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.