Friday, July 31, 2009

One Book in One Day: Well, Maybe Next Time

Writing Cultural Heroes (not me, by a long shot)

I've already described the first essay in this collection, which helped me think about why I might call Yang Jiang a "cultural hero." But I never read the other eight essays included here, mostly because I still read Chinese much too slowly. To overcome this frustration, I've adapted Adler and Van Doren's techniques of "inspectional reading." My goal was to "inspect" all nine essays on Tuesday. For various reasons, I could not spend the entire day reading, nor did I do so on Wednesday, and on Thursday I took up most of the day with this task, but found myself easily distracted. (Scholarship with an internet-ready laptop presents distraction, temptation and ultimately dissipation, a folly that I hope to combat with Ben Franklin-like assiduousness. But that's more a topic for phramok than Wandermonkey). At last, though, on Thursday afternoon I completed my inspections. Here is the reduction of 20 or so pages of notes.

当代大众文化批评丛书

Writing Cultural Heroes
is a volume in the Contemporary Popular Culture Criticism Series -- I'll make a list of other titles to look at in this series soon. The series editor is Li Tuo, who in his series preface gently chides scholars for not developing popular culture studies as a field. MTV may not seem important to scholars, he says by way of example, but they all need to recognize that young people reinforce their ideas of what is right, wrong, ugly and beautiful 美丑对错 with MTV. Hence popular culture, which is any and all books and media produced for a mass-market, is an important topic of study. The western world has already developed theories of popular culture, but these need to be analyzed carefully by the Chinese. Back when postmodernism became a fad, some scholars who lacked prudence 谨慎 thought that China in the 1990s was already in the postindustrial age!

1. Top-Tier Cultural Heroes

Yang Zao explains how Chen Yinke and Gu Zhun represent two major pathways by which an established scholar forgotten during the Communist years could rise again to gain iconic status in the 1980s and 1990s.

2. The Road to Self-Redemption 自我救赎之路

Jia Guimei describes the ways victims of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaigns have written about their experiences in novels, memoirs, and mainstream historical works. For Jia, 1998 is a year of particular interest because so many books on these experiences appeared.

3. The Decline and Fall of Chinese Poetry 诗神的降落

Zhou Zan gives us an extensive outline of poetry movements since the Cultural Revolution, focusing on the bifurcation between more elevated forms and so-called "people's writers" 民间作家. The gloomy conclusion is that poetry as a form is probably dying in China.

4. The Canonization of Jin Yong 金庸小说经典化

A fascinating account of Jin Yong's evolving status as the most-read author in the Chinese diaspora. The development of "Jin Yong studies" at Peking University gives author Wu Xiaoli a chance to reflect on how Jin Yong has helped elevate all popular literary forms in the eyes of China's teachers. Not everybody likes Jin Yong: Wang Shuo has a big problem with him.



Jin Yong 2009: Who da man?




5. Morte accidentale di cinese Avante garde 先锋的结束

Wang Chang examines the staging and reception of the 1998 Nobel Prize-winner in Literature's most representative work, the play Morte accidentale di un anarchico. That few Chinese scholars were even aware of the play or its author, Dario Fo, just goes to show the bankruptcy of the Chinese avant garde.

6. The Spirit of the Age has Symptoms: How Steel Was Tempered in 2000

How Steel Was Tempered (1934-ish) is apparently one of the most important Soviet Realist novels, though I'm just learning about it here. See, for example, a nice reading in a book on the female protagonist in Russian literature. A close reading of the main character Pavel and his romantic interest Gaia as the appear in the year-2000 feature-length TV version in China reflects the peculiar official (re)vision of a hero during a period of millenium fever.

7. Ain't Got Nuthin' 一無所有 : Cui Jian and Chinese Rock

Meng Wa gives a fun and enlightening examination of the spirit of resistance as exhibited in Cui Jian's biography and career. Meng's close reading of the song "Eggs Under/laid by the Red Flag" 紅旗下之蛋 gives me my first glimpse at how parody can work in China.



Cover of a Cui Jian Album




8. Say Hello to Mr. Fashion 時尚先生

This examination of the magazine "Fashion" 時尚 over the course of 1995-2000 is definitely my least favorite piece in the book. Concluding what is really no more than a report on the contents of the magazine, Ms. Mei hopes that readers get a sense that the figures in "Fashion" can become exemplary. But how so? She seems to recognize the weakness of her argument -- or more precisely, that she lacks any argument at all.



"Fashion" later merged with Cosmo




9. Privacy Fever 隱私熱

Teng Wei profiles a 1998 explosion of confessional and testimonial writing onto the Chinese market: "privacy fever." This is an excellent piece -- I remember that Wang Lingzhen covered the same topic from a different angle, and I intend to come back to this and to compare the two essays.



The original privacy bestseller became a TV movie in 2005




Dai Jinhua 戴锦华, editor. Shuxie wenhua yingxiong: shiji zhi jiao de wenhua yanjiu 书写文化英雄:世纪之交的文化研究 [Writing cultural heroes: cultural studies at the turn of the century]. Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2000.
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Monday, July 27, 2009

Finished the Red Brush; back from the Wilderness

Idema, W. with Beata Grant. The Red Brush : Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center ; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2004.

At long last, I finished this massive anthology of women's writings in so many genres and from so many different periods of time. I feel like I've just been introduced to a whole small town where everybody is related to everybody else and every relative worships each of her or his elders. Either that or they categorically condemn them.

My favorite section by far is on the drama, near the end of the book. We meet Xie Xucai, the Chinese Yentl, who for me brings to life the adventure of journeying past what culture makes you out to be. (The picture below is from a 2006 production put on by Eslite Bookstore in Taiwan.)



Every woman who learned to read and write in Chinese was once already in drag, because these were the things that men did, as much as wearing pants.
Today the spring colors are splendid and I am consumed with longing. And so to amuse myself, I sit here alone, dressed up as a man... -- Xie Xucai, in The Fake Image《喬影》
So then for Xie Xucai to actually wear pants is only a dramatic flourish that emphasizes the transgression, and hence the adventure, of reading and writing. If you think about this long enough, the figure of the Chinese woman writer becomes the figure of any writer or any artist, because art is really at essence the pouring out of the mind into envisioning some new thing that will then inevitably come to stand for its maker.

Writing is always a kind of self-creation. That a artist can produce something completely unlike his own life, making the association between the work and the identity of its creator an arbitrary and uninformative point, is simply an entry point for the larger realization that the self and its products are equally ephemeral, unknowable, "dream-like." This larger truth reduces gender to a trivia, but that's admittedly poor consolation.
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Friday, July 17, 2009

Lecture: Li Qingzhao and poetic self-fashioning

The autobiography [perhaps its own class session?]

The letter. Character and verse.

Ci. poetry. The writing "I" -- pacte? [good example of an ID] Red Brush 220

Lyric writing assignment!

what is romance? what is the connection between romance and the personal? Music: Carter Pann's "Mercury Concerto" July 17.

