Yang Jiang and her family of three. Judging from her daughter's apparent age, this would have been from the 1950s. So Yang Jiang looked a bit like this when she went from Beijing to a mountain village to work with peasants.
The essay is from 1991, and I'm slightly ashamed to say I still don't know its publishing history. I do know it was not in the 1994 volume Za yi yu za xie (Memoires Decousus), which is where I thought I had originally encountered it. For now, I feel like I can put off understanding where the essay came from while I worry about reading it very carefully.
Yang Jiang 杨绛. "Di yi ci xia xiang" 第一次下鄉 [The first time I was sent down]. ? : 1991. [I'm taking the text off millionbook.net]
1. A Socialist Education
When we first went down to the countryside, one of my fellow senior scholars waved at one peasant woman, saying, "Look at that! Doesn't she resemble Mona Lisa?"
"She does. She really does!"
From then on, we called her "Mona Lisa."
On the threshing floor, beside a triangular chicken coop, there was a very tall and very thin old man grasping a long bamboo pole. His head was facing straight up, and he was waving his beard. Another colleague said, "Look at that! It's Don Quixote!"
"Ha! No way!"
So then we called him "Don Quixote."
This was after the "pulling white flags" of 1958, in the late fall of the "Great Leap Forward." Our corps of over twenty or so people went down to the countryside to get an education in socialism. To remold our selves. But these senior scholars were still looking through capitalist intellectual lenses. By continuing to think of things subjectively, they had actually managed to remold the characters of the peasants!
I had heard that female comrades over forty five did not have to go down to the countryside. I didn't dare to believe it, and didn't want to, either. I had seen with my own eyes how "Lao Zhang" and "Xiao Wang," younger comrades, had become so intimate with each other, while I had remained always the "older woman," someone to respect, but also keep one's distance from. And I too was not satisfied with myself.
Of course, going down to the countryside was "voluntary." I was a true volunteer, not out for political gain in any way. But it's true that my motives were not pure. First, I was curious. I wanted to know what it would be like to live in a thatched hut. Second, curiosity again: I had heard that the ability or inability to form a strong connection to the peasants marked whether one was a true revolutionary or not. I wanted to know, once and for all, whether I was a revolutionary, or not.
Going down to the countryside of course presents many difficulties. Our only daughter, had already gone to work in a factory, smelting steel. The two of us would then go down to the countryside to smelt ourselves -- even if the Ahyi who looked after the house was unreliable. Mocun went down a month after I did, so I was not able to pack all his luggage for him; I couldn't stop worrying about this. I also was also a little afraid that I was to old and weak myself to adapt to collective life. Still, before Liberation I had already experienced a few years of bitter struggle to survive, so I new this chicken fluff would hardly count.
Notes: Since reading Berlant's "Theory of the Infantile Citizen," I have begun to suspect that Yang Jiang can be described as infantile in some respects. She is interested in what it would take to make her a "revolutionary," which was at the time, we might say, a crucial criteria for citizenship in China. In one reading, Yang Jiang is like Lisa Simpson going out on a bike ride -- she hopes to gain a sense of what it means to be a citizen (a "revolutionary" at least) by checking whether she can gain a connection with the peasants, just as Lisa and other American pilgrims hope to commune with nature. So here the peasants are a bit like nature, and indeed, they are associated with nature. Perhaps even more importantly, like American pilgrims, Yang Jiang must submit to "education," or "re-education;" both terms call to mind the negation of the adult's satisfaction with his role in society and the need to approach the state as an infant, to learn to be something else.
But like The Simpsons, Yang Jiang's prose is a source of irony, and even at times sarcasm perhaps. This complicates what she is saying. She may well be undermining the predominant, hegemony-helping role of the "sent down" narrative even as she sort of confirms it in her own way.
For example, Yang Jiang writes, "But these senior scholars were still looking through capitalist intellectual lenses. By continuing to think of things subjectively, they had actually managed to remold the characters of the peasants!" If we take Yang Jiang to be earnestly seeking to become a revolutionary, then this is a criticism and a distancing gesture. But if we take Yang Jiang as speaking with a resigned sense that she already knows she was no revolutionary, then she actually sympathized with her colleagues. The presence of Don Quixote here seems important: Don Quixote had long become a symbol of her stubborn resistance, located in her hard work, fortitude, persistence, humor, learned capacity for satire, learned in the ways that ideology can cloud the brain, etc. So I would like to think that Yang Jiang is being ironic when she criticizes her colleagues. But actually I get the feeling that there is a mixture of irony and earnestness here. Part of her earnestly wants the experience of pure, magical entry into the club of "revolutionaries," and part of her is proud, or at least wry, in articulating the ways that she stands outside that club.
We might also note the use of quotation marks, particularly around that term "voluntary," which seems to point to a system of power that could call something voluntary when it really was not.
On the concept of a self in Chinese literature: it's obvious even from this opening passage that Yang Jiang is highly engaged with the business of investigating the self, and the big issue that underlies her story here is the question of whether she could change her 'self' to match the needs of the revolution. In this piece, she does seem to be at least partly earnest in her quest to do so -- that's what makes it especially interesting to me right at this moment, because I feel that in more famous texts like Six Chapters of a Cadre School and We Three, there is no question that she could not change her 'self,' but the question is much more open here.
That's very interesting. Did you finished the translation? I'm quite curious!
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