Women Writers in Postsocialist China

Kay Schaffer, Xianlin Song

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138643468
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135091422
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to read from elsewhere? Women Writers in Postsocialist China introduces readers to a range and variety of contemporary Chinese women's writing, which has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The book addresses the different ways women's issues are understood in China and the West, attending to the processes of translation, adaptation, and the grafting of new ideas with existing Chinese understandings of gender, feminism, subjectivity, consumerism and (post) modernism. By focusing on women's autobiographical, biographical, fictional and historical writing, the book engages in a transcultural flow of ideas between western and indigenous Chinese feminisms. Taking account of the accretions of social, cultural, geographic, literary, economic, and political movements and trends, cultural formations and ways of thinking, it asks how the texts and the concepts they negotiate might be understood in the social and cultural spaces within China and how they might be interpreted differently elsewhere in the global locations in which they circulate. The book argues that women-centred writing in China has a direct bearing on global feminist theory and practice. This critical study of selected genres and writers highlights the shifts in feminist perspectives within contemporary local and global cultural landscapes.

1 Introduction

Contemporary Chinese women's writing, prolific and popular at home, has enjoyed scant attention internationally. Promoted by the post-Mao liberation movement and propelled by China's new market economy, it has now begun to find receptive audiences beyond China's borders. In this book we consider a variety of genres – from serious literary fiction and autobiographical novels to popular novels and blogsites; from representations of the lives of silenced rural women to the ghostly traces of historically demonized subjects of Chinese history; from women's nostalgic recollections of early Shanghai to the harsh realism of migrant workers lives; from street-wise ‘beauty writers’ to epic tales of matriarchal lineages infused with magic realism. These texts iterate an array of possibilities for figuring and refiguring women as subjects in modern China as they renegotiate gender relations and wrest ‘the personal’ from the residues of the socialist, class-based past.

Although the book considers many literary genres, we approach the texts as various forms of life writing. Along with Smith and Watson (2012: 4), we understand life writing broadly, ‘as a general term for writing that takes a life, one's own or another's, as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore auto biographical’. ‘Engaging with memory, experience, identity, space, embodiment, and agency’ (Smith and Watson 2012: 5), life writing ‘may take on many guises as narrators selectively engage their lived experience and situate their social identities through personal storytelling’ (Smith and Watson 2012: 18). Contemporary Chinese women's life writing offers a multiplicity of emerging forms of self-representation and female subjectivity. Whether emanating from the urban spaces of Beijing and Shanghai or the outer reaches of the rural hinterland, this writing expands traditional notions of women and explores new ways of being and becoming: as marginalized historical and historicized subjects chaffing at the manipulation and scrutiny of the State; as abjected and virtually voiceless rural workers; as members of the ‘floating population’ who migrate from their villages to live on the fringes of cities seeking employment with little more than their bodies as capital; as introspective urban women writers engaging with modernist and postmodernist literary and social formations; as sexualized, agential modern consumers in urban spaces; as netizens and internet celebrities; as rebels and renegades; as lesbian cosmopolitan subjects; and as figures in the spaces and temporalities in between – re-imagining what it might mean to be a woman in postsocialist China, in a globalized era of rapid change.

Women's writing articulates and promulgates varieties of being and becoming ‘woman’. In all of its heterogeneity, women's semi-autobiographical novels, memoirs, blogsites, published oral narratives, and the like provide spaces and forums for women to imagine themselves differently. The writing strikes a chord both within and beyond China not only because of its intrinsic value as a vehicle for articulating new subjectivities in formation, but also because Chinese women's desires for independence, autonomy, and greater freedoms find points of convergence with audiences in disparate global locations. The women writers, in addition, challenge the very concept of ‘writer’ in modern China. In a country with a long history of reverence for writers, generally considered as elite, male, and part of an exclusive literary milieu, the new women's writing challenges Chinese patriarchal structures and processes, defies literary traditions, and contributes to an emergent field of gender theory. This is a recent and noteworthy development. Even at the end of the 1980s, as Wendy Larson (1998: 203) points out, women writers in China continued to struggle against the well-known precept: ‘for women, lack of literary talent is a virtue.’ At the same time, as they have become more visible, as their writing has become less marginal, and as their ability to self-actualize as writers has become more achievable, Chinese women writers also play into new state ideologies and agendas, expressing individualistic urgings consonant with the new consumer-driven economy. Nonetheless, women and their writings confront and dispute rigid traditions and enduring social expectations as they move away from the constraints and deprivations of an earlier era (see Rofel 1999).

