Snapshot of an Icon: Database evidence

The "China Academic Journals Full-text Database" provides convenient snapshots of major topics covered not only in specialized journals like Journal of the Second Northwest University for Nationalities (Philosophy and Social Science Edition) 西北第二民族学院学报(哲学社会科学版) but also more mainstream literary journals like Reading magazine 读书. This database provides some evidence that Yang Jiang has become a major topic of discourse since 2003 -- a significant and unusual achievement for an author who is over 90 years old!

Between 1980 and 1994, Yang Jiang is a topic of discussion in just 15 articles, mostly praising her autobiographical collection Six Chapters of a Cadre School (1980). However, between 1994 and the present, there are over 200 articles that focus on Yang Jiang in a wide variety of journals (including the two mentioned above). In general, this tremendous rise in popularity as a topic of journal articles is in keeping with other intellectual figures of this generation. Yang Jiang's husband Qian Zhongshu, for example, is the subject of nearly 100 articles between 1980 and 1994, but some 400 articles discuss his life and work since 1994. And perhaps most influential of all the Chinese elder writers, Ba Jin, was the subject of 400 articles between 1980 and 1994, but nearly 1,200 articles since 1994.

The remarkable difference I'd like to point out, however, is Yang Jiang's amazing rise in popularity since 2003. Of the 200-some articles about Yang Jiang's life and work since 1994, some 60 percent were written after 2003, with 37 articles on Yang Jiang in 2008 alone and three more already in 2009. Writing about Qian Zhongshu, by contrast has declined slightly since 2003, and the rate of writing about Ba Jin has stayed the same.

Yang Jiang can be said have been an established Chinese writer at least from 1981, when Six Chapters received a warm welcome (it has stayed in print ever since). But she has only been a "hot topic" in academic and literary journals in the last 5 years. This popularity seems to have been spurred by her 2003 memoir, We Three, a surprise bestseller that dominated the paperback markets in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan through-out the second half of 2003. One of the goals of my dissertation is to examine in detail the factors that have led to this very recent rise in fame, and to link Yang Jiang's fame to the social and political situation of China since 2003, as well as the literary market.
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Listening to Yang Jiang Talk about the Past

The year 2008 saw yet another new effort from Yang Jiang, this time an authoritative biography based on interviews with the author by one of the author's closest friends, Wu Xuezhao 吳學昭.

In her preface 序 to the work, Yang Jiang waxes humble : "I don't know why anyone would want to write a biography of me" ... "if the biography seems uninteresting, that may be because there is nothing of great interest or import to record!"

Behind her humility is a skepticism towards biography in general -- to write the life story of someone you are not, she reasons, you have to rely on the written records. The oral history dimension of this biography, though, is a source of consolation to her ("I did very much enjoy going over the past with a close friend"), and is perhaps why she gives it her authoritative approval: "This is the only biography to which I am giving my official endorsement."
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Popular *and* Elevated: Revised Abstract

So my panel at the ACCL conference is called "Popular and Elevated: Overlapping Roles for Intellectuals" and my paper is called "A Life of Ideas: Yang Jiang as a Cultural Icon." This morning I re-tooled my abstract. More to come, including a Chinese translation.


The icon, the audience

Yang Jiang (1911-), writes in her 2003 memoir, Women sa (We Three), that "Our little family was a very plain one, a very pure one. We were never ambitious, and we were never competitive." With this tone of testimony, Yang Jiang gives an account of herself to her audience, detailing tremendous fortitude in the face of political struggle. Although Yang Jiang's autobiographical writing was an immediate success in the early 1980s, the character of her reputation has changed significantly since the publication of We Three in 2003. This book was a bestseller that made Yang Jiang a common topic of discussion in mainstream media and on the internet. Readers are inspired by Yang Jiang's example to love literature, language and a certain way of being. In short, since 2003 Yang Jiang has become a cultural icon, a figure whose received personality has come to symbolize the life of the intellectual, the joy of reading and study, and even the continued importance of humanities higher education in China.

Yang Jiang's rapid rise to the level of icon offers us a case study for the role of the elder intellectual in early 21st-century China. Elder intellectuals tend to produce memory writing in a wide variety of genres: life lessons, reminiscence essays, elegies, prefaces, journals, notes, autobiography and more. As the case of Yang Jiang shows, readers of Chinese are intimately familiar with all of these forms, and they actively read to build role models out of their elders. The respect, authority and popularity of elder writers across a wide range of audiences is phenomenon that is generally little understood in the English-speaking world. This preliminary investigation hopes only to serve as a motivation for future study.

