a short form of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which
is adopted since 1945. The English translation “Red Army” (Hongjun 紅軍), short for the
Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (Zhongguo gongnong hongjun 中國工農紅
軍), is an earlier designation used only in 1927–1937.
129
That upset the soldiers, for wherever they went, they had been greeted by
loud cheers. They were the army of the poor, who made up the majority of
the world’s population. The poor people cheered because they had finally
gotten an army of their own. But not here, where the slaves opened wide
their foolish mouths to cry for their masters. [402/428]
It is such ‘foolishness’ or, in a more literal sense of the Chinese original, yu
bu ke ji 愚不可及 ‘stupidity in the extreme’, that disavows the mammoth
myth of the colonial liberation. Stupidity in the extreme is not merely a
gesture of political sublation, but also a vision of alternative history that
seeks to rewrite the region in the imagination with a possible past.
In fact, such dumb idiocy can be comprehended in the Daoist idiom
of ‘great wisdom appearing slow-witted’ (da zhi ruo yu 大智若愚). It is not
a simple synthesis of sagacity and stupidity, but the oxymoron of ‘a wise
fool’ in an upside-down world, where “an idiot was thinking for everyone
else” (244/261). Portrayed as prophetic and passionate, the imbecile hero
of Sichuan Tibet is intended to embody a primitive wisdom that is dead
and gone. The Tibetan slow-witted wisdom is found in the practice of
tolerance: first, the mentally challenged Maichi discovers the magic that
he feels no pain if someone hits him with hatred; later, when his family’s
implacable enemy attempts his life, he thinks not of killing them; lastly,
when he is murdered, he calls the avenger his friend. In the reality of Aba,
it is such spirit of lenience that yields a syncretism, which allows differing
religions or sects to coexist in one temple.145 This position of idiocy resists
religious fundamentalism and destabilizes pure Tibetanness. To those
who criticize and/or ridicule him for not being a real Tibetan, Alai laughs
like an idiot.
Hence, idiocy is a way of denying that one is identical or identifiable
with any single group, be it the Chinese or the Tibetans, for the dunce
is doomed to be simultaneously neither Tibetan nor Chinese. Indeed, by
virtue of its inabilities and ignorance, idiocy opens up a space for a mixed
—instead of a fixed—identity and allows conflicting characteristics to fill
in the identity vacuum. Yet it persistently resists the master narrative as,
to borrow Bhabha’s words again, “colonial nonsense.”146 The idiocy of
identity is not an answer to “Who am I?” but a strategy to interrogate
the institutional nationality imposed by the great Nation (like the bloody
145 For a study of syncretism and syncretic temples in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang
Autonomous Prefecture, see Yan and Que, Aba diqu zongjiao shiyao, 107–112, 430–435.
146 Bhabha, “Articulating the Archaic: Cultural Difference and Colonial Nonsense”
(1990), in his The Location of Culture, 123–138.
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purple garment of a wronged slave’s spirit that mysteriously wraps the
protagonist’s body, making his movements involuntary) and to recognize
and repudiate at the same time the colonial otherness within oneself
for the post-liberation generation, a generation bereft of a proper, ideal
identity.
It is from the interstices of the geological and cultural planes between
the so-called Xizang and China’s hinterland that a historic hybrid identity emerges. The idiotic identity that Alai attempts to articulate is an
undecidable and yet undeniable self-positioning. It is not a cross-cultural
identity found in any homologous sense, but an in-between nonidentity
existing as a heterologous presence. Wild folly prevents such identity from
being ideologically identified and defined. And such is an ‘I’-idiot who,
in spite of his occasional clear-headedness, never informs us of his name
in his narrative game, demanding our sensibility to address him by his
multiple positions. Because the question “Who am I?” would be unanswerable without also asking: “Where am I?”
Thus, the three Tibetan taletellers included in this chapter present
alternative modes of historical writing against the teleological historiography advocated by Communist propaganda. To transcend the dualism
of progress vs. tradition, Tashi Dawa adopts a cyclical historiography
and Ge Fei, a cynical tone. I have argued that there are indeed political messages hidden in Tashi Dawa’s lacunose chronicles, which require
us to read closely and carefully in order to discover the feminine resistance indicated by the images of Cering Gyamo, Lhamo Quzhen and
Langqin’s 237 daughters against the masculine aggressions committed by
the British Expeditionary Forces and the PLA. Moreover, Tashi Dawa
renders Mother Nature the ultimate limit to human action, deeming
all human efforts futile in the last analysis. This Buddhist perspective
is pushed further by Ge Fei into a nihilism, with which he turns history
into ridicule. Consequently, the seriousness of writing history is dispelled
in his playfulness. In contrast, what concerns Alai is the identity vacuum
created by history. History, for the ‘liberated’, is a process of losing, until
one’s self is emptied out. By providing historiographic alternatives for
China, these fictions of Tibet repudiate the official historiography that
vindicates Chinese colonialism under the pretext of ‘development’.
Our mythic and magic route around historic China starts from the Pacific
Coast and extends to the Gobi Desert, crossing the Great Northwest
and ending on the Tibetan Plateau. We have taken a textual tour under
the guidance of Wang Anyi, Zhang Chengzhi, and Ge Fei, in whose
131
œuvres primary historical sources are translated through imagination
into a melancholy, holy, or playful landscape. No matter which exotic
scene we encounter, it always elicits the foreignness from within ourselves, transgressing, if not blurring, the boundary between the self and
the other. At this point, Tzvetan Todorov’s four phases of “knowledge
of others,” which include historic and ethnic knowledge, are useful to
our critique of ethno-historiography.147 The first phase, “assimilating the
other to oneself,” coincides with Sinicization, an ethnocentric unity opposed by our minority writers. The second phase, from “effacing the self
for the other’s benefit” to “mak[ing] others speak,” may well describe
Zhang Chengzhi’s and Tashi Dawa’s fusion with their respective peoples. As the authors devoted themselves to religion and tradition, they
become more Muslim and Tibetan than the Muslims and Tibetans with
their essential and exotic representations. In the third phase, “a dialogue
between myself and them” is established, as in the case of Wang Anyi’s
family myths. This duality of self and other is gradually undone during
the fourth phase:
I no longer desire, nor am I able, to identify with the other; nor can I,
however, identify with myself. The process can be described in these terms:
knowledge of others depends on my own identity. But this knowledge of
the other in turn determines my knowledge of myself. Since knowledge of
oneself transforms the identity of this self, the entire process begins again:
new knowledge of the other, new knowledge of the self, and so on to infinity.
The ideal of this endless movement is to open up a space of mutual
understanding amid ethnic enmities. The nonidentity of the idiot in
Alai’s Red Poppies, the act of leaving on the parts of the I-narrator in Alai’s
“Bloodstains of the Past” and the characters in Ge Fei’s “Encounter”
seem to suggest such a motion of ever-changing identity.
Along with this hermeneutic process of knowing the self and others,
we have also journeyed through transformations between history and fiction. The definitions of different genres are problematized by the interlocutions of historical ‘facts’ and fictional fantasies. Wang Anyi translates
her parents’ biographies into family myths, whereas Zhang Chengzhi
blends Arabic hagiographies and imperial records in a historical novel.
Historical documents are first quoted to authenticate literary creations
and then are questioned by them. Historical fiction must base itself on
certain past records, but then it strives to go beyond their boundaries
147 Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History, trans. Alyson Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 14–15.
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into the realms of imagination. Fictional writings about the past of the
peripheral provide not only references to the reality of present politics,
but also entrances to the never-never land, be it Wang’s “spiritual world,”
Zhang’s pure land of the soul, or the Tibetan taletellers’ magical land of
snows.
chapter three
FROM THE COUNTRY TO THE CITY:
NOSTALGIA FOR THE HOMETOWN
Nostalgic representation here is indeed
the best substitute for historical consciousness.
– Dai Jinhua 戴錦華, “Imagined Nostalgia”1
Readers may have noticed that most of the fiction discussed in the previous chapters is set in rural regions. In fact, until the urban culture was
revived in the late 1980s as a result of Deng’s economic reforms, literature in mainland China had been predominated by rural writings for
half a century.2 Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵 has observed that after 1937 “the
countryside [became] the ultimate backdrop of reality,” and that “the
city did not dominate the literary imagination in the same way that it did
in Western modernism.”3 For all its historic significance in Mao’s peasant
revolts and political movements, the countryside found favor with writers
under the red flag. In the Mao period rural representation was hoisted
to be the orthodox mode of revolutionary writing. This was followed by
root-seeking experiments on the mainland in the 1980s as discussed in
the first chapter. It was not until 1988, when Wang Shuo’s hooligan fiction set the fashion, that urban discourse recovered its territory lost for
half a century in China.4
1
Dai Jinhua, “Imagined Nostalgia,” trans. Judy T.H. Chen, boundary 2 24.3 (Fall 1997):
148.
2 There are of course a few exceptions produced in the Mao era before the Cultural
Revolution, for example, Zhou Erfu’s 周而復 novel Shanghai de zaochen 上海的早晨 (Morning in Shanghai) (1958–1962) and Ouyang Shan’s 歐陽山 twin volumes Sanjiaxiang 三家巷
(Three Families Lane) (1959) and Kudou 苦鬥 (Bitter struggle) (1962).
3 Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Modern Chinese Fiction: An Interpretive Overview,” in International Cultural Society of Korea, Critical Issues in East Asian Literature: Report on an International Conference on East Asian Literature, 13–20 June, 1983 (Seoul: International Cultural
Society of Korea, 1983), 269, 261.
4 In 1988, four of Wang Shuo’s popular novels and novellas on the subject of contemporary city life are reproduced as films. See Xiaobing Tang, “In Search of the Real
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chapter three
In the symbolic order of modern literature, a contrast between city
and country, as historian Raymond Williams characterizes it, is that “of
the present and actual with the past or the lost.”5 Thus, the agricultural
countryside, rather than the industrial and commercial city, is normally
the locus of nostalgia. In effect, the word xiang 鄉, meaning ‘rural area’ or
‘home village’, in two of the Chinese translations of ‘nostalgia’, xiangchou
鄉愁 or huaixiang 懷鄉, suggests a penchant for rurality or a countryside
complex—be it in the sense of Shen Congwen’s lyricism, Lu Xun’s irony,
or post-Mao root search. Yet nostalgia for rural life is impossible without
the subjective experience of urban culture. Nan Fan infers that homesickness is merely “a literary fantasy” (wenxue menghuan 文學夢幻) amid
the presence of the urban space.6 According to Jean Starobinski’s study,
the idea of nostalgia emerges in Europe “at the time of the rise of the
great cities when greatly improved means of transportation made movements of the population much easier.”7 Not only do the developed means
of transportation facilitate people’s travel away from home and arouse
homesickness, but the mobility of urban life also fixes the rural hometown as a stable concept. Zhang Ning 張寧 has stated that the hometown
is often objectified by a “stranger” (yixiangren 異鄉人) as a complex affective image, a cultural memory, or a Freudian desire of returning to the
matrix.8 Thus, one must first and foremost identify oneself as an alien,
who has escaped or been exiled to the urban distant land, so as to long
for a ‘return’ to the rural hometown.
Nostalgia manifests itself in the sensation of pain as denoted in its
Greek roots, nostos, meaning ‘to return home’, and algos, ‘pain’, translated
into a kind of psychological disorder in the twentieth century.9 Whether it
is a personal feeling or a popular mood, nostalgia is not a simple duplica-
City: Cinematic Representations of Beijing and the Politics of Vision,” in his Chinese Modern, 247.
5 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973), 235.
6 Nan Fan, “Wenxue: Chengshi yu xiangcun” 文學：城市與鄉村 (Literature: The city
and the country), Shanghai wenlun 上海文論 (Shanghai literary theory), 1990, no. 4: 32.
7 Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966): 101–102.
8 Zhang Ning, “Xungen yi zu yu yuanxiang zhuti de bianxing—Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Liu Heng de xiaoshuo” 尋根一族與原鄉主題的變形—莫言、韓少功、劉恆的小說
(The root-searchers and transformations of the theme of the hometown: Fictions by Mo
Yan, Han Shaogong, and Liu Heng), Zhongwai wenxue 中外文學 (Chinese and foreign literatures) 18.8 (1990): 155.
9 For a review of the term ‘nostalgia’ from its original medical-pathological theory
invented by Johannes Hofer in 1688 to its modern psychological definition, see Linda
from the country to the city
135
tion of memory; it goes far into the imagination under the masquerade of
memory. Thus, both “imaginary nostalgia,” the phrase that David Derwei Wang uses to describe the aesthetic consciousness from native soil
literature to root-seeking fiction, and “imagined nostalgia,” the title of an
essay by Dai Jinhua on the fashion and need of 1990s Chinese culture,
refer to a yearning to return to a past more or less outside the yearner’s
experience.10 In terms of memory, nostalgia is less than the past; it loses
the irrecoverable ‘facts’ from history. In terms of imagination, nostalgia is
more than the past; it attaches excessive fantasies to history.11 It is in both
temporal and ideological senses that Fredric Jameson reads the “nostalgic” synonymous with “regressive.”12 Although it is true that nostalgia is
backward looking, in a time when progress becomes the telos of history,
regress is perhaps more thought-provoking.
In this chapter, we shall encounter writers of the generation yearning
for the hometown, namely, Su Tong, Wang Shuo, and Wang Anyi. Su
Tong’s Maple Village series deals with displacement between the country and the city.13 His nostalgia has created a southern aura of decadence
against the political agenda of modernization. One of the many levels at
which nostalgia operates is when individuals “go through the shifting perspectives of childhood and adulthood.”14 This retrospection is shared by
Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern” (1997), at University of Toronto
English Library (www.library.utoronto.ca/utel), listed under “Literary Criticism and
Theory.”
10 Wang, “Imaginary Nostalgia,” 107–132; idem, “Nanfang de duoluo—yu youhuo
—Xiaoshuo Su Tong” 南方的墮落—與誘惑—小說蘇童 (The decadence—and seduction
—of the South: A minor talk on Su Tong), introduction to Su Tong, Tianshi de liangshi 天使的糧食 (Food from an angel) (Taipei: Maitian, 1997), 18; Dai, “Imagined Nostalgia,” 143–161. Wang’s Chinese article is an expansion of the section on Su Tong in his
“ ‘Shijimo’ de xianfeng: Zhu Tianwen yu Su Tong” “世紀末”的先鋒：朱天文與蘇童 (‘Fin
de siècle’ avant-garde: Chu Tien-wen and Su Tong), Jintian 今天 (Today), 1991, no. 2:
99–101.
11 J.M. Fritzman, “The Future of Nostalgia and the Time of the Sublime,” Clio 23.2
(Winter 1994): 167, defines nostalgia as a “wistful or excessive sentimental, sometimes
abnormal, yearning to return somewhere or to some past period or irrecoverable condition.”
12 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 1, Situations of Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 110; and his Postmodernism, 156.
13 The village is named after a tree, fengyang 楓楊, whose common English name is
beech. However, since it is widely rendered as maple or maple-poplar by Su Tong’s
translators and critics, I follow the conventional wisdom here.
14 Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” in The
Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Shaw and Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 15.
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Su Tong and Wang Shuo in their coming-of-age stories. Both Su Tong’s
Fragrant Cedar (Xiangchunshu 香椿樹) Street and Wang Shuo’s Beijing
military compound become the nostalgic homes for a lost generation.
In the case of the latter, revisitation of the capital has turned the central stage of the Cultural Revolution into a playground of anamnesis
and narration. Born to Communist Party cadres in Nanjing, Wang Anyi
expresses an estrangement in her fiction owing to her family’s move back
to Shanghai in her infancy, as we have seen in the preceding chapter.
Because her father is a returned overseas Chinese, who does not speak
Shanghainese, and her Shanghai mother chooses to use Mandarin, the
official language, instead of her native dialect, Wang has never felt at
home in the metropolis. However, it is precisely her alienated familiarity
with Shanghai that affords the author the distance of aesthetic perception necessary to observe the city in detail, collecting its little shells left by
the ebb tide of history into her nostalgic novel, The Song of Lasting Regret
(Changhen ge, 1995), and novella “An Anecdote from the Cultural Revolution” (“Wenge yishi” 文革軼事).
Maple Village and Fragrant Cedar Street: Su Tong’s Southern Decadence
In a note to her analytical essay on Su Tong’s Maple Village novellas,
Hu Ying limits nostalgia to the traditional idealization of rural home “as
an idyllic dreamland” and argues that an antinostalgia “filled with decay
and death” is a trademark of the writer.15 There are, however, various
dimensions of nostalgia, one of which is to be found exactly in “decay
and death.” It is the carnival of decay and death, as David Wang proposes, that constitutes the exoticism of Su Tong’s nostalgia.16 Where the
epic and the sublime in Mo Yan’s root-seeking The Red Sorghum Family
stop, decay and death in Su Tong’s post-root-seeking Maple Village and
Fragrant Cedar Street series begin. Post-root-seeking fiction is a recoil
from the organic life of primitive culture fantasized in root-seeking literature. Pervading Su Tong’s works are morbid sensations. His Maple
Village and Fragrant Cedar Street are preoccupied with an aura of decadence, in both moral and aesthetic senses. I borrow the word ‘decadence’
15 Hu Ying, “Writing Erratic Desire: Sexual Politics in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” in In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture, ed. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 67n10.
16 Wang, “Nanfang de duoluo—yu youhuo,” 18–19.
137
to describe Su Tong’s writings of the South not only because it appears
in the title of one of his stories as well as his collection, The Decadence of
the South (Nanfang de duoluo 南方的墮落), but also due to the preoccupation
with decay in his narratives.17 As a matter of fact, the postrevolutionary
mood expressed in Chinese fiction of the 1980s–1990s is comparable to
the fin de siècle decadence espoused in French and English literature
of the late nineteenth century. The sensual delight and sexual deviation
experimented with in Su Tong’s texts are totally opposed to the social(ist)
norm of morality. In this section we shall follow the author’s nostalgic
path to escape into the bizarre sensationalism and refined aestheticism
of decadence.
Maple Village: Erotism, Escapism, and Effective History
Su Tong’s acclaimed Maple Village series consists of several short stories, novellas and a novel published from 1987 to 1991, including “The
Father and Son Outsiders” (“Waixiangren fu zi” 外鄉人父子), “Flying
over Maple Village” (“Feiyue wo de Fengyangshu guxiang” 飛越我的
楓楊樹故鄉), “Escape” (“Tao” 逃), “Mourning for Red Horse” (“Jidian
hong ma” 祭奠紅馬), “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes” (“Yijiusansi nian
de taowang” 一九三四年的逃亡), “Opium Family” (“Yingsu zhi jia” 罌
粟之家), and Rice (Mi 米). Unlike Mo Yan’s Northeast Gaomi Township, which can be located in Shandong province, Maple Village is Su
Tong’s imagined hometown, his addition to the map of world literature
side by side with the fictitious places of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and García Márquez’s Macondo Town. There are bamboo
craftsmen (“The Father and Son Outsiders” and “Nineteen Thirty-four
Escapes”), lecherous landlords dressed in white silk (“Nineteen Thirtyfour Escapes” and “Opium Family”), and hungry peasants (“Escape,”
“Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” “Opium Family,” and Rice). Su Tong
assigns them three family names, to wit, his own real surname Tong 童
to the bamboo craftsmen in “The Father and Son Outsiders,” Liu 劉
to the landlords in “Opium Family,” and the very common southern
name Chen 陳 to the peasants, another landlord and the bamboo craftsmen in other stories. Su Tong’s nostalgia for a nonexistent hometown
with inhabitants sharing his rare surname renders the series into pseudo
memoirs. Nevertheless, as Zhang Qinghua observes, his “fabrications”
17 While the literary term ‘decadence’ is usually translated into Chinese as tuifei 頹廢,
it can as well be rendered as duoluo 墮落.
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or “fabled” writings are based on the abstraction of “historical elements”
such as culture, human nature, and living ambiance.18
Situated in south China, Maple Village emerges as an exotic and erotic
wonderland driven by raw libido and saturated with an infectiously decadent glamour. There the age-old Ghost Festival evolves into a FlowerBurning Festival and the delivery of bamboo handicrafts to the city develops into a riverside ritual. Amid these carnivals, however, diseases and
famines decimate the population. The village is plagued by cholera,
tuberculosis, and typhoid, while gonorrhea and syphilis are transmitted
from the city. Flooded rice paddies and bloody poppy fields overseen by
the landlords’ gruesome black mansions, and waters of corpses—these
are the ‘idylls’ repeatedly shown in Su Tong’s nostalgia. Women’s value
is defined by an exchange of land and sex among men. The hometown
image, equated with the mother figure and female characters, becomes
an object of male desire, while family/national history turns into sexual
history.19 Now let us first focus on the writings of feminized space and sexual desire in the novellas “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes” and “Opium
Family” before looking into the common theme of the series, namely,
escape.
In “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” as the protagonist Grandfather
Chen Baonian 陳寶年 leaves the countryside to start his bamboo business in the city, his two women fulfill their respective duties at his rural
and urban homes. Men are travelers, drifting desires; women are terminals, loci of stability. But when the two places, the rural and the urban,
are connected by the wayfarers, they collide. The meeting of Chen’s rural
wife, Grandmother Jiang 蔣, and his city mistress, little woman Huanzi
環子, in the village ends up in disaster: the former poisons the latter’s fetus
and causes a miscarriage; then the latter avenges the loss by kidnapping
the former’s baby back to the city. Robin Visser has pointed out that the
irreconcilable rivalry between Jiang and Huanzi represents the diametric
opposition between the country and the city, whereas the male characters’ ventures signify a tension between the conflicting rural and urban
values.20 Interestingly, in reviewing this episode of his family history,
18 Zhang Qinghua, “Tiantang de aige—Su Tong lun” 天堂的哀歌—蘇童論 (An elegy
of paradise: On Su Tong), Zhong shan, 2001, no. 1: 200.
19 Hu Ying, in her “Writing Erratic Desire,” 61, has pointed out that Su Tong’s
history of his feminized hometown is narrated through the history of sexual desire: “The
rewriting of history, then, is predicated on the writing of erratic desire.”
20 Robin Visser, “Displacement of the Urban-Rural Confrontation in Su Tong’s Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 9.1 (Spring 1995): 120–123.
139
instead of asking why his grandfather abandons his grandmother, the
narrator questions Huanzi’s legitimacy: “She was a city woman. Why did
she enter the history of my Maple Village family?”21 If we accept Huanzi
as the symbol of modern city, then the question may be rephrased as:
Why did the city enter the history of the country? Or: Why did modernity enter the history of our tradition? And the narrator can provide no
answer: “My father and I had no way to explain it.”
In the other novella of the Maple series, “Opium Family” (1988),
the protagonists are the father and son landlords named Liu Laoxia 劉
老俠 and Liu Chencao 劉草. Yet Liu Chencao’s biological father, as
indicated phonetically and graphically in his given name, is the laborer
Chen Mao 陳茂. Set on the threshold of liberation, the story relates the
decline of the family with their business in opium poppies, which are
planted alternatively with wet rice in different seasons. The nostalgic aura
of history is presented in the scent of the poppy flowers throughout the
text. Liu Chencao feels dizzy and falls into ennui whenever he smells the
sweet, pungent odor. It all begins with his return from the county middle
school, marking the end of his city dream. As Hu Ying has interpreted,
Chencao was
educated in the city, a type of education that carries a distinctly modern
and Western connotation, symbolized by the tennis ball, which was mysteriously lost as soon as he came home. For more than one reason, then,
‘home’ for Chencao is an uncanny place—dark, damp, and full of unexplained murderous instincts, the fragrance of the poppy flowers both alluring and repulsive.22
Su Tong’s nostalgia is macabre. It is under the influence of opium poppies’ strange and all-pervasive fragrance that Chencao kills his idiot elder
brother at home, and in an opium crock where he is executed by his former schoolmate and tennis playmate Lu Fang 盧方 a year after liberation.
A Party representative, Lu believes that communism and equality are
the keys to revolution, but in reality “[e]very kind of thought and ‘ism’
was far removed from Maple Village.”23 The actual driving forces are
21 Su Tong, “Yijiusansi nian de taowang,” in his Dahong denglong gaogao gua 大紅燈籠高
高掛 (Raise the red lantern) (Taipei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1990), 67; English transla-
tion, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” in idem, Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas, trans.
Michael S. Duke (New York: William Morrow, 1993; rpt. New York: Penguin Books,
1996), 166.
22 Hu, “Writing Erratic Desire,” 54.
23 Su Tong, “Yingsu zhi jia,” in his Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 96; English translation,
“Opium Family,” in idem, Raise the Red Lantern, 196.
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hungers for food and sex, especially the latter in “Opium Family.” This is
how the narrator depicts Chen Mao, the leader of the peasant movement
in the village:
There wasn’t a man in Maple Village whose sexual history was richer or
more varied and fascinating than Chen Mao’s. When Chen Mao walked
through the village, everyone admired two things; one was his brass trumpet, and the other was his hidden organ.24
Here ‘class struggle’ is reconstructed as a pretext for sexual abuse, and the
opposition of classes is deconstructed by incest between the landlord class
and peasantry. Hu Ying points out that class revenge comes along with
sexual violence in the novella through the pun on the word gan 幹—the
sacred meaning of gan (to make) revolution against the vulgar meaning
of gan (to screw) the landowner’s daughter:
The result is a sacrilegious utterance. Chen Mao’s libidinal desire has
overridden his class affiliation, whereas the narrative text, through his
wandering desire, has overwritten the Maoist master narrative of class
struggle.25
What integrates the personal history of Chen Mao, the family history of
the opium grower, and the national history of the People’s Republic is
not the Party’s ideology, but the penis’ biology.
However, sexual revenge being the ultimate form of class revenge, as
seen above and in other experimental fiction of the Deng era (for example, Tashi Dawa’s “The Old Manor” discussed in the last chapter), is
not an imputation cast by fictioneers on the dominant discourse. Sexual
confrontation is ever and always a mode of revolutionary historiography. In the aforementioned Mao’s “Report on an Investigation of the
Peasant Movement in Hunan,” class struggle is implicitly and yet vividly
described as sexual struggle: “They [the liberated peasants] even loll for
a minute or two on the ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies
in the households of the local tyrants and evil gentry.”26 Thus, the rifle
that Chen Mao, now chairman of the Maple Village Peasant Association, receives from Lu Fang is not only “the symbol of power conferred
by revolution,”27 but also that of the phallus legitimized by the Party. As
24
Su Tong, “Yingsu zhi jia,” 107; idem, “Opium Family,” 209.
Hu, “Writing Erratic Desire,” 58.
26 Mao Tsetung [Mao Zedong], Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1971), 29. This was discovered by Hu Ying in her “Writing
Erratic Desire,” 60.
25
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the socialist moralism in the revolutionary history is hollowed out, the
Maoist ideal of the proletarian hero is also demystified. In fact, there is
no ideological difference, only biological distinction between Liu Chencao’s two fathers, the impotent landlord Liu Laoxia and his sex-starved
laborer Chen Mao.
Both Wang Gan and Hu Ying have analyzed the adroit shifting of
pronouns in Su Tong’s metafiction.28 Unlike other experimental works
of polyphonic structure, such as Gao Xingjian’s 高行健 Nobel Prizewinning novel Soul Mountain (Lingshan 靈山, 1989), in which different characters’ points of view or the same person’s split of the self are/is mechanically placed in alternative chapters, Su Tong’s novella minimizes the distances among the ‘I’-narrator, ‘you’ the reader, and ‘he’ a personage by
deliberately blurring their perspectives.29 A descendant of the Liu clan,
the first-person narrator appears to be ignorant of his family’s history and
uncertain about his own narration. Because of the storyteller’s unreliability, the reader is invited to join ‘us’ in the investigation of history by being
addressed directly in the narrator’s apostrophes, the characters’ dialogues
and monologues. At the same time, the apologetic I-narrator resorts to
the grandfather’s private version of history against the official misjudgment passed by Lu Fang on Chen Mao. In contrast with the authoritative
image of the grandfather, as Hu Ying has observed, the figure of the Party
arbiter “is presented as a naive reader of history, quite unable to make
sense of the role of the laborer and the turn of events.”30
In the face of such incompetent historiography, Su Tong adopts a strategy of escapism in his nostalgic narratives. David Wang has argued that
Su Tong’s escapism “is no longer only ‘escaping into’ another historical stage or predestined period, but rather ‘escaping out’ of the necessity
and ought-to-be of history itself.”31 Therefore, a common motif in the village stories is ‘escape’, as the word appears in two of the titles. Under Su
Tong’s pen, nostalgia is essentially escapist, exiling us from the material-
28 Wang Gan, “Su Tong yixiang” 蘇童意像 (Su Tong imageries), Huacheng, 1992, no. 6:
205; Hu, “Writing Erratic Desire,” 53–54.
29 For a discussion of the split of the self into different persons’ points of view in Soul
Mountain, see Liu Zaifu’s introduction to Lingshan, by Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: Tiandi
tushu, 2000), v. An earlier example of multiple identities—‘he’, ‘I’, ‘you’, and the thirdperson narrator—that constitute an author-protagonist is found in Zhang Chengzhi’s
1987 novel Jin muchang 金牧場 (Gold prairie) (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2001).
See Zhang Xuelian, “Muslim Identity in the Writings of Zhang Chengzhi,” 104.
31 Wang, “Nanfang de duoluo—yu youhuo,” 19.
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istic city as it brings the imagined country nearer, whereas homecoming
is just an excuse to flee the dominant discourse. History is lost in exile
and the wanderer attempts to recover it through homecoming, though it
proves a futility in a poem from “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes”:
My old Maple Village home
Has been silent for many years,
And we
Who have escaped here
Are like wandering blackfish
For whom
The way back is eternally lost.32
At this point Wang Gan suggests: “Escape/homecoming are seemingly
oppositional, but in fact they are merely two sides of a coin.”33 He explains
that in the Maple series this paradox is formed by the characters’ escapes
from country to city and the narrators’ returns from the urban area to
their native village. I find the bilateral displacement still more complex
in that the central figures of “The Father and Son Outsiders” are homecomers to the village, whereas the author-narrators of “Nineteen Thirtyfour Escapes” and “Flying over Maple Village” discover themselves to be
ever-running fugitives.
The most outstanding image of a life-long escapee is found in the short
story precisely entitled “Escape.” The protagonist, the narrator’s uncle,
first leaves the village for the city, then for the battlefield in Korea, and
after returning home as an army deserter, he escapes again into a forest
in Heilongjiang to become a lumberman until he is killed in an industrial
accident. Not only is the story ironical when “Maple Village slaughtered
chickens and goats to welcome back the Chen family’s hero” who was
actually a deserter, but also lyrical when his wife never gives up chasing
him to the end: “You caught up with me after all. If I ran to the ends
of the earth, I could never escape.”34 For him, every escape is to elude
the cruel reality, but where is the haven if his home is an impoverished
village, a foreign country is a battlefield, and Mother Nature, a burial
place? However, what one ultimately cannot escape is the sentimentality
32 Su Tong, “Yijiusansi nian de taowang,” 16–17; idem, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” 103. Translator’s italics.
33 Wang, “Su Tong yixiang,” 200.
34 Su Tong, “Tao,” in his Shangxin de wudao 傷心的舞蹈 (A sad dance) (Hong Kong:
Tiandi tushu, 1992), 147, 155; trans. Michael S. Duke, “Escape,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Joseph S.M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 495, 500.
143
of escape per se, symbolized by the wife’s act of pursuing the escapee.
After all, nostalgia is no less than a retreat into the world of sentiment.
While in “Escape” the runner dies in a strange land, “The Father and
Son Outsiders” is a short story about the return of diaspora. A member of
the Tong clan has an allergic reaction to bamboo and declines to inherit
his family’s bamboo craftsmanship. He flees the village at eighteen after
burning all bamboo strips at home. Many years later, a hunter and his
son, Winter, appear in the village and claim to be the posterity of the
Tongs, but they are not accepted due to their lack of the Tongs countenances and, more significantly, the big-handled bamboo knife. Yet when
the first-person narrator joins hands with Winter, the two kids’ hands
stick inseparably: “I wanted to free Winter’s hand, but his palm and mine
grew together like intertwining branches….”35 Winter finally becomes
the best bamboo craftsman in the village and is posthumously recognized by the narrator’s grandfather as a descendant of the Tongs. From
the fleer’s refusal of his predetermined career to his offspring’s return and
regain of recognition, history is presented as a cyclic psychic process of
nostalgic estrangement and fulfillment. The central artifact of this nostalgic process here is the big-handled bamboo knife, a production tool and
family heirloom, which also appears in “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes”
with its urban variant—an awl-shaped bamboo knife that indicates a
functional change from being a tool to a weapon.
Another account about outlanders in exile is “Mourning for Red
Horse.” Unlike the hunter and his son in the above story, the herdsman
and his grandson here are more of an archetype. On the surface, the
short story is about two strangers, a boy rider named Lock and his grandfather, who wander with their red horse from remote Angry Mountain in
the north to Maple Village; yet on analysis the characters are personified
virtues, as Lock tells the narrator’s great-aunt, a young girl then: “My
grandpa says that all humans evolve from horses, that all humans are
descendants of horses, but people’s good hearts all went bad, and then
they don’t like horses now.”36 The fairy tale relates the first awakening
of love between the young girl and Lock. Unlocking his eros, she asks him
to “ride on” her before her marriage to an itinerant pedlar. A modern
Chinese version of the Biblical story in Genesis about the forbidden fruit
of Adam and Eve, this Freudian fable ends in the disappearances of the
symbolic red horse and its little master after great-aunt’s death caused by
35
36
Su Tong, “Waixiangren fu zi,” in his Shangxin de wudao, 117; translation is mine.
Su Tong, “Jidian hong ma,” in his Shangxin de wudao, 164; my translation.
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dystocia when she is delivered of a foal-shaped baby. The Angry Mountain horse’s being used as a draft animal in a mill before running away
is a result of its dislocation in Maple Village—a dystopia, or rather, a
dystocia of utopia in Su Tong’s nostalgia.
As indicated in the plural form of its English translated title, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes” deals with the theme of escape along multiple
plotlines of the narrative. Running throughout the story is the temporal
thread of 1934, “the year of escape for Maple Village’s bamboo craftsmen,” the 139 of whom, or half of the men in the area, follow in the
footsteps of Chen Baonian, founder of Chen’s Bamboo Goods Store, to
the city.37 The four-hundred-mile mass male exodus stretching from the
village’s mud road to the bamboo town ends with the bare-footed escape
from his mother to look for his father on the part of Dingo, Chen’s fifteenyear-old son. Another runaway is Chen’s city mistress, Huanzi, who manages to escape the clutches of Chen’s rural wife, Jiang, and runs back to
the city after Chen has sent her into the village to have his child. Yet the
first runner we encounter in the beginning of the metanarrative is none
of these characters, but the I-narrator who refers to himself as a fugitive:
Last winter I stood under a streetlight in the city examining my shadow.
I realized this was going to become a habit that would grow and spread
throughout my body…. I discovered that my shadow was wildly and weirdly elongated on the sidewalk, like a reed blowing in the wind; I was being
followed by my shadow; I pushed my shoulders forward and leaned into
the metallic pole of a high-voltage neon lamp. Looking back at my shadow
on the ground, I saw that in the dead of night in the city it took on the image
of a fugitive…. I am like my father. As I ran wildly through the urban
night’s eerie light, my father’s shadow was shouting and chasing me from
behind in a surrealistic pursuit that transcended the nature of ordinary
matter. I understand: Running for my life that time was an escape.38
With the breathtaking touch of a thriller, this self-reflexive introduction presents to its audience the identity crisis of a city immigrant. The
author-narrator’s shadow, being gazed at by himself, suddenly becomes
his father’s. Seventy years before the publication of “Nineteen Thirtyfour Escapes,” when reading history at night, Lu Xun’s Madman insists
he must “examine” (yanjiu 研究) the history book carefully and finally sees
37
Su Tong, “Yijiusansi nian de taowang,” 37; idem, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,”
129.