Comments: who is the most individual?

Reading tips for autobio: the particular, the everyday. [individuality, personality]. the writing "I" , complexity of the interior. Not a single will, but a bundle of wills. [quote Augustine if you like]
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Thursday, July 16, 2009

Buddhist and Daoist Lives

Xie Daoyun disses the DUke of Zhou. (also in Paul's book as an epigraph, I remember)
a sister and a nun. Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. 竹林七聖. imit of Xi Kang. "I jump up, but find I cannot soar in flight," Daoist inclinations. 游仙詩. 正一 daoism, from Sichuan. Shangqing Daoism. (Red Brush 143)

Red Brush 156. Movie: In Clouds!
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Lecture: Literary Couples

Xu Shu. ca. 150 poem. Qin Jia's wife; his 3 poems.
1. A human life is like the morning dew. (Shijing mat poem)
response: "So far, so far, alas, we are apart!" 兮 Zhong Rong: the pain of the husband and wife come through. Du Yu on her castity. Hu Yinglin on literary couples. (Red Brush 135)

Liu Lingxian, perhaps Red Brush 152.
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Yellow Lily

Thanks to Flickr user Lasre for the image.
I gaze at the "forget-your-pain" flower but my pain is not eased,
I pluck the zither but how it wounds my heart!
Now I left my sons and returned to my home,
An old grief has gone, but a new grief has been born.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Course Preview

The shape of Chinese history

Reading Tips 1: Tips for reading autobiography.

Tip 1. Look for the writing "I"
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Lecture: Writing Women

Liu Xiang's Biographies of Women. (development of harsher and harsher bios)

"The Epitaph of Fang Mu Zhang Ruren" by Gui Youguang (1507-1571)
Wu Meicun "The Epitaph of Wang Mu Zhou Taianren"
The Epitaph of Pei Mu Cha Yiran.

Ban Zhao.

(Wang Zhaojun)?

Li Qingzhao.

Poetry: why does autobiography have to be prose? Why...so overt?

a little poem about the woodpecker. Example of Odd autobiography!

The Inner Palace, described. 73-74 of the Red Brush.

"In ancient times there was lady Fan but now we have Concubine Ban" !

use Idema's text, because embedded in the biography. 80

(reading tips: reading poems with allusions)

defense poem: Red Brush 304.
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Lecture: Inhibition and Indulgence

Lecture 01 (?) Inhibition and indulgence

Review the historical context. The mountain that is the Han!

(reading tips: nested reading)

"As the self was not considered a self-contained entity that defined its own importance, autobiography, a genre that apparently celebrates the achievement of the autonomous individual, was tantamount to unabashed self-exaltation." Jumping through hoops p. 4. This is of course only one half of the story.

Encountering sorrow. "distasteful narcissim"? Red Brush, p. 6: "ci poems and feminine mode."

Wang Chong, "the first untrammeled autobiographical expression in China" (Wu 45-6)

Cao Pi's Tianlun Self-reference as "I"

Elements to point out: "I" (explain); temporal/spatial (comix? Larson!)
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Autobiography Theory

Gusdorf 1956

Pascal 1960


China special:

Koozoo 1999

Wu Pei-yi 1990
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Lecture Outline: Wartime Autobiography

Lecture __

First, explain the larger context: China's entry into WWII. (I think probably I'll take a page from Jonathan Spence)

Explain what "Jumping through hoops means" with close association to the more general picture above.

List out what you want students to look for in the coming readings.

Sources Used for this Lecture:

Wang Jing, Jumping Through Hoops

Wang Jing, When "I" Was Born

Review essays.
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Class Schedule for ALL 3900-002: Writing Lives in China

Ugh. Drawing this up makes me really nervous!

Wednesday, September 9: Preview of the Course
poem 1 of the shijing
master five willows

Friday, September 11: concubine ban. portraying the portrait

Monday, September 14: Week 2
Sima Qian Bios: Liu Bang, Xiang Yu. Empress Lü, Lady Qi

Wednesday, September 16:
Wang Zhaojun and Cai Yan: Impersonation.

Friday, September 18:
End of the Party: The Hermit

Monday, September 21: Week 3

Wednesday, September 23:

Friday, September 25:

Monday, September 28: Week 4

Wednesday, September 30: "Why Curse of the Golden Flower Sucks"
Tang dynasty biographies: Shangguan, Empress Wang, Empress Wu, Empress Wei.

Friday, October 2:
Tang dynasty biographies: Yang Guifei (Concubine Plum, Phantom)
Monday, October 5: Week 5

Wednesday, October 7:

Friday, October 9:

Monday, October 12: Week 6


Wednesday, October 14:
Li Qingzhao (autobiography, [letter], poetry)


Friday, October 16:
Wen Tianxiang, soldier patriot.Hero.

Monday, October 19: Week 7

Wednesday, October 21:
Nuns, Guanyin Red Brush 314, Empress Xu
Friday, October 23:
Daoist Lady Lives.
Monday, October 26: Week 8
Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man
Wednesday, October 28:

Friday, October 30:

Monday, November 2: Week 9

Wednesday, November 4:

Friday, November 6:

Monday, November 9: Week 10

Wednesday, November 11:

Friday, November 13:

Monday, November 16: Week 11

Wednesday, November 18:

Friday, November 20:

Monday, November 23: Week 12

Wednesday, November 25:

THANKSGIVING BREAK

Monday, November 30: Week 13

Wednesday, December 2:

Friday, December 4:

Monday, December 7: Week 14 (Wartime Lecture)
Jumping Through Hoops: Imprints of Life by Chu Wenjuan; A Journey of Twenty-Seven Years by Lin Beili (75-139)

Wednesday, December 9:
Lost in The Crowd: A Cultural Revolution Memoir
1. Literary Couples.

Friday, December 11:

Monday, December 14: Week 15

Wednesday, December 16:
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Bibliography Addendum: Jiu-jung Lo on Women's Autobiography

Lo, Jiu-jung 羅久蓉. "Jindai Zhongguo nüxing zizhuan shuxie de aiqing, hunyin yu zhengzhi 近代中國女性自傳書寫中的愛情、婚姻與政治" (Love, Marriage and Politics in Modern Chinese Women’s Autobiographical Writings). Jindai Zhongguo funü shiyanjiu《近代中國婦女史研
究》volume 15 (2007.12): 105-117.

Strangely, I cannot find a digital copy online. I'll have to read this at the library later...
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Friday, July 10, 2009

Is the Chinese Language Bad?


Hannas, William C. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai'i Press, 1997.

Hannas, William C. The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

I'm currently consternated to find that a linguist with extensive knowledge of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese has decided that none of these languages offers much hope to their respective peoples. In his 1997 work, Hannas concludes, "As a human being, I am appalled by the tragic waste of resources and creativity that Chinese characters cause."