Update: a preliminary Chinese version (not for consumption just yet)

楊絳2003年發表的《我們仨》寫了: “我們這個家，很樸素；我們三個人，很單純。我們與世無求，與人無爭，只求相聚在一起，相守在一起，各自做力所能及的事。” 用這樣又自省又自信的態度，楊絳敘述的是支持困難中中國知識份子的毅力,引起了大眾的歌頌。從80年代開始，楊絳的傳記文學作品都受了歡迎。但是從 2003年《我們仨》發表了後，她的名誉又改變了。《我們仨》是暢銷書，使大眾注意到楊絳、錢鐘書、錢媛的人格與家庭生活。楊絳家的傳記文學現在是變成讓 讀者灵思泉涌的藝術品。讀者看這種書而多對文學、語言、與道德有興趣。總之說，叢2003左右而來，楊絳變成了一種文化英雄，她現在是學習人文欣賞文學的 符號。

楊絳變成文化英雄是值得關注的現象。第一，這一種的英雄是解放前國外留學的老人作家。革命後，這些作家寫的大多是多種傳記文學，包括散文與自傳。楊絳這個人寫了不少傳記作品，而且她98歲的人還在勤奮地工作。楊絳的讀者都很佩服她又高齡又樸素，又傳統又西化的身份。這個小報告的目的是介紹楊絳身份與讀者怎麼受影響。
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Floating through a Floating Life

I find it difficult to read the work of any teacher I actually know. I both want and don't want to criticize, both want and don't want to learn from their texts. I think this reveals my own insecurities, which simply have to be conquered. With that in mind, I re-read:

Waltner, Ann. "Spatial Decorum, Transgression, and Displacement in Shen Fu's Six Records from a Floating Life," in Empire, Nation, and Beyond: Chinese History in Late Imperial and Modern Times - A Festschrift in Honor of Frederic Wakeman, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Madeleine Zelin. China Research Monograph no. 61, (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2006).

Floating Life: A Brief Intro

Six Chapters from a Floating Life is another book I've decided to really take my time with. A rare example of extended autobiography from late imperial China, Floating Life is the story of Shen Fu 沈復, a hapless painter-designer-writer type of guy. He was born into a Suzhou literati family, but not a particularly rich one. Shen Fu obviously deeply loved his wife, Chen Yun 陳雲, because he embeds her life story into his own, including many details of the things she did and said, and an empathy for her feelings, ambitions and disappointments that is striking and fresh -- especially so considering how rare this kind of writing is in China even today.

A Floating Story for a Floating Life

Professor Waltner first asks, and then answers, the question of "how to read" Six Records from a Floating Life. The piece is valuable social history, writes Waltner, and that social history is deeply embedded in its narrative structure. It's a weird, non-linear set of 'jottings' that tells some parts of the life story multiple times, yet leaves the reader guessing about much else. So the narrative, so the state of so-called 'traditional Chinese society.' We'd like to imagine that most Chinese "literati" lived lives like Shen Fu's parents: stable, professional, honorable, and rigidly adherent to the social mores of the day. But even though many families must have acheived this ideal, more of them may have been like Shen Fu and Chen Yun: married, in love, but "on the move." Alienated from the Shen Fu's parents, yet still in fear of them, they led lives of worry, uncertainty and a good deal of self-deception.

Ways of Being: Shen Fu's Little China Girl

In early 19th-century China, there were strict codes for what a person could do and be; yet, this is only half the story. If you were a woman, you were supposed to take care of the house and take care of your husband. But this might include needlework and embroidery, and if your husband couldn't get a good job then you might have to supplement his income from this kind of labor. In-laws would not approve of this practice, but bill collectors wouldn't care. In elite families, women often learned to read and write; in Shen Fu's family, women seem to have been in charge of correspondence, giving them the power to tell family members what has been happening and why. Marriage was as much a career for a young 19th-century Chinese woman as it was for any of Jane Austen's women. And much like Jane Austen's heroines, Chen Yun is always looking for ways to bend the traditional rules of behavior to help her husband along, to get their little household out of poverty, to give herself more authority, or even just for a bit of escape. Ever the reader, she tried to be the kind of pro-active woman she'd read about in literary works. This leads to a tragedy worthy of a very sophisticated novelist: she falls in love with the woman she pursues to be her husband's concubine, upsets her fearsome in-laws, and dies of a broken heart while her effete husband looks sensitively on, unable to imagine himself as the man who saves her.

Metafloat: From 1809 to 1980, and back again

Yang Jiang titled her 1980 memoir Six Chapters of a Cadre School, an obvious reference to Six Chapters of a Floating Life. Like her predecessor, Yang Jiang paints a moving portrait of a displaced couple who chafe against the social codes of their time. I think that Professor Waltner's insight about the memoir -- that it's structure really says something about the social history of the time -- is a great point from which to begin thinking of the terms in which we can compare these two works. As in Shen Fu's text, in Yang Jiang's we can readily identify "a tension between the world in miniature and the world beyond walls." Just as for Shen Fu and Chen Yun, for Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu "Defiance is a possibility, but criticism seems not to be." The point of both works is to document the lives of an ill-fated pair who defy the system they live in, but not for the same reasons that revolutionaries defy the system. It's not that these couples want to change society completely -- they just want to tweak it. They want a world where they can do what they do best -- where they can live off their own very clever minds. But compared to Chen Yun and Shen Fu, Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu speak for a segment of society who has experienced decades of revolution. Thus, to the degree that Yang Jiang imitates the form of the much older book, she is appealing to readers who have had enough of revolution, and just want something Chinese.
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Reading Yang Jiang (IV):Yang Jiang's a Patriot

Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang: Romantic Nationalists?

