Chinese Literature and the Child

Children and Childhood in Late-Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction

K. Foster

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137310972
• eBook ISBN: 9781137310989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Tracking ideas of the child in Chinese society across the twentieth century, Kate Foster places fictional children within the story of the nation in a study of tropes and themes which range from images of strength and purity to the murderous and amoral.

Part I

Introduction

The young are to be held in awe. How do we know that what is to come will not surpass the present?¹

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) held that even the youngest child already carried “the perennial contents of the human soul.”² For many critics, both Western and Chinese, the literary baby cannot be delivered into any narrative unmarked by its origins. Indeed, the child in literature has been argued to be a fluid and changing enigma which is essentially culture-bound.³ The child is not, however, merely a product of its heritage; it also represents the future. It is a figure of potential which, according to Confucius (traditional dates 551–479 B.C.), offers the possibility that tomorrow will “surpass” today and, as such, is worthy of adult respect. Positioned between past and future, between the adult that was and the adult to come, the child is a potent representative of dissatisfaction with the past and present, and the promise and desire – or lack of hope – for change.

In the context of China’s twentieth century it is not difficult to understand why the idea of the child would prove to be such a useful and effective tool in the hands of successive generations of writers, from May Fourth intellectuals to post-Liberation propagandists to reform-era dystopians. With Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) “Diary of a Madman” (Kuangren riji, 1918),⁴ modern Chinese literature began with the child as focus of adult despair over China’s condition. Indeed, Andrew Jones connects the evocation of childhood in the Republican era (1911–1949) with discourse on the development of the nation itself.⁵ From such beginnings, in a modern history characterized by repeated attempts to critique the past and define and control the future, to forge a new citizen for a new nation, the child, as victim of the old and/or standard-bearer of the new, would grow to be a powerful symbol.

The child is most easily defined by age, and all cultures have their own understanding of when adulthood begins. Childhood itself is both a reality, an “existential fact,” and a “historically situated invention of the adult mind and a social construction.”⁶ In pre-modern China, childhood normally ended between the ages of fourteen and nineteen,⁷ with the age at which an individual was expected to take on adult responsibilities and roles varying according to era, social class, and gender.⁸ In modern times the “social construction” associates maturity with, for example, the end of schooling and/or the point at which an individual leaves home. Late-twentieth-century fiction reflects this, and eighteen appears repeatedly as the point of change. The coming-of-age tale which brought critical attention to a young Yu Hua (b. 1960), “On the Road at Eighteen” (Shiba sui chumen yuanxing, 1986),⁹ features a youth sent off by his father into a hostile world armed only with happy anticipation and a red backpack. Wang Shuo’s (b. 1958) young Beijinger in “Animal Ferocity” (Dongwu xiongmeng, 1991)¹⁰ knows that all he has to do to grow up is wait; his eighteenth birthday will inevitably come around.

But childhood is also, at least in fiction, a list of attributes. These are most commonly things lacking – speech, authority, independence, strength, experience – but may also be traits such as innocence, purity, and honesty, which are already lost in the contrasting adult world. Childhood, considered in this way, becomes a process, not of aging but of stages of development, from the acquisition of speech to the growth of knowledge and ability (or, conversely, the loss of childish qualities). These stages, from pre-speech infancy to the adolescent hurtling towards adulthood, are also well represented in recent Chinese fiction. The growth of the child provides ample opportunity to explore contrasts such as worldliness and naivety, while stages of growth have also been afforded specific historic and cultural significance. In literature produced soon after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), for example, literary critic Wang Wenling observed that “maturity in years also represented political maturity, which echoed the demands of the time.”¹¹

The desired developmental goal – maturity – may remain perpetually beyond reach, and fiction offers us the eternal child, the adult trapped in a childlike state. This is particularly clear in the use or denial of speech. As Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff note, the Latin infans means “unspeaking,” and the English “infant” can be understood to define “one who cannot speak and whose progressive attempts at articulation must be translated by adults into a world of discourse not yet fully inhabited by the child.”¹² An individual may be “infantile,” voiceless, regardless of their age. They may also, of course, continue to play the role of child as dependent, powerless, lacking autonomy, in relation to “adult” authority as embodied in an individual or a group. The struggle for maturity in this context is played out in fiction by the child who will eventually depose that adult. Childhood is a journey towards “my own” adult identity, whether this is the rejection, acceptance, or usurpation of the existing adult role. This idea has further relevance in traditional Chinese culture, in which the Confucian hierarchy allocates each individual “a social status relative to his or her elders”¹³ – son or daughter, father or mother – for life, a hierarchy borrowed in more recent times to colour the individual’s relationship with the state, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Mao Zedong (1893–1976).