This study introduces readers to a range of contemporary Chinese women's writing, most of which has been written and translated into English during the last twenty years. This work is indebted to and builds on the dialogic work of other scholars, including Tani Barlow (2004), Dai Jinhua (1997, 1999, 2000, 2002), Wang Jing and Barlow (2002), Kam Louie (2008), Kam Louie and Louise Edwards (1993), Gail Hershatter (2007), Dorothy Ko and Wang Zheng (2007), Wang Lingzhen (2004a), and many others who have been instrumental in offering interpretative frameworks and building bridges between indigenous Chinese and western feminisms and Chinese women writers and their readers in the West. This dialogue, initiated in the early 1990s in preparation for the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW), has been intense and varied – sometimes smooth, sometimes fractious, always stimulating. The publication of more Chinese women's writings in English, both creative and theoretical, and the more frequent interactions between Chinese and western women at conferences and symposiums in China and the West, have generated a more nuanced and complex awareness of cultural continuities and differences between women in China, diasporic Chinese women, and non-Chinese women in the West.

‘The West’, of course, is a highly contested and heterogeneous cultural formation that signifies in widely different registers within mainland China and in other geographic locales. With Stuart Hall (1996/2006) we understand ‘the West’ not essentially as a historical or geographic entity, but as a discourse: a cultural formation. With Foucault (1980) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we register ‘the West’ not only as a material and cultural formation but also an affective production, constituted within the knowledge–power nexus, as well as being an effect of affective intensities or assemblages of fear and desire. These cultural formations and affective productions work to establish and maintain concepts of ‘identity’ through ‘difference’ – the Nation/Self through its difference from the Other. In this sense ‘the West’ is an imaginary formation supporting specific (but unstable) identities within personal, national and globalized Eurocentric contexts in which ‘China’ is the mirror, the imagined Other. Conversely, ‘the West’ is also an Other for China, and has a different genealogy from a Chinese cultural perspective.¹ Today, with China's rise to power, the two are mutually constituting – shaping and being shaped by each other. In our study we recognize these imaginary identifications while also sometimes referring to ‘the West’ or deploying the adjective ‘western’ to refer to historically constituted Eurocentric contexts of reading and reception that have been forged within enlightenment ideologies, modernist philosophic and aesthetic movements, democratic forms of government, and humanistic values, upon which rests the concept of autonomous selfhood.

Through our analysis of a range of women's writings from the 1990s to the present, we articulate the differences in the way women's issues are understood in China and the West. We attend to the processes of translation, adaptation, and the grafting of new ideas on to existing Chinese understandings of crucial concepts such as woman, gender, feminism, subjectivity, and the like. As we examine the various narratives, we endeavour to relay the import of these historically and socially constituted processes of translation and newly emergent gender-related concepts as they are adopted and transformed by postsocialist authors. In so doing we hope to provide a bridge for non-Chinese readers situated across the spaces designated as ‘the West’. That is, by focusing on the self-referential aspects of women's autobiographical, biographical, fictional and historical writing in the past twenty years, we attempt to enact a transcultural dialogue concerning not only the writing itself as it engages with new gender concepts and forms of female subjectivity but also the different processes of the production, circulation and reception of texts. We ask how the texts and the newly received concepts they negotiate might be understood in social and cultural spaces within China and how they might be interpreted differently in the global locations outside of China in which they circulate. We hope to register the heterogeneous aspects of textual production and reception, not assuming to find in our readings of the texts a knowledge of the other who is ‘like me’, but reading transculturally for similarities and differences. Taking account of the accretions of social, cultural, geographic, literary, economic, and political movements and trends in China in the twentieth century, we study how China's specific histories and ideologies have impacted on cultural formations and ways of knowing, being, and becoming with particular regard to notions of ‘women’ and ‘writing’. We pay attention to how these notions are variously understood (or understood differently, some might say mis-understood): in Chinese and western contexts; when produced and circulated within China; and as they interact with western concepts and understandings when transported into anglophone cultural contexts and readerships.