Spring, 1973
Hunan, China.
The "May 7th" Cadre School in Minggang village.

Yang Jiang:

My mind wandered back to the days just before Liberation when so many people were fleeing overseas. Why hadn't we taken one of the many offers and left as well?

Though the couple was famous worldwide, and though they were sought after as lecturers in America and Europe, still, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang in 1978 remembered agreeing not leave China in 1949. They loved being at home, together. Just as together, they can be patriots. How patriotic was Yang Jiang, really? And Qian Zhongshu -- did he really quote that rather sappy and romantic Liu Yong line?

My belt may grow looser all of my days; for her, I will wither away
衣帶漸寬終不悔，為伊消得人憔悴

I believe that the logic of Yang Jiang's reading is as follows: She wishes to tell us why and how she and Qian Zhongshu chose not to leave China in 1949. Or, to be more precise and accurate, she wishes to tell us what Qian Zhongshu thought of when she asked him why they hadn't left China in 1949. Apparently he would quote a rather trite line from a distinctly second-rate love poem, which seems uncharacteristic of the grandmaster, unless he be making some kind of joke at the poem's expense. Was it possible or even common for Qian Zhongshu to quote poems against themselves, to use a line of poorly set praise to effect a criticism? Perhaps I'm over reading here. Even if we settle whether Qian Zhongshu is up to some sort of game here, we also must ask ourselves whether Yang Jiang is up to one. If Qian Zhongshu means for the 'her,' of the poem to mean China, then it's quite natural to see the thinning, withering man as both Qian Zhongshu and the Chinese people. The generally romantic notion that national identity is like true love, and would not see reason, would not respect a sense of self-preservation may be a darkly witty comparison meant to criticize. Or it might be quite genuine. Other studies have linked nationalism, both generally and Chinese in particular, as related in the world of words to the terms of love, truth and eternity. Qian Zhongshu might be a bit of an old-fashioned romantic, as Stephen Owen has strongly implied in a series of objections to Qian's reading of the Rhapsody on Literature (Readings in Chinese Literary Thought).

The Romantic Patriot

Whether Qian Zhongshu's romanticism is genuine or not, in this passage, Yang Jiang's romantic notion of nation certainly is.

The simple fact was that we couldn't abandon our homeland, discard 'her' -- the only place in the world we could ever be part of that 'us'. Even though there are hundreds of millions of Chinese, members of the 'us' who we don't know, we are all still part of one entity. We feel as one, breathe as one, all undeniable, inseparable parts of China. I felt ashamed that I had believed the rumors and had hoped that Mocun would be going back to Peking to live with Ah Yuan in safety. It was selfish of me to think only of my own family without any regard for others. In the end, that's what it all had come to: despite the endless campaigns and injunctions to reform my thinking, I was worse than I had been before.

"The simple fact," "the only" -- Yang Jiang imagines in very concrete terms here the bond between the couple's identity and their identity as Chinese. With what is really, on close inspection, breathtaking directness (we "breathe as one"), Yang Jiang imagines China. The issue here is suddenly not that Yang Jiang is patriotic; it is that she writes a definition for patriotic, a beautiful and romantic way to imagine China as a life love, a destiny -- one's lungs. [To be...uhm? re-read?]
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Reading Yang Jiang (III): Min Ze

Min Ze 敏澤 (Hou Minze . "Gan xiao liu ji du hou 《幹校六記》讀後" (A Response to Six Chapters of a Cadre School). Du shu 讀書, 9 (September 1981): 9-12.


A sensitive reader

To see that Six Chapters of a Cadre School calls for nuanced, politically sensitive reading strategies, I turn now to one of the work's earliest and most sympathetic readers, 侯敏泽 Hou Minze (1927-2004). Min Ze (Hou Minze's pen name), was evidentally a close friend of both Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu; his review reflects this intimacy from its very beginning: "I was lucky enough to be one of the very first readers of Six Chapters of a Cadre School. One day, I went to see Mocun and Jikang, and we three chatted on and on about this and that, and as we talked we grew warmer and more enthusiastic -- altogether a most congenial time, just like those of the past." In his retelling, Jikang (he calls her Jikang, Yang Jiang's real name) gave Min Ze the manuscript of Six Chapters as a sort of parting gift, and she asked him to read it and to offer suggestions. Min Ze lay in his bed that evening and decided to get just a few pages of Six Chapters in before going to sleep, but once he began reading, he could not put the book down. Not only did he stay up until the small hours of the morning to read the entire work, he also felt compelled to respond immediately to the work in a long personal letter back to Yang Jiang. All of these details, from the congeniality (touji 投機) of the chat to his need to write back to her, show how Min Ze frames his comments with a strong sense of personal engagement with both Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu. Readers are invited to imagine that the rest of this review is that letter to Yang Jiang. In this way, a clear community of readers is drawn. As we can see in the review, speaking up to praise and defend Yang Jiang is thus, for Min Ze, a way to speak up for a whole community, and a way to speak up for himself, as well.