38
102.
145
the words “Eat people” hidden between the lines of “Confucian Virtue
and Morality.”39 The history book of Su Tong’s ‘I’ is filled with the disastrous year 1934 but it means nothing, because “my father was a mute
fetus. His profound reticence left my family shrouded in a murky gray
fog for fully half a century.”40 So he turns to “examine” his shadow and
finds in it his father’s shadow, which he strives to escape. His escapology
is to separate himself as the implied author ‘Su Tong’ from his I-narrator,
reportedly born in the year of the tiger (the real author Su Tong’s birthday is 23rd January 1963, at the end of the year of the tiger): “I am my
father’s son; I am not called Su Tong. In the city I have developed many
habits inherited from my father….” In “A Madman’s Diary,” the Madman’s scrutiny concludes in a confession of cannibalism: “I may have
eaten several pieces of my sister’s flesh unwittingly …”; in “Nineteen
Thirty-four Escapes,” the escapee’s narratology results in an alienation
from the city: “I’m an outsider.”41 While Lu Xun’s “‘confession’ is in fact
an enlightenment to call for the discard of the old culture of the father’s
generation,”42 Su Tong’s escapism is caught in a dilemma: on the one
hand, being a son, he is anxious to cast aside the influence of tradition
represented by the father figure; on the other, as a writer, he is tempted
to travel into the days of yore experienced by the elder generations. If
Lu Xun and his hysteric hero have disconnected the signifiers of feudal
ethics from their signified, emptied their meanings out, and rearranged
the signs so as to open up a new signifying space for an antitraditionalism, then Su Tong and his nostalgic narrator realize that their shadow is
merely one along the whole chain of signifiers procreated by their forefathers, which never connects them to a stable identity.
So the ending of “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes” echoes its opening
on the image of the midnight fugitive: “If you all open your windows,
you will see my shadow cast upon this city, fluttering in the wind./Who
can say what kind of shadow it is?”43 Tang Xiaobing sees in the final
39 Lu Xun, “Kuangren riji,” 1: 424–425; English rendition in Yang and Yang, Lu Xun,
1: 42. Translation of the word yanjiu is modified from “consideration” to “examination”
so as to better render its meaning and be consistent with the English citation of Su Tong’s
paragraph.
40 Su Tong, “Yijiusansi nian de taowang,” 15; idem, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,”
101.
41 Lu Xun, “Kuangren riji,” 1: 432; Yang and Yang, Lu Xun, 1: 51; Su Tong, “Yijiusansi
nian de taowang,” 77; Su Tong, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” 177.
42 Liu and Lin, Zui yu wenxue, 242.
43 Su Tong, “Yijiusansi nian de taowang,” 78; idem, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,”
178.
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question a reflection on identity: “In the mirror of history, the young man
finds his own identity, or rather, finds his own identity problematized and
complicated.”44 To his own question all the author can do is restate it in
somniloquence at the end of the short story “Flying over Maple Village”:
Many families who moved here from the villages now live under the roofs
of this city of ours. Every night the sound of their snoring is quite uneven
because they all have their own particular worries and dreams. If you are
like me and have had strange dreams ever since you were a child, then you
will see your old homeland, your clan, and your relatives in your dreams.
There is a river that flows by you when you are born and you seem to be
sitting on a bamboo raft floating down that river: you turn and gaze back
upon your old home, far, far off in the distance.45
We now realize that the escapist is actually a somnambulist, but sleepwalking from the city to his chimerical old home is so impossible that the
future tense is heavily employed to indicate uncertainty throughout “Flying over Maple Village,” a legend about his youngest uncle’s mysterious
death related to a madwoman and a stray dog. The frequent use of “I
shall” (wo jiang/hui 我將／會) throughout the historical journey creates an
anachronism in rapport with the illusion of déjà vu from the angle of the
baby narrator, who sees in his cradle the blue body of his drowned uncle.
The viewpoint of a baby or child allows for a special perspective in
historical discourse, particularly in nostalgic narration. Malcolm Chase
and Christopher Shaw have pointed out that while adults live in both
private and public times, feeling both the psychological internal clock
and mechanical pulse of quartz, small children know only the subjective experience of time.46 Although the narrator in “Flying over Maple
Village” is able to synchronize his birth with his uncle’s funeral in 1956,
the public time is totally personalized without any reference to historical events in 1950s China (this is quite different from Günter Grass’ The
Tin Drum, a magic realist historical novel without nostalgia, in which the
always three-year-old Oskar Matzerath narrates the two terrible decades
of fascism in Nazi Germany). Su Tong’s short story forms an interesting comparison and contrast with Fang Fang’s 方方 novella “Landscape”
(“Fengjing” 風景, 1987), a life history of an ordinary family from 1975 to
44 Xiaobing Tang, “The Mirror of History and History as Spectacle: Reflections on
Xiao Ye and Su Tong,” in his Chinese Modern, 241.
45 Su Tong, “Feiyue wo de Fengyangshu guxiang,” in his Shangxin de wudao, 140; idem,
“Flying over Maple Village,” trans. Michael S. Duke, in China’s Avant-Garde Fiction: An
Anthology, ed. Jing Wang (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 159.
46 Chase and Shaw, “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” 4–5.
147
1985 in the city of Hankou told by a dead baby. Both narratives transgress
the limits between life and death, in which Fang Fang’s infant narrator
reflects rather philosophically on an array of queries:
And how big a difference was there between the dead and the living? Was
it possible that the dead, in their own world, were saying that they were
alive and that all the living beings on earth were really dead? To die: wasn’t
that to reach a higher stage of life?47
Nevertheless, “Flying over Maple Village” poetizes the old days in an
escapist nostalgia, whereas “Landscape” prosifies the near past in a realist
irony.48
If dates, as Lévi-Strauss suggests in The Savage Mind, are the historian’s
thread to link the temporal relationship of before and after, what will happen to a historical narrative without dates? While emphasis is laid on the
year in “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” Su Tong deliberately neglects
temporal reference in his first novel Rice, the full-length installment of his
genealogical series on Maple Village. A historical date is mentioned only
once in the middle of the novel: “A second major famine hit south China
in 1930” (157/137).49 Before that, the omniscient narrator only informs us
ambiguously that the story takes place “[i]n times of war and turmoil”
(18/11), which indicates the iterability of the narrative that would then
not be bound to a certain historical context. This distinguishes Rice from
the earlier works of the series, in which, as Meng Yue 孟悅 remarks, the
author repeatedly makes it a point to remind us of a ‘real’ age in history.50 In Rice, however, Su Tong has largely effaced the effects of time
and translated them into a tension between rural and urban spaces.
47 Fang Fang, “Fengjing,” in her Xingyun liushui 行雲流水 (Floating clouds and flowing
water) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992), 116–117; English translation by
Anne-Marie Traeholt and Mark Kruger, in Three Novellas by Fang Fang (Beijing: Chinese
Literature Press, 1996), 156.
48 That is why the mainland critic Chen Xiaoming 陳曉明, in his “Fankang weiji: Lun
‘xin xieshi’ ” 反抗危機：論“新寫實” (Resist crisis: On the ‘neorealist’), Wenxue pinglun, 1993,
no. 2: 88, attributes the first literary effort of ‘neorealism’ to Fang Fang’s piece.
49 Here and in the following chapter, all quotations from the novel with page references
in parentheses are from Su Tong, Mi (Taipei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1991) and its English
rendition, Rice, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: William Morrow, 1995). This section
and the corresponding parts on Rice in the next chapter are based on my Chinese article
“Mi de minian—Jieshao Su Tong de di yi bu changpian” 米的迷念—介紹蘇童的第一部
長篇 (Obsession with rice: Introducing Su Tong’s first novel), Shun po, 11 July 1993.
50 Meng Yue, “Su Tong de ‘jiashi’ yu ‘lishi’ xiezuo” 蘇童的“家史”與 “歷史”寫作 (Su
Tong’s ‘family history’ and ‘historical’ writing), Jintian, 1990, no. 2: 85.
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Chen Wanhui’s 陳婉慧 cover illustration of the Taiwan edition highlights the two major images in Rice: the interlocking railroads stretch
endlessly toward the horizon; in the foreground stands a broken ricestem. If Mo Yan’s The Red Sorghum Family represents the high tide of the
root-seeking movement in the late 1980s, then Rice can be regarded as
a magnum opus about the rural-urban clash in modern Chinese history. The polarity between traditional values, as implied by the rice-stem,
and Western civilization, the railway, hints at the trajectory of China’s
modernization. What concerns Su Tong is the anxiety about urbanization in the third world. This anxiety points to an identity crisis as Visser
argues: “[T]he existential value that the city promises … is demonstrably depleted in Rice, yet the rural space remains an equally ineffectual
—indeed inaccessible—grounding for modern identity”; “[u]nderlying
this violent clash of [urban and rural] values is the intense longing for
an authentic homeland and a cohesive identity, both of which prove
unattainable.”51 The search for homeland and identity in the novel poses
such a question for the individual: How does one position oneself in the
displacement between the country and the city?
The novel begins and ends with the chronotope of a railroad: “A freight
train from the north comes to a rocking halt at the old depot” (5/1); “[t]he
last sound to fill his ears was the rhythmic clatter of iron wheels on steel
tracks, and he knew he was on a train taking him away from disaster”
(299/266). But this is not a simple return to the starting point, because
history has already inscribed itself on the body of our protagonist, Five
Dragons, which initially appears in full vigor and finally disappears in
deformity (about this I shall say more in the next chapter). Five Dragons
is born into a peasant family of south China and takes refuge in the city
after a flood. His story is metaphorically received by critics as “a revenge
of the country on the city.”52 Early in the text, Five Dragons spends
his first earned dollar in sending an anonymous letter to make Sixth
Master get rid of Abao 阿保, his first enemy in the city. Then the storyline
51
Visser, “Displacement of the Urban-Rural Confrontation in Su Tong’s Fiction,” 117,
125.
52 Wu Bingjie 吳秉杰, “Yiban shi lishi, yiban shi yuyan—Su Tong changpian xiaoshuo
Mi zhong xin de tansuo” 一半是歷史一半是寓言—蘇童長篇小說《米》中新的探索 (Half
history, half allegory: New exploration in Su Tong’s novel Rice), Dangdai zuojia pinglun,
1991, no. 6: 51; Wu Yiqin, “Zai xiangcun yu dushi de duizhi zhong gouzhu shenhua—Su
Tong changpian xiaoshuo Mi de gushi chaijie” 在鄉村與都市的對峙中構築神話—蘇童長
篇小說
《米》
的故事拆解 (Constructing myth in the confrontation between the countryside
and the city: Deconstructing the story of Su Tong’s novel Rice), ibid., 57.
149
develops around the link between Five Dragons and rice: he marries
into the rice emporium; he masters the gang Wharf Rats and the city by
selling rice; he names his children Rice and Bowl; Little Bowl is suffocated
in the mounds of rice by Rice Boy, whose leg is broken as punishment by
his father; Abao’s son, Jade Embrace, seduces Five Dragons’ daughterin-law in the rice storeroom; Five Dragons is arrested and tortured by
Jade Embrace because of the weapons found in the mounds of rice; his
last wish is to return to his hometown with a carful of rice as his war booty
and to become a landlord of paddies. From his possession of a handful
of coarse rice to a carful of white rice, our hero finally dies under the
obsession with rice: “RICE—His head moved toward the mound of rice
as he uttered one last word” (298/265).
As rice is commodified in the city, the rice-eater is also uprooted from
his native soil. When Five Dragons first steps into the city, he is “uncertain on alien territory, not knowing where he is” (5/1). The feelings of
alienation and dizziness never stop haunting him for the rest of his life.
He remains an outsider of the city even after “he had managed to fulfill
the fantasies of all Maple-Poplar Village men in a strange and distant
land” (179/159). His dilemma is: “He had always been contemptuous of
the city and of city life, yet was drawn irresistibly to it, and thus powerless
to resist its temptations” (222–223/199). Yet “[i]n his mind he had never
left the inside of a railroad car. It bounced and it shook” (224/200). His
life is not a stable discourse, but a jolting history driven by a splintering
of forces. In contradistinction to the ‘pure land’ of Maple Village, which
was ruined by a devastating flood, “the city was an immense, ornamental graveyard” (270/241). The first body Five Dragons meets in the city
is dead, and he himself turns out to be the last corpse in the story. His
impression of the city is ambivalent, a parody of paradise:
Five Dragons turns and looks at the gaudy painted advertisements on the
wall behind him: soap, cigarettes, and a variety of herbal tonics in the
hands of pouty, pretty young women with lips the color of blood. Tucked
in among the sexy women are the names and addresses of VD clinics….
This is the city: chaotic and filled with weird things that draw people like
flies, to lay their maggoty eggs and move on. Everyone damns the city, but
sooner or later they come anyhow. [7/2–3]
The city is simultaneously a ‘private utopia’ with “[m]ounds of snowwhite rice; beautiful and desirable women” (26–27/19) and a huge casket:
That’s what cities are for: They come into being for the sake of the dead.
Throngs of people materialize among crowded, noisy streets, only to disappear, like drops of water evaporating in the sun’s rays. Throngs of them
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are murdered, or carried away by disease, or killed by depression and
apoplexy, or impaled on Japanese bayonets, or dispatched by Japanese
bullets. For them the city is a gigantic coffin that emits thick black industrial smoke, scented powder, and the hidden odor of women’s sex as soon
as the lid is raised. An arm, shapeless yet limber and powerful, grows out
of the coffin, which contains gold and silver, fancy clothes and delicacies.
The arm reaches into the streets and alleys to drag wanderers into the cold
depths. [270/241]
In such a paradoxical space of utopia/dystopia, individuals, like flies,
can only be seen in “throngs”; they have no consistent identity of their
own. Jade Embrace, for instance, is Sixth Master’s son in name, Abao’s
offspring in appearance, Cloud Weave’s descendant who has forgotten
her face, and yet Five Dragons concludes: “If anything, he’s a younger
version of me” (285/253). He is indeed the child of everyone and no one
in the city.
Five Dragons himself comes as no exception to the genealogical chaos.
Orphaned by the famine in his village and married into the Feng’s 馮 rice
emporium in the city, he once has his name added to the Feng family tree,
but it is eventually blotted out by Cloud Silk, Feng’s younger daughter,
because of his evil deeds. Although in the genetic make-up of his peasantry, “globs of sweat still oozed from his armpits, and his feet still stank
when he slipped them out of his shoes” (224/201), he bears neither a
surname from his peasant father for his rural origins nor the digestive
apparatus of a citizen for his urban identity. One may be tempted to
trace Five Dragons’ improper diet, characterized by huge bowls of rice
he eats without wasting a single kernel, back to his peasantry. His strange
habit of chewing uncooked rice may also be explained by his parents’,
his countrymen’s, and his own suffering from famine. In fact, two scenes
of crunching the raw grain as ‘reward’ for rape or sodomy have been
described in the earlier fiction “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes.” Rice
seems to be a constant symbol for the collective self throughout all historical processes.53 However, it turns into a private story when Five Dragons eroticizes rice: “Rice enveloping feminine flesh, or feminine flesh
wrapped around rice, always drove him into a state of uncontrollable
sexual desire” (148/129). Five Dragons’ sexual perversion has dissociated
him from the bonds of blood and morality.
53 Cf. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 99–102.
151
By hybridizing his characters’ identities and hollowing out the moral
value of rural revenge, Su Tong showcases what Nietzsche calls wirkliche Historie, or, in Foucault’s rendering, “effective history.”54 As a critique of the Lukácsian model of Marxist historiography, the NietzscheanFoucauldian genealogy
does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity
that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to
demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues
secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to
all its vicissitudes,
but to
record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must
seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is
without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts.55
Such historical awareness locates not in roots, but in displacements. The
heterogeneous rural-urban genealogy in Rice, to use the NietzscheanFoucauldian language, is “capable of shattering the unity of man’s being
through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the
events of his past.”56 Both rural tradition and urban civilization dismember Five Dragons, detach him from his roots, and defamiliarize him from
his descent:
There they are, my family, my heirs. The only family I’ve known since the
age of twenty. Suddenly Five Dragons felt surrounded by strangers, and
wondered if any of this family business was real. [224/200]
On the one hand, he no longer has a home in his hometown; on the other,
despite his family in the city, he never considers the city to be his second
home. He is an individual drifted away from the country and standing
aloof from the city.
Some Chinese critics tend to interpret the individualized tale of Five
Dragons as a family romance of three generations, only to extend it to a
national allegory or a representation of a ‘total’ history of modern China.57
54 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Donald F. Bouchard,
ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 152–153.
55 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146, 139–140.
56 Ibid., 153.
57 See, for example, Wu, “Yiban shi lishi, yiban shi yuyan,” 52; and Wu, “Zai xiangcun
yu dushi de duizhi zhong gouzhu shenhua,” 58.
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Visser also projects on it an innuendo of the Communist Party’s history.58
However, I venture to say that Five Dragons’ incomplete genealogy is
solely a fragment on a margin of the historical picture. To borrow Foucault’s words again, it “rejects the meta-historical deployment of ideal
significations and indefinite teleologies.”59 A wirkliche historiographic fiction like Rice is not a collective memory of a nation-state or ruling party,
but a fragmentary counter-memory of a mere individual’s displacement
on the fringe of the modern world. It provides a stage for the individual
to perform his faulty history—a history not subject to any master narrative. As such, Su Tong prefers an isolated episode in the rural-urban
strife to a comprehensive history of modern China.
Fragrant Cedar Street: Crime, Carnival, and Coming of Age
Corresponding to Maple Village is a street named Fragrant Cedar in
a southern immigrant city, the second hometown in Su Tong’s historical fiction. There the storyteller diverts the meaning of nostalgia from
homesickness in the Maple Village series to a return to a time of youth.
As he avers in an essay, “love it or hate it, among the traveling bags in a
writer’s lifetime, the heaviest one is perhaps that which carries the memories of his childhood.”60 In Su Tong’s nostalgia for the age before adulthood, an inconspicuous small street becomes a fabulous chronotope. The
Fragrant Cedar Street series spans more than a decade in the writer’s
career, starting with his 1984 short story “In Memory of Mulberry Garden” (“Sangyuan liunian” 桑園留念) and including the subsequent short
stories “Going Faraway on a Skateboard” (“Cheng hualunche yuanqu”
乘滑輪車遠去), “A Sad Dance” (“Shangxin de wudao” 傷心的舞蹈), “The
Decadence of the South,” “Bridge-side Teahouse” (“Qiaobian chaguan”
橋邊茶館), “The Rooster Raiser” (“Siyang gongji de ren” 飼養公雞的人,
1995), “Paper” (“Zhi” 紙), and “The Queen of Hearts” (“Hongtao Q”
紅桃Ｑ), the novellas “The Brothers Shu” (“Shu Nong” 舒農, 1988) and
58 Visser, “Displacement of the Urban-Rural Confrontation in Su Tong’s Fiction,”
126–127:
Because the urban space is usually associated with modernization, Su Tong ironically implies that the revolutionary path [of retreating from the city] chosen by the
Party may in fact have been regressive rather than progressive.
59
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 140.
Su Tong, “Tongnian shenghuo de liyong” 童年生活的利用 (A certain use of childhood), Shijie, no. 4 (2001): 163.
60
153
“The Age of Tattoos” (“Ciqing shidai” 刺青時代), as well as the 1994
novel North Town (Chengbei didai 城北地帶).61 All of these works involve a
child’s or youth’s point of view, except “The Rooster Raiser,” which is
not a historical fiction, and “Bridge-side Teahouse,” a story about a teahouse “destroyed in a big fire fifty years ago,” that is, before the author’s
birth.62
Fragrant Cedar Street is located on the north side of Suzhou, Jiangsu.
The north town is on the edge of the city, an “area joining town and
country … with both urban experience and rural memory.”63 It represents a transition from the country to the city in historical geography as
well as in Su Tong’s historiography. This area of the city, as described in
the opening of North Town, is characterized by dermatitis-causing industrial pollution:
Three huge chimneys were the symbol of north town.
The sky of north town gathered all kinds of industrial grease and smoke.
When the particles of carbon black and cement sprinkled in the hot wind of
July, the windowsills of the houses in Fragrant Cedar Street were covered
with black and white dust, which, if not cleaned up regularly, might accumulate up to half-an-inch thick in a few days, often mistaken by kids for a
layer of flour. And the chemical plant’s chimney had a color of beautiful
tangerine. The pungent smell of benzene anhydride was coiling up and diffusing around the cylindrical chimney. People passing in front of the plant
occasionally would look up at its chimney and, even if they understood the
production process of benzene anhydride, camphor or detergent powder,
sometimes could not help having a childish illusion—they regarded it as
a queerly fragrant, pungent chimney, which made up all compositions of
the air.64
The gigantic chimneys as a symbol of the industrial town are eulogized
for their visual sublimity and olfactory stimulation, but in a parodic tone,
because it is only “a childish illusion” (zhiqi de huanjue 稚氣的幻覺), a
hallucination of modernization. The river that intersects Fragrant Cedar
61 Zhang Qinghua identifies “Sangyuan liunian,” collected in Su Tong, Shangxin de
wudao, 41–50, as the first piece of the Fragrant Cedar Street series. Although the street is
not mentioned in this coming-of-age story, its setting is unmistakably that of the series. See
Zhang, “Tiantang de aige,” 199. Some late works of the series is produced in the postDeng period, including the novel Pusa man 菩薩蠻 (Deva-like barbarian) (Hong Kong:
Tiandi tushu, 1999), which, however, lies outside the scope of this study.
62 In Su Tong, Qiaobian chaguan (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1996), 37.
63 Interview of Ba Qiao 巴橋, a young writer and primary school alumnus of Su Tong,
in Sun Jianmin 孫健敏, “Xunzhao yizhong nanfang shenghuo de yiyi” 尋找一種南方生
活的意義 (In search of a meaning of the Southern life), Huacheng, 2004, no. 2: 179.
64 Su Tong, Chengbei didai (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1995), 5; translation is mine.
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Street yields no fish since the water got polluted: “it was black and stank
horribly…. it carried rotten vegetable leaves, dead cats and rats, industrial oils and grease plus a steady supply of condoms.”65 Several stories
mention newborn babies and raped girls drowned in this river. It witnesses all sorts of vice in the history of modern urban life.
There are no more cedars in the short and drab Fragrant Cedar Street.
If one looks it up in the gazetteer, one will be surprised that the street used
to be a jail during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and that the predecessor
of the bottle cleaning factory in the district was a labor camp workshop
for prostitutes in the early post-liberation period. These seem to explain
the active juvenile delinquency and sexual indulgence in the modern
city. In fact, there is nothing special about Fragrant Cedar Street, as it
is introduced in the first paragraph of “The Brothers Shu”:
In the south of China, there are lots of streets just like it: narrow, dirty, the
cobblestones forming a network of potholes. When you look out your window at the street or at the river’s edge, you can see dried meat and drying
laundry hanging from eaves, and you can see inside houses, where people are at the dinner table or engaged in a whole range of daily activities.
What I am about to give you isn’t so much a story as it is a word picture
of life down south, and little more.66
When it comes to describing the everyday life of Fragrant Cedar Street
in “The Decadence of the South,” the author-narrator finds himself in
a dilemma: he loathes the air with its moldy smell and his neighbors of
wretched appearances—his dissolute set of characters—but he cannot
help lauding them at the same time, because “[t]he south is a decayed
and yet fascinating existence,” “a symbol of decadence.”67 Decadence is a
passive aesthetic attitude posed to decline the official projects of homogenization in political revolutions and economic reforms underway from
Mao to Deng and beyond. It is a call to return to personal sensations.
The Fragrant Cedar series can be divided into two interrelated categories: thrillers told from a child’s or youth’s viewpoint and comingof-age stories, both permeated with sex, violence and crimes. Belonging
to the former genre are “The Decadence of the South,” “Paper,” “The
Queen of Hearts,” and North Town, of which the last work is also a coming65 Su Tong, “Shu Nong,” also titled “Shujia xiongdi” 舒家兄弟 (The brothers Shu),
is anthologized in Hongfen 紅粉 (Rouge) (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1992), 196; English
translation, “The Brothers Shu,” by Howard Goldblatt, in Chairman Mao Would Not Be
Amused: Fiction from Today’s China, ed. Goldblatt (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 36.
66 Su Tong, “Shu Nong,” 183; idem, “The Brothers Shu,” 25.
67 Su Tong, “Nanfang de duoluo,” 73, 118.
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of-age story. In “The Decadence of the South,” the seriously ill owner
of a teahouse stores his gold in a flashlight and hides it inside his pillow,
but it is eventually stolen at his deathbed by his wife’s young lover. The
image of the escapee appears once again at the very end of this story,
when the narrator recalls the enigmatic instruction given to him by the
owner through an upstairs window of the teahouse:
Run, kid, run.
So I started running. I heard the whole of southern China uttering
a familiar hubbub, running right after me, like a wronged man’s spirit
pouring out its tears and mishaps to me.68
The author-narrator finds his memory haunted by the scandalous anecdotes of southern life, but he realizes that rumors and slanders are the
historical sources of his writing. The real roman série noire about haunting, however, is the ghost story “Paper.” The young daughter of an old
pasted-paper sculptor was killed by a Japanese stray bullet on her away to
deliver funereal paper goods during the war. Her spirit begins to appear
in the adolescent protagonist’s dreams since he heard her story from the
paper sculptor and accidentally found her grave in the summer of 1971.
He finally runs a high fever after stealing a white paper horse, which is
supposed to be burned for the deceased sculptor himself. Under the cloak
of the supernatural, Su Tong suggests the haunting power of storytelling.
In “The Queen of Hearts,” the child protagonist sets out on a journey
to search for the Queen of Hearts missing from his playing cards. Cards,
however, are condemned as a plaything of ‘feudalism, capitalism, and
revisionism’ (fengzixiu 封資修) during the Cultural Revolution:
It was 1969, when our city was plunged into a strange ‘revolution’. People
refused all kinds of entertainment; streets were deathly quiet, with stores
standing ajar. Even if you walked through the city, you could not see a
vestige of a playing card.69
Hoping to buy a new deck, the boy follows his father to Shanghai, where
he catches the bloodstains of the revolution twice instead: first in an inn,
some caked blood is found on the wall next to his pillow, believed to
have been shed by a person detained and tortured in the room; then
on the train home, a bloodstained Queen of Hearts is discovered in a
lavatory with a small window, from which an old man has disappeared
after being escorted into it. Notice that there are no direct descriptions of
68
69
Ibid., 118.
Su Tong, “Hongtao Q ,” in his Tianshi de liangshi, 46; my translation.
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brutal scenes in the narrative, and that the narrator relies on his father’s
clarification to give some crucial details (for example, the old man is not
dumb, but his tongue has been cut out). Strictly speaking, ‘I’ was too
young to bear witness to anything save some traces of history. What he
saw in the past from a child’s angle has to be explained by the adults
around him. Although their indisputable judgments are invited to correct
his erroneous recollections and create literary surprises, the child’s memory of the “strange ‘revolution’” remains open to interpretations other
than the tragic view, as he maintains that the found Queen of Hearts is
free of bloodstains.
Su Tong’s coming-of-age stories include “Going Faraway on a Skateboard,” “A Sad Dance,” “The Brothers Shu,” “The Age of Tattoos,”
and North Town. These works represent the memories of urban boys born
in the 1960s. The young heroes in most of these stories are narcissistically handsome and adorable. They were only school kids when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, too little to be seriously involved in
the political movement. Yet they were still infected by the fanaticism of
the turbulent times, turning their classrooms into playgrounds or simply playing truant until they were expelled from school. They fought on
streets and raped girls—revolution means nothing more than violence
and sex for their adolescent agitation. In retrospect, their impression of
Mao is vague, and his teachings are more for laughing than for learning.
While Mao’s portrait becomes moist and misty behind the steam of boiling water in the thriller “The Queen of Hearts,” his poetry is rendered
into a joke through the mouth of a political teacher in “Going Faraway
on a Skateboard”:
I heard Fatty Qi suddenly spot testing [our memory of] Chairman Mao’s
poems. He called on Shorty Zhang to answer his question: “How many
willow branches in a spring wind?” “Thousands. Thousands of willow
branches in a spring wind,” said Shorty. “Six hundred million of China,
land of the gods, how to yell?” Fatty asked again. Shorty stroked his head
in hesitation for a moment, and replied: “Six hundred million of China,
land of the gods, and exemplary like the emperors Shun and Yao.”70
70 Su Tong, “Cheng hualunche yuanqu,” in his Shangxin de wudao, 20. The two lines
are the opening couplet from the second poem of the two heptasyllabic regulated octaves
under the title “Song wenshen” 送瘟神 (Saying good-bye to the god of disease), dated 1
July 1958, in Mao Zedong, Mao zhuxi shici 毛主席詩詞 (The poems of Chairman Mao)
(Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1976), 26; translated by Willis Barnstone in collaboration with Ko Ching-po, The Poems of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Harper & Row, 1972),
93.
157
In a cynical tone, the author presents boyhood as an absurd time of life
in the age of revolution. “Going Faraway on a Skateboard” takes place
on the first day of classes. It is a day full of surprises for the narrator, who
sees his male classmate Cathead masturbating at home in the morning,
his female classmate menstruating in class, his music teacher and the
Party secretary making love in a campus storehouse, but nothing is more
astonishing than the news of Cathead’s being run over by a car when
playing on his skateboard in that evening. A similar surprise ending is
found in “A Sad Dance,” where a former classmate’s legs are broken
when he falls from a scaffold at work. The narrator laments the sudden
and unexpected turn of fortune: “I think that’s fate. Fate is, you only
dance once in your life, but then you fall and break your legs. That’s
it.”71 In “The Brothers Shu,” the falling of the younger brother Shu Nong
from a roof into the river ends his life at fourteen. To be more precise,
thinking of himself as a cat, Shu Nong jumps from the rooftop when he is
chased by his father after setting fire to his brother’s bed in revenge, but
instead of burning up his sleeping brother, his cat catches fire and dies.
Earlier in the novella, he forms a habit of climbing catlike onto the roof,
from where he spies on his father’s affair with the housewife upstairs. He
derives gratification from observing their sexual acts, especially her naked
body, which gives off an unforgettable blue glare at night. Following the
voyeuristic episode is another Freudian twist: Shu Nong has stopped bedwetting since he put on the condoms his father threw into the river. But
Shu Nong’s becoming mature through the Oedipus complex disguised in
his father’s used condoms and mistress (instead of his own mother) turns
out to be a Kafkaesque metamorphosis (into a cat) in the modern city.
In “The Age of Tattoos,” Fragrant Cedar Street emerges as an urban
animal pit, in which father and son are enemies, neighbors fight together,
not to mention large-scale bloody gang fights. Gang fights produce a
nihilistic heroism corresponding to the chaotic radicalism of the Cultural Revolution. That all of the gangs—Wild Boar, White Wolf, and
Black Tiger—are named after a beast reveals the brutish nature of the
revolutionary age. However, when the young hero, a crippled gangster,
asks for a tattoo of a boar head on his arm, what he gets is the word “coward” (naozhong 孬種) on his forehead. Yet the narrator ironically calls this
kind of life their “warm and happy childhood.”72 More spectacles of gang
fights are found in North Town as the heroes of “The Age of Tattoos” reap71
72
Su Tong, “Shangxin de wudao,” in his Shangxin de wudao, 40.
Su Tong, “Ciqing shidai,” in his Ciqing shidai (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1995), 137.
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pear in this coming-of-age thriller. The novel begins with the death of a
gangster Dasheng’s 達生 father in a traffic accident and ends with the
gangster’s being killed in a fight. What makes it a chilling story are the
paper hearts left behind throughout the city by the ghost of a girl, who
had thrown herself into the river after being raped by another gangster.
Throughout the text, the red hearts cut out from waxed paper are said
to be posted on the door of the rapist’s house, the shutter of a drugstore,
the back of the crippled gangster, and the window of Dasheng’s bedroom.
Dasheng experiences a nocturnal emission every time the ghost visits him
in his dream. Indeed, it is sex and violence that nurture the city kids during the revolution and entertain them in their manhood nostalgia.
In Su Tong’s nostalgia for childhood, the age of innocence has become
“the age of tattoos,” whence the scars raised in the past are indelible.
But he does not sanctify or moralize these scars as his predecessors did
in ‘scar literature’; rather, he celebrates and revels in them in the living
hell of the pestilential city, where humans dance with ghosts. As Zhang
Qinghua remarks,
Su Tong has therefore effectively simplified this age and, at the same
time, effectively enriched it, peeling off its political hues and resuming
the gloomy scenes of urban petty bourgeois life. At the same time, the
youthful sentiments and ways of experience allow him to reduce anything
of ideology to childish games and carnival.73
The carnivalesque approach to violence in history, according to Robert
Stam’s comments on Jean-Luc Godard’s comic treatment of physical
violence, is a “strategy of radical simplification aimed at the unmasking
and ridiculing of the hypocrisies of a Power stripped of all euphemism.”74
Su Tong’s teenage perspective is to make the logic of revolution simply
a kind of gang fight (Was not the Gang of Four held responsible for
the Cultural Revolution?). All ideas, ideals, and ideologies are merely
pretexts for libidinal manifestation. Su Tong’s carnivalization of southern
urban life in the age of revolution finds an echo in Wang Shuo’s comingof-age metafiction, which recounts a psychologically homeless gangster
of the same period looking for a memorable home in the capital city
Beijing.
73
Zhang, “Tiantang de aige,” 199.
Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989), 108.
74
159
Beijing Military Compound: Wang Shuo’s Rootless Homesickness
Geremie Barmé observes that during the 1990s “the Cultural Revolution
appeared to many … to have been a period of simple emotions and
plain living.”75 He gives Jiang Wen’s 姜文 acclaimed film In the Heat of
the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi 陽光燦爛的日子, 1994), an adaptation of
Wang Shuo’s novella “Wild Beasts” (“Dongwu xiongmeng,” 1991), as an
example of “a crude retro Cultural Revolution longing,” describing it as
“a coming-of-age story of a group of childhood friends set in the 1960s
[should be 1970s], [which] affirmed this sense of lost innocence.”76 Simple
as the emotions may appear, both the original writing and its cinematic
version present a rather complex view of history unprecedented in the
narratives about the Cultural Revolution. This section first examines the
aesthetics of nostalgia in Wang’s novella that acknowledges the falsehood
of memory in historical testimony, and the meaning of homesickness for
one who is homeless. Secondly, the literary work is compared with the
film reproduction, including the movie script and the motion picture. I
will demonstrate that, for the late and postrevolutionary generations, the
problem of constructing the self lies not so much in a loss of innocence
as a lack of experience in history.
“Wild Beasts”: The Lost Generation
Unlike other opuses about the Cultural Revolution, for example, Gu
Hua’s 古華 Hibiscus Town (Furongzhen 芙蓉鎮, 1981), “Wild Beasts” is not
a heavy-hearted, painful record of the dark age, but a rather light and
cheerful recall of one brilliant teenage year in a hot summer.77 Also different from earlier coming-of-age stories such as Liu Xinwu’s “The Classmaster,” a representative work of ‘scar literature’, it is not intended to
be didactic, but nostalgic.78 The story is set in 1975, the last year of the
Vietnam War and one year before the end of the turbulent decade. The
first-person narrator is a soldier’s son, who dreams of becoming a hero
75 Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia
76 Barmé, In the Red, 317, 324.
77 The film Hibiscus Town (1986) won Jiang Wen the Best Actor Hundred-flower Award
in China.
78 This comparison is made by Zhang Dexiang 張德祥 and Jin Huimin 金惠敏 in
their Wang Shuo pipan 王朔批判 (Critique of Wang Shuo) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue
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of the PLA that would defeat the Soviet Union and the United States in
the third world war. Taking place in a Beijing military compound, where
the author himself grew up, the autobiographical fiction has less concern
with political turmoil than personal disturbances of sex, friendship, and
self-discovery. Dai Jinhua has written:
The salience of Wang Shuo’s and Jiang Wen’s work consists not only of
sexually romanticizing the remembrance of revolution and individualizing
the writing of history, but, more importantly, it embodies the ‘self ’ and the
expression of self.79
Here a viewpoint of the self has replaced value judgment of the ten-year
social disruption, reckoning history to be no more than escapades.