But at least in that work he found that Vietnamese and Korean made real progress in leaving Chinese characters behind. And he also took care in his earlier work to say that he did not consider Asians to have any lesser capacity for productivity. By 2003, the tune had changed:

"Although Korean and Vietnames writing do identify phonemes, the tutorial effect is subverted by....syllabic format, which constitutes the basic psychological unit" (248). No, I haven't figured out what he means by that yet. As for creativity, well, read the subtitle of the book!
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Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Jumping Through Hoops (2003)

Wang, Jing. Jumping through hoops : autobiographical stories by modern Chinese women writers. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2003.

There are a number of real gems here -- particularly Lin Beili's hyper-distanced account of life in war conditions. "Children, servants, water, rice, and coal occupied my entire mind. By then I already understood very well that my life was being consumed day after day."

But unfortunately, an awkward translation style combines with the sometimes low or maudlin literary qualities of the original writings to produce more than a few howlers. Bai Wei's title story is probably the worst:
Jump! Jump! Jump out of hell! My heart was laughing. I could realize my ambitions. My heart could pursue its goals. Jump! Jump! My happy heart felt like a white lotus in full bloom at dawn. (55)


Preparing for class:

All stories in this book come from the 1945 volume Nü zuojia zizhuan xuanji 女作家自傳選集 edited by Xie Bingying. I'll need to locate the cover of the 1945 edition, for sure:
Highlighting the unconventionality of these narratives, the front cover of Xie's book features the portrait of a Western woman wearing long curly hair, earrings, and a low-neck dress. She looks half submissively and half defiantly to her lower right, with her right hand on her heart, as if full of stories that she hesitates and yet strongly desires to confide in the reader. This portrait gracing the cover of the book embodies the complicated connection between modern Chinese women's autobiographical practice and its Western "model"... (1)
Other zingers:

Teaching was indeed a joy. (164, Xie Bingying)

People in love with literature are like gardeners, eager to spread seeds at all times. (164, Xie Bingying)

A Chinese page describes the book very briefly, yielding up the Chinese forms of all nine authors represented: 子冈、安娥、白薇、林北丽、彭慧、叶仲寅、褚问鹃、赵清阁、谢冰莹.
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Monday, July 6, 2009

Lao She Translations

A quick glance reveals these titles; I'll build on this list. My goal is to determine whether Beneath the Red Banner is the best piece to assign.



Lao, She. Beneath the red banner. Beijing: Panda Books (China Publications Centre), 1982.

Lao, She. The Two Mas. Translated by Kenny K. Huang and David Finkelstein, illustrated by Ding Cong. Hongkong: Joint Pub. Co., 1984.

Lao, She. Blades of Grass: The Stories of Lao She. Translated by William A. Lyell and Sarah Wei-ming Chen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999.
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The Encyclopedia of Life Writing


Jolly, Margaretta. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

I mentioned once before that I'm quite interested in this massive tome and what it means for professional roles that I might take on. I guess the main issue here is to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of putting my readings in Chinese literature into a broader "world literature" context.

For now, this will be the notes page for my occasional readings in this encyclopedia. I'll do my best to be a more interrogating reader, and to bring in some of the objections to world literature that I've heard but failed to note carefully before.

China: to the 19th Century (Wu, 206-8) "If biography in various guises constitutes probably the largest component of Chinese writings, Chinese autobiography is by comparison minuscule." Li Qingzhao, Li Zhi, Wang Jie, Mao Qiling.

Gender (Helena Grice, 359-60) Women have a "relational" self, which leads to more fragmented autobiography; men are individualistic and so produce "seamless narrative." There's something vaguely troubling about this now-standard generalization. Also, is Jade Snow Wong really a decent representative of the Chinese sense of "self"? There is a good list here showing "the recent flourishing autobiographies of transsexuals"

Lesbian and Gay Writings

Xie Bingying (971-2) Zhao Baisheng's entry reminds me that he once said he disagreed with Jolly about some of the Chinese entries here. Remember to ask him for more of that story.
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a/b Auto/biography Studies



One of my goals for the coming weeks will be to figure out what journals I'm most publishable in and to get a feel for the kind of project I might do for each one.

What I like about a/b is that it's not a China journal, so for any writing I put out there I'll be taking the role of "China hand" explaining my exotic slanty-eyed friends to the English and French specialists. That's not the only role I ever want to have, but it's a good one to get some practice at, methinks.

23, volumes, 2 issues to each volume.

Volume 22. Jay Prosser reviews the 6th IABA conference in Honolulu (he notes he missed panels because he was at the beach). Miram Fuchs reviews volume 1 of the new Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies; I need to check her new book Teaching Life Writing Texts.

Volume 1. There is information here on how the journal got started back in 1985 as an idea among a/b-minded MLA folks. There are plugs for the journals Women's Diaries, Prose Studies, and Biography. The first review is of A.O.J. Cockshut's whimsical volume The Art of Autobiography in 19th and 20th Century England (Yale University Press, 1984; I've encountered this before).

"Backlist" ("standard works in the field")

Weintraub, Karl. The value of the individual : self and circumstance in autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
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Review: When "I" Was Born

The previous few entries were notes for a review. At long last, I'm done with a draft of said review. Here's hoping the magazine will actually publish it!

Draft review for a/b: Auto/biography Studies



Wang, Jing M. When "I" Was Born : Women's Autobiography in Modern China. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Scholars of life writing and Asian studies alike owe a great debt to Jing M. Wang for giving us When “I” Was Born, a highly crafted literary history that tells us how modern autobiography emerged in China from the 1920s through 1945. It is a highly gendered story, in that vernacular, prose-based life writing in China is a rare example of a field dominated by women writers. Wang’s exploration of how this came to be so takes the reader on a journey into early commercial publishing centered in Shanghai in the 1920s and against the backdrop of political tumult, from Chiang Kai-shek’s consolidation of power to the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.

In her "Introduction," Wang presents her basic motivation for the study, which is quite simply to adopt an approach informed by Philip Lejeune and other theorists of life writing that distinguishes autobiography both from fiction and from other types of historical writing. Readers from the field of Asian studies will find here a sensitive scholar who is profoundly dissatisfied with past criticism in which "fiction overshadows autobiography" and autobiography, when considered at all, is only used as a historical resource. What Wang says is perfectly true, and as her readings show, the course correction that incorporates life writing approaches brings out of the “shadows” an amazing new canon of works. “The light of these texts shone out to me from dusty shelves in libraries, urging me to bring them together as one tradition." (10) Wang’s enthusiasm is infectious.