Picking out themes

Min Ze was an extremely prolific expert on
Chinese aesthetics and Chinese literary theory; in 1981 alone, he put
out 15 articles in addition to his review of Yang Jiang's new book;
early 1982 saw the publication of his mammoth History of Chinese Literary Criticism in two volumes (see his profile on the website Beijing University's Research Center for Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education). As a somewhat younger but in no way less illustrious member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, his positive review in Reading magazine (Du shu) may have helped shape the official reception of the book. At the very least, the main themes of future reviews, essays, prefaces, and biographies that mention Six Chapters are all found here, and have perhaps never been stated so concisely. These themes include the highly elevated concision embedded with a modest, plainspoken (pusu 樸素) tone, the focus on quotidian detail and the poetic potential that details have, to open out into a world fused between the inner self and the historical situation. Like future reviewers, Min Ze recognizes a highly personal take on an experience virtually all Chinese intellectuals of the time could understand, drawn up in a form that celebrates their aesthetic values, and their particular skillsets, such as the strong humanistic temperament (qingcao 情操) that empowered the older generation in particular to survive the Cultural Revolution intact and ready to return to work.

Politics

Another theme that pervades practically every word of this review is a political one. Clearly delineating Yang Jiang's book as a form of biographical writing, within the scope of historical writing and the truth value that this entails, Min Ze goes on to fill in, to supplement the portrait of Yang Jiang in order to establish her legitimacy as a Chinese patriot and as a loving and dutiful wife. In this way, Min Ze hopes to place Yang Jiang among a broader set of Marxist socialist intellectuals. Yang Jiang should not be seen as a critic of socialism, says Min Ze. Min Ze offers some strong criticism, calling the Cultural Revolution a shocking waste of human talent, a national tragedy for which Lin Biao and the Gang of Four are directly responsible. It is Min Ze who draws our attention first to a particularly oft-quoted passage near the end of the book, when Yang Jiang asks Qian Zhongshu whether he regrets staying in China after 1949:

My mind wandered back to the days just before Liberation when so many people were fleeing overseas. Why hadn't we taken one of the many offers and left as well? ...

When Mocun passed the garden I pointed to the hut. 'If we had a little hut like this one we could settle down here, couldn't we?' He thought it over for a moment and replied dolefully, 'We don't have any books.'

He was right. We could do without every other type of material comfort, but without books, life would be impossible. All he had brought with him were dictionaries, notebooks, and calligraphic inscriptions. 'Have you ever regretted that we stayed in China?' I asked.

'If I could turn back the clock, I wouldn't want to change a thing.'

Later readers would see in this scene a classic articulation of patriotism in a Chinese intellectual: "The simple fact was that we couldn't abandon our homeland" For Min Ze, they are all that and just as much a testament to the undying love of the couple, a beautiful statement of the habitual way that "we usually arrived at the same conclusions." [To be continued]
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Aging 1: Encyclopedia of Life Writing

Jolly, Margaretta. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

I met Prof. Jolly in the UK in 2008. It's all starting to fade a bit from my memory, but I do remember that she gave a keynote address to members of the "Writing Lives in China" workshop on the subject of "global life writing." She basically called on all of us to look beyond the individual traditions we were working in and try to imagine a larger, universal field of letters. I wasn't surprised by her speech because I was already aware of the massive Encyclopedia of Life Writing which clearly aims to answer her own call. What did surprise me, though, was the way my fellow scholars scorned and dismissed Jolly as soon as she had left the room. Could there be something dreadfully wrong with the concept of "global life writing," or at least its application to Chinese literary forms? I've really no clear way to even begin answering this question yet, but I must admit I'm still quite biased in Jolly's favor. From time to time I will take a close look at entries from the Encyclopedia; if the information here forms a major hindrance to my studies, I suppose I'll figure that out sooner or later.

"Aging" by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Gullette introduces the idea that "age" in literature should be treated critically. Elderly writers are much more likely to write elegies, for example: such are the "politics of aging." But "age positive" writings are not necessarily the best reply to the perception of "agism" in literature; what is needed is a new field of "Age Studies" that would serve to "convey (as others have done for gender and race) the tremendous impact of age discourses on subjectivity and social relations."