In Wang Shuo’s nostalgia for the age of puberty, the Cultural Revolution is no longer a stereotyped tragedy of unjust, falsified, and misjudged
cases, but a refreshing black comedy filled with gang brawls, petty crimes,
and chasing after girls. The translation of xiongmeng as “wild” in the title
may be best justified in a later interview of Wang by Jamie James:
Although in the West that era is regarded as one of the most appalling
periods in Chinese history, for Wang Shuo and his friends it was a chance to
run wild. “It was a paradise for kids,” he told me. “We were out of control.
Everything was turned upside down….”80
The novella opens with three paragraphs in a nostalgic mood:
I envy those people who come from the countryside. In their memory
exists an infinitely recollectable hometown. Even though this hometown
may in reality be a destitute and unpoetic shelter, if they want, they can
imagine that certain things that they thought to have lost may still be safely
kept in that innocent hometown, and thereby restore their self-esteem and
comfort their sorrow.
I left home for this big city when I was very young, and I have never left
here since. I consider this city to be my hometown. Everything in this city
is changing rapidly—houses, streets, and people’s dress and conversation
—everything has changed, becoming a brand new city that keeps up our
standard of fashion.
Not a lingering trace of what came before. Everything is stripped
clean.81
79
Dai, “Imagined Nostalgia,” 153–154.
Jamie James, “Bad Boy: Why China’s Most Popular Novelist Won’t Go Home,” The
New Yorker, 21 April 1997, 51; emphasis added.
81 Wang Shuo, “Dongwu xiongmeng” (Wild beasts), in Wang Shuo wenji 王朔文集 (Collected works of Wang Shuo), vol. 1, Chunqing juan 純情卷 (Sentimental volume) (Beijing:
Huayi chubanshe, 1992), 406. All quotations of the novella, followed by page references in
80
161
The term ‘nostalgia’ is commonly translated into Chinese as a temporal expression, huaijiu 懷舊 ‘longing for the old days’, or, more apt to
the word’s Greek origin nostos ‘to return home’, as a spatial designation,
huaixiang ‘longing for one’s hometown’. The image of hometown is pervasive in modern Chinese literature ever since Lu Xun’s celebrated short
story “Hometown” (“Guxiang” 故鄉) written seventy years before “Wild
Beasts.” A chronotope of nostalgia, the hometown preserves a person’s
past, often the heady days of one’s youth. Even though the narrator here
realizes that the lost paradise may in fact be a dystopia, as Lu Xun discovered in his homecoming shock, the hometown is indispensable to childhood memories. Its stability provides an urbanite not only with a sense of
security badly needed in the ever changing city, but also with the roots or,
in Wang’s own word, the “traces” (yiji 遺跡) of life. That yiji is usually rendered into ‘historical remains’ suggests the historicity that can be found
in the guxiang, literally ‘old home’ or ‘home of the past’. A city dweller
having no home to yearn for is therefore an outcast of history. The lack
of ‘home of the past’ is a trope of partial or total loss of memory.
As the story unfolds, the I-narrator recalls that he, then a fifteen-yearold boy largely free from adult supervision, is addicted to picking locks
and breaking into apartments with the keys he collects and the passkey
he makes. Literary and film critic Yomi Braester has pointed out the
symbolic meaning of the key:
The skeleton key opens the doors to an alternative fantasy world for Xiaojun, to a place that is paradoxically truly his own. Yet the key brings him
face to face with more mysteries he cannot sort out and more memories
suspended between fiction and reality.82
The protagonist-narrator swears that he has never taken anything worth
ten dollars or more, but later in the story he steals a watch and sells it
for thirty. Accidentally he witnesses the plain living of the government
officials at that time, fully convinced by their old furniture that they
are free from corruption. And the female protagonist Mi Lan’s 米蘭
home that he breaks into, according to his description, has no portrait
of Chairman Mao as other families do; instead, there is a color photo
parentheses hereafter, are translated by me except this one by Judy Chen in her rendition
of Dai, “Imagined Nostalgia,” 153.
82 Yomi Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in TwentiethCentury China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 204. Ma Xiaojun 馬小軍, literally ‘Horse, Junior Armyman’, is the name of a soldier’s dependent that Jiang Wen gives
to Wang Shuo’s I-narrator.
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of Mi Lan in a swimsuit, whose vividness is said to be comparable with
Mao’s pictures. Substituting Mi for Mao deftly unlocks the secret of a
sexualized view of the revolutionary history in the postrevolutionary era.
After telling one-third of the story about how he skips school and
hangs around with his buddies day and night, the narrator begins to
question the reliability of his own recountal. It is at the end of a gang fight
when he confesses that his detailed depiction of a severely wounded boy’s
facial expressions is unreal, because he was running after the innocent
kid and could not possibly see his face. From then on the author uses a
number of sihu 似乎 ‘seemingly’ or ‘as if ’, yexu 也許 ‘perhaps’, and keneng
可能 ‘probably’ throughout the rest of his narration, which consists of
unproved rumors, doubtful descriptions, as well as different versions of an
episode with equally strong evidence. The authenticity of some incidents,
as the narrator admits, is still unknown. Yet the affairs and their actual
states are insignificant now, because the people concerned have long
since forgotten them. By traditional definition, anything insignificant and
forgotten can hardly be counted as ‘history’ proper, for history is not
simply the past, but must be something memorable and relevant to the
present. History is selective and exclusive; a past is not deemed historic
until it is attached with certain importance, regarded as influential or
meaningful—in short, until it is historicized.
In an age of politico-educational nihilism, the protagonist passes the
high-school final examinations in language and literature, politics, and
history by writing nonsense on his examination papers. This interestingly corresponds with the author-narrator’s playful attitude toward the
interrelationship of writing, reality, and memory. About two-thirds into
his narration he finds that his “memory is treacherous; the scene is real,
and yet the time may be incorrect,” because his “memory of the order
of events is somewhat confused, and the motives of acts are unclear”—
even though the scenes are real, they are “mostly fragmentary” and their
“meanings too ambiguous, images vague, only effects distinct”; so he
loses confidence in his recollections: “I am not sure if they really occurred,
perhaps out of the imaginative, obscure desires of myself” (463–464).
We may interpret these statements as the late revolutionary generation’s
incapability to understand the whole picture of their times. Their fragmented views of history are destined to be immature and imperfect,
hence their memories unreliable. Such amnesia results largely from inadequate experience of history, as indicated by Jiang Wen when he elaborates on the original’s opening sentence in his scenario:
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I envy those people who come from the countryside very much, even those
who were sent to the mountains and countryside to live and work in production teams or production and construction corps. Yet I was not among
them; I missed it. In the most spectacular time, we were still little, had
nothing to do with anyone, and so nothing to take pride in nor anything
to complain about afterwards. We are the generation that was ignored.83
They are the forgotten generation, the dropouts who missed the historical
moment. Indeed, they were too young to be among the rusticated youths,
whose experiences are so special and rich that a literature of the educated
youths has formed. Again Wang speaks of the urban and the rural in the
same breath: “In the city there were not many young people; they all
went to the countryside or joined the army” (409). Nor was there much
adult authority, when the fathers were sent away for military assignments.
Cui Shuqin 崔淑琴 has observed in her critique of Jiang’s film:
With the father(s) absent from view, the street and the city become a stage
where adolescents inscribe their own sense of history and experiment with
the excitement of youthful impulses.84
The city as such is a no-place, an un-historical entity—both the past and
the future of revolution seem to belong to the countryside. The educated
youths were geographically marginalized and yet politically centralized,
whereas our characters stayed in the deserted capital because they were
born late and left behind the great current.85
Wang’s childhood world is not a hometown in the countryside, but a
military compound in suburban Beijing. The family housing is a haven,
almost a heaven, for the military brats. As a group of Hong Kong film
critics put it, “they were not duly drawn into the whirlpool of the Cultural
Revolution, nor directly affected by it….”86 Jiang Wen also points out
that during the revolution, children of the army, including himself, were
generally free from political persecution and “lived through the chaotic
years by having fun.”87 They played in the heat of the sun without being
burnt by the sun. Besides such non-events as routine parades and demon83 In Jiang Wen et al., Dansheng 誕生 (Birth) (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1997), 200.
Translation is mine.
84 Shuqin Cui, “Working from the Margins: Urban Cinema and Independent Directors in Contemporary China,” Post Script 20.2 & 3 (Winter/Spring & Summer 2001): 92.
85 Cf. Ni Zhen 倪震, “Canlan de qingchun zhi meng” 燦爛的青春之夢 (In the heat of
adolescent dreams), postscript to Dansheng, 515.
86 Andy Leung 梁良, Yeung How Man 楊孝文, and Gary Mak Sing Hei 麥聖希,
“Zhongguo dianying dahuo quansheng” 中國電影大獲全勝 (A triumph of Chinese film),
Dianying shuangzhoukan 電影雙周刊 (Movie biweekly), no. 404 (6–19 Oct. 1994): 30.
87 Ibid. See also Jiang, Dansheng, 2, 4.
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strations, they had no chance to participate in history. Lacking experience, all this disillusioned generation of China remembers is playing for
thrills.88
Playfulness is the trademark of Wang Shuo and “Wild Beasts” is no
exception, though its thoughtfulness is seldom found in his other fictional
works.89 For instance, in the middle of the story, he writes anachronistically, “Ten odd years later, not long after I finished this story …” (473).
Metafictional remarks like this highlight the alienation of the narrator
from the narrative. As a result, the subject is split into the narrating self of
the present and the narrated self of the past: “I find it very difficult now
to accurately describe my true feelings then, because I am now a person quite different from the person then” (476). Claire Huot argues that
the adult narrator’s “constant conscious distancing from his younger self
also preempts any nostalgia trip.”90 The narrator tries to explain the gap
by attributing it to the conflict of past and present values, but soon he
realizes that the problem of his alienated nostalgia actually lies in writing
—writing as regards the form of fiction, writing as language, and writing as an act to record memory. The most playful scene takes place in
Moscow Restaurant at the birthday party of both our protagonist and
his best friend, who finally fall out over Mi Lan and are about to strike
each other. When it comes to a climax, the story is suspended by a long
ellipsis. Then the narrator jumps out and confesses once more: “Now my
mind is as clear as a bright moon. I find myself making it up again” (481).
Contrary to the prevailing solar symbol (ubi infra), the lunar image here
brings forth contemplation on the fidelity of historiography.
The author, now sitting in front of a mirror on a rainy day, ponders
whether facts are recoverable through the writing of memory: First, is
88 Wang Shuo is placed on a par with Jack Kerouac, an American writer of the beat
generation during the late 1950s. See Chen Xue 陳雪, “Wang Shuo de pizi chuangzao
lishi lun” 王朔的痞子創造歷史論 (On the making of history by Wang Shuo’s hooligans),
in Gao Bo, ed., Wang Shuo: Dashi haishi pizi 王朔：大師還是痞子 (Wang Shuo: A master or
a hooligan) (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 1993), 218.
89 The “intellectual composition” of the novella is disparaged as a failure among
Wang’s typical anti-intellectual works by Xu Jiang 徐江, “Mengna Lisha de yilian huaixiao: Wang Shuo pipan” 蒙娜麗莎的一臉壞笑—王朔批判 (Mona Lisa’s tricky smile: A critique of Wang Shuo), in Zhu Dake 朱大可 et al., Shi zuojia pipanshu 十作家批判書 (A critique
of ten writers) (Xi’an: Shaanxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1999), 301. Zhang and Jin, in their
Wang Shuo pipan, 142, however, deem it one of Wang’s best writings precisely because of
his turn from ridicule toward speculation. It is also regarded as Wang’s least commercial
piece in Chen Sihe, Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng, 328.
90 Claire Huot, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 57.
165
fiction a reliable form? Second, does the nature of memory lend itself to
truth? His answers to both questions are negative. In order to construct
a comprehensible story with a coherent plot, he cannot avoid neglecting
some details of the past and exaggerating others. Language only causes
disruption and distortion of facts. There are inevitable gaps among a
word’s various meanings, and
[t]he accumulation of these gaps has produced a huge space, which separates me far from the facts themselves and creates a world of its own.
I have never seen anything like language that is so fond of boasting and
lying. [482]
Thereupon, as the author concludes, the space of language is always
already imbued with lies unintended by the user of language. He is doubtful whether language can preserve the experiencing self. As for the second
question, he observes that memory tends to sacrifice facts for dramatic
effects. Now that the narrator acknowledges his first encounter and intimate terms with Mi Lan to be sheer fabrications, the entire plot that he
has been painstakingly building up collapses immediately: the outbreak
in the Moscow Restaurant turns out to be an anticlimax with a happy
ending, while the picture of Mi Lan in a swimsuit may be derived from
a photograph of a model on a Sanyo wall calendar. Thus we gradually
discover that the so-called memory of our antihero is largely anamnesis,
an imaginary retrospection of his youth. In his study of youth subculture in the film, Song Weijie 宋偉傑 points out the ambiguity of memory:
“Memory is abstract and concrete. The abstraction makes the narrator doubt again and again the coherence of his story, but the concrete
aspects are crystallized in details such as flavors, colors, and spaces.”91
Yet it is precisely out of the concrete details that the abstract doubts are
raised.
The author-narrator’s obsession over zhenhua 真話 ‘telling the truth’,
zhenxiang 真相 ‘the true situation’, zhencheng 真誠 ‘sincerity’, zhenshi 真實
‘the true’, rushi 如實 ‘being accurate’, chengshi 誠實 ‘honesty’, shishi 事實
‘fact’, laoshi 老實 ‘ingenuousness’, and zhengju 證據 ‘evidence’ throws him
into a confusion of truth and falsehood. The problems of his represented
world direct him to the problems of representation per se. A mainland
91 Song Weijie, “Transgression, Submission, and the Fantasy of Youth Subculture:
The Nostalgic Symptoms of In the Heat of the Sun,” In One Hundred Years of Chinese Cinema:
A Generational Dialogue, ed. Haili Kong 孔海立 and John A. Lent (Norwalk: EastBridge,
2006), 178.
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critic has pointed out: “His suspicion of language is in effect also a suspicion of his own existence.”92 Finally he decides to abandon the truth
so as to finish his story beautifully. After all, filling the blank mind with
illusions and embracing them as recollections is the last resort for someone’s lack of experience to resume his subjectivity, just as those displaced
homeless people must accept the city as their hometown.
In order to rebuild a climax for his story, the narrator divulges his
decision to stamp his brand on the body of Mi Lan, whom he now calls
“a terrible temptation, a flower of evil in full bloom” (490). After he has
broken into her home and raped her, the novella ends in a melancholy
scene underwater. Having dived into a swimming pool, the main character finds himself fall into enemy hands. A group of gangsters at the
edge of the pool keeps kicking him back to water. The last laconic paragraph reads, “I broke into sobs, swimming and weeping hopelessly in
silence” (493). He is crying over his helplessness. Such solitary feeling can
be attributed to his absence or belated birth in the revolutionary age.
In the Heat of the Sun: Inadequacy of Historical Experience
The screen version is basically faithful to the original. First of all, it is
entitled to showcase the frequent appearance of the image of the summer
sun in the fiction. Wang employs the words “sunshine” (yangguang 陽光,
12 times), “sunbeam” (riguang 日光, 3), “the sun” (taiyang 太陽, 3), “blazing
sun” (lieri 烈日, 2), “red sun” (hongri 紅日, 1), and even “setting sun” (xiyang
夕陽, 1) with modifiers like “burning” (shai 曬), “blistering hot” (zhuore 灼
熱), “suffocating hot” (yure 燠熱), “scorching” (kaoren 人), as well as the
most commonly used adjective “strong” (qianglie 強烈). These modifiers
convey a sense of violence. Needless to say, the sun was the symbol of
Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Whereas the title “Wild Beasts”
emphasizes the basic instincts of human nature that transcend the limits
of time, the name In the Heat of the Sun stresses the sense perception of a
specific historical period. Of course, this is not to say that Jiang overlooks
the importance of man’s brutal nature in the course of history. In the right
margin on page 122 of the director’s manuscript, I discover an insertion
about a cruel gang fight in the protagonist’s dialogue with Mi Lan.93 As
92
Deng Xiaomang, Linghun zhi lü, 37.
Jiang, Dansheng, 188, 233, 364. According to Jiang’s final script on p. 364 and the
film, the number of combatants from the other gang should read “two hundred odd”
instead of “two” on pp. 188 and 233.
93
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a matter of fact, violence as a romantic element of redolence and an
irresistible impulse of history is even more explicitly displayed in the film.
When he received his director’s chair, actor-turned-director Jiang Wen
began by searching all local schools and military compounds for his
young actors. A regression to an admiration of one’s adolescent selfimage is commonly found in the coming-of-age stories of Su Tong, as
mentioned above, and Wang Shuo. According to Wang, the city boys
and girls today could hardly match the pretty, pure, and healthy image of
his generation twenty years ago, though such impression was at once disproved by some old pictures, on which the kids then looked skinny, stubborn, and dull.94 Wang now discovers that they have completely transfigured themselves in their creative nostalgia, echoing the narcissistic portrait of his peers in the novella.95 Here nostalgia can be equated with
narcissism in the Freudian sense of self-preservation, though such preservation is problematized in the fiction. The cast of young actors is based
on their idealized projection of themselves nevertheless.
On the one hand, subjectivity is fundamental for both cinematography
and historiography to Jiang:
I think that there is only subjectivity, no objectivity, in a film. Nor do I
believe in an objective history; histories are always discoursed on by an
individual, a group, or a state, and always bear the imprint of the subject.96
It is not surprising to see many shots from the subjective angle of view,
particularly follow shots, in the film.97 On the other hand, verisimilitude
has been the aesthetics Jiang has striven for since becoming an actor.98
After initial casting, Jiang gathered all the young actors, who were born
or raised after the Cultural Revolution, in a military camp in Liangxiang
良鄉, a suburb of Beijing. For one to two months they were cut off from
the outside; wore military uniforms and had their hair cut in old styles;
reported regularly on their ideological progress and personal problems;
94 Wang Shuo, “Yangguang canlan de rizi zhuiyi” 陽光燦爛的日子追憶 (Recalling in
the heat of the sun), in Jiang, Dansheng, 127; also his “Dongwu xiongmeng,” 421.
95 Xiao Yuan 蕭元, in his Wang Shuo zai pipan 王朔再批判 (Another critique of Wang
Shuo) (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1993), 206–207, interprets the narcissistic portrait
as “worship of males,” which is in turn corresponding to the “discrimination against
females” throughout Wang’s fiction.
96 Cited in an interview with Jiang by Wu Kunyong 吳坤 , “Jiang Wen mizhi dianying meiwei” 姜文秘製電影美味 (Jiang Wen’s secret recipe for cinematic delicacy), Yazhou
zhoukan 亞洲週刊 (Asiaweek), 22–28 May 2000, 66.
97 See Leung, Yeung, and Mak, “Zhongguo dianying dahuo quansheng,” 31.
98 See Wu, “Jiang Wen mizhi dianying meiwei,” 65–66.
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learned to ‘combat selfishness and repudiate revisionism’ (dou si pi xiu 鬥
私批修); listened to and sang revolutionary songs; watched movies and
videos from the 1960s and 1970s; read contemporary newspapers and
books; practiced swimming and biking; lived a frugal and disciplined
life in a house full of propaganda posters; and addressed each other
by the characters’ names.99 This pickling process, as Jiang proudly calls
it, can actually be traced to the Soviet dramatic theory of Konstantin
Stanislavsky’s naturalism.100 Stanislavsky’s system of acting requires the
actor to identify with the character by experiencing a similar life in
reality or in the re-creation of such reality. Accordingly, Jiang re-created
a small cultural revolution in a suburb for the postrevolutionary actors,
forcing them to experience the past in order to reproduce his generation’s
experience.
And so Jiang re-created the Great Cultural Revolution on the screen
in like manner. He would not compromise on any minute part, be it a
strident broadcasting tone in the high spirits of revolution or the sound
a car made in the former Soviet Union.101 The film lavishly exhibits
revolutionary songs, including “The Storm of Revolution Raging in All
Its Fury” (“Geming fenglei jidang” 革命風雷激蕩), “The Wild Goose
Flying Afar” (“Yuanfei de dayan” 遠飛的大雁), “Song of Guerrilla Band”
(“Youjidui ge” 游擊隊歌), “Ode to Beijing” (“Beijing songge” 北京頌歌),
the music of the “Internationale,” the Soviet movie Lenin in 1918 (Lenin
v 1918 godu, 1939), the model play The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse
niangzijun 紅色娘子軍), the iconic images of Mao’s statue and portrait, as
well as the celebrated painting “Great Unity of All Peoples.”102 These
cultural relics intensify the aura of history, arousing the sentiment of
nostalgia in an ironic way.103 One might argue that such verisimilitude
is requisite to a film, because the medium demands concrete images for
99 See notes of the director, assistant director Ma Wenzhong 馬文忠, and the young
actors, Han Dong 韓冬 and Shang Nan 尚楠, in Jiang, Dansheng, iv, 18–19, 149–150, 154–
155, 168.
100 Jiang, Dansheng, 19. This culinary metaphor is used again when discussing the auteurism in his second production, namely, Guizi laile 鬼子來了 (Devils on the doorstep).
See Wu, “Jiang Wen mizhi dianying meiwei,” 65.
101 Jiang, Dansheng, 33, 53.
102 On 7 September 1994, two days before the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film
Festival, the Chinese Film Bureau asked Jiang Wen to cut out the “Internationale,” which
is ironically used as background music in the bloody scene of gang fight, but Jiang rejected
the request. Ibid., 67.
103 Braester, in his Witness Against History, 202, has argued that Jiang’s filmic iconology
ridicules, mocks, and finally “undoes Maohistory” (sic).
169
its audio-visual qualities. But Jiang’s nostalgic perfectionism reflects his
quest for a simulacrum of history. Only then when it comes to the scene in
the Moscow Restaurant in which our protagonist stabs his love rival with
a broken bottle, the anticlimax produced by freeze-frame and reverse
slow motion is so powerful that it makes the spectator deeply aware of
the falsehood of reminiscence and the fraudulence of image, because the
more true to life it appears, the higher the degree of fabrication and the
stronger the effect of dramatic irony.
If there is a new sense of history embedded in Wang’s novella and
Jiang’s film, it is the inadequacy of historical experience revealed in their
nostalgia for the past. The next question is: Is the problem of historical
experience merely a generation gap, as it seems to be? Or, more pertinently: To what extent is history experienceable? Perhaps the answer lies
in the absurdity of the response by the retarded boy (a character created
by Jiang himself) to the bad boys—now yuppies in their thirties, riding
in a luxurious limousine and drinking cognac—at the end of the movie,
when they try to evoke from him the memory of the Korean password in
the model play Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi Baihutuan 奇襲白虎團)
that they used to play at in their golden age of the Cultural Revolution.
Contrary to the colorful imagined memory of the remote sunny days,
this last scene of the 1990s is filmed in a black-and-white documentary
style that suggests an alienation from the monotonous reality of the late
Deng period.104 So, instead of giving the expected shibboleth, as he never
failed to do in the Mao era, the retarded boy suddenly replies: “Dumb
cunt!” (shabi 屄).
Shanghai longtang Cityscape: Wang Anyi’s Descriptive Historiography
Among all the major cities in China, Shanghai has become the most
popular in recent academic research and creative writings. This is partly
a consequence of its resuscitation under Deng’s intensified economic
reforms in the 1990s, and partly due to its unique experience during one
hundred years (1843–1943) of colonization and the concomitant modernization that laid the foundation for the new Shanghai today. Dai Jinhua
has pointed out the city’s representation of the Chinese nation-state in its
104 Braester, Witness Against History, 205, observes that the film’s last sequence “suggest[s]
that the present too is only a faded memory, as flat as an old photograph. It is in fact the
past, embellished by fantasy, which is brighter and more real.”
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entirety: “As a specific historical and existing real space, Shanghai reflects
the historical period that includes the beginning of China’s belonging to
the world.”105 Many (hi)stories of the ‘paradise for adventurers’ focus on
its prosperous prehistory from the late Qing to the end of World War II, in
which the French Concession, the British-American International Settlement, and later the Japanese occupation dominated the treaty port. For
instance, Leo Lee’s Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture
in China, 1930–1945 (1999) and Sherman Cochran’s Inventing Nanjing Road:
Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (1999) both conclude in 1945.
In this light, it is interesting to see that Wang Anyi begins her Shanghai tale, The Song of Lasting Regret, not in the flourishing 1930s, but in late
1945, when Japan surrendered and the ‘Paris of the East’ danced its last
tango before the communist liberation. The postwar period is indeed a
transitional point of Shanghai’s shifting image from a capitalist haven to
a communist hotbed in the middle of the twentieth century.
Writing Shanghai (through) Women
The protagonist of The Song of Lasting Regret is not a male mastermind of
the metropolitan network, such as the capitalist hero in Mao Dun’s 茅盾
masterwork Midnight (Ziye 子夜, 1933), but a fringe female figure called
Wang Qiyao 王琦瑤. Writing Shanghai women and writing Shanghai
through women have a long tradition in modern Chinese fiction. David
Wang traces this tradition back to Han Bangqing’s 韓邦慶 Flowers of Shanghai (Haishang hua liezhuan 海上花列傳, 1894), the ‘neo-sensationalist’ school
(xin ganjue pai 新感覺派), the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school, as
well as Eileen Chang and Su Qing 蘇青 of the 1940s.106 Furthermore, Cao
Juren’s 曹聚仁 literary comment has characterized the urban styles in
terms of the female sex: “the Peking school (Jingpai 京派) is like a boudoirbound lady, whereas the Shanghai school (Haipai 海派) is like a modern
girl.”107 In her essay, “Shanghai Women” (“Shanghai de nüxing” 上海的
女性), Wang Anyi elaborates the relation between Shanghai and women,
identifying the city as the theater for the female:
105
Dai, “Imagined Nostalgia,” 158.
Wang Der-wei, “Haipai zuojia you jian chuanren” 海派作家又見傳人 (Another heir
of the Shanghai school), Dushu 讀書 (Reading), 1996, no. 6: 41.
107 Cao Juren (1903–1972), “Jingpai yu Haipai” 京派與海派 (The Peking school and
the Shanghai school), 1935, rpt. as “Haipai” in Cao Juren wenxuan 曹聚仁文選 (Selected
works of Cao Juren), ed. Shao Heng 紹衡, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi
chubanshe, 1995) 1: 150.
106
171
The best way to write about Shanghai is through women. No matter how
aggrieved they feel, Shanghai provides them with a good stage, allowing
them to display their abilities…. If there is a hero in the story of Shanghai,
it is they.108
This idea is embodied in The Song of Lasting Regret, which Yue Gang refers
to as an “urban folklore” that at once deconstructs the male fantasy and
“reconstruct[s] a gender-specific, alternative social history.”109 It is exactly
the feminine sensibility that conceives an alternative historiography of
the metropolitan margins.
Spanning forty odd years from 1945 to 1986, The Song of Lasting Regret
is tripartite. Book I is set in the glittery city of Shanghai during the latter
half of the 1940s. Wang Qiyao, a glamorous girl from a lowly family who
dreamed of becoming a movie star in her school days, takes third place
in the first Miss Shanghai beauty contest after the war. She is then kept
as a mistress by a KMT politician, who is killed in a plane crash in 1948.
In Book II she retreats to the countryside and soon returns as a neighborhood nurse to the fallen city in the 1950s. Associating with three men
—a profligate son of the rich, a half-Russian loafer, and a photographer,
she gives birth to a girl out of wedlock in 1961. Book III covers the decade
after the Cultural Revolution. The middle-aged beauty spends a simple
life with her daughter and young admirers in the reviving city until her
daughter gets married and leaves for the United States. Allusive to Lady
Yang Yuhuan’s 楊玉環 (719–755) demise romanticized in Bo Juyi’s 白居
易 (772–846) oft-quoted poem “The Song of Lasting Regret,”110 the story
ends with Wang Qiyao’s violent death while protecting a box of gold
bars left to her by the politician. The last thing she sees on her deathbed
is mystically the mise en scène of a bedroom murder that she watched in a
film studio forty years ago.
Miss Shanghai Wang Qiyao’s declining life from youth to old age
can be understood synecdochically as Shanghai’s vicissitudes from the
postwar to the postrevolutionary periods,111 but then she is left behind
108 In Wang Anyi, Xunzhao Shanghai 尋找上海 (In search of Shanghai) (Shanghai: Xuelin
109 Gang Yue, The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern
China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 307.
110 For an annotated translation of Bo Juyi’s poem with a historical introduction by Paul
W. Kroll, see Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 478–485.
111 The parallelism between the character and the city has been pointed out by critics.
Wang and Xiao, for example, in their “Lun Wang Anyi,” 194, suggest that the female
fate and the city’s changes are mirror images of each other.
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when the city is back to its sprint at breakneck speed. Uncomplicated
as the storyline appears, the novel is nearly four hundred pages long,
because the author devotes her energy to details of the city’s corners
and nuances of the protagonist’s psychology instead of an intricate plot.
For modificatory purpose, the sentence pattern ‘… shi 是 … de 的’ is
extensively employed in the narrative. The prolonged descriptions in
The Song of Lasting Regret are redolent of the nineteenth-century romanticist Victor Hugo and naturalist Emile Zola, and the efforts of meticulous writing point ironically to the futility of life resonant with Cao
Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. The close attentions to every bit of
life and subtle emotional changes are enhanced by feminine sensibility.
Like Cao Xueqin and Eileen Chang, Wang Anyi is good at in-depth
depiction of the female psychology. The lyrical writing of the romantic
and the nostalgic has distinguished the Shanghai style from the didactic Peking style “equipped with modern western notions of historical
progress.”112
Identifying Wang Anyi as a foremost exponent of the Shanghai school,
David Wang points out that she has walked out of Eileen Chang’s shadow
in two steps: first, Wang Anyi tells the story of what happens to those
pining young lovers in Chang’s romances during the last half of their
lifetime, offering a continuance of the Haipai fiction with a group of oldfashioned acquaintances as a living memory; second, she has replaced
the aristocratism in Chang’s writings with philistinism, remolding the
Shanghai style of literature.113 Therefore, Wang Anyi presses the past of
Shanghai as a canvas on which she paints a beautiful lady past her prime
walking in the city’s residential lanes beyond the neon lights at the end of
nightly carnivals. In order to draw to the last detail this lane-scape, Wang
adopts a descriptive historiography in her narrative.
Descriptive Historiography
What is descriptive historiography? Or, more fundamentally, what is
the importance of historical description in historical narrative? In his
112 Wang, Illuminations from the Past, 220. Li Tiangang’s 李天綱 “‘Haipai’—Jindai shimin
wenhua zhi lanshang” “海派”—近代市民文化之濫觴 (Shanghai school: The beginning of
a modern urbanite culture) gives a detailed account of the term ‘Shanghai school’ from
its origins in painting and opera during the late Qing to the literary debate (with the
Peking school) and practice (of popular literature) in the 1930s. See Li, Wenhua Shanghai
文化上海 (Cultural Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 3–34.
113 Wang, “Haipai zuojia you jian chuanren,” 38, 41, 43.
173
article “Narrative versus Description in Historiography,” Laurent Stern
concludes:
Human actions are narrated, their circumstances and settings are described. Narratives that are not supported by descriptions are vacuous;
descriptions that do not lead to narratives are pointless.114
Accordingly, a description is irrelevant unless it introduces, informs, or
contributes to a narrative; it is relevant only when the environment described has a function in human action. Although Stern ends by claiming: “Both narratives and descriptions are constituent parts of historical
writings,” description is meant to support and be secondary to narrative.115 Responding to Stern’s argument, Haskell Fain argues that historical description should also have aesthetic uses in the art of historical
writing:
One may wish to reexperience, to savor certain events…. Wandering down
memory lane can be an activity that brings pleasure to the wanderer. And
if the time traveler is a novelist or an epic poet, he or she will be able to
make the private pleasure accessible as a work of art, a recherche du temps
perdu [remembrance of things past].116
If Fain’s horizon of appreciation can be widened from events to objects,
beings, and situations, then a historical novelist’s descriptions need not be
narrative-relevant. Descriptive historiography can go beyond the mode
of simply explaining or illustrating a narrative. Such descriptions can
be either ‘objective’ representation of a milieu of the past or subjective
re-creation of a site of memory. Furthermore, contrary to narration,
description is spatial rather than temporal, topological rather than chronological; it presents time in slices and memory in spaces. Whereas narrative historiography is employed to pursue the centrality of a theme or
venue, descriptive historiography is used to draw the details of its peripheries.
The Song of Lasting Regret starts with a five-page section describing old
Shanghai’s “memory lane”—the longtang 弄堂 alleys. This beginning of
the novel is so prosaic that part of it actually appears as a separate short
essay under the title “Speechless Soliloquy” (“Wuyan dubai” 無言獨白) in
114 Laurent Stern, “Narrative versus Description in Historiography,” New Literary History 21.3 (Spring 1990): 567.
115 Ibid.
116 Haskell Fain, “Some Comments on Stern’s ‘Narrative versus Description in Historiography’,” New Literary History 21.3 (Spring 1990): 569–570.
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Wang’s In Search of Shanghai.117 From a bird’s-eye view of the city, postwar
Shanghai is read as a negative print: while the lights form punctuation
and lines, the massive alleyways are the darkness behind them. It is not
at night, but at daybreak when the narrator enters into the particulars of
various classes of the longtang, making a tour from the stone-gate houses
(shikumen 石庫門) to shanty towns (penghu 棚戶). Roofing tiles and roofing felt, roof ridge and roof dormer (laohuchuang 老虎窗), window frame
and windowsill, wooden staircase and wooden partition, street lamp and
street door, rear window and back door, iron gate and cement floor,
wing-room and pavilion room (tingzijian 亭子間), courtyard and parlor,
kitchen and boudoir, terrace and balcony, gable and sewer—the domestic architecture is presented with the utmost exactitude as in a traditional Chinese realistic painting. Then there are other topo-sections on
boudoir, film studio, and apartment house for mistress keeping in Book I,
followed by Book II’s first two chapters, subtitled “Wu Bridge” (“Wuqiao”
橋) and “Peace Lane” (“Ping’anli” 平安里) respectively. Peace Lane
is an extremely common name for more than a hundred alleys in the
municipal maze. The graffiti on the walls of these filthy lanes are inscriptions of fragmentary life scattered in the fissures of the city.118
Shanghai is no longer the same city when its street names are decolonized and revolutionized.119 Thirty years after the liberation, the trams
whose clanging bells sounded like the city’s heartbeat have disappeared,
both the Huangpu 黃浦 River and Suzhou River are badly polluted, and
the alleys are beaten-up.120 In the first chapter of Book III we revisit the
longtang and the houses connected by them—again under the author’s
descriptive guidance. While the apartment complexes’ carved Romanesque designs have gathered dust and cobwebs, the Western-style houses’
117
Wang, Xunzhao Shanghai, 167–170.
Wang Anyi, Changhen ge (The song of lasting regret) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe,
1996), 148–149, 189–190. All page references are given in the text, and all translations
are mine.
119 Wang Anyi is attentive to the changes of street names. Another example can be
found in the opening paragraph of “Banjia” 搬家 (Moving), in her Xunzhao Shanghai, 87,
where she traces the nomenclatures of Huaihai 淮海 Road back to the colonial age of the
French Concession.
120 The mechanical dingdong sound made by tolling of a bell on trams is frequently
mentioned to invoke a nostalgic mood in the novel. It is also associated with the city’s
desire in Wang Anyi’s essay “Xunzhao Shanghai,” in her Xunzhao Shanghai, 20. The
sentimental sound and image of trams have found favor with modern Shanghai writers,
such as Eileen Chang in her 1943 short story “Fengsuo” 封鎖 (Sealed off), whose English
translation by Karen Kingsbury is in Lau and Goldblatt, The Columbia Anthology of Modern
Chinese Literature, 188–197.
