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.