Chapter 1
The Sino-Japanese War and Chinese History in Amy Tan’s Novels and Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls
Early-twentieth-century China was a country in turmoil, witnessing such events as the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War. Of these events, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), which resulted in the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Northern Shaanxi, has captured the attention and imagination of historians, film makers, and fiction writers.1 In particular, the Rape of Nanjing has become the center of focus in this war, not least because of the atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army against the inhabitants of Nanjing, atrocities that have become the subject of historical scholarship and literary representation. When Chinese immigrants in America describe the Sino-Japanese War, they not only identify a major source of national trauma in twentieth-century Chinese history but also clarify that any sense of Chinese American belonging in the United States can never be free from American political involvement in the Asia-Pacific world.
In Chinese American literature, the Sino-Japanese War has been invoked as the historical backdrop of works as different as Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution (1979),2 a short story made into a prize-winning film directed by Ang Lee, and Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem (2011).3 Lust, Caution is about a patriotic student radical called on to seduce an intelligence agent of the occupying government to lure him to his death, and Nanjing Requiem honors the life of Minnie Vautrin, “The Living Goddess of Nanjing,” celebrating the organizers of the Nanjing Safety Zone who offered refuge to desperate Chinese fleeing the Japanese occupation of the city. With the publication of Nanjing Requiem, Chinese American literature gives the Rape of Nanjing a thematic centrality not previously available.
The Rape of Nanjing, the event that crystallizes the brutality of the Japanese invasion of China, is a topic that has generated controversy and contesting interpretations. There are those who question the veracity of historical and eye-witness accounts of this event just as there are others who are convinced it is their moral duty to bring to the attention of the world the war atrocities committed at Nanjing. In 1997 Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking to draw attention to the atrocities committed by the invading Japanese army against hapless inhabitants of the ancient city of Nanjing. Chang tells us that her reason for doing so is to tell the story of “the forgotten holocaust of World War II,” a historical event that must never be forgotten. Central to the discourse of the Rape of Nanjing are both the extent of the carnage inflicted by the Japanese and the degree to which this violence has (not) been accorded ample recognition in world history. Growing up in China during World War II, fleeing to Taiwan, and later migrating to the United States, Chang’s parents impressed on her the importance of remembering “the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War.”4 It is in response to this injunction that Chang committed herself to search for evidence to reconstruct the Japanese occupation of the city both as a journalist and as a historian.
In 2011 Ha Jin published Nanjing Requiem, a novel that brings the reader back in time to the Japanese occupation of Nanjing and contributes to the growth of recent interest in the subject as evidenced by documentaries and films such as Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s Nanking (2007), Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death (2009), Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe (2009), and Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War (2011).5 In Nanjing Requiem, the narrator Anling observes that “most people are good at forgetting,” to which Minnie Vautrin responds that “history should be recorded as it happened so it can be remembered with little room for doubt and controversy” (NR 97). Jin’s diary-like narrativization of events, focused on the activities of the Nanjing Safety Zone and Vautrin’s Jinling College, resists the poststructuralist premise that history cannot be interpreted with clarity and certitude. The novel recounts events that daily took place: rape, killings, and desperate attempts to escape harm. Much of the suspense is built on trauma experienced as parents await news of children who have been abducted, young girls turn mad or commit suicide after rape, and young men are terrified of being mistaken for soldiers and killed.
Memory and trauma are controlling motifs in Chinese American writing of the Sino-Japanese War. Memories of the war may be persistent and debilitating—one of the symptoms of trauma—or they may be hazy and require disciplined effort to maintain. In the diasporic experience, memories often shade into nostalgia owing to distance of space and the passing of time. In Amy Tan’s novels, China persists as memory for first-generation Chinese Americans and also as the source for the dissemination of ancestral culture to the Chinese American diaspora. It contributes to Orientalist discourse in lending support to visions of inhospitable living conditions in China that compel dreams of migration to the New World.
When Lisa See represents the Chinese American immigrant experience, she makes ample narrative space for portraying life in China. In Shanghai Girls (2009), See’s chronological narrative begins with a detailed view of life in early-twentieth-century Shanghai just before the Japanese attack on the city. See’s detailed description of Shanghai lends concreteness to her representation of a historical setting soon to be violently disrupted by war. The Sino-Japanese War constitutes the historical backdrop for two sisters’ journey to the United States, signifying also as the event that, refusing to be erased from personal and communal memory, haunts the overseas Chinese. In Shanghai Girls, the Sino-Japanese War is represented not only as trauma but also as an event that inspires nationalistic emotions toward China and complicates social relations between the Chinese and Japanese in America.
