Yang Jiang: Finding the Irony

(This is my second post about the subject of my dissertation; check out the first one, if you wish. )

Political Criticism?

Yang Jiang is a widely celebrated writer in China today; her memoir of the Cultural Revolution is actually taught in Chinese schools.


One of the main problems that interests me is: how did this memoir become such an enduring classic? It is especially interesting when we remember that fiction and memoir of the Cultural Revolution was openly published in the years 1978-1980, and then promptly silenced in 1980. Yang Jiang's book was published at the tail end of this period, but unlike other works from those years, it was never banned. Clearly, it was never seen as a deep political critique. But I always got the feeling it was one of the more powerful critiques not only of the Cultural Revolution but against Communist ideology as a whole. It often seems to me to be just the kind of book that China's leaders should have banned in 1980. Why didn't they? I'm only slowly putting together the answer to the question. Below, my initial response to a reading from a 2004 MA thesis by a Taiwanese graduate student.


Yeh Han-yin 葉含氤. Yang Jiang wenxue chuangzuo yanjiu 楊絳文學創作研究 (A study of Yang Jiang’s literary writing). MA thesis, Soochow University Taiwan.

Irony in Chinese: a preliminary note

In this strikingly sophisticated look at the "literariness" of Yang Jiang's writing, Yeh Han-yin 葉含氤 accomplishes a lucid exposition on what I have called in English the "irony" that is everywhere present in Six Chapters of a Cadre School. In Yeh's terms, what Yang Jiang accomplishes is a dual portrait of political movements and her own emotional interior that applies a style most notable for its detached, completely irreverent form of wit, what Yeh calls 'humorous satirico-comical style' (youmo fengci de xiju bifa 幽默諷刺的戲劇筆法). The central term of Yeh's analysis of this crucial feature of Yang Jiang's style is maodun 矛盾, meaning "contradiction" or "paradox;" the strong similarity of maodun in this exposition to the term "irony" in my exposition helps reveal the considerable overlap of our arguments.

A prerequisite for irony: distance

In a brilliant reading of the 1987 essay "On the Cusp of Fire: The Years of the Horse and Ram (1966-1968)," Yeh Han-yin points to the skill with which Yang Jiang is able to use language to distance herself to the situation at hand, thus obtaining in many respects a 'clear perspective' (qingxing de shijiao 清醒的視角). Yang Jiang alludes at various places to the strong bond between this distancing and the capacity for seeing the situation ironically, as when she describes the scene of a public struggle session against intellectuals: "Like Monkey, my soul rose up into the air and surveyed the strange performance, including the ragged troupe of Monsters and Demons trailing on behind in their dunce's caps. It was a superb farce, and even now I can picture that droll parade, with me at the head of it." (Barmé 40) The distance that comes with memory, coupled most likely with the sort of inwardly-turned personal character that Yang Jiang always exhibits, forms its own strategies of survival.

A Small Battery of Verbal Ironies, Summarized

Looking closely at the verbal forms these strategies take, Yeh finds two kinds of "paradoxes" (maodun) at the center of Yang Jiang's injections of distance, clarity, and the comic. The first is the paradox of logical dialectic (luoji de bianzheng 邏輯的辯證). In "On the Cusp of Fire: The Years of the Horse and Ram (1966-1968)," Yang Jiang also describes the Cultural Revolution struggle session as incredibly boring, so much so that she couldn't help "falling asleep on her feet, like a horse" (xue ma er shui 學馬而睡). Here, says Yeh, the paradox is between Yang Jiang's apparent calm and collection and the intense atmosphere of cruelty and confession that characterized the setting. For Yeh, this type of paradox is also commonly found in Six Chapters of a Cadre School. In Chapter 3, "The Vegetable Garden: On Idleness," for example, the chief paradox is between Yang Jiang's sense of distress at the tremendous waste characterized by the cadre schools and the more superficial mode of leisure characterized by the term "idleness" (xian 閒). Similarly, the end of this same chapter contains a pithy exposition on the various exclusive but overlapping cliques that existed between prisoners, cadres, and peasants at the cadre school, and as Yeh points out the complex tones of the exposition serves mainly to contrast starkly with the intended function of the cadre school to end the distinction between the prisoners and the peasants and to bring about a general collective identity.

Irony and Political Criticism

Yeh deserves credit not only for working out the main features of this type of "paradox," but also for pointing out that these paradoxes deep critiques of Cultural Revolution policies. But Yeh does not perhaps go far enough to explore the implications of this critique, especially in light of mainland readings of Yang Jiang that remain seemingly blind to her writing as a form of critique. Whether it be the cruelty of struggle sessions, the tremendous waste of human capital and other resources at the cadre schools, or the failure of the schools to foster the intended collective spirit, Yang Jiang's clear meaning is that the project as a whole was a failure from the very beginning. It was not that the Cultural Revolution was a good idea that had gone to excess, and it was not that any particular individuals such as Mao Zedong or the Gang of Four were at fault. Rather, the ideology itself, as expressed in its main terms and assertions, is the subject of ironic, paradoxical play in Yang Jiang's work. In place of "struggle," Yang Jiang alternates between laughter and boredom; facing "re-education through labour," Yang Jiang finds altogether too much 'idleness,' and in the place of 'collective spirit,' Yang Jiang finds only the limited and exclusive 'we-ness' (zamen 咱們) of cliques that are formed in times of duress. The stakes of this political critique are high; if the authoritative mainland reading that labels Yang Jiang's writing a form of "showing a wound, yet uttering no complaint" (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒) were better readers of irony, they might have found a considerable dose of 'complaint' in her memoirs.