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady

"Age" as a critical issue is incredibly likely to be a major theme of my dissertation, but I just don't know where I'm going with it yet. A few facts to chew on:

• Yang Jiang's entire autobiographical career dates from after the Cultural Revolution; her first memoir came out as she turned 70.
  
• Her only novel was published at age 77
• In 2003, she started publishing again, and has put out three volumes since. Many articles begin by remarking how amazing it is that she is still writing.
  

Finally, a brief thought to connect with my last entry. When I was reading "scar" literature, I was particularly attentive to the 'elder' characters like the police inspector Wang Gongbo in "Sacred Duty." These characters all serve as important role models that help former red guards and other disillusioned younger people find ways to become active, engaged Chinese citizens again. I really wonder how much the power of the elder figure to serve as a role model owes itself to their age itself. I think again of the passage I've already quoted:

Ai Hua was looking thoughtfully at the hardened and experienced old man in front of her. Something that had always been very difficult for her to grasp suddenly became clear: this is what a common, yet at the same time great, man was like...

How many of the outward signs of what "common, yet at the same time great" is have to do with age? She must consider the man's grizzled face, his neat clothes, and above all the air of certainty about what is good and right. Now, when we turn to Yang Jiang, we have to admit first of all that gender enters into the picture as well as age. I wonder if there is a sense in which I might at some point be able to describe her as "China's mom."

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Teaching Yang Jiang

This is part of a continuing set of readings about Yang Jiang, a Chinese writer who forms the subject of my dissertation (below, second from left, at age 16). As I've mentioned before, her autobiographical writings are so well-established that some of them are actually taught in Chinese schools. Here is a some evidence that Yang Jiang is part of the established curriculum for schools in Hong Kong.

Yang Jiang in the 6th Grade



The Education Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. Zhong liu Zhongguo wenxue: mingzhu xuandu jianjie 中六中國文學——名著選讀簡介 (Form 6 Chinese Literature: Selections and Introductions to Classic Works).

The Chinese Canon

Using Google, I found this on the webpage of the HK Education Bureau. The list of 48 works covered ranges from the Tang dynasty to literature of the 1980s, with a fairly equal distribution between modern and pre-modern works. The preface (this link goes to a .pdf file) to this listing dates it to September 2003 and says it is meant to accompany a 2002 publication entitled Guide to Chinese Literature Curriculum (Form 6) 中國文學課程指引（中六）. Apparently this is supplied to teachers to help them select works for their classes, and to give them guidelines for teaching these works. In the terms of my field, I think this institutional authority over works would be called a form of canon formation. Thus, the listing is a kind of canon. Yang Jiang's memoir of the Cultural Revolution may be the only representative work describing this period of Chinese history -- or if it isn't it is clearly one of very few such works -- and so the listing helps me show that her memoir of the Cultural Revolution is a major part of the 'official history' of that period. "Official" here refers very simply to the historical narrative promulgated in educational institutions sponsored through the Chinese government. The mere list of officially designated works no doubt provides some great insights into how Chinese teach and understand their own history, but before I study the list as a whole more carefully, I have focused on the entry for Yang Jiang's memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Six Chapters of a Cadre School.

Yang Jiang the Teacher: The Official Yang Jiang

The listing described above links to a three-page account (again, a .pdf file) of Six Chapters of a Cadre School, including a brief introduction to the author, summary of the contents of the work, and list of teaching suggestions. I sort of half-expected this to be boring reading, but it wasn't, mostly because it was full of surprises. The brief little biography of Yang Jiang was quite different than other such snippets because it emphasized her role as a teacher and leader in education so much more firmly. Where Yang Jiang and her other biographers have minimized or entirely elided her teaching career during and after the war in Shanghai and Beijing, the biography here poudly calls her a "professor of foreign languages" at Zhendan Women's University in Shanghai and a "professor of Western languages" at Qinghua University in Beijing. It makes sense that the "official" Yang Jiang would stress these credentials as a teacher.

Yang Jiang the Political Critic: The Chinese Verdict on the Cultural Revolution

Given that the summary of the book's contents is a government-produced publication intended for middle school teachers to use in their classes, I was frankly surprised at what a sophisticated elaboration on the style of the work and the form of its critique appears here. Six Chapters is praised for inheriting key elements of the style of its 18th-century predecessor, Shen Fu's Six Chapters of a Floating Life, especially the celebration of love within marriage, and the meticulously-drawn portrait of home life, and also domestic concerns that follows a synechdocal pattern characteristic of Chinese poetics, allowing the reader to see from the part expressed the whole of the historical situation. "What is of interest here," explains the curricular guide, "is how the few stitches reflect the entire tapestry, how whimsical asides can effectively tell the whole tale." The Cultural Revolution is castigated as one of the worst moments in Chinese history, but Yang Jiang's writing is particularly praised for foregoing "complaint and accusation" (kongsu qianze 控訴譴責) in favor of maintaining in a calm, placating tone (pinghe de yudiao 平和的語調) a lightly-sketched (diandiandandan 點點淡淡) form of satire (fengci 諷刺). The summary emphasizes that the satirical content of the work is framed in a mild, because fundamentally stoic (wunaihe wanzhuan 無奈和婉轉) form that has to be 'tasted at length' (zixi jujue 仔細咀嚼) in order to appreciate the 'sharpness' (xinla 辛辣) of the critique. Here and in the chapter-by-chapter reading guidelines that follow, the education bureau officially endorses reading strategies that are closely aligned with the best available strategies that I have been able to discover, offering Yang Jiang a far greater stake in actual political critique than Kong Qingmao did in his biography (cf. my comments on this biography).