118
175
semicircular balconies are divided into two kitchens by the families residing in them. Gone are the splendor of all architectural adornments and
the exquisiteness of the metropolis. Echoing her city-text simile at the outset of the novel, the author laments that the cityscape has become chaotic
and unreadable, even though the old street names are now restored. We
view food, clothing, shelter and transport—every basic aspect of life in
the late 1970s Shanghai detail by detail. In his criticism of the classical
historical novel, Georg Lukács uses Sir Walter Scott as a telling instance
to propose that detail “is only a means for achieving the historical faithfulness.”121 Such observation is hardly sufficient in the case of The Song of
Lasting Regret, since Wang Anyi’s concern is less an authentic reproduction
of a world in the past than the passage of time per se. The accumulation
of time lost is palpable in the dust and dirt repeatedly mentioned in the
specifics about the Romanesque designs, windows, banisters, and oleander leaves.
Wang Ban approaches this stratum of time spent by ordinary people
in their everyday life as the alternative version of temporality explored
by Wang Anyi “that cuts through both the ever-changing time of revolution and the frantic, teleological time of triumphant capitalism,” and
this lived temporality originates “in the cramped space of the longtang.”122
It is precisely because of Wang Anyi’s focus on the longtang, instead of the
bustling Bund, as a sublime spectacle that Zhang Xudong 張旭東 renders her writing of the city into a “natural history” (Naturgeschichte) in the
aesthetic sense of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.123 Asserting
that “the longtang is the embodiment of middle-class Shanghai,” Zhang
analyzes the novel in the context of postsocialist China and argues that
Wang Anyi directs nostalgia “toward a past associated with the unfulfilled dreams of bourgeois modernity.”124 A mainland critic also cites The
Song of Lasting Regret as the first example of an emerging middle-class literature in post-Mao China.125 Indeed, the official history of the radical
proletarian revolution in contemporary Chinese literature is undercut
by everyday concerns of the urban petty bourgeois in Wang’s descrip121 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1963; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 59.
122 Wang, Illuminations from the Past, 228, 231.
123 Xudong Zhang, “Shanghai Nostalgia: Postrevolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s
Literary Production in the 1990s,” positions 8.2 (Fall 2000): 366–375.
124 Ibid., 373, 383.
125 Cheng Guangwei 程光煒, “Zhongchan jieji shidai de wenxue” 中產階級時代的文學
(A literature of the middle-class age), Huacheng, 2002, no. 6: 199–200.
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tive historiography. The rustle of Shanghai’s past is heard in the diurnal
rituals of the wilderness of longtang.
Gossip and Fashion
The changing Shanghai lane-scape has accumulated a history, but the
marginal culture of the longtang precludes a grande histoire. The trivial
matters of everyday banality
have nothing to do with the concept of history, not even petite histoire,
but merely gossip. Gossip is another spectacle of Shanghai’s alleyways. It
is almost visible, viewable, flowing out from rear windows and back doors.
[6–7]
Gossip is error-ridden, hence unsound, and yet unlike history in musty
old books, it concerns personal proxemics and intimate feelings. So the
author dedicates the second section of her novel to a five-page description
of liuyan 流言, or gossip, evocative of Eileen Chang’s favorite mode of linguistic expression and, of course, the title of a collection of Chang’s essays.
Disseminated and distending among innumerable backstreets, gossip is
regarded as the city’s spirit, dream, mind and heart. The congeniality
of the city and fiction lies precisely in, as Wang Anyi expresses it elsewhere, “the psychology of pry” (kuimixin 窺秘心).126 As Shanghai is effeminated in terms of perfumes, fashions and flowers, gossip is also defined
in the feminine: “It … is the scent of women, a mixed scent of boudoir
and kitchen, with a little fragrance of rouge and powder, a little smell
of oil and smoke …” (8). On the one hand, it is considered woman’s
myopia, “junk speech” (9); on the other, insight and truth can sometimes
be found in it. Filled with hearsay and heresies, gossip nonetheless has
the capacity to mislead the public and undermine history: “it seems to
rewrite history…. It nibbles away at the records in books bit by bit …”
(10). Yet gossip is neither public opinion nor political views; it is merely
rumors, despised by both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces.
The nature of rumor reveals Shanghai people’s apolitical and ahistorical
attitude toward life, not only for self-protection, but also for self-creation:
The moments when rumors arise are indeed the moments to take the
utmost care of oneself. To conduct oneself in the alleys of Shanghai is to
exercise the greatest care of, to devote all attentions to oneself, to com-
126 Wang Anyi, “Shanghai he xiaoshuo” 上海和小說 (Shanghai and fiction), in her
Xunzhao Shanghai, 131.
177
pletely concentrate on the self without distraction. One does not want to
make history, but to make one’s own self. [12]
This philosophy of life, with its political indifference, prevails against the
agenda of communist revolution. As Zhang Qinghua remarks, the novel
evinces a contest between the “urban petty bourgeois Shanghai” and the
“revolutionary and political Shanghai” represented respectively by Wang
Qiyao and her girlfriend, Jiang Lili 蔣麗莉.127 Born of a capitalist family,
Jiang converts herself to communism, but after the victory in 1949, life
resumes its routine and she has to spend it with her peasant-turned-cadre
husband’s and their three sons’ garlic odor and athlete’s feet until she dies
of liver cancer in 1965. The result of the contest is:
‘revolutionary Shanghai’ seems never to be able to beat the ‘urban petty
bourgeois Shanghai’—revolution and politics stand above the roofs of
Shanghai, but the daily life of the urban petty bourgeois is deep-seated
in every alley and corner.128
It is in the private corners rather than the political center that everyday
life is practiced.
In the highly politicized 1960s, Wang Qiyao and her fellow townspeople have no concern beyond their humdrum existence and self-images.
After all, the state machine is too big and faraway for them to follow with
interest:
So, the citizens of Shanghai all deal with life in daily routine. With regard
to politics, they are all peripheralized. If you tell them that the Communist
Party is the people’s government, they will keep a respectful distance from
it notwithstanding. They are self-abased and self-effacing, but also selfimportant, thinking they are the real masters of the city. [224–225]
This statement of quotidian depoliticization can be read as a manifesto
of Shanghai citizens, who strategically take an ex-centric position to stay
away from the communist commotion. All of a sudden it appears that
Shanghai has forgotten her birth of the party in 1921 and her aborted
First Chinese Communist Revolution of 1927. That the novel does not
cover the 1920s should not be used as an excuse for the city’s amnesia.
The amnestic city chooses rumor over history in the face of political dis127 Zhang Qinghua, “Cong Qingchun zhi ge dao Changhen ge—Zhongguo dangdai xiaoshuo de xushi aomi ji qi meixue bianqian de yige shijiao” 從“青春之歌”到“長恨歌”—中國
當代小說的敘事奧秘及其美學變遷的一個視角 (From The Song of Youth to The Song of Lasting
Regret: A view on the narrative secret of contemporary Chinese novels and its aesthetic
flux). Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 2003, no. 2: 86.
128 Ibid., 88.
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turbance. Even so, when rumors are utilized as propaganda in the written
forms of ‘big-character posters’ and leaflets during the Cultural Revolution, the city is turned upside-down. The aforementioned photographerlover of Wang Qiyao is among the people who commit suicide under the
pressure of rumors. Rumor has it that he is a spy responsible for training
his women clients as sex-traps.
Embellished by Shanghai opera, brand-name cigarettes, toilet water,
advertisements, and calendar posters from half a century ago, the image
of Wang Qiyao is neither an all-conquering hero of the times nor a
classical tragic hero against fate but, if I can call it oxymoronically, a
hero of everyday life. The quotidian ‘hero’, a major character(istic) of
post-Mao literature in the 1980s and 1990s, knows best how to lead
the urban life under all circumstances. Such heroism lies in the self’s
immersion in the struggle for a livable life and material amenities. Li Jing
criticizes Wang Anyi’s “material morphology” (wuzhi xingtai 物質形態)
for reducing history to a social biology with no concern of spirituality.129
As I am arguing here, the materiality of the mundane world that Wang
demonstrates is the city dwellers’ device to distance themselves from the
state ideology. Of the basic necessities of life, clothing—read ‘fashion’—
is what Wang Qiyao hankers after. Pages of graphic details are given over
to discussions and descriptions of her dress styles for the Miss Shanghai
pageant. Concerning people’s bodily relation to their garments, Eileen
Chang has pointed out the politics in her 1943 essay “Chinese Life and
Fashions”:
In an age of political disorder, people were powerless to modify existing
conditions closer to their ideal. All they could do was to create their own
atmosphere, with clothes, which constitute for most men and all women
their immediate environments. We live in our clothes.130
The clothing space as the ‘second skin’ is the ultimate space that one
could defend.
The politics of apparel becomes more conspicuous in the second and
third parts of the novel. Following the change of regime in 1949, the 1950s
lost city of Shanghai witnesses the replacement of Western-style men’s
suits by modified Sun Yat-sen suits (Zhongshan zhuang 中山裝) and the
gradual disappearance of the once fashionable Manchu banner gowns
(qipao 旗袍), whose modern version, cheongsam 長衫, has become more
fitted and waisted to reveal the contours of the female body since the
129
130
Li Jing, “Bu maoxian de lücheng,” 33.
Eileen Chang, “Chinese Life and Fashions,” The XXth Century 4.1 (Jan. 1943): 60.
179
1920s and 1930s.131 The Cultural Revolution is marked by an anti-fashion
trend of “frugality as fashion” under the dominance of uniform blue cotton clothes “cut full [to] conceal the contours of the figure.”132 The politics of abstinence is characterized by Wang Anyi in her “Notes on a
Fashion Show” (“Ji yici fuzhuang biaoyan” 記一次服裝表演) as a generation of women’s neglect of their own gender—in what I would call a
‘state style’ of no sexual difference.133 On the contrary, the historic significance of 1976, the ending year of the revolution, “belongs to the category
of aesthetics of life,” and in 1977 “the fashion world began to flourish,
with many new styles emerging into the street” (268–269). When Wang
Qiyao found an old qipao in her suitcase, “the clothes in her eyes were
not clothes, but cicada sloughs of time, layer upon layer” (218)—good
old clothes are reminiscences of good old days. While her daughter and
other young fashionists embrace the brave new world of fashion, Wang
Qiyao, in her late forties, welcomes it as a renewal of her sweet experience of bygone days because she sees the provenance of new fashions in
the old styles. As Walter Benjamin remarks, “fashion evokes costumes of
the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in
the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past.”134 Fashion is all
about the past in the guise of the future.
David Wang has indicated that through Wang Qiyao’s attention to
chic, Wang Anyi deems “the ups and downs in politics as no more than
the ins and outs of fashions.”135 Yet I want to stress that the detailed
descriptions of dress should not be reduced to a mere metaphor of politics, which is especially tempting in the case of the anti-fashion Cultural Revolution, when people were deprived of their personal choice of
clothes.136 The politics of apparel lies in the wearer’s retreat into the textile
space, where the immediacy of attire allows the most direct expression of
131 Hazel Clark, “The Cheung Sam: Issues of Fashion and Cultural Identity,” in Valerie
Steele and John S. Major, China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999), 157–158.
132 Verity Wilson, “Dress and the Cultural Revolution,” ibid., 170.
133 See Wang, Xunzhao Shanghai, 79.
134 Benjamin, Illuminations, 261.
135 Wang, “Haipai zuojia you jian chuanren,” 43.
136 Claire Roberts has summarized the sartorial practice of the Cultural Revolution
in her Evolution & Revolution: Chinese Dress 1700s–1990s (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing,
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 1997), 23:
During the Cultural Revolution, it was wise to dress in sympathy with the proletariat. Concern with personal appearance was regarded as an expression of bour-
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personal taste in times of liberty and minimal comfort of the corporeal
self in periods of turmoil.
In his trichotomy of the garment system, Roland Barthes defines written descriptions of clothes as a collective language (langue) rather than
an individual speech (parole), photographs of clothes worn by models
as a semi-formalized state, and real clothes as a dialectic between general rules of fashion and individual ways of wearing.137 Of course, unlike
those published in fashion magazines, verbal descriptions of garb in literary works lack the visual images necessitated in Barthes’ garment system. However, if we apply Saussure’s distinction between language and
speech to Wang Anyi’s vestmental descriptions, the heroic triumph of a
woman’s individual freedom in clothing (speech) over costume (the language) is evident. Wang Qiyao reckons the public taste in the era of
economic reforms as vulgar, representing a fashion statement of many
Shanghainese who believe that fine clothes make the man. This reminds
us of an episode in Records and Fiction: Wang Anyi is disappointed on the
one hand by her parents’ wedding picture, in which they put on rumpled
military uniforms instead of Western wedding garments, and is satisfied
on the other by her maternal grandmother’s photo, in which a bordered
satin dress with stand-up collars and pearls suggest a distinguished family background.138 The word xurongxin 虛榮心 ‘vainglory’ is used in both
novels when it comes to the Shanghai tribe’s consciousness of clothing,
because vainglory is considered the very thingness of life.
Pavilion-room Memorabilia
While the Cultural Revolution is largely skipped in The Song of Lasting
Regret, it functions as a frame of reference in Wang Anyi’s “An Anecdote from the Cultural Revolution.” Like Wang Qiyao, the novella’s main
character, Zhao Zhiguo 趙志國, is also from a humble longtang. He marries into a declined capitalist family, mixing with its female members
when the men are in trouble and away from home in the early 1970s.
Although the story is set against the backdrop of the raging revolution,
it is not about the misfortunes of the father and his two sons or the bitgeois tendencies. Traditional dress was categorized as one of the Four Olds (old
ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits), while Western suits, ties and dresses
were confiscated and denounced as evidence of their wearers’ bourgeois past.
137
138
Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 26–27.
In Wang, Fuxi he muxi de shenhua, 98–99.
181
ter experiences of the age, but about a women’s livable space insulated
in a pavilion room. The author seems to purport that the (dis)course of
revolution is masculine by nature, and that the feminine space may be
an alternative to it. Wang Zheng 汪政 and Xiao Hua 曉華 have spelt out
their understanding of the title:
… the Cultural Revolution engulfed the countryside and the city [as] the
mainstream life in that age, but what [Wang Anyi] saw or found is a
marginal, hidden alternative life outside of or covered by this mainstream
life. Compared with the Cultural Revolution, [the alternative life] can only
be counted as “anecdotes.”139
What is this alternative life? The critics point to traditional values and
human relations, which were under siege by the revolution, but I read
something else.
For Zhao Zhiguo and many old Shanghainese, the Cultural Revolution brings history to an end and leads their city toward historical decay.
Nostalgia becomes the ladies’ infectious mood that ferments in their
pavilion-room chitchats. Amazed by the European landscape mosaic on
the mantelpiece and other traces of prosperity in the house, Zhao feels
as if he had entered a ruin of the historic city. Yet what really intrigues
him is the personal experience of his wife’s sister-in-law, Hu Dijing 胡迪
菁, whose memory of old Shanghai always inspires the Zhang 張 sisters
and interests Zhao himself. Zhao and Hu gradually set their affections
on each other through their pleasurable exchange of memorabilia from
1930s pop songs (e.g., “Yelaixiang” 夜來香, or “The Tuberose”), ballroom
dances (tango, waltz), Hollywood movies (Waterloo Bridge) and stars (Clark
Gable, Ingrid Bergman), Chinese operas, old cigarette brands, calendar
models, hair oil, toilet water and Paris perfume. These affections, however, drive Zhao away from home twice: the first time takes place when
he falls into a love triangle with Hu and his wife’s younger sister, resulting
in Zhao’s visit of his rusticated wife in Anhui;140 the second time he moves
away from Shanghai with his returned wife after Hu has disclosed to the
family that the younger sister was infatuated with him. So the story ends
with the couple’s decision to leave for a remote town.
Zhao Zhiguo’s two journeys to the rural are, de facto, escapes from the
urban. Contrary to Wang Qiyao’s consideration of Shanghai as her stage,
139
Wang and Xiao, “Lun Wang Anyi,” 192.
The author herself went to live and work in the production team of a rural commune
in Wuhe 五河 County, Anhui, between 1970 and 1972, but she was unable to return to
Shanghai until 1978.
140
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Zhao regards the city as his prison: “Life in Shanghai thus routinizes and
reifies all aspects of life, art, and cultivation. It enshrouds you, leaving
you no way out.”141 From his point of view, it is precisely in the details of
everyday living that modern urbanites are confined:
Life is just too concrete, so busy and complicated, full of details…. And
details in the city of Shanghai are particularly numerous…. They are that
kind of ornamental, decorative, redundant details, capable of reproduction, and their proliferation cannot be restrained by any force. [114]
Zhao is good at going into details, especially in the boudoir, but the
propagation of details finally endangers his place in the family. He has no
choice but to displace himself, to travel outside Shanghai. On the train
to Anhui, he experiences travel as an abstraction of time and space:
The train moved again. This world is literally boundless. Journey amplifies
time, and time is infinite. Zhao Zhiguo seemed to be taking a test, which is
to remove all concrete and tangible things, leaving only time and space for
one to deal with. At this moment, man has nothing but abstract thought.
[114]
After he has arrived at the farm, it is not the revolutionary film The
White-haired Girl (Baimao nü 白毛女) shown in the fields but nature that
empties him of his metropolitan memory. The ballet dancers’ movements
on the flapping screen in the wind appear to be overacted and absurd,
but looking at the stars overhead, Zhao “became a man without a past; all
of his history had retreated beyond the darkness of night and wilderness
of open country” (118). Thus, the masculine mass movement is not an
exit for the mundane urban life, nor is the feminine private space. Hu
Dijing once compares Zhao Zhiguo to Jia Baoyu, the heartbreaker in
Dream of the Red Chamber, and their pavilion room to Jia’s Prospect Garden
(Daguanyuan 大觀園). The ladies’ pavilion room first serves as Zhao’s
haven in the middle of the turbulent decade, but soon turns out to be
a love snare for him. Zhao’s escapism presents a striking contrast to
Wang Qiyao’s engagement in everyday life. Zhao’s mourning of the lost
Shanghai is a means to shun reality, whereas Wang Qiyao’s nostalgia is
to use the past as a gauge to scrutinize the present.
Nevertheless, there is common ground between the two stories, and
that is descriptive excess. The tedious descriptions of day-to-day experiences and heart-to-heart intimacy in Wang Anyi’s historical fiction of
141 Wang Anyi, “Wenge yishi” (An anecdote from the Cultural Revolution), in her
Shangxin Taipingyang (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1995), 121. Hereafter page references are
given in the text; translations are mine.
183
Shanghai are commeasurable to the trivial round of daily life and the
complex sensibilities of the common people in the real world. The everydayness in descriptive historiography has decentered, if not yet dissolved,
the grandiloquence of revolutionary history. With Wang’s decentering
methodology, history is not to be redeemed from major political events,
but from minor personal matters, which the author often likens to leftover
bits and pieces of fabric. In fact, this understanding of history undermines
the treatments of history and humankind by Marx and Engels:
But life involves, before everything else, eating and drinking, a habitation,
clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life
itself. And indeed this is a historical act, a fundamental condition of all
history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be
fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.142
Whereas Marxist materialism is foremost interested in life as a collective
historical trend in which the individual is considered a mere means of
production, Wang is more concerned about life as a private practice
against the massive political forces of history. She sees history in private
life, in its smallest trifles. Trifles are worth ruminating upon because
they are the bits of the past that one was able to control (e.g., choice
of one’s clothing—at least its size and degree of cleanliness), is able to
re-create (according to one’s nostalgic needs), and will be able to engage
(in the day’s routine). And this minimal freedom of the individual can be
materialized only in the metropolitan margins.
Dai Jinhua sees the nostalgic tendency as testimony to the anxiety over
modernization:
The wave of nostalgia brings new representations of history, making history the ‘presence in absentia’ that emits a ray of hope on the Chinese
people’s confused and frenzied reality.143
While this view may sound too optimistic, nostalgia for the hometown in
the Deng era finally rescued the city from Mao’s strategy of encircling the
cities from the rural areas. Writing through Maple Village and Fragrant
Cedar Street, Su Tong has undertaken a historical journey from an imaginary rural hometown to his boyhood urban home. In this course, the
142 Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), The German Ideology (1846),
in their Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1959), 249.
143 Dai, “Imagined Nostalgia,” 159–160.
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country gradually yields to the city in Su Tong’s fiction, as well as in contemporary Chinese literature. After half a century of silence, the bustling
cityscape now re-emerges into the literary scene of mainland China from
the nostalgia of Southern town streets, a Beijing military compound, and
Shanghai longtang alleys. The nostalgic imaginations of the city in the
works of Su Tong, Wang Shuo, and Wang Anyi facilitate personal experiences of history and self-analyses in narrating the past. Both Su Tong
and Wang Shuo choose their own ways to interpret the Cultural Revolution, rendering the elder generation’s political tragedy into their own
generation’s coming-of-age thriller or lyric comedy. Wang Shuo’s lighthearted metafiction presents the rootless homesickness of a decentered
generation in the political center. And Wang Anyi’s Miss Shanghai has
left the stage to become a spectator of the new China after 1949. This
historical consciousness brings forth an outsider position of the characters vis-à-vis their sociopolitical environments in history. It allows us to
stand outside of and look back at a modern history, whose complexity
can only be mapped from the country to the city.
chapter four
THE BODILY TEXT AND THE TEXTUAL BODY:
THE VIOLENCE OF HISTORY
It forces the silent body to speak….
The violence of the body reaches the
written page only through absence,
through the intermediary of documents that the historian has been able
to see on the sands from which a presence has since been washed away….
The body is a cipher that awaits deciphering.
– Michel de Certeau, The Writing of
History1
We have reviewed the remapping of history in Deng’s China in terms of
the regional-familial, the minority marginal, and the urban-rural spaces.
In this last chapter, I shall concentrate on the most basic locales—the personal and, metafictionally, the textual spaces. Since “history—as something given, as a reality, a suprapersonal power—represents no less an
oppression of the ego by an external agency …,”2 private memory can
be the last defense line to resist the collective recollection. Insofar as the
personal past is concerned, nothing is more immediate than one’s own
body, the body being both the agent that experiences and desires to know
about history, and the medium through which history violently manifests
itself. It is the body that painfully feels the effects of history and on which
history forcefully etches itself. Without the body, history is an intangible
idea. Not only does history register itself through the life cycle of birth,
age, illness and death, but it always also configures itself by disfiguring the
human body. Yet the body is not a mere passive object awaiting mutilation; it also plays an active role in an attempt to reconstruct the past,
hence the subjectivity, departing from the destructive marks that history
1
De Certeau, The Writing of History, 3.
Georg Simmel, “How is History Possible?” (1905), in his On Individuality and Social
Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 4.
2
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mercilessly imprints. It transforms its flesh and blood into lines and pages,
turning its torso into a text. After all, it is the truncated text—the fiction as
a fraction of history—that embodies the individual’s memory and imagination of the past.
In his probing study of the body in literature, Peter Brooks extends
sexual curiosity about the body to the narrative desire for knowledge
under the rubric of the Wisstrieb, or “epistemophilia”:
My subject is the nexus of desire, the body, the drive to know, and narrative:
those stories we tell about the body in the effort to know and to have it,
which result in making the body a site of signification—the place for the
inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot
and meaning.3
Here I see the body as a site of historic signification—the place for the
inscription of the past—and therefore as a text, a narrative embedded
with historical experience and knowledge. At the same time I also read
the text as a body, a corpus of signs that invites interpretation and incites
pleasure from its reader. Accordingly, I consider the human body as
a locus of historical writing—as a text on which the past is violently
inscribed—and the textual body as an embodiment of delighted violence.
Indeed, the theme of violence appears in all of the preceding chapters.
For example, in Mo Yan’s The Red Sorghum Family, discussed in chapter 1,
the male-dominated history of modern China is presented regionally as
a carnival of violent conquests of women by men and violent conflicts
among men and women (e.g., the battles between various military forces
and the excoriation of Uncle Arhat). In chapter 2, the politics and poetics
of representing the minority is dealt by Zhang Chengzhi in the valance
of violence. This is followed in chapter 3 by the necessity of violence in
Su Tong’s and Wang Shuo’s nostalgia for their comings-of-age in urban
space.
Violence involves space—the space of one’s own, particularly one’s
own body, being violated. Politically speaking, violence and power are
inseparable.4 In the beginning of his 1919 essay Politics as a Vocation, Max
Weber defines the state as “a relation of men dominating men, a relation
supported by means of legitimate (i.e., considered to be legitimate) vio3 Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 5–6.
4 Political theorist C. Wright Mills says in his The Power Elite (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1956), 171: “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power
is violence.”
the bodily text and the textual body
187
lence.”5 Insofar as modern Chinese history is concerned, it is revolutionary violence that is legitimized and heroized. When revolutionary violence is presented in revolutionary historical fiction, such as Zhao Shuli’s
趙樹理 short novel Changes in Li Village (Lijiazhuang de bianqian 李家莊的變
遷, 1946),6 it takes the form of discursive violence to justify violent revolution and violently suppress the other, be it the KMT or the Japanese.
Discursive violence is the violence that uses the power of writing to claim
that what is written in words represents ‘objective facts’, or what is textualized must be the Truth of history. In their study of violence, Nancy
Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse offer two modalities of violence,
namely, the representation of violence and the violence of representation:
that which is ‘out there’ in the world, as opposed to that which is exercised
through words upon things in the world, often by attributing violence to
them. But … the two cannot in fact be distinguished, at least not in writing.7
Discursive violence is the violence of representation, or the violence of
narration.
Hannah Arendt once wondered why so little attention has been paid to
the enormous role of violence in the scholarships of history and politics;
she notes: “There exists, of course, a large literature on war and warfare,
but it deals with the implements of violence, not with violence as such.”8
Yet the idea of violence is almost inseparable from its practices, for violence can hardly be such until it is implemented. This is reflected in the
origin of the Chinese word for ‘history’, shi 史. As I discuss in detail in the
appendix, the oracle-bone inscription of the character is constructed by
the pictographs of a weapon on the top and a hand at the bottom, indicating the act of hunting or fighting. The early conception of ‘history’ in
China is therefore derived from the violence of venery or military ‘events’
(shi 事). What makes it more interesting and complex are the later—and
more popular—interpretations that civilize the barbarism by substituting a written document or writing instrument for the battling implement
depicted in the graph. As a result, the violence of history is pacified by
5 Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 2.
6 In Zhao Shuli daibiao zuo 趙樹理代表作 (Representative works of Zhao Shuli), ed. Lin
Xianbi 藺羨璧 and Liu Jingchun 劉景春 (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1986),
76–195.
7 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “Representing Violence, or ‘How
the West Was Won’,” introduction to The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History
of Violence, ed. Armstrong and Tennenhouse (London: Routledge, 1989), 9.
8 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 8.
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the power of discourse through the act of recording. Thus, the etymological explanations of shi ‘history’ suggest both the content and the form for
historical representation: history is perceived as violent events, recounted
in the narrative mode.
The problem remains: from our experience of reading history, violence appears to manifest itself only by isolated events through the act
of narration; consequently, it is difficult, if not impossible, to deal with
“violence as such.” In their study of narrativity and violence in Assyrian palace reliefs of war and hunting, Berkeley scholars Leo Bersani and
Ulysse Dutoit pertinently point out that our thought about violence has
long been conditioned within narrative frameworks:
We usually think of violence in terms of historically locatable events; that is,
as a certain type of eruption against a background of generally nonviolent
human experience. In this view, violence can be made intelligible through
historical accounts of the circumstances in which it occurs. Such accounts,
like almost all historical writing, are narrative in that they elaborate story
lines as a way of making sense of experience. Violence is thus reduced to
the level of a plot; it can be isolated, understood, perhaps mastered and
eliminated.9
Because of narrativization, violence is dangerously believed to be only
abnormal, hence forgettable or even forgivable. Thus, Bersani and Dutoit propose a tactic of de-dramatizing or denarrativizing violence. This
requires us to reflect upon the ways violence is represented. It is therefore
interesting to investigate how the fictionalization of ferocity in the Dengist
era had gone beyond being a symptom of history to become a form of
aesthetic.10 We shall examine the aesthetic experiments in the bodily and
textual spaces made by the history-hungry and bloodthirsty writers Mo
Yan, Su Tong, Liu Heng, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei on the following pages.
Gastrotext: Food and the Body in the Fictions
of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Liu Heng
In contemporary Chinese fiction of history, many personae are noticeably named for food, e.g., Sima Grain (Liang 糧) in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts
and Wide Hips, Rice Boy in Su Tong’s Rice, as well as the six children—
9 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and
Modern Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 47, 51.
10 Jing Wang, introduction to her China’s Avant-Garde Fiction, 4.
189
Buckwheat, Soybean, Little Pea, Red Bean, Mung Bean, and Millet—
in Liu Heng’s “Dogshit Food” (“Gouri de liangshi” 狗日的糧食, 1986).
Mo Yan’s The Red Sorghum Family elevates a daily foodgrain to a local
cult. The salty white powder from sorghum stalks functions as an elixir
to heal Granddad’s wound; sorghum porridge is prepared as a tonic to
treat his typhoid and as a weapon to scald the invaders; sorghum field
serves as cover for the guerrillas; and sorghum wine is used as an antiseptic by Grandma to disinfect the leper’s house. But the significance of
red sorghum extends beyond the plant’s practical value. At the end of the
fifth chapter, pure-breed sorghum is exalted to be the “family’s glorious
totem and a symbol of the heroic spirit of Northeast Gaomi Township”
(496/359). Furthermore, in his award-winning film Red Sorghum (1988),
an adaptation of the novel’s first two chapters, director Zhang Yimou
張藝謀 stresses the pleasure of intoxication by adding two ritual scenes
of wine ceremonies in the light of Nietzschean “Dionysiac rapture” and
subversive sublime.11
Breasts and Breads: Mo Yan’s Mammary Historiography
Noteworthier is Big Breasts and Wide Hips, in which Mo Yan writes about a
mother who, in order to feed her children and mother-in-law, steals beans
from a mill by swallowing them raw at work and then uses a chopstick to
make herself throw them up at home. During the great famine of the early
1960s, when an estimated thirty million people died of hunger, “mother’s
stomach ha[d] turned into a grain sack” (468/440). Food also dominates
the destinies of her starving daughters: Laidi elopes with Sha Yueliang,
who leaves eighty-eight hares hanging from the trees as an engagement
gift for her mother; Zhaodi first thinks of marrying Sima Ku when he
helps her catch a big eel on the frozen surface of a river; Lingdi trysts
Birdman Han for the birds he hunts; Xiangdi becomes a prostitute to save
her family from starvation; Yunü, the blind youngest daughter, drowns
herself in a river because she cannot bear to ‘see’ the suffering of her
mother with the raw beans. And Qiudi 求弟, sold to a White Russian
11 Mo Yan informs us that Zhang Yimou was reading Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
and expressed his admiration for the Dionysian spirit while making the movie. See Mo
Yan, “Hong gaoliang jiazu beiwanglu” 紅高粱家族備忘錄 (Memorandum of The Red
Sorghum Family) (1987), in his Hui changge de qiang—Mo Yan sanwen xuan 會唱歌的牆—莫言
散文選 (The singing wall: Selected essays by Mo Yan) (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe,
1998), 260. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, 22.
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lady and renamed Qiao Qisha 喬其莎, ends up with a most disturbing
detailed depiction of exchanging her body for buns:
Finally, Pockface Zhang tossed the bun to the ground. Qiao Qisha rushed
up and grabbed it, stuffing it into her mouth before she even straightened
up. Pockface Zhang moved behind her, lifted her skirt, pulled her filthy
[pink] panties down to her ankles, and skillfully lifted out one leg. After
parting her legs, he took out his organ, unaffected by the famine of 1960,
and stuck it in. Like a dog stealing food, she forced herself to tolerate the
painful posterior attack as she gobbled down the food, continuing to swallow even when it was gone. The pain in her crotch was nothing compared
to the pleasure the food brought. And so, while Pockface Zhang was madly
pumping from behind, making her body rock, she never stopped attacking
her food. Tears wet her eyes, a biological reaction from choking on the bun,
totally devoid of emotion. Maybe, once she’d finished swallowing the food,
she became aware of the pain in her backside, because when she straightened up, she turned to look behind her. The dry bun had gone down
hard, stretching her throat, so she thrust out her neck like a duck. Pockface Zhang was still inside her, so he wrapped his arm around her waist
and, with the other hand, took a flattened bun out of his pocket and tossed
it on the ground in front of her. She stepped forward and bent down again,
with him still attached, one hand on her hip, the other pushing down on
her shoulder. This time, as she ate the bun, she allowed him unconditional
freedom to proceed as he wished, with no interference. [460–461/434]
The master trope of this saga, as its title indicates, is the female figure.
The story begins and ends in similar sexual photisms by a Swedish pastor
and his half-breed son, respectively: the former dreams of celestial bodies
resembling a woman’s breast or buttocks and sees the Virgin Mary’s pink
breast when he wakes up from his bed, whereas the latter, lying in front
of his mother’s grave under the star-lit sky, indulges in debris of former
days that turn into various types of breast, which finally combine into one
gigantic breast and “become the world’s highest peak towering between
heaven and earth” (685).12 Here Mo Yan presents the topography of
history in the somatology of woman, particularly the breast, because the
breast is the beginning of desires—for food, for sex, and for narration.
Shelley Chan has compared the images of the heroines in Mo Yan’s
phallic text, The Red Sorghum Family, and this philogynous piece:
Whereas Grandma’s breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets in the first
novel, the breast in the later work not only signifies the suffering body of
12 The opening scene is deleted by the author in subsequent editions of the novel and
not available in the English version.
191
the female protagonist and the other female characters of the story, but
also bears historical meaning.13
In the light of Peter Brooks’ interpretation of the psychoanalyst Melanie
Klein’s symbolization of the mother’s body, especially the breast, Chan
suggests that mother Shangguan Lu’s breasts, with which she nurses
her daughters who are married to men of various military backgrounds,
“serve to eliminate the boundaries between different political forces.”14
And for Shangguan Lu’s only son, Jintong, who has an aversion to
all food except mother’s—and later, goat’s—milk, his mother’s breasts
become the original object of his fetishistic obsession. Thus, Chan concludes her comparison between Mo Yan’s fatherly and motherly texts:
From drinking wine (Granddad) to drinking milk (Shangguan Jintong),
Mo Yan’s characters actually represent the writer’s skepticism and sarcasm
toward history as reflected by what he sees as a “species’ regression.”15
Twentieth-century Chinese history here is narrated by the male protagonist Shangguan Jintong through his desire to describe the breasts
of his mother, his sisters (Laidi, Lingdi, Pandi, Niandi), a woman soldier, call girls, as well as some 120 pairs of breasts at the annual Snow
Festival, during which he acts as the Snow Prince to bless the town’s
women to bear a son by fondling their breasts. Their breasts are likened
to a plethora of natural and artificial images, including gourds, turnips,
pears, muskmelons, fruit of a palm tree, opium flowers, butterflies, doves,
roosters, hens, quails, hornets’ nests, little red-eyed white rabbits, fawns,
mountain peaks, stars, enamel vases, glass bowls, and even steamed buns.
Then in the era of capitalism, they are emblazoned with all styles of lingerie, including a flapped lined jacket and a rabbit-fur brassiere attributed to Shangguan Lu’s inventions for her own nursing purpose and
protection for the exposed teats of Jintong’s milk goat, respectively, as
well as an electronic massage bra. Jintong’s extravaganza of eros requires
an overflow of oratory in Mo Yan’s mammary historiography.
As the gauge of both private and public history, the breast is transformed along the vicissitudes of life and times. Mother’s moods are reflected by the color and shape of her nipples, by the output and taste
of her milk; to Jintong, victory in the anti-Japanese war means only the
end of breast-feeding and the beginning of relying on goat’s milk. Dur13
14
15
Chan, “From Fatherland to Motherland,” 497.