Within the context of China’s recent history, the role of the parent, and of the father in particular, is vitally important. Dong Xi’s (b. 1966) novel of moral decline A Resounding Slap in the Face (Erguang xiangliang, 1997)¹⁴ makes an often oblique reference explicit when, on 9 September 1976, a boy discovers both the death of Mao and the disappearance of his own father, this dual loss marking the end of an era of childish certainty. Since the 1990s in particular, China’s growth and development have been mapped out in a cultural discourse which is closely reflected in the image of the (fatherless) child. In this lively and powerful commentary, the last two decades of the twentieth century are argued to be markedly different. The “New Era” (xinshiqi) of the late 1970s to 1989, and the “Post-New Era” (hou xinshiqi) which followed, are most often described in terms of opposites: elite culture and popular culture; the search for a new ideology and money worship; modernist idealism and post-modern cynicism; radicalism and a new conservatism.¹⁵ Within this discourse the events of 1989 and their aftermath, coupled sometimes with the intensification of economic reforms in 1992, are presented as points at which the tectonic plates of Chinese culture shifted.¹⁶ Literature must be expected to reflect such traumatic shifts, just as Dong Xi’s protagonist steps from an ordered world into the untameable chaos of a new “fatherless” society.

Such tensions make the literature of the late twentieth century a particularly rich and significant period in the complex evolutionary tale of the child image in Chinese narratives. Fiction produced in the 1980s and 1990s has frequently been compared to the literature of the pre-Communist era, in part because of the dominance in scholarship of Lu Xun and other celebrated figures and a parallel sense of experimentation in early Republican and post-Cultural-Revolution times, but also because of similarities in (and contrasts between) works from the two eras. May-Fourth-era intellectuals’ obsession with the child and childhood make such interactions particularly inviting, and, even in a period of deliberate liberation from the past, there are many visible threads which connect the child figure at the end of the century with its literary antecedents. Such comparisons are, however, as problematic as they are attractive. The gulf of experience between the early and late twentieth century warns against oversimplified connections between works and authors. Equally, literature may (or may not) interact with, reference, and even influence life, but literary children are not real; they are, as Ellen Pifer states, “images of childhood reflected in a novel, a patently constructed world of words.”¹⁷ To explore tropes and themes of childhood, it is therefore important to acknowledge the context of production, but it is essential to begin with the work itself; with the internal logic of the text.

Works of fiction are read here with this dual context in mind, established in Part I through consideration of both the child in literature, and the child in modern Chinese society and culture. There are many points of interaction between ideas of childhood in fiction and attitudes towards children in the real world. When combined, they demonstrate a lively discourse on the child in twentieth-century China which includes a dynamic interplay between literature, culture, ideology, politics, and society. In Part II, this context provides the backdrop for the analysis of representations of childhood in fiction from the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter 3 exposes the prominence in Chinese fiction of the arrested infant: the child whose life is curtailed or restricted in the narrative to early infancy, or an infantile state. Chapter 4 examines the use of the paradox of the corrupt innocent and narratives of tainted progeny, the products of adulterated origins. In Chapter 5, I chart a late-twentieth-century fascination with the abandoned child, tracing a narrative arc from heroic orphans to amoral – fatherless – youth. Finally, in Chapter 6, through self-narrated childhoods and the use of child narrators, I examine a late-twentieth-century surge of experimentation with the child voice and its role in discourse on identity and ownership of the personal past.

The images discussed in this book are drawn from thirty-one works by twenty-three writers, many born in the 1950s, such as Chen Cun (b. 1954), Deng Yiguang (b. 1956), Han Shaogong (b. 1953), Mo Yan (b. 1955), Tie Ning (b. 1957), and Wang Anyi (b. 1954), but including earlier and later generations, from Cen Sang and Li Xintian, both born in the 1920s, and Zhang Jie (b. 1937), to Chi Zijian (b. 1964), Bi Feiyu (b. 1964), and Zhu Wen (b. 1967). Overseas-based writers are also referenced, including Gao Xingjian (b. 1940), Ma Jian (b. 1953), and Ha Jin (b. 1956), who writes in English. These stories reflect the diversity of literary production, and the child image, during the 1980s and 1990s. They include fiction by both literary stars and less well-known writers, and by different generations, enabling connections and contrasts to be identified between disparate works. They were chosen for their use of the child image or childhood rather than with reference to the gender, age, or literary style of the author. In this way, biographical details, the (often contentious) labelling of writers and works according to literary schools or movements, and supposed or stated authorial intent, have largely been set aside in favour of a textual perspective. It may be useful to read fiction in relation to an author’s life, but the tendency to view fiction through biography has, I would suggest, been disproportionately characteristic of much popular commentary on Chinese li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index