Wounds Without Complaint (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒): Officially Historicizing the Cultural Revolution

In a brief but densely-packaged exposition on the artistry of Six Chapters with teaching suggestions, the prescribed curriculum defines the central issue in a clear and simple opening sentence: "This work manifests the "Wounds Without Complaint" (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒) element of traditional Chinese literature." The slogan "wounds without complaint" serves, predictably, to distinguish Yang Jiang's work from the aggressiveness of 'scar literature.' Rather, Yang Jiang's memoir focuses on the sources and manifestations of true human relationships. Yang Jiang's love for her husband is brought up again, alongside the mutual love and respect that grows between her and the little dog Xiao qu 小趨. The latter example is crucially important for the bitter irony of finding the seeds of a new, genuine humanism in a dog rather than the surrounding humanity. The curriculum guide does not suggest that readers can use this point to stage their own political critique, but it does not deny this possibility either.

Finally, an illuminating set of study questions concludes the curriculum guide. Readers are asked to contrast Yang Jiang's 'casual, placating' (xisong pingchang 稀鬆平常) style with the preface supplied by her husband, which is imagined to be written as a 'stinging insult' (tongma 痛罵) to all those ignored the voice of their consciences, allowing the torment of their fellow man to go unopposed. Clearly, the writers of this curriculum guide put special value in the unaggressive writing style exhibited in Yang Jiang. A second question names three elements of Yang Jiang's artistic style and asks students to search the text for examples of each: "Wounds without womplaint" (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒), "Hidden meanings in the text" (yan wai zhi yin 言外之音), and "Writing warm love of life" (xie qing xi ni 寫情細膩). This is the first time I have encountered two out of the three terms listed here, which shows how much I have to learn about the rhetorical framework that Chinese readers use to understand Yang Jiang's writing as part of a long tradition of poetical-satirical memory writing. [To be continued...]
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Yang Jiang: Finding the Irony

(This is my second post about the subject of my dissertation; check out the first one, if you wish. )

Political Criticism?

Yang Jiang is a widely celebrated writer in China today; her memoir of the Cultural Revolution is actually taught in Chinese schools.


One of the main problems that interests me is: how did this memoir become such an enduring classic? It is especially interesting when we remember that fiction and memoir of the Cultural Revolution was openly published in the years 1978-1980, and then promptly silenced in 1980. Yang Jiang's book was published at the tail end of this period, but unlike other works from those years, it was never banned. Clearly, it was never seen as a deep political critique. But I always got the feeling it was one of the more powerful critiques not only of the Cultural Revolution but against Communist ideology as a whole. It often seems to me to be just the kind of book that China's leaders should have banned in 1980. Why didn't they? I'm only slowly putting together the answer to the question. Below, my initial response to a reading from a 2004 MA thesis by a Taiwanese graduate student.


Yeh Han-yin 葉含氤. Yang Jiang wenxue chuangzuo yanjiu 楊絳文學創作研究 (A study of Yang Jiang’s literary writing). MA thesis, Soochow University Taiwan.

Irony in Chinese: a preliminary note

In this strikingly sophisticated look at the "literariness" of Yang Jiang's writing, Yeh Han-yin 葉含氤 accomplishes a lucid exposition on what I have called in English the "irony" that is everywhere present in Six Chapters of a Cadre School. In Yeh's terms, what Yang Jiang accomplishes is a dual portrait of political movements and her own emotional interior that applies a style most notable for its detached, completely irreverent form of wit, what Yeh calls 'humorous satirico-comical style' (youmo fengci de xiju bifa 幽默諷刺的戲劇筆法). The central term of Yeh's analysis of this crucial feature of Yang Jiang's style is maodun 矛盾, meaning "contradiction" or "paradox;" the strong similarity of maodun in this exposition to the term "irony" in my exposition helps reveal the considerable overlap of our arguments.