How does one read from elsewhere? In speaking of the spread of the novel beyond the peripheries of Europe, Franco Moretti (2000) suggests that western readers need to develop the capacity to read distantly. ‘Distant reading,’ he asserts, ‘is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems’ (Moretti 2000: 57, emphasis in original). Examining adaptations of the novel in its South American, Turkish, African, Indian, and Asian formations, he suggests that when a culture begins to lean towards the modern novel form, ‘it's always as a compromise between foreign form and local materials’ (Moretti 2000: 60, emphasis in original). Further, the lived social experience of writers in China or Japan, for example, may or may not be easily adaptable into the abstract formal patterns of western literature, even when labelled ‘autobiography’, ‘biography’, or ‘novel’. To read not only trans nationally but also transculturally, one needs to be open to new frames of knowledge and understandings of lived experiences. One needs to negotiate a series of relationships between here and there, the familiar and the distant, the lived historical and social conditions, and the discursive formations produced in the original culture and those that prevail in the destinations to which texts arrive. Sometimes there are what Wai Chee Dimock (cited in Gelder 2010: 3) calls ‘connective tissues’ or ‘forms of attachment’ that link elements of the text to the reader's knowledge and experience. These can be modes of sociality that connect the experience of the text to categories of experience, structures of feeling, gendered relations of power, or networks of global capitalism that are both localized and familiar (albeit differently) to readers in distant locations. At other times, semantic networks and styles or themes of writing might appear unfamiliar and distant. Chinese women's explorations of ‘the self’ may seem quite alien to non-Chinese readers.

Such reading that occurs between cultures, knowledge frameworks and sensibilities can too often carry automatic judgments of superiority (the West) and inferiority (its others); or open up issues of (their) appropriation of (our) forms and concepts and (our) hierarchization of the value of (their) achievement; or interpret the text with an assumption of sameness with the author and her referential universe, rather than acknowledging differences. Often this means that when readers approach a ‘foreign’ text that develops ‘familiar’ themes, they empathize with the narrator and appropriate the text's concerns into their own knowledge frameworks, eliding the cultural differences that separate them. Whereas, when readers confront a text that seems strange or alien, they can choose to dismiss it as perplexing or beyond their comprehension, allowing its difference to bar meaningful dialogic connection. If we are to more fully appreciate the achievement of the text, perhaps reading in a ‘third space’ is necessary (see Bachner 2005; Dagnino 2012). This would be a mobile space, beyond categories of sameness and difference that divide and privilege; a space which is open to the challenge of reading about identities, ideas and concepts that have different discursive genealogies and arise out of different historical specificities from our own.² In this study we attempt to read from a ‘third space’ in our responses to and critique of Chinese women's writing. We trace the familiar and the unfamiliar in order to better understand the heterogeneous nature of the enterprise, appreciating differences as well as discovering new commonalities with the interests, concerns, desires, and emerging subjectivities of women in postsocialist China. In this way, reading Chinese women's life writing might be understood as a process of becoming with the other that is diverse, fluid, and never complete.

Women's writing in China has a specific, localized trajectory tied to nationalist projects and agendas. It grows out of different traditions and customs and China's twentieth century historical contexts of semi-colonialism, revolutionary Marxism, and socialist and postsocialist transformations. It requires different frameworks for reading, understanding and critique. This is not to say that the writing is so localized to be inaccessible or incomprehensible to readers outside of China. To the contrary, we argue that while it needs to be read transculturally with reference to western and Chinese historical and cultural contexts, those contexts can be incorporated into a dialogic approach to the literature. To the extent that Chinese women's writing takes up narrative themes, literary styles, and feminist concepts that engage with a transnational flow of ideas and theories that are familiar, they can be additive to our understandings of women's lives and formations of gender in different cultural contexts. Both local and global influences impinge upon the new writing, producing multiple dimensions to the shifting assemblage of woman-centred texts. The specific ways these forces and flows play out within China and beyond the nation's borders as Chinese women and their interests emerge on the global stage is of paramount interest here.