The instinct to write the story of the Sino-Japanese War is prompted by the necessity for historical remembering, an imperative that never goes away owing to the material fact of the Japanese occupation of China that imprinted its effects on the lives of Chinese subjects trapped in the mainland or forced to seek out the alleviations of a transpacific crossing. The largest Asian war of the twentieth century, this major conflict between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan bled into the larger outbreak of World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 7, 1941.
The Sino-Japanese War brings focus to a historical past directly experienced by first-generation Chinese American immigrants, a past that is not always made accessible to their American-born children. For the second-generation Chinese American, this war belongs to a hazy past, part of the story of their parents’ lives prior to their coming to America. Even while historical details of the Sino-Japanese War may elude ready apprehension, the horrors of the war are a familiar theme, reinforced by the stories of immigrant parents. Chinese American literature participates in this reinforcement by reminding the reader of the war. In Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976), Brave Orchid departs China shortly after the communal stoning of a mad woman in the village suspected of collusion with the Japanese, the context of the Sino-Japanese War thus framing her transpacific crossing to America. In Tan’s Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei Woo’s mother Suyuan flees Guilin for Chongqing to escape the advancing Japanese army, leading to her separation from her babies, twin daughters she will not set eyes on again in her life. In referring to the Sino-Japanese War, Kingston and Tan aim less to amplify the historical details of the war than to create images of a bygone era associated with poverty, political turmoil, and social upheaval.
The Sino-Japanese War becomes an important part of the Chinese American family’s historical memory, bringing focus to the experience of a past life that had necessitated the quest for migration to the United States in the first place. It exerts pressure across time to affect social relations between the Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities in the United States, relations also given literary expression in the narrativization of American/Asian political relations. The day-to-day social experience of the Chinese in the United States during the period of World War II, the Communist Revolution, and the Cold War is deeply shaped by American foreign policy in Asia, often tangled up with the symbolic formulations of an Orientalist discourse supportive of American expansionist interests.6
US political involvement in national conflicts in East Asia and military engagement in the Pacific War have bearing on the writing of the immigrant experience and of Chinese history in Chinese American literature. Representations of the Sino-Japanese War not only highlight the challenges encountered by the American-born author seeking to gain a better understanding of life in the ancestral homeland but also draw attention to the unfolding of historical events in East Asia that have ramifications for both Chinese and Japanese living in the United States.
If Asia refers not only to a group of nations with which America interacted politically in the first half of the twentieth century but also to a set of “invented” ideas about the Asia-Pacific world, does the representation of China and Japan in Chinese American literature partake of some of the ideological structures of American Orientalism?7 How does Chinese American literary representation of the migration experience, typically framed with reference to the pursuit of the American Dream, engage with both the realities of American neocolonial practices in Asia and an Orientalist discourse that defines mainstream and minority social relations in the United States? This chapter sets out to respond to these questions by reading representations of the Sino-Japanese War in Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and also Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, analyzing the sociocultural and ideological implications of Chinese American literature’s characteristic impulse to deploy defining events of East Asian history to give shape to the interrelated themes of national belonging, migration, and diasporic identity.
Amy Tan and Chinese History
The history of China cannot be dissociated from the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States, an experience that is deeply felt at the microcosmic level of family relationships. Cultural and historical distance, compounded by linguistic alienation, makes it difficult for the American-born Chinese subject to gain access to the history of the family with its roots in China and also the political history of a faraway country in East Asia with which ancestral origin is enmeshed. This distance is also exacerbated by the felt need on the part of parental figures to hold on tenaciously to carefully guarded secrets. The degree of effort required to penetrate these secrets means not only getting to know better the person keeping them but also catching a glimpse of the historical world that necessitated the importance of secrecy to begin with. When children strive to connect with their parents across generational and cultural divides, they also cross time to connect with history. When reading about characters’ past lives in China, the reader of Amy Tan’s novels becomes acquainted with important events of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese history.
Tan’s novels are preoccupied with beginnings, tied to a history and land to which Chinese American subjects born in the United States encounter general difficulties gaining easy access. Both Tan and Kingston portray tapping cultural roots as a preoccupation of American-born children seeking cultural connection with their mothers whose past lives in China are often shrouded in mystery. Serving as a source of cultural information and historical knowledge, parental figures are indispensable despite cultural tensions that usually define their relationship with their children; they continue to be the primary link connecting American-born Chinese to ancestral culture. If the immediate family is the primary source of Old World culture and knowledge, it functions as such via the amalgamated experiences of the early immigrants who made their way to the New World. If interpreting the experiences of a mother’s life in China is necessary for a daughter aiming to improve intergenerational bonds, the personalized dimensions of Tan’s writings also bring the reader into the world of East Asia, defined with reference to cultural practices, political events, and social upheavals not necessarily familiar to the reader: the Taiping Rebellion, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War. Tan’s representation of Chinese history opens the reader to a “China” that requires making sense of because it is culturally distant and epistemologically foreign.