A prerequisite for irony: distance

In a brilliant reading of the 1987 essay "On the Cusp of Fire: The Years of the Horse and Ram (1966-1968)," Yeh Han-yin points to the skill with which Yang Jiang is able to use language to distance herself to the situation at hand, thus obtaining in many respects a 'clear perspective' (qingxing de shijiao 清醒的視角). Yang Jiang alludes at various places to the strong bond between this distancing and the capacity for seeing the situation ironically, as when she describes the scene of a public struggle session against intellectuals: "Like Monkey, my soul rose up into the air and surveyed the strange performance, including the ragged troupe of Monsters and Demons trailing on behind in their dunce's caps. It was a superb farce, and even now I can picture that droll parade, with me at the head of it." (Barmé 40) The distance that comes with memory, coupled most likely with the sort of inwardly-turned personal character that Yang Jiang always exhibits, forms its own strategies of survival.

A Small Battery of Verbal Ironies, Summarized

Looking closely at the verbal forms these strategies take, Yeh finds two kinds of "paradoxes" (maodun) at the center of Yang Jiang's injections of distance, clarity, and the comic. The first is the paradox of logical dialectic (luoji de bianzheng 邏輯的辯證). In "On the Cusp of Fire: The Years of the Horse and Ram (1966-1968)," Yang Jiang also describes the Cultural Revolution struggle session as incredibly boring, so much so that she couldn't help "falling asleep on her feet, like a horse" (xue ma er shui 學馬而睡). Here, says Yeh, the paradox is between Yang Jiang's apparent calm and collection and the intense atmosphere of cruelty and confession that characterized the setting. For Yeh, this type of paradox is also commonly found in Six Chapters of a Cadre School. In Chapter 3, "The Vegetable Garden: On Idleness," for example, the chief paradox is between Yang Jiang's sense of distress at the tremendous waste characterized by the cadre schools and the more superficial mode of leisure characterized by the term "idleness" (xian 閒). Similarly, the end of this same chapter contains a pithy exposition on the various exclusive but overlapping cliques that existed between prisoners, cadres, and peasants at the cadre school, and as Yeh points out the complex tones of the exposition serves mainly to contrast starkly with the intended function of the cadre school to end the distinction between the prisoners and the peasants and to bring about a general collective identity.

Irony and Political Criticism

Yeh deserves credit not only for working out the main features of this type of "paradox," but also for pointing out that these paradoxes deep critiques of Cultural Revolution policies. But Yeh does not perhaps go far enough to explore the implications of this critique, especially in light of mainland readings of Yang Jiang that remain seemingly blind to her writing as a form of critique. Whether it be the cruelty of struggle sessions, the tremendous waste of human capital and other resources at the cadre schools, or the failure of the schools to foster the intended collective spirit, Yang Jiang's clear meaning is that the project as a whole was a failure from the very beginning. It was not that the Cultural Revolution was a good idea that had gone to excess, and it was not that any particular individuals such as Mao Zedong or the Gang of Four were at fault. Rather, the ideology itself, as expressed in its main terms and assertions, is the subject of ironic, paradoxical play in Yang Jiang's work. In place of "struggle," Yang Jiang alternates between laughter and boredom; facing "re-education through labour," Yang Jiang finds altogether too much 'idleness,' and in the place of 'collective spirit,' Yang Jiang finds only the limited and exclusive 'we-ness' (zamen 咱們) of cliques that are formed in times of duress. The stakes of this political critique are high; if the authoritative mainland reading that labels Yang Jiang's writing a form of "showing a wound, yet uttering no complaint" (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒) were better readers of irony, they might have found a considerable dose of 'complaint' in her memoirs.
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Yang Jiang: Meet her in Medias Res

A Frought Saint

So. Meet the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation: Yang Jiang 楊絳. Below, a nice photo of her with her husband (now deceased). Like many dissertation subjects, she has become a prickly, anxiety-inducing topic for the student. The student has read a certain number of his subject's writings and writings about her, and he has put into place a plan of study that will lead to a book-length exposition of her life and work, but he is more than a little afraid that he is not smart enough to handle the project. Virtually all of the student's anxieties about learning Chinese have become concentrated in this old lady.

At some point, I'll try to introduce Yang Jiang elegantly and simply in a wikipedia entry. For today, though, I'll keep to what is currently on my mind: comments on the first biography devoted to her in Chinese.

Kong Qingmao 孔庆茂. Yang Jiang ping zhuan 杨绛评传 [Yang Jiang: A Critical Biography]. Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1998.

To become a saint, you have to give up on irony.