Ibid.
Ibid., 499.
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ing the war, Mother’s milk first “tasted like dates, rock candy, and preserved eggs, a magnificent liquid” (53/78), but then “carried the taste of
grass and the bark of trees” (132/154) due to shortage of food. With the
advent of the Communist army that Pandi has joined, Shangguan Lu’s
milk reaches high quality and quantity, and yet during the mass starvation the women of Northeast Gaomi Township are “so undernourished
that [their] breasts lie flat on [their] chest[s]” (458/432). In the crazy
years of class struggle, fantasy has it that a woman spy plants a radio in
her breast and uses her nipple as electrode; and the Cultural Revolution
witnesses the prostitute Shangguan Xiangdi’s breasts covered with scars
and bruises. Finally, the late 1980s is represented by woman’s breasts
totally commercialized as sexual objects in terms of prostitution, plastic
surgery, and the lingerie business. The course of history thus unfolds in
the story of the breast, with different appearances and a variety of the
bosoms associated with events past.
Rice and Vice: Su Tong’s Alimentary Historiography
While the material need for food metamorphoses Shangguan Lu into
a ruminant in Mo Yan’s somatization of history, it also finds a way in
Su Tong’s fiction to shatter the master narrative of official history. In
“Escape,” a Chinese farmer volunteers to fight in the Korean War not
because of the grand communist mission or national defense, but simply
for food: “Dying with a full stomach is certainly a damn sight better than
plowing the fields on an empty one.”16 Food and violence are perfectly
twisted together in Su Tong’s “The Song of Sweet Osmanthus” (“Guihuashu zhi ge” 桂花樹之歌), “The Brothers Shu,” and Rice. In “The Song
of Sweet Osmanthus,” a pseudo-autobiographical story about generations of two villages contending for osmanthus flowers, thieves are punished by spreading nectar on their hands to attract bees to sting them.17
In “The Brothers Shu,” corporal punishment is frequently inflicted upon
children by teacher, father and brother. The way a principal punishes his
pupil, who pees in a neighbor’s rice pot, is to force him to eat the rice.
In Rice, a story about the rural-urban internecine war that takes place
on the body, the human body is no less biological than historical.18 The
16
In Su Tong, “Tao,” 146; idem, “Escape,” 494.
Su Tong, “Guihuashu zhi ge,” in his Nanfang de duoluo, 298.
18 Robin Visser, in her “Displacement of the Urban-Rural Confrontation in Su Tong’s
Fiction,” 128, explains: “Because the city is depicted as a space that distorts humanity by
17
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body needs to be fed by its staple food—rice in our case. Rice in China
has a history even longer than that of the state itself, where it has been
the southern diet for over two thousand years.19 In its historical struggle
with other staples, as anthropologists have pointed out, “[r]ice dominated
wherever the soil and water conditions were right.”20 Being “the cultural
superfood,” rice exercises its mighty power through the body of the hero,
Five Dragons. It is the hunger for rice that drives Five Dragons from a
famine-stricken village to an urban rice emporium. The grain implicitly
recapitulates a Freudian version of the transformation of need into concupiscence. Soon after it has satisfied Five Dragons’ hunger, it turns into
an impulse of desires for vengeance, sex, wealth and power. Five Dragons
not only eats much rice, but also likes to sleep and make love on mounds
of rice, and to abuse the female body with rice. When history leaves stigmata, gonorrhea, and wounds upon his body cap-à-pie, rice also serves
as a healing force:
It was, after all, rice, and rice alone, that had a calming, cooling effect on
him; all his life it had comforted him….
… Scooping up handfuls of rice, he poured it over his head. The soft
flowing sound was soothing; the rice cooled him as it brushed his skin; it
was burying him, covering his scars and every inch of rotting, suppurating
flesh. It eased his tension and turned his thoughts to happier episodes from
his childhood in Maple-Poplar Village…. [270–271/241–242]
Su Tong’s description of rice is reminiscent of Mo Yan’s fetishism of
sorghum in the aforementioned medical and strategic powers. The double functioning of rice as food and pharmakon, as poison and antidote at
the same time,21 manifests itself through the body of the peasant-turnedmerchant Five Dragons. Five Dragons also develops a sexual perversion
of cramming raw rice into the vagina, as if the rice were his sperm. When
a whore manages to remove the sticky kernels, he forces her to swallow
them with the muzzle of his pistol. Violence comes to its climax in the
depriving it of the unique attributes of soul and spirit, the body takes on increased priority
as the novel progresses.”
19 E.N. Anderson, Jr., and Marja L. Anderson, “Modern China: South,” in Food in
Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, ed. K.C. Chang (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977), 328: “A huge bowl of rice, a good mass of bean curd, and a dish of
cabbages … is the classic fare of the everyday south Chinese world.” See also K.C. Chang,
“Ancient China,” ibid., 27, 50–51.
20 Anderson and Anderson, “Modern China,” 323.
21 In Su Tong’s “Yingsu zhi jia” (Opium family), 113, opium and rice are regarded
identical as food for living.
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form of sexual abuse, and on the top of it Five Dragons adds his appetite
pleasure.
Unlike Mo Yan’s red-sorghum heroes, Five Dragons’ diet is marked
by abstinence from any kind of liquor, even rice wine. For many people,
as Freud observes, intoxication is one of “the most interesting methods of
averting suffering” and “directly caus[ing] … pleasurable sensations.”22
To Five Dragons, however, wine only evokes his memory of being humiliated on his first night in the city by Abao, who forces him to drink and
to call him dad for a piece of meat. The stigma is engraved in the mind
of Five Dragons, who later follows the example of Abao to abuse others.
Thus he refuses to drink even at his own wedding banquet: “I don’t drink.
I hate the stuff. It puts [a man] at the mercy of sober people” (98/83–
84).23 Five Dragons’ digestive and alimentary language is heterogeneous,
indicating a personal past rather than a homogenous history. In terms
of Barthes’ semiology of the food system, it is not evolved from a “collective usage,” but “from a purely individual speech,” a kind of culinary
idiolect.24 Only Five Dragons would knock all his good teeth out, as if
erasing all blots on his microhistory, in order to put in the gold ones to
celebrate his rebirth in the city.
Under Su Tong’s pen, the body becomes a spectacle, hence an object
of description. In the scene of a public bathhouse, for example,
Five Dragons … would strip naked, like everyone else, his and their genitals
out there for all to see in the mist….
[Gazing at Abao’s body lying prone on a plank,] Five Dragons was
sickened by [his] milky skin. His buttocks were as soft and fleshy as a
woman’s, with the same curves; dark curly hairs grew around the anus. Five
Dragons splashed water on Abao’s back,… his fingers brushing against
flabby skin that covered a layer of cottony fat and a network of indigo
blood vessels. [44–45/35–36]25
However, the body is more than a Cartesian corpus that lies ‘outside’
language as a discursive object.26 It is, in the light of the NietzscheanFoucauldian genealogy,
22 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 25.
23 I restore “a man” (nanren 男人) from the Chinese original to highlight the gender
issue.
24 Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 28.
25 Here the beginning of the second paragraph about the protagonist’s gazing at the
same sex, left out in Goldblatt’s translation, is my rendition.
26 For a discussion of René Descartes’ dualistic conception of the body as opposed
195
the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas),
the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity),
and a volume in perpetual disintegration.27
It is the place of confrontation, the medium of history, and the frame
of plot. All adverse forces wage against each other in molding the body,
affecting its temperament, nervous system, and digestive apparatus,
which in turn speak for its experience of being constructed and destructed by sickness and food: “A sack of rice perfectly describes the diseaseridden Five Dragons” (283/252). This metamorphosis echoes the Hindu
aphorism “A man is what he eats.”28
Rice does not register such historical details as the decreased output
of rice from seventy to thirty-six percent in China between the seventeenth century and the 1930s.29 Nor can we find any official data in the
novel about the famines in south China. What we see is a translation
of history into the biological space of the body. The body, to borrow
Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, “becomes a concrete measuring rod for the
world, the measurer of the world’s weight and of its value for the individual.”30 Su Tong’s writing is a strikingly violent collage of human bodies
printed in three hundred pages, where men murder men, men abuse
women, fathers abuse sons, and sons murder fathers. Different historical forces (floods, famines, wars, and modernization) contend with each
other through the male and female bodies. While all women in the narrative are victims of men, no man—not even the hero Five Dragons—
is the master of himself, his circumstances, or his origin and descent.
Every-body is a piece of paper on which history writes its fission.
Excretion as Expression: Liu Heng’s Scatological Historiography
Famine as a major theme in modern Chinese literature also appears in
Liu Heng’s early short story “Dogshit Food,” which relates the life and
to the thinking subject, see Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection
(London: Methuen, 1984), 99.
27 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 148.
28 I quote from Jonathan Parry, “Death and Digestion: The Symbolism of Food and
Eating in North Indian Mortuary Rites,” Man 20 (1985): 613; Parry’s italics.
29 The estimate is from Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 189.
30 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–1938, 1973),
in Michael Holquist, ed., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 170–171.
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death of an ugly woman from the aftermath of Land Reform (1950–1953)
to the Cultural Revolution. The author starts off with a standing joke
about a sex-starved farmer, Yang Tiankuan 楊天 , who trades a sackful
of grain for a woman with a giant goiter:
Many years later, when the villagers tried to recall how Yang Tiankuan
had left Flood Water Valley that morning, they didn’t know how to begin.
They could only remember one thing, though they had no idea if it had
any particular significance.
“He was carrying a hundred kilograms of millet.”
This insipid phrase had been repeated in the village for more than thirty
years.31
This foresighted opening (“Many years later”) reveals the general problematics of Chinese historical narrative: people do not know how to articulate the past except by talking about food. Only food has iterability in
the formulation of Chinese history. So, Yang Tiankuan, now the sixth
buyer of the goitered woman, first and foremost judges his barter by her
exchange value for food: “A hundred kilograms of millet in trade for
a giant goiter? Was she worth it?” (2/417). It proves to be a good deal
because “she was … as good in bed as she was skilled in the field” (3/418).
This capable and hardworking woman bears him six children and is able
to pan out corn kernels from mule dung, saving the entire family from
famine.
In spite of her shrewdness, Goiter loses her money and food coupons
on her way to the grain co-op. It gives Tiankuan an excuse to beat her—
to regain his manhood, ending in her suicide by swallowing bitter apricot
kernels. On the mountain road to the clinic, the moribund who has
been suffering from enlargement of the thyroid gland owing to iodine
deficiency spits out her last curse: “Dogshit … food!” Ironically, just
after she has drawn her last breath, the missing coupons wrapped in a
bandanna are accidentally recovered on the roadside:
It was lying under a rock, covered by a few blades of grass and looking
like a piece of gray mortar. A couple of feet away were two sections of notquite-fresh green human shit. Tiankuan could guess why it was green….
31 Liu Heng, “Gouri de liangshi,” in his Liu Heng zixuanji 劉恆自選集 (Self-selected
works of Liu Heng), 5 vols. (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1993), vol. 4, Gouri de liangshi,
1; trans. Deirdre Sabina Knight, “Dogshit Food,” in Lau and Goldblatt, The Columbia
Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, 416. Henceforth two page references, the Chinese
first, will be given in the text.
197
If human shit could petrify, it would expose the folly of future archaeologists. They would sink into the labyrinth of history, tangled up in enigmas
related to questions of time and race. [13/427]
With a sense of black humor, the writer suddenly jumps in to pose a
quasi-anthropological question: What on earth made grass a diet for a
people living in the last half of the twentieth century? Like Tiankuan, who
probably knows who his wife was cursing, one can guess why it is ‘quasi’anthropological, because the problem is actually politico-historical in the
disguise of scatology.
Liu Heng’s scatology becomes a storiology in his 1993 novel Green
River Daydreams. The river, as a frozen metaphor, is easily interpreted as
symbolizing the macrohistory of China.32 The dreams, recorded day by
day from 1st March to 15th April 1992, are recollections of 1908, when
the last Chinese emperor Aisin Gioro Puyi 愛新覺羅•溥儀 (r. 1909–1911)
is enthroned on the verge of the downfall of the Qing dynasty. Narrated
by a sixteen-year-old house slave, the story begins with the return of
Second Master Cao Guanghan 曹光漢 to his hometown, Elm Township,
after studying four years in France. With the help of a French engineer
friend, Big Road, Guanghan dreams to overthrow the Manchu empire by
making explosives in his match factory commune, but he is arrested and
dies on the gallows. Revolutionary hero though Guanghan appears to be,
he is sexually incompetent, masochistic, and behaves like an infant in his
mother’s bosom. In fact, he has been at the breast until the age of nine,
reminding us of the baby emperor. As a result, Guanghan’s beautiful and
brilliant bride, Zheng Yunan 鄭玉楠, has a liaison with the Frenchman
and bears him a blue-eyed son. In the end, Big Road is carved up by
the Cao’s with a match machine; Yunan throws herself into the Green
River; and their illegitimate son, Cao Zichun 曹子春, is secretly saved
by the slave and Wulingr 五鈴兒, Yunan’s maid. Yet the one to whom
the adolescent slave has been strongly attached is not the maid, but her
mistress. In effect, the whole story is permeated with the slave-narrator’s
lingering daydreams to get closer to his young mistress.
The work starts at the end of the Author’s verbatim record of an
old man’s senile memory before the beginning of the latter’s first-person
narrative:
32 Zhang Yiwu, “Postmodernism and Chinese Novels of the Nineties,” trans. Michael
Berry, boundary 2 24.3 (Fall 1997): 253.
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Kid, my story is finished.
—Old Man W
Old folk, what can I do with it?
—Author L33
If L refers to Liu Heng, then W may be an abbreviation of the reflexive
wo 我 ‘I’—the old man or the author himself—or the negative wu 無 ‘no
[body]’. In any case, the author is split into two: the storyteller and the
fiction-writer—the mouth that tells and the hand that writes. But the
ears also play an important narrative role. From the very beginning of
the first-person narrative, when the old man opens his mouth and starts
to talk, there appears to be a young listener sitting in front of him:
There’s so much to tell you that I’ll just start at the beginning…. Now
where do we begin, you little shit? I’ve got a dirty mouth. That doesn’t
bother you, does it? I could tell right off you’re a good boy. [5/3]
Who is this boy? Would it be Author L, Old Man’s little friend, or his
adopted son, Cao Zichun? This narratee seems to be very obedient—
while listening to the story, he constantly responds to the old man’s speech
and dutifully complies with his instructions to hand him his teacup and
spittoon, and to touch his ear. However, at the end of his story, the old
man discloses that he is actually talking to a tape recorder. So, who was
passing him his teacup and spittoon? Is he muttering to himself ? His
childhood name is Ears, and he says to his listener: “You sure have big
ears” (6/4). His audience is himself; the old man is the author himself.
The story is a soliloquy, with which the old man is narrating his Green
River daydreams, or, the author is indulging himself in reverie in the
Freudian view that all writers are daydreamers.
As the old man’s pet name indicates, the circumstances surrounding
the Cao family in Green River Daydreams are inquired or eavesdropped on
through “ears.” Yet Ears and his resource person, Wuling, were both too
young to comprehend the information acquired. While Ears is sometimes
limited by his age, other times it is due to physical distance or language
barriers—the three protagonists often converse in English and French
33 Liu, Liu Heng zixuanji, vol. 2, Canghe bairimeng, 3. All subsequent references to the
Chinese original and the English translation by Howard Goldblatt, Green River Daydreams
(New York: Grove Press, 2001), are bracketed in the text. This dialogue, not given in the
translation, is my rendition. An earlier Chinese version of my analysis here was published
as “ ‘Wangshi zai paixie’—Shuo Liu Heng de Canghe bairimeng” “往事在排泄”—說劉恆的
《蒼河白日夢》(“The past is being excreted”: On Liu Heng’s Green River Daydreams), Shun
po, 1 Aug. 1993.
199
—that he “wasn’t sure what they were talking about” (107/114). Being a
slave to the Cao household, Ears only have a smattering of knowledge of
his masters and cannot make heads or tails of Cao Guanghan’s revolutionary work. A story told by such a narrator can never be counted as a
reliable family history or an official revolutionary history.
Ears has a habit of climbing on the roof to spy on the activities of the
Cao’s in the depths of night, as if he were an omnipresent god:
I may have been a slave, but when I stood on the rooftop I felt like the
master of the house. I could see everything that was going on. I was
stepping on their heads, every one of them. A spy sent down by Heaven.
My eyes were his eyes. They couldn’t get away from me if they sprouted
wings! [26–27/27]
Although he secretly looks at and listens to everything, he fails to extract
total knowledge from the historic situations and events. In addition, as
pointed out by the characters, including Ears himself, Ears is a good
liar, hence an unreliable narrator. His story is full of surmises, unveiling
language’s incapacity to give a truthful account of what has happened.
After all, oral records and written histories are mere daydreams.
For Ears as a one-hundred-year-old man suffering from constipation,
absurdity lies in his desire to return to a child’s anal stage, in which he
finds the pleasure of excretion; for Ears as a storyteller, narration takes
the form of defecation, with which the mouth functioning as the asshole
enjoys the freedom of expression:
What if I soil myself ?
The past is being excreted.
The exhalations of an old mouth stink up the sky.
It’s not modesty.
If you can put up with it, that’s fine with me.
I can’t stand my own odors.
But I’m not happy unless I’m spitting stuff out. [53–54/56]
Liu Heng’s scatological strategy is to use the excremental outpouring to
raise an outcry of what John Clark describes fecal matter as the “unmentionable.”34 While Clark sees scatology as one of the common themes in
the Western literary tradition of satire, Liu prescribes it as a laxative for
the politically costive historiography in China.
Running through Ears’ oneiric recollection of past events is the gastronarrative about the unusual dietary practices of Old Master Cao and
34 John R. Clark, The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1991), 130.
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Mrs. Cao in a famine year. Mrs. Cao refrains from eating grain for
the purpose of becoming an immortal, whereas Old Master tries all
kinds of exotic ingredients with his little cauldron to prepare an elixir of
longevity. His foodaholic consumption starts with herbal tonics (Korean
ginseng, Chinese wolfberry and angelica), then insects (ants, wasps, silkworm pupas, hornets, centipedes, dragonflies, crickets, butterflies, earthworm, spiders and spiderwebs), animals (baby mice, sparrow head, lizard, toad, and antler), eggshells, talcum powder, rusty brass bell, ink,
even a virgin’s menstrual blood, an infant’s urine, his grandson’s afterbirth, and ends with shit. Of course, Ears did not serve his hyperphagic
master with real feces; instead, he gave him a bowl of fried rice cake sprinkled with brown sugar: “he turned to me and said that it wasn’t bad at
all. With a long string of saliva hanging from his mouth, he asked: Whose
was it?” (287/309).
Old Master Cao’s alimentary aberration is not only a storyline, but the
entire psychosexual structure of the narrative and the creative motive of
the writer as well. While food and feces are merely thematic in “Dogshit
Food,” they are rather structural in Green River Daydreams. The historian
Sun Lung-kee’s 孫隆基 observation that Chinese tend to remain in the
oral and anal stages (the first two periods in a child’s psychosexual development according to Freud’s theory)35 without proceeding to the phallic stage may find its cases in Cao Guanghan’s sexual impotence, Old
Master’s medicinal concoctions, and the I-narrator’s fantasy that Wuling
“wanted me to soil myself again so she could wash my clothes as a way to
show how much she cared for me” (53/56). Liu Heng’s Cao Guanghan
and Mo Yan’s Shangguan Jintong represent, to borrow Sun’s words, “a
people not yet weaned,” who dream to return to mother’s womb.36
In the gastrotexts of contemporary Chinese fiction, starvation is developed into obsession with specific food and even feces. If these perversions
are unconscious regressions on the part of the personae, then such ‘dirty
realism’ is a conscious tactic on the part of the storyteller. Scatology, in
particular, is to subvert the aesthetic standard of literature, to disturb
the sense of taste with such disgusting imagery as sweet stool. What dis-
35 See Sun Lung-kee, Zhongguo wenhua de shenceng jiegou 中國文化的深層結構 (The deep
structure of Chinese culture), rev. edn. (Hong Kong: Jixian she, 1992), 89–100.
36 For Sun Lung-kee’s discussion of the “mother’s womb” phenomenon in modern
Chinese fiction, see the second chapter of his Wei duannai de minzu 未斷的民族 (A people
not yet weaned) (Taipei: Juliu tushu gongsi, 1995), 109–158.
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tinguishes Liu Heng, Mo Yan, Su Tong, and their peers from the older
generation is the turning of literary works from a means of catharsis to
excreta per se. In this sense, history is a mere waste product of human
beings.
The (Non)performance of Violence: Yu Hua’s Cruel Historiography
If one aspect of the bodily writing of history in post-Mao Chinese literature is to disclose the dirtiness of the historic reality, then another
aspect of it is to show the cruelty of history. It is in cruelty that Zhao
Yiheng 趙毅衡 sees Yu Hua’s fiction of torture and execution as “antihistory”: “Cruelty, nevertheless, is not present just to shock readers. It
is a distillation, a to-the-marrow summary of history.”37 From the beginning, Yu’s style is at once recognized for its “extreme visual violence.”38
In his 1989 essay “Hypocritical Writings” (“Xuwei de zuopin” 虛偽的
作品), the writer acknowledges that he is enthralled by violence: “I am
fascinated with violence because its form inspires passion and its power
comes from human desire.”39 Violence is indeed the central metaphor in
his universe of fiction, where he presents it as the essence of history. In
her investigation of the logic of violence in Yu’s works, Lu Tonglin concludes that while the writer “succeeds in denouncing the logic of naked
violence in the current political order … [b]y identifying violence with
the official order,” it is precisely this process of identification that “contributes to consolidating the logic of the dominant ideology indirectly.”40
On reading Yu’s fiction, I shall argue that he actually lays open the logic
of sociopolitical (dis)order and then problematizes it by his performance
and nonperformance of violence.
37 Y.H. Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” World Literature Today 65.3 (Summer
1991): 418.
38 Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “One Kind of Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996): 137.
39 Yu Hua, “Xuwei de zuopin,” in his Yu Hua zuopin ji 余華作品集 (Collected writings of
Yu Hua), 3 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995), 2: 280. The statement
is translated by Jianguo Chen in his “Violence: The Politics and the Aesthetic—Toward
a Reading of Yu Hua,” American Journal of Chinese Studies 5.1 (April 1998): 23.
40 Lu Tonglin, “Violence and Cultural Nihilism,” in her Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and
Oppositional Politics, 176, 178. Lu’s analysis is based on Yu’s two stories set in the present
age, “Shishi ruyan” 世事如煙 (World like mist) (1988) and “Ouran shijian” 偶然事件 (An
accident) (1990).
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(De)narrativizing Violence
As critics have pointed out, “Yu Hua’s organization of the world of violence is first realized by detailed descriptions of the process of bodily
dismemberment.”41 The earliest work by him that struck readers with
uncanny refinements of cruelty is “1986” (“Yijiu baliu nian” 一九八六年),
composed ten years after the Cultural Revolution. The novella is about
the return of a nameless history teacher, who was taken away by the Red
Guards and disappeared during the revolution, to haunt his remarried
wife and forgetful fellow townspeople. In his discussion of the traumas of
the Cultural Revolution preserved in memory works, Wang Ban defines
‘trauma’ as less a one-time shock than a persisting, haunting impact, with
which the “temporal scheme [of history] is put out of order.”42 Time
does not always heal. Though the protagonist survives the turbulence,
his mind is deposited with all forms of violence and images of death.
In the victim’s eyes, the town is a tomb; the road becomes a bone;
street lamps are human heads; buildings, slaughterhouses; boats, floating
corpses. Having been fascinated by ancient punishments in his student
days, the deranged teacher fancies himself to be an executioner. First
targeting passers-by, then inflicting wounds on himself, he demonstrates
eleven physical punishments with maniacal pleasure one after another:
branding, nose-cut, leg-cut, castration, halving, roasting in oil, skin peel,
rib-pluck, disembowelment, slicing, as well as drawing and fifthing. For a
brief example, castration:
He splayed his legs out in front of him and lifted the rock above his head
…. Bellowing “宮 [gong ‘castrate’]!” at the top of his lungs, he pounded the
rock against the tail [i.e., his penis] as hard as he possibly could. Then he
began to roar.43
The penalties are performed like rituals until the teacher tortures himself
to death. However, the horrors of history do not let go of the town at the
end of the tale, when another madman—another return of the wounded
past—appears on the street.
41 Xing Jianchang 邢建昌 and Lu Wenzhong 魯文忠, Xianfeng langchao zhong de Yu Hua 先
鋒浪潮中的余華 (Yu Hua in the wave of avant-garde) (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 2000),
49.
42
Wang, Illuminations from the Past, 114.
Yu Hua, “Yijiu baliu nian,” in Yu Hua zuopin ji, 1: 164; English translation, “1986,”
by Andrew F. Jones, in Yu, The Past and the Punishments (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 1996), 160.
43
203
This is reminiscent of the coda in Gu Hua’s Hibiscus Town, where the
evil madman’s voice resounds through the town like a specter: “Don’t
ever forget—! The Cultural Revolution…!”44 Amnesiac are the people
in the flourish of the commodity economy in the spring of 1986:
The disastrous years of the Cultural Revolution have faded into the mists
of time. The political slogans pasted again and again on the walls have all
been painted over, obscured from the view of pedestrians strolling through
the spring night, invisible to those for whom only the present can be seen.45
To the teacher’s daughter, who has already changed her name to sever
herself from history, her former father is no more than a stranger; she only
recognizes her “present father” (xianzai de fuqin 現在的父親). It is against
such presentism that history attempts to punch people’s memory with
physical violence. But the violent shock will eventually be consumed as
table talk:
The dinner conversation was relaxed and happy. Everything made them
laugh. After a while they started to talk about the crazy things they had
seen, the crazy rumors they had heard going around town. Some of them
had seen the madman. Some of them had only heard about him.
They said they couldn’t believe he had cut apart his own body with
a cleaver. They registered their surprise. Finally, they burst into laughter.
They talked about the madman, the one who had sawed through his own
nose and sliced his own legs a few days back. They gasped and swore and,
having run out of exclamations, were reduced to sighs. Their sighs had
more to do with sheer amazement than pity. As they talked, the terror began to
fade. It was something unusual. They always discussed anything unusual
that had happened around town. And when the first topic got stale, they
would always move on to something else. That was what they did at the
dinner table. That was how they passed the time until they were done.46
So the appearance of another madman in town can at best serve as a
new subject of conversation in the dialectics between remembering and
forgetting.
Alternating between the viewpoints of the madman and the spectators, that is, between hallucination and reality, the nightmare narrative
is organized according to the series of penalties that govern the protagonist’s traumatic memory of the Cultural Revolution. Yet critics have
pointed out that the lunatic’s performance of the five ancient punishments “not only condemns the violence of the Cultural Revolution, but
44
45
46
Gu Hua, Furongzhen (Hibiscus Town) (Taipei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1988), 264.
Yu Hua, “Yijiu baliu nian,” 1: 150; idem, “1986,” 143.
Yu, “Yijiu baliu nian,” 1: 173; idem, “1986,” 171–172. My italics.
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also points to the atrocities of the remote past.”47 The story’s translator,
Andrew Jones, further argues that the male lead’s
madness goes deeper than mere historical circumstance. Instead, it represents a meditation on the ways in which history, culture, and language
collaborate with our seemingly innate capacity for brutality and callousness to create political violence.48
The political madness is described as a beastly carnival with “a ghostly
chorus of wails and brutish howls,” when the teacher is detained in his
office by the Red Guards, “a pack of wild animals.”49
Compared with Zhang Chengzhi’s writing of inflictions in History of the
Soul (see chapter 2 above), Yu Hua’s presentation of the madman’s performance of punishments is far more graphic and grotesque. In “1986,”
narrative per se becomes a way of performing. The author uses not only
the performance of violence to reveal the authority’s abusive exercise of power
throughout Chinese history, but also the violent performance of language to
challenge the rational, innocuous language of the grand narrative. The
hair-raising scene below is illustrative of Yu’s eerie style:
He shouted, “劓 [yi ‘nose-cut’]!” as he carefully placed the teeth of the saw
against the bottom of his nose…. His arms began to rock back and forth,
and with each spasmodic motion he shouted “劓” as loudly as he possibly
could. The blade worked its way into his flesh, and blood began to seep
out from under the skin…. He looked as if he were happily blowing on a
harmonica as the saw ate into his cartilage…. He continued to work the
saw back and forth, but the pain had become unbearable, and he quickly
pulled the saw away from his nose and set it down on his knees…. The
blood was flowing freely now, quickly staining his mouth and his chin red.
Little streams trickled down from his face, tracing a tangle of intersecting
lines across his chest. A few drops landed on his head, slid down strands
of hair, and splashed on the pavement like little red sparks…. Satisfied,
he pulled his nose away from his face with one hand while positioning
the saw blade under it with the other. But, instead of setting the saw in
motion, he merely shouted for a moment and placed the saw back on his
47 Huang Yunzhou 黃蘊洲 and Chang Qie 昌切, “Yu Hua xiaoshuo de hexin yuma”
余華小說的核心語碼 (The kernel codes of Yu Hua’s fiction), Xiaoshuo pinglun 小說評論 (Fic-
tion review), 1994, no. 1: 54. The five cardinal forms of ancient punishment are branding,
nose-cut, leg-cut, castration, and decapitation, as listed in Kong Yingda’s 孔穎達 (574–
648) commentary to the early historical text Shang shu 尚書 (The book of documents)
(Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 edn.), 3.44–45; and, in slightly different designations, Zhou
li 周禮 (Rites of Zhou) (Shisan jing zhushu edn.), 36.539.
48 Jones, translator’s postscript to Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments, 271.
49 Yu, “Yijiu baliu nian,” 1: 146; idem, “1986,” 138.
205
knees. Holding his nose between his fingers, he twisted it from side to side
until it dangled loose from his face.50
The madman’s self-violence is achieved by splitting the self into two: a
sadist and a masochist. One may interpret his sadomasochistic act as a
usurpation of the state “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”
over the individual.51 And the performativity of Yu’s bloody depiction
relives history from oblivion with its horrific violence.
If “1986” is a narrative performance of brutality, then “The Past and
the Punishments” (“Wangshi yu xingfa” 往事與刑罰) is a philosophical
reflection on violence as the abstract of history. Written in 1987 and
published two years later, the pseudo-detective story takes place “[o]n
a summer night in 1990,” when “the stranger” receives a mysterious
telegram urging him: “return quickly.”52 The brief message reminds him
of 5th March 1965, the date when someone bound to his past hanged
himself, and brings him to a small town by the name of Mist (Yan 煙)—a
sensorial simile that Yu uses in this and several other works to symbolize
the past. There the stranger meets with “the punishment expert,” who
claims to be his past, but his past is also marked with four other enigmatic
dates: 9th January 1958, 1st December 1967, 7th August 1960, and 20th
September 1971. The old expert asks to test the ancient punishment of
halving by cutting the stranger in two at the waist. The latter consents, but
the former is too feeble to perform the punishment. At last the stranger’s
search for the occurrence on 5th March 1965 comes to a result, when the
expert executes himself by hanging and leaves a note dated 5th March
1965. The expert’s death, however, forever severs the threads leading to
the other four dates in the past.
Reading the short story as a narrowly political allegory, Chen Jianguo
regards the penologist as “an epitome of the absolute discursive power,”
“a paradigmatic symbol of the absolute power of the Party apparatus,”
and “a projection of the stranger’s split self.”53 Accordingly, the stranger
represents the masses, who should be held responsible for their complicity
with the Party apparatus in fabricating a violent history. Believing that the
five dates must be of great historic significance, Chen tries painstakingly
to relate each of them to specific events in the Maoist era:
50
Yu, “Yijiu baliu nian,” 1: 161–162; idem, “1986,” 157–158.
Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 2; originally in italics.
52 Yu Hua, “Wangshi yu xingfa,” in Yu Hua zuopin ji, 1: 32; English translation, “The
Past and the Punishments,” by Jones, in Yu, The Past and the Punishments, 114.
53 Chen, “Violence,” 15–16.
51
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For example, the year of 1958 witnessed the ‘anti-rightists’ movement;
1960 saw the political purge of ‘class enemies’; whereas 1965 marked the
beginning of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, a national disaster that reached its
climax in 1967.54
Yet one wonders what happened on the specified days of these years. If
we consult comprehensive annals such as the Cultural Revolution Chronicle
(Wenge da nianbiao 文革大年表), 9th January 1958 and 20th September 1971
are recorded for some nonviolent events, whereas no entries for the other
three dates are found.55 Thus, I argue, while the years may represent
certain times in the PRC history, the specified months and days are added
to undo their referential meanings. These numeric conundrums about
the past are not answered; rather, they are further and forever perplexed
into a series of punishments: 9th January 1958 was rent in fifths; 1st
December 1967 was castrated; 7th August 1960 was cut through at its
waist; 20th September 1971 was buried alive; and 5th March 1965 marks
a suicide by hanging.
Translating the title into “History and Power,” Dai Jinhua interprets
the suicide of the punishment expert as “the death of history,” which disenchants us of our idealistic search for roots or any possibility to “redeem
history.”56 Indeed, with the stranger’s failure in accessing his past and the
expert’s nonperformance of his experiment, Yu Hua defies all attempts
to represent history as a body of concrete facts. Under Yomi Braester’s
observation, “The Past and the Punishments” is
a parable on searching for one’s memories of the past, [in whose Chinese
original] the word ‘memory’ appears only three times, never in direct
relation to past events, and the content of memories is never specified.57
In this avant-garde work, history is empty of material events; the past
is reduced to extreme punishments. By doing so, the writer has denarrativized history and avoided the violence of representation. Because to
narrate is to establish or submit to logic certain events, their origins and
54
Ibid., 13.
Zhao Wumian 趙無眠, Wenge da nianbiao (Flushing, N.Y.: Mirror Books, 1996), 75,
305, records 9th January 1958 for the announcement of the “Ordinance Regarding
Household Registration,” and 20th September 1971 for the cancellation of National Day
parade.
56 Dai Jinhua, “Liegu de ling yi cepan—Chudu Yu Hua” 裂谷的另一側畔—初讀余華
(The other side of the gorge: A preliminary reading of Yu Hua), Beijing wenxue 北京文學
(Beijing literature), 1989, no. 7: 31–33.
57 Braester, Witness Against History, 186.
55
207
destinations in the course of history while suppressing other happenings,
Yu chooses not to give any necessary account for the past—as the punishment expert says:
Necessity plods blindly and inexorably ahead on its accustomed track. But
chance is altogether different. Chance is powerful. Wherever coincidences
occur, brand new histories are born.58
Thereby, the author acts like his character to dismember—instead of
remember—history, deconstructing it into five eventless dates. He tells us
that violence is the very nature of history as such, as a whole, passim, not
limited to particular incidents. This explains why the executions of those
dates are presented as pure violence, transcending all historical contents
and contexts.
Unexpected (Non)violence
Whereas “1986” and “The Past and the Punishments” are the writer’s
experiments in penalties, “Classical Love” (“Gudian aiqing” 古典愛情,
1988) and “Blood and Plum Blossoms” (“Xianxue meihua” 鮮血梅花,
1989) are pertinent to the reader’s expectations of violence. The latter
two pieces are parodies of vernacular fiction set in premodern China
without specific times.
“Classical Love” first appears as a pastiche of the traditional popular
romance of ‘scholar and the beauty’ (caizi jiaren 才子佳人), and then turns
into a quasi-ghost story in the end. The tale unfolds with the scholar Willow’s thrice embarking on a yellow highway. The first time, with peaches
and willows flourishing in the height of spring, Willow is on his way to
take the civil service examinations in the capital. He wanders into a private garden and encounters a fair maiden. Following the common plot
of caizi jiaren fiction, they fall in love immediately and pledge enduring
affection. Having failed the exams, Willow takes the same road back in
the autumn, but the maiden has mysteriously disappeared with her aristocratic family. The scholar travels once again down the yellow highway
for his second attempt at the exams three years later. Although it is the
same season on the same road, the landscape has changed: blossoming
peaches and willows are replaced by withered trees and beggars. In a tavern Willow discovers his lover being slaughtered for a merchant’s meal.