Unlike the West, China does not have a women's movement. Chinese women's liberation has been intertwined within China's national liberation movement and the May Fourth Cultural Movement of the early twentieth century, within which ‘the woman question’ was debated and women's interests were advocated and supported, mainly by male national leaders (Huo Jizheng 2005), in ways that both enabled and limited women's interests (Hershatter and Wang Zheng 2008). Many of the May Fourth feminist activists were powerful and instrumental in the shift to socialism, influencing Maoist policies that advocated equal education and employment opportunities for women, especially urban women (Wang Zheng 1997). Their achievement, however, has yet to be recognized, both in what they accomplished in terms of effecting women's equality, and the ways in which they understood gender theory and consciously worked to undermine patriarchal representations, images, and symbols of past equality (Wang Zheng 2012). Although the Women's Federation was disbanded during the Cultural Revolution, it was revived in the 1980s to represent the interests of women, albeit within the strict guidelines of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).³ The All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), a top-down, hierarchical organization that operates as a forum of advocacy for women across the nation, has supported conferences, research, and debates on women's liberation. Espousing gender equality, it has intro duced many reforms to improve women's lives, including the introduction of Women's Studies to the university sector. Charged with the responsibility for carrying out government policies and practices, it's top-down hierarchal organizational structure within the CCP limits its capacity to engage in theoretical or political critique or to enable women to explore their own concerns or to unite around spontaneous campaigns addressing issues of social justice for women.

In the last two decades, however, an increasing number of non-government organizations (NGOs), public forums and feminist collaborations have emerged, not only in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai but also in rural areas,⁴ that enable feminist debates and critiques of gender relations, albeit circumscribed by the government's strict controls on the public expression of opinions that might be construed as political. During this time scholars in China introduced Gender Studies courses, developed research projects, and hosted conferences on women that have been embraced by the ACWF and academics within China, opening up new intellectual and social spaces for women in the academy. Between 1978, when Deng Xiaoping announced the Open Door Policy that opened China to the world and enhanced international cultural contact, and the year 2000, scores of western feminist articles have been translated, abridged, and commented upon in China. As Hershatter and Wang Zheng (2008: 1415) note, over 1,000 articles on women's history have been published, signalling China's eagerness to ‘join the world’. As a result of collaborative conferences between western and Chinese academics, ‘gender’ as a category of analysis has been embraced by Chinese academics, leading to a transformation of the concept in China in the late 1990s. The term xingbie, which translates as ‘sexed being’, was originally used for the word ‘gender’, but the concept shifted to shehui xingbie, or ‘social sex’ in the course of these conferences.⁵ Chinese academics began to understand ‘gender’ as a social construction rather than a biological entity. They adapted the work of some western feminist theorists – like Joan Scott (1988) on ‘difference’ and Gayle Rubin (1975) on the sex–gender system, turning ‘gender’ into an empowering concept for Chinese scholars (Hershatter and Wang Zheng 2008: 1416–19). As Hershatter and Wang Zheng (2008: 1418) suggest, ‘gender’ provided feminists in the 1990s with a tool to critique hierarchical power relations without having to resort to Marxist or Maoist class analysis.

In the light of this renewed interest in the theory and practice of feminism, published women's life writing took on a heightened importance as a privileged site for the exploration of gender relations and female specificity. In the 1990s, women began writing autobiographies, semi-autobiographical novels and memoirs that explored women's consciousness. They pioneered new forms of writing. This writing stood in contrast to publishing in the 1980s, when women's life writing was rare in China. What existed was designed to be educative and more aligned with ideology than aesthetics (Edwards and Louie 1990: 95). Short stories, rather than fiction, tentatively began...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Asian Studies Association of Australia Women in Asia Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• A note on names
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Translations of the self: Hong Ying's Daughter of the River and Summer of Betrayal
• 3 Narrative, trauma and memory: Chen Ran's A Private Life
• 4 Silence and the silenced: literary renderings of rural women's lives in and beyond China – Lin Bai, Sheng Keyi and Xinran
• 5 ‘Beauty writers’, consumer culture and global China: Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby, Mian Mian's Candy and the internet generation
• 6 Revisiting the twentieth century: Zhang Yihe's historical memoirs and Chen Danyan's Shanghai trilogy
• 7 Reconstructing the past: Zhao Mei's biography of the Tang Dynasty Emperor, Woman: Wu Zetian
• 8 Epic re-visionings: Xu Xiaobin's fabulist tale Feathered Serpent
• 9 Conclusion: new desires, new identities: reorienting literary and gender relations in and beyond China
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index