When “I” Was Born is organized into seven brief chapters, all of which maintain an admirably clear, concise writing style that for the most part encourages the general reader and does not assume a specialty in the field of modern Chinese literature. Familiarity with major figures like Lu Xun (1881-1936), Hu Shi (1891-1962), Lin Yutang (1895-1976) and others would be welcome, but Wang takes care to introduce these in her text. Less well-covered is the story of the women’s movement in China; Wang simply assumes familiarity with basic figures like the feminist and revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin (1875 – 1907) and she does not describe any of the major events of the women’s movement per se; readers will have to look elsewhere for this crucial background.
Chapter 1 is an extremely abbreviated look back at the tradition of life writing in China from ancient times to the early 20th century. This is perhaps the weakest chapter of the book, as I argue below. Chapters 2-7 are a closely associated set of stand-alone pieces that show the emergence of modern vernacular autobiography in China; each of these chapters contains exciting, highly original contributions to a story that has gone too long untold. First, in chapters 2 and 3, we meet impresarios like Lin Yutang producing translations and introducing new writers in the mass-market publishing center of Shanghai, and we learn how the new autobiographical forms were taken up by a wide readership of would-be writers. In chapters 4 – 7, Wang gives individual portraits of four of the new women writers: Lu Yin (1898-1934), Su Xuelin (1897-1999), Bai Wei (1894-1987), and Xie Bingying (1906-2000). Collectively, these essays are a major advancement in our understanding of the range of autobiography produced in China before the end of World War II.

In Chapter 1, Wang attempts to lay out the challenges faced by would-be Chinese-language autobiographers. She outlines a tradition she calls “an institutionalized mechanism of documenting imperial history by court-employed historians.” (16) 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 Biographies of Women, which "is filled with gory atrocities women inflicted on themselves to prove their sexual loyalty toward their husbands." (19) The dramatic forms of self destruction in these biographies is a good figure for the generality that 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." (24) This image 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.

As might be expected, this generality does not effectively sum up the entire Chinese tradition. Wang could be forgiven for over-simplifying traditional Chinese self-fashioning if indeed the twentieth-century figures she studies turned their backs on this tradition, but by her own admission in later chapters, they are often highly engaged with it. Su Xuelin, for example, was a scholar of Qu Yuan, whose lyric poem Encountering Sorrow has been called China’s first autobiography, and yet neither the legend of this poet nor his significance in the tradition are described here or later in the book. Besides Qu Yuan, there is a significant counter tradition of self-focused writing in China, one that reaches its peak in the late Ming (1368-1644) and early Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, but despite a familiarity with Wu Pei-yi’s 1990 study of this subject, The Confucian’s Progress, Wang does not emphasize this tradition. Even later in the Qing dynasty, when feudal and patriarchal gender frameworks were at their most severe, progressive figures within the tradition existed, like Yuan Mei (1716-1799), who could be called a precursor of Lin Yutang in that he helped women writers publish. Why does Yuan Mei appear only in a footnote to chapter 7, and not in chapter 1? Wang’s apparent attempt to monolithize the imperial tradition underemphasizes the strength and continuity of an equally old counter tradition of personal, private writing.

But despite this unsatisfactory background chapter, with Wang’s chapter two the reader is treated to one of the highlights of this generally excellent work. “Western Life Narratives and Theories in Chinese Translation” is a masterful engagement between translation studies and a contemporary market-based history-of-the-book perspective. Wang’s interdisciplinary approach here is effective at illustrating how autobiography as a modern Chinese-language form was essentially born in the late stages of the collapse of the Chinese Republic and the subsequent plunge into World War II. Under these unforgiving political and economic conditions, China's first mass-market literature producers introduced autobiography to Chinese readers, and garnered a wide response whose significance in the field of modern Chinese literature resonates to this day.

Wang’s goal is to explain the apparently paradoxical situation of an increasingly nationalist and anti-individualist literary field that simultaneously produces the first women’s autobiographies. The solution is two-fold: first, the mass-market for books was dominated not by ideologically inclined literary leaders like Lu Xun, but by advocates for a literature that eschewed politics and engaged with people’s ordinary lives. Second, the 1910s and 20s saw the coming of age of a broad generation of educated, working women, the Chinese “new woman.” Taking up new roles as teachers, writers and soldiers, they were often forced to make tough decisions about family, sex, marriage, domesticity and bearing children. The new autobiographical forms, introduced to them from the west by mass-market publishing, gave them powerful new tools to imagine new ways of being, to craft genuinely personal new literary forms of themselves, and to distribute these forms amongst each other as readers. “It was an act of literary democracy," says Wang later in chapter 3, when the first anthologies of new women’s autobiographies had begun to emerge. (100)

A set of particularly brilliant case studies drives Wang’s narrative. We learn of Zhang Jingsheng, who in the 1929 translated Rousseau’s Confessions to widespread Chinese acclaim. Zhang, a “Parisian free spirit” (48) whose radically egalitarian notions of sex, society and art earned him imprisonment and exile in China, was the perfect translator for Rousseau. Just as influential to Chinese readers was the translation of Isadora Duncan’s My Life. Duncan (1877-1927) was a great American dancer whose autobiography told her rise from poverty to great fame on the strength of her talent. Rousseau’s story, with its iconoclastic egocentrism, and Duncan’s, with her more modest reflection on the writer's doubts, each gave inspiration to Chinese readers, as Wang proves with the comments of Lu Yin, Su Xuelin, Xie Bingying and others.

Rousseau’s Confessions and Duncan’s My Life, both imprints of Shanghai’s Commercial Press, function in Wang’s narrative as precursors to the wave of translated autobiographies produced by the publishing machine of Lin Yutang. In her fascinating and original perspective on the author of such American bestsellers as My Country and My People (1936), Lin emerges as the single most important agent for autobiography as a form to emerge in China. As World War II began in earnest with the occupation of Shanghai, Lin worked hard to provide cheap, yet sustaining, new literature for Chinese readers that would emphasize the values of humor, fortitude, responsibility and independence. With a triumvirate of literary magazines -- these were cheaper to produce and consume in war conditions -- Lin Yutang and his colleagues published new translations of great Western autobiographies like W.H. Davies Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) in serial form. Other autobiographies were reduced to digest form, again mainly in response to the material conditions of the war. These new “short autobiographies” were devoured by a readership that was able and eager to answer a call from Lin’s magazines to write up their own stories in like kind.

Having described the publication arena that brought autobiography to China in the 1920s through the 1940s, Wang turns in the third chapter to five anthologies of short autobiographies published between 1936-1945, focusing on the majority female authors. Wang surveys all of the collections deftly, showing that major themes of later autobiographies first appear here. Especially to be noted is the theme Wang calls "dissociation from femininity," but which might better be called a re-negotiation of traditional feminine values. For example, Wang says, “Women's refusal to discuss domestic life in their autobiographies serves as a good index of their new self-definition in the public arena." (77) Actually, "refusal" is perhaps too strong a term. Certainly, some writers distanced themselves from traditional female values: Fan Xiulin defends her decision to wear short hair. Xie Bingying is a proud soldier. And one brave woman, Shi Wen, openly dreams of adopting a lesbian lifestyle. But more often, these writers wish not to "refuse" domestic life, but to renegotiate it. A writer named Meng Zhuo proposed that “school and home work together in the raising and education of children.” (80). Li Su and Fu Ying love being moms, and find room for personal growth in this. And even Xie Bingying, stuck in a Japanese prison camp, is proud of her skills at mending socks.

