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."