He buys back her severed leg and kills her with one stroke of a knife at her
58
Yu, “Wangshi yu xingfa,” 1: 35; idem, “The Past and the Punishments,” 118.
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request. Lastly, his third journey onto the highway is to visit the maiden’s
burial mound. With peaches and willows booming in spring again, the
beauty resurrects to meet the scholar at night. Unfortunately, Willow is
too hasty in opening up the grave and, as a result, their hope to rejoin
in the world of the living is ruined. Atypical of the comic dénouement of
scholar-beauty romances, the story finishes tragically.59
Readers are irritated by the unpredictable violence of mayhem in the
middle of the romance, where markets for human flesh crop up in a time
of great famine. We first encounter a man selling his wife and ten-year
old daughter for meat. When the customers prefer the little girl’s flesh to
the older woman’s, the mother begs for mercy:
“Do a good job of it. Kill her with the first stroke.”
The proprietor said, “That I won’t do. The meat wouldn’t be as fresh.”
Inside the shack, the cashier grabbed hold of the little girl’s body, laying
her arm out on top of a tree stump. The girl, whose eyes had drifted out of
the shack to glance at the woman, did not notice that the proprietor had
already picked up his ax….
Willow watched the proprietor’s ax blade bear swiftly down, heard the
‘ka-cha’ sound of splitting bone. Blood spattered in all directions, covering
the proprietor’s face.
The girl’s body convulsed in time with the ‘ka-cha’ sound. She turned
to see what had happened and, catching sight of her own arm resting on
the tree stump, was quietly transfixed. Only after a long pause did she let
out a long scream and collapse.60
Here Yu Hua probes the relation between food and the body into the
‘gastroviolence’ of cannibalism. Cannibalism doubles violence: the brutality of mutilation and the savagery of human-flesh consumption—consumption in both senses of physical ingestion and economic activity.
Howard Goldblatt has aptly commented that in this scene of butchery
59 Richard C. Hessney, in The Indian Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., 2nd rev. edn. (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1988), s.v.
“Ts’ai-tzu chia-jen hsiao-shuo” 才子佳人小說 (Scholar and the beauty novels), points
out that caizi jiaren fiction, except such master variation as Dream of the Red Chamber, is
characterized by its comic structure. For studies of the subgenre, see Hessney’s Ph.D.
thesis, “Beautiful, Talented, and Brave: Seventeenth-Century Chinese Scholar-Beauty
Romances” (Columbia University, 1979); and William Bruce Crawford, “Beyond the
Garden Wall: A Critical Study of Three ‘Ts’ai-tzu chia-jen’ Novels” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana
University, 1972).
60 Yu Hua, “Gudian aiqing,” in Yu Hua zuopin ji, 2: 178; English translation, “Classical
Love,” by Jones, in Yu, The Past and the Punishments, 37.
209
“there is more to the transaction than relief of starvation.”61 Indeed, Yu
presents the anthropophagi rather like gourmets, who are so concerned
with the tenderness and freshness of the flesh that violence manifests itself
as gastrology.
The third victim of violence in “Classical Love” is also a female—the
maiden who is found maimed in the tavern. The scene of Willow cleaning
her corpse before burying it mixes brutality with beauty through the male
gaze and touch:
He began to examine the maiden. She was splattered with dried blood
and mud…. Soon, her body emerged from beneath the cloth, pure and white
….
Opening his eyes, he was dazzled by the place from which the leg had
been severed. He could still discern where the ax had cut messily and
repeatedly into the flesh, like the stump of a felled tree that has been hastily
hacked to the ground. Random strands of skin and flesh hung from the
stump in a pulpy mass. Extending his fingers toward this mass, he found it
incomparably soft, but his fingers were flustered by the sharp edge of shattered
bone that lay within….
… Willow carefully wiped away the stain. The skin and flesh that had
been displaced by the knife as it had stabbed into the chest had curled out
around the puncture, deep red, like a peach flower in bloom….
Having removed all of the blood and dirt, Willow reexamined the body.
The maiden was laid out on the ground, her skin as clear as ice, as lustrous as
jade.62
The above descriptions of the maiden’s skin and flesh as “pure and
white,” “incomparably soft,” “like a peach flower in bloom,” and “as
clear as ice, as lustrous as jade” suggest a virtuosity of violence. In his
analysis of the novella, Andrew Jones concludes that Yu problematizes
the representation of violence by aestheticizing brutality and situating
his readers in a voyeuristic relation to the text:
Yu Hua confronts the implied reader with an uneasy awareness of his or
her own complicity with the violence of the text, and by extension, with
the violence of the larger discourses in which s/he has participated and
helped to construct.63
61 Howard Goldblatt, “Forbidden Food: ‘The Saturnicon’ of Mo Yan,” World Literature
Today 74.3 (Summer 2000): 480.
62 Yu, “Gudian aiqing,” 2: 184; idem, “Classical Love,” 44–45. Italics added.
63 Andrew F. Jones, “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun,”
positions 2.3 (Winter 1994): 596–597.
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I would like to add that part of the uneasiness arises from the unexpected violence that frustrates our reading experience with classical love
stories, thus attracting our attention to the brute force concealed in the
historical grand narrative.
If we are appalled at the abrupt brutality in “Classical Love,” then
“Blood and Plum Blossoms” disappoints us by letting our expectation of
violence come to nothing. The short story in the form of knight-errant
fiction can be summed up by citing one sentence:
It was thus that, without so much as an inkling of the skills required of a
swordsman, Ruan Haikuo 阮海闊 shouldered the celebrated Plum Blossom
Sword in order to find and take his revenge on the men who had killed his
father.64
The revenge mission entrusted to Ruan by his mother turns out to be
an anticlimax when, after six years of search, the avenger is informed
that his enemies have already been slain by two roving knights, whom
he encountered on his way. The good news only throws the antihero’s
mind in turmoil, turning his life into an aimless journey. Andrew Jones’
comment reveals the piece’s characteristics as a new historical fiction:
Yu Hua’s sophisticated retake of the genre has all the trappings of a proper
revenge tale, but the moral center of the narrative mold has been hollowed
out, casting the reader into an enigmatic world of chance, coincidence, and
uncertainty.65
Although its title carries Yu’s favorite image, blood, the martial arts fiction
is one without fighting. Its absence of violence marks the writer’s drastic
move from his graphic depiction of violence to distanced representation
of it.
From Incidental Violence to Existential Violence
The novella “The Death of a Landlord” (“Yige dizhu de si” 一個地主的
死) and the short novel To Live (Huozhe 活著), both published in 1992, are
macabre. Together, the two works convey the writer’s understanding that
history is based on deaths. As a matter of fact, the same image of an old
landlord clad in a black silk robe, who maintains the habit of squatting
over an outdoor night soil vat instead of sitting on his own chamber pot,
64 Yu Hua, “Xianxue meihua,” in Yu Hua zuopin ji, 1: 48; English translation, “Blood
and Plum Blossoms,” by Jones, in Yu, The Past and the Punishments, 184.
65 Jones, translator’s postscript, 266.
211
appears in the beginnings of both oeuvres. Andrew Jones suggests that
“The Death of a Landlord” deftly undercuts the logic of revolutionary
fiction by portraying a good landlord’s son instead of a heroic Bolshevik
patriot.66 The plot of the novella focuses on Wang Xianghuo 王香火, the
landlord’s only son who leads the local peasants to trap the Japanese
invaders and sacrifices his own life in the process. He experiences death
as if his own body were alien from himself:
The blades pierced his chest and his stomach. He felt them churn inside
him, and he felt them being pulled from his body. It seemed that he had
been disemboweled. Wang Xianghuo screamed:
“Pa, it hurts!”
His body slid down the tree trunk to the ground and lay lifelessly twisted
in a pool of gore.67
Notice the funny scream (“Pa, it hurts!”), which would otherwise be a
fervent slogan like “Long live China!” in a nationalistic writing. Likewise,
the landlord, after learning of his son’s self-sacrifice, tumbles down beside
the vat and passes away. Their comic deaths create an alienation effect
on the representation of violence.
A critic has pointed out a perspective switch of Yu Hua’s fiction from
“physical violence”—“a metonymy of psychological violence and ideological violence”—in his early works to the “violence of life”—“a more
latent, more powerful, and more irresistible form of violence”—in his late
novels.68 To Live, later a Zhang Yimou film adapted by the screenwriter
Lu Wei 蘆葦 and the author himself, represents Yu’s stylistic retreat from
avant-gardism to realism.69 Yet Yu’s realism is rather low-key as the sad
story is filtered through a second narrator, a folksong collector who mediates the casual recollection of the first narrator Xu Fugui 徐福貴.70 The
old man Fugui recalls how his family members and friends died one after
another from the pre-liberation times of the 1940s to the post-revolution
66
Ibid., 266–267.
Yu Hua, “Yige dizhu de si,” in Yu Hua zuopin ji, 1: 314; English translation, “The
Death of a Landlord,” by Jones, in Yu, The Past and the Punishments, 249–250.
68 Xie Youshun, “Yu Hua de shengcun zhexue ji qi daijie de wenti” 余華的生存哲學
及其待解的問題 (Yu Hua’s philosophy of life and its unsolved problem), Zhong shan, 2002,
no. 1: 109.
69 For a study of Yu’s stylistic shift, see Liu Kang 劉康, “The Short-Lived Avant-Garde:
The Transformation of Yu Hua,” Modern Language Quarterly 63.1 (March 2002): 89–117.
70 It is more likely an intended parody than a mere coincidence that Yu Hua adopts his
protagonist-narrator’s given name from the poor peasant in Zhao Shuli’s revolutionary
story “Fugui” (1946), collected in Lin and Liu, Zhao Shuli daibiao zuo, 205–218.
67
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days in the late 1970s: his father passes away when Fugui gambles away
all of the Xu’s fourteen odd acres of land; his mother dies of illness soon
after; one of his two battle companions is shot dead by a stray bullet
near the end of the civil war; the other, Chunsheng 春生, hangs himself
in the Cultural Revolution; the gambler who won the Xu’s property is
labeled a landlord and executed at the onset of the land reform; Fugui’s
son Youqing 有慶 is literally sucked dry when he donates blood to save
the life of his principal, the county magistrate Chunsheng’s wife; Fugui’s
daughter Fengxia 鳳霞 does not survive hemorrhage during delivery; less
than three months later Fugui’s wife Jiazhen 家珍 joins her children after
perennial suffering from osteomalacia; then Fugui’s son-in-law Erxi 二喜
is killed in an industrial accident; and finally Fugui’s grandson chokes to
death on beans.
In the afterword to his English translation of the novel, Michael Berry
lists several key differences between the fiction and the film, including
the change of the locale from a southern village to a northern town, the
addition of shadow puppetry for visual effect, and, most importantly, the
survivals of Fugui’s wife, their son-in-law and grandson at the end of the
movie, which undermines the existential sense of the original.71 Besides
the loss of the ten lives in succession, the novel also contains a war scene
of grievous casualties. However, the violence of history lies not only in
the numerous deaths but, more cruelly, in the sole survivor’s witness to
the deaths of the people around him. To live is to experience dying.
Brutality does not end with the war; it continues in a more subtle way
in the era of ‘peace’. In a political sense, Youqing is murdered by power
and its fawners:
If they wanted to take some blood, they should have taken only a little.
But to save the magistrate’s wife, the people in the hospital wouldn’t stop
taking Youqing’s blood—they just kept extracting more and more. When
his face turned white, Youqing didn’t say anything. Only after his lips
turned white did he finally say, “I’m dizzy.”
The guy doing the blood work said, “You always get dizzy when you
donate blood.”
Youqing had already given more than his body could take, but out
came another doctor saying there still wasn’t enough blood. The fucking
asshole doing the blood work extracted almost every drop of blood from
my son’s body. Youqing’s lips turned blue, but the guy still didn’t stop.
71 Michael Berry, translator’s afterword to Yu Hua, To Live (New York: Anchor Books,
2003), 242–243.
213
Only after Youqing’s head slumped and fell to one side did he finally begin
to panic. He called a doctor over, who squatted down and listened with a
stethoscope.
“I can’t get a heartbeat,” muttered the doctor.
The doctor didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. He just scolded the
blood technician. “You’re really an idiot.”
He then went back into the delivery room to save the magistrate’s wife.72
In the screen version, Youqing’s death is imputed to a traffic accident;
on the contrary, Fengxia’s death during childbirth is cinematized as a
tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards parade their
medical professors through the streets and take over their places in the
hospital. Where the movie limits violence to the tumultuous years of war
and revolution, the novel extends it to all circumstances of everyday life.
Life as the most basic form of history is full of violent deaths.
Nevertheless, To Live is not a heavy novel. Here, upon revisiting the
Cultural Revolution, Yu Hua steps back from his early surreal representation of violence in “1986,” “The Past and the Punishments” and “Classical Love,” and re-presents violence as an intrusion of the Mao discourse
into people’s private space in a humorous tone:
Inside they had good ol’ Chairman Mao’s words written on their washbasin, and printed on Fengxia’s pillowcase was “Never Forget Class Struggle.” The characters on their quilt read “March Forward Through the
Great Storms.” Every night Erxi and Fengxia literally slept on the words
of Chairman Mao.73
It is based on such lightheartedness that Zhang Yimou reproduced To
Live as a black comedy. However, the overwhelming deaths in the original
work render the lightness unbearable.
Preoccupied with cruel punishments, dismembered bodies, poeticized
cannibalism, and multifarious deaths, Yu Hua’s fictional universe
amounts to a history of violence without the conventional burden of
ethics. In fact, some Chinese critics are discontented with the absence
of moral criticism in his excessive presentations of predicaments.74 Of
course Yu Hua is not alone. Mo Yan, for example, also describes the
72
Yu, Huozhe, in Yu Hua zuopin ji, 3: 324; English trans. Berry, To Live, 150–151.
Yu, Huozhe, 3: 350; idem, To Live, 192.
74 See, for example, Gao Yuanbao
元寶, “Yu Hua chuangzuo zhong de kunan yishi”
余華創作中的苦難意識 (The consciousness of plight in Yu Hua’s creative writings), Wenxue
pinglun, 1994, no. 3: 90.
73
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fearful tortures of skin peel and “barefoot on a hot griddle” in his The
Red Sorghum Family and Big Breasts and Wide Hips, respectively, followed
by a plethora of punishments in his first historical novel produced during the post-Deng period, Sandalwood Torture (Tanxiang xing 檀香刑, 2001).
What distinguishes Yu from other writers of violence is his tactics of shifting from performance to de-dramatization of historical violence, a dedramatization without de-traumatization. To use the words of Bersani
and Dutoit, Yu “prevent[s] the reading of violence from becoming a
fascinated identification with acts of violence.”75 If we put his avantgarde stories of the 1980s in pairs—“1986” and “The Past and the Punishments” as modernist works of punitory experiments, and “Classical
Love” and “Blood and Plum Blossoms” as premodern pasticcio playing with reader’s expectations—it is obvious that the denarrativization
or destitution of violence in the latter of each group tends to undo the
vivification of violence in the former. Finally, Yu’s return from his narrative indeterminacy to novelistic realism in the 1990s explores history as
violence in daily life, admitting cruelty as the general situation of human
existence.76
Typography and Topography:
The Textual Body in the Works of Su Tong and Ge Fei
The infliction of historical violence on the human body is visualized in
the textual body of the works by Su Tong and Ge Fei, who make use
of typography and topography to foreground the textuality of history.
In Su Tong’s Rice, when Five Dragons reviews his life, from being an
orphan in the countryside, to an animal (a pig, an ox, a dog, or a mouse)
as he is insulted by the proprietor’s family, and finally to becoming the
city’s father, the author employs boldface type to summarize the life
experience of “a body totally imprinted by history and the process of
history’s destruction of the body”:77
He reached up to rub his eyes, first the useless one on the right, which
was covered by a colorless secretion, then the left one, in which tears he
75
Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence, 56.
After To Live, Yu Hua published a similar novel of existential violence, Xu Sanguan
mai xue ji ([Nanjing]: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1996); English trans. Andrew F. Jones,
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003).
77 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 148.
76
215
never knew he had were pooling. He examined his body, starting at the
bottom, where his left foot, with its broken toe, rested on a green roof tile,
the dark purple toothmarks as ugly as ever. Then he looked over at the
right foot, twisted and misshapen by the pirate’s bullet. Slowly, painfully,
his gaze moved up past his legs and torso, where oozing lesions crawled
like cockroaches. He was racked by violent shudders. They’ve left scars all
over my body. They are cutting me up, slowly but surely, limb by
limb. [244–245/218]
At the end of the story, not only is his right eye blinded by his enemy’s
son, but his gold teeth are yanked out by his own heir. Scars have marked
the body of Five Dragons as the plate for historical inscription.
Su Tong’s Visual Historiography
The frequent employment of boldface print in the monologues and dialogues of the novel diverts our attention from the human body as an
inscribed text, to the printed text as an inscribed body—a corporeality. Boldface not only adds accents to the characters’ voices, but also lays
emphasis on the author’s act of writing, forcing the reader to heed the
text. The thick, heavy type evokes power. It represents Abao’s violence
that forces Five Dragons to call him daddy in the beginning of the novel;
it increases the characters’ volume when they shout and think aloud; it
makes rice speak and gives rise to the narrative of Rice. The myriad forms
of violence in the text are often performed and reinscribed by boldface
type, as in the above passage about Five Dragons’ deformed body and the
following instance: “Now you’ve given me another scar. Slowly he
rubbed his head, then looked at his hand in the sunlight. Blood coursed
silently through the runnels of his palm …” (145/126). These eye-catching
boldface highlights create a roughened surface that makes the reader
attend to the ‘grains’ of the text.
Su Tong’s playing between the verbal and the visual on the textual
body can also be found in two of his earlier works, “Nineteen Thirty-four
Escapes” and “Opium Family.” In the former, when the villagers’ anger
is stirred up by the bewitching heresy that the plague originates from
nowhere but their landlord Chen Wenzhi’s 陳文治 black brick building,
the author shows their flurry by randomly repeating the name on the
page:
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Chen Wenzhi!
Chen Wenzhi!
Chen Wenzhi!
Chen Wenzhi!78
Chen Wenzhi!
The page is transformed into a stage, on which the form of writing is
visually performed. And in the following sentence printed vertically in
the classical Chinese style, the line, like a visual poem, is cut apart to
visualize the dropping of a knife:
You
tell
me
why
Chen
Baonian
was
afraid
the
bighandled
bamboo
knife
would
be
lost79
Then there is a curve outlining the rise and fall of men’s life as summarized by the narrator:
78
147.
79 Idem, “Yijiusansi nian de taowang,” 61; my translation and layout in accordance
with the Chinese original.
80 Ibid., 64; idem, “Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes,” 162. The curve is not found in
Michael Duke’s rendition.
217
But the most provocative drawing is the character chart in “Opium
Family,” which allegedly resembles the female sex organs:
Not only does it pictorialize the relationships among the landlords on the
top, their woman and her lover in the middle, and his biological son at
the bottom, but it also symbolizes the textual body as the female body.
Reading the chart, Hu Ying concludes that here “history is translated into
sexual history.”82 Meanwhile, the effects designed for the eye also suggest
the inadequacy of words in historical representation. This is perhaps
why in another story, “The Brothers Shu,” a stinging nursery rhyme
is purported—again in boldface—to be censored, so as to leave out its
offensive sexual content for our imagination to fill in:
Nursery rhyme:
(Thirteen characters are excised here.)83
Ge Fei’s Mazy Historiography
Both born in the first half of the 1960s and raised during the Cultural
Revolution, Su Tong and Ge Fei realize that history is at once constructed
and constrained by language. Reading ‘history’ as a blank sign in their
works, Wang Jing mentions the two fictionists in the same breath:
81 Su Tong, “Yingsu zhi jia,” 103; idem, “Opium Family,” 204. The oblique and
vertical lines are missing in the English version.
83 Su Tong, “Shu Nong,” 233; translation mine.
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Invariably, Ge Fei’s and Su Tong’s protagonists always wander into the
labyrinth of history and are fated to retrace the footsteps of history … only
to find that it is ultimately unavailable because its decrepit path merges
imperceptibly into the trails marked by the pursuers’ own footprints.84
The “labyrinth effect” in Ge Fei’s fiction, as another critic, Ji Hongzhen,
has observed, is created by concealing a story within the fissures of discourse and by obscuring its meaning beyond the logic of language. Ge
Fei’s labyrinthine narratives “have first subverted the rationalistic conception of history in the twentieth century, and then questioned the possibility of knowing and making history on the part of humans.”85 Zhang
Xudong also concludes in his reading of Ge Fei: “The labyrinth of language is not the end of history and subjectivity, but their origin.”86 All
of these scholars share the identical image of ‘labyrinth’ in viewing the
writer’s works. A labyrinth is space plotting. It maximizes the division of
space. A labyrinthine narrative increases the textual space by providing
more possibilities of plotting and reading. Its spatial complexity suggests
an intricate structure, in which the tortuous passages to the past confuse
the characters, the narrators, as well as the reader.
Ge Fei’s daedalian narratives are mostly set in the lower Yangtze valley
—an area poetized in a lyrical and lethargical aura. In the misty drizzles
and muggy breeze of the delta, his mazy stories unfold before our eyes
a network of blind alleys leading to many puzzles about the past. Such
historical accounts often turn out to be language games. An example is
the short story “Green Yellow” (“Qinghuang” 青黃, 1988), in which the
author-narrator, after reading The Gazetteer of Mai Village (Maicun difang zhi
麥村地方誌) and A History of Prostitutes in China (Zhongguo changji shi 中國娼
妓史), revisits the fishing village, in an effort to decipher the enigmatic
term “green yellow.” What triggers the research trip is the word that
“stands for an erased page in history,”87 which concerns the vanishment
of a fleet of floating whorehouses known as the “nine fishing families” (jiu
xing yuhu 九姓漁戶) prior to the founding of the People’s Republic. In an
interview with Young Green, the last fisherman’s daughter, the narrator
is told that her ancestors helped the famous bandit Chen Youliang 陳友
84
Wang, introduction to her China’s Avant-Garde Fiction, 12.
Ji Hongzhen, “Zhixun zhuti: Ge Fei yuedu yinxiang” 質詢主體：格非閱讀印象 (Interrogating the subject: A reading impression of Ge Fei), Shun po, overseas edn., 15 Sep. 1993.
86 Xudong Zhang, “Fable of Self-Consciousness: Ge Fei and Some Motifs in MetaFiction,” in his Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and
the New Chinese Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 198.
87 Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 197.
85
219
諒 (1320–1363) fight for state power; so when his rival Zhu Yuanzhang
朱元璋 (1328–1398) established the Ming regime, they were forbidden to
go ashore, and later in a famine year the women on the boats gradually
became prostitutes. Six theories about the historical referent of qinghuang
are found through the search: firstly, a pretty young woman’s name;
secondly, seasonal change from spring to summer; thirdly, annals of the
nine-fishing-families prostitutes’ lives; fourthly, young (green) and old
(yellow) prostitutes; fifthly, a dog with greenish blue hair and a yellow
dotted circle; and finally, a perennial herb.
As half of the above explanations are irrelevant to the nine fishing
families, the chains between the signifier and the signified, and among the
signifiers, are broken and lost. In effect, the fragmented historical ‘facts’
are made up under forged titles of documents, from which four of the six
meanings are derived. The journey in “Green Yellow” is actually inspired
by a tour to Qiandao 千島 Lake in Hangzhou that the author made in the
summer of 1986, according to his travel companion Wu Hongsen 吳洪森:
The person in charge at the County Cultural Center introduced us to the
local attractions and customs, among which the story of “fishermen of nine
stars” (jiu xing yuhu 九星漁戶) made us so curious that we went to the site of
their former settlement; but the trip was futile. People there knew nothing
more than that they were the descendants of Chen Youliang’s men; even
this ‘knowledge’ was derived from the county annals. They denied firmly
the rumor that there used to be prostitution among the women in their
fishing fleet.88
To expand this experience into historical fiction, Ge Fei makes up a
gazetteer, a history, a book titled Totem and Fire, and a dictionary compiled
in the 1620s. He even authenticates his fabrications with references to
specific editions and page numbers, but then doubts their accuracy and
relevancy. Similarly, his interviewees—like all historians—often cover up
something while recounting the past. At moments the investigation turns
rather surreal, when the narrator is informed of the disappearance of the
last fisherman’s corpse from the coffin and its reappearance in the village
many years after his death.
Though no conclusion is drawn on the definition of “green yellow,”
the story ends in a sudden change of font in a block quotation of the fake
dictionary entry:
88 Wu Hongsen, foreword to Mi zhou 迷舟 (The lost boat), by Ge Fei (Beijing: Zuojia
chubanshe, 1989), 3. The quote, with my revisions, is translated by Xudong Zhang in his
Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 191–192.
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green yellow
perennial herb of the figwort family; plant
is entirely covered with fine gray hair; stemlike root
is yellow in color; flowers in summer.89
The typographical alternation creates an anticlimax that disappoints the
reader who, while expecting a solution to the riddle about the word,
reaches yet another impasse of the maze. The futility of the field trip,
however, has already been predicted by the professor, author of A History
of Prostitutes in China, in the beginning before the author-narrator embarks
for his destination: “You’ll find nothing there.”90 By replicating himself
into several authors, so as to afford multi-meanings of the keyword without a definite answer, Ge Fei presents to us an antihistorical metafiction,
which displays history as a tangram.
The writer’s playing with font change is also seen in “The New Year”
(“Danian” 大年, 1988), a novella about a grain thief, Leopard, trapped
in political trickery as he joins the New Fourth Army of the CCP after
being whipped by a landlord. We enter the revolutionary history of 1945
through the landlord’s compound in a famine-stricken village sealed off
by heavy snow—his courtyard, banquet hall, granary, and storage—then
proceed to the thief’s thatched cottage, the private tutor Tang Jiyao’s 唐
濟堯 study, back to the compound into the bedroom of the landlord’s
concubine, and so forth. We encounter a suspense in the cottage, where
the illiterate Leopard receives a letter. He brings it to the tutor’s house
and is informed that he should lead his troops to the north of the Yangtze
River for the squadron’s reorganization after the lunar New Year. On
New Year’s Eve, Leopard loots the compound and, on the New Year’s
Day, vengefully shoots the landlord dead. Surprisingly, on the following
morning, Tang ‘executes’ Leopard in the name of revolution. One of the
latter’s crimes, as it is announced to the unlettered villagers on a written
proclamation printed in a different font at the end of the story, is his “open
defiance” of the squadron’s secret missive about the reorganization to be
carried out on New Year’s Eve.91 In the very brief coda, the landlord’s
concubine reappears in front of the tutor’s house and runs away with
89 Ge Fei, “Qinghuang,” in his Hushao 唿哨 (Whistling) (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi
chubanshe, 1992), 79; English trans. Eva Shan Chou, “Green Yellow,” in Wang, China’s
Avant-Garde Fiction, 42. The font changes here and hereafter, based on the Chinese versions
I use, are all from Song 宋 typeface to imitation Song style. In the 1989 edition in Ge Fei’s
Mi zhou, 200, the citation is set in boldface type instead of in a different font. Neither of
these changes, however, is reflected in the English rendition.
90 Ge Fei, “Qinghuang,” 59; Chou, “Green Yellow,” 24.
91 Ge Fei, “Danian,” in his Hushao, 35.
221
him. It turns out that Tang’s art of political maneuvering is intended to
fulfill his own sexual desire.
Ge Fei echoes with his peer writers that revolution is not driven by
ideas and ideals, but by the basic instincts for food and sex, that history
is not a matter of morality, but a game of power and rhetoric. What
distinguishes his historical fiction from others’, however, is his frequent
employment of “plots of space.”92 Despite its proceeding in traditional
linear temporality and the importance of timing, the “anti-epic,” as is
categorized by Xu Zidong,93 guides us through the story from place to
place in the village. Furthermore, when Leopard and his men attack the
landlord’s compound, the plot is presented as a floor plan laying out
the living room, kitchen, bedroom, hallway, and backyard, in addition
to the earlier introduction of the courtyard, banquet hall, granary, and
storage. The spatial form of narration finally fixes our focus on the public
announcement that violently kills the protagonist for the third time—
the first murder attempt is perpetrated by his mother, so that he cannot
cause troubles; then his teacher drowns him; finally, he is declared guilty
by his army. He dies twice, through both the murder of his body and
the condemnation of his name. The change of typeface on the official
notice highlights the fact that his deaths are due to his illiteracy, that he
is actually destroyed by language. In this sense, the violence of history is
attributed to the power of words.
A more graphic plot of space is seen in Ge Fei’s 1987 short story “The
Lost Boat” (“Mi zhou”). It takes place in 1928, when the Northern Expeditionary Army takes control of the strategic town of Yuguan 關 at the
junction of two rivers and confronts the warlord Sun Chuanfang’s 孫傳芳
(1884–1935) crack divisions in the Qishan 棋山 mountains.94 The protagonist is a brigade commander of Sun’s defense force, Xiao 蕭, who receives
a secret order to slip into the village of Little River across River Lian 漣
for terrain reconnaissance with his bodyguard. There he falls into the
temptation of rejoining his former lover, Xing 杏. Upon discovering their
affair, her husband castrates her with a pig-gelding knife before sending
her back to her family’s home in Yuguan. Regardless of the fact that his
92 I borrow the notion from Tamar Yacobi, “Plots of Space: World and Story in Isak
Dinesen,” Poetics Today 12.3 (Fall 1991): 447–493.
93 Xu, “Dangdai xiaoshuo zhong de xiandai shi,” 79.
94 Sun Chuanfang became one of the most influential warlords in 1925. According
to official history, he was defeated by the Northern Expeditionary Army in 1927. See
Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Republican
China, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), s.v. “Sun Ch’uan-fang.”
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brother is serving in the enemy army there, Xiao stealthily crosses River
Lan 蘭 to see Xing, leaving his pistol and bodyguard at home. It ends
tragically as Xiao’s personal act is interpreted to be political betrayal—he
is shot down upon returning to Little River by his bodyguard, who simply
carries out the divisional commander’s secret instruction that Xiao must
be killed if he delivers intelligence to his brother. Haphazardness rules at
historical moments of life and death, as it does in the rainy morning of
15th April 1928:
Before [the bodyguard] had finished what he was saying, Xiao very
deftly kicked the table over and, with a sideways bound, was out of the
room. As he dashed into the yard, his mother was just shutting the gate so
that she could catch a chicken. Like a weary wolf, he fled to the gate, but
it was already too late to unbolt it. He turned round, helplessly.
The bodyguard walked up to him, holding the gun….
The bodyguard, standing only three paces away from him, very deliberately fired all six bullets.95
While the story is sectioned under the temporal headings from “Day
One” to “Day Seven,” it begins with a military map in the prologue:
95 Ge Fei, “Mi zhou,” Shouhuo 收穫 (Harvest), 1987, no. 6: 106, 114; translation by
Caroline Mason in Henry Y.H. Zhao, ed., The Lost Boat: Avant-Garde Fiction from China
(rpt. London: Wellsweep Press, 1994), 99–100.
223
Zhang Xudong has noticed that this map “serves both as a guide in the
fictive world and as coordinates for a narrative analysis.” He points out
that River Lian functions as the boundary between the present and the
past for the protagonist, whereas River Lan is “the last border of Xiao’s
life.”96 Indeed, every time the hero crosses a river, he throws himself into
a dreamy retrospection or dangerous situation. The two rivers symbolize the intersecting of desire and death. The humid air, hazy mist, the
prolonged intermittent drizzles enveloping the mountains of Qishan, the
riverside bamboo hut in Yuguan, the dense bamboo forest, and Xing’s
red house in Little River create a lethargic labyrinth to hem in the Reason
of history. Of course, the most outstanding image is that in the title: the
boat, which is regarded by Foucault as the ‘heterotopia’—a ‘counter-site’
of utopia—par excellence:
[T]he boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists
by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the
infinity of the sea and that … has been simultaneously the greatest reserve
of the imagination.97
It is the boat that connects the three strategic zones on the map and
carries Xiao—and us—across the rivers of memory and imagination, but
it is also with the boat that we get “lost” (mi 迷) in the labyrinth (migong 迷
宮) of history.
Ge Fei’s labyrinthine narrative is reminiscent of García Márquez’s The
General in His Labyrinth (1989), in whose opening the Colombian “Map
of the Last Voyage of Bolívar, 1830” already sets up a spatial-temporal
frame for the novel. The juxtaposition of toponyms at one point of time
requires the reader to view the history of South America synchronically
rather than diachronically. Exiling along the Magdalena River after his
liberation of Spanish America and exercise of the supreme power for
twelve years, General Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) traces his memory by
traveling physically and spiritually from one place to another in the last
few months of his life. He dies gloomily without having accomplished
his dream of creating the largest empire in the world. The narration
of the past, be it chronologic or psychic, is presented as a navigational
chart. History is mapped on a text through the transformation of storytelling into space-telling. The historical experience thus articulated is that
96
Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms, 185–187.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring
1986): 27.
97
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of anachronism and displacement. Lost in the labyrinth of history after
many years of struggle, the general complains:
The damn problem is that we stopped being Spaniards and then we went
here and there and everywhere in countries that change their names and
governments so much from one day to the next we don’t know where the
hell we come from.98
Compared with Márquez’s detailed map of Bolívar’s itinerary, Ge Fei’s
cartograph for Xiao’s movements is much simpler: the two rivers form
a U-shape composition, with Yuguan at its lower left corner, Qishan
garrison at the lower right, and Linkou 臨口 upper right. Whereas Linkou
is mentioned only once in the introductory paragraph as the warlord’s
military assembly area, the most important place in the story, Little River,
cannot be found on the map. According to the narrative, the village
should be located somewhere in the center of the U shape, but the author
leaves it blank.99 The obviously invisible village and the large empty space
bring forth a cartography of absence, with which the reconnoiterer is
destined to get lost while the reader can fill in his/her imagination. As
Wang Biao has commented, the plot in “The Lost Boat” is composed
of a set of “gaps.”100 On the one hand, Little River as the central stage
of the historical drama is missing on the map; on the other, in spite of
the presence of Yuguan on the illustration, Xiao’s mortal revisit of the
town appears to be a lacuna in the narrative. The narrator does not tell
us whether Xiao and Xing have met there—there it is, but we just do not
know what happened. Ge Fei’s topography of the absent presence (Little
River) and the present absence (Yuguan) suggests a nihilism that denies
the knowability of a total history.
I have discussed Ge Fei’s nihilistic view of history in his “Encounter” in
chapter 2. Here let me make additional remarks on the novella’s narrative strategy of spatial organization. This fictional rewriting of the 1903–
1904 British invasion of Tibet is based on Col. Francis Younghusband’s
route from Siliguri, India via Chumbi 春丕, Guru and Gyantse 江孜,
across Yarlung Tsangpo 雅魯藏布 River to the ‘holy land’ of Lhasa. In
the Chinese original the author does not provide a map, but his space
98 Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth, trans. Edith Grossman (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 184.
99 This is unlikely to have been a careless mistake, because Little River is also not given
on the maps reproduced in two later editions of the story in Ge Fei, Mi zhou, 102; and
Wang, Xin lishi xiaoshuo xuan, 52.
