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.