The term "critical" in the title of Kong Qingmao's work -- the first full-length biography of Yang Jiang -- belies what is actually a patchwork condensation of Yang Jiang's own autobiographical essays. By relying almost entirely on Yang Jiang's own writing, Kong manages to inject the rhetoric and style of Yang Jiang's short, fragmented essays into a longer, more complete life story. This shows us how easily autobiography can become biography in the current Chinese book market, which is no doubt one avenue by which Yang Jiang's memories become official history. On the other hand, Mr. Kong seems mostly blind to the value of Yang Jiang's prose style, particularly when it comes to irony. Deprived of her wit and humor, the Yang Jiang of Mr. Kong's biography becomes a sort of everyday saint who seems to deserve fame just for being nice to people -- "possessed of a heavenly nature of benevolence and goodness, no matter who had problems, she would reach out with a helping hand." Moreover, the historical backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, far from coming into clearer focus in Kong's exposition, is dismissed as a "nightmarish historical monster" (lishi de mengmo 歷史的夢魔), a time when ordinary people stopped being ordinary. Stumbling upon Mr. Kong's biography before reading Yang Jiang's autobiographies, the truly uninitiated reader would probably wonder what all the fuss is about, since there is virtually no discursive, objective look at Yang Jiang's literary and political significance. And yet, if we consider that most readers will be using the biography as a supplemental reference to the autobiographical writings, we can deduce that the book's main function is to certify and reaffirm Yang Jiang's literary and political significance in a form that is rather specific to the current context of Chinese life writing: when fragmented autobiographical essays transform into a complete and singular "critical biography," the subject in question is more than ever a role model for readers.

Giving up on irony

An example from the chapter "Going down to the Cadre School" (Xia fang gan xiao) will illustrate what I mean by "patchwork condensation," as well as the literary and political stakes of the patches. Near the end of his chapter, Kong Qingmao writes:

她很慚愧自己經過這番學習改造並沒有多少進步，私心也沒有減少。

She was very ashamed (cankui) that after going through all this ideological reform, she still had not accomplished any personal transformation, and that her selfishness had not decreased. (my translation)

Despite the lack of any citation, readers will probably recognize the statement as a paraphrase from the conclusion to Six Chapters of a Cadre School. The original passage has,

而看到不在这次名单上的老弱病残，又使我愧汗。但不论多么愧汗感激，都不能压减私心的忻喜。这就使我自己明白：改造十多年，再加干校两年，且别说人人企求的进步我没有取得，就连自己这份私心，也没有减少些。我还是依然故我。

And yet, looking at this list of the old and sick, I still felt a twinge of guilt (kuihan). And yet, all that aside, I couldn't rid myself of selfish joy. This made me realize something about myself: that despite more than ten years of ideological reform and two years in a cadre school, not only did I not not achieve the personal transformation that others had sought after so diligently, I hadn't even managed to get rid of my own selfishness. I was the same person I had always been. (translation heavily dependent on Geremie Barmé 1989, but modified to read more literally here).

Kong Qingmao's sentence is written in the third person, as if it were a historical judgment based on his view of the evidence. But as with the vast bulk of the biography, this sentence is in fact little more than a condensed re-arrangement of Yang Jiang's language. The main terms of Kong's sentence -- shame, ideological reform, personal transformation, and selfishness -- are all taken from Yang Jiang's passage, reproduced in the exact same sequence. But a crucial transformation to the term "shame" removes the irony that is inherent and crucial to Yang Jiang's conclusion, and thus removes the sting of her critique of the Cultural Revolution.

In the original conclusion, she feels some shame that she and Qian Zhongshu are on the list of people going home, but other people present in the room are not on the list. She wishes they could all go back together. But Kong's statement, "She was very ashamed...that she had not accomplished any personal transformation" misrepresents her use of the term "shame." When Yang Jiang says she "did not achieve personal transformation," she is being deeply ironic: where "did not achieve" would normally connote disappointment, her meaning here is that she withstood the political movement and survived intact. The term "personal transformation" (jinbu, lit. "progress"), a popular term for the goal of many Cultural Revolution policies, is just one of many such terms from the language of Cultural Revolution that Yang Jiang uses ironically, effectively showing us that she can speak this language, but refuses to use it seriously. Other people may pursue jinbu or "ideological reform" (xuexi gaizao) if they wish, she says, but she is content to retain her old "selfishness" (sixin) -- and here she turns a term that has negative connotations in the Cultural Revolution into one with the positive sense of 'staying true to yourself.' These densely packed bits of verbal irony add up to a larger political irony: the political movement designed to change her old values only made her more her hold to them more deeply; the strongest ever application of Communist terms and assertions to achieve radical cultural transformation only proved to her that she opposed it utterly.

In a pithy short essay describing Yang Jiang's memoirs, Simon Leys has praised the irony of the book: "Paradoxically, [Six Chapters] is also heavy with all that it does not say." Leys understands quite rightly that this major feature of the work, it's "aesthetic reserve," "is further reinforced by a political taboo." Leys seems uncertain whether Yang Jiang has outwitted the political taboo or not. Kong Qingmao's reading shows us that Leys was right to wonder, because Kong's biography proves that even if some readers are willing or able to decode all that the memoir "does not say," there are other readers who do not. Kong and other such readers who ignore or miss the irony of this memoir align themselves with the official, authoritative reading of Yang Jiang, that it "shows a wound, yet utters no complaint" (yuan er bu nu 怨而不怒). [To be continued...]
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