100 Wang, Xin lishi xiaoshuo xuan, 75.
225
plotting necessitates the translator to draw one in the English version.101
The drawing visualizes the mountainous plateau, which causes altitude
sickness, pneumonia, and bronchitis among the foreign soldiers, as well
as the perilous plight of the bloody battle in Guru canyon. Yet the story
is more intricate with the interconnecting pathways of the lives of the
British commander Younghusband himself, the Scottish missionary John
Newman, and the Chinese official He Wenqin. Being a Sandhurst man,
Younghusband began his military career in the Meerut and Kashmir
regions of India before trekking all over northeast China, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and the Kunlun Mountains in 1886 and 1887.102 Newman entered
Tibet by way of the Kashmir basin and northwest India in 1894 after
more than a decade of doing missionary work in the Yangtze valley, particularly the ancient cities of Jiangning 江寧 and Yangzhou. A former
supervisor of grain transport on the Grand Canal, He Wenqin was banished from Yangzhou through Gansu and Qinghai to Tibet in 1893.
So, before the three men meet in Tibet, their footmarks have overlapped in Kashmir and Yangzhou by happenstance. Then, on the Tibetan Plateau, the Chinese, the Scottish, and the British find their “conception[s] of geography changed.”103 He Wenqin realizes that Yangzhou
is becoming ever more remote on his map of memory. He is killed in an
encounter with a Tibetan kidnapper in a forest by Lake Yamdrok Yumtso
羊卓雍, notwithstanding the fact that he is not the target. Newman buries
He and, upon his return to Scotland from Yadong 亞東 in southern
Tibet, discovers that the image of the Buddha on the leaf he picked from
a sacred tree has vanished. Perhaps the message is: missionary work is
global, but neither Buddhism nor Christianity is universal and eternal.
At last, Younghusband is removed from command and ordered to leave
Tibet “[f]or the sake of Britain’s honor.” On the eve of his departure:
Now, under the snowy peaks of the Nyenchen Tangla 念青唐古拉, Colonel
Younghusband momentarily lost consciousness of where he was. Ringing
in his ears was the feeble voice of the abbot of Tashilhunpo Temple. It was
in his command tent at Khamba Dzong as he and the abbot had been
hotly arguing the basic facts of geography. With incredible obstinacy the
abbot insisted:
101
See Batt, Tales of Tibet, [vi], 77n1.
For Younghusband’s early career from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst
to the King’s Dragoon Guards at Meerut between 1881 and 1883, and his 1886–1887
journey in China from Canton, Peking to Manchuria and across the Gobi, see French,
Younghusband, 13–17 and 38–55, respectively.
103 Ge Fei, “Xiangyu,” 63; Batt, Tales of Tibet, 86.
102
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The earth is not round, but triangular, shaped like
a shoulder of mutton.104
To accentuate the Tibetan abbot’s argument that has altered the British
officer’s world outlook, Ge Fei again brings the text to a close with font
change in the last sentence.
The author’s mazy historiography, in the allegory of the abbot’s incomprehensible geography, rebuffs the ‘science’ of objective historiography with the arts of typography and topography that translate the battle
with the past into a baffle of history. Herbert Batt has nicely summed up
a number of Ge Fei’s works as “antihistorical fiction,” in which
a web of misunderstandings, conspiracies, and counterconspiracies enmesh the characters in a net of shifting points of view until history becomes
the mere product of the interplay of contradictory perspectives, the result
of caprice, with no possibility of genuine meaning.105
Not only are the personae caught in the trap of the Cretan labyrinth
of history, but the reader is also confined like the Minotaur of Greek
mythology.
Responding to the chapter’s epigraph by de Certeau that bodily violence
can only be visualized by means of historical texts, I suggest that it is the
text itself which is always ignored, precisely because of its material presence or printed readiness. It is only through fiction, through the artistic fabrication of documents, especially with imaginative typographical
inventions, that we are able to see on the written page the texture of history, which our habitual reading has treated as transparent. In the gastrotext and cruel historiography offered by Mo Yan, Su Tong, Liu Heng,
and Yu Hua, the human body is rediscovered as the space of historical
violence. Yu Hua also reflects on the problematics of narrative representation of violence, experimenting with non-performative writing, so as
to avoid the reinforcement of violence in representation. From the bodily text, Su Tong and Ge Fei turn around to draw our attention to the
textual body. Their visual storytelling and space plotting have reinstated
the graphicness of historiography, which is to figure rather than to signify
the past. While Su Tong’s typography somatizes the historical text, Ge
Fei’s topography deconstructs the logic of history and reconstructs it into
a ludic labyrinth that involves the reader’s participation in the process of
104
105
Ge Fei, “Xiangyu,” 89; Batt, Tales of Tibet, 104. I modified the translation here.
Batt, Tales of Tibet, 261.
227
detection. Our ultimate focus on the human and textual bodies is not to
reduce the sphere of historiography; rather, it attempts to reclaim one’s
own space of writing from the dominance of national historic discourse.
conclusion
BACK(WARD) TO THE FUTURE:
TOWARD A RETRO-FICTION
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom
Angelus”
With the above epigraphic quotation of his cabalist friend Scholem’s
poem “Greetings from the Angel,” Walter Benjamin begins the ninth of
his eighteen “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The Jewish German
thinker’s powerful portrayal of the “angel of history” deserves a citation
of the entire passage, wherefrom I shall conclude my study:
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though
he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His
eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.1
The Angel of History
Profound is this paragraph about “New Angel,” but none of the background details in the description, including the ruins, the corpses, and
Heaven, are represented in the Swiss painter Paul Klee’s extant picture.
1 Benjamin, Illuminations, 257–258. Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s (1879–1940) “Angelus
Novus” in 1921. A screen version of the painting is made available by Jürgen Braungardt
on his webpage, “The Concept of History” (http://www.braungardt.com/Theology/
Benjamin/Angelus%20Novus.htm), listed under “Theology.”
230
conclusion
The only hint that the surrealistic figure is a portrait of an angel of history
is its scroll-shaped hair, which suggests a headful of historical documents.
“[H]is mouth is open,” as if to articulate, or fabulate, history—a history
vividly depicted by Benjamin as a heap of shattered remains beneath the
angel. The writer understands history not as “a chain of events” occurring along a timeline, but as “one single catastrophe” splintered in front
of the bird-like angel’s feet. He brings the past right here, visualizing the
passage of time as nothing but an accretion of calamities in this world.
While Hannah Arendt interprets “what has been smashed” as “the end
of history,”2 I consider it to be Benjamin’s conception of the original state
of history. However, as the angel attempts to redeem the distressful past,
he is summoned back to the hopeful future by the wind of progress (or,
“the law of progress,” as de Certeau would term it later)3 from Paradise—
read ‘fascism’, ‘communism’, or ‘capitalism’. Thus, Benjamin criticizes
the violence of compulsive progress in his last essay, which he composed
in 1940, shortly before his mysterious suicide or murder during his flight
from the Nazis.
Benjamin’s angel of history may best illustrate the fictions of history
in the Deng era. While demonstrating how history might be read and
written, reread and rewritten, contemporary Chinese writers have abandoned such linear, unidimentional teleologies of progress as Social Darwinism and Marxist Maoism. Their works disturb the regnant ideologies
of Mao and Deng, forming a province between the critical and speculative philosophies of history. Where official history claims that the political faux pas committed by the current authorities are merely accidental
‘mistakes’ that can be set aright, thus must be forgiven and forgotten for
the sake of the future, fictional historiographers remind people that manmade disasters are neither exceptional cases nor isolated events, but routine happenings and integrated parts of one common catastrophe called
‘modern history’. Yet this catastrophe is not over; more severe destructions lie in the future, and an accelerating history known as ‘modernization’ or ‘globalization’ will only speed up its process, and disperse its
effects. Since materialistic modernization has been upheld as the grand
2
Hannah Arendt, introduction to Benjamin, Illuminations, 13.
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 199–200:
3
Now, value is assigned to every human being according to his actions, his function
within a historical economy that is directed by the law of progress, rather than
according to his position within a system of absolutes.
back(ward) to the future: toward a retro-fiction
231
goal of the nation as well as the world, a historiographical consciousness
of a new futurism is forcing us to efface rather than face the past. A violent
interpretation of the past is endorsed in the name of the future. Mainstream historiography today is making a history not only for the future,
but also of the future—simply put, a science fiction.
The fictions of history no longer predicate a one-way progressivism;
instead, they appear as a “paragrammatism,” a double writing that simultaneously absorbs and attacks the traditional historic discourse with a
spatialized articulation of the past.4 In Julia Kristeva’s own words, the
paragrammatic practice is an “insertion of history (society) into a text
and of this text into history; … a reading of the anterior literary corpus and … an absorption of and a reply to another text.”5 The Chinese angels’ contemplations about the relationship between the past and
the present constitute a writing gesture that I would like to call ‘retrofiction’—a fiction that turns back to the past, with its back turned to the
future, and willingly stays behind in resistance to the irresistible force of
progress. If Hayden White’s new historicism is essentially, as Dominick
LaCapra criticizes it out of ethical and disciplinary considerations, fictionalization of history,6 then retro-fiction is inopportunely, against the
ideological and socioeconomic trends, a historicization of fiction. Such
historicization appears to be ancient, ancestral, mythical, or nostalgic in
modern times, revealing the historicity of fiction. By its very nature of
storytelling, fiction is necessarily historical. However, unlike their preceding historical texts, fictions of history concern themselves less with
what actually happened in the past than with how to rewrite the past in
the present historical context, so as to refute the state historiography’s
thought control and brainwashing. Therefore, to historicize fiction is to
reveal the past as a product of the present, and simultaneously to present
the present under the pretext of the past, because fiction is conditioned
by history, and the present cannot be presented without pointing to the
past. It is in such retroactive sense that fiction becomes a body of historical literature.
4 Derived from Ferdinand de Saussure’s “anagrams,” Julia Kristeva’s “‘paragrams’
refer not merely to changing letters (Webster’s definition) but to the infinite possibilities of
a text seen as an open network of indicial connections.” Leon S. Roudiez, introduction
to Kristeva, Desire in Language, 15.
5 Kristeva, Desire in Language, 68–69.
6 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 8–13, 26. LaCapra’s refutation of White’s identification of historical
232
conclusion
Retro-fiction
In the last paragraph of his general introduction to the voluminous Realms
of Memory, the French historian Pierre Nora concludes sorrowfully with a
literary reference:
Memory has known only two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary.
These have run on parallel tracks but until now have always remained
separate. Lately the boundary between the two has blurred…. History has
become our substitute for imagination…. Memory has been promoted to
the center of history: thus do we mourn the loss of literature.7
In Deng’s China, however, it was literature that offered imagination to a
history fossilized by the official ideology; it was fiction that replanted the
memory uprooted by the conquering forces of political revolution and
economic reform. In an epoch devoid of a meaningful present, retrofiction emerged as the root-seeking movement (Han Shaogong), the retrogradation motif (Han Shaogong and Mo Yan), the resistance to forced
modernization and marketization (Zhang Chengzhi, Tashi Dawa, and
Alai), remembrance in the nostalgic mood (Su Tong, Wang Anyi, and
Wang Shuo), retro-chic (Wang Anyi), and retreat to the bodily/textual
space (Su Tong, Liu Heng, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei). It is not only a retroanalysis of past events that relates to the present but also, more importantly,
a vision of retrospection that concerns human conditions, as opposed to
the politico-economical prospect that cares only for power and wealth.
A major element that contributes to retro-fiction is reflection on the
identity crisis during the postrevolutionary age. In the fiction of regional
history, root-seeking amounts to a national, local, and finally individual
identity search; in the writings of diaspora and minorities, the poetics of
racial representation inevitably involves the politics of national identity;
in nostalgia for one’s hometown, homesickness and homelessness reveal
the lack of a stable urban identity; and in the violent inscriptions of history on the human body and narrative text, the problem of personal
identity turns into an issue of existential predicament and positioning
of the self in the labyrinth of historical discourse. In order to find their
narration with fictionalization is largely based on the idea of “truth claims” by the “middle voice.”
7 Nora, Realms of Memory, 1: 20. Nora distinguishes between memory and history in
the current epistemological age, seeing the former emotional, magical, absolute, spatial,
and living in the present, and the latter intellectual, critical, relative, event-driven, and
reconstructed from the past.
233
identities, many authors and/or narrators trace their ‘lost origins’ back
to the older generations. As a result, the immediate past of the twentieth century, particularly the Republican age, has become the common
point of interest in most of their tales. Hu Ying has shrewdly observed
that the Republican era “is the period that is most often rewritten in
the history books of the Communist Party, and it is therefore paradoxically the most erased, the most blank in terms of alternative stories.”8
Despite the CCP’s description of the epoch as the dark night of the evil
old society, modern Chinese history in these works has become a cornucopia filled with fantasies. After all, is there any fundamental difference
between the KMT’s Republic of China and the CCP’s People’s Republic
of China?
The distance of this recent past gives rise to post-memory, a kind of
transgenerational memory which stems not directly from personal experience of the author/narrator, but rather is partially passed on from that
of his/her parents and grandparents by word of mouth in the modern
anxieties of amnesia and aphasia. From oral tradition to textual transmission, post-memory doubles the tensions between the factual and the
fictional. It is a memory of the forgotten memory, necessarily imbued
with imagination that restores missing memory to magical myth in the
labyrinth of history, where one attempts to walk out in the indiscernible
past steps of absurd times. Since the history of modern civilization is
largely based on patriarchy, the majority of domestic sagas showcased
here are told in the male voice, mostly handed down from grandfathers
and fathers to sons and grandsons. In the wake of gender difference, the
granddaughter’s legends of grandmothers by Wang Anyi are exceptionally notable. They distinguish themselves from the grandsons’ narratives
by exhibiting less savageness and more sentimentality. Whereas Wang’s
migratory mythology is an ongoing imaginary journey searching for foreign roots, her descriptive historiography of metropolitan memorabilia
substitutes for the masculine mode of revolutionary historiography in
the feminized Shanghai story. Only she translates the transgenerational
memory into transnational and transhistorical melancholy.
There are also writers like Han Shaogong and Alai, who search for
their national and personal identities all the way back to pre-memory,
where they encounter but an idiot. The idiotic image, be it a negative innuendo of national character or a positive reflection of primitive
8
Hu, “Writing Erratic Desire,” 52.
234
conclusion
wisdom, renders all ideologized identities nonsensical. Identity is a shadow of the past, always already historical; idiocy is atavistic, a reversion
of (r)evolutionary advancement. The idiotic identity—or rather, nonidentity—is antiestablishment. The literary figure of the retarded is often
bastardized, as the bastard represents regression: the falling humankind,
the failing history. After the sublime heroes of revolutionary history have
exited, the retarded and the bastard enter hand in hand into the histrionics of history. They urge us to reopen the unhealed wounds and closed
books of history, to unfix the past in both senses of destabilizing it for
posttraumatic reevaluation and detaching it from the standardized historiography. Their dramatic début debunks Deng’s developmentalism.
They ridicule the homogenous, hegemonic history in their heterogeneous, hybridized historiettes.
As a hybrid literary form, retro-fiction resumes the active interchange
of styles before the establishment of generic classification. It incorporates
the traditional genres of myth, legend, folklore, biography, memoir, family romance, religious discourse, and even the non-literary style of lexicon. It pushes the limits of the definition of historical fiction by assimilating other popular fictional forms, including the thriller, detective story,
ghost story, classical love story, and knight-errant fiction, but they are
employed in such a quasi or parodic way that they no longer cater to vulgar tastes and conventional morals. Therefore, it is not a simple return
to or repeat of any literary tradition, since it is never aimed at a naive
retrogression to or resurrection of the good old days; rather, it is a critical reflection on or retrodiction of the past, so as to resist and reproach
the present-day projects of blind progress. In contrast to revolutionary
historical fiction, which serves only to reinforce the monological ideology of Party history, retro-fiction creates a “conversation”—as LaCapra
advocates in his study of rhetoric and history—with a “unified authorial
voice” through its “multiple-voiced uses of language” in mixed modes of
writing.9 The stylistic collage not only furnishes “contestatory voices and
counter-discourses of the past,”10 but also refurbishes the narrative form
and performance of historical fiction.
The multiple voices in the heteroglossia of history include not only
hearsay and gossip, but also silence. Silence is not quiet; quite the oppo9 Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985),
36. Evidently, LaCapra’s proposal benefits from Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogism and heteroglossia.
10 Ibid., 132.
235
site, silence is a speechless speech or the absence of voice that marks the
presence of power. It could be a disturbing refusal to speak, like the mute
first generation of urban immigrants; a violent suppression of expression,
as in the cases of the Muslim minority and the Tibetan tribes; or, in terms
of aphasia, an involuntary inability to articulate, a cut of the mother
tongue. On the one hand, there are wordsmiths who express concerns
about language’s reliability in conveying memorial and historical truths
and its domination over individual users or minority sociogroups; on the
other, there are worries about the disappearance of local dialects and the
aphasia of native languages under the double influence of Putonghua and
globalization. Aphasia is a linguistic amnesia, a memory loss in voice, a
historical lack of utterance. Where silence serves as a soundless sound—a
pause in the noise of the past—aphasia functions as the forgetfulness that
reminds us of unfilled blanks and unfulfilled tasks in the dialogic imagination of history. Retro-fiction means to refill these empty spaces with
alternative histories by vocalizing the unutterable.
The four chapters here are intended to demonstrate a few new paths
to the past opened up by fictions of history in Deng’s China. My different case studies are connected to each other in a spatial structure that
remaps Chinese history from the provincial scale down to the bodily
level. These cases create fictive fissures in the national narrative, unfolding a network of regional-familial, diasporic-colonial, rural-urban, and
corporal-textual historiettes that trace the past to local roots and domestic ancestors in Hunan and Shandong, foreign origins beyond the Great
Wall, colonial conditions in the Northwest and Tibet, adolescent experiences in south China and Beijing, the memoried hometowns of Suzhou
and Shanghai, physical scars on the Chinese body, as well as typeset
prints on the literary text. It is precisely in these places, spaces, sites that
fiction remaps the past and constructs another China. They constitute
a historiography not only for the outcasts and outlaws, but also of interrogations and interlocutions. The preposition ‘of’ in ‘fictions of history’
pre-positions an interaction between the two genres, an in-betweenness
indicating neither sheer fiction nor essential history but both—both are
a part of, and a container of, each other. They complement and supplement one another. History informs fiction; fiction informalizes history.
Where history provides fiction with raw materials, fiction frames, performs and transforms history into various forms. Through the ‘of’, history and fiction are connected, confronted, and finally confused. Consequently, we see a new history fictionalized into a maze of memory, a
236
conclusion
new fiction historicized into a labyrinth of language, or rather, a new
historical fiction weaved into a web of possible pasts.
Toward the end of the Dengist regime, historical fiction has redirected
its path from enlightenment via engagement to entertainment, suggesting
a historiography of neither didacticism nor dissension, but dissipation. A
commercialization of the genre was finally completed in 1994, when five
historical fiction-writers (Su Tong, Ge Fei, Bei Cun 北村, Xu Lan 須蘭,
and Zhao Mei 趙玫) were hired individually to produce their own stories
about the celebrated Tang empress Wu Zetian 武則天 (r. 684–705) for
Zhang Yimou’s eventually aborted film;11 at the same time, Ye Zhaoyan’s
Flowery Shadow (Hua ying 花影) was assigned and designed by Chen Kaige
陳凱歌 for his movie Temptress Moon (Feng yue 風月, 1996). Remolded by
the mass-culture industry as commodities, these consumerist versions
of historical narrative not only finished the Chinese literary pilgrimage
from communism to capitalism before the turn of the century, but also
declared the death of the spirit of resistance in fictions of history. Perhaps Pierre Nora’s conclusive statement should be rephrased in the current historical and cultural context of China after Deng. Visual effect has
become our substitute for imagination. Costume play has been promoted
to the center of history: thus do we mourn the loss of literature.
11 For example, Ge Fei’s “Tuibei tu” 推背圖 (Prognostication chart), in his Tiaowang,
195–314, with more than a hundred historical figures appearing in the novella, showcases
but a triumph of commercialism over the author’s avant-gardism. Xu Lan’s historical
fiction, full of imitations of classical atmosphere, utilizes traditional poetic language to
produce costume dramas.
appendix
WHAT IS HELD AND IN WHOSE HAND?
AN ETYMOLOGICAL REEXAMINATION OF SHI
There is no document of civilization
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
– Walter Benjamin, Illuminations1
In his 1994 book, From Historicity to Fictionality, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu 盧
小鵬 follows the widespread modern analysis of the Chinese character for
‘history’ or ‘historian’, shi 史, as a pictogram of an “officer … hold[ing]
documents in his hands,” relating the idea of ‘history’ to “the power of the
state.”2 A similar theory of authority is concluded in Wai-yee Li’s essay
on Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (145 – ca. 86 B.C.) Records of the Historian (Shi ji 史
記) published in the same year in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, in which
Li also bases her study on the interpretation of the graph as a historian
holding records.3 However, there are a number of alternative suggestions
made by twentieth-century scholars, which have been largely ignored by
both Lu and Li. The disagreements are mainly focused on the upper part
of the graph: What does it represent? This also broaches a question for
the lower element of the graph: Whose hand is it? These inquiries are
not only about the various possibilities in the original meaning of shi and
the early Chinese conception of history, but also about the methodologies
and ideologies behind different understandings of the graph.
Book and Pen: The Civilized shi
The reading of shi as a hand holding a text emerged from the Qing
dynasty as a skepticism against the age-old definition given in Xu Shen’s
Explanation of Graphs and Analysis of Characters. Xu explains shi as “the
1
Benjamin, Illuminations, 256.
Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 38–39.
3 Wai-yee Li, “The Idea of Authority in the Shih chi (Records of the Historian),” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 54.2 (1994): 346.
2
238
appendix
recorder of events (shi 事), with the right hand holding on to a just medium (zhong 中), the medium that means squareness.”4 Apparently, shi
史 is a cognate of shi 事, which is listed immediately after shi 史 in Xu’s
lexicon. Yet here shi 史 refers neither to historical events nor to historical
records, but to the historian. Xu decomposes the graph and attaches to
it the Confucian principle of unbiased historiography.
Although Xu’s abstraction represents an advanced political and historiographic ideal from the Spring and Autumn period, it could not satisfy
the Qing philologists. Jiang Yong 江永 (1681–1762), inspired by a note in
the classic Rites of Zhou (Zhou li) made by Zheng Zhong 鄭 (d. 83), Xu’s
contemporary, argues that the zhong in shi actually signifies official “books
and documents, similar to files of modern times.”5 Jiang’s identification of
shi as “the person in charge of papers and documents” stems from Xing
Bing’s 邢 (931–1010) gloss that “the shi is the official in charge of documents.”6 Wu Dacheng 吳大澂 (1835–1902) echoes that the top portion
of shi is the shape of a bamboo slip used for writing on in ancient times.7
This can be sustained by a statement in the early historical text Zuo’s Commentary (Zuo zhuan 左傳): “South Historian … got his slips to go.”8 In Wu’s
view, the Zhou-dynasty (1045–256B.C.) inscription of shi 事 resembles a
shi 史 holding a slip while standing under a banner, hence equivalent to
a shi 使, or ‘envoy’, being sent abroad. In the meantime, Ruan Yuan 阮元
(1764–1849), Fang Junyi 方濬益 (d. 1899), and Zhu Youzeng 朱右曾 (19th
cen.) elaborate Zheng Xuan’s 鄭玄 (127–200) annotation to the character zhong in Etiquette and Rites (Yi li 儀禮) as a vessel containing tallies for
archery contests.9
These ideas were inherited by students of the late Qing and Republican periods, including Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1868–1936), Wang Guowei
4
Duan, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 3B.121.
Jiang Yong, Zhou li yi yi juyao 周禮疑義舉要 (Quintessence of doubtful points in Rites
of Zhou) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 5.58.
6 Xing Bing, Lunyu zhushu 論語注疏 (Commentaries and subcommentaries to the
Analects) (Si bu bei yao 四部備要 edn.), 15.4b.
7 Wu Dacheng, Shuowen guzhou bu 說文古籀補 (Supplement to the ancient Zhou script
in Explanation of Graphs), in Wu et al., Shuowen guzhou bu, bu bu, san bu, shuzheng 說文古籀補•補
補•三補•疏證 (Supplement, second supplement, third supplement, and commentaries to
the ancient Zhou script in Explanation of Graphs) ([Beijing]: Zhongguo shudian, 1990),
3.15a.
8 Zuo zhuan, Xiang 襄 25.
9 See quotations from Ruan Yuan, Fang Junyi, and Zhu Youzeng in Chou Fa-kao 周法
高 (1915–1994), ed., Jinwen gulin 金文詁林 (Etymological dictionary of bronze inscriptions),
8 vols. (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1974–1975), 4: 1753–1754, 1: 326–
327.
5
what is held and in whose hand
239
王國維 (1877–1927), Lin Yiguang 林義光, Wang Xiang 王襄, and Wu Qichang 吳其昌. Zhang renders zhong into ce 冊, tied slips.10 Wang Guowei’s
celebrated essay, “An Interpretation of shi” (“Shi shi” 釋史), composed in
March 1916, opens with a rebuttal of Xu Shen’s explanation, pointing out
that the virtue of squareness or impartiality is not a concrete object that
can be held in one’s hand.11 Wang regards the zhong in shi as a receptacle
for tallies, and considers slips and tallies to be one thing in ancient times;
thus zhong also contains slips, which become books and documents when
bound together. By comparing shi 史 with another official term, yin 尹, he
confirms that the former depicts a person holding a document, whereas
the latter is that of a person holding a pen. Wang cites the Confucian
classics such as The Book of Documents (Shang shu) and Rites of Zhou to support his argument, concluding that the shi is responsible for collecting,
reading and writing documents. He goes on to state that the characters
shi 事 ‘event’ and li 吏 ‘officer’ were not distinguished from shi 史 during
the Shang period (1766–1046 B.C.); therefore, the ministerial titles qingshi
卿史, qingshi 卿事, and even qingshi 卿士 are all the same, and so as yushi
御史 and yushi 御事 ‘Royal Scribe’, san shi 三事 and san li 三吏, the Three
Dukes.12 Finally, the official title neishi 內史, Royal Secretary, also evolved
into zuoce 作冊, literally ‘writing on tied slips’, and zuoce 作筴, ‘writing on
divining-straws’, the last of which reveals that the historian was concurrently a shi 筮, Stalk Diviner.13
Wang Guowei’s formulation has been so influential that it is accepted
by a whole generation of Chinese and Western scholars, including Chou
Fa-kao and Herrlee Glessner Creel. In The Birth of China, Creel tells his
English reader of shi that “[t]he whole thing is a cup-shaped tally-holder,
used for keeping score in an archery contest; the hand holding it is that of
the score-keeper,” from which he derives a theory of “power rested in the
10 Zhang Taiyan, Wen shi 文始 (The beginnings of graphs) (1910; rev. 1913), juan 7;
quoted in Dai Junren 戴君仁, “Shi ‘shi’” 釋“史” (An interpretation of shi) (1963), in Zhongguo shixueshi lunwen xuanji 中國史學史論文選集 (Selected research papers on the history
of Chinese historiography), ed. Du Weiyun 杜維運 and Huang Jinxing 黃進興, 2 vols.
([Taipei]: Huashi chubanshe, 1976), 1: 17.
11 Wang Guowei, “Shi shi,” in his Guantang jilin 觀堂集林 (Collected works of Wang
Guowei) (1927; rpt. Changsha: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1940), 6.1a.
12 Lin Yiguang, in his Wen yuan 文源 (The origins of graphs), suggests that li was
originally a homonym, in fact the same character, of shi 事. See Chou, Jinwen gulin, 4:
1781.
13 Wang, “Shi shi,” 6.1b, 2b–4b, 5b–6a.
240
appendix
hands of the scholars.”14 Although he also points out that “[t]he bow and
arrow was the chief offensive weapon of China until very recently,” he did
not bring forth any military connection with shi 史.15 In effect, earlier in
1914, the Japanese Sinologist Naito Konan 內藤湖南 (1866–1934) had also
put forward in his lecture notes the same conclusion drawn by Wang that
the zhong in shi is a tally-holder. He relates it to military affairs in his books
on ancient Chinese history and the history of Chinese historiography, but
gains no attention outside of his own country.16
Disputing Wang’s interpretation, Ma Xulun 馬敘倫 (1884–1970) asserts
that the so-called zhong in shi is not a tally-container, but simply an upsidedown carving pen, and that the graph of shi is no more than an inverted
yu 聿, the original form of shu 書 ‘to write’. While yu pictorializes a hand
holding a pen to write downward, shi is to write onto the opposite.17 Reminiscent of the statement in Records of Rites (Li ji 禮記) that “[t]he historian
carries a pen,” this hypothesis of a writing instrument echoes Takada
Tadachika’s 高田忠周 earlier comparison between shi and yu, except that
Takada maintains Xu Shen’s moral interpretation.18
Another modern Chinese scholar, Lao Gan 勞榦, also disagrees with
the tally-vessel theory, but Wang’s association of divination to the historian’s duty lays the foundation for his imagination that the object being
grasped is a bow-drill used for the preparation of thinning and making cracks on tortoise shells, and that “the matter of divination by tortoise shell is the official historian’s primary job.”19 Meanwhile, in Japan,
Shirakawa Shizuka 白川靜 argues that the pseudo-zhong should be inter-
14 Herrlee Glessner Creel, The Birth of China: A Survey of the Formative Period of Chinese
Civilization (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 139–140.
15 Ibid., 139.
16 See Chou Fa-kao, ed., Jinwen gulin bu 金文詁林補 (Corrections and additions to
Etymological Dictionary of Bronze Inscriptions), 8 vols. (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi
yuyan yanjiusuo, 1982), 2: 980.
17 Ma Xulun, “Zhongguo wenzi zhi yuanliu yu yanjiu fangfa zhi xin qingxiang” 中國
文字之原流與研究方法之新傾向 (The origin and development of Chinese script and the
new tendencies in methodology) (1941), in his Ma Xulun xueshu lunwen ji 馬敘倫學術論文集
(Collected research papers of Ma Xulun) (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1958), 12, 169, 200;
Chou, Jinwen gulin, 4: 1758.
18 Li ji (Shisan jing zhushu edn.), 3.56; Takada Tadachika, Guzhou pian 古籀篇 (Treatise
on ancient Zhou script) (Tokyo: Guzhou pian kanxing hui, 1925), 59.20.
19 Lao Gan, “Shi zi de jiegou ji shiguan de yuanshi zhiwu” 史字的結構及史官的原始
職務 (The structure of the graph of shi and the original duties of the official historian),
Dalu zazhi 大陸雜誌 (The continent magazine) 14.3 (1957): 4. Lao is inspired by the
primitive fire-drills described and illustrated in Robert H. Lowie’s An Introduction to Cultural
Anthropology, 2nd edn. (New York: Rinehart, 1940), 55–58.
241
preted as a prayer utensil attached to a divine stick, which is used in
monthly sacrifice to ancestors or deities. And of course, he adds, a prayer
book is supposed to be placed in the utensil. Therefore, shi refers to one
kind of sacrifice, the act of such practice, as well as the official in charge of
it.20 To convince us of his sacrificial theory, Shirakawa shows an oraclebone inscription of shi with a shi 示 ‘tablet’ radical on the left.21 At the
same time his coeval, Hayashi Minao 林巳奈夫, proposes that the upper
element of shi looks like the feathering he found on a dagger-ax in a picture. However, he assigns the feathering to a banner instead of to the
weapon, averring that the shi would hold the feathering to summon spirits.22 These religious expositions fit P. van der Loon’s presumption that
“[t]he task of the scribe was probably of a ritual character.”23
Both assumptions of pen and drill have been disapproved by many
scholars. Creel, for example, has pointed out that under no circumstances should a pen be held in both hands as we found two hands instead
of one in some oracle-bone inscriptions: .24 As for Ma Xulun’s proposition of an inverted pen, Yao Xiaosui 姚孝遂 is discontent with his sealstyle oriented method in paleographic analysis.25 Nevertheless, with the
traditional accounts of shi, one might be tempted to draw a happy conclusion that the Chinese word shares an etymological common ground
with its English counterpart: ‘history’, whose Greek root, hístôr, denotes
‘learned man’. However, the conventional explanations are based on
the well-established historiographic institutes of later days. Moreover, it
relies heavily on the sources of the Zhou and Han periods. The discovery and study of more Shang oracle-bone inscriptions make it possible
to trace further back to the early conception of history as reflected in the
graph shi.
20
See Chou, Jinwen gulin, 4: 1772; idem, Jinwen gulin bu, 2: 986–987.
See Michio Matsumaru 松丸道雄 and Ken-ichi Takashima 高島謙一, eds., Jiagu
wenzi zishi zonglan 甲骨文字字釋綜覽 (Synthetic index for interpretation of oracle bone
inscriptions) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994), 11, no. 0024.
22 See Chou, Jinwen gulin bu, 2: 985–986.
23 P. van der Loon, “The Ancient Chinese Chronicles and the Growth of Historical
Ideals,” in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W.G. Beasley and E.G. Pulleyblank (London:
Oxford University Press, 1961), 25.
24 Creel, The Birth of China, 139.
25 Yu Xingwu 于省吾, ed., Jiagu wenzi gulin 甲骨文字詁林 (Etymological dictionary of
oracle bone inscriptions), comm. Yao Xiaosui, 4 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996), 4:
2961.
21
242
appendix
Tool and Weapon: The Barbarian shi
It is now generally believed that the upper portion of shi differs from
zhong in their ways of writing, particularly because in the middle of zhong
is a rectangular, circle, or oval ( , , ) instead of a mouth-shaped symbol
( ).26 Scholars have been debating whether zhong represents a tally-vessel,
a flag, a streamer, a sundial, or an arrow on a target.27 But the Y-shaped
image found in some variants of shi (e.g., ) eliminates at once the reading
of the element in shi as zhong. In 1936, two decades after the date of
Wang Guowei’s “An Interpretation of shi,” Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (1911–
1966) first observes that the upper half of shi delineates a hunting tool, a
stick with a net. He identifies the Y in the variants of shi with gan 干,
a sharpened crotch of a tree, sometimes with an additional streamer.
Belonging to the same word family of ge 戈 ‘dagger-ax’, gan is a cognate
of zhan 單 (戰), a crotch with two sharpened stones and a net: . Chen
also found a compound graph with a shi 豕, or ‘boar’, atop shi ( / / ),
which, together with the archaic forms of shou 獸 ‘animal’ and shou 狩 ‘to
hunt’ ( , ), provides evidence to his hunting theory.28
Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940), Yinxu shuqi kaoshi 殷虛書契考釋 (A study of the
script from Yin ruins), 2nd edn. (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1969), 2.14; and Yu, Jiagu
wenzi gulin, 4: 2943, 2961.
27 For zhong as an army flag or clan banner, see Tung Tso-pin 董作賓 (1895–1963),
“Taiwan daxue suocang jiagu wenzi” 台灣大學所藏甲骨文字 (Oracle bone inscriptions
collected in Taiwan University) (1953), in his Dong Zuobin xiansheng quanji 董作賓先生全集
(Complete works of Mr. Tung Tso-pin), 12 vols. (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1977), 2: 760;
Yan Yiping 嚴一萍, “Yin Shang bing zhi” 殷商兵志 (Military records from the Yin period
of the late Shang dynasty), Zhongguo wenzi 中國文字 (Chinese script), n.s., no. 7 (1983): 37;
Liu Xinglong 劉興隆, Xinbian jiaguwen zidian 新編甲骨文字典 (A new dictionary of oracle
bone inscriptions) ([Beijing]: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1993), 27–28; quotations from
Tang Lan 唐蘭, Wu Qichang, and Rao Zongyi 饒宗頤, in Yu, Jiagu wenzi gulin, 4: 2935–
2939; as a streamer, see Huang Dekuan 黃德 , “Buci suojian zhong zi benyi shishuo”
卜辭所見中字本義試說 (On the original meaning of the graph zhong as seen in oracle
inscriptions), Wenwu yanjiu 文物研究 (Cultural relics research), no. 3, cited in Yu, Jiagu
wenzi gulin, 4: 2941–2942; as a sundial, see Wen Shaofeng 溫少峰 and Yuan Tingdong 袁
庭棟, Yinxu buci yanjiu—Kexue jishu pian 殷墟卜辭研究—科學技術篇 (A study of the oracle
inscriptions from Yin ruins: Science and technology) (Chengdu: Sichuan sheng shehui
kexueyuan chubanshe, 1983), 14–16; as both a streamer and a sundial, see Li Pu 李圃,
Jiaguwen xuanzhu 甲骨文選注 (Annotated selection of oracle bone inscriptions) (Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1989), 68; as an arrow on a target, see Takada, Guzhou pian,
23.3–4.