In chapter 4, Wang considers Lu Yin’s 1934 Autobiography to be among the earliest voices to develop themes that we see in later women's autobiographies in China, including the "awakening consciousness of oppression." In Lu Yin's case, her birth on the day of her grandmother's death makes her particularly unwelcome in an already misogynist household. "This is the inglorious beginning of Lu Yin's life as told in her autobiography, rare in Chinese life writing by men but recurrent in that by women." This theme continues as Lu Yin grows up in an abusive household, eventually recognizing the power of education for attaining independence, and identifying early role models in autobiographies that she read. Wang finds in all of this "a microhistory of educated Chinese women's fight for new womanhood through writing." (114) In another telling anecdote, Lu Yin found love with a young man over a shared love of literature, but the relationship ended when Lu decided that "marriage would ruin my life." (115) Thus we see an original exploration of the potential for a severe opposition to traditional female roles.



Just as opposed to misogyny, but more ambivalent about the Chinese tradition of arts and literature, novelist, literary scholar and memoirist Su Xuelin presents a much more problematic case. Where Lu Yin’s reputation can be judged from a single work, her 1934 Autobiography, Su Xuelin’s fragmented autobiographical essays have to be tracked with a scattershot approach: some were originally put out as early as the 1920s, but not collected in book form until the appearance of Su’s My Life in 1967, and others were published in a painfully ignored 1991 volume called Ninety Four Years of a Floating Life. Wang finds in the old teacher's little-known life writing the story of a major 1920s-era thinker who fought at once against misogyny and for preserving certain parts of the Chinese tradition, like classical Chinese language and literature. Her complicated positions in the ideological wars of the 1920s left her marginalized in modern Chinese literature, despite her immense talent -- indeed, Wang feels no compunction in labeling her "the best female prose writer in modern times." (122)

Wang can feel confident in this appraisal because, of the writers surveyed in this book, only Su Xuelin masters the difficult pre-modern written version of the Chinese language, which opens up access to a rich tradition of idiomatic, allusive, scholarly, and poetic forms of expression that give her prose elegance and sophistication. In an essay called "My First Literature Teacher," Su narrates her growth as a person as she teaches herself to read. Wang understands this as one way in which Su mostly eschews personal writing in favor of a form of life writing that tells who she is in terms of her values. As Su the young student identified with books, so Su the researcher also identified with the ancient and probably legendary founding father of the Chinese lyric tradition, Qu Yuan. Su the fiction writer and literature theorist defined herself contra Lu Xun, whom she considered a political opportunist and a vengeful despot over the field. Su was so engaged in a life of literature that she rarely makes direct personal observations, and these are often wry and pessimistic. "I owe my literary accomplishments to my joyless marriage," she once said. (140)

The sort of frustrations bubbling just under the surface of Su Xuelin’s catalog of her work and role models emerge much more vividly in work by Wang's third individual subject, Bai Wei. Wang argues persuasively that Bai Wei’s 900-page autobiography A Tragic Life deserves a look for both its complex and highly innovative structure and its nearly Augustinian contemplation on sex, illness and existence.

Wang attends especially to the preface of the work, which affirms Bai Wei's opinion that she was an ordinary woman driven to record her life during a course of treatment for syphilis, contracted from her lover Zhan. "I wrote in tears, in pain, in debility after spells of illness, in critical condition, with paper spread on my knee and the ink bottle hanging on my neck. Some parts I wrote in the wake of high fevers, biting my lips and sitting in bed in the crowded third-class ward." (146) In plot structure, Bai Wei's story is similar to that of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House: trapped in the "quagmire" of a bad relationship in an unsympathetic society, Wei must find her own path out. Bai Wei’s contribution to this narrative is the clearest yet example of "the autobiographical pact" in Lejeune's sense. Readers confront Wei’s inner struggle as she constructs a convincing “I” who desperately wants to “free herself from the entanglement with Zhan and devote herself physically and mentally to the collective good of the country." (160)

Finally Wang's chapter 7 contains what has to be the fullest reading yet of Xie Bingying's (1906) "girl soldier" persona. Wang reveals the international impact if her composed, translated, revised, reworked, supplemented, and reverse-translated life stories. As we learn in this chapter, the key to Xie Bingying's success in the 1930s was the skillfully evoked immediacy in her self-portraits of a rebellious child turned “girl soldier” on the war front.


As Wang tells us,
her very identity as a rebel depended on the shapeless jacket, the leggings, the belt, the gun, all of which gave her a set of new vocabulary to describe the Chinese brand of feminism of the early twentieth century. (180)
As a soldier, Xie felt she had to give up many traditional female values, like motherhood and domesticity, and like many self-empowering girls her age, she had a fraught sex life. No wonder her story quickly gained a mass audience!

Like Lu Yin, Su Xuelin, and Bai Wei before her, Xie faced adversity at home and at school and responded by rebelling. Exposed to the memoirs of Isadora Duncan and Agnes Smedley, she was inspired to write her own story to figure herself out, make a statement to the world, and perhaps gain some financial independence along the way. As she wrote, Xie developed a new style she called the "spur-of-the-moment account" that incorporated diary entries, lyric poems, and journalistic reports into a tightly-spun reportage of personal engagement. Xie's story took on a new level of fame and influence when Lin Yutang commissioned his own teenaged daughters to translate and reformat Xie's stories into English; the resulting Girl Rebel (1940) was a big success in an American market suffused with new titles about the state and fate of an embattled China. (183-4)

Meanwhile, Xie wrote a fuller, more highly crafted autobiography in the 1930s; this was only completed with a second volume in the 1940s, and these were revised and combined by Xie in her retirement in San Francisco in 1980. This cross-continent, decades-long process of revision and translation points to a new significance for Chinese women autobiographers in the larger scope of world literature. All of this makes Xie Bingying a fitting last subject to Wang's study.

Wang's conclusion re-affirms her commitment to considering autobiography as a tool for identity formation, one crucial to the generation of the Chinese “new woman.” Wang’s emphasis here is on the “subjective truth” of a writer who genuinely means to tell her own story, and what this means for literary history. Her argument is that when this new form was presented to Chinese audiences in translation in mass-market books and literary journals, women readers and women writers responded particularly strongly because so many of them were just then taking very active -- indeed, quite courageous -- steps to be something new, something their parents and local communities for the most part did not expect them to be: writers, teachers, and soldiers. For them and for their readers, the craft of autobiography was a crucial tool to motivate, to negotiate, and to explain how and why they did what they did. The significance of this co-incidence of a new literary form and rapid social change goes far beyond the scope of Chinese women's literature; it is a phenomenon worth considering by any student of history.
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Thursday, July 2, 2009

When "I" Was Born: Chapter 2

Drafting done. Whew! Back later for pictures, elaborations, updates.

