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.