28 Chen Mengjia, “Shi zi xin shi” 史字新釋 (A new interpretation of the graph shi),
Kaogu 考古 (Archaeology), no. 5 (1936): 7–12. See also Xu Zhongshu 徐中舒, “Zenyang
yanjiu Zhongguo gudai wenzi” 怎樣研究中國古代文字 (How to research archaic Chinese
script), Gu wenzi yanjiu 古文字研究 (Paleography) 15 (1986): 3–4.
26
243
Despite Chen’s later return to Xu Shen’s classical definition of shi
and the Taiwanese etymologist Li Xiaoding’s 李孝定 rebuff, his hunting
theory has prevailed in mainland China since 1949.29 Historical linguists
Wang Guimin 王貴民, Wu Shiqian 伍士謙, Fang Shuxin 方述鑫, Xu
Zhongshu 徐中舒, and Hu Houxuan 胡厚宣 all consider the hunting tool
depicted in the upper part of shi to be a primitive weapon as well. Wang
lists a number of examples from oracle-bone inscriptions, in which the
compound graph with a ‘boar’ atop or below shi—obviously a hunting
activity in its origin—is used as a verb, meaning in its contexts to capture
foreign enemies.30 This explains why hunting has long been employed as
a metaphor for military expedition in Chinese history and literature. As
Wu suggests, hunting and battling were the two major shi 事, or ‘events’,
in everyday life of the Shang people.31 Fang’s reading of the problematic
part of shi 史 as a piece of stone tied to a stick reminds us that we are
searching for the graph’s meaning in Neolithic China.32
Perhaps the most comprehensive investigation of shi in this regard is
Hu Houxuan’s 1985 essay “On the shi of the Yin Period as a Military Officer” (“Yindai de shi wei wuguan shuo” 殷代的史為武官說).33 The paleographer quotes a number of bone inscriptions to demonstrate the military
connotation shared by the homonyms shi 事, shi 使, and shi 史: the first
shi as in the phrases you shi 有事, literally ‘there is an event’, and wu shi
亡事 , ‘no event’, often refers to a war affair; the second shi is an envoy
or emissary sent for military mission; and the third shi as an official title
in the Shang period has less to do with any civil responsibility for state
documentation than a military outpost for defense or offense. From 1955
29 For Chen Mengjia’s changed view, see Chou, Jinwen gulin, 4: 1757, 1771; for Li Xiaoding’s reproof of Chen’s hunting theory, see his Jiagu wenzi jishi 甲骨文字集釋 (Collected
interpretations of oracle bone inscriptions) ([Taipei]: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan
yanjiusuo, 1965), 3.968–969.
30 Wang Guimin, “Shuo yushi” 說御史 (On ‘Royal Scribe’), in Hu Houxuan et al.,
Jiagu tan shi lu 甲骨探史錄 (Historical researches through oracle bones) (Beijing: Sanlian
shudian, 1982), 324–332.
31 Wu Shiqian, “Jiaguwen kaoshi liu ze” 甲骨文考釋六則 (Study of six oracle bone
inscriptions), in Guwenzi yanjiu lunwenji 古文字研究論文集 (Collected research papers on
paleography), ed. Sichuan daxue xuebao bianjibu 四川大學學報編輯部 and Sichuan daxue guwenzi yanjiushi 四川大學古文字研究室 ([Chengdu]: Sichuan renmin chubanshe,
1982), 97.
32 Fang Shuxin, “Jiaguwen kou xing pianpang shili” 甲骨文口形偏旁釋例 (Explanatory
examples of the ‘mouth’ radical in oracle bone inscriptions), ibid., 300.
33 In Hu Houxuan, ed., Quanguo Shang shi xueshu taolunhui lunwenji 全國商史學術討論
會論文集 (Collected research papers from the National Symposium on Shang History)
(Anyang: Yindu xuekan bianjibu, 1985), 183–195.
244
appendix
to 1986, Hu gradually built up his theory.34 He renders the term lishi 立
史 as “installation of ambassadors” to the four corners and borders of
the Shang domain, or as a ritual of such appointment. According to his
translation of some oracle-bone inscriptions, people were gathered to the
ceremony and the sacrificial liao 燎, or ‘burnt-offering’, was performed.
These inscriptions constantly appear on the tortoise plastrons where divination about expedition is found. Hence the shi must be established for
territorial aggrandizement or frontier security. In one inscription it is
reported that a large-scale offensive was mounted in the north, and so a
shi was installed on the northern land.
We have come to the point of examining the inscriptions per se. I found
numerous inscriptions listed under the entry “shi 事/shi 史/shi 使” in
Concordance of Oracle Bone Inscriptions from Yin Ruins (Yinxu jiagu keci leizuan
殷虛甲骨刻辭類纂) pertinent to war and diplomacy.35 The most frequent
divination on military campaigns concerns Fang 方, one of the Shang
people’s major enemies on the borders:
貞我史弗其方
Divined: “Our shi may not strike Fang.”
貞我史其方
Divined: “Our shi may strike Fang.”
貞方其我史
Divined: “Fang may strike our shi.”
34 Hu Houxuan, “Ji Xianggang dahuitang meishu bowuguan suocang yi pian niujiagu
buci” 記香港大會堂美術博物館所藏一片牛胛骨卜辭 (Notes on the oracle inscriptions on an
ox shoulder blade collected in the Museum of Fine Arts, Hong Kong City Hall), Zhongyuan
wenwu 中原文物 (Cultural relics from the Central Plains), 1986, no. 1: 46.
35 Yao Xiaosui and Xiao Ding 肖丁, eds., Yinxu jiagu keci leizuan, 3 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 3: 1125–1130.
245
貞方弗我史
Divined: “Fang may not strike our shi.”36
These formulaic statements of divination are to lay out the possibilities of
victory and defeat for both belligerents. Note that the proper name Fang
also signifies a farm implement similar to plow. In fact, many minorities’
or place names in the inscriptions are either that of a tool of production
(e.g., xin 新 ‘ax’) or virtually a weapon (dao 刀 ‘knife’ and bi 柲, handle of
a spear or halberd).
Another powerful enemy of the Shang people was the Qiang tribe,
who rose from an area in modern Gansu:
貞在北史有獲羌
Divined: “In the north shi will catch Qiang.”
貞在北史無其獲羌
Divined: “In the north shi will not catch Qiang.”
A Qiang prisoner of war, as indicated by the name itself, would be treated
as a ‘human-goat’:
侑于亞一羌三牛
In the temple sacrifice one Qiang and three cows.
Sometimes the ears of the slain were presented by the shi to tender
allegiance:
…
… 史以有取
The shi uses the method of cutting off the left ear.
Here the character qu 取, composed of the pictographs er 耳 ‘ear’ on the
left and you 又 (右) ‘(right) hand’ on the right, signifies the act of cutting
off the enemy’s ear for the count of battle achievements, which is known
36
I have consulted David N. Keightley’s translation of these charge lines in New Sources
246
appendix
as guo 聝 in later times.37 These records are imbued with violence or the
desire for violence. If we retain our modern translation of shi as ‘history’,
then it is a history soaked in blood.
Let us turn to two more characters related to shi 史 or shi 事 before
closing. Also given in the word family of shi 事 in Bernhard Karlgren’s
Grammata Serica Recensa is zi ‘to stab’.38 Its meaning, its additional ‘knife’
radical, plus its supradental pronunciation, as Wang Guimin has pointed
out, reveal that there must be a pricker (ci 刺) embedded in shi 事 and shi
史.39 Another interesting reference is the homonym shi 士, considered
interchangeable with shi 史.40 As a matter of fact, in one of the poems
collected in The Book of Songs (Shi jing 詩經), the phonetic loan word for
shi 士, translated as ‘knight’ or ‘gentleman’, is precisely shi 事,41 which is
in turn identical to shi 史 in oracle-bone inscriptions. As Wu Qichang
observes, shi 士 is a pictograph of an ax.42 If we agree that the shi 士 has
shifted from a warrior caste to the scholar class, then its transformation is
parallel to that of the shi 史 from a military post to a civil position. These
are just two examples of many civil service offices in imperial China that
originated from military service.
When Chen Mengjia’s article on shi first appeared in the mid-1930s,
Darwinism and Marxism were prevalent in China. With Marxism established as the state ideology in communist China, most mainland scholars
maintain that the object in grasp is a means of production as well as a
weapon used in territorial expansion. Even a historian like Li Hu 黎虎,
who preserves the view that the element in question is a flag with a speof Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts, ed. Edward
L. Shaughnessy (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1997), 50.
37 For exemplary uses of both terms of qu and guo in an early historical text, see Zuo
zhuan, Xi 僖 22.
38 Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa (1957; rpt. Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1972), no. 971d.
39 Wang, “Shuo yushi,” 324–332.
40 Wang, “Shi shi,” 6.4a.
41 Mao shi 毛詩 87/2. The word shi 士 in the poem is rendered into “knight” by Arthur
Waley and “gentleman” by both James Legge and Karlgren. See Waley, trans., The Book
of Songs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1960), 45; Legge,
trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 4, The She King, or The Book of Poetry, 2nd edn. (rpt. Taipei:
Southern Materials Center, 1991), 140; and Karlgren, trans., The Book of Odes: Chinese Text,
Transcription and Translation (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950), 57. For
the loanword relationship between shi 士 and shi 事, see Duan, Shuowen jiezi zhu, 1A.20,
3B.121; and quotation from Yang Shuda 楊樹達 (1885–1956) in Chou, Jinwen gulin, 4: 1784.
42 Cited in Chou, Jinwen gulin, 1: 310.
247
cial bamboo-joint bottom, still places military leadership at the top in his
duty list of the shi.43 On the contrary, under the continuing influence of
Confucianism, Taiwanese scholars tend to carry on the civil tradition.
Kao Hung-Chin 高鴻縉, for instance, translates shi into English as “an
official recorder,” whose hand is holding a slip to record speech from the
‘mouth’.44 Another example is Dai Junren 戴君仁, who agrees that the
zhong in the upper part of shi should read ce, or ‘tied slips’, which has a
special handle and is for ritual purposes.45 He further infers that the shi
is a historian specialized in learning, writing, reading, as well as creating
characters.46 Shen Gangbo 沈剛伯 also holds that the shi is a scribe or a
writer in general, who always carries a pen and a slip.47 Finally, intellectual historian Hsü Fu-kuan 徐復觀 believes that shi is composed of the
‘mouth’ radical (as in the character zhu 祝 ‘prayer’), a vertical stroke that
symbolizes a pen, and the right hand, all together meaning to write down
prayers on tied slips before praying; thus, the shi was originally a religious
occupation.48
Interestingly, a crossing of the scholarly and military readings of the
character shi would give a historian with blood on his hands. What strikes
us is: the historical development of China seems to shape the Chinese
understandings of the early Chinese conception of history. So they learn
the violence of ‘history’ through their violent modern history.
43 Li Hu, “Yindai waijiao zhidu chutan” 殷代外交制度初探 (Studies in the diplomatic
system of the Yin period), Lishi yanjiu 歷史研究 (Study of history), 1988, no. 5: 39–40.
44 Kao Hung-Chin, Zhongguo zi li 中國字例 (The origin and development of Chinese
characters), 2 vols. (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1964), 1: 230.
45 Dai, “Shi ‘shi’,” 1: 18–21.
46 Ibid., 28–29.
47 Shen Gangbo, “Shuo ‘shi’” 說“史” (On shi) (1970), in Du and Huang, Zhongguo
shixueshi lunwen xuanji, 1: 8–9.
48 Hsü Fu-kuan, “Yuan shi—You zongjiao tongxiang renwen de shixue de chengli” 原
史—由宗教通向人文的史學的成立 (Tracing the shi: The making of a historiography from
religion toward humanity), in his Liang Han sixiang shi 兩漢思想史 (An intellectual history
of the Former and Later Han), vol. 3 (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1979), 218–224.
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INDEX
Acheng, 18, 19n, 27n
Aisin Gioro Puyi, 197
Alai, 12, 13, 64, 104, 117–131, 232,
233. Works: “Bloodstains of the
Past” (Jiunian de xueji), 117–119;
“The Eternal Galo” (Yongyuan
de Galo), 118–119; Red Poppies
(Chen’ai luoding), 120–131
amnesia, 118, 126, 162, 177, 203,
235; and aphasia, 12, 233. See also
memory
anamnesis, 136, 165. See also memory
aphasia, 43, 80, 99, 127, 235. See also
amnesia; language
Arendt, Hannah, 187, 230
Aristotle, 2
Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard
Tennenhouse, 187
Bakhtin, M.M., 195, 234n
Barmé, Geremie R., 159
Barthes, Roland, 11n, 41, 78, 100n,
180, 194
bastardy, 58–64, 234; bastard hero,
13, 53, 60–61, 64, 234
Bei Cun, 236
Beijing, 13, 101, 121, 136, 158–163,
184, 235
Benjamin, Walter, 100, 175, 179, 229–
230, 237
Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit,
188, 214
Bhabha, Homi K., 125, 126n, 129
body: human, 11, 14, 54, 57, 61–62,
97, 107, 110–111, 130, 148–149,
157, 178, 185–186, 188, 190–195,
201–202, 208–209, 211, 213–215,
221, 226–227, 232, 235; textual, 11,
14, 188, 214–227, 232, 235. See also
food; sex
Braester, Yomi, 161, 168n, 169n, 206
Brooks, Peter, 186, 191
Cai Rong, 28
Cao Juren, 170
Cao Wenxuan, 21n, 63
Cao Xueqin, 60, 172
Chan, Shelley W., 56–57, 190–191
Chang, Eileen, 170, 172, 176. Works:
“Chinese Life and Fashions,” 178;
“Sealed Off” (Fengsuo), 174n
Chen Jianguo, 205
Chen Kaige, 236
Chen Mengjia, 242, 243n, 246
Chen Sihe, 9–10, 20, 33, 46n, 53–55,
164n
Chen Xiaoming, 147n
Chen Youliang, 218–219
Chen Zhongshi, 25
Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
7, 37, 51–53, 58, 62, 106, 113, 152,
177, 233
Chou Ying-hsiung, 46n, 47, 54
Chow, Rey, 87, 98, 101
Chow, Tse-tsung, 6n
Chu culture, 18, 26n, 28–29
city, 11, 13–14, 53n, 54, 72–74, 133–
158, 166, 170, 181, 183–184, 192n,
194. See also Beijing; country; sex;
Shanghai; Singapore
Confucianism, 19, 27, 66, 101–102,
145, 238, 247
country, 11, 13–14, 32, 53n, 81, 133–
142, 148–153, 160, 163, 181–184.
See also city
Creel, Herrlee Glessner, 239–241
Cui Shuqin, 163
Cultural Revolution, 8, 13, 17–18,
22, 25n, 34–35, 41–42, 54, 58, 63,
73–74, 76, 94–95, 109, 111, 136,
272
index
155–160, 163, 166–169, 178–182,
184, 192, 202–203, 206, 213
Dai Jinhua, 133, 135, 160, 169, 183,
206
Dalai Lama, 106, 117, 121–122, 125
Darwinism, 6–7, 27, 230, 246. See also
evolution
De Certeau, Michel, 2, 84, 185, 226,
230
decadence, 13, 135–138, 154. See also
nostalgia
Deng Xiaoping, 1, 7, 9, 14, 17, 19,
43, 53, 81, 94, 103, 133, 169,
234
dialect, 25, 31, 36, 39, 43, 73, 100,
120, 127; vs. Mandarin (Putonghua), 12, 40, 43, 64, 136, 235. See
also idiolect; language
diaspora, 65, 68, 90, 100–101, 143;
diasporic discourse, 11, 13, 67, 79,
122, 232, 235. See also exile
Dirlik, Arif, 7n
effective history, 4, 151
escapism, 141, 145–147, 182. See also
exile; nostalgia
everyday life, 13, 154, 175–178, 182–
183, 213–214, 243
evolution (jinhua), 27–28, 234; Marxist, 109. See also Darwinism; progressionism; revolution
exile, 30, 65–67, 72, 76, 89–90, 100,
121, 134, 142–143, 223; exilic
discourse, 69. See also diaspora;
escapism
famine. See food
Fang Fang, 146–147
fashion, 176
Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei, 26, 28, 30,
47–48
fiction (xiaoshuo): traditional Chinese conception of, 5–6. See also
metafiction
food, 25, 56, 108, 118, 175, 188–196;
and famine, 52, 59, 87, 138, 150,
189–190, 192–193, 195–196, 200,
208–209; and sex, 14, 21, 140, 193,
200, 221. See also body
Foucault, Michel, 151–152, 194–195,
214, 223
French, Patrick, 115
Freud, Sigmund, 84, 134, 143, 157,
167, 193–194, 198, 200
Fromm, Erich, 59
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 4
Gao Xingjian, 141
Ge Fei, 12–14, 24–25, 64, 104, 113–
117, 130, 188, 214, 217–226, 232,
236. Works: “Encounter” (Xiangyu), 10–11, 113–117, 131, 224–226;
“Green Yellow” (Qinghuang),
218–220; “The Lost Boat” (Mi
zhou), 221–224; “The New Year”
(Danian), 220–221; “Prognostication Chart” (Tuibei tu), 236
Genghis Khan, 75, 77
Gladney, Dru C., 79, 80n, 86, 95n,
97n, 98n
Goldblatt, Howard, 50n, 208–209
Greenblatt, Stephen, 22n, 23n
Gu Hua: Hibiscus Town (Furongzhen), 159, 203
Guo Moruo, 7
Han Bangqing: Flowers of Shanghai
(Haishang hua liezhuan), 170
Han Shaogong, 12, 18–20, 25–43,
53, 63–64, 232–233. Works: A
Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao
cidian), 25, 31–43, 64; “Pa Pa
Pa” (Ba ba ba), 25–31, 64. See
also root-seeking literature (xungen
wenxue)
Hershatter, Gail, 5
historical fiction, 2–3, 5, 8, 10,
64, 131, 234, 236. See also new
historical fiction; revolutionary
historical fiction
historiography, 3–5, 12, 47, 164, 167,
236, 238; alimentary, 192–195;
alternative, 15, 171; anachronis-
index
tic, 47; bodily, 57; communist,
7, 26; cruel, 201–214, 226; cyclical/linear, 6, 13, 27, 46, 108–109,
113, 130, 143; descriptive, 13–14,
172–176, 183, 233; diachronic/
synchronic, 10; ethnoreligious
(ethno-, religio-), 81, 96, 102,
131; magical realist, 113; mammary, 189–191; Maoized, 14;
Marxist, 151; mazy, 217–226;
objective, 226; official (mainstream, standard, state), 9, 11,
17, 51, 62–64, 67, 93, 99, 104,
130, 227, 231, 234; postrevolutionary, 9; revolutionary, 9,
140, 233; scatological, 195–201;
sexual, 138, 140, 217; teleological, 103, 130; visual, 215–217,
226
history: and literature, 9, 232, 236;
definitions of, 1–2, 5–7, 9, 232,
241. See also effective history;
historiography; meta-history;
myth; shi
hometown, 44, 64, 100, 133–138,
149, 151–152, 160–161, 163, 166,
183, 235. See also nostalgia
Hong Zicheng, 9n, 17n
Hsü Fu-kuan, 247
Hu Shi, 7
Hu Ying, 136, 138n, 139–141, 217,
233
Huang Ziping, 8n
Huizu. See Muslims
Hutcheon, Linda, 1, 3–4, 6, 116,
134n
hybridity, 54, 94, 122, 125–126, 234.
See also identity
identity, 14, 65, 81–82, 84, 88, 119,
131; colonial, 124–125, 130; crisis,
12, 95, 118–119, 144–146, 148,
232; ethnic, 80, 94, 106, 122–126;
hybrid, 53, 61, 109, 121, 125–126,
129–130, 150–151; individual, 81,
84, 94, 118–119, 121, 131, 232;
minority, 97, 119–120; national,
273
6n, 9, 13, 80, 128, 232; politics, 93,
100. See also idiocy
idiocy, 14, 25, 28, 63–64, 119, 128–
129; and identity, 119–120, 129–
131, 233–234; and idiolect, 64
idiolect, 25, 41, 43, 100, 194; and
dialect, 25, 40, 100. See also language
Inge, M. Thomas, 23n, 46
Jameson, Fredric, 1–2, 19n, 106,
135
Ji Hongzhen, 29, 44n, 50, 55, 218
Jiang Wen: In the Heat of the Sun
(Yangguang canlan de rizi), 159–
163, 166–169
Jones, Andrew F., 204, 209–211
Karlgren, Bernhard, 246
Klee, Paul, 229
Kristeva, Julia, 1, 84, 93, 231
Kuomintang (KMT), 41, 51–53, 55,
57–58, 187, 233
LaCapra, Dominick, 231, 234
language, 14, 164–165, 234, 236; and
body, 194–195; and history, 12–
13, 39–43, 100, 102, 199, 217–
218, 235; and subjectivity, 26,
39–41, 165–166, 218; Chinese
as metropolitan, 65, 80, 92, 99–
100, 103–104, 127; consciousness,
30–31; instrumentalism of, 40–41;
meta-, 34–35; national (official),
12, 31, 40, 43, 120, 127–128, 136;
vs. speech (parole), 40–41, 180. See
also aphasia; dialect; idiolect
Lau, Joseph S.M., 26–28
Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 133, 170
Lee, Vivian, 37, 39n
Leenhouts, Mark, 33, 37
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 35, 78, 147
Li Jiefei, 78
Li Rui, 18. Work: Silver City (Jiuzhi),
11, 22
Li Tiangang, 172n
Li Tuo, 8n, 30n
274
index
Li Wai-yee, 237
Li Zehou, 19
liberation: national, 7. See also People’s Liberation Army; Tibet
Lin Gang, 7
Lin Yü-sheng, 6n
Lipman, Jonathan N., 65–66, 80n,
82n, 89n, 92n, 94n, 98
Liu Heng, 12, 14, 25, 64, 188, 195–
201, 226, 232. Works: “Dogshit
Food” (Gouri de liangshi), 189,
195–197, 200; Green River Daydreams
(Canghe bairimeng), 24, 61, 197–
200
Liu Kang, 211n
Liu Xinmin, 93–95
Liu Xinwu, 8, 159
Liu Zaifu, 7, 26–27, 141n
Loess Plateau (huangtu gaoyuan), 82
Louie, Kam, 27n
Lovell, Julia, 32–33, 36n, 38n
Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, 237
Lu Tonglin, 44, 50n, 51, 105–106,
201
Lu Xun, 27–28, 64, 134. Works:
“Hometown” (Guxiang), 161;
“Kong Yiji,” 61–62; “A Madman’s
Diary” (Kuangren riji), 27, 144–
145; “Medicine” (Yao), 87
Lukács, Georg, 151, 175
Ma Xulun, 240–241
magical realism, 14, 67, 105–108, 113
Mao discourse, 8, 44, 100, 213
Mao Dun: Midnight (Ziye), 170
Mao Zedong (Chairman Mao), 7,
44, 63, 108, 140, 156, 161, 213
Maoism, 7, 9, 17, 41, 56, 94n, 230
Márquez, Gabriel García, 21; influence on Chinese writers, 23, 105–
106. Works: The General in His
Labyrinth, 223–224; One Hundred
Years of Solitude, 105, 137
Marx, Karl, 99n, 183
Marxism, 9, 17, 80, 86, 230, 246; and
evolution, 109; and revolution,
7; as philosophy of history (his-
torical materialism), 6–7, 42, 56,
183
memory, 7, 14, 18, 59–60, 73n,
102, 159, 161, 165, 202, 232; and
imagination, 135, 165, 169, 223,
232–233; and writing, 162, 164,
235; childhood, 152, 155–156, 159–
161; collective/institutionalized,
94, 97, 152, 203; fragmentary, 118,
152, 162; lost, 119, 161, 233, 235;
personal/private/individual’s,
9, 13, 19n, 46–47, 64, 97, 185–
186, 206, 225; post-, 48, 233; site
of, 173; vs. history, 232. See also
amnesia; anamnesis; nostalgia;
trauma
Meng Yue, 147
Menggu mishi. See The Secret History of
the Mongols
metafiction, 4, 22, 35, 64, 141, 158,
164, 184–185, 220; historiographic, 3–4
Mills, C. Wright, 186n
minority, 13, 53n, 65, 82, 95, 185–
186, 235; writers, 66, 131. See also
Mongols; Muslims; Tibet
Mo Yan, 11–12, 14, 17, 44–64, 188–
192, 201, 213, 226, 232; as new
historical fictionist, 23, 25, 64.
Works: Big Breasts and Wide Hips
(Fengru feitun), 23–24, 50, 56–
63, 188–192, 200, 214; The Red
Sorghum Family (Hong gaoliang
jiazu), 11n, 23–24, 44–56, 60,
64, 136–137, 148, 186, 189–190,
193–194, 214; Sandalwood Torture
(Tanxiang xing), 214; “White
Dog and the Swings” (Baigou
qiuqianjia), 44. See also rootseeking literature (xungen wenxue)
modernization, 14, 73n, 135, 148,
152n, 153, 169, 195, 230, 232; and
nostalgia, 183; and root-seeking
literature, 17–18, 27–28; and
Tibet, 103. See also progressionism
Mongols, 65–67, 75, 79–80. See also
The Secret History of the Mongols
index
Muslims, 12–13, 66–67, 79–103, 131,
235. See also Zhang Chengzhi
myth, 64–65, 78, 234; and history,
13, 35, 78–79, 105–106, 130, 233;
family, 78, 131; migratory, 13, 26,
29–30, 65, 67, 72, 78–79, 233. See
also Wang Anyi
Nan Fan, 31–32, 134
Nationalist Party. See Kuomintang
new historical fiction (xin lishi xiaoshuo), 12, 17, 20–24, 51, 53n, 64,
210, 236; and neorealist fiction
(xin xieshi xiaoshuo), 20; and new
historicism, 22. See also historical
fiction; Mo Yan
new historicism (xin lishi zhuyi), 14,
22–24, 231. See also new historical
fiction
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 84n, 151–152,
189, 194–195, 214
nihilism, 4, 116–117, 130, 224
Nora, Pierre, 67n, 232, 236
nostalgia, 11, 13–14, 126, 133–139,
143–146, 152, 158–161, 164, 168–
169, 172, 174n, 175, 181–184,
186, 231–232; and decadence,
137; and escapism, 141, 147; and
imagination, 12, 135, 184; and
myth, 72; and narcissism, 167;
and root-seeking literature, 19;
for the present, 7; of the Mao era,
95. See also hometown; memory;
Su Tong; Wang Anyi; Wang
Shuo
Orwell, George, 8
Pavi´c, Milorad: Dictionary of the
Khazars, 31
People’s Liberation Army (PLA),
106n, 107, 110, 123, 128, 130,
160
progressionism (developmentalism),
9, 12–14, 53, 103, 234. See also
evolution; modernization
Punch, 116
275
quotidian, the. See everyday life
Republican period, 20, 82, 118, 120,
127, 233
revolution, 7, 18, 51–54, 59, 68, 73,
94–95, 112, 139–140, 154, 175, 177,
220–221, 232, 234; and violence,
187, 213; Republican, 52, 85,
88. See also Cultural Revolution;
evolution
revolutionary historical fiction, 8–9,
11–12, 21, 51, 63, 187, 234
Ricoeur, Paul, 37–38
root-seeking literature (xungen wenxue), 12, 14, 17–20, 24, 27, 30–
31, 43, 64, 133–135, 232, 235;
and Han Shaogong, 12, 18–20,
25, 27, 29–31, 64, 232; and Mo
Yan, 136, 148; and Tashi Dawa,
104; and Wang Anyi, 73, 77, 79,
233; linguistic, 31; post-, 136, 151,
206
Said, Edward W., 28, 104
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 40–41, 180,
231n
scar literature (shanghen wenxue), 8–9,
11, 14, 158–159
Schiaffini-Vedani, Patricia, 8–9, 105,
109
Secret History of the Mongols, The
(Menggu mishi), 75
sex, 40, 111–112, 137, 157, 178–179,
196–197, 200, 221; and body, 186,
190, 192; and city, 149–150, 154,
170; and history, 138, 140, 160,
162, 217; and violence, 14, 20, 53,
140, 154, 156, 158, 193–194; as
metaphor, 66, 107, 124. See also
food
Shakya, Tsering, 104, 107n
Shanghai, 13, 69, 71–73, 101, 136,
155, 169–184, 233, 235
shanghen wenxue. See scar literature
shi (history/historian), 6, 187, 237–
247. See also history
Simmel, Georg, 185
276
index
Singapore, 65–66, 68–72
Sino-Japanese War, 38, 45, 51, 71, 191
socialist realism, 106
space plotting, 14, 218, 221–225, 226
Su Qing, 170
Su Tong, 12, 14, 21n, 25, 64, 135–
158, 167, 183–184, 186, 188, 192–
195, 201, 214–218, 226, 232, 236;
Fragrant Cedar Street (Suzhou
city) series, 13, 136, 152–158;
Maple Village series, 11, 13,
24, 135–152. Works: “The Age
of Tattoos” (Ciqing shidai),
153, 156–158; “Bridge-side Teahouse” (Qiaobian chaguan),
152–153; “The Brothers Shu”
(Shu Nong), 152, 154, 156–157,
192, 217; The Decadence of the
South (Nanfang de duoluo), 137;
“The Decadence of the South,”
152, 154–155; “Escape” (Tao),
137, 142–143, 192; “The Father
and Son Outsiders” (Waixiangren fu zi), 137, 142–143; “Flying over Maple Village” (Feiyue
wo de Fengyangshu guxiang),
137, 142, 146–147; “Going Faraway on a Skateboard” (Cheng
hualunche yuanqu), 152, 156–157;
“In Memory of Mulberry Garden” (Sangyuan liunian), 152;
“Mourning for Red Horse” (Jidian hong ma), 137, 143–144; My
Life as Emperor (Wo de diwang
shengya), 24, 25n; “Nineteen
Thirty-four Escapes” (Yijiusansi
nian de taowang), 137–139, 142–
145, 147, 150, 215–216; North Town
(Chengbei didai), 153–154, 156–
157; “Opium Family” (Yingsu
zhi jia), 137–140, 193n, 215, 217;
“Paper” (Zhi), 152, 154–155; “The
Queen of Hearts” (Hongtao Q),
152, 154–156; Rice (Mi), 137, 147–
152, 188, 192–195, 214–215; “The
Rooster Raiser” (Siyang gongji
de ren), 152–153; “A Sad Dance”
(Shangxin de wudao), 156–157;
Wu Zetian, 236
subjectivity, 9, 50, 71, 78, 81, 84, 87,
166–167, 185. See also language
Sufism, 83
Sun Lung-kee, 200
Tang Xiaobing, 71, 133n, 145–146
Tashi Dawa, 12–13, 18n, 64, 66–
67, 103–113, 117, 130–131, 140,
232. Works: “The Old Manor”
(Guzhai), 110–113, 140; “Tibet:
The Mysterious Years” (Xizang:
Yinmi suiyue), 104–110, 113
Tibet, 12–13, 65–67, 79, 103–132,
224–226, 235; liberation of, 103,
112–113, 117–120, 128–129. See also
Alai; Ge Fei; Tashi Dawa
Todorov, Tzvetan, 131
trauma, 8, 14, 112, 126n, 202–203,
214, 234
Tung Tso-pin, 242
utopia, 10, 18–19, 72, 76, 82, 103,
124, 149–150; vs. dystopia, 144,
150, 161; vs. heterotopia, 223
Vico, Giambattista: The New Science,
28
violence, 14, 51, 62, 87, 97–98, 108,
158, 166–167, 185–192, 195, 201–
215, 221, 226, 229–232, 235, 246–
247; existential, 12, 213–214; non-,
88, 96–97, 188; of revolution, 54,
187, 203; representation of/of
representation, 96–97, 187–188,
206, 209–213, 226. See also sex
Wang Anyi, 8n, 12–13, 18, 64–79,
130–131, 135–136, 169–184, 232–
233. Works: “An Anecdote from
the Cultural Revolution” (Wenge
yishi), 136, 180–182; “Granny
Hao and Comrade Li” (Hao po
he Li tongzhi), 73n; Patrilineal and
Matrilineal Myths (Fuxi he muxi de
shenhua), 66–67, 78; Records and
index
Fiction (Jishi he xugou), 67–68, 72–
78, 180; “Sadness for the Pacific”
(Shangxin Taipingyang), 67–72;
In Search of Shanghai (Xunzhao
Shanghai), 174; The Song of Lasting
Regret (Changhen ge), 10n, 136,
170–180
Wang Ban, 7, 9, 14n, 22, 175, 202
Wang, David Der-wei, 17n, 52, 136,
141, 170, 179
Wang Gan, 31, 141–142
Wang Guowei, 238–239, 242
Wang Jing, 18, 64, 188, 217
Wang Shuo, 12–13, 133, 135–136,
158–167, 184, 186, 232. Works:
“Wild Beasts” (Dongwu xiongmeng), 35n, 159–166. See also Jiang
Wen
Weber, Max, 186–187, 205
Wedell-Wedellsborg, Anne, 201
White, Hayden, 4, 23n, 35, 39n, 231
Williams, Raymond, 134
Wong Kai Chee, 27
wound literature. See scar literature
Wu Yiqin, 77, 148
Xie Youshun, 19n, 211
Xu Jian, 82, 86
Xu Lan, 236
Xu Zidong, 51, 221
xungen wenxue. See root-seeking literature
Yao Xueyin: Li Zicheng, 10
Ye Zhaoyan: Flowery Shadow (Hua
ying), 236; Night Moor at the Qinhuai
River (Ye po Qinhuai), 24–25
You Fengwei, 25
Younghusband, Francis E., 107, 114–
116, 224–225
Yu Dafu, 71
Yu Hua, 12, 14, 24–25, 188, 201–214,
226, 232. Works: “1986” (Yijiu
277
baliu nian), 202–205, 207, 213–
214; “Blood and Plum Blossoms”
(Xianxue meihua), 207, 210,
214; Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
(Xu Sanguan mai xue ji), 10n,
214n; “Classical Love” (Gudian
aiqing), 207–210, 213–214; “The
Death of a Landlord” (Yige dizhu
de si), 210–211; “The Past and
the Punishments” (Wangshi yu
xingfa), 205–207, 213–214; To Live
(Huozhe), 210–214
Yue Gang, 126, 171
Zhang Chengzhi, 12–13, 18, 64–66,
79–102, 130–131, 186, 232. Works:
“The Black Steed” (Hei junma),
81; Gold Prairie (Jin muchang),
141n; History of the Soul (Xinling
shi), 65, 81–82, 84–85, 88–102,
204; “Investigation of Assassinations in the Western Province”
(Xisheng ansha kao), 81–82,
84–88, 90, 100, 102; “Ruins of
Flowers” (Xianhua de feixu), 100;
“Yellow Mud Hut” (Huangni
xiao wu), 81
Zhang Jingyuan, 24
Zhang Qinghua, 22, 59, 61, 137–138,
153n, 158, 177
Zhang Xinying, 39n, 73, 87
Zhang Xudong, 175, 218, 223
Zhang Yimou, 236. Works: Red
Sorghum (Hong gaoliang), 189;
To Live (Huozhe), 211–213
Zhang Yiwu, 31, 32n, 197n
Zhao, Henry Y.H. (Yiheng), 201
Zhao Mei, 236
Zhao Shuli, 187, 211n
Zhou Meisen, 25
Zhu Yuanzhang, 219
Zuo Zongtang, 85, 88, 93, 96

Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng`s China, 1979

Transcription

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