One of the highlights of this generally excellent work is chapter 2, a masterful engagement between translation studies and a contemporary market-based look at the history of books and literature. This engagement between highly related fields shows how autobiography as a modern Chinese-language form was essentially born in the late stages of the collapse of the Chinese Republic and the subsequent plunge into World War II. Under these unforgiving political and economic conditions, China's first mass-market literature producers introduced autobiography to Chinese readers, and garnered a wide response whose significance in the field of modern Chinese literature resonates to this day.

The first major case that Wang chooses to illustrate this narrative is a brilliant and wholly original choice: Rousseau's Confessions, translated in the 1910s for Commercial Press by Zhang Jingsheng. It is Wang's remarkable (and likely quite sound) point that Zhang Jingsheng, an all-but entirely obscure figure in modern Chinese literature, was the perfect agent to bring Rousseau to China because he was a Chinese Rousseau. What does this mean? Zhang Jingsheng was a passionate advocate of a translated and modified form European Romanticism, with radical notions of equality of the sexes, sexual rights, and the place of art and culture in a democratic society standing for equal rights for all Chinese. He also advocated the replacement of the written Chinese language with an alphabet-based system. "As his theories and actions collided with the moral values of his time," Wang reveals, "Zhang met with ridicule, persecution, imprisonment, and exile." Thus, Zhang is in a unique position to understand and translate Rousseau. "The Parisian society banished Rousseau for his daring acts and opinions, and China exiled Zhang for similar reasons." "Just as Rousseau was labeled 'a psychotic romantic,' Zhang was called 'sex maniac,' 'madman,' and 'literary demon.'" Zhang may have been too over-the-top to gain wide acceptance in the China of the May Fourth era, but Rousseau's story was, in Wang's formulation, the first major book-length autobiography to gain wide acceptance on the Chinese market. The second one was My Life by Isadora Duncan.

The story of Duncan's Chinese translation is no less interesting than Rousseau's -- this reader admits being riveted to the page! Without giving it away, it must be said that Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was a great American dancer whose autobiography telling of her rise from poverty to great fame on the strength of her talent, with its modest and sincere reflection on the writer's doubts and struggles, was an instant success in China. Su Xuelin and other major autobiographers to be discussed later in the book have averred that they were moved to write autobiographies because of Rousseau and Duncan.

As with the Rousseau Confessions, Duncan's My Life was published by an arm of the Commercial Press, now greatly reduced in power since Shanghai had fallen to the Japanese, but still publishing works that a mass audience eager for new knowledge of the west and low-cost entertainment to while away the hours of occupation. The book was apparently a title suggested, reviewed and advertised by the great impresario of Western culture to China and Chinese culture to the West, Lin Yutang. Wang at this moment in her book segues to the story of Lin and his role in modern autobiography, crafting a tight historical set piece that is to be admired, for never before has Lin's crucial role in modern Chinese literature been so thoroughly recognized.

Originally a member of the "New Literature" circle that included Lu Xun, Hu Shi and other names now more well-known than his, Lin, as Wang says, "departed from the contemporary tendencies to prioritize political ideology and to use language comprehensible only to educated elites in writing." Instead, Lin Yutang "promoted a democratic literature of life in the periodicals he would publish, and his practice was to lead to the formation of Chinese women's unique autobiographic genre in the years of historical upheavals." Wang proceeds to describe the founding of Lin's major magazines, especially Cosmic Wind, West Wind, and Western Book Digest, the pages which journals, supplements and special publications essentially introduced each and every one of the major authors covered in the rest of this book.

Wang continues by examining in turn the other first major autobiographies that Lin and his colleagues at the various presses and journals he helped run first put out, including G. K. Chesterton's autobiography and a surprise success in China, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, by W.H. Davies. Throughout these years, the Lin Yutang publishing machine emphasized simple, vernacular language to reach a wide audience with stories that they would find relevant, including the stories of the lives of ordinary people. As the war years went on, material necessity led to the publication of more short summaries and extracts of autobiographies, and it was in this new form adapted to cheap wartime literary journals that Chinese readers first responded with their own autobiographies, a topic that Wang takes as the focus of her third chapter.
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When "I" Was Born: Chapter 3

Having described the publication arena that brought autobiography to China in the 1920s through the 1940s, Wang turns in the third chapter to five anthologies of short autobiographies published between 1936-1945. Composed of submissions in response to the autobiographical literature broadcast by Lin Yutang and his constantly struggling publishing machine, these collections show that a mass readership in China was inspired and energized by a new pattern of self-fashioning, and it shows that women readers responded especially strongly. Wang demonstrates that the short autobiography evolved to fit the needs of wartime publications, but at the same time were a manageable, easy-to-read craft that a wide range of young writers quickly latched onto as necessary tools for self expression. Just as Wang says, the production and publication of these anthologies "was an act of literary democracy."

Wang surveys all of the collections deftly, showing that major themes of later autobiographies first appear here. Especially to be noted is the ever-present "dissociation from femininity" that pervades many of the texts that Wang examines throughout the book. "Women's refusal to discuss domestic life in their autobiographies serves as a good index of their new self-definition in the public arena." As Wang's discussion of these life stories shows, "refusal" is far too strong a term. Certainly, some writers distanced themselves from traditional female values: Fan Xiulin defends her decision to wear short hair, Xie Bingying, her dirty socks. And one brave woman openly dreams of adopting a lesbian lifestyle. But more often, these writers wish not to cut themselves off from femininity, but to renegotiate it. A writer named Meng Zhuo wants to make work and school part of the same project. Li Su loves being a mom, and finds room for progressive thought in it.

Some of the writers represented in these collections, like Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) and Xie Bingying (Hsieh Pingying) would go on to greater fame and recognition, but sadly, the changing political and economic tides would snuff out many of these new voices after 1945. By redirecting our attention to these unique examples of emerging autobiographical practice in a country which, though highly literate, did not encourage dwelling on personal and self-oriented prose literature, Wang provides a valuable service to the field of life writing more generally.
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When "I" Was Born: Chapter 5

Chapter 5 of When "I" Was Born tells the fascinating story of the literary scholar and memoirist Su Xuelin. Photos of Professor Su often appear in Taiwan on campuses and in libraries, where she still forms in many people's minds the perfect portrait of a female waishengren (born-abroad) teacher, scholar and artist: stubborn, dignified, and very old. Wang finds in the old teacher's little known autobiographies the story of a major 1920s-era thinker and writer who fought at once against misogyny and for preserving certain parts of the Chinese tradition, like classical Chinese language and literature. Her complicated positions in the ideological wars of the 1920s made her a problematic and ultimately marginalized figure in modern Chinese literature, despite her immense talent -- indeed, Wang feels no compunction in labeling her "The best female prose writer in modern times."

