When "I" Was Born: intro and chapter 1

Jing M. Wang's new look at Chinese women's autobiography shows us that the genre emerged from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. In her "Introduction," she gives two basic motivations for the study: first, to combat the implicit hegemony of Western male privilege and so expand the sense of what autobiography is. A second, related motivation is Wang's sense that in critical examinations of modern Chinese women's literature, all too often "fiction overshadows autobiography." To Wang, this "shadow" is completely unjustified: "The light of these texts shone out to me from dusty shelves in libraries, urging me to bring them together as one tradition." To do so, Ms. Wang makes a major nod a/b studies, adapting Lejeune's definition of autobiography as a form to be distinguished from both fiction and historical writing and fiction. Unlike the fiction writer, the autobiographer intends to be a kind of true statement, but this should be a "subjective truth," and so "the autobiographer...must not be held accountable for 'factual errors.'"

Wang's chapter 1 lays the groundwork for her conception of Chinese women's autobiography as a unique genre emerging first in the 1920s by considering autobiography in the Chinese tradition in an extremely abbreviated fashion. Traditionally, biographical writing in China is a historical genre with strictly didactic functions, as we can see from the foundational biographies of Sima Qian and repeated endorsements of the tradition in critical writings by figures such as the eight-century historiographer Liu Zhiji and Liang Qichao, the great reformer of the early 20th century. Traditional Chinese historical biography crafts heroic lives to be model figures of moral rectitude; this historiography reaches extreme didactic ends in works like the Ming dynasty tradition of Biographies of Women (Lie nü zhuan), which "is filled with gory atrocities women inflicted on themselves to prove their sexual loyalty toward their husbands..." The dramatic forms of self destruction in these biographies figures well the generality that Jing M. Wang wishes to emphasize, which is that "for both women and men, the circle of the so-called self can be compared to a ripple stirred up by the dropping of a pebble into water: it multiplies, magnifies, and gradually extends and disappears into the body of water." This figure helps us understand why autobiographical writing in ancient China was most often considered only a supplement to larger works, was usually very short, and did not dwell on the interior workings of the author's mind.

There is, however, a counter-tradition to this tradition, one that is perhaps not emphasized strongly enough in this chapter. The most influential of all Chinese lyrics, the Encountering Sorrow (Li sao), has also been called China's first autobiography for its extended and allegorical investigations of the poet's state of mind. And as Ms. Wang perceptively outlines, the growth of funerary writing, especially epitaphs, as a independent genre offers a pathway for personal engagement with the self that was used by countless outstanding figures of the tradition, from Cao Pi to Ouyang Xiu. Wang even brings up important but seldom-mentioned members of the critical tradition of personal, private writing, including Liu Xie, Xu Shizheng, and Zhang Xuecheng.

This discussion is perhaps too brief to function as anything more than a first glance at the problem of autobiographical writing in traditional Chinese literature. Interested readers are referred by Wang herself to the still under-celebrated 1990 work Confucian's Progress by the late Professor Wu Pei-yi, for a fuller exposition on the issues. Still, Wang's generalizations about the tendency in traditional writing to focus the imaginative power away from the self-portrait and instead to the service of historical lesson-making are for the most part still accepted understandings of the milieu from which China's first generation of modernists, the generation of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, emerged. Liang's generation promoted fiction to a higher level in Chinese letters than ever before for the express purpose of reforming politics and society, but understood autobiography strictly as a form of biography, which in turn was strictly understood as a form of history. These traditional precepts first broke down under the pens of the May Fourth writers in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Especially significant was Hu Shi, who called for book-length autobiography as a genre which was literary and historical at once, and able to serve in the development of the Chinese sense of the individual. Also there was Yu Dafu, who perhaps more than any other writer of the May Fourth generation strove to answer the call for inwardly-turned exploration of the author's mind and memory in book-length autobiography. Wang identifies a few works from this period that illustrate well the new turn towards self-writing, including Shao Shunmei's introduction to Lu Yin's Autobiography (廬隱自傳),
in which Wang finds a "nudge" toward the concept of the "subjective truth" that effectively makes autobiography a historically-intended genre distinct from fiction. As is well-known, all of these writers were avid readers of Western literature, including Western autobiographies like Augustine's Confessions; Ms. Wang notes this and also finds as well a 1937 anthology from Commercial Press in Shanghai which proves that Chinese autobiographical writing was at the time considered alongside Western autobiography in translation even in the popular sphere.

As Wang argues, writers of the early May Fourth period tended to focus strongly on the growth and development of the individual, believing that individualism was a crucial ingredient of the more powerful and modern Western societies. But as the events of the late 1920s and 1930s brought deterioration of the Republic, the birth of a new collectivist politics in the new Communist Party, and finally a desperately violent war with Japan, individualism quickly declined. Prof. Wang demonstrates a recurring fascination with the fact that, despite the rapid uptake of new nationalist and collectivist themes in Chinese literature of the 1920s to the 1940s, there is a seemingly paradoxical emergence of autobiographical writing by women during this same period. Professor Wang's goal is to explain how this happened. As the reader finishes chapter 1 and prepares to begin chapter 2, he or she is given to understand that the resolution to the apparent paradox lies in the quickly advancing social and political status of women in China. New roles like teaching and writing are available to a small but quickly growing proportion of Chinese women by the 1920s, and these roles call on women to turn away, at least partly, from their old roles as mothers and wives, as agents of private and domestic spaces; these "new women" firmly occupy the new and exciting public sphere. It makes sense, in a general way, that these women will create literary explorations of all these new ways of being, that they will turn to their own experiences for an honest, earnest look at these new identities, and that they will not see these autobiographies as anything less than fully serving the creation of a new, defensible and modern Chinese nation.