In The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, Amy Tan reveals her interest in the history of China between the early 1920s and late 1940s, a history that involved not only the Japanese invasion of China but also political conflicts between “the old revolutionaries, the new revolutionaries, the Kuomintang and the Communists, the warlords, the bandits, and the students,” all “too busy fighting each other to fight together” (The Kitchen God’s Wife 166)8 against China’s enemies. The wars that marked the course of Chinese history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that forced China into the Westphalian system9 constituting the basis for the international world order as we know it today, frame her writing of the Chinese American immigrant experience. In Joy Luck Club, the stories of the mothers who were born in East Asia all take place in pre–World War II China shortly before and during the Sino-Japanese War. This war is also described in The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001).
In The Kitchen God’s Wife, family history—as expressed in Tan’s motif of the unveiling of secrets on the part of both mother and daughter—obtains its significance within the context of the Sino-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek’s political maneuverings, and “bombs [that] fell on Shanghai . . . , on the roofs of houses and stores, on streetcars, on hundreds of people, all Chinese” (KGW 191). We read about the Rape of Nanjing that Hulan (Helen) and Weili (Winnie), two characters in the novel, just escape by the skin of their teeth, leaving before the arrival of the Japanese. In a village referred to as “Heaven’s Breath,” Winnie learns about the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in their occupation of the city. The Japanese “raped old women, married women, and little girls, taking turns with them, over and over again. Sliced them open with a sword when they were all used up. Cut off their fingers to take their rings. Shot all the little sons, no more generations. Raped ten thousand, chopped down twenty or thirty thousand, a number that is no longer a number, no longer people . . . [T]he real number of people who died was much, much worse”(KGW 234). In grappling with news and “rumor” (KGW 234) about the Japanese in Nanjing, Winnie’s response appears to complicate affirmation of Japanese atrocities by questioning the precision of the information that is being communicated. There can never be verifiable information about “the real number of people who died” (KGW 234) because it was not possible to count the bodies buried, burnt, or dumped into the river. Winnie then tells her daughter that she had a difficult time imagining Nanjing because she could not claim it as her tragedy: she was not affected, and she was not killed.
Winnie’s discourse here raises questions that also pertain to the Chinese American author’s relation to those aspects of Chinese history evoked for literary representation. When history is (re)packaged as literary narrative, does it mean that the factual details of a historical event—the precise scope of the Nanjing Massacre, for example—can only remain elusive? In her reading of Tan’s representation of history in The Kitchen God’s Wife, Bella Adams argues that the author embroils the novel in “a number of aporias: between seeing and telling, between self and other, and between event and discourse.”10 Adams argues that, alert to the limitations of representation, Tan “promotes vigilance with respect to the complexity of representing the Rape of Nanking and the rape of Weili, preserving the tension between past experiences and linguistic structures.”11 While Tan would be alert to the theoretical premise that access to East Asian history and the story of the Chinese immigrant experience in America is not readily available owing to linguistic, experiential, and cultural distance, her literary projects are not framed by a poststructuralist perspective in the way that a work like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s semiautobiographical Dictee (1982) is. In Dictee, Cha self-reflexively questions the definition of history as a body of archived and retrievable knowledge, open to deciphering, piecing together, and interpretation.12
In Tan’s novels, events in Chinese history constitute circumstances that, while experientially real for Chinese immigrants who came to America, can lose the sharpness of their delineations when narrated across cultural boundaries and affected by the passage of time. If Tan’s portrayal of China contains features of “low-resolution”13 focus owing to the author’s distance from the details of Chinese history in the first half of the twentieth century, it nevertheless identifies and offers narrative sketches of the major events of this history—the Republican Revolution, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, the convulsions of China’s twentieth-century political landscape find their metaphorical analogy at the microcosmic level of family life in Winnie’s physical abuse and mental torture by her husband Wen Fu. If Winnie’s rape by Wen Fu and her overall helplessness in the face of his abuse symptomatize the far reach of Chinese patriarchal tyranny, they also become associational metaphors for China’s invasion by a masculinist and imperialist Japan.
In The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Tan continues to make reference to the Sino-Japanese War. We read about characters being dragged to Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and tortured. We overhear conversations about how “the Japanese were doing unspeakable acts with innocent girls, some as young as eleven or twelve. That was what had happened in Tientsin, Tungchow, and Nanking” (The Bonesetter’s Daughter 235).14 LuLing, responsible for th...