Most likely, Wang can feel confident in this appraisal because of the writers surveyed in this book, only Su Xuelin masters the difficult pre-modern written version of the Chinese language, which opens up access to a rich tradition of idiomatic, allusive, scholarly, and poetic forms of expression that give her prose a bravura-like quality shared by other students of classical Chinese. In an essay called "My First Literature Teacher," Su explains the constitutive significance of teaching herself to read and discovering the world of literature through classical Chinese translations of world literature classics. These translations -- adaptations, really -- were mostly done by Lin Shu (1852-1924) (Lin, a fascinating case in his own right, is now the subject of a Columbia PhD dissertation by Michael Gibbs Hill expected to appear in book form soon), the great Qing man of letters whose devotion to the Emperor and the great traditions of Chinese past put him at irrevocable odds with the revolutionary leaders of China's early 20th-century. In her early autobiographical essay, Su Xuelin is an apologist for Lin's conservatism, affirming his value as a teacher. She works to, in Wang's words, "braid the self and the other as historical products of their respective times."

For Wang, what is developed to the highest degree in Su's autobiographical practice that constructs "the self through projecting the relationships with others." In a second study of this phenomenon, Wang examines Su's record of her research into the figure of Qu Yuan, the ancient and probably legendary founding father of the Chinese lyric tradition, a jilted official of the southern kingdom of Chu who, sometime in the 4th or 5th century BC, composed Encountering Sorrow and other poems in long lyric form to protest his own exile and other bad policies of his king in the voice of a beautiful bride who has been unfairly rejected by her man. In an essay included in Su's 1967 autobiographical collection My Life, Su reveals how she engaged in a long course of research on the Qu Yuan figure in China, in Taiwan, and in France, eventually concluding that she had found "intercultural sources underlying Qu Yuan's work, such as the Old Testament." (146) She was deliriously happy to be the first to understand that "'many mythologies and outlandish details in Qu Yuan's poetry came from foreign sources.'" (146, quoting Su in translation). According to Wang, the memories expressed here of the work that Su did themselves form "a poetic vision, a vision of comparative, cross-cultural interaction." Sadly, however, her findings were rejected in the "male-dominated field" of traditional Chinese poetry and poetics. But Su's autobiographical essay is in part a strategy to affirm the value of her work against an academic field that did not welcome it. For Wang (who, by the way, does not attempt to verify or deny Su's research) this act itself constitutes an innovation in autobiography. "By acting as the historian on her own behalf, Su Xuelin tells much more than her life story and opens the category of autobiography to include critical appraisal of her work."

Like many women coming of age in the 1910s and 1920s in less-than-progressive households across China, Su remembers her development as a human being chiefly in terms of escaping the fate of a traditional, family-oriented woman and achievement of a public, work-oriented position. Her Qu Yuan essay is part of Su's "grand scheme to work out her own salvation and to install her name not only as a writer but also as a literary critic." (127).

At times, this tendency in women writers of China has called on them to trim away their private, sexual, or family lives in painful ways. Wang rejects most of her early childhood as a time of imprisonment in a misogynistic nightmare and thanks her education chiefly for having "helped her transform from a woman of family to a woman of society." Sticking to critical evaluations of her work and only rarely remarking on her personal life throughout her autobiographical essays, Su once said, "I owe my literary accomplishments to my joyless marriage." (140) For Wang, Su's account is representative of her generation, a generation in which so many women were forced to make stark choices early in life between education and family, career and love. Still, Su Xuelin's particularly elevated, curmudgeonly (she also actualized herself as a writer by taking a negative stance toward Lu Xun), and often eccentric self-fashioning surely make her a figure worthy of more attention still.
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When "I" Was Born: Chapter 4

In the first of four brief studies of authors of book-length autobiographies, Wang considers the work of Lu Yin, particularly her 1934 Autobiography, to be among the earliest voices to develop themes that we see in later women's autobiographies in China, including the "awakening consciousness of oppression" that first develops from earliest childhood memories of home life and extends to school and adolescence. In Lu Yin's case, her birth on the day of her grandmother's death makes her particularly unwelcome in an already misogynist household. "This is the inglorious beginning of Lu Yin's life as told in her autobiography, rare in Chinese life writing by men but recurrent in that by women." "By relating her birth as a jarring incident," says Wang, "Lu Yin cuts the tie with her family and foreshadows her separate, isolated identity as an individual woman.(108-9) This theme continues as Lu Yin grows up in an abusive household, strategizing for her own education, recognizing the power of education for attaining independence in a world of oppression, and identifying early role models in teachers like Hu Shi, and later, autobiographies that she read. Wang finds in all of this "a microhistory of educated Chinese women's fight for new womanhood through writing."

A second and equally important model laid down in Lu Yin's autobiography is the development of a new understanding of love and marriage informed by her awakening opposition to the traditional gender framework. Lu Yin found love with a young man when the two realized they shared a love of literature, but the relationship ended when Lu decided that a traditional marriage would not allow her to have a career as a writer; she felt at the time that "marriage would ruin my life." This potential for a severe opposition between traditional female roles and newly opened up public and professional roles is a theme that would infuse nearly all women's autobiographies from this point forward, and receives its first extended treatment in Lu Yin's work.
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When "I" Was Born: Chapter 6

Wang's thesis in chapter 6 is that Bai Wei, long known for her plays of the 1920s, also wrote an autobiography called A Tragic Life in 1936 that truly qualifies as her magnum opus. The 900-plus page A Tragic Life is perhaps not suited for the widest range of audiences, but Wang argues persuasively that both its complex and highly innovative structure and its themes of existential struggle, sex and sensuality, and illness and make Bai Wei's work "the manifesto of female autobiography in the 1930s."

Written in a unique style that passes from first person to third person and back again several Wang finds that Bai Wei's voice speaks both for itself and in "symbolic portrayal of the collective experience of women." (147) Wang attends especially to the preface of the work, which affirms Bai Wei's opinion that she was an ordinary woman driven to record her life through the pain and suffering of a course of syphilis treatment. "I wrote in tears, in pain, in debility after spells of illness, in critical condition, with paper spread on my knee and the ink bottle hanging on my neck. Some parts I wrote in the wake of high fevers, biting my lips and sitting in bed in the crowded third-class ward." (146) In plot structure, Bai Wei's story is similar to that of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House: trapped in the "quagmire" of a bad relationship in an unsympathetic society, Wei must find her own path out. Her contribution to this narrative is a magnificently articulated statement of the intent to tell the true story of the writing "I," with a commitment to convey the memories as they boiled up in pain. Wang finds here the clearest yet example of "the autobiographical pact" in Lejeune's sense, and marks especially the connection between the struggle to overcome patriarchy, feudalism, and a genuinely bad choice of mate and the figures of sexual desire and disease: Wei's tragic decision to acknowledge and follow her desires is rewarded with syphilis, which becomes the greatest obstacle she must overcome.

Of all the writers considered here, Bai Wei does the most to write about her own body, including her sexual experiences and her long battle with syphilis. Critics of the 1940s and even the early 1980s tended to snub what they saw as unacceptable transgressions of morality and respectability, but as Wang reminds us, a growing body of readers now recognizes the great value of attending to the body in all its sensuality and contradictory forms of desire. Indeed, there is in Bai Wei's writing a positively Augustinian struggle between the needs of the flesh and what the writing subject can or should desire as a higher form of good. On the one hand, "she reclaims her person from the clutches of feudalism by insisting on her right to sexual pleasure," but on the other, "she tries to free herself from the entanglement with [her lover, also thought to have given her syphilis] Zhan and devote herself physically and mentally to the collective good of the country."
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Xie Bingying

Originally my notes for a review of chapter seven of Jing M. Wang's When "I" was Born, this page will now be a broader set of notes on Xie Bingying.


Xie, Bingying. A woman soldier's own story : the autobiography of Xie Bingying. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.



Xie, Bingying [Hsieh Ping-ying]. Autobiography of a Chinese Girl. Translated by Tsui Chi with a new introduction by Elisabeth Croll. London; Boston: Pandora, [1943] 1986.

In what has to be the fullest reading of Xie Bingying's (1906) "girl soldier" personae yet, Wang's chapter 7 shows how her composed, translated, revised, reworked, supplemented, and reverse-translated life stories were innovative, process-oriented literary projects that made an impact on readers across the world. As we learn in this chapter, the keys to Xie Bingying's success in the 1930s were both the skillfully evoked immediacy of the times, and the effect of that urgency in the portrait of girl who would become a rebel and a soldier. As Wang tells us, "her very identity as a rebel depended on the shapeless jacket, the leggings, the belt, the gun, all of which gave her a set of new vocabulary to describe the Chinese brand of feminism of the early twentieth century." (180) As a soldier, Xie felt she had to give up many traditional female values, like motherhood and domesticity, and like many self-empowering girls her age, she had a frought sex life. No wonder her story quickly gained a mass audience!

As we see more clearly than ever before in Wang's exposition, the freshness and sense of immediacy in a series of self-portraits leading up to the English-language bestseller Girl Rebel: The Autobiography of Hsieh Pingying (1940) and beyond was a fortuitous meeting of Xie Bingying's unique talents with the demands of mass-market publishing in the years leading up to World War II.

Like Lu Yin, Su Xuelin, and Bai Wei before her, Xie faced adversity at home and at school and responded by rebelling. Exposed to the memoirs of Isadora Duncan and Agnes Smedley, she was inspired to write her story to figure herself out, make a statement to the world, and perhaps gain some financial independence along the way. Always focused strongly on reacting to the events of her young life as they happened, Xie learned to adapt a writing method she called the "spur-of-the-moment account" that incorporated diary entries, lyric poems, and more highly crafted autobiographical structures into a tightly-spun reportage of personal engagement.

But every writer needs an agent. Once again, Lin Yutang and his colleagues play the role of impressarios, having first recognized the strength of the young Bingying's literary voice from her late 1920s posts from the front where she served Chiang Kai-shek in the Northern Expedition. After he helped her War Diary make it to publication, another publisher sought her to complete a project that he had already conceived of and called "Autobiography of a Female Soldier!" (178) Xie's story took on a new level of fame and influence when Lin Yutang's commissioned his own daughters, teenaged sisters Adet and Anor, to translate and reformat Xie's stories into English; the resulting Girl Rebel was a big success in an American market suffused with new titles about the state and fate of an embattled China. (183-4)

Xie Bingying's girl soldier persona seemed never to stop evolving, from 1920s newspaper column accounts to her 1930s development of a "spur-of-the-moment account" to the English versions, which were later translated back into Chinese based on the English. Meanwhile, Xie wrote a fuller, more highly crafted autobiography in the 1930s which was only completed with a second volume in the 1940s, and these were revised and combined by Xie in her retirement in San Francisco in 1980. As Wang emphasizes, each version of the story, each edition of this portrait, is essentially a new story and a new portrait. Parts are discarded, parts are added. Small anecdotes are expanded to take on larger significance, and large portions are sometimes removed entirely. All of the features of this new form of writing that were discussed in previous chapters occur here, and the "translingual practice" that takes us to 1940's Girl Rebel points to a new significance for Chinese women autobiographers in the larger scope of world literature. All of this makes Xie Bingying a fitting last subject to Wang's study.
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When "I" Was Born: conclusion

Wang's conclusion re-affirms her commitment to considering autobiography as a tool for identity formation and not as a form of historical writing. More than once, Wang attempts to take autobiography down from its place among the collections of facts and truths that we normally think of as history. Back in the introduction, we have seen her state categorically that "published facts have little relevance in autobiography, and that the absence of historical exactitude does not hurt autobiography." In the conclusion we have, Autobiography is not about the truth of the lived experience; it is about the retrospection and interpretation of the experience as the writer is situated in her present moment in history and geopolitical location.

This reader would tentatively suggest that the position is too strong, for the simple reason that all historical writing is as contingent as autobiography: all historical writing is the product of the present moment of the author or authors, and all historical writing is the interpretation of the past rather than the past itself. If this contingency separates autobiography from "the truth of the lived experience," then all history is similarly so separated.

Be that as it may, clearly it is not Ms. Wang's point to say that autobiography has no value as historical writing. Several times throughout her book she refers to the concept of a "subjective truth," which accounts for the phenomenon in which an autobiographer may remember an event or a figure as a true one, but their memory and their tools for expressing the memory may yield an account that is not completely accurate. Wang is an apologist for these situations: "the autobiographer...must not be held accountable for 'factual errors.'"

Her point here, then, is not that autobiography is not a form of historical writing at all, even if at many points throughout the book she implies that she thinks this is the case. Rather, she means to emphasize that story of the emergence of this literary form in China has immense value for understanding how human identity is formed, for understanding how ways of being spread, change, and evolve. Quite correctly, she sees that this understanding has in the past been slighted by academic readers who only use autobiographies as historical resources, and nothing more.

The case of the women examined here is so fascinating because it shows that reading, writing, and passing on autobiographies to mass audiences was a crucially important part of the Chinese literary field beginning in the 1920s. Jing Wang's point is that when the new form was presented to Chinese audiences in translation in mass-market books and literary journals, women readers and women writers responded particularly strongly because so many of them were just then taking very active -- indeed, quite courageous -- steps to be something new, something their parents and local communities for the most part did not expect them to be: writers, teachers, and soldiers. They became professionals, working to gain their independence and break free of the all-too-universal conservative notion that women belonged only in the home as mothers and wives. For them and for their readers, the craft of autobiography was a crucial tool to motivate, to negotiate, and to explain how and why they did what they did. The significance of this coincidence of a new literary form and rapid social change goes far beyond the scope of Chinese women's literature; it is a phenomenon worth